Thinking

I've been reading Breanna's post- her poem "Flying Wings," which does cover a lot of what we talked about on Monday and Anne's notes on what we talked about: “...the final belief is to believe in a fiction which you know to be a fiction because there is nothing else.”
We need to give up illusions and replace them with fictions.  I guess the difference would be knowing it's a fiction rather than being stuck in a fantasy you didn't create.  This is an excerpt from Woyzeck.  I posted this on Facebook, because I thought it was funny in the context of the translation I had, but also because it stirred something in me. I don't know what it is about it, but it seems to sit in that illusion/ fiction discussion.  I just can't figure out which is the illusion and which is the fiction. Was it the world before or the nothing afterward?
I hope when we strip away illusions, they won't all be this depressing. 

"Once upon a time there was a poor little girl. She had no father and no mother. EVERYTHING was dead. NO ONE was left--in the whole world. Everything. Dead. So the little girl went out and searched night and day, and since, on earth, there was no 

one left, she thought she'd take a trip into the sky. The moon seemed to be giving her a friendly look but, when she came to the moon, it turned out to be just a piece of rotten wood. So she went on to the sun, but when she got to the sun, it turned out to be just a withered sunflower, and when she went on to the stars, they turned out to be just small golden flies stuck to the firmament-- the way a shrike sticks flies to a thornbush all in a bunch. And when she tried to return to earth, she found the earth was now just a pot upside down. She was now REALLY alone, and she sat down and cried. She's still there. Sitting. Really alone." 

Beards, Naturalism and a little Blue Guitar

"But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves"

So I'm hanging out at work at the library, talking with a co-worker, Scott, getting to know him better by creeping on photos with him on Facebook.  We're helping patrons and then back on Facebook and then back to patrons and so on.  For whatever reason, Scott has a few buddies studying in the library that day, and they keep stopping by too.  Looking at those friends and then looking at Facebook, I realized Scott and his friends all had one thing in common: beards.  Granted, some beards were more like scraggly patches here and there, but some had legitimate, bushy, mountain man beards.  From that realization, we moved to the workplace, and we discovered that all the men closing the library that night either had a beard or was able to grow a nice Santa Claus kind of beard. We had a long conversation about this bearded discovery, when we decide it's time to do something more productive.  I flip open Wallace Stevens and I read, "The Well Dressed Man with a Beard," because obviously it had to happen that way.  I started laughing and I say, "Hey Scott- Wallace Stevens wrote a poem about you." And he says, "Of course, I'm awesome." And then more co-workers show up and ask, "Is it all about Scott? Is it like him?" and to answer that question, another English ed major, Michelle, reads the poem out loud for everyone, and the reaction is almost unanimous: ????? and "I guess not." My first thought was, "This has nothing to do with bearded men," but then immediately, "But then again, it probably has everything to do with them and us." Scott re-reads it and I re-read it and I don't know his thoughts, but the last line stuck out (for me)  "it can never be satisfied, the mind, never."  
After several readings of the poem, I got that modernist sense again of just trying to find "what will suffice."  He's sliding thing in and out of view to find a world in which he can sleep and find rest.  But then I was reading a paper by Ph.D. Justin Quinn about Nature and Ideology in Wallace Stevens-http://colloquium.upol.cz/coll00/quinn.htm It has an interesting look at the idea of landscapes and how Stevens's poetry dealt with reality of the time (something we saw in the TVA anecdote of the jar and in other poems we've unpacked). In it, Quinn discusses landscapes and the difference between Stevens and naturalist poets of his time, especially Robinson Jeffers.  Jeffers' poetry dreamed of returning to a time where nature bloomed free from humanity's sordid touch.  He can't wait until humans are wiped off the earth.  Stevens's poetry contrasts greatly with this view, as his poems "sings the praises of the major man."  He seems to criticize the idea of nature without man, because in order to write poetry or see nature as it is, man has to be an agent in the landscape.
"a thing supposed
In a place supposed, a thing that he reached
In a place that he reached, by rejecting what he saw
And denying what he heard"
Quinn applies that to Jeffers, saying his truth is a rejection of what is perceived- a kind of denial of the things as they are.  With this idea in mind, Quinn looks as a "Well Dressed Man with a Beard," as Stevens saying "If" I looked at the world like these other nature poets, "If" I tried to create a nature or world the way I want by hiding the nature of things, I might be able to hold onto that beautiful landscape "out of a petty phrase, out of a thing believed." But then the mind would never find satisfaction.  Reality and imagination are entwined together, and the things cannot be tucked away or hidden.  Or at least, that's how I'm reading things.
Things as they are may not be what we'd like to see- the things we've imagined; but poetic imagination can simultaneously expose the truth, that seems beyond our grasp and keep things real.  So poems like "The Well Dressed Man with a Beard" are songs "beyond us, yet ourselves."
Maybe.

Sudden Rightness

I'm slowly making my way through Critchley's Things Merely Are, and so far, I'm enjoying it.  It's been helpful and frustrating to read that alongside Dusty's post "That Things Merely Are Not" to get a clearer idea of the philosophical argument surrounding Stevens. I'm not sure what I'm getting out of it all yet, but I have been thinking on the relationship between reality and imagination.  Critchley says you can't have one without the other.

For Stevens (says Critchley), imagination is not imagination unless it has a basis in reality.  Poetry/imagination transfigures the world from something oppressive to life.  Without a base, imagination and poetry move away from "life with a ray of imagination and power," from elevated meaning into the realm of pure fantasy and fiction.  The question/problem is what is reality? I don't really want to go there now, but I like how Stevens kind of talks about what is real in his poem- Of Modern Poetry.

"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 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 than 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 rightness, wholly
containing the mind, below which it cannot descent,
Beyond which it has no will to rise.
                                                     It must
Be the finding of satisfaction, and may
Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman
Combing.  The poem of the act of the mind.

I love this poem. It is super modernist (from the title, it's obvious), talking about the way things were, the way things were whole and made sense, but  how, now the world is in pieces and we have to figure out a "new stage" and find what satisfies us even if it that satisfaction is common or as fleeting as a sound passing by.  It's searching for harmony (harmonium) in reality, snatches of it, anyway.

Critchley focuses a little on the "invisible audience," ideas that when we construct, through imagination/poetry, life, it has to correspond with the audience's sense of reality, but "real" is subject-dependent, "that which is, is only for the subject to whom it appears, even if what appears is real for us." I may be misinterpreting, but this idea that real is different for every person appeals to my thesis project of dyslexia, synaesthesia and the imagination. Synaesthetes in particular perceive reality in ways, which are real for them, but seem completely fanciful to us.  I read a study, where a five year old girl wrote poetry about her morning.  It was filled with imagery, which didn't make sense, but the teacher gave her kudos for being imaginative.  The girl's response was confusion, because she simply wrote about what she had experienced. From Stevens' poem, I get the sense that as a poet, he must write and write about the things he perceives until he illuminates the aspect of its reality, which everyone understands and can be "satisfied with."

Then again, maybe not; but I'm intrigued to keep looking until I find that "sudden rightness" (or one of many sudden rightnesses), which will illuminate something new.  

A Postcard from the Volcano

The little boys and girls ran around the hilltop.  Chasing, stumbling, Catching. Picking up souvenirs, treasures they found in the dirt.  A cracked plastic ring, dull pennies, a broken chain, a button, a pen cap-- All left behind by other children before them, or the children before that or those before that.  The little ones didn't know or care. They were too busy being the first explorers to sneak into the dark vineyards, tasting the sharp smell of the ripe grapes, blurring the footsteps of their predecessors, intoxicated with their bravery.

Every spring, they gathered by the tree by the old mansion, haunted by the man, who had died alone and angry (or so they say).  In their daring, they would tell the story, the legend they always tell, because it has always been that way, of the creaking darkness, the gusts of spirits and dust rattling against the shuttered windows and the raggy tattered dirt of the place until the sky lightened when the giant behemoth blinked and yawned, shuddering in and out the Chinook in rattling gasps, a waking eyesore in the early dawn.

 

Renaissance Conclusion

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 condamnes, as Victor Hugo says: we are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve–les hommes sont tous condamnes a mort avec des sursis indefinis: 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. [239] 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.

Anecdote of the Jar

Our discussion of Stevens' poem on Friday- the TVA, the environmental question, the Dr. Seuss sound- led me to believe the poem is basically the Lorax.  

Lucretius to Milton to Pullman

Into this wild abyss
The womb of nature and perhaps her grave
Of neither sea, nor shore, nor air, nor fire,
But all these in their pregnant causes mixed
Confusedly, and which thus must ever fight ,
Unless the almighty maker them ordain
His dark materials to create more worlds,
Into this wild abyss the wary fiend
Stood on the brink of hell and looked awhile
Pondering his voyage
                 Paradise Lost~Milton

While we were talking about the Lucretian sublime (the immutable particles, the finite amount of time we have to live and appreciate song and art, and the void), I couldn't help thinking about Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy and how Mr. Pullman is a Lucretius "swerve" kind of guy.

The books revolve around Dust, "elementary, charged particles," which are the keys to conscious thought.  Like the "bucks" and the "jar," they are imagination or they are the atoms, which make humans. . .I guess human.  People die and turn back to Dust (particles).  An afterlife isn't life, it is prolonged dying, which is Lucretius- there is no existence from death onward.

Out of curiosity, I typed in "pullman" and "lucretian sublime" into google and got Harold Bloom's The Anatomy of Influence. This wasn't the book I picked, but the google books excerpt led me to the Milton passage above, which is at the beginning of Pullman's Amber Spyglass. This surprised me a little, because Milton was a Christian dude; but Bloom says that his choice of "atheist Lucretius as a guide to the abyss suggestive."  (I might be paraphrasing there). He doesn't really elaborate clearly there, but I think he's moving towards the idea that poetry is not religious or more specifically, Christian, because it cannot "believe" in anything. Bloom says Milton's poetry is "passionate, sensuous and simple," which falls in line with the Lucretius idea of living life fully, which kind of takes me back to Pullman.

"He meant the Kingdom was over, the Kingdom of Heaven, it was all finished.  We shouldn't live as if it mattered more than this life in this world, because where we are is always the most important place."

It's not perfect, but there are plenty of connections. If Pullman's books were allowed anywhere near high school classrooms, I think it'd be possible for kids to even get it a little.

Peacock Brainstorm

Peacocks are on my mind.  I have been reading both Anecdotes of the Prince of Peacocks, and I'm digging the colors. 

Harmonium's Peacock seems to be in the mind's landscape- "in the moonlight, in this milky blue. . .midst of sleep."  But Berserk (violent, deranged, unrestrained) is working in the dreamland "setting traps," which could be madness or frustration or limits or wakefulness. "Dread of the bushy plain," which is full of "blocks and blocking steel."  Or maybe Berserk is Rage.  "Blessed rage," 'red" and "sun-colorod."  There is an ominous threat looming behind the peaceful, innocent sleep. 

But in the 1919-20? Prince of Peacocks, the tone is tired.  The colors are white and nothingness, which reminds me of our discussion on the nothingness sandwich around human existence. 

In the land of the peacocks, the prince thereof 

Grown weary of romantics, walked alone,

In the first of evening, pondering.

. . .

He seemed to seek replies,

from nothingness, to all his sighs.

"My sighs are pulses in a dreamer's death!"

Exclaimed the white one, smothering his lips.

Other stuff I was thinking on. . . .
Peacock symbolism
immortality in Christian churches
renewal of the soul/ resurrection
royalty/nobility

Juno/Hera
Alchemy - "cauda pavonis"

Peacocking-- a seduction technique? setting "traps in the midst of dreams?"  I doubt that.

Stuck in anecdotes, rambling.

"

During the last class, we discussed the importance of titles.  Wallace Stevens had a drawer-full of them, and I have to wonder, why "anecdotes"?

"Anecdote" is the word I keep running into in Harmonium, and I can't get it out of my mind: "Earthy Anecdote," "Anecdote of Men by the Thousand," "Anecdote of Canna," Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks" and "Anecdote of the Jar."  It's a lot of anecdote for one section, and there are only two others in the collection: another Prince of Peacocks, which seems to fit the title better than the first and Anecdote of the Abnormal. 

I looked up various definitions of "anecdote" online- "a short narrative, which is often biographical, amusing, obscure and/or historical."  But I don't think that's what I'm questioning, whether or the not the poems above are anecdotes, but why only those poems and for what purpose? 

I have been looking up the use of anecdotes in essays and have had disappointing results, but some lines stick out. One essay by Dominique Jullien compares anecdotes with fait divers (brief news stories- lurid/sensational), saying "that anecdotes are little stories about big people, while faits divers are stories about little people made big by publicity or the press." Jullien also points out that the etymological meaning of anecdote is "unpublished." A lady named Helen Deutsch says the genre of anecdotes is used by literary theorists and historians as a starting point or kicking stone to "prove the reality and solidity of the matter they analyze." 

And I've been stuck on that too, but just now I was thinking maybe I am thinking too hard about the little story anecdotes and missing the big picture or reality of what is sitting in plain view there within the story. I feel like I'm staring at one of those stereogram pictures. . .

All I'm seeing is that when I should (supposedly) be seeing

this

And then the Prince of Peacocks won't get out of my head with his two anecdotes.  Someone's wandering and wandering, lost in madness and dreams and nothingness.  And it could be the man or it might be me. It's kind of a toss up.