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Thursday, June 7, 2012

The order of "The Idea of Order..."

Early blue and white ware,
first half of 14th century
In Wallace Stevens's poem, "The Idea of Order at Key West," the narrator and his friend Ramon Fernandez listen to a woman singing in imitation of the sea, the narrator reflecting on the metaphysics of the situation before they turn back toward the town and the narrator asks his friend why the lights being turned on as night descends seem to demarcate the vista, at which point the narrator realizes that it's because of their "rage for order"—the same rage that prompted the woman to sing.
    The poem's seventh (and last) stanza:
Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker's rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.
Stevens's act of making the poem sprang from the same rage. The poem expresses a human's drive to understand and represent what he or she experiences.
    As I understand the "rage" Stevens was talking about (the biological promptings of the human brain; in the poem, the sea has no such promptings and is therefore not singing), my blogging springs from the same source, and so, I think, did the idea yesterday (even if a joke) that the blue & white porcelain pen had magical properties.

By the way, the hypothesis about the pen has already been falsified, alas. This morning, I erred in attempting the third Sudoku using the pen...But there is, I suppose, the "magical" possibility that the failure was really the pen's indicating to me that my interpretation of "The Idea of Order at Key West" is also wrong. Could that be the true way to order my experience here?

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