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of S. particularly amuse when the attempt is made to force the role of a Solon upon the creator of Richard 3d.
    So I come again to my present day gyrations.
    So it is with the other classics: their meaning and worth can only be studied and understood in the imagination — that which begot them only can give them life again, re-enkindle their perfection —
    useless to study by rote or scientific research — Useful for certain understanding to corroborate the imagination —
    Yes, Anatole was a fool when he said: It is a lie. — That is it. If the actor simulates life it
is
a lie. But — but why continue without an audience?
    The reason people marvel at works of art and say: How in Christ’s name did he do it? — is that they know nothing of the physiology of the nervous system and have never in their experience witnessed the larger processes of the imagination.
    It is a step over from the profitless engagements of the arithmetical.
    XII
    The red paper box
    hinged with cloth
    is lined
    inside and out
    with imitation
    leather
    It is the sun
    the table
    with dinner
    on it for
    these are the same —
    Its twoinch trays
    have engineers
    that convey glue
    to airplanes
    or for old ladies
    that darn socks
    paper clips
    and red elastics —
    What is the end
    to insects
    that suck gummed
    labels?
    for this is eternity
    through its
    dial we discover
    transparent tissue
    on a spool
    But the stars
    are round
    cardboard with
    a tin edge
    and a ring
    to fasten them
    to a trunk
    for the vacation —
    XIII
    Crustaceous
    wedge
    of sweaty kitchens
    on rock
    overtopping
    thrusts of the sea
    Waves of steel
    from
    swarming backstreets
    shell
    of coral
    inventing
    electricity —
    Lights
    speckle
    El Greco
    lakes
    in renaissance
    twilight
    with triphammers
    which pulverize
    nitrogen
    of old pastures
    to dodge
    motorcars
    with arms and legs —
    The agregate
    is untamed
    encapsulating
    irritants
    but
    of agonized spires
    knits
    peace
    where bridge stanchions
    rest
    certainly
    piercing
    left ventricles
    with long
    sunburnt fingers
    XIV
    Of death
    the barber
    the barber
    talked to me
    cutting my
    life with
    sleep to trim
    my hair —
    It’s just
    a moment
    he said, we die
    every night —
    And of
    the newest
    ways to grow
    hair on
    bald death —
    I told him
    of the quartz
    lamp
    and of old men
    with third
    sets of teeth
    to the cue
    of an old man
    who said
    at the door —
    Sunshine today!
    for which
    death shaves
    him twice
    a week
    XV
    The decay of cathedrals
    is efflorescent
    through the phenomenal
    growth of movie houses
    whose catholicity is
    progress since
    destruction and creation
    are simultaneous
    without sacrifice
    of even the smallest
    detail even to the
    volcanic organ whose
    woe is translatable
    to joy if light becomes
    darkness and darkness
    light, as it will —
    But scism which seems
    adamant is diverted
    from the perpendicular
    by simply rotating the object
    cleaving away the root of
    disaster which it
    seemed to foster. Thus
    the movies are a moral force
    Nightly the crowds
    with the closeness and
    universality of sand
    witness the selfspittle
    which used to be drowned
    in incense and intoned
    over by the supple jointed
    imagination of inoffensiveness
    backed by biblical
    rigidity made into passion plays
    upon the altar to
    attract the dynamic mob
    whose female relative
    sweeping grass Tolstoi
    saw injected into
    the Russian nobility
    It is rarely understood how such plays as Shakespeare’s were written — or in fact how any work of value has been written, the practical bearing of which is that only as the work was produced, in that way alone can it be understood
    Fruitless for the academic tapeworm to hoard its excrementa is books. The cage —
    The most of all writing has not even begun in the province from which alone it can draw sustenance.
    There is not life in the stuff because it tries to be “like” life.
    First must come the transposition of the faculties to the only world of reality that men know: the world of