C.Parcelli wrote,
>
>I've begun reading your essays and believe your analysis of the collapse
>of the Cantos as Pound's disenchantment with Confucionism to be wrong.
>The collapse of the Cantos is essentially tied in with the inevitable
>structural failure of the form.

I would be wrong to insist that Pound’s disenchantment was the ONLY
explanation.  It does not seem unreasonably to posit an ideational crisis
which stemmed both from the contents and the form of the work.  Such an
explanation would encompass both our arguments within a  potentially
consistent framework.

>As one who writes in the form, the
>energy (and time) required to pursue such activity does require a belief
>and energy for the material. But more importantly it requires the energy
>to face the inflexibility and uncooperativeness of much of that material
>and the willingness to accept an overwhelming set of new insights that
>one faces as one works in the form. Pound faced the same problems early
>on with his Ur-Cantos--his false starts. It takes a particular kind of
>temperament to work in the Cantos form.

I find this to be completely plausible, and I bow to your superior knowledge
in this area.

>There is some merit in what you
>say about Pound's disillusionment of the material. But it doesn't
>require a World War to evoke this disillusionment. Witness my
>abandonment of the Han/Qin project.

Of couse you are right there is no such “requirement.”  But in Pound’s case
I think there was an actual “spiritual crisis,” a loss of faith, which he
spoke of on numerous occasions.   One could imagine what might have happened
to ‘The Divine Comedy’ if Dante had ceased to be a religious believer and
had abandoned his faith while in the midst of composing the ‘Paradiso.’  Or
what would have happened to ‘Paradise Lost’  if Milton had become an atheist
in the midst of composing Book Nine.

>Also, you open yourself up to
>writing about material so detailed and expansive that the poet cannot
>possibly absorb it. Of course, this is true of Pound, Olson, me. So you
>have to be pretty thick skinned and be able to suffer many insults for
>this kind of poetic ambition. Then toward the end you have to face the
>many gaps and errors that result from setting such an impossible set of
>agendas for yourself.

Yes.  Well, there are errors and there are errors.  “I cannot make it
cohere”---refers, in my view, to more than mere form.
>
>You yourself admit in essay 6 that Pound embraced aspects of Taoism and
>Buddhism in the later Cantos and was not entirely hostile early on.
>
I think what happened to Pound was a bit subtler than that.  Frankly, I
think the life story (and the end of the Cantos) might have had a “happy
ending,” if Pound really had become a Buddhist or a Taoist in the last phase
of his life.  My view is NOT so much that he embraced (in a conscious and
delberate manner) aspects of Taoism and Buddhism.

With regard to Taoism, I argue that some of the Taoist notions seeped into
his unconscious mind, by virtue of his immersion in and “translation” of
books like the Da Xue (Ta Hio, he calls it).

This was a product of the so-called philosophy of what was termed the
Confucian-Taoist synthesis.   It was not a pure Confucian text.  But Pound
was not consciosly aware of this.  He was deliberately working out a harshly
anti-Buddhist and anti-Taoist interpretation of Chinese history.

When his belief system collapsed, he became “quiescent” and used some of the
partially Taoist language of the “Ta Hio” and other works (language which
was essentially anti-Confucian) to express his personal recourse to
non-action.
>
>The Taosim of Lao-tse and Chuang-tse is hard to come by. The very
>anti-legalist nature of the philosophy allows for its easy corruption
>into superstition.

Yes.  This is especially true.  My own view, having taught the Tao te Ching
to Chinese graduate students in China, is that it is one of the most
profound texts ever produced.  One line is worth several hundred hours of
contemplation.  In the classroom, it can be used to help students delve into
the most fundamental questions about metaphysics,  ethics, religion, and
politics.  Sophisticated readers are easily able to separate the
superstitiious accretions from the essense of the text.

>In my store most of the requests for Taoist texts is
>from New Agers, a new form of superstition.

Some new agers are “superstitious,” and some are perhaps simply going
through a phase.  They may be on their way to something else, looking for
something better than the ready made dogmas they were given.
>
>I had an early sympathy
>with Tao and this is hard for me to take. I've become quite cynical
>about the matter. I write in a parody in the style of Dante's Divine
>Comedy-- "The way that can be called the way, is in the way."
>
That is fair.  I can appreciate the extent to which this great text (like
the Bible, or the Bhagavad Gita) can be abused.

>As for democracy, I've never seen it. A friend of mine who teaches
>classics is preparing (or at least would like to prepare) a paper on
>Athenian democracy in the raw. His conclusion so far is that our
>historical knowledge of democracy comes from Athenian writers who
>actually despised democracy.

I agree.  This makes the study of Athenian democracy particulary difficult.
I am very enthusiastic about Livy’s ‘History of Rome from its Foundation,’
because his treatment of the 500 years of the Republic is so thorough and so
dialectical.  In spite of an obvious bias in favor of the Patrician class,
he presents, in great detail, the confilcts which occurred over the most
essential policies.   One can learn more about democracy from two pages of
Livy’s work than from all the US history texts ever written.

As to seeing democracy work, isn’t democracy a matter of degree?  On the
larger scale, isn’t it clear that Norway, for instance is more democratic
than the US; and that the US is more democratic than Saudi Arabia?

On the micro level, I have seen democracy function.  In votes for strike
actions, for taking a particular course in a labor dispute; in some
educational institutions, where decisions affecting real policy issues were
arrived at by vote; or in a Quaker meetings, where there is no priest,
decisions are reached by consensus, and each person “is a minister unto his
or her fellows.”

In the field of labor - management relations, a unique experiment in the
democratic control of industry is taking place at the Mondragon Cooperative
Corporation in Spain

The principles are enunciated at:       http://www.mcc.es/
>
>Not much has changed. The hypocrisy of the
>US is most pronounced in this area. Witness the current attempt on the
>part of the US to destabalize the shoulder of South America--Colombia,
>Peru and Venezuala stirring up a tempest and rocking the boat with their
>capital influx then denial of capital, influxes of intelligence and
>materiel and then denial, subversion of elections, support for the
>authoritarian Fujimori then withdrawal, all geared to force the region
>to come apart at the seams.
>
All too true.
>
>"Quasi-religio-metaphysical assumptions" in my work? I'm afraid I don't
>know what you mean.
>
The question was badly phrased.  Let me think about how to reword it after I
have read more.

Regards,

Wei
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