offering evidence that is suspect, is to forget the dÈlire operating at the
borders of expression, perception and experience; the ways in which
language and thinking operate by metaphor, analogy and association;
and how sense is haunted by nonsense.
For Fenollosa, poetry only does consciously what the primitive
races did unconsciously:^42
Our ancestors built the accumulations of metaphor into structures of language
and into systems of thought. Languages today are thin and cold because we
think less and less into them. We are forced, for the sake of quickness and
sharpness, to file down each word to its narrowest edge of meaning. Nature
would seem to have become less like a paradise and more like a factory. We are
content to accept the vulgar misuse of the moment.^43Fenollosa views the Western script as removed from nature and the
present moment as it abandons metaphor and the visual aspect of
representation. For him, poetry brings the visual and metaphorical
back into representation so that ëthe momentí is no longer misused.
After his visit to Tunisia, Klee draws on the hieroglyph in his
painting Arab Song which is illustrated on the cover of Paulinís
Walking a Line.^44 Here, the linguistic or vocal fabric of song and the
letters in the painting infiltrate the iconic representation of the picture.
Poems and books are often written or drawn into Kleeís paintings, and
the inverse of this is at work when Paulinís poems refer to Kleeís
painting and draw on the visual representation of the hieroglyph.
Paulinís use of the hieroglyph takes us back to Fenollosaís argument
that these letters spoke with both the vividness of painting and the
mobility of sounds.^45 The art critic Rainer Crone notes: ëBy letting the
book be materialized as painting, and by submitting the painting to the
textuality of the book, Klee blurs the boundaries between categories of
cultural representation: image and word, nature and culture, thing and
42 Fenollosa, pp.22ñ3.
43 Ibid., p.24.
44 Cf. ëArab Songí (1932) from The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C. and
painted after Kleeís visit to Tunisia (1914). This provides the cover for Paulinís
Walking a Line (London: Faber, 1994). All further references are to this edition
and are cited in parentheses in the text.
45 Fenollosa, p.9.