An Example of the Well-Being I Wish for You This Year

I thought I would send a greeting for this new year in which exultancy is attained not only wished for--a well-being that is perfectly embodied. Imagine, if you will, a world that is answer to our prayers. I found such a world, as well as a tonic to today's winter gray, in Wallace Steven's "Credences of Summer." I have never seen contentment and peacefulness so well invoked.

IV

One of the limits of reality
Presents itself in Oley when the hay,
Baked through long days, is piled in mows. It is
A land too ripe for enigmas, too serene.
There the distant fails the clairvoyant eye

And the secondary senses of the ear
Swarm, not with secondary sounds, but choirs,
Not evocations but last choirs, last sounds
With nothing else compounded, carried full,
Pure rhetoric of a language without words.

Things stop in that direction and since they stop
The direction stops and we accept what is
As good. The utmost must be good and is
And is our fortune and honey hived in the trees
And mingling of colors at a festival.

The scene Stevens describes is literal, found in a Pennsylvania Dutch farming community named Oley near Reading. The stanza begins with a kind of Van Gogh voluptuousness of new-mown hay. I couldn't help but think of Van Gogh's famous painting of the napping mower. But Stevens has in mind more contemplative, wakened ends--the world as a shared paradise. We are engulfed by "A land too ripe for enigmas, too serene." In other words, we come to rest in an oft-conjured state in Stevens of "things-as-they-are." Here there is no need for any duality between the visible and the invisible worlds. "Clairvoyance" is now a sublime visibility of things, the hidden made rapturously self-evident, a honeyed state and place of meeting/unity between the fully present world with our fully practiced sentience. There is nothing beyond this fullest capability--this exultancy--of perception and being. Aware as never before.

In this paradise, senses ring and bring adornment; what is heard are madrigals of sonority ("not secondary sounds, but choirs, / Not evocations but last choirs, last sounds / With nothing else compounded, carried full, / Pure rhetoric of a language without words.") Here we are in a state much like that of the Zen Master who, upon enlightenment, wrote the following poem: "The bird sings / and the mountain is more quiet." All is attention paid as homage, as contribution, as participation, as surrender..

Now the poem bursts with contentment:

Things stop in that direction and since they stop
The direction stops and we accept what is
As good. . . .

This serenity ("the utmost") is our destiny, the ultimate reality that is, and by so being, is our fortune. We inherit, by sheer dint of true being, a world hived with honey and a "mingling of colors at a festival." In case you didn't realize, Stevens is here a transcendental objectivist. The angels are things in themselves, things seen and savored in jubilant sufficiency. I leave you in this summertime conjoinment of heaven and earth and pray this scene serves as correlative for salvation and self-reliance. May we arrive at and share in this mercy of well-being in the months, days and, if we're lucky, hours ahead. Happy New Years.