REPLIES TO 13 QUESTIONS
165
of pastoral civilizations are not the "rational" expression of pastoral
values.
It is the poet's genius which diScovers the metaphors that mo–
bilize, in the person who hears them, the feelings related to his
civilization, without their being a rational expression of it. And it
is precisely this discovery that interests us. It takes form within the
"conditioning," but breaks through it precisely in the degree to which
it becomes
art.
What is likely to lead us astray is that there are in man feelings
that are eternal, though falling within particular forms of civiliza–
tions whose vast domains of metaphors are, after all, classifiable:
feelings which derive from the night, the seasons, death, blood (the
whole great cosmic and biological domain). It is their permanence
that we find in the Hindu writers as well as in Homer, in the Chinese
and in the moderns, whenever the latter appeal to the feelings. It
is that, too, which we find in the tragic film, where we have the il–
lusion of a permanence of metaphor toward which all poetry con–
verges, whereas the truth is that this cosmic domain reaches its full
strength only when incarnated in metaphors peculiar to each civiliza–
tion.
I remember, in Spain, seeing one of our wounded flyers come
back in a pursuit plane covered with blood. The plane was hidden
away under some olive trees. The next morning, drops of dew
spangled the newly dried blood of the fuselage, blood tinted every
drop, and it seemed that the resurrection of the dew had brought
with it the wound in its eternal cycle. The return of day took on its
full measure of pathos, because it was incarnated at once in the
earth, in the plane and in the blood. It was this incarnation that
gave the spectacle such a startling accent; it is by a succession of
similar incarnations, discovered by the poet, that poetry lives.
Now, a philosophy of conditioning
is
perhaps able to show us
what the poet cannot incarnate, but it does not reveal to us any–
thing that is essential in his act of incarnation.
Your example is drawn from the eternal myths. But, as you have
said, there is also Europe and the modern world.
It isn't so easy to find out what we think about Europe. The
different European nations, except (and even then) in the face
