Wallace Stevens was a twentieth century poet from Pennsylvania with an active imagination. Some say his poetry doesn't take place anywhere, or doesn't take "place" at all; others say that it takes place in the space between places. But I say it takes place in the dream just beneath waking reality. In "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock,"
The houses are haunted
By white night-gowns.
None are green,
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings,
Or yellow with blue rings.
None of them are strange,
With socks of lace
And beaded ceintures.
People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches tigers
In red weather.
For me, Stevens' verse is reminiscent of the
ambiguity of childhood--of both the strangeness
of Where the Wild Things Are and the softtextured
reality of Goodnight Moon. The poem
smacks of childhood daydreams: the dreamlike
colors, the objects of special importance, the
whimsical style that pays attention to some
parts of consciousness but not others. And like
childhood, "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock"
paints a friendly picture of whatever reality it
describes, yet it still holds the mysterious and
the haunted that every child knows is a real
threat to his or her receptive mind.
The house I used to visit during summers in
Colusa, California was a haunted mansion that
could dwell in Stevens' poem. It sat on a tenacre
plot of flat Central Valley land in the part
of California where you can see tens of miles of
brown farm in every direction, and the smog
colors the sky at the horizon. The air was rich:
stinky with rural smells of strange families, old
houses, a history of farm and wealth I would
never know, and social sagas that continued with
the friends my age that lived in that flatland.
About three of the ten acres were occupied by the
house's front lawn. Imagine a huge, symmetrical
garden, replete with greenery and symmetrical
pathways leading behind shrubs and flowers.
The front lawn was like this, except dried to crisp
yellows and browns, with exotic loquat trees
ringing the fringe and the shrubs almost sparse
enough to see through to the other side. Here, in
this strange abandoned garden, I experienced a
mystery that still haunts my memory.
I spent days running over the thick
alfalfa, playing tag with the children whose
grandmother owned the house. The property was
too big, too full of possibility and sensation for
me to wrap my mind around. Not to mention
the house itself--a three-story whitewashed
Victorian presence that I was sure held secrets I
didn't want to learn. The memory of my visceral
experience there consists of watching someone
search for me from my hiding place inside a
shrub, of the terrible ferocity of a dog-fight that
broke out between two strange mutts, of the white
porch-swing hanging ghostly in the midday heat
at a distance that seemed like a quarter mile
away across the property. This was the haunting
of the place; its size created the illusion that no
one was ever on the property except you, alone
in a primordial, deserted ghostworld in which
white night-gowns could be very much alive,
and a child at play could very much accept that
his imagination and reality, consciousness and
dreaming, were one and the same.
And even now, once in a while, you might give
your mind to your eyes and awaken.–to chance
upon an old sailor asleep in his boots by the fire, in
a room where the immense tasseled blanket,
sewn from old night-gowns, and the wolf-mother
wallpaper, give way to constellations of tigers
stalking the night sky.