The Cantos

[luka]

you should never mix food and alcohol in any case, just muddies the waters

 

[luka]

have you read this poem all the way through? it's very long and you must be half cut by now

 

[luka]

youve been drinking steadily for 3 hours, in a bar, all alone

 

[Benny Bunter]

I read it all yesterday without notes having read a summary which was very little help at all, no notes, so obviously it mostly flew over my head, but I could tell it was good and would be worth spending time on. Today I've just read the first 4 pages again and some of the research you've been posting and they now make a lot more sense. I'm no rush, I consider that good progress

 

[luka]

i forbid you to leve that bar until we have finished making our notes

 

[luka]

order another beer and a vile Spanish brandy we will continue

 

[Benny Bunter]

Where are we up to? 4 giants at the four corners, what's that all about then?

 

[Benny Bunter]

Ah ok, the four guard roosts at the corners of the prison

 

[luka]

there's loads to look at before that, the symbolism of light, Dun Scotus, all the Chinese stuff....

 

[luka]

wait, it's not Dun Scotus it's a different one...

 

[Benny Bunter]

Erigena scitus

 

[Benny Bunter]

That definitely rings a bell from a previos canto

 

[luka]

John Scotus Eriugena - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Benny Bunter]

One prominent figure in Pound’s counter-tradition is the ninth-century Irish theologian, scholar and poet Johannes Scottus Eriugena. This figure came to prominence in the court of Charles the Bald, two generations after Charles’s grandfather, Charlemagne, had initiated the Carolingian Renaissance by establishing a new centre of learning at Aachen.

Pound saw in Eriugena a strikingly original and courageous thinker, willing to endure ecclesiastical opprobrium in his pursuit of systematic theology, and an intellectually adventurous scholar who sought to advance Greek learning in Western Europe at a time of its near-eclipse. Pound was prescient in his support of Eriugena’s importance in intellectual history, made the more striking by the fact that it is only in recent decades that his contributions to theology, poetics and dialectics have received the scholarly attention they deserve. Eriugena served multiple intertwined functions for Pound: he was an intellectual sphinx, arising out of the desert wastes of early medieval thought as an alternative to scholastic narrow mindedness; his embroilment in various controversies demonstrated that he was prepared to stand for his beliefs counter to a bull-headed ecclesiastical hierarchy, and for which he earned the loyalty and protection of his royal patron; and in the composition of courtly poetry in Greek, Eriugena serves Pound as a model for his own cosmopolitan, polyglot, experimental poetics.” (M. Byron, Preface xv-xvi)

 

[Benny Bunter]

"sunt lumina"

 

[luka]

there;s our ideogram at last!

 

[catalog]

cf Canto LXXVIII 'and as for the solidity of the white oxen in all this/perhaps only Dr Williams (Bill Carlos)/will understand its importance'
View attachment 9940

Didn't @william_kent have something about the red cow in his illuminati study group?

 

[luka]

i'm still testing positive which is frustrating but means we will have to continue with Pound. i've just had a Fisherman's Friend so maybe that will cure it.

 

[luka]

Didn't @william_kent have something about the red cow in his illuminati study group?

yes but this is a white ox, and the invocation of WCW is enough to indicate that it is valued for its actuality not for any symbolic import

 

[luka]

the word 'solidity' is another indication. it makes an impression as itself, as the big, heavy, muscled thing, white in the sun, white with the white tower of Pisa behind it