Sunday, October 28, 2012

Muscle memory in the void

When you don't dream you're in the void, but what if you're consciously dreaming daimon blinks? Do you blink in dreams?
It all started a couple days before the class when Sexson mentioned to Tanner that he had been in the void because he hadn't dreamed that prior night. A couple of nights before this instance I had a dream. I had a dream that I was in a foreign valley hitting golf balls in the backyard of my mansion. I can't actually be sure if if it was my mansion (or if it was even a mansion) but I was in a backyard being overlooked by two of my friends [who I cannot remember] from the verandah. I was hitting a bucket of balls into the vista of the valley [not really watching where they landed] until the two of them told me to "close my eyes," which I did, knowing my golf swing by heart. I didn't blink, setting a ball into the center of my stance, and then closed them. I followed their command in my dream, took a swing, and struck the ball as I would awake.
Now, my awake self remembers that brief segment in the dream but knows not why I wasn't in the void. I was sleeping and, when having my eyes closed, wasn't 'in the void' because I knowingly was taking my dreamed germs into account and listening to them.
There no moral to this, but there is a question: If I'm dreaming and close my eyes in my dream, seeing the black as the back of my eyelids, then is that the void? Or a void within the void? Or neither or both or something else?
Just a thought....also, does your consciously dreaming daimon blink?

Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction

I wanted to do a blog more in depth with this poem, but I don't think I would get around to everything. I skimmed over the poem again before writing this, loving all the stuff I'm rereading and dumbfounded that I didn't see it before, and realize that there is way too much too talk about. So without further or due, here I have for you some simple random thoughts
On a Single Canto: IV

The first idea was not our own. Adam
In Eden was the father of Descartes
And Eve made air the mirror of herself,
Of her sons and of her daughters. They found themselves
In heaven as in a glass; a second earth;
And in the earth itself they found a green–
The inhabitants of a very varnished green.
But the first idea was not to shape the clouds
In imitation. The clouds preceded us
There was a muddy center before we breathed.
There was a myth before the myth began,
Venerable and articulate and complete.
From this the poem springs: that we live in a place
That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves
And hard it is in spite of blazoned days.
We are the mimics. Clouds are pedagogues.
The air is not a mirror but bare board,
Coulisse bright-dark, tragic chiaroscuro
And comic color of the rose, in which
Abysmal instruments make sounds like pips
Of the sweeping meanings that we add to them.

Thoughts Towards Canto:
Helpful definitions before getting into it.....
Descartes - French dude who said "I think therefore I am" (simply put...)
venerable - deserving respect because of age/wisdom/character
pedagogue - a teacher/a strict, pedantic teacher
coulisse - flat piece of scenery on side of theatre in stage play
chiaroscuro - the treatment of shading and effects of light in painting or drawing
pips - small, hard fruit seeds/ OR (colloquial) excellent, attractive person or thing

I apologize beforehand because you might get as lost as I henceforth...
With that, let's springboard into Stevens' idea of Adam, as if all the world were Descartes' progeny, who exists if I (or you or whoever) exist because if thinking exist then previous thoughts exist including anything before, in between, and after Genesis and the Meditations. As for Eve and air, Stevens is talking about, arguably umm say, how oxygen and all the components of the element of air keep the generations of our fallen people alive. We're fallen because this earth is heaven, paradise is already here, but earth is an enclosed glass jar. We've been inland for as long as we can recall, and although recollection isn't as pretty as how we evolved, regarding our buffed and varnished nature, our imaginations may outweigh our empiricist philosophies; out of which, when we're sitting on our back porch, we call that cloud a "dog" and that one a "face" and that other one a "UFO." None of that is true, but all of it is true in our imaginations. It's not true because the clouds came first. We shaped the clouds after the clouds became as clay, that which can be molded and given meaning. Clay is dirt (but isn't clay also etymologically Adam, too?) which is germinal primacy. That's where the muddy center is, metaphorically in the clouds and realistically in the base, germinating in and of the myth of the myth of the poet within the poet. There are layers behind this muddy, base "concrete," although the concrete is not the venerable. The concrete is like us, and the venerable is like the earth, but where do we place the mythologists? They're the poets. Those beings who aren't only humans and not only matter. They're the thinkers of thinkers, the poets of poets, and the germination of poetical progeny who make the concrete, affectionate, lasting myths. Obviously we are using and living in a world that we didn't create, and we (the assumed non-poets...for now) are those miming the poets who mimed [via their myths] the earth and the clouds and the sky itself. The poets are the clouds maybe'cause they're the liaison between the base beings of the earth and the stories of the sky; the poets are the clouds who are the teachers. Air is as we, the people, who are dealt a clean slate; a clean slate and a void to fill with a beautiful portrait of ourselves and our thinking and our being. A painter's portraiture is a poet's literature who work is as black and white as a graphite drawing or writing. Yet, without color is tragic which is why readers must manifest their own interpretation, inimitable and separate from authorial intention, of, well....whatever is artistic or too real if reality is boring. Then, lastly, we return the pips, the germination and general potential progeny, who tend to flee from their originator and their fruitful mother. In conclusion, well the one conclusion that I have in mind right now, the poet is the cloud and that's who the pips can be once they flee and shed their mother's sin....ehem from their mothers' skin.

Lastly, here I have other quotes that I had set aside for my big blog that can't happen any time soon:

"And see the sun again with an ignorant eye

There is a project for the sun. The sun
Must bear no name, gold flourisher, but be
In the difficulty of what is to be

But the priest desires. The philosopher desires.
And not to have is the beginning of desire

At summer thunder and sleeps through winter snow.
But you, ephebe, look from your attic window,
Your mansard with a rented piano. You lie
In silence upon your bed. You clutch the corner
Of the pillow in your hand. You writhe and press
A bitter utterance from your writhing, dumb,

The first idea is an imagined thing

The major abstraction is the idea of man
And major man is its exponent, abler
In the abstract that in his singular,
More fecund as principle than particle,
Happy fecundity, for-abundant force,
In being more than an exception, part,
Though an heroic part, of the commonal.
The major abstraction is the commonal,
The inanimate, difficult visage. Who is it?

After lustre of the moon, we say
We have not the need of any paradise,
We have not the need of any seducing hymn.

The eye of a vagabond in metaphor
That catches our own. The causal is not
Enough. The freshness of transformation is
The freshness of the world. It is our own,
It is ourselves, the freshness of ourselves,
And the necessity and that presentation.

Whereon it falls in more than sensual mode.
But the difficultest rigor is forthwith,
On the image of what we see, to catch from that
Irrational moment its unreasoning,
As when the sun comes rising, when the sea
Clears deeply, when the moon hangs on the wall
Of heaven-haven. These are not things transformed.
Yet we are shaken by them as if they were.
We reason about them with a later reason.

A lasting visage in a lasting bush,
A face of stone in an unending red,
Red-emerald, red-slitted-blue, a face of slate,

The words they spoke were voices she heard.
She looked at them and saw them as they were
And what she felt fought off the barest phrase.

When at long midnight the Canon came to sleep
And normal things had yawned themselves away,
The nothingness was a nakedness, a point,
Beyond which fact could not progress as fact.

Beyond which thought could not progress as thought.
He had to choose. But it was not a choice
Between excluding things. It was not a choice
Between, but of. He chose to include the things
That in each other are included, the whole,
The complicate, the amassing harmony.

Out of nothing to have come on major weather,
It is possible, possible, possible. It must
Be possible. It must be that in time
The real will from its crude compoundings come,
Seeming, at first, a beast disgorged, unlike,
Warmed by a desperate milk. To find the real,
To be stripped of every fiction except one,
The fiction of an absolute--Angel,
Be silent in your luminous cloud and hear
The luminous melody of proper sound.
VIII
What am I to believe? If the angel in his cloud,
Serenely gazing at the violet abyss,
Plucks on his strings to pluck abysmal glory,
Leaps downward through evening's revelations, and
On his spredden wings, needs nothing but deep space,
Forgets the gold centre, the gold destiny,

And if there is an hour there is a day,

The man-hero is not the exceptional monster,
But he that of repetition is most master.

They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne.
We shall return at twilight from the lecture
Pleased that the irrational is rational,

Yet it depends on yours. The two are one.
Two parallels that meet only if only in
The meeting of their shadows or that meet
In the book in a barrack, a letter from Malay.
But your war ends. And after it you return
With six meats and twelve wines or else without
To walk another room...Monsieur and comrade,
The soldier is poor without the poets lines,
His petty syllabi, the sounds that stick,
Inevitably modulating, in the blood.
And war for war, each has its gallant kind.
How simply the fictive hero becomes the real;
How gladly with proper words the soldier dies,
If he must, or lives on the bread of faithful speech."

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Womb to the Tomb to the Womb

The last thing I want to be is a pessimist, in the same regard that this class isn't teaching us about atheism, but I had a thought. Life is an experience, and it's span is an experience from the womb to the tomb, however well cataloged and remembered, right? Starting from conception to coffin is another way of putting it. But the thought is what if it was the opposite? What if life itself is a tomb, even though technically death has nothing to do with it because that's why they call us living beings? Death is inexperienceable and separate entity of existence. Although, by living aren't we technically dying? Thus if life is synonymous with tomb then what would be the womb? Simply, the womb would be the things we came from before life, that experience separate from life, and out of nothing we came into existence and from existence we'll get back out and leave it eventually. And, well then, I suppose that would make the womb the earth, mother nature, or whatever other title you can come up with. The womb is dust because from dust we came and to dust we'll return. The point is, dust is us and therefore so is everything else. Walt Whitman became a bridge and put his experience as that bridge on paper. That's one of the purpose of poetry, literature, writing, and education in general; to become something more, something you've never been before. Consider this suggestion, sometime today please talk to an inanimate object because, even though the thing can't talk and write like you and I, they can hear. They share the same soul as you and we have to share the same world as them.
With that, here's something else to consider:
Lucretius, from what I've gathered, believes that the soul does not persist through the decomposition of a body. A body's lifetime is equal to the soul's. In that context the soul is limited as opposed to, and correct me if I'm wrong, Ovid's belief [stunningly similar to Buddhism] that the soul is immortal, transformable, and can essentially be reincarnated. In that respect, doesn't it seem that Ovid' beliefs are considerably more optimistic than those of Lucretius? Then again, how can we prove that a tree has a conscience?
Given the challenge above I'd say that I'm more Ovidian than Lucretian.

Friday, October 19, 2012

Response to Jenny's blog

I saw a picture on her blog which make me think and influenced me to share this...




These pictures were photographed October 2, 2012 around Anchorage, AK.
Gah, I missed it again! But enough of woe, so please enjoy...

Like "sweeping leaves on a windy day"

I want to know the difference between "anxious expectations" and "influence," or rather as Bloom writes regarding the founder of contemporary literary anxieties, "Shakespeare employs the word influence in two senses: an astral influx, and inspiration." (52) Does this sense of astral influx involve divine intervention, what Stevens' would refer to as utter belief in a supreme fiction? Today friend of mine dropped by after work and we chatted for a solid two hours about this and that and I think I mostly talked about what we're learning in this class. No, I didn't bring up Wallace Stevens but we first talked about writing stream-of-consciousness, then about how the invention of the backspace-key on a PC is a plague (imagine an old, gold parchment rich with brilliant typos, or what about all the ideas untyped), then about how typewriters are the shizzznit (especially in Finding Forrester [see the video in one of my older blogs, or better yet watch the movie]), and then settled for some time discussing our beliefs in God. I told him, "I believe in God" but was emphatic that "he doesn't have any influence down here with us." My buddy then reminded me of jinxes. I thought of "you owe me a soda" but he was talking about, basically, how karma is arguably divine intervention. Point taken. We talked about a lot. He said he really didn't know what he believed, that maybe he was agnostic. I said he should be Gnostic instead because he's a pretty open-minded guy. I mentioned it because I prefer "knowing" to "not knowing." Knowledge is confidence in belief (or acquiescence to suspension of disbelief), I think. Yeah, sure why not?, that's what I think. Well, at least, that's what I think I think which gets me thinking of Bloom again when he is "speaking of the poet-in-a-poet, I mean precisely his daimon, his potential immortality as a poet, and so in effect his divinity." (12) This inner-daimon is an ever-morphing meta-poet who is a warped, alter egotistical, misread dude whose ephemeral consciousness composes and sculpts the bulk of the "materia poetica" (37).

This gets me back to thinking about us talking about early poets and old Greek gods, which in today's world are largely part of the realm of Gnostic beliefs. We talked about how the sky is simple, and how the moon is simple, and if they're so simple then why can't we complicate them. Well, as he said, "there is not an original idea." I agreed, and that's why I believe in Greek mythology because, one, there are already back stories for the sky and moon and ocean and the sun all sorts of stuff and, two, why not for the fun of it? It's a starting point; a starting point which, if my inner-genius daimon-dude takes notice, I'll have to work my way away from to become a strong poet. Gotta start fresh, I suppose, and find my own importances in the world. "Shakespeare the inventor would be admirable," Bloom says, "but few understand any more what Dr. Johnson meant by 'the essence of poetry is invention.'" (42) I understand viewing from the outside in, and if it were visa-verse then I'd actually have some pundit-worthy voice and style.
Hmm, got side-tracked, I guess the difference for now between anxious expectations and influence looks something like this analogy:
Anxious expectations : Influence : : Self-induced inspiration : Astral influx
Something like that, but please by all means correct me if I'm wrong, but here's something that maybe makes more sense:
Composing poetry is like "sweeping leaves on a windy day" (influenced and misread from The Wire).




Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Opening Thoughts: The Anatomy of Influence


I just came across these lines in Stevens' Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction...
Soldier, there is a war between the mind
And sky, between thought and day and night. It is
For that the poet is always in the sun,
Patches the moon together in his room
To his Virgilian cadences, up down,
Up down. It is a war that never ends.
...and it got me thinking about one of Harold Bloom's opening chapters in his book titled "The Influence of a Mind on Itself." But before I get into Bloom's book, I remember back when I took a Shakespeare class a couple springs ago and Sexson had us read Bloom's shorter essay "The Anxiety of Influence," which emphasized that a writer must empty themselves out (i.e. kenosis) in order to order their ideas within the their mind as well as on paper. This difficult task is the path to take to shape your pen with the precision that you as a writer want. But then suspicion sets in, a suspension of believing in yourself as an artist, coordinated by one's inner-monologue who permeates an anxious incantation upon the self and skeptically asks the artist, "How the hell are you going to do/outdo something like that?" The anxiously unsettled writers keep telling themselves that their vision is too vast, that their ambitions overreach what's realistic, and thus cannot be captured merely with words of a single story. That's how Shakespeare built his repertoire and Bloom praises his advention of elliptical lang--

This is where it gets interesting, and I'm sorry if my language doesn't suffice but I'll give it a try. Theoretically, if one were to successfully 'empty themselves out' then they would reach the point where they could restart and, as Stevens says in his Notes..., "become an ignorant man again." That's exactly what Shakespeare did, over and over, treading new paths back to the top of this...sort of...preceding mountain...except the Platonic form kind. The really imagined one where the peasant and the king are on the same level. The one where the ass and the horse collide in the middle. Over the course of his career, he'd regress back to the base while writing a play, then ascended to the top while writing his next play, then fall into the abyss again writing his next one, then climb back up doing another, and so on and so forth. Arguably, Shakespeare's biggest success exists in his array of fool characters rather than his aristocratic figures (which in some cases become fools, such as Lear or Shylock) although, as Bloom would inquire, what would we make of Hamlet? The most affective fool characters which come to mind now are Launcelot from The Merchant of Venice, the Fool from King Lear, the Gravedigger from Hamlet, and even Falstaff from King Henry the Fourth: Part I. Shakespeare reshaped himself from top to bottom, over and over again, and is the most enigmatic person in literature, as Bloom suggests, "There are many unanswerable paradoxes presented by Shakespeare but one such is, How could the same dramatist have written As You Like It and Othello, A Midsummer Night's Dream and King Lear, Twelfth Night and Macbeth? Yet even that less enigmatic than, How could anyone have composed Hamlet?" (see page 42).

This all goes back to one question, how does practicing kenosis influence the mind on itself? One answer is that if you succeed in completely purging the youness in you then there's nothing left, no personality within except a pure stoic. You're a body, or what Lucretius would call a primal germ. You're nothing but a grain of dust with analytic thinking and problem solving skills in the void. And you're free, a free man-body-thing, and therefore you can be anybody. And becoming anybody else is creating new youness, a new part of you. I think Shakespeare woke up a different person every day, and that's how, not why, Shakespeare could develop so many different characters, conflicting layers of content, and even, simply put, genres. With his immense understanding of art and self-awareness he allowed himself to debate with, eavesdrop on, and overhear himself which is why Bloom calls his chapter "The Influence of a Mind on Itself." The influence from  your art comes from within (yeah I know we've all heard that before) but the next time you write make it a commentary, critique, criticism, or whatever written by either you about your youness or your youness about you. Become that damned gadfly intruding your intellectual space. My last thought is, I hope you're as lost as I am because Bloom's chapter concludes, "No critic, however generously motivated, can help a deep reader escape from the labyrinth of influence. I have learned that my function is to help you get lost."

Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Lucretians in Cars Getting Coffee

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wriy3ICfF9U&feature=g-logo-xit

When others say exactly what you think so well then you have to give them the credit.
The link above is to a video, the first video which this Youtube site suggested to me, and now I suggest it to you. It's long, seventeen minutes of worthiness though.
This might be my shortest blog, but the video's thickness and interest should make up for my content lacking.
If you appreciate Seinfeld then please take a look.
I love the start, which is why I replaced Lucretians with Comedians, where Kramer (excuse me, Richards) points out the 7.5 million dollar museum which is falling apart. Hmm...why is that?
Anyways, who's to say? You's to...
(Ehem, if the link is wrong [because my computer couldn't connect it with the blog], then search on youtube "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee").
Enjoy.