Dear Mohandas,
 
Your dissertation sounds interesting.  I'm glad to see that
your studies face you with that old moral dilemma regarding
EP that so many bardolatrous Poundians prefer to sweep under
the carpet.
 
I find it difficult to believe that EP's antisemitism stems
in any significant way from the ancient Hebraic stricture
against graven images.  Deeply embedded cultural prejudices
do not come from literary sources but, as you well know,
given the history of Hindu-Muslim relations, are imbibed
with the mother's milk.  Isn't it far more likely that this
disposition of Pound's consists of one part "village prejudice"
and one part rejection of all that is implied in the Ezra of
his name, i.e., revulsion against his Puritan heritage, with
its Old-Testamentarian coloring and its distrust of pleasure
for pleasure's sake (which is hardly an aspect of actual
Judaism!)?  He would have seen the stricture against graven
images, if he thought of it at all, as merely an aspect of
what he assumed to be a larger program of Judaic pleasure-
policing.
 
In any case, I would still like to know whether EP had any
acquaintance with the "Talmud" which he vilifies.  I think
the word, for him, is merely a talisman for all he rejects.
 
==Dan Pearlman
 
At 11:54 AM 10/15/98 +0500, you wrote:
>Re Pound and Jewish mysticism:
>I'm new to this forum and I find it interesting because the coffee shops I
>frequent do not welcome a serious discussion of Poundstuff.
>
>It's possible that Gill's remarks on Pound's (anti)Semitism are supported
>by a neat structure based on the latter's first footnote and last book.
>However, to accept these at face value, one has to ignore EP's statements
>like "All the Jew part of the Bible is black evil" (Paige 1982, 345) and
>(far more important) the implicit assumptions on which the edifice of the
>Cantos is founded.  The pagan mode of perception (which converts everything
>into "graven" images) is instrumental in the Cantos and this, as I
>understand it, is incompatible with the Jewish way of looking at the world,
>in which Imagisme is forbidden.  That is, when you perceive Judaism as the
>faith of Abraham, Moses and David, you won't be able to reconcile it with
>the idolatrous (Aphrodite-Kuanon-Bacchus-Muss.) way the Cantos apprehend
>the cosmos.  The Talmud, it is quite possible, (I don't know) dilutes the
>rigor of the Torah.
>
>Incidentally, I've just completed a dissertation on the Cantos, which
>argues that Pound's anti-Semitic thinking can be traced back to his
>"imagistic" phase during which his poetics was sketched.  For a reader of
>Pound who started as an admirer, such "findings" are rather unsettling.  I
>face an enigma now, when I am seduced by the beauty of a line such as "The
>enormous tragedy . . . . "  In my present (Indian) milieu, it is difficult
>to forget that such beauty is compatible with the discourse of a similar
>(dominant/ruling) ideological Imagisme that threatens political and
>religious liberty.
>I am eager to discuss the matter with those who hold different views.
>
>Mohandas C. Bhaskaran
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