It is for a later period to discover the closer unifying laws that are already present in the works themselves. When this true conception of art is achieved, then there will no longer be any possible distinction between science and inspired creation. The further one presses forward, the greater becomes the identity of everything, and finally we have the impression of being faced by a work not of man but of nature.

Anton Webern

Although in its "mimic motion" the sea makes a kind of "constant cry . . . / That was not ours although we understood . . .," the woman's song does not, and indeed, cannot, merge with it into one "medleyed sound." For her singing, Stevens reminds us, "uttered word by word by word," is of a completely different order from the "language" of the sea: "she was the maker of the song she sang . . . the single artificer of the world / In which she sang." Neither the sea for the earth which contains it is her muse; for her song is--to borrow the favorite metaphor of the American poet Robinson Jeffers--"incestuous" and not the product of any real intercourse with the world. As Stevens explains in his The Necessary Angel, poetry is only a "transcendent analogue" composed of the "particulars of the world." As an analogue, poetry parallels reality, just as the woman of the poem walks parallel to the sea along the beach. And parallel lines meet only in infinity.

In Stanislaw Lem's science fiction novel Solaris (1961), however, the poem's sea of "mimic motion" attains a kind of revenge against Stevens' solipsistic slight. Solaris is a distant planet, covered almost entirely by a vast ocean which seems to be a living sentient organism. Solaris' ocean is capable of reproducing--out of the minds and memories of all those humans who venture near it--almost exact, biologically functional, replicas of individuals dear to them, and, although its motives in doing so are never fully understood, it seems to offer them as gifts and as experiments in understanding, despite the disastrous effects which result. (Among its replications is the ex-wife of the novel's narrator, Kris Kelvin, a woman he helped drive to suicide years before.)

But the externalization of the internal is not the only result of this thinking ocean's "mimic motions." The ocean is able to create periodically a panoply of formations as part of its very texture, which thousands of Solarian scientists during years of extensive study of the mysterious planet have classified variously as "tree-mountains," "extensors," "fungoids, "symmetroids," "assymetroids," and "mimoids." It is the last of these on which Lem's own imagination concentrates.

Mimoids are wave formations of hundred of thousands of water, lasting in duration from a day to a mouth, in which objects external to the ocean are imitated within its textures. Viewed from above, we are told, "the mimoid resembles a town, an illusion produced by our compulsion to superimpose analogies with what we know." The mimoids are awakened out of the ocean commonly by a cloud passing overhead, an object that that the mimoid's original seed crystal--a large, flat disc beneath the surface of the ocean--then seeks to reproduce. The mimoids, Lem informs us, have a particular fondness for all human artifacts, producing facsimiles of machines and other objects within a radius of eight or nine miles with great facility. A mimoid, which lives in slow motion, pulsates at a rate of one beat every two hours, thus allowing explorers to enter and examine it closely. In addition, mimoids have what are termed "gala days," on which each of them goes into hyperproduction and performs with wild flights of fancy, playing "variations on the theme of a given object" and embroidering "formal extensions" that entertain it for hours, "to the delight of the nonfigurative artist and the despair of the scientist, who is at a loss to grasp any common theme in the performance" (122-24).

At the novel's close, after enduring the agonizing second loss of his wife's double, Kelvin confides to Snow, the Solaris station's expert on cybernetics, that he has come, after a futile effort at comprehending Solaris' mysteries, to think of the planet-ocean as an aspect of an evolving go, which in an early stage of development approached "the divine state," but "turned back into itself too soon," and became, instead of a god, an "anchorite, a hermit of the cosmos," completely under the sway of repetition, as witnessed in endless formations gestated by its waters. But soon afterward to leaves the station to explore the surface of Solaris directly for the first time, and he undergoes before its presence an epiphanal realization which does not permit him the luxury of singing, like Stevens, beyond the sea's genius.

Flying in a small aircraft over the ocean's depths, Kelvin perceives that "the alternating motion of the gleaming waves was not at all like the undulations of the sea or the billowing of clouds. It was like the crawling skin of an animal--the incessant, slow-motion contractions of muscular flesh secreting a crimson foam." Kelvin lands on a mimoid in the form of a "Moroccan city tens of centuries old" and descends to the beach, feeling its swaying motion, "moving forward, propelled by the dark muscles of the ocean towards an unknown destination . . ." (207-209). Stretching his hand into the water, he watches a wave envelop and then explore him as a potential object of its mimicry. Again and again he inserts his hand and witnessed the final result: "A flower had grown out of the ocean, and its calyx was molded to my fingers" (210). Yet finally the ocean refuses to be interested any longer in the repetition and its curiosity ebbs.

But from the experience Kelvin finds himself "somehow changed":

The contrast was inexpressible between that lively curiosity and the shimmering immensity of the ocean that stretched away out of sight. . . . I had never felts its gigantic presence so strongly, or its powerless changeless silence, or the secret forces that gave the waves their regular rise and fall. I sat unseeing, and sank into a universe of inertia, glided down an irresistible slope and identified myself with the dumb fluid colossus; it was as if I had forgiven it everything, without the slight effort of word or thought. (210)

The works of Stanislaw Lem have often been characterized as disguised parables, and Solaris, I would like to suggest, is at bottom one such parable. Solaris is but a figure for the earth itself, and the novel's message concerns the nature and source of human imagination. Throughout the course of the novel, as part of Kelvin's attempts to understand his situation, he explores the vast library of over one hundred years of Solarian research, and it becomes readily apparent that Lem, in having him do so, intends to parody the history of human thought by telescoping it into a more assimilable span of time. Yet for all this fantastic theorizing of Solaris' scholars, the planet-ocean remains an unfathomable mystery and Kelvin, with this vast library of "knowledge" at his fingertips, can ultimately understand the immense being that confronts him only by yielding himself over to its sway. A similar wisdom may be overtaking the modern mind.

In his The Lives of a Cell, Lewis Thomas has argued that it is time to recognize the earth itself is the equivalent of a living cell, whose atmosphere is the permeable membrane and whose "organelles" include, among many, the human race, although our biological function is obscure and our effort on the whole organism potentially disastrous. This same conception has been designated recently by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis as the "Gaia hypothesis" the belief that the earth itself, like the mother of the gods in Greek mythology, generated out of itself, like the mother of the gods in Greek mythology, generated out of itself all those beings that live upon it and they remain inextricably part of an organismic whole. In some form this idea permeates the work of Loren Eiseley, Teilhard de Chardin, Claude Levi-Strauss, and especially the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who, at the end of the Ninth Duino Elegy, turns in direct address to the earth as to a lover and pledges to it his undying poetic faithfulness:

Earth, you darling, I will! Oh, believe me, you need
your springs no longer to win me: a single one,
just one, is already more than my blood can endure.
I've now been unspeakably yours for ages and ages.
You were always right, and your holiest inspiration's
Death, that friendly Death.
Look, I am living, on what?

Nature is made better by no means
But nature makes that mean; so, over that art
Which you say adds to Nature, is an art
That Nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry
A gentler scion to the wildest stock,
And make conceive a bark of baser kind
By bud of nobler race. This is an art
Which does mend Nature, change it rather, but
The art itself is Nature.
William Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale