16) “The World as Meditation”
“XVII. The Cognitive Claims of Memory”
“The World as Meditation” takes its inspiration from Santayana’s discussion of memory in the seventeenth chapter of Scepticism and Animal Faith.¹ The best way to describe the manner in which Stevens makes use of this chapter is to say that he “particularized” Santayana’s ideas in his poem. By this term I mean to suggest that Stevens did not write a philosophic poem. Stevens drew a distinction between philosophic poetry and modern poetry: he described what he felt was the outdated genre of philosophic poetry (e.g., Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura) as a poetry of ideas in which the particulars of reality stand in the shadows (OP 187); modern poetry is the opposite — the particulars of reality are foremost and ideas stand in the shadows (NA 130). In making use of Santayana’s chapter, then, Stevens’ task was to create a poem of particulars which would embody Santayana’s more general conclusions about memory. In “The World as Meditation” Stevens particularizes the philosopher’s discussion by providing an example of memory at work: Penelope remembering the absent Ulysses.²
Santayana begins his chapter by describing the process of memory:
Some subtle influence fills me with a sentiment wholly foreign to my present circumstances and redolent of the remote past; and that dramatic shift seems to lift all the details out of the perspective of memory into the foreground of the present. It is the fancy that comes forward producing a waking dream. (153)
By this description Santayana means to correct the mistaken notion that in remembrance we drift back to the past; instead, the memory is lifted out of the past, comes forward, invades the present, and creates “a waking dream.” Stevens particularizes this process in his opening stanzas:
Is it Ulysses that approaches from the east,
The interminable adventurer? The trees are mended.
The winter is washed away. Someone is movingOn the horizon and lifting himself up above it.
A form of fire approaches the cretonnes of Penelope,
Whose mere savage presence awakens the world in which she dwells.
The poem follows Santayana’s description of what occurs in remembrance: the memory of Ulysses “fills [Penelope] with a sentiment wholly foreign to [her] present circumstances and redolent of the remote past.” Santayana says that in remembrance a dramatic shift occurs which seems to “lift all the details out of the perspective of memory”; Stevens says the figure of Ulysses appears “lifting himself up above” “the horizon.” Santayana insists in his description that the fancy “comes forward” “into the foreground of the present”; in Stevens’ poem the fancy is a form of fire that “approaches” Penelope in “the world in which she dwells.” This creates, according to Santayana, a “waking dream”;⁴ this is the state in the poem which causes Penelope to wonder, “Is it Ulysses that approaches from the east, . . . Whose mere savage presence awakens the world in which she dwells”?
Penelope has reason to wonder whether she is only dreaming (of Ulysses’ return) because, Santayana explains, invention is a part of memory. He notes that while things and events may be recalled, actual experience must be sympathetically imagined: “When I remember I do not look at my past experience, any more than when I think of a friend’s misfortunes I look at his thoughts. I imagine them; or rather I imagine something of my own manufacture, as if I were writing a novel” (158).
Stevens’ Penelope has been composing a novel of her own, and (in words that apparently echo Santayana’s) it is one she has “imagined” about her “friend”:
She has composed, so long, a self with which to welcome him,
Companion to his self for her, which she imagined,
Two in a deep-founded sheltering, friend and dear friend.
This novelizing invention enters in, Santayana explains, because the past is remembered by someone who has matured during the interval: “The soil in which these [memories] now grow has been tilled and watered, and even if a little exhausted, it may yield a fairer description of those ancient incidents than existed before, more voluminous, better knit” (157).
It seems likely that the philosopher’s odd, metaphoric slide— as his cultivated “soil” yields a description that is better “knit” — that led Stevens to employ a mixed metaphor and speak of how “the trees had been mended.”³ Whatever the case, in the next stanza the poet conveys the fact of Penelope’s maturation by this metaphor of seasonal and arboreal repair and by the observation that Penelope’s maturation is not something that can be undone like the shroud she unraveled while her suitors slept:
The trees had been mended, as an essential exercise
In an inhuman meditation, larger that her own.
No winds like dogs watched over her at night.
“In living remembrance,” Santayana continues, “I live in the present only thinking of the past, and observe the past without supposing I live in it” (155). This precise separation of past from present prevents our mistaking items in a recollection for existing things; these items, “my souvenirs,” Santayana explains, should be regarded “as messengers, as signs [of something] for which I am perhaps hopeful of substituting a better view” (155). In her own remembrance of Ulysses, Penelope does not suppose she lives in the past; she knows her husband is absent and wants him to come to her. Stevens says she wanted nothing but his return; she wanted no “fetchings,” and even when Penelope thinks of these, she regards these (to use Santayana’s words) “souvenirs” as signs of something for which she is “hopeful of substituting a better view”:
She wanted nothing he could not bring her by coming alone.
She wanted no fetchings. His arms would be her necklace
And her belt, the final fortune of their desire.
There is a control in memory, Santayana explains, which prevents thoughts from drifting from their principal concern to idle daydreams about fetchings and the like. In memory, the “heart” is active:
Obviously what I am calling the heart, which is the psyche, is blind in herself: imagination is her only light, her only language; but she is a prior principle of choice and judgement and action in the dark; so that when that light shines in the darkness, she comprehends it, and feels at once whether the ray falls on the object towards which she was groping, or on some irrelevant thing. (156)
In shared vocabulary it becomes clear that Penelope’s “heart” is likewise a principle of judgement. It seems blind as well since it does not see but feels whether the warmth of the sun — what Santayana calls the light of the imagination that shines like a ray in the dark — falls on the object towards which she was groping (i.e., Ulysses) or on some irrelevant thing (like her pillow):
But was it Ulysses? Or was it only the warmth of the sun
On her pillow? The thought kept beating in her like her heart.
The two kept beating together. It was only day.
Santayana might be able to console Penelope when she judges that “it was only day,” when she disappointedly concludes that the sun shines on her pillow and not upon her returning husband.⁵ He notes that “the felt imperfection of memory is no obstacle to the directness of such knowledge as it does afford” (156): “a miraculous identity may be felt emotionally” even when the ghostly image in memory is compared with what was once physically present; “the vital reaction, the deeper adjustment of the psyche, to the two appearances is the same” (153). Stevens’ Penelope recognizes this in the next stanza:
It was Ulysses and it was not. Yet they had met,
Friend and dear friend and a planet’s encouragement.
The barbarous strength within her would never fail.
Penelope knows that the figure she sees in her memory is not the physical Ulysses. Nevertheless, she asserts an identity between the two because her vital reaction, the deeper adjustment of her psyche, to the “friend” imagined in her memory is the same as it would be if Ulysses were physically present. That vital reaction is her “barbarous strength.”
Repetition increases that barbarous strength. Repetition, Santayana says as his chapter concludes, is what prevents forgetfulness:
It is mainly the habit of memory that testifies to the truth of memory. I believe I remember, and do not merely imagine, what I have always said I remembered; just as we believe events to be historical and not invented, when historians have always repeated them. (160)
And so, as Stevens’ poem concludes, the last picture is of Penelope “repeating” her husband’s name, and thereby never “forgetting” him:
She would talk a little to herself as she combed her hair,
Repeating his name with its patient syllables,
Never forgetting him that kept coming constantly so near.
In this manner, then, “The World as Meditation” is a poem of particulars that embodies Santayana’s ideas about memory. This portrait of the memorious Penelope can be seen — to use a term Stevens was fond of — as an illustration.
Notes.
- A version of this essay originally appeared as “Santayana On Memory and ‘The World As Meditation,’” The Wallace Stevens Journal, vol. 3, 3/4 (Fall 1979), 113–11.
- The circumstances described by Stevens are those in Homer’s Odyssey where Penelope is a model of marital fidelity who waits twenty years for the return of her husband Odysseus. Sought by the many suitors who encamp in her home, Penelope delays them by saying she will only concede she is a widow after she has finished making a burial shroud for her husband; but “wily” seamstress that she is, Penelope weaves the garment by day but each night undoes a part of her work. By the time Odysseus does return, the suitors have discovered Penelope’s ruse and demanded that she choose a new husband; so, Penelope designs an archery contest which the disguised Odysseus wins by being the only one who can string a certain bow. After slaying the suitors, Odysseus then reveals himself to his wife but she designs one more test to confirm his identity, which he passes. Homer then suggests that in the years that followed, the couple lived on happily. Stevens’ poem presents a moment when Penelope is still awaiting the return of Odysseus (called by his Latin name “Ulysses”) and remembering him. Stevens also takes up the hero in “The Sail of Ulysses,” a poem collected in Opus Posthumous.
- This “waking dream” connects with the “rêve permanent” in the poem’s epigraph from Georges Enesco [sic] where the composer discusses creative life: “J’ai passé trop de temps à travailler mon violon, à voyager. Mais l’exercice essentiel du compositeur — la médiatation — rien ne l’a jamais suspendu en moi … Je vis un rêve permanent, qui ne s’arrête ni nuit ni jour.” [“I spend too much time practicing my violin, traveling. But the essential exercise of the composer — meditation — is never suspended in me. I see a permanent dream that never stops night or day.”] Incidentally, George Ohlson has pointed out to me that George Enescu was known for his prodigious memory. The legends are many but here is one: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/music/total-recall-musical-feats-of-memory-1.2292315
- Eric Saap has pointed out that a tree plays a role in Homer’s story. One of the tests that Penelope designs to see if the stranger is, indeed, Odysseus involves the marital bed her husband designed which was constructed using a living tree that grows in their bedroom.
- Once again — in those repetitions that give coherence between the poems of The Rock as a “book” — Stevens uses imagery of the sun and of sleep (as well as half-asleep and waking) or both (as he does in “Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself”).
