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Engaging with a memespace of paradoxical complexity
Anticipating When Blackbirds Sing Chinese (Part #8)
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Blackbird as enigma: With "blackbird" as focal theme of this argument about complexity and its comprehension, it is curiously appropriate to discover that it figures as the central motif in a much-cited enigma by one of the most famed American poets. As succinctly expressed by Kent Palmer:
Wallace Stevens was a poet who thought about the nature of poetry and wrote his poetry about it. Wallace Stevens was one of the first truly modern poets who wrote self reflexive experimental poems that challenged all the norms of poetry of his time changing the course of the poetic tradition (Idea, Essence, Existence and Archetype, 2001).
The enigma that has evoked so much commentary is his "poem" Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (1917). As an enigma, any engagement with it (or with comment about it) is itself problematic. It effectively calls for a creative way of looking at "ways of looking" and the imaginative responses it might evoke.
This challenge is helpful in clarifying the connectivity amongst the associations to "blackbird" emerging from the above argument. It conforms to the tradition of literary paradox, namely an anomalous juxtaposition of incongruous ideas for the sake of striking exposition or unexpected insight (Nicholas Rescher, Paradoxes: their roots, range, and resolution, 2001). This aesthetic tradition has been articulated by Cleanth Brooks (The Language of Paradox, 1947) arguing that:
Yet there is a sense in which paradox is the language appropriate and inevitable to poetry. It is the scientist whose truth requires a language purged of every trace of paradox; apparently the truth which the poet utters can be approached only in terms of paradox.
For Viorica Patea (The Poetics of the Avant-garde : modernist poetry and visual arts. SPELL: Swiss papers in English language and literature, 26, 2011):
Influenced by experimental concerns with structure and multiplicity of form, the modernist poet seeks to achieve a serial equivalent to Cubist multiple perspectives. This is Stevens's favorite technique, evident in poems such as Sea Surface Full of Clouds, Metaphors of a Magnifico and Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, in which a landscape, a narrative or the portrait of a blackbird is viewed from different angles and rendered by a series of variations and rhetorical riddles.
Given recognition of the undeniably enigmatic nature of Stevens' account of the blackbird, it is appropriate to frame further consideration of it by recalling attitudes evoked by a disparate range of other well-known enigmas: The Sphinx, Mona Lisa's enigmatic smile, riddle, koan, uncertainty principle, Fermat's Last Theorem, Voynich manuscript, Enigma of Bologna, Godel's incompleteness theorems. One website frames discussion of the poem as The Dao of Wallace Stevens.
Given the significance of the Enigma Machine for encoding meaning during World War II, is there a case for considering the singing blackbird as an "enigma machine" in its own right? How then to comprehend the integrative nature of the memetic system of which the "13 ways" are indicative? Expressed otherwise, is the singing blackbird to be compared with a graffiti artist -- variously inscribing its encoded identity into the memescape through sound? In contrast with conventional thinking, might human identity "operating under the memetic radar" then be understood as requiring the interrelationship of "13 ways" in order to be decoded? Could the engima of human identity then be compared metaphorically to crop circles in memespace?
The issue here is to find a fruitful way of discussing a paradoxical blackbird without engaging in extensive commentary on other potentially more insightful commentaries -- themselves effectively constituting "ways of looking at a blackbird".
Varieties of blackbird: A first observation of relevance is the lack of clarity, or mention, of whether Stevens is referring to the songster blackbird, a crow or a raven. Some have assumed it is a raven. Stanza V, containing The blackbird whistling, suggests that it may be the songster blackbird rather than raven or crow. The calls of a raven are rarely described as including a whistle (Common Raven Sounds). For Simon Armitage (The Poetry of Birds, 2009) it is the red-winged blackbird that is the most likely species for the poem.
From an etymological perspective, it may not immediately be clear why the name "blackbird", first recorded in 1486, was applied to this species, but not to one of the various other common black English birds, such as the carrion crow, raven, rook or jackdaw. However, in Old English, and in modern English up to about the 18th century, "bird" was used only for smaller or young birds, and larger ones such as crows were called "fowl". At that time, the blackbird was therefore the only widespread and conspicuous "black bird" in the British Isles.
Three unrelated birds are called Blackbird. Red-Winged Blackbird (Agelaius phoeniceus) and Yellow-head Blackbird (Xanthocephalus xanthocephalus) of North America are members of the Troupial Family. Blackbird (Turdus merula) of Europe is a close cousin of American Robin (Turdus migratorius).
In accepting the requirement for a multiplicity of perspectives, any sense of a singular blackbird can be understood as a form of interpretative vortex, possibly a form of cognitive blackhole -- a psychoactive interface with a mirroring function, or a catalyst for imagination. (papers ***) This recalls the Zen tradition of engagement with a koan.
With Stevens' failure to distinguish which blackbird is the focus of his poem, the scene is set to evoke commentary on its relation to the "blackbirds" of other highly influential poets, and the influence of their perspectives on each other:
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Raven (1798): Subtitled OR, A Christmas Tale, Told by a School-boy to His Little Brothers and Sisters), includes the following lines:
Underneath an old oak tree
There was of swine a huge company
...
Next came a Raven, that liked not such folly:
He belonged, they did say, to the witch Melancholy!
Blacker was he than blackest jet,
Flew low in the rain, and his feathers not wet.
...
Where then did the Raven Go?
He went high and low,
Over hill, over dale, did the black Raven go.
Many Autumns, many Springs
Travelled he with wandering wings...
Round and round flew the Raven, and cawed to the blast.
He heard the last shriek of the perishing souls--
...
Right glad was the Raven, and off he went fleet,
And Death riding home on a cloud he did meet,
And he thank'd him again and again for this treat:
They had taken his all, and revenge it was sweet!
- Edgar Allan Poe's Raven (1845): One early review notes:
In this weird and wonderful creation, art holds equal dominion with feeling. The form not only never yields to the sweep of the thought, but that thought, touching and fearful as is its tone, is made to turn and double fantastically, almost playfully, in many of the lines. The croak of the raven is taken up and moulded into rhyme by a nimble, if not a mocking spirit; and, fascinating as is the rhythmic movement of the verse, it appears like the dancing of the daughter of Herodias. (The Poetical Works of Edgar A. Poe, The Atlantic Monthly, 4, October 1859).
A later review of Poe, renowned for his tales of mystery and the macabre, traces the considerable influence of Coleridge, noting that:
... in imitation of Coleridge, he humanized his redoubtable raven. His mind was like a mirror in the precision with which it reflected the prevailing tendencies of his time, and with no more intention. The effect of Coleridge's influence on Poe has never been properly estimated.... Not only did Coleridge exert a general influence, which Poe shared with every other man of letters in this country, but he transmitted a special and unique influence to him alone. This had already made of Coleridge a great poet, while to it Poe owes the tardy measure of fame which has been accorded him.... Poe assumes that a talking bird is the most natural thing in the world. In his so-called Juvenile Poems ... thirteen years before The Raven was published, he already makes use of birds as symbols of Nemesis or Destiny, and many of the passages are nearly identical in thought with some of Coleridge's lines. (The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, The Atlantic Monthly, 462, April 1896)
- Ted Hughes' Crow (1970): This is a collection of poems based around the character Crow, which borrows extensively from many world mythologies, notably Christian mythology (The Life and Songs of the Crow, 1970). As noted by Neil Roberts:
Crow holds a uniquely important place in Hughes oeuvre. It heralds the ambitious second phase of his work, lasting roughly from the late sixties to the late seventies, when he turned from direct engagement with the natural world to unified mythical narratives and sequences. It was his most controversial work: a stylistic experiment which abandoned many of the attractive features of his earlier work, and an ideological challenge to both Christianity and humanism. (Crow: From the Life and Songs of Crow, The Ted Hughes Society Journal, 2012)
Symbolic associations: So framed, elements of traditional symbolism with respect to blackbirds can be evoked as seems appropriate. In a technological world, increasingly disassociated from nature, it is credible that significance previously carried by animal species is attached to technological devices. This is especially obvious in the case of the animal names by which many military vehicles are distinguished, notably in the case of planes (F-15 Eagle, F-16 Fighting Falcon, Me-262 Swallow, FW-200 Condor, P-36 Hawk, Curtiss SOC Seagull, Fw190 Shrike, RQ-11 Raven). With respect to this argument, this is evident in the case of the SR-71 Blackbird -- and the functions with which it has been associated.
This highlights the question of the symbolism potentially appropriate to any interpretation -- especially as it may clarify the significance associated with the complex of references to blackbird above. However, rather than the more obvious transition from biosphere to technosphere, the concern here is with how this might play out in a transition from technosphere to noosphere -- as it frames any memespace.
Curiously, with respect to blackbird symbolism, the blackbird songster seldom figures. Whether distinguished or not, both crows and ravens have appeared in a number of different mythologies and folklores throughout the ages, as noted below (supplemented by the respective collective nouns).
| Symbolic associations | |
| "blackbird" (possibly conflating or confusing specific associations) | raven and crow (undistinguished, notably as with Le Corbeau) |
|
|
| raven (as variously considered) | crow (as variously considered) |
|
|
| blackbird (as songster) |
|
Challenging ambiguity of relevance to governance: There is clearly a degree of ambiguity to the above associations. Furthermore, irrespective of the above, it is curious to note the association of crow/raven with carrion and to recognize that the image of the blackbird songster does not merit the association with "turd" (as a consequence of the Latin name, shared by the thrush family Turdidae of the genus Turdus).
More relevant to this argument is the remark of John Marzluff and Tony Angell (In the Company of Crows and Ravens, 2007) that: Crows and people share similar traits and social strategies. To a surprising extent, to know the crow is to know ourselves. In his review of that book, Paul A. Johnsgard notes:
On examining various Nebraska birds under ultraviolet light a few years ago, I was amazed at the visual transformation of a crow into a stunning creature shimmering with a violet iridescence that reminded me of some birds of paradise . It made me realize that our human visual abilities are sometimes pitifully inadequate to appreciate the real beauty of our often seemingly mundane natural world.
In the USA the term "Jim Crow", meaning "Negro", was a pejorative political expression by 1838. With respect to perception of politicians themselves, even more relevant are the collective nouns by which they may be variously framed: a lie of politicians, an equivocation of politicians, or an odium of politicians. Any problematic association with blackbirds is not helped by the black-suited clothing propensity of male politicians worldwide.
As being characteristic of crows and ravens, to which they are often compared, use of "caw" and "cawing" is frequently made in commentary with respect to politicians, as with the early remark of William Cobbett:
"Caw me caw thee", as Lord Byron describes the tickling and the complimenting which passed between the King and the Scotch. accordingly, the Lord Mayor having cawed the "consistent advocate", thought it but right that he should caw the city. He thought it right that he should caw somebody; and eloquent as he is, and full of invention, he seems to have thought it impossible to caw the Lord Mayor; and so he fell to cawing the city (Cobbett's Political Register, 48, 1823, p. 79)
| A "murder of crows" ? |
 |
| or a meeting of the G8 Group? |
More recently Gray Matthews has argued:
Instead of being sullied, again, into the complicit role of cawing like crows on a fence, we should be developing a more devastating -- less dismissive -- critique of the hollowness of discourse masquerading as serious political communication, by focusing on its futility, not mere banality, and the egregious losses of speech and the preciousness of time itself. We need, therefore, to better understand language use when it is useless. (Practical Advice from Communication Experts, Communication Currents, 6 , 2011, 4)
For R. J. Derosa (Of Crows, Poetry, and Politicians):
I often stop and watch a crow cawing atop a pole. Each caw takes a lot of energy.... Politicians also make a lot of noise. I would rather listen to birds any day. Crows and politicians share one similarity; they both puff themselves up prior to emitting sound. Given a choice, I will always prefer crow-talk (RJ Derosa's Weblog, 27 March 2012). [emphasis added]
Corresponding curiously to the work of Stevens, is the focus on "tin crow" in the the work of renowned Chinese poet Bei Dao (Daydream, 1986; The August Sleepwalker, 1990). As a Chinese imperial symbol, the crow is traditionally depicted with three legs drawn within a solar disk: sunrise, midday and sunset. In his review, Tony Wheldon (Blackbirds: Contemporary Chinese Poetry, The American Poetry Review, 1991) argues that he:
... grapples here with the sense of an epoch coming to an end, with books -- and with history -- awaiting the flames, a "tin crow" presiding over all. The crow -- especially as it's described as a "tin crow...on a marble pedestal" -- is the first of the Chinese Imperial emblems and represents Yang, or the active life of the emperor. This tin crow has a dual significance, representing the inorganic nature of the present regime while it conjures up images of a despot-filled past repeating itself in the present. As with so many younger Chinese poets, Bei Dau's concerns focus on the eternal rhythms that bind culture. Bei Dau's crow might as well have been a phoenix. For the past is constantly rising, transmogrified, from its own ashes in China. Although Bei Dau's poetry, on the whole, puzzles me -- it 's mostly poorly translated and hermetically obscure -- his is the most powerful poetry written in China today.
Use of "raven" in commentary on "cawing" by politicians is readily to be associated with their "ravenous" appetite for resources -- whether personally, for a constituency, or for a lobby with which they are complicit. This in turn is readily associated with "vultures" -- as used with regard to "vulture fund", for example. A form of conflation of associations of crow and raven could be recognized in use of "craven politicians" (Craven, Dishonest, Corrupt Politician: A Definition, Daily Kos, 13 November 2013; The Dispossessed and the Greedy Capitalists, Craven Politicians, Scheming Bankers... Human Wrongs Watch, 22 October 2011; Distraught father blames 'craven, irresponsible politicians and the NRA', Daily Mail, 25 May 2014)
| Global governance by a "murder of crows" -- the G8 Group ? |
 |
In French culture in particular, the crow/raven has acquired particular significance in books and film concerning a mysterious writer of poison-pen letters in a community Le Corbeau (1943/1951). In recognizing any capacity of crows to whistle, there is some irony to the manner in which politicians may be "whistled at" as an expression of disapprobation.
The crow figures in collections of fables, as in that of Jean de La Fontaine (The Crow and The Fox). Recollection of one of Aesop's Fables, merits further reflection given the above-mentioned iridescence of crows under ultraviolet light:
If we are to believe Aesop, crows are known to take the color shed by peacocks, replacing their "own rusty black ones [feathers]" with the "borrowed plumage" in order to strut amongst the flock of the favored (The Vain Crow). (A Cawing Kakaphonic Constellation of Crows, Or, The Refrain of Just "Bird-wisdom", On Icarian Seas, 3 July 2013)
Again, in the light of Stevens' poem, caution has been expressed regarding any particular interpretation. For Richard Allen Blessing (Wallace Stevens' "Whole Harmonium", 1954):
Peter McNamara [The Multi-faceted Blackbird and Wallace Stevens' Poetic Vision, 1964] agrees with Rosenthal [The Modern Poets: a critical introduction, 1960] that the blackbird brings awareness of death, but emphasizes that the awareness of death is important... only as a stimulus to man's explorations of the things of this life. It is true enough that ravens, crows, and other birds of black hue are often associated with disaster and death in literature and popular imagination. Nevertheless, it seems to me that to see the blackbird as representing death or any other single possibility from all thirteen points of view is to misread the poem. As the title implies, the point of Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird is that in thirteen different contexts the imagination is able to provide thirteen different values for a bird which would appear to the utilitarian or the scientist to have only one value, one way of being looked at. (p. 26)
It is understandably appropriate that the SR-71 should be named as "Blackbird", benefitting primarily from associations to the sleek skills of ravens -- as valued in use of that variant in naming many sports teams. That said, there is a strange contrast between the masculine values associated with "ravens" and the more feminine values associated with "songbirds". Curiously, in the sense of being "invisible" to radar through stealth technology, SR-71 shares a form of "blackness" with the blackbird songster -- whose song typically emanates from an invisible source.
With respect to eliciting information from informants, the focus in the first case may be on getting them to "croak" and only secondarily on ensuring that they "sing". Strangely evidence is currently emerging that John McCain is alleged to have been labelled as a "songbird" when held captive by the North Vietnamese (Wayne Dupree, EXPOSED: Veterans voice displeasure and non-trust of John "Songbird" McCain who spilled his guts to get out of torture, 3 September 2013). Within Chinese military culture, references to songbirds relate primarily to those women singing military songs.
This pattern helpfully frames the strategic opportunity of blackbird songsters in operating "under the memetic radar" characteristic of conventional mindsets -- unable as they are to associate strategic value with aesthetic communication skills.
Reality and imagination: Comparative comments on these different blackbirds have been variously made. For Paulina Ambrozy (The Black Bird of Edgar Allan Poe and Wallace Stevens' Thirteen Blackbirds, Studia Anglica Posnaniensia: international review of English Studies, 2003), both Poe and Stevens perceived imagination as the ultimate faculty of the human mind capable of giving shape and meaning to the world's chaos -- but with different approaches:
The Raven embodies Poe's search for a total disjunction between the real and the imagined world whereas Stevens' poems present a close interrelation between those two realms. Poe's work shows that the ultimate meaning should be sought beyond the physical world, out of time and space, while Stevens argues that the tangible real, the sensuous world with the multiplicity of perspectives it offers is the powerful substance for his imagination and a necessary element of his poetic landscape....
The opening lines of the The Raven and [Stevens'] Domination of Black establish strikingly similar settings: in The Raven it is "the bleak December," "a dreary midnight," and a chamber lit by "dying ember"; in Stevens' work it is a windy autumn night and a room warmed by the fire. In the latter however, the inner-outer relation is more dynamic. While the student's abode is isolated from the world outside, Stevens' room is open for the contact with reality.
Given the above-mentioned relation between the peacock and the crow in Aesop's The Vain Crow, it is curious to note that Stevens' Domination of Black focuses on peacocks and their calls -- in contrast to the focus on "blackbirds" in the other poem. For Kenneth Lincoln (Sing with the Heart of a Bear: fusions of Native and American Poetry, 1890-1999, 2000):
To begin, the trochaic title is strangely reverse of blank verse (the only pentameter in the poem): Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. The trochee's insistently reverse rocking, beginning with that superstitious surd, thirteen, an indivisible number with no stable root, sets up an inverse poetics, or radical set of "Ways" -- that is, passages or mental journeys -- of "looking at" (not so much seeing) a bird the color, all colors, of the night. This is trickster stuff, as Ted Hughes darkly develops in Crow, the off-comic possibilities of god as Harlequin who tosses disappearing dice with reality. The poem shows us seeing a "black" bird as surd pronoun, it, treading syllabic night terrain, searching for winged focus on a disappearing, then reappearing radical. Call it the blackbird factor, the unpredictable quark of reality, the poem's decentering center. Disruptively patterned, this wild shadow is its own original being, in motion.
The trap associated with any such commentary is however framed by Steven's own poem. As with the Sanskrit adage, Neti Neti, it is a case of "not this, not that" -- somewhat as with the uncertainty principle of physics. Any interpretative associations could then be considered somewhat like the notes of a musical instrument -- to be variously combined and played in an attractive composition.
Techno-poetics of flight: It is potentially striking to note the extent to which the SR-71 Blackbird could be understood as having the symbolic significance -- unconsciously or not -- of the raven or crow, or with blackbirds in general. Especially evident is the sense of a hidden, all-seeing eye on high -- a threatening harbinger of death. As such it could even be understood as representing a global "secular deity" -- namely the USA -- with which change is potentially associated and in whom the world is encouraged to believe.
A relation between the avian blackbird and the SR-71 is notably explored by Christopher Schaberg (Bird Citing: on the aesthetics and techno-poetics of flight, Nebula, 6, 2, 2009) within the following context:
Here, I would like to suggest that we might also learn to investigate the practical and political mysteries of commonplace figurations that reveal how humans struggle to attain a certain animality. To this end, the following pages explore an aesthetic and poetic trend around human air travel that I call bird citing. A first order bird citing appears as simple as the citation of a bird in an aesthetic object such as a poem, such as in Wallace Stevens's widely anthologized Modernist paragon, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird....
In these lines the blackbird is cited as a poetic object worth visualizing. Yet as the reader catches sight of the blackbird, the blackbird's own ocular perception is cited, and object becomes subject. In these lines, bird citing becomes a double bird sighting -- the view zooms from panoramic to the point of a blackbird's eye, from distant topography, to intimate anatomy...
... my aim is to outline a network of allusive avian vectors and spectacles that intersect along lines of flight. Such lines of flight can be imaginative and imagistic, as in Stevens's poem; they can be straight forwardly symbolic, as in the bird insignias that appear on the tails of many commercial jets; or, bird citing can be starkly literal, as in errant birds flitting in and out of sliding doors at the baggage claim. In other words, I am particularly curious about how bird citing appears where many lines of flight converge: at airports. I want to suggest that there are curious overlaps in the multiple significations of bird forms that collide and collude in this networked space.
It is remarkably appropriate that "ways of looking" should be framed and challenged in poetic form -- traditionally renowned for its role in this respect. As noted by Gregory Bateson, in explaining why "we are our own metaphor" to a conference on the effects of conscious purpose on human adaptation that:
One reason why poetry is important for finding out about the world is because in poetry a set of relationships get mapped onto a level of diversity in us that we don't ordinarily have access to. We bring it out in poetry. We can give to each other in poetry the access to a set of relationships in the other person and in the world that we're not usually conscious of in ourselves. So we need poetry as knowledge about the world and about ourselves, because of this mapping from complexity to complexity. (Mary Catherine Bateson, Our Own Metaphor, 1972, pp. 288-289)
Bateson is thus pointing to the advantages of poetry in providing access to a level of complexity in people of which they are not normally aware.
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