Dear Don,
“Pound against abstraction” is too simple. “Pound on the right use of abstraction”? Money, exempli gratia, is an abstraction, a mark of work done or value added, and may be used aright, if securely anchored in nature’s abundance or in the works of men & women attuned to nature, read heaven & earth, read tao.
And so usura is a defilement of nature, money attached to acts of no worth, parasitism, sucking the life out of creative man, productive man (sympathies with Marx here are several), leaving in place of living culture a table chandeliered & girdled by dry husks, locust shells pretending to the status & stature of men.
Re/ my efforts to reconcile Pound’s fascist sympathies. War & loss hurt & pitched him into extremity. I do get that. And suppose, had there been no Hitler, we would not think quite so ill of Mussolini … the Jews, at least, were safer in Italy than in Vichy, viz. Primo Levi. Still though the hate in some of these chansons makes me sad. I know the hate is for practices, not for persons, but his poetic method leads him to embody practices in persons, and the bile does seem to me a stain.
Not to go too far into psycho-babel, but in my few but gathering years on earth, I’ve come to think, no one hates like that, but in hating something within & disowned. Usura, standing for sthg. weak or blurred in himself, is demonized, & stuffs the eighth circle with demons. (I guess it don’t take much to mint a fascist, dismay at what men & women do, a sense of what glories they might do, & a notion of, a program for, bridging the distance.)
You asked before about sustained vision & gathered fragments. And yes, I see the arc, from Modernist imperative — contain & master the material, the work as Work, magisterial opus — through the humbling of cage & tent & ant (a centaur in his dragon world: he does that, I realized yesterday, the ant does—stands square on four legs, rears up on two, to feed or to preen) in Pisa — to a postmodern surrender, work as simply working, a submission that says, the whole is uncontainable, containment diminishes it, & you, just mark a track through it, that suffices.
Of the species of postmodern, some seem to me blackly comic, nihilistic graveyard whistling, or intellectual gamesmanship, or just despair, thinly veiled, at the incommensurability of mind & world, the pretensions & ambitions, the benightedness, of one, and the mute implacable face of the other, blank & alien as a sheer canyon redrock wall. This is not that.
What’s here is a faith that the world is whole, no striving called for. Any step one takes, however contingent & inflected, is connected to, & reflects within it, every other possible step. (The light unsevered from its source though it touches on all things.) There is no such then as fragment. Whole is whatever the eye sees whole — sees as whole — sees wholly.
I’ll spare us both the self-evident pun. And I do not mean some new-aged mushy faith that all-is-one whereby we float nine inches off the ground & smile sweet & beatific. Rather the heart of the heart of the Heart Sutra —
Form is exactly emptiness,
Emptiness exactly form,
— from which my own work is trying (through fat tectonic plates of notion & control) to gush hotly forth.
I should add here that my reading of postmodern poetry has grown up some since I wrote this. And I see more obstacles to lining up Pound with the dharma than I did then.
By this the whole work comes home to a sweet orphaned song —
I have tried to write Paradise.
Do not move
Let the wind speak
that is paradise
Let the Gods forgive what I
have made
Let those I love try to forgive
what I have made
Paradise is. The whole work, all its striving, every utterance, wonderfully needless. And, as transcript of its own arrival at this point, complete w/ atonement, a great gift to the tribe.
From mastery through humbling to freedom, the bits growing smaller & smaller, pounded & ground down in the mortar & pestle of one sensitive & impassioned mind, but the vision is singular, is a vision of its own activity & arc, of which Pound’s own concerns (“I am not a demigod, / I cannot make it cohere”) and confessions (“That I lost my center / fighting the world”) are seamlessly part.
Cutting across that arc (for the method is, one thought cut slantwise through another) (the arc, I mean, from parts that try to make a whole, to parts that are wholes) is this axis: Confucius — Eleusis.
The work can’t be reduced to any one, or any several, polarities, there is much mixture & flux in it, so I don’t want to claim more for this one than is seemly, but here, just this. Confucius, his China, is a pole of quiet & contemplation, in which one steps outside of passion, into a reasoned ethics, attuned to a tao of change that does not itself change. Eleusis & related rites (Dionysus, Adonis, Tammuz, Osiris), are a pole of activity, passion, coitus, a flux in which one is fully immersed.
The Seven Lakes Canto, XLIX, though not re/ Kung-fu-tse, is Confucian in its quality of mind; is as Kenner says the still heart of the turning wheel. Canto XLVII, close at hand, is the force & fire that turn the wheel. Here then the Tammuz/Adonis rite in which the death of the vegetation god is mourned (“the red flame going seaward” his blood at midsummer) even as small potted plants thrust up shoots of wheat.
Odysseus into the cave fades into Tammuz gone underground. Odysseus ploughing (& heeding Hesiod’s dicta — harmony with natural orders) becomes the farmer drawing Tammuz back into life & air. And his going into the cave is at once entombment & impregnation:
Hast’ou a deeper planting, doth thy death year
Bring swifter shoot?
Hast thou entered more deeply the mountain?
The light has entered the cave. Io! Io!
The light has gone down into the cave,
Splendour on splendour!
By prong have I entered these hills:
That the grass grow from my body,
That I hear the roots speaking together,
The air is new on my leaf
These two cantos work as cathode & anode, set just a bit apart, activity & stillness. The energy that moves between them is the godlike “power over wild beasts” in which each canto comes to rest.
Finally. This thought & exemplum. My reading of Pound and my own writing have begun to draw together a little. Here’s a small recent effort to make use of his line and cadence:
UNION. SQUARE.
Slabs of a crumbling white cheese
baskets of onions, and small fragrant leeks
wild purslane & gold purslane
white wine, brown eggs and willow cuttings
Gone one whose bones are ground down
white flour, white wool
black flour, & black wool
grey dust at sift through the scumbled earth
rain on the fruit-spur as light shakes the twig.
Mind-ground, blossom-heart,
spring wind blowing madly, here, now, there . . .
—Well, they thought they had it all
but they didn’t have it all
—Oh once you have that you don’t get rid of it
le grain, le blé, le sang
les os qui la terre arée
pollen hangs on air under white pines.
—Monday she goes, an ontologist,
that’s the specialist
Hangs on the air, not pure or impure
gold fines the lord breaks in through
Αδοναι Adonis
gold that leavens the tree
all once wild, now a sweet sauce
earth-tuft of herb
apples in a wood crate on a fold-out card table
It is disappointing in a dozen ways. I can already smell the dissatisfactions to come. 1. Imitative. 2. First stanza’s got no metafurs in it. 3. Furrin’ languages. 4. Nuttin’ happens. 5. Mind-ground, blossom-heart, was ist? 6. Nuttin’ happens again.
But here’s what I like in it, what hints at future openings & ventures. 7. The cadences emerge out of the material and are durational as well as accentual … are, to my ear anyway, musical phrasings. 8. Each line is its own completion. 9. No interstitial tissue, narrative, syntactical, or otherwise, it trusts the process. 10. It has twists and turns … arrives in the end where it started, but hasn’t followed a course you might have predicted. 11. Has the recursion & overlap to which I have for a long time been drawn, but uses them less forcefully, braids them into the thought more naturally. 12. Ain’t about control.
Re/ that last. Writing it was a strange experience. I kept wanting to impose shape on it, shapeliness, coherence, and then noticing that impulse & renouncing it … find instead I said the shape inside it. That feels like entering a new country — so what if the first steps are clumsy, tentative? A poem that says is instead of should be. What a relief.
The Art of Compost 