Imaginations, page 23
11/6
Russia is every country, here he must live, this for that, loss for gain. Dolores Marie Pischak. “New York is a blight on my heart, lost, a street full of lights fading to a bonfire—in order to see their hats of wool on their heads, their lips to open and a word to come out. To open my mouth and a word to come out, my word. Grown like grass, to be like a stone. I pick it. It is poor. It must be so. There are no rich. The richness is everywhere, belongs to everyone and it is hard to get. And loss, loss, loss. Cut off from my kind—if any exist. To get that, everything is lost. So he carries them and gets—himself and has nothing to do with himself. He also gets their lice.
Romance, decoration, fullness—are lost in touch, sight, a word, to bite an apple. Henry Ford has asked Chas. Sheeler to go to Detroit and photograph everything. Carte blanche. Sheeler! That’s rich. Shakespeare had that mean ability to fuse himself with everyone which nobodies have, to be anything at any time, fluid, a nameless fellow whom nobody noticed—much, and that is what made him the great dramatist. Because he was nobody and was fluid and accessible. He took the print and reversed the film, as it went in so it came out. Certainly he never repeated himself since he did nothing but repeat what he heard and nobody ever hears the same words twice the same. Homekeeping youth had ever homely wit, Sheeler and Shakespeare should be on this soviet. Mediæval England, Soviet Russia.
It is a pure literary adjustment. The supremacy of England is purely a matter of style. Officially they are realists, such as the treaty with Italy to divide Abyssinia. Realists— it is the tactical spread of realism that is the Soviets. Imperial Russia was romanticist, strabismic, atavistic. Style. He does not blame the other countries. They fear what he sees. He sees tribes of lawyers tripping each other up entirely off the ground and falling on pillows full of softly jumbled words from goose backs.
I know a good print when I see it. I know when it is good and why it is good. It is the neck of a man, the nose of a woman. It is the same Shakespeare. It is a photograph by Sheeler. It is. It is the thing where it is. So. That’s the mine out of which riches have always been drawn. The kings come and beg for it. But it is too simple. In the complexity, when we try to enrich ourselves—the richness is lost. Loss and gain go hand in hand. And hand in hand means my hand in a hand which is in it: a child’s hand soft skinned, small, a little fist to hold gently, a woman’s hand, a certain woman’s hand, a man’s hand. Thus hand in hand means several classes of things. But loss is one thing. It is lost. It is one big thing that is an orchestra playing. Time, that’s what it buys. But the gain is scattered. It is everywhere but there is not much in any place. A city is merely a relocation of metals in a certain place.—He feels the richness, but a distressing feeling of loss is close upon it. He knows he must coordinate the villages for effectiveness in a flood, a famine.
The United States should be, in effect, a soviet state. It is a soviet state decayed away in a misconception of richness. The states, counties, cities, are anemic soviets. As rabbits are cottontailed the office-workers in cotton running pants get in a hot car, ride in a hot tunnel and confine themselves in a hot office—to sell asphalt, the trade in tanned leather. The trade in everything. Things they’ve never seen, will never own and can never name. Not even an analogous name do they know. As a carter, knowing the parts of a wagon will know, know, touch, the parts of—a woman. (Maybe typists have some special skill. The long legged down east boys make good stage dancers and acrobats. But when most of them are drunk nothing comes off but—“Nevada” had a line of cowboy songs.
11/7
We must listen. Before
she died she told them—
I always liked to be well dressed
I wanted to look nice—
So she asked them to dress
her well. They curled her hair …
Now she fought
She didn’t want to go
She didn’t want to!
The perfect type of the man of action is the suicide.
11/8
O river of my heart polluted
and defamed I have compared you
to that other lying in
the red November grass
beginning to be cleaned now
from factory pollution
Though at night a watchman
must still prowl lest some paid hand
open the waste sluices—
That river will be clean
before ever you will be
11/8
Out of her childhood she remembered, as one might remember Charlie Wordsworth’s print shop in the rear of Bagellons, the hinged paperknife, the colored posters of horses (I’ll bet it was for the races at Clifton where the High School now stands). Once Pop made a big kite, five feet tall maybe, with the horses’ heads in the middle, and it flew and I couldn’t hold it without help. They fastened it to a post of the back porch at nightfall, real rope they had on it, and in the morning it was still there. She remembered the day the old man painted the mirror back of the bar: He took off his coat and laid the brushes and pans from his bag on one of the barroom tables. No one else was there but Jake who sat with his head in his hands except when someone came in for something or to telephone. Then he’d unlock the inside door and sit down again watching the old man. It was a big mirror. First he painted in a river coming in over from the door and curving down greenywhite nearly the whole length of it and very wide to fall in a falls into the edge of another river that ran all along the bottom all the way across, only a little of the water to be seen. Then he put in a blue sky all across the top with white clouds in it and under them a row of brown hills coming down to the upper river banks. Green trees he made with a big brush, just daubing it on, some of it even up top over the hills on the clouds, the trunks of the trees to be put in later. But down below, under the top river and all down the right side where it curved down to the falls he painted in the trunks first like narrow dark brown bottles. Then he drew in the houses, with white sides, three of them near the falls. “A good place to fish” Jake said. The roofs were red. On the other side of the falls, between the two rivers the houses were brown, two of them on brown hills with trees all among them. Then, after the paint of the rivers was dry, he began to paint in little boats, above and below— She never saw the work finished, for the saloon had been sold and they moved away. The last thing she saw him do was paint in the boats, “Look out that boat up there don’t go over those falls,” Jake said. The rivers were painted flat on the glass, wonderful rivers where she wanted to be. Some day she wanted to go to that place and see it. Like the song she remembered in school and she always wanted them to sing when you could ask what song you wanted sung, “Come again soon and you shall hear sung the tale of those green little islands.” She always wanted to hear the rest of it but there was never any more. They moved away.
11/10
The shell flowers
the wax grapes and peaches
the fancy oak or mahogany tables
the highbacked baronial hall chairs
Or the girls’ legs
agile stanchions
the breasts
the pinheads—
—Wore my bathing suit
wet
four hours after sundown.
That’s how. Yea?
Easy to get
hard to get rid of.
Then unexpectedly
a small house with a soaring oak
leafless above it
Someone should summarize these things
in the interest of local
government or how
a spotted dog goes up a gutter—
and in chalk crudely
upon the railroad bridge support
a woman rampant
brandishing two rolling pins
11/11
A cat licking herself solves most of the problems of infection. We wash too much and finally it kills us.
11/13 SHAKESPEARE
By writing he escaped from the world into the natural world of his mind. The unemployable world of his fine head was unnaturally useless in the gross exterior of his day—or any day. By writing he made this active. He melted himself into that grossness, and colored it with his powers. The proof that he was right and they passing, being that he continues always and naturally while their artificiality destroyed them. A man unable to employ himself in his world.
Therefore his seriousness and his accuracies, because it was not his play but the drama of his life. It is his anonymity that is baffling to nitwits and so they want to find an involved explanation—to defeat the plainness of the evidence.
When he speaks of fools he is one; when of kings he is one, doubly so in misfortune.
He is a woman, a pimp, a prince Hal—
Such a man is a prime borrower and standardizer—No inventor. He lives because he sinks back, does not go forward, sinks back into the mass—
He is Hamlet plainer than a theory—and in everything.
You can’t buy a life again after it’s gone, that’s the way I mean.
He drinks awful bad and he beat me up every single month while I was carrying this baby, pretty nearly every week.
(Shakespeare) a man stirred alive, all round not minus the intelligence but the intelligence subjugated—by misfortune in this case maybe—subjugated to the instinctive whole as it must be, but not minus it as in almost everything—not by cupidity that blights an island literature—but round, round, a round world E pur si muove. That has never sunk into literature as it has into geography, cosmology. Literature is still mediaeval, formal, dogmatic, the scholars, the obstinate rationalists—
These things are easy and obvious but it is not easy to formulate them, and it is still harder to put them down briefly. Yet it must be possible since I have done it here and there.
Such must be the future: penetrant and simple—minus the scaffolding of the academic, which is a “lie” in that it is inessential to the purpose as to the design.
This will do away with the stupidity of little children at school, which is the incubus of modern life—and the defense of the economists and modern rationalists of literature. To keep them drilled.
The difficulty of modern styles is made by the fragmentary stupidity of modern life, its lacunae of sense, loops, perversions of instinct, blankets, amputations, fullsomeness of instruction and multiplications of inanity. To avoid this, accuracy is driven to a hard road. To be plain is to be subverted since every term must be forged new, every word is tricked out of meaning, hanging with as many cheap traps as an altar.
The only human value of anything, writing included, is intense vision of the facts, add to that by saying the truth and action upon them—clear into the machine of absurdity to a core that is covered.
God—Sure if it means sense. “God” is poetic for the unobtainable. Sense is hard to get but it can be got. Certainly that destroys “God,” it destroys everything that interferes with simple clarity of apprehension.
11/16
The art of writing is all but lost (not the science which comes afterward and depends completely on the first) it is to make the stores of the mind available to the pen—Wide! That which locks up the mind is vicious.
Mr. Seraphim: They hate me. Police Protection. She was a flaming type of stupidity and its resourceful manner under Police Protection—the only normal: a type. One of the few places where the truth (demeaned) clings on.
11/13 TRAVELLING IN FAST COMPANY
As the ferry came into the slip there was a pause then a young fellow on a motorcycle shot out of the exit, looked right and left, sighted the hill, opened her up and took the grade at top speed. Right behind him came three others bunched and went roaring by, and behind them was a youngster travelling in fast company his eyes fastened on the others, and behind him an older guy sitting firm and with a face on him like a piece of wood ripped by without a quiver. And that brings it all up—Shakespeare—plays.
… Its hands stuck up in the air like prongs. Just sticking up in the air, fingers spread apart.
Goethe was a rotten dramatist….
11/20
Even idiots grow old
in a cap with the peak
over his right ear
cross eyed
shamble footed
minding the three goats
behind the firehouse
his face is deeper lined
than last year
and the rain comes down
in gusts suddenly
and hunters still return
even through the city
with their guns slung
openly from the shoulder
emptyhanded howbeit
for the most part
but aloof
as if from and truly from
another older world
11/24
If genius is profuse, never ending—stuck in the middle of a work is—the wrong track. Genius is the track, seen. Once seen it is impossible to keep from it. The superficial definitions, such as “genius is industry, genius is hard work, etc.” are nonsense. It is to see the track, to smell it out, to know it inevitable—sense sticking out all round feeling, feeling, seeing—hearing touching. The rest is pure gravity. (The earth pull.)
Creations: —they are situations of the soul (Lear, Harpagon, Œdipus Rex, Electra) but so closely (subjectively) identified with life that they become people. They are offshoots of an intensely simple mind. It is no matter what we think, no matter what we are.
The drama is the identification of the character with the man himself (Shakespeare—and his sphere of knowledge, close to him). As it flares in himself the drama is completed and the back kick of it is the other characters, created as the reflex of the first, so the dramatist “lives,” himself in his world. A poem is a soliloquy without the “living” in the world. So the dramatist “lives” the character. But to labor over the “construction” over the “technique” is to defeat, to tie up the drama itself. One cannot live after a prearranged pattern, it is all simply dead.
This is the thing (obvious and simple) that except through genius makes the theater a corpse. To intensely realize identity makes it live (borrowing, stealing the form by feeling it—as an uninformed man must). A play is this primary realization coming up to intensity and then fading (futilely) in self. This is the technique, the unlearnable, it is the natural drama, which can’t imagine situations in any other way than in association with the flesh—till it becomes living, it is so personal to a nothing, a nobody.
The painfully scrupulous verisimilitude which honesty affects drill, discipline defeats its own ends in—
To be nothing and unaffected by the results, to unlock, and to flow (they believe that when they have the mold of technique made perfect without a leak in it that the mind will be drilled to flow there whereas the mind is locked the more tightly the more perfect the technique is forged) (or it may flow, disencumbered by what it has learned, become unconscious, provided the technique becomes mechanical, goes out of the mind and so the mind [now it has been cut for life in this pattern]) can devote itself to that just as if it had learned it imitatively or not at all.
To be nothing and unaffected by the results, to unlock and flow, uncolored, smooth, carelessly—not cling to the unsolvable lumps of personality (yourself and your concessions, poems) concretions—
11/28
I make really very little money.
What of it?
I prefer the grass with the rain on it
the short grass before my headlights
when I am turning the car—
a degenerate trait, no doubt.
It would ruin England.
12/2
The first snow was a white sand that made the white rocks seem red.
The police are “the soldiers of the Duke.” The great old names: Gaynor, Healy—
12/9
Imagine a family of four grown men, one in bed with a sore throat, one with fresh plaster dust on his pants, one who played baseball all last summer and one holding the basin, four young men and no women but the mother with small pox scars marring the bridge and the end of her nose and dinner on the table, oil and meat bits and cuts of green peppers, the range giving out a heat for coats on the backs of the chairs to dry in.
Fairfield: Peoples Loan and Service, Money to Loan: and a young man carrying a bowling ball in a khaki canvas case. The Midland and a fern in the window before the inner oak and cut glass screen. House and sign painting in all its branches. Fairfield Bowling and Billiard Academy. Architect John Gabrone Architect, U. S. Post Office, Fairfield, N. J. Branch. Commercial Barber Shop. The New Cigarette Three Castles. Real Estate and Insurance, Motor Vehicle Agency. Commercial Lunch. Fairfield Home Laundry, soft water washing.
12/15
What an image in the face of Almighty God is she
her hands in her slicker pockets, head bowed,
Tam pulled down, flat backed, lanky legged,
loose feet kicking the pebbles as she goes
12/18
Here by the watertank and the stone, mottled granite, big as a rhinocerous head—cracked on one side—Damn families. My grandfather was a business man, you know. He kept the ice house in Mayaguez. They imported the ice. He kept it and sold it. My grandmother, my mother’s mother, would make syrups, strawberry and like that. He would sell them also. But his half brother Henriquez, there’s plenty of that in my family, would go there, to the ice house, and drink all day long without paying anything, until the man my grandfather had there complained. “You know Henriquez comes and drinks five or six glasses of syrup and never pays anything.” He did that. Just drank, lived at the house, took anything he pleased. That’s how, as my Mother says, she came to know Manuel Henriquez, her half cousin, better than she did her own brother who was away much of the time studying. Henriquez would never work, help or do anything until my grandfather had to tell him to stop. It was at about this time my grandfather died and this is how my Mother came to distrust and hate the Germans. All my grandfather’s friends were German, all but a few. “It was a man named Krug. I suppose he may have been father’s partner, anyhow he was his best friend, I don’t know. When my father died, Krug came to my mother and asked her if she had anything because my father owed some money. She had an hacienda in the country that she had had since before she was married, her own. She gave that. Then Krug came and said it was all gone, that there was nothing left. After that, he turned his back on the family (the skunk). It was the Spanish druggist Mestre who lent my mother the money to buy a few things and sell them to make a little business. He was a Catalan—they can’t say Pepe, like a Castilian, but he would call his wife, Papeeta. My Mother would send to Paris for a half dozen fine shirts, but fine, fine shirts and a few things like that. My brother was in Paris studying. When Krug told my mother she must send for him, that there was nothing left, she wrote. He answered her that he would sweep the streets of Paris rather than leave. She would send him money she made on her little business. Sometimes, he told us afterward, he would keep a sou in his pocket two weeks so as not to say he hadn’t any money. The students helped each other. Barclay, an Englishman, was one of his best friends. He helped him.”
