The Descent of Winter: 11/13

Salvador Dali, Cubist Self-portrait

SHAKESPEARE

   By writing he escaped from the world into the natural world of his mind. The unemployable world of his fine head was unnaturally useless in the gross exterior of his day——or any day. By writing he made this active. He melted himself into that grossness, and colored it with his powers. The proof that he was right and they were passing, being that he continues always and naturally while their artificiality destroyed them. A man unable to employ himself in the world.

   Therefore his seriousness and his accuracies, because it was not his play but the drama of his life. It is his anonymity that is baffling to nitwits and so they want to find an involved explanation——to defeat the plainness of the evidence.


   When he speaks of fools his is one; when of kings he is one, doubly so in misfortune.

   He is a woman, a pimp, a prince Hal——

   Such a man is a prime borrower and standardizer——No inventor. He lives because he sinks back, does not go forward, sinks back into the mass——

   He is Hamlet plainer than a theory——and in everything.

   You can't buy a life again after it's gone, that's the way I mean.

   He drinks awful bad and he beat me up every single month while I was carrying this baby, pretty nearly every week.

   (Shakespeare) a man stirred alive, all round not minus the intelligence but the intelligence subjugated——by misfortune, in this case maybe——subjugated to the instinctive whole as it must be, but not minus it as in almost everything——not by cupidity that blights an island literature——but round, round, a round world E pur si muove. That has never sunk into literature as it has into geography, cosmology. Literature is still mediæval, formal, dogmatic, the scholars, the obstinate rationalists——

   These things are easy and obvious but it is not easy to formulate them, and it is still harder to put them down briefly. Yet it must be possible since I have done it here and there.

   Such must be the future: penetrant and simple——minus the scaffolding of the academic, which is a "lie" in that it is inessential to the purpose as to the design.

   This will do away with the stupidity of little children at school, which is the incubus of modern life——and the defense of the economists and modern rationalists of literature. To keep them drilled.

   The difficulty of modern styles is made by the fragmentary stupidity of modern life, its lacunæ of sense, loops, perversions of instinct, blankets, amputations, fulsomeness of instruction and multiplications of inanity. To avoid this, accuracy is driven to a hard road. To be plain is to be subverted since every term must be forged new, every word is tricked out of meaning, hanging with as many cheap traps as an altar.

   The only human value of anything, writing included, is intense vision of the facts, add to that by saying the truth and action upon them,——clear into the machine of absurdity to a core that is covered.

   God——Sure if it means sense. "God" is poetic for the unobtainable. Sense is hard to get but it can be got. Certainly that destroys "God," it destroys everything that interferes with simple clarity of apprehension.


(W.C.W.)


[NEXT]