by Nicholas A. DeBoer
II. Thematics
I cannot remove myself from this man and these poetics without acknowledging and becoming intimate with him. I can remove the forms from the art of this man and clear the detritus, that stoned perfection from the altar. I was a late blooming young pup in 2006, when I attended the Summer Writing Program at Naropa University. Somewhere in the middle, Peter Quartermain guest lectured about the errors made by publishers towards spacial and grammatical units in poetic language. On transparent paper, Quartermain displayed on a projector, a poem from Pound’s Cantos. This was the first time I saw free verse. The language erupted, a cast/kind of divinity stretching back to my childhood, where a grandmother would try to instill in me the love of God. The words melded and fell, remarking and diving back into themselves. As Orson Welles would say about making a film, “Each time I set foot on a movie set, I like to plant a flag. The more I know about the intrepid discoverers who’ve come before me, the more my little flag begins to look like the one on the golf course which you take out of a hole so you can sink a putt” (Welles, 168). A discovery was made, one that I didn’t understand.
I bought that book and that companion and tried, unsuccessfully albeit, to read it over the course of a couple weekends when visiting my family in Indiana at a little 24-hr diner. A year would pass, my romantic relationships would change and I would and did not read it. I lazed around with him, never really paying attention and not getting much bent out of shape until I found out the following summer that he was a fascist and antisemitic. There was an anger, a disappointment. How could this transitional epiphany be destroyed so quick? I conceived of then, a simple, silly little video piece. I would, with the help of Isaac Linder, purchase 15 copies of the book and through a choreographed frame, hammer, burn, drill and rip apart Ezra Pound. In that moment, we would call it FTC for (F)uck (t)he (C)antos. The project never came to fruition, but something else happened, slight and quiet, I re-read that first canto. A lark made of confusion and surprise,
And then went down to the ship
set keel to breakers
forth on the godly sea
(Pound, Canto 1)
A pinhead of light burst forth, a necromantic energy and so it went, the obsession. A sigilic moment.
Impossibility is certainly a way to describe going towards an understanding of Pound’s work. He even mentions, in the abortive text of the final sequence,
to “see again,”
the verb is “see,” not “walk on”
i.e. it coheres all right
even if my notes do not cohere.
(Pound, Canto 116)
Something imperceptible to his own eyes, was that of his 47 yrs of work on this one poem. One cannot summarize his epic in a few syllables influenced in the direction of a sentence. One can bore out that meaning, thrive to possess the ‘will’ to see the vision, half-smudged as it is. The poem is a work, one of history, mythology, of a multiplicity developed into language, of sign-symbols. At its best, it is personal, tragic, fearful, alive. For the lay scholar, the best moments happen around 1930, 1948 and 1969. These are the markers, that path where Pound saw himself, empowered at times, withered in others.
The Cantos can also be seen as, “a Gothic church…built over many generations, under the direction of various master builders, and frequently with many changes of design and construction techniques … each departure in design … would necessarily be made to conform in some respect with already completed portions of the edifice lest the whole collapse” (Eleusis, 29). Pound’s impressions of his friend and early admirer, James Joyce and his work, Ulysses, adds a level to his own process. Pound saw it as a, “manipulating [of] a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity” (Eleusis, 39). The poem as discovery, as a voyage on the continent of history, eventually becoming a return, a homeward journey to paradiso.
Pound, who developed and abandoned Imagism (clear, precise language of imagery), started Vorticism with Wyndham Lewis, an offshoot, if not, a combination of Cubist vitality and Futurist rigidity and then abandoned it after the war. In final, he found favor for the often oft-putting writings of Ernest Fenollosa on the ideogrammic method. This method was a way for Pound to use concrete images to impress and build a system of construction out toward abstract content. A system that he would play with for th rest of his life.
Thematically, one can see five distinct components to Pound’s ‘great failure’. Sometimes, they work in tan tum to one another, at other moments they are wholly their own threads. They are, however, a rhythm against and with history, shaping themselves as veils/symbols. These themes are (1) the Eleusinian Mysteries, (2) banking via economic theory, (3) the principles of Confucius, (4) the American Revolutionary War and lastly, (5) antisemitism and fascism. This last theme, is the expansive labor of the his poetics, in no uncertain terms.
(1) As some of these themes appear in the poem, at their best, they make a world unseen by human eyes, never touched, only hinted, by our long history of poetry. At their worst, the vileness, violence and contempt for human life, the bizarre reflection against compassion only goes to lengthen the ready made tears that are the march of the 20th, our most violent century. Leon Surette says that, “Pound has reinterpreted Odysseus’ descent in the light of Eleusinian models, creating a bridge between Dante’s dream vision of the other world and the Homeric wanderings punctuated by a visit to the Underworld” (Eleusis, 25) It’s through this visit to Hades, that he tries to develop a prescient vision, a recovery. An inferential dimension of poetics that wields the reader to work backward from a reference or statement (Eleusis, 51).
The Eleusinian Mysteries, founded around 1500 BC served as a initiation ceremony held every year on the 14th through the 23rd of Boedromion (present day September/October). The rites were incredibly secret and involved the story of Demeter (goddess of agriculture and fertility) and how her daughter, Persephone (as maiden, goddess of death/rebirth) was abducted and raped by her uncle Hades (god of death and the underworld). As Demeter searches for her daughter, she causes a terrible drought, depriving sacrifice and worship to the gods. Demeter convinces Zeus to release her and thus bringing the harvest. It’s this return that the Mysteries celebrated.
In its essence, the Mysteries represent a ritual encounter with death by its worshipers, who have taken Kykeon, a psychotropic compound that enhances both joy and sorrow, akin to modern day LSD or Psilocybin mushrooms. As the initiates entered the Telesterion, they reenact the sacred drama of Persephone. It’s here, where the mystery lies, “Though Athens brought forth numerous divine things, yet [it] never created anything nobler than those sublime Mysteries through which we became gentler and have advanced from a barbarous and rustic life to a more civilized one, so that we not only live more joyfully but also die with a better hope” (Wasson, 142). So says, Cicero in his recounting of those rites.
Michel Foucault notes that, “at winter solstice, which is the time when one is most susceptible to catarrh [the common cold], sexual practice should not be restricted” (Foucault, 114-5) and this is meant in regards to the times within the seasons where sexual pleasure was habituated, built out of an appreciation to when the human health would benefit from it most greatly. All of this points to Pound’s interest in the fornication rites of Eleusius. It is this kind of sexual divination that is the imaginative heart of The Cantos. Pound clarifies this as he connects (rather erroneously) the historical termination of the Mysteries around 400BC and the rumor of their survival and transference to the Albigenses (or Cathars) in Southern France. This Christian splinter group, also known as the cult of amor, dedicated to the transcending of the human over matter, attaining union through love and love only, thus fitting perfectly in Pound’s conception. The Cathars believed that within us, a divine light exists, one that refuses corruption. It’s this light from Eleusis, Pound believes, that caused Pope Innocent III to bring forth a crusade to eradicate them. In a letter to T.S. Eliot, Pound notes that, “I believe that a light from Eleusis persisted throughout the middle ages and set beauty in the song of Provence and of Italy” (Eleusius, 66)
(2) In the dualistic mind of Pound, the opposite of amor is that of usura. Usury initially was a system of excessive interest charged on borrowed monies. Unlike the traditional view of evil, as, “a negative, an absence … Pound’s … evil is an immaterial fatal force that subverts the power” (Eleusis, 119) …of the sexual and knowledgeable light of Eleusius and the cult of amor.
By the 1930s, the world had plummeted into a Great Depression and all around suffering was coming to all people. At the moment of that kind of suffering, it is hard-struck to not feel the confusion and stupidity of whatever economic system is in place. “Pound came to believe that the munitions industry fostered wars for its own economic benefit, and that the banks fostered both unemployment and wars to increase indebtedness” (Eleusius, 119/20). While working for The New Age in London, he met a man, Major C.H. Douglas. Douglas, an industrial engineer, had built his economic theory of Social Credit upon one epiphanatic moment. While reorganizing air force equipment and charting his data, “he found that the wages, salaries, dividends, and retained profit of the factory added up to a smaller sum than the [total] price of the goods it produced” (Purgatory, 28). This underconsumption could, under Douglas’ view, give birth to an increase in purchasing power through, “a kind of negative tax, called the national dividend, to make up the shortfall in purchasing power and was opposed to expansion of the money supply” (Purgatory, 8).
The expression of this for Pound was incredible. This belief in Douglas and Social Credit would give Pound the confidence to investigate economics at its own game. However, “the more Pound read…the more confused he became” (Purgatory, 2). And he believed that Social Credit was, “directed to the prevention of new wars, wars blown up out of economic villainies at the whim of small bodies of irresponsible individuals” (Purgatory, 38). The continued failure of Social Credit to gain any followers led Pound to a great frustration. Being unable to pull people away from the usurious system of power, lead him to a, “profoundly anti-democratic and [thusly he] adopted a paranoid belief in the existence of an international conspiracy of Jews and Freemasons who controlled the banks of the world” (Eleusius, 123).
The importance of economics, however, did not benefit The Cantos. It is almost completely indecipherable within the text and as he increases in obsession, a certain banality and lack of interest takes over the poem. Economics takes up whole sections, swallowing the available potentiality and starving out the personality of the poem. Social Credit as it stood was never acknowledged, accepted or implemented by either the Italian Fascists or the National Socialists as part of their ‘Third Way’ propaganda.
The ‘Third Way’ is the conceptual apparatus of that time period. After the end of hostilities in 1919, two distinct economic forms continued to proliferate. Communism, state power congealed and given over to the people through tyrannical means and Capitalism, a free market system congealed amongst corporations and given over to the people through oppressive means. The pinch of these systems bore out, Fascism, a public-private trust, where representatives of capital and labor work together within corporations to harmonize labor relations and maximize production for national interest (World Fascism, 150). The Third Way that Pound so heavily begged for would never come.
(3) The third major thematic device is that of the rational ordering of nature, via the Confucian ethical system. Pound points out that, “Confucius is more concerned with the necessities of government, and of governmental administration than any other philosopher. [Confucius] had two thousand years of documented history behind him which he condensed so as to render it useful to men in high official position… [This] analysis of why the earlier great emperors had been able to [in Pound’s view] govern greatly was so sound that every durable dynasty, since [that] time, has risen on a Confucian design” (Eleusis, 221). Pound’s identification of Confucius/Kung is on par with his attempt to envision an Eastern variation on the Mysteries. However, as Pound dives further and further into the work, he moves away from the Odysseus ‘person of action’ to the ‘person of action in mind only’. This transition is marked mostly through his Social Credit dedications and thusly trying to find a container to his importance to Mussolini, who was his obvious choice for a philosopher king.
Pound’s rendering of the Confucian system of ethics was built on the development of sage leaders in history. The balance of this order was an interlinking of building and maintaining a proper social order and equally toward the violation of them to accomplish these goals. It is also worthwhile to note how quickly the veil of this system, for Pound, exemplifies the Italian Fascist ordering. “Confucian political theory legitimates tyranny in that the just ruler reigns with ‘the mandate of heaven,’ not of the people” (Purgatory, 74). Pound’s interest in Confucius also relates to the ideogrammic method. The recognition here is one that offers a key to the form of The Cantos. His excitement is billed out of a sign system where, “there is no possible confusion of the real meaning.” “The Chinese have one word, ming or mei. It’s ideograph is the sign of the sun together with the sign of the moon. It serves as verb, noun, adjective. Thus you write literally: ‘the sun and moon of the cup’ for ‘the cup’s brightness.’ Placed as a verb, you write ‘the cup sun-and-moons,’ actually ‘cup sun-and-moon” (Pound, Literary, 29). This misunderstood view of the ideogram serves the entirety of The Cantos, and is seen as both an organization of the perfect social order and a sincerity that is reasonable and of itself.
(4) This order is most readily seen in Pound’s reflection of John Adams and Revolutionary America. Adams serves as the fascist Odysseus. In analyzing the period, Pound found two movements. The first was that of an imperial civil war in which propertied men and merchants sought to foster their own economic interest without British interference and the second as a people’s revolution of inarticulate, disorganized violence such as mob assaults, eager enlistment in the army and then the wholesale desertion when there was no fighting (Eleusis, 193). This is the paideuma, ‘the tangle or complex of the inrooted ideas of any period’ of history. The revolution itself is seen as fairly pedagogical, more so than a military achievement, for it is built on ideas, not actions. “The revolution took place in the minds of the people.” It is curious, and disheartening that Pound never even comes close to approaching the Native Americans in his epic, as they would certainly have had a mimicking for some of the Confucian principals. Instead, he moves towards a Jeffersonian order, whereby he believes that Mussolini will rebuild and restore Rome in the image of Jefferson and Adams. “Gradually the romance of history, and its attendant legend of Odysseus, the hierophant of Eleusis, was pushed aside … [and then with the] Chinese and Adams cantos it was entirely displaced” (Eleusis, 240). This displacement is also a showcase of the shifting of Pound’s concerns, for at this point, a New Roman Empire will be made by the hands of Mussolini, made in the Fascist Eagle high in the sky.
(5) The most complex and difficult problem in reading the works of Ezra Pound is the most consistent thematical allusion, antisemitism and fascism. “As the most unstable and irrational element … antisemitism helps to reveal incoherences concealed elsewhere in [The Cantos]” (Casillo, 19). “It is necessary to emphasize that Pound was truly antisemitic. Critics have argued that Pound’s antisemitism is really economic rather than cultural, racial, and biological, and that it develops mainly from his identification of the Jew with the usurer” (Casillo, 36). Robert Casillo’s characterization, however, shines the ultimate insight into these claims. In Casillo’s estimation, Pound moves through four distinct stages. The initial stage occurs during Pound’s upbringing in Wycote, Pennsylvania, where it was popular, if not a common prejudice. The next stage is typified by his return to America in 1910-11, where there was the sight of an extensive Jewish immigration. This is the moment that in Pound’s writing, “hostile and contemptuous remarks of Jewish artists, businessmen, publishers, women, social reformers, and more ominously pawn brokers” (Casillo, 4) begins.
The third stage moves from the 1920s to the late 1930s, where Pound invites and brings about an open and violent hostility to the Jewish people. These first three stages are not easily or clearly seen in the work of The Cantos, hints here and there, awful and pathetic, but it isn’t until the fourth stage in the 1940s that Pound’s writing and language is strongly colored with antisemitism. It bears an unmistakable resemblance to the Nazi version of biological racism (Casillo, 6/7). One, however, cannot exonerate his views by expressing that he caught it from the air, or a form of populism that he became involved with by accident. “Simply put, antisemitism goes further to explain Pound’s fascism than vice versa” (Casillo, 16).
It operates as, “a characteristic manifestation… [an] inescapable response to the most pressing intellectual and poetic difficulties” (Casillo, 16). It’s through these five thematic devices that we are given over to an incomplete, 824 page epic poem. Ezra Pound, whose own myth of Eros (god of sexual love and beauty) is one that weeps to his own death in mourning for the murder of Sicheus, a death brought about by Pygmalion’s greed.
And life goes on, mooning upon bare hills;
Flame leaps from the hand, the rain is listless,
Yet drinks the thirst from our lips,
solid as echo,
Passion to breed a form in shimmer of rain-blur;
But Eros drowned, drowned, heavy-half dead with tears
For dead Sicheus.
(Pound, Canto 7)