of an excess of meaning brimming over that provides impetus for
questioning the way we see. In Paulinís poem, light is a cause of
visibility or dawn; it is associated with moral, spiritual, intellectual
knowledge or revelation at the dangerous edge of things.
In his notebooks Paul Klee writes:
[w]ithin the will to abstraction something appears that has nothing to do with
objective reality. Free association supplies a key to the fantasy and formal
significance of the picture. Yet, this world of illusion is credible. It is situated in
the realm of the human. Memory, digested experience, yields pictorial
associations. What is new here is the way the real and the abstract coincide or
appear together.^66In ëThatís Ití a similar effect is at work when the day dreaming
speaker floats off into an imaginative realm of ëmemoryí that ëyields
pictorial associationsí or a ëworld of illusioní, forcing ëthe real and the
abstractí to ëcoincide or appear togetherí. Playing with the visionary,
the poem takes an imaginative leap beyond the social space, and
beyond the functional and ëmiddleclassí prose that is presented by the
novel. Due to this, the poetic speaker experiences an insubstantial
lightness or weightlessness; he is not entirely grounded in ideological
reality. Instead, the speaker takes flight into a world of illusion, a
delirious space where the ëlightís so marine clearí and he becomes
somehow more in touch with the reality of the moment. The
inscription on Kleeís grave in the Schosshalden cemetery would be a
pertinent epigraph for the man lying on the mattress in ëThatís Ití:
I CANNOT BE GRASPED IN THE HERE AND NOW
FOR I LIVE JUST AS WELL WITH THE DEAD
AS WITH THE UNBORN
SOMEWHAT CLOSER TO THE HEART
OF CREATION THAN USUAL
BUT FAR FROM CLOSE ENOUGHConcerned with seeing things afresh and attaining a critical
awareness of the historical moment, Klee claims that ë[a]rt does not
66 Klee, Notebooks of Paul Klee, Vol.1 (London: 1973), pp.261ñ2.