Philo-aesthetic Digest 11/22/24

Here at the western world

Hi! Many are saying that ours is a time of renewed spirituality, of a retreat from the material into the inner space of ritual and belief. I’m not sure. It can be difficult to tell when you’ve hardly left the temple, if there really are more members of the congregation than usual. In any case my reading of late has been heavy on religious texts, so I’m afraid you’ll have to endure my limited ability to summarize them for now. I’ve also been reading Ezra Pound, and I’m afraid you’ll have to endure my limited ability to think about him as well!

Both Sides of the Sky: Zarathustra and Buddha

Zoroastrianism is a fascinating faith, among the oldest surviving religions and influential on the subsequent development of western thought across several axis. Given that, I was somewhat surprised at how few scholarly English translations of the faith’s holy texts seemed to be floating around. Indeed, in my experience you can far more easily access (what remains of) the Manichaean scriptures.¹ The text I’ve been primarily consulting is Mary Boyce’s Textual Sources for the Study of Zoroastrianism, and while at some point I plan on reading some less abridged translations and secondary sources this seems serviceable for now. It’s been an enlightening read, clarifying much about a religion about which I knew very little beyond fire veneration and dualism.

alert indeed to declare yourselves for Him before the great requital. (3) Truly there are two primal Spirits, twins renowned to be in conflict. In thought and word, in act they are two: the better and the bad. And those who act well have chosen rightly between these two, not so the evildoers.

(4) And when these two Spirits first came together they created life and not-life, and how at the end Worst Existence shall be for the wicked, but (the House of) Best Purpose for the just man. (5) Of these two Spirits the Wicked One chose achieving the worst things. The Most Holy Spirit, who is clad in hardest stone, chose right, and (so do those) who shall satisfy Lord Mazda continually with rightful acts.

I had been unaware, I confess, that there was a final judgment in Zoroastrianism, let alone that this may be the origin of the doctrine. The excerpts of the afterlife journey of Viraz I found fascinating as well.

And I saw the blackest hell, dangerous, fearful, terrible, holding much pain, full of evil, foul-smelling. Then I thought that it seemed like a pit, to whose bottom a thousand spears would not reach; and if all the firewood which is in the world were placed on the fire in the most evil-smelling, darkest hell, it would never give out fragrance. Again, as (close) as eye to ear, and as many as the hairs on a horse's mane, so (close) and many in number are the souls of the wicked therein. Yet they see not, and hear no sound from one another. Each one thinks: 'I am alone.' And they suffer gloom and darkness and stench and fearfulness and torment and punishment of diverse kinds, so that he who has been one day in hell cries out: 'Are not those nine thousand years yet fulfilled, that they do not release us from this hell?'

I’ve also been looking into Buddhism again, despite harboring certain longstanding reservations about the secularized American form of the religion. First the Dhammapada, now the Bodhisattvacaryāvatāra, with other collections of texts and a few samplings of some of the sort of American texts I’m suspicious of by way of comparison. There’s something very appealing to me about the idea of a bodhisattva, although my compassion being finite, I also probably wouldn’t offer myself up to feed a starving tigress, however much I felt for them. I probably am too attached to monotheism, to myself. I do earnestly hope for universal restoration, and yet something in me calls out however hypocritically for the day of judgement.

This was the only historical art I could find that illustrated the Buddha and Zarathustra together, please forgive the fact that owing to the (Chinese Manichaean) source Mani and Jesus are present as well.

Selling Modernism by the Pound: assorted political-aesthetical musings

I asked them to look into the Abyss, and, both dutifully and gladly, they have looked into the Abyss, and the Abyss has greeted them with the grave courtesy of all objects of serious study, saying: "Interesting, am I not? And exciting, if you consider how deep I am and what dread beasts lie at my bottom. Have it well in mind that a knowledge of me contributes materially to your being whole, or well-rounded, men.

-Lionel Trilling, “On the Teaching of Modern Literature”

Artists are the antennae of the race, the man once said. True enough I suppose, but I worry about what kind of signals the speaker was picking up. I’ve been looking into Ezra Pound for the last few weeks. It seemed appropriate somehow. He’s not a poet I’d made serious study of prior to this year, and the looking into him I had done before had tended to leave me with the impression that he was largely a facilitator, someone who made things happen rather than made things. Probably that’s not quite fair. If he had never written a word he’d have been a world-historic facilitator, one of those behind the scenes figures you can’t quite believe had a hand in nearly every luminary of his age. The poetry’s not bad either.

Cliche as it is for one of my sensibility I do find Pound the most troubling of the major American modernists. There’s extremity all over the movement of course-even if you weren’t a reactionary writers of the era tended toward a left radicalism of the sort professed by Dos Passos before the Spanish civil war knocked it out of him. Both The Waste Land and Nightwood are antisemitic works.² That said, the attitudes of Elliot and Barnes almost do seem too personal, too parochial somehow to take seriously even if they do mar the work, even if their presence was a symptom of something truly evil in western culture.³ With Pound it’s different. Perhaps because it’s systemic in a way that it mostly isn’t with the others, perhaps because he followed through on the sentiment, because he made those speeches decrying “Anglo-Judaic empire” while his idols were liquidating European Jewry?⁴

Then again perhaps it’s the learnedness that offends. I’ve implied my political stance by comparison with Joyce several times over the last few months, grudging defense of liberalism’s empire on the grounds that empire by nature tends to foster a kind of cosmopolitan absentee multiculturalism, while the condition that follows empire is so often rule by the Citizen skewered in the Cyclops episode of Ulysses- a hateful particularism seeking an inner independence from “foreign influence”, purifying the blood of the nation by force. It might be better, Joyce intimates and I nod, for the artist and the minority to live in an empire than a nation. Pound every bit as learned as Joyce, drawing on some of the same sources, that same northern fascination with the Med which possesses all three of us- with a broader frame in some ways, calling in China and Japan-he sings his song for Mussolini, for neo-nazism after the war. He punctures our illusion that cosmopolitanism must agree with us.

One wonders about the influence of the Confucian material Pound translated, about the hostility of that philosophy to commerce and the role it played in his regrettable politics. World war aside one theorizes about these artists and their worldviews even when one shouldn't. From a certain perspective capitalist modernity is good for the merchant and the peasant, who get penthouses and Cadillacs, apartment blocks and mass literacy. Meanwhile, the priest and the artist are set adrift, deprived of the old certainties, reduced from the height of their cathedrals to anodyne suburban offices and the proverbial garrets, diminished into the therapist and entertainer. There was a bit more going on with the first generation of modernists: there had been an apocalyptic war that seemed to annul all values, to extinguish all hope of anything beyond barbarism of one form or another. Today we are instead last men, megalothymics. You feel like a ghost on your screen, wandering downtown, reading and watching others who truly lived.⁵ Someone else must suffer, someone else must take this belatedness away from you. For some great Apollo must redeem the aeon and brutalize the degenerates whose fault this of course was back into shape or off the stage. This is partly what I mean when I said that I find “modernism, again” a somewhat baleful aesthetic development in our time, even if I happen to really like some of the art!

I’m stumbling Borgeslike through the Cantos. I can’t help but be a little resentful of this kind of author, this gesamtkünstler, and what he puts on you. There is it seems to me something authoritarian about this type of writing, something doctrinal, like it was making you declare “I believe…” with what you must accept to partake of the lines that move from side to side on the page. It’s not really political either, Joyce was a good liberal and still I feel this way about him sticking his Greekirish blendsprach words in my head, not just old Pound with his Zeilen ohne Übersetzung and shrine to Mussolini.⁶ I enjoy the way it almost seems to collapse on itself in the final Canto

Can you enter the great acorn of light?

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.

in a way that almost reminds me of the last part of Pale Fire where the wheels come off and Kinbote all but admits that none of this is accurate, that he’s insane, that he is not a king but one destined to “huddle and groan in a madhouse” . The revenge of the universe on proud men is one of my favorite themes. Pound perhaps lets himself off the hook at the end? Perhaps I misunderstand (this could be engraved on my tomb.)

i.e. it coheres all right

even if my notes do not cohere.

Many errors,

a little rightness,

to excuse his hell

and my paradiso

And as to why they go wrong.

thinking of rightness

And as to who will copy this palimpsest :

al poco giorno

ed al gran cerchio d'ombra

But to affirm the gold thread in the pattern

(Torcello)

al Vicolo d'oro

(Tigullio).

To confess wrong without losing rightness:

Charity I have had sometimes,

I cannot make it flow thru.

A little light, like a rushlight

To lead back to splendour

Obviously these are first impressions of a very complex work, and an artist worth wrestling with however less than angelic he may have been, take them as you will, they are subject to change as all things are. See you next time!

1. Manichaeism partook of influence from virtually every major tradition of its period, but broadly speaking has a similar relationship to Zoroastrianism that Christianity does to second temple Judaism in substantially modifying a still-recognizable theological base.

2. Amusingly enough Pound himself edited the really beyond the pale parts of The Waste Land out of the published version we read today.

3. This may be upsetting to some of my readers, but the contemporary phenomenon that modernist antisemitism most reminds me of is certain flavors of anti trans rhetoric, in both the more shallow view wherein the trans woman and enby are blamed for the fact that you don’t feel like a real man or woman anymore or the more cosmological variant wherein transgender people as a category are seen as the telos of modernity, that which you are forced toward by some them, and which must in this view be abolished for us to know who we all are again. Pretty sordid stuff regardless of who you’re thinking it about.

4. I’ve read the transcripts of some of his fascist radio broadcasts. They read a bit like the output of a Thomas Pynchon who was best buddies with George Lincoln Rockwell (a correspondent of Pound’s during his years at St. Elizabeth’s) rather than Richard Farina.

5. I’m fascinated by how Fukuyama’s end of history is both a condition savagely bemoaned and a lost Eden yearned for, bile spewing at them who trapped us or deceived us out of it. One hears the vitalists weep and gnash their teeth that one is not alive now, is imprisoned in a matrix of immobile culture, while others (sometimes the same people) complain that all is politics today. Why can’t we have fun, as though that floating sensation was the default rather than the state of exception in history.

6. I owe this assertion in part to

bp

, who commented something similar under my post on my misgivings about Ulysses, verbalizing something I’ve felt as long as I’ve known Ulysses but never quite thought of in those terms.