Introduction

Louis offers condolences for Mary de Rachewiltz, who passed away on July 24th.

Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas, our host jumps in. He shares a story about visiting the Beijing temple with Mary, and seeing her again more than 20 years later: “You won’t remember me;” Mary: “Why wouldn’t I remember you?” Mary referred to the 1999 China trip as one of the great events of her life.

Ben reads two poems by Mary from Family Tree (“What’s a Lifetime” and “This House is Made to Last and Last Forever in the Mind”)

Ben shares his own Mary story: Ben is in the “eye of the storm,” a “maelstrom of well-wishers” at Brunnenberg with Mary for her centenary birthday. Mary starts talking Italian to Ben: “that is the problem with these big dinners, you never know which language to speak.” Ben calls the hospitality at Brunnenburg incredible.

Jeff’s Discussion

Pietro introduces Jeff - “Welcome everyone to the 10th session of EPIRG”

Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas is an Independent scholar, editor z-site.net; a scholar concerned with Pound, Zukofsky, Chinese poetry.

Postcard image of the “snow range,” mountains in Naxi province referred to by Pound.

Jeff teaches for five years in China - 87-92; The big yearly break is Chinese New Year. In the middle of winter, the north is freezing cold, and the south rains perpetually; very few places in the country with decent weather. An example, Yunnan province and Lijiang -regaling their qualities. Lijiang on a big bend of the Yangtze, but not on the river. This is the center of the Naxi people.

Why did Rock go to Yunan? This area of the world is a mecca for Botanists: floral biodiversity.

Observations: small canals in Lijiang with fast running water (one of Rock’s photos shown).

Observations: Elephant mountain in distance (Pound mentions this in his writings). At the foot of “the head of the elephant” are a bunch of springs, a temple. Pound refers to this too–Long Wang– Dragon King temple pool. The pool supplies the rivers for the town, Yu Pu (?) or jade spring.

Lijiang is basically an oversized village.

Canto 112: “BY the pomegranate water…” Pomegranate water -Pound probably liked the name, also symbolizes rebirth in many countries, like Persephone, the queen of the dead who returns for spring (rebirth)

(Looking at the Dragon King Pool Temple) A little scruffier for Rock when he visited. Nowadays it has been fixed up, but modest and beautiful. Rock was interested in the large, impressive mountain in the background (Lu Yong); “Snow Range,” Jade Mountain, a temperate environment, lots of hot springs, snow year round. Rock lived at the foot of the mountain in a smaller village; Mountain large and impressive, though it is not a range, why Pound refers to it as a range?

Major works on the Na-khi used by Pound

• The Ancient Na-khi Kingdom (1947)
• The Muan-bpo Ceremony, or the Sacrifice to Heaven as Practiced by the Nakhi (1948)
• The Romance of Ka-ma-gyu-mi-gkyi, A Na-Khi Tribal Love Story (1939)
• Peter Goullart, Forgotten Kingdom (1955)

Rock had to leave because of communist takeover, huge number of work written while in the region; much of what West knows of Naxi is due to Rock, Pound not wrong that Rock is preserving this world for us (in memory, in text).

Goullart, a Russian who studied Chinese, helped the Chinese war effort in WWII. He was kicked out of Russia, and wrote a book on his experiences in China. Pound read this book after its publication. It was recommended to him, a key introduction on the Naxi for Pound. Rock’s work took over for him from there ; Goullart was a paying guest at Brunnenburg. His work did not contribute directly to the Cantos, but perhaps contributed to Cantos atmospherically.

Canto 110

“Mr. Rock still hopes to climb at Mount Kimbalu
his fragments sunk (20 years)
13.455 ft facing Jesston, Borneo”

That is the height of Mount Kimabalu - another botanist mountain in Northern Borneo (Malaysia); Where does this come from? Correspondence? No clue. Rock going for plants, not because it is a challenging mountain.

His fragments sunk meant a bulk of his work sunk by Japanese Submarine on a Chinese ship. From this vignette here, Rock is a heroic cultural figure; he is a companion to Pound, & this passage refers to the destruction of war; these are some of the primary motivations of the Cantos.

Canto 113

The snow range is turquoise (over Lijiang). Here, preserving culture and its value in memory more than anything else. It is basically gone now, and lives in a different context.

Canto 101

In Thrones (this is the first Naxi material, and offers the canto its structure); most mentions on the first page, then a significant middle passage, and the final two lines from Rock. In some ways, it is the canto’s scaffolding.

Junipers here come from Rock. This is the first time in the Cantos it is mentioned.

Critique on Confucian China by an introduction of Naxi? At least in Thrones, it does not conflict with the Confucian empire and its social philosophy; area was absorbed into the empire under Kublai Khan. Political themes hinted at.

Character for Tan included in this section = DAWN

Forest thru ice into emerald, Dawn – This is Rock.

Taxes, good governance, pastoral;

Elziard is a Johnny Appleseed character = French Alps with acorns.

Next image of Tseng-Kyan, his kid was told he is a lama incarnate.

Pound description of shrine is strange; just a little shrine from all the tons of shrines in Rock’s book.

Stamp scrip, Italian interpretation from Rossoni in 101.

Love ritual and lovers being able to choose what they please against Chinese arranged marriage; the double suicide in Naxi culture of two lovers is accepted, as with Japanese culture.

Pound avoids the suicide in his text by direct address ; only a wide meadow is reference to the lover’s ritual text and the mention of the Dongba.

Image of garments with sun and moon, seven stars on the backs of women.

After Italian: Dongba script; Naxi priest and Naxi religion and Naxi Script; derivative of Tibetan Bong religion before Buddhism overlaid or superimposed its image upon pagan practice.

Pictographic rebus script that requires knowledge of practices, rituals etc, homophonic punning; text only used by Naxi priests. It makes sense why Pound would be fascinated by it.

Image of a long Naxi scroll manuscript (39 ½ ft long) (Rock collected and preserved thousands of these; otherwise destroyed during Communist Revolution and Cultural Revolution).

Canto 110 (return)

Now in Drafts and Fragments.

Oak and Juniper; Har La Luk Kow - expiation ritual to appease soul of suicide lovers (still no mention of suicide in Cantos).

Latin used because Rock is a botanist and appreciates taxonomy (like Linnaeus).

Mount Sumeru is center of cosmos.

Center is Juniper. It is the altar for a sacrifice to heaven. Juniper is in the middle, oak on either side, in photograph; this is a visual suggestion of the Unwobbling Pivot.

Artemis is hinted at by the plant Artemisia; relation to Greek myth because goddess of the woodland, chaste. Afterwards, Kuanon video by Rock of short guys doing dances (so there is footage).

Pound leaves out the suicide, but takes from its glyph. Sun with straight lines, setting.

Canto 112

Pieces from the ritual here include lists of hundreds of animals. Pound is picking little pieces.

Subscripted tonal numbers: some come after some before (if it comes before it is the Naxi, if after Chinese).

The red panda is the fire fox (not related to the great panda). The goddess comes again; the breath of primordial goddess; from one comes others.

“Winnowed in Fate’s tray:” winnowing tray to separate chaff from wheat, much a goal of the poem. Fate is Naxi homophone for their winnowing tray (MU). Pound is combining them and capturing essence of Cantos.

Amrita- gods food and liquor = artemesia and arundinaria.

Final Questions

How much does one read from Pound’s sources into his Poetry? For instance, the suicides? Perennial question: does he amend?

Assumption that Naxi material is a critique of Confucian/Chinese material from earlier on? Jeff thinks maybe/maybe not. It is hard to say.

What does it say about how Pound wanted to conclude the Cantos?

Questions & Discussion

Pietro: To Pound, Confucian is about ethics, Naxi is about religion in The Cantos. As he has read it so far, Naxi represents a pure religious experience, maybe not solely ethical? Entwined? Confucian state ethics and order personalized in a way?

Tyler: Perhaps ethics are the natural and its rituals in Pound’s Naxi, working alongside the ethical dimension of human construction of laws around nature in Confucian.

Tyler asked about footage and remnants; is there a lot of interest in Naxi now?

Jeff suggests an epilogue to his presentation:

“When I was at Pound conference in Beijing, Emily Wallace gave a long paper on the Naxi, recently visited Lijiang, all enthusiastic. Then an airport was built in 1995. In 1997 it was named a UNESCO heritage site, and that was the end of that. Jeff went back in 2015, now Lijiang is a dead town. It is full of people like never before–a real Chinese spot; every single building is a boutique hotel, shop or restaurant. It's all performance.

Now there is a lot of study, it is a big academic subject, the Naxi. There are quite good books, footage, Jeff is not too sure; Probably no more real Dongba priests anymore, though institutes understand the language.

Louis: josephrock.net writes about Rock being cancelled in China. What is the modern-day interpretation of Joseph Rock?

Jeff: Rock’s house was once turned into small museum, but the preservation is now being reversed.

Walter: Marcella was doing botanizing on Pound’s behalf, some connection there between her and Rock; what do you think of the interpretation of her and him together? Maybe suicide is an option or thought regarding his own situation?

Jeff: You’re right, Walter… That is how people want to read it, perhaps. Pound had suicidal thoughts? Various romantic entanglements, and double suicide maybe… not literally suicide, but forked love and reading; but is it really there? Ron Bush takes biographical reading. Sensible, but overdoes it for my taste; I don’t like Biographical readings a lot; Marcella is there.

Massimo: Do not overread text; we do know Pound likes to hide traces though, I would not exclude that suicide is part of it. Pound is hermetic on purpose. 110 begins with interpretation from Inferno, Paolo & Francesca, the story of two lovers, it begins with old ancient love, life, death, nostalgia, could very well be intended then.
  How was Rock to be discovered in the text? I remember in ‘65 or ‘66, limited edition of 110 printed by Guy Davenport privately. Davenport corrected name Rock to Reck. Boris de Rachewiltz first person to mention Rock. Perhaps this has something to do with Italian institute of Eastern studies; the Rock connection not exactly clear. I met Goullart at Brunnenburg in ’63, who reminisced on days in China and gave Massimo photos of Naxi to pass on. Donald Davie saying material is so poorly used, but some of us disagree. From the ideas of China already in Canto 39, a romantic, oriental China is already present, a continuity from there to here is clear. Confucius is a sage who thinks things through going back to early version of 13; Confucius is a pushing towards earthly paradise. Bruce Chaplain wrote about this Ezra Pound?
  The moon and so forth goes back to Canto 97, “la luna under fortuna,” … a poem attributed to Cavalcanti; included it in his 1920s opera on Cavalcanti; the line “only the moon,” (this is pertinent); to Canto 112 at the end.

Jeff: Things go all over the place in the Cantos, picking up lots of threads, some recognizable, some less. I am inclined to believe Confucius and Naxi are a continuity rather than discontinuity, Following Tyler’s remarks, some artificial rigidity of Confucianism, it has natural basis; the Naxi as a wellspring of Confucianism. So many commentators want to see Pound soften his Confucianism because they connect it to his fascism.

Massimo: The ideal present culture runs through the Cantos, with fertility, with Inferno, etc; they are stable. Canto 74: “not the way,” another atmosphere of time. Those quotations from Rossoni, he perceived it as a citation to stamp scrip: this is the natural process, what economy should be about with Rossoni.

Leopold: This material about paradisical moments in the Cantos? Is that correct? More back to Eleusis rather than China and Confucius?

Jeff: Yeah, I would go along with that. I was trying to emphasize a bit how in Thrones 101 there is from the Naxi material a handful of references to China and empire, but it is also Eleusis. Continuity from the political Thrones to the personal Drafts and Fragments. Rock is a fantastic philosopher; exotic feel, romantic, attractive and ideal; just like everyone else.

Tyler: Naxi is in between for “Kung and Eleusis?” Two oaks, and Juniper in the middle?

Jeff: If any of you are serious about this, read the textual stuff on Drafts and Fragments. You don’t really know who you are reading when you are reading this stuff. How much did Pound authorize? There is something bizarrely appropriate about that, though.

Louis: Datapoint and Digital Pound mention from thesis by a scholar Robert Seguy. This is Digital Humanities studies of Pound; this is a dissertation of how we store cantos and thus represent the Cantos in digital format and things like this; Seguy encoded cantos in TEI format (a kind of xml); he tagged all the locations in the poem, which allowed him to measure the distance from where Pound wrote a text and the place it was about. He measured the distance of places from ST Es, and found before 1950s it was a random distribution, and afterwards a more constant distribution of places far away, such as China, different reading than classic literary scholar, with the digital humanities. This is Thrones, possibly beyond a biographical reading, as a psychological reading.
  But we haven’t mentioned Frobenius. It clearly is similar to Rock. Both are measuring histories, taking copies of rock drawings and such. Surely you thought of this, Jeff.

Jeff: Frobenius and Pound, not much knowledge on Frobenius. Pound admired guys in the field, figuring things out on the ground. In the Naxi Kingdom, lots of Rock’s geological descriptions, as he is going along the trail. It is the immediate periplum description, with enormous detail, bogging down most people. Pound liked that kind of stuff. Rock work is study of tribal or human behaviours, allows us to compare to Confucianism, Pound is hugely for local things, part of fascist governance, I think, agricultural.

Ben: Louis is touching on distinction between universal principles and instances of things. There is a different function of the two. Walter has reminded us in past EPIRGs, paradise in Cantos is paradise of fragments. China cantos, etc: the lessons of Chinese history serve a different function than the later Cantos to the end. It is worth remembering the emphasis on specificity in the instances of things Michael Kindellan and institution of different spellings of Leucothea, highlighting particularities of truth that can be captured in philological studies. It is possible that one of the functions of Naxi in the poem is to take that particular instance of real world–lived experiences or structures of governance–and hold them up as the essential principles of existing on the margins. At some point to Pound usury is victorious, and enemies exist in opposition to principles he tries to preserve.

Louis: Sounds to me like you are asking about Pound’s perception of futures.

Ben: Who is gonna copy the palimpsests? Pound is concerned about legacy after he is gone… What is important: the ritual or just the recording and preservation?

EP: Certain generations forget; others remember.

Ben: Jeff knows, in the past it was mentioned Olson’s use of Chinese history contrasts Pound’s China because it is China under Mao; different, to your point, text, history, Drafts and Fragments, Pound stopped working in around ’61, has there been any commentary that ties Naxi to China as it existed at that time? What degree did Pound want to engage with contemporary China at the time?

Jeff: None that I know of. Cross-cultural communication (Pound) in various projects, I’ve elaborated on that. I don’t think he had any interest in 20th century China; classical China only. I don’t even think he comments on it negatively, but then I don’t read lots of correspondences.

Ben: In some St Es correspondence, there is a fair amount of concern about Eastern Europe, among other things. It is prominent in the Cold War context, but very little comment on China, some tangentially related conversation on critical edition on Cathay, and there were attempts for Pound on Japan, relations on that, Imperial Japan shaping China to his liking.

Jeff: China quasi-cut off for most of Pound’s life; under communism it was difficult to go to, an inaccessible place, a difficult place to get reliable info about. Maybe just not in Pound’s way of gathering. Pound’s lousy sinology, for anybody who is interested who wants to learn classical Chinese language and literature, is nowadays a thousand times more available. Pound, all his life, only had a real English translation with Herb Giles, until ’60s no other replacements; so relations to China, on China were not easy.

Louis to Jeff: have you read a Pound/Rock correspondence?

Jeff: We have only one letter from Pound, but know there was more that has not been seen. Mt. Kinabalu, for example, was not in Rock’s books; maybe Pound got this from a letter.

Louis: Knowledge of pronunciation of Naxi language, how did you learn this?

Jeff: I don’t know, just guessing. In front of Ancient Book there is an elaborate mention of the language, but also kinda doing Chinese pronunciation and trying to get close. Also, NAXI, Rock came up with Na-Khi in, difference. My suspicion is that /Na-shi/ is a Chinese pronunciation, and /Khi/ was Rock correcting. In 1924 National Geographic, Rock using /shi/. Rock trying to be MORE PRECISE; reality may be that it’s something in between… no romanization.

Walter: Thanks Jeff.