June 28, 2007
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Professor Eucalyptus again–
Real Numbers:
An Object Lesson(continued from
Anti-Christmas)A Cornell professor discusses a poem by Wallace Stevens:
“Professor Eucalyptus in ‘Ordinary Evening’ XIV, for example, ‘seeks/
God in the object itself,’ but this quest culminates in his own
choosing of ‘the commodious adjective/ For what he sees… the
description that makes it divinity, still speech… not grim/ Reality
but reality grimly seen/ And spoken in paradisal parlance new’….”– Douglas Mao, Solid Objects:
Modernism and the Test
of Production,
Princeton University Press,
1998, p. 242“God in the object” seems
unlikely to be found in the
artifact pictured on the
cover of Mao’s book:
I have more confidence
that God is to be found
in the Ping Pong balls
of the New York Lottery.
These objects may be
regarded as supplying
a parlance that is, if not
paradisal, at least
intelligible– if only in
the context of my own
personal experience:Journal entry dated 5/14:
