We could - doing no violence to the integrity of Pound's
own obsessions - take the Chinese meaning of "ching"
(sincerity) which is an equivalence of thought and action.
If we do this then one is left wondering how true EP was
to a Confucian ethic by pleading insanity when he, at least,
didn;t think he was mad!
 
 
Stoneking
 
 
 
 
----- Original Message -----
From: Jonathan Morse <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, December 02, 1999 6:05 PM
Subject: Re: Getting things all mixed up
 
 
> At 12:32 AM 12/1/99 -0500, Patricia Cockram wrote:
>
> >    It was Pound who equated sincerity with technique.  His anti-semitic
> >obsession was wrongheaded, if not pathological, but he was sincere, and
that
> >is one reason so much of his work is both beautiful and disturbing.
>
> I sort of see what you mean, Patricia. "The worst / Are full of passionate
> intensity," intoned Yeats, a great poet who stood with the worst. But boy,
> I wish I knew how to understand that hard word "sincerity."
>
> It fits Pound in one obvious biographical way: he held to his political
and
> economic beliefs no matter what, at great cost to himself. And yet I
should
> think sincerity must entail some element of free choice, and in that
> respect we have to worry a little when we apply the term to Pound. No
> economist of any standing has ever paid the slightest attention to Pound's
> ideas about money, for instance, but that rejection had no effect whatever
> on the curriculum of the Ezuversity. By contrast, John Crowe Ransom
> abandoned agrarianism after he worked systematically through the
> economists' criticisms of _I'll Take My Stand_ and concluded that the
> economists were right. You wouldn't call that insincere, would you? No;
> you'd just say that Ransom was a rational man trying to learn from his
> mistakes.
>
> Pound's other sincerities were equally durable in their defiance of
> reality. There's something to be said for punctual trains, for instance,
> but after 23 years of Fascism the Italians were happy enough to kick
> Mussolini's body to pieces. Fascism would seem not to have worked. No
> reflection of that little fact in Pound's oeuvre, though.
>
> And whatever it accomplished 2500 years ago, Confucianism as of the
> twentieth century was doing a lot more harm than good. It too didn't work.
> (Ask me about the status of women in South Korea before and after it
became
> a predominantly Christian society.)
>
> And Pound's antisemitism was an affront to his own language, because it
> consisted entirely of cliches. When Pound was a young man, the
> anti-Dreyfusards and eugenists included many intelligent people among
their
> numbers, but by the time he was 50 he was alone with the Jason Compsons.
>
> So many unconvinceabilities! And yet Pound is the man who said "Make it
> new." There's sincerity in that phrase, but I should think it's the
> sincerity of technique, not the sincerity of the sad stony heart. But
> sursum corda: the sincerity of technique is the one that didn't die on
> November 1, 1972.
>
> Jonathan Morse
>