Part XI
4 And that ‘‘it’’ isn’t
5 is what your poet-painter has been trying to say by vainly writing of what love is what hate is
6 and what a rose,—
7 or any continuing process group identified with life,—
8 is.
9 Paradoxically the poet’s preoccupation with describing the indescribable and his disdainful neglect of the physical for what it precisely is worth allows him to fall
10 into the psychological nature-trap tended by those who exploit such illusory preoccupations with pragmatic glee.
11 That is they exploit him by dealing in fish which only the poets can catch with their creative imagination nets.
12 The pragmatists have only to stand by with their baskets infra-visible
13 to the ultra rangeing spectrum of the poets, as the latter throw the caught fish aside, shimmering, flapping, and vital, disdaining for the moment of even thinking of consuming such beauty,—and only intent on casting again.
14 But between fishing trips our poet must buy those fish again from the merchants, smoked, grilled, or hashed.
15 Thus are the poets kept poor, poor in eats, while rich in potential.
16 Poor poet eating with one hand while writing his book with the other is constantly positing disproval of the love abstraction which he weaves by identifying life only with the corporeal mechanism of ordination.
17 And what the poet wrote which may live down the ages was much more of his living soul than was the hand of the body which moved the pen.
18 Anyway it is very interesting,—and artist, if you must be favored in your insistance that her legs are Sylvia and the hand is man, then also you must agree that his eye glasses must also be man.
19 And also his chair devised but two thousand years ago as an extension of the monarchial fanny by Mediterraneans for mobility purposes while their Eastern cousins still sat on the ground.
20 The eyeglasses and chair are
21 neither fungus, nor flower, nor rock outcropping. They are phenomena that exist in the world only because
22 man was there first.
23 Therefore it follows
24 that whether we hold with the artist’s or with the scientist’s concepts it is inconsequential
25 to the resultant under consideration
26 for either way
27 the mechanical extension
28 is still an articulated part of ‘‘man’’ whether the extension be of organic or inorganic substances or only an ephemerally vibrated air word electrically transcribed;
29 or ‘‘canned’’ for tomorrow.