Visions of the East: Averroes, Guanyin, and the Redemption of Pound’s System of Spiritual Aesthetics in the 1940s.

Robert Kibler, Associate Professor of HumanitiesMinot State University

14 Oct 2004

Ezra Pound’s early study of the 13th century Florentine poet Guido Cavalcanti

helped acquaint him with an Islamic world wherein beliefs concerning the spirit

combined with those concerning art and beauty. This link between belief, art, and beauty

was understood as a rational process involving perception, cognition, and ultimately, the

creation of divinely beautiful and philosophically intelligible forms. I would like to

suggest that Pound picked up on this process and used it as a basic model throughout his

long career, and that largely underwriting this basic model is the work of the 12th century

Islamic philosopher, Averroes. Averroes indirectly influenced Pound, who even early in

his career was set on a course of creating an earthly paradise fraught with forms produced

in much the same way Averroes describes.

Yet for reasons great and small, Pound is often considered to have failed in his bid

to create such a paradise, and indeed, in the 1930s and 1940s, arguably moved his

creative energy in the opposite direction. The net result for his Cantos was an increasing

movement toward a sort of moribund incoherence, and for the poet, a stint in a cage

among the death cells of the American Detention Center—the DTC--in Pisa in 1945.

There, in his darkest days, Pound re-introduced lyrically elevated verse of the kind long

associated with his intended creation through poetry of an earthly paradise, yet long

missing from his Cantos. What is more, for the first time in decades, he invoked the

image of Kuonon, Chinese Goddess of Mercy and Patroness of those who travel by sea. I

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would like to suggest that her introduction to Pound’s pantheon of deities in 1945 serves

as a confirmation of his enduring spiritual and aesthetic program founded in Averroist

principle. But who is Averroes, what did he believe, and what does he have to do with the

emergence of Kuonon?

Averroes, or Ibn Rushd was part of the 12th century Andalusian school of Islamic

philosophers. Born in 1126, he spent most of his life in Cordova and Marrakech,

commenting in both Latin and Arabic upon the works of Aristotle. His influence on the

world of Islam was great, but his affect on Christian thinkers and doers was also

profound. Etienne Gilson tells us that ideas promoted by Averroes were propagated in

multiple directions during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. i Ernst Renan further

suggests that as great as was his philosophical impact, Averroes’ mythic reputation

exerted an even greater influence.ii He became a larger than life symbol of rationalism in

an emotional age, a heretic who denied individual immortality and promoted a humanist

theological model for existence, and an Islamic thinker so dangerous to the Christian

world view that he was linked to Satan and Mohammed as the ‘third imposter,’ the

“monster theologian,” and the “secretary of hell,”iii—all of which would have made him

generally appealing to our young bohemian poet and rationalist heretic, Pound.iv

Pound’s study of Averroism probably began during his university years,”v and

what he notes about it is nearly always linked to his discussions regarding Cavalcanti.vi

As part of his ongoing work on Cavalcanti, Pound read and frequently referred to a

variety of medieval Islamic sources and variously shows familiarity with Averroist

thought, noting that Cavalcanti’s overall philosophy has its “main origins” in Avicenna

and Averroes,”vii and that to understand Cavalcanti, “we must suppose the Arabian

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background….Averroes’, in particular, for ‘dangerously’ upsetting the static, immobile

framework of medieval thought.viii Further, Ernest Renan recalls Pound remarking that

Aquinas had twisted the meaning of the term “Form,” presumably in a way that Averroes

—the arch rival of Aquinas--had not.ix Elsewhere, Pound suggests that in trying to

understand Cavalcanti, we should only deal with those authors who refer to the “possible

intellect” as opposed to those who call “passive” one of the key Averroist terms for

describing divine cognitive process.x

Similar evidence for Pound’s awareness of Averroist thought occurs variously in

his works, but the above examples are key because they collectively show an awareness

of ideas germane to Averroes’ Great Commentaries on Aristotle, and specifically, to his

Middle Commentary on “Book III” of Aristotle’s De anima, concerning the Soul. In that

work Averroes writes at length about the process by which God or the Divine

Consciousness comes to know itself through the operations of its own Potential and

Active Intellects.

Divine perception for Averroes, following Aristotle, results from a transforming

intellectual reality timelessly shifting from a potential or possible state within the mind of

God to an active one (Arabic hylic). This active state or intellect is consequently received

by external and corruptible material form—form that has an appetite for what is offered

to it by the Active Intellect.xi Divine Active intelligence (energeia in Aristotle i Etienne Gilson. Histoire du philosphie au moyen age. ii Renan, p. 18. iii Renan, page 17.iv L. Howard. “Virgil’s Discourse on Love in Purgatorio XVIII and Guido Cavalcanti.” Quaderni d’italianistica Vol VI, no 2, 1985. Page 168v Tytell, page 72. vi John Tytell. Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano. New York: Doubleday, 1979. Page 58.vii Make it New. Page 376. viii Make It New. Page 356-7. ix Pater Makin. The Cantos of Ezra Pound. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1992. Page 192. x Make it New. Page 389.

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Metaphysics XII), embodied in corruptible material form (itself a potential divine

intellect in its secondary state) inevitably is drawn back again into the primary potential

mind of God (ousia in Aristotle’s Metaphysics XII, Fakhry 144). In the process, it passes

out of material form into rational abstract principles, or “intelligibles,” and then back into

the Potential Intellect that will again become active and seek further self-knowledge

through its reception by material form, ad infinitum. Universal creation results from this

process, as does human participation in divine creation.xii In short, according to

Averroes’ “homo non intellegit,”xiii man is not intelligent. Rather, “it is through [God’s

intellectualized] action in us that we think.”xiv

Averroes’ simple proposition carried in its wake the condemnation on over 200

doctrinal points associated with him in 1277 by Stephanus Tempier, Bishop of Paris,

acting on behalf of all of Christendom. xv For if human thought is simply divine intellect

acting through our material form as a means of knowing itself, then our individual

function is incidental to the purpose of God, and so too is the case concerning our

individual souls. Averroes suggests as much and adds that anything made unique by its

investment in the individual material forms of humankind is in turn collectively

synthesized, abstracted, and absorbed by the mind of God through God’s Potential

Intellect. Thus only collective humanity appears to be immortal or “eternalisable,” as

Gilson notes, and each individual intellect, like each individual soul, vanishes into

death.xvi As Averroes put it, “quod intellectus omnium hominum est unum et idem

xi Fakhry. Islam. Page 56xii Renan, pages 99-122; Gilson, pages 107.xiii Maria Luisa Adrizzone. Guido Cavalcanti: The Other Middle Ages. Toronto: U Toronto Pr., 2002. Page 50. Ardizzone is making reference to Corti, la felicita mentale, pp. 3-37 and his Dante a un nuovo crocevia, p. 27.xiv Gilson, page 107.

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numero.” (because all human intelligence is one and the same in number.”xviiThis was

high heresy in the late thirteenth century, for separating both mind and soul from

individual existence effectively denied individual immortality at a time when Christian

theology was asserting that the individual survived death--mind, body and soul.xviii Dante

put his friend Cavalcanti in the Inferno for this assertion, and St. Thomas Aquinas wrote

many a denunciatory tractate against it. Yet to think that the individual mind or soul is a

substantial part of the divine consciousness is no more true, according to both Averroes

and Aristotle, than it is to say that a ‘ship is a part of the sailor at its helm.’xix Our union

with the divine, they imply, is primarily the result of our function, and our function, while

essential to God’s purpose of self-knowledge, is nevertheless not the object of God’s

purpose. We are secondary, and as Averroes suggests, we only borrow God’s intellect for

our lifetimes and for our own temporal ends.xx Pound thought similarly.

In the 1910 preface to his translations of Cavalcanti’s sonnets, Pound asserts his

belief in “an absolute rhythm as [he believes] in an absolute symbol or metaphor…[and

that the] perception of the intellect is “given in the word” just as those of the emotions is

“given in the cadence.” Linking the perfect word to the perfect cadence results in

visionary expression. In the same article, Pound then links his belief about words,

xv Howard, page 172. xvi Gilson, page 107.xvii Maria Luisa Ardizzone. Guido Calvalcanti: The Other Middle Ages. Toronto: U Toronto Pr., 2002. Page 79. Ardizzone is citing the first article or point of condemnation of Averroist doctrine by Stephanus Tempier in 1270. This was key, because it took away individual immortality and implied the eternality of matter that stood against the Christian doctrine of creation ex nihil.xviii See Dante’s argument to this effect in Paradiso.xix Howard, page 172.xx Gilson, page 202, and follow on “borrow” from page 172. Howard quotes from Commentaries 6, De Anima. 16-22:Se enim esset admixtus etc., idest, si enim esset virtus in corpore tunc esset aliqua dispositio aut aliqua qualitas, et, si haberet qualitatem, tunc ille aqualitas aut attribueretur calido aut frigido, scilicet copmplexioni in eo quod complexio; aut esset qualitas existens in complexione, tantum addita complexioni, sicut est de anima sensibili et sibi similibus. [The seventh error of the 209 errors listed in the 1277 condemnation is just this understanding of humanity to god].

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cadence, and vision to his understanding of color and line in painting, in order to praise

the line at the expense of color. Color itself is finite, he writes, “confined within the

frame” and “modified by the colors around it.” By contrast, the line is “unbounded, [and]

marks the passage of a force, [that] continues beyond the frame” as an energy that Pound

further links to beauty in motion.xxi Now, if Pound assumes a moving conceptual reality

at work in the unbounded line, and that line exists both within and beyond the boundaries

of the colors it frames, then he also assumes a connection between the activity of the line

and a visionary reality that is greater than either color or his own ability to track it. He

thus very early on in his career links motion, beauty, and a “visionary” expression that

may have been modified by an individual artist but at the same time, seems to be

possessed of an energy that passes both into and beyond the individual artist’s

understanding. This implies that the line is part of an intellectual and visionary activity

governed by a consciousness greater than that of the artist.

Throughout his career Pound sought examples of this arch cognitive process in

the works of others, and also tried to embody such a process in his own. He often found

corollaries to it in Asian poetry and art. One such example appears in his 1915 translation

of the 15th century Japanese Noh play, Suma Genji. Pound describes a Shite or chief

character or hero who is a sort of “spirit of the seashore at Suma. As the chorus describes

the Shite

He, the soul of the place…./…./Blue-grey is the garb they wear here,Blue-grey he fluttered in SumaHis sleaves were like the grey sea wavesThey moved with curious rustling,

xxi Pound. Sonnets of Guido Cavalcanti. New York: Hyperion Press, 1910. Page xxi.

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Like the noise of the restless wavesLike the bell of a country town“neath nightfall.” xxii

Collectively, the key image of blue-grey moves from the people of Suma to the fluttering

Shite and on into sea waves and off towards a restless bell of a country town, ringing in

what we can imagine to be the blue-grey “nightfall” of the play. In doing so the image

seems to emphasize the quality of perpetual motion itself, investing in material forms

then shifting out again in nearly random fashion. There is no easy conceptual link, for

example, between bells clanging in the blue-grey twilight and the blue grey garments

worn by those living in Suma. And yet the key repeating image secures that bond

between disparate realities. In doing so, it compels us to consider that what connects the

various images beyond movement and transformation is a hidden unity operating as a

governing part of the recorded transformational process, and that unity provides validity

to those connections we do recognize through their intimate relation to what we do not,

thereby creating visionary expression.

Likewise, Pound attempts to enact a cognitive movement towards visionary

expression in his own work. In Canto II, for example, Picasso’s eyes appear in the eye

sockets of a seal, sporting about the “spray white circles of cliff wash,” and swimming

artist seal transforms into a swimming Neptune; swimming Neptune becomes a moving

ship whose sailors become swimming fish, and swimming fish transform into a

swimming Dafne, a mythical girl who transforms into a waterside reed. In such a way,

Canto II’s presentation of these interconnected forms seemingly bound by little else

beyond energy moving through form suggests a divine and contemplating mind in

xxii Pound. Translations. Page 236.

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operation, because the connection between bound forms is hardly one of analogy or even

metaphor. Instead of serving as a chronicle of discernible meaning, they rather intimate

some great action taking place mostly beyond the poet’s ken. Human perception, process,

and creation are thus again confirmed as small parts of a bigger process seemingly

serving other ends.

The unbound line, Suma Genji, and “Canto II, ” all show at least the vestigial

traces of Averroist thought, for the overarching act of apprehension and enactment

appears separate from the creative activity of the artist or the poet, just as it seems to be

part of a process intimating and enacting a greater unity. It is a unity that in Averroes’

model is the mind of God. That the artist or poet is part of this process and at the same

time can be seen to emulate it suggests that the poet serves in Averroist fashion as both

the material receiver of divine intellect, and, through participation in the creative process,

as God or the Divine Consciousness itself, moving through forms as a means towards

self-knowledge. Pound describes his sense of the creative process in much this way in

1915:

The image….can rise within the mind…External causes play upon the mind perhaps….If so, they are drawn into the mind, fused, transmitted, and emerge in an Image unlike themselves.xxiii

As images emerge unlike themselves for Pound, they tend to confirm another tenet of

Averroes’—for when the potential intellect of either God or the poet extracts its own

active intellect from tangible material form, active intellect is thereby transformed into

xxiii Pound. “Affirmations IV.” New Age. London: Orage, 1914. Pages 349-50 in Selected Prose.

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what is referred to as an abstract intelligible, to then be subsumed into the potential

intellect, adding in this way to either God or the poet’s self-awareness.

A similar movement from the tangible to the abstract typifies Pound’s own

aesthetic process making its way toward paradise. Again in 1910 explaining Cavalcanti’s

understanding of the quality of virtu, for example, Pound suggests that virtu is the

potency, the efficient property of a substance or person. As such, it moves towards the

pure and abstract, such as in the Cavalcanti phrase, ”thou shall see depart from her lips

her subtler body, and from that a still subtler form ascends and from that a star, the body

of pure flame surrounding the source of virtu….which will declare its nature.”xxiv Its

nature is one that seems to be moving back to itself, from corrupt and tangible matter to

abstract intelligible form. Thus Cavalcanti and Pound seem to understand the image as

possessing an intellectual substance that moves towards self awareness just as the active

intellect, extracted by the potential intellect from material form, becomes an

“intelligible,” a primary aspect of the mind of God. Approximately two years after

explaining Cavalcanti’s understanding of virtu, Pound again found its aesthetic corollary

in Chinese painting.

In art historian Ernest Fenollosa’s lecture notes entitled “Landscape Poetry and

Painting,” Pound read of the process by which the Sung painter Kakki creates. Kakki,

Fenollosa notes, does not hope to produce the landscape before him, but instead, creates a

synthesized version of all the various landscapes, mountains, and rivers that he has ever

seen. In a passage marked by Pound’s blue crayon, Fenollosa writes that “by observation

and reference the artist will come to have before him the infinitely various mountains he

has seen, stored away, and amassed inside his bosom, and when he wishes them to come

xxiv Pound. Sonnets. Page 18 in Translations.

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forth he can paint them without the eye, spontaneously, as if everywhere were his

picture.”xxv

In essence, Kakki’s creative act is much like that of Averroes’ God, for just as the

mind of God invests in material form in order to know itself, Kakki’s invests (remembers)

images in his own mind in order to then produce what is only consequently imaginable

through the abstract forms of mountains, lakes, and skies. At the same time, his own

intellect, God-like, can be said to have invested in Kakki’s material mind, thus making

him not only the ideal model for Averroes’ understanding of the divine process of self-

knowledge, but also for Pound’s sense of the transformational nature of the creative artist

in general. And as Pound’s own work confirms, that artist is part of a metaphysical

process greater than himself, facilitating its actions through his vision of the unbounded

line, the movement of the Shite spirit from sea-grey garments to god, bell, night, and sea,

and by the seemingly arbitrary connections made between Picasso, Neptune, and

Dafne.”xxvi

This belief in the transformational nature of the artist’s work remained as strong

in Pound as did his penchant for entering the paradisal mode through poetic lines

characterized by a distinct elevation of melody and diction, and associated with static

images abstracted from life and myth, the so called “crystal vision” of his Cantos, traits

well noted by Eugene Paul Nassar.xxvii That Pound would place emphasis on the living,

transforming image in his poems, yet ultimately move towards elevated abstraction and

fixity of line and form when imagining paradise further confirms Averroist thought

xxv Ernest Fenollosa. “Landscape Poetry and Painting.” Manuscript from the Beinecke Rare Books Rome, Yale University, page 160.xxvi Get a note herexxvii Eugene Paul Nassar. The Cantos of Ezra Pound: The Lyric Mode. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1975. Page ix.—3.

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underwriting his vision, just as it confirms that for Pound, paradisal beauty may be

abstracted from living material form while remaining essentially part of a process driven

by a quest for self knowledge in both God and man.

Yet however noble and elevated were Pound’s intentions of creating his earthly

paradise through poetic line and image, his attempts to do so often bogged down, as

virtually every Poundian notes. This was especially true in the decades leading up to his

incarceration by the U.S. Army in Pisa in 1945. His 1934 ABC of Reading, and his 1938

Guide to Kulchur are often aggressive, insulting works that contradict any general

movement in search for knowledge or beauty, despite their obvious intellectual strengths.

What is more, a quick scan of his cantos written from the 1930s to the mid 1940s reveals

that the elevated lyrical and visionary passages associated by Nassar with a move towards

paradise nearly completely disappear.xxviii

Yet all of this changed while Pound was detained in the camp at Pisa, and indeed,

his “Pisan Cantos,” published in 1948 contain better than 111 moments wherein the

diction, melody, and general abstraction of image move again towards paradise, re-

initiating a trend that will continue throughout the remaining cantos.xxix I have suggested

that just as Averroes is a key figure for understanding Pound’s combined spiritual –

aesthetic process, Kuonon, Chinese Goddess of Mercy, emerging from Pound’s creative

consciousness in Pisa, is the appropriate figure for understanding his return to it. But

who is she?

xxviii Nassar, page 3. I count in cantos 1-30 (pub 1930) 65 moments plus one entire canto; 31-41 (pub 1933) 2; 45-51 (pub 1937) 10 moments plus one entire canto; 52-71 (pub 1940) 2; 72-73 (published 1944) none; 74-84 (published 1948) 111 moments plus one entire canto; 85-95 (pub 1955) 58; 96-109 (pub 1959) 86; 110-116 (1969) 49. See Kibler, page 110. xxix Kibler. Jade Dragon. Page 110.

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Pound had first encountered Kuonon 35 years before Pisa, in 1910, having

recently arrived from London. His friend, Laurence Binyon, organized an Asian art

exhibit at the British museum that year. Of the seven paintings of Buddhist icons

exhibited, 4 were of Kuan-yin, described in Binyon’s exhibit pamphlet as “goddess of

Mercy…seen in contemplative ecstasy, floating above the waters…seated by a waterfall

on a wave beaten rock.”xxx According to Ernest Fenollosa, she was Boddhisatwa, a “being

who, having the right to enter nirvana, deliberately renounces it, electing to work under

the conditions of renewed temptations of the world, for the love of one’s fellow man.”xxxi

She is a figure of “intense holiness,” who protects in sorrow and takes away fear.xxxii

Kuonon begins to appear in Pound’s work circa 1915, as “Kwannon/Footing a

boat that’s but one lotus petal,” in the first discarded Ur canto. In the next year, she

appears in his translation of the Noh play Tamura, pouring a “saving rain of light [and]…

mercy” upon soldiers beleaguered in battle.xxxiii She may have appeared floating on an

invisible raft in Canto 20,” but after that, she disappears from Pound’s writings

altogether, until at Pisa, where she is mentioned three times in Canto 74, and once each in

Cantos 77 and 81. In addition, her presence is implied many other times in the cantos

written at Pisa and thereafter. She is “Kuonon” with “suave eyes, quiet, not

scornful,”(74/435) and is described as gentle in her moving through “soft air,” air as if of

“Kuonon, enigma forgetting the times and the seasons,” (74/428) and through stone as of

“Kuonon” which to a weary and broken man, “bringeth sleep.” (74/428)

xxx Woo Ping Holoday. “Pound and Binyon: China via the British Museum.” Paideuma. Vol 6, no 1, 1977. Pages 23-36.xxxi Ernest Fenollosa. Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art. Vol II. New York: Dover, 1912. Page 80.xxxii Edward Chalmers Werner. Myths and Legends of China. New York: Arno Press. 1976. Page 251.xxxiii Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa. The Classic Noh theater of Japan. New York: New Directions Press (1916) 1959. Page 53.

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As a paradisal figure fashioned by an artist, or as an intelligible fashioned by the

mind of God, Kuonon serves as a sort of golden emblem of something learned, a

revelation of greater self awareness, an awareness brought back into art as back into

mind, and back into Pisa and the death cells and to the poet who had strayed from his

mission just as he appears to have strayed in some sense from the general intentions of

his own heart. She speaks for a poet who realizes at Pisa that a certain amount of

humanity and compassion were missing from his life and from his work, and as he put it,

that he had pity for “des autres probablement pas assez.” Through her, Pound appears to

recognize the need to seek forgiveness. Her emergence also confirms an enduring

aesthetic process in Pound’s work, for as she is known and as Pound presents her,

Kuonon stands in start contrast to his own dark disposition at Pisa, as evidenced in his

cantos, thereby suggesting that while his own creative process produced her, some other

overarching process, working perhaps both within and beyond him, served as its catalyst.

Seen in this way, Kuonon’s emergence at Pisa confirms the longstanding link

between greater process, beauty, and awareness in Pound’s aesthetic program, and at the

same time pays homage to the influence on that program of Islamic thought in a way that

Averroes, looking down upon Pound from his 13th century Spanish courtyard, would find

very familiar.

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Notes

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