RELACIÓN ODONTÓLOGO PACIENTE

Once the subject’s perception is cleared of prior associations, the imagination is free to engage with the things “already in plain view.”209 _{Imagination is the antithesis of}

interpretation, as it neither adds to nor subtracts from the thing as it is. As Williams and Kora

209_{Rita Felski, “Everyday Aesthetics,” The Minnesota Review Spring 2009, no. 71–72 (2009):} 173.

progress throughHell—which I understand to be a metaphor for the banality of everyday life, with Williams associating himself with Kora—Williams describes splitting himself in two in order to isolate a form of perception that is disentangled from the meta-context of social expectations. This disentangled self is free to observe without accommodating associations, social interpretation, and the conventions in which the moment unfolds. He writes:

The trick is never to touch the world anywhere. Leave yourself at the door, walk in, admire the pictures, talk a few words with the master of the house, question his wife a little, rejoin yourself at the door—and go off arm in arm…” (XII.2)210

The poet being sad at the misery he has beheld that morning and seeing several laughing fellows approaching puts himself in their way in order to hear what they are saying. Gathering from their remarks that it is of some sharp business by which they have all made an inordinate profit, he allows his thoughts to play back upon the current of his own life. And imagining himself to be two persons he eases his mind by putting his burdens upon one while the other takes what pleasure there is before him.

In both paragraphs, there is a “free” self and a “burdened” self. In touching “the world,” the burdened self assumes the weight of convention and association, and when “he eases his mind by putting his burdens upon one,” he unburdens himself of convention and association. Touching the world is not to be confused with the “pleasure there is before him”; in this passage, it seems that the “world” refers to convention. “What is before him” echoes another passage that speaks approvingly of the immediate context that an individual may be blind to. Thus, to “touch the world” is to interpret it and to become complicit in the matrices of association that accumulate around immediate experience, as with the social conventions attached to “the master of the house” and his wife. Here, even though Williams seems to initiate distancing, I read this as an anticipation of the inherent distance and lack of intimacy

that surround the interaction. Williams affirms that the “true” self is in the imagination, and the part that enters the house is an empty shell constructed to operate within the matrix of convention. And in the second passage, the improvisation again suggests that Williams initiates voluntary internal distance from banality, which is different from immediate, ordinary experience. He seems to have drawn near with the hope of participating in the laughter and sense of intimacy, but the artifice he encounters causes him to recede into his imagination.

But before we imagine that Williams is creating a space of escape, he will instead suggest that the world he separates himself from is not actually the real world. The imagination alone is attuned to reality:

XV.3: That which is heard from the lips of those to whom we are talking in our day’s- affairs mingles with what we see in the streets and everywhere about us as it mingles also with our imaginations. … This is the language to which few ears are tuned so that it is said by poets that few men are ever in the full senses since they have no way to use their imaginations. Thus to say that a man has no imagination is to say nearly that he is blind or deaf. But of old poets would translate this hidden language into a kind of replica of the speech of the world with certain distinctions of rhyme and meter to show that it was not really that speech.Nowadays the elements of that language are set down as heard and the imagination of the listener and of the poet are left free to mingle in the dance.211

In essence, the individual going about her day’s affairs is “blind or deaf” to life and language “as heard.” Although the imagination may be seen initially as distanced from reality, Williams believes that it is actually a space of reality and an existential intimacy through dance. If the poet can learn to communicate through language as heard, and if the listener can shed the deafness of association, dance can occur. Indeed, Williams will hold toward the end of his career that imagination is a mental-perceptive space more real than the

world as it appears and is interpreted according to convention: “The ‘truly real’ was in the artist’s imagination, thronging in on his inward view.”212