Cultivating "a mind of winter"

The Singer and the Snowman

I was entranced by Wallace Stevens’ poem “The Idea of Order at Key West” when I first read it in a freshman literature class so long ago. That’s when I knew I was a writer, whether I ever wrote a word or not. I was that woman singing while she strolled by the sea. We all are.

She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. . . .
. . . there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

What we experience as the world around us is always to some degree a creation of our own imaginations—the objective world filtered through our subjective experience of it. We are writing the world as we live it. And there’s beauty and mystery and grace it that.

And yet, and yet . . . . There is too that “mind of winter” that Stevens also writes about. The sense that we can get at the “thing-in-itself” without the cloud of imagination, the subjective, standing between it and us, as he writes about below.

The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

There’s a sense that if we cultivate “a mind of winter”—

a mind stripped down, bare and essential pristine, without artifice or ego the mind that is and is not at the same time that can hold equally two opposing thoughts at the same time and rest in the still center that “beholds nothing that is not there and the nothing that is”

—then we may see things as they truly are and not as we create them to be.

But to do that, you have to become it. Become the snow man, literally: no-mind, no-thought. Leave “I” behind and become the frosted junipers. Become the night sky. Become the sea. To truly behold things as they are, we have to “behold” it—-be it and hold it at the same time.

That’s what I’m trying to do—in my daily life, in my writing, in whatever meager way I can. Cultivate a mind of winter, be what I behold.

Be it and hold it all at once.

Perhaps that’s what the woman is doing as she be-holds the sea and sings it.

What do you think? Is there a poet who influences how you see or think of the world?