Ladies and gentlemen good evening and
welcome to The Center for Ballet and the
Arts inaugural Lincoln Kirstein lecture
we're very happy it's a very exciting
event and we're very happy to be having
it here at Lincoln Center which I sort
of like to think of as our kind of home
away from home. I'm Jennifer Homans
I'm the Founder and Director of The
Center and before I introduce our
speaker Helen Vendler, I'm going to just
take a few moments to do a few thanks
and also to tell you a little bit about
Lincoln Kirstein and why we created
these lectures in his name. First special
thanks to Nicholas Jenkins and to Leon
Wieseltier here for helping in conceiving
this lecture series and next a very very
special and warm thanks to Nancy LaSalle
who is sitting right up in the corner
over here.
Now that we clapping her I'm going to
tell you what she did she very
generously has made it possible for us
to have this lecture today with a very
generous gift.
Nancy knew Lincoln well and her
comments about him are in your program
so I would encourage you to please read
them and on Nancy's behalf I would also
like to invite you to a reception after
the lecture which will be held out in
the lobby. Now, before we turn to Helen a
brief word about Lincoln Kirstein.
Lincoln of course was huge and by that
I don't just mean physically huge and he
was physically huge over six feet tall a
large man with a large troublesome
very generous mind he was a towering
sometimes glowering figure hunched over
in a suit I think of him always with a
knitted brow somehow. I remember him
when I was a young dancer he would come
into Dance Studios at the School of
American Ballet where I was a student he
would come in unannounced he would walk
right to the center of the room and
without saying a word he would just
stand there this big figure silently
like a great oak kind of pillar in the
room and then you would turn around and
leave. And of course he was also a large
and towering figure in American culture
in the 20th century yet when you think
about it I mean Kirstein wasn't a
well-known artist he wasn't a famous
dancer or choreographer he wasn't a
politician or a president or a CEO or
CFO of anything and although he was born
with some means and was a patron it was
not his money that made him important
either.
Lincoln was above all a man of ideas and
strong convictions and I think of him as
the man who was behind so many artists
and institutions that we take for
granted today he was behind them in
boardrooms he was behind them with
politicians
behind them in print publishing
countless articles and books making the
case for things and people he believed
in and against things and people he
didn't and he did this for a very long
time for most of the 20th century.
Kirstein was born in 1907 and he lived
until 1996 he lived through World War I
World War II where he enlisted was a
driver for General Patton and then
became one of the monument men digging
through the rubble of the war to recover
an artistic heritage.
He lived through the Cold War the Korean
War the Vietnam War the fall of the
Soviet Union through the depression the
post-war boom the 50s 60s 70s 80s just
making a point here 90s through hippies
civil rights women's liberation
modernism post-modernism post-postmodern
and through it all through all of it he
devoted himself we could really say
unstintingly and got behind the artists
and ideas he believed in Kirstein is
perhaps best remembered for his lifelong
devotion to George Balanchine and
classical ballet here was Kirstein of
course who was responsible for bringing
the young St. Petersburg born
choreographer to New York in 1933 and
with him establishing the School of
American Ballet and in 1948 the New York
City Ballet no one doubts that the
company would have folded many times
over without him and he remained its
general director until 1989. He stood
behind Balanchine literally for a half a
century but for Lincoln, ballet was never
alone in his life and imagination. Ballet
was always part of what Sergei Diaghilev
Kerstein called him the last impresario
liked to call a world of art and
Kirstein like Diaghilev was also behind
and a force in film theater literature
sculpture painting architecture in
addition to dance
and they're just going to remind us of a
few of the things he accomplished at
Harvard. He co-founded the influential
literary magazine hound and horn, he
started the Harvard Society for
Contemporary Art which led to the
founding of the Museum for Modern Art in
New York it was Kirstein who was behind
Walker Evans and his show at MoMA and he
put himself behind Tchelitchew, Cartier-Bresson and many
others he was behind the American
Shakespeare Festival in Stratford
Connecticut where he envisioned a
national repertory company and it was
Kerstein's personal collection that seeded
the dance collection here at the New
York Public Library he was of course
behind the New York State Theatre too
and not without a lot of struggle none
of these things came easily the
struggles really were epic and in the
midst of it all he published books
pamphlets articles and really fought the
culture wars of his time this of course
is only a partial list so just as
Kirstein's life ranged across the Arts
so too will these lectures given in his
name. We begin this year with poetry in
subsequent years music drama photography
art film will take the stage as well.
Next year, I'm pleased to say we will
welcome Ian Bostridge who will speak on
dance and song, but we begin this year
with poetry. We were doing that for two
reasons really. The first is because
poetry mattered a lot to Lincoln
Kirstein and as Nancy has pointed out
in her comments, he thought of dances as
poems. But we begin with poetry - because
ballet began with poetry in the
Renaissance. It was a group of poets
after all who got together with players
and musicians to create a new kind of
spectacle in which rigorous rhythms a
classical Greek verse would harmonize
music movement and language into a new
whole. The first ballets really were then
kind of danced song and a danced poem. To
my mind poetry is also one of the best
ways to understand and analyze a ballet
which brings me to our guest Helen Vendler. Reading Helen Vendler and
following her into and through a poem
watching her illuminate it. Offers I think
a way we might also study a dance dances
have some of the same compressed often
abstract qualities that she describes in
lyric poetry in particular and I for one
have learned more from reading her about
how to study a dance than from almost
anything. So I can think of no better
person to inaugurate the Lincoln
Kirstein lectures and we are perfectly
thrilled that Helen has agreed to be
here with us today and if I may I'll
just end with a small personal note
which is that it was well Wallace Stevens's
necessary angel that helped me find the
title of my own book
"Apollo's Angels" so now to Helen and I'm
not going to give a long list of her
accomplishments and the credentials now
her bio is in your program. I don't want
to keep us any longer from hearing her
but I will just mention a few things by
way of introduction Helen Vendler is
the Professor at Harvard where
she received her PhD in English and
American Literature after completing an
undergraduate degree in guess what
chemistry at Emmanuel College she has
written books on Yates, Stevens, Herbert,
Keats, Shakespeare, Dickinson among others
and several volumes of selected essays
and reviews.
She holds 28 honorary Doctorate degrees
and is a frequent reviewer of
contemporary poetry in such journals as
the New York Times Book Review, The New
York Review of Books, the London Review
of Books, and the new or perhaps we
should call it the old New
Republic. The title of her lecture today is
"Life is Motion": Motion in Wallace Stevens.
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome
Helen Vendler.
Oh. The brightness of the lights, I can't see
you at all. Ah it's these ones up here at
stage lights that are sort of blinding,
but that's alright. Okay I don't have to
see the audience and besides I'm taking
off my distance glasses anyhow so I
wouldn't see you. Fine, thank you all for
being here. When Jennifer Homans
who's the Founder and Director of this
Center invited me - gave me the
honor of being - invited to be the
inaugural
Lincoln Kirstein lecturer she
assured me that I could talk on poetry
since The Center firmly situates Ballet
among the other arts all of which are
connected by their creative invention
and all of which and that's what The
Center represents, needs scholarly
investigation which has been hard to do
of course with the ballet, but a big step
has been taken in Jennifer's beautiful
book about the history of ballet about
which I knew nothing because The Center
is dedicated first to dance.
I couldn't resist inquiring into Wallace
Stevens announcement so strain of the
identity is the identity of life and
motion to imagine motion in a given
phase of life as a symbolic equivalent
to the emotional life that is going on
underneath the artwork are in parallel
with it to imagine motion is a symbol
for certain phases of life.
Adolescence old age isn't easy nor is
the effort to find verbal equivalence
for ordered or disordered motion like
every concept motion implies its
opposite which Stevens named chaos and
I'll be talking about both poems of
happy motion and poems of chaotic motion
as they exemplify Stevens articulation
of his emotions from youth to age he
thinks of wonderful things you'll see.
Stephens extraordinary copulate
of claim that life is motion arrives as
the declarative and philosophical title
of a poem in his radical first volume
the 1923 harmonium published from the
poet was 44 Paulo Stevens had been
composing poetry since his student gaze
at Harvard writing could be at best only
an intermittent activity during the
several years in which he earned his law
degree, held a succession of jobs,
traveled as a lawyer, moved from
Reading to Cambridge to New York to
Farmington to Hartford and married badly
but once his career in Hartford was
established the drive to write could
establish it - sorry - the drive to write
could express itself again and he is
lucky enough to compose great poems
until his death at 75. What would come
after a title that said Life is Motion
one can only real back when one looks at
the poem. Let me read it, it's very short.
You have it on your handout it's hard to
take in Stevens just through the ear so
that's the purpose of the handout. So not
only that you'll have it but you can
take it home. Life so it's so grand
it sounds platonic -- Life is Motion. [Reading the poem] In Oklahoma, Bonnie and Josie,
Dressed in calico,
Danced around a stump.
They cried, Ohio Oh Ohoo"
... Celebrating the marriage
Of flesh and air. [Done reading poem]. Isn't that peculiar? Would one expect that? But we see as we look at
the poem, this is Stevens' New World
version of classicism
Bonnie and Josie I presented as
childlike nicknames but translated they're
also among the names given two of the
three joyaces: beauty and joy. The dancers
in Stevens' poem
we're not the gauzy garments of
Botticelli and graces but study - but
sturdy - calico they're unintelligible
cries
still syllables not yet words the girls
are in no Greenwood not even in the
place of trees they orient their dance
around the stump. Oklahoma didn't gain
statehood till 1907 when
Stevens was 28. All through his youth the
terrain later called Oklahoma had been
an unspecified area within Indian
Territory. To Sill -
To Stevens as a boy, the territory would
have seemed foreign and primitive in his
New England life and the subsequent
state name with its strange
native-american syllables Okla and
Homa may have seemed fun as well
Stevens places his joyful dancers the
two girls named beauty and joy in time
as firmly as he had placed an immobile
man-made jar in space a few poems
earlier in his famous poem "Anecdote of
the Jar." The gray and man-made jar sits
in the middle of the wild world it is
immobile. By replacing his gray and bare
man-made jar by two young girls engaged
in intentional art motion and by
defining life it's self esteem and by
reducing his formal lavish Tennessee
wilderness to his Oklahoma stump Stevens
withdraws ostentatiously from his
earlier conception of life as an
enigmatic standoff between man-made art
and wild nature. The jar he says did not
give a bird or bush like nothing else in
Tennessee.
"Life is Motion" by contrast relates
not a standoff but a cooperation of life
in art they mutually create each other
in the motion of the dance as natural
flesh takes on aesthetic being in the
designed dance motion in space there's a
whole history of course of the dancer
how long before Stevens which he would
have known danced relates
Stevens creates a notable change in
diction from the dancers quoted cries to
his narrated stately concluding words
characterizing dance as ceremony poem is
epithalamium. Bonnie and Josie are as
Grace's attendance on the goddess Venus
and we are celebrating not a marriage of
two human beings but rather the marriage
of flesh and air. Dance is what marries
flesh and air. In an intentional
choreography occupying not only space as
the jar had done, but also time how will
this American poet so conscious of both
European tradition and American
insubordination invent original ways to
represent mobility in time and space.
over the years. Stevens solution in "Life
is Motion" is to substitute for the
classical three graces of all
beautifully intertwined if they dance
intertwined arms, he substitutes for them
to rural companions in calico dancing
around a stunt he abandons intelligible
classical language of the selected
classical personages speaking keeps for
instance, in favor of the girl's
elemental cries a song without words,
however as we may hear only on rereading
there, what shall I say, there as yet
meaningless syllables almost aspire to
the nascent name of their young state as
though they are creating is Oklahoma oh
ho ho it's almost there the American
Circle dance though intentional is folk
derived spontaneous and is yet untouched
by high culture, but in Stevens' mind
European high culture stands behind the
poem, yet in order to make the poem
American Stevens conceals the
mythological ground of tradition
entering and introducing it only by
implication in the girls names. Motion is
created here by the primitive rhythms of
the short lines by the double meanings
of Bonnie and Josie. He does that a lot.
You have to think of the word behind the
word, but one of my students called crypt
words in Ashbury, where one word makes two happen in your mind. By the double
meanings of Bonnie and Josie, motion is
created by the replacement of dance by
Scylla - sorry by syllabic - cries as the
poem goes on and by the change of
language at the end from the simple to
the ceremonial that is Stevens of
forty-four if we look backward to
Stevens as a 21-year-old Harvard
undergraduate, we find him publishing in
the Harvard advocate - did I say -
Harvard undergraduate - we find him
publishing in the Advocate. The
unmistakable forerunner horrible really
of "Life in Motion," which he grandly
called statuary in this embarrassingly
bad two stanza poem. It is, you'll see. With
its archaic hath. Oh archaic language in hath. His young dancers are not rustic
but urban and they ostentatiously bear
the divine names of Apollo and Diana. The
windy morn has set their feet to dancing
young Diane and Apollo on the curb the
pavement with this forms a
glancing no clath or duth their gaiety
disturbed. Stevens at 20 is not yet
aware that the pentameter - the least
dance like meter in English - hardly suits
a dance poem the title "Statuary" betrays
the young poets dubiousness about the
status of his class in the classical
perch - sorry person - is just dancing on
the curb of a live flesh or animated
statues. Stevens ends with sententious
youthful editorializing the young like
to editorialize is what of duties of
people teaching them in creative writing
to make them stop.
It's true Stevens ends with sententious
youthful editorializing on the appeal
the public appeal of their divine and
joyous gaiety no eyes are ever blind
enough to shun them men wonder what
their jubilance can be no passerby, but
turns to look upon them. Then goes his
way with all his fancy-free. This you can
see, however, the later poem is a
rewriting of this early one. How can we
put classical tradition into American
poems and start enough to say here are
two people in New York so and they are
called Diana and Apollo. Bonnie and Josie
is better. In the most famous of his
aphorisms, Stevens declared that a change
of style is a change of subject and the
changes in style between the deplorable
undergraduate "Statuary" and the material
"Life is Motion" denotes Stevens' change of
subject.
At 44, rewriting "Statuary," he adopts a
radically different view of the motion
suitable to life in America are actual
in life in America. He rejects his
earlier translations in life in motion
he rejects his earlier translation of
the classical God's to an American city
places them instead at the treeless
frontier changes god and goddess into
two of the three graces, identifies them
as young Beauty enjoyed by his
diminutive Bonnie and Josie, deprives
them of intelligible speech while
suggesting that they're giving to the
word Oklahoma with their approximating
syllables over Yahoo, and finally defines
through his narrator the sensual
spontaneity of their celebration as
their dance Mary's flesh to air. The
stump is a kind of translation of the
omphalos you know what you dance around
there was absolutely no believable flesh
as you can see in statuary and nothing
in its decor too intimate,
an ecstatic marriage of the body and its
atmosphere. Throughout his life, as in this instance, Stevens' rewrote his
central motif always inventing a change
of style to represent a change in view
tracking almost any Stevensian
concept as it mutates over the decades
through poem after poem reveals the
riches his richest subjects of which
motion is one generate over the years of
profusion of poems. Each poem of course
hoping to bring out some unexamined
aspect of their concept or to repudiate
a form of view of it his own form of
view of it. The concept of dance and order
designed by a human imagination and
expressed by a mobile human body is one
of those rich subjects for him, however
under the solace in order and joy
afforded by motion, motion implies as
every concept does its opposite
undirected and incoherent motion which
Stevens will call chaos, the opposite
thing from art, of course. By what means
could he arrive at a believable chaos on
the page. Before returning to ordered
motion, ordered life, I need to stop to
follow the track of chaos which we will
see later in several poems, but I thought
it best to begin with comparison of
order and chaos so you would know where
I was going the word. Chaos first appears
in his famous poem "Sunday Morning" as a
synonym for the physical world we live
in, an old chaos of the Sun, the
intelligible Copernican order has
vanished - I'm sorry both the Ptolemaic
and the Copernican orders have vanished - 
and now the unit physical universe is
simply no longer the nine spheres
singing harmoniously together, but rather
the chaos of the Sun. Thirteen years
later in another famous poem the idea of
order at Keywest the nature that opposes
meaning is the longer the Sun in its
radiating chaos
and it's a rational universe but rather
the inhuman as he says and tumultuous
ocean with it's meaningless plunging
through are threatening the "furor
poeticus" the old name for the poet's
rage as he says the makers rage to order
words of the sea.
It's not until 1942 - in middle of WWII
as you can see - it's not until
1942 in the uneasy volume parts of the
world the Stevens tentatively and
interestingly describes himself as a
connoisseur of chaos, that's really
terrific linkage. Who would want to be
one, how do you get to be one. By now
Stevens has seen the succession of
events WWI, the Russian
Revolution, the Great Depression of the
30s, National Socialism in Germany, the
rise of American Marxist literary groups
in the beginning of World War Two. As he
looked at this span of time, he sees the
historical succession produces as he has
to admit a variety of incompatible
ideologies philosophy itself becoming a
form of intellectual chaos with each.
Truth, as he says, begins becoming over
time just one more truth one more
element in the immense disorder of
truths. For a moment a wistful
supposition arises to voice the poet's
continuing yearning for order but
suppose the order of proof should ever
come - sorry but suppose the disorder of
truth should ever come - to an order most
Plantagenet most fixed the sheer and
likeliness of this platonic. Plantagenet
order in the modern world clauses the
poet's supposition but suppose to
collapse and Stevens temporary attempt
at imagining a connoisseur of chaos is
itself though appealing unsustainable. The
poem ends
this is the - sorry where am -
The poem ends in imagining
- Sorry I said that - Serve chaos is itself
though feeling unsustainable analysis of
Stevens proposal of the connoisseur of
chaos might be able to do because from
the pensive man recalling Milton's in
pens are also the pensive men the
pensive man
and then he tries to think of a summary
description of the pensive man he sees
that Eagle float for which the intricate
helps our single mist
although mortal man cannot accept exists
at that height from which the jutting
Alps become a single mist he can at
least by taking thoughts conceive of
such a legal view a god-like view really
not tethered to life on Earth
the Tennessee wilderness of anecdote of
the jar have to transmute it into an
Alpine renal Tunis and just as the
man-made jar did not give a bird a bush
like nothing else in Tennessee the Eagle
view we could say does not give a human
life troubled by the presence of Marxist
and populist factions to which he cannot
subscribe and unsure his responsibility
as a poet to public issues Stevens
creates ambitious poems and parts of the
world but veer between the syntactic
simplicity when addressing workers like
the simplicity in Life is Motion and
elaborate intellectual and rhetorical
feces in died long didactic poems with
such parodic titles wonderful as
extracts from addresses to the academy
of fine ideas in the poem where he
begins with the workers called idiom of
the hero where are you going to get a
hero from this disordered society an
idiom of the hero workers that plural
noun digital Marxist literature we're
earth they the workers introduced the
word chaos as they sum up their distress.
I heard to work as say this chaos will
soon be ended. Angered by the Marxist
contempt for the Isleta aesthetic, Stevens
has bitterly refutes the workers utopian
fantasy of a better world order wealth
after poverty homeless after brokenness,
yet he realizes suddenly that their word
chaos is also the correct description of
his own emotional and intellectual
disorder and despair and he says of the
world and himself this chaos will not be
ended not ended never and never ended I
am the poorest of all I know that I
cannot be mended the workers have no
such knowledge but he gives up on any
utopian fantasy about society from the
poet the inflexibility of the Marxist
prescriptive order of socialist realism
in its fixity abolish 'as all emotions
that are and must be intrinsic to art as
well as to life. Yet Stevens himself
still longing for a justification of our
press to those thoughts of justice how
to justify our Marxist
discourse around him turns to his own
utopian fantasy of permanence it's not
as like give up is your to gear anymore
than the workers can in that long and
discursive satiric treatise called
extracts from addresses the academy of
fine ideas is a nice imagining of a
satiric view of cultural gatherings of
intellectuals what he now proposes as a
solution to chaos is as inimical to
Marxism to the motion that is life.
Abandoning the worker diction of idiom
of the hero, Stevens dreams of a morally
static sensual existence
undisturbed by thought, a world of
irrational moods as fluctuating as that
immoral guide the weather. It is enough
that's the word with which he will end
his great poem of satisfaction final
soliloquy of the interior paramour in
which being there together, he says, is
enough. Enough is the word of highest
satisfaction for him, but here he is
evading what might guarantee the word
and he remains superficial it is enough
to breathe in the weather and in the
things and men of the weather and in
oneself as part of that and nothing more
nothing more preclude any sense - sorry I
have a word mistyped - nothing more
precludes any departure from this
sensual belief there is nothing more so
I can't leave the same floating with the
weather apart. This nothing more is as
utopian in its way as the economic hope
of the workers Stevens maintains this
affectation of intellectual
anti-intellectual sensual complacency --
let's just go up and down with the
weather, with the clouds, with the rivers
meaningless motions as he said in the
idea of water at Key West. But such
anti-intellectual sensual complacency
cannot last and completely collapses in
a time of war so that the polar man's
blood smears the Oakes soldier stocks
before my door and you can't say to the
soldier, I'm feeling it's a cloudy day
today, it just doesn't work. He gives
that up, but don't devote reluctance
Stevens and midlife is convinced of the
impotence of philosophical ideas that
they have been classically presented,
whether they're classical or Christian
or Marxist or hedonistic, they're all
equally partial. He doesn't see that
philosophical ideas can offer a valid
sanction for existence,
so he places a new confidence and
individual feeling intrinsically
trustworthy as ideas are not. Speaking of
himself in the third person as he often
does, Stevens who always became depressed
in winter now Stevens in wonder finds
his former wintry self sign in an April
that releases torrents of feeling as
extract and present participles insisted
on articulate for the poet the joyous
notions of resurgent being as if the
king of being itself generated a
blooming of life in participial form
winter would be broken and done and
being would be being himself again being
becoming seeing and feeling
himself black water breaking into
reality. With its awakened trust - did I
skip something, no - though we as awake in
trust and feeling life can once again be
analyzed as motion instead of some kind
of paralysis.As the poet encounters
warmth an excitation of the senses a
renewed self. Be in spring - being almost
eliminates in this exhilaration the
difference between nouns and verbs as a
tautology being would be being something
or other insists on life energy as the
primal good manifested as the blackwater
of depressive winter and then with the
melting of ice into the seeing and
feeling of the restored senses in April.
In Stevens next volume, the post-war
publication bearing the grateful title
"Transport Summer After the Winter" and
then the spring this is you know a
wonderfully hopeful title he has a poem
in transport to summer called by the
sleepwalking name, it
offers you have the whole thing I should
explain there are four poems quoted
whole
and they have titles at the top the
poems that are not folded all the exits
just have titles and pages of the fun
but this is the whole thing.
This poem offers a
strange parable of the interactive
motions of the ocean a bird and a
scholar these three realities are
invoked to describe the unity of being,
seeing, and feeling when happiness comes.
Stevens creates an allegorical
personage the scholar sometimes he calls
him rabbi whose mental motions enable
the completion of poetic imaginings
nature and the poet can only go so far
until the scholar enters the picture. The
scholar is one of the three figures here
of life as motion, the first is the
rolling sea of the physical universe, the
second is a reckless - sorry - the second is
a restless bird logging to inscribe
himself with his claws on the unstable
sand, and the third is the absolutely
necessary creative scholar Stevens
personification of the creative power of
learning when it is has become
inseparable from emotion. The motions of
life benefits themselves the ocean rolls
the bird makes futile attempts to leave
a trace on the sand and the scholar
makes the indispensable final
contribution to the poem. The scholar is
defined as someone feeling everything
who is clothed,
not in imperial regalia, but in
individual personalea -- a nice invention
of a new word on the basis of regalia
the king Ricks. Without the scholars
fertility of learning and imagination
and feeling nature itself would be cysts
demons a geography of the dead and then
speaking of all dead of the human past
not the afterlife to which we are the
office can sign them, but something else
without the scholar nature would be says
Stevens, a geography of the dead
in which no scholar separately dwelling
poured forth the fine fins,
the gawky beaks, the personalea which
as a man feeling everything for his by
eking out with fine growing fins and
young beaks the suggestive contours of
the interaction of ocean and bird the
scholar who dwells apart in solitude he
next the divine Fiat of Genesis or
completes it. In the scholar Stevens has
found a figure to incorporate the
ingenious and free motions of the
intellect in poetry but he maintains the
necessary aesthetic hierarchy of
functions the intellect is net is
necessarily subordinate to the
originating will of the bird who wants
to make that inscription and moves
restlessly and never settles. The
intellect is necessarily subordinate to
the originating will of the bird and the
sensuous scene setting of nature because
without the ocean you wouldn't have the
bird, but poetry would not be complete
without the third ingredient as I said
subordinated to nature and the Restless
and creative bird longing to write its
poem but unable to do so the very old
image one day I wrote her name upon the
sand in the sand always wipes away the
name so he is the pauper it translated
from Renaissance idealistic versions
like Spencer's I wrote her name upon the
the sand, poor bird can't write
buried on the sand in such a poem.
Stevens makes us aware of his own
subjection to the unintelligible ocean
of nature his own frustration in trying
to inscribe himself on the shore and of
his own amusement tinged joy in seeing
his mind add a final elegance to form. In
the parable we see an aesthetic and
perfected composite of grand nature
elevated a descriptive intention and
intellectual joy for all its initial
frustration it ends as a happy poem. The
apprentice has seen as
sleepwalks the arrival of his
masterpiece of personalea that is a
style inseparable from itself as the
intellect takes the beaks of the baby
birds and makes them adult takes
anything and makes it what is going to
be Stevens is ready after his high
investment in the emotions to invent in
his 1947 famous sequence notes go to
supreme fiction he's ready to invent the
poetry that satisfies him which he
defines as the fiction that results from
feeling stating implying boldly that
unless you had the feelings to start
with you would never make up the myths
that embody them. The fiction aids the
fiction originates itself again and
again cultured by culture but the
initial pleasure of a new cultural
services Morrow erotic intellectual
symbolic that pleasure grows weaker as
its repetitions see more and more
routine by this time Stevens has been
doing insurance company work for many
decades and here's something he loves
about the routine he continued to go
into the office till he died and turned
down an invitation to be the Norton
lecturer at Harvard because he knew if he went
away they would never let him back in
the office he's so old. So he did take pleasure in it
nonetheless when routine supervenes on
your original excitement about some
adventure of the mind or soul - sorry as a
culture wanes and meaninglessness seems
truer than meaning the active motion
feels almost mechanical birdsong for
instance in notes becomes a thing final
in itself and therefore good one of the
vast repetitions finally in themselves and
therefore good they're going round and
round and
the merely going round until merely
going round is a sign of good was
someone trying to convince himself of
course the beauty of routine but he's
always a comic poet in everything.
I mean his sensibility is comic God
every poem is kind but if you wanted to
represent routine and didn't know what
to say about it well it's not a myth
it's not a religion it's not a sexual
partner I mean what is it and why am i
living it and do I like living it should
I just kill myself
I mean sounds really what's behind
despair when he can't find an anchor for
his poems an earlier poem called
ironically the pleasures of merely
circulating had already marked as
insufficient the ancient classical myth
of life's cyclical recurrence embedded
in its predictable plos in which the age
of gold declines into the successive
ages of silver bronze and iron and then
Richards's gold again the primal
paradise but guard visited by angels
declines in this poem as the cycle
repeats itself the angel descends from
the clouds and then the poem Babel sort
of in the other vacuity of childlike
pleasure in watching in human nature is
a merely circulating clouds the gardens
were round at the angel the angel flew
round with the clouds and the clouds
flew round in the clouds flew around and
the clouds were round the call with
Vicks re lipid clouds I mean you could
think of it as legal cases coming to his
desk a case flew round in the office if
they had whatever the office sent it out
to soft place and then finally it
circulates in the office of clouds flew
round and the plows flew round and you
think they way to get somewhere of
course but all they get is each other
and the clouds flew round with the
clothes.
Stevens confronts these inane if
pleasurable motions but the deathly
aspects of life brought to mind
especially by this mindless routine of
merely circulating going around
around the Deathly aspects of life are
those that the mindless routine can
neither encompass nor describe so the
poem ends after all these ridiculous
things about the angel flying on clouds
line poor men's is there any secret in
skulls the cattle skulls in the woods to
the drummer's in black hoods Rumble
anything other fair drums and that's the
end
these are unendurable threats of death
the animal stealth we know very animals
in the same way as we bury each other
but we don't have evidence of rotting
humans lying about but you do have that
evidence in animals we these are an
ignore both rets of death the animal
skulls denoting unavoidable organic
mortality and the awful reduction of
music - drumming on off on off on off
it's only a single motion all motions
reduced to a sort of metronomic ticking
in the drumming produced by black-hooded
funeral attendance a little stevens have
meditated on death often declaring in
Sunday morning the death is the mother
of beauty. Without transience we would
get bored by the office and by even
beauty itself so the death is the -
what shall I say - the indispensable
ingredient in the creation of anything
that lives and moves against that
background. He has seemed to evade he has meditated on death but he has seemed to
evade or at least to postpone bringing
into full view two events to which
pleasure whether sensual or intellectual
is sorry isn't - sorry - which pleasure
whether sensual or intellectual is no
remedy used to events of course a
tragedy and death are they not included
in the aphorism life is motion. Stevens
relatively unconvincing gestures to
catastrophic motions in wartime
now find more authentic personal
equivalence lifes motions in the poets
anticipations of death that's what all
the chaos boards end up being about the
conclusiveness of death does away with
all those earlier fantasies of eternal
recurrence even in the boring form of
the routine how shall the poet find
figures for the motions and emotions
surrounding his anticipation of death
Stevens admission of death into the
precincts of his imagination prompts a
serious inquiry into the fundamental
opposite of order chaos for Stevens
chaos is and remains an unbearable
concept first truly explored in his
great poem of old age chaos, in motion
and not in motion, showing the
philosophical axiom that a thing cannot
be and not be at the same time. In the
same way oh he said you don't know chaos
chaos can be in motion and not in motion
inside your head chaos comes late in the
1947 volume transport to summer lurking
under the poems of barely rescued
happiness transitory. I'm skipping the
next quotation by abandoning
unsustainable fancies of even minimal
resurrection and by conceding that life
is always encouraged ajik and encouraged
ibly tragic in itself students is forced
to more truthful imagery, perhaps he
thinks one commute one's personal and
present pain at the apprehension of
death by taking along historical view. In
a poem published during World War II,
Dutch graves in Bucks County, Stevens
addresses the successive generations of
his dead Pennsylvania Dutch ancestors.
Dutch is a corrupted form in that name
of Deutsch they were all Germans not
Dutch
his ancestors in their City grave ash
substance really of great his ancestors
in their city graves with their distant
historical overview can he seeks truly
regard the chaos of these violent
marches of the presence in WWII
as merely one epic of human expression
after which one after which reassuring
periods of peace will prevail
but Stevens must abandon this
on-off version of culture, yes we have a
war then we have some peace then we have
work, enemy hasn't beat you, no because
the same people are not veritable who
have a violent culture and so they don't
like the new peace they have to make it
their own and he says this is the pit of
torment. The Placid end in peace should
be illusion that the mobs of birth avoid
our stale perfections seeking out their
own waiting until we go to picnic in the
ruins that we leave the mobs of birth
mobs of course always associated with
revolution and violent revolution the
mobs were uh Keats's hungry generations
that tread down their parents when he
says to the nightingale thou was not
born for death immortal bird no hungry
generations tread see down and that's a
terrible cannibalistic image of the next
generation crushing their parents in the
savage evolutionary moment -
sorry motion - of history every cultural
perfection disabused of itself illusions
of permanence Oh as they have gone stale
the aspects of permanence of a previous
culture or when they're not immutable
I mean earthquakes are renewable but
this is more about the feelings that you
can displace your anxiety about your own
death into a whole lot of dead people
your ancestors in a cemetery and saying
well you don't feel
present pain of it you see the long
historical view in the seventh
evolutionary motion of history every
cultural perfection perceives in torment
its own abolition a long view of history
does not mitigated the force of
inevitable destruction in an individual
life Stevens search for adequate
motions of consciousness in old age
culminates in the great poem I have
already mentioned chaos in motion and
not in motion.
Poor man didn't understand at all first
they seemed so crazy so I like Stevens
of the poems, but of course as he said a
poem must resist the intelligence almost
successfully wonderful sentence in one
of his poems and an aphorism Stevens
search for adequate motions represent
consciousness in old age culminates in
this great poem chaos in motion and not
in motion in old age the declaration
that life is motion halls true but in a
new and horribly different way in chaos
in motion and not in motion, we see a
pitiful and comic and appalling portrait
of a person suffering the frantic and
yet led and feelings of old age
remembering once again his German
origins in the Pennsylvania Dutch
satirically - sorry Stevens satirically
presents his turbulent and anxious self
as [name]
never called himself anything like that
anywhere else but if it's true, but he
can't even value himself in the state in
which he's in if life is motion what
sort of life is this new and paradoxical
motion in which intense accelerations in
the sense of time are accompanied and
opposed by an absolute paralytic stasis
in which nothing is all at all is
happening or can happen. In to the
outward yearnings of both bodily desire
and individual thought in the depressed
search for adequate objects of
Iyer and the adequate repose of
intellectual truth do these fade into
Baroness not quite the speed of
experience becomes more and more surreal
in old age life is still motion
yes but the swarm of motions in the mind
becomes intolerable and it's once it is
worth of incoherence we are already
nearing the end sister poet we are in
the fourth act of the tenth scene in the
tenth series of our spinning spectacle
and chaos whirls around us in macabre
motion it lays bare the tatters of our
western culture from theology to opera
the impotent churches have become deaf
to prayer and mute in prophecy and
vivarium Sopranos deserve their exalted
areas for the boredom of repetitive
scales the animating spirit of chaos in
motion and not in motion.
Stevens wind is not the Pentecostal
wind of consolation nor the Shelley and
west winds praying for the spring Zephyr
but a wild wind of incipient death
bringing into a summer day, an
apocalyptic thunderstorm of lightning
and winter rain torturing the poet with
the deadly acceleration and irrational
violence of his final days. He begins
over this lashing wind or something more
than the spirit of woods like - sorry I'm
a spirit of logic the rain is
pouring down it is July there is
lightning in a thickest Thunder it is a
spectacle scene 10 becomes 11 in series
roman numeral 10 act 4 etc you will see
that we're heading down to the end once
you're in act 4. People fall out of
windows trees tumble down, summer has
change to winter, the young grow all the
years full of children
statues roofs and snow the theater is
spinning round colliding with deaf-mute
churches and optical trains the most
massive Sopranos are singing songs of
scales I have no idea what optical
trains are. I mean obviously he made up
something,
maybe it was even Smulders going by and
his eye it became like think, I don't
know I love it as a completely
unintelligible picture optical drains in
this chaotic collision of theater
impaired churches and surreal optical
trains the spectacle exhausts itself
and as he closes the poem Stevens sums
up his encompassing deprivation his
inability though desire has not died to
think of a single thing he actually
desires he feels the chill of standing
intellectually outside of his own life
in cold observation of its
epistemological and temporal dissolution
and most terrifying of registers a
rage at the absolute absence within
himself of any genuine feeling as he
becomes at the climax of his frenzied
confusion all mind and violence and
nothing felt. The destructive wind which
matches his own inner turbulence
obliterates even speculation. The poet
has the total laughing presence of death
nothing more to think about there was of
course no future what we were going
together
and Ludwig Richter it ends and has lost
the hole in which he was contained those
desire without an object of desire all
mind and violence and nothing felt. He
knows he has nothing more to think about
like a wind that lashes everything at
once Stevens will never invent a better
set of equivalents for mental terrors
but brilliant as the poem is it's chaos
is not his last word on life as motion,
yes in his own room he is impelled to
extinction by what seems a maligned fate,
but when he looks to the sublime motions
of the universe not his personal
emotions or motions not the historical
ones of his buried ancestors but rather
the motions ordained by immutable
law he abandons his rage against the
fate bent on extinguishing him
personally necessity is indifferent to
our lives he writes a whole set of - whole
part of - the long poem about the Greek
ananka who's the Greek names a necessity
as long as you see it all as not
attached to a body but rather attached
to the universe, the chaos is not
personally wounding necessity, is
indifferent to our lives, it is no harder
yes Spectre the spheres, but rather a
mathematical result of the billions of
convergences that bring about change in
all things even in the heavens
themselves. Life is motion one of the
motions of the failing life that
contemplates a future of nothing but
losses the beautiful and pitiless
universe exhibits the sublime motion he
says of the serpentine aurora borealis
those Northern Lights that had already
been the subject of forms by both
Emerson and Dickinson if your two
predecessors like that have written
about the Northern Lights there's a
terrific temptation I'll see what I can
do with it but there's a kind of
competitiveness about what you can do
with the motif the Aurora's of autumn.
Stevens greatest sequence is a stunning
exploration of the unpredictable but
fascinating
there is a lot of exploration of the
unpredictable, but compelling motions of
those constantly changing celestial
waves of color the scholar poet is on
earth below with a single candle in his
solitary cabin. It's great pathos as he
says what has happened to his mother, my
mother as he calls her, she has grown old
the necklace is a carving not a kiss
I'll turn into woodenness in death in
part of the poems the poem is very long
it has many many motions. Here is the
solitary poet in the cabin when he opens
the door he opens the door of his house
on flames the scholar of one candle
season arctic effulgence wearing on the
frame of everything he is and he feels
afraid the stephenchien
aesthetic which has been rendering life
by inventing words and images and
structures for the characteristic motion
of each human stage. Science's ultimate
replica is aesthetic when he really
wants to find the right symbol for it at
the end of his life is these Northern
Lights beautiful ever as they can be but
having absolutely no interest in us at
all. They are so to speak the simulacra
of the mind in its terrifying - he
finds the simulacrum of the mind - and the
terrifying the beautiful late-life
Aurora itself so various, changing second
by second to decide definition and in
that way it becomes a plausible symbol
for consciousness, which also changes
second by second. You can's pin it to any
one of its manifestations. Stevens's lines
about the Aurora trying to define it
send outcasts of the imagination seeking
to identify and interpret the
unpredictable motions of
the Northern Lights. He ventures different
definitions.
it is a theater floating to the cloud
itself a cloud although of mist in rock
and mountains running like water, wave
on waves, the waves of life. It is a cloud
transformed - clouds transformed again
idly the way a season changes color to
no end, except the lavishing of itself in
change as light changes yellow into gold
and gold to its opal elements and fires
delight. The aurora does this splashes
itself
these things are splashed wide wise
because it likes magnificence.
I like magnificent, why shouldn't the
heaven, why shouldn't I consider my
consciousness as magnificent if he can
do all if it can do, all these changing
things - second to second to second - all of the
beautiful splashed wide wise because it
likes magnificence and the solemn
pleasures of magnificent space. The aurora
as the whole of the skies, as its context
magnificence is the chief of the
aristocracy virtues in Spencer's fair queen coming from the
notion that the king is the only person
who can be called magnificent, he's the
only person who can disseminate benefits
to the whole - what shall I say the whole
world - and the whole world of his kingdom
and so when Stevens takes the concept of
magnificence and removes it from King
Arthur who was going to embody it
Spencer never finished the poem, didn't
but nonetheless King Arthur was the
king and he is the one representative of
magnificence when you change it from our
worldly King in a human Court and put
magnificence up there in the realm of
non-intentional changing beauty,
you have given Spencer who was so
troubled by mutability the very queen are
so troubled by the constant change that
everything goes through and thinks he
can find it, you can find a stability for
that change only in heaven
the Spencer says at the end oh how great
Sabbath God grant me that Sabbath sight
the eternal Sabbath no eternal Sabbath's
here only this wonderful energy in the
Aurora's and not doing it with a purpose
not doing it with an argument not doing
it with logic the cloud drifts idly
through half thought of formed who could
not say that of the ninth in meditation
or in reverie. The workings of the aurora
as it drifts idly through half thought
our forms parallel a drifting motions of
subjectivity itself yet the poet must
depict the destructive energy of the
universe as well as its lavish
magnificence. If life is motion, what life
is implied by the fearful electrical
motions of the heavens? It is the life of
old age within the painful recognition
of griefs and extinctions. As we watch,
the aurora goes about its wild work of
slaughter, our friends and lovers, our
parents and our children are swept away
before our eyes and we remain the
shivering residue of combustion stripped
of emotion. The aurora it leaps through
us, through all our heavens leaps
extinguishing our planets one by one
leaving off where we were and looked of
where we knew each other and of each
other thought, a shivering residue, chilled and forgot. Then in a very surprising
turn,
Stevens asserts that since the motions
of the cause unnecessitated by
physical laws, they are innocent of any
malignity against us even though they
are the instruments of our obliteration.
So then he says making up his
mind about the Aurora's at least
voluntarily
so in these lights are not a spell of
life of saying out of a cloud but
innocence the person who speaks out of a
cloud is always a supernatural person
and a spell brings up the notions of
wood wizards and the manipulation of
magic it's not divine it's not magical
So then these lights are not a spell of
light of saying out of a cloud but
innocence
an innocence of the earth and no false
sign or symbol of malice you remember
that it was thought that in Adam saw the
whole structure of the world came apart
and he is saying and then - therefore they
sid - and therefore the temptations that
follow it and the failings that
follow it and he says the heavens are
not like the heavens are enjoying
themselves,
and they are not telling us divine
Commandments and they are not they are
not instructing us about anything
ethical.
Although the Aurora's - of
necessary fate -
maybe indefinable they remain a dazzling
and powerful manifestation that
unavoidably suggests moral and equal an
epistemological equivalence when you say
what do the Aurora's symbolize, you can't
leave out the ethical as it relates to
human beings because you don't want to
be like the Aurora's going around
killing everybody. Is that nature or
should be aimed at a better nature?
Stevens will be dead in five years and
yet he has the energy to ask
rhetorically drawing on Saint Matthew's
Gospel. He has the energy to ask
rhetorically whether there is in the
universe an imagination that sits
enthroned as grim as it is benevolent
but just and the unjust which in the
midst of summer stops to imagine winter. In Matthew 5:45, Jesus says of God he
make of his Sun to rise on the evil and
on the good and sendeth rain on the just
and the unjust as long as the oceanic
Aurora's in the skies and the responsive
imagination in the heart are in motion
so is the poet and so is currently
apocalyptic life. Stevens could scarcely
have foreseen the next phase of bodily
existence you never know what's going to
happen when you're old I mean you have
very strange emotions as he says in
Chaos. Stevens could scarcely have
foreseen the next phase of bodily
existence in which there is no night and
no spectacle and no violence and nothing
felt. Silence falls and there is nothing
to say. The hitherto ceaseless
metaphorical alchemy by which experience
is transformed into language has died.
Finally the poets field of view goes
completely blank as his past world is
nearly erased.
It's like an exhibition the senility
of old age where you don't know anybody
you don't recognize anything anymore as
he says of his world. The physical
universe - sorry in a clear day and no
memories - which is a terrifying title you
can see everything but the other part,
the whole back would train of your mind
has been erased in a clear day and no
memories the mind is, as he says,  not part
of the weather, no longer changing as the
weather changes or as the aurora changes
and even the motion of the physical
universe when you are in this state of
senility has become an invisible
activity you no longer know the laws of
physics or anything else, the whole
energy of the universe which is a
satisfaction to know now has deserted
him to. Today the air is clear of
everything it has no knowledge except of
nothingness and it flows over us without
meanings as if none of us had ever been
here before and are not now. It was
shallow spectacle, this invisible
activity, this sense that nothingness has
no accompanying presence unlike the
nothing in the famous earlier poem, the snow
man, in actuality the snowman lives among
a wealth of presences in a landscape of
winter beauty around him of the junipers
shag with ice the spruce is rough in the
distant glitter of the January Sun. When
the poet at the end of the snowman says
that he sees nothing that is not there
and see nothing that is, he hasn't sorry
he has perhaps killed his aesthetic
nostalgia for the deciduous trees of the
erotic past that hasn't yet advanced to
the point where he can recognize the
beauty of slow - snow-laden evergreens
glittering in a bright Sun. The
glittering landscape of winter is
invisible to the mourner of summer, it
adds up only to the nothing that is. The
Snowman can affirm in his later
revolution, in the plain sense of things,
that the absence of the imagination had
itself to be imagined, required as a
necessity requires. The life that is
motion nonetheless persists thinks the
poet, if not in his own life you're not
not in the physical universe around him
life there's motion nonetheless persists
he sinks in what he intends as an
abstract form of landscape, it's a
platonic form if you know the idea is up
there and then the instances are
down in this world are always in perfect
copies of the beautiful thing in the
Platonic super, super human level. The
life that is motion nonetheless persists
thinks the poet in an abstract platonic
form of landscape a virtual landscape
devoid of human emotion without human
thought. The motion and thought of what the
realm of the pure idea kept lilacs until
each generation arises and infuses into
the Platonic geometry both human feeling
and human meeting the landscape of being
that we solved before, just being - mere being as Stevens calls it - mere being seems to
exhibit in its minimal platonic imagined
form each item that the world of
artifice might need, the basic items a
palm tree, all exoticism and nature, a
bronze stage - set the bronze decor -
I'll be reading this in a second - and a
golden bird, but Stevens rebukes the
notion of the - in what shall I say - the inertness
of the Platonic forms as they simply are
they are ready to be imitated he rebukes
the notion of an eternally static set of
platonic ideas by animating its forms
into continuing action. The poem rises the
bird sings a wind moves in the branches
Stevens's ideal landscape quivers with
potential ever ready to grow from its
tableau like stasis to living motion. In
the virtual realm of the abstract idea
life is hovering or quivering, not ended of
mere being poem of mere being, affirms on
a conceptual plane the eternal present
tense motions of reality. They never die
there are always up there in the forms
you can't have forms that are simply
static because so much of any form is
motion of mere being affirmed on a
conceptual plane the eternal present
tense motions of reality this is his
last poem in The Collected Poems. The
palm at the end of the mine beyond the
last thought rises in the belly take or
a gold feathered bird sings in the poem
without human meaning without human
feeling a foreign song you know them but
it is not the reason that makes us happy
or unhappy
the birds think it's heaven sign the
palm stands on the edge of space the
wind moves slowly in the branches the
birds
fire fangled feathers dangle down if it
is not the reason that makes us happy or
unhappy where is happiness to be found
of mere being claims that we find
happiness in our mental tableaus of
human potential or the universe's
potential
ever aren't offered to seeing and
hearing because of the attraction these
tableau a possibility exert on us human
desire infiltrates the realm of mere
being and begins to activate it it words
the Phoenix of fire bangle feathers
seems to promise future flight as soon
as its wings lift and the motion in the
wind the singing of the bird the rising
of the slender palm all import a
hovering action ready to begin. The
characteristic Stevensian moment a
verbal play because artifice is one of
his intrinsic conceptions of art that
isn't transcripted, it is symbolic and it
has to find a moment in which words play
with each other and are amused by each
other and here it is of course the birds
fire fangled feathers dangled down.
Wonderful line. The - sorry - the
characteristic Stevenian moment
of verbal play as the birds fire fangled feathers, by sonic contagion
dangled down, intimates that wordplay is
intrinsic to the events emerging in this
atmosphere acting as a bridge joining
the symbolic pictorial moments - sorry the
symbolic pictorial motion in platonic
space - existential motions of our own
the limited number of life phases
infancy childhood youth and so on makes
it necessary for each capable poet - each
capable lyric poet - to seek out an
original and personal and accurate set
of images and idioms and to force them
into a recognizably idiosyncratic style
the function of that style is to
represent in her hopkins words, the own
the abrupt self, there you have a blow of
a new self coming at you through words.
The own the abrupt self there. The motions
of life as Stevens lives it
behold it feels it and remembers it
synchronize themselves with motions of
style unforgettably his own. Who but he
could have invented to match old ages
rage and dejection chaos in motion and
not in motion when we remember the
adolescent Harvard graduates who set
Diana and Apollo dancing - in what is
probably New York - we realize how far his
style inherited from European poetry had
to travel, how often it had to mutate if
it was to map his American world and the
kind of art that it must construct for
itself. You don't end with Bonnie and
Josie of course, you end with the state
of Oklahoma being killed and made
fertile and made happy as art itself
evolves into perfection, of mere being
the last poem displays the conjoined
boldness and ease with which Stevens
could transform platonic ideas into minutely potential spere of human action.
Stevens sense of mere being, the scene of mere being in an eternal present tense
eternally available to the poetic
imagination he has the bravura to
announce as the motto of the scene, it is
not the reason that makes us happy or
unhappy thereby freeing the Platonic
idea from the chill of abstract reason,
which always entails of course the
notion of temperance, a notion that's not
especially dear to art. Stevens knew how
slight the motions can be that begin to
activate life in the human ear and I the
bird sings if feathers shine of all he
dares to show that the realm of the
classical idea of reason lacks the
essentials human meaning, human feeling
which only the artist could provide. The
bird does sing without human meaning,
without human feeling a foreign song it
is only the artist who can make the song
become native to our own moving life
Often we are being in its firm rejection
of ever temperate reason is recalling
Keats a sonnet sometimes called what the
thrush said Keats was in bed he had been
hit by a billiard ball in the eye he was
feeling very guilty about his indolence
and then he suddenly hears the thrush
singing and the thrush says to him - sorry
I should say that - Keats's sonnet rejects the rule of
knowledge just as of mere being rejects
the rule of reason, and what the thrush
said to the poet is, oh fret not after
knowledge I have none and yet my swarm -
and yet my song - comes native with the
warmth Oh fret not after knowledge I
have none
and yet the evening listen listening to
Keats's thrush. Stevens writes his own
version of the primal value of the
objects of year and I the bird the
feathers
in the tableau of the ideal as we know
the only admitted senses are hearing and
seeing called the higher senses because
they can occur without physical contact
with the object smell taste and touch
can enter only after the aesthetic will
brings the distant ideal into the full
sense to terrestrial transforming the
conceptual to be embodied verifying the
abstract quivering landscape into a
magical awakening, the mere being then
mere being becomes the earthly paradise
and life takes on motion once again this
time in art.
