Saint John and the Back-Ache

Reading through the Auroras of Autumn, the mode and mentality I tried to capture was one of reflection. As Stevens goes through the seasons, different mentalities or moods are acquired and we are along for the ride, subject to Stevens's imagery and color. Yet, it seems to be a somewhat depressing reflection. Or at least one more somber and morbid. In the title poem Stevens writes, "Is there an imagination that sits enthroned/As grim as it is benevolent, the just/And the unjust, which in the midst of summer stops/To imagine winter? For me, this captured one of the many essences of fall. While we are in the midst of summer, cheer, and sunshine, we realize that it is going to end. This realization brings us to fall, and the coming of a new, darker season. One defined by cloudy skies, fateful winds, and dead leaves smattered on the ground.

While skimming through this section, looking for a poem that would capture my interest and speak to me, I came across Saint John and the Back-Ache. Honestly, for the simple reason of amusement, this title grabbed me. I thought it was a little silly and sounded like a kid's poem.

Of course when it starts out, my assumption was quickly shattered with the opening line, "The mind is the terriblest force in the world, father/Because, in chief, it, only, can defend/Against itself. At its mercy, we depend/ Upon it."

After this opening stanza, my mind whirled to recategorize the poem, defining it in a neat box that I could understand and conceptualize. There is a debate going on. This is now about philospohy. Okay.

Saint John then says back to the back-ache, "The world is presence and not force. Presence is not mind."

I reread these two stanzas a few times to catch a sense of what they meant. The back-ache represents suffering and physicality. It is saying that the mind is the most powerful force because we can't escape it. To define it, we have to use it. We are at its mercy for everything we do in life. The back-ache is here talking to Saint John as father, which I took to mean that the back-ache is Saint Johns back-ache. Saint John replies with something that I first saw as irrelevant, "The world is presence and not force."

What does the world have to do with the mind? Or better yet, what does force have to do with the mind? Yet the more I think about it, the more it makes sense. The mind tries to force it's impressions and memory on to every landscape that we come across. It makes everything familiar and we as humans are agents of destruction.

Then comes the question of what is presence and how is this separate from the mind? The next stanza addresses this and the one after and here is where I initially got lost, or rather my mind did. To define presence with words is a most difficult task and one in which Stevens does with remarkable aplomb. Reading the stanza of presence, our mind grasps for meaning at the words flying by, discombobulated, bouncing around, and popping on our reaching fingers. Stevens shows by the first line, "It fills the line before the mind can think." It can't  be described, yet he tries describing it. And to do this, we have to step out of our mind. Going back to the primitive, the basic, where vagueness is the option and the world is still unknown. A chasm of thought. This is what happened when I read this stanza the first time haha. My mind blanked out for twenty lines and came back when the back-ache was talking. After re-reading and re-reading this stanza I think I have some sense of what he is saying.

He keeps saying it is not this and not that, and when he brings these things to mind images flash before our eyes and are instantly dismissed. By using the tool of saying that presence is not these things he is denying the images from staying. It is not the thing itself that matters but rather the feeling that accompanies it. These feelings and brief glimpses at no preconceived reality are what keep us sane and human.

The most important lines for me were, "The little ignorance that is everything/ The possible nest in the invisible tree." The way I interpreted this

Death and Dying

What captured me in this book was the notion that the creations wanted to die. They are manifestations of something that is not quite right. In a sense they are like actual man, they are imperfect and instead of being the exact replication of nature and oneness, are always separated from each other and nature. They sense their imperfection and want to die because of it.

Here, the ocean sees the humans as the gods and tries to replicate them and their memories yet it cannot. Because of this distance, the incarnations want to die. On one hand we have Kelvin dreaming of the ocean and dreaming of creation, something that seems like it came straight from the entity. He says, "The beat of our heart combines, and all at once, out of the surrounding void where nothing exists or can exists, steals a presence of indefinable, unimaginable cruelty." He continues, "[...] I howl soundlessly, begging for death and for an end. But simultaneously I am dispersed in all directions, and my grief expands in a suffering more acute than any waking state, a pervasive, scatttered pain piercing the distant blacks and reds, [...] I felt myself being invaded through and through, I crumbled, disintegrated, and only emptiness remained" (180).

The creations love life and the concept of death is something does not appeal to these creations. "Does not appeal" is to light of a phrase- the creations fight till their last breath for life, much like the symmetriads when they realize their impending death. In this passage we find that the creations have a distance from what destroys them and they are not committing suicide but rather something outside of themselves is ending their life.

When Snow and Kris are discussing the ocean as a god, Kris says, "It repeats itself, Snow, and the being I'm thinking of would never do that." When the incarnation of Gibarian comes to visit Kris he off-handedly says, "No, I am the real Gibarian-just a new incarnation." The first thing that comes to mind is the notion of reincarnation on this planet. If reincarnation is true and we all do come back to this earth to repeat the same things then we are like the creatures on this ocean planet. We are like the symmetriads or asymmetriads who form some great masterpiece and then cave in on ourselves, destroying our masterpieces with evil and malice.

A true god is nothing but pure creation. When this imperfect god created us he created us as a tool to experience himself. Just like the ocean created the replicas to experience itself and discover something new, our planet or god created ourselves as an expression of it. Kris notedly says to Snow, "He has created eternity, which was to have measured his power, and which measures his unending defeat." He also says, "This god has no existence outside of matter, he would like to free himself from matter yet he cannot."

Death then in a cosmic sense is the escape from immortality. The god wants to die and experience something out of the world it has created and the only way it could do this was to create an imperfect creation. These creations die so that the god can experience what death feels like. They are the contrast and lens in which it views itself. When Gibarian comes to visit Kris the two of them have a conversation that goes like this,
"You are not Gibarian."
"No? Then who am I? A dream?"
"No, you are only a puppet. But you don't realize that you are."
"And how do you know what you are?"

Ideally I would..

I keep thinking and turning around in my head... what is the ideal way of looking at things? How am I suppose to think and act in a certain circumstance? To solve this problem, we scour through our memory, search our past, and find something in the dregs of our consciousness telling us that when we acted THIS WAY it worked out okay. We also base our habits and actions off of others and every influence we come across. Our brain is a giant database that catalogues every instance and files it away, or maybe, connects itself to the event through an invisible strand to the time or place where this event occurred. If there is no such thing as time except as a human and wordly conception, then maybe our mind and memory is extradimensional, going back (and forth) in time, recalling instances that have happened to us.

Buddhist religions and many other spiritual practices have focused on the importance of now. Nothing has happened before and nothing will happen in the future. Here I use the word "nothing" as no-thing, but really it also means nothing, nil, blank. Nothing is happening in the past and future. Everything is happening right now. Every breath that we take in is new and fresh. We remember our last breath and act because this is how we learn. We would never survive, and for that matter, no species would have ever lasted more than a few seconds if we didn't have the function of memory. Memory is biological, necessary for survival. Our brains are rooted in the classic flight-or-fight syndrome and when we choose a memory, we are choosing the correct response, determined by our brain on how best to act in that situation for our biological imperative.

If memory is for the means of biological safety, why does it remember a beautiful sunset? Why our the most special moments the one that we treasure the deepest? Maybe memory serves two functions. One is for our physical health and the other is for our emotional. We remember the times when we felt most at peace and in touch with the world. It is a feeling that is stored in our mind, when we recount the memory, the feeling permeates our body and tingles to our toes. I would argue that the beautiful times we remember are when we felt most "natural." The times when our mind dissappeared for a brief few seconds and we were able to see the world and it's creatures in the simplest, yet most wondrous light. The light of truth.

Why would our mind want us to remember the few times that we were free from it though?  Free from thought... 

Recently I have been seeing the mind as something malignant. Like the Hindu ascetics I have cast it as something evil, something that needs to be shaken off and conquered. To be free from thought it so to be happy, the mind spins a web around us and traps un its pulpous snares, trapping us in its bile and sweet stickiness. It bites and nibbles at our happiness and peace of mind until we give ourselves up and submit to its mastery. Yet when we see its maliciousness we can be free. By recognizing its pervasive control over us and our actions, we begin to see that every action we take is usually first dictated by the mind, and the memory, it's evil minion that it draws on.

How wrong I have been..

Adagiu?

It's about 10:00 A.M. and I'm trying to stay awake. I woke up early and am suffering from the consequences of staying up late, berating my eyes to melodrama and my ears to choruses of background laughter. So now this morning, with my head in hands and my legs stretched out the full extent, I flip open Wallace Stevens to a few different poems in the Ideas of Order, my eyes setting faster than a Montana sunset, looking for an idea that I could grasp and something that resonated with me. Nothing was really hitting the mark, so I shut my tome and clicked on the computer. Scrolling through the blog posts, I instantly chose the blog, The Rambler. I love the little quotes that Penwell chose and especially the first one, "An evening's thought is like a clear day of weather." It is such a beautiful sentence that even without trying, sums up imagery unique yet similar for all of us. It doesn't matter where we are, we can all remember that moment when we were completely at ease. Looking back on the day in harmony and peace, sitting in silence and joy.

It is ironic that these two events that feel so similar are also somehow intrinsically tied. I can remember my most peaceful moments of discourse in the hills of Lenox. It is a cool 65 degree day, the sun starting to set, and me in the middle of Massachusetts during the peak of fall season. Walking through the woods, and feeling everything and nothing, completely absorbed, looking forward. Smelling and sensing the trees around me, listening with rapture the swish of the leaves I step through; piles of multicolored, transparent, gatherers of light.

Yet, the darkness rises in me recalling this. A bitter pill is left to swallow. The next part of the story is that as I read this small sentence that brought so many pleasant memories to mind and took me to another place, reserved in the banks of my memory for joyous days and hours of reflection, I felt like I needed to investigate further. The quotes were so good that I needed more. I looked for the Adagia and found the Adagio. The poem goes like this,

Drone, dove, that rounded woe again,
When I bring her to-morrow.
The wood were a less happy place,
But for that broken sorrow.

Tell her in undertones that Youth
With other times must reckon;
That mist seals up the golden sun,
And ghosts from gardens beckon.

My golden sun dissolves under the shadow of something that I can't seem to shake off. A rough year it has been, with my Dad dying, my dog dying, and then my grandpa, in a span of less than 2 months. But life goes on and soon we are caught up with the strains of I and the daily business that this contains. Once you think you have shaken these things off and life seems to return to its normal flow, you are brought back to death. Is it a coincidence that when I look for life in the Adagia I find the death in the Adagio? I would think it is besides the fact that it has happened so many other times. We sometimes think that our "I" is all powerful, I am the only one that can choose my lessons. Yet, life is a giant lesson, or remembrance. We cannot choose our lessons, we can just be ready to receive them.

Something stuck with me when we read the sonnet by Spencer honoring his dead grandmother. I feel a bulge in my throat right now for some reason. Something is left to do, the dead need to be honored.

The Fly Revisited

The Fly: Part Deux

Buzzing, spinning, dancing across my eye
Moments are precious
So says the fly
It walks, it talks, with the speak of a wing

Dancing, twirling, it settles on my things.
I close my eyes and hear its call
The sound of a moment, a dream, a space
That slips away from my mind.

 Watch it spin and me try to swat it
Watch it's dance and the way it captures all
I huff, I puff, I smote it with my eyes
It spins, it twirls in the blink of an eye

My backpack is a perch
My ears are it's home
I fell for it's call
And it buzzed me ever since.

The Fly In My Eye

I've been waking up a few mornings in a row to a fly. It buzzes around my head and disturbs my dreams and peace and slumber. Something wells up in my wanting to SMASH this fly into the ground. I swat at it with angry, clumsy hands, swishing through empty air and inciting it to further incite me. I put my head back to the white, downy pillow and it attacks. Buzzzzz, Buzz, buzz, Buzzzzzzzzz. I pop open my eyes in fury and try to smite it with my angry burning eyes of madness. A few half-hearted attempts at swatting it and it disappears into the air. I stay with my head perked and my arm extended, muttering curse words in my mind. The time is 10:00 AM.

 Settling back down, I burrow into the blanket of down and fluff. My head tucks in, hiding under the white protective sheets. I hear it outside. It buzzes around my head, looking for me. I want to scream but that will be to no avail. All I really want to do is sleep.

It has so disturbed my peace of mind that I have looked for this fly and its family in every nook and cranny of the house. One is dead. Others will follow. My religious zeal in exterminating these flies knows no bounds. Something about the buzzing of a fly and how it will constantly attack your face and ears, trying to penetrate into your eyes and hearing, infuriates me.  Yet, the more I focus on it the more it follows me and taunts me. It buzzes in my ear when I'm eating lunch, it follows me into Sexson's class, hovering, waiting on my backpack for me to depart. It is the source of discourse in my other class, The Revenge Tragedy.  It is a constant torment. I'm afraid that soon I will metamorphosis into a fly one morning and find that I am one of them. Then I will be the one persecuted and swatted at. My playful dabblings will be seen as malicious, my curiosity-as sinister.

The meaning of the fly in my eye is that it won't take part. It buzzes, it scurries, it swoops, it dives, it delights and incites, and wow does it make me mad.

P.S. Ironically.. While I write this I'm listening to the song, "Kiss of Life."

Breaking out of the box of logic

With halting, gasping words I struggle to write and express myself through rational, direct states of order. Catching at every intersection, getting lost in the vast puzzle that is philosophy and logic. I try to make sense out of a world that is nonsensical. Henry Bradley, a senior editor for the Oxford Dictionary said this about philosophy, "Not that I despise philosophy or philosophers; but I feel that the universe of being is too vast to be comprehended even by the greatest of the sons of Adam." Whenever these philosophers climb deeper and deeper down into the repeating, circling rational that is our mind and that is our world, they lose sight of why they are here in the first place. The world is wonderful, large, and strange. We are creators every day, we have the power every day to discover and liberate ourselves through expression. Beautiful, dazzling, gleams of light crack and chip away at my psyche. Monuments to old philosophers and ancient relics is replaced by visions of hot air balloons manned by pterodactyls, leaping globs of light that bounce off each other and fall back down to the ocean from whence they came. Poetry is fascinated with the sensical as well though, the ordinary. Bringing an old, dusty, forgotten memory to the surface, and shining it in a new light. Stevens talks about the first time that you look up at the sky and notice how beautiful it is. Stevens writes,

"It is easy to suppose that few people realize on that occasion, which comes to all of us, when we look at the blue sky for the first time, that is to say: not merely see it, but look at it and experience it and for the first time have a sense that we live in the center of a physical poetry, a geography that would be intolerable except for the non-geography that exists there-few people realize that they are looking at the world of their own thoughts and the world of their own feelings."

Each moment is piled onto each other, waiting to be taken apart, unpacked, and examined more closely. This is what the poet does. This is his or her philosphy, not the analyzing of what is a mind, but the reflection of what is a moment. How can one express and remember a moment and its beauty through words and expression.

A Postcard from the Volcano

Matilda and I scoured the hillside for trinkets and old bones of animals. My sister and I would run from place to place, delighting in every rock and hillside. Then there was the accident, and our innocence was uprooted. Our delights gave way to survival and soon we were supporting each other, living off of the animals and fruit, letting the mansion, our mansion go to ruin. Everything turned sour and the leaves lost their color during their winter, and our breath lost it's heat. We grew to hate the mansion and its large vaunted walls. Everything lost its color, and our faces begin to turn into an ugly pallor...

"Look what I found!"

"Oh my god Gerald, is that a skull! Put it down!"

"Or else what? A ghost is going to come and haunt me? Haha, dont be silly Geraldine! This house is nothing but an empty ruin. Some poor guy lost all his money and had to skip town, leaving this huge place all to ourselves. Just think of all the fun we're going to have!"

The sun sets in the sky, casting shadows on the house in all the wrong places. The children keep playing, oblivious to despair.

Wallace Stevens: Images and Judgments (John J. Enck)

Reading this book feels like going to the back of the book in 5th grade math class, only to find that it gives only the even numbers, not the odd.

Walter Pater- The Renaissance

To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike. While all melts under our feet, we may well catch at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist's hands, or the face of one's friend. Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening. With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch. What we have to do is to be for ever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy of Comte, or of Hegel, or of our own. Philosophical theories or ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism, may help us to gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded by us. "Philosophy is the microscope of thought." The theory or idea or system which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of this experience, in consideration of some interest into which we cannot enter, or some abstract theory we have not identified with ourselves, or what is only conventional, has no real claim upon us.
One of the most beautiful passages in the writings of Rousseau is that in the sixth book of the Confessions, where he describes the awakening in him of the literary sense. An undefinable taint of death had always clung about him, and now in early manhood he believed himself smitten by mortal disease. He asked himself how he might make as much as possible of the interval that remained; and he was not biassed by anything in his previous life when he decided that it must be by intellectual excitement, which he found just then in the clear, fresh writings of Voltaire. Well! we are all condamnes, as Victor Hugo says: we are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve—les hommes sont tous condamnes a mort avec des sursis indefinis: we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among "the children of this world," in art and song. For our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion—that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of this wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for art's sake, has most; for art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake.



"Show me your hand, Logan," said the psyc doctor.
Logan obeyed.
"Do you know why you have this?" he said, tapping the palmflower with an index finger.
"To tell my age," said Logan.
"And how old are you?"
"I'm six."
And what happens when you are seven?"

"It goes to blue... and I leave the nursery."

I come into this class with a new brain and a new train of thought. For the first time in a while my ears and eyes have been peeled back and uncovered a new delicate worm that could or not could fruition into something beautiful and divine. Upon hearing and listening to the poems of Stevens I have pierced into a reality that I find strange and delightful. The musings of a madman maybe? Or the enquiries of a realist?
To see the beauty in this life we have to find the beauty. There is no one that does this better than Stevens. Not only does he find the beauty in nature he transposes this fluidity and natural sense into the words. We feel the beauty, in the same way that we feel the beauty in music or art. We can't rationalize it or deliberate over it, we let it flow through us and around us, we lose ourselves in it's sweetness and sting. Each word flows together in harmony and the more we give in, the more harmonious the work becomes. To understand Stevens work is to lose ourselves in the sound and imagery of the work. It is to imagine what each scene looks like and how each color tastes and smells. It is the world of imagination, where firecats are an everyday occurrence and we have the chance to dine with emperors and sultans. To uncover the hidden symbolism of Steven's work is the next challenge for me but one that I will take on ardently. For to understand this man's mind and reality, might be to uncover the true nature of being.