The Lost Lunar Baedeker Page 9

  She is NOT!

  The man who lives a life in which his activities conform to a social code which is a protectorate of the feminine element———is no longer masculine

  The women who adapt themselves to a theoretical valuation of their sex as a relative impersonality, are not yet Feminine

  Leave off looking to men to find out what you are not—seek within yourselves to find out what you are

  As conditions are at present constituted—you have the choice between Parasitism, & Prostitution —or Negation

  Men & women are enemies, with the enmity of the exploited for the parasite, the parasite for the exploited—at present they are at the mercy of the advantage that each can take of the others sexual dependence—. The only point at which the interests of the sexes merge—is the sexual embrace.

  The first illusion it is to your interest to demolish is the division of women into two classes the mistress, & the mother every well-balanced & developed woman knows that is not true, Nature has endowed the complete woman with a faculty for expressing herself through all her functions—there are no restrictions the woman who is so incompletely evolved as to be un-self-conscious in sex, will prove a restrictive influence on the temperamental expansion of the next generation; the woman who is a poor mistress will be an incompetent mother—an inferior mentality—& will enjoy an inadequate apprehension of Life.

  To obtain results you must make sacrifices & the first & greatest sacrifice you have to make is of your “virtue” The fictitious value of woman as identified with her physical purity—is too easy a stand-by—— rendering her lethargic in the acquisition of intrinsic merits of character by which she could obtain a concrete value— therefore, the first self-enforced law for the female sex, as a protection against the man made bogey of virtue—which is the principal instrument of her subjection, would be the unconditional surgical destruction of virginity through-out the female population at puberty—.

  The value of man is assessed entirely according to his use or interest to the community, the value of woman, depends entirely on chance, her success or insuccess in manoeuvering a man into taking the life-long responsibility of her—The advantages of marriage are too ridiculously ample—compared to all other trades—for under modern conditions a woman can accept preposterously luxurious support from a man (with-out return of any sort—even offspring)—as a thank offering for her virginity

  The woman who has not succeeded in striking that advantageous bargain—is prohibited from any but surreptitious re-action to Life-stimuli—& entirely debarred maternity.

  Every woman has a right to maternity—

  Every woman of superior intelligence should realize her race-responsibility, in producing children in adequate proportion to the unfit or degenerate members of her sex—

  Each child of a superior woman should be the result of a definite period of psychic development in her life—& not necessarily of a possibly irksome & outworn continuance of an alliance—spontaneously adapted for vital creation in the beginning but not necessarily harmoniously balanced as the parties to it—follow their individual lines of personal evolution—

  For the harmony of the race, each individual should be the expression of an easy & ample interpenetration of the male & female temperaments—free of stress

  Woman must become more responsible for the child than man—

  Women must destroy in themselves, the desire to be loved—

  The feeling that it is a personal insult when a man transfers his attentions from her to another woman

  The desire for comfortable protection instead of an intelligent curiosity & courage in meeting & resisting the pressure of life sex or so called love must be reduced to its initial element, honour, grief, sentimentality, pride & consequently jealousy must be detached from it.

  Woman for her happiness must retain her deceptive fragility of appearance, combined with indomitable will, irreducible courage, & abundant health the outcome of sound nerves—Another great illusion that woman must use all her introspective clear-sightedness & unbiassed bravery to destroy—for the sake of her self respect is the impurity of sex the realisation in defiance of superstition that there is nothing impure in sex—except in the mental attitude to it—will constitute an incalculable & wider social regeneration than it is possible for our generation to imagine.

  Modern Poetry

  Poetry is prose bewitched, a music made of visual thoughts, the sound of an idea.

  The new poetry of the English language has proceeded out of America. Of things American it attains the aristocratic situation of vitality. This unexpectedly realized valuation of American jazz and American poetry is endorsed by two publics; the one universal, the other infinitesimal in comparison.

  And why has the collective spirit of the modern world, of which both are the reflection, recognized itself unanimously in the new music of unprecedented instruments, and so rarely in the new poetry of unprecedented verse? It is because the sound of music capturing our involuntary attention is so easy to get in touch with, while the silent sound of poetry requires our voluntary attention to obliterate the cold barrier of print with the whole “intelligence of our senses.” And many of us who have no habit of reading not alone with the eye but also with the ear, have—especially at a superficial first reading—overlooked the beauty of it.

  More than to read poetry we must listen to poetry. All reading is the evocation of speech; the difference in our approach, then, in reading a poem or a newspaper is that our attitude in reading a poem must be rather that of listening to and looking at a pictured song. Modern poetry, like music, has received a fresh impetus from contemporary life; they have both gained in precipitance of movement. The structure of all poetry is the movement that an active individuality makes in expressing itself. Poetic rhythm, of which we have all spoken so much, is the chart of a temperament.

  The variety and felicity of these structural movements in modern verse has more than vindicated the rebellion against tradition. It will be found that one can recognize each of the modern poets’ work by the gait of their mentality. Or rather that the formation of their verses is determined by the spontaneous tempo of their response to life. And if at first it appears irksome to adjust pleasure to unaccustomed meters, let us reflect in time that hexameters and alexandrines, before they became poetic laws, originated as the spontaneous structure of a poet’s inspiration.

  Imagine a tennis champion who became inspired to write poetry, would not his verse be likely to embody the rhythmic transit of skimming balls? Would not his meter depend on his way of life, would it not form itself, without having recourse to traditional, remembered, or accepted forms? This, then, is the secret of the new poetry. It is the direct response of the poet’s mind to the modern world of varieties in which he finds himself. In each one we can discover his particular inheritance of that world’s beauty.

  Close as this relationship of poetry to music is, I think only once has the logical transition from verse to music, on which I had so often speculated, been made, and that by the American, Ezra Pound. To speak of the modern movement is to speak of him; the masterly impresario of modern poets, for without the discoveries he made with his poet’s instinct for poetry, this modern movement would still be rather a nebula than the constellation it has become. Not only a famous poet, but a man of action, he gave the public the required push on to modern poetry at the psychological moment. Pound, the purveyor of geniuses to such journals as the “Little Review,” on which he conferred immortality by procuring for its pages the manuscripts of Joyce’s “Ulysses.” Almost together with the publication of his magnificent Cantos, his music was played in Paris; it utters the communings of a poet’s mind with itself making decisions on harmony.

  It was inevitable that the renaissance of poetry should proceed out of America, where latterly a thousand languages have been born, and each one, for purposes of communication at least, English—English enriched and variegated with the grammatical structure and voice
-inflection of many races, in novel alloy with the fundamental time-is-money idiom of the United States, discovered by the newspaper cartoonists.

  This composite language is a very living language, it grows as you speak. For the true American appears to be ashamed to say anything in the way it has been said before. Every moment he ingeniously coins new words for old ideas, to keep good humor warm. And on the baser avenues of Manhattan every voice swings to the triple rhythm of its race, its citizenship and its personality.

  Out of the welter of this unclassifiable speech, while professors of Harvard and Oxford labored to preserve “God’s English,” the muse of modern literature arose, and her tongue had been loosened in the melting-pot.

  You may think it impossible to conjure up the relationship of expression between the high browest modern poets and an adolescent Slav who has speculated in a wholesale job-lot of mandarines and is trying to sell them in a retail market on First Avenue. But it lies simply in this: both have had to become adapted to a country where the mind has to put on its verbal clothes at terrific speed if it would speak in time; where no one will listen if you attack him twice with the same missile of argument. And, that the ear that has listened to the greatest number of sounds will have the most to choose from when it comes to self-expression, each has been liberally educated in the flexibility of phrases.

  So in the American poet wherever he may wander, however he may engage himself with an older culture, there has occurred no Europeanization of his fundamental advantage, the acuter shock of the New World consciousness upon life. His is still poetry that has proceeded out of America.

  The harvest from this recent fertiliser is the poetry of E. E. Cummings. Where other poets have failed for being too modern he is more modern still, and altogether successful; where others were entirely anti-human in their fear of sentimentality, he keeps that rich compassion that poets having for common things leads them to deck them [sic] with their own conception; for surely if there were a heaven it would be where this horrible ugliness of human life would arise self-consciously as that which the poet has made of it.

  Cummings has united free verse and rhyme which so urgently needed to be married. His rhymes are quite fresh—“radish-red” and “hazarded,” and the freeness of his verse gives them a totally new metric relationship.

  But fundamentally he is a great poet because his verse wells up abundantly from the foundations of his soul; a sonorous dynamo. And as I believe that the quality of genius must be largely unconscious, I can understand how Cummings can turn out such gabble when he is not being sublime. He is very often sublime.

  In reading modern poetry one should beware of allowing mere technical eccentricities or grammatical disturbances to turn us from the main issue which is to get at the poem’s reality. We should remember that this seeming strangeness is inevitable when any writer has come into an independent contact with nature: to each she must show herself in a new manner, for each has a different organic personality for perceiving her.

  When the little controversies over what is permissible in art evaporate, we will always find that the seeming strangeness has disappeared with them in the larger aspect of the work which has the eternal quality that is common to all true art.

  Out of the past most poets, after all, call to us with one or two perfect poems. And we have not complained of being too poor. You will find that the moderns have already done as much.

  H. D., who is an interesting example of my claims for the American poet who engages with an older culture, has written at least two perfect poems: one about a swan.

  Marianne Moore, whose writing so often amusingly suggests the soliloquies of a library clock, has written at least one perfect poem, “The Fish.”

  Lawrence Vail has written one perfect poem, the second “Cannibalistic Love Song,” a snatch of primitive ideation with a rhythm as essential as daylight. Maxwell Bodenheim, I think, had one among his early work, and perfect also is a poem of Carlos Williams about the wind on a window-pane.

  Williams brings me to a distinction that it is necessary to make in speaking of modern poets. Those I have spoken of are poets according to the old as well as the new reckoning; there are others who are poets only according to the new reckoning. They are headed by the doctor, Carlos Williams. Here is the poet whose expression derives from his life. He is a doctor. He loves bare facts. He is also a poet, he must recreate everything to suit himself. How can he reconcile these two selves?

  Williams will make a poem of a bare fact—just show you something he noticed. The doctor wishes you to know just how uncompromisingly itself that fact is. But the poet would like you to realize all that it means to him, and he throws that bare fact onto paper in such a way that it becomes a part of Williams’ own nature as well as the thing itself. That is the new rhythm.

  Preceptors of Childhood

  or The Nurses of Maraquita

  I. Lilah

  Lilah was pale, and Maraquita loved her. She read her “Peep of Day,” a pretty book about a pretty man, that made her cry.

  Maraquita’s introduction to crying without being hurt for it.

  Lilah and Maraquita understood each other perfectly.

  They read “Peep of Day” all over again, and the sauce of the “Last Supper” tasted of tears.

  And Lilah wore a brooch of pale pink coral rose-buds, cool to the fingers.…

  One day Maraquita threw a domino through the window-pane, and was punished by Mamma.

  And after the psychic concussion, she was still alive.

  … And Lilah was still there—and once she had been governess in a jewish family in Hungary.

  And in Hungary you buried medlars under trees and dug them up when they were rotten.

  And a cavalry officer had galloped after the beautiful daughter of the family—and rode her down—because she was a jewess.

  So the world grew bigger than it had been … and Maraquita wondered where the domino went to, and she felt lonely, like the pretty man on the wooden cross.

  And Lilah had kind soft hands, but not very useful … and Maraquita was never going to set any store by useful things again.

  Lilah one morning wasn’t there any more … Maraquita wondered what it was about mornings, that made her wake up.

  II. Queenie

  She had large eyes.

  Maraquita feeling affectionate called her Black-beetle.

  And “Black-beetle,” who hadn’t lost all her fun yet, let her.

  But after a few more months had happened to her, she would rather Maraquita called her “Queenie.”

  Maraquita supposed she wanted to be called that way, because she hoped Victoria would die.

  She liked grand funerals.

  But Victoria wouldn’t die.

  And nothing happened.

  She was very clever at finding streets.

  All the streets were the same—bare and buff.

  Sometimes a richer house would have pillars painted a dull red.

  The more streets they saw—the less they had to say.

  “Next week will come Good Friday,” said Maraquita at the corner of Blenheim Terrace.

  And after an hour and a half—they got back to the corner of Blenheim Terrace.

  And Queenie answered. “Yes, next week will come Good Friday.”

  III. Nicky

  Nicky was the governess that Mamma loved.

  She was very good.

  Her breath was damp on the back of your neck over lessons, and the gold tassel on her watch chain tickled.

  Nicky could sharpen pencils as fine as a needle.

  And she drew narcissi with them, shading them till they shone.

  Maraquita respected her for it.

  This was the only respect from Maraquita she was ever going to get.

  Her forehead was too high, and her square red fringe wouldn’t flatten to it.

  Her face was spotted with sunrust.

  Her nose was flat, and pinkly turned up at the tip.

  He
r teeth were yellow.

  Her eyelashes were white.

  Her sleeves were too short, and red hairs grew among the freckles above her wrists.

  Her ears were flannelly!

  She wore a brown velvet waistcoat to a plaid dress with glass buttons that rucked on her virgin bosom.

  She was very good.

  She only made Maraquita feel very sick.

  She prayed at leather chairs in the morning, in the morning room.

  And Maraquita curdled with shame for conversing with something she couldn’t see.

  And the coal-heaver outside was quite likely to look in.

  Nicky lived in fearful conspiracy with Mamma for two years.

  Twenty-four months of unbearable biliousness.

  Maraquita grew very thin.

  They gave her porridge—with lumps in it.

  Maraquita didn’t want it.

  They gave her cod-liver oil.

  For was she not the child of parents who never stinted of buying anything that was all for the best for her?

  And it was best to go to bed early.

  Maraquita went to bed at 7 o’clock, and Nicky was so good.

  She sat outside the bedroom door—forever—with an open Bible, under the gas jet—so that Maraquita shouldn’t play.

  Maraquita knew very well what should be done with Nicky.

  Nicky, who was so blushfully buttoned up, should be quite undressed and thrown into a cage of Lions; she should be married to a lion—and have children with Lion’s manes and Nicky’s freckles.

  Then again Maraquita felt the damp breath down the back of her neck—and the lions ROARED and their claws scratched.

  * * * * * * * * *

  And it was beter Maraquita should go to school in the country—she was getting very thin.

  Auto-Facial-Construction

  The face is our most potent symbol of personality.

  The adolescent has facial contours in harmony with the conditions of his soul. Day by day the new interests and activities of modern life are prolonging the youth of our souls, and day by day, we are becoming more aware of the necessity for our faces to express that youthfulness, for the sake of psychic logic. Different systems of beauty culture have compromised with our inherent right, not only to “be ourselves” but to “look like ourselves”, by producing a facial contour in middle age, which does duty as a “well preserved appearance”. This preservation of partially distorted muscles, is, at best, merely a pleasing parody of youth. That subtle element of the ludicrous inherent in facial transformation by time, is the signpost of discouragement pointing along the path of the evolution of personality. For to what end is our experience of life, if deprived of a fitting aesthetic revelation in our faces? One distorted muscle causes a fundamental disharmony in self-expression, for no matter how well gowned or groomed men or women may be, how exquisitely the complexion is cared for, or how beautiful the expression of the eyes, if the original form of the face (intrinsic symbol of personality) has been effaced in muscular transformation, they have lost the power to communicate their true personalities to others and all expression of sentiment is veiled in pathos. Years of specialized interest in physiognomy as an artist, have brought me to an understanding of the human face, which has made it possible for me to find the basic principle of facial integrity, its conservation, and when necessary, reconstruction.