This is increasingly my reading log/blog. A painting friend texted that she was reading Ezra Pound’s Cantos. Now I have dipped into the cantos but have never read them cover to cover. I am not going to talk about the cantos because I really don’t know anything about the cantos – and everything I know is probably wrong. I do know that Ezra Pound edited that modernist classic -The Waste Land. And so this is sort of waste land ish -and also sort of James Joycean – those were the influences.

My friend sent a screenshot of a commentary on the text comparing logopoeia with phanopoeia. The play of ideas versus the play of images. The cantos being phantopoeia. Now what are the images of the first two cantos!

Canto 1 is from the Odyssey! It is reworked from a dated translation. It begins with a ship! We are going on a voyage my friend! My friend Orit and I decided that we should make an animated tv show about noah’s ark but it is a decadent party ark- because it is the end of the world. There is something magical about this passage – setting sail – a ocean passage – an adventure (although I prefer Cimmerian not Kimmerian), rituals and sacrifices and gods (Pluto and Persephonie) And the dead. To begin we must go back maybe but not to repeat. I just wanted the D&D movie with my kids and in that movie to they go and talk to the dead. What do the dead have to tell us?

Canto 2 we continue but we enter into history from mythology of legend – we talk to Robert Browning – a poet! We are not connecting with tradition – with our transmission from poet to poet – the great golden chain. “Under black fur-hood, hthe daughter of Ocean,” This line is so tactile. Reading the greek – I am reminded eleanor is helen – but what if I did not read greek – what would this look like to me – these arcane symbols. The format changes in the middle of canto 2 – I don’t know the proper name.

“Leopards snrffing the grape shoots by scupper-hole, Crouched panthers by fore-hatch,” No idea what is going on here. But Images YES! Runa Puma

“And So-shu churned In the sea, So-shu also, USIng the long moon for a churn-stick” All mythology and the milky ocean of Rama and the milky way and all poetry and mythology is about the cosmos/ the world – I am that!

“And we have heard the fauns eluding Proteus m the smell of hay under the olive-trees.

And the frogs singing against the fauns In. the half-light

And”

(&)

I also wants to put something about Boothby’s book Death and Desire on Lacan and Freud’s metapsychology. The first 30 pages are about painting and the relationship between the foreground and teh background but what if everything is just atmosphere and certain objects have more weight more gravity in the atmosphere. Monet’s heystacks and different from Millet. Millet has gleaners – people – subjects – objects. Monet has light – the heystacks are just as they appear in light. They arise from. the atmosphere. How do we organize our experience. Lacan is about language – language is the structure of the unconscious – Jung (or maybe Hillman) is about images – images are the structure/of the unconscious (or perhaps archetypes for Jung). Freud is also about myths and drives – oedipus, the death drive. Logopoeia and phanopoeia in another place. When I think of ordering – i think of yes – computation. What if the order is the first thing and from that the word and the image arise.

So many stories ? Why so many? Part of my personal journey I suppose is relishing in the abundance and the multiplicities. We forget the importance of this in the monoculture we now cultivate.

I forgot how much I love these stories. How I want to make a Grimms fairytale video game. How now the song ‘play a video game’ by Lana Del Rey is in my ears.

The story follows a stupid father and his three daughters. He asks them what they want, and the first wants a diamond the second a pearl and the third a singing springing lark – whatever that is. He can buy the first two but not the last.

Throughout the story I see money. What can money buy? What transactions exist without money? I think about this with cryptocurrency and the possibility of a new way to transact other than debt.

In order to get the lark the father must give his favorite daughter to a lion! Which he does.

As it turned out the lion was really a prince so although the daughter thought she was walking to her doom she walked towards something else. Not sure what – this looks like self-sacrifice to me.

Again one of the other sisters get married and there is a snafu where the lion gets turned into a bird for 7 years. SEVEN! This is a magic number- again. And again, the daughter/wife self sacrifices to go chase after the lion/bird. but this is an example of a woman going on a quest not a man – so I suppose this is interesting different. What is a female questor? I alway think about what is the heroine’s myth – but perhaps this is part of the old culture that we must leave behind for a new collective myth without heroes or heroines but some other story line.

The daughter/sister gets help from the winds, gets magic trinkets, and goes through trials, there is an almost marriage of the lion/bird to another and then the duagher/sister prooves herself.

These stories are all so similar? Why are there so many of them? What is the difference that makes the difference?