Mina Loy - Stories and Essays of Mina Loy

lo

Therefore, he who incalculably replaces himself.

mi

To the end of all understanding — submission of identity to the continuity of Truth.

lo

?

mi

Truth is that evidence the intellect ignores in the interest of its libre arbitre.

lo

But is it not in pursuit of evidential Truth that the intellect exercises its libre arbitre—

Is Truth the concept inviolate to controversy; a single silence amid a loud diversity—

mi

Truth is the question that answers itself. Truth is the creative formula.

VIII.

lo

What is perfection?

mi

The maximum reciprocity between conception and realisation.

lo

A conception that allows no realisation.

mi

Perfection occurs within that zone where it is possible to advance but not recede.

lo

In advance there is degree but in perfection there is no degree

mi

In perfection the infinite dissimilarities are reconciled.

Extrospection. The infinitrospector —

In meditation the mind unbuilds itself for a divine re-edification.

lo

It is not easy to determine the junction between introspection to neurosis.

— — — — — — — — Introspeculates —

mi

Yet all the evolutional “odds” are on the neurotic for it would seem that it is in the as yet unsown fields of consciousness that he loses himself.

lo

And the genius finds himself.

IX.

mi

There is a degree of knowledge that reaches no farther than death. We exist for as long as we can imagine ourselves. All that secedes from the Absolute — asserts the only independence. The Liberty to be perishable.

The death of the body, of reason, of the will of affection— All these deaths added together amount to no more than the death of beauty—

the fall of man

The struggle of man—

floundering between his descent into the microscopic universe for which he has discovered a mode of introduction and an intuitional ascent towards the cosmic.

The phenomenon of vibration is an emission from the macrocosm or divinity to humanity.

It is amusing that microbes have an aspect of diabolism. Mediocosm = man.

X.

Lust

mi

I doubt whether the new Promiscuite would admit the authenticity of lust.

Lust being perhaps as far as the Purist can conceive of it — an insane attribution to a sane impulse.

The miasma of traditional taboo rising to the brain at the onset of desire — the complement of shame imposed on the right to realisation — a mental congestion that obfuscates the directitude of virility.

lo

But may there not be some perspicacity in this presentation of an abandonment of the reasoning self to a swollen eroticism?

mi

It is the paradox of morality that the only human passion that has been tabooed is the amatory passion. The sole passion that is not destruction — the only passion that can do no harm to anybody — the only passion that can disseminate comfort and consolatory relationship—

The law of the world moralist actually is—

Thou mayest kill — wholesale

But thou shalt not enjoy

One would think that suffering sold easier — that there was a greater profit to be culled from pain — that the moral merchant-combine should so consistently endeavour to withhold rapture from the market—

Hear the evangel of the new era—

The machine has no inhibitions

Man invented the machine in order to discover himself

Yet I have heard a lady say, “ Il fait l’amour comme une machine à coudre ,” with no inflection of approval.

It is the oil in the machine to which the mystics referred as the Holy Dove ——And what could we make of the sort of pulpy material the Padre Eterno made engines out of

We spasimal engineers

Whose every re- act — ion of grace is an explosion in consciousness.

Serene, amid scintillas of sunlight gilding our narrow garden, writing of the danger induced by extracting force from Power, suddenly, seismically was I overcome by an eccentric sense of guilt; as though speared by an echo of some forgotten wisdom sunken in ancient time, forbidding all revelation of some perilous secret.

Excentric guilt! I did not know the secret.

A causeless accusation as if of defying some unknown taboo detonated in my brain, a shattering terror of the limited incarcerated within the illimitable—

Longing to regain serenity I struggle to regain serenity, to refocus a tremulous perception, to recapture my easeful surroundings — to see “Nature” as before my inexplicable shock? explosion blast? despite a dawning premonition it might no longer prove to be enjoyable —

Indeed, the lively foliage of the garden had concentrated to a mirage of but one branch, bronzed by some unnatural blast, a mummied relic of previous appearance to arraign me as dupe of molecular pretence to forms of reality.

I faced a glaucous continuity of evacuated space, a universe constructed of intangibles crushed one upon another like endless proportionless strata of inexistent glass, reflecting nothing (néant) .

Nonentity of force, of pressure, more pressure; inopposable pressure upon the soulless branch it was driving into the visual locale, through my brain and out into the limbo ever present to man’s blind back.

My usual warm appreciation of the concrete world disintegrated in a global disappointment — continued in endless chain-reaction of terror transpiercing me.

I could feel the former ulcer in my body revert to its origin, a sensate sore in cerebration — nauseous nucleus of fear.

Jam packed into an instant the linked infantile panics diffused by ill-mated parents — the consequent catastrophes of maturity shrouded in lethal anxieties — rearose — — from dreamy hollows, long since sealed by my inconquerable optimism due to the fascination of existence — — — anxiety. . . . . an inexhaustible fount of terror involving force in fear of itself.

Turned loose on an Infinity, forever emitting one, now, meaningless apparitional phenomenon after another all common to our historic earth.

Thought, no longer reasonable, confronted with the prestidigitation of an unreasonable universe, changed to mere confusion.