It's funny you bring up Wallace Stevens. I've actually been going over
an anthology of his these last few weeks. And in the poem you mention
you've actually swapped some key words.
In a village of the indigenes,
One would have still to discover. Among the dogs
and dung,
One would continue to contend with one's ideas.
I'm
not sure if this takes away from the meaning of the way you wrote it,
but it definitely adds another. Instead of having something anonymous
and vague to discover, Stevens is saying it is also possible to
discover stillness itself.
You ask if this is not possible in
the modern village, our cities and contemporary existences of walmarts.
I'd say it is certainly harder. There are distractions on every
surface, the walls are beginning to move. But the way I read these
lines is that Stevens thinks in a simple existence it might be easier
to find the stillness of an idea, but it is just as hard there to hold
on to it. "One would continue to contend with one's ideas." One would
continue to battle with one's ideas.
The word "one" comes
three times rapidly here. This is what I think is harder to grapple
with in a modern life. How can we be content with one when there is always one better?
But even in the village of the indigenes, Stevens asserts activity.
Absolute stillness is an impossibility, it is something of movement.
The lines come from a poem called The Glass of Water. From the opening stanza:
That the glass would melt in heat,
That the water would freeze in cold,
Shows that this object is merely a state,
One of many, between two poles. So,
In the metaphysical, there are these poles.
Stevens
is interested in the change of states in a simple glass of water. So
while modernity appears complex he wants us to look at complexity
itself and then dissect it. Simplicity doesn't exist anywhere, not in
the village or in Walmart. Simplicity and Complexity are just notions
of human beings who want to understand. Stillness is Stevens' way of
examining the complicated depths of the universe. Village or not, the
universe is a fragmented and illusory place.
It lis like his Jar in Tennessee, by the sheer act of being, it changes things.,
but stevens always had other things afoot. He is one of the obscure poets I truly love decoding, only thinkng is once decoded you are left wishing you could be mystified again
as he said:
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The
only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
