Life & Wisdom Quote by James Merrill

Merrill is letting you watch him edit his own curiosity in real time: seduced by an idea, then instantly suspicious of it. “Arthur Young’s Reflexive Universe” arrives as a shiny, totalizing cosmology, the kind of metaphysical model that promises to make everything click if you’ll just accept its diagram. Merrill’s quick pivot - “fascinating but too schematic” - is the poet’s allergy to systems that explain too cleanly. He’s not rejecting mystery; he’s rejecting the bureaucratization of mystery.

The slyest turn is “too schematic to fit into my scheme.” It’s a self-implicating joke with teeth. Merrill admits he has his own ordering impulse, his own private architecture for meaning, even as he side-eyes someone else’s. The line performs the perennial modernist bind: you crave a worldview, but you distrust worldviews, especially the ones that come with instructions.

Then he lowers the stakes, almost tenderly: “The most I could hope for was a sense of the vocabulary and some possible images.” That’s the real manifesto. He doesn’t want doctrine; he wants usable language. He’ll raid the metaphysician’s toolkit for metaphor, not for marching orders. Contextually, it sits neatly inside Merrill’s larger practice (think The Changing Light at Sandover): an artist willing to flirt with occult or speculative structures, but always translating them into the sensuous, the audible, the picturable. Systems may be “fascinating,” but for Merrill they earn their keep only when they can be turned into speech that shimmers.