The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [131]
“Before sewing one must cut,” the proverb says, and to begin our tale we must cut the pattern of these two forces, beginning with Eleusinian fecundity.
Pound referred broadly to all polytheistic religions as “pagan,” and when he speaks of them he tends to speak of mystery, fertility, and procreation. His 1939 statement, “Religio,” reads:
Paganism included a certain attitude toward, a certain understanding of, coitus, which is the mysterium.
The other rites are the festivals of fecundity of the grain and the sun festivals, without revival of which religion can not return to the hearts of the people.
A decade earlier he had written that “at the root of any mystery” lies what we now call “consciousness of the unity of nature.” The point is simple: nature’s fecundity depends upon its unity, and we shall not long enjoy the fruits of that fecundity if we cannot perceive the unity. The rituals of ancient mysteries were directed toward the apprehension (and therefore the preservation) of this unity.
Pound is after something even broader than the fertility of the crops when he speaks of mystery, however. In a prose text he once described how a man can become “suddenly conscious of the reality of the nous, of mind, apart from any man’s individual mind, of the sea crystalline and enduring, of the bright … molten glass that envelops us, full of light.” When Pound speaks of Eleusinian mysteries, he is speaking not only of the wheat whose recurrence bespeaks the fecundity of nature but also of this light that bespeaks the fecundity of the mind. Twitted once by Eliot to reveal his religious beliefs, Pound (after sending us to Confucius and Ovid) wrote: “I believe that a light from Eleusis persisted throughout the middle ages and set beauty in the song of Provence and of Italy.” This “undivided light” occasions beauty in art, and vice versa— that is, beauty in art sets, or awakens, the knowledge of this light in the mind of man.
Over and over in essays and in the Cantos, Pound tries to make it clear that fecundity can be destroyed by any dividing or splitting of the unity; in art and spiritual life the destructive force is a certain kind of abstraction.
We find two forces in history: one that divides … and one that contemplates the unity of the mystery … There is the force that destroys every clearly delineated symbol, dragging man into a maze of abstract arguments, destroying not one but every religion.
Before we go any further, I want to point out that this line of thought is of a piece with the central tenets of Imagism, that literary movement to which Pound’s name will be forever linked. “Go in fear of abstractions” was the cardinal Imagist injunction according to Pound’s own 1913 manifesto. “Don’t use such an expression as ‘dim lands of peace.’ It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete.” Pound was drawn to the study of Chinese written characters partly because they are image-writing, concrete speech. Pictograms “[have] to stay poetic,” he says, because their form itself prohibits the “maze” of abstractions that destroy the unity. He explains in the ABC of Reading:
In Europe, if you ask a man to define anything, his definition always moves away from the simple things that he knows perfectly well, it recedes into an unknown region, that is a region of remoter and progressively remoter abstractions.
Thus if you ask him what red is, he says it is a “colour.”
If you ask him what a colour is, he tells you it is a vibration or a refraction of light, or a division of the spectrum.
And if you ask him what vibration is, he tells you it is a mode of energy, or something of that sort, until you arrive at a modality of being, or non-being, or at any rate you get in beyond your depth, and beyond his depth …
But when the Chinaman wanted to make a picture of… a general idea, how did he go about it? He is to define red. How can he do it in a picture that isn’t painted in red paint?
He puts … together the abbreviated pictures of
ROSE CHERRY
IRON RUST FLAMINGO
Ezra Pound was essentially