Notes on "Notes"

Notes on Notes

(Pt.1)

Cameron Meek

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction

To Henry Church

And for what, except for you, do I love?

Do I press the extremest book of the wisest man

Close to me, hidden in me day and night?

Equal in living changingness to the light

In which I meet you, in which we sit at rest,

For a moment in the central of our being,

The vivid transparence that you bring is peace.

Presently, humanity seems to have been and be caught up this constant act of dichotomizing. Another word, to be more Stevensian, might be “negation”. As understood in a “dictionary” sense, negation functions as “the action or logical operation of negating or making negative.” (Merriam-Webster) However, the Stevensian notion of “negation” is quite different, or at the very least more complex. In Negation, Stevens writes:

Hi! The creator too is blind,

Struggling toward his harmonious whole,

Rejecting intermediate parts,

Horrors and falsities and wrongs;

Incapable master of all force,

Too vague idealist, overwhelmed

By an afflatus that persists.

For this then, we endure brief lives,

The evanescent symmetries

From that meticulous potter’s thumb.

To offer a very simple analysis of this, Stevens appears first to be turning our eyes upon the creator, alluding to a divine knowledge, “an afflatus”. It will be easy from a cursory reading of this text to assume that the “afflatus” references something of God, though I hope to convince you of the contrary. This creator, presumably God or a god, is blind. He does not see all, “Rejecting intermediate parts, / Horrors, falsities and wrongs”, because when God created he looked upon everything and “saw that it was good”. While Stevens’ seeming dislike for God must occupy another time and study, as “we endure brief lives” we seem to be in the act of negating. On a somewhat “material” level, though the act transcends mere physicality, we recognize the act of negating God as “sin”. A proper theology of sin, though, sees it not simply an act, but a nature. Here is where we find that the ability to partake in the act of negating God actually persists within that “afflatus”, what George Santayana elucidates in Three Philosophical Poets:

“It is that all we observe about us, and ourselves also, may be so many passing forms of a permanent substance. This substance, while remaining the same in quantity and in inward quality, is constantly redistributed; in its redistribution it forms those aggregates which we call things, and which we find constantly disappearing and reappearing. All things are dust, and to dust they return; a dust, however, eternally fertile, and destined to fall perpetually into new, and doubtless beautiful, forms. This notion of substance lends a much greater unity to the outspread world; it persuades us that all things pass into one another, and have a common ground from which they spring successively, and to which they return.”

I will not and cannot argue that this “substance” is solely the sinful nature, for there is good in it too, but we may safely conclude that sinful nature is, indeed, a part/piece of that substance. The afflatus is a kind of divine “thing” that is carried forward through time, persisting in the “human spirit”. Negation, then, is inherently and naturally a human “thing”. Transcendentalist philosophy reveals to us the idea that we live in a world of shadows; the things we see are not the things themselves, but the closest possible representation of what is real. Because of this, we see that all things in this world are somehow imperfect. That being the case, if we are to set up this world as very adversarial, we contrast two imperfections. This is not to say that truths do not exist within the world (don’t steal, don’t murder, etc.), but that in regards to certain topics we must centralize.

A good example of this is the debate between architects and engineers of form and function. If there were no functionality to things, but only artistic value, the world would be difficult to operate in. However, there is a certain pleasure given by aesthetics. As modernity has shown us, putting people in boxes within boxes seems to have an effect of eroding and weakening the human spirit. The arts occupy a large part of every person’s life, whether it be film, literature, music, or “art”, and humanity places great value upon these things. What then is the solution, for it seems that form over function or function over form fall short. The answer, of course, is that we must exist, as we do, in a kind of tension between the two.

This is how we must understand negation in Stevens. Not merely an act of opposing a singular force, it is to exist within the tension of two forces. For as we enter into this first part of Notes, It Must be Abstract, Stevens will gaze upon two forces and seek to center us within that tension. In The Primacy of Negation, Dustin Dallman concludes with these words:

“Negation does not consist in the pale cynicism of the naive realist, nor the puerile dismissal of the contrarion, but in the rigor and ardor of the artist and the materialist. And it is negation, not affirmation, that resides at the very center of Stevens' poetics.”

“Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction  Life”

Before entering Notes, Stevens offers a kind of forward or preface, as I revise this, it may be best understood as a kind of thesis, dedicated to the elusive “Henry Church”.  I say elusive, for I found it rather difficult to learn much about the man. What I have discovered I will share: Church was born in 1836 and died in 1908, receiving “posthumous reputation as an American primitive for his avocation of painting and sculpting.” He was a blacksmith by trade, but expressed interest in art, most famous for “carving bas relief figures in Squaw Rock on the bank of the Chagrin River.” (Lipman #) In The Poems of Our Climate, Harold Bloom writes, “The eight lines that stand at the start of Notes toward a Supreme Fiction are no more addressed to the muse or interior paramour than they are to Henry Church.” (Bloom 167) Why, then, name Henry Church? Despite the lack of biography present, we can ascertain some importance from what little we find. Key in that biography are the terms, whether intentional or not, “American primitive” and “art”. In the first part of Notes, Stevens is involved with a reduction, obviated by the seeming obsession with or pressing towards the “first idea”. Stevens makes it quite clear that the ephebe must be, obviously, a youth, but also a youth untainted by an knowledge or understanding of the parts of the world. This, then, gets us to Church. Church, as an “American primitive”, embodies this idea of someone fresh and unscathed by understanding; he is free to see and experience anew. As an artist, he is a creator, someone or something from which ideas originate. The first idea, no doubt, references numerous things, yet the first consciousness originates with words, for they are a tangible, explained manifestation of not simply consciousness, but shared consciousness. Two notions of this: “In the beginning was the Word”, John 1. And in Genesis 1 we read, “In the beginning, God created […] And God said…”

Here we encounter the afflatus, for this divine knowledge that lives and persists in all things must originate somewhere. It does, and that is with God.

            As you see, we have exacerbated a great amount of time and effort upon understanding Church, but with good cause. So we then enter into the prologue or prelude, reading,

And for what, except for you, do I love?

Do I press the extremest book of the wisest man

Close to me, hidden in me day and night?

This “you” is not simply Henry Church, and as we concluded earlier, it may just as easily be the muse, specifically Mnemosyne the mother of the muses for she could be associated not just as a mother figure, but the mother figure. This accounts for the place of the feminine within the “supreme” fiction, as provider of life, love, but also a kind of starting point or origin. This makes sense because the ephebe, while referring to a youth, most often specifies it as male. And here we have that first instance of two things, Adam and Eve, ephebe and Mnemosyne, not negating, but held in tension together, alongside one another.

The “you” also could be the reader. Oversimplified, yes, but equally likely to any other guess. If this is the case, the notes are not merely towards a “supreme fiction”, though a supreme fiction, as we should discover, transcends the apparent barrier of reality, but a supreme life. For as Jesus or Galatians may read, all commandments are summed up in the one: Love your neighbor as yourself. On this, Bloom writes, “The ‘you’ here must be a synecdoche which includes all familial passions yet transcends them. Transcendence, indeed, seems to me the tenor of this octave, culminating as it does in ‘the central’, ‘the vivid transparence’, and ‘peace.’” (Bloom 167) As a synecdoche, the “you” refers to a part of the whole, which makes sense as Stevens writes this as “his truly central humming, where a more capable idea of the hero appears as ‘the major man’”, though of course he begins his journey/quest to heroics as an ephebe. (Bloom 166) And as a synecdoche, this is the central piece of Stevens’ work; it is that negation, the part which exists within the tension of two, not necessarily opposing parts, but of two parts dealing with that interplay between fiction and reality. The supreme fiction will encompass a portion of reality, and the supreme life will accomplish feats that seem impossible, fictitious.    

Because it, this “supreme” thing, sits in a negation of reality and fiction and as the central part of the whole of Stevens’ work, it transcends, becomes “the tenor of this octave”. We then must move to deal with those parts of transcendence that give this piece centrality, as well as those parts of centrality that make this piece transcendent.

            Before taking that step though, let us deal with “the extremest book of the wisest man/ Close to me, hidden in me day and night?” In the beginning, God says, “Let there be light. God saw that the light was good, so he separated that day from the night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.” This may be a slight paraphrase, but it introduces us to this idea of light as something which makes clear, as well as visible. Light is both physically visible and invisible. It is real and “fictitious”. And it is for you, for Henry Church, for the muse that Stevens holds this book within himself in times of light and darkness. What is this extremest book of the wisest man? It may be the Bible, of course, but it may also be whatever “you” understands or comes to understand as the supreme fiction. In many ways, the Bible is the story, or series of stories, from which all other stories come. Does this make it the supreme fiction? If you were to ask an archaeologist, they would tell you it is partially fictitious and partially real; regardless, we must not stray from the significance of the presence of this text within light and darkness. The supreme fiction is “hidden in me day and night”. Again, we encounter this seemingly divine spirit or knowledge that is hidden within a person. They know not how it came about or surfaced within them, but it was there as both light and the absence of light, day and night, light and dark. The first idea is always the word, but the next idea is light. The light comes forth from the word, the first idea, and Stevens’ reduction to this first idea is essential as the starting point of Notes.

 Earlier I made mention of form v. function, and this example was not without intention. On Stevens’ reduction, Bloom writes, “It is then a socially induced dissatisfaction that sends Stevens back to an ultimate reduction”. (Bloom 179) Stevens is upset at his surroundings, “at being surrounded by apartment-dwellers.” The reaction to an excess of function was a desire to get outside of that, to return to nature. This might be easily accomplished with a walk in the woods, as seemed to satisfy Frost, Whitman, and others. But Stevens dissatisfaction, his ennui, occurs more in a “centering on ‘desire’ or the pathos of the poet’s will discovering that to live with the first idea alone is to have ‘what is not.’” (Bloom 179) In other words, he is not merely satisfied to return to nature, but must reach for the source of nature. If you remember the scriptures, we find that the before light, “darkness was over the surface of the deep.” Darkness is what is not. People describe it as the absence of light. Here then we are moving closer to the reason for this reduction; it seems that these “things”, if they can be called that, have eluded us. We have sought to rationalize things and make sense of them without knowing that first idea. “The word”, language, is how we come about understanding things; through the word comes light, or understanding and the ability to see which, in turn allows us to organize things, domesticate them, into parts of a sensible whole. David Spurr has written at great length on the subject of “the gaze” and how by looking at things and people and places, we begin to colonize and order them. But we must not forget that the physical is merely one part, on end. To exist in the center, the negation, is to move towards those things which are not. Because, as we know, the true composition of reality is as much material as it is immaterial. Having established the reason for Stevens’ reduction, then, we move to those transcendental ideas that he introduces us to in this preface.

In the uncertain light of single, certain truth,

Equal in living changingness to the light

In which I meet you, in which we sit at rest,

For a moment in the central of our being,

The vivid transparence that you bring is peace.

Here we actually find the word “light”, in the context of a single, certain truth where Stevens encounters the proverbial “you”. What is hidden in darkness, that which is not, becomes visible in the light. It is a paradox as well as a trope, showing us that to even acknowledge “what is not” is to acknowledge existence. That something is sublime and transcendent, and Bloom has revealed what those transcendent and sublime “things” that allow us to take the primary steps in Notes manifest as.  We have “the central”, “the vivid transparence”, and “peace”. I feel as though centrality receives sufficient attention and explanation. Transparence should be easy enough, for it operates with light. To be transparent is to be visibly or physically seen through, usually as a result of light passing through an object. However, to be transparent is also to be open about who you are and what you think and believe. The transparence that we bring somehow “is peace.” How is this so? It is because “you”, as we have established, is the primitive artist: the first creator, the muse of the oral tradition, the innocent ephebe. “You” are untainted or, as we enter into It Must be Abstract, must re-become untainted and “see the sun again with an ignorant eye”. It must be seeing the light with recognition that light is not the only significant part of the whole.

So we conclude: peace is a result of an untainted being experiencing a recognition, or a re-cognition, of light and dark, reality and fiction, the word and the silence. The primitive artist naturally exists in negation, the tension of the real and fictitious, and he is the freed man because he has acknowledged that he is merely man, part of a whole that persists in the sublime, the divine knowledge or force that persists in all things despite the fact that, to those dwelling in apartments, trapped within the confines of the modern and overly rational and fixated world, “that which is not” is nothing but an irrational fancy, it is the first idea and therefore the source of all things. Even more than that, it is the supreme fiction. 

Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius (pt. 2)

Well, I am back at it with Santayana. I want to focus on some different aspects of his writing other than oneness, continuity, and the interplay between the material and insubstantial, or surreal, rather, though I think my discussion will probably bleed into the latter of those three.

As Sexson has apportioned part of the class title to "the Lucretian Sublime", that will consume this portion of my analysis and ramblings on Santayana.


To discover substance, then, is a great step in the life of reason, even if substance be conceived quite negatively as a term that serves merely to mark, by contrast, the unsubstantiality, the vanity, of all particular moments and things. That is the way in which Indian poetry and philosophy conceived substance. But the step taken by Greek physics, and by the poetry of Lucretius, passes beyond. Lucretius and the Greeks, in observing universal mutation and the vanity of life, conceived behind appearance a great intelligible process, an evolution in nature. The reality became interesting, as well as the illusion. Physics became scientific, which had previously been merely spectacular.

Here is the first marked shift from a divided physical/immaterial to physics becoming science, "an evolution in nature", "the unsubstantiality, the vanity, of all particular moments and things." There is something more, something transcendent. When I took Lit. Crit. from Bennet, he explained the sublime as something beyond explanation or reason, and how one's experience of the sublime is not a fixed thing, but a fluid comprehension, or "incomprehension", based upon the totality of one's experience and understanding of things. I can encounter a painting or poetry or music or scenery that is beautiful, but those which transcend beauty are sublime. To be clear, though, the sublime does not always merit a positivistic experience. The sublime is, in many ways, simply outside of an individual comprehension. However, this again is too simplistic, for the fact that I do not understand or comprehend astrophysics, or even civil engineering, does not classify these things as "sublime". The sublime seems to almost be restricted to the artistic and natural. If it has not become apparent, I will state it: the sublime is extremely difficult to define and explain on the very basis that it transcends language. The best description might be to understand the sublime as God. This is not to limit the sublime to a specific faith or religious persuasion, but to say it is that which you hold in the place of "I am content to experience this without fully comprehending it." The difference, however, is that if I begin in the middle of a circle, and the sublime, for me, exists outside of that circle, it is not impossible for me to move into that outer ring. However, beyond that first ring is another ring, and so forth. The reason I say God, then, is that the only idea ever conceived of beyond every ring is God Himself. And not merely an idea, not merely a being, but some essence transcendent, again, of all human comprehension. Sublime.

Now, a materialist or atheist will not ascribe to that view, thus establishing nature as the paramount idea only makes sense for Lucretius and his fellow Epicureans. For those who ascribe to such views, nature is god. The idea of nature, then, is the greatest idea ever conceived of. It captures both material and immaterial, the physical life and the life force itself. And the totality of these things, the oneness, is sublime.

Continuing on, we find a brief explanation of the progression of this materialist idea, beginning with Democritus, passing into Epicurus, and landing in the mind of Lucretius. The notion rejects the supernatural, and adopts the motion of the atoms, the eternal movement and occasional change, as the penultimate truths. These truths help man to maintain his free will, his freedom to operate within a world that acknowledges the contrary and terrifying possibility of fate, a decide, predestined pattern and movement to the universe.

It fascinates me that people are not disconcerted by the fact that Epicurus adopted this ideal for such menial reasons. He found "Democritus the most helpful and edifying", "The system of Democritus was adopted by Epicurus, but not because Epicurus had any keenness of scientific vision", and "he gathered his scientific miscellany with an eye fixed not on nature, but on the exigencies of an inward faith,—a faith accepted on moral grounds, deemed necessary to salvation, and defended at all costs, with any available weapon. It is instructive that materialism should have been adopted at that juncture on the same irrelevant moral grounds on which it has usually been rejected." It is compelling that Santayana seems to acknowledge the hypocrisy of Epicurus, that everyone takes something on faith. This is an undeniable truth, that undeniable truth Santayana talks of, that "wishes to pursue a possible, not impossible, happiness." This begs the question, "What is possible?" To a materialist we have only look towards the finite and comprehensible and testable and "scientific" and tangible. This is possibility manifest in "real" form. However, even their great philosopher Epicurus cannot escape the fact that his adoption of a naturalistic, materialistic ideology centers on feeling, faith, fear, many things accused towards the religious, the pious, and the faithful. Epicurus, if Satayana is to be believed, invented his own religion.


Materialism, like any system of natural philosophy, carries with it no commandments and no advice. It merely describes the world, including the aspirations and consciences of mortals, and refers all to a material ground. The materialist, being a man, will not fail to have preferences, and even a conscience, of his own; but his precepts and policy will express, not the logical implications of his science, but his human instincts, as inheritance and experience may have shaped them. Any system of ethics might accordingly coexist with materialism; for if materialism declares certain things (like immortality) to be impossible, it cannot declare them to be undesirable. Nevertheless, it is not likely that a man so constituted as to embrace materialism will be so constituted as to pursue things which he considers unattainable. There is therefore a psychological, though no logical, bond between materialism and a homely morality.

It would be unfair to address materialism as a merely surface level experience of the world, as well as with naturalism. From what I gather, Santayana claims there is a depth and a sublime and Naturalism is a philosophy of observation, and of an imagination that extends the observable; all the sights and sounds of nature enter into it, and lend it their directness, pungency, and coercive stress. At the same time, naturalism is an intellectual philosophy; it divines substance behind appearance, continuity behind change, law behind fortune. It therefore attaches all those sights and sounds to a hidden background that connects and explains them. So understood, nature has depth as well as surface, force and necessity as well as sensuous variety.

It seems that entire experience of nature is at once informed by, and equally informs, our understanding of that force, the force of nature itself, behind the physical. However, it seems that this fore i bound up in and centered upon the energy within nature, the law of thermodynamics, that energy be neither created nor destroyed, but merely transferred. This is where the materialist seems to come about their idea for how things are carried forward. I cannot take credit for the energies I employ, for they are transferred, almost imparted, maybe even willed to me, by the forces of nature: atoms, DNA, psyche, etc.

Here we come upon an interesting point (and hopefully I have not made to great a leap). The materialist discerns that the presence of man is unessential to the progression, or at the very least, the procession, of nature. I do not think I disagree. However, this experience, "the sublime" as we have come to call it, this experience is something almost entirely transcendent of conscience, yet not quite. And the issue is that that particular "thing", if we can call it that, depends upon a consciousness. We are left with two options: the force of nature, energy, natural energy, or whatever you may please to call. The other option is grounded in the myths, a God. Here is an interesting question that is more important than we have let it become: If a tree falls in a forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Before we can answer that, we must define sound. Wikipedia defines it as such:

Sound is a mechanical wave that is an oscillation of pressure transmitted through a solid, liquid, or gas, composed of frequencies within the range of hearing


Now, if this definition proves insufficient to the scholarly mind due to its source, I say fair enough. The references merit credibility to my only mildly comprehensive mind.

However, this definition necessitates a "range of hearing". Hearing is done by people and animals (so far as I know). If atoms or molecules or cells are known to hear, my argument ends here. I recently noticed a book titled Singing to the Plants, but my existing stack of books prevents me from adding yet another. From what I gather, this idea has more to do with the transfer of gases and less to do with the sounds themselves, and this book seems less concerned with that idea than a variety of mysticisms.

I digress, and the point is this: if sound in fact necessitates a "range of hearing", then the tree does not make a sound. It does not if there is no consciousness to hear. But is there? Again, behind this we either have a god or God, and we have energy. My dissatisfaction with energy as the source should seem logical and fair enough. Energy powers a computer, a lamp, it apparently even causes my energy bill to increase when all I have done is leave my power source for my computer plugged in.

You see, energy is without control. It swerves, it changes, Epicurus declares the atoms as malleable not in form, but in action. Any reasoning man will here say, "Yes, but a god or God, too, may be without control." I do not deny this fact. So why argue? Energy is not simply without control, but it is without self control. Energy has and always will simply continue. Given the example of my computer power source, energy does not develop or evolve or naturally select an intelligence that tells itself to stop wasting. The materialist will say it has not been wasted, merely transferred. From what I gather, it is not stored in the power source to provide a sudden jolt of enormous power to my battery, no, instead it has been limited by such factors as voltage, but the point is that this energy is transferred for nothing. The transfer of ideas as energies makes sense. The transfer of a constant flow of constrained power into...what?...makes no sense in light of evolutionary theory or what little I know of atomic theory. It seems that atoms organize themselves into more complex forms. Though the electron proves chaotic, there is a level of order in the electron cloud.

To think in terms of evolutionary theory, do not the simple forms arrange themselves into more complex, better developed, more fit forms? And energy is the driving force behind all of that, correct? Why has the most base of all these forms, the mere constituent of all things, the source of life for nature, not evolved itself into a more complex better form? Energy is uncontained and uncontrolled, and yet the complexity and improvements of nature are founded in the harnessing and controlling of energy. Beings and societies advance as they better harness energy. But left to its own devices, what is the inherent value of energy? Does energy exist? Absolutely. Does energy matter? I would say yes, but for a far different reason than the naturalist.

I think a fatal flaw of humanity is the assumption that my consciousness of something is what makes it important, makes it exist. If there is no one to be conscious of energy, does it exist? If there is no matter to harness energy, does energy matter, does it have a purpose? I have given myself away here in insisting that purpose matters, has weight. As I reflect upon that sentence, I am aware that I use material terms to describe abstract things. However, "matter" has become an equally material and abstract word, words themselves abstractions.

I think human existence, and all existence, is not predicated upon human consciousness, but the consciousness of God. I exist because God knows all and he therefore knows me and not just me, but the matters and energies that compose me.

These are merely thoughts and ideas and reflections upon what Santayana has introduced me to, and I do not doubt that I err at certain points. I am not unwelcoming of correction or opposition.

These ideas, wherever they might take me, exist in a kind of philosophical, nebulous realm, and I have to remind myself to be careful before I reduce everything to mere abstractions. I think there is serious value to the material, but I also think it is not difficult for man to quickly arrive at a conclusion based on those feelings and emotions and convictions that are so obviously present. I include myself here and I include, though not as my equal, Epicurus.

The value of these ideas, if for nothing else, is also present in analyzing and thinking about Wallace Stevens. Well, it's 3 am, so I think I will call it a night. If my errors are obvious, it is because I have written at an absurd hour. I feel that my mind was clear, but if not, that will suffice as an excuse. Good night.

Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius (pt. 1)

I finally managed to sit down and start reading George Santayana's  Three Philosophical Poets. I must confess I find it quite dense, and am only slowly making headway in my navigation of his ideas on Lucretius. In the opening statements, Lucretius is found casting his hands and eyes towards the heavens, exclaiming, "The All is One!" Here, he has stumbled upon something. In some regards, this seems to be a cry of defiance to the god or gods of the ancient mythologies. In others, it seems a question,

it is to ask how things hang together, and to assume that they do hang together in one way or another.

Lucretius has hit upon the idea that all things, in some manner or fashion, fit together. He has assumed a commonality, a unity, an order, to nature. An obvious part of nature is the cyclical pathway it follows, and its constant movement towards a greater, more fit being or object or thing. Santayana writes,


when they vanish, nothingness does not succeed; other things arise in their stead. Nature remains always young and whole in spite of death at work everywhere; and what takes the place of what continually disappears is often remarkably like it in character. Universal instability is not incompatible with a great monotony in things; so that while Heraclitus lamented that everything was in flux, Ecclesiastes, who was also entirely convinced of that truth, could lament that there was nothing new under the sun.

It seems that in some regards, these early poets and philosophers were deconstructionist, though only in some regards. They sensed a world where, though new things might sprout up, a shadow or remembrance or recollection of the old, the previous, remains.

Today I was thinking about how, ultimately, we repeat the same mistakes of previous generations over and over and over again. I think what catalyzed these questions was the fact that I had just finished watching the movie trailer for Cloud Atlas. I plan to see it this Friday and remain assured that I may write more of it over the weekend, seeing as I am anticipating an encounter with Stevens as I watch it. Anyways, history...after I set off on this tangent, I recalled a clip from a movie that I saw in high school, which was also reference my sophomore year of college in my Bible as Lit. course. The movie is Waking Life, and in it the characters discuss a novel I read a year ago: Philip K. Dick's Flow My Tears the Policeman Said. Shortly after writing it, Dick goes to a party where he meets people who share the names of his characters, who share the relations of those characters, and who seem real despite the fact that for him, at least initially, they were merely members in his fiction novel. Startled by this realization, he leaves the party, encounters a man whose car is out of gas, and helps this man. He again becomes starkly aware of the fact that this, too, is part of his novel.

Dick then makes his way to a priest, and tells him of his experience. The priest tells him everything is from the book of Acts. Dick reads it and concurs. He develops this idea that we are frozen in time, merely reliving the same events over and over and over again until Christ's return. Much of this resonates with the Gnostic view that the demiurge created time as an illusion to convince us that the return of Jesus is a ways off, despite the fact that it will happen very soon.

What this has to do with Lucretius is the fact that "what takes the place of what continually disappears is often remarkably like it in character." In many regards this mirror the happenings in Solaris; the beings that arise out of Solaris itself are striking resemblances to the actual thing, though not the thing itself. How can this be if they are derived from the idea of something rather than the reality itself? How is it possible for a physical mimicry, mimesis, to take place when what it mimics is an idea rather than a physical reality? Here we enter again into Stevens's constant conflict between the imagined and real, but before we go there I must say that this hearkens to a holiday only shortly passed. November 5th. Remember, remember, the 5th of November...This day has become a holiday thanks to the popular graphic novel, and now popular movie, "V" for Vendetta where a sole revolutionary transforms the political state of London from tyranny to freedom with his belief that, though you might kill him, "You can't kill an idea." Is it not the same Santayana's analysis of Lucretius or Solaris or, as we will later see, Stevens? The first two we can concede, the last will come in due time.

Given this fact though, we see the plausibility of a physical manifestation of remembered and recalled lovers in Solaris. We see the probability of a figure emerging, "though the place there-of knows them no more" (according to Santayana), because it is not their physical form that need survive, only the idea of them. This is how we come upon the advancement of progression of ideas. They are shared and passed on and reconsidered and reevaluated and shaped and transformed by societies and cultures and thinkers. And this, this, is how we come upon the greatest idea, according to Santayana, that humanity has ever hit upon. We have done so, vicariously, through Lucretius...


It is that all we observe about us, and ourselves also, may be so many passing forms of a permanent substance. This substance, while remaining the same in quantity and in inward quality, is constantly redistributed; in its redistribution it forms those aggregates which we call things, and which we find constantly disappearing and reappearing. All things are dust, and to dust they return; a dust, however, eternally fertile, and destined to fall perpetually into new, and doubtless beautiful, forms. This notion of substance lends a much greater unity to the outspread world; it persuades us that all things pass into one another, and have a common ground from which they spring successively, and to which they return.

IF "all things pass into one another", we have hit upon this idea of some kind of spirit or soul or life-force that persists through time and space. It takes different forms and different shapes but, if we again operate from a perspective that deconstructs, we are but dust and ash. What lives on? It is the idea. Cloud Atlas, an interesting movie-though falling short of my expectations-dealt with the idea of a continuity of spirit in a somewhat interesting way. It seemed to suggest that the complexity of a man, the good, the bad, the beautiful, the sublime, the physical, the spiritual, the sin, the apathy, all passed on, but manifested in different ways at different times in varying fashions and places. This is where we hit upon Stevens. I do not think Stevens rejects any one view or, to simplify, either imagination or reason, reality or surreal. Instead, I think he sees people as green, rational and reasoning, as blue, imaginative, as red, reality, as white, representing death in some cases, and new life, or simply life itself in other cases. We do not merely contain rationale or creativity, but instead play with each of these, exist in an imbalance of them, and struggle to understand how our particular set of "colors" informs our understanding, interaction with, perception of and, ultimately, materialized experience of the world. A man does good and a man sins. Humanity continues to do good and to sin, and every generation claims their sins as far more depraved than those of the previous generations, if not for pride's sake, for ignorance's sake, for we are little different than them, save for technological advancement. This is not to reduce or deconstruct humanity to the point of ambiguity and insignificance, but to understand the shared spirit and life of humanity. Santayana continues:


Here was a much richer theme for the poet and philosopher, who was launched upon the discovery of the ground and secret causes of this gay or melancholy flux. The understanding that enabled him to discover these causes did for the European what no Indian mystic, what no despiser of understanding anywhere, suffers himself to do; namely, to dominate, foretell, and transform this changing show with a virile, practical intelligence. The man who discovers the secret springs of appearances opens to contemplation a second positive world, the workshop and busy depths of nature, where a prodigious mechanism is continually supporting our life, and making ready for it from afar by the most exquisite adjustments. The march of this mechanism, while it produces life and often fosters it, yet as often makes it difficult and condemns it to extinction. This truth, which the conception of natural substance first makes intelligible, justifies the elegies which the poets of illusion and disillusion have always written upon human things. It is a truth with a melancholy side; but being a truth, it satisfies and exalts the rational mind, that craves truth as truth, whether it be sad or comforting, and wishes to pursue a possible, not an impossible, happiness.

I think Santayana is pointing out an interesting idea. To focus upon the material, nature itself as it specifically pertains to Lucretius, brings about a level of "intelligence" and scientifically encounters life in new and profound ways, at the same time "makes it difficult and condemn it to extinction." We have this thing called matter, and matter composes physical nature. But what of human nature? What of the nature of God? From what I can gather, science has successfully reproduced all things, save for the human soul, life itself. This material understanding, this great awakening in which we have reduced all things to a consistent matter, atoms,  all at once unifies all things. We are all dust. However, it only accounts for one half of the equation, and again we experience the Stevensian duplicity of reality and imagination. I hold that these are separate, and that their separateness is a necessary idea. Though language limits these to one being more "real" than the other, I would contend that neither intends to force fictitiousness upon the other. It is Picasso's painting of Gertrude Stein, more real than the "actual" Gertrude Stein. Again, is this truly, truly, the case? The point is not in the physical matter of Gertrude Stein, whether paint on canvas or flesh on bone, but instead, the idea of Gertrude Stein. However, it is always important to note that there was a physical, material Gertrude Stein, and to some regard is a material Gertrude Stein immortalized in the painting by Pablo Picasso. In this material painting we also have an idea of Gertrude Stein, but the idea of her transcends that image. People act and think in ways that she did, people are influenced by the ideas that manifest in her writings. But the words, the paint, they are not the thing itself. They are merely physical pieces pointing to the true nature, the true "thing".

I think I have said enough for now. I would encourage everyone to take some time with Santayana, as it is highly probable that my interpretations of his writings are inconsistent or misrepresented. I apologize for the length of this post, as well as the likely repetitiveness of it. I think I am in over my head, but I don't think Sexson would expect anything else.

For those doing a research project on art...

I found this in academic search complete...I'm sure there's a lot more out there, but this could be a start...

http://ehis.ebscohost.com.proxybz.lib.montana.edu/ehost/detail?sid=b3faf1d1-06f3-4dc4-bb0b-408ceb92fa5a%40sessionmgr113&vid=1&hid=102&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#db=a9h&AN=6897315

Been a long time...

I realize it's been a long time since I've written a blog. I reached a point a few weeks ago where I just had to stop. I don't know if you've ever seen the movie The Number 23, but the main character eventually goes insane because of what he begins to see. And in a sense, I felt myself reaching that point. I couldn't read something or listen to something or think about something without seeing more in it...without seeing Wallace Stevens in it. In some classes I just said, "I don't care" because the discussion was not what I had become consumed with and therefore insignificant to me.

I read that, and I realize it sounds pretty dramatic, so I should say I've also been taking some time to read through Solaris, as well as my secondary text The Poems of Our Climate by Harold Bloom, and even spend a weekend in Las Vegas. And after all of that, it is still with reluctance that I return to my notes and my blog.

Ecclesiastes 1:18 says this:
For in much wisdom is much vexation, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.

I think in some ways I began to feel some of the weight of that. Reading Solaris made me wrestle with some philosophical and existential questions. Kris arrives on the space station, and there is no way for the other people to know that he is real or that if they kill him, he won't simply reappear like the rest of the apparitions on the ship. They have no reason to trust him because what they have seen makes them doubt everything. I was once told that some people share this idea that we all are in a dream, and we simply create this subconscious agreement that what we are seeing is what we are seeing, therefore lending existence to the thing. The only way I know that what I see is what another person sees is through language. In the beginning was the Word...

The word is not just the ability to create, but to affirm the existence of. If I had to describe language, I think I might say it is an immaterial manifestation that comes about through the necessary act of comprehending. I'm sure someone like Harold Bloom has a better idea of what language is, but that is my best shot. We feel a need to comprehend and experience and understand the material world, and we do that by sharing it together, through language, with other people. 

I was thinking about what we discussed in class on Friday, and I wondered why the organization of Stevens's poems went as such:

Harmonium, ideas of order, parts of a world, and then synthesis (in the Notes on a Supreme Fiction). 

If you remember, Sexson described the creation cycle as thesis, antithesis, synthesis, or harmony, split, reordering. With Stevens, Harmonium makes sense as the launching point for his poetry. But ideas of order confused me. It seemed out of place. Ideas of order are a suggestion about the way things should be; it is my understanding and rationale of how the world is supposed to operate and work. Ideas of order, however, are not the kind of synthesis they sound like, but instead the antithesis. If we return to the Garden of Eden, we find Adam and Eve standing at the base of a tree, and Eve is having a conversation with a snake, presumably Lucifer. He insists that they eat the fruit, and they do. Eve takes of it first, and Adam follows. The reason ideas of order operates as an antithesis to the harmony, is because it is the judgement of what is already as it should be. Adam and Eve's ideas of order involved being like God, having the power to see and understand and know all (or a great deal). However, this is a rebellion, a fall, a swerve. It contradicts the harmony sending the world into turmoil. As a result, the world becomes fragmented, thus the Parts of a World. 

And I think this is the stage we are in; a disjointed and broken and fragmented world that is working towards synthesis, or order. If you pay attention, there are always new ideas, philosophies, and religions vying for the intellectual support of the masses. And ultimately, these are varying ideas of order. They are another antithesis thrown into a mix of other antitheses. 

In Notes, we find the following words:

The first idea was not our own. Adam
In Eden was the father of Descartes
And Eve made air the mirror of herself,

Of her sons and of her daughters. They found themselves
In heaven as in a glass; a second earth;
And in the earth itself they found a green–

The inhabitants of a very varnished green.
But the first idea was not to shape the clouds
In imitation. The clouds preceded us

There was a muddy center before we breathed.
There was a myth before the myth began,
Venerable and articulate and complete.

From this the poem springs: that we live in a place
That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves
And hard it is in spite of blazoned days.

We are the mimics. Clouds are pedagogues.
The air is not a mirror but bare board,
Coulisse bright-dark, tragic chiaroscuro

And comic color of the rose, in which
Abysmal instruments make sounds like pips
Of the sweeping meanings that we add to them.

From a materialist point of view, we see that it is obviously possible for the world to exist and persist without human presence. It did at one point. And at the end we read of "the sweeping meanings we add to them", the constant effort towards giving a reason for my existence. In a lot of ways, I am not fully sure why I am here, but I think it is a cop out to say I am here for pleasure because that is what feels most right. In other words, I am not Epicurean. Suffering often makes pleasure worthwhile. And I do not think I intentionally add meaning to things, but even when I set down Stevens and took a break and just stopped, I couldn't really stop. I joke about swerve gum and Cat Stevens, but on a deeper level it seems that there is this connection between things grounded in that creation myth, those first words. 

You know the first thing that came was light? I spend countless hours wondering why light as opposed to anything else. The best I can do is say that light exposes things, it helps us see. It is good that we see, but the word, the word which precedes the seeing, gives leverage and meaning to what we see.

A while back we talked about the tree that connects heaven and earth. The tree has been cut down, we have separated ourselves. Though this is the case, I think the tree is growing back. Right now, in our ideas of order, we have concluded that it would be better to have no tree, to cut it down, and dissolve it into another fragmented part of the world. But one day, I think, we will realize that the tree has grown back, that we have access. Until then, we remain in the green world, and the dissolution of the imagination in the face of the "real" will proliferate. 

Coulisse bright-dark, tragic chiaroscuro

Man carrying thing (pt. 3)

Landscape with Boat opened our discussion yesterday. I came to the class thinking only about kenosis and the way it fits into all of this, the whole discussion we have been having. Justin Bieber vomiting? It is an emptying out. But what of "things"? What of the Man Carrying Thing who has now been following me around for some time? What of this new discussion with boats and the letter "c" and the sea?

I am looking for a place to start with all of this, so maybe I'll go back to the weekend and work forward. This last weekend I backpacked the Cascade Canyon trail in Grand Teton National Park. It is a 20 mile loop that carried me and my friends through some incredible backcountry. And as I was there, I remembered Sexson's challenge to see something as it really is. While considering that, I came upon a large, clear pool where ice and water seemed to collide. Below is the image of what I saw.

And as I looked at that, I thought of this idea that we are all made of the same stuff. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes. There was ice, and there was water, but it was all water. This idea of the swerve is about constant motion, movement, and fluidity. That's water. But what about the ice? Along other parts of the trail, there were these incredible streams, and at parts a small waterfall spitting drops of water onto a log laid across the stream. And upon the log, these magnificent layers of ice formed. The fluid became solid, still, fixed, but it is still the same stuff. I think life is about movement and motion and transformation and constantly traveling along the spiral that moves us closer to wherever we might be going. However, it is more. It is a series of images frozen in time. The conscience of reason centers upon the absolute and knowable truths. It focuses on what is presently visible, the thing "as it is". It is like the ice. But this other part, the imagination, it is the water. It is the fluid and shifting, and also presents the thing "as it is", though in a different way. And I made the mistake of thinking one superseded the other in regards to which conscience a human must operate from. Then it became clear in the clear waters of this pool. They must coexist, reason and imagination, and we know this from our discussion on Monday. 

But it goes further. Man Carrying Thing:

The thing he carries resists

The most necessitous sense. Accept them, then,
As secondary...

...A horror of thoughts that suddenly are real. 

What is the necessitous sense, "the horror" of these suddenly real thoughts? It goes back to the snow man as I mentioned in the first part of this blog. And this is the final line of that poem:

Nothing that is not there and nothing that is.

Finally- I know this is a lot of setup, but it is necessary- this is from Dustin's blog (also addressed in my first post):

imagination remains as the negation of reality, the nothing in excess of the something.

All of this deals with kenosis. It is an emptying out; we know this. And this negates what is normal or common to human thinking. People fill themselves with knowledge, fill their houses with things, and occupy their time with activity. This is reality. Imagination negates that because it is an emptying out. Imagination breeds creativity, and creativity is an expressive outpouring of ideas, thoughts, and experiences in a manner that makes sense to us. In many ways, it is how someone shows the world how they personally experience reality through their lens of understanding based on the summation of those experiences. You see, reality is the form of something in the most real way we can experience it. Imagination negates this in that it is not a filling up, but instead an outpouring (the nothing in excess of something). What is interesting is what we find in Adagia...

The imagination wishes to be indulged.

In part 2 I wrote about how we all carry something, and our job is to share that and occupy the voids around us with those things. We are all the man carrying thing, and that thing inside of us resists the outpouring because, generally, to be full is to be satisfied. A significant part of this is the idea that the imagination wishes to be indulged. It seems that this part of us is somehow uncontainable, though often contained, and must be indulged through release. Imagination, though secondary, confronts us with the "horrifying"thought that it is suddenly real. This is evident in the fact that it has the very real desire of being indulged.

But why is this horrifying?

I think it is because kenosis feels unnatural. Though people naturally want to create, that natural desire is often stifled by the pressures to learn, to be filled with knowledge and understanding, and to not look stupid on the off chance of saying something dumb in a personal outpouring of thoughts. But this is the life and death process, an idea that seems to continually surface in these considerations. Sometimes I have an idea that strikes me as profound and important. I like the idea, but fear that the validity of it might be challenged if shared with people around me. In order to share that, I have to give up a part of myself, and this is the same thing. It is a small death. However, as the idea grows and gains momentum and more and more people become interested in it- as has been the case when people share in this class- the entire process is very life giving. Death, life, death, life.

To return to Landscape with Boat, I return to Monday's class. While Sexson was teaching, I was working on some different ideas that surfaced as a result of Eli's sharing and the discussion that followed. I was flipping through the table of contents looking for a particular poem when Sexson began talking about the sea. He then said it was more than that, that there was a connection to the letter "C". My first thought was, "That's an interesting idea, but so what?" My second thought was, "Sexson seems like he almost always knows what he is talking about, but I don't really see the point/significance of the letter 'c' bearing a connection to the sea." Then, in another one of those instances of unfathomable coincidence, probably better described as fate, my eyes fell upon this poem from Harmonium...

The Comedian as the Letter C

I think Sexson may have made mention of it, now that I think of it, because he was talking about Crispin who is the predominant figure in the poem. Maybe he did, but maybe not. Like I said, my mind was preoccupied with a number of things from the earlier part of the discussion, thus causing me to miss out on the latter half. But we are confronted with "C", sea, and see. With each of these comes a different connotation, though out of context to any ear, they are all the same. I cannot distinguish c from sea from see with no context and when I simply hear each one. I could reach any variety of conclusions about what one may mean by saying c, sea, or see, but the point is that eventually one will supersede the other two, and the other two must be left. But I can always return to them. I may have reached land in a sense, but I always have the ability and opportunity to take the boat and return to sea.

Sexson told us in Oral Traditions that we already know everything, and we have simply begun to forget everything. This is kenosis. This is the emptying out. Those things are out there, but we always leave them for a time to go to land, to the solid, to the real. We go to the ice. But eventually we have to return to the boat and return to sea, to the fluid, to the imaginary. We go to the water. And we pour out one and gather another. And the cycle continues on and on and on until. One thing dies, another comes to life. It is like the variety of ideas in this class. Everyone becomes consumed with one thing. Eventually, though, he or she will leave that thing and move on to something else. The previous thing will always be there for them to return to, but it is no longer the thing.

This last weekend I got to be a part-time hermit in some ways. I abandoned society and entered into a place where I could empty myself out. I was able to set some things down so that I might return and pick up in a different place with a new set of ideas and things. I returned having seen something as it is, but that is only a small part of a greater reality. Later on I will have to set aside these ideas for the sake of others that are built upon it. They will only be built upon it, though, if it becomes the horrifying thought of reality, reality itself.

This is the importance of the man carrying thing and the interplay between reality and imagination. People always carry something with them, but that something comes at the expense of other things. I have given something up in order to carry this other thing. I will eventually give the thing I carry up so I can carry another thing, and so on and so forth. This is negation. This is the nothing that is not there, and nothing that is. Why are all the things nothing? Because they negate each other by their mere essence and existence. We are all made of the same stuff. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes. 

Life is the elimination of what is dead.

     Wallace Stevens, Adagia, 908

Man carrying thing (pt. 2)

I was thinking about how Sexson will often have us come up in front of the class and share their discoveries, their epiphanies, and their revelations with the class. I believe we would call this a testimony. They share a newfound truth with us, and we as critics have the delicate and weighty responsibility of handling this truth that they have so generously bestowed upon our fragile minds.

And as I began to think further on the subject, I wondered why Sexson would have us testify before the class. I cannot say for sure whether or not this is true, but let me share my thoughts, my testimony, and you can weigh whether or not you think it valid.

In Christianity people share their testimony. They testify to what God has done in their lives, and usually it centers around this thing called the Gospel. You see, if someone is truly changed by the Gospel, so say Christians, then they do not just know about the Gospel, they actually know it. And if they actually know it, then they can share it with people around them without the help of the Bible or a piece of paper with "6 easy steps to meeting Jesus", or whatever. They can stand before a group of people and speak it with confidence and conviction and certainty because it is not just something they wrote about or thought about or read about. It is part of them.

The reason I write this is not to proselytize, but because I think Sexson is doing much the same thing with us. I might write something in my blog, but if it is truly a transformative force in my life, a catalyst, and agent of change, then I need not read it off of my blog or notes or what have you. Now, to be fair, James read to us, but the passion behind that reading indicate it is something more than merely words on a page. It is part of him.

I think all of us have something to say. We are all carrying a thing, and it is significant and precious and protected by each of us. But notice what happens when someone exposes themselves, makes themselves vulnerable. What James is thinking is different from what I am thinking, but it informs my thoughts and may even shift or change or impact them. Brianna shared a poem with us, and it was admittedly embarrassing for her. But it was brilliant. Dustin shares his profound thoughts regardless of the fact that they may be judged as overachieving and intimidating. Chase stood up and shared his thoughts with us though he was still working through some of the things he had considered. Eli shared some incredible thoughts yesterday. And all of these instances inform us. They move us, they cause us to swerve. We all carry a thing, and it is only that until exposed, pushed into the void, and made known. Then it becomes more than the primary thing itself; it becomes the secondary which is even more true and more real and all in all more than the primary.

Do not just carry the thing, share it.

Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house.
Matthew 5:15