Pro-log to exploration 355 Consider human artifacts as bridges between areas of experience. Bridges are metaphors (from Greek metaferein: “to carry across”). Bridges as extensions of man are resonating vortices of power. THE GREATEST BRIDGE KNOWN TO MAN IS SPEECH AND LANGUAGE. AS CLICHÉS, WORDS ABRIDGE TIME AND SPACE BY RECORDING AND STORING THE MULTITUDINOUS MATTERS OF PRIVATE AND CORPORATE IMPRESSION. The language of a people is not only the resonant bridge that binds them in space and time; it is also the medium that shapes and processes their sensory and mental lives. The poet is concerned with releasing and controlling the corporate linguistic and traditional experience of the race by ever-new resonance and rhythms. He bridges the latest and most ancient awareness by the interface thatT. S.Eliot speaks of in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism. THE AUDITORY IMAGINATION What I call the “auditory imagination” is the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word: sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something back, seeking the beginning and the end. It works through meanings, certainly, or not without meanings in the ordinary sense, and fuses the old and obliterated, and the trite, the current, and the new and the surprising, the most ancient and the most civilized mentality. Auditory imagination is the mind’s ear—the complement of visual imagination. Less familiar as “bridge” is the “tragic flaw” (hamartia), of which Aristotle speaks in the Poetics. Without this interval of ignorance or awareness in his character, the tragic hero cannot bridge one state to another. The flaw is an area of interface and mutation, without which he cannot get better, but can only be hung up. When Lewis Carroll’s Alice went through the looking glass, she bridged the inner and outer worlds of fancy and imagination just at the time when the French biologist Claude Bernard bridged the inner and outer fields of medical science by his exploration of le milieu intérieur, creating internal medicine. Alice went through the vanishing point into the “total field” that bridges the worlds of visual and acoustic, civilized and primal space. SYMBOLISM IS PRE-EMINENTLY THE WORLD OF THE INTERVAL, OR RESONANT EFFECTS MINUS CAUSES (Greek sym- ballein: “to put together without connection”). Edgar Allan Poe’s