Sensuality dependancy

To lose sensibility, to see what one sees,
As if sight had not its own miraculous thrift,
To hear only what one hears, one meaning alone,
As if the paradise of meaning ceased- Wallace Stevens

At the start of this class I thought the whole point was to analyze and interpret the meaning of Wallace Stevens poems, to a point yes we are, but I've learned through this course that it's much more than that. Each of us use our own abilities to interpret between reality and imagination. We do this any way we wish to do so by whatever definitions we choose. But more importantly we interpret his crazy poems, and yes I believe they are crazy sometimes. His poems make us visualize things, our visualizations are done through eye sight. Stevens makes us hear things with our own ears. Not always are these sounds and visualizations real, the physical presence real, but they are real in our mind. Our imagination, but real.

Sexson asked me to explain my improved eye sight over the loss of my hearing. It simply is that because I could not hear much of anything that i relied on anything I could see. Examples from class that were hands on, books (I read the dictionary as a child because I felt left out playing with kids), and I also learned to read lips even from far distances just because I could see lips moving but not hear the sounds that were being made. Since I used my eye sight so much more dependably, it improved at the same rate my hearing decreased. By the time I was 16 I no longer needed large biofocal lenses but could wear low impact contacts. I debated for a while about whether or not I would include a photo from when I was younger to basically give a "visualization" of how large my glasses were. You cannot see the depth of them but there were usually about 1/4 to 1/2 inch thick.

 

As we talked in class today about the poem stanza IV:

Two things of opposite natures seem to depend
On one another, as a man depends
On a woman, day on night, the imagined

On the real. This is the origin of change.
Winter and spring, cold copulers, embrace
And forth the particulars of rapture come.

Music falls on the silence like a sense,
A passion that we feel, not understand.
Morning and afternoon are clasped together

And North and South are an intrinsic couple
And sun and rain a plural, like two lovers
That walk away as one in the greenest body.

For me my eye sight depended on my hearing, my silence created my sight.