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.