Spencer Heath Archive

Item 640

Random taping by Spencer MacCallum from conversation

December, 1955

 

 

 

…that constitute the creative life. I’m giving you a breadth of conception about fundamental things that doesn’t often appear.  Carrying out the poet Longfellow’s poem:

 Nothing useless is, or low

 Each thing in its place is best

              And what seemed but idle show

              Strengthens and supports the rest.

 

That’s a universal, philosophic and cosmic application. We have that, too, in the clay that is so common. Men are supposed to be made out of clay. Only within my life­time that men have learned how to use clay and make aluminum out of it. So even this clay wasn’t “useless” or “low;” it had its potentialities for mankind. And it was the subject of poetry, clay was, when we talked about making life out of clay and so on, human clay. That’s the subjective side. When we take it in the objective side, with the rationalism of science, then it becomes a physical instrument of life — it becomes aluminum, a utilitarian thing — and we are filling out the other side.

It isn’t that we need more truth than poetry. What we need is more synthesis between poetry and truth, between the objective and the subjective sides. There is no disharmony between poetry and truth. Each is complementary of the other. But there is a temporal order, an order of succession. Poetry has to come before truth.