What happened? (pt. 2)

Today, at the end of class, Sexson stopped me and said, "I mean it when I say your blog is what I am looking for." Then he made a remark about how it was always what he was looking for from me. This is my fourth Sexson class and, sadly, it is the first time my blog got mentioned in a class. As a final question, he asked, "What happened? What changed?"

I couldn't answer him in the moment. I am aware that something has happened, something has changed, but at that moment I was still unsure, I needed time to process. To be honest, I wasn't sure if I had broken through even though it felt like I had. I needed someone to affirm that, and Sexson, in that moment, did.

For the rest of the day I pondered the question, "What happened?" And after a great deal of thinking, I believe I am moving towards understanding. You see, I have always had thoughts in my head on par with what I wrote in my blog yesterday. I have always had strange thoughts, obscure thoughts, and thoughts that I find unfit for human ears. To be clear, they are not crude but, rather, outlandish. And because of this, I have been afraid to share them. I am afraid to say, "So and so wrote this and this is what I think about it" at the risk of being wrong, off, or offending that person, and at the risk of people saying, "Who could think this?" in a tone of disgust and anguished disbelief.

But for some reason, for some odd reason beyond myself, I took a risk, I jumped into that void which confronted me for so long. It is as Marlow says in Heart of Darkness:

True, he had made that last stride, he had stepped over the edge, while I had been permitted to draw back my hesitating foot. And perhaps in this is the whole difference; perhaps all the wisdom, and all truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that inappreciable moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible. 

This one line from Conrad has stuck with me for quite some time. I remember looking at this, and thinking how I had conquered my fear of heights. I had walked to the edge and peered down a vast expanse. And the fear was gone. I had conquered a physical fear. Looking back, I think how at that time I saw through a glass darkly. Now, however, I see...well...I see more clearly. However, now, at this time, I have been confronted with a deeper fear. And that fear is baring my soul, my mind, thoughts, and heart to a group of strangers through a blog. Yet here I am, passing over the threshold of the invisible into a place where all wisdom and truth and sincerity, the whole difference, are compressed. Not a blog, obviously, but in the realm of thought.

In my first blog, I thought to write on how things come full spiral, as it were. Yet, as I often do, I erased it and posted something else. But in coming full spiral, rather than circle, we do not return to the place from whence we began but instead we are, ideally, closer to something. Is this the truth, is it wisdom, or is it merely- merely, what a foolish thing to say- becoming better versed in the connectedness of the universe? Whatever it may be, we are closer. When I came to college, I brought Conrad with me, and as I am departing after three and a half years, I again come upon Conrad.

For another class we have just finished Lord Jim. In the end of the novel, Jim is pinned between two worlds. As a young boy the first world, the world of the occident, provided an escape for him. He escaped to what he thought would be a world of romance and adventure. Ultimately, though, this cruel and unforgiving world rejected him and was his undoing. He escaped to another world, the world of the orient, and again found a temporary escape. This world too, as you might expect, became his undoing. Jim, in a single act, is undone, brought to nothing. And he dies. And in death, death, he escapes, he finds peace.

The coming of age tale is always a story of a man who dies and is born again. For my last Sexson class I remembered the first chapter of the Bible, the creation of the world. And the Bible tells us a story where a man named Nicodemus is told, "You must die and be born again." These are the famous words of Jesus. And from this story, we know numerous other stories of a man or woman who overcomes a fear, an adversary, a past. And this thing dies and, because of this death, life springs forth. It is evident in nature as well, to move towards Lucretius. Flowers, trees, shrubs, they all die in the fall and winter. However, spring comes and life bursts forth. Death, and life. Life, and death.

Merlin commented on my last blog:

Creation with Emptiness. We can't look at the world and make sense out of it without both facets.

A fascinating thought. We cannot know something without also knowing that which is in stark contrast to the something. And yet, just as in the story of creation that I memorized, something fills the nothingness. That something is sublime, which God can look upon and say, "This is good" and which we look upon and say, "Words cannot express." Among these good things, is the nakedness of a man and woman. They are laid bare before creation, fully exposed. And this is significant...

So for me, what has changed? I have stepped into the void. I have stepped over the edge. I am putting words on a blank screen. I am trying my best to put thoughts into those places where the thoughts, the questions, and the ideas have not yet filled a void. And for the first time, in filling that void with "myself", or the things of myself, I am occupying a space I have never occupied. And to occupy the space is to experience the sublime, the thing which occupies the space. To step into a void is to expose oneself. If we remember, one of the "good" things in creation was the man and the woman, naked and shameless before creation. It was good. 

What does this have to do with Wallace Stevens you ask? And how, in all of this, do we spiral or, as I said, move closer?

Bit nakedness, woolen massa, concerns an innermost atom.
If that remains concealed, what does the bottom matter?

Nakedness concerns an innermost atom. What was that? An atom? Lucretius? The swerve? And yet, in concealing nakedness, that which concerns the innermost atom, the bottom, the void, the end of the spiral ceases to matter. In exposure, though, something good comes to light. I think, at the very end of this day, that this is what happened...

To be fair...(pt 1)

As Deep Waters pointed out, people often flood the blog scene with a blitzkrieg of blogs at the end of the semester, failing to post regularly through the semester. I hope this will not be the case for me, though I have been fairly stagnant in the world of blogging thus far. So instead of an end of the year blitzkrieg, I hope to post numerous times over the next 4-5 days based on a series of thoughts the readings and other blogs have invoked.

First, then, I want to analyze my thoughts on other people's thoughts. To accomplish this, I randomly selected from Rio's list of people conveniently located on his blog.

And thus, we begin with the wizard Merlin. Is it not fascinating how we try to rationalize everything? Even when we break "out of the 'so-called' box", there is a sense that we need to rationalize things. I need to explain that I am seeing something; that, having seen it a million times before, I haven't really seen it. I rationalize the moment into a new, profound, transcendence of a previous consciousness. But I am now conscious of this, am I not?

I like your title, "The Sublime in the Mundane". It is fascinating that those things which we care not to rationalize, the mundane, can capture us and, by failing to be explained, considered, and rationalized, they become sublime. It is the classic Biblical paradox: he that is in a high position should take joy in his low position. He that is in a low position should take joy in his high position. The first will be last, the last first. The greatest are the least, the least the greatest.

What to make of all this?

Exposed here is the truth of humility. It is as your philosopher says: "I feel that the universe of being is too vast to be comprehended." Truth.

Often there is a sense of urgency; we need to act, to move, to swerve, as it were. But for me, the key is to be still, to accept that I am nothing.

Yet, in this insufficiency, I am unsettled. And again I feel the need to move, to swerve. I need to change things, to make myself better, to dream in an American fashion. What happens in the stillness, when rationale is dismissed and I simply am? The famous "I think, therefore I am" suggests that to cease the act of thinking, of rationalizing and considering, is to cease to exist. But I would argue this is such a small view. To assume that I am the center of the universe, that my acting and thinking vastly transforms my place the multitude of otherness, of things beyond me, is to assume that I am much and, therefore, to become aware of the fact that I am not much.

The last part of Sunday Morning is fascinating, and an appropriate conclusion.

She hears, upon that water without sound,
A voice that cries, 'The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.'
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
                                                                                                           Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
                                                                                                                Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

For us, the part about Jesus will give pause. Where he still "lay", or where he once "lay"? What could it be!?! Yet Stevens reveals that we are obsessed with rationalizing an irrational thing, and draws our attention to the deer, the quail, even the berries, as they continue on in those things which first set them in motion. But not the man. He has paused because he has dared to think, to ask, and to wonder. These, though, are acts. They involve movement, information transfer, shiftings in consideration. So has he paused for another reason? Will he truly pause?

The pigeons "make/Ambiguous undulations as they sink,/Downward to darkness on extended wings." The pigeon knows not where it goes, but it carries on, casually and ambiguously. Why has the pigeon's willingness to be taken him to the void, the emptiness, the darkness? Have we reached the point at which logic and rationale must begin, at the edge of the darkness? Have we found a necessity for such things? I am sure we have, yet here, where I close and where we must cease to attempt to fully understand, the lines between knowledge and wisdom, or understanding, are drawn. To return to our starting point, it is one thing to see, and an entirely different thing to see. In the end of the poem, the woman looks beyond herself and, for the first time, sees the greater universe. She longs for eternity, but she cannot have it. And why is that? I would say because she continues to act, to think, to strive in vain from a self-centered view.

She must look beyond the self. And here, here she must pause. For when she arrives, for the first time, she will be confronted with the reality of something so far beyond herself, that the mind ceases to rationalize and the sublime, a wisdom and understanding transcendent of fully knowing, manifests in the void.  

The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

I don't claim to know much about interpreting poetry, especially the poetry of the elite, as Dr. Sexson would say. However, as I read The Snow Man and thought more about it, I had some ideas as to it's meaning.

My friend Jake and I often talk about "truth", and the variety of conflicting "truths" that people ascribe to. Often times, it is very apparent that people follow, believe, or think one thing despite the fact that conflicting truth, backed by evidence, reason, logic, or any combination of the three, says another thing. People willfully deny truth for the sake of such things as religious and ethical views, and often times the deeper attachment to the issue is founded in some kind of emotional connection to the issue.

At the end of our conversations, one of us will usually shake his head and ask, "If truth is the goal, then why would people willfully deny it and believe something they know is false?"

Now, to be fair, neither Jake nor myself think ourselves the bearers of all truth to humanity. In fact, I am certain that I am wrong much more often than I am right. That last sentence was one of those rare instances when I happened to be right.

But as I read Wallace Stevens, I can't help but think he, Jake, is like the snow man, and I myself am like the snow man. We, like all other people, know to some extent what we should think and do, what is right and wrong. In light of all of this, though, people are still given over to their emotions and, though emotions are not bad, defy truth for nothing.

 ...

The poem is about a cold man. His "mind of winter", he cares not for what emotions the snowfall in the forest might arouse. He thinks neither romantic thoughts, nor thoughts of "misery". He thinks of but one thing: truth. Further and further he goes into the barren wasteland. He is not searching for anything, simply going from one place to another, as a ship sailing from one coast to another. Eventually, after long travel and toil, he comes to a place where he is surrounded by nothing but a barren, white, wasteland. The snow swirls around, and he can barely see. The wind blows, whistling in his ears like a train setting out on some journey. And in this moment, the man becomes vaguely aware of something. As he looks, and as he listens, and as he watches the snow swirl, and the snow fall, and sees nothing but white, he finds himself lost in the nothingness, and thinks himself nothing. And he is aware that nothing is in this place; no reason, no truth, no fact. But, then, from this nothingness, something stirs in him. It stirs. What stirs? He knows, he reasons, and he thinks. But this...this...feeling, it suddenly becomes everything for him. He does not care what he knows, he wants this. It was once nothing to him. But now, now...it is everything.

An Introduction

As this is my last Sexson class, as well as my last semester of college, I am looking ahead into a period of transition. With this transition comes a plethora of questions not too different from those put forth in the beginning of class...

How do we live?

What do we do?

Peering inward, I consider these questions, but also a different one. I often meet people around me who say they think, believe, or idealize one thing, and yet their actions subsist in an opposite manner. We often use the word "hypocrite" to describe such people. Judgements aside, I consider my own actions; how I live, what I do.

Often times we put things in a chicken egg fashion, insisting that one precede another. However, the reality of a multitude of things happening at once, neither coming from another but, rather, both appearing, is significant. To gaze upon my own actions, and consider my response to them is an indication of my answers to "how do I live" and "what do I do". However, my reason also plays a role in directing the decisions I make about living and doing.

I have never read any Wallace Stevens, but my hope is to consider these things, to move forward in working out the beginnings of solutions to a couple of different questions...

How do I live?
What do I really want to do?

In pitting these against one another all at once, neither one being a chicken nor an egg, I hope to move forward, even if only a step, and be better for it.