but still the discussion is interesting, isn't it, whether or not you MEANT
"the c-word".
 
The Cantos is the work I want to be buried with. It's been part of my life since
my school days back in West Berlin in the 60s. There are with me day in & day
out. I cannot imagine being some place and NOT having them with me. And West
Berlin means America in VERY many respects - the Berlin Air Lift which kept us
alive - my lifelong gratitude to America.
 
WHAT I mean is that Europeans seem to read the Cantos differently. I love and
NEED them because they show how a man's brain works. This is an important aspect.
It SHOWS how EP's brain is AT WORK, in some ways similar to Paul Valery's
"Cahiers". It is no poem, it is no epic, it is no meta-ideogram made up of
thousands of haiku, they are nothing more & nothing less then what THEY are: the
documentation of a brain at work. It is a VERY American brain; it longs for
history, it longs for a better place in history & on the map than it holds; it
longs for everything told in Mauberley and in Canto VII. It longs for an American
identity - which, in the end is (Eliot's "objective correlative" here) all
mankind's "sailing after knowledge" (the Odyssean nostos).
 
So, the Cantos' comfort for ME is a) in its documentation of fallibility and b)
in their being a HOME as they are a documentation of homeLESSness. I believe that
this a very American homelessness. More than Cranes Bridge, more than Lowell,
Sandburg, Frost, Black Mtn., the Beats, Gary Snyder (or his "green" grandpa
Thoreau) & Co the Cantos is THE American poem [or WORK, if we'd better avoid such
terms] as much as Ives is THE American composer (Guy Davenport knows THAT) or
Lenny Bernstein is THE conducter etc pp. The Cantos cdn't have been written here
in Europe. Briggflatts cdn't really have been written in the US. Maximus and
Paterson and "A" are thoroughly American, but the Cantos, as I said, allow us to
see ON THE PAGE what's going on in EP's head. A Kennerian thought, I guess. I
always thought this a fundamental problem in dealing with Eliot. The Cantos is a
documentation of a specifically American of FAILURE [in which they in certain
ways pre-mirrored Vietnam, Watergate &c. Eliot found comfort/home/consolation in
a church EP cdn't accept. EP  h i m s e l f  is, yes, everything good & beautiful
& adorable & amiable & above all: human in America. The sum is in Canto 81: and
to have done instead of not doing, vide Herbert Marcuse's reflections on American
Pragmatism. I love the Canto's because they reflect EP's tragedy. I love EP more
than words cd try to explain. I love the Cantos more than ANY other work of
American art.
 
alex