o meager times, so fat in everything imaginable! imagine the New World that rises to our windows from the sea on Mondays and on Saturdays—and on every other day of the week also. Imagine it in all its prismatic colorings, its counterpart in our souls—our souls that are great pianos whose strings, of honey and of steel, the divisions of the rainbow set twanging, loosening on the air great novels of adventure! Imagine the monster project of the moment: Tomorrow we the people of the United States are going to Europe armed to kill every man, woman, and child in the area west of the Carpathian Mountains (also east) sparing none. Imagine the sensation it will cause. First we shall kill them and then they, us. But we are careful to spare the Spanish bulls, the birds, rabbits, small deer and of course—the Russians. For the Russians we shall build a bridge from edge to edge of the Atlantic—having at first been at pains to slaughter all Canadians and Mexicans on this side. Then, oh then, the great feature will take place.
Never mind; the great event may not exist, so there is no need to speak further of it. Kill! kill! the English, the Irish, the French, the Germans, the Italians and the rest: friends or enemies, it makes no difference, kill them all. The bridge is to be blown up when all Russia is upon it. And Why?
Because we love them—all. That is the secret: a new sort of murder. We shall make leberwurst of them. Bratwurst. But why, since we are ourselves doomed to suffer the same annihilation?
If I could say what is on my mind in Sanscrit or even Latin I would do so. But I cannot. I speak for the integrity of the soul and the greatness of life's inanity; the formality of its boredom, the orthodoxy of its stupidity. Kill! kill! let there be fresh meat. . . .
The imagination, intoxicated by prohibitions, rises to drunken heights to destroy the world. Let it rage, let it kill. The imagination is supreme. To it all our works forever, from the remotest past to the farthest future, have been, and are and will be dedicated. To it alone we show our wit by having raised in its honor as monument not the least pebble. To it now we come to dedicate our secret project: the annihilation of every human creature on the face of the earth. This is something never before attempted. None to remain; nothing but the lower vertebrates, the mollusks, insects and plants. Then at last will the world be made anew. Houses crumble to ruin, cities disappear giving place to mounds of soil blown thither by the winds, small bushes and grass give way to trees which grow old and are succeeded by other trees for countless generations. A marvelous serenity broken only by bird and wild beast calls reigns over the entire sphere. Order and peace abound.
The final and self-inflicted holocaust has been all for love, for sweetest love, that together the human race, yellow, black, brown, red and white, agglutinated into enormous soul may be gratified with the sight and retire to the heaven of heavens content to rest on its laurels. There, soul of souls, watching its own horrid unity, it boils and digests itself within the tissues of the great Being of Eternity that we shall then have become. With what magnificent explosions and odors will not the day be accomplished as we, the Great One among all creatures, shall go about contemplating our self-prohibited desires as we promenade them before the inward review of our own bowels—et cetera, et cetera, et cetera . . . and it is spring—both in Latin and Turkish, in English and Dutch, in Japanese and Italian; it is spring by Stinking River where a magnolia tree, without leaves, before what was once a farmhouse, now a ramshackle home for millworkers, raises its straggling branches of ivorywhite flowers.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . .
Chapter 2
It is spring: life again begins to
assume its normal appearances as of "today." Only the imagination is undeceived.
The volcanos are extinct. Coal is beginning to be dug again where the fern
forests stood last night. (If an error is noted here, pay no attention
to it.)
Chapter 19
I realize that the chapters are rather quick in their sequence and that nothing much is contained in any one of them but no one should be surprised at this today.
THE TRADITIONALISTS OF PLAGIARISM
It is spring. That is to say, it is approaching THE BEGINNING.
In that huge and microscopic career of time, as it were a wild horse racing in an illimitable pampa under the stars, describing immense and microscopic circles with his hoofs on the solid turf, running without a stop for the millionth part of a second until he is aged and worn to a heap of skin, bones and ragged hoofs—In that majestic progress of life, that gives the exact impression of Phidias's frieze, the men and beasts of which, though they seem of the rigidity of marble are not so but move, with blinding rapidity, though we do not have the time to notice it, their legs advancing a millionth part of an inch every fifty thousand years—In that progress of life which seems stillness itself in the mass of its movements—at last SPRING is approaching.
In that colossal surge toward the finite and the capable life has now arrived for the second time at that exact moment when in the ages past the destruction of the species Homo sapiens occurred.
Now at last that process of miraculous verisimilitude, that great copying which evolution has followed, repeating move for move every move that it made in the past—is approaching the end.
Suddenly it is at an end. THE WORLD
IS NEW.
I
By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast—a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing
and fallen
patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees
All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines—
Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches—
They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind—
Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wild carrot leaf
One by one objects are defined—
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf
But now the stark dignity of
entrance—Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted they
grip down and begin to awaken
II
Pink confused with white
flowers and flowers reversed
take and spill the shaded flame
darting it back
into the lamp's horn
petals aslant darkened with mauve
red where in whorls
petal lays its glow upon petal
round flamegreen throats
petals radiant with transpiercing light
contending
above
the leaves
reaching up their modest green
from the pot's rim
and there, wholly dark, the pot
gay with rough moss.
A terrific confusion has taken place. No man knows whither to turn. There is nothing! Emptiness stares us once more in the face. Whither? To what end? Each asks the other. Has life its tail in its mouth or its mouth in its tail. . . .
At any rate, now at last spring is here!
The rock has split, the egg has hatched, the prismatically plumed bird of life has escaped from its cage. It spreads its wings and is perched now on the peak of the huge African mountain Kilimanjaro. . . .
The imagination, freed from the handcuffs of "art," takes the lead! Her feet are bare and not too delicate. In fact those who come behind her have much to think of. Hm. Let it pass.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The work will be in the realm of
the imagination as plain as the sky is to a fisherman—A very cloudy sentence.
The word must be put down for itself, not as a symbol of nature but a part,
cognizant of the whole—aware—civilized.
[ADDITIONAL PASSAGES AND POEMS FROM OTHER PAGES OF SPRING AND ALL]
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
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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 if 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 minute 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—
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
XVI
O tongue
licking
the sore on
her nether lip
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
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—