The Organ

[AdamSmith]

 

[AdamSmith]

Fierce.

 

[MsAnn]

 

"Copperhead Road"
 

Well my name's John Lee Pettimore
Same as my daddy and his daddy before
You hardly ever saw Grandaddy down here
He only came to town about twice a year
He'd buy a hundred pounds of yeast and some copper line
Everybody knew that he made moonshine
Now the revenue man wanted Grandaddy bad
He headed up the holler with everything he had
It's before my time but I've been told
He never came back from Copperhead Road
Now Daddy ran the whiskey in a big block Dodge
Bought it at an auction at the Mason's Lodge
Johnson County Sheriff painted on the side
Just shot a coat of primer then he looked inside
Well him and my uncle tore that engine down
I still remember that rumblin' sound
Well the sheriff came around in the middle of the night
Heard mama cryin', knew something wasn't right
He was headed down to Knoxville with the weekly load
You could smell the whiskey burnin' down Copperhead Road

I volunteered for the Army on my birthday
They draft the white trash first,'round here anyway
I done two tours of duty in Vietnam
And I came home with a brand new plan
I take the seed from Colombia and Mexico
I plant it up the holler down Copperhead Road
Well the D.E.A.'s got a chopper in the air
I wake up screaming like I'm back over there
I learned a thing or two from ol' Charlie don't you know
You better stay away from Copperhead Road

Copperhead Road
Copperhead Road
Copperhead Road

[Guest Larstrup]

23 hours ago, AdamSmith said:

P.S. Possibly the most basic reason I call myself 'atheist' instead of 'agnostic' (and, again, this is not meant as any criticism of anyone's choice in belief) is that -- in the dreadful event I am called to appear before the Judgment Seat -- the Almighty will ask me:

'Had you not the courage to choose?'

 Well Adam Smith, if you believe that to be true, then you’re fucked even  worse than the agnostic. There’s no squirming out of that possible moment in time for you.

At least the agnostic could plead, I just didn’t know.

[AdamSmith]

22 minutes ago, Larstrup said:

 Well Adam Smith, if you believe that to be true, then you’re fucked even  worse than the agnostic. There’s no squirming out of that possible moment in time for you.

At least the agnostic could plead, I just didn’t know.

If so, then so...

Canto III

    Per me si va ne la città dolente,

per me si va ne l’etterno dolore,

per me si va tra la perduta gente.

    Giustizia mosse il mio alto fattore:

fecemi la divina podestate,

la somma sapienza e ’l primo amore.

    Dinanzi a me non fuor cose create

se non etterne, e io etterno duro.

Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate.

[Guest Larstrup]

3 minutes ago, AdamSmith said:

If so, then so...

Canto III

    Per me si va ne la città dolente,

per me si va ne l’etterno dolore,

per me si va tra la perduta gente.

    Giustizia mosse il mio alto fattore:

fecemi la divina podestate,

la somma sapienza e ’l primo amore.

    Dinanzi a me non fuor cose create

se non etterne, e io etterno duro.

Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate".

 I don’t read Latin or Italian, And your image failed to reproduce here for conversation.

All I am saying is that I’d rather be an agnostic rather than an atheist, in the situation which you suggested above.

[AdamSmith]

1 minute ago, Larstrup said:

 I don’t read Latin or Italian, And your image failed to reproduce here for conversation.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Inferno_(Dante)#Canto_III:_The_Gate_of_Hell

• Through me you go to the grief wracked city; Through me you go to everlasting pain; Through me you go a pass among lost souls. Justice inspired my exalted Creator: I am a creature of the Holiest Power, of Wisdom in the Highest and of Primal Love. Nothing till I was made was made, only eternal beings. And I endure eternally. Abandon all hope — Ye Who Enter Here
• Variant translation: 'Through me the way to the suffering city; Through me the everlasting pain; Through me the way that runs among the Lost. Justice urged on my exalted Creator: Divine Power made me, The Supreme Wisdom and the Primal Love. Nothing was made before me but eternal things And I endure eternally. Abandon all hope - You Who Enter Here.'
• Variant Translation: 'I am the way into the city of woe. I am the way to a forsaken people. I am the way into eternal sorrow. Sacred justice moved my architect. I was raised here by divine omnipotence, primordial love and ultimate intellect. Only those elements time cannot wear are beyond me, and beyond time I stand. Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here.'
• Note: Full inscription on the top of the gate.

[AdamSmith]

Charon on the River Styx, coming to collect the lost and ferry them across.

by Gustav Dore

[Guest Larstrup]

On 3/17/2018 at 7:55 PM, AdamSmith said:

P.S. Possibly the most basic reason I call myself 'atheist' instead of 'agnostic' (and, again, this is not meant as any criticism of anyone's choice in belief) is that -- in the dreadful event I am called to appear before the Judgment Seat -- the Almighty will ask me:

'Had you not the courage to choose?'

Again, I will just say this to you my friend, I will always be more comfortable with my agnostic beliefs, than those of your own, If I was ever to be met by the face of the God who, I could just simply say I didn’t know better.

 Suggesting that an atheist would have a better standing, is really for those who  believe otherwise.

[AdamSmith]

6 minutes ago, Larstrup said:

Again, I will just say this to you my friend, I will always be more comfortable with my agnostic beliefs, than those of your own, If I was ever to be met by the face of the God who, I could just simply say I didn’t know better.

 Suggesting that an atheist would have a better standing, is really for those who  believe otherwise.

Well, it is.

I would stand in trembling, and dread, and fear of his judgment.

I would not seek to evade that judgment.

[Guest Larstrup]

1 hour ago, AdamSmith said:

Well, it is.

I would stand in trembling, and dread, and fear of his judgment.

I would not seek to evade that judgment.

Yet you do and say so in your mortal life. How can you be so absolute in your  beliefs, only to cave when they may become before a higher power of your life? 

You can’t claim, both. Until you have to because you knew you were wrong.

You’re either an atheist or youre and agnostic.

[AdamSmith]

6 minutes ago, Larstrup said:

Yet you do and say so in your mortal life. How can you be so absolute in your agnostic beliefs, only to cave when they may become before a higher power of your life? 

You can’t claim, both. Until you have to because you knew you were wrong.

I think I am an absolute atheist.

Yet I believe in a spiritualism that the concept 'humanism' does not remotely do justice to.

Help me understand your beef with that?

[Guest Larstrup]

5 minutes ago, AdamSmith said:

I think I am an absolute atheist.

Yet I believe in a spiritualism that the concept 'humanism' does not remotely do justice to.

Help me understand your beef with that?

I can’t help you with that. You’re either one or the other.

[AdamSmith]

On 3/17/2018 at 6:43 PM, MsAnn said:

 

 

[AdamSmith]

 

[Tartegogo]

2 hours ago, Larstrup said:

I’d rather be an agnostic rather than an atheist

They are not exclusive. One is about knowledge, the other is about believing. Not exclusive  

Gnosticism is about what you know and don’t know. (Greek “gnosis” knowledge)

An agnostic is some who doesn’t know ( “a”, without,  and “gnosis”, knowledge, someone who doesn’t claim to know, in this case, that a god exists).

Theism is about believing in \ worshipping a god. (Greek “a”, without, and “theo” god, so “without a god”).  

So an atheist is someone who doesn’t worship any god. 

I am an agnostic atheist: I don’t know that there are no gods for sure, but I don’t believe so, and I certainly don’t worship any.

 

[AdamSmith]

8 minutes ago, Tartegogo said:

They are not exclusive. One is about knowledge, the other is about believing. Not exclusive  

Gnosticism is about what you know and don’t know. (Greek “gnosis” knowledge)

An agnostic is some who doesn’t know ( “a”, without,  and “gnosis”, knowledge, someone who doesn’t claim to know, in this case, that a god exists).

Theism is about believing in \ worshipping a god. (Greek “a”, without, and “theo” god, so “without a god”).  

So an atheist is some who doesn’t worship any god. 

I am an agnostic atheist: I don’t know that there are no gods for sure, but I don’t believe so, and I certainly don’t worship any.

 

That is very useful. Genuinely thank you

That was helped clarify my thinking a lot.

[Tartegogo]

32 minutes ago, AdamSmith said:

That is very useful. Genuinely thank you

That was helped clarify my thinking a lot.

I like it when Greek word formation is used correctly! It is not often in English, too often the meaning has diverged significantly from the original usage, but in this case it works. 

[AdamSmith]

1 hour ago, Tartegogo said:

I like it when Greek word formation is used correctly! It is not often in English, too often the meaning has diverged significantly from the original usage, but in this case it works. 

Occurs also that the Germanic grammatical basis of English has maybe embedded into itself a certain Teutonic leaning-into-emotional-&-intellectual conflict--for-its-own-sake which is not very productive?

...'Tomorrow belongs to me'...

[AdamSmith]

2 hours ago, Larstrup said:

I can’t help you with that. You’re either one or the other.

again -- and given all the above posts -- you have lost me. Sorry to be so slow.

Explain if desired.

[AdamSmith]

 

[AdamSmith]

'Novel Writing with Thomas Hardy...' 

 

[AdamSmith]

'Atheists & agnostics...'

 

[AdamSmith]

Insurance Man

The life and art of Wallace Stevens.

 

By Peter Schjeldahl

 

 

Stevens, in 1954: the quintessential American poet of the twentieth century.

Illustration by John Gall; Source: Bettmann Archive / Getty (Photograph)

 

Paul Mariani’s excellent new book, “The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens” (Simon & Schuster), is a thrilling story of a mind, which emerges from a dispiriting story of a man. It’s hard to think of a more vivid illustration of T. S. Eliot’s principle of the separation between “the man who suffers and the mind which creates.” For most of his life, Stevens was an elaborately defended introvert in a three-piece suit, working as a Hartford insurance executive. He came slowly to a mastery of language, form, and style that revealed a mind like a solar system, with abstract ideas orbiting a radiant lyricism. Mariani persuasively numbers Stevens among the twentieth-century poets who are both most powerful and most refined in their eloquence, along with Rilke, Yeats, and Neruda. He is certainly the quintessential American poet of the twentieth century, a doubting idealist who invested slight subjects (the weather, often) with oracular gravitas, and grand ones (death, frequently) with capering humor.

Stevens’s first book, the ravishing “Harmonium,” which contains “Sunday Morning,” “The Snow Man,” “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” “Anecdote of the Jar,” “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” and most of the rest of his poems that people still read—if they read any of them—came out in 1923, when he was forty-four. His next book, “Ideas of Order,” published thirteen years later, features what may be the finest American modern poem: “The Idea of Order at Key West.” (It gets my vote, with perfectly paced beauty that routinely squeezes tears from me.) His subsequent work, which abounded until his death, in 1955, is less familiar, because most of it is gruellingly difficult; the great mind finally spiralled in on itself, like a ruminative Narcissus. It takes heroic stamina to get through “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” and other of the late long poems, which American literary culture coped with at the time by loading Stevens with every possible prize, honor, and encomium. Since then, his reputation has stood as a windswept monument, tended by professors.

Mariani, an accomplished New England poet himself, with an unstressed Catholic bent, has written well-received biographies of William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. He has a prehensile feel for the roots and branches of literary modernism, exemplary taste in what he chooses to quote, and a real gift for exegesis, unpacking poems in language that is nearly as eloquent as the poet’s, and as clear as faithfulness allows.

Something like a flame comes off the page (page 71, to be exact) of “The Whole Harmonium” when Mariani quotes lines from Stevens’s first published mature poetry, a waltz-timed passage that begins, “An odor from a star.” It appeared in 1914, when Stevens was thirty-four. Up to that point in the story, we have attended the growth of a restless child into a skittish adult. Thereafter, the book switches back and forth between Stevens’s seraphic art and his plodding life. But they merge as sides of a coin: philosophical, in his continual grappling with implications of the death of God—a loss that he tried to remedy by making poetry stand in for religion—and psychological, in his constant compulsion to cheer himself up.

The key sentence in the biography, for me, tells that Stevens, who was prone to being depressed, “hated depression—hated it.” So do a lot of people, but few fight it as tenaciously as Stevens did. He relied, for stability, on the routine demands of his office job. (Whenever free of them, he commonly drank to excess.) He projected his struggles as abstract patterns of human—and, beyond human, of natural and metaphysical—existence. One late poem hints at a nagging anguish that poetry relieved for him: “It is a child that sings itself to sleep, / The mind.”

Stevens was born in 1879 in Reading, Pennsylvania, the second of five children. His father, from humble beginnings, was a successful lawyer, his mother a former schoolteacher. Each night, she read a chapter of the Bible to the children, who attended schools attached to both Presbyterian and Lutheran churches, where the music left an indelible impression on Stevens. Both sides of the family were Pennsylvania Dutch, an identity that meant little to him when he was young but a great deal later on, perhaps to shore up a precarious sense of identity. (He became obsessed with tracing his family genealogies, poring over thousands of documents, and was “deeply disappointed,” Mariani writes, at being denied membership in the Holland Society of New York when, in the poet’s words, “some bastard from Danzig” popped up to spoil the requisite ancestral purity.) His father, a stern man, urged upon him a regimen of “work and study, study and work,” toward a professional career. Stevens was often ill, to the extent that he had to repeat a year of high school, and a bout of malaria—as improbable as that sounds, in Pennsylvania—permanently impaired his hearing. But he played football, consorted with the town’s bad boys, and cultivated a blustery front.

He also had a hunger for erudition, expressed in precocious poems, essays, and orations. In 1897, he enrolled at Harvard, where he studied closely with the humanist philosopher George Santayana, debating matters of belief (Stevens was afire with skepticism, against Santayana’s more nuanced views) and even exchanging sonnets on the subject. He became the editor of the Harvard Advocate, read widely and deeply, and mastered French on the way to commanding a fabulous vocabulary, choreographing such tangos of words regular and rare as “The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind,” in “The Connoisseur of Chaos.” On graduation, in 1900, he moved to New York and wrote for newspapers. For one, he covered the second Presidential campaign of William Jennings Bryan, whom he hopped home to Reading to vote for. In his third book, “Owl’s Clover,” issued by a leftist publisher, in 1936, Stevens made haplessly clumsy allusions to social and political tensions of the time, though he was “a Hoover Republican,” Mariani writes, and also an admirer of Mussolini for rather longer than is comfortably excused as a common myopia of the time. He was no better than most white men of his class in point of casual racism and anti-Semitism, though fewer such toxins leak into his poetry than into that of Eliot or Pound. In verse, Stevens transcended anything mean or petty in himself, but for art’s sake; he wasn’t much given to moral scruple.

For the New York Tribune, in 1900, Stevens covered the funeral of Stephen Crane, whom he admired but whose mourners he found “wretched, rag, tag, and bobtail.” He thrilled to a performance, in French, by Sarah Bernhardt, as Hamlet, for what he later recalled as her “intricate metamorphosis of thoughts”—quite the keynote of his own developing sensibility. He was bemused by the “quick, unaccountable” life of the city, and took to sitting for spells of restorative peace in St. Patrick’s Cathedral—unbelieving, but savoring the aura of sanctity. Tiring of journalism and seeing no path to a life in literature, he succumbed to pressure from his father and enrolled in the New York Law School. He passed the bar in 1904 and worked at various law and insurance firms...

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/02/the-thrilling-mind-of-wallace-stevens

[AdamSmith]

...

Also in that year, Stevens fell wildly in love with Elsie Kachel, a Reading girl from a family who lived on “the wrong side of the tracks,” Mariani writes—a cliché now that was at the time a grinding social fate in railway-divided American towns. When his father vehemently opposed the match, Stevens stormed out of the house and never spoke to him again. (He generally avoided all his relatives except, by way of genealogical research, those who were dead.) Elsie was beautiful. In 1916, her profile, sculpted by an artist who was a chance acquaintance, is said to have become the face of the dime, reigning there until she was replaced by F.D.R., in 1946. (Mariani believes the oft-told story, though the artist’s son denied it.) She was also prim, humorless, and, having left school in the ninth grade, intellectually defensive and incurious—traits overlooked by the smitten Stevens through the years of their courtship, while he accrued enough income, by his conventional lights, to justify marriage. The couple wed in 1909 and moved into an apartment on West Twenty-first Street.

The next few years, spent on a small but seething scene of budding modernists, were golden for Stevens’s formation as a poet. At the salon of Walter Arensberg, a wealthy doyen of the new, Stevens met Marcel Duchamp—one of their conversations, in French, suggested to Stevens “sparrows around a pool of water”—and the New Jersey pediatrician and brilliantly innovative poet William Carlos Williams, his peer and cordial rival, who once called him “a troubled man who sings well, somewhat covertly, somewhat overfussily at times, a little stiffly but well.” Williams’s vernacular free verse and Stevens’s sumptuous blank verse long remained magnetic poles of American poetic form. They more or less merged in the work of Marianne Moore, whom both men esteemed.

Mariani’s chapters on these years sparkle with personalities, anecdotes, and ideas. There’s Carl Van Vechten, calling Stevens “a dainty rogue in porcelain” who was “big, blond, and burly”—he stood six feet two—but possessed of “a tiny reserved spirituality.” Arensberg promptly revised the description to “that rogue elephant in porcelain,” in view of Stevens’s social ineptitude. (The patron’s stated formula for a successful poets’ salon was to convene “five or six men who live in the same town and hate each other.”) One gathering was so much fun that Stevens sent a telegram to Elsie, not daring to phone, to say that he would be home late. He admitted to his companions that he dreaded what awaited him at home.

Mariani gives a fascinating account of a poet, previously unknown to me, who strongly influenced Stevens in those days: Donald Evans, a free spirit with a bejewelled, determinedly decadent poetic style, who most probably committed suicide, in 1921. “With their silk-swathed ankles softly kissing,” a typical line reads. Something of Evans—French elegance crossed with American vigor—informs Stevens’s early “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” which weaves theories of music and beauty into a comic version of the story, in the Apocrypha, of Susanna’s harassment by lusting elders: “She turned— / A cymbal crashed, / And roaring horns.” And: “Beauty is momentary in the mind— / The fitful tracing of a portal; / But in the flesh it is immortal.”

 

 

“It was the cheapest way for us to cover the potholes.”

 

Some of Stevens’s breakthrough works amount to literary equivalents of the formally audacious still-lifes and interiors of advanced French painting. The masterpiece “Sunday Morning,” from 1915, is an argument for spirituality without God, interlaced with a woman’s parlor daydream. It begins with “Complacencies of the peignoir, and late / Coffee and oranges in asunny chair”; ranges “Over the seas, to silent Palestine”; decides that “Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, / Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams / And our desires”; and concludes with a breathtaking image of “casual flocks of pigeons” that, at evening, “make / Ambiguous undulations as they sink, / Downward to darkness, on extended wings.” It was the first poem to appear under Stevens’s name in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, which had recently started publication in Chicago. (He had shyly used a pseudonym, Peter Parasol, when submitting earlier poems, two of which were accepted.)

The editor, Harriet Monroe, cut some stanzas and rearranged others, and Stevens agreed to it, though he restored the original in “Harmonium.” A certain reciprocal high-handedness among poets and editors—as if the modern in aesthetics required a team effort—marked the time. (Think of Pound’s retooling of “The Waste Land.”) Williams advised Stevens to delete, from a poem, two lines that struck him as sentimental. “For Christ’s sake yield to me and become great and famous,” he hectored. Stevens obeyed.

Then, in 1916, perhaps, in part, to secure a suitable life with Elsie, who disliked New York, Stevens took a position with the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, where he worked for the rest of his life. After the move to Connecticut, he retreated from collegial enterprise—“a frightened man drawing back,” in Williams’s view—and conducted his art as a sideline to his humdrum life. It took him seven years to complete and perfect “Harmonium,” leaving out as many poems as he included. Except for Marianne Moore, who called the poems “sharp, solemn, rhapsodic,” reviewers of the book were bewildered. One condemned Stevens for having created a “fictitious reality,” which might seem a positive achievement. Another praised him as America’s first true dandy, thereby missing the sincerity of his ambition.

For several years after the birth of his only child, Holly, in 1924, Stevens wrote little. (In a letter to Monroe, he called parenthood a “terrible blow to poor literature.”) When he resumed, it was in less sprightly veins, as his idealist’s temperament groped, through thickets of qualification, toward a never quite attained ideal. But flares of comedy recurred. The painting-like “So and So Reclining on Her Couch” begins, “On her side, reclining on her elbow, / This mechanism, this apparition, / Suppose we call it Projection A.” It ends, “Good-bye, / Mrs. Pappadopoulos, and thanks.”

Stevens took to composing poems on slips of paper in the morning while walking to his office, where his secretary typed them up. The results made him a regular and imposing presence in literary journals, starting in the nineteen-thirties, and his poems from “Harmonium,” especially, which were frequently anthologized, fascinated a growing popular audience. After work, at home, he closed himself off, with a sense, he told a friend in a letter, of “shutting out something crude and lacking in all feeling and delicacy.” His marriage had foundered—Elsie had banished him from her bed after Holly’s birth—although he seems never to have considered ending it. When they moved to a new house, in 1932, Stevens occupied the master bedroom and Elsie a former servant’s quarters. A full-time housekeeper tended to Holly. There’s no hint in the book of any other romantic attachment, except for a chaste crush on a young teacher whom he met in the summer after his first year in law school—memories of which haunted him with visions of a flawless woman, forever lost.

His public manner became aloof and stony, but the bravado of his boyhood resurfaced when he drank too much, as he did with zestful abandon on annual, usually solo vacations to the Florida Keys. Mariani tells us that at a party in Key West, in 1935—the year after Stevens became his firm’s vice-president in charge of surety and fidelity claims—he drunkenly insulted Robert Frost, disparaging his poetry. He wrote Frost a not quite penitent but mollifying letter, to which Frost replied gracefully, “If I’m somewhat academic (I’m more agricultural) and you are somewhat executive, so much the better: it is so we are saved from being literary and deployers of words derived from words.” But a few years later Stevens had at Frost again, telling him, “The trouble with you, Robert, is that you write about subjects.” Frost answered, “The trouble with you, Wallace, is that you write about bric-a-brac.”...