The Avengers: Yeah, it’s Joss Whedon. I do love some of his stuff; others, not so much. I think he did a fine job on this movie, but I was not as blown away by it as other people I know. It was fun, but not so fun I felt I needed to see it again. (Though maybe I could be talked into seeing it in IMAX.)

I think, though, the bottom line for me was that not only was Loki just kind of unexciting as a bad guy, but Thor is my least favorite of the Avengers. Captain America was, well, okay, I suppose. Iron Man was good, and I though the Hulk was actually pretty good in this film. But Thor has never interested me, and to be honest I wasn’t crazy about the Thor film.

Miss Jiwaku’s  Most Noteworthy Comment: ”The sound was really good!” (She’s been studying audio design for films… but for the record, she seemed to feel as I did: fine movie, but not genre-shattering.)

두레소리 (Du-re Sori Story): If you’re a musician, or into music, this will probably do more for you than if you’re not. It’s based on the true story of a singing club at a traditional Korean music school that, for idiotic reasons, was shut down despite brightening the lives of its members, and the teacher who broke the rules to keep the club going.

It was heartening to see a teacher fighting the system to help his students get more interested in, and excited about, their chosen field of study. (Because, take it from me: the more you learn about music, even music outside your field of specialization, the better — more creative, more innovative, more passionate, more inspired — a musician you will be.)

It was disheartening to see how “natural” it seemed to all the characters — except the teacher, and the students — that the choir should be canceled, banned from the school, and assailed on all sides. Sometimes, one gets the feeling that pleasure, happiness, and excitement are forbidden to young Koreans, and that some justification — usually the necessity of preparing for university, marriage, having a kid, or whatever — is always offered for ruining any hint of fun being had.

Miss Jiwaku’s  Most Noteworthy Comment (in response to my perplexity at why anyone would cancel a singing club at a music school): “They should show this film overseas, so people can see what Korean education and society are really like.”

Dark Shadows: A new vampire movie with a lot of familiar faces. We had low expectations, as the posted makes it look like a crappy supernatural comedy, but it’s actually a pretty good film. There are moments of wonderfully deadpan comedy, there is interesting conflict, the supernatural stuff is integrated into the story very well, and the film doesn’t try too hard to be knee-slappingly hilarious — which makes it work. Oh, and the special effects are mostly subtle at first, mostly pretty extreme toward the end, but very well done all the way through.

Miss Jiwaku’s  Most Noteworthy Comment: “It was really funny… especially the part with the keyboard.”

(While I am not going to comment on Arudou’s “controversial” career, I so daresay I suspect that what I have to say about highly sensitive expats in Korea might apply to him.)

The discussion of the man’s ideas that I’ve seen has, characteristically for the Korean expat blogosphere, been a mixture of rage-filled expat bile-venting on the one hand, and high-handed (er, that is, snotty) dismissals on the other. I don’t want to get into a long diagnostic discussion of the psychology of the Korean blogosphere — who has time for that — but I will say that what is probably at work in the different reactions has as much to do with different degrees of inborn sensitivity as anything.

About 20% of people are highly sensitive; I don’t mean hypersensitive, though that is what some who are not highly sensitive like to call them. being highly sensitive is not a choice, not a decision, any more than red-haired people choose to process pain different that the rest of us. It’s genetic, and people who are within this range tend to be very sensitive across the spectrum: they are more sensitive not only to social stresses, but also to certain types of lighting, to temperature changes, to loud noises, and so on. For a highly sensitive person, a night club — with flashing lights, loud music, and artificially stressful social dynamics — is about the last place one would go for fun… and if you’re not highly sensitive, this sounds weird. You can change this feature of your makeup about as easily as you can change your sexual orientation, or your reaction to the smell and taste of durian fruit… which is to say, not very easily at all.

And yeah, HSP is a somewhat controversial concept; some psychologists and psychiatrists see the condition as a pathology. The same kinds of professionals said that about homosexuality too, as well as of non-passive women, of nonwhites who wanted equality… so, meh. I’ve read up on it, and the description of HSPs seems to apply to me as much as to a lot of other writers, artists, and intellectuals I know.

(I’m not, by the way, suggesting that highly sensitive people are smarter than non-highly sensitive people. There are different kinds of intelligence, and highly sensitive people tend towards the more introverted kinds, while less-sensitive people tend to more extroverted types of intelligence; but this doesn’t mean highly sensitive people are all hermits or that the people in the average range are all party animals. I’m just talking about tendencies.)

(I’m also not saying highly sensitive people cannot develop coping mechanisms for living in a world that isn’t made for them. They can, and many do. The fact I can live in Korea, despite being highly sensitive, amid the flashing neon lights and constant loud noise and often-stressful social interaction, is a testament to the power of coping mechanisms and management.)

You might think I’m building up to say that Korea is an especially difficult place for a highly sensitive person to live, but I don’t know that; I imagine there are places that are easier, and places that are harder. I imagine Korea lands somewhere in the very- to extremely-difficult range for highly sensitive people (both Korean and non-Korean), because of attitudes towards noise and light pollution (and general pollution), the range of acceptable public behaviours, and so on. But I’m sure there are other places that are as difficult or worse.

But the point I’m building up to is that I suspect the pitfalls of high sensitivity (and the character traits that tend to go with it) also extend into the realm of  how one deals with expat life, at least the kind of expat life one experiences in a place like Korea or Japan. I’m not the only person to have noted parallels between the “Japanese” behaviours mentioned in Arudou’s article, and countless tiring experiences I’ve had in Korea — even those expats who dismiss the concept of “micro-aggressions” freely admit to having had these experiences: they simply don’t see why it would “wear someone down.” HSP’s “hypersensitivity” baffles them as much as their apparently “thick skin” (or apparent obliviousness) baffles their fellow expat HSPs.

It probably comes down simply to how sensitive you are, and to some degree that’s something we perhaps can adjust a little, but generally speaking cannot control. Of course, the rage-filled expats tend, like most people, not too realize exactly how their own sensitivity might exacerbate things; and the less-sensitive people are simply unaware that anyone else could be configured, neurochemically, differently from themselves, so they tend to see this high sensitivity as hypersensitivity, of a willful kind.

So with all that said, I can finally address Arudou’s article myself. And here’s what I have to say:

1. Arudou is definitely right that exposure to these behaviours can wear a person down. I have lost all patience with people whose attempts to connect with me demonstrate, from the get-go, that they are unable to think of me as anything but a “foreigner”; I am simply not interested in it.

   So I am self-protective, in fact, and the self-protection manifests as me avoiding people who seem likely to engage in the kinds of tiresome conversational moves that Arudou specifically calls “micro-aggressions.”

   Which is not to say I necessarily agree with the designation. But I think the less-sensitive expats among us are a little too quick to dismiss the experiences of whose who do feel worn down by the constant inquiries and shocked observations about the most obvious, banal of things, as well as the occasional hostility.

   In fact, I almost always sense hostility when an older man asks me if I’m American, and I get that a lot… but even the non-hostile questions or comments wear me down. Part of that can be attributed to boredom, but I don’t think a sense of boredom is the primary reason… nor do I believe it necessarily has anything to do with being “put in one’s place” or the malice of one’s interlocutors.

2. Where I suspect Arudou has it wrong is regarding the main reason why exposure to such behaviour can wear a person down.

   I am not convinced that most of the people asking me these tiresome questions intend — even on a deep, unconscious level — to subjugate me or put me in my place. Certainly, some do — the middle-aged man on the subway who snarls at me an asks, “American?” or shouts at any Korean woman who seems to be there with me certainly has a negative intent. In some contexts, I think, a lot of people have negative intent towards a “foreigner.”

   But my experience tells me that a lot of people just are ignorant, uninformed, and/or have silly — and unexamined — misconceptions about non-Koreans.

   A lot of these misconceptions can be explained in part by a kind of popular sense of general Korean exceptionalism: the language is harder than any other, the food is the spiciest thing a Western could ever encounter (and no foreigner could actually eat it); Korean chopstick skills are amazing (and foreigners cannot live up to them).

   Likewise, a lot of Koreans seem to have weird ideas about foreigners of a kind we’ve seen uneducated or stupid people in the West having about races other than their own: such “exotic” people are often imagined to have weird genitalia or sexual appetites; are assumed to be more prone to violence or crime; are seen as taking away the jobs that “ought” to be held by the local racial majority…

   If you can imagine a patently ridiculous belief about Westerners, believe me, I’ve run into it. (Foreigners defecate only once a week; foreigners are all bisexual; no foreigner could ever be as devoted a Christian as a Korean; foreigners are more violent than Koreans — the last, actually, being the exact opposite of the truth, at least to go by reported violent crime.)

   But once again, we know from experience that stupid people in any culture think the same stupid things about people from other races or cultures. The shape of human stupidity is pretty universal, and we know this.So what gives? The problem comes in terms of who says the stupid things to us, and what our bafflement and frustration caused by their identity begins to mean to us.

3. I think what wears down the more sensitive people is their incessant desire to understand why people keep behaving this way. That is to say, I suspect that the search for understanding is something we’ve been taught — as reasonably sensitive, open-minded individuals who believe that cultural differences can be negotiated, understood, and overcome in the search for a way of peaceably and respectfully coexisting — is a narrative and an ideology that doesn’t conform well to reality, and is precisely the kind of ideology that highly sensitive people tend to be attracted to (in part because they, so often misunderstood themselves, like to imagine that all differences are comprehensible given enough understanding).

   The problem is that this narrative at the core of multiculturalism — that the person who seeks understanding will eventually attain it, and with it will develop acceptance — and peace — doesn’t conform to reality. Many an expatriate (especially the highly sensitive ones) desperately want to understand Korean culture, and desperately want it to make sense to them.

   Well, it’s easy to understand why an older woman working in a restaurant in the countryside, or an elderly man sitting on a mountainside in the middle of nowhere and sharing a bottle of liquor with his friends, might be relatively ignorant of expatriates. One can chalk it up to lack of exposure, or old-fashioned ideas that were picked up long ago and never rethought. How often do we not just overlook, but even expect, overt bigotry among the elderly in the West? So often, in fact, that its absence surprises us, and it is something of a running gag in Western society. So, it’s easy to shrug and say, “Old folks are bigots everywhere.” Whether we excuse it, or dismiss them, or confront them, it doesn’t tend to wear us down: this kind of behaviour is predictable, expected, and unsurprising.

   Similarly, when dealing with kids, it’s easier to shrug and say, “Well, they’re just repeating what they hear at home…” But at least with kids it doesn’t seem pointless to try explain to them that, no, that idea is wrong, and makes you look silly when you express it. Or to dismiss it as childish ignorance: again, it’s not like we don’t expect this sort of thing, and while we might be thrown for a loop about what they pick up from their parents, the fact that they do so isn’t surprising.But how about the professor who earned a Ph.D. overseas, and lived in a Western country for five or eight or ten years, and marvels — as might the old man on the mountain, or the old lady in the countryside restaurant, or the little kid in the cafeteria — that you can speak a few sentences in his or her language, after living in the country for over a decade? Or how about the non-mentally-handicapped co-worker you’ve had lunch in a (chopsticks-and-spoon-only) Korean cafeteria with for months on end, who suddenly gapes in shock and says, “You can use chopsticks?” Or how about the young, apparently bright young man or woman who has lived abroad for years, but still can’t grasp the fact that yes, you have tried bebimbap during your decade of living in the country?

   (And don’t even get me started on educated people believing in, and defending, the idea that sleeping in a room with the window shut and a fan on can kill people on an average Korean summer night, or that kimchi can prevent SARS or bird flu, or that Dr. Hwang Woo-Seok was not a fraud but instead was the victim of an American scientific conspiracy…)

   When confronted with one of these stupidities, the narrative of multicultural understanding-enlightenment-acceptance-respect falls apart, and that is traumatic for a lot of people, but most especially for those who actually believed in it.

   Sure, educated people can believe obviously stupid things. Smart people can make really idiotic assertions. People who are really bright and ought to know better can have blind spots several solar systems wide, and culture obviously does have something to do with this. But for us, this realization is enough to summon up that record-scratching-to-a-stop sound they use when action halts in cheesy comedy movies, even though we never play music on LPs anymore: our fundamental model breaks down, we are thrown for a loop, and we simply don’t know what to do with what has just happened. The blithering ignorance and stupidity clashes with our expectations of what someone in a certain educational or experiential space “ought” to understand naturally.

   I strongly suspect that, as being more prone to conscientiousness (or a self-conception that includes conscientiousness, at least), HSPs are more prone to have bought into that flawed, vulnerable multiculturalism model. They tend to be very intellectualizing (not necessarily to say intellectual) —  very much living in their heads, very invested in theoretical models of the world;as people who like order, peace, and harmony, they tend to be very willing to invest in models that promise these outcomes as a way of mitigating against disturbing, hyperstimulating conflict, dispute, and confrontation. When a cherished model breaks down, it is rather traumatic to them (as it is to all of us: normal people also experience anxiety, and react badly, when their worldview is challenged, after all).

   And heaven help you if you’re around a Westerner HSP when this model of multiculturalist understanding-and-transformation falls apart: it’s not at all pretty. What happens is they discover what they think is the great secret — that cultures can be “stupid” and the culture that has baffled them up to the present must be one of these.

   Now, the wisest person can dodge that train, though it may take time. (See the rants throughout my blog’s archives if you want to see some of my struggle with it.) The wise person realizes there are idiots in every walk of life, including among the PhD holders of the world. The wise person realizes that culture does have something to do with this, but doesn’t have to do with stupidity per se; the wise person also realizes that his or her perspective is subjective, and a product of his or her own culture.

   (As Ta Nehesi-Coates argues in “A Muscular Empathy,” it’s easy to imagine oneself as being someone who would swim against the culltural flow — for example, modern African-Americans imagining they would have raised a slave-rebellion had they found themselves as slaves several centuries ago, or modern white Americans imagining that, had they been born into the slave-owning South, they would surely have refused to keep slaves; but most people don’t swim against the mainstream cultural flow, and as Nehisi-Coates points out, it’s more sensible and honest to admit (and imagine why) one likely would not have done so, if we want to understand the fact that many people historically failing to do so does have to do with culture, human nature, and weaknesses most of us today still share.)

   Moreover, the wise person also recognizes that there are things the majority of people from their own culture seem willfully stupid about — such as, for example, the quaint notion that we have, with electoral democracy, hit the final point of human political development, or, for a simpler example, the trash that most of us eat on a regular basis.

   Culture cannot make people stupid, of course. Culture can fail to punish stupidities of various kinds, of course, and one of the things that drives us mad is that Korean culture fails to punish many of the stupidities that have long haunted us, but have also (to some degree) become more openly and straightforwardly recognized as stupidities in our home cultures, and to some degree really do get punished now (so that the stupidities are isolated to the truly, congenitally stupid).

   But the serious expat for whom these frustrations emerge from an effort to understand Korean society and culture is tragically more likely to interpret those stupidities as rooted in the culture. He or she will be hard put to explain Koreans who think differently,, of course: well, this or that person is just different somehow, naturally, or something. Or this or that person has had experiences abroad, and “gets it.”

   The reality is simpler: the people who “get it” are the smart, empathetic people. They’re likely distributed about as evenly here in Korea as they are anywhere else, which is to say, they are a minority, but not necessarily a tiny one. It is also to say that back home, the truly smart people are a minority — the HSP expat, in all statistical likelihood, is not one of them. That, of course, is too much to face… so the mind avoids this particular calculation, and returns to the self-contradictory position that this or that culture somehow makes people stupid, with of course the exception of those whom it doesn’t make stupid.

   The way out is to get comfortable with the fact that (a) you’re probably to some degree similarly stupid or blinkered, in ways you don’t realize and for which which your own culture doesn’t punish you, and (b) that most people are like that, that this is a normal state of affairs on planet earth, among the human species.

   It may not make Korea any more of a livable place for you — I prefer places where a larger range of stupidities are socially punished and banished from public acceptability — but recognizing this fact can help you out of your conundrum.

And that, I believe, is why this stuff drives some of us up the wall, while barely affecting others.

As with so many other things I’ve learned paying attention to my  experiences here, it likely also applies to life in one’s own culture: politics, for example, looks interestingly different when you have a society that has a significant HSP population. You begin to wonder if, out there on the other end of the spectrum, there is also an LSP population who matches the HSP population in size, and in its inversion of their reactions to the world.

Interesting stuff.

(For those interested, I’ll see if I can post a copy of the piece in English sometime soon, since it won’t be appearing in English anywhere anyway.)

It looks like an interesting issue, featuring an interview with Ted Chiang and a piece on Charlie Stross, what looks like some original fiction, and more. I wish I could sit down and read it all! And by the way, check out the cover: yes, that is Alice from Alice in Wonderland, accompanied by R2D2, with a neat reflection trick separating the urban from the pastoral…

I have to say, I’m pleasantly surprised at how this fanzine, put out the by Seoul SF&F Library, 기적의책 (Miracle Books) and 도서출판 사십이 (42 Press) (a small press), has helped fill the void in the print  left behind by the apparent demise of Fantastique a while back. I’m sure there’s much more going on online to which I’m not privy, but I think that having a print publication — even just one — is a good thing for an SF scene.

I’ll have more good news involving Miracle Books soon, but for now, I need to get going!

Page 37... that's me, baby.

Well, only subscribers will see it for now, but I just got my contributors’ copies for the July 2012 issue of Asimov’s SF, which contains my short poem “Fix” (along with work by a number of other wonderful writers, including Robert Reed and Michael Blumlein, the latter an author I’ve read and admired since I first started reading speculative fiction: The Brains of Rats is still on my shelf, here in Korea!)

Even better, This is the first of two appearances I’ll be making in Asimov’s this year, with my short story “The Bernoulli War” coming in the following issue (i.e.  August 2012), along with work from an impressive group of other authors.

Since this is my first poetry publication since 2009, and since I have published so little poetry  over all, people likely don’t know that I started out my writing (yeah, as a kid) with poems, and indeed worked on a lot of verse. It was only around 1998, I decided that genre fiction, and specifically SF, would be my focus.

I started developing a little annex on this site back in February, with the intention of launching it on International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day (April 23) but I ended up insanely overloaded, and hit some technical difficulties that I couldn’t sort out until late last week. Right now, there are a couple of short-short stories, as well as a lot of poems — some published, others unpublished (or, rather, since they’re on that site now, “self-published”). “Fix” isn’t there since the rights have not yet reverted to me, but there are a bunch of poems there for those who are curious or interested.

So it seemed appropriate to launch the annex today — a bit late, but, well, here it is: Stuff to Read by Gord Sellar:

Screenshot-Stuff to Read | Selected writing by Gord Sellar… - Google Chrome

These are not exactly typical readings of the poems, so much as readings I’m doing with a specific research project in mind — how to write Ezra Pound as a figure in a novel in which modernist artists, poets, and musicians secretly waged an occult war in the earlier half of the 20th century. If you’d like to know more about the project, I recommend scrolling down to the bottom of extended post, and reading the first installment in this series.

After last week’s discussion of the Hell-Cantos (XIV and XV), I’m turning to Canto XVI alone to finish off what was originally published as A Draft of XVI Cantos, in 1924/25. Along the way, I’m also going to dig into Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir, the book Pound wrote about the sculptor who died in 1915, and who is mentioned halfway through this poem.

Wonder of wonders: Canto XVI is online, here.

Pound’s revulsion at The Great War would be difficult to overemphasize: it was the war that sent him looking for a better understanding of economics, that send him into radical politics, that made his poetry take on an overtly, and directly, political bent.

Last week, we left off with Pound emerging from the hellmouth, with Plotinus serving as his guide (the way the pagan poet Virgil guided Dante through Inferno and Purgatorio. We have seen Inferno — the hell of the financiers and politicians and of the befouled, word-fouling presses. But after his flight from hell, and out the hellmouth, where does Pound emerge?

He emerges in Purgatory, of course–that non-paradisical place, still absent of the godhead, which resembles nothing so much as it resembles life in the world: neither heaven nor hell, but an in-between place. Yet in Purgatory, the infernal forces are at work, along with the divine ones.

If you think of Homer, of Virgil, of other epic poems, you will recall that they tend to be about wars, as Daniel Albright notes in The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound, and The Cantos is not an exception: in some ways, the long-poem is a response to (and the child of) The Great War, which by the time the last poems were being written, was no longer called that, because World War II had eclipsed it in horrors. And here is the signal difference: Pound is no glorifier of war, at least not in Canto XVI. War represents, for him here, nothing so much as the stupid, wasteful, and destructive power of a system run by people with no ethics, no common sense, no respect for anything of importance.

That is to say, Pound’s attraction to the occultism of Kensignton (as I discussed a couple of weeks ago) and his attraction to Social Credit theory, his rage against the corruption of the presses and the ignorance-multiplying uselessness of mainstream education — as is evident in his Guide to Kulchur, at the very least —  all flow from the same source. The world is out of balance, with madmen and rotters holding the reins.

This is one reason that Pound and other modernist authors break away from what we were, in ages past, often told literature is supposed to be about — “eternal human verities.” People don’t argue that anymore about literature — not worthwhile critics, anyway — but it was the sort of idea with which Pound’s generation had an uneasy relationship: there was, after all, that dream of a master key to the “grand narrative” of history. The Cantos, by its very poetical logic and structure, seems to argue that there are universals in history, patterns that inexorably emerge from the chaotic soup of human life: the repetitions may play out slightly differently, but they play out nonetheless, over and over and over. And yet Pound’s generation struggled to find comfort in such a world: the repetitions could be brave, or brilliant, or wonderful — but they were so very often stupid, destructive, and the source of horror and brutal impoverishment.

Imagine a civilization experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) all at once: its memory (as embodied in art, in culture, in politics) riddled with flashbacks of blood and horror, its ability to focus rattled, its temper permanently unmanageable. This is the world in which Pound found himself — and it is to some degree a part of him, a part of everyone in the time. Virginia Woolf cries out in excitement, asking a taxicab driver to follow some zeppelins flying over London, dropping bombs from the skies. Hemingway curses and drinks himself senseless — the priceless line put into his mouth by Woody Allen in the film Midnight in Paris capturing him wonderfully: turned down by a woman, he turns to the crowd and says, “Who wants to fight?” Wyndham Lewis goes to the war, and survives, bringing back horror stories — stories more horrifying than those in the films we watch and the books we read now: trench foot, and immense rats, and trenches filled with dead bodies.

A 1913 self-portrait of Gaudier-Brzeska

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska dies in the war, and Pound will forever point to him as an example of the cost of wars not even considered — the unfinished work that goes undone, the genius squandered in the mud and shit, in the making of blood and of money and of borders on maps.

Pound started out cavalier about the war: J.J. Wilhelm describes how he quipped to his parents that he thought perhaps a German victory might not be such a bad thing, and quoted a friend on the observation that it was a pity that everyone couldn’t be beaten; he even apparently, wrote a war-poem at the time, that went unpublished until much later. But he changed his tune when Gaudier-Brzeska died, and when things turned bad in London: influenza, zeppelin raids, and constant bad news from the front, especially in Flanders. Not only that, but death surrounded him in civilian life, as well: Hilda Doolittle’s pregnancy at the time resulted in a stillbirth, and others died too — Rémy de Gourmont, and Rupert Brooke in Greece. Pound did not fight in the war, did not even come close — unless you count attempting to enlist in the British Army and being turned down as close. Gripped by grief over Gaudier-Brzeska and horror at the proceedings, he wrote, and wrote, and wrote; and he watched, from London, as things on the Continent went from bad to worse. (For all of this, see Wilhelm’s Ezra Pound in Paris and London, pages 174-176).

Canto XVI is a long Canto, much longer than the last few we’ve read, and it is a war-Canto. Which is to say that the purgatory into which Pound-as-Dantean-narrator emerges from the “hell mouth” is the purgatory of war.  The first few pages riff on Dante’s treatment of Dante and Virgil’s ascent up Mt. Purgatory, with Pound invoking Sordello (as Dante does, but differently), and Augustine, and Piere Cardinal (an anti-Papal satirist, perhaps an Albigensian) and William Blake —  a Christian, but also a mystic and someone as iconoclastically rebellious as Pound likely thought himself to be.

Horror continues a little, along the way up Mt. Purgatory, with Pound having to bathe himself in acid to remove the “hell ticks. / Scales, fallen louse eggs”; he passes a lake full of dead bodies, next:

Palux Laerna,
the lake of bodies, aqua morta,
of limbs fluid, and mingled, like fish heaped in a bin,
and here an arm upward, clutching a fragment of marble,
And the embryos, in flux,
new inflow, submerging,
Here an arm upward, trout, submerged by the eels;
and from the bank, the stiff herbage
the dry nobbled path, saw many known, and unknown,
for an instant;
submerging,
The face gone, generation.

Here is a glimpse, I think, not just of Gaudier, but of all the great minds, the artists and poets and inventors and thinkers lost to war. This is an interesting attitude towards war, and one that speaks directly to why Pound appeals to so many intellectuals, but also discussing him awkward: he does not weep for the common soldier. His horror at war is not fundamental, not the horror of a Siegfried Sassoon, but instead is the horror of a cost-benefit analysis of sorts. He believes in an elite, and is concerned with the fate of that elite. The masses, perhaps, not so much. He is disgusted by the death count — five million dead is mentioned near the end of the poem, as a figure for the Franco-Prussian War, and one wonders why he did not mention numbers for the even more destructive Great War — but it is not the scope of the horror that troubles him most deeply: Pound himself primarily mourns the loss of his friend Henri Gaudier-Brzeska.

And yet, the warlords of his idealized Italian past, Sigismundo Malatesta and his younger brother Novvy, stand by their fountains – stand-ins for Dante’s contemporary “heroes” by their fountains in Purgatorio. What is the difference? Presumably, the understanding by the Malatestas that war is fought, and won or lost, for a stake both valuable and real. The Malatestas fought to secure their place, their elite rulership of Rimini, so that they could continue to patronize things Pound later valued: thus, they are heroes. The Great War did nothing for the arts, for the sponsorship of the intellectual and artistic elite of Europe. All it did was leave them dead, in fetid pools, clutching fragments of marble they would never carve into beauteous shapes.

Pound runs through the story of Galliffet — the story of the Franco-Prussian War, which Terrell compares to Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (though that poem discusses a similarly hopeless episode in the Crimean War). Supposedly Victor Gustave Plarr himself told of his experiences in the Franco-Prussian War to Pound, which are related as the French material that makes up over a page and a half of the poem, toward the end.

But before he gets into Galliffet, he touches on other wars and warriors: Lord Algernon Percy, and the 15th century Silk War between Venice and Ragusa. He touches on Byron — a revolutionary poet, who fought on the side of the Greeks in the Greek War of Independence (against the Ottoman Empire). The fight to help free Greece from the Ottomans was not joined by Byron alone: plenty of Western Europeans, aristocrats and rich folk, joined the war on the side of the Greeks, which must have impressed Pound. (Who, recall, was barred from taking up arms himself.) Byron was often said to have “the face of an angel,” which is why Pound describes him thus — but he elides an interesting connection to the occult history that fascinated him so: Byron’s onetime associate, John Polidori, was the brother of Frances Polidori, who married Gabriele Rossetti and bore him Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Rossetti; but her husband was also an important occult historian for the Kensington crowd, as mentioned a few weeks ago in my exploration of Leon Surette’s The Birth of Modernism.

Perhaps this is reaching: the mention of Byron alone, in the context of war, brings to mind much more immediately his participation in the Greek Revolution. But those of us who remember the occult-tinted stories of the Lake Geneva circle that included Byron cannot help but start at the mention of the hellmouth and Byron, who was for so very long associated with vampires. It is tempting to imagined what a pulpier Ezra Pound might have written regarding his pet conspiracy theories and occult histories, if only he had, like Byron, embraced a more romantic and theurgical-occult sensibility: the vampire, after all, seems a particularly good metaphor for the relationship between the voracious and rapacious bankers and financiers, and the rest of humanity, including the elite that Pound was most concerned about. (And there are, in fact, references to them in the Hell-Cantos, discussed last week, “drinking blood sweetened with sh-t”… so who knows, maybe the resonances really were in the back of his mind. Which I suppose kinda works as a NEATO SF CONNECTION, sorta.

The warmongers (Franz Josef of Austria, Napoleon), Pound excoriates. But he dwells mostly on those he knew personally, who went to The Great War and died (Gaudier especially, but also Thomas Hulme — the T.E.H.), or went and survived into the postwar hell. These latter, Pound used pseudonyms for: Wyndham Lewis, Donald Windeler, Richard Aldington, Bimmy (a friend of a friend named Bimbo Tennet), and Guy Baker, and of course Ernest Hemingway. These, too, become the heroes of Pound’s war-poem.

There is a long French passage, recounting Plarr’s experiences in the Franco-Prussian war, in which soldiers are driven mad, to the point of killing in order to be able to eat, and the ditch-diggers (almost Shakespearean, they speak in doggerel and quip at different positions in the war) turn up at the end; this is followed by memories recounted by Lincoln Steffens of the outbreak of the Russian Revolution:

That’s the trick with a crowd,
Get ‘em into the street and get ‘em moving.
And all the time, there were people going
Down there, over the river.

Lenin speaking to a crowd, and the Cossacks politely trying to break up the crowds that listen, until an office commences hostilities against the masses, and a cossack kills the officer with his sword — bam, the  beginning of the revolution.

So we used to hear it at the opera
That they wouldn’t be under Haig;
and that the advance was beginning;
That it was going to begin in a week.

Douglas Haig

[Douglas] Haig is, according to Terrell, the field marshal of the British expeditionary forces in France and Flanders in 1919 — but other sources (yes, Wikipedia) place him elsewhere, and somewhere more relevant for Pound, I think:

For much of 1919 Haig served as Commander-in-Chief Home Forces in Great Britain, a key position as a General Strike seemed likely. Haig kept a low profile in this job and insisted the Army be kept in reserve, not used for normal policing.

This, of course, is after the war, whereas Pound is talking about during the war — “the advance” being that of the British Army, when it was stalled; perhaps, specifically, when it was stalled in late summer 1918 as the British planned on stockpiling munitions in preparation for an offensive in summer 1919. Their imagined prolongation of the war that much more seems insane to us now, at a great remove, but probably seemed even more insane in 1925, if this was indeed public knowledge. (I don’t know if it was yet.) Haig was popular at the time, grew upopular by the 1960s — by which point he had become a symbol for the pre-World War I arrogance of the upper classes and the destructiveness of that mindset when that same elite was given charge of the military. (By the 80s, a rehabilitation of Haig’s name was underway.)

The question of occult resonances usable in my story seems quite important to address: they are the Dantean. Here, we accompany Pound busting through the quotidian world to the eternal: wars always represent a waste, that slough of dead bodies, arms reaching upward clinging to marble fragments they will never carve. Pound here is responding to the particular tragedy of Gaudier, but also the the more general tragedy and horror of war itself.

But… on that other level, it’s important to remember that I envision my arcana-empowered Pound as mired in battle as well — an occult war raging between two factions of artists, with the fate of Europe (and in some sense the whole world) hanging in the balance. My imaginary, magical Pound may decry the violence and death and destruction, but he also must probably have had to carry out acts that horrified him; to attack other artists, poets and sculptors and painters, including those to whose art he may have been hostile. It’s easy to speak harshly about another creative person’s work; it’s another thing to bury him in rubble, or to put her in the madhouse, or to obliterate your enemies from the face of the Earth entirely… or to reboot history — as Pound uses The Cantos and (with the help of a war-dead Wyndham Lewis in a parallel universe) “the Vortex” to do in one short story I’ve drafted, but not yet published. Such use of magic would be very powerful: one’s enemies or antagonists could be eliminated — or recruited — before becoming too much of a problem. But to wander between alternate histories, reliving them, making decisions differently, undoing them and reweaving them: it’s enough to drive anyone mad… especially the ones who remember it, as one seems certain Pound would insist on doing, were he to reboot history at a certain point at all.

Pound's book on Gaudier-Brzeska

Pound’s extreme grief at the death of Gaudier-Brzeska sent me to his memoir of the man, Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir.

This is — and perhaps it is redundant of me to say so, after noting that Pound is its author — a bizarre book. Others write of Pound’s profound grief at the death of Gaudier-Brzeska, but the pages of this book seem to reflect something less like grief than like pedantic rage. Pound is eager to decry the Germans for killing Gaudier, but also the art world for not recognizing him — or, just as often, for not taking Vorticism seriously. The first part of the book does discuss Gaudier-Brzeska quite directly, but roughly a third of the way, Pound expands his focus rather significantly: he explains Vorticism, explains what is wrong with the art world, explains the connection between Vorticism and imagism, explains and explains and explains.

I shall, I hope, content myself and the reader alike with some choice quotes — either thoughtful, amusing, or downright strange:

Any mind that is worth calling a mind must have needs beyond the existing categories of language, just as a painter must have pigments or shades more numerous than the existing names of the colours. (pg. 88)

This, I swear, put me in mind of my students, as did this passage:

It turns out Leon Surette was not exaggerating when he termed Pound scientifically illiterate, insofar as science depends on mathematics:

There are four different intensities of mathematical expression known to the ordinarily intelligent undergraduate, namely: the arithmetical, the algebraic, the geometrical, and that of analytical geometry.

For instance, you can write

3×3+4×4=5×5
or differently, 3²+4²=5².

That is merely conversation or “ordinary common sense.” It is a simple statement of one fact… (pg. 90)

Of course, 3×3=9, 4×4=12, and 9+12=21, which does not equal 5×5. Ah, Ezra…

Writing of Wyndham Lewis, he opines:

“Lewis is Bach.” No, it is incorrect to say that “Lewis is Bach,” but our feeling is that certain works of Picasso and certain works of Lewis have in them something which is to painting wht certain qualities of Bach are to music. Music was vorticist in the Bach-Mozart period, before it went off into romance and sentiment and description. A new vorticist music would come from a new computation of the mathematics of harmony, not from a mimetic representation of dead cats in a fog-horn, alias noise-tuners. (pg. 93)

I’m not  quite sure what he means by “noise-tuners” but he would likely be pleased by the trend that was observed, in the late 20th century, of composers (especially French ones) who composed works for orchestra that did actually seek to mimetically replicate sounds like church bells ringing and so on. I can see what he means about Bach’s music being akin to vorticism, though to me it sounds like claiming the good stuff for one’s own movement. But Mozart? Eh?

On the difficulties of getting the masses into art:

Of course, you will never awaken a general or popular art sense so long as you rely solely on the poretty, that is, the “caressable.” We all of us like the caressable, but we most of us in the long run prefer the woman to the statue. That is the romance of Galatea. We prefer–if it is a contest in the caressabilities–we prefer the figure in silk on the stairs to the “Victory” aloft on her pedestal-prow. We know that the “Victory” will be there whenever we want her, and that the young lady in silk will pass on to the Salon Carré, and thence onward to the unknown and unfindable. That is the trouble with the caressable in art. The caressable is always a substitute.

Ideals of the caressable vary. In Persia, the Persia of its romances, the crown of beauty, male or female, goes to him or her whose buttocks have the largest dimensions. And we all remember the Hindoo who justified his desire for fatness with the phrase “same money, more wife.”

Ideals change, even the ideals of the caressable are known to have altered. Note, for example, the change in the ballet and in “indecent” illustrations. Twenty years ago, the ideal was one with large hips and bosom. To-day the ideal is more “svelte.” the heavier types appear only in very “low” papers. In fact, the modern ideal approaches more nearly to the “Greek type,” which is, as Pater says, disappointing “to all save the highest culture.” The development of Greek sculpture is simple; it moves steadily towards the caressable. One may even say that people very often set up Greek art as an ideal because they are incapable of understanding any other.

The weakness of the caressable work of art, of the work of art which depends upon the caressability of the subject, is, incidentally, that its stimulativeness diminishes as it becomes more familiar… (pg. 97)

Incidentally, huh? I don’t know the story of that Hindoo, and I wonder how many of Pound’s readers at the time did.

On art and fame:

The sequence is easy: you make for the market, you become rich; being rich, you are irresistible, honours are showered upon you. (pg.109)

and

There are always two parties in “civilization.” There is the party which believes that the stability of property is the end and the all. There are those who believe that the aim of civilization is to keep alive the creative, the intellectually-inventive-creative spirit and ability in man–and that a reasonable stability of property may be perhaps one of the mny means to this end, or that it may not be detrimental, or even that it doesn’t much matter. Because of this indifference to the stability of life and property on the part of one segment, this entire party is branded anarchic, or incendiary. “New art” is thought dangerous, and the dangerous is branded as “ugly.” Those who fear the new art also hate it. (pg. 109)

I kind of wish I could buy this, but I find usually it is difficult, challenging art that is labeled as ugly (or perverse, or whatever.)

Pound addresses those who claim the avant-garde to be impossible to enjoy:

You, gracious reader, may be a charming woman who only like [sic] pretty men, a statue of a primitive man holding a rabbit may not be a matter of interest to youm but that is no reason for abusing the artist. Or, on the other hand, ferocious and intolerant reader, you may be a vigorous male, who likes nothing save pretty women, and who despises feminine opinions about the arts. In either case you are quite right in saying that you dislike the new sculpture, you are being no more than honest. But there is no cause for calling it unenjoyable or even ugly, if you do you are but stupid, you hate the labour of beginning to understand a new form. (pg. 109-110)

I must admit, I admire the gutsiness of calling people on laziness  and stupidity, though calling your readers on it may not get you too far in the world.

In discussing the Renaissance, Pound alludes to the translations of Ficino, which are “anything but classic”, and were, indeed,

ultimately, a “Platonic” academy messing up Christian and Pagan mysticism, allegory, occultism, demonology, Trismegistus, Psellus, Porphyry, into a most eloquent and exciting and exhilarating hotch-potch, which “did for” the medieval fear of the dies irae and for human abasement generallt. Ficino himself writes of Hermes Trismegistus in a New Testament Latin, and arranges his chronology by co-dating Hermes’ great-grandfather with Moses. (pg.112)

Pound seems to be quite approving of the vibrant “hotch-potch,” or that’s what I think he’s being. Likewise, he mentions Divus, whom we remember from Canto I, as a transformer of Latin:

… the Greek langauge was made an excuse for more adjectives. I know no place where this can be more readily seen than in the Hymns to the Gods appended to Divus’ translation of the Odyssey into Latin. The attempt to reproduce Greek by Latin produced a new dialect that was never spoken and had never before been read… (pg. 114)

His bitterness at England is evident even in the original version of this book, which i think slightly predates his departure from the country — a bitterness to rival the most disgusted of expat bloggers writing about Korea:

England has always loved the man incapable of thought, the praise of Shakespeare which they most love is some absolutely inaccurate rubbish about “wood notes wild” uttered by one of the most unpleasant of theorists. They will pardon reams of insipidity rather than one clear thought. I don’t know that it matters, but one may as well register the fact for the comfort of future sufferers. (pg. 119)

Writing of the popular arts of his time, Pound wrote:

We are, I think, getting sick of the glorification of energetic stupidity. (pg. 124)

Would that this were true, then or now. Pound makes the comment along the way to praising Joyce, Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, and Gaudier-Brzeska as part of an “awakening” of “art for the intelligent”. One wonders what Pound would have said of Jerry Springer. He writes of how vorticism has him quicker discerment of Asian art, and a  better appearance of the play of light upon scenes before him, “new chords, new keys of design… new life… a new aroma, a new keenness for keeping awake” (pg. 126). Pound asks,

If vorticism has does this for me, I think it can do it for others. Others?

Of course the rest of the world may not want a new sense of forms, or a new sense of anything.

I think it is De Quincey who writes of “the miracle that can be wrought if only one man feels a thing more keenly, knows it more intimately than any one has known or felt it before.” Such a miracle has been performed [by Gaudier-Brzeska and other Vorticists] in our vicinity.

I dare say various miracles have been so wrought for the few. I am constantly surprised at the faintness of men’s talent for lving, at the number of things they so willingly do without.  (pg. 127)

I must admit, my immediate thought was of my own students, here: when I ask a class how many of them have gone to a cinema in the past month, or a live music performance in the past year, or any sort of artistic or cultural event, very few put up their hands. Many starve, and do not realize it. Again, one cannot help but imagine Pound as some itinerant teacher in Korea — the only place the man would likely make a living today — raging at his students’ failure to be interested in anything.

Ah, Allen Ginsberg comes to mind now: but it is not America I realize is myself, it is Pound. Shudder at the thought.

There is an interesting reference to John Heydon’s “The Holy Guide” wherein Pound notes there are “numerous remarks on pure form and the delights thereof,” worth noting mainly as Heydon was a major occultist. (He also mentions LaurenceBinyon’s Flight of the Dragon, a book about Asian art.)

Pound is almost universal in the blame he spreads around for the loss of Gaudier and the work that, “uncreated went with him” — and his bombastic rage verges on the (rhetorically, at least) homicidal:

There is no reason to pardon this either to the central powers or to the allies or to ourselves… With a hundred fat rich men working overtime to start another war or another six wars for the sake of their personal profit, it is very hard for me to write of Gaudier with the lavender tones of dispassionate reminiscence. The real trouble with war (modern war) is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people. (pg. 140)

But who can disagree?

But then Pound comes out with this:

There is still enough energy even in what I was able to get into my memoir of [Gaudier-Brzeska's] (i.e. all his own writing and 40 half-tone reproductions) to modernize Russia, to bring communism to date, I mean into harmony with the best thought of the occident, and to make America fit to live in. By modernizing Russia I mean that the trouble with Russia is the trouble with a smoky locomotive. When they get to dividing the cultural heritage, and to seeing that this heritage is the actual source of value they will have arrived at a state of understanding which will make them good neighbours even though Russian. And if we could do likewise we would also be good neighbours for them.

This is a curious sort of occupatio — Pound claiming to be writing about Gaudier, while actually raging about the usual things Pound raged about. And yet, the most curious thing of all is his insistence that all he wishes to see happen could happen from the energy pent up in the little work Gaudier-Brzeska got done… I’m not sure whether to read it as a strange case of projection, or some sort of over-the-top praise, or just an excuse to talk about what Russia and America must do. (This, written in 1938, by the way.)

Pound’s memoir of Gaudier-Brzeska is well in line with other nonfiction of Pound’s: bombastic, largely off-topic, littered with both interesting and bizarre nuggets buried in the thick of a generally somewhat pedantic and boring diatribe. (Though I found Guide to Kulchur much less boring.)

Ah well, maybe in the summer I’ll have time to actually figure out the horrors of the code — at the moment, I have too much else going on, and I’ve already burned a half an hour trying to get it to work!

These are not exactly typical readings of the poems, so much as readings I’m doing with a specific research project in mind — how to write Ezra Pound as a figure in a novel in which modernist artists, poets, and musicians secretly waged an occult war in the earlier half of the 20th century. If you’d like to know more about the project, I recommend scrolling down to the bottom of extended post, and reading the first installment in this series.

I’ve taken a week of Canto-readings (to discuss Leon Surette’s The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound:, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, and The Occult) but before that, we examined Cantos XII (the tale of Baldy Bacon and also the Tale of the Honest Sailor) and XIII (a “Kung” [Confucius] Canto).  This week, it’s time to dive into the “Hell Cantos.”

“Hell” is a loaded word. It’s loaded in religion, where the concept is used to promote the idea of damnation and a fear of divinities; but it’s also loaded in the literary world, where hells abound. Of all the literary hells that might have interested Pound, the one that is most apparent here is the late medieval poet Dante Alighieri’s, from The Divine Comedy: after all, Pound begins his hell-cantos with a line straight from Dante’s Inferno:

Io venni in luogo d’ogni luce muto…

The line, taken from Book V of Dante’s Inferno, translates as, “I came to a place mute of all light,” according to Terrell, and as Robert Anton Wilson reminds us, light — for Pound — is the divine, the Paradiscal. (And darkness is ignorance, hellish in its awful power.) Of course, if you know Dante’s work, then you know who Dante put in hell: not just Biblical or classical figures, but also contemporaries of his, especially those from among his political opponents in Florence. Dante was a Guelph — paerticularly, a “White Guelph,” which meant that his faction favored the Pope over the Holy Roman Emperor, but that they also wanted more freedom from Rome.

This is significant in a few ways. First, Pound readily admitted (for example, in letters to Wyndham Lewis and John Drummond) that the hell in these Cantos is an English, Londonian hell. (See Terrell, page 65, for details.) Pound does consign the off American figure to this hell, mid you — Woodrow Wilson, near the beginning, is one example — but it is, overall, an English inferno. His bitterness and dismay may have actually turned his decision to leave, after burning too many bridges, into what felt for him like an exile comparable to Dante’s.

Second, Pound’s hell cantos are quite directly political, though in the economic sense. He was already under the sway of Douglas and Social Credit to some degree by Canto XII, but here, he behaves like Dante, consigning particular figures of the time. Prime Minister Lloyd George and Woodrow Wilson, he blames for the war that still stands clearly in his mind as a modern horror, an evil committed against men for — as he understands it — economic reasons; he consigns these leaders to a layer of hell where, amid the “stench of wet coal” they stand with

their wrists bound to
their ankles
Standing bare bum,
Faces smeared on their rumps,
wide eye on flat buttock,
Bush hanging for beard,
Addressing crowds through their arse-holes,
Addressing the multitudes in the ooze,
newts, water-slugs, maggots…

Pound goes farther than any English poet up to his day that I can think of in his scatology, in the display of sexual organs, and he even ventures into the realm of sodomitic imagery. But say what you will about arse-holes, there is not much pubic hair in English literature, and none too many penises. (At least not till it became the trend to put sex organs in poems, and a badge of biopollitics or whatever; prior to that explosion in the poetry world, Geoffrey Chaucer stands out in my mind as a big exception, with the mention of a woman’s pubic hair in The Canterbury Tales, in the line, ”A beard!”)

An illustration of Chaucer's "The Miller's Tale" from The Canterbury Tales. One of the few major works of English literature to include not only farts and anuses, but also pubic hair -- especially female pubic hair.

Pound goes on, excoriating others — one with a “scrupulously clean table-napkin / tucked under his penis” and another “[w]ho disliked colloquial language” standing together oin the same position, collars circumscribing their legs.

Pound’s political and ideological enemies are, in effect, reduced literally to assholes farting into the wind. And gathered there are profiteers and financiers, “drinking blood sweetened with sh-t” and “lashing them with steel wires.”

Also in hell are “the betrayers of language” — liars, impersonators, sloppy or careless users of words, and those who betray words and ideas knowingly and maliciously. This is a place in hell that is ironic for Pound to discuss, given his own later abuse of language and words. Among the sins of those in this place are putting “money lust” above “the pleasure of the senses”, whom Pound decries as perverts. I would tend to agree with Terrell in reading the lines about those who plunge jewels into mud and howl to find them unstained being about those whose relationship with art — be it poetry, sculpture, music, or paintings — is inherently perverse.

Pound also consigns agents provocateurs to his hell — their hands where feet should go, and feet where hands should, their asses high in the air as the others above — and names a few Irish nationalists who were murdered by them — Patrick Henry Pease and Thomas M. McDonagh — and in the same passage (and position in his hell) Pound also attacks Gaius Verres — an administrator was was corrupt even by Roman standards — and two religious figures whom he hated — John Calvin and St. Clement of Alexandria. (He essentially hated the two for their opposition to the mystery tradition within Christianity, which Pound found to be one of the few redeeming features in Christianity — and, building on Surette’s arguments, which he probably linked to the secret history of occult knowledge going back to the ancient Greeks. (Likely Pound imagined this strand of mystic knowledge to have survived in some form within the Church, until it was bludgeoned to death by its clerical, moralist, Pauline opponents.) Of them, he writes:

black beetles, burrowing into the sh-t,
The soil a decriptude, the ooze full of morsels,
lost contours, erosions.

This is as castigatory as we have seen Pound, and he’s only just gotten started. The next images echo the kind of Medieval horror-imagery of hell probably most familiar to us in the work of the fifteenth-century painter Hieronymous Bosch, just as much as the body-deconstruction above does:

Hieronymus-Bosch-Hell_1546

Above the hell-rot
the great arse-hole,
broken with piles,
hanging stalactites,
greasy as sky over Westminster,
the invisible, many English,
the place lacking in interest,
last squalor, utter decrepitude,
the vice-crusaders, fahrting through silk,
waving the Christian symbols,
. . . . . . . . frigging a tin penny whistle,
Flies carrying news, harpies dripping with sh-t through the air,

May William Gibson forgive me, but: “The sky was the color of an asshole, struck by a hemorrhoid sickness.” But what this hemorrhoid-stricken asshole represents, of course, is a little less straightforward; well, this is Ezra Pound, after all.

The slough of unamiable liars,
bog of stupidities,
malevolent stupidities, and stupidities,
the soil living pus, full of vermin,
dead maggots begetting live maggots,
slum owners,
usurers squeezing crab-lice, pandars to authority,
pets-de-loup, sitting on piles of stone books,
obscuring the texts with philology,
hiding them under their persons,
the air without refuge of silence,
the drift of lice, teething,
and above it the mouthing of orators,
the arse-belching of preachers.
And Invidia,
the corruptio, foetor, fungus,
liquid animals, melted ossifications,
slow rot, foetic combustion,
chewed cigar-butts, without dignity, without tragedy,
. . . . .m Episcopus, waving a condom full of black-beetles,
monopolists, obstructors of knowledge,
obstructors of distribution.

There are a great many sins listed here — attributed to everyone from slum owners and preachers to pets-de-loup (“wolf farts,” apparently a French idiom for scholars) and “pandars to authority”. The images, too, are among the most powerful in the poem: “the drift of lice, teething…” and then we glimpse Envy (Invidia) in the middle of a physical horror smorgasbord:

And Invidia,
the corruptio, foetor, fungus,
liquid animals, melted ossifications,
slow rot, foetic combustion,
chewed cigar-butts, without dignity, without tragedy,
. . . . .m Episcopus, waving a condom full of black-beetles,

With “obstructors of knowledge, / obstructors of distribution” it is suddenly clear that here in hell, it all comes down to usura, for Pound; but of course, one should never assume that because Pound has pulled up a Medieval Latin word, that he means what the word originally meant. J.J. Wilhelm puts it fairly succinctly in Ezra Pound in London and Paris (pg 219):

Pound employed the medieval word usura to describe the excessive profits taken from wrongful moneylending (but never condemning lending at a just rate of interest, which is necessary for capitalistic development).

As Daniel Albright puts it in his section of The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound, “Hell is, to some degree, a bad bank” (pg. 78). Well, I’ve read enough about Pound’s economic ideas to date that I feel comfortable taking a stab at explaining them, but would like to attempt it in a post of its own. Therefore, for the moment, I think I’ll simply note that for Pound, governments and banks colluded in the way money was created, and Pond felt this system was dangerous for everyone else in the world… which seems quite apparent today, in the ongoing economic crisis, though Pound’s proposed solution seems — as Leon Surette points out — to have had in common with the occult that interested Pound so deeply, a thread of oversimplification and impatience with empirical testing and confirmation.

Still, the primal, visceral horror of this hell is surprising, and powerful; Pound’s revulsion makes it clear that his economic concerns were not merely vague theoretical interests, but were (for him) deeply connected to the world, and to whatever “ethics” he held as crucial for the continuance of life in the world. And yet, this primal, swirling chaos also reminds one a little of the primal, swirling chaos in certain creation myths, for example in the first section of Ovid’s Metamorphoses: and this makes sense too, if one will see one’s way to fiding a little optimism in Pound. He may have felt the world had already come apart at the seams — but that kind of collapse and destitution was also a part of the recurrent cycle described in earlier Cantos. For that reason, it should not surprise us that Pound took to the present-day now, only after some sixty pages of pseudo-historical content: he was illustrating a thesis of a historical pattern, and for what other reasons would he start out doing that, than to talk about the present, and the immediate future that he wanted to build? This is the question foremost in our minds, as we reach the end of Canto XIV.

Ah, but Pound is not finished with his exploration of Hell. Canto XV continues through the infernal landscape:

The saccharescent, lying in glucose,
the pompous in cotton wool
with a stench like the fats at Grasse,

The French city of Grasse was, as those who have read Patrick Süskind’s Perfume: The Story of a Murderer will remember, a major site of European perfume production in the old days: but, ironically, it stank to high heaven, a horror in itself. There is something horrifying about the sweetness, the glucose and cotton wool in the opening lines, combined with that horrendous stench at the site where gorgeous perfumes were made. Like sausage and law, for Pound seeing money being made was sickening.

Perfume

the great scabrous arse-hole, sh-tting flies,
rumbling with imperialism,
ultimate urinal, middan, pisswallow without a cloaca,
. . . . . . r less rowdy, . . . . . . episcopus
. . . . . . . . sis,
head down, screwed into the swill,
his legs waving and pustular,
a clerical jock strap hanging back over the navel
his condom full of black beetles,
tattoo marks round the anus,
and a circle of lady golfers about him.
the courageous violent
slashing themselves with knives,
the cowardly inciters to violence
. . . . . n and. . . . . . . .h eaten by weevils,
. . . . . . ll like a swollen foetus,

There is a lot going on here: hateful insectile imagery, and scatology mobilized in the service of moral commentary. Pound’s image of a  ”the great scabrous arse-hole, sh-tting flies, / rumbling with imperialism, / ultimate urinal, middan, pisswallow without a cloaca” seems to be a characterization of London itself, and his horror at its corruption. Daniel Albright, again: “The excrementiousness of money, a thesis dear to Freud, has rarely been presented so vividly as in Pound’s Cantos” (again, page 78, and not for the last time in this post).

toilet 1

Here, finally, we meet USURA, “the beast with a hundred legs” — amid those “respecters, / bowing to the lords of the place” and “the laudatores temporis acti / claiming that the sh-t used to be blacker and richer”; to Pound’s cast of villains are added the depraved Fabians — aha, another NEATO SF CONNECTION, as H.G. Wells was a prominent Fabian. The Fabians were a progressive movement, tied up with socialist economics (though of a gradualist sort, rather than a revolutionary Marxism) and free love and other things. But there are also “conservatives” in this region of hell, “chatting, / distinguished by gaiters of slum-flesh,” and then:

and the back-scratchers in a great circle,
complaining of insufficient attention,
the search without end, counterclaim for the missing scratch
the litigious,
a green bile-sweat, the news owners, . . . . s
the anonymous
. . . . . . . . ffe, broken
his head shot like a cannon-ball toward the glass gate,
peering through it an instant,
falling back to the trunk, epileptic
et nulla fidentia inter eos,

– “and no trust among them.” — the teeming rabble of England, the meddlers and the profiteers of misery and the rest –

all with their twitching backs,
with daggers, and bottle ends, waiting an
unguarded moment;

Urban man is a backstabber, after all — but for Pound, this is enshrined in economics, it is part of the system. For, after all, the hell here is a systemic hell, and once again as Daniel Albright observes, for Pound hell is as much an enormous printing press as it is anything else, and just as Martin Luther once did, Pound conflates feces with ink —  both doing their part to foul and corrupt the world, “boredom out of boredom,” in the form of “British weeklies.” Pound is, perhaps, thinking of Leopold Bloom in Joyce’s Ulysses wiping his ass with a British newspaper — he certainly seems to hold them in the same esteem as Bloom (and, apparently, Joyce). Pound was not alone in this disgust with newspapers — see Matthew Kibble’s article “‘The Betrayers of Language’: Modernism and the Daily Mail“ for a discussion that goes beyond Pound.

Plotinus.

Pound turns to his guide, the figure analogous to Virgil in Dante’s Commedia; according to Terrell, this figure is Plotinus, the “Neoplatonist light philosopher” (who is actually mentioned later on in the Canto). The guide tells him of the breeding of the tumorous, stinking periodicals of Britain, in metaphors of tumours, “pus flakes, scabs of a lasting pox.”

The horror of the scene returns to the transfigured sky:

skin-flakes, repetitions, erosions,
endless rain from the arse-hairs,
as the earth moves, the centre
passes over all parts in succession,
a continual bum-belch
distributing its productions.

As R.A. Wilson suggests (in his commentary on Canto XV), if we compare this to the “radiant beauty” of several earlier Cantos, the contrast is stark, powerful, and affecting… even if you do pause and say, “But it’s all scatology!” This is the moment when the horror proves too much, and Pound’s narrator voice cries out, “Andiamo!” in a line all it’s own: the Korean “가자!” or the late-20th and early- 21st century American, “Let’s get the fuck outta here!”

There is a struggle, the mud gripping at feet, the run stifled by the hell itself, but Plotinus provides the key: light is the key, reflected from Perseus’ shield, and the Pound figure angles it such as to petrify the mud, the buried usurers, the landscape of this hell just enough to provide a solid road — a road like that built by the Romans —  that leads out. Here, the poem’s shape on the page shifts: shorter lines, and split almost as if into pairs, as Pound and Plotinus flee the horrors, amid serpents’ tongues and growing evils.

The follows oblivion, and then some sort of waking, into a dream where Plotinus is gone and talk of Naishapur — the birthplace of Omar Khayyam — or Babylon is mentioned, and Pound comes to at the gates of hell… the shield of Minerva, borne by Perseus, tied to his back, he stumbles toward the gate, towards the sun — the Greek here means “the sun” in Homeric Greek — and then,

Swollen-eyed, rested,
lids sinking, darkness unconscious.

Pound has reached the hellmouth — stop it, you Buffy fans, this is a Dantean hellmouth, but okay, yes, another SF CONNECTION I suppose (see below) – and is ready to leave, leaving, on his way out, the cleverness of Plotinus and the luck of Minerva’s shield — of knowledge, of understanding, but a knowledge and understanding that goes back before Christianity, to the Hellenic myths and legends, as well as to Neoplatonist philosophy of Plotinus that postdates Christianity, but reaches back before it; and of course, it is the occult veneration of light (which, in the end, can be imagined to be as ancient as human worship itself) that saves him in the end.

And here it is: the gnostic theme we have been awaiting, the shield of Minerva, borne by Perseus against the Medusa. It’s interesting, though, in that the power of something destructive — Medusa’s horrific visage — is used to wipe out the oppressive horror of the Dantean hell. That which destroys can, with cleverness, be used instead to save; Pound could be metaphorizing the kind of economics he hopes will be adopted by the world… but amid all the sodomitical references, it’s difficult to isolate the economic from the sexual… and the sexual, for Pound, is always esoteric or occult! Therefore, it’s important to think about how the esoteric or occult sexuality of this poem connects to the concept of usura, as Pound understood it.  For Pound (as for the medieval world) usura and sodomy were similar in “unnaturalness” — in being supposedly contra natura, because they did not give rise to “natural increase.” (Hence also the condoms being waved about in both Cantos — filled with black beetles, the foul result of a repression of nature being verminous and horrifying.)

Light here is somehow a power different from the necromantic magical power represented in the earliest Cantos, though like necromantic power it can be destructive or empowering. It is different because it  mediates our relationship with the world differently; it mediates between us and what is, rather than what us and what was, or what was said to be. In the image of Pound holding Minerva’s shield just so, angled toward the ground in order to escape from hell, we see a strange admixture of this light/truth metaphor and the necromantic, however, for after all, for Pound the necromantic is also on some level the necroverbal — the resurrection of the dead happens when ink intermediates. When ink is corrupted, so is everything that proceeds from the verbal — including the fine details of the necromantic. Yet it is only through the necromatic that we can find a route through the present, fallen state of the world, the hell that the world becomes in a corrupted system — poetical, economical, social: the three are impossible to disentangle anyway.

And, back to that SF CONNECTION above: as for the idea of hells, hellmouths, and the monstrosities sewed from them, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer: my Korean tutor of a few years ago was a diehard Buffy fan. When I asked her what attracted her to Buffy, she told me it was because the series encapsulated for her everything that was hellish about high school. She was a Korean woman, from Seoul, but had spent her high school years  in Busan, and had undergone various kinds of maltreatment and ostracization due to her origins as a Seoulite. (Her accent was mocked, she was excluded, and people commented about her being a “big city” girl.) For her, Buffy’s hellmouth-haunted school embodied the hellishness of regionalist bigotry among her fellow teens years before. For me, Buffy’s hellmouth-haunted high school represents other hellish aspects from my youth — the violence that exploded into my life when we moved from Nova Scotia to northern Saskatchewan, among other things.

Welcome to the Hellmouth... not the first reference you expected today, was it?

Which is to say, “hell” is a versatile concept: it can metaphorize just about anything one likes, as long as one is sufficiently anti-conformist and sufficiently unhappy with the system in which one lives. And that, it seems to me, is the interesting thing about these Cantos: they’re not simply a pair of “hell-Cantos.” Instead, they depict a system, one in which occult truth is concealed in a way like many other truths; in which the lies of bankers and the lies of clergymen intersect, forming a mutual continuity, and forming a system hostile to  meaning, purpose, and artistry in the world, but also economic freedom and health, the stability of civilization, and the decency of humanity. All of the scatology may simply demonstrate Pound’s rage, but it also bespeaks a kind of ruination that is either ongoing, or seems to Pound at the time to loom in the immediate future.

Pound may well smell another war, another great conflict, or maybe he is only looking back to The Great War, and its horrors — which he will discuss further in Canto XVI. Nearly nobody today is willing to hear out, much less seriously consider, the solution Pound suggested for the problems of the European world in his time (ie. Social Credit theory). But the thing to note here is a strange, shining sense of optimism running through the poems. Optimism, even in the jaws of hell… well, for a certain value of hell, and a certain value of optimism as well. But the definition of hell as Pound sees it is impossible to pinpoint without definitions of purgatory and paradise. But those who have glimpsed at the Drafts and Fragments in the back of The Cantos know the lines that cannot but come to mind, when asking what Pound thought paradise was:

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.

The project is doomed, we know —  or should know. But we will bear witness to this failure, over the coming year: we will see how things fall apart, how paradise refuses to be written.

Purgatory, that’s another matter, and for that, we can turn to Canto XVI, as we shall next week.

Now, as for how to works out in terms of what is useful for the fiction I want to write about Pound — well:

1. By 1924 or 1925, Pound is quite convinced that Douglas’ Social Credit theories hold water, and are useful and important.
2. He is given to a very definite and specifically angry understanding of the mainstream economic systems in which he is living — and maybe those concerns also spill over into his dreams and the “visions” he implies having had. Indeed, if he has gone a-dream-voyaging, it is possible he has actually experienced Hieronymous Bosch-like scenes of hell explicitly, though with different figures in their place. Either way, his economic concerns are definitely moralistic in nature, and not purely theoretical.
3. Pound is also positioning himself in relation to other visionary philosopher-poets, with Dante being the specific (and loudly-asserted) example here. It reminds one of the question: what is the organization that Pound has absolutely by this point joined, what is its mythology about itself, and which artistic figures in history does it claim as historical members? Doubtless the group, like Pound, traces itself back to antiquity: is Pound’s Eleusinian origins-story the default, or a departure from the group’s main narrative? How do Dante and the Guelph-Ghibbeline political split fit into it? How about other political movements, occult and pseudo-occult (like the Jacobins, the Albigensians, and others) fit into this story, if at all?
4. The demonic and the hellish are, for Pound, insectile and scatological; when Pound does experience hell, evil, or dark magics, along with darkness (as absence-of-light) there should be scatological and insectile images or  nuances to it.

Next time, we’ll read Canto XVI, which rounded out the first major publication of the Cantos in 1924, as A Draft of XVI Cantos; I will, if I can, also dig into another text to make up the difference. (Probably Pound’s memoir of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, an artist who died in The Great War.) But  if I cannot get the time to read another text, I’ll at least draw some conclusions about the Pound of my story — a Pound who will, for significant portions of the text, be up to and around this time, the 1925 or so, at least during the first part of the book.

(I do wish to bring it back to his youth, and to ride the Poundian train all the way into his incarceration in (and final release from) St. Elizabeth’s in Washington. Of course, at the same time, another part of me has been wondering whether I wouldn’t rather write of a poet in some other world, rather like Pound; I’m not sure, but I suspect it will be less difficult to drum up readership for a book about someone imaginary than ol’ Ez. I guess we’ll see how I feel when the summer rolls in.)

We were all quite impressed with it. I have to admit, I don’t often go for “modern dance” performances — often because, without some kind of narrative to hang on to, I find myself lost and bored — and so I wondered whether a dance troupe could really bring to life Tan’s wordless, intensely beautiful art.

Without question, they did. They used all of those serious dance skills strenuously, but they did so in the service of a moving story — indeed, a set of moving stories embedded in a bigger one. Puppetry, stage design, dance, acting, and even singing (in what sometimes sounded distinctly Soviet-sounding, in terms of the style of music) all came together in a wonderful, fluid, and very effective — even beautiful — performance.

The performance wasn’t exactly wordless like the book, mind you — and what’s more, it wasn’t all nonsense language. This was the one (very small) objection I had: having the “immigrant” protagonist speak English didn’t add anything to the story, I felt, but then, I’ve read the book and knew what was coming… and I’m a grown-up. I think kids (especially who don’t know the book) would probably appreciate the little English that the protagonist speaks, and of course there is the interesting reversal of it being an English-speaker who is a refugee and immigrant in a strange land where he must struggle to learn the language. It’s not objectionable, it just surprised me and shook me out of the performance for a moment or two.

I will also say with regret that Part VI from the book was omitted, since I think it has the perfect ending to the story (and that ending is my favorite moment in the book) — and ending that shows this story isn’t over, but in fact is ongoing, repeating itself on and on. But I still found strong emotional satisfaction in seeing how they brought to life Books I-V: they did so with wonderful imagination and creativity, using sets that were moved around and modified on the fly, shadow projections, and excellent puppetry. (I expected to be distracted by the puppeteers, who were fully visible onstage as you can see in the video above, but I wasn’t at all.)

All in all, I think Red Leap Theater’s adaptation of the book is an achievement that definitely worth high praise — a faithful, passionate, and enchanting adaptation of the story to the stage. And I saw a lot of people checking out copies of the Korean book. Here’s hoping Shaun Tan has gotten some Korean fans through this show. Tomorrow is the last night, but I imagine it’s sold out.

(Though if you’re interested enough to try, this is where we booked the tickets.)

Some still shots, and a full cast listing, are available on Shaun Tan’s website.

A beautiful cover, isn't it? Gives you a sense of adventure, and a sense of the world it depicts, all at once.

Noise is the first Hal Clement novel I’ve read. (I would like to read Mission of Gravity, but the library where I work only has it in Korean!) It’s an odd choice to read, for my first Clement novel — it was his last published work, apparently, as he passed away a month after it was first published in 2003.

I can certainly see why he was a “Grand Master of SF” (as it says under his name on the cover of the paperback I read): Noise takes place in an interesting ocean world with a harsh-as-hell environment (and effectively no native ecology), populated by Polynesians who fled Earth long ago and who use pseudolife technologies to grow things like ships and other technical devices from seeds. The point of view character is Mike Hoani, a linguist/historian who is on the world — Kauinui — to study the way in which the (mostly-Polynesian) languages there have changed since human settlement.

For me, though, the novel ended up being somewhat unsatisfying. This is because it ended up being less of a story and more a series of scientific/technical puzzles that the characters and Mike work out, often in ways that didn’t humanize them particularly well. The process of hypothesizing — working through the mystery of how this or that unknown object or phenomenon works — makes up the majority of the character interaction. When that isn’t the focus, then the source of mysteries is rooted in interactions between different groups on Kainui — the group that Mike has been sailing with, and the group whom they encounter late in the novel.

Perhaps life on such a planet would be so harsh, so difficult that characters would be constantly mind-busy just making sure they know and understand their environment, making sure they know enough to stay alive, but even so the characters felt somewhat hollow to me. While I enjoyed the idea of a young person “earning” adulthood by a constant series of points, accumulated or docked on the basis of practical application of learning, the points being awarded or deducted by an experienced mentor, the little girl in the book — ‘Ao — never acts much like a child, and neither do most of the other characters in the novel act like people. Interpersonal conflict is constantly held back, in favor of intellectual discussion of (and puzzling through) problems. There is, near the end of the last chapter, some struggle in the heart of Mike, who is possessed by an intense interest in a particular group’s sociotechnical history, but when he decides against pursuing the lead, he thinks — for what feels like the first time — very fondly of his family, left back home, to whom he feels obligated to return. Even then, a moment when Mike could feel something, it is duty that is foremost in his mind.

There are stakes to these problems, often very high stakes for the characters, but for me, after a while, the stakes began to matter less and less, and I began to care less and less, because the pattern — present an enigma; have characters puzzle through it; have characters solve it but withhold the answer, so the protagonist can keep puzzling through (or have the protagonist solve it but withhold it so other characters and puzzle through); and then  present the scientific explanation of the enigma — got to be just a bit too repetitive and a bit too transparent, and because the characters didn’t end up mattering much to me on an emotional level. (And I have to say, maybe it’s just me: this is exactly the kind of novel I can see being serialized in Analog, and praised highly in those pages. But for me, it was just missing something important.)

I wouldn’t call Noise a bad book, but it frustrated me a little, and took me forever to read — short sittings, each time, but over a year’s time. (And knowing that, you can take some of my observations with a grain of salt.) I just feel a bit let down because I feel like if Clement had spent more time humanizing the characters, I could easily have fallen in love with the world, with their adventure through it, and the book would have been amazing. As it is, I can’t help but wistfully feel like it represents a lost opportunity. Still, I’m curious to read more of Clement, and see whether

1. Wonmisan Micro-aj pi ɛ?: Currently finished first round of dry-hop and ready to be racked to a keg. Add second round of dry hops in keg.
2. Wonmisan aj pi ɛ? (Mega): Rack to secondary. Dry hop with Pacific Gem pellets. Re-rack to empty keg, and second-round dry hop with more Pacific Gem, or alternative dry hop.
3. Silvered Moon Barleywine: Bottle in small-serving bottles.
4. Wonmisan Pastafarian (original batch, with pellicle): taste and discard or bottle, possibly blend with other sour ale. (But unlikely.)
5. Womisan Mint Metheglin: Currently cold-crashed. Bottle in small-serving bottles.
6. Fenian Raid Old Ale — Re-yeast. Bottle in small-serving bottles. Harvest yeast cake for Brett strains. (Depending on Brett action, may or may not have turned out tasty, but should rack to a keg for storage/aging at this point.
7. Sour Pale Ale: taste, possibly bottle and refrigerate. Harvest complete yeast cake for sour/funky Saisons.
8. Wonmisan Wit (split batch) — Bottle in big bottles. Harvest yeast cake.
9. Chestnut Honey Mead, Larger portion of batch: cold crash, rack to clear, and bottle in small-serving bottles.
10. Brew a 3G Berliner Weisse.
11. Brew a Maple Beer / Citra Blond Ale split batch
12. Plan and brew a student brew (double batch) by 13 May.

Wow, that’s lots to do. Some things *could* wait a little while, but I don’t want to wait too long on them! I guess I’d better get to work!

The following post is extremely lengthy, at almost 6,000 words, so I shall place it behind a cut: the interested can click through to read the whole thing… but to make a long story short, Leon Surette begins the book with the promise to explore and untangle the role and genealogy of the occult both in English popular culture when Pound arrived in London, and its role in Pound’s thinking and poetry. And he does both quite admirably here.  

SuretteTBoM

The Birth of Modernism is the second book by Surette regarding Pound and The Cantos, the first being one I’m a quarter of the way through at the moment — A Light From Eleusis. The former was written at a point when Surette had regarded the occult-type content of The Cantos as something Pound didn’t quite take seriously — like most Pound scholars still do, he then regarded Pound as skeptical not just of Christianity, but also of the occult; the standard assumption seems to have been that Pound put that stuff into The Cantos for literary effects. (There’s a whole bunch of technical terminology for this, but I’m expressing it simply here; the more dedicated reader can check out the book.)

Anyway, in the preface, Surette explains the moment where he changed his mind about this: it was when he got a call from a fellow named William French, of Vienna, Virginia, who was calling to talk over the occult arcana in the poem. He seemed to assume Surette was an initiate in the occult, if he’d figured out as much as he had about The Cantos, and finding that Surette was not, he told him “to read H.P. Blavatsky and Annie Besant where all would be made plain.” Surette chose other scholars to pursue, but did indeed reassess his position on Pound’s relationship with the occult, the visionary, and the mythical. After all, G.R.S. Mead — an associate of Pound’s in London — had been not only a theosophist, but also the secretary to Blavatsky herself!

I will discuss Surette’s book in pretty deep detail, though I will first say: if you are interested in Pound’s occult interests, and in the occult milieu which informed both literary modernism, and indeed the “intellectual” world of late 19th and early 20th century Europe, one would do well to read The Birth of Modernism for yourself. While Pound seems to have been very interested in secret histories himself, Surette’s book simultaneously seems to play out a kind of secret history of its own, tracing the writings and ideas of kooks and nutters of the 19th century and earlier, as they filtered down through subsequent commentators and into the beginning of the 20th century.

Which, indeed, should concern us: while we cannot quite blame the horrors of the 20th century, there is a certain harmony that exists between the occult notions to which Pound clung, and the larger stupidities of the time… and anyone who knows enough about today’s popular flavors of whackaloonery will also see a lineage connecting that to the gunk in which Pound’s London circle (and Anglophone culture of the time generally) indulged.

In his introduction, Surette works on developing a working and usable definition of “the occult” which, in fact, takes a little more work than you would think. The definition of “the occult” today has been deeply informed by mouthy evangelical Christians on American talk shows — and has been relegated to the margins of social acceptability, in the forms of Californian New Age “wisdom” — it occupied a very different cultural niche in the late 19th and early 20th-century.

That niche, to be specific, was among intellectuals and would-be intellectuals who were, even more direly than most literary critics today, essentially scientifically illiterate and hostile to the sciences, just as much as they were hostile to Christianity. Today, science is positioned oppositionally to Christianity or The Church, but traditionally, it was the occult — not science, or not science alone — that occupied this position. The non-scientist opponents of Christianity tended to be attracted to a kind of occult mishmash of ideas taken from early 19th-century writers, remixed by mid- and late-19th century writers, attributed to much older (invented) occult traditions, and celebrated by a lot of intellectual and literary types in London around the time Pound arrived there.

It is curious that so many are so eager to dismiss intellectuals and indeed the major figures of American modernist liteature were willing to flirt with–and discuss seriously–the ideas of Helena Blavatsky, of her devotee G.R.S. Mead, of Joséphine Péladan, of Gabriele Rossetti (father of Dante Gabriele and Christina Rossetti), and many others-when there is, in fact, clear evidence of it. Surette is careful, of course, to note that like in any superstitious community (say, within Christianity, or Buddhism) one finds a range of modes of engagement with the core ideas and narratives of the superstition: not every Christian is a biblical literalist, after all, and a range of attitudes defined the way the moderns related to “the occult.” (The specific modes outlined by Surette are on page 32, and he neatly describes how several moderns–Pound, Eliot, Yeats–seemed to combine a couple of positions at once.

I found this particularly interesting since, as a young man (and prior to my reading of Pound) I found myself quite curious about some of the figures mentioned, and as a university undergraduate signed out books by Blavatsky and Carl Jung, both of whose works were held, I think in complete form (definitely for Jung, and also I think for Blavatsky), in my university library. It would be fascinating to visit the university library once more and trace just the writings of Blavatsky ended up at the University of Saskatchewan library–perhaps they were donated, but by whom? When? And how did they end up on the shelvees, instead of in some special collection squirreled away?

(By the way, I never got far into the Jung, and found the Blavatsky both tiresome and, eventually, unreadable.)

But I cannot help but think that if the books were present in the circulating collection even of my small, podunk city’s university library, they must have been in wider circulation when they were brand-new and being discussed more publicly. Not only that, but — and yes, this is NEAT SF CONNECTION #1 for today, and a big one — Blavatsky also may have inflluenced some of Pound’s pulpier contemporaries writing in America; Edgar Rice Burroughs, for one. (That was the apparent opinion of both Fritz Leiber and L. Sprague de Camp.) I’m ill at the moment (drafting this part of the post on the evening of Friday, April 27th) so I don’t have the strength to recount it all, but here is a lengthy discussion of the parallels between Burroughs’ Mars books (including A Princess of Mars, recently adapted into the film John Carter [of Mars]) and the earlier works of Blavatsky, who, yes, discusses all kinds of weird pseudoscientific theories of evolution, of life on other planets, of telepathy (hello, John W. Campbell), and indeed the origins of humanity. As well, theosophy was definitely known to H.P. Lovecraft, as is explored in this article.

I’ll throw in a bonus NEAT SF CONNECTION #2: the parallels between Blavatsky’s cosmic narrative and the narrative that apparently — from court proceedings — sits nestled at the heart of the secret teachings of the religion that pulp SF author L. Ron Hubbard established, Scientology. No, really, even that Thetan stuff seems to come from Blavatsky. See here.

All of which brings to mind the musings of Lee Lady, another Pound reader who sees in Pound some of this:

If Pound had been born a little later and the circumstances of his life had been a little different, I think he would have been ideally suited to be a science fiction writer of the Golden Age of Science Fiction — someone like Damon Knight or Frederick Pohl or, perhaps more to the point, A. E. van Vogt.

And we’re still only on introduction to the Surette, by the way… so let’s move on.

In the first chapter, Surette notes that most literary interest in the occult is directed at the mystical and transcendantal aspects of it — and not, paerticularly, at the esoteric occultism that defines a lot of Pound’s interest in the area. Thus occult historiography has kind of gone overlooked, both in terms of its presence but also in terms of its significance in modern literature. This, in turn, is part of why it has been so common and so easy for Pound scholars to dismiss the presence of seemingly-occult content in The Cantos being more than metaphorical or literary-poetical in nature/intention. (And, in turn, has also made it harder to detect some of the occult content for what it is.)

Surette discusses the notion of the “secret history” within the occult context, unearthing several examples of types of occult historiography and noting that Pound tended, like many, towards that which postulated a decline and fall. (A tendency shared by European fascists in their core narratives, unsurprisingly.) He traces the role of “sedition” in the following:

• occult historiography;
• the notion of an artistic tradition within the secret history — where artists are keeping alive the flame of occult knowledge or wisdom;
• the interest in anthropological  writings on religion and mythology among occultists of Pound’s time;
• the notion of malignant and benign conspiracies — both of which seemed to interest Pound, from what I know of The Cantos and of his writings elsewhere, though Surette argues it is the positive conspiracies that interest him;
• a reconstruction of the kind of occult historiography Pound would have come across in his readings; and the importance of the “imaginative and ‘speculative’ history circulating in the early twentieth century” to the inspirations of modernist literature–which Surette assures us are historiographic and political.

(Here, Surette also goes a bit into the way ideology at the time interacted with the way literary figures interacted with the present and the recent past, as well as how own our historiographic views of the early 20th century obscure the way the people living then saw themselves and their world. (For example, Nazi adoption of a racial history fantasy that nobody but occultists took seriously; it’s not all Nietzsche there!))

Also in Chapter 1, Surette discusses “Psychology and the Occult,” writing — and this is a signally important line,

In the nineteenth century and up to the thirties of the twentieth, occult beliefs about contact with spirits, illuminated souls, and divinities seemed at worst goofy and at best a refuge for those whose desire for spirituality was not met by established religions.

He discusses how many major cultural figures — Balzac, William James, Victor Hugo, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Heine, Jung, and Goethe were all interested in Eastern mysticism and/or “spiritualism”.  (And indeed, such folk as John Ruskin, Leslie Stephen, and Charles Dodgson were all involved in the Society for Psychical Research. Artists have long turned to  the occult either as refuge from, or for ammunition against, their commmon struggle with the scientific materialist worldview in its advance toward cultural dominance (and the resulting relegation of the arts to entertainment or decoration, as opposed to mystical, spiritual, or other roles art supposedly played in society). All of this fits nicely into the sense of being under siege that artists at the turn of the 20th century seemed to feel, and their embrace of “heretical” occult positions. Such heresy as discussed one one writer of great importance to Surette’s story, Abbé Barruel (who invented a secret, occult history wherein the Masons were the remnants of an ancient cult that traced back to the Eleusis, and which had in modern times become a Jacobin, atheistic, and revolutionary conspiracy — one Barruel argued was also behind the French Revolution, a project he wanted to discredit), is important to understanding the critical difference between Pound’s anti-Christian sentiments and his apparent interest in the occult, according to Surette — and he seems to points toward a sort of vague identity between Pound’s other heretical views and his occult ones.

All of that is to say that Surette does the hard work of reconstructing the cutting-edge of kookiness that was pretty much acceptable and in popular circulation around the time Pound got to London, and providing us with a framework through which to view it, as well as a kind of genealogy for this occultist kookiness —  which Surette will follow even further back in later chapters. But he also reveals just how important it was for European culture generally, how tied in with politics, the big questions of the day, with art and the role of artists, and with popular culture the whole occult scene was.

Now it’s not like I’d never heard of Yeats’ and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s interest in séances, or the latter’s apparent belief in faeries; it’s not as if I was  unaware of Jung’s odder tendencies, or of the explosion of theosophy in the late 19th-century; but somehow I imagined that stuff was all just as marginal then as it is now, and that the straight-laced intellectuals of the time might have looked down their noses at it; that is, I expected it all to be as disreputable then as it was within the realm of my own experience from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, when I was growing up. I should, of course, have known better: if we look back just a little bit, we see the hippies and a resurgence of all kinds of nonsensical spiritualist mumbo-jumbo; that, I think, is the echo of the earlier  interest in the occult that Surette has traced for us, which survived into the 1930s (only to be stamped out by World War II and, I imagine, by the rise of Christian evangelicalism on one side, and scientific rationalism on the other).

This leads me to wonder whether people will someday look back on 2012 and see a caricature of comparable simplicity: atheistic scientific-rationalists on one side, and Christian evangelicals on the other, with the hugely popular and profitable New Age movement (along with its “respectable” offspring, the Self-Help movement) being omitted. Most of the SF authors I’ve met have been solidly in the first camp — the atheistic scientific-rationalists (even when their grip on science has been less solid than they believed) but many of the mainstream literary types I have run across personally have tended toward a more ecletic, weak-occultic view, taking and melding bits and pieces of New Age, Self-Help, and Eastern mysticism (as well as thhe abominable Eastern mysticism = quantum mechanics claptrap so popular among would-be poets I’ve known), and generally tending towards both anti-science and anti-Christian positions. We obviously don’t have the exact same thing going on, but the number of poets and mainstream literary writers I’ve met who’ve mentioned authors like Fritjof Capra’s unfortunately dubious book about The Tao of Physics (or Gary Kukav’s also-awful The Dancing Wu Li Masters) to me is certainly indicative of something!

(It also chastens me in terms of that endlessly-offered criticism of Korean education, that “critical thinking doesn’t get taught here.” That may be true, but given the number of Western academics I’ve met who have also cited Capra to me, it seems one can be highly, highly educated in the West without developing a proper bullshit detector in certain (really important) areas; else there would be far fewer literature professors whose minds are muddled by New-Ageified accounts of cutting edge science. When Surette calls Pound “scientifically illiterate” (I forget the page) I’m sure it touched a nerve among those scholars who read it and who are, at least unconsciously, aware that it is true of them as well.)

It’s time to move on to the second chapter, I think!

Chapter 2: “The Occult Tradition in The Cantos,” is where Surette really gets cooking!  Now, it’s important to understand that when Surette uses the term “the occult tradition” what he means is a particular fictitious tradition (or set of them) that had common currency in the literary and intellectual scene of London during (as well as just before and after) the second decade of the 20th century. “The occult tradition” is neither a particularly coherent narrative — for it is composed of a conglomeration (or accretion, perhaps) of sometimes-conflicting claims regarding an esoteric history of occult knowledge stretching back into the ancient world. While some authors, like Abbé Barruel, traced the Masonic conspiracy (a secret society he accused of being Jacobin, atheistic, and occult) back to Manicheanism, a later writer who cribbed from him, Josephine Péladan, traced it instead back to Eleusis — a very important occult landmark for Pound, who definitely read and seems to have been influenced by Péladan. (He reviewed several of his books in London, in fact.) Pound’s own odd lecture “Psychology and the Troubadours” (published in The Spirit of Romance), indeed touches on the subject in a footnote, where he dismisses the connection between Manicheism and the troubadours, promoting instead a possible link between the troubadours and the pagan-gnostic cult of the Eleusinian Mysteries.

Surette, of course, has to reconcile “atheism” with “occultism” and does so easily: anything anti-Christian was “atheist” — including paganism, the occult, and so on. And since monarchy was justified by Christian ideology, the occult was not only atheist but by implication Jacobin. This, for Barruel, is the grounds for indicting the French Revolution. (Surette also discusses the hermeneutics of Barruel, which operates along the principle of affinity — a sort of like-equals-like approach to establishing the identity of narratives, concepts, and so on.) This connection between occultism and anti-establishment thinking is not alien to us, as Surette notes: just think of the hippies!

Following this opening shot, Surette does some of the work in reconstructing the occult history that seems to concern Pound, delving into the writing of Barruel, but also of those to whom his work responded, and those who reworked his ideas later on. Important here are Nesta Webster, the London theosophists (who agreed with Pound that the Albigensians (also known as the Cathars) were carriers of a secret occult tradition dating back to antiquity, though Pound rejected the idea of that tradition dated back to Mani and the Manicheans, preferring instead to trace it back to Eleusis. In a search for a source that Pound could have used to make this connection — and to connect the Albigensians to the troubadours, since they both flourished in Southern France at the time — he studies Denis de Rougemont, who argues the connection and cites Péladan and Eugène Aroux as his sources for the notion of a “forbidden ‘Church of Love’ ” that “came into Europe from the ‘East’” and passed through a tradition linking “Sordello, Cavalcanti, Dante, and Boccaccio, as well as… the Grail literature” (103).

Surette also discusses the sources used by Barruel — people like “Martinez de Pasquales, L.C. de Saint Martin, and Adam Weishaupt , all of whom were prerevolutionary occultists who did in fact organize secret societies and who claimed antique origins for their societies” (104). These fellows apparently also were active in trying to co-opt one anothers’ organizations and Freemasonry as well, for their own ends. But Barruel is crucial to modern conspiracy theory in that he attributes the French revolution, and all other major upheavals in European history, to a single cause: a conspiratorial occult organization — somehow tied in with both the Albigensians and the suppression of the Templars. In effect, Barruel politicized the already-existing fantasies of occult secret history, and while Pound seems perhaps not to have read Barruel, the influence is there because Barruel affected European thinking more generally — as well as specific authors that Pound did read.

On of the major routes of distribution for these ideas was through theosophy, which got a lot of airplay in London in the time Pound was there. Theosophy has certain things in common with Barruel’s ideas, namely the existence of a secret occult tradition tracing back to ancient times and someplace in the East (be it Egypt, Tibet, pre-Socratic Greece, or India), and a particular interest in the notion of palingenesis (“rebirth”) found widely in many of the mythologies of such places.

Which brings us to Gabriele Rossetti, who arrived in English in 1824 as an exile from Napoli. Rossetti wrote a criticism of Dante’s Divine Comedy where he alleged that the text was written in a “gergo” or “secret jargon,” a notion that seemed to appeal to Rossetti (who was in fact a Mason). He also seemed to want to align Dante with himself politically, as a Ghibelline, which would appeal to Protestant England — Italy was Guelph and Catholic, and he’d been exiled for anti-monarchic political writing. In 1832 Rossetti produced a book titled Sullo spirito antipaple che produsse la riforma — the only text by Rossetti to be translated into English, and the one that seems to have solidified for many a link between the Freemasons, the Cathars, and Eleusis, was translated into English very quickly afterward, and it essentially is a Rossetti-flavored remix of the Barruel: essentially, replacing the Jacobinism of Barrue with his own favored pro-Imperial Ghibelline stance as characterizing the “hidden tradition” kept alive by hidden priests of a forbidden religion.

NEAT SF CONNECTION #3: Rossetti happened to married Frances Polidori, the sister of Dr. John Polidori, who apparently was present with Byron and the Shelleys during that stay in Switzerland where not only Frankenstein, but also The Vampyre (the prototype for Bram Stoker’s Dracula) were brought into the world. So here we are again, only a degree or two away from what some people term the first modern SF novel — Frankenstein, which is should be remembered also bears the mark of the occult within it. (As Surette reminds us, Frankenstein explores Kabbala and Paracelsus as well as other “medieval theurgic scholars” (109) while puzzling through the mysteries of generating life.)

This story, Surette traces through the theosophists in Pound’s London — G.R.S. Mead and Isabel Cooper-Oakley, though the Londoners rejected straight political reading of the “conspiracy” (which Rossetti, Barruel, and their like presented) arguing that it was rather a mystical, occult tradition that was kept alive from the ancient times, and into which initiates were introduced. Traces of such a belief are hinted at often in Pound’s work — in Guide to Kulchur and in The Cantos as well — and Surette traces them, comparing passages to Luigi Valli, Barruel, and others. In essence, Pound’s roll call of thinkers, mystics, and heroes seems linked in a number of Cantos to the roll calls suggested by other occultists.

Surette makes some very interesting observations:

• that the “descent” into the underworld (the “A” in the ABC/ACB pattern I mentioned earlier in these readings) is not repeated throughout The Cantos, while the BC/CB  – the repeats in history and the theophanies, are sprinkled throughout the poem
• that The Cantos can be read as a kind of séance, something I’ve clearly picked up on in earlier readings of cantos, give my many references to necromancy; to this I would add that there is an eerie connection of the séance with the minstrel show here: both types of performers (mediums at séances and minstrels in minstrel shows) are superficially masked, and allow others’ voices to speak through them, but only sort-of.
•  Surette argues that The Cantos seem to be “an articulation of a theosophical understanding of history” works until The Fifth Decad of Cantos XLII-LI. Pound’s cantos from during World War II — the “Chinese” and “Adams” cantos — are very different, and apparently rely on single sources. Pound’s magical historiography went on hold here, as he could not predict the outcome of the war and did not want to jeopardize his epic poem.

Then comes a masterstroke in Surette’s argument, where he cites a passage from Joséphine Péladan’s Secret des troubadours, which Pound reviewed in 1906. Here it is:

If one studies the hidden meaning of medieval literature, the Renaissance no longer appears to be a sudden resurrection of the ancient world.

Neoplatonism had already penetrated our [i.e. French] tales of adventure, and when it showed itself openly under the Medicis it was because they assured it effective protection against the Roman Inquisition.

Gemisto Plethon and Marsilio Ficino are the official teachers of old Albigensianism, as Dante is its prodigious Homer.

Fiction and history correspond with a striking similarity on this subject: do not the knights Templar represent in reality the Grail Knights, and does not Monsalvat have a real name, Montségur? (Péladan 1906, 44-46; translation by Leon Surette, cited in Surette 127.)

Here, Surette points out, not only does this match Pound’s historical fantasies — including his argument that the sect was esoteric and occult, not just political — but also can in part explain his immense interest in Malatesta — who was, as discussed earlier, Gemisto Plethon’s patron (and was so mad about the man that he brought back his remains to be interred at The Tempio). Given that it is well-known Pound read and even publicly reviewed Péladan, it’s worth thinking about this more. Péladan was a notorious occultist in Paris late in the 19th century, but Pound probably didn’t know that… but Pound was already reading Swedenborg, and Swedenborgian Balzac, and more even before leaving America, along with Yogi Ramacharaka. Occult ideas were present in some of Pound’s correspondence, as well, with HD and William Carlos Williams, and Surette is careful to remind the reader that none of this would have been seen, at the time, as particularly eccentric.

We do know from early reviews, and later work and writings, that Pound started out skeptical about Péladan’s iudeas, but changed his mind by the time of “Psychology and the Troubadours” — probably, Surette argues, in Kensington and due to the occult ambience he encountered there, for example in the Quest Society headed by G.R.S. Mead, who as mentioned before was a prominent English theosophist. Mead was, of course, only one of a number of English occulists with whom Pound was connected: A.R. Orage, W.B. Yeats, and others come up as well.

Surette explores Mead’s writing a bit, which we needn’t do here, except that there is an amusing reference to the Gnostic paligenesis as transforming one into a “Lord of time and space” — though I cannot quite bring myself to suggest a Neat SF Connection here, as Mead wasn’t talking about Dr. Who. There are, however, links between the writing of Mead and the work of Pound, not only in early versions of “Canto One” but also in the concept of the “vortex” that becomes so important to Pound later —  and which Yeats calls a “gyre” and Mead calls a “whirl-swirl”, in a passage that Pound marked explicitly in his copy of Mead’s The New Word. (In that passage, it is described in a way that calls to mind the mystic point that is focal in Borges short story “The Aleph.”)

Surette departs for a bit, exploring the links between Jung and Péladan and Wagner and Rossetti, before focusing on the esoteric eroticism found in Pound’s poetry, which also has its roots in Péladan and another occult writers, such as Remy de Gourmont, who imposed all kinds of erotic-esoteric mumbo-jumbo upon the entomological writings of one J.H. Fabre, specifically Souvenirs entomologiques. (Yup, a book about bugs and the study of bugs.) Fabre was a hardcore Darwinian, and even gets a mention in The Cantos, but probably only because of the mumbo-jumbo de Gourmont imposed on it, and the pseudoscientific silliness Pound further imposes on de Gourmont. Here, Pound’s assignment of “extraordinary psychic or even metaphysical power to sexuality and to the erotic” was something in common with others, not the least Carl Jung. Surette spends some time discussing gynocentric/androgentic and phallocentric thinkers on these subjects, but Pound is clearly phallocentric.

And if all this sounds kooky, consider what Surette writes on page 150, of how all this

might count as keeping his head, when on considers the ambience in which the ambitious young poet moved bvetween 1909 and 1917. To men like Yeats and Pound, who were scientifically illiterate, occult physical theories — which were essentially just ancient pre-Aristotelian monism — probably seemed no more mystical than Mme Curie’s radiation, Einsteinian relativity, Planck’s quantum theory, Freud’s subconscious, or Bergson’s élan vital. Indeed, in many cases they seem to have thought that all these descriptions of nature were interchangeable.

Surette refers to Canto 23, in a capacity I hope to recall when we reach that particular canto, as a demonstration of this, and rounds out the chapter with a few more references to other cantos which seem to bear out this understanding of Pound’s understanding of the continuity between the occult ideas prevalent in Kensington at the time, and the scientific knowledge available then.

Chapter Three is less interesting and useful for my purposes and interests, but essentially traces the Nietzschean influence on Pound — though Pound seems to have read little of Nietzsche directly. Surette traces a number of secondary sources who drew on Nietzsche and were known to have influenced Pound, as well as tracing some primary sources drawn upon by both Nietzsche and other authors whom Pound did read. Surette also gets in a glorious attack on the postmodernist misreading of science (indeterminacy, for example); he traces a commonality in the misunderstanding among Pound’s academic critics regarding “skepticism” toward science, and their belief in Pound’s own claimed skepticism, which is a wonderful thing to watch, though one suspects he did not do himself any favors in the literary establishment by doing so. One of the great influences on both Pound and Wagner is one Friedrich Creuzer — a major wellspring for 19th century occultism the way Frazer was for the 20th; Creuzer was also influential on theosophy, in fact, and it is through those lines, and the London theosophists, that Pound seems to have gotten his Nietzsche… as well, of course, as through Péladan, who riffed on Creuzer as well.

(Which reminds one of the line in Bruce Sterling’s Zeitgeist where a Russian tough comments to the protagonist that he had to pick up his Derrida “on the street” — at least I think it was his Derrida.)

In any case, Surette traces some of the specifics, but I don’t think that I need to outline them beyond one point: Surette (rightly) points out that Social Credit theory was something Pound encountered within the occult-infused Kensington milieu, in fact through A.R. Orage, and that Social Credit not only appeals to those who theorize about a negative conspiracy (economic in this case, but it fits with Pound’s occult ones) and also suited the occult mind-set “with its insistence on a simple cognitive solution” to the world’s economic problems and its tendency toward a priori thinking, viewing the slow process of emprical inquiry impatiently.

The fourth and last chapter, “Pound’s Editing of The Waste Land,” explores the claim Surette makes in Chapter 3 that Eliot’s The Waste Land was “the central document” in the story of how the modernists of Pound’s and Eliot’s generation (after Yeats’, that is) “presented themselves as skeptical relativists implacably hostile to the credulity and ‘romantic’ mysticism of their immediate predecessors” (206). Those immediate predecessors were the Romantics, but it’s important to understand that just because the modernists claimed to be skeptical, and rejected/attacked certain forms of mysticism, doesn’t mean they were actually hostile to all mysticism. Indeed, a careful reading of many modernist writers reveals a constant obsession with myth, a heavy recurring theme of the occult, and a great deal of mysticism, just of a different kind than was popular among the Romantics.

In any case, Surette argues in Chapter 3 that The Waste Land was presented as (and widely read as) the achievement of making poetry possible in a post-Nietzschean, skeptical world, no gods of myths necessary; a word-painting of the “moral and ethical impasse in which Europe found itself in the wake of World War I” (206), when a loss of faith in progress had occurred (if not a loss of faith in God). And yet it can be read another way, where the poem proceeds from the occult wellspring of the decades before it, and is more mystical than skeptical.

Now, jumping back to Chapter 4, Surette basically brings together the following:

• The Waste Land as it was in both its final form, and in the form submitted to Pound for editorial aid,
• The writings of Jessie Weston, a theosophical writer who is referenced in the headnote and notes to The Waste Land
• The correspondence between Pound and Eliot regarding The Waste Land during the process of editing,
• Eliot’s other writings and thinking expressed in it, and compared to other ideas of the day — Jung, Freud, and so on — particularly on the ideas of relativism, cultural pluralism, superstitition and faith, and Eliot’s studies (as a philosophy PhD) in the subject of culture and knowledge (ie. relativism).

Basically, Surette states that a full explanation of the occult content of The Cantos would be quite doable, but too big for his book, and so he sets out to analyze instead the editorial process of The Waste Land — that is, what Pound suggested Eliot do with an earlier draft. He also demonstrates (to me, pretty satisfactorily) that the Frazerian “vegetation ceremonies” mentioned by Eliot in regards to the final version of The Waste Land were much less of a major theme in the original draft, and that in the original, the theme of hieros gamos — a typical occult feature, the “sacred marriage” connected to esoterically mystical eroticism (and specifically Eleusis) — was a much bigger theme, along with some instances of palingenesis.

The Conclusion is short, but in some ways packs a lot of punch: in it, Surette points not only to a continuity between the Romantics and the moderns they claimed to reject, for example transplanting traditional Romantic skepticism about religion to a more modern skepticism about science, and continuing to celebrate the visionary and revolutionary — albeit, swimming against the dark, pessimistic tides of European reality after the first World War. He also has very interesting observations about the reception of this work, and the anxieties among modernist and postmodernist critics regarding religion, politics, and the occult.

Finally, he neatly sums up with his thesis, in the course of trying to explain Pound’s enduring presence in literature:

I argue that Pound’s work captures and expresses a set of passions, fears, hopes, and errors that were ubiquitous in the political and cultural history of the first half of the [twentieth] century. I make this claim at the same time as I argue that Pound’s “world view” is deeply indebted to occult speculation on the one hand and to conspiracy theories of history on the other.

As for what purpose all of this can serve me in my own literary endeavours with Pound, I think that:

1. Occult Kensington will be dreadfully fun to depict, especially with all that Blavatskian theosophy in the air.
2. The fascinations with palingenesis (occult re-birth) and hieros gamos  (“sacred marriage” — ero-mysticism, in other words) are particularly useful, as they link to magical/theurgical themes in Pound’s work but also to quite likely plot points.
3. The idea of a secret history Pound is struggling to uncover and write about is also likely useful in terms of plot drive — lost books, hidden conspiracy narratives and so on make for good adventure, played correctly!

And that seems like enough for me. This post is almost now over 6,000 words long, but the details may serve me well in the long run, as a set of notes about the Poundian occult. (Incidentally, my reading of the book inspired a sudden outburst of fiction, and I have a short story featuring the hieros gamos and palingenetic ritual, set at the site of the ancient ruins in Eleusis. Yay!) But now, I need to sleep (as I write this, it is late on Monday night, the day before this is due to be published).

Next week, we’ll return to our regularly scheduled Canto-readings, tackling at least Canto XIV, probably XIV and XV — two “Hell-Cantos.” Until then…

These are not exactly typical readings of the poems, so much as readings I’m doing with a specific research project in mind — how to write Ezra Pound as a figure in a novel in which modernist artists, poets, and musicians secretly waged an occult war in the earlier half of the 20th century. If you’d like to know more about the project, I recommend scrolling down to the bottom of extended post, and reading the first installment in this series.

Last week, we examined the last two of the four “Malatesta Cantos”, specifically numbers X and XI; this week, it’s on to two of what Hugh Kenner calls “Exemplary” Cantos: XII (the tale of Baldy Bacon and also the Tale of the Honest Sailor) and XIII (a “Kung” [Confucius] Canto).   

During Pound’s years in London, he spent some time among the circle of artists, writers, and intellectuals who were variously associated with A.R. Orage and The New Age, a weekly journal to which Pound contributed various pieces of writing during his stay in London. (Brown University’s Modernist Journals Project has copies of the journal throughout the period available for free.)

The New Age, and Pound’s association with its contributors (known to have hung out at afternoon teas in the magazine’s offices, in the basement of the ABC Restaurant in Chancery Lane, as Tim Redman recounts in Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism), was to influence Pound profoundly in terms of his economic and social thinking. It began the second decade of the 20th century being rather Fabian in its leanings, though by the end of the Great War (World War I) its publisher Orage had become enamored of the Social Credit theories of C.H. Douglas, as Pound in turn would become later.

(That he held this in common with Robert A. Heinlein was mentioned, in an earlier post, as a Neat SF Connection: I will not belabor the parallel again for now.)

Broadly speaking, The New Age was a socialist magazine, and focused on literature and the arts in connection with its socialist concerns. Its publisher, Alfred Orage, was open to some disagreement and debate within the pages of the journal, and indeed often himself clashed with Pound there. It was through The New Age that Pound became directly acquainted with Hilaire Belloc, HG Wells, Cecil Chesterton, Katherine Mansfield, F.S. Flint, and others.

And yeah, that’s a Neat SF Connection too: Pound actually knew HG Wells. His opinions on the man seem to have shifted here and there–Humphery Carpenter notes his disdain for the sort of popular novelist Wells was when they met, and in my own recollections (from reading The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, years ago–a book I no longer have on hand–Pound anticipates a book by Wells on economics with great relish, only to write, a year or two later, something like, “Wells disgusts me”) he seemed not to hold the man in high regard, but Noel Stock points out that Wells indeed ends up quoted in the Cantos themselves. (You’ll have to wait till Canto XLII for that, though!)

A full accounting of Pound’s “education” Pound received while writing for, and socializing with, those in the Orage circle–and a discussion of Orage’s interesting C.H. Douglas and the Social Credit Movement, as well as some explanation of the theories of Douglas themselves–is well-provided by Redman, and I leave it to the interested reader to check out the first two chapters of that text for more on the subject.

But it does seem clearly pertinent to Canto XII, where in the tale of Francis S. Bacon (“Baldy Bacon”) is recounted. As any good guide can tell you, Bacon was a businessman whom Pound met during  a trip to New York in 1910, at “the old Weston boardinghouse at 47th Street.” Bacon was “a jobber… living on the fringes of the business world — distributing orders for commercial writing paper to printers and selling ‘odd sorts of insurance.’” Pound was excited by some sort of business proposition put forth by the man, and tried to get several family members to invest in it, but it seems not to have happened. (And that’s about all the information mentioned in the account by Noel Stock, on page 90 of The Life of Ezra Pound).

The description of Bacon in the Canto is a little more specific, placing him in Cuba where he supposedly “bought all the little copper pennies in Cuba”; Pound describes him as “Sleeping with two buck niggers chained to him, / Guardia regia, chained to his waist / To keep ‘em from slipping off in the night”. Bacon seems to have taken ill and returned to Manhattan, where he took up the work mentioned above. It is notable that Pound would hold up such a figure:

Baldy’s interest
Was in money business.
“No other interest in any other kind uv bisnis,”
Said Baldy.

This, in the wake of Malatesta–a man interested in arts-business, philosophy-business, literature-business, war-business, love-business, architecture-business, pagan-business, and more. Why would Pound turn, suddenly, to a character of such contracted (ahem) interests? In criticism, one assumes: Bacon’s scheme for getting rich was to corner the market on Cuban copper coins. Once he owned them all, he would be able to turn his monopoly into profit. The “buck niggers” chained to him while he sleeps are not mentioned in appobation, but in condemnation, for slavery is associated with usury for Pound.

The question becomes more dire as the poem unfolds: not only does it relate the story of one Dos Santos, who bought a sea-wrecked ship full of grain and then fattened pigs on it to make a fine profit –

Porkers of Portugal,
fattening with the fulness of time,
And Dos Santos fattened, a great landlord of Portugal
Now gathered to his fathers.
Did it on water-soaked corn.
(Water probably fresh in that estuary)
Go to tell Apovitch, Chicago aint the whole punkin.

Here, it seems, there is a contrast: pigs beget pigs, an investment (and a clever one) begets wealth, but it is done in harmony with nature.

A hint as to how to read all this emerges when one finds Jim X — John Quinn, an American lawyer, literary expert, and art collector — “in a bankers’ meeting, / bored with their hard luck stories”. The bankers are described as unwilling to invest money in anything except new bank buildings–that is, they do not seem interested in turning money to natural increase. Like Baldy Bacon, they are happy to maintain a shortage for their own profit.

Here, the teachings of Orage and of CH Douglas begin to show through, for Pound recounts, in the last part of the Canto, the “Tale of the Honest Sailor,” a joke he’d apparently heard from Quinn. It concerns an ignorant and hardworking sailor who ends up in the hospital because of his excessive drinking habit, and has to undergo an operation. The hospital staff claims, after his operation, that a child was pulled from inside him, and present the child to the sailor. (The child is actually the offspring of a poor prostitute.) The sailor raises the boy, and on his deathbed, confesses that he isn’t the boy’s father at all:

“I am not your fader but your moder,” quod he,
“Your fader was a rich merchant in Stambouli.”

This isn’t the first bit of humor in the Cantos, but it probably is the first outright joke, and definitely one of the most modern of moments — the sailors in earlier sections were heroic, great adventuring like Odysseus and Acoetes, but this sailor is one of those figures we encounter regularly in jokes about people walking into a bar. It is also quite self-consciously ribald: while sex and sexuality exist on a pretty elevated level in early Cantos, here, it is buggery by a rich merchant in Istanbul of a drunk sailor.

Of course, if you know Dante–or let Terrell fill you in on Dante–there is a connection between the bankers (which, for Pound by this time, thanks in part to Orage and Douglas, represent what he would call “usury”) and the “sodomy” mentioned the sailor’s tale: for Dante, and for the Roman Church, there was a connection between the two, for both failed to give rise to what Pound quoted the Church as calling “natural increase.” The idea of “usury” here, and in Pound generally, isn’t exactly the same as it was in the Middle Ages  (when it was understood to mean lending money with interest), but Pound suggests it has to do with the concentration of wealth in the hands of those who do not return the money into the economy for active growth — only for the growth of the banking industry.

Are we to see this poem as also homophobic, or hateful of homosexuality? The Cantos, so far, have been fairly invested in the ancient world, and Pound was probably held back from outright antipathy against homosexuality and homosexuals because of this–but he also was living in the 1920s, and born in the 1880s, and it seems extremely unlikely that he would have had altogether liberal views of homosexuality either. (And he apparently complained of the “pansification” of America whenhe was cooped up in St. Elizabeth’s, as mentioned in this interesting discussion of Pound and his contemporary Jean Cocteau in relation to homosexuality. Most interesting in that post is Kenner’s recounted suggestion that Wyndham Lewis and his circle were flaunting their machismo in part as a reaction to the Bloomsbury circle, since Forster and Stratchey were homosexuals (Forster closeted, but surely rumors flew) and Woolf was rumored to be what we now call bisexual. (As anyone who has read an introduction to her wonderful novel Orlando is likely to have heard.) That said, I wonder what Pound made of his former lover H.D.’s lesbian relationships?

Well, Pound is clearly interested in The Tale of the Honest Sailor about the metaphor of usury and “sodomy”–there is obviously some kind of criticism of usury intended here. But it’s important not to stop there in reading the Canto: after all, look at the dialect used to render the sailor’s words: “fader” and “moder”, and elsewhere, “I leave you re-sponsa-bilities” and more. The language in this Canto resembles Pound’s own letter-writing more than anything since the line “Hang it all, Robert Browning,” and drips with the sound of the 1920s. A lot of the Canto is very self-consciously contemporary (for the year it was written, I mean) and it even includes a locker-room type joke.

The “tawdriness” of the story (as J.J. Wilhelm puts it), and the tawdriness of the language in the poem: they seem to intersect because of the presence of the bankers, complaining and whining about how tough it is to be a rich banker. For Pound, bankers play the same role that, in Soviet cinema from around the same time (say, Sergei Eistenstein’s Strike (1925)) is played by rich industrialists smoking cigars in opulent rooms. Those bankers and their woes seem laughable now… but also familiar. Again, I think of Hugh Kenner’s claim that Pound was “ahead of his time” in more ways than we like to admit; certainly, there is no shortage of political-types online who think Pound was clearly onto something, and that North American society is just waking up to it now. (That is, reading Pound as some kind of proto-Occupy Movement intellectual, or something.) Unsurprisingly, it’s right-wing/libertarian types who tend towards this reading of him.

To explore whether they’re right, though, would require a closer reading of C.H. Douglas, something I don’t have the resources (time, mainly) to attempt as yet. However, several works by C.H. Douglas, are available online (for example, but not only, here and here). Suffice it to say, though, that while Pound may have been an early critic of our banking system, the bouquet of ideas among which that criticism of banks was included, and which he seems to have picked up from among the fellow contributors to The New Age, also included the roots of his anti-Semitism, and the seeds of his eventual support for (and idolization of) Mussolini and Italian fascism.

That is to say, Baldy Bacon is “exemplary” in his function as an exemplar of economic perversion, a personification of the evil Pound sees in the banks; though Pound seems to have been excited by his business acumen on some level, and according to Hugh Kenner stayed in touch with the man until the 1940s, Frank Bacon is a kind of cheap, minor demon–a mere imp of clever, insightful perversion–used to represent much larger and more powerful evil forces in the world of The Cantos, which we will glimpse in the two “Hell Cantos” which follow that of Kung.

But Pound’s devotion to fascism was not only rooted in his economic concerns, which would grow over the years. There is a sense in which he seems to have sought (and found) what support he was looking for (for his opinions) not only in the radical economic-politics of the West, but also the conservative philosophy of the East.

And so, we turn to Canto XIII, which jolts us to ancient China:

Kung walked
by the dynastic temple
and into the cedar grove,
and then out by the lower river,
And with him Khieum Tchi
and Tian the low speaking
And “we are unknown,” said Kung.
“You will take up charioteering?
Then you will become known…

In the introduction to his translation of The Analects, Simon Leys makes several useful and interesting observations:

• That Confucius’ political career (as opposed to his philosophical one) was an unarguable failure: Confucius in general went from court to court, often received with respect but soon rejected, ostracized, or even chased out with violence. He simply preached too high a standard and princes and dukes feared they would be out of a job, unable to perform at the level he demanded, if he gained too much influence. Confucius attained low office once, early in his career, and never again. It is not clear in Canto XIII whether Pound is aware of these biographical details, but it is fitting considering the fact that it also sounds a bit like Malatesta, and even, one could argue, eerily like Pound himself, especially at the time when he left England for France, after leaving America for England, and preparing to leave France for Italy.
• That Confucius’ work was, very deeply, at once political, ethical, and focused on education. These interests are, of course, of central concern to Pound, and inextricably linked for both.
• That all of the historical and philosophical baggage that, for Chinese readers, Confucianism carries make it difficult for Chinese to read Kung the way Westerners do — that, in a sense, the one benefit of historical and cultural ignorance is that we can pierce through the manipulations and machinations of Imperial Confucianism, and the Confucianism of Chinese Communism–which after all is still alive and well: when James Cameron’s Avatar set off a livid discussion of evictions in China, a Confucius biopic was swiftly released into cinemas and booked in place of many showings of Avatar. While Pound did not have Mao to read past, Confucius had already gained a problematic reputation among early 20th century Chinese intellectuals like Lu Xun; but Pound was able, as Leys writes, to appreciate “the modernity of Confucius” which is something he argues “non-Chinese readers may perhaps be in a better position to appreciate. The only advantage that can be derived from our condition of ignorant foreigners is precisely the possibility to look with a kind of innocence at this book–as if it were all fresh and new. Such innocence is denied to native readers.” This seems, in fact, to epitomize Pound’s Indiana Jones-like  approach to literature very generally: by reading across language barriers, he seems to run in, plunder the bits most amenable and most useful to the modernity he wants to argue for, and then he gets out, before the accumulated weight of history and context falls in on him. “Make it new,” refers, of course, to the old things of the world. Leys is arguing that “Make it new” is a hell of a lot easier with material that is decontextualized… and Pound seems to argue that the process of making things new is creative recontextualization.

Without a doubt, this latter point describes exactly how Ezra Pound came to Confucius, and to Chinese letters generally. (Both in the sense of “Chinese literature” and, through the work of Ernest Fenollosa, in the sense of Chinese writing: both are important to the story the The Cantos, and the story of Pound more generally.)

Canto XIII is a kind of neo-cento in its form: a construction built almost wholly from quotations–though conventionally, one quoted poetry. What Pound quotes instead, here, is philosophy, specifically the philosophy of China attributed to Kong Qiu, known in the East as Kong-zhi and in west as “Confucius.” Those who want to know exactly where the lines in the poem come from, and who all these disciples are, is advised to either consult the Terrell Companion  to the Cantos, or even better, to or to go and read Confucius for themselves. (Of obvious use will be Pound’s own translation of the Confucian works, though I personally recommend the Simon Leys rendition of The Analects, linked above, which I found lucid and interesting.)

For our purposes, it is enough to trace the philosophical and thematic issues that come up in this poem. It begins with Confucius and his disciples in a pastoral setting, as quoted above. But their talk concerns how they are “unknown” and various disciples suggest various ways of remedying the fact:

“You will take up charioteering?
Then you will become known…

Other strategies are mentioned, such as taking up archery, or performing fantastic public rituals, or hanging out in a garden and playing lovely music with young folks. Kung (in the poem at least, and Pound with him), seems to think that answering the question according to one’s own nature is the correct way. Then, in a move that seems utterly alien to the South Korean form of Neo-Confucianism, Kung (Pound) raises his cane against an old fellow named Yuan Jang who is sitting “by the roadside pretending to / be receiving wisdom.” Kung’s rebuke is as follows:

“Respect a child’s faculties
“From the moment it inhales the clear air,
“But a man of fifty who knows nothing
Is worthy of no respect.”

This seems a hint of what was left out of Imperial Confucianism, and the Neo-Confucianism that was promoted in Korea: that age alone is not worthy of respect, but age and wisdom together demand it. It certainly looks like the kind of thing that, if it was said often enough, would have prevented Confucius from attaining office. (Though, again, whether Pound was fully aware at this time of Confucius’ biographical details–the grand failure of his political career–is something I don’t know.)

Pound proceeds to another bitlet of Confucius that suits his own agenda, with only a short “And” linking quotations from different sources. Next up is the quotation Koreans will recognize as 수신제가치국평천하 (or, in Chinese, 修身齊家治國平天下). Pound will, later on, begin including Chinese characters in his poem, but he has already begun including Chinese content. In English, this is rendered,

If a man have not order within him
He can not spread order about him;
And if a man have not order within him
His family will not act with due order;
And if the prince have not order within him
He can not put order in his dominions.

Little wonder Pound quotes this particular exhortation: it is what many read as an injunction prescribing the necessity of study for all men — for personal cultivation, but also because order within the world, society, and the kingdom supposedly was only possible as a reflection of order within men — particularly the “great leaders.” In my discussion of the Malatesta Cantos, I noted the observation made by A. David Moody that Pound seemed to think of the world in terms of two groups of people: the individuals, and the sheep. It is hard not to see this Confucian edict spelling out a similar picture of the world.

Pound’s inscription of Kung in English also involves erasures: from the Five Confucian Relationships described by Confucius, Pound sees fit only to mention “order” and “brotherly deference” here — nothing of marriage or the subjection of wife to husband; nothing of the necessity of son to honor father, nothing of the fealty of subject to ruler. He does mention a passage where Kung suggests a father has a duty to shelter his son even when his son is a murderer, but only after mentioning that Kung believes that excess is easy, but balance is difficult.

And of course, as Pound delighted in mentioning time and again, Kung “said nothing of the ‘life after death’” — though don’t tell the Confucian world that! (The two main Confucian festivals in South Korea are specifically rituals that involve offerings of food to the departed, and while perhaps the most noble of families saw the rituals as devoid of supernatural dimensions, that is far from what is suggested by what people today say about it. Many people today may feel ambivalent about the supernatural dimension, but they recount it as if it was widely-understood to be real.) Simon Leys argues that Confucius’ silence on the subject of death was a way of getting his listeners more deeply engaged with the fact of death, and through that, the significance of the life that precedes it. But for Pound, of course, this is a handy way of pointing to a major philosopher and philosophical system that could revolt against the privileging of monotheism in western society, and the power of the Church so often fingered as the enemy of art, thought, and progress (and, for example, the enemy of Malatesta) in The Cantos.

Kung keeps promises and alliances even when it’s hard for him, marrying his daughters to men who are in prison or out of office. He recounts with approval the days “when historians left blanks in their writings, / I mean for the things they didn’t know, / But that time seems to be passing.” This echoes with what Simon Leys writes of the “silences” in The Analects: the topical omissions and their significance. It is funny that Confucius “hated… clever word games” (Leys, page xxx, which, arguably, are a major part of what Pound is doing in The Cantos) but like Pound, he also “distrusted eloquence; he despised glib talkers… For him, it would seem that an agile tongue must reflect a shallow mind; as reflection runs deeper, silence develops” (Leys, xxx).

Little surprise that, later in life, Pound was given to very long silences. Of course, the observation is funny when it comes from Pound of the 1920s, a man who is given to explosive letters, to railing about and opining on all things–regardless of whether he understands them, regardless of whether anyone cares to listen.

The last quotation from Kung is one that is interesting:

“Without character you will
be unable to play on that instrument
Or to execute the music fit for the Odes.
The blossoms of the apricot
blow from the east to the west,
And I have tried to keep them from falling.”

It is here that a strange, haunting irony sets in: Pound is quoting Confucius about the link between character and artistic performance, in a milieu where art, ritual, ethics, philosophy, and power are all linked. “A music fit for the Odes” is a striking phrase since it immediately calls to mind Pound’s own musical studies, and of course “The Odes” could as well be “The Cantos.” There is an admonition here in pursuing art without also refining one’s character–and an admonition that one’s art will be unfitting if one does not refine oneself.

Though Pound attributes the last three lines to Kung, they are his own. Apricot blossoms are a reminder of the apricot orchard where Kung lectured: fragments of the philosopher’s wisdom. They fall from the east to the west–wisdom falling from Asia to Europe, which Pound has tried to keep from falling–indeed, buoyed up by the act of translation. (Pound’s translations of Confucius were published much later–at this stage, in the 1920s, he is still dependent on others’ translations, particular those by French Sinologists.)

Now, what of the novel element? Of what use is Pound’s raging against modern economics–and its effect on the artistic and philosophical world–and his explorations of Confucius in terms of my proposed novel project?

For these purposes, it seems that each canto must be discussed separately.

Canto XII does not immediately suggest anything mystical in itself. It is so utterly modern, so overtly political in the first part, and so locker-room-humor in the second. But it could be argued that this is some sort of camouflage, of course: that the poem is very specifically seizing modern figures–people alive at the time of Pound’s writing–and thrusting them into the poem’s narrative so as to drive some force sensed by Pound in those individuals, against the other force, the one he resented and claimed, here, as his enemy. For Pound is writing this at a time when the wreckage of The Great War is not yet even repaired, aflame with rage at the destruction wrought by the war but also the immense profit gained by industry and banks as a result of the war, and their relation to it.

It also opens up a specific question about sexuality and magic in The Cantos. That there should be such a connection is hardly surprising, given Pound’s interest in ancient rituals, including those at Eleusis, and the love-poetry of the troubadours; and many commentators have discussed this sort of thing in many places. Here we find the first direct analogy between sodomy and usury, and Pound’s highlighting, after medieval canon law, that both were “against natural increase.” Setting aside questions germane to how we, as enlightened progressives in 2012, ought to read this, we ought to be given pause by the fact that Pound is in his thirties, is childless until 1925, when Olga Rudge gives birth to a daughter, Mary, who is raised by a German peasant woman. His wife Dorothy Shakespear separates from him after the birth, though they got back together in 1926 and she soon had a child too: Omar Pound, who was raised by Dorothy Shakespear’s mother in Kensington.

Given the scarcity of children, this raises important and interesting questions about the notion of fecundity in Pound’s mystical aesthetics. There is an interesting essay I read the other day, concerning references in Pound’s The Spirit of Romance (his master’s thesis on Provençal verse, published as a book) and in some to which lecture he refers in the book, where the sexual abstinence of a man who sleeps with a woman (but only sleeps with her) is said to give rise to a heightening of the senses, transcendent visions, and mystical insight. (This is not only mentioned in connection to Simon Magus, but also the Pauline epistles, if I remember right: the book is one of those in my office but I think it’s an essay in Ezra Pound’s Cantos: A Casebook (edited by Peter Malkin) that this connection is made. This would prove an interesting, tension-inducing, and troubling detail in the relationships between Pound and the two women discussed–as well, of course, as the women with whom he was involved earlier. (Yseult Gonne, H.D., and whoever else my research turns up.)

Oh, and one more thought: given all of the magic and so on that I’m happily stuffing into this poem, it may well be that Baldy Bacon–ie. Frank Bacon, which is the real name of the American businessman Pound met in 1910–could be intended as a reference to Sir Francis Bacon. There’s plenty of speculation about connections between Bacon and occult societies in England in his day, and even if they look like trash, they don’t seem more trashy to me than the weird Eleusis-troubadour connection suggested in that infamous footnote in Pound’s The Spirit of Romance. I don’t know enough about the Bacon and the Rosicrucians to make a sensible connection right now, but it could prove worth exploring. Certainly, though, Pound and Bacon shared an interest in restructuring human understanding in a radical way (in terms of Bacon’s hope of a “Great Instauration”, as discussed here). Bacon also had a great influence on American law, and perhaps his thinking was relevant to the legal systems which Pound saw as perverted in the connection of government and banks. Again, this occurs to me at the last minute, and I have no time at the moment to dig deeper. I don’t really see how all that might link up now, but reflection, or further research, may turn something up.

As for Canto XIII, it is, in Indo-Arabic numerals the number 13. Signally, Pound turns here to someone he saw as an anti-superstitious philosopher, but also to a culture where 13 was (as far as I know) not held as especially unlucky. (In countries within the Chinese sphere of influence, it is the number 4 which is unlucky, as it (四, 4) rhymes in Chinese with a word for death (死). Here in Korea, the fourth floor in elevators is marked with F, not 4, because of this aversion.)

As far as it goes, Pound’s turning to Confucius is significant in a few ways, but probably most centrally because it represents the beginning of Pound’s official engagement with Chinese. If you flip through your copy of The Cantos, or the Terrell, it becomes apparent that Chinese turns out to be quite important for the project. I will discuss Fenollosa, and his notions (accepted by Pound) of the Chinese character as ideographic, in more depth later, when we begin to encounter such characters in the poems, but at this point it’s worth it to consider the process of translation, the engagement with an alien language and writing system, could do to a poet who is also an occult worker of magic, specifically someone who works magic or directs occult forces through his writing. 

For that kind of a conceit, there would be built-in benefits to using Chinese, foremost among them its inpenetrability to Pound’s enemies. Should the Cantos fall into the wrong hands, it would be difficult to perform alterations in the text–with supernatural consequences for the world entire–if Chinese characters were used either to failsafe some of the occult functions of the text, to contain significant occult “circuity” on its own, or to fine-tune the safeguards and effects of the text. Anyone with any experience altering such texts would know better than to meddle with a text before understanding the full contents, and this would buy Pound time for retrieving it, or constructing a suitable alternative structure for it.

Then there’s the issue of the construction of the Chinese characters, which, after all, are in many cases composites of different radicals. This kind of composition might not just suit Pound’s imagist and literary sensibilities: it could also serve as a means for steganographic concealment of signficant terms. For example, if one has written the character 氣 (qi, life force), one has also, implicitly, written the character for breath (气) and for rice (米). Perhaps more complex characters could function as a concealment system for pertinent radicals, among less pertinent words. (And this raises the question of whether other cryptographic methods might be used among the other scripts, including Roman lettered-content in the poem.)

Meanwhile, just as much as Pound may be attempting to establish a deeper understanding of the human experience (something Simon Leys argues is impossible without coming to an understanding of Confucius, given its influence on so many cultures and societies in the East), and the apparent likelihood that Pound was also, very much, seeking to find justification for his own theories and philosophical/political inclinations, it may be that Pound was attempting to make good on his plans to write a poem “containing history.” The verb “contain” in this context has always had a slightly ominous resonance to me, contain as in “containment,” as to “contain oneself”; perhaps the reach of Pound’s poetical project here could not extend to China unless he engaged China on its own terms; at first, by visiting the apricot grove of Confucius, and later by steeping himself in the language.

I will have more–likely much more–to say of Pound, Fenollosa, Chinese characters, and Confucius in The Cantos later… but if anyone doubts just how insane this reading project of mine is, flip through The Cantos a bit and see if you can’t find some pages so laden with Chinese characters that it doesn’t suddenly become understandable why I put it off for so long!

Oh, also, this might be a little bit tangential, but I have the feeling that Pound may, as Kenner put it, have been ahead of his time in another way: he looked to the East for models of how the West could be rebuilt after the horror of The Great War. This, of course, was nothing new, for Western writers had been looking to Eastern writing and language and philosophy for a long time: American Renaissance authors were interested in both Japan and ancient Egypt, and European authors sometimes looked to the Near East or India for confirmation of their spiritual hunches. But SF also partakes of this: there was, in the 80s and 90s, a profound fascination with Japan-as-enemy and Japan-as-the-future in the American subgenre of SF known as Cyberpunk. I cannot help but think that, even in the 1920s, Pound’s interest in Japan’s past and philosophy isn’t eerily similar. Not sure I can call this a Neat SF Connection, but I think it’s worth mentioning, even if only to note that both SF and American modernist poetry drank, in more than a few ways, from the same barrel of contaminated rainwater!

This concludes (for the moment) my reading of Cantos XII-XIII; at this point, we’re now a little over 10% of the way through The Cantos (in fact, a bit more than that, but just over 10% through the originally projected number of poems. We’re not yet 10% of the way through the book, though, which suggests that there will be a lot of longer Cantos coming up. My pace will probably keep up, but I’m not sure that I’ll be actually getting through two cantos a week once I hit those. We’l just have to see.

But for now, I am taking a little “break” and reading no cantos for exam week. Instead, I’ll be reading a book or two about Pound’s biography, in a more relaxed manner (though still likely taking notes, as I intend to summarize what I read, at least in terms of points useful to understanding the cantos. I am also considering taking a detour through the earlier poetry of Pound–at least, what is contained in Personae–most of which I have read before, but not in a long time. I figure it will come in handy in terms of contrasts with The Cantos.

Which is less like a holiday and more like a detour overall, but I will also be making time for some pleasure reading, as well, once I’ve caught up on some of my grading… I need to read something else, to be quite honest, and between my classload and this project, I’m short of free time.

In any case, this will give anyone who is quietly reading along out there a chance to catch up, if there indeed is anyone out there doing so! (Marvin, are you out there?)

Anyway, I hope one more good night’s sleep fixes me up. I need to make a trip in to Seoul to pick up a pair of shoes, assuming I can find some in my size that is. More about why in another post.

I haven’t added anything to the SF in South Korea series, in part because I’ve been consumed with other things, but also because I haven’t heard much of the doings about town. However, last night Miss Jiwaku and I took in the newest Korean SF offering —  titled 인류멸망보고서 (and Doomsday Book in English) and despite our worst fears from the advertising and marketing, the film is actually pretty good!

(Miss Jiwaku even went so far as to say she felt it suggested a “way forward” for SF cinema in Korea. More about that later.)

The reason we were worried was because, unless you know something about the film, the trailer might confuse you:

It features a zombie outbreak (in Seoul), a robotic monk in a Buddhist monastery, and a giant asteroid shaped like an 8-ball (like, the 8-ball on a pool table) hurtling towards the Earth. I, for my part, wondered what the hell kind of narrative could knit the three together, and suspected it would take an audacious director to pull it off. Ready for disaster, but hopeful, we went to the movie…

… and discovered it was an omnibus film. That is, a collection of short films marketed under a single title. Thus it was that we got to enjoy three different stories–or, at least, two of them, in my case–and I have to say that each one had its strengths.

The first tale, 멋진 신세계 “Mutjin Sinsegye,” concerns a a man left behind in Seoul when his family goes on an overseas trip; his mother leaves a list of chores for him to complete, including taking out the recycling and dumping the food trash in the communal bin. The man does so, dutifully but with no little horror, and something happens with some of that food trash: an apple that was rotting on the floor of his balcony, which ends up spawning some kind of mutated, viral horror. Rotten apple + the Korean food trash recycling system = wonderful horrible awful zombie plague.

The second tale apparently is an adaptation of Korean SF author Park Sung-Hwan’s 2004 prize-winning story (from a national SF writing competition, as far as I can tell), a piece titled “레디메이드 보 살” (“Readymade Bodhisattva” is a direct transliteration, though I would probably suggest “Prefab Bodhisattva” as more similar in meaning). The story appears to be online here. (In Korean; there isn’t an English translation as far as I know.) It features a robot that, living among Buddhist monks, seems to be a devoted and outstanding Buddhist… without any apparent breakdown or change in its operating system, as the monks suspected. But when the owner of the robotics company decides it’s time for the robots in that line to be destroyed, things take a surprising turn.

The third tale, which in my opinion is the weakest of the three, concerns a little girl who orders a replacement 8-ball for her father’s pool table, since the old 8-ball cracked. By a strange series of coincidences–or are they?–the replacement that get delivered to her is about ten kilometers in diameter, and approoaching the Earth fast enough to, er, do some damage, let’s say.

Though I’m not the biggest fan of omnibus films, I think they can do justice to adaptation of SF short stories. The fact that the third film is a collaboration between the directors of the first two isn’t surprising, since someone’s penchant for social satire takes very similar form in the first and third films. That said, the satire is hilarious, at least if you have a brain in your head. (Sadly, in a theater that was unfortunately already somewhat empty, Miss Jiwaku and I were the only ones laughing aloud at parts that were genuinely hilarious.)

I’m going to add a cut below, because there are spoilers in the discussion I want to add about the three segments specifically. So consider yourself warned. In the paragraph following this one, there be spoilers a-lurking! (And also pics from the film.)

Oh, but one more thing: I don’t know whether the filmmakers are aware of Connie Willis’ Doomsday Book but I do know it exists in (supposedly very good) Korean translation. I thought it was weird they chosen that name for their SF omnibus, but obviously it has nothing to do with the Willis novel.

The first story–that of a zombie outbreak in Seoul–was notable for several reasons.

One of them was the source of the zombie contagion. It’s worth noting that the segment was made in 2006–as was the second segment, after which funding fell apart and the project had to be shelved until 2011. The reason I mention this is that the film echoes an observation made about the 2008 US Beef Protests in Seoul in the pages of the (now defunct, in print form anyway) Korean SF magazine Fantastique; namely, that zombies were mentioned on both sides of the political spectrum in response the the protests and their focus. (The protesters tended to argue that their fears of US Beef were rooted in a terror about the prospect of Koreans being “zombified” by mad cow disease; the opponents, the political conservative establishment, argued that the leftists had already been “zombified” themselves, by the ideologues who organized the protests.)

The signal thing is that the source of the zombie contagion in the film is not American beef, but instead Korean beef, fed on the waste products of Korean food trash, which–as you’ll know if you’ve lived in a Korean apartment building, and dumped your food trash into one of the communal bins–is a horrifically disgusting business. Those who have not done so might imagine that the acting is exaggerated in that part of the film, but from my experience I know that it is not. I am not sure that the director would have done things differently if the segment had been filmed after 2008, when the US Beef-zombification meme had arisen. And though the film likely would not in 2006 have reached a big enough audience to complicate the 2008 beef-zombification meme, I can’t help but wonder if a feature zombie film on the subject could have done so.

Still, for me, it’s a step forward that the film locates the source of contagion in the industrial processes of agriculture taking place in Korea, instead of the common, and oft-heard, trope of it always being corruption-from-without (ie. the manifestation of xenophobic anxiety). This represents the power of SF to drive home criticisms and discussion of the real world–the world that is of direct and crucial concern to the audience. While Korean society tends to be quick to worry about the industrial agricultural processes of other countries exporting to Korea (China, the USA, and so on) they tend to be just a little too comfortable with Korea’s domestic agribusiness… while those know know the truth about it–about outbreaks of bird flu, hoof-in-mouth disease, and so on–know that that comfort is probably to ssome degree unwarranted.

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I also think the zombie apocalypse visited upon Seoul is pretty well-done, as far as zombiepocalypses go. And yet the director manages to tell a story–to put a human face on the destruction, to squeeze a tragic romance into the story in a way that makes dark comedic sense. Very well done.

The second film, the one based on Park Sung-Hwan’s story, is an odd segment. I think it’s amazingly well done in terms of rendering the robot, and the setting (I mean the monastery where most of the action takes place) is perfect. I noticed everyone speaking very, very formal Korean constantly, which was odd–during my trips of monasteries, and even occasional interactions with Buddhist monks, I didn’t find them speaking in extremely formal terms to me or even to older Koreans with me (on a couple of occasions).

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Miss Jiwaku hasn’t yet read Park’s original story, but she said that she got the feeling the director was, at certain points, engaging in homage to the Japanese SF series Ultraman (I think she said it was Ultraman, anyway), since a lot of the language seemed to remind her of that. There are some interesting twists and turns, but what makes this segment work most is that it is based on a real philosophical question that has been asked, and answered, within a specifically Korean cultural context: not exactly whether AIs can “be human”–though Hollywood seems to have us believing that human status is what intelligent nonhumans will always most desire–but rather whether nonhumans, intelligent machines, will be able to attain the most revered and elevated states that humans aspire to. Can a machine become a bodhisattva? The answer offered is especially interesting because of the explanation the robot gives: that, while humans must struggle against their attachments and emotions, robots are born tabula rasa, primed and ready for a bodhisattva state.

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In that, the film inverts our usual arrogance: if we’re special, then it’s just as possible we’re especially handicapped, and our struggle to spiritual or philosophical enlightenment is harder, not easier, because of our humanity. Though I haven’t read Mr. Park’s story all the way through, I cannot help but think that the reason this story–unlike the other two in the film–has this deeper speculative-philosophical dimension, and indeed shares in the universal inquiry and questioning that is present in all the best SF, is because it was based on a story by an actual SF author. More, please! More!

(Which is not to say that the first segment didn’t have a philosophical  issue at hand: but it’s an overt one, not a deeper, nuanced dilemma we cannot yet answer; anyone with his or her head screwed on straight knows agribusiness is not sustainable, but nobody knows right now whether an AI could become a saint or bodhisattva.)

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I was not a fan of the third segment in this film, in part because it seems to me to fall into some of the same traps that previous SF films in Korea have fallen into. While I very much enjoyed parts of it–such as the news broadcast section, which is brilliantly hilarious, though a bit reminiscent of the TV program in the first segment–overall, this was sort of SF of the handwavey mumbo-jumbo variety: um, like, it’s destiny for a broken 8-ball to get tossed out a window and land in a hole in the concrete that’s the opwn mouth of a wormhole and then a little girl orders a new 8-ball for a tiny amount of money from an alien website she accessed via Naver, so that the earth (or at least Seoul) could get ruined by an alien-send 8-ball asteroid from space. Or something.

It was cute in  parts, frustrating in parts, and there were a couple of special effects that were phenomenal, like the delivery man near the end. Oh, and it has Bae Doona, which I’d normally think of as a good thing (though I was confused at first: she looks nothing at all like the little girl she was supposed to have been in the earlier part of the film). In the end, I felt frustrated because I couldn’t help imagine what could have been made if the directors had used those resources to adapt a story of the same quality as Park Sung Hwan’s. Cute and funny plus wormholes and weirdness does not SF make. At least, not the best stuff.

However, I should qualify my criticism: I wasn’t crazy about “Happy Birthday” but it was still leaps and bounds better than most Korean SF films made so far. It kicked most of those flat outright. It just wasn’t quite up to the quality of the other two segments in my opinion.

In any case, I do hope Miss Jiwaku is right that this heralds a route forward for Korean SF cinema, in that I hope more directors turn to Korea’s SF authors for material, in that more directors consider the possibilities of lower-budget omnibus projects, and in that more directors start grappling with ideas, and with the SF genre on a deeper level than just the superficial.

These are not exactly typical readings of the poems, so much as readings I’m doing with a specific research project in mind — how to write Ezra Pound as a figure in a novel in which modernist artists, poets, and musicians secretly waged an occult war in the earlier half of the 20th century. If you’d like to know more about the project, I recommend scrolling down to the bottom of extended post, and reading the first installment in this series.

Last week, we examined the first two “Malatesta Cantos”; we’re going to finish that particular set this week, by checking out Cantos X and XI.  While the Malatesta Cantos are some of the most easily read of the Cantos I’ve worked my way through in the past (up to about the first forty or so) I have to say that this doesn’t exactly make them the most readable. They’re longer than the others, and full of quotations. There’s a narrative arc involved, but it’s not  a rather familiar, fairly simple one: the great man rises up, does great things, is set upon by the mediocres around him, and falls.

The image of Malatesta most popular among Pound scholars.

One gets a sense that Pound would have been a steady and constant viewer of The Sopranos, had he been born a century later, and I can’t help but think of how Hugh Kenner argues he was very much ahead of his time in ways we deign not to discuss. The quips about this or that condottiero being “invited to lunch” in Canto X remind me of the Sopranos-code for a mafioso meeting: a “sit-down.” While there was obviously some interest in the condottieri of Renaissance Italy, at least in literate circles — Hemingway is mentioned having chatted about them with Pound — specifically about the intricacies of their military campaigning, during some trip to Italy (again, in the Kenner). Was this ahead of Pound’s time? I’m not sure, but I get the vague sense that the sort of macho-yet-poetry-sponsoring hero/antihero of the Malatestiad wasn’t really a popular type in Pound’s day… I could be wrong, though.

Cantos X and XI describe the decline and fall of Sigismundo Malatesta. They are full of snippets of treacherous plots (both personal and institutional) against him, moments of bad luck, and occasional missteps that proved to plant the seeds of his undoing. Sigismundo, who was doing so well for himself, finds himself beset by enemies, and though he fights the good fight, cannot resist the forces amassed against him, and finally he falls, though even toward the end he remains, unshakeable, a man of greatness — or so Pound would have us see it.

One of the obvious ways to read this is that Pound is talking about himself. It’s not an unreasonable assumption, after all: writers do this kind of thing all the time, and certainly Pound saw himself as surrounded by mediocrity, and a society which promoted mediocrity.

This is not unusual: most people with any brains tend to see the world in this way — this being one of the major reasons why the Foundation-type narrative is so common in SF. Which is NEAT SF CONNECTION #1 for today’s post: For those who haven’t read their Asimov (and I don’t blame you) the Foundation-narrative is the story of a secret conspiracy of smart, educated people saving the world/civilization/the universe. It’s a concept that has appeared in a number of SF narratives over the years, though of of course at this moment only a few examples come to mind: Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End; Fritz Leiber’s The Big Time; Pohl’s Time Patrol novels; and surely much more that escapes my memory at the moment.

(And, indeed, this as much as anything else can explain Pound’s attraction to fascism; if, like him, only you decide to see people’s general functional mediocrity as effective stupidity, it becomes clearly obvious that democratic government is a bad idea. You don’t give the steering wheel of a bus to someone who couldn’t in a million years get a drivers’ license, after all. But while those of us who are for similar reasons unnerved by the power of the ignorant and the stupid in  democracies recognize that it’s impossible to set up a metric everyone will agree on while maintaining the ideals of democratic society (or without tearing a democratic society apart), Pound took refuge in fascism — in the idea that a consensus would emerge not through debate and discussion, but through strong, manly leadership. Poor Pound: he didn’t realize until much too late that most fascist leaders, and most fascist followers, are just as mediocre, but without the checks and balances to power.)

Another way of seeing this narrative movement is as a criticism of the institutional structures which mitigated the best efforts of great men — a circle in which I imagine Pound holding himself. In the case of Malatesta, the criticisms are squarely aimed at the Papacy, but of course in Renaissance Italy, the Papacy is essentially the major institution of power; in Pound’s day, the institutions of power would be different, especially as Pound himself would have seen them: the banks, bankers, and financial elites; the arbiters of poetic and artistic taste; the idiot governments who let (or made) things like The Great War take place.

There is a level on which the inter-familial warfare of Italy in the age of Sigismundo could be held up to mirror the international fighting that took place from 1914-1918, and which horrified Pound profoundly. Here is where the question of who parallels the Church begins to matter most, and from what we all know of Pound, he will be seeking to describe his enemies in terms of economics.

Why a decline-and-fall story? Well, of course, the story of all “great men” who survive is a decline-and-fall story: nobody can remain great indefinitely, no culture or society can do so, no artistic form can do so, at least not without an eventual destruction-and-renewal. (And there is some sense in which Pound is doing so with poetry-as-he-knows-it, in the very act of writing The Cantos: compare it to his earlier work, as collected in Personae, and this is evident.) Pound may have chosen Sigismundo for reasons of personal affinity as well — his anti-Catholicism and interest in pagan religion; his particular defiance; his various peculiarities, such as his exhortation (mentioned in Canto XI) of women in his domains not to dress sedately (as in many other Italian city-states of the time) but instead to deck themselves in ornate finery, the better to glorify their city. One imagines Pound saw in Sigismundo a kind of kindred spirit — or at least, a kindred iconoclast.

But Sigismundo’s decline and fall also demonstrates the brutality and uselessness of a poorly-aligned world system. Pound seems eager to find parallels with modern, post-Great War Europe: for example, Malatesta’s address of a council in Mantua that (unlike everyone else seemed to think) Italians should do the fighting in Constantinople, and others should pay, since, in his opinion, Italians were braver and better fighters, and everyone in the region of Constantinople was already too demoralized to offer proper resistance.

The international council in Mantua may well have reflected his unease with the then-new League of Nations. There is a wonderful, if lengthy, passage on pages 371-72 of A. David Moody’s book Ezra Pound: Poet (Vol. I) which discusses this unease of Pound’s, essentially suggesting he was a kind of proto-Libertarian in 1919 (when the “League of Nations” was a proposed idea, and not a reality) and in 1920 (when it had taken form):

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Pound in 1919 and 1920 suspected any and every organized group with power over the lives of others, whether it was a church, a state, or a network of bankers, of being a conspiracy against the rights and values of the individual citizen. He was against the assertion of nationalities and nationalisms because that led to the subordination of the individual to an actual state or to an idea of one… As for the then proposed ‘league of nations,’ that appeared to him ‘about as safe and as inviting for the individual as does a combine of large companies for the employee’. It would mean power being removed even further from the people and being put in the hands of ‘a small committee appointed by Governmental inner cliques in each nation’. Pound really did believe in democracy, even in a pure and absolute democracy in which every individual should have the opportunity to be true to his or her own nature without let or hindrance. He believed that in a democracy the state should obey and serve its people rather than the other way round. His position was complicated though by his dividing ‘the people’ into the few and the rest–the self-determining individuals and the mass of sheep.

What he really wanted was a society of and for the genuine individuals, a civilization which would transcend nations and collective cults and corporations, and from which enlightenment would spread and prevail. ‘The function of civilization’, he declared, ‘is to depreciate material values and to build up values of intelligence.’ Rather than a League of Nations let there be ‘a centre of civilization’. what we would now call a transnational research institute, to bring together creative thinkers imbued with a profound understanding of what made life worth living; and let them concentrate on solving the pressing problems of the post-war situation, starting with the dysfunctional economic system. He probably did not expect that such a centre would be set up; but he did find what he was looking for in one odd individual, Major C.H. Douglas.

… which is not the first parallel we may find between him and Heinlein — NEAT (er, DISTURBING?) SF CONNECTION #2 for today. Heinlein (a libertarian) and Pound (an early proto-Libertarian of sorts) both were not just interested in the theories of Douglas and his Social Credit movement; they also had somewhat utopian ideals about how power ought to be distributed in society — well, utopian in their eyes, dystopian in many others (mine included). There is more than a little of that vision of the “few” and “the sheep” in Heinlein’s work, for example in the requirements for suffrage in Starship Troopers.

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(And to get it out of the way, there is, also, the reference to Morea — the Peloponessus, which may have been the inspiration for Tolkien’s Mines of Moria, though I am not sure this is really a Neat SF Connection.)

There’s another way to read the decline and fall of Sigismundo Malatesta at the hands of his enemies, and that is, to see it in connection with the poetical world in which Pound was working at the time. It’s well known that Pound’s income in England could not match the increasing price of living, and that Pound left England in a fuss: left and right there were cuts, and his income became increasingly limited in London, and this was surely one reason he finally left when he did. That his bitterness at the financial situation might meld with his dissatisfaction with having failed at his most grandiose of dreams seems natural — especially with such grand expectations for himself.

Just as one senses Pound’s feeling that Malatesta should, instead of running for his life, be running Italy, one can feel Pound’s frustration that, instead of having ascended to the height of English literary life, he ended up leaving broke, busted, on the thin side; he left having effected not much of that palpable change in English society which he had thought he might achieve, and having found that England in fact did not have as much room for  literary heroes as he’d hoped — certainly, not for Pound as a literary hero, at any rate.

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Here, having read the text before helps with the gift of prescience — for knowing that the rage of Pound’s Hell-Cantos — numbered XIV-XV — seethe only a few pages away, the same rage becomes visible in the telling of the Malatestiad. While Pound’s focus is on the hero Sigismundo, he spares a great deal of time to disparage his enemies. His enemies, or his enemies? Given the number of panhistorical correspondences Pound has assigned so far in the poem, and given the fact he does so again, and later — at some point, I recall reading, he masks Eliot as “Arnaut” while recalling a conversation they had, to spare Eliot embarrassment — one cannot help but wonder who, for Pound, “Wattle” Sforza represented; who the rank and foul Pio (Pope Pius II) stood in for; whom it was that Pound envisioned as wearing the painted-on mask of Benzi, the Vatican-appointed accuser charged with presenting the case against Malatesta. Whom, the treacherous betrayers?

One imagines Pound may have had names in mind, faces — maybe not for exact correspondences, perhaps, but likely for types of slights. He started out pondering Dante best-known long-poem as a possible model for The Cantos, and that work — Dante’s Commedia – was absolutely a work of propaganda, of naming names and attacking enemies.

There are other interesting moments, such as the one near the end of Canto XI that catches Hugh Kenner’s eye so much he uses it as the caption for a shot of the Tempio’s ceiling:

In the gloom, the gold gathers the light against it.

Also, the bit about one of Sigimundo’s pranks, beginning at the bottom of the third page of Canto X:

And that he did among other things
Empty the fonts of the chiexa of holy water
And fill up the same full with ink
That he might in God’s dishonour
Stand before the doors of the said chiexa
Making mock of the inky faithful, they
Issuing thence by the doors in the pale light of the sunrise
Which might be considered youthful levity
but was really a profound indication;

“Whence that his, Sigismundo’s foetor fill the earth
And stank up through the air and stars to heaven
Where–save they were immune from sufferings–
It had made the emparadised spirits pewk”
from their jeweled terrace.

A profound indication indeed: the idea of church founts full of ink is one appealing to an anti-clerical, anti-Christian writer almost by default, for all the ways it can symbolize a religion’s black mark upon its adherents, their complicity in inscribing its madness upon themselves, and also the defiant assault of writing — more ink — against the faith the author refuses to respect and cower before.

Striking, too, is the burning in effigy of Malatesta — of Pound, perhaps? — at the bottom of the page where the previous quotation concludes:

So they burnt our brother in effigy
A rare maginificent effigy costing 8 florins 48 bol
(i.e. for the pair, as the first one wasn’t a good enough likeness)
And Borso said the time was ill-suited
to tanta novità, such doings or innovations,
God’s enemy and man’s enemy, stuprum, raptum,
I. N. R. I. Sigismun Imperator, Rex Proditorum.

Pound, while he was away, had parts of his income slashed, and returned to London from a trip to France (in, I believe it was, 1919) to discover his income severely reduced. Surely, there is some echo for him in the sudden excommunication Sigismundo suffered in absentia; both of them after all, suffered financially thereafter.

I also find interesting the list of Sigismundo’s men — what Terrell calls a “Homeric roster,” as Pound seems to be imitating the list of names for the followers or crews of heroes in the Homeric epics. It is interesting also as Sigismundo has eleven — not twelve — followers.

But for me, far more striking is the passage on page 50 (of my edition, at least, a few pages before the end of Canto XI) where Pound returns to the steps of the arena, perhaps also the steps of the Dogana, all the way back in Canto II:

And we sit here. I have sat here
For forty thousand years…

This short pair of lines, I suspect, suggest a solution to the problem of how we are supposed to read the Malatestiad. For it is easy to imagine Pound grinding axes, or fantasizing about a hero the world might need:

But if The Cantos were a magical document, as the story I want to write suggests, then it’s hard to imagine Pound would take time off to rant about his enemies. He might spend some ink constructing literary-thaumaturgical traps, the poetical-magic equivalent of sticking pins into voodoo-dolls that are made in effigy of his enemies… and there, the reference to Malatesta being burned in effigy during the auto-da-fe in the Vatican takes on a deeper and more powerful significance.

Perhaps, also, there is a return to the necromantic fascinations of the earlier Cantos: it could be that Pound is using the poem to channel some of the spirit, the energy, of Malatesta. After all, just because one sees history as a series of looping reinstantiations of the same clash of historical forces, doesn’t mean one imagines destiny has laid out all the results.  Likewise, perhaps Pound is attempting to wield some kind of controlling power over the destructive energies unleashed by the Great War; perhaps he hopes that they can be harnessed for the same kind of good that Malatesta patronized, while he could, amid all his own destructive acts.

The poems resist magical, occultic reading, but that suggests there’s all the more reason to examine them carefully: where one suspects a trap least, is where a trap might most likely be laid; and the idea of Pound’s that returns late in Canto XI — and once again, at the beginning of Canto XII, as we shall see next week — is of the Roman arena, of the spectacle of history played out as some kind of gladiatorial show. If it is, then what can we learn from watching the show? What can be learned by watching it for forty-four thousand years… and why that number, specifically? Did Pound imagine it perhaps to contain all of human history? As simply a very, very long time? To stretch to so pre-Greek, more ancient time? It is impossible to say, except that the vastness stretches back farther than any human history…

(I wonder what Lovecraft would have made of that span of time, in terms of the dating of the strange city discussed in At the Mountains of Madness.)

As I said: no normal reading of The Cantos, this.

Next week, we’ll hit Cantos XII and XIII, in all likelihood: the story of Baldy Bacon, and a full-fledged Kung (Confucius) Canto. Next week is also midterm exam week, and I’ll spend my spare time (of which I’ll actually have some, for a change) not just brewing, but also reading a different Pound-related source, probably one of the several biographies I have assembled. (I’m betting it’ll be the A. Davd Moody one, but a few others look interesting too! It’ll be a break, but will also keep me on task.

(If I’m lucky, I’ll manage to read a second book during the week as well — I’m eyeing a few, though I’m not sure which I’ll grab if I have time!)

Earlier this week, I procured a sample of Wyeast Belgian Wit yeast from a brewer friend in Seoul, Bryan; this is supposedly the classic Wit yeast, in other words a version of the strain used by Hoegaarden. The last Wit I made, I used the other Hoegaarden strain, which is known as Forbidden Fruit; though that beer took a long, long time to come into its own — probably because of the huge amount of raw wheat I used. (50% of the grist was raw wheat; the other 50% air-dried, unkilned, home-malted barley from another local brewer, Garrett.)

This time around, I decided to go for something that could age a little more quickly; less wheat overall, but a bigger portion of malted wheat, some torrefied wheat, and a small portion of raw wheat and oats. But I also decided to do a double-sized batch, and split it, so that I could do a side-by-side between the two yeasts I now have on hand.

The recipe was simple (and can be viewed in whole form here):

• 5kg of Pilsner Malt
• 3kg of Wheat Malt
• 1.5 kg of Torrefied Wheat
• 0.5kg of raw wheat (boiled in a pressure cooker and added to the mash after cooking)
• 0.35kg of Quaker Quick Oats

The mash temperature was about 65°C, though fluctuated somewhat — going up when I added the cooked wheat, and dropping down slowly during the long mash rest.

That grist was used to produce 47L of wort, which I then boiled, adding the following during the boil:

• 60 min: 60 grams of Tradition (whole hops), ~5%AA
• 30 min: 28 grams of Czech Saaz, ~5% AA
• 15 min: 10 grams of Chamomile Flowers, 8 grams of crushed coriander, 4 grams of bitter orange peel, and 4 grams of Tangerine zest, 1 tab of whirlfloc (crushed)
• 5 min: 28 grams of Czech Saaz

I decided to go with Whirlfloc because even though Wits are often cloudy, I am going to give this beer a good long post-chill settling rest, and rack the beer into the buckets when I can control how much trub gets in. I’m not necessarily going for a clear beer — this is a Wit, after all — but I figure between the yeast and the protein that will doubtless get through, I don’t need to pruposefully leave proteins in suspension or anything!

I decided to experiment with making a lighter, milder, but still-intensely hoppy IPA-ish brew after reading a bit about experiments towards that style by The Mad Fermentationist, and discussions among a few brewers here in Korea regarding the brewing of a hoppy session ale. I figured I would try making a hoppy, low-ABV beer with some of my favorite hops — Citra and Sorachi Ace — to see whether I could pull it off. Since I was already planning to make an IPA, it made sense

For the second half of the batch, I’ll cap the mash with 500 grams of wheat malt, 500 grams of flaked rye, and 100 grams of Gambrinus Honey malt, and let the wheat malt mash for an hour, while the flaked rye and Gambrinus Honey malt steep. I’ll mash that at a pretty high temperature, hoping for a higher proportions of unfermentable sugars to get into the wort. This should boost the OG of the second batch’s runnings to 1.039-ish, though if it’s a little lower that’s okay. (I can always steep some Carahell or something in the boil pot before boiling it, if the gravity comes out low. I suppose I should test it.)

This mini-aɪ pʰiː eɪ? is hopped with Citra and Sorachi Ace, hops I have successfully paired before in the beer I made for the late-hopping experiment we conducted last summer. (Mine were the Ship O’Boons beers, posted about here and here.) I figure, with how much I love Citra and Sorachi Ace, it’ll be hard to go too far wrong. Like the other IPA, I’ll be fermenting this with a California Ale yeast, from the cake used to ferment my low-ABV braggot.

The specific hop schedule is a bit unusual: whenm I cap the mash, I’m going to add 30 grams of Citra pellet hops. I’ll follow up with 5 grams of Citra at first wort, 8g at 30 min, 9 grams of Sorachi Ace at 20 minutes, 10 grams of Citra at 15 minutes, 11 grams of Sorachi at 10 minutes, 12 grams of Citra at 5 minutes, 14 grams each of Sorachi and Citra at flameout, and then 14 grams or so each for dry hopping. This sounds like small amounts of hops for a heavily-hopped beer, but since the OG is so low, and hops are so high in alpha acids, this is a pretty heavy hop schedule for a beer of this size, with a BU:GU of about 0.93…  I could go higher, but I figure this is hoppy enough for me.

The recipe, for those interested, is here.

UPDATE (12 April 2012): By the way, I seem to have overboiled the brew. I did this beer in a bigger pot than usual, and discovered the evaporation rate is also higher. It ended up at 1.050-ish. We’ll see whether I want to add boiled water to the keg, but I have a feeling I won’t want to. I would have done so this morning, but the beer has already krausened, since I pitched it onto some of a live yeast cake. The gravity sample tasted okay, though it will likely just end up as a hoppy Pale Ale, and not so much a micro-IPA.

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If I planned on bottling it, I’d probably have fun doing up a label, but I’ll almost certainly be kegging these two batches.

As I mentioned, this is to be a parti-gyle brew, and instead of blending runnings, I’m simply going to cap the mash and let it sit for an hour more before pulling the second half of the runnings. 25L for first half, 25L for the second half. Since I have two heat sticks, I can easily just boil both out on the balcony and then bring them indoors to chill and rack them into fermenters.

I’m experimenting here with making a normal AIPA (using Pacific Gem as the single hop, to see if I get any blackberry flavor from it), and then a smaller, micro-IPA of less than 4%, with a heavy dose of late hops. The idea is to get proportionally similar levels of bitterness, but also equally intense levels of hop flavor and aroma. We’ll see how that plan fares.

The recipe is simple. The main mash is 3kg each of Vienna, Munich, and Pilsner malt, plus 750 grams of Carahell, 300 grams of Melanoidin malt (yes, for an over-the-top maltiness), and 250 grams of Caramunich II, mainly for color. The wort should be about 1.063-ish for the bigger beer, the Wonmisan aɪ pʰiː eɪ?.

The hop schedule for this is simple: 10g at first wort, 15g at 30 minutes, 20g at 20 min, 25g at 10 min, 30g at 5 min, and another 30g at flameout, plus a substantial dry hop addition when it’s in the keg. I will ferment this brew with California Ale Yeast, using the cake from the low-ABV braggot that I’ll be racking to a new carboy to clear later today.

My goal for this particular brew is simply to make a good solid IPA, and to test whether Pacific Gem actually has a blackberry flavor that I can detect. If I decide I want a little more complexity, I’ll find another hop to add for dry hopping, and that should do the trick.

In another post, I’ll explain my plans for the second runnings. For those interested, the recipe for this beer is here, and the recipe for the partigyle mash is here.

These are not exactly typical readings of the poems, so much as readings I’m doing with a specific research project in mind — how to write Ezra Pound as a figure in a novel in which modernist artists, poets, and musicians secretly waged an occult war in the earlier half of the 20th century. If you’d like to know more about the project, I recommend scrolling down to the bottom of extended post, and reading the first installment in this series.

After a brief look at Cantos VI and VII last week, I’m going to try keep up the pace, and tackle half of the for Malatesta Cantos (XIII and IX) this week.  Creative types beware: there comes a time in your life where you will be attracted to nutball crap.

Trust me: I’ve been through it, so I know personally. I’ve long suspected that there’s a scene in the Odyssey that embodies this. It’s the one wherein Odysseus has his men tie him to the mast of the ship, with wax in their ears, so that he can hear the siren’s song without falling to the usual fate of those who do so. The problem is that most of us are not captains of ships with crews to tie us to the mast. Rather, many of us — the poets, the novelists, the composers, the painters — work alone, and alone is the most vulnerable of states of human beings.

As Humphery Carpenter relates in his biography of Pound (A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound), after finishing Canto VII, the poet set aside The Cantos for two years. Through this time, he did other things — like moving to France, for one, and assisting T.S. Eliot with The Waste Land for another, and like writing an opera.

Yeah, an opera, and you’d think that for Pound — who basically considered himself tone-deaf — this would be nutball crap enough for a lifetime… and yet, it turned out to be more a minor, odd episode. It’s a treatment of poems by Francois Villon, a mid-fiftteenth century Frenchman Wikipedia describes as a “poet, thief, and vagabond.” The bits of the opera, Le Testament de François Vilhon, that I’ve heard were not impressive if taken as attempted operatic music; but they are impressive if taken as the record of a poet’s attempt to come to an understanding of rhythm, breath, melody, and harmony. (And Richard Taruskin has suggested there is actually musical value to the thing, if only just barely.) You can hear bits of it here.

But in 1922, Pound did return to the Cantos, and the first he completed is one which, in its final form, we have already read (weeks ago: the original Canto 8, which he wrote at this point, became Canto II in the final text). It is worth noting, he drafted that Canto, now Canto II, while reading James Joyce’s Ulysses for the first time in book form. Thereafter, he began casting about for a new grand subject to treat, one up to the grade set by earlier figures in the poem — Odysseus, Sordello, several troubadours, and various gods.

The new subject he finally settled upon was suggested to him by “a visit Italy in the spring and summer of 1922″ (Carpenter, 418). During his trip, Pound went to Siena, Venice, Sirmione, Rimini, Ravenna, and Verona, and it was in Rimini that he visited the Tempio Malatestiano. (And apparently at some point after his trip, Pound read a biography of Malatesta, by one C.E. Yiriate, who presented him as, in Pound’s words, “a failure worthy of all the successes of his age.”

The relationship between the Tempio Malatestiano and The Cantos is one worth remarking on. Tempio, of course, is temple; Malatestiano designates it is the temple of the Malatestas. It was the brainchild of one Sigismondo Malatesta, an Italian condottiero; the condottieri (that’s the plural) were what we would now call warlords… sort of. For Pound, at least, condottieri like Malatesta seem to have embodied a particular set of paradoxes necessary for the achievement of great things. It’s easy enough to try map these sorts of men onto Don Corleones or Tony Soprano, except that the vicious, rapacius warlord side of them was only part of the picture. As Cantos VIII-XI unfold, we realize that Malatesta was not only responsible for a mercenary army, but also for the funding of various things that fit very well into the what we now call “the Renaissance.”

The Malatestas may have been the type to kidnap and rape the neighbor’s daughter on a whim, but they were also the type to fund the translation of Greek verse into Latin; they were patrons (and fans) of music and of romantic seduction; and Malatesta in particular was a sort of twisted mind of exactly the type to appeal to Pound, the proof of which is no less than the Tempio Malatestiano.

To build a Tempio:

• Take a medieval Franciscan church — one partly in ruins — in Rimini, and reconstruct it by adding an outer, more modern layer around what’s left of the original structure, gutting the inside, and remodeling.
• When you reconstruct it, don’t make it look at all Christian. In fact, just for good measure, omit Christian symbols completely. Make sure it is full of depictions of pagan figures, for one thing, and that it celebrates science. Generally include stuff that normally would not be included in a Renaissance-era church, like tributes to oneself and one’s wife (for whom the structure is intended as a kind of sepulchre) in ways that ambiguously suggest you might be described as deities on the level of the pagan gods, but also include chapels to the planets (with zodiacal figures), the liberal arts, childhood games, astronomy, and so on.
• Make enemies with the pope, and get excommunicated, and have your Tempio criticized by the Vatican as being “full of pagan gods and idols.”
• Fail to finish construction, because being excommunicated is bad for Renaissance-era business in Italy, but leave the glorious tangled mess for the tourists to marvel at. Or, at any rate, for a proto-fascist poet to marvel at in 1922.

[Malatesta Group]

VIII  He concentrates on the life of a time. Wars, artists.

IX  The Tempio. The post-bag. (Two emblems of The Cantos.)

X  His enemies gather forces. The burning in effigy.

XI His decline (Cf. Le [sic] Cid, Canto III). “In the gloom, the gold.”

These fragments you have shelved (shored).

“Slut!” “Bitch!” Truth and Calliope.

Slanging each other sous les lauriers:

That Alessandro was negroid. And Malatesta

Sigismund:

Frater tamquam

Et compater carissime: tergo

…hanni de

…dicis

…entia

Equivalent to:

Giohanni of the Medicis

Florence.

And he began building the TEMPIO

And this is what they found in the post-bag:

I haven’t read The Hunger Games or the other books in the series, in part because I hadn’t caught much buzz but also just because I’ve been busy with other things. (The first book has been on my shelf about a year, as have many other books.) But I hadn’t heard much of the buzz, like I said, but it seemed like a potentially interesting North American, SFnal treatment of the Japanese film Battle Royale, so I thought we might as well give it a shot. When I heard there was a movie coming out — which was not long before it did come out, by the way —  I got curious and Miss Jiwaku and I booked a ticket for the opening night, which I think in Korea was on Thursday night.

When the film began, I thought it was a well-made movie that would probably be interpreted as a bit too kiddie for Korean audiences. Miss Jiwaku had said she’d heard it was bad from a guy (who happens to be Korean-American) whom she knows from Indonesian classes in Jakarta, though my retort — “Yeah, and he takes off his pants in public when he’s drunk…” — summed up what I thought of his reaction. (The guy has great taste in food, but in movies, not so much.)
But when the first announcer showed up on stage in District 12, in her awful purple outfit with awful makeup and an awful purple flower in her hair, I knew a lot of people would instantly think of Johnny Depp’s Willy Wonka, and both Depp’s and Helena Bonham Carter’s characters in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland. I suspected that the film would probably look pretty ridiculous to Korean audiences.

But of course, the Korean public’s taste in movies usually makes no sense to me anyway, and indeed, neither does the Korean public’s attitudes about makeup and fashion — which made me think a little more about the fashion of the Capitol and of the Districts of the film. The fashion in the two districts we glimpse — the home districts of Katniss and Rue  – is very much recognizable to us, pretty much from the scattered memories we have of what poor people looked and dressed like during the Great Depression. This identifies the District kids as familiar, as underdogs, as poor, and as authentically like us in a way that contrasts with the fashion of the Capitol.

Which leads me to try imagine a modern-day source for the makeup and fashion of the Capitol. While it does remind me of the most cutting-edge fashions in Korea — men in makeup with very odd hair and an oddly feminized look about them, and women in horribly frilly, flowery, garish-looking outfits and heavy makeup — that perceived similarity  is obviously quite idiosyncratic.

But I think the route to my idiosyncratic perception might be revealing: I am an outsider, a foreigner, a Westerner in Korea. That is to say, the fashion and makeup norms of South Korean culture are alien to me, and thus look more unusual (and sometimes discomfitingly weird) because they’re that of a foreign culture.

Of course, The Capitol and the Districts are supposed to be in one country, and pardon me for saying this but that country is pretty obviously readable as the USA. So if I were looking for two separate, alien cultures in the USA…

… well, they call it the culture war.

The reason I didn’t get it right away, of course, is that the film seems to root for the rural Midwesterner. The hero, the victim: it’s the kid from the countryside. The villains? It’s those decadent city folk, who dress all weird: the men wear makeup and are all oddly femmy or at least are able to be deeply fake and calculating (though they might, like Lenny Kravitz, be somewhat sympathetic, they’re still consummately fake and focused on appearance — he still has gold scare makeup on, after all, and dolls up Katniss in fake fire and skin-deep beauty), while the women of the Capitol seem to cake on their makeup and totter about in heels and horrid dresses. They dye their hair weird colors. They cheer at awful, horrible, evil spectacles in which poor underdog people are victimized.

Which is kind of how some Red State folk see some Blue State folk, isn’t it? The decadent, parasitic, exploitative, amoral monsters who dwell in the cities, who are dragging America down into the dirt, who are ruining the country, and who will, doubtless, come down hard on any poor, beseiged community of right-wingers who dares to challenge their rule of the country. Ironically, the right wing seems capable to seeing itself as victims even when the White House is in Republican hands… it’s an eternal motif.

Of course, there is that other reading that’s equally possible, the one that is likelier to come to Blue Staters when watching the film: that corruption and exploitation by a small overclass (the super-rich, or those whom the Occupy Movement seem to have convinced everyone to call the 1%) is forcing the masses into real poverty — in the inability to get proper health care, in the instability of life, in falling standards of living across the board, in the current economic recession itself. The Hunger Games would be an allegory of politics as played by the right wing, in this read, and the monstrosity of the city folk and of the world’s entertainers would suggest itself as an attack on the rise of right-wing media, of the cultural prominence of shills for the right. Katniss is your average kid who, like everyone she knows, is a victim of that consumptive and rapacious overclass which by the time of the film has utterly unwoven democracy and freedom and established a media-entertainment-police state; and since the uber-rich and powerful in America don’t go away when the President is a Democrat, this perception of the Right as oppressor and Left as victim never really goes out of fashion either.

What’s most discomfiting is how these two perspectives interact: as long as both Left and Right see themselves as victims, and the people of the Districts, as the kids thrown into the Arena of the Games, the people who run those Games on the most minute level — and who actually subscribe, in fact, to neither perspective — don’t need to worry about being cast out of power. After all, the kids from the Districts will keep on fighting against one another, and as long as they cling to the prefabricated enmities that have been provided for them, everyone will remain complicit with the system-as-it-is.

This is why I found the film The Hunger Games so fascinating: it’s a good movie, and it gives you a feeling that, at least provisionally, the protagonist has triumphed over an evil system. But it also paints a picture that can be interpreted as being the encapsulation of the two main points of view on the ground in the American culture war, and I just wish that the interchangeability of those two victim-identities, and their mutual sense of having been victimized by the other — but also their complicity with the system — had been made more clear in the film.

But then, I have no idea what the rest of the trilogy’s narrative does with this stuff — or indeed whether it is part of Collins’ narrative, or what I’m imposing on it — so I guess we’ll just have to wait and see. (In the meantime, there are the books, I guess. When I am a little less busy, mind…)