7) “The Green Plant”
“VI. Ultimate Scepticism”
In previous chapters, Santayana has made clear the many beliefs and illusions that are imported into the given of the present moment. All a sceptic might ever be concerned with is the “pure image” of the present, but an over-eager mind supplies “the rashest presumptions” that place the discrete instant in contexts of time and change not indicated by the moment itself (35). Another of these presumptive contexts is “existence,” and in the sixth chapter of Scepticism and Animal Faith Santayana means to show how this belief also places the pure image of the present moment in external relations not suggested by itself.
Belief in existence is insinuated, the philosopher says, when the image of the present moment is reframed by gratuitous contexts prompted either by expectation or memory. In the first case, when we say something exists, what may be implied is our expectation that it will continue into the next moment. But, as Santayana explains, experience teaches us that this kind of expectation is hazardous: How many times have we expected such-and-such to occur and been disappointed? Santayana makes this point by employing a striking arboreal metaphor: “[What] if the imminent events for which animal sense is watching failed altogether, failed at the very roots, so to speak, of the tree of intuition, and left nothing but its branches flowering in vacuo? “ (36).
What is true of expectation is equally true of memory, after all, the philosopher observes, “The backward perspective of time is perhaps really an inverted expectation” (36).
Here is where Stevens’ “The Green Plant” enters. Stevens picks up Santayana’s arboreal metaphor and inverts it: instead of talking about trees about to bloom, he talks about trees that have already bloomed. And instead of talking about misguided expectation, he talks about the distortions of memory.
Silence is a shape that has passed.
Otu-bre’s lion-roses have turned to paper
And the shadows of the trees
Are like wrecked umbrellas.The effete vocabulary of summer
No longer says anything.
The brown at the bottom of red,
The orange far down in yellow
What can be observed in these lines are the insinuations of memory; the elements of the absolute present are not seen in themselves but in terms of history. “Silence” becomes in the poem not simply a condition of the present but “a shape that has passed.” The roses and the trees are not just what they are but ghostly records of what they have been. The time of year is not simply autumn but a time when “the effete vocabulary of summer / No longer says anything.” And the dyadic colors, we shall see, are likewise symptoms of a present distorted by the insinuations of memory.
Memory contaminates the given with subjectivity: “This fugitive existence I attach to something,” Santayana says, involves that thing with the fate of the observer “when this is no part of its true being” (38). Steven says as much in his third stanza when he admits that the autumnal images he has offered
Are falsifications from a sun
In a mirror, without heat,
In a constant secondariness,
A turning down toward finality
The ruined flowers and wrecked trees are “falsifications” because they are not true pictures of the present but distortions of it in terms of memory. They are not images of autumn in itself but of an autumn-that-is-no-longer-summer, a season refashioned in a subjective way as “a turning down toward finality.” They are reflections, as “in a mirror,” of the perspective of the observer. They are not pictures of the ding an sich but of a world filtered through self-interest “in a constant secondariness.”
But, Santayana insists, “This fugitive existence I attach to something . . . is no part of its true being.” And it should be possible, he indicates, to exclude these gratuitous additions and see the present moment as it is in itself:
Remove this frame, strip off all suggestion of a time when this image was not yet present, or a time when it shall be past, and the very notion of existence is removed. . . . [The present] lies simply in its own category. If a colour, it is just this colour; if a pain, just this pain. . . . The sceptic has here withdrawn into the intuition of a surface form without roots, without origin or environment, without a seat or a locus; a little universe, an immaterial absolute theme, rejoicing merely in its own quality. This theme, being out of all adventitious relations and not in the least threatened with not being the theme it is, has not the contingency nor the fortunes proper to an existence; it is simply that which it inherently, logically, and unchangeably is. (39)
Stevens follows these instructions and strips away adventitious contexts, and in the last stanza of the poem encounters the absolute present, “a little universe,” an “absolute theme,” in his vision of a green plant:
Except that a green plant glares, as you look
At the legend of the maroon and olive forest,
Glares, outside of the legend, with the barbarous green
Of the harsh reality of which it is part.
The vision of the forest has become a “legend” because the trees have been seen in terms of memory of what they once were, in terms of their history. Remove those superfluous addition, however, the philosopher says, and we see the thing simply as it is: “If a colour, just this colour . . . .” Once Stevens strips away these insinuations, the forest can be seen in the colors it is (“the maroon and olive forest”). This is different from the same forest when seen by a narrator whose sorrow about summer’s loss and anxiety about winter’s approach yields a vision of dyadic colors which smacks of nostalgia and premonitions of decay: “The brown at the bottom of the red, / The orange far down in the yellow.”
Then there is the green plant. The ding an sich. The present moment all by itself which glares outside of the “legend” of the forest when the trees were reshaped by self-interest and projection.. Strip away these adventitious additions, Santayana had said, and we have an image that “lies simply in its own category. If a colour, it is just this colour. . . . A little universe, an immaterial absolute theme, rejoicing merely in its own quality.” We have, in other words, Stevens’ green plant that “glares, outside the legend, with the barbarous green / Of the harsh reality of which it is part.”
