The Emperor of Ice Cream

Perhaps the most important American bard of "aesthetic bliss" was Wallace Stevens. Twenty years Nabokov's senior, Stevens was, like Nabokov, a literary genius whose works are at once difficult and engaging, with a strangely seductive music that has the capacity to haunt one long after a poem has been read, dissected, and forgotten.

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.


Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

("The Emperor of Ice Cream," from Harmonium).

Throughout his remarkable body of work, Stevens wrestled with a dialectic he posed as "imagination" versus "reality." This poem illustrates an early expression of that tension as the poet juxtaposes the death of an old woman with the festivities being prepared to commemorate the occasion. The intense aestheticism of the poet's apprehension does not lose sight of the shadows of mortality; yet, it cannot help but revel in the oddly comic gloss that the funeral preparations lend to the moment at hand. One may find relief from the oppressive facts of the human condition, if only in the ridiculous--or near ridiculous. For the poet does not obviously ridicule the proceedings; he remarks upon them, albeit with the "sly smile" of the refrain.

Like Nabokov, Stevens had arrived at the place "where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm": the place where "the two seas meet."

(Qur'an 18:60).

Nabokov Interviewed

Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 40, Vladimir Nabokov

Aesthetic Bliss

For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.

--Vladimir Nabokov, On A Book Entitled Lolita.

Nabokov made it to the place where the "two seas" (the sea of lectio divina and the sea of lectio humana) meet.

Faced with the Choice between Philosophy and Candor, Richard Rorty Chose Candor

Max Ehrmann

I suppose it was an early '70's thing, but Max Ehrmann's Desiderata graced my bedroom wall from the time I was in Middle School until I went off to college.

Ehrmann was a lawyer-turned-writer from Terre Haute, Indiana. Nothing he wrote ever caught fire during his lifetime but, after his death, this particular set of admonitions took on a life of its own.

Desiderata is simple, folksy, American wisdom literature with universal appeal. Solid and unpretentious, like its author. Indeed, that is its greatest drawback: for who wants to believe that the secret to living a good and decent life could have been penned in the 20th century by a relatively obscure son of German immigrants to the United States? Where is the drama in that? And where is the tragedy?

If there is tragedy to be associated with these lines, it is not in their production but in their reception. It is tragic that such sound advice could be deemed trite. Plain-spoken common sense, in short supply these days, was, at one time, a peculiarly American virtue. When Americans became too "smart" or "worldly" for such trifles, we abandoned the only genius we had to offer history.

Coleman Barks

Interprets Mevlana.

Omar Ibn Said

Organic intellectual in the slave-holding south.