Saint John and the Back-Ache

Reading through the Auroras of Autumn, the mode and mentality I tried to capture was one of reflection. As Stevens goes through the seasons, different mentalities or moods are acquired and we are along for the ride, subject to Stevens's imagery and color. Yet, it seems to be a somewhat depressing reflection. Or at least one more somber and morbid. In the title poem Stevens writes, "Is there an imagination that sits enthroned/As grim as it is benevolent, the just/And the unjust, which in the midst of summer stops/To imagine winter? For me, this captured one of the many essences of fall. While we are in the midst of summer, cheer, and sunshine, we realize that it is going to end. This realization brings us to fall, and the coming of a new, darker season. One defined by cloudy skies, fateful winds, and dead leaves smattered on the ground.

While skimming through this section, looking for a poem that would capture my interest and speak to me, I came across Saint John and the Back-Ache. Honestly, for the simple reason of amusement, this title grabbed me. I thought it was a little silly and sounded like a kid's poem.

Of course when it starts out, my assumption was quickly shattered with the opening line, "The mind is the terriblest force in the world, father/Because, in chief, it, only, can defend/Against itself. At its mercy, we depend/ Upon it."

After this opening stanza, my mind whirled to recategorize the poem, defining it in a neat box that I could understand and conceptualize. There is a debate going on. This is now about philospohy. Okay.

Saint John then says back to the back-ache, "The world is presence and not force. Presence is not mind."

I reread these two stanzas a few times to catch a sense of what they meant. The back-ache represents suffering and physicality. It is saying that the mind is the most powerful force because we can't escape it. To define it, we have to use it. We are at its mercy for everything we do in life. The back-ache is here talking to Saint John as father, which I took to mean that the back-ache is Saint Johns back-ache. Saint John replies with something that I first saw as irrelevant, "The world is presence and not force."

What does the world have to do with the mind? Or better yet, what does force have to do with the mind? Yet the more I think about it, the more it makes sense. The mind tries to force it's impressions and memory on to every landscape that we come across. It makes everything familiar and we as humans are agents of destruction.

Then comes the question of what is presence and how is this separate from the mind? The next stanza addresses this and the one after and here is where I initially got lost, or rather my mind did. To define presence with words is a most difficult task and one in which Stevens does with remarkable aplomb. Reading the stanza of presence, our mind grasps for meaning at the words flying by, discombobulated, bouncing around, and popping on our reaching fingers. Stevens shows by the first line, "It fills the line before the mind can think." It can't  be described, yet he tries describing it. And to do this, we have to step out of our mind. Going back to the primitive, the basic, where vagueness is the option and the world is still unknown. A chasm of thought. This is what happened when I read this stanza the first time haha. My mind blanked out for twenty lines and came back when the back-ache was talking. After re-reading and re-reading this stanza I think I have some sense of what he is saying.

He keeps saying it is not this and not that, and when he brings these things to mind images flash before our eyes and are instantly dismissed. By using the tool of saying that presence is not these things he is denying the images from staying. It is not the thing itself that matters but rather the feeling that accompanies it. These feelings and brief glimpses at no preconceived reality are what keep us sane and human.

The most important lines for me were, "The little ignorance that is everything/ The possible nest in the invisible tree." The way I interpreted this

Death and Dying

What captured me in this book was the notion that the creations wanted to die. They are manifestations of something that is not quite right. In a sense they are like actual man, they are imperfect and instead of being the exact replication of nature and oneness, are always separated from each other and nature. They sense their imperfection and want to die because of it.

Here, the ocean sees the humans as the gods and tries to replicate them and their memories yet it cannot. Because of this distance, the incarnations want to die. On one hand we have Kelvin dreaming of the ocean and dreaming of creation, something that seems like it came straight from the entity. He says, "The beat of our heart combines, and all at once, out of the surrounding void where nothing exists or can exists, steals a presence of indefinable, unimaginable cruelty." He continues, "[...] I howl soundlessly, begging for death and for an end. But simultaneously I am dispersed in all directions, and my grief expands in a suffering more acute than any waking state, a pervasive, scatttered pain piercing the distant blacks and reds, [...] I felt myself being invaded through and through, I crumbled, disintegrated, and only emptiness remained" (180).

The creations love life and the concept of death is something does not appeal to these creations. "Does not appeal" is to light of a phrase- the creations fight till their last breath for life, much like the symmetriads when they realize their impending death. In this passage we find that the creations have a distance from what destroys them and they are not committing suicide but rather something outside of themselves is ending their life.

When Snow and Kris are discussing the ocean as a god, Kris says, "It repeats itself, Snow, and the being I'm thinking of would never do that." When the incarnation of Gibarian comes to visit Kris he off-handedly says, "No, I am the real Gibarian-just a new incarnation." The first thing that comes to mind is the notion of reincarnation on this planet. If reincarnation is true and we all do come back to this earth to repeat the same things then we are like the creatures on this ocean planet. We are like the symmetriads or asymmetriads who form some great masterpiece and then cave in on ourselves, destroying our masterpieces with evil and malice.

A true god is nothing but pure creation. When this imperfect god created us he created us as a tool to experience himself. Just like the ocean created the replicas to experience itself and discover something new, our planet or god created ourselves as an expression of it. Kris notedly says to Snow, "He has created eternity, which was to have measured his power, and which measures his unending defeat." He also says, "This god has no existence outside of matter, he would like to free himself from matter yet he cannot."

Death then in a cosmic sense is the escape from immortality. The god wants to die and experience something out of the world it has created and the only way it could do this was to create an imperfect creation. These creations die so that the god can experience what death feels like. They are the contrast and lens in which it views itself. When Gibarian comes to visit Kris the two of them have a conversation that goes like this,
"You are not Gibarian."
"No? Then who am I? A dream?"
"No, you are only a puppet. But you don't realize that you are."
"And how do you know what you are?"