"Barefoot in reality"

Big Frank opened his collected works of Wallace Stevens this morning and this is the poem that presented itself to him: “Large Red Man Reading”. Imagine a large red man lit by the setting sun starkly outlined against a bright blue sky reading to disembodied ghosts from the book of life – the stuff of life, the real hard, concrete things that surround you. That is what this poem is all about; how poetry can reawaken you to the glories that surround you – much as Wordsworth wrote about in his Ode: Intimations of Immortality along with Whitman in Leaves of Grass:

"Clear and sweet is my Soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my Soul.
Lack one lacks both, and the unseen is proved by the seen,
Till that becomes unseen, and receives proof in its turn."

Large Red Man Reading

There were ghosts that returned to earth to hear his phrases,
As he sat there reading, aloud, the great blue tabulae.
They were those from the wilderness of stars that had expected more.

There were those that returned to hear him read from the poem of life,
Of the pans above the stove, the pots on the table, the tulips among them.
They were those that would have wept to step barefoot into reality,

That would have wept and been happy, have shivered in the frost
And cried out to feel it again, have run fingers over leaves
And against the most coiled thorn, have seized on what was ugly

And laughed, as he sat there reading, from out of the purple tabulae,
The outlines of being and its expressings, the syllables of its law:
Poesis, poesis, the literal characters, the vatic lines,

Which in those ears and in those thin, those spended hearts,
Took on color, took on shape and the size of things as they are
And spoke the feeling for them, which was what they had lacked.

---- Wallace Stevens

I thought, on the train, how utterly we have forsaken the Earth, in the sense of excluding it from our thoughts. There are but few who consider its physical hugeness, its rough enormity. It is still a disparate monstrosity, full of solitudes & barrens & wilds. It still dwarfs & terrifies & crushes. The rivers still roar, the mountains still crash, the winds still shatter. Man is an affair of cities. His gardens & orchards & fields are mere scrapings. Somehow, however, he has managed to shut out the face of the giant from his windows. But the giant is there, nevertheless.
---- Wallace Stevens from Souvenirs and Prophecies

The painting is Robert Rauschenberg's "Page 42, Paragraph 1 (Short Stories)". He was a master at presenting the stuff of life in art.