"The trouble with you, Robert, is that you write about subjects."

"The trouble with you, Wallace, is that you write about bric-a-brac."

Or so the story goes about the infamous quarrel between Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost.  I, like many of my class mates, have been struggling with Stevens.  This is in part due to his obscurity; but this is one of the things I've come to appreciate about Stevens.  What I hate about Stevens is his obsessive insistence that beauty is bound only to this physical realm.  I do not mean to argue a case for the superiority of the metaphysical, for I do not believe it to be either more eminent or more relevant than the physical.  The mind becomes just as vexed and exhausted by the sentimental pining for the abstract as it is dulled by the constant inundation of concrete things in the concrete world. Perhaps this is why we sleep, to escape, and perhaps this is why we dream when we sleep.  To be in that world, filled both with specters of everyday life and non-cognizant chimeras is to be subliminally reconciled to one within body and mind.  Not all of our dreams are pleasant, just as not all of our experiences in the physical world are unpleasant.  That is the paradox of life, and we must learn to live within this paradox.  That is why I am not hostile toward religion, even though I am not religious.  It provides something deeper, that cure of the mind, which I do not believe can be found only in poetry.

 Last week I was talking with Biz about personal suffering borne from the deaths of others.  The conversation meandered along several paths, coming to a discussion of feelings versus emotions.  We thought that emotions are perhaps deeper than feelings, denoting the difference between sorrow and sadness, or joy and happiness.  To be joyful is something different than merely feeling happy.  I may find happiness in a new pair of jeans that fits well, or a new tube of lip gloss; but I find joy in my love for my children.  It is something inexplicable.  Of course I love my children--most normal parents do.  But when I really think about it I am not able to reduce the truth of it to something tangible and existing in the world.  I am sad for them as they are saddened by fights with friends or the death of a baby bird that fell out of its nest, but the terrible and ever present fear of the possibility of their loss provokes sorrow.  Of course, worry over something that hasn't happened is irrational, but it would be an absolute lie to say that the thought crosses my mind only occasionally.  Besides, the imagination is irrational and it is foolish to set forth that it functions only to produce positive effects.

This is why we need that cure of the mind, the subject of which came up while discussing my ambivalence toward Stevens with Eli.  He said the reason I didn't like some of the poems is probably because they don't lend a cure for my mind when it is troubled.  So maybe sometimes to be merely poetry is not enough, to look for beauty solely in the world around us is not enough.  I think Stevens is just as aware of this as I am; indeed he has known it far longer than I have, for he says so in canto VIII of "It Must Give Pleasure."  It all comes together here for me, but not necessarily in the way that my sentimental selves would have liked.  Though it does provide a cure for my mind in one respect, in another it shatters all my secret illusions.

What am I to believe?  If the angel in his cloud,
Serenely gazing at the violet abyss,
Plucks on his strings to pluck abysmal glory,

Leaps downward through the evening's revelations, and
On his spredden wings, needs nothing but deep space,
Forgets the gold centre, the golden destiny,

Grows warm in the motionless motion of his flight,
Am I that imagine this angel less satisfied?
Are the wings his, the lapis-haunted air?

Is it he or is it I that experience this?
Is it I then that keep saying there is an hour
Filled wit expressible bliss, in which I have

No need, am happy, forget need's golden hand,
Am satisfied without solacing majesty,
And if there is an hour there is a day,

There is a month, a year, there is a time
In which majesty is a mirror of the self:
I have not but I am and as I am, I am.

These external regions, what do we fill them with
Except reflections, the escapades of death,
Cinderella fulfilling herself beneath the roof?

If a poem is not the cure of the mind, it is because it never claimed to be.  And the reason I hate the poem is because it hates me, just as some of my selves hate the others and vice versa.  What, then, are we to do when faced with that awful truth, when we must stand between two glasses and see that they are not dark, and see all of ourselves behind and beyond?

Sometimes I need a little Robert Frost to stir up my Stevens.  Or maybe it's the other way around.

"And so Frost, who wanted 'to get away from earth awhile/ And then come back to it and begin over,' and Stevens, for whom 'Reality is the beginning not the end,' would share sapodillas and conch chowder but remain isolated from one another's poetry, in which was the other's only peer."--Arlo Haskell
Quote taken from    www.kwls.org/littoral/post_11/

Of late I have spent much time trying to decide whether I am a materialist or immaterialist.  I long ago rejected the Christian belief of God and the Devil, or the existence of Heaven and Hell.  I looked up the definition of materialist on Wiki, but I am not familiar with most of the terms used to describe the term "materialist."  I listened to Dustin in class as he explained it, but all I can remember him saying distinctly is a belief that this world will exist even without our species living upon it.  This seemed odd to me: not because it rings untrue to my ears, but that it would ring untrue at all.  Of course this world will exist long after we are gone.  Didn't it exist for millions upon millions of years before we came to walk upon it?  It seems asinine to me that there are people who cannot comprehend the favorable odds that we will perish long before the earth does.  It's asinine because it's true.  Does that count as an adagium?  Probably not.  Maybe I am grossly misconstruing what Dustin said, and if so I apologize for it.  At any rate, I still do not know what materialism really is. 

But I hesitate to say that I am an immaterialist.  For as long as I can remember I have always believed that there must be something beyond this world.  But I second guess myself at every turn, for fear of being scorned for being too idealistic...for knowing that this belief may very well be a trick of my own mind, a silly feeling borne out of the fear of death and non-existence.  I suppose it would be very trite of me indeed to say that there may be another realm beyond this physical realm of matter that I perceive through my conscious being, but it is beyond my capability to understand it.

It's true what they say about the dead: that when somebody dies, they don't look like themselves anymore.  I'd never seen a dead body up close until I saw my best friend from child hood lying in a silver coffin her brother had spent his life savings to procure.  She OD'd thousands of miles away from home, in sunny Florida, before she even turned thirty.  I was invited to the private viewing, restricted to family, and I couldn't even cry when I looked at her lying there in that pink satin.  And it wasn't peaceful, but neither was that vessel sad to me because it wasn't her.  Sometimes I wish that I had never gone, never seen the empty matter that once contained something I loved so much...and I didn't even know how much until I stood there in shock.  I looked at her hands that used to be so warm and soft and plump that all the rest of us little girls would take turns letting her cup our hands in her own on cold winter playground days to warm them.  Sometimes, when I think too long about her, I want to dash my book of poetry to the ground.  I want to grab Wallace Stevens by the lapels and scream in his face, "I don't give a damn about your two pairs, or you dish of peaches in Russia, or your glass of water!  I'm tired of the world and all its damned infernal 'things!' Can't you understand that?" 

Maybe when I die I am just dead, and there is nothing at all beyond this.  And maybe I won't ever be able to contemplate green gleaming corn again, maybe I will have taken it all for granted.  But I won't have to think anymore about my friend who died all alone down in sunny Florida, or how my pet cat brutally diverts herself with baby field mice for playmates, or little children butchered on brisk fall mornings when they should have been walking to school.

I retrieve my book from the floor....

"...este toro es un toro y este caballo es un caballo...Si buscas una interpretación a ciertas cosas en mis pinturas puedan que sean totalmente verdaderos, pero no es mi idea darles estes significados.  Las ideas y conclusiones que usted tiene yo también las obtuve, pero instintivamente, inconscientemente.  Yo hago la pintura por la pintura.  Yo pinto los objectos por lo que sean." --Pablo Picasso

"...this bull is a bull and this horse is a horse...If you give a meaning to certain things in my paintings it may be very true, but it is not my idea to give this meaning.  What ideas and conclusions you have got I obtained too, but instinctively, unconsciously.  I make the painting for the painting.  I paint the objects for what they are."

While reading for Spanish class I decided to try and look up "guernica" to see if the town's name of the famous Picasso painting represented a specific object.  As far as I can find it does not; but I did find a request, typed in Spanish, asking if someone could check the translation of the quote above.  I could not find the original source of the quote, but I did find the English version on pbs.org.  I am entrusting that PBS is accurate in stating that this is an actual quote from Picasso.  I do not know if it was originally written in English or Spanish.  Of course Picasso is Spanish, but he lived most of his adult life in France and obviously learned to speak the language. I do not know if he also spoke English.

I would further assume that the quote was issued in response to the widespread speculation concerning the meaning of the painting's images.  It also directly relates to where our class discussions have turned of late, and to Stevens' own claim that his poems mean to be poems.  There is no great Ideal in the sky to imitate; the Romantics ultimately failed in their quest.  There are also no specific meanings to be found in Guernica.  There is only an image of war, of a town bombed for no authentic reason, and there is no comfort to be found in the jarring, scrambled images of Picasso's brush.  This is the reality of what happened to that town, and reality is just as fickle in its ugliness as it is in its beauty.  The dead are gone:  their deaths as random as the cards dealt them in life.  There is no rationality.  There is no grand purpose, no promise fulfilled of a plastic paradise waiting for us in an immutable afterlife.  And what comfort is afforded even to the living?  

None.  That is what Stevens and Picasso are trying to tell us; that is what Lucretius tried to tell us.  There is not even comfort to be found in poetry, for the modernists have wrenched us from the lap of our mother, the moon, and her dark maternal veil.  We have been thrust into the full starkness of the northerly glaring sun to walk the plank with our eyes wide open, over the edge out of the abyss and into the interval of earthly life.  We cannot languish in our mother's lap forever.  It is jarring, it is shocking, but it is nonetheless all that we are ever truly granted in life--the plain sense of things, the cherished pipe of a father, the blank pages of a crumbling book whose words are spoken even as they ripen to dust.  Life is poetry, and what is poetry but a mere little poem, an ordering of words on an empty canvas?

This is all that there is.

"Art is a lie that makes us realize truth." --Picasso

"Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun."--Picasso

"Good artists copy, great artists steal."--Picasso

"So this is the end of the story,

Everything we had, everything we did,

Is buried in dust,

And this dust is all that's left of us.

But only a few ever worried.

We walk the plank with our eyes wide open."--Gotye

The Reader

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.

Creating meaning in the interval.  This is what Stevens is up to in his poetry, but what is the interval?  Is it our brief life on Earth?  An interval is a gap, the space between the oblivion of the void.  The void within the void, the interlude that prescribes the construction of meaning; for it is the space where our irrational imagination lives, and it is where we live.  Now I'm just talking nonsense:  the space within in the space surrounded by space...It makes about as much sense as being both the book and the book's reader at the same time.  But it does make sense in Stevens' modern world, in our modern world where the gods have been annihilated and the romantic vision of the poet as ultimate prophet of static Truth is debunked.  In such a world we have no choice but to be our own book of dusky pages.  And at such a quandary the lamp has become as vain as the way obscure: as the blank pages illuminated by the flashes of dying numina, going the way that we all shall as surely as the ripe fruit languishes in the leafless autumn garden, their forms shriveled and warped upon the vine.  The lamp, the light, has gone the same way as the gods, to whatever it is that lies on either side of the interval, that obscure latitude from whence we come and to where we go when the pages of our book, that is us in the lines we ourselves write, crumble to dust and blow hence with the leaves that have left the garden stark, without embellishment.  There is no guiding light; only the reader's own voice mumbling the truth, the chilling northern masculine truth, of our provisional earthly endeavor.

What the Ancients Knew

I read "A Postcard from the Volcano" as a memoir from the Villa of the Papyri.  I have already alluded to this event as it is described by Greenblatt in my previous post.  The volcano is of course Mt. Vesuvius, and its postcard is the blackened remains of briquettes burned to ward of the cold on that day of discovery in 1750 before their discoverers realized that these "roots" were, in fact, the bones of a long buried ancient library.  The library that contained the root of what Ovid prophetically called, "The verses of sublime Lucretius [that] are destined to perish only when a single day will consign the world to destruction" (as quoted by Greenblatt, p. 52 of The Swerve).  That single day was August 24, 79 CE in "that autumn, when the grapes/ Made sharp air sharper by their smell" (Stevens 128).  Of course Poggio had already found the copy of On the Nature of Things before the discovery of the Villa of the Papyri; but there in that long "shuttered mansion-house" where the "windy sky/ Cries out a literate despair" was found the encased and bones of Lucretius' work preserved in its cultural context.  It is a work that tells us what it is that was left by the quick inhabitants of the Villa of the Papyri on that fateful day in 79 CE:  "And least will guess that with our bones/ We left much more, left what still is/ The look of things, left what we felt/ And what we saw" (Stevens 128).  And the children (which are us) "will speak our speech and never know,/ Will say of the mansion that it seems/ As if he that lived there left behind/ A spirit (Lucretius) storming in blank walls, A dirty house (the smashed remains of the library) in a gutted world (the plundered villa),/ A tatter (the remains of the scroll of On the Nature of Things) of shadows peaked to white,/ Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun" (Stevens 129).  Ah, but the Swerve!  The swerve that allowed for the discovery of the remains of the ancient disaster; and then the specific find of the library.  The swerve that allowed for the particular scroll containing the ancient to poem to have not been burned, or accidentally disintegrated.  The story of how the world swerved in a new direction (Greenblatt 11).  It is all there packed tightly into one little piece of opaque Stevensonian imagery, so subtle so...sublime.  So much more than just merely beautiful.

Some Assembly Required

My last post is disjointed as are my thoughts most of the time.  They are the disassembled pieces of the puzzle that composes the Lucretian sublime and the imagery of Stevens' poetry.  The book I have been lent from Dr. S may be moving my understanding a little bit closer...maybe. 

But first I feel I must try to assemble some of the ramblings of the effect of "Domination of Black."  This is not an analysis; I am not being academic, but trying to pin down the nature of the feelings it rouses in me.  As I said before, and apparently as Stevens himself said, the images are the hook that captivates the reader.  Though I do not know if the images influenced my dream of the wildfire or the dream more deeply embedded the images into my psyche.  The unusually violent thunder and the potential its lightening has to create an uncontrolled wildfire are forces that are beyond our human control; just as the planets gather and turn like leaves in the wind or flames in a controlled fire.  The planets aligning, the flames churning in a fire, the disturbing call of a peacock in the dark colored night dominated by the dark color of the naturally poisonous hemlock--these are all things easily understood through scientific explanation.  But they are sublime in that they still contain a semblance of mystery.  "The day is beautiful, the night is sublime."  Stevens' images speak of forces that we can neither predict nor control, even though we have a rudimentary understanding of their nature.  They reside in what we may understand as the abyss, and what we perceive to be "staring" back at us when we attempt to order the chaos of the abyss.  This is where we may feel the fear, or the realization that there are natural forces that we can never subdue no matter how enlightened we are in our modern era.  But to be fearful is useless, for we can no more control the motion of the planets, or the colliding of atoms in the void, than the inhabitants of Herculaneum could have prevented the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the Villa of the Papyri.

Earlier in the evening I felt a little bit of fear listening to the loud, repeated claps of thunder.  The Millie fire burned close to our water supply and the haze of smoke burned our throats and eyes.  The fear crept into my dreams as I slept.  But when I woke at such a random time in the middle of the night, I woke not to a raging inferno, but to the aftermath of rain.  For a short time it cooled the earth and quenched the haze of smoke that strangled the Valley.  And my fear had dissipated because I realized that there are forces yet beyond our control that don't have to scare us.

And I was scared like I was as a child...

Domination of Black    

Wallace Stevens

At night, by the fire, 
The colors of the bushes 

And of the fallen leaves, 
Repeating themselves,
Turned in the room,
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
Yes:  but the color of he heavy hemlocks
Came striding.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

The colors of their tails
Were like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
In the twilight wind.
They swept over the room,
Just as they flew from the boughs of the hemlocks
Down to the ground.
I heard them cry--the peacocks.
Was it a cry against the twilight
Or against the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
Turning as the flames
Turned in their fire,
Turning as the tails of the peacocks
Turned in the loud fire,
Loud as the hemlocks
Full of the cry of the peacocks?
Or was it a cry against the hemlocks?

Out of the window,
I saw how the planets gathered
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
I saw how the night came,
Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks.
I felt afraid.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.



As I thumbed through our Bible the other night looking for "The Snow Man"  I stumbled upon this poem printed just before it in chronological order.  The title drew my eyes further downward and I was instantly transfixed by its cadence and images.  I read it a second, and even a third, fourth, and fifth time.  It is one of my favorite pieces.  In class I noticed that it was included in the collection of Stevens' poems for children that Dr. S passed around.  I thought this odd, for it did not at first seem to be a suitable poem for children; but as I read it again, I realized that my internal narrator's voice was that of a child.  The brief explanation provided by the children's edition stated that when Stevens was asked what the poem meant, he merely shrugged and said something to the effect of, "I just wanted the reader to be filled with its images" (paraphrased).

Later that night, as I thrummed on that threshold between awake and sleep, I thought of the swerve.  The swerve is what creates being and consciousness, and therefore reality; but wouldn't the particles falling through the void be the true reality?  So which reality is really real?  The void? Or our illusions as result of the swerve?  Oranges and apples.  Snorting bucks and firecats.

I dreamed of having to be evacuated along with my parents and grandmother because of the forest fires.  I was scared like I would have been if I were still a child.  Earlier there was an unusually illustrious thunderstorm, and the lightening must have been striking very close.  I never saw any of it, but the thunder was louder than any I have heard in recent memory.  My children weren't with me; they are not here with me now.  They are safe in Wyoming, where only one fire presently burns near them.  But I wanted them with me so that I could lay my eyes upon them and know for sure they were not in danger.  We drove down Cobb Hill; we passed the burnt out shell of a truck.  We turned off Cobb Hill, and my dad took a secret back road to avoid the panicked rush of all the other evacuees.

I woke in the dark at 2:44 a.m.  I was filled with the images of Wallace's poem.  I went to the door and looked through the glass, looked in fear of the fires.  But it had rained sometime during my dream.  It had rained enough to soak the old piece of particle board outside the side door of my grandma's house.  It rained enough that the raspberry bushes outside my bedroom window glistened in the night.  And I was no longer afraid.

I am enchanted by Kant's musings on the beautiful and the sublime.  He says that the sublime is something "lofty," as in something higher or beyond us.  "The sublime moves," he writes, "the expression of a person experiencing the full sense of the sublime is serious, at times rigid and amazed."  And, "The sublime...is at times accompanied by some terror or melancholia...."  Or, "A very great height is sublime as well as a very great depth; but the later is accompanied by the sense of terror, the former by admiration."  It does not exist in nature he says, but in our minds.  It's how we perceive those things even our imaginations cannot fully fathom.  It is that threshold between reality and imagination of Steven's poetry that he has so expertly woven with his images.




And so I shall depart with the words of yet another German philosopher, words that have long tumbled round my mind and have resurfaced, borne by the upheaval of this poem's images.

"And when you stare for a long time into an abyss, the abyss stares back into you."
                                                     Nietzsche

 All quotes taken from WisdomPortal.com; ed. Peter Y. Chou