It’s incomplete to say that description describes consciousness; it’s more like a balance between terms, saying what you see and saying what you see. The seer of Concord, in the dictum I’ve quoted previouly, insists that it’s not just looking at things that reveals the self, but vigilant, careful seeing: “Every object rightly seen unlocks a new faculty of the soul.” The more accurate and sensory the apparent evocation of things, the more we have the sense of someone there doing the looking, a sensibility at work. It’s as if the harder the eyes and the verbal faculties work to render the look of things, the more we see that gaze itself, the more we hear that distinctive voice. Shelley’s handwriting, wrote his friend Trelawny, “might have been taken for a sketch of a marsh overgrown with bulrushes, and the blots for wild ducks.” How true to marshes, true to a messy hand in ink, revealing of the man who’s looking at both and making the seamless connection between them.
Sometimes only a little sense perception is enough to become the vehicle for a great deal of thinking and feeling. Here is Rilke’s famous auto-epitaph, in Stephen Mitchell’s translation: “Rose, oh pure contradiction, joy / of being No-one’s sleep, under so / many lids.” To point to the resemblance between petals and eyelids is one thing, a form of visual accuracy, but to suggest what lies beneath those lids is to enter into the inner life of the rose, into the subtler dimensions of the way that flower means within the inner life of the speaker. So many eyelids over no one’s sleeping—is there a comment there about collectivity, the way the world’s body is held in common, belonging to no one? Or does “no one” point toward an absence at the heart of the world, a phantom presence felt through emptiness? Or we can read the image as pointing to the way that roses seem entirely, permanently awake, and call us toward the same sort of alert being.
E. M. Forster described the great Alexandrian poet Constantin Cavafy as “a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe.” There in a very few words is a movement from the particular to the immense, balancing the least detail (a straw hat) with the great field of being. Forster invites us to consider all the ways in which one might stand “at a slight angle” to that field.
Or there was the Japanese philosopher—I regret that I don’t know his or her name—who said, “A fish never makes an aesthetic mistake.” That is a statement, on the one hand, a rhetorical move, but it sends us hurrying to every visual image of fish we can think of, to see if it could be true. It describes a notion of beauty, a way of valuing the effortless, the uncalculated, the unwilled.
Since there is so little sensory evidence in these examples, they seem to be diving beneath, attempting to name some elusive quality of their subject. They name the object of their attention without in the least depriving it of any of its mystery. They instruct us in what is here to be seen, and they resist too easy a knowing.
This quality of resistance is an aspect of the most resonant of descriptions. How does it happen that an evocation of the sensory world also suggests the limitations of such evoking, maintaining a sort of open space? Rilke, Forster, and that philosopher whose identity I cannot discover each create a space of indeterminacy, a kind of field—circumscribed by their precise sketch of their subject—in which meaning isn’t closed or completed, but remains instead generative. When Baker says “the fish doesn’t want to be described,” he points toward this unresolvable, and therefore energizing, zone in which what we say about things can’t ever be conclusive.
One of the twentieth century’s most forceful examples of this principle is also one of its best-known poems, Ezra Pound’s inexhaustible “In a Station of the Metro”:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
The poem is so quick and compressed that it operates on us before we’ve even had time to think about what’s happening; it’s as if the subway doors have been flung open in Times Square and there you are, immersed in a human world that’s both immediate and immense. There’s a slight internal gasp that comes with that experience: oh, I was in a contained space, and suddenly it’s opened into a vast one. Pound’s poem describes the Métro in Paris, but the grand spaces of public transportation, the big hubs of coming-and-going, are signature spaces of international modernity. In train stations, subway stations, airports, bus stations, we’re lifted out of our individual focus into the stream of people in motion—and there are so many of them, in London or Paris, Barcelona or D.C., all plucked for a moment out of context, become bits of light in the great pouring stream of being on the way to somewhere.
Because it’s such a tiny poem, merely fourteen words (plus six for a title that does the useful work of placing us specifically, so that the body of the poem can turn its attention to the heart of the matter), it’s instructive to consider the contribution that these tremendously pressurized terms are making to the whole.
Apparition comes with connotations of color, so that the faces seem pallid, even transparent. More important, it establishes a tone for the visual image to come, suggesting that the speaker’s haunted, that perhaps there’s a sort of unreality, a phantom quality to the suddenly appearing strangers, and a heightened sense of subjectivity. Imagine the poem as “These faces in the crowd: / Petals on a wet, black bough.” That would make a claim about what reality is, and the poem becomes descriptive in the less profound sense of the term—simply an evocation of the look of things. Apparition, though, makes the poem a description of the speaker’s reality, the world-as-it-is-being-known-and-felt. Apparition is the poem’s secret source of energy; without the word, the memorable resonance of this poem—its lonely, beautiful ache—vanishes.
These faces—not those, or some, or even just plain faces. The modifier brings the speaker into a more dynamic, immediate relation to the people before him; these particular faces loom. The crowd on the other hand is more distanced; it doesn’t feel the same as this crowd would, and lends a sense of distance to the speaker’s relation to the undifferentiated mass.
Petals, by nature, tend to be small, and thinking about small petals against the big black background of the Métro station makes the individual human seem tiny, and perhaps suggests something about the speaker’s sense of the weight or proportion of an individual life. What are petals now were flowers once; a wholeness has been shattered. The image pulls us in two directions at once: the faces, like petals, have been separated from an original unity, losing their structural connection, yet there’s also a sense here of a continuum of life, a kind of human brightness. The human face is what blooms, renews, and shines in the dark. Perhaps it’s raining, and the assembled mass in their soaked slickers have the look of a “wet, black” branch. The sight of these individuals (are they?) in the urban dark, their faces made brighter against the dark shine around them, is chilling and disconnected, but you can also read it as an affirmation. The poem won’t let us have it one way or another, finally.
I don’t want to leave Pound’s poem without pointing to the perfection of that semicolon. Imagine replacing it with words:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd
… is like petals on a wet, black bough
… reminds me of petals on a wet, black bough
… resembles petals …
Enough! But these awful distortions of the poem point to how much life is in that little double jot of ink, with its power to suggest but not define linkage. With nothing but the punctuation mark between the poem’s elements, we experience the disparate nature of these two things more intensely. The more yoked things do not have in common, the greater the level of tension, the greater the sense of cognitive dissonance for the reader. We have to work in the poem, and we feel something happen, instantaneously, in the yoking of those faces and those petals. The use of like here would have drawn a firm line between the two elements, but without such a firm gesture of equivalence we confront a metaphor that is far more alive in its associations, far more ambiguous, and more crucial.
An image, Pound wrote, “is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time…. It is the presentation of such a ‘complex’ instantaneously which gives that sense of sudden liberation … which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art. It is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works.” (Something he might have kept in mind later on.)
An instantaneous intellectual and emotional complex is precisely what we get in this poem. And how deeply satisfying it turns out to be that we can’t quite finish mining the poem for its conjoined intellectual and emotional content. It seems both an evocation of alienation and a recognition of commonality; tonally, it seems composed of equal portions of sorrow and wonder. Pound’s poem stays with us because it yokes unlike things, allows us space to move, and refuses to make a direct statement, forcing us to remain in the position of interpreter of something that is perpetually open.