To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary an the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he or she has been born -- the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other peopleęs experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it be-devils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.
Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception
Huxley said we are all "island universes." If this is so, then the human mind is the last frontier. More elusive than the question of life on Mars, is the question of what it feels like for you, yes you, to be reading this now. Writing, of anything from technical manuals to poetry, is an attempt to express something exactly and succienctly using metaphors. Obstacles are met in the mind of the writer, in deciding what this idea "feels like" in language, and in the mind of the reader, who must translate these metaphors back to useful ideas. The process is confounded by our inability to confirm anotheręs autonomous experiance ( or even existence). That we continue this process -- attempting to communicate in metaphor (language) -- is at once an evolutionary given and the most collective demonstration of faith in our (or perhaps only my) universe.
The power of our individual minds to construct plausible reality is evidenced in dreams. Most peopleęs first brush with existentialism is probably the thought, "Maybe this is all just a dream." The often indiscernible line between dream and waking realities or personal and consensual realities is expressed often in the lyrics of the Grateful Dead. "Stella Blue" gives us, "it seems like all this life / was just a dream," and from "Box of Rain," there is, "this is all a dream we dreamed one afternoon long ago." Images like these pervade much of the writing Robert Hunter did for the Gratful Dead. The primary lyricist of the Dead, Hunter also expressed the alternative perceptions of the world (and so, necessarily, the personal realities) that exist for each individual in "Box of Rain," "Look into any eyes / you find by you / you can see / clear through another day." In an essay he wrote responding to what Huxley might have termed a "data-based" interpretation of the song, "Franklinęs Tower," Hunter provides a detailed analysis of his own song, which includes several literary references.
In doing this, Hunter illustrates the process of metaphor-translation in poetry. Hunter took in data (metaphor) from other authors. His mind then translated this to meaning, correlated this meaning with a meaning he was trying to express, and then re-coded it in metaphor in a song. In further analyzing it, he interprets his own metaphor. Thus, analysis dulls the accuracy of the message one generation (if the reader could interpret the original metaphor). Of course, the analysis also adds another layer to the meaning of the poem as well as providing a dictionary of the metaphors in it for those not familiar with them. Hunter acknowledged both these phenomena, saying that "attempts by language to overdetermine language are doomed out the door," and that, "My allusions are, admittedly, often not immediately accessible to those whose literary resources are broadly different than my own...."
In an interview, Hunter referred to Wallace Stevens as a poet similar to himself in technique. Stevens wrote "The Man With the Blue Guitar," a poem on which "Stella Blue" was based in part. The same translation problem may be observed in the poem's lines, "They said, "You have a blue guitar / You do not play things as they are." The man replied, "Things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar." That Stevens may have been inspired in writing this poem by seveal paintings, including Picasso's "Old Man with a Guitar" adds another intriguing layer to the trail of translation here. The poem says that art changes things. Since art is the interpretation of something by the artist, interpretation changes things.
Since art is interpreted by the viewer, reader, listener, or other recipient, the act of understanding art is art. We change things by seeking to understand them, or as Stevens says in "Postcard From the Volcano," "with our bones / we left much more, left what still is / the look of things / left what we felt / At what we saw." Hunter echoes this idea in his essay on "Franklin's Tower," "The meaning(s), or lack thereof, ascribed by others to an example of lyric work are not part of the work. They are separate "works." Stevens, both an insurance executive and famous poet, was also sensitive to the tension between "reality" and "art" (or interpretation). He said, "realists, who exist without imagination... have it your way... the world is ugly. And the people are sad. Was he really disparaging "reality," or a tireless devotion to the consensual "data" or "word" based reality?
A portion of his correspondance with Jose-Rodriguez Feo supports the latter. He advises his friend that the only way to happiness is to be like his burro, Pompilio, who Stevens says does not alter his perception of reality with "feelings." Stevens says, "Give him a bunch of carrots and swear at him in a decent way, just to show your interest in reality." The poetęs understanding of poetry as an attempt at direct exchange of metaphor -- and in that, of highly efficient and effective communication, is suggested in his comments when recieving the National Book Award in 1955, "It is not what I have written, but what I should have like to have written that constitutes my true poems, the uncollected poems I have not had the strength to realize."
Poetry is, a Murray Krieger suggests in an essay on language and poetry, an attempt to •break through to the complexities of our inner experiance... and to open us beyond ourselves." It is our hope to reclaim in our communications the metaphors by which we learn to call feelings, ideas, and senses by names and to convey them exactly as they are in our existence. Poetry then, is not just, as Robert Frost said, "that which cannot be translated," but ideally, that which does not have to be.
http://www.uccs,edu/~ddodd/silber.html
http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/steves/home.html
http://www.courant.com/st/people/stevens/html
http://elias.eng.fr/surfaces/vol4/krieger.html
http://www.mt.cs.cmu.edu/ehu/release/doors.html
