high sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they
are
useful; when they become so derivative as to become
unintelligible, the
same thing may be said for all of us—that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand. The bat,
holding on upside down or in quest of something to
eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf
under
a tree, the immovable critic twinkling his skin like a horse that
feels a flea, the base-
ball fan, the statistician—case after case
could be cited did
one wish it; nor is it valid
to discriminate against “business documents and
school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must make a
distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is
not poetry,
nor till the autocrats among us can be
“literalists of
the imagination”—above
insolence and triviality and can present
for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them, shall we
have
it. In the meantime, if you demand on one hand, in defiance of
their opinion—
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is, on the other hand,
genuine then you are interested in poetry.
IN THE DAYS OF PRISMATIC COLOR
not in the days of Adam and Eve but when Adam
was alone; when there was no smoke and color was
fine, not with the fineness of
early civilization art but by virtue
of its originality, with nothing to modify it but the
mist that went up, obliqueness was a varia-
tion of the perpendicular, plain to see and
to account for: it is no
longer that; nor did the blue red yellow band
of incandescence that was color, keep its stripe: it also is one of
those things into which much that is peculiar can be
read; complexity is not a crime but carry
it to the point of murki-
ness and nothing is plain. A complexity
moreover, that has been committed to darkness, instead of granting
it-
self to be the pestilence that it is, moves all a-
bout as if to bewilder with the dismal
fallacy that insistence
is the measure of achievement and that all
truth must be dark. Principally throat, sophistication is as it al-
ways has been—at the antipodes from the init-
ial great truths. “Part of it was crawling, part of it
was about to crawl, the rest
was torpid in its lair.” In the short legged, fit-
ful advance, the gurgling and all the minutiæ—we have the classic
multitude of feet. To what purpose! Truth is no Apollo
Belvedere, no formal thing. The wave may go over it if it likes.
Know that it will be there when it says:
“I shall be there when the wave has gone by.”
IS YOUR TOWN NINEVEH?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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