Incomplete Transactions: The Meditative Gaze in “When I Buy Pictures”
In Poetry and Criticism, Marianne Moore borrows from Joseph Conrad in an attempt to articulate the complex matrix of language, perception, and imagination that constitutes the human soul as an inherently creative reality inventing fictions in and through which to recognize both the world and itself:
“Seeing, and saying;—language is a special extension of the power of seeing, inasmuch as it can make visible not only the already visible world; but through it the invisible world of relations and affinities.” The world of the soul? Deficient as it is to define the soul, “creativeness” is perhaps as near a definition as we can get. (in Costello, 137)
For Moore, seeing and saying are part of one indissoluble imaginative act; rather than language functioning to report upon an already constituted experience, language exists as the experiential ground of the ever-circulating “relations and affinities” beneath all human fashionings of the “real.” Objectivity and subjectivity merge, for Moore, as saying it as one sees it becomes inseparable from seeing it as one says it. Language thus serves as the means of connection to oneself, others, and the world, even while it prohibits, due to its intermediary status, any direct, univocal, static knowledge.
The creative base of perception finds expression not only in the meta-poetic musings of Moore’s critical essays but also in her overall poetic project. Indeed, that prefix meta- becomes redundant, as Moore’s poetry is always simultaneously reflecting and reflecting upon its reflecting. An example of this self-reflexivity is Moore’s “When I Buy Pictures,” a poem that in its form and content demonstrates the doubleness, duplicity, and “creativeness” inherent in perception.
In the context of “When I Buy Pictures,” the concrete act of buying a picture becomes a trope for the act of perception itself. More specifically: the notion of buying a picture as a means of owning it functions as an analogue for a certain kind of perception in which appropriation of the thing perceived is the ultimate goal of the perceiver. The quest to master a concrete object through the human act of perception is, for Moore, not close enough to the ambiguous truth of the actual transaction between self and world. Instead, the opening lines of the poem serve as a foil for the notion of ownership implied in buying pictures:
or what is closer to the truth,
when I look at that of which I may regard myself as the
imaginary possessor,
Being an “imaginary possessor” of a picture – a perception – is quite different from literally possessing it; it implies an unavoidable go-between separating self and world, so that imaginary possession (possession of something by or through the imagination) becomes the most complete act of possession/perception possible. Though an object can be approached, approximated, and enjoyed in its unmasterable otherness, it can never be fully owned by the human subject who buys it. Also important in these opening lines are the two simultaneous forms of looking presented by the speaker of the poem. The speaker describes both looking at an object and looking at herself looking at it: “when I look at that of which I may regard myself as the / imaginary possessor…” In these lines “look” and “regard” occur as two parts of one complex act of seeing in which the speaker discovers both herself and an object – discovers them not in their separateness but in the mysterious place where they collude and collide. Of course, a third form of looking going on in the poem involves the reader’s gaze into the language that, through its simultaneous mirroring and projecting, contains the other forms of looking and makes imaginary possession a “visible” reality.
Does this imply a Romantic form of solipsism in which the human self swallows up the outer world in the act of perception (buying and eating both at once in a kind of capitalistic cannibalism)? The speaker of the poem, in elaborating the nature of her looking, appears to suggest this:
I fix upon what would give me pleasure in my average moments:
the satire upon curiosity in which no more is discernible
than the intensity of the mood,
The “intensity of the mood,” the flights and fancies of the speaker’s subjectivity, constitutes the limits of the discernible. However, this Romantic form of vision is immediately contradicted in the lines that follow, thus subtly bringing into question the precise location of subjectivity. Is mood a quality of a person or of a thing? Does the speaker fix upon the intensity of the mood
or quite the opposite – the old thing, the medieval decorated
hat-box
in which there are hounds with waists diminishing like the
waist of the hour-glass,
and deer and birds and seated people;
The speaker of the poem moves from regarding herself looking to examining the thing itself looked at, in this case the “medieval decorated / hat-box.” This quick, somewhat contradictory movement from one form of looking to another is common in Moore’s poetry. The move from the intensity of the mood to the “old thing” presents a shift that resists easy accommodation (appropriation) by the reader eager to understand the poem’s twistings and turnings in a logical manner. The poem presents two contrasting ways of seeing seeing that nevertheless cannot be torn asunder. To put this within the content of the poem: the speaker can only perceive herself seeing, and experience the mood attendant upon this act of seeing, in and through the concrete hat-box that she sees; and vice versa: the hat-box is only seen because she can regard herself looking at it. The intensity of the mood thus resides both in the speaker and in the hat-box itself. But there is more to the hat-box, and more to the poem, than mere epistemological musing.
Unlike the formal syllabic structure of many of Moore’s poems, “When I Buy Pictures” features unstructured free-verse that approaches prose. Also, unlike Moore’s best known poems, her complex meditations upon various animals (sleekly subtle ones like the jerboa and the plummet basilisk), “When I Buy Pictures” appears to focus more overtly on perception itself as the object of the poem. Due to these characteristics of structure and content, it is tempting to take “When I Buy Pictures” as a kind of philosophical treatise, as poetic theory thinly disguised as poetry. However, the odd list of things that follows the intrusion of the hat-box into the poem works against abstraction and creates the pleasure of bafflement that Moore prizes: the bafflement of the reader confronting the enigmatic movement of the mind amid the things of the world:
it may be no more than a square of parquetry; the literal
biography perhaps,
in letters standing well apart upon a parchment-like expanse;
an artichoke in six varieties of blue; the snipe-legged
hieroglyphic in three parts;
the silver fence protecting Adam’s grave, or Michael taking
Adam by the wrist.
Alas, Moore’s bestiary steps into this poem as well – from the earlier-mentioned hounds, deer, and birds to the description of the hieroglyphic as “snipe-legged”; and the “literal biography” is written on a parchment-like expanse – parchment originally refers to the skin of a sheep, goat, or other animal, prepared for writing on. For Moore the animals of the imagination figure into so-called literal life, and perhaps the imagination itself can be figured as a subtle animal leaping and bounding amid the interstices of human perception and language. And then comes Adam, the first human charged with bringing language to bear (so to speak) on his perception of the animals.
This complex list, introduced after the dash following “or quite the opposite,” serves as an antidote dashing the subjective mind’s illusion of mastery over the things it perceives. The list of things demands of the mind numerous associative leaps to make sense of it. As described above, the list can lead to considerations regarding the relationship of the literal and the figurative; in addition, Adam’s grave and “Michael taking / Adam by the wrist” introduces an allegorical dimension relating to the fall and to Adam viewing the history – the “literal biography” – of humanity. How exactly, though, does all this relate to “an artichoke in six varieties of blue”? Here the poem frustrates intellectual maneuvering. The meanings circulating around the list of things are potentially inexhaustible and the associations forever incomplete, though at the same time they are precisely delimited by the things found in the list. In the end, the reader is left with the things staring back at him, aware of the inherent double vision that constitutes human perception. The blue artichoke, the snipe-legged hieroglyphic, and the silver fence prohibit the poem from being reducible to diagrammatical philosophical assumptions; indeed, their insistent stare makes the poem itself a totem object provoking questions rather than answers to the enigma of human perception. No single meaning or conclusion inheres in the poem, though it appears to urge readers to look and look again, to look into one’s looking so as to see one’s reflection in the things of the world. It does this through language, which serves as a medium for seeing into seeing without disrupting the puzzling and provocative fluidity of perception.
In line with all this, the poem continues:
Too stern an intellectual emphasis upon this quality or that
detracts from one’s enjoyment.
It must not wish to disarm anything; nor may the approved
triumph easily be honored –
that which is great because something else is small.
Here Moore grounds perception (or picture looking/buying) not in understanding but in enjoyment: the eye responds to beauty rather than logical consistency. Further, Moore implies that the ultimate failure of intellectual understanding provides the enjoyment inherent in the act of looking (and reading). The elusiveness of the things of the world creates the enjoyment that sparks the interest to look at them and formulate this looking in language. In addition, Moore anticipates deconstruction by at least thirty years in seeking to displace any standard interpretation (“the approved / triumph”) invisibly based on hierarchical ordering (“that which is great because something else is small”).
The final lines of the poem brilliantly embody the quiddity of poetic looking and the double-gaze inherent in perception:
It comes to this: of whatever sort it is,
it must be “lit with piercing glances into the life of things”;
it must acknowledge the spiritual forces which have made it.
If the perception that Moore favors is “‘lit with piercing glances into the life of things,’” it therefore involves looking at an object while simultaneously seeing the object looking back. This double look in turn involves the imagination, which provides associations and fills in the gaps between the always elusive, never-finally-graspable things of the world. This process of imaginative vision is revealed in content and process in Moore’s pithy line: though the quotation marks enclosing it mark it as a source lifted from another context (Moore’s notes confirm this), they also mark the line itself as double, capable of existing in this context even while it can be lifted into another one. In other words, the line itself looks back at the poem, and therefore the reader, through its quotation marks.
“When I Buy Pictures” is a tour de force enactment of the kind of vision Moore is engaged in repeatedly throughout her poetry. Perhaps more overtly than in other poems, however, it also demonstrates the similarity between the poet’s project and the reader’s reading of it. Language as an organ of perception connects both writer and reader as they seek to glimpse the movement of the mind in its engagement with an ever-fleeting world in which it is always immersed. This act of imaginative perception through language involves a spiritual dimension – “it must acknowledge the spiritual forces which have made it.” Looking into the things of the world to glimpse the fleeting sparks of spirit that animate them and mysteriously connect them to the human requires a meditative gaze content with partial knowing. Moore contrasts this meditative approach to the world with the hard, level gaze of ownership that is blind to the piercing glance of its own subjective fantasy of objectivity looking back at it from the uncontainable things of the world.
Works Cited
Costello, Bonnie. Marianne Moore: Imaginary Possessions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1981
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