A Horror of Thoughts

Reading Wallace Stevens' "Man Carrying Thing"

Man Carrying Thing

by Wallace Stevens

The poem must resist the intelligence

Almost successfully. Illustration:

A brune figure in winter evening resists

Identity. The thing he carries resists

The most necessitous sense. Accept them, then,

As secondary (parts not quite perceived

Of the obvious whole, uncertain particles

Of the certain solid, the primary free from doubt,

Things floating like the first hundred flakes of snow

Out of a storm we must endure all night,

Out of a storm of secondary things),

A horror of thoughts that suddenly are real.

We must endure our thoughts all night, until

The bright obvious stands motionless in cold.

The poem is calling us to know something. It feels like my intelligence will never reach it. And yet it is there in print for us to read, and read again. It is there for us to recite in incantatory meditation. We can not see the man, can not quite see the object. But both are in the painting, the painting being revealed to us in impressionistic strokes —strokes that as they hit the light are snowflakes, snow surrounding us everywhere, surrounding the man and his parcel. We see a desolate winter like that in the “Snow Man,” who

“nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”

And here we sit in our (hopefully) heated homes knowing this winter, but not quite.

The Most Necessitous Sense

What is this? It is implied in the previous sentence: “identity.” We are deprived of this classification of the object until we encounter it with imagination. The image is not complete until recognized by our categorizing minds, affixing it into place in the order of our intellectual grammar.

But the more we try to do this, the more snowflakes emerge, first obscuring what we’d intended to be our focus, but then becoming themselves the new, more complete focus. It’s like trying to define something, but in every statement seeing exceptions to the rule which contest the will to order. Suddenly I wonder if I even know what the word means, whether it’s even really real. If it’s not simply some communicative shorthand — a stand-in for the idea itself that garners just enough consent to function in a sentence, but which will fall apart when I attempt to express it in conversation.

The brune figure, represented with just-too-little detail to make him fully human, a man with an identity. An identity would entail a name, relations with others, a telos toward which he’s carrying this what-is-it, this “thing.”

We are outside of time, outside of the context that brings us as readers into full reality. We must place it, poem with title, in the corpus “Wallace Stevens” — a gallery of many rooms of high, white walls, on which the titles of the poems are printed as text panels labeling the poems, themselves framed ornately in gilt-painted rectangles. This is the place we have stopped to rest on a bench facing the wall, noticing this poem uniquely among all the others as a monument for meditation. And we see in the center of it this figure, this object.

The Meditation

We have accepted the secondary thoughts as garland to the Primary, the question: “Who is this man, and what is he carrying? Where is he going?” But we can not but see that the poem is entirely composed of these secondary thoughts, they are the very content of the Primary. Without them, the Primary does not emerge, there is no figure to consider.

The “horror of thoughts that suddenly are real.” This is not a gallery but a convenience of our Mind that has served as a momentary second-hand to convey the real via substitution. But this is not what is really real. What is real is that we cannot know this poem, cannot know what it is conveying. We can only know what we are thinking about it in a desire to make sense, that most necessitous sense, that Primary sense, which can only be made by our imaginative participation. We cannot see it on the wall, must know it by our knowing, which can either create or destroy.

That destructive capacity, our ability to destroy the entire metaphor, is always with us. The forms emerge and the forms decay, entropic, seasonal. And yet we must return to the sense, like Sisyphus, imagining ourselves happy as we lose focus and return, always another figure, misrepresented, lacking full identity until we find a means to create one.

But our ability to create an identity is always already dependent upon our relations with others, always new words slipping into the conversation and challenging our assumptions, our metaphors, our galleries, to become newer, larger fields of more and more diffuse meaning. Always another fluttering of wind to transform the air into yet more snow.

The Resistance

The poem resists our intellect’s capacity to know. The horror is that Life also resists our intellect’s capacity to know. And yet we cannot live that way, cannot live and move throughout the world without the need to know. As Vervaeke says ad infinitum, there are more ways to know than mere proposition. The evocative statement at the beginning of the poem: “the poem must resist.” In order to know, we must participate, we must proceed, we must take perspective.

For example, what is it to be a poem? How could you read me this way? Why can’t you Love me? It is tragic to be a poem, to never truly, purely be without this incessant reading.

Yet what a delight to be alive in the mouth and throat of the reader, in her eyes and ears as her fingers type these words. It is a lightness that is like snow — “cloud at once, and shower” (Coleridge). Not a solid object, just as likely to dissolve as disappear into a flood of other snowflakes flurrying into drift. All the uniqueness of your crystalline patterning obsolete amidst the snowbank, now another form entirely.

The Obvious Whole

“But whoever endures to the end —this one will be saved.” (Matthew 24:13)

“We must endure our thoughts all night,” Stevens writes, “until / the bright obvious stands motionless in cold.” We are the nothing of the Snow Man, in possession neither of the brune figure nor the thing carried. Neither are we in possession of the poem, which will remain on the wall, in the book, in our memory until recalled.

Nevertheless, we shall endure. “The keys to spiritual development,” says “Mr. Nothing,” John Butler “is less me, more God. Not my will, but thine.” “Spirit,” he says, “may strengthen to bear an unbearable world.”

This is the Spirit in “Man Carrying Thing.” The breath which fills my voice as I incant the poem, knowing what I already know, which is knowing all that I don’t know. But I may forebear, knowing this not-knowing. This is the center to which I return, “man carrying thing.” But the yoke is easy, and its burden light, and it need not be carried uphill — need not be carried anywhere at all.

We’re nearly there.

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