Wally Stevens was a goof.
"Of Mere Being" is a favorite, and ol' Wally sure fooled me when I first read it.
Cool imagery, right? We've got mind, and this mind has an end. Maybe the end of conscious thought? When you've thought through everything, what's left? But it's a spatial metaphor, the mind is a place, not a process. And what's there? A palm, apparently.
Now, "palm" has a couple of intuitive meanings, depending on context. The palm of your hand is one kind of palm, and Palm Sunday is another. Which is it here? We're in a human mind (mine? Wally's?), and it's like a place or a house, with decor, and a bird that isn't so human, maybe made of bronze like the decor, with which Wally can't really relate, at least the human parts of him can't (which is his mind? or other parts of him?). Feels kind of like those odd dreams I get in which I feel out of place in my own body.
Maybe the palm is an ahimsa, that ancient palm-shaped symbol of nonviolence towards all creatures? The hand at the end of the mind that rises out of the local decor, with a bird in it? A bird in hand is better?
Reading on, learn more about the bird.
The palm has branches, therefore is of the plant variety. And boom, the poem feels like a nod to Yeats and his Byzantium-kind-of-art that is so good, its beyond us (ok fine, insert doctoral dissertation HERE to tell me my blue-collar interpretation is WRONG WRONG WRONG, and thank you, and have a nice day).
Is that transcending art in all of us? but just beyond our minds, where we can't think, or something like that? So, Wally's point is that mere being, which all of the non-human-conscious world is, is "out there" (not in us!, in a contradictory incomprehensible outer-space-with-wind and fire-bird-that-dangles-not-flies, kind of dreamscape. But isn't this phoenix-bird-symmetrical-plant-shiny-metal kind of Byzantine-beautiful to our imaginations? But we can't comprehend it, Wally tells us. And yet, he gives us this beautiful poem! Aren't we comprehending/appreciating it? So inaccessible! but he grasped it?
Oh the irony!
I like the poem's word play, but remain annoyed that Wally didn't put a physical palm at the center of his poem. For in my actual experience, the greatest aesthetic achievements of human workmanship come through wordless cognition. All the arts, sculpture, painting, music, architecture, even literature, can only be described with words. They cannot be created through conscious, verbal direction, even when the art is with words (Shakespeare did not tell himself "Ima gonna create a play with all these allusions and references and layers of meaning that's gonna be powerful and beautiful and enduring." He rather created a play as the words and plots came to him, the same way Wally did, navigating their beauty and sense through an intuition that resonated with his audience. If what Shakespeare did could be directed by verbal instructions, anyone could do it. Shakespeare's hand wrote those plays, as Michelangelo's painted the Sistine Chapel, probably humming a tune while he did (not telling his hands specifically what to do.
Ask yourself:
When you walk, what are you thinking about?
Isn't putting one foot in front of the other, navigating steps, turning left and right, aren't these all complex mechanical operations? And yet they don't require mental attention, except when as infants we're learning how.
We don't think about walking when we walk, is my point. And how is this possible? Isn't the conscious mind what controls our actions? At least our choices?
It is some other part of the brain, we conclude, that controls our walking, not our focused, linguistic thought. We don't instruct or guide our legs with our conscious thought, except, perhaps, in the most broad manner such as thinking "I'll go upstairs to get a book." Our conscious mind is like the executive office compared to the factory floor of our muscles.
And no.
How many of our mental executive offices say "I will write a beautiful poem", and actually do? Wally did. Yeats did. Shakespeare did. I have not. My palms and the thought beyond thought just don't cooperate. I write drivel.
So.... the executive office has relatively little control over the mastery of the factory floor, right? We do what we do, with our hands that is, and our heads are only partly in control. Much of linguistic thought, then, is narration. It describes many things (what we want, what we feel, what we intend, what we hope), but actually creates little of it. Our hands create what we do. And when we make, we just are being human, I think. Merely being human.
For me, the palm at the end of my mind is a hand: it feels the wind of space, creates that bronze decor, and that bird, and maybe even cultivates that palm tree and its lovely fronds in rich soil. And these things just are. They don't make me happy (though creating them does).
A lovely poem, Wally, but just maybe rewrite that last line to something like this:
The wind moves slowly through the fingers.
Nah. What am I thinking? I am no poet. My hands have not spent enough time forging words to be masterful with them.
I will spend time better wondering what my mind does when I make things. It's one of those lovely questions with no easy answer, certainly none in words.
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