Renate's Response to Williams

May I just start off by saying that this was the most confusing thing I have ever read? Ever???

Maybe I should be a bit nicer about it and just say that it was very difficult to understand. So, he starts out talking a little bit about the reader; Oh, Williams loves his fellow man? OK, that's fine. "I love my fellow creature. Jesus, how I love him: endways, sideways, frontways, and all the other ways--but he doesn't exist!" (178). . . Wait, what?

"Tomorrow we the people of the United States are going to Europe armed to kill every man, woman, and child in the area west of the Carpathian Mountains (also east) sparing none" (178). Why??? What have they ever done to you? Where did this come from (and this doesn't really make sense if his fellow man doesn't exist)? I understand, now, why there was all this killing and destruction--to bring about spring and rebirth, which I did recognize as a main theme in this piece--but why, in his scenario, did we all have to kill each other? Why couldn't some natural disaster wipe us all out? Or is the apocalypse in Williams' mind one where people just kill each other?
". . . we love them--all. That is the secret: a new sort of murder" (179). This makes even less sense. I can't form my idea concretely in my head, but I could guess that we love them so much we want to make a new world for them. But that wouldn't work if they're already dead. We seem to want the new beginning more than we want to keep our friends alive.

Bear with me as I skip towards the end (pg 226) where Williams says, "If the power to go on falters in the middle of sentence--that is the end of the sentence--Or if a new phrase enters at that point it is only stupidity to go on." Excuse me for being stupid. I'd rather people understood all of what I was trying to say.
But that one sentence pretty much sums up how he's written this whole. . . thing. The beginning was hard enough to understand--what with killing the whole population of the world because we love them. Now we have to get through his broken thoughts. On page 192, for example, he says, "A work of the imagination which fails to release the senses in accordance with this major requisite--the sympathies, the intelligence in its selective world, fails at the elucidation, the alleviation which is--" Which is what???
Or on page 194, "In work such as Shakespeare's--" This is even worse.
Oh, here's a good one, page 198: "Cezanne--"

OK, I'm sorry. I don't mean to poke fun (as I smile to myself). I think I focus more on the random breaks than what Williams is saying before and after. I just feel that I don't have much to contribute when I don't understand the reading. I just have questions. Which are also OK, but I wish I could answer them once in a while!

I wonder how Williams felt about writing this. I mean, I assume that what was going through his head is almost exactly what's written on the page. But what made him decide to write this? Who was his audience?

I hope it wasn't me.

"Spring and All": a very fitting title for this piece. Especially the "and All."