THIS catalogue might be increased to larger proportions without stimulating the sense.
In works of the imagination that which is taken for great good sense, so that it seems as if an accurate precept were discovered, is in reality not so, but vigor and accuracy of the imagination alone. In work such as Shakespeares —
This leads to the discovery that has been made today — old catalogues aside — full of meat —
“the divine illusion has about it that inaccuracy which reveals that which I mean”.
There is only „ illusion” in art where ignorance of the bystander confuses imagination and its works with cruder processes. Truly men feel an enlargement before great or good work, an expansion but this is not, as so many believe today a „ lie”, a stupefaction, a kind of mesmerism, a thing to block out “life”, bitter to the individual, by a “vision of beauty." It is a work of the imagination. It gives the feeling of completion by revealing the oneness of experience; it rouses rather than stupefies the intelligence by demonstrating the importance of personality, by showing the individual, depressed before it, that his life is valuable — when completed by the imagination. And then only. Such work elucidates —
Such a realization shows us the falseness of attempting to “copy” nature. The thing is equally silly when we try to “make” pictures —
But such a picture as that of Juan Gris, though I have not seen it in color, is important as marking more clearly than any I have seen what the modern trend is: the attempt is being made to separate things of the imagination from life, and obviously, by using the forms common to experience so as not to frighten the onlooker away but to invite him,
The rose is obsolete
but each petal ends in
an edge, the double facet
cementing the grooved
columns of air — The edge
cuts without cutting
meets — nothing — renews
itself in metal or porcelain —
whither? It ends —
But if it ends
the start is begun
so that to engage roses
becomes a geometry —
Sharper, neater, more cutting
figured in majolica —
the broken plate
glazed with a rose
Somewhere the sense
makes copper roses
steel roses —
The rose carried weight of love
but love is at an end — of roses
If is at the edge of the
petal that love waits
Crisp, worked to defeat
laboredness — fragile
plucked, moist, half-raised
cold, precise, touching
What
The place between the petal’s
edge and the
From the petal’s edge a line starts
that being of steel
infinitely fine, infinitely
rigid penetrates
the Milky Way
without contact — lifting
from it — neither hanging
nor pushing —
The fragility of the flower
unbruised
penetrates spaces
VIII
The sunlight in a
yellow plaque upon the
varnished floor
is full of a song
inflated to
fifty pounds pressure
at the faucet, of
June that rings
the triangle of the air
pulling at the
anemonies in
Persephone’s cow pasture —
When from among
the steel rocks leaps
J. P. M.
who enjoyed
extraordinary privileges
among virginity
to solve the core
of whirling flywheels
by cutting
the Gordian knot
with a Veronese or
perhaps a Rubens —
whose ears are about
the finest on
the market today —
And so it comes
to motor ears —
which is the son
leaving off the g
of sunlight and grass —
Impossible
to say, impossible
to underestimate —
wind, earthquakes in
Manehuria, a
partridge
from dry leaves
things with which he is familiar, simple things — at the same time to detach them from ordinary experience to the imagination. Thus they are still “real” they are the same things they would be it photographed or painted by Monet, they are recognizable as the things touched by the hands during the day, but in this painting they are seen to be in some peculiar way — detached
Here is a shutter, a bunch of grapes, a sheet of music, a picture of sea and mountains (particularly fine) which the onlooker is not for a moment permitted to witness as an “illusion." One thing laps over on the other, the cloud laps over on the shutter, the bunch of grapes is part of the handle of the guitar, the mountain and sea are obviously not “the mountain and sea”, but a picture of the mountain and the sea. All drawn with admirable simplicity and excellent design — all a unity —
This was not necessary where the subject of art was not “reality” but related to the “gods” — by force or otherwise. There was no need of the “illusion” in such a case since there was none possible where a picture or a work represented simply the imaginative reality which existed in the mind of the onlooker. No special effort was necessary to cleave where the cleavage already existed.
I don’t know what the Spanish see in their Velasquez and Goya but
Today where everything is being brought into sight the realism of art has bewildered us, confused us and forced us to re-invent in order to retain that which the older generations had without that effort.
Cezanne —
The only realism in art is of the imagination. It is only thus that the work escapes plagiarism after nature and becomes a creation
Invention of new forms to embody this reality of art, the one thing which art is, must occupy all serious minds concerned.
From the time of Poe in the U. S. — the first American poet had to be a man of great separation — with close identity with life. Poe could not have written a word without the violence of expulsive emotion combined with the in-driving force of a crudely repressive environment. Between the two his imagination was forced into being to keep him to that reality, completeness, sense of escape which is felt in his work — his topics. Typically American — accurately, even inevitably set in his time.
So, after this tedious diversion — whatever of dull you find among my work, put it down to criticism, not to poetry. You will not be mistaken — Who am I but my own critic? Surely in isolation one becomes a god — At least one becomes something of everything, which is not wholly godlike, yet a little so — in many things.
It is not necessary to count every flake of the truth that falls; it is necessary to dwell in the imagination if the truth is to be numbered. It is necessary to speak from the imagination —
The great furor about perspective in Holbein’s day had as a consequence much fine drawing, it made coins defy gravity, standing on the table as if in the act of falling. To say this was lifelike must have been satisfying to the master, it gave depth, pungency.
But all the while the picture escaped notice — partly because of the perspective. Or if noticed it was for the most part because one could see “the birds pecking at the grapes” in it.
Meanwhile the birds were pecking at the grapes outside the window and in the next street Bauermeister Kummel was letting a gold coin slip from his fingers to the counting table.
The representation was perfect, it “said something one was used to hearing” but with verve, cleverly.
Thus perspective a
nd clever drawing kept the picture continually under cover of the “beautiful illusion” until today, when even Anatole France trips, saying: "Art — all lies!” — today when we are beginning to discover the truth that in great works of the imagination A CREATIVE FORCE IS SHOWN AT WORK MAKING OBJECTS WHICH ALONE COMPLETE SCIENCE AND ALLOW INTELLIGENCE TO SURVIVE — his picture lives anew. It lives as pictures only can: by their power TO ESCAPE ILLUSION and stand between man and nature as saints once stood between man and the sky — their reality in such work, say, as that of Juan Gris
No man could suffer the fragmentary nature of his understanding of his own life —
Whitman’s proposals are of the same piece with the modern trend toward imaginative understanding of life. The largeness which he interprets as his identity with the least and the greatest about him, his “democracy” represents the vigor of his imaginative life.
IX
What about all this writing?
O “Kiki”
O Miss Margaret Jarvis
The backhandspring
I: clean
clean
clean: yes.. New-York
Wrigley’s, appendecitis, John Marin:
skyscraper soup —
Either that or a bullet!
Once
anything might have happened
You lay relaxed on my knees —
the starry night
spread out warm and blind
above the hospital —
Pah!
It is unclean
which is not straight to the mark —
In my life the furniture eats me
the chairs, the floor
the walls
which heard your sobs
drank up my emotion —
they which alone know everything
and snitched on us in the morning —
What to want?
Drunk we go forward surely
Not I
beds, beds, beds
elevators, fruit, night-tables
breasts to see, white and blue —
to hold in the hand, to nozzle
It is not onion soup
Your sobs soaked through the walls
breaking the hospital to pieces
Everything
— windows, chairs
obscenely drunk, spinning —
white ,blue, orange
— hot with our passion
wild tears, desperate rejoinders
my legs, turning slowly
end over end in the air!
But what would you have?
All I said was:
there, you see, it is broken
stockings, shoes, hairpins
your bed, I wrapped myself round you —
I watched.
You sobbed, you beat your pillow
you tore your hair
you dug your nails into your sides
I was your nightgown
I watched!
Clean is he alone
after whom stream
the broken pieces of the city —
flying apart at his approaches
but I merely
caress you curiously
fifteen years ago and you still
go about the city, they say
patching up sick school children
Understood in a practical way, without calling upon mystic agencies, of this or that order, it is that life becomes actual only when it is identified with ourselves. When we name it, life exists. To repeat physical experiences has no —
The only means he has to give value to life is to recognise it with the imagination and name it; this is so. To repeat and repeat the thing without naming it is only to dull the sense and results in frustration.
this make the artist the prey of life. He is easy of attack.
I think often of my earlier work and what it has cost me not to have been clear. I acknowledge I have moved chaotically about refusing or rejecting most things, seldom accepting values or acknowledging anything.
because I early recognised the futility of acquisitive understanding and at the same time rejected religious dogmatism. My whole life has been spent (so far) in seeking to place a value upon experience and the objects of experience that would satisfy my sense of inclusiveness without redundancy — completeness, lack of frustration with the liberty of choice; the things which the pursuit of « art » offers —
But though I have felt « free » only in the presence of works of the imagination, knowing the quickening of the sense which came of it, and though this experience has held me firm at such times, yet being of a slow but accurate understanding, I have not always been able to complete the intellectual steps which would make me firm in the position.
So most of my life has been lived in hell — a hell of repression lit by flashes of inspiration, when a poem such as this or that would appear
What would have happened in a world similarly lit by the imagination
Oh yes, you are a writter! a phrase that has often damned me, to myself. I rejected it with heat but the stigma remained. Not a man, not an understanding but a WRITER. I was unable to recognize.
I do not forget with what heat too I condemned some poems of some contemporary praised because of their loveliness —
I find that I was somewhat mistaken — ungenerous
Life’s processes are very simple. One or two moves are made and that is the end. The rest is repetitious.
The Improvisations — coming at a time when I was trying to remain firm at great cost — I had recourse to the expedient of letting life go completely in order to live in the world of my choice.
I let the imagination have its own way to see if it could save itself. Something very definite came of it. I found myself alleviated but most important I began there and then to revalue experience, to understand what I was at —
The virtue of the improvisations is their placement in a world of new values —
their fault is their dislocation of sense, often complete. But it is the best I could do under the circumstances. It was the best I could do and retain any value to experience, at all.
Now I have come to a different condition. I find that the values there discovered can be extended. I find myself extending the understanding to the work of others and to other things —
I find that there is work to be done in the creation of new forms, new names for experience
and that « beauty » is related not to «loveliness » but to a state in which reality playes a part
Such painting as that of Juan Gris, coming after the impressionists, the expressionists, Cezanne — and dealing severe strokes as well to the expression-its as to the impressionists group — points forward to what will prove the greatest painting yet produced.
— the illusion once dispensed with, painting has this problem before it: to replace not the forms but the reality of experience with its own —
up to now shapes and meanings but always the illusion relying on composition to give likeness to « nature »
now works of art cannot be left in this category of France’s « lie », they must be real, not « realism » but reality itself —
they must give not the sense of frustration but a sense of completion, of actuality — It is not a matter of « representation » — much may be represented actually, but of separate existence.
X
The universality of things
draws me toward the candy
with melon flowers that open
about the edge of refuse
proclaiming without accent
the quality of the farmer’s
shoulders and his daughter’s
accidental skin, so sweet
with clover and the small
yellow cinquefoil in the
parched places. It is
this that engages the favorable
distortion of eyeglasses
that see ev
erything and remain
related to mathematics —
in the most practical frame of
brown celluloid made to
represent tortoiseshell —
A letter from the man who
wants to start a new magazine
made of linen
and he owns a typewriter —
July 1, 1922
All this is for eyeglasses
to discover. But
they lie there with the gold
earpieces folded down
tranquilly Titicaca —
XI
In passing with my mind
on nothing in the world
but the right of way
I enjoy on the road by
virtue of the law
I saw
an elderly man who
smiled and looked away
to the north past a house —
a woman in blue
who was laughing and
leaning forward to look up
into the man’s half
averted face
and a boy of eight who was
looking at the middle of
the man’s belly
at a watchchain —
The supreme importance
of this nameless spectacle
sped me by them
without a word —
Why bother where I went?
for I went spinning on the
four wheels of my car
along the wet road until
I saw a girl with one leg
over the rail of a balcony
When in the condition of imaginative suspense only will the writting have reality, as explained partially in what preceeds — Not to attempt, at that time, to set values on the word being used, according to presupposed measures, but to write down that which happens at that time —
To perfect the ability to record at the moment when the consciousness is enlarged by the sympathies and the unity of understanding which the imagination gives, to practice skill in recording the force moving, then to know it, in the largeness of its proportions —
It is the presence of a
This is not “fit” but a unification of experience
That is, the imagination is an actual force comparable to electricity or steam, it is not a plaything but a power that has been used from the first to raise the understanding of — it is, not necessary to resort to mystecisism — In fact it is this which has kept back the knowledge I seek —