December 31, 2006

• Garden Party

  Aesthetics of Evil
  vs. Christ Church
  
  
  "... the closing number
  for Spielberg's tribute
  and the gala
  itself...
  [is] the finale to
  the opera 'Candide,'
    'Make Our Garden Grow.'"

  -- Press release from CBS
  on this year's
  Kennedy Center Honors

  Wallace Stevens,

  "Esthétique du Mal, XI"--
  "We are not
  At the centre of a diamond."

  

  The map shows the original
  (pre-1846) diamond shape
  of the District of Columbia.

  For the relevance of the
  closing number of "Candide"
  to diamonds, see
  the previous entry.

  For the relevance of the
  closing number of the
  12/3/06 DC lottery, see
  Theme and Variations.

  For the relevance of the
  earlier mid-day number,
  see the conclusion of
  "Esthétique du Mal" --

  "And out of what one sees    and hears and out Of what one feels, who could    have thought to make So many selves, so many    sensuous worlds, As if the air, the mid-day air,    was swarming With the metaphysical changes    that occur, Merely in living    as and where we live."

  

  A search on the mid-day number
  in the context of metaphysics
  yields the following:

  

  Related material:

  "In 'Esthétique du Mal,' one of his later poems, Wallace Stevens
  considers existence from a variety of critical and philosophical
  perspectives, among them various moral, aesthetic, political,
  theological, and philosophic 'epistemes' that condition how humanity
  perceives and experiences the world. These epistemological 'modes'
  dictate how we live and perceive the world about us, providing
  preconceptions that shroud understanding and obfuscate ontological
  explanation. What Stevens accomplishes in 'Esthétique du Mal' is to
  create a dialogue with various historical and philosophical 'schools,'
  systematically confronting and rejecting their perspectives, and
  creating a movement toward Martin Heidegger's 'aletheia' to uncover the
  ontological substructure that exists beneath the individual's
  experience in the world. This movement of 'uncovering' and exposing the
  nature of what it means 'to be in the world' is a journey to an
  ontological substructure that allows Stevens to arrive at a dynamic,
  ontological proof: that existence is full of 'reverberating'
  possibilities, not solitary and 'univocal' statements."

  -- Conversations with the Dead:
  The Ontological Substructure of
  Wallace Stevens's "Esthétique du Mal"--
  a 1999 Master's thesis

  For further remarks on
  ontological substructure,
  see A First Class Degree
  (on a notable graduate of
  Christ Church, Oxford).

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