Hamilton celebrates Ezra Pound’s 128th Birthday
By Max Newman '16
October 31, 2013
Forum on Image and Language and Motion (F.I.L.M.) celebrated Hamilton alumnus and late poet Ezra Pound’s 128th birthday last Wednesday with a night full of history and experimental film adaptations.
Associate Professor of English Steve Yao opened the discussion with a detailed history of Pound from his time at Hamilton to his death in Venice in 1972. Professor Yao claimed, “Pound is arguably the most important poets of the 20th century,” referencing his controversial support of Benito Mussolini and fascism.
A graduate of the Hamilton Class of 1905, Pound portrayed his social and political beliefs in his poetry. “Pound’s goal was to solidify free verse as the dominant mode in American Literature,” Professor Yao said. Pound’s poems draw on revolutionary era American history, Chinese history and his own experiences.
Professor Yao describes Pound’s poetry as “difficult” and “mystical” because of its political commentary through romance language. This is especially true in The Cantos, Pound’s unfinished poem split into 120 sections. The poem was highly controversial as politics became heated at the start of World War II. Pound takes the reader through his ideas, focusing on oppression in China due to government corruption.
Professor Yao ended his opening words by introducing the evening’s main attraction: “Emergency-room physician in Toronto by day (and night), Bernard Dew has an aesthetic calling and artistic gift: he is a devotee of experimental poetry, and Ezra Pound in particular, and is fascinated with avant-garde film, especially the work of Stan Brakhage. In recent years Dew has brought these fascinations together in a series of remarkable cinematic adaptations of selections from Pound’s epic Cantos.”
Many of Pound’s poems are ekphrastic, written verses in response to visual images or paintings. Dew brilliantly took the text and turned them back into images through his films portraying Cantos #49 and #116. Four years in the making, Dew primarily gathered footage from Venice, Pound’s home for the last few decades of his life as well as his burial ground.
In Canto #49, Dew has a typewriter-at-work overtone throughout the movie as 15mm film images flash on and off the screen. The grainy collage of film allows the viewer, for even just a few minutes, to journey inside Pound’s complex poetic mind. The images move quickly from beautiful Italian architecture to abstract color flashes Dew filmed in his basement.
In his final completed Canto, #114, Pound reflects upon the poem as a whole. “It’s especially moving to see him questioning himself,” Dew said. Rarely do poets question the legitimacy of their work, yet Pound explores his crisis in depth.
Dew portrayed the beauty of Pound’s reflection by filming the first half of the Canto in in silence. Images of long, drawn-out ocean waves fill the screen in silence as if representing Pound’s mind at work.
Bernard Dew offers an intriguing perspective on Pound’s legacy. Although the films will unlikely appear in a theater near you, the adaptations are slowly circling around the world depicting Pound’s poetry in a language that is universal.
http://students.hamilton.edu/spectator/arts-entertainment/p/hamilton-celebrates-ezra-pound-s-128th-birthday/view
Ezra Pound and Film adaptations of fragments from the Cantos
Robert Anton Wilson: further musings by steve fly
Robert Anton Wilson: further musings by steve fly
Robert Anton Wilson spent over 50 years producing original thoughts and ideas, criss-cossing academic boundaries like a flock og migrating birds. All-at-once an independent scholar, social critic, comedian, playwright, poet and novelist. RAW lived through WWII, the cold war, the 1960s counter culture explosion, the digital technological millennium and the globalization of humanity by way of the world wide web. RAW kept a front row seat next to other great scientific philosophers of the 20th/21st century, observing patterns and communicating with great care and attention to language, meaning and clarity, what he suspects is going on.
RAWs approach to the questions confronting all American citizens, and so by default the entire planet, currently under the boot of the U.S.A, are critical alternative perspectives and insights desperately lacking from both the public and academic discourse, and that have new roads into almost every department of any existing academic center you care to think of. Yet, what i find most stimulating about RAW and his ideas circles around his fierce independence and adherence to the principle of thinking for oneself, questioning everything and constantly reformulating based upon new data.
Every human being on earth can benefit from literacy, and RAWs particular take on the human condition features the development of language and critical reasoning as tools to enable good functioning in a chaotic universe, inhabited by shadows, distractions, illusions and disinformation. I feel that RAW left us all with examples of how best to confront confusion, propaganda and low level information warfare, his life as a case study and scientific experiment, in the tradition of R. Buckminster Fuller and Dr John Lilly, where they're own mind-body system is recognized to be a scientific laboratory itself, and so the nervous system and linguistic operating system also can be seen as scientific instruments.
It strikes me, when i surf around the web and more often read newspaper headlines and/or watch TV shows, that in 2013 a large proportions of professional scientists, and almost ALL politicians seem to have not picked up on this principle of 'inprobable objectivity' at all. On the contrary, the direction of most political and popular scientific discourse seems to be skewed towards materialist ideology and a 'bad' use of language, manipulated and squeezed through various filters to attract either/or investors, voters, or whatever ends maybe required, e.g, higher carbon monoxide limits, or the use of genetically modified seeds. There are an increasing amount of people waking up the coercion and trickery played by authoritarian structures, so as to keep the position of authority right where it is, with a centrist, top down, capitalist model. An Aristotelian war-head.
RAWs ideas and special writings smash away hundreds of rotten foundations that support these authoritarian monsters, often targeting the strongest parts of his opposing arguments, so as to be sure to totally demolish them. RAW has referred to himself as a libertarian anarchist, and a 'guerrila ontologist' in the past. I think these descriptions help distinguish his kind of constructive and cheerful criticism from the dull speculations and sensational garbage i detect in many of today's so called 'exposers of the truth' not least those who claim to be uncovering the all powerful 'Illuminati'. A hugely popular meme in 2013, largely due to the bastardization of RAWs ideas, along with a handful of others during the 1960s war on some culture.
--Steve Fly Agaric
23 November 2013.
Amsterdam
Robert Anton Wilson spent over 50 years producing original thoughts and ideas, criss-cossing academic boundaries like a flock og migrating birds. All-at-once an independent scholar, social critic, comedian, playwright, poet and novelist. RAW lived through WWII, the cold war, the 1960s counter culture explosion, the digital technological millennium and the globalization of humanity by way of the world wide web. RAW kept a front row seat next to other great scientific philosophers of the 20th/21st century, observing patterns and communicating with great care and attention to language, meaning and clarity, what he suspects is going on.
RAWs approach to the questions confronting all American citizens, and so by default the entire planet, currently under the boot of the U.S.A, are critical alternative perspectives and insights desperately lacking from both the public and academic discourse, and that have new roads into almost every department of any existing academic center you care to think of. Yet, what i find most stimulating about RAW and his ideas circles around his fierce independence and adherence to the principle of thinking for oneself, questioning everything and constantly reformulating based upon new data.
Every human being on earth can benefit from literacy, and RAWs particular take on the human condition features the development of language and critical reasoning as tools to enable good functioning in a chaotic universe, inhabited by shadows, distractions, illusions and disinformation. I feel that RAW left us all with examples of how best to confront confusion, propaganda and low level information warfare, his life as a case study and scientific experiment, in the tradition of R. Buckminster Fuller and Dr John Lilly, where they're own mind-body system is recognized to be a scientific laboratory itself, and so the nervous system and linguistic operating system also can be seen as scientific instruments.
It strikes me, when i surf around the web and more often read newspaper headlines and/or watch TV shows, that in 2013 a large proportions of professional scientists, and almost ALL politicians seem to have not picked up on this principle of 'inprobable objectivity' at all. On the contrary, the direction of most political and popular scientific discourse seems to be skewed towards materialist ideology and a 'bad' use of language, manipulated and squeezed through various filters to attract either/or investors, voters, or whatever ends maybe required, e.g, higher carbon monoxide limits, or the use of genetically modified seeds. There are an increasing amount of people waking up the coercion and trickery played by authoritarian structures, so as to keep the position of authority right where it is, with a centrist, top down, capitalist model. An Aristotelian war-head.
RAWs ideas and special writings smash away hundreds of rotten foundations that support these authoritarian monsters, often targeting the strongest parts of his opposing arguments, so as to be sure to totally demolish them. RAW has referred to himself as a libertarian anarchist, and a 'guerrila ontologist' in the past. I think these descriptions help distinguish his kind of constructive and cheerful criticism from the dull speculations and sensational garbage i detect in many of today's so called 'exposers of the truth' not least those who claim to be uncovering the all powerful 'Illuminati'. A hugely popular meme in 2013, largely due to the bastardization of RAWs ideas, along with a handful of others during the 1960s war on some culture.
--Steve Fly Agaric
23 November 2013.
Amsterdam
The New Science of Psychedelics by David Jay Brown.
Review by Steve ‘fly agaric 23’ Pratt.
"Cosmic Trigger is where I first encountered controversial psychologist Timothy Leary’s eight-circuit model of the brain and psychiatric researcher John Lilly’s radical ideas about programming the brain as though it were a computer. These models became two of the primary maps that I have used to navigate my psychedelic experiences, and Leary introduced me to many other important ideas, which we’ll be discussing in more detail later in the book. What’s most amazing for me is that later in my life, years after I read Wilson and Leary’s work, I was fortunate enough to become good friends with these two incredible gentlemen, and they both played an integral role in my work.--David Jay Brown.
In his latest book, David Jay Brown ignites the neural synapses and builds a web of psychedelic intel. Leaking some of the most scrumptous mind spray and zesty juices from the psychedelic 'happy' mutants, the book oozes with goo and liquids beyond description. I found buckets of crystallized optimism concerning the future of psychedelic research and shared livingry. DJB on the cuts and on beat. To paraphrase Bob. Hurray for the optimists!
Brown presents the reader slices from an array psychedelic scientist/gangsters/mavericks, who stick up the reader with surprise noises, snatching them hostage with strangely delicious ideas, tying them up with super-guts and silly-string while demanding their ransom be paid in full, the price of your mindscrape. A cooler-roaster of a ride, the greatest hits of Psychedelic Science future bound. An refreshingly honest series of life adventures, way out there and back here with the sentences to make his experience true enough.
I would like to simply reproduce a small section of the book, and let Brown entice you: "In the book I quote from my interviews with luminaries such as Terence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson, Timothy Leary, John Lilly, Allen Ginsberg, Jerry Garcia, Ram Dass, Noam Chomsky, George Carlin, Deepak Chopra, Ray Kurzweil, Andrew Weil, Jack Kevorkian, Edgar Mitchell, Albert Hofmann, Stanislav Grof, Joan Halifax, Alex, Grey, H. R. Giger, Simon Posford, and Rupert Sheldrake. Some of the varied topics explored in the book include the interface between science and spirituality, lucid dreaming, time travel, morphic field theory, alternative science, optimal health, what happens to consciousness after death, encounters with nonhuman beings, the future evolution of our species, and how psychedelics affect creativity.”
A delight to read for anyone who follows Dr Robert Anton Wilson and Timothy Leary, Brown performs by example his reiteration of the founding principles of psychedelic science and consciousness studies, roughly ‘Think for yourself, and question everything, especially authority”.
Here are gathered great magicians of consciousness metaphor and living language, an embodiment of the scholarly compassionate ones IMHO, contextualized by somebody who knew them and their works well, and can hump the torch of a new synthesis in 2013. Cheers David.
The New Science of Psychedelics and Giambattista Vico.
‘The human mind is naturally inclined by the senses to see itself externally in the body, and only with great difficulty does it come to understand itself by means of reflection. This axiom gives us the universal principle of etymology in all languages: words are carried over from bodies and from the properties of bodies to signify the institutions of the mind and spirit.—Giambattista Vico, Science Nuova, The Elements.
David Jay Brown, produced a kind of 'tale of the tribe' in blending his own experiences with insights gained from those great thinkers around him, and placing them in recent historical context with a particular focus on the psychedelic sciences. David J. Brown, I am very pleased to tell you, seems a happy mutant of the Robert Anton Wilson tribe, and pays particular homage to RAW who permeates the entire text IMHO. So, I dedicate this review to some expanded RAW tentacles.
The Italian Hermetic philosopher Giambattista Vico, outlined a New Science for the changing landscape of humanity, thought, history and language taking place in Europe during the Renaissance. I get the impression that Brown is rubbing up on Vico by using the term ‘New Science’ in his book ‘The New Science of Psychedelics’ and indeed, the sudden explosion of psychedelics and the decentralized philosophy of ‘Psychedelic Science’ across the planet, heralds the possibility of a new beginning (bigending?) which brings and slings many challenges and hurdles and roundabouts, to leap over and swing with, together, with the promise of a cohesive tolerant and pluralistic humanity (tribe) utilizing the planets pharmacopeia for fun and for profit.Why not?
While reading the book, I started trying to reduce some of the recurring themes into general terms and simplified ideas, as stoners often do…searching for short slogans that encapsulate what I view as the most important messages.Take for example, the subheading of the book: At the NEXUS of Culture, Consciousness and Spirituality. This NEXUS: Origin: 1655–65; (Latin nexus, a binding, joining, fastening, equivalent to nect ( ere ) to bind, fasten...) yes, precisely.
This vortex of connectivity and links reflect my own study of a particular NEXUS of culture, consciousness and spirituality, as defined by Dr Robert Anton Wilson: The Tale of The Tribe. Interestingly to me, RAW and his ideas permeate this book in almost every paragraph, to my RAW biased perceptions but of course, Brown and RAW were good friends for over 17 years and fellow researchers in the field so in some sense this book ‘TNSOP’ tells us much about the tribe (all around the world humanity), and includes wisdom from Dr Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsburg, both of whom were specifically familiar with the tricky concept as it pertains to Ezra Pound, Marshall McLuhan, James Joyce: a modern verse epic including history and more. Plus, Brown met and studied the works of Buckminster Fuller closely, who is another node within RAWs wheel of historical hermetically charged genii.
Joyce is widely noted as being the most famous interpreter of Vico, and for me RAW is in direct line after Joyce as expanding some of Vico’s ideas into formulations and sentences that cut right into the 20/21st century, and, in this instance, illustrate how ahead of his time Vico and The New Science were in their formulations, not forgetting how liberty, humanity, tolerance and equality tend to ooze out, helping us to solve many problems today.
“What Vico is here drawing attention to is the sheer unhistorical character of many accouts of the past. They are lacking what Sir Isaiah Berlin has called ‘historical perspective’, i.e. any recognition that at different times in the past men’s mental and intellectual abilities have varied widely and that the sorts of knowledge that could be formulated and used I one age could not be formulated and used in another.” Leon Pompa, Vico: A study of the new science.
Vico is just one character among a dozen that RAW pinpoints as a major node in his Tale of the tribe Nexus. I hope that the psychedelic science researchers and those engaged in the new emergent approaches to the big questions will reconsider RAW and ‘The Tale of The Tribe’ for guidance and some rare hermetically charged historical perspective, lovingly balanced and deployed like a gang of sexy loving Ninjas.
One example of TTOTT condensed wisdom is taken from Allen Ginsberg and also quoted in a recent review of Davis Jay Brown’s book. This quote presents insight into the decentralized philosophy of Giordano Bruno (and Vico), with overtones of Nietzsche, Joyce, Pound and McLuhan, with whom which Robert Anton Wilson also liked to equate global decentralized internet, by bend and swerve of TTOTT. We may also reconsider the lofty aims of Bruno and Vico in unifying and making peace between religions, OMG, by way of better communication and translation of ideas and with balanced humanitarian value systems.
“No, no, no, absolutely not. None of that bullshit! No Gaia hypothesis. No theism need sneak in here. No monotheistic hallucinations needed in this. Not another fascist central authority . . . You’ve got this one big thing. Who says it’s got to be one? Why does everything have to be one? I think there’s no such thing as one—only many eyes looking out in all directions. The center is everywhere, not in any one spot. Does it have to be one organism, in the sense of one brain, or one consciousness? The tendency is to sentimentalize this idea into another godhead and to reinaugurate the whole Judeo-Christian-Islamic mind trap.--Allen Ginsburg, in conversation with David Jay Brown.
The decentralized philosophy that runs, with an emerald hue through the current of 'Hermetic philosophy' from Ficino to Bruno and Vico (maybe the last great Hermetic Philosopher) up to the present cypher-punks incarnations, seem to me, to have related principles in physics, cosmology, psychology and social philosophy. Sure. And, I might add that i think that the psychedelic sciences which may include, neuro-physics, psycho-pharmacology, botany, Anthropology, linguistics, magick, painting, MUSIC...which are also in resonance with the Hermetic principles make sense, cohere with a snuggy fit, when viewed with a decentralized pluralistic set of models, flushing the centrist reductionist atomic singular conclusion, or the empirical tyrannical certainty of authority, down the tube. What is the relationship between the individual and the state?
“The decisive sort of proof in our science is therefore this: that, once these institutions have been established by divine providence, the course of the institutions of the nations had to be, must now be, and will have to be, such as our Science demonstrates, even if infinite worlds were born from time to time through eternity, which is certainly not the case.
Our science therefore comes to demonstrate at the time an ideal eternal history traversed in time by the history of every nation in its rise, development, maturity, decline and fall. Indeed we make bold to affirm that he who meditates this Science makes it for himself by that proof it had, has and will have to be. For the first indubitable principle posited above is that this world of nations has certainly been made by man and its guise must therefore be found within the modifications of our own human mind.”—Giambattista Vico, Scienza Nuova. P 344.
James Joyce dazzles with his customized ‘Hermetic principles’ at work in his great work of cypher-punk science fiction: Finnegans Wake, and it is here. with some help from Dr Wilson that we can see the holographic principle emerging as a connecting principle between Hermetically inclined innovators, and I would add psychedelic scientists of the 21st century. Nurosiphpuqz. Mutants, the others.
Today, with the advanced state of alchemical tools both organic and software based, anything and everything our psychedelic forefathers and mothers imagined is at our fingertips, at least temporarily, in alternate virtual spaces. However, the goal of preserving the biosphere and providing all humans with an equal footing in life seems in dire need of help, and some new ideas and new directions and maps. Maybe The New Science of Psychedelics, as a broader movement can ignite the sort of brave imagination required to build our psychedelic peace-planet, here, right Facebooking now. I hold out the same species of hope with regards to the ideas and works of Robert Anton Wilson, and specifically his ‘the tale of the tribe’, and by osmosis of David Jay Brown, who reconnected some of these ideas into a new 2013 Nexus. Nice one.
Words simply cannot describe what a thrilling experience this was for me! In 1989, I moved to Los Angeles, where Bob and his wife, Arlen, were living at the time, and I became good friends with them. I dedicated my book Virus: The Alien Strain to Arlen. I began going to regular weekly gatherings at Bob and Arlen’s home, where a small group would read and discuss mind-expanding ideas. We read virtually everything that James Joyce had written, Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, each other’s writings, and Bob’s books. We watched Orson Welles’ films and talked about quantum physics and primate politics.--David Jay Brown.
Steven 'fly agaric 23' Pratt.
Amsterdam.
http://ettt.wikispaces.com/ (My 'tale of the tribe' wikispace)
SEMIOTIC MACHINES: by Louis Armand (Joyce, McLuhan, Shannon, Weiner, Von Neumann)
SEMIOTIC MACHINES: by Louis Armand, presents a number of passages that see James Joyce, McLuhan, Shannon, Weiner, Von Neumann, criss-crossing and pollinating the tale of the tribe with a Joycean, atomic, digital glossing. Also invoking Orson Welles through the reference to expanded cinema of Gene Yougblood, this essay exhibits the highest standards of critical writing on Joyce IMHO, and in the kind of prose i would like to see utilized to help explicate the questions of the tale of the tribe as defined by Robert Anton Wilson, Ezra Pound, Buckminster Fuller, and Joyce.--Steve fly
Above all, the importance of Joyce for McLuhan resides in the decisive role of Finnegans Wake in re-defining the late stages of print culture and the advent of digiculture (the so-called “postmodern moment”). In this sense, Joyce’s text assumes a pre-eminent status among the agents and historians of late modernity—among them John von Neumann, Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon, Lewis Mumford and Siegfried Giedion—and, along with the Mallarméan critique of the book and Marcel Duchamp’s satirisation of mechanical rationalism, the Wake becomes something of a benchmark in the early discourse of cyberspace.
Joyce’s technique of “verbivocovisual presentement”(5)—reprising the symbolist preoccupation with effects of synaesthesia—bears directly upon the conceptualisation of virtual reality and emersive signifying environments. Gene Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema (1970?), which proposes the integration of computing technology and other forms of telecommunications for the synaesthetic and syncretistic expansion of film, is heavily indebted to McLuhan’s reading of Finnegans Wake in Understanding Media (1964) and The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962). “The stripping of the senses and the interruption of their interplay in tactile synaesthesia,” McLuhan writes, “may well have been one of the effects of the Gutenberg technology”—of which Finnegans Wake is considered a kind of apotheosis.(6)
http://hjs.ff.cuni.cz/archives/v8/main/essays.php?essay=armand
Joyce, Bruno, Baudrillard and the coincidence of contraries.
MUSEYROOMS AND MOEBIUS EFFECTS: A RUIM OF HISTORY IN FINNEGANS WAKE
Interestingly, Baudrillard’s collapse of poles operates on dynamics similar to those expressed in Giordano Bruno’s Cause, Principle and Unity, whose coincidence of contraries extends binary values, like macro and micro, to such an extreme that they become equal, like two antithetical objects travelling in opposite directions on a single line that becomes a circle (8). As is well known, Bruno’s theory of the coincidence of contraries plays a substantial role throughout Finnegans Wake. Besides the fact that his name is often referenced and that merging binary values are frequently represented through Shem and Shaun, Issy and her mirror image, between father and sons, and mother and daughter--in all manner of conflicts familial or epic--the paradoxical function of Bruno’s theory surfaces in numerous aesthetic and epistemological issues in Finnegans Wake. The Museyroom, overture and prelude to all that follows, plays a pivotal role in complicating a system of differentials like past/present, factual/fictive, and inside/outside, thus exposing historiography and archive practices to the labyrinthine effects of paradox and inversion. -- http://hjs.ff.cuni.cz/main/essays.php?essay=mcfeaters
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