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Tag Archives: Wallace Stevens

The Snow Man

17 Saturday Dec 2016

Posted by memoirandremains in Literature, Uncategorized

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poem, Poetry, Wallace Stevens

Glacier National Park, December 17, 2016

aplocam-2

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

— Wallace Stevens

The Snow Man

There are no uninterpreted facts.

 

Yet the absence of the imagination

25 Thursday Feb 2016

Posted by memoirandremains in Literature, Uncategorized

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poem, Poetry, Wallace Stevens

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Wallace Stevens

The Plain Sense of Things

After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to an end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir.

It is difficult even to choose the adjective
For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.
The great structure has become a minor house.
No turban walks across the lessened floors.

The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.
The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side.
A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition
In a repetitiousness of men and flies.

Yet the absence of the imagination had
Itself to be imagined. The great pond,
The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,
Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence

Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,
The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this
Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,
Required, as a necessity requires.

Wallace Stevens and David Foster Wallace

09 Saturday May 2015

Posted by memoirandremains in Culture, Literature

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David Foster Wallace, poem, Poetry, The Rabbit as the King of the Ghosts, Wallace Stevens

The “rabbit” poem. Any mention of Wallace Stevens will pique my interest and when Adam Plunkett’s piece, ‘King of the Ghosts’ in N+1 said that David Foster Wallace had this poem on his mind in the last month of his life, I immediately investigated. 

The difficulty to think at the end of the day

One Must Have a Mind of Winter

06 Tuesday Jan 2015

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poem, Poetry, Snowman, Wallace Stevens

 

 

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One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Wallace Stevens, The Snow Man

We Murder to Dissect

28 Tuesday May 2013

Posted by memoirandremains in Epistemology, John Frame

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Duchess, epistemology, John Frame, poem, Poetry, The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God, The Tables Turned, Theory, Wallace Stevens, William Wordsworth

We Murder to Dissect

John Frame begins his volume The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God with the observation that knowledge depends upon its object:  what we can know, how we can know differs with the object of knowledge. For example, today I read story of a “photograph” of a hydrogen atom. That photograph provided a kind of knowledge obtained in a specific manner. Such knowledge is true – but it is not comprehensive. Moreover such knowledge differs fundamentally from the knowledge I have of my family members.

Even the barest consider will demonstrate his point, “Our criteria, methods and goals in knowledge all depend on what we seek to know” (9).

To confuse the appropriate form of knowledge for a particular object would be to miss the object altogether. Wordsworth drew this out in his poem, “The Tables Turned”:

         UP! up! my Friend, and quit your books;

          Or surely you’ll grow double:

          Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks;

          Why all this toil and trouble?

 

          The sun, above the mountain’s head,

          A freshening lustre mellow

          Through all the long green fields has spread,

          His first sweet evening yellow.

 

          Books! ’tis a dull and endless strife:

          Come, hear the woodland linnet,                             10

          How sweet his music! on my life,

          There’s more of wisdom in it.

 

The ‘friend’ who seeks nature in his books – in scientific study, if you will – will miss the beauty and wonder of nature in his study of nature.  Wordsworth contends that the friend has brought the wrong means to study the object. Thus, in “studying” the friend misses everything of importance – in fact he destroys the object in his search:

          Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;

          Our meddling intellect

          Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:–

          We murder to dissect.

 

          Enough of Science and of Art;

          Close up those barren leaves;                               30

          Come forth, and bring with you a heart

          That watches and receives.

 

This same principle applies to theology, “Knowing God is something utterly unique, since God himself is unique” (9).  Much of the argument about God hinges upon this plain proposition: God is not known the way knows the batting average of a baseball player; a wife cannot be known the way one knows a spider. God cannot be known the way one knows types of coffee. And yet, we often grow frustrated with a personal God who will only be known personally.

Now God – as all things and all persons – is not and cannot be known absent the knowledge of other objects.  God is known in his relationship to his creation – just as a child is known in relationship to a parent: the relationship is a fundamental aspect of the knowledge[1]. 

This implies a much broader understanding of knowledge, “So we cannot know God without knowing other things at the same time”. We cannot know God as Creator without knowing (in some manner) creation. [2] Now this problem of knowledge of God becomes all the greater when we think that we are within the scope of God’s creation – there is not some unbiased place from which to observe. It is as if one seeks to know about a person, but only after the relationship is established – as a child has no potential space to know the parent except from the vantage of being a child.


[1] Wallace Stevens gets at some of this in his poem “Theory:

I am what is around me.

Women understand this.
One is not duchess
A hundred yards from a carriage.

These, then are portraits:
A black vestibule;
A high bed sheltered by curtains.

These are merely instances.

[2] Wallace Steven’s poem, “Theory” illustrates this fact of relatoin

Winter Poems

10 Wednesday Apr 2013

Posted by memoirandremains in Literature

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Poetry, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens

Sometimes you can see things more clearly by holding up one to spark off the other. Both of winter, both of seeing.

Robert Frost, Stars

HOW countlessly they congregate
O’er our tumultuous snow,
Which flows in shapes as tall as trees
When wintry winds do blow!—
As if with keenness for our fate,
Our faltering few steps on
To white rest, and a place of rest
Invisible at dawn,—
And yet with neither love nor hate,
Those stars like some snow-white
Minerva’s snow-white marble eyes
Without the gift of sight.

Wallace Stevens, The Snowman

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

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