Only the imagination is real!
I have declared it
time without end.
If a man die
it is because death
has first
possessed his imagination.
Our good friend Jeremy Johnson at Evolutionary Landscapes posted to his Facebook account this insight recently:
"An orientation to the world which does not recognize the importance of symbolic thinking, indeed that we imbue the world with a
living mythological presence, is inadequate for the challenges of a planetary crisis. A planetary setting requires, perhaps for the first time since our species inception, a total presence and wholeness, a recognition of our participatory role in the ecology of Earth and interpenetrating divine realms. In a word, an ecology of consciousness."
This is the world of understanding poetry at its best, or at least, how to best understand the sometimes strange sometimes suspiciously contained poet Williams. It is the imagination that carries his work and by imagination I don’t mean fantasy or whimsy, rather sharp insight into first what is hidden and then what lives potent just out of reach, as the future, a future not of events and routine, but of potential, potential only the powers of intuition can perceive. Tremulous with anticipation, a future elusive, lacking concrete, alive only by gifts of communication and courage of conviction.
The Poem
It's all in
the sound. A song.
Seldom a song. It should
be a song—made of
particulars, wasps,
a gentian—something
immediate, open
scissors, a lady's
eyes—waking
centrifugal, centripetal.
The moment is gutted, or, if not the moment itself, our sense of its essence. So, with no obvious recourse, the poet acts to rehabilitate it, give it back its moxie, not merely to stand alone perfect for eternity, how dull, no, a future, dawning anew before our very eyes becomes possible, and that too is the poet’s dominion, calling it out, giving it form. But, power-washed of its taint, restored to its essential condition, a condition of utter receptivity, it, the world, us, becomes capable of perceiving the ‘interpenetrating of divine worlds’. Along with a new way to relate to language, we must be capable of a leap of imagination, a turning of the minds eye inward, a reconfiguration of the will, radically subjective, radically surrendered, alert, in service, ready to be animated, animated by something else.
By the brokenness of his composition the poet makes himself master of a certain weapon which he could possess himself of in no other way.
The language must break at some point to force a crack in the continuity of conventional apparatus of mind, of culture, of certainty. No crack, no light, no light, no disinfectant, and so enclosed, the contained mind, apparently free, becomes contaminated by its own storage. Say something different then, but say it clean, drawn out by the powers of insight, the radical perception of life as it is and the future as it might then be. Give it form, but be careful. Because the future misapprehended will drive you uncontrollably mad.
The poet Williams, and any good poet really, chose as his primary weapon metaphor or, as Jeremy might have it, the refinement of the imagination in order to perceive the world first and foremost for its symbolic messages rather than its literal ones.
A Sort of Song
Let the snake wait under
his weed
and the writing
be of words, slow and quick, sharp
to strike, quiet to wait,
sleepless.
-- through metaphor to reconcile
the people and the stones.
Compose. (No ideas
but in things) Invent!
Saxifrage is my flower that splits
the rocks.
So say something different or say the same thing sideways, in song sensing the rhythm of living flesh as it swings motionlessly in place. Out of direct perception, free from your alibi, in and of the body, the body in whom the mind serves effortlessly. Below, my favourite Williams poem, one I’ve never in any way understood but its hold on me remains, as does the glorious refrain, Beautiful Thing!
Paterson: Episode 17
Beat hell out of it
Beautiful Thing
spotless cap
and crossed white straps
over the dark rippled cloth——
Lift the stick
above that easy head
where you sit by the ivied
church, one arm
buttressing you
long fingers spread out
among the clear grass prongs——
and drive it down
Beautiful Thing
that your caressing body kiss
and kiss again
that holy lawn——
And again: obliquely——
legs curled under you as a
deer's leaping——
pose of supreme indifference
sacrament
to a summer's day
Beautiful Thing
in the unearned suburbs
then pause
the arm fallen——
what memories
of what forgotten face
brooding upon that lily stem?
The incredible
nose straight from the brow
the empurpled lips
and dazzled half-sleepy eyes
Beautiful Thing
of some trusting animal
makes a temple
of its place of savage slaughter
revealing
the damaged will incites still
to violence
consummately beautiful thing
and falls about your resting
shoulders——
Gently! Gently!
as in all things an opposite
that awakes
the fury, conceiving
knowledge
by way of despair that has
no place
to lay its glossy head——
Save only——Not alone!
Never, if possible
alone! to escape the accepted
chopping block
and a square hat!——
And as reverie gains and
your joints loosen
the trick's done!
Day is covered and we see you——
but not alone!
drunk and bedraggled to release
the strictness of beauty
under a sky full of stars
Beautiful thing
and a slow moon——
The car
had stopped long since
when the others
came and dragged those out
who had you there
indifferent
to whatever the anesthetic
Beautiful Thing
might slum away the bars——
Reek of it!
What does it matter?
could set free
only the one thing——
But you!
——in your white lace dress
"the dying swan"
and high heeled slippers——tall
as you already were——
till your head
through fruitful exaggeration
was reaching the sky and the
prickles of its ecstasy
Beautiful Thing!
And the guys from Paterson
beat up
the guys from Newark and told
them to stay the hell out
of their territory and then
socked you one
across the nose
Beautiful Thing
for good luck and emphasis
cracking it
till I must believe that all
desired women have had each
in the end
a busted nose
and live afterward marked up
Beautiful Thing
for memory's sake
to be credible in their deeds
Then back to the party!
and they maled
and femaled you jealously
Beautiful Thing
as if to discover when and
by what miracle
there should escape what?
still to be possessed
out of what part
Beautiful Thing
should it look?
or be extinguished——
Three days in the same dress
up and down——
It would take
a Dominie to be patient
Beautiful Thing
with you——
The stroke begins again——
regularly
automatic
contrapuntal to
the flogging
like the beat of famous lines
in the few excellent poems
woven to make you
gracious
and on frequent occasions
foul drunk
Beautiful Thing
pulse of release
to the attentive
and obedient mind.
