rifəlraftər

i’ve found it.

In essence, Poetry is a condensed mode of perception. Though its role as a condensation of anything should not be taken to imply a resulting increase in simplicity; namely, there is somewhat of a reversal regarding the laws of language inherent to poetic construction—the complexity of poetical meaning, implication, and imagery is most often inversely proportional to its simplicity in syntax and form. That is: With poetry, saying something simply is not necessarily the same thing as saying something straightforwardly.

Consider Wallace Stevens, and the gap between the two widens all the more. If we are to trust self promotion, “Artists,” Ezra Pound says, “are the antennae of the race,” endowed with a heightened sense of perception, graced with the ability to see and consequently speak concisely what they observe. Hopefully this well of intellectual greatness is used to inform and guide the populace. However, where Pound would implement a stark separation between the artist and the everyman, Stevens, viewing this role of the poet as an artistic impertinence, is keen to dwell on the democratic multiplicity found in the act of perception itself—he seeks the poet within the everyman, and the poetry within the corporeal, not just the spiritual and the far removed. In Stevens’ work, a deconstruction of poetry is at hand. Therein, layers of philosophical rumination are removed, and the object—the idea, the image, the poem—is revealed in its essence: condensed, transformed, and undoubtedly complex.

Stevens is a compiler of cognizance. His poetry often never speaks with a single voice, but rather with the voices of many. For this reason, a blackbird can be seen in thirteen diverse ways. However, are we to take all thirteen “ways” of seeing this blackbird as individualized instances of unique perception, or rather as the collective product of a single persona, attempting to view something mundane in new, different ways? Perhaps the answer is less important than the question itself; granted, we can accept that this is Stevens at work, the capable wordsmith, testing his abilities to express a singular image in multiple styles, moods, and constructions. But, the poem’s authorship could be feasibly contributed to a consortium of individuals as well, all of them composing unique submissions for our consideration with the only prompt being a blackbird which ostensibly “whirled in the autumn winds.”

The importance of the poem is in its potential for expansion; if Stevens’ sense of humor had gone unrestricted, the poem very well could have been called, “Seven Hundred and Forty Eight Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” And this was precisely his point—perception, being an individual construct of the human imagination, is endless, limitless, and boundlessly eccentric.

Thereby, there exists an infinite number of ways of looking at a blackbird. And the thirteen that come to us through Stevens—each constructing the same bird in distinct, and specific ways—could ultimately be the products of a poetically inspired flock of dichromatic nuns, issuing from a stone church, and frantically pencilling their ideas and thoughts regarding blackbirds within the margins of their prayer books—glory be to God, and all his creatures here on Earth…The specifics of the poem’s inspired origin are inconsequential.

In short, Stevens refused to become a despot of perception. Through his poetry, Stevens did not seek to present something as he perceived it, but rather sought to explore the various ways in which things are, and can be perceived. This is the primary element of Stevens’ complexity. The mercurial aspect of his poetry—the flippancy, the inconclusiveness—though repelling the less than vigilant reader, works to distance Stevens from the poetical “high-horse” upon which Pound (“The Antenna” of his race) would have gladly ridden.


Because Stevens does not present a concrete method of understanding in his poems, there is an implied expectation of contribution. In this regard, Wallace Stevens’ poetry can be seen as a kinetic machine requiring input and even insight of its readers in order to function. The act of perception is rife with movement and association. The production of poetry—and, in connection, the reading of it—thus becomes a kinetic conversation of the mind in relation with the objective, physical world. This is most basically exhibited in Stevens’ inclination to question, and to conclude images and thoughts mid-stride before an answer is reached. This aspect of Stevens could be extended and contrasted with the complacently thoughtful stasis of Frost and the Romantics.

Stevens, instead of presenting the reader with a fully fledged poetical edifice of American ingenuity and art, is content in asking the reader to despair in his own ignorance. Though in doing so, Stevens simultaneously assures the confused peruser that he is not alone in his desperation. Numerous examples can be found within the enigmatic spiritualism of “Sunday Morning.” “Shall our blood fail?” he asks, “And shall the earth/ Seem all of paradise that we shall know?” These are profound and troubling questions, lacking an explicative antecedent or conclusion. Should not the poet answer these perplexing uncertainties? Given the common model, it would seem so. But engendering this hasty conclusion would be to disregard the implied multiplicity of perceptions—the questions are open and therefore exposed. Here, the open question as a linguistic device is an instigator of depth—with each reading, and thereby with each new reader, an additional answer is contributed, an ancillary route of perception is laid bare.

Perhaps the most powerful effect of a unique perception is its ability to transform an object or idea into something conforming to the perceiver’s immediate mode of thought. It is safe to assume that Stevens was aware of this, and thus attempted to expose the dark side of poetry implicit in this characteristic of perception. Capable of providing insight and awareness, poetry is also capable of clouding those same ideals—the goals and aspirations of its own production—in vague verbiage, only masking something it seeks, in vain, to expose. Poetic perception, being a construct of the mind, and thereby a product of the imagination, can never express a thing as it truly is. Rather, perception can only attempt to express in its own language things that are without language. By perceiving something, we subconsciously enact a cycle with the ultimate aim of reconciling things of a corporeal nature—things of the earth—with things and processes of the mind. It is within this cycle, within this attempt at defining singular perceptions, that poetry takes its root.

This concept of the relation between mental perception and the physical, almost organic process of visual reception became Stevens’ primary theme. The definition and understanding of the physical object in the poem thus becomes, to a certain extent, nonessential. Instead, the importance of the same object lies in its infinite potential for the production of a series of unique perceptions. The subject of the poem—whether it be a scene, a persona, or an event—does not exist in isolation; there is no individual approach to dismantling or perceiving it. It is in this way that Stevens’ work can be seen as a summation of every poet’s role within himself and as a working component of a cognizant society.

Poetry relies on perception, and thereby can never be an honest and simple representation of reality; what was described and perceived by one poet is discounted entirely by another. Stevens understood this and thus presented his subjects as they were: mercurial, open-ended, and unresolved. In this regard, Wallace Stevens, battling some of his “naive” contemporaries, was unwilling to break his subjects down into their visual essences. Each image—each subject—as Stevens’ poetry manipulates it, is a silo of potential perceptional approaches. Inevitably, these approaches become more important than the subject—the image—itself. At root, the physical existence of the subject cannot be contained, nor can it become a “mask” for the object’s true identity. For this reason, “Water never formed to mind or voice”. Water, as an element—as an image—forms not to the mind but to itself and from a series of perceptions spread across time.


And what of Wallace Stevens? Is he to fall away, lost in the complexities of his own making? What did Wallace Stevens perceive? If the thirteen ways are, in fact, individual representations of a blackbird, which impression belonged to Stevens? It is easy to assume VIII. With its nobility and calm acceptance of what is, it is perhaps the closest we can come to pinning Stevens down:

I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

The speaker is older, educated, and wise. The segment could easily be taken as the poet’s admittance of his own insufficiencies and a recognition of the shortcomings in his art. It is the poet, elated by his ability to interpret and to “know noble accents,” to compose “lucid, inescapable rhythms,” realizing for the first time that, as an element of the world which he—the poet—must see, the blackbird demands recognition—it is the divine within the mundane, though it is seen as such only through a unique and individual form of perception.

If I when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
and the sun is a flame-white disc
in silken mists
above shining trees—
if I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my mirror
waving my shirt round my head
and singing softly to myself:
“I am lonely, lonely.
I was born to be lonely,
I am best so!”
If I admire my arms, my face,
my shoulders, flanks, buttocks
against the yellow drawn shades—

Who shall say I am not
the happy genius of my household?

-William Carlos Williams

I’ve recently re-read Nabokov’s ‘Lolita.’

I cannot even think of what to say.

I really like it.



“you can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.”

Accepting that fiction is a largely linear craft regarding time progression and development, it becomes obvious that Proust was an adversary of protocol.

For within Proust, the present, as a specified point in both space and time, forms the center of a nebulous web that reaches contemporaneously into the future, the past, and deeper into the present moment as it exists than what is immediately perceived by the reader, and perhaps the author himself.
Diagrammatically—for I currently am unable to adequately describe it—this can be represented in two different ways. It can be seen as a sort of linear, though dendritic narrational line, thus:

dendritic representation

or as a sort of concentric relation of three diverse, remote epochs in time, thus:

concentric representation

I’m partial to the second myself. Though, if you are quick to counter: “Yes, but that’s a fancy way of showing the obvious: our current lives are inherently affected by and constructed of events in the past as well as aspirations found solely in the future—a future idealized, remote, though inflexibly real.” You wouldn’t be wrong in saying so.

However, in Proust, the perception of this widely acknowledged “truth” goes beyond such a topical explanation. In Proust, the past and future, instead of merely acting invisibly upon the characters’ actions, as well as constructing their individual traits, maintain a nearly physical presence within each successive contemporary moment.

In this regard, past, present, and future are all actors upon Proust’s stage. The amorphous idea of one’s identity based on one’s experience of an individual temporality is not forced behind the satin curtain of “common sense.” Proust denies that this idea of temporality in an individual should be taken for granted. In short: time is a near-entity; time is not the structure in which events are placed, but rather the essence behind an event’s impetus, placement, and outcome.

What Proust means to expose is that time, that “thing”—for lack of a better word—that has perpetually confounded scientists and novelists alike, is rather simple. Taken literally, time, as opposed to being something metaphysical and beyond definition, rather is composed of easily recognizable physical elements, sensory data, and—it is Proust, after all—memories.

Whether it be the smell of lilac tainting the nose of a youthful perambulator, or the savory effect engendered by a Madeleine, dipped into a strong lime tea, each of these perceptions—moments, supported by one’s senses, left suspended in an individual’s unique understanding of time—work as pieces which ultimately compile to produce a life.


This is all very vague and philosophical—if that. Patience is pleaded for.
I’m sure that it will develop into something containing at least a meager amount of sense and worth. More will be added later as I get further along in the reading.

In the meantime: Think of a cephalopod, for this is the consummate Proustian character. With a brain for a body, and countless suctioning digits, its reason, its perception of time, reaches outward in every which way, in an attempt to hold onto and assimilate moments, ideas, dreams, entire lives. And sometimes—for this is an unavoidable result of having suction cups for fingers—we cannot seem to shake these things free.
And now, for the cephalopods.

Proust’s volumo secundo, “Within a Budding Grove,” has been veritably subdued! Onwards—gallantly, headlong into the thick of it—toward and through volume the third.

Reflections, observations, vehement fulminations are still warranted. Give it time. I am even now reeling with the “news” undoubtedly disclosed to southbound eyes.

Still…..I’m guiltily enjoying it, without knowing why I should feel guilty in doing so. The work is beautiful, plainly beautiful, and my advocacy of high modernism, against which I place Proust as a sort of over-qualified and contemporaneous preamble, has been trundling into obscurity and uncertainty as a result.

I, too, doubt the accuracy of my Latin.

MR. SAMUEL VINCENT LEMLEY
PO BOX 15338 UCSB
SANTA BARBARA, CA 93107
Dear Samuel:

It gives me great pleasure to offer you admission to the Sophomore class at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the General College. Even among the many strong students applying for admission this year, your academic and personal achievements set you apart. We believe that you have an exciting future ahead of you, and we hope that Carolina will be the next step in your journey.

Because we want you to finish strongly and come to Carolina ready to excel, your enrollment will depend upon your successful completion of your current academic year and your continued achievement at the level that enabled us to offer you admission. If you are currently enrolled in spring courses, we require that you have your final end-of-year record sent to us as soon as it becomes available.

Enclosed you will find a detailed description of the opportunities that await you, as well as a checklist of the steps you must take in order to complete your enrollment. Please review this information carefully, and please note that you will need to submit your response to our offer of admission no later than May 11, 2009, to guarantee your place in the class. Shortly, you will receive a written evaluation of your transfer credit that summarizes the credits you will be awarded upon your enrollment at the University. Please note that your class standing may change as result of our formal credit evaluation.

Again, congratulations on your admission to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I am delighted to be the first to welcome you to Carolina, and I wish you every success in the months ahead.

Sincerely,

Stephen Farmer
Associate Provost and Director of Admissions

And so, each step of mine jauntily bounces off of the fleeting promises inherent to life; a goal has been reached, and in consequence, a chain of potentialities has been simultaneously revealed, promised, and resolved.

As an English major with an adequate amount of the old amour propre, I have taken on the challenge of Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time.”

Reflections and reactions are bound to follow; I have only completed Vol. 1, “Swann’s Way,” and it can be said that its position as a masterpiece is fully justified. The intricacies in its architecture and syntax, which, in fact, are presented in a most simple way, are resplendent—coursing with life and hidden associations. The ambiguities present act as agents of disambiguation to what came before—I will not begin here, I hope to have the entirety of this beautiful monstrosity tamed and constrained by summer’s end.

Luck wished once is appreciated,
twice, and it is abhorred.

An outpouring of tension is needed; a cathartic burst of noise.
Igor will suffice:

What we do know is this: sense is arrived at by opposition. This idea of the dichotomy found in the process of creating sense—that is, sensible unity in logical signification reached through disunity—is not a new one. To a degree, every arm and branch of semiotic linguistics is somehow dependent on the principle of the dialectic—a predictable interchange of thesis and antithesis until some form, or at least some shade of sense reveals itself: a sense seemingly random, though as a final product, ostensibly indisputable and crystalline—defying refutation. It cannot be denied that we make sense of words, names, and concepts by use of other words, names, and concepts. It is the act of definition by selective cohesion; a search for meaning by way of a linguistic system of unknown origin or design. This chain of clarifying abstraction extends to a length based on the complexity of the concept or word at hand.

The process has taken on many names since its first appearance, and its inception can be placed alongside that of language itself. This is exhibited insofar as with language, we make an immediate leap to understanding—to logic—in our day to day modes of communication. In language, a web is woven throughout society, at once unifying a cultural group as well as defining it. Language is the means by which its end (sense) is reached. Word for word, diction woven into syntax, the relationships between words form a system of understanding—a system through which we might navigate in order to develop new ideas and methods of communicating a thought or concept.

For our purposes here, this vast subject must be condensed. The conversation is to be delimited and demarcated to the authorial process of creating a paradox, an absurdity, i.e. Nonsense. Centering on the opinions delineated in The Logic of Sense by Gilles Deleuze, the process of this linguistic dialectic must be questioned, tested in practice—tested, perhaps most importantly, within the literary mode of nonsense. Following in this vein, Deleuze’s conclusion on the nature of nonsense* cannot be accepted. In his exegesis, the ultimate dichotomy is left out: Sense/Nonsense. Because Nonsense is only a negation of sense, it relies entirely on an understanding of the sense used to create it. Namely, the act of writing Nonsense requires an initial substructure of sense if its product is to be understood as Nonsense, therefore nonsense cannot be a free-standing entity. Its nonsensical classification cannot be achieved solely through its existence. All of this can be further condensed: 1. Sense relies on a logical web of understanding, 2. Nonsense (by directly negating it) relies on sense, thereby, 3. Nonsense must follow the same protocol as sense and cannot state its own meaning unaided.

A separation must be made between philosophical speculation and artifice. The common cycle of production by an artist, followed by a dismantling of thought, purpose, and moral by philosophers/semioticians etc., must be abandoned. It is within this cycle that Deleuze has set up camp. What is lost in his explanation, however, is the intention of the authors to which he applies his logic. Because nonsense is produced through and by language, it cannot neglect the roots of pure rationality from which it emerges—a rationality of linguistic interplay, and logical, systematic relations. We must confront and expose the way in which Nonsense is constructed. To this end, Nonsense as a genre can take root in two separate entities: Language and Circumstance.

Language. A gnat buzzes in Alice’s ear: “What’s the use of [things] having names….if they wo’n’t answer to them (Carroll 149)?” Thus the undeniable absurdity of language comes forth. Absurd, though concurrently logical. Alice responds, “No use to them, …but it’s useful to the people that name them, I suppose. If not, why do things have names at all (Carroll 149)?” And with little flourish, Carroll takes a jab at himself and his chosen profession. For, at its most basic level, is not Through the Looking Glass entirely composed of these “useless” words? Are not all works of literature built around this uselessness? Useless, but necessary, Alice might say. But why? The role that language plays in the production of nonsense must be explored first. Its acting as an introduction is based on its importance—literary nonsense must start with language. Carroll is perhaps the most appropriate one to turn to in this venture of understanding, for none before or after him have exposed the absurdity of language—written or spoken—to quite the degree he has. In Carroll, language sheds its assumed totality; language bends, language strains to the point of breaking, and then snaps backward assuming a new meaning, a pure significance. In this way, Carroll explores individual words for nonsense.

The origins of individual words are questioned: why is a tree called a “tree,” and not a boot? Or, why is it that we must call Latin by its given name and not “Laughing” in order for it to fit, to make sense (Carroll 85)? Carroll’s nonsense relies on the sense already in place with language. He does not create a form of nonsense by simply expressing a “thing.” As Deleuze has said, Nonsense says its own sense, but in Carroll, the opposite could be argued. Of course, calling Latin, “Laughing,” is nonsensical, but we see it that way only in relation to the original context in which it was said. The joke, if it can be called a joke, relies on the reality, the seriousness of what is real in order for it to be seen as “making-fun.”

The extent and power of single words are also explored. Carroll examines the way in which individual words are qualified. The Red Queen explains: “When you (Alice) say ‘hill,…I could show you hills, in comparison with which you’d call that a valley.” Alice, again taking up the cause of logic responds, simply: “No, I shouldn’t…a hill ca’n’t be a valley, you know. That would be nonsense…(Carroll 140).” The interchange goes on to point/counterpoint, with the Red Queen always unveiling an antithesis to what Alice considers as irrefutable fact. We are forced to question which is more nonsensical, the fact that a hill can’t be a valley, or the idea that a hill must always maintain a certain amount of “hillness” in order for it to be considered such. The paradox can be applied to almost any comparison involving hierarchical significance and qualification—a bowl is not a tub is not a pool is not a lake. Where and when did these qualifications arise?

Nonsense in language is a challenge to any form of linguistic totality. We take language completely for granted—we do not realize that, if we were to step back, the “logic” of language becomes almost nonsensical. It is in this way that Carroll develops a unique form of nonsense through sense. The darker side of this lies in the potential for misunderstanding. Language is taken for granted in order to assume efficiency and a standardized mode of communication. If this accepted system of language is questioned, challenged, or inverted, then understanding and sense disappear beyond our reach. When Alice says she is parched, the Red Queen takes it to mean she would like a biscuit, something Alice would rather not have, but accepts out of courtesy (Carroll 143). It could be assumed that the word “thirsty” means something different to the Red Queen, or at least something more than the state of being in need of a drink. This concept is troubling.

(1)* 1 [Nonsense] says something, but at the same time it says the sense of what it says: it says its own sense. It is therefore completely abnormal (Deleuze 67).