13 Ways of Looking at Wallace Stevens

by Caveh Zahedi

1)   I’ve never liked reality. It has never conformed to my dreams or desires. It has never satisfied me. In fact, I hate it. I hate it and I resent it. Fuck reality. Reality can go fuck itself. Fuck you, Reality. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you. I hope I never see you again.

2)   I love reality. Reality has given me everything I have. There’s nothing that I have that does not come from reality. Reality is greater than my wildest dreams. Reality is the only thing that satisfies. Reality is everything I’ve ever wanted. I love reality. I love it so much. I love it more than I can comprehend. I love you, Reality. You rule. Long live Reality.

3)   I first read Wallace Stevens on an airplane. I was sitting next to my friend Jeff Nunokawa, who now teaches English at Princeton. We were both students at Yale and were on the same plane flying back to school from LA to New York. 

We weren’t close friends but we liked each other. I had met Jeff through my friend Micha, who was Jeff’s roommate freshman year. Jeff had fallen in love with Micha and it made their friendship more complicated. But I’ve always liked Jeff. He was charming and smart and vulnerable and complicated. 

 Ever since moving to New York from the West Coast, I’ve reached out to Jeff periodically to get together. But it never happens. Once he said he was coming over for dinner but then he canceled at the last minute. I’ve stopped reaching out to him. But writing about Wallace Stevens, and grateful to Jeff for introducing me to him, I’ve been inspired to reach out again. I have no reason to believe it will result in an actual encounter (I haven’t seen him in over 40 years), but it’s important to keep trying. Don’t give up on your fellow man. You never know. Anything could happen. 

 I just sent Jeff an email. It read: “Hey Jeff, want to try again?” I would never have written to him if I hadn’t been asked by a total stranger to write a piece for this journal I’ve never heard of and that I’m being published in right now, that you who are reading this are reading right now. 

 I hope Jeff answers. My son is fifteen now and he is starting to think about colleges. His plan is to apply to every Ivy League school, which includes Princeton. It occurred to me that taking him to Princeton might be a good excuse to reunite with Jeff. Maybe if I ask Jeff to give us a tour of Princeton, I’ll be able to see him again. Which is exciting. I would LOVE to see Jeff again.

 But I digress. The poem Jeff showed me on that plane when we were both in college was “On the Road Home.” It was in the, at the time, standard edition of Stevens’ poems, The Palm at the End of the Mind. The world’s greatest Stevens scholar, Harold Bloom, had written the introduction.

If I had to take only one book to a desert island and that’s all I could read for the rest of my life, The Palm at the End of the Mind would be high on the list. It is inexhaustible and, being organized chronologically, sheds quite a bit of light on Stevens’ artistic evolution. It also contains several never-previously-published poems which are among the best he ever wrote.

But getting back to reality. So Jeff and I are sitting on a plane and Jeff is reading The Palm at the End of the Mind. I am reading some other book, which I’ve since totally forgotten. And then, at a certain point, he’s moved to share the poem he has just read and he asks me to read it. 

It's not very long so I read it. I like it. I can’t say I understood it the way I would understand it later, but I liked it right away. It’s not all that challenging to read, and it’s not as abstruse as some of his other poems (particularly the longer ones from his middle post-Harmonium period). 

It begins: ‘It was when I said/‘There is no such thing as the truth,’/That the grapes seemed fatter. The fox ran out of his hole.” I liked that. I liked that a lot. I liked Stevens’ rejection of the idea of “truth.” And I liked the metaphor of the grapes seeming “fatter.” And I loved the way Stevens used the fox running out of his hole as a metaphor for the way letting go of truth can make you more free and wild and brave. 

What I think Stevens is saying is that it is the idea of “the truth” that oppresses us, that prevents the grapes from seeming fatter than they would otherwise be. I like fat grapes. The fatter the better. At the end of “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” in the section titled “It Must Give Pleasure,” Wallace Stevens, speaking to Reality, writes: “Fat girl, Terrestrial, my summer, my night.”  He calls reality “Fat Girl.” For Stevens, “fat” is a compliment. It denotes reality’s superabundance and uncontainability. 

He goes on to write: “You… You said,/‘There are many truths,/But they are not parts of a truth.’/Then the tree, at night, began to change…” This is not a monologue but a dialogue. There are two people here. The scene suddenly gets romantic. Two different ways of describing Reality, but they are not incompatible. No truth and many truths is basically the same thing. It’s just looking at it from a different angle. 

I’m not going to go through the whole poem, even though it’s not particularly long, but I will quote the last stanza, because it’s my favorite one. Stevens writes: “It was at that time, that the silence was largest/And longest, the night was roundest/The fragrance of the autumn warmest,/Closest and strongest.” It’s when we approach the Real that the silence becomes largest and longest. It’s when we let in the reality of night that the night’s roundness becomes roundest. It’s when we let in the reality of Autumn that its fragrance becomes warmest, closest, and strongest. 

4)   Stevens was death-obsessed from an early age. He had experienced St. John of the Cross’ dark night of the soul and understood that enjoying life was the only thing worth living for. It’s amazing how long it took for the reality of death to actually kill him. But like Rimbaud, a poet he idolized and referenced repeatedly, the reality of death caused him to die before he died. In that sense, he was (like Maurice Blanchot whom he read and loved) a walking dead man. 

5)   Gilles Deleuze uses the term “an event” to describe the experience of reality not conforming to your maps of it. When it’s an event, you can’t wrap your head around it – you can’t figure it out. It resists you. That’s how you know it’s real. Because reality pushes back and fantasy doesn’t. If it pushes back, it’s reality.

6)   Philip K. Dick, who despite appearances has a lot in common with Wallace Stevens (specifically a Gnostic view of the nature of Reality), writes: “Reality is that which, after you stop believing in it, refuses to go away.” In other words, it’s real alright. But reality, for Stevens is dialectical, and the only way to grasp it is dialectically. It is something ineffable and evanescent. The last line of “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” is: “It is not in the premise that reality is a solid. It may be a shade that traverses a dust, a force that traverses a shade.”

For Stevens, reality is neither a solid nor the shade that something solid might cast – like the shadows on the wall in Plato’s allegory of the cave. It is a force. In other words, it is energy as opposed to matter. In that sense, the solidity of matter, the solidity of reality, is an illusion. Stevens inhabits a quantum universe in which thoughts affect what one sees and thinks. He is at the center of the world and, in that moment when one surrenders to the real that exceeds us, Stevens calls reality by its real name. He writes: “I call you by name, my green, my fluent mundo. You will have stopped revolving except in crystal.” 

For Stevens, reality is fluent. It speaks our language, even if we refuse to understand it. It is trying to connect with us, to communicate with us. It is the whole world and it is ever-green. When you attain the real, which is to say when you finally surrender your ego, the spinning world will stop revolving. Except in crystal. It will forever revolve in crystal. But how is that possible? It’s not. But neither is reality.

7)   Stevens writes: “The poem must resist the intelligence/Almost successfully.” It is this quality of resistance that Deleuze called the event. The event is resistance itself. 

8)   Diane Arbus wrote: “It’s what I’ve never seen before that I recognize.” What you’ve never seen before is reality. Reality is what you recognize as being real, more real than your projections, more real than your ideals, more real than your most cherished beliefs. You’ve never seen it before because it’s always new, never the same way twice. 

9)   The pre-Socratic philosopher Cratylus, in response to Heraclitus, said: “You can’t even step into the same river once.” And then he never spoke again. That was his entire teaching, in a nutshell. He was a performance artist long before that terminology existed. Reality is not a river. A river is a thing. And reality isn’t a thing. It’s everything and nothing. 

10)    The boxer Mike Tyson put it like this: “Everybody’s got a plan… till they get punched in the face.” Reality is the boxer that punches you in the face and knocks you out. Reality is bigger and stronger than you. Reality will always win out. And no one likes it when that happens. Except maybe Jesus.

11)    Wallace Stevens once wrote: “Reality is an Activity of the Most August Imagination.” For Stevens, reality and the imagination are not opposites. Their relationship is dialectical and, at the end of the day, they are the same thing. He agrees with the Gnostics who claimed that it is the imagination that creates reality and not the other way around. For Stevens, who lived in the twilight of the death of God, the imagination is another word for God, and so is reality.

12)    In “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” Stevens writes: “O thin men of Haddam,/Why do you imagine golden birds?/Do you not see how the blackbird/Walks around the feet/Of the women about you?” Reality is the blackbird that the thin men of Haddam fail to see, even though it’s in plain sight, walking around the feet of their women. Instead, they dream of golden birds, which don’t exist, and thereby prevent them from seeing the real women about them. 

13)    Wallace Stevens taught me to see. He taught me to love and embrace Reality. He taught me to appreciate and inhale “the rancid rosin, burly smells/of dampened lumber, emanations blown/From warehouse doors, the gustiness of ropes…” He taught me to see “nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” No one has ever given me so much. No one has ever had such a profound and positive effect on the quality of my life. I owe him everything, and I love him more than I can ever say. 

He is a towering figure in my psyche, and my esteem for him only continues to grow with each passing year. When I read his poems, which I have been reading and re-reading for over forty years, I get vertigo because he is so high, so exalted, so in conversation with God. Like the genie of “genius” in the Rimbaud poem of that name, “He has known us all and has loved us all. May we know… how to hail him and see him, and to send him away.” 

Because you can’t live in reality. You are always approaching reality and then sending it away. And that’s okay. That’s what we do here on earth. Like the angel of reality in “Angel Surrounded by Paysans,” Stevens could say of himself: “I am the necessary angel of earth,/Since, in my sight, you see the earth again/Cleared of its stiff and stubborn, man-locked set.” The reality that Stevens affirms is not man-locked. It is not locked at all. It is wide open, which is why Stevens can ask: “There is a welcome at the door to which no one comes?” 

Reality is a door with a welcome mat in front of it. But no one is knocking at the door. No one is trying to get in. Instead, we are all trying to go in the opposite direction. But I’m starting to get tired of doing that. I want to knock on the door of the angel of reality and I want to see the earth again. No poet has ever grappled with the nature of reality as deeply and as relentlessly as Wallace Stevens. In doing so, he has enriched my life to an astonishing degree. And I just want to say thank you, thank you, thank you. 

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