Ezra Pound and the Balance of Consciousness —Pt 2
by Glenn Hughes
Glenn Hughes is Professor of Philosophy at St. Mary’s University (San Antonio). He is the author or editor of four books, most recently Transcendence and History: The Search for Ultimacy from Ancient Societies to Postmodernity (University of Missouri Press, 2003), from which this excerpt is taken. He is also the poetry editor here at VoegelinView. This excerpt appears in three parts with permission of the publisher.
Pound on Divine Reality and Historical Truth
Turning now to Ezra Pound, we find that his work reveals a remarkable range of agreement with Eric Voegelin's philosophical account of existence in the In-Between. To begin with, for Pound the gods are real, and so for him as for Voegelin experiences of human-divine encounter are a fact of existence. As Voegelin is a mystic philosopher in an age profoundly suspicious of mystery, so Pound is a genuinely religious poet in a generally irreligious age. As George Kearns points out at the start of his excellent guide to Pound's Selected Cantos, divine reality is constantly affirmed in his epic poem, through repeated descriptions and evocations of " 'magic moments,' visions of the light, divine energies, paradisal states of mind," an affirmation that must not be misinterpreted as a mere "literary conceit." 6 Divine energy is the font of reality, the source of all things, the force that draws into patterns of beauty and order both the works of nature and those of human invention. This is true now, as it has always and everywhere been true.
Because it is true now, Pound's task as an artist in a secular age includes the special responsibility of remembrance of this fact, poetic witness to the fact of divine mysteries. Because it has always and everywhere been true, the hierophanies of all cultures and religions should be respected, Pound holds, and one of his poetic aims is to show that sacred stories and images from different traditions will, when juxtaposed, reveal archetypal equivalence through their common root in the constants of human-divine encounter. For Pound it is through the visions of hierophanic experience that we ascend to the realm of the timeless, the transhistorical dimension of divine presence, the metaphysical realities that do not change, although their appearances to us do, bound as our perceiving is to the finite and imaginable. In sum, Pound confirms the human dwelling place to be the In-Between of time and timelessness, of immanence and transcendence.
For Pound the poet, such remembrance is a matter of visions preserved and revisited, and visions consist of images. "[T]he images of the gods," he asserts, ". . . move the soul to contemplation and preserve the tradition of the undivided light."7 Images of divine presence erupt in lyric passages throughout The Cantos, images drawn from a variety of cultures but principally those of Greek, Roman, and Chinese mythology, and from the Neoplatonic tradition including its Christian strands. Even detractors of Pound's general poetic achievement have tended to admit the power of these passages, which reveal not only his openness to the sacred but his powers of artistry as well:
Gods float in the azure air,
Bright gods and Tuscan, back before dew was shed.
Light: and the first light, before ever dew was fallen.
Panisks, and from the oak, dryas,
And from the apple, madid,
Through all the wood, and the leaves are full of voices,
A-whisper, and the clouds bowe over the lake,
And there are gods upon them,
(3/11)8And in thy mind beauty, O Artemis,
as of mountain lakes in the dawn,
Foam and silk are thy fingers,
Kuanon,
and the long suavity of her moving,
(110/778)
there came new subtlety of eyes into my tent,
whether of spirit or hypostasis,
but what the blindfold hides
or at carneval
nor any pair showed anger
Saw but the eyes and stance between the eyes,
colour, diastasis,
careless or unaware it had not the
whole tent's room
nor was place for the full Εíδως
interpass, penetrate
casting but shade beyond the other lights
sky's clear
night's sea
green of the mountain pool
shone from the unmasked eyes in half-mask's space.
(81/520)9
They also reveal a polytheistic enthusiasm that rushes to embrace every kind of hierophany, every species of "magical moment," as long as it speaks to Pound of genuine encounter. As Guy Davenport explains, the poet "was in love with so many religions that we have to accept him as a pagan who couldn't have too many gods on his hearth."10
For Pound, without imaginative vision there is no ascent to the timeless; our feeling and apprehension of divine reality are impossible without the mediation of images. This outlook explains his antipathy to both Hebraic and Protestant iconoclasm, as well as to theological doctrine and speculation in the form of philosophical abstractions. We ascend to the divine through image and contemplation; both the suppression of images and abstruse theological argumentation destroy religion. "Tradition inheres . . . in the images of the gods, and gets lost in dogmatic definitions."11
Pound's attraction to experiences and symbols from the world of Cosmological myth, as well as his aversion to much of the Christian tradition, is explainable to some degree by that world's openness to nature as a medium of revelation and its pluralistic tolerance for differing symbolic expressions of equivalent experiences of the divine.12 Pound approves of all images and myths that help us to discover and contemplate the divine reality and the truths of human-divine encounter. His attitude recalls the words of the pagan philosopher Maximus of Tyre (second century c.e.): "If Greeks are stirred to the remembrance of God by the art of Phidias, or the Egyptians by paying worship to animals, or others by a river, or others by fire, I will not quarrel with their differences. Only let them know, let them love, let them remember."
Along with suppression of images and theological abstractions, then, Pound resists any kind of exclusivism that tries to secure a monopoly of religious truth for one tradition, to bring the timeless mystery under dogmatic control, or to restrict our experiential access to it. He is convinced that if we cannot apprehend, in some way or another, the divine as the formative and transformative ground of the natural world we ourselves experience, then we are not apprehending nature as it really is at all. The lyric passages in The Cantos describing or invoking divine appearances in nature, so odd to modern sensibility yet so poetically convincing, aim to remind us of our existence in the In-Between, to release our sense of the natural world from the fiction of pure immanence and reveal it as it truly is: saturated with the mystery of the divine and with potency for revelation.
Thus, for Pound, Hugh Kenner declares, " [t]o see gods was a way to see nature, not to use an antique way of talking." When people lose their capacity for visions of the divine and the sense of the timeless fades, then according to Pound the invigorating heart of culture withers. "Without gods, no culture. Without gods, something is lacking," he states tersely.13
Pound's recognition of the crux of human existence as the encounter with timeless reality leads him to a sense and view of history that is similar to Voegelin's in many respects. They both reject the popular notion of history as a steady march of civilizational progress, not simply on empirical grounds, but because if the divine is real, then meaning in history lies essentially in the attunement of any and all persons, and any and all social orders, with the divine ground of truth, goodness and beauty. Such attunement is gained and lost over time, both by individuals and by societies, and so history is an oscillation of progress and decline, or rather an unfolding over time of multitudes of oscillations among many persons and societies.
Pound does not imagine, therefore, any more than Voegelin does, that history is headed inexorably toward some enlightened or perfected social order that marks the end of history. There have been, Pound believes, places and periods of civilization where exceptional good order, exceptional success in realizing the good and the beautiful in civic life, has been achieved. They have faded or disappeared, though, and were bound to do so, for the "conspiracy of intelligence" cannot ever be broadly effective for long against the forces of disorder — at the forefront of which Pound usually places "stupidity" — though it may live on underground.
So although Pound works hard at his self-appointed task of helping a new civilization "as good as the best that has been" to rise out of what he sees as a chaotic and decadent Western culture, he does not labor under the illusion that any civilizational gain achieved will be permanent. "Earthly paradises for Pound are various and have come and gone, for they are effective spiritual or social contexts gained at points of time"; and as time passes, the achievement invariably erodes, the orienting vision loses efficacy, the ordering energy is dispersed.14
However, past achievements vivid in the remembering mind are in a real sense not past at all, for Pound. His understanding of divine presence in history enables him to recognize that the popular conception of the historical past as having receded irretrievably into a distance of time is a misconception based on a failure to appreciate human participation in timeless realities, and to appreciate that all who grasp and enact those realities are brought together in immediate and true contemporaneity.
Kenner notes that Pound's early thought and poetry reflect a Romantic fascination with "the magic of time" and the "romance of temporal distance," but that this fascination soon evaporates. All of his mature and influential work reflects an anti-archaizing assumption that there are crucial human experiences and insights that, though conceived or written about or realized in different forms by different people in different cultures, are genuinely common and enduring because rooted in the timeless, and that, when we intelligently engage such experiences and insights in whatever image-form they are manifest, the "past" is in a sense obliterated; to put it somewhat more accurately, the "historical" comes into being in its simultaneous temporality and timelessness.
It is precisely this understanding of history and culture that guides The Cantos, both in the method of the poem's construction and in Pound's aim for it to be a "tale of the tribe" that helps us find meaning in history.15 The most striking, and initially disorienting, structural feature of the poem is its often sudden juxtapositions of events, persons, phrases, or images drawn from throughout history that Pound considers to be "subject-rhymes" revealing a common insight or element in reality.
These are juxtaposed to create ever augmenting leitmotifs of complex images that are intended to reveal significant, repeated, underlying patterns of energy, constructive and destructive, in human affairs. These images Pound famously compares to ideograms built up from multiple units of meaning, organized to express the richest concentrations of meaning that the poet can achieve. For example, in Canto 74, Greek wisdom concerning the importance of an exact and authentic use of language is juxtaposed with Chinese wisdom on the same topic:
. . . because as says Aristotle
philosophy is not for young men
their Katholou can not be sufficiently derived from
their hekasta
their generalities cannot be born from a sufficient phalanx
of particulars
lord of his work and master of utterance
who turneth his word in its season and shapes it
Yaou chose Shun to longevity
who seized the extremities and the opposites
holding true course between them
(74/441-42)16
With this method Pound celebrates the distinct wisdoms of diverse cultures and great individuals and simultaneously annihilates the time and distance that separate them, turning history from a linear course of events into, in Voegelin's phrase, a "web of meaning with a plurality of nodal points" whose ultimate reference is a transcendence known in the flow of timeless presence and its ordering influence. By forging in this way what Kenner calls "an ecumenical reality where all times [can] meet without the romance of time," Pound hopes to help us find our bearings in our own historical situation, through understanding our relation to other civilizations as well as to their common ground.17
It follows that one of Pound's deepest convictions is that anything excellent in present achievement must be founded on diligent retrieval of the best of the past. The poet whose language and style more than that of any other writer stand for the invention of a revolutionary modernism invariably in his work expresses contempt for the idea of novelty for its own sake. The motto he adopts from a Chinese emperor, "Make It New" —
Tching prayed on the mountain and
wrote MAKE IT NEW
on his bath tub
Day by day make it new
(53/264-65)
— signifies not the artist's duty to reject tradition, but rather the obligation to reclaim, revivify, and apply energetically to the present the best of tradition. The slogan, as Donald Davie observes, "is a recipe for conservation, for protecting past monuments in all their potency."18
We can do this only if we respect and meditate carefully on the language, the symbols, in which any such wisdom has come down to us. A respect for careful interpretation and use of terms, insistence on the need to attend to the experiential perceptions and insights that words and other symbols convey, again unites Pound and Voegelin. Language can become bankrupt through laziness or corruption of mind, can degenerate into cliché (disastrous to poetry), can even be used "to conceal thought and to withhold all vital and direct answers." When this happens, when "the application of word to thing goes rotten, i.e. becomes slushy and inexact," Pound asserts, ". . . the whole machinery of social and individual thought and order goes to pot." A precise use of language is the only means by which we can maintain and use our understanding of the important truths carried down to us by tradition and pass them on to those who come after us.
This is a view of language that presumes, of course, that there is a metaphysical stability behind language (the presumption that is the bane of the philosophers of groundlessness), that there are enduring truths of natural process that include "enduring constants in human composition." Pound is never reticent about expressing his confidence that such constants exist, as here in "Patria Mia": "One wants to find out what sort of things endure, and what sort of things are transient; what sort of things recur . . . to learn upon what the forces, constructive and dispersive, of social order, move; to learn what rules and axioms hold firm, and what sort fade, and what sort are durable but permutable, what sort hold in letter, and what sort by analogy only, what sort by close analogy, and what sort by rough parallel alone."
This reads like a gloss on Voegelin's description of his own work as involving a "search for the constants of human order in society and history."19 This search is their common concern because, for both men, exact knowledge about such constants, gained through penetrating to the original perceptions underlying the symbolic formulations in which the greatest of our predecessors have expressed themselves, is the key to sustaining individual and social order.
The agreement extends further, because both men also give the same response to the question as to how that knowledge becomes socially or politically effective: it does so through the guidance and influence of leaders — political and cultural — whose enlightened minds and sensibilities, moral virtue, and steadiness of will constitute an achieved order of the personal soul attuned to unchanging truths. Order flows into society through the medium of great individuals, who as rulers can move the people toward a civic order in harmony with the divine and with natural human ends. However, if Voegelin turns to Plato and Aristotle for the foundational articulation of this truth, for Pound it is provided in the teachings of Confucius (K'ung-Fu-tzu), whose formulation of the core principle Pound briefly paraphrases in the beautiful Canto 13:
And Kung said, and wrote on the bo leaves:
If a man have not order within him
He can not spread order about him;
And if a man have not order within him
His family will not act with due order;
And if the prince have not order within him
He can not put order in his dominions.
(13/59)
This theme runs right through The Cantos, and both there and in the rest of Pound's writings Confucius remains its central image, the paradigm of political authority and enlightened source of civic order. Pound's fascination with Confucius may seem curious to a Westerner, but nevertheless explainable. More troubling for Pound's reader is his choice of certain other "great individuals" whom he holds up for admiration and emulation, most notably Mussolini. In fact, if we compile a brief list of Pound's heroes — Confucius, Sigismondo Malatesta, Voltaire, Jefferson, John Adams, Mussolini — and note that such figures as Plato, Jesus, Buddha, Augustine, and Aquinas are absent, we find a significant clue to the parting of the ways between Pound and Voegelin.
The list indicates a decided bent on Pound's part toward confidence in what can be achieved through direct political action. It suggests a feature of Pound's character and thought that is finally decisive, from the point of view provided by Voegelin's analysis, in distorting his vision of human existence in the In-Between: his distrust of transcendence in its full radicality, and, in his representation of the human situation, his habitual collapsing of transcendence into the quasi immanence of that which can appear to human intellect and imagination and can appear in and through human action. For all his insight into timeless reality, Pound slips away from "the balance of consciousness" in the direction of an immanentist construction of reality and human purpose.
[This is the second part of a 3 part article. Part 3 will appear next week. Part 1 may be read here.]
NOTES
6. Kearns, Guide to Ezra Pound's "Selected Cantos," 9
7. Pound, "A Visiting Card" (1942), 307.
8. References to The Cantos will be given in the form (3/11), which means Canto 3, p. 11, in The Cantos of Ezra Pound. All further quotations from the poem will be from this edition.
9. Ειδώς means "form."
10. Davenport, "Ezra Pound, 1885-1972," in 173.
11. Pound, "A Visiting Card," 322.
12. The pluralism inherent to the Cosmological perspective is discussed by Voegelin in the introduction to Israel and Revelation. There he explains: "If anything is characteristic of the early history of symbolization, it is the pluralism in expressing truth, the generous recognition and tolerance extended to rival symbolizations of the same truth. . . . The early tolerance reflects the awareness that the order of being can be represented analogically in more than one way. Every concrete symbol is true insofar as it envisages the truth, but none is completely true insofar as the truth about being is essentially beyond human reach" (45-46).
13. Maximus of Tyre translation by Frederick C. Grant, in his Hellenistic Religions, quoted in Mircea Eliade, ed., From Primitives to Zen: A Thematic Sourcebook of the History of Religions, 54r; Kenner, The Pound Era, 30; Pound, Guide to Kulchur, 126
14. Pound, Guide to Kukhur, 263; Pound quoted in Kearns, Guide, 23; Eugene Paul Nassar, The Cantos of Ezra Pound: The Lyric Mode, 30.
15. Kenner, The Pound Era, 30,141; Pound, Guide to Kulchur, 194.
16. Katholou means "universal"; hekasta means "singulars (individual experiences)."
17. Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age, 106; Kenner, The Pound Era, 552.
18. Davie, Ezra Pound, 100.
19. Pound, "Interview: Ezra Pound," 328; Polite Essays, quoted in Hugh Kenner, The Poetry of Ezra Pound, 42; Guide to Kulchur, 47; "Patria Mia" (1913), 125; Voegelin, "Equivalences of Experience," in Published Essays, 1966-1985, 115.
