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