I’m going to write about “Metaphor as Degeneration,” one of my favorite Stevens poems, from later in his career, from The Auroras of Autumn. I’ve always loved this poem, the idea behind it, but it strikes me now as particularly fun and funny because of an ongoing mock fight between myself and a fellow writer (Blake Butler) about metaphor, what it is, and how useful it can be in one’s writing.
Metaphor as Degeneration
If there is a man white as marble
Sits in a wood, in the greenest part,
Brooding sounds of the images of death,
So there is a man in black space
Sits in nothing that we know,
Brooding sounds of river noises;
And these images, these reverberations,
And others, make certain how being
Includes death and the imagination.
The marble man remains himself in space.
The man in the black wood descends unchanged.
It is certain that the river
Is not Swatara. The swarthy water
That flows round the earth and through the skies,
Twisting among the universal spaces,
Is not Swatara. It is being.
That is the flock-flecked river, the water,
The blown sheen–or is it air?
How, then, is metaphor degeneration,
When Swatara becomes this undulant river
And the river becomes landless, waterless ocean?
Here the black violets grow down to its banks
And the memorial mosses hang their green
Upon it, as it flows ahead.
I take it that this question is rhetorical: ‘how would it be possible for metaphor to be degeneration, and not a mingling of de- and persistently re- generation?’
Looking at that stanza-question, “the river”, after “[t]wisting among the universal spaces”, becomes “landless, waterless ocean.” – as though metaphor ‘degenerates’ – or perpetually threatens ‘to degenerate’ – , by virtue of picking out and pedestalizing similarities in different things, perception into a blur, a smear, in which different things are, to the sensual mind, indifferentiable. Hence the ‘degeneracy’ of metaphor: ‘this thing is not that thing’ has, ontologically, to be not just the final, but the immanent comparison.
But how can such a thing – how can any thing – be said without indication or disclosure? “Apple” is not an apple; “ontology” is, perhaps, the beginning, but not the whole of ontology.
And if one uses words to indicate the ‘degeneracy’ of using words?? – that, to me, sounds like ‘degeneracy’ necessarily generates. – which sounds, to me, like a Stevensian ‘theory of poetry’.
Deadgod:
This is an amazingly awesome response! Yes! Language itself is metaphor, as when you say ‘”Apple” is not an apple.'” AND, metaphor–to a certain extent–is inherently ironic. One uses language to express the “realness” of visceral experience, without ever approximating (hence, degenerating) said actual experience. But experience itself cannot be generated, only happens, right? Like a bumper sticker (shit happens)? And yet, language itself generates experience, which is what we get when we read a poem, story, novel, essay, etc.
I feel like my brain’s a shoe that too big a foot just got crammed into.