quaint and curious volumes, take number whatevereth

Nicolas Bouvier's The Way of the World, the account of his 1953-54 trip from his native Switzerland to the Khyber Pass by way of Yugoslavia, Turkey, Iran and Pakistan (Afghanistan would come later), has just been republished in an NYRB Books Classics edition. As usual with these NYRB titles, I know this one only from a display ad.

But seeing the ad brought back memories of seeing Bouvier's photographs from that trip (not reproduced in the account of the journey, which was illustrated by drawings by his travel companion Thierry Vernet) in a traveling exhibition curated by Pierre Starobinski, which came to Oglethorpe University in the spring of 2001.

I was struck by the curator's family name and remarked that he shared it with a famous phenomenological critic of literature. Jean Starobinski, it turned out, is Pierre's father. I hadn't thought of the Geneva School of what Sarah Lawall called "Critics of Consciousness" in a very long while, but they had been my role models back in the innocent pre-poststructuralist day. Don't ask. You don't want to know. It goes back to my Readings in Existential Phenomenology textbook at U.C. Santa Barbara and my quest for some kind of descriptive system of perception and consciousness that would get me out of the blind alleys of the disciples of Carl Jung.

I learn from Wikipedia that Nicolas Bouvier...well, I quote verbatim: "At the end of the 1950s, the World Health Organization asked him to find images on the eye and its diseases. Thus Bouvier discovered, 'through the chances of life,' his profession of 'image searcher,' which perhaps appealed to him because 'images, like music, speak a universal language,' as suggested by Pierre Starobinski in his preface to Le Corps, miroir du Monde - voyage dans le musée imaginaire de Nicolas Bouvier. Another posthumous work, Entre errance et éternité, offers a poetic look at the mountains of the world. The iconographer commented on some of his finds in a series of articles for Le Temps stratégique, collected together as Histoires d'une image."

Two or Three Ideas: Actually, Maybe Only One, re an Earlier Post

The New York Review of Books has the irritating tic of charging its print subscribers extra to access the online edition, so I can do no more than offer you the table of contents: http://www.nybooks.com/contents/20091119

However, the November 19 edition contains a review by Dan Chiasson that buttresses some of my assertions regarding Wallace Stevens in my post of ten or twelve days ago, to the point of making use of the same quotation I used to demonstrate Stevens' relationship to the world via individual visual perceptions rather than extended social interactions. (In fact, Chiasson goes considerably further than I went in that blog post, and I would now go still further, based on lines I've used before from "The Man with the Blue Guitar," section XXXII. But I'll spare you.)

Chiasson's most remarkable revelation, which I can't quote in detail because I can't access the text, is that a number of paintings and sculptures that belonged to Stevens are currently for sale for $2.2 million, and that a Kandinsky lithograph is among them. The Tal Coat painting that Stevens retitled "Angel Surrounded by Peasants" is also one of the works for sale. The poem "Angel Surrounded by Paysans," which introduces Stevens' "necessary angel" of reality, has a completely oblique relationship to the still life: Stevens wrote of the painting that "Now that I have had the new picture at home for a few days, it seems almost domesticated. Tal Coat is supposed to be a man of violence but one soon becomes accustomed to the present picture. I have even given it a title of my own: 'Angel Surrounded by Peasants.' The angel is the Venetian glass bowl on the left with the little spray of leaves in it. The peasants are the terrines, bottles and the glasses that surround it. This title alone tames it as a lump of sugar might tame a lion."

This is a fairly bizarre response to a painting. But it illustrates Stevens' need to perceive intensely and then to transmute physical perception into something manageable via the verbal and visual imagination. He truly is looking at "pictures" (as he always called paintings in his letters) and "throw[ing] away the lights, the definitions," and saying that what he sees is this or that, without using "the rotted names," as in the section of "The Man With the Blue Guitar" cited above.

And I am astonished, though literary critics knew it all along and put it in books such as the Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens, to find that "the necessary angel of earth" started life as a Venetian glass bowl in a painting by Tal Coat. In the angel/bowl's "sight, you see the earth again," just as we see it in a jar placed in Tennessee, round, upon a hill, in "Anecdote of the Jar."

Or in the places where old Neal got off the train in California, to return to my original post about Jack Kerouac and his improbable companions in ecstatic/eks-tatic perception.

But what did Stevens make of Kandinsky's abstract brand of ekstasis? I must return to the collected letters.

And one wonders whether Stevens or Kerouac are ever "standing outside" themselves in this perception of the physical object or its depiction, as it is translated at once into inwardness in a form that Rilke would have recognized. See the Duino Elegies. Or, better, get on with the day's tasks, and stop reading.