the eye of Nova's mind

"No image satisfies me unless it is at the same time knowledge." -- Artaud

"My ambition is to corner the reader and make him or her imagine and think differently." -- Charles Simic

I just had a "duh" moment in the shower.

( words & symbols )

Looking for a Put-Down? Nouns Beat Phrases: Research Suggests Labels Influence Our Views of Others

This takes me back to my first sociology course, Deviance & Social Control. Labels are definitely powerful.

I also look at this from a linguistic perspective. How might I use this in poetry, perhaps? Or how have I? ( Read more... )

"For the style of the poem and the poem itself to be one there must be a mating and a marriage, not an arid love song.

"Yes: but the gods--how they come into it and make it a delicious subject, as if we were here together wasting our time on something that appears to be whimsical but turns out to be essential. They give to the subject just that degree of effulgence and excess, no more, no less, that the subject requires. Our first proposition, that the style of a poem and the poem itself are one was a definition of perfection in poetry. In the presence of the gods, or of their images, we are in the presence of perfection in created beings. The gods are a definition of perfection in ideal creatures. These remarks expound the second proposition that the style of the gods and the gods themselves are one. The exhilaration of their existence, their freedom from fate, their access to station, their liberty to command fix them in an atmosphere which thrills us as we share it with them. But these are merely attributes. What matters is their manner, their style, which tells us at once that they are as we wished them to be, that they have fulfilled us, that they are us but purified, magnified, in an expansion. It is their style that makes them gods, not merely privileged beings. It is their style most of all that fulfills themselves. If they lost all their privileges, their freedom from fate, their liberty to command, and yet still retained their style, they would still be gods, however destitute. That alone would destroy them, which deprived them of their style. When the time came for them to go, it was a time when their aesthetic had become invalid in the presence not of a greater aesthetic of the same kind, but of a different aesthetic, of which from the point of view of greatness, the difference was that of an intenser humanity. The style of the gods is derived from men. The style of the gods is derived from the style of men."

--Wallace Stevens, "Two or Three Ideas"

I've decided to build my cult up around Wallace Stevens quotes. I never knew he thought up such witty, sagacious, interesting things, much less wrote them down.

"Style is not something applied. It is something inherent, something that permeates. It is of the nature of that in which it is found, whether the poem, the manner of a god, the bearing of a man. It is not a dress. It may be said to be a voice that is inevitable. A man has no choice about his style. When he says I am my style the truth reminds him that it is his style that is himself. If he says, as my poem is, so are my gods and so am I, the truth remains quiet and broods on what he has said. He knows that the gods of China are Chinese; that the gods of Greece are always Greeks and that all gods are created in the images of their creators; and he see in these circumstances the operation of a sytle, a basic law. He observes the uniform enhancement of all things within the category of the imagination. He sees, in the struggle between the perfectible and the imperfectible, how the perfectible prevails, even though it falls short of perfection." -- "Two or Three Ideas"

( more Stevens goodies )