10) “Vacancy in the Park”
“X. Some Uses of this Discovery”
Without recourse to Scepticism and Animal Faith,¹ what conclusions might someone come to about Stevens’ short poem “Vacancy in the Park”?
March…Someone has walked across the snow,
Someone looking for he knows not what.It is like a boat that has pulled away
From a shore at night and disappeared.It is like a guitar left on a table
By a woman, who has forgotten it.It is like the feeling of a man
Come back to see a certain house.The four winds blow through the rustic arbor,
Under its mattresses of vines.
To many it might seem simply an exercise in similes. It is that but in a manner which, when seen in the light of Santayana’s work, is far from simple. “Vacancy in the Park” provides a notable example of one of Stevens’ poems which, if understood in the context of Scepticism and Animal Faith, takes on richer meaning.
In the previous chapter, Santayana’s scepticism had at last touched bottom with the discovery of pure images he called “essences.” By this term, he means something akin to but different from Plato’s ideals. In the Platonic system, our world of things and flux imperfectly mirrors the eternal realm of ideals or essences from which they are derived. In Santayana’s system, however, essences are not normative nor universals. The realm of essences is not a warehouse of perfected models of things, as it is for Plato; instead, for Santayana, it is an unwritten catalog of every possible thing that exists or can be imagined, and any image of whatever kind or imperfection.
Scepticism leads Santayana to the discovery of essences in the obvious and the literal. In Chapter X, he discusses “Some Uses of this Discovery”: specifically, how essences may be used to transcend the immediate and actual in the act of knowing. In one sense, the realm of essences is like a huge vocabulary. Faced with an unfamiliar thing, a ready mind uses essences the way a quick tongue uses words; , essences can be summoned and manipulated as terms to describe and understand the unknown.
Essences allow the mind, Santayana says, “to know something about what is not itself, . . . some existing thing or removed event which would otherwise run on blindly in its own medium” (my emphasis, 81).
Stevens’ first lines introduce us to this situation:
March…Someone has walked across the snow,
Someone looking for he knows not what.
In the three similes that follow, Stevens describes the act of coming-to-know.
Essences can be used as terms to describe the unfamiliar or as signs of what is absent. But for essences to be employed in this way, “the immediate must be vehicular” (81). In other words, the unknown object or removed event must lend itself to suggestibility to evoke certain essences in terms of which the unknown is perceived or imagined. The intuition of essences, Santayana observes, “enables the mind to say something about anything, to think of what is not given, and to be a mind at all” (82).
In his effort to describe the initial situation (of an absent someone walking across the snow “looking for he knows not what”), Stevens offers his first simile:
It is like a boat that has pulled away
From a shore at night and disappeared.
The simile is another essence and one not present in the initial intuition. The absent someone is linked to an absent boat. But to make that link, the original circumstances must be “vehicular”: for example, “like a boat,” Stevens seems to joke.
Another conclusion that Santayana comes to about the use of essences in knowledge is that those essences need not copy or echo what they endeavor to describe:
In sensuous perception the unlike knows the unlike. Here the organ is not adjusted to a similar organ, like instruments tuned up to the same key: the adjustment is rather to heterogeneous events in the environment or remote facts on quite a different scale; and the images that mediate this knowledge are quite unlike the events they signify. (87)
The musical metaphor of this passage was sure to capture Stevens’ attention since he had in earlier poems, particularly in “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” played with the necessity of music mirroring “things as they are” (CP 175–179). Hence, Stevens’ second simile for the someone in the first lines “looking for he knows not what”:
It is like a guitar left on a table
By a woman, who has forgotten it.
Santayana’s conclusion is that essences need not copy what they describe “like instruments tuned to the same key.” The echoing guitar is not required. A simile suffices.
A third conclusion that Santayana comes to about the use of essences in knowledge is that one particular perspective does not yield a more accurate vision of an unfamiliar thing than any other. Metaphysicians are mistaken, he says, if they believe an abstract idea, like that of a geometrical figure, is more concrete than some vague “inner feeling or sentiment” [all bolded words my emphasis]; and nominalists are mistaken when they argue that perceptions are more concrete than, Santayana says by way of example, the vague idea of any house” (97). Each essence, whether a feeling or an idea, is itself and distinct and equal to any other. Vagueness enters in when the mind is not satisfied with the essence used to describe a certain thing.
The search for a satisfactory description of a certain thing shows the mind when it is “most vivid in the act of hunting, . . . just when mistakes are probable: and any essence is then precipitated upon the object, and quarreled with or dismissed if the object does not sustain it” (95). Stevens’ third simile pictures the mind “vivid in the act of hunting” for a certain thing:
It is like the feeling of a man
Come back to see a certain house.
The certainness that is sought here does away with the adventitious determinations of “vagueness” that Santayana reproves metaphysicians for finding in “inner feeling or sentiment” and reproves nominalists for finding in the idea (which Stevens rephrases correctly) “of any house.”
In summary, Santayana’s chapter shows that the use of essences frees the mind from the literalness to which scepticism confines it and that the mind can transcend the actual and the immediate in the act of knowledge. In making that point, Santayana reaches several conclusions which Stevens encapsulates in his three similes: the absent boat, the forgotten guitar, and the search for a certain house. With each, Stevens exemplifies Santayana’s conclusions: 1) that the essences that scepticism discovered can now be used as signs for what is not given (provided the immediate is “vehicular”); 2) that essences need not copy what they describe (“like instruments tuned up to the same key”); and 3) that the mind seeks truth in description by the alternation of essences to specify a certain thing (not just “any house”).
Santayana ends this chapter with an observation about this last conclusion. Since descriptive truth is possible through the alternation of essences, the choice of what essences are elicited depends upon the selection of different perspectives or “foci,”
foci which are a part of nature in dynamic correspondence with other parts, diffused widely about them; so that, for instance, alternative systems of religion or science, if not taken literally, may equally well express the actual operation of things measured by different organs or from different centres. (98)
The widely diffused and corresponding character of these foci are what Stevens pictures in the entwining vines of his last stanza; and, as if recalling the title of Santayana’s Winds of Doctrine (1913), Stevens also pictures these alternating foci as operating from different centers like the four winds:
The four winds blow through the rustic arbor,
Under its mattresses of vines.
Each wind blows in its own direction, all lines of thought intertwine with each other, and every perspective expresses its own truth. This concluding metaphor for the alternation of perspectives, like the three similes that precede it, reveal “someone looking for he knows not what”–or, in Santayana’s terms, reveal the use of essences in the hunt for knowledge.
In this way, Stevens’ poem, when seen within the context of Scepticism and Animal Faith, reveals itself as more than a simple ticking off of similes or as some variation upon Stevens’ famous poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” When this context is supplied, “Vacancy in the Park” becomes an exemplification of something more significant and existential: How and why the mind, in its effort to understand, seeks resemblances.²
Notes.
- Two critics might provide examples. Douglas E. Airmet suggests “the similes are progressive from the point of view of the perceiver” who scans the occasion differently and the poem ends with an imagistic reference to the four winds which echo this endeavor (“An Ordinary Essay.” The Wallace Stevens Journal, vol. 5, no. 3/4, 1981, 75–76). In a nine-page essay on this slender poem which makes reference to a dozen other poems and essays by Stevens, eight literary critics, and numerous thinkers (e.g., Aristotle, Jacques Derrida, Northrop Frye, I. A. Richards, Martin Heidegger, and Kenneth Burke), Jacqueline V. Brogan presents “Vacancy in the Park” as an illustration of Stevens’ preoccupation with: a) “imitatio” and similarity; b) identity and resemblance; and c) metaphors and similes (“Wallace Stevens’ ‘Vacancy in the Park’ And The Concept of Similitude,” The Wallace Stevens Journal, vol. 10, no. 1, 1986, 9–17). Incidentally, for an altogether different take on subjects that concern us here, see this bagatelle (“Vagrancy in the Park”) by poet Susan Howe which appeared in The Nation in 2015: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/vagrancy-in-the-park/
- At a next level of complexity, we might note how Stevens’ poem is self-referential. In describing how essences are used in knowledge, Santayana explains that the mind is endeavoring to understand some unknown object or some removed event. Now, to illustrate this process, Stevens could have offered any of a million examples: say, someone coming to know an unfamiliar dish like paella or learning about the Boer War. Instead, each of the three similes (as well as the concluding metaphor) are offered as resemblances to one thing: “Someone looking for he knows not what.” In other words, in exemplifying how knowledge is sought, Stevens offers a series of analogies for knowledge-seeking.
