The Man from the Night

"What kind of thought,"
I asked the man who came from the night,
"prepares a man for death?"
His hands were manacled
and from his collar hung a leash.

"The empty gurgles of the last
blood through the veins,
an ice-edged gasp, the lung's
last fling, a wordless trick
such as a domme might turn

"or pull, a page thrown to the wind,
a video of sea and sky, a childhood
dolphin ride (yet still the sense
of being tied) these narratives
are preparation of a sort," he said,

"but are sensation-driven. Logic
brought no man into this world,
or eased his passage here or later,
and will bring no comfort to him then.
We seek a thought sublime,

"subliminal, though incompletely beautiful,
as is the sea. One source there is:
one comforter, one hand upon my leash,
one Queen of Night and Bitch of the park bench,
one Mistress of the deep within." "And with

"that thought you are prepared to die?" I asked.
"It breaks upon me like a wave,"
he said, "a fist through glass,
a scarred back, shards of song,
thoughts fashioned dolphin-wise;

"or child-like images arise
with feelings such as floaters in the eye
or dark clouds on a summer's day
may bring - rogue instincts
out of sinc with mine.

"The sea swell lifts
and carries me, its kindly reach
takes hold upon the leash, the beach
receives me like a bird
(no vermin in its plumes),

"assures me I am rock
on which the world will shatter -
and rock, the chosen rock,
the sea will grind to sand...
So no, not die with thoughts of her,

"but rather knowing how a change
in us wrings echoes from the sea,
how portals open, myths are born -
vignettes perhaps - among which
my last swim with dolphins,

"seaward to their graves. The leash
lies limply on the waves,
but she does still what she does best:
she keeps my frothy, whipped emotions
strictly locked away."

Every Picture Tells a Story

One of the more enjoyable aspects of growing old is the "I remember that!" moment. Occasionally, though, it brings with it a downside, a sense of unbelief, sometimes even guilt, that you could ever have forgotten... I have enjoyed two such moments recently, one of which did indeed bring in its train a tinge of guilt. It was occasioned by reading the obituary (a less enjoyable aspect of growing old: figures from your past become history) of the painter Martin Bloch. I guess I would have to admit that as major artists go, he was probably a minor one, but his work was no less enjoyable, "important" even, for that. If he was major it was as a lyrical colourist. There have been few better than him, I think. His canvases were, to my mind, all a painting should be: a lucid expression of an original take upon the world. He should not be forgotten, which makes me sad that I did indeed forget him - though I have been in good company all these years. Perjaps I will post more on him in the future, in the meantimea few images of his work (on display at The Sainsbury Centre, Norwich) can be seen at http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ArtistWorks?cgroupid=999999961&artistid=769&page=1

This subject for this post was brought to mind by the current fashion for all things Chinese. The Times has been running a "Brainteaser" feature in which readers are invited to use their intuition to match words with Chinese picturegrams. It reminded me of the excitement I once felt upon encountering Ezra Pound's theories of poetics. As I subsequently discovered, the inspiration for them came from a total misunderstanding of the nature of Chinese characters, but that did nothing to dampen down my enthusiasm, either for Pound's theories or his poems.

I came to his work via the now famous poem "In a Station at the Metro" in which commuters emerging from the Paris subway take on the aspect of wet petals.

  
The apparition              of these faces               in the crowd
Petals                 on a wet, black                 bough.

It is now, to use an overworked word, iconic, but back then the compression, the rejection of conjunctions, the unorthodox spacing, were all new to me. Everything, in fact, was there in embyo, just waiting for its coming of age and its call-up for The Cantos.
So what was this "misunderstanding" that led to something that would prove ground-breaking?

When Fenellosa died, his widow asked Pound to edit her late husband's notebook. Pound found there a series of classical Chinese poems with Fenellosa's notes in English written beneath them. (Intriguingly, they were spaced rather as Pound would later space the lines of his poems, as he spaced those in the poem given above.) Fenellosa had fallen prey to the basic misunderstanding that Pound would inherit and accept completely: the belief that all Chinese characters were ideograms, compressed visual metaphors that had developed over long years of increasing abstraction. That being so, Fenellosa had reasoned, they could be directly transcribed into English, without reference to their original language. Pound accepted this, too, as gospel, and saw this "sign language" as a model for a new kind of poetry in which he would juxtapose, not just visual images, but almost anything else: narratives, prose on occasion, facts of all sorts, his theories of finance and usury. It led to the Imagist movement and to The Cantos.

So what do I recall of that far off time? (I am speaking once more of my art school days - see my "It's How He Sees It" post.)
I recall that we (some of us) actually read the cantos - though not in their entirety, I think!
We embraced his imagist theories, and thought that all poetry should be "Imagist", though what we meant by that varied.
We knew that Pound had edited Eliot's Waste Land, had given it its form and that it had been dedicated to him - and we applauded that and thought The Waste Land, like Cathay and Tha Cantos, were a breath of fresh air in what was a very stuffy environment, but we tended to read Pound, not Eliot.
And I recall that we (most of us) felt that The Cantos didn't quite work, but that it didn't matter, for their importance transcended their quality - which I think was correct.
Even knowing that Pound was a tireless promoter of Eliots cause, didn't persuade us to read Eliot - so far as I can recall - from what was over fifty years back!
I have scoured the Internet for a glimpse of Pound's exposition of his imagist theories, but have found nothing. Some bits about him, but none by him. If any kind person reading this should know something I don't know, I would be very grateful to be enlightened.

Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon - and mine.

A Wikipedia Image




Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" is one hundred years old this year.

Some facts:

The painting measures 8 feet by 8 feet.
Picasso worked on it for over a year.
He produced over 400 sketches for it.
The composition originally included two men, a sailor and a medical student.
The "Avignon" in the title is not the town, but a street in Barcelona's red light district.

---

So, these young ladies are prostitutes, and from them, many would maintain, sprang the whole of what we now call modern art. They caused shock and horror on their debut and still are often greeted with incomprehension. I, like most, have had my difficulties with them, not least of which, the question of why each was conceived and rendered in differently. For example, to the figure on the extreme left paint has been applied more thickly than is the case with the others. Her head is more classical in conception than are theirs. In the center are two figures influenced - or taken directly - from Iberian sculptures. One wears a mask taken from African art, while the two central, standing figures have been graced with a few curves which have been denied to the others, for whom sharp, splintery, geometric forms are the order of the day. They all seem to be in no sort of relationship with each other, like five figures imported from five other paintings, and all stare out of the picture frame as if at the viewer. They share a common colour scheme. These three facts are about all they have in common.
This multiplicity of styles within one painting was, and is, a stumbling block for many critics. What was Picasso driving at? It is of no help to point to what others have found in the work, or to emphasise the influence it has had on Modernism. (See January's post "It's how he Sees It".)
Neither of the two standard responses seem to me to be wholly convincing. The first of these says that during the time Picasso took to complete the work he, being the artist he was, took up and then discarded several styles, and that our five chicks who were all laid (shall I say) at different times, were depicted accordingly. Like Salisbury Cathedral, I guess, thoughoils, unlike architecture, allows the artist to go back over earlier work in the light of new insights. The other response is to say that he was trying to make us look, to make us see. The extended effort that he put into the painting is clear evidence, I think, that he didn't see this as one more painting, but as something special. Ground-breaking, even. It has been said that if Picasso had died before 1907 he would have been an interesting minor painter. After this he was a colossus.
My own view is that this is Picasso pushing at the boundaries. Having five young women to work on, gave him the opportunity to push against five different boundaries. It is him saying (discovering) "So, if I push Cezanne to the ultimate, this is where I get to, whereas African Art pushed as far as it will go, will land me here," or "This is journey's end so far as Iberian sculptiure is concerned," and so on. It is the new Martin Luther nailing his theses to the cathedral door: "Copying is out. Copying is not reality." No longer is it the case that you look at something and then try to reproduce it, you look - or not, as the case may be - and think about purposefully changing it. He is rethinking the grammar, the syntax of painting, and he is discovering, for himsel but also for those who would follow, potential ways to paint - in this case, women. It is, if you like, his sampler. And the reason it took so long and so many studies is because he had to figure out how to blend five differing styles into one cohesive painting.

---

I have taken the liberty of adding for good measure my own depiction of Les Demoiselles, shown in happier days, relaxing on an away day to the beach. I did attempt to portray each of the young ladies in a completely different style. (It was actually quite tricky, and I did not persist.) Oh, and I have reinstated one of the young men - the medical student, as it happens. The sailor proved to be a bit of a misfit, and Picasso was quite right to leave him out.

It May Not Say What It Says

After posting "It's How He Sees It" last month, I was surprised and delighted to receive an email sent by a friend from college days. The email - and another which followed soon after - developed an aspect of literary theory that I had touched on: the possibility that a work might possess content, even contradictory content, which the author did not knowingly include and of which he had no conscious knowledge. I was grateful to him referring me to an essay by Pierre Macherey, "The Text Says What It Does Not Say", which I have now read in lengthy extracts - and may even invest in the full text at some future point. For anyone who is interested in the subject (deconstruction of texts) I can recommend as an introduction a Literary Studies piece intended for Third Year Undergraduates. You will find it at
http://www2.plymouth.ac.uk/gateway_to_study/essaywriting/litera-2.htm (or click on the title of this post).
Thinking on these things - and the idea, outlined in the Lit Studies piece, that the "meaning" of a literary work resides in its incompleteness, its "gaps and silences" - I was reminded of the question attributed to Basho, the seventeenth century master of the Haiku: "Is there any good in saying everything?" An illustration I have seen given with the quotation, comes from the modern art of photography: "The poet makes the exposure, leaving the reader to develop it." I leave you to develop that thought, but as I do so I also leave you with (for what it may be worth!) my own light-hearted contribution to the debate.

The Poet

Quietly in his living room,
he'd write his poems
like a dead man
filling in the details
of dead people on a form.

And yet the poems laughed and sang;
his words would play the fool,
wear tatty jeans and swap their clothes
like children out of school.

Morose and unaware of how
they skittered round the room,
escaping from the forms he thought
secure as Alcatras,
he'd fit each word into its frame -
”Forms are,” he said, “the only way
to give words gravitas.”

He was a saintly Christian man
whose instincts were to bless,
how could he know his words would run
and be promiscuous?

"Experimental!" critics cried,
"The form, the form is all!
It's here and there and everywhere -
in one form or another.”

The people heard the words at play,
they heard them in the street,
"How perfectly absurd," they said,
to be so indiscreet!"

But when at last the word was out,
their thoughts, once cold, grew warm:
"How sad," they said,
"the poet's dead -
died filling in a form!"

Two Centenaries

Think of a poet. Can you recall the details of your first experience of a poem by him or her? I ask because it just so happens that this year is the double centenary of two poets, W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, and it also happens that my first encounter with the poetry of each was memorable. I suspect that is somewhat unusual.

Auden

Auden, I met on the night mail crossing the border. I was young enough to be completely bowled over by the rhythm of it, and though I didn't realise it at the time, also by what was in fact my first dose of Benjamin Britten - but that's another story. I can still recite chunks of it from the memory. On that occasion I couldn't get them out of my head, particularly:

"This is the Night Mail crossing the border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner and the girl next door."

(full text at: http://www.newearth.demon.co.uk/poems/lyric206.htm )

It was a documentary, a classic film of the Postal Special's night run from London to Scotland. No, not A documentary, it was THE documentary of its day. Auden spoke for his generation and to the man on the tram on his way to work. The same man today, I suppose, will know of Auden, if at all, from "Twelve Songs" from his "Funeral Blues" featured in the film "Three Weddings and a Funeral". I rather think that most people, reminded of it, would say they loved it, but haven't heard it since.

He spoke to his generation, but his work could also be highly intellectual and/or laced with private jokes. He tackled the romantic entanglements of his fellow man, along with the big problems of the day. I find one of his most moving works to be "In Memory of W.B.Yeats". (Full text at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15544 )

Often overlooked is Auden's revival of verse drama. He wrote several libretti for opera and several successful verse plays and he was before his time in believing that there should be no distinction between cast and audience, all should be involved. He co-scripted with Isherwood and Benjamin Britten, though this last partnership did not achieve the success it promised.

Louis MacNeice

"Bagpipe Music" was my first encounter with Louis MacNeice. Like "Night Mail", though for vastly different reasons, it wouldn't leave me; words were going round in my head, particularly the couplet:

"It's no go the Yogi-Man, it's no go Blavatsky,
All we want is a bank balance and a bit of skirt in a taxi."

(Full text at: http://www.artofeurope.com/macneice/mac6.htm)

Was I lucky or unlucky in my introduction? Both, I think. I felt at the time that he was probably not one to be taken too seriously, that what I had heard sounded too much like a cross between a nonsense rhyme and material for a stand-up commedian.

Burns Night

Tonight is Burns Night. What that conjures up in the minds of most people, I guess, is a certain conviviality, not to say rowdiness, associated with the eating of haggis and the singing of "Auld Lang Syne". The words known by everyone are:

For Auld Lang Syne!

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And auld lang syne?

Also well-known is:
"My Love is like a Red, Red Rose",
Less so, perhaps:
"A Man's a Man for a' that", "To a Mouse" and "Address to a Haggis".

For these poems and others, with texts, also facts about the poet and much else, click on the title of this blog.

What Burns Night (and to a lesser extent Burns) conjures up in my mind are a few verses from Hugh MacDiarmid's "A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle". This is a deep and complex poem in which the drunk man finds himself lying helplessly on a moonlit hillside, staring at a thistle and meditating on its jaggedness and its beauty. This becomes a metaphor for the divided state of Scotland - and much else, as the meditations become varied and far-ranging.

But here he is on Burns Night (though not Burns):

"You canna gang to a Burns supper even
Wi-oot some wizened scrunt o' a knock-knee
Chinee turns roon to say, 'Him Haggis - velly goot!'
And ten to wan the piper is a Cockney.

"No wan in fifty kens a wurd Burns wrote
But misapplied is a'body's property,
And gin there was his like alive the day
They'd be the last a kennin' haund to gie -

"Croose London Scotties wi their braw shirt fronts
And a' their fancy freens rejoicin
That similah gatherings in Timbuctoo,
Bagdad - and Hell, nae doot - are voicin

"Burns' sentiments o' universal love,
In pidgin English or in wild-fowl Scots,
And toastin ane wha's nocht to them but an
Excuse for faitherin Genius wi their thochts.

"A' they've to say was aften said afore,
A lad was born in Kyle to blaw aboot.
What unco fate maks him the dumpin-grun
For aa the sloppy rubbish they jaw oot?

"Mair nonsense has been uttered in his name
Than in ony's barrin liberty and Christ.
If this keeps spreedin as the drink declines,
Syne turns to tea, wae's me for the Zietgeist!"

If you do not know the poems of MacDiarmid, you should certainly see about putting that right.
You will not agree with all his sentiments, but you surely will enjoy disagreeing.

Here he is, for example, on the common folk:

"And a' the names in History mean nocht
To maist folk but 'ideas o' their ain,'
The vera opposite o' onything
The Deid 'ud awn gin they cam' back again.

"A greater Christ, a greater Burns, may come.
The maist they'll dae is to gi'e bigger pegs
To folly and conceit to hank their rubbish on.
They'll cheenge folks' talk but no their natures, fegs!"

Start at the link I have given - the poems have a glossary running alongside. Enjoy!

Homage to Duchamp

Another from the "sketchbook". I call this one
"Explosion in a Shingle Factory" to cock a snook
at critics who have likened it to a nude descending
a staircase.

It's how he sees it!

For me, it has been one of those weeks when whichever way I might turn, the same train of thought would present itself: in the newspaper, magazines, on the radio, everyone seemed to be on the same track, a track that for me led to a little nostalgia, and to a question echoing from centuries back, from days spent arguing with fellow art students about how we might legitimately judge a work of art to be successful. Along with that question went one concerned with who is best placed to judge whether a work is successful. There were those who argued that only the artist can know, for the only valid criterion of success is whether or not the finished product corresponds to his/her initial vision (has s/he, in fact, accomplished what s/he set out to do?), and only the artist can know that. If it met that one test, it would be deemed successful; if not, then it was written off - which should have meant the waste bin: ergo, everything not junked by the artist is successful! (I use the word "vision" as shorthand for "the artist's personal - i.e. unique - experience and the significance that s/he gives to it.")

So from that standpoint we have to take it on trust from the artist that the work is faithful to the vision to which we cannot be privy. We are saying, in effect, not just "It's art because I (as artist) say it is" (Marcel Duchamp), but even that it is great art because I say it is! But wait: does a close correspondence between the finished artefact and the vision, automatically make it great (or successful) art? And conversely, does a lack of such correspondence mean that it fails, end of? If millions of people all over the world are moved, thrilled, excited, chastened, shamed or whatever by the work, yet what they are getting from it is not what the creator thought s/he was putting in, does that inescapably disqualify it from being great art?

The word "truth" comes to mind at this point, and with it "communication". They go hand in hand. For me a work of art, to be a valid work of art, must communicate something, and at least part of that something has to do with truth. But truth to what? More echoes from the art school: we talked much in those days about truth to materials.( Important if you are carving stone, not to try to make it look like wood.) Also, truth to yourself, and to your vision. But if we can't know what that was, what then? First of all, when looking at, listening to or reading the work in question, I want at the very least to be able to catch some of the emotion, the passion that led to it and went into it. Being true to yourself is an aspect of your character, and the work will display whatever character its creator showed when creating it. Frieda Hughes remarked in Monday's Times 2 that while sports commentators may speak of sportsmen and teams showing character in the way they perform, we don't think that way of artists, musicians, writers. To my mind, great art results from an inner exploration of some sort. The persistence with which that is pursued and the concentration with which it is pursued decide the intensity of the experience, from which derives the work's character. Does that help to decide who is best able to make a judgement on it? I think it may, for when we follow that path to its final destination, we find that a great work of art has the ooomph to make you turn aside from being yourself in the-world-as-it-appears-to you, and, at least for a while, to be another consciousness in some quite different-looking world.
Whether that happens exactly in the way the artist envisioned it happening, seems to me quite incidental. One of my favourite quotes is that by Alfred Brendel:"A work of art is like a person: it has more than one soul in its breast." Just as valid from this perspective is the man in the street's (still) instinctive defense of "modern" art: "Well, that's the way the artist sees it!" Let's hope he's right!

The End of the Line

Browsing through the Review section of yesterday's Saturday Guardian, my heart initially sank when I reached Gillian Beer's article, End of the Line, in that paper's Lives and Letters. Another article on whether or not poetry should rhyme!
But then I read it, and as I began to do so my heart recovered somewhat: it was not that at all, but the most sustained piece of common sense and thought-provoking comment I have ever (I think) read on the strangely vexed subject of rhyming. I commend it to anyone still feeling saddened by the spectacle of the banner-waving bards at the Ledbury Festival. My own feeling? As ever, truth lies on both sides of that particular divide, but do read the article for yourself, at Guardian Unlimited . If you don't already think it, you may decide that there is no real argument. But something I am sure about: you will be well rewarded for your time and trouble.

Intelligence Gathering

I read somewhere that catharsis can be the blogger's only motive, that for secular man, blogging has replaced the confessional. (Are there no Catholic bloggers then?) I am a lapsed painter who has not picked up a brush in well over a year. (I will let you know in some future blog if that unburdening of the soul produces any spiritual benefit.) Having so deserted my first love, things have not gone too easily with my second poetry.

The "photos" from my last blog, "Winter of Global Warming", were an attempt to pick up the brush again. They would be "sketches" for a painting, but I became fascinated by the process and began to see them as an end in themselves.

"Write about what you know", is the usual advice to wannabe poets when they start to write. Should work just as well when wanting to restart, I thought. As luck would have it, I had on file an unfinished fragment of autobiography. Even easier to ease myself back into the swing of things by finishing one already under way. Here then, though not exactly epic, my faint-hearted attempt to woo back the favours of the lady Calliope:

Intelligence Gathering

The light below,
which was always white in sitting room and hall,
but yellow from my post upon the landing,
could be a wedge to split a wall in two
or a flood that rose up through the stairwell,
filling it with muffled sounds, strange vowels

that surely came through water.
My great aunt and my mother talking
late at night, their voices sounding foreign.
My great aunt's house. My brother,
five years younger, sleeping, unaware
of how the world can change its shape and bare

its soul when darkness falls. Evacuees,
our world had changed before, conscripting me
so far into its bonnet's bee of spy and counter-spy,
that zooming in on my aunt's bureau, my mind's eye
would recognise among the clutter, code books, maps
and two-way radio - all trappings of the spy.

Sometimes on my watch, a phrase
would startle with a vague familiarity,
sunlit and leaping from the flood, glistening
with drops from memory: a distant cousin
to one of my first snapshots of the world.
My job to gather and decode. Sifting through,

I laid bare secrets that I swore
to carry with me to the grave:
my parents married after I was born;
my mother loved a man who wore
a funny hat; and, dying of an unknown
illness, I had only days to live.

A Winter of Global Warming

Ah, for the power of the found phrase!

It was the phrase "winter of global warming"

that led to these "fiddlings" in my digital sketchbook.

Oxymorons are very inspirational, I find.

Through a Glass Lightly

Yesterday's Times2 carried an article on The New York-based artists, The OpenEnded Group and their digital reconstruction of York Minster's Great East Window. The window is undergoing restoration, courtesy of a National Lottery grant, and is current;y under wraps, not to mention scaffolding. For a few weeks, though, the public will be able to see it in its computerised reinterpretation. One phrase in the article caught my eye particularly, a quote from a member of the group: "None of us is religious, but we ended up making a religious work of art."
I wondered briefly if it would be possible to make a work of art that was not religious. I guess it might, but that would all depend on your understanding of the word. To me "religious" implies that something is going on that is not wholly physical - though that need not be taken to imply that something is going on that is not physical. Usually, it means that somehow the physical has acquired a non-physical dimension. (Hey, isn't the universe's supposed fourth dimension, time, non-physical? Or doesn't that count?) So, if the human mind can posit such a creation, it should be able to posit other non-physical dimensions, should it not?
For me, visual art without that extra dimension is decoration; poetry or prose without it has something akin to decoration: rhyme rhythm, assonance, storytelling, or whatever, but I find myself looking for that extra dimension, that value-added dimension, and being disappointed when I do not find it. It is the inexplicable that eventually makes sense of life and brings sense to life. In life it is always there, lurking beneath the surface. Art exposes it. It is the ghost in the machine, the numinous in the secular. Have a look at my last blog, The Day was Green: Wallace Steven in "The Man with the Blue Guitar" argues that poetry should take the place of out-dated religion - "empty heaven and its hymns". And how will it do that without the presence of something not wholly physical?
Or do you see it differently?

The Day Was Green

Christmas has for me long been associated with a good read. Books have always figured prominently on my wish lists, and to be able to curl up with a good new book was ever an essential part of the festivities. This time around it was not a new book, but one I was given way back in September and have not yet been able to put back on its shelf: "Wallace Stevens: The Collected Poems". How did he manage to stay beneath my radar for so long? True, I had read the odd poem, but individually they had somehow not amounted to a significant encounter.

Latterly, I have been getting to know (I think - I hope!) his "The Man with the Blue Guitar", a long poem which seems to have inspired as many interpretations as there have been interpreters, analysts and reviewers. So, it is about perception; it deals with the different natures and roles of poetry and music; it is a debate between philosophers of the Realism and Anti-Realism schools; it is concerned with form and function in art; it is a dream sequence; and so on. They seem to agree about only one thing: it was inspired or suggested by Picasso's Blue Period painting.

Here now, for what it is worth, is the way I have come to see the poem:
It takes the form of a dialogue between the man and "them" and it opens with:

"The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are."

The man replied, "Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."

And they said then, "But play you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are."

There are thirty-three such sections, though of varying length.
I suppose that the first thing that might detain the reader is "A shearsman of sorts". It's unexpected. In what sense is a man playing a guitar a shearsman? But we see, as the poem progresses, that he is shaping reality. He is bent over his guitar, an image, perhaps, of the artisan/craftsman's concentration as he brings the inherent beauty out of his natural material - though changing it in the process.

The poem raises the question: can we, in fact, see things as they are? "Things as they are" is a phrase that is repeated like a refrain throughout the poem, but it could be said that the reality we see is merely a figment of our brains. If these were constructed differently, or if our eyes were sensitive, not to what we now call the visible part of the spectrum, but to rays of longer or shorter wavelengths, would not the world look rather different? Or to take another example: our brains do not receive photographic-type images from the world. Rather, a few cells receive data concerning straight lines in the field of vision, elsewhere others are informed about the existence of corners, yet others handle curves, and so forth. Somehow these fragments are assembled to form the picture that we "see", but if our brains were structured differently... So the day is green, but the guitar, the shaping tool (and/or the organ of the man's perception?) is blue.

In a much later long poem, "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven", Stevens again uses the same colour coding:

"....... and green, the signal

To the lover, and blue, as of a secret place
In the anonymous color of the universe."

In the same poem we also read:

"Reality as a thing seen by the mind,
Not that which is, but that which is apprehended."

So the guitarist asks (section XII):
"Where
do I begin and end? And where,

As I strum the thing, do I pick up
That which momentously declares

Itself not to be I and yet
Must be. It could be nothing else."

As he shapes reality and finds in it meaning that was not apparent when the material was in its "raw" state, he momentarily (whilst the shaping proceeds?) "loses" himself (loses track of his identity, the me/not me) in what emerges, for reality is not as it had seemed to be. Or again, we read:
"Poetry is the subject of the poem,

From this the poem issues and
To this returns. Between the two,

Between issue and return, there is
An absence of reality."

Taken in its entirety, the poem seems to me to suggest the existence of three realities: "Things as they are", things as we perceive them and things as imagined (shaped) by the creative imagination. In this, poetry is taking over from (has to take over from) religion. It dons the mantle that religion once wore in making sense of the universe.
"........................Poetry
Exceeding music must take the place

of empty heaven and its hymns."

Or again: in "An Ordinary Evening...." (Section IX) we read:
"We keep coming back and coming back
To the real: to the hotel instead of the hymns
That fall upon it out of the wind."

but
"Reality is the beginning, not the end,
Naked Alpha, not the hierophant Omega,

It is the infant A standing on infant legs
Not twisted, stooping, polymathic Z"

The poem is ultimately optimistic.
"You as you are? You are yourself.
The blue guitar surprises you."

and Stevens at the end finds his authoritative voice:

"And things are a I think they are
And say they are on the blue guitar."


More at http://web.onetel.com/~davidaking/
or
www.thepoetschair.co.uk
Click on A Personal View

Question: What should we make of Section III ? Ideas welcome. (It is "they" who speak.)

"Ah, but to play man number one,
To drive the dagger in his heart,

To lay his brains upon the board
And pick the acrid colors out,

To nail his thought across the door,
Its wings spread wide to rain and snow,

To strike his living hi and ho,
To tick it, tock it, turn it true,

To bang it from a savage blue,
Jangling the metal of the strings...."

Awards

I have created this page for the display of my blog's awards. Initially they were to be found in the blog's side panel, but I then decided that in the interests of slimming the blog as much as possible and so lessening the time it takes to load, I should discard them.

They do each have their own special significance for me and I do very warmly thank all those who have been good and gracious enough to offer them.

This award was kindly gifted to me by Rachna at rachnachhabria.

This from readingsully2 - for which much thanks.


For this one my thanks to Ladytruth