He Shall be Compelled to Read....

 

    I started reading The Swerve over the weekend and I am really enjoying it. I have found it a much easier and palatable text than Bloom's The Anatomy of Influence. Greenblatt does a great job guiding the reader with him as he makes points about the past and takes those thoughts into present time. I like that we have Poggio as our guide as if we were there with him. Searching for these old manuscripts as he was, a book hunter of the humanities.
            
         As you may have come to know I am pretty into paintings and art history, throughout reading the first three chapters Greenblatt mentions some very important pieces of art work thats caught my attention. Particularly what stood out to me was his mention of The Getty Museum in Los Angeles, CA. This is one of my favorite museums and I have been over a dozen times even though the exhibits do not change very frequently. There was however an exhibit of Illuminated Manuscripts last Christmas that I drug my parents to go see them with me. The combination of text and the decoration of each letter and page have always draw me to these ancient pages. 

 These pictures can not even display the beauty of these buildings. It is standing alone on the top of a hill overlooking all of Los Angeles County. You walk up the white steps to the main entrance and from there you meander your way through room after room, going through different buildings just engrossed in the art.

  "In the 1980's, modern archeologists resumed serious work on the buried villa, (near Pompeii, after the eruption of Vesuvius) in hopes of gaining a better understanding of the whole style of life expressed in its design, a design vividly evoked in the architecture of the Getty Museum...where some of the statues and other treasures found at Herculaneum now reside" (63).
    The Getty's website says that the Villa of the Papyr was the inspiration for the design of the museum. This Villa is where parts of Lucretius's De rerum natura was found.

   
       Another part that stood out to me while reading was the huge importance placed on these manuscripts and the role the monasteries had in preserving and perpetuating these texts existence. I titled this blog "he shall be compelled to read" because Greenblatt states that as one of the rules for the monks. Because of the tremendous dedication of monks to reading and writing these texts have survived.

I guess on a simple level the journey to remote and far off monasteries is very intriguing to me, a sort of impossible task or a treasure hunt. Greenblatt writes in a way that makes me feel Poggio's excitement at discovering the manuscripts and the joy that was felt when the papyrus scrolls were found as the Villa of the Papry.

"What is not clear is whether [Poggio] had any intuition at all that he was releasing a book that would help in time to dismantle his entire world." (50)

"Lucretius had accomplished a near-perfect integration of intellectual distinction and aesthetic mastery." (51)

"...a single incandescent idea: that everything that has ever existed and everything that will ever exist is put together out of indestructible building blocks, irreducibly small in size, unimaginably vast in number...atoms" (73).

"atoms and void and nothing else" (75)

"What the Greek philosopher offered was not help in dying but help in living. Liberated from superstition, Epicurus taught, you would be free to pursue pleasure" (76).

     I was hesitant to start reading another text for fear of confusing myself. Lucretius seemed daunting and a bit too much to handle, but I am glad I have been able to just read Stevens poems and now take a guided tour with Greenblatt.

Supreme Fiction

Dante and Virgil in the Underworld

By:

Ferdinand Victor Eugene Delacroix

Salon of 1822

        Delacroix was a French Romantic painter at the close of the 18th and into the 19th century. He is known for his expressive brushstrokes and optical effects of shapes and colors. He emphasized color and movement like his predecessors Rubens and other painters of the Renaissance. He was a talented lithographer and illustrated scenes from Shakespeare and Goethe as well as others. It is also mentioned that Delacroix took inspiration from Lord Byron, particularly in their shared interest in the "forces of the sublime...of nature in often violent action."
       I say all this because of the link I found to Stevens. In the final bonus canto at the end of Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, Stevens' line reads "To his Virgilian cadences, up down, Up Down. It is a war that never ends."......Vigilian cadence...this caught my eye because I knew that through this Vigil reference, I could find a painting that might help to encapsulate the rest of the poem. It seems to have been a theme for me through this class that the best way for me to express what I see in one of Stevens' poems is through finding a painting that pairs with it. A sort of combating art with art, for I feel that in a battle of words, Stevens will always win out.
     This painting Dante and Virgil in the Underworld did just that, again it was a painting I had encountered previously and one that exudes tremendous passion and romantic emotion. Stevens final, final cantos in this section addresses a soldier and the war that is going on "between the mind and sky, between thought and day and night." In the painting Dante is in the red cowl, and is attempting to cross the River Styx described in Dante's Eighth Canto, using the guidance of Virgil to steady him as they travel through the water laden with heavy souls of fraud.
      The final stanza of this very last, eleventh cantos, reads:

How simply the fictive hero becomes the real;

How gladly with proper words the solider dies,

If he must, or lives on the bread of faithful speech.

....Words are our guidance, they are a "passion that we feel, not understand" (Cantos IV). Words and poems and art are the supreme ficiton, giving us the guidance with which to live our lives. Virgil guides Dante. Dante gave Delacroix the words with which to paint. Stevens made the reference and I pieced a connection.

The imagination wishes to be indulged.  

 

 

 

Where the Sidewalk Ends...And Stevens Begins

     Thank you Alex Miller for re-reminding me of my absolute love of Shel Silverstein poetry! I had a second grade teacher who read us his poems and I made my mom buy me Where the Sidewalk Ends and absolutely loved it as a little girl. I now have a tremendous feeling of guilt for having set aside one of my favorite poets for so long, but after a little online searching I have been reminded and reinvigorated. These are a few of my favorites....

Come In
If you are a dreamer, come in,
If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar,
A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer...
If you're a pretender come sit by my fire
For we have some flax-golden tales to spin.
Come in!
Come in!


        I read Peanut-Butter Sandwich over and over, I think I even used to have parts of it memorized, sadly the words have since been replaced with a decade or so of new knowledge...

Peanut-Butter Sandwich

I'll sing you a poem of a silly young king
Who played with the world at the end of a string,
But he only loved one single thing—
And that was just a peanut-butter sandwich.

His scepter and his royal gowns,
His regal throne and golden crowns
Were brown and sticky from the mounds
And drippings from each peanut-butter sandwich.
His subjects all were silly fools
For he had passed a royal rule
That all that they could learn in school
Was how to make a peanut-butter sandwich.
He would not eat his sovereign steak,
He scorned his soup and kingly cake,
And told his courtly cook to bake
An extra-sticky peanut-butter sandwich.
And then one day he took a bit
And started chewing with delight,
But found his mouth was stuck quite tight
From that last bite of peanut-butter sandwich.
His brother pulled, his sister pried,
The wizard pushed, his mother cried,
"My boy's committed suicide
From eating his last peanut-butter sandwich!"
The dentist came, and the royal doc.
The royal plumber banged and knocked,
But still those jaws stayed tightly locked.
Oh darn that sticky peanut-butter sandwich!
The carpenter, he tried with pliers,
The telephone man tried with wires,
The firemen, they tried with fire,
But couldn't melt that peanut-butter sandwich.
With ropes and pulleys, drills and coil,
With steam and lubricating oil—
For twenty years of tears and toil—
They fought that awful peanut-butter sandwich.
Then all his royal subjects came.
They hooked his jaws with grapplin' chains
And pulled both ways with might and main
Against that stubborn peanut-butter sandwich.
Each man and woman, girl and boy
Put down their ploughs and pots and toys
And pulled until kerack! Oh, joy—
They broke right through that peanut-butter sandwhich
A puff of dust, a screech, a squeak—
The king's jaw opened with a creak.
And then in voice so faint and weak—
The first words that they heard him speak
Were, "How about a peanut-butter sandwich?"

        And the poem that shares the title of the entire collection.....

Where the Sidewalk Ends

“There is a place where the sidewalk ends
And before the street begins,
And there the grass grows soft and white,
And there the sun burns crimson bright,
And there the moon-bird rests from his flight
To cool in the peppermind wind.

Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black
And the dark street winds and bends.
Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow
We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And watch where the chalk-white arrows go
To the place where the sidewalk ends.

Yes we'll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And we'll go where the chalk-white arrows go,
For the children, they mark, and the children, they know
The place where the sidewalk ends.” 

      I read these poems and I think of Stevens. I see Stevens more in these poems than I do in Dr.Seuss's writing. Particularly in the Peanut-Butter Sandwich, in the way that the poem goes round and round and then at the end the King asks for the same thing that got him into his situation in the first place. Reading the poem now, as opposed to 12 years ago I can see the circular pattern of the poem, the way we as people have habits and desires that repeat because we like them and they are apart of who we are. But I want to stop there, because I have the Stevinsian perspective and I want to leave the poem as it is meant to be, a poem. Just reading them for the way the words feel in my mouth, and the way my imagination paints the poem in my head. Silverstein, like Stevens, is a master with his words and each word has a purpose and a meaning and that, for me at least, is where I find my place and peace in the poem.
      I think it is also a testament to Silverstein's abilities that I am as enthralled and wrapped up in his poetry now at 22 as I was at 8 and at 12, and whenever else his poems appeared in my life. Sexson in class today said that Stevens picks up "where the sidewalk ends"...I wasn't sure at the time what he meant, because in my head they went together, a sort of individuation. But now I see that Stevens has picked up where Silverstein left off, I can read the poems I read as a child and now I am actually reading them, with the lens that Wallace Stevens' poem have given me.

      

Brushy Winds in Brushy Clouds

Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction

VI

Not to be realized because not to

Be seen, not to be loved nor hated because

Not to be realized. Weather by Franz Hals,

Brushed up by brushy winds in brushy clouds,

Wetted by blue, colder for white. Not to

Be spoken to, without a roof, without

First fruits, without the virginal of birds,

The dark-blown ceinture loosened, not relinquished.

Gay is, gay was, the gay forsythia

And yellow, yellow thins the Northern blue.

Without a name and nothing to be desired,

If only imagined but imagined well.

My house has changed a little in the sun.

The fragrance of the magnolias come close,

False flick, false form, but falseness close to kin.

It must be visible or invisible,

Invisible or visible or both:

A seeing and unseeing in the eye.

The weather and the giant of the weather,

Say the weather, the mere weather, the mere air:

An abstraction blooded, as a man by though.

      This is a self portrait of the painter Frans Hals, the man who Stevens says the weather is by in the first stanza. Or at least who I think Stevens is talking about, he spells his name with a "z" not and "s", but I am choosing to leave that out. Frans was known for his loose painterly brushwork, and that can be seen in the delicate lace detail in the portrait above. Stevens in the next stanza lends a little explanation for this by saying "brushed up by brushy winds in brushy clouds". I love this line, I would never use brushy to describe the winds but if you think about it, it is actually a good way to describe them. 

     I am not sure what made this section stand out to me, but of course it has an obvious reference to art in it. (Sexson's magic at work again is all I can assume) I was entranced by the word repetition and how  it makes sense in a nonsensical way. "It must be visible or invisible, invisible or visible, or both: A seeing and unseen eye." You can either see something or you can't. But what about air or water? You can't see air, but you know its there and you can see water, but you can also see through water.....

     I once again took another run at reading The Anatomy of Influence by H. Bloom, I seem to always get interrupted or disastrously distracted and have reread the first 25 pages 3 times now. But in this attempt I took notice of a quote by Lev Tolstoy about Bloom on the page facing the Contents.  I feel like it ties into the last line of this section from Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction, "An abstraction blooded, as a man by thought." .......

“For art criticism we need people who 

would show the senselessness of looking for ideas in 

a work of art, and who instead would continually 

guide readers in that endless labyrinth of 

linkages that makes up the stuff of art, and 

bring them to the laws that serve as the 

foundation for those linkages.”

The Motive for Metaphor

by Wallace Stevens

You like it under the trees in autumn,
Because everything is half dead.
The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves
And repeats words without meaning.

In the same way, you were happy in spring,
With the half colors of quarter-things,
The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds,
The single bird, the obscure moon--

The obscure moon lighting an obscure world
Of things that would never be quite expressed,
Where you yourself were not quite yourself,
And did not want nor have to be,

Desiring the exhilarations of changes:
The motive for metaphor, shrinking from
The weight of primary noon,
The A B C of being,

The ruddy temper, the hammer
Of red and blue, the hard sound--
Steel against intimation--the sharp flash,
The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X.

     A week ago I was in the library working on homework for another class and finding myself unfocused and restless I decided that I could at least do something semi productive with my time. I looked up a book on Stevens. I was then overwhelmed by the large amount of titles and texts dedicated to Stevens' work. I wandered over to the PS35 section of shelves and started sifting through the books. The one I landed on was Wallace Stevens Supreme Fiction: New Romanticism by Joseph Carroll. Until this morning I had not looked at it since checking it out. But I should have know that it would address what we talked about on Friday, because Sexson has magical powers.

    After a lovely introduction that seems to cover all of Stevens in as straightforward of a way as is possible; chapter one is titled "The Imagination as Metaphysics":

        "The referent of a supreme fiction is an object

that is no object; it is an illimitable presence that contains

all other objects, including poetic

 representations of it."- Pg 13.

     We are all the fly and the fly is all of us, we are J.Bieber vomit. There is no way to limit where we start and stop, begin and end it all leaks together. How can an object be not an object and still an object? I feel that poetry is one way of defining objects, at least it serves as one way of lending a definition to things. Then in The Motive for Metaphor the third stanza made a little more sense to me. In this circle of trying to define the undefinable, "of things that would never be quite expressed, Where you yourself were not quite yourself, and did not want nor have to be". What makes us ourselves? What makes us different from the fly? I think Stevens is trying to comfort us by saying that its fine because we do "not want nor have to be" anything more than what we are or are trying to be. I feel as though it is starting to make sense in my own head but I don't think I can yet articulate it in a way clear enough for someone else to get it.

    A few weeks ago we head the Earth's song. Yesterday a man jumped from 24miles above the earth, broke the sound barrier and survived.

Wikipedia says this about Metaphysics.....

Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world,^[1] although the term is not easily defined.^[2] Traditionally, metaphysics attempts to answer two basic questions in the broadest possible terms:

1. What is there?
2. What is it like?

I feel as though we are constantly changing and adding to what there is and what it is like.



A D A G I A

An evening's thought is like a day of clear weather.

The imagination wishes to be indulged.

Politics is the struggle for Existence.

The individual partakes of the whole. Except in extraordinary cases he never adds to it.

It is belief and not god that counts.

Things seen are things as seen. Absolute real.

Realism is a corruption of reality.

Reality is a vacuum.

Society is a sea.


    I really like the Adagia section of Steven's collected work. To me each line was a mini Stevens poem, that you can easily hold in your mind and carry with you always. Memorizing an entire poem is a daunting task to me, but these might be a better place to start. These were a few that I particularly liked, no real reason other than they made me think just a little bit more than I would have with other ordered words. I think that is what I am really starting to like about Stevens' poetry, his choice of words are very specific, he places words to conjure feelings from the reader. No word seems to be used without meaning.

One of Those Hibiscuses of Damozel

    I randomly opened my Stevens book and ended up on the page with the poem One of Those Hibiscuses of Damozels which is apart of the Uncollected Poems section. I chose this poem and not one of the others on this page for the simple fact that I have always loved hibiscus flowers. After reading the poem however, I think that this flower may not have been the meaning desired in the poem. That fact aside, I really enjoyed this poem and the way it read like a Dr. Seuss work, with an interesting rhythm and repetition that I liked. Beyond the surface level the poem is talking about a woman and her being and what she is made up of. As we talked about in class a few times the poem is about poetry, but it is also about this damsel being made of the air and the things that she wears being made of her and also making her. I took away from the poem the idea of actually seeing this woman. Stevens seems to be questioning the actuality of seeing her and how that can change from seeing to really seeing for the first time. A line in the last stanza really solidified this for me:

  "This was not how she walked for she walked in a way And the way was more than the walk and was hard to see." 

    I feel like this line really summarizes a main feeling of Stevens, that you can see her walking, and recognize it is her; because each person walks in their own way, but it is never just walking to walk, people are always walking in a way that means a variety of other things both consciously and unconsciously navigating the world around them in a certain way, all because of how they are walking. I know that that definition is just about as confusing as the line from Stevens poem, but it is an idea that resonates with me because people have frequently commented on the way in which I walk. I tend to walk with purpose and direction, I am not someone who will idle passively on my way to somewhere. I want to get to where I am going and be there. I also tend to walk somewhat assertively and it has drawn more than a few comments from people who walk next to me. I walk like I walk and that is something which defines me as an individual.  Just as this woman's walk helps contribute to her being.

    After reading the poem I wanted to look a little more into the title, and that lead me to the poem The Blessed Damozel written by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. An interesting poem in itself about a young girl, or damozel, and what seems to be a love trial intermix with the ideas of youth and beauty and life and death. What I found more interesting was the poet, Rossetti and how he painted a picture to go along ith the poem. He seems to have done this with several poems and paintings. This again ties back into Stevens and his interest in art and the correlation from paintings to poems. 

   I again have the notion that Steven's poem One of Those Hibiscuses of Damozel could be transformed into a very interesting painting. He seems to be able to create such an amazing visual from the words he uses that a tremendous 2d visual could quite fluidly be created to go along side the poem, just as Rossetti's painting and poem flow together, to enhance the experience of the audience. 

The Blessed Damozel 

by 

Dante Gabriel Rossetti