Monday, September 10, 2012

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.

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