Spring and All (3 page)

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 and 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.

enlargement — revivification of values,

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 everything 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 —

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”.