Everything below this paragraph is taken from Visions and Ecstasies, a series of essays by the American writer H.D. They are collected in a volume published by David Zwirner Books, part of a series I enjoy collecting. The pages in this volume are few, but there are genuine ideas to be found from an unfamiliar perspective, amidst a stream of merely intelligent thought. H.D.’s brief list of pornographic literature would make a satisfying winter reading list.

‘My sign-posts are not yours, but if I blaze my own trail, it may help give you confidence and urge to get out of the murky, dead, old, thousand-times explored old world, the dead world of overworked emotions and thoughts.’

***

‘Two or three people, with healthy bodies and the right sort of receiving brans, could turn the whole tide of human thoughts, could direct lightning flashes of electric power to slash across and destroy the road of dead, murky thought.

Two or three people gathered together in the name of truth, beauty, over-mind consciousness could bring the whole force of this power back into the world.’

***

‘There is plenty of pornographic literature that is interesting and amusing.

If you cannot be entrained and instructed by Boccaccio, Rabelais, Montaigne, Sterne, Middleton, de Gourmont and de Régnier there is something wrong with you physically.’

***

‘But a man has intellect, brain—a mind in fact, capable of three states of being, a mind that may be conscious in the ordinary, scholarly, literal sense of the word, or sub-conscious—those sub-conscious states varying in different states of dream or physical feeling, or illness, delirium or madness—a mind over-conscious as well, able to enter into a whole life as Leonardo entered, Euripides, the Galilean with his baskets and men’s faces and Roman coins—the first hermits of the Ganges and the painter who concentrated on one tuft of pine branch with its brown cone until every needle was a separate entity to him and very pine needle bore to every other one, a clear relationship like a drawing of a later mechanical twentieth-century bridge builder.’

***

‘I draw the curtain across my window, across them, their impertinence and their greatness. I cannot bear to think of them. But with my fingers stained with moss and scratched with whortleberry and oak-tangle, I open a little Tauchnitz volume.

With my fingers too, rather than with my eyes, I read these poems.’

***

[Anacreon] ‘is gone. There floats this legend through old text-books, a date, an anecdote, but he, he himself is gone. He is gone, cruel in his immortality. He has left us—he has left me, and before me fingering this little volume, there is a path, set with small white paving-stones, a little edge of white marble, laid in long, even, slender, graceful books, stone blocks, imperceptible curves, two steps, columns, very small, very perfect.’