Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey is, quite unambiguously, concerned with the nature of memory and recollection; the poet has been to this view of the English country side and the Wye river* five years before, and has remembered it all this time; not in a staid philistine way ("Oh yeah I went to that place during the summer, now let's talk about cell phones."), but in a way as invests it with a tremendous living significance, a vision of what things really are:

"Nor less, I trust,/To them I may have owed another gift,/O aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,/In which the burden of the mystery ,/In which the affections gently lead us on,--/Until, the breath of this corporeal frame/And even the motion of our human blood/Almost suspended, we are laid asleep/In body, and become a living soul:/While with an eye made quiet by the power/Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,/We see into the life of things."

We see into the life of things. Is this not what the Aesthetic Hero strives to do? Is this then, for Wordsworth, what an epiphany is, when we see into the life of things? "Almost suspended, we are laid asleep/In body and become a living soul." This is almost like the Religous Epiphany, where one is struck down by the sheer sublimity of what is being beheld. This came to the poet with a view of Tintern Abbey, yet this sublime power, while transcendent, isn't explicitly aligned with a standard Christian notion of God. Calling Wordsworth's aesthetic a kind of animism seems a rather gross oversimplification, but perhaps on the direction to the right path. This path would lead of course to Tintern Abbey. Or to Hylite, or to the M or to any other place in this Beautiful World of Ours. Because it is these experiances that could help free us from distracting distraction and allow us to see into the life of things. Or Kari could be completely off-base, that is also possible.

We centered upon a recurring motif today: that of borrowing, or stealing if one wishes to be more blunt. Eliot stole the via negativa section of "East Coker" from St. John of the Cross, just as David Malouf in his most recent novel Ransom steals from The Dry Salvages in the opening sentance: "The sea has many voices." This is obviously a ubiquitous element within literature. But then again maybe it isn't "Stealing" so much as different definition.

In regard to Walter Pater's notion of the Aesthetic Hero, for instance, is he stealing from John Keats, with his notion of negative capability(the state where mysteries are no longer troublesome, but accepted by taking everything in)? And is Henry James stealing from both Pater and Keats by talking about the ideal person being "one on whom nothing is lost"? And is Wallace Stevens stealing from all of them by writing about a "figure of capable imagination"(from his poem Mrs. Alfred Uruguay)? Or are they all taking about the same thing, just in slightly different ways?

The thing is you need to use your brain to be an Aesthetic Hero, in order to see things the way that they ought to be perceived. Taylor and Kevin are both on the right road, if not already there, in their readings of Disillusionment at 10:00 and Gerard Manley Hopkins, respectively. I've gotta say I liked The Windhover well enough when I read it, but it took hearing it recited for the full impact of the words and the imagery to really hit home; you realize just how ecstatic it really is. As Kevin said, "I've never read anybody that uses so many exclaimation points before."

And I gotta say I did not know that Wreck of the Deutshland was Gerard Manley Hopkin's longest poem, or that their was a book of Wallace Stevens' poems for children. Learn something new everyday.

Today was the day of wowser blogs. I am very impressed by the lengths others in the class are going to; I actually am almost envious and in thrall to the anxiety of influence. Many of them centered upon Walter Pater, and his followers, who also include Gerard Manley Hopkins and Oscar Wilde, both of whom were students of his at Oxford.

Jennie Lynn blogged about Marcus Aurelius, whom she admires, in what was a wonderfully instructive digression from Walter Pater, who was also a fan of Marcus Aurelius( so it wasn't a 'distraction' after all).

Lisa little Legs wrote about her adoration for John Keats, which goes back to his notion of the Veil of Soul-making from Literary Criticism. And it also turns out that the Aesthetic Hero(discussed so eloquently by Pat in his blog) is engaged in the Veil of Soul-Making! Pater attempted to construct a novel with the Aesthetic Hero, Marius the Epicurean.

And Taylor's great blog about having her 101 writing students write about epiphanies, which theoretically would go completely over their heads. But we find amazing unexpected things when we are confronted with things that we don't "understand" or "get", as Taylor says she was when reading Pater. But she has come through in a rather resounding way.

In short, it has become evident that there are many figures of capable imagination(borrowing from Harold Bloom, who was borrowing from Wallace Stevens)in the class.

*I must correct a previous blog. The Henry James short story was called A Jolly Corner not as I originally thougth, The Wrong Corner. Huge difference. Or is there?

Walter Pater, as we have already discovered, was enormously influential to the aesthetic development of James Joyce, as well as Oscar Wilde and others who can be said to fall within the realm of aestheticism, or what is more commonly known as 'art for art's sake.'

Another one of his disciples was Virgina Woolf, another dedicated aesthetic. She recalls in her piece Old Bloomsbury(later anthlogized with others in a collection called Moments of Being, in itself a Pater-sounding title), coming back from parties she had to attend very early in the morning(she recalls this as a very confusing, unhappy time of her young adulthood): "It was long past midnight that I got into bed and sat reading a page or two of Marius the Epicvrean for which I had then a passion."(Moments of Being, pg 160) This was a novel of Pater's. In another interesting connection between them, Virgina was tutored in Classical literature by Clare Pater, Walter Pater's sister(small world I guess).

Here' the concluding sentances from Pater's The Renaissance:
" Great passions may give us a quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which comes naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion--that it does not yield you this fruit of a quickened, mulitplied consciousness. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most. For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake."

Maybe I am seeing a connection in to vague a spot(but I don't think so), but I was reminded of the epiphany(one of many really) that occurs for Mrs. Ramsey in To the Lighthouse:
" She listened, but it was very still; cricket was over; the children were in their baths;there was only the sound of the sea. She stopped knitting; she held the long-reddish brown stocking dangling in her hands a moment. She saw the light again. With some irony in her interrogation, for when one woke at all, one's relations changed, she looked at the steady light, the pitiless, the remorseless, which was so much her, yet so little her, which had her at its beck and call(she woke in the night and saw it bent across their bed, stroking the floor), but for all that she thought, watching it with fascination, hypnotised, as if it were stroking with its silver fingers some sealed vessel in her brain who's bursting would flood her with delight, she had known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness, and it silvered the rough waves a little more brightly, as daylight faded, and the blue went out of the sea and it rolled in waves of pure lemon which curved and swelled and broke upon the beach and the ecstasy burst in her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and she felt, It is enough! It is enough!"(pgs 64-65)

This all transpires in one brief moment, but the landscapes(of the bedroom, and of the ocean, one in the plane of vision before her, the other in her mind) are illumintated by light, the light from the lighthouse and also the light that comes with recognition, with epiphany. And the moment, just on its own and of its own, is enough. The moment with the highest quality, much like Pater suggested, but different all the same.

Class began with Mick explaining, at the behest of Mr. Sexson, the architecture for his term paper, a rewritting of the Four Quartets with the Mick stamp upon it. He will be assisted in this endeavor by Northrup Frye's Words with Power, a great book about different metaphors. I don't know about everybody else but I am thourougly intimidated now.

We are to blog about the following things(after reading them, of course):
Walter Pater
Hopkins' poems
Wordsworth--Tintern Abbey
Annie Dillard
Proust--the madeline pastry
St. John of the Cross, who wrote two important works in the history of Christian mysticism, Ascent to Mount Carmel and The Dark Night of the Soul. Which ties in ideally, the latter does, with what we discussed today: the dark epiphany. Bright epiphanies can only exist in relation to dark epiphanies, which fill us with fear and despair, and recognition of the fact that nothing matters, since we are all, in the words of Burnt Norton, "distracted from distraction by distraction." And it is when we cease being distracted by the thousands of things that distract us constantly, that we can possibly work toward something else; after kenosis(emptying out, which is a terrifying thing)then we can maybe begin to be filled up again.

Samuel Beckett was a major believer in emptying things down to their bare essential components, and this is why we percieve his work as being so dark and despairing and awful. Until we begin to read it properly. I guess.

Today was a day of patching in holes in The Four Quartets, or rather in our presentations of them. We got through about twelve lines of Burnt Norton, the rest of our time(whatever in the world that is really) was spent on digressions, which were of course illuminating in the extreme, as digressions tend to be.

Among them were the discussion of the lines by Heraklitus that open the poems, which translated into English from the Greek are "The way up is the way down." This is clearly reflected in The Dry Salvages, though I have to confess Willy Wonka sprung to my mind as well. Heraklitus, who was a pre-Socratic philosopher(one of the Ionians to be specific) who revealed in the notion of paradox and coined the phrase "You can't step in the same river twice." None of these were things that I really knew before.

We also have the notion of time and its poetic relation to place, so prominent for Eliot in these poems. This suggests that place is a potent artistic thing; you choose a place, like Burnt Norton or East Coker or Tintern Abbey, and let the place come to you, the past of it and also the future of it come into the "now" that you are there. Because what didn't happen matters more than what did happen, in some strange way. What might have been is always an imaginative possibility, as the movie Sliding Doors apparently is an example of(which actually sounds almost exactly like a movie directed by Krystof Kieslowski called Blind Chance), as well as the last quarter of Kazantzaki's The Last Temptation of Christ.

I also need to read the Henry James story The Wrong Corner and Saint John of the Cross

*and a final note for this blog. Perhaps I was wrong and over-heated describing Eliot as a "rabid" anti-semite, and in making the grave error of bringing biographical information into play with discussion of the poet's work. I could chaulk it up to the heat engendered by my dark epiphany or it could just as well be that I am an un-learned reader, as of yet or when will be. Just felt I should mention it.

The presenters for Little Gidding did an excellent job presenting their portion of the poem, with its terrible darkness, allusions to the war, Dante and the Bible for imagery of destruction and purification. The drawings of the old man and time and the dying and living rose were great, I thought, and I'm still marveling that it was an actual picture of an actual snake that Gossamer von Goss presented--metaphor and allegory can be viscerally real, it seems.

Which leads in uncomfortably with the thing which I feel I must talk about, the dark dove with the flickering tongue which alighted on my shoulder during the presentation, specifically when Derek tied the poem in with Schindler's List. The element of Little Gidding is fire, and the recurring trope is fire which destroys and devastates so that redemption can come; there can be no salvation or purification without destruction, the forest has to burn so that the trees can grow again.

The literal Greek meaning of holocaust is "purification by fire". So, might there be arguments that the Holocaust was cosmically essential for the flourishing of life? That the Third Reich served a part in the ultimately good functioning of God's cycle? That the incalculable suffering of this was and is justifiable? It has been argued by many figures in different veins throughout history(even somebody like Leibnitz could espouse something like this, since it goes into all these hoary issues of theodicy and the paradox of how God allows us to suffer because of love and all the rest of it). I don't think I can accept this. Perhaps I am also feeding into this reading by the un-erasable biographical knowledge that TS Eliot was a virulent anti-Semite(as to an even greater extant was his mentor Ezra Pound, one of the three heads on the ghost),and in all likelihood didn't view the Nazi genocide as a bad thing, if anything the reverse. Can I not let this color Little Gidding? I want very much for it not to, but at the same time I do not think it can be ignored.

I admit I wasn't expecting to experience a dark epiphany this morning, yet I have. I'm still reeling from the implications of what the dark dove with the flickering tongue brought to me.

I think I will return to the question of rivers and their signifigance that the last blog sort of left dangling(though I have to say that this entry may not do much more than 'dangle' itself).

Rivers are powerful and are a part of original creation, at least in the Bible, where there are four rivers that have a role in the geography of the garden of Eden, and we travel down them for journeys of various lengths and dangers(my own family floats on rivers in the summertime, which sometimes takes up to a whole day, or days depending on the trip). It may be for fun, or it may be of dire necessity, or it may simply be to go the way that one needs to go. Think of the importance of river journeys in, say The African Queen or Huckleberry Finn. Heck, even the Henry Mancini/Johnny Mercer song "Moon River" fits into this: "Moon river, wider than a mile/I'm crossin' you in style, someday."

And, since the river is the source of life, we can never know for certain were it can lead. For some reason I think of the line in Coleridge's Kublai Khan : "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/A stately pleasure dome decree/Where Alph the sacred river, ran/Through caverns measureless to man/Down to a sunless sea." Is the sunless sea the end, Death? Or are we being taken back to where we were before, into Creation which was also dark before the light comes forth? Maybe this is what the first sentance in Finnegans Wake is getting at then: "riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Invirions."

Maybe I've just been going in circles around this issue, which is so incredibly fruitful and revealing. But I do think we can see that something is here. Even I can see that.

Today was the presentation by the Dry Salvages group, who continued on with the impressive Four Quartets dissertations. The element which this quartet is aligned with is water, like Burnt Norton was air and East Coker was earth. I was particularly struck by the distinction poetically made between rivers and the ocean: rivers are inside of us, the ocean is outside of us.

I also loved the parallel between the labyrinth(which always for only one through way, though it appears otherwise)and the river, which takes us down the path toward our destination, which if we are on the river of life, is Death. But this is alright, because if all rivers flow to the ocean, which is outside us but which we all come to eventually, than it is also the return to that which we came from originally anyway. I just now realized this as I was typing this blog, so if it isn't more cogently phrased this is why.

When Kari is more motivated and with a bit more time(but what is that anyway?), she may blog about the metaphorical and spiritual significance of rivers in literature.

The sharing of diamonds from The Dead continued today. It was also pointed out by Loomis(also according to Loomis) that there are five sections of the story.
1. Musicale
2.Dinner
3.Leave-taking
4.Drive to hotel
5.Vision
The last is of course the great moment to which everything had been building, and it is also where the still point is. Relating of course to the lines from Burnt Norton: "at the still point of the turning world, there the dance is."

It is also mentionable that Gabriel and Michael are of course the names of archangels, further pushing the contrast between the two in the story: Gabriel is so at pains to keep the elements at bay(such as with the galoshes and refusing to go outside), and Micheal Furey stood in the rain, literally meeting his death for the sake of showing Gretta he loved her.

And the connection between Michael Furey and the song that is sung, The Lass of Aughrim. It tells the story of a young woman who has been seduced, impregnated and abandoned, and who is standing outside of the man's house in the rain, with the dead baby in her arms. So Gretta's epiphany even has an element of connecting Michael Furey with the story in the song rather than just the song itself. This was something that it had not occured to me to consider until it was mentioned this morning.

Today was the day of sharing diamonds from The Dead in class. There are many to be had, even though it is undeniably styled like a mundane story, not something that we would see elsewhere in a big exciting world other than the one we live in(mundane actually is derived from mundo, the world). Because, according to Mr. Sexson, 95% of writing out there is aimed at lazy readers, who expect the story to do everything for them. Joyce needs you to be an active reader and pull the meat from the story out on your own(really Virginia Woolf is another writer who requires her readers to be active).

One learns things one wouldn't expect to. I did not catch the linking of the painting of the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet with Michael Furey, or with Gabriel looking up at his wife on the stairs in ecstacsy from the music. But now I do. Guess I need to strive toward being a more active reader than.