Solaris and Seeing

     I got nightmares. I am one of those people that rarely remembers dreams, unless its a midday nap. But I read Solaris at night, alone, right before going to sleep, and I had three nights of nightmares. Its not the nightmares I remember so much as waking up feeling like someone was in my room and having to turn the light on to check and verify with myself that there was no one there. This was my main reaction to Solaris, other than this disturbance, which has gone away since finishing the book, I don't have much to say. I like the novel, the plot was interesting, it was a quick and fairly easy text to read. I do have to admit I glossed over the sciencey parts for the desire to not be bogged down by that and lose track of the story.
    The novel for me did not cross paths with Stevens until the last five or so chapters. It may have been because my Dad asked me if I still remembered "that one poem I had to memorize a while back", and I replied confidently by reciting A Postcard from the Volcano for him. It was after that when I was reminded of Solaris.

Children picking up our bones will

 never know...and least will guess that 

with our bones we left much more, left what

 still is the look of things, 

left what we felt at what we saw....

     We leave behind pieces of us when we die, be it in accomplishments or the impressions we have made on peoples live, these are legacies. For Kelvin he leaves behind his work as a Solarist and all the other fantastical things that he goes through in the book. The last two paragraph he becomes very Lucretian, talking about life and humans and how the ocean has affected all of it. I can now answer the question Sexson posed to us, about why he would assign this book, and I feel that it was a way for me to read something that was not Lucretius and was not Wallace Stevens and was not presented obviously as sublime, and yet I saw all three of those things in the novel. This for me goes back to the first few days of class when we were talking about seeing things for the first time, and how it is all about what you want to see, what your attention is drawn to notice. Before this class if I had read Solaris I would not have seen any of Stevens, Lucretius, or the sublime. Actually, to be honest I would not have read Solaris at all if it hadn't been assigned. But that is the beauty of classes, making you read things you may not have otherwise and coming out all the better for it.
   I will close with one last thought, I am currently home in Southern California for break and I ventured down to the beach this afternoon. Sitting on the sand looking out at the Pacific Ocean I very much believe that it is alive, not in the bizarre way the ocean on Solaris is, but watching the birds dive into the waster and the seaweed swaying in the current, the waves crashing set after set I found myself completely mesmerized by the rhythmic nature of it. It was as though I was seeing the ocean for the first time.

Random Stevens

http://thoughtcatalog.com/2012/8-bit-poem-thirteen-ways-of-looking-at-a-blackbird/

       So here is another random appearance of Stevens in my day to day life. This article posted on The Thought Catalog blog website about Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.
       Now I have to throw the disclaimer out there that I did not particularly enjoy the author of this article's writing style nor the flippant way he describes the poem and I think that our class has been blogging on a much better level than this. But I thought I would share it anyway....

How many lives can you live?

       An extra hour on a lazy Sunday let me to the most obscure discovery....

   I was bored with reading, no longer able to focus on the text in front of me but still wanting to feign productivity, I turned to the internet. I decided to enlighten myself with a Ted Talk or two. Pursuing the video tags I first looked for art, nothing. Then down to Literature, maybe one or two to come back to. Then down to Poetry, where on the last page of the 31videos one existed with the title "How Many Lives can you Live?" This could be relevant to the Lucritian thoughts that were consuming me after reading The Swerve....
    This is where the weird part comes in....the young woman on my computer scene looked eerily familiar. Her name Sarah Kay, no longer a generic name but one that seemed even more familiar than the girl's face....
    As she started speaking I realized I knew her. Not only did I know her but I spent five or so summers with her in our childhood. Her cousin, was my best friend. The three of us, my best friend, Sarah and I would become inseparable whenever she came to visit, leaving our brothers to do what they wanted. And I remember hearing her voice again today that she was a great storyteller back then. She was three years older than my friend and I, she was our leader, our voice of wisdom.
    Her video has astounded me, not because of the profound thought or her poetry, but because here is this young woman, no longer the girl I went to the zoo and beach and museums and wherever else our mothers felt we needed exposure to, here is an articulate grown up version of a friend, long forgotten in the time when our lives got busy and she no longer came to California to spend the summer in her Grandmother's house, at the beach with her cousins and friend.

     I encourage you to watch her video, it is about 12 minutes long and the way she talks about her perspective on life and the poem she shares at the end are beautiful.

http://www.ted.com/talks/sarah_kay_how_many_lives_can_you_live.html

     She quotes Paul Valery saying "a poem is never finished, only abandoned." Sarah talks about rewriting and rewriting until you get something just right in how you want to say it, but that even then the words can only capture how you felt in that moment. This is something that we have talked about in our class before, that Stevens' writing is a reflection of how he was feeling at the moment he was writing. Sarah says that for her she can look back at a poem she has written and know exactly what she was trying to navigate or overcome by the words and what she wrote in that moment. For her poetry is a way to navigate life.
   At the end of her poem she says that she had learned "the art of letting go". For me this ties back into Lucretius, and how finding pleasure is the goal in life and that death is nothing because we won't know it. By letting go of things and not trying to hold onto everything in our lives at all times, I feel that there can be a sense of freedom and enlightening. For Sarah, realizing that she could not be a princess and a ballerina and an astronaut, and that she could only be herself she has been able to deal with the anxiety of life. Also by letting go, there is not the anxiety of life, you can just live.