Pacific Northwest American Studies Association Conference

Spokane, Washington

April 2002

Gary Williams

University of Idaho

June 1985. A campfire on Kamiak Butte north of Pullman. Don Scheese and I have just discovered a mutual affection for Wallace Stevens’ "Sunday Morning," and we are trying, there in the summer dark, with no copy of the poem at hand, to reconstruct the thing from imperfect memory. The lines spin out into the night like curls of smoke from the fire, fragmented, patternless, insubstantial, but the effort, fueled by a few beers, is absorbing. We want to retrieve the whole poem, we want to put all the lines and stanzas in order, but failing that, we want to make at least a constellation, a few points of brilliant certainty, something that re-reading can flesh out tomorrow, and in years ahead.

Why is this poem important to us? For Don (as he says six weeks later in a letter from his fire lookout in the River of No Return Wilderness) the poem "defines the world and my relationships with others: there is only the sensuous." He says he has read the poem "maybe fifty times" since the Kamiak Butte campfire–"out loud, shouting it into the west wind." Sixteen years later, in his book Mountains of Memory,  he explains (somewhat more prosaically) that reading the poem in college helped him break with his religious upbringing by offering him the woman who finds in sun, fruit, green wings "things to be cherished like the thought of heaven" and thereby assuring him that it is possible to be "intensely religious and spiritual" without being Christian. Like many before him, he finds God in the out-of-doors.

What about for me? Well, yes, there was that college experience for me, too: why should I, why should any of us give our bounty to the dead when the glorious world makes us weak in the knees with its invitations, its loveliness?  I first read Stevens’ poem about the same time I read Siddhartha, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and the Levin-mowing-with-the-peasants scene in Anna Karenina, and they all said to me then: NO contemptus for the mundi, you idiot! Deer walk upon our mountains! Quail whistle! Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness! Flocks of pigeons ambiguously undulate! The heavenly fellowship is of men that perish and of summer morn! This flood of love for the here and now, and for the fact that its splendor lies in its being ONLY here and ONLY now (death being the mother of beauty)–yeah, that moved me. Like the pigeons, we are casual; our undulations in the isolation of the sky are ambiguous; we sink downward to darkness; but if we do it slowly, knowingly, without haste, without fear, on extended wings, the spectacle of that descent is almost unbearably gorgeous.

So that June night on Kamiak Butte, it’s the beautiful lines of the poem itself we are invoking, but it is also this vision of beauty and impermanence, the beauty beautiful because it is impermanent, the poem one with the smoke and with the knowledge that there will not be another night like this. We do pretty well, I think. We affirm something, I think. We respond to the poem’s affirmation with one of our own. We perform an affirmative action.

The dictionary: To affirm is to validate; to state positively; to assert that the fact is so.

Fast-forward to the fall of 2000. I am teaching the Alan Ball-Sam Mendes film American Beauty and feeling that it bears structural and thematic analogy with Stevens’ poem. Like "Sunday Morning," the film offers two views, vaguely evocative of the colloquy between the musing woman and the disembodied oracular other speaker. In voiceover at the beginning, Lester Burnham points out his neighborhood, his street, his wife and daughter, himself, while we watch the characters begin their day unaware of this meta-narrative. Lester’s voice tells us he’ll be dead in a year–is in a way dead already. The voice returns at the end to let us know what it’s like to die, to provide captions for a few images from Lester’s memory, and to underline what the narrative has meant:

it’s hard to stay mad, when there’s so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I’m seeing it all at once, and it’s too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that’s about to burst . . . and then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain and I can’t feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life . . . (100)

The thematic congruences between poem and film, I imagine, are apparent from this speech. Although Lester seems to have the beginnings of an epiphany just before Colonel Fitts shoots him, the full force of it comes as a result of being shot. Lester’s death gives birth to a Stevens-like grasp of the beauty of his American world: falling stars at Boy Scout camp, maple trees in autumn, his grandmother’s hands, a 1970 Pontiac Firebird, his daughter (age 4) in a princess costume, his wife laughing on the teacup ride. [VIDEO CLIP 1: AMERICAN BEAUTY] The images are idiosyncratic, but presumably meant to evoke in the film’s viewers some equivalents, and to leave them moved to reaffirm this sorry world’s occasional brief respites from boredom, cynicism, solipsism, cruelty, greed, materialism, psychosis, deceit, oppression, predatory behavior, distorted perceptions–all the varieties of ugliness the film otherwise showcases.

So, I am teaching this film to a class of first-year students, and I’m hearing from them how cool it is that Lester blackmails his boss, quits his job, reverts to adolescence by smoking weed, working in a fast-food establishment, and lusting after a high-school girl. Is this all possibly just a little irresponsible? I ask, echoing Lester’s wife Carolyn. Well, I’m told, it’s better than, as Lester says, "going through life like a fucking prisoner while she keeps my dick in a mason jar under the sink" (61). And I am also hearing what a hero Ricky Fitts is–Ricky Fitts, the neighbor boy who covertly videotapes Janie Burnham, sells drugs, is gratuitously mean to Angela, and whose response to Lester’s head in a pool of blood is "Wow" (97). Ricky is heroic, it seems, because he isn’t afraid of anything and because he sees meaning in unexpected places. A homeless woman frozen to death on the sidewalk is "like God looking right at you, just for a second. And if you’re careful, you can look right back"(57). And he’s cool because, after all, it’s Ricky who utters the film’s first (some might say purer) version of Lester’s epiphany at the end. Watching an empty plastic bag blow around in an alley, he muses, "Sometimes there’s so much beauty in the world I feel like I can’t take it. . . and my heart is going to cave in" (60). [VIDEO CLIP 2: AMERICAN BEAUTY]

But why should his perceptions have any weight with us? I ask. He’s a cynic, a liar, a drug dealer, a person growing rich on the vices of others, a person in the end about to drop out of conventional life by disappearing into New York City’s drug world and taking Janie with him. More generally, are we to feel any joy when Lester reprises his words at the end, even if Lester’s notions of beauty are more recognizable than Ricky’s? IS there an affirmation in this film? On second thought, DOES it in fact move us to affirm anything useful? On second thought, does even "Sunday Morning" promote an affirmative ACTION? Does an affirmation need a consequent action?

The dictionary: To affirm is to validate; to state positively; to assert that the fact is so.

Critics of "Sunday Morning," by and large, don’t view the poem as stating anything positive or as validating anything except that the earth is a hard place. (And, in fact, there’s a generalized annoyance at the tendency, in reading the poem, to want to extract a statement at all; Helen Vendler says Stevens has suffered "from the dreadful repetitive effect of moral paraphrase by his critics.") Janet McCann says Stevens here chooses "elegy over energy." For Helen Vendler, it is Stevens’ "poem of the Götterdämmerung"; the operative words in her analysis are "mourns" "wistfully" "disbelievingly" "anachronistic" "elegiac" "autumnal" "resignation" "grieving" "corpse-like" "bleak"and "funereal." Merle Brown says the poem asserts that "one can experience beauty, can love a thing or person, only if he at the same time experiences the painful sense that the loss of that thing or person is imminent." Harold Bloom sees affirmation, but finds that it derives from Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, and Whitman. Alone among major Stevens scholars, Walt Litz says that living in an old chaos of the sun is "cause for celebration," but even he allows that the celebration encompasses "elegiac regret" for what’s lost in embracing that chaos. Stevens himself wrote that although seeing the gods dissolve is "one of the great human experiences," it also threatens us with dissolution: "It was their annihilation, not ours, and yet it left us feeling that in a measure we, too, had been annihilated" (Opus Posthumous 206-07).

Tom and Mrs. Davis, main characters in Donald Barthelme’s profoundly funny story "At the End of the Mechanical Age," share this anxiety about the waning of the old dispensation: 

"One must be fair [says Mrs. Davis]. We don’t know yet what kind of an age the next one will be. Although I feel in my bones that it will be an age inimical to personal well-being and comfort, and that is what I like, personal well-being and comfort."

"Do you suppose there is anything to be done?" I asked her.

"Huddle and cling," said Mrs. Davis. "We can huddle and cling. It will pall, of course, everything palls, in time . . ." (273)

And then it is about 8 a.m. Pacific Daylight time, September 11, 2001, and I, in my office to prepare a morning class, watch my computer screen weeping, gasping, as two towers of the World Trade Center and part of the ring of the Pentagon are annihilated. What affirmation is imaginable this morning? What can I say to my students? What can any of us say to each other? What we do, without a shred of Barthelmean ironic detachment, is huddle and cling. And a week or so later we ponder Stephen Dunn’s poem "To a Terrorist," offered, as he says "without hope, knowing there’s nothing, / not even revenge, which alleviates / a life like yours." Offered as "a gesture / when there’s nothing else to do. [. . .] speaking out loud / to cancel my silence."

Is that an affirmative action, I wonder? It feels reflexive, semi-automatic, compulsive and fruitless, "doomed to become mere words." "Thunder" has no ear, makes no choices; what will happen, will happen; the poet who "must say" these words seems as much in love with death as his terrorist is. And yet he and we obey the sting, the impulse, to speak, and the speaking, because it cancels silence, affirms . . . something. Doesn’t it?

Possibly it’s instructive to consider together two other instances of aesthetic responses to the world’s horrors: Moises Kaufman’s The Laramie Project and Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight Los Angeles, 1992. They are similar in genesis and structure: both are devised from the words of people involved in two events that received intensive media coverage. Kaufman sent actors to Laramie to listen to people talk about their feelings in the wake of Matthew Shepard’s murder, and they communally constructed the play, as he says in his introduction, in order to bring "the various ideologies and beliefs prevailing in a culture into sharp focus" (v). Smith’s work was commissioned as a one-woman performance piece and is a product of over two hundred interviews she conducted with Angeleños in the wake of the initial verdict in the Rodney King beating case. A film based on Smith’s play, produced by PBS Pictures, was broadcast in WNET New York’s Stage on Screen series in 2000.

The Laramie Project ends with a quiet invitation to viewers to contemplate "the sparkling lights of Laramie, Wyoming" (101), referring, presumably, to the townspeople whose understanding of the unstable and dangerous cultural space occupied by gay people and whose sympathy for people living in that space have grown. We might call it a hopeful ending, a bid to audiences to feel good that people’s perceptions have been altered and that some people have become activists against homophobia (although such a reaction has to be qualified by the words of a still-alive gay resident of Laramie, spoken just before the end: "Change is not an easy thing, and I don’t think people were up to it here. [. . . ] it’s been a year since Matthew Shepard died, and they haven’t passed shit in Wyoming" [99]).

Smith’s play leaves viewers much less persuaded that the sun is about to break through the clouds. She asserts explicitly (in her introduction to the 1994 published edition of the play) that she is not about solutions to social problems, but rather sees herself as issuing a "call to the community" to get involved in discussions that break the silence about race. We need, she says, a more complex language to talk about race, a need exemplified at the play’s end by the words of Twilight Bey, an ex-gang member who had committed himself to negotiating gang truces. [VIDEO CLIP 3: TWILIGHT LOS ANGELES] "I can’t forever dwell in darkness, / I can’t forever dwell in the idea, / of just identifying with people like me and understanding like me and mine," we upliftingly hear at the film’s end. But in the play’s ending, Twilight goes on to describe an army of crackheads wandering the night streets and to narrate the beating up of an old man at a bus stop at 3 a.m. by children ages eight to eleven. He is, we are, ". . . stuck in limbo, / like the sun is stuck between night and day / in the twilight hours." 

My freshman students this spring have just finished writing a paper in response to the question that I’m trying to answer here: what is an affirmative action? We are trying to imagine an answer to this question in terms suggested by Martin Luther King, Jr., in an April 1967 speech: 

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. We are called to play the good samaritan on life's roadside; but . . . one day the whole jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be beaten and robbed as they make their journey through life.

I have suggested that the question, "what is an affirmative action?" might be rephrased: "what can we do to transform the Jericho Road?" Like me, they are wringing their hands. They have been given some examples of potentially road-transforming work to contemplate, and they are moved by these, and ready, most of them, to lend a hand. But they also express doubt, see inconsistencies, feel the creepy tug of despair and offer a "gesture, when there’s nothing else to do." Poignantly, one of these students, Audra Johnson, ends her paper this way: "Every robber you take off the Jericho road is replaced by another. Every revision you make to the road’s structure only changes the way in which the robber operates."

I think perhaps I have made a mistake, with them, in tying the notion of affirmative action so tightly to the redress of social injustice. That’s not where I began, not where this paper has begun. Wallace Stevens didn’t see himself as a contractor hired to repave and install lighting on the Jericho road, nor perhaps even as a good guy out of Samaria trying to buck up the bereft. Don Scheese and I, up there on Kamiak Butte, trying to remember a poem, could hardly be spending our time less productively, given this perspective. We and Wallace Stevens and Alan Ball and Stephen Dunn and Donald Barthelme look unpleasantly lightweight in the context of a Martin Luther King, Jr. Jeez, we’re anemic even in the context of the honorable/abominable Jesse Helms, who a couple of months ago put his Senatorial weight behind a request for an extra $500 million to prevent mother-to-child transmission of AIDS overseas.

I see this PNASA conference as an occasion to consider how we make meaning, what counts as affirmation, what counts as action, what prompts someone to determine to help us affirm and act, what kind of help he or she offers, what use that help is. I think it is useful to affirm, or re-affirm, the reality of the pain of others; to give voice to the hope that, knowing the contours of that pain, we will cause less of it. I think it is also useful to affirm, or re-affirm, beauty and impermanence and (with Barthelme’s characters) "personal well-being and comfort," and the manifold ways we help each other to that happy state. I close, then–somewhat contentiously, but I hope not unfeelingly–with a few lines from John Lahr’s New Yorker review of the Broadway show The Producers. The Producers, of course, is about the staging of a musical comedy set in Nazi Germany called Springtime for Hitler. John Lahr: 

We are polluted by grief and greed; let’s acknowledge it, defy it, meet the inevitable vulgar annihilation with careless vulgar rapture, and, with the last measure of our energy and imagination, refuse darkness its dominion. [. . .] Laughter makes you light-headed, but it also brings light. It’s intoxicating. It works. (May 7, 2001, 84-86)