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."