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June 4, 2005

Drama of the Diagonal,
continued

“I could name other writers
who share this sense of a world
larger than ourselves; their writing provides
a field in which something like
a sacramental imagination is clearly at play.”

– Paul Mariani,
God and the Imagination

“… the horizon is not the limit of meaning,
but that which extends
meaning
from what is directly given
to the whole context in which it is given,
including a sense of a world.”

– David Vessey,
Gadamer and the Fusion of Horizons

From Wallace Stevens,
“A Primitive Like an Orb“:

X

It is a giant, always, that is evolved,
To be in scale, unless virtue cuts him, snips
Both size and solitude or thinks it does,
As in a signed photograph on a mantelpiece.
But the virtuoso never leaves his shape,
Still on the horizon elongates his cuts,
And still angelic and still plenteous,
Imposes power by the power of his form.

XI

Here, then, is an abstraction given head,
A giant on the horizon, given arms,
A massive body and long legs, stretched out,
A definition with an illustration, not
Too exactly labeled, a large among the smalls
Of it, a close, parental magnitude,
At the center of the horizon, concentrum, grave
And prodigious person, patron of origins.

XII

That's it. The lover writes, the believer hears,
The poet mumbles and the painter sees,
Each one, his fated eccentricity,
As a part, but part, but tenacious particle,
Of the skeleton of the ether, the total
Of letters, prophecies, perceptions, clods
Of color, the giant of nothingness, each one
And the giant ever changing, living in change.

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