Marvel of being home, how quiet my head becomes. What You overhear so often while listening from the eaves is the reverberating noise of too many things happening at once. It spills over. Here. And now my whole attention is on the thing at hand and there is enough room in my life for my life. I grilled asparagus with basil and oil and the rain rolled down my neck. The asparagus was the color of river moss so I thought of the river and all the kid days I spent there and the water in my hair rolled down my face. Into my eyes. I wore braids then as I do now, all summer. I used the tongs that are too big for my hands and the wire brush the size of my femur. My right forearm is sore. As are my legs. Every morning I head out on the same path, late, when it's as hot as I can bear it. Two miles to the curb round the bend of the yellow line, two miles back. I run the foothills up, save my shins and walk the down. I eat soybeans from their pods every afternoon while reading in case I will not find them in the grocery stores when I get back. I read about Image. Recklessly. I am dressed now but for my shoes. It's as hot as I can bear it, which is very hot, so it is time. I am quiet. I am listening. I didn't think to tell You I was so intent on listening.
***
Intense emotion causes pattern to arise in the mind--if the mind is strong enough. Perhaps I should say, not pattern, but pattern-units, or units of design. (I do not say that intense emotion is the sole possible cause of such units. I say simply that they can result from it. They also result from other sorts of energy.) I am using this term 'pattern-unit', because I want to get away from the confusion between 'pattern' and 'applied decoration'. By applied decoration I mean something like the 'wall of Troy pattern'. The invention was merely the first curley-cue, or the first pair of them. The rest is repetition, is copying.***
By pattern-unit or vorticist picture I mean the single jet. The difference between the pattern-unit and the picture is one of complexity. The pattern-unit is so simple that one can bear having it repeated several or many times. When it becomes so complex that repetion would be useless, then it is a picture, an 'arrangement of forms'.
Not only does emotion create the 'pattern-unit' and the 'arrangement of forms', it creates also the Image. The Image can be of two sorts. It can arise within the mind. It is then 'subjective'. External causes play upon the mind, perhaps; if so, they are drawn into the mind, fused, transmitted, and emerge in an Image unlike themselves. Secondly, the Image can be objective. Emotion seizing up some external scene or action carries it intact to the mind; and that vortex purges it of all save the essential or dominant or dramatic qualities, and it emerges like the external original.
In either case the Image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy. If it does not fulfil these specifications, it is not what I mean by an Image. It may be a sketch, a vignette, a criticism, an epigram or anything else you like. It may be impressionism, it may even be very good prose. By 'direct treatment', one means simply that having got the Image one refrains from hanging it with festoons.
from Selected Prose 1909-1965, "Affirmations: As for Imagisme," Ezra Pound
So long as it is possible for his desires to point towards objects thus infinite and unmeasured, he is joyous, and tranquil, and self-possessed. But the period arrives when these objects cease to suffice. His mind is at length suddenly awakened and thirsts for intercourse with an intelligence similar to itself. He images to himself the Being whom he loves. Conversant with speculations of the sublimest and most perfect natures, the vision in which he embodies his own imaginations unites all of wonderful, or wise, or beautiful, which the poet, the philosopher, or the lover could depicture. The intellectual faculties, the imagination, the functions of sense, have their respective requisitions on the sympathy of corresponding powers in other human beings. The Poet is represented as uniting these requisitions, and attaching them to a single image. He seeks in vain for a prototype of his conception.***
from preface to "Alastor: or, The Spirit of Solitude," Percy Bysshe Shelley
And God said, let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over all the creepers creeping on the earth.***
And God created the man in His own image; in the image of God He created him. He created them male and female.
Genesis 1:26-7
