Reverberating Twangs
Ruminating on the Self in "The Man With The Blue Guitar"
Say blue guitar; twang it out, blue guitar, blue guitar...The [u] phoneme of blue is placed in the back of the throat, a rounded mouth is required to form the vowel (oooh), which is held a bit longer than normal, because of the voiced consonant [g] of guitar--blue guitar; the extension of the oooh into the g makes the velar stop of the [g] phoneme more abrupt--blue guitar; a twang echoed by the added tension needed to produce the sharper, more forward, and flattened mouthed [i] of the tighter first syllable of guitar; the final, round again and returned to the back of the throat, (ah) of guitar recalls the beginning of the phrase. The blue soothes, the stopped [g] gets plucked, before the tightened [i] spits its note in front of the falling phrase's final echo. Blue guitar, blue guitar, I'm hearing things the way they are.
But wait. This is a poem. This is not things as they are. The Blue Guitar is about the difference between things in the poem and things as they are: it "cannot bring a world quite round," patch it as it might. The poem announces in its opening the dynamic between a metaphysical world as it is and a poetic world as it is heard to be. The problem is that the poetic world which is heard will always be once removed from the metaphysical world, a patch. And so much is at stake. To know things as they are is to know the self, what the poem calls "man [sic] number one." And if the tune misses the metaphysical, it will only be valid on a level once removed from reality and the self; it will not be the self, merely "the serenade / Of a man that plays a blue guitar." The poem begins with need and doubt; "play you must," the poet is told. However, to play the blue guitar is to apparently miss the metaphysical, to distance the self from the real.
The doubt seeps in, but it's a sneaky kind of doubt. Listen:
Ah, but to play man number one,
To drive the dagger in his heart,
To lay his brain upon the board
And pick the acrid colors out,
To nail his thought across the door,
Its wings spread wide to rain and snow,
To strike his living hi and ho,
To tick it, tock it, turn it true,
To bang it from a savage blue,
Jangling the metal of the strings. . . .
The passage speaks of a hope, of what it would be like to capture the essence of the metaphysical in the playing of the guitar. It's sneaky, though, because, while the passage acts as if it's speaking of an impossibility, poetically it is capturing the essence brilliantly. The imaging of thoughts as "wings spread wide" works subtly with the poetic material, the stuff of the blue guitar, to do what the lines say they want to do. Wings spread wide, contains two sets of wings, the w's beginning both wings and wide present wings to the sight in a visual metaphor that nails the thought firmly in place for the eye. More subtle, is the enunciation of the phrase that the poem requires; spread wide introduces the listener/reader to an idea, the semantic thought of spreading. Immediately, the thought is revealed in the poem's sonics with the enunciation of the word wide. The word partakes of the unique spreading of sound that the [ay] diphthong requires. To say the i in wide, one must begin in the back of the vocal tract with the [a] phoneme and gradually slide the sound to the high front region of the tract for the palatal glide [y]. The diphthong spreads sound inside the mouth, so that "spread wide" in the poem indeed spreads the thought out loud.
The passage performs a similar erasure with the doubt regarding capturing the essence of the metaphysical self. In fact, the passage turns the essence back on itself, when it tries "To strike his living hi and ho, / To tick it, tock it, turn it true." To strike his living initially might suggest the expressed desire to convey the essence, to mark it, perhaps. However, the lines take on interesting connotations when considered with the remainder of the couplet: "To tick it, tock it, turn it true." The series of iambs conveys a sense of repetition. However, the final line of the couplet highlights this repetition with the insertion of the commas between tick it, and tock it. The commas create a brief spondee or pause in the reading of the line and place extra stress on both tick and tock. Piled onto the regularity of the line, then, is the clicking emphasis on tick and tock. "To tick it, tock it, turn it true" strikes with the very clock of finitude that defines metaphysical existence. The dagger and the brain upon the board take on a new negative connotation, and the strumming of the blue guitar, in addition to demonstrating the efficacy of its once removed playing of things as they are, demonstrates the finitude and limits of the metaphysical self and the world from which it is removed.
It is no coincidence that the poem follows this demonstration with a recognition of the validity of things as they are on the blue guitar, and the possibility of discovering a self in this realm of the once removed:
Ourselves in the tune as if in space,
Yet nothing changed, except the place
Of things as they are and only the place
As you play them, on the blue guitar,
Placed, so, beyond the compass of change,
Perceived in a final atmosphere;
For a moment final, in the way
The thinking of art seems final when
The thinking of god is smoky dew.
The poetic, the realm of the blue guitar, has been posited as a more permanent realm, "beyond the compass of change," and we may discover there for "ourselves" a more permanent self.
However, the self and permanence we may discover there will still be a self found in art, a self , however brilliant and prevailing in a moment, still expressed with the fleeting presence of smoky dew. The presence is fleeting here, I suppose, because, while it has placed itself in opposition to a finite and untenable metaphysical self and reality, it nevertheless is based on opposition. The artistic self still must address the duality between itself and the metaphysical self. The poem expresses this clearly with its description of the poetic self in opposition to the metaphysical/real world:
It is the sun that shares our works.
The moon shares nothing. It is a sea.
When shall I come to say of the sun,
It is a sea; it shares nothing;
.............
And shall I then stand in the sun, as now
I stand in the moon, and call it good,
The immaculate, the merciful good,
Detached from us, from things as they are?
Not to be part of the sun? To stand
Remote and call it merciful?
If it is the sun that shares our works, then the poetic self, which now stands in the moon, is somehow invalid, because it is remote, isolated. Further, if we take the sun as a traditional symbol of metaphysics, then the question becomes , when will this poetic self be validated by a (social?) shift in what is seen as permanent, immaculate, and good? The distance between the poetic self and the metaphysical remains; the poetic self is alone, the man [sic] in the moon; "the strings are cold on the blue guitar." Further, without social validation, the poetic or artistic self not only stands alone, it too grows cold and dies:
Is this picture of Picasso's, this "hoard
Of destructions," a picture of ourselves,
Now an image of society?
Do I sit, deformed, a naked egg,
Catching at Good-bye, harvest moon,
Without seeing the harvest or the moon?
Things as they are have been destroyed.
Have I? Am I a man that is dead. . . .
The paradox of the poetic self is that its very brilliance and sense of permanence separates it from the finite metaphysical world and other social selves which might validate it. It sits, detached from reality, transcending reality, yet unable to shore that transcendence.
In a sense, then, the realm of the blue guitar, too, succumbs to finitude. Is "the blue guitar a mould," and was the poetic realm and self merely a dream? For a moment it seems so, but the playing of the blue guitar, and the self and realm it reveals are later sensorially elaborated:
A dream no longer a dream, a thing,
Of things as they are, as the blue guitar
After long strumming on certain nights
Gives the touch of the sense, not of the hand,
But the very senses as they touch
The wind-gloss. Or as daylight comes,
Like light in a mirroring of cliffs,
Rising upward from a sea of ex.
Wow! The permanence and existence of the realm of the blue guitar are not exactly revealed in its strumming; rather they become real, things beyond the physical, the hand, in the touch of the sense; the sensations involved in listening to or strumming the instrument are such that a world, a self, even can rise up from the finitude of the metaphysical and the transience of duality, like light and cliffs rising upward from the sea of ex. Thus,
. . . .the blue guitar
Becomes the place of things as they are,
A composing of senses of the guitar. (136)
The realm of the once removed where the blue guitar composes the senses is again validated. The sensory validation allows the poetic self to become "like a native in this [poetic] world / And [to] think in it as a native thinks"(146). The thoughts of the metaphysical self and the world of things as they are once again are transcended. The sensory realization, the "unspotted imbecile revery," offers the poetic self contentment and a viable realm in which to play:
Here I inhale profounder strength
And as I am, I speak and move
And things are as I think they are
And say they are on the blue guitar. (147)
The inhalation mentioned in the passage marks it as a realm and self offered through sensory revery. Later, the poetic self contrasts a metaphysical reality with the poetic in the same terms:
. . . .Morning is not sun,
It is this posture of the nerves,
As if a blunted player clutched
The nuances of the blue guitar.
It must be this rhapsody or none,
The rhapsody of the blue guitar.
The passage combines the elements of sensory self, "the posture of the nerves," with those of rapture, and those of song; rhapsody captures both the revery of the poetic self and the song that inspires it. The final result is again the validation of the realm of the blue guitar, for the song has now become the "rapture of things as they are." The metaphysical world has become the world where the employer and employee contend, and beyond this is where the self will be finally discovered:
. . . .Nothing must stand
Between you and the shapes you take
When the crust of shape has been destroyed.
You as you are? You are yourself.
The blue guitar surprises you.
So, the beginning transcendence of the metaphysical world and self by the poetic self strummed out in the realm of the blue guitar, which was socially inadequate has been replaced by one which is sensorially validated. But one might question the adequacy of this second transcendence and discovery of self as well. Even if the sensory nature of the second poetic self is what makes it possible for social validation, one might ask how much the sensations can be trusted. At some level there is still distance between the poetic self and the metaphysical self and between the sensory poetic self and her metaphysical self. There's still an old philosophical nut to crack here. One might say that both versions of the poetic self are simply supplements offered in response to the dissolution and absence inherent in the original metaphysical self. I'm thinking of Jacques Derrida, of course, who states that "the superabundance of the signifier, its supplementary character, is . . . the result of a finitude, that is to say, the result of a lack which must be supplemented."1 Mapping the supplementary superabundance of the signifier over the discussion of Stevens here would place the superabundance in the realm of the blue guitar; it might even account for the sensory revery that leads to the eventually more valid poetic self. The same map, however, would have to place the persistent lack and finitude driving the superabundance over the metaphysical world of things as they are in the poem. Once again we're made to realize that the poetic self is a self once removed from an inadequate metaphysical self. The more rigid thinking of Derrida, however, forces us to admit that this poetic self, operating in a realm of freeplay based on an initial lack, too, lacks the stability and therefore viability that a metaphysical self (if one were possible) would contain.
After establishing that the realm of the blue guitar, the signifier, is one of freeplay, and even that "freeplay must be conceived of before the alternative of presence and absence" (242), Derrida outlines two responses to this knowledge:
The one seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering, a truth or an origin which is free from freeplay and from the order of the sign, and lives like an exile the necessity of interpretation. The other, which is no longer turned toward the origin, affirms freeplay and tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name man being the name of that being who....has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation. . . . (242)
It might be possible to see the initial poetic self in The Blue Guitar as responding in the first manner; seeking the assurance of the metaphysical, yet living a life of exile, the man [sic] in the moon alone. The second sensory poetic self, then could be seen as responding in the second mode, with what Derrida calls, the Nietzschean affirmation; content with the sensory reverie heard in the strumming of the blue guitar, the second poetic self, though empirically invalid, is in a sense, or several, self-sufficient; rapt in its reverberating realm, the poetic self thinks, and says, and makes things as they are. For Derrida, the second response, the affirmation "determines the non-center otherwise than as the loss of center And it plays the game without security. For there is a sure-freeplay: that which is limited to the substitution of given and existing, present pieces" (242). The second response to freeplay, paradoxically, is a "sure-freeplay," taking as given the substitute nature of its realm. The Blue Guitar may take the reassurance of this realm even further, taking as a given its own substitute nature, and further taking its given substitute nature as its subject matter, and from this making a world. The end result is a realm and a world that each and where each of us may hopefully discover ourselves. It is a realm where,
Poetry is the subject of the poem,
From this the poem issues and
To this returns. Between the two,
Between issue and return, there is
An absence in reality,
Things as they are. Or so we say.
But are these separate? is it
An absence for the poem, which acquires
Its true appearances there, sun's green,
Cloud's red, earth feeling, sky that thinks?
From these it takes. Perhaps it gives,
In the universal intercourse.
The passage speaks of a self awareness of its own once removed nature, from which its very nature issues and to which it must return; the section also notes that this is a realm removed from metaphysical presence, a realm where there is an "absence in reality," which nevertheless is not an absence in the realm of the once removed blue guitar, "which acquires / Its true appearances there." Note the freeplay involved in the depiction of the "true appearances" of the realm of the blue guitar: "sun's green," and "Cloud's red" make little sense in the metaphysical world, yet in the world of the blue guitar they provide the sense that creates the final knowledge of reality; note the freely played out descriptions of the realm are once again reinforced with sensation and lead to eventual new, call it blue, knowledge: "earth feeling, sky that thinks." It seems as though the realm of the blue guitar, for all its absence, is sure enough in its freeplay to present a world, and by implication a self.
There remains one difficulty, however, with the blue guitar's freely played self. While the blue guitar may indeed be an instrument able to create a world and self, Derrida notes that the Nietzschean affirmation also "surrenders itself to genetic indetermination, to the seminal adventure of the trace" (242). At first, this might merely suggest that the strummed out self lacks any final certitude, but Derrida ends his essay with a passage that makes the seminal adventure seem much more ominous. Contrasting the two different reactions to freeplay, Derrida states:
I do not believe that today there is any question of choosing [between the two]--in the first place because here we are in a region (let's say, provisionally, a region of historicity) where the category of choice seems particularly trivial; and in the second, because we must first try to conceive of the common ground, and the differance of this irreducible difference. Here there is a sort of question, call it historical, of which we are only glimpsing today the conception, the formation, the gestation, the labor. I employ these words, I admit with a glance toward the business of child-bearing--but also with a glance toward those who, in a company from which I do not exclude myself, turn their eyes away in the face of the as yet unnamable which is proclaiming itself and which can do so, as is necessary whenever a birth is in the offing, only under the species of the nonspecies, in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity. (242-243)
The passage complicates the seminal adventure of the trace, I think, in two ways. On one level, the birth of the monster may be the result of the unknowable that must reside in freeplay; the genetic indetermination that the strummed out self, by virtue of its substitute nature, surrenders itself to. But the passage also speaks of an attempt to "conceive" of the difference between the two reactions to freeplay, and by implication between the metaphysical world and the substitute realm of the blue guitar. It is interesting, then, that Derrida includes himself in turning away from this emerging and potentially monstrous conception. If any assurance found in sure-freeplay is genetically indeterminate, then the tune played out on the blue guitar may only be a siren song. However, if even conceiving of the difference between this genetic indeterminacy and a sought for metaphysical determinacy is itself indeterminate, and possibly threatening, then the only sure solution and certain solace for the self is to erase the difference between the two realms; to make the self heard in the song of the blue guitar not merely a substitute for the world as such, but rather an equal to or an integral part of the self as such. So the poet says,
. . . .Where
do I begin and end? And where,
As I strum the thing, do I pick up
That which momentously declares
Itself not to be I and yet
Must be. It could be nothing else.
The passage ends in assurance, and might prompt us to say that the blue guitar is positing a substitute self that knows itself well enough to avoid the genetic indeterminacy that corrupts Derrida's sure-freeplay. But this would not do justice to the final assurance of The Blue Guitar. The final level of knowledge for the poem answers Derrida's question. It states in two different directions that the knowledge of the substitute self must nevertheless be self-knowledge. It is impossible to conceive of a substitute self without an original self to do the conceiving, or, conversely, it is impossible for a substitute self to conceive of itself without creating a conception which is in fact itself, and a self. In either case there remains an interchange between the metaphysical and the substitute levels. The final knowledge of the passage is assured, but this is an assurance resting not just in some exact coincidence between the substitute self and a metaphysical self, or in the sure-freeplay of the substitute self itself; the final assurance and a final conception of self comes from the sure-freeplay the blue guitar allows between the two, the substitute and the metaphysical self. The interchange between the two is the difference that Derrida conceives to be monstrous. The player of the blue guitar, however, takes this difference and makes a final self from it.
That I may reduce the monster to
Myself, and then may be myself
In face of the monster, be more than part
Of it, more than the monstrous player of
One of its monstrous lutes, not be
Alone, but reduce the monster and be,
Two things, the two together as one,
And play of the monster and of myself,
Or better not of myself at all,
But of that as its intelligence. . . .
To be a self in face of the monster is to take Derrida's knowledge and play with it. Just as denial of self affirms self, facing the monster reduces it. To know a self in the face of the monster is to take Derrida's knowledge and play of it. And so the final reverberation of the blue guitar, then, is heard beyond the distinctions which seem at first to mute its strings:
Dichtung und Wahrheit, all
Confusion solved, as in a refrain
One keeps on playing year by year,
Concerning the nature of things as they are.
The two realms remain, but the final self has little to do exclusively with the original or substitute world of things as they are; The shearsman plays on concerning the two, and rests assured in the knowledge that it is from their very difference that the monster shall be reduced, and that the final song of the self will emerge.
Notes
1. Jaques Derrida, Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences, in Contemporary Literary Criticism, eds. Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schliefer (New York: Longman, 1989).