Spring and All (2 page)

Thus, weary of life, in view of the great consummation which awaits us — tomorrow, we rush among our friends congratulating ourselves upon the joy soon to be. Thoughtless of evil we crush out the marrow of those about us with our heavy cars as we go happily from place to place. It seems that there is not time enough in which to speak the full of our exaltation. Only a day is left, one miserable day, before the world comes into its own. Let us hurry! Why bother for this man or that? In the offices of the great newspapers a mad joy reigns as they prepare the final extras. Rushing about, men bump each other into the whirring presses. How funny it seems. All thought of misery has left us. Why should we care? Children laughingly fling themselves under the wheels of the street cars, airplanes crash gaily to the earth. Someone has written a poem.

Oh life, bizarre fowl, what color are your wings? Green, blue, red, yellow, purple, white, brown, orange, black, grey? In the imagination, flying above the wreck of ten thousand million souls, I see you departing sadly for the land of plants and insects, already far out to sea. (Thank you, I know well what
I am plagiarising) Your great wings flap as you disappear in the distance over the pre-Columbian acres of floating weed.

The new cathedral overlooking the park, looked down from its towers today, with great eyes, and saw by the decorative lake a group of people staring curiously at the corpse of a suicide: Peaceful, dead young man, the money they have put into the stones has been spent to teach men of life’s austerity. You died and teach us the same lesson. You seem a cathedral, celebrant of the spring which shivers for me among the long black trees.

Now, in the imagination, all flesh, all human flesh has been dead upon the earth for ten million, billion years. The bird has turned into a stone within whose heart an egg, unlayed, remained hidden.

It is spring! but miracle of miracles a miraculous miracle has gradually taken place during these seemingly wasted eons. Through the orderly sequences of unmentionable time EVOLUTION HAS REPEATED ITSELF FROM THE BEGINNING.

Good God!

Every step once taken in the first advance of the human race, from the amoeba to the highest type of intelligence, has been duplicated, every step exactly paralleling the one that preceeded in the dead ages gone by. A perfect plagiarism results. Everything is and is new. Only the imagination is undeceived.

At this point the entire complicated and laborious process begins to near a new day. (More of this in Chapter XIX) But for the moment everything is fresh, perfect, recreated.

In fact now, for the first time, everything IS new. Now at last the perfect effect is being witlessly discovered. The terms „ veracity” „ actuality” „ real” „ natural” „ sincere” are being discussed at length, every word in the discussion being evolved from an identical discussion which took place the day before yesterday.

Yes, the imagination, drunk with prohibitions, has destroyed and recreated everything afresh in the likeness of that which it was. Now indeed men look about in amazement at each other with a full realization of the meaning of „ art”.

It is spring: life again begins to assume its normal appearence as of „today". Only the imagination is undeceived. The volcanos are extinct. Coal is beginning to be dug again where the fern forests stood last night. (If an error is noted here, pay no attention to it).

I realize that the chapters are rather quick in their sequence and that nothing much is contained in any one of them but no one should be surprised at this today.

It is spring. That is to say, it is approaching THE BEGINNING.

In that huge and microscopic career of time, as it were a wild horse racing in an illimitable pampa under the stars, describing immense and microscopic circles with his hoofs on the solid turf, running without a stop for the millionth part of a second
until he is aged and worn to a heap of skin, bones and ragged hoofs — In that majestic progress of life, that gives the exact impression of Phidias’ frizze, the men and beasts of which, though they seem of the rigidity of marble are not so but move, with blinding rapidity, though we do not have the time to notice it, their legs advancing a millionth part of an inch every fifty thousand years — In that progress of life which seems stillness itself in the mass of its movements — at last SPRING is approaching.

In that colossal surge toward the finite and the capable life has now arrived for the second time at that exact moment when in the ages past the destruction of the species
Homo sapiens
occured.

Now at last that process of miraculous verisimilitude, that grate copying which evolution has followed, repeating move for move every move that it made in the past — is approaching the end.

Suddenly it is at an end. THE WORLD IS NEW.

I

By the road to the contagious hospital

under the surge of the blue

mottled clouds driven from the

northeast — a cold wind. Beyond, the

waste of broad, muddy fields

brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water

the scattering of tall trees

All along the road the reddish

purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy

stuff of bushes and small trees

with dead, brown leaves under them

leafless vines —

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish

dazed spring approaches —

They enter the new world naked,

cold, uncertain of all

save that they enter. All about them

the cold, familiar wind —

Now the grass, tomorrow

the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf

One by one objects are defined —

It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf

But now the stark dignity of

entrance — Still, the profound change

has come upon then: rooted they

grip down and begin to awaken

II

Pink confused with white

flowers and flowers reversed

take and spill the shaded flame

darting it back

into the lamp’s horn

petals aslant darkened with mauve

red where in whorls

petal lays its glow upon petal

round flamegreen throats

petals radiant with transpiercing light

contending

above

the leaves

reaching up their modest green

from the pot’s rim

and there, wholly dark, the pot

gay with rough moss.

A terrific confusion has taken place. No man knows whither to turn. There is nothing! Emptiness stares us once more in the face. Whither? To what end? Each asks the other. Has life its tail in its mouth or its mouth in its tail? Why are we here? Dora Marsden’s philosophic algebra. Everywhere men look into each other’s faces and ask the old unanswerable question: Whither? How? What? Why?

At any rate, now at last spring is here!

The rock has split, the egg has hatched, the prismatically plumed bird of life has escaped from its cage. It spreads its wings and is perched now on the peak of the huge African mountain Kilimanjaro.

Strange recompense, in the depths of our despair at the unfathomable mist into which all mankind is plunging, a curious force awakens. It is HOPE long asleep, aroused once more. Wilson has taken an army of advisers and sailed for England. The ship has sunk. But the men are all good swimmers. They take the women on their shoulders and buoyed on by the inspiration of the moment they churn the free seas with their sinewey arms, like Ulysses, landing all along the European seaboard.

Yes, hope has awakened once more in men’s hearts. It is the NEW! Let us go forward!

The imagination, freed from the handcuffs of „ art”, takes the lead! Her feet are bare and not too delicate. In fact those who come behind her have much to think of. Hm. Let it pass.

The great English divine, Sam Butler, is shouting from a platform, warning us as we pass: There are two who can invent some extraordinary thing to one who can properly employ that which has been made use of before.

Enheartened by this thought THE TRADITIONALISTS OF PLAGIARISM try to get hold of the mob. They seize those nearest them and shout into their ears: Tradition! The solidarity of life!

The fight is on: These men who have had the governing of the mob through all the repetitious years resent the new order. Who can answer them? One perhaps here and there but it is an impossible situation. If life were anything but a bird, if it were a man, a Greek or an Egyptian, but it is only a bird that has eyes and wings, a beak, talons and a cry that reaches to every rock’s center, but without intelligence? —

The voice of the Delphic Oracle itself, what was it? A poisonous gas from a rock’s cleft.

Those who led yesterday wish to hold their sway a while longer. It is not difficult to understand their mood. They have their great weapons to hand: „ science”, „ philosophy” and most dangerous of all „ art”.

Meanwhile, SPRING, which has been approaching for several pages, is at last here.

— they ask us to return to the proven truths of tradition, even to the twice proven, the substantiality of which is known. Demuth and a few others do their best to point out the error, telling us that design is a function of the IMAGINATION, describing its movements, its colors — but it is a hard battle. I myself seek to enter the lists with these few notes jotted down in the midst of the action, under distracting circumstances — to remind myself (see p. 2, paragraph 4) of the truth.

III

The farmer in deep thought

is pacing through the rain

among his blank fields, with

hands in pockets,

in his head

the harvest already planted.

A cold wind ruffles the water

among the browned weeds.

On all sides

the world rolls coldly away:

black orchards

darkened by the March clouds —

leaving room for thought.

Down past the brushwood

bristling by

the rainsluiced wagonroad

looms the artist figure of

the farmer — composing

— antagonist

IV

The Easter stars are shining

above lights that are flashing —

coronal of the black —

Nobody

to say it —

Nobody to say: pinholes

Thither I would carry her

among the lights —

Burst it asunder

break through to the fifty words

necessary —

a crown for her head with

castles upon it, skyscrapers

filled with nut-chocolates —

dovetame winds —

stars of tinsel

from the great end of a cornucopia

of glass

S
O
long as the sky is recognised as an association

is recognised in its function of accessory to vague words whose meaning it is impossible to rediscover

its value can be nothing but mathematical certain limits of gravity and density of air

The farmer and the fisherman who read their own lives there have a practical corrective for —

they rediscover or replace demoded meanings to the religious terms

Among them, without expansion of imagination, there is the residual contact between life and the imagination which is essential to freedom

The man of imagination who turns to art for release and fulfilment of his baby promises contends with the sky through layers of demoded words and shapes. Demoded, not because the essential vitality which begot them is laid waste — this cannot be so, a young man feels, since he feels it in himself 
— but because meanings have been lost through laziness or changes in the form of existance which have let words empty.

Bare handed the man contends with the sky, without experience of existence seeking to invent and design.

Crude symbolism is to associate emotions with natural phenomena such as anger with lightning, flowers with love it goes further and associates certain textures with

Such work is empty. It is very typical of almost all that is done by the writers who fill the pages every month of such a paper as. Everything that I have done in the past — except those parts which may be called excellent — by chance, have that quality about them.

It is typified by use of the word « like » or that « evocation » of the « image » which served us for a time. Its abuse is apparent. The insignificant «image» may be « evoked » never so ably and still mean nothing.

With all his faults Alfred Kreymborg never did this. That is why his work — escaping a common
fault — still has value and will tomorrow have more.

Sandburg, when uninspired by intimacies of the eye and ear, runs into this empty symbolism. Such poets of promise as ruin themselves with it, though many have major sentimental faults besides.

Marianne Moore escapes. The incomprehensibility of her poems is witness to at what cost (she cleaves herself away) as it is also to the distance which the most are from a comprehension of the purpose of composition.

The better work men do is always done under stress and at great personal cost.

It is no different from the aristocratic compositions of the earlier times, The Homeric inventions but these occured in different times, to this extent, that life had not yet sieved through its own multiformity. That aside, the work the two-thousand-year-old poet did and that we do are one piece. That is the vitality of the classics.

So then — Nothing is put down in the present book

— except through weakness of the imagination — which is not intended as of a piece with the « nature » which Shakespeare mentions and which Hartley
speaks of so completely in his « Adventures »: it is the common thing which is annonymously about us.

Composition is in no essential an escape from life. In fact if it is so it is negligeable to the point of insignificance. Whatever « life » the artist may be forced to lead has no relation to the vitality of his compositions. Such names as Homer, the blind; Scheherazade, who lived under threat — Their compositions have as their excellence an identity with life since they are as actual, as sappy as the leaf of the tree which never moves from one spot.

What I put down of value will have this value: an escape from crude symbolism, the annihilation of strained associations, complicated ritualistic forms designed to separate the work from « reality » — such as rhyme, meter as meter and not as the essential of the work, one of its words.

But this smacks too much of the nature of — This is all negative and appears to be boastful. It is not intended to be so. Rather the opposite

The work will be in the realm of the imagination as plain as the sky is to a fisherman — A very clouded sentence. The word must be put down for itself, not as a symbol of nature but a part, cognisant of the whole — aware — civilized.

V

Blacks wind from the north

enter black hearts. Barred from

seclusion in lilys they strike

to destroy —

Beastly humanity

where the wind breaks it —

strident voices, heat

quickened, built of waves

Drunk with goats or pavements

Hate his of the night and the day

of flowers and rocks. Nothing

is gained by saying the night breeds

murder — It is the classical mistake

The day

All that enters in another person

all grass, all blackbirds flying

all azalia trees in flower

salt winds —

Sold to them men knock blindly together

splitting their heads open

That is why boxing matches and

Chinese poems are the same — That is why

Hartley praises Miss Wirt

There is nothing in the twist

of the wind but — dashes of cold rain

It is one with submarine vistas

purple and black fish turning

among undulant seaweed —

Black wind, I have poured my heart out

to you until I am sick of it —

Now I run my hand over you feeling

the play of your body — the quiver

of its strength —

The grief of the bowmen of Shu

moves nearer — There is

an approach with difficulty from

the dead — the winter easing of grief

How easy to slip

into the old mode, how hard to

cling firmly to the advance —

VI

No that is not it

nothing that I have done

nothing

I have done

is made up of

nothing

and the dipthong

ae

together with

the first person

singular

indicative

of the auxilliary

verb

to have

everything

I have done

is the same

if to do

is capable

of an

infinity of

combinations

involving the

moral

physical

and religious

codes

for everything

and nothing

are synonymous

when

energy in vacuuo

has the power

of confusion

which only to

have done nothing

can make

perfect

The inevitable flux of the seeing eye toward measuring itself by the world it inhabits can only result
in himself crushing humiliation unless the individual raise to some approximate co-extension with the universe. This is possible by aid of the imagination. Only through the agency of this force can a man feel himself moved largely with sympathetic pulses at work —

A work of the imagination which fails to release the senses in accordance with this major requisite — the sympathies, the intelligence in its selective world, fails at the elucidation, the alleviation which is —

In the composition, the artist does exactly what every eye must do with life, fix the particular with the universality of his own personality — Taught by the largeness of his imagination to feel every form which he sees moving within himself, he must prove the truth of this by expression.

The contraction which is felt.

All this being anterior to technique, that can have only a sequent value; but since all that appears to the senses on a work of art does so through fixation by the imagination of the external as well internal means of expression the essential nature of technique or transcription.

Only when this position is reached can life proper
be said to begin since only then can a value be affixed to Hthe forms and activities of which it consists.

Only then can the sense of frustration which ends. All composition defeated.

Only through the imagination is the advance of intelligence possible, to keep beside growing understanding.

Complete lack of imagination would be the same at the cost of intelligence, complete.

Even the most robust constitution has its limits, though the Roman feast with its reliance upon regurgitation to prolong it shows an active ingenuity, yet the powers of a man are so pitifully small, with the ocean to swallow — that at the end of the feast nothing would be left but suicide.

That or the imagination which in this case takes the form of humor, is known in that form — the release from physical necessity. Having eaten to the full we must acknowledge our insufficiency since we have not annihilated all food nor even the quantity of a good sized steer. However we have annihilated all eating: quite plainly we have no more appetite. This is to say that the imagination has removed us from the banal necessity of bursting ourselves — by
acknowledging a new situation. We must acknowledge that the ocean we would drink is too vast — but at the same time we realize that extension in our case is not confined to the intestine only. The stomach is full, the ocean no fuller, both have the same quality of fullness. In that, then, one is equal to the other. Having eaten, the man has released his mind.

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.