> Martin writes:
> "Come off it. Beliefs are unavoidable, and unsubstantiated ones at
> that. I believe in the power of evil and the evil of power and my
> beliefs are often challenged."
>
> They might be unavoidable, but what would be the point of worship or
> exaltation?...as Wallace Stevens would have us do...
I'm not a Stevens expert by any means, but in the absence of any such august persons, I will venture to suggest that Stevens' view of religion (at least the organized, Christianity-like type) was much more negative that you suggest.
I quote from Helen Vendler's essay on Stevens in the book she edited, _Voices & Visions: The Poet in America_:
"Wallace Stevens distinguished his twentieth-century version of the twilight of the Gods from Norse and Greek versions:
'It is not as if they had gone over the horizon to disappear for a time; nor as if they had been overcome by other gods of greater power and profounder knowledge. It is simply that they came to nothing.'
"The extinction of religious belief represented for Stevens a crisis of the imagination, which had possessed, in the past, various therapeutic, solacing, and inspiring notions (those of God, heaven and hell, eternity, omnipotence, transcendence, Incarnation, and so on) which it had now to do without. 'It was their annihilation,' Stevens writes of the gods, 'not ours, and yet it left us feeling dispossessed and alone in a solitude, like children without parents, in a house that seemed deserted.' For many writers, the sense of religious loss provoked a religious nostalgia. Stevens thought this a false position. The gods are remembered, of course, because they are represented in our art and literature: 'they had been a part of the glory of the earth. At the same time, no man ever muttered a petition in his heart for the restoration of those unreal shapes' [Opus Postumus, 206–7]." (Voices & Visions, p. 123)
Reading Doug's quote from _Adagia_ ("The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.") in this light brings out a meaning which I think no one has seen so far in this thread. I would especially emphasize the words "which you *know* to be a fiction, there being *nothing else.*" "Fictions," of course, was a kind of technical term for Stevens, meaning something like creations of the imagination which we make (remember that the root of the word "fiction" is the Latin word for "making") in order to give meaning and order to a chaos that does not have either:
"Stevens argued that poetry is a 'supreme fiction' that shapes chaos and provides order to both nature and human relationships."
<http://www.bedfordstmartins.com/litlinks/poetry/stevens.htm>
And there is what looks like a very good on-line paper ("The Quest for the Fiction of an Absolute: The Mystic's Movement from Ancient Sacrifice to Supreme Fiction in Wallace Stevens") at <http://www.brysons.net/academic/fictionofanabsolute.html>. (Haven't had time yet to do more than glance at it.)
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ When I was a little boy, I had but a little wit, 'Tis a long time ago, and I have no more yet; Nor ever ever shall, until that I die, For the longer I live the more fool am I. -- Wit and Mirth, an Antidote against Melancholy (1684)