The talk is talked by Louis de Beaumont.
The preliminary readings are the Chinese Witten Character and Kay Davies’s Fugue & Fresco, with a nod to Bob Dylan’s spoon, moon and balloon - It’s Alright Ma.
10 to 12 people attending.
90 minutes duration.

Louis offers a tuning fork out of Pound’s ABC:
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. That is very much the thing a biologist does when he gets together a few hundred slides and picks out what is necessary for the general statement, something that fits the case, that applies in all of the cases. The Chinese ideogram for red is based on something that everyone KNOWS. Fenollosa was telling why language written in this way simply had to stay poetic.

Then we get a fragment of Guide to Kulchur: I have a certain real knowledge that would enable me to tell a Goya from a Velazquez… This differs from the knowledge you and I would have if I went into the next room, copied a few maxims from good Fiorentino’s history of philosophy and committed the names, maxims and possibly dates to my memory.

The first attempt is to establish two dimensions with Fenollosa. One is to do not with definition but with ‘choice of word’ as a poetic method (selecting the appropriate ideogram of the dominant overtone, as in the row of the sun, sun in the tree, sun rising in the east). The other is to deal with etymologies of single ideograms (being = hand snatching from the moon) and the metaphoric interaction of inner elements. Followed by an open discussion on Fugue & Fresco, the principle of nesting, logopoeia and phenopoeia (the ability to see the moving image, the noun and verb dynamic). We ask how valid is the scholar’s talk about the Cantos as one ideogram and how it distends. Interest diverts to more Pound:
It is a mistake to suppose, with some philosophers of aesthetics, that art and poetry ain’t to deal with the general and the abstract. This misconception has been foisted upon us by medieval logic. Art and poetry deal with the concrete of nature, not with rows of separate particulars, for such rows do not exist. Metaphor is at once a substance of nature and of language.

For Pound, Fenollosa sets the active quality of image-language in Chinese against the tyranny of medieval logic and the brickyard of terms. Yet 3 propositions from Wittgenstein’s contemporary treatise on logic, circa 1918, have more language in common with Fenollosa than with Aquinas: The object contains the possibility of all situations. The possibility of its occurrence in atomic facts is the form of the object. The object is simple. (Tractatus: 2.014-2.02)

We also bundle Aristotle with Pound’s Machine Art (1927-1930), where unities are seen to abstract from things. Is truth only graspable in the phalanx of particulars? We look to Mozart, Agassiz and Linnaeus/ 'neath overhanging air under sun-beat (as in Canto CXIII) or Mozart, Linnaeus, Sulmona (in Canto CXV) - and it seems to be so. Then, in the same mode of rose, cherry, iron rust, flamingo, we have the lexical series of Canto XLVII:
By this gate art thou measured./ From the long boats they have set lights in the water,/ The sea's claw gathers them outward. [...] By this gate art thou measured/ Thy day is between a door and a door

And we see the ideogrammatic method at its simplest in Pound’s ekphratic translations of 灰 for the claw gathers them, or 闔 in between a door and a door.

We are now at a good point to address the fact that the Chinese Written is WRITTEN, Chinese language was something before the mark and the spoken word could not have had any visual quality unless Chinese thinking itself happened in metaphor. Inconclusive. Contentions over the application of polysemic to metaphor and some agreement that metaphors don’t arise in ‘twisty thoughts’ - they come from a relation in nature. To bolster, Pound’s 3 are brought up: descent into the underworld, encounter with ghosts, encounter with gods. If Pound says metamorphosis on the last, on encounter with gods, can we say metaphor too? Is the underworld the place of etymologies? Etc.

We have just enough time for Pound politics and Pound the ventriloquist.

We forget that ‘personality’ once meant not the soul but the soul’s mask. Thinking Personae (1909), is this line from the Chinese Written (1919) an example of common ground between Fenollosa and Pound or a Fenollosa cast in Pound’s mould? We have not consulted the Beinecke papers. According to Haun Saussy’s introduction to the 2010 edition, Pound weeded out Buddhism and American pragmatism from Fenollosa’s original texts.

As to the politics - we have here not a bare philological discussion but a study of the fundamentals of all aesthetics. Fenollosa looked to an American renaissance and aimed to restore the greatness of anglophone poetry with a toppling of nouns. A small problem with the Reich of the verb and Pound’s tendency to find totalitarian structures in his concepts.

Other stray thoughts on Pound’s unreliable marketing, as in the early case of promoting Tagore (1912-13), the ideogrammatic method as a pedagogy (juxtaposing specimens of poetry, collaging examples) and reading poetry to know poetry.

We are tidy enough to end with the gallery of samples in ABC.