Passage quoted in A Philosopher's Stone (April 4, 2013)—
This passage from Heidegger suggested the lexicon excerpt on
to hypokeimenon (the underlying) in yesterday's post Lexicon.
A related passage:
The Eliade passage was quoted in a 1971 Ph.D. thesis
on Wallace Stevens.
Some context— Stevens's Rock in this journal.
One way of interpreting the symbol 
at the end of yesterday's post is via
the phrase "necessary possibility."
See that phrase in (for instance) a post
of July 24, 2013, The Broken Tablet .
The Tablet post may be viewed in light
of a Tom Wolfe passage quoted here on
the preceding day, July 23, 2013—
On that day (July 23) another weblog had
a post titled
Wallace Stevens: Night's Hymn of the Rock.
Some related narrative —
I prefer the following narrative —
Part I: Stevens's verse from "The Rock" (1954) —
"That in which space itself is contained"
Part II: Mystery Box III: Inside, Outside (2014)
The "Bronze Age" reference in the previous post suggests . . .
"… another way of making the point that this aging Omega
of a culture cannot recognize or accommodate the Alpha
that is something importantly new and vital."
— HELGESON, KAREN. “‘Fully Apparent’: The Center in Stevens’
‘Credences of Summer.’” The Wallace Stevens Journal,
vol. 32, no. 1, 2008, pp. 32–54. JSTOR,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/44885050. Accessed 2 Jan. 2025.
See as well . . .
HELGESON, KAREN. “Place and Poetry in Stevens’ ‘The Rock.’”
The Wallace Stevens Journal, vol. 27, no. 1, 2003, pp. 116–31.
JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44884834. Accessed 2 Jan. 2025.
A meditation suggested by yesterday's evening fashion news . . .
* 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)"
Related reading: "Back in Action."
"It is not enough to cover the rock with leaves.
We must be cured of it by a cure of the ground
Or a cure of ourselves, that is equal to a cure
Of the ground, a cure beyond forgetfulness.
And yet the leaves, if they broke into bud,
If they broke into bloom, if they bore fruit,
And if we ate the incipient colorings
Of their fresh culls might be a cure of the ground."
— "The Rock," a poem by Wallace Stevens from
a section with the same title in the Collected Poems .
The red of the watermelon eaten on the cover of the
August 28, 2023, New Yorker is RGB (240, 57, 53) —
Cinnabar Red, also known as Vermilion.
For related poetic remarks, see a post of Leap Day 2004 .
"It is not enough to cover the rock with leaves.
We must be cured of it by a cure of the ground
Or a cure of ourselves, that is equal to a cure
Of the ground, a cure beyond forgetfulness.
And yet the leaves, if they broke into bud,
If they broke into bloom, if they bore fruit,
And if we ate the incipient colorings
Of their fresh culls might be a cure of the ground."
— "The Rock," a poem by Wallace Stevens from
a section with the same title in the Collected Poems .
Friday, May 27, 2011
|
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."
Some narrative for a ghost writer —
I prefer the following narrative —
Part I: Stevens’s verse from “The Rock” (1954) —
“That in which space itself is contained”
Part II: Mystery Box III: Inside, Outside (2014)
"That simple operator, 'as,' turns out to carry within its philosophical grammar
a remarkable complex field* of operations…."
— Charles Altieri, Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry,
Cambridge University Press, 1989, page 343
See also Rota on Heidegger (What "As" Is, July 6, 2010), and Lead Belly
on the Rock Island Line — "You got to ride it like you find it."
* Update of Oct. 10, 2014: See also "Complex + Grid" in this journal.
From today's earlier post, Stevens and the Rock—
"Rock shows him something that transcends
the precariousness of his humanity:
an absolute mode of being.
Its strength, its motionlessness, its size
and its strange outlines
are none of them human;
they indicate the presence of something
that fascinates, terrifies, attracts and threatens,
all at once."
— Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion (1958)
An object with such an "absolute mode of being"
is the plot center of a new novel discussed here previously—
Max Barry's Lexicon . From a perceptive review:
I believe he’s hit on something special here.
It’s really no surprise that Matthew Vaughn
of Kick-Ass and X-Men: First Class fame
has bought the rights to maybe make the movie;
Lexicon certainly has the makings of a fine film.
Or graphic novel… Whatever.
From The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens ,
John N. Serio, ed., "Stevens's Late Poetry," by B.J. Leggett,
pp. 62-75, an excerpt from page 70:
Click the above image for further details.
See also Nothingness and "The Rock" in this journal.
Further readings along these lines:
For pure mathematics, rather than theories of the physical world,
see the properties of the cube illustrated on the second (altered)
book cover above.
From today's noon post—
"In all his poems with all their enchantments
for the poet himself, there is the final enchantment
that they are true. The significance of the poetic act
then is that it is evidence. It is instance and illustration.
It is an illumination of a surface,
the movement of a self in the rock.
Above all it is a new engagement with life.
It is that miracle to which the true faith of the poet
attaches itself."
— Wallace Stevens at Bard College, March 30, 1951
Stevens also said at Bard that
"When Joan of Arc said:
Have no fear: what I do, I do by command.
My brothers of Paradise tell me what I have to do.
these words were the words of an hallucination.
No matter what her brothers of Paradise drove her to do,
what she did was never a poetic act of faith in reality
because it could not be."
There are those who would dispute this.
Some related material:
"Ageometretos me eisito."—
"Let no one ignorant of geometry enter."—
Said to be a saying of Plato, part of the
seal of the American Mathematical Society—
A poetic approach to geometry—
"A surface" and "the rock," from All Saints' Day, 2012—
— and from 1981—
Some mathematical background for poets in Purgatory—
"… the Klein correspondence underlies Conwell's discussion
of eight heptads. These play an important role in another
correspondence, illustrated in the Miracle Octad Generator
of R. T. Curtis, that may be used to picture actions
of the large Mathieu group M24."
Speech by Wallace Stevens upon accepting
an honorary degree from Bard College in 1951—
Transcription of conclusion:
"In all his poems with all their enchantments
for the poet himself, there is the final enchantment
that they are true. The significance of the poetic act
then is that it is evidence. It is instance and illustration.
It is an illumination of a surface,
the movement of a self in the rock.
Above all it is a new engagement with life.
It is that miracle to which the true faith of the poet
attaches itself."
— Wallace Stevens at Bard College, March 30, 1951
For St. Peter's Day
"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…."
—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
Related material on transforming shapes:
It is not enough to cover the rock with leaves.
We must be cured of it by a cure of the ground
Or a cure of ourselves, that is equal to a cure
Of the ground, a cure beyond forgetfulness.
And yet the leaves, if they broke into bud,
If they broke into bloom, if they bore fruit,
And if we ate the incipient colorings
Of their fresh culls might be a cure of the ground.
— "The Rock," a poem by Wallace Stevens from
a section with the same title in the Collected Poems .
"A little bit of Las Vegas in the 1960s has
splashed down Off Broadway…. Actually,
the show as a whole could benefit from a softer sell."
— Charles Isherwood's review of
"The Best Is Yet to Come"
on page C1, NY edition, today's NY Times
"Out of the tree of life I just picked me a plum…"
Recent New York Lottery numbers—
The interpretation of "056" in yesterday's
The Aleph, the Lottery, and the Eightfold Way
was not without interest, but the interpretation there
of "236" was somewhat lacking in poetic resonance.
For aspiring students of lottery hermeneutics,
here are some notes that may help. The "236" may
be reinterpreted as a page number in Stevens's
Collected Poems . It then resonates rather nicely
("answers when I ask," "visible and responsive")
with yesterday evening's "434"—
For today's midday "022," see Hexagram 22: Grace in the context of the following—
As for yesterday afternoon's 609, see a particular Stevens-related page with that number…
For "a body of thought or poetry larger than the subject's," see The Dome of the Rock.
Today's previous post suggests the following—
Bester on bedrock and "the bottom line of all existence" suggests
a review of Wallace Stevens's "The Rock." Some background:
See Succor, May 11, and But Seriously, May 12.
See also Waiting for Benjamin, May 15.
Larry McMurtry famously wrote of reading Walter Benjamin
at the Dairy Queen. I never read Benjamin there, but I did
read at least some of the Bester book quoted above.
The bottom lines of this peculiar meditation—
It is not enough to cover the rock with leaves.
We must be cured of it by a cure of the ground
Or a cure of ourselves, that is equal to a cure
Of the ground, a cure beyond forgetfulness.
And yet the leaves, if they broke into bud,
If they broke into bloom, if they bore fruit,
And if we ate the incipient colorings
Of their fresh culls might be a cure of the ground.
— "The Rock," a poem by Wallace Stevens from
a section with the same title in the Collected Poems .
… Walter Benjamin, that is… At the Dairy Queen.
(With apologies to Parker Posey.)
"One of Benjamin's many unrealised projects was a book
that would consist only of culls from already existing material;
he would do no more than arrange and edit."
— Screenwriter Frederic Raphael, May 2011 Literary Review
Raphael is clever, but I prefer Wallace Stevens on culls—
It is not enough to cover the rock with leaves.
We must be cured of it by a cure of the ground
Or a cure of ourselves, that is equal to a cure
Of the ground, a cure beyond forgetfulness.
And yet the leaves, if they broke into bud,
If they broke into bloom, if they bore fruit,
And if we ate the incipient colorings
Of their fresh culls might be a cure of the ground.
Dairy Queen — Click to enlarge—
See also Stevens and "The Rock" in this journal and today's "Shoe."
From this journal on July 23, 2007—
|
It is not enough to cover the rock with leaves. We must be cured of it by a cure of the ground Or a cure of ourselves, that is equal to a cure
Of the ground, a cure beyond forgetfulness.
And if we ate the incipient colorings – Wallace Stevens, "The Rock" |
This quotation from Stevens (Harvard class of 1901) was posted here on when Daniel Radcliffe (i.e., Harry Potter) turned 18 in July 2007.
Other material from that post suggests it is time for a review of magic at Harvard.
On September 9, 2007, President Faust of Harvard
"encouraged the incoming class to explore Harvard’s many opportunities.
'Think of it as a treasure room of hidden objects Harry discovers at Hogwarts,' Faust said."
That class is now about to graduate.
It is not clear what "hidden objects" it will take from four years in the Harvard treasure room.
Perhaps the following from a book published in 1985 will help…
The March 8, 2011, Harvard Crimson illustrates a central topic of Metamagical Themas , the Rubik's Cube—
Hofstadter in 1985 offered a similar picture—
Hofstadter asks in his Metamagical introduction, "How can both Rubik's Cube and nuclear Armageddon be discussed at equal length in one book by one author?"
For a different approach to such a discussion, see Paradigms Lost, a post made here a few hours before the March 11, 2011, Japanese earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster—
Whether Paradigms Lost is beyond forgetfulness is open to question.
Perhaps a later post, in the lighthearted spirit of Faust, will help. See April 20th's "Ready When You Are, C.B."
Catherine Elizabeth "Kate" Middleton, born 9 January 1982,
will marry Prince William of Wales on April 29th, 2011.
This suggests, by a very illogical and roundabout process
of verbal association, a search in this journal.
A quote from that search—
“‘Memory is non-narrative and non-linear.’
— Maya Lin in The Harvard Crimson , Friday, Dec. 2, 2005
A non-narrative image from the same
general time span as the bride's birthday—
For some context, see Stevens + "The Rock" + "point A".
A post in that search, April 4th's Rock Notes, links to an essay
on physics and philosophy, "The Discrete and the Continuous," by David Deutsch.
See also the article on Deutsch, "Dream Machine," in the current New Yorker
(May 2, 2011), and the article's author, "Rivka Galchen," in this journal.
Galchen writes very well. For example —
| Galchen on quantum theory—
"Our intuition, going back forever, is that to move, say, a rock, one has to touch that rock, or touch a stick that touches the rock, or give an order that travels via vibrations through the air to the ear of a man with a stick that can then push the rock—or some such sequence. This intuition, more generally, is that things can only directly affect other things that are right next to them. If A affects B without being right next to it, then the effect in question must be in direct—the effect in question must be something that gets transmitted by means of a chain of events in which each event brings about the next one directly, in a manner that smoothly spans the distance from A to B. Every time we think we can come up with an exception to this intuition—say, flipping a switch that turns on city street lights (but then we realize that this happens through wires) or listening to a BBC radio broadcast (but then we realize that radio waves propagate through the air)—it turns out that we have not, in fact, thought of an exception. Not, that is, in our everyday experience of the world. We term this intuition 'locality.' Quantum mechanics has upended many an intuition, but none deeper than this one." |
An Ordinary Evening in Tennessee
"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….." — Wallace Stevens
Related material: The Discrete and the Continuous
See Malcolm Lowry's "A corpse will be transported by express!" in this journal.
"When Plato regards geometry as the prerequisite to
philosophical knowledge, it is because geometry alone
renders accessible the realm of things eternal;
tou gar aei ontos he geometrike gnosis estin."
— Ernst Cassirer, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research,
Volume V, Number 1, September, 1944.
Maybe.
June 23, Midsummer Eve, was the date of death for Colonel Michael Cobb.
Cobb, who died aged 93, was "a regular Army officer who in retirement produced
the definitive historical atlas of the railways of Great Britain." — Telegraph.co.uk, July 19
As for geometry, railways, and things eternal, see parallel lines converging
in Tequila Mockingbird and Bedlam Songs.
The Rock Island Line’s namesake depot
in Rock Island, Illinois
See also Wallace Stevens on "the giant of nothingness"
in "A Primitive Like an Orb" and in Midsummer Eve's Dream—
At the center on the horizon, concentrum, grave
And prodigious person, patron of origins.
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.
Diamond-Faceted:
Transformations
of the Rock
|
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)
|
For some explanation of the
groups of 8 and 24
motions referred to in the note,
see an earlier note from 1981.
For the Perlis "diamond facets,"
see the Diamond 16 Puzzle.
For a much larger group
of motions, see
Solomon's Cube.
As for "the mind itself"
and "possibilities for
human thought," see
Geometry of the I Ching.
Commonweal on Gopnik on Chesterton:
"Gopnik thinks Chesterton’s aphorisms are better than any but Oscar Wilde’s, and he describes some of them as 'genuine Catholic koans, pregnant and profound.' For example: 'Blasphemy depends on belief, and is fading with it. If anyone doubts this, let him sit down seriously and try to think blasphemous thoughts about Thor.'"
Kate felt quite dizzy. She didn't know exactly what it was that had just happened, but she felt pretty damn certain that it was the sort of experience that her mother would not have approved of on a first date.
"Is this all part of what we have to do to go to Asgard?" she said. "Or are you just fooling around?"
"We will go to Asgard… now," he said.
At that moment he raised his hand as if to pluck an apple, but instead of plucking he made a tiny, sharp turning movement.The effect was as if he had twisted the entire world through a billionth part of a billionth part of a degree. Everything shifted, was for a moment minutely out of focus, and then snapped back again as a suddenly different world.
— The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
"A theorem proposed betwen the two–"
— Wallace Stevens, "The Rock"
From The History of Mathematics,
by Roger Cooke
"… point A
In a perspective that begins again
At B…."
— Wallace Stevens, "The Rock"
Big Rock
"I'm going to hit this problem
with a big rock."
|
A professor discusses a poem by Wallace Stevens:
"Professor Eucalyptus in 'Ordinary Evening' XIV, for example, 'seeks/ God in the object itself,' but this quest culminates in his own choosing of 'the commodious adjective/ For what he sees… the description that makes it divinity, still speech… not grim/ Reality but reality grimly seen/ And spoken in paradisal parlance new'…."
– Douglas Mao, Solid Objects:Modernism and the Test of Production, Princeton University Press, 1998, p. 242
"God in the object" seems
unlikely to be found in the artifact pictured on the cover of Mao's book: 
I have more confidence
These objects may be |
June 28, 2008:
These numbers can, of course,
be interpreted as symbols of
the dates 6/29 and 5/30.
The last Log24 entry of
6/29 (St. Peter's Day):
"The rock cannot be broken.
It is the truth."
– Wallace Stevens,
"Credences of Summer"
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