The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

The value of a profane thing lies in what it usefully does, the value of a sacred thing lies in what it is: a sacred thing may also have a function but it does not have to. The apt name for a profane being, therefore, is the word or words that accurately describe his function—a Mr. Smith, a Mr. Weaver. The apt name for a sacred being is the word or words which worthily express his importance—Son of Thunder, The Well-Wishing One.

Great changes in artistic style always reflect some alteration in the frontier between the sacred and profane in the imag­ination of a society. Thus, to take an architectural example, a seventeenth-century monarch had the same function as that of a modern State official—he had to govern. But in designing his palace, the Baroque architect did not aim, as a modern architect aims when designing a government building, at making an office in which the king could govern as easily and efficiently as possible; he was trying to make a home fit for God's earthly representative to inhabit; in so far as he thought at all about what the king would do in it as a ruler, he thought of his ceremonial not his practical actions.

Even today few people find a functionally furnished living room beautiful because, to most of us, a sitting room is not merely a place to sit in; it is also a shrine for father's chair.

Thanks to the social nature of language, a poet can relate any one sacred being or event to any other. The relation may be harmonious, an ironic contrast or a tragic contradiction like the great man, or the beloved, and death; he can relate them to every other concern of the mind, the demands of desire, reason and conscience, and he can bring them into contact and contrast with the profane. Again the consequences can be happy, ironic, tragic and, in relation to the profane, comic. How many poems have been written, for example, upon one of these three themes:

This was sacred but now it is profane. Alas, or thank goodness!

This is sacred but ought it to be?

This is sacred but is that so important?

But it is from the sacred encounters of his imagination that a poet's impulse to write a poem arises. Thanks to the language, he need not name them directly unless he wishes; he can describe one in terms of another and translate those that are private or irrational or socially unacceptable into such as are acceptable to reason and society. Some poems are direcdy about the sacred beings they were written for: others are not, and in that case no reader can tell what was the original en­counter which provided the impulse for the poem. Nor, prob­ably, can the poet himself. Every poem he writes involves his whole past. Every love poem, for instance, is hung with trophies of lovers gone, and among these may be some very peculiar objects indeed. The lovely lady of the present may number among her predecessors an overshot waterwheel. But the encounter, be it novel or renewed by recollection from the past, must be suffered by a poet before he can write a genuine poem.

Whatever its actual content and overt interest, every poem is rooted in imaginative awe. Poetry can do a hundred and one things, delight, sadden, disturb, amuse, instruct—it may express every possible shade of emotion, and describe every conceivable kind of event, but there is only one thing that all poetry must do; it must praise all it can for being and for happening.

THE VIRGIN & THE DYNAMO

There is a square. There is an oblong. The play­ers take the square and place it upon the oblong. They place it very accurately. They make a per­fect dwelling-place. The structure is now visible. What -was inchoate is here stated. We are not so various or so mean. We have made oblongs and stood them upon squares. This is our tri­umph. This is our consolation.

virginia woolf

The Two Real Worlds

O The Natural World of the Dynamo, the world of masses, identical relations and recurrent events, describ- able, not in words but in terms of numbers, or rather, in algebraic terms. In this world, Freedom is the conscious­ness of Necessity and Justice the equality of all before natural law. (Hard cases make bad lawS) 2.) The Historical World of the Virgin, the world of faces, analogical relations and singular events, describable only in terms of speech. In this World, Necessity is the consciousness of Freedom and Justice the love of my

neighbor as a unique and irreplaceable being. QOne law for the ox and the ass is oppression