Portrait of Il Magnifico by Agnolo Bronzino
Lorenzo de Medici was known in his Florentine kingdom as Lorenzo il Magnifico, from the Italian for “magnificent.” Il Magnifico was a quite interesting figure, managing despite almost unbelievable debauchery, unscrupulousness and dishonesty (see the Showtime series The Borgias for example) to be the patron of the rebirth of humanism in the form of the Italian Renaissance, supporting da Vinci, Botticelli, Michelangelo and so many other artists, and making it possible for books like the Hermeticum (the inspiration for the scientific revolution) to be distributed throughout Europe.
Today’s poem, “Metaphors of a Magnifico” poses at the outset an interesting question: What kind of metaphors would this magnifico need? To be seen as a great and benevolent king? To have a staff of great thinkers and artisans to replace in the public mind his horrible and bloody deeds?
This poem was published in June of 1918, in the midst of the Great War that made the concept of human civilization a somewhat sketchy one. The scene described in the poem is clearly martial, except that instead of the foxholes and repeating rifles of the then-current war we have men presumably with spears marching across the bridge in unison to what appears to be a medieval city-fortress. We hear and see the squad marching menacingly closer and closer to the pleasant village, followed by what appears to be a loss of consciousness, like a soldier losing his consciousness before death as he nears the gate of the city to fight.
Yet the poem seems about other things. It is a metaphor for something far different, as we’ll discuss. Here it is:
Twenty men crossing a bridge,
Into a village,
Are twenty men crossing twenty bridges,
Into twenty villages,
Or one man
Crossing a single bridge into a village.
This is old song
That will not declare itself . . .
Twenty men crossing a bridge,
Into a village,
Are
Twenty men crossing a bridge
Into a village.
That will not declare itself
Yet is certain as meaning . . .
The boots of the men clump
On the boards of the bridge.
The first white wall of the village
Rises through fruit-trees.
Of what was it I was thinking?
So the meaning escapes.
The first white wall of the village...
The fruit-trees...
Frederick II Conquered Parma in 1521, Tintoretto (1579)
Let’s unpack this stanza-by-stanza:
Twenty men crossing a bridge,This stanza expresses quite concretely the ancient philosophical notion of the One and the Many. Each person lives in their own subjective world that cannot be shared by anyone else. Thus the march of 20 men into a village happens differently in the 20 distinct consciousness’s to the degree that it becomes 20 distinct and separate villages. By the same token, all men are one man in form and moral inheritance, we all share the mind of the one universal consciousness, much as the unified regiment of the soldiers in this image seem to be operating from one shared, hive mind.
Into a village,
Are twenty men crossing twenty bridges,
Into twenty villages,
Or one man
Crossing a single bridge into a village.
This relationship between the collective and the singular is basic to human society and to each individual’s spiritual journey, but it is fundamentally ambiguous. The collapsing figure that fragments into multiple perceptions in Cubist paintings like Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase cannot be easily reconciled with the Mona Lisa. Here the speaker struggles to resolve the polarity:
This is old songThe term “declare” is striking, both in its war-like implications and its connotation of a decision between two choices being definitively made. Clearly the speaker wants to know what is the ultimate truth contained in this picture. “Song” is also an interesting choice of word, suggesting an imaginative or unconscious prodding as much as an intellectual thought process. That it is old is indisputable:
That will not declare itself . . .
The One manifests as the many, the formless putting on form. (Rig Veda ~ 1200 B.C.).
We are in the habit of assuming one Form for each set of many things to which we give the same name. (Plato, The Republic, 380 BC)
Reality cannot be found except in One single source, because of the interconnection of all things with one another. (Leibniz, 1670)Interesting in this context is Fritjof Capra’s book The Tao of Physics, a wonderful introduction to the immense commonality between the Western quantum physics of the Modernist time period and ancient Eastern spiritual beliefs:
The central aim of Eastern mysticism is to experience all the phenomena in the world as manifestations of the same ultimate reality. This reality is seen as the essence of the universe, underlying and unifying the multitude of things and events we observe. The Hindus call it Brahman, The Buddhists Dharmakaya (The Body of Being) or Tathata (Suchness) and the Taoists Tao; each affirming that it transcends our intellectual concepts and defies further explanation. This ultimate essence, however, cannot be separated from its multiple manifestations. It is central to the very nature to manifest itself in myriad forms which come into being and disintegrate, transforming themselves into one another without end. (p. 210)
A careful analysis of the process of observation in atomic physics has shown that the subatomic particles have no meaning as isolated entities, but can only be understood as interconnections between the preparation of an experiment and the subsequent measurement. Quantum theory thus reveals a basic oneness of the universe. It shows that we cannot decompose the world into independently existing smallest units. As we penetrate into matter, nature does not show us any isolated ‘basic building blocks’, but rather appears as a complicated web of relations between the various parts of the whole. (p. 78)The coincident realities to the speaker of the poem seem as confounding as they must have seemed to the physicists of Stevens’ time grappling with wave-particle duality. As Capra writes:
In ordinary life, we are not aware of the unity of all things, but divide the world into separate objects and events. This division is useful and necessary to cope with our everyday environment, but it is not a fundamental feature of reality. It is an abstraction devised by our discriminating and categorising intellect. To believe that our abstract concepts of separate ‘things’ and ‘events’ are realities of nature is an illusion. (p 76).But to just accept the one as reality is to turn away from multiplicity, and more importantly to lose the promised connection of subjectivity to the unity. Einstein’s theory of invariance, his term for what we now call the theory of relativity, was designed to answer the question of why the objective laws of nature sometimes seemed to bend depending on the vantage point of the observer. Thus he developed formulas for the relationship between the constancy (or invariance) of physical laws (such as the speed of light), and the relativity of the observer (the position or motion in time or space from which it is observed). Wallace Stevens, who shared the exact same chronology as Einstein (1879-1955), is posing here how the vantage point of the observer affects the constancy of the whole, the effect of which is a reality that can’t stay fixed. How does one get beyond oneself to the ultimate reality?
Osho, who wrote the book Einstein The Buddha
The speaker tries a different tact:
Twenty men crossing a bridge,This standard-issue tautology provides a certain comfort of “that’s the way it is.” But that cannot be satisfying given what the mind had just perceived before, how it came close to a sense of ultimate reality via imagination, only to inevitably fall back on uncertainty and ambiguity.
Into a village,
Are
Twenty men crossing a bridge
Into a village.
That will not declare itselfAs with Thomas Pynchon’s novels, the patterns and correspondences the mind so easily identifies don’t connect to a truth that stays valid for more than a split second. The irrefutable truth the mind needs stands slightly beyond ever elusive. The metaphor for metaphor, I suppose, is bridge, and in this one, the narrator gets stuck on said bridge.
Yet is certain as meaning . . .
Every time the physicists asked nature a question in an atomic experiment, nature answered with a paradox, and the more they tried to clarify the situation, the sharper the paradoxes became. It took them a long time to accept the fact that these paradoxes belong to the intrinsic structure of atomic physics, and to realise that they arise whenever one attempts to describe atomic events in the traditional terms of physics. (Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics, p76)The traditional terms of physics are mathematics, equivalent to the words metaphysicians use. The speaker cannot give up his quest, so decides to go closer in:
The boots of the men clumpThe abstraction recedes as details come into focus: the sound of the boots on the boards, the fruit trees appearing, as they would to a soldier getting closer to the walls. This more direct engagement with the phenomenon brings a tangible sensory awareness, but one that eludes the mind and so cannot be captured or understood. The mind is left behind, as in the moment of its death trying to remember something from childhood:
On the boards of the bridge.
The first white wall of the village
Rises through fruit-trees.
Of what was it I was thinking?
So the meaning escapes.
The first white wall of the village...ChaCha! expert Randy T calls this moment in the poem “a nebulous no man’s land where the intelligence struggles, unsuccessfully, to encompass a reality beyond its reach.” The unreal can be discussed, the real cannot. Is the village even there?
The fruit-trees...
This, to Cary Wolfe (in “The Idea of Observation at Key West”, collected in What is Post-Humanism?) “[confirms] the otherness and difference of ‘external’ reality precisely by insisting on its inseparability from the mind and imagination.” The disjunction calls to mind wave/particle duality again, for the one thing (Space/Consciousness) has potentialities (Wave/Thought) that give rise to the many things (Matter as the Spherical Wave Motion of Space/Reality). Imagination is aligned with the waves in the quantum field, that seem as one and wholly different from the particles we call reality. Capra again:
At the sub-atomic level, matter does not exist with certainty at definite places, but rather shows ‘tendencies to exist’ and atomic events do not occur with certainty at definite times and in definite ways, but rather show ‘tendencies to occur.’ In the formalism of quantum theory, these tendencies are expressed as probabilities and are associated with mathematical quantities which take the form of waves. This is why particles can be waves at the same time. (p. 76)Or H.G. Widdowson, in the essay “So the Meaning Escapes…”:
[Poetry] is a reality which cannot be explained but only expressed and experienced through the expression.I think of it also as that moment when the mind gives way to direct experience. I wrote about this sensation in a poem “The Flight from Cincinnati” in terms of the way people waiting at airports for travelers stop their fretting and cogitating when they finally see the people they are there to pick up:
The people who wait look confused, then,Where does this all leave us? Despite the stretching of intellectual muscles this poem makes us do, it’s not a stretch to note that the Renaissance fighters for de Medici have been replaced by the doughboys of the Western Front, just as the science de Medici fostered was being replaced by a new science aligned with different myths.
finding their travelers, lose themselves
in recognition, the woes of the waiting
turned to song and story—then I, too,
disappear again.
The metaphors, the ability to translate and connect ideas, the highest fruits of the mind when thinking and communicating, in the end serve only the barbarism of war, with death the only resolution possible.
Or maybe that viewpoint too is relative, too narrow:
The Eastern mystics see the universe as an inseparable web, whose interconnections are dynamic and not static. The cosmic web is alive; it moves and grows and changes continually. Modern physics, too, has come to conceive of the universe as such a web of relations and, like Eastern mysticism, has recognised that this web is intrinsically dynamic. The dynamic aspect of matter arises in quantum theory as a consequence of the wave-nature of subatomic particles, and is even more essential in relativity theory, where the unification of space and time implies that the being of matter cannot be separated from its activity. The properties of subatomic particles can therefore only be understood in a dynamic context; in terms of movement, interaction and transformation. (Capra p. 78)
