The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [160]
Once he has returned to Italy, a sibyl offers to guide Aeneas into Hades so that he may speak with his dead father. As they cross the river Styx, he sees Dido’s ghost. But she won’t look at him; she turns her head away, still resentful over his betrayal. Aeneas pushes on to find his father, whose prophecy tells him how he will establish the city of Rome.
The Aeneid is the myth of the founding of a patriarchal urban culture. In the background lies an erotic connection cut off by politics. The love affair is destroyed for the sake of empire, and the feminine figure is left as a suicidal, unredeemed, and restless ghost. Aeneas’s descent into hell is meant not to heal that wound but to seek out the father and his advice about government.
Ezra Pound’s father was an assayer at the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia. If a man wanted to know if his gold was real or just fool’s gold, Homer Pound would weigh it and drill it and tell him the truth. The most luminous memory from Pound’s childhood concerns a time his father took him to visit the mint. In the enormous basement vaults, four million silver dollars lay where their sacks had rotted. “They were heaving it into the counting machines with shovels bigger than coal shovels. This spectacle of coin being shovelled around like it was litter— these fellows naked to the waist shovelling it around in the gas flares—things like that strike your imagination.”
Like Aeneas, Pound descended into hell on the side of the father. A memory of eros lingers in the background. There had been a desire to live with those “who thought copulation was good for the crops.” There was a man who had once turned into a tree. There was a gifted man, moved by the undivided light of Eleusis, who brought his consciousness forward to the Renaissance and who, wary of the centuries of usury that followed, descended into the underworld to try to bring that gift out again in its clarity. But this was a modern man, living at the height of the patriarchies, wary of his own emotions, classic by temperament, and given to willfulness. He chose the via voluntatis. Rather than revalue the gift through affirmation, he undertook the hopeless task of changing the nature of money itself. And so he met no Tiresias in hell. He met no boy lover, nor did he see the face of the beloved. He met, instead, his own devil, a Hermes/Jew whom he chose to fight man to man: he fought bad money with good money, bad will with goodwill, politics with politics, and avarice with power, all in the name of generosity and the imagination.
In 1961 Pound fell into silence. For the last eleven years of his life he rarely spoke. When visitors would come to his apartment, he would shake hands and then, while the others chatted, sit in silence or disappear upstairs. Toward the beginning of these years a newspaper reporter came to see him. “Where are you living now?” the man asked. “In hell,” replied Pound. He never came up. He lost his voice.
In October of 1967 Allen Ginsberg visited Pound in Italy. Pound was eighty-two; he had been in his silence for six years. Ginsberg spent several days with him during which Pound hardly spoke at all and Ginsberg told him stories— told him about his Blake vision and drug experiences and Buddhism and what was happening in America. He chanted sutras for Pound and played him phonograph records of Bob Dylan, Donovan, the Beatles, and Ali Akbar Khan. On the third of these days, in a small Venetian restaurant with a few friends, Ginsberg having been told that Pound would respond to specific textual questions about the Cantos, they finally began to talk. Ginsberg later recalled part of the exchange:
[I explained] how his attention to specific perceptions