Just as a matter of completion and conclusion (one can hope!) I must make a note of some language in William James’ Pragmatism that may ground, once and for all, the wayward phrase that I had found so troublesome for so many years and has followed me into several posts and original poems on this blog. For the present purposes I will only include the phrase itself, apparently R. P. Blackmur’s, as quoted in John Berryman’s poem “Olympus”:
The art of poetry
is amply distinguished from the manufacture of verse
by the animating presence in the poetry
of a fresh idiom: languageso twisted & posed in a form
that it not only expresses the matter in hand
but adds to the stock of available reality.
Only recently have I read the complete lectures that comprise Pragmatism. I am of course aware that this book is an American classic, and many properly educated people before me have read it. Without a doubt one of these readers was R. P. Blackmur.
In the second lecture (pp 512-13 Library of America edition) James writes,
The individual has a stock of old opinions already, but he meets a new experience that puts them to a strain…. The result is an inward trouble to which his mind till then had been a stranger, and from which he seeks to escape by modifying his previous mass of opinions. He saves as much of it as he can, for in this matter of belief we are all extreme conservatives. So he tries to change first this opinion, and then that (for they resist change very variously), until at last some new idea comes up which he can graft upon the ancient stock with a minimum of disturbance of the latter, some idea that mediates between the stock and the new experience and runs them into one another most felicitously and expediently.
This new idea is then adopted as the true one. It preserves the older stock of truths with a minimum of modification, stretching them just enough to make them admit the novelty, but conceiving that in ways as familiar as the case leaves possible.
I wonder if David Bowie read this as well, because on reading about the new experience that puts routine and habit “to a strain”, meeting this disturbance of mind as “a stranger”, immediately the song “Changes” blasts in my ears, with Bowie’s long drawn out, “turn and face the straaaaaaange ch-ch-changes.” Anyway, I’ve placed the relevant “stock” terms in bold. There’s a correspondence between Blackmur’s “stock of available reality” and the habits of mind—the cache of views and opinions—one holds in one’s mind, as James puts it. “Reality” is a problematic word, and James is wary of it. As he writes (P 595): “When we talk of reality ‘independent’ of human thinking, then, it seems a thing very hard to find.” In the first lecture he is careful to note that, “The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments” and that the philosopher, “Wanting a universe that suits it, believes in any representation of the universe that does suit it.” (pp 488 and 489) One might say, running James through Blackmur, that the “stock of reality” that is “available” to any given person at any given time is the whole complex of opinions and habits of thought that occupy that person’s mind and compose “reality” for that person, nothing more nor less than the view of the world that person holds through those habits and opinions. What Blackmur is saying—rather, what Berryman is emphasizing in Blackmur—is the way in which language itself can shake one’s habits of mind and modify them. And James says something very similar.
A further correspondence of terms can be found in lecture VII on p 592:
Truth grafts itself on previous truth, modifying it in the process, just as idiom grafts itself on previous idiom, and law on previous law. Given previous law and a novel case, and the judge will twist them into fresh law…. Our rights, wrongs, prohibitions, penalties, words, forms, idioms, beliefs, are so many new creations that add themselves as fast as history proceeds.
The process of addition happens through poetry as well, Blackmur is saying.
The Mockingbird Sings 
I feel like you ended this blog in mid-sentence…please tell there is more. It is funny to stumble upon this today as I was reading, of all things, a graphic novel about Bertrand Russell (Logicomix) which addresses BR struggle with mathematics, logic, language, reality, truth, and of course, a young Wittgenstein. Even in comic form, the basis of their foundational arguments hurt my brain, but yet they came to mind as your post reckoned with the truth of “reality” and the world and how language is at the core. I cannot help but then wonder about the concept of grafting truths. I look forward to a further exploration via your writings.
If you haven’t read Pragmatism I highly recommend it–not very long but very rich in useful ideas.
It’s been a while since I read criticism devotedly – back when I though a career change to academia might still be possible (hah) — Now I read it almost as little as fiction, but I do stray now and then. I’ve been dipping into a book by Richard Poirier, “Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing,” and your post here makes me remember that Poirier wrote “Poetry and Pragmatism,” (I’ve recently ordered it), and much of his criticism makes a case for the performative work language enacts on our “stock” of ideas. He writes about Frost’s poetry, “you ‘know’ a thing and know that you know it only when ‘work’ begins to yield a language that puts you and something else, like a field, at a point of vibrant intersection.” To paraphrase Berryman, language “twisted and posed” (eg, “worked”) speaks of the thing while adding to our stock of knowledge. I first took notice of Poirier reading “The Renewal of Literature: Emersonian Reflections,” which you might find engaging now that you’re reading through Emerson’s essays. (And if USF has a library accessible to you, you might want to delve into Emerson’s journals which make for fascinating reading on process.) Thanks for reminding me of that bouncy wing of the stock library.
Thanks Brendan. Poirier sounds intriguing.