Tomas Tranströmer: Schubertiana (English version)

Schubertiana 
by Tomas Tranströmer
translated by Robert Fulton


This poem includes an allusion to the Schubert Fantasia in f minor for two pianists: "We squeeze together at the piano and play with four hands in F minor, two coachmen on the same coach, it looks a little ridiculous." Under this wonderful poem you will find a link to Perahia and Lupu playing this piece.

This first video is Tranströmer reading his poem, in the original (and melodic) Swedish. The bluish grey-green tone of the colour fits the feel of Tranströmer, in particular this poem.

Schubertiana

I

In the evening darkness in a place outside New York, a viewpoint point where

             one single glance will encompass the homes of eight million

             people.
The giant city over there is a long shimmering drift, a spiral galaxy seen

            from the side.
Within the galaxy coffee-cups are pushed across the counter, the shop

           windows beg from passers-by, a flurry of shoes leave no prints.
The climbing fire escapes, the lift doors glide shut, behind  police -
locked doors  a perpetual seethe of voices.
Slouched bodies doze in subway cars, the hurtling catacombs.
I know too – without statistics – that right now Schubert is being played
in some room over there and that for someone the notes are
more real than anything else.

II

The endless expanses of the human brain are crumpled to the size of a fist.
In April the swallow returns to last year’s nest under the guttering of this

             very barn in this very parish.
She flies from Transvaal, passes the equator, flies for six weeks over two

continents, makes for precisely this vanishing dot in the land-

             mass.
And the man who catches the signals from a whole life in a few ordinary
            chords for five strings,
who makes a river flow through the eye of a needle,
is a stout young gentleman from Vienna known to his friends as `The
Mushroom," who slept with his glasses on
and stood at his writing desk punctually of a morning.
And then the wonderful centipedes of his manuscript were set in motion.

III

The string quintet is playing. I walk home through warm forests with the

             ground springy under me,
curl up like an embryo, fall asleep, roll weightless into the future, suddenly

            feel that the plants have thoughts.

IV

So much we have to trust, simply to live through our daily day without
           Sinking through the earth!
Trust the piled snow clinging to the mountain slope above the village.
Trust the promises of silence and the smile of understanding, trust that

           the accident telegram isn’t for us and that the sudden axe-blow

           from within won’t come.
Trust the axles that carry us on the highway in the middle of the three
           hundred times life-size bee swarm of steel.
But none of that is really worth our confidence.
The five strings say we can trust something else. And they keep us  com-
           pany part of the way .
As when the time-switch clicks off in the stairwell and the fingers –
          trustingly – follow the blind handrail that finds its way in the
          darkness.

V

We squeeze together at the piano and play with four hands in F minor,
          two coachmen on the same coach, it looks a little ridiculous.
The hands seem to be moving resonant weights to and fro, as if we were

          tampering with the counterweights
in an effort to disturb the great scale arm’s terrible balance: joy and
         suffering weighing exactly the same.
Annie said, `This music is so heroic,’ and she’s right.
But those whose eyes enviously follow men of action, who secretly
          despise themselves for not being murderers,
don’t recognize themselves here,
and the many who buy and sell people and believe that everyone can be

            bought, don’t recognize themselves here.
Not their music. The long melody that remains itself in all its transfor-

             mations, sometimes glittering and pliant, sometimes rugged

             and strong, snail-track and steel wire.
The perpetual humming that follows us – now –

up
the depths.

Rilke again: "I love the dark hours of my being" / "Ich liebe meines Wesens Dunkelstunden"

In line with the earlier excerpt from Rilke's Das Stundenbuch / The Book of Hours, there is a piece hinting at darkness and silence and depth that I would like to share with you.

I might actually be more fond of the first seven stanzas than the five that conclude this poem. More of that later.

I love the dark hours of my being

in which my senses drop into the deep.
I have found in them, as in old letters,
my private life, that is already lived through,
and become wide and powerful now, like legends.
Then I know that there is room in me
for a second huge and timeless life.

But sometimes I am like the tree that stands
over a grave, a leafy tree, fully grown,
who has lived out that particular dream, that the dead boy
(around whom its warm roots are pressing)
lost through his sad moods and his poems.

*


Ich liebe meines Wesens Dunkelstunden,
in welchen meine Sinne sich vertiefen;
in ihnen hab ich, wie in alten Briefen,
mein täglich Leben schon gelebt gefunden
und wie Legende weit und uberwunden.
Aus ihnen kommt mir Wissen, dass ich Raum
zu einem zweiten zeitlos breiten Leben habe.

Und manchmal bin ich wie der Baum,
der, reif und rauschend, über einem Grabe
den Traum erfüllt, den der vergangne Knabe
(um den sich seine warmen Wurzeln drängen)
verlor in Traurigkeiten und Gesängen.

*

Again I am seduced by the tangible singing blackness of Rilke's. My senses drop into the deep as I read his lines. I see that Bly, the translator, has made a choice in translating "vertiefen" into "drop into the deep". This is not a direct translation, which I don't think possible with this Germanic word (we have the same, "fortape", in Norwegian). However the interpretation Bly makes here I think gains the reading of the poem. "Drop into the deep" fits very well with the tone of the poem and where it comes from.

Through the dark hours of his being, Rilke has found endless room in himself, "for a second huge and timeless life". This I understand well. It is perhaps nothing I could explain very well, but this notion of a huge and timeless life, depersonalised, speaks its blackly glimmering language in my ears.

The ending I to some degree find a little pity-me, a kind of melancholy feeling sorry for himself. A hard judgment perhaps, but the concluding line "lost through his sad moods and his poems" doesn't ring well with me. On the other side, Rilke is pointing to something very human and understandable. He sometimes feels like he is in another depersonalised form, that of a a vast and upright tree looking down on the boy (himself) who got lost in his sad moods an poems/songs. Actually this is just another way of saying what he said in the first part of the poem. The tree-boy is purely that vital and timeless part of him that the moody and broody poetry writing boy doesn't get to experience.

With the seasonal darkness pressing in on the windows from around 4 pm everyday, the darkness is quite tangible here. Still I can conclude with the opening line: I love the dark hours of my being.

Tomas Tranströmer: Madrigal

This is also a very good poem by Tranströmer. Although the more usual set-up of the poem isn't there; or rather, that this looks like a piece of prose, the text rings like a poem to me. The imagery, the rhythm, the silences between the words and the sentences; and of course the weight of each word. If you hear this poem recited, you probably wouldn't think of it as a prose poem. However the form, Tranströmer seems to shine through.

* * *

Madrigal

I inherited a dark forest where I seldom walk. But a day is coming when the living and the dead trade places. Then the forest will be set in motion. We are not without hope. The most serious crimes will remain unsolved despite the efforts of many policemen. In the same way there is somewhere in our lives a great unsolved love. I inherited a dark forest, but today I am walking in the other forest, the light one. And the living things that sing, wiggle, wave and crawl! It's spring and the air is very strong. I have an examination at the University of Oblivion and am as emptyhanded as the shirt on the clothesline.

* * *


I have always loved the closing line:

I have an examination at the University of Oblivion and am as emptyhanded as the shirt on the clothesline.

How wonderfully simple yet recognisable that image is! The cheerfully waving shirt hanging out to dry on a clothesline. No worries, just existing right there and then, with the sun shining through its cotton white and blue stripes.

I also like that the air is very strong (stark is the Swedish word, the emphasis on the rolling 'r'). The air can be strong. When life holds meaning and your stride is full. When the time of year is spring as well, I get his meaning clearly.

The dark and light forests he speaks about is hardly difficult to recognise. At least not to me. Again I guess the Northern or even Scandinavian landscape I share with this poet informs my reading and makes me feel right at home in the world he paints. But beyond that, the forest isn't exactly an unknown image to mental landscapes. Yet powerful, I find, a valid illustration.

Here the balance between the light and dark is quite visible. You just don't have one without the other. 

Squeezed in is the line about unsolved love. This I find in a way very hopeful. That somewhere in our lives there is a great unsolved love. That puts some light and warmth into areas one might often think of as dark and mysterious, just because one doesn't see what is there, what it is within you that feels unsolved, unilluminated. Why shouldn't it be a great unsolved love rather than a deeply forgotten dark something?

What shines through the clearest, I think though, is that although you inherit a dark forest or wood, you dont have to live in it. You don't have to reproduce the worldview you grow up in, the fights of your fathers. Through the University of Oblivion you wash free of static worlds and come out light and emptyhanded, translucent with sunlight and full of life.


In Swedish:

* * *

Madrigal

Jag ärvde en mörk skog dit jag sällan går. Men det kommer en dag när de döda och levande byter plats. Då sätter sig skogen i rörelse. Vi är inte utan hopp. De svåraste brotten förblir ouppklarade trots insats av många poliser. På samma sätt finns någonstans i våra liv en stor uoppklarad kärlek. Jag ärvde en mörk skog men idag går jag i en annan skog, den ljusa. Allt levande som sjunger slingrar viftar og kryper! Det är vår och luften är mycket stark. Jag har examen från glömskans universitet och är lika tomhänt som skjortan på tvättstrecket.

* * *

From För levande och döda, 1989 (For the living and the dead).

Tomas Tranströmer: Romanesque Arches (English) / Romanska bågar (Swedish)

Another of Tranströmer's poems I hold dear is "Romanesque Arches" or "Romanska bågar". This poem is deeply human, hence international.

From our shared heritage, here exemplified by a Romanesque church (rumoured to be the San Marco Cathedral in Venice/Venezia, Italy), we enter our shared world of spirit, of humanity, our nearly endless human potential.


Romanesque Arches

Basilica di San Marco

Tourists have crowded into the half-dark of the enormous
       Romanesque church.
Vault opening behind vault and no perspective.
A few candle flames flickered.
An angel with no face embraced me
and his whisper went all through my body:
"Don't be ashamed to be a human being, be proud!
Inside you one vault after another opens endlessly.
You'll never be complete, and that's as it should be."
Tears blinded me
as we were herded out into the fiercely sunlit piazza,
together with Mr. and Mrs. Jones, Herr Tanaka and Signora Sabatini;
within each of them vault after vault opened endlessly.


(Translated by Robert Bly, tweaked a little by me)

* * *




Here is the original:

Romanska bågar

Inne i den väldiga romanska kyrkan trängdes turisterna i halvmörkret.
Valv gapande bakom valv och ingen överblick.
Några ljuslågor fladdrade.
En ängel utan ansikte omfamnade mig
och viskade genom hela kroppen:
"Skäms inte för att du är människa, var stolt!
Inne i dig öppnar sig valv bakom valv oändligt.
Du blir aldrig färdig, och det är som det skall."
Jag var blind av tårar
och föstes ut på den solsjudande piazzan
tillsammans med Mr och Mrs Jones, Herr Tanaka och Signora Sabatini
och inne i dem alla öppnade sig valv bakom valv oändligt.


* * *
Read in Swedish by the poet. I have always loved the music of Swedish. Does it translate?

The openings within us, vault behind vault opening endlessly as we understand how sacred the act of being human is.

Tomas Tranströmer: Allegro (in English)

I wish to offer you a translation of the poem Allegro which I shared in Swedish in the previous post. This translation is provided by Lyle Daggett, and he has refined the translation of Robert Bly so that it sounds, at least to me, to be closer to the original Swedish. Some of you may have read it already in the comments to the previous post where I had just learned that Tranströmer had gotten the Nobel Prize of Literature.

Thank you very much for this, Lyle!

Here it is:


Allegro

I play Haydn after a black day
and feel a little warmth in my hands.

The keys are ready. Kind hammers fall.
The sound is green, lively and still.

The sound says that freedom exists
and that someone does not pay tax to Caesar.

I shove my hands in my haydnpockets
and act like one who is calm about the world.

I raise the haydnflag -- it signals:
"We do not give up, but want peace."

The music is a glass house on a slope
where stones fly, stones roll.

And stones roll straight through
but every pane of glass is still whole.


* * *

There will be more Tranströmer in English on this blog. I can hardly wait to put it out!

The Nobel Prize of Literature goes to Tomas Tranströmer!

How my heart is warming and glowing and sparkling -- Tomas Tranströmer, over 80 years of age, has finally gotten the Nobel Prize of Literature.

I am not exaggerating if I say that Tranströmer is my favourite poet. I don't usually deal with lists of favourites and "the best" of this or that. But Tranströmer hits a Nordic nerve that is so close to my bones, heart and hide and that it will be difficult to push him off the mossy throne I've put him on.

The poem I first read of him and which opened me to his world of blue and grey and green, musicality, his deep love and compassion for the human experience, and the depths underneath and behind everything is the one called "Allegro". It remains one of the poems closest to my heart.






ALLEGRO

Jag spelar Haydn efter en svart dag
och känner en enkel värme i händerna.

Tangenterna vill. Milda hammare slår.
Klangen är grön, livlig och stilla.

Klangen säger att friheten finns
och att någon inte ger kejsaren skatt.

Jag kör ner händerna i mina haydnfickor
och härmar en som ser lugnt på världen.

Jag hissar haydnflaggan - det betyder:
"Vi ger oss inte, men vill fred."

Musiken är ett glashus på sluttningen
där stenarna flyger, stenarna rullar.

Och stenarna rullar tvärs igenom
men varje ruta förblir hel.




Sadly I don't have the English translation where I'm at (travelling), but I'll look into it when coming home.

Anyway, it is pure beauty.

You can read about him at the page of Poets.org, here as well, an article from the British newspaper The Guardian, recently in The New York Times, at the Poetry Foundation or just generally do a search on Google about him. A few volumes of his poetry have been translated into English.

Needless to say I find his work worth looking into.

Rilke: I have many brothers in the South/Ich habe viele Brüder in Sutanen

I've been touching the subject of blackness and stillness earlier. I have known Rilke for a while, but haven't really read that much of him. Why? My rather lacking skills in German as well as a lack of Norwegian translations of the works I am most interested in. I know there are quite a few English translations out there, but being a speaker of a Germanic language, an English translation just isn't the same as a Scandinavian one.

My interest for this poet has been ignited, though. Funnily enough through an English translation made by Robert Bly.

What attracted me is the following:

Ich habe viele Brüder in Soutanen
im Süden, wo in Klöstern Lorbeer steht.
Ich weiß, wie menschlich sie Madonnen planen,
und träume oft von jungen Tizianen,
durch die der Gott in Gluten geht.

Doch wie ich mich auch in mich selber neige:
Mein Gott ist dunkel und wie ein Gewebe
von hundert Wurzeln, welche schweigsam trinken.
Nur, daß ich mich aus seiner Wärme hebe,
mehr weiß ich nicht, weil alle meine Zweige
tief unten ruhn und nur im Winde winken.

* * *

I have many brothers in the South.
Laurels stand there in monastery gardens.
I know in what a human way they imagine the Madonna,
and I think often of young Titians
through whom God walks burning.

Yet no matter how deeply I go into myself
my God is dark, and in a webbing made
of a hundred roots, that drink in silence.
I know that my trunk rose from this warmth, but that's all,
because my branches hardly move at all
near the ground, and just wave a little in the wind.

* * *


This piece is part of a longer poem from the work Das Stunden-Buch or The book of Hours.

Strange when you recognise so much in a few words, that someone across time can express something so recognisable to you. Rilke is a Northern European and as much as he likes and admires the southern style of worshipping through "burning" paintings, Madonnas and the like, he sees that his own depths are different.  They are dark, a web of a hundred roots that drink in silence. That sentence alone opens my being to this poet.

There is a word in Norwegian (and German) which doesn't have a good correlate in English, which I think this poem reflects. The word is "inderlig" (German: innig) - an adjective or adverb, and "inderlighet" (innigkeit) - noun. What does this describe? A kind of intense personal longing, passionate, with a melancholy side to it - and very personal or even private. The longing is not necessary to this word (begriff), but I put it in this attempt to explain to get at the intensity this word describes. Also, "passionate" gives off rather too warm connotations. Innigkeit/inderlighet has something cool in it - hence the whiff of melancholy.

I understand only too well how he knows his trunk rose from the warmth of the southern cultures, but that up here, in this Northern European consciousness, it is cooler, sharper, and in a strange personal way more intense. Take Luther - the reformation of the Roman Catholic church began in Germany. Not a coincidence. Your relationship to God is deeply personal. Rilke's God is dark (dunkel) and drinking cool water from a deep well. This is the sense I get. The silence, darkness, the sinking feeling of an immense depth - all part of a strongly "inderlig" relationship to yourself and at the same time your god. The sentence "Doch wie ich mich auch in mich selber neige" / "Yet no matter how deeply I go into myself" also points to a Northern European tendency - that of turning inwards, of contemplating silently on your own, in an innig way. His branches growing out of his trunk embedded in the warm, southern history and mindset hardly move at all - they only wave a little in the wind. Why is this so recognisable? The whole image he gives off just fits with a sense I have of ground, of what I rest upon, spring from. A cultural layer, I believe, that easily can be mistaken as a personal layer.

Look at the man's eyes and you can see the darkness, depth and stillness centred. I think maybe only this picture would have made me realise he is a poet to my liking.

And thank goodness for bilateral translations! Now I can learn a lot more of the German language, via English. Kind of ironic, but effective. It is possible to wish to learn a language fully because of an author you like. T. S. Eliot with Dante, J. L. Borges with Ibsen. Rilke definitely tickles that bone in me.

My God is dark, and in a webbing made of a hundred roots, that drink in silence.

Burnt Norton and the pool of light - T. S. Eliot

A part of T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets sprung up in my mind as I was reading "The glass of water" by Wallace Stevens. In the poem by Stevens the glass is at one point referred to as a pool, fed upon by the light with "frothy jaws".

Eliot's Four Quartets, quite a literary (and philosophical) masterpiece, can be said to have sprung from one experience he had in a once grand, then rather forlorn rose garden. In a garden with a kind of lost, old beauty Eliot passed through a hedge of tightly growing rose bushes and came upon an empty pool in the grounds.

The genesis of the Quartets reminds me of the incident in Proust's Remembrence of things Past, where his dipping a madeleine cake in a cup of lukewarm lindenflower tea made his whole childhood whoosh back to him in a split-second, bringing with it what developed into the twelve volume modernist novel.
 



The pool in Burnt Norton

 Eliot put his birthing experience into writing:

So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,
Along the empty alley, into the box circle,
To look down into the drained pool.
Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.

This is from Burnt Norton, the first of the Quartets. Burnt Norton is a real life garden belonging to an estate of the same name in England.

The experience of the dry pool that briefly filled with sunlight expanded in Eliot into an outstretched, timeless moment of stillness, beauty and a sense of the "heart of light" as he put it in a draft of this poem.

"Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged, / And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight, / And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly / The surface glittered out of heart of light". This is the heart of this part of the quartet, maybe even of the whole of the quartets themselves. Without this experience the Quartets probably would not have been written; at least not in the form they now exist. We see that the empty, dry pool is filled with sunlight, an ethereal and brilliant water substitute - or rather, a sunlight-water, existing in a dimension of its own. The surface, he says, "glittered out of heart of light" - somehow the essence of light seems to have presented itself to him in that brief, timeless moment. A silence of a sort, revealing itself to a present and observant onlooker.

The lotos is an interesting feature here. This flower has many properties and meanings in several Eastern cultures. It has a pure white blossom on the surface of waters, be they dirty or clean. Their roots go deep into the mud in rivers and lakes, which makes it stretch from the dirt through the water and flower in this pristine whiteness, making itself a symbol of the possible transformation from dirt to purity; from ignorance to enlightenment and so on. Eliot knew at least the Eastern philosophical tradition quite well, and also had a knowledge of Sanskrit, the classical language in India; the language many of the old Buddhist texts are written in. The lotos seems to represent a lot of things in this poem written by an American turned British, in something as British as a rosegarden belonging to a stately home. Simplicity, beauty, something deeply real, something mystical, a touch of the Eastern mindset - all in all a whiff of simple elegance incorporating a mystery which is almost making itself completely accessible to us. We only have to enter a quiet state of mind to sense its direct presence and have revealed whatever it might be presenting to us.

All these words to describe a quiet moment which brought a poet a deep stillness and a connection with something he called heart of light, which again brought him to write the section overhead. But this is really part of my fascination with thought/experience and language/art/poetry. From a tiny moment, a flash of insight, can spring a whole novel, a movie, a painting, a theory, a haiku. "Moments in and out of time" Eliot calls these kinds of experiences another place in the Quartets. The intersection of the timeless with time.

"The still point of the turning world, there the dance is". This about sums up the Four Quartets. And makes me come back to it again and again.

Wallace Stevens: Human Arrangement

There is another poem of Wallace Stevens that I would like to put here. It touches in on the same theme as "A glass of water", shedding light on something of the same the "...glass of water" does and which might seem hard to grasp. The only reason it seems hard to grasp, I think, is because it is so surprisingly simple.

But first things first:


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 for transformation's self,

In a glitter that is a life, a gold
That is a being, a will, a fate.

* * *

First of all I notice how nice it is to have "human" in the title of this poem. It feels like a warm welcome somehow, even though the first line almost makes me feel that being human is something limiting. "Place-bound and time-bound" he starts off, pinning us to our concepts of time and space. I guess he is kind of right; these concepts are important to most of us and practically viewed as something given. Are they, though.

Again we see that a poem of Stevens' involves beginnings and ends. "It begins and ends, / Begins again and ends again". This gives a sense of a neverending movement, or a time with no beginning or end. This of course waves time in the normal linear sense goodbye. Do we really know any other way of looking at time? Most of us probably don't. Also, these words might point at how human lives begin and end and begin and end again, over and over; a cycle of birth and death and birth, each of us expressing something human. This in itself is a kind of endlessness, I guess – that is, as long as humans exist.

The evening rain in this poem is like a soft backdrop (nearly literally); grey, moist, silent. Somehow the sound of evening rain feels to me like a direct translation of something very human. I don't really know why – the softness of it, as mentioned, and the just-there-ness, the quiet way it settles on the earth. (I realise that much of humans' activities on this planet doesn't exactly rhyme with settling quietly anywhere, but I am speaking more of the humanity in every human, the common ground we hold and spring from.)

As always Stevens sounds a little mysterious at times. "The centre of transformations that / Transform for transformation's self" does sound rather convoluted. But I get the sense of something glimmering right underneath, something so simple that it is hard to phrase, that words simply complicate the matter. The "human arrangement" – as probably the most intelligent being on this planet, we do have quite a responsibility on our hands. The centre of transformation – who else can embody and execute that but us? This transformation, though, "transforms for transformation's self" – seemingly independent of us as its vessel. I have the feeling that both transformation of consciousness, the way we look at ourselves, our world, our fellow beings including animals, our beliefs, that all of this is up for transformation. Why shouldn't it? Transformation, movement; development. And no one can govern that transformation better than we can. Is this what Stevens meant? I don't know. But that is what his words is stirring up in me.

This transformation happens in "a glitter that is life, a gold / That is a being, a will, a fate." This beautiful ending cuplet brings back the human feel to me. It seems he is implying that life, which to us is intercoiled with being human, is a glitter, a gold, and that this gold is a being, a will, a fate. I get the sense that this is Stevens' view of what human life is. These words send a warm golden glow into me, making me sense directly the simplicity, beauty and responsibility of being human.

Wallace Stevens on a glass of water

There seems to be tons of literature on Wallace Stevens and his poetry. Should I read it all and carefully compare it with my own thoughts; correct them, refine them and write a piece at the end of all that work, I never would have gotten around to put down a word on his work.

And this I just can't allow, as interesting and mind-tickling as his poetry is.

Take "The glass of water", for instance:

THE GLASS OF WATER

That the glass would melt in heat,
That the water would freeze in cold,
Shows that this object is merely a state,
One of many, between two poles. So,
In the metaphysical, there are these poles.

Here in the centre stands the glass. Light
Is the lion that comes down to drink. There
And in that state, the glass is a pool.
Ruddy are his eyes and ruddy are his claws
When light comes down to wet his frothy jaws

And in the water winding weeds move round.
And there and in another state – the refractions,
The metaphysica, the plastic parts of poems
Crash in the mind – But, fat Jocundus, worrying
About what stands here in the centre, not the glass,

But in the centre of our lives, this time, this day,
It is a state, this spring among the politicians
Playing cards. In a village of the indigenes,
One would have still to discover. Among the dogs and dung,
One would continue to contend with one’s ideas.

From Parts of a World, 1942, 1951

***

The object is merely a state between two poles. Between nothingness and it-ness, perhaps. Between endlessness and time? These propositions point to what Stevens himself probably points towards – that there is a continuum of existence, not stopping by the word or concept a glass or water represent, but stretching out endlessly. Which, of course, is the same as saying that nothing really is. 

Stevens, a connoisseur of Asian art, must have known well the Eastern way of looking at things directly and immediately, existing only here and now – take zen as an example. A world or world-view without time is quite hard to grasp for the Western mind; or perhaps the human mind, driven as we are of appointments and schedules and all of that.

The glass is a glass in this moment, in this environment. In a much warmer environment, the glass will melt, becoming something seemingly other. What else can the glass become? Gas, air, stars? If we remove time, all of them.

Here in the centre stands the glass. The centre, which is now, here (our ways of trying to pin down something in time and space). When we see the glass now, it is a glass. That's what's real to us. But in the metaphysical, according to Stevens, there are poles at each side of the object we see – the glass. But why should the metaphysical be something else than what is right here, right now; the glass and ourselves?

You could go all metaphysical about this poem, but really, if you just take a straight look at it, read it and see or sense directly what it is – what comes up? It seems to me that it is circling around something, an underlying unity of sorts. 

This poem, there is really no beginning or end to it. There is a great sense of a loop of existence, wiping out anything to do with beginnings and ends. 

And of course there are lines that stand out poetically. I particularily like that "the plastic part of poems / Crash in the mind" with "the refractions" and "the Metaphysica" (not in that order, though). The metapoetic turns in many of Stevens' poems direct his poems inward, toward some common poetic ground which is almost possible to see if you squint through the words to look directly at it, rather than the words themselves. 

This too is a part to notice: "Here in the centre stands the glass. Light / Is the lion that comes down to drink. There, and in that state, the glass is a pool." There, and in that state, the glass is a pool. Doesn't this point to the relativity of things? The glass of water is only a glass to us, but  a pool to the thirsty lion-light, bathing in the glass of water – which, from the light's perspective, is a pool of something clear and thirst-quenching.

"But in the centre of our lives, this time, this day / It is a state". There. He puts it simply and squarely. Things are not things, defined by borders like the edges of a glass, or the wetness of water. Things, what we call things, are states, different states of a great existing thing. To put it thingly.

Will we continue to contend with our ideas?

I guess so, but we don't have to. 

We can settle with looking straight at things, taking them for what they are; not what we think they are.