Mallarmé and the formation of experience
Encountering Mallarmé
I remember asking my poetry writing teacher, the great poet Nathan Hauke, for a book recommendation after our class one day, and him saying, “Have you discovered Mallarme yet?”
What an enigmatic way of telling someone to read a book, even now it strikes me as almost an initiation, like there was a whole way of life that I hadn’t yet encountered.
When I made my weekly trek to Ken Sanders Rare Books, I encountered an old, worn-out copy of a collected Mallarmé, which since he didn’t write much wasn’t a huge, hulking thing as one would expect from the word “collected.”
In it, I found one of the wildest poems I had ever yet encountered, “A Throw of the Dice Never Will Abolish Chance,” scrawling across a good 14-15 pages with writing moving across pages as if his thinking and expression couldn’t be contained by the margins of a book.
What really struck me on that first encounter with the poem was the massive sweeps of white space, and it felt so much like how my life felt at the time, these large, empty regions of interior and subjective experience until this confrontation with another, and this sudden shock into meaning or interpretation.
In the poem, disconnected lines move across large portions of blank space, and that spacing makes the reader feel meaning as something unstable, partial, and still forming as the poem moves.
How much of life feels this way?
The Vast White Spaces
We move through the world and our lives experiencing things before we can explain them, and yet we are constantly trying to orient ourselves, creating meaning out of our past or interpretations of events, and yet none of this is accurate until something bursts through.
The field of experience suddenly organizes around something, whether that be the job offer or the breakup, and suddenly all those little interpretations along the way crystallize in this moment, so that the way she looked at me or what she said or the distance I felt is set into context at that moment of time.
In this poem, Mallarmé is exploring how experience itself forms from a field of possibility into an actuality and then my interpretation of it: “A Throw of the Dice Never Will Abolish Chance.”
A throw of the dice is an action which enters the field of possibilities and yet with each roll and movement, that field of possibilities shifts and changes.
Mallarmé ends the poem with the great line that “All Thought emits a Throw of the Dice,” meaning that our subjective experience or interior activity is not outside of life, as if we could somehow step out from the here and now and describe what is given.
There is not, nor could there ever have been, such a thing as neutral observation; every thought we think is thus an event, just like the throw of the dice, because it opens the fields of possibilities, shaping experience before we encounter it.
Because of this nature of thought, every thought thus changes the field of experience to such an extent that it can never go back to the way it was.
Most of us take our first interpretation of an event as if it were reality, or the actual fact, so that when a circumstance presents itself, we are already wrapped up in our own perception of it and it becomes the lived experience of it.
We tend to just feel rejected if we ask our partners to go for a walk with us and there is a long pause.
Hardly ever do we sit inside the silence as it is happening and say to ourselves “I am interpreting this as rejection.”
All Thought Emits A Throw of The Dice
Mallarmé’s line here, as well as the whole poem, interrupts the automatic meaning-making we naturally form as experience is arising, a meaning-making which is a fundamental aspect of our condition.
The silence we hear after the question is an uncertainty which we try desperately to clarify, and often our clarifications tend to pull towards the negative, but we could also interpret the event through a positive light, as an event that is still unfolding in its entirety.
“All Thought emits a Throw of the Dice.”
In interpreting silence as rejection, I have completely closed the field of possibilities, whereas if I look at it as an unfolding inside of a totality, then the field of possibilities is open long enough for more of the experience to become visible.
Please be clear, I am not saying that we can name life however we want it, nor am I saying that our interpretation is simply arbitrary, but what I am saying is that my interpretation is formative, in that how I name an experience begins to organize what I will be able to perceive inside of it.
The silence after asking the question to my partner could be a world of rejection or spaciousness depending on how I bring my interpretation into an experiential situation that hasn’t changed.
The first meaning that we give to an experience arising is so powerful because it is so hard to see in the moment as a meaning we’ve given to the event; it simply becomes the reality of what is happening.
Oftentimes, we bring the past into the present, and our old response confirms our self; we’ve created a world out of the past and brought it into the present.
This is why we repeat the patterns in our life day after day.
It can feel as if we are responding to life as it is when, in fact, we are responding to the way life is appearing through a meaning we’ve already thrown onto it.
Before Meaning Crystallizes
In Mallarmé’s poem, the experience is never simply received as is, but is always in an active creation; it is always being formed through my own attention and expectation, almost as if the poem itself is holding up a mirror to my own language and meaning-making interpretations.
This was why the vast white spaces in the poem mattered so much to me when I first encountered the poem; they were like an active field discharged of actuality, a field of potentiality before a field could even be organized, and the intervals between relation laid bare for me to see.
And how much of my life is organized like this?
When something ends like a relationship or a career, and I am left in those black spaces before I know why it happened the way it did or what it means for me moving forward.
These fields of potentiality in life are often subject to quickly ascribing meaning because these spaces feel like uncertainty, and the mind seeks for a painful meaning rather than orbiting around space of no meaning.
How often do we rush into organizing our still-forming experiences with meaning or interpretation so that we can step out of the uncertain field of potentiality into the certainty of actuality?
“All thought emits a Throw of the Dice.”
Our interpretation crystallizes the experience into something that may have only partially emerged.
Life is so often unfolded this way, piece by piece and innocently in pauses or glances, distances and fragments of meaning that only later become organized into the world we say was there all along.
“A Throw of the Dice Never Will Abolish Chance” leaves the field open long enough so we can see how meaning-making is actually structured when thought itself reaches into uncertainty and begins shaping the visible meaning from within the experience itself.
Have you ever mistaken your first interpretation for reality itself?
Dr. Samuel Gilpin is a poet and essayist working at the point where language meets experience, where words are not used to explain life, but to enter it more honestly. At samuelgilpin.com, he writes for those who feel the quiet pressure to fix themselves, offering a different approach: not optimization, but a return to what has been covered over or pushed aside. He holds a PhD in English Literature, but his work moves away from analysis toward something more direct, reading and writing as a way of loosening what has become too tight. When he’s not writing, he’s returning to Four Quartets, rewatching The Wire, or lifting weights.