[...]... repudiation of the “transparent eyeball” and the opacity of the axis of things.” The desire to be a disembodied eye and the fantasy of seeing through things by an Emersonian redemption of the soul are the inflations of the physical he shuns At the core of Olson’s teaching there is an affirmation of the inescapable centrality of the poet’s body, a thoroughly Whitmanian revision of Emerson The body is... begins the fourth lecture of Narration: “After all anybody is as their land and air is It is that which makes them and the arts they make and the work they do and the way they eat and the way they drink and they way they learn and everything.”2 It is characteristic that an avowed anti-Emersonian poet such as Charles Olson, who deliberately aligned himself with Melville’s rejection of the Sage of Concord,... at the necessity of beauty under which the universe lies; that all is and must be pictorial; that the rainbow and the curve of the horizon and the arch of the blue vault are only results from the organism of the eye Let us build altars to the Beautiful Necessity, which secures that all is made of one piece; that plaintiff and defendant, friend and enemy, animal and planet, food and eater are of. .. Sonata.” More often they have been unwitting Emersonians, or even Emersonians in spite of themselves Gertrude Stein is an example of the former, John Cage and Charles Olson of the latter I shall focus on them as significant figures in the transmission of Emersonian aesthetics to the filmmakers at the core of this book, although they are by no means the only exemplars that might have been chosen They represent... Appendix: Chronology of Films 401 Index 409 243 Eyes Upside Down This page intentionally left blank Introduction: Emersonian Poetics T he art of the first British settlers of America was literary, originating in the severe rhetoric of New England divines Absolutely convinced of their election, and often ferociously excoriating the heresy of toleration, they theologized the very idea of America as a redemption... of an audience from a darker moment of solipsism than Emerson will allow here It is one of her versions of his earlier noncoincidence of the axes of vision and of things: That is to say can does any one separate themselves from the land so they can see it and if they see it are they the audience of it or to it If you see anything are you its audience and if you tell anything are you its audience, and. .. time, has the qualities of this moment of time/3 The peculiarly Emersonian inflection of this commonplace would be the invocation of Necessity or Ananke under the guise of “law.” The transformation of Necessity into a category of poetics is one of the dominant Emersonian features of American aesthetic theory that I shall 1 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Lectures (New York: Library of America, 1983), pp... images and film shots as Stein treats road signs (some of those images may even be road signs), looking at the poetry of their movement and detachment I also point out elements in their films that might be viewed as implicit responses to themes and tropes in the major essays of Emerson and the central poems of Whitman The objective of Stein’s Narration is the displacement of narrative as “a telling of what... Meanwhile within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE And this deep power in which we exist, and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object are one If... twentieth century, the aesthetics of the Beautiful Necessity animated the debate on the function and value of chance in making art The expansiveness of the Emersonian heritage makes John Cage, who tirelessly sought to erase the distinctions between art and life, and Stan Brakhage, the orphic filmmaker whose poesis was a religious vocation, coequal heirs of the Beautiful Necessity, although they invoke it . Eyes Upside Down: Visionary Filmmakers and the Heritage of Emerson P. Adams Sitney Oxford University Press Eyes Upside Down This page intentionally left blank Eyes Upside Down Visionary Filmmakers. or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sitney, P. Adams. Eyes upside down : visionary fi lmmakers and the heritage.  Introduction: Emersonian Poetics T he art of the fi rst British settlers of America was literary, originating in the severe rhetoric of New England divines. Absolutely convinced of their election, and often