“Mermaids Singing, Each to Each”
Kandinsky mash-up
Marcel Duchamp, Fountain (1917)
Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907)
“Mermaids Singing, Each to Each”
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.”
T. E. Hulme 1883-1917
Wyndham Lewis
Abstract Composition (1915)
“It is essential to prove that beauty may be in small, dry things.”
Hulme, “Romanticism and Classicism,” 1999-2000
“Mermaids Singing, Each to Each”
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” 2005-6
Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
“Mermaids Singing, Each to Each”
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,
“Mermaids Singing, Each to Each”
Wyndham Lewis, Workshop (1914-15)
“Mermaids Singing,
Each to Each”
Mina Loy, La Miason en Papier (1906)
“Mermaids Singing, Each to Each”
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 standby------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”
Mina Loy
“Mermaids Singing, Each to Each”
Wyndham Lewis, A Canadian Gunpit (1918)
“Mermaids Singing, Each to Each”
Henri
Gaudier-Brzeska
L'Oiseau de feu
(1912)
Brzeska, Red Stone Dancer (1913)
“Mermaids Singing, Each to Each”
Thomas Sternes Eliot
1888-1965
“Mermaids Singing, Each to Each”
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
“Mermaids Singing, Each to Each”
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 selfsacrifice, 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,” 2322
The 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”
Jaun Gris, The Washstand (1912)
“Mermaids Singing, Each to Each”
Manuscript Pages
from The Waste Land
“Mermaids Singing, Each to Each”
Bran of the Blessed, one of the
possible origins of the Fisher King
myth. Bran was based on the Irish seagod Manannan mac Lir.
The Fisher King
“Mermaids Singing, Each to Each”
“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"
“Mermaids Singing, Each to Each”
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.
Ezekiel, by Raphael
Eliot, The Waste Land, ll. 18-30
“Mermaids Singing, Each to Each”
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)
“Mermaids Singing, Each to Each”
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.
Eliot, The Waste Land, ll. 43-59
“Mermaids Singing, Each to Each”
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!’
Eliot, The Waste Land, ll. 60-76
“Mermaids Singing, Each to Each”
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
“Mermaids Singing, Each to Each”
“Tereus violates Philomela” (17th century)
“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.
Wyndham Lewis, Lovers (1912)
‘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.
Eliot, The Waste Land, ll. 111-25
“Mermaids Singing, Each to Each”
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
“Mermaids Singing, Each to Each”
Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
fighting in the captain’s tower
While calypso singers laugh at them
and fisherman, they hold flowers
Portrait of Eliot by Wydham Lewis