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.