Spring and All Read online

  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”.

  CHAPTER 2

  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).

  CHAPTER XIX

  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.

  THE TRADITIONALISTS OF PLAGIARISM

  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.

  CHAPTER I

  SAMUEL BUTLER

  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

  SO 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.