Time to Lay Some Schooling

An object can change.  Any object, even an eternal one.  We perceive the object, adding our own meaning to it.  But because of that, the object isn’t eternal.  The object’s value is dependent on the perception of the person.  What seems magnificent in a moment becomes normal over time.  What is beautiful seems commonplace later.  How sinister it is for us to impose ourselves on the world.  What is even worse is that it is necessary.  Without our thoughts, without our views, objects would have no worth.  They wouldn’t even be eternal, for being forgotten forced them to exist in nothingness. 

There is a good poem “The Snow Man” by Wallace Stevens, that sums up this idea.  

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Stevens uses the precision of imagery of Imagism and the dissociation of Cubism.  He has the “mind of winter”, seeing things through different senses.  He slowly fades away as each sense escapes.  First he uses sight, then touch, then hearing, until he is “nothing himself.” Stevens is completely disassociated from the scene.  He cannot impart his own thoughts and ideals on the scene.  What is left? “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” The only thing there is the physical objects, hence the first part of that phrase, but I’m obviously talking about the second part: “the nothing that is.”

THE nothing, not just nothing.  The only thing left is a blank, a void.  Nothing has meaning, so the winter scene is just a null.  By removing himself from the scene, Stevens is saying there is nothing in the scene.  Only through humans can value be derived in objects.  Without people, the scene is bare of anything except the physical object, while before he describes it in great detail.  Things we associate with nature, such as a beauty and grandeur, is gone without people, and this is true with any object.  Just something to think about.