17) “Long and Sluggish Lines”
“XV. Belief in Experience”
Perhaps the most important concept in Santayana’s fifteenth chapter is “contradiction,” a subjective judgement and gratuitous problem created by humans. There are no problems in nature nor in the realm of essence, Santayana observes; neither a tree nor an image, for example, wonders why it exists or why something else exists instead of some other. If problems are found, they arise in human discourse and give evidence of a psyche with its own interests.¹
To begin with, Santayana observes that the individual who has made “nature the standard naturalness” finds no problems. His discourse upon events follows events “as in a dream with perfect acquiescence.” Because he is in fixed accord with nature, he “does not protest,” “is not surprised,” and remains “self-satisfied.” Perhaps a little smugly, he takes things “blandly for granted.” Such a psyche exhibits “a healthy dulness” [sic] and is “extraordinarily censorious concerning all other things,” as if the world was made for him (134–135). The title of Stevens’ “Long and Sluggish Lines” hints at the aforementioned “dulness,” and the opening lines introduce an individual whose smugness and ennui are presented as characteristics of a senior citizen:²
It makes so little difference, at so much more
Than seventy, where one looks, one has been there before.Wood-smoke rises through trees, is caught in an upper flow
Of air and whirled away. But it has been often so.
But Santayana adds that such self-satisfied discourse cannot continue for long before encountering “interruption, confusion, doubt, or contradiction.” (136). So, in short order, the ennui in Stevens’ poem gives way to an “uproar” among trees enraged by a “contradiction”:
The trees have a look as if they bore sad names
And kept saying over and over one same, same thing,In a kind of uproar, because an opposite, a contradiction,
Has enraged them and made them want to talk it down.
This image of angry trees trying to talk down a contradiction might strike readers as comic or puzzling or both, but Stevens has something in mind which we can understand by referencing Santayana. According to the philosopher, when I encounter “interruption, confusion, doubt, or contradiction,” what is revealed is “an impulse to select, to pursue, and to reject specific essences.” What is revealed, in other words, is a psyche with its own agenda. If, for example, I want one thing and another thing appears, the disappointment or anger provoked in me reveals
some hidden interest, which cannot put up with them both. There is an inertia or prior direction somewhere, in the region of what I call myself, that demands one of them, and rejects the other for the innocent crime of not being that one. The incongruous essence appearing offends me because I am wedded to an old one, and to its close relations. I will tolerate nothing but what I meant should come, what fills my niche, and falls in with my undertaking.
Irrelevance, incongruity, and contradiction are accordingly possible in discourse only because discourse is not a play of essences but a play of attention upon them; which attention is no impartial exercise of spirit but a manifestation of interest, intent, preference, and preoccupation. A hidden life is at work. (137)
The recognition of this “hidden life” is, as will soon be explained, an important step in mankind’s evolution. But what if a person does not rise to this recognition? What if they have no notion of psychology or inner mental life, as E.R. Dodds has argued was the case with the earliest Greeks?³ What if they remain mired in superstition? Then, for example, a dissatisfaction felt within might mistakenly be projected and seen — crazy as it may sound to enlightened minds — as an “uproar” among enraged trees. Then, instead of looking for the sources of such imagined animosity within one’s own personality, an atavistic mind might mistakenly seek such provocations elsewhere in the world at large.
This unenlightened view is what Stevens comically presents as his poem continues. Wondering what opposite has provoked the “uproar” of the trees, his character proposes several possibilities that are as far-fetched as they are superstitious. The trees are enraged by either: a) the side of the house, b) the first fly, or c) the early blooming forsythia and magnolia.
What opposite? Could it be that yellow patch, the side
Of a house, that makes one think the house is laughing;Or these — escent — issant pre-personae: first fly,
A comic infanta among the tragic drapings,Babyishness of forsythia, a snatch of belief,
The spook and makings of the nude magnolia?
Of course, if enlightened, Stevens’ character might have recognized the source of this “contradiction” is a reactionary self that is resisting innocent events occurring in the world at large. And if enlightened, instead of hunting for irritants to blame, Stevens’ character might have seen his irritation as evidence of a psyche with its own agenda: in this case, a grumpy senior sensitive to mocking laughter and complaining about upstart youngsters. But he is not enlightened. Instead, he is like the unthinking, stone-age neighbor in Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall.”
As he continues, Stevens brings more clarity to this situation by employing a gambit he used in “Looking Across the Fields and Watching the Birds Fly”: he introduces a deus ex machina, a second speaker who reflects on the first character in the poem:
. . . Wanderer, this is the pre-history of February.
The life of the poem in the mind has not yet begun.You were not born yet when the trees were crystal⁴
Nor are you now, in this wakefulness inside a sleep.
To understand this judgement and dismissal, we first need to grasp the point Santayana has been moving to in this chapter. Contradictions and other interruptions of discourse give evidence of three things: 1) the existence of a psyche with its own interests, 2) the presence of a world-at-large that may or may not bring disappointments, and 3) the interaction between the two which Santayana calls “experience.” Now, the wise man collects experience in order to modify his behavior and prosper in life:
Belief in experience is the beginning of that bold instinctive art, more plastic than the instinct of most animals, by which man has raised himself to his earthly eminence: it opens the gates of nature to him, both within him and without, and enables him to transmute his apprehension, at first merely aesthetic, into . . . science. This is so great a step that most minds cannot take it. They stumble, and remain entangled in poetry and in gnomic wisdom. Science and reasonable virtue, which plunge their roots in the soil of nature, are to this day only partially welcome or understood. Although they bring freedom in the end, the approach to them seems sacrificial, and many prefer to live in the glamour of intuition, not having the courage to believe in experience. (SAF 144)
This is the attitude of the second speaker in Stevens’ poem, at least in so far as he shares Santayana’s condemnation of atavistic thinking. Finding an “uproar” not in himself but in the trees, searching for the sources of this animosity not within himself but in the world at large, the first character in the poem is a benighted individual who is not looking where he should be looking and someone unaware of his yet unborn psyche: “The life of the poem in the mind has not yet begun.”
To be sure, this senior citizen is not entirely unconscious like the somnolent one who appears in the first poem of The Rock, “An Old Man Asleep.” But at the same time, he is not fully awake like the character stirring at a dawn in March in the last poem of the book, “Not Ideas About the Things but the Thing Itself.” Instead, “this is the pre-history of February” and this character, still mired in superstitions, exists in a “wakefulness inside a sleep.”
To a discussion of “Long and Sluggish Lines” might be appended some textual observations.
First, as I observed previously (poem #15, n. 1), “Long and Sluggish Lines” is out of order. Since it corresponds with Chapter XV, it should appear after “Looking Across the Fields and Watching the Birds Fly” (Chapter XIV) and before “Song of Fixed Accord” (Chapter XVI). This sequencing error, I suggested, seems to have occurred in the gathering of extant poems for The Collected Poems and taking an eight-poem group that appeared in The Hudson Review as a unit and then subsequently adding “Long and Sluggish Lines” (a single poem that was printed in an issue of Origin) rather than inserting it in its logical place within the eight-poem group.
The second observation is to note the relationship between this poem and “The Course of a Particular,” a poem collected in Opus Posthumous (123–124). The latter strikes me as an earlier response to Santayana’s Chapter XV; to demonstrate this, however, would require another occasion and an essay of greater length than this note. In brief, my thinking goes this way: Stevens was disappointed with the way he responded to Santayana’s materials in “The Course of a Particular” and penned “Long and Sluggish Lines” as a remedy, and then chose the latter for inclusion in The Rock.
Though rejected, “The Course of a Particular” did end up serving a purpose: Stevens sent it to Joseph Bennett at the Hudson Review because he had promised to contribute work to the publication, felt guilty that he had not done so, but found that he was too busy at work to do something new (L. 701 and n. 3). “The Course of a Particular” was published in Hudson Review, IV (Spring 1951).
That created a snafu. Robert Pack wrote Stevens in Spring of 1955 asking why “The Course of a Particular” had been omitted from The Collected Poems, and Stevens replied that it must have been an oversight (L. 881). For that reason, John N. Serio and Chris Beyers added the poem to their Corrected Edition of The Collected Poems (CP 553). And Serio advised me that their placement of the poem in the sequence of poems in The Rock was decided by chronology of prior publication.
On my part, I would suggest that Stevens misremembered and that the absence of “The Course of the Particular” from The Collected Poems was not a mistake. If Stevens was confused about this publishing detail, perhaps we can forgive him since, at the time of his correspondence with Pack, he was gravely ill and few days away from entering the hospital.
My own feeling is that “The Course of a Particular” is like many of the two dozen or so poems penned between 1949 and 1954 that are gathered in Opus Posthumous: viz., early attempts to deal with Santayana materials that Stevens felt unhappy with and did not believe merited inclusion as his choice in the poem-for-chapter sequence of The Rock.
Notes.
- By “psyche” Santayana means the individual “self,” the living personality. It is the more physical or material side of “spirit” which interacts with the world (that can shock or please it) and which pursues its own interests and agenda (SAF 147). Santayana says he sometimes calls the psyche the “heart” — cf. the use of this word in “The World as Meditation” — because it is the repository of memories and desires (156).
- From the first poem of The Rock (which features an “old” man asleep), through the tribute to Santayana (an “old” philosopher in Rome), and even in descriptions (in “The Plain Sense of Things” a chimney is “fifty years old” and slanting to one side) —the repeating motif of the aged that makes The Rock both a coherent “book” and autobiographical.
- E.R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (U. of California Press, 1951).
- “the tree were crystal”: Presumably “crystal” in its original sense, “ice covered.” Trees, needless to say, are another leitmotif in The Rock: for example, the reddish chestnuts in “Old Man Asleep,” the “wrecked umbrellas” in “The Plain Sense of Things,” Mr. Homburg’s efforts to think them away in “Looking Across the Fields,” and the arboreal “mending” that occurs in the poem just before this one (“The World as Meditation”).
