ashyton’s Blog

Emerson is saying that it is not enough just to think and read and write about nature, it must be actually experienced and interacted with. Humanity was, well before the institution of universities, a species that lived in perfect harmony with nature. Thus, the backbone of human culture is derived from nature (“language which the field and the work-yard made”), not from book learning. Emerson still believes that reading and writing are worthwhile pursuits, but only when they are complemented with frequent interactions with nature itself.

Emerson’s notion of “creative reading” works along somewhat similar lines. Passively reading something may result in the retention of a little bit of information, a little bit of knowledge, but the best way to read, Emerson would argue, is to be actively engaged in it, to be constantly thinking about and evaluating the ideas that are being read about. Just reading about a lot of things without active engagement would be akin to becoming “the recluse thinker commenting from afar” (quote from wikipedia), which is just about the worst kind of intellectual you can be in Emerson’s viewpoint.

I raced through the black pine trees of the forest, making wild gestures with my staff, screaming and laughing uncontrollably, the whole forest ringing with the sounds of my insanity. Suddenly I came upon a red light like the blaze of a midnight conflagration shining demonically against the sky. I stopped for a moment, momentarily free from my maniac possession. I could hear, in the distance, the sound of what seemed like a hymn. It was a hymn I knew from frequent renditions in the village meeting-house. The singing drifted to a close, followed immediately by a screeching chorus of all the wild sounds of the forest in harmony. I screamed, but my utterance only became another part of the gathering din.

As the cacophony died down, I chanced to venture slowly forward until I came into full view of the red light. Here there was an open space with a monstrous rock crudely carved (or possibly having a natural resemblance) into the shape of an altar or pulpit. Surrounding this rock were four pine trees with there tops ablaze and their trunks untouched. The light from these fiery pines illuminated the entire clearing, and with it’s flicker could be seen and then hidden, then seen again the dark silhouettes of a goodly congregation.

“A grave and dark-clad company,” I said to myself, terrified. Among this wicked number were many with whom I had acquaintance, who I had once admired for their seeming piety and grace. All of the most honorable and noble esteem were numbered among this devilish group, shoulder to shoulder with the most impious and ill reputed.

I trembled with wild hope as I realized that Faith was not present. The hymn once again shattered the darkness of the night, putting the most hideous descriptions of sin to the most solemn strains of evangelical melody. Finally the hymn came to a riotous halt, replaced by a sound like all of the bestial noises of the forest pledging allegiance to Satan. The fiery pines increased their blaze, and the burning foliage resting on the rock sprang up into an arch. Underneath this arch appeared a figure like an exalted New England priest.

From an unknown voice echoed “Bring forth the converts!”, and I was compelled to step forward. I could not help for the wickedness in my heart but feel a sense of fraternity with this sinful assembly, and for this I despised myself. Two apparitions my eyes beheld—one my father, beckoning me forward; the other my mother, imploring me to stay away. Her gesturing was futile as I was compelled onward by the minister and Deacon Gookin. My sweet Faith was similarly compelled under the canopy of fire.

“Welcome, my children,” said one of the dark figures who had led my love forward, “to the communion of your race. Ye have found thus young your nature and your destiny. My children, look behind you!”

We turned, and were confronted with the wicked grins of the entire congregation.

“There,” continued the shadowy figure, “are all whom ye have reverenced from youth. Ye deemed them holier than yourselves, and shrank from your own sin, contrasting it with their lives of righteousness and prayerful aspirations heavenward. Yet here are they all in my worshipping assembly. This night it shall be granted you to know their secret deeds: how hoary-bearded elders of the church have whispered wanton words to the young maids of their households; how many a woman, eager for widows’ weeds, has given her husband a drink at bedtime and let him sleep his last sleep in her bosom; how beardless youths have made haste to inherit their fathers’ wealth; and how fair damsels — blush not, sweet ones — have dug little graves in the garden, and bidden me, the sole guest to an infant’s funeral. By the sympathy of your human hearts for sin ye shall scent out all the places — whether in church, bedchamber, street, field, or forest — where crime has been committed, and shall exult to behold the whole earth one stain of guilt, one mighty blood spot. Far more than this. It shall be yours to penetrate, in every bosom, the deep mystery of sin, the fountain of all wicked arts, and which inexhaustibly supplies more evil impulses than human power — than my power at its utmost — can make manifest in deeds. And now, my children, look upon each other.”

We did so, and in trembling fear gazed at each other before the perverted altar.

“Lo, there ye stand, my children,” said the figure, “Depending upon one another’s hearts, ye had still hoped that virtue were not all a dream. Now are ye undeceived. Evil is the nature of mankind. Evil must be your only happiness. Welcome again, my children, to the communion of your race.”

“Welcome,” echoed the sinful worshippers, in a unified cry of mingled anguish and triumph.

And there we both stood, seemingly the only ones left on Earth who had not yet chosen darkness, who still wavered between light ad evil. Of its own accord, a basin carved itself into the rock. What was in I could not divine, and the shape of evil proceeded to dip his into the substance for the baptism of sin he intended to perform.

I glanced at Faith, and she at me. What hideous, wretched complexion would peer back at me upon glancing next!!

“Faith! Faith!” I screamed, “look up to heaven, and resist the wicked one!”

Without warning I found myself suddenly back in the stillness of night and wilderness. I staggered, my heart racing, my mind reeling, against a cold, damp rock, while a hanging twig, aflame but moments before, sprinkled my cheek with freezing dewdrops.

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant –

It seems a little paradoxical—the truth is straight as can be, so to tell it slant seems strange (how can a straight line be crooked?). Truth is obviously an important thing to the speaker, hence the capitalization.

Success in Circuit lies

“Circuit”, which I’m taking to mean deceitfulness and sort of telling the truth but leaving out important details, is also capitalized, so it must be as important as truth is. The word “lies” might be a pun. I can’t help but think of the dichotomy of Truth and Slant as good and evil, light and dark.

Too bright for our infirm Delight

Truth is too much of a shock for us to receive directly. Delight is a delicate feeling that is sickly and weak, and so easily susceptible to being destroyed by too much of a good thing. “Delight” is capitalized, and I am not really sure why.

The Truth’s superb surprise

Now truth is great again. It went from being good (in that it should all be told) to unsuccessful, and now it has become superb again. It’s like the speaker can’t make up her mind whether it’s better to discover truth in its entirety even though it may be extremely unpleasant, or whether it’s better to live under a blissfully ignorant illusion.

As Lightning to the Children eased

Lightning can be hard to understand for little kids, and is often terrifying. Also, lightning is very bright, relating to the representation of truth as a blindingly bright thing. The capitalization of “Lightning” and “Children” leaves me befuddled once again.

With explanation kind

It would be kinder to soften the danger of lightning to a child, rather than explain all of its potential gruesome impacts on a human body. Then again, an explanation like this might not give the child sufficient understanding to stay away from lightning, and could be dangerous in itself. This might be another instance of the speaker’s uncertainty as to whether it is better to know all the truth or only the nicest parts of it.

The Truth must dazzle gradually

The truth should be revealed bit by bit, rather than all at once, which would be too painful. It seems a resolution is being reached. It feels sort of like the speaker is realizing the truth about the matter of truth and how/whether it should be revealed.

Or every man be blind –

Finally, the effect of a sudden revealing of truth in its entirety is too powerful and shocking for anyone to endure. But the conclusion isn’t really that “Success in Circuit lies”, but that truth should be revealed in pieces so that the shock of it does not become overwhelming.

Notes:

- I hadn’t really noticed the subtle uncertainty that seems to dwell in this poem, the argument the speaker seems to be having with herself.

- It’s kind of interesting that all the rhymes are regular (I don’t know the technical term). You might think she would use slant rhymes.

- I can’t help but wonder if sometimes her capitalizations are very important, and other times totally arbitrary. Maybe she just goes right over my head sometimes.

- I really like the idea that this poem kind of seems to reveal through each line a piece of the truth about truth to the speaker. It’s like she’s debating with herself, and the truth gradually dazzles her until she realizes what truth is essentially about. I didn’t get the same impression reading the poem as a whole—the meaning of it had to gradually dazzle me as well through reading it line by line.

Surprisingly, the number of instances in which Ginsberg directly references starvation or hunger in the poem are few. Here are the ones I was able to find:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,

who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston
seeking jazz or sex or soup,

who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of
beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a can-
dle and fell off the bed,

Despite this dearth of specifically hunger-referencing passages, it could be argued that the whole poem is really about desperate hunger. The first page sets the stage, talking about the “angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night” who Ginsberg is talking about through the rest of part I. Whatever the definition of the “heavenly connection” here referred to is, it is clear that the subjects of the poem, the great minds and angelheaded hipsters of Ginsberg’s generation, are constantly searching for this experience. All of the seemingly insane things they do, their bodily self-destruction, reckless drug abuse, etc., is done for the sake of this ever-present hunger for “heavenly connection”. It is the intensity of this desire that causes their madness, and hence this hunger that truly defines them. Their lives and actions are motivated at every turn by the search for this elusive experience.

Immigrants to America often feel most comfortable in communities composed largely of their own ethnicity. This way, they can make use of American advantages like job availability while retaining their cultural identity. When someone’s loyalty to their community wavers to the point that they are no longer accepted by the other members of the community, what do they have left? They are no longer welcome in the community they are comfortable in, and at the same time will never be fully Americanized because the values and beliefs of their ethnic community are too deep-rooted in them. This duality of identity, the struggle to remain loyal to one’s roots while living in a differing society, is one of the concepts that lies at the heart of “A View from the Bridge”.

Eddie, though firmly planted in his Italian roots, has trouble reconciling the expectations of his community with his own self-interest. In the end he rejects the community’s values for the sake of his own desires, and this ultimately leads to his destruction. As Alfieri reluctantly admits among the play’s closing lines: “…it is better to settle for half, it must be!”—a compromise must be reached between self-interest and the expectations of one’s community, and the penalty for neglecting this compromise is death.

Miller’s preoccupation with loyalty in the play may be related to his relationship with filmmaker Elia Kazan. Both Miller and Kazan grew up in immigrant families in New York City. Once close friends, Miller was no longer willing to maintain a relationship with Kazan after his naming of several Communist Party members in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee. If Eddie can be thought of as at all reminiscent of Kazan, Miller’s reaction to Kazan’s betrayal must have been one of intense dislike and disgust (perhaps mingled with a pinch of pity).

I am going to go out on a limb and offer a somewhat different interpretation of “Indian Camp” then what we talked about in class. I think that Nick did, in fact, learn something that his father would approve of. Toward the end of the story, Nick asks his father whether dying is hard, to which he replies “No, I think it’s pretty easy, Nick.” Perhaps this is a stretch given the sparseness of the statement, but I really get the feeling that Nick’s father views suicide as the coward’s way out of a difficult situation. Nick, taking this to heart, decides “that he [will] never die”. It is not so much, following this interpretation, the naivete of youth that causes Nick to make this decision, but rather his desire to conform to the standards and values of his father.

What is most immediately apparent upon looking at these paintings and sculptures is that they seem purposely to have been made in highly unconventional, individualized styles. Each piece looks utterly different from the piece before it. Perhaps it is because I know next to nothing about visual art, but I don’t have this impression when looking at more traditional paintings and sculptures.

The pieces are extremely subjective in the way they portray their subject matter, and reveal more about the artist than about what they are depicting. As Mr. Hanley notes, the artists seem more interested in exploring perception itself than what is actually being perceived.

Often, I get the feeling that what the artist is really trying to say has little to do with what he is representing; it is the way in which the subjects are portrayed that gives the pieces meaning. For instance, many of the works blur the lines between the subjects of their paintings. In Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2” (http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MUSEUM/Armory/galleryI/duchamp.nude.html), for example, it is very difficult (for me at least) to discern where the nude begins and the staircase ends. This technique, common to a number of the paintings and some of the sculptures as well, draws more attention to the way in which the work is created, with the content itself taking a distant second. Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” is a literary parallel of this technique. It is not so much the commuters or the petals or the tree branch that are important, but the feeling that the stark contrast (and at the same time, the strange similarity) of the images evokes.

Looking at the cubist work of artists like Duchamp and Picasso puts me in mind of a quote from a brief documentary about William Carlos Williams (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BE60GfjkEGI). An interviewee sums up Williams’ method of writing poetry by saying: “It is made out of small parts; it is made out of lines, it is made out of phrases.” This idea is most evident in Williams’ artistic use of line breaks (a parallel to the previously mentioned focus on form). Every line is essential to the poem’s effectiveness, and the poem as a whole seems as though it could be broken down into its component parts. I get the same impression from the cubist paintings. They look as though they are made out of different chunks of material carefully put together to create a cohesive whole.

In general, the main themes running throughout these pieces seem to be those of the artist and his perception’s importance over the content, the subjectivity of the ways in which the pieces are created, and in some cases the focus on form rather than subject.

1. In this excerpt, Hurstwood has discovered that the cash register at Fitzgerald and Moy’s, which he checks nightly, has been left unlocked. Spurred by desperation at the imminent loss of Carrie and his comfortable Chicago life, he is considering taking the money and running away to Montreal with Carrie at his side. He is in the midst of a moral dilemma, torn between irrationally choosing a chance at a new life and the safer but dismal prospect of riding out the storm of his circumstance and potentially retaining his position as manager.

2. In the first, fourth and fifth paragraphs the perspective is Hurstwood’s, as demonstrated by such exclamations as “Lord! What was that?” and “There was the money!”, and by the descriptions of Hurstwood’s thoughts and feelings. The second and third paragraphs are clearly in the narrator’s voice, as he is discussing an intellectual idea that is not directly relevant to the plot or any of its characters.

3. Throughout the excerpt the narrator is the one doing the actual description, but the point of view varies between Hurstwood and the narrator.

4. From the narrator’s erudite use of language and his sometimes patronizing analysis of his character’s thoughts and actions, he appears to be an educated, somewhat pompous man. This impression can be felt throughout the novel.

5. The narrator is expressing his belief that an aversion to evil is not solely a characteristic of a man of reason, but rather an instinctual aversion present in every animal. He is, I think, further contributing to the theme of moral decanonization that runs throughout the novel.

6. The narrator in this excerpt is making it clear that Hurstwood is not distressed over his impending decision out of any sense of moral righteousness, but out of an instinctual aversion to evil. “Even the dullest specimen of humanity”, notes the narrator, “when drawn by desire toward evil, is recalled by a sense of right…” .

7. Though able to identify and analyze the thoughts and feelings of every character in the story, the narrator seems entirely disconnected from the plot itself. He is no more than an outside observer and commentator. This is true in this excerpt and in the novel at large.

The narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” triumphs over her stifling husband by “blowing his mind” to the point of incapacitation. Unfortunately, the cost of this victory is her sanity. It was probably inevitable that she would lose her mind being trapped alone in a desolate, abandoned nursery all day, so it’s poetically just that she was able to take her husband and his corrosive medical techniques–the real source of her problems–down with her. The story, I think, is a condemnation of the androcentric culture we seem to nurture in America, which was especially prominent during Perkins’ lifetime. No one benefits, in the end, from a sexually unequal society.

Things I liked:

1. Being forced to read the poem more closely and to be creative in my interpretation.

2. How it created a practical manifestation of Emerson’s suggested way of reading.

Thing I disliked:
1. Messiness of wetpaint page thing.

New things learned:

I probably learned more about Emerson’s creative approach to reading than I did about “Song of Myself”, although it was interesting to find more instances of what I have come to see as quintessentially American literary themes.

Things I Would Change:

Nothing (honestly).