I never write until I feel it. It's weird because I... When I took the meds, the part that was visionary, when I closed my eyes, One thing they did find out that it was domestic, it doesn't change the reflexes at all.

[01:09]

I thumbed the battery back. But it did send Duncan off, who was always in a euphoria, and even more so then, into an extraordinary euphoria. But when closing my eyes, I saw instantly before me what I had already begun to read about an Islamic and in Jewish legend, which is the Tree of the Sephiroth, or the Tree of Life, it would be called in the Christian literature I'd read. I saw it before me, but I also saw it as a work of art. Probably most properly because it would be a work of art for me. I saw it as I had been moved by it in Muslim carpets. At the back, there's one that seems to me as a work of art that goes into the truly sublime. And so it is like an immediate experience. And I rejected it. I also was in a great state of confusion because it then seemed to me that I was seeing the platonic archetype, a platonic archetype, and I realized, no, I don't want to see it.

[02:25]

I want to work in it. And it isn't understandable to me unless it's the work of thousands and thousands of reincarnations, unless it's the work of thousands, millions, and millions of lives. To see it, to merely see it, the thing you think the artist wants. Although that is posed as an early... I don't know if your poets have had it posed, but it was posed to me early, and not by a mystic, unless he's really... He has a strange enough proposition as a mystic to be a mystic. But Pauline Kael... who had a drop of it, did ask, if you could have a poem and a dream with you, would that be, and she thought poems were satisfying. Well, no way, I realize, I mean, if they happen to you in a dream, they happen to you, but still it's the labor, it works. So my whole thing, to get back to this, was no wonder I was in tune as I'd come across more and more of this doctrine of labor.

[03:25]

But the Old Testament also says, doesn't it, that the universe labors to bring something about. And finally, not to give birth to itself. Heraclitus has a universe that gives birth to itself. So if you drew the whole circle, it would be the universe. And what changes in this is that the universe is essentially real until it realizes, and then of course it's unreal, because its whole work is to come to the thing. And yet, very different from anything I know of Buddhism, it's not a metaphysical proposition like this, because the reason the work started is that there's something terribly wrong about the real. So we don't have a, and this work redeems it. I mean, it's not just the split between reality and unreality. And when you, in the Jewish picture, in Burma, Burma really is, of course, we've got to, this isn't out of way, by the way, for Sardello, because we're going to next time, in our plan, we come, I've now delightfully postponed our first troubadour,

[04:36]

In order to go to Sardello's appearance in Dante, because I've worked on Browning's Sardello, it becomes more and more haunting about why this... It was because of his Italian teacher that he came to hear of Sardello and think of picking up Sardello to write it, and that there was a hint. But it was not a hint of something the Italian teacher knew. It was again a question why in the world Tardello was there in Dante's poem. But Dante's poem will bring us to what we're talking about is what I mean. There are no loops, not only the universe looping around to find out by its labor that it comes to its reality. The ends of labor. In this youthful poem of Robert Browning, he begins to realize that, as he writes to friends, that a poet works in ends in order to come to means.

[05:46]

Again, this is why you can't write a summa. St. Thomas Aquinas' Summa remains active when it is a means. It was a means for Joyce. It was not an end, not a Summa at all. I mean, a Summa would be, but a means. Joyce read it, and a revelation is always a revelation of this labor which starts in you. And Browning saw that when you enter a poem to write it, you are constantly in ends. That's why your line really must be a summa in itself. That's why your work must be aimed at a kind of perfection of itself. But that is the perfection of a means, not an end. The end is right before you, and you mess up the end long before you come to the end. When you do it wrong, it's the end that's wrong, not the means that are wrong. And the poem itself, if it's realized, becomes, if the ideal poem becomes a tremendous means for the entire community. Now do you see, I mean, as a matter of fact, as we are reading Sordello, and we're not reading, of course, one that anybody felt was ideal,

[06:50]

but one that the poet experienced. As he goes into this poem, he's almost willing, he lifts that question then of perfection. And he begins to bring forward seriousness. Pound will write the serious artist. You mean what you say, but it's going, the poem is the meaning that you address. But right where you are at the end is what the end of your work is. A very young French writer said to Cocteau, but it won't come to my mind why, that Cocteau was annoyed because the writer was only 18 or 19 and had written a perfect novel. Cocteau would gladly have written it. And he said, well, how can you write that way? You don't change anything. And he said, but when you are writing, you can't write any better than you know how to write.

[07:52]

All of the stage, the thing we call the writing is not the means. If, like Browning, you write over and over again, it's in order to labor at it. But the qualification must come from what you have learned previous to writing. My own early thing of this was I have no revisions. I have only revisions. I mean, you're there again, but it's not the same as revising. Because the question came to me, how come when you make an error, from what knowledge do you turn to correct it? usually from some other idea that's coming up from outer space to tell you that should have rhymed with that or something like this. And I remember looking at a William Everson poem where he crossed out a bunch. He tried a whole bunch of terms. You do that in the beginning. You try rhymes. You try different things. But I thought, my God, have you... And then after ten trials, he came back to a word that was there originally.

[08:58]

I thought... Duncan's ten trials are spread all over the place. He continues to sit with the same thing. But in time, I had to take myself in hand not to try to shape that way. And the other one was then pay attention to what's happening. Work with what's happening. And that's what Browning begins to do in... do in this, the significance. We will begin to compile for you, Rev, some bibliography of how this idea appears when it's in the Judeo-Christian and Muslim world. It's interesting enough that we, of course, with a very small Muslim population, continuously refer to ourselves as being in a Judeo-Christian civilization. But we should be rightly as Islam does, say that we're in the civilization of the book. And as writers, we're in the civilization of the book. I've not found essays, but it would be interesting to compare the idea of the book that arises in the Orient and the idea of the book that haunts our entire Western European civilization.

[10:07]

I must put that in quotes because we don't any longer have that because we're all in a world civilization. So we could call it our locality, which is our Western European locality of the people of the book. And most of the populace of the people of the book, the ones that when you open, as the Bay Guardian this time describes every section of our town and tells us that such and such pretend white and such and such pretend black and such and such pretend Asian, they must be They're going by colors. They say it's ethnic anyway. But if you think about it, if you took the percent of white, most of them would have been violently converted to the book in historical time at considerable cost to their own underlying religious layers. And they show over and over again historically violent antipathy to the book that they were violently converted. converted to, especially, of course, north.

[11:09]

French are slowly converted by the Romans. There are two things, by the way, of course, to the Roman law. First, that's their first rounds of conversion. But the way in which peoples were converted to Christianity does not seem to disappear at all from history. It also is laboring, because not only the book, but it didn't have a means to an end. A conversion itself became part of the laboring. So when you cut down the oaks, they didn't just cut down the sacred oaks of the Germans and essentially cut down the tree of Yggdrasil, which is that underlies, that enters into vital labor from there on, but they could never leave it alone. And from a marvelous book called The Triumph of the Trees, I followed through with what many European men then stripped... not only stripped the tree, I always thought they were exploiting trees, but had great sprees of burning trees.

[12:12]

Somebody the other day talking about people who feel dogs dirty the ground. I remembered a couple in woods, I mean in Stinson Beach who gave me a lift and they lived on the hill above us and they were angry at the neighbors because they couldn't, wouldn't cut down their trees because they dirtied the ground. Well, Acts, what I'm getting at here is, in a conversion, these people wouldn't have known at all about the hatred, deep underlying hatred and so forth of the tree cult that went in the battle of the book against the trees. They should have stopped a bit, you know, because when they got off papyrus and books, oddly enough, started coming from the trees, And now the book trade tries to see it, that we've got some . There are some lovely jokes that run through the labor as it goes, thank goodness. Well, the work of this, by the third round, has begun to be a little like the HD book for me.

[13:25]

So I'm going to tell you a bit of what of what I undertook in the last week, and that's gone deep enough that last night I had a dream session with all of you. I kept looking around. I saw Tom Gunn there. I think I saw Ron. But actually, of course, the company proved to be a different company. My task was much the same, which was... To get to what was the issue, the thing that was hard enough for me to get to, they had the same patients. You had that with nice and the drink. But I thought, gee, I mean, it's getting so... Now I'm getting sessions from the other side, so to speak, that go along with these ones, and they lifted to some... And at the end, as I was waking up, I said, ah, well, actually...

[14:30]

The fact that I haven't done everything, which is perfectly apparent, and we'll be laboring all the way through this, is okay. And more than that, what I am to start with is start at the ground of what I said about. I called it a structural analysis of the first book of Sordello. And now, it will, those of you who are reading Sordello will will recognize, but I will be reading parts anyway, as I put together this picture, so you will get some of the flow. The first thing I wanted to do was to start and analyze what were the levels of address in the poem. How many levels were they? I had the impression, let's say, offhand there are five, but we have five fingers and, I mean, this seemed okay. So I'm at the other five.

[15:32]

And certainly I was aware, as I said last time, it comes as quite an abrupt turn when visibly it's Robert Browning talking in the complexion of this when he says, I sat on the dogana step. And at the other end of it, we've got a Robert Browning fursona and a very awkward one of the person who's giving the lecture on Sardella, and one that wasn't noticed. I can now make a correction of something I remember saying, that it was 40 years after Browning, but it was really 40 years after Ezra Pound wrote his Sardello in the poem in which he realized that the man was in a booth and pointing. So we're not, the academic world suddenly dawned on them that it was a lecturer in a diorama booth.

[16:43]

Forty years after Ezra Pound in 1910 or whatever, yeah, not around 10, 11, 12, assumed that in writing so so the appearance of in browning studies of any realization of that voice so how distant it was indeed for uh because the pointer uh it when you notice that the pointer is going to be there pointer is there right away But it seems your setter's fourth, Browning's talking about, remember I told you that one of his terms for poets is maker's seed. That's a very important one. He keeps makers, and he has a whole section which he begins to wander in upon all of what? Makers, the role of makers, and awkward. Browning's awkward terms like maker's seed really go much further than visionaries, for instance. By talking continuously about visionary poets, we're left with people who seem to have a magic all of their own and sail off and be all the way over into prophets, and they're not making.

[17:51]

I mean, they again are not in this. Robert Browning was not concerned with visionaries. He's concerned with those who make us see. That's what I mean. Blake, well, Blake is a visionary, true, because, or fabulous, as he could tell us, he could see. I mean, he saw. But he doesn't talk about his poems when he talks about both scenes. He doesn't, we don't know him as a visionary. People writing on Blake often think of him as a visionary. Why? Because of his drawings not on your penis, that what they see is in the drawings, and he made you see by, so he's making you see. He's making himself see. The drawing is the labor we understand of the universe coming forth. So Blake sees as he draws. He sees what he draws. All right, he tells us that. And he tells us of other occasions which have no such works in which he saw. But most companies have also seen. But making see is a very different thing.

[18:54]

And that's what the poet turns to. And most marvels is that words make us see. unless, as it comes to Browning over and over again, is music really the most marvelous of all in the way in which it makes? But these belong to that. Your setters forth of unexampled themes, makers of quite new men. Now, Browning is, there's a play here, because Browning has taken up Sardello, And he's not a quite new man. It isn't just that Dante had Sardella before. So he got made by Dante. By the time Pound is making Sardella, and almost heading to it, he might have the right one. Nowhere we're going to go along this line are you going to get the virgins. Every one of them has made Sardella anew.

[19:57]

And Sardello's own legend makes him up in the first place. And then when we turn to the, as we will eventually get around that labor of these, to look at some reports of Sardello's contests. in the courts of the troubadours, they were a little like debates. Sordello, you can't tell if Sordello's doctrine is in what he says because he's actually in a form of poetic joust with the poet opposite him, and he takes a position, and the other poet takes a position. So the minute you enter this, the minute you enter the poem itself, you're making yourself up. But Dante... Browning here is interested in, but it seems you're set as forth of unexampled themes, makers of quite new men producing them. Would best chalk broadly on each vesture's hem the wearer's quality, or take their stand motley on back and pointing pole in hand beside him?

[21:02]

Meaning that even if you make up a quite new man in your poem, you're still standing beside him. What it means also is that Browning's confronting... a doctrine which, in spite of, one that as a matter of fact has led to the derogatory criticism of Browning in our period. We are so convinced that the role of the poem is to express what we truly think and truly feel. Now that's quite different from making up feeling and making up thought. And in the same way, we're quite convinced, and it seems quite necessary to us, that vision, when we talk about a visionary, be something they really saw, not something they just made up seeing. Poor Shakespeare gets cut out entirely. As I showed you before, Browning Keats is quite aware of this danger coming forward. Coleridge has some anxiety about reality. He wants to divide fantasy from imagination.

[22:04]

And in this poem, Browning will see to it he refers to fantasy throughout. It is fantasy that he uses for the word that the makers see do. It is fantasy that he insists the poem have its whole thing in. Coleridge had produced an imagination that was true and that was the mind of God. in a sense that had no labor to realize itself. That was in no way unreal. The irreal has not appeared yet. As far as I know, glorious Odillon Redon will be the one who announces he's not interested in the unreal, much less the surreal, where the subject did not come up, but the irreal. I mean, to us, it could almost be our ear reel, but it's certainly, Redon's is not visionary in that sense, then, that we think of, that the Blake people pick up Blake to have him visionary of, to see, let's say, the reel.

[23:16]

I'm not saying, nowhere in Blake does Blake come on that he's seeing the real, by the way, so we're sticking something 20th century on him. But I think you see that, at least in the 30s as I grew up, the 20s and 30s and 40s, I was surrounded by the demand, and if I had a diagnosis of my poetry as well as Olsen's or Denise Labrador's or Crilly, it's that we are very little capable of fantasy straight on. we're exceedingly anxious that it be a dream we had, that we're drawing from something that, in quotes, really happened. And so I'm delighted to find myself going back to Robert Browning, which had been the original reason I ever wanted to write a poem, and that was probably a form of psychic drag to be the Duchess or something in a Robert Browning poem. I mean, it could suddenly be all those things that at 12 or 13 or 14, my God, you could grow up and write poems like this and Half the time, your head would be in all series of unreal personalities.

[24:19]

And along the line, you began to hear about schizophrenia and other terrible states in which you might even for two minutes be, uh, be puked and punched, you know, or whatever comes along. You might get stuck there. It's like the faces you used to make in the mirror. Mother comes along, she says, if you continue making your face, it'll stick that way, and you'll never get out of that face. You know, I, this, that's where that pointing paw in hand appears. They'd better stand beside him and show that while you've made a new man, you're still out here, so, so, you, so you don't, you're in this, are you any better off than the ones who have a, have a not new person they're making up? And And Browning is absolutely at ease in this poem with the problem about is Sordello a historical person, or any of the rest of the people in the poem, as a matter of fact. Zalinguer is a much more historical person than Sordello.

[25:20]

I mean, that is, we have a handful of, an unsatisfactory handful of historical facts about Sordello. Now, what is an historical fact? Every fact is a factor of something. And both of those mean to make up something. And we have just a handful of things you'd use to make up history. So Sordello doesn't get very far in history. When they try to make a history with it, they don't have many facts that they can... History makes its own network, and jigsaw puzzle pieces that fit are facts. But we've got marvelous facts of a play. Poetry has facts, too. Every single word, every phrase, everything that happens in the poem as it's being written, is a factor of that poem, and so much so that a poem can be experienced as confused, the factors can be confused, and Browning also in this poem addresses himself constantly to a mire, to a thing that he's very modern in that, too, in that he feels that the most...

[26:27]

Not the most. Let me get off that. He feels he is, what he has to work with, what he has to pay attention to is the mire, a gut. And right away on that same thing, by the way, last time I talked about Pound, I read the passages from Pound and Tricking Out and so forth, and you said, and we have the passage, Confess now, poets know the dragnet's tricks. Yes, it's just below there, but it's a different procedure. Let me read then this opening. Always in the structure, begin straight out of the structure, and then take hold here. A couple things come together. Who will may hear Sordello's story told? His story? In a letter to Charles Olson at one point, I said, I don't know why you have trouble with history.

[27:32]

Why don't you just call it his story? And now we might see the trouble as we don't have her story or its story. Well, Olson felt I was doing wicked punning, but at the same time, he almost felt I'd answered what his trouble was. I mean... History's a story. I mean, luckily, I took history. Well, so did Olson. He was in American Studies, and history's part of that thing. History's nothing but a story. A story of what? A story of economic materialism? A story of... dances under the moon and all those awful periods when you aren't dancing under the moon. A story of anything you can partly make up will entirely make a new history. The blacks are quite right. Black history is going to look better and different. Better, indeed, than any other kind of history. Better, largely, because they haven't been sitting on top. The top history looks terrible.

[28:33]

Dancing on the moon looks great. Whatever was done there... Okay, but every time with this announcement, who will may hear Sordello's story told his story. We have who believes me shall behold. And then ye believe. And at one point, we've got a time when they come together and we have who conceives. Another rhyme of believes. So there's a thematic business. The story told, that it will be a telling story is underneath that all the time. And And he is already, I certainly would take the pun of history that's in his story. Who will may hear Sordello's story told, colon, his story? That's exactly the question that raises all the way around, because as I pointed out last time, it's not history that we get it. Sordello here dies the minute Palma and Salen Vera solve who he will be to come out and triumph, and he dies.

[29:37]

and yet the historical Sordello is yea, lo and behold, our last document of his troubles in the world comes some 40 years after he died in this poem. And his entire poetry, do we know at all, is not written in Italian, is written in Provençal, and comes after the entire poem of this Sordello, I mean after the death of this Sordello in this poem. So much so that some very earnest historical cats have searched because they think Browning must have found some Sardella who wasn't Sardella. I mean, trust the ones who try to solve the riddle that way. But it is a riddling poem and one that Browning delights in the proposition of Not just the mystery, but the riddle. It interests me that one of the earliest forms in our Anglo-Saxon verse is the riddle. And in the riddle, it is not the answer at all, but the riddling that fascinates us.

[30:42]

We eagerly ask what the answer is, but the answer does not satisfy the riddling. If the answer satisfies the riddling, it's too simple in this. and the riddling no longer gets to you. But this was a true riddling he was going into. So it not only meant best business about history. He knew any poet had better stand with pointer in hand while he's giving a history, because you've got to realize that he's standing there. But he's also going into Sardello, and he had found in Paracelsus, and he'd found in Paulette, and others had noticed him finding that Browning was finding himself. So he was a young man, a very young man. He hasn't yet got... Something is teaching him and it is fancy, something of... Actually, what was fancy? Every time we come to fancy and phantasms in this, they are points at which Sardello is no longer in his own boundaries.

[31:47]

It isn't a mirror like in the stories of narcissists. It's that he finds himself in the poppy, for instance. He finds himself in the entire array of other men, finds his role like a young person, tries it on, looks around everywhere, finds himself. He has no self inside him. This is, by the way, the psychoanalytic current derogation and dismissal of Robert Browning is that he's totally fraudulent. You can't psychoanalyze. I mean, they should work out on Shakespeare where they'd be afraid to work, who is also so totally fraudulent that there are a million theories that somebody else wrote it. But the theory of the psychoanalytic theory of Robert Browning is that they know very well every one of these masks won't fit with their fantasy, not imagination. You find in Freud writing, for instance, that he is afraid of fantasy also.

[32:50]

Like Coleridge, he has a great deal of trouble about it. Fantasy may be very dangerous, but not... Robert Brown expects to find himself in it. Who believes me shall behold the man pursue his fortunes to the end like me. That's exactly what you're not going to do, as Denison said, and it was a lie. As for For as the friendless people's friend flied from his hilltop once, despite the din and hint of multitudes, Pentapolin named to the naked arm, whom I know not. I mean, I don't worry about characters coming in. I did rush to the library to see if there was a handy Robert Browning dictionary so I could be smart about this character. Does anybody know who Pentapolin is? I mean, hello, goodbye. I single out Sordello. Just like that, I single out Sordello. Compass merkeley about with ravage of six long and hundred years. Only believe me. You believe? So that merkeley, it's the merc that I went back to read that opener thing.

[33:56]

That merc, it is... I have found contemporary scholars really beautiful because they also seem to be near contemporaries of mine, I guess, or ours, let's say, really. And they have our sense of the merge. And they have a sense of Robert Browning's mixing up that he could only have arrived at the feel you have in this poem. All that syntax that people thought, could he have straightened it out, was not a mistaken syntax. It was a syntax in which everything was enmeshed together. Everything participated in everything else, and we couldn't tell where a part of the sentence that was going, one part, we couldn't ascertain. It certainly belonged to the preceding statement, but it also belonged to the following. Yeah. From Don Quixote. From Don Quixote. And that's the friendless people's friend in Don Quixote. You have a Robert Browning dictionary?

[34:59]

Here are the notes. Hooray. Great. Okay. But thank God I didn't have good notes. And more than that, since I didn't have good notes, Don Quixote is, in a funny way, has got the other friendless people's friend. If you read the New Testament, it sounds like it's Christ. So Don Quixote is where Christ is sitting around in that century for sure. Mistaking the season. Appears, Verona, never I should warn you first. Of my own choice had this, if not the worst, yet not the best expedient served to tell a story I could body forth so well by making speak myself kept out of view the very man as he would want to do, and leaving you to say the rest for him. It It's that one that Pound undoes between the first writing of the Cato's, the opening one in which he does take over, and you see Pound there.

[36:00]

Moreover, you see Robert Browning, and Pound says, but in this booth, the speech, and so forth. All of that's swept away, and Pound makes the decision, much under the influence of the theories they were putting forward, the ones that make for our modern actual... The term is awkward because in poetry, Gertrude Stein may possibly be a modernism, it looks like it, but most modernism, modernism is the style of 1920 to 1929, and anything else used for that is bullshit. And it's a very high style. Cummings is modernism, so much modernism that it's quaint, like Mother's Old Clothes. I mean, otherwise you miss out what's going on. I mean, Mayakovsky's modernism, a mother's wearing pretty grand clothes. When you see actual Mayakovsky editions, you realize it belongs to the moments of the... So it really begins about... First World War is a modern war, modernistic war.

[37:08]

And the Cubism is trying on modernism, so it comes a little early. In poetry, in our poetry, Pound was so awkward about modernism that you have a little jazz in canto eight or nine, and Amy Lovo looks better when she's doing, much more modern when she's doing takes from having heard Stravinsky's etudes. As a matter of fact, she catches on to modernism quite early. And since she's writing, as Pound despised her for doing, she's writing impressionistically, she succeeds in looking modern. And it probably was modern to a pretty good extent. And now that we've got terms critically of postmodern, that failed to look at what the modern actually was. There's modern in art, all right, but by the time we come to the Picasso that's painting Guernica, that's not modern in any term that we could possibly think of. The modern Picasso, the one that was a cubist.

[38:13]

And outside of that, Picasso's out of bounds, totally out of bounds. Okay, but we're back in... So the proposition of Pound was not to modernize. It had something that went, the idea that the past should be, that the 1920s had... especially gets solidified there, that they called the war, like the Dadaists are typically modern. They called the war a Summa. They called the First World War a Summa. When we turn around, the First World War looked like not a Summa at all, but a modern war. By means that most of the people fighting in it couldn't understand. It looks like a Cupid's canvas when you think about his advances in violence and so forth. But, oh, Whitman would be an example of modernism in America. America had a lot of modernism. We are so new, and we're going into a new era, and we will not have any of the sins of the past or errors of the past, though that would almost define what was the modernist attitude.

[39:15]

That's not the attitude at all in the cantos, and it certainly isn't in Eliot, and it's not in H.D., uh... it's dying to get forward fairly strongly that if we were sensible and moderate we really wouldn't be mixed up on and there's a lot of promise of modernism and with the weenie uh... at certainly the mood to leave that lincoln stephens of style and and uh... uh... and palmer all to get thought a counterpart there was a lot of of course the propositions under lennon and the any What is that called? I'm trying to think. New? The very first cultural propositions were modernistic in Russia. But Pound actually, when he's straightening out, so it becomes something else he does when he eliminates from his pados the relation between the reader and the

[40:20]

and the fictional writer, this one out front. Eliminate the invention of the author. Remember, novels had continued. Novels also were eliminating it. Modern novels eliminate the, or a lot of novels do eliminate the author, but the omnipotent author he's called, or many other things, but let's say presides over Dickens very strong. And you become the reader in the secret, and little conversations go on between you and the author, back and forth. Surrealists reintroduce the omnipotent author, by the way, in order to have their readers, because they were entering a little cult of the reading. Pound's first cantos have that author there, right out front. He takes that away, and then when Pound comes into the cantos, He is the omnipotent author. The one who starts out here, since only the author in the poem is going to be able to do it, Robert Browning has said, of my own choice, I wouldn't have ever done this. That's the I. I take that as Robert Browning.

[41:24]

And all of a sudden, Robert Browning does come back in. I was sitting on the double counter. And Pound does want his own choice. Also, what happens in the course of Pound's poem, Sordello, in Dante criticism, and certainly Browning, undertakes the task here. The position of Sordello in Browning in the Purgatorio seems to be that Sordello becomes a prototype of the poet who undertakes political action and has political effect from his... from his poem, because the one poem that survived with some fame of Sardello is a two-half, but the one with great force is a Cervantes in which all of the ruling powers are named and told they should have eaten of the heart of a man who has died because the world is ruled by cowards in the period of

[42:36]

Sordello. Well, what interests me is that as Pound dodges, in a way, cleans up his canto, eliminates how deeply he was going to go into the Sordello question, he becomes a victim of, it's his own politics that comes into those cantos, and the raging against powers that be and so forth come forth. but they do not have the levels in which they... Right away they don't have the levels in which... By the way, I don't mean that in Robert Browning it's satisfactory as a political poem. I'm talking about the deeper mystery in which Pound wants to come to a poem in which his actual contemporary world will be, but shies away from what now begins to look like Artifice, the one of having an omnipotent author. and the one of having a chat with the reader. Yet Palantir, at the end of the account, is chatting with the reader away. I wonder, should he be there? And he's saying, you know, he'll tell you right in the middle of anything you should go read a little economics and give you a reading list or anything he wants to do.

[43:48]

Well, it would have been marvelous if there had only also been fancy, because once it's only himself, his own dementia can take over. Because vanity enters the poem when, not because you're there, but because you have ruled out the author. Was it last time or the first time? I projected how firmly, and I am sure that, like Blake says, the authors are in eternity. I enter the poem where the author, and I then, well, And then I encounter author and reader, a primary business, my own I'm talking about now, but if I'm reading Browning, I do the same thing. And Browning can speak out in the middle of that, and that will become so clear that I don't think I'm a part of the author. And yet I understand absolutely that Browning is almost what we call autobiographical voices that comes into this.

[44:51]

Never, I should warn you, first of my own choice had this, if not the worst, yet not the best expedient serve to tell a story. And it's in the epic poem that this becomes very much an issue. In Homer, in the Odyssey, in one scene, the reader can, I think, Odysseus is so central a character to the poem he's in and especially to man of words, an interesting person, a man of lies, there are two scenes that strike me. One in which, the first one that we encounter, is that Odysseus, a guest in the court, asks to have sung the fall...

[45:56]

Troy, and a blind, in all accounts of Homer, he's described as blind and as being a bard. A blind bard comes forward and sings the Iliad in the middle. his entire story sung and and and he's and but he's also he's no one everybody in the scene including the homer who sings is in the poem we're reading not somewhere else these are levels that that make it absolutely clear to me that we're not talking about a folk poem when we've got um when we've got the Odyssey. It has all of these layers of the strange magic of an unreal reality, a relation of what we call a real and what we call the unreal, of realizing what's going on in a scene, for instance, what the reader does to realize.

[47:05]

The other scene is that toward the end, there is a contest between Athena... and Odysseus, Athena, Odysseus, let's say Odysseus hyphen Homer, doesn't have a muse, he has Athena as his muse, not Mnemosyne. And she, what is his quality? It's the same one that Homer met. Plato, Herodotus, everybody accused Homer of what? They accused him of lying. a fantasy of making it up, but of lying, just lying, lying about what history was about. So what happens at the end of the... But remember, this is a... Well, Homer undoubtedly had his own critics, but he can't be thinking of Plato and Herodotus and so forth. They're coming three or four hundred years later, at least. And... Athena and Odysseus have a kind of contest, but no, a telling off.

[48:11]

She says, you know, you think you can lie. But I, I who actually moved this whole poem, lie much better than you can lie. You can't even spot me when I'm lying. I mean, she tells him exactly what the muses tell Hesiod at the other beginning of Greek poetry, that they can tell the truth so it looks like a lie, and they can tell a lie. It looks like the truth. So part of what we enter in this business of the cold ground of the poem is Browning insisting himself that it's made up. All right, now I'm going still on in this early part that follows that business where the ones who maintain that they made up, that they are the makers of quite new men and they're not mixed up with... So they don't come up against his story that they change around. Then we have, not only do you make up what's in the poem, but you make up its audience.

[49:21]

There also is no audience. It consists of called up or made up people. In reading a poem, we do not feel that we have become an audience. We feel, as a matter of fact, in our illusion that it was written for us, even though we understand it's not. This is so powerful that, for instance, if the poem complements us in, let's say, the most serious sense, if it rhymes with us, we feel not only moved by it, but we really do feel it was written for us. But if it, for instance, doesn't, If it doesn't please us, we're ferocious. In other words, somebody wrote that for us and so mistook us as, I mean, we're as outraged as a nice friendly pass made by somebody you didn't want a friendly pass from. And all the world is filled by poems that they're making. their audiences.

[50:23]

I mean, how do you feel about being made by so-and-so? As a matter of our period is getting very sensitive indeed about, I don't want to be made by any old girl. I don't want to be made by any old boy and then go all the way through literature. They won't read Emily Dickinson or they're not going to take Ernest Hemingway or something. Now the other side of this that opens in Shakespeare and Robert Browning is the imagination of other people's lives. It's the other part. There are a concord of things that you do when you're a reader. You also read because you're fascinated opening up a world that's not yours. And as a matter of fact, and yet it seems to be... All writing seems to present itself to us, a present and a presentation. And the one beautiful, decent thing about writing, differing from lecturing, as I have, you see, you have to sit, you have to think it, is that with a book, we open it when we want to. Do we? I mean, we can also be wondering, God, I'm chained to this endless story by Henry James, and while I'd like to cut it, he's just one of the worst seducers in the world, because I am tired of it, but if I close the book, I've still got the hook in my mouth.

[51:34]

And then you curse him, you come to the end of The Ambassadors, and you find that he is contrived to be able to cook massive Edwardian meals. that have you groaning and leaving you hungry at the end of the whole thing. And in no way somehow arriving at the taste which you had all the time. I mean, all the savor throughout, like, oh, it's like the way coffee never really gets as good as smelling it ground, but There's no way not to go through the whole thing. Well, this is just a burlesque of Henry James. There are authors that absolutely do do this. So there is a reader there. And one of the things in that typical writing in the modern period was to decide not only do away with the author and the reader that were in the writing, and you participated in. But both reader and writer would become really tough, and there would be a writer, and the book would be his book, and there would be a reader at the other end, and the reader would judge the book.

[52:45]

Judgment already starts. But judgment in our period is almost maniacally the process of reading. As a matter of fact, in education and larger, as to judge the thing, which is very different from The experience, giving an account of the experience. Think about all the criticism you read, how little is giving an account of what is the experience and how that writing enters your life as a person does, as a flower does, or as anything, and how much of it is evaluative for the market and about whether, sorting it out about whether we do or don't want to read it, which is centerfold reading. I mean, you're... I'll write another piece of gossip. At the Alliance Francaise, we have a rather charming and very typical French guy who the subject came up about nude bathing, nude beaches.

[53:51]

And his entire view of a nude beach was that it would be just simply disgusting to go to some place where anybody was nude who wasn't your ideal sex commodity. I mean, like you're going to a junkyard of cars or something, seeing lots of stuff you didn't want. And that's exactly what I said. I couldn't... I didn't know... I know that even in France, you might refer to it as Le Centerfold, because it's absolutely America that you'd come up with a final nude who was the commodity. And I said, but you don't realize that nude bodies are expressive like faces are. You get to know people by what they... And the total body is expressing. It takes you only a couple of minutes to come off the centerfold mentality unless you're clutching to it. Except in the Muslim world where everything is covered up, the centerfold mentality must be marvelous.

[54:54]

Even the face is in the centerfold mentality world. But much of our reading, and let's turn it around, a lot of our reading, the reading in which we open up and we don't ask what happens in it when we give an account of it. We size it up. And we deliver it over in a kind of centerfold mentality of a poem novel. And that's almost the end product of not coming into contact with what's happening in it. Well, Browning's got the one voice that Pound loved in it was the fact that as Browning separates Browning from author, The thing Dickens doesn't do, for instance, he's still that fiction, he enters the, he keeps in that fictional, the omnipotent author voice is all his. So for once I face ye friends, summoned together from the world's four ends, dropped down from heaven or cast up from hell to hear the story I propose to tell.

[55:57]

Oh, well, his audience is throughout time and he is actually addressing those concerned with the poem, which as in in the poem that he found Sordello in, when Dante aligns the poets most important to him, I know Danielle's in hell. And I know Danielle, when you read Dante giving account of master poets, is a master poet. Dante's own master in the art of poetry. And he's in hell for his poetry, which is important here. Because masterly and marvelous poetry, Dante knows, can cause schism and hatred and division from the world. I'm thinking now, at one time, seeing some notes of Tom Gunn on... Rock Drill Kettos when he had them for review.

[57:02]

I'm pretty sure it's Rock Drill. Was it Thrones? In any case, maybe, yeah, Thrones is the one that has about Marx and Freud and their kikery and American beaneries and so forth. That's right. And there were notes. I mean, Dante's judgments, however, because I don't remember reading the review that came out of it. But when we turn next time to look at the Sordello section of Dante and ask some questions, and we'll look also at the Arnaud Daniel section, they are emblematic there. He's not judging Arnaud and Sardella because he's invented them in their place, as a matter of fact. Dante also knows that they don't fit. One thing isn't judging them in the poem.

[58:05]

They are characters in the poem. He frequently, well, it's hard to say, all right, I'll have to get, we're going to a different one here. He places Arnaud Daniel in hell for his causing schisms among powers and war and strife and so forth. And Arnaud Daniel is eloquent. Eloquence is the role of poetry for Dante. Eloquentia is the one thing. It's very close to my sense of does it have music, I think. But eloquentia means a lot. But eloquence is something modern poetry has very little to do with. It's rhetoric in the place of eloquence. So we get advanced shock when we turn around to ask what eloquence is. But perhaps the reason is because we put our think tanks out front and then we're not to blame for anything as disturbing as might end us up in hell or purgatory or

[59:15]

or I'm proud of these, or under Mr. Gunn's observation in reading Pound, we can't picture Pound anywhere but in hell, unless we're careless. And when we think deeply, Because he got a personal help that he sent. Maybe a purgatorial will give him... He seemed to be in purgatory at the end. Okay. All right. This is not true of Arnaud Daniel at all. Arnaud Daniel's poetry is the slimmest evidence, but in actuality, I mean, if we went to history, that's not what... While Arnaud Daniel writes poetry that might suggest citizen division and so forth, he himself, in any political sense, was ineffectual, A, be really made for a kind of concordance. But in Sardella's case, it's quite the contrary.

[60:18]

And yet he's in purgatory for onore, for an entirely different term. So Dante's not talking about this. He knows about the history of those two poets. He's not talking about their being, that's it. He's not talking about Arnaud being in hell. nor exactly about his poetry, though it's drawn from his poetry, but another Arnault's appeared. And you would get it all wrong if you were arguing about Arnault oughtn't to be there because that other Arnault becomes the poet who does cause schisms, the poet who does cause hatred instead of unities. Remember, this is a Europe in which, in Italy, for instance, had not yet begun to appear, and Dante spends a whole... And in the Sardello section, Dante spends a whole... No sooner has Sardello appeared than Dante interrupts it, mid-sentence. And there is a long, long... The rest of the canto is a rage against the Italy failure to appear from Italy and all of those city-states of the world.

[61:22]

who would be exactly the counterpart of, and was for me, for instance, turning and doing it in direct Dante-esque fashion, of a rage against the United States for its cause of divisions. or Ayatollah, who is not a poet, but that's what Ayatollah's dimension, hatred, is. But he again is a causer of schisms. And when I come finally to the larger one, yes, I've got a passage in which both Islam and Israel are read out in the terms of these schisms because of the ancient one entity, Allah and Jehovah. identical and at war with itself and all. So Dante underlying this is the idea, again, of a keeping of the peace and a causing of dissension. So you'd find Dante profoundly against one kind of revolution and profoundly for another kind. profoundly for the unification element, or let's say one element within the revolution, and profoundly against the one which sets dissension of class against class and so forth throughout that constructive universe.

[62:37]

For us, it's even harder to read, but he was also at the end of a particular civilization. He was also at the end of the feudal order, which really does not last beyond merchant orders advancing and taking over. the very beginnings of our world, and we seem to be in a very light position in relation to our fundamental social economic order to Dante's period. So it becomes quite striking to us how much he insists upon unity, and it's the unity of the poem and the unity of its forces. Sardello then is Well, but in truth, Sardello, as Robert Browning's Sardello makes clear, while he switches sides back and forth, Sardello and Robert Browning comes forward for something that emerges, as we say, to be continued. All those who've read, have started reading, gotten book two, two, three, I guess it will appear, where Sardello switches sides from the...

[63:38]

where he's born to the Guelphs because the Guelphs seem to stand for the people. And something marvelous and curious has come forward because Robert Browning, we're right in this passage, we're really in Duncan's extended of the passage of Friends and you people who are reading this. Robert Browning is having trouble enough finding five readers or ten readers, having trouble Getting, where only, if you thought of anybody from the, well, we, you know, Jane Carlyle might be reading, and Carlyle might be reading, and Mill might be reading, and a handful of such people, but the critics were sure saying, no way are we going to read. And while masses of the middle class were out reading Tennyson, they were out not reading Robert Browning, and he comes up with the people. Not only does Sordello then finally live for the people, the term, the people, like I screamed it in shrill tones at Denise Levertov for bringing the people forward.

[64:44]

Well, I can get undone along my line because here we've got to take seriously Robert Browning comes up, R. Sordello comes up, forward with the people. And so he sees that the fundamental disunity is of both, as a matter of fact, of both Guelphs and Ghibli and the disunity of all of these houses, is the destruction of the life of the people. Well, I'd say, yeah. All right, there I'd say yes. But it still is in capital letters here, and, well, there is a kind of a, I think you see, I mean, the people have never been shacked up with it. poem in which Robert Browning sees the people as it. Confess now, poets know the dragnet's trick, catching the dead if fate denies the quick and shaming her. It is not for fate to choose silence or song because she can refuse real eyes to glisten more, real hearts to ache less awe, real brows turn smoother for our sake.

[65:54]

This is before Elizabeth Barrett Browning. No wonder she was a little fond of this poem. She was A little bit of reality helps. I have experienced something of her spite, but there's a realm wherein she has no right, and I have many lovers. Oh, it's really a young man who's at this point got no lover, but in that realm in which the real, thus gone, fate, the necessity, the real, the one thing that is really happening like that, has no right, suddenly they're all, in a sense, all that Robert Browning has loved in turn must be his lover. And so he has no right. And essentially we've got a new definition, an absolute definition, that holds true all the way through Robert Browning.

[66:55]

But I think again ought to be accented about the poem, in line about the fact, for instance, that we evaluate or my remarks about the centerfold approach to the poem, or the larger and graver ones, since there is a, although now shaky in their boots, installed profession, it's only been a hundred years to install, who teaches something like poetry or literature. But And so, also, poems were judged as their best readers, the ones who knew how to read it for a literature, knew how to defend it as a cultural asset. It's clear here, Robert Browning, when talking about readers and talking about lovers, and true readers are worth remembering who they are. I mean, they're the ones who, in their own volition... and in their own way are that close, and you don't get to make them close. You can make them see, but they meanwhile are doing something too.

[68:00]

They're loving the making see that goes on, and so they participate and come into the thing, and we have a circulation of, we have a currency throughout. In a monograph called As Testimony, written on the occasion of George Stanley, who had a classical education. As a matter of fact, he had been sort of seduced from what would have been a course of, he would have been an unmitigated snot, but of more than competence in Latin and Greek. Suddenly, left Cal from the graduate school and became a poet, a street poet in his own way, a poet, and certainly a very fine poet. That's not the whole story, because he certainly loved poems, and also went happy had he been that scholar.

[69:06]

However, he could on occasion turn, as he had in a meeting where Weiser and I were both present, to turn with scorn on another poet's poem. And I start writing a long letter to him, and it turned into almost an essay. And at the course of that essay, I began to get in line how similar were Lawrence's feelings that something had gone wrong about the currency of feeling, of touch. Well, remember, it had gone wrong in Lawrence, for one thing, because Lawrence has don't touch me, which comes all the time. And then he has a great longing to be touched. to have touch and union. And something had gone wrong in the circulation of vitalities between men and women, between men. And at the same time, it suddenly dawned on me, but Pound, when he's talking about usury and currency, is talking about a light failure of circulations, a light failure of

[70:14]

If I want to borrow from you, I put a touch on you. And if we are not in a free-flowing world of currencies, if our interest rate is already at 25%, All you have to have is a trust fund like mine. The minute I had it, I said, what? I mean, I changed over from Bound's ideas of usury and was wishing we'd get to 25%. It's great if you have some money that's going to be lent to someone. You think, could I get 25%? Could I get maybe 30%? Could I still be friendly and get 50%? And yet, let us picture what fascinated Pound. Christian groups, in answer to usury in the Middle Ages, the Church founded a bank in which no interest was charged. However, the Church, Catholic Church, soon began to have rationales for how you could lend out and get a little interest back. They were getting along. Trust was entering into this, like my feelings about trust then. and and so forth the quakers meanwhile have that uh quakers and within their own community jews um had their loans with no interest at all you have alone today with no interest at all nobody dreaming you that if they heard about it they'd lock you away perhaps but there's but but personally there's no law about how much interest you'd be charging if you lent some money and and and actually uh uh uh with friends you don't uh

[71:39]

lend money at, as I would say, more than 20% interest today. All of these are actual terms, though, about human flow of confidence and feeling and community. And the authors suffer them as symptoms. Lawrence isn't thinking symbolically. He feels it. He's talking about what he feels. His don't touch me is what he feels. And then his other half of this, the that he's got to be somehow. The back of it is an agony like Emerson's Touching Won't Touch, I mean, The Great Desire for Union. All of that seems to me to belong to the dream of the period we were in in which this break of sympathies was. that the break of sympathies was seen throughout, and in poets, most vividly the break of sympathies. And from the day when I wrote as testimony, the break of sympathies has become, in our community, much more rife.

[72:40]

So we're very, very aware of our minorities. We're very, very aware of the little communities we belong to as almost in a position antipathetic to whole sections and possible events. We're surrounded with events that would be very threatening to happen. And yet I'm not saying that we should change our attitude. I'm talking about the total, how total that is, that our experience, our own experience, and I think if you looked over at poetry, it would come up over and over again. We'll go back to this young man he had many lovers. Say, but few friends, fate accords me. Here they are, now view the host I muster. Many a lighted face, foul with no vestige of the grave disgrace. What else should tempt them back to taste our air except to see how their success is fair? My audience, and they sit, each ghostly man striving to look as living as he can. Brother by breathing brother, thou art set.

[73:44]

clear-witted critic by dot, dot, dot. But I'll not fret a wondrous soul of them, nor move death's spleen who loves not to unlock them. Friends, I mean the living in good earnest, ye elect, but we're already passing into the, into the, thoroughly back into the person who of the, all the time we've been in the person of the man with the diorama pointing out a pure Verona and so forth, who's facing an audience who've paid for their way in. And it's clear that The only thing we know in our experience, give or take, let's say our human experience, the most common knowledge of this kind is the one in dreams. When we begin to read deep in dreams and see it as having many levels, many possible readings, or let's say many lovers. A Freudian reading, the Freudian reading of the dream, which is constantly shifting and changing.

[74:46]

And remember, at the end, he's reading all dreams, not in terms... He's reading sexuality itself, where originally he reads the dreams in terms of physiology. And most importantly, he begins to see that sexuality is not just genitalia, but also the intestinal system and especially the mouth and the... anus, but the whole digestive system, a primary one in life. So all of that, so sexuality and genitalia are sexuality. Sexuality itself is in the process of changing and meaning as he reads, and he's reading a dream. Toward the end, it's thanatos and eros. Now he's no longer talking about sexuality because eros is a power that sexuality is only an aspect of. the sexuality originally was addressing. By the time he comes back to Eros and Thanatos, nor is Eros life. That won't work. There isn't the choice between life and death for Freud at all.

[75:47]

They're two great powers. Much as he's come all the way back to the earliest physics of the Greeks, where attraction, I mean, where Eros and Thanatos do indeed construct the atomic and subatomic universe, are the principles we'll be good on. The one's dreaming. Two dreamers. He comes to two dreamers at the end. Two dreaming forces. What is happening? Well, let me go back to the description because we've got half an hour of my chase down to these levels. I was looking just for pronouns you and ye, because they are the, were they, at times they're the reader, at times they are the audience of the voice addressing an audience with pictures before it. In that first opening, we have who will may hear Sardella's story told, his story, who believes me shall behold the man and then ye believe.

[77:01]

So there's a you present all the time. Never I should warn you first. Well, that one... Take a look at 11 again, but I think that one... Well, the ambiguities are lovely here. I like... In the 30s, as I was coming to intellectuality, the book was Seven Types of Ambiguity, and I got it wrong, totally wrong, because I thought you should have at least seven types of ambiguity, and everybody else was going out trying to get rid of seven types of ambiguity. And finally, having met Mr. Empson, having taught in the same session, by that time I saw that Mr. Empson at least had gotten rid of his seven types of ambiguity. All he had to do was drink enough And he dissolved them in a sort of an angry mumble-bumble. But it's a glorious book. I mean, it was a wonderful source book.

[78:03]

I felt like I didn't have enough sources of ambiguity. I studied my ambiguities in absence of seven types of ambiguity and thank him forever. It's like reading Bultmann's Mythology of the New Testament when they... When the little group who are the core of the Zen Center here went down to Tassajara to take a look at the place, I sat while they would do any Buddhist little affairs. I would sit and read, or I was reading Bultmann's, what is it called, The Fallacy of the New Testament, whatever. And actually, I read blissfully through that book. getting more and more mythology, while Bultmann was nervously trying to demythologize the New Testament. I mean, I was getting my New Testament mythologized. That's what I wanted. And again, I'll read you the series of yous, because just you and ye gets interesting.

[79:09]

On 194, but this won't tell you, on the next page, we're at the very beginning of that first one. And leaving you to say the rest for him, I should delight in watching first to last his progress as you watch it, not a whit more in the secret than you, than yourselves. Now, of course, the omnipotent author immediately shares the secret or doesn't. In murder mystery, you often don't share the secret. At Dickens, the omnipotence of the omnipotent author, like Dickens, shares a little secret, but he knows, and in this, Henry James and Proust are very Dickens-like. They share with you just what they're going to share, and so you feel very loved and cozy, but they won't tell you the whole story, so there's a you and And Browning is really playing with that. He would love to because he is in the same position and doesn't really know what this is going to come to, no more of the secret than ourselves. And that's what actually Pound thought of himself as doing as he became the victim of the poem.

[80:13]

What Browning's saying here is he says, I'd love to be the victim of this poem as you are, but I'm dishing it out. In Pound's case, he became the victim of the poem. because he's always at the same ground that we're in as a reader. There is not something that he knows that we don't know. So he's really in the position of a fool's card in the tarot, for those of you who know the fool's card in the tarot. And just recently, I've come across a marvelous, marvelous emblem of Blake's in which we've got, and let me describe the fool's card in the tarot for those of you who don't know it. is that we're at the edge of a cliff and the fool is in full medieval dresses, absolutely would be Pound. And he's got his rag bag on his shoulder, so it would be exactly the Pound that proposes my Sardello and my rag bag, my pack of odds and ends.

[81:13]

And he's got his hat in the air, and at his feet a little dog runs around. Sometimes that little dog looks meaner than that, but he's running along. In Blake's, It goes along with a little story about a valiant dog who, when his owner wants to go in bathing, so this fool is totally naked. Of course, happy Lakeland. And the dog keeps trying to prevent him from going in bathing, and the man gets angry at the dog. So the little dog valiantly jumps into the water, which point a huge crocodile's mouth opens like this. So we see the dog, the valiant, loving dog, diving to his death. warning death in the monster's jaws, and the fool, there's a dog. It could be an emblem of Pound. I mean, he's stripping away everything, and as a matter of fact, disowning the dog and the crocodile, most of all, because the crocodile's a... I thought, gee, Blake, maybe you and then... Maybe if you're... I think you...

[82:15]

If you are running around purgatory, could you show this little picture to him? He saw you running in his purgatory. In the cantos, Dwight is running around purgatory. You're running around the mountain. And that's a secret. When I see, you know, his progress, I should delight in watching first to last his progress as you watch it. Not a whit more in the secret than yourselves. You can see where my mind is. I see the secret is that crocodile in the water. Nothing but that kind of secret to my world. So, for once, I face these friends, come later, and then I thought to myself, oh, I have fun in this. Within the narration quotes, there's you, you uh there's a neutral referent you but like our use of the word he or one and so forth you're pushing by to gain a post like uh his is is is within a speech but again i catch since since a texture is forming through and through a texture of a dream uh and just as now we wonder when we say um

[83:31]

When we use what used to look like a neuter, he is, or he, has everyone his book, we rightly no longer hear that as Because not only are we in the place where, as the feminist movement reminds us, they're always hearing his, but we're in a place where, by the way, people wear the same haircuts and everything else. And there's gender. His and her are just genders, so there's gender exchange. So was everyone, his book was a joke already to kids in schools, I remember. I mean, that could be a great joke. And we have moved into a society in which if we said, as everyone, her purse, the whole audience, male and female, but look around to see if they have their handbag, it's by their side. I mean, because the he and hers absolutely move this way. And in Browning's case, it's the one that we use, but one, your, you was used that way, quite prevalently.

[84:35]

How do you make a cake? Well, you take eggs first, and that you gets to be the you, gets to be the reader. But if you're opening a recipe, and you're reading the recipe, who is you? I mean, you, man, and we've got instructions like this in it. I mean, the poem will tell it, now look, you, believe, you believe, pay attention here, you, the form of the the patron tells you once for all, grudgy such a lot, that's just the crowd talking. We've descended to quotes that are in quotes that are in the narration. And in the narration itself, we had two levels in which we can't quite be sure, nor can Robert Browning, whether he's talking to his person or whether the author is talking. whether we have to do with the authorial level of the poem. And then we've got commands.

[85:38]

Question is addressed to the audience. That's still inside quotes because it's an audience that has appeared inside the poem that has an audience. Sinketh the breeze. Creep closer on the creature. Oh, this is the audience. This is the audience that's watching the diorama. Creep closer. Look closer. Creep closer on the creature. Think about it in a dream, though. In the middle of Sardella, we get creep closer on the creature. His back is fairly turned, question mark. Our Guelphs. All those friendly things, everything's gotten so nervous by the time you are willing to get into it at this level, as I'm reading, that I will question, I mean, the most normal thing that now our hero takes his way along that, you know, that voice, but all of a sudden when it's you, when you start following the you and the ye and the sudden our, And how about there? And then in later parts of the poem, it's exactly that happens when I thought, oh, well, now, come on, haven't we gone too far with our, well, we could say that's merely a rhetoric of the poem.

[86:49]

But later, it will be our and their, and you begin to wonder, who are they? I know who you, I mean, I am telling this thing, and you are listening, but who are the they? He already has a they. Is it audience or what? I say, echo from I, points from I to you, I say, oh yeah, I say it's a bad day. I mean, I say it's a terrible thing. That's an awful thing I say. For fear your timid sort would fly, and that's another one of that you, for fear your timid sort would fly Ferrara at the bear report. It's activity with the reader is, Already, as I said, Pauline and Paracelsus, I mean, he succeeded whatever his timid sort had already fled from in the previous two poems. So the activity at the level of wit of that one, of the kind of wit that comes in a dream, but an I and a U is formed all the way And then yourselves may spell it out yet in chronicle again.

[87:54]

Well, that's again to this. So we've got an audience that we both are and are not that's present in the poem that stands for the audience of readers. And the poem is still to come to a proposition where the they appears. When the people appear in the poem, thank you, ours. We're not going by too fast. And the people appeared from there to they. There's no you, the people, I, the people, we, the people. Is it Sandberg who picks up we? But Whitman is the one. And very modern, by the way, is we, the people. I will venture it, but I have not sat down as I did. In book one, I looked at every single word as if I were looking through the entire dictionary, or rather, I'm thinking of city directory. A name as interesting as we once found Nelson Sexy in the directory of...

[88:57]

I mean, as if I were looking to find what were the full sum of interesting names from A to Z. That's the way I read through Sardella this last week, looking through not only this, but a whole series of other things, looking for every time you or I or we or, and I didn't, like I didn't do that. So much so that as we go on, and there's a rhetorical question, why cry? And that exactly, again, asks of somebody, lines within inner discourse, not set off by quotes. a line 208 where our and us is not audience. To our field, what else rebut but us? Our chokeweed. Now that's already an hour a day, a group. We're coming down to Sardella's own level, but let me go to our chokeweed because it's where Merck comes forward and another pound aspect is in it. I'm glad I don't have your scholarly one, but your line number, yours will have line numbers.

[90:07]

I had to, what kept my head on here all the way is that I had to number all the lines in this just reader's edition and count them out by fives, and then that gave me a little tesserize, so I looked in each five to see what kind of bugs were moving around in that area. I mean, I'd read this enough times that I felt I could look around in the immediate area of five lines at a time, and pay no attention to where it was in a sentence. But I... What did I get there? 224, okay. Well, the passage really itself, the locus for that... but the passage itself starts at 212. In Pound's cantos, there is a canto of great enchantment that has to do with the appearance of Dionysus on the sea.

[91:08]

It's a ship of kidnapped a young boy, and they're going to sell him as a slave. And suddenly, what they have in their hands is not just a young boy, but is also Dionysus. And all the mammals of the sea begin to be active, and the vine begins to grow, and the sea and the purr of the leopards begins to appear, and the dolphin, I think the boy becomes a dolphin, but this is not, I mean, these metamorphoses in Pound are, the sea itself is then growing with vegetation. And I wondered if that wasn't haunted, since he was drawing on it, or many other things out of this canto by the following passage. But the passage itself is certainly haunted by the theme I spoke of last time, which was fault, the faultlessness and the fault in writing.

[92:16]

And then the idea of fault, and it was brought forward that they hurt that also as a vein, the veins of fault. in which gems are or the veins in the earth are false lines. And so I began to pay attention in the poem also, along with you, I, and so forth, to the cleavage, figures of cleavage and fault lines. And the cliffs right away almost are where that begins. And in this then begins to appear not only something related to the theme of Myrrh, to a making sea, something that's remarkably like the intertwining of the parts in Browning's sentences, but also making sea a vision that looked very much like, to me, I mean, which reminded me immediately of this marvelous, Pound is a master of making sea, the early Pound, of this marvelous passage of the transformation of the sea.

[93:19]

Cliffs and earthquake suffered jut in the mid-sea.

[93:23]

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