Dysfunctional relationships

poetix

we murder to dissect
I think there's a connection - not a necessary, cause-and-effect sort of connection, but a reciprocal strengthening perhaps - between the exasperated-with-everyone's-inexactitude posture and the cranky and increasingly authority-fetishising politics. How someone of Pound's talents ends up admiring a dim thug like Mussolini is one of those questions to which the answer is probably not as obvious as one might like, but the conviction that we live in a comprehensively decadent era, which awaits its moment of sweeping rectification, seems to prepare people psychically for captivation by a certain sort of charisma.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
cf "Trump will complete the system of German Idealism". Kantbot was joking when he said that, but he also wasn't.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
Ah, that makes a little more sense - RAW is very considerably more likely than Pound to be talking about tantric sex techniques...
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
The idea of the Templars as the conduit of esoteric wisdom from the Mystick East to the Basic West reminds me of Foucault's Pedulum. So was it an independent discovery of Eco's? I can't imagine Eco being influenced by Pound, or wanting to admit it, anyway.

(Not that I've read Pound but I understand he was quite fashy, or got that way.)
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Anna tells me Pound made pro-fascist and anti-Semitic broadcasts four times a week while living in Italy during WWII, which I think qualifies as "quite fashy".
 

luka

Well-known member
Pound didnt invent that stuff although he may have made up the bit where he posits Eleusis as the ultimate source and the bit about the troubadours-Dante carrying the torch for a while
 

luka

Well-known member
here's the relevant grapejuice essay


according to Pound this stream can be traced back to the troubadours and Cathars of Provence. Before the bohemians were the alchemists, the mages of the Renaissance, medieval heresies like the Free Spirit, the Fedeli d'Amore group of poets centred around Dante and Calvacanti, and finally back to the troubadours themselves. In each of these Eleusis is occasionally revealed, but we know that for Pound the tradition is much older. It extends back to the original fertility Mysteries and their even more archaic ancestry.

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Provence in the 12th century, though, is a turning point. It begins the modern wave of resistance. Here Eleusis almost fully unveiled herself. It was AMOR directly against ROMA, love against the Empire. And neither it nor the Empire ever died. It manifested in the south of France, but that was not the only place to witness the expression of AMOR at this point in history. Joseph Campbell, in his Creative Mythology, explains that this time was a pivotal one for the entire globe:


...Simultaneously with the rise, at the opening of the twelfth century, of this elite tradition of Arabized European poetry, the "cult of the dame," likewise "following the Arab precedent," also suddenly appears. Thus we now have evidence of an unbroken, though variously modified, aristocratic tradition of mystically toned erotic lore, extending from India not only eastward as far as to Lady Murasaki's sentimental Fujiwara court in Kyoto, but also westward into Europe, and even rising to almost simultaneous culmination all the way from Ireland to the Yellow Sea...

The "cult of the dame", the resurgence of the archaic fertility/goddess tradition, swept the whole length of the Eurasian super-continent.
 
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