IN THE SACRED PARK
97
But it is at least highly probable that for us modems the sacred is
present-outside of authentic religious experiences-at precisely those
junctures of life where the reality of time impinges on us most vio–
lently. Let us recall the importance Pascal attached to the need men
feel for distracting themselves, and his contention that this need
leads inevitably to the question of religion. Indeed a modem eth–
nologist, Marceau Eliade, asserts that only in pastimes does the sacred
appear at all in the modern world. He writes:
the defense against time, which all mythological behavior reveals, but
which is consubstantial with the human condition, we find again, but
camouflaged for the modern, mainly in his distraction, in his amuse–
ments ... the real fall into time began with the secularization of work.
It is only in modern societies that man feels himself a prisoner of his
profession, for within it he can no longer escape from time. And because
he cannot kill time during his hours of work-when in possession of
his real social identity-he makes an effort to escape from time in his
free hours.
The sacred not in our work but in our play! But if this is
true, then Stevens, in the whole of his poetry, concerned as it is with
distraction, amusement and pleasurable meditation, has encompassed
an encounter with the sacred which was not his alone but belongs
to all of us. As an amateur he found a way to be not just his own
poet but ours also.
Valt~ry
says that
in
every poet there is a very
old man. In the voice of Wallace Stevens we hear the oldest of poets,
the poet of feasts and festivals, who by means of the magic of lan–
guage made time stand still for the whole of his tribe. For Stevens,
the amateur, was not forced to feel that he took up his tools just when
others laid down theirs; he could participate with them,
in
his own
fashion, in the sacred venture of making escape from time. Thus
he was able to see in the lives of those around him a relationship to
poetry, and, accepting this perception, he could transfigure it, so as
to be at one with his fellows even when most remote from them,
not disdainful of their jukeboxes even while strumming his Blue
Guitar. He found nothing less than a historically given exit from
the historically given, a breakthrough out of time, if not into eternity.
Taking for his theme those sorties from the daily round which bright–
en the colors of the world for everyone, he was able to make his own
entrances into poetry neither romantically extravagant nor arrogantly
individual but virile, periodic, unserious, and wise.
