That Which Passes Show: The Conflict of Representation in Poetry

When Shakespeare tells us that we are such stuff as dreams are made on, he is also pointing to a problematic area for our discipline. For Freud's assertion was that dreams are the stuff that dreams are made on, thus instigating that faculty called ego between life and its true opposite, which is never quite a dream. For there is indeed an “abstract joy” (Yeats, 1997, p. 210), contained in and by itself, derived not from the metaphors of Eros or Tanatos, but rather from the much stronger source that Yeats identified as the “half read wisdom of demoniac images.” That all wisdom is bound to be half read is, for art, never a question of the unconscious but of the reality or the conditions we live under. In this regard, art is concerned with a state of mind, an openness that sees both ends of the equation and aims to make something, not out of this realization—which is rhetoric—but with this realization, which means, eventually, doing something with the mind itself. How this is done is a wonder, which we precisely end up calling art. Harold Bloom , evoking Hamlet, asserts: “Our map or general theory of the mind may be Freud's, but Freud, like all the rest of us, inherits the representation of mind, at its most subtle and excellent, from Shakespeare. Freud could say that the aim of all life was death, but not that readiness is all” (p. 3).

For it is a state of mind of readiness, this passing of the visions and the night,1 which art offers us, a state that is to be recognized in and by itself and is not to be seen as a derivative of this or that. Nietzsche stated: “Art is the proper task of life, art is life's metaphysical exercise,” and Jacques Barzun commented