I have just experienced several hours of what I can only describe as "Missing Time." It all started innocently enough this morning by taking an innocent peek at Cora Williams's book "Creative Involution", which segued wildly into skimming through a PhD dissertation that in a cursory reference (although that by-the-way was presented in the highglossed academic prose and specialized vocabularies invented for graduate students to use when communicating with their dissertation committees) just skated at high speed through Cora Williams's assumed influence on Ezra Pound. So it seems Cora Williams because of a theoretical assertion weilded a distant influence from afar, sparking alive a pulse of shared insight which might underlay the poet's own "metaphysical/artistic/mathematical" role in the invention of the Vortograph.
I confess my energy has been seriously depleted from reviewing many pages of minute, disparate, and disconnected elements all of which were written about either in a dated arcane prose or a frustrating specialized language.
Before I collapse from mental exhaustion, and being unable at this moment to muster the intellectual vigor necessary to generate a display of conspicuous cognition or even to prepare a long winded summation, I will provide the broad stokes below.
Before I do, I will remind the reader that "Creative Involution", as an innocent looking brittle half-century-old book, was retained on the shelves at the Williams College library. I am confidant that Dr. John W. Hopkins had examined the contents of this slim volume there, as indeed I had done though later in 1969 when I was seated at one of the long tables in the reading section of the library.
"Creative Involution" has long since fallen from print, and is available rarely and then only from the hands of rare book sellers. You may, however, if you wish, read a digital version of "Creative Involution", in fact the original 1916 edition which Cora Williams and her own Williams Institute published.
(You can have your choice of reading formats here, "Creative Involution")
Also in 1916, a major publisher, Knopf released the book to a larger public. Maintaining the original title "Creative Involution", the author was Cora Williams (self-described in the fronts piece in a bordered box as a "Sometime Instructor of Mathematics University of California"). In her opening paragraphs, Miss Williams explained she had selected the topic and the title not so much as a challenge, but as a response to Bergson's "Creative Evolution (pub. 1911). When the Knopf edition of her book was published in 1916, the asking price was $1.50 (The publishers weekly, Volume 90, Part 1, pg. 1038).
Who else read it, aside from me and probably Dr. John W. Hopkins? Ezra Pound read "Creative Involution" soon after publication, and in 1916 gave his broken shaving mirror to a photographer and fellow metaphysical and artistic traveler named Alvin Coburn who assembled the shards into a new camera and took a "Vortograph" of the poet.
"Pound's own influence for using fourth-dimensional images has been established within Canto 49, written in 1937, where he calls "the fourth; the dimension of stillness ..."
"Pound was aware of the fourth dimension through other sources, such as H.G. Wells, Poincaré and Fenollosa, who were also influenced by Charles H. Hinton's ideas on the fourth dimension. Ian Bell links the fourth-dimension within Pound's works to the images of the atom, the molecule, and crystals, noting Pound's desire for clarity and transcendence led to readings of Charles Hinton's The Fourth Dimension, James Huneker's interpretations of Gourmont's materialism, Gourmont's Chemin des velours (1902), where "the physics of thought" led to a conclusion of the concrete image, and Cora Williams' Creative Involution, whose mathematical thesis explained "the conduct of certain crystals and molecules ... as a fourth-dimensional activity" (I Bell, Critic as Scientist 221)."
(The Scientist in Modernist Literature: Degeneration, Dynamics, and Demons by Shari Jill Clark, B.A. M.A., a dissertation in English submitted to Texas Tech University for completion of PhD in May, 2001. pg 198)
http://etd.lib.ttu.edu/theses/available/etd-06272008-31295017306118/unrestricted/31295017306118.pdf
retreived 7.23.11
cited: Ian F. A. Bell, Critic as Scientist: The Modernist Poetics of Ezra Pound (London and New York: Methuen, 1981.) Pp. 221.
All you really need to remember is that "Coburn's 1916 vortograph shows the prizmatic effect of using crystals in
photography gave a material basis for Pound's vision." And remember that after taking that photograph of Pound, Alvin Coburn almost immediately threw his camera and photography aside for the rest of his life, destroyed almost 15,000 photographic plates, nearly his entire life's output, and spent the remainder of his years studying metaphysics.
All this just proves is that you can never tell how people will receive knowledge and what they will do with it.
