This thread will be around forever, so maybe I can risk saying that I largely agree with Kant's idea that all of what is known about the external world comes via the senses. However, the "knower" is at first glance inside the intact brain, and, as Stevens surely wondered: how does it know? Examining the quote above, I completely agree.

This thread is recalling my 10 yrs at Talk Freethought (erstwhile Internet Infidels/FRDB).

I agree with you. No-one is privy to another's view of the world, and no-one can see through the other's eyes. As much as some people think it would be fine and dandy if we could, it would have catastrophic repercussions. I argued for a decade with scientists, lawyers, teachers, physicians, you name it, professionals in every field, about these things you touch on. Quite a number of these people I refer to thought it would be a great thing to be able to intervene in a person's brain and literally know what they were thinking. The arguments usually happened in the morality forum. Some defended the notion of this possible, potential, and literal "mind-reading" as a means of crime prevention. All we have to do is find out what goes on in the brain that causes criminal behavior, go in there, and "fix" the problem.

I got into the tragedy of the lobotomy, its widespread acceptance, and eventually got slammed for being an "alarmist." I mentioned Dr. Jose Delgado over and over and over, but only one person offered any critique, and it was a gentle critique: "He lost his objectivity there for a while." was the sum of it. Delgado's (in)famous book is called Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilised Society. He's also famous for this quote:

I'm rambling again, but it's pertinent, I think. I'll answer your last question up there in my response to Allen.

You couldn't, and you shouldn't, IMHO.

I always agreed with the empirical view, until I started to experience certain things that I found inexplicable, and these "things" were happening so often, and in such abundance, that my entire worldview began to wobble into major uncertainty and cognitive dissonance. I began to consider a more subjectivist, rather than objectivist (small 'o') look at things. I had always taken Existence as primary, irreducible, in the Aristotelian sense, but for some reason I began to entertain the idea that maybe some Grand Consciousness was primary.

Was it God, like Spinoza's God—and he was no closet atheist, as his letters prove, nor was he the same as a pantheist, which many assert. Was it time to make a tinfoil hat and fend off the alien mindrays; was it evil spirits; was it Cthulhu, or just bi-polar disorder, which is famous for causing religious mania? I eventually settled on God, with a dash of some kind of mental disorder, since I have been through two care programs and was never diagnosed bi-polar. All I had, according to the first psychiatrist, was "an emotional disorder", and "a drinking problem".

Back to Stevens: I used to have one way of looking at a blackbird. Now I've got, oh, about 42.

(Just kidding about the 42).

Pressing on in Harmonium, and enjoying it immensely (if slowly), here's one that stood out to me.


The Load of Sugar-Cane

The going of the glade-boat
Is like water flowing;

Like water flowing
Through the green saw-grass,
Under the rainbows;

Under the rainbows
That are like birds,
Turning, bedizened,

While the wind still whistles
As kildeer do,

When they rise
At the red turban
Of the boatman.

I think this is my favorite poem by Stevens:



Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit

If there must be a god in the house, must be,
Saying things in the rooms and on the stair,

Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor,
Or moonlight, silently, as Plato’s ghost

Or Aristotle’s skeleton. Let him hang out
His stars on the wall. He must dwell quietly.

He must be incapable of speaking, closed,
As those are: as light, for all its motion, is;

As color, even the closest to us, is;
As shapes, though they portend us, are.

It is the human that is the alien,
The human that has no cousin in the moon.

It is the human that demands his speech
From beasts or from the incommunicable mass.

If there must be a god in the house, let him be one
That will not hear us when we speak: a coolness,

A vermilioned nothingness, any stick of the mass
Of which we are too distantly a part.

Aaron, the imagery and plain-spokenness of that poem are striking. And Rogerbob, that’s a new one to me -- thank you for posting it.

I’ll take advantage of the bump to thank Bill for his last thoughtful comment and for validating my sanity. :cool:

And Allen: The only (possibly) direct allusion to the great Kant I have heard in WS’s work is in “A High-Toned Old Christian Woman”, about the nave of the moral law, but that’s more the 2nd critique than the 1st. But I haven’t read all of WS, and I may well be missing others... [edited in: On reflection, I think you're probably referring to the general point that sense data is conditioned or determined by the Kantian categories of the understanding, and the Kantian "Copernican Revolution". So, yes, WS is in that lineage, in a manner of speaking.]

Wow, the dynamics of that are really interesting, Rogerbob.

L1's twinned "must" (showing the speaker's helplessness) quickly becomes "let him" (showing the speaker's assertion of godlike control). Note how perfectly the sunlit L3 echoes the "Let there be light" of Genesis.

This, in turn, associates speech itself--whether in Genesis or in this poem--with the power to create the universe anew, as the speaker is now doing, displacing the Creator by not letting Him speak. By L6, even the word "must" itself has transformed from L1's expression of reluctant acceptance into yet another expression of the speaker's verbal power. God's silence becomes implicit acceptance of the universe-ruling narrator's commands.

[I wrote much more on this, but then decided that not everyone will be inclined to sit still for a sermon in the Church of Julie, so PM me if you want a bigger dose of my theological blather.]

I love the poem but never thought about it as hard as you, Julie. I just like the idea of someone who isn't necessarily an atheist, but hopes there is no God. This poem sometimes makes me think of a wonderful barber I had for several years who told me that every morning he prays for two things. First, he asks God for health. Next he asks God to stay out of his business.

You can get a haircut at the Church of Julie, too, but you probably won't like the results.

I should probably take another look at Wallace Stevens's "Sunday Morning". It's been a while, and I'm a different person since I read it last.

Dear COJ, couldn't one read that much of that poem, maybe all of it, as expressing a fear or discomfort at having a god of some particular size (like a decorative garden gnome) in the house commenting and making remarks at awkward times like a resident mother-in-law or nosy neighbor? I am not theologizing here, just trying to get a sense if the poem. The idea just expressed makes me giggle, and if Stevens didn't want a yapping gnome, I wouldn't either -- unless it was very wise, seldom spoke, and was uncommonly diplomatic. As to his "deaf" god, well that's not a particularly useful god -- with its nose in its newspaper or whatever. This seems to me to be more of an annoyed manifesto than a poem I could care about much. A bit of pique. Almost a rather tedious high school paper editorial tricked up with spelling puns and easy rhetoric. I think, COJ, that your analysis is better than the poem.

Such a god would indeed be pointless, but that's the kind of god that Stevens is asking for in the poem. He would just as soon there not be a god at all, but if there must be one, he's hoping it will stay on the sidelines and not bother us too much. He has no use for a god, and that's an attitude you might not approve of but one that I find appealing.