So I thought all the time when I took the drug that it would be like being in the state of writing a poem, so I would write a poem and I'd get to see how I felt, which was entirely different when I was performing. I never write until I feel it. You're eager to know. So I thought, gee, I want to see what that looks like on a piece of paper. So that was the main thing that got me out of that process. I was really quite nervous. I thought, gee, that's what it must be, that's what it is. And it must be only one thing. When I took the mescaline, part of it was visionary. One thing they did find out was that mescaline doesn't change reflexes at all. Some of that I got.

[01:11]

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 in 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've 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 Met. There's one that seems to me as a work of art. It goes into the... I'm truly sublime. And so it is like an immediate experience. And I first didn't... 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, I want to work in it.

[02:26]

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. Pauline Kael, who I'm going to drop when he's around, did ask, if you could have a poem in a dream, would that be... and she thought poems were satisfying. Well, no way, I realized. I mean, if they happen to you in a dream, they happen to you, but still it's the labor, work. So my whole thing, to get back to this, was no wonder I was in tune as I come across more and more of this doctrine of labor, 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.

[03:37]

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 that it is. And yet, very different from anything I know in 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, and this work redeems it. I mean, it's not just the split between reality and unreality, and 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, in order to go to Sardello's appearance in Dante.

[04:39]

Because as 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 Sardello 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 that it's by its labor that it comes to it. Reality is 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.

[05:43]

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 ends, not a summa at all. I mean a summa would be this. 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 aim at a kind of perfection of itself. But that is the perfection of a means, not an ends. 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. As a matter of fact, as we are reading Sordello, and we're not reading, of course, one that anybody felt was ideal, but one that the poet experienced as he goes into this poem, he's almost willing, he lifts that question out of perfection.

[06:58]

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 that Cocteau would gladly have written. And he said, but how can you write that way? You don't change anything in the end. And he said, but when you are writing, you can't write any better than you know how to write. 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.

[08:17]

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 or from outer space to tell you that should rhyme 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. And then after 10 trials, he came back to a word that was there originally. I thought, Duncan's 10 trials is spread all over the place. He continues 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 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.

[09:31]

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 its writers were 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 Western European civilization. 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 present white and such and such present black and such and such present Asian.

[10:36]

Since we'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 to, especially, of course, North. 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 labor. 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 underlying book. That enters into vital labor from there on.

[11:49]

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 trees, I always thought they were exploiting trees, but had great sprees of burning trees. Somebody the other day talking about people who feel dogs dirty the ground, I remembered a couple in Stinson Beach who gave me a lift and they lived on a hill above us and they were angry at the neighbors because they wouldn't cut down their trees because they dirtied the ground. Well, 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.

[12:49]

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 we don't, you know, the book trade tries to see it that we've got some trees. There's 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, so I'm going to tell you a bit 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 was hard enough for me to get to. They had the same patients who had that with Nice in the Dream.

[14:13]

But I thought, gee, now I'm getting sessions from the other side, so to speak, that go along with these ones. And at the end, as I was waking up, I said, ah, well, actually, 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, those of you who are reading Sordello 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 an impression, let's say offhand, there are five, but we have five fingers.

[15:25]

And, I mean, this seemed okay. So I'm asking, are there five? 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 one. He says, I sat on the doganas steps. And at the other end of it, we've got a Robert Browning persona, and a very awkward one of the person who's giving the lecture on Sordello. 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 Sordello in the poem, in which he realized that the man was in a booth and pointing.

[16:33]

So we're not, the academic world suddenly dawned on them that it was a lecturer in a diorama booth, 40 years after Ezra Pound in 1910, or whatever it is, yeah, 10, 11, 12, assumed that in writing. So the appearance in Browning's studies of any realization of that voice. So how distant it was indeed, because the pointer, when you notice that the pointer's going to be there, the pointer's there right away. But it seems, or setters forth, Browning's talking about, remember I told you that one of his terms for our poets is maker-see, that's a very important one. He keeps makers, and he has a whole section in which he begins to wander in the poem all about makers, the role of makers, and awkward. Browning's awkward terms, like makers-see, really go much further than visionaries, for instance. By talking continuously about visionary poets, we're left with people who seem to have a magical on their own, and sail off, and see, and be all the way over into prophets, and they're not making, I mean, they again are not in this, but Robert Browning was not concerned with visionaries, he's concerned with those who make us see.

[17:59]

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 isn't talking about his poems when he talks about those things, 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 beanies, that what they see is in the drawings, and he's 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. And that's what the poet turns to, and most marvels is that words make us see. Unless, as it certainly comes to Browning over and over again, is music really the most marvelous of all in the way in which it makes us see.

[19:09]

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 Sardello before, so he got made by Dante. By the time Pound is making Sardello, and almost hinting to us that he might have the right one, nowhere we're going to go along this line are you going to get the versions, every one of them is made Sardello anew. And Sardello's own legend makes him up in the first place, and then when we turn to, and 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.

[20:22]

You can't tell if Sardello'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 you make, 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. 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.

[21:24]

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 keeps us quite aware of this danger coming forward. Coleridge has some anxiety about reality. He wants to divide fantasy from imagination. 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 due. It is fantasy that he insists the poem have its whole thing in it. 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.

[22:43]

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, although the subject did not come up, but the irreal. I mean, to us, it could almost be our irreal, 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, to see, let's say, the real. 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, 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 Olson's or Denis's, Lavertasse's or Crilly's, it's that we're very little capable of fantasy, straight on.

[23:44]

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 a whole series of unreal personalities. And along the line, you began to hear about schizophrenia and other terrible states, in which you might even, for two minutes, be pukapuk or whatever comes along, and 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 to make your face, it'll stick that way, and you'll never get out of that face. That's where that pointing paw in hand appears. They better stand beside him and show that while you've made a new man, you're still out here, so you don't ...

[24:57]

Are you any better off than the ones who have a not-new person they're making up? And Browning is absolutely at ease in this poem with the problem about, is Sardello a historical person, or any of the rest of the people in the poem, as a matter of fact. Zollingware is a much more historical person than Sardello. I mean, that is, we have an unsatisfactory handful of historical facts about Sardello. 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 Sardello doesn't get very far in history. When I try to make a history with it, they don't have many facts that they can ... History makes its own network, and the jigsaw puzzle pieces that fit are facts. But we've got marvelous facts of a lake. 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.

[26:08]

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 ... He's very modern in that, too, in that he feels that the most ... 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 I've got. Just a second. 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 trick. Yes, it's just below there, but it's a different procedure. Let me read these. Let me read, then, this opening. Always, always in the structure, begin straight out of the structure, and then take hold here, and a couple things come together.

[27:22]

Who will may hear Sordello's story told? His story? In a letter to Charles Olsen at one point, I said, I don't know why you have trouble with history. Why don't you just call it his story? And now we might see the trouble is we don't have her story, or its story. Well, Olsen felt I was doing wicked punning, but at the same time, he almost felt I had answered what his trouble was. I mean, history is a story. Luckily, I took history, well, so did Olsen. He was in American Studies in the history part of that thing. Well, history is 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 hardly make up will entirely make a new history.

[28:23]

The blacks are quite right, black history is going to look better than any other kind of history. Actually, better largely because they haven't been sitting on top. The top history looks terrible. 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 he has 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 it raises all the way around, because as I pointed out last time, it's not history that we get it from.

[29:29]

Sordello here dies, the minute Palma and Salinguera solve who he will be to come out and triumph. And he dies, 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 that we know it all is not written in Italian, is written in Provencal, 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 Sordello who wasn't Sordello. I mean, that 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.

[30:30]

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. We eagerly ask what the answer is, but the answer does not satisfy the riddling. If the answer satisfies, the riddling is too simple, and the riddling no longer gets to you. But this was a true riddling he was going into. So it not only meant less business about history. 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 Sordello, 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...

[31:34]

Actually, what was fancy? Every time we come to fancy, and phantasms in this, they are points at which Sordello is no longer in his own boundaries. It isn't a mirror like in the stories of Narcissus. 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 fantasies, not imagination.

[32:45]

You find in Freud writing, for instance, that he is afraid of fantasy also. Like Coleridge, he has a great deal of trouble about it. Fantasy may be very dangerous. But not, Robert Browning 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. For as the friendless people's friend spied from his hilltop once, despite the din and hint of multitude, pentaphalin 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 pentaphalin is? I mean, hello, goodbye. I single out Sordello. Just like that, I single out Sordello. Compass mercily about, with ravage of six long and hundred years, only believe me.

[33:49]

Ye believe? So that mercily, it's the merc that I went back to read that opening thing. That merc, it is... I have found contemporary scholars really beautiful because they also seem to be... They're contemporaries of mine, I guess, or ours, let's say, really. And they have our sense of the merc. 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. Pentaphalin came from Don Quixote.

[34:50]

From Don Quixote. And that's the friendless people's friend in Don Quixote. You have a Robert Browning dictionary? There are good notes. Oh, hooray, great. Okay. But thank God I didn't have good notes. And more than that, since I didn't have good notes, I had... 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. Mistakenly seen. 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 was wont to do, and leaving you to say the rest for him. It's that one that Pound undoes,

[35:54]

between the first writing of the cantos, the opening one in which he does take over, and you see Pound there, moreover you see Robert Browning, and Pound says, but in this booth, the speech, and so forth, all 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' modernism, so much modernism that it's quaint, like mother's old clothes, otherwise you miss out what's going on, Mayakovsky's modernism, a mother's wearing pretty grand clothes,

[36:56]

when you see actual Mayakovsky editions, you realize it belongs to the moments, so it really begins, the First World War is a modernistic war, and 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 8 or 9, and Amy Loho 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 good extent, and now that we've got terms critically of post-modern, that failed to look at what the modern actually was,

[37:59]

there's modern in art alright, but by the time we come to the Picasso's painting Guernica, that's not modern in any term that we could possibly think of, the modern Picasso's, the one who was a Cubist, and outside of that Picasso's, out of bounds, totally out of bounds, OK, 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 1920's had, especially it 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 looks like, not a summa at all, but a modern war, by means that most of the people fighting in it couldn't understand, looks like a Cubist canvas, when you think about its events and violence and so forth,

[38:59]

but 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, so that would almost define what was the modernist attitude, that's not the attitude at all in the Cantos, and it certainly isn't in Eliot, and it's not in H.D., it's Stein who gives forward fairly strongly, that if we were sensible and modern, we really wouldn't be mixed up on all this, and there's a lot of promise of modernism in Mussolini, and certainly the Mussolini that Lincoln, Steffens, and Stein, and Pound were all enthusiastic about, and saw their counterpart, there was a lot of, of course, the propositions under Lenin, and the any, what is that called, the very first cultural propositions were modernistic in Russia,

[40:01]

but Pound, Pound actually, when he straightened out, so it becomes something else he does, when he eliminates the, when he eliminates from his Cantos, the relation between the reader, and the, and the fictional writer, this one out front, he eliminates the invention of the author, remember novels had continued, novels also were eliminating, a lot of novels eliminate, 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 omnipotent, you become the reader in the secret, and little conversations go on between you and the author, back and forth. Surrealists reintroduced 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,

[41:06]

he is the omnipotent author, the one who starts out here, and 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, and all of a sudden, Robert Browning does come back in, I was sitting on the Ducana, but the one, and Pound does want his own choice, also what happens in the course of Pound's poem, Sardello, in Dante Criticism, and certainly Browning, undertakes the task here, the position of Sardello in Browning, in the Purgatorial, seems to be that, Sardello becomes the prototype of the poet, who undertakes political action, and has political effect, from his poem,

[42:07]

because the one poem, that survived with some fame, of Sardello, is, two have, but the one with great force, is the Cervantes, in which all of the ruling powers, are named and, told they should have eaten of the heart, of man who has died, because the world is ruled by cowards, in the period of, Sardello. 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 Sardello 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,

[43:08]

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 Artepus, the one of having, an omnipotent author, and the one of having a chat with a reader, yet Pound toward the end of the canto is chatting with a reader away, until you 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, give you a reading list, or anything he wants to do, what would have been marvelous if he'd only, if it had only been, if there'd 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 the last time?

[44:13]

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, and then I encounter author and reader, as 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 in the part of the author, when it's, and yet I understand absolutely, that Browning is, is almost what we call autobiographical voices, that comes into this, never I should warn you, first 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, in the Odyssey, in one scene, the reader can I think,

[45:14]

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, false Troy, and, and a blind, now we, in all accounts of Homer, he's described as blind, and as being, and as being a bard, a blind bard comes forward, and sings, the, Iliad in the middle, his entire story sung,

[46:20]

and, and he's, but he's also, he's, no, 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, when we've got, the Odyssey, it has all of these layers, of a, of the strange magic, of a, unreal, reality, a relation of, of what we call the real, and what we call the unreal, of realizing, what's going on in a scene, for instance, what the reader does, to realize. The other scene is, that toward the end, there is a contest, between Athena, and, Odysseus. Athena, Odysseus, let's say Odysseus hyphen,

[47:21]

Homer, doesn't have a muse, he has Athena, as his muse, not, Mnemosyne. And, 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, of fantasy, of making it up, but of lying, just lying, lying about what history was about. So what happens at the end, of the, of, but remember, this is, Homer, undoubtedly, had his own critics, but he can't be thinking of Plato, and Herodotus, and so forth, because they're coming, three or four hundred years later, at least. And, Athena, and, Odysseus, have a contest, a kind of contest, but no, a telling off. She says, you know, you think you can lie, but I, I who actually moved, this whole poem, of lying, much better than you can lie. I mean, you, you can't even spot me,

[48:21]

when I'm lying. I mean, he, he tells him exactly, what the Muses tell, he's here, 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, a lie, so, it looks like the truth. So, part of what we enter, in this business of, of, of the, the, the whole ground of the poem, is, is that, is insisting, is insisting, Browning is insisting himself, that, that it's made up. All right, on, on, 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, with, so they don't come up against, the, his story, that they change around. Then, we have, not only, not only does, do you make up, what's in the poem, but, you make up, its audience. There,

[49:22]

also, is no audience. Yet, it, it is, 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 religion, that it was written for us, even though we understand, it's not. This is so powerful, that, for instance, if the poem, if the poem, compliments us, and let's say, in the most serious sense, if it comes in, if it rhymes with us, we feel, not only moved by it, but we, but, 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 something, somebody wrote that for us, and so mistook us, as, I mean, we're as outraged, as a nice, friendly pass, made by, somebody who 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 fact, 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 they'll go all the way through literature. They won't read Amelia 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 at 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 up when we want to. Do we? I mean, we can also be wondering, God, I'm chained to this endless story

[51:24]

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. and then you, 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. so, 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, of, of Henry James. There are authors that, that absolutely do do this. So, there is a reader there. And one of the things in that typical writing in the modern period

[52:24]

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 tough, 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. A judgment already starts. A judgment is, but judgment in our period is almost maniacally the, the process of reading. As a matter of fact, in education at large you're asked 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

[53:24]

about whether we do or don't want to read it. Which is centerfold reading. You know what I mean? 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. 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, 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 had to, I couldn't, I didn't know. I know that even in France you must refer to it as le centerfold because it's absolutely America that you'd come up with the final nude

[54:25]

who was the commodity. And I said but you don't realize that nude bodies are, bodies are expressive like faces are. You get to know people by, by, what they, and you get, and the total body is expressive. It takes you, if, I've, it takes you only a couple of minutes to come off the centerfold mentality unless you're clutching to it. And, except in the Muslim world where everything's covered up, the centerfold mentality must be marvelous. 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, and we deliver it over in a kind of centerfold mentality of, of poem, novel. And in order not to, and that's almost the end product of, of not coming into contact with what, what's happening in it. Well, Browning's got the,

[55:25]

the, the one, the voice that Pound loved in it was, was the fact that it kind of, as, as Browning separates Browning from author, I think Dickens doesn't do, for instance. He's, he's still that fictional. 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. Oh, well, his audience is throughout time and, and, and, and he is actually addressing those concerned with the poem, which as in, in the poem that he found Sordello in, when Browning, when Dante aligns the poets most important to him, I know Danielle's in hell and I know Danielle, when you read Dante giving an account of, of master poets as a master poet, but,

[56:27]

but, Dante's own master in the art of poetry and he's in hell for his poetry, which is, which is important here, because masterly and marvelous poetry Dante knows can cause schism and, and, and hatred and division from the world. I'm thinking now, seeing, at once, at one time, seeing some notes of Tom Gunn on, on, on ah, ah, the rock drill cantos when it happened for review. I'm pretty sure it's rock drill, yeah. Oh, was it, was it Thrones? In any case, ah, ah, ah, maybe, yeah, Thrones is the one that has about Marx and, and Freud and their Kyrie and American Venus and so forth, and, and there were notes. I mean, Dante's judgments, however, because I didn't, I don't remember reading the review

[57:28]

that came out of the, but I, but, but, we're, when we turn next time to look at the Sardello 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, and Sardello because he's invented them in their place. As a matter of fact, ah, Dante also knows that, that they don't fit. So, so, that, one thing isn't judging them in the poem, ah, they, they're, they're, they, they are characters in the poem. He, ah, he, frequently, ah, well, it's hard to say, all right, I'll have to get, we'll go into it in a different way. He places Arnaud Daniel in hell for his causing schisms among powers and war

[58:30]

and strife and so forth. and he, and Arnaud Daniel is eloquent, eloquence is the role of poetry for Dante. Eloquentia is the one thing. It's, it's, it's, ah, ah, very close to my sense of does it have music? I think. Ah, but eloquentia means a lot. Ah, ah, ah, ah, even, but, eloquence is something modern poetry has very little to do with. Ah, it's, it's put rhetoric in the place of eloquence and so we, we get advanced shock when we turn around and ask what eloquence is. But perhaps, 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, ah, hell or purgatory or, or, I'm proud of these O.F. words or, or under Pound's interdict. Ah, they, I mean, under Mr. Gunn's observation in reading Pound exhibiting, ah, ah, ah, Pound doesn't,

[59:30]

we can't picture Pound anywhere but in hell unless we're careless. Ah, when we think deeply, ah, because you've got a personal hell that he's in. maybe a purgatorial will give him, ah, ah, he seems to be in purgatory at the end and, OK. All right. This is not true of Arnold Daniel at all. Arnold Daniel's poetry, ah, has the slimmest evidence but in actuality, I mean, if we went to history that's not what, well, Arnold Daniel writes poetry that might suggest schism and division and so forth. He himself, in any political sense, was, ah, ineffectual A, B, really made for a kind of concordance. OK. But, in the Sardella's case, it's quite the contrary caused all kinds of, and yet he's in purgatory for honore, 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

[60:31]

Arnold being in, in hell nor exactly about his poetry though it's drawn from his poetry but another Arno's appeared and, and you would get it all wrong if you were arguing about Arno oughtn't to be there because that other Arno becomes the poet who does cause schisms. The poet who does cause hatred instead of unity. 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 Sardella section, Dante spends a whole, it no sooner has Sardella appeared than Dante interrupts it and, mid-sentence and there is a long, long, rest of the canto is a rage against the Italy, failure to appear from Italy and all of those city-states of war with each other. It would be exactly the counterpart of, of, of, and was for me, for instance, turning and doing it in direct Dante-esque fashion of,

[61:31]

of, of a rage against the United States for its cause of divisions and so forth, or the, or Ayatollah who is not a poet but that's what Ayatollah's dimension hatred is, but he again is a causer of schisms, I mean, 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, I mean, identical and at war with itself and, [...] and all, so that this is Dante underlying this is the idea again of a, of a, of a keeping of the peace and, and the causing of dissension, so you 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 a revolution and profoundly against the one which sets dissension of classic against class

[62:32]

and so forth throughout that constructive unification. We, for us, it's hard, even harder to read but he was also at the end of a, of a particular civilization. He was also at the end of the feudal order was, was, was, really does not last beyond merchant orders advancing and taking up the very beginnings of our world and we seem to be in the, in, in, 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 Sardello makes clear while he switches sides back and forth Sardello and Robert Browning comes forward for something that will, that emerges as we say to be continued to all those who have read, have started reading gotten,

[63:32]

book two, two, three, I guess it will appear where Sardello switches sides from the, from the um, Ghibellines where he's born to the Guelphs because the Guelphs seem to stand for the people and it's, and, and something marvelous and curious has come forward because Robert Browning we're right in this passage we're really in Duncan's extended passage of Friends and you people who are reading this Robert Browning is having trouble enough finding five readers or ten readers having, 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 gonna read and there were, 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 says

[64:33]

Sardello then finally lived for the people the term the people like I screamed at, in shrill tones at, at, Denise Levertov for bringing the people forward well, I can get undone along my line because here we've got to take seriously Robert Browning comes up, R. Sardello 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 uh my it, but it still is in capital letters here and uh uh well it, there is a kind of I think you see I mean the people have never been jacked up with the poem on which Robert Browning sees the people because it

[65:34]

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 uh this is before Elizabeth Barrett Browning no wonder she was a little fond of this poem she was a little bit of reality a little bit of reality is helps um I have experienced something of her spite but there's a realm wherein she has no right in Washington 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 in which uh the real thus gone fate the necessity the real the one thing that is really happening left side has no right suddenly

[66:37]

they're all uh in a sense all that Robert Browning has loved in turn must be his lover lover and so he has no idea and essentially we've got a new definition an absolute definition that holds true all the way through Robert Browning but I think again ought to be accented about the poem in line about the fact for instance we evaluate or my remarks about centerfold approach to the poem or the larger and graver ones for instance there is a although now shaky in their boots uh installed profession it's only been a hundred years installed who teaches something like poetry or literature but and so also poetry 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 as a cultural asset it's clear here Robert Browning when talking about readers talking about lovers and

[67:38]

and and uh uh true and true readers are worth being 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 but they meanwhile are are doing something too they're loving the making see that goes on and so they participate and come into the thing and and we have a circulation of of we have a currency throughout in in a in a monograph called As Testimony written written on the occasion of George Stanley who had classical education as a matter of fact had been sort of seduced from what would have been a course of he would have been

[68:38]

an unmitigated snot if he'd gone in but of of of more than confidence in Latin and Greek suddenly but uh left Cal from the graduate school and became a poet street poet in his own way poet certainly a very fine poet uh that's not the whole story because he was certainly loved poems too also unhappy had he been that scholar however he could on occasion turn as he did had in a meeting where Spicer and I were both present to turn with Scorn on another poet's poem and and what I 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

[69:39]

in Lawrence for one thing because Lawrence has Don't Touch Me which comes all the time and and then he has a great longing to be to have touch and union and and and something had gone wrong in the circulation of vital vitalities between between men and women between men and at the same time I I suddenly dawned on me but Pound when he's talking about usury and currency is talking about a like failure of circulations a like failure of of if I want to borrow from you I put a touch on you and [...] if if we are not in a free-flowing world of currencies if our interest rate is already at 25 percent all you have to have is a trust fund like mine the minute I had it I said what and I changed over from Pound's ideas of usury and was wishing we'd get to 25 percent

[70:39]

it's great if you have some money that's going to be lent to someone you think could I get 25 percent could I get maybe 30 percent could I still be friendly and get 50 percent and and 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 the Catholic church soon began to have rationales for how you could lend out and get a little interest back they were getting a long card trust was entering into this like my feelings about trust and so forth the Quakers meanwhile had Quakers and within their own community Jews had loans with no interest at all you have a loan today with no interest at all nobody's dreaming if they heard about it they'd lock you away perhaps but there's but personally there's no law about how much interest you'd be charging if you lent some money and and actually with friends you don't lend money

[71:40]

as I would say more than 20 percent interest today all of these are actual terms though about human flow of confidence and feeling and community and the authors suffered 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 that that that he's got to be somehow the back of it is an agony like Emerson's touching touching won't touch I mean the great desire for union all of that seems to be a seemed to me to belong to the dream of the period we were in in which this break of sympathies 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 so we're very

[72:41]

very aware of our minorities we're very very aware of the little communities we belong to as as almost in a position antipathetic to all 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 at our poetries it would come up over and over again but I'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 great disgrace what else should tempt them back to taste our air except to see how their successes fare my audience and they sit each ghostly man striving to look as living as he can brother by

[73:42]

breathing brother thou art set clear-witted critic by dot dot dot suspended but I'll not fret a wondrous soul of them remove 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 and back into the person 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 paid for their way in and and 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 and many many possible readings or let's say many lovers a Freudian reading the Freudian reading

[74:42]

of the dream which was which is constantly shifting and changing 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 well he's reading he begins to see that sexuality is not just genitalia but also the intestinal system and especially the mouth and the anus and the I mean but the whole digestive system of 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 is a power that sexuality is only an aspect of the sexuality originally was addressed by the time he comes back to eros and thanatos nor is eros

[75:42]

life that won't work there isn't the choice between life and death in Freud at all 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 thanatos do indeed construct the atomic and subatomic universe are the principles of Moby-Druid one's dreaming two dreamers he comes to two dreamers two dreaming forces for what is happening and well let me go back to the description because we've got half an hour of of my chase down to these levels I was looking just for pronouns you and ye because they are the where they where they at times they're the reader at times they are the audience of the of the voice

[76:45]

addressing an audience with pictures before it in that opening we have who will may hear Sardello's story told his story who believes me shall behold the man and then ye believe 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 I like what I in the 30s as I was coming to intellectuality the e-book with 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 I've been met mr. Empson at a having taught in the same session by that time I saw that mr. Empson

[77:47]

at least had gotten rid of his seven types of ambiguity all that all he had to do is drink enough and he did dissolve them in a sort of a mum angry mumble bumble but but but it's a glorious book I mean it was a wonderful source book of I felt like I didn't have enough sources of ambiguity I studied my ambiguities in Empson's than seven types of ambiguity and thank him forever it's like reading Boltman's myth mythology of the New Testament when that when they went when the little group from who are the core of the Zen Center here went down to Tassajara to him to take a look at the place with the I sat I sat while I would do but have any Buddhist little affairs I would sit and read or I was reading Boltman's physical apology of the New Testament whatever and actually I read blissfully through that getting more and more mythology while Boltman was nervously trying to demythologize the

[78:50]

New Testament I mean I was getting my New Testament mythologized that's what I wanted so and and the and again I'll redo this series of use because just you and you gets interesting on 194 but this won't tell you this is 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 him watching first to last his progress as you watch it not a with more in the secret than you than yourselves now of course the omnipotent author immediately shares the secret or doesn't and murder mystery you often don't share the secret but Dickens is the omnipotence of the omnipotent author like Dickens shares a little secret but he knows that like and and and this Henry James and Proust are very Dickens like they share with you just what they're going to share in that and so you feel very loved and cozy but they won't tell you the whole story

[79:53]

so there's a you and and Browning is really playing with us 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 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 fall of what Browning saying here is he says I'd love to be the victim of this form as you are but I'm dishing it out in Pound's case he became the victim of the fall because he 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 the fool's card in the tarot of those of you who know the fool's card in the tarot and and just recently I've come across a marvelous marvelous emblem of Blake's in which the we've got and let me describe the fool's card in the tarot for those of you don't know is that

[80:54]

we're at the edge of a cliff and the fool is is is in full medieval dresses could absolutely would be Pound and he's got his rag bag on his shoulder so it would be exactly the Pound who proposes my Cerdello and my rag bag on my my pack of odds and ends and he's got his head in the air and at his feet a little dog runs around sometimes that little dog looks meaner than that but in Blake's it'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 Blake plan and the dog keeps no keep 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 mouth opens like this so we see the dog the valiant loving dog diving to his death warning death in the in the monster's jaws and and and the fool there's a dog it could be an

[82:01]

emblem of Pound I mean is is stripping away everything in that and and as a matter of fact disowning the dog and and the crocodile most of all because the crocodiles that I thought gee Blake I maybe you and then maybe if you're if you're I think you if you are running around purgatory and could you show this little picture to he saw you running in his first story and the cantos flight is running around purgatory running around the mountain and that's a secret when I see no you know his progress that I would should delight in watching first to last his progress as you watch it not a wit more in the secret than yourselves that 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 facie friends comes later and I and then I caught myself always have fun in this within the narration quotes there's you you there's a neutral reference you like our use of

[83:11]

the word he or one and so forth you're pushing by to gain a post like his is within a speech but again I catch since since a texture is forming through and through a texture of a dream just as now we wonder when we say when we 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 whereas 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 just gender so there's gender exchange so was everyone his book was a joke is already to kids in school as I remember I mean I could be a great joke and and and we have moved into a society in which if we said as everyone her first

[84:17]

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 her is absolutely move this way and that and in Browning's case it's the one that we use but one your you was used that way quite prevalent how do you make a cake well you take eggs first and you 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 you man and we've got instructions like this in this I mean we the poem will tell it now look you believe you believe pay attention here you the poem of the patron tells you once for all grudgy such a lot that's just the crowd talking we've descended we've descended to quotes that are in quotes that are in the narration and in the

[85:18]

narration itself we had two levels in which we were in which we can't quite be sure nor can Robert Browning whether he's talking in his person or whether the author is talking whether we have to do with the authorial level of and then we've got commands question is addressed to the audience that's still inside quotes because it's an audience that has appeared inside the form that has an audience sink at the breeze creep closer on the creature oh this is the audience this is the audience that's watching the diorama creep creep closer look close creep closer on the creature think about in a dream though we don't have in the middle of Sardella we would get creep closer on the creature his back is fairly turned question mark our wealth all those friendly things are not that not everything's gotten so nervous by the time you are

[86:19]

willing to get into it at this level as I'm reading that that I will question in I mean the most normal thing that now our hero takes his way along that you know that 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 and later in later parts of the form is exactly that happens when I follow well now come off and tell me gone too far with our wealth that we could say that's merely a rhetoric of the poem but but later there will be our and there and you begin to wonder who are they I know who you I mean I am telling this thing and you are listening with the day he already has he has a day and 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

[87:21]

timid sort would fly for our eye at the bearer report it it's activity with the reader already as I said Pauline and Paracelsus I mean he succeeded in what his timid sort had already fled from in the previous two poems so the activity at the level of width of that one of the kind of width that comes in a dream but but but I and a you is formed all the way and then yourselves may spell it out yet in Chronicle comes again well that's again 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 yet is is still to come to a proposition that where the they appears when the people appear in the poem thank you hours for not going back too fast when the people appeared forms of there the they there's no you the people I the

[88:25]

we the people is it is it a Sandberg a big subway but but Whitman is the one I'm very modern by the way is we we the people that I will venture it but but I have not sat down as I did in book one I looked at every single word as if I were looking through as if I were looking through the entire dictionary or the entire rather I'm thinking of city directory in a part of a name as interesting as we once found Nelson sexy in the directory 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 there's a rhetorical question why cry and that exactly again asks of somebody lines within the inner discourse not set off by quotes a line 208 where our and us is not audience to our fields what else

[89:36]

rebut but us our chokeweed now that's already the an hour a day of a group we're coming down to Sardella's own 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 I had to get what kept my head all the way is that I had to number all the lines in this just readers edition and count them out by five and then Then that gave me a little test rise, so I looked in each five to see what kind of bugs were moving around in that area. 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. Well, the passage itself, the locus for that hour, but the passage itself starts at 2.12.

[90:56]

In Pound's cantos, there is a canto of great enchantment that has to do with the appearance of Dionysus on the sea, and 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 that the sea itself is then growing with vegetation, and I wondered if that wasn't haunted since he was drawing on many other things out of this canto by the following

[92:03]

passage. But the passage itself is certainly haunted by the theme I spoke of last time, which was the faultlessness and the fault in writing, and then the idea of a fault, and it was brought forward that they hurt that also as a vein, the veins in which gems are, the veins in the earth are fault 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 Merck, to a making see something that's remarkably like the intertwining of the parts in Browning's sentences, but also making see a vision that looks very

[93:06]

much like, to me, I mean, which reminded me immediately of this marvelous, Pound is a master of making see, the early Pound, of this marvelous passage of the transformation of the sea. Cliffs, an earthquake suffered jut in the mid-sea.

[93:23]

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