[Image: “Three Worlds” (1955), by M.C. Escher. As you can read in this essay at the website of the Escher in Het Palais museum, this was actually Escher’s third attempt to capture the effect, starting in 1950. The print served as the front-cover illustration for Beaver & Krause‘s influential electronica album, In a Wild Sanctuary (1970).]

From whiskey river:

The American Sublime

How does one stand
To behold the sublime,
To confront the mockers,
The mickey mockers
And plated pairs?

When General Jackson
Posed for his statue
He knew how one feels.
Shall a man go barefoot
Blinking and blank?

But how does one feel?
One grows used to the weather,
The landscape and that;
And the sublime comes down
To the spirit itself,

The spirit and space,
The empty spirit
In vacant space.
What wine does one drink?
What bread does one eat?

(Wallace Stevens [source])

…and:

A normal existence—what could be more irrational? It’s fantastic the number of things you’re forced not to think about in order to go from one end of the day to the other without jumping the track! And the number of memories that have to be driven from your mind, the truths that have to be evaded!

(Simone de Beauvoir [source])

…and (last stanza):

There is a dream going on while I am awake.
Because I must pay attention to what
is happening around me, I am unconscious
of the dream. When I sleep, the daylight
things fade out and the perpetual dream
surfaces fully and is memorable.
When I die, the dream is the only
thing left. It balloons and fills the world.

As a writer, I coax partly into action
that internally coherent, silent story.
I let my conscious life yield a little,
and a little more, and occasionally a great way,
to my best needs and hopes: whatever
I mean by my best, whatever I mean
by my judgments on the happenings around me,
that center and guide is invited to have its way.

For intervals, then, throughout our lives
we savor a concurrence, the great blending
of our chance selves with what sustains
all chance. We ride the wave and are
the wave. And with renewed belief
inner and outer we find our talk
turned to prayer, our prayer into truth:
for an interval, early, we become at home in the world.

(William Stafford [source])

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