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.”