In The Mind.

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.

Reflections of a World.

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?

The Bread of Faithful Speech.

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.

There Being Nothing Else.

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.

Belief Without Belief Beyond Belief.

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?

Not Seen as the Observer Wills.

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.

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.

Self-Reliance.

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.

The Epic.

Whoever is tallest among men cannot reach the heavens, and the greatest cannot encompass the earth. - Gilgamesh

Loss of Faith is Growth.

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?

A Pear is a Pear.

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.

To Be Without a Description of To Be.

We now know what the earth itself sounds like. Chorus...is one of the clearest examples we've ever heard. Keep in mind that it is not actually sound waves, no sounds that we can hear, but waves much deeper than that. Maybe deep isn't such a bad thing after all.

Steve Kemper is researching painting and Stevens; Paul Klee says that painting is simply to put color in the right place. Not only do Stevens' poems talk about poetry, but his prose does, too.

Everything is starting to draw together – just imagine how we'll look at things by the end of the semester. Words Chosen of Desire is a phrase drawn by Primitive of an Orb. We should only choose words out of desire; they will not work otherwise. Unfortunately we will not be able to read the entirety of Man With a Blue Guitar in class but we encourage you to do so anyway.

We're reaching the point in the semester where if you read peoples' blogs you can get a pretty idea of what's going on in class because that is what we talk about. You should probably watch the video that Alexandra put on her blog, though. And read Spencer's poem, because it's pretty rad.

Also, if you're sad, try writing sonnets until you will feel better. It's worked for me when I try it, though I should try it more. I might have my own harmonium by now.

"My mother said to me, 'If you become a soldier you'll be a general; if you become a monk you'll end up as the Pope.' Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso."

Things As They Are.

It is possible to have two lines of poetry in which the words are identical and somehow still mean two different things. Human life oscillates between desire unfulfilled and desire fulfilled; pain and boredom. Stevens is a master of taking the simile and making it totally unexpected, like the spittle of cows threading in the wind. Sunday Morning is the ultimate displacement of the human being; it makes us totally and completely free and unconditioned.

Ashley said it ain't easy to give up all our illusions, those which we have been conditioned to believe by our culture. However, she is predispositioned to Stevens because she is actually a triplet, and Stevens likes to think in threes. Dante was also a trinitarian, writing in triple rhyme and connecting to the Biblical Trinity.

Decreation, Via Negativa, and Kenosis.

Negative Capability means that you can't actually know what you are talking about, you just know everything surrounding what you are talking about. Stevens wants to be a thinking stone. Alchemists were not actually frauds or charlatans; they were indeed removing all impurities of the base metal and making it into the purest stone. In some ways, Stevens had no more control over the stuff he was writing than Ashley has over being one of three; he was a modern-day alchemist although he never thought about that.

In Sunday Morning Stevens asked a question which was answered in Ideas of Order at Key West. His thought is that we should not put humans in the position of gods; gods are immortal and humans are not. Instead, in the place of god, we should put a fictional person: “...the final belief is to believe in a fiction which you know to be a fiction because there is nothing else.”

Ideas of Order is not a poem of kenosis, but of pleurosis, or being filled up.

genius (ˈdʒiːnɪəs, -njəs)

— n , pl ( for senses 5, 6 ) -uses , genii
1. a person with exceptional ability, esp of a highly original kind
2. such ability or capacity: Mozart's musical genius
3. the distinctive spirit or creative nature of a nation, era, language, etc
4. a person considered as exerting great influence of a certain sort: an evil genius
5. Roman myth
a. the guiding spirit who attends a person from birth to death
b. the guardian spirit of a place, group of people, or institution
6. ( usually plural ) Arabian myth a demon; jinn

Who is this impossible possible philosopher? What is the significance of the color blue? Blue is the color of the sea and sky, but it also calms you down and makes you mentally more able to accept things. The blue guitar does not show you the world as you perceive it, but the world as it actually is, because it is the world that you want to see.

Poetry
Exceeding music must take the place
Of empty heaven and its hymns,

Says the man with the blue guitar.

She comes along and speaks, and the world comes into being. Logos does not mean psychology; it means the divine creative principle, the speaking word that brings about the creation of the world. Speech can bring out things that have no being without words. "Valuation of the creative imagination is what brings the world into being." One may think of poetry as an eye, a way to see things. We are spectators before an act of poetic will.

A Glass Darkly.

If Sexson had known we would start memorizing our poems already, he would have assigned us one ten times as long. If things were “perfect” they would never change; fruit would never ripen and things would be downright boring. Great poems of heaven and hell were written by people such as Dante, but it has been claimed that a great poem of earth has never written. Maybe that was Stevens' job.

Once again I have my own little piece of the pie in today's discussion about Orson Welles and 1Q84; just two days ago I listened to another podcast talking about the radio drama and the hysteria that had occurred surrounding it. Did you know that a radio station in South America tried to do the same thing a few years later, and the town was so scared that they rioted and burned down the radio station and the man who started it had to flee the country? Did you know that George Orwell's real name was Eric Arthur Blair?

The only way to get to a miracle is to climb Cold Mountain and notice all the things along the way that aren't miracles. But how much will you find? Is it the world that changes, or is it the way that we see the world?

The blogs are blowing us all out of the water; the longer I wait to blog the more intimidated I am. Maybe that's good, but hopefully this weekend I'll get a chance to get a gulp of air and dive in. I certainly have a lot to talk about.

Heart of Darkness is very Lucretian; it's all about illusions. The wretch's last words at the end were “The horror, the horror!” but you simply can't tell a pretty lady that. Is it possible, though, as James alluded, that what he saw was the Lucretian sublime?

You'll remember Nudity at the Capital if you think of going to Helena in the buff, but it makes me think of the Capitol in the Hunger Games – the people there were pretty crazy and I could easily see a few of them running around naked.

The first thing you try to do in your writing should be to teach people to see. Dynamic quality is a constant epiphany; you are startled moment by moment by what you see. Where the Red Fern Grows is where we learn to see new things, though the movie just made me cry.

1 Corinthians 13:12
“For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”

Don't forget that Sexson is not a Ludite, but, he missed something in Things Merely Are - at the beginning of the chapter in which we find Stevens, Critchley admits that some of the words are his, but some are indeed Stevens'.

The reason that She sings beyond the genius of the sea is that every day She sings a new song, and nature's song is more like that of perfection.

See things.

Of Sea and Sky.

Wallace Stevens was seen as a dandy, a poet who didn't really write about anything important. Between Harmonium and Ideas of Order there was 13 years of writers' block. Harmonium was basking in the maternal consciousness, the sense of warmth and water and metamorphosis, and then Stevens headed north, into the cold. We are only able to understand Farewell to Florida because we have been in this class for the last three weeks. This is a farewell to the mother and a venture into the masculine North, the land of men. Stevens is now searching for the man of glass, the impossible possible philosopher's man.

ke·no·sis /kəˈnōsis/
n.
(in Christian theology) The renunciation of the divine nature, at least in part, by Christ in the Incarnation.

decreation /de`cre*a"tion/
n.
Destruction; -- opposed to creation.

Stripping away everything so that nothing is left at the center, stripping the self of everything so that one is more ready to take everything in. The Cloud of Unknowing. Get rid of everything so that you are ready to stand pure before the divines. Even the bible says this in Matthew 19:21 –

'Jesus answered, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”'

Sometimes it's more of an emotional purging than a physical, though –

Crying only a little bit
is no use. You must cry
until your pillow is soaked!
Then you can get up and laugh.
Then you can jump in the shower
and splash-splash-splash!
Then you can throw open your window
and, "Ha ha! ha ha!"
And if people say, "Hey
what's going on up there?"
"Ha ha!" sing back, "Happiness
was hiding in the last tear!
I wept it! Ha ha!"

There are so many wonderful blogs today, you simply must read them!

Is it important for music to have sounds in order to appreciate it? Ode to a Grecian Urn is a poem about the music we can find in silence. “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter...” Hearing can change the way that we see. Artists are here to change the way we see things.

Nothing is ever destroyed, it is only destoried.

Some Friends.

Two or Three Ideas talks about how all the ideas that have come before are just trash now. We cannot go back to a past glory and see things the way they were, because that no longer exists.

“In the age of disbelief...it is for the poet to supply the satisfactions of belief...”

200-300 years ago, the institutions and arbiters were the people who supplied our beliefs, but now that job is for the poet, for anyone who sees the world poetically, and those are some big shoes to fill.

“To see the gods dispelled in mid-air and dissolve like clouds is one of the great human experiences.”

How do we respond to the way in which we have been stripped of those psychological aids? The best way to respond is with a sense of wonder, as in How to Live, What to Do. It is up to us to find new things that might suffice through our imaginations. It is up to build a new world out of the trash of the old one.

Sexson has even assigned himself a poem: Waving Adieu, Adieu, Adieu.

There will be a day that will remind you, 30 years in the future, about this. Don't we all already know that Sexson has magic powers? The ordinary world in which ordinary stuff lies about you can be lit up by the imagination. Wallace Stevens is a dumpster diver – he knows how to take boring everyday things and bring them to life using only his imagination and his words.

Our little epiphanies are more like striking a match in the dark than being struck by a bolt of lightning – you will never truly see things as they are until you are dead.

When you are unpacking a poem, try to stick more closely to the original poem and don't leave things out! The thing you leave out might very well be the most important.

We don't even know who left the legacy, but we do know what the legacy is all about, and maybe it's okay that we don't know.

The Glistening Blue.

"Yet in every word he breathed was a meaning in line with the subtle principles of things, if only you thought of it deeply."

I've been thinking about synesthesia quite a bit lately. I had a project for another class in which I had to write using synesthesia, and it made me realize just how many of the turns of phrase we use are already synesthetic: things like hard stares, warm smiles, bright laughter. Those of you in the class (there are several) surely know what I'm talking about. I've always thought it was a particularly interesting concept, in part because my vision seems a particularly deficient sense. Not in the sense of blurriness (though I'm half blind without some sort of correction), but more in that there almost seems to be a disconnect between my eyes and brain; I can see and observe things but forget about them the instant that I look away - it is only when they are in my sight that I can see things.

Maybe I need to take oral traditions.

Anyway, I'm working on that whole turning-notes-into-a-poem thing, and you may see it today or you may not. This week has been a rather long and overwhelming one and I feel an early bedtime is in order tonight. I'll be lucky indeed if I can make it through the day without being eaten by a firecat.

No Angels, No Demons, No Ghosts.

Each of us will be assigned a poem to recite for the class. As long as you do it, and understand the poem as being chosen out of desire, we will be happy.

Is is possible to enjoy a poem without understanding it?

Things are patient – you leave the house and are gone all day, and the coffeepot is always exactly where you left it.

Stevens is looking to build the impossible possible philosopher's man. Not looking at the mythological context so much as the scene and how the imagination came up with it.

Start thinking about what your project is going to be and how it ties in with Lucretius and Stevens. You can do whatever you want, but it should involve words somehow, because it won't be gradable otherwise.

Blog, blog, blog! It doesn't matter what to say, as long as you just say something.

In the bible is a book called Proverbs. Most people can remember proverbs because they are written to be memorable. Take these for example:

“Life is an affair of people, not places.
But for me,
Life is an affair of places
And that is the problem.”

“There is only the weather.”

“The collecting of poetry
For one's experience
As one goes along
Is not the same as merely writing poetry.”

You may want to read the poem The Motive for Metaphor. Stevens belonged to a group of poets called the imagists; their motto was “no ideas but in things.” Umbrellas are trees.

To Sleep Before Evening

An esthete is a person who spends a good amount of their time thinking about art or poetry, who think that not only do you need to write to be understood, but you need your writing to be the thing you are talking about. Walter Pater was the esthete of esthetes.

Lucretius, sublime, Wallace Stevens – the things that we are asked to think about so far. But how can we think about Lucretius and the sublime in relation to each other?

Lucretius was one of the first empiricists, which means that he looks at natural processes and thinks of very different ways that thing have come about. Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face...

A response to the question how to live, and what to do:

“To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike. While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist's hands, or the face of one's friend. Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening. With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch. What we have to do is to be for ever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy of Comte, or of Hegel, or of our own. Philosophical theories or ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism, may help us to gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded by us. "Philosophy is the microscope of thought." The theory or idea or system which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of this experience, in consideration of some interest into which we cannot enter, or some abstract theory we have not identified with ourselves, or of what is only conventional, has no real claim upon us.

“One of the most beautiful passages of Rousseau is that in the sixth book of the Confessions, where he describes the awakening in him of the literary sense. An undefinable taint of death had clung always about him, and now in early manhood he believed himself smitten by mortal disease. He asked himself how he might make as much as possible of the interval that remained; and he was not biassed by anything in his previous life when he decided that it must be by intellectual excitement, which he found just then in the clear, fresh writings of Voltaire. Well! we are all condamnés, as Victor Hugo says: we are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve—les hommes sont tous condamnés à mort avec des sursis indéfinis: we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among "the children of this world," in art and song. For our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion—that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most. For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake.”

The best of the children of the world spend their pulses in two things: art, and song.

It wouldn't be sublime if it wasn't Lucretian! It only works if you have this brief interview, and nothing on the other sides. Death means nothing for the people who die, it only concerns those who are left there watching. Things are only beautiful because we die – if we had them forever they would have no value to us.

Although drawing it out into prose makes it make more sense, it does not have this same compact beauty that a poem will. We have been dancing around poems, but now it's time to get analytical. Find a poem, and go to work on it.

The jar is probably the third or fourth cousin of the most famous holding container ever – the Grecian urn. A Dominion Jar was a common jar for canning in Stevens' day. It is the act of imagination that creates order in the world.

Look at these 7:
Domination of Black
Snow Man (Dustin)
A High Toned Old Christian Woman
The Emperor of Ice-Cream
Disillusionment of Ten O'clock
Anecdote of the Jar
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.

Also
Sunday Morning