behind all words

  

.

The skreak and skritter of evening gone
And grackles gone and sorrows of the sun,
The sorrows of sun, too, gone ... the moon and moon,
The yellow moon of words about the nightingale
In measureless measures, not a bird for me
But the name of a bird and the name of a nameless air
I have never–shall never hear. And yet beneath

The stillness of everything gone, and being still,
Being and sitting still, something resides,
Some skreaking and skrittering residuum,
And grates these evasions of the nightingale
Though I have never–shall never hear that bird.
And the stillness is in the key, all of it is,
The stillness is all in the key of that desolate sound.


—Wallace Stevens

.

Happy are those who know:
Behind all words, the Unsayable stands;
And from that source alone, the Infinite
Crosses over to gladness, and us 

Free of our bridges
Built with the stone of distinctions;
So that always, within each delight,
We gaze at what is purely single and joined.


—Rainer Maria Rilke

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on the road home

  

.

It was when I said,

“There is no such thing as the truth,”

That the grapes seemed fatter.

The fox ran out of his hole.

You….You said,

“There are many truths,

But they are not parts of a truth.” 

Then the tree, at night, began to change,

Smoking through green and smoking blue.

We were two figures in a wood.

We said we stood alone.

It was when I said,

“Words are not forms of a single word.

In the sum of the parts, there are only the parts.

The world must be measured by eye.”

It was when you said,

“The idols have seen lots of poverty,

Snakes and gold and lice,

But not the truth;”

It was at that time, that the silence was largest,

And longest, the night was roundest.

The fragrance of the autumn warmest,

Closest, and strongest.

—Wallace Stevens

 .

a person is a person through other persons

   

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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

.

There is a Zulu phrase, ‘Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu’, which means ‘A person is a person through other persons.’ 

This is a richer and better account, I think, than ‘I think, therefore I am.’

—Abeba Birhane

.

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart. —William Wordsworth

 

.

Everything that happens is the message:
you read an event and be one and wait,
like breasting a wave, all the while knowing
by living, though not knowing how to live.

Or workers built an antenna -- a dish
aimed at stars -- and they themselves are its message,
crawling in and out, being worlds that loom,
dot-dash, and sirens, and sustaining beams.

And sometimes no one is calling but we turn up
eye and ear -- suddenly we fall into
sound before it begins, the breathing
so still it waits there under the breath --

And then the green of leaves calls out, hills
where they wait or turn, clouds in their frenzied
stillness unfolding their careful words:
"Everything counts. The message is the world."


—William Stafford
A Message from Space
from The Worth of Local Things

.

The idea of the unus mundus is founded on the assumption that the multiplicity of the empirical world rests on an underlying unity, which is to say that all of the different things in the world belong to one and the same field of potential. This very same underlying unity is what quantum theory is revealing to us.


—Paul Levy
Quantum Revelation

.

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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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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the Bravest - grope a little

  

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We grow accustomed to the Dark -
When light is put away -
As when the Neighbor holds the Lamp
To witness her Goodbye -

A Moment - We uncertain step
For newness of the night -
Then - fit our Vision to the Dark -
And meet the Road - erect -

And so of larger - Darkness -
Those Evenings of the Brain -
When no a Moon disclose a sign -
Or Star - come out - within -

The Bravest - grope a little -
And sometimes hit a Tree
Directly in the Forehead -
But as they learn to see -

Either the Darkness alters -
Or something in the sight
Adjusts itself to Midnight -
And Life steps almost straight.


—Emily Dickinson

.

Here in the centre stands the glass. Light 

Is the lion that comes down to drink. 


—Wallace Stevens
The Glass of Water

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a dark sort of joy

  

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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
radishes and roses

.

Meditation Celestial and Terrestial

  

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The wild warblers are warbling in the jungle
Of life and spring of the lustrious inundations,
Flood on flood, of our returning sun.

Day after day, throughout the winter,

We hardened ourselves to live by bluest reason

In a world of wind and frost,

And by will, unshaken and florid

In mornings of angular ice,

That passed beyond us through the narrow sky.

But what are radiant reason and radiant will

To warblings early in the hilarious trees

Of summer, the drunken mother?

—Wallace Stevens

.

sudden rightnesses, wholly containing the mind

 

.

Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning, 
Every poem an epitaph. 
And any action 
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea’s throat 
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.


—T.S. Eliot

.

The poem of the mind in the act of finding  

What will suffice. It has not always had  

To find: the scene was set; it repeated what  

Was in the script.

Then the theatre was changed  

To something else. Its past was a souvenir.


It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.  

It has to face the men of the time and to meet  

The women of the time. It has to think about war  

And it has to find what will suffice. It has  

To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage  

And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and

With meditation, speak words that in the ear,  

In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat,

Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound  

Of which, an invisible audience listens,

Not to the play, but to itself, expressed

In an emotion as of two people, as of two  

Emotions becoming one. The actor is

A metaphysician in the dark, twanging

An instrument, twanging a wiry string that gives  

Sounds passing through sudden rightnesses, wholly  

Containing the mind, below which it cannot descend,  

Beyond which it has no will to rise.

It must

Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may

Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman  

Combing. The poem of the act of the mind.

—Wallace Stevens
Of Modern Poetry
(begs to be spoken

.

💗

 

.

Poor, dear, silly Spring, 
preparing her annual surprise!

 

—Wallace Stevens

.

madly wonderful

.

Some things, niño, some things are like this,
That instantly and in themselves are gay
And you and I are such things, O most miserable...

For a moment they are gay and are a part
Of an element, the exactest element for us,
In which we pronounce joy like a word of our own.

It is there, being imperfect, and with these things
And erudite in happiness, with nothing learned,
That we are joyously ourselves and we think

Without the labor of thought, in that element,
And we feel, in a way apart, for a moment, as if
There was a bright scienza outside of ourselves,

A gaiety that is being, not merely knowing,
The will to be and to be total in belief,
Provoking a laughter, an agreement, by surprise.


—Wallace Stevens
Of Bright & Blue Birds & The Gala Sun

 

.

 

 

 

say i am

.

There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words.

They make themselves manifest.

They are what is mystical.


—Ludwig Wittgenstein
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

. 

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

.

more truly and more strange

.

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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Get rid of everything.
If you exist, then you are loved
by existence. What do you need?
A spoon, a blanket, a bowl, a book -
maybe the book you give away.

Resist the need to worry, robbing everything
of immediacy and peace.
Resist traveling except where you want to go.
Resist seeing yourself in others or them in you.
Nothing, everything, is personal.


—Louise Erdrich
from Advice to Myself #2: Resistance
whiskeyriver (treasure)

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13 ways of looking at a blackbird

  

  

.

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

.

 

 

 

being imperfect

National Geographic photo of the year

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Beat doesn't mean tired, or bushed, so much as it means beato, the Italian for beatific: to be in a state of beatitude, like St. Francis, trying to love all life, trying to be utterly sincere with everyone, practicing endurance, kindness, cultivating joy of heart. 

How can this be done in our mad modern world of multiplicities and millions? By practicing a little solitude, going off by yourself once in a while to store up that most precious of golds: the vibrations of sincerity.

—Jack Kerouac

. 

Some things, niño, some things are like this,
That instantly and in themselves are gay
And you and I are such things, O most miserable...

For a moment they are gay and are a part
Of an element, the exactest element for us,
In which we pronounce joy like a word of our own.

It is there, being imperfect, and with these things
And erudite in happiness, with nothing learned,
That we are joyously ourselves and we think

Without the labor of thought, in that element,
And we feel, in a way apart, for a moment, as if
There was a bright scienza outside of ourselves,

A gaiety that is being, not merely knowing,
The will to be and to be total in belief,
Provoking a laughter, an agreement, by surprise.


—Wallace Stevens
Of Bright & Blue Birds & The Gala Sun

.

 

the nothing that is

  

.

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

.

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

 

. 

We recognize things, as in poetry, through resemblances.
Through metaphors. 

This way we gather them into wider systems so that they don’t dangle alone.


—Anna Kamienska

.

When a poet carries the mind into a context of meanings and then pitches it past those, one knows that marvelous rapture that comes from going past all categories of definition. Here we sense the function of metaphor that allows us to make a journey we could not otherwise make, past all categories of definition.

—Joseph Campbell

Thou Art That

.

 

Our lives, it seems, are a memory 

we had once in another place. 

Or are they its metaphor? 

The trees, if trees they are, seem the same, 

and the creeks do. 

The sunlight blurts its lucidity in the same way, 

And the clouds, if clouds they really are, 

still follow us, 

One after one, as they did in the old sky, in the old place. 

I wanted the metaphor, if metaphor it is, to remain 

always the same one. 

I wanted the hills to be the same, 

And the rivers too, 

especially the old rivers, 

The French Broad and Little Pigeon, the Holston and Tennessee, 

And me beside them, under the stopped clouds and stopped stars. 

I wanted to walk in that metaphor, 

untouched by time's corruption. 

I wanted the memory adamantine, never-changing. 

I wanted the memory amber, 

and me in it,

A figure among its translucent highlights and swirls, 

Mid-stride in its glittery motions. 

Wanted the memory cloud-sharp and river-sharp, 

My place inside it transfiguring, ever-still, 

no wind and no wave.

But memory has no memory. Or metaphor. 

It moves as it wants to move, 

and never measures the distance. 

People have died of thirst in crossing a memory. 

Our lives are summer cotton, it seems, 

and good for a season. 

The wind blows, the rivers run, and waves come to a head. 

Memory's logo is the abyss, and that’s no metaphor. 

—Charles Wright
Transparencies, Scar Tissue

.

I am what is around me.

.

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

.

the outlines of being and its expressings

.

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

.

take nothing

  

 .

The birds don't alter space.
They reveal it. The sky
never fills with any
leftover flying. They leave
nothing to trace. It is our own
astonishment collects
in chill air. Be glad.

They equal their due
moment never begging,
and enter ours
without parting day. See
how three birds in a winter tree
make the tree barer.

Two fly away, and new rooms
open in December.
Give up what you guessed
about a whirring heart, the little
beaks and claws, their constant hunger.
We are the nervous ones.

If even one of our violent number
could be gentle
long enough that one of them
found it safe inside
our finally untroubled and untroubling gaze,
who wouldn't hear
what singing completes us?


—Li-Young Lee
praise them
Book of My Nights

 

 

.

 

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

.