Mother of the Muses

   I would like to give a special thanks to Megan Mother of the Muses for all of her encouragement and for laughing at me and with me everyday in class. She is truly is a Diva and I have greatly enjoyed the time I got to spend getting to know her this semester.

What we see in the mind is as real to us as what we see by the eye.

-Wallace Stevens

Megan Bruggeman=DIVA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNM5HW13_O8

Closing Thoughts

    This semester has been a whirlwind and seems to be over before it has even started. I am normally ecstatic for the semesters to end and for a break to ensue but this fall semester is different. This is my last. And as I run down the list of last mondays, last essays, last paragraphs, the one I find to be most sad is the last Sexson class. This class was daunting to me the first few days, but I stuck with it because I knew Sexson would make it all ok and I would regret it if I didn't in the end.
      The Lucritan Sublime in the poetry of Wallace Stevens .....What a title for a class. If that wasn't intimidating enough, my classmates have proven themselves brilliant and dedicated. I have to say that this might be the one class from my college career that really sticks with me. I have enjoyed nearly every minute of it and was constantly impressing myself with the new thoughts and ideas I would have about Stevens and the sublime.
     I think Eli said it perfectly...

"It should also be added that by reading Stevens poetry one will acquire a love for poetry."

  I too have found a love for poetry and it has been a direct result of this class and the guiding words of Stevens. I thought Biz's poem about Wallace Stevens' bio was perfect, and should be exactly what the wikipedia article says. 

   Thank you to Dr. Sexson and thank you to my classmates. I feel that the only appropriate way to end this class is to leave you all with another one of my favorite sublime paintings. I will give you guys the freedom to read and create your own interpretations from it and see Stevens where and how you want with in it. 

                                   This is by Joseph Turner titled Snow Storm.

The imagination wishes to be indulged....

The imagination wishes to be indulged.

-Wallace Stevens

            Wallace Stevens is an awesome poet. He challenges what we know to be truth and forces readers to ask themselves if what they are seeing it reality or a mere version of it. Stevens is to words what Picasso is to painting. Stevens’ poetry shows us that art is a way to describe what we see and feel around us in just the way we wish to see it. It has been previously mentioned that each reading of a Stevens poem will bring with it a new meaning and a new interpretation. That is because as readers we are never in the same moment of our lives twice and therefore what we need and desire of a poem will never replicate itself. This is why as Stevens says “we do not have to be told of the significance of art”^[1] because the significance will become as clear to the reader as they need it to be. Just as poetry is creating a version of reality, painting does the same only in a different medium. There is an intrinsic relationship between Stevens and painters, particularly with the modern artists. By examining Wallace Stevens’ poem “The Man with the Blue Guitar” a reader can extrapolate a multitude of meaning, significance, and references to the real world outside of the words of the poem, and that seems to be the intention of Stevens. The second part to this poem that screams for attention is Picasso’s painting “The Old Guitarist”, a modern expressionist painting that depicts an old man hunched over a guitar. The connection between these two modern arts pieces are not far reaching, the ideologies of the two respective creators, Stevens and Picasso, are very similar and thus the outcomes of their work share several characteristics. Stevens explains that “the world about us would be desolate except for the world within us. There is the same interchange between these two worlds that there is between one art and another.”^[2] People give meaning to the world, and art makes the world have meaning to people. “The Man with the Blue Guitar” provides a microcosmic platform to look at the symbiotic relationship of these ideas about Stevens, reality and truth.

            Looking first at Stevens’ personal regard for poetry and painting enlightens us to his own feelings and takes away the need for much assumption. “The Relations Between Poetry and Painting” is an essay that provides a lot of different information and ideas, and few answers. But again it is not Stevens who we turn to for answers, he is there to shed a different light and provide guidance to the answer for which we need in that moment. Stevens does clearly convey that “one of the characteristics of modern art is that it is uncompromising” and through that it is able to contain the truth of reality. In an article written by Bruce Lawder, he mentions in his first paragraph that “the whole effort of modern art has been about: the attachment to real things”.^[3] It is upon the blue guitar that Stevens alludes to the truth being resident of, saying that “that’s life, then: things as they are, This buzzing of the blue guitar” and “of things as they are, as the blue guitar”. These lines say many things, one, is that the blue guitar is as real as life is real. The guitar is a physical object, it can be held, strummed, and looked at more or less unchanging, the guitar is an easy truth to realize. Michel Benamou clarifies that “there were two realities for Stevens-- the reality of things observed and the reality of things imagined” and this duality is what makes his poetry so expansive and relatable to so many different people.^[4] The “buzzing” is the creation of the guitar, it cannot be held or seen, and it is always changing in unimaginable combinations, it is more of an unrealizable truth.  And yet, this physical object plays the truth of life, of things as they are. This is an example of the “reality beyond reality” which Stevens references in “The Relations Between Poetry and Painting”. He also explains that through art “the search for the supreme truth has been a search in reality or through reality or even a search for supremely acceptable fiction”.^[5] Art is one of the most important ways of subscribing meaning both to and from the world we live in. When one form of art may not suffice it is nice to have a coinciding item to help affix more or better meaning. This is how Picasso’s painting and the poem help each other reach a new level of sublimity, the one picks up where the other leaves off. Michel Benamou expounds that “Stevens teaches us that the center of modern art is metamorphosis” the change and the morphing of artistic mediums fits this thought as well, the guitar in the poem and the guitar in the painting are in different stages of their being, but that is dependent on the viewer.^[6]  Benamou also mentions that “the metaphors of poetry and the metamorphoses of painting tap the same reservoir analogies” and this is another layer adding to why the two arts are so complexly interconnected.^[7] The reality is that nothing is the same twice, in order to capture or explain something the most comprehensive way to achieve that would be through many different mediums.

            The senses are another way to approach the poem, “The Man With the Blue Guitar”, sight and sound play into the poem and the painting working together to create a greater meaning. The reader can speak the words of the poem as easily as they can see them written on the page. The painting can only be seen, but the cliché that a picture is worth a thousand words is very applicable. Seeing something gives tangible proof and a constant with which to revert to. The idea of using the senses to gain sensibility about the art in front of us is not a random notion. Stevens says that “the origins of poetry are to be found in sensibility”, without an audience’s response the purpose of art is moot. Benamou notes that “visual appearance and mental reality are one...the mind of the beholder mirrors his surroundings and fluctuates with the slightest change of light”.^[8] As I mentioned before, the viewer sees or hears what they want or need at that precise moment, as the light changes on the painting or in the room where the poem is being read so too does the meaning of the art. It is near impossible to see what we do not already have a sense of knowing. The two stanzas of Cantos VI read:

The thinking of god is smoky dew.

The tune is space. The Blue Guitar

Becomes the place of things as they are,

A composing of senses of the guitar.

One way of looking at these lines is to look literally at what the words mean; god cannot be seen in clarity, but only through a haze. The guitar is where reality of space lives and gives true light to things, and the guitar is the link that makes sense of it all, gives composure to the fictions of truth in the world we live in.

            Each one of the cantos in this very long poem paints a picture for the reader, words narrating the creation of mental images all conjuring the vivid reality of light and dark, life and change. Cantos VI can be looked at to gain even closer familiarity with Stevens and what the poem is trying to convey. Each line, each word Stevens uses is no accident, the words are chosen as purposefully as paint hues were chosen and lines were drawn by Picasso. With a meticulous eye that only a great artist could achieve. “A thing beyond us as we are, Yet nothing changed by the blue guitar” is the opening line of the cantos and it is not easy to digest and offers so much to the reader. Stevens seems to be trying to convey that we cannot understand because things are beyond us, but that it is completely fine to feel this way, because we have things like music, poetry, and painting to help reign in the meaning. One of the few things we can be certain about is uncertainty, but Stevens lends his writing as the place to find solace in this idea. Another line from the IX cantos reads “the maker of a thing yet to be made” and that is Stevens and the it is also the reader. The future is unknown by everyone and there is no point in driving oneself crazy over trying to sort it out, just sit back and listen to the buzz of the guitar, that is why art exists, as a refuge from the chaos that bombards our senses in the world. “Of things as they are and only the place you play them, on the blue guitar, Placed so beyond the compass of change, perceived in a final atmosphere”. Living in the now, the present is what matters. The Lucretian idea that death should not be feared because you will not know death any more than you were aware of birth shines through preeminently in these lines. Stevens gives readers the encouragement to just enjoy what you believe to be true and what is good for you, and the rest will fall away into insignificance. “For a moment final, in the way The thinking of art seems final when The thinking of god is smoky dew.” Nothing is final. Everything changes, but for one instance finality can be achieved for a breadth of time, before the next wave of change washes over it. The smoke can clear and the artist can create, capturing that instant in a forever fixed position. The art does not change, but the need for it and the viewer of it do, that is what keeps art constantly alive.

            “It would be tragic not to realize the extent of man’s dependence on the arts”.^[9] The arts keep us sane; they keep us alive as much as we keep them alive. Stevens believes in the supreme fiction being the truth of reality. Modern art is this supreme fiction and as Stevens says, “it has a reason for everything. Even the lack of a reason becomes a reason...This explains everything”.^[10] Michel Benamou ends his chapter on Poetry and Painting with this thought, that art is “understood as the poetic and moral principle of an order protecting us from chaos, art becomes more than a source of beautiful shapes and colors; it becomes a ‘supreme fiction’”.^[11] This metamorphoses into something more is what Stevens achieves with his words. The subject of his poems is poetry because nothing more is needed. Within the scope of his poetry he shows us what we want and what we need, sometimes without our consent and sometimes without conscious recognition, but if answers are needed they are there, forever changing and forming new truths and a new idea of reality.

The power of poetry, leaves a mark on whatever it touches.

 The mark of poetry creates the resemblance of poetry

as between the most disparate things and

unites them all in its recognizable virtue.

-Wallace Stevens

           

---

^[1] Stevens, Wallace. Collected Poetry and Prose. “The Relations Between Poetry and Painting”. Literary Classics of the U.S., Inc. New York, NY. 1997. Pg 747.

^[2] Stevens, Wallace. Pg 747.

^[3] Lawder, Bruce. “Poetry and Painting: Wallace Stevens and Pierre Tal-Coat”. Word and Image: A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry. 18.1.2002. 348-356. Pg 348.

^[4] Benamou, Michel. Wallace Stevens and the Symbolist Imagination. Princeton University Press. 1972. Pg 20.

^[5] Stevens, Wallace. Pg 749.

^[6] Benamou, Michel. Wallace Stevens and the Symbolist Imagination. Princeton University Press. 1972. Pg 9.

^[7] Benamou, Michel. Pg11.

^[8] Benamou, Michel. Pg 6.

^[9] Stevens, Wallace. Pg 751.

^[10] Stevens, Wallace. “The Relations Between Poetry and Painting”. Pg 745.

^[11] Benamou, Michel. Pg 24.

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.

   

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.