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.

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.”