On Fri, 17 Jul 1998 08:03:32 +0800 wrote...
>
Jeff Twitchell-Waas asks what is to be gained by seeing Pound as Taoist?)I will
try and begin a response, or a discussion.  First, a couple premises that I
think Poundians would generally agree upon, then a brief catalogue of some of
the big Western sources for Pound's spiritual/religious/mythopoetic mix, and
how they fall short of offering the explanation for Pound's aesthetic
development that Taoism does. These are more clearly arguable. I will keep it
short.
Premises:
1. Pound dabbled--sloppily threw alot of stuff in his cantos, much of which he
knew little about.
 
2. Pound was a westerner, steeped in the knowledge of the Western tradition,
but gradually came to condemn the Western tradition--especially as it was
promulgated by Christianity.
 
3. Christian dualism has its primary corrollary and influence in the Platonic
Theory of Forms (interestingly, this theory was a revision of earlier Socratic
assertion that words themselves intrinsically held the form, or meaning. This
early assertion would not stand up to scrutiny, however, so Socrates went
abstract, made Forms untouchable, and preeminent. In consequence, all material
form was made inferior to abstract form.  Fear and loathing of the human body
was just one result of this crime that Pound railed against.)
 
4. Pound sought other spiritual/philosophical/mythopoetic models for his
universe--ones that implicated the deep value of humanity all through them. He
put so much emphasis on humanity and human action within the cosmos that the
act of coitus became for him one of the ways in which humanity could connect to
that which he called divine--perhaps because bigger, and other than the self.
 
5. In search of models, he turned to Pre-socratic thought and religious
systems, then to other systems which kept an emphasis on humanity, while at the
same time connecting humanity and material form to something greater or beyond
form, through rituals, through physical and intellectual actions.  A top 8 list
of the systems to which he variously turned: Eleusis, Confucianism,
Neoplatonism, divers other celestial traditions and occult traditions, the
culture of 11-12th cent Provence, French Symbolism, the system of Erigena's De
Divisione, Averroism (the system informing Calvancanti's understanding of
metaphysics, and perhaps Dante's also.), and his own mixed pantheon of deities,
comprised of mythic elements that were authorized divine by virtue of his
mind's ability to call them to form and recombine them.
 
Arguable assertion:
6. All of these fall short as models for Pound's overall attempt to write his
particular version of an earthly paradise (where social order, aesthetic
freedom, and beauty result from human interaction with divinity),  because they
either lack the conceptual fluidity of movement that his combined intellectual
and aesthetic universe depended upon, they showed themselves to be corrupted
forms, they wore out in time, they allowed little or no interactive
relationship between the divine universe and humanity, or they put too much
specific emphasis on the ordered mechanism used for this interaction.  By
contrast, Taoist philosophy remains fluent, human, divine, interactive,
non-specific, and highly poetic. Pound had said yes to these elements of Taoist
philosophy in an aesthetic sense, early in his career, and whether he knew it
or not, he developed his investment in it, as well as his ability to write it
to form.
 
Quick take on how these other systems fell short:
1.Eleusis--a good system for interaction, based on both ritual, and at least
the intimations of coitus, but it did not last.  Whores brought to Eleusis.
Corrupted. Nor did the ritual and its epoptea centrally value humanity so much
as it situated it within the greater, anonymous recurring rhythms of nature.
Individuals would die, but humanity would live on--like corn.  Like
existentialism, perhaps, a forgivable philosophy for the young. Lots of
pageant, and fun--but as a system of belief, intimidating as one ages. Pound
drops it.
 
2. Confucianism:  as Cheadle notes, Pound went through many phases of
understanding Confucianism, but as a philosophy, and especially as a philosophy
seen through the Classics, it did not interact with the universe.  Too
pragmactic, and ultimately, too rigid. It does not elevate. Nolde suggests that
even Pound's reading of de Mailla gave him evidence of its problems and
corruption. Pound may have kept with it, but it was Stoicheff who saw both
Pound's Confucian and Odyssean personae as hollowed out in later cantos.
 
3. Neoplatonism.  Good, pagan system, but it rushed material form to one
specific universal location in GOD.  Plotinus' "flight of the alone to the
alone."  Naturally hierarchical, rather than interactive. Desire for unity
pre-programmed. De-emphasized material form, and thus humanity. Plotinus was
ashamed he had a body. Not very Poundian character.
 
4. Celestials and occult systems.  one of Pound's early favorites, by the Comte
de Gabalis, had sylphs in all of the woodwork, and so worked for "wood alive,
stone alive," but occultism, unless defined very broadly, is altogether too
secretive, by definition, and generally posits systems of reality that affect
humanity, without at the same time, or as consequence, being affected by it.
But Pound's letters and poems mostly show him to be a poet who loved the
sunshine, and the aesthetic and philosophical surface of a thing, not its
secret inner squirmings. He was a meditteranean. He also denied suggestions
that Calvancanti had dabbled in the occult. Perhaps he did not want one of his
heroes there.
 
5. Provence died. It may have had the light from Eleusis--the right attitude
towards living, and found through poetry a relationship between words, nature,
society, and greater understanding, but as a paradise on earth, ephemeral, if
harmonious.  Passed into the hands of Italian intellectuals, who took the life
out of it, made it lofty.  Had nothing of permanency to it, and Pound wanted
permanency.
 
 
6. French Symbolism.  intellectual and aesthetic mush. Besides, it zeroed
essential reality in a zone completely separate from the act of living, even if
that zone was somewhere deep within the dark corridors of the human
psyche/soul. Pound's symbolism in the "profounder sense" meant something beyond
this.  Bergsonian thought all through the symbolists. Pound did not like
Bergson, who thought that the artist was the one who cut through the network of
static abstractions to obtain the transient stream of consciousness somewhere
within.  What artists cut through were the static, abstract impressions that
they had solidified in order to express or arrange them.  This arrangment was
the veil through which artists cut, even though they (and everyone else)
continually produces it. But where those artists got to, what greater reality
at the core of the human psyche they penetrated--a reality that Bergson saw as
moving--nevertheless remained cloaked in the only half-recognizable symbols and
images the French Symbolists produced--presumably as a result of reaching the
absolute reality at the individual and collective psyche's core. Bergson and
the Symbolists ultimately place value elsewhere, in a place only theoretically
connected to palpable humanity.
 
7. Erigena, Grosseteste, later Plethon--all essential Neo Platonists. Good
pantheist vision in Erigena, and anti-establishment thinker, so Pound's type,
but he has a God, which, like Dante's God, existed in a removed location
somewhere outside of time and space. God needs to be in a crust of bread for
Pound--a crust of bread that transforms the character of God through the eating
of it.
 
8. Averroes.  The philosopher whose thought bolstered the poetry of Cavalcanti
and perhaps Dante--the two chief upholders of the Provencal tradition in
Tuscany.  Averroes had interpreted Aristotle in a way that upset the church of
Aquinas, and, along with the entire emphasis on the movement of the intellect
that Guido and Dante promoted, served as the kind of philosophical model to
which Pound was always drawn. But overall, too system-driven.  The passive
intellect interacts with the active intellect--humanity writes the aspects of
character on God's face sort of thing--so good, Poundian stuff, save for the
wheels within wheels of the system itself, which made for a cumbersome approach
to love, beauty, and all of the other good things of being human and living
within the universe.
 
9. His own mixed pantheon.  This works according to Pound's desire for an
interaction, but as he summons them up, his gods and particularly his goddesses
take on a kind of static character.  Only in that he can see their faces or
aspects invested in others, over time and space, do they possess the
fundamentally random sense of movement that characerizes a Taoist aesthetic. It
is such a movement as that sought after only by those adepts who have watched
for movements and patterns and rucurrences at the deepest, most minute levels.
The Taoist adept recognizes the metphysical unity of all things through minute
observations, which qualify this unity by seeing it constantly in motion, and
never the same.  Thus when Pound sees Helen in Elenor of Aquitaine, or Venus in
a peasant girl outside of pisa, unity comes from the transmutation of something
that can at the same time be recognized as unchanged.  The recognition is
scant, however, and observation is the only way to see unity, because
recurrences move through recombinant forms.  Forms are nearly random, but our
careful observation allows us to see that they are not quite so.
The emphasis on random interactive movement, over that of recurrence, however,
is Taoist, and is exactly the aesthetic/living situation Pound recreates in his
cantos as existing among the Naxi. He does this not only through his truncated
descriptions of Naxi life, but also through his presentation of the Nazi dompa
into the Cantos. This dompa serves as an arbiter of interaction between
humanity and the universe. He is a priest, whose ordered, ritualized
incantations, of necessity, break into creative innovative form, and he
operates within a universe where demons and spirits are made numerous or
limited, powerful or weak as a direct result of human activities.  He embodies
the subordination of words and order to wordless, random, changing essence,
within an interactive system in which humanity's role is central and naturally
transformative.  This is a uniquely Taoist philosophical vision of paradise, I
think.
 
Anyway, that is five cups of coffee's worth. Broad statements, subject to
massive counters, to be sure. But it was a broad question.  Maybe it will
generate some smaller discussions.
 
 
 
Robert E. Kibler
Department of English
University of Minnesota
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