|
recent thought / activity
See the full list at LibraryThing
audio
|
I've spent a lot of this summer staking out The Cantos. The poem has proven to be relatively impermeable to forward assault, so I'm doing the kind of thing I don't normally do, namely, attempting to make the poem more intelligible by reading a bunch of contextual material, the writing about/around the poem.
This is more fun with Pound than it sometimes is with other poets, because The Cantos is a poem so Cinemascoped that it sometimes seems like almost everything ever written could be counted as part of "the context." The Odyssey? Check. Ovid's Metamorphoses? Check. The correspondence of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson? Check. The Confucian Analects? Check.
I've been struggling through Pound's own (unorthodox?) translation of some of the Confucian writings, trying to see what he saw in them. The Analects in particular have been very difficult for me to appreciate: their repeated articulation of the actions and traits of the "superior man" makes them read, at times, like selections from the world's oldest self-help book.
Additionally, I struggle with the Confucian emphasis on tradition ("performing the rites") and the corresponding disdain for "twistiness" or deviance... this world-view is so congruent with contemporary U.S. conservativism that I have great difficulty feeling comfortable with it as a philosophy.
All the same, there's something in the Confucian works that I'm interested in, most notably the way the works approach pattern and change: the Analects can be seen, in part, as a way to ensure the continued iteration of certain patterns through time. How does one maintain a way of life or a body of knowledge through a universe in a state of eternal flux? This is a question that seems to have interested Confucius, and it's almost certainly a question that interested Pound, whose work can be understood as a kind of digest version of the history of literary knowledge, a kind of seed-book that might preserve information through a civilization's apocalyptic collapse (a collapse that Pound may have seen as imminent).
Pattern is also key to another text in this volume, The Great Learning, which is interested less in replicating patterns through time and more with replicating a specific pattern through scale: from the micro- to the macro-. If a man [sic] can establish self-discipline, or manifest the pattern of "orderliness" within himself, says Confucius, this pattern has the potential to radiate out, remanifesting in larger and larger spheres, all the way up to good (orderly) governance of the State.
"Things have roots and branches; affairs have scopes and beginnings. To know what precedes and what follows, is nearly as good as having a head and feet." Labels: book_commentary, poetry_commentary
Friday, August 27, 2004
| |||||||||||
|