On Realizations

What is it to realize? The philosophers of mind have a working definition: “a dependence relation that is thought to exist between higher-level properties or states and lower-level properties or states”. As arcane and baroque as it is, it holds a kernel of truth: to realize something is to be able to shrink a problem down. In short, it’s the way “modern” people think about scale in life.

But surely, realization must also be an event. Hence hermeneutics. To realize something implies for me a change, a before and after punctuated by the event of the realization. It’s at least often prompted by one. Someone dies, someone reads a poem, someone gets into a car crash, someone falls in love, someone finds God, and so on.

This very polysemy simply is the scandal of the mind.

In her pamphlet The End, Aditi Machado anatomizes the epiphany, perhaps a genre of the realization (or even, she might say, revelation). She calls it “the thing for which you remember it, if you remember it at all”. (15) It’s “Dickinson’s ‘—then—‘.” (39) She thinks of it as something procedural, something arising out of protocolization. In a way this is nothing new. Rilke and Stevens are pretty clear about this. Abhinavagupta uses this idea of realization to interpret a treatise about yogic suicide.

Charles Altieri has a wonderful gloss: “realization, where an initial distance between mind and world becomes a sudden awareness of the possible mutual interpentration within a particular way of seeing, experiences of sympathy with depth of character and of clever ways of engaging with superficiality, and experience of the plasticity of our caring that can have various modes of encounter enter into conversation with each other – conversation that is itself exemplary of how capacious a conscious [sic] may become when we read completely for appreciation.” (Wallace Stevens and the Demands of Modernity 237)

But here’s Stephanie Burt: “Don’t read poetry… Instead, find ways to encounter kinds of poems and learn different reasons to read poems, realized in various ways by various poems.” (Don’t Read Poetry 7-8)

Realizations: what poems do with reasons.