It Started Rings

Charlie Demuth once told me that he did not like the taste of liquor, for which he was thankful, but that he found the effect it had on his mind to be delightful. Of course Li Po is reported to have written his best verse supported in the arms of the Emperor's attendants and with a dancing-girl to hold his tablet. He was also a great poet. Wine is merely the latchstring.

The virtue of it all is in an opening of the doors, though some rooms of course will be empty, a break with banality, the continual hardening which habit enforces. There is nothing left in me but the virtue of curiosity, Demuth puts in. The poet should be forever at the ship's prow.

An acrobat seldom learns really a new trick, but he must exercise continually to keep his joints free. When I made this discovery it started rings in my memory that keep following one after the other to this day.

WCW, Kora in Hell (Prologue)

There is proficiency in dissection...

The whole field of education is affected -- There is no end of detail that is without significance.

Education would begin by placing in the mind of the student the nature of knowledge -- in the dead state and the nature of the force which may energize it.

This would clarify his field at once -- He would then see the use of data.

But at present knowledge is placed before a man as if it were a stair at the top of which a DEGREE is obtained which is superlative.

nothing could be more ridiculous.  To data there is no end.  There is proficiency in dissection and a knowledge of parts but in the knowledge--

It is imagination that --

That is : life is absolutely simple.  In any civilized society everyone should know EVERYTHING there is to know about life at once and always.  There should never be permitted, confusion --

There are difficulties to life, under conditions there are impasses, life may prove impossible -- But it must never be lost -- as it is today --

I remember so distinctly the young Pole in Leipzig going with hushed breath to hear Wundt lecture -- In this mass of intricate philosophic data what one of the listeners was able to maintain himself for the winking of an eyelash.  Not one.  The inundation of the intelligence by masses of complicated fact is not knowledge.  There is no end --

And what is the fourth dimension?  It is the endlessness of knowledge --

It is the imagination on which reality rides -- It is the imagination -- It is a cleavage through everything by a force that does not exist in the mass and therefore can never be discovered by its anatomization.

It is for this reason that I have always placed art first and esteemed it over science -- in spite of everything.

Art is the pure effect of the force upon which science depends for its reality -- Poetry

The effect of this realization upon life will be the emplacement of knowledge into a living current -- which it has always sought --

In other times -- men counted it a tragedy to be dislocated from sense -- Today boys are sent with dullest faith to technical schools of all sorts -- broken, bruised

few escape whole slaughter.  This is not civilization but stupidity -- Before entering knowledge the integrity of the imagination --

The effect will be to give importance to the subdivisions of experience -- which today are absolutely lost -- There exists simply nothing.

from Spring and All by William Carlos Williams (1923)

Out of Sight, Out of Mind

The world is wrapped up tight within us. And yet towards externalities are we driven--do we drive ourselves. Imagination sets us moving; ambition paves the way; we set our sites and embark.

Imagination is thinking is seeing. Seeing is believing (though Thomas, wisely, doubts). Doubting is seeing something else.

If so, what is the imagined self?

Melville's Ishmael, in the chapter Nightgown: "Because no man can ever feel his own identity aright except his eyes be closed; as if, darkness were indeed the proper element of our essences, though light be more congenial to our clayey part."

Vision is light.
Light is vision.

Congenial to our dust and less our essence.

Ishmael, elsewhere, in The Mast-Head (look-out): ..."There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship indolently rolls; the drowsy trade winds blow; everything resolves you into languor. For the most part, in this tropic whaling life, a sublime uneventfulness invests you..."

"...but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity;"

"There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch, slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror."

Breathe that in; close your enslaving eyes and be more attuned while less attentive.