Wallace Stevens and Modern Science 2

in the mind of the observer. This is in a sense exactly what Stevens century physics, concluded that an event cannot be said to have happened, or be "real," until it registers in the mind of the observer. This is in a sense exactly what Stevens means, with the qualification that for Stevens the mind does more than "register" the event; it helps to create it. Further, Neils Bohr pointed out early in the discussion of quantum physics' philosophical implications that one of the major problems with talking about the "reality" depicted in quantum findings is that language as it now exists is inadequate to do anything except present the findings: nothing that can be said is its solid self, perhaps, but only a "seeming."
With all this in mind, we can see how the 31 cantos of "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven" are efforts to shape the universe out of the meeting of the external facts of the universe (such as New Haven) with the internal ordering force of the imagination. The poem has a sense of sadness which springs mainly from the expressions of difficulty and even futility with words. If "it is a world of words to the end of it," but things cannot be described or approached directly, only through "the intricate evasions of us," then things can never be directly apprehensible or knowable, as we would perhaps like
them to be.
But solutions are proposed, even though they are admitted to be tentative:

Professor Eucalyptus said, "The search
For reality is as momentous as
The search for god." It is the philosopher's search

For an interior made exterior
And the poet's search for the same exterior made
Interior.
(CP 481)

The proposal, or the frame of reference of the personal, is that interior and exterior meet. The world of words - of the poet, or creative consciousness - is the nexus of that meeting.
At the end of the poem comes an assertion which is downright hopeful:

It is not in the premise that reality
Is a solid. It may be a shade that traverses
A dust, a force that traverses a shade.

This is hopeful because it implies that our description of reality need not be fixed and settled. We need not continue to think of reality, in its difficulty and futility, as being necessarily a physical place or having a "solid self"; we can make radical changes in the quality of reality by making radical changes in what we say is true of it. We may find, Stevens says in a late essay, that "man's truth is the final resolution of everything."
Further, the words "solid" and "force" in this stanza imply ideas from physical science. "Force" is a technical term in physics, and "solid" suggests atomic physics' description of all material reality as un-solid, composed of whirling particles with huge spaces between them. It also recalls Stevens' essay "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words," where he quotes Joad as saying, "'Philosophy has long dismissed the notion of [solid] substance, and modern physics has endorsed the dismissal..,'" (NA p. 25). Even his terminology is parallel to - and sometimes the same as - the terminology of modern science.
But for Stevens as well as for many physicists, even the proposition that reality somehow occurs as a whole but unexplained activity of exterior made interior (or vice versa) rather than exists statically as a set of objects or events, is rationality insufficient. This is reflected in the tentative quality of the language in those closing lines of "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven." Stevens presses this rational insufficiency, late in life, by carrying the discussion beyond simply the problem of language to what he calls "the irrational element in poetry." For Stevens (as he says in his essay of this title), the
irrational element involves what "takes place unaccountably" in the human mind, and the major part of what takes place is the search for meaning.
Stevens' characteristic rationality leads him not only in the direction of science, but also in a (perhaps) more unexpected direction: the problem of God returns from rational exile to both the

physicists' discussion and to Stevens's, after apparent detours through the worlds of Crispin and the languishing woman of "Sunday Morning." The search for reality, noted Professor Eucalyptus (quoted above), is as momentous as the search for god.
Section VI of "The Irrational Element in Poetry" focuses his ideas concisely:

Why does one write poetry? I have already stated a number of reasons, among them these: because one is impelled to do so by a personal sensibility and also because one grows tired of the monotony of one's imagination, say, and sets out to find variety. In his discourse before the Academy, ten years ago or more, M. Bremond elucidated a mystical motive and made it clear that, in his opinion, one writes poetry to find God. I should like to consider this in conjunction with what might better be considered separately, and that is the question of meaning in poetry. M. Bremond proposed the identity of poetry and prayer, and ... eliminated reason as the essential element in poetry. Poetry in which the irrational element dominated was pure poetry ... Ail mystics approach God through the irrational. Pure poetry is both mystical and irrational. If we descend a little from this height and apply [a] looser and broader definition of pure poetry, it is possible to say that, while it can lie in the temperament of very few of us to write poetry in order to find God, it is probably the purpose of each of us to write poetry to find the good which, in the Platonic sense, is synonymous with God. One writes poetry, then, in order to approach the good in what is harmonious and orderly. Or, simply, one writes poetry out of a delight in the harmonious and orderly.
(OP 227-28)

Here Stevens will not speak directly of God's existence, as Bremond did. But he does say indirectly that a poet aspires to "the good," which in Platonic terms is God, or the One. It would seem at this point that Stevens departs from the spirit of the scientific age, which has nearly done away with any serious consideration of the existence, presence or possibility of God. But in another sense, Stevens here intersects with the ideas of a number of major modern physicists. Like Wolfgang Pauli, Erwin Schrodinger, David Bohm and Heisenberg, Stevens expresses the proposition - or clear implication - that the physical universe in conjunction with human consciousness displays a property of wholeness or unity. Schrodinger (for example) in his essay "Mind and Matter" carefully demonstrates that "Subject and object are only one" (127) and, following this line of reasoning, later remarks that the experience of God is "an event as real as an immediate sense perception" (138). The ideas that the universe is whole or unified and God is real are tenets of the "perennial," or mystical, philosophy whose main elements are common to many cultures.
Although there is not space to document the remark here, I will note that Schrodinger and Bohm in their later writings express views about reality remarkably similar - even in articulation - to those expressed by Stevens about the relation of the imagination to the physical world. "Nature will respond in accordance with the theory with which it is approached" says ... Stevens, or Bohm? Theory of poetry or of quantum physics?
The "circumstances and psychology" of the modern age, in other words, are characterized not merely by fragmentation and social and personal disjointedness. Rather, they reflect the turbulence of a transitional time for western culture, which in the twentieth century has been making its way out of a decayed and static way of understanding the universe, through a period marked by an overemphasis on rationality.
There is powerful evidence to suggest that the creative imagination of the human mind is an activity as real as a sense perception; the mind and its experiences, including the emotions, are of an order of reality different from that described by classical science. Stevens and Schrodinger - along with other prominent modern scientists - suggest, in other words, that the modern world need not ground itself absolutely in a materialistic
view of nature. Material science seems to come to a stop at its analysis of physical facts, but Stevens and some physicists point toward the spiritual implications of those facts, and they move toward a way of speaking of the spiritual reality inside human beings - and of God - without recourse to the stagnant religious myths of the pre-modern culture.
The intersection of Stevens' poetic ideas with both the