VI
Rationalists, wearing square hats,
Think, in square rooms,
Looking at the floor,
Looking at the ceiling.
They confine themselves
To right-angled triangles.
If they tried rhomboids,
Cones, waving lines, ellipses –
As, for example, the ellipse of the half-moon –
Rationalists would wear sombreros.
Theme
It’s very easy to get stuck with a one-point perspective. We all have ideas about the world, and how it should work, and views on all sorts of topics, and we feel comfortable in such long-held views. However, this month we’re thinking about new ways of looking. A change in perspective, however, small, can totally refresh your sense of leadership. This might mean that you look at a problem you’ve had from a different angle, or you practise sympathy with a colleague—however you do it, this month we’re challenging you to look at life differently.
Who?
To help us consider some new ways of looking, we have Wallace Stevens (1879 – 1955). For much of his life, Stevens worked as a businessman and lawyer, writing poems by night. His first full collection, Harmonium, wasn’t published until he was 38 years old, proving that it’s never too late to try something new! He’s no considered one of the finest poets in his history, not only in his native America, but all over the world. His poetry is often considered with new – sometimes surprising – perspectives on things, and teaches us that readjusting how we approach the world can yield extremely valuable results.
What?
There’s any number of poems one might choose from Stevens to demonstrate the benefits of a fresh perspective (he even wrote a famous poem called ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’), but here I’ve chosen the final section of ‘Six Significant Landscapes’. The scene Stevens describes might not at first appear like a landscape, because it takes place inside, ‘Looking at the floor, | Looking at the ceiling.’ But it is really about mindscapes, the shapes of our thoughts, and how we can make them fresher and more interesting. Rationalists, in the poem’s view, are confined in ‘square hats’ and ‘right-angled triangles’ and this prevents meaningful development.
Instead, we’re asked to move and think outside of the box; consider, instead, ‘Cones, waving lines, ellipses’, or step into the night where we find ‘the ellipse of the half-moon’ smiling overhead.
What Else?
As I mentioned above, Stevens spent much of his life working as a businessman. This inflects his poems with a curious matter-of-factness; but his work was hugely influenced by the French Surrealists of the 1920s. These Surrealists, who included the likes of Salvador Dalí (take a look at his painting here), sought to show how differently the world could appear if you only changed your approach to it. Stevens, too, throughout his writing career, took simply objects or observations and showed his reader how complex even the simplest act of looking can be.
Changing your environment, your habits and habitats of thinking, can give you a brand new outlook—and, Sombrero donned, a new look, too.
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