looking too closely

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This is a song about somebody else
So don't worry yourself, worry yourself
The devil's right there right there in the details
And you don't wanna hurt yourself, hurt yourself
Looking too closely
Looking too closely
Oh, no, no, no!

Put your arms around somebody else
Don't punish yourself, punish yourself
Truth is like blood underneath your fingernails
And you don't wanna hurt yourself, hurt yourself
Looking too closely
Looking too closely
Oh, no, no, no!
Oh, no, no, no!

You don't wanna hurt yourself, hurt yourself
You don't wanna hurt yourself, hurt yourself
Oh, no, no, no!
And I could be wrong about anybody else

So don't kid yourself, kid yourself
It's you…


—Fin Greenall

...

In my room, the world is beyond my understanding;

But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four
hills and a cloud.


—Wallace Stevens
Of the Surface of Things, excerpt

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largerloves
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Everything in the world began with a yes. —Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

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It is part of a wise man, I say, to refresh and restore himself in moderation with pleasant food and drink, with scents, with the beauty of green plants, with decoration, music, sports, the theater, and other things of this kind, which anyone can use without injury to another. For the human body is composed of a great many parts of different natures, which constantly require new and varied nourishment, so that the whole body may be equally capable of all the things which can follow from its nature, and hence, so that the mind also may be equally capable of understanding many things at once.

—Baruch Spinoza
Ethics, IVP45S

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After the final no there comes a yes
And on that yes the future world depends.
No was the night. Yes is this present sun.

If the rejected things, the things denied,
Slid over the western cataract, yet one,
One only, one thing that was firm, even
No greater than a cricket's horn, no more
Than a thought to be rehearsed all day, a speech
Of the self that must sustain itself on speech,
One thing remaining, infallible, would be
Enough. Ah! douce campagna of that thing!

Ah! douce campagna, honey in the heart,
Green in the body, out of a petty phrase,
Out of a thing believed, a thing affirmed:
The form on the pillow humming while one sleeps,
The aureole above the humming house...
It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.


—Wallace Stevens
The Well Dressed Man With A Beard

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more truly and more strange

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I was in the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.


—Wallace Stevens
Tea in the Palaz of Hoon

...

We are individualized waves of consciousness on the Infinite Ocean of Spirit; so say the sages.

But, although the Ocean has become the wave, and the wave, when it dissolves the illusion of ego-separation and limitation, realizes that it has always been one with the Infinite Ocean, the form-bound wave itself is not the Ocean. Nor is the Ocean merely the sum of its waves—the Ocean can exist without the waves, but the waves cannot exist without the Ocean.

Everything you can see, hear, smell, touch, taste, and much more, is part of this Ocean. For all matter, energy and consciousness is merely waves of certain rates of vibration on the surface of the Ocean of Consciousness; Spirit has become, and is present in and as, every created thing. That is, consciousness is the “water” of the Infinite Ocean of Spirit, and all phenomena arise as modifications of this one stuff, or ripples on/of this Ocean of cosmic consciousness.


—Geoffrey D. Falk
The Science of the Soul:
On Consciousness and the Structure of Reality

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I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.

A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.


—D. H. Lawrence

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radishes and roses

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In the oldest religion, everything was alive, not supernaturally but naturally alive … For the whole life-effort of man was to get his life into contact with the elemental life of the cosmos, mountain-life, cloud-life, thunder-life, air-life, earth-life, sun-life. To come into immediate felt contact, and so to derive energy, power, and a dark sort of joy. This effort into sheer naked contact, without an intermediary or mediator, is the root meaning of religion.


—D. H. Lawrence

...

Ursula, in a garden, found
A bed of radishes.
She kneeled upon the ground
And gathered them,
With flowers around,
Blue, gold, pink, and green.

She dressed in red and gold brocade
And in the grass an offering made
Of radishes and flowers.

She said, “My dear,
upon your alters
I have placed the marguerites and coquelicot,
And roses
Frail as April snow;

But here," she said,
"Where none can see,
I make an offering in the grass
Of radishes and flowers.”
And then she wept
For fear the Lord would not accept.

The good Lord in his garden sought
New leaf and shadowy tinct,
And they were all his thought.
He heard her low accord,
Half prayer and half ditty,
And He felt a subtle quiver,
That was not heavenly love,
Or pity.

This is not writ
In any book.


—Wallace Stevens

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Panic is the sudden realization that everything around you is alive. –William S. Burroughs

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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.

—Wallace Stevens

theory

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plural

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Morning and afternoon are clasped together
And North and South are an intrinsic couple
And sun and rain a plural, like two lovers
That walk away as one in the greenest body.


—Wallace Stevens
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction

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You were enmeshed in a great network which magically changed you into something vaster than yourselves. For you have need of the vastness that such words alone impart.

—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The Wisdom of the Sands

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Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor. —Wallace Stevens

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In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference.  We believe in marbles that disintegrate when we search for them but that are as real as any genuine marble when we’re not looking for them.  Our very nature is such as to prevent us from fully understanding its very nature.

Poised midway between the unvisualizable cosmic vastness of curved spacetime and the dubious, shadowy flickerings of charged quanta, we human beings, more like rainbows and mirages than like raindrops or boulders, are unpredictable self-writing poems – vague, metaphorical, ambiguous, and sometimes exceedingly beautiful.


—Douglas Hofstadter
I Am a Strange Loop

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the outlines of being and its expressings

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There were ghosts that returned to earth to hear his phrases,
As he sat there reading, aloud, the great blue tabulae. 
They were those from the wilderness of stars that had expected more. 

There were those that returned to hear him read from the poem of life, 
Of the pans above the stove, the pots on the table, the tulips among them. 
They were those that would have wept to step barefoot into reality, 

That would have wept and been happy, have shivered in the frost 
And cried out to feel it again, have run fingers over leaves 
And against the most coiled thorn, have seized on what was ugly 

And laughed, as he sat there reading, from out of the purple tabulae, 
The outlines of being and its expressings, the syllables of its law: 
Poesis, poesis, the literal characters, the vatic lines, 

Which in those ears and in those thin, those spended hearts, 
Took on color, took on shape and the size of things as they are 
And spoke the feeling for them, which was what they had lacked. 


—Wallace Stevens
Large Red Man Reading

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Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour

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Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:

Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence.

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one . . .
How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.


—Wallace Stevens

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13 ways of looking at a blackbird

  

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I

Among twenty snowy mountains,

The only moving thing

Was the eye of the blackbird.

II

I was of three minds,

Like a tree

In which there are three blackbirds.

III

The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.

It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV

A man and a woman

Are one.

A man and a woman and a blackbird

Are one.

V

I do not know which to prefer,

The beauty of inflections,

Or the beauty of innuendoes,

The blackbird whistling

Or just after.

VI

Icicles filled the long window

With barbaric glass.

The shadow of the blackbird

Crossed it, to and fro.

The mood

Traced in the shadow

An indecipherable cause.

VII

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?

VIII

I know noble accents

And lucid, inescapable rhythms;

But I know, too,

That the blackbird is involved

In what I know.

IX

When the blackbird flew out of sight,

It marked the edge

Of one of many circles.

X

At the sight of blackbirds

Flying in a green light,

Even the bawds of euphony

Would cry out sharply.

XI

He rode over Connecticut

In a glass coach.

Once, a fear pierced him,

In that he mistook

The shadow of his equipage

For blackbirds.

XII

The river is moving.

The blackbird must be flying.

XIII

It was evening all afternoon.

It was snowing

And it was going to snow.

The blackbird sat

In the cedar-limbs.

—Wallace Stevens

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Re-Statement of Romance

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The night knows nothing of the chants of night.
It is what it is as I am what I am:
And in perceiving this I best perceive myself 

And you. Only we two may interchange 

Each in the other what each has to give. 

Only we two are one, not you and night, 

Nor night and I, but you and I, alone, 

So much alone, so deeply by ourselves, 

So far beyond the casual solitudes, 

That night is only the background of our selves, 

Supremely true each to its separate self, 

In the pale light that each upon the other throws.

–Wallace Stevens

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the snow man

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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

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