The Latest Freed Man

To memorize Wallace Stevens is to be mesmerized.

Back Story. The Latest Freed Man

Wallace Stevens completed the metamorphoses from poet to insurance salesman to poet.

Why he did this is the speculation of critics and scholars, so of what I am about to write is from the color and sound of "The Lastest Freed Man", based on simply what is leftover. Stevens sits on the edge of his bed, relinquishing "the mother" and the "philosopher" but unable to change the behavior of waking without the alarm as his sun is his alarm. Alarming as it is that Stevens is tired of legal consults and oratory defense, or offense, to waltz in the wake of "old descriptions of the world", someone in my past about the same time Stevens passed reminded me that we must make a space, a hole, a place before anything new can come. Perhaps this is what Stevens is doing. Jurisprudence, Truth with a capital T, and a clean getaway for Stevens as he engages with the morning relinquishing all control to the sun. In the full emptiness of the moment, Stevens realizes he needs nothing and contemplates how he thinks. His thoughts reach out to heal from his lofty freed state, a state of how he thinks about want one could do to live. In Stevens thinking, this is how he thinks; much more important to him that what he thinks.

Anthony Hopkins asks a counselor "What are you afraid of losing?" The right answer is required by the counselor to achieve freedom from the pen poked in the vicinity of his jugular. The counselor answers "my freedom." The pen pokes tighter, "No. What are you afraid of losing? You think you have freedom? (pause) Try again!" The counselor answers wrong a second time, "My life," as the pen poke and the position of his bones are transformed into a cowering corner. "Wrong again! Everyone loses their life. What are you afraid of losing?" Short story long, the counselor finally acknowledges, "my illusions, I am afraid of losing my illusions." I am certain that I murdered the correct words as I am citing from memory "Instinct" (1999) Directed by Jon Turteltaub, Writer Gerald Di Pego, starring Anthony Hopkins, Cuba Gooding Jr., Donald Sutherland.

Tired of the old descriptions of the world,

The latest freed man rose at six and sat

On the edge of his bed. He said,

                                    "I suppose there is

A doctrine to this landscape. Yet, having just

Escaped from the truth, the morning is color and mist,

Which is enough: the moment's rain and sea,

The moment's sun (the strong man vaguely seen),

Overtaking the doctrine of this landscape. Of him

And of his works, I am sure. He bathes in the mist

Like a man without a doctrine. The light he gives--

It is how he gives his light. It is how he shines,

Rising upon the doctors in their beds

And on their beds. . . ."

                                    And so the freed man said.

It was how the sun came shining into his room:

To be without a description of to be,

For a moment on rising, at the edge of the bed, to be,

To have the ant of the self changed to an ox

With its organic boomings, to be changed

From a doctor into an ox, before standing up,

To know that the change and that the ox-like struggle

Come from the strength that is the strength of the sun,

Whether it comes directly or from the sun.

It was how he was free. It was how his freedom came.

It was being without description, being an ox.

It was the importance of the trees outdoors,

The freshness of the oak-leaves, not so much

That they were oak-leaves, as the way they looked.

It was everything being more real, himself

At the centre of reality, seeing it.

It was everything bulging and blazing and big in itself,

The blue of the rug, the portrait of Vidal,

Qui fait fi des joliesses banales, the chairs.

Beckett Stevens Link in the imagination

Samuel Beckett and Steven Wallace are linked by citation in "Einstein and Beckett. A record of an imaginary discussion with Albert Einstein and Samuel Beckett" by Edwin Schlossberg. I checked out the book last week because of its title last week - speak of coincidence. Cited works come from the 1964 "Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens." It may not be what "Deep Waters" seeks, but interesting still the same.

"A normal that I ought to achieve."

~1940 Wallace Stevens letter excerpt (Brown 1970):  . . . "Of course, I don't agree with the people who say that I live in a world of my own; I think that I am perfectly normal, but I see that there is a center. For instance, a photograph of a lot of fat men and women in the woods, drinking beer and singing Hi-li Hi-lo convinces me that there is a normal that I ought to try to achieve."

Merle E. Brown attempts to explore Stevens's shift or changes in writing and writing style and content between Harmonium's content "of the mind in the act of finding / What will suffice." and Owl's Clover "to achieve" this normal [described in Stevens's letter]. Yet Brown suggests that Owl's Clover is a failure; that Stevens without validation of the substance found in "The Comedian", attempts to explore "the thoughts of all are the same thought. The ideal is to be pure being, devoid of becoming, a life lived"

For the gaudium of being, Jocundus instead

Of the black-blooded scholar, the man of the cloud, to be

The medium man among other medium men,

The cloak to be clipped, the night to be re-designed,

Its land-breath to be stifled, its color changed,

Night and the imagination being one.

Brown suggests that Stevens eliminated the influence of the poet (90), or in my understanding the blue guitar and its playing. Brown also asserts that in The Man with the Blue Guitar (~1935) Stevens "seems to have acquired a strength of will and ease of mind that are not at all apparent in his early work (85) / It is a world of things as they are, of men like mechanical beetles never quite warm, but played upon the blue guitar, in the blueness of the historical imagination (84)."

So why is it, I do not see Owl's Clover as failure. My first reading of Owl's Clover, minus insights of the others, was almost a mirror to the characters developed in a 12-minute screenplay titled "Picasso's Hands" (2009) situated in the present about Picasso's experience losing his friend Carlos Casagemous to suicide and Guillaume Apollinaire to the war. The screenplay parallels two stories that intersect the present with the past as an Afghan war veteran explores without words how to grieve the loss of his mother and his fathers' quest to erase the past. Owl's Clover buzzes and twanges what reads to me the same attributes assigned to actions, characters deprived of the words, expressing the senses of the scene.

Tone is paramount! It colors Stevens's words: an ultimate lack of substance in a sense of loss; a sense of unchangeable destiny; no need to create a "past card" that for them all would be the same "past card".  In my limited naive understanding of Stevens's vision, I gaze upon the blue guitar reading aloud a eulogy, Owl's Clover. I am interested in your perspectives and response to Owl's Clover, if you were influenced.

Works Cited

Brown, Merle E. Wallace Stevens: The Poem as Act. Detroit: Wayne State University P. 1970 Page 62

Hoopes, Carla. Picasso's Hands. Bozeman: InterMedia Productions. 2009. Print.

Sexson, Michael. September 17, 2012. Bozeman: Lecture. Past card as metaphor for Post Card from a Volcano].

Unpacking: A Postcard from a Volcano

Poetry is a most concise air - bones are a most concise poetry.

Wallace Stevens might hope we believe that embracing a poet's body of work from its spring to its winter is like separating the white [imagination] from the yolk [body] and whipping it full of air [life set aside in the space of nature] until it peaks as a stiff froth; a legacy smearing life's experience with the noble yolk [sun].

It is spring, the beginning of a shared experience such as mine, the reader of Wallace Stevens's poetry. I pick up the poems [bones] buried in books and manuscripts [archives like a coffin for the dead] and read aloud; expecting to hear, see, feel what Stevens' observed, his passions, and his life's experience. I am here as a child transformed by the poems written knowing that somehow I am here because they were written and archived. My pace is at first slow hoping to understand not realizing how quickly the words were spoken in their day in the way most meaningful. Words come off my tongue like the trusting wind [literate air] not realizing how much meaning is lost in the first reading. Stevens wants me to know that A Postcard from a Volcano [like receiving a note in a bottle at sea] is not about him, is about as he proclaims, "our" [dead poets], body [bodies] of work [oevres] and the gatekeepers. I read the poet's contemporaries' thoughts about the work and bring diverse perspectives to my understanding; never fully experiencing the same air, the poet's transformation because the poet's own words [fruits] become more direct and succinct, tempered in autumn. Singing praises to poets seems to lend itself to the empty walls, un-listening publics. Is it likely that Wallace Stevens is suggesting here that reality and imagination of life is found by the individual; singing, reading, experiencing poetry as body of experience beginning with spring.

A Postcard from the Volcano

Children picking up our bones

Will never know that these were once

As quick as foxes on the hill.

And that in autumn, when the grapes

Made sharp air sharper by their smell

These had a being, breathing frost;

And least will guess that with our bones

We left much more, left what still is

The look of things, left what we felt

At what we saw. The spring clouds blow

Above the shuttered mansion-house,

Beyond our gate and the windy sky

Cries out a literate despair

We know for long the mansions look

And what we said of it became

A part of what it is . . . Children,

Still weaving budded aureoles,

Will speak our speech and never know,

Will say of the mansion that it seems

As if he that lived there left behind

A spirit storming in blank walls,

A dirty house in a gutted world,

A tatter of shadows peaked to white,

Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.

Considerations and annotations: [initial reception: message by mail from Mt. Vesuvius - eruption - arts and antiquities buried for future generations to unbury.]

Children [the reader] picking up our bones [Afghani children picking up unexploded field arsonal] [bones are the point of view = poetry in its most concise air]

Will never know that these were once

As quick as foxes on the hill. [poetry of its time and the huge conversations philosophies]

And that in autumn [days are shorter and air crisper], when the grapes [fruits of a poets writing]

Made sharp air sharper by their smell [Grapes of Wrath - the movie of postwar depression]

These had a being, breathing frost; [crisp crackling voice with signs of winter]

And least will guess that with our bones [poetry and writings]

We left much more, left what still is

The look of things, [descriptions] left what we felt [passions]

At what we saw [looking]. The spring clouds blow [wind, air, activity, promise]

Above the shuttered mansion-house, [archives of the ancients - experience - body is one's temple - buried in a coffin]

Beyond our [poets'] gate [to heaven] and the windy sky

Cries out a literate despair [loss of written words]

We know for long the mansions [body's] look

And what we said of it became [biography]

A part of what it is . . . Children [the readers],

Still weaving budded aureoles [praises and new meanings],

Will speak our speech and never know, [recite our poetry without passion]

Will say of the mansion that it seems [speaking of the dead]

As if he that lived there left behind [legacy]

A spirit storming in blank walls, [passion erupting in the void listen-less public]

A dirty house in a gutted world [cluttered thinking with no receptacle],

A tatter of shadows peaked to white, [whipped egg whites - draping of the poet's oevre whipped to a stiff froth]

Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun. [blessed with a noble life]

Unpacking: Earthy Anecdote (1918) by Wallace Stevens

The Back Story:

The thoughtful schoolboy packed for a weekend in Oklahoma with his raucous classmates and regarded the warnings of his mother as he tried to leave the house. The schoolboy protected his careful planning; avoiding counter plans that his mother lay bare to keep him safe. The schoolboy recognized his thoughts spinning in figure eights seeking the right responses to get past his mother and out the door. The diligent thoughts came to him and his response got him past his mother and out the door with his friends whose disinterest reignited his mother's counter-warnings; which are now a lost voice as the schoolboys make their escape.

Everytime A goes mouthing off

B bristles

Everytime A moves left it is because of B

Everytime A moves right it is because of B

B = controller; A = lesser rank

The poem is written in the midst of World War I.

Can it be that this poem engages the reader from the perspective of the imagination to not think, or to think, about the orange and purple air as the framework--that preys upon lesser imaginings dancing in the dark? How many of Wallace Stevens's friends and family were killed or negatively impacted during World War I?

Unpacking considerations:

The unpacking of Earthy Anecdote could be applied, in my opinion, to piety, political positioning, or the topic of thinking itself. My thinking races to limiting factions on freedoms of expression: over-speakers; silencers; those proud of their ability to communicate using skill sets in the interest of censorship.

"Earthy" as opposed to "Earthly": Stevens uses nature as the frame of space for his conversations with the reader. "Earthy" is within nature while "Earthly" is of nature.

"Bucks": In the midst of World War I (1917-1918), bucks might be considered as the lowest rank of soldiers [I choose to define bucks as worthy thinkers yet less regarded for the point of view Wallace takes for Earthy Anecdote].

"Bucks" further research: It might be interesting to compare the roster of soldiers who died in World War I (W.M. Haulsee, et al, Soldiers of the Great War, 3 vols. Washington, D.C.: Soldiers Record Publishing Association 1920 (see Oklahoma Periodicals): perhaps Wallace Stevens lost friends or relatives in the war.

"Clattering" is talking rapidly and noisily

"Fire-cat" with closed bright eyes could be the cessation of bullets exploding

"Fire-cat" could be a domesticated entity smothering the existence of mice or rats and the lowest ranks of humankind (power or political or domesticated controller, parent, police, society)

The pouncing dominant -- vocal combatants until the end of the war, or vice versa.

Each and every time the lessers vocalize noisily and rapidly

The domesticated controller bristles in annoyance

Makes no difference the message

Silence the voice [pounce squelch censor alienate redirect]

This poem inspires me to wonder if Wallace Stevens is immune, and is not immune, to the causality and casualty of war.

Cat-and-mouse exploitation; probing for vulnerabilities = war.

When the cat sleeps the mice can play.

 

EARTHY ANECDOTE

Every time the bucks went clattering

Over Oklahoma

A firecat bristled in the way.

Wherever they went,

They went clattering,

Until they swerved

In a swift, circular line

To the right,

Because of the firecat.

Or until they swerved

In a swift, circular line

To the left,

Because of the firecat.

The bucks clattered.

The firecat went leaping,

To the right, to the left,

And

Bristled in their way.

Later, the firecat closed his bright eyes

And slept.

Annotations to Wallace Stevens: Tea at the Palaz of Hoon
Published 1921

... the loneliest air ...

The loneliest anything merely is.

I was 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.
I was myself the compass of that sea.

All is air above and below
Itself all that is the loneliest air
On the seas and overseas
More airless in its wake.

Michael Sexson's Book: Wallace Stevens: The Poem as Act by Merle E. Brown