November 2002
The appeal to Nature, mainstay since Wordsworth of poetic reformers, had in [Ernest] Fenollosa's mind the peculiar transcendentalist torque. Another mind similarly energized was soon to detect in Nature an equally significant reticence. In 1917, while Ezra Pound in London was extracting virtu from The Seafarer to make what would be Canto I, a seafarer ten years his junior, great-nephew of Emerson's collaborator Margaret Fuller, was watching the bubbles boiled up in the wake of a Navy ship, and concluding from those millions of changing spheres that nature did not use pi. For pi will only describe a sphere once formed, and a sphere moreover idealized because static. But the generation of forms is described by vectors ("Vectors represent energy events, and they are discrete"), and Buckminster Fuller proposed to make it his business to find nature's energetic geometry. Just 50 years later the bubble behind the ship had become in Montreal a geodesic skybreak bubble 20 stories high, enclosing 7 million cubic feet of air, as free as a water bubble of internal supports, and weighing a hundredth of what former technology dictated that such a structure should weigh. The load on its foundations was less than the weight of its materials, and had it been a mile wide it would have floated away. Outlining the first principles of the universe whose differentiation by mind can yield such a marvel, its designer spoke of knots.
And in 1920, within earshot of guns near Minsk, a Red Army poster artist shared freight-car lodgings with a former instructor of Japanese. The teacher talked; the artist applied himself with passion, and learned 300 ideographs: knife-and-heart, "sorrow"; water-and-eye, "weep." His name was Sergei Mihailovitch Eisenstein. He envisaged an orientalist's career, drifted amid economic chaos into the theater instead, and by 1925 was applying ideographic principles to an art of blended snapshot: The Battleship Potemkin.
To such dynamic vigors from Chinese poetry is both a long way and a short one, and reviewed from the end of the way, the starting point alters. Mind applied fire to stone, and we, knowing of iron, can see stone with a different eye. A Russian mind, applied to ideographs in a time of Revolutionary propaganda, in conceiving montage has altered our understanding of ideographic potentialities. An American mind, brought to ideographs by an art historian of Spanish descent who had been exposed to Transcendentalism, derived Vorticism, the Cantos, and an "ideogrammic method" that modifies our sense of what Chinese can be. Buckminster Fuller adduces a general law: "Heisenberg said that observation alters the phenomenon observed. T.S. Eliot said that studying history alters history. Ezra Pound said that thinking in general alters what is thought about. Pound's formulation is the most general, and I think it's the earliest." Where, when, in what connection had Pound said that? Fuller couldn't remember; he'd read it long ago; it would take weeks to find it. No matter: such a self-interfering pattern does not derive its power from its credentials. To think of Pound in that way alters Pound.
Walk away from Omelas.