When a Good Raft and Compass Won T Do: Ezra Pound S Reliance in the Cantos on Guan Yin

When a Good Raft and Compass Won’t Do: Ezra Pound’s Reliance in The Cantos on Guan yin, Chinese Patron-Goddess of Those Who Travel By Sea Robert E. Kibler, Assistant Professor of English and Humanities For the Linguistic Circle of Manitoba and North Dakota Annual Conference, Grant Forks Minot State University. October 19 2003

Thrown into a military detention camp outside of Pisa and charged with treason against the United States at the end of World War II, Ezra Pound’s dark personal circumstance begins to encroach upon his long poem, The Cantos, as he undergoes what

St. John of the Cross called the “dark night of the soul.” Yet throughout the “Pisan

Cantos (74-84), Pound continues to rely on his interrelated spiritual and aesthetic system of belief—but his system seems to falter under shadow of the gallows, and so does the poet, who nevertheless continues to defend his system. When Pound falters in Pisa, he invokes in his poem the aid of Kuonon, Chinese goddess of Mercy, and patroness of those who travel by sea. It is an appropriate invocation for a poet who is in need of mercy, and who has taken sea-going Odysseus as the protagonist of his long poem. I will briefly outline Pound’s system of spiritual aesthetics, and how that system proves insufficient to his needs at Pisa until such time as the poet’s invocation of Kuonon alters and thereby redeems both his system and perhaps to some degree, the man.

Pound’s spiritual and aesthetic system became roughly set early in life. As he noted shortly after arriving in London in 1909, he believed “in a sort of permanent basis in humanity.”i That is to say, Pound believed that humanity makes its own gods, in its own image, just as it produces beauty in its own image. Divinity and beauty thus depend on a human imaginative power capable of creating and linking the two. Pound discusses 2 how these links are made and why in his Religio: or a Child’s Guide to Knowledge, published in 1918. The article takes an interrogatory form:

What is a god? A god is an eternal state of mind…. When is a god manifest? When the states of mind take form. When does a man become a god? When he enters one of these states of mind. Are all eternal states of mind gods? We consider them so to be…. By what characteristic may we know the divine forms? By beauty…. Are there names for the gods? The gods have names. It is by names that they are handled in the tradition. Do we know the number of the gods? It would be rash to say we do. A man should be content with a reasonable number.ii

Clearly for Pound the individual imagines a divine form and by doing so, creates it, and what the individual creates is beautiful, subjective, and variable. Likewise, Pound carries this idea of imagining divinity into the realm of creative artistry. In doing so, he is working within an identifiable Medieval and Renaissance tradition.

Largely following the lead of medieval philosophers such as Averroes,

Grosseteste, and Aquinas, who linked spirit to intellect and intellect to sight,iii 3

Renaissance artists such as Alberti iv Michelangelo, Leonardo, della Francesca and others likewise created according to the premise that ‘art is the imitation of the Divine in nature.’v By this, according to Adrian Stokes, they understood their medium--stone, for example, “as if it were alive,” and the artist as one who is “sensitive both to its potential as a medium as well as [to] its capacity [for realizing] his own fantasies, i.e., its content.” vi Following the lead of Italian Renaissance masters and of his contemporaries such as

Stokes and Gombrich, Pound sees artistry in a similar way. As early as 1911 he wrote of the artist as one who draws “from the air about him…latent forces…things present but unnoticed,”vii and elsewhere adds that the artist’s emotional organization of these forces works in much the same way as does a “magnet” to bring “order and vitality and thence beauty to [even] a plate of iron filings.”viii If we are to hold him to what he says about the creation of divine forms, then likewise this process of creating beautiful ones through the power of emotional organization is both divine and altogether subjective. Pound asserted as much all of his life, even when imprisoned at Pisa, where he writes:

The drama is wholly subjective Stone knowing the form which the carver imparts it The stone knows the form. (74/430)

As a result, the subjective artist creates divine and beautiful forms at will, and in doing so, participates in a process whereby what is perceived and created works in accordance with a cosmic understanding of the connectedness and interrelationship of all things, so that the stone and the carver, creator and created, are really one and the same, divine and beautiful together. 4

Yet this creative process has a social value to the degree that subjective perceptions are brought to external form and ritualized for extended use. This way, the perceptions pass out into the world and into tradition, thereby transcending the boundaries of the subjective perception by making it a collective one extending beyond the individual through time and space.ix Pound seeks to participate in this process through his own work, wherein as Eugene Paul Nassar and Angela Elliot note, character traits ascribed to gods and goddesses create meaning in a way that is partly private to

Pound, and partly discernible to others through the repeated associations he gives them.x

Further, illustrative of this process by which the subjective individual perception becomes an objective collective one are the Eleusinian Mysteries. These sacred rites embody a divine and aesthetic way of knowing, and Pound confirms his belief in their ability to transcend individual and subjective boundaries when he writes in 1910 that he believes “a light from Eleusis persisted throughout the middle ages and set beauty in the song of

Provence and Italy.xi A close look at the Eleusinian Mysteries will allow us to see how they function in spiritual and aesthetic ways for Pound, just as they did for so many people over thousands of years.

The Eleusinian Mysteries, performed in Greece from roughly 1500 B.C.E. to the

6th century C.E.,xii take as their focus the mythological story of the mother Demeter and her daughter Persephone. Persephone was of course whisked away by Dis, and planted on the throne of the underworld as queen and wife. Demeter, goddess of grains and harvests, searched high and low for her, until being tipped off concerning her whereabouts. After a judicial council of the gods found in Demeter’s favor, Persephone was returned by Dis to her, but had to go back down to the underworld once a year because she had eaten a 5 pomegranate seed while there—hence the link between the myth and the seasons. Mystes or initiates to the Mysteries first celebrated the Lesser Rites of Demeter as prelude to being initiated into the Greater Rites of Persephone. As N.M. Perret notes, Demeter’s rites were “festivals of homeopathic magic in which men and women, mimicking the seeding of the earth with grain, copulated in the newly plowed fields.”xiii

By contrast, the Greater Rites were of a somewhat more cerebral and spiritual nature, requiring sometimes months of ritual preparation by the mystes before they were ready. According to Carl Kerenyi, when it was time for their initiation, the mystes fasted for 9 days and then set off on the 10th day on foot down the road from Agrai, where the rites to Demeter were performed, on route to the isle of Eleusis, where at low tide, they crossed over to the island, bearing on their shoulders pots filled with a barley beverage.xiv

On the island, the mystes drank and danced themselves into an hallucinatory frenzy, then descended into an underground temple, the telestrion, filled with shadowy columns.

Within the temple, some kind of great light burst forth, and presumably, Kerenyi writes,

“it was in the glare of the spiritual and material illumination that the initiate received his or her transforming visio beautifica or as the Greeks called it, an epopteia.xv This vision, or instance of “having seen” was said to have given initiates a powerful sense of their place in the cosmos. Like all men and women, they would die, but presumably, ‘having seen’ in a flash their connection to all things, they would in some sense become aware of their immortal place both in the cycles of life, and in divine and immortal beauty. As

Perret notes, “the light from Eleusis does not transform the world [per se]…; it transforms [the initiate’s] perception of that world,” and in this way, the world itself.xvi 6

For Pound, that transformed perception ideally embodied the relationship existing between individuals and society, because the Mysteries historically enacted the means by which peoples’ perceptions of the world organized into imagined forms that are at once divine and beautiful, individualized and participatory, and led to an awareness of and existence in what Pound imagined as an actualized earthly paradise, a paradiso terrestre.

It is for this reason that the Mysteries became, as Leon Surrette has definitively shown,xvii one of the keys to unlocking meaning in the Cantos. So it is not surprising that in Pisa, locked in the “death cells”xviii, Pound announces in his poem that such a “paradise n’est pas artificial,”xix and that he will not surrender “the temples” created by a humanity insistent upon promoting divine beauty.xx Yet his assertion is shaky even when made, for of his own admission Pound in Pisa is a man “upon whom the sun has gone down.”

(74/430)

The Pisan Cantos are replete with objectified images of fear and darkness, to which are added Pound’s narrative interjections conveying the same personal message.

He tells us that he writes “from the death cells” (74/427) of “lordely men to earth o’er given” (74/432), and invokes the image of a hero from earlier in the cantos, Niccolo

D’Este, Lord of 15th century Ferrara, “buried naked,” the poet tells us, in earth “to the breast bone.” (82/526). “O Gea Terra, “ Pound laments, “what draws as thou drawest/Till one sink in thee by an arm’s length.” (82/526) Elsewhere he writes “as a lone ant from a broken…hill” (76/458) that they are “black who die in captivity,” (74/432) and that a man should not have to “live in further terror” of the “loneliness of death,”(82/527) as apparently Pound does, when in Canto 80 he writes “Je suis au bout de mes forces,” I am about at the end of my strength.” (80/513). In the same poetic moment, Pound’s 7

Odyssean protagonist recalls, when having put out to sea on a raft from Circe’s island,

“the raft broke and the waters went over me,” and as Pound adds, then fell into an “aeon of nothingness.”(80/513)

Enter Kuonon into this scene, a figure associated with ease, softness, lightness, serenity, and above all, mercy. She is mentioned three times in Canto 74, once each in

Cantos 77, and 81, and her presence is implied many other times in the cantos written at

Pisa. “Kuonon,” the poet writes, appears with “suave eyes, quiet, not scornful,” (74/435) gentle in her moving through “soft air.” (74/443) And again, after what appears to be a free moment observing a lizard, some wild birds, and a green bug,” he observes that “on this day the air was made open/For Kuonon of all delights.” (74/428) Elsewhere she is associated with the classical graces, and Pound writes of “possibility in the soft air/…./in this air as of Kuonon/enigma forgetting the times and the seasons,” (74/443) and again

“Kuonon,” he writes, “this stone bringeth sleep.” (74/428). Where had she come from?

Pound had first encountered Kuonon 35 years before Pisa, in 1910, having arrived in London as a brash young poet the year beforehand. He was befriended in London by

Laurence Binyon, curator of the East Asian collection of the British Museum. Binyon organized an Asian art exhibit at the Museum in 1910 and Pound attended. Of the seven paintings of Buddhist icons in that exhibit, 4 were of Kuan-yin, and in Binyon’s pamphlet describing the works on display, he wrote “Kwanyin the goddess of Mercy…seen in contemplative ecstasy, floating above the waters….Sometimes she is represented seated by a waterfall, [or] solitary on a wave beaten rock, with a spray of leaves in a little vase beside her.”xxi Pound also knew about Kuonon from the late Ernest Fenollosa, asian art 8 critic whose famous work Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art was published in London in 1912.

Binyon was commissioned by Fenollosa’s widow to finish the book Fenollosa had started, and Pound read it when published in 1912. It filled in his picture of the Chinese goddess of Mercy. Kuonon, Fenollosa wrote, was “symbolic of water and ether,” and was

“the providence who guards the travellors upon ships.xxii She was a Boddhisatwa, a

“being who…having the right to enter nirvana, deliberately renounces it, electing to work under the conditions of renewed temptations of the world, for the love of one’s fellow man.”xxiii Her figure is “so light and graceful, almost seeming to poise against the wind currents,”xxiv and gives the impression “of intense holiness.”xxv She “usually sits by the sea” and in one of the paintings of her that Fenollosa describes, she “dominates the room like an actual presence.”xxvi She protects in sorrow and she takes away fear. As Edward

Werner further notes of her:

If in the midst of fire the name of Kuanyin is called, the fire cannot burn; if tossed by mountain billows, call her name and shallow waters will be reached….Anger and wrath may be dispelled by calling on the name of Kuan yin. A lunatic who prays to Kuan yin will become sane.xxvii

Kuonon begins to appear in Pound’s work circa 1915, as “Kwannon/Footing a boat that’s but one lotus petal” in the first of his discarded ur cantos.xxviii In the next year, she appears in his translation of the Japanese Noh play entitled Tamura, wherein the

“light of the goddess Kwannon…pours a saving rain of light” upon the battlefield as she

“holds in her thousand hands the bow of “Great Mercy.’”xxix According to Angela Elliot, 9 she may also appear in Canto 20, floating on an invisible raft in a bodhisattva image,”xxx but after that, she disappears from Pound’s writing altogether until her reemergence seventeen years later in Pisa.xxxi Yet our issue here is not why she disappeared, or even that she re-emerged. Rather, at issue are the problems with Pound and his spiritual aesthetic system that I have suggested required her reemergence as redeeming solution.

Put under the pressure of historical crisis, Pound’s system of spiritual aesthetics falters. That is to say, it does not, as constructed without Kuonon, seem to possess the means by which to lift up the poet’s spirits and to help him transcend his personal circumstance in order to participate in divine beauty. Yet that system had been a help to him in the past. Throughout his Cantos Pound had invoked a loosely assembled pantheon of deities whose character positively affected the action of the poem and at the same time helped Pound the didactic poet get across his political, spiritual and aesthetic messages.

Three of the most impactful and enduring deities of this pantheon are Artemis, Aphrodite, and of course, Persephone. While Pound mixes and mingles their attributes throughout his long poem, their overall effect is unmistakable.

In Canto 4, for example, Artemis and her nymphs are bathing in the shadowed forest, the “ivory” of their skin “dipping into silver”water, embodying as they do a paradisal moment with the “air/Shaking, air alight with the goddess,/fanning her hair in the dark.” (4/14) The mythical moment is one in which the hunter Acteaon accidentally stumbles upon the divine troop naked, and is thus transformed as “the empty armour shakes [and] the cygnet moves.” (4/15). Acteaon witnessed a scene of divine beauty beyond the lights of humankind, and though he pays a price, the emphasis in the poem is on the beauty of the scene, not on the violence done to poor Acteaon. In Canto 30 10

Artemis again appears, this time as the means by which the world is purified, complaining about “pity” and how it “befouleth April,” and leaves “nothing now clean slayne.” Pity instead leaves everything in excess to “rotteth away.” (30/147) In her lament against pity, Artemis helps Pound promote in his poem the Renaissance ideal of clarity and efficiency of line as line pertains to painting and the plastic arts, (See Durer

1525 treatise on perspective, and Janmiller’s 1568 Platonic Solids et alia.) and as extended by Pound into poetry and life.xxxii Aphrodite in Canto 39 also promotes Pound’s message concerning the fertility that he always associated with human interaction with the gods. She engages in sexual intercourse on the high cliffs of Terracina with Anchises, father of Aeneas, and thereby creates a man/god who will found a divinely sanctioned empire in Italy—Dante and Pound’s beloved Rome. Their rhythmic beating of flanks by

Cliffside is echoed in the canto by that of an anonymous man and his bride, and the poem notes that “his rod hath made god in her belly,” and thus the bride sings, “cantat sic nupta.” (39/196)

A similar parallel between divine and semi-human action occurs in Canto 47, wherein Odysseus finds out that he must again go down into hell, into, as Pound writes,

“the bower of Cere’s daughter Persephone,” to there summon the seer Tiresias in order to divine the future. This ritualized interaction with dead spirits has its parallels in the canto to the ritualized celebration of the rebirth of Adonis. Both suggest that humanity resurrects the gods through interaction and ritual. Pound knew that the rites to Adonis took place in villages on the Ligurian coastline of Italy. Each year, the villagers put red candles in floating bowls, and in boats set them out upon the night sea. In a link between the rite to Adonis and those of Demeter and Persephone, these bowls were also filled with 11 earth, and seeds of wheat, fennel, and barley, and as Pound writes in the canto, “the small lamps drift into the bay…[and] in the pale night…float seaward….the sea…streaked red with Adonis,” and the “wheat shoots ris[ing] new by the altar/flower from the swift seed.” (47/236). Clearly the resurrection and transformation motifs associated with these goddesses emulate the sort of perceptual action that takes place when an individual or a society imagines its divine forms and by doing so, creates and participates in a beautifully awakened and fecund world, located within a beautifully imagined and divine cosmos.

Yet in Pisa, Pound imagines these same goddesses in association with fear and dread. In Canto 76, a canto full of tears and cruelty, we find as live wind in beech groves,

“Cythera potens, deina Aphrodite, dread Aphrodite,” and both the “daughter” Persephone and Artemis deina, “dread Artemis…et libinis expers,” to whom passion is unknown.

(76/456-457) In Canto 79, the poet warns the Lynx, sacred animal of Dionysious, to beware, for “coming up from the olive yards” is “Kuthera,” with “gleaming eyes.” Later in the same canto the poet addresses Aphrodite, noting “you are dreadful, Cythera/terrible in resistance,” as are “the daughter” Persephone,” and “Delia” or Artemis. (79/492). In

Canto 80, with a “death chill” coming down “from the mountains,” in Pisa, the poet notes that in the underworld Persephone has “granted reason to a blind man,” the seer Tiresias, but that there is no reason to have “faith” in what he might have to say. (80/494). Later,

Artemis is purported to have compassion for silversmiths, but none for Actaeon, (80/501) and again the poet refers to “fearful Cythera” …”pales eyes as if without fire,” and to a poem by Arthur Beardsley in which Aphrodite knew that she drew others to her, saying

“I am the torch”…[what do I care] “if the moth[s] die of me?”(80/511). Throughout the 12 canto, the poet repeatedly echoes Beardsley’s remark that “beauty is difficult” and Yeat’s confirmation, “very difficult…so difficult.”(80/511) Indeed.

What is more, the Eleusinian rites are referred to time and again throughout the

Pisan cantos, and yet the general fear and dread that characterizes much of Pound’s state of mind there suggests that the awakening, or epopteia that he associates with an invocation of the rites draws his attention more to fear and death than it does to any understanding of a divine and immortal beauty. Hence Kuonon, turning back from the threshold of paradise because she heard the cry of humanity, enters his poem. Once she is there, she continues to make regular appearances for the next twenty or so years until the end of Pound’s poem and nearly to the end of his life.

So we are left to consider whether Pound’s system faltered when he needed it most, or whether it may be more precise to say that according to the terms of that system, the poet failed to imagine paradise, being unable at first to transcend his own dread and fear, until such time as Kuonon emerged as a new form of divine beauty, and as a new means to a paradise that the poet had always hoped to create, even though while imprisoned, it apparently took a tremendous amount of emotional energy for him to actually do so. And yet he did, and that really must be taken into consideration when we assess both the spiritual and aesthetic system in which he was working, and the man himself.

Of course, it is altogether reasonable to consider that Pound’s entire system is simply hokey or fraudulent, and the emergence of Kuonon likewise a sort of literary ruse.

Most literary works, after all, purport to be true, yet we often must suspend our disbelief in order to follow their story—and Lord knows we must do so when considering religious 13 texts. Yet wouldn’t all of us on some level like to believe that those forms we imagine to be beautiful are actually manifestations of both the self and of whatever there is out beyond us that we hope all at once is personal, collective, inspiring, and divine?

If so, then in a way perhaps, Kuonon not only redeems the system and the man, but also his long poem, which often leaves not only its Odyssean protagonist, but also many of Pound’s readers, sometimes too long adrift at sea. Finis.

Notes i Ezra Pound, Spirit of Romance. New York: New Directions (1910) 1968. Page 92 ii Ezra Pound, “Religio, or, The Child’s Guide to Knowledge.” Pavannes and Divigations (1918), in Selected Prose, 47. iii From Averroes Great Commentary, 12th, wherein he misinterprets Aristotle’s discussion in de Anima, book iii, concerning the active and the passive intellect. Aquinas writes a similar commentary to correct Averroes error, but Aquinas is no closer —just more Christian. In the 13th, Grosseteste of Lincoln wrote the seminal tract connecting divinity to light, and thus to perception. But this idea is born with Averroes in medieval times. Averroes notes that the active intellect and the passive intellect were both collective, and germaine to all men. The Active Intellect was that which was able to derive abstract principles or particulars from intellectual matter, and when it did so, it produced Passive Intellect material. Passive in this sense means ‘potential,’ as in food for thought. Passive intellectual material is then acted upon by INDIVIDUAL MINDS to produce new forms that enter back into circulation. Medievalists such as Cavalcanti and Dante, as well as de Lorris and de Meum saw the eyes as able to abstract this principle as Active Intellect, and they shifted gears to take the same process and apply it to the recognition of love. The Tuscans Cavalcanti and Dante, following the fin amour tradition concerning love as opposed to the bon amour, shifted love back into things of the spirit. Et cetera. Whole paper is really here., in his 1435 treatise Della Pictura, for example,. iv Leon Battista Alberti, in his 1435? Treatise Della Pictura outlines the means by which in mathematical terms perspective —see his argument about ceramic tiles--is an imitation of nature, and as such, is also an imitation of the divine. v Must find notes vi Adrian Stokes, The Quattro Cento, London, 1932. From my notes. vii Ezra Pound, “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris.” The New Age, 7 Dec 1911, in Selected Prose, page 21. viii Hugh Kenner. The Pound Era. Berkeley: UCAL Pr., 1972, page 146. ix “Religio,” page 48. This is also Harold Bloom’s definition of the “tradition.” x Angela Elliot, “Pound’s Isis-Kuonon Ascension Motif in the Cantos. Paideuma vol 13, number 3, Winter 1984, page 347., and Eugene Paul Nassar, “This Stone Giveth Sleep, Io Son Luna.” Paideuma. Vol 1, number 2, Winter 1972. Page 207. xi Ezra Pound, “Credo.” Front. New Mexico, 1930, in Selected Prose page 53. xii Kerenyi notes that the mysteries were reported as ended in the 5th century by the historian Eunapios, who noted that shortly after Alaric’s invasion of Greece in A.D. 396 the cult fell into neglect. Page 16-17. xiii N.M. Perret. “God’s Eye Art’Ou: Eleusis As Paradigm for Enlightenment in Canto CVI.” Paideuma. Volume 13, No 3, Winter 1984, page 422. xiv Kerenyi, Page 88 for fasting reference, page 178 for alchoholic content of the kykeon, or type of vessel in which the bjarley beverage was carried. Kerenyi also suggests that the kykeon may have contained other hallucinatory chemicals, such as mentha pulegium, a mild stimulant, and/or poley oil (oleum pulegii) which is known to have an hallucinatory effect in large doses, even though it causes spasms in large ones. Initiates each received a set dose of whatever it was in the kykeon. Page 178-9. xv Carl Kerenyi. Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter. Ralph Manheim, trans. Princeton: Princeton UP. 1967. page 46. xvi Perret, “God’s Eye,” page 421. xvii Leon Surrette. A Light From Eleusis: A Study of Ezra Pound’s Cantos. 1976/2000. xviii LXXIV/427. xix LXXIV/438. xx LXXIV/434. xxi Woo-Ping Holoday. “Pound and Binyon: China via the British Museum.” :Paideuma. Vol 6, no 1, 1977, pages 23-36. xxii Fenollosa. Epochs. Volume II, Page 80. xxiii Ernest Fenollosa. Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art. Volume I. New York: Dover (1912) 1963, page 107. xxiv Fenollosa, Epochs. Page 66. xxv Epochs. Page 63. xxvi Epochs. Page 63 xxvii Edward Chalmers Werner. Myths and Legends of China. New York: Arno Pr., 1976. Page 251. xxviii Ezra Pound. “Ur Canto I.” Personae. A. Walton Litz and Lea Baechler editors. New York: New Directions Pr., 1990. Page 233. xxix Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa. The Classic Noh Theatre of Japan. New York: New Directions Pr., (1916) 1959. Page 53. xxx Elliot. Page 336. xxxi A Draft of Cantos 17-28 was published in 1928. xxxii See Pound’s statement from Fenollosa concerning the ability to determine the level of spiritual and economic corruption in an epoch based on the thickness of the lines in the painting produced during the period.