MAKING LIGHT OF IT

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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