MAKING LIGHT OF IT

(The Return by Nathaniel Dorsky)

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(The Return by Ezra Pound)

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"What 'The Return'...accomplished, precisely, was to shift our attention away from a search for what some dramatic character, identified or not, might be saying to something more nakedly present: what the poem before us is creating.  It is undoubtedly easiest to recognize the visual aspects of such a nakedly present creation-the picture or 'image' the words conjure up.  Yet obviously Pound's sense of the image as an 'intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time' suggest more than the visual element stressed in his definition of 'Phanopoeia': 'a casting of images upon the visual imagination'.  The 'intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time' is well on the way to our conception of the tonal center or affect....As for 'The Return' it is neither wholly speech nor wholly a succession of images cast upon 'the visual imagination'.  But if we see it as a progression of tonal centers, we shall indeed find something of 'interest' to say about it-and we shall point ourselves towards the evolution of the sequence in our century". 

-The Modern Poetic Sequence: The Genius of Modern Poetry by M.L. Rosenthal and Sally M. Gall

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(The Return by Nathaniel Dorsky)

A sketch given to me by a friend and talented artist, Chuck Landvatter...

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"It certainly 'seems' like Ezra Pound is primarily involved with telling his mind; you know, he's telling what he thinks is good and what he thinks is bad, but I hear his song, and I heard it even when I was utterly baffled by a book that obviously had been given to me as a joke.  It wasn't just stubbornness, and I had certainly encountered other books that were tough and tougher to read than that; but after comprehending something of them I threw them out.  Here was one that the more I understood the more yield came to me.  So here became the great book for going over and over and over.  Now I would say that I can read six to ten, in some places twenty words in a row, which isn't very much still, but it's good progress in a life time's worth of reading.  I'm working on it.  I've got some of the major slogans that were to sustain me all of my life, prayers, like 'All that is is light.'  That is enough to return me to that kind of person Pound is who would know how important it is to say and give Erigena a translation-'All that is is light.'  It's so powerful in that context.  That's something of what I mean by meaning." 

- Stan Brakhage on Pound's The Cantos

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(Also be sure to check out Yoel Meranda's excellent recent post involving Pound as well...)

"All that is is light." - Dun Scotus Erigena

"To see a world in a grain of sand." - William Blake

These the primary impulses while working on this film. It is dedicated to Jim Davis who showed me the "first spark" of refracted film light.

-Brakhage's program notes for The Text of Light

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(From Canto LXXIV by Ezra Pound)

(From Canto LXXXVII by Ezra Pound)

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(From The Films of Stan Brakhage... by Bruce Elder)

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See Robert Grosseteste's On Light here...

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(From The Text of Light by Stan Brakhage; courtesy Anthology Film Archives)

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