So, I was planning to write out an explanation of the story, but I just need to stop putting this off. There are plot gaps, characters that disappear, and people who show up with no explanation. In writing as much as I did I allowed myself no time to edit. That will happen eventually, but I need to step away from the story for a while.
It didn't turn out the way I thought it would. Maybe it will someday. At least I did it.
Read and comment here. Thoughts are much appreciated.
There are only three things we talk about in this poem – the sublime, Lucretius, and Wallace Stevens.
To care about something is to effect a cure. The rock is all about possibility and the word if. If we are to eat the incipient colorings we might receive a cure of the ground. These leaves are the cure, the poem. There is nothing else.
But what is it that we are curing?
It is not important that you publish the things that they write, nor that they last beyond you, just that you write to the best of your ability. It is important that you are here and you are doing things and that you do them to the best of your ability.
The interior paramour is the muse, who presides over all. When you work with Stevens, look up every single word, even the ones that you know, because in reality you probably do not.
The intensest of rendezvous is with your own interior self. Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves. This might be the only poem in which is explained what caused this. Under this situation and these qualifications, God and the imagination are one.
The Lord the Shepherd of His People
A Psalm of David.
23 The Lord is my shepherd;
I shall not want.
2 He makes me to lie down in green pastures;
He leads me beside the still waters.
3 He restores my soul;
He leads me in the paths of righteousness
For His name’s sake.
4 Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil;
For You are with me;
Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me.
5 You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies;
You anoint my head with oil;
My cup runs over.
6 Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
All the days of my life;
And I will dwell[a] in the house of the Lord
Forever.
So yeah. Memorized it in 6th grade and then promptly forgot it. Been a while since I thought about it.
P.S. Kubla Khan is totally Ghengis Khan's grandson, and there are at least an estimated 16 million people descended from Ghengis. If you're lucky, there's a little bit of the Blood of Kubla in you, too.
Ariel was glad he had written his poems.
They were of a remembered time
Or of something seen that he liked.
Other makings of the sun
Were waste and welter
And the ripe shrub writhed.
His self and the sun were one
And his poems, although makings of his self,
Were no less makings of the sun.
It was not important that they survive.
What mattered was that they should bear
Some lineament or character,
Some affluence, if only half-perceived,
In the poverty of their words,
Of the planet of which they were part.
Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.
This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:
Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence.
Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.
Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one...
How high that highest candle lights the dark.
Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.
I. Seventy Years Later
It is an illusion that we were ever alive,
Lived in the houses of mothers, arranged ourselves
By our own motions in a freedom of air.
Regard the freedom of seventy years ago.
It is no longer air. The houses still stand,
Though they are rigid in rigid emptiness.
Even our shadows, their shadows, no longer remain.
The lives these lived in the mind are at an end.
They never were…..The sounds of the guitar
Were not and are not. Absurd. The words spoken
Were not and are not. It is not to be believed.
The meeting at noon at the edge of the field seems like
An invention, an embrace between one desperate clod
And another in fantastic consciousness,
In a queer assertion of humanity:
A theorem proposed between the two--
Two figures in a nature of the sun,
In the sun's design of its own happiness,
As if nothingness contained a metier,
A vital assumption, an impermanence
In its permanent cold, an illusion so desired
That the green leaves came and covered the high rock,
That the lilacs came and bloomed, like a blindness cleaned,
Exclaiming bright sight, as it was satisfied,
In a birth of sight. The blooming and the musk
Were being alive, an incessant being alive,
A particular of being, that gross universe.
II. The Poem as Icon
It is not enough to cover the rock with leaves.
We must be cured of it by a cure of the ground
Or a cure of ourselves, that is equal to a cure
Of the ground, a cure beyond forgetfulness.
And yet the leaves, if they broke into bud,
If they broke into bloom, if they bore fruit,
And if we ate the incipient colorings
Of their fresh culls might be a cure of the ground.
The fiction of the leaves is the icon
Of the poem, the figuration of blessedness,
And the icon is the man. The pearled chaplet of spring,
The magnum wreath of summer, time's autumn snood,
Its copy of the sun, these cover the rock.
These leaves are the poem, the icon and the man.
These are a cure of the ground and of ourselves,
In the predicate that there is nothing else.
They bud and bloom and bear their fruit without change.
They are more than leaves that cover the barren rock.
They bud the whitest eye, the pallidest sprout,
New senses in the engenderings of sense,
The desire to be at the end of distances,
The body quickened and the mind in root.
They bloom as a man loves, as he lives in love.
They bear their fruit so that the year is known,
As if its understanding was brown skin,
The honey in its pulp, the final found,
The plenty of the year and of the world.
In this plenty, the poem makes meanings of the rock,
Of such mixed motion and such imagery
That its barrenness becomes a thousand things
And so exists no more. This is the cure
Of leaves and of the ground and of ourselves.
His words are both the icon and the man.
{two of three parts}
I
He was at Naples writing letters home
And, between letters, reading paragraphs
On the sublime. Vesuvius had groaned
For a month. It was pleasant to be sitting there
While the sultriest fulgurations, flickering,
Cast corners in the glass. He could describe
The terror of the sound because the sound
Was ancient. He tried to remember the phrases: pain
Audible at noon, pain torturing itself,
Pain killing pain on the very point of pain.
The volcano trembled in another ether,
As the body trembles at the end of life.
It was almost time for lunch. Pain is human.
There were roses in the cool café. His book
Made sure of the most correct catastrophe.
Except for us, Vesuvius might consume
In solid fire the utmost earth and know
No pain (ignoring the cocks that crow us up
To die). This is a part of the sublime
From which we shrink. And yet, except for us,
The total past felt nothing when destroyed.
II
At a town in which acacias grew, he lay
On his balcony at night. Warblings became
Too dark, too far, too much the accents of
Afflicted sleep, too much the syllables
That would form themselves, in time, and communicate
The intelligence of his despair, express
What meditation never quite achieved.
The moon rose up as if it had escaped
His meditation. It evaded his mind.
It was part of a supremacy always
Above him. The moon was always free from him,
As night was free from him. The shadow touched
Or merely seemed to touch him as he spoke
A kind of elegy he found in space:
It is pain that is indifferent to the sky
In spite of the yellow of the acacias, the scent
Of them in the air still hanging heavily
In the hoary-hanging night. It does not regard
This freedom, this supremacy, and in
Its own hallucination never sees
How that which rejects it saves it in the end.
III
His firm stanzas hang like hives in hell
Or what hell was, since now both heaven and hell
Are one, and here, O terra infidel.
The fault lies with an over-human god,
Who by sympathy has made himself a man
And is not to be distinguished, when we cry
Because we suffer, our oldest parent, peer
Of the populace of the heart, the reddest lord,
Who has gone before us in experience.
If only he would not pity us so much,
Weaken our fate, relieve us of woe both great
And small, a constant fellow of destiny,
A too, too human god, self-pity's kin
And uncourageous genesis . . . It seems
As if the health of the world might be enough.
It seems as if the honey of common summer
Might be enough, as if the golden combs
Were part of a sustenance itself enough,
As if hell, so modified, had disappeared,
As if pain, no longer satanic mimicry,
Could be borne, as if we were sure to find our way.
IV
Livre de Toutes Sortes de Fleures D'Après Nature.
All sorts of flowers. That's the sentimentalist.
When B. sat down at the piano and made
A transparence in which we heard music, made music
In which we heard transparent sounds, did he play
All sorts of notes? Or did he play only one
In an ecstasy of its associates,
Variations in the tone of a single sound,
The last, or sounds so single they seemed one?
And then that Spaniard of the rose, itself
Hot-hooded and dark-blooded, rescued the rose
From nature, each time he saw it, making it
As he saw it, exist in his own especial eye.
Can we conceive of him as rescuing less,
As muffing the mistress for her several maids,
As foregoing the nakedest passion for barefoot
Philandering? . . . The genius of misfortune
Is not a sentimentalist. He is
That evil, that evil in the self from which
In desperate hallow, rugged gesture, fault
Falls out on everything. The genius of
The mind, which is our being, wrong and wrong,
The genius of the body, which is our world,
Spent in the false engagements of the mind.
V
Softly let all true sympathizers come,
Without the inventions of sorrow or the sob
Beyond invention. Within what we permit,
Within the actual, the warm, the near,
So great a unity, that it is bliss,
Ties us to those we love. For this familiar,
This brother even in the father's eye,
This brother half-spoken in the mother's throat
And these regalia, these things disclosed,
These nebulous brilliancies in the smallest look
Of the being's deepest darling, we forego
Lament, willingly forfeit the ai-ai
Of parades in the obscurer selvages.
Be near me, come closer, touch my hand, phrases
Compounded of dear relation, spoken twice,
Once by the lips, once by the services
Of central sense, these minutiae mean more
Than clouds, benevolences, distant heads.
These are within what we permit, in-bar
Equisite in poverty against the suns
Of ex-bar, in-bar retaining attributes
With which we vested, once, the golden forms
And the damasked memory of the golden forms
And ex-bar's flower and fire of the festivals
Of the damased memory of the golden forms,
Before we were wholly human and knew ourselves.
VI
The sun, in clownish yellow, but not a clown,
Brings the day to perfection and then fails. He dwells
In a consummate prime, yet still desires
A further consummation. For the lunar month
He makes the tenderest research, intent
On a transmutation which, when seen, appears
To be askew. And space is filled with his
Rejected years. A big bird pecks at him
For food. The big bird's boney appetite
Is as insatiable as the sun's. The bird
rose from an imperfection of its own
To feed on the yellow bloom of the yellow fruit
Dropped down from turquoise leaves. In the landscape of
The sun, its grossest appetite becomes less gross,
Yet, when corrected, has its curious lapses,
Its glitters, its divinations of serene
Indulgence out of all celestial sight.
The sun is the country wherever he is. The bird
In the brightest landscape downwardly revolves
Disdaining each astringent ripening,
Evading the point of redness, not content
To repose in an hour or season or long era
Of the country colors crowding against it, since
The yellow grassman's mind is still immense,
Still promises perfections cast away.
VII
How red the rose that is the soldier's wound,
The wounds of many soldiers, the wounds of all
The soldiers that have fallen, red in blood,
The soldier of time grown deathless in great size.
A mountain in which no ease is ever found,
Unless indifference to deeper death
Is ease, stands in the dark, a shadow's hill,
And there the soldier of time has deathless rest.
Concentric circles of shadows, motionless
Of their own part, yet moving on the wind,
Form mystical convolutions in the sleep
Of time's red soldier deathless on his bed.
The shadows of his fellows ring him round
In the high night, the summer breathes for them
Its fragrance, a heavy somnolence, and for him,
For the soldier of time, it breathes a summer sleep,
In which his wound is good because life was.
No part of him was ever part of death.
A woman smoothes her forehead with her hand
And the soldier of time lies calm beneath that stroke.
VIII
The death of Satan was a tragedy
For the imagination. A capital
Negation destroyed him in his tenement
And, with him, many blue phenomena.
It was not the end he had foreseen. He knew
That his revenge created filial
Revenges. And negation was eccentric.
It had nothing of the Julian thunder-cloud:
The assassin flash and rumble . . . He was denied.
Phantoms, what have you left? What underground?
What place in which to be is not enough
To be? You go, poor phantoms, without place
Like silver in the sheathing of the sight,
As the eye closes . . . How cold the vacancy
When the phantoms are gone and the shaken realist
First sees reality. The mortal no
Has its emptiness and tragic expirations.
The tragedy, however, may have begun,
Again, in the imagination's new beginning,
In the yes of the realist spoken because he must
Say yes, spoken because under every no
Lay a passion for yes that had never been broken.
IX
Panic in the face of the moon -- round effendi
Or the phosphored sleep in which he walks abroad
Or the majolica dish heaped up with phosphored fruit
That he sends ahead, out of the goodness of his heart,
To anyone who comes -- panic, because
The moon is no longer these nor anything
And nothing is left but comic ugliness
Or a lustred nothingness. Effendi, he
That has lost the folly of the moon becomes
The prince of the proverbs of pure poverty.
To lose sensibility, to see what one sees,
As if sight had not its own miraculous thrift,
To hear only what one hears, one meaning alone,
As if the paradise of meaning ceased
To be paradise, it is this to be destitute.
This is the sky divested of its fountains.
Here in the west indifferent crickets chant
Through our indifferent crises. Yet we require
Another chant, an incantation, as in
Another and later genesis, music
That buffets the shapes of its possible halcyon
Against the haggardie . . . A loud, large water
Bubbles up in the night and drowns the crickets' sound.
It is a declaration, a primitive ecstasy,
Truth's favors sonorously exhibited.
X
He had studied the nostalgias. In these
He sought the most grossly maternal, the creature
Who most fecundly assuaged him, the softest
Woman with a vague mustache and not the mauve
Maman. His anima liked its animal
And liked it unsubjugated, so that home
Was a return to birth, a being born
Again in the savagest severity,
Desiring fiercely, the child of a mother fierce
In his body, fiercer in his mind, merciless
To accomplish the truth in his intelligence.
It is true there were other mothers, singular
In form, lovers of heaven and earth, she-wolves
And forest tigresses and women mixed
With the sea. These were fantastic. There were homes
Like things submerged with their englutted sounds
That were never wholly still. The softest woman,
Because she is as she was, reality,
The gros, the fecund, proved him against the touch
Of impersonal pain. Reality explained.
It was the last nostalgia: that he
Should understand. That he might suffer or that
He might die was the innocence of living, if life
Itself was innocent. To say that it was
Disentangled him from sleek ensolacings.
XI
Life is a bitter aspic. We are not
At the centre of a diamond. At dawn,
The paratroopers fall and as they fall
They mow the lawn. A vessel sinks in waves
Of people, as big-bell billows from its bell
Bell-bellow in the village steeple. Violets,
Great tufts, spring up from buried houses
Of poor, dishonest people, for whom the steeple,
Long since, rang out farewell, farewell, farewell.
Natives of poverty, children of malheur,
The gaiety of language is our seigneur.
A man of bitter appetite despises
A well-made scene in which paratroopers
Select adieux; and he despises this:
A ship that rolls on a confected ocean,
The weather pink, the wind in motion; and this:
A steeple that tip-tops the classic sun's
Arrangements; and the violets' exhumo.
The tongue caresses these exacerbations.
They press it as epicure, distinguishing
Themselves from its essential savor,
Like hunger that feeds on its own hungriness.
XII
He disposes the world in categories, thus:
The peopled and the unpeopled. In both, he is
Alone. But in the peopled world, there is,
Besides the people, his knowledge of them. In
The unpeopled, there is his knowledge of himself.
Which is more desperate in the moments when
The will demands that what he thinks be true?
Is it himself in them that he knows or they
In him? If it is himself in them, they have
No secret from him. If it is they in him,
He has no secret from them. This knowledge
Of them and of himself destroys both worlds,
Except when he escapes from it. To be
Alone is not to know them or himself.
This creates a third world without knowledge,
In which no one peers, in which the will makes no
Demands. It accepts whatever is as true,
Including pain, which, otherwise, is false.
In the third world, then, there is no pain. Yes, but
What lover has one in such rocks, what woman,
However known, at the centre of the heart?
XIII
It may be that one life is a punishment
For another, as the son's life for the father's.
But that concerns the secondary characters.
It is a fragementary tragedy
Within the universal whole. The son
And the father alike and equally are spent,
Each one, by the necessity of being
Himself, the unalterable necessity
Of being this unalterable animal.
This force of nature in action is the major
Tragedy. This is destiny unperplexed,
The happiest enemy. And it may be
That in his Mediterranean cloister a man,
Reclining, eased of desire, establishes
The visible, a zone of blue and orange
Versicolorings, establishes a time
To watch the fire-feinting sea and calls it good,
The ultimate good, sure of a reality
Of the longest meditation, the maximum,
The assassin's scene. Evil in evil is
Comparative. The assassin discloses himself,
The force that destroys us is disclosed, within
This maximum, an adventure to be endured
With the politest helplessness. Ay-mi!
One feels its action moving in the blood
XIV
Victor Serge said, "I followed his argument
With the blank uneasiness which one must feel
In the presence of a logical lunatic."
He said it of Konstantinov. Revolution
Is the affair of logical lunatics.
The politics of emotion must appear
To be a intellectual structure. The cause
Creates a logic not to be distinguished
From lunacy. . . One wants to be able to walk
By the lake at Geneva and consider logic:
To think of the logicians in their graves
And of the worlds of logic in their great tombs.
Lakes are more reasonable than oceans. Hence,
A promenade amid the grandeurs of the mind,
By a lake, with clouds like lights, among great tombs,
Gives one a blank uneasiness, as if
One might meet Konstantinov, who would interrupt
With his lunacy. He would not be aware of the lake.
He would be the lunatic of one idea
In a world of ideas, who would have all the people
Live, work, suffer, and die in that idea
In a world of ideas. He woul not be aware of the clouds,
Lighting the martyrs of logic with white fire.
His extreme of logic would be illogical.
XV
The greatest poverty is not to live
In a physical world, to feel that one's desire
Is too difficult to tell from despair. Perhaps,
After death, the non-physical people, in paradise,
Itself non-physical, may, by chance, observe
The green corn gleaming and experience
The minor of what we feel. The adventurer
In humanity has not conceived of a race
Completely physical in a physical world.
The green corn gleams and the metaphysicals
Lie sprawling in majors of the August heat,
The rotund emotions, paradise unknown.
This is the thesis scrivened in delight,
The reverberating psalm, the right chorale.
One might have thought of sight, but who could think
Of what it sees, for all the ill it sees?
Speech found the ear, for all the evil sound,
But the dark italics it could not propound,
And out of what one sees and hears and out
Of what one feels, who could have thought to make
So many selves, so many sensuous worlds,
As if the air, the mid-day air, was swarming
With the metaphysical changes that occur
Merely in living as and where we live.
I
It was something to see that their white was different,
Sharp as white paint in the January sun;
Something to feel that they needed another yellow,
Less Aix than Stockholm, hardly a yellow at all,
A vibrancy not to be taken for granted, from
A sun in an almost colorless, cold heaven.
They had known that there was not even a common speech,
Palabra of a common man who did not exist.
Why should they not know they had everything of their own
As each had a particular woman and her touch?
After all, they knew that to be real each had
To find for himself for his earth, his sky, his sea.
And the words for them and the colors that they possessed.
It was impossible to breathe at Durand-Ruel’s.
II
The flowering Judas grows from the belly or not at all.
The breast is covered with violets. It is a green leaf.
Spring is umbilical or else it is not spring.
Spring is the truth of spring or nothing, a waste, a fake.
These trees and their argentines, their dark-spiced branches,
Grow out of the spirit or they are fantastic dust.
The bud of the apple is desire, the down-falling gold,
The catbird’s gobble in the morning half-awake—
These are real only if I make them so. Whistle
For me, grow green for me and, as you whistle and grow green,
Intangible arrows quiver and stick in the skin
And I taste at the root of the tongue the unreal of what is real.
Thought is false happiness; the idea
That merely by thinking one can,
Or may, penetrate, not may,
But can, that one is sure to be able--
That there lies at the end of thought
A foyer of the spirit in a landscape
Of the mind, in which we sit
And wear humanity's bleak crown;
In which we read the critique of paradise
And say it is the work
Of a comedian, this critique;
In which we sit and breathe
An innocence of an absolute,
False happiness, since we know that we use
Only the eye as faculty, that the mind
Is the eye, and that this landscape of the mind
Is a landscape only of the eye; and that
We are ignorant men incapable
Of the least, minor, vital metaphor, content,
At last, there, when it turns out to be here.
A young man seated at his table
Holds in his hand a book you have never written
Staring at the secretions of the words as
They reveal themselves.
It is not midnight. It is mid-day,
The young man is well-disclosed, one of the gang,
Andrew Jackson Something. But this book
Is a cloud in which a voice mumbles.
It is a ghost that inhabits a cloud,
But a ghost for Andrew, not lean, catarrhal
And pallid. It is the grandfather he liked,
With an understanding compounded by death
And the associations beyond death, even if only
Time. What a thing it is to believe that
One understands, in the intense disclosures
Of a parent in the French sense.
And not yet to have written a book in which
One is already a grandfather and to have put there
A few sounds of meaning, a momentary end
To the complication, is good, is a good.
On her side, reclining on her elbow.
This mechanism, this apparition,
Suppose we call it Projection A.
She floats in air at the level of
The eye, completely anonymous,
Born, as she was, at twenty-one,
Without lineage or language, only
The curving of her hip, as motionless gesture,
Eyes dripping blue, so much to learn.
If just abover her head there hung,
Suspended in air, the slightest crown
Of Gothic prong and practick bright,
The suspension, as in solid space,
The suspending hand withdrawn, would be
An invisible gesture. Let this be called
Projection B. To get at the thing
Without gestures is to get at it as
Idea. She floats in the contention, the flux
Between the thing as idea and
The idea as thing. She is half who made her.
This is the final Projection C.
The arrangement contains the desire of
The artist. But one confides in what has no
Concealed creator. One walks easily
The unpainted shore, accepts the world
As anything but sculpture. Good-bye
Mrs. Pappadopoulos, and thanks.
One of the countrymen :
There is
A welcome at the door to which no one comes?
The angel :
I am the angel of reality,
Seen for the moment standing in the door.
I have neither ashen wing nor wear of ore
And live without a tepid aureole,
Or stars that follow me, not to attend,
But, of my being and its knowing, part.
I am one of you and being one of you
Is being and knowing what I am and know.
Yet I am the necessary angel of earth,
Since, in my sight, you see the earth again,
Cleared of its stiff and stubborn, man-locked set,
And, in my hearing, you hear its tragic drone
Rise liquidly in liquid lingerings
Like watery words awash; like meanings said
By repetitions of half meanings. Am I not,
Myself, only half of a figure of a sort,
A figure half seen, or seen for a moment, a man
Of the mind, an apparition apparelled in
Apparels of such lightest look that a turn
Of my shoulder and quickly, too quickly, I am gone?
Speaking from the point of view of someone who has spent years learning how to draw a portrait and pay attention to facial features, I can say with confidence that Dr. Sexson does not look like Robert Pirsig. It's definitely the beard.
Psychic mutilation is the best that we can do for this class, but damned if we won't try.
First day of presentations: (arranged alphabetically) Sam – Rio
Day Two: Merlin – Tanner
Day Three: Elisha – Megan
Day Four: Alexandra – Jennifer
Day Five: (everybody else)
Your presentation will be 6.25 minutes. That's not so long, anyone could do that. We are not having a final exam in this class unless you want one.
There are two camps of people when it comes to Solaris – one loved it and the other got bogged down in getting to the good bits. It is the delight of the non-figurative artist and the despair of the scientist. Stevens' poetry is Solaris, the planet on the table, watery displays of these perplexing things in which we find consolation.
We have no need of other worlds. The only thing we are looking for is a mirror of ourselves.
We are searching for an ideal image of our own world.
Lucretius does not say that he doesn't believe in the gods; he just does not think that we need them. The final belief is to believe in a fiction which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. To see through a glass darkly.
Everyone has an alter ego that is part of us (our conscience). His animal loves its anima. We need to be reconnected with our daemons. To die is no more fearful to be born, you are in the void, then are present, then you return to the void from whence you came.
Who are you?
I
Two forms move among the dead, high sleep
Who by his highness quiets them, high peace
Upon whose shoulders even the heavens rest,
Two brothers. And a third form, she that says
Good-by in the darkness, speaking quietly there,
To those that cannot say good-by themselves.
These forms are visible to the eye that needs,
Needs out of the whole necessity of sight.
The third form speaks, because the ear repeats,
Without a voice, inventions of farewell.
These forms are not abortive figures, rocks,
Impenetrable symbols, motionless. They move
About the night. They live without our light,
In an element not the heaviness of time,
In which reality is prodigy.
There sleep the brother is the father, too,
And peace is cousin by a hundred names
And she that in the syllable between life
And death cries quickly, in a flash of voice,
Keep you, keep you, I am gone, oh keep you as
My memory, is the mother of us all,
The earthly mother and the mother of
The dead. Only the thought of those dark three
Is dark, thought of the forms of dark desire.
II
There came a day, there was a day--one day
A man walked living among the forms of thought
To see their lustre truly as it is
And in harmonious prodigy to be,
A while, conceiving his passage as into a time
That of itself stood still, perennial,
Less time than place, less place than thought of place
And, if of substance, a likeness of the earth,
That by resemblance twanged him through and through,
Releasing an abysmal melody,
A meeting, an emerging in the light,
A dazzle of remembrance and of sight.
III
There he saw well the foldings in the height
Of sleep, the whiteness folded into less,
Like many robings, as moving masses are,
As a moving mountain is, moving through day
And night, colored from distances, central
Where luminous agitations come to rest,
In an ever-changing, calmest unity,
The unique composure, harshest streakings joined
In a vanishing-vanished violet that wraps round
The giant body the meanings of its folds,
The weaving and the crinkling and the vex,
As on water of an afternoon in the wind
After the wind has passed. Sleep realized
Was the whiteness that is the ultimate intellect,
A diamond jubilance beyond the fire,
That gives its power to the wild-ringed eye.
Then he breathed deeply the deep atmosphere
Of sleep, the accomplished, the fulfilling air.
IV
There peace, the godolphin and fellow, estranged, estranged,
Hewn in their middle as the beam of leaves,
The prince of shither-shade and tinsel lights,
Stood flourishing the world. The brilliant height
And hollow of him by its brilliance calmed,
Its brightness burned the way good solace seethes.
This was peace after death, the brother of sleep,
The inhuman brother so much like, so near,
Yet vested in a foreign absolute,
Adorned with cryptic stones and sliding shines,
An immaculate personage in nothingness,
With the whole spirit sparkling in its cloth,
Generations of the imagination piled
In the manner of its stitchings, of its thread,
In the weaving round the wonder of its need,
And the first flowers upon it, an alphabet
By which to spell out holy doom and end,
A bee for the remembering of happiness.
Peace stood with our last blood adorned, last mind,
Damasked in the originals of green,
A thousand begettings of the broken bold.
This is that figure stationed at our end,
Always, in brilliance, fatal, final, formed
Out of our lives to keep us in our death,
To watch us in the summer of Cyclops
Underground, a king as candle by our beds
In a robe that is our glory as he guards.
V
But she that says good-by losing in self
The sense of self, rosed out of prestiges
Of rose, stood tall in self not symbol, quick
And potent, an influence felt instead of seen.
She spoke with backward gestures of her hand.
She held men closely with discovery,
Almost as speed discovers, in the way
Invisible change discovers what is changed,
In the way what was has ceased to be what is.
It was not her look but a knowledge that she had.
She was a self that knew, an inner thing,
Subtler than look's declaiming, although she moved
With a sad splendor, beyond artifice,
Impassioned by the knowledge that she had,
There on the edges of oblivion.
O exhalation, O fling without a sleeve
And motion outward, reddened and resolved
From sight, in the silence that follows her last word--
VI
This is the mythology of modern death
And these, in their mufflings, monsters of elegy,
Of their own marvel made, of pity made,
Compounded and compounded, life by life,
These are death's own supremest images,
The pure perfections of parental space,
The children of a desire that is the will,
Even of death, the beings of the mind
In the light-bound space of the mind, the floreate flare...
It is a child that sings itself to sleep,
The mind, among the creatures that it makes,
The people, those by which it lives and dies.
Memorize your poems now, because you'll have to recite them next week if you haven't already!
Most people on this planet are taking up space. Poetry really can be used for edification. We should do more than just take up space and fill up time. We should talk about more than just sports and the weather. What is there in life except the weather? We are all involved in menial things.
The whole of appearance is a toy. For this,
The dove in the belly builds his nest and coos,
Selah, tempestuous bird. How is it that
The rivers shine and hold their mirrors up,
Like excellence collecting excellence?
How is it that the wooden trees stand up
And live and heap their panniers of green
And hold them round the sultry day? Why should
These mountains being high be, also, bright,
Fetched up with snow that never falls to earth?
And this great esplanade of corn, miles wide,
Is something wished for made effectual
And something more. And the people in costumes,
Though poor, though raggeder than ruin, have that
Within them right for terraces—oh, brave salut!
Deep dove, placate you in your hiddenness.
So this is my poem, in case I haven't posted it already, and I think I've finally got it memorized! If we are still to present our poems to the class, I should probably do that today, seeing as I'll be in Seattle all of next week for a senior field trip in design. We'll see how that goes, what with my great frankenstein boot and all.
Imagination does not destroy reality, it puts it to your own use. Heaven is found in the whispers of heavenly labials among a world of gutturals, says James. There is a transition to Auroras of Autumn just as important as the last hiatus. All of the wonderful recognitions of Ideas of Order are made over and over again. Every time you have an epiphany you can expect another one in a week or so. Stevens' demonstrations of reconciliations have been thrown away, and he has to start over again.
What is your candle to that of the northern lights? If you think you've got something great you should take a look outside and see what is around you.
Hopefully this is the video James was talking about – if you're not reading Harold Bloom, watch this! If you are, sure, watch it anyway. We won't tell.
We are going to suffer until we get everything figured out, that is, until we die.
Fun fact. The first time that The Rite of Spring was played, it sent the audience into a riot. Oh, and 50,000 words should be around 150 (paperback) pages.
When at long midnight the Canon came to sleep
And normal things had yawned themselves away,
The nothingness was a nakedness, a point,
Beyond which fact could not progress as fact.
Thereon the learning of the man conceived
Once more night’s pale illuminations, gold
Beneath, far underneath, the surface of
His eye and audible in the mountain of
His ear, the very material of his mind.
So that he was the ascending wings he saw
And moved on them in orbits’ outer stars
Descending to the children’s bed, on which
They lay. Forth then with huge pathetic force
Straight to the utmost crown of night he flew.
The nothingness was a nakedness, a point
Beyond which thought could not progress as thought.
He had to choose. But it was not a choice
Between excluding things. It was not a choice
Between, but of. He chose to include the things
That in each other are included, the whole,
The complicate, the massing harmony.
Is the poet of divine creation or is it something else? There are three steps to poetry – paradise lost, the broken world, or expulsion, and recreation, or paradise regained. The beginning is immaculate, and that is what we are supposed to reach. Sentience is only the second step, but you must remember that your head is full of everything.
It Must Change.
Who do you see in your mind's eye when you read these poems? Nanzia Nunzio is one helluva woman. Ozymandias is a poem by Shelley, a man who will never be anything but dust. To find out about her counterpart Inanna, go here, but it's not a link for the faint of heart!
Heraclitus believes that both subjectivity and objectivity are subject to change. One has to wonder if that's what makes him weep over the world. We peer through a glass darkly, but we want nothing more than to see things face to face. Harold Bloom can never forget anything – don't try to tell me that would be a good thing.
When we opened Tanner's eye, we saw that he does not see anything – he stares straight into the void. Three years it took to learn this. “Not a choice between, but of.”
Do not impose with your project. Do not say what you think Sexson wants you to say, say those things that you know now that you didn't know before.
Have you ever had a dream that was so real you were convinced that it happened? I still have some moments in my life that I am not sure are reality; they might be dreams that I forgot that I've dreamt about.
As I am, I am.
All that we have is all that changes constantly; the northern lights. When you ask why you haven't made up your mind about anything, take advice from Stevens and don't. Oh.
All poetry is about all poetry. If we can train ourselves to use flawed words and stuttered sounds, we can do anything. Stevens' epiphanies are only possible with the bread of faithful speech.
On Wednesday, bring a two to three sentence summary of your final project on a slip of paper, and be prepared to talk about it.
In the first canto of the final canticle,
Too conscious of too many things at once,
Our man beheld the naked, nameless dame,
Seized her and wondered: why beneath the tree
She held her hand before him in the air,
For him to see, wove round her glittering hair.
Too conscious of too many things at once,
In the first canto of the final canticle,
Her hand composed him and composed the tree.
The wind had seized the tree and ha, and ha,
It held the shivering, the shaken limbs,
Then bathed its body in the leaping lake.
Her hand composed him like a hand appeared,
Of an impersonal gesture, a stranger's hand.
He was too conscious of too many things
In the first canto of the final canticle.
Her hand took his and drew it near to her.
Her hand fell on him and the mi-bird flew
To the ruddier bushes at the garden's end.
Of her, of her alone, at last he knew
And lay beside her underneath the tree.
It is difficult to read. The page is dark.
Yet he knows what it is that he expects.
The page is blank or a frame without a glass
Or a glass that is empty when he looks.
The greenness of night lies on the page and goes
Down deeply in the empty glass…
Look, realist, not knowing what you expect.
The green falls on you as you look,
Falls on and makes and gives, even a speech.
And you think that that is what you expect,
That elemental parent, the green night,
Teaching a fusky alphabet.
The poem of the mind in the act of finding
What will suffice. It has not always had
To find: the scene was set; it repeated what
Was in the script.
Then the theatre was changed
To something else. Its past was a souvenir.
It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.
It has to face the men of the time and to meet
The women of the time. It has to think about war
And it has to find what will suffice. It has
To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage,
And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and
With meditation, speak words that in the ear,
In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat,
Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound
Of which, an invisible audience listens,
Not to the play, but to itself, expressed
In an emotion as of two people, as of two
Emotions becoming one. The actor is
A metaphysician in the dark, twanging
An instrument, twanging a wiry string that gives
Sounds passing through sudden rightnesses, wholly
Containing the mind, below which it cannot descend,
Beyond which it has no will to rise.
It must
Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may
Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman
Combing. The poem of the act of the mind.
The lion roars at the enraging desert,
Reddens the sand with his red-colored noise,
Defies red emptiness to evolve his match,
Master by foot and jaws and by the mane,
Most supple challenger. The elephant
Breaches the darkness of Ceylon with blares,
The glitter-goes on surfaces of tanks,
Shattering velvetest far-away. The bear,
The ponderous cinnamon, snarls in his mountain
At summer thunder and sleeps through winter snow.
But you, ephebe, look from your attic window,
Your mansard with a rented piano. You lie
In silence upon your bed. You clutch the corner
Of the pillow in your hand. You writhe and press
A bitter utterance from your writhing, dumb,
Yet voluble dumb violence. You look
Across the roofs as sigil and as ward
And in your centre mark them and are cowed . . .
These are the heroic children whom time breeds
Against the first idea – to lash the lion,
Caparison elephants, teach bears to juggle.
I want to do this. I want to be a lion, to roar, to face the world without fear, trembling, or apprehension. I am the one who curls up in the corner of my bed, whimpering, because the world is just too much for me to handle. I'm the one whose blog is nothing but poems, because they say the words I can't. I don't want to be the one dancing around with words that don't make any sense - what would the point of that be?
At the same time, though, I know I have to say something. I've finished Solaris; it was actually quite difficult to put down. As I read, I found myself a part of the story, and I went on a journey through my mind as I watched Kris' mental struggles. It left me with a confession to make. I would like my end to be something like that of Rheya's.I love the idea of oblivion. I would like nothing more than to simply not exist anymore; the idea of heaven scares me almost as much as hell does, particularly in light of the conversations that we've had in this class about eternal perfection. I don't think that I could do anything forever. Life's brevity is one of its greatest appeals to me, and yet...
I'm scared of being wrong. I'm trying to empty my mind, to get rid of everything that I think I know, but...what if there really is a god? There's that one last thread that I can't seem to cut. I don't quite understand why. I'll continue to work on it...and I'll let you know if anything changes.
It was in the earth only
That he was at the bottom of things
And of himself. There he could say
Of this I am, this is the patriarch,
This it is that answers when I ask,
This is the mute, the final sculpture
Around which silence lies on silence.
This repose alike in springtime
And, arbored and bronzed, in autumn.
He said I had this that I could love,
As one loves visible and responsive peace,
As one loves one’s own being,
As one loves that which is the end
And must be loved, as one loves that
Of which one is a part as in a unity,
A unity that is the life one loves,
So that one lives all the lives that comprise it
As the life of the fatal unity of war.
Everything comes to him
From the middle of his field. The odor
Of earth penetrates more deeply than any word.
There he touches his being. There as he is
He is. The thought that he had found all this
Among me, in a woman- she caught his breath-
But he came back as one comes back from the sun
To lie on one's bed in the dark, close to a face
Without eyes or mouth, that looks at one and speaks.
A sunny day's complete Poussiniana
Divide it from itself. It is this or that
And it is not.
By metaphor you paint
A thing. Thus, the pineapple was a leather fruit,
A fruit for pewter, thorned and palmed and blue,
To be served by men of ice.
The senses paint
By metaphor. The juice was fragranter
Than wettest cinnamon. It was cribled pears
Dripping a morning sap.
The truth must be
That you do not see, you experience, you feel,
That the buxom eye brings merely its element
To the total thing, a shapeless giant forced
Upward.
Green were the curls upon that head.
The deer and the dachsund are one.
Well, the gods grow out of the weather.
The people grow out of the weather;
The gods grow out of the people.
Encore, encore, encore les dieux. . .
The distance between the dark steeple
And cobble ten thousand and three
Is more than seven-foot inchworm
Could measure by moonlight in June.
Kiss, cats: for the deer and the dachsund
Are one. My window is twenty-nine three
And plenty of window for me.
The steeples are empty and so are the people,
There’s nothing whatever to see
Except Polacks that pass in their motors
And play concertinas all night.
They think that things are all right,
Since the deer and the dachsund are one.
It was when I said,
"There is no such thing as the truth,"
That the grapes seemed fatter.
The fox ran out of his hole.
You . . . You said,
"There are many truths,
But they are not parts of a truth."
Then the tree, at night, began to change,
Smoking through green and smoking blue.
We were two figures in a wood.
We said we stood alone.
It was when I said,
"Words are not forms of a single word
In the sum of the parts, there are only the parts.
The world must be measured by eye";
It was when you said,
"The idols have seen lots of poverty,
Snakes and gold and lice,
But not the truth";
It was at that time, that the silence was largest
And longest, the night was roundest,
The fragrance of the autumn warmest,
Closest and strongest.
That the glass would melt in heat,
That the water would freeze in cold,
Shows that this object is merely a state,
One of many, between two poles. So,
In the metaphysical, there are these poles.
Here in the centre stands the glass. Light
Is the lion that comes down to drink. There
And in that state, the glass is a pool.
Ruddy are his eyes and ruddy are his claws
When light comes down to wet his frothy jaws
And in the water winding weeds move round.
And there and in another state--the refractions,
The metaphysica, the plastic parts of poems
Crash in the mind--But, fat Jocundus, worrying
About what stands here in the centre, not the glass,
But in the centre of our lives, this time, this day,
It is a state, this spring among the politicians
Playing cards. In a village of the indigenes,
One would have still to discover. Among the dogs and dung,
One would continue to contend with one's ideas.
That's what misery is,
Nothing to have at heart.
It is to have or nothing.
It is a thing to have,
A lion, an ox in his breast,
To feel it breathing there.
Corazon, stout dog,
Young ox, bow-legged bear,
He tastes its blood, not spit.
He is like a man
In the body of a violent beast
Its muscles are his own...
The lion sleeps in the sun.
Its nose is on its paws.
It can kill a man.
There were ghosts that returned to earth to hear his phrases,
As he sat there reading, aloud, the great blue tabulae.
They were those from the wilderness of stars that had expected more.
There were those that returned to hear him read from the poem of life,
Of the pans above the stove, the pots on the table, the tulips among them.
They were those that would have wept to step barefoot into reality,
That would have wept and been happy, have shivered in the frost
And cried out to feel it again, have run fingers over leaves
And against the most coiled thorn, have seized on what was ugly
And laughed, as he sat there reading, from out of the purple tabulae,
The outlines of being and its expressings, the syllables of its law:
Poesis, poesis, the literal characters, the vatic lines,
Which in those ears and in those thin, those spended hearts,
Took on color, took on shape and the size of things as they are
And spoke the feeling for them, which was what they had lacked.
This structure of ideas, these ghostly sequences
Of the mind, result only in disaster. It follows,
Casual poet, that to add your own disorder to disaster
Makes more of it. It is easy to wish for another structure
Of ideas and to say as usual that there must be
Other ghostly sequences and, it would be, luminous
Sequences, thought of among spheres in the old peak of night:
This is the habit of wishing, as if one's grandfather lay
In one's heart and wished as he had always wished, unable
To sleep in that bed for its disorder, talking of ghostly
Sequences that would be sleep and ting-tang tossing, so that
He might slowly forget. It is more difficult to evade
That habit of wishing and to accept the structure
Of things as the structure of ideas. It was the structure
Of things at least that was thought of in the old peak of night.
Stevens resists the mind almost successfully, as a poet should. Let's not talk about things that cannot be put into words; let us talk about things that can be put into words. We don't want to just deal with the “woooo,” the things that we just cannot put into words. If we cannot find the words for it, we must remain silent. I feel I spend too much of this class silent. I need to find something to hold on to.
“He who knows does not speak, and he who speaks does not know.”
There is nothing boring about the poem, the poem finds you to be boring. The poem finds me to be misleading. “I have been with you my whole life, and I will end my life thinking about you.”
Wallace Stevens is waiting for us where the sidewalk ends. Originally poems needed to do four things, but they Stevens decided that they did not need to be human, and that three was a better number anyways. If we can get rid of our illusions, we can get rid of everything that stands between us and pleasure.
There are three instances of mystical marriages in Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction. Reading poetry is desperately important for your psychological health. Obviously I need to read the poems again.
Choose a canto – not necessarily one that you understand. In fact, it should not be familiar or comfortable at all. Choose something that makes you feel uncomfortable, that is odd, and asks you to deal with it. You do not have to understand it, but you do have to engage it. Stevens wonders if he can use that same sense of participation to reengage you with the world, to help you become what you used to be – everything.
Harold Bloom would like us to know that not only does Notes resist the imagination almost successfully, it resists the imagination almost completely successfully.
Choose a canto to write about in your blog for next time.
Mysticism is when you have an experience with the divine, where there is no dividing line. There are only ordinary things, but Stevens wants you to understand that these ordinary things are the most beautiful things that ever happened to you.
There are moments in which we more than awaken.
Zorba's dance and the 8 ½ dance are the best movie endings there are.
There are no ideas except in things, say the poets, and Stevens says “maybe”. There is an audience behind us and our watching, and everyone writes their poems to the muse.
There are three things that a poem must do: be abstract, change, give pleasure. To be abstract it must not be Trees. To abs-tract means to strip away so we can see things as they really are.
ephebe |ˈefēb; iˈfēb|
noun (in ancient Greece) a young man of 18–20 years undergoing military training.
There is only us and this bare rock.
The poem, through candor, brings back a power again
That gives a candid kind to everything
He throws away god and then god comes back, he throws away myth and out comes the myth of mythlessness.
THAT is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
Friday's notes are going up a little late as I did not have access to my computer at the time...also they will be a bit briefer than normal as I don't write very fast.
Stevens is obsessed with the muse, in fact, ti seems he cannot write without invoking the muse. What does Stevens have to do with the invisible eyeball?
"The way up and down are the same, and the end of life is pleasure."
Stevens is still and will always be stuck on the idea of threes. Please read Solaris this weekend, it should really only take a couple of hours.
Maybe oblivion isn't so bad after all, I mean, the first thing we did when we came out of the void was scream.
Do Stevens' poems really help us live their lives?
We will have no class on November 12 or November 15. The prologues are over, and now is the time to choose your project. Within the next 10 days, begin to work on your project and tell us what it is. If you are behind on your blog, please catch up – it's quite an easy thing to do.
Postpone the anatomy of summer, as
The physical pine, the metaphysical pine.
Let's see the very thing and nothing else.
Let's see it with the hottest fire of sight.
Burn everything not part of it to ash.
Trace the gold sun about the whitened sky
Without evasion by a single metaphor.
← Take that and hang it up on your wall. Read the Dao of Pooh if you get a chance. Only fools can make a tree, and only poets can see things as they really are.
If you're wondering who won the debate, watch the video above.
If we have come from the void, why are we so afraid of going back to it? There's nothing to be afraid of anymore.
I thought I was confused before, but now I'm really clueless. One of the adagias that I chose was
"The man who asks questions seeks only to reach a point where it will no longer be necessary for him to ask questions."
But today in class Sexson said that if something doesn't cause us to ask questions, that means we aren't learning from it, and learning is good, right?
The reason that adage stood out to me is that I feel like I always have to ask questions, and it's hard to find the answers that I seek. I thought maybe that if I just stopped asking questions and let things be, it would be better...but now that means that I'm not learning anything.
Surely that is not a good thing.
Right?
Six stripes of yellow mark a road
Street and curb and leaves, slow-shifting faded fall
Crisp cool cerulean above, adrift
Alone although within a crowd, wonderful wanderings
Slow and shift and drift along the way
Time stops.
A biker drifts the street
Once more the stream ignites.
Six stripes of yellow mark the streetside while
The wind blows wild, skittering, skipping on
Rattles the rusted leaves along the lane
Which swirl and dance and swing the day away
High heartbeats skitter
Oh-o-woah-o-oh
Deep drumbeats boom, bringing a brawny base.
What kind of poem ends with the letter X? Our job is simply to listen. We are all carrying a thing, and at this point in the semester we should all be sharing those things with each other. We are all to be in-formed.
max·im /ˈmaksim/
Noun: A short, pithy statement expressing a general truth or rule of conduct.
The poem must resist the intelligence
Almost sucessfully.
The adages are not proverbs. Proverbial truths are things that are true because they are familiar; we see them and say “how true!” Adages are things that we do not understand at first; we see them and say “how can this be true?” Proverbs answer questions, and Adages ask them.
Let's read Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction this week, shall we?
Anabasis and Katabasis have a much deeper meaning than we ever suspected...katabasis is to go down, to dismount from a horse or chariot, while anabasis is to go up or climb onto a horse or chariot. Put Vico's A New Science on your list of things to read for the summer, it will affect you quite profoundly.
We are the esoteric.
“Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative and creation, there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.”
Once you decide what you want to do, once you are committed, things will just start falling into place. It's the Cinderella effect; these things will always come to your assistance once you decide to rely on them.
The greatest example of katabasis in literature comes from the Mahabharata. Do not think that your project will be the greatest, or that we will think it is absolutely fantastic (though it will be); the mind can never be satisfied.
A mound of earth and a heap of muck and a puddle of vomit are all one.
Altogether all is loud. Stevens does extremely mathematical things and if you get confused about them you should talk to Dustin about it, as he has a very mathematical mind. Although we think of Stevens as being very ethereal and metaphysical, in reality he is a very primitive poet. The metaphysician is the man behind the curtain, the metaphysical is above and beyond the physical. Powerpoints are boring; do not use them in your presentations.
http://www.behindthename.com/name/alfred
Montevideo, the capitol of Uruguay, is actually the mountain of vision. Mrs. Alfred Uruguay is searching for vision. Reality is a woman, climbing the mountains of vision to see, and she meets this figure coming down, phosphorescent of hair. A figure of capable imagination.
The emptying out process is broken down into two very separate ways – Metaphysical (or immaterial) beyond that which we see, not physical – and Physical (or material) made of stuff.
A metaphysician wants you to get rid of material things, stuff you don't need. Even we are material; if we are truly to empty ourselves out, we must rid ourselves of our bodies and go to a better realm, an immaterial zone. To arrive out of materialism is the aim of dominant religions and hidden religions such as gnosticism. We are stuck in the muck of this place and we need to reject the material to escape this place.
A materialist (like Lucretius) wants you to get rid of doctrines and ideas and everything that floats around in your head, thinks that are difficult to get ahold of. Kenosis in this sense means getting rid of everything you thought you knew and just pressing deep into physicality, knowing not who you are but what you are (that is, you are stuff). Most scientists are materialists.
LET us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question…
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
(They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”)
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
(They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”)
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?
And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?
And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?
. . . . . . . .
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?…
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
. . . . . . . .
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep … tired … or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.
And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all;
That is not it, at all.”
And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.”
. . . . . . . .
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.
I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
So what said the others and the sun went down
And, in the brown blues of evening, the lady said,
In the Donkey's ear, "I fear that elegance
Must struggle like the rest." She climbed until
The moonlight in her lap, mewing her velvet,
And her dress were one and she said, "I have said no
To everything, in order to get at myself.
I have wiped away moonlight like mud. Your innocent ear
And I, if I rode naked, are what remain."
The moonlight crumbled to degenerate forms,
While she approached the real, upon her mountain,
With lofty darkness. The donkey was there to ride,
To hold by the ear, even though it wished for a bell,
Wished faithfully for a falsifying bell.
Neither the moonlight could change it. And for her,
To be regardless of velvet, could never be more
Than to be, she could never differently be,
Her no and no made yes impossible.
Who was it passed her there on a horse all will,
What figure of capable imagination?
Whose horse clattered on the road on which she rose,
As it descended, blind to her velvet and
The moonlight? Was it a rider intent on the sun,
A youth, a lover with phosphorescent hair,
Dressed poorly, arrogant of his streaming forces,
Lost in an integration of the martyrs' bones,
Rushing from what was real; and capable?
The villages slept as the capable man went down,
Time swished on the village clocks and dreams were alive,
The enormous gongs gave edges to their sounds,
As the rider, no chevalere and poorly dressed,
Impatient of the bells and midnight forms,
Rode over the picket rocks, rode down the road,
And, capable, created in his mind,
Eventual victor, out of the martyrs' bones,
The ultimate elegance: the imagined land.
The fish does . . . HIP
The bird does . . . VISS
The marmot does . . . GNAN
I throw myself to the left,
I turn myself to the right,
I act the fish,
Which darts in the water, which darts
Which twists about, which leaps–
All lives, all dances, and all is loud.
The fish does . . . HIP
The bird does . . . VISS
The marmot does . . . GNAN
The bird flies away,
It flies, flies, flies,
Goes, returns, passes,
Climbs, soars and drops.
I act the bird–
All lives, all dances, and all is loud.
The fish does . . . HIP
The bird does . . . VISS
The marmot does . . . GNAN
The monkey from branch to branch,
Runs bounds and leaps,
With his wife, with his brat,
His mouth full, his tail in the air,
There goes the monkey! There goes the Monkey!
All lives, all dances, and all is loud.
“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
Kenosis can work in two ways: it can be the religious stripping of what is superficial, or decreation – not the deconstruction that we know of, but the movement from the created to the uncreated. Simone Weil might be a good source for your project.
“To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.”
Empty yourself out of everything that you thought was true; divine ignorance is purification of the soul. Our journey is not to get to here from there; it is to be here. “In order to find my heart's desire, I won't look any further than my own backyard.” You're already at the place you need to be, so how do you get here? The greek word nostos is the root of nostalgia, sophia means wisdom, and theos is the knowledge of god. The witch says to Dorothy; “You already know how to go home, you've know all along – but you have to click your heels and wish for home.”
Even wizards have feet of clay. We need to arrive where we started and see the world for the first time. The etymology of the word “mere” sounds more like “essential”. It's very frustrating when your wonderful idea has been discovered hundreds of times before you. Neti neti is a sanskrit expression which means “not this, not this,” or “neither this nor that.” We already know what we need to know but we just don't know it yet. To talk about god in words is to reduce god to an object; trying to catch the divine reality will never succeed. Instead of talking about what it is we should talk about what it is not. We must transcend words.
The Veda are the earliest Hindu texts; videos are something you watch, an act of seeing. The Vedas are meant to make you see. True seeing is into reality. Aldous Huxley is the one who tried to reunite eastern and wester philosophy, and died November 22, 1963. He was also the writer of The Doors of Perception.
“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.”
Perennial Philosophy is the notion that some thoughts are the same whether you're in India, New York, or the moon. We sink into ever increasing dimensions of reality. Thing about the metaphor of the stage, how we are all the actors. Think about how the stage has changed and how we need to go about things differently than we used to. The prologues are over, it is a question now of final belief. The final belief must be in a fiction that you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else...
Stevens is such a painterly poet that the internet is full of paintings that inspired him. The fictional person who will lead us out of this illusion will also lead us to see the world the way it really is.
The presentations that we've seen the last couple days are good ideas for how your project should be. Talk about things that get you in your blogs; write about poems that just get you and you can't stop thinking about them. Work. Work with your poems, and use all the assets you have to shape together your project. Tat Tvam Asi is the word of the day; it means everything you think you are and everything you think you are perceive are one.
Stevens was possessed with getting it right; he spent his entire life trying to do so. Poetry is not entertainment; it is a great deal more than that, a destructive force, poetry is the thing itself. We are in search of nothing less than the Truth and the Reality. Stevens heard things that he should not have been able to hear because of the alchemical work he had been performing on himself.
There is a line between imagination and reality and Stevens dots it with his poems. It shows the mimicry, the transition, the dance between the two. He gives us the entire spectrum of human experience. Everything is changing, in the state of flux, encountering the swerve.
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds...”
The real is only the base, but it is the base. Let's just see things as they are, without metaphor. If it were possible to be a thinking stone we would not have so much homework to do.
At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.
He knew that he heard it,
A bird's cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.
The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow...
It would have been outside.
It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep's faded papier-mache...
The sun was coming from the outside.
That scrawny cry--It was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,
Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.
I'm going to go back a step now and talk about the poem about poetry we were supposed to discover. As many others have found, mine not only related to poetry, but mentioned poetry directly (I got July Mountain, from the late poems).
We live in a constellation
Of patches and of pitches.
Not in a single world,
In things said well in music,
On the piano, and in speech,
As in a page of poetry--
Thinkers without final thoughts
In an always incipient cosmos,
The way, when we climb a mountain,
Vermont throws itself together.
---
A mythology reflects its region. Here
In Connecticut, we never lived in a time
When mythology was possible--But if we had--
That raises the question of the image's truth.
The image must be of the nature of its creator.
It is the nature of its creator increased,
Heightened. It is he, anew, in a freshened youth
And it is he in the substance of his region
Woods of his forests and stone out of his fields
Or from under his mountains.
The second part, I think, is its own untitled poem, but it seems to relate, and I thought it was worth throwing in anyway. But anyway. The "constellation of patches and of pitches" reminded me of an orchestra tuning up, all of those different noises that eventually come together to make a beautiful song, and that's how poetry seems to come together, too, at least when I'm writing it - I take a jumble of ideas and toss them in a bowl, shake vigorously, and then pull out the things that seem to have some sort of connection.
I want to write more poetry.
Anyway, I don't think that I experienced the same epiphany from this experience that Carla and Grace and others did, but I did it at least, and I do see the connection there. Maybe if I read it again once I stop asking questions it will make more sense.
All night I sat reading a book,
Sat reading as if in a book
Of sombre pages.
It was autumn and falling stars
Covered the shrivelled forms
Crouched in the moonlight.
No lamp was burning as I read,
A voice was mumbling, "Everything
Falls back to coldness,
Even the musky muscadines,
The melons, the vermilion pears
Of the leafless garden."
The sombre pages bore no print
Except the trace of burning stars
In the frosty heaven.
The night knows nothing of the chants of night.
It is what it is as I am what I am:
And in perceiving this I best perceive myself
And you. Only we two may interchange
Each in the other what each has to give.
Only we two are one, not you and night,
Nor night and I, but you and I, alone,
So much alone, so deeply by ourselves,
So far beyond the casual solitudes,
That night is only the background of our selves,
Supremely true each to its separate self,
In the pale light that each upon the other throws.
He brushed away the thunder, then the clouds,
Then the colossal illusion of heaven. Yet still
The sky was blue. He wanted imperceptible air.
He wanted to see. He wanted the eye to see
And not be touched by blue. He wanted to know,
A naked man who regarded himself in the glass
Of air, who looked for the world beneath the blue,
Without blue, without any turqouise hint or phase,
Any azure under-side or after-color. Nabob
Of bones, he rejected, he denied, to arrive
At the neutral center, the omnious element,
The single colored, colorless, primitive.
It was not as if the truth lay where he thought,
Like a phantom, in an uncreated night.
It was easier to think it lay there. If
It was nowhere else, it was there and because
It was nowhere else, its place had to be supposed,
Itself had to be supposed, a thing supposed
In a place supposed, a thing he reached
In a place that he reached, by rejecting what he saw
And denying what he heard. He would arrive.
He had only not to live, to walk in the dark,
To be projected by one void into
Another.
It was his nature to suppose
To receive what others had supposed, without
Accepting. He received what he denied.
But as truth to be accepted, he supposed
A truth beyond all truths.
He never supposed
That he might be truth, himself, or part of it,
That the things that he rejected might be part
And the irregular turquoise part, the perceptible blue
Grown dense, part, the eye so touched, so played
Upon by clouds, the ear so magnified
By thunder, parts, and all these things together,
Parts, and more things, parts. He never supposed divine
Things might not look divine, nor that if nothing
Was divine then all things were, the world itself,
And that if nothing was the the truth, then all
Things were the truth, the world itself was the truth.
Had he been better able to suppose:
He might sit on a sofa on a balcony
Above the Mediterranean, emerald
Becoming emeralds. He might watch the palms
Flap green ears in the heat. He might observe
A yellow wine and follow a steamer's track
And say, "The thing I hum appears to be
The rhythm of this celestrial pantomime"
We could not see anything at all until an artist came along and taught us how to see that way.
I wish that I could be a thinking stone.
Just when I think I'm feeling confident that I know what's going on in this class we get thrown a curveball. I've had a lot of epiphanies this semester, or at least I think I have, but the idea of getting rid of imagination frankly makes me rather angry. I have enough trouble being imaginative as it is...you would think that would mean that I wouldn't mind giving it up but no...I feel like I can't, like I won't be creative enough if I give up imagination. Not that I feel as though I'm brimming with creativity as it is right now.
"The romantic exists in precision as well as in imprecision."
That's one of the adages that caught my eye, and it's a little bit of an insight for me as well. I like things to be just-so, and it's very frustrating when they're not. Just taking my thoughts and throwing them out onto my blog is difficult because of this, but my semester has been so hectic that doing anything more than that is nigh impossible. So I've been putting it off and convincing myself "I'll blog tomorrow, when I have some free time."
Yesterday I was having a conversation with my otter about epilogues in stories. My personal thought is that epilogues are rarely necessary to the story, and serve only as a sequel hook or a way to show that the couple did get married in the end and had eighteen children. I don't care what happens after most stories and I don't understand, if that information is so important, why the writer doesn't just make it a part of the story.
This is where the conversation segued off and we started talking about our own stories (we are both writers, or at least try to think we are). My otter mentioned that he would like to write a whole series of books set in the world he's building now, and I realized then that the idea of having a sequel to the story I'm writing now had never even occurred to me. In fact, I don't think I could write a sequel. I'm loving the Lucretian elements that I've been finding to pull in and it's been a great joy (and a challenge) to see things start to take shape, plotwise, in this setting that's been brewing in my head for a while, but I see the ending of the story, and that's where the story, well, ends.
I'm stuck on the idea of How to Live. What to Do. It adds a very satisfying ending, I think, to the piece. The problem is that there's this whole new world that has just opened up in front of these characters (and me) and I have no idea what will happen. I just don't. As much as I'm loving the idea of being able to throw off everything old, all of your illusions and preconceptions and notions of the way life should be, I have absolutely no idea what should happen after that...
"The man who asks questions seeks only to reach a point where it will no longer be necessary for him to ask questions."
That describes me in a nutshell.
So how do I stop asking?
Read Adagia and find a couple of adages that you like.
“The ceaseless mutation of forms composed of indestructible substances is the single greatest thought that mankind has ever had.”
...or is it...
“This double experience of mutation and recurrence, an experience at once sentimental and scientific, soon brought with it a very great thought, perhaps the greatest thought that mankind has ever hit upon, and which was the chief inspiration of Lucretius. It is that all we observe about us, and ourselves also, may be so many passing forms of a permanent substance.”
We say “carpe diem” because we see the horrifying brevity of life that poets have taught us to see, that of mayflies. One generation comes and another generation goes but the earth abides forever. The word that shows up as vanity should really be something to the effect of “breath”. If things are here and then gone, what are we going to do once they are?
There is an Indian philosophy that everything is made of the same substances, in fact, that all things are one, even the flies that buzz around our heads. A gadfly is someone who asks questions that aren't pertinent, who can interrupt progress by bothering these issues relentlessly. Looking for a cure for that buzzing? Try a poem.
Sonnets are cures in an almost medicinal sense. They are very strict; fourteen lines in either three quatrains and a couplet, or an octet and a sextet. The emphasis always has to be on the right syllable, and the right number of syllables must be on each line. You only get fourteen lines to do what you want to do; you need this form of order, or else the cure just won't work. Keep in mind that everything is used to speak about poetry.
Cutting down the tree that connected us to heaven helps us to see the world in a way that we have never seen it before. Get in touch with all the things that are alienated to you. If you are in touch with everything, there will be nothing that you do not enjoy, because they are all a part of you. Everything is wonderful.
We should probably get rid of the way that we want to see things, and see things as they actually are. "The pears are not seen as the observer wills." Stevens, in this phase, is trying to get us to strip away all of these distractions that make us see things in relation to another.
Read landscape with boat, and then go out and see something as it really is.
Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room;
And hermits are contented with their cells;
And students with their pensive citadels;
Maids at the wheel, the weaver at his loom,
Sit blithe and happy; bees that soar for bloom,
High as the highest Peak of Furness-fells,
Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells:
In truth the prison, unto which we doom
Ourselves, no prison is: and hence for me,
In sundry moods, 'twas pastime to be bound
Within the Sonnet's scanty plot of ground;
Pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be)
Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,
Should find brief solace there, as I have found.
In this class, we are going to empty ourselves out and then build up new things to fill that emptiness. We are going to finally see things as they are, and that epiphany will fill us. Everybody hears the same thing when we listen to the music of the earth. It is called a dawn chorus, tying it back to Not Ideas About The Thing But The Thing Itself. Why is it that things always seem to tie back to Stevens? Do they really, or are we just drawing meanings from it? I think we could say that it is not just a coincidence, but rather that it is a poetic coincidence, a poesis.
Today's magic word is thing. Stevens is the King of Things, the Thing King (thinking). In the volume we are in right now, he is obsessed with things. This comes back to On the Nature of Things. When we are unable to sort things out we find that we want to cease all thought and find a cure of the mind. Many critics dismiss this volume, and say it's not as good as the rest.
cure (ky
r)
n.
1. Restoration of health; recovery from disease.
2. A method or course of medical treatment used to restore health.
3. An agent, such as a drug, that restores health; a remedy.
4. Something that corrects or relieves a harmful or disturbing situation: The cats proved to be a good cure for our mouse problem.
5. Ecclesiastical Spiritual charge or care, as of a priest for a congregation.
6. The office or duties of a curate.
7. The act or process of preserving a product.
v. cured, cur·ing, cures
v.tr.
1. To restore to health.
2. To effect a recovery from: cure a cold.
3. To remove or remedy (something harmful or disturbing): cure an evil.
4. To preserve (meat, for example), as by salting, smoking, or aging.
5. To prepare, preserve, or finish (a substance) by a chemical or physical process.
6. To vulcanize (rubber).
v.intr.
1. To effect a cure or recovery: a medicine that cures.
2. To be prepared, preserved, or finished by a chemical or physical process: hams curing in the smokehouse.
The primordial tree is what allowed people in heaven to talk to people on earth and so on. As long as this tree was there the world was all right. Look at as many still lives as you can between now and Friday.
