I'm thinking out loud in this post rather than affirming very definitely.

Tim Romano wrote:

>  These are NOT metaphysical
> categories. Nor are they mythical "themes" but structures of the psyche.
> Myths reflect the "eternal states of mind".

Whoa. You can't say leave metaphysics out of it -- and then proceed
to use the key concept that distinguishes metaphysical thinking from
historical thinking, "eternal states" (of anything). It may be (you are
fairly convincing on this) that Pound *thought* the states of mind (or
social relations) he was making manifest in his poems were eternal
states, and one of the things certainly the Cantos do repeatedly is
dramatize what it is *like* to project historical experience into eternity.
But "eternal states of mind" as an ontological or historical actuality
simply don't exist.

> Let's put this into terms less intellectualized, more metaphorical. When the
> poet says "I stood still and was a tree amid the wood"  he is having an
> unmediated metamorphic EXPERIENCE of the same order as that undergone by
> Yeats, who asks: "How can we tell the dancer from the dance?"

(On the side, I personally began to have trouble in various contexts when the
either "mediated" or "unmediated" appears in a discourse. I'm never sure what
they mean.) How can we tell the agent from the act? "Once out of nature I
shall never take / My bodily from from any natural thing" (quoted from memory)
-- Yeats apparently believed  something like this (as both Arnold and Keats
had tried to before him). It is part of the lust for order that infiltrates
modern
thought and feeling as the analogical order (the visible social relations of
feudal hierarchy which Dante projects into the cosmos) breaks up. Pound,
I've always thought, was more conscious of this development than some
(many) of his predecessors and contemporaries -- which was perhaps one
of the reasons he went rummaging through history as he did. He was engaged
in a salvage endeavor -- finding in history a pattern of that old order which
would allow its reassertion within a historical movement antithetical to it.
(This could lead us back to Pound and the Constitution.) His  complaint
(in Kulchur?) that Descartes screwed up our geometry (I suppose by
arithmetizing the visual) rhymes with Keats's complaint that Newton
spoiled the rainbow.


> The interplay
> of archetypes is the dance, is the woods.  The ego is the dancer,  the tree.

I simplly  don't believe in archetypes (either in Jung's sense or in Frye's).
Often it seems to me that critics use "archetype" to describe a successful
reinvigoration of a cliche or dead metaphor: Make it new.

>
> There is no absolute border between Self and un-self; the self-consciousness
> we refer to by the term "ego" is merely a threshold.

My mind spins here. Let me translate into my own terms. Humanity (or the
individual human) does not *have* a history, it *is* its history (or an ensemble

of social relations, prior to and independently of which "I" simply have
no existence). *Paradise Lost* is all about denying this -- Adam, in his account

of his own creation, wakes up alone, looks around him, leaps to his feet
and (one hand clapping, language in isolation from social relations) begins
to speak -- to reason like an 18th c. French philosopher. Austen is all
about denying this -- which is why she first isolates her heroines so they
can then "reenter" the world of social relations as though that were as  free
an abstract choice as was Adam's.

Pound breaks free from his world in his first line (And then went down to
the sea) so that he  can then reenter it, over and over again, as a free
act of the mind. I think that's what you are calling an archetype.

> One may assent to this
> statement intellectually. Or one may RECOGNIZE its truth by undergoing an
> unmediated liminal experience. This poem is the record not of intellectual
> assent but of the liminal experience.

This division is perhaps more commonplace than you think. A week, even a
day, after I pull out of an attack of depression I no longer know what it
*feels* like to be depressed -- I no longer can imagine what I felt like,
but I can very definitely assent to various propositions to that state -- and
I expect others (who have never experienced it  and cannot imagine it)
to give intellectual assent and *not* claim imaginative understanding. Pain
tends to individualize (to create a solipsism of the moment) almost as
successfully as capitalist relations of production. (Which is only one of
many reasons that Clinton's "I feel your pain" is offensive.) But everything
we (any of us, including the poets among us) "recognize" or experience is
not for that reason anything beyond an experience. In other words: the
vividness or power of the recognition does not give assurance (or even
probability) to the theoretical claim that the experience links to some
eternal state.


> It relates great emotion in the
> calmness of retrospect. The EXPERIENCE recounted in this poem is one of
> crossing that threshold. Normally that happens in sleep and dream. This time
> it took place in broad daylight  "among the primal things".

You are claiming that Pound recapitulates Wordsworth?

Carrol

>
>
> Tim
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "bob scheetz" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Thursday, June 15, 2000 11:45 PM
> Subject: Re: Pound myth and religion
>
> > tim,
> >      yes, the baucis & philemon story is an objective correlative
> > ...the speaker, the olympian,
> > having been accorded the great gift of the ironic perception of the
> > magnanimity of the-little-ones
> > (correlatively, the mean-ness of the great);
> > in gratitude for which he immortalizes their beauties in poetry.
> > ...this is the lyrical mode, the "mark but the lillies of the field," no?
> >
> > from whence i guess you could say he's working
> > out the xian archetype...
> > ...and surely his bio with all the cornball romances
> > is  preposterous enuf for a quixote (and indeed,
> > his political-econ fits here, no?)
> >
> > ...but  did he take this to his heart's hearth tropologically?
> > does the poem evoke/invoke the spirit of jesus cum enuhim?
> > step into that archetype, that cosmos of meaning?
> >
> > maybe you got sumpin here...
> > and, of course, jesus was the last
> > of the greek (i.e. "pagan", as you'd have it)
> > translated semitic deities.
> > so...the gospel according to ep, eh?
> > ok, very nice
> >
> > bob
> >
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: Tim Romano <[log in to unmask]>
> > To: <[log in to unmask]>
> > Sent: Thursday, June 15, 2000 1:56 PM
> > Subject: Re: Pound myth and religion
> >
> >
> > > I prefer to state this approximate truth in another way ;-)  Namely,
> that
> > > Pound has begun a search for corroborating  expressions of the liminal
> > > experience alluded to in The Tree, and a language with which to describe
> > > that experience.  The poems in PERSONAE are the record of the poet's
> > > embarking upon this exploration to find his sincere voice and a unifying
> > > mythos. What Pound discovers is not one voice, nor one myth, but many
> > voices
> > > and multiple myths, each facet reflecting however the same "eternal
> states
> > > of mind".
> >
> > > > the arrival of the lyrical
> > >
> > > Yes, this experience does eventually take Pound to Cavalcanti. But the
> > > subjects of the lyricism are psyche and knowing, archetype and the high
> > > dream; it is not a simple unselfconscious lyricism.
> > >
> > > > ...the heightened sense (wonderfull-ness) of the simple,
> > > > unmediated, sensual moments
> > >
> > > Here, I must differ rather strongly.  The poet's day is lit by a light
> the
> > > quality of which he has never seen before.  The _experience_ alluded to
> in
> > > The Tree is straight out of Ovid.  I don't mean merely that the language
> > or
> > > themes are cribbed from Ovid, but that  this is a new and strange mode
> of
> > > awareness for the poet. He hasn't merely got himself a new attitude; his
> > > senses now add up to more than 5. He has "stepped into the myth",
> stepped,
> > > as in the Cocteau film, through the mirror into the underworld.
> > >
> > > > he's not a poet of the grande narrative...myth, archetype, allegory
> > >
> > > There are two assertions here. Grande narrative (as in cohesive
> sequential
> > > story without narrative lacunae, that adheres to the rules of syntax so
> > > firmly one could drive a bullet-train upon its rails) -- you've got a
> > point
> > > there. But NOT A POET OF MYTH, ARCHETYPE, ALLEGORY ?????
> > >
> > > Perhaps you are thinking of Ezra Pound the monetary theorist?
> > > Tim
> >
> >