Jon Orsi- On Books

Too little thought went into my last blog on Epiphanies. Specifically concerning the venue of Books- I really didn't have a whole lot to say.
There is no easy way to describe the phenomena and I suppose that's what particularly drew me to The Aleph because its subject is epiphanic. I felt and still feel today that this short story is the magnum opus of my literary vocabulary thus far.
Instead of breaking some sort of copyright by posting the story on here, I'll just give you the option to check it out yourself here (though I have sense that this translation is lacking somehow)

But what came to me was the acceptance that though this story  "IT" for me there are many other "it's" I have come across and each has it's place. Some are very small, the "light-bulb" that clicked over my head with these may have only been one of those eco-illegal 70W incandescent bulbs.

I will share these in the hopes that further meditation on them will help me reseed the fields of my mind.
I often have held the view that literature is sort of womb, fruitful and ceaseless in it's births yet each one can yield a new (both fresh and varied) life.
(Dr. Luebner had a great discussion skirting this idea that, he described the importance of where one reads a book and the idea that one copy of a book can be very different depending on where, when, how and by whom it is read.)
Where was I?
Ah yes, So these following bits and pieces of epiphanic literature influenced me in former life-as each passing day creates another life lived formerly- and revisiting them now may have a different effect. Or perhaps they may spark interest in whoever may be reading.

Ezra Pound-

IN THE STATION OF THE METRO
These appartions of faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet black bough.

-the simple radiance of beauty, the simple radiance of simplicity. This made me love poetry.

From The Tempest-

The isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices,
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that, when I waked,
I cried to dream again. (III.ii.130–138)

Though I truly love this play because its role in the disillusionment of the theater, of literature, of all things really, Calliban's soliloquy expresses the power of the illusion. Both sides to this coin comprise the coin itself. The yin and the yang. This symbol is not just something cool to draw on your grade school notebook, it is representative of the balance of life and in this case epiphanic literature. Wikipedia actually puts it quite well, "describe how polar or seemingly contrary forces are interconnected and interdependent in the natural world, and how they give rise to each other in turn."


From Finnegans Wake-

"in the silence, of the sycomores, all listening, the kindling curves you simply can't stop feeling, he plunged both of his newly anointed hands, the core of his cushlas, in her singimari saffron strummans of hair, parting them and soothing her and mingling it, that was deep-dark and ample like this red bog at sundown" 

 -There really isn't a "word" in this book that with enough investment wouldn't yield and epiphany but, this passage in particular struck me quite well. Very beautiful, very sensual.


Wallace Stevens-
THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT A BLACKBIRD
I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.
III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.
IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.
V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.
VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?
VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.
IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.
X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.
XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.
XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.
XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.


-This distills beauty, simplicity and notion of epiphany reappearing  in different form.
If pound was my first poetic love. This was my re-bound. upgrade.


I was wrong to attempt to classify or issue quality to any epiphanic moment. They occur at every moment, in every moment.
as Eliot puts it
"Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before or after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment."

But, these instances, I find, are worth mentioning.