1. L08-421-15-10-26-15 Imagination Williams: p. 19 “So long as the sky is recognized as an association Is recognized in its function of accessory to vague words whose meaning is impossible to rediscover Its value can be nothing but mathematical certain limits of gravity and density of air The farmer and the fisherman who read their own lives there have a practical correctice for— they rediscover or replace demoded meanings to the religious terms Among them, without expansion of imagination, there is the residual contact between life and the imagination which is essential to freedom The man of imatination who turns to art for release and fulfilment of his baby promises contends with the sky through layers of demoded words and shapes. Demoded, not because the essential vitality which begot them is laid waste—this cannot be so, a young man feels, since he feels it in himself’/ --but because the man contends with the sky, without experience of existence seeking to invent and design.

2. Demoded shapes, dead words 22No more crude symbolism “Composition is in no essential an escape from life. In fact if it is so it is negligible to the point of insignificance. Whatever ‘life’ the artist may be forced to lead has no relation to the vitality of his compositions. Such names as Homer, the blind; Scheherazade, who lived under threat—Their compositions have as their excellence an identity with life since they are actual, sappy as the leaf of the tree which never moves from one spot. What I put down of value will have this value: an escape from crude symbolism, the annihilation of strained associations, complicated ritualistic forms designed to separate the work from a ‘reality’— such as rhyme, meter as meter and not as the essential of the work, one of its words.

3. This week Follow up on polyphony, with specific attention to p. 52: We’ll read it now, together: but add to it this: Examine cases in Unbearable Lightness in which you find exactly what Williams is talking about in Spring and All. NOT the crude symbolism, NOT some similarity to something you already thought, but the exact relation of the narrative to what is happening. It is not ‘like’ something else: it is what it says. What does that require of us? First, to see it, not to fantasize about it, or associate it with what is already familiar. Second to see it in exact relation to what appears with it, is conjoined to it, follows from it.

4. U L of B a few examples 9, 10, 11 Compassion / Pity / Feeling with, feeling for Fidelity (to what?) A lost sock The revelation of character is always in relation. This narrative does NOT encourage you to fantasize or ‘identify’ with a character: oh, that is ME! (NOT Me), but requires us to see the means, the connections, by which we come to understand Tereza or Tomas or Sabina. Are they types? Are they ‘symbols’? Exactly how is Tereza presented to us? Tomas? Sabina? Dreams Metaphors Patterns

5. Dreams / patterns Tomas & “erotic friendships” Parents, wife, son: what happens in these relationships? How does his pattern of ‘erotic friendships’ emerge? If you judge it from your ‘values’ (do you really have any clear idea of what they are? Have they been tested? Where did they come from?) about all you can expect is to reject what is presented, or embrace it, without in any meaningful way understanding it or even seeing it.

6. Tereza Body and soul: How does the soul show itself? How is it revealed? Her photographs Her dreams: In threes, like Tomas’s rules of erotic friendship Sections 14, 15, 16