The above title is from Wallace Stevens.
Related meditations — This journal on March 9, 2021, and . . .
See as well recent posts in this journal
now tagged The Chinese Room Experiment.
For the source of the above Wallace Stevens phrase, see (for instance) . . .
The above weblog post on Stevens is dated November 17, 2010.
Posts in this weblog on that same date and its eve are now tagged . . .
Related Scholarly Remarks:
"János Bolyai was a nineteenth-century mathematician who
set the stage for the field of non-Euclidean geometry."
— Transylvania Now , October 26, 2018
From Coxeter and the Relativity Problem —
Desiring the exhilarations of changes:
The motive for metaphor, shrinking from
The weight of primary noon,
The A B C of being,
The ruddy temper, the hammer
Of red and blue, the hard sound—
Steel against intimation—the sharp flash,
The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X.
|
"In certain moods the horror of a word is the meaning it defends against all comers; so metaphor is the device by which one undermines that defense. In Stevens’ 'Someone Puts a Pineapple Together,' the someone contemplates 'A wholly artificial nature, in which / The profusion of metaphor has been increased.' If you put a pineapple together and see metaphors becoming more profuse, you release yourself from psychological determinations, you become a performative gesture and are happy to find yourself in that state. But then a scruple may assert itself:
Presumably a bad metaphor murders a good one: bad in the sense of telling lies, ignoring the truths that can’t honorably be ignored."
— Denis Donoghue, "The Motive for Metaphor," |
"In U.S. criminal law, means, motive, and opportunity is
a common summation of the three aspects of a crime
that must be established before guilt can be determined
in a criminal proceeding." — Wikipedia
See also "Motive for Metaphor" in this journal.
"I'm in with the in crowd,
I go where the in crowd goes"
— Musical motif of the recent film "Irrational Man"
"The motive for metaphor, shrinking from
The weight of primary noon,
The A B C of being,
The ruddy temper, the hammer
Of red and blue, the hard sound—
Steel against intimation— the sharp flash,
The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X."
— Wallace Stevens,
"The Motive for Metaphor" (1947)
See also a search in this journal for Philosophy Hammer.
This post is a scholium for Joyce Carol Oates, who has
written a very readable essay in the current New York
Review of Books titled
Inspiration and Obsession in Life and Literature.
Oates mentions three times, without attributing it to the late poet
Wallace Stevens, the phrase "the motive for metaphor."
The following paragraphs are by Denis Donoghue, from
a piece titled "The Motive for Metaphor" in the Winter 2013
issue of The Hudson Review —
Related material in this journal: Copleston and a fellow Jesuit.
From a recent Gitterkrieg post:
"The motive for metaphor, shrinking from
The weight of primary noon,
The A B C of being…." — Wallace Stevens
See also the cover of the February 2015
Notices of the American Mathematical Society .
"Omega is as real as we need it to be."
— Burt Lancaster in The Osterman Weekend
"The motive for metaphor, shrinking from
The weight of primary noon,
The A B C of being…." — Wallace Stevens
See also Cube Trinity in this journal.
The Motive for Metaphor
You like it under the trees in autumn,
Because everything is half dead.
The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves
And repeats words without meaning.
In the same way, you were happy in spring
With the half colors of quarter-things,
The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds,
The single bird, the obscure moon–
The obscure moon lighting an obscure world
Of things that would never be quite expressed,
Where you yourself were never quite yourself
And did not want nor have to be,
Desiring the exhilarations of changes:
The motive for metaphor, shrinking from
The weight of primary noon,
The A B C of being,
The ruddy temper, the hammer
Of red and blue, the hard sound–
Steel against intimation– the sharp flash,
The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X.
— Wallace Stevens,
Transport to Summer (1947)
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