eyes of the cartoon figure who is baffled, unconscious, or dead:
XX. In all these uses, the 'ex' means out of, beside itself, displaced.
The real and visible rises, exhales, from the unreal, or does the
unreal always appear as the intervening veil or substitute for the
absent real, as, in stanza 18 of Wallace Stevens 'Man with the Blue
Guitar,' daylight comes 'Like light in a mirroring of cliffs,/Rising
upward from a sea of ex.' ³

Daylight, the visible and nameable, is always doubly derived,
secondary. It rises from the sea and then is further displaced by its
mirroring from the cliffs in a wandering like that of all those terms I
have been examining. This movement makes the source itself unreal,
a sea of ex. Stevens speaks, in section 13 of 'An Ordinary Evening in
New Haven,' of the approach of night, from which the light comes and
to which it returns, as 'the big X of the returning primitive.' ⁴ The real
and the unreal, the metaphorical and the literal, the figure and the
ground, constantly change places, in oscillating chiasmus, for
'ex'ample in Stevens's contradictory explanation of 'sea of ex' in his
letters. To Renato Poggioli he wrote: 'A sea of ex means a purely
negative sea. The realm of has-been without interest or
provocativeness.' To Hy Simons: 'Sea of Ex. The imagination takes us
out of (Ex) reality into a pure irreality. One has this sense of irreality
often in the presence of morning light on cliffs which then rise from
a sea that has ceased to be real and is therefore a sea of Ex.' ⁵ Which
is unreal, which real, the sea or the light? It cannot be decided.
Whatever one sees is unreal and creates as its ground a phantasmal
real, which becomes unreal in its turn when one turns to it.

[ . . . ]

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