“Daphne with her thighs in bark
“Stretches toward me her leafy hands,” —
Subjectively. In the stuffed-satin drawing-room
I await The Lady Valentine’s commands,
Knowing my coat has never been
Of precisely the fashion
To stimulate, in her,
A durable passion;
Doubtful, somewhat, of the value
Of well-gowned approbation
Of literary effort,
But never of The Lady Valentine’s vocation:
Poetry, her border of ideas,
The edge, uncertain, but a means of blending
With other strata
Where the lower and higher have ending;
A hook to catch the Lady Jane’s attention,
A modulation toward the theatre,
Also, in the case of revolution,
A possible friend and comforter.
***
Conduct, on the other hand, the soul
“Which the highest cultures have nourished”
To Fleet St. where
Dr. Johnson flourished;
Besides this thoroughfare
The sale of half-hose has
Long since superseded the cultivation
Of Pierian roses.
(Ezra Pound, watercolor by Badges The Elder)
A sunny day’s complete Poussiniana
Divide it from itself. It is this or that
And it is not.
By metaphor you paint
A thing. Thus, the pineapple was a leather fruit,
A fruit for pewter, thorned and palmed and blue,
To be served by men of ice.
The senses paint
By metaphor. The juice was fragranter
Than wettest cinnamon. It was cribled pears
Dripping a morning sap.
The truth must be
That you do not see, you experience, you feel,
That the buxom eye brings merely its element
To the total thing, a shapeless giant forced
Upward.
Green were the curls upon that head.
(Wallace Stevens, watercolor by Badges The Elder)
Contemple-les, mon âme; ils sont vraiment affreux!
Pareils aux mannequins; vaguement ridicules;
Terribles, singuliers comme les somnambules;
Dardant on ne sait où leurs globes ténébreux.
Leurs yeux, d’où la divine étincelle est partie,
Comme s’ils regardaient au loin, restent levés
Au ciel; on ne les voit jamais vers les pavés
Pencher rêveusement leur tête appesantie.
Ils traversent ainsi le noir illimité,
Ce frère du silence éternel. Ô cité!
Pendant qu’autour de nous tu chantes, ris et beugles,
Eprise du plaisir jusqu’à l’atrocité,
Vois! je me traîne aussi! mais, plus qu’eux hébété,
Je dis: Que cherchent-ils au Ciel, tous ces aveugles?
(Baudelaire, drawing by Badges The Elder)
The fountains are dry and the roses over.
Incense of death. Your day approaches.
The pears fatten like little buddhas.
A blue mist is dragging the lake.
You move through the era of fishes,
The smug centuries of the pig—
Head, toe and finger
Come clear of the shadow. History
Nourishes these broken flutings,
These crowns of acanthus,
And the crow settles her garments.
You inherit white heather, a bee’s wing,
Two suicides, the family wolves,
Hours of blankness. Some hard stars
Already yellow the heavens.
The spider on its own string
Crosses the lake. The worms
Quit their usual habitations.
The small birds converge, converge
With their gifts to a difficult borning.
(Sylvia Plath, watercolor by Badges The Elder)
Creativity includes ruthlessness. It drives to develop, unfold, multiply outward. When our ruthlessness transforms into the imaginative life that operates unconsciously to wipe the slate of our perception clean so that we now and always perceive freshly… we enter a new zone of living. Objects become objective, not under our control but able to offer us real resources for living. Objects appear as durable and resilient, and they reassure us that our destructiveness does not totally destroy. The other person displays for us the secrets of a unique, independent selfhood. In long-range, committed, passionate relationships, one lover addresses the mysterious core of the other. The mystery of the beloved’s creative self opens to the lover the mystery of being…
The love between lovers protects them from attack on their creative selves, and thus they contribute to the social welfare of all of us. For creative living does evoke attack, which rears up to blunt vitality and repel original perception. We feel the threat ourselves, says Winnicott, in moments of integration. We expect attack to follow from all the elements that we repudiate as not-me while we collect together all those experiences of aliveness that integrate into me…
The anxiety of integration helps one face an interpretation of Judeo-Christian tradition that has always troubled many, myself among them. Simone Weil, for example, joined the heretic Marcion in rejecting the Old Testament entirely because of Yahweh’s bloodthirstiness. God’s command to wipe out every one of the Amalekites strikes horror in our hearts… When Saul spares the king of the Amalekites and keeps the best of the sheep and oxen, Yahweh does not spare Saul. Samuel, Yahweh’s prophet, announces Saul’s punishment: “you have rejected the word of the Lord, and the Lord has rejected you from being king over Israel. The Lord has torn the kingdom of Israel from you this very day, and has given it to a neighbor of yours, who is better than you.” If we read these texts through the lens of the anxiety of integration, we see that the gathering of elements of I-am-ness into a unit requires that we must repudiate whatever lies outside.
I am not reducing the text and its savagery to a psychological perception. Life and the probity with which we face it do not allow that. But depth psychology does give us access to a truth as valuable as it is ruthless: to become one, we must unite elements of aliveness at the expense of all else. We make the same harsh decision when we choose someone for a mate and renounce all others, when we embrace an actual child we have parented and destroy the fantasy children we wished for, when we pursue one idea and reject all others, at least for the moment. Such definition is the cost of finitude and its fulfillment.
(Ann Belford Ulanov, watercolor by Badges The Elder)
