14) “Looking Across the Fields and Watching the Birds Fly”
“XIV. Essence and Intuition”
Stevens’ poem “Looking Across the Fields and Watching the Birds Fly” describes the activities of one “Mr. Homburg.” Critics have linked the character with the German idealists (because of his Teutonic name) and with Ralph Waldo Emerson (because Homburg’s home is in Concord).¹ Those connections might have been anticipated because, before Stevens penned his poem, Santayana had made such a link in his chapter on Emerson in Interpretations of Poetry and Religion,² a work Stevens knew well.³
It should be noted that Santayana does not mention Emerson in Chapter XIV of Scepticism and Animal Faith. That is a link Stevens makes. Though Stevens sometimes passed himself off as an amateur in the field of philosophy, it is one measure of his perceptiveness that he realized the errors Santayana discusses in Chapter XIV had been attributed to Emerson some twenty-three years earlier in Santayana’s Interpretations. That might best be explained by looking at the poem as occurring in four acts.
Act I. How Oversouls Are Made
Santayana’s fourteenth chapter means to make a distinction between essence and intuition, between essence and our view of it, which will lead to a belief in intuition. I find it helpful to think of the philosopher’s realm of essences as a kind of warehouse of static and eternal images which are without life and without power to compel our interest. Intuition of essence occurs when some animal spirit drags one or other of these images out of the warehouse and, in so doing, implicates the essence in its animal life, temporalizing the essence with its existential conditions.
When intuition aspires to be pure intuition, however, it seeks to see essences only and to divorce the view of essence from any conditions which temporalize it. When this height of pure intuition is reached, intuition becomes unaware of itself and its knowledge ceases to be knowledge for a self.
This unawareness in pure intuition, Santayana observes, may lead to a curious mistake: It may lead someone to think that, since they are unaware of their own presence, the essence itself commands a power to come forth from the warehouse and present itself to our attention. As he says, “It is therefore inevitable that minds singly absorbed in the contemplation of any essence should attribute the presence and force of that essence to its own nature, which alone is visible, and not to their intuition, which is invisible” (127).
This mistaken belief, we might say, converts the realm of essences from a warehouse of static images into some deity of inspiration. In truth, Santayana says, such a deity would really be “an eternal actualisation of cognitive life” (127–128) — namely, the faculty of intuition writ large and projected or posited out there.
This is what Mr. Homburg does in Stevens’ poem:
Among the more irritating minor ideas
Of Mr. Homburg during his visits home
To Concord, at the edge of things, was this:To think away the grass, the trees, the clouds,
Not to transform them into other things,
Is only what the sun does every day,Until we say to ourselves that there may be
A pensive nature, a mechanical
And slightly detestable operandum, freeFrom man’s ghost, larger and yet a little like,
Without his literature and without his gods . . .
Mr. Homburg aspires to pure intuition: to free thought from everything which temporalizes and conditions it, to think away the grass and trees and clouds. This leads to the mistake Santayana identified: when the mind seeks to see essences delivered from their existential circumstances, it becomes unaware of its own presence and in this unawareness may come to mistakenly believe that its view of essences is due to some power of inspiration on their part. As we observed, in this manner, the realm of essences is converted from a warehouse of static images into a deity of inspiration, and just such a mistaken belief has occurred to Mr. Homburg as he comes to believe in a “pensive nature,” an “operandum.”
Strictly speaking, Santayana had said, this deity of inspiration is really the faculty of intuition writ large and projected out there as a separately existing source of inspiration; so, Stevens says Homburg’s operandum is “free // of man’s ghost, larger.” And Stevens observes that such an extrapolation is “without [man’s] literature and without his gods” because it has been stripped of human conditions that might diminish pure intuition; in fact, in Interpretations, Santayana notes that Emerson’s effort to achieve pure intuition by stripping it of extraneous accretions of the human imagination ultimately means forfeiting art and religion (226). But Stevens adds that this operandum is “yet a little like” because it is really the human faculty of intuition magnified and projected.
Another resemblance may be too clear to miss: between, on the one hand, Homburg’s “pensive nature” and his Deistic “operandum” and, on the other, Emerson’s Oversoul. In his dissection of Emerson in Interpretations, Santayana points out how the other’s notion of the Oversoul reveals that “the faculty of idealization was what he valued most” (223).
Act II. A Celebration of the Human Contribution
The mistake that Homburg, Emerson, and other idealists make is their insistence that thought is independently inspired, ignoring that it arises from human circumstances. To make his point, Santayana asks us to consider what would happen if human presence was withdrawn. First, there would be no occasion for intuition since without human predicaments no essence would need to be dragged out of the warehouse because essences do not demand this of themselves. Second, all essences would remain valueless since it is “fevered preferences” of a human that assigns “the intense splendour of divinity” to them (125, 128). Finally, without human presence, objects would simply be what they are without the rapture of our feelings about them.
“Mystical spokesman of the spirit” — and here Santayana mentions Aristotle, though in Interpretations the example is Emerson — have ignored these facts. They think the entire realm of essences is valuable in itself and superior to the world of things; they wish to ignore that it is the contributions of human interest that assign virtue to parts of that realm. Santayana means to correct that view when he insists that the realm of essence is unimaginably large, that it contains every “infinitely minute and indelible distinction” and “the form of everything and anything” (129). It is only human selectivity which finds some part of it of value, worth pursuing, and superior to something else.
As his poem continues, Stevens converts Santayana’s negative rhetoric (his critique of those who overlook this human contribution) into full-throated praise of what “we” add to life from our side:
No doubt we live beyond ourselves in air,
In an element that does not do for us,
so well, that which we do for ourselves, too big,
A thing not planned for imagery or belief,Not one of the masculine myths we used to make,
A transparency through which the swallow weaves,
Without any form or any sense of form,What we know in what we see, what we feel in what
We hear, what we are, beyond mystic disputation,
In the tumult of integrations out of the sky,And what we think, a breathing like the wind,
A moving part of a motion, a discovery
Part of a discovery, a change part of a change,A sharing of color and being part of it.
In an expansive use of the pronoun, Stevens says: We do “live beyond ourselves in air”; we do make more out of essences than they are in themselves. The realm of essences is a fantastically large warehouse of static terms — ”too big, / A thing not planned for imagery or belief” — and these static terms do not suggest how they might be arranged or used. Only we have the power to do things with these impotent terms, so that the realm of essences without us is “an element that does not do for us, / So well, that which we do for ourselves.” And without us, Santayana had observed, that realm would have none of “the intense splendour of divinity” which human preference assigns to some part of it; it has, Stevens writes, “not one of the masculine myths we used to make.” Without human presence, the realm of essence is a static element lacking pathways chosen by human preference; instead, it is “a transparency through which the swallow weaves, / Without any form or sense of form.” For that matter, what do swallows know of the constellations we see or imagine in the sky?⁴
We do make more out of the realm of essence than it is, live beyond ourselves in air, arrange imagery and belief, coin masculine myths, and imagine planetary integrations in the sky which go unnoticed by flying swallows. The raptures that we feel about objects, Santayana observed, make evident our human presence in (to use Stevens’ words) “what we know in what we see, what we feel in what / We hear.” “Mystical spokesman of the spirit,” the philosopher had said, might ignore these facts in their soleminded contemplation of the realm of essence absent of human presence, but they are wrong. So, Stevens writes “we are, despite mystic disputation, / In the tumult of integrations” we make “out of the sky.”
The evidence of a self had, of course, been discussed in the two previous poems and we hear echoes of them here. Recalling the projection of an enduring self in “Two Illustrations That the World is What You Make of It,” Stevens refers here to that prior poem’s notion of “a breathing like the wind.” And recalling “Prologues to What is Possible”–with its oarsmen in motion, its self “snarling in him for discovery,” and its dithering light suddenly increased “by an access of color” — Stevens references that prior poem in the lines of this poem: “a moving part of motion, a discovery // Part of discovery, a change part of a change, // A sharing of color and being a part of it.”
Act III. Making the Creator in Our Image
The deity of inspiration, we have seen Santayana insist, is really only a magnification and projection of the faculty of human intuition. As the poem continues, Stevens shows how these projections occur:
The afternoon is visibly a source,
Too wide, too irised, to be more than calm,Too much like thinking to be less than thought,
Obscurest parent, obscurest patriarch,
A daily majesty of meditation,That comes and goes in silences of its own.
We think, then, as the sun shines or does not.
We think as wind skitters on a pond in a fieldOr we put mantles on our words because
The same wind, rising and rising, makes a sound
Like the last muting of winter as it ends.
When intuition rises to its height in pure intuition, Santayana had said, the mind achieves a calmness and equanimity that it may mistakenly credit to its object. In this way, the object is “suffused with a general tint” of what the mind feels and we may mistakenly come to believe that the origin of those feelings is in the object itself (130); the splendor, the beauty, “the consequent warmth and moral colour” the mind feels for what-it-sees are assigned to that object because “natural operations lend these values to the visions in which they rest” (131). In his own fashion, Stevens likewise explains how the afternoon comes to be thought of as a “source” because it is “too wide, too irised, to be more than calm” in and of itself. Unaware of its own presence, the mind may mistakenly believe in some deity of inspiration or credit its own capability of thought to some other source which “cannot be less than thought, / Obscurest parent, obscurest patriarch.”
This deity is, instead, Santayana had insisted, the magnification and projection of the human faculty of thought. Stevens makes the same point in his emphatic pronouns: “We think, then, as the sun shines or does not. / We think as the wind skitters on a pond in a field.” And what we think about what we see, Santayana had said, lends a “consequent warmth . . . to the visions in which they rest.” So Stevens, in a bit of comic haberdashery, refers to how “we put mantles on our words” when the sound of a certain wind reminds us of winter.
Act IV. Mistaking the Part for the Whole
In a deus-ex-machina moment, the introduction of a new character near the end of the poem allows Stevens to a explain how Homburg/Emerson went wrong.⁵ For our purposes, it does not matter whether this “new scholar” is Santayana dissecting Emerson in Interpretations of Poetry and Religion or Stevens, himself, reflecting on the shortcomings of Mr. Homburg.⁶
A new scholar replacing an older one reflects
A moment on this fantasia. He seeks
For a human that can be accounted for.The spirit comes from the body of the world,
Or so Mr. Homburg thought: the body of a world
Whose blunt laws make an affectation of mind,The mannerism of nature caught in a glass
And there become a spirit’s mannerism,
A glass aswarm with things going as far as they can.
Stevens’ new scholar seeks “for a human that can be accounted for,” just as Santayana, the naturalist, sought the spirit which actually lives in man, noting that “the spirit that actually breathes in man is an animal spirit . . . [and the] the roots of the spirit, at least in man, are in matter” (125–126). On the other hand, Homburg and his kind believe the spirit arises not in man but in the world. These “mystical spokesmen of the spirit” wish to separate thought from man’s agency and, idealizing it, fly (as Santayana said Emerson did) “to a fairyland of thought and fancy” (IPR 219). This fairyland is Homburg’s “fantasia,” is Emerson’s Oversoul.
They would not wish this, Santayana observes, “if they had not taken so narrow a view of essence. They see it only through some peep-hole of morals, grammar, or physics; the small part of that infinite realm which thus becomes visible they take for the whole” (129). Thus Nature becomes moral, logical, or orderly for them, and God becomes a Moralist, Grammarian, or Physicist. By confining nature to their view of it and by making God over into an image of themselves, these thinkers (Aristotle and Emerson included) have narrowed their view of the realm of essences and thus made sure its infinite plenitude would escape their grasp.
The error of these mystical spokesman, Santayana says in effect, is they mistake the part for the whole. Indeed, to stress that, when referring to their partial survey of essences, Santayana remarkably repeats the phrase “part of” nine times in the chapter’s seven pages. Stevens echoes him in his poem, using the phrase “part of” four times and three times using the grammatical equivalent in what-in-what constructions (“know” in see, “feel” in hear, “are” in tumult). And it is this myopia, this mistaking the part-for-the-whole, that Stevens identifies as his poem concludes.
Homburg believed the “blunt laws” of the world “make an affectation of mind,” revealed not our mind at work upon the world but the “mannerism” of a spirit setting the world in order. This is the mistake Santayana had mentioned In Scepticism and Animal Faith when certain mystical spokesman discovered natural laws and attributed them to some organizing deity (125–126), the God of Deism, a deus ex machina. It is the same mistake that Santayana attributes to Emerson in Interpretations of Poetry and Religion when he describes his New England predecessor finding “in the laws of Nature, idealized by the imagination, only a more intelligible form of the divinity he had always recognized and adored” (218). By this leap of faith, both Homburg and Emerson forget what is human in thought, divorce the spirit from its embodiment in matter, and fly to their fantasia.
This would not have been their pastime if, as Santayana suggested, they had not seen the realm of essence through their “peep-hole” and mistaken the part for the whole. By doing so, they limited reality to their myopic vision of it, in the same way Stevens’ persona in “Madame La Fleurie” mistook all of Nature for the part he saw in his mirror (“He looked in a glass of the earth and thought he lived in it”). To mistake the part-for-the-whole is Homburg’s mistake as well. According to the New Scholar, he has missed reality and the greater scheme of things and, instead, captured the spirit in his glass, “a glass aswarm with things going as far as they can” — which is to say, not very far at all. What Santayana said of Emerson, the New Scholar might say of Homburg: “Reality eluded him” (218).
Notes.
- See, for example, Ronald Sukenick, Wallace Stevens: Musing the Obscure (New York, 1967), 189.
- “[Emerson’s] thought is essentially the same that is found in the German romantic or idealistic philosophers, with whom Emerson’s affinity is remarkable all the more as he seems to have borrowed little or nothing from their work.” Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (New York, 1957), 221–222.
- Joel Porte calls Stevens “Santayana’s truest disciple” in his “Introduction” to Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, Critical Edition, ed. William G. Holzberger and Herman J. Saatkamp, Jr. (Boston, 1990), xxix. See also: Sidney Feshbach, “A Pretext for Wallace Stevens’ ‘Sunday Morning,’” Journal of Modern Literature Vol. 23, №1 (Summer, 1999), pp. 59–78.
- Cf. “One of the Inhabitants of the West.”
- This deus ex machina echoes a similar rhetorical moment in Santayana’s chapter where the philosopher concedes he has jumped ahead in his argument and employed a perspective he has yet to establish in the step-by-step procedural of Scepticism and Animal Faith: “The external and naturalistic point of view from which all this appears is one I have not yet justified critically: I have anticipated it for the sake of rendering the conception of essence perfectly unambiguous” (131).
- David Dilworth suggests that the “new scholar” is Stevens himself. “Santayana’s Anti-Romanticism versus Stevens’ New Romanticism,” Overheard in Seville (2017), 45.
