{"id":459,"date":"2009-02-27T12:51:45","date_gmt":"2009-02-27T12:51:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/onecity\/2009\/02\/emptiness-and-wallace-stevens.html"},"modified":"2009-02-27T12:51:45","modified_gmt":"2009-02-27T12:51:45","slug":"emptiness-and-wallace-stevens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/2009\/02\/emptiness-and-wallace-stevens.html","title":{"rendered":"Emptiness and Wallace Stevens"},"content":{"rendered":"

I am interested in how emptiness shows up in Western culture, particularly in poetry, philosophy and music.\u00a0 Today I wanted to take a close look at a poem by Wallace Stevens, “The Snow Man,” and discuss to what degree what he is talking about in this poem is akin to Buddhist emptiness.\u00a0 Also, I would love to hear from you about other poems or philosophies or song lyrics you think of when you think of emptiness.\u00a0 What kinds of cultural reference points, besides the obvious Buddhist texts and teachings, help shape your understanding of emptiness?
\nHere is the poem, “The Snow Man,” one of the ten most anthologized American poems ever.
\nThe Snow Man<\/em>
\nby Wallace Stevens
\nOne must have a mind of winter
\nTo regard the frost and the boughs
\nOf the pine-trees crusted with snow;
\nAnd have been cold a long time
\nTo behold the junipers shagged with ice,
\nThe spruces rough in the distant glitter
\nOf the January sun; and not to think
\nOf any misery in the sound of the wind,
\nIn the sound of a few leaves,
\nWhich is the sound of the land
\nFull of the same wind
\nThat is blowing in the same bare place
\nFor the listener, who listens in the snow,
\nAnd, nothing himself, beholds
\nNothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
\nIn this poem, Stevens gives us a clear and vivid representation of his experience of emptiness.\u00a0 He calls emptiness \u201cthe nothing,\u201d and my first thought concerns the difference between a so-called Western sense of existential nothingness versus the Buddhist sense of a luminous emptiness.\u00a0 This problem\u2014nothing vs. emptiness\u2014seems to come up all the time.\u00a0 My inspiration for this essay is a certain linguistic dissatisfaction with that word “emptiness”, so I feel the need to investigate more closely Stevens’s diction.\u00a0 Is he talking about Nagarjuna\u2019s emptiness or a more existential nothingness?
\n
\nStevens begins \u201cThe Snow Man\u201d with the third personal singular pronoun One.\u00a0 Immediately any clear sense of subject\u2014either the poet-narrator or the eponymous snowman himself\u2014is submerged into the objective, impersonality of the pronoun one, a pronoun used to represent any person representing people in general.\u00a0 Every reader, every individual, everyone is the subject of the poem.
\n\u201cOne must have a mind of winter\u201d says Stevens.\u00a0 One must have a cold, precise, disciplined mind: this imperative is the poem\u2019s subject.\u00a0 In his essay on Wallace Stevens, Pat Righelato elucidates how Stevens is instructing us to see reality clearly in this poem; \u201c\u2018The Snow Man\u2019 is a rejection of the idea that nature is the vehicle of human splendors and miseries; rather, the creative consciousness must discipline itself to a condition of wintriness in order to apprehend without embellishment.\u201d
\nOne must have a mind of winter
\nTo regard the frost and the boughs
\nOf the pine-trees crusted with snow;
\nThe poem\u2019s title and this first of five stanzas set the tone, wintry and difficult; the object-scene, (ostensibly) a snowman in the snow; and the subject, a certain discipline of mind that leads to clear-seeing.\u00a0 Stevens continues:
\nAnd have been cold a long time
\nTo behold the junipers shagged with ice,
\nThe spruces rough in the distant glitter
\nOf the January sun…
\n\u201cBehold\u201d is a privileged word in Stevens\u2019s lexicon.\u00a0 For Stevens, to behold means to see clearly.\u00a0 Stevens\u2019s notion of beholding gives purpose to life: we must learn to see clearly.\u00a0 And in this way, to learn our true nature.\u00a0 There is nothing vague about Stevens\u2019s prescription.\u00a0 Rather, he is demonstrating in this poem a definite way to discipline the creative consciousness.\u00a0 To see the world without embellishment, as Righelato expresses it.\u00a0 To see the world without self-projections, as the Buddhists would say.\u00a0 To see the world and its objects and its inhabitants as they really are.
\nIf the aim is to see the world clearly, without unnecessary embellishments or self-projections, what is it that gets in the way of this clear-seeing?\u00a0 Our selves, our desires, our emotions, etc.\u00a0 But also, in a word, language.\u00a0 Language covers all.\u00a0 Anthony Whiting writes, \u201cThe pine trees are crusted with snow; the junipers are shagged with ice, and the spruces are rough in the distant glitter. The landscape that is seen is the landscape that the mind beautifully \u2018decorates\u2019 with language.\u201d\u00a0 Even laying language on our experience obstructs clear-seeing, which is beyond words.\u00a0 Therefore, Stevens moves from this ornate, descriptive diction to an aural mode, from an object in space (the snow on trees), to an object in time (the sound of the wind):
\nOf the January sun; and not to think
\nOf any misery in the sound of the wind,
\nIn the sound of a few leaves,
\nNotice how the poem is one long sentence, building its meaning by accumulation.\u00a0 The subject, the first word, the one that is everyone, is, through Stevens\u2019s patient enjambment, slowly being forgotten, or more specifically, being merged with the object of description, namely, the snowman in the snow, or more precisely, the space around the snowman.\u00a0 Three stanzas deep into the poem, Stevens has not written a single descriptive line about the actual snowman.\u00a0 Does he have a carrot nose?\u00a0 A row of black coat buttons down his chest?\u00a0 A top hat?\u00a0 This more classical description\u2014the writer\u2019s foremost tool\u2014is eschewed for a more subtle explication of the functioning of consciousness itself, of the intersection between perceiving subject and perceived object, of the merging of the two into one, that is, of their coemergence.\u00a0 Stevens progressively pulls the camera back on his scene: we move from the boughs of the pine-trees to junipers shagged with ice to the spruces in the distant sun\u2014all the way to the sound of the wind and the sound of a few leaves.\u00a0 This ever-widening perspective reaches its apogee in the fourth stanza:
\nWhich is the sound of the land
\nFull of the same wind
\nThat is blowing in the same bare place
\nThe instruction is to widen our perspective, to rest our awareness on the whole of being.\u00a0 And, critically, when perceiving the world, no matter how wintry the scene may be, not to project our own emotions, for example, our personal misery, onto the scene.\u00a0 In short, in order to see clearly, keep the self out of it.\u00a0 Stevens encourages his reader to be wise and disciplined enough\u2014to be cold enough\u2014to simply hear the rain and not attribute to it our own private pain.
\nThis fourth stanza speaks of a wind, a wind that dissolves boundaries between inner and outer: the wind of the land, the empty wind of the outside world, \u201cthat is blowing in the same bare place for the listener,\u201d the wind of the person, the empty wind of the inner world.\u00a0 This wind points to the emptiness, and the poem ends in a meditation thereupon:
\nFor the listener, who listens in the snow,
\nAnd, nothing himself, beholds
\nNothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
\nAnthony Whiting keenly interprets these last few lines: \u201cTo behold nothing that is not there is to behold reality stripped of all that the self attributes to it. Since misery is not part of nature but something that the self adds to it, to behold nothing that is not there suggests that it is possible not to think of any misery in the sound of the wind.\u201d
\nAll reality, all phenomena is emptiness.\u00a0 The snowman and the scene, the listener and his mind\u2014nothing, empty.\u00a0 What remains is only beholding, only clear-seeing.\u00a0 This clear-seeing, and only this, allows the listener (not even the seer at this point) to behold emptiness itself, \u201cthe nothing that is.\u201d\u00a0 Stevens\u2019s pseudo-subject, the listener, the universal one, simply beholds\u2014fulfilling T.S. Eliot\u2019s wish to cultivate the intelligence that might \u201csee the object as it really is\u201d\u2014one beholds, in the most profound sense of the word, \u201cnothing that is not there,\u201d one behold reality as it really is, without embellishments, without self-projections.\u00a0 One beholds.
\n\u201cThe Snow Man\u201d is a chilling poem, a valid poem, and a perspicacious expression of a man\u2019s experience of emptiness.\u00a0 Whatever name it goes by\u2014emptiness or the nothing\u2014Stevens is writing about emptiness in one way or another.\u00a0 A friend of mine, Juan-Carlos Castro provided me with a critique of Steven\u2019s view of emptiness, saying that in order to see-clearly, one need not to try not<\/em> to project our emotions onto nature, but rather \u201cto simply let go and let be, to arrive at absence with presence: the tricky project of conscious, embodied non-involvement.\u201d\u00a0 There is something to this critique.\u00a0 What do you think? Is there too much existential nothingness in Wallace\u2019s experience of emptiness?\u00a0 Must emptiness necessarily be so so chilling, so austere, so cold?\u00a0\u00a0 Furthermore, perhaps Steven\u2019s instructions on how to perceive emptiness are still too much, well, instruction.\u00a0 Perhaps one could “simply let go and let be.”\u00a0 But then what would that mean?
\nThe fact is Stevens, a Western poet and insurance salesmen writing in the early twentieth century (not a guru in 11th century Tibet), had some kind of direct experience of emptiness, then tried to share his experience in words, in poetry.\u00a0 I believe his experience of emptiness, as well as similar experiences of other poets and writers,\u00a0 is worth talking about.\u00a0 And in this way, we can talk about our own experiences and our own understandings of a difficult truth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am interested in how emptiness shows up in Western culture, particularly in poetry, philosophy and music.\u00a0 Today I wanted to take a close look at a poem by Wallace Stevens, “The Snow Man,” and discuss to what degree what he is talking about in this poem is akin to Buddhist emptiness.\u00a0 Also, I would…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":187,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-459","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-and-media"],"yoast_head":"\nEmptiness and Wallace Stevens - One City<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/2009\/02\/emptiness-and-wallace-stevens.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Emptiness and Wallace Stevens - 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He writes book reviews for The Brooklyn Rail. His poetry and fiction can be found on his website: http:\/\/thepennies.blogspot.com. He believes enlightenment is real.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/author\/pgriffin"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/187"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=459"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=459"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=459"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=459"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}