Wallace Stevens
How the mind constructs reality
Anecdote Of the Jar (story or illustration of a jar/container/construction/idea) the mind continually overflows any containment�and in that action shows/reveals its infinity (perhaps, immortality)�constantly breaking through previous vision of the world�our mind is a perpetual play of impression (senses) and ideas (mind creates from the sense impressions)
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness sloppy/disorganized
Surround that hill.
(round jar makes disorganized wilderness
somewhat organized)
The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild. Why no longer �wild�? Jar brings
outside in�civilization,
order, structure
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air. �port in air��gateway
Between wilderness and civilization, order
And disorder (jar�human
imagination/mind�that primary faculty of
the mind that puts things together for us�
into �jars�)
It took dominion everywhere. Ordering principle in or outside us
The jar was gray and bare. Irony/contradiction: need balance of
Wildness and structure or order and disorder
Like the yin-yang symbol
It did not give of bird or bush, it�s not natural but spiritual/transcendent
Like nothing else in Tennessee. But Imagination needs Tennessee
Imagination needs Tennessee (natural world) to receive new images in order to make new wholes/structures/works of art/coherent ideas and perceptions
Interdependence of imagination and nature
Disillusionment at 10 O�Clock
Near bed-time lost illusions (lost imagination---living in that gray world)
Role of art to not let us become disillusioned, but to see the �colors�
The houses are haunted
By white night-gowns. Why haunted by ordinary gowns?
There�s a loss of imagination here.
No one wants to think differently
Like film �Pleasantville��must think
Outside the box, be yourself
None are green,
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings,
Or yellow with blue rings.
None of them are strange,
With socks of lace
And beaded ceintures. Sash for waist (like middle-aged)
People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles. Monkeys or flowers (odd irrational
things we can dream about and the
imagination can �connect�
ugliness and beauty?
We waste so much of our lives, we
Fail to notice the beauty
Only, here and there, an old sailor, Redemption comes in the form of
Drunk and asleep in his boots, an old drunk, marginalized,
Catches Tigers has a vision�transforms reality
In red weather. With his imagination (doing same
Thing jar on hill in TN is doing)
William Blake �The Tyger�
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
What could be more simple, plainer than a blackbird? Less susceptible to the power of the imagination to transform into something miraculous?
Not a peacock or magic bird,
Blackbird is mysterious essence
Sex in woods/ union is union�blackbird is part of that union
�I was of three minds
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds�
Connection of mind and blackbird
Does recognition of beauty come during or after whistling of blackbird
�O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?�
We don�t need golden, imaginary birds�real blackbirds �women associated with blackbirds several times in the poem�how are women different than men in how they construct/perceive (women for intuitive/holistic than rationalist/objective)
Subjective vs. objective (can you achieve objectivity?) blackbird exists in that tipping point between subjective and objective? Mysterious darkness�the source of consciousness itself (river moving, blackbird flying)
When we come back to the �real� (objective) in no. 13, it�s different than if we had read it first. After we�ve had all the flights of fancy/subjectivity/exploration of the potential for meaning (denotation and connotation), the blackbird is transformed.
Last Modified 7/1/23