The Value in a Foreign Song

Before Sunrise

We left Wallace Stevens in a pinch: seeking the ability to perceive value outside of the human order, he is needful, hopeful, and yet uncertain about whether it is possible. Rejecting a vision tempered by Christian revelation, he does not know if the world has value woven into the fabric of its being, and neither does he know whether such value can be perceived, even if it’s there. But if he’s going to keep searching for a way to shape the structure of his thought to the architecture of the real, he’s got to at least hope that there’s value in the world and that there’s at least some chance that he can glimpse it.

For his questions to be real questions and not just witty conversational prompts, for his search to be a real search for something and not just a distracting game, some vision of the really real, what he and others have called the absolute, must be possible. Even if he is only able to assert its necessity, he cannot deny that necessity: he calls it the supreme fiction. And if it is more than a fiction, if the fiction is real, meaning and possibility flow into our lives like sunlight at dawn through an eastern facing window. In this part of the essay, I would like to inhabit this hope, but inhabit it still outside of theological hope: I would like to inhabit its human form and ask what shape it might take.

I've landed on an image here that I’d like to explore: an eastern facing window, and the hope for a light-filled room. What do you do, in the darkness? What do you do when you hope that there will, in time, be light? When I was younger and I lived in Chicago, when parties would occasionally last all night, sometimes my friends and I would walk out to the lake as the sky lightened and attempt to wait for the dawn. It always took longer than we thought it would, than we hoped it would. Mostly we would give up and go back to bed before the sun made it over the horizon. Other days I'd wake up early enough to go jogging, and arrive at the water with maybe a dozen other dawn-watchers. I remember there was always a nun there. I knew that the sun was coming because I could see it reflected off the top windows of the buildings downtown, shining onto people whose sunrises came before mine. And so I waited there, with the others, in the silver light, and eventually the sun would come, as expected, and yet utterly surprising. But I had to wait for it.

This is an inescapable point: if a value that orders the world outside of me has a source outside of me, my only hope to perceive it is to wait for it. There is nothing within me that can help me to see it precisely because I am looking for something that is outside of me. That’s not to say there’s nothing I can do to help the process along, of course. That eastern facing window has to be there. The curtains have to be drawn aside. The hour must be right. But the structure of this hope is essentially receptive. It is a hope that waits.

When you're studying the structure of mathematical proofs, you learn early on that it's far easier to prove that something is possible than to prove that it's impossible. The only thing you need to do to demonstrate possibility is to find a single instance where it’s realized. If it happens once, it must be possible. It is possible. Even if everyone in the world thinks it is impossible, that impossibility is disproved when the thing happens. Even if something doesn’t appear on the horizon as a possibility because it hasn’t occurred to me or to anyone else, it is revealed in its possibility when it happens. Falling in love is like this. A child learning to walk or to speak can feel like this. It feels impossible or like something that exists only in the imagination. Then something happens, and suddenly it is possible. When something like this happens, it’s what the philosopher Jean-Luc Marion calls an “event,” something that happens that reveals some new possibility through its actuality.

If the supreme fiction isn't possible, if there’s no event that could reveal that possibility to be real, then my world remains quite closed. More or less, I can't see any farther than the back of my own eyelids. I am confined to my own categories of material existence, condemned to live within the values that I arbitrarily place upon people and things around me—even if those values are given to me by other people. The world itself can't place any demands on me. I can only choose this value or that according to my own whim. But if the supreme fiction isn't a fiction, if it is a possibility—if it not only must be possible, but it is possible, our human possibilities are, critically, changed. And if there is hope that it is possible, then we need very little assurance that it is: a single instance in a single life proves the point.

If one person, at one time, manages to glimpse that value at the ground of the really real, then a wholly other order of value would surface on the horizon of human possibility, an order beyond our most fastidious constructions. It would be an order and a structure of value outside of human categories, a value washed clean of us and our images, woven into the very fabric of reality that we move within. Would we not be inestimably richer for it? Would life not acquire a new dimension, like depth added to the two dimensions of a plane? It might sound strange to say, but might such new concepts, new ways of speaking, new values, act as a kind of evidence that sometime, somewhere along the line, some true vision has broken through—some event has taken place?

If there is a moment in Stevens’ poetry where I wonder if there has been an event, when a world he worried was hopelessly mute, suddenly spoke, it is at the end of his career and of his life, in “Of Mere Being,” the last poem he wrote before he died:

The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze decor,

A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.

 You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.

The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down.

There is, under the familiar, rich images and the deep, straightforward assertions, the quiet confidence of having seen through the things to the source. Of hearing the “foreign song” and knowing it for what it is, so as to be able just to say, “The bird sings.” Did he see it, in the end?

Like the other poems we’ve considered in this series, there are two orders of value in this poem: there’s the human order of “human meaning / human feeling” and “the reason,” and then there’s the non-human order of the bird’s song, “a foreign song.” But in the other poems, these two orders of value are set in enmity with one another. The speaker in “The Idea of Order in Key West” sharply delineates the meaningless of the ocean’s “song” and the meaningfulness of the singer’s, and can only hear the singer. The speaker in “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” posits the necessary possibility of an as-yet unreachable non-human meaning but is still striving to perceive it.

After Sunrise

In “Of Mere Being,” something has reached the speaker from outside of the human order: “You know then that it is not the reason / that makes us happy or unhappy.” Something, outside of human reason, outside of human meaning and of human feeling, has reached him. “The bird sings.” And the speaker hears it. All of nature is thus enlivened. “The bird sings,” and then the speaker can hear it, can see it—its feathers, the palm, the wind moving in the branches. If the bird sings, the ocean can sing, too. If the bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down, then the sun is visible in the idea of it. All of the world is there in the birdsong, and all of it is meaningful, but meaningful with that non-human value, meaningful “beyond the last thought.”

Tom Break is an artist, critic, and editor at In the Wind Projects.