old Jarge: George
Santayana
[80:49J.
A-Companion-to-the-Cantos-of-Ezra-Pound-II
Hercules is associated in tradition with "solar vitality.
"
59. A"'/lrrpiY. aV/l~",ivEt: H, "What splendour. It all coheres. " Or so Pound translates [WT 50] and adds in a note: "This is the key phrase, for which the play exists" [109/ 772].
60. dawn blaze . . . : The Women ofTrachis opens at dawn, and the pyre that consumes Hercules burns at sunset at the end of the play. Hercules' attitude is that under the law of the gods, "What has been, should have been," while his young son who must start the blaze believes, "And for me a great toler- ance / matching the gods' great unreason"
[WT,54].
61. Destutt: Antoine Louis Claude Destutt de Tracy, Comte, 1754-1836, a French phi- losopher who became a deputy to the Con- stituent Assembly in 1789. His major works include Elements d'ideoligie and Commen- taire sur l'esprit des lois [71 :96].
62. "Pity to stamp . . . '-: If a gold or other coin is stamped for a value less than its value by weight of metal, it will be melted down and disappear from the marketplace. Pound calls people who do such things "gold-bugs": they are a drag on any monetary system.
63. Ari: [Aristotle]: A saw "money as a measure," which is "called NOMISMA be- cause it exists not by nature but by custom and can therefore be altered or rendered useless at will [Pound's italics]. If we put this 'be rendered comparatively useless' we shall have got the juice out of 'altered and rendered' [which], . . . is now part of the bank wheeze" [GK, 278-279]. "Wheeze" has an informal meaning of "trickery. "
64. chih4 : [M971]. "Aim, intention. " Pound defines this: "The will, the direction of the will, directio voluntatis, the officer standing over the heart" [CON, 22].
Hnes: "The pusillanimous . . .
[86:64] [DG].
36. quia . . . est: L, "which is
37. Ver novum: L, "Fresh spring" [39:13]. 38. hie est medium: L, "here is the center. " 39. chih: [M939]. "Rest in. "
40. Ae6iv",: H [Ae1/v". ], "Athena. " At the end of the Oresteia, Athena broke the tie of the jury [Eumenides, 752; Loeb, 344: "this man stands acquitted on the charge of mur- der. The number of the casts [ballots] are equal"]. The play provides the first evidence of trial-by-jury in Judeo-Hellenic-Christian civilization.
41. Shang: [M5673]. Second dynasty: 1766-1121 B. C.
42. Y Yin: A minister of the Shang dynasty.
44. Erigena: [36:9; 74:90]. Because Pound associates Erigena with light-philosophers, he attributes to him the phrase from Grosse- teste, "All things are lights," as a way of suggesting his agreement with Grosseteste.
45. Greek tags: His dates, about 800 to about 877, make him one of the earliest philosophers to know Greek and thus one of the most complete scholars of his time.
46. Alexander: A. the Great, 356-323 B. C. In the spring of 323, A moved to Babylon to undertake great new developments, includ- ing a plan to open up maritime routes from Babylon to Egypt around Arabia: "under his supervision was prepared . . , an immense fleet, a great basin dug out to contain 1000 ships. " But on June 15 and 16 of that year, at the beginning of a great enterprize, he "caroused deep into the night at the house of the favourite Medius. On the 17th he developed fever; . . . on the 27th his speech was gone . . . on the 28th Alexander died" [EB]. "In him the soul wore out the breast, and he died, in his thirty-third year, of a fever which might well have spared hhn
dishonesty"
impossible. "
43. Ocellus:
Pythagorean philosopher from Lucanus who may have been a pupil of Pythagoras. An Ionic treatise attributed to him, entitled On
the Nature of the Universe (quite certainly spurious), dates not earlier than the 1st cen- tury B. C. "It maintains the doctrine that the universe is uncreated and eternal; that to its three great divisions correspond the three kinds of beings-gods, men and daemons; and finally that the human race with all its institutions . . . must be eternal. It advocates an ascetic mode of life, with a view to the perfect reproduction of the race and its training in all that is noble and beautiful" [EB]. Since Ocellus is listed by Iamblicus
as a
Pythagorean,
Pound associates
Or Occelus.
A 5th-centurY -B. c.
[5: 5]
him with the hnportant philosophers of light, and attributes to him the phrase "to
build light" [94: 172]. Ocellus was lated by Thomas Taylor in 1831.
trans-
? 494
87/572-573
87/573
495
65. directio voluntatis: L, "direction of the will" [77:57J: "The science of economics will not get very far until it grants the exis- tence of will as a component; Le. will toward order, will toward 'justice' or fairness, desire for civilization, amenities included. The in- tensity of that will is definitely a component in any solution" [SP, 240J.
66. "An instrument . . . ": Major theme of
Economic Democracy (1920).
67. Douglas: [38:49J. A criticism he often made: economic disaster resulted because money was used not as a just measure but for political ends.
68. Jean C: J. Cocteau [74:246J. Pound regarded him as one of the greatest and most perceptive of French poets and playwrights.
69. "gros legumes": F, "large vegetables. " Slang sense: "fat cats. " A pejorative epithet Cocteau applied to bankers. Pound quotes: "AlDIs, si l'idee de fantome te fait sauter en l'air, c'est que tout le monde, fiche ou pauvre aThebes, sauf quelques gros legumes qui profitent de tout . . . " [SP,436J. The sentence comes from L'Infernal Machina, a play about Oedipus.
70. in pochi: I, "in a few. " From Machia- velli: "Gli uomini vivona in pochi . . . " ("mankind lives in a few . . . "). Pound used the quote as an epigraph to GB in 1918.
71. causa motuum: L, "cause of motion [or emotion] . "
72. pine seed . . . : The power in nature by which the seed realizes itself: a leitmotif of the hidden city [83/530J, restated often, as in "the clover enduring" [94: 19J and "bois dormant" [93:128J.
73. BinBin: Laurence Binyon, 1869-1943. British poet, orientalist, and translator. Pound recalled in a 1934 letter to him [L, 255J that he used to say, "Slowness is beauty. "
74. San: [M5415J. "Three. "
75. Ku: [M3470J. "Solitary. " The "San Kul> was a sort of secret~society council of
three Pound found in Couvreur [IV, XX, 5-6, 333-334; Legge, 527-528J. They were part of the San Kung: "I appoint the Grand Tutor, the Grand Assistant, and the Grand Guardian. These are the three Kung. " These were assisted by juniors called the San Ku: "I appoint the Junior Tutor, the Junior As- sistant, and the Junior Guardian. These are called the three Koo [KuJ. They assist the Kung to diffuse widely all transforming in- fluences; they with reverence display bright- ly the powers of heaven and earth:-assisting me, the one man" [Grieve, Pai 4-2 & 3, 481 J. Stock called it "a sort of masonic council" [90:8J.
76. Poictiers: Poitiers [76:77J. A town in W central France, ancient capital of Poitoo. It dates from pre-Roman times; early on it became a center of Christian orthodoxy and an episcopal see, with St. Hilaire as bishop in the 4th century. The tower of the Hall of Justice was built here in the 12th century and has a room where on bright days the light is suffused indirectly so that no shadow is cast [HK, Era, 331, picture J . Pound listed this building as one where the architect in- vented something: "The cunning contrivance of lighting and the building of chimneys
est under the guise of rent . . . though the Church never ceased to denounce the Jew [sic J moneylenders" [Guilt, 28J. "Usury was the principal guilt of the Templars, and the secret of their enormous wealth" (ibid. , 22J. The Italian banking system grew enor- mously through the Renaissance because it filled the gap left by the destruction of the
Templars [90:IIJ.
78. "Section": The Golden Section of Pyth- agoras, a numerical process which seemed to involve mystical relationships representing proportions in nature. The proportion is ex- pressed as alb +b/c =c/d . . . =1/8 where 8 is greater than 1. Here, the architecture of the tower is seen as expressing proportions that relate it harmoniously with the cosmos [FR,Pai, 7-2 & 3, 29 ff. J.
79. false . . . barocco: Expresses Pound's be- lief that "usury" or money lust fosters bad art.
80. Mencius: [54:66; 78:60J: "Mencius said, 'All who speak about the nature of things, have in fact only their phenomena to reason from, and the value of a phenomenon is in its being natural. ' "
81. monumenta: L, "memorials, monu- ments, statuary. " Pound, following Heydon, distinguishes "monumenta" (plastic arts), "documenta" (verbal arts), and "phenome- na" (art of nature). The oak endlessly bears a precise pattern of the oak leaf, directed by an intelHgence in nature, without the aid of man [92/622J.
82. John Heydon: English astrologer and al- chemist, 1629-? , author of The Holy Guide, 1662, and other books in the hermetic tradi- tion. In the first version of Canto 3, Pound devoted 23 lines to him, calling him a "worker of miracles," a visionary, and a "servant of God and secretary of nature. " Pound saw in Heydon's "doctrine of signa- tures" an idea he related to a chain of Neo- platonic thought involving Trismegistus,
Psellus, and Porphyry [GK, 225J and the kind of intelligence in nature that makes an acorn produce only an oak tree. Heydon
[91:96J is mentioned several times in Rock- Drill with occult writers soch as Apollonius [91:9, 25J and Ocellus [91:12, 26J and in contexts of intelligence as light descending [WB, Approaches, 303-318; Surette, Eleusis,
263-267J.
83. LEAAoi: H, "the Selli. " Original inhabit- ants of Dodona, among whom was the oracle of Jove. Jessie L. Weston [RitualJ connects the Templars with pagan priests known as "Salii. " Pound prob. rhymes the "secret so- ciety" ambience of the Selli with other se- cret societies, such as the San Ku [cf. 75 above; 109:48J
84.
old Jarge: George Santayana [80:49J. Although G. S. maintained he was a materi- alist and a mechanist, his four-volume work on "essences" (The Realms of Spirit) ac- cepted the historical facts that religious faiths and traditions assumed much more than a materialist theory of knowledge could allow [Marginalia in DP's copy of The Can- tos. Note provided by OPJ.
85. houris: For all faithful men who died for Allah, the Islamk paradise contained an endless line of couches, each occupied by a houri, a nymph created from musk and spices and endowed with eternal youth and perfect beauty.
86. hsin: [M2735J. "Heart, mind. "
87. Morrison: Robert M. , 1782-1834, first Protestant missionary to China, whose dic- tionary in 6 quarto volumes was published between 1815 and 1822. He also promoted cultural interchange, education, and medi~ cine.
88. Remy: R. de Gourmont, 1858-1915, French writer, thinker, and stylist celebrated by Pound for many years for his Natural
Philosophy o f Love, which celebrates sensu- ality as a natural process in the universe which makes the cosmos continue [cf. NPL, 149-158J.
89. San! ' Ambrogio: Small town at the end of the salita leading up from Rapallo, where at one time during the war Pound, Dorothy, and Olga Rudge lived together. They were
is . . . something that has no hood" [GK, 109J.
known father-
77. Jacques de Molay: 1250? -1314. The last grand master of the Knights Templars. He was burned at the stake as a lapsed heretic on March 19, 1314 by order of King Phil- ip IV of France. Pound seems to believe that the Templars were destroyed because they undermined the money powers by lending money at nonusorious interest rates. Latest scholarship shows that they were indeed the major money dealers of the time, but that they charged excessive fees for their capital and were destroyed so that their enormous wealth could be expropriated by the king and his reluctant henchman, Clement V (the first French pope), whom the king moved to A vignon. Their headquarters in Paris, called the Temple, was the money center of the Western world: "The Temple lent money to kings and merchants and collected its inter-
? 496
87/573-574
87/574-575
497
joined there toward the end of WWII by Mary de Rachewiltz. The area escaped seri- ous harm. although the Ligurian coast near- by was heavily damaged.
90. Baccin: An elderly friend from Rapallo, who, in the spring of 1944, helped Pound carry "the accumulation of twenty years of books and papers, letters, manuscripts, draw- ings" up the hill to casa 60, Sant' Ambrogio
[M de R,Discretions, 196].
91. ulivi: I, "olive trees. "
92. Monsieur F. : Prob. Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880), who had visionary experiences that were prob. a bizarre form of epilepsy. They were always cued and accompanied by brilliant light and "a million thoughts, im- ages . . . crowding at once into his brain like blazing rockets in a flood of fireworks"
[Steegmuller, 22]. Flaubert spoke of his vi- sions as combinations of "Santa Theresa, Hoffman, and Edgar Poe. "
93. Windeler: B. Cyril Windeler, author of EUmus, a story with 12 designs by Dorothy Shakespear, one of the 6 books published by Three Mountains Press, Paris, ca. 1923. This
press, run by William Bird, also published Pound's Indiscretions and Hemingway's In Our Time.
94. Windeler's vision: Pound wrote: "and you have Mr. W. , a wool-broker in London, who suddenly at 3 A. M. visualizes the whole of his letter-file, three hundred folios; he sees and reads particularly the letter at folder 171, but he sees simultaneously the entire contents of the file, the whole thing about the size of two lumps of domino sugar laid flat side to flat side" [NPL, 155].
95. Santa Teresa: Or Theresa (1515-1582). Spanish visionary and mystic who had vi? sionary trances that "recurred frequently . . . and grew more and more vivid. The cross of her rosary was snatched from her hand one day, and when returned it was made of jew- els more brilliant than diamonds, visible, however, to her alone" [EB]. Pound said, "YOll have the visualizing sense, the 'stretch' of imagination, the mystics . . . Santa There?
sa who 'saw' the microcosmos, hell, heaven, purgatory complete, 'the size of a walnut' "
[NPL,155],
96. Butchers: Pound divided primitive men into four categories: (1) hunters, (2) killers of bulls, (3) killers of lesser cattle, and (4) agriculturists. "Ethics begins with ag- riculture, i. e. enough honesty to let him who plants reap. Plenty of religion in hunters, magic, etc. with reverent apology to ancestor of beasts killed" [letter from Pound to Wil- liam Cookson].
97. Fell between horns: Prob. an actual occurrence of a bullfighter attempting a ring maneuver such as "salta sin barra. " Says HK: "DP told me that EP saw bullfights at Arles. Ez wanted to join the fighters in the ring but DP's hand on his coattails held him back. 'With his eyesight! ', she said. "
98. "salta sin barra": S, "[he] leaps without pole. " Goya, in a series of etchings called La Tauromaquia (The Art of BUllfighting), shows a bullfighter vaulting over a bull on a pole grounded between the attacking horns. One might describe the movement as a "leap with pole" [Goya, Complete Etchings, plate 20]. In The Palace of Minos, by Sir Arthur Evans, a number of illustrations show a maneuver, performed by both women and men, in which the "Taureador" seized a bull by the horns and executed various acrobatic feats, sometimes landing on the bull's back before springing in another somersault to the ground, in effect a "salta sin barra. "
[Vol Ill, 203-232; see CFT,Pai 13-2].
99. Mr. Paige: Douglas Duncan P. , editor of The Letters of Ezra Pound. He prob. de- scribed Ligurian butchery in an unpublished and unlocated letter to Pound.
100. Ligurian: Of an area in NW Italy reach- ing from the French border to Le Apezia. It includes the Ligurian Alps in the west and the Ligurian Apennines in the east; the coastal strip forms the Italian Riviera; Genoa is the capital.
101. Mont Segur: F, "Segur Mountain. " From Latin "Mons Securus," indicating a
stronghold. Site of Provence castle / temple of the Catharists [23:25,28]. Pound be- lieved "a light from Eleusis" persisted in this area until the temple was destroyed by the Albigensian Crusade. Studies of the ruins indicate elaborate su,n-worship rituals [HK, Era, 335 ff. ].
[5:24] and suffered a sea change, suggesting a "delightful psychic experience" [SR, 92] akin to the experiences of Flaubert, Santa Teresa et a1.
103. Frobenius: Leo F. [38:45; 74:44]. The quote from Frobenius [GK, 57] is one of Pound's favorites [SP, passim], since it expresses a cultural coherence-"gristly roots of ideas that are in action" [GK,58].
104. oak cats: Poundian for "squirrels. "
105. Indians say: Paraphrased: "High weeds precede a hard winter. "
106. water-bug: An image Pound had in mind for years. It seems to relate to Pytha. gorean light imagery: just as light through air shadows forth creation, so does light through the denser medium water produce a patterf. ' of beauty on stone, a pattern that rhymes, in turn, with the "rose in the steel dust" [74:503]. Pound said in letter to Katue Kitasono: "I wonder if it is clear that I mean the shadow of the 'mittens'? and can you ideograph it; very like petals of blos- som" [L, 348; 91:105]. "The interaction between heaven, prince, and people para}? leled by that between the descent of light, the refractive processes of dented water, and the substantiality of the water-bug, which results i n . . . the special flower on the stone" can be seen as a "metaphysical image" that effects "a blending of the moral ambience of the te ideogram" [HK, Pai, 4-2 &3,381].
107. nel botro: I, "in the pool. "
108. Ideogram: TO [M6162], "awareness. " Pound says: "the process of looking straight into ones own heart and acting on the re? suits" [CON, 27]. The ideogram introduces again the idea of process in nature [74:9].
109. "Bomb him down . . . : Prob. a memo- ry from the Pisan confinement.
110. "Und . . . Shinbones! :
that one can tell who is talking by the noises he makes is partly true, Here, one can tell the kind of person (which matters) but not his name (which doesn't). The scene of ec- stasy relates to the discovery of another ex" ample of how divine intelligence works in the world. Just as the branches of a plant are spaced with mathematical precision so that they can spread their leaves to absorb the maximum amount of energy from the sun, so skeletal structures express optimal econ- omy of weight, size, and shape for the load to be carried. A rhyme with other processes in nature, such as the cherrystone producing only the cherry tree [113/788]. Or phyllo- taxis [104:87; 109:49]. For detailed ac- count of the mathematical precision of na? ture, see Thompson, On Growth and Form in particular Chap. IX on Spicular Skeletons and Chap. XIV, "On Leaf-Arrangement, or Phyllotaxis. "
111. ottocento: I, "19th century. "
112. Mencken: Henry L. M. [81:31]. Re-
current theme [GK, 182].
113. Mencius: Meng-tzu [78:60]. The lines are a compressed statement on taxing or sharing (tithing) which occurs in Mencius Ill, I, iii, 6 [ef. Legge, 612-613].
114. T'ang Wan Kung: C, "The duke Wan of T'ang. " Title of Bk. III, Pt. I of The Works o fMencius [ibid. ].
115. Ideogram: Shang [M5669], "supreme, top, first. "
116. pu erh: Pu [M5379], "not"; erh [MI752], "double. " Here, "no dichotomy. "
117. Ideogram: Li [M3867], "profit. " The "grain cut" is the annual renewable product
A French town on the
102. San Bertrand:
Garonne near Montsegur where the Albigen- ses defended their citadel until they were all massacred. It was on the road to this town that Poicebot had a visionary experience
Pound's idea
? 498
of nature, which is distinguished from usury: to harvest acorns brings legitimate profit; to cut down the oak tree for profit is usury. In Legge [Mencius I, I, 1, 125-127J, King Hui of Liang says to Mencius that, having trav- eled a thousand Ii [57:32J, he must have
CO(Tle with counsels "to profit my king- dom. " Said Mencius "Why must your majesty use that word 'profit'? " He said he offered only "counsels to benevolence and righteousness. "
118_ Ideogram: Chih [M933J, "wisdom" [85:9J _The sun (lower) element of the ideo- gram suggests "the light descending," in
Pound's recurrent religious metaphor.
119_ Religion: A deficiency of contempo- rary Christianity, which has no ritualistic dances in celebration of the mystery. With- out such rites, Pound implies by tone, no creed can be effective Of affective as a religion.
120. Cythari,triae: Followers of Cythera [24:30; 79/492J . To be seen here as dancing girls used in ritual.
121. Vide: L, "See. "
122. Neruda: Pablo N. , pseudonym of Nef- tali Ricardo Reyes, 1904-1973, a surrealist poet from Chile. His work is distinguished by his use of bold metaphors and the common tongue. He made sensuous verse out of grief and despair and had wide influence in His- panic America in both social and literary
thought.
59. A"'/lrrpiY. aV/l~",ivEt: H, "What splendour. It all coheres. " Or so Pound translates [WT 50] and adds in a note: "This is the key phrase, for which the play exists" [109/ 772].
60. dawn blaze . . . : The Women ofTrachis opens at dawn, and the pyre that consumes Hercules burns at sunset at the end of the play. Hercules' attitude is that under the law of the gods, "What has been, should have been," while his young son who must start the blaze believes, "And for me a great toler- ance / matching the gods' great unreason"
[WT,54].
61. Destutt: Antoine Louis Claude Destutt de Tracy, Comte, 1754-1836, a French phi- losopher who became a deputy to the Con- stituent Assembly in 1789. His major works include Elements d'ideoligie and Commen- taire sur l'esprit des lois [71 :96].
62. "Pity to stamp . . . '-: If a gold or other coin is stamped for a value less than its value by weight of metal, it will be melted down and disappear from the marketplace. Pound calls people who do such things "gold-bugs": they are a drag on any monetary system.
63. Ari: [Aristotle]: A saw "money as a measure," which is "called NOMISMA be- cause it exists not by nature but by custom and can therefore be altered or rendered useless at will [Pound's italics]. If we put this 'be rendered comparatively useless' we shall have got the juice out of 'altered and rendered' [which], . . . is now part of the bank wheeze" [GK, 278-279]. "Wheeze" has an informal meaning of "trickery. "
64. chih4 : [M971]. "Aim, intention. " Pound defines this: "The will, the direction of the will, directio voluntatis, the officer standing over the heart" [CON, 22].
Hnes: "The pusillanimous . . .
[86:64] [DG].
36. quia . . . est: L, "which is
37. Ver novum: L, "Fresh spring" [39:13]. 38. hie est medium: L, "here is the center. " 39. chih: [M939]. "Rest in. "
40. Ae6iv",: H [Ae1/v". ], "Athena. " At the end of the Oresteia, Athena broke the tie of the jury [Eumenides, 752; Loeb, 344: "this man stands acquitted on the charge of mur- der. The number of the casts [ballots] are equal"]. The play provides the first evidence of trial-by-jury in Judeo-Hellenic-Christian civilization.
41. Shang: [M5673]. Second dynasty: 1766-1121 B. C.
42. Y Yin: A minister of the Shang dynasty.
44. Erigena: [36:9; 74:90]. Because Pound associates Erigena with light-philosophers, he attributes to him the phrase from Grosse- teste, "All things are lights," as a way of suggesting his agreement with Grosseteste.
45. Greek tags: His dates, about 800 to about 877, make him one of the earliest philosophers to know Greek and thus one of the most complete scholars of his time.
46. Alexander: A. the Great, 356-323 B. C. In the spring of 323, A moved to Babylon to undertake great new developments, includ- ing a plan to open up maritime routes from Babylon to Egypt around Arabia: "under his supervision was prepared . . , an immense fleet, a great basin dug out to contain 1000 ships. " But on June 15 and 16 of that year, at the beginning of a great enterprize, he "caroused deep into the night at the house of the favourite Medius. On the 17th he developed fever; . . . on the 27th his speech was gone . . . on the 28th Alexander died" [EB]. "In him the soul wore out the breast, and he died, in his thirty-third year, of a fever which might well have spared hhn
dishonesty"
impossible. "
43. Ocellus:
Pythagorean philosopher from Lucanus who may have been a pupil of Pythagoras. An Ionic treatise attributed to him, entitled On
the Nature of the Universe (quite certainly spurious), dates not earlier than the 1st cen- tury B. C. "It maintains the doctrine that the universe is uncreated and eternal; that to its three great divisions correspond the three kinds of beings-gods, men and daemons; and finally that the human race with all its institutions . . . must be eternal. It advocates an ascetic mode of life, with a view to the perfect reproduction of the race and its training in all that is noble and beautiful" [EB]. Since Ocellus is listed by Iamblicus
as a
Pythagorean,
Pound associates
Or Occelus.
A 5th-centurY -B. c.
[5: 5]
him with the hnportant philosophers of light, and attributes to him the phrase "to
build light" [94: 172]. Ocellus was lated by Thomas Taylor in 1831.
trans-
? 494
87/572-573
87/573
495
65. directio voluntatis: L, "direction of the will" [77:57J: "The science of economics will not get very far until it grants the exis- tence of will as a component; Le. will toward order, will toward 'justice' or fairness, desire for civilization, amenities included. The in- tensity of that will is definitely a component in any solution" [SP, 240J.
66. "An instrument . . . ": Major theme of
Economic Democracy (1920).
67. Douglas: [38:49J. A criticism he often made: economic disaster resulted because money was used not as a just measure but for political ends.
68. Jean C: J. Cocteau [74:246J. Pound regarded him as one of the greatest and most perceptive of French poets and playwrights.
69. "gros legumes": F, "large vegetables. " Slang sense: "fat cats. " A pejorative epithet Cocteau applied to bankers. Pound quotes: "AlDIs, si l'idee de fantome te fait sauter en l'air, c'est que tout le monde, fiche ou pauvre aThebes, sauf quelques gros legumes qui profitent de tout . . . " [SP,436J. The sentence comes from L'Infernal Machina, a play about Oedipus.
70. in pochi: I, "in a few. " From Machia- velli: "Gli uomini vivona in pochi . . . " ("mankind lives in a few . . . "). Pound used the quote as an epigraph to GB in 1918.
71. causa motuum: L, "cause of motion [or emotion] . "
72. pine seed . . . : The power in nature by which the seed realizes itself: a leitmotif of the hidden city [83/530J, restated often, as in "the clover enduring" [94: 19J and "bois dormant" [93:128J.
73. BinBin: Laurence Binyon, 1869-1943. British poet, orientalist, and translator. Pound recalled in a 1934 letter to him [L, 255J that he used to say, "Slowness is beauty. "
74. San: [M5415J. "Three. "
75. Ku: [M3470J. "Solitary. " The "San Kul> was a sort of secret~society council of
three Pound found in Couvreur [IV, XX, 5-6, 333-334; Legge, 527-528J. They were part of the San Kung: "I appoint the Grand Tutor, the Grand Assistant, and the Grand Guardian. These are the three Kung. " These were assisted by juniors called the San Ku: "I appoint the Junior Tutor, the Junior As- sistant, and the Junior Guardian. These are called the three Koo [KuJ. They assist the Kung to diffuse widely all transforming in- fluences; they with reverence display bright- ly the powers of heaven and earth:-assisting me, the one man" [Grieve, Pai 4-2 & 3, 481 J. Stock called it "a sort of masonic council" [90:8J.
76. Poictiers: Poitiers [76:77J. A town in W central France, ancient capital of Poitoo. It dates from pre-Roman times; early on it became a center of Christian orthodoxy and an episcopal see, with St. Hilaire as bishop in the 4th century. The tower of the Hall of Justice was built here in the 12th century and has a room where on bright days the light is suffused indirectly so that no shadow is cast [HK, Era, 331, picture J . Pound listed this building as one where the architect in- vented something: "The cunning contrivance of lighting and the building of chimneys
est under the guise of rent . . . though the Church never ceased to denounce the Jew [sic J moneylenders" [Guilt, 28J. "Usury was the principal guilt of the Templars, and the secret of their enormous wealth" (ibid. , 22J. The Italian banking system grew enor- mously through the Renaissance because it filled the gap left by the destruction of the
Templars [90:IIJ.
78. "Section": The Golden Section of Pyth- agoras, a numerical process which seemed to involve mystical relationships representing proportions in nature. The proportion is ex- pressed as alb +b/c =c/d . . . =1/8 where 8 is greater than 1. Here, the architecture of the tower is seen as expressing proportions that relate it harmoniously with the cosmos [FR,Pai, 7-2 & 3, 29 ff. J.
79. false . . . barocco: Expresses Pound's be- lief that "usury" or money lust fosters bad art.
80. Mencius: [54:66; 78:60J: "Mencius said, 'All who speak about the nature of things, have in fact only their phenomena to reason from, and the value of a phenomenon is in its being natural. ' "
81. monumenta: L, "memorials, monu- ments, statuary. " Pound, following Heydon, distinguishes "monumenta" (plastic arts), "documenta" (verbal arts), and "phenome- na" (art of nature). The oak endlessly bears a precise pattern of the oak leaf, directed by an intelHgence in nature, without the aid of man [92/622J.
82. John Heydon: English astrologer and al- chemist, 1629-? , author of The Holy Guide, 1662, and other books in the hermetic tradi- tion. In the first version of Canto 3, Pound devoted 23 lines to him, calling him a "worker of miracles," a visionary, and a "servant of God and secretary of nature. " Pound saw in Heydon's "doctrine of signa- tures" an idea he related to a chain of Neo- platonic thought involving Trismegistus,
Psellus, and Porphyry [GK, 225J and the kind of intelligence in nature that makes an acorn produce only an oak tree. Heydon
[91:96J is mentioned several times in Rock- Drill with occult writers soch as Apollonius [91:9, 25J and Ocellus [91:12, 26J and in contexts of intelligence as light descending [WB, Approaches, 303-318; Surette, Eleusis,
263-267J.
83. LEAAoi: H, "the Selli. " Original inhabit- ants of Dodona, among whom was the oracle of Jove. Jessie L. Weston [RitualJ connects the Templars with pagan priests known as "Salii. " Pound prob. rhymes the "secret so- ciety" ambience of the Selli with other se- cret societies, such as the San Ku [cf. 75 above; 109:48J
84.
old Jarge: George Santayana [80:49J. Although G. S. maintained he was a materi- alist and a mechanist, his four-volume work on "essences" (The Realms of Spirit) ac- cepted the historical facts that religious faiths and traditions assumed much more than a materialist theory of knowledge could allow [Marginalia in DP's copy of The Can- tos. Note provided by OPJ.
85. houris: For all faithful men who died for Allah, the Islamk paradise contained an endless line of couches, each occupied by a houri, a nymph created from musk and spices and endowed with eternal youth and perfect beauty.
86. hsin: [M2735J. "Heart, mind. "
87. Morrison: Robert M. , 1782-1834, first Protestant missionary to China, whose dic- tionary in 6 quarto volumes was published between 1815 and 1822. He also promoted cultural interchange, education, and medi~ cine.
88. Remy: R. de Gourmont, 1858-1915, French writer, thinker, and stylist celebrated by Pound for many years for his Natural
Philosophy o f Love, which celebrates sensu- ality as a natural process in the universe which makes the cosmos continue [cf. NPL, 149-158J.
89. San! ' Ambrogio: Small town at the end of the salita leading up from Rapallo, where at one time during the war Pound, Dorothy, and Olga Rudge lived together. They were
is . . . something that has no hood" [GK, 109J.
known father-
77. Jacques de Molay: 1250? -1314. The last grand master of the Knights Templars. He was burned at the stake as a lapsed heretic on March 19, 1314 by order of King Phil- ip IV of France. Pound seems to believe that the Templars were destroyed because they undermined the money powers by lending money at nonusorious interest rates. Latest scholarship shows that they were indeed the major money dealers of the time, but that they charged excessive fees for their capital and were destroyed so that their enormous wealth could be expropriated by the king and his reluctant henchman, Clement V (the first French pope), whom the king moved to A vignon. Their headquarters in Paris, called the Temple, was the money center of the Western world: "The Temple lent money to kings and merchants and collected its inter-
? 496
87/573-574
87/574-575
497
joined there toward the end of WWII by Mary de Rachewiltz. The area escaped seri- ous harm. although the Ligurian coast near- by was heavily damaged.
90. Baccin: An elderly friend from Rapallo, who, in the spring of 1944, helped Pound carry "the accumulation of twenty years of books and papers, letters, manuscripts, draw- ings" up the hill to casa 60, Sant' Ambrogio
[M de R,Discretions, 196].
91. ulivi: I, "olive trees. "
92. Monsieur F. : Prob. Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880), who had visionary experiences that were prob. a bizarre form of epilepsy. They were always cued and accompanied by brilliant light and "a million thoughts, im- ages . . . crowding at once into his brain like blazing rockets in a flood of fireworks"
[Steegmuller, 22]. Flaubert spoke of his vi- sions as combinations of "Santa Theresa, Hoffman, and Edgar Poe. "
93. Windeler: B. Cyril Windeler, author of EUmus, a story with 12 designs by Dorothy Shakespear, one of the 6 books published by Three Mountains Press, Paris, ca. 1923. This
press, run by William Bird, also published Pound's Indiscretions and Hemingway's In Our Time.
94. Windeler's vision: Pound wrote: "and you have Mr. W. , a wool-broker in London, who suddenly at 3 A. M. visualizes the whole of his letter-file, three hundred folios; he sees and reads particularly the letter at folder 171, but he sees simultaneously the entire contents of the file, the whole thing about the size of two lumps of domino sugar laid flat side to flat side" [NPL, 155].
95. Santa Teresa: Or Theresa (1515-1582). Spanish visionary and mystic who had vi? sionary trances that "recurred frequently . . . and grew more and more vivid. The cross of her rosary was snatched from her hand one day, and when returned it was made of jew- els more brilliant than diamonds, visible, however, to her alone" [EB]. Pound said, "YOll have the visualizing sense, the 'stretch' of imagination, the mystics . . . Santa There?
sa who 'saw' the microcosmos, hell, heaven, purgatory complete, 'the size of a walnut' "
[NPL,155],
96. Butchers: Pound divided primitive men into four categories: (1) hunters, (2) killers of bulls, (3) killers of lesser cattle, and (4) agriculturists. "Ethics begins with ag- riculture, i. e. enough honesty to let him who plants reap. Plenty of religion in hunters, magic, etc. with reverent apology to ancestor of beasts killed" [letter from Pound to Wil- liam Cookson].
97. Fell between horns: Prob. an actual occurrence of a bullfighter attempting a ring maneuver such as "salta sin barra. " Says HK: "DP told me that EP saw bullfights at Arles. Ez wanted to join the fighters in the ring but DP's hand on his coattails held him back. 'With his eyesight! ', she said. "
98. "salta sin barra": S, "[he] leaps without pole. " Goya, in a series of etchings called La Tauromaquia (The Art of BUllfighting), shows a bullfighter vaulting over a bull on a pole grounded between the attacking horns. One might describe the movement as a "leap with pole" [Goya, Complete Etchings, plate 20]. In The Palace of Minos, by Sir Arthur Evans, a number of illustrations show a maneuver, performed by both women and men, in which the "Taureador" seized a bull by the horns and executed various acrobatic feats, sometimes landing on the bull's back before springing in another somersault to the ground, in effect a "salta sin barra. "
[Vol Ill, 203-232; see CFT,Pai 13-2].
99. Mr. Paige: Douglas Duncan P. , editor of The Letters of Ezra Pound. He prob. de- scribed Ligurian butchery in an unpublished and unlocated letter to Pound.
100. Ligurian: Of an area in NW Italy reach- ing from the French border to Le Apezia. It includes the Ligurian Alps in the west and the Ligurian Apennines in the east; the coastal strip forms the Italian Riviera; Genoa is the capital.
101. Mont Segur: F, "Segur Mountain. " From Latin "Mons Securus," indicating a
stronghold. Site of Provence castle / temple of the Catharists [23:25,28]. Pound be- lieved "a light from Eleusis" persisted in this area until the temple was destroyed by the Albigensian Crusade. Studies of the ruins indicate elaborate su,n-worship rituals [HK, Era, 335 ff. ].
[5:24] and suffered a sea change, suggesting a "delightful psychic experience" [SR, 92] akin to the experiences of Flaubert, Santa Teresa et a1.
103. Frobenius: Leo F. [38:45; 74:44]. The quote from Frobenius [GK, 57] is one of Pound's favorites [SP, passim], since it expresses a cultural coherence-"gristly roots of ideas that are in action" [GK,58].
104. oak cats: Poundian for "squirrels. "
105. Indians say: Paraphrased: "High weeds precede a hard winter. "
106. water-bug: An image Pound had in mind for years. It seems to relate to Pytha. gorean light imagery: just as light through air shadows forth creation, so does light through the denser medium water produce a patterf. ' of beauty on stone, a pattern that rhymes, in turn, with the "rose in the steel dust" [74:503]. Pound said in letter to Katue Kitasono: "I wonder if it is clear that I mean the shadow of the 'mittens'? and can you ideograph it; very like petals of blos- som" [L, 348; 91:105]. "The interaction between heaven, prince, and people para}? leled by that between the descent of light, the refractive processes of dented water, and the substantiality of the water-bug, which results i n . . . the special flower on the stone" can be seen as a "metaphysical image" that effects "a blending of the moral ambience of the te ideogram" [HK, Pai, 4-2 &3,381].
107. nel botro: I, "in the pool. "
108. Ideogram: TO [M6162], "awareness. " Pound says: "the process of looking straight into ones own heart and acting on the re? suits" [CON, 27]. The ideogram introduces again the idea of process in nature [74:9].
109. "Bomb him down . . . : Prob. a memo- ry from the Pisan confinement.
110. "Und . . . Shinbones! :
that one can tell who is talking by the noises he makes is partly true, Here, one can tell the kind of person (which matters) but not his name (which doesn't). The scene of ec- stasy relates to the discovery of another ex" ample of how divine intelligence works in the world. Just as the branches of a plant are spaced with mathematical precision so that they can spread their leaves to absorb the maximum amount of energy from the sun, so skeletal structures express optimal econ- omy of weight, size, and shape for the load to be carried. A rhyme with other processes in nature, such as the cherrystone producing only the cherry tree [113/788]. Or phyllo- taxis [104:87; 109:49]. For detailed ac- count of the mathematical precision of na? ture, see Thompson, On Growth and Form in particular Chap. IX on Spicular Skeletons and Chap. XIV, "On Leaf-Arrangement, or Phyllotaxis. "
111. ottocento: I, "19th century. "
112. Mencken: Henry L. M. [81:31]. Re-
current theme [GK, 182].
113. Mencius: Meng-tzu [78:60]. The lines are a compressed statement on taxing or sharing (tithing) which occurs in Mencius Ill, I, iii, 6 [ef. Legge, 612-613].
114. T'ang Wan Kung: C, "The duke Wan of T'ang. " Title of Bk. III, Pt. I of The Works o fMencius [ibid. ].
115. Ideogram: Shang [M5669], "supreme, top, first. "
116. pu erh: Pu [M5379], "not"; erh [MI752], "double. " Here, "no dichotomy. "
117. Ideogram: Li [M3867], "profit. " The "grain cut" is the annual renewable product
A French town on the
102. San Bertrand:
Garonne near Montsegur where the Albigen- ses defended their citadel until they were all massacred. It was on the road to this town that Poicebot had a visionary experience
Pound's idea
? 498
of nature, which is distinguished from usury: to harvest acorns brings legitimate profit; to cut down the oak tree for profit is usury. In Legge [Mencius I, I, 1, 125-127J, King Hui of Liang says to Mencius that, having trav- eled a thousand Ii [57:32J, he must have
CO(Tle with counsels "to profit my king- dom. " Said Mencius "Why must your majesty use that word 'profit'? " He said he offered only "counsels to benevolence and righteousness. "
118_ Ideogram: Chih [M933J, "wisdom" [85:9J _The sun (lower) element of the ideo- gram suggests "the light descending," in
Pound's recurrent religious metaphor.
119_ Religion: A deficiency of contempo- rary Christianity, which has no ritualistic dances in celebration of the mystery. With- out such rites, Pound implies by tone, no creed can be effective Of affective as a religion.
120. Cythari,triae: Followers of Cythera [24:30; 79/492J . To be seen here as dancing girls used in ritual.
121. Vide: L, "See. "
122. Neruda: Pablo N. , pseudonym of Nef- tali Ricardo Reyes, 1904-1973, a surrealist poet from Chile. His work is distinguished by his use of bold metaphors and the common tongue. He made sensuous verse out of grief and despair and had wide influence in His- panic America in both social and literary
thought.
