Maybe it’s because I’ve been living with this poem for a good two weeks now in preparation for my recitation this coming Friday. Or maybe Wallace Stevens’ “Debris of Life and Mind” really does haunt in its reticence. Stevens’ message, although certainly applicable to the period in which he wrote the poem, is applicable to innumerable periods and situations due to the space it inhabits: youth, the unconscious, the sanctity of sleep. These undefinable spaces of the imagination, of sanctuary from the presumable chaos and misgivings of the real world, are places we have to retreat. The call to “Stay here. Speak of familiar things awhile,” is a call yes, to close one’s eyes to the real world, but is an imperative in favor of nostalgia. The past – or youth – seems to Stevens to embody the rare comfort found in reality, the “close and warm” that we gradually lose, the youth we gradually forget. Even in the present, in the “bright red woman’s” moment of utter “meditation” on “her [own] color,” happiness is not “as gay as it was.” Ultimately, any attempt of the adult, corrupted and ultimately separated from a true union with imagination, to achieve happiness results in an understanding that the days of comfort are gone. The urge to stay in these moments of remembered warmth is one I daresay we all feel from time to time.
Stevens’ poem also demands a slowed diction in lines most heavy with nostalgia: “Besides, when the sky is so blue, things sing themselves.” The last three words demand a heaviness on the tongue, demand the poem’s speaker to “stay here” just as the poem’s last line eventually will do. “We ought not to be awake” belabors the verb of existence, extending it over two separate words, “to be,” instead of merely stating “We ought not be awake.” The line beckons the speaker to stay in the moment of non-consciousness, in the not-awake space where utter immersion in nostalgia is possible.
On a semi-related note, while searching the web for images related to “Debris of Life and Mind,” I chanced upon artist Kenji Fujita’s sculpture titled “Debris of Life and Mind.” It’s really interesting to think about this piece in conjunction with Stevens’ poem; perhaps Stevens is calling for an organic life force, one where “the old pieces become raw material” for the present. The fact that Fujita uses “found objects” in his work, also, reflects this idea of memory that Stevens is addressing. Bits and pieces of familiarity, of warmth, can be conglomerated to create something beautiful. Maybe the “debris” of “Life and Mind” has more positive connotations than is at first apparent. Maybe moments we recall most often, with the most fondness, are the debris of which we are made…and maybe that should be enough for us, to be an amalgamation of the “found memories” we find solace in.
To see more of Fujita’s work, click here. And here is a brief description of Fujita’s process: “Fujita uses wood, cardboard, paper, plaster-cloth, felt, aqua-resin and paint. These materials are used to make and transform objects in several ways: there is recycled old work that has been cut up and re-made into new objects; there are found objects, such as cardboard boxes, that get laminated with material such as plaster-cloth and aqua-resin; there are new objects that are made just in order to be cut up. This process of finding, making, undoing and redoing makes it possible to get from one point to another, with turns that are unpredictable: sometimes they’re ordered logically, other times they’re messily scrambled. It’s a process that allows Fujita to see his work as something organic. The detritus of the old pieces becomes raw material for the new pieces” (Quoted from here).
Your nostalgic reading of Stevens (or reading of the heavy nostalgia in Stevens) next to Kenji’s vision of repurposed nostalgia as the “detritus of the old pieces becomes raw material for the new pieces” aptly captures the tension I sense in Stevens poem. Thinking of our graph from class on Wednesday, I have trouble placing stevens on either side of the “retreat” and “engagement” line. Is the desire for connection, for speaking, a movement towards engagement with the world? Or is it a movement backward towards nostalgia, towards the imagination. The image of the “Sun” in Stevens is often understood as a metaphor of the imagination. From the “darkness” in which the poem begins–a darkness in which nostalgia itself seems impossible (“it is as if we were never children,” the saddest line ever) the “sun” of the imagination arises, offering a clarity in which “things sing themselves.” Yet the last lines of the poem suggest that even the rebirth of the imagination is not so profound as it used to be. We are left with that odd thing: the familiar–something between nostalgia for the past and desire to connect with the present. This poem is firmly on the line for me!
Ah yes, I also wanted to say that I appreciate your attention to the heaviness of sound in this poem. If I have time before class, I might try to memorize one of my own favorite Stevens poems called “Long and Sluggish Lines.” It has a similar weight of phrasing at key times that makes you linger, stay, and articulate these lines. Reminds me of the line from “Of Modern Poetry”: “slowly and with meditation.” Even the phrasing requires that slowness.