The Beautiful Vision

The ultimate secrets of nature will not be revealed until man has stopped the self-destructive activity that prevents him from seeing what kind of world he is really in. The real world is beyond time, but can only be reached by a process that goes on in time. As Eliot says, only through time is time conquered.

Northrop Frye, The Great Code, 76.

And what, we may ask, is the "real world"? For Wallace Stevens, it was the phenomenal world as experienced and negotiated by the imagination. Stevens was following the aesthetics of Santayana (the Moor) who seems to have somehow intuited or imbibed (or arrived at coincidentally, perhaps through a creative misreading of Spinoza) a version of Ibn 'Arabi's metaphysical aesthetics--a version liberated from its metaphysical commitments.

Frye may have been more of an Akbarian than he knew. If so, he betrayed an anti-modernist streak. I follow Stevens (and Wittgenstein) into metaphysical minimalism--a familiar modernist move. That said, I affirm the beautiful vision that Stevens coined the "Supreme Fiction." Only a naive realism could doubt the power of the imagination to shape perceptions and, hence, influence one's conduct in the found world. In his "whole harmonium" Stevens articulated a sober Romanticism: one that eschews both the naive realism of the Positivists and the insupportable magical-idealism of many Romanticists (not to mention religious believers of all stripes). Stevens saw with both eyes (an Akbarian trope): the Knight of Doleful Countenance is never permitted to undertake his adventures without the assistance of his loyal, and earth-bound, Squire.