VISIONAitV
CIN~MA
phenomenologically just
this
is given to us in the privileged moments
of our lives. The problem is to describe a secularized epiphany that
cannot be described, but Shelley was a specialist in the indescribable.
I don't know the critical technique that would permit
us
to describe
accu rately just
what
happens in this passage that confronts the idealized
Emilia. Confrontation takes place in the second person; all analysis or
description takes place in the third. The Intellectual Beauty, a gleam just
beyond the range of our senses to apprehend it, gets into this passage,
but phenomenologically what counts most is what Shelley beautifully
calls "the air of her own speed ." The miracle of Shelley's art is in its
continual impression of speed. Like the Psalmist, when his soul is up–
lifted, Shelley in moments of glory moves with a speed that reproves
the slow dullness of the ordinarily visible. His nuances are subtler than
Blake's or Wordsworth's; too subtle for the outward eye to apprehend,
but not too subtle for the awakened spirit seeking, as Yeats said of
Shelley, more in this world than any can understand.
The final use of Romantic poetry, or of poetry written in that
tradition down to Yeats, Lawrence, Stevens and Crane, is to teach us
that we do not know either what our senses, just as they are, can reveal
to us, or what can be reyealed to us, perfectl y naturalistically, and yet
seemingly just beyond the range of our senses. All actual cinema that I
know, including the rubbish that currently passes for experimental or
"new" cinema but seems designed merely to bring on a saving myopia
- all cinema yet made has failed in imagination, has absurdly fallen short
of the whole esthetic needs of the awakened consciousness of man. One
does not ask a film to be a poem; films-as-literature bore, and will go
on boring. But one waits for an artist, and an art, to go beyond the
relative crudity of what one has been offered. The burden of Romantic
poetry, and the true though frequently evaded burden of post-Romantic
poetry, is either to offer an apocalypse of the order of physical realit/"
as in Blake or Shelley or Yea ts, or to move us towards that adventure
in humanity in which, at last, we would be a race completely physical
in a physical world, the dream of Keats and of the colder Stevens after
him. Between these fierce alternatives there is the blending vision of
Wordsworth, seeking the difficult rightness of a nature "first and last
and
mid~t
and without end," in which the Characters of the Great
Apocalypse could be read in every countenance and on every blossom.
No medium has inherent limitations so great that the Imagination
cannot overcome them, and no medium is its own message. Films will
either become more imaginative, will either achieve their own apocalyp–
tic fo rm, whatever that may be, or they will die, leaving us again with
