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  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

  lakes

  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