I think we get a hint in those words of that moment when Pound paradoxically lost his free will, and yet another vision of human evolution that bids us to back further out of Borges’s labyrinth. Pound, in those years from 1958 to 1972, was a once-bright ember slowly fading behind a thickening layer of ash. None of us who hew to a writing life would want to end ours the way his ended.

It may be time to admit that none of us who write want to our lives to end at all, and yet a writing life, almost on a work-by-work basis, takes us to those depths where we contemplate our own end. What poem or story isn’t a memento mori, at least if you listen to the writing advisor who is incessantly urging you to go deeper? Break through that glass bottom of your ocean. Board that ship for your night-sea journey. Walk through the portal that leads to the Valley of Death. Hope you make it back.

And yet it’s good advice. The soil in the Valley of Death is deep and fertile. The climate is mild. And there’s light there, even if the way many people have described it is as paradox: brightness born of the dark, darkness visible, images outlined by a hallucinatory glittering blackness—a blackness that always causes a shock of recognition. The way Pound put it in one of the Cantos was “beasts like shadows in the glass.”

That’s not a daylit image, but when I think of Ezra Pound as a glowing ember, I think that’s what his glittering dark fire must have looked like. He must have seen a light capable of blinding petty intention, and as long as he could see by it and see what it demanded of him he could avoid the intention that for him ruined anything good he ever did.

The Valley of Death is the warehouse of images, the prop-room for our world, the costume shop, the parts department, the pottery shard, the medicine bundle, the salvage-yard, the caves overlooking the Dead Sea, the land of lost and singing souls. It’s a writer’s inheritance, but it will claim you as strongly as you claim it.

One way of being true to yourself as a writer is by cleaving to the image. Cleaving to the image means just what it says: sticking with it and simultaneously being separate from it, object to its subject. There’s a humility to this way of looking at things that lasts only until we decide that an image stands for something else. That’s when it becomes part of our matrix of conscious intention and we not only lose our humility, we lose the light of the image.

I owe thanks not to Ezra Pound but to James Hillman, the depth psychologist, for this way of looking at image. Hillman wrote a good book called Suicide and the Soul, which postulates the idea that the needs of the soul are much different from those of the body or those of the intellect. Hillman says we subsume soul into intellect in our culture—that’s the sort of thing that has us giving doctors the position of priests—so when we pay our lip service to life after death we’re confusing our soul with our conscious identity. That’s not giving the soul its due.

Hillman says that in the extreme, the soul reclaims its own by violence, which is what sadism and suicide are all about.

In another good book called Dream and the Underworld, Hillman states that our daylit life is only a perverse parody of our reality, which lies in the images of our dreams.

Moreover, those images contain imperatives, algorithms. Images embody a morality. Images contain whole poems, stories, and books. Faulkner found The Sound and the Fury in the image of a little girl’s muddy underwear.

Hillman says that soul lives in image, but the soul will flee the image if you analyze it. Our dreams are full of soul until we analyze them. Our psyches are full of soul until we engage in psychoanalysis.