In a message dated 11/9/2015 10:59:26 A.M. Eastern Standard Time,
jejunejesuit.geary2@xxxxxxxxx was referring to "the meditation on the poetry of
Wallace Stevens."
Some further commentary.
The poetry of Wallace Stevens makes Susan Howe happy.
-- As opposed to sad. ("Sometimes I'm happy, sometimes I'm sad." (cfr.
"Sometimes I'm lonely, sometimes I'm glad.")
Did you know that Stevens wrote “The Course of a Particular” was "omitted
by accident" (to use Stevens's own words) from his Collected Poems.
This triggers the right implicature.
i. Surely Stevens read Grice.
ii. Surely Grice read Aristotle.
iii.Surely Aristotle found the idea of 'accidence' otiose.
iv. The Pope agreed, "Nothing happens _by accident."
The odd thing is that “The Snow Man” suffered a similar fate.
And one is bound to wonder if in reality Stevens omitted both pieces
accidentally on purpose.
"On purpose" is NEVER otiose.
For Susan Howe, its lyric
austerity defines late February weather in
Guilford, Connecticut.
Guilford was thus called after East Guilford on the coast of England.
Guilfordians (some of them) claim the name refers to GuilDford in Surrey -- and
as Geary would say, "it is only natural that a middle "d" may get drop as
we sail across the pond").
Howe refers to the Guilford quarry, which was operated by 'furriners', back
in the day! (There's the old Guilford quarry and the new Guilford quarry
-- not to be confused with the neighbouring Stony Creek quarry that gave
Americans the pink granite for the pedestal of the French statue, "Liberty" --
it represents a woman).
Did you know that Stevens read his poems for the first time at Harvard?
It was probably the first time he had ever read his poetry in public -- if
you can call Harvardites a 'public'. As Grice commented before delivering
his William James Lectures on Logic and Conversation, "their attention span
is infinitesimal."
Richard Wilbur recalled a Cambridge gathering after Stevens’s poetry
reading at Harvard, when Stevens talked at length about his three years spent
in
Amsterdam (see "The Girls of Amsterdam").
To Wilbur’s surprise, the professors Stevens remembered were the
philosophers, particularly Josiah Royce and George ("Castilian") Santayana.
Now, tthe philosophical profession was dominated by an epistemological
debate, of which pragmatism was an aspect, between the many forms of idealism
and the even more numerous forms of realism.
This debate, to which Royce, Santayana, and my favourite philosopher that
Grice honoured, William James, contributed so much, concerned the process of
knowing and the nature of the reality known.
We can say Popper is a pragmatist, but then we can also say that snow is
not white.
Santayana was born in Madrid -- and was thus hardly a Boston brahmin.
Still, he was (or perhaps because of this, a popular lecturer in the oldest
philosophy department in America.
Stevens says that Santayana was a philosopher -- and not just a lecturer of
philosophy.
Santayana died in (of all places) Rome.
In fact, Santayana, being a Spaniard, is buried in the Tomba degli Spagnoli
in Rome’s Verano Cemetery.
The Spaniards tried to expatriate the corpse to Spain, but the Curator of
the Verano Cemetery rejected the idea. ("It's sad we cannot ask Santayana --
by natural methods," he added --, implicating some sort of psychic
research might be operative).
Did you know that Stevens wrote a poem in the Rock series at the Convent of
the Blue Nuns of the Little Company of Mary?
("They are called 'blue' due to their costume," Geary explains -- The
implicature is that nuns usually wear BLACK unless these, who are "of the
little
company of Mary". ""Little company" triggers its own implicatures; I would
have "small company"," Geary adds).
Did you know that Stevens loved etymology.
In “The River of Rivers in Connecticut”. He notes that "The Connecticut
River" (not far from Guilford -- "but then nothing is far from nothing,"
Geary adds, "in Stephen Hawking's theory of the expanding universe") derives
from the Native American
designations Quonehtacut (sometimes pronounced,
Quinatucquet, sometimes Quenticut). The sobriquet means “long tidal river.”
And long it is -- if you sail it upstream and stop at Hartford, that
Stevens visited more than once.
Did you know that Elizabeth Park was a place where Stevens spent many an
hour?
The parks many are familiar with (in Boston, Manhattan, New Haven, or
Buffalo -- all of them designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, who was born in
Hartford but didn’t plan one here), are all beautiful.
Because Olmsted was what I call a genius.
Did you know that in Letter XLIII (Selborne, September 9, 1778) White
implicates that birds implicate:
White writes:
"The language of birds is very ancient, and like other ancient modes of
speech,
very elliptical."
White's implicature: "As if birds are abiding by Grice's maxim, 'be brief
[avoid unnecessary prolixity]."
White continues:
"Lttle is said, but much is meant and understood" -- by other birds, and W.
H. Hudson (of whom Borges recalled, "He preferred the company of birds to
that of humans -- Odd man Hudson was).
Did you know that in Rembrandt’s "The Abduction of Proserpina", Plutone’s
lion-headed chariot is pulled by a furiously charging horse is dragging her
to Hell while Diana and Minerva (who seem to be rising from the waves) tug
at what could be her wedding dress?
It's a nice picture (if you are into that sort of thing).
Jorie Graham evokes a radiant image from her days in Rome: a huge marble
statue of the reclining Apollo on the landing above the ballet class that we
would run up the wide flight of stairs to, sweaty, after class, a gaggle of
girls in black leotards, and lie on to cool off; he was so cold.
Some would call that statue 'tacky'. Others won't.
Cheers,
Speranza
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