—Thanks!
O I am not afraid, my voices! You shall be very proud of me, for I will be very beautiful for you: I will dress myself carefully in thick red fire and in sharp white fire and in round blue cool fire. Now it is not dark and there is no world: perfectly begins to grow a brighter brightness than all of the sky and of the sea and of the earth; everywhere Jehanne only is alive, everywhere this climbing wonderfully mighty only colour is her gladness. And in her gladness rising, taller than everyone than everything than nothing, stands He Whom she may know: hark—to only Him, to Him, her life is calling and crying and singing “my Love! my Love! out of all this light which is my joy comes to You a woman who is more than every queen: look, her wings begin to open—King Of All Kings, put your great eyes around me as I climb beyond the steepest flower which breathes—see; now all of the little flames are lifting me higher than tomorrow in all of their hands—Man Who Is God! take from these alive fingers quickly one shining bird”
From Furioso, Summer 1941; also This Is My Best (New York: The Dial Press, 1942).
. . . please honour my contribution by surrounding it with a little silence. Silence is lively; and deathful is doubletalk, eg la guerre
—EEC’s
Silver Lake, N.H.
Aug. 1942
FAIR WARNING
Here is a thing.
To one somebody, this “thing” is a totally flourishing universal joyous particular happening deep amazing miraculous indivisible being.
To another somebody, this “same” thing means something which, if sawed in two at the base, will tell you how old it is.
To somebody else, this “selfsame” thing doesn’t exist because there isn’t a thunderstorm; but if there were a thunderstorm, this “selfsame” thing would merely exist as something to be especially avoided.
To a fourth somebody, this “very selfsame” thing, properly maltreated, represents something called “lumber”; which, improperly maltreated, represents something else called “money”; which represents something else called (more likely than not) “dear.”
Somebody number one is a poet. Actually he is alive. His address is: Now. All the other somebodies are unpoets. They all aren’t alive. They all merely are not unexisting—in a kind of an unkind of real unreality or When. Here is another thing: whatever happens, everybody cannot turn the Nowman’s Now into When; whatever doesn’t, nobody can turn the Whenmen’s When into Now.
From the Junior League Magazine, May 1938.
WHAT ABOUT IT?
I frankly admit that if I should meet the man who designed the first flying machine, or the Egyptian pyramids, or La Normandie, I should not be tempted to tell him how much better my Aunt Jemima could have turned the selfsame trick with two cracked teaspoons and a withered hairpin. Not because this would constitute a breach of good manners, nor because such a statement might injure my reputation for sanity, but because a poet and painter can always learn something—especially from someone who is neither. I further confess that if the aforesaid poet and painter should find himself face to face with aerial raids, or statues by Lachaise, or tidal waves, or anything equally unbelievable, he would not feel an overwhelming desire to cry “fake!” On the contrary; he would be bowled over, not to mention under and around, by a feeling which can rightly be called “aesthetic.” This feeling isn’t in the least mysterious. This feeling is merely incredible. It is as if two feelings—the feeling of exaltation and the feeling of humility—should completely mingle while remaining perfectly separate. Anyone who has ever begun-to-begin falling seventy feet in the Cyclone rollercoaster at Coney Island knows what I mean.
And will this anyone kindly tell me why it’s okay for Good Americans to enjoy great rollercoasters, whereas no Good American can enjoy first-rate works of art? Why, I demand to know, has “aesthetic”—the one word which stands for whatever is true and unexpected and beautiful and universal in this or any other life—come to be regarded as a symbol of everything which is timidly premeditated and pompously insignificant and pretentiously exclusive? Above all, why should the very people who recoil so violently from “aesthetic” values (attributing thereto God knows what obscurity and affectation) tumble all over each other worshipping science in general and superscience in particular?
Suppose I remarked at this point that the symbolic circumlocutions of an Einstein are child’s play, compared with the creative activity of a great, i.e. first-rate, artist. “Liar!” someone would yell “a moment ago you said that art was universal and could be enjoyed by anybody; now you are claiming that art is more mysterious than something which only a handful of people in the whole world pretend to understand.—Fool!” someone else would shout “what right have you to talk condescendingly, let alone disparagingly, about a world-renowned contemporary oracle? How can you, a mere scribbler and dauber, possibly judge anything so abstruse as mathematical physics?—Hypocrite” a third compatriot would bellow “didn’t you tell us you felt humble and exalted when you found yourself in the presence of something unbelievable? Well, how about a fourth dimension? Could anything be more unbelievable than that?”
It might be observed sotto voce that this same world-renowned mathematical physicist has contradicted and reversed himself, as only an honest worker in a dishonest medium can and must do. Einstein worshippers might also be reminded that their deity had predecessors: Newton and Ptolemy, to name just a couple, benefitted by some pretty slick advertising in their respective days . . . and did you ever read a book by Charles Fort? As for the matter at hand: yes, I did call “aesthetic” experience universal (which it is). But no, I did not state that it could be enjoyed by anybody. I seem to have met, in the course of my life, people who were incapable of enjoying anything; let alone universality or beauty or truth or freedom or themselves. What I did infer, if I did not say it, was that our socalled souls desire and deserve a break just as much as, or more than, our socalled bodies; and if intelligence consists in getting what you want, the Good American body is vastly more intelligent than the Good American soul. I may be wrong, I may very easily be (and very often have been) a fool. But a hypocrite I am not. When I feel that a non-Euclidean continuum doesn’t hold a candle to a Renoir, I say so frankly.
Which brings us again to “aesthetic.”
And what might be the opposite of this extraordinarily misunderstood word? My reason for asking is simple. If “aesthetic” gives most of my compatriots a pain, then the word which is the opposite of “aesthetic” must imply something altogether painless. By way of discovering this altogether painless opposite, let us make a little pilgrimage to never-never land via the air-conditioned cinema express. What happens when a photograph of Mr. Righto—having taken a most imposing photograph of a nose-dive—is flicked around a photograph of the corner per a photograph of someone’s eighteen-cylinder Cadillac at a photograph of some ninety miles an hour and tossed, in a photograph of almost (but not quite) all our hero’s stalwart manhood, on a photograph of a nice clean operating table? Answer: Miss You Know Who, the ravishing nurse with the starry eyes, bending deliciously over that once-boyish face contorted by unmitigated heroism, gently but firmly applies an—that’s it. “Anaesthetic” is what we were looking for.
No wonder this little stranger arrived by courtesy of a celluloid stork! Like radio (and unlike art) the talkies are a concrete manifestation of mythical superscience. If radio is Public Anaesthetic Number 1, the talkies are Number Two. Poor old bestsellers, despite the benevolent efforts of their worthy publishers, hobble home a feeble third: why? Obviously because the reading of even completely villainous trash requires a slight, a negligible, an almost imperceptible but nevertheless real, effort. By definition, however, any “anaesthetic” succeeds in proportion to the patient’s entire effortlessness, to his total submission, to the absolute paralysis of his will. Certain foolish folks have been heard to murmur brightly, now and again, that Man is not a fundamentally rational animal; but I’d like to know what could be more rational than (
1) perfecting a painful state of affairs and (2) inventing all sorts of ways of not feeling the painfulness. If that isn’t being rational, being rational doesn’t consist in advancing boldly to court disaster with one foot and running away with the other as fast as you aren’t able to.
Tell me: must our world in general, and our native land in particular, be more and more dangerously and more and more uncomfortably filled to overflowing with gadgets designed to eliminate every vestige of discomfort and of danger including superfluous hair and the human soul? A little bird answers that, if and when discomfort, superfluous hair, danger and the human soul are eliminated, they will recur. He sings (and he means it) that the future holds more for man- and woman-kind than perfect security, utter materialism, prenatal luxury and baldness. This may sound suspiciously reassuring, but it might possibly be true. It would certainly be true if, as some folks (including the wisest folks) have more than once darkly hinted, socalled human beings are essentially and instinctively selfish.
I’m aware that the word “selfish” is strictly taboo just now, like the word “aesthetic.” A very popular word just now is “altruistic”; which means, being someone else. Of course if you’re already someone else (and the Lord knows exactly how many people are) then you’ve got to be everybody else. Which (in case you don’t know) will be the millennium. Meanwhile, please do me a perfectly huge favour. Try to imagine what would happen if—anywhere in our almost, but thank Heaven not quite, successfully anaesthetized universe—a single living breathing laughing crying loving hating human individual, with no collective axe to grind, should stand straight up in his life, his fortune, his sacred honour and his boots, and cry out “by God! this is good and true and beautiful, and I’m all for this: that is bad and false and ugly, and to hell with that!” I say, just try to imagine. . . .
Such a selfish act wouldn’t be in the least mysterious. Such a selfish act would be merely incredible. It would be somewhat as if our nose-diving talkie hero should very unexpectedly (not to say suddenly) hop clean off the operating table—with his stalwart manhood in one hand and his unmitigated heroism in the other—and give that ravishing female anaesthetist with the starry eyes a redhot ripsnorting You Know What, right in front of tooler mond. And there wouldn’t be any comfort and there wouldn’t be any security and there wouldn’t be any prenatal luxury in protesting “but people don’t really do such things!” because somebody would have, actually or miraculously, behaved like a man and done something heartily and mightily and thoroughly; as only a man should and can do.
That, enemies and friends, is all for the socalled nonce. I am closing the daubing chest and pocketing the scribbling iron. Now I scram. With me scram just a few more foolish queries than would thoroughly and mightily and heartily plug all the greedily gaping holes in all the comfortably foolproof theories in all this socalled world. But, because I love and hate you, I leave with you neither a query nor a theory; neither anything useful nor everything useless. I leave with you something valuable: a challenge. And here it is—
Can you lose time and experiment with yourselves, or must you lose yourselves and let time do the experimenting? Will you take a poke at fate before you have to pawn your poker? Are you for aesthetics, or are you for anaesthetics? Would you rather wake up while you’re you, or afterwards?
How about it!
From Twice A Year, Fall–Winter 1938.
RE EZRA POUND: I
John, viii, 7.
So now let us talk about something else. This is a free country because compulsory education. This is a free country because nobody has to eat. This is a free country because not any other country was is or ever will be free. So now you know and knowledge is power.
An interesting fact when you come right down to it is that simple people like complex things. But what amounts to an extraordinary coincidence is mediocre people liking firstrate things. The explanation can’t be because complex things are simple. It must be because mediocre people are firstrate.
So now let us pull the wool over each other’s toes and go to Hell.
John, viii, 7.
From We Moderns, Catalogue 42 of The Gotham Book Mart, N.Y.C. 1940.
RE EZRA POUND: II
Re Ezra Pound—poetry happens to be an art; and artists happen to be human beings.
An artist doesn’t live in some geographical abstraction, superimposed on a part of this beautiful earth by the non-imagination of unanimals and dedicated to the proposition that massacre is a social virtue because murder is an individual vice. Nor does an artist live in some soi-disant world, nor does he live in some socalled universe, nor does he live in any number of “worlds” or in any number of “universes.” As for a few trifling delusions like the “past” and “present” and “future” of quote mankind unquote, they may be big enough for a couple of billion super mechanized submorons but they’re much too small for one human being.
Every artist’s strictly illimitable country is himself.
An artist who plays that country false has committed suicide; and even a good lawyer cannot kill the dead. But a human being who’s true to himself—whoever himself may be—is immortal; and all the atomic bombs of all the antiartists in spacetime will never civilize immortality.
From PM, Sunday, November 25, 1945; also The Case of Ezra Pound (New York: The Bodley Press, 1948).
FOREWORD TO AN EXHIBIT: I
Simple people, people who don’t exist, prefer things which don’t exist, simple things.
“Good” and “bad” are simple things. You bomb me = “bad.” I bomb you = “good.” Simple people (who, incidentally, run this socalled world) know this (they know everything) whereas complex people—people who feel something—are very, very ignorant and really don’t know anything.
Nothing, for simple knowing people, is more dangerous than ignorance. Why?
Because to feel something is to be alive.
“War” and “peace” are not dangerous or alive: far from it. “Peace” is the inefficiency of science. “War” is the science of inefficiency. And science is knowing and knowing is measuring.
Ignorant people really must be educated; that is, they must be made to stop feeling something, and compelled to begin knowing or measuring everything. Then (then only) they won’t threaten the very nonexistence of what all simple people call civilization.
Very luckily for you and me, the uncivilized sun mysteriously shines on “good” and “bad” alike. He is an artist.
Art is a mystery.
A mystery is something immeasurable.
In so far as every child and woman and man may be immeasurable, art is the mystery of every man and woman and child. In so far as a human being is an artist, skies and mountains and oceans and thunderbolts and butterflies are immeasurable; and art is every mystery of nature. Nothing measurable can be alive; nothing which is not alive can be art; nothing which cannot be art is true: and everything untrue doesn’t matter a very good God damn . . .
item: it is my complex hope that the pictures here exhibited are neither “good” nor “bad,” neither peacelike nor warful—that (on the contrary) they are living.
From the catalogue of a onemanshow at the American British Art Center, N.Y.C., March 1944.
FOREWORD TO AN EXHIBIT: II
Are you the author of The Enormous Room?
Eimi.
A me?
I am.
Oh—is that Latin?
Greek.
Well, I’d like to ask you a few questions in English.
How about American?
All right; in American.
Fine and dandy.
Why do you paint?
For exactly the same reason I breathe.
That’s not an answer.
There isn’t any answer.
How long hasn’t there been any answer?
As long as I can remember.
And how long have you written?
As long as I can remember.
I mean poetry.
So do I.
Tell me, doesn’t your painting interfere with your writing?
Quite the contrary: they love each other dearly.
They’re very different.
Very: one is painting and one is writing.
But your poems are rather hard to understand, whereas your paintings are so easy.
Easy?
Of course—you paint flowers and girls and sunsets; things that everybody understands.
I never met him.
Who?
Everybody.
Did you ever hear of nonrepresentational painting?
I am.
Pardon me?
I am a painter, and painting is nonrepresentational.
Not all painting.
No: housepainting is representational.
And what does a housepainter represent?
Ten dollars an hour.
In other words, you don’t want to be serious—
It takes two to be serious.
Well, let me see . . . oh yes, one more question: where will you live after this war is over?
In China; as usual.
China?
Of course.
Whereabouts in China?
Where a painter is a poet.
From the catalogue of a onemanshow at the Memorial Gallery, Rochester, N.Y., May 1945.
FOREWORD TO AN EXHIBIT: III
Sold (as Santa Claus learned from Death) a strictly not giveable epoch—whose bag is out of the cat and whose horse is in the saddle and whose anybody is anybody else (because religion is the opium, and peace! it’s fission, and come let us adjust until the whole world’s an infrahuman ultrafamily of supersubmorons delightedly drowning in telejukemovieradiovision) and whose hyperscientific miracles can never stop happening (because every day without exception must be christmas or else those three wise salesmen might stop laying their more and more de luxe millenniums at the common feet of the forgotten babe joe blow incorporated)—I have the very great honour to remind you, through one of the arts of silence, that “Life” (as Miss Weird taught Him) “is a matter of being born”; but “Art is a question of being alive”
A Miscellany (Revised) Page 30
