I'm taking a Bible As Literature with professor minton, and one of our assignments was to analyze a piece of literature and how it uses the bible as a source. I choose Sunday Morning by wallace stevens, but perhaps I would of been better off selecting a Christian rock song or something easier. I realized I might of dove a little too deep when I began to analyze Sunday Morning and stevens use of the bible throughout the poem. Perseverance and lots of coffee motivated me to really try and deconstruct the poem and desperately try and relate it to the bible. After doing all of this, I has a confident understanding of the poem, much more understanding then I did when i first read it for this class a couple weeks ago. Throughout the poem Steven's uses biblical and mythological imagery as he questions religious and secular beliefs in a modern day life.
In WRIT 205 we have to do a "how to" assignment. I decided to write a paper on, "how to write about nature," but i quickly realized I have absolutely no authority to tell people how to write, or write about nature. And i know whoever has been reading my incoherent blog posts agrees. I proceeded by asking myself what makes a good nature essay, because most of the traditional nature essays are....boring. My throught process evolved into why we like to write about nature, what inspires us. I began to think about the reasons beyond the obvious why we love nature, and ask what is it in us, our bodys, or souls, our minds, that we feel this connection to the wilderness. I began to think about our disconnection with nature, how humans are inherently wild being and the second we loose connection with the wild, we loose a connection with ourselves. As individuals, whether we are conscious of it or not, have this connection with nature, the way we view it, the role it has on out lives. I then began to think about stevens theory of reality as a creation of out imagination Using that theory I began to think about how this could realtre the the "frame" we as individuals put on nature, and how that frame is unique to all of us. So in my "how to write about nature" I hope to inspire my readers to recognize this frame, this subconscious interaction we have with nature, and how they can tap into that as a source of inspiration to write. Encourage then to stop writing about the jagged mountain peaks, and glistening snowy fields. We've all heard it, we want something raw and original that resonates with our own soul. A piece of writing that helps as recognize our "frame" of nature, or our own imagination that influences our interpretations of the wild. This research has introduced me to works of literature i feel are pertinent in my philosophy on life, one specifically is The Abstract Wild, by Jack Turner. And a word, a single word that wraps it a up in a tidy package, biophila. Coined by E.O. Wilson, an innate and genetically determined affinity of human beings with the natural world. All of this is swirling around in my head, it keeps me up at night..but in a good way. In such a way that I feel like im pulling the curtain on something in my life, my mind, my conscious that has been waiting to come out, i just needed motivation, i needed stevens. and sexon as my translator.
Onto the weird.....I'm a music whore. I'm constantly looking for new albums from the bands i love and new emerging bands. I have very specific taste, but i like a wide variety. Metal, acoustic, mellow, indie, downright weird, electronic...Anyways, i came across a band called "Milagres" the other day. Here is youtube video to the song "here to stay"
Here are the lyrics:
I was restless.I was young.I was a killer.I spoke in tongues.He did it through me.He did it right.He took me from the gutterinto a light.All the leaves are glowing green as the seasons rage.All the birds seem to sing in the key of H.
The Emperor of Ice Cream is here to stay.The way you tell it, it sounds so nice.The sandy beaches, buckets of ice.What about hurricanes? What about mice?Open the shutters!There is no light.All the leaves are glowing green as the seasons rage.All the birds seem to sing in the key of H.The Emperor of Ice Cream is here to stay
I think it's too big of a coincidence to not be a reference to stevens poem, "The Emperor Of Ice Cream." Doing a quick wiki search, i discovered the main singer wrote most of the songs after a mountain climbing accident left him with a broken back. It wouldn't surprise me if he read stevens as a stimulus of the mind while bed ridden, and his poetry inspired him, like it does so many of us. Maybe I'm making a skeptical assumption, but i don't care, its cool to think about it that way.
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