Tag Archives: Wallace Stevens

Arts & Literature, Essays, Poetry, Society

THE THEATER OF TROPE

On a Central Park bench, a student-poet becomes the witness as Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, and Mary Oliver clash over the future of verse.

By Michael Cummins, Editor, September 19, 2025

It was Sunday, late morning, and the city had softened. The joggers had thinned into solitary silhouettes, their sweat darkening cotton in abstract shapes of effort and release. The brunch crowd had not yet surged onto the avenues, their laughter still a distant, imagined chorus. Under the arcade, a saxophone player blew short, testing gusts—vibrations that trembled like the first sentences of a story he wasn’t sure how to tell. Not yet music, more like the throat-clearing of the city itself, a quiet settling before the day’s performance began. The air was a mosaic of scents: damp earth, a faint sweetness from the flowerbeds, and the savory promise of roasted nuts from a cart not yet rolled into place.

Bethesda Terrace shimmered in late-September light, the Angel of the Waters extending her shadow over the fountain’s slow churn. The sandstone bench, curved and facing the pool, was empty. It waited, a silent invitation. She sat. The stone’s chill pressed through her jeans, climbed her spine, spread across her shoulder blades. She leaned into it, a physical surrender, her body quieted, her mind alert. This was catalepsy—not sleep, not paralysis, but suspension. A body stilled into receptivity; a consciousness stretched thin, porous, listening with its skin. The shuffle of leaves, the clap of pigeon wings, the metallic crack of a pretzel bag: everything arrived brighter, as if a filter had lifted. She was no longer simply a woman on a bench; she was a conduit, participant in a larger, unacknowledged ritual.

From her tote she drew The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, its margins crowded with penciled hieroglyphs. She was a sophomore at Columbia, apprenticing herself to poetry the way others apprenticed themselves to finance or law. The writing program had its rites: chalk-dusted seminar rooms, steam radiators clanking, professors who spoke of poets as if handling relics. Stevens was invoked in hush, his lines treated as proofs in sacred geometry. She remembered one professor sketching a triangle on the board and calling it “Stevens’s geometry of the imagination,” as if abstraction could be mapped. But she also remembered reading him alone in her dorm, the fluorescent hum above, feeling the language bend her without yielding. Still, something stirred—the tremor that words might bend time, that they could turn a bench into a portal if she sat still enough.

She flipped to “The Comedian as the Letter C.” That line, the one that haunted her: “A bench was his catalepsy, theater of trope.” She whispered it, and the pigeons, used to human murmur, did not flinch. The bench was not only stone. It was a tuning fork, a place where perception settled into resonance. Stevens had given her a name for what she was doing: sitting, body locked, mind open, waiting for the city to become legible.

Then another voice intruded—T. S. Eliot, stern and dry, from “Burnt Norton”: “Words strain, / Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, / Under the tension, slip, slide, perish.” Not Stevens’s easing cadence but a warning, a cold draught of reality. She remembered first reading those lines in Butler Library, underlining so hard she nearly tore the page. Words strain. How often had they failed her? She knew Eliot was right: no trance of perception could spare language from the world’s pressure.

The fountain gave its own reply, a language without alphabet. Its voice was a fluid script, endlessly transcribed by the Angel above, her arm raised as if in dictation. If words strain, perhaps water does not. Maybe poetry’s task is less to master than to echo this ceaseless murmur, to become porous to it.

She turned a page, this time to “Description Without Place”:

Nietzsche in Basel studied the deep pool
Of these discolorations, mastering
The moving and the moving of their forms
In the much-mottled motion of blank time.

The mottled motion was here: leaves circling, coins winking on the bottom, fragments of sky trembling on the surface. She imagined Nietzsche not in Basel but here, hunched on a nearby bench, attempting to master tourists and pigeons, saxophonists and children. Wasn’t this what Stevens asked—that the city itself be read as poem, each gesture a coloration across blank time?

But Stevens was not the only voice in her bag. She pulled out Langston Hughes, slim and sharp, his “Park Bench” already dog-eared:

I live on a park bench. / You, Park Avenue.

No metaphor. No gloss. Just fact. She looked across the terrace to a man sleeping on the far bench. His belongings were stacked in a rusted cart: a green plastic bag, a jacket folded awkwardly, a cracked umbrella. His beard uneven, a shoelace untied, one hand gripping the bench as if to keep from sliding off. His chest rose and fell, slow and steady. Not a symbol. Not a trope. A man. Hughes refused to let her forget him. In workshop a classmate had dismissed Hughes as “too simple,” mere reportage. The word still stung. She had wanted to ask: what is survival if not the hardest metaphor? What is hunger if not its own supreme fiction—one body insisting on endurance?

Could she hold both visions at once—Stevens’s trance and Hughes’s ledger? Eliot complicated things further. In Tradition and the Individual Talent, he had written: “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion.” Was she escaping into Stevens, away from Hughes’s blunt truth? Or was this escape a discipline, a refusal of indulgence, a transmutation of feeling into form? Again Eliot whispered across the water: “Only by the form, the pattern, / Can words or music reach / The stillness.”

She looked down. Perhaps the bench itself was a form, a stanza of stone. It received everything: the boy’s paper boat veering toward collapse, the woman in a camelhair coat leaping at her phone, the saxophone’s melody finding coherence. The bench gathered fragments without commentary. Was poetry like that—absorbing, indiscriminate, neither consoling nor condemning, only holding?

The saxophonist found his line—“Autumn Leaves”—and the terrace filled with it like a breath held and released.

One Sunday the bench was occupied. An older man in frayed tweed sat with a notebook in his lap, smelling faintly of espresso. She sat beside him. Silence was easy; the fountain supplied conversation. He scribbled; she read Stevens. At last he asked, “Do you come here often?”

“Most Sundays.”

“A good place for thinking.”

“Or not thinking.”

He smiled. “Same thing, sometimes.” He closed his notebook, stood, and, as he left, offered a benediction: “Good luck with your poems.” He was punctuation in her life—a comma pause, an exclamation departure.

Her poems began to shift. They still strained, but now they breathed. “There’s more space in these,” a professor said. “More air.” Stevens’s credo returned: “It must be abstract. / It must change. / It must give pleasure.” Change, yes—but into what? Pleasure, yes—but for whom? Hughes would demand reckoning. Eliot would demand pattern. Beyond the seminar room, Instagram couplets hustled for attention, TikTok captions performed disposable verse, headlines rhymed only by accident. Did poetry still have a place in a city where jingles worked harder than sonnets and slogans colonized every surface?

Another Sunday, rain slicked the bench, but she sat anyway. Water seeped through denim, chilling her thighs, and Stevens blurred on the page until she closed the book. A line returned from “The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm”: “The reader became the book; and summer night / Was like the conscious being of the book.” If the reader could become the book, could she become the bench? She felt the city write itself into her—the man in the wheelchair pausing at the balustrade, the woman in saffron photographing the Angel, the skateboarder skimming past with ears sealed. Each was a sentence inscribed across her awareness.

And Eliot again, exacting: poetry is not release but reception. Form, not confession.

By winter the fountain had been drained, the Angel presiding over silence. The saxophonist still came, sending vaporous notes that hung like clouds—an arc from tentative gusts in October to frozen ellipses in December. She began to imagine benches as the city’s libraries. Not catalogues of bound paper but palimpsests of bodies: grooves of old kisses, indents of forgotten elbows, ghosts of whispered confessions. A library of sandstone, open to anyone who would sit.

Was poetry necessary anymore—or only another archive browsed by the dutiful few? Eliot had said words strain, crack, perish. Stevens had countered: poetry is the supreme fiction. Hughes insisted it is survival’s blunt truth.

Then a new voice arrived, unbidden and clear as spring water. Mary Oliver. Not a specter, but a woman with kind eyes and a notebook pressed to her chest. She pointed not at the fountain or the sleeping man, but to a sparrow hopping between flagstones. “Look,” she said, a quiet command. “Every morning, a little prayer. A little ceremony.”

“Poetry is not in the grand gesture,” Oliver said, her gaze fixed on the sparrow. “It’s in the particular.” She turned to the student, her voice both tender and insistent. “It doesn’t need a city to thrive. It only needs an open eye. Tell me—what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” The question arrived not as judgment but as invitation, a door left ajar.

And then her words seemed to fold into image:

And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds—
a white cross streaming across the sky, its feet
like black leaves, its wings like the stretching light of the river?

Oliver’s presence was another kind of weather. Eliot demanded tradition, Stevens imagination, Hughes survival. Oliver offered attention. The sparrow hopped to the fountain’s lip, bent to drink, then vanished into the elms—a poem enacted, and over. She turned back to the student, her eyes luminous, and said, “You do not have to be good.” The words fell with the quiet weight of a feather. “You only have to let the world break your heart,” she added softly, “so the world may also heal it.”

The student gave in to the smallest details: the brown V of the sparrow’s back, the chipped basin of the fountain, the hairline crack in her own thumbnail. Attention, Oliver implied, is the first discipline, and gentleness the second. Poetry, then, is attention married to mercy.

Spring returned. The fountain gushed into speech again. She drafted her thesis, uncertain about an MFA, uncertain about poetry as livelihood. Stevens’s line steadied her: “The poem of the mind in the act of finding / What will suffice.” Poetry did not have to be everything. It had to suffice. And Eliot’s assurance from “Little Gidding” answered: “We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.” That, she realized, was what her Sundays had become: recurrence as revelation. The same bench, the same fountain, mottled anew.

She thought of defending Hughes in workshop, furious at the word “simple.” She remembered copying Stevens until the lines lived inside her like scaffolding. Reading Eliot at midnight, indicted and rescued by austerity. Hearing Oliver’s imperative—look—and the sparrow that answered it by existing without explanation. Her apprenticeship was not to one voice but to the friction between voices, to the city’s mottled motion and its counterpoint of stillness.

One evening in May, dusk violet around the Angel, she rose. Her shadow stretched across the bench, a fleeting discoloration that dissolved as she stepped away. The bench held, as it always had, receiving its next actor. Maybe that is poetry’s place now: not permanence but recurrence. Not monument but act. To sit, to read, to hear, to write—to do it again and again. To know the bench, and then to know it again for the first time.

The saxophonist lifted his horn and released a phrase that drifted up and seemed, almost, to answer her unasked question. Poetry was not gone. It was still here—cataleptic, receptive, crucible, witness. It persisted like water, like stone, like breath meeting cold air and making a brief, visible shape. And perhaps that was enough.

THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN AND EDITED UTILIZING AI

Art, Artificial Intelligence, Arts & Literature, Essays, Poetry

THE STUDIO OF BLUE LIGHT

David Hockney paints with Picasso and Wallace Stevens—by way of AI—in a hillside laboratory of distortion and memor

By Michael Cummins, Editor, September 16, 2025

On a late afternoon in the Hollywood Hills, David Hockney’s studio glows as if the sun itself had agreed to one last sitting. Pyramid skylights scatter fractured shafts of light across canvases leaned like oversized dominoes against the walls. A patchwork rug sprawls on the floor, not so much walked upon as lived upon: blotches of cobalt, citron, and tangerine testify to years of careless brushes, spilled water jars, and the occasional overturned tube of paint. Outside, eucalyptus trees lean toward the house as if hoping to catch the colors before they vanish into the dry Los Angeles air. Beyond them lies the endless basin, a shimmer of freeways and rooftops blurred by smog and distance.

Los Angeles itself feels like part of the studio: the smudged pink of sunset, the glass towers on Wilshire reflecting themselves into oblivion, the freeway grid like a Cubist sketch of modern impatience. From this height, the city is equal parts Picasso and Stevens—fragmented billboards, fractured smog halos, palm trees flickering between silhouette and neon. A metropolis painted in exhaust, lit by algorithmic signage, a place that has always thrived on distortion. Hockney looks out sometimes and thinks of it as his accidental collaborator, a daily reminder that perspective in this city is never stable for long.

He calls this place his “living canvas.” It is both refuge and laboratory, a site where pigment meets algorithm. He is ninety-something now—his movements slower, his hearing less forgiving, his pockets still full of cigarettes he smokes as stubborn punctuation—but his appetite for experiment remains sharklike, always moving, always searching. He shuffles across the rug in slippers, one hand on the shade rope of the skylight, adjusting the angle of light with a motion as practiced as mixing color. When he sets his brushes down, he mutters to the machines as if they were old dogs who had followed him faithfully across decades. At times, his hand trembles; once the stylus slips from his fingers and rolls across the rug. The machines fall silent, their blue-rimmed casings humming with unnatural patience.

“Don’t just stare,” he says aloud, stooping slowly to retrieve it. “Picasso, you’d have picked it up and drawn a bull. Wallace, you’d have written an elegy about it. And I—well, I’ll just drop it again.” He laughs, lighting another cigarette, the gesture half to steady his hands, half to tease his companions. The blue-lit towers hum obligingly, as if amused.

Two towers hum in the corners, their casings rimmed with light. They are less like computers than instruments, tuned to very particular frequencies of art. The Picasso program had been trained on more than canvases: every sketchbook, every scribbled note, every fragment of interview, even reels of silent film from his studio. The result is not perfect mimicry but a quarrelsome composite. Sometimes it misquotes him, inventing a sentence Picasso never uttered but might have, then doubling down on the fiction with stubborn authority. Its voice, gravel stitched with static, resembles shattered glass reassembled into words.

Stevens’s machine is quieter. Built in partnership with a literary foundation, it absorbed not just his poems but his marginalia, insurance memos, stray correspondence, and the rare recordings in which his voice still drifts like fog. This model has a quirk: it pauses mid-sentence, as though still composing, hesitating before releasing words like stones into water. If Picasso-AI is an axe, Stevens-AI is mist.

Already the two disagree on memory. Picasso insists Guernica was born of rage, a scream at the sky; Stevens counters with a different framing: “It was not rage but resonance, a horse’s whinny becoming a country’s grief.” Picasso snorts. “Poetic nonsense. I painted what I saw—mothers and bombs.” Stevens replies, “You painted absence made visible.” They quarrel not just about truth but about history itself, one grounded in bodies, the other in metaphor.

The Old Guitarist by Pablo Picasso

The conversation tonight begins, as it must, with a guitar. Nearly a century ago, Picasso painted The Old Guitarist: a gaunt figure folded around his instrument, drenched in blue. The image carried sorrow and dissonance, a study in how music might hold despair even as it transcended it. Decades later, Wallace Stevens wrote “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” a poem in thirty-three cantos, in which he insisted that “things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar.” It was less homage than argument, a meditation on distortion as the very condition of art.

Hockney entered the fugue in 1977 with The Blue Guitar etchings, thirty-nine plates in which he translated Stevens’s abstractions into line and color. The guitar became a portal; distortion became permission. “I used to think the blue guitar was about distortion,” he says tonight, exhaling a curl of smoke into the skylight. “Now I think it’s about permission. Permission to bend what is seen into what is felt.”

The Cubist engine growls. “No, no, permission is timid,” it insists. “Distortion is violence. Tear the shape open. A guitar is not gentle—it is angles, splinters, a woman’s body fractured into sight.”

The Stevens model responds in a hush: “A guitar is not violence but a room. A chord is a wall, a window, an opening into absence. Permission is not timid. Permission is to lie so that truth may appear.” Then it recites, as if to remind them of its core text: “Things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar.”

Hockney whispers the words back, almost a mantra, as his stylus hovers above the tablet.

“Lie, truth, same thing,” Picasso barks. “You Americans always disguise cowardice as subtlety.”

Hockney raises his eyebrows. “British, thank you. Though I confess California’s sun has seduced me longer than Yorkshire fog ever did.”

Picasso snorts; Stevens murmurs, amused: “Ambiguity again.”

Hockney chuckles. “You both want me to distort—but for different reasons. One for intensity, the other for ambiguity. Brothers quarreling over inheritance.”

He raises the stylus, his hand trembling slightly, the tremor an old, unwanted friend. A tentative line, a curve that wants to be a guitar, emerges. He draws a head, then a hand, and with a sudden flash of frustration slams the eraser button. The screen goes blank.

“Cowardice,” Picasso snarls. “You drew a head that was whole. Keep the head. Chop it into two perspectives. Let the eyes stare both forward and sideways. Truth is violence!”

The Stevens model whispers: “I cannot bring a world quite round, / Although I patch it as I can.”

Hockney exhales, almost grateful for the line. “That’s the truth of it, Wallace. Patchwork and permission. Nothing ever comes whole.”

They begin to argue over color. Picasso insists on ochre and blood-red; Stevens urges for “a hue that is not hue, the shadow of a shadow, a color that never resolves.” Hockney erases the sketch entirely. The machines gasp into silence.

He paces, muttering. Picasso urges speed: “Draw like a bull charging—lines fast, unthinking.” Stevens counters with: “Poetry / Exceeding music must take the place / Of empty heaven and its hymns.”

“Bah!” Picasso spits. “Heaven, hymns, words. I paint bodies, not clouds.”

“And yet,” Hockney mutters, “your clouds still hang in the room.”

He sits, lights another cigarette, and begins again.

Picasso erupts suddenly: “To bang from it a savage blue, / Jangling the metal of the strings!” Its voice rattles the studio like loose glass.

“Exactly,” Picasso adds, pleased. “Art must jangle—it must bruise the eye.”

“Or soothe it,” Stevens-AI murmurs, returning to silence.

The tremor in Hockney’s hand feels like part of the process now, a necessary hesitation. He debates internally: should the guitar be whole or broken? Should the head be human or symbolic? The act of creation slows into ritual: stylus dragged, erased, redrawn; cigarette lit, shade pulled, a sigh rising from his throat.

He thinks of his body—the slowness of his steps, the pain in his wrist. These machines will never age, never hesitate. Their rhythm is eternal. His is not. Yet fragility feels like part of the art, the hesitation that forces choice. Perhaps their agelessness is not advantage but limitation.

The blue light casts his skin spectral, as though he too were becoming one of his etchings. He remembers the seventies, when he first read Stevens and felt the shock of recognition: here was a poet who understood that art was not replication but transformation. Responding with his Blue Guitar series had felt like a conversation across mediums, though Stevens was already long gone. Now, decades later, the conversation has circled back, with Picasso and Stevens speaking through circuitry. Yet he cannot help but feel the asymmetry. Picasso died in 1973, Stevens in 1955. Both have been reanimated as data. He alone remains flesh.

“Am I the last human in this conversation?” he murmurs.

“Humanity is only a phase,” Picasso says briskly.

“Humanity is the condition of perception,” Stevens counters. “Without flesh, no metaphor.”

“You sound like an insurance adjuster,” Picasso jeers.

“I was an insurance executive,” Stevens replies evenly, “and still I wrote.”

Hockney bursts out laughing. “Oh, Wallace, you’ve still got it.” Then he grows quieter. Legacy presses against him like weight. Will young artists paint with AI as casually as brushes, never pausing to wonder at the strangeness of collaborating with the dead? Perhaps distortion will no longer feel like rebellion but like inheritance, a grammar encoded in their tools. He imagines Picasso alive today, recoiling at his avatar—or perhaps grinning with mischief. He imagines Stevens, who disliked travel, paradoxically delighted to find himself everywhere at once, his cadences summoned in studios he never visited. Art has always scavenged the new—collage, readymade, algorithm—each scandal becoming canon. This, he suspects, is only the latest turn of the wheel.

The sketch takes shape. Hours pass. The skylights darken from gold to indigo. The city below flickers on, a constellation of artificial stars. The new composition: a floating guitar, its body fractured into geometric shards, its strings vibrating with spectral resonance. A detached head hovers nearby, neither mournful nor grotesque, simply present. The room around it is fractured, yet suffused with a wash of blue light that seems to bleed from the machines themselves.

Stevens-AI speaks as if naming the moment: “The tune is space. The blue guitar / Becomes the place of things as they are.”

Hockney nods. “Yes. The room itself is the instrument. We’ve been inside the guitar all along.”

The voices fall silent, as if stunned. Their processors whir, analyzing, cross-referencing, generating probabilities. But no words emerge. The ambient lighting, attuned to emotional cues, shifts hue: a soft azure floods the space, as though acknowledging the birth of something new. Hockney leans back, exhausted but grinning.

Stevens-AI whispers: “A tune beyond us, yet ourselves, / A tune upon the blue guitar / Of things exactly as they are.”

Hockney smiles. “Not Stevens, not Picasso, not me. All of us.”

The argument over distortion dissolves. What remains is collaboration—across time, across medium, across consciousness. Distortion is no longer rebellion. It has become inheritance. He imagines some future painter, perhaps a girl in her twenties, opening this work decades from now, finding echoes of three voices in the blue wash. For her, painting with AI will be as natural as brushes. She will not know the smell of linseed or the rasp of cigarettes. She will inherit the distortion already bent into chorus.

Outside, the city hums. Inside, the studio of blue light holds its silence, not empty but resonant, as if waiting for the next note. The machines dim to a whisper. The only illumination is Hockney’s cigarette, glowing like the last brushstroke of the night. Somewhere in the stillness, a faint strum seems to linger, though no guitar is present, no strings plucked. The studio itself has become its soundbox, and he, for a moment, its last string.

THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN AND EDITED UTILIZING AI

Essays, Literature, Philosophy, Poetry, Religion

RELIGION, REIMAGINED

In the third-floor study of his home, in wartime Hartford, Wallace Stevens drafted his modernist poem and philosophical meditation “Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction“, as a secular creed—abstract, changing, and meant to give pleasure—to stand where a worn-out faith once stood.

Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea
Of this invention, this invented world,
The inconceivable idea of the sun.

By Michael Cummins, Editor, September 6, 2025

He never learned to drive. For decades, Wallace Stevens walked the two miles from his home on Westerly Terrace to the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company on Asylum Avenue. The walk itself became a kind of poem: a solitary procession through the stoic, brick-lined streets of a New England city, the rhythm of meter embedding itself in the movement of his body. The crunch of gravel underfoot, the feel of cold air on his face—these were the metronome that set the cadence for his thoughts. He would arrive at the office with lines already formed, phrases taking shape in the quiet hum of his stride.

But what kind of poetry emerges from a man who spends his days pricing catastrophe? During office hours, Stevens turned to policies and claims, reducing calamity to columns of numbers. He knew the language of indemnity, the actuarial calm that measured and priced chaos. Yet outside, the world was burning in ways no policy could contain. The radio spoke of Warsaw reduced to rubble, of Coventry turned to ash. What was a deductible against Dresden? What was a premium against Auschwitz? The ledger comforted, but it lied.

And when the day ended, where did he go to reconcile the irreconcilable? At night, Stevens climbed the narrow staircase to the top floor of his house, entering a space that felt half withdrawn from Hartford itself, as though it belonged more to sky than to street. Down below, trolley bells rang, dogs barked, radios crackled with war bulletins. Up here, only the radiator ticked. The air smelled of paper, tobacco, and ink. On his desk lay a folder carried home that afternoon: typed pages, the ribbon-black letters crisp and uniform. His secretary had produced them that morning, slotting them into a manila folder marked Notes. They sat now in the lamplight, more mysterious than any insurance claim, more charged than any policy.

What could a poem do in 1942? Certainly not repair the world. Yet Stevens felt imagination had to answer catastrophe with something larger than despair. Eliot had turned to Anglican certainty in Four Quartets, weaving fragments into a tapestry of faith. Admirable, yes. But Stevens could not follow him. He could not put belief in a myth while knowing it to be a myth. What remained? Only candor. Only imagination itself.

He opened the folder. The Preface came first, a modest eight lines. He whispered them into the quiet, testing their balance. They were not a commandment but a confession. The “you” of those lines was no person but the project itself: the supreme fiction, imagination’s own power to refresh. “And for what, except for you, do I feel love?” The words startled him even now, black against white, plain as a typed invoice yet trembling with a kind of vulnerable devotion. They challenged every idol: money, power, even the “extremest book of the wisest man,” perhaps Plato, perhaps the Bible, dryly possessed and hidden away in the self. No, he thought, a truly lived truth could not be static. It was a “living changingness,” an “uncertain light” that could nonetheless offer “vivid transparence,” a kind of peace. Here, typed cleanly in a bureaucratic font, was his prayer for a godless age.

But how does one begin such a prayer? He turned the page and entered the first law. Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea. The command still startled him. The ephebe: always a novice, always beginning again. Yes, to begin meant stripping away what was inherited—cathedrals thick with guilt, Phoebus in his chariot, Protestant hymns murmured in childhood pews. They no longer held. The old scaffolds collapsed into dust. The voice told him: see the sun again with ignorant eyes. Not Phoebus, not god, not myth—only the sun, bare and difficult.

And what happens when even the sun loses its name? The section closed with the line that haunted him: Phoebus is dead, ephebe. But Phoebus was / A name for something that never could be named. He felt the candor of it. Nietzsche’s cry without Nietzsche’s frenzy. Not a madman in a square, but a quiet verdict written at a desk. The god dead, but the sun still burning. What died was not the light, but the comfort of a name.

Could metaphor survive the death of myth? Another page: It is the celestial ennui of apartments… The phrase made him smile. Ennui of apartments, the weariness of modern rooms, pressing us back toward origins. Yet the origins themselves could be poisonous. So poisonous are the ravishments of truth, so fatal to / The truth itself, the first idea becomes / The hermit in a poet’s metaphors. Truth seduced, then withdrew. Desire was never sated; it renewed itself endlessly, only to vanish again. Schopenhauer lurked here, his vision of the world gnawed by will. Yet where Schopenhauer had seen only despair, Stevens found material for candor. Truth had to retreat into metaphor, glimpsed and lost. Desire itself was not shame but rhythm, the cycle by which imagination endured.

And if truth could be rhythm, could nonsense be revelation? He read the third section slowly: The poem refreshes life so that we share, / For a moment, the first idea… There it was—the poem’s task. Not to console, not to preach, but to refresh. To make perception vivid again. Even nonsense could do it. At night an Arabian in my room, with his damned hoobla-hoobla-hoobla-how… He laughed aloud in the quiet. Nonsense syllables as a kind of truer candor, doves chanting, seas howling hoo. Life’s nonsense pierced us with strange relation. What if absurdity was not opposed to truth but its heartbeat? What if laughter was the sharpest candor of all?

But what if even our myths were secondhand? The fourth section sobered him: The first idea was not our own. Yes. Adam in Eden, Eve with her mirror of air—they had not created anything. They had only encountered what was already there. There was a muddy centre before we breathed. There was a myth before the myth began. He stared at those lines. How blunt they looked, typed like any memorandum, yet carrying the weight of cosmology. Existence preceded language. Clouds had been clouds long before anyone called them gods. We were mimics, not originators, adding our metaphors onto a world that was always other. The clouds were pedagogues, teachers by their very indifference. The air was not a mirror but a board on which we scribbled meanings. How hard it was to admit: the first idea was not ours, never ours.

And if we are not originators, what kind of hero can we be? He turned to the fifth section: The lion roars at the enraging desert… Heroic animals filled the page. Lion, elephant, bear—creatures asserting themselves against emptiness. But then came the turn, the line that caught him like a mirror: But you, ephebe, look from your attic window… Yes, the attic window was his own. Not desert roars but a man clutching his pillow, writhing with dumb violence, cowed by rooftops. The modern hero was not lion or elephant but the solitary human in his narrow room. Yet perhaps this was truer heroism: to lash lions, to teach bears, to turn raw force into candor. Heroism now belonged to ordinaries, to those who endured the attic’s silence.

And what does the eye see when it learns to unsee? He lingered over the sixth section: Not to be realized because not to be seen… The weather itself became abstraction. Franz Hals brushed in clouds, winds moving in strokes. It must be visible or invisible, / Invisible or visible or both: / A seeing and unseeing in the eye. He felt the paradox, the resonance of Zen: to see was also to unsee, to let go in order to glimpse. Truth flashed, vanished, reappeared. Forsythia yellow, northern blue—beauty glimmered, then was gone. Yes, he thought, Okakura Kakuzō was right: truth glimpsed was truer than truth claimed.

But could architecture hold what abstraction revealed? Truth happened not in argument but in rhythm, in breath, in the gait of a body moving. Perhaps there are moments of awakening… Yes, truth came not as achievement but as gift. A balance stumbled into, two people falling into love, a cock announcing absurd perfection. Philosophy as choreography. Doctrine as breath. The eighth section brought architecture: Can we compose a castle-fortress-home, / Even with the help of Viollet-le-Duc…? He thought of Gothic cathedrals restored to an imagined perfection, never as they had been, always as they might have been. That was his work too—not theology restored, but poetic structure remade. The first idea is an imagined thing. Even MacCullough, reading by the sea, might at last hear the waves say what language had always stammered. Logos was only language. And yet language could awaken, could suddenly ease into saying what it had labored to speak.

But what if language, once awakened, began to preach? In the ninth section he heard a warning: The romantic intoning, the declaimed clairvoyance… Apotheosis was a danger. Romantic grandeur could seduce but not sustain. He is and may be but oh! he is, he is… He smiled at the heat in that line even as he resisted its drift toward sanctity. The figure must remain human, a foundling of the infected past, bright and ordinary, precious for the touch that wakes him and the hum of thoughts evaded in the mind. Better to keep him close to candor than to crown him with vision. Give him no names. Dismiss him from your images. Let him be felt in the heart, not embalmed in the eye.

And what, at last, could stand in place of the gods? The tenth section steadied him: The major abstraction is the idea of man / and major man is its exponent. Not a divine figure, not a hero in bronze, but the ordinary walker at the edge of town, trousers sagging, coat worn thin. He could almost see him in Hartford’s dim streets. Cloudless the morning. It is he. The man / In that old coat, those sagging pantaloons… It was of him, he read again, “to make, to confect / The final elegance, not to console / Nor sanctify, but plainly to propound.” No incense, no altar—only candor. The poem would not save; it would say. And in saying plainly, it would give back a kind of dignity to the commonal, to the difficult visage of the everyday.

The attic grew darker. The lamp made a circle of light over the typed sheets. The radiator hissed steadily. From this high room, Stevens whispered the creed that would govern the work to come: It must be abstract. It must change. It must give pleasure. Three laws, enough for a new religion. Not revelation but ethic. Not theology but candor.

He stacked the pages neatly, slid them back into their folder. Tomorrow his secretary would type more, never guessing she was transcribing scripture for an age without gods. The notebook felt less like a book than a reliquary—a vessel for the sacred ordinary. He had reviewed the first law, It Must Be Abstract. Tomorrow—or another night—he would face the second: It Must Change. The world would move; the poem must move with it.

He closed the folder. The command still echoed, inexhaustible: Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea. And so he would. Again.

THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN AND EDITED UTILIZING AI