Art and the Work of Holding onto Hope
I concluded my first essay on value with a sobering call from Simone Weil about how we could overcome the cultural disappearance of value, which she calls “the affliction of our time,” and what a moral reorientation would require:
If our present suffering ever does lead to a moral reorientation, it will not be accomplished by slogans, but in silence and moral loneliness, through pain, misery, terror, in the deepest part of each spirit.
I’d like to return to thinking about the concept of value by wondering what such a journey through that silence and moral loneliness might look like. Weil’s call to arms reminds me of St. John of the Cross’s notes on his illustration of Mount Carmel, notes that T. S. Eliot channels in “East Coker”:
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go by a way in which you are not.
Perhaps, in order to arrive at a concept of value that could ground a genuine moral reorientation, we must go by a way in which there is no value. For this reason, I’d like to return to Wallace Stevens’ philosophico-poetic project, the poetry of a world understood as devoid of value, and look for a way through.
There are lots of tensions in Stevens’ poetic worldview that he’s continuously exploring, setting one against the other to seek a synthesis that seems forever just out of reach. On the one hand, he seems committed to a staunch atheism—as he writes in “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” “Never suppose an inventing mind as source / Of this idea nor for that mind compose / A voluminous master folded in his fire”—which is why the natural world must remain essentially meaningless, for it is only in the context of an inventing mind that meaning is possible at all.
Wallace Stevens
For Stevens, the real world exists outside of that sense-making order of a rational mind: it confounds us, because we, as sense-making beings, with our blessed rage for order, cannot fully access or comprehend the heart of the heart of reality. We’re stuck in our own minds, where some things matter more than others, looking out for meaning, looking out for sense, looking at a reality that would essentially deny those categories. We’re stuck in our own ordered universe, with hierarchies and priorities. We need to eat every day; we need to do those things that preserve our lives to keep living; we care about things, and about some things more than others. That is to say, we live in a world replete with value, riven through with value so thoroughly that it is incoherent to say that there is something that does not have value for me—for if something is so insignificant that it does not matter to me at all, it doesn’t matter only in relation to other more valuable things that do matter. Value is an axis of our perceived world; nothing is accessible outside of its architecture.
If you think about it, everything we notice (because we notice one thing instead of another), everything we think (because our thought picks something out of the world, real or imagined, instead of some other thing), everything we count (because we organize the world into measurable units instead of fluid continuities), everything we say (because we choose specific words over other alternatives), every way that we move (because our limbs follow organized, directed paths, even unconsciously) is utterly knitted together with value. Even our unconscious bodily processes proceed toward the highly complex and ordered result that, when working, properly keeps us alive.
Every aspect of our existence is shot through with value, and it is inconceivable even to think outside of this value-replete framework. So this question, how do we fit in an unmade world, in a world essentially devoid of value, is both disturbing and essential to confront. This question, in a world supposed to be essentially devoid of value, is pretty much the existential question for humans trying to make sense of living in this world.
What I admire so much about Stevens is that he doesn’t avoid the question: he faces it head-on and works to forge a poetic understanding of what it means to be, as a person, in a world in which value has disappeared. The ways he resolves the questions and dilemmas change over time, so that in a poem like “The Idea of Order at Key West,” written in 1934, the nexus of sense-making amidst the “meaningless plungings of water and wind” and the “grinding water and gasping wind” is the artificer of the song, the poet, who emerges as the root and source of meaning. It’s only through her song that we are able to perceive a veritable value in what lies before our eyes (“It was her voice that made / The sky acutest at its vanishing”).
The ones who listen to the song, then, for all that the song might appear to say about the natural world, can’t seek order in all of that, but only in the spirit that enlivens the poetic fire that can make the song. The speaker of the poem warns constantly against the possibility that the ocean qua ocean could be revealed in any way through the song, cautioning us to train our attention on the only possible source of value that we can know—the spirit of the singer:
Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew that
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang.
Even when the speaker turns toward the town with Ramon Fernandez, it’s the human traces against the wild landscape—the lights of the fishing boats at anchor there—that prompt the stirring closing lines that express the felt dilemma of a being whose consciousness is woven entirely of value, in an unmade world that renders that value absurd:
Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.
The problem with this resolution is that there’s no escaping a certain arbitrariness in the weaving of value in this way: if it is only within the spirit of the artificer that value can emerge, if we are all the sole makers of the world in which we sing, then haven’t we reduced ourselves to irredeemably small existences, locked inside the narrow confines of our own minds or in the minds of those immediately surrounding us?
This is the prison he’s attempting to break out of in his poem “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” where the invocation calls the addressee of the poem, the ephebe or seeker of knowledge, to press through the impossible dilemma to some true vision that flows from the world outside of himself. So he must, on the one hand, “become an ignorant man again / and see the sun again with an ignorant eye / And see it clearly in the idea of it,” and, on the other, “Never suppose an inventing mind as source / Of this idea.” The imperative is to achieve an über-human vision: “The sun must bear no name”—that is, it must exist outside of the order of human naming and speech—“but be / In the difficulty of what it is to be.” It’s critical to the task, of course, to cast aside everything in our historical consciousness that would personify that inhuman order, that would transform it into a (human) shape that is essentially foreign to it, which is why he calls for a vision “washed in the remotest cleanliness of a heaven / That has expelled us and our images.”
The thing about this possibility of true vision is that it is bound to the great hope that such vision is possible, a hope that our minds can take the shape necessary to see truly (which is not a given), and a hope—even if we can so conform our spirits to the real, the really real, the heart of the heart of reality, the truth of truth—that that reality will give itself up to be seen and is the kind of thing that can be seen. That is, that the really real is itself, in itself, in the fabric of its being, woven with a value that could become visible to us if we can become capable of seeing it.
That kind of hope, as it is understood in the Christian tradition, is a theological virtue, not a natural one. That means that it’s the kind of thing we can’t earn for ourselves, but must be given freely by God through grace and revelation. It is essentially and utterly outside the scope of merely human reason and purely human aspiration. This is why hope was such a foreign concept to the Greeks, who refused it as a good, and were grateful that Pandora managed to get her box closed before hope could escape into the world. They could see that true hope, genuine hope, does not belong to humankind. It is only because Christians have it promised to them by the creator of the universe that we can hold onto it as a virtue, something real that can justly serve in the architecture of human enquiry.
The Mystical Drawing of St. John of the Cross, Ascent of Mt. Carmel
The essential thing to attend to is that by Stevens’ own lights, for the honest seeker (Christian or not, with the assurance of hope or without it), hope remains necessary—necessary if our seeking is to bear fruit. Even if it’s not a hope that can be counted upon, it is a hope for something that must, at least, be possible. Without it, all seeking is eventually going to fall into despair. Without it, it becomes difficult to imagine what meaning life could hold, outside of the pursuit of a kind of self-satisfaction. Without hope, all of our seeking is indeed ridiculous.
But of course, for Stevens, who rejects the revelation of hope from that inventing mind, none of these sad states of affairs guarantee that hope is there. None of these absurdities preclude the possibility that we are all doomed to inevitable smallness. This precarious predicament—the absolute need for hope coupled with the sober recognition that it might be a phantom—must be what prompts Stevens to call it a “supreme fiction,” and yet, to insist that it be possible:
It is possible, possible, possible. It must
Be possible. It must be that in time
The real from its crude compounding comeSeeming, at first, a beast disgorged, unlike,
Warmed by a desperate milk. To find the real,
To be stripped of every fiction except one,The fiction of an absolute.
The quandary, then, is clear: I am drawn into the necessity of saying that there must be a true value outside of myself that I can somehow access, even if it is a fiction. I can’t lose this hope; it is the hope that must remain for the questioning not to collapse into absurdity—so what would it mean to be in a position to receive this hope and the vision of the real that makes it possible?
Tom Break is an artist, critic, and editor at In the Wind Projects.