Maybe this is a stretch. It's certainly a bit outdated with the approach of Christmas - the holiday for which Thanksgiving serves as an healing balm.
Thanksgiving is celebrated as a time to count our blessings, a harvest festival with ancient roots tied to the natural high-latitude season for chowing down.
But in a world of mechanized agriculture, in a colonized land filled with immigrants of various races, ethnicities and religions, I'm thinking the cultural significance of Thanksgiving stems from its symbolism of community harmony. Thanks for not killing me. I have no plans to kill you.
Think of the iconic image of Thanksgiving: pilgrims and Native American's dining together. An armistice before the grueling winter. We're all in this together. Pass the turkey, please.
At Thanksgiving, Jews, Muslims and Christians can - and do - dine together without the theological ackwardness that accompanies religious holidays like Christmas, Hannukah or Ramadan. (Saying grace aside, of course.)
Next time someone asks me what holiday is the most important in America, I'm going to tell them it's Thanksgiving.
Showing posts with label Symbolism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Symbolism. Show all posts
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Friday, April 24, 2009
You are what you analogize
A stanza from Wallace Stevens poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird was display on the home page of Poet.org this morning.
The poem reminds me of William Carlos Williams' Red Wheel Barrow and Archibald MacLeish's Ars Poetica, in that it seems to be a meta-poem, a poem about writing poems, about the nature of art.
The entry for Stevens on the site placed him between the English Romantics and the French Symbolists -- between, and I'm interpolating here, "inflection" and "innuendo." Which got me onto Symbolism (so attracted to abstraction, the French). The Poetry Portal says the Symbolists "rejected the pastoral tradition, and took their themes and images from city life, emphasizing its bleak, hallucinatory and/or illicit aspects."
This is, of course, only one characteristic of the Symbolist movement. But it got me thinking about the imagery and analogies (not to mention forms and techniques) writers use change over time.
Homer derived most of his imagery from nature. The exception to Homers nature-based imagery may be the scene in the Iliad in which Hephaestus makes armor for Achilles; his animated forges and girls made of metal are VERY unnatural, the stuff of science fiction. These rare technology-based images aside, Homer was grounded in nature. How many Homeric similes in the Iliad depict a lion ravaging a sheep while quaking shepherds watch? His audience were farmers themselves and intimately acquainted with nature, so those analogies were accessible to them.
It makes sense then that people living in cities would write for other people living in cities by using urban imagery. Suburbanite that I am, I'm wondering how to work Starbucks and rush-hour traffic into my writing.
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendos,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
The poem reminds me of William Carlos Williams' Red Wheel Barrow and Archibald MacLeish's Ars Poetica, in that it seems to be a meta-poem, a poem about writing poems, about the nature of art.
The entry for Stevens on the site placed him between the English Romantics and the French Symbolists -- between, and I'm interpolating here, "inflection" and "innuendo." Which got me onto Symbolism (so attracted to abstraction, the French). The Poetry Portal says the Symbolists "rejected the pastoral tradition, and took their themes and images from city life, emphasizing its bleak, hallucinatory and/or illicit aspects."
This is, of course, only one characteristic of the Symbolist movement. But it got me thinking about the imagery and analogies (not to mention forms and techniques) writers use change over time.
Homer derived most of his imagery from nature. The exception to Homers nature-based imagery may be the scene in the Iliad in which Hephaestus makes armor for Achilles; his animated forges and girls made of metal are VERY unnatural, the stuff of science fiction. These rare technology-based images aside, Homer was grounded in nature. How many Homeric similes in the Iliad depict a lion ravaging a sheep while quaking shepherds watch? His audience were farmers themselves and intimately acquainted with nature, so those analogies were accessible to them.
It makes sense then that people living in cities would write for other people living in cities by using urban imagery. Suburbanite that I am, I'm wondering how to work Starbucks and rush-hour traffic into my writing.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
