by Nicholas A. DeBoer
I. Biographical/Introductory
Who is he to be evil? A toppled man.
people
don't change. They only stand more
revealed.”
(Olson, Maximus to Gloucester: Letter 2)
Within the infinite losses of sixteen million humans in the Great War, including T.E. Hulme & Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Ezra Pound felt a loss that echoed throughout the 20s. Combined with his own judgment of failure as a poet and discontent with London, brought him to France in 1920 and finally, Rapallo, Italy in 1924. His disillusion, possibly cauterized with the Great War gave birth in Pound to seek and find a new economic system. One that wasn’t involved with the banking community, or bureaucratic has-beens seeking distinction from war. The truth that Pound was to arrive at, was a mixed bag of economics that would lead him to fascist support and the most intense and deplorable anti-semitic ravings.
And yet, here is a person, someone fully conscious and available to analyze, digest and make sense of thousands of years of literature in such a single-bound that the only view available would be one of sickness, of messianic feelings of culture and post-October revolutionary poetry. This, is, the Modernist Tyrant. A story that, to be invented would be just as ludicrous as the life in question, a thin veil of insanity and asininity intermixed for eighty-seven years of life.
With Pound, it can only be an attempt to admire his poetry, for at the same interstice, guilt and a decided loss, a sense of bereavement accompanies the work, this fear of acknowledgment. A singularity of his own fire, Pound fore-fronted a rhythmic continent of history; the double beat of womb-worthy child & parent. People have found passion in The Cantos, a deeper imagination, an ‘acorn of light’ without lift. It is here, a reference to the final sequence in his poem, that the catalog or canon is presented for its flourish into the 1970s.
Through him, a morality, a stipend is seared into the namesake behind that space of fragmentation, that space the arts enters at, after the Great War, a collage of movable labyrinths. It would be a hard job to defend him and there is nothing I can or will do, to such end. His deprivation, well-protected by friends and admirers sent him to the Bollingen Prize in 1949. This level of esteem brought him a wider audience that was met equally by detractors.
In the preceding years, his engagement became more and more vacuous, energies turning toward summarizing and collaging entire epochs of Chinese history and the full biography of John Adams into his ‘poem of some length’. By 1940 he had become merely a small time propagandist for the Mussolini government and his antisemitism became revealed not as a ‘suburban prejudice’ but of ‘biological racism’ most readily seen through his Rome Radio broadcasts (started in 1935, regular by 1940).
On the 2nd of May, 1945, four days after the death of Mussolini, he was picked up for treason and put inside one of the death cells and held at the United States Army Disciplinary Center north of Pisa. Eventually, they would bring him back to America to stand trial, where he was found to be exhibiting, “extremely poor judgment as to his situation, its seriousness and the manner in which the charges are to be met. … He is abnormally grandiose, is expansive and exuberant in manner, exhibiting pressure of speech, discursiveness and distractibility. In our opinion, with advancing years his personality for many years abnormal, has undergone further distortion to the extent that he is now suffering from a paranoid state which renders him mentally unfit… (Surette, Eleusis, 263-4)” Is this the case?
The literary critics of that time appraised Pound to be morbid, disgusting, arrogantly cruel and rank with the stench of Hitler-level racism. And they are/were right. There has been only seldom texts here or there that have the courage to state out in the open, that a spade is a spade. The axiom of Pound’s imprisonment was that ‘he was insane, that he was swept with the rest of the Axis’, but all the conditions are available. His personality, seen in government cables revealed in the early 1980s, “that he had [a] personality-trait disturbance and a narcissistic personality….Nobody ever actually said he was insane. [Pound] himself chose to plead that way” (Mitgang).
It revealed itself. The poet and former college friend, William Carlos Williams noted, that Pound, “would come to my room to read me his poems, the very early ones…it was a painful experience. For it was often impossible to hear the lines the way he read them…But I listened; that’s all he wanted, I imagine, from anyone. His voice would trail off in the final lines of many of the lyrics until they were inaudible – from his intensity” (Williams, 56). With H.D., a close friend and one time romantic partner from the University of Pennsylvania, “[Pound] forced an education on her that included the classics…even yoga, whatever his greedy mind had picked up” (Guest, 4).
It appears that he was always quite found of himself, eloquent with some, flatter-less with others, but he is there, a human, ready to do and be a something. Either way, from 1945 to 1958, he was allowed to be free of treason and execution at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. The revolt of world powers that would result in Time magazines coining in 1939 of World War II dictated that enough death, this time some 79 million people, would hold old friends together and that this support and love let by some of the worst of Pound’s nature. Yet, that is that. A conquerers history cannot be changed, but revised, revealed, seen in context when the generations dwindle. What does remain of Ezra Pound evokes incredible interest. 824 pages, roughly 10 distinct sequences with countless companions, the most well-known is that of Carroll F Terrell’s A Companion to, which clocks in at a little over 800 pages. The journals, papers, scholarly research and dedication to his work and his legacy is on par with carbon dating cuneiform tablets. But, how do I describe this?
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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)
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by Nicholas A. DeBoer
III. My Project
During my final semester at Naropa University, I decided to take a not-for-credit course with Andrew Schelling on The Cantos. We would go, bit by bit, all the way through it. Each week we would have a page count to keep and one of my classmates would research a certain aspect of the thematic realms of the poem. Within a couple weeks, I had started a process whereby I would take notes in consultation with the companion by Terrell. The initial attempt to move towards an understanding of the narrative structure started to change. On the 3rd of February 2008, these notes became ‘image-notes’. They would operate as a representation of the watchwords, the rhythm(ing) of history and any conceptual framing I found of interest. Each phrase in my notes would be expanded and built into a new ‘image echo’. A new continent was being found, seen, given over.
It is not innovation that I seek, but a re-visioning, re-capturing, dialectically handling that tension in these poetics, redirecting the labor. I am an apprentice to 195,000 yrs of human relationships. I learn, change, draft. I had begun to turn the screws in, towards the poems. My day job was at a small bank in Boulder, Colorado where I wrote a rough draft based on the impressions of these notes. One of the particular problems was that the last book of Pound’s work was unfinished, with only a few pieces being completed. To offset this challenge, I found that a small Italian publisher, Mandadori, brought out a selection of posthumous canto fragments. This served to fill out this section and to set the stage for other sections that would need to be extended for the sake of the work. All totaled, the rough draft collected some 700 pages.
On the 28th of August 2008, I began drafting the first section. It would be a reversal of Drafts & Fragments, starting with my own creation of a 120th canto and moving towards 110. After two years, the first book was finished, 20 May 2010, entitled The Singes. The channeling was on, a fluidity set forth. It became an obsession, taking up all of my time. This would now be a 10 yr project as I would shape and recapitulate my concerns with the ‘all of it’ that is my life, the voices, the artifacts of daily and dream worlds, of the bedrock and poetry. It felt like a gauntlet roar made actual intention. The poetry would not be a hold over of mid-century nihilism, or modern day apathy, nor a rendering of word juxtaposition to provide forth a politic. The intent is that of a sigil, and ongoing investment into epic poetry, a reminder of my own life moving forward. It would be made with the dirty and sick, this sacred little blue dot of a planet.
I have lived with this completed section for almost a year, and in living with them, like an appendage, there is a sense that I have met them, finally. Now, as I begin, again, on a second book, I have a sense of sitting on the edge of a precipice. The space of the writing is more than just a cognitive process. Once I started to produce something, put it into the world, the change was available, inevitable. The gesture has to be enough, has to be an incantation, a will structure.
I am not so much interested in creating games or exercises that bring about phrases as shapes alone. The work I make contains a meaning, and although, I cannot promise to the reader that they will find the meaning I have instilled, one is prefigured into the text. It is not possible to make a reader see what I see, but I want to be active in giving as many hints, clues and pieces of the puzzle as possible. I am an autonomous individual, working collectively. I have a name and I cannot stand afraid of its ramifications. It is reasonable to assert that meaning is arrived at culturally, that any piece of writing has a trace, a thread, a narrative device. These things are, however, not necessarily within my control, as the shaping of any piece of writing is made of the many voices of the city, of the ghosts of previous generations, so many factors bore out prior to my birth, that actual entry into the world on the 23rd of October, 1981.
And being here, all these little years, I have found myself in desire of being part of the wave that is history, instead of utilizing history for my own ulterior purposes. I want a poetry that is subjective, bold faced, damaged and wild. I am tired of having nothing left. I want breath on cold windows at the base of the tongue; an actual human intimacy, shot harpooned from honesty and mess. I write of my small presence in the world, sharing with you the dependent murmurs of my love for you. A desire, a yearning to see your naked lunch and suffer with you. The dream, the poems of the body as actual, physical contact with the community, with the commons, with that untenable ideal of utopic pirate ships at dawn break. There is such love that I have found in these five years of being a poet, that feeling of such agerasia, such passion and drive that we do not have to feel alone. We have feet on the ground.
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by Nicholas A. DeBoer
IV. The Fight
So much, so much to fight for. The historical period we find ourselves in, is an important one to acknowledge, to see. Corporate caste systems refuse to recuse themselves from the power and alienation that has come to dominate our individual freedoms. The infighting of the 1950s government culture, where people were seen as needing to be surveilled has become a mimic by the paranoid and well-rooted protest against, what would be by the 1980s, itself. Rhetoric has common-worded itself into debate and dialog completed in a full variation on a new semiological system. It’s this system that needs to be discussed, for it is something that every artist is in league with, fighting for their lives, suffering at the hands of the Situationist coined spectacle.
In relation to my work on Ezra Pound, there is relation to a secret history. It contains a twofold structure in The Cantos. “The first under the general rubric of usury; the second is more varied but is always related somehow to natural increase, the sacredness of grain, and the awareness that copulation is good for the crops, that is to say, related to…Eleusis” (Eleusis, 190). In my work, I have markedly decided to see and imagine the availability of the Eleusian Mysteries as part of my own interest in Chaos Magick and sigilization. Chaos Magick’s, “basic message…is that, what is fundamental to magic is the actual doing of it – that like sex, no amount of theorizing and intellectualization can substitute for the actual experience” (Hine, 9) Whereas sigilization, developed by Austin Osman Spare, can be divided into six stages: 1) specifying magickal intention, 2) open pathways available for the intention, 3) link intent to symbolic carrier, 4) intense Gnosis, a ritualized context, altered consciousness 5) fire or projection of the sigil into the void, 6) forget the intent/walk away (Hine, 31-33).
One of the core tenants of Chaos Magick is to create your own system, that, “what symbol systems you wish to employ is a matter of choice, and that the webs of belief which surround them are means to an end, rather than ends in themselves” (Hine, 9). In this context, I found an interest in the Temple ov Psychick Youth, a magickal network founded in 1981 via Genesis P-Orridge. This system, “centered around its unique approach to the ‘sigil’ method. At the same time every month – the 23rd hour of the 23rd day – each active sigilizer would create a ‘Sigil ov Three Liquids.’ After careful deliberation on something truly wanted and needed in life, each sigilier would write in detail what they wanted to happen, thereafter anointing the paper with blood, spit, sexual fluids and a clipping of hair. After drying, this would be placed in an envelope and mailed to TOPY World Headquarters where it would be filed away anonymously under each sigilizer’s identity number with the Temple” (P-Orridge, 20). The primary goal of this ritual is discipline, “focusing on and actualizing the life one actually wants to live, regardless of social pressure or constraint” (P-Oridge, 21).
The positivity of the sigilic system will, in part, act as an antidote to my reworked variation on usura, Guy Debord’s concept of the ‘spectacle’. The building blocks for the ‘spectacle’ are related to the work of the German Jewish philosophers, Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin. In 1936, Benjamin points that the contradiction between seeing a piece of art to the act of seeing a film is that, “the painting invites the spectator to contemplation; before it the spectator can abandon [themselves] to [their] associations. Before the movie frame [they] cannot do so. No sooner has [their] eye grasped a scene that it is already changed. It cannot be arrested” (Benjamin, 238). Further, this can be seen in Adorno’s conception of society, in his coined ‘culture industry’, where in 1941 he states that, if he is right, “the advances of technology largely determine the fate of society, then the technicized forms of modern consciousness are also heralds of that fate. They transform culture into a total lie, but this untruth confesses the truth about the socio-economic base with which it has now become identical” (Adorno, 96).
The production of images has become the main form of mechanical reproduction. As this increases it begins to turn the imagination into a grouping of disparate images as society, as everyday existence. The mediation of life through these images is not one veiled in secrecy, in so much, as it is a conversation dominated by media, popular reference and above all, consumption. This mediation has become a totalizing view of society, an autonomous form of reality ‘objective’ of itself, an inverse of direct experience. This ‘spectacle’ is an extension of our very own consciousness.
Semiology offers us the signifier, the signified and the sign. If the signifier is an acoustic/sound image (the saying of the word ‘rose’) and the signfied is the concept, or abstract idea inferred (a flower that is named ‘rose’) than the relationship between them is the sign, that concrete entity. When this equation is in place, and is then shifted toward a signified whole, one can relate a rose as passion. Passion represents myth, a semiological system, “which has the pretension of transcending itself into a factual system” (Barthes, 134) … “in that it is constructed from a semiological chain which existed before it: it is a second-order semiological system. That which is a sign in the first system, becomes a mere signifier in the second” (Barthes, 114).
Roland Barthes points out that, “in a first system, causality would be, literally, natural…in the second system, causality is artificial, false; but it creeps, so to speak, through the back door of Nature. Myth is experienced as innocent speech [signs]: not because its intentions are hidden, but because they are naturalized” (Barthes, 114). In fitting this theory over and onto capitalism, we see a, “pure signifying function as soon as [it was] caught by myth” (Barthes, 114). This capturing brings about, “…different strands of the economy achiev[ing] unprecedented autonomy … so extensive that financial crises can arise directly from the circulation of money. The surface of capitalism appears to ‘disintegrate’ into a series of elements all driven toward independence” (Lukacs, 1036). Or as Guy Debord conceives, the spectacle is, “driven toward a concrete inversion of life, and, as such, the autonomous movement of non-life” (Debord, 12).
Whereas Barthes says that myth, “transforms history into nature” (Barthes, 129), the spectacle transforms mythical nature into spectacular history. History that is the consumption of time, “commodified moments are explicitly presented as moments of real life [is really that] the spectacle is displaying and reproducing itself at a higher level of intensity. What is presented as true life turns out to be merely a more truly spectacular life” (Debord, 153). Conceived and seen as a third-order system, the spectacle is experienced as not innocent speech, but natural speech. “Wherever representation takes on an independent existence, the spectacle reestablishes its rule” (Debord, 17). The non-living exists as an economic order, not an epiphenomena, but an order which has risen from it, a semiological system that appears as unity and division, that is available to have consciousness. Nothing is real, everything is permitted.
Tension is the building block of history, a process that incites change and an ongoing reordering of society. The spectacle is a process that keeps the threads far enough away that they will never move enough to encompass change, just suggest it. If a population is conditioned to view life as a condensation of images, than those images become the encyclopedia and dictionary of life. When the imagination is no longer full of direct experience to draw from, the spectacle is then given over to gain domination. The landscape of the imagination is saturated by just this force, a pacemaker, felt but not seen. Life becomes the contemplation of reality. As myth becomes a sign in the third system, a naturalizing project improves in strength. It’s, “essential character reveals itself to be a visible negation of life, a negation that has taken on a visible form” (Debord, 14).
A constancy of change, a permanent revolution that producing alienation and contemplation as its major syncopations. The exploitative space designated by capitalism weakens people. The spectacle is a vacancy that has becomes a shifting identity.
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by Nicholas A. DeBoer
V. The Example
I take it as my task, to shift from Pound’s difficult and untenable position of usura to that of the spectacle in my own work. To further this, here is an example of my process. Here are the opening lines from Canto 116:
Came Neptunus
his mind leaping
like dolphins,
These concepts the human mind has attained.
To make Cosmos -
To achieve the possible -
Muss., wrecked for an error,
But the record
the palimpsest -
a little light
in great darkness -
cuniculi [canals]
An old “crank” dead in Virginia.
Unprepared young burdened with records,
The vision of Madonna
above the cigar butts
and over the portal.
The ‘image-notes’ that I gleaned from these opening lines are as follows:
“water leaps → have attained → make world, achieve → wrecked for an error → palimpsest → moon, great darkness → canals, big footprint → unprepared youth have history burden → beauty over cigar butts → portal.”
It’s through these notes that I composed this rough draft:
the waters have
leapt into attainment:
as if there was
achieve wrecked for an
error: palimpsest.
the moon on the edge of
a
great
darkness, near the sun
the canals
in there big foot print
the unprepared youth
have the
burden of history,
beauty is above cigar butts.
this quiet portal
And here is my final appreciation of this work, in the completed section thereof, entitled Plate Glass,
Tarantula Canto:
→ →
tart and acidic
corrosion deluge over riverbanks
contained by lazuli roll over heedless grass blades ← ←
plates of glass:
the mooring land leapt tenses
soil as a mask
in the stomach pit gyre of ocean felt
heavy ropes stir in its image to float
on the force of hydrothermal vents
blush
down
miles far below lunar shine
along crisp edges of canals
thru abyssal plains
to deepest city )(libertatia)(at rest
pressure etches
pounds about the oceanic portal
and in law: white flag and no violation of the articles
mission not lit forever
clever stitchwork held long heals nothing
nor the poem
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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