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Driftworks, Pulseworks,Lightworks The Letter to Dr. Henderson R. Bruce Elder EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION The Dantean universe was once a domain of intense creativity. In the Empyrean, from which all the artistic or formative energy in Creation was supposed to spring, Divine Love could beget an excess of light in a brief “flash” [fulgore] (Par. 33.141).1 What ever happened to the Empyrean? Was it swiftly bombed by the deicidal outrage of the twentieth century, or slowly smothered by what R. Bruce Elder calls “the antiartistic animus of modern existence”? If it was all a grand poetic fantasy—a fantasia in the Dantean sense— then there may still be hope for an empyreal revival. Since the tiniest ray of creative energy striking any part of the Whole has the potential to ignite a new life, a new vision, a new poem, a new art form, or a new world-order, even the dead old Empyrean may blaze forth again in our startled imaginations as a “Living Light” [vivo lume] (Par. 33.110). Dante hints at the need for an incendiary oltraggio of creativity when he proclaims his faith in the artistic life at the conclusion of his aesthetic credo: “this is the spark which then dilates to a living flame and like a star in heaven shines within me” [quest’ è la favilla / che si dilata in fiamma poi vivace, / e come stella in cielo in me scintilla] (Par. 24.145–7). Implicit in this personal vocation statement is a political mission. His long-range meditations on cultural history had convinced him that creative excess is especially needed in times of spiritual destitution and deepening contempt for the arts. Without the quickening power of the arts to actualize “the full intellectual potential of the human race” [humani generis… totam potentiam intellectus possibilis] (Mon. 1.4.1), we soon lose sight of “the purpose of human civilization as a whole” [finis totius humane civil450 itatis] (Mon. 1.3.1) which is the attainment of a beatific state of peace. In such a state, everyone participates in the vitality of “God Everlasting with his art, which is nature” [Deus ecternus arte sua, que natura est] (Mon. 1.3.2). Hence the prophetic force of the Poet’s dictum: “A great flame follows a little spark” [Poca favilla gran fiamma seconda] (Par. 1.34). If the creative process is difficult to explain for a “little spark” like Brakhage’s The Dante Quartet, it is especially so for a grand polysemous blaze of a work like Elder’s Dantean film cycle The Book of All the Dead. In the following letter, addressed to Dr. Archie Henderson, a lawyer and bibliographer of Poundiana, Elder musters all his philosophical impeto to articulate what went into the making of his maximum opus. Having heard that The Book of All the Dead was influenced by The Cantos, Henderson wrote to inquire about Elder’s specific allusions to Pound. “He sent me a few simple questions,” Elder wryly noted in an e-mail gloss on his letter, “and, taking the request as an opportunity to reflect on my relationship to Pound’s magnum opus, I provided him with an extended response. Of course, these reflections included comments on Pound’s interest in Dante’s Commedia, and my own interest in that work.” The response turns out to be not just a scholarly introduction to his film cycle but also an impassioned manifesto for the aesthetics of transgression . If The Book of All the Dead is Elder’s Commedia, then the Letter to Dr. Henderson is surely his Epistle to Cangrande. In case his correspondent should miss this analogy, the filmmaker refers to Dante’s famous epistle twice. Adopting the detached tone of an academic commentator, he first alludes to it in his hermeneutical introduction to the (then) unfinished cycle as an imaginatively complete work to be read on four levels; then, speaking with the resurgent excitement of a visionary artist, he quotes it directly in his concluding reflections on the anagogic open-endedness of his “making.” Though caught up in Pound’s whirlwind of meditations on history, Elder is forthright in confessing his Dantean delight at the prospect of eternal release from temporal consciousness. His artistic trajectory is “outrageous”: it leads him to the preposterously unmodern goal of trasumanar. As Dante surpassed Virgil and Ovid in imitating the Divine Artist’s cinema-like “visible speech” [visibile parlare] (Purg. 10.95), so Elder proclaims his intention to out-Pound Pound...

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