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210 The Films of Stan Brakhage crack in the ground, filmed by an accelerated camera moving along it; two tigers in a green, green field, etc. Pound hoped that paratactical constructions would release an exciting force, that the interaction of the elements brought into proximity would pro­ duce an impulse that would incite the reader's mind to an epiphany.Pound himself came to understand that he harboured a curious mixture of ambi­ tions for the Cantos: on the one hand, he proposed to write a long epic work, a poem whose scope comprised the whole of history and all that was impor­ tant to know; while, on the other, he wanted to create a work of extreme concentration, dedicated to the quest for sudden epiphany—to the quest for the revelation ofthe immediate moment that would annihilate time. The envelope of a work that contains history can only be metahistorical, and a work that contains, simultaneously, all times, can only be timeless. The aspiration to rise above time and to accede to the realm of the timeless is also implicit in Pound's desire to overcome abstraction and Aristotelian logic through a method that deployed "a phalanx of particulars." Pound,like Fenollosa, held a hierophantic conception of reality, on which the ascent to higher levels of reality preserves the reality of all the lower levels. The Chi­ nese written character provided Pound with a splendid example of how par­ ticulars can be preserved in relations that convey something as abstract as "sincerity." Fenollosa's "The Chinese Written Character" offered comments about the importance of metaphor. The notion of metaphor that underlies them resem­ bles Brakhage's conception ofthat trope, in some respects at least. Fenollosa believed that an experience lies at the core of any written character (even an abstract term) and that the core experience can be uncovered by discerning the structure of the sign. Brakhage believes much the same about language. (For Brakhage, as for Charles Olson, that structure depends on the term's etymology; for Fenollosa, it depends upon the combination of radicals in the written character.) Furthermore, Brakhage and Fenollosa agree that the experience that one can discover at the core of any term is an experience of action: "The whole delicate substance of speech is built upon substrata of metaphor. Abstract terms, pressed by etymology, reveal their ancient roots still embedded in direct action."285 At another point, Fenollosa alluded to light to convey the lasting importance of the root meaning of words. He writes that the original metaphors buried in words "stand as a kind oflumi­ nous background."286 Pound concurs. Speaking ofwhat has been lost to mod­ erns—lost partly through language's reifying effects—he writes: We appear to have lost the radiant world where one thought cuts through another with clean edge, a world of moving energies 'mezzo oscuro rade', 'risplende in se perpetuate effecto', magnetisms that take form, that are seen, Between Self and World: The Image in Hulme, Williams, Brakhage 211 or that border the visible, the matter of Dante's paradiso, the glass under water, the form that seems a form seen in a mirror, these realities percep­ tible to the sense, interacting, 'a lui si tiri' 287 Pound concludes the paragraph with proleptic comments that distinguish his notion of how the energies of words disclose a mysterious, luminousworld from the ideas ofthe Symbolists, whom (along with Unitarians, Wordsworth­ ians, and all adherents of the Perennial Philosophy) he despised as vague and woolly dreamers. His conception was something as hard as crystal and as definite as the 'section d'or' that gives churches like Saint Hilaire, San Zeno, and the Duomo di Modena their clear lines and proportions. The ener­ gies he was after produced the "'harmony in the sentience' or harmonyof the sentient, where the thought has its demarcation, the substance its virtu, where stupid men have not reduced all 'energy' to unbounded undistin­ guished abstraction."288 Through the combined influences of Bergson, Hulme, and Fenollosa, Pound came to adopt the view that poetry is a matter of energy. In 1911, he described a collection of pictures as "an array of engines each designed 'to gather the latent energy of Nature and focus it on a certain resistance. The latent energy is made dynamicor "revealed" to the engineer in control, and placed at his disposal.' "289 Questions about the picture's being pretty or not have little importance. What counts is how these picture­machines gather...

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