The Present Moment: The Tenacity of Facts
The Present Moment
There is currently an assault on ‘truth’ as we have understood it. Dominating our lives in the present, our ways of knowing seem to have absorbed the principles of Roy Cohn, evil genius, the counselor to Joe McCarthy and then later Donald Trump. His counsel: Say whatever you need to say to advance your agenda. ‘Is it true?’ does not matter. Just repeat what you have to say, and repeat it again, and again. Repetition makes for familiarity, and that in turn lends a ‘truthiness’ to the contention being advanced.
Should the contention be challenged, challenge back. The courts work in one way – slowness in decision making, fairness to all sides of a contested idea –while the ‘court’ of public opinion works by different rules, giving precedence to speed and rhetoric from one side or another. That an election was ‘stolen’ when it was clearly won by one candidate is an example: Repeat the idea of ‘the steal’ often enough, and have ideological commentators posit it as truth (Think: Fox, OneNews, News Max, right-wing web sites) and what is false becomes, in the minds of many, true.
A new emergent attack on ‘truth’ comes and will come from artificial intelligence (AI). AI scrapes the web and recombines what it finds to produce seemingly definitive answers. If what it finds is false, or racist, or misogynist, well, those skewed perspectives become part of the new knowledge a computer will produce for us, often in compulsively readable form. In this way, too, what is demonstrably false is somehow converted, by algorithmic alchemy, into truth. In addition, AI will generate new ‘truths’ to propagate. And AI will do the propagating, as well.
What are we to do when ‘truth’ is so strenuously challenged? Perhaps poetry has an answer, which is why I embarked on this essay on a poem by Zbigniew Herbert, “A Stool,” even though I have written about Herbert before.
A Stool
Zbigniew Herbert
in the end one cannot keep this love concealed
tiny quadruped with oaken legs
o skin coarse and fresh beyond expression
everyday object eyeless but with a face
on which the wrinkles of the grain mark a ripe judgment
gray little mule most patient of mules
its hair has fallen out from too much fasting
and only a tuft of wooden bristle
can my hand feel when i stroke it in the morningdo you know my darling they were charlatans
who said: the hand lies the eye
lies when it touches shapes that are emptythey were bad people envious of things
they wanted to trap the world with the bait of denialhow to express to you my gratitude wonder
you come always to the call of the eye
with great immobility explaining by dumb-signs
to a sorry intellect: we are genuine
at last the fidelity of things opens our eyes
A short while back, I sent out a letter about two poems by Frank O’Hara which, it seemed to me, focused on the present moment – the moment we live in, instant by instant.
T. S. Eliot, in the third line of his famous poem The Waste Land, said something momentous. We all know the beginning, “April is the cruelest month.” Then follows, “Breeding,/ Lilacs out to the dead land, mixing/ Memory and desire….” ‘Mixing memory and desire.’ So much of each present moment is shaped by the past and the future. We carry the accrued past along with us into the present, retaining not only what we remember but what has shaped us. So it is with desire, which is the way in which our future wants and needs help determine what it feels like to ‘be in the present.’
How do we meet the present moment without the incumbrance of the past or the desire for the future? That is a tough question. And yet it is enormously timely, for we live in an era when ‘fake news’ and contested truthfulness dominate the political and social sphere. When all things seem equally capable of being seen as illusionary – in the Vedic Hindu tradition this is known as ‘maya,’ the veil of appearances in which things appear as other than what they are – we find it hard to know where to turn. When ‘truth’ is contested everywhere, we find ourselves unable to cite anything as truth. And without ‘truth,’ where are we? Confused, manipulable, at the mercy of demagogues who would sell us falsehoods dressed as truth.
This will date me, I am sure, for we are about to go back a hundred and fifty years, to the middle of the nineteenth century, when a man named Henry David Thoreau asked a similar question. His rapidly industrializing time challenged much that people had believed in, so Thoreau asked: What can I be certain of? He moved, in a situation which is now famous, to a small cabin of his own making and decided to live simply (“Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!” he wrote, putting into a word his method of searching for what would suffice for him to live his life). He wanted to reduce life to its essentials so that he could decide what he could depend on: What, amid everything that was ‘told,’ could be counted on as certain?
Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe . . . till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a point d’appui, below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely . . . . If you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business.
I know this is a product of a nineteenth century sensibility, one that believed in truth as incontrovertible, one that thought that finding a truth could be enough to ground a life and make it authentic. Ah well. We live in different times. Or do we?
There is that still that Thoreauvian desire – Descartes had it too, although his core belief “Penso ergo sum” (“I think therefore I am”) split mind from body and is perhaps at the origin of many of our present troubles – to ground life in a basic truth. Today, we are beset by ‘truths’ and too often we do not always know how to distinguish ‘facts’ from ‘alternative facts.’ Maybe finding a ground to stand on is not as naïve as we think. Maybe finding what is real at the present moment – between memory and desire, but somehow uninflected by either – is what we need.
This is why I have returned to Zbigniew Herbert, a poet I have written about twice before. His poem, “A Stool,” is to my mind a counsel for us to return to what we can know, and know incontrovertibly. It tells us that there is an object world, a world of objects which exist outside ourselves. It says that in living with an awareness of the objects which we live amongst we might ground ourselves in ‘reality.’
in the end one cannot keep this love concealed
tiny quadruped with oaken legs
o skin coarse and fresh beyond expression
everyday object eyeless but with a face
on which the wrinkles of the grain mark a ripe judgment
The poem begins, unexpectedly, with “love,” the emotion the poet feels when he considers the stool in his room. [Let me confess that I live with a stool that I have had for over fifty years. Made of wood, like Herbert’s stool, it has patiently resided beside and within my life for five decades. Currently, it stands on the tiled floor of my kitchen, where it supports day-old newspapers and an occasional pot hot from the stove.] This first stanza is full of metaphors. Having four legs, the stool is a ‘quadruped,’ constructed of oak. Its surface – “skin” – is grainy with the striations of the wood, but being inanimate and flat it is “beyond expression.’ Although the planar surface of the stool is a face, the face is “eyeless; yet somehow the “everyday object” judges him, the human beside whom the stool stands. (One thinks of Rainer Maria Rilke’s great sonnet, “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” in which an object of stone seems to judge the poet who has less life, less ‘brilliance,’ than the defaced and inanimate object he beholds.)
But let us not read too quickly. “Love.” The poem is about his love for the stool, which stands before him today as it stood yesterday, and will stand tomorrow. He loves this ‘object’ because, as we will learn in the concluding line, it possesses “fidelity.” It is there, and always there, for him. “Love…wonder…genuine.” The poem is love song to the stool in his room.
gray little mule most patient of mules
its hair has fallen out from too much fasting
and only a tuft of wooden bristle
can my hand feel when i stroke it in the morning
The metaphor in the first lines becomes more specific, for the stool with its four legs becomes a “little mule” which is unbelievably “patient.” Whenever he turns, whenever he wants to sit or to place something upon it, the stool is there, waiting. “Patient,” waiting for him. There. A mule is for the poet a beast of burden, patiently carrying what is placed on its back. So too with the stool, which is what occasions the metaphor.
He sometimes strokes this little patient mule, but only feels “a tuft of wooden bristle” – the grain of the wood – instead of the hair which encases an actual mule. We are returned to that metaphor of the ‘face,’ which he introduced a few lines earlier: The face of this mule is a wooden plane which has only the grain of the wood, and no hair, to adorn it. (Now the poet is off on a flight of fancy: Maybe it had hair, once. Yet being an object and nothing more may have subjected it to too much that partakes of the object world, and thus may have reduced it to hairlessness [pure object, not a living being] which he regards as “too much fasting.” Still, the stool is there for him when he touches it each morning. That rough contour of the wooden surface of the stool, perhaps – as we stay in the metaphor – is the remnant of what was there before pure object-hood encompassed the stool?)
Then, remarkably, the poet speaks directly to the stool:
do you know my darling they were charlatans
who said: the hand lies the eye
lies when it touches shapes that are empty
Those who claim that objects are ‘empty,’ are not just wrong but misleading. ‘It is just a thing,’ our intellect wants to say, because neither the hand nor the eye can comprehend the fulness of the world. In the domain where intellect is king, senses feel and see, but do not comprehend what it means to exist. For the philosophical intellect, sense impressions are not enough, false guides to what is ‘really’ there. But – but – the intellect’s dismissal of the senses is like selling snake oil. The claims of the intellect, of the people who insist on the primacy of self-aware consciousness, are ‘charlatans.’ Objects are just ‘there.’ Knowable as themselves, objects. Full of themselves, not just ‘objects’ in a world dominated by self.
Let me reflect on that very present ‘thereness,’ which is actually a ‘thisness’ that is outside of us. The Latin term for ‘thisness’ is ‘haecceitas,’ this thing, here, the actuality that is here. It was the basis of the philosophical system of a medieval Catholic philosopher named Duns Scotus, and is, according to Wikipedia, “the irreducible determination of a thing that makes it this particular thing.” In Herbert’s poem, the stool is there, individuated, itself, not reducible to anything but itself. To say the stool is empty because our intellect, since neither our hand nor our eyes find no ‘meaning’ in it, is a lie: It is just there, outside us, beside us, but there.
The poem continues into another brief stanza:
they were bad people envious of things
they wanted to trap the world with the bait of denial
The ‘thereness’ of things irks many people, envious of an object’s untrammeled existence: No consciousness, no feelings, no memory nor desire. Objects are just there: They exist without condition. So many people want “to trap the world with the bait of denial,” troubled (“envious”) that there are things that exist outside of themselves, outside of the narcissism that – like the ancients who believed the center of the universe was earth – sees everything as revolving about the self, dependent on the self. How comfortable is a world in which everything is a projection of the self and the needs of the self? Very comfortable, even if it is troubled by an inability to define the self or say what it consists of. Nothing, in this sort of world, challenges the self. Narcissism can rule comfortably because there is no ‘other’ that can challenge it.
how to express to you my gratitude wonder
you come always to the call of the eye
with great immobility explaining by dumb-signs
to a sorry intellect: we are genuine
at last the fidelity of things opens our eyes
The final stanza is a marvel. It begins by expressing gratitude to the object world, which is always ‘there,’ coming to us whenever or wherever we look. (Note that it is the eye, not the mind, which sees the stool.) It is just ‘there,’ immobile and yet unflinching, unable to express itself (“dumb”) and yet telling our feeble brains, our flawed consciousnesses (“a sorry intellect”) that something outside the self is real. ‘Reality,’ of course is contested, so Herbert provides us with an alternate term, “genuine.” Fidelity, the “fidelity of things,” “opens our eyes.” We see, if we put our sorry intellect aside, that there are genuine things in our world. They communicate not with language but with “dumb-signs,” telling us that an otherness exists and is always there for us. Objects do not speak, but they show that a physical world exists.
The present moment? It is the things of this world that are ‘there,’ that have a haecceitas that constantly reminds us we are in the moment, in the world of things. Is this a lot? Maybe it is not what we want, which is incontrovertible proof of some sort of truth of our existence. But it is something. The stool is, in its immediately accessible (to the senses) way, incontrovertible.
It is a stool. Solid, real, outside ourselves.
Consider a brief prose poem by Herbert:
Objects
Inanimate objects are always correct and cannot, unfortunately, be reproached with anything. I have never observed a chair shift from one foot to another, or a bed rear on its hind legs. And tables, even when they are tired, will not dare to bend their knees. I suspect that objects do this from pedagogical considerations, to reprove us constantly for our instability.
Objects, like the stool in our poem, are just there. It is we, humans, who are unstable, who vacillate in the search for meaning, the search for a certainty which is always around us and yet beyond us. Objects do not shift evasively, or rear up to take offence, or bend down in homage to something greater than themselves. They are just ‘there.’
Herbert finds a threadbare (hairless?) yet nonetheless real assurance in the endurance and stability of objects. What of our lives, which seem far more complex than merely an encounter with objects? What of life, and death, and greed, and happiness, and the messiness of human relationships with other humans? Objects are stable; it is we, with all our questions, that are shaped by our “instability.”
Herbert wrote another poem, “Pebble,” about how an object is “full” – and yet how we are reluctant to depend on objects because, being outside of us, they “cannot be tamed.” This remarkable poem shows us how an object is itself, “equal to itself.” The object does not proclaim that is something other than it is – “mindful of its limits” – and its meaning is, well, itself: “filled exactly/ with a pebbly meaning.” The object, while an object, is indeed itself, reminiscent of nothing. No wonder the poet feels “a heavy remorse,” because the pebble looks at him “with a calm and very clear eye” and reminds him of the object world in which he, the poet, is also an object.
Pebble
The pebble
is a perfect creature
equal to itself
mindful of its limits
filled exactly
with a pebbly meaning
with a scent that does not remind one of anything
does not frighten anything away does not arouse desire
its ardour and coldness
are just and full of dignity
I feel a heavy remorse
when I hold it in my hand
and its noble body
is permeated by false warmth
- Pebbles cannot be tamed
to the end they will look at us
with a calm and very clear eye
The word that stops me, as I read this poem, is “remorse.” Why remorse? Because, Herbert seems to say, we humans lack that self-contained-ness that marks even a pebble, full of both “ardour and coldness” a pebble which does not lack for either justice or dignity, or nobility. We humans, caught up in our world of desire and fear, lack the capacity of the pebble to be contented with itself, with its ‘pure being.’
The great, Nobel-prize winning poet Seamus Heaney wrote in admiration of another Herbert poem, “A Knocker.” I have referred to Heaney before in an earlier letter on Herbert. There, I said, Herbert “may be the poet of the past half century who most radically tests the myths and certainties which so often we take for granted, the ‘truths’ of everyday life.”
A Knocker
There are those who grow
gardens in their heads
paths lead from their hair
to sunny and white citiesit's easy for them to write
they close their eyes
immediately schools of images
stream down their foreheadsmy imagination
is a piece of board
my sole instrument
is a wooden stickI strike the board
it answers me
yes—yes
no—nofor others the green bell of a tree
the blue bell of water
I have a knocker
from unprotected gardensI thump on the board
and it prompts me
with the moralists dry poem
yes—yes
no—no
I wrote that, “In ‘The Knocker’ the speaker says he will let others write of images and metaphors: For himself, he merely pursues what rings true, knocking on a piece of wood.” For this is what the poem is ‘about:’ The poet’s task is to test the world and see what is true and real and, yes, ethical (he is a “moralist”). His duty is not to describe the world, or to use imagination to recreate it. The poet has to test the world to see what is ‘genuine.’ We are back to Thoreau, who strove to say, “This is, and no mistake.”
It is a frail reed, to recognize the object world. We desire so much more: To understand ourselves, to comprehend our relations with others, to know how and why the world we live in moves us so much and in so many different directions.
Beginning with Herbert is hard medicine. I am not sure I myself can follow him, so difficult is the road. ‘Still, one would want more, one would need more, / More than a world of white and snowy scents,” Wallace Stevens wrote of objects, specifically carnations in a white bowl. (Type ‘Stevens poems of our climate’ in Google.) Yet for him the facts we can observe, says Stevens, are not enough. “The imperfect is our paradise.” [That poem by Stevens will be the subject of my next letter!]
But this is where the present moment begins, in our living in a physical world, a world of objects which, uninflected by memory or desire, are irreducibly objects. How do we get from there to justice, or Donald Trump, or climate change? I don’t know. (Maybe this is the great philosophical dilemma, of how one moves from the descriptive to the normative.) But I think that, nostalgic as it may seem in its longing for a certainty that seemed possible in the nineteenth century, Herbert’s sense of the reality of objects is where we must begin. With that stool, with things that “come always to the call of the eye,” things that “are genuine.” Maybe more is not possible; maybe what we can do, must do, is recognize that “the fidelity of things opens our eyes.”
Two footnotes:
1. There is a branch of philosophy known as phenomenology, which is directed in the same direction as Herbert’s “A Stool” and for the same purpose: Finding a ‘ground’ on which thinking can take place. It was originated by an Austro-German philosopher named Edmund Husserl. For centuries philosophy had tried to distinguish between the phenomenal – what we can know, using our senses – and the noumenal – what is ‘really’ there antecedent to our perceptions of it. (The terms ‘phenomenal’ and ‘noumenal’ are from Immanuel Kant.) Husserl cut through that philosophical argument by saying that since all we had were our perceptions, we must look to objects as we perceive them, and forget about what they ‘really’ are. His method was to ‘bracket’ an object, cutting away from it all that we had learned about it, all we thought it meant, and just focus on the object and how it appeared in our bracketed perception. (This method he called the ‘epoché’.) This, it seems to me, is not very far from what Herbert does in this poem, despite its initial and continuing use of metaphors. He is after “the fidelity of things.” He is in “wonder” that the object world appears to us and is always before us, around us; that it is the world in which we live.
2. I have been mulling over this need to pare down the world to the present moment. What is pared down is, of course, the encrustation of past experiences which cohere around objects. Do we want to pare down the world to such things, to un-encrusted objects, so that we can ground ourselves in what is before us? Yes, and no. (I have written an emphatic ‘yes’ in looking at “A Stool.”) But what we lose by seeing objects as objects, I think, is the ‘human,’ that halo of past experiences which make the world our world, which connects objects to the lives we have lived. The reward of the epoché is that we see things clearly, with our own sight, unencumbered by the pre-judging of things that the social world enforces and that we so readily assent to. No pre-judice. The other side of bracketing is that our very real connection to things is sundered: They appear without all our past experience attached to them. We cut ourselves off from our own history. I think Herbert’s poem avoids this phenomenological trap: He sees, touches, the stool in all its “immobility,” and “fidelity,” but he also – in the poem – connects the stool to a mule, that beast of burden which carries our relations to it on its bristly back. The stool is an object, but also – tellingly – an object the poet lives with. It is part of his human world.