Jawohl, my typo. I wouldn't want unfairly to cast asparagus on LS's
grammar. He expresses himself more than clearly.
Good of you to point out that sedition is to government what heresy is
to religion. I wonder. Does war compound these relations? Define them? "Yur
either with us or against us". When does dissent become treason or apostasy?
When does the esoteric and mythopoetic become occult? What nut addresses a
muse? Who could ever imagine the artists taking over the world but the
artists? How expendable they are to the State in every age! And how they
have known it since the time of Ovid.
A sign recently seen in Washington- "One Nation under surveillance"
Is there a reason to believe that the Federal Reserve is divinely inspired?
Are there Masonic symbols on the greenback?
Should Kurt Hoffmann be tried for treason or heresy for writing, "It is
the misfortune of politics that it is primarily the false myths that have
shaped history - myths of earthly redemption, the apocalyptic myth of the
classless society, the myths of blood and soil and the chosen people."? Is
there any room for discursive thought on these? Any accusation that they
thrive in the dark and secret heart nurturing resentment?
"I envy your courage of absolute defiance, words inflamed, the
fierce maledictions of a prophet.
The demure smiles of ironists are preserved in museums, not
as everlasting art, just as a memento of unbelief.
While your blasphemous howl still resounds in a neon desert
where the human tribe wanders, sentenced to unreality.
Walt Whitman listens and says, 'Yes, that's the way to talk, in
order to conduct men and women to where everything is
fulfillment. Where they would live in a transubstantiated
moment."
And your journalistic cliches, your beard and beads and your
dress of a rebel of another epoch are forgiven.
As we do not look for what is perfect, we look for what remains
of incessant striving."
-from "To Allen Ginsberg" by Czeslaw Milosz
Charles
----------
>From: Tim Romano <[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: Pound and the Occult
>Date: Fri, Jan 31, 2003, 8:39 AM
>
> Thank you Chas.
>
> Here's something to read: http://www.ume.maine.edu/~npf/cat50.html
>
> I do not know what LS means by "a sedition theory of history" -- that
> shorthand phrase lacks clarity for me. I suppose it could mean that the
> modernists commonly held the opinion that voices of dissent tend to get
> suppressed? There's ample evidence of that. It was possible in the early
> middle ages in Europe to be flogged to within an inch of one's life or
> executed outright (after a little torture) for teaching "heresies" about
> free will versus predestination. And Galileo had a bit of a hard time
> finding university teaching opportunities after contradicting Aristotle's
> position on the speed of fall. Eventually the Church commanded his Dialogue
> to be burned. Things were subtler in the dawn of the age of mass
> communication. Wyndham Lewis writes about a conspiracy of silence: his
> books were not given bad reviews they simply were not reviewed at all.
> (Wyndham Lewis has some interesting things to say about Hitler and the
> Occult, BTW.) Augustus John's portrait of the poet Roy Campbell has been
> hidden in the basement of the Museum of Art in Pittsburgh for more than
> half a century; it has never been on display as far as I have been able to
> ascertain.
>
> With respect to Pound, when LS writes "a belief in the power of poetry to
> communicate revelations of ultimately reality" [I assume that's your typo
> for "ultimate reality"] he could be referring to Pound's "busting out of
> the quotidian". If so, I would agree with him on that. But this revelatory
> power has always been wielded by Art that is essentially (not
> superficially) mythical. Cocteau's films 'Orpheus' and 'Beauty and the
> Beast' come immediately to mind. Sandro Botticelli's paintings.
>
> In my view, Pound describes the clash as occurring between the "Occult", as
> represented by Judeo-Xianity, and the "Real" as represented by Art.
> Tim Romano
>
> At 10:58 PM 1/30/03 -0500, charles moyer wrote:
>>Tim,
>> Perhaps this will help explain the use and misuse of "occult" in B of M.
>>
>>from p.11 amazing honesty-
>> "If we were to call our subject Perennial Philosophy, Gnosticism,
>>Neoplatonism, or Hermeticism, some of the contempt and fear prompted by the
>>label 'occult' might be allayed, for these terms isolate the occult from
>>ghosts, poltergeists, witches, vampires, werewolves, and the like."
>> Then in order to understand the far-reaching range of the "occult"
>> from p.45
>> "As with Nietzscheanism, the occult finds adherents across the whole
>>political spectrum, from conservative authoritarians to revolutionary
>>anarchists. A case in point is the admiration that Allen Ginsberg, a
>>left-wing Jewish poet, maintains for the right-wing and anti-Semitic Ezra
>>Pound. Despite these differences, they share a sedition theory of history
>>and culture, and a belief in the power of poetry to communicate revelations
>>of ultimately reality."
>>
>> Then for an utterly and fantastically strained association
>> p.30
>> "A two volume expansion of "The Golden Bough" was published in 1900,
>>and the great twelve-volume expansion appeared between 1911 and 1915. It
>>was this expanded version that was read by Eliot and his contemporaries. An
>>abridged edition appeared in 1922 - which coincidentally was also the year
>>of publication of "Ulysses" and "The Waste Land", and of Mussolini's march
>>on Rome which ushered in the "era fascista".
>
>
>> Is there an "occult" connection between these events?
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