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

A quick shift...

Yesterday Dr. Sexson commented that I was suggesting in my blog that we need to eat the green eggs and ham. It was, however, quite the opposite. Instead, I was suggesting that we reject the green eggs and ham. However, his point is taken, and I realize that I was the one missing the point. I think we need to eventually depart from a solely "green" view of the world, and shift into a view that takes into account both the blue and the green worlds, imagination and reason, respectively.

                                       (note the image takes both into account. Art? Indeed.)

I cannot escape...I am a man carrying thing (pt. 1)

I bought some gum the other day. It was called "Swerve". I have a friend named Tyler who was nicknamed "Swerve" freshman year. I downloaded a Cat Stevens song the other day, Peace Train, and the album title is "Teaser and the Firecat". I was listening to Pandora the other day and a song with harmonium in the title was playing. I cannot escape Wallace Stevens. He was following me before I even knew it. How could this be?

The first place I thought to look was the Earthy Anecdote. It is the first poem in harmonium, and therefore a great starting point. There is certainly more to the poem than I am putting down, but for the sake of my discussion, we see this: the bucks cannot escape the firecat. They swerve every which way, but eventually they are consumed. Can we escape Wallace Stevens? Of course not! We have become consumed (or will be). What does this have to do with Cat Stevens' song Peace Train? At the end of the poem Earthy Anecdote, the firecat sleeps. The firecat is at peace. I imagine that poetry, as every poem is about poetry, will not rest until it has consumed us. But when that happens, we will be at peace.


The Swerve's part in this seems fairly simple. We are constantly moving, composed of particles that are in constant motion. The firecat, poetry, does something that makes us shift, swerve. It ignites something, hence the fire, and I would call that something life. But it is only when we are consumed that we fully spring to life. If you remember the words of Christ to Nicodemus, "You must die and be born again."


Now, to bring in Man Carrying Thing, we must slowly make our way through the poem. The reason I find this poem of the utmost significance is that it is my assigned poem for memorization. It leads off saying:


The poem must resist the intelligence

Almost successfully.


If we look back to Dustin's blog, we read this:


The point at which Stevens' implicit philosophy does not cohere with transcendental realism is that which most likely motivated Critchley to eschew any commonality between the two positions in the first place. As a transcendental realist, I hold that the physical sciences stand in a privileged relation to that intelligible nothing which is the thing-in-itself. By contrast to the attitude most commonly taken up in the humanities, I am not at all bothered by the notion that the average scientist understands crude reality far better than I ever will. And in fact, I believe that, insomuch as the artist must first negate the spontaneous "reality" of the song in order to revise it into new poetic constellations, art depends absolutely on the negative force of science.


In my opinion, it is as though Dustin has taken those first two lines of poetry, and given us the back story. Furthermore:


Illustration:


A brune figure in winter evening resists

Identity.

I did not understand the word "brune" at first, so I made my way to the dictionary. It did not initially show up until I did some further looking. From what I can gather, brune as a verb is "to brown". As an adjective, I believe it to simply describe a dark figure. While our first thought might be that this is a black man, identifying the brune figure as a shadow seems a greater appropriation, seeing as the man resists identity. And what of the "winter evening"? The first thing we should all think of upon hearing of winter is, of course, The Snow Man. But we must wait to consider those implications.

The thing he carries resists 

The most necessitous sense. Accept them, then.

As secondary (parts not quite perceived

Of the obvious whole, uncertain particles

Of the certain solid, the primary free from doubt,

Things floating like the first hundred flakes of snow

Out of a storm we must endure all night,

Out of a storm of secondary things),

A horror of thoughts that suddenly are real.

As we should know at this point, the crude sciences, the "primary" operate from a stance of what they call "truth". We have scientific laws. The law of gravity, the second law of thermodynamics, etc. These are the primary things. The secondary, then, is of a different nature. We first see "parts not quite perceived of the obvious whole, uncertain particles of the certain solid". Particles elucidates atoms elucidating a swerve, and they are part of a "certain solid", a body of some kind. The predominant figure in this illustration magnifies that which is small, secondary, seen as subservient to the primary. However, this secondary is that which composes all, the solid thing, in other words, the truth. It becomes quite apparent that the primary relies upon the secondary in some regard, though it would be unfair to describe this as a parasitic relationship when it is, in fact, a mutual bond (no pun intended). Again Stevens points to snow in a kind of chaotic storm, which again takes us to The Snow Man, but again we resist the urge to go there just yet. And we, we the bucks, must "endure all night" the ferocious storm of secondary things set upon us. You see, we are rational beings, we are primary. We seek truth, and we pursue understanding. Much like the deer, though, we cannot escape the firecat. Much like a primary thing, we bear some uncertain yet unmistakable link to the secondary thing. And the horror, "the horror!", is that these secondary things, much like a Picaso painting of Gertrude Stein, "suddenly are real."

There are a lot of ideas at work in this moment, but the conclusion is really quite simple:

We must endure our thoughts all night, until

The bright obvious stands motionless in cold.

At last we may confront the Snow Man. But first we should recap. The fire cat is poetry, consuming the deer. The snowstorm is poetry, and it consumes us. But if you notice, we carry that poetry with us, for we are all a man (or woman) carrying thing. Because that thing is always just a thing, and it is always resisting the "necessitous sense", the needful thing, and that is because it is never quite the real thing. And only when we become aware that the primary is actually subliminal when set against the secondary, the poem and poetry, do we see "The bright obvious" standing "motionless in cold." That bright obvious is, of course, the snow man. Here is what I had to say about the snow man in an earlier post: 

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.

And Dustin writes:

The frostiness of the boughs, the roughness of the spruces, the bareness of place are all comprehensible only insomuch as these qualities are possessed already by the observer. Making this claim, Stevens performs a sly transposition of registers: the Snow Man is rough, icy, and cold not in his physical constitution--for as the final stanza explains, he too is nothing--but rather possesses these qualities as concepts. The fabrication of reality is mediated by such concepts, and the makeup of our commonplace experiences, prior to the interventions of poetry, consists in the labor of imagination.

[...]

This synthesis is the result of the antagonism between imagination and the real. As explained above, such a procedure results always in some remainder: imagination remains as the negation of reality, the nothing in excess of the something. Negation thus figures as the condition of possibility for all poetry. The nothing that is, understood in the dialectical sense, is precisely the negation of the something that is, its negative inverse.

I would argue that the "nothing that is everything", "the negation of something that is", is poetry itself. And this poetry is negating the man who is nothing, opposing his desires for the primary and resistance to, though always somehow being controlled by it, the subliminal. 

The point seems to be this: we cannot escape poetry because it is not only pursuing us, but somehow a part of us, within us, made manifest somehow in the "thing", whatever that may be, that each of us carries. Because that thing is not the real thing, but instead a shadow of a greater reality. And what is this greater reality, where and when and how and by who is it made manifest? For now, I believe that transcendental piece to be none other than the Lucretian sublime, that thing which is behind everything. 

This is what I had written for my ending:

And this is where I will end for now because I must think and I must be consumed and I must try, because of some futile human instinct, to escape once more for the sake of knowing, if in fact, it is truly impossible. How much farther I have to go...

But then I realized something...

It is snowing outside today. Today, of all days, when I am writing this post, when I am trying my best to draw and pull and bring everything back to the snow man. You see, I thought I would try to escape again to know for sure. But, as I finished writing those words, I clicked over to facebook and was overwhelmed by the amount of comments on the snow. I scrolled through my blog, and saw the small picture of some forlorn looking snow man. I thought of the very music I enjoy on a snowy day. And then, as my mind paced through those thoughts, I had an epiphany. I had not escaped, I could not. It was all around me and, try as I might to know and understand and exist in a state of primacy, I cannot. Because, you see,

We must endure our thoughts all night, until

The bright obvious stands motionless in cold.

And for now, for this particular moment in time, this is what I have done. 

Green eggs and ham and a man and a blue guitar and a pencil

Here are the final lines of Dr. Seuss' Green Eggs and Ham:

You do not like them.

SO you say.

Try them! Try them!

And you may.

Try them and you may I say.


Sam!

If you will let me be,

I will try them.

You will see.


Say!

I like green eggs and ham!

I do!! I like them, Sam-I-am!

And I would eat them in a boat!

And I would eat them with a goat...

And I will eat them in the rain.

And in the dark. And on a train.

And in a car. And in a tree.

They are so good so good you see!


So I will eat them in a box.

And I will eat them with a fox.

And I will eat them in a house.

And I will eat them with a mouse.

And I will eat them here and there.

Say! I will eat them ANYWHERE!


I do so like

green eggs and ham!

Thank you!

Thank you,

Sam-I-am

And this is a bit of what James read to us on Friday:

 These are the people lit up in the greenery who accost the shearsman with his Blue guitar telling him in essence that things are green in their nature: effectively showing their ignorance from being in youth. We should say that they are green behind the gills off of their own self-centeredness. They have yet to have ever truly Changed, the Capitol C, that metamorphic change wherein you become in-tuned to that "something beyond us" and realize that you are no longer that old green self. We often refer to our past selves as our younger selves, and in a parallel view we often try to stay away from blue thoughts or so the saying goes. And this debilitating, this offsetting context, this discourse which has been formed by a very "green" rhetoric is something the Blue guitarist sings about in the end.

It seems as though James us suggesting we reject the green world, though I could be wrong. However, if that is the case, Seuss' poem takes on a new light when gazed upon in light of The Man with the Blue Guitar. 

You see, it seems as though "green" asks us to look upon the world as we want to see it, rather than see it as it truly is. They are content to look at a picture of a pen rather than search out the real thing. They do not see Gertrude Stein as she truly is, they simply see her as she appears. 

If this is the case, the character who repeatedly rejects green eggs and ham is in the right. He refuses to see the world as he wants to see it, and instead demands that he be allowed to see a world opened up to him without being told, "This is how the world is." 

However, as we have read above, he takes the green eggs and ham. He eats them and, with that, chooses to see the world in a very simple way, a very green way, to see things as they seem. The people in Stevens' poem beg, "play, you must, A tune beyond us, yet ourselves, A tune upon the blue guitar, Of things exactly as they are." Yet these people cannot see things as they are, for they are green. They are limited, they are unchanged, and they are, as James says, self centered. 

And when Green Eggs and Ham was brought up in class I realized that children are being told, though they probably will never assume it, that they must look at the world as it seems, not as it is. Because, as Clear Waters tells us, a pencil is not just a pencil. It is poetry and poison and chewing and a tattoo. It is much more. A child enters this world full of brilliance and creativity and imagination, but at some point they are asked if they would like some green eggs and ham. And because they look upon Dr. Seuss and read, "I do so like green eggs and ham! Thank you, thank you Sam-I-am", they accept the green world. 

And then we might ask, "Who is Sam-I-am?" 

And I cannot help but think of our own Uncle Sam, 

And a government of the people, a government that "I am". 

And then I begin to sound like a conspiracy theorist. 

So for now, make of that what you will, 

As for me, and for others, and for my will,

I do not like green eggs and ham,

And I will not eat them, Sam-I am.

A blue guitar is much more suitable than green eggs and ham,

And I will play blue melodies while I reject them, and I will be

For Cam-I-am.