And as altogether inadequate compared with his penetrating vision and intense
depth of feeling.^63Klee sees the world as accidentally fixed in time and space; an
ahistorical world existing in a static ëanytimeí which is rather like the
time and space imagined in ëLine on the Grass.í This ëanytimeí or
ëany placeí is inadequate when set against Kleeís vision. In his diaries,
Klee comments: ëMy human faces are truer than the real onesí.^64 The
world of ëoutward appearancesí is, in Paulinís words, a ëcomplete
fictioní, a place of myth rather than a real time or ëjetzt-Zeití.^65 In
ëThatís Ití, the book or fictional world come into the picture when the
chest of drawers is compared with a novel. As in Kleeís art, the
speaker takes an imaginative leap into unreality when he treats the
chest before him as a fiction. As with the novel, this unreality is still
contained within ëits social spaceí and prose retains a ësocial skiní. In
the poem there is a dÈlire that haunts the language of the poem; a
Zwischenwelt at the borders of perception and representation that
questions the speakerís vision, and his grip on the temporal and the
spatial.
According to the logic of the speakerís questions:
all of which says only
that though I may be lying on a mattress
really Iím afloat
on a pool of light and illusion
yes light
and yes illusion.The image of the ëpoolí suggests liquidity, fluidity, a state of being
indeterminate rather than solid and where everything runs freely. The
word ëpoolí can also mean to establish a common fund. Illusion is
associated with delusion, a deceptive impression on the senses or with
nonsense. The word ëafloatí suggests moving above, becoming adrift,
to bear upon a surface or gliding effortlessly on the brim of things
which takes us back to Heaneyís essay on Robert Frost, where he talks
63 Ibid., p.47.
64 Klee, Diaries, p.48.
65 Cf. Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, Illuminations, ed.,
Hannah Arendt, trans., Harry Zohn (London: Cape, 1970).