“mermaids singing, each to each”

““Mermaids Singing, Each to Each”Mermaids Singing, Each to Each”

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain (1917)

Kandinsky mash-up

Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907)


The Romantic view holds that “man is intrinsically good,

spoilt by circumstance. Remove all the “bad laws and

customs that had suppressed him . . . and the infinite

possibilities of man would have a chance.” It is “spilt

religion.”

The Classical view holds that

“man is an extraordinarily

fixed and limited animal

whose nature is absolutely

constant. It is only by

tradition and organization

that anything decent can

be got out of him.” It is

absolutely identical with

normal religious attitudes.”

Wyndham LewisAbstract Composition (1915)

T. E. Hulme 1883-1917

“It is essential to prove that beauty may be in small, dry things.” Hulme, “Romanticism and Classicism,” 1999-2000


Imagisme. “An “Image” is that which presents

an intellectual and emotional complex in an

instant of time. . . . It is the presentation of such

a “complex” instantaneously which gives that

sense of sudden liberation; that sense of

freedom from time limits and space limits . . . .

Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which

does not reveal something. . . . Be influenced by

as many great artists as you can, but have the

decency either to acknowledge the debt

outright, or to try to conceal it. . . . Use either

no ornament or good ornament. . . . Consider

the way of the scientists rather than the way of

an advertising agent for a new soap.”

Pound, “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste”

2005-6Ezra Pound (1885-1972)


Blast will be popular, essentially. It will not

appeal to any particular class, but to the

fundamental and popular instincts in every class

and description of people, TO THE INDIVIDUAL.

The moment a man feels or realizes himself as an

artist, he ceases to belong to any milieu or time.

Blast is created for this timeless, fundamental

Artist that exists in everybody.

The Man in the Street and the Gentleman are

equally ignored.

A VORTICIST KING! WHY NOT?

Lewis, “Long Live the Vortex!” 2011

Vorticism: a literary and artistic movement associated with Cubist-Futurist abstraction and theories of history in which the past and present intersect or overlay each other, “ply-on-ply.” Wyndham Lewis edited Blast,


Wyndham Lewis, Workshop (1914-15)

““Mermaids Singing, Mermaids Singing, Each to Each”Each to Each”

Mina Loy, La Miason en Papier (1906)


Mina Loy

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 acquistition of intrinsic merits of character by which she could obtain a concrete value – therefore the first self-enforced law for the female sex . . . would be the unconditional surgical destruction of virginity through-out the female population at puberty---.

Mina Loy, “Feminist Manifesto”


Wyndham Lewis, A Canadian Gunpit (1918)

Brzeska, Red Stone Dancer (1913)


Henri Gaudier-BrzeskaL'Oiseau de feu (1912)

Thomas Sternes Eliot

1888-1965



Tradition “cannot be inherited, and if you

want it you must obtain it by great labour.

It involves, in the first place, the historical

sense, which we may call nearly

indispensable to any one who would

continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-

fifth year; and the historical sense involves

a perception, not only of the pastness of the

past, but of its presence. . . . This historical

sense, which is a sense of the timeless as

well as of the temporal and of the timeless

and the temporal together, is what makes a

writer traditional.”

Eliot, “Tradition and Individual Talent,”

2320


Jaun Gris, The Washstand (1912)

What happens [to the poet] is a continual surrender

of himself as he is at the moment to something which

is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a

continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of

personality.

The mind of the poet . . . may partly or exclusively

operate upon the experience of the man himself; but,

the more perfect the artist, the more completely

separate in him will be the man who suffers and the

mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind

digest and transmute the passions which are its

material.

Eliot, “Tradition and Individual Talent,” 2322The poet “is never the bundle of accident and

incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been

re-born as an idea, something intended, complete.”

W. B. Yeats, “General Introduction to

My Work”


Manuscript Pages from The Waste Land

The Fisher King


Bran of the Blessed, one of the possible origins of the Fisher King myth. Bran was based on the Irish sea-god Manannan mac Lir.

“The Quest of the Grail” by Elizabeth Siddal

(wife of D.G. Rossetti).Also known as

"Sir Galahad at the Shrine of the Holy Grail"



Ezekiel, by Raphael

What are the roots that clutch, what branches

grow

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images, where the sun

beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket

no relief,

And the dry stone no sound of water. Only

There is shadow under this red rock,

(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),

And I will show you something different from

either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet

you; I

will show you fear in a handful of dust.

Eliot, The Waste Land, ll.

18-30


Frisch weht der Wind

Der Heimat zu.

Mein Irisch Kind,

Wo weilest du?

“You gave me hyacinths first a year

ago;

They called me the hyacinth girl.”

—Yet when we came back, late, from

the

Hyacinth garden,

Your arms full, and your hair wet, I

could not

Speak, and my eyes failed, I was

neither

Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,

Looking into the heart of light, the

silence.

Od' und leer das Meer.

Eliot, The Waste Land, ll. 30-42

John William Waterhouse Tristram and Isolde Sharing the Potion (1916)


Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,

Had a bad cold, nevertheless

Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,

With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,

Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,

(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)

Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,

The lady of situations.

Here is the man with three staves, and here

the Wheel,

And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this

card,

Which is blank, is something he carries on his

back,

Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find

The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.

see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.

Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,

Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:

One must be so careful these days.



From the Anglican Prayer Book

Unreal City, Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many. Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, And each man fixed his eyes before his feet. Flowed up the hill and down King William Street, To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine. There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying Stetson! ’You who were with me in the ships at Mylae! 'That corpse you planted last year in your garden, 'Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? 'Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed? 'Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men, 'Or with his nails he'll dig it up again! 'You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!’



The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,

Glowed on the marble, where the glass

Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines

From which a golden Cupidon peeped out

(Another hid his eyes behind his wing)

Doubled the flames of sevenbranched

candelabra

Reflecting light upon the table as

The glitter of her jewels rose to meet it,

From satin cases poured in rich profusion;

In vials of ivory and coloured glass

Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic

perfumes,

Unguent, powdered, or liquid—troubled,

confused

And drowned the sense in odours.

Eliot, The Waste Land, ll. 77-

89

“Tereus violates Philomela” (17th century)


““Mermaids Singing, Each to Each”Mermaids Singing, Each to Each”‘My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with

me.

‘Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.

‘What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?

‘I never know what you are thinking. Think.’

I think we are in rats’ alley

Where the dead men lost their bones.

‘What is that noise?’

The wind under the door.

‘What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?’

Nothing again nothing.

‘Do

‘You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you

remember

‘Nothing?’

I remember

Those are pearls that were his eyes.


Wyndham Lewis, Lovers (1912)


When Lil's husband got demobbed, I said—

I didn't mince my words, I said to her myself,

HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME

Now Albert's coming back, make yourself a bit smart.

He'll want to know what you done with that money

he gave you

To get yourself some teeth.

You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique.

(And her only thirty-one.)

I can't help it, she said, pulling a long face,

It's them pills I took, to bring it off, she said.

(She's had five already, and nearly died of young George.)

The chemist said it would be alright, but I've never been the

same.

Eliot, The Waste Land, ll. 139-44,

156-61

Portrait of Eliot by Wydham Lewis


Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot

fighting in the captain’s tower

While calypso singers laugh at

them

and fisherman, they hold

flowers

“mermaids singing, each to each”

Documents

eachmermaids singing

infinite possibilities

time limits

fundamental artist

space limits

good ornamentconsider

female sex

female population