ECHOLOCATION
In lecturing and writing about the particular resonance of the sound of Stevens’s words in relation to the work of contemporary poet Susan Howe, an aspect she herself writes about and celebrates, I have used the concept of echolocation to characterize the manner in which words that matter in fact become matter: they actually lead us—in the way sonar signals do among certain kinds of bats, whales, and some other creatures—to find nourishment, one another, and other elements necessary for survival. As Stevens expressed so movingly in closing “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,” originally delivered as a lecture at Princeton University in May 1941:
The deepening need for words to express our thoughts and feelings which, we are sure, are all the truth that we shall ever experience, having no illusions, makes us listen to words when we hear them, loving them and feeling them, makes us search the sound of them, for a finality, a perfection, an unalterable vibration, which it is only within the power of the acutest poet to give them. . . .
It is not an artifice that the mind has added to human nature. The mind has added nothing to human nature. It is a violence from within that protects us from a violence without. It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation; and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives. (CPP 662, 665)
Of course, all poets echo other poets to some extent, sometimes intentionally but more often accidentally, finding themselves in a rhythm, cadence, or phrase that only in or after their own composing reveals itself to belong to another’s voicing. My own sensitivity to this aspect of the sound of words began under the tutelage of John Hollander, with whom I was fortunate enough to have studied and who directed my dissertation. His exquisite little book, The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After (1984), encapsulates his abundantly rich elucidation and tracing of resonance through time as it is perceived and registered by makers, listeners, and readers of poetry in mappings of influence.
What I am pointing to under the term echolocation, however, is something different, not an academic or historical tracing; rather, my address is to the primary process of poets, readers, and listeners who, in turning toward certain phenomena of sound, find themselves to be inhabited by the “studious ghosts” who shaped those sounds. In other words, my concern is the phenomenology of poetic experience, the frisson charging the moments when one feels directly addressed by a poem, recognized “more truly and more strange” in an uncanny inhabitation. This is a secular variety of religious experience, not different from the recognition wished for by Orthodox Christian believers in their veneration of icons, an engagement in which they come to feel not that they are looking at an image of Christ, the Virgin, or one of the saints but that this figure is looking at them. In effect, “all mean egotism vanishes” in these instances of what William James called “pure experience,” when the subject-object divide is breached and “the currents of the Universal Being circulate through”: “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”1 I have intentionally run together Emerson’s and Stevens’s voices here in an attempt to capture, however feebly, the actuality of the poetic process as Stevens certainly knew it. Indeed, a description of this process comes to us famously from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, another poet devoted to translating divinity: “The primary Imagination I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.”2
The manner of this process will be familiar to readers who have found a particular phrase repeating itself periodically in their mind’s ear without at first understanding why this trace appears, but who, in following it to its source within the texture of the whole of which it is a part, find there, as if by miracle, the answer to a question they have been pondering or find that the occasion of the source poem expresses their own cry: “It is safe to sleep to a sound that time brings back.” Following the trace, or the echo, back to its source and noting where and when it emerged spatializes and temporalizes the experience, revealing something about the embodied relation so that the relation itself becomes a lived texture in which self and other, subject and object, are collapsed, all mean egotism vanished in transparency. Being overtaken by this kind of experience is a form of telepathy: “far-feeling,” from the Greek tele and pathos, as William James described, “thought-transference, or the phenomenon of the reception by the mind of an impression not traceable to any of the ordinarily recognized channels of sense.”3 This phenomenon is equivalent to Jonathan Edwards’s “sense of the heart.” As Edwards spelled out in his notes to himself elaborating this sense, in order for it to be perceptible it must be contained in what he called a “room of the idea”—a stanza, as it were, a prosodic habitation in which its pulsing can be felt.4 “It is,” Stevens indicated, “only within the power of the acutest poet” to create these rooms to which we return for comfort and sustenance. “Poetry is like prayer in that it is most effective in solitude and in the times of solitude as, for example, in the earliest morning. . . . Poetry is a health. . . . Poetry is a cure of the mind” (CPP 903, 913).
Indeed, only the acutest poets achieve such sacraments—their poems are nothing less than transubstantiations of spirit that in turn transfigure the reader, “the listener in the snow,” into “nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” These are moments of illumination, of “critical opalescence,” of being figuratively bathed in sweat at the instant of enlightenment—the snowman described in the Diamond Sutra.5 A precondition for accomplishing such secular miracles—Western versions of satori—is, of course, having been so affected, having found oneself “Engaged in the most prolific narrative, / A sound producing the things that are spoken.” In the third lecture (chapter) of The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), “The Reality of the Unseen,” William James describes the “cosmical It” that informs “the human ontological imagination”: “It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call ‘something there,’ more deep and more general than any of the special and particular ‘senses’ by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed.”6 In the absence of the traditional forms of prayer and ritual that prepare the imagination to experience the reality of the unseen, it is up to the poets to prepare us through poems that demand the kind of intense attention that belongs to prayer. By reading Stevens we learn to pray. The poet’s role, he observed, “is to help people to live their lives” (CPP 661). “After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption” (CPP 901).