Mina Loy - Stories and Essays of Mina Loy

PROCURESS. ( to directors ) We haven’t succeeded in balancing accounts yet— You see, it is not yet decided whether the demand creates the supply, or the supply the demand.

REALITY. Cut that! As long as you have them both, they will total up the same.

PROCURESS. There’s been a lot of fuss lately over the pathological and hygienic side.

WORLD-FLESH-AND-DEVIL. Leave it to me to gloss that over — all we have to bear in mind is to keep the surface glittering.

, and crackled a laugh that came out in sharp hard spurts of metallic sound.

Yoland laughed harshly disdainful.

And she smiled her glistening

mechanically glamorous smile into his eyes

was laughing her unlubricated

laugh, steadily now — —

The jeer and taunt in her weird laugh — –

She laughed a warmer rusty

chortle now

She smiled sphinxly

, and they shrilly shrieked laughter

– voice was higher and more abandoned than usual. It shrieked, but rustily mechanical rather than human. Their jokes could not be heard

because of the laughter,

She gave an inebriated rasp of laughter

– caused the other girls to shriek their shrill hyena laughter again.

Yoland’s cute crackling ripple

sounded more subdued now

because she had laughed too much before — — –

She was overcome with mirth and held her hand over her heart — — — –

she explained — crackling

Their laughter taunted like that of so many hyenas — — jeering and laughing.

Her rusty cackle of laughter sounded and Yoland’s cute, inhuman laugh creaked after him.

Chortling menacingly this time.

Her unlubricated rusty laugh chortled

Her laughter mingled with that of other girls to make hyena noises

Her teeth when she smiled, were the perfection of dentifrice and glistening beauty.

She smiled enigmatically

Though her smile seemed directed at me I knew she wasn’t even looking at me.

– to chortle a low metallic cackle

She chortled cutely again

, and she merely rattled her machine laugh,

again to chortle dry rattling laughter

“I love her laugh.”

Her laugh is cleared of emotions.

The interpretation of Brancusi—

the analysis of the elemental.

An art engendered beyond the formidable naked subjectivity—

Here is no abstraction coerced to the domain of form—

Perhaps form arrested at its very inception—

a certain élan of primary embodiment—

has revealed to us the intriguing comparison of elemental form—

evolved by the forces of nature—

and an elemental form whose evolution is submitted to the process of the intellect—

Of a man comparatively young in years — whose concentration — such

sublime and imprecise

the friction of his aesthetic has brought to a white heat of featureless beauty—

the memory and anticipation of aesthetic fulfilment—

and he has got irrefutably that something that every one of them lacks—

the primary investigators of beauty.

At any race he has set a terrible precedent — that will be impossible to eliminate with either fundamental or accessory—

The form on which form is based.

And so elemental — —

that it actually connives with the atmosphere in any attainment of a prolongation of its direction

A song to the eye—

“who” used to take after belle matière —

Brancusi is one of the few moderns — whose art has survived its own impetus — its cosmic reticence — he has got none of that everything else that all his other contemporary sculptors have—

Confirming the near conclusion one sometimes comes to, that for most human beings traditional concepts remain more real than their actual experience, that it is impermissible to contradict tradition — my Catholick confidante, immediately upon describing the staircase fugue, gasped, as might one in regret for having desecrated an altar.

“Oh no ! I shouldn’t say that!”

For such, to question tradition is like denying God.

Confiding to me her own anguish she had offered this panic of her neighbour’s as proof that “not she alone — —

– — and listening was like looking through a microscope at a secret world.

She stood out among the working classes as the perfect exemplaire of wife and mother — her home, husband, children were well cared for — her terror of having another child — was financially sound — in her plan one addition to her family would have broken entirely down the civilised condition — to which as practical Idealists they clung.

The only safeguard she could imagine was entire chastity — — — The husband compliant; under stress of his inhibited electric virility — took to drink—

My confidante, finding her ultimation of chastity so unprofitable, with a look of absolute confusion — spoke these words of questioning affirmation—

“But the church says ‘it’s ’ wrong!”

Censorship may be suitable to the haziness of the social morality and Censors might hold on to their authority for ever if censorship had not defeated its own aims. As long as any social misbehaviour is not official— When it becomes accepted behaviour — the Censor represents no electors.

There is no secret to be kept when “all” are in the secret.

The Censor is sufficient unto himself. Dare him to produce a single individual of the moral negativism — that he pretends he strives to protect — and he will be unable to do so. No one aspires to put any restriction on his own “amoral” sophistication.

The public to whom the censor defers exists only in its supposing that public to exist “somewhere” else.

The worst kind of sex maniac is the Censor (re: Sumner and Smoot). With their canine affinities — they can only sustain their sexual potentiality by sticking their noses into their neighbour’s ——

Hitherto it has been said that a period of sexual liberty precedes a period of degeneration— The present tendency toward sex liberation should — understandingly and purely directed — inaugurate a period of regeneration .

If as Freud infers — Religion and Sex are interchangeable — why not reintegrate both giving the people an impetus toward the equilibrium they require?

Sexual myths become the masters of civilization.

The obsessions prescribed by the Holy Church of Rome, are re-edited by the Psychoanalyst.

The Fathers and Freud successively established confessionals for neurotics, and it will not be long before they are fitted with domestic appliances.

Our Virgin Mary has resuscitated in the incest complex — —it is refreshing to consider that “Our Mary” Pickford has also her devotees.

In psycho-analytic literature, at least, we are offered no escape from the post-natal womb of the Eternal Mother

And the Eternal Mother devours her literary kittens ——invariably.

Once the Catholic convert has gone to ——his Mother, his literature follows him in the filial chute

And now that the Psycho-Analytic convert has gone to his ———mother complex ———

The aim of the artist is to miss the Absolute ——the only possible creative gesture ——whereas the mystic impulse is to embrace a “ready-made” in the way of absolutes

And the Absolute of this new mechanised mysticism of the Psycho Analyst is the Unconscious.