After The Leaves Have Fallen

“After the Leaves Have Fallen”

Zen and the Enlightening of the Self in Modernist Poetry

Octavian More

Faculty of Letters, “Babes-Bolyai” University, Cluj-Napoca

ABSTRACT

This paper sets out to examine a number of connections between Modernist poetry and the path towards the enlightening of the self as proposed by Oriental philosophy and religion, in particular the Buddhist/Zen perspective on the role of meditation, spiritual advancement, as well as the search for balance and harmony. We propose a metaphorical reading of the poetic visions and paths adopted by Modernist poetry in its incorporation of Oriental influences. This is achieved by focusing on some central aspects through which poets of the age related to such material in their quest for answers to the problem of the individual living in a world marked by dichotomies and fragmentation and the alienation of subject from object.

KEY WORDS: Stevens, Modernism, Buddhism, Zen, enlightenment, still point, painting, seeing, No-Mind, old-age

After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to an end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir.

Wallace Stevens, The Plain Sense of Things

If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.

Buddhist dictum

1. Old-age wisdom of still natures, or from six persimmons to six significant landscapes

In his late poem entitled “The Plain Sense of Things”, Wallace Stevens, the poet engaged in a lifelong debate with the relationship mind-imagination-the world, emerges as an advocate of a change of attitude that should characterise any enlightened spirit: the poet seems to have finished his “combat with the sun,” realising the insufficiency of the imagination's mechanisms for creating a harmonious compound structure of interior-exterior, subject and object. At this point, his poetic creation has come full-circle, passing through the extremes of a “disillusionment at ten o'clock,” “ideas of order” and “auroras of autumn.” As the themes and titles of his old-age poems suggest, Stevens now craves for an appeasement that is seen as originating in repose, sleep, the impenetrability of a rock, a river flowing “nowhere, like a sea,” or “a palm at the end of the mind” populated by a bird that sings without “human meaning, without human feeling/A foreign sound.” On the surface, Stevens's old-age poetry may be seen as pervaded by a sense of renunciation tributary to experiencing the acute sense of alienation of the self, consequent on the upheavals that affected the 20th century in its first decades. Yet, the same poetic vision of twilight is expressive of a more serene stance, in which opposites seem to have merged, bestowing calm upon the troubled mind:

The two worlds are asleep, are sleeping now.

A dumb sense possesses them in a kind of solemnity.

The Self and the earth—your thoughts, your feelings,

Your beliefs and disbeliefs, your whole peculiar plot; (CP 501)

Stevens's old-age poetry successfully reconciles subject and object, the individual and the world. Along the lines proposed by Kathleen Woodward (1980), one can claim that there is a refreshed, revitalised perception of the world and the self in the late poetry of the great Anglo-American Modernists. The poets rediscover or recuperate values and their verse is marked at this point by more “heroic” attitude that no longer comes from combating reality, but rather from the virtues of acceptance and detachment. There is a “dumb sense” that nevertheless possesses “a kind of solemnity,” derived not from renunciation, but rooted, as Stevens admits, in a wisdom that comes from “a new knowledge of reality” (CP 534).

This “new knowledge” is explainable both through the particulars of each poet's literary development and, as Stevens would put it, as a necessity, “required as a necessity requires” (CP 503). The composed vision emergent in poems such as those collected in Stevens's The Rock, Eliot's Four Quartets or Pound's Pisan Cantos bear the imprint of the lifelong preoccupations and struggles of each individual poet, but they are also the result of some inherent forces that circumscribed Modernism and the social, political, cultural and aesthetic context of the age. For, despite the peculiarities of each artist, there is a common spirit in what, in Woodward’s line, could be called “the second age of Eliott”: it is an age built along four major co-ordinates: (i) the central image of the still point, (ii) a method of reflection that denies the Cartesian view of the act of the mind as conscious, Promethean and dominating, stressing instead an easy penetration of mind and world (an “ecology of the mind”), (iii) the image of a new hero, the wise old man, set in a society that would worship youth and (iv) a dedication to tradition and the creative act as a stay against chaos, most often manifested in the life review (4-6). These are, basically, the same co-ordinates that Stevens metaphorically captured in his poem “The Irish Cliffs of Moher”:

Who is my father in this world, in this house,

At the spirit's base?

My father's father, his father's father, his—

Shadows like winds

Go back to a parent before thought, before speech,

At the head of the past.

They go to the cliffs of Moher rising out of the mist,

Above the real,

Rising out of the present time and place, above

The wet, green grass.

This is not landscape, full of the somnambulations

Of poetry

And the sea. This is my father or, maybe,

It is as he was,

A likeness, one of the race of fathers: earth

And sea and air. (CP 501-502)

The “spirit's base” is a still point against which the human dimension is represented by the domestic space of the house where the mind finds comfort; it transcends time and space and becomes a source of integration. The poetic imagination, as in “The Plain Sense of Things”, being an intermediary between interior and interior, is seen as a hindrance in the path of re-integration in the world, and is thus discarded. The world here is neither imaginatively translated, nor rationally comprehended. There is nothing but “mere being,” which transcends concepts and thoughts and dwells in a timeless spot where the individual and the race fuse into oneness. This spirit is radically different from the one marred by the sense of chaos and dissolution (both internal and external), as depicted by poems that Woodward would connect with “the first age of Eliot”—the landscape of “Gerontion” and “The Waste Land.” It is a spirit that transcends the dichotomic construction of the West and bears closer affiliations with the Oriental philosophy and religious thought, as manifest in Buddhism and Zen, engendered through the “enough-ness” of the mind before conceptualization, opinion, or ideation, and leading to manifold possibilities. This serenity of old age poetry is characterised by a suspension of “knowledge” and the adopting of a “don't know mind,” through which, as Eliot suggested in “Burnt Norton”, body and mind can unite in a mystical communion.

Thus, using as a starting point Woodward's remark on the novelty and freshness of the old-age poetry of the major Anglo-American Modernists, this paper proposes to highlight some of the possible connections between these artists and the spirituality of the Orient, in particular some key-concepts of Confucianism, Buddhism and Zen, at the level of commonalities, influences and analogies, as well as the personal ways in which they were transposed in the works of Eliot, Pound and Stevens. This investigation aims neither at exhausting the multiplicity of such connections, nor at in-depth analysis. Given the complexity of the subject, this would be impossible within the limits of a paper. Rather, it will build around the central image of the “enlightening” of the self, both as an expression of the central Modernist preoccupation with the fate of the individual in a world subjected to the pressures of the new and the re-appreciation of values, and as a global metaphor for its inherent drive to “make it new,” to refresh and revitalise, to be flexible and to transcend limits (at least in its initial programmatic impulses). Analogous to the idea suggested by Woodward, that of the rejuvenation through old age, the argumentation sets out to perform a circular movement, in a metaphorical vein, from the image of stillness, through those of fragmentation and self-assertion, to “the final elegance” achieved through awakening of the true self in the Stevensian manner of “plainly to propound.”

*

As Woodward develops on one of the characteristics of the late poetry of Anglo-American Modernists, together with this “second age of Eliot,” the “wasteland” that is emblematic for both Modernist mindscapes and landscapes, transforms into a new image, that of the still point, potent and integrative, or at least signals the desire for it, and a belief in its possibility (7). The past is absorbed into the spontaneity of a timeless present and the subject is now engaged in a pure participatory act. An emblematic poem in this sense, she argues, is the above-cited “Burnt-Norton”, which expresses a desire for wholeness, a reconciliation of opposites:

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless

Neither from, nor towards; there the dance is,

But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,

Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,

Neither ascent nor decline. (CPP 119)

Here, the contemplated object represents a state of balance as the source of change, yet without being touched by it. The still point is the origin of meaningful creation, both individual and cultural, a point of unity and deep space, and the point of eternal return (“both the new world // and the old made explicit”). It stands for a moment of pure present-ness that can counteract the tyranny of the biological and historical time without degenerating into stagnation (“do not call it fixity”). In its turn, this creates a state of grace, in which, released from the demands of the world and inner pressures, the subject can stand outside time and thus be enlightened by a new wisdom.

The inner freedom from the practical desire,

The release from action and suffering, release from the inner

And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded

By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving (ibid.)

Through its ability to release, the still point becomes the ultimate goal of a person’s life, representing enhanced spirituality, increased consciousness, an inner peace that comes from the acceptance of the “partiality” of one’s existence (what Stevens had constantly decried as “the being that yielded so little”). The still point is a means of articulating the self in its relation to the world, a most adequate way to unite subject and object.

This “stillness” is a point where the first connection can be made with the tenets held by Oriental philosophy and religion. Unlike the perspective on the world envisaged in the Western tradition, the universe as seen in Taoism, Buddhism and Zen, is not marked by binary oppositions or dichotomies. The entire body of Oriental thought builds on the idea of complementarity of opposites, rather than their mutual exclusion. Dichotomies arise where there is an intrusion of the conceptual mind. As Richard Shrobe explains in his book on Korean Zen, “Don't Know Mind,” relating to experience in a dualistic manner (whether through seeing, hearing or sensing in general), dissecting the world into subject and object in a perpetual relationship of “here” and “there,” leads to what in Buddhist philosophy is called “dust.” “Not explaining, not understanding is the transcendence of ideas, concepts, words and speech”—a tenet that lies at the basis of (Korean) Zen tradition. Buddhism and Zen attempts at sweeping away this dust by renouncing to the “ongoing commentary” on the world, discarding them as being radically different from our factual experience, in fact, nothing more than mere lies (Shrobe 18 – 21).

Stevens strived for reaching out to “not ideas about the thing but the thing itself” (CP 534). As Zen has it, the phenomenal world as a world of dust prevents accession to the original clarity. What is necessary in order to reach through the curtain of appearances is a letting go of concepts and expectations; by doing so, it is possible “to fall into the world of just now, just as it is.” (Shrobe 21) This instantaneousness pervades most aspects of Oriental existence, not being limited to philosophy and religion. In this sense, it is possible to speak about a certain “one-ness” underlying the Eastern space as a unifying force—that which Pound so much esteemed in Confucianism. As will be seen in a later section of this paper, Pound even adopted it as an aesthetic principle through his allegiance to the “one-principle text.” In the following, one such example illustrated by Oriental art will be examined in more detail.

Mu Chi's “Six Persimmons” (c. 1270) is a fine example of Chinese still life painting. To a Western eye, and especially a modern audience, this painting may seem as overly banal: there are six persimmons, only differing in shape, shades and position, set against a blank background. At face value, the depiction of the persimmons has echoes of the above-mentioned creed in the “just now, just as it is.” There appears to be nothing beyond the object: it is impervious to human scrutiny, much like Zen painting in general. To make an analogy with Stevens's remark on poetry as the “supreme fiction,” one may say that the persimmons “resist the intelligence almost successfully.” Each persimmon functions as a still point on its own, yet their substantive commonality enables the contemplating subject to sense the underlying principle that unifies them into one single entity, simultaneously encompassing past and present, as suggested by the different shades used for their depiction, as well as by their shapes and sizes. Still life thus comes to life in front of our eyes—there is ripening and decay, life and death unfolding on the canvas. Yet, despite the metaphorical connotations, the persimmons, in a truly Zen spirit are ungraspable in their essence. They remain pure objects and a communion with them is possible only after suspending our conceptual thinking and casting doubt on the capacity of our senses to gaze beyond the surface of things. The idea is the same as Stevens’s suggestion in his “Study of Two Pears”:

Opusculum paedagogum.

The pears are not viols,

Nudes or bottles.

They resemble nothing else.

[…]

The pears are not seen

As the observer wills. (CP 196)

In addition to the necessity to suspend conceptual thinking, both pieces seem to connect with another key-concept of Oriental thinking: the intrusion of human will and desire in the space between subject and object. As Buddhist faith holds, “desire” or “craving” are the roots of worldly misery. A life through meditation and compassionate participation is required to weed out such sources of “dust” and open up the path toward illumination, and eventually leading to an enchanted-enlightened state of existence through experiencing the void, where the circle of cause and effect is broken and nirvana is attained. As Mu Chi's painting suggests (and as implied in Zen art and philosophy in general), one should not look too far for a starting point. The immovable object contains in itself the same void (or “no-mind”) that can be attained after enlightenment.

In the light of this, as Peter Y. Chou (2008) remarks, “Six Persimmons” transcends its immediate function and may be read as an allegory of the stages of enlightenment, as well as of the creative and mental states experienced by the artist while working on his canvas. Chou proposes a parallel reading of two pieces, by juxtaposing Gary Snyder's poem “The Persimmons” and Mu Ch'i's ink painting. For the sake of this discussion, we will summarize only the points on the latter, which will serve as an analogy with another Stevens Poem, “Six Significant Landscapes.” As Chou argues, the depiction of the persimmons follows a four-step process analogous to the moments involved in the road towards enlightenment. At the beginning, there is the darkness of Deep Sleep, the Unconscious (or the No-thoughts state). This is symbolised in the painting by the two black persimmons, emerging from the dark void or emptiness to manifestation (the brush of full ink). The next stage is represented by the Twilight of Dreams, or the Semi-Conscious, suggested by the two grey persimmons that mark a transition from complete darkness to the world of shades (by the artist's use of some ink on the brush). The third moment is that of the Daylight of Wakefulness—the Fully Conscious, embodied on the pictorial plane by the two white persimmons, rendered by using almost no ink on the brush. The final stage is that of the Satori, or Buddha Mind, the Pure consciousness, symbolised by the painting's background—the canvas against which the black, grey and white persimmons rest, untouched by ink or brush, or the emptiness as substratum for form.

Chou's interpretation of the possible symbolism of “Six Persimmons” is similar to what Stevens does in some of his anthological poems, most notably in “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” (CP 92-95). Here, the blackbird, just like the persimmons, is both an individual (a form) and a force (a principle). It is the thing which, by its conspicuous and ubiquitous nature, unites human and human (a man and a woman and a blackbird are “one”), observer and object (the man mistaking the shadow of his equipage for blackbirds), cause and effect (the mood which traces in the shadow “an indecipharable cause”), reality and conceptual thinking (“the beauty of inflections” and “the beauty of innuendos”). As such, it extends the functionality of the jar “placed in Tennessee” in “Anecdote of the Jar” (CP 76) through a more dynamic image. Despite its moving nature, the blackbird eventually remains an image of formlessness the moment it comes to rest in the cedar limbs of the final stanza (somehow in anticipation of the bird that stands motionless in Stevens's last poem, “Of Mere Being”).

Stevens's parallels with Zen art and thinking are taken one step further from the symbolism of “Thirteen Ways…” in another piece constructed against the varying instances of one single unifying element. “Six Significant Landscapes” (CP 73-75), another of his early poems, can be read much like Chou's reading of “Six Persimmons.” Apart from the commonality suggested by the occurrence of the number six, this poem may be interpreted both as an extended metaphor of the “no-mind” and a direct critique of conceptual thinking. The first four stanzas are centred around the subject, continuously juxtaposed against the object: an old man in the shadow of a pine tree, the night concealing herself like a bracelet, the “I” that measures itself “against a tall tree,” one's dream nearing the moon. The images that prevail in these lines are in themselves similar to those favoured by Oriental poetry—“shadow,” “tree,” “pool,” “moon”; the construction too is analogous to a certain extent (although different in metric pattern) to the haiku, by a succession of sudden leaps from one thing to another, apparently unrelated thing at the end of the first three stanzas (a technique also employed by Pound in his “In a Station of the Metro”). In addition to these elements, the title of the poem comes to place Stevens in the lineage of Chinese nature and still life poetry. Just like the six persimmons that function both individually and as a group, the landscapes both depict different facets of the same reality experienced primarily at a sensorial level and function as the canvas on which “parts of a world” are immortalised. But the poem does not stop here. In the last two stanzas Stevens expresses his critique of rationalist thinking. He does so, firstly by expressing his disbelief in the power of man-made objects in front of nature (“lamp-posts,” “chisels of long streets,” “the mallets of the domes/And high towers” which cannot “carve/What One star can carve,/Shining through the grape-leaves.”) and, secondly, by openly attacking “rationalists” who “confine themselves/To right-angled triangles.” The idea expressed in these lines is analogous to the Buddhist creed in flexibility and non-attachment. Living within the cycle of continuous thought is a delusion, and holding on to one's illumination once it has been attained is an unsurpassable obstacle in the path towards revealing one's Buddha-nature. True enlightenment implies non-attachment to anything, including one's enlightening experience. As will be seen in the sections to follow, the bodhi, or “awakened wisdom,” requires a renunciation to Nirvana in order to aid all humans to achieve enlightenment. As the second opening quote implies, “knowledge” of Buddha is impossible—it is a delusion just like any other caused by conceptual thinking. If one meets Buddha on the way, one must kill him.

2. “Still not far-off”: East vs. West as an exercise in “translation”

This initial excursion into the poetry of the object parallelled by references to traditional Oriental still life painting has had a double motivation. On the one hand, there is a similarity between the Modernist treatment of the object materialised as representations of the still point in the mature works of Pound, Eliot and Stevens and the attention given by Zen to the ordinary and immediate; on the other hand, the analogies are not limited to their function in the path to enlightenment and wisdom. Modernist poetry's affinities with Oriental modes of representation are expressive of the internal mechanisms that affected the field of visual arts at the end of the 19th century. As Rupert A. Cox notes, “seeing is a privileged sense in Zen arts because it is necessary and prior to all bodily learning” (103). Awakening in Buddhism is derived from a manner of “seeing,” which presupposes the establishing of a direct relationship between the body and mental states (ibid.). Early 20th century poetic approaches such as those of Imagism (in turn tributary to Symbolism) reveal similar intentions to set up such intimate connections between the thing and the perceptive mind (or between the object and the emotions of the observer)—as illustrated, for instance by Pound's definition of “image” or Eliot's “objective correlative”. In his turn, in “The Relations between Poetry and Painting” Stevens draws attention on a similar issue, when he speaks in favour of an appropriation by the poet of the methods peculiar to fine arts, based on the assumption that the instruments of the latter can equip the former with novel insights into his own “materia poetica.” This, as he says, is the result of the same commonality of experience and knowledge of the real:

Modern reality is a reality of decreation, in which our revelations are not revelations of belief, but the precious portents of our own powers. The greatest truth we could hope to discover, in whatever field we discovered it, is that man’s truth is the final resolution of everything. Poets and painters alike today make that assumption and this is what gives them the validity and serious dignity that become them as among those that seek wisdom, seek understanding. (NA, 175)

Such associations, Stevens goes on, are necessary not only as a form of epistemological experiment, but as an ontological prerequisite. One must not claim that “they are the sole sources [of our present conception of reality];” rather, we must see them as mere steps along the sinuous process of getting knowledge of the world, “a stage in the endless study of an existence, which is the heroic subject of all study” (176).

The similarities between the role of seeing in Zen Buddhism/Art and the Modernists’ preoccupation with the increased role of vision point to issues of broader concern in the analysis of the mechanisms trough which Modernism appropriated both tenets and techniques pertaining to Oriental spirituality. In this sense, it is possible to identify two major forces—an extrinsic and an intrinsic one—that can facilitate an understanding of this opening towards non-Western traditions. The former is represented by Modernism’s relating to external sources and the endeavours to incorporate them both as an expression of the individual spirit and the Pound-esque “make it new.” As such, it is an aesthetic and intellectual exercise that implies a confrontation of the individual with his own art and an engagement of Modernism in a dialectic relationship with tradition and its contemporaneity. Eliot’s inclusion of Indic material in the construction of the “Waste Land” or the “Four Quartets” results in both an aesthetic and intellectual exercise, but it does not stop there. Pound’s use of the ideogrammatic method in both his imagist poetry and “The Cantos,” as well as his fascination with Confucianism are not only meant to support a unified artistic vision. With the exception of Stevens perhaps, most Modernist poets who tried to incorporate such influences could not escape a certain tendency towards politicisation or a penchant for aesthetic and cultural debates which would eventually transgress art. As is well known, in Eliot’s case, they became a vehicle for his attempts to root out what he considered to be the Hebrew substratum of European culture, while with Pound, ideas like “dharma” or the Dao of Confucius, ultimately emerged as instruments that would support his views on enlightened, but authoritarian leadership. It may be said that the way this Oriental material was read by the artists of the age, while mostly beneficial for supporting the spirit of Modernism, could not entirely capture the essence of the spirituality and can be attributed, to a great extent, to what Pound remarked while translating Li Po’s poetry—the impossibility to translate and abide by this spirituality unless one thinks and feels like an Oriental. The dichotomic-dualistic nature of the Western mind remained, both metaphorically and literally, a perpetual obstacle in the face of true renderings.

As will be seen, the divide between the Eastern and Western “paths” and the imperfect “translations” can also be seen at the level of the second major force—the intrinsic one—that is, in the Modernist endeavour to question and re-define its own aesthetic modes of expression. For an illustration, the following part of the paper will be devoted to discussing some of the mutations that affected visual arts, such as the “reification of vision” or transition from “the retinal” to “the pictorial.” As Rosalind E. Krauss points out, a defining characteristic of the 20th century mode of approaching objects is that vision is “pared away” into a condition of pure instantaneity, an abstract condition with no before and no after (like the perception of a base-ball hitter hitting the ball) (284). This is the moment when visual arts and poetry shift from Impressionism to true Modernism, as the retinal of the impressionists is gradually replaced by the illusory pictorial of the surrealists, a visual image that addresses the grey-matter (e.g. Duchamp’s precision optics, Pound’s ideogram). This is analogous to the inseparability of seeing (sensing) and knowing (understanding), as proclaimed in Zen painting.

Examples of this can be found, in diverse forms of manifestation, all throughout the work of Anglo-American Modernist poets. For instance, Eliot’s preference for the conceit as an epitome of his “objective correlative” can be attributed to his fascination with sudden optical shifts, changes in focus and the technique of the visual montage. At the level of poetic imagery, this was conducive to multiple associations, contrasts, unexpected juxtapositions and heterogeneous ideas. The matrix for this, however, had already been established by the predominantly static techniques employed by Imagism and its penchant for techniques employed in Oriental art. Pound’s ideogram, as Sergei Eisenstein noted (cited in Laity 430 and passim) can be compared to the operations of montage. As his poem “In a Station of the Metro” illustrates, there is a potentiality in the still image to shock the observer by springing into sight and creating a network of associations on the subject’s mind:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough. (6)

As in the case of Mu Ch’i’s “Persimmons”, the Modernist poet’s object has the potential to transcend its own immediate significance. Yet, unlike in Zen, where the sensorial experience of the object by the perceiver is meant to arrest intelligence, the Modernist object cannot avoid setting up new semiotic networks: rather than being a vehicle for illumination, as the Western eye would see it, the strength of the object lies in its capacity to offer itself up to gaze and intellectual scrutiny. At a technical level, in Modernist arts this often amounts to the use of such devices as super-position and the creation of associations, as a result of which new meanings were meant to arise. This is illustrated, for instance by Eliot’s approach in “Prufrock,” where the protagonist’s “wistful, sea-borne telescopic gaze […] lures both reader and citydweller outward toward the ‘shock’ of a submerging modernity” (Laity 434). The super-position works at the level of senses, too. Prufrock’s passage underwater from the secluded private spaces of rooms sapping with human shallowness or the etherizing urban landscapes implies a transition from the purely appreciative eye to a sight that is imbued with auditive and tactile perceptions (suggested both through imagery and the use of stylistic devices like assonance and alliteration:

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves

Combing the white hair of the waves blown black

When the wind blows the water white and black (CPP 7)

Through its synaesthetic valences, super-position may be a vehicle that brings the subject closer to experiencing the object in its immediacy (the “forever renewable present” that Krauss alludes to, or the “just here, just now” of Zen). As Laity points out, Eliot resorts to this technique in the “Four Quartets,” where the abrupt onset of midwinter spring (in “Little Gidding”) through its “assault” on the eye is at once suggestive of the “incandescent terror” of the bomb and modern cinema’s use of light that “optically flays the spectator:”

Midwinter Spring is its own season

Suspended in time between pole and tropic.

When the shortest day is brightest with frost and fire

The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches…

Reflecting in a watery mirror

A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon. (CPP 138)

Yet, this is still far different from both the function of the image in Oriental arts and the true enlightenment championed in Buddhism. At this point, “experiencing” the object does not imply the subject’s communion with it by entirely excluding the presence of the self. Nor is it conducive to a sense of accomplishment and integration, since, despite the intimations of the “just here” and “just now,” with these Modernist poetic techniques there is always an intrusion of semiosis and of conceptual thinking. Dualistic patterns still prevail, for, as Laity remarks in reference to the above-quoted poem by Eliot, “the perceiver is prompted to occupy the gaps ‘between’ wildly deflecting and reflecting light momentarily undimmed by moist or crusted opacities” (444). As such, it can be seen as a form of detachment and abstraction, as Stevens’ approach in “Study of Two Pears illustrates:”

The yellow glistens.

It glistens with various yellows,

Citrons, oranges and greens

Flowering over the skin

…

The shadows of the pears

Are blobs on the green cloth.

The pears are not seen

As the observer wills. (CP 196-197)

Here, the meanings arise not from the observer’s peculiar standpoint, but from what the subject perceives to be a latent semiotic potentiality of the object, as well as from the analogies their sudden juxtapositions may create. Again, the problem seems to be rooted in the same Western conception that nothing can ultimately exist beyond some form of rationalisation/conceptualisation. Metaphorically speaking, in order to attain awakening, the subject should strive to inhabit his own “waste land,” of the “no-mind,” since there is always the possibility that his intrusions may lead to “descriptions” of objects. As Cain (2003) points out, in order to grasp the object in its uniqueness and to attain communion and harmony it would be necessary for the subject (and the poet) to detach from his source of contemplation in an almost painterly (or even cinematic) precision, a transformation meant to maximize the effect of the image by making it dynamic and endowing it with vitality. In other words, the object has to reveal itself without intervention, just like the persimmons, that seem to be both devoid of meanings and an expression of the void. Without such an exercise, the object would either be lost in “the blandness of clinical descriptions” or would move too quickly to be appreciated in motion and thus lose power in representation (Cain, par. 10).

The form of detachment at work through such techniques is an imperfect one, as it is pervaded with the conscious effort of the poet to engage in abstractisation and distancing, rather than being done by adopting a contemplative-meditative stance. The problem alluded to in Stevens’ “Study of Two Pears” is symptomatic of some of the sources of dissatisfaction that came to plague Modernist poets until old-age wisdom brought with itself a change of perspective. As Costello notes in reference to some of Stevens’ still life poems, often “the ‘perfect thing’ eludes description or fails to satisfy, and the poems become ‘compounded’ with human desire and imperfection” (445). Like Stevens’ “ultimate poem,” the object “defeats intelligence successfully.”

3. Concluding remarks: “Already there” or Modernist poetry and the Zen “attitude”

Union of the weakest develops strength
Not wisdom. Can all men, together, avenge
One of the leaves that have fallen in autumn?
Stevens, Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery

A monk asked Zhaozhou, a Chinese Zen master: "Has a dog Buddha-nature or not?" Zhaozhou answered: "Wú"
The Mu Koan

The previous sections were intended to point out some aspects related to the way in which Oriental religious concepts and philosophical views were adopted and illustrated by Modernist poets, both in terms of successes and failures. The key forces underlining Oriental thought, belief and action may be connected with Modernism both at a metaphorical level and in aesthetics. Yet, these connections require judicious examination, due to several factors. On the one hand, despite the “unity in disunity” that characterizes Modernism, it is not possible to speak about a certain “school of thought” or organised movement in support of a large-scale adoption of such tenets. Rather, the poets cited above, in their attempts to include elements of Oriental tradition or establish cross-cultural connections remained tributary both to their individual aesthetic visions and the Western tradition against which their works emerged. Thus, their contribution in this matter remains essentially that of opening up the path to unprecedented perspectives, in a truly Modernist fashion. It is hardly possible to speak about a certain “legacy” that they passed on to later generations, as the poets to follow would have to re-establish the connections on a personal level, by a harmonious integration of foreign material filtered through individual and communal experience.

In the light of these, an endeavour to circumscribe the impact of Oriental influences on Modernist Anglo-American poetry by disregarding both the individual and cultural backgrounds against which such connections emerged might lead to insurmountable difficulties due to the fragmentary and collage-like nature of the influences, as well as the particulars of the development of each poet's literary destiny. Nonetheless, such a study, might prove beneficial for an enquiry into some essential forces that characterised European and American Modernism at an internal level. The concluding part of this presentation is dedicated to discussing one such aspect.

In the concluding chapter of his work on Stevens’s meditative stance, William W. Bevis takes up on the question raised by Marjorie Perloff in “The Dance of the Intellect”(1985): “Pound/Stevens: whose era?” Bevis sets forth to challenge Perloff’s argument that it is Pound who should be considered the more modern/Modernist of the two, on the basis of his famous dictum “Make it New!”and his practical application through Imagism/Vorticism. Perloff—as Bevis notes— is unjust in giving such a verdict, solely on the basis of Stevens’s connections with the Symbolist movement. Rather than seeking answers at the level of the technical elements present in the two poets’ works, as well as in their relation to tradition and the degree of innovation displayed by their verse at a formal level, such value judgements should take into account the degree in which these poets managed to express the defining spirit of the age. By taking into account such essential denominators as indeterminacy and relativity of point of view, Bevis proceeds to negate and revert Perloff’s conclusion, regarding Stevens as the true exponent of the Modernist vision. It was Pound, rather than Stevens who ultimately “betrayed” his own tenets by adopting an inflexible attitude and holding on to the fixity of one’s concepts and beliefs. Both Pound and Eliot, Bevis goes on, were essentially “reactionaries,”as neither could fully embrace the idea of indetermination and relativity, nor could they accept the relativity that pervades any individual, subjective frame of mind. As such, in the end, both remained Neo-classical. What they did, to use Stevens’s words, was “to impose” rather than “plainly to propound.” It was Stevens, through his adopting of a meditative stance, that fulfilled what the Modernist project, by definition, aimed at: “the pursuit of impersonality in art” (Bevis 311). Add to this his emphasis on the ever-fluid nature of the imagination, as well as his dialectic view on the relationship between subject and object, and Stevens emerges as a true Modernist.

If we build on Bevis’s remark on the Modernist pursuit of impersonality in art, we may establish a further analogy with the spirit of Buddhism and Zen: at the heart of each there is the essential concept of fluidity, flexibility and open-mindedness. “Don’t hold to anything” — this is how Shrobe captures the essence of Zen (141). Re-evaluate, recuperate, but “make it new” is how Modernists would have it. In terms of attitude, Zen and Modernism are alike, as they both advocate an essential suspicion toward anything rigid or conceptual. With the former, this is a creed; with the latter, it came out of necessity, through its engagement with a world that turned out be fragmented overnight, where there was nothing to hold on, as scales shifted, values changed and beliefs were shattered. The Modernist attitude is a Zen metaphor. In its turn, Zen is a revolution of perspective, similar to that championed by Modernism.

By way of conclusion, it is pertinent to make one last parallel between Bevis’s point on “the Pound/Stevens”debate and the subject of Zen/Buddhist elements in the work of the Anglo-American Modernist: “Eliot/Pound/Stevens: who is more Zen?” Addressing this question requires a succinct presentation of the functions of the elements of Oriental spirituality in the poetry of each, as well as a re-appreciation of the solutions provided by the old-age wisdom that pervades their representative late works. In this sense, it is possible to identify three major streams, each to be associated with one of these poems.

For Eliot, resorting to Oriental spirituality was part of an effort to find a solution to the desolution that pervaded “The Waste-Land” and “Gerontion.” His still point, as noted earlier, emerged as a unifying force that could bring together the fragments of a dissolving world. His penchant for Oriental culture and religion was meant to enhance the collage of the Modern, as well as to offer an alternative where other beliefs proved to be imperfect. In the end, he remained Neo-Classical or, metaphorically speaking, fixed in the rigidity of his own still point. With Eliot, resorting to Oriental elements came out of necessity—it had a recuperative function.

Pound looked at the East with a view to finding a means to renew both poetic form and expression, as part of an endeavour to set up his private aesthetics. In doing so, like Eliot, he was confronted with his own poetic mode and with the world at large, by transferring ideologies from different backgrounds. The ideogram, the one-principle text, Confucianism—all had in common the idea of unifying force, yet in a manner different than was the case with Eliot. Pound did not have to piece together shattered fragments. His effort, unlike Eliot’s, was directed outwards, rather than inwards. He saw in the Orient a means to refresh art and to propose a view on culture and politics. Looking eastward was a source of self-assertion.

“Has a dog Buddha nature or not? is the question addressed in the famous “Mu-koan.” The answer is “Mu,” a denial of the question itself, meant to draw attention on its inadequacy to capture the essence of the problem. The “Mu”-solution is one that can metaphorically describe the manner in which Oriental spirituality was expressed in the works of both Eliot and Pound. There was no possibility for illumination, no “solution” to the problems they addressed, since the question itself was wrongly posed in the first place. In fact, it was the wrong question which would necessarily whirl one back into the maze of dualism: self and the world, interior and exterior, subject and object. Can Oriental spirituality offer a solution to the problems of the Western world? Could elements of Eastern literature, philosophy, or religion provide a sense of individuality in art? Could they function as alternatives, at least? As long as they are taken out their context and their role is twisted they may provide useful sources, but cannot guarantee solutions, as they have not been meant to function so. There is no Zen-like illumination like this: while they prove to be useful repositories of ideas, they cannot enlighten the self.

Of the three, it was only Stevens who truly captured the essence of the Buddhist spirituality and the Zen way both intensively and extensively. His kinship with the Orient, though never programmatically expressed, was derived from a personal disposition. It manifested itself thematically, in his relentless preoccupation with the functions of the imagination, the role of the mind in comprehending the world and the dialectic of subject and object. Yet, the affinities can be seen on a more profound level too. The path chosen in his old-age poetry is perhaps the best expression of this. Stevens’s still point neither unites, nor asserts. His “bird in the bronze decor” (SP 398) no longer challenges the mind to engage in analysis or metaphoric transformations; nor does it offer a solution to personal conflicts. Thus, “the plain sense of things” emerges from the assertion that even “the end of the imagination/Had itself to be imagined,”—that all constructs are elusive and that enlightenment can be attained only by continuously doubting, questioning, denying, by constantly approaching, but never attaining the essences. Stevens’s final objects are no longer there for pure intellectual scrutiny—they are sensed and lived as nothing beyond what they are. They are not invested with the subject’s own desires, or interiorised: the movement is from the perceptive self towards reality, as in a willingness to live among the objects. As a result, the space between the two, as reflected in the poem, is freed from subjective and creative constraints and can be populated with the reader’s own intimations.

“Can all men, together, avenge one of the leaves that has fallen in autumn?” Stevens wondered around the middle of his poetic development (CP 158). In his final days, the answer to this koan-like sentence seemed to come naturally: “a quiet, normal life” was not to be found in “anything that he constructed.” As in Zen enlightenment, it emerged from attaining a wisdom that resulted in a compassionate engagement in the world just as it is here, just as it is now:

He became an inhabitant, obedient

To gallant notions on the part of the cold

It was here. This was the setting and the time

Of year. Here in his house and in his room,

In his chair, the most tranquil thought grew peaked

And the oldest and the warmest heart was cut

By gallant notions on the part of night—

Both late and alone, above the crickets’ chords,

Babbling, each one, the uniqueness of its sound.

The was no fury in transcendent forms.

But his actual candle blazed with artifice. (CP 523)

Works cited:

Bevis, William W. Mind of Winter. Wallace Stevens, Meditation and Literature. University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988.

Cain, Thomas. “The Enhancement of Static to Dynamic Images in Wallace Stevens.” Cantrell. 06 Nov 2006 <http://writing.colostate.edu/gallery/parataxis/cain.htm>.

Chou, Peter Y. “The Persimmons: a Painting in a Poem.” 21 Oct. 2008 <http://www.wisdomportal.com/Art/ArtGallery.html>.

Cox, Rupert A. The Zen Arts. An Anthropological Study of the Culture of Aesthetic Form in Japan. Routledge Curzon, 2003.

Eliot, Thomas Stearns. Collected Poems 1909-1962. London: Faber and Faber, 1974.

Krauss, Rosalind E. “The Story of the Eye.” New Literary History. A Journal of Theory and Interpretation 21.2 (Winter 1990): 283-98.

Laity, Cassandra. “T. S. Eliot and A. C. Swinburne: Decadent Bodies, Modern Visualities, and Changing Modes of Perception.” Modernism/Modernity 11.3 (Sep. 2004): 425-48.

Mu Chi. Six Persimmons. c. 1269. Daitoku-ji, Kyoto. Wisdomportal.com. “Art Gallery: Sacred Paintings.” 15 Jul 2009. < http: //www.wisdomportal.com/Art/ArtGallery.html>.

Pound, Ezra. “Contemporania.” Poetry: A Magazine of Verse 2.1 (Apr. 1913): 6.

Shrobe, Richard. Don't Know Mind. The Spirit of Korean Zen. Boston and London: Shambhala, 2004.

Stevens, Wallace. Collected Poems. London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1984.

– . The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play. Ed. Holly Stevens. New York: Vintage Books, 1972.

– . “The Relations Between Poetry and Painting.” The Necessary Angel. Essays on Reality and the Imagination. New York: Vintage Books, 1951. 159-76.

Woodward, Kathleen. At Last the Real, Distinguished Thing. The Late Poems of Eliot, Pound, Stevens and Williams. Ohio State University Press, 1980.