The Sublime Mundane in Conrad Aiken’s “Morning Song of Senlin” (Part 2)

Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Aiken’s “Morning Song of Senlin,” and whether humanity’s religious impulses can be fully compensated with an aesthetic or ironic relation to nature and cosmic scale. Thanks to our sponsor GiveWell, an organization that would provide rigorous, transparent research about the best opportunities for charitable giving. If you’ve never used GiveWell to donate, you can have your donation matched up to $100 before the end of the year, or as long as matching funds last. To claim your match, go to GiveWell.org, pick “Podcast,” and enter “SUBTEXT Literature and Film Podcast” at checkout. Upcoming Episodes: Conrad Aiken’s “Morning Song of Senlin,” “Sunset Boulevard,” Marianne Moore’s “Jerboa.” Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:19 Erin: [email protected] subtextpodcast. 0:32 Wes: Welcome to part two of our discussion discussion of Conrad Aiken's Morning Song of Senlin. We just got done Talking about Stanza 2 and the role of the natural world and whether China Berry is actually pronounced Chinaberry, which it turns out it is. We solved that riddle pretty quickly. Whether the robin is repeating what the dew drops are saying. The dew drops always get plagiarized. All right, so, third stanza. Let me get some repetition here. 1:01 Erin: Ties don't stay tied. It's one of the sad facts of life. 1:05 Wes: Well, that's, you know. Yeah. You know, in my notes I said, is it the next day, question mark? Or has he failed as we all do and has to try again? Right. So for me, tying a tie. Yeah. Takes more than one time. On the other hand, he could just be, you know, it could just be the next day and then, you know, that really emphasizes the mundanity of this. Any sort of repetition, you know, emphasizes that mundane. Because that lack of novelty, that ordinariness, that connotation of, you know, isn't this boring? Is this all there is to life? Getting up, tying your tie, going to work as an accountant, which is what I imagine he does. He can't possibly be a poet or something really interesting. 1:44 Erin: He's Wallace Stevens, he works in insurance. 1:46 Wes: Right. You could do both, obviously. You can always do both. 1:49 Erin: You have to have the two sides of life. This is where I really got on board with this poem because I'm like, oh man. That's the thing that is the worst about life is that you wake up and you have to shower again and do everything all over again. It's very, it's very tiresome, especially for me. I'm like a non habit forming human being. So everything is like doing it for the first time for me. So every, every day, everything I have to do to keep myself up as a human being actually requires a tremendous exertion of will. It's very sad. 2:20 Wes: I agree. 2:20 Erin: I don't know if that's just like being clinically depressed over long periods of time or if that's just my personality at this point or both. But anyway, yeah, so here he stands by the mirror. That's the difference that I see. That is this is a different morning. Perhaps before he was standing in front of. No, a glass. Never mind. At other points I think it's my mirror. Maybe I'm getting that wrong. There's some slight changes of the versus my that occur a couple times. So he ties his tie once more while waves far off in a pale rose twilight. I looked this poem up online as well and in a version of it I saw online, the following line was crash on a white sand shore, which in your version, in mine I think we have crash on a coral shore. Later the coral will be picked up with coral sky in stanza 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. But I like the white sand shore, even if it's a bit familiar because it Links us back to the stars more. You know, the white sand on the shore is maybe obliterated temporarily in the surf. In the same way that in the first stanza, white stars pale and die. Obliterated in the mist, saffron mist. So I don't know, but I also just really like pale rose twilight. This poem is so tightly constructed. It's not quite, but it is almost an anagram with swiftly tilting planet. As soon as I saw those two phrases, I was like, they have to have like majority of their letters in common. And I sketched it out and I think they have like 12 letters in common and six different. Something like that. I got rid of the little scrap paper I did on. But yeah, I mean, they're really close to each other. 4:07 Wes: Yeah, really interesting. Yeah. So again, we get this, you know, whereas before we had the contrast between the tying of the tie and the swiftly, swiftly tilting planet, which I would put in the cosmic order, here it is another sublime image. So maybe is cosmic the wrong word? Is it sublime? Is that the better category? But that waves crashing far off are an image of sublimity and. Right, so something that's aesthetically beautiful but also fear inducing or awe inspiring. And the aesthetic character of it and the awe inspiring character of it are wrapped up in each other in some way. But yeah, we get that contrast between that and the being in front of the mirror again. And then he combs his hair, which really, he's got a small and white face. Whereas again, the green earth, I guess now it's the green Earth. Right. It was swiftly tilting planet. The green Earth tilts through a sphere of air. So again, maybe this reinforces my Don Quixote reading, where it's as if the Earth has a lance and is charging. 5:17 Erin: Yeah, I like that. I can picture the hole on the model Earth, you know that that is used in school, like, you know, to show you like the. The Earth on its axis, you know. Yeah, that's really. 5:29 Wes: Oh, right, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. I hadn't thought of that. Perfect. And you'd have to be deluded, right, Like Don Quixote to want to go around the sun for billions of years. For what? For no good reason 5:41 Erin: to wake up and tie your tie over and over again. Yeah, no, the. 5:45 Wes: The Earth is in love with the sun in some sense, but yeah, that's nice. 5:49 Erin: The sun is out of its league, though, but it won't stop trying. 5:53 Wes: The sun is a complete narcissist, but 5:57 Erin: the Earth is too. 5:58 Wes: But that is a blast in the context of the Poem. That's a blasphemous thing to say. You know, better call it lonely. Maybe loneliness is a better image than. Yeah, that's the problem with being God and being perfect and complete unto yourself. You can always be accused of being a narcissist and not caring. 6:16 Erin: That's right. 6:17 Wes: Why? Why don't you care about me? You know, my bagel fell on the floor this morning. Why? 6:25 Erin: Yeah, but what if you score a touchdown? Then you're Dad's favorite. 6:29 Wes: Right. So it depends on us. He's moody. Yeah. So. No, that's great. With the line through the earth as a lance, it's really. 6:38 Erin: Well, then we get. I stand by a mirror and comb my hair. How small and white my face. This is what I was referring to earlier. So before he stood before a glass. Now he stands by the mirror. And then now he stands by a mirror. So there's slight changes throughout in the prepositions and the articles. And I think these are. I think these are really smart because this is actually what gives us the sense that this is a Groundhog Day thing because of the slight differences that clue us into the fact that this is a different day, but the same thing being repeated over and over again. So I think, you know, whether or not we even notice the smallness of these tweaks, I think we get the sense that even just in the stanza now, two days are represented here. 7:21 Wes: Yeah. And the use of a definite article like the suggests that we. I mean, it's not ironclad, but could suggest that we already know the context. Right. Oh, it's the mirror that we're already familiar with from the context of the narrative. And A is more like an introduction to the object. But here we get this alternation between an assumption of familiarity and a. Right. And then an assumption that we're not familiar. So now he's in front of a mirror again. Well, didn't you just say the mirror? Don't we already know this mirror? Haven't we already been introduced to this mirror? Is it another mirror? So I think there's this alternation also between an assumed familiarity and assumed distance. So like you said. Yeah, it gives it that Groundhog Day quality because it's almost like he's forgetting that he's told the story. He's one of those people. They're telling you a story and they're excited about it. And you're like, this is the fifth time you've told this to me. How can you not remember? I know you're standing in front of the mirror. You already told me then, all right, there are houses hanging above the stars. Or did you want to say anything more about that previous stanza? 8:28 Erin: Just that bathes in a flame of space. I don't think we pointed out that we have air, fire and water altogether in that. So there's, you know, you could just track, like, you could underline in various representational colors. Like if you did brown for earth and blue for. I don't know, you know, you could just track the elements and how they show up in the poem all mixed together. And this is one of the rare lines that we get three all in a single image, which I just really, really like. And I like the image of like 8:56 Wes: a blue, blue flame. 8:58 Erin: And maybe just to the double encasement that the implication of the speaker's position relative to the Earth now kind of gives us. So we have the sun in a shell of silence we already talked about, but the Earth too. Like, we're on the Earth, so we're on this green ball. And that green ball is itself encased in this flame. So we're sort of like doubly dwarfed, I think, in this image. And so the image of his face being small and white, which is sort of like one of the pale stars or the flecks of sand. If we go by the alternate version of the poem, he's at once like a star, so a heavenly body in and of himself. But he could also just be a grain of sand or something in between. But being dwarfed by the Earth and then being one's own little kind of dwarf star, if you will, in the mirror, I think is all kind of interestingly collapsed there. 9:51 Wes: Very good. 9:52 Erin: But yeah, the houses above the stars. I'm embarrassed to say that I wrote in the margins tree houses, question mark, because I was trying to think of things that could be like if you're looking up and you see like a tree house or. And then I wrote, God, question mark. Satellites, question mark. And I crossed that out. 1957. Aliens, question mark was another thing I wrote. 10:18 Wes: Wow, that would be cool if it were literal. Yeah. What if alien spaceships were shaped like houses? That would be confusing. So just descend A frames. They would have to be A frames. 10:30 Erin: No, no, no, no, no. They would be mid century modern. So like an A frame, but a little more squat, like a Flintstones house. That's how I picture it. Anyway. 10:40 Wes: It took me a minute to figure this out as well. 10:43 Erin: But you did. 10:44 Wes: I think he's reminding us that the Earth is a sphere. Right? Or maybe not this is my reading of it is just that the fact that the earth is right, our houses hang above Australia's stars. Maybe I'm being too literal minded about this now, but the stars hung under the sea. Australia stars are under our sea. What do you make of it? 11:07 Erin: Oh, I get it. Okay. It took me a second. First I had to picture the toilet flushing the opposite direction. Then I had. Yeah, is that. Yeah, that's good. 11:17 Wes: Is that a reasonable. 11:19 Erin: I still think Treehouses is the primary reading. No, that's great. 11:23 Wes: So, yeah, on one level, perhaps that's what he's doing is just pointing to the fact that we live on a sphere. And so our sense of up and down is relative, and therefore our sense of what is cosmic and mundane are relative. Or at the very least, it seems to. Right, Reverse. It's reversing the roles of the cosmic and the mundane. The houses hanging above the stars, the stars being under a sea, and maybe the sea will take as a representative of the natural. So we get all three domains here again, at a psychological level, we can understand how one, the mundane again eclipses or dissolves the cosmic and the divine. We forget about God, the stars disappear into the mist coming from above. The houses, the mundane and the domestic, they hang over us, right? We have obligations, we're busy, we don't look up as much, and we can't even see the stars as much because of light pollution. Right. If we're in an urban area. So our orientation to the divine is interfered with or distracted by the project of survival and just getting along, just trying to make our way in life, just trying to make a living. 12:40 Erin: Yeah, I like that. But at the same time, it cuts both ways too, right? Because also, like, the mundane is being pierced here by the cosmic, so things are brought suddenly near at the same time, right? So we have the topsy turvy element of the houses and the star also means that, yes, those things are being obliterated, but also we're reminded suddenly, like recalled to ourselves, that as he says in the next lines, that the sun, which is far away from us in this vacuum of space, is also dappling our walls. So there's nearness to. And I'm thinking about the fact that, like, you know, I like your distinction between cosmic and sublime, with the, you know, the sublime image of the wave on the shore in the previous stanza. But of course, also we have stars under the sea. There's like this inverted image or the stars being dipped into the cookie, into the milk or something like that. Where we have something kind of being turned inside out. Also, the sea is the origin of the natural, the origin of all. Like, we evolved out of the sea. So the fact that we can tie our ties today is thanks to the sea and the cosmic. Just as our daily rhythms, our mundane rhythms, are set by this ball of gas millions of miles away. I just want to emphasize, like, I think that there's. For me, it's like the closeness. The poem isn't doing as much for me in terms of reminding me of the ways in which the cosmos are kind of blotted out over the course of daily life as it is doing the opposite for me. Like reminding me of the strangeness of the cosmos repeatedly intruding on these mundane images in the poem. 14:16 Wes: Yeah, well, as you point out, these are formative influences, right? Whether it's God, our creator, or the sun, which, in a sense, is our creator, or the stars. We all come from stardust, ultimately. Right? 14:29 Erin: And we, at least I do. 14:33 Wes: We are at the end of a long chain of cause and effect. We are who we are because of all these forces that have preceded us, cosmic and biological and then, you know, cultural on top of that. So. And that, of course, is part of what produces the roteness and what I've been calling the mundane. So there's something quite grand about those forces. And yet they construct us as something very ordinary in the sense of. Right. Not having the power of a God, not having that kind of freedom, except in those rare moments when we do what the things our fathers did, which is learn to do something new and exert that kind of freedom and approach to the divine and maybe, you know, are in the image of God, in our intelligence or whatever. All right, it's morning again. 15:22 Erin: Well, actually, before we do that, I just wanted to point out that one of the allusions I found in here is to Tennyson. I had this kind of earworm thing happen with the stanza. With their houses hanging above the stars and stars hung under a sea and a sun far off and a shell of silence dapples my walls for me all of a sudden, I was washing dishes, and I was like, break, break, break on thy cold gray stones oc And I would that my tongue could utter the thoughts that arise in me there's an exact parallel, even with the rhyme scheme of break, break, break. And that connected back to the three clear tones. Break, break, break. So I think Tennyson is being sampled here like a rap song. That's the interesting. I hear. Anyway, just wanted to point that Out. 16:07 Wes: But very cool. 16:08 Erin: Yeah, yeah. So we should pause for a moment of silence to remember God. 16:12 Wes: Well, that's what he's going to do. 16:14 Erin: Yeah. 16:15 Wes: Should I not pause in the light to remember God? So, yeah. What do we make of this? Upright and firm. I stand on a star. Unstable. We get this image of this cosmic and perhaps divine realm as something chaotic, right. And it's our formative origin. But we come out of chaos and we are the ordered, stable things, you know, as organic forms. Right. We persist in this very unique way. He is the one who's lonely now. He's. So there's kind of a reversal, you know, speaking of topsy turvy, there's a kind of a reversal of roles here where God is the lonely, unstable one. We are the firm ones. We are firm in our. 16:55 Erin: Right. 16:56 Wes: This defensive structure, I would call it, in this having these habits and the culture and things to do. Just by virtue of being the products of the formative forces, we get to be the stable ones, whereas the formative forces themselves are a kind of cauldron. 17:12 Erin: I like that. I like to you saying that out loud. You know, should I not pause in the light to remember God? I hadn't really realized before how that's framed in the negative. So there's almost an assumption that one. That one is ridiculous for doing these things right. This is a modernist poem. This is cast in opposition to the impulse to ignore any kind of creator. And I think by that same token, like, I think in the previous episode, I maybe suggested that this is sort of like the opposite of deism. It's also kind of the opposite of Stephen's in Sunday Morning of his kind of casting the sky as the barrier between us and God. This is like saying that the sky is like the barrier between God and us. Like, he wants to reach out to us, but he can't. He's sort of bound by his own rules or something. Like, he's sort of like. 18:00 Wes: He's shy. 18:00 Erin: He's shy. He's a non intervention. 18:02 Wes: He's also shy. 18:03 Erin: Well, lonely cloud. I mean, we don't just think of Wordsworth. If this is a God and we think of a cloud that gets lonely and wants to sometimes get with people named IO. We think of Ovid, right? Or even there's something kind of being the person who's firmly standing on a star. Unstable. I think of like us versus the thing we're standing on. I think of cloud. That's the thing that God sits on, right? Like the bearded guy sitting on a cloud. Instead, he is the cloud. So he's sort of like the. Like the foundation. I think this gives credence maybe to your reading of this idea of, like, the formative chaos out of which things come. Like, there's something, like, rooted here in the natural, where God, like, as this kind of personified figure is being reabsorbed back into these natural images in a more progressed kind of relationship, a more modern relationship to God might just subsume him fully into the natural and not make that distinction. In other words, he starts off as being natural forces, he comes out and becomes personified. And modernism would kind of squash him back down and put him back into the cloud, if that makes any sense. 19:15 Wes: It seems to me there's an element of condescension here. So should I not pause in the light to remember God? Should I not stop to give this beggar his alms, to throw him a quarter? He's lonely after all. Why don't I give him a little something? 19:29 Erin: Yeah. 19:29 Wes: Why don't I feed him a little bit here? I'm combing my hair just for you. Seems pretty disrespectful, Senlin. But it's for him alone. For Him I will come. When I put on makeup in the morning. I don't. I'm not doing it for others. 19:49 Erin: I love the contouring, by the way. 19:51 Wes: And I'm not even doing it for me. I'm doing it for God. 19:55 Erin: I thought you were doing it for me. Since we have a zoom component to this now. I like aesthetics, but there is, okay? It's condescending and yet it's truthful, of course. Right. Because any offering we make, anything we do, is going to be small to God. That's kind of the joke, right? Whether it's combing our hair or dyeing for him, you know, very small potatoes either way. I mean, one is like, he's got a lot. 20:18 Wes: He's got a lot of fans. Anyone accept these humble offerings? 20:22 Erin: Not as many as he used to. 20:24 Wes: Silence. 20:25 Erin: Yeah. 20:27 Wes: So accept these humble offerings. Right. There's an irony in that, right? Humble as in, you know, nominally, it's him. He's the one who's being humble. But it's really the offerings themselves that are kind of meager. 20:39 Erin: Yeah. 20:40 Wes: And it seems to indicate that that's all God is worth. And then calling him a cloud of silence. All right? It's just straight up disrespectful. 20:49 Erin: It's joke God can do. 20:50 Wes: He's lonely as a cloud now. He's a cloud of silence. So like I said, he's shy. If God talked more, he would have more friends. Let's just put it that way. 20:58 Erin: That's true. That's true. Well, that puts me in mind of a couple things. I'm thinking of two different Teresa and Therese. So Teresa Babila saying, you know, maybe you'd have more friends if you were nicer to people. She says to go. I'm also thinking of Therese of Lisu and her little way, a saint known as the little flower. And her little way was this idea that you could just offer even the most mundane things to God over the course of your day, that you didn't have to do something heroic and you didn't have to martyr. You know, be a martyr or, you know, wear a hair shirt. That everyday life, that the mundane things like tying your tie every day are quite painful often. I certainly can understand this and that just this constant orientation. So not like this, like throwing him a bone every third Tuesday when you remember, or whatever, but a constant orientation that everything that you do, that nothing is mundane, that everything you do over the course of your day could be offered to him any tiny little inconvenience. Right. That. That is a way to holiness. The little way to holiness, as she calls it. 22:02 Wes: Right. 22:02 Erin: So this is very funny twist on that because it's at once St Therese approved and also deeply disrespectful, but in a joking way, like, maybe I'm. Again, maybe I'm reading this wrong or I'm giving the speaker too much credit. I find the speaker very winning, but it's sort of like winking at God, like, God can take the joke. 22:21 Wes: Yeah. This is why I phrased it earlier as, you know, could this be a form of reverence? Is the irony of this compatible with that? But, yeah, I also thought of these humble offerings or these more ordinary things that we do in life as being capable of being turned into a prayer. But, you know, the final note of condescension, my point of view, saying, I will think of you as I descend the stair. 22:44 Erin: That's straight up proof rock, too, right? 22:47 Wes: Yes. 22:48 Erin: Time to turn back and descend the stair. I also just want to point out that the only slant rhyme in this entire poem is cloud and God. Everything else is really chimy. 22:57 Wes: Interesting. 22:58 Erin: Yeah. 22:58 Wes: I did not notice that. Well, we have vine leaves are back. 23:01 Erin: Vine leaves again. Yeah. And the snail track shines on the stones, which I really like. I think of that as an interesting kind of middle state thing with all these elements. You know, the snail track is like the slime, the viscous. The viscous thing. This is maybe, you know, reminiscent of that kind of chaos and the slime out of which we've evolved or something. 23:22 Wes: Yeah, good point. You know, I had associated the dew drops with night and with chaos. And it's also this kind of thing. When you walk through the grass in the morning, you get it all over your shoes. It's wet. Right. So it amniotic maybe. So it's a. Right. As you mentioned, we all come out of the sea. We all come out of the watery, the watery depths and the formless into form. So formlessness into form. Right. The inorganic dew drops and garden stones into biological forms which are more stable and are a good example, right. Of someone standing on an unstable star or unstable formative origins. The organic attains its stability through repetition, really, through, right. Metabolic cycles, cells, you know, at the cellular level. Cellular level, all these processes that. That maintain structure against entropy. But in any case, those processes take inorganic, I mean, ultimately inorganic but non living components and produce something that's living and persistent and stable out of it. You know, in this next invocation of the vine leaves, we get the snail track shining on the stones, the organic leaving its mark on the inorganic. And then the robin is gone now and it's the dew drops on the tree. So I don't know what to make of that because that's another. That reversal goes in the opposite direction, replacing robin with dewdrops. Hmm. Well, this one I think the organic with the inorganic. 24:58 Erin: This one I think of as being less, you know, it's less sonic because it has two less sound verbs in it. So I think of this as being the more visual. It's actually almost cinematic to me. I mean, I think of this stanza as having almost like rapid cuts between close ups of different images. Like we're getting a shot of the dew drops flashing and then a shot of this and that, you know? You know, I like this one, but yeah, the combination, or the different nouns and verbs combining in different ways maybe is just kind of formally doing some of this work of life sort of emerging from the inorganic that you're kind of talking about. So even though the robin disappears, maybe just the combination, the new combination of words here in a slightly different order, so that there's a sort of like, expenditure of energy or new things combining. And then in the last stanza we get a return to the robin and to the organic again in the same combination. But let's do Awaking from a bed of silence shining I rise from the starless Waters of sleep. This is a really funny line to me. I don't know why I think it's. You know, I'm taking it as a little, like, tongue in cheek. I think especially because they're longer. You know, these first lines kind of get a little bit longer. And I think they're longer than the first two lines of any other stanza. So they're a bit awkward. And maybe that's kind of mimicking the slowness of the first moments of. Of waking. But here we're actually in the bed, right? As opposed to in the first stanza. Which kind of, I think, places us maybe in the bed, but only in retrospect and shows it in light of, like, habitual action. It's more about, like, the getting up from the bed rather than being in the bed, you know, so the bed is the bed of silence as the sun is in a shell of silence. And so I like this idea that, like, the bed is being literally made of silence or something. Not quite a bed. This encasement in sleep makes me think of a lot of different things, but I don't want to get ahead of myself. But this idea of boundaries that I think I brought up in part one is something that I see as being an essential theme in this poem. And like, transformation of states, different transformation of different states of matter or different elements kind of mutating or life forming, as I think we were talking about. One of the things that seems to evoke that for me is this bed and being asleep versus waking. That slippage is, I think, a really crucial part of that theme working itself out here. 27:31 Wes: The suggestion seems to be that going from sleep to waking, in a way, is a recapitulation of creation or birth. And now he is the star, and he calls Earth a star at one point. So he is the one who's shining. It's almost as if it's, you know, him waking up as like a star emerging against a starless backdrop. Or maybe he's in the position of the sun itself shining. I rise from the starless waters of sleep. I'm not sure. But in any. Any case, sleep belongs to that chaotic cosmic, divine order, potentially formless order from which formed things, things come. 28:18 Erin: That reminds me of Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner. I think in one of the episodes that we did on that, you pointed out the fact that the sun rises up out of the ocean, right? 28:27 Wes: And then, you know, there's this emphasis. I am the same. So, I mean, this speaks to an old philosophical paradox about identity and how we are the Same. Even though we change so much over time, how our psychological identity stays the same, what the ground of that is. But he suggests that it's a matter of having the same name. But in any case, you know, you get the. You get the sense that he is sort of the stable, unchanging thing in a world of change, including the Earth, which revolves with me, which is. I take it to mean revolves. He's on with me, meaning he's on the Earth. So he's standing on the Earth. The Earth is going around the sun. Yet relative to his perspective, he makes no motion. Right. It appears as if the sun's going around him. And, you know, we don't feel the fact that the earth is going 50,000 miles an hour out of the sun. We don't feel like we're in a speeding car. We feel like it's still. Yeah, I don't know what else to make of that. 29:27 Erin: Yeah, I think sleep and waking and the moments when we just are waking up. Or maybe. Maybe what I'm interested in, in this idea of, like, the boundary. The stars pale silently in a coral sky. So again, we have the stars kind of dying. But another way of putting this, you know, because he puts it this way with dusk in the first stanza, is that they're going to sleep, right? So as we're waking up, the stars are going to sleep. I think that there's a certain sort of heightened awareness at the boundary, at the border between sleep and waking up because we've experienced some other consciousness. We've gone, like, where do we go? Where do we go when we sleep? We're not quite in our bodies, Right. Our bodies are in a kind of stasis. I mean, if we're. If we're lucky and we're not like, sleepwalking or something, they're in a kind of suspended state. And we go somewhere else. And then we have to be. Because we've been somewhere else. We have to be returned to ourselves when we wake up. You know, sometimes we might have the experience of waking up and forgetting where we are. Happened to me a few times over the past week because I just got back to Utah from Connecticut after break and I woke up thinking that I was in Connecticut for a second, you know. Oh, right. I'm still me. I'm still here. I might have had a dream in which I was a vampire or whatever or I was Elon Musk or somebody. Somebody other than me. Right. And now, no, I'm actually me. I'm back. I'm here. This Is the real life. That moment when we wake up is, I think, because it's a border zone, it's where we're aware, or most aware maybe of the strangeness of our existence and the kind of instability of our identity for that reason, because of what happens when we sleep and where we go. And that I think is mimicked in what happens with the stars where they pale silently. Like there's just like our bodies are kind of in stasis. We no longer see the stars. They're being put to sleep. They lose. There's a combination, interesting combination here between paling, which is losing color, and silence. You know, they don't have any sound. And so there's something mimicked between those two images. Then we get like. Actually I'm reading Stanza 8, which I don't want to jump ahead to, but as a dream sequence. The first part of that is like a dream. I don't know if that's how you read it. The horses neighing. 31:45 Wes: You know, you get these images of far off. Right. Compared to the mundane and local. I stand before the mirror and tie my tie once more while waves far off in a pale roast white line crash on a coral shore that was above the sun, far off in a shell of silence. And then now the far off image is one of horses with long white manes, which is quite. It's actually, when you think about it, quite similar to the image of the ocean with the white manes of the crashing waves. Mountains flash in the rose white dusk. So I again I think of. You know, we get this alternation between sublime images, whether natural or cosmic, and then again the mundane images of what he's doing standing in front of the mirror. But say more about the dream. Why? You want to think of it as a dream sequence. 32:34 Erin: Yeah, I think because this breaks the pattern. Right. So we've had eight line stanzas interspersed with four line refrains. And in this stanza we get where there should be a four line stanza and eight line stanza, so it's like a double. And so we get this image, this extra image of the horse and the mountain. And it's very. To me, it's very dreamlike, it's very associative. It's doing this boundary crossing thing where we have horses that we can hear neighing even though they're far off. So they can't be far off from us. We have to be kind of there in that dream space. And then the mountains flash like the dew drops flash in line 35. And so again, this Is this is because of water. So the mountains are black, but they're slick with rain, so they're flashing with light. And the rains that are falling on them. The R A I n is of course, suggestive of rains. R E I N S. Right. And the mountains is kind of like horses. And this image of black and white together, that the blackness of the rain saturating. I'm thinking of like water falling on stone. Right. And making it darker. And something about that saturation of making it darker also enables the light to shine off of it and make it white. And we get that same image of, like, the white horse's mane with the black reins crossing it. So there's a black, white dichotomy that's also being. Yeah. Run together. 34:04 Wes: Good point. There seems to be metamorphoses here. I mean, earlier on, you know, I think the waves have become horses which become mountains. So the boundaries between things are fluid. 34:18 Erin: Right. And that's a very dreamlike thing. And then, you know. And so then he wakes up in the middle of the stanza this time. So it's as if he had just been dreaming. And then he wakes up. It is morning. I stand by the mirror and surprise my soul once more. And this is. Yeah. Where the beginning, typical beginning of the stanza, the refrain of the eight line stanza is embedded in the middle, as though. Yeah. He has to recall himself to the present from a dream state. That's. I think, what surprises his soul is this idea of, like, waking up and being oneself again after this dream where one has departed from the self. And this deja vu. 34:56 Wes: And this is the most. Sorry, go ahead. 34:58 Erin: No, just the deja vu quality of this, like, recognition, like deja vu has this doubling as well. Surprise and familiarity at the same time. Right. We're surprised in deja vu. And what we're surprised by is the sense of familiarity with something that we've seen before. It's an idea that has something both ways. It's black and white at the same time. It's different and the same. I think that's kind of a good way of describing the feeling we get when we wake up and realize we're, oh, we're here, we're the same, we're back where we were before, you know. 35:31 Wes: Yeah. I think if I had to point to a climactic moment in the poem, this would be it, this moment of surprise, because it's a new feeling and it's in a register that's quite different, at least as far as I can tell from the rest of the poem where he seems to be in a state of maybe complacency, you know, in the previous stanza, in a whistling void I stand before my mirror unconcerned and tie my tie. Although of course when he says surprise my soul once more. And maybe it's suggestive of the idea that every time one of these cosmic or sublime images enters his consciousness, that's the surprise. But at the very least we haven't heard it characterized that way up to this point. So we're cued into the fact that this is something of some emotional or psychological significance for him. And maybe I'm wrong to think that he's as condescending as he seemed to be towards God. Right. So the moment of surprise also goes, goes along with the concept of something more oriented towards actual worship or awe, let's say. And the kind of the conceit of the poem is that these awe inspiring things seem to have been dissolved into the mundane. But here I think we get the sense that they maybe live alongside it or kind of rescue him from the mundane by capturing his imagination even when he's involved in a mundane moment. So here he is standing in front of the mirror and he's not thinking about, oh, you know, another boring workday ahead of me. He's thinking in terms of these very interesting images, you know, blue air rushing above his ceiling, the sun's beneath his floor, which, right again, I take to be the stars above Australia. 37:13 Erin: Yeah, that's great. 37:14 Wes: Maybe that's too literal. So one might, you know, what I've called condescension, where it might think, well, if the sun is beneath him, then it's really beneath him. But in fact, one might also say it's actually just an awe inspiring idea and we ought not to take the beneathness to literally. And we ought not, I think, as you've suggested from the very beginning, take his irony to necessarily entail blasphemy. 37:39 Erin: Well, it puts him in certainly in a compromised position. He's in a high pressure, I mean, he's in a pressure cooker in a way. Right. It's almost like he's been hypnotized. You know, like these hypnosis shows where in performance where they establish that, I don't know, the person being hypnotized is like super afraid of snakes or something, or they're afraid of heights and then when they're hypnotized they go up onto a tightrope or something and then all of a sudden they look down or they realize they're On a platform and they look down when they wake up and it's like, oh my gosh, they freak out, you know, so there's something of that here. Like he wakes up and he looks down and he realizes the precarious, terrifying situation he's in. He's in this high pressure. Literally he's being pushed down from above, right. Because the blue air is rushing above him and there are suns beneath his floor, which implies that there's this heat or pressure coming up from below as well. Right. So those moments when we're hyper aware of the perilousness of our existence, the smallness of ourselves, you know, those moments of like hyper awareness of just how vast the universe. Universe is and how small we are, are moments like that. Like we're being woken up from a trance, you know, the trance of modern life or of just not even modern life, just life, just human existence, just kind of having to go along to get along and do various things. Right. When we wake up from that, that it's like we have to kind of suppress that if it comes at an inopportune moment because it's this feeling of intense pressure and hyper awareness. 39:05 Wes: Yeah, very good. It doesn't stand out as a. As an obvious epiphany moment, but if there were an epiphany, that would be it. Maybe this would be Senlin's version of that. And then what follows is an epilogue after that sort of psychological climax. So I ascend from darkness. So again, it seems to be another reference to creation and formative origins and coming from nothing and depart on the winds of space, for I know not where. So he may be getting in his car to go to work, or he could be walking to work, but also the Earth is moving through space around the sun, and that's the journey we're always on. And so instead of saying, as I get up in the morning, get my car and go to work, I ascend from the darkness, I wake up, I come out of sleep. And then the more relevant journey is not what my car is doing relative to the Earth, but what the Earth is doing relative to the sun and the destination, for I know not where. Of course, there is no destination, it's just going in a circle. But it's another way of saying we don't know the point of existence. Nevertheless, my watch is wound, the key is in my pocket, right. We have these implements, we measure time and we have keys that will unlock rooms, even though we don't have keys that are going to unlock the mysteries of the universe. 40:26 Erin: Right. Yeah. I love that. Yeah. This is at the moment of highest psychological pressure. He has to suppress that. We all have to go to work. We can't sit around thinking all day about how we're just a speck of dust, dust on a marble in a vast void. And therefore it doesn't matter if we brush our teeth or go to work. 40:42 Wes: The Earth is going to be around for billions of years. 40:45 Erin: That's right, yeah. 40:47 Wes: Billions of years. 40:49 Erin: Yeah. Yeah. So we have to. We have to suppress that. We have to suppress that hyper awareness and convince ourselves that we have dominion over time and space as symbolized by the watch and the key, Right? Convincing ourselves that, no, we. It's okay. Like, we have ownership over this. We've got this. You know, we're. And of course, it's like, comically absurd, the suggestion that we would have dominion over time and space because we have a watch and a key to a little studio apartment all 200 or so square feet of it, right. That somehow that can calm us down and make us feel better about our sort of cosmic minisculeness, but it's enough to suppress that hyper awareness for the time being until the next time we wake up from a crazy dream and wonder who we are and how we got here. 41:38 Wes: There are clouds in heaven and a God among the stars. And I will go thinking of him as I might think of Daybreak. So perhaps the suggestion is that just communion with the natural world, because I think we can reconceive the cosmic in terms of the natural always. We can naturalize it so that we don't necessarily have to be thinking these deep thoughts. God is just there among the stars. I get up and, you know, if I get up in the morning and there's still stars out, and I'm. He's there, whether I'm attending to it or not, or some kind of principle like that is there. And so I will go thinking of him as I might think of Daybreak, so that thinking of God is not just some event, right, that happens in church, but that it could be a part of ordinary consciousness. I guess that's what I. I'm trying to say, right? Humming a tune, I know something quite familiar. Not an extraordinary rupture of the fabric of our daily existence. 42:38 Erin: And it's the light and the dark, right? Because we've now established a connection between God and the sun and Daybreak and the sort of source, but also the cloud, as he explicitly says. And the shadows across the windows, I think, are the clouds in heaven. The Shadows are being made by the clouds, it seems. So there's something of both clarity and mystery involved. Like, you know, the tendency for me to imagine a God that's both cloud and sun. That's almost like, you know, the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Right. But there's also the, you know, getting away from that. There's just this idea of like, there's both clarity and mystery. There's sort of like, okay, we're going to think of God to the extent that we can think of him, which is this someone both embedded in the structure of the day and also remote from us. There are things about him that we can know and things that we can't know. And accepting that God is both the sun and the cloud, the thing revealed and the thing hidden, seems to be part of that ability to have a kind of normal or, you know, not like terrifying or crazy making relationship to the divine. 43:43 Wes: And it helps to think of him as lonely and shy. Yeah, just kidding. 43:47 Erin: And to hum. Hum a tune, you know, when you get scared of a scarier gut. Right. Like, that's almost like what you do when you're scared. You hum a song to yourself. Maybe it's the three clear tones of the robin. 44:00 Wes: It's not whistle while you work, it's whistle while you what? 44:05 Erin: While you get. 44:05 Wes: Have an existential crisis. 44:07 Erin: Well, it's like Sigourney Weaver singing you are my lucky star. At the end of Alien. 44:12 Wes: Right. 44:15 Erin: When you're getting attacked by a terrifying existential threat, you sing to calm yourself down. 44:22 Wes: Okay, so we're almost out of time, but do we have anything else to say about why the vines are trying to remind him of something again? Why they're tapping at his window? Heathcliff, let me enter your window. I'm so cold. Just give a Wuthering Heights reference. Are the vines trying to get in? Are they lonely? Tune in for the. Yeah. What is this? Yeah. Why is he ending it it this way? And you know, why is the stanza repeated almost verbatim? I don't know that I have a good answer for that. Except for the potential mediating role of the natural world and life. Right. Between the divine and the inorganic. Or the divine and the mundane. 45:02 Erin: Yeah, maybe if there was a tagline for this episode, it would be like the cosmic domesticated. That's nature, you know, that's the vine leaves tapping. 45:09 Wes: Well, I was just thinking of life will find a way. 45:11 Erin: Life will find a way. 45:13 Wes: What's his name? Yeah, who's that? Actor? Or life finds a way. 45:18 Erin: Is that the old man? Or is it Sam Neill, the Australian guy? Or Jeff Goldblum? Or the old man is Richard. 45:26 Wes: It's Jeff Goldblum. Yeah. Yeah. So just. Yeah, you gotta think of Jeff Goldblum saying that. 45:30 Erin: There you go. 45:31 Wes: In his kind of like quasi creepy, but also charming, portentous, charmingly pretentious and pretentious way. But life finds a way. 45:43 Erin: Yeah. I don't know if maybe now this is his work window that the vine is tapping on. But, you know, the only difference here between this stanza and the one that it almost copies, stanza two is, as I think we already pointed out, tap at the window rather than my window. So I thought maybe there was something here about how he learned to, like, take less ownership over the course of the poem. But that can't be right. I mean, on the one hand, the tune of the world, the tune of nature, if that's the tune that he hums, is a tune that he knows. So that suggests harmony with nature rather than separation from it. On the other, he has to have his talismans or his, you know, his holy relics that he carries with him, his watch and his key to reassure him of his mastery over nature rather than equality with it or harmony with it so that he doesn't go insane at being, you know, in the void. So I'm not sure. I'm not sure if I can say that the slippage to the article there means that there's something evolved about the last stanza or about his relationship to nature or his consciousness somehow. But it's certainly, it's complicated by what precedes it. 46:49 Wes: Okay, that was fun. Thank you. 46:52 Erin: Thank you. And thanks to everyone who listens. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast. Please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to lettersoubtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook at Subtext Podcast and on Twitter njoysubtext.