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"...XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs."
From: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
Wallace Stevens
For the poet, Wallace Stevens, inspired by his piece, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird:
II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.
(THE HOUSE) OF THE ULTIMATE POLITICIAN
(S)he is the final builder of the total building,
The final dreamer of the total dream,
Or will be. Building and dream are one.
There is a total building and there is
A total dream. There are words of this,
Words, in a storm, that beat around the shapes.
There is a storm much like the crying of the wind,
Words that come out of us like words within,
That have rankled for many lives and made no
sound.
(S)he can hear them, like people on the walls,
Running in the rises of common speech,
Crying as that speech falls as if to fail.
There is a building stands in a ruinous storm,
A dream interrupted out of the past,
From beside us, from where we have yet to live.
– (With apologies to) Wallace Stevens
*Tenney is a Repuglican NY state rep. But it took a while to find that out. She seems to hide it a bit. Which is maybe why the arrow points in both directions? (If you enlarge the photo you will see her name beneath the sign, which I am taking to mean this is her house.) I find it ironic – and repugnant – that a Repuglican represents Seneca Falls, the birthplace of the rights of women.
" The day of the sun is like the day of a king.
It is a promenade in the morning, a sitting on the throne
at noon, a pageant in the evening. "
..........Wallace Stevens ... ( 1879 -1955 ).
.....U.S. poet.
Check out Kiras photostream here:
www.flickr.com/photos/kira_westland/
***** PLEASE NO MULTI - INVITES ***** THANK YOU ! ********
***** AND PLEASE NO MULTI - GRAPHICS * THANK YOU ! *****
***** NEW FLICKR IS SO, SO, SO, SO, SO SLOW !!!!! *************
I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the black bird.
II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.
III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.
IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.
V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.
VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?
VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.
IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.
X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.
XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.
XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.
XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.
The starting point of the human and the end,
That in which space itself is contained, the gate
To the enclosure, day, the things illumined
By day, night and that which night illumines,
Night and its midnight-minting fragrances,
Night's hymn of the rock, as in a vivid sleep.
Words by Wallace Stevens
for Flickriver - Sophie Shapiro
.
"What we know in what we see, what we feel in what
We hear, what we are, beyond mystic disputation,
In the tumult of integrations out of the sky,
And what we think, a breathing like the wind,
A moving part of a motion, a discovery
Part of a discovery, a change part of a change,
A sharing of color and being part of it.
The afternoon is visibly a source,
Too wide, too irised, to be more than calm,
Too much like thinking to be less than thought,
Obscurest parent, obscurest patriarch,
A daily majesty of meditation,
That comes and goes in silences of its own.
We think, then as the sun shines or does not.
We think as wind skitters on a pond in a field
Or we put mantles on our words because
The same wind, rising and rising, makes a sound
Like the last muting of winter as it ends."
~ Wallace Stevens, 1879-1955 ~
From "Looking Across Fields and Watching the Birds Fly By"
Another from Keukenhof.
The starting point of the human and the end,
That in which space itself is contained, the gate
To the enclosure, day, the things illumined
By day, night and that which night illumines,
Night and its midnight-minting fragrances,
Night's hymn of the rock, as in a vivid sleep.
Words by Wallace Stevens
.
.
Nina - ready to go home ...
"The winter is made and you have to bear it,
The winter web, the winter woven, wind and wind,
For all the thoughts of summer that go with it ..."
Wallace Stevens
crazy messy but when you make it big, you see the hidden greens and purples and the half centimeter that is actually in focus.
© Ben Heine || Facebook || Twitter || www.benheine.com
_______________________________________________
For more information about my art: info@benheine.com
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The Emperor of Ice Cream
A poem by Wallace Stevens
Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
---------------
Poem's source : compsci.rice.edu/
- Wallace Stevens
I hope you all aren't getting sick of the water shots yet because I'm just getting warmed up. It's funny because when I shoot these, they all feel so pretty and sexy, and then I swim over and take a look in the viewfinder to see how they're turning out and I'm never happy with any of them. Luckily, after a little post-processing, I usually wind up with one or two that I find acceptable.
365 Days (self portraits): Day 67
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measures destined for her soul...
Wallace Stevens
The houses are haunted
By white night-gowns.
None are green,
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings,
Or yellow with blue rings.
None of them are strange,
With socks of lace
And beaded ceintures.
People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches tigers
In red weather.
–– Wallace Stevens
She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.
The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard,
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.
For she was the maker of the song she sang.
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.
Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang.
If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone. But it was more than that,
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea.
It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.
Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As the night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.
Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.
–––– Wallace Stevens, THE IDEA OF ORDER AT KEY WEST
1. Come again under the red umbrella, 2. So many things appear at twilight, 3. We have this tree at home, 4. A poet's tree with borrowed flowers, 5. Red leaves are gone, but see, 6. Passionate tree on a cloudy day, 7. Winter sunlight on a fragile parasol, 8. Walking in black under the snowfall,
Created with fd's Flickr Toys.
This is funny. Yesterday (Jan 6, 2007) I found four of my pics in Explore, got the Scout poster and posted it as a comment to one of them with the headline: "One with no umbrellas or trees!" (Most of my photos that made it to Explore are about trees or umbrellas... )
Then, as it happens, the last four dropped (including the different one, that btw is still receiving favs and comments and being blogged etc.). And just a few minutes after this sad discovering was made, I took a book from the shelves (Wallace Stevens' Adagia) and to my great surprise opened it just in the page where readers are told:
"All of our ideas come from the natural world: trees = umbrellas."
There was more. In the same page are these sentences on the devotees of Explore, written decades before the invention of internet:
"The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly."
This photo belongs to The Asiain Gallery.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it to and fro.
The mood traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.
--Wallace Stevens.
"Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in the falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The boughs of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measures destined for her soul."
~ Wallace Stevens
_____________________________________________________________
I was raised in the Caribbean. Our holiday card was the family in our bathing suits waving beside the Christmas tree. But after many years of living in an eternal summer, I craved the seasons I saw in the movies and read about in the books. The children having snowball fights in the winter...Batmans and Princesses partly covered by hats and coats on Halloween...pumpkin carving and apple cider in the fall...
I believe that when we set an intention, the entire universe conspires to make it happen. And with the opportunity to further my studies, I came to live in beautiful, intense New England. While it has taken me years to adjust to the cold and to the short summers, (I am still very much a beach girl at heart) I have grown to love the beauty and uniqueness that every season brings. In fact, just today we were moving snow to make room for the snow coming this week. It's official. I have arrived!
The poem above....I love. To me, it interprets a woman's soul, a woman's moods, as changes in the weather and the seasons....brilliant.
Happy week everyone!
♥
Cannon Mountain - At the summit, the trail to the transmitter building.
"Cold is our element and winter's air
brings voices as of lions coming down ..."
Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) in: "The Sun this March"
It was a long day. School, luggage, four hours driving and then here with my family, chats and everything...now I feel tired...have a great saturday you all out there!
(shot taken in Paris while sitting on a bench, looking at people passing by)
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
Wallace & Stevens Steam Roller OT9586 (1928) on the road with a living van near Cowfold, Sussex. Just came across this on my way to the Bluebell Railway.
Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock
The houses are haunted
By white night-gowns.
None are green,
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings,
Or yellow with blue rings.
None of them are strange,
With socks of lace
And beaded ceintures.
People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches tigers
In red weather.
(wallace stevens)
(again)
Who knew! that "the old lady in Dubuque" ... turned out to be none other than a British born lady named Tina Brown, who was the first woman editor of this American cultural icon.
Hey, who knew ?
I recently completed reading this fascinating history of THE NEW YORKER magazine, lovingly written by Ben Yagoda, and I learned a lot, about Modern American Literature, from the Lost Generation gang to David Remnick current New Yorker's editions, in the process.
Always Trust your friendly baker:
I also learned from "the old lady in Dubuque" (pp. 39-40) that daring and novel ideas, in publishing, do succeed, and can rise as fast as highly active yeast. It was Raoul Fleischmann, from the General Baking Company family (pp. 32-33), who, in the summer of 1924, backed Harold Ross and Jane Grant own's $20,000.00 savings, with an initial $25,000.00 investment, in cash, to start THE NEW YORKER. Hence, Raoul Fleischmann, and his heirs, were Publishers of THE NEW YORKER from 1924 to 1985, when S.I. Newhouse, of Advance Publications, bought the property. (pp. 408-409)
So I recommend reading this volume with a 10/10 star rating !!
jacket Illustration by Harry Bliss
www.amazon.com/About-Town-Yorker-World-Made/dp/0306810239...
(496 pages, DA CAPO PRESS, 2001, ISBN-10: 0306810239)
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Title quote by Wallace Stevens - Another from my "Growth of the Soil" images. The following is an excerpt from Wendell Berry's "A Native Hill"
"I have been walking in the woods and have lain down on the ground to rest. It is the middle of October, and around me, all through the woods, the leaves are quietly sifting down. The newly fallen leaves make a dry, comfortable bed, and I lie easy, coming to rest within myself as I seem to do nowadays only when I am in the woods."
"And now a leaf, spiraling down in wild flight, lands on my shirt at about the third button below the collar. At first I am bemused and mystified by the coincidence - that the leaf should have been so hung, weighted and shaped, so ready to fall, so nudged loose and slanted by the breeze, as to fall where I, by the same delicacy of circumstance, happened to be lying. The event, among all its ramifying causes and considerations, and finally its mysteries, begins to take on the magnitude of history. Portent begins to dwell in it."
"And suddenly I apprehend in it the dark proposal of the ground. Under the fallen leaf my breastbone burns with imminent decay. Other leaves fall. My body begins its long shudder into humus. I feel my substance escape me, carried into the mold by beetles and worms. Days, winds, seasons pass over me as I sink under the leaves. For a time only sight is left me, a passive awareness of the sky overhead, birds crossing, the mazed interreaching of the treetops, the leaves falling - and then that, too, sinks away. It is acceptable to me, and I am at peace."
"When I move to go, it is as though I rise up out of the world."
Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
"She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
as we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.
-Wallace Stevens, "The Idea of Order at Key West"
I found this old scribbled quote in the pocket of a shirt I haven't worn in ages. I started to play with my digital tools to express the quote and realized that I happen to be reading Chapter 6 from Tulshi Sen's "Ancient Secrets of Success for Today's World" entitled : "The Everyday Magic of Creating from No-Thing." Read How This Chapter Touched My Life
“Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.”
Wallace Stevens
Well, nuncle, this plainly won't do.
These insolent, linear peels
And sullen, hurricane shapes
Won't do with your eglantine.
They require something serpentine.
Blunt yellow in such a room!
You should have had plums tonight,
In an eighteenth-century dish,
And pettifogging buds,
For the women of primrose and purl
Each one in her decent curl.
Good God! What a precious light!
But bananas hacked and hunched....
The table was set by an ogre,
His eye on an outdoor gloom
And a stiff and noxious place.
Pile the bananas on planks.
The women will be all shanks
And bangles and slatted eyes.
And deck the bananas in leaves
Plucked from the Carib trees
Fibrous and dangling down,
Oozing cantankerous gum
Out of their purple maws,
Darting out of their purple craws
Their musky and tingling tongues.
Floral Decorations for Bananas
from Harmonium (1932)
Wallace Stevens
(1879 - 1955)