Real Numbers:
An Object Lesson
An Object Lesson
(continued from
Anti-Christmas)
Anti-Christmas)
A Cornell professor discusses a poem by Wallace Stevens:
"Professor Eucalyptus in 'Ordinary Evening' XIV, for example, 'seeks/ God in the object itself,' but this quest culminates in his own choosing of 'the commodious adjective/ For what he sees… the description that makes it divinity, still speech… not grim/ Reality but reality grimly seen/ And spoken in paradisal parlance new'…."
— Douglas Mao, Solid Objects:
Modernism and the Test
of Production,
Princeton University Press,
1998, p. 242
Modernism and the Test
of Production,
Princeton University Press,
1998, p. 242
"God in the object" seems
unlikely to be found in the
artifact pictured on the
cover of Mao's book:
unlikely to be found in the
artifact pictured on the
cover of Mao's book:
I have more confidence
that God is to be found
in the Ping Pong balls
of the New York Lottery.
that God is to be found
in the Ping Pong balls
of the New York Lottery.
These objects may be
regarded as supplying
a parlance that is, if not
paradisal, at least
intelligible– if only in
the context of my own
personal experience:
Journal entry dated 5/14:
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