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.Because language is common, andbecause the evolutionary goals of human beings and other life forms remainconstant, Hulme believes he has escaped the charge of total relativism thatProtagoras’ principle of ‘man the measure of all things’ implies ( CW, p.8).Whether this is justified or not, the important thing is the communal basis of this construction of an expedient reality through language: ‘Through all the ages, the conversation of ten men sitting together is what holds the world together’ ( CW, p.14).Hulme was, as I have mentioned, characterized by Ezra Pound as ‘thePickwickian Englishman who starts a club’ (Ferguson, 2002, p.58).RobertFerguson reprints Hulme’s ‘Rules 1908’, which formed the constitution of the‘Poets’ Club’: twelve rules that, from the first (‘The Club shall be called the“Poets’ Club,” and shall consist of not more than fifty members’), to the last(prescribing the method of electing new members), with, in between, details of the officers and titles, place and times of meeting, procedures at dinners, price ofdinners eaten and dinners missed, length of papers to be discussed and protocolsfor contributions from the floor, number of guests to be invited, in one short page conjures up from a chance shared interest the picture of a stable, well-orderedsociety ready to deal with any contingency, housed in its own comfortablepremises ‘above Rumpelmeyer’s’ in St James Street, London.The document is amicrocosm of Hulme’s conception of the construction of reality – and reading it we cannot help (probably wrongly) inferring the existence of a well-disciplined andcarefully structured reality, an efficient going concern.The tone of ‘Cinders’ is frequently disparaging of such inferences insofar asthey are applied macrocosmically, and Hulme is often insistent on the need to set aside the ‘disease’ of language that overlays the cinderheaps and substitutes itself for them.But it is essential to realize that, however skeptical he was about its ultimate foundations, the club was essential for him: indeed it was essentialbecause of his skepticism and the underlying fear of isolation in an ocean of ashes.‘Living language is a house’, he decides ( CW, p.33), and ‘the bad is fundamental,The Imagery of Hulme’s Poems and Notebooks 27and.the good is artificially built up in it and out of it, like oases in the desert, or as cheerful houses in the storm’ ( CW, p.10).When he writes, in one of the fragments that Alun R.Jones collected under the title ‘Images’, ‘Old Houses were scaffolding once / and workmen whistling’ (Jones, 1960, p.180) it is not difficult to guess the reaction of the ‘carter in the Leek Road’.Whether he thought it worth bothering with or not, he would take it as a simple statement of fact.I do not wish to dissolve the fact into allegory, even while I wish to insist on certain resonances to the lines.Only with some knowledge of Hulme’s thought could anymetaphysical implication be definitely assigned to the image, which can beunfolded without reference to it.First, we have here a contrast between what issolid (and reliable) now – the old houses that we imagine standing four-square and enduring – and its earlier non-existence except as space enclosed by scaffolding.Emotions cluster round this contrast.Second, we have an image of the workmen,co-operating in the erection of the wooden scaffolding, perhaps climbing to adangerous height while they build up the house inside, and insouciantly whistling while they do so.The security of the old house contrasts with its precarious process of construction out of (it would seem) nothing.The juxtaposition of the images is as important as the images themselves, though this textbook characteristic ofimagism is not something I am particularly concerned with at present, since I amhere interested in Hulme’s positive presentation of the construction of a dwelling for us amidst the cinders.Such a dwelling has more needs to fulfil than purely utilitarian ones.We haveseen that for Hulme the instinct for belief in the deity is part of humankind’s fixed nature.In ‘Notes on Language and Style’, a view of the dome of BromptonOratory apparently floating in the mist suggests to him the process by which theconstruction of reality through language also goes beyond the utilitarian humandwelling so that it encompasses a location for the deity: ‘And the words moveduntil they became a dome, a solid, separate world, a dome in the mist, a thing of terror beyond us, and not of us.Definite heaven above worshippers, incense hides foundations.A definite force majeure (all the foundations of the scaffolding are in us, but we want an illusion, falsifying us, something independent of foundations)’( CW, pp.27-8).We have here again the image of scaffolding, rooted in nothing but ourselves and when dismantled leaving the overarching dome apparently a thing-in-itself, independent enough of its constructors to cause them ‘terror’.The stage of making this dwelling ‘other’, of removing the scaffolding, Hulme associateswith ‘art’: ‘the mist effect, the transformation in words, has the art of pushing it through the door’ ( CW, p.28).The ‘door’ would seem to be the way into another world, the ‘imaginary land which all of us carry about in desert moments’; artgives ‘a sense of wonder, a sense of being united in another mystic world’ ( CW, p.34).This branch of the argument is already beginning to generate its own reversed reflection, however, to which it will be necessary to return.The dome we havebuilt is the heaven above the worshippers, and it inspires terror.This, as we know, is going to be a real terror for Hulme, but the terror is going to be morefundamental than the attribution of its origin, for the vault of heaven at this early stage of his thought can simply be resolved into a misprision of one of the tracks28T.E.Hulme and the Question of Modernismleft in the cinders by the networks of language, a product of the constitution of the club.Hulme’s emphasis on the power of language to construct a ‘dwelling’ for uscalls to mind Heidegger’s essay ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, in which Heideggerreaches back to what he calls the ‘primal nature of these meanings’ (Heidegger,1975, p.148), which are available through the etymology of German words but aresilenced in the everyday traffic of language as verbal counters [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]