A passage from Wallace Stevens—
The spirit and space,
The empty spirit
In vacant space.
A frame from the film American Psycho (2000), starring Christian Bale—
The rest of the film is not recommended.
Related material—
"24 Hour Psycho" at the Museum of Modern Art in the novel Point Omega .
Illustration from a New York Times review—
Line from "Vide," a post of June 8, 2014 —
Vide Classical Geometry in Light of Galois Geometry.
Recall that vide means different things in Latin and in French.
See also Stevens + "Vacant Space" in this journal.
Consider Stevens’s verse from “The Rock” (1954):
“That in which space itself is contained.”
Consider also Whitehead in 1906 —
"This is proved by the consideration
of a three dimensional geometry in which
there are only fifteen points."
— and Stevens on the sublime (1935):
"And the sublime comes down
To the spirit itself,
The spirit and space,
The empty spirit
In vacant space."
Or: Notes for the Metaphysical Club
Northrop Frye on Wallace Stevens:
"He… stands in contrast to the the dualistic
approach of Eliot, who so often speaks of poetry
as though it were an emotional and sensational
soul looking for a 'correlative' skeleton of
thought to be provided by a philosopher, a
Cartesian ghost trying to find a machine that
will fit."
Ralph Waldo Emerson on "vacant and vain" knowledge:
"The new position of the advancing man has all
the powers of the old, yet has them all new. It
carries in its bosom all the energies of the past,
yet is itself an exhalation of the morning. I cast
away in this new moment all my once hoarded
knowledge, as vacant and vain."
Harold Bloom on Emerson:
"Emerson may not have invented the American
Sublime, yet he took eternal possession of it."
Wallace Stevens on the American Sublime:
"And the sublime comes down
To the spirit itself,
The spirit and space,
The empty spirit
In vacant space."
A founding member of the Metaphysical Club:
See also the eightfold cube.
For insatiable actor Patrick Bateman (protagonist of
American Psycho) and anti-theologian Kirk Varnedoe
( Pictures of Nothing, this journal ten years ago today )
|
Philip Rieff, The Crisis of the Officer Class,
The third culture's life-style, its way, is no way: it is abandonment,
proclaims
This is masterly anti-theology. This is what no "mickey mockers" of
[12] Wallace Stevens, "To the One of Fictive Music," in Collected
velous panic and emptiness of belief by which the "sublime comes
The spirit and space,
This poet is no great character, nor temple priest. He is a virtuoso
[13] Stevens, "The American Sublime," 130-31 |
One grows used to the weather,
The landscape and that;
And the sublime comes down
To the spirit itself,
The spirit and space,
The empty spirit
In vacant space.
— Wallace Stevens,
"The American Sublime"
The Times Online on the artist Agnes Martin,
who died Dec. 16 in Taos, New Mexico:
"At a glance, or from a distance, her work looks like nothing at all. Square canvases are so palely touched with colour they might almost be blank. Considered slowly and carefully and close-up, however, the whole surface comes alive."
"The restraint and formal regularity of Martin’s work has led her often to be grouped with the Minimalists. She shares something of their self-effacing rigour and their concern with the material qualities of art, but she herself preferred to be seen in the context of the Abstract Expressionist painters who were her own contemporaries and early artistic models. Like them she may have seen abstract art as the means to a distinctively American sublime…."
"Taos had been a magnet for artists since the last years of the 19th century. D. H. Lawrence famously spent time there in the 1920s. 'Never shall I forget the Christmas dances at Taos,' he wrote, 'twilight, snow, the darkness coming over the great wintry mountains and the lonely pueblo.'"
Chorus from
The Rock
Author Joan Didion is 70 today.
On Didion’s late husband, John Gregory Dunne:
“His 1989 memoir Harp includes Dunne’s early years in Hartford and his Irish-Catholic family’s resentment of WASP social superiority: ‘Don’t stand out so that the Yanks can see you,’ he wrote, ‘don’t let your pretensions become a focus of Yank merriment and mockery.'”
— The Hartford Courant, August 4, 2002
From a Hartford Protestant:
The American Sublime
How does one stand
To behold the sublime,
To confront the mockers,
The mickey mockers
And plated pairs?When General Jackson
Posed for his statue
He knew how one feels.
Shall a man go barefoot
Blinking and blank?But how does one feel?
One grows used to the weather,
The landscape and that;
And the sublime comes down
To the spirit itself,The spirit and space,
The empty spirit
In vacant space.
What wine does one drink?
What bread does one eat?— Wallace Stevens
A search of the Internet for “Wallace Stevens” + “The Rock” + “Seventy Years Later” yields only one quotation…
Log24 entries of Aug. 2, 2002:
From “Seventy Years Later,” Section I of “The Rock,” a poem by Wallace Stevens:
A theorem proposed
between the two —
Two figures in a nature
of the sun….
From page 63 of The New Yorker issue dated August 5, 2002:
“Birthday, death-day —
what day is not both?”
— John Updike
From Didion’s Play It As It Lays:
Everything goes. I am working very hard at not thinking about how everything goes. I watch a hummingbird, throw the I Ching but never read the coins, keep my mind in the now.
— Page 8
From Play It As It Lays:
I lie here in the sunlight, watch the hummingbird. This morning I threw the coins in the swimming pool, and they gleamed and turned in the water in such a way that I was almost moved to read them. I refrained.
— Page 214
And the sublime comes down
To the spirit itself,
The spirit and space,
The empty spirit
In vacant space.
One heart will wear a Valentine.
— Sinatra, 1954
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