The Insight of IMAGINATIONS, by William Carlos Williams

I finished reading today IMAGINATIONS by William Carlos Williams and wanted to sum up what I found. W.C.W. places a great amount of emphasis on the imagination, which powers knowledge and intelligence. Poetry works with the imagination, science knowledge and philosophy intelligence. Found in Williams's prose is explanation of this and in his poetry, examples. The prose passages below are taken from "Spring and All".

"It is the imagination on which reality rides---It is the imagination---It is a cleavage through everything by a force that does not exist in the mass and therefore can never be discovered by its anatomization."

I believe that here he is defining the separation between mind and body. He goes on:

"It is for this reason that I've always placed art first and esteemed it over science---in spite of everything."

Dr. Williams practiced medicine professionally for decades while writing prolifically published work. This circumstance gave him extraordinary insight to an unique matter. He further explains:

"Art is the pure effect of the force upon which science depends for its reality---Poetry"

"The force" here is refered to the imagination. Taking facts and putting them into play is art, and Williams's medium is poetry. He also acknowledges in "Spring and All" the importance of the other artistic mediums painting, scuplturing and music. Science and philosphy are very enlightening, but what of it if it be stagnat, still? The next excerpt is personal to me:

"In other times---men counted it a tragedy to be dislocated from sense---Today boys are sent with dullest faith to technical schools of all sorts---broken, bruised"

Ill prepared, I dropped out of tech college my sophmore year. In my twenites I experienced a decade-long torrent of constant explosive emotions. I later went back to college to earn a degree in the Arts in order to control them, lest I wrecked my life. I am an engineering technicaian now, and my unique experiences with the Arts and Sciences have come full circle, and therefore Williams's work interests me greatly. He speaks further on modern boys:

"few escape whole---slaughter. This is not civilization but stupidity---Before entering knowledge the integrity of the imagination---"

I believe what he is talking about here is a student's head being view as an empty vessel to be filled with factual knowledge without the experience to move it. This touches on the idea of craft versus art. As a young man, my manual drafting skills could draw any classical facade in three dimensions yet fail to light upon the acanthas leaves of Corinthian columns, everlasting life.

Catholic Humanity

While reading William Carlos Williams's Imaginations a parallel of Catholic humanity struck me between his piece of criticism of James Joyce's style and Carl Jung's addressing the Holy Ghost of Protestantism in Answer to Job. Here Williams and Jung are quoted, repectively:

"Joyce is to be discovered a catholic in his style then in something because of its divine humanity. Down, down it goes from priesthood into the slime as the church goes. The Catholic Church has always been unclean in its fingers and aloof in the head. Joyce's style consonant with this has nowhere the inhumanity of the scientific or protestant or pagan essayist. There is nowhere the coldly dressed formal language, the correct collar of such gentlemen seeking perhaps an English reputation."

"It[Protestantism] is obviously out of touch with the tremendous archetypal happenings in the psyche of the individual and the masses, and with the symbols which are intended to compensate the truly apocalyptic world situation today. It seems to have succumbed to a species of rationalistic historicism and to have lost any understanding of the Holy Ghost who works in the hidden places of the soul. It can therefore neither understand nor admit a further revalation of the divine drama."

They are both making point that Catholicism approaches the spirit or soul with humanity than Protestantism and irreligious. Williams says this to at least artistic thinking while Jung points out this to at least ethics. However, the commonality here is that Protestants and the irreligous use science to kind of THINK their way through the human soul rather than to FEEL their way through, and to support their way of thinking systematically with historical facts by deduced theory rather than feeling sporadically what they know to be right and true, that is, that faith is more rooted in the heart than in the mind. THINKING your way is a typical old-style German ethos drawn from perhaps the historicly rich German philosphers. It is drab yet rational, like an inornate yet tasteful Luthern church in the Midwest.

T.S.