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  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  The rose is obsolete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.

  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 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 —