January 11, 2006

• Time in the Rock

  
  “a world of selves trying to remember the self

  before the idea of self is lost–

  Walk with me world, upon my right hand walk,

  speak to me Babel, that I may strive to assemble
  of all these syllables a single word
  before the purpose of speech is gone.”
  
  – Conrad Aiken, “Prelude” (1932),

      later part of “Time in the Rock,

      or Preludes to Definition, XIX” (1936),

      in Selected Poems, Oxford U. Press

      paperback, 2003, page 156

  “The rock is the habitation of the whole,
  Its strength and measure, that which is near, point A
  In a perspective that begins again

  At B: the origin of the mango’s rind.
  It is the rock where tranquil must adduce
  Its tranquil self, the main of things, the mind,

  The starting point of the human and the end,
  That in which space itself is contained, the gate
  To the enclosure, day, the things illumined

  By day, night and that which night illumines,
  Night and its midnight-minting fragrances,
  Night’s hymn of the rock, as in a vivid sleep.”

  – Wallace Stevens in The Rock (1954)

  “Poetry is an illumination of a surface,
    the movement of a self in the rock.”
  – Wallace Stevens, introduction to
      The Necessary Angel, 1951

  Related material:
  Jung’s Imago and Solomon’s Cube.

  The following may help illuminate the previous entry:

  “I want, as a man of the imagination, to write poetry with all the
  power of a monster equal in strength to that of the monster about whom
  I write.  I want man’s imagination to be completely adequate in
  the face of reality.”

  – Wallace Stevens, 1953 (Letters 790)

  The “monster” of the previous entry is of course not Reese Witherspoon, but rather Vox Populi itself.

  • 10:30 pm
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