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Black Magick & Curses

Black Magick & Curses

Secrets of ye Dark Arte Call’d Ducdame

Basic Axioms of Magick

by Robert Anton Wilson

from R.U. Sirius’ The Thresher, The Third One, 2003
reprinted in Email to the Universe

zounds! I was never so bethump’d with words since I first call’d my brother’s father dad. — The Bastard in John Act II, Scene 1 by Wm. Shakespeare

People sometimes ask me, “Doctor Bandler, do you have to use that kind of language?” And my answer is “Fuck, yes!” — Richard Bandler, Neuro-Linguistic Programming Workshop, Los Angeles, 1999

Dr. Harold Garfinkle, a UCLA sociologist, has written a whole book recounting experiments that demonstrate that it takes remarkably little breeching of local Game Rules before subjects begin to show disorientation, anxiety, anger, panic, delusions, “inappropriate” emotions etc. — wigging out or going ballistic in lay language.

Even standing with your nose closer to a person’s face than the social norm for conversation can provoke remarkable uneasiness with remarkable alacrity; it may even trigger “homosexual panic.” Doc Garfinkle did experiments to prove it.

To treat one’s parents with the politeness and formality usually given to landlords and landladies can produce memorable freak-outs, sometimes involving pleas for psychiatric intervention Etc. [More experiments. See Garfinkle, Studies in Ethnomethodology , Prentice-Hall, NJ, 1967.]

Garfinkle’s data demonstrates that humans at this primitive stage of terrestrial evolution have so many tabus that they cannot remember or articulate most of them; but they quickly become physiologically “disturbed” when even one of the rules seems even temporarily suspended. This disturbance may culminate in serious injury, or death.

Thus, when I first moved to Santa Cruz, the world capital of Moral & Political Correctness, I made the mistake of quoting a George Carlin routine at a party. One line of this shtick goes, more or less,

Why, why, why do all the women you see at anti-abortion protests look like nobody would want to fuck them in the first place?

A psychiatrist standing nearby said to me, sourly, “I don’t like cursing.” This caused me considerable confusion. I had obviously violated a local tabu, but I did not know which one, and worse yet, I had never considered “fuck” as a curse or malediction. I felt like a guy who wanders into the local branch of Al Qaeda under the impression that he has found the Department of Motor Vehicles, or –even more– like a ginkus who opens a door in his own house and finds The Three Stooges in a phaser-gun shoot-out with Darth Vader and Mother Teresa.

I feel grateful to that psychiatrist now, of course. Mulling over how he came to classify “fuck” in the category of curses, led me to review all that I knew about the art and science of effective Cursing and about Black Magick in general. The results of my meditations will appear as we proceed. [Thanks, Doc!]

This sort of head-banger or mind-bender happens more and more in our postmodern & multicultural world, especially if you travel as much as I do. A basic sociological and anthropological law holds that while every culture (and every sub-culture) has different Game Rules regarding speech and behavior, each tends to believe that its own tribal rules represent the only “correct” way for humans to interact with each other . Among savages, you must learn the local tabu system quickly or your life may pay for your ignorance. Of course, as Veblen pointed out long ago, among the Higher Barbarians, they will not take your life but only your liberty; yet because confinement in a cage causes much suffering in all mammals, including humans, this threat terrifies the majority as much as the threat of death.

Among the Politically Correct, milder reprisals for tabu-breakers vary from economic arse-kicking [denial of tenure] to cruel & unusual punishments [compulsory “Sensitivity” Training.]

I first experienced this sociological phenomenon when, after three years in Ireland, I had a lecture-tour in the United States. I found that tabu systems had changed rapidly in some places but not in others: no city on the trip prepared me for the Game Rules in the next city. E.g. in Dallas, they still thought it polite to hold a door for a lady and boorish not to, but in New York they thought it insulting to hold the door for a lady, thereby making it necessary for me to navigate with extreme delicacy to avoid either holding the door or allowing it to slam rudely in her face.

If you fully understand the anthropological significance of the above, you know enough to write a whole book on black magic. Otherwise, read on. I will reveal the secret inner dynamics of how to hurl a truly nefarious curse — knowledge previously reserved only to the greatest Adepts of the Art called Ducdame.

We all, to some degree, think in “magical”* categories. Books on anthropology have sold better than any others in social science because they all shed as much light on our own tribal tabus as on whatever so-called “primitives” they depict. We need to understand Magick to understand ourselves.

What do we mean by Magick? As Aleister Crowley, Epopt of the Illuminati, 97th degree Order of Memphis and Mizraim, 33rd degree Scotch Rite, 10th degree Ordo Templi Orientis, “Baphomet” to the profane and “Phoenix” within the Sanctuary of the Gnosis, the Great Beast 666, etc. wrote:

MAGICK is the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in Conformity with Will. Illustration: it is my Will to inform the World of certain facts within my knowledge. I therefore take “magical weapons,” — pen, ink and paper; I write “incantations” — these sentences — in the “magical language,” i.e. that which is understood by the people I wish to instruct; I call forth “spirits,” such as printers, publishers, booksellers, and so forth, and constrain them to convey my message to those people.
–Magick, by Aleister Crowley, Weiser, New York, 1997, p 126]

In other words, the distinction between “magick” and “communication” exists only in our traditional ways of thinking. The uncanny Egyptians attributed both inventions to a single deity, Thoth, god of speech and other illusions.

In the existential world — in the sensory-sensual continuum — Thoth still reigns and language still has magick. All communication contains sorcery and/or hypnosis, because humans use howls, snarls, yaps, purrs, gargles, gurgles etc. — noises of many sorts — to create a neuro-semantic “grid” projected upon all incidents and events. We generally call these grids languages. We literally “see” incidents and events only as they register upon that grid.

If I use certain words that cause you to have certain predictable neuro-somatic reactions, I have cast a spell upon you. I have enchanted you. I may even have cursed you. [Sure you want to know more about this?]

My method of spellbinding or enchanting or cursing may not involve the traditional drums and rattles of the tribal shaman, but the laws ofneurolinguistic programming governing the transactions do not differ. I once triggered widespread scotoma, primate herd panic and psychoclonism in one nut cult called CSICOP simply by ridiculing them. They thought of themselves as Rationalists but I “magically” turned them into terrorized savages acting exactly like the ancient Irish kings who ordained death for any Bard writing satire against them. [No applause, please.]

To understand the language of magick one must first understand the magick of language. Let me define certain key terms. It may help disperse the fog of ignorance and superstition that has covered this subject for centuries.

By the sensory-sensual continuum I mean all that humans can experience, as distinguished from those “things” [or non-things, or nothings] that they can only make noises or chatter about.

Examples: [A] I can say “If you open that box of candy, you will find three chocolates inside.” Going to the box and opening it, in the sensory-sensual continuum, will quickly confirm or refute my statement, because you will inevitably find [1] less than three chocolates, [2] exactly three chocolates, or [3] more than three chocolates. Results [1] and [3] refute my statement; [2] confirms it.

But [B} I might also say “Opening God for similar investigation, you will find three persons inside,” as in fact Romish Magick does say. No investigation of the sensory-sensual manifold can ever confirm or refute this. Scientific philosophers generally describe such statements [about things beyond confirmation or refutation] as “meaningless”. Without speaking that harshly, I venture that we cannot fathom our situation in space-time if we habitually confuse ourselves by mixing type [A] statements with type [B] statements. We may never achieve Total Clarity [short of infinity] but we should at least have the ability to distinguish between what humans can experience and what they can only blather about.

Distinguishing between these two types of statements seems necessary for sanity and survival, because all forms of illusion, delusion, mob hysteria, hallucination etc., dogma, bigotry, “madness,” intolerance etc. “idealism,” ideology, idiocy, obsession etc. depend upon confusing them. The people who released poison gas in the Tokyo subways, the Nazis, the Marxists, nut-cults like Objectivism, Heaven’s Gate, Scientology, CSICOP, etc. represent some of the horrors and curses unleashed by mixing Class [A] statements with Class [B] statements.

All forms of Black Magick therefore depend on confusing and mingling these two classes: the nonverbal experiential and the verbal nonexperiential.

By the neuro-semantic field I mean the total vocabulary, grammar, syntax, logic etc. by which an extremely rapid system of feedbacks synergeticallylinks the verbal centers of the brain to the neuro-muscular, neuro-chemical, neuro-immunological, neuro-respiratory etc. systems of the organism-as-a-whole. In other words, I explicitly reject, not only the traditional verbal division between “magick” and “communication,” but the equally fictitious splits between “mind” and “body,” between “reason” and “emotion,” between “thought” and “reflex” etc.

All words transmitted as sonic or visual signals — sound waves or light waves — rapidly become photons, electrons, neurotransmitters, hormones, colloidal reactions, reflex arcs, conditioned or imprinted “frames.” physiological responses etc. as they impact upon the total synergetic organism.

Let’s take that a bit slower:

All words transmitted as sonic or visual signals — sound waves or light waves — rapidly become photons, electrons, neurotransmitters, hormones, colloidal reactions, reflex arcs, conditioned or imprinted “frames” physiological responses, etc., as they impact upon the total synergetic organism.

“Perception” consists of a complex series of codings and decodings as in-form-ation trans-forms itself through successive sub-systems of the organism-as-a-whole.

[Please re-read the last two sentences.]

We never experience “thoughts,” “feelings,” “perceptions,” “intuitions,” “sensations,” etc. We invent those categories after the fact. What we experience, nanosecond by nanosecond, consists of continuous synergetic reactions of the organism-as-whole to the environment-as-a-whole, including incoming verbal signals from others in the same predicament. These incoming verbal signals also produce in us reactions of the organism-as-a-whole sometimes culminating in a return signal.

That much seems simple neurobiological savvy.

But suppose I point a shamanic death-bone at you? Or utter a Magick Word that alarms and threatens you as much as a simple “fuck” threatened thatSanta Cruz psychiatrist?

We never “know” organismically all that we know theoretically. Parts of us remain simian, childish, “ignorant,” murky, inertial, mechanical etc.

Illustration: Consciously and will-fully remind yourself that you can tell the difference between a “movie” and “real life.” Then go to see the latest ketchup-splattered horror/slasher classic and pay attention to how many times the director “magically” tricks you into real gasps, internal or overt cringe-reflexes, dry mouth, clutching [seat-rails, coke can, companion’s arm etc.] or other symptoms of minor but real [polygraph-diagnosable] anxiety and short-term near-panic, sometimes verging on vomit-reflex.

Illustration #2: With the same conscious and will-full reminders about the difference between “movies” and “real life,” rent a hard-core XXX porno DVD. Observe how long it takes before physiological responses indicate that parts of you at least have lost track of that distinction.

To repeat an earlier point, in Neurolinguistic Programming [NLP], Dr Bandler makes a distinction between the “meta-model” and the “Milton model.” The meta-model, continually revised, updated and expanded, consists of the class of all scientifically meaningful statements available at this date. We should revise our meta-model every day, by keeping in contact with others in the same predicament. Since Scenario Universe always and only consists of — as Bucky Fuller said — nonsimultaneously apprehended events [coherent space-time synergies], such continuous feedback appears necessary.

If everything happened at once, we would know Absolute Truth at once: but since space-time events happen nonsimultaneoously, we need feedback.

The ” Milton model, ” on the other hand, named after Dr. Milton Erickson, “the greatest hypnotist of the 20th Century,” consists of the class of all scientifically meaningless statements that “magically” make us feel much better, or much worse — or, in occult language, the class of all blessings and all curses. [General Semanticists call it the class of all purrs and all snarls.]

This Heap Big Magick, bwana. You can fucking kill a guy with this stuff. And, of course, if you have Dr. Erickson’s compassion, you can repeatedly heal the seemingly helpless.

Four score and something years ago, Drs. Ogden and Richards, in The Meaning of Meaning, brought forth a distinction between the denotation of words and the connotation of words.

In the denotation, any word or group of words belongs in the meta-model if it conforms to the test of the model, viz. scientifically meaningful reference in the experiential-phenomenological world.

And in the connotation, any word or group of words belongs in the Milton model if it conforms to the test of that model, viz again, scientifically meaningless reference to nothing-in-particular and everything-in-general so packaged as to make us feel better, or worse.

Our major problem, in the elementary blessing and cursing game called social conversation, lies in the fact that quite often — very, very often — the same word may have “objective” denotations in the scientific meta-model but also have “emotive” neurosemantic connotations in the magical Milton model. In other words, we hypnotize ourselves, and one another, with remarkable ease. In only a few minutes, a dedicated dogmatist can have you heatedly shouting something in the form of the Primary Magick Theorem, which declares that any non-verbal incident or event encountered and endured “really” “is” some noise or grunt we choose to label it with. [One corollary holds that sticking pins in a doll will hurt the person sharing the doll’s label, and a second states that throwing darts at an image of the Enemy Leader will “help the war effort.”]

Illustration: by persistent reiteration of medieval logical forms, the anti-choice people in the abortion debate have hypnotized the pro-choice people into interminable haggling about whether one non-verbal event inside a woman “really is” [the noise or grunt preferred by my side] and “really” “is” not [the gargle or gurgle preferred by the other side]. Since the various noises, grunts, gargles, gurgles etc. have no experiential or experimental or phenomenological or existential referents in the sensory or sensual or instrumental space-time manifold, this contest transpires in the Milton model, each side trying to hypnotize the other.

But, even more nefariously, this has the structure of what Watslavick called, in Pragmatics of Human Communication, the Game Without End. This Game –which word “really” “is” the non-word –gives great entertainment and self-esteem to those who really like that kind of thing; but it causesKafla-esque and “nightmarish” sensations throughout the organism-as-a-whole among those who want to get out of the Game and go back where language made sense, but nonetheless remain spellbound . & “cursed” for the seemingly infinite length of the Game Without End.

The Game Without End begins with the attempt to decide which bark or howl “really” “is” a nonverbal existential event.

None of this represents abstract theorems. The role of magick in all language transactions has very concrete and exhilarating/terrifying implications; viz. the tris:

Well-documented case of a man literally killed by a shaman’s curse and a “death-bone” — The Psychobiology of Mind-Body Healing , by Ernest Lawrence Rossi, Norton, 1988, page 9-12.

Equally well-documented case of another man, a cancer patient, “miraculously” blessed by remission and recovery due to a placebo [with tumors shrunk to half their previous size], then cursed back into critical condition when learning of deaths of others receiving the same placebo — same book, page 3-8.

Robert Houdin, often called the greatest stage magician of the 19th Century, once said, “A magician is only an actor — only an actor pretending to be a magician.”

Similarly, what French anthropologists call participation mystique [“at-one-ness” or even “holy union”] — a state allegedly limited to “savages” — occurs every day, in every modern city, in nonpathological forms, at our theatres and movie houses, and on our TVs, VCRs and DVDs.

This mystic trance, in which [for instance] Laurence Olivier becomes “Hamlet” right before our eyes only mutates to the pathological if we cannot break the spell –if we continue to see, and relate to, Lord Olivier as Hamlet even if we chance to meet him in a pub: “I say, old bean, you seem to suffer from compulsive rumination, as the shrinks call it. Just kill the old bugger and make a run for the frontier.”

Here the Milton model has replaced the meta-model in the wrong space-time locale [territory not defined as play acting space.] Madness lies but one step further.

My mother never stopped hating Charles Laughton for the sadistic glee he projected in the punishment sequences of Mutinty on the Bounty. She’d never look at another movie with Laughton in it.

Orson Welles, with considerable experience as both actor and stage magician, said “I have been an acting-forger all my life.” He said it in his last film,* a fake documentary about a partially fake biography of a totally fake painter — F For Fake, based on a seemingly true but partly bogus biography called, even more bluntly, Fake!

Some of us have become postmodern whether we like it or not. As the Poet wrote,

I saw a man upon the stair,
A little man who wasn’t there;
He wasn’t there again today –
Gee, I wish he’d go away!

Of course, we all clearly understand that the little man who “wasn’t there” simply “wasn’t there” and hence can’t go away, but the structure of Indo-European grammar so spellbinds and enchants us that we illogically feel that the spooky little bastard should go away, just to conform to the syntax.

Whosoever speaks in any tongue gives birth to blessings and curses. & if the uncanny Egyptians made Thoth the father of both language and magick, the canny Greeks made Hermes, their version of Thoth, the god of both language and fraud.

_______________

* Not the last film he acted in, just the last film in which he had control as writer/producer/director/actor

The Celtic Roots of Quantum Theory

The Celtic Roots of Quantum Theory

by Robert Anton Wilson

excerpt from Email to the Universe

The reality of metaphysics is the reality of masks.  -Oscar Wilde

The day in 1982 when my wife, Arlen, and I arrived in Ireland we tried her battery-operated radio to listen avidly to whatever we might find: our way of dipping our toes in the new culture before plunging into its alien waters totally. By the kind of coincidence that I don’t regard as coincidental we found an RTE* interviewer discussing local legends about the pookah with a Kerry farmer. As a longtome pookaphile, I found the conversation spellbinding, but the best part came at the end:
——————-
*RTE = Radio Telefis hEirenn, the State-owned but feisty and independent radio-TV monopoly.
——————-
“But do you believe in the pookah yourself?” asked the RTE man.

“That I do not,” the farmer replied firmly, “and I doubt much that he believes in me either!”

I knew then that I had indeed found my spiritual homeland, wherever I may otherwise roam, and that Yeats and Joyce and O’Brien had not risen out of a vacuum. We had planned to say six months; we eventually stayed six years.

Anthony Burgess once argued that English English, American English and all the other varieties of Anglophonics have become rational and pragmatic [closure-oriented] but Irish English remains ludic and esthetic [open-oriented]. The rest of us speak dry prose; the Irish speak playful poetry.

While I see some truth in that formulation, I would prefer to describe all-other-English as belonging to what Neurolinguistic therapist Dr Richard Bandler calls the meta-model [statements we can logically judge as true or false] and Irish English as belonging to the Milton-model [statements not containable in true-false logic but capable of seducing us into sudden new perceptions.]

The Milton-model, named after Dr. Milton Erickson –“the greatest therapeutic hypnotist of the 20th Century,” in the opinion of his peers — contains no propositions subject to proof or disproof, uses language the way that Kerry farmer did, and can cause both intellectual and physiological transformations. Because of his many successes in curing the allegedly incurable, Dr Erickson often became proclaimed “the Miracle Worker.”

Oddly, most of Dr. Erickson’s patients did not think they had undergone hypnosis at all. They just remembered having a friendly chat with an unusually sympathetic doctor. ..

According to the Korzybsk-Whorf-Sapir hypothesis, the language a people speak habitually influences their sense perceptions, their “concepts” and even the way they feel about themselves and the world in general. “A change in language can transform our appreciation of the cosmos,” as Whorf stated the case.

The clinical record of Erickson and his school indicates that language tricks can even make us ill or make us well again.

The Irish neurolinguistic system illustrates these theorems uncommonly well.

Whether you call it ludic language, Ericksonian hypnosis or the verbal equivelant of throwing LSD in the linguistic drinking water, Irish English — even in the professional hands of all of Ireland’s greatest writers –shows the same non-aristotelian “illogic” or Zen humor as that Kerry farmer

Witness:

Death and life were not
Till man made up the whole,
Made lock, stock and barrel
Out of his bitter soul
–W.B. Yeats

Try taking all literary, scientiific, theological and philosophic connotations out of “death” and “life” — see them merely as two predicaments of grammar — and then — ?

“Men are born liars.”
— Liam O’Flaherty, in the first sentence of his autobiography.

Logcians call this an Empedoclean paradox. To an Irish stylist, it does not appear Empedoclean nor paradoxical but merely another pregnant bull. Since O’Flaherty belonged to the class of all men, he lied; but if he lied, his statement does not carry conviction, so maybe he told the truth….

“Are the commentators on Hamlet really mad or only pretending to be mad?”
— Oscar Wilde.

Thy spirit keen through radiant mein
Thy shining throat and smiling eye
Thy little palm, thy side like foam —
I cannot die!

O woman, shapely as the swan,
In a cunning house hard-reared was I:
O bosom white, O well-shaped palm,
I shall not die!
–Padraic Colum

[A Romantic poem, in style; anti-Romantic in content — whether you think of the female as a human lady or a symbol of Ireland a la Cathleen ni Houlihan, Dark Rosaline or shan van vocht, Colum still will not die for Her.]

“Durtaigh disloighal reibel aigris dogs.”
–Myles na gCopaleen

[It only makes sense if you pronounce it as Gaelic, and then it becomes ordinary English, expressing an ordinary English attitude toward their Hibernian neighbors.]

“They shall come to know good.”
— James Joyce. [Read it silently, then read it aloud.]

“There is in mankind a certain
*************************************************** Hic multa
******************************************************************
disiderantur***************************************************************

And this I take to be a clear solution of the matter.”
— Jonathan Swift [all expurgations in Swift’s original text.]

“I considered it desirable that he should know nothing about me but it was even better if he knew several things that were quite wrong.”
— Flann O’Brien

Or, to take a few examples that lend themselves better to condensation than quotation:

Consider Swift’s “pamphlet war” with the astrologer Partridge, in which Swift claimed Partridge had died and Partidge vehemently insisted on his continued viability. Swift won hands down by pointing out that just because a man claims he’s alive does not compell us to accept his uncorraborated testimony.

Or: Bishop Berkeley, proving with meticulous logic that the universe doesn’t exist, although God admittedly has a persistent delusion that it does.

Or — the scandalous matter of Molly Bloom’s adulterous affairs in Ulysses, which number between one [Hugh Boylan] and more than thirty [including a few priests and Lords Mayor and one Italian organ grinder], depending on which of Joyce’s 100+ narrators one chooses to believe. This grows more perplexing when one realizes that some of the “narrators” seem more like styles than persons: styles masquerading as persons.

Or maybe the ghosts of departed stylists, in the sense that Berkeley called Newton’s infinitesmals the ghosts of departed quantities?

Colonized and post-Colonized peoples learn much about text and sub-text; and Yeats did not develop his mystique of Mask and Anti-Mask out of Hermetic metaphysics alone. In my six years sampling Dublin pubs [1982-88] I overheard many conversations in the form:

–I saw your man last night.
–Oh? And?
–All going well there.

Who the devil is “your man”? Does this concern hashish from Amsterdam for the Punk Rock crowd, gelignite on its way to Derry, or just ingrained habits –Masks and Anti-masks– shaped by 800 years of Occupation? After all, the speakers might simply refer to tickets for a soccer game….[You will find a similarly oblique dialogue in the second section of the “Wandering Rocks” montage in Ulysses, except that “your man” has become “that certain party.” Palestinians have probably become that “Irish” by now.]

I do not claim that Sassanach conquest alone produced Ireland’s elusive wit and ludic poesy; but it sharpened tendencies already there as far back as Finn Mac Cumhal. Yeats says somewhere that Ireland was part of Asia until the Battle of the Boyne; but that dating merely represents W.B.’s reactionary Romanticism. Joyce knew thatIreland remained part of Asia; Finnegans Wake explicitly tells us it emerged from “the Haunted Inkbottle, no number, Brimstone Walk, Asia in Ireland.”

You can test one level of truth in this by simply asking directions in both Tokyo and Dublin. In either place you will encounter old-fashioned politeness and friendliness unknown in most of the industrial world, and you will get sent in the wrong direction. Hostile humor? I think not. Asiatic languages, including Irish English, simply do not accommodate themselves to Newtonian grids, either spatial or temporal.

Arlen and I used to play a game in Dublin: whenever we saw two clocks we would compare them. They never agreed.

In Cork, the four clocks on the City Hall tower always show four different times; locals call them “the Four Liars.”

The sociologist may class this as “post-Colonial syndrome”– based on the baleful suspicion that the English invented time to make a man work more than the Good Lord ever intended — but Joyce noted that the only three world-class philosophers of Celtic geneology, Erigena, Berkeley and Bergson, all denied the reality of time [and only Berkeley lived under English rule.]

A Dublin legend tells of an Englishman who, noting that the two clocks in Padraic Pearse station do not agree, commented loudly that this discordance”is so damned typically bloody Irish.” A Dubliner corrected him: “Sure now, if they agreed one of them would be superfluous.”

Even more in the Daoist tradition: Two Cork men meet on the street. “Filthy weather for this time of year,” ventures the first.

“Ah, sure,” replies the second, “it isn’t this time of year at all, man.”

Compare the Chinese proverb, “Summer never becomes winter, infants never grow old.” Einstein’s relativity and Dali’s melting clocks belong to the same universe as these Hibernio-Chinese Eccentrcities.

In County Clare and the West generally one often hears the grammatical form, “My uncle was busy feeding the pigs one night and I a girl of six years….” [One also hears this in Synge’s plays — all of them.] Elsewhere in the English speaking world one would hear, “My uncle was busy feeding the pigs one night when I was a girl of six years…” The Irish English retains the grammar of Irish Gaelic, but it thereby retains the timeless or Daoist sense of a world where every now exists but no now ever “becomes” another now.

Nor does this neurolinguistic grid, or reality-tunnel, only manifest in Irish speech and literature. William Rowan Hamilton, one of Eire’s greatest mathematicians, probably the greatest of all, made many contributions, but two have special interest for us here.

One — Hamilton invented non-commutative math, which I shall try to explain. In arithmetic, 2 x 3 = 3 x 2, or they both equal 6 [if you haven’t raised too many pints that night.] Ordinary algebra, the only kind most of us ever learned in school, follows the same rule: a x b = b x a. Everybody knows that, right? Well, in Hamilton’s algebra, a x b does NOT = b x a.

More “Asiatic” influence? More of the Celtic Twilight? Well, in Pure Mathematics, you can invent any system you want as long as it remains internally consistent; finding out if it has any resemblence to the experiential world remains the job of the physicist, or the engineer. It required about 100 years to find a “fit” for Hamiltonian algebra, and then it revolutionized physics. Hamilton’s math describes the sub-atomic [quantum] world, and ordinary math does not.

The reader may classify Hamilton’s feat as a variety of precognition or maybe just as more of the Hibernian compulsion to challenge everything the Saxon regards as unquestionable.

Two — Physicists of Hamilton’s day endlessly debated whether light travels as “waves” like water or as discrete “particles” like bullets. He supported both totally contradictory models, although in different contexts. Among Fundamentalist Materialists, they call this the Heresy of “perspectivism,” but again, after 100 years, it became part of quantum mechanics, although usually credited to Neils Bohr, who only rediscovered it.

Perspectivism also haunts postmodern literary theory, cultural anthropology — and, especially, the Joyce Industry, as more and more Joyce scholars realize that all of the 100+ narrative “voices” in Ulysses seem equally true in some sense, equally untrue in some sense and equally beyond either/or logic in any sense.

Quantum Mechanics owes a second huge debt, and a perpetual head-ache, to another Irish physicist, John Stewart Bell.

Bell’s Theorem, a mathematical demonstration by Dr. Bell published in 1965, has become more popular than Tarot cards with New Agers, who think they understand it but generally don’t. Meanwhile it remains controversial with physicists, some of whom think they understand it but many of whom frankly admit they find it as perplexing as Mick Jagger with his guitar hopping around like a chicken on LSD in the middle of a Beethoven string quartet.

In a [hazardous] attempt to translate Bell’s math into the verbal forms in which we discuss what physics “means,” Bell seems to have proved that any two “particles”oncein contact will continue to act as if connected no matter how far apart they move in “space” or “time” [or in space-time.] You can see why New Agers like this: it sounds like it supports the old magick idea that if you get ahold of a hair from your enemy, anything you do to the hair will effect him.

Most physcists think a long series of experiments, especially those of Dr Alain Aspect and others in the 1970s and Aspect in 1982 have settled the matter. Quantum “particles” [or “waves’] once in contact certainly seem “connected,” or correlated, or at least dancing in the same ballet….But not all physicists have agreed. Some, theAntiBellists, still publish criticisms of alleged defects in the experiments. These arguments seem too technical to be summarized here, and only a small minority still cling to them, but this dissent needs to be mentioned since most New Agers don’t know about it, and regard Bell’s math with the same reverence Catholics have for Papal dogma.

The most daring criticism of Bell comes from Dr N. David Berman of Columbia, who believes he has refined the possible interpretations of Bell down to two:

(1) non-locality [“total rapport”] and
(2) solipsism.

We will explain non-locality below, but Dr Berman finds it so absurd that he prefers solipsism. [“Is The Moon There When Nobody Looks?” Physics Today, April 1985. He says the moon, and everything else, does’t exist until perceived; Bishop Berkeley has won himself one more convert.]

Among those who accept Bell’s Theorem, Dr David Bohm of the University of London offers three interpretations of what it means:

“It may mean that everything in the universe is in a kind of total rapport, so that whatever happens is related to everything else ; or it may mean that there is some kind of information that can travel faster than the speed of light; or it may mean that our concepts of space and time have to be modified in some way that we don’t understand.”[London Times, 20 Feb 1983.]

Bohm’s first model, “total rapport,” also called non-locality, brings us very close– very, very close — to Oriental monism: “All is One,” as in Vedanta, Buddhism and Daoism. It also brings us in hailing distance of Jungian synchronicity, an idea that seems “occult” or worse to most scientists, even if it won the endorsement of WolfgangPauli,a quantum heavyweight and Nobel laureate. You can see why New Agers like this; you will find it argued with unction and plausibility in Capra’s The Tao of Physics. It means atomic particles remains correlated because everything always remains correlated.

I suggest that physicists often explain this in Chinese metaphors because they don’t know as much about Ireland as they do about China, and because they haven’t readFinnegans Wake.

The strongest form of this non-local model, called super-determinism, claims that everything “is” one thing, or at least one process. From the Big Bang to the last word of this sentence and beyond, nothing can become other than it “is,” since everything remains part of a correlated whole. Nobody has openly expressed this view but several (Stapp, Herbert et al) have accused others, especially Capra, of unknowingly endorsing it.

Bohm’s second alternative, information faster-than-light, brings us into realms previously explored only in science-fiction. Bell’s particles may be correlated because they act as parts of an FTL (faster than light) cosmic Internet. If I can send an FTL message to my grandpa, it might change my whole universe to the extent that I wouldn’t exist at all. [E.g., he might suffer such shock that he would drop dead on the spot and not survive to reproduce.] We must either reject this as impossible, or else it leads to the “parallel universe” model. I’m here in this universe, but in the universe next door the message removed me, so I never sent it there.

Remind you, a bit, of that Kerry farmer?

Even more radical offshoots of this notion have come forth from Dr John Archibald Wheeler. Dr Wheeler has proposed that every atomic or sub-atomic experiment we perform changes every particle in the universe everywhichway in time, back to the Big Bang. The universe becomes constant creation, as in Sufism, but atomic physicists, not Allah, serve as its creators. Yeats again wakes? [He would, of course, place Bards as the creators, not mere measurers and calculators, but still the human mind has “made up the whole.”]

Dr Bohm’s third alternative, modification of our ideas of space and time, could lead us anywhere…including back to the Berkeleyan/Kantian notion that space and time do not exist, except as human projections, like persistent optical illusions.(Some think Relativity already demonstrates that…and some will recall Mr. Yeats again, and that Kerry farmer….) All particles remain correlated because they never move in space or time, because space and time only exist “in our heads.”

Meanwhile, a Dr. Harrison suggests that we may have to abandon Aristotelian logic, i.e. give up classifying things into only the two categories of “true and real” and “untrue and unreal.” In between, in Aristotle’s excluded middle, we may have the “maybe” proposed by von Neumann in 1933, the probabilistic logics (percentages/gambles) suggested by Korzybski, the four-valued logic of Rapoport (true, false, indeterminate and meaningless) or some system the non-Hibernian world hasn’t found yet. The Kerry farmer would handle all of this better than the typical graduate of any university outside Ireland.

And so we see that two Irishman, Hamilton and Bell, have the majority of physicists arguing about issues that make them sound like a symposium among Berkeley, Swift, Yeats, O’Brien and Joyce. Through their literature, speakers raised in Irish English have transformed the printed page; now their mathematicians, raised in the sameneurolinguistic grid, have revolutionized our basic notions of “reality,” which in the light of what we have seen, badly needs the dubious quotes I just hung on it.

Afterthought 2004: Two of the giants of quantum math, Schrödinger and Dirac, both spent time at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Dublin. Schrödinger, in fact, wrote his most important nonmathemetical book there — What Is Life? [1948], in which he defined life as a function of negative entropy. This thought seemed so radical and far-out that nobody began to grasp it until Wiener and Shannon showed that information also behaves like negative entropy. Information = that part of a message you didn’t expect; the unpredictable part.

Or as Wiener once said, great poetry contains high information and political speeches contain virtually none.

And therefore Life = negative entropy = high information = surprise and initial confusion = tuning-in the previously not-tuned-in…..

Got it?

Canto XXXII (partial) commentary

The revolution,’said Mr Adams,
‘Took place in the minds of the people.’

A very umportant idea to Ez, which explains why he
repeats it in Canto 50.
He called his notions “voluntarist economics” as distinct
feom Marx’s materialist economics.
Anyway, in Adams’ day it did not qualify as wishful thinking to assume the people had minds.

…..deem it necessary to keep them down by hard labour, poverty,
ignorance,
and to take from them, as from bees, so much of their earnings
as that unremitting labour shall be necessary to obtain a
sufficient surplus
barely to sustain a scant life. And these earnings
they apply to maintain their privileged orders in splendour and
idleness
to fascinate the eyes of the people….as to an order of superior
beings….
June 12, í23 to Judge Johnson

Jeff, as already noted, not likely to succeed in American
politics today.

whether in a stye, stable or state-room,
let everything bend before them and banish whatever might
lead them to think….and thus are become as mere animals..
Cannibals of Europe are eating one another again…

More of letter to Johnson; ‘stye’ and ‘stable’ recall
Canto 2 [greed leading by reverse evolution to animal level]

…whether in a stye, a stable or in a stateroom….
Louis Sixteenth was a fool
The King of Spain was a fool, the King of Naples a fool
they dispatched two couriers weekly to tell each other, over a
thousand miles
what they had killed…..the King of Sardinia
was, like all the Bourbons, a fool, the
Portuguese Queen a Braganza and therefore by nature an idiot,
The successor to Frederic of Prussia, a mere hog
in body and mind, Gustavus and Joseph of Austria
were as you know really crazy, and George 3d was in
a straight waistcoat,

there remained none but old Catherine, too lately picked
up….

In “The Jefferson-Adams Letters as Shrine and Monument” [SELECTED PROSE, New Directions,1972]
Ez paises Tom and John for not feeling inferior to
European intellectuals [see Canto 31] or European
governments

………

a guisa de leon
The cannibals of Europe are eating one another again
quando si posa.

Jefferson wrapped around by Dante’s lines comparing
Sordello to a crouching lion. [Pound shared Dante’s high
regard for Sordello.] I think Ez regarded Jeff’s prose
and Sordello’s songs as comparable in concision and
precision

Canto XXXI (partial) commentary

Tempus loquendi,
Tempus tacendi.

[a] a joke on the reader– Cantos 1-30 in general
and 17-30 in particular [minus
a few foreshadowings of Jefferson and Kung] have
alternated between Rennaisance history and modern
economic history. This opening sounds like we’re going
back to the Rennaisance again….but Ez has in mind
what he considers the second Rennaisance….

[b] the phrase [which means ‘A time to talk, a time to
keep silent’] : motto of Sigismundo Malatesta….but
as the use of cypher makes clear Jeff. also knew times
to keep silent…”Liberty always in danger” as Burke said

Said Mr. Jefferson: it wd. Have given us
time….
modern dress for your statue….

Some wanted a ‘classical’ statue of Washington in Roman toga; Jeff wanted him in contemporary garb.
Cf Sigismundo’s shockingly ‘modern’ Temple [by the standards of his time[; Pound’s role as agitator for
modernism in literature, painting, sculpture, music etc.;
see especialy:

For years no water came, no rains fell
for the Emperor Tching Tang
grain scarce, prices rising
so that in 1760 Tching Tang opened the copper mines
(ante Christum)
made discs with square holes in their middles
and gave these to the people
wherewith they might buy grain
where there was grain
der in Baluba das Gewitter gemacht hat
Tching prayed on the mountain and
wrote MAKE IT NEW
on his bath tub
Day by day make it new
hsin
jih
jih
hsin
cut underbrush,
pile the logs
keep it growing
Consider their sweats, the people’s
If you wd/ sit calm on throne
Canto 53

MAKE IT NEW: These ideograms which I rendered hsin jih jih hsin mean ax/logs, day, day, ax/logs — or, more generally house-building, every day, house-building;
or renew, day after day, renew. The idea: we can’t repeat the past exactly, must renew/revitalize it. Kung made this quote from Tching central to his politics; Pound made it central to his art and his art criticism.

BTW, Jefferson agreed with Tchng [and Ez] that an honest state has credit and need not borrow from private banks

I remember having written you while congress sat at An-
napolis,
on water communication between ours and the western
country,
particularly the information….of the plain between
Big Beaver and Cayohoga, which made me hope that a canal
navigation of Lake Erie and the Ohio. ..
You must have had
occasion of getting better information on this subject
and if you have you wd. oblige me
by a communication of it. I consider this canal,
if practicable, as a very important work.
T. J. to General Washington, 1787

Cf the bombards of Sigismundo; cf Kung [Canto 13]
“get up and do something useful”‘; cf Ez’s grandpaw
“sweating blood” to build his railway.[cantos 21-22]..
Ez built his own funiiture BTW and Bucky Fuller
admired its TEXNE

…no slaves north of Maryland district….

Jeff giving up [temporarily] on abolition of slavery
and concentrating on limiting its spread;
Pound’s heroes always appear with warts visible

…flower found in Connecticut that vegetates when suspended
in air….
screw more effectual if placed below surface of water.
Suspect that a countryman of ours, Mr Bushnell of Connecticut
is entitled to the merit of prior discovery.

Compare the contents of Sigismundo’s pouch [Canto 9];
two ideogrammic definitions of “Rennnaisance man’

And thus Mr Jefferson (president) to Tom Paine:
You expressed a wish to get a passage to this country
in a public vessel. Mr. Dawson is charged with orders
to the captain of the Maryland to receive and accommodate
you
with passage back, if you can depart on so short a warning…
in hopes you will find us returned to sentiments
worthy of former time…..in these you have laboured as
much as any man living. That you may long live to
continue your labours and to reap their fitting reward…
Assurances of my high esteem and attachment.

To illustrate Jeff.s solidarity with rationalism; this
kinda guy cd never succeed in American politics today

This country is really supposed to be on the eve of a XTZBK49HT
(parts of this letter in cipher)
Jefferson, from Paris, to Madison, Aug. 2, 1787

…care of the letters now enclosed. Most of them are
of a complexion not proper for the eye of the police.
From Monticello, April 16th. 1811
To Mr Barlow departing for Paris.

“A time to keep silence” See?

But observe that the public were at the same time paying
on it an interest exactly the same amount
(four million dollars). Where then is the gain to either
party which makes it a public blessing? to Mr Eppes, 1813

think about it…and about the current deficit

Canto IX commentary

A strong Whitman influence here, emphasized by the
repeated “one year”: cf Walt’s “I hear…”
Where WW used these rhythms to celebrate the energy
and optimism of 19th Century U.S., Ez uses them
to record a lot of energetic war and treachery–
the world in which, and against which, Sigismundo
built his Temple:

One year floods rose,
One year they fought in the snows,
One year hail fell, breaking the trees and walls.
Down here in the marsh they trapped him
            in one year,
And he stood in the water up to his neck
            to keep the hounds off him,
And he floundered about in the marsh
            and came in after three days,
That was Astorre Manfredi of Faenza
            who worked the ambush
            and set the dogs off to find him,
In the marsh, down here under Mantua,
And he fought in Fano, in a street fight,
            and that was nearly the end of him;
And the Emperor came down and knighted us,
And they had a wooden castle set up for fiesta,
And one year Basinio went out into the courtyard
            Where the lists were, and the palisades
            had been set for the tourneys,
And he talked down the anti-Hellene,
            And there was an heir male to seignor,
            And Madame Ginevra died.
And he, Sigismundo, was Capitan for the Venetians.
And he had sold off small castles
            and built the great Rocca to his plan,
And he fought like ten devils at Monteluro
            and got nothing but the victory
And old Sforza bitched us at Pesaro;
            (sic) March the 16th:

The “narrative voice” seems that of a common
soldier who served under Sigismundo.
“fought like ten devils” “Sforza bitched us”:
we come closer to modern vernacular,
in contrast to the previous Canti.

“that Messire Alessandro Sforza
            is become lord of Pesaro
through the wangle of the Illus. Sgr. Mr. Fedricho d’Orbino
Who worked the wangle with Galeaz
            through the wiggling of Messer Francesco,
Who waggled it so that Galeaz should sell Pesaro
            to Alex and Fossembrone to Feddy;

Wangle, wangle, wiggle, waggle: a
snakey imagery…..

and he hadn’t the right to sell.
And this he did bestialmente; that is Sforza did bestialmente
as he had promised him, Sigismundo, per capitoli
            to see that he, Malatesta, should have Pesaro”
And this cut us off from our south half
            and finished our game, thus, in the beginning,
And he, Sigismundo, spoke his mind to Francesco
            and we drove them out of the Marches.

And the King o’ Ragona, Alphonse le roy d’Aragon,
            was the next nail in our coffin,
And all you can say is, anyway,
that he Sigismundo called a town council
And Valturio said “as well for a sheep as a lamb”
            and this change-over (haec traditio)
As old bladder said “rem eorum saluavit
Saved the Florentine state; and that, maybe, was something.
And “Florence our natural ally” as they said in the meeting
            for whatever that was worth afterward.
And he began building the TEMPIO,
            and Polixena, his second wife, died.
And the Venetians sent down an ambassador
And said “speak humanely,
But tell him it’s no time for raising his pay.”
And the Venetians sent down for an ambassador
            with three pages of secret instructions
To the effect:  Did he think the campaign was a joy-ride?
And old Wattle-wattle slipped into Milan
But he coun’t stand Sidg being as high with the Venetians
And he talked it over with Feddy; and Feddy said ” Pesaro”
And old Foscari wrote “Caro mio
“If we split with Francesco you can have it
“And we’ll help you in every way possible.”
            But Feddy offered it sooner.
And Sigismundo got up a few arches,
And stole that marble in Classe, “stole” that is,
Casus est talis:
            Foscari doge, to the prefect of Ravenna
“Why, what, which, thunder, damnation????”

Casus est talis:

Casus est talis: That’s it, that’s the way it is.
Cf: Nec Spe Nec Metu [neither hope nor fear]
in Canto III.

            Filippo, commendatary of the abbazia
Of Sant Apollinaire Classe, Cardinal of Bologna
That he did one night (quandam nocte) sell to the
Illmo. Do., Do. Sigismund Malatesta
Lord of Arimininum, marble, porphyry, serpentine,
Whose men, Sigismundo’s, came with more than an hundred
two wheeled ox carts and deported, for the beautifying
of the tempio where was Santa Maria in Trivio
Where men, Sigismundo’s, came with more than an hundred
two wheeled ox carts and deported, for the beautifying’
of the tempio where was Santa Maria in Trivio
Where the same are now on the walls.  Four hundred
ducats to be paid back to the abbazia by the said swindling
Cardinal or his heirs.
            grnnh! rrnnh, pthg.
wheels, plaustra, oxen under night-shield,

Very cinematic: the grunts unite the Cardinal
and the oxen.

And on the 13th of August: Aloysius Purtheo,
The next abbot, to Sigismundo, receipt for 200 ducats
Corn-salve for the damage done in that scurry.

And there was the row about that German-Burgundian female

Sigismundo was accused of raping her so violently that
she died. Historians tend to reject this, but the
Inquisition included it among the 100-or-so
charges of which they found him guilty.
In a letter EP describes the charges as
“‘shrouded in  mystery’ or rather lies”

And it was his messianic year, Poliorcetes,
            but he was being a bit too POLUMETIS


polymetis: “many-minded”; many-sided; well-rounded–
a stock Homeric tag for Odysseus, in case the reader hasn’t already noticed the Odysseus/Malatesta
parallels.

And the Venetians wouldn’t give him six months vacation.

And he went down to the old brick heap of Pesaro
            and waited for Feddy
And Feddy finally said “I am coming!…
            …to help Alessandro.”
And he said: “This time Mister Feddy has done it.”
He said: “Broglio, I’m the goat.  This time
            Mr. Feddy has done it (m’l’ha calata).”
And he’d lost his job with the Venetians,
And the stone didn’t come in from Istria:
And we sent men to the silk war;
And Wattle never paid up on the nail
            Though we signed on with Milan and Florence;
And he set up the bombards in muck down by Vada
            where nobody else could have set ’em
            and he took the wood out of the bombs
            and made ’em of two scoops of metal
And the jobs getting smaller and smaller,
            Until he signed on with Siena;
            And that time they grabbed his post-bag.
And what was it, anyhow?
            Pitigliano, a man with a ten acre lot,
Two lumps of tufa,
            and they’d taken his pasture land from him,
And Sidg had got back their horses,
            and he had two big lumps of tufa
            with six hundred pigs in the basements.
And the poor devils were dying of cold.
And this is what they found  in the post-bag:

By analogy with “Found Art” one can consider these
documents a “found ideogram.” They exemplify
Sigismundo Malatesta’s polymetis, and the mad
chaotic creative vortex in which he lived:

                        Ex Arimino die xxii Decembris
     “Magnifice ac potens domine, mi singularissime
“I advise yr. Lordship how
“I have been with master Alwidge who
“has shown me the design of the nave that goes in the middle,
“of the church and the design for the roof and…”
“JHesus,
“Magnifico exso.  Signor Mio
“Sence to-day I am recommanded that I have to tel you my
“father’s opinium that he has shode to Mr. Genare about the
“valts of the cherch…etc…
  “Giovane of the Master alwise P. S.  I think it advisabl that
“I shud go to rome to talk to mister Albert so as I can no
“what he thinks about it rite.

Ez finds the right kinda English for each Italian voice….

“Sagramoro…”

Illustre signor mio, Messire Battista…”

“First: Ten slabs best red, seven by 15, by one third,
“Eight columns 15 by three and one third
            etc… with carriage, danars 151
“MONSEIGNEUR:
  “Madame Isotta has had me write today about St. Galeazzo’s
“daughter.  The man who said young pullets make thin
“soup, knew what he was talking about.  We went to see the
“girl the other day. for all the good that did, and she denied
“the whole matter and kept her end up without losing her
“temper.  I think Madame Ixotta very nearly exhausted the
“matter.  Mi pare che avea decto hogni chossia.  All the
“children are well.  Where you are everyone is pleased and
“happy because of your taking the chateau here we are the
“reverse as you might say drifting without a rudder.  Madame
“Lucrezia has probably, or should have, written to you, I
“suppose you have the letter by now.  Everyone wants to be
“remembered to you.                     21 Dec.  D. de M.”

Ixotta degli Atti, Sigisundo’s longtime mistress and third
wife, here dealing with another of his mistresses.
War, temple-building and multiple mistresses…polymetis indeed.

“…sagramoro to put up the derricks.  There is a supply of
“beams at…”
“MAGNIFICENT LORD WITH DUE REVERENCE:
  “Messire Malatesta is well and asks for you every day.  He
“is so much pleased with his pony, It wd. take me a month
“to write you all the fun he gets out of that pony.  I want to
“again remind you to write to Georgio Rambottom or to his
“boss to fix up that wall to the little garden that madame Isotta
“uses, for it is all flat on the ground now as I have already told
“him a lot of times, for all the good that does, so I am writing
“to your lordship in the matter I have done all that I can, for
“all the good that does as noboddy hear can do anything
“without you.
                “your faithful
                                            LUNARDA DA PALLA.
                                                20 Dec. 1454.”

Siggy even had time to be a good father/while
still supervising the Tempio from a distance.

“…gone over it with all the foremen and engineers.  And
“about the silver for the small medal…”

Magnifice ac potens
            “because the walls of…”

Malatesta de Malatestis ad Magnificum Dominum Patremque
suum.

“Exso. Dno. et Dno. sin Dno. Sigismundum Pandolfi Filium
            “malatestis Capitan General

“Magnificent and Exalted Lord and Father in especial my
“lord with due recommendation:  your letter has been pre-
“sented to me by Gentilino da Gradara and with it the bay
“pony (ronzino baictino) the which you have sent me, and
“which appears in my eyes a fine caparison’s charger, upon
“which I intend to learn all there is to know about riding, in
“consideration of yr. paternal affection for which I thank
“your excellency thus briefly and pray you continue to hold
“me in this esteem notifying you by the bearer of this that
“we are all in good health, as I hope and desire your Exct.
“Lordship is also: with continued remembrance I remain
            “Your son and servant
                            MALATESTA DE MALATESTIS.
            Given in Rimini, this the 22nd day of December
                                    anno domini 1454
                            (in the sixth year of his age)

Damn well-written for a 6-year-old; but then Sigismundo
led his first army at age 13…

“ILLUSTRIOUS PRINCE:
  “Unfitting as it is that I should offer counsels to Hannibal…”

”     Magnifice ac potens domine, domine mi singularissime,
“humili recomendatione premissa etc.  This to advise your
“Mgt. Ldshp. how the second load of Veronese marble has
“finally got here, after being held up at Ferrara with no end
“of fuss and botheration, the whole of it having been then
“unloaded.
  “I learned how it happened, and it has cost a few florins to
“get back the said load which had been seized for the skipper’s
“debt and defalcation; he having fled when the lighter was
“seized.  But that Yr. Mgt. Ldshp. may not lose the moneys
“paid out on his account I have had the lighter brought here
“and am holding it, against his arrival.  If not we still have
“the lighter.
  “As soon as the Xmas fetes are over I will have the stone
“chapel; first because the heavy frosts wd. certainly spoil
“the job; secondly because the aliofants aren’t yet here and
“and one can’t get the measurements for the cornice to the columns
“that are to rest on the aliofants.
  “They are doing the stairs to your room in the castle… I
“have had Messire Antonio degli Atti’s court paved and the
“stone benches put in it.
  “Ottavian is illuminating the bull.  I mean the bull for
“the chapel.  All the stone-cutters are waiting for spring
“weather to start work again.
  “the tomb is all done except part of the lid, and as soon as
“Messire Agostino gets back from Cesena I will see that he
“finishes it, ever recommending me to yr. Mgt. Ldshp.
                                             “believe me yr. faithful
                                              PETRUS GENARIIS.”

That’s what they found in the post-bag
And some more of it to the effect that
            he “lived and ruled”

Again, the theme of fragments, shelved [or shored]

et amava perdutamente Ixotta degli Atti
e “ne fu degna
            “constans in proposito
Placuit oculis principis
pulchra aspectu
populo grata (Italiaeque decus)

“And he loved Ixotta degli Atti to distraction, and
she deserved it; she that he loved to look upon,
and she pleased the people and was the ornament
of Italy”
The Temple has his initial, S, intertwined with hers, I,
all over the walls. Every naked Venus has her face.

“and built a temple so full of pagan works”
            i. e. Sigismund
and in the style of “Past ruin’d Latium”
The filigree hiding the gothic,
            with a touch of rhetoric in the whole
And the old sarcophagi,
            such as lie smothered in grass, by San Vitale.

In Canto 10 the Inquisition has more to say
about this pagan Temple and its maker…..

Canto VII commentary

These fragments you have shelved (shored).

Paraphrase from Eliot’s “Waste Land.”
Both Ez and Tom felt European culture
only survived in “fragments” after World War I.
Eliot thought they cd be “shored” [rescued]
Ez worries they might only get “shelved” [preserved.]
Cf MAKE IT NEW theme from Emperor Ching later.

 “Slut!”  “Bitch!”  Truth and Calliope
Slanging each other sous les lauriers:

Who gets the laurel: fact [Truth] or the Muse
of Epic Poetry? Ez ain’t sure. Cf opening
of Canto II: which Sordello “is” the “real”
Sordello?

That Alessandro was negroid. 

Alessando de Medici again, still more full of life
than 1919 London, bringing another fact
or rumor with him.

            And Malatesta
Sigismund:
             Frater tamquam
Et compater carissime: tergo
                               …hanni de
                               …dicis
                               …entia

The hero of the next four Cantos appears as
part of a mostly ruined document….
sorta like the letter containing all history
found in the garbage dump in Finnegans Wake.

And suddenly Sigismundo speaks directly to us
in “his own words” of at least in Ez’s invention
of a kind of English isomorphic to Sigd’s
15 Century aristocrat/soldier Italian:

Equivalent to:
                               Giohanni of the Medici,
                               Florence.
Letter received, and in the matter of our Messire Gianozio,
One from him also, sent on in form and with all due dispatch,
Having added your wishes and memoranda.
As to arranging peace between you and the King of Ragona,
So far as I am concerned, it wd.
Give me the greatest possible pleasure,
At any rate nothing wd. give me more pleasure
    or be more acceptable to me,
And I shd. like to be party to it, as was promised me,
            either as participant or adherent.
As for my service money,
Perhaps you and your father wd. draw it
And send it on to me as quickly as possible.

They all wrote with unction and
lubricating oil in those days
even when asking to be paid;
but Sigismundo will surprise us:

And tell the Maestro di pentore
that there can be no question of
His painting the walls for the moment,
As the mortar is not yet dry
And it wd. be merely work chucked away
                 (buttato via)
But I want it to be quite clear, that until the chapels are ready
I will arrange for him to paint something else
So that both he and I shall
Get as much enjoyment as possible from it,
And in order that he may enter my service
And also because you write me that he needs cash,
I want to arrange with him to give him so much per year
And to assure him that he will get the sum agreed on.
You may say that I will deposit security
For him wherever he likes.
And let me have a clear answer,
For I mean to give him good treatment
So that he may come to live the rest
Of his life in my lands –
Unless you put him off it –
And for this I mean to make due provision,
So that he can work as he likes,
Or waste his time as he likes
(affatigandose per suo piacere o no
non gli manchera la provixione mai)
                                               never lacking provision.
                 SIGISMUNDUS PANDOLPHUS DE MALATESTIS
                 In campo Illus. Domini Venetorum die 7
                 aprilis 1449 contra Cremonam

Sigd wrote that age 32 after 19 years as a professional
soldier-for-hire [yeah, he started at 13];|
his attitude toward artists much pleased Ez
and, as we shall shortly learn, wd please Kungfutse too

The money Sigd earned as killer-for-hire
went largely to creating the monument he
left behind, the  first Pagan temple built
in Itay in 1000 years, Tempio Malatesta

Pound’s Voluntarist Economics differs from
Deterministic Economics in positing creative
leaps of intelligence as ‘chaotic’ factors

 . . . . . and because the aforesaid most illustrious
Duke of Milan
Is content and wills that the aforesaid Lord Sigismundo
Go into the service of the most magnificent commune
of the Florentines
For alliance defensive of the two states,
Therefore between the aforesaid Illustrious Sigismund
And the respectable man Agnolo della Stufa,
                        ambassador, sindic and procurator
Appointed by the ten of the baily, etc., the half
Of these 50,000 florins, free of attainder,
For 1400 cavalry and four hundred foot
To come into the terrene of the commune
                        or elsewhere in Tuscany
As please the ten of the Baily,
And to be himself there with them in the service
of the commune
With his horsemen and his footmen
                   (gente di cavollo e da pie) etc.
Aug. 5 1452, register of the Ten of the Baily.

Even in documents as “dusty” as this Ez helps us
see the meaning of the STYLE: these guys sure
wuz perlite even about minute details…
sorta like the Confucian rulers we’ll meet later

From the forked rocks of Penna and Billi, on Carpegna
with the road leading under the cliff,
                        in the wind-shelter into Tuscany,
And the north road, toward the Marecchia
                        the mud-stretch full of cobbles.

Ez and Hemingway went over the scenes of Sigd’s
most famous battles, with Hem explaining military
details to the Quaker-raised Ez. Soomehow,
the above Imagist impressonism emoiged

Lyra:
” Ye spirits who of olde were in this land
Each under Love, and shaken,
Go with your lutes, awaken
The summer within her mind,
Who hath not Helen for peer
                  Yseut nor Batsabe.”

An early poem by Sigismundo; Ez stresses
the troubadour [Eleanor] influence.

With the interruption:

[always interruptions. Sigd lived that kind
of life….]

            Magnifico, compater et carissime
            (Johanni di Cosimo)
Venice has taken me on again
            At 7,000 a month, fiorini di Camera.
For 2,000 horse and four hundred footmen,
And it rains here by the gallon,
We have had to dig a new ditch.
In three or four days
I shall try to set up the bombards.

“I sing eternal war between light and mud”–Canto 73
Light and joy again:

Under the plumes, with the flakes and small wads of colour
Showering from the balconies
With the sheets spread from windows,
            with leaves and small branches pinned on them,
Arras hung from the railings; out of the dust,
With pheasant tails upright on their forelocks,
            The small white horses, the
Twelve girls riding in order, green satin in pannier’d habits;
Under the baldachino, silver’d with heavy stitches,
Bianca Visconti, with Sforza,
The peasant’s son and the duchess,
To Rimini, and to the wars southward,
Boats drawn on the sand, red-orange sails in the creek’s mouth,
For two days’ pleasure, mostly “la pesca,” fishing,
Di cui in the which he, Francesco, godeva molto.
            To the war southward
In which he, at that time, received an excellent hiding.

Best imagist outburst since Canto 2….

And the Greek emperor was in Florence
            (Ferrara having the pest)
And with him Gemisthus Plethon
Talking of the war about the temple at Delphos,
And of POSEIDON, concret Allgemeine,

Florence hosted a meeting between the Pope and
the Patriarch  of the Eastern Church, and there
Sigd met Gemisto Plethon, a neo-pagan
philosopher who profoundly impressed him.

Gemisto conceived “the sea” and/or the “sea-god”
as concrete abstractions, things you can experience
but still not totally concrete — e.g. the sea
changes every nanosecond but Poiseiden, Lyr,
So-Shu, the concrete images of the sea
reveal a form behind the metamorphoses

Many commentators believe Gemisto’s ideas
about seagods inspired the aquatic emphasis
of the Tempio Malatesta

And telling of how Plato went to Dionysius of Syracuse
Because he had observed that tyrants
Were most efficient in all that they set their hands to,
But he was unable to persuade Dionysius
To any amelioration.

I can’t read this  without thinking about poor
idealistic Ez trying to sell his ideas to Mussolini…..
but we leap ahead to Sigd’s chaotic & tragic
last years:

And in the gate at Ancona, between the foregate
And the main-gates
Sigismundo, ally, come through an enemy force,
To patch up some sort of treaty, passes one gate
And they shut it before they open the next gate, and he says:
“Now you have me,
           Caught lke a hen in a coop.”
And the captain of the watch says: “Yes Messire Sigismundo,
But we want this town for ourselves.”
            With the church against him, 

[for heresy and paganism]

With the Medici bank for itself,   
With wattle Sforza against him
Sforza Francesco, wattle-nose,
Who married him (Sigismundo) his (Francesco’s)
Daughter in September,
Who stole Pesaro in October (as Broglio says “bestialmente“),
Who stood with the Venetians in November,
With the Milanese in December,
Sold Milan in November, stole Milan in December
Or something of that sort,
Commanded the Milanese in the spring,
the Venetians at midsummer,
The Milanese in the autumn,
And was Naples’ ally in October,
            He, Sigismundo, templum aedificavit

HE BUILT A TEMPLE, GODDAM IT,
WITH ALL THAT AGAINST HIM

In Romagna, teeming with cattle thieves,
            with the game lost in mid-channel,
And never quite lost till’ 50,
            and never quite lost till the end, in Romagna,
So that Galeaz sold Pesaro “to get pay for his cattle.”

And Poictiers, you know, Guillaume Poictiers,
            had brought the song up out of Spain
with the singers and viels.  But here they wanted a setting.
By Marecchia, where the water comes down over the cobbles
And Mastin had come to Verucchio,
            and the sword, Paolo il Bello’s,
            caught in the arras
And, in Este’s house, Parisina
Paid
For this tribe paid always,

She paid with more than money. Story
comes later.

and the house
Called also Atreides’,
And the wind is still for a little
And the dusk rolled
            to one side a little
And he was twelve at the time, Sigismundo,
And no dues had been paid for three years,
And his elder brother gone pious;
And that year they fought in the streets,
And that year he got out to Cesena
            And brought back the levies,
And that year he crossed by night over Foglia, and…

Some consider Sigismundo one of the worst
monsters of the Rennaisance; some consider
him its most maligned hero. I think Ez
presents him as a case in the development
of Western Individualism
another heir of Odysseus
OUTSIDE Dante’s categories
a one man hell/purgatory/paradiso

But we have 3 more canti about him
coming at us

Truth or Calliope?
Which the slut, which the bitch?

Canto IV commentary

BTW, Pound called Cantos 1-7 “preparation of the palate.”
If that metaphor seems obscure, consider ’em
an OVERTURE presenting themes that get
explored and developed in Cantos 8-120….

Palace in smoky light,
Troy but a heap of smouldering boundary stones,

a] return to Homeric world: recurs thematically
as a root of Occidental culture. “To know what
precedes and what follows will assist yr comprehension
of Dao”–Kungfutse quoted later.
b] first short image of the waste and destruction of
warfare, a theme developed in much longer
passages later.
“SmOky…TrOY…smOUlder…bOUnd…stOne”: nice assonance

ANAXIFORMINGES! Aurunculeia!

An EXTREME example of EP’s ideal of
“condensation.” Foist woid, from Greek of Pindar,
relates to poetry as source of civilization;
second woid, from Latin of Catullus, relates
to sexuality as root of family/tribe/society etc

Hear me. Cadmus of Golden Prows!

Cadmus: another ornery individualist:
metamorph of Odysseus archetype

The silver mirrors catch the bright stones and flare,
Dawn, to our waking, drifts in the green cool light;
Dew-haze blurs, in the grass, pale ankles moving.
Beat, beat, whirr, thud, in the soft turf
under the apple trees,
Choros nympharum, goat-foot, with the pale foot
alternate;

The vegetative gods again. Cf Kung on respect
for same [later] and Frazer on fertility-worship.
EP utilized Frazer as early as “Canzone: The Yearly Slain”
[1907] and, while working on these early Cantos,
edited Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” which also
incorporates the death/resurrection of
vegetation gods.

Crescent of blue-shot waters, green-gold in the shallows,
A black cock crows in the sea-foam;

“black cock crows”: more subtle aliteration than
Swinburne, I’d say.
I suppose everybody living on the Mediterranean
notices its beautiful variety; but who ever
found such precise images to convey that?
“tin flash in sun-dazzle,” “green-gold in shallows,” WOW!!

And by the curved, carved foot of the couch,
claw-foot and lion head, an old man seated
Speaking in the low drone… :
Ityn!
Et ter flebiliter, Ityn, Ityn!

The legend of Itys/Ityn involves rape
and cannibalism as revenge for
rape: i.e. mind under passion,
Pound’s version of Hell.
[Shakespeare used rape and cannibalism
similarly in Titus Andronicus]
The Greek legend metamorphs to a medieval
horror story involving the same elements:

And she went toward the window and cast her down,
            “All the while, the while, swallows crying:
Ityn!
            “It is Cabestan’s heart in the dish.”
            “It is Cabestan’s heart in the dish?”
            “No other taste shall change this.”
And she went toward the window,
                 the slim white stone bar
Making a double arch;
Firm even fingers held to the firm pale stone;
Swung for a moment,
                and the wind out of Rhodez
Caught in the full of her sleeve.
            . . . the swallows crying:
‘Tis.  ‘Tis.  Ytis!

Cabestan got done in by the husband of a lady
he courted. The husband then served her Cabestan’s
heart for dinner, telling her it was a deer’s.
After she finished the meal, hubby told her
The Awful Truth and she jumped to her death.
Note how “It is….’Tis” swings back and forth
between the two legends, ancient Greek
and medieval French.
Sordello and Cabestan both sponsored by
Eleanor of Acquitaine, who pops in and out
of these early Cantos.
“Firm even fingers held to the firm pale stone”–
EP began exploring this kind  of limpid simplicity
in his first Imagist poems, 1912, but only reached
this level in his first
Chinese translations, 1915, guided
by the notebooks of Ernest Fenollosa.
“the while, the while:” to me, the frequent
use of repetition in this Canto invokes both “poor
old Homer” and more recent sea-chanties.

           Actaeon…
             and a valley,
The valley is thick with leaves, with leaves, the trees,

The sunlight glitters, glitters a-top,

“with leaves, with leaves” “glitters, glitters”–
see what I mean?

-Like a fish-scale roof,
            Like the church roof in Poictiers
If it were gold.
            Beneath it, beneath it
Not a ray, not a slivver, not a spare disc of sunlight
Flaking the black, soft water;
Bathing the body of nymphs, of nymphs, and Diana,
Nymphs, white-gathered about her, and the air, air,
Shaking, air alight with the goddess,
             fanning their hair in the dark,
Lifting, lifting and waffing:
Ivory dipping in silver,
            Shadow’d, o’ershadow’d
Ivory dipping in silver,
Not a splotch, not a lost shatter of sunlight.

What to  say, except what W.H. Auden wrote of
Raymond Chandler: “I wish I could write
that well.”
Allegorical interpretations of Acteaon legend go
back 2500 years. In context of Cantos I suggest:
Actaeon, undisciplined hunter = mind driven
by passion, Hell; Diana nude = sudden vision
of Nature Whole [Dao]; Acteaon turned to
deer = sudden empathy with his victims;
the dogs who devour him = his own
awakened conscience [cf “agenbite of
inwit” in JJ’s *Ulysses*]
That church in Poctier reappears often in
the Paradiso Cantos, oddly linked to
Knights Templar & Mithraism….
Metamorphoses theme continues.

Then Acteaon: Vidal,
Vidal.  It is old Vidal speaking,
            stumbling along in the wood,
Not a patch, not a lost shimmer of sunlight,
            the pale hair of the goddess.

Metamorph of Actaeon into Pierre Vidal,
Vidal into Acteaon.
[Vidal, a poet in tradition of Sordello
and Cabeston, in order to impress a certain
noble lady spread rumor that  he had
magick powers and cd metamorph into
a wolf. Unfortunately, the Holy Inquisition
believed the rumors and he had to flee,
pursued by dogs like Actaeon]

The dogs leap on Actaeon,
            “Hither, hither, Actaeon,”
Spotted stag of the wood;
Gold, gold, a sheaf of hair,
            Thick like a wheat swath,
Blaze, blaze in the sun,
            The dogs leap on Actaeon.
Stumbling, stumbling along in the wood,
Muttering, muttering Ovid:
            “Pergusa… pool… pool… Gargaphia,
“Pool… pool of Salmacis.”
            The empty armour shakes as the cygnet moves.

Since Acteaon unlikely to quote Ovid, Vidal
must speak here, mixing rape legends with the
Acteaon story. Why DO so many Greek gods
appear as serial rapists?????

Thus the light rains, thus pours, e lo soleills plovil
The liquid and rushing crystal
            beneath the knees of the gods.
Ply over ply, thin glitter of water;
Brook film bearing white petals.

Lovely imagery, but where are we now?

The pine at Takasago
            grows with the pine of Ise!

JAYsus Christ, we’ve landed in Japan….
& same themes pursue us. Both pines
started out as humans. Metamorphoses
as common theme in both Occident & Orient.
“Tree of Visages” below from Noh play
about these pines.

The water whilrs up the bright pale sand in the spring’s
                                                                        mouth
“Behold the Tree of the Visages!”
forked branch-tips, flaming as if with lotus.
            Ply over ply
The shallow eddying fluid,
            beneath the knees of the gods.
Torches melt in the glare
            set flame of the corner cook-stall,
Blue agate casing the sky (as at Gourdon that time)
            the sputter of resin,
Saffron sandal so petals the narrow foot: Hymenaeus Io!
            Hymen, Io Hymenaee!  Aurunculeia!
One scarlet flower is cast of the blanch-white stone.

Quotes and translations from Latin marriage songs.
Aurunculeia! as before, from marriage poem
[hymenial] by Catullus.
Scarlet flower on blanch-white stone sounds
like one of EP’s Chinese translations. Ez
learned a lot from Fenollosa.

            And So-Gyoku, saying:
“This wind, sire, is the king’s wind,
            This wind is wind of the palace,
Shaking imperial water-jets.”
            And Hsiang, opening his collar:
“This wind roars in the earth’s bag,
            it lays the water with rushes.”
No wind is the king’s wind.
            Let every cow keep her calf.
“This wind is held in gauze curtains…”
                 No wind is the king’s…

Back to China for the poem’s first statement
of limits on monarchy; humorous, like
Canute vs. the Ocean, but foreshadows
later canti on Coke, Jefferson, Adams
and limitations on all government.

The camel drivers sit in the turn of the stairs,
            Look down on Ecbatan of plotted streets,

Ecbatan: ancient city which allegedly models
the whole universe. Recurs in final Cantos….
[linked to real and imagined Paradiso Terrestre…]

“Danae!  Danae!

Another rape victim; locked in a tower
but Zeus got her anyway, coming as
a shower of gold light.

            What wind is the king’s”
Smoke hangs on the stream,
The peach-trees shed bright leaves in the water,
Sound drifts in the evening haze,
            The bark scrapes at the ford,
Gilt rafters above black water,
            Three steps in an open field,
Gray stone-posts leading…
Pere Henri Jacques would speak with the Sennin, on
                                                      Rokku,
Mount Rokku between the rock and the cedars,

A very tolerant, or very pragmatic, Jesuit, accused
by the Vatican of converting himself to Confucianism
instead of converting Chinese to Christianity.
Here he attempts to communicate with the Sennin,
Chinese isomorphs of the vegetation gods
we’ve already met.

Polhonac,
As Gyges on Thracian platter set the feast,
Cabestan, Tereus,
            It is Cabestan’s heart in the dish,

Vidal, or Ecbatan, upon the gilded tower in Ecbatan
Lay the god’s bride, lay ever, waiting the golden rain.

Danae/Zeus legend interpreted as magick
ritual [hierogamy]

By Garonne.  “Saave!”
The Garonne is thick like paint,
Procession, – “Et sa’ave, sa’ave, sa’ave Regina” –
Moves like a worm, in the crowd.
Adige, thin film of images,
Across the Adige, by Stefano, Madonna in hortulo,
As Cavalcanti had seen her.

A Catholic feast which Ez said [in a letter to his
dad] reminded him of Voodoo.
Guido Cavalcanti: not here by accident. He will reappear
often, as both poet and philosopher.
Dante put Cavalcanti’s family in Hell as
heretics, but EP will dig them up again.

            The Centaur’s heel plants in the earth loam.
And we sit here…
            there in the arena…

More cinematic technique, I think: gods, mortals, places
all seen as from above, like one of Griffith’s
or Kubrick’s tracking shots.

Canto III commentary

Two themes: [2] the poet in poverty,
enVISIONing the world of the gods;
[2] My Cid as another Odysseus

I sat on the Dogana’s steps
For the gondolas cost too much, that year,


a] Autobiography: Pound at his lowest ebb financially in Venice
1908,unable even to afford a gondola;
b] foreshadowing of Venice/deMedici theme
which will dominate Cantos 17-27;
I love the assonance of Dogona/gondola….

And there were not “those girls”, there was one face,

“those girls”: echo from Browning’s “Sordello.”
“one face”: EP very sensitive to beautiful faces.
Cf Thomas Hardy’s poem about beautiful girl
seen from train, Bernstein’s speech about
ditto seen from Staten Island ferry [Citizen Kane]
etc. The poem later insists that nothing is lost
that lives in memory. Hardy & Bernstein never lost
those girls; EP never lost that face.

And the Buccentoro twenty yards off, howling “Stretti”,
And the lit cross-beams, that year, in the Morosini,
And peacocks in Kore’s house, or there may have been.

Images of beauty of Venice. Medicis later appear
as both heroes [creators of beauty] and
villians [founders of modern banking].
EP oft repeated, “Dante’s map NOT
suitable for our age,” e.g. we recognize
ambiguities, mixes, middles, grey areas……..

              Gods float in the azure air,

Bright gods and Tuscan, back before dew was shed.
Light: and the first light, before ever dew was fallen.

Crowley defined Magick as “causing change by
act of Will.” Psychoanalyst Violet Wirth, student of Crowley,
defined Magick as “causing change in consciousness
by act of Will.” Assuming one of them,
oversimplified for slow learners, which
wd you suspect?
Did EP “imagine” the gods or “perceive” them?

Panisks, and from the oak, dryas,
And from the apple, maelid,
Through all the wood, and the leaves are full of voices,

Vegetation spirits; later we will hear Confucius
urge proper respect for them.
In one sense these gods exist as individuals,
with their own trees even; in another sense
they exist as manifestations or metamorphs
of Dionysus [Canto II].
Cf EP’s “Axiomata,” 1921, “We have no proof
that [the theos] is one, or is many, or is
divisible or indivisible, or is  an ordered
hierarchy culminating, or not culminating,
in a unity…Dogma is bluff based on ignorance.”
The Cantos seem [to me] to lean toward
polytheism, but pantheism and even
monotheism sometimes appear…..

A-whisper, and the clouds bowe over the lake,
And there are gods upon them,
And in the water, the almond-white swimmers,
The silvery water glazes the upturned nipple,

            As Poggio has remarked.

Green veins in the turquoise,

EP always presents precise images…
These I like especially: almond-white,
silvery water, green veins in turquoise.

Or, the gray steps lead up under the cedars.

Chinese theme sneaking in subliminally;
|Confucius ascends such grey steps under
cedars when taking office in Chou [in the Lun Yu]
Now we jump to the Cantar de mi Cid, 1140:
[Pound condenses as he translates]

My Cid rode up to Burgos,
Up to the studded gate between two towers,
Beat with his lance butt, and the child came out,
Una nina de nueve anos,
To the little gallery over the gate, between the towers,
Reading the writ, voce tinnula:
That no man speak to, feed, help Ruy Diaz,
On pain to have his heart out, set on a pike spike
And both his eyes torn out, and all his goods sequestered,
“And here, Myo Cid, are the seals,
The big seal and the writing.”

Myo Cid [a.k.a. Ruy Diaz] at a low point,
like EP at the beginning of this Canto.
“On pain to have his heart out, set on a pike spike”:
the sound conveys the brutality of the age;
note how “pain” reinforces “pike spike”
una nina de nueve anos: an 8-year old girl,
kept in Spanish presumably because      a]
EP liked the sound; b] reminds reader that
we usually look at primary sources in these Cantos
voce tinnula: ringing voice? tinny voice?
I think EZ wd prefer latter if he
translated this phrase….

And he came down from Bivar, Myo Cid,
With no hawks left there on their perches,
And no clothes there in the presses,
And left his trunk with Raquel and Vidas,
That big box of sand, with the pawn-brokers,
To get pay for his menie;

They thought the box contained gold, not sand.
First money-swindle in the Cantos:
a Xtian cheating two Jews. Cd
EP’s reputation as antisemite contain
some oversimplification?
In any case, the rascal or scoundrel side
of the Odysseus/Individualist here emphasized.

Breaking his way to Valencia.

Exit El Cid….

Ignez da Castro murdered,

An historic detail that will recur, with horror
added, in Canto XXX.

                       and a wall

Here stripped, here made to stand.
Drear waste, the pigment flakes from the stone,
Or plaster flakes, Mantegna painted the wall.
Silk tatters,

That whole age of chivalry and/or brutality
suddenly fades, as in cinematic montage.

“Nec Spe Nec Metu.”

“Neither hope nor fear”: Stoic motto that
the Occidental periodically rediscovers.
Also a “Chinese” theme…
When A Draft of Cantos 1-16 published [1925]
Pound asked publisher NOT to send a copy
to his friend Thomas Hardy because “HELL
Cantos” shd not go to old man “before later
chants bring them into proportion  to
the whole.” Do not try to judge the
meaning or even the flavor of the whole
from the Infernal overture.

Canto I commentary

And then went down to the ship,

Probably the first time an epic began in the middle of a sentence. *Thus EP notifies us at once that he will present fragments [“luminous details,” ideograms]
* Canto I published 1917. Finnegans Wake begun 1922.

Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and

“godly sea”: first divine presence in the poem. Cf
Bucky Fuller’s claim that the first deity was
a “mathematicizing sea-god”

We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,
Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also
Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward
Bore us onward with bellying canvas,
Circe’s this craft, the trim-coifed goddess.

Translating from Homer [via Divus: see below] but
EP uses alliteration and some archaism to suggest
early Anglo-Saxon  poems like “The Seafarer.”
He considered this episode the oldest part of
the Odyssey because of its archaisms. The
Descent to the Underworld cd indeed contain
parts of an ancient death/rebirth initiation ritual.

Then sat we amidships, wind jamming the tiller,
Thus with stretched sail, we went over sea till day’s end.
Sun to his slumber, shadows o’er all the ocean,
Came we then to the bounds of deepest water,
To the Kimmerian lands, and peopled cities
Covered with close-webbed mist, unpierced ever
With glitter of sun-rays
Nor with stars stretched, nor looking back from heaven
Swartest night stretched over wreteched men there.

Read as stretchED and wretchED. Supposed to sound
 archaic….Also read unpiercED…..
BTW, in any translation, the Kimmerian lands always
sound like Ireland in the winter to me.

The ocean flowing backward, came we then to the place
Aforesaid by Circe.
Here did they rites, Perimedes and Eurylochus,
And drawing sword from my hip
I dug the ell-square pitkin;

The first “I”; until now we have only had “we” & “our”
and “us.” Indicates the sudden emergence of Western
Individualism from previous Wholism, I think. Cf Canto52, translated an equally ancient Chinese text presenting
Wholism. The poem seeks a synthesis of the best
of East and West. Pitkin: small pit – deliberately archaic,
maintaining “Seafarer” flavor.

Poured we libations unto each the dead,
First mead and then sweet wine, water mixed with white flour
Then prayed I many a prayer to the sickly death’s-heads;
As set in Ithaca, sterile bulls of the best
For sacrifice, heaping the pyre with goods,
A sheep to Tiresias only, black and a bell-sheep.
Dark blood flowed in the fosse,
Souls out of Erebus, cadaverous dead, of brides
Of youths and of the old who had borne much;
Souls stained with recent tears, girls tender,
Men many, mauled with bronze lance heads,
Battle spoil, bearing yet dreory arms,
These many crowded about me; with shouting,
Pallor upon me, cried to my men for more beasts;
Slaughtered the herds, sheep slain of bronze;
Poured ointment, cried to the gods,
To Pluto the strong, and praised Proserpine;
Unsheathed the narrow sword,
I sat to keep off the impetuous impotent dead,
Till I should hear Tiresias.

I love the rhythm of sea-surge here, and
how it unites the Saxon/Seafarer alliterations with
Homer’s own rolling sea-sound

But first Elpenor came, our friend Elpenor,
Unburied, cast on the wide earth,
Limbs that we left in the house of Circe,
Unwept, unwrapped in the sepulchre, since toils urged other.
Pitiful spirit. And I cried in hurried speech:
“Elpenor, how art thou come to this dark coast?
“Cam’st thou afoot, outstripping seamen?”
And he in heavy speech:
“Ill fate and abundant wine. I slept in Crice’s ingle.
“Going down the long ladder unguarded,
“I fell against the buttress,
“Shattered the nape-nerve, the soul sought Avernus.
“But thou, O King, I bid remember me, unwept, unburied,
“Heap up mine arms, be tomb by sea-bord, and inscribed:
A man of no fortune, and with a name to come.
“And set my oar up, that I swung mid fellows.”

Pound cdn’t have planned it, but later, in the death cells
 at Pisa [Canto 74 et seq], he becomes  Elpenor…..

And Anticlea came, whom I beat off, and then Tiresias Theban,
Holding his golden wand, knew me, and spoke first:
“A second time? why? man of ill star,
“Facing the sunless dead and this joyless region?
“Stand from the fosse, leave me my bloody bever
“For soothsay.”
And I stepped back,
And he strong with the blood, said then: “Odysseus
“Shalt return through spiteful Neptune, over dark seas,
“Lose all companions.” Then Anticlea came.

Prepare for a quantum jump:

Lie quiet Divus. I mean, that is Andreas Divus,
In officina Wecheli, 1538, out of Homer.

Ez reveals his source: not Homer directly
but the 1538 Latin translation of Divus—the
text best known to the Renaissance figures
who dominate the first 30 Cantos. Pound
considers Divus part of what he calls the
paideuma of that period [modern: the
reality-tunnel or gloss]

And he sailed, by Sirens and thence outwards and away
And unto Circe.

No longer “I” but “he.”
Change to 3rd person indicates the “perspectivism”
of the Cantos.

Venerandam,

I prefer Arlen’s translation of this powerful wordto all others: “she who must be adored.”
Strongest declension in Latin.

In the Cretan’s phrase, with the golden crown, Aphrodite,
Cypri munimenta sortita est, mirthful, oricalchi, with golden
Girdle and breast bands, thou with dark eyelids
Bearing the golden bough of Argicidia. So that:\

Bits from a pseudo-Homeric hymn to the Love Goddess,
which Divus tacked on at the end of his Odyssey.
Note the “mirthful”: this foreshadows the union
of amor and hilaritas  in the closing Cantos.

Bearing the golden bough of Argicidia. So that:

Canto 1 began in the middle of a sentence,
and ends in the middle of another sentence:
emphasis on fragments –which eventually form ideograms

I wonder where Joyce got the idea of beginning
and ending Finnegans Wake in mid-sentences?

Wal, Ez probably got the idea of using a Homeric
frame for the Cantos from Ulysses...