The Boundary of Tennessee

Fifty-one years ago, perhaps to the month, I was assigned to read this poem:
Anecdote of the Jar

I placed a jar in Tennessee, 
And round it was, upon a hill. 
It made the slovenly wilderness 
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it, 
And sprawled around, no longer wild. 
The jar was round upon the ground 
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion every where. 
The jar was gray and bare. 
It did not give of bird or bush, 
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

Wallace Stevens

I was not, and am not, a Lit major, but I believed that I “got” this poem. The jar provides a boundary for Tennessee. It does not matter whether the jar is inside Tennessee or Tennessee is inside the jar. Through the magic of the mathematics of topology, we can imagine either to be the case. And by bounding the wilderness of Tennessee with this gray and bare surface, the jar tames it. 
What makes art good, in my estimation, is that it continues to engage its audience, and this poem has not disappointed me. I have returned to it many times, and it has supported a great deal of contemplation and interpretation. Among the many questions it has suggested are: 

“In just what respect is the entire state of Tennessee slovenly wilderness?” 
“Is all of Tennessee somehow chaotic? And isn’t this jar, as part of Tennessee, part of the chaos?”
“What’s so special about this jar? Aren’t there other jars in Tennessee?”

Most recently it has pleased me to consider the jar somehow special simply because we (as the placer of the jar) are looking at it. Of course there are other jars in Tennessee, but they are on the chaotic Tennessee side of the gray and bare surface. The jar, it pleases me to imagine, is analogous to Atman, the Witness, the great I Am, me-ness. And the Experiencer is impossibly different from the experience. 

Many philosophers—too many—have argued that consciousness (self-consciousness, self-awareness, or whatever you want to call it) is just brain structure, or behavior, or some other manifestation of how things work in the world. Well, as far as everyone else’s consciousness is concerned, it is. What these philosophers fail to take into account is my consciousness. (They should, speaking for themselves, certainly call their own consciousness “my consciousness”.) Those philosophers are actually talking about everyone else’s consciousness, and failing to recognize their own self-awareness as something that is like nothing else in Tennessee. 

Is it possible that anyone could choose to work at philosophy and never “remember himself” (in the words of Gurdjieff)? I’m not concerned at the moment with what a thinker might say about that pure witness, but not to mention it at all? 
Anyway, no one ever mentioned this interpretation of the Anecdote of the Jar in my Lit class.