The Luminous Detail called Life

“I knew that art could be lovely,” squeaked the boy,

as he danced with unadmonished joy.

He said “Love it? If I may!”

And with glee did cast his eyes away,

just to say,

“I did not know it could love me.”

 

“In each soul there Is some one element which predominates, which Is In some peculiar and Intense way the quality or virtu of the Individual; In no two souls Is this the same [. . .] It Is by reason of this virtu that we have one Catullus, one Villon.”



The human eye, as it ever could be, evolved for detail. Try moving your eye across a room - it shutters like still images displayed across a rolling lens.

Now, try tracking something detailed in front of it - a finger, or anything at all - and your eye will find it and hold close to it. The human eye evolved to hug details. The people who saw the lion in the bush lived longer than those who could only see if it moved.

Movement has always been a sore spot for the eyes. Humanity found victory in these details, and it is there one can find the joys of life.

The greatest details, those of the most revelatory capacity, are translucent. They hold the light in it and let it pass in equal parts. t is through translucent details that celluloid film first developed, and it is in translucent details that humanity thought that words could carry and obstruct meaning - each one, holding just a drop of light in it from a moment long ago.

Every time you open a book, if you’re careful, you can see just a bit of light come pouring out.

Luminous detail is the message of the past to the future, and a way of understanding the works of those who have taught us the lessons we take for granted. Villon and Catullus, two names unfamiliar to the average person, are such that are worth mentioning.


He might have died on a mat of straw in some cheap tavern, or in a cold, dank cell; or in a fight in some dark street with another French coquillard; or perhaps, as he always feared, on a gallows in a little town in France. We will probably never know.[8]

Anthony Bonner, The Complete Works of Francois Villon.

(I mourn the season of my youth

[When, more than most, I lived it up

Until old age came upon me]).

La Testament, Stanza 22.

Tricksters tricking in trickery,
Take a good look at where you play your tricks
Lest Ostac send your behind
Where your elders were taken by the neck.
Shake a leg and speed away
For you’d soon be sorry.
Take care not to let your neck be grabbed
By the hangman’s paw.

  • Francois Villon, Complete Poems (1994)


A 15th century France would not have recovered culturally without the work of Francois Villon, who became a villain in the eyes of the same state that which in years towards would exalt his own work.

For his popularity during his own lifetime, and the legacy of his own contrarian, pulse-beating work, Villon disappeared into the ether like the last words of his own poems. The man had a great gallows humour; his humour, despite it all, did not save him from the hangman’s noose.

The despondency of his own ramshackle upbringing welded his mind to his morality – when it came to attesting to his own imprisonment, though which was not notably unjust for the time, he relented.

A university education gave him the strength and craft to create works that would outlast his life tenfold, but it was through his intimacy with his own mortality that Villon became not just a villain of the growing French state, but a hero of the downtrodden and sequestered. 

A ‘new poet’ of an ancient time, Catullus bridged the gap between the Hellenistic tradition and his own Latin roots. Sporadic pearl-clutching within the Classics community of Western academia have made his work stand out; he reflected, more than anything, the refusal to catatonia. 


Catallus shone the light to his own eroticisms – on the exacerbation a man has on his own emotions, and the rick-rocking those carnal forces have on the man likewise, and how the ship sails nonetheless. His legendary verses were full of specific remarks that could only be made in Latin - a language which, for all of its admiration, also has a word for every sex act that Catallus wanted himself or his enemies to experience. His was the end of the Republic’s flourescence, and in it we can catch glimpses of the light of the Hellenic-Latin world in careful harmony. It would not last. Another man that lived at the time, who Catallus also remarked, was none other Julius Caesar.

Tradition is present and trampled upon all the same in Catallus’ poems. He wrote to his lover, Lesbia, who he engaged in an adulterous manner, in the style of Sappho. His fondness for the woman was, in his own words, unlike that of traditional romantic couplings, but that of a father and son-in-law. The lack of biographic detail means that his poems stand alone as the monument to his ever existing at all.

If only all poets were so lucky.


But the Annals of Volusius will die in Padua itself,

and often become loose tunics for mackerel,

Small monuments are dear to me . . . ,

But the people rejoice in swollen Antimachus.


Writing to shout one’s own voice into the void is an ancient endeavour, even if it does not always create the most prized work, nor the most emotionally turgid. The combination of craft, and the study of art history, is as vital to an understanding of the legacy that the new poet inherits as what words mean themselves - Ezra Pound, pioneer of the term ‘luminous detail’ argued so in his career in the United States.

His name may not strike a chord with those who care to talk about art - indeed, those who walked in his footsteps and admired the man are as memorable as they come. Eliot, Hemingway and Joyce all claimed influence from his part - it was Pound who read Eliot’s very first published poem and lauded the man for training and modernising himself ‘on his own.’ 

Pound’s own work, consisting of ‘Three Cantos’ and ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberly.’ To follow his work’s progression is to follow the path of a cave until one cannot separate oneself from the dark, damp walls.


Pound did not stop at any particular traffic sign - he translated Chinese, Latin, Greek and Anglo-Saxon poems in his style while being criticised for his skill in those very languages. He absorbed the history and legacy of the works with which he critiqued and created with an arrogance that other were quick to note.

Indeed, his work has been described as ‘both traditional and original.’

When the haughty head of 20th century debauchery rose, Pound’s move away from the United States, and later London, were symptoms of a greater frustration with the financial world, nationalism in the Anglo-Saxon world, and as intellectualism in post-war Europe grew more violent, the Jewish people. 

The poet met Hemingway at the age of 22 while in Europe and helped point the man towards a destiny amongst literary fiction that has yet to be seen again; Pound also met Mussolini and quickly adopted the fascistic viciousness that would claim the lives of millions across the next two decades. His blatant anti-semitism proves that, like all people, the artist is as fallible as the paper they write upon. 

While the artist went on a journey that saw his frustrations with the financial world embrace Mussolini, and later Hitler’s, fascism, his legacy did not die on the battlefields of Europe - his work continued to resonate even while Pound continued to write in a mental facility.

Hemingway petitioned the man to be released in the late 50s, as did many other contemporaries who disliked someone who had such great influence to spend his last years in custody. He was eventually freed, but his re-entry into the poetic world was a shock – Pound allegedly said that "at seventy I realized that instead of being a lunatic, I was a moron." 


The arrogance and surety of his work gave rise to imagism that, for better and for worse, dominated the landscape of 20th century English.

To assure that imagism can be easily discussed is a fool’s errand, but it was a process that was nonetheless observed, and can be roughly described as the ‘illumination of an object through inventive verse and classical detail.’ A rejection of the all-encompassing romantic and hedonistic aesthetic.

For despite his greatest ills and malices, Pound’s gift to the world was this unfettered focus on the object of all things - the phantasm that exists within the mind of every reader who can imagine the world being different than the way it is.



T.S. Eliot’s Preludes.

 For the power of imagination, poetry triumphs as much as sugar triumphs over the taste buds, and for narrative, the proteinous meal does not give up its power easily. 

Through this focus and rejection of the tradition that, like many of Pound’s contemporaries, many were familiar with, the parts of the meal were plated and dished to the execution of one particular image, picture or concept.

Within each compounds the skills and craft of the writer, a thousand silent dressings holding hands, and the dish is tasted anew despite its contents, more or less, being the meals of months and years past. Pound did not revolutionise the written word, but only guided it towards a causal goal.

Perhaps, without him, Eliot and Hemingway may have missed their mark and become swallowed by the literary industry’s propensity for eating authors alive for nothing in return. Perhaps not: Pound was, towards the end of his life, under no illusions about the legacy he had left behind. There was no place, even in the world of poetry, that would ever accept him again. 


The winter's evening settles down
With smells of steaks in passageways.
Six o'clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves across your feet
And newpapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On empty blinds and chimney-pots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
And then the lighting of the lamps.

For imagism, illumination is key – and here one can arrive at perhaps Pound’s greatest gift: luminous detail.

While simple in concept, it has far-reaching implications for the way one can talk about art and understand its greater concepts. All art is, by definition, reflective; a painting of a symposium will always be a two-dimensional reflection of the real one, and therefore lighter and darker tones will have to be added to ‘reflect’ light artificially. Simply, the luminous detail of the construct itself would be the detail of light itself.


 But this is the most basic of the terms application, as these details are key to understanding more complex artistic concepts – even if they are not used literally by the reader or viewer, they are known well enough.

The smile of da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, faint but distinct, is a luminous detail that highlights the woman’s enduring image of moderation against ecstasy. Who was the woman, and why was she smiling? This detail is only partly illuminated, and in doing so, makes it all the more detailed as the viewer seeks to understand Lisa for the secrets she holds behind her lips. 


For the moving image, Kubrick’s 2001 incorporated the terrifying, minimalist image of the monolith to encapsulate knowledge and all the evil that it obscures.

The ebony obelisk is as captivating as it is horrifying, and its rigid form lacks any movement, and yet it never remains in one place for long. Knowledge and the desire for it compromise little in Kubrick’s imagined world, and for the moving image, an unmoving matte-black monolith has become one of cinema’s most ironically luminous detail.

In narrative, the vernacular of Orwell’s 1984 reflects a dystopian world not only literally but in being conventional and unimaginative - a world without colour, and therefore without candour.

Orwell masterfully illuminates how oppressive the world has become that the characters can barely imagine their own happiness because they lack the words to express it. 

Moreover, the lack of words to express one's feelings can inhibit the feeling itself. It is said that the Greeks had four different words for love, and in Tamil there are even more, but in Japanese the vocabulary may lack compared to the expression once is expected to perform in love’s name. And yet, the word ‘luminous detail’ exists in English and the concepts it should describe are talked about just the same – they are, in almost all ways, the parts of a work that deserve attention.

For so much of art is craft and that craft can be invisible by design: the detail that is luminous lifts the whole work to something higher, and illuminates the image, whether that is the painfully short Tears in Rain speech in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, that hints deeply at a life fully lived and cut terribly short, or Mr. Darcy’s confession to Miss Bennet that, despite her view and his pride, he does love her.

Indeed, these luminous details are often all the more illuminating when they reveal what hasn’t been said - a half-made image is often so much more interesting to the viewer when the parts that have not been revealed are of keen interest. These are not always luminous in the sense that a cliff-hanger must generate interest, for the detail must illuminate the purpose, the mode, and the image of the whole, not just its next part.

But it refreshes the mind of the reader and viewer that the art is illuminated through details, carefully placed amongst the craft, and not through the callous casting of wide-holed nets. 


The same, oddly, can be said for people too: a man may have a scar upon his stomach that teases a whole that has not yet healed its wounds, or a woman with a birthmark on her arm that, when looked from above, seems to be a comet racing across the sky – this is nature’s dalliance with meaning.

Of course, these artefacts of a person’s mind that constantly looks for patterns through the muck should not be mistaken for the carefully crafted details of art, but they reveal phenomena nonetheless: that, despite the largest sum of a person, or a thing, one tends to remember the detail, and that does greater work than the whole ever could. 

 Wherever it may come from, these details illuminate the image of the piece and take the viewer one step closer into the artist’s world. Those without these details often struggle to maintain an audience’s expectation, or in most cases, do not stand the test of time. Pound’s expression of that single expression for the single image is not monumental in the same way that Paradise Lost or the Canterbury Tales were for the progression of English verse, but they offer a tool for the artist and appreciator that is, from these details, indispensable.

There is a certain turn of phrase of ‘a stroke of genius.’ It comes from the 19th century in the works of Monet and Renoir, and originally was quite literal - it was often a single stroke that transformed a piece into something exceptional and powerful, and was done, from the viewer’s point of view, effortlessly. Over time, it became easy to use it as an accolade to any talented artist’s work, but if it was to be used more accurately, it would describe that final, pivotal, luminous detail.

Lesser artists claw and scratch at its heels, and egotistical artists assume what has worked before will work once more; the truly inspired, the truly genius, create a brush out of thin air and stroke across their work in ways that few can understand … unless one stands back and takes it all in.

The stroke may be invisible now, taken as fact, but it was once not there at all – and now, thanks to the pioneer, the detail illuminates not just their own work, but the conversations of those in the future, and their work they may one day produce. 

“There is another turn of phrase,” replies the artist, slattern of his own wills. He touches the carapace of the celluloid he cuts, and cuts, and cuts. When the projection flickers to life, he catches the figures in his film dance in darkness, and in doing so, they trust each other fully. The artist shouted it once, and now the audience too, each in their mental palaces: 

“Eureka.” 

And all the dreamers run naked from their baths, glistening and free in the daylight imagination.


Sources:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/francois-villon

https://jala.net/blog/story/30/languages-of-love-expressing-love-in-different-cultures

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/t-s-eliot

https://www.studentwritingcenter.us/modern-poetry/pound-the-method-of-luminous-detail.html

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/ezra-pound

https://poetryarchive.org/poet/ezra-pound/