Thirteen Ways of Looking at Twilight—3
In his poem “The Idea of Order at Key West,” Wallace Stevens considers the juxtaposition of natural and man-made order: natural order that just is, man-made order that is created.
In the poem a woman is singing by the surf at Key West, and seems to be spontaneously creating the song she’s singing. Weighing that artful performance against the random sights and sounds of the surf, the waves, the horizon, the sky, the narrator seems to give precedence to art. The woman sings “beyond the genius of the sea.”
I find the line between the two harder to draw than apparently the narrator does, though even he is not sure. I don’t see any need to argue that nature is conscious—though I think it is—if, really, there isn’t any essential difference between the human and the natural. Both are generated by myriad forces stretching back to a primordial impulse we can’t understand, and have the power to affect a perceiving consciousness aesthetically. To what extent is the woman echoing the sea, competing with it, inspired by it? Are the two songs interconnected or only accidentally associated? Is the woman an intermediary for “the genius of the sea,” equal parts natural and manufactured, like Coleridge’s Eolian harp? The narrator feels it is “more than that.” He wonders “whose spirit is this?”, knowing “it was the spirit that we sought.” And then, a whiff of the solipsistic: “There never was a world for her/Except the one she sang and, singing, made.”
As the narrator and his friend walk away when the woman’s song is done, he wonders not how but why the sea, burning in sunset, looks like the rapture that could inspire a painting: the meaning—Stevens calls it “order”—that we crave.
The human soul yearns for something that is not itself.
What is meaning—or art or order—but restatement? The impulse to do something when we are moved?
You can mask your inability to grasp the ineffable by giving it names, or by confusing it with your restatement, but the matter is certainly not about belief. What is belief but the end of wonder?
It’s about the horror of being trapped in your own mind.
* * *
Tinnitus must have started in the summer.
I say that because for me it mimics the sounds of a summer night, and I’m sure I had it for some time before I became aware of it. For years perhaps—is it possible? Which just goes to show that you see, smell, think, believe—hear—only what you agree to hear. And once you do, you can never un-hear it again. For me the epiphany occurred in the car, driving along and suddenly realizing I was hearing the restless humming of an Alabama summer night. In the car? In December? It was a catastrophic loss of innocence. I had just made a new friend for life.
Textbooks call tinnitus “the illusion of sound.” Hairs in the inner ear transform sound waves into electrical signals which are interpreted by the brain as sound. And if, through hearing loss, the brain doesn’t receive the signals from a swath of the spectrum that it expects, its interpretive mechanism will proceed without them. In the end, the only reality we have access to is the one our brain creates. As if we’re not isolated enough, hearing loss can isolate us even further from our fellow beings, and accelerate dementia.
That is the human lot, but it’s depressing. People fear being an insignificant blip in a vast universe—I fear not being one. It is solipsism that terrifies me. The dialogue in your head keeps you company, but drives you mad in the end.
“It was the spirit that we sought.”
I remember a night sitting on the porch of our lake house with my cousin on a real Alabama summer evening—that lovely between time of day—no longer quite this, not yet quite that—the time when nature’s symphony starts. Of course, in my head it had already started, but what I was hearing on this evening was fuller. If these weren’t the sounds of an Alabama summer evening, they were a very convincing impression of them.
I asked my cousin to describe what he was hearing. A buzzing here, a chirping, croaking there. That spike of sound, above all the others—did you hear that?
Yes. I heard that.
Good.
Stevens’ narrator says, “The song and water were not medleyed sound.” But for me there was no escaping the medley. I knew I could never again be sure what was real and what wasn’t. And that incertitude was the new real. For me, unlike Stevens’ narrator, what comes from outside yourself, if anything does, has a higher status than what comes from within. One is a gift, the other a trick.
The human soul yearns for something that is not itself.
March 20, 2022