The Holidays Are Over. Real Life Has Begun.

Stevens contradicts himself in his view about imagination, among other things – imagination is the greatest of tools, but we must rid ourselves of imagination to see things as they really are. It helps us to create reality while preventing us from seeing reality. Are Stevens' poems really a voyage or are they something more than that? If you want an idea for what to do as your capstone, say that Stevens already knew what he was doing from the very beginning through Comedian as the Letter C.

“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.