Week 4

                                                      Vulcan, Greek God of the Forge

“For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.” 

― Charles Bukowski

Question:  Why are the depictions of Gods so often burly, imposing figures?  Can you think of exceptions? What do goddess figures typically look like? Check out Athena on Google. What ideas do we see or read in the various shapes and elements we see?  

Jabberwocky                         by Lewis Carroll

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

   Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

All mimsy were the borogoves,

   And the mome raths outgrabe.

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son

   The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!

Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun

   The frumious Bandersnatch!"

He took his vorpal sword in hand;

   Long time the manxome foe he sought—

So rested he by the Tumtum tree,

   And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,

   The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,

Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,

   And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through

   The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!

He left it dead, and with its head

   He went galumphing back.

"And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?

   Come to my arms, my beamish boy!

O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!"

   He chortled in his joy.

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

   Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

All mimsy were the borogoves,

   And the mome raths outgrabe.

                                   –from Through the Looking-Glass

Question:  What method or reason is there in this madness (by which I mean, the strange word concoctions, cartoonish characters)?  Does the poem make sense after all?  What appeal does it make to children or adolescents?

Here, too, a short commentary on nonsense lyrics by George Orwell:  http://www.nonsenselit.org/Lear/essays/orwell_1.html
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Today, we look also at the theme of freedom and conversely necessity, obligation, in stories where grownups and children misbehave or fare poorly, and at what is deemed good and what bad in human nature and in storytelling itself, with including by Guy de Maupassant, Charles Bukowski, Jamaica Kincaid, et al,  focusing on boyhood, girlhood, . . . growing up.  All are stories of initiation. The point of view varies from first person to third, including third-person dramatic voice, better known as dialogue.  In each, the  protagonist is young and trying to figure things out from the little experience he or she has.

 Here's  "Girl," by Jamaica Kincaid: http://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/virtualit/fiction/Girl/story.asp
We'll build on what you wrote in last week's assigned response work, reproduced here, and move on, catching up on the poetry works:

In 400-500 words or more, explore a theme addressed in the poem by Lewis Carroll and one or another of the short prose stories.  Compare the two pieces in terms of the theme and the perspective or interpretation each allows. You may use any prose piece from the handouts or links provided thus far, and may follow associated ideas and images, whether of authority, power, and rule, personal independence and freedom, experimentation, discovery and growth; peace, joy, fun or some opposite, as of obligatory work, rules, unwanted discipline, punishment, confinement, deprivation.  Recall the range of responses given in class and even, if it helps, President Roosevelt’s famous Four Freedoms:  Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, Freedom from Fear, which he claimed government was bound to protect.

A very interesting story here (for Halloween!), by  2013 Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro:  http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/02/11/free-radicals-2?printable=true

And Edgar Allen Poe's "The Black Cat":  http://poestories.com/read/blackcat

----------------Summary Presentation Examples

In Charles Bukowski's  “Son of Satan,” a semi-autobiographical account, the author tells how a group of boys alleviate boredom by torturing an erstwhile playmate, Simpson is a a quiet kid, different, the narrator says, but perhaps simply weaker than the others, “a loner. Probably lonely.” The narrator takes Simpson's offhand boast of having been with a girl under the narrator’s house as a challenge, though they know in all likelihood it was just a boast, “a lie.”  After a brief trial, they hang him from his porch.

      Before Simpson comes to serious bodily harm, the narrator cuts him down, and then the narrator goes for a long walk, feeling lost, “vacant” and somewhat remorseful. His shoes are thin and “hurt [his] feet.”  When he says that the “nails started coming through the soles,” we might imagine the story of Christ, whose feet were nailed to a cross. When he gets home his father is waiting for him, and he wants answers. But the boy, perhaps unable to explain, and afraid, chooses instead to fight his angry father, who for all he knows, might kill him. In the end, the boy is hiding under the bed, hoping to elude the big man’s grasp, waiting.

      The power and influence of parents and other authority figures is something we contend with throughout our lives as we come into our own. The story, to me, illustrates something of the cruelty, suffering, and longing for relief that mark a human life. The narrator is coming to terms with these experiences in, perhaps,  the only way he knows. The fight between him and his father, their coming to blows, appears a crucial departure in his young life.

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"The White Heron," by Sarah Orne Jewett, portrays a young girl who, along with her grandmother, lives in the woods, remote from town, the wild things her closest companions. Her relative social isolation and peace are interrupted by the arrival of a young man in search of an elusive white heron.

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Homework:  Poetry Essay #3, due week 6:  Compose an essay of 600-700 words on a theme illustrated by one or more works presented thus far.  Introduce the text(s) by title and author and proceed to support a thesis point or claim about the text(s). You may address poetry and/or prose selections but if addressing multiple texts unite the essay by means of a comprehensive thesis, with each  text you focus on serving to develop and support your main thesis in some way. Include some description of the formal structure of the poem and prose elements, for example, stanza form, line length and rhyme pattern, use of repetition or anaphora, use of narrative structure, conspicuous sound devices, imagery, figurative elements (such as metaphor, simile, symbol, personification).  Remember, that story (narrative) always involves the perspective or point of view of the narrator (first person or third person typically, as well as plot, setting, character development, tone or mood, and central thematic concerns. Lyric poems may have little in the way of narrative or story, though they always have a speaker and the speaker provides perspective, along with whatever other voices may be presented in the poem.  

You may include brief examples of personal experience to show the ways in which the text mirrored your direct experience or made you think about the theme in personal terms.

Provide support and evidence for your claims in the form of textual summary and direct quotation, formatted in the MLA style, with line citations. Prose quotation do not to be cited unless you are borrowing another critic's comments.  Avoid using quotations unnecessarily or dropping quotations in without explanation or clear purpose. With poetry integrate short quotations into the text with quotation marks and slashes to indicate line breaks. Quotations of 4 and more lines should be block formatted. Title your essay (do not use the poetry title in the essay title unless a subtitle is also present). Double‐space the lines.

Bring the rough draft  copy to class week 6 for homework credit.

For Fun:  http://www.ndt.nl/en/ballets/13  A performance of Gertrude Stein's poem about Pablo Picasso called "If I Told Him," published in 1923.  Read it here:  http://www.writing.upenn.edu/library/Stein-Gertrude_If-I-Told-Him_1923.html

A Guide to the Study of Literature:  Explore the pages and links at the site below, where you will find helpful introductory material and insightful essays and responses to the themes and topics readers have discovered in literature.

http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/read_lyr.html

http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/rom.html

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Week 3

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life.  Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing.  He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates.  For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.
                                                       –from Ernest Hemingway's Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech in 1954

Welcome back. Hope you've had a good week.  Today we will continue discussing Week 1 poetry selections, including short stories by American writers Kate Chopin (1860-1904) and Ernest Hemingway (1899-1960), and by Frenchman Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893).  "My Uncle Jules,"  and the some 300 other De Maupassant  stories, were models of the short story form and known by both Americans.  The ones selected here for class focus on the trials of youth, how we grow up, the influence of family and the force of authority.

I'll return  your first written responses, submitted last week.   I've also a couple of extra pieces, just below.

when serpents bargain for the right to squirm            by e.e. cummings when serpents bargain for the right to squirm and the sun strikes to gain a living wage-- when thorns regard their roses with alarm and rainbows are insured against old age when every thrush may sing no new moon in if all screech-owls have not okayed his voice --and any wave signs on the dotted line or else an ocean is compelled to close when the oak begs permission of the birch to make an acorn-valleys accuse their mountains of having altitude-and march denounces april as a saboteur then we'll believe in that incredible unanimal mankind(and not until) 1944

 


Discussion Question:  What is the point the poet here makes about nature and about humans?  What is his method or means of address, or how is the poem formed?

----------------------------- In the poem "The Walrus and the Carpenter" we see a peculiar, dark humor of author Lewis Carroll.  So-called nonsense literature, like the prose novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, is typically set in fantastical places and features strange creatures we wouldn't expect to meet in real life.  Often the plot events and speech are equally mystifying or silly but the premium seems to be on defying logic and authority by showing the irrational side of our being and imagination and all the flexibility and ambiguities of language; and, of course, on having fun! We have to let go for a time our reliance on strict logic and what is sensible and right to play along.  Nonsense works appeal to children and to the child in us all. And perhaps in them we may find something beyond age.

The poem below, in the form of a ballad, has always been a favorite of mine, and one easily memorized, by a poet much admired by the late Beatle John Lennon, who wrote some nonsense verse himself.

The Owl and the Pussycat               by Edmund Lear (1812-1888)

The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea 

   In a beautiful pea green boat,

They took some honey, and plenty of money,   

  Wrapped up in a five pound note.

The Owl looked up to the stars above,   

  And sang to a small guitar,’

O lovely Pussy! O Pussy my love,     

  What a beautiful Pussy you are, 

      You are,       

      You are!

What a beautiful Pussy you are!’

Pussy said to the Owl, ‘You elegant fowl!   

   How charmingly sweet you sing!

O let us be married! too long we have tarried:   

   But what shall we do for a ring?’

They sailed away, for a year and a day,   

  To the land where the Bong-tree grows

And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood   

   With a ring at the end of his nose,         

       His nose,         

       His nose,

With a ring at the end of his nose.

‘Dear pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling

    Your ring?’ Said the Piggy, ‘I will.’

So they took it away, and were married next day   

    By the Turkey who lives on the hill.

They dined on mince, and slices of quince,   

    Which they ate with a runcible spoon;

And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,   

    They danced by the light of the moon,         

        The moon,         

        The moon,

They danced by the light of the moon.

Here, too, a short commentary on nonsense lyrics by George Orwell:  http://www.nonsenselit.org/Lear/essays/orwell_1.html
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Writing Assignment #2

In 400-500 words or more, explore a theme addressed in the poem by Lewis Carroll and one or another of the short prose stories.  Compare the two pieces in terms of the theme and the perspective or interpretation each allows. You may use any prose piece from the handouts or links provided thus far, and may follow associated ideas and images, whether of authority, power, and rule, personal independence and freedom, experimentation, discovery and growth; peace, joy, fun or some opposite, as of obligatory work, rules, unwanted discipline, punishment, confinement, deprivation.  Recall the range of responses given in class and President Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms:  Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, Freedom from Fear.

Week 1

Poppies

The earth is rocky and full of roots; it's clay, and it seems doomed and polluted, but you dig little holes for the ugly shriveled bulbs, throw in a handful of poppy seeds, and cover it all over, and you know you'll never see it again - it's death and clay and shrivel, and your hands are nicked from the rocks, your nails black with soil. –Anne Lamott



                                     

Welcome to the Introduction to Literature (ENC1102) class here at the Art Institute.  As your instructor, I will post description of course material and assignments and discussion of key terms and selections presented in class (and additional material too, perhaps).  You should visit the site to stay abreast of material and apprised of any changes to assignments or selections to be covered.

Course Description:  The course is designed as a study of some of the various genres of literature–lyric and narrative poetry, fictional and non-fictional narratives, and dramatic works in performance.  The themes, forms and conventions of the various works we read will provide means of discussion, and written and oral performance.

Themes:  

Nature:   perhaps the primary thematic focus, and a wide field of play, for there is no escaping Nature, the ultimate source and end of all things human and non-human.  What is Nature actually, and what is not?  We look at nature through the lens of "Art," an entirely human construct, one which here includes philosophy, religion, history, science and, importantly, language.  In so far as humans are nature’s creatures, however distinct, highly evolved, and seemingly removed from direct contact and awareness of the Earth, Sun, Moon, Stars, and all the world's “creatures great and small,” we are yet defined and bound by our relationship to the natural world, the Cosmos, out of which we emerged, as did all things, some 13 billion years ago, when the Big Bang occurred, according to scientific calculations. 

       

The Human Experience and Journey (Individual/Society):  We are born, grow to youth and maturity, age, and then die . . . and in this our lives reflect the age-old succession of the seasons and life elemental.  A continual process of creation and destruction, as the old gives way before the new, and what is past becomes an archive of artifacts, and stories, whereby we can trace our origins, and wonder and speculate about the mysteries.  In fact, As William Faulkner wrote, the past is never dead. The vital function that artists perform in creating art works, their evocations and explorations of the material and spiritual realms, of human growth and identity, society and its institutions, provide an endless source of inspiration and wonder.  I am hoping you find it so, at any rate.

Religion/God/ Spirituality:  The course material invites you to consider representations of nature, the nature of nature, our cosmic origins, and our relationship to the cosmos, the Creation, and to each other, family, society, culture.   Indeed, we may see nature, including humans and their constructs, as antagonist, ally, or morally neutral, even amoral, reflective of forces and processes far beyond our ability to comprehend, in which savagery, destruction, suffering and death stand equally with kindness, creation, joy, and life.  Life comprises a great many conceptual opposites and their reconciliation is a life's work.  The poems and stories illustrate just such work. We think in categories of opposition: life/death; light/dark; good/evil; finite/infinite; material/immaterial/spiritual; mutable/immutable; temporal/eternal; transcendence/immanence; the One/the Many.  We have the given and what we make of it verbally or linguistically, conceptually.  Art manifests the human imagination and spirit in its attempt to recreate, name, and understand life.

We live in time, and in space, and the cycles of nature and stages of life provide rich subject matter for writers reflecting on the experience of living.  Nature, in fact, appears a mirror and a touchstone of the Self and human experience.  We are part of universal nature, and we bring our particular human nature to it, with our griefs, our joys, our forebodings, aspirations, and imaginings.  The Book of Nature informs us to the extent we take the time to read it and to acknowledge how it shapes us. A falling leaf, a sudden snowfall, the stars shining in the blackness of space–these speak to us.  Indeed, it is a story of "supernatural" dimensions in human imagination, and thus the religious and spiritual experience is necessarily a theme we will address. 

The Night, The Porch                          by Mark Strand

To stare at nothing is to learn by heart

What all of us will be swept into, and baring oneself

To the wind is feeling the ungraspable somewhere close by.

Trees can sway or be still.  Day or night can be what they wish.

What we desire, more than a season or weather, is the comfort

Of being strangers, at least to ourselves.  This is the crux

Of the matter, which is why even now we seem to be waiting

For Something whose appearance would be its vanishing–

The sound, say, of a few leaves falling, or just one leaf,

Or less.  There is no end to what we can learn.  The book out there

Tells us as much, and was never written with us in mind.

Woman Work                                                       by Maya Angelou

I’ve got the children to tend

The clothes to mend

The floor to mop

The food to shop

Then the chicken to fry

The baby to dry

I got company to feed

The garden to weed

I’ve got shirts to press

The tots to dress

The can to be cut

I gotta cleanup this hut

Then see about the sick

And the cotton to pick.

Shine on me, sunshine

Rain on me, rain

Fall softly, dewdrops

And cool my brow again.

Storm blow me from here

With your fiercest wind

Let me float across the sky

‘Til I can rest again.

Fall gently, snowflakes

Cover me with white

Cold icy kisses and

Let me rest tonight.

Sun, rain, curving sky

Mountain, oceans, leaf, and stone

Star shine, moon glow

You’re all that I can call my own.

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I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.   –John Masefield (1878-1967), British poet

                      

      Eternal, Infinite, Immutable, Immortal, God, the One, and their polar opposites–the temporal, finite, mutable, mortal, human, the many–we shall see how these concepts are embodied, literally and/or figuratively in various works.  We shall see how some artists have articulated the search for Truth, God, the impact of Beauty, the experience of the Sublime.  Literature gives us a window into the human experience that is not to be missed.  

As regards the symbols of stories, myths and legends, whether of ancient Babylon, Egypt, Greece, India  the Judeo-Christian world, Native America, or the contemporary U.S., Joseph Campbell, a scholar in comparative literature, wrote that they refer “primarily to our inner selves” and not to “outer historical events” (Thou Art That 28), that they are psychological archetypes known to all mythologies.”  Beyond the necessities imposed by our animal nature, he writes, is “another order of living, which the animals do not know, that of awe before the mystery of being, the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, that can be the root and branch of the spiritual sense of one’s days” (29).

When we read “To see a World in a Grain of Sand,” by William Blake, we may sense the great mystery of the heavenly, infinite, eternal realms evoked by his focus on the familiar, small by comparison, microcosm of sand particle and wild flower. By metaphor and symbol we bridge in language inner and outer worlds, subject and object, the personal and the cosmic.

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In writing about literature, you will reproduce in summary or direct quotation lines of text to illustrate and to ground your descriptions and interpretations in the precise language used by the poet.  You will want to show readers how you have arrived at your conclusions about its construction and meaning.  Use quotation marks around the word-for-word phrasings and lines and a slash or virgule to separate lines of text that run no more than three successive lines. Blocks of text four or more lines in length should be indented or offset 10 spaces, without use of quotation marks.  The example below illustrates the block format:

Example presentation:  summary description, block formatted quotation, and response to a poem:

      In "Snow Toward Evening," Melville Cane shows the surprise and delight of an unexpected turn in the weather.  The poem begins thus:

         

                      Suddenly the sky turned grey.

                      The day,

                      Which had been bitter and chill,

                      Grew soft and still.     (1-4)

                                         

The lines above, by virtue of end rhyme, appear as couplets of uneven length that come to a hushed, extended close with the words "soft and still."  Notice the first couplet constitutes one simple sentence (line 1) and the brief start, the subject alone–"The day" (line 2) of the next sentence, which takes three lines to complete. So though we have exact end rhyme on both couplets, the rhythm changes by virtue of line length and sentence pattern.  The particular arrangement of words within lines, the breaks between lines, presence or absence of rhyme and the weight of accents or beats shape the sense and potential meaning of the text.
       The next line is a single word, "Quietly," from which the remainder of the poem hangs, as if suspended, like the "petals cool and white," the snow that falls "from some invisible blossoming tree" (lines 7, 6).   The airy dance of flakes is wonderful, a kind of epiphany, a manifestation of divine grace.

HOMEWORK:  For homework please read the poetry and prose selections in the packets distributed week one, beginning with the first entries and working forward.  Read also the introduction and "Nature" section of Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay Nature  for some background understanding of nineteenth century romantic views (and a very influential writer's work here).  

Take notes on key elements, lines, and ideas of 5 of the poetry texts.  These will be useful when you start writing in response to the texts.  Use the following questions as a guide:

1.  What does the title indicate? How does it frame or shape our understanding of the poem body?

2. Who is speaking and why, to what purpose?  What tone(s) of voice do you hear and where?

3. What is the situation? What's the poem about?  Is a story being told?  What's the conflict or at stake for the speaker or central character?

4. What image(s) do you see most strongly or arrestingly?

5.  Which words, phrases, lines or images present difficulties of interpretation?

6. What is the climax of the poem?

I will be checking to see if you have provided notes to the texts and giving points for execution, out of the 10 possible.

Note:  the following site, which I have permission to use from the author, contains much helpful background information on reading poetry, the formal elements of poetry, key themes of English Romanticism, readings (interpretative presentations/essays) of selections, etcetera. It appears as a link on the upper right pullout drawer of the blog page, A Guide to the Study of Literature.

http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/read_lyr.html

You might also look at the some of recitations collected at poetryoutloud.org to get a sense of the range of material and approaches possible in reciting poetry, whether familiar or wholly new to you.  Here for instance, is one young lady's reading of  e.e. cummings'  free verse poem "i carry your heart": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-nymX7IIWM

This first page may be updated to cover week one's lecture and discussion before we meet again for class week 2.  Until then  . . . I leave you with one more poem, a famous one, too!

The Panther                        Rainer Maria Rilke ( 1875-1926 )

His vision, from the constantly passing bars,

has grown so weary that it cannot hold

anything else.  It seems to him there are

a thousand bars, and behind the bars, no world.

As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,

the movement of his powerful soft strides

is like a ritual dance around a center

in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.

Only at times, the curtain of the pupils

lifts, quietly.  An image enters in,

rushes down through the tense, arrested muscles,

plunges into the heart and is gone.

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 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." Read also "My Uncle Jules,"  "Simon's Papa," and the poem "The Walrus and the Carpenter," by Lewis Carroll. We'll see the peculiar, dark humor of author Lewis Carroll in this material.  The  American writers Kate Chopin (1860-1904) and Ernest Hemingway (1899-1960), and the French writer Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893)  provide models of the short story form.   The ones selected here for class focus on the trials of youth or how we grow up, what we learn,  the influence of family, and the force of authority.

      Draft a short response comparing any of the prose story pieces above to the nonsense poem,  on the basis of a shared theme or narrative focus, similar or contrasting imagery, symbolism, tone, or other figurative and formal elements.  Your understanding or interpretation and aesthetic response, the questions that arise for you–these are what we want.  This is a draft, so not due for a grade as yet.