{"id":95411,"date":"2016-03-09T14:33:11","date_gmt":"2016-03-09T19:33:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=95411"},"modified":"2016-03-09T15:06:36","modified_gmt":"2016-03-09T20:06:36","slug":"clairvoyant-observation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/03\/09\/clairvoyant-observation\/","title":{"rendered":"Clairvoyant Observation"},"content":{"rendered":"

A vision of Wallace Stevens\u2019s \u201cSunday Morning\u201d at its centenary.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Diane Szczepaniak, Stanza 6 (Is there no change of death in paradise)<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

When \u201cSunday Morning<\/a>\u201d was first published in the November 1915 issue of Poetry<\/em>, just over a hundred years ago, Wallace Stevens was thirty-six; the poem was one of his first major publications. He\u2019d recently moved to the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, where he would spend the rest of his life insuring people against the hazards of sudden change. His professional and poetic lives converged on that fact: everything changes.<\/p>\n

A spiritual meditation for a secular era, \u201cSunday Morning\u201d glows with the ripe colors of late summer and early autumn, brief arc segments of the seasonal cycle whose rhythms Stevens celebrates.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

In 2007, my mother, Diane Szczepaniak, a lifelong abstract painter and sculptor, began to memorize \u201cSunday Morning.\u201d She was unaccustomed to memorization; it became a kind of ritual for her. She kept Stevens\u2019s book by her bed and worked through the poem line by line. As she built each stanza in her memory, she began to paint her experience of the images, music, and emotions carried by the language. The paintings became her \u201cSunday Morning\u201d series<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

At the time, she was painting L-shaped abstract compositions with endless layers of watercolor. She called an early set of these paintings \u201cDwellings<\/a>,\u201d and I learned to feel at home in their interlocking fields of color, which she explained represent a cliff fronting sea and sky. In the \u201cSunday Morning\u201d series, she used this composition to create a large painting for each of the poem\u2019s eight stanzas: expansive watercolors responding to the poem in the abstract.<\/p>\n

The interconnected colored fields emerge from thousands of translucent watercolor washes that saturate a sheet of fibrous paper. \u201cI put red on top of blue, blue on top of red, sometimes yellow over everything,\u201d my mother writes, describing the slow, contemplative method by which she applies nearly invisible layers of paint. Over two years, she repeated Stevens\u2019s lines to herself throughout this meditative process, inhabiting each stanza as she translated the poem from page to paint.<\/p>\n

So how does an abstract minimalist artist transform the scenes of Stevens\u2019s dynamic poetry into non-figural compositions? In what follows, I\u2019ll suggest ways to run interpretive wiring between the poem and these abstract paintings. The other half of the story, though, comes with the experience of being absorbed into the luminous depth of the paintings, which invites the viewer to look for a long time\u2014the same way Stevens\u2019s shifting images draw a reader into the maze of his poems.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

The experiential dimension was vital to Stevens. He knew that his poems, like all productions of \u201cour perishing earth,\u201d are created and received as durations in time. He wrote poems that argue with themselves, refusing to settle down to say any one thing. \u201cThe reading of a poem must be an experience. Its writing must be all the more so,\u201d he declared in his collection of aphorisms, Adagia<\/em>. This \u201cexperience\u201d means more than the sequential movement of linear forms such as writing or music. The seemingly motionless visual arts, too, can court \u201cexperience.\u201d In the poem \u201cBouquet\u201d (1950), likely inspired by a still life Stevens owned, the color of a single blossom can be<\/p>\n

\n

crowded with apparitions suddenly gone<\/p>\n

And no less suddenly here again, a growth
Of the reality of the eye.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Where has reality \u201cgrown,\u201d in the bouquet or in the viewer\u2019s eye? Which has changed?<\/p>\n

In this spirit, my mother\u2019s \u201cSunday Morning\u201d paintings ask viewers to look almost as slowly as she paints. The apparently minimal surfaces deepen and change as they take hold of your gaze. They solicit the sort of ardent attention that Stevens pays to textures, colors, smells, and sensations.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

In \u201cSunday Morning,\u201d Stevens meditates on one person\u2019s search for spiritual meaning in the early twentieth century. He imagines Sunday morning spent at home, relishing \u201ccomplacencies of the peignoir,\u201d coffee, and oranges in a comfortable chair, while the sun glances along a green rug ornamented with tropical motifs. Over this lush scene hover the neglected demands of religious observation, the \u201choly hush of ancient sacrifice\u201d that for millennia has dictated Western culture\u2019s relation to the material world, morality, and death. When an anonymous woman enters the prismatic, secular setting in the sixth line, she might be any modern reader seeking spiritual answers.<\/p>\n

Stevens lived in a period when religious authority was being dismantled at an accelerating pace, and he believed he had a duty as a poet to confront the resulting spiritual vacuum. Setting aside the vexed question of Stevens\u2019s own religion, a reader of \u201cSunday Morning\u201d is encouraged to find wisdom in the varieties of experience Stevens offers as earthly substitutes for otherworldly bliss.<\/p>\n

Stevens rejoices in fleeting phenomena, such as \u201cgusty \/ Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights,\u201d that exist only where \u201cchange of death\u201d holds sway, and that give rise to passions, moods, even ideas. By cultivating imaginative attention to these experiences, Stevens suggests, an observer can discover metaphors that illuminate some aspect of his or her relation to the world. Abstraction is key here\u2014one of his Adagia<\/em> suggests that \u201cThe momentum of the mind is all toward abstraction.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"stanza1\"<\/a>

Stanza 1 (Complacencies of the peignoir)<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Some of the visual responses in the paintings seem fairly direct, as in the painting for the first stanza<\/a>, suffused with the \u201cgreen freedom of a cockatoo\u201d and acting as herald for Stevens\u2019s verdant poem. But metaphoric relations also occur outside color symbolism. In the almost colorless painting corresponding to the fourth stanza<\/a>, where warbling birds in the predawn stillness \u201ctest the reality \/ Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings,\u201d faint hues give the mind room to concentrate on composition. The painting\u2019s borders sharpen and assume geometric clarity as an indeterminate pastel color, shading towards marigold, floats from the paper. This colored pathway might conjure the margin of trees or hedges where the birds are sheltering as they test the blankness nearby. No bird has yet entered the field to perceive its full reality, nor will the noonday sun blaze on the \u201cgreen and actual\u201d world of summer until the following painting.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Stanza 4 (She says, I am content when wakened birds, before they fly)<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Taking its title from the stanza\u2019s third line, \u201cDeath is the mother of beauty,\u201d the fifth painting<\/a> uses bold midsummer colors to summon memories of fleeting joy and pleasure\u2019s inevitable decay. Its internal lines hum with energy that surges through the colors. One\u2019s gaze travels not only across but into<\/em> either field. As one color comes into focus, tension with the peripheral color gathers intensity, until one\u2019s eye is pulled back to the vibrating center, where the balance of space, hue, and contrast is struck.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Stanza 5 (Death is the Mother of Beauty)<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Subsequent paintings suggest the flecked russet of pears in the sixth<\/a> stanza, followed by the flaring, \u201csavage\u201d sun of the seventh<\/a>, and finally the mysterious undulations of pigeons gliding \u201cdownward to darkness\u201d in the eighth<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In Stevens\u2019s philosophy, any act of intense perception is a kind of poem. Each such experience joins other vivid, vanishing moments to create the \u201cwhole of harmonium\u201d\u2014his projected title for his life\u2019s work. The paintings we\u2019ve been discussing both result from and invite such acts of imaginative perception, participating in the motion and change that \u201cSunday Morning\u201d celebrates. They conceal themselves from a cursory glance, opening gradually at each encounter.<\/p>\n

Marissa Grunes received her B.A. from Yale University and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in English at Harvard University, where she concentrates on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature. She writes about the literary culture of a World War I internment camp in Germany for Et Seq.<\/a>, a blog of the Harvard Law School Library.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A vision of Wallace Stevens\u2019s \u201cSunday Morning\u201d at its centenary. When \u201cSunday Morning\u201d was first published in the November 1915 issue of Poetry, just over a hundred years ago, Wallace Stevens was thirty-six; the poem was one of his first major publications. He\u2019d recently moved to the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, where he would […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":944,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[21455,2189,8513,21452,15339,21456,15331,6509,4524,67,7221,165,21453,21451,792,21454],"class_list":["post-95411","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-abstraction","tag-borders","tag-color","tag-diane-szczepaniak","tag-experimentation","tag-interdisciplinary-art","tag-metaphor","tag-minimalism","tag-modernism","tag-painting","tag-poems","tag-poetry","tag-stanzas","tag-sunday-morning","tag-wallace-stevens","tag-water-colors"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nPainting a Poem\u2014Diane Szczepaniak\u2019s Watercolors & Wallace Stevens<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Marissa Grunes on her mother\u2019s paintings, 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