Authors, American -- 20th century -- Correspondence; Crane, Hart, 1899-1932. Correspondence
In the above sense I feel you as entering very strongly into certain
developments in _The Bridge_. May I say it, and not seem absurd, that
you are the first, or rather the purest living indice of a new order of
consciousness that I have met? We are accomplices in many ways that we
don’t yet fully understand. “What is now proved was once only imagined,”
said Blake. I have to combat every day those really sincere people, but
limited, who deny the superior logic of metaphor in favor of their
perfect sums, divisions and subtractions. They cannot go a foot unless
to merely catch up with some predetermined and set boundaries, nor can
they realize that they do nothing but walk ably over an old track
bedecked with all kinds of signposts and “championship records.” Nobody
minds their efforts, which frequently amount to a great deal,--but I
object to their system of judgment being so regally applied to what I’m
interested in doing. Such a cramping cannot be reconciled with the work
which you have done, and which I feel myself a little beginning to do.
The great energies about us cannot be transformed that way into a higher
quality of life, and by perfecting our sensibilities, response and
actions, we are always contributing more than we can realize
(rationalize) at the time. We answer them a little vaguely, first,
because our ends are forever unaccomplished, and because, secondly, our
work is self-explanatory enough, if they could “see” it. I nearly go mad
with the intense but always misty realization of what _can_ be done if
potentialities are fully freed, released. I know you to feel the same
way about your camera,--despite all that you actually _have_ done with
it already. In that sense I hope to make it the one memorable thing to
you in this letter that I think you should go on with your photographic
synthesis of life this summer and fall, gathering together those
dangerous interests outside of yourself into that purer projection of
yourself. It is really not a projection in any but a loose sense, for I
feel more and more that in the absolute sense the artist _identifies_
himself with life. Because he has always had so much surrounding
indifference and resistance such “action” takes on a more relative and
limited term which has been abused and misunderstood by several
generations,--this same “projecting.” But in the true mystical sense as
well as in the sense which Aristotle meant by the “imitation of nature,”
I feel that I’m right.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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