Weather, Sound Technology, and Space in Wallace Stevens

Whereas the earlier poem sees sound as passing out of one place as it passes into another, "The Sick Man" ventures the more radical idea that sounds from these disparate origins may actually fuse, within some shared, if imaginary, space. [...]the auditor "Waits for the unison of the music," in which "these two will come together" (455)7 The question then becomes one of what role, if any, technology plays in this. [...]the point here is not so much that space, time, and sound henceforth have nothing to do with one another, as that the three can now be recombined in different ways (again, this echoes Giddens) (187). [...]developments in acoustic engineering and accompanying science (Thompson's focal interests) meant that by the 1930s, "Any size or type of space could . . . possess any type of sound" (187). A popularizing history of the weather bureau published in 1922 celebrated such developments; its account of how radio, especially, expands the scope of weather forecasting deserves to be quoted at some length: Since the development of radio telegraphy it has been possible to supplement the telegraphic reports from mainland stations with reports made on distant islands in the north Pacific and in the West Indies and on ships at sea. In a certain sense, everything is everywhere at all times, for every location involves an aspect of itself in every other location. [...]every spatio-temporal standpoint mirrors the world' " (858; cf.