signs of stendhal

Sure. Well, I can tell you my interpretation of Daniel Ladinsky’s translation of an already translated poem written nearly seven centuries ago, so whatever I say will be a few deviations away from its “meaning,” but here’s how I read it:

One part of enlightenment is understanding that there is nothing in this world that is not a miracle. No matter how simple it seems to us or how accustomed to it we become, every single atom is a miracle and therefore warrants our awe. That’s a pretty typical mystic/animist assertion.

Then Hafiz proposes a less celebrated aspect of enlightenment regarding the management of this justified desire to rave. He says the enlightened person will not constantly rave about every single atom despite constantly appreciating its miraculous nature. An enlightened person will restrain that urge when appropriate. Ladinsky (who used lots of contemporary lingo in this particular collection) translated the examples given as “when there are // young souls near … or people trying to sleep.” Not knowing the original Persian, I can’t say how literal or liberal his word choice is here, but to me this represents two basic scenarios:

(1) “young souls,” are not necessarily young people, but people still early on their journey toward enlightenment. They deserve to forge their own path to the mountain top, and squwaking universal glories at them won’t help. So basically this is advice to resist the temptation to over-praise/explain your epiphanies to (would-be) seekers, and rather get out of their way.

(2) To “let people sleep” means just that, which is to say, not to be a dick. Profound insight sometimes turns people into dicks. Such people spend so much time zoomed out in the eternal perspective that they stop relating to others’ daily needs and considerations. The truly enlightened understand that life also happens on a mundane level, and people aren’t always on the same level as their company. In such cases, they don’t insist on subjecting others to their own ecstatic fits. When it’s the right time to share awe with someone else, it should feel right.

Pound didn’t claim (nor did I mean to) that the sensation of the soul in ascent could only be experienced through art, but rather that art is how such an experience can be passed on from one person to another. So, there may be infinite ways to get the feeling directly and on your own, but to pass it on to someone unfamiliar with the sensation requires a transcendent intermediary. Before I address the rest of your question, consider this (somewhat convoluted) metaphor:

Imagine Pound is a scientist, and he’s talking about physical evolution rather than spiritual evolution (although he’d probably insist those are simply different bands of the same spectrum: Evolution). He claims to have discovered that all humans are born with dormant genetic code for a new mutation, say, one that enables us to breathe underwater. This would solve a ton of problems for humanity, so it’s super important that everyone activate this gene.

The problem is, no one can just explain the situation and induce the desired genetic expression; it only happens when each brain is individually stimulated in such a way that it produces the necessary chemical environment for the process. To do this, Dr. Pound prescribes not reading up on brain chemistry nor discussing it with those who’ve already successfully mutated, but exposing oneself to sensory input that stimulates the needed chemical cocktail in the brain. Once the gene has been activated, the individual is not constantly breathing underwater, but she forever afterward has that capability. She is, however, no more useful to activating the gene in someone else than she was before — only the sensory prescription can do that — except she can now recreate and share the recipe of sensory stimuli that worked for her.

New mutation = epiphany

Talking about mutation = talking about enlightenment

Breathing underwater = a skill that can be exercised at will but isn’t always in use, much like the ability to enter a state of enlightened bliss

Sensory stimuli = art

So yes of course, contemplation of nature, civilization, and the cosmos is not only a possible route to enlightenment, it is actually much more likely to get you there than contemplating a work of art because those things are the reality of the truth revealed, rather than a representation of it. (Art’s usefulness is not in presenting anything new, but rendering the familiar to be processed as if new.) 

As far as conversations about those contemplations — I would say that if the people conversing have each already known ecstasy on their own, yes, the exhilaration of connection and the act of recollection can trigger ecstatic feelings or some nostalgic simulacrum. And if they’re talking to someone who hasn’t yet ‘activated their gene,’ the conversation can certainly pique a curiosity that might well result in the neophyte pursuing eventual evolution — but even that is not passing it on directly. 

That said, you’re right that conversation can sometimes communicate (in the Latin sense of “share”) an aspect of enlightenment from the initiated to the uninitiated, but when this happens, conversation ceases to be ‘just’ conversation and becomes art. Recall Wordsworth’s definition of poetry: “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings…from emotion recollected in tranquility.” He wrote that to affirm inspired poetry as “the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation” and vice-versa. 

It’s hard for us to understand the concept of poetry — or any kind of art — being defined not by form but by spirit, because we are so used to thinking of art as product, past-time, or ornament, whereas Pound and Wordsworth thought of it as nothing less than the catalyst and the by-product of Enlightenment. To them art is not a ‘thing’ to be perceived, but the perception itself, in which one person’s understanding is transmitted to someone else. So the actual objet d’art, though sacred, is more of a vessel than anything. Interpretation of the sensory stimuli it provides, if done in a meaningful albeit arational, alchemical way, produces “such knowledge [which] cannot be communicated discursively or even understood intellectually: it can be grasped only in a state of actual identity with the Supreme Principle.”

Architect Herbert Bangs wrote that last line, explaining the mystical inspiration behind cathedrals, which were conceived as art more so than practical structures. He goes on to sum up the mystic architects’ concept of art’s usefulness in society, which can too easily be contrasted with our common assumption of its uselessness: 

“We are here, incarnate on the earth, to pursue the higher state of consciousness that is our birthright. Therefore… the truly practical is that which moves us closer to [this enlightenment]. It is, then, art that is useful.”

Nicely put, I think, if only a tad off-topic to your question — but it does relate to the (demeaned) purpose of art in human culture. Seemingly all the great literary and mystic geniuses agreed that beyond just being a mundane noun (a painting! a book! a fancy knot!), art’s higher state is as a verb: it is the sudden expansion of epiphany; it is the slow ascent of evolution.

And if I can go further off-topic, I’d say that our contemporary focus on art as a clutter of tangible nouns rather than a conceptual method or a state of consciousness perfectly exemplifies the mental block of our times: we take the real, the mysterious, the infinite, the complex, and reduce them to something symbolic, knowable, objectified, vapid. (Perhaps it is language itself, and the thinking that shapes itself around language, that has forced us to do this — another argument for bypassing conversational analysis.)

The only better example I can think of is what religion routinely does to those mystics’ understanding of god. God — that pure state of the collective being; that ongoing undulation of chaos fucking itself into creation and dying back into chaos — becomes a bearded man wagging his finger at us with one hand and blowing kisses with the other. Because he, and not Universal Mind, is the kind of divinity that could fit into a Newtonian universe made of discrete objects and empty space — but we don’t live in that universe anymore, and, frankly, never did. We know now, even with empirical certainty, that what seems to be a noun is really a verb (i.e., principle matter behaving like various forms), and that object and subject are not just connected, they are (in the original sense of the word) atoned. Our science has finally caught up to our poetry, so it’s time we followed suit.

— But, see how silly all this sounds when I try to explain it rationally? 
Once again, my ineloquence proves my point! File this post under #paradox #tricksterarchetype #ouroboros #rambling #funwithetymology

I’ve actually thought about this a lot. I use Pound’s phrase in my bio mainly because it contains a concise, inspired definition of art (and its implied value) that I believe has been lost. To say whether I agree with it exactly, I have to break it into parts: what Pound meant by “art,” what he meant by “the sole means,” and what he meant by “ecstasy” or “the sensation of the soul in ascent.”

ART: People have proven time and again that the term “art” is very pliable, that there’s room for all sorts of products and practices to share it if these things emerge from passion rather than imperative. But I think it’s safe to say that here Pound is talking about culture’s conventional definition: fine arts, literature, drama, music. My definition tends to be broader – I am moved when I see people do even mundane tasks with love and flair – so we might disagree slightly here on that term.

THE SOLE MEANS: When he calls art ‘the sole means’ of transmuting a certain ecstasy to others, he is specifically contrasting art with religion. Later in this same passage* he calls religion an inferior subcategory of art, a “[failed] attempt to popularize” it, by which he probably meant to standardize it for the populace, i.e., to indiscriminately diffuse the sensation of the soul in ascent to religious devotees. He admits that a religion can sometimes convey this ecstasy to its members, but irregularly — and I might add, with more distressing consequences when it fails, in that it can too easily provide a false sense of having succeeded.

ECSTASY, or, THE SENSATION OF THE SOUL IN ASCENT: Forgive me while I speak with total authority about something I have not and can not confirm. Because I’m about to clarify, on Pound’s behalf, what this turn of phrase truly refers to:

Art has many functions that everyone knows about – provoking critical thought, emotional reactions, discussion, aesthetic pleasure – but ‘the soul in ascent’ is a specific phenomenon that not everyone experiences (although everyone could), so it’s not an inherent aspect of art appreciation. In other words, by “ascent” Pound is not simply talking about art’s potential to be “uplifting.” (For that matter, tons of great art can ruin your day.) His ecstasy is the quintessential spiritual experience: it is the feeling of growth on an arational psychic plane. It is the expansion (ascent) of the self (soul) into a broader understanding of reality, which cannot be achieved through studying or obeying parental guidance, governments, scholastics, or even, as Pound wishes to emphasize, religion.

There are a lot of other words for this awakening. Mystics tend to call it “Enlightenment.” Scientists might be more comfortable with “evolution.” What it means is in either case is transcending your paradigm, and since all language and institutions are produced by and for their paradigm and are so limited to its logic, they are not very effective at conveying its transcendence. That is why Pound calls art the sole means – or really, the best hope – for sharing (and therefore perpetuating) this phenomenon. It can do so by nature of its forms (stories and pictures), which forego pretentious/futile “explanations” of ecstasy, aiming instead to arouse the innate intuitions that, taken seriously and sincerely pursued, become ecstasy itself.

Now, I’m certain there are other ways that the seed of transcendence is passed on and planted. Falling in love with someone, for example, can mutually initiate such an adventure. (Although falling in love and appreciating a work of art are not so different; in both cases deriving meaning from and becoming attached to something beyond rational self-interest and/or its practical function.) But Pound was writing about social change, so I suspect he didn’t intend to rule such revelations out so much as focus on ways that ecstasy can be inspired remotely, and on a large scale. Here I do agree with him that art trumps anything formally organized for the good of the people. The appreciation of art is an emotional state, and only in such a state can epiphany take you over the threshold to ecstasy. Religion and politics are usually founded on the logical conclusions of somebody’s legitimate ascent, but they focus on canonizing and enforcing those conclusions rather than precipitating individual epiphany. Insofar as a religion or the like does inspire individual epiphany, Pound says, it does so as art.

So I guess that’s a rambling way of saying that I agree with Pound’s intended subtext, if not his actual statement. History seems to agree that even the most sincere attempts to transmute enlightenment are doomed to fail – to be exploited and misinterpreted, to generate propaganda, to brainwash, to disempower – if they do not intrinsically incite personal epiphany on the other end. Because the whole point of Enlightenment is that you can’t bum it off someone else like a cigarette or a pop quiz answer. You can only fully know the sensation of ascent if you actually ascend.

What do you think?

*In his 1907 letter to Viola Jordan, which I’ve admittedly not read in its entirety but only seen as fragments in secondary sources.