To the End of Ezra Pound

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by Nicholas A. DeBoer

VI.  Final

The historical representation of Ezra Pound through a thorough explication of his thematic devices in his 47 yr epic has given me the availability and excitement to produce and render my own attempt at a ‘poem of some length’.  Through the benefits of the theoretical heritage of the Situationist writer Guy Debord and the available shifting of the Eleusinian Mysteries into the processing of a ‘sigilic moment’ gives visit to a new magickal interpretation of poetics.  Once a culture censors its magickal practitioners it resigns its heritage to a posterity without the unknown.  If we lose our incantations, so goes our voice.

The ‘sigilic moment’ can be encountered in a myriad of ways.  Robert Anton Wilson, through his research with Timothy Leary, furthered a model for understanding the ‘imprinting’ that is natural to human existence.  His belief, is that we have four circuits of activity in our brain that exist in everyone and four that precapitulate our future evolution.  The initial four are concerned with terrestrial survival.  First, is the Oral Bio-Survival Circuit, which, “is DNA-programmed to seek a comfort-safety zone around a [parenting] organism” (Wilson, 48), which is followed by the Anal Emotional-Territorial Circuit, typified by the ego, “simply the mammalian recognition of one’s status in the pack” (67).  Third, is the Time-Bending Semantic Circuit, where the brain handles and packages the environment, “allow[ing] us to sub-divide things, and reconnect things, at pleasure” (95).  The fourth circuit is the Moral Socio-Sexual Circuit, whereby the, “DNA signal awakens the sexual apparatus” (123).  These represent the normal processing of human life from primates to today.

However, the second group of brain circuits is much newer, deals with the evolutionary process, seeing it as part of extraterrestrial survival.  The fifth circuit is the Holistic Neurosomatic Circuit, seen historically as faith-healing, regeneration, ecstasy, rapture, most readily available through pranayama breathing or the ingestion of cannabis (Wilson, 179).  The sixth, or Collective Neurogenetic Circuit, is historically seen as re-incarnation, memories of past lives and archetypes of the collective unconscious.  This is the genetic archives, Gaia, consciousness with access to the whole evolutionary script, activated by advanced rajah yoga or heavy doses of LSD (197/8).  The seventh, or Meta-programming Circuit can be seen as the soul, as the no-mind, the White Light of the Void, the brain becoming aware of itself.  In the terms of human civilization, this is activated through cybernetic consciousness, the singularity (220-3).  The last is that of the Non-Local Quantum Circuit.  The highest varieties of shamanic and yogic consciousness seem to begin from the out of body experience, a dilation beyond the immediate, to a further union with the Cosmic Mind, or cosmic information system.  “Everything one can associate with the idea of Oneness With God – or Oneness with Everything is part of what is experienced…beyond-space time” (269).

I am concerned with this, with poetry as this.  If the terrestrial side of the brain has brought forth the current variation of the spectacle, then the utilization of our current language, built from an oppressive system is a language of attack of the static milieu.  Wouldn’t the magickal act bring history with us, through our bodies?      Isn’t the biological imperative one that is melded with the universe, a larger cosmic intelligence?  In turning to the end of Ezra Pound’s Cantos, his failures perceived and seen in his own mind, his death inevitably forthcoming, “not knowing if he shall rise…into that other ‘arcanum’ of dawn, no longer assured of his status as solar hero, with admirable stoicism and heroic will-power, the poet chooses to journey not by sail, but by oar into the ‘lowest depths of dark night’” (Casillo, 323).  I begin my journey of discovery here, where no one is dead in contemporaneous time, where all that remains to be seen is everything.

The playing field has many choices and the variations.  If we are to fight, dialog must arm itself to impose its own conditions.  The question is, what are those conditions that are of the earth and us, and what are the conditions that we want to engage, emerge, immerse ourselves in?

 

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Works Cited

 

The Culture Industry/Theodor Adorno [Routledge Classics, 2001]

Mythologies/Roland Barthes [Hill & Wang, 1972]

Illuminations/Walter Benjamin [Schocken Books, 1969]

World Fascism: A Historical Encyclopedia, Vol. 1/Cyprian Blamires & Paul Jackson [ABC-CLIO, 2006]

The Genealogy of Demons: Anti-Semitism, Fascism, and the Myths of Ezra Pound/Robert Casillo [Northwestern University Press, 1988]

The Society of the Spectacle/Guy Debord [Zone Books, 1995]

The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Vol. 1/Michel Foucault [Vintage Books, 1990]

Herself Defined: H.D. and her World/Barbara Guest [Schaffner Press, 2003]

Over-Ready Chaos/Phil Hines [Chaos International, 1992]

Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism/“Realistm in the Balance”/Luckacs, George [Norton, 2001]

Researchers Dispute Ezra Pound’s ‘Insanity’/Herbert Mitgang [New York Times, 31 Oct 1981]

The Maximus Poems/Charles Olson [University of California Press, 1983]

The Psychick Bible/Genesis Breyer P-Orridge [Feral House, 2010]

Fenollosa: The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry/Ezra Pound [City Lights, 1969]

The Cantos of Ezra Pound/Ezra Pound [New Directions, 1972]

A Light from Eleusis: A Study of Ezra Pound’s Cantos/Leon Surette [Clarendon Press, 1979]

Pound in Purgatory: From Economic Radicalism to Anti-Semitism/Leon Surette [University of Illinois Press, 1999]

The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries/R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann & Carl A. P. Ruck [North Atlantic Books, 2008]

This is Orson Welles/Orson Welles & Peter Bogadanovich [Da Capo Press, 1998]

The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams/William Carlos Williams [New Directions, 1967]

Prometheus Rising/Robert Anton Wilson [New Falcon Publications, 1983]

 

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Nicholas DeBoer was born at 1024 p.m. with a temperature of 29.1 degrees Fahrenheit. The wind gust a bit, around 5.8 mph under a clear sky in Chicago, Illinois. It was the Michel Reece hospital, designed by Walter Gropius. He certainly still likes to think about it. Later on, he attended schools, they were nice schools and some of his friends were met there. He found out that he could get obsessed with things around the age of 11, when his mother told him he could listen to their vinyl and found a photograph of Edgar Poe in the Beatles seventh album. It got worse, over time. By his early twenties he had found out that he really liked Guy Debord and the Situationist International, and really thought it was important at 18 to watch Citizen Kane something like 100 times. Now, it’s Ezra Pound, then it’s Charles Olson. He went to Naropa and Western Michigan University. People have been nice enough to take some of his words in poetry journals, such as Fact-Simile, Bombay Gin, and other(s). He was born on the 23rd of October, 1981

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