Part I —
A search for images of Wallace Stevens's "Pediment of Appearance"—
Part II —
A geometric analogue of the pediment—
Note that the above cross also appears in
Euclid's proof of the Pythagorean theorem.
Part III —
An echo of the above geometry—
In the foreground of the above image
from today's online New York Times
is the pediment of Harvard's McKean Gate.
http://www.wallacestevens.com/concordance/
savage
Your query matched 15 lines
An Ordinary Evening in New Haven (iv)
Stanza: 61; Line Number: 7
They only know a savage assuagement cries
Stanza: 62; Line Number: 8
With a savage voice; and in that cry they hear
Stanza: 64; Line Number: 10
In a savage and subtle and simple harmony,
Credences of Summer (vii)
Stanza: 101; Line Number: 11
The object, grips it in savage scrutiny,
Examination of the Hero in a Time of War (ii)
Stanza: 26; Line Number: 12
And rainbow sortilege, the savage weapon
Exposition of the Contents of a Cab (OP)
Line Number: 12
And savage blooms;
From the Journal of Crispin (II) (OP)
Stanza: 114; Line Number: 20
Into a savage color he goes on.
Gubbinal
Line Number: 9
That savage of fire,
Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit
Title
Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit
Page from a Tale
Line Number: 20
They looked back at Hans’ look with savage faces.
Sunday Morning (vii)
Stanza: 95; Line Number: 5
Naked among them, like a savage source.
The Comedian as the Letter C, ii: Concerning the Thunderstorms of Yucatan
Stanza: 14; Line Number: 14
Into a savage color he went on.
The Man with the Blue Guitar (iii)
Stanza: 29; Line Number: 9
To bang it from a savage blue,
The Pediment of Appearance
Line Number: 10
The savage transparence. They go crying
The World as Meditation
Line Number: 6
Whose mere savage presence awakens the world in which she dwells.
_________________________________________________________________________
Online Concordance to Wallace Stevens’s Poetry
… For those taken aback by the tone of midnight's report
on the death of a 1960's counterculture figure.
See Didion's view of the counterculture in her classic
Slouching Towards Bethlehem .
A search in this journal for Didion + Nihilism yields …
|
From Wallace Stevens: A World of Transforming Shapes, by Alan D. Perlis, Bucknell University Press, 1976, p. 117: … in 'The Pediment of Appearance,' a slight narrative poem in Transport to Summer … A group of young men enter some woods 'Hunting for the great ornament, The pediment of appearance.' Though moving through the natural world, the young men seek the artificial, or pure form, believing that in discovering this pediment, this distillation of the real, they will also discover the 'savage transparence,' the rude source of human life. In Stevens's world, such a search is futile, since it is only through observing nature that one reaches beyond it to pure form. As if to demonstrate the degree to which the young men's search is misaligned, Stevens says of them that 'they go crying/The world is myself, life is myself,' believing that what surrounds them is immaterial. Such a proclamation is a cardinal violation of Stevens's principles of the imagination. |
The following passage by Tolkien was suggested by a copy of next Sunday's New York Times Book Review that arrived in the mail today. (See Orson Scott Card's remarks on page 26— "Uncle Orson"— and the Review 's concluding essay "Grand Allusion.")
"Lastly, tengwesta [system or code of signs] has also become an impediment. It is in Incarnates clearer and more precise than their direct reception of thought. By it also they can communicate easily with others, when no strength is added to their thought: as, for example, when strangers first meet. And, as we have seen, the use of 'language' soon becomes habitual, so that the practice of ósanwe (interchange of thought) is neglected and becomes more difficult. Thus we see that the Incarnate tend more and more to use or to endeavour to use ósanwe only in great need and urgency, and especially when lambe is unavailing. As when the voice cannot be heard, which comes most often because of distance. For distance in itself offers no impediment whatever to ósanwe . But those who by affinity might well use ósanwe will use lambe when in proximity, by habit or preference. Yet we may mark also how the 'affine' may more quickly understand the lambe that they use between them, and indeed all that they would say is not put into words. With fewer words they come swifter to a better understanding. There can be no doubt that here ósanwe is also often taking place; for the will to converse in lambe is a will to communicate thought, and lays the minds open. It may be, of course, that the two that converse know already part of the matter and the thought of the other upon it, so that only allusions dark to the stranger need be made; but this is not always so. The affine** will reach an understanding more swiftly than strangers upon matters that neither have before discussed, and they will more quickly perceive the import of words that, however numerous, well-chosen, and precise, must remain inadequate."
* "If a poem catches a student's interest at all, he or she should damned well be able to look up an unfamiliar word in the dictionary…."
— Elizabeth Bishop, quoted in the essay "Grand Allusion" mentioned above. For a brief dictionary of most of the unfamiliar words in this post's title and in the above passage, see Vinyar Tengwar 39 (July 1998). This is copyrighted but freely available on the Web.
** The word "affine" has connotations not intended by Tolkien. See that word in this journal. See also page 5 of next Sunday's Times Book Review , which contains a full-page ad for the 50th anniversary edition of A Wrinkle in Time . "There is such a thing as a tesseract."
An image suggested by last night's PBS hour "Chautauqua: An American Narrative"—
Click for larger versions of the image search and of the Hall of Philosophy.
Both the screenshot and the Chautauqua photo (by jbi46 at flickr.com) were taken on July 19th, 2010.
The screenshot appeared in the post "Pediments of Appearance" (which also included two much less complex images).
Some background — A webpage on Analytical Cubism and a related search in this journal.
From Wallace Stevens, who appears at top center in the image above—
An Ordinary Evening in New Haven, XXII
Professor Eucalyptus said, “The search
For reality is as momentous as
The search for god.” It is the philosopher’s search
For an interior made exterior
And the poet’s search for the same exterior made
Interior: breathless things broodingly abreath
With the Inhalations of original cold
And of original earliness. Yet the sense
Of cold and earliness is a daily sense,
Not the predicate of bright origin.
Creation is not renewed by images
Of lone wanderers. To re-create, to use
The cold and earliness and bright origin
Is to search. Likewise to say of the evening star,
The most ancient light in the most ancient sky,
That it is wholly an inner light, that it shines
From the sleepy bosom of the real, re-creates,
Searches a possible for its possibleness.
From the preface to the inaugural issue of Tympanum: A Journal of Comparative Literary Studies—
Regarding the choice of name for this journal, tympan or tympanum is a word that designates several objects at once. Tympan is perhaps first of all a typographical term: as a printer's term in early book production, a tympan designated "the iron frame covered with parchment on which the paper was placed." Taken as an anatomical term, the word tympanum is another term for the eardrum, the oblique stretching of tissue between the auditory canal and the middle ear that allows one to hear: to hear others, to hear music, or even to hear oneself speak. The tympanum is a partition of the ear that separates inside from outside, translating various tones and punctuations, a liminal membrane traversed by hearing others speak. In this instance, the tympanum is a tissue, a weave or web that mediates hearing. It is by extension the term for the diaphragm of a tele-phone, that technological figure of the spatialization of the voice. As an architectural term tympanum names the pediment that sits atop the cornice or frieze of a building. And to this heterogeneous list one might add that in ancient Greece a tympanum, like the stoa or colonnades, was a gathering space for the discussion of philosophy. All these meanings could be enlisted to indicate the interests of this new journal.
By its very nature, a world wide web site would be a site of a mediation of or meditation on the problematic of space and place (in short: of "site" itself), and of their dislocation. In this way the web opens the possibility for a journal concerned with the problem of a mediated or textualized hearing.
Several of the articles contained in this first issue of Tympanum share a thematic of location and of reading and hearing….
Deborah Levitt's essay on Heidegger and theatre, in its exploration of the problem of space and place, implicitly touches on the very medium of the web: the perpetual dislocation of place from space. Levitt couples several of Heidegger's writings together with Artaud's on her Freiburg-Paris Express. Levitt's meditation on theory and theatre is at once incisive and innovative, and locates its opening problematic in the substitution of a metaphysics of sight by site, a move which she says opens a spatiality. In a recent issue of Assemblage, Sam Weber makes some remarks on the metaphysics of site that could indeed be used as a succinct introduction to the problems that Levitt's essay, Heidegger and the Theatre of Truth, engages:
If what we call "space" is, like the Platonic chora, on the one hand always already caught up in the process of making room for that determinate other of space that can be called place or site, and if, on the other hand, this process of making room remains distinct from the particular places and sites it makes way for, then the emergence of the latter from the former will inevitably appear as a more or less violent event. Violent, because the staking out of territory and the assignment of positions and posts can never simply legitimate itself in terms of preexisting borders. It cannot do this, since there is no original order to which such a process of partition might appeal without equivocation. In place of such an origin, there is chora: the process of partition and repartition as such, except that "as such" here is impossible to distinguish from: "as other." Such partition and repartition constitute the law, the nomos, of chora…3
3 Samuel Weber, "The Parallax View: Place and Space in Plato and Benjamin," Assemblage 20, MIT Press: 1993: 88.
The Tympanum preface (1998) is by Peter Woodruff.
Wallace Stevens—
"The pediment
Lifts up its heavy scowl before them."
Scowl courtesy of Samuel Weber—
Excerpt from Wallace Stevens's
"The Pediment of Appearance"—
Young men go walking in the woods,
Hunting for the great ornament,
The pediment* of appearance.
They hunt for a form which by its form alone,
Without diamond—blazons or flashing or
Chains of circumstance,
By its form alone, by being right,
By being high, is the stone
For which they are looking:
The savage transparence.
* Pediments, triangular and curved—
— From "Stones and Their Stories," an article written
and illustrated by E.M. Barlow, copyright 1913.
Related geometry—
(See Štefan Porubský: Pythagorean Theorem .)
A proof with diamond-blazons—
(See Ivars Peterson's "Square of the Hypotenuse," Nov. 27, 2000.)
The history of mathematics continues…
|
For some background on Professor Artemiadis, see two notes of July 2005 (the month an international conference on "Mathematics and Narrative" was held in Greece).
A post related by synchronicity to Artemiadis's Jan. 26 speech— Symbology.
Other philosophical remarks— "The Pediment of Appearance."
Tina Fey to Steve Martin
at the Oscars:
"Oh, Steve, no one wants
to hear about our religion
… that we made up."
|
From Wallace Stevens: A World of Transforming Shapes, by Alan D. Perlis, Bucknell University Press, 1976, p. 117:
… in 'The Pediment of Appearance,' a slight narrative poem in Transport to Summer… A group of young men enter some woods 'Hunting for the great ornament, The pediment of appearance.' Though moving through the natural world, the young men seek the artificial, or pure form, believing that in discovering this pediment, this distillation of the real, they will also discover the 'savage transparence,' the rude source of human life. In Stevens's world, such a search is futile, since it is only through observing nature that one reaches beyond it to pure form. As if to demonstrate the degree to which the young men's search is misaligned, Stevens says of them that 'they go crying/The world is myself, life is myself,' believing that what surrounds them is immaterial. Such a proclamation is a cardinal violation of Stevens's principles of the imagination. |
Superficially the young men's philosophy seems to resemble what Wikipedia calls "pantheistic solipsism"– noting, however, that "This article has multiple issues."
As, indeed, does pantheistic solipsism– a philosophy (properly called "eschatological pantheistic multiple-ego solipsism") devised, with tongue in cheek, by science-fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein.
Despite their preoccupation with solipsism, Heinlein and Stevens point, each in his own poetic way, to a highly non-solipsistic topic from pure mathematics that is, unlike the religion of Martin and Fey, not made up– namely, the properties of space.
"Sharpie, we have condensed six dimensions into four, then we either work by analogy into six, or we have to use math that apparently nobody but Jake and my cousin Ed understands. Unless you can think of some way to project six dimensions into three– you seem to be smart at such projections."
I closed my eyes and thought hard. "Zebbie, I don't think it can be done. Maybe Escher could have done it."
|
A discussion of Stevens's late poem "The Rock" (1954) in Wallace Stevens: A World of Transforming Shapes, by Alan D. Perlis, Bucknell University Press, 1976, p. 120:
For Stevens, the poem "makes meanings of the rock." In the mind, "its barrenness becomes a thousand things/And so exists no more." In fact, in a peculiar irony that only a poet with Stevens's particular notion of the imagination's function could develop, the rock becomes the mind itself, shattered into such diamond-faceted brilliance that it encompasses all possibilities for human thought:
The rock is the gray particular of man's life,
The stone from which he rises, up—and—ho,
The step to the bleaker depths of his descents ...
The rock is the stern particular of the air,
The mirror of the planets, one by one,
But through man's eye, their silent rhapsodist,
Turquoise the rock, at odious evening bright
With redness that sticks fast to evil dreams;
The difficult rightness of half-risen day.
The rock is the habitation of the whole,
Its strength and measure, that which is near,
point A
In a perspective that begins again
At B: the origin of the mango's rind.
(Collected Poems, 528)
|
Stevens's rock is associated with empty space, a concept that suggests "nothingness" to one literary critic:
B. J. Leggett, "Stevens's Late Poetry" in The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens— On the poem "The Rock":"… the barren rock of the title is Stevens's symbol for the nothingness that underlies all existence, 'That in which space itself is contained'…. Its subject is its speaker's sense of nothingness and his need to be cured of it."
More positively…
Space is, of course, also a topic
in pure mathematics…
For instance, the 6-dimensional
affine space (or the corresponding
5-dimensional projective space)
over the two-element Galois field
can be viewed as an illustration of
Stevens's metaphor in "The Rock."
Cara:
Here the 6-dimensional affine
space contains the 63 points
of PG(5, 2), plus the origin, and
the 3-dimensional affine
space contains as its 8 points
Conwell's eight "heptads," as in
Generating the Octad Generator.
| From April 28, 2008:
Religious Art
The black monolith of One artistic shortcoming The following One approach to "Transformations play See 4/28/08 for examples |
| From Wallace Stevens: A World of Transforming Shapes, by Alan D. Perlis, Bucknell University Press, 1976, pp. 117-118:
"… his point of origin is external nature, the fount to which we come seeking inspiration for our fictions. We come, many of Stevens's poems suggest, as initiates, ritualistically celebrating the place through which we will travel to achieve fictive shape. Stevens's 'real' is a bountiful place, continually giving forth life, continually changing. It is fertile enough to meet any imagination, as florid and as multifaceted as the tropical flora about which the poet often writes. It therefore naturally lends itself to rituals of spring rebirth, summer fruition, and fall harvest. But in Stevens's fictive world, these rituals are symbols: they acknowledge the real and thereby enable the initiate to pass beyond it into the realms of his fictions. Two counter rituals help to explain the function of celebration as Stevens envisions it. The first occurs in 'The Pediment of Appearance,' a slight narrative poem in Transport to Summer. A group of young men enter some woods 'Hunting for the great ornament, The pediment of appearance.' Though moving through the natural world, the young men seek the artificial, or pure form, believing that in discovering this pediment, this distillation of the real, they will also discover the 'savage transparence,' the rude source of human life. In Stevens's world, such a search is futile, since it is only through observing nature that one reaches beyond it to pure form. As if to demonstrate the degree to which the young men's search is misaligned, Stevens says of them that 'they go crying/The world is myself, life is myself,' believing that what surrounds them is immaterial. Such a proclamation is a cardinal violation of Stevens's principles of the imagination. For in 'Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction' he tells us that ... the first idea was not to shape the clouds In imitation. The clouds preceded us. There was a muddy centre before we breathed. There was a myth before the myth began, Venerable and articulate and complete. From this the poem springs: that we live in a place That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves And hard it is in spite of blazoned days. We are the mimics. (Collected Poems, 383-84) Believing that they are the life and not the mimics thereof, the world and not its fiction-forming imitators, these young men cannot find the savage transparence for which they are looking. In its place they find the pediment, a scowling rock that, far from being life's source, is symbol of the human delusion that there exists a 'form alone,' apart from 'chains of circumstance.' A far more productive ritual occurs in 'Sunday Morning.'…." |
For transformations of a more
specifically religious nature,
see the remarks on
Richard Strauss,
"Death and Transfiguration,"
(Tod und Verklärung, Opus 24)
in Mathematics and Metaphor
on July 31, 2008, and the entries
of August 3, 2008, related to the
death of Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
The pictures are from
the Bloomsbury Auctions site.
The Bloomsbury Auctions caption for these images is as follows:
303. Einstein (Albert, theoretical physicist, 1879-1955) Autograph Letter signed to Eric B. Gutkind, in German, 1½pp. & envelope, 4to, Princeton, 3rd January 1954, thanking him for a copy of his book and expressing his view of God and Judaism, [The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish… . For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people…], folds, slightly browned ; and a photograph of Gutkind, v.s., v.d.
est. £6000 – £8000
Einstein’s view of God and Judaism.
Eric B. Gutkind (1877-1965), philosopher; author of Choose Life: The Biblical Call to Revolt, 1952.
Albert Einstein – see also lot 497Sold for £170000
Sale 649, 15th May 2008
Here is a close reading of the part of the letter itself that Bloomsbury gives in English, transcribed from the above images.
Line-by-line transcription of paragraph 2, starting at line 4 of that paragraph:
... Das Wort Gott ist für mich nichts als Ausdruck und Produkt menschlicher Schwächen, die Bibel eine Sammlung ehrwürdiger, aber doch reichlich primitiver Legenden. Keine noch so feinsinnige Auslegung kann (für mich) etwas daran ändern. Diese verfeinerten Auslegungen sind naturgemäß höchst mannigfaltig und haben so gut wie nichts mit dem Urtext zu schaffen. Für mich ist die unverfälschte jüdische Religion, wie alle anderen Religionen, eine Inkarnation des primitiven Aberglaubens. Und das jüdische Volk, zu dem ich gern gehöre und mit dessen Mentalität ich tief verwachsen bin, hat für mich doch keine andersartige Qualität als alle anderen Völker. So weit meine Erfahrung reicht, ist es auch um nichts besser als andere menschliche Gruppierungen, wenn es auch durch Mangel an Macht gegen die schlimmsten Auswüchse gesichert ist. Ansonsten kann ich nichts "Auserwähltes" an ihm wahrnehmen.The Guardian of May 13, 2008 stated that the following was "translated from German by Joan Stambaugh"–
... The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. These subtilised interpretations are highly manifold according to their nature and have almost nothing to do with the original text. For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish [German: primitiven] superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them.
Phrases by Stambaugh that do not appear in the German text are highlighted.
Stambaugh, a philosophy professor, is the author of a work on Buddhism, The Formless Self. For some related material on young men who "go crying 'The world is myself, life is myself'" in May, see Wallace Stevens's "The Pediment of Appearance."
From amctv.com: The Milkman (1950) “Donald O’Connor plays Roger, an agitated war veteran with an unusual speech impediment caused by a war injury: he quacks like a duck when he gets upset. His father refuses to give him a job at the family dairy because he wants him to rest, so he goes to work for a competing milk farm where eccentric milkman Breezy (Jimmy Durante) works. Roger falls in love with the boss’s daughter [Piper Laurie] and proves himself to be a comically incompetent milkman, and Breezy must cover up his mistakes.”
From amctv.com: St. Patrick’s Day (1999) “In this warm family saga, Mary Pat Donnelly McDonough (Piper Laurie), the widowed matriarch of a big Irish-American clan, shocks her family when she announces she has pledged to give up alcohol and won’t be serving any at her traditional house party. What follows is a multi-generational story with many surprising revelations….” See also The Diamond Project. |
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