1/13/2024 0 Comments A clear day and no memoriesYet everyone has shared some aspect of it everyone knows the truth here conveyed. Well, this Wallace Stevens poem is consciousness of – as Gass says – an extraordinary kind. It has no knowledge except of nothingnessĪs if none of us had ever been here beforeĪnd are not now: in this shallow spectacle, Today the mind is not part of the weather. Meaning if you want to feel the truth of consciousness – not be informed about a particular state of consciousness being experienced at a particular time by a particular person – you could do worse than this sort of thing:īending in blue dresses to touch something, For us, reading the poem, activating its verbal awareness once again is the discipline. Somehow the discipline of ordering words in a certain way is the cleansing, an act of self-transcendence and true-world-invocation. Great poems are cleansed perceptions wordified. One might say here that art is an excellent analogy of morals or indeed that it is in this respect a case of morals. This is not easy, and requires, in art or morals, a discipline. The chief enemy of excellence in morality (and also in art) is personal fantasy, the tissue of self-aggrandising and consoling wishes and dreams which prevents one from seeing what there is outside one. You want the doors of perception cleansed. The poet will make an awareness, a verbal awareness.Īnd you want that from the poem, because you know damn well your measly consciousness traps you in triviality and anxiety. If she’s a good writer, the words will push past the ego and its restless self-monitoring to a stately capture of broader truths. It’s the product of the poet’s transcendence of her measly consciousness via the act of writing the poem. This consciousness is not the poet’s – it’s not anybody’s. Poetry lifts us from propositional statements about what it’s like to have a particular human consciousness to a unique, fashioned, verbal, consciousness. Or think of it this way: Dull confessional poetry is dull because it records the consciousness of the artists themselves – I feel this, I feel that, this scene makes me feel this way, that scene makes me feel that way… As Gass says, the artist’s consciousness is liable to be just like ours, so there’s no art, no surprise, nothing new, when she simply discloses it. For that is what fine writing does: it creates a unique verbal consciousness.” It is not the writer’s awareness I am speaking of but the awareness he or she makes. “What works of art testify to is the presence in this world of consciousness, consciousness of many extraordinary kinds,” writes in “The Literary Miracle.” But this is “not that of the artists themselves, for theirs are often much the same as any other person’s.
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