Form, emergence, space in To the One of Fictive Music

To the One of Fictive Music explores the philosophical question of the emergence into form, and traces the movement from fluid hyle to wrought object. It situates this movement in the context of another allied philosophical debate, namely that which pertains to the ontological status of a work of art. By virtue of the self-reflexive gestures pervading the language of the poem, and when placed in the context of Stevens’ other work, the question of the ontological status of the poem itself is never far from the centre of the poem’s concerns.

In a striking opening which resonates with a variety of philosophical interventions, including Aristotle, and Irigaray’s reading of Physics 4, Stevens poses his initial problematic in terms of the matricial status of the maternal body, and by extension (indeed performing the extension mentioned by Irigaray) the body of woman. The pregnant body of the opening stanza comes to term in the second. With birth there is a coterminous emergence of music. This however is not just any music, but a specific type of music wrought out of our imperfections. The emerged being retains a foothold in the fluidity of the maternal matrix (“the wind and sea/yet leaves us in them”) for as long as earth has not yet ‘become’s intwined and intermingled with the emerged body. The intermingling would be an instance of a Dasein-like reciprocity, an example perhaps of the dwelling described in ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’, where ‘homelessness’ “is the sole summons that calls mortals into their dwelling” (363). For Dasein pervades space,as Hillis Miller observes (246).

The music is said to ‘give motion’: it sets something to work; it inaugurates and undertakes. This ignition or spark of music orchestrates a passive stalled foetal being half-way into life but already dragging its heels in inert matter. The poem captures this moment, which would be close to what Bernard Cache calls inflection (as in his discussion of Leibniz on mind-matter) in a synaesthetic turn whereby the animating music is the most kindred (the most related?) to the matter in question, as underlined by the fact that the gown – the formed, finished garment – of the first stanza, is itself being animated and created anew (“the weaving that you wear”) at the end of the second stanza.

The men of the third stanza are said to be reluctant to err, to stray or wander: they stick to the related, the kindred, the alike; they adhere moreover to the very structure of relation. The relation in question is to the matricial body, the hyle (which phenomenology would subject to inventory and the laws of property). But the relation is manifest in a determination to rest, to remain, not to move – an instance of what Blanchot in L’Espace littéraire calls fascination. The stasis finds expression in a holding on to the refrain which celebrates the same “clearest blooms” of the maternal matrix. Music is considered first, and is said to be superlative only when the “retention” and restraint just discussed are operative. The second, and allied, consideration is that of a vigil. The property linked to the first is intensity, the second apprehension. Music can be more of less intense whereas the vigil can apprehend more or less. Music can also “proclaim” and vaunt in a kind of spontaneous response to the kindred, the nearest, the most related (autopoeisis). By contrast the vigil can “see” and “name”. Music thus speaks while the vigil sees, but also imposes. The vigil is privileged. This statement finds itself ‘proven’ in the example of “your name”. But the name is also an image, thus indicating that the two functions of the vigil are of a piece; perhaps to name is to see. Once more synaesthaesia takes hold as name and image meld with “arrant spices” – the sonorous, the visual and the olfactory. The sun is light, illumination, that which is required to have something be “most clear”, that which is a prerequisiste for the vision of the “clearest bloom”. Thus stanza 3 reveals that it is on the boughs, bushes and scented vines that one finds these blooms: the structure of relation, the most near, the most proximate, the most belonging, the most attached, property and properties.

This structure of return, of retention, this restraint that compels men to listen only to that which is closest is however subject to qualification and dismantling in the final stanza. Here the attachment to likeness is thought to be problematic. In place of repetition that confirms the matrix and holds only to the minimal quotient of emergence, that is into form, after as swift an issuing forth as possible, the fourth stanza speaks of stretching out the process. It is a little like the concept of enfance as described by Lyotard. The come to rest too soon is to become already a gross effigy; it is to be frozen in Platonic torpor. Rather, the action advocated by the fourth stanza suggests a neoplatonic solution (close to Plotinus in particular) to the question of fallen bodies. In a sense the fallen body in the Plotinian conception has lost closeness to the divine (see Irigaray, ‘Mere de glace’); it has spurned, in Stevens’ terms, “imagination”.