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1.

   "Francis P. Gavin" wrote:


>Subject: Re: Pound is, and is not simultaneously and at different times
>
>Horsecrap.

Looked at from the Chinese viewpoint, your single word can be taken various
ways.  The horse, you know, has been revered in China since pre-dynastic
times.  (Pound you may recall commemorates the horse sacrifice of antiquity;
a truly barbaric rite by modern standards, even though Pound says “There may
be lesson in animal sacrifice”.  Some modern peasants in China instead
perform, in certain contexts, a ceremony in which the manure of horses is
spread over the a small portion of the land, as fertiliser.  Horse manure,
is highly valued, and many people believe that it has a highly pleasant
odor, compared with the feces of humans, pigs, cows, monkeys and other
animals.

Human and animal waste have great symbolic significance in Chinese myth and
literature.  In the great epic comedy, Travels to the West, a monkey spirit
is tricked by the Buddha in the following way.  The Monkey spirit, named Sun
Wu-kong, fights a battle in Heaven, trying to overthrow the Jade Emperor,
ruler of the Universe.  The Buddha tells the Monkey spirit that he will be
given control over all the celestial regions if he can perform a simple
task.  He asks the spirit, Sun Wu-kong to stand on the Buddha’s  hand and
simply jump off.  If he fails, Buddha says, he will be imprisoned under a
mountain for a thousand years.

Monkey Sun Wu-kong jumps thinks to himself that he will jump clear to other
side of the cosmos.  He jumps with all his might, using his considerable
magic powers, traveling an unimaginable distance, and seeing at his
destination a large pink pillar he decides to deposit his “waste” there.
Then he jumps back to his original point of departure.

He tells the Buddha, “I have done it.  And to prove that I accomplished my
task, I left my mark on the other side of the universe.  Surely you, Oh wise
Buddha, in your omniscience, can verify this.”

The Buddha replies, “You have not accomplished the task I assigned you.  I
said you must leap off my hand, but you never left it.  Look across, and you
will see the mark you made at the base of my thumb” [This was the pink
pillar].  Sun Wu-kong realized that the Buddha’s hand had grown to fill the
entire universe, and that he had failed.  Buddha’s attendant spirits took
the astonished Monkey and imprisoned him beneath the mountain.


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2.    Tim Romano <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>Subject: Re: Ezra Pound is, and is not, Ezra Pound,
>          simultaneously and at different times

>
>Wei,
>
>An interesting observation vis-a-vis Pound. What you have described is
>precisely what seems to have occured with Pound and the (in places very
>vehement) Old Testament.
>
>Tim Romano
>
>P.S. The name Old Testament refers to the hebrew scriptures as subsumed
>into
>the Christian Bible.  I use this term advisedly, in reference to Pound's
>daily reading of the Christian Bible as a boy.
>

Thank you for your remark.  I was aware that the Old Testament refers to the
Hebrew scriptures “subsumed into the Christian Bible.”  But what is it
exactly you are saying happened to Pound when he read the Bible.  Are you
saying he “read them infernally” as Blake did?  Or did he just reject them
outright?  Blake loved to read the Bible, and said that it had to be read
inside out, or by inverting the traditional interpretations, or  even by
inverting the sense of the orginal passages.  Are you saying Pound was doing
this too?   I was saying we should invert the ordinary interpretation of
Pound’s words, as Blake did when he read Milton and the Bible.

Perhaps you could expand your point.

Regards,

Wei
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