A Late Poem by Wallace Stevens about the Metaxy

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) is considered one of the greatest American poets, perhaps a third after Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman.  He had something of both: a sharp metaphysical wit and a broad generous embrace of the spectacle of humanity. The former is more often noticed than the latter, however; Stevens, especially in his later, longer poems, can be difficult, if not infuriating to read.

I believe Stevens’s difficulty has roots in his ultimate beliefs. Beliefs were few for Stevens, but his poetry sometimes seems haunted by an unconscious search for beliefs; “order” is a key word for Stevens. It took most of a lifetime to bring his “rage for order” (a phrase from his second,1936 book, Ideas of Order) into line with his aesthetic principles. The concept of order is of course inseparable from, but in no wise defined, by politics, and Paul Mariani’s recent biography The Whole Harmonium (2016) does a good job accounting for Stevens’s shifting political opinions; as to party, Stevens was a Republican, but one who responded to Truman’s victory over Dewey by acknowledging that the ultruism of the Truman party was probably the greatest force for good in the world at that time. In the academy today, with its prickly sensitivities to hierarchies of power, Stevens is a hot potato or a dead white male.

The controversy among the professors may neglect Stevens’s search for and ultimate belief in metaleptic experience. Take the issue of religion. As we learn from Mariani’s biography, for all his dandyish aestheticism and skepticism, Stevens’s journey from the Presbyterian faith of his fathers in Bucks County, PA, through alternatingly jocular and pained disbelief, to his deathbed in Hartford Connecticut, comes to an end with the visits of a priest to his hospital bed. The Catholic priest, who visited him out of kindness not because Stevens was of the faith (he wasn’t), was surprised to discover that Stevens had a “marvelous idea of what God was.” For Stevens, God was “this absolute idea. Everything had been created, except for this one original uncreated concept  . . .” (Mariani, p. 396). (That this idea is a version of the perennial problem called the ontological difference will be of interest to the theologically-minded reader.) In their discussions, Stevens resisted the idea of Hell in favor of a merciful God. And yet he did receive communion before he died.

For Stevens, in his resistance to contemporary Christianity, the imagination and God were not opposed; he often played with the idea that they were the same ‘thing.” But for Stevens, the word “thing” was always in play. The thing-world could become charged with a heart-breaking beauty. This mystery is his central preoccupation, and he connected it with “imagination.” Just whose imagination becomes less and less clear as time goes on.

The experience of reading Stevens can be mind-numbing; he had no intention to produce language that was a paraphrase of concepts independently believed. More than most poets, Stevens made poems that conveyed the experience of thinking. For Stevens, thinking was inseparable from feeling, from perceiving, from, you might say, being. So in trying to understand the structure of Stevens’s poems, I have found that Eric Voegelin’s idea of imagination has proved crucial. Here is a key text from In Search of Order (2000, p. 52):

“Imagination, as a structure in the process of a reality that moves toward its truth, belongs both to human consciousness in its bodily location and to the reality that comprehends bodily located man as a partner in the community of being. There is no truth symbolized without man’s imaginative power to find the symbol that will express his response to the appeal of reality; but there is no truth to be symbolized without the comprehending It-reality in which such structures as man with his participatory consciousness , experiences of appeal and response, language and imagination occur. Through the imaginative power of man the It-reality moves imaginatively toward its truth.”

This meaty paragraph is part of Voegelin’s discussion of the metaxy. Voegelin’s refusal to reduce the imagination to a “thing” – indeed, to understand it in terms of both the perceiving body and reality as a whole – would satisfy Stevens’s need to convey in imagery his experience of order. In his later poems, Stevens expansively communicates the metaleptic experience of partnership in the ongoing search.

Stevens’s meditative journey towards metaleptic clarity occupied him as his career allowed. From 1916 until his death, Stevens worked at The Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, assigned to handle surety claims; when he wasn’t traveling, he liked to spend his evenings upstairs in his private suite, where he insisted on keeping the windows open regardless of the cold, acknowledging to a correspondence that the sitting Buddha, sent to him by a friend in Ceylon, probably suffered more than he from the cold. (The house became insufferably hot in summer.) His poetry increasingly reflected his meditative habits of mind. Stevens would have appreciated Voegelin’s chiastic phrasing when he writes: “There is no truth symbolized without man’s imaginative power to find the symbol that will express his response to the appeal of reality; but there is no truth to be symbolized without the comprehending It-reality . . .”

As for the It-reality, Voegelin introduces that neologism as the key actor in what we call the metaxological narrative. For Voegelin, the metaxy is a structure informed by the paradox of consciousness. That is, the movement or narrative in/of consciousness was between univocal objectivity—thinghood out there — to an equivocal all-encompassing “space” animated by the search for truth, the space which included the partnership of God and man. The theology of the metaxy is complicated and embedded in rich figural language.

The It-reality points to something impersonal or rather trans-personal. In In Search for Order, Voegelin explains his coinage of the phrase “It-reality.” The word It, he notices, was often resorted to in philosophical texts about the search for truth; it is also found idiomatic phrases like “It’s raining.” As it happens, we find it in a comment on Wallace Stevens in a popular text, Michael Schmidt’s Lives of the Poets (1999, p. 663):

“In Adagia, his aphorisms, he goes so far as to say that poetry is ‘life’s redemption,’ after belief in God is no longer possible. It is a redemption that knows itself to be the Supreme Fiction and that nonetheless elicits belief. Like Blake he is an enemy of reason, which destroys; unlike Blake he has no metaphysic but a physic in both senses, a medicine and a material world made over, made real, taken back to what it is before habits of work and rest, of play and passion, have dulled or misshapen it. To take it back to it, the poet must first be aware of what has happened to it. Through the distorted world of dailiness he finds the real, and that is poetry, even when he does not write the poem. ‘The humble are they that move more about the world with the lure of the real in their heart.’ ”

“The lure of the real” is perhaps the kind of phrase that goes without explanation; but Voegelin’s idea of reality is central to the narrative of the metaxy as Stevens’s experienced it. For Voegelin, the search is for “symbols” of metaleptic experience. In Stevens, “reality” is always already in dialectical relation to “imagination.” In Voegelin vision of the metaxy, reality is the transformative term common to both poles: “ . . . reality moves from the position of the intended object to that of subject, while the consciousness of the human subject intending objects moves to the position of a predicative event in the subject ‘reality’ as it becomes luminous for its truth” (In Search of Order, 30). Reality moves, its passage gives shape and direction to the metaxy. In this sense, as Plato, Voegelin was a poet of the metaxy.

As was Stevens in his last poems. Many could be cited. From The Rock, see  “To an Old Philosopher in Rome,” his poem about his Harvard mentor George Santayana as he lay dying in Rome attended by nuns. There are longer poems exploring the metaxy, for example the monumental  “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” where his anti-Apocalypticism takes shape in Professor Eucalyptus, who says, “The search / For reality is as momentous as / The search for god.” But perhaps perfect for this occasion is this poem in which the metaleptic partnership transforms the language of romance into a philosophical confession.

Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour

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.

Reading this with the above discussion in mind allows us to experience the poem as a “spiritual exercise” (the phrase is Pierre Hadot’s), and more specifically, a metaxological meditation.

The opening of the poem is suitably objective sounding; I say “suitably” because poems, and metaxical thinking, always start with the given (see Voegelin’s meditation on the beginning at the beginning of In Search of Order). The reader is asked to light “the first light of evening . . . “ We can see a man retiring to his room, turning on the lamps one by one. The “we” seems casual, rhetorical, we talk to ourselves. And:  to think in a “room in which we rest,” to think – experimentally, “for small reason” – this strange hypothesis: “The world imagined is the ultimate good.” Not a transcendent being, not “Being,” but the “world imagined.” Voegelin’s search for symbols of metaleptic partnership in the search for truth.

The student of Voegelin’s metaxy will notice the effort to categorize beings within beings, the “structural” theme. Structures within structures. The univocal language of “things” becomes the equivocal language of plurivocal “things.” An extreme idea – “the intensest rendezvous.” The plural “we” begins to become, ”out of all the indifferences,  one thing”:  and within that thing is another thing .  .  . the miraculous influence.” As Voegelin says, the structures of the metaxy are paradoxical. As we will see in later essays, there are many metaxies, many betweens, the structural paradox is what they have in common.

Something pours into the room where we rest and reflect, where we forget ourselves and feel “the obscurity” – not the clarity or certitude, the “obscurity” – of the composing Other, ‘that which arranged the rendezvous.” “We” – the dialogical reflective self and also the metaleptic relationship – has become the “object” of a grander subject “in the mind.” We are now deep within a “vital boundary”: and the spatial metaphor of the “metaxy” emerges as a seeming necessity emerges at the end of thinking. Space as symbolic paradox of tensions –structures and movement. In a kind of ecstasis of insight “we say”: “God and the imagination are one.”

“We say” and light the “highest candle.” It’s not as if we have discovered a new thing in the universe. The “dark” is boundless, but within the dark is a room of light, a space we call metaxy, between dark and dark, where we experience the partnership of the erotic search for truth, where we “float ideas” as in a grand conversation, where we watch the It-reality move through the between towards the beyond.

We follow as far as we can. The consolation of being in the between – which is not a final state of resolved tensions, an apocalypse, but a satisfaction nonetheless. It is still evening. “We make a dwelling in the evening air” – the verb “make” returns us to the “poesis” of being here; and in this dwelling, “being there together is enough.” The narrative of the metaxy claims no end in gnosis, but in “being there together.” Being-there-together, a Trinitarian structure-of-structures, if you will.

Also available are “Seamus Heaney and the Metaxological Narrative,” “Czeslaw Milosz and the Metaxy,”  “Geoffrey Hill and the Metaxy,” “Elizabeth Bishop and the Metaxy,” and “The Question of Literary Form.”

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