Wordsworth: some thoughts

While reading Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey I was reminded of the beginning of East Coker. In East Coker he is looking out over a field, meditating on it and the history of it.....And in Tintern Abbey, in the beginning of the poem we read that he is looking out over a landscape as well. Then part way through the poem I noticed this passage:

"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." - Wordsworth

It is like resting on an image, landscape, object, or surrounding in your mind so deeply that we go from just seeing everything around us into seeing whatever it is for the first time.....seeing into the life of things, rather than just the things. This passage so reminds me of Wordsworth again: recollected in tranquility. The mind has to be calm, empty, recieving to see into the life of things....or perhaps have a mystical experience......an epiphany. It also seems like Wordsworth is optimally aware of of the world at which he is experiencing, unlike the times of his youthful boyhood, "(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days,And their glad animal movements all gone by)" - Wordsworth

For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. - Wordsworth

We talked about this passage in class in terms of Dr. Sexson walking to school in the morning while the sun is rising and Bozeman is waking up.

Nor wilt thou then forget,
That after many wanderings, many years
Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs,
And this green pastoral landscape, were to me
More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake! - Wordsworth

This passage reminded me of part of the Upanishads that goes something like this ....it is not for the sake of the husband that the wife loves the husband, but for atman, and atman is brahman.

So there are just some thoughts on Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey.

Class Notes 2/26

Notes...

Eliot, not borrowing, but stealing from St. John of the Cross
**See the text circled by yellow on the scan picture from John of the Cross: Selected Writings.

Eliot, Four Quartets, East Coker

In order to arrive there,To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.

HOMEWORK: Read William Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey, then blog about it

IMPORTANT: Dr. Sexson stressed this in class, we must catch up on our blogging & be reading the blogs of others. We have no exams in this class, therefore we are expected to show up and blog.

See Pat's blog: aesthetic hero, which we talked about for nearly the entire class period.

connected to Pater and intellectual excitement, everything is fleeting which is why we must pay attention.....

'still sad music of humanity" - walking to campus early in the morning, the sun is rising, Dr. Sexson

Rousseau, Confessions, intellectual excitement, "love of art for its own sake", give highest quality to moments as they pass...

John Keats, Walter Pater, Wallace Stevens, Henry James.....ALL aesthetes.

Walter Pater, taught at Oxford University
Epicurean, becoming aesthetic hero...... = becoming a person who is optimally aware of the world...

**Dr. Sexson said Taylor is a developing aesthete by responding to a poem as it need to be responded to, reading the poem correctly...Taylor subsequently disagreed. Taylor is responding to the poem as a whole, emotional, imagination wiped from the world:
Sexson: (to Taylor) 'You are an aethetic hero.'
Taylor: 'First thing, I am not an aesthetic hero.'
Sexson: "Yes you are."
Taylor: "No..."

to see a thing in itself which really counts in this class you are being the enlightenment

not Pater - hedonism, pursuit of pleasure for pleasure, living for the moment

figure of capable imagination
Wallace Stevens poem, working to come up with his own concretization of the aesthetic hero.

Keats - negative capability, via negativa, drain yourself, become nothing in order to have everything

DVD film: Bright Star, about John Keats, living example of who Pater thinks is aesthetic hero, which is done by being optimally aware.

Henry James, one on who nothing is lost, Ambassadors

Hopkins - Windover.....talking about a bird, bird of prey, the prey bird dive bombs, destroying, and shredding the mouse, extreme violence, but also extreme beauty...Christ do to me what the bird of prey did in that dive bomb, is the idea.

Kevin is loving Hopkins, read his blog, Holy Hopkins Batman.
aesthetic hero

Hopkins Poetry = Rice Crispies = snap, crackle, pop

Kevin: got up in front of the class and gave a clear impromptu presentation about Inscape, a rhetorical category, a means by which the aesthetic hero sees something as it really is and no other thing... one you see that an explosion happens. Also instress. The uniqueness of everything. close to the word of God....
Figure out instress of inscape
Kevin:
Hopkins - religious spin on everything, what it's about is not important, what Hopkins did with the theme is important....

I think we are also supposed to read Dillard over the weekend as well.....She is Hopkinsian

Class Notes 2/24

Homework: Basically, just read everyone's blog! before Friday. tomorrow. And we should be reading Virginia Woolf


So here's the plan with our memorization of the Four Quartets, in addition to the original plan of recitation at the end of the semester.......Dr. Michael Sexson's two classes (Capstone and Emergent Lit) are going to meet with Dr. Lynda Sexson's two classes (Mystics and Rel. & Science). So there will be a recitation of lines from Joyce, Dante, Eliot, and Heraclitus. I think this is going to be filmed........and edited and if anything put on youtube for fun. Dr. Lynda Sexson was talking about people making masks if they wanted.....(artistic handmade relevant masks) for dramatic effect or some dramatic makeup. Anyway, fun stuff. It isn't any extra work because we are supposed to have it all memorized anyway.

Dante: four levels of reading something.........
Literal
Allegorical
Moral
Anagogic, mystical

Dr. Sexson listed off blogs with snippets telling us to read them, he listed almost everyone, so just get to reading everyone's blogs.

Walter Pater
stylist
distinct writing, embodies both dark & light epiphanies
appropriate his last name is Pater.....which means father.....father of the epiphany


Taylor's blog, asking her students about something they didn't know that in them....asking outside the realm of convention....
trying to get intellectually excited


do not condescend to people......what is reading readiness all about?

Dr. Sexson says just start with the best!


Helena's blog also discusses Walter Pater, "the Dead" and Gabriel.....same as Taylor's......they were on the same brainwave...cool


capable imagination...stolen from Wallace Stevens


Are we all one of the living dead???
Dr. Sexson answer: yes
Taylor's answer: no!


None of us are optimally responsive to the forces and rhythms of the universe...we need to rise to the occasion....Lisa of the Little Legs says......Just do it......and so does Nike


Jennie Lynn's blog talks about the 4 Noble Truths of Buddhism....and more (AND her birthday is today, Feb. 25, Happy Birthday Jennie Lynn!) Right Action in Eightfold path.


Renaissance: Mayflies have 24 hours to live....need to mate....must have some good pick up lines.....why go to bed before the day is over if you only have one day? just here to be here?


we only have so many moments.....so many heartbeats.....so many pulses


people may make more money....but they aren't living

Eliot:
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.

last 5 minutes of class spent on the last 3 paragraphs of Walter Pater's Renaissance..."How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy?"

St. John of the Cross & Walter Pater

St. John of the Cross
http://www.themystica.com/mystica/articles/j/john_of_the_cross_st.html :

Detachment and suffering are presented as requirements for the purification and
illumination of the soul. St. John of the Cross depicts the "dark night of the
soul" as "an inflowing of God into the soul, which purges it from its ignorances
and imperfections, habitual, natural, and spiritual, and which is called by
contemplatives infused contemplation or mystical theology." The phrase "dark
night of the soul" has since become a reference to the state of intense personal
spiritual struggle including the experience of utter hopelessness and
isolation.(see Dark
Night of the Soul)

the above descrption sounds very very dark.
you can read snippets here from Google Books: Saint John of the Cross, Dark night of the soul, where it let's you look and read inside the book!

Walter Pater http://www.subir.com/pater/renaissance/conclusion.html
as I read I grabbed this sentence out of the sencond paragraph:

Analysis goes a step further still, and assures us that those impressions of the
individual mind to which, for each one of us, experience dwindles down, are in
perpetual flight;that each of them is limited by time, and that as time is
infinitely divisible, each of them is infinitely divisible also; all that is
actual in it being a single moment, gone while we try to apprehend
it, of which it may ever be more truly said that it has ceased to be
than that it is.

Class Notes 2/22

Notes
Happy Monday... is the first thing I have written in my notes because class started off with an impromptu presentation from Mick because he has his final paper worked out, writing his own Four Quartets using Northrop Frye. (is anyone else feeling a bit anxious now?)

so we should all be thinking about our final papers, past themes & material from other classes, we are to bring it together into our own swan song, this is our capstone...

HOMEWORK!! - Blog about Walter Pater! Must. He is essential to theories of epiphany. Hopkins was a student of Pater (the link is on my previous blog post of class notes)

Hopkins "inscape"
Wordsworth - emotion recollected in tranquility
Dillard - eclipse
Proust - revelation from dunking his cookie

continually responsive to the presence of the word or world? (can't read my notes) Frye: metaphorical habit

Adam is possessed, just everyone knows and he is writing a poem

Back to filling in the gaps of the presentations from Dr. Sexson
speak about the dark epiphany
no longer speaking of the benign epiphany

Burnt Norton, T.S. Eliot
"Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.
Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after."

These above lines are devastating, dark........
infected by unconscious distracted people...similar image to wasteland......Dante
consumes itself
Kafka, distraction is only evil in the world
TV distracts us from distraction by distraction.

Which is a coincidence, or maybe not that we talked about this because the night
before class Monday morning, I slept about 2 or 3 hours. I was kept from sleep
because I was paranoid that there was a vagrant living in a condo across from
our house, and I was worried that he know that I knew and he was going to break
into the house. It didn't help that the cold causes the house to make strange
noises. So in order to distract myself from this (paranoid) distraction, I turned
on the TV. It worked distracting me from my other distraction that was probably
far more interesting, but a distraction I could not cope with, all the while
this all distracted me from sleep.

Need to spend our time with the negative, awesome, awful.
KENOSIS emptying out

How Eliot feels about words:
"Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. "

BLOG HOMEWORK St. John of the Cross, the Dark Night of the Soul, a detailed set of instructions for a soul to redeem itself.

references metaphor, climbing down the ladder, negative epiphanies
before climbing up the ladder you must go down
(you gotta get up so you get down, or rather down before up.)

Joseph Campbell

East Coker has a lot of dark epiphanies, section III of E.C. is the great dark epiphany
Starts in part II "What is the late November doing..."

"In the middle, not only the middle of the way
But all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble,
On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold,
And menaced by monsters, fancy lights,
Risking enchantment."
East Coker part reminds us of Dante

"Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly."

*no wisdom derived from experience

mystical, Kabbala

"I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God."
-not a usual view of God, also brings to mind Harold Bloom
you need the furnace, you need to get burned, to be purified....(like purgatory?)

Paradoxes, giving up of things:
"You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only think you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not."

Beckett, when the characters give up their possessions, demonstration of kenosis, giving up of things

Taylor, contents of her purse....everything ordinary.....but a dagger?! Happy Days film.....the woman keeps a revolver

The Jerk, an attachment to all his stuff

Dry Salvages
"Where is there an end of it, the soundless wailing,
The silent withering of autumn flowers
Dropping their petals and remaining motionless;
Where is there and end to the drifting wreckage,
The prayer of the bone on the beach, the unprayable
Prayer at the calamitous annunciation?"

Recognize there is a problem, (like addiction), human condition, distraction, need to make a digression in order to make the mysterious mental maneuver

Dry Salvages
"When the train starts, and the passengers are settled
To fruit, periodicals and business letters
(And those who saw them off have left the platform)
Their faces relax from grief into relief,
To the sleepy rhythm of a hundred hours.
Fare forward, travellers! not escaping from the past
Into different lives, or into any future;
You are not the same people who left that station
Or who will arrive at any terminus,"

not even the same person as we were a second ago, continually in the process of change

Bhagavad Gita
Buddhism, 4 Nobel Truths, #1 all life is suffering and ephemeral

Little Gidding
"gifts reserved for age...cold friction...impotence of rage"

"unless restored by that refining fire"
After the Furnace, purified.....(purgatory, for purging)

"like a dancer"
join the dance, Alice and Wonderland, will you, won't you, will you, won't you, will you join the dance?

Little Gidding IV
"The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre of pyre—
To be redeemed from fire by fire."

Human beings...........to become conscious

arrive where we started and know the place for the first time

Eliot and the Mystical

Simple definition of mystical (from another class, Dr. Lynda Sexson):
experience of the collapse of space & time in a single point, an experience of nothing, finding the zero, the zero experience. The whole thing wipes out everything.

Perhaps an experience unmediated by the structure of organized religion?

I might be way off base here, but I'm just trying to think this through. The above definition seems to me to be like finding the still point, as we discussed the still point in class. An epiphany! It is non-theistic and an experience. Then how does Eliot, a man who follows the tradition of Christianity it seems to me, get mixed up with the mystical?, which some might say that a monotheistic tradition cannot be mystical. Although Eliot is a man of tradition, perhaps he finds it necessary to go beyond, and to find the logos, the truth that is common to all of us, beyond the structure of organized religion.

Using my above definition I could not help but think of this passage from Eliot's East Coker:
"I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without
love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for though:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing."

So in order to find faith, love, and hope, you must be still, be empty, collapse space and time into a single point, the zero, the still point. There in the empty zero stillness can there be an epiphany. This experience to the epiphany sounds to me like a mystical experience from the above definition that I'm working with. Where we find a knowledge of things (faith, love, hope) that could not have been reached while thinking directly about them.

Then Eliot continues on several lines down:
"You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only think you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not."

This passage seems to me like language of the via negativa, the negative way, which it is not a value judgement, but rather talking about something by talking about what it is not. Apophatic Language.
We have said before that en epiphany is an experience that is ineffable. Trying to explain the experience would be to diminish the experience, so in order to talk about it, or how we got there might be through via negativa.

Which reminds me of Daoism.
"The Way that can be told of is not an Unvarying way; The names that can be named are not unvarying names."

Through looking at the experience Julian (14th C, disembodied) who gets a bodily illness, she is expected to die, has a vision, sees Jesus on the Cross, the passion of the Christ, felt his dying pain, and was born through the wound. We see a mystical experience.....an epiphanic experience?

William James, from Lecture XVI, The Varieties of Religious Experience, talks about a mystical experience this way (which I've shortened considerably)
-there is the experience
-the feeling, it is an emotional experience
-the knowledge, which can only be remembered (imperfectly)
-the recognition that it is significant
-then the experience effects ordinary consciousness

*most recent class notes from 2/19 are just below this post

Class Notes 2/19

Notes:
Dr. Sexson wanted to fill in some gaps from presentations
stick close to the text with Eliot, otherwise we drift into Kinbote-ism


Heraclitus, presocratic, reveled in the notion of paradox, a realm where conventional logic doesn't work. The universe is run by fire, rather that believe that other elements were primary.

see the Heraclitus fragments before the poems in the Four Quartets:

'The way up is the way down.'
'Though the logos is common, the many live as if they had a wisdom of their own.'
Logos = language, the word, truth
We enter the poems to find the logos, the truth that is common to us all


T.S. Eliot, a great believer in tradition, see ZuZu's blog
tends to the more conservative side of things
knew he was an unpleasant man, antisemitic


Wallace Stevens, radically conservative, insensitive comments, but great poetry, thought Eisenhower was a dangerous radical.
(But how many of us would raise to sainthood?)

Eliot admired Dickens greatly
'doing police in different voices'
there are different voices in the Four Quartets

Page 13 (of my book), B.N. this passage a Eliot assuming a philosophical voice, thoughtfulness, pedantic:
"Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time in unredeemable."


Page 15, B.N. Eliot assumes a lyrical voice:
"Garlic and sapphires in the mud
Clot the bedded axle-tree.
The trilling wire in the blood
Sings below inveterate scars
Appeasing long forgotten wars.
The dance along the artery
..."

Page 25-26, E.C. Eliot uses a more colloquial voice:
"That was a way of putting it-not very satisfactory:
A periphrasic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,
Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meaning...."


music comes up quite naturally with epiphany

Homework! Walter Pater - Here is the conclusion to Walter Pater's study, THE RENAISSANCE and it comes close to a summative statement about the nature of epiphanies........http://www.subir.com/pater/renaissance/conclusion.html
Renaissance, "all arts aspire to the condition of music"
give moments as they pass their highest possible value....spend it reading poetry.

Words are so inadequate to express what needs to be expressed: Burnt Norton page 19:
"...Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burned,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still..."

Eliot subjected to the vicissitudes of time and history
history is important, we are all creatures of time and place
place names for each section
important to know our place.....we all start somewhere
Eliot born in Missouri
Dry Salvages, pile of rocks
history is now in England, because that is where Eliot is.

Look at things as if for the first time.

As said above, Eliot liked tradition, he had a desire for formal tradition
Eliot liked the formal style in Britain, and adopted a British accent for reciting his poem

We have memories of what we have done.....but what about memories of what we haven't done?
What is, and what could have been.
What was, and what could have been.
imagining an alternate reality, more interesting than reality

birds - agents of epiphanies

The Jolly Corner - short story, wonders about if he had taken another road.

For Monday, we will talk about what ZuZu brought up in her presentation section, the creepiness, and the darkness
we will also look at the via negativa, (what about apophatic language?)
-St. John of the Cross
-Julian of Norwich
Eliot studying Christian Mystics - Homework, define or look at the term mystic