9-30-24  MARIE PONSOT--ABOUT CLARITY

MARIE PONSOT—PATHETIC FALLACIES ARE BAD SCIENCE BUT

On reading Susanne K. Langer's Mind

If leaf-trash chokes the stream-bed

reach for rock-bottom as you rake

the muck out. Let it slump dank,

and dry fading, flat above the bank.

Stand back. Watch the water vault ahead.

Its thrust sweeps the surface clean, shores the debris,

as it debrides its stone path to the lake,

clarity carrying clarity.

To see clear, resist the drag of images.

Take nature as it is, not Dame nor Kind.

Act in events; touch what you name. Abhor

easy obverts of natural metaphor.

Let human speech breathe out its best poor bridges

from mind to world, mind to self, mind to mind.

Yet, I admit the event of the wood thrush:

In a footnote Langer (her book rapids-clean

like the spring-water aired over sleeked rock)

says she witnessed an August bird in shock

when a hawk snatched its mate. It perched, rushed

notes fluting two life-quotas in one flood,

its lungs pushing its voice, flushing the keen

calls, pumped out as the heart pumps blood,

not in twilight or warning but noon & wrong,

its old notes whistled too fast but accurate.

I read this drenched in bird-panic, its spine-

fusing loss all song, all loss; that loss mine

awash in unanswered unanswered song.

And I cannot claim we are not desolate.

I find myself reflecting now and again on the state of the world and how we humans fit into what is a churning stream of events. Part of my confusion with all of the vectors and forces at play is how to see what is happening with more nuance and subtlety. It is altogether very easy to attribute to our advanced technologies and sciences certainty and predictability. We build trust in our cell phones and computers and the information that the sciences turn out. But I have to remind myself that everything we do in science or technology and, indeed, in our own personal lives is experimental. By that I mean that we are continually posing hypotheses about what decision to make, what action to take, what to say in our relationships with the world around us. But it is also true for me to remember that many experiments don't prove the hypotheses initially proposed. So, I am often left somewhat confused as to what comes next in my understanding or how to proceed with words or actions. This outcome is familiar to scientists whose work is predicated on taking the next step, where a negative outcome is just the beginning of another line of inquiry. I don't think this is necessarily the way most of us in our daily lives think about what we might consider a setback or a rebuke of our best intentions. We have emotional lives that complicate how we see ourselves in the great flow of life. But I propose that we can, in fact, use our emotions, often conflicting ones, to come to a deeper understanding of our lives and to see that we share them with other species. After all, we have come from nature and live our lives dependent on what nature offers us and to realize that all beings and things are interdependent.

Ed Yong has written a book, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, in which he surveys how the senses familiar to us (he lists as chapter headings smells and tastes, light, color, pain, heat, contact and flow, surface vibrations, sound, echoes, electric fields, magnetic fields) or senses not at all gifted to us but alive and functional to what might be termed “lesser” species on an arbitrary hierarchical scale. He points out that only science has been able to describe through experiments what some of these exquisite senses are and what they might mean to the life and survival of the creatures that possess them. But his extensive survey begs the question: What other senses are experienced by other species that we can only guess from our species-specific (and often limited) array of sensory inputs? Yong includes a quote from William Blake on the first page of his book that echoes what Marie Ponsot includes in her poem. It is:

“How do you know but ev'ry Bird

that cuts the airy way,

Is an immense world of delight,

clos'd by your senses five?”

Ponsot's poem title draws us in to this new realm of perception by referring to “pathetic fallacies,” defined as the attribution of human emotions or characteristics to inanimate objects or to nature. The “but” in the title is a key word, an interruption in our usual way of thinking and prepares us for what she ponders in her poem. I think it is all too easy to dismiss the sensescapes of other creatures as we cling to our own, a very normal and human trait.

The first stanza takes the stand of someone observing nature's force as if the event were strictly scientific and practical. If there is muck in the stream-bed, then one clears the way for the water to flow more freely and cleanly. All the observations of the water are factual and obvious and the human factor in moving the water is also described. Humans are agents in the “sweep” of nature's force. There is emphasis in the last line on clarity and this seems to be assumed as the outcome of the efforts to channel nature's energies. Very human and hubristic, it seems. Yet, there is an outstanding metaphorical reference to flowing waters here. The metaphor is one used in religious settings to refer to God's flowing presence and, also, to the refreshing and cleansing presence of Jesus. The clarity of flowing water is a universal reference. I am not certain, of course, that the poet wants us to note this meaning at the beginning as much as to reinforce how water does clarify and cleanse but not with any religious overtones. On the other hand, perhaps she wants us to arrive at the religious meaning by working our way through the poem to finally clear out what we might have been led to believe is a “pathetic fallacy.”

The second stanza is an attempt to shore up what the first stanza suggests by framing how one might think of human control, eliminating all emotional import to what is, on the surface, a very scientific occurrence. The poet takes up the idea of “clarity” again, to see nature clearly as a neutral realm of cause and effect. We are strongly encouraged to avoid looking at the natural phenomena in any way but in causal terms and also to name the phenomena as they appear and not attempt metaphorical allusions. The only hint in this stanza of what is to come are the lines: “Let human speech breathe out its best poor bridges/from mind to world, mind to self, mind to mind.” The “best poor bridges” lets us know that there might be more to perception than we can observe or manifest.

The third stanza is really a narrative within the narrative of the poem but it represents a turning point in the poet's thinking. The “yet” at the beginning of the stanza echoes the “but” in the title, indicating something contrary to expectation or hypothesis. The story is gleaned from a work by Susanne Langer in her three-part book Mind: An Essay on Human Feelings (1967, 1972, 1982). Once again there is a reference to Langer's approach to perception as being “...rapids-clean/like the spring-water aired over sleeked rock.” There follows the incredibly dramatic and tragic event in the life of a wood thrush when its mate is “snatched” by a hawk. The response of the thrush casts off what might be seen as a “natural” event, something one might observe scientifically as behaviors characteristic of both thrush and hawk. But the poet here casts off any restrictions applied by a “pathetic fallacy” to relate in visceral terms what the thrush experiences, framed in the terms of what a human (and the poet certainly) feels when such a loss is experienced at a deep level.

The final stanza is a resolution of sorts. The poet tells us how she has been moved physically to the loss expressed as the thrush's “keen calls” and finding no answer to the tragic loss expressed by the bird, equally unable to find an expression for the loss except in song. The final line: “And I cannot claim we are not desolate.” It is the “we” in this line that makes common cause with the thrush and underscores the “clarity” of the first stanza as seeing a shared emotion with another species, as if it were your own loss. The clarity of science is bound with the clarity of emotional content, each contributing to a wider view of the human species embedded in a world of countless species, all of which are adapted to their own sensescapes. And these sensescapes are miracles of adaptation and subtlety and amazingly beyond our own limited senses. And there is no way to know if the many species with their own unique sense experiences are also bound with emotional content that we can't perceive. We need to give up our arrogant attitude about how special we are in the whole scheme of life. We need to see ourselves as changing and evolving and perhaps hoping that one day we will understand all those “lesser creatures” on their own terms in their own realms. Marie Ponsot outlines for us what that might look like as we use our own senses as stepping off points to a wider and deeper understanding of the “immense world.”

I am continually amazed to see how a poet's sensibility and sensitivity can emerge from so few words, leaving so much room for our own engagement. More than that, as we study the poem and polish what is there, we are making a mirror in which we see ourselves reflected differently. In this poem, the word “clarity” at the beginning takes on more nuanced meaning as the poem progresses to the end when we discover there is more to being in nature than neutral observation. We are in nature and nature is in us and our senses merge and emotions are shared. We are also offered the opportunity to read into the poem the notion of how human beings fit into the schemes and structures of this world of ours. We are not the end-point of evolution but only on the top rung of beings on a ladder that extends out into the future. Perhaps, noticing this, we can better manage our shared affairs with greater humility and honor all beings and things as created just as we have been.