Week 2

 

Magnificent Peak                 by Muso Soseki (1275-1351)

By its own nature
     it towers above
        the tangle of rivers
Don't say
   it's a lot of dirt
      piled high
Without end the mist of dawn
    the evening cloud
      draw their shadows across it
From the four directions
    you can look up and see it
       green and steep and wild.

 Poetry and literature generally are rooted in human experience, private and public, ordinary and extraordinary.  Nature and Time are two great and old themes.   Our existence on earth in whatever time and circumstances we happen to be born, the natural elements that surround us, the changes as we grow and age, the seasons of our life, as it were, inform the works of the human collective.   Art is a record of awareness, belief, desire, knowledge, custom, and so on and calls upon us to consider, reflect, imagine, and question what is significant. Look at the photo and the poem above.  How is each composed?  Does the poem, an old one, show something like the photo image?  If so, how or in what way(s)?

Look at the images in the photos below.  What impressions do they make?  What ideas do you associate with these images?

     

Angkor Wat, Cambodia    Photos by C. Houge

The photo above captures, for me, something of the emerald mystery of Nature and sacred space.  The temple of Angkor Wat (12 c.) is a part of the world's oldest and largest Hindu religious site and incorporates an architectural element called the Temple Mountain which represents Mount Meru, the home of the Gods.  The natural mountains of the world have inspired monumental architecture around the world.  But the snaking tree here in the center of the photo appears to threaten the  edifice, made fragile also by age.

In week one's set of stories and poems, the short fable by Leonardo Da Vinci called "The Nut and the Campanile" also, it seems to me,  articulates the dynamic of creation, growth, age, and eventual destruction:  a nut escapes being eaten by a crow and finds shelter in a crevice of a wall of the campanile.   The wall, an admirer of beauty and nobility, is moved by the nut's story of having lost its place beneath the "old Father" and its plea of "do you, at least, not abandon me." So the wall extends its compassion, happy to shelter one that acknowledges "the grace of God,"  Now the nut,  rooted in darkness, reaches for the light.  It grows to great height and in time displaces "the ancient stones."  The wall comes down. 

    Thus, perhaps, does each generation tread upon another, and civilization itself (symbolically the wall of the campanile) appear to be in Nature's grip.  We may see the theme of continual change here, Time that continually gives and yet takes or removes, creation in the process of transformation, a new manifestation.  As with us, each moment gives way to the next while the whole of life is nonetheless centered in the present moment.  .

    The campanile or belltower in the European tradition was most often a part of a church and was rung several times a day to call the faithful to prayer, to remind them of the incarnation of God.   In civic life, a belltower might warn, among other things, of natural disasters or danger.  Thus we may see in Da Vinci's story, an allegory of the fragility of human constructs in the face of nature's powers and, to my mind, the poignancy of the conflict between humans and nature, a source that giveth and taketh all, and that is loved and feared.

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     In Nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson writes: 

 nature, in the common sense, refers to essences unchanged by man; space, the air, the river, the leaf.  Art is applied to the mixture of his will with the same things, as in a house, a canal, a statue, a picture.  But his operations taken together are so insignificant [. . . ] that in an impression so grand as that of the world on the human mind, they do not vary the result "("Introduction").  

The works or operations of humans in their totality cannot compare with those of nature, he claims, as all our Arts are meagered by nature's grand show.   

     Later he speaks of an "occult relation" between man and nature, a sense of delight and wonder, but warns that "nature is not always tricked in holiday attire" and what appears lovely today may tomorrow be "overspread with melancholy." He says, "Nature always wears the colors of the spirit."  And "Nature is the symbol of spirit."  

     He makes it clear that the inward, subjective human experience of nature shapes our views of nature;  we humanize nature; our imagination clothes nature in various dress–boon companion, indifferent Other, enemy menace.  But he urges the higher, ideal conceptions:   "Nature stretches out her arms to embrace man, only let his thoughts be of equal greatness."  And, too, "Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue," and "in art does Nature work through the will of a man filled with the beauty of her first works."  

    
     By contrast, we have culture, art, civilization opposed to the "natural" world.  What has the poet below to say on this experience of difference, of the natural and artificial?

The Geraniums                                           by Genevieve Taggard (1894-1948)

Even if the geraniums are artificial


Just the same,


In the rear of the Italian café


Under the nimbus of electric light


They are red; no less red


For how they were made. Above


The mirror and the napkins


In the little white pots . . .
. . . In the semi-clean cafe


Where they have good 
Lasagna . . . The red is a wonderful joy


Really, and so are the people


Who like and ignore it. In this place


They also have good bread.

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                                                                    Guido Cagnacci  Allegory of Human Life

The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge  said that "poetry reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities." Reading a poem, we note the ways words and related images and feelings are juxtaposed and the dynamic created. We  last week looked at the doubleness or duality of various familiar concepts, including  nature/art; heaven/hell/; order/disorder; temporal/eternal; mortal/immortal; mutable/immutable; one/many; yin/yang; black/white; good/evil.  If what Coleridge said applies, we might look for the patterns, the contrasting qualities and notes and the play to which they are put or how reconciled, if at all. 

In art we find representations of nature's creations, and of human creation–of course the art work is itself a human construct.  In the painting above, the artist has depicted a largely nude woman,  flowers in her right hand, an hourglass in the other, and a human skull supporting her arm.  Above her head is the image of an ourobouros, a snake swallowing its own tail, an ancient symbol of eternity, and of the natural cycle of continuous birth and death, creation, destruction, and recreation that is fundamental to life as we know it.

Poets and other artists (scientists, too) invite us to look and to see more deeply into the nature of human experience and the cosmos, however small and close, however large and distant.   William Blake shows the power of attention and imaginative connection in a series of paradoxes in "Augeries of Innocence":  "To see a World in a Grain of Sand/And a Heaven in a Wild Flower" is one way he expresses this capacity for seeing beyond the thing at hand, to seeing the connections between life forms in an intuitive or "visionary" way. The emphasis on vision and imagination comes up over and over, as we shall see.

The following link provides an introduction to the topic of the sacred and associated religious and cultural history as well as symbols of sacredness such as water, mountains, caves, trees, stones, which often appear as symbols in poetry and story:  http://witcombe.sbc.edu/sacredplaces/sacredness.html   

We looked or will look at Oscar Wilde's short story "The Artist"(http://www.literaturepage.com/read/wilde-essays-lectures-121.html);  in this story Wilde dramatizes the opposition between The Pleasure that Abideth for a Moment, and The Sorrow that Endureth for Ever.  In the story, the artist is an archetype of the creative human, one who will "fashion an image" from imagination and the stuff of experience to express something of what we feel in our life's journey.  The materials Wilde's artist uses, as with creative endeavor of whatever kind, are those that have been used before, or can be found in raw natural form, for new-fashioned expression.

I reproduce here below definitions of Nature and Art:

 NATURE

1

a : the inherent character or basic constitution of a person or thing : essence 

b : disposition, temperament

2

a : a creative and controlling force in the universe

b : an inner force or the sum of such forces in an individual

3

: a kind or class usually distinguished by fundamental or essential characteristics <documents of a confidential nature> <acts of a ceremonial nature>

4

: the physical constitution or drives of an organism; especially : an excretory organ or function —used in phrases like the call of nature

5

: a spontaneous attitude (as of generosity)

6

: the external world in its entirety

7

a : humankind's original or natural condition

b : a simplified mode of life resembling this condition

8

: the genetically controlled qualities of an organism

9

: natural scenery

ART     A definition of  Art,  from Carl Jung's "The Poet":  Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument.  The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him. . . .

     A great work of art is like a dream; for all its apparent obviousness it does not explain itself and is never unequivocal.  A dream never says:  "You ought," or:   "This is the Truth."  It presents an image in much the same way as nature allows a plant to grow, and we must draw our own conclusions.

And from Annie Dillard's "About Symbol": All art may be said to be symbolic in this sense:  it is a material mock-up of bright idea.  Any work of art symbolizes the process by which spirit generates matter, or materials generate idea.  Any work of art symbolizes juncture itself, the socking of eternity into time and energy into form.  

                                                                                                                                     Christian Houge

As I stressed last week, in poetry and prose figurative language is used to make imagery, patterns of represented objects, feelings, and ideas that appeal to our senses–of sight, sound, movement inward and outward, scent, taste, touch, and mind or thought.  Poets and prose writers seek language means to express everyday experience in uncommon, extraordinary ways and their work, at its best, invites us to see the world anew, in all its original wonder, or with the eyes of a child whose sight has not been tarnished by experience or age, nor dulled by habit and routine.  

The Romantic poet William Wordworth and others who followed (like the modernist William Carlos Williams) sought an aesthetic rootedness in common experience and ordinary people and things. The modern movement known as Imagism in fact made it practice to strip poetry to clear concrete physical details, as clear and solid as a piece of sculpture; the details of the image were to "speak for themselves," so as to free the poem from sentimentality, ideology, dogma, doctrine, stale language, what have you.  The imagists were influenced by Asian poetry, haiku and tanka, which you probably remember from grade school.  Haiku is unrhymed and typically limited to three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables, and expressive of some aspect of Nature's seasonal show.  I reproduce some here below:

Haiku   (lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables, considered a closed form)

After spring sunset

Mist rises from the river
Spreading like a flood.

                                                Chora

A bare pecan tree

slips a pencil shadow down

a moonlit snow slope.

                                                Etheridge Knight

From the bough

floating down river,

insect song.

                                    Issa (1763-1827)

The bougainvillea

Beckons with its flowered stem

Of sunlit fuschia

Yellow butterfly

Fluttering over the roof

Against the blue sky

                        --Vincent Bellito, student

the dalai lama

sitting lotus on the floor

on my girlfriend’s shirt

                        --Matt Dee, student

Rain kicks down my door

Like quarterbacks settle scores

Tougher than ever before

                        --Michelle Rodriguez, student

Poems rely upon images; in other words, we see, hear, taste, scent, touch, or feel something concrete, something that exists in the material world we routinely experience.  Poems shape ordinary experience in extraordinary ways by means of the resources of language, including metaphor, simile, personification, paradox, symbol, and allegory.  We will take some time in class today to sort through what these terms mean and how they resemble and differ from each other. I suggest you google the meanings associated with certain images or symbols that frequently appear in stories and poems–a tree, the ocean, mountains, birds, flowers, spheres and circles (center and circumference), stars.  See if traditional associations fit, or if what you discover adds to your experience of a given work.

Homework or classwork :   Read the bible stories "Cain and Abel"  and "The Prodigal Son." Selections from last week not yet addressed.