NPPF Zembla & the Criminal Imagination (Anatomy Of Frenesi)

[Terrance]

 Line 42: I Could make out
 Vintage Pale Fire page 80


By the end of May I could make out the outline of some of my images in
the shape his genius might give them; by mid-June I felt sure at last
that he would recreate in a poem the dazzling Zembla burning in my
brain. I mesmerized him with it, I saturated him with my vision, I
pressed upon him, with a drunkard's wild generosity, all that I was
helpless myself to put into verse. 

AL&CS

A madman is reluctant to look at himself in the mirror because the face
he sees is not his own: his personality is beheaded; that of the artist
is increased. Madness is but a diseased bit of commonsense, whereas
genius is the greatest sanity of the spirit--and the criminologist
Lombroso (psssss Brock uses the Lombroso model, but can not quite find
Frenesi in it) when attempting to find their affinities got into a bad
muddle by not realizing the anatomic differences between obsession and
inspiration, between a bat and a bird, a dead twig and twiglike insect,
a bush vet and veteran of the jungle. Lunatics are lunatics just because
they have thoroughly and recklessly dismembered a familiar world but
have not the power--or have lost the power--to create a new one as
harmonious as the old. The artist on the other hand disconnects what he
chooses and while doing so he is aware that something in him is aware of
the final result. When he examines his completed masterpiece he
perceives that whatever unconscious cerebration had been involved in the
creative plunge, this final result is the outcome of a definite plan
which had been contained in the initial shock, as the future development
of a live creature is said to be contained in the genes of its germ
cell. 

Canto 4

Two methods of composing