It Must Give Pleasure

I am not sure why but my first thoughts were of Sir Percy Blakeney and his words and the following scene how in the midst of a revolt he insults both the boyfriend of his true love and the revolution and gets away with treason and the girl. The part ends at 3min 20sec or so.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKgs7hv9_Kw&feature=relmfu

 Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction: The ------------- after X (pg 351)

I enjoy tring to find meaning in the words or mind of the author but end up placing myself in the words and cross what are my thoughts with the thoughts I might suppose are the thoughts of the poet.  This to me is satisfactory and I find I do not need to know the truth or the real intent of the author; although that would be nice to know too.

 Everyone who believes there is conflict between perceptions

And heaven between ideas and truth and deception.  It is

Because of this the seeker of knowledge draws from the source of truth

 

Confines the deceiver to darkness

To his Lord Krishna steps, Porphyrius the Charioteer, up down,

Up down. It is a conflict that ends with the end of thought

 

Yet it depends on yours. The deception and truth are one

They are plural, inescapably both within us,

Two that meet only to repel each other

 

The meeting to push against the other, or that meet

By chance like knowledge given to the foot-soldier, ---

You think you find peace of mind, and after it you return to confusion

 I had to stop at this point for the loss of understanding and words to describe that loss, but I wanted to finish with the last lines.

 How simply our thoughts become real;

How gladly with proper knowledge we stop fighting to find truth,

If you must give up, or in other words just live simply in ignorance

 

I guess for me Steven is wrestling once again with the conflict between truth and perception.   Neither one winning the war yet both just as real. I love the line where they meet “The meeting of their shadows” The image of the sun fighting against the shade never able to actually fight but never ending the pushing match over the world.  The creators of shadows being us because as the sun shines on one side the other side is in the shadows.

I have been writing down ideas to post as blogs for this class drawing on the interruptions in thoughts that come whilst the words flow in our class of prophetic poets.  The struggle inside is the actual and the need to have no actuality.

Do words make a difference can poems take the place of mountains are men made out of words? "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" Is God a word or is it the words that God uses to assemble all things. 

We know from Lucretius that everything already existed. Is it impossible to believe that words are power; the power that controls the universe and beyond?  The firstlings existed and can never be destroyed yet there are those that act and those that are acted upon.  In this life created by our own perception of reality we say or think and things happen.

Motion is created by thoughts or words and must be so for we can not turn on the light with out thinking to do so first.  Someone discovered in the infinite infinity to act upon those things that can be acted upon and formed them and shaped them through the use of words or commands or knowledge or thoughts, for it is all the same. Those combining firstlings in combinations of meticulous design to create the simplest of organisms precisely compelled to regenerate and replicate itself.


The Role Of PoetryStevens often writes directly about poetry and its human function. The poet “tries by a peculiar speech to speak / The peculiar potency of the general, / To compound the imagination’s Latin with / The lingua franca et jocundissima.” Moreover, “The whole race is a poet that writes down / The eccentric propositions of its fate.” In a manner reminiscent of Wordsworth, Stevens saw the poet as one with heightened powers, but one who like all ordinary people continually creates and discards cognitive depictions of the world, not in solitude but in solidarity with other men and women.
These cognitive depictions find their outlet and their best and final form as words; and thus Stevens can say, “It is a world of words to the end of it, / In which nothing solid is its solid self.” In a poem called “Men Made out of Words,” he says: “Life / Consists of propositions about life.” Poetry is not about life, it is intimately a part of life. As Stevens wrote elsewhere, “The poem is the cry of its occasion, / Part of the res itself and not about it. / The poet speaks the poem as it is, // Not as it was.” Modern poetry is “the poem of the mind in the act of finding / What will suffice.”

http://payingattentiontothesky.com/category/wallace-stevens/

A power of poetry is its words that make thoughts that create action, thoughts move elements together with purpose and direction.

As my eyes skimmed through the Adagia a couple of lines captured my thoughts.  My eyes became more focused as I returned to the Adagia and searched one by one for further light and knowledge that seemed to resonate with my mind:

Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts it becomes and epidemic.

The earth is not a building but a body.
That part of the truth of the world that has its origin in the feelings.
As the reason destroys, the poet must create.
We live in the mind
Everything tends to become real; or everything moves in the direction of reality.
The word must be the thing it represents otherwise it is a symbol. It is a question of identity.

 I had to stop because at this point my mind is ringing and hardly managing the thoughts swimming around in my head.  I had to start writing notes in my book for fear of loss, loss of those ideas, which would surely make me sad.  My mind then returned to Ashley’s blog. How is it that loss seems to trump both past and present? Having lost an adopted brother, I never forget his dorky ways or his annoyingly great stealing of my cheese. Although it has been 15 years my thoughts of him are always a mix of tears and smiles.  Sometimes I wonder what his life would have been like and in the same thought how that would have changed me. 

But he has changed me and I am happy for his time with me and in his absence am happy that I know him; because as words are thoughts and thoughts create feelings, we live in the mind, where reason cannot destroy what our poet creates, and this infection moves us to our epidemic of happiness. “The word must be the thing it represents otherwise it is a symbol.” and so are we, “It is a question of identity.” Who do we want to be?

Does a poet write or do poets transcribe

Is it a poet that writes dialectic harmonium from his subconscious semi filter by the conscious to paint himself in words on a page unexpected to be seen?

Or is it a poet that takes an emotion a cause worthy of debating and discerning about creates a cypher which will allude some and strike dead others it may even set free.

 Free Creation

 Or

The use of words to capitulate the issue to make a statement that is subtle yet poignant.

How did Stevens become such an amazing poet? In the piece I am working on, Lions In Sweden, I marvel at the complexity and yet wonder if he knew he was going to be complex when he began to write.  Did he research the zoo or people he speaks of or did he know them and they came to mind as his soul poured out on the page.  As a romantic I want to believe the later. Yet, the unborn-genius in me wants to believe that through practice and study I could write as brilliantly.

`Lions In Sweeden

Lions in Sweeden (so far) in the fantasy of my reality is a converstation between an unkown and swenson.

The unknown
doesn't like what swenson says his phrases
owns souvenirs
doesn't want lions on his souvenirs
thinks lions are majestic
says the soul has parts
knows what men in sweeden will admit or know is true
souls hanker to have lions
souls stilll hanker to have sovereign images
souls dont want lions necisarrly but some sovereign image

Swenson
was a hunter of sovereigns
there is a soul
and sovereigns of the soul
finds fault with the lions
souvenirs are the soul?

 

Dufy's Lion- woodcuttings some from the Hagenbeck zoo souveniers

building thoughts of thoughts lucretia thinking i think

Are thoughts physical or come from the physical or because of the physical

 

Are feelings physical or do they come from the phyiscal or because of the physical

 

Is the body electric is it elecrodes that drive the heart are words our defibulator

Is the body windy is it air that drives us is it air that feeds our blood

Is the body odorerous is our body driven because of the smells that move us to attrack or dispell us

Is the body a chemical is our body a reaction to chemicals that moves us

that carries our minds to know to understand OR to know we dont know?

 

What invisable force makes a dead man walk on water and a poet wRight?

Desconhecido zorro del hueso de la uvas

H: Tag you’re it, Desconhecido.

D: No fair you run like a zorro.

H: I can’t help that you are deformed, Hueso.

 

D: I could catch you but the uvas are in the way

H: Yea and if you squish the grapes they will throw you in the volcán

D: There are peor things

 

H: Como lo que

D: Like being sent to work for the tirano

H: But then you get to see inside the casa de gran lujo

 

D: My dirt house is better than his prisión of a house

H: But don’t you wish you could see through the cortinilla

D: His house is my shutter it bloquear out the morning sun

 

H: But even the lluvia doesn’t fall around his house

D: Look at his walls blanco and plain what does his house say about him

H: That he is rico and power full

 

D: When his house is gone mine will be opulent, painted with the sol

H: Desconhecido, do you suppose our kids will ever know us

D: Hueso, I hope they will one day run these hills as we do and find our bones

 

And  in those bones I will cry out and they will rise up and they  will harvest these grapes for themselves