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Visions of the East: Averroes, Guanyin, and the Redemption of Pound’s System of Spiritual Aesthetics in the 1940s.
Robert Kibler, Associate Professor of Humanities
MinotStateUniversity
14 Oct 2004
Ezra Pound’s early study of the 13th century Florentine poet Guido Cavalcanti helped acquaint him with an Islamic world wherein beliefs concerning the spirit combined with those concerning art and beauty. This link between belief, art, and beauty was understood as a rational process involving perception, cognition, and ultimately, the creation of divinely beautiful and philosophically intelligible forms. I would like to suggest that Pound picked up on this process and used it as a basic model throughout his long career, and that largely underwriting this basic model is the work of the 12th century Islamic philosopher, Averroes. Averroes indirectly influenced Pound, who even early in his career was set on a course of creating an earthly paradise fraught with forms produced in much the same way Averroes describes.
Yet for reasons great and small, Pound is often considered to have failed in his bid to create such a paradise, and indeed, in the 1930s and 1940s, arguably moved his creative energy in the opposite direction. The net result for his Cantos was an increasing movement toward a sort of moribund incoherence, and for the poet, a stint in a cage among the death cells of the American Detention Center—the DTC--in Pisa in 1945. There, in his darkest days, Pound re-introduced lyrically elevated verse of the kind long associated with his intended creation through poetry of an earthly paradise, yet long missing from his Cantos. What is more, for the first time in decades, he invoked the image of Kuonon, Chinese Goddess of Mercy and Patroness of those who travel by sea. I would like to suggest that her introduction to Pound’s pantheon of deities in 1945 serves as a confirmation of his enduring spiritual and aesthetic program founded in Averroist principle. But who is Averroes, what did he believe, and what does he have to do with the emergence of Kuonon?
Averroes, or Ibn Rushd was part of the 12th century Andalusian school of Islamic philosophers. Born in 1126, he spent most of his life in Cordova and Marrakech, commenting in both Latin and Arabic upon the works of Aristotle. His influence on the world of Islam was great, but his affect on Christian thinkers and doers was also profound. Etienne Gilson tells us that ideas promoted by Averroes were propagated in multiple directions during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. [i] Ernst Renan further suggests that as great as was his philosophical impact, Averroes’ mythic reputation exerted an even greater influence.[ii] He became a larger than life symbol of rationalism in an emotional age, a heretic who denied individual immortality and promoted a humanist theological model for existence, and an Islamic thinker so dangerous to the Christian world view that he was linked to Satan and Mohammed as the ‘third imposter,’ the “monster theologian,” and the “secretary of hell,”[iii]—all of which would have made him generally appealing to our young bohemian poet and rationalist heretic, Pound.[iv]
Pound’s study of Averroism probably began during his university years,”[v] and what he notes about it is nearly always linked to his discussions regarding Cavalcanti.[vi] As part of his ongoing work on Cavalcanti, Pound read and frequently referred to a variety of medieval Islamic sources and variously shows familiarity with Averroist thought, noting that Cavalcanti’s overall philosophy has its “main origins” in Avicenna and Averroes,”[vii]and that to understand Cavalcanti, “we must suppose the Arabian background….Averroes’, in particular, for ‘dangerously’ upsetting the static, immobile framework of medieval thought.[viii] Further, Ernest Renan recalls Pound remarking that Aquinas had twisted the meaning of the term “Form,” presumably in a way that Averroes—the arch rival of Aquinas--had not.[ix] Elsewhere, Pound suggests that in trying to understand Cavalcanti, we should only deal with those authors who refer to the “possible intellect” as opposed to those who call “passive” one of the key Averroist terms for describing divine cognitive process.[x]
Similar evidence for Pound’s awareness of Averroist thought occurs variously in his works, but the above examples are key because they collectively show an awareness of ideas germane to Averroes’ Great Commentaries on Aristotle, and specifically, to his Middle Commentary on “Book III” of Aristotle’s De anima, concerning the Soul. In that work Averroes writes at length about the process by which God or the Divine Consciousness comes to know itself through the operations of its own Potential and Active Intellects.
Divine perception for Averroes, following Aristotle, results from a transforming intellectual reality timelessly shifting from a potential or possible state within the mind of God to an active one (Arabic hylic). This active state or intellect is consequently received by external and corruptible material form—form that has an appetite for what is offered to it by the Active Intellect.[xi] Divine Active intelligence (energeia in Aristotle Metaphysics XII), embodied in corruptible material form (itself a potential divine intellect in its secondary state) inevitably is drawn back again into the primary potential mind of God (ousia in Aristotle’s Metaphysics XII, Fakhry 144). In the process, it passes out of material form into rational abstract principles, or “intelligibles,” and then back into the Potential Intellect that will again become active and seek further self-knowledge through its reception by material form, ad infinitum. Universal creation results from this process, as does human participation in divine creation.[xii] In short, according to Averroes’ “homo non intellegit,”[xiii] man is not intelligent. Rather, “it is through [God’s intellectualized] action in us that we think.”[xiv]
Averroes’ simple proposition carried in its wake the condemnation on over 200 doctrinal points associated with him in 1277 by Stephanus Tempier, Bishop of Paris, acting on behalf of all of Christendom. [xv] For if human thought is simply divine intellect acting through our material form as a means of knowing itself, then our individual function is incidental to the purpose of God, and so too is the case concerning our individual souls. Averroes suggests as much and adds that anything made unique by its investment in the individual material forms of humankind is in turn collectively synthesized, abstracted, and absorbed by the mind of God through God’s Potential Intellect. Thus only collective humanity appears to be immortal or “eternalisable,” as Gilson notes, and each individual intellect, like each individual soul, vanishes into death.[xvi] As Averroes put it, “quod intellectus omnium hominum est unum et idem numero.” (because all human intelligence is one and the same in number.”[xvii]This was high heresy in the late thirteenth century, for separating both mind and soul from individual existence effectively denied individual immortality at a time when Christian theology was asserting that the individual survived death--mind, body and soul.[xviii] Dante put his friend Cavalcanti in the Inferno for this assertion, and St. Thomas Aquinas wrote many a denunciatory tractate against it. Yet to think that the individual mind or soul is a substantial part of the divine consciousness is no more true, according to both Averroes and Aristotle, than it is to say that a ‘ship is a part of the sailor at its helm.’[xix] Our union with the divine, they imply, is primarily the result of our function, and our function, while essential to God’s purpose of self-knowledge, is nevertheless not the object of God’s purpose. We are secondary, and as Averroes suggests, we only borrow God’s intellect for our lifetimes and for our own temporal ends.[xx] Pound thought similarly.
In the 1910 preface to his translations of Cavalcanti’s sonnets, Pound asserts his belief in “an absolute rhythm as [he believes] in an absolute symbol or metaphor…[and that the] perception of the intellect is “given in the word” just as those of the emotions is “given in the cadence.” Linking the perfect word to the perfect cadence results in visionary expression. In the same article, Pound then links his belief about words, cadence, and vision to his understanding of color and line in painting, in order to praise the line at the expense of color. Color itself is finite, he writes, “confined within the frame” and “modified by the colors around it.” By contrast, the line is “unbounded, [and] marks the passage of a force, [that] continues beyond the frame” as an energy that Pound further links to beauty in motion.[xxi] Now, if Pound assumes a moving conceptual reality at work in the unbounded line, and that line exists both within and beyond the boundaries of the colors it frames, then he also assumes a connection between the activity of the line and a visionary reality that is greater than either color or his own ability to track it. He thus very early on in his career links motion, beauty, and a “visionary” expression that may have been modified by an individual artist but at the same time, seems to be possessed of an energy that passes both into and beyond the individual artist’s understanding. This implies that the line is part of an intellectual and visionary activity governed by a consciousness greater than that of the artist.
Throughout his career Pound sought examples of this arch cognitive process in the works of others, and also tried to embody such a process in his own. He often found corollaries to it in Asian poetry and art. One such example appears in his 1915 translation of the 15th century Japanese Noh play, Suma Genji. Pound describes a Shite or chief character or hero who is a sort of “spirit of the seashore at Suma. As the chorus describes the Shite
He, the soul of the place…./…./
Blue-grey is the garb they wear here,
Blue-grey he fluttered in Suma
His sleaves were like the grey sea waves
They moved with curious rustling,
Like the noise of the restless waves
Like the bell of a country town
“neath nightfall.” [xxii]
Collectively, the key image of blue-grey moves from the people of Suma to the fluttering Shite and on into sea waves and off towards a restless bell of a country town, ringing in what we can imagine to be the blue-grey “nightfall” of the play. In doing so the image seems to emphasize the quality of perpetual motion itself, investing in material forms then shifting out again in nearly random fashion. There is no easy conceptual link, for example, between bells clanging in the blue-grey twilight and the blue grey garments worn by those living in Suma. And yet the key repeating image secures that bond between disparate realities. In doing so, it compels us to consider that what connects the various images beyond movement and transformation is a hidden unity operating as a governing part of the recorded transformational process, and that unity provides validity to those connections we do recognize through their intimate relation to what we do not, thereby creating visionary expression.
Likewise, Pound attempts to enact a cognitive movement towards visionary expression in his own work. In Canto II, for example, Picasso’s eyes appear in the eye sockets of a seal, sporting about the “spray white circles of cliff wash,” and swimming artist seal transforms into a swimming Neptune; swimming Neptune becomes a moving ship whose sailors become swimming fish, and swimming fish transform into a swimming Dafne, a mythical girl who transforms into a waterside reed. In such a way, Canto II’s presentation of these interconnected forms seemingly bound by little else beyond energy moving through form suggests a divine and contemplating mind in operation, because the connection between bound forms is hardly one of analogy or even metaphor. Instead of serving as a chronicle of discernible meaning, they rather intimate some great action taking place mostly beyond the poet’s ken. Human perception, process, and creation are thus again confirmed as small parts of a bigger process seemingly serving other ends.
The unbound line, Suma Genji, and “Canto II, ” all show at least the vestigial traces of Averroist thought, for the overarching act of apprehension and enactment appears separate from the creative activity of the artist or the poet, just as it seems to be part of a process intimating and enacting a greater unity. It is a unity that in Averroes’ model is the mind of God. That the artist or poet is part of this process and at the same time can be seen to emulate it suggests that the poet serves in Averroist fashion as both the material receiver of divine intellect, and, through participation in the creative process, as God or the Divine Consciousness itself, moving through forms as a means towards self-knowledge. Pound describes his sense of the creative process in much this way in 1915:
The image….can rise within the mind…External causes play upon the mind perhaps….If so, they are drawn into the mind, fused, transmitted, and emerge in an Image unlike themselves.[xxiii]
As images emerge unlike themselves for Pound, they tend to confirm another tenet of Averroes’—for when the potential intellect of either God or the poet extracts its own active intellect from tangible material form, active intellect is thereby transformed into what is referred to as an abstract intelligible, to then be subsumed into the potential intellect, adding in this way to either God or the poet’s self-awareness.
A similar movement from the tangible to the abstract typifies Pound’s own aesthetic process making its way toward paradise. Again in 1910 explaining Cavalcanti’s understanding of the quality of virtu, for example, Pound suggests that virtu is the potency, the efficient property of a substance or person. As such, it moves towards the pure and abstract, such as in the Cavalcanti phrase, ”thou shall see depart from her lips her subtler body, and from that a still subtler form ascends and from that a star, the body of pure flame surrounding the source of virtu….which will declare its nature.”[xxiv] Its nature is one that seems to be moving back to itself, from corrupt and tangible matter to abstract intelligible form. Thus Cavalcanti and Pound seem to understand the image as possessing an intellectual substance that moves towards self awareness just as the active intellect, extracted by the potential intellect from material form, becomes an “intelligible,” a primary aspect of the mind of God. Approximately two years after explaining Cavalcanti’s understanding of virtu, Pound again found its aesthetic corollary in Chinese painting.
In art historian Ernest Fenollosa’s lecture notes entitled “Landscape Poetry and Painting,” Pound read of the process by which the Sung painter Kakki creates. Kakki, Fenollosa notes, does not hope to produce the landscape before him, but instead, creates a synthesized version of all the various landscapes, mountains, and rivers that he has ever seen. In a passage marked by Pound’s blue crayon, Fenollosa writes that “by observation and reference the artist will come to have before him the infinitely various mountains he has seen, stored away, and amassed inside his bosom, and when he wishes them to come forth he can paint them without the eye, spontaneously, as if everywhere were his picture.”[xxv]
In essence, Kakki’s creative act is much like that of Averroes’ God, for just as the mind of God invests in material form in order to know itself, Kakki’s invests (remembers) images in his own mind in order to then produce what is only consequently imaginable through the abstract forms of mountains, lakes, and skies. At the same time, his own intellect, God-like, can be said to have invested in Kakki’s material mind, thus making him not only the ideal model for Averroes’ understanding of the divine process of self-knowledge, but also for Pound’s sense of the transformational nature of the creative artist in general. And as Pound’s own work confirms, that artist is part of a metaphysical process greater than himself, facilitating its actions through his vision of the unbounded line, the movement of the Shite spirit from sea-grey garments to god, bell, night, and sea, and by the seemingly arbitrary connections made between Picasso, Neptune, and Dafne.”[xxvi]
This belief in the transformational nature of the artist’s work remained as strong in Pound as did his penchant for entering the paradisal mode through poetic lines characterized by a distinct elevation of melody and diction, and associated with static images abstracted from life and myth, the so called “crystal vision” of his Cantos, traits well noted by Eugene Paul Nassar.[xxvii] That Pound would place emphasis on the living, transforming image in his poems, yet ultimately move towards elevated abstraction and fixity of line and form when imagining paradise further confirms Averroist thought underwriting his vision, just as it confirms that for Pound, paradisal beauty may be abstracted from living material form while remaining essentially part of a process driven by a quest for self knowledge in both God and man.
Yet however noble and elevated were Pound’s intentions of creating his earthly paradise through poetic line and image, his attempts to do so often bogged down, as virtually every Poundian notes. This was especially true in the decades leading up to his incarceration by the U.S. Army in Pisa in 1945. His 1934 ABC of Reading, and his 1938 Guide to Kulchur are often aggressive, insulting works that contradict any general movement in search for knowledge or beauty, despite their obvious intellectual strengths. What is more, a quick scan of his cantos written from the 1930s to the mid 1940s reveals that the elevated lyrical and visionary passages associated by Nassar with a move towards paradise nearly completely disappear.[xxviii]