I finished solaris in record time. Swiping my finger across my ipad for hours on end, i was disappointed when there was no more to read. I feel like lem could of tripled the books length, forever evolving and describing the world of solaris and the weird, vivid details he uses. The link or rios blong to solarpedia provides to stunning visuals of solaris. I was also a tad confused when i began to read the book. I remember hearing the characters name, Rheya and Snow. After a couple hours reading, I wondered when I was going to be introduced to these characters. I finally realized my translation left the charters with their original polish names names. So Rheya becomes Harry, and Snow becomes Snaut. I'm always fascinated curious when I read a book that was originally written in a foreign language. I can't help but wonder how much meaning is lost in the translation. I wonder about word choice; there were more then a few unique words in Solaris. Does surreptitiously or somnambulistic translate directly from polish? Or was it up to the translators discretion?
Jenny did a fantastic job at connecting certain phrases and sentences to Stevens poetry. I can only hope to produce a few that are as well connected and thought out:
Here are a few passages i found relative to Stevens poetry. I would include page numbers, but its an ebook and they won't correspond with the print version.
"This was simply untrue, because the living ocean certainly does act-it's just that it does so according to notions other than those of humans, it doesn't build cities."
"It occurred to me that I could take some powerful medication, like peyote for example, or something else that produces hallucinations or graphic visions. Experiencing such things would prove that what I had taken really exited and was a part of the material reality surrounding me. But, I thought further, that too would not be the critical experiment I was after, because I knew how the substance (which I of course would have to select) ought to act on me, and so it could also be the case that both taking of the medication and the effects it caused were equally products of my imagination."
"One world is enough, even there we feel stifled We desire to find our own idealized image; they're supposed to be globes, civilizations more perfect than ours; in other worlds we expect to find the image of our own primitive past."
"What are G-formations? They are not persons, nor are they copies of specific individuals, but rather materialized projections of what out brain contains regarding a particular person."
"the content of this architecture is motion, intent and purposive. We observe a fragment of the process, the trembling of a single string in a symphonic orchestra of super giants, and on top of what we know-we only know, without comprehending-that at the same time above us and beneath us, in the plunging deep, beyond the limits of sight and imagination there are multiple, million folds simultaneous transformations connected to one another like the notes of musical counterpoint....we are its unhearing audience."
The application of stevens poetry outside of this class in my life is beginning to surprise me. It seems his philosophy on life, which i don't entirely understand, has percolated into other areas of my life and school work beyond my control....its eerie.
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.
I finished the swerve last week. whoa. The book captured me. I finished it last week and quickly began reading solaris, which has me completely absorbed as well. Now that i have some time, i thought id write a quick post about the book.
I didn't really know what to expect, i pretty much just picked it up and started to read. I didn't read the book jacket, know the focus of the book, or anything really. I dove in blind. After a couple chapters i couldn't put it down. Fortunately, i was reading the book on an ipad, and that made it easy to quickly look up words i didn't know and highlight to my hearts content and be able to flip through those specific spots i highlighted.
The history of the written word is complicated and I didn't have the slightest idea the effort people went to preserve their written text. Poggio was quite the ambitious scribe to go to such effort to find ancient texts and preserve them. Reading the swerve made me realize how much i have taken for granted in reading the older texts i love so much. People went to such great effort and tedious labor to preserve these texts for future generations.
I really liked how greenblatt ended the book by tracing the "atoms of lucretius" in the declaration of independence. His summary of on the nature of things will be helpful when i begin to deconstruct the actual poem.
"The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion." There are a many connections we can make to stevens and this book, but ill stick with this one in particular. Humans are gripped by the illusion of the infinite, and it is the power of the imagination that encourages these illusions.
I have the privilege of teaching 15 kindergartners twice a week. I'm a science teacher and every week I prepare two experiments for the little ones. They LOVE science days. Their infautaion with simple pleasures mature adult minds ignore amazes me. I brought in balloons the other day—it made their week. I dropped mentos in a 2 liter of diet coke, a coke fountain erupted and they all got a mento, they screamed like it was new years eve.
Throughout the course of the class I've come to the realization that these kids live unconsciously in the lucretian sublime, they are epicureans in a broad sense, free from anxiety, without concern or fear of death and the gods. They have no worries, responsibility, and their sole concern is having a fun day in school. They are on a constant pursuit of pleasure, taking life as it comes, juice box to juice box. I think most of us were like this when we were young. Who says we can't stay like it?
When Dr. Sexson encouraged us to write about a poem that spoke to us I was quickly reminded of On The Road Home, a poem I read last week in Parts Of A World. It goes something like this; ON THE ROAD HOME It was when I said, "There is no such thing as the truth," That the grapes seemed fatter. The fox ran out of his hole. You....You said, "There are many truths, But they are not parts of a truth." Then the tree, at night, began to change, Smoking through green and smoking blue. We were two figures in a wood. We said we stood alone. It was when I said, "Words are not forms of a single word. In the sum of the parts, there are only the parts. The world must be measured by eye." It was when you said, "The idols have seen lots of poverty, Snakes and gold and lice, But not the truth;" It was at that time, that the silence was largest, And longest, the night was roundest. The fragrance of the autumn warmest, Closest, and strongest.
I've noticed this reoccuring theme of weather in stevens poetry and it seems he draws a lot of inspiration from it. Helen Vendler writes in On Broken Wings, “…the natural cast of his eyes is upward, and the only phenomenon to which he is passionately attached is the weather”
The title of the of poem points toward a home but puts the reader in transition. I think it was the first stanza that complety absorbed me into this poem. The speaker has realized that there is no truth, we must see everything as it really is, not how he would like to or imagine. And as soon as he did this he began to see things as they really are. Many of us deny the truth and will only see it or understand it in a way we seem fit. The second line of the poem is surprising, if there is no truth, how can it make grapes fat or the fox run out of its hole? However the listener makes the distinction that, "there are many truths, but they are not parts of a truth." We begin to see how such constructs determine how we can see the world. And the line that follows depicts this time of change after the listener has realized the constructs that shape their reality. The third stanza finally uses the personal pronoun We. It is also the only stanza in the poem that is three and not four lines long The last line in the fourth stanza, "the world must be measured by eye"; restates stevens point that we must leave behind these expecatations of how we are supposed to see things or interpret things. We must see them how they are. I have a problem with a lot of the idols, celebraties and just "things" people idolize. Maybe this was obvious when dr.sexson told us to name somehing we hate, and i said justin beiber. Ok so maybe I don't actaully hate him as a person, I just despire what he stands for. Hundered of thousands of teenage girls and boys idolize him for all the wrong reasons. This is a problem in all the "idols" most of americans look up to. This is why i love the fith stanza of the poem. Stevens writes how these people, are blind from the truth, regardless of how they much they have seen or the expiernces they lived. the repetition of "It was..." in four the the six stanzas suggest the speaker is looking in the past to deal with their current reality. Stevens wants to encourage our escape from all these "truths" these realities: and preconceived notions we live out lives by, and when we do that, out world, our life, will be largest, longest, roundest, warmest, closest and strongest.
I found it interesting how Stevens thought of calling Harmonium "Grand Poem: Preliminary Minutiae. At one point he wanted his entire collection of poetry to be called The Whole Of Harmonium. Reading the poems in the harmonium as one large poem creates a different expiernce, for me at least. As if each poem is contributing to a bigger vision, a grand story telling through the culmination of each poem.
I believe it was through the long poems I've been reading in On Extended Wings, that stevens was able to discover his strengths. Stevens talks about the poets subject, and how it provokes his sense of the world. A man's sense of the world dictates his subjects to him, and this sense is derived from his personality. And his personality manifests itself from the poets style.
On Extended Wings has pointed out how stevens resorts to words of uncertainty, or "skeptical music" in his poetry. In reading any of the poems in Harmonium, we see may, might, must, could, should and would resolve his poems. As if using the present tense would imply succesfull action, and it can be performed again with succeful action. Ive discovered this sense of "openendness" in his poetry, as if something or someone is searching for something in a lucid dream without direction. Perhaps stevens doesnt want his poetry the the reader what will happen and how it happen yet leave that up to the reader to interpret.
I finally found some time between 18 credits and three jobs to start reading On Extended Wings, the book Dr. Sexon gave me. The book focuses on fourteen of the longer poems that Stevens wrote over the span of thirty years. The author Helen Hennessy Vendler suggests that these poems deserve equal fame and consideration to his more popular, shorter works. Stevens central theme, the worth of the imagination remained with him throughout his entire life. Vendler suggest that his development as a poet can best be seen, not in description—which must be repetitive— of the abstract bases of his work, but rather in a view of his changing styles.
"Stevens was engaged in constant experimentation all his life in an attempt to find the appropriate vehicle for his expansive consciousness; he found it in his later poems, which surpass in value the rest of his work."
I'm looking forward to her analysis of his work and the deconstruction of his poems and how they compare to his shorter works in the harmonium.
