IMAGINATION AS VALUE
In 1895 William James read and was impressed by Swami Vivekananda’s Raja-Yoga; they had met in 1894, and in March 1896 Vivekananda delivered an address to the Graduate Philosophical Society at Harvard on “The Philosophy of Vedanta.” James later described Vivekananda as “an honor to humanity.” Vivekananda had been speaking widely in the United States since 1893, when he first presented his ideas at the Parliament of Religions held as part of the Columbian Exposition in Chicago. He was from a high-caste family, was deeply educated and cosmopolitan, and intended to integrate “evolutionism” into Hinduism and, reciprocally, introduce the West to the teachings of the East. In his “Practical Vedanta, Lectures on Jnana Yoga” (the yoga of the mind), Vivekananda observed that most of our differences as human beings “are merely differences of language.”1
James shared this notion. Pragmatism, as conceived by Charles Sanders Peirce and developed by James, is a method designed to show how to make our ideas clear (the title of one of Peirce’s foundational pragmatist essays): the basis of the method is learning to attend to the many possible shades of meaning in the words we use. Imagination’s value in this mental scanning is to perform spectrum analyses, considering the meaning and “feeling of if” in this context, “of and” in another, or of “around” in the famous example of the squirrel and the tree used by James in his Pragmatism (1907). Peirce had been in the habit since childhood—having been trained by his father, the Harvard astronomer and mathematician Benjamin Peirce—of recording star measurements and adjusting carefully by degrees for parallax distortion. He carried this skill over to the way he imagined words in their different usages. This exacting attentiveness to the varieties of verbal experience characterized Stevens’s way with words as well, and he composed his poems as exercises to teach us, women and men made out of words, how and what to do with them: “The slightest sound matters.” By reading through Stevens’s body of work we learn to become pragmatists.
In chapter 1 I remarked that as Stevens developed his poetics, certain lessons that he took in from the East, beginning during his years at Harvard, were to become as formative as what he internalized from his native West. The young poet was sensitized to nuance early in his life from reading Emerson, and as he came to know the art and poetry of the East when it became the subject of exhibitions and scholarship in Boston and Cambridge (Ernest Fenollosa’s collection and lecturing being the wellspring), he found his senses excited even more by the delicacy of distinctions and the shape or schema of ideas. He read Chinese and Japanese aesthetics. In a letter to Elsie in the months before they married, he transcribed lists of colors drawn from things he had seen and of “aspects” that could be used to compose paintings or poetry: “pale orange, green and crimson, and white, / and gold, and brown”; “deep lapis-lazuli and orange, and opaque / green, fawn-color, black, and gold”; and “lapis blue and vermilion, white, and gold / and green.” And he transcribed the following list of aspects:
The Evening Bells from a Distant Temple
Sunset Glow over a Fishing Village
Fine Weather after Storm at a Lonely Mountain Town
Homeward-Bound Boats off a Distant Shore
The Autumn Moon over Lake Tung-t’ing
Wild Geese on a Sandy Plain
Night Rain in Hsaio-Hsiang
He commented as follows:
This is one of the most curious things I ever saw, because it is so comprehensive. Any twilight picture is included under the first title, for example. “It is just that silent hour when travellers say to themselves, ‘The day is done,’ and to their ears comes from the distance the expected sound of the evening bell.”–And last of all in my package of strange things from the East, a little poem written centuries ago by Wang-an-shih: “It is midnight, all is silent in the house; the water-clock has stopped. But I am unable to sleep because of the beauty of the trembling shapes of the spring-flowers, thrown by the moon upon the blind.” I don’t know of anything more beautiful than that anywhere, or more Chinese—. . . I am going to poke around more or less in the dust of Asia for a week or two and have no idea what I shall disturb and bring to light.—Curious thing, how little we know about Asia, and all that. It makes me wild to learn it all in a night. (L 137–38)
Throughout his life Stevens continued learning more about Asia, Buddhism, and the life of the Buddha, eventually building his own small collection of statues of the Buddha. It is particularly useful in the context of what has been so far presented in this penultimate way of looking at Stevens to draw from the work of Nolan Pliny Jacobson, the noted scholar of Buddhism in its affinities with American pragmatism. An observation Vivekananda made repeatedly to his audiences in America is pertinent as well: the Buddha was a Hindu, the first to bring Vedanta out of India. Jacobson’s insight is especially helpful in relation to Stevens’s understanding of imagination as value. Here, then, is Jacobson focusing on Peirce’s affiliation with Buddhism:
For Peirce . . . all thinking is dialogic in nature, extending the feeling of the thinker into the feelings of others—this is what he means by the “outreaching identity” of the self. What distinguishes the human mind is not that it is unextended—nothing really is, Gilbert Ryle’s “ghost in the machine” notwithstanding. What distinguishes the mind is the acuteness of its sensitivity to the shared processes of feeling and the equally distinctive ability to extend the range of our awareness by high-level sign language, “by knowing which,” Peirce says, “we know something more” and engage in dialogue with private and public moments in our experience. This is crucial for Peirce’s philosophy of science, as well as an access road into profound dialogue with the Buddhist orientation. “There is an immediate community of feeling between parts of mind infinitesimally near together, between the self at one moment and the oncoming self of the next; without this,” Peirce writes, “it would have been impossible for minds external to one another ever to become coordinated in the search for public truth to which even the most prejudiced persons will come if they pursue their inquiries far enough.”2
Peirce’s aim, shared by James and inherited by Stevens, was to use language “to strengthen and multiply the connective links that establish human life more firmly in its natural habitat, rendering more transparent our relations with one another and with the speechless world’s fellow-creatures.”3 “Remember how the crickets came / Out of their mother grass, like little kin, / In the pale nights, when your first imagery / Found inklings of your bond to all that dust?”
In one of his meditations on the function of the photograph in the modern period, John Berger underscored that the ever increasing acceleration of events does violence to human experience. “The violence consists in conflating time and history so that the two become indivisible, so that people no longer read their experience of either of them separately.” Writing in 1982, he continued with a description especially chilling in relation to where we find ourselves today (as I write in 2016):
The conflation began in Europe in the nineteenth century, and has become more complete and more extensive as the rate of historical change has increased and become global. All popular religious movements—such as the present mounting Islamic one against the materialism of the West—are a form of resistance to the violence of this conflation.
What does this violence consist in? The human imagination which grasps and unifies time (before imagination existed, each time scale—cosmic, geological, biological—was disparate) has always had the capacity of undoing time. This capacity is closely connected with the faculty of memory. Yet time is undone not only by being remembered but also by the living of certain moments which defy the passing of time, not so much by becoming unforgettable but because, within the experience of such moments there is an imperviousness to time. They are experiences which provoke the words for ever, toujours, siempre, immer. Moments of achievement, trance, dream, passion, crucial ethical decision, prowess, near-death, sacrifice, mourning, music, the visitation of duende. To name some of them.
Such moments have continually occurred in human experience. . . . They are the material of all lyrical expression. . . . They are summit moments and they are intrinsic to the relation imagination/time.4
Stevens wrote as follows:
The imagination is the power of the mind over the possibilities of things . . . it is the source not of a single value but of as many values as reside in the possibilities of things. (CPP 726)
The imagination that is satisfied by politics, whatever the nature of the politics, has not the same value as the imagination that seeks to satisfy, say, the universal mind, which in the case of the poet, would be the imagination that tries to penetrate to basic images, basic emotions, and so to compose a fundamental poetry even older than the ancient world. (CPP 732)
And, as coda, again:
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 665)