There is no sound in an empty room - Reality Club lecture on Wallace Stevens

There Is No Sound In An Empty Room

MUSING on the Reality Club issueof Whole Earth Review and Wallace Stevens brought me to consider sound, at the same time the most concrete and abstract "reality' of poetry. In 1942 Stevens delivered a lecture entitled "The Noble Rider and The Sound of Words' (later published as an essay and collected in The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and Imagination,1 in which he stressed the primary power of the sound of words to help us live our lives. What did he mean? He wrote and spoke at a moment when yet another surge of the century's great violence overwhelmed senses, emotions, and intellect. He foresaw that this violence would only increase and offered in this essay an exposition of how the work of "a possible poet . . . an acutest poet' could help the individuals in a society to survive "the wild, the ruinous waste' the world was quickly becoming.

1. Alfred Knopf, 1965.

From the time of Plato, who wanted to banishpoets from his ideal republic, we have been aware of the control over the soul made possible by the joining of words and music. In our own very real republic, advertisers have channeled this potential masterfully. We walk down supermarket aisles quietly humming some tune in rhythm with our heartbeats and find ourselves picking up a package of yet another product we don't need. This is one of the unfortunate aspects that Plato perhaps imagined for a less than ideal future.

Stevens accepted the imperfect as our paradise andso understood that compensating for the negative uses to which words and music might be put, there were and are positive, salutary ones. Realizing these has been the work of the greatest poets who in their joining of imagery and sound have given us an access to transcendence, a sense of the sacred.

The repetition of regular vibrations producessound as opposed to noise, the product of irregular vibrations. Eastern and Western religious orders have, as we know, incorporated the voicing of sounds bound to certain syllables and words into their daily practice of living. The inspiration of air becomes an exhalation that is shaped to return to the universe as sound, not noise. We can imagine the various patterns of some of these sounds, from a simple ?? to a more complex ?? and so on. This is very different from the jagged, uneven patterns we can imagine for the kinds of noise that emanate from ordinary speech, not to mention the heated arguments or rude exchanges we hear around us every day as we shop, work, or simply walk through the streets of our neighborhoods. We don't generally have time to think about being responsible for the noise we make as we move through our days. But, as Edgar Allen Poe reminded us in his essay "Eureka'--borrowing from a perception of Pascal's--just as the movement of each pebble on the sea floor causes vibrations that rise up to expire into the air as it mixes with the crests of waves that break upon the shore, so each of our voicings causes vibrations that affect the universe as well. We ought, then, to become aware of, if not always responsible for, what we give back to our cosmos as we exchange the air that is our breath. Stevens knew Poe's essay, as he knew, too, the effect of participating in hymn singing, having attended weekly church services as a boy and listened to his mother's Sunday singing of sacred songs as she accompanied herself on the piano in their living room.

Stevens also knew of Eastern practices of meditationand had read certain central texts. One of these was a translation of one of the classical T'ang anthologies, The Jade Mountain, Being Three Hundred Poems from the T'ang Dynasty, 618-906 (translated by Witter Bynner from the texts of Kiang Kang-Hu). In the introduction to that volume, Kiang Kang-Hu notes that the old Chinese thought the ideal number of poems for an anthology to be about three hundred because they believed that by thoroughly coming to know this number of poems, individuals would themselves learn to write poetry. The anthology was to be used in a household much like the Bible was used until recently in the Christian West. It was to be read from every day, aloud, so that all members of the family might enjoy the same suspension in the more perfect atmosphere of sound and image that poetry creates.

It was not surprising, after reading this, to find thatStevens's Collected Poems2 number three hundred and one, the odd poem added, as the Chinese also suggested, to promise opening.

2. Alfred Knopf, 1954.

Stevens also learned from his Oriental masters touse the sound imagery of his work to recreate as closely as possible a direct sense of being in nature. Stevens's upbringing in a still-pastoral American setting, as well as his later reading of the Romantic poets, prepared him to give careful attention to the sky and its clouds, trees with their branchings, birds in their song. But it was, in large part, what he learned from reading both Chinese and Japanese poetry and from studying Oriental paintings and prints with their depictions of human beings dwarfed by mountains and driven by rain that enabled him to transform the set of feelings he had been taught as a child to attach to a Christian definition of the sacred into an aesthetic that celebrated as sacred each and every element of the natural world. Stevens made his intricate mind sensitive to the murmurings of streams, the rustlings of leaves, the skritterings of birds, the delicate tones of petals, and attempted to reproduce in the lines he composed a sense of his communion with these things in a trembling present. We, in turn, reading his poems aloud, compose ourselves in this purified state and for a while at least remove ourselves from the exigencies of politics and wars, the chitter-chatter of everyday noise. Our breathing becomes regular, eased into his meditative pentameter pace--Stevens wrote as he walked, jotting his lines in pencil on small slips of paper he carried in his pockets. His long syllables twist and turn through a complex syntax that stops thought and prompts imagining and then leads back to thought once more. All of this is meant to slow us down in our rigorous days, shift our mind's eye from the countless contingencies of daily life to the real world of things as they are. Through his poems we learn to pay attention to the forces of nature that come in their regular rhythms, yet with variations, with every season and with the constant movement of our planet through light and darkness. Stevens understood that this is all there really is, together with our mysterious ability to witness it and know that we are witnessing it. This last aspect is what he meant by the "abstract.' The sound of words is the echoing of this activity, the mimicking of the feeling that accompanies participation in "the nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.'

Stevens grew up in a generation still attached tofilling the "nothing' with something, "something in which to believe'--the idea of God. In his twenties, even after having been exposed while at Harvard during the last three years of the nineteenth century to the various discussions concerning what Nietzsche had proclaimed as the "death of God'--following Darwin's uncovering of our ancestor to be a "hairy quadruped, mostly arboreal in its habits'--the young poet continued to yearn intensely for "something in which to believe.' He had heard William James, George Santayana, Josiah Royce, and others attempting to adjust themselves to a world stripped of the myth of heavenly bliss. Gone was the promise of a place where those once loved but dead might be met and loved again, where rewards would be given for present suffering. Stevens came away from Harvard knowing there was no longer a God in his heaven, yet he still felt, as he put it, the "instinct of faith.'

As he grew through the years of his maturity, withthis knowledge and with this feeling, he substituted communion with nature for the communion of the faithful he had enjoyed as a child and adolescent. He no longer attended church services, though he occasionally wished for the solace of sacred words and music. In separating himself from his Christian background during this period, he came to understand the constraining influence it had exerted and continued to exert--in spite of his nominal renunciation of it--on what he called "that monster, the body.' This was at roughly the same time that Freud shocked his American audience with his "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.' It was these combined personal and cultural forces that prompted Stevens to search for a way of being, perceiving, and acting that would simultaneously satisfy the instinct for faith and acknowledge and celebrate human participation in a natural environment purged of myths of punishment. In recognizing his own needs, Stevens recognized the need all have for the most important function of religious participation, the reminder that impelling us and all things there are forces, or a force, that we cannot comprehend fully but in which we rejoice, humbly and proudly.

Stevens knew that in his secular century the Bibleand church services could not be expected to fulfill that function, especially for the "enlightened' elite who, on the basis of what they learned about the structure of our "relative' universe, could not or would not any longer participate in outworn religious practices. He understood the danger that the arrogance, or even the indifference, growing out of such an attitude posed to the life of society. While, then, he eschewed a specifically didactic purpose for poetry, he sought to provide through his work a replacement for the once-sacred texts. It was because of the high seriousness of this purpose that Stevens remained committed throughout his lifetime--and often against harsh criticism-- to high diction and, on the surface, difficult subject matter, the movement of his mind and spirit "in relation to his world,' as he defined his own poetry. Spinoza wrote that anything noble is as difficult as it is rare. Stevens knew this and knew, too, that it was only by exercising his intellect and imagination to their extremest degree that he could hope to hold the attention of those with an equally keen intelligence who might lose sight of their real place in this "planetary pass-pass.'

It was, in part, Stevens's association in NewYork during the teens with a group of individuals who themselves formed a kind of "reality club' that prepared him for the role he took on as a poet. This group was informally organized by Walter Arensberg, an old Harvard classmate of Stevens's and later a man of letters and patron of the arts. The "club' met regularly in his apartment on West 67th Street in Manhattan. Arensberg has recently come to be referred to as the father of "New York Dada,' and the group, by extension, as the first Dadaists, since their gatherings and discussions predated the formal naming of the European Dadaists in Zurich. Arensberg was involved with those who put together the Armory Show of 1913, and it was in the studio attached to the Arensberg apartment that Marcel Duchamp lived and worked during his time in New York. Other members of the Arensberg circle included, at various times, William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy, Albert Gleizes, Man Ray, Tristan Tzara, Charles Sheeler, Marsden Hartley, Marianne Moore, Francis Picabia. On the walls hung works by Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Derain, Cezanne, Henri Rousseau, Joseph Stella, Duchamp, Morton Schamberg; on the floor, tables, and mantelpiece stood sculptures by Brancusi, as well as many African pieces.

Arensberg was an avid student of the work of FrancisBacon and of cryptography. He wrote and published three or four books on Bacon, one a cryptographical analysis of Shakespeare's work in an attempt to substantiate further the claim popular around the turn of the century that the playwright and the scientist were one; Arensberg also published a volume on Dante's cryptography. Keenly interested in using puzzles of all kinds to exercise the intellect and imagination--based on a perception of Bacon's about devising practices to keep the mind poised and so ready to discover something new concerning the structure of reality--Arensberg encouraged various mind games amongst his friends. He himself often played seemingly endless games of chess with Marcel Duchamp while one of the poets in the group read a poem composed around some arcane pun. The "game' in this latter instance involved the assembled company in trying to find the key to unlock the poem's layers of meaning. For another part of the evening they would discuss one of their "assigned readings.' Among these were Freud's Interpretation of Dreams and the issues of Camera Work as they appeared; these last contained, for example, the first American printings of some of Gertrude Stein's early writing, as well as the first translations of extracts from the work of Henri Bergson on time, on time and will, creativity, laughter. Arensberg modeled his circle on one that Bacon had fictionally drawn in his New Atlantis where the "best and brightest' minds in all fields were to be brought together to live and work. While this vision was utopian, there were nonetheless, as Arensberg realized, possible settings where it might be partially fulfilled. To this end he subtly directed his friends. It was in this atmosphere that Stevens as a mature poet tested the sound of his words as World War I finally shattered the last vestige of the nineteenth century's belief in the myth of Christian and technological progress.

As his own century moved on andthrough World War II, Stevens became more acutely aware of the necessity of "resisting,' as he put it, the "pressure of reality.' He understood that only through work that reveals the process of mind attempting to attune itself with the greater order from which it springs can individuals perceive their "bond to all that dust'--the dust from which we came and will return, the dust of particles that move beyond our seeing but that we nonetheless know and name from watching their effects. More specifically, Stevens realized that experientially, for us, it is sound that provides the most constant and direct awareness of the vibration that in its multifarious velocities and phases accounts for all there is.

Stevens had, of course, inherited the Romanticpoets' renewed image of their function as aeolian harps, instruments through which the breath of nature passed to produce divine harmonies, and the Symbolists' aspiration to have poetry achieve the pure condition of music. He was well aware, too, that the development of this aesthetic had reached an impasse in terms of what it could accomplish in teaching how to live and what to do because of its rarefaction into what came to be known as "art for art's sake.' It became too difficult for the ordinary reader to follow the rhythm and meaning of Mallarme's lines as they strayed across facing pages, or, when they didn't, to guess at the possible semantic significance of a word invented seemingly only for its sound. This was especially true for an American audience, committed even beyond their explicit knowledge of it, particularly after William James, to an essentially pragmatic world view.

While he had learned from and deeply appreciatedthe English and European traditions, Stevens was strongly American. With the hard-nosed rigor of his good Puritan ancestors, he attempted to understand as well as he could whatever was current in the scientific world of his time. He kept up with the discoveries of Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, Planck, and translated what he apprehended about the structure of reality into the lines of his poems. In this way he hoped to revitalize what came to seem "romantic' or merely "aesthetic,' in the pejorative senses of both, and to integrate their valuable elements into forms, poems, that would demand the activity of being read aloud. To make readers fully attentive to this end was one of the purposes of "The Noble Rider and The Sound of Words.' If with this awareness we then read aloud one of his poems,

Human Arrangement

Place-bound and time-bound in evening rain

And bound by a sound which does not change,

Except that it begins and ends,

Begins again and ends again--

Rain without change within or from

Without. In this place and in this time

And in this sound, which do not change,

In which the rain is all one thing,

In the sky, an imagined, wooden chair,

Is the clear-point of an edifice,

Forced up from nothing, evening's chair,

Blue-strutted curule, true--unreal,

The centre of transformations that

Transform the transformation's self,

In a glitter that is a life, a gold

That is a being, a will, a fate.

what do we experience? The very nature of our"human arrangement of intellect rubbing against the nonsense of sound, of feeling the driving circles of rain move us, un-place-bound and untime-bound: we are inside the experience of another man in another place and time while we are simultaneously place-bound and time-bound in our own place and time. The experience of the poem both contradicts and affirms our intellectual sense of things while the sound provides the only true constant--that within that shimmering frame of paradox, in voicing the syllables once spoken by the poet, we are feeling precisely the same flow of energy move us. We, in short, participate in the mystery of being and of being human. Simply to stop at least once in our over-wrought days to move and be moved through a reflection on and of the process of being is to in some small way become aware of the sacred, what is beyond the power of words unbound to sound to communicate immediately and experientially. Curiously--or, again, paradoxically-- becoming fully attentive to the present process of our being, becoming, that is, fully self-conscious in this way also frees us from self-centeredness since we recognize ourselves in such extended moments as nothing more than patterns of waves channeled through an instrument tuned by a finer hand than we can ever see. Even without this apprehension--that might seem or sound to some quasi-mystical and so unacceptably soft-minded--there is the more direct understanding that in giving ourselves, our attention, to the shaped thoughts and feelings of another being in another place and time we have expanded our sense of what it means to be human. If, as in the case of Stevens, the subject to which he draws our attention is not simply his self but the movement of his mind as it regards the various aspects and elements of the natural world, then our sense of the human is stretched to its proper limit of seeing and feeling ourselves part of a much larger universal order.

As Stevens stressed again in closing "TheNoble Rider and The Sound of Words,' the more the pressure of external events threatens to violate our senses, emotions, and intellect, the more necessary it becomes to resist with all the power and resources we can manage to make ourselves aware of the "true' reality, the things we can never forget. (The Greeks knew this in their very voicing of the word for truth: it translates literally as "that which cannot be forgotten.') Unfortunately, our word for this same reality, "truth,' does not enforce the remembrance. But Plato knew and Stevens knew that it is the changing of light, the dance of our planet with the sun that makes our seasons, the sound of the sea, the gray driving of rain, the fierce flying of birds, their songs, the myriad mysteries that we witness and participate in every moment of our lives that cannot be forgotten. These are the things that the sound of words in Stevens's poems help us remember and regard. In coming to know these things, we come to know ourselves. As Stevens put it:

The mind has added nothing to humannature. It is a violence from within that protects us from a violence without. It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation; and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives.

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