The Descent of Winter: 11/24

Paul Klee, Comedy

  If genius is profuse, never ending——stuck in the middle of a work is——the wrong track. Genius is the track, seen. Once seen it is impossible to keep from it. The superficial definitions, such as "genius is industry, genius is hard work, etc." are nonsense. It is to see the track, to smell it out, to know it inevitable—sense sticking out all round feeling, feeling, seeing——hearing touching. The rest is pure gravity (the earth pull).

  Creations:——they are situations of the soul (Lear, Harpagon, Œdipus Rex, Electra) but so closely (subjectively) identified with life that they become people. They are offshoots of an intensely simple mind. It is no matter what we think, no matter what we are.

  The drama is the identification of the character with the man himself (Shakespeare——and his sphere of knowledge, close to him). As it flares in himself, the drama is completed and the back kick of it is the other characters, created as the reflex of the first, so the dramatist "lives," himself in his world. A poem is a soliloquy without the "living" in the world. So the dramatist "lives" in the character. But to labor over the "construction" over the "technique" is to defeat, to tie up the drama itself. One cannot live after a prearranged pattern, it is all simply dead.

  This is the thing (obvious and simple) that except through genius makes the theater a corpse. To intensely realize identity makes it live (borrowing stealing the form by feeling it——as an uninformed man must). A play is this primary realization coming up to intensity and then fading (futilely) in self. This is the technique, the unlearnable, it is the natural drama, which can't imagine situations in any other way than in association with the flesh——till it becomes living, it is so personal to a nothing, a nobody.

  The painfully scrupulous verisimilitude which honesty affects——drill, discipline defeats its own ends in——

  To be nothing and unaffected by the results, to unlock, and to flow (They believe that when they have the mold of technique made perfect without a leak in it that the mind will be drilled to flow there whereas the mind is locked the more tightly the more perfect the technique is forged) (or it may flow, disencumbered by what it has learned, become unconscious, provided the technique becomes mechanical, goes out of the mind and so the mind (now it has been cut for life in this pattern)) can devote itself to that just as if it had learned it intuitively or not at all.

  To be nothing and unaffected by the results, to unlock and flow, uncolored, smooth, carelessly——not cling to the unsolvable lamps of personality (yourself and your concessions, poems) concretions——


(W.C.W.)


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