Rethink.

New Rooms (from Poetry)
Kay Ryan

The mind must
set itself up
wherever it goes
and it would be
most convenient
to impose its
old rooms — just
tack them up
like an interior
tent. Oh but
the new holes
aren’t where
the windows
went.

Comment:

“Impose” for me triggers another metaphor, that of mind as grasping or acquiring. I think Ryan’s poem “Octopus” (it’s behind a pay wall at the New Yorker) engages that theme. I’ll write on it soon.

So forget “acquisition” for the moment. We’re guests of some sort at a house. And while we may be good guests, one rule I’ve learned from travel is that if you can bring yours with you, you should. It is horrible when you’re someplace and there’s something you want to do and you could have done it oh-so-easily had you brought it with you. “Set itself up” must be done and “impose” is for the sake of convenience. This is not unbridled dominion. An “interior tent” can beautify a place, make it party-ready.

The explicit issue is that of mind. Why is mind an interior that must work with another interior? Our pursuit of the natural sciences breaks conventions down, no? Not exactly: it reinforces some and destroys others. It yields unwittingly its own orthodoxy. We are now tempted to throw “nature” entirely out the window. (Side note: I very often tell students that the nature/convention distinction makes sense only with regard to the question “What is justice?”)

But our speaker has brought up “old” and “new;” I wonder about beauty. Conventionality is so powerful because something in it is familiar. Aesthetics aren’t an issue – they’re the issue. They are the light we see with (“holes” matching with “windows”). Something like a natural light exists at some point. Maybe it’s the fire of the cave. In any case, we try to get it in our house as we do sunlight. Nothing so beautiful in our interior tent matters unless we orient things properly to get that light.

It would be tempting to say light and truth and nature and being have some priority over our mind’s establishment, imposition and convenience. But the one thing certain is that mind must set itself up and is setting itself up. How do we really know we missed the windows or not? The urge to get the holes and windows to line up properly is from mind itself. “Went” – motion more than settling – ends the poem. For whatever reason, mind moves on. The funny thing about dissatisfaction with one’s own opinions is that it is internal. You really can’t teach open-mindedness. It is at least twice-removed from nature.