A Pound of Cure

Some of Ezra Pound's greatest poems are his translations--especially of Chinese and Latin poets. In defense and proof of this assertion, I give you:

This monument will outlast metal and I made it
More durable than the king's seat, higher than pyramids.
Gnaw of the wind and rain?
Impotent
The flow of years to break it, however many.

Bits of me, many bits, will dodge all funeral,
O Libitina-Persephone and, after that,
Sprout new praise. As long as
Pontifex and the quiet girl pace the Capitol
I shall be spoken where the wild flood Aufidus
Lashes, and Daunus ruled the parched farmland:

Power from lowliness: "first brought Aeolic song to Italian fashion"--
Wear pride, work's gain. O Muse Melpomene,
By your will bind the laurel.
My hair, Delphic laurel.

Horace, Odes, Book III

--Ezra Pound, New Selected Poems & Translations, New Directions, 2010, page 280

Some notes: This ode by Horace is a powerful reminder that the word music is derived from "muse" (Melpomene), whom the poet invokes for inspiration to his song by which he "binds the laurel" (i.e., coheres the world). I love the last line ("My hair, Delphic laurel"), which signifies full oracular power granted and active in the poet. The ode is a kind of ascent during which the power most manifest in poetry confers indestructible beauty and immortality: "Bits of me, many bits, will dodge all funeral, / O Libitina-Persephone (Libitina is the Greek goddess of death and Persephone a Greek goddess of the underworld]..." "I shall be spoken where the wild flood Aufidus [a long, winding Roman River whose name was taken from the Greek word for snake) / Lashes, and Daunus [one of three mythical Greek brothers who conquered eastern Italy and named a portion of it after himself] ruled the parched farmland."

Speech After Long Silence

Dear Friends,

And so another Ramadan has come and almost gone and NATO, Assad, the latest Al Kalifa, Netanyahu, et. al, have forced Muslims to find and worship in the mosque within, and the rest of us to offer the lame, symbolic shelter of our knotty prayers and feeble protest. As I write, Irene has bid a fond, gusty farewell--a reminder that aberrant man and nature work in consort.

This August, I've been reading George Herbert, possibly the greatest metaphysical poet England ever produced (forgive me Blake and Donne fans). But in this year of personal deconstruction and dissent, Herbert has helped me make my private assault on religion a reclamation. So have modern sojourners into a more bereft beyond--where icons hide in ruins like buried cans of pineapple found during a famine. Making do with less is still to have an All/Ah! At its most empty, post-Dover Beach life is still an extension of gnosis and thus never less than FULL.

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY AND AFTER

Though the great song return no more
There's keen delight in what we have:
The rattle of pebbles on the shore
Under the receding wave

--William Butler Yeats, 1932

Hence I have added Beckett to my backpack for the first time in years. He is adroit at the metaphysics of exhaustion. And he keeps me laughing at my own pilgrim pretensions:

"Do you feel like singing? said Camier
Not to my knowledge, said Mercier.
The rain was beginning again. But had it ever ceased?
Let us make haste, said Camier.
Why do you ask me that? said Mercier.
Camier seemed in no hurry to reply. Finally he said:
I hear singing.
They halted, the better to listen.
I hear nothing, said Mercier.
And yet you have good ears, said Camier, as far as I know.
Very fair, said Mercier.
Strange, said Camier.
Do you hear it still? said Mercier.
For all the world a mixed choir, said Camier.
Perhaps it's a delusion, said Mercier.
Possibly, said Camier."

--Samuel Beckett, Mercier and Camier, Grove Press, p. 16

Because Beckett-ian deconstruction has become such a necessary part of my life, it tempts all sorts of mockery of the constructs by which I have lived for decades. It works during Ramadan because it enjoins a fasting from conventional expectation.

"There are days, said Mercier, one is born every moment. Then the world is full of shitty little Merciers. It's hell. Oh but to cease!
Enough, said Camier. You look like a capital S. Ninety if a day.
Would I were, said Mercier. He wiped his hand on the seat of his trousers. He said, I'll start crawling any minute.
I'm off, said Camier.
Leaving me to my fate, said Mercier. I knew it.
You know my little ways, said Camier.
No, said Mercier, but I was counting on your affection to help me serve my time.
I can help you, said Camier, I can't resurrect you."

--Samuel Beckett, Mercier and Camier, Grove Press, p. 22

Into and out of this diminution comes a new grace, a refusal to give up on this tattered here and now as a land of opportunity:

Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

--William Butler Yeats, from "Among School Children," 1927

THE FOIL

If we could see below
The sphere of virtue, and each shining grace
As plainly as that above doth show;
This were the better sky, the brighter place.

God hath made stars the foil
To set off virtue; grief to set off sinning:
Yet in this wretched world we toil,
As if grief were not foul, nor virtue winning.

Hence, as Bawa once told me, "Despair was your way. If not for despair, worse would have happened to you. Now it is time to find a better way." Via despair, I practiced a stubborn intactness. The job was to always make the world from which we looked upward and outward a correlative of the original platform/departure point with "the better sky" of a "brighter place." Despite the current, sustained end-of-days tenor to earthly and human affairs, this birth/place still seems designed for maturity and the intransigence of my belief that "grief [sets] off sinning" and that "virtue [ought to be] winning." In other words, faith reduced to a naked hum of dis-content is still tropism and this a forward motion of faith. No wonder I take refuge in the rugged terrain of Japanese and Chinese poetry and these days the monastic disciplines of Herbert and other English metaphysicals.

For those of you who have been fasting this Ramadan, or wish you had done so, here is a poem about the accumulation of both fatigue and fathoming that usually occurs. This poem has a rugged, rigorous serenity. In other poems Herbert talks about everything that we experience or own being God's--even the nothingness we feel. As "His" property it is ordained--thus, Herbert says over and over, the highest extension of God and part of never-ending replenishment. I have found a more sinewy, non-sentimental splendor. At the end of this poem, we have the "gentle path" God of Christos--no more withered lands ("Throw away thy rod") and desolate cities ("Throw away thy wrath"). Pay no attention to that man on the cross ("Then let wrath remove; Love will do the deed: For with love, Stony hearts will bleed"). If nothing else, Ramadan tires us from and for wars. Drinks are on me!

DISCIPLINE

Throw away thy rod,
Throw away thy wrath:
O my God,
Take the gentle path.

For my heart's desire
Unto thine is bent:
I aspire
To a full consent.

Not a word or look
I affect to own,
But by book,
And thy book alone.

Though I fail, I weep:
Though I halt in pace,
Yet I creep
To the throne of grace.

Then let wrath remove;
Love will do the deed:
For with love
Stony hearts will bleed.

Love is swift of foot;
Love's a man of war,
And can shoot,
And can hit from far.

Who can scape his bow?
That which wrought on thee,
Brought thee low,
Needs must work on me.

Throw away thy rod;
Though man frailties hath,
Thou art God:
Throw away thy wrath.

--George Herbert (1593-1633)



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