FURTHER NOTES ON WALLACE STEVENS’ POEM, THE FINAL SOLILOQUY OF THE INTERIOR PARAMOUR AND A FINAL NOTE ON POETICS

 FINAL SOLILOQUY OF THE INTERIOR PARAMOUR

 The Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour

Wallace Stevens 

Light the first light of evening, as in a room

In which we rest and, for small reason, think

The world imagined is the ultimate good.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous. 

It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,

Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:

Within a single thing, a single shawl

Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth, 

A light, a power, the miraculous influence.

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.

We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole, 

A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.

We say God and the imagination are one... 

How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind, 

We make a dwelling in the evening air, 

In which being there together is enough.

—————-

R:

I think the thoughts are the way the speaker expresses the sentiments.  Take the first stanza:

Light the first light of evening, as in a room

In which we rest and, for small reason, think

The world imagined is the ultimate good.

This soliloquy is spoken by the "interior paramour," our somewhat shameful love for our own selves, not god.   The "small reason" and "think" (not "know") also expresses hesitation about the belief expressed, and the poem as a whole expresses the tentativeness with which this view must be held, in contrast to the certainty of believers.  (Of course believers have their own problem, ie., disbelief, but it is usually much more dramatic given the nature of the belief.)

So my paraphrase would describe the various expressions of the tentative state of mind that the poem expresses about what (you elucidate the "what"), and how it does it.  But I don't enjoy doing it.  It seems clumsy compared to the poem.  

——————

Me:

I read you to say we differ in that I see good lyric poems as finally or ultimately expressing ideas, themes—and I have a specific idea about theme, which is what the poem is “saying”, and which can be briefly stated—and you see poems as the, can I say? dramatization or dramatic expression of thoughts. 

I remember our difference in that now, and I won’t go on about why I disagree with you. So, I’ll just repeat that I see no exclusiveness between the two approaches and any difference dissolves in a holistic approach. 

At this point more interesting to me is coming to better terms with Stevens’ poem, which I’ve looked at more and thought more about. I need to adjust my own initial emphasis 

The poem concerns those of us who are “interior paramours”.

And in that, different from you, I see no shameful self love, no hesitation about what the speaker sets out, no tentativeness, no contrast with what believers believe, their certainty. And even if I disagree, don’t you see, as I do, that your description of the  ways the tentativeness come across adds up to your own idea of what the poem is about, which is to say, its theme.

Me, more than before, I see a continuity between what’s set out in the first stanza  and the heights of things in the last two stanzas. The first stanza is the seeds of what finally culminate in what’s “enough”. The interior paramour isn’t a self lover but rather the lover of innerness, which includes thought and imagination leading to inner illumination.

We start at beginnings: the beginning of light, “the first light of evening”, just as evening is the beginning of darkness, and so the first light of illumination in that darkening; the beginning of the soliloquy, where one speaks to oneself, consistent with the love of innerness; the beginning of “rest”, of calmness, tranquility; the beginning of thought, “for small reason”; the beginning of understanding the interrelation among thought, imagination and beneficence: 

we rest and, for small reason, think

The world imagined is the ultimate good.

And we have the beginning of a self conscious meditation cast in poetry—“as in a room”. 

The imagistic and thematic links among the beginnings in the first stanza and the culmination of things in the last two stanzas dispel, I argue, your view of what the first stanza introduces and your characterizations of the sentiments with which I’ve taken issue.

The “small reason” and what we “ think” blossom into the “central mind”. Our initial thought of “the world imagined as the ultimate good” evolves into the fullest and highest synthesis of mind intertwined with imagination as inner illumination:

“Within its vital boundary, in the mind.

We say God and the imagination are one... “

From the first lighting the first light of evening, an inner illumination as well as an outer one, we get to “How high that highest candle lights the dark.” 

And out of that light, our brightest inner illumination, and out of our connection to the order of things, at first “obscure”, out of the connection to the central mind, we release ourselves from our contraction, our movement into ourselves, over the course of the poem: “the intensest rendezvous”; “we collect ourselves…into one thing”; “within a single thing”; “wrapped tightly around us”. From out of that process, which is a leaving behind of “indifferences”, a forgetting of “each other and ourselves”, we “feel”,  and “think” of, “that which arranged the “rendezvous”. 

The release from the contraction, the movement to within, is this freeing:

“Out of this same light, out of the central mind, 

We make a dwelling in the evening air”

So the beginnings are good. “This is”, which begins the second stanza, refers to the thought that “the world imagined is the ultimate good.” As the speaker says, using the language of logic, “This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.” 

So as I say, we have at the highest height of things a kind of symbiosis of knowledge, thought, imagination, God and the light of inner illumination. 

There is no end to what can be noted. So I’ll stop here. 

————

R:

I would prefer to say the poem depicts a person who. . . etc.  I think of poems as verbal portraits based on sentiments expressed. If you think the smile on the Mona Lisa is the theme of the picture, then we agree.  But I do agree that sentiments (feeling charged ideas, like a feeling charged face) are the material of the portrait.  The Latin tag for my view is ut pictura poesis. "As portraits are so are lyric poems."  I thought you paraphrased to make the theme clearer, but one cannot paraphrase a portrait. The words of the poem in that order are the paint.  One makes of the paint a portrait, one makes of the words a portrait, not paraphraseable thoughts.  Two very different ways of taking words.  De Santis wasn't popular not because of what he said but his "presentation of self" was not appealing.  (So it was said).  

NOTE ON WALLACE STEVENS’ POEM, THE FINAL SOLILOQUY OF THE INTERIOR PARAMOUR

 The Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour

Wallace Stevens 

Light the first light of evening, as in a room

In which we rest and, for small reason, think

The world imagined is the ultimate good.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous. 

It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,

Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:

Within a single thing, a single shawl

Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth, 

A light, a power, the miraculous influence.

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.

We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole, 

A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.

We say God and the imagination are one... 

How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind, 

We make a dwelling in the evening air, 

In which being there together is enough.

R:

Not a faith many can live with, or even understand.  Lovely though.  

Many of his poems are concerned with the idea that the worlds we create with our imaginations, the ordinary everyday world, which is lovely and ugly, etc.  good and evil, is one, and science just gives us new powers over it and is itself an achievement of our imaginations.  Rather like Blake's view, but the relaxed atheist one, not Blake's passionate marriage of heaven and hell.  

Me:

I’m curious about this poem. 

Some say it’s about the imagination or imaginative creativity. 

I tried briefly online to check out Stevens’ views on religion but seemed to get conflicting answers such as, not religious as such, lapsed religiosity, poetry or the creative imagination as replacing  diminishing religious belief, or he was religious. I  found—it was only the briefest look—no firm answer. 

I read the poem as deeply religious, showing an interrelation between God and the imagination even while the “poet”, ie, the speaker, is non committal as to the existence of God or if God exists merely because we have created Him. 

I read the poem to mean it doesn’t matter. 

Either way, there is a God, and we reach spiritual height either in virtue of Him and our ability to imagine Him or, differently, in virtue of our ability to imagine Him into existence.

When we reach Him, it is a unifying, peace of mind-making, abiding, sheltering, synthesizing, beautiful, fusing physical and spiritual, necessary and sufficient, all resolving, transcending order of Him correlative with our capacity to imagine him. 

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,

We make a dwelling in the evening air, 

In which being there together is enough.

The pathway of the poem is an “epistemological” and spiritual journey from “for small reason” and “the first light” to “the central mind”, “the highest candle lights in the dark” and to “ In which being there together is enough.”

I reject views of this poem as the imagination, read art, read poetry, taking the place of God in our lives. 

Exchange On Robert Kelly’s Poem Looking

 Looking 

Robert Kelly, 1935 –

Once when I read the funnies

I took my little magnifying glass

and looked too close.

Forms became colors and colors

were just arrays of dots

and between the dots I saw the rough bleak

storyless legend of the pulp paper

empty as the winter moon

and I dreaded it.

I had looked right through,

when I wanted a universe

that sustains

looker and looking and the seen

forever, detail after detail

never ending. And all I had found

was between. But between

had its own song:

Find it in the space between—

it is just as empty as it seems

but this blankness is your mother.

R:

Interesting, since I like to look "too" closely at paintings and the paint becomes a painting itself, abstract but its own little world.  Many are even more interesting looked at closely.(Riopelle is an example.)   So I thought I understood up to "its own song."  And liked it. 

But why then "empty?" And the last line is completely baffling. What is the "blankness," and how is it "your mother?"  

If he just means that looking closely means one loses the 3-D illusion, that doesn't seem either expressive of anything.

Me:

Isn’t it in effect, or like, the inversion of Pascal’s 'The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me'? It captures some blend of the experiences like looking so hard at something it becomes as nothing as it loses all sense of anything, or repeating a word over and over till it loses all sense and is just meaningless sound, or staring at a blank page wanting to write something but being stuck or mired in the blankness. 

But then, as you note, you see something, hear something, think something in and amidst all that meaninglessness, which is an emptiness, and creating begins, whether it’s in apprehension or the making of something. 

And so, the blankness is likened to your mother. IE, the poem reframes this emptiness as something significant and nurturing, and, so, again, the "blankness" is likened to a mother. The emptiness becomes a source of origin and potential, like the creative void from which new art, ideas and perspectives come forth.

R:

You are very generous in your idea of what is implied by "your mother."  Perhaps my problem is that a common insult where I came from was "your motha," as in motha fucker.  To which the standard reply was "at least I got a mother."  But even without that it comes as an utter surprise.

And the "your" sounds like the speaker is talking about another person's mother.  It seems weird to me, and your explanation goes quite a way beyond what it will imply for most readers---I would guess. 

Me:

The poem feels conversational, but like an immediately initial casual conversation that quickly grows serious and thoughtful. The speaker works something through. He starts with how he read the funnies, as innocuous as he can get. 

And then, poetically, he thinks things through, culminating from the reversal on to his final summarizing insight. And now, having that, he addresses the reader, who he’s been “talking to”. The “your” is just that. I can’t see any plausible connection to “motherfucker”, “your mother”, as in the dozens, “you mother”, or anything else along those lines.

This may be just me extrapolating too much, but really I don’t think so. I think it’s a plausible reading of the poem and its final metaphor.

Exchange On Israel As Apartheid And Related Issues

 I got this from M in response to Coleman Hughes dismantling the idea that Israel is an apartheid nation and I answered him:

M:

“Itzik I'm not sure if I have a counter argument per se, but it seems to me that there are two somewhat separate issues being touched on here.  One is whether or not Israel can be described as an 'apartheid' state and the other is whether African-Americans should line up with the Palestinians using the same measure as the civil rights movement in the U.S.

 

I think I'd mostly agree with Hughes on the first (although I'll add a rider below) and on the second -- whether black Americans should take the Palestinian side as a matter of racial solidarity against European colonialism -- I'd say that it's a difficult question to answer as it depends a lot more on feelings and emotional reactions than the first issue does.

 

So, leaving the West Bank aside here, I'd say this:  although I don't see Israel as an apartheid society, I do think that there are unresolved issues and an actual worsening of the situation in respect of Arab Israelis.  A few years ago the Netanyahu administration lowered the status of Arabic from being an official language of Israel (for 70 years!) to a secondary language, which was a noticeably contemptuous move to indicate to Arab Israelis that they are tolerated rather than standing on the same footing with Hebrew-speaking fellow citizens.

 

I've just begun reading a very interesting book by the historian Schlomo Sand called The Words and the Land, which looks at the relationship between Jewish writers and intellectuals and the creation of an Israeli national identity that developed exclusive rather than inclusive assumptions.  He says that the peculiar thing about Israel is that its Arabic-speaking inhabitants (presumably mostly Muslim with some Christians) aren't really represented by the nation that they are citizens of.

 

That doesn't make it an apartheid state, needless to say, but it does suggest a problem that is sharpened by decisions made at the beginning of the modern Israel e.g. the religious veto over marriage, exemptions from military service etc.  Can you be an equal citizen of a country that draws its circle of national identity in such a way as to emphasize that you stand outside that circle?

 ———

I answered him thusly:

“M, sorry for the delay. I meant to respond sooner but it slipped my mind till just now when I reminded myself to.

I think there are more than two issues. The context of all this recent focus on Israel has been generated by 10/7. It triggered and crystallized the outpouring of nearly global anti Israeli, anti Semitic vehemence. 10/7 cannot be separated from Hughes’ analysis. And in my view what underlies his piece is his outspoken rejection of Hamas and what it did, which is undergirded by his view of Israel as a liberal democracy, an imperfect one to be sure, with, presently, that exacerbated by the right wing extremists in her government.

But, in my view at least, what animates Hughes’ full throated dismissal of Israel practicing apartheid, being white supremacist, a colonizer needing decolonization, is that these canards are trotted out, nay galloped out, by many to sympathize with, justify, identify with, with Hamas’ 10/7 medieval barbarism. He’s confronting an ideological consensus, most prevalent on university campuses, held by academics and students alike, that sees "10/7 as the righteous apotheosis of Jews’ evil. 

So, I agree with you that Israel is not an apartheid state. And it as an ostensible ground for what I’ve just described amongst those cheering on Hamas must be rejected. It just ain’t so.

I note you say, “leaving the West Bank aside”. Why leave it aside? Here, a whole host of issue come screaming forth. It’s not part of Israel. It’s part of the occupied/disputed territory waiting for resolution, and brimming with wrong doing from both sides in its seemingly permanent state of intractable irresolution. 

The problems range from the blurry line between Fatah and Hamas, legitimate Israeli security concerns, the Hamasian spectre of what would happen if Israel didn’t maintain some sort of West Bank occupier status, deeply embedded and widespread Palestinian irredentism and rejectionism—there was in the West Bank much Palestinian cheering for 10/7 and next to nothing, if any, in the way of criticism of it, with apparently Abbas denying what Hamas did on 10/7 and raising conspiracist claims of Israeli complicity: once a Holocaust denier, then forever one, I guess—the fanatics in Netanyahu’s coalition and a rising numbers of incidents involving fanatical right wing Israelis against innocent Palestinians. 

So I say, it’s right to leave the West Bank aside, not because it’s a case of shadow apartheid or some such but because it’s irrelevant to the claim that Israel is an apartheid state. 

Now, only respectfully, it strikes me as an odd and unhelpful way to frame your second issue as you have: 

…and the other is whether African-Americans should line up with the Palestinians using the same measure as the civil rights movement in the U.S….

and 

…whether black Americans should take the Palestinian side as a matter of racial solidarity against European colonialism -- I'd say that it's a difficult question to answer as it depends a lot more on feelings and emotional reactions than the first issue does…

I say skin colour ought have nothing to do with anything here. Your framing replicates the general problem with racial identitarianism, the obsession with which now bedevils American society, and less so but Canadian society as well, and feeds into the false imposition of the terms of this American racial problem onto Israelis and Palestinians. 

Half or nearly half of Israelis are Mizrahi and are visibly indistinguishable from most Palestinians. Some Palestinians are whiter than many Israelis. So where does race come into it; and where does European colonialism come into it? After all, Jewish indigeneity to these lands goes back millennially and a big bulk of Israeli citizenry is the outgrowth of her neighbouring countries making themselves effectively judenrein after 1948. 

So to my mind African Americans as a racial bloc should feel nothing about whom they should line up with, and even putting it as “line up with” is reductive. The racial bloc should be an irrelevance. Individuals regardless of the hue of their skins should take their own positions on these issues, and should reject any pull coming from the fact of their skin colour. The “line up” way of seeing this only fuels a false divisiveness, where any resolution that is to come must be borne of some kind of a not-yet conceived of form of compromise that must needs beggar lining up, ie be in toto, with one group or another. 

I wasn’t aware of the devaluation of Arabic as an official Israeli language. If so devalued, then that is an internal Israeli issue to be dealt with internally. As are other issues involving Israeli Arabs. Every county has its problems. There is plenty enough to criticize Israel about, with of course much more to praise her for, without the former forming the basis of canards about what she is and what she isn’t, and certainly without raising what may be problematic in her internal politics to the heights of international obsession, let alone concern, and let alone the conflagrating pervasive anti Semitism generated by the international fetishizing of Israel as the paradigm of all that is evil, which, as noted, finds expression in the bizarre amplitude of support that 10/7 has garnered, all the while example after example of Muslims doing terrible things on grand scales to other Muslims, and other nations and groups doing terrible things on grand scales to others gets such relatively little mention.

Rich Lowry’s Great Takedown Of Ta-Nehisi Coates in 2015

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/07/the-toxic-world-view-of-ta-nehisi-coates-120512/