The Cantos

[catalog]

i'm reading a book on van gogh and he was in love with cypress trees, according to him they looked like egyptian obelisks


View attachment 9826

You might like Arthur Machen, he talks a lot about walking through the city and looking at houses and other buildings and seeing trees in them.

I took a photo of a tree the other day and my phones AI labelling function, where it tells you what you are photographing, eg "landscape", "plant", "portrait" came up with "historic building"

 

[Benny Bunter]

Anyone got a link to good notes on the 1st Pisan Canto? Decided to skip all the Chinese/Adams ones for now and I want to give this one a good go cos it looks really good but also really long and hard. Can't see anything on the cantos project website which I've even using up till now.

So far I have this summary but I need more detail:

Summary​

Canto 74​

As this canto begins, the speaker (again presumably Pound) looks out his window at the American Disciplinary Training Center (DTC) in Pisa, reflecting on the death of "Ben" Mussolini and his mistress Claretta ("Clara" in the canto), who were shot and then hung by their feet from a scaffold. This had happened shortly before Pound was taken into custody. This is followed by a reference to the last line of T.S. Eliot's poem "The Hollow Men": "a bang, not a whimper." After this opening, the poem shifts to Odysseus and several images of movement—the movement of Venus (Lucifer) in the sky, meteors, and sciroccos (winds). Returning to Pound's personal situation, the speaker complains about his own situation: "without free radio speech is as zero" and references Wanjina, an Australian god whose father closed his mouth so he could not create things by speaking their names. Pound also describes visits from several goddesses, including Aphrodite. A reference to Sigismundo Malatesta and passages about financial practices and anti-Semitism bring back themes found in earlier sections of the canto. This is one of the longest cantos.

 

[luka]

probably bits and pieces. when i get out of bed i'll have a look and see if i can photograph them

 

[Benny Bunter]

If it's not too much trouble that would be great, thanks.
Just read through the whole thing fairly quickly just to get a feel for it and my head is spinning. Recognise quite a lot of references to things from the earlier cantos, like he's swirling everything together he's written so far.

 

[luka]

im struggling to find my books becasue so many are piled up on the floor in different rooms like a mad persons house

 

[luka]

this is Manes who was tanned and stuffed

Mani (prophet) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Bahram I, a follower of the intolerant Zoroastrian reformer Kartir, began to persecute the Manichaeans. He incarcerated Mani, who died in prison within a month, in 274.[24] According to sources, he passed his last days comforting his visiting disciples, teaching that his death would have no other consequence than the return of his soul to the realm of light.[5]

Mani's followers depicted Mani's death as a crucifixion in a conscious analogy to the crucifixion of Jesus; al-Biruni says that Bahram ordered the execution of Mani. There is a story which claims that he was flayed, and his corpse suspended over the main gate of the great city of Gundeshapur;[25] however, there is no historical basis for this account

 

[luka]

Διγονοσ means twice born, so Dionysus DIGONOS

 

[luka]

"Ecbatan (‘Ecbatana’) is an ancient city on the Silk Road, located in modern day Iran. It was the capital city of the Empire of the Medes. In Canto LXXIV, Pound refers to Ecbatan as “the city of Dioce”, the first ruler of the Medes."

ECBATAN - AletheiaToday

Great bulk, huge mass, thesaurus; Ecbatan, the clock ticks and fades out The bride awaiting the god’s touch; Ecbatan, City of patterned streets; again the vision

aletheiatoday.com

 

[luka]

The Judeo-Christian tradition (including Dante) understands God as “the creator of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible” (Nicene Creed). Pound joins Alfred North Whitehead, perhaps Carl Jung, and a very few others in reversing that process. For these visionaries, the world in some sense ‘creates God’; or at least there is a mutually creative relationship between the two!

This is the meaning of Who writes the Writer?

 

[luka]

G-O-D constructs own self from clay compounds upwards
bootstrap to higher complexity and coherence etc

 

[luka]

i've always enjoyed his use of the word suave and rip it off often, usually as suavity of air

 

[luka]

Ecbatana - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Deioces - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Herodotus describes that the royal complex was made of seven concentric walls, with each internal one higher than the external one. Each of the seven walls were decorated with a specific color: the first (external) wall was white, second wall black, third one high red, fourth blue, fifth low red, sixth wall copper, and the seventh and innermost wall gold. Such a coloring was the symbol of the seven planets in Babylon, but was an imitation of Babylon in Ecbatana.[17] The king's palace was situated within the last wall along with its treasure

 

[luka]

im going to have another look for my books because im more invested in the game now

 

[luka]

ok i found them

 

[luka]

i mean you get this basic principle of conflation, and superimposition, and the rhyme in history i assume?
that Bloom is Uylesses and there is a similiar stacking here, with Manes, Mussolini, Pound, the great bullocks
eaten by maggots, and with the cities also, the cities built on earth and the heavenly prototype, Jerusalem
and the fourfold city of Golgonooza.

 

[luka]

the Process is the Tao

 

[luka]

when asked what he beleived in Pound said I beleive in The Process.

 

[luka]

"after Confucius' death, when there was talk of regrouping, Tsang declined, saying 'Washed in the Keang and Han, bleached in the autumn
sun's-slope, what whiteness can one add to that whiteness, what candour?"

"candor with the sense of both frankness and brilliant whiteness"

 

[luka]

periplum-voyage round a coastline. in the pisan cantos it is sometimes used for a voyage of the mind. here is refers to the journey of the sun "drawing the boats of his planets" like a great admiral.

 

[Benny Bunter]

Amazing thank you! Might as well as well make yourself useful while you're self isolating

I've just eaten my own weight in seafood and about to have a siesta or I'd get stuck into all this straight away.

i mean you get this basic principle of conflation, and superimposition, and the rhyme in history i assume?
that Bloom is Uylesses and there is a similiar stacking here, with Manes, Mussolini, Pound, the great bullocks
eaten by maggots, and with the cities also, the cities built on earth and the heavenly prototype, Jerusalem
and the fourfold city of Golgonooza.

Yeah, I guess this is what it's all about, putting all of history and literature onto one plain. With this one it really seems to be coming to a head, folding in and cutting up all the previous cantos.