As I ‘see' it, and I am not trained in this stuff, the object is the Idea and the Idea the object. Through the act of perception they become a unified conduit passing a current, a wave-form of energy back and forth. I am thinking of it as the traffic of light through a prism. The eye (mind/consciousness) needs to ’see’ itself and can only do that by mirroring itself in things - a mango, a pencil, a cat, a pat of cow dung, a cloud. It needs such containers, ‘jugs of atoms' to act as holding and refracting devices to catch, retain and bounce back the light, or splinter it off in new directions. Otherwise, the inward looker can only consider its abstract presence within and lives alone in an existentially insentient void. We were not meant to be lonely in the universe!
Likewise, the image/object/thing may only exist when it is registered by the perception of the viewer. The object needs its seer to become real, meaningful and significant. They are like two lovers who crave each other to express what is throbbing at the core of both.
So sight and identification with a scene, of a specific first object (first cause?) in a scene is ye olde red wheelbarrow, the central sun within a farmyard universe. As one looks and identifies through the act of looking, the object becomes the receptacle of consciousness, a holographic correlative for the act of perception that registers its own existence. The 'No ideas but in Things’ deal...as WCW puts it, is I think, really shorthand for -- Look chaps and chapettes at that red painted thingamy of ordinary utility stuck out the bland yard glistening with after-rain near the planetary bodies of chickens radiating with the light of the mind. So much depends on the viewing of it, because the object is really Me and I am recreating a poem-hologram of it for You, baby!
What’s in it for the poet, the passionate onlooker? Well it’s a bugle call to create, to work. Looking at things allows consciousness to enter the visible world and express itself with sound and fury. (This is looping back to Eliot’s Objective Correlative.) The purpose of writing then, about ‘the object’ is for us to create a reaction, or emotional response in the reader. It acts as our prism - the poet’s time machine to ride the wild beam of light. Our ray passes through the object and then into the poem, which in turn becomes a refracting glass for the reader sending the refraction onward through countless other prismatic minds. It's a Net of Indra, a cosmological web with each mind reflecting the same on to the next, or perceiving the thing in a new way and enriching the subjective first impression, adding layers of new significance. This is certainly two way, meta-mind stuff, just as the readers enrich the poem-prism by adding interpretation i.e. refracting current back through it. And the circuit of ’singing the body electric’ completes and continues. What is Walt’s body? I leave that one open.
Finally, I like Heidegger who ran further with Husserl’s phenomenology and linked it up with Eastern philosophy, ‘the zen moment’, the Taoist yin-yang nexus, yet kept us in mind:
“The poets are in the vanguard of a changed conception of Being."
So poets, onward!
RSS Feed