CHAPTER 2

The Speed of the Image (1940)

It is a curious way to begin on a theme by approaching the resistances to it, the obstacles which prevent all the lost people, the great populations of the world, the faces which fall away on every page of the history books, from ever reaching the state of communication of which I speak, and which is in itself only a means to higher states which may find their existence only in secret and in silence.1 It was necessary and human, as it is in the description of anything possible and desirable, but not here, to begin by telling with grief of the main force which restrains us from that state. It would seem to be the most desirable and difficult step in the world, to meet each moment with a full focus, bringing one’s history to each moment, giving each word of life a rich attention and the laughter and imagination and graveness it requires. But we must always begin by saying: It is not so. It is another way. And we must know that fear prevents us, even from the processes which lead us to the state of full meeting, full communication.

In speech, we mediate and deny to a certain extent because of the apparatus itself. Poetry, and the arts it approaches, have attempted to do away with the counterfeit in expression, at the most complicated level; and, as life has become more complicated—as the population, to put it on the most ordinary level, has increased, and the complications have become available to more people—the search for a clarity which can assume any complication has become of terrifying importance. There has been a frenzied casting-about for forms, with every now and then, in times of urgency and crisis, a calm and tragic knowledge that memory will serve us, that tradition is not far away, that the distances remind us only that the past cannot be repeated, not that it cannot be carried ahead.

In any communicative act, the hope is not for an identical attitude, because that would destroy the need for communication. And communication is the social pleasure of shared relationship towards the same object. I spoke of the link between art and nature, not a link of imitation of each other, but rather of imitation of some third phase, the object. The connection between them is of the nature of communication, in which speaker and audience are fixed on an object which turns and is expounded and clarified. Full communication, in that definition, would be reached when the full consciousness of both members is turned on the object.

But the description, the illumination under which the object can be shown in its meaning, the processes of that act, the grammar of communication itself, is the formal interest of poetry. And as other arts have emerged, the possibilities have increased.

I know that what I am saying presupposes more than anyone is meant to do. But I wish to presuppose, I wish to take for granted. There are too many preliminary steps to the subject, and they can be made anywhere. They must be taken for granted when one approaches the end. It is the beast in view at the end of the chase, and one cannot go through the preparation for the hunt whenever the beast is the concern.2 There is an experience of life and an experience of criticism which need to be absorbed, really assimilated into oneself, to focus on the belief in poetry at this time—to focus on the belief in communication at any time, people being what they are. But the preparation does need to be absorbed as completely as your dinner, and there is no good throwing out facts and references. There are many excellently clumsy books of criticism, and they hold the material, if you read them with all your antagonism up; and in them the flashes of insight are something to be grateful for, and they are rare. I know it has been quite clear to you from the beginning that I am not speaking critically, and do not mean to, at any of these times; I am speaking of possibility and hope. As far as I myself am concerned, little enough of what I need to hear is being talked and written about, and the one positive application of our time of war to this is that everything else is now to be pared away. Let us have what we want to hear more than anything else. As for the rest—as for amusement, that is, it is quite simple, and Hollywood has been quick to recognize the fact and gives us as much tap-dancing and detective thriller entertainment as it can, shelving all other pursuits, all straight projected movies. It’s perfectly possible to know what a movie will be like for the next months; during its course you will laugh a lot, and at the end you will know that the one important thing is to defend the shores of this country. That is the stock pattern; and the movies which get past that point will say, as I say now, that the people are to be defended, not alone the shores. The tradition at this point is to hand out guns; and it is a very good idea, too, that every family has a gun to defend democracy. But it is not going very far to do that; it is a little like being at a picnic at which paper napkins are handed out. All you can be sure of at that moment, if your people are reasonably hungry, is that everyone is waiting for food. And if we think for a moment of the values involved in this crisis of the world, we can be very sure that there are meanings for which everyone is starving.3

Not very many of those meanings have reached us through art, which may be one of the reasons that Isaac Newton complained so bitterly about the lack of poetry; and much meaning has always been encumbered by an exorbitant interest in devices. Part of this, surely, is due to the curiosity which keeps the race alive; part to the wish that we turn against ourselves and that hinders us in everything we do from honesty and sensitivity that should add up to truth; and part a wish of the imagination to conquer our shortcomings and double-dealings. But in the end, we learn our tools. The sharp elusive images are revealed, the cutting edge of the world presents itself in its excitement, one more degree is added to the ways in which people may reach each other, and there is something new in the world.

Hollywood, in all its suburban tropical display, is full of clews.4 It is one of the few places in the world where cheapness—the shabby spirit walking around the streets—has anything but a savage and tragic appearance. The irony is so terrible, the laugh is so dark. The town has in its one trade, its one obsession, carried deeply American (and that is an absurdity, for the appeal is not restricted)—carried a possession over the boundary. It is an obsessive-compulsive town, and the making of films takes the place of manual therapy in a madhouse; but one of the forces which haunts it is a wish for communication, and several valuable clews have emerged.

The cutting of films is a parable in the ethics of communication. I say “ethics” because of the values and needs involved, and the obligations. The scene itself is familiar: the cameras set up in the great hangars of studios, the players spotlit in a little corner of the darkness loaded with painted flats and ropes and girders; the signal to shoot, the hush as the cameras mark an exchange lasting, say, two minutes; the ending; the repeat; the countless repeats—until spools and spools of repetition turn up in a laboratory, waiting for the selective shears. The business of such selection is a business of preparation. Anything can be said in art, if it is prepared; as with Mozart, as with Kafka, as with Chaplin, all can be accepted, it has been indicated. The single image, which arrives to us with incredible speed, takes its place in a sequence which reinforces the image itself.5

This happens most recognizably in films and in poetry. If you isolate certain moments in Hitchcock films, you have the illustration of the reinforced image that is used in poetry constantly. There was a point in The 39 Steps at which a landlady opened the door of an apartment, walked in and saw the corpse of a woman flung across the bed, with a knife handle rising fiercely from the dead back.6 The landlady turned to you, and opened her mouth with a scream of horror which was much more pure horror than scream; hard to place; and not identified until a moment later, when you saw the image of the train hurling out of a black tunnel, and knew the train had screamed, and it was that blast that served the moment before.

Again, in The Woman Alone, there is a moment at the aquarium, when looking into a fish tank with two conspirators who have met in this safe and shadowy public place, you see the water troubled by the swimming motion, until a distortion is produced which makes the little structures of the tank shudder and seem to lean; and suddenly it is clear, not only that the bomb that these conspirators have plotted has gone off, and that this fish tank is Piccadilly Circus, and the buildings are falling down; but also a comment on the nature of an explosion.7 An explosion, says the image in the fish tank, is distorting, is maximum derangement, is a warping of reality that becomes more unbearable as you see it more clearly; in this case, as you see it more slowly. That comment is the reinforcement, the additional note which happens when an image is well-placed in a work of art. In a Russian film, Life Is Beautiful, the ending of war is shown as earlier shots in reverse; great explosions of earth are gathered back into the ground as you watch, with a moving and ironic gesture of wishful thinking.8 In another Hitchcock film, Foreign Correspondent, one of the most exciting and melodramatic sequences ever made, the airplane crash in mid-ocean, is made with a minimum of reference, and marked in with the speed and economy that is to be found in the most laconic poetry.9 If you have seen the film, you will remember that the only continuity is the screaming of the plane’s engines in the fall. What we see is broken and maneuvered, and although I do not know the circumstances of the scene’s shooting, very easy to reconstruct. The plane has been established in the beginning of the sequence. The first shot was one of the plane itself from outside, and the camera drew closer and closer to the fuselage, and finally went through one of the windows. From then on, we were inside the plane, and stayed there as it fell. It would have destroyed the fear of the fall to see the plane falling from the outside. No; we were all trapped in that fall. What we saw were fragmentary impressions of disaster; an end of the wing ripped; an expression of fear stamped on a face seen for a second; the posture of bodies braced for the fall; the end of the wing breaking; the tense stubborn attitudes of the pilot and radio operator, remaining at the dangerous nose of the ship; the rush of the passengers toward the tail of the plane; the stump of wing; the water hurling into the cabin as the plane crashed in the sea. But these were all fragments arbitrarily—and ethically—assembled. One may speculate about how much of the breaking-wing image our ancestors would have felt, or play with a rearrangement of the pieces. But the process was this: one constant, in this case the constant of sound—threaded on that, a group of related but broken images, which add up to an experience so convincing and satisfactory and melodramatic that it is completely successful within its own definition.

The examples all have their parallels in poetry. They are all instances of reinforced sensation or understanding, and in at least one of them, the explosion-aquarium analogy, a comment on the situation itself which leads to a revaluation.

This kind of engineering is inherent in movie making as we know it, and has been accepted instantly, as far back as the shots of pounding horses’ hooves in The Birth of a Nation.10 The scientific material we have to go on is the material of the psychologists who have measured some of these responses, and that of the engineers in every field, who have taught the kind of preparation that is useful. Not really taught, but made a tradition—that is, gone on with the intuitions that the earlier artists have given us, in their work.

In this kind of communication, which is territory in which poetry and the films share, there is not to be found the distinction between direct and indirect communication. What the artist is presenting is a development in which timing is one of the most important factors. The sequence is, in its own nature, dramatic; and speed and timing become of the greatest importance. Most of the difficulty with recent poetry can be traced to this; references are introduced as they are in Foreign Correspondent—a face, a braced back, a breaking wing, another face, until the effect is built up. The place of the soundtrack, with its increasing scream of the chute, must be taken by the curve of emotion in the poem, or the curve of belief, if you will. We look for that, we wish it, it is the unity we hope for in emotion.

As for the structural unity, there are two categories in which it can be analyzed. The two sides have been defended expertly in a discussion between two eminent film artists—Eisenstein and Dovzhenko.11 They are the two processes themselves—linkage and collision, the two kinds of relationship that mean growth, the processes of birth and love. The distinction there is the distinction between evolution and revolution, that is falsified again and again when one term is used to exclude the other. Seen over short periods of time, or in short works of art, they may appear singly. But, in a work of art of any size, or over years, they appear together as process. As history.

In art, the use of linkage predominantly produces the beautiful, even, and sure effects of work we have come to regard as traditional. The use of collision produces the beautiful, uneven, and sure effects of the dramatic, the fantastic and mordant other line which has risen into recent work as art founded on the knowledge of the subconscious, in the best of the anti-poetic writers—and I use their term, which I feel was false but useful from the beginning—and at its most romantic level, of the surrealists. In any extended work of art, the effects fuse. The Waste Land is a masterpiece of collision, and yet at its climaxes and at its close, the cry for belief and the cry of despair that whatever belief arrives will have arrived too late is clear, and the reader realizes that these cries have provided a constant as pronounced as the soundtrack in Foreign Correspondent’s airplane sequence.12 On the other hand, most of the work of MacLeish has been built on the links of a fluid emotion which could play on fluid images that moved under the attention without break.13 Blake, I should say, builds the importance of his meaning on impact, on collision, as does Coleridge; Wordsworth and Tennyson work link by link.14

There has been a great deal of hesitation before contemporary poetry, and much explanation of its difficulties. I think one of the fairest and simplest avenues to sympathy with its advances may be made through an understanding of the method of collision. The work, laid on, as it were, stroke by stroke, emphasizes placing and timing, the relations between the parts. What we need to know is first, the connection that allows for collision, the line of emotion that sets a center to all this activity, and the relation of the parts to it.15

I think it is best sometimes to begin at the bottom. There is no reason to approach a process with respect for itself, and it is my feeling that a lot of the uneasiness about art—a lot of the fear of poetry—is taught to people when they first find their teachers treating the mechanics of art with a fiendish reverence. I should feel that a good beginning was in sight if I knew that nobody would ever parse a line of verse in high school, or learn to read poems by memorizing rules of form. Anyone who is interested in the formal aspect of any art will know it soon enough by himself, and ask to learn. I should like to begin in rage and mouthings at the misuses, and I think it is possible to do that here; if we can work up to an understanding, we shall really have found communication, and I propose to begin with Joyce Kilmer’s world-famous production, “Trees,” which is incomparable of its kind—it is difficult to think of comparisons in other fields.16 I think of the Albert Memorial in London, and the Bahá’í Temple in Winnetka.17

But the object of all of this, the beast in view, for there is a beast at the end of the hunt, and all this speed is not only for the pleasure of speed, is a deep wish for structure. Unity is a hope of all human beings; and the “devouring unity” that Emerson knew is the unity of form, poetry is in love with that.18 As a matter of fact, unity is the hero of the formalists. Every poet is in love with some hero, there is praise involved somewhere, and praise of unity is general in the world’s welter of complexity. All devices such as rhyme are unifying devices, although they seem to speak variety. When we leave them and go to the naked unity of emotion, many readers feel balked. They wanted to recognize more than that. You remember when every movie had a theme song. It came back whenever the heroine smiled, not once, as a rhyme does. That is something which has baffled me for a long while—what deep satisfaction could have been found in rhyming, in the pairing of lines, what deep and staying satisfaction strong enough to keep writers from going ahead. Refrain and the parallelism of the Bible, in which whole circuits of thought and phrase are repeated, seemed to me more whole and healing, than this single recurrent sound that vanished. There was a reflection as if a tree had been seen in water once, and passed by, on a ride that rode past once and for all. There is other pleasure, that pleasure of parallels I mentioned, the pleasure we take in looking at skyscrapers, whose tall lines fly upward past many windows—whose windows race upward in rows of repetition, no two quite alike because of spacing and relationship, like the repeated phrases in Gertrude Stein. The charm of that repetition is in the difference of place and the ensuing difference of relationship to the other parts and to the whole itself.

As for myself, I was never quite satisfied with one echo of anything in a poem; and I would like to read two poems to you now.19

This, again, is a wish for unity, a wish for reinforcement, a hope for a form that will reinforce the images and carry them more quickly and mortally to the reader. We receive these images in a flash of welcome, once we are open to the process; and all this talk of kinds and devices must be carried on in hope and in a wish to share an attitude toward the material, toward poetry and its material, which is indeed as various and infinite as the named and suggested world.20

(Unpublished, 1940)