Category: Ezra Pound

STOURBRIDGE AWOKE

Calling all political parties, councils and historical societies, professors, teachers and those who claim to love their country and county, those who cherish their history! Here, (below) as performance by example is my demonstration to help provide clarity, fair and balanced information, well sourced and checked facts, all about Stourbridge. James Joyce and Ezra Pound. Cheers for the help, Gemini.

–Steve The Fly.

Stourbridge: River, Clay, Glass, and the Modernist Imagination

I. Introduction

Stourbridge, a market town nestled in the Metropolitan Borough of Dudley in the English West Midlands, presents a compelling case study in the interplay of geography, geology, industry, and cultural resonance.¹ Historically situated in Worcestershire ¹, its identity has been profoundly shaped by the River Stour that flows through it, the bridge that gave the town its name, and the rich deposits of fireclay beneath its surface. This unique geological endowment fostered a world-renowned glassmaking industry that defined Stourbridge for centuries.¹ Beyond its tangible history, the town’s name echoes, perhaps unexpectedly, within the complex landscapes of two major works of literary modernism: James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and Ezra Pound’s The Cantos.

This report seeks to explore these interwoven facets of Stourbridge’s significance. It will investigate the origins and meaning of the town’s name, examining the etymology of both “Stourbridge” and the “River Stour,”. It will trace the historical development of the settlement, focusing on the foundational roles of the river and its crossing point. Furthermore, the report will delve into the history of the Stourbridge glass and ceramics industries, highlighting the indispensable contribution of local fireclay resources. Finally, it will analyze the specific mentions of Stourbridge in the works of Joyce and Pound, considering their context and potential meanings, before synthesizing these diverse threads to articulate the town’s multifaceted importance across history, industry, and literature.

II. Unpacking the Name: The Etymology of Stourbridge and the River Stour

The name of a place often holds clues to its origins, geography, or the perceptions of its earliest inhabitants. In the case of Stourbridge, the name points directly to its defining topographical feature, while the river it references carries echoes of ancient linguistic roots and debated meanings.

A. Stourbridge: The Bridge Over the Stour

The etymology of “Stourbridge” itself is remarkably straightforward and consistently attested. The name signifies exactly what it describes: a bridge crossing the River Stour.⁴ Historical records confirm this derivation. The town appears in the 1255 Worcestershire assize roll as ‘Sturbrug’ or ‘Sturesbridge’.¹ Later medieval forms include ‘Sturbrugg’ in the Subsidy Rolls of 1333 and ‘Stourbrugge’ recorded in 1375.⁸ The element ‘-brugge’ is an older form of the word ‘bridge’.⁸ The settlement that grew around this crossing point was originally known by a different name, likely the Anglo-Saxon ‘Bedcote’, which lay within the larger manor of Swynford (or ‘Suineforde’ as recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086).¹ The name ‘Bedcote’ survived for centuries, attached to one of the local mills, and persists today as a street name.⁹

The explicit naming of the township after the bridge underscores the immediate and defining importance of this river crossing from at least the mid-13th century. It suggests that the bridge was already a significant landmark, facilitating movement, trade, or administration across the River Stour, which historically formed the boundary between Worcestershire and Staffordshire.¹ This infrastructure, enabling passage over the river, was thus central to the settlement’s nascent identity and its distinction from other points along the watercourse.

B. The River Stour: A Name of Power and Motion?

While the origin of “Stourbridge” is clear, the etymology of the river name “Stour” is considerably more complex and contested. The challenge is compounded by the existence of several major rivers bearing this name in England, including those in Kent, Dorset, Suffolk, and Warwickshire, in addition to the Worcestershire Stour that concerns us here.⁵ This necessitates careful consideration of the specific context, although many etymological discussions address the name generically.

Numerous origins have been proposed, reflecting potential layers of linguistic history and varying interpretations of the river’s character. A common suggestion is a Celtic or Old English root ‘sturr’, meaning “strong” or “powerful”.⁵ This aligns with a possible, though perhaps less direct, Latin association with ‘stauro’, also meaning “strong or powerful”.¹⁶ The influential Anglo-Saxon scholar Walter William Skeat connected ‘Stur’ (an early form with a long ‘u’ vowel) to the English word ‘stir’ and the German ‘stur-m’, implying meanings like “bustling,” “stormy,” or “turbid”.⁸ This resonates with suggestions of an Old English origin meaning “violent,” “fierce,” or simply “the fierce one”.¹⁰

Further complicating matters, Middle English possessed a word ‘stour’ with two distinct derivations: an adjective of Germanic origin meaning “large, powerful,” and a noun from medieval French meaning “tumult, commotion, conflict,” itself derived from Proto-Germanic sturmaz (“storm”).¹² Some scholars have traced potential roots deeper, to Proto-Germanic sturiz (“turmoil; noise; confusion”) potentially stemming from Proto-Indo-European (s)tur- or (s)twer- (“to turn around, confuse”) ²¹, or to PIE (s)twerH- (“to stir up, agitate”).²²

Alternative theories exist, such as Isaac Taylor’s proposal linking ‘Stour’ to the Welsh word ‘dŵr’ (“water”), though this is often viewed sceptically by modern linguists.⁸ Richard Coates has offered a more structural interpretation, suggesting ‘Stour’ might be an Old European river-name adopted into Old English, representing “fierceness” on a conceptual spectrum opposite the meaning of “gentle” associated with rivers named ‘Blyth’.¹⁰ The variety is further illustrated by differing regional pronunciations: the Worcestershire Stour is typically pronounced to rhyme with “hour,” whereas the Kentish and East Anglian Stours often rhyme with “tour”.¹²

The sheer multiplicity of these proposed etymologies, the scholarly debate surrounding them, and the variations in pronunciation strongly indicate an ancient origin for the name ‘Stour’. It likely predates consistent written records and may reflect successive linguistic influences. Despite the uncertainty, a recurring semantic field emerges, consistently associating the river’s name with concepts of strength, power, movement, and potentially turbulence or even conflict, painting a picture of how early inhabitants perceived this watercourse.

The following table summarizes the main etymological proposals:

Proposed Meaning	Linguistic Origin	Key Proponent/Source Snippet	Notes/Counterarguments
Strong / Powerful	Celtic/Old English (‘sturr’)	⁵	Widely cited possibility.
Stir / Move / Bustling	Old English (‘styr’/’styrian’)	W.W. Skeat ⁸	Connects to observable river action.
Fierce / Violent	Old English	¹⁰	Emphasizes a potentially dangerous aspect.
Tumult / Conflict	Middle English / Proto-Germanic	¹² (sturmaz)	Links to ‘storm’ and ‘battle’.
Large / Powerful (adj.)	Middle English / Germanic	¹²	Alternative ME meaning.
Stir up / Agitate	Proto-Indo-European ((s)twerH-)	²²	Deepest proposed root relating to movement/agitation.
Turmoil / Confusion	Proto-Germanic (sturiz)	²¹	Related to PIE (s)twer-.
Water	Welsh (‘dwr’)	Isaac Taylor ⁸	Generally discredited by modern linguists.
Fierceness (structural)	Old European / Old English	Richard Coates ¹⁰	Posits a conceptual opposition with ‘Blyth’.

III. From Bedcote to Borough: A History of Stourbridge

The history of Stourbridge unfolds from a crossing point on a significant river, evolving through stages as a manor, a market town, an industrial centre, and finally a part of a larger metropolitan borough. Its trajectory reflects broader patterns of English urban development, yet is uniquely inflected by its specific location and resources.

A. Early Settlement and the River’s Influence

The origins of settlement in the Stourbridge area predate the town’s current name. An Anglo-Saxon settlement known as ‘Bedcote’ existed within the larger Manor of Swynford.¹ This manor, recorded as ‘Suineforde’ in the Domesday Book of 1086, was then held by the powerful Norman lord William Fitz Ansculf.¹ The name ‘Swinford’ itself likely refers to a ford across the river, possibly located near the present-day riverside estate called Stepping Stones.⁹ An earlier Saxon charter mentioning Swinford dates from around 950 AD.⁹

Central to this early history was the River Stour. It provided an essential water source, powered early mills vital to the local economy, and served as a significant administrative and geographical boundary, historically dividing Worcestershire from Staffordshire.¹ Families like the Foleys later built substantial fortunes from forges and mills powered by the Stour and its tributaries.⁹ The aforementioned Bedcote mill was one such important early enterprise.⁹

The construction of a bridge over the Stour proved pivotal. As discussed previously, this structure gave the developing township its name, ‘Sturbrug’ or ‘Sturesbridge’, by 1255.⁴ This bridge facilitated communication and trade across the river boundary, likely accelerating the growth of the settlement at this strategic crossing point and distinguishing it within the Manor of Swynford.²

B. Growth as a Market Town and Industrial Hub

Over the following centuries, Stourbridge evolved into a recognized market town. Edward IV granted the right to hold a weekly market and two annual fairs in 1482, a right renewed by Henry VII in 1486.⁹ By the early 19th century, it was described as a “populous, wealthy, and flourishing market town”.¹

Before the dominance of glass, other industries thrived. Surrounded by hills suitable for sheep rearing and with ample water for washing wool, Stourbridge became a centre for woollen cloth production.⁸ The leather and clothing trades were also significant contributors to the town’s early economy.³

The Industrial Revolution dramatically reshaped Stourbridge. While the glass industry, discussed in the next section, became its most famous attribute, the exploitation of local coal and fireclay deposits fuelled broader industrialization.¹ The iron industry also grew significantly, exemplified by the large works of John Bradley and Company.⁹

Crucial to this industrial expansion was the development of transport infrastructure. The opening of the Stourbridge Canal in 1779 provided a vital artery for moving raw materials and finished goods, vastly enhancing the prospects for local industries.⁹ The subsequent arrival of the railway age further accelerated growth, particularly in the iron sector, with works strategically located alongside the canal.⁹ Alongside industrial development came improvements in urban infrastructure, including widened bridges, improved roads, piped water supplies, gas lighting, and drainage systems, which enhanced living conditions and facilitated further growth.⁹

The town’s civic structures evolved alongside its economy. An early town hall existed in the High Street from the late 15th century but was demolished in 1773.²⁴ A new neoclassical Market Hall opened in 1827, supplemented by a Corn Exchange in 1850.²⁴ The current Stourbridge Town Hall, an imposing brick and terracotta building in the Renaissance style, was constructed on Market Street in 1887 to commemorate Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, financed by public subscription.²⁴

C. Administrative and Social Evolution

Industrial growth fuelled a significant increase in population. Recorded at 5,090 in 1821 ¹, the population grew substantially, reaching 55,480 by the 2001 census and 63,298 by 2011.¹ This growth was closely linked to the expansion of the glass and other industries.²⁴

The town’s administrative identity has been somewhat fluid. Historically part of Worcestershire, its boundaries shifted over time. Amblecote, previously in Staffordshire, was incorporated into the Borough of Stourbridge in 1966.¹ A major reorganization occurred with the Local Government Act 1972, when Stourbridge was amalgamated into the newly formed Dudley Metropolitan Borough and became part of the wider West Midlands county in 1974.¹

Parallel to economic and administrative changes, Stourbridge developed a notable civic and social infrastructure. Educational provision included the ancient King Edward VI College, founded in 1552 ¹, and a well-regarded charity school established by the industrialist Thomas Foley, which educated and apprenticed hundreds of boys.²⁷ Community learning was fostered by the Stourbridge Mechanics Institute, founded in 1834.⁸ Public amenities grew with the establishment of a Public Library in 1905 (funded by Andrew Carnegie) ⁹ and the creation of public parks, most notably Mary Stevens Park, gifted to the town in 1929 by the industrialist Ernest Stevens.¹

This historical trajectory showcases Stourbridge’s evolution from a settlement defined by its river crossing to a thriving industrial centre. Its path was heavily directed by its advantageous geography – proximity to the river for power and transport, and access to crucial mineral resources. Technological advancements, from water wheels to canals and railways, continually reshaped its potential. While industry was the engine of growth, the concurrent development of civic institutions, educational facilities, and public spaces indicates a parallel process of community building, striving for social stability and improvement alongside economic expansion. The shifting administrative boundaries also highlight how local identity exists within, and is sometimes redefined by, larger regional and national governmental structures.

IV. Clay, Coal, and Crystal: The Rise and Transformation of Stourbridge Industry

The name “Stourbridge Glass” became synonymous with quality and artistry, particularly during the 19th century. This reputation was built upon a unique confluence of geological resources, immigrant skills, and technological adaptation, creating a specialized industrial district that defined the area’s identity for centuries.

A. The Genesis of Glassmaking: Huguenots and Resources

Glassmaking in the Stourbridge district dates back over 400 years, with continuous production established from the early 1600s.¹ The catalyst for this industry is widely attributed to the arrival of skilled Protestant glassmakers, known as Huguenots, fleeing religious persecution in the Lorraine region of northeastern France.⁸ While some sources suggest their arrival began as early as the 1550s ⁸, others place the key migration and establishment of glassworks in the early 17th century.²⁹ These ‘gentleman glassmakers’ brought invaluable expertise in glass production techniques.³³ One key figure, Paul Tyzack, is recorded in nearby Kingswinford in 1612 and is credited with building the first documented glasshouse in the immediate area, known as Colemans near Lye, around 1614.²⁸

What drew these skilled migrants specifically to the Stourbridge area was the remarkable local abundance of the essential raw materials for glassmaking:

Fireclay: This was arguably the most critical factor.¹ Found in rich seams beneath the local coal measures ⁸, the fireclay of the Stourbridge and Amblecote area possessed exceptional qualities. It was highly refractory, meaning it could withstand the intense heat of glass furnaces without melting or cracking, and it was remarkably pure, lacking impurities that could cause defects in the melting pots (crucibles) or contaminate the glass.⁸ This made it ideal for constructing the large, durable pots needed to hold molten glass and for lining the furnaces themselves.⁸ The quality of Stourbridge fireclay was so renowned that it was exported in large quantities worldwide.⁸ Specific types, like a dark blue clay from Amblecote, were particularly prized for making the best glasshouse pots.⁸
Coal: As glass production industrialized, coal replaced wood as the primary fuel for furnaces. Wood had become scarce, and its use was restricted by the early 17th century to prevent deforestation.²⁹ The Stourbridge area possessed plentiful coal seams, often mined in conjunction with the underlying fireclay.³⁶ Coal furnaces burned hotter and were more controllable than wood fires, enabling higher quality glass production but also demanding more resilient fireclay pots.³⁵
Sand: The basic ingredient for glass, silica sand, was initially sourced from local sandstone.²⁹ As the industry evolved towards producing finer lead crystal, higher purity silica sand with fewer impurities (like iron, which colours glass green) was imported from areas such as Scotland and Cornwall.³⁵

The establishment and success of the Stourbridge glass industry serve as a classic illustration of industrial location theory. The convergence of uniquely suitable, high-quality natural resources – particularly the refractory fireclay essential for evolving furnace technology – with the timely arrival of skilled migrant labor created a powerful synergy. This combination gave the region a distinct competitive advantage, allowing it to develop into a highly specialized industrial cluster focused on glass production.

B. The “Stourbridge Glass” Appellation and Geography

An important geographical distinction must be made. Despite the industry being universally known as ‘Stourbridge Glass’, very few, if any, glassworks were ever located within the boundaries of Stourbridge town itself.¹ The actual production sites were clustered in the surrounding parishes and villages, forming a ‘glass quarter’ that included Wordsley, Amblecote, Oldswinford, Lye, Wollaston, Brierley Hill, and even extending towards Dudley.¹

The name ‘Stourbridge Glass’ arose because Stourbridge town functioned as the commercial, financial, and administrative hub for this wider industrial district.³ The town housed the banks and merchants who served the glassmaking enterprises. Consequently, business correspondence, bills of lading, and financial documents originating from the glassworks often bore a ‘Stourbridge’ heading, leading to the adoption of this name as the generic term for the region’s renowned products.³ Key historical sites within this glass quarter include the iconic Red House Glass Cone in Wordsley (built circa 1790 and now a museum) ²⁸, the Coalbournhill Glassworks in Amblecote ²⁹, and the Dennis Glassworks.³⁰ This demonstrates that “Stourbridge Glass” represents a regional industrial identity, where a central town provided commercial and service functions for a network of specialized production sites in its immediate vicinity.

C. Products, Peaks, and People

The output of the Stourbridge glass industry evolved significantly over time. Initial production focused on utilitarian items like window glass (often made using the blown and slit-cylinder ‘broadsheet’ method), bottles, and phials for apothecaries.³ A major shift occurred in the late 17th and early 18th centuries with the adoption of lead glass (often called lead crystal), perfected by George Ravenscroft in the 1670s.³⁴ This heavier, more brilliant glass allowed for intricate cutting and engraving, leading Stourbridge factories to move into the production of high-quality tableware, such as drinking glasses and decanters, catering to fashionable tastes.³ The area also became known for coloured glass, high-quality ‘flint glass’, and specialized glass for chemical and scientific use.⁸ Later innovations included pressed glass technology, adopted from the USA in the 1830s-1850s.⁴²

The 19th century, particularly the period after the repeal of the burdensome Glass Excise Act in 1845, is widely regarded as the “Golden Age” of Stourbridge Glass.¹ Freed from punitive taxation, manufacturers experimented lavishly, establishing Stourbridge craftsmen as world leaders.³ This era saw a dazzling proliferation of shapes, colours, and decorative techniques. Firms developed expertise in cameo glass (carving through layers of different coloured glass, pioneered locally by figures like John Northwood), intricate engraving, acid etching (facilitated by Northwood’s invention of etching machines), cased glass (layers of different colours), iridescent finishes, and numerous patented novelty glasses with names like ‘Moss Agate’, ‘Burmese’, and ‘Alexandrite’.²⁸ Leading families and firms associated with this peak period include Jeavons ¹, Thomas Webb & Sons ³⁰, Stuart Crystal ³⁰, Richardson ³³, and Webb Corbett.³⁰

This thriving industry supported a substantial workforce. By 1852, an estimated 1,000 people were employed in glassmaking in the town and its neighbourhood.⁸ The 1861 census recorded 1,032 Stourbridge residents involved in the glass trade, with 541 specifically identified as glass workers.¹ While many workers came from the surrounding counties of Staffordshire, Warwickshire, and Shropshire, the industry also attracted skilled labour from further afield. Notably, a significant percentage of glass cutters (8.1% in the 1861 census) came from Ireland, likely due to the decline of the Irish glass industry in the early 19th century.¹ Highly skilled decorators, engravers, and gilders were also recruited from France and Bohemia (modern Czech Republic).⁴² Although housing for glassworkers was generally better than the slums occupied by workers in other local trades like nailmaking, home ownership among them remained low.¹

Alongside glass, the fireclay industry itself became a major employer and economic force, described as almost as important as glassmaking by the 1850s.⁸ Besides supplying the crucial melting pots to the glassworks, the fireclay mines produced vast quantities of fire bricks (exported globally for lining furnaces in various industries), crucibles for metal melting (Birmingham factories alone purchased around 1200 per week), large clay retorts for gas works, and even sizable baths moulded in one piece.⁸ Several prominent local families owned and operated these fireclay mines.⁸

The trajectory of Stourbridge glass demonstrates a dynamic adaptation to technological change (lead crystal, pressing, etching machines), evolving market demands (from basic necessities to luxury goods), and shifting economic conditions (the repeal of the Glass Excise Act). The industry’s success was built not only on local resources but also on its ability to attract and integrate a diverse pool of specialized, often migrant, labour, reflecting the interconnectedness of industrial development in the 19th century.

D. Decline and Legacy

Despite its centuries of success, the large-scale Stourbridge glass industry faced significant decline in the latter half of the 20th century. Several factors contributed to this downturn, including a perceived failure to fully modernize production methods, intense competition from overseas manufacturers, shifts in consumer tastes away from traditional cut crystal, rising energy costs, and increasing environmental and health and safety regulations.²⁸ This led to the closure of the major, historic firms that had long dominated the industry: Thomas Webb and Sons closed in 1990, Webb Corbett (by then owned by Royal Doulton) closed in 1995, Royal Brierley Crystal faced bankruptcy in 2000 (though the name was later acquired), and Stuart Crystal was closed by its parent company Waterford Wedgwood in 2001.²⁸

Today, the glass industry in the Stourbridge area operates on a much smaller scale but has not disappeared entirely.³ A few companies continue traditional production, such as Brierley Hill Crystal (specializing in cut crystal) and Plowden & Thompson (producing technical glass, notably still operating on an original glass cone site).²⁸ Alongside these, a growing community of smaller studios and independent contemporary glass artists keeps the traditions of skill and creativity alive, often focusing on studio glass and artistic pieces rather than mass production.²⁸

The rich heritage of Stourbridge Glass is actively preserved and celebrated through museums and visitor centres, including the Red House Glass Cone museum in Wordsley, the dedicated Stourbridge Glass Museum (opened opposite the Cone), and the Ruskin Glass Centre (located on the former Royal Doulton factory site), which houses craft workshops and studios.³⁰ Events like the biennial International Festival of Glass also draw attention to both the historical legacy and contemporary practice.⁴¹ Archaeological investigations continue to uncover physical remnants of the industry’s past, such as early furnace bases discovered at the Glasshouse College site.³¹ The decline of the large factories thus marks a transition, shifting the role of “Stourbridge Glass” from a dominant economic engine based on mass production towards a combination of specialized niche manufacturing and a carefully curated cultural and historical legacy.

V. Stourbridge in the Modernist Lens: Joyce and Pound

Beyond its tangible history of industry and settlement, Stourbridge finds intriguing resonance within the complex textual worlds of two giants of literary modernism, James Joyce and Ezra Pound. Their inclusion of the town, though differing significantly in nature and context, highlights how specific place-names and their associations could be absorbed and repurposed within the ambitious scope of modernist writing.

A. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939)

In James Joyce’s notoriously dense and linguistically playful final work, Finnegans Wake, the name Stourbridge appears in a characteristically compressed and evocative phrase. On page 184 of standard editions, during the extended, often satirical portrayal of the artist-figure Shem the Penman (a complex analogue for Joyce himself), the text describes Shem’s meagre and messy existence: “…so up he got up whatever is meant by a stourbridge clay kitchenette and lithargogalenu fowlhouse for the sake of akes”.⁴⁴

This passage occurs within Chapter 7 of Book I, a section dedicated to dissecting Shem’s character, creative processes, and bodily functions, often blurring the lines between writing, creation, and excretion in a typically Rabelaisian fashion.⁴⁵ The phrase itself combines mundane domestic imagery with specific industrial and chemical references:

“stourbridge clay”: This immediately invokes the town’s primary industrial association – the high-quality fireclay essential for its glass and ceramics industries. In this context, it suggests a raw, earthy, perhaps even waste material, the basic ‘stuff’ of physical existence or primitive creation. It grounds the description in a specific, real-world industrial substance known for its connection to heat and transformation.
“kitchenette”: This denotes a small, functional, often basic domestic space for cooking. Its juxtaposition with “Stourbridge clay” creates a jarring image – a primitive or makeshift domestic or creative area constructed from, or perhaps contaminated by, industrial material. It suggests inadequacy, confinement, or a fusion of the industrial and the domestic.
“lithargogalenu”: This portmanteau word blends “litharge” (lead monoxide, used in glazing pottery and glassmaking) and “galena” (lead sulfide, the natural ore of lead). Both substances connect to Stourbridge’s associated industries (ceramics, glass) and the broader context of mining and chemical processing. They carry connotations of weight, potential toxicity, and transformation through heat, perhaps hinting at alchemical processes.
“fowlhouse”: A simple structure for housing poultry, suggesting basic animal existence, shelter, and potentially organic waste (guano).

Combined, “stourbridge clay kitchenette and lithargogalenu fowlhouse” constructs a bizarre, multi-layered metaphor. It likely represents Shem’s (the artist’s) creative space and process as something grounded in base, physical, even messy and industrial realities. It conflates the domestic (kitchenette), the animal (fowlhouse), the industrial (Stourbridge clay), and the chemical/mineral (litharge, galena). Within the chapter’s critique of Shem, it could mock pretensions to purely ethereal or refined artistic creation, emphasizing instead its connection to bodily functions and raw materials. The choice of “Stourbridge clay,” specifically, seems deliberate, leveraging the material’s association with fire, transformation, and industrial production to mirror or parody the ‘heat’ and transformative nature of artistic (and biological) processes that are central themes in Finnegans Wake.⁴⁶ Joyce uses the specific industrial identity of the place to enrich his complex metaphorical language.

B. Ezra Pound, The Cantos (Canto LXXVI, 1948)

Ezra Pound’s reference to Stourbridge occurs in Canto LXXVI, part of The Pisan Cantos section, written during his incarceration in an American military detention camp near Pisa, Italy, following World War II.⁴⁹ These cantos are marked by their personal, fragmented, and often elegiac tone, weaving together memories, historical allusions, observations of the prison camp, and reflections on Pound’s life and work.

The specific line reads: “and I went in a post chaise Woburn Farm, Stowe, Stratford, Stourbridge, Woodstock, High Wycombe and back to Grosvenor Sq”.⁵⁰ This appears within a passage recalling English landscapes and journeys.

The Itinerary: The line lists a sequence of specific English place names, mapping out a journey undertaken by post chaise (a type of fast horse-drawn carriage used for mail and passengers, common in the 18th and 19th centuries). The locations themselves – Woburn Farm, the renowned landscape gardens of Stowe, Shakespeare’s Stratford-upon-Avon, Stourbridge, Woodstock (near Blenheim Palace), High Wycombe, and London’s aristocratic Grosvenor Square – evoke a particular sense of English history, literature, landscape, and social hierarchy.
Function in the Canto: Within the context of Pound’s imprisonment and mental fragmentation in Pisa, such lists of places often function as attempts to reconstruct memory, impose order on disparate fragments of the past, or evoke a lost world of culture and movement.⁴⁹ The journey by post chaise represents a specific mode of travel from a past era, connecting these culturally significant locations. Stourbridge appears simply as one geographical point along this remembered or reconstructed route.
Possible Sources: Pound frequently incorporated historical details and itineraries, which he termed ‘periploi’ (voyages or coastal surveys), into The Cantos.⁴⁹ This specific itinerary might be drawn from his extensive reading of historical accounts or biographies. For instance, James Boswell’s accounts of his travels with Samuel Johnson mention passing through Stourbridge in a post chaise, a potential source Pound might have utilized.⁵¹ Figures like John Adams, central to later Cantos, also undertook extensive tours of England.⁵²

Unlike Joyce’s usage, Pound’s mention of Stourbridge does not appear to draw heavily on the town’s specific industrial identity. Its significance seems primarily topographical and historical. It functions as a concrete geographical marker within a larger constellation of places that, together, evoke a particular vision of England’s cultural and historical landscape. In the Pisan context, recalling such a journey serves as an act of mental reconstruction, mapping points of cultural significance from a lost past against the backdrop of present confinement and ruin. Stourbridge’s role here is relational – its importance derives from its position within this specific historical and geographical sequence, contributing to the Canto’s complex tapestry of memory, history, and place.

VI. Synthesis: The Interwoven Significance of Stourbridge

The identity of Stourbridge, West Midlands, emerges from a rich tapestry woven from threads of geography, geology, human ingenuity, industrial history, and even literary representation. Its significance lies not in any single element but in the intricate ways these factors have interacted over centuries.

The town owes its very name and initial prominence to its location on the River Stour and the vital bridge constructed across it.⁴ This river crossing, established by the mid-13th century, provided the nucleus around which the settlement grew, distinguishing it and facilitating its development as a market town.⁴ The river’s name, ‘Stour’, though etymologically uncertain, carries ancient resonances of power and motion, providing a fitting backdrop to the town’s dynamic history.⁵

Stourbridge’s destiny, however, was most profoundly shaped by the resources lying beneath its surface. The exceptional quality of the local fireclay – its purity and ability to withstand extreme heat – proved to be the crucial ingredient for industrial success.⁸ Combined with readily available coal reserves, this geological endowment attracted skilled Huguenot glassmakers in the 17th century, providing the foundation for an industry that would bring the town global renown.⁸ This demonstrates powerfully how specific geological conditions can interact with human migration and technological need to create highly specialized industrial centres.

The “Stourbridge Glass” identity, synonymous with quality and artistry for over three centuries, became the town’s defining feature, even though production largely occurred in surrounding villages.¹ This industrial specialization shaped the local economy, drew in diverse populations of workers including significant migrant communities ¹, and left a distinctive mark on the landscape, symbolized by the iconic (though now rare) glass cones.²⁸ While the era of large-scale production has passed, the legacy endures through specialist manufacturers, contemporary craftspeople, and dedicated heritage institutions that preserve and interpret this unique industrial history.²⁸

Finally, Stourbridge resonates, albeit differently, within the works of Joyce and Pound. For Joyce in Finnegans Wake, “Stourbridge clay” becomes a potent, earthy symbol, integrated into his complex metaphorical exploration of the messy realities of artistic and biological creation.⁴⁴ For Pound in The Cantos, Stourbridge serves as a topographical point on a historical map, a fragment of remembered or reconstructed English geography contributing to his vast collage of memory and cultural landscape.⁵⁰ These literary appearances, while tangential to the town’s main historical narrative, demonstrate how even seemingly localized industrial identities can be absorbed and re-signified within the broader cultural consciousness.

In conclusion, Stourbridge stands as a place deeply marked by the interplay between its natural environment – the river that birthed it and the clay that fuelled its fame – and the human activities of bridge-building, industrial innovation, and artistic creation. Its significance spans local history, the narrative of British industrial development, and unexpected corners of modernist literature. The initial query regarding a potential link between ‘Stour’ and ‘steer’/’Cybernetics’, though ultimately found to be linguistically unsupported, served as a valuable catalyst for uncovering the complex and genuinely fascinating etymological, historical, industrial, and cultural layers that constitute the rich identity of Stourbridge.

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April 28, 2025

Fly On The Tale Of The Tribe – Reading From TSOG by Robert Anton Wilson

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–Steve Fly

August 22, 2018
INTRODUCTION THE TALE OF THE TRIBE – Michael André Bernstein

Michael André Bernstein

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

INTRODUCTION THE TALE OF THE TRIBE “I hold that a long poem does not exist. I maintain that the phrase ‘a long poem’ is simply a contradiction in terms. . . . If at any time, any very long poem were popular in reality—which I doubt—it is at least clear that no very long poem will ever be popular again.” —Edgar Allan Poe, “The Poetic Principle”
1 “A heroic poem, truly such, is undoubtedly the greatest work which the soul of man is capable to perform.” —John Dryden, “Dedication Of The Aeneis”

2 In 1920, Georg Lukacs published a critical study entitled The Theory of the Novel. The subtitle of this work, “A historicophilosophical essay on the forms of great epic literature,” announces Lukacs’ decision to treat the novel as the fundamental form of epic literature in modern writing. Subsequently, he justifies this decision, explaining: The epic and the novel, these two major forms of great epic literature differ from one another not by their author ‘s fundamental intentions but by the given historico -philosophical realities with which the authors were confronted. The novel is the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given, in which the immanence of meaning in life has become the problem, yet which still thinks in terms of totality.

3 The conviction that verse could no longer deal adequately with “the extensive totality of life” (while the novel was now

4 · INTRODUCTION regarded as uniquely suited to attempt such a task) was by no means original with, or restricted to, Lukacs. Rather, he is representative of a widely shared attitude: a narrowing of the sphere regarded as “appropriate” for verse, which any poet seeking to equal the breadth of scope and subject matter of great novelists was compelled to confront. In 1917, when Ezra Pound began to publish his long modern verse epic, The Cantos, he was distinctly nervous about the problematic nature of his undertaking, and in the unrevised version of Canto I, he speculates whether it would not be wiser to “sulk and leave the word to novelists.”

4 As late as 1922, after he had already completely revised the poem’s opening and published the first eight Cantos, Pound’s correspondence reveals a man still anxiously defending the ambitious intentions of his work-in-progress: “Perhaps as the poem goes on I shall be able to make various things clearer. Having the crust to attempt a poem in 100 or 120 cantos long after all mankind has been commanded never again to attempt a poem of any length, I have to stagger as I can.” (L:180) Underlying both Lukacs’ critical pronouncement and Pound’s initial self-doubt is a questioning of the essential nature of poetic discourse, of the formal limits within which the special language of verse must move if it is to remain faithful to its fundamental character as poetry. The question is really one of “decorum” in the full classical sense, an attempt to discover anew which modes of literary presentations are intrinsically most suitable to the different areas of human experience. By the end of the First World War, a verse epic was not so much a form as an oxymoron, an anachronism that seemed to violate what many poets as well as critics had come to regard as the characteristic structure and horizon of poetic discourse. Edgar Allan Poe’s strictures against the long poem in “The Poetic Principle” (1848) exercised a profound influence throughout the nineteenth century, especially upon the decisive figures in the development of modern French verse— Charles Baudelaire, Stephane Mallarme, and Arthur Rimbaud —but, in their own writings, Poe’s argument was taken up as only one aspect of a fundamental upheaval in the connection between language as a literary, poetic artifact and the INTRODUCTION ·

5 world of quotidian reality. At bottom it was the representational nature of artistic language that was challenged, the traditional conception of verse as a mimesis of some external, and consequently independent, event. For Mallarme the poetic text was neither the discoverer nor even the celebrant of previously existent values: it was their sole originator, at once the source and only locus of meaning. The words of a poem, an incantation and hieroglyph, were absolutely divorced from their usage in the mundane world, and art, rather than offering an articulated duplication of reality, was seen as itself conferring the only reality, the only authentic and absolute form of being attainable.
https://muse.jhu.edu/chapter/1258462
.

March 2, 2017
McLuhan and Holeopathic Quadrophrenia | The Mouse-That-Roared Syndrome by Bob Dobbs

McLuhan and Holeopathic Quadrophrenia | The Mouse-That-Roared Syndrome

ListenBob Dobbs at “Legacy of McLuhan Symposium,” Lincoln Center, Manhattan, sponsored by Fordham University, 28 March 1998
by Bob Dobbs
(published in The Legacy of McLuhan)

Phase 1
“…much of III.3 (Book Three, Chapter Three-ed.) is telephone conversation… As III.3 opens with a person named Yawn and III.4 displays the ingress of daylight upon the night of Finnegans Wake, the note on VI.B.5.29 is interesting:
‘Yawn telegraph telephone Dawn wireless thought transference.’ “
Roland McHugh,The Sigla of Finnegans Wake, p.19, 1976

“…Orion of the Orgiasts, Meereschal MacMuhun, the Ipse dadden, product of the extremes giving quotidients to our means, as might occur to anyone, your brutest layaman with the princest champion in our archdeaconry, or so yclept from Clio’s clippings, which the chroncher of chivalries is sulpicious save he scan, for ancients link with presents as the human chain extends,…”
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, p.254, 1939

(In McLuhan’s private library in one of his copies of Finnegans Wake he has pencilled in the words “me” and “moon child” next to Joyce’s “Meereschal MacMuhun”.)
“The ordinary desire of everybody to have everybody else think alike with himself has some explosive implications today.”
(the first sentence in the first article McLuhan wrote for Explorations-ed.)
H. M. McLuhan, Culture without Literacy,Explorations Magazine, Volume1, p.117, December, 1953

“Entertainment in the future may have quite different patterns and functions. You’ll become a yogi, you’ll do your self-entertainment in yoga style.”
Marshall McLuhan,Like Yoga, Not Like the Movies,Forbes Magazine, p.40, March 15, 1967

“T. S. Eliot’s famous account of ‘the auditory imagination’ has become an ordinary form of awareness; but Finnegans Wake, as a comprehensive study of the psychic and social dynamics of all media, remains to be brought into the waking life of our world.”
Marshall McLuhan,Letter to Playboy Magazine, p.18, March, 1970

“At electric speeds the hieroglyphs of the page of Nature become readily intelligible and the Book of the World becomes a kind of Orphic hymn of revelation.”
Marshall McLuhan, Libraries: Past, Present, Future(address at Geneseo, New York-ed.), p.1, July 3, 1970

“The future of government lies in the area of psychic ecology and can no longer be considered on a merely national or international basis.”
Marshall McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt,Take Today: The Executive as Dropout, p.227, 1972

“And do you know,” he (Eric McLuhan-ed.) enthuses, “there are actually (four-ed.) laws governing media communications? At last we can prove to people that we aren’t just theorists. This is a real science…. We know there is one more law,” says Eric. “And we’ll find it. Sooner or later.”
Olivia Ward,Now! Son of Guru!,Toronto Star, p.D1, March 30, 1980

Marshall McLuhan made two decisions in 1937: one was the spiritual strategy of becoming a Roman Catholic, and the other was the secular strategy, after intensive study at Cambridge, of translating James Joyce’s Work-in-Progress (later given the title of Finnegans Wake in 1939) into an aesthetic anti-environment useful for countering and probing the cultural assumptions of a practicing Catholic.
For the next twenty years he refined his understanding of, first, the Thomist concept of analogical proportionality as the expression of the tactile interval, and second, its usefulness in perceiving the cultural effects of the new electric technologies, through an ongoing dialogue, analysis, and sensory meditation on the nature of metaphor and consciousness (including extrasensory perception) as an artifact. Since McLuhan defined “metaphor”(1) as the act of looking at one situation through another, each situation constitutive of figure-ground interplay (a concept borrowed from Gestalt psychology), then a metaphor was an instance of mixed media, or two figure-grounds. And so was consciousness – because of its essential subjective experience as doubleness, which is doubled again as the objective effect of its autonomous interplay with other consciousnesses. Metaphor, for McLuhan, was hylomorphic(2). In retrospect, the equation McLuhan was playing with could be flattened out as:

metaphor=mixed media=doubleness =consciousness=tactile interplay=the Christian Holy Cross=figure/ground=analogical mirror=iconic fact= cliché/archetype=resonant field= hendiadys=menippean irony,

each and all (except for “metaphor”) squared. However, after he made personal contact with Wyndham Lewis in 1943, their dialogue enhanced his appreciation of adopting Wyndham Lewis’ social probing style as a political anti-environment to McLuhan’s own commitment to the poetry of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, and James Joyce. Hence, his own studies simulated the doubleness he was observing technically. For the rest of his career McLuhan juggled the artistic approaches of these five artists in miming the tactile qualities of the analogical drama of proper proportions – the drama of being and perception. For him, language was the drama of cognition and recognition, or consciousness.

“The measure of our (Catholics-ed.) unawareness and irrelevance can be taken from the fact that no Thomist has so far seen fit to expound St. Thomas’s theory of communication by way of providing modern insight into our problems.”
H. M. McLuhan,The Heart of Darkness(unpublished review of Melville’s Quarrel with God by Lawrence Thompson, 1952-ed.), p.8, 1952

“The analogical relation between exterior posture and gesture and the interior movements and dispositions of the mind is the irreducible basis of drama. In the Wake this appears everywhere. So that any attempt to reduce its action, at any point, to terms of univocal statement results in radical distortion.(p.33)… It needs to be understood that only short discontinuous shots of such a work as Joyce’s are possible. Linear or continuous perspectives of analogical structures are only the result of radical distortion, and the craving for ‘simple explanations’ is the yearning for univocity.”(p.36-7)
Marshall McLuhan,James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial (1953) in The Interior Landscape, pp.33 and 36-7, 1969

“For the Catholic the revealed word of God is not the Gutenberg Bible nor the King James’ version. But the Protestant cannot but take a different view of the passing of the pre-eminence of the printed book; because Protestantism was born with printing and seems to be passing with it. There again the Catholic alone has nothing to fear from the rapidity of the changes in the media of communication. But national cultures have much to fear.”
Marshall McLuhan,Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters,Christian Humanism in Letters: The McAuley Lectures,Series 2, p.78, 1954

“Wyndham Lewis is perhaps the first creative writer to have taken over the new media en bloc as modes of artistic and social control. (Joyce and Eliot have done so on a smaller scale.)(p.17)… With the help of modern scientific medicine he (Lewis-ed.) re-edits and refurnishes the various levels of Dante’s Inferno in a startling way. The Devils appear as film stars perturbed by the ease with which their supernatural dimensions are mimicked by modern publicity devices. It’s this power of the new media which fosters a new humanist movement in Hell.”(p.18)
Marshall McLuhan,Third Program in the Human Age,Explorations Magazine, Volume 8, p.17-8, October, 1957

“Finnegans Wake is the greatest guidebook to media study ever fashioned by man.”
Marshall McLuhan,Newsweek Magazine, p.56, February 28, 1966

“The Catholic Church does not depend on human wisdom or human strategies for survival. All the best intentions in the world can’t destroy the Catholic Church! It is indestructible, even as a human institution. It may once again undergo a terrible persecution and so on. But that’s probably what it needs.”
Marshall McLuhan,Futurechurch: Edward Wakin interviews Marshall McLuhan,U.S. Catholic Magazine, p.6, January, 1977

McLuhan also meditated and formulated with the process-pattern that there had been three Copernican Revolutions in the collective consciousness: the first, via Copernicus, had thrown man as an image to the edges of the universe; the second, via Kant, threw man into an inner landscape; and the third, via the twentieth-century revolution of pattern-recognition, threw man inside the machine. His growing understanding of the third revolution in collective perception allowed him to see that the managers of contemporary society operated by means of the principle that the technological unconscious (the “archetypes of the social unconscious”)(3) is a massage in all facets of modern life. For example, Keynesian economics was the recognition, in the 1930s, that money would now be a technically-managed medium, or a guaranteed environment. In all areas of decision-making, this principle meant the use of the technique of the suspended judgement in parallel with a multi-levelled application of the anthropological concept of “phatic communion” (4).

“It is on its technical and mechanical side that the front page is linked to the techniques of modern science and art. Discontinuity is in different ways a basic concept both of quantum and relativity physics. It is the way in which a Toynbee looks at civilizations, or a Margaret Mead at human cultures. Notoriously, it is the visual technique of a Picasso, the literary technique of James Joyce.”
Marshall McLuhan,The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man, p.3, 1951

“By pretending that the new magic can be contained in the entertainment sphere we assume the old form-content split which is based on the doctrine that the form of communication is neutral. Even Hitler and Goebbels, fortunately, shared this illusion with the Western world. At present we appear to be living by an illusion but with magical media. Of course this may prove to be an enduring formula.”
Marshall McLuhan,Notes on the Media as Art Forms, Explorations Magazine, Volume 2, p.13, April, 1954

“As gimmick, the machine is useful. As object, as companion, as environment-shaper, it is magical. Marx was right to that extent. He saw that the machine would necessarily transform human feeling and sensibility. It would change habits of association and work. It would re-structure one’s idea of the world and of oneself. It was the revolution.”
Marshall McLuhan,Poetry and Society, Poetry Magazine, Volume 84, No.2, p.95, May, 1954

“A few Europeans like LeCorbusier and Giedion have undertaken to verbalize our technology for us. A few of our artists such as Poe, Henry James, Pound, and Eliot have in reverse order undertaken to technologize the traditional verbal world of the European.”
Marshall McLuhan,Space, Time and Poetry, Explorations Magazine, Volume 4,p.60, February, 1955

“Cubism, by seizing on instant total awareness, suddenly announced that the medium is the message…. Specialized segments of attention have shifted to total field, and we can now say, ‘The medium is the message’, quite naturally. Before the electric speed and total field, it was not obvious that the medium is the message.”
Marshall McLuhan,Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, p.28, 1964

“The futurists, the cubists, the Vorticists, and others accepted the mechanical as an art form. Today, Pop art, derived from the old environment of advertising technology, appears as an art form.”
Marshall McLuhan,New Media and the Arts, Arts in Society Magazine, Volume 3, No.2, p.239, September, 1964

“Like Burroughs, Joyce was sure he had worked out the formula for total cultural understanding and control. The idea of art as total programing for the environment is tribal, mental, Egyptian. It is, also, an idea of art to which electric technology leads quite strongly. We live science fiction.”
Marshall McLuhan,Notes on Burroughs, Nation Magazine,p.519, December 28, 1964

“My own interest in symbolist techniques in poetry and painting, and my concern with the poetic processes and the training of perception and awareness, have long taught me to avoid fixed positions and value judgements where techne is concerned.”
Marshall McLuhan,Obiter Dicta, Letter to Atlantic Monthly Magazine,p.39, October, 1971

McLuhan, however, revealed an aspect of this principle that included the concept of a collective extrasensory perception as an hylomorphic (“organic”)(2), dramatic quality and effect of any electric environment – an anticipation of the recent popular concept of the “meme”. Privately, he would refer to one facet of the complex extrasensory characteristics of this third Copernican revolution as the “‘Prince of this World’,… a great electric engineer, and a great master of the media”(5). McLuhan was anticipating what I would term “tetrad management”, the managerial “postures and impostures”(6) resulting from an environment of “participation mystique”(7) (effects merge with causes) and “anticipatory democracy”(8) (effects precede causes).

“Synesthesia, the new sin of the nineteenth century, roused as much misunderstanding as E.S.P. today. Extra sensory perception is normal perception. Today electronics are extra sensory, Gallup polls and motivation research are also. Therefore, people get all steamed up about E.S.P. as something for the future. It is already past and present.”
Marshall McLuhan,Electronics as E.S.P., Explorations Magazine,Volume 8, Section 3, October, 1957

“Any artist in any field whatever knows that ‘form’ and ‘content’ are a bogus pair. But when such a notion is all we have with which to cope with modern entertainment (and education) we are helpless. When we hear that ‘the medium is the message in the long run’, we think it is jabberwocky or Finneganese. And so it is. That is, such a formula speaks not of one plane of fact at a time, but is multi-leveled.”
Marshall McLuhan,Around the World, Around the Clock(review of The Image Industries by William Lynch, S.J.-ed.),Renascence Magazine, Volume12, No.4, p.205, Summer, 1960

“Wealth is already derived for the most part from the movement of information alone, and will increase in our time as the mere reflex of human chatter. That is why paid learning is long overdue.”
Marshall McLuhan,The Electronic Age – The Age of Implosion,Mass Media in Canada, p.201, 1962

By June, 1952, after television had become an environment in the United States, Harold Innis had died, and McLuhan had gotten tenure as a professor, he was ready to present his insights into the tentative maneuverings of tetrad-management in a multi-disciplinary format as an anti-environment to the new technical developments in society. Thus was born the Explorations experiment which ran its course until 1957
“We can win China and India for the West only by giving them the new media. Russia will not give these to them. Television prevents communism because it is post-Marx just as the book is pre-Marx.”
Marshall McLuhan,Media Log, Explorations Magazine,Volume 4, p.55, February, 1955

“Politics have become musical; music has become politics. Government has become entertainment, and vice versa. Commerce has become incantation and magical gesture. fScience and magic have married each other. Technology and the arts meet and mingle.”
Marshall McLuhan,Space, Time and Poetry, Explorations Magazine,Volume 4, p.59, February, 1955

“We have to know what we are doing in advance. We have to repeat what we were about to say.”
Marshall McLuhan,The Be-Spoke Tailor, Explorations Magazine,Volume 8, Section 4, October, 1957

“A bell is to auditory space what a polished surface is to a visual space – a mirror. ALP is river mirror of HCE the mountain. It is he for whom the belles toil.”
Marshall McLuhan,Television Murders Telephony, Explorations Magazine,Volume 8, Section 19, October, 1957

“In his Company Manners Louis Kronenberger describes how ‘one very real social phenomenon of our time is that “creative” people constitute America’s newest nouveaux riches ‘. Spectorsky in his Exurbanites refers to them as the symbol-manipulators, meaning those who have mastered the grammar and rhetoric of the new media.”
Marshall McLuhan,The Old New Rich and the New New Rich,Explorations Magazine, Volume 8, Section 23, October, 1957

“The effect of TV, as the most recent and spectacular electric extension of our central nervous system, is hard to grasp for various reasons. Since it has affected the totality of our lives, personal and social and political, it would be quite unrealistic to attempt a ‘systematic’ or visual presentation of such influence. Instead, it is more feasible to ‘present’ TV as a complex gestalt of data gathered almost at random.”
Marshall McLuhan,Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, p.317, 1964

“In a world in which we are all ingesting and digesting one another there can be no obscenity or pornography or decency. Such is the law of electric media which stretch the nerves to form a global membrane of enclosure.”
Marshall McLuhan,Notes on Burroughs, Nation Magazine,p.518, December 28, 1964

“In an interview with James R. Dickenson for the National Observer (May 30, 1966) he (McLuhan-ed.) spoke about the pride he takes in understanding media and quoted Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, ‘We were the first that ever burst/Into that silent sea’.”
Raymond Rosenthal,Current Biography, McLuhan: Pro&Con, p.22, 1968

This project was obsolesced by Sputnik on October 4, 1957. During the following twenty years McLuhan studied the consequences of the post-tactile and post-television environments created by the new computer and satellite technologies (with an eye on the new laser inventions, also) which had cracked all the visual, acoustic, and tactile mirrors. The multi-media gestures that McLuhan made in this second twenty-year phase were based on a post-tetradic sensibility of menippean tactility, or menippean phatic communion, i.e., from the perspective of the “pentad-manager”(9) – one who understands that the Present can only be an art form.
“Jet travel and satellite broadcasting will foster the grasp of languages, ancient and modern, in a simultaneous cultural transparency.”
Marshall McLuhan,The Humanities in the Electronic Age, Humanities Association Bulletin (Canada), Volume 34, No.1, p.11, Fall, 1961

“And I think it is this multiplicity of media that is now enabling man to free himself from media for the first time in history. He has been the victim, the servo-mechanism of his technologies, his media from the beginning of time, but now because of the sheer multiplicity of them he is beginning to awaken. Because he can’t live with them all.”
Marshall McLuhan,Prospect, Canadian Art Magazine,Volume 19, p.365, September/October, 1962

“Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man – the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our senses and our nerves by the various media.(p.19)… For with the telegraph, man had initiated that outering or extension of his central nervous system that is now approaching an extension of consciousness with satellite broadcasting.”(p.222)
Marshall McLuhan,Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man,pp.19 and 222, 1964

“TV, as the latest archetypal environment or technology, is very much in this dishevelled phase. The movie remained in such a dishevelled phase for decades. Whether Telstar is already a new archetypal environment that assumes the present TV form as its content will appear fairly soon.”
Marshall McLuhan,New Media and the Arts, Arts in Society Magazine,Volume 3, No.2, p.242, September, 1964

“The hullabaloo Madison Avenue creates couldn’t condition a mouse.”
Marshall McLuhan,Newsweek Magazine, p.56, February 28, 1966

“The 70’s will see: The end of SOLUTIONS. Pattern recognition via inspection of multiple problems will bring an end to the hidden environments.”
Marshall McLuhan,Profile of the 70’S, The McLuhan DEW-Line,Volume 2, No.3, a poster, November, 1969

“For the future of the future is the present.”
Marshall McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt,Take Today: The Executive as Dropout, p.134, 1972

“At instant speeds, everybody begins to live inside a 360-degree module in which every event echoes every other event back and forth at electric speeds, and all events bounce off each other creating patterns. There is one optimistic feature. The mind moves very much faster than light. Light travels to Mars in minutes. The mind can go and come back from Mars in an instant many times. The mind can actually recognize all these electric patterns as easily as it can alphabetic letters. It’s very much faster than the computer.”
Marshall McLuhan in McLuhan Dissects the Executive,Business Week Magazine, p.118, June 24, 1972

Returning to the first phase (1937-57) we see, from McLuhan’s perspective, he had enthusiastically performed as an agent and catalyst for a discriminating plenary awareness under electric conditions of the interplay between private and public awareness as an artifact. Miming the Logos (speech as an archetype)(10) this entailed retrieving the five parts of rhetoric (inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria, and pronuntiatio) and the four Aristotelian causes (formal, material, efficient, and final) in parallel with the four traditional levels of exegesis (literal, allegorical, moral, and eschatological) and applying them as a grammarian, rhetorician, dialectician, musician, mathematician, geometer, astronomer, psychologist, sociologist, anthropologist, scientist, psychic, doctor, and politician either simultaneously or separately in their traditional specialized contexts, depending on the medium and audience addressed. This method was McLuhan’s conscious strategy of mirroring and testing the conventional “schizophrenic”(11) lives of the ordinary citizen: McLuhan as cyborg and floating, winking tetrad (see the four-level interplay of the SI/SC/HD/LD charts in McLuhan’s Report on Project in Understanding New Media, 1960-ed.). In this regard, he explored meditative attention a great deal further and deeper than the popular and influential Menippean religionist, Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895-1986), or any of his imitators or successors. This phase of McLuhan’s career inaugurated a new and enduring private and collective yoga inside an immanent “communication ecology”(12).

“This may be said, at least, by way of illustrating the mode in which any poet’s prose criticism directs the keenest possible ray on his own poetic practice.”
Marshall McLuhan,Pound’s Critical Prose (1950) in The Interior Landscape,p.80, 1969

“Industrial man is not unlike the turtle that is quite blind to the beauty of the shell which it has grown on its back. In the same way, the modern newspaper isn’t seen by the reporter except from the point of view of its mushy sensual content, its pulsating, romantic glamour. The reporter doesn’t even know there’s a beautiful shell above him. He grows the shell, unwittingly, subhumanly, biologically. This is not even the voice, but only the feel, of the turtle.”
Marshall McLuhan,The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man, p.4, 1951

“Today we get inside the machine. It is inside us. We in it. Fusion. Oblivion. Safety. Now the human machines are geared to smash one another. You can’t shout warnings or encouragement to these machines. First there has to be a retracing process. A reduction of the machine to human form. Circe only turned men into swine. Our problem is tougher.”
Marshall McLuhan,Letters of Marshall McLuhan, p.227 (June 22, 1951), 1987

“Now was the time for the artist to intervene in a new way and to manipulate the new media of communication by a precise and delicate adjustment of the relations of words, things, and events. His task had become not self-expression but the release of the life in things. Un Coup de Dés illustrates the road he (Mallarmé-ed.) took in the exploitation of all things as gestures of the mind, magically adjusted to the secret powers of being. As a vacuum tube is used to shape and control vast reservoirs of electric power, the artist can manipulate the low current of casual words, rhythms, and resonances to evoke the primal harmonies of existence or to recall the dead. But the price he must pay is total self-abnegation.”
Marshall McLuhan,Joyce, Mallarmé, and the Press (1953) in The Interior Landscape,p.11-2, 1969

“As mime, the artist cannot be the prudent and decorous Ulysses, but appears as a sham. As sham and mime he undertakes not the ethical quest but the quest of the great fool. He must become all things in order to reveal all. And to be all he must empty himself… the artist cannot properly speak with his own voice.”
Marshall McLuhan,James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial (1953) in The Interior Landscape, p.31-2, 1969

“For it was Coleridge as much as anybody who hastened the recognition of the poetic process as linked with the modes of ordinary cognition, and with the methods of the sciences.”
Marshall McLuhan,Coleridge as Artist (1957) in The Interior Landscape,p.115, 1969

“Senecan antithesis and ‘amble’ (as described in Senecan Amble by George Williamson) provided the authentic means of scientific observation and experience of mental process.”
Marshall McLuhan,The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man,p.103, 1962

“The central theme of Naked Lunch is the strategy of by-passing the new electric environment by becoming an environment oneself. The moment one achieves this environmental state all things and people are submitted to you to be processed. Whether a man takes the road of junk or the road of art, the entire world must submit to his processing. The world becomes his ‘content’. He programs the sensory order.”
Marshall McLuhan,Notes on Burroughs, Nation Magazine,p.517, December 28, 1964

“You can never perceive the impact of any new technology directly, but it can be done in the manner of Perseus looking in the mirror at Medusa. It has to be done indirectly.”
Marshall McLuhan,Address at Vision ’65, The American Scholar,p.202, Spring, 1966

“For all their obsolescence he (McLuhan-ed.) himself finds books ‘a warm, visceral, tactile medium’….”
Jane Howard,Oracle of the Electric Age, Life Magazine,p.96, February 28, 1966

Phase 2
Reviewing the second phase (1957-77) we can observe, again from McLuhan’s vantage-point, that he “acted” under and “mimed” the new and more challenging electronic (post-electric) conditions of the computer-and satellite-mandated programming of the whole planet. This meant that the technological environments, the “media”, were retrieved as coordinated rhythmic modulations to replace the formerly-retrieved formulaic “Logos” in his advocacy for, and training of, perception as a counter-program of “awareness”(13) for now-fused whole populations in the global theatre. This approach was McLuhan’s conscious strategy of probing and mirroring the “quadrophrenic” (post-tetrad) lives of the cyborgian citizens and their “pets”: McLuhan as Pollstergeist and multi-clairvoyant pentad(9) probing the environment of electronic “autonomy” in the situation of the post-fusion of Nature and Technology via satellite (see Up the Orphic Anti and Silencing the Virtually Solar Theatre).

“Today with electronics we have discovered that we live in a global village, and the job is to create a global city, as center for the village margins. The parameters of this task are by no means positional. With electronics any marginal area can become center, and marginal experiences can be had at any center. Perhaps the city needed to coordinate and concert the distracted sense programs of our global village will have to be built by computers in the way in which a big airport has to coordinate multiple flights.”
Marshall McLuhan,Letters of Marshall McLuhan,p.278 (December 23, 1960), 1987

“The work of James Joyce exhibits a complex clairvoyance in these matters.”
Marshall McLuhan,The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man,p.74, 1962

“Such a program involves the endowing of each plastic form with a kind of nervous system of its own.”
Marshall McLuhan,Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, p.220, 1964

“If University of Toronto professor Marshall McLuhan is right – and if he gets the money – he figures that within five years ‘Madison Avenue could rule the world’. In turn, governments could manage the national economy ‘as easily as adjusting the thermostat in the living-room.’”
Lee Belland,He Sees Planners’ Paradise, Toronto Daily Star,p.11, May 7, 1964

“The bias of our culture is precisely to isolate the bias of all others in an effort at orchestration. Social connubium?”
Marshall McLuhan and George Thompson,Counterblast, p.64, 1969

“One of the most successful genres of this age is the book title itself as a ‘youdunit’. It involves the reader in such titles as: Time and Western Man;… The Revolt of the Masses;… The Organization Man;… Space, Time and Architecture;… The Hidden Persuaders;… The Death of God;…. Replacing the encyclopedias of earlier centuries, such books are all ‘guides to understanding’.”
Marshall McLuhan and Wilfred Watson,From Cliché to Archetype, p.91, 1970

“It is man who has become both figure and ground via the electrotechnical extension of his awareness.”
Marshall McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt,Take Today: The Executive as Dropout, p.11, 1972

“The new art form of our time is the media themselves, not painting, not movies, not drama, but the media themselves have become the new art forms…. I write cartoons…. I have wanted to write a play, for a long time, on the media. And the media themselves are the avant-garde area of our society. Avant-garde no longer exists in painting and music and poetry, it’s in the media themselves. Not in the programs. Avante-garde is not in hockey, not in baseball or any of these entertainments. It’s in the media themselves.”
Marshall McLuhan,Forces Magazine, Hydro-Quebec, No.22, p.68, 1973

“Marshall McLuhan, the communications scholar, compared his own approach to that of the advertiser…. For centuries there had been no problem associated with what the product aimed to correct. So the manufacturer first invented the problem, through advertising, then made the cure available. ‘That’s the way advertising is done,’ said Mr. McLuhan. ‘They start off with the effects, then look for the cause. That’s how I prophesy. I look around at the effects and say: well, the causes will soon be here.’”
John Slinger,Advertising is: making someone ill, then selling the cure,Globe and Mail, p.5, August 5, 1973

“Again, the transmission of data at the speed of light creates non-persons.”
Marshall McLuhan (1978),The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century, p.143, 1989

Granted, I have just uttered, and you have just eaten, a huge mouthful. But I am qualifying and supporting these themes, as you can see and taste, with selective quotations culled from my archives (see note at end of paper-ed.), which includes the largest private collection of McLuhan’s creative output – outside of Langley, Virginia. This meal will include as many of the appropriate citings that the law and space will allow. Above all, these are offered in the spirit of modeling the mosaic of psychic surgery that McLuhan had at his fingertips.
“It is the difference between matching and making, between spectatorship and total dramatic participation. Through the drama of the mouth, we participate daily in the total re-creation of the world as a process.”
Marshall McLuhan, Letters of Marshall McLuhan, p.347 (December 15, 1967), 1987

“This principle of a continuous dual structure for achieving order has always been present in the work of Sorel Etrog. In one of his poems he called it ‘recollecting things to come’, which might have been an alternative title for Finnegans Wake, itself a dramatic spiral of a single sentence.”
Marshall McLuhan, Spiral: Man as the Medium (1976) in Sorel Etrog: Images from the Film SPIRAL, p.126, 1987

I will now retrace what I have already said and define a few details and then elaborate on them. The first key to my understanding of McLuhan is grasping the emphasis he placed on the drama of cognition as an artifact, in contrast to Freud’s study of the dream as an artifact. This drama is based on the doubleness of consciousness, the folding back on itself – the complementary process of “making” and “matching” that is necessary to create the resonance of coherent consciousness. An example of the “making” aspect of perception is the reversal of the rays of light that occurs in the retina as part of the process of creating the experience of sight. Another example is the fact that when food is ingested, what comes out at the other end is not the same as what went in. This sensory alteration, or closure, occurs with all sensory input. McLuhan used the transforming power of the movie camera and projector as a model of this drama of cognition. When the camera rolls up the external world on a spool by rapid still shots, it uncannily resembles the process of “making”, or sensory closure. The movie projector unwinds this spool as a kind of magic carpet which conveys the enchanted spectator anywhere in the world in an instant – a resemblance of the human’s attempt to externalize or utter the result of making sense in a natural effort to connect or “match” with the external environment. The external environment responds and the person is then forced to reply in kind and “make” again. This systole-diastole interplay is McLuhan’s “drama of cognition” and it is parroted by the movie camera and projector. (Has it occurred to you yet of what the live pick-up in the television camera is a parrot?) This drama is the archetype for all creative activity produced by humanity, from ritual, myth, and legend to art, science, and technology. McLuhan understood that James Joyce was the first person to make explicit the fact that the cycle of Ritual, Art, Science, and Technology imitates, is an extension of, the stages of apprehension. And this is possible because the extensions have to approximate our faculties in order for us to pay attention to them.

“But, he (John Lindberg-ed.) argues, we now have the key to the creative process which brings all cultures into existence (namely the extension into social institutions of the central form and mystery of the human cognitive process).”
Marshall McLuhan,Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters, Christian Humanism in Letters: The McAuley Lectures, Series 2, p.86-7, 1954

“And it was his mastery of the art process in terms of the stages of apprehension that enabled Joyce to install himself in the centre of the creative process. Whether it appears as mere individual sensation, as collective hope or phobia, as national myth-making or cultural norm-functioning, there is Joyce with cocked ear, eye and nose at the centre of the action.”
Marshall McLuhan,Notes on the Media as Art Forms, Explorations Magazine,Volume 2, p.9, April, 1954

“We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools ape us…. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.”
Anonymous voiceheard on the album The Medium is the Massage, 1967

“Miss Sontag writes:… To this one can add that consciousness, as well as dreams, has a structure that can be aesthetically enjoyed.”
Marshall McLuhan and Wilfred Watson,From Cliché to Archetype, p.199, 1970

The second key to understanding McLuhan is guessing that he realized that the implicit discovery of the nineteenth century via Marx, Schopenhauer, and Hertz was the fact that the medium is the message: Life, Art, and Science imitate, are an extension of, the technologies they use. But the concomitant mystery and problem evoked by this second insight is the need to explain why human beings cannot recognize this cultural fact. McLuhan realized that the effects of television had been spelled out in Finnegans Wake, in that the structure of the television medium resulted in a vivid X-ray of whatever culture employed this medium. Thus, the traditional spell or numbness that hypnotized any culture, and created a subliminal bias in that culture, could be overcome through the comprehensive, plenary, perceptual bias of television. In addition, McLuhan, at first, pretended to believe that Joyce had come up with a plausible sensory and mental strategy to explain and counteract this natural “numbness”, including the numbness induced by television (by virtue of the fact that Finnegans Wake, in the end, is a printed book), thanks to Joyce’s training in the thought and perception of the “angelic doctor”(14), St. Thomas Aquinas. But later, adequate scientific experiment and study by Hans Selye proved and explained the physiological basis for the cultural numbing process. (Selye’s results were published in the first issue of Explorations in December, 1953.) McLuhan then saw with Archimedean delight that Joyce had manifested the truism that the effects of an artist’s work precede the causes.

“A common observation of European visitors to America is that life here is more collectivized and stereotyped than communists have ever aimed to achieve. It was always the central theme of Marx that direct political action was unnecessary. The machine was the revolutionary solvent of bourgeois society. Allow the dynamic logic of the machine full play in any kind of society and it will, said Marx, become communist automatically. Certainly America is far more advanced on the road to a collective, centralized, consumer’s paradise than any other part of the world. May not some of the American panic about the communist threat be a dim recognition of this paradox?”
H. M. McLuhan,Revolutionary Conservatism (unpublished-ed.), p.1, 1952

“For Joyce has solved numerous problems which science has not yet formulated as problems.”
Marshall McLuhan,James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial (1953) in The Interior Landscape, p.41, 1969

“So extraordinary is this unawareness that it is what needs to be explained. The transforming power of media is easy to explain, but the ignoring of this power is not at all easy to explain.(p.304)… Examination of the origin and development of the individual extensions of man should be preceded by a look at some general aspects of the media, or extensions of man, beginning with the never-explained numbness that each extension brings about in the individual and society.”(p.6)
Marshall McLuhan,Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man,pp.304 and 6, 1964

How did McLuhan create a sensibility that could perceive the nature of his time with such acumen? By means of a thorough study not only of poetry as presented in the Western canon but also of the mystical, esoteric, and Manichean traditions in the alchemical concerns of the grammarian. Such were the preoccupations and background of his Ph.D. on Thomas Nashe. An essential program of these pagan doctrines has always been to use the senses as a laboratory. This sensory expertise, coupled with his Thomistic bias, was the knowledge that gave McLuhan the advantage over other students of Joyce, Lewis, Pound, Eliot, and Yeats.

“If we grant that human existence is the state of damnation, two possibilities follow. Either we can learn to retrace the stages of our fall into matter, and so escape, or we can devise some means of extinction of personality. The pagan art and culture of the world, past and present, is divided in the pursuit of these alternatives. On one hand art is followed as a continuous labyrinth in which by blind, dogged persistence we may struggle upward by means of will power and ethical struggle. On the other hand there is the intellectual course presented by Mr. Eliot, in which we move from one intensity to another, towards a final flash of awareness and extinction. In the one art – that linked with Plato’s cave man – Time, continuity, dialectic, are of the essence. In the other, time is lost in simultaneities and juxtapositions.”
H. M. McLuhan,Eliot and the Manichean Myth as Poetry (unpublished),p.3, 1952

“Aesthetically the newspaper creates an impact of immediacy and of super-realism. Metaphysically its mode is existential. Its impact is that of the very process of actualization. The entire world becomes, in this way, a laboratory in which everybody can watch the stages of an experiment.”
H. M. McLuhan,Technology and Political Change, International Journal,Volume 7, p.191, Summer, 1952

This advantage also enabled McLuhan to immediately exploit Harold Innis’ studies, once he encountered them, to engage, as a post-man/machine merger, the 1950s in a prophetic challenge to the fused cluster of sex, death, and technology he saw all around him. He understood that the tactility (“the central form and mystery of the human cognitive process”) of the television environment added the dimension of living thought, or the dancing drama of cognition, to that triad and loosened the grip of the mechanical Medusa. This was cause for a cautious and temporary celebration as any poet or scientist with a new vision will naturally express. However, the implied harmonies of this vision ended when Sputnik whirled around the planet.

“As the consequences of change accelerate, on the other hand, it is easier to discern causes. Another paradox of our time is the avid pursuit of a theory of change. Interest in formal causality seems to have declined after the sixteenth century, as did interest in analogy. But the artist picked up this interest where the philosophers left off and has always insisted on the formal (not just the efficient) causality of artefacts whether of individual or collective origin. (The Marxist claim to a theory of change may well be its major attraction in the West.)”
Marshall McLuhan,Around the World, Around the Clock (review of The Image Industries by William Lynch, S.J.-ed.), Renascence Magazine,Volume12, No.4, p.205, Summer, 1960

“It is quite literally true that since printing it has been the poets and painters who have explored and predicted the various possibilities of print, of prints, of press, of telegraph, of photograph, movie, radio and television. In recent decades the arrival of several new media had led to prodigious experimentation in the arts. But, at present, the artists have yielded to the media themselves. Experimentation has passed from the control of the private artist to the groups in charge of the new technologies. That is to say, that whereas in the past the individual artist, manipulating private and inexpensive materials, was able to shape models of new experience years ahead of the public, today the artist works with expensive public technology, and artist and public merge in a single experience. The new media need the best artist talent and can pay for it. But the artist can no longer provide years of advance awareness of developments in the patterns of human experience which will inevitably emerge from new technological development.”
Marshall McLuhan,Report on Project in Understanding New Media,Part VII(Exhibits), p.i, 1960

McLuhan took seriously Joyce’s ambivalence towards radio and television as communication technologies which did not have the traditional characteristics of former arts that had held up an energizing mirror to their respective cultures. The reason, for McLuhan: if you have ever looked at yourself in the television monitor while the television camera is focussed on yourself, you can observe that your electrified image is not reversed as it is in a flat mirror. In other words, there is no visual reflection in the television “mirror”. The viewer falls into it. The viewer becomes the screen and is forced to start swimming. Now imagine a whole society dunked in such a manner. How does it get a perspective on itself? What serves as a mirror or anti-environment to the new mode of collective consciousness, if it can be considered a consciousness at all? Does the society really need a mirror anyway, when it is fused and splashing in the same pond?
“That is to say, nuclear structures, whether sub-atomic or in the form of mass-audiences for radio and TV, are, in their instantaneous speed modalities, not capable of comprehension in visual modes, except `a la Walt Disney science shorts.”
Marshall McLuhan,Effects of the Improvements of Communication Media, Journal of Economic History,Volume 20, p.571, December, 1960

“The mirror, like the mind, by taking in and feeding back the same image becomes a wheel, a cycle, able to retrieve all experience.”
Marshall McLuhan and Wilfred Watson,From Cliché to Archetype, p.163, 1970

The needs of the West, as articulated by Joyce and McLuhan, would certainly scream loudly in the affirmative. And the West quickly gave us one – the satellite, with a little help from the computer. These two great technological cloaks enabled the establishment of an integrated fulcrum from which to orchestrate the sensory mixes induced by older media for the intended harmony of all. Or such a potential, at least, McLuhan foresaw. Would others? Not likely, and certainly not enough to implement McLuhan’s vision. As a result, the satellite and computer environments were built with a fragmented perspective and with increasingly fragmented consequences. And thus, the 1960s ushered in a decade of social turbulence on a world-wide scale as every culture had a thrombosis and embarked on a violent identity quest. And this also was an effect that Joyce included in the possible scenarios suggested in Finnegans Wake.
“The oral man never asks for a blueprint. He never wants an over-all view. His but to feel he is a member of the team. The only possibility in an oral structure is a monarchical apex of control. Where the activities of many are to be orchestrated there can be only one conductor. But the more necessary the conductor the more expendable he becomes. The first job of a top executive today is to see to it that there are several who can succeed him instantly. They often do!”
Marshall McLuhan,The Organization Man, Explorations Magazine,Volume 8, Section15, October, 1957

“The Bomb is electric software. It inspires nightmares of population explosions in the old nineteenth-century minds. There is no finish line.”
Marshall McLuhan,Culture is our Business,p.334 (the last sentence of the book-ed.), 1970

“It is the speed-up of information by telephone and telex, etc., that destroys bureaucracies regardless of geography or ideology. China and Russia, as much as France and the U.S.A., experience this collapse at the same time.”
Marshall McLuhan,An Interview: McLuhan on Russia, The McLuhan DEW-Line,Volume 2, No.6, p.3, May/June, 1970

“The hijacker of a plane does not presume to operate the craft. He merely decides where it is to put down. So it is today with the very largest organizations. The larger the enterprise, the easier it is to shape its patterns and destinies, unknown to the occupants and ‘owners’.”
Marshall McLuhan,The Hijacking of Cities, Nations, Planets in the Age of Spaceship Earth, Explorations(insert in University of Toronto’s Varsity Graduate-ed.),Number 30, p.110, Spring, 1971

“Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity.”
Marshall McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt,Take Today: The Executive as Dropout, p.92, 1972

“When war and market merge, all money transactions begin to drip blood.”
Marshall McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt,Take Today: The Executive as Dropout, p.211, 1972

“J. Pare: L. B. Johnson was a dropout in a sense, but it is difficult to conceive of John Kennedy as a dropout? M. McLuhan: He really dropped out. You know why: he was killed by the Establishment. He was executed. He was dangerous to them. J. Pare: Because he did not want to drop out, he wanted to change things like his brother? M. McLuhan: Yes. These men were executed by the Establishment. And they will be anytime they try anything like that.”
Forces Magazine,Hydro-Quebec, No.22, p.67, 1973

“As the world manifests its credentials and rewards in ever more theatrical terms, it becomes ever more difficult for some to resist the world, while for others it becomes easier and easier to reject its sinister and shallow pretensions. Like our money, which is a ‘promise to pay’, our advertising and P.R. only promise to pay promises.”
Marshall McLuhan,Forward to Abortion in Perspective:The Rose Palace or the Fiery Dragon, p.iv, 1974

“Everyone will be involved in role-playing, including those few elitists who interpret and/or manage large-scale data patterns and thus control the functions of a speed-of-light society.”
Marshall McLuhan and Bruce Powers,Journal of Communication, Summer, 1981, p.199

Phase 3
Now, after having reviewed this background, I would like to examine the condition and nature of “quadrophrenia”(15). McLuhan’s prolonged study of the qualities and functions of metaphor led him to see that the characteristics of the tetrad (enhancement, obsolescence, retrieval, and reversal) were intuited by Joyce and demonstrated in Finnegans Wake as the constituent properties of metaphor (The four parts of the Wake admit of the tetradic structure from the widest possible perspective:
Book One handles enhancement, or the extensions;
Book Two the obsolesced;
Book Three the retrievals; and
Book Four the reversal).
Using the Wake as a guide, he turned his meditative double-focus on television and observed that the contents of television (the evolutionary species and by-products of the interplay between culture and technology) would manifest in regular epicycles of tetradic action as long as no new environments were created.

“Newton revolutionized the techniques of poetry and painting. Joyce encompasses Einstein but extends his pictographic formula to the entire world of language and consciousness. The tendency of the challengingly new to revoke and reinforce ancient disciplines never appeared more strikingly than in Joyce. Literature may have come to an end in 1870 but poetic, rhetoric and metaphysic have come increasingly alive since then.”
Marshall McLuhan,New Media as Political Forms, Explorations Magazine,Volume 3, p.123-4, August, 1954

“Examples of the operation of the four laws for various communication media follow: VERBUM (utterance): (A) Intensifies and crystallizes percept – as word (thing); (B) Obsolesces the merely sensory via perceptual interplay; (C) Retrieval: transference of power from things to word-as-vortex; (D) Reverses into the conceptual (replay of meaning-minus-the experience).”
Marshall McLuhan,Laws of the Media, Et Cetera,Volume 34, No.2, p.177, June, 1977

But once they were, then the tetrad would be obsolete and Humpty Dumpty would fall off the wall and shatter again. However, this time it would be the after-image of a fall because humanity’s technological evolution had ended with television as all “hardware” had flipped and fused into “software” and what remained was a complex collective ESP the patterns of which would be invoked by constant audience research, polling and surveillance. These new “weather” patterns, since they were multi-sensuous and abstract, McLuhan called “pollstergeists”(16). These are what plagued the human citadel of consciousness as it stared from its cave at the newly-retrieved quantum fluctuations of a still-born “astoneaged”(17) society. The content of this situation, the human users and “media” themselves, imploded into a rapid, Sisyphean, and tetradic oscillation through the states of metaphor, metonymy, synechdoche, and irony which registered emotionally as states of paranoia, schizophrenia, hysteria, panic, and ecstasy. This is the condition I have designated as quadrophrenia in which the living metaphoric coherence of the collective consciousness appears to be usurped. Knowing it was unlikely “those few elitists” were going to take an active interest in his new discoveries, he retrieved Menippean satire as a hobby. Simulating the printed book’s archetypal response to this dissolution of the tetrad-manager, McLuhan produced an after-image of the epyllion – the Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media. And this is where the symptoms of quadrophrenia make their entrance. McLuhan knew that he had to mime discontinuously the splintering after-images of human/technological cognition to manifest an “impossible”(18) anti-environment to the seduction effected by the pollstergeists. This is why an anticipated cursory inspection of McLuhan’s books produced the intended effect that they were rampant with confusion – an early and persistent complaint by his critics, which proved the success of the technique (“You mean, my whole fallacy is wrong.”)(19). One minute he seemed to be a utopian, the next a neo-Luddite, then a Gnostic, still later an agent of the Vatican, or a Zen Buddhist, then a technological determinist, pseudo-scientist, Manhattan Project romantic, and on and on and back and forth. But the classifiers couldn’t see the method in the actor’s performance – the miming of the fate that the Pollstergeist needed “a rapid succession of innovations as ersatz anti-environments”(20) to disguise the fact it had long disappeared. His satiric retrieval of the mini-module of acoustic and tactile mirrors via the constituency of the homeopathic print mirror, in the genre of a “memory theatre”, reflected the contemporary Medusan after-image of collective technological quadrophrenia, and its complementary human echo.

“…Whereas the cyclic epic, as in Homer, moves on the single narrative plane of individual spiritual quest, the little epic (epyllion-ed.) as written by Ovid, Dante, Joyce, and Pound is ‘the tale of the tribe’. That is to say, it is not so much a story of the individual quest for perfection as it is a history of collective crime and punishment, an attempt to justify the ways of God to man.”
Marshall McLuhan,Tennyson (1956) in From Cliché to Archetype, p.95, 1970

“It is postulated that just as white is a result of the assembling of the primary colors in ratio, so touch is an assembly of all the senses in ratio. Black is, therefore, the after-image of touch.”
Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker,Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting,p.15, 1968

“And no matter how many walls have fallen, the citadel of individual consciousness has not fallen nor is it likely to fall. For it is not accessible to the mass media.”
Marshall McLuhan and George Thompson,Counterblast, p.135, 1969

“The familiar ad form of rippling repetition of profiles is an accessible example of the mini-module that is found in every electric structure, from space capsule to the modes of consciousness.”
Marshall McLuhan and Wilfred Watson,From Cliché to Archetype, p.155, 1970

“The epyllion, by creating an interface or continuous parallel between two worlds, one past, one present,… More’s (Utopia-ed.) Book I is the retrieval of the medieval archetype world, and his Book II is the cliché-probe of his own time, retrieving the past.”
Marshall McLuhan and Wilfred Watson,From Cliché to Archetype, p.165, 1970

“Innovation is obsolete. So is obsolescence, as information speed-up transforms man and his world into art form.”
Marshall McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt,Take Today: The Executive as Dropout, p.297, 1972

“The theology of discarnate man, I should think, is going to be extremely transcendental and gnostic. It’s not going to have much place for the human being as an incarnate spirit. Perhaps this may be behind the present swing toward abortion and the idea of euthanasia. (Why should we have people around when they’re of no use?).”
Marshall McLuhan,Interview with Marshall McLuhan, The Review of Books and Religion, Volume 3, No.9, pp.2 and 15, Mid-June, 1974

But there remained two more surprises. First, the Pollstergeist would generate the means for its own metaphysical self-consciousness, its own doubleness, or folding back on itself – the instant replay. This technology would allow the Pollstergeist to wallow in and exploit its own “memory theatre”, and, like an artist, create the effects beforehand, anticipating its first extension, of its own subsequent evolutionary leap – the hologram.

“Dante’s Commedia was recognized as a ‘memory theatre’ in its time and later, as were the Summas of the philosophers. Vico was the first to spot language itself as a memory theatre. Finnegans Wake is such a memory theatre for the entire contents of human consciousness and unconsciousness.”
Marshall McLuhan,Letters of Marshall McLuhan,p.339 (December 1, 1966), 1987

“One of the conflicts of a progressive and rapidly changing world concerns the use of surrounding services which have been obsolesced by daily innovations and discoveries. A vast new industry has been born from this conflict, and its name is ‘Camp’, and its motto is: ‘Throw something lovely away today. Help beautify junkyards’. Despite the grotesque aspect of ‘Camp’ as the incessant revival of that which has scarcely had a chance to register its appearance or existence, it has already been itself obsolesced by the popular technology of the video replay. The instant replay, available mainly to the audiences of sporting events, offers, as it were, the meaning minus the experience, reversing Mr. Eliot’s observation that ‘we had the experience but missed the meaning’. The instant replay is the meaning in that it is less concerned with the input of experience than with the process of perception. The instant replay, indeed, offers not just cognition but re-cognition, and leads the mind to the world of pattern recognition, to aftersight and foresight.(p.44)… Living in a new environment of instant electric information has shifted American attention from specific goals to the cognitive thrills of pattern recognition, a change most obviously manifested in the TV service of the instant replay.”(p.54)
Marshall McLuhan,The Implications of Cultural Uniformity (1973) in Superculture: American Popular Culture and Europe,pp.44 and 54, 1975

“I think the instant replay is probably the most powerful experience that you will ever have in your lifetime.”
Marshall McLuhan,addressing students in his brother’s class at Sheridan School of Art & Design, Mississauga, Ontario, in January,1975(caught on video by Richard Kerr-ed.).

The stage for the second surprise was set by the implementation of the new digital chip as a technological environment in tandem with the established instant replay environment to usher in an unprecedented collective effect: the reincarnation of the Pollstergeist as the Android Meme. In short, the extensions of humanity had evolved to the point of actualizing their own drama of cognition. It thought like us, it intuited like us, and it anticipated like us. But we were “still”(21) suspicious. It seemed to have no staying-power. So humanity was left in the situation of having its ability to code and decode in “real time”(22) frustrated and paralyzed. It could only come up with a rear-view mirror term for the Android Meme’s subtle collective actualization – “virtual reality”.

“In fact, the next stage beyond subliminal projection has already occurred in the providing of TV for the blind by direct wire to the brain centers, by-passing external physical perception altogether. This latter step is slightly more contemporary than the crudities of subliminal projection, and for those who enjoy the thrills of moral alarm here is a field indeed in which to cavort. Since there is nothing to prevent all of us being provided with cranial wall-plugs which would permit instruction in all subjects to occur endlessly during a physical sleep which could be indefinitely prolonged.”
Marshall McLuhan,The Subliminal Projection Project,The Canadian Forum Magazine, p.196, December, 1957

“When the movies were new, they used literature as content. When TV was new, it used movies as content. The laser beam will use human dreams and the audience of the intellect right off the court decks. They will be scrubbed, but good!”
Marshall McLuhan,Response to New Media, Explorations(insert in University of Toronto’s Varsity Graduate-ed.),Number 23, p.68, November, 1968

As the Android Meme, in its own “anthropomorphic theatre”, began to extend and hypnotize itself, it enjoyed miming and simulating the natural human modes of cognition – paranoia, schizophrenia, hysteria, panic, ecstasy, individual sensation, collective hope or phobia, national myth-making and cultural norm-functioning. McLuhan did not live to see the Android Meme in action, but as an effective “empath”(23), he mimed the effects before the causes showed up. To accomplish this he intuited the “fifth element”, what I call the “holeopathic cliché-probe”(24), by means of an understanding of the homeopathic effect (creating and maintaining memory in water), which is a process of “etherealization” (Toynbee) or “doing more with less” (Fuller) that is invisible and post-fusion, and projecting that effect as the consequences of the hologram when it becomes an environment that starts to evolve.

“For all the conscious intellectual activity of an industrial society is directed to non-human ends. Its human dimensions are systematically distorted by every conscious resource while the unconscious and commercially unutilized powers struggle dimly to restore balance and order by homeopathic means.”
Marshall McLuhan,Inside Blake and Hollywood, Sewanee Review,Volume 55, pp.714-15, October, 1947

“45 years ago things were like this, but less so.”
Marshall McLuhan,Letters of Marshall McLuhan,p.227 (June 22, 1951), 1987

“The Expressionists had discovered that the creative process is a kind of repetition of the stages of apprehension, somewhat along the lines that relate Coleridge’s Primary and Secondary imagination. In the same way there would seem to be an echo of the formative process of consciousness in the entire content of the unconscious. This, in turn, implies a close liaison between private and corporate awareness, though which exerts the most effect on the other may depend entirely on the degree of awareness achieved.”
Marshall McLuhan and Wilfred Watson,From Cliché to Archetype, p.200, 1970

“J. Pare: Nobody knows when it (TV-ed.) will be obsolete? M. McLuhan: Yes, with the hologram. J. Pare: That is 3D transmission? M. McLuhan: Yes, that makes the TV obsolete. And there are other developments, like the videophone, that might make it obsolete. The videophone is one of the things that terrifies people. I don’t think anybody wants a videophone.”
Forces Magazine,Hydro-Quebec, No.22, p.68, 1973

If you mate “hologram” and “homeopathy”, you might create the term “holeopathic”. I did. All evolution is the process of bashing and mating of clichés and archetypes. But when evolution can only be a non-linear process of resonance and modulation, there are no archetypes and we are left with only cliché-probes. And the human response is to stubbornly and cynically express quadrophrenia since we cannot avoid the four laws of the tetrad. But McLuhan playfully did this technically and artfully – the stance of the pentad-manager, who knows the Present could only be a fragile art form. Most everyone else, unless they retrace the stages of apprehension I have just outlined, is forced to painfully and reluctantly be a tetrad-manager – an unconscious response to the Internet and World Wide Web, the simulation of all electric and electronic technologies – from the telegraph to the satellite – for hoicking up an ersatz private identity. So, in conclusion, we see McLuhan made fun of those who live in the nineties, the mice who roar, by the traditional means of having perfect pitch when sung to by an inaudible environment of holeopathic quadrophrenia.

“BLESS the locomotives WHISTLING on the prairies proclaiming the SEPARATENESS Of Man.”
H. M. McLuhan,Counterblast, p.10, 1954

“A culture of quantum fluctuations where you can only know that you have never seen what you thought you were looking at because you have never really heard what you were listening to.”
Arthur Kroker,Spasm: Virtual Reality, Android Music and Electric Flesh,p.53, 1993

Anyway, this is what always occurs to me whenever I’m in the presence of Marshall McLuhan and contemplating how the world ignored his scientific discoveries. But still, there is one question we are all curious about: what would McLuhan say of the 1990s if he were alive today? Well, I happened to ask him a couple of years ago. Through a trance medium, when I asked him this question, he confidently asserted that he certainly would create his own web page, but then he added: “…and I would let James Joyce write the instructions on how to get to it.”
Yup, the medium is the message under electric conditions.

Footnotes

Marshall McLuhan,
Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters, Christian Humanism
in Letters: The McAuley Lectures,
Series 2, p.70,
1954.
Marshall McLuhan,
Letters of Marshall McLuhan,
p.460 (Jan.3, 1973),
1987.
Marshall McLuhan and George Thompson,
Counterblast,
p.31,
1969.
Marshall McLuhan,
Joyce, Mallarmé, and the Press (1953) in The Interior
Landscape,
p.8,
1969.
Marshall McLuhan,
Letters of Marshall McLuhan,
p.387 (July 30, 1969),
1987.
Marshall McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt,
Take Today: The Executive as Dropout,
pp.15 and 26,
1972.
Marshall McLuhan,
The Crack in the Rear-View Mirror,
McGill Journal of Education,
p.31, Spring,
1966.
Marshall McLuhan,
Kandy Kolored Massage
(report on press conference held by McLuhan on February 25, 1972 at UCLA,
Los Angeles, California, written by Lowell Ponte-ed.),
International Times,
pp.34 and 44, No.129,
1972.
Frank Zingrone,
Laws of Media: The Pentad and Technical Syncretism,
McLuhan Studies,
Volume 1, No.1, pp.109-15,
1991.
Marshall McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt,
A Media Approach to Inflation,
New York Times, (op-ed, note the phrase “the Word Makes the Market”-ed.),
September 21,
1974.
Marshall McLuhan and Wilfred Watson,
From Cliché to Archetype,
pp.161-2,
1970.
Marshall McLuhan,
Toronto Is a Happening,
Toronto Life Magazine,
pp.23-29, September,
1967.
Marshall McLuhan,
Sight, Sound, and the Fury, Commonweal Magazine,
p.11, April 9,
1954, and
Marshall McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt,
Take Today: The Executive as Dropout,
pp.11 and 297,
1972.
Marshall McLuhan,
Maritain on Art, Renascence,
Volume 6, p.44, Autumn,
1953.
Marshall McLuhan,
McLuhan McLuhan McLuhan,
New York Times, (op-ed, note the title-ed.), May 10,
1974.
Marshall McLuhan,
Living at the Speed of Light,
MacLean’s Magazine,
p.33, January 7,
1980.
Marshall McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt,
Take Today: The Executive as Dropout,
pp.21 and 36,
1972.
Marshall McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt,
Take Today: The Executive as Dropout,
p.142,
1972.
Marshall McLuhan,
Annie Hall
(a line created by McLuhan for his cameo and used on public occasions such
as convocation addresses when heckled by audience members-ed.), directed by
Woody Allen,
1977.
Marshall McLuhan and George Thompson,
Counterblast,
p.31,
1969.
Marshall McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt,
Take Today: The Executive as Dropout,
p.11,
1972.
Marshall McLuhan and Bruce Powers,
The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and
Media in the 21st Century,
p.178,
1989.
Marshall McLuhan,
The Informal Mr. McLuhan
(audio tape of interview by June Callwood-ed.),
Globe and Mail, Nov.25,
1974.
Marshall McLuhan and Wilfred Watson,
From Cliché to Archetype,
pp.107 and 165,
1970.

October 6, 2016
On McLuhan’s Mental Mosaic – Hologrammic Prose

“But McLuhan created a more fundamental means to a more organic understanding in the very aphoristic style in which he chose to convey his ideas one consciously embodying the concept that the medium is the message. Its means is not to follow a continuous, linear, and unbroken line of thought, but to create a tessellated pattern of ideas, with each of the tiles in the mental mosaic a particular facet of the overall pattern. Like fractals, an analogue that has gained currency only since McLuhan’s last work, the grand, overall pattern is contained in miniature in each of the parts. He also took as models for this style writers in the symbolist and modernist movements, particularly Mallarme, Eliot, Pound, and Joyce.”
http://ejournals.library.vanderbilt.edu/ojs/index.php/ameriquests/article/viewFile/83/90

“McLuhan contends that all media–in and of themselves and regardless of the messages they communicate–exert a compelling influence on man and society. Prehistoric, or tribal, man existed in a harmonious balance of the senses, perceiving the world equally through hearing, smell, touch, sight and taste. But technological innovations are extensions of human abilities and senses that alter this sensory balance–an alteration that, in turn, inexorably reshapes the society that created the technology. According to McLuhan, there have been three basic technological innovations: the invention of the phonetic alphabet, which jolted tribal man out of his sensory balance and gave dominance to the eye; the introduction of movable type in the 16th Century, which accelerated this process; and the invention of the telegraph in 1844, which heralded an electronics revolution that will ultimately retribalize man by restoring his sensory balance. McLuhan has made it his business to explain and extrapolate the repercussions of this electronic revolution.”–Playboy, http://www.mcluhanmedia.com/m_mcl_inter_pb_01.html

September 19, 2016
Fenollosa – Pound – Yeats: (Certain Noble Plays of Japan)
From The Manuscripts Of Ernest Fenollosa,

Chosen And Finished

By Ezra Pound

With An Introduction By William Butler Yeats

Fenollosa, Pound and Yeats are all members of Robert Anton Wilsons ‘all star cast’ for The Tale Of The Tribe.

Here we have one document which features 1/4 of the stars. Well worth the read i presume. In particular for anyone interested in Theatre.

Keep on truckin’

–Steve Fly

CERTAIN NOBLE PLAYS OF JAPAN:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/8094/8094-h/8094-h.htm

INTRODUCTION

NISHIKIGI

HAGOROMO

KUMASAKA

KAGEKIYO
NOTES

Introduction by William Butler Yeats, April, 1916.

In the series of books I edit for my sister I confine myself to those that have I believe some special value to Ireland, now or in the future. I have asked Mr. Pound for these beautiful plays because I think they will help me to explain a certain possibility of the Irish dramatic movement.
I am writing these words with my imagination stirred by a visit to the studio of Mr. Dulac, the distinguished illustrator of the Arabian Nights. I saw there the mask and head-dress to be worn in a play of mine by the player who will speak the part of Cuchulain, and who wearing this noble half-Greek half-Asiatic face will appear perhaps like an image seen in revery by some Orphic worshipper. I hope to have attained the distance from life which can make credible strange events, elaborate words. I have written a little play that can be played in a room for so little money that forty or fifty readers of poetry can pay the price. There will be no scenery, for three musicians, whose seeming sun-burned faces will I hope suggest that they have wandered from village to village in some country of our dreams, can describe place and weather, and at moments action, and accompany it all by drum and gong or flute and dulcimer. Instead of the players working themselves into a violence of passion indecorous in our sitting-room, the music, the beauty of form and voice all come to climax in pantomimic dance.

In fact with the help of these plays ‘translated by Ernest Fenollosa and finished by Ezra Pound’ I have invented a form of drama, distinguished, indirect and symbolic, and having no need of mob or press to pay its way—an aristocratic form. When this play and its performance run as smoothly as my skill can make them, I shall hope to write another of the same sort and so complete a dramatic celebration of the life of Cuchulain planned long ago. Then having given enough performances for I hope the pleasure of personal friends and a few score people of good taste, I shall record all discoveries of method and turn to something else. It is an advantage of this noble form that it need absorb no one’s life, that its few properties can be packed up in a box, or hung upon the walls where they will be fine ornaments.

II

And yet this simplification is not mere economy. For nearly three centuries invention has been making the human voice and the movements of the body seem always less expressive. I have long been puzzled why passages, that are moving when read out or spoken during rehearsal, seem muffled or dulled during performance. I have simplified scenery, having ‘The Hour Glass’ for instance played now before green curtains, now among those admirable ivory-coloured screens invented by Gordon Craig. With every simplification the voice has recovered something of its importance and yet when verse has approached in temper to let us say ‘Kubla Khan,’ or ‘The Ode to the West Wind,’ the most typical modern verse, I have still felt as if the sound came to me from behind a veil. The stage-opening, the powerful light and shade, the number of feet between myself and the players have destroyed intimacy. I have found myself thinking of players who needed perhaps but to unroll a mat in some Eastern garden. Nor have I felt this only when I listened to speech, but even more when I have watched the movement of a player or heard singing in a play. I love all the arts that can still remind me of their origin among the common people, and my ears are only comfortable when the singer sings as if mere speech had taken fire, when he appears to have passed into song almost imperceptibly. I am bored and wretched, a limitation I greatly regret, when he seems no longer a human being but an invention of science. To explain him to myself I say that he has become a wind instrument and sings no longer like active men, sailor or camel driver, because he has had to compete with an orchestra, where the loudest instrument has always survived. The human voice can only become louder by becoming less articulate, by discovering some new musical sort of roar or scream. As poetry can do neither, the voice must be freed from this competition and find itself among little instruments, only heard at their best perhaps when we are close about them. It should be again possible for a few poets to write as all did once, not for the printed page but to be sung. But movement also has grown less expressive, more declamatory, less intimate. When I called the other day upon a friend I found myself among some dozen people who were watching a group of Spanish boys and girls, professional dancers, dancing some national dance in the midst of a drawing-room. Doubtless their training had been long, laborious and wearisome; but now one could not be deceived, their movement was full of joy. They were among friends, and it all seemed but the play of children; how powerful it seemed, how passionate, while an even more miraculous art, separated from us by the footlights, appeared in the comparison laborious and professional. It is well to be close enough to an artist to feel for him a personal liking, close enough perhaps to feel that our liking is returned.

My play is made possible by a Japanese dancer whom I have seen dance in a studio and in a drawing-room and on a very small stage lit by an excellent stage-light. In the studio and in the drawing-room alone where the lighting was the light we are most accustomed to, did I see him as the tragic image that has stirred my imagination. There where no studied lighting, no stage-picture made an artificial world, he was able, as he rose from the floor, where he had been sitting crossed-legged or as he threw out an arm, to recede from us into some more powerful life. Because that separation was achieved by human means alone, he receded, but to inhabit as it were the deeps of the mind. One realised anew, at every separating strangeness, that the measure of all arts’ greatness can be but in their intimacy.

III

All imaginative art keeps at a distance and this distance once chosen must be firmly held against a pushing world. Verse, ritual, music and dance in association with action require that gesture, costume, facial expression, stage arrangement must help in keeping the door. Our unimaginative arts are content to set a piece of the world as we know it in a place by itself, to put their photographs as it were in a plush or a plain frame, but the arts which interest me, while seeming to separate from the world and us a group of figures, images, symbols, enable us to pass for a few moments into a deep of the mind that had hitherto been too subtle for our habitation. As a deep of the mind can only be approached through what is most human, most delicate, we should distrust bodily distance, mechanism and loud noise.

It may be well if we go to school in Asia, for the distance from life in European art has come from little but difficulty with material. In half-Asiatic Greece, Kallimachos could still return to a stylistic management of the falling folds of drapery, after the naturalistic drapery of Phidias, and in Egypt the same age that saw the village Head-man carved in wood for burial in some tomb with so complete a naturalism saw, set up in public places, statues full of an august formality that implies traditional measurements, a philosophic defence. The spiritual painting of the 14th century passed on into Tintoretto and that of Velasquez into modern painting with no sense of loss to weigh against the gain, while the painting of Japan, not having our European Moon to churn the wits, has understood that no styles that ever delighted noble imaginations have lost their importance, and chooses the style according to the subject. In literature also we have had the illusion of change and progress, the art of Shakespeare passing into that of Dryden, and so into the prose drama, by what has seemed when studied in its details unbroken progress. Had we been Greeks, and so but half-European, an honourable mob would have martyred though in vain the first man who set up a painted scene, or who complained that soliloquies were unnatural, instead of repeating with a sigh, ‘we cannot return to the arts of childhood however beautiful.’ Only our lyric poetry has kept its Asiatic habit and renewed itself at its own youth, putting off perpetually what has been called its progress in a series of violent revolutions.

Therefore it is natural that I go to Asia for a stage-convention, for more formal faces, for a chorus that has no part in the action and perhaps for those movements of the body copied from the marionette shows of the 14th century. A mask will enable me to substitute for the face of some common-place player, or for that face repainted to suit his own vulgar fancy, the fine invention of a sculptor, and to bring the audience close enough to the play to hear every inflection of the voice. A mask never seems but a dirty face, and no matter how close you go is still a work of art; nor shall we lose by staying the movement of the features, for deep feeling is expressed by a movement of the whole body. In poetical painting & in sculpture the face seems the nobler for lacking curiosity, alert attention, all that we sum up under the famous word of the realists ‘vitality.’ It is even possible that being is only possessed completely by the dead, and that it is some knowledge of this that makes us gaze with so much emotion upon the face of the Sphinx or Buddha. Who can forget the face of Chaliapine as the Mogul King in Prince Igor, when a mask covering its upper portion made him seem like a Phoenix at the end of its thousand wise years, awaiting in condescension the burning nest and what did it not gain from that immobility in dignity and in power?

IV

Realism is created for the common people and was always their peculiar delight, and it is the delight to-day of all those whose minds educated alone by school-masters and newspapers are without the memory of beauty and emotional subtlety. The occasional humorous realism that so much heightened the emotional effect of Elizabethan Tragedy, Cleopatra’s old man with an asp let us say, carrying the tragic crisis by its contrast above the tide-mark of Corneille’s courtly theatre, was made at the outset to please the common citizen standing on the rushes of the floor; but the great speeches were written by poets who remembered their patrons in the covered galleries. The fanatic Savonarola was but dead a century, and his lamentation in the frenzy of his rhetoric, that every prince of the Church or State throughout Europe was wholly occupied with the fine arts, had still its moiety of truth. A poetical passage cannot be understood without a rich memory, and like the older school of painting appeals to a tradition, and that not merely when it speaks of ‘Lethe’s Wharf’ or ‘Dido on the wild sea-banks’ but in rhythm, in vocabulary; for the ear must notice slight variations upon old cadences and customary words, all that high breeding of poetical style where there is nothing ostentatious, nothing crude, no breath of parvenu or journalist.

Let us press the popular arts on to a more complete realism, for that would be their honesty; and the commercial arts demoralise by their compromise, their incompleteness, their idealism without sincerity or elegance, their pretence that ignorance can understand beauty. In the studio and in the drawing-room we can found a true theatre of beauty. Poets from the time of Keats and Blake have derived their descent only through what is least declamatory, least popular in the art of Shakespeare, and in such a theatre they will find their habitual audience and keep their freedom. Europe is very old and has seen many arts run through the circle and has learned the fruit of every flower and known what this fruit sends up, and it is now time to copy the East and live deliberately.

V

'Ye shall not, while ye tarry with me, taste
From unrinsed barrel the diluted wine
Of a low vineyard or a plant illpruned,
But such as anciently the Aegean Isles
Poured in libation at their solemn feasts:
And the same goblets shall ye grasp embost
With no vile figures of loose languid boors,
But such as Gods have lived with and have led.'

The Noh theatre of Japan became popular at the close of the 14th century, gathering into itself dances performed at Shinto shrines in honour of spirits and gods or by young nobles at the court, and much old lyric poetry, and receiving its philosophy and its final shape perhaps from priests of a contemplative school of Buddhism. A small daimio or feudal lord of the ancient capital Nara, a contemporary of Chaucer’s, was the author, or perhaps only the stage-manager, of many plays. He brought them to the court of the Shogun at Kioto. From that on the Shogun and his court were as busy with dramatic poetry as the Mikado and his with lyric. When for the first time Hamlet was being played in London Noh was made a necessary part of official ceremonies at Kioto, and young nobles and princes, forbidden to attend the popular theatre in Japan as elsewhere a place of mimicry and naturalism were encouraged to witness and to perform in spectacles where speech, music, song and dance created an image of nobility and strange beauty. When the modern revolution came, Noh after a brief unpopularity was played for the first time in certain ceremonious public theatres, and 1897 a battleship was named Takasago, after one of its most famous plays. Some of the old noble families are to-day very poor, their men it may be but servants and labourers, but they still frequent these theatres. ‘Accomplishment’ the word Noh means, and it is their accomplishment and that of a few cultured people who understand the literary and mythological allusions and the ancient lyrics quoted in speech or chorus, their discipline, a part of their breeding. The players themselves, unlike the despised players of the popular theatre, have passed on proudly from father to son an elaborate art, and even now a player will publish his family tree to prove his skill. One player wrote in 1906 in a business circular—I am quoting from Mr. Pound’s redaction of the Notes of Fenollosa—that after thirty generations of nobles a woman of his house dreamed that a mask was carried to her from heaven, and soon after she bore a son who became a player and the father of players. His family he declared still possessed a letter from a 15th century Mikado conferring upon them a theatre-curtain, white below and purple above.

There were five families of these players and, forbidden before the Revolution to perform in public, they had received grants of land or salaries from the state. The white and purple curtain was no doubt to hang upon a wall behind the players or over their entrance door for the Noh stage is a platform surrounded upon three sides by the audience. No ‘naturalistic’ effect is sought. The players wear masks and found their movements upon those of puppets: the most famous of all Japanese dramatists composed entirely for puppets. A swift or a slow movement and a long or a short stillness, and then another movement. They sing as much as they speak, and there is a chorus which describes the scene and interprets their thought and never becomes as in the Greek theatre a part of the action. At the climax instead of the disordered passion of nature there is a dance, a series of positions & movements which may represent a battle, or a marriage, or the pain of a ghost in the Buddhist purgatory. I have lately studied certain of these dances, with Japanese players, and I notice that their ideal of beauty, unlike that of Greece and like that of pictures from Japan and China, makes them pause at moments of muscular tension. The interest is not in the human form but in the rhythm to which it moves, and the triumph of their art is to express the rhythm in its intensity. There are few swaying movements of arms or body such as make the beauty of our dancing. They move from the hip, keeping constantly the upper part of their body still, and seem to associate with every gesture or pose some definite thought. They cross the stage with a sliding movement, and one gets the impression not of undulation but of continuous straight lines.

The Print Room of the British Museum is now closed as a war-economy, so I can only write from memory of theatrical colour-prints, where a ship is represented by a mere skeleton of willows or osiers painted green, or a fruit tree by a bush in a pot, and where actors have tied on their masks with ribbons that are gathered into a bunch behind the head. It is a child’s game become the most noble poetry, and there is no observation of life, because the poet would set before us all those things which we feel and imagine in silence.

Mr. Ezra Pound has found among the Fenollosa manuscripts a story traditional among Japanese players. A young man was following a stately old woman through the streets of a Japanese town, and presently she turned to him and spoke: ‘Why do you follow me?’ ‘Because you are so interesting.’ ‘That is not so, I am too old to be interesting.’ But he wished he told her to become a player of old women on the Noh stage. ‘If he would become famous as a Noh player she said, he must not observe life, nor put on an old voice and stint the music of his voice. He must know how to suggest an old woman and yet find it all in the heart.’

VI

In the plays themselves I discover a beauty or a subtlety that I can trace perhaps to their threefold origin. The love-sorrows, the love of father and daughter, of mother and son, of boy and girl, may owe their nobility to a courtly life, but he to whom the adventures happen, a traveller commonly from some distant place, is most often a Buddhist priest; and the occasional intellectual subtlety is perhaps Buddhist. The adventure itself is often the meeting with ghost, god or goddess at some holy place or much-legended tomb; and god, goddess or ghost reminds me at times of our own Irish legends and beliefs, which once it may be differed little from those of the Shinto worshipper.

The feather-mantle, for whose lack the moon goddess, (or should we call her fairy?) cannot return to the sky, is the red cap whose theft can keep our fairies of the sea upon dry land; and the ghost-lovers in ‘Nishikigi’ remind me of the Aran boy and girl who in Lady Gregory’s story come to the priest after death to be married. These Japanese poets too feel for tomb and wood the emotion, the sense of awe that our Gaelic speaking country people will some times show when you speak to them of Castle Hackett or of some Holy Well; and that is why perhaps it pleases them to begin so many plays by a Traveller asking his way with many questions, a convention agreeable to me; for when I first began to write poetical plays for an Irish theatre I had to put away an ambition of helping to bring again to certain places, their old sanctity or their romance. I could lay the scene of a play on Baile’s Strand, but I found no pause in the hurried action for descriptions of strand or sea or the great yew tree that once stood there; and I could not in ‘The King’s Threshold’ find room, before I began the ancient story, to call up the shallow river and the few trees and rocky fields of modern Gort. But in the ‘Nishikigi’ the tale of the lovers would lose its pathos if we did not see that forgotten tomb where ‘the hiding fox’ lives among ‘the orchids and the chrysanthemum flowers.’ The men who created this convention were more like ourselves than were the Greeks and Romans, more like us even than are Shakespeare and Corneille. Their emotion was self-conscious and reminiscent, always associating itself with pictures and poems. They measured all that time had taken or would take away and found their delight in remembering celebrated lovers in the scenery pale passion loves. They travelled seeking for the strange and for the picturesque: ‘I go about with my heart set upon no particular place, no more than a cloud. I wonder now would the sea be that way, or the little place Kefu that they say is stuck down against it.’ When a traveller asks his way of girls upon the roadside he is directed to find it by certain pine trees, which he will recognise because many people have drawn them.

I wonder am I fanciful in discovering in the plays themselves (few examples have as yet been translated and I may be misled by accident or the idiosyncrasy of some poet) a playing upon a single metaphor, as deliberate as the echoing rhythm of line in Chinese and Japanese painting. In the ‘Nishikigi’ the ghost of the girl-lover carries the cloth she went on weaving out of grass when she should have opened the chamber door to her lover, and woven grass returns again and again in metaphor and incident. The lovers, now that in an aery body they must sorrow for unconsummated love, are ‘tangled up as the grass patterns are tangled.’ Again they are like an unfinished cloth: ‘these bodies, having no weft, even now are not come together, truly a shameful story, a tale to bring shame on the gods.’ Before they can bring the priest to the tomb they spend the day ‘pushing aside the grass from the overgrown ways in Kefu,’ and the countryman who directs them is ‘cutting grass on the hill;’ & when at last the prayer of the priest unites them in marriage the bride says that he has made ‘a dream-bridge over wild grass, over the grass I dwell in;’ and in the end bride and bridegroom show themselves for a moment ‘from under the shadow of the love-grass.’

In ‘Hagoromo’ the feather-mantle of the fairy woman creates also its rhythm of metaphor. In the beautiful day of opening spring ‘the plumage of Heaven drops neither feather nor flame,’ ‘nor is the rock of earth over-much worn by the brushing of the feathery skirt of the stars.’ One half remembers a thousand Japanese paintings, or whichever comes first into the memory. That screen painted by Korin, let us say, shown lately at the British Museum, where the same form is echoing in wave and in cloud and in rock. In European poetry I remember Shelley’s continually repeated fountain and cave, his broad stream and solitary star. In neglecting character which seems to us essential in drama, as do their artists in neglecting relief and depth, when they arrange flowers in a vase in a thin row, they have made possible a hundred lovely intricacies.

VII

These plays arose in an age of continual war and became a part of the education of soldiers. These soldiers, whose natures had as much of Walter Pater as of Achilles combined with Buddhist priests and women to elaborate life in a ceremony, the playing of football, the drinking of tea, and all great events of state, becoming a ritual. In the painting that decorated their walls and in the poetry they recited one discovers the only sign of a great age that cannot deceive us, the most vivid and subtle discrimination of sense and the invention of images more powerful than sense; the continual presence of reality. It is still true that the Deity gives us, according to His promise, not His thoughts or His convictions but His flesh and blood, and I believe that the elaborate technique of the arts, seeming to create out of itself a superhuman life has taught more men to die than oratory or the Prayer Book. We only believe in those thoughts which have been conceived not in the brain but in the whole body. The Minoan soldier who bore upon his arm the shield ornamented with the dove in the Museum at Crete, or had upon his head the helmet with the winged horse, knew his rôle in life. When Nobuzane painted the child Saint Kobo, Daishi kneeling full of sweet austerity upon the flower of the lotus, he set up before our eyes exquisite life and the acceptance of death.

I cannot imagine those young soldiers and the women they loved pleased with the ill-breeding and theatricality of Carlyle, nor I think with the magniloquence of Hugo. These things belong to an industrial age, a mechanical sequence of ideas; but when I remember that curious game which the Japanese called, with a confusion of the senses that had seemed typical of our own age, ‘listening to incense,’ I know that some among them would have understood the prose of Walter Pater, the painting or Puvis de Chavannes, the poetry of Mallarmé and Verlaine. When heroism returned to our age it bore with it as its first gift technical sincerity.

VIII

For some weeks now I have been elaborating my play in London where alone I can find the help I need, Mr. Dulac’s mastery of design and Mr. Ito’s genius of movement; yet it pleases me to think that I am working for my own country. Perhaps some day a play in the form I am adapting for European purposes shall awake once more, whether in Gaelic or in English, under the slope of Slieve-na-mon or Croagh Patrick ancient memories; for this form has no need of scenery that runs away with money nor of a theatre-building. Yet I know that I only amuse myself with a fancy; for though my writings if they be sea-worthy must put to sea, I cannot tell where they may be carried by the wind. Are not the fairy-stories of Oscar Wilde, which were written for Mr. Ricketts and Mr. Shannon and for a few ladies, very popular in Arabia?

W. B. Yeats, April 1916.
September 19, 2016
Pound to Joyce: ‘Wall, Mr Joice, I recon you’re a damn fine writer, that’s what I recon’

ON THIS DAY…19 DECEMBER

December 19, 2013

ON 19 DECEMBER 1917 POUND WROTE TO JOYCE PRAISING ‘TELEMACHUS.’

Pound, who had already been responsible for getting A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man into print, was impressed by the first episode of Joyce’s new novel, Ulysses. For the next three years, Pound was editor, critic, and even censor of Ulysses.

Shortly after A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man started to appear in serial form in the Egoist in February 1914, Joyce started work on Ulysses, a novel he may well have been thinking about since his time in Rome in 1906-7. However, he put off work on Ulysses in favour of his play Exiles, and it was not until June 1915 that the first episode of Ulysses was written.

However, even in April 1917 Joyce still maintained that the only part of it that might be ready for publication was the ‘Hamlet’ chapter, and he was reluctant to see that cut to fit the space available in the Egoistmagazine. He told Pound in June that he had finished the ‘Hades’ episode and was working on ‘Aeolus,’ and by August he was telling Margaret Anderson that he hoped to send some of Ulysses to Pound for the Little Review.

A severe attack of lumbago and glaucoma meant that Joyce had to undergo an eye operation at the end of August, and in mid-October he moved to Locarno to recuperate. The first three episodes of Ulysses were finished there, and sent to Claud Sykes in Zurich for typing. The first episode was then sent on to Pound who hoped to publish it in the Little Review and the Egoist.

In his letter of 19 December 1917, Pound declares that the opening chapter is ‘echt Joice’ and though there was a passage on the third page that made him question it for a moment, he reread it, and could find nothing wrong. There were some words that he wondered about, for instance ‘merry’ in the phrase ‘merrying over the sea,’ but again these were not a matter for concern.

The one thing that seemed to occur prophetically to Pound was that the novel was sure to be suppressed but, he declared, ‘it is damn wellworth it.’ Unwittingly, Pound had a dig at Anthony Comstock, the founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, and promoter of a bill that made it illegal to deliver obscene, lewd or lascivious material. It was Comstock’s law and his Society for the Suppression of Vice that got Ulysses suppressed in 1920.

Pound concluded his letter in a voice imitative of an American drawl: ‘Wall, Mr Joice, I recon you’re a damn fine writer, that’s what I recon’… You can take it from me, an’ I’m a jedge.’

Sources & Further Reading:

Joyce, James: Letters of James Joyce, vol. II edited by Richard Ellmann, London: Faber & Faber, 1966.

Pound, Ezra: Pound/Joyce – The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce with Pound’s Essays on Joyce, edited and with Commentary by Forrest Reid, London: Faber & Faber, 1968.

December, Significant Joycean Dates Anthony Comstock, Ezra Pound, Margaret Anderson, New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, Telemachus, The Egoist, The Little Review. permalink.

February 21, 2016
The Pound Question: “Light lights in air”: Value, price, profit and Louis Zukofsky’s poetry By Andras Gyorgy

On the Pound question,

Quoted from the article “Light lights in air”: Value, price,

profit and Louis Zukofsky’s

poetry by Andras Gyorgy:

(wiki links edited by steve fly)

The “Pound Question” is a complex one. At this stage we may conclude at the very least that his well-known fascist sympathy in the war and broadcasts on behalf of Mussolini need be set against his enthusiastic support of Zukofsky’s circle, mostly Jewish and avowedly Marxist.

British painter and writer Wyndham Lewis, with whom Pound worked on the Vorticist magazine Blast in 1913-14, offered some insight into the American poet’s personality. Lewis called Pound, “A bombastic galleon, palpably bound to, or from, the Spanish Main. Going on board, I discovered beneath its skull and cross-bones, intertwined with fleurs de lys and spattered with preposterous starspangled oddities, a heart of gold.”
Pound had discovered the power of “movements” which consisted of little more than a manifesto, a special issue of a journal and an anthology. At his most enthusiastic, he would be praising and advising Zukofsky almost daily, sometimes more often, in letters, introducing his discovery to editors, giving him the benefit of his time, his wondrous editing, academic sponsorship. When his friend James Joyce was down on his luck, Pound sent him a pair of old shoes. According to Ernest Hemingway (in A Moveable Feast), Pound was “so kind to people that I always thought of him as a sort of saint.”
The touching relationship between Zukofsky and Pound, which did not cease in warmth and respect to the end of their days, is an aspect of the passing on of the modernist tradition to another generation of Zukofsky’s Objectivist circle, and then again through Robert Creeley and his generation, or “company” as he called it.

Zukofsky fought for years to have “A” 1-12 (1959, 1967) in print. The poetic sequence Anew (1943), also the name of the collection of shorter poems that New Directions is bringing back, was the last volume that a publisher brought out for a very long time. A testament to Zukofsky’s mood during the long period of his neglect is the title of the sequence “Barely and Widely” (1962), which refers to Louis’ complaining to his soul mate Celia, as he often did, about how “barely” he was known and how “widely” neglected. This was true at least until many of the poets represented in Donald Allen’s very influential anthology, The New American Poetry (1959), discovered and championed him in their war against “academic” poets and the Eliot-inspired “New Criticism”, which ruled English departments after the Second World War.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/02/03/zuko-f03.html

February 10, 2016
Hilaritas Press – The New Home of Robert Anton Wilson publications

Hilaritas Press grew out of a desire to keep the books of Robert Anton Wilson in print and to fulfill Bob’s wish to provide for his children, something that during his life was difficult when authors typically receive less than ten percent of the money generated by their work. Bob’s daughter Christina and his friend Rasa, directing enterprises of the Robert Anton Wilson Trust, created Hilaritas Press as a way to fulfill Bob’s wishes and insure that his legacy remains robust. We’ve enlisted the aid of a small group of Bob’s treasured friends and others who are advising and helping out the Trust on RAW related matters. Bob would have loved that. Throughout his life he generously gave thanks and returned support for the many people who were touched by his heart, humor and wisdom.

Bob said that he first got the word hilaritas from Ezra Pound’s Cantos which was quoting the Byzantine philosopher Gemistus Pletho who said “you can recognize gods even in their human form by their outstanding hilaritas.” Bob notes that in Pletho’s time, hilaritas meant “cheerfulness, good humor we would say, but not in the sense of always joking.” For many years Bob would often sign his letters, and then emails with “amor et hilaritas”, or simply “hilaritas”.

After editing, reformatting and publishing Bob’s books in eBook and Print editions, a huge task that will take us a while, Hilaritas Press will invite other adventurous authors to become members of the Hilaritas Press family. Stay tuned to this internet channel for more details!

http://www.hilaritaspress.com/

February 8, 2016
Cathay: Ezra Pound’s re-imagination of Chinese Poetry by Kerry Brown

Cathay: Ezra Pound’s re-imagination of Chinese Poetry
This slim volume, born from an accidental discovery, set the tone for modern translations of Chinese poetry into English
By Kerry Brown

This year marks the hundredth anniversary of the first publication of Ezra Pound’s slender volume of oriental poems, Cathay. While the collection does not have the fame of his epic lifelong work, Cantos, it ranks highly among modern fusion poetry that blends in two different literary traditions.
Pound never claimed to be fluent in Chinese, writes Ira Nadel in his introduction, although in the last decades of his life he did study Confucius’s Analects with a dictionary by his side. He used Chinese characters in his work, but Pound’s view from early on was that Chinese ideograms or characters, and the culture they represented, had primarily an aesthetic appeal.
The translations, which he based his own works on, came from the work of Ernest Fenollosa, an early Orientalist who mostly used Japanese renditions of classical Chinese works. Cathay is, therefore, a double mediation—a work based on another body of work which itself was derivative — rather than directly linked to the source material.
Pound was criticized for this remoteness once Cathay was published. But in the intervening hundred years, the consensus remains that he did manage to capture something of the spirit and deeper meaning of the Chinese texts.
Pound made a major contribution to the modern western concept of “the Orient”, a place of otherness, with a different tempo and emotional register to European or American cultures. He described the dominant feelings of being lost and the sense of solitude within his imagined Orient. “The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter” is the most celebrated of this genre, with its tale of “two small people, without dislike or suspicion” who marry at 14, get separated at 16, with the wife waiting for her husband to one day return.
Exile and absence marks many of the other poems, reinforcing this sense that Chinese poetry is about delicate understatement and restraint, expressed through metaphors concerning the landscape, vegetation, or water.
Pound’s imagination and work dealt with a larger “orient” rather than a specific place called China. The ways in which he treated this idea of what is oriental typifies other writers or thinkers from Europe or North America, whose cultures are distinct from that in Japan, China, or across East Asia.
Pound makes certain assumptions. In the Cantos, he described the whole dynastic history of China. Historians would now despair at his idea of such neat divisions between order and chaos. But when we remember that he is writing not so much about what China or the Orient as an actual place might be, but how western imagination configured it and responded to ideas about it this question of how accurate Pound’s translations are becomes unimportant. What makes his poetry important not only in and for itself, but because its role in this history of western conceptualization of the Orient, and of China.
The book is also a reminder that Pound was a skilled lyricist. His later political adventures, which almost led to a conviction for treason during World War II for producing propaganda for the Fascist government of Italy, have tended to overshadow awareness of his immense technical skills. The Cathay poems show the intensity, the concreteness and the music that Pound at his best was able to create. Cathay contains hybrid material—most of it related to Fenollosa’s renditions of Japanese-Chinese texts, but he also put in his celebrated translation from the Old English, The Seafarer. There is nothing discordant about this. In fact, it stimulates thoughts on how similar the worlds from these two eras—ancient imperial China and the dark ages of Europe—might be. Both describe loss, vulnerabilities, and the creation of beliefs.

Pound is perhaps one of the very few creative figures that succeeded in bridging two very different cultural worlds. Cathay stands as a testament to that.
Kerry Brown is Professor of Chinese Studies and Director of the Lau China Institute at King’s College, London. His latest book China’s CEO: Xi Jinping will be out in April, 2016Reprinted with permission from The Asian Review of Books

http://english.caixin.com/2015-11-28/100879225.html

December 5, 2015