Ezra Pound and the Balance of Consciousness —Pt 3
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's Resisitance to Radical Transcendence
Pound's brand of immanentism, of course, is quite different from those of philosophical materialists or secular progressivists: it has ample room for the divine and its mystery, but still at a certain limit Pound balks at the full implications of transcendence. The closest he gets to an embrace of radical transcendence is his approving use of the light symbolism he finds in the Neoplatonic mystical tradition, the notion of the "undivided light" of which all visible things are but manifestations.
Shines
in the mind of heaven God
who made it
more than the sun
in our eye.
(51/250)
Light tensile immaculata
the sun's cord unspotted
"sunt lumina" said the Oirishman to King Carolus,
"OMNIA,
all things that are are lights"
(74/429)20
Pound is comfortable with the notion of the divine mind, the Platonic Nous, as an original "light" that both constitutes reality and is refracted in the "light" of human understanding, and he gives credit to Plato for establishing the symbolic tradition: "What we can assert is that Plato periodically caused enthusiasm among his disciples. And the Platonists after him have caused man after man to be suddenly conscious of the reality of the nous, of mind, apart from any man's individual mind, of the sea crystalline and enduring, of the bright as it were molten glass that envelops us, full of light."
Yet in Platonic and other mystical traditions there is a further level of affirmation where Pound will not follow, in which the acknowledged participation of the human mind in the divine light greets a border of unyielding darkness, a "beyond" that is only darkness to our understanding: Plato's "being beyond being," the mystery of the mystery.21 Voegelin refers to this reality in Anamnesis as "the ineffable," of which we can know only that it lies beyond what we can know. As he says, "[I]n the tension toward the [divine] ground we have experience of a reality that incomprehensibly lies beyond all that we experience of it in participation," and we "can speak of the incomprehensible only by characterizing it as reaching beyond the symbolic language of participation." It seems that when Pound is faced with this "tension between symbol and ineffability," his agreement turns to suspicion. Kenner addresses this when he states that Pound's openness to mythic symbolization ends when the symbols begin to differentiate a dimension of reality that cannot be addressed in terms of appearance, that Pound was "never willing to concede a shift of dimension between crystalline myth and the polymorphous immediate."
So the radically transcendent God of Hebrew and Christian faith is notably absent from The Cantos; the "divine beyond" of Moses and Jesus that has been understood as condemning other gods and other revelations to falsehood or irrelevance is unacceptable to Pound, who sees its worship as having undermined our abilities to perceive the divine in nature and to seek out and trust in our own ecstatic experiences. Therefore, as a guide to the divine he will "substitute for the Moses of the Old Testament the Ovid of the Metamorphoses, with [the latter's] recognition of the vivifying personal immediacy of supernatural forces and the constant penetration of the supernatural into the natural."22 Buddhism and Taoism likewise for Pound place too much stress on an otherworldly transcendence, so that in his view their teachings easily degenerate into the promotion of superstitions, such as the belief that magic rituals can guarantee personal immortality. In The Cantos we find the rigorous, realistic Confucianists contrasted with the passive Buddhists and degenerate Taoists (whom Pound derisively calls "taozers"):
And there came a taozer babbling of the elixir
that wd/ make men live without end
and the taozer died very soon after that.
(54/288)
And of Taosers, Chu says:
concerned neither with heaven, earth
or with anything on the square
but wholly subjective, for the Dragon moaning,
the screaming tiger, mercury, pills, pharmacopia,
And the Bhud rot: that floaters eat
without maintaining their homesteads
(99/696-97)23
Pound's frustration with feverish otherworldliness is understandable: he realizes it to be a self-comforting or self-aggrandizing fiction in which the experienced unity of the In-Between of human existence is imaginatively split into distinct entities; he abhors the superstitious mind that seeks magical powers over nature or avenues to personal immortality, ignoring the sufficient beauty and mystery of natural processes —
Hast'ou seen the rose in the steel dust
(or swansdown ever?)
(74/449)
— and abandoning the concrete conditions of existence, with their real challenges and opportunities for personal and social improvement. This last point should be underscored. At the core of Pound's refusal to affirm a radical transcendence is his conviction, buoyed by the popularity of images of other worlds and immortal delights, that such affirmation vitiates our interest in and energy for purposeful action in the world. "The concentration or emphasis on eternity is not social," he grumbles, and what is needed is "a sense of social responsibility."24 It is an understandable irritation: he is fighting against the loss of the balance of consciousness in the direction of ignoring or degrading immanent reality in light of the perfection of transcendence. However, it pushes Pound into an opposite imbalance, in which recognition of the ultimate transcendence of timeless standards of truth, beauty, and goodness is replaced by an impatient desire and effort to realize those standards in the In-Between.
This denial and impatience manifest themselves in a number of related aspects of his thought and work, yielding a specifically Poundian idiosyncratic mixture of insights into the human-divine truth of the In-Between and oversights about the full implications of transcendence. Returning to the question of history, while Pound is no naive progressivist and understands that civilizational progress alternates with decline, in the bulk of his work he still portrays the ultimate telos of human community in terms of a civic order to be built by leaders with sufficient wisdom and strength of will. He is not inclined to accept Saint Augustine's distinction between the city of God and the earthly city, nor the Platonic insight that the perfectly just city exists only as "a pattern . . . laid up for the man who wants to see and found a city within himself on the basis of what he sees," and that it "doesn't make any difference whether it is or will be somewhere."25
Whether it exists "somewhere" on earth does make a difference to Pound. And out of that stance comes his support of Mussolini and Italian Fascism. Pound's writings present Mussolini as a leader who understands what the people truly need, and who is willing to take action unhampered by degenerate "democratic" scruples deriving from ignorant fear and resentment of exceptional talent — "Democracies electing their sewage / till there is no clear thought about holiness" (91/613-14) — a ruler who respects the role of higher culture in establishing civic order, who can shape society along the lines of Confucian principles. For Pound, such a leader is justified in imposing his vision on society, as he is a lover of order, not of power, and he asserts his belief
that the Duce will stand not with despots and the lovers of power but with
the lovers of
ORDER
τò καλòν.26
However, the faith in Mussolini must be seen as part of a larger pattern of judgment reflecting Pound's long-held conviction that social injustice, war, indeed all human evils following on the misuse of will, can be alleviated or eliminated through proper government — at least for a time — if only the ruler's vision is clear enough and the will is strong enough. As Guy Davenport states, "Pound has always gone on the principle that if a thing can be thought it can, by golly, be done. One can animate the dead past and make it live again in a poem (The Cantos), one can find out the causes of wars, one can educate the people and make them noble."27 The key word in this description of Pound's energetic optimism is educate. Like Socrates, Pound is convinced that evil arises from ignorance, not from perverted will; if governmental leaders are sufficiently educated, and implement policies — especially economic policies — that in turn guarantee adequate guidance and education of the populace, the causes of disorder in human society will surely diminish, and a just society, reflecting timeless principles of order and beauty, begin to flourish.
Marion Montgomery and others have pointed out that this political confidence of Pound, manifest in his idealization of Fascism and Mussolini, is based in part on his faith in language itself: a conviction that when language is exact, and communicates perfected knowledge, it has an essentially irresistible power to transform and guide the individual will. To Pound, says Montgomery, ideal language "is an infallible medium that transubstantiates external existence in such a way that the mind is powerless to disgorge it," the result being that by a kind of causal necessity, proper intention and action follow from "the right word spoken."28
Voegelin has no such confidence in the power of language. Pound's view of it would appear to him a dream of sorcery, reflecting the desire for a magically infallible means of transmuting disordered into ordered wills. Voegelin would reply that one must never forget not only the extent to which the efficacy of language depends on the recipient having had, or being able to have, the experiences and insights of which the language is the symbolic expression, but also that even understood language can be rejected by a perverse will, by a will committed to self-assertion, dominated by disordering desires, or overwhelmed by the anxieties of existence. To imagine that the will's imperfection is correctable by human language, however exact and authentic its use, is, for Voegelin, a symptom of the refusal to accept the human situation in the In-Between as a tension toward transcendent perfection.
Voegelin's analysis suggests that Pound's confusion about the perfectibility of the will is linked to his resistance to radical transcendence, because it is only within the logic of affirming that divine perfection is somehow "beyond being" that human moral imperfection, including deviance of the will, can be understood and accepted in the permanence of its tension toward what cannot be perfected within the known conditions of existence. The resistance of the will to its own good is a mystery, and this is at least one mystery that Pound seems unwilling to accept. In his assessment of the human condition there is no mystery of iniquity, no reflection of the Christian doctrine of the perversion of the will; "original sin," as George Kearns states, is not a term in Pound's vocabulary.29
Consequently, Pound's view of evil, like his view of transcendence, is not radical enough: he does not acknowledge the fact of moral impotence, that the mind can know what is good yet still not act on that knowledge, or can act in violation of it. For Pound accurate knowledge of the good immediately results in — essentially is — moral goodness; it is a moral force (Pound's primary symbol for it is virtu) that is the source of right order in self and society, a force that operates with the inevitability of a law of physics. Proper knowledge of the nature of virtu is obscured, he believes, by the teachings of religions characterized by worship of a radically transcendent divinity, which substitute a "mystery" of evil for clear understanding that evil is no more than the selfish ignorance correctable by the ordering force of moral knowledge:
The principle of good is enunciated by Confucius; it consists in establishing order within oneself. This order or harmony spreads by a sort of contagion without specific effort. The principle of evil consists in messing into other peoples' affairs. Against this principle of evil no adequate precaution is taken by Christianity, Moslemism, Judaism, nor, so far as I know, by any monotheistic religion. Many "mystics" do not even aim at the principle of good; they seek merely establishment of a parasitic relationship with the unknown.30
One consequence of this view of good and evil is that there is something distressingly abstract about Pound's diagnoses of problems in human affairs and his proposed solutions for them. His eager equation of moral knowledge with moral goodness and his denial of the perversity of the will lead him to undervalue the significance of the struggle for moral maturity at the personal level, to ignore the mess and mystery of the concrete individual existing in the concrete tension between ordering and disordering influences, who may or may not support the better angels of his nature.
This abstracting from the concrete individual is what enables Pound to believe in systematic solutions — economic, political, cultural — to human problems, a belief in systems that Voegelin would argue is another signal that Pound has lost the balance of consciousness in the manner of trying to draw transcendent perfection into the range of cognitive and practical control.31 Such an effort always entails eclipsing the full mystery of the "beyond," and along with it the truth of personal order as a tension of existence in faith toward a transcendent ground. If we consider now the various immanentizing components of Pound's thought, they help to explain a major feature, and failure, of The Cantos. The mythic vision they present is finally incoherent, not adequate either to Pound's insights into the In-Between of human-divine existence or to Pound's ambitions to tell the "tale of the tribe."
As moving and convincing as the mythic elements in the poem are, they do not unite into a compelling vision of the meaning in human history in relation to the Whole: as Michael Bernstein asserts, Pound's "insights into magic moments . . . cannot. . . adequately engage historical reality on its own terms." Our analysis suggests that one of the reasons Pound ends up with only fragments of a mythos is that he fails to resolve the contradictions between his love of the divine and his resistance to the full depth of its mystery. He recognizes that existence unfolds in the intersection of temporal with timeless reality, but is not willing to affirm that timeless reality reveals itself in human consciousness only by revealing itself as reaching into the In-Between from an unknowability beyond human consciousness. To put it another way, he wants the gods that appear, but not the God who does not. With regard to history, Pound recognizes that its essence is the history of the waxing and waning struggle for attunement with divine truth, but continues for much of his life to envision the perfected community in terms of that which can be fashioned on earth.
Even in his poet's devotion to language, a related contradiction lurks: along with Voegelin, he understands that important and needed language symbols can become detached from the underlying experiences and insights that they were intended to express, and that one must work to penetrate to an exact understanding of what Voegelin would call their "engendering experiences," but at the same time he ignores the very possibility of that gap between experience and symbolization when he assumes that right words will of their own accord produce right knowledge and right action.
From the perspective of Voegelin's philosophy, a visionary, poetic mythos adequate to the structure of history in the In-Between would have to move us to a sense of ultimate community (of cosmopolis) that transcends adequate figuration in terms of an earthly city; to a sense of human-divine encounter that embraces not only ecstasies, but also the opening of the soul to radical transcendence, where faith embraces also the episodes of unmet longing and waiting, "the periods of aridity and dullness, guilt and despondency, contrition and repentance"; and finally, to a sense of the ineffable divine grace that is the alpha and omega of the transfigurative process of history.32 In sum, such a mythos would be characterized by something in notably short supply in The Cantos: religious humility.
Coda
It is in short supply, but still it is not absent; it comes suddenly to the fore in the Pisan Cantos (Cantos 74 through 84), the part of the poem written by Pound after he had been arrested by Allied troops in Italy and held at the Detention Training Center near Pisa — first in an outdoor cage, until he had a breakdown, and afterward in a tent — while awaiting transport to a U.S. court to be tried on charges of treason. The Pisan Cantos show Pound reviewing the course of his life and his learning, reconsidering his convictions and commitments, sifting through his memory to try to find where he has been right and where he has gone wrong. They register an awareness of personal failure, of pride-induced blindness, and also a new degree of existential openness, a readiness to relax the will:
Pull down thy vanity, it is not man
Made courage, or made order, or made grace,
Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down.
Learn of the green world what can be thy place
In scaled invention or true artistry,
Pull down thy vanity,
(81/521)
This note of humility deepens in the final drafts and fragments Pound composed for the poem during his late years, as the writing increasingly reflects a recognition that his epic poem does not, in fact, add up to a convincing vision of human history and divine reality:
But the beauty is not the madness
Tho' my errors and wrecks lie about me.
And I am not a demigod,
I cannot make it cohere.
(116/795-96)
To confess wrong without losing rightness:
Charity I have had sometimes,
I cannot make it flow thru.
(116/797)
And he pointedly confesses the misplacement of energy and love in his devotion to building the heavenly city on earth:
M'amour, m'amour
what do I love and
where are you?
That I lost my center
fighting the world.
The dreams clash
and are shattered—
and that I tried to make a paradiso
terrestre.
(117/802)
Paradiso there is indeed, but terrestre it is not. Pound's inability or unwillingness to embrace transcendent meaning in the fullness of its mystery, it would seem, is at the center of the intellectual and artistic misjudgments that he came to see as having seriously marred his life and work. The failure of The Cantos as a convincing vision of human history and divine reality haunted Pound's last decade, the years between 1961 and 1972 during which he rarely spoke, withdrawn into silence and self-doubt. During this time a reporter asked him, "Where are you living now?" Pound replied: "In hell."33
Pound's complex achievement in The Cantos displays, in its idiosyncratic way, the terrible difficulty facing twentieth-century artists or thinkers who want to remain true both to the justice, order, and beauty that exists, has existed, and may yet be achieved in world and history, and to the fact of a divine reality that has manifested itself in many different guises to peoples of all places and epochs. Pound's loss of the balance of consciousness occurs not because he attempts to stop history, as do the apocalyptists or modern gnostics or historiogenetic exclusivists who either claim special knowledge of divine being or try to absorb transcendent meaning fully into human insight, or because he closes himself off to transcendent meaning, as do the historical immanentists and the philosophers of groundlessness. Rather, because in Pound the dynamism of wonder and inquiry that draws him toward transcendence balks at the ultimate mystery, at the transcendence of transcendence, his vision of history and divine reality does not cohere but fragments into beautiful and curious splinters.
His pluralistic embrace of religious epiphanies turns aside from the Buddhist, Upanishadic, and Taoist insights into radical transcendence, and he resists the radically transcendent God of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. His understanding that history involves a waxing and waning of personal and social attunement to the divine ground hesitates at the recognition that divine reality lies ultimately beyond history. The erotic energy that informs his artistic evocations of divinity stops short of the revelation of the transcendent mystery as absolutely unrestricted love. Consequently, he remains "essentially a religious poet," as Lewis Hyde notes, whose "work displays a curious incongruity: it is framed by clear declarations of erotic and spiritual ends which it does not achieve."34
If this critique is accurate, then the achievement of truly balanced visions of history and divinity must rest on ideas and images that give (1) the finite world, (2) the radical transcendence of the ground, and (3) human existence as the site of their conscious interpenetration their full and proper due. 
[This is the last part of a 3 part analysis. Part 1 may be read here.
Part 2 may be read here.]
NOTES
20. The "Oirishman" is Scotus Erigena (810-877), whom Pound is quoting: "Omnia quae sunt, lumina sunt" (all things that are, are lights).
21. Pound, Guide to Kulchur, 44; The Republic of Plato 509b. For Voegelin's analysis of this and other Platonic symbols of transcendence, see, for example, The Ecumenic Age, 292-300; and "Beginning and Beyond," in What Is History? 212-22.
22. Voegelin, "What Is Political Reality?" in Anamnesis, 395-97; Kenner, The Pound Em, 15; Clark Emory, Ideas into Action: A Study of Pound's Cantos, quoted in Donald Davie, Ezra Pound: Poet as Sculptor, 216.
23. Pound firmly chooses one side in the age-old conflict in Chinese culture between the "realistic" Confucian concern with human affairs and social ideals, with its confidence in the potentials of human intelligence and virtue, on the one hand, and the "transcendentalism" of Taoism and Chinese Buddhism, on the other. On the introduction and impact of Buddhist thought in China, and its relation to Confucian teachings and principles up through the great Neo-Confucian synthesis of the twelfth century, see Wm. Theodore de Bary, East Asian Civilizations: A Dialogue in Five Stages, 21-61. For a brief description of Confucian humanism versus Taoist and Buddhist transcendentalism in relation to Chinese poetry, see Burton Watson, Chinese Lyricism: Shih Poetry from the Second to the Twelfth Century, 73-74,124-26,169-72, 203-6.
24. Pound, Guide to Kulchur, 38-39.
25. The Republic of Plato 275 (592b).
26. Pound, Jefferson and/or Mussolini, quoted in John J. Espey, Ezra Pound's "Mauberley": A Study in Composition, 87. τò καλόν means "beauty, moral virtue."
27. Davenport, "The Pound Vortex," 167.
28. Montgomery, "Ezra Pound: The Quest for Paradise," 84.
29. Kearns, Guide, 64.
30. Pound, "Prolegomena" (1927).
31. On the construction of "systems" as a symptom of revolt against the transcendence of the ground, see Voegelin, "Anxiety and Reason," in What Is History? 82-83.
32. Bernstein, The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern Verse Epic, quoted in Lillian Feder, "Pound and Ovid," 23; Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, in Modernity without Restraint, 187.
33. Hall, Their Ancient Glittering Eyes, 255.
34. Hyde, The Gift, 219, 223.
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