Sudden Rightness

I'm slowly making my way through Critchley's Things Merely Are, and so far, I'm enjoying it.  It's been helpful and frustrating to read that alongside Dusty's post "That Things Merely Are Not" to get a clearer idea of the philosophical argument surrounding Stevens. I'm not sure what I'm getting out of it all yet, but I have been thinking on the relationship between reality and imagination.  Critchley says you can't have one without the other.

For Stevens (says Critchley), imagination is not imagination unless it has a basis in reality.  Poetry/imagination transfigures the world from something oppressive to life.  Without a base, imagination and poetry move away from "life with a ray of imagination and power," from elevated meaning into the realm of pure fantasy and fiction.  The question/problem is what is reality? I don't really want to go there now, but I like how Stevens kind of talks about what is real in his poem- Of Modern Poetry.

"The poem of the mind in the act of finding
what will suffice.  It has not always had
To find: the scene was set; it repeated what
Was in the script.
                          Then the theatre was changed
To something else.  Its past was a souvenir.

It has to living, to learn the speech of the place.
It has to face the men of the time and to meet
The women of the time.  It has to think about war
And it has to find what will suffice.  It has
To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage
And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and
With meditation, speak words than in the ear,
In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat,
Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound
Of which, an invisible audience listens,
Not to the play, but to itself, expressed
In an emotion as of two people, as of two
Emotions becoming one.  The actor is
A metaphysician in the dark, twanging
An instrument, twanging a wiry string that gives
Sounds passing through sudden rightness, wholly
containing the mind, below which it cannot descent,
Beyond which it has no will to rise.
                                                     It must
Be the finding of satisfaction, and may
Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman
Combing.  The poem of the act of the mind.

I love this poem. It is super modernist (from the title, it's obvious), talking about the way things were, the way things were whole and made sense, but  how, now the world is in pieces and we have to figure out a "new stage" and find what satisfies us even if it that satisfaction is common or as fleeting as a sound passing by.  It's searching for harmony (harmonium) in reality, snatches of it, anyway.

Critchley focuses a little on the "invisible audience," ideas that when we construct, through imagination/poetry, life, it has to correspond with the audience's sense of reality, but "real" is subject-dependent, "that which is, is only for the subject to whom it appears, even if what appears is real for us." I may be misinterpreting, but this idea that real is different for every person appeals to my thesis project of dyslexia, synaesthesia and the imagination. Synaesthetes in particular perceive reality in ways, which are real for them, but seem completely fanciful to us.  I read a study, where a five year old girl wrote poetry about her morning.  It was filled with imagery, which didn't make sense, but the teacher gave her kudos for being imaginative.  The girl's response was confusion, because she simply wrote about what she had experienced. From Stevens' poem, I get the sense that as a poet, he must write and write about the things he perceives until he illuminates the aspect of its reality, which everyone understands and can be "satisfied with."

Then again, maybe not; but I'm intrigued to keep looking until I find that "sudden rightness" (or one of many sudden rightnesses), which will illuminate something new.