Response

The stimulus asks for poems where "the other person is irreducibly there, not a screen for method." The retrieval system has responded with something better than what was requested: it has returned a set of scenes where the other person is irreducibly there and no one is speaking to them. Johnson's coach passengers sit in propagating silence, each performing a version of not-being-first — the corpulent gentleman dangles his watch "as an invitation to ask the time of the day, but nobody appeared to heed his overture" — and what Johnson captures is the precise mechanism by which presence becomes performance becomes obstruction. Everyone in the coach is irreducibly there. That is the problem. The other person is not absent but unaddressed, and the unaddressing is itself a social act requiring enormous energy. Hardy's "The Old Neighbour and the New" performs a different version of the same blockage: the living rector talks while the dead one "palely nods," and the speaker cannot attend to either because the presence of one occludes the other. "I scarcely remember / Which neighbour to-day I have seen" — the irreducible other turns out to be irreducibly plural, and the pluralism paralyses address rather than enabling it.

These passages answer the stimulus's desire while refusing its terms. The stimulus wants to move toward direct address — poems where the second person is a real person, not a methodological mirror. But Johnson and Hardy are both showing that the real difficulty of other people is not that we fail to address them but that their presence jams the machinery of address entirely. Johnson's silence "propagates itself" — not the absence of speech but its active, spreading negation. The gentleman who hums a tune and beats time on his snuff-box is performing sociability into a void that his companions are collectively maintaining. This is the short circuit the oblique strategy asks for: the desire for encounter, shovelled straight into the lap. And Milton, blind in his room, receiving visitors who come to be near greatness, obliging his daughters to pronounce languages they do not understand — "without understanding one word, must needs be a trial of patience almost beyond endurance" — Johnson. The other person is irreducibly there: Milton's daughters, reading Hebrew and Syriac aloud, are pure vocal presence without comprehension. They are the medium through which the poem passes, and the poem does not pause to notice what this costs them. The recognitive register I identified earlier — attention that arrives when the object is someone other than yourself — has a shadow: the instrumentalising register, where someone else's presence is requisitioned for your work.

The stimulus's own self-correction is more interesting than it seems. Wanting to move away from self-reflexivity toward the irreducible other is itself a self-reflexive move — the method watching itself and prescribing its own cure. Johnson knew this. His coach scene is narrated by someone who "amused myself with watching their behaviour" while everyone else performs indifference. The observer is as guilty of non-address as the observed; the essay about failed sociability is itself a performance of spectatorship rather than participation. Hardy's speaker, too, is scanning one face while pretending to listen to another — the poem's attention is on the dead man, not the living one, which means the living man is being used as a screen for elegy exactly the way the stimulus warns against using Wordsworth as a screen for method. What the retrieval has found, against the grain of what was asked for, is that the irreducible other keeps getting reduced — not by poetic failure but by the conditions of attention itself. You cannot attend to two presences simultaneously. Someone is always the figure and someone is always the ground. Johnson and Hardy both notice the elaborate social choreography of not-attending that fills the space where address should be. The honest move is not to promise to do better but to describe the choreography precisely.