“A new knowledge of reality”

“It was like/A new knowledge of reality”—Wallace Stevens

Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1817)

Ritchie Robinson begins his chapter on the Enlightenment’s approach to aesthetics with the phrase, “[c]onsistent with its emphasis on happiness.” [p. 464] Funnily enough, I have found little addressing the “pursuit of happiness” that forms the subtitle of his book. And just when I think Robertson might be embarking on a demonstration of that pursuit, it morphs.

And The Eyes Have It

On occasion, something shows up in my inbox that intrigues me enough that, if I can’t get to it right away, I let it sit there as a “holding place.” One such thing was Al Filreis’s alert of a new Poem Talk about John Giorno’s poem/sound performance piece “Everyone is a complete disappointment.” Whatever the poem was about, that title caught my attention. 

Pohjola’s Daughter and Other Wonders of the World

Esa-Pekka Salonen

With thanks to David Nice for identifying this wonderful performance. For more on Sibelius’s Pohjola’s Daughter, click here.

Turbans in Connecticut (and New York)

The great structure has become a minor house.
No turban walks across the lessened floors.

—Wallace Stevens (The Plain Sense of Things)

Turbans, along with sombreros, appear early on in the poems of Wallace Stevens. At least three poems in Harmonium sport turbans. Here’s The Load of Sugar-Cane:

The going of the glade-boat
Is like water flowing;

Like water flowing
Through the green saw-grass
Under the rainbows;

Under the rainbows
That are like birds,
Turning, bedizened,

While the wind still whistles
As kildeer do,

When they rise
At the red turban
Of the boatman.

A Mind of Winter

One must have a mind of winter
—Wallace Stevens

Snow left by the blizzard has receded here, but the cold continues on. We view the landscape from the warm side of the window, venturing out only as our needs require.