Better Roll Up the Windows

When Wallace Stevens wrote: “The world is ugly and the people are sad” he was speaking in a specialized tense, “The Stevensian pluperfect” on behalf of an ordinary evening in New Haven.

The voice at once autocratic and abstract sounds right. But let’s contrast Stevens’ lines with these By Greg Brown, a folk singer From the American Midwest: “The world aint what you think it is/ it’s just what it is.” One way to look at the difference between these two sensibilities is to say that Mr. Greg Brown has had his heart broken by local girls: (he grew up on a strawberry farm in Iowa) while Wallace Stevens broke his heart on Schopenhauer, a matter that did not necessitate leaving his room. The difference here matters since what we call “the local” in American literature is inexhaustible and organic. Words don’t spring from a vacuum.  Our human losses are balanced by recoveries which in turn occur in real fields and strawberry patches. This takes work, whether we’re talking about the psychiatrist’s couch or serious digging..

All landscapes, and especially Midwestern ones, appear elusive at first glance. Michael Martone writes: “The Midwestern landscape is abstract and our response to the geology of the region might be similar to our response to the contemporary walls  of paint in the museums. We are forced to live in our eyes, in the outposts of our consciousness, he borders of our being. Forget the heart. In the flatness everywhere is surface. This landscape can never take us emotionally in the way smoky crags or crawling oceans can. We stare back at it. Beneath our skins we begin to disassemble the mechanisms of how we feel. We begin to feel.”

And to this I must add that there are Midwestern sounds that surprise us, trick us out of our rooms.
Rain comes across the farm fields of Ohio and sweeps along the river valley and behind it the thunder can be heard like a trick of tempo in a work by Sibelius. Something is coming. Better roll up the windows of the car.

SK

Comments

[Sue Zivi]

Contrasting "the what is" with a theoretical fascimile seems appropriate for Pearl Harbor Day. Fire, brimstone
and death delivered by unexpected planes to sitting duck ships packed with US sailors. Quite unlike the surprise ending line of a Haiku poem.

[Sue Zivi]

The Zen cat smiled his cheshire grin and told me to meditate until Dec. 7 on my latest post. He humorously pointed out that out that I'm detail disabled. Perhaps a Care for the Soul for those of us in this category is in order.