Hard to Know who Is the Good Guy or Bad Guy.

August 29, 2012

Notes on Ezra Pound and his Poetic Activities

     Yesterday I read the newspaper and it told of the recently deceased science fiction writer Ray Bradbury’s surveillance by the FBI because of suspected Communist leanings. It has been said that the pen is mightier than the sword. Now the computer enters into the game. Who will, or rather, which will triumph in the end is now an open question. The computer program Deep Blue had beaten the world champion of chess, a Russian, as it is usually the case. Russians take chess seriously. The computer actually has no consciousness but it can be programmed to compute and fetch information light years faster than the human. I am facing an opponent, if I think that humans have any freedom, in the computer. It does not judge. It merely examines all the moves that I can make and can go where I may want to go before I get there, in a manner of speaking. But the computer, by itself is inert. A mind had to first program it. I can think of the computer is an extension of that programmer’s thinking process or memory. It is a symbol in the Jungian sense. It is a symbol of speed and storage.

     The poet and man of letters and arts advocate Ezra Pound was a saint and misguided man, besides being a genius. For his pro-Fascist activities he was arrested and confined to a mental hospital. During his long incarceration, he studies Chinese poetry and history. He translated a poem by the Tang Dynasty poet Li Po that follows:

The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter

  by Ezra Pound

While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead

I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.

You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,

You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.

And we went on living in the village of Chokan:

Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.

At fourteen I married My Lord you.

I never laughed, being bashful.

Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.

Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

At fifteen I stopped scowling,

I desired my dust to be mingled with yours

Forever and forever and forever.

Why should I climb the look out?

At sixteen you departed,

You went into far Ku-to-yen, by the river of swirling eddies,

And you have been gone five months.

The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.

You dragged your feet when you went out.

By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,

Too deep to clear them away!

The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.

The paired butterflies are already yellow with August

Over the grass in the West garden;

They hurt me.  I grow older.

If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,

Please let me know beforehand,

And I will come out to meet you

   As far as Cho-fu-Sa.

        By Rihaku


"The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter" is based on the first of Li Po's "Two Letters from Chang-Kan." Copyright © 1956, 1957 by Ezra Pound. Used with permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved. No part of this poem may be reproduced in any form without the written consent of the publisher.

This kind of mirrors my life in reverse. I spent my early formative years in China under Communism. For some reason, genetic, hard life, or being an immigrant, I developed a schizophrenia like illness with a mood component. From my late twenties on I need to take medication to be grounded in reality. To pass the long hours of the three o’clock and four o’clock solitudes I wrote poetry. From what I understand of my illness and some facts about psychiatric illnesses I think Pound had paranoia delusions. He saw a conspiracy of Jewish bankers controlling and financing wars and inequality. He did propaganda for Mussolini because the latter at first brought some measure of social equality to the Italians.

With this background, it is revealing that what Pound wrote was genius stuff and not “word salad.”
This suggests that the most cerebral part of the brain could be diseased while the emotions and the virtues may stay intact. Now, I would like to comment on the poem above:

The plain language of the poem suggests some artless person without guile, but I do not know if this is the poem written by Li Po. But it is definitely a poem by Ezra Pound. The simplicity of the language and the directness of speech paint a vivid picture for me that seem to be burnt into a shadow on the ground by a severe midday sun. I know he will not return this river merchant.

Li Po lived around 700 A.D. and records indicate that he was a fairly large man who when younger was a traveling knight-errand. He was called to the palace but was also banished from China. His gifts include drinking wine and was roaring drunk, passing out, and upon awakening, dash off an immortal poem. Or he could, to win a cask of wine by a bet; he could compose a poem while taking seven paces.

Historically, the highest class in China was the literati. Next came the big land owners, then craftsmen, peasants, and the lowest class of people were the merchants. It was so because the emperor’s wealth and power came from agriculture, in fact, intensive agriculture. The people have to be glued to the land for planting and harvesting. Although mining and metallurgy had developed in China long before many other places, the emperors levied such heavy taxes on mining and metallurgy and also on trade that they simply were taxed out of existence. To be a merchant was a low-prestige occupation. And does the heart grow fonder in long absences? I don’t know.

Now the Supreme Leader Deng Hsiao Ping had declared “what differences does it make what color is the cat as long as it catches mice?” The merchant has gone downstream forever out to sea with all of China’s wares. The young faithful and dutiful wife will pine for her husband forever. The Chinese rivers have finally joined the seas.

The imagistic poem:   

                                              

    In a Station of the Metro

    The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

    Petals on a wet, black bough.

    — Ezra Pound

This poem requires a different kind of analysis. Although it is influenced by Chinese poetry, it also contains the linguistic philosophy of its time.

This is Ludwig von Wittgenstein’s early philosophy or “picture philosophy,” where each word stands for an object and how the words are arranged represent how their referents in the world are positioned. Wittgenstein’s pupil and the subsequent Chair of Philosophy at Cambridge University in England, Professor John Wisdom (whom I had for a philosophy class one time), when troubled by what Bertrand Russell means by the word “the,” would come up with several “pointer words” that serve identifying the referents. Wisdom would say something to the effect: “this is on that and thess is on thatt,” because if the word “the” is used more than once, it ceases to be a unique pointer to an object. And what Russell means by the word “the” is that “there exists (such and such) and that such and such has the following properties.” For example, if I say, “The present king of France is bald.” It is a nonsense statement because I have not yet demonstrated existence.

So, what these linguistic philosopher tried to do is to have a lean language, the leanest possible, so that each word is an “atomic fact” and each sentence is a configuration of “objects in the world.” Obviously a statement like the following is nonsense: the blue unicorn only eats oats, and not grass. It is grammatical and syntactically correct, but semantically vague or empty. If we could only mirror all the facts of the world with language, then we would have real Imagist poetry. And although Chinese started out as pictorial representations with each character (word) representing a object in the world. But the language evolved so that each pictograph is also and ideograph. It becomes an idea as well. But because of the dearth of words (characters) in the Chinese language (only 50,000), many characters have to assume multiple duties. Thus it will have several meanings. And because Chinese language is monosyllabic, it is also tonal and gives rise to countless number of homonyms. Therefore, Pounds efforts to make poetry more precise using Chinese language or a similar usage of English words is also a challenge.