the monster. We know what he failed to do, but what he should have done, in order to be true to his being, who can say? We have to revise the laws of understanding in order to grapple with such an enigma.
Men are being thrown up now who will force us to alter our methods of perception. That ancient refuge in which Rimbaud lived with his secret is fast crumbling. Every discordant figure will soon be forced into the open; there are no hiding places left any more. In the common plight the bizarre figure with his mysterious malady will be routed from his unique trench. The entire world of men and women is being rounded up, brought before the bars of justice. What matter if some rare spirits were ill at ease, maladjusted, distilling perfume from their sufferings? Now the race as a whole is preparing to suffer the great ordeal. With the great event almost upon us the reading of the glyphs becomes more than ever important, more than ever exciting. Soon, and most abruptly, we shall all be swimming breast to breast, the seer as well as the common man. A world totally new, a world awesome and forbidding, is at our door. We shall awaken one day to look out upon a scene beyond all comprehending. The poets and seers have been announcing that new world for generations, but we have refused to believe them. We of the fixed stars have rejected the message of the wanderers in the sky. We have regarded them as dead planets, as fugitive ghosts, as the survivors of long forgotten catastrophes.
How like the wanderers of the heavens are the poets! Do they not, like the planets, seem to be in communication with other worlds? Do they not tell us of things to come as well as of things long past, buried in the racial memory of man? What better significance can we give to their fugitive stay on earth than that of emissaries from another world? We live amidst dead fact whereas they live in signs and symbols. Their longings coincide with ours only when we approach perihelion. They are trying to detach us from our moorings; they urge us to fly with them on the wings of the spirit. They are always announcing the advent of things to come and we crucify them because we live in dread of the unknown. In the poet the springs of action are hidden. A more highly evolved type than the rest of the species—and here by “poet” I mean all those who dwell in the spirit and the imagination—he is allowed only the same period of gestation as other men. He has to continue his gestation after birth. The world he will inhabit is not the same as ours; it resembles ours only insofar as our world may be said to resemble that of the Cro-Magnon man. His apprehension of things is similar to that of a man from a fourth-dimensional world living in one of three dimensions. He is in our world but not of it; his allegiance is elsewhere. It is his mission to seduce us, to render intolerable this limited world which bounds us. But only those are capable of following the call who have lived through their three-dimensional world, have lived out its possibilities.
The signs and symbols which the poet employs are one of the surest proofs that language is a means of dealing with the unutterable and the inscrutable. As soon as the symbols become communicable on every level they lose their validity and effectiveness. To ask the poet to speak the language of the man in the street is like expecting the prophet to make clear his predictions. That which speaks to us from higher, more distant, realms comes clothed in secrecy and mystery. That which is being constantly expanded and elaborated through explication—in short, the conceptual world—is at the same time being compressed, tightened up, through the use of the stenographic calligraphy of symbols. We can never explain except in terms of new conundrums. What belongs to the realm of spirit, or the eternal, evades all explanation. The language of the poet is asymptotic; it runs parallel to the inner voice when the latter approaches the
Men are being thrown up now who will force us to alter our methods of perception. That ancient refuge in which Rimbaud lived with his secret is fast crumbling. Every discordant figure will soon be forced into the open; there are no hiding places left any more. In the common plight the bizarre figure with his mysterious malady will be routed from his unique trench. The entire world of men and women is being rounded up, brought before the bars of justice. What matter if some rare spirits were ill at ease, maladjusted, distilling perfume from their sufferings? Now the race as a whole is preparing to suffer the great ordeal. With the great event almost upon us the reading of the glyphs becomes more than ever important, more than ever exciting. Soon, and most abruptly, we shall all be swimming breast to breast, the seer as well as the common man. A world totally new, a world awesome and forbidding, is at our door. We shall awaken one day to look out upon a scene beyond all comprehending. The poets and seers have been announcing that new world for generations, but we have refused to believe them. We of the fixed stars have rejected the message of the wanderers in the sky. We have regarded them as dead planets, as fugitive ghosts, as the survivors of long forgotten catastrophes.
How like the wanderers of the heavens are the poets! Do they not, like the planets, seem to be in communication with other worlds? Do they not tell us of things to come as well as of things long past, buried in the racial memory of man? What better significance can we give to their fugitive stay on earth than that of emissaries from another world? We live amidst dead fact whereas they live in signs and symbols. Their longings coincide with ours only when we approach perihelion. They are trying to detach us from our moorings; they urge us to fly with them on the wings of the spirit. They are always announcing the advent of things to come and we crucify them because we live in dread of the unknown. In the poet the springs of action are hidden. A more highly evolved type than the rest of the species—and here by “poet” I mean all those who dwell in the spirit and the imagination—he is allowed only the same period of gestation as other men. He has to continue his gestation after birth. The world he will inhabit is not the same as ours; it resembles ours only insofar as our world may be said to resemble that of the Cro-Magnon man. His apprehension of things is similar to that of a man from a fourth-dimensional world living in one of three dimensions. He is in our world but not of it; his allegiance is elsewhere. It is his mission to seduce us, to render intolerable this limited world which bounds us. But only those are capable of following the call who have lived through their three-dimensional world, have lived out its possibilities.
The signs and symbols which the poet employs are one of the surest proofs that language is a means of dealing with the unutterable and the inscrutable. As soon as the symbols become communicable on every level they lose their validity and effectiveness. To ask the poet to speak the language of the man in the street is like expecting the prophet to make clear his predictions. That which speaks to us from higher, more distant, realms comes clothed in secrecy and mystery. That which is being constantly expanded and elaborated through explication—in short, the conceptual world—is at the same time being compressed, tightened up, through the use of the stenographic calligraphy of symbols. We can never explain except in terms of new conundrums. What belongs to the realm of spirit, or the eternal, evades all explanation. The language of the poet is asymptotic; it runs parallel to the inner voice when the latter approaches the
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