The value of the imagination to the writer consists in its ability to make words. Its unique power is to give created forms reality, actual existence
This separates
Writing is not a searching about in the daily experience for apt similies and pretty thoughts and images. I have experienced that to my sorrow. It is not a conscious recording of the day’s experiences “freshly and with the appearance of reality” — This sort of thing is seriously to the development of any ability in a man, it fastens him down, makes him a — It destroys, makes nature an accessory to the particular theory he is following, it blinds him to his world, —
The writer of imagination would find himself released from observing things for the purpose of writing them down later. He would be there to enjoy, to taste, to engage the free world, not a world which he carries like a bag of food, always fearful lest he drop something or someone get more than he,
A world detached from the necessity of recording it, sufficient to itself, removed from him (as it most certainly is) with which he has bitter and delicious relations and from which he is independant — moving at will from one thing to another — as he pleases, unbound — complete
and the unique proof of this is the work of the imagination not “like” anything but transfused with the same forces which transfuse the earth — at least one small part of them.
Nature is the hint to composition not because it is familiar to us and therefore the terms we apply to it have a least common denominator quality which gives them currency — but because it possesses the quality of independant existance, of reality which we feel in ourselves. It is not opposed to art but apposed to it.
I suppose Shakespeare’s familiar aphorism about holding the mirror up to nature has done more harm in stabilizing the copyist tendency of the arts among us than —
the mistake in it (though we forget that it is not S. speaking but an imaginative character of his) is to have believed that the reflection of nature is nature. It is not. It is only a sham nature, a “lie”.
Of course S. is the most conspicuous example desirable of the falseness of this very thing.
He holds no mirror up to nature but with his imagination rivals nature’s composition with his own.
He himself become “nature” — continuing “its” marvels — if you will
I am often diverted with a recital which I have made for myself concerning Shakespeare: he was a comparatively uninformed man, quite according to the orthodox tradition, who lived from first to last a life of amusing regularity and simplicity, a house and wife in the suburbs, delightful children, a girl at court (whom he really never confused with his writing) and a café life which gave him with the freshness of discovery, the information upon which his imagination fed. London was full of the concentrates of science and adventure. He saw at “The Mermaid” everything he knew. He was not conspicuous there except for his spirits.
His form was presented to him by Marlow, his stories were the common talk of his associates or else some compiler set them before him. His types were particularly quickened with life about him.
Feeling the force of life, in his peculiar intelligence, the great dome of his head, he had no need of anything but writing material to relieve himself of his thoughts. His very lack of scientific training loosened his power. He was unencumbered.
For S. to pretend to knowledge would have been ridiculous — no escape there — but that he possessed knowledge, and extraordinary knowledge, of the affairs which concerned him, as they concerned the others about him, was self-apparent to him. It was not apparent to the others.
His actual power was PURELY of the imagination. Not permitted to speak as W.S., in fact peculiarly barred from speaking so because of his lack of information, learning, not being able to rival his fellows in scientific training or adventure and at the same time being keen enough, imaginative enough, to know that there is no escape except in perfection, in excellence, in technical excellence — his buoyancy of imagination raised him NOT TO COPY them, not to holding the mirror up to them but to equal, to surpass them as a creator of knowledge, as a vigorous, living force above their heads.
His escape was not simulated but real. Hamlet no doubt was written about at the middle of his life.
He speaks authoritatively through invention, through characters, through design. The objects of his world were real to him because he could use them and use them with understanding to make his inventions —
The imagination is a —
The vermiculations of modern criticism of S. particularly amuse when the attempt is made to force the role of a Solon upon the creator of Richard 3d.
So I come again to my present day gyrations.
So it is with the other classics: their meaning and worth can only be studied and understood in the imagination — that which begot them only can give them life again, re-enkindle their perfection —
useless to study by rote or scientific research — Useful for certain understanding to corroborate the imagination —
Yes, Anatole was a fool when he said: It is a lie. — That is it. If the actor simulates life it is a lie. But — but why continue without an audience?
The reason people marvel at works of art and say: How in Christ’s name did he do it? — is that they know nothing of the physiology of the nervous system and have never in their experience witnessed the larger processes of the imagination.
It is a step over from the profitless engagements of the arithmetical.
XII
The red paper box
hinged with cloth
is lined
inside and out
with imitation
leather
It is the sun
the table
with dinner
on it for
these are the same —
Its twoinch trays
have engineers
that convey glue
to airplanes
or for old ladies
that darn socks
paper clips
and red elastics —
What is the end
to insects
that suck gummed
labels?
for this is eternity
through its
dial we discover
transparent tissue
on a spool
But the stars
are round
cardboard with
a tin edge
and a ring
to fasten them
to a trunk
for the vacation —
XIII
Crustaceous
wedge
of sweaty kitchens
on rock
overtopping
thrusts of the sea
Waves of steel
from
swarming backstreets
shell
of coral
inventing
electricity —
Lights
speckle
El Greco
in renaissance
twilight
with triphammers
which pulverize
nitrogen
of old pastures
to dodge
motorcars
with arms and legs —
The agregate
is untamed
encapsulating
irritants
but
of agonized spires
knits
peace
where bridge stanchions
rest
certainly
piercing
left ventricles
with long
sunburnt fingers
XIV
Of death
the barber
the barber
talked to me
cutting my
life with
sleep to trim
my hair —
It’s just
a moment
he said, we die
every night —
And of
the newest
ways to grow
hair on
bald death —
I told him
of the quartz
lamp
and of old men
with third
sets of teeth
to the cue
of an old man
who said
at the door —
Sunshine today!
for which
death shaves
him twice
a week
XV
The decay of cathedrals
is efflorescent
through the phenomenal
growth of movie houses
whose catholicity is
progress since
destruction and creation
are simultaneous
without sacrifice
of even the smallest
detail even to the
volcanic organ whose
woe is translatable
to joy if light becomes
darkness and darkness
light, as it will —
But scism which seems
adamant is diverted
from the perpendicular
by simply rotating the object
cleaving away the root of
disaster which it
seemed to foster. Thus
the movies are a moral force
Nightly the crowds
with the closeness and
universality of sand
witness the selfspittle
which used to be drowned
in incense and intoned
over by the supple jointed
imagination of inoffensiveness
backed by biblical
rigidity made into passion plays
upon the altar to
attract the dynamic mob
whose female relative
sweeping grass Tolstoi
saw injected into
the Russian nobility
It is rarely understood how such plays as Shakespeare’s were written — or in fact how any work of value has been written, the practical bearing of which is that only as the work was produced, in that way alone can it be understood
Fruitless for the academic tapeworm to hoard its excrementa is books. The cage —
The most of all writing has not even begun in the province from which alone it can draw sustenance.
There is not life in the stuff because it tries to be “like” life.
First must come the transposition of the faculties to the only world of reality that men know: the world of the imagination, wholly our own. From this world alone does the work gain power, its soil the only one whose chemistry is perfect to the purpose.
The exaltation men feel before a work of art is the feeling of reality they draw from it. It sets them up, places a value upon experience — (said that half a dozen times already)
XVI
O tongue
licking
the sore on
her netherlip
O toppled belly
O passionate cotton
stuck with
matted hair
elysian slobber
from her mouth
upon
the folded handkerchief
I can’t die
— moaned the old
jaundiced woman
rolling her
saffron eyeballs
I can’t die
I can’t die
XVII
Our orchestra
is the cat’s nuts —
Banjo jazz
with a nickelplated
amplifier to
soothe
the savage beast —
Get the rythm
That sheet stuff
’s a lot a cheese.
Man
gimme the key
and lemme loose —
I make ’em crazy
with my harmonies —
Shoot it Jimmy
Nobody
Nobody else
but me —
They can’t copy it
XVIII
The pure products of
America go crazy —
mountain folk from Kentucky
or the ribbed north end of
Jersey
with its isolate lakes and
valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves
old names
and promiscuity between
devil-may-care men who have taken
to railroading
out of sheer lust of adventure —
and young slatterns, bathed
in filth
from Monday to Saturday
to be tricked out that night
with gauds
from imaginations which have no
peasant traditions to give them
character
but flutter and flaunt
sheer rags — succumbing without
emotion
save numbed terror
under some hedge of choke-cherry
or viburnum —
which they cannot express —
Unless it be that marriage
perhaps
with a dash of Indian blood
will throw up a girl so desolate
so hemmed round
with disease or murder
that she’ll be rescued by an
agent —
reared by the state and
sent out at fifteen to work in
some hard pressed
house in the suburbs —
some doctor’s family, some Elsie —
voluptuous water
expressing with broken
brain the truth about us —
her great
ungainly hips and flopping breasts
addressed to cheap
jewelry
and rich young men with fine eyes
as if the earth under our feet
were
an excrement of some sky
and we degraded prisoners
destined
to hunger until we eat filth
while the imagination strains
after deer
going by fields of goldenrod in
the stifling heat of September
Somehow
it seems to destroy us
It is only in isolate flecks that
something
is given off
No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car
or better: prose has to do with the fact of an emotion; poetry has to do with the dynamisation of emotion into a separate form. This is the force of imagination.
prose: statement of facts concerning emotions, intellectua states, data of all sorts — technical expositions, jargon, of all sorts — fictional and other —
poetry: new form dealt with as a reality in itself.
The form of prose is the accuracy of its subject matter-how best to expose the multiform phases of its material
the form of poetry is related to the movements of the imagination revealed in words — or whatever it may be —
the cleavage is complete
Why should I go further than I am able? Is it not enough for you that I am perfect?
The cleavage goes through all the phases of experience. It is the jump from prose to the process of imagination that is the next great leap of the intelligence — from the simulations of present experience to the facts of the imagination —
the greatest characteristic of the present age is that it is stale — stale as literature —
To enter a new world, and have there freedom of movement and newness.
I mean that there will always be prose painting, representative work, clever as may be in revealing new phases of emotional research presen
ted on the surface.
But the jump from that to Cezanne or back to certain of the primitives is the impossible.
The primitives are not back in some remote age — they are not BEHIND experience. Work which bridges the gap between the rigidities of vulgar experience and the imagination is rare. It is new, immediate — It is so because it is actual, always real. It is experience dynamized into reality.
Time does not move. Only ignorance and stupidity move. Intelligence (force, power) stands still with time and forces change about itself — sifting the world for permanence, in the drift of nonentity.
Pio Baroja interested me once —
Baroja leaving the medical profession, some not important inspectors work in the north of Spain, opened a bakery in Madrid.
The isolation he speaks of, as a member of the so called intellectual class, influenced him to abandon his position and engage himself, as far as possible, in the intricacies of the design patterned by the social class — He sees no interest in isolation —
These gestures are the effort for self preservation or the preservation of some quality held in high esteem —
Here it seems to be that a man, starved in imagination, changes his milieu so that his food may be richer — The social class, without the power of expression, lives upon imaginative values.
I mean only to emphasize the split that goes down through the abstractions of art to the everyday exercises of the most primitive types —
there is a sharp division — the energizing force of imagination on one side — and the acquisitive — PROGRESSIVE force of the lump on the other
The social class with its religion, its faith, sincerity and all the other imaginative values is positive (yes)
the merchant, hibernating, unmagnatized — tends to drop away into the isolate, inactive particles — Religion is continued then as a form, art as a convention —
To the social, energized class — ebullient now in Russia the particles adhere because of the force of the imagination energizing them —
Anyhow the change of Baroja interested me
Among artists, or as they are sometimes called “men of imagination” “creators”, etc. this force is recognized in a pure state — All this can be used to show the relationships between genius, hand labor, religion — etc. and the lack of feeling between artists and the middle class type —
The jump between fact and the imaginative reality
The study of all human activity is the deliniation of the cresence and ebb of this force, shifting from class to class and location to location — rhythm: the wave rhythm of Shakespeare watching clowns and kings sliding into nothing