Ground War, Like Ground Meat: A Radio Script
(written in 1991)

Jack Foley

Give peace in our time, O Lord.

                --The Book of Common Prayer

This is Jack Foley. And Adelle Foley.

Today’s show is a rebroadcast of excerpts from “Ground War, Like Ground Meat,” a show originally written and broadcast in 1991, during the course of a different Bush administration from the present one. At that time the catch-phrases were “Operation Desert Storm” and “ground war,” a war on the ground rather than in the air. Today’s catch-phrase was very nearly “Operation Infinite Justice.” One wonders how much has changed.

We will be bringing you readings on the subjects of war, peace and poetry. We’re centering the show on the American poet, Ezra Pound. Pound ran spectacularly afoul of the American military and narrowly escaped being tried for treason at the end of World War II. He also wrote one of the great anti-war poems of the twentieth century.

Ezra Loomis Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho in 1885 and died in Venice, Italy in 1972. The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry writes about him:

Pound was the central figure in the modern movement, personally responsible for the renewal of English poetry in the 1910s. Yet he remains a controversial figure. His brutal politics have been damaging to his lofty view of the artist and civilization; he is also condemned as an elitist, an obscurantist, and a charlatan...None of these charges quite shakes the substance of his achievement.

In the later 1930s Pound devoted much of his energy to defending fascism and trying to avert war. When war broke out, he embarked on a series of fanatical addresses to American troops, which were broadcast on Rome Radio. As a result, he was arrested by partisans in 1945 and handed over to the US forces, who held him for six months at a Disciplinary Training Centre near Pisa, pending trial on a treason charge. It seems likely that the inhuman conditions he endured there for the first three weeks accelerated the breakdown in rationality already to be glimpsed in his writings. Repatriated to the United States to stand trial, he was found unfit to plead on grounds of insanity and incarcerated in St. Elizabeths Hospital, Washington, DC, from 1946 to 1958.

His imprisonment brought about an artistic recovery.

*

  We’ll begin with a poem by the painter, Marsden Hartley. It’s called “V Is for Victory, as You Can Plainly See,” and it was published posthumously in Hartley’s Selected Poems in 1945. Hartley died in 1943.

I never really like this cat though she is
a valuable asset to this household.
Everybody smiles and is pleased when she
rolls over on a mouse; and if she gets a
rat by the back of the neck she drags him
in until somebody has noticed her skill,
then she will chew off its head.

She does far worse than this; she
catches birds and it makes no difference
how the family frowns; she pays no attention
to it.
She has just caught a little bird and killed  
a song, it flutters a little in her
tightened jaws.
I try to get it loose but suddenly I see the
head lean back--give up the ghost.
In each of the cat’s eyes is a vast V.
No more songs now in the waving grass.

A friend of mine writes me, “Now that the war is over, we can start living again. We can continue to write about life.” We live no doubt in difficult times. Almost everyone I know feels depressed, lonely, alienated, with a sense of “Am I the only one?” Was the war in the Persian Gulf really so widely supported? President George Bush has been propagating a second-rate mythology which doesn’t mention its own murderous consequences. How is it possible to respond? Can we respond? Are the dead glad to have been slaughtered so that America can exorcize its Vietnam trauma? Why isn’t America traumatized by the events in the Persian Gulf? Where others feel release, the people I know feel only frustration or frustration mixed with anger, bewilderment. Do we really live here? Does our opinion matter at all? What does it mean to be “American”? The mood of the country --but is it the mood of the country?--is a mirror in which we are sickened to see ourselves. How is love, how is any connection possible here? Is it possible to love some people while we are murdering others? The Persian Gulf issue has a physical dimension. To admire what we did there requires an act of repression, of denial, of misnaming. Such acts extend deeply into our history. It is precisely how we “handled” the Indians. A friend phoned me recently and said the word “genocide.” Is it possible to feel national pride without murdering someone? Oughtn’t we to feel national pride because we have not murdered someone? How are we roused to thought? How are we roused to speech?

Earlier today I met a very nice 6-year-old named Sam. He had just finished making a paper airplane. He didn’t bother trying to fly it: he just pointed it at me and said, “BANG!” How can we love one another when everything we pick up is a gun? A phallus is not a gun but a possible bridge, a possible connector. Love is not something we do to someone. It is something we do with someone, for someone. Sam was trying to make a connection with me. He wanted to be a “hit” in my consciousness. BANG! He would have been appalled had his gun turned out to be real, had I exploded there in front of him. Someone asked me, years ago, “Did you bang her?” “No, but I wanted to.” Pleasure is violence in a repressive, guilt-ridden culture. Violence and sexuality go together--BANG!--when we are faced with some enormous blockage to which violence seems the only adequate response. How do we learn to love one another? BANG! How do we learn to speak?

Ground war, like ground meat. I was asked to make some comments on the effects of censorship on a radio station like KPFA. I said that I thought the war itself was a mode of censorship. War coverage tends to dominate any radio station at a time like that. It becomes “the story,” the “news.” But it seems to me that insofar as we allow the war to dominate our consciousness, then the war has won. Part of the point of this war in the Persian Gulf was to deflect our awareness from anything else. If we allow that to happen, even in our opposition to the war, then we are the war.

I was born in 1940. World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf. It is necessary to keep, even as we take up an oppositional stance, the sense of what that opposition is rooted in. What does it mean to be alive? What does it mean to have a body? What does it mean to experience pleasure and delight?

Ground war, like ground meat.

The following passage is taken from Ezra Pound’s poem, “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” published in 1921. It deals with the First World War--called “The Great War” at the time. Pound quotes a bit of Greek from Pindar which is immediately translated. The Latin is from the Roman poet, Horace: dulce et decorum est pro patria mori: Sweet and fitting it is to die for your country. You will see that Pound is by no means in agreement with that sentiment.

O bright Apollo!
tin anthra, tin eroa, tina theon,
What god, man, or hero
Shall I place a tin wreath upon!
 
These fought in any case,
            and some believing,
                                    pro domo, in any case...
 
Some quick to arm,
some for adventure,
some from fear of weakness,
some from fear of censure,
some for love of slaughter, in imagination,
learning later...
some in fear, learning love of slaughter;
 
Died some, pro patria,
                             non “dulce” non “et decor”...
walked eye-deep in hell
believing in old men’s lies, then unbelieving
came home, home to a lie,
home to many deceits,
home to old lies and new infamy;
usury age-old and age-thick
and liars in public places.  

Daring as never before, wastage as never before.
Young blood and high blood,
fair cheeks, and fine bodies;
 
fortitude as never before
 
frankness as never before,
disillusions as never told in the old days,
hysterias, trench confessions,
laughter out of dead bellies.  

*

There died a myriad,  
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization,
 
Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid,
 
For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered books.
 

Pound had much earlier published a poem which is very different in its sense of war from what we have just heard. It’s a sestina, which is a complicated form. You’ll find the last words of each stanza repeating as the poem goes along, and there is a certain tension between the poem’s passionate speech and its extremely refined form. The repeated words are peace, music, clash, opposing, crimson, rejoicing. The speaker is Bertran de Born, a warrior and a troubadour of twelfth-century Provence, and, as Pound tells us, “Dante Alighieri put this man in hell for that he was a stirrer up of strife. Eccovi! Judge ye! Have I dug him up again?” The scene is at Altaforte, de Born’s castle. Papiols is his jongleur, his minstrel, the singer of his songs. The leopard is the device of Richard Coeur-de-Lion, Richard the Lion-Hearted.

SESTINA: ALTAFORTE
 
Damn it all! all this our South stinks peace.
You whoreson dog, Papiols, come! Let’s to music!
I have no life save when the swords clash.
But ah! when I see the standards gold, vair, purple, opposing
And the broad fields beneath them turn crimson,
Then howl I my heart nigh mad with rejoicing.
 
In hot summer have I great rejoicing
When the tempests kill the earth’s foul peace,
And the lightnings from black heav’n flash crimson,
And the fierce thunders roar me their music
And the winds shriek through the clouds mad, opposing,
And through all the riven skies God’s swords clash.
 
Hell grant soon we hear again the swords clash!
And the shrill neighs of destriers in battle rejoicing,
Spiked breast to spiked breast opposing!
Better one hour’s stour than a year’s peace
With fat boards, bawds, wine and frail music!
Bah! there’s no wine like the blood’s crimson!
 
And I love to see the sun rise blood-crimson.
And I watch his spears through the dark clash
And it fills all my heart with rejoicing
And pries wide my mouth with fast music
When I see him so scorn and defy peace,
His lone might ’gainst all darkness opposing.
 
The man who fears wars and squats opposing
My words for stour, hath no blood of crimson
But is fit only to rot in womanish peace
Far from where worth’s won and the swords clash
For the death of such sluts I go rejoicing;
Yea, I fill all the air with my music.
 
Papiols, Papiols, to the music!
There’s no sound like to swords swords opposing,
No cry like the battle’s rejoicing
When our elbows and swords drip the crimson
And our charges ’gainst “The Leopard’s” rush clash.
May God damn for ever all who cry “Peace!”
 
And let the music of the swords make them crimson!
Hell grant soon we hear again the swords clash!
Hell blot black for alway the thought “Peace”!

“May God damn forever all who cry, ‘Peace.’” Pound had a very different understanding of war when he wrote “Mauberley.” The “war” he is talking about here, in this poem, “Altaforte,” is at least half metaphorical. It’s a war of mental energy, a war of opposing principles. It is not a physical war--or at least not entirely a physical war. But it is expressed as a physical war. The sentiment is something like what drove Pound’s friend, the great poet William Butler Yeats, to write late in life, and on the eve of World War II,

You that Mitchell’s prayer have heard
‘Send war in our time, O Lord!’
Know that when all words are said
And a man is fighting mad,
Something drops from eyes long blind
He completes his partial mind.....

            (“Under Ben Bulben”)

When Pound experienced the reality of the First World War, he arrived at a very different sense of what war meant. It was no longer a question of war as a metaphor of mental activity. For many of the finest intellects of Pound’s generation, war meant precisely the end of mental activity: “Died some.” Pound’s experience of World War I determined his life and career to a large degree. The final passages of his long poem, The Cantos, hope for peace in the world:

The scientists are in terror 
            and the European mind stops
Wyndham Lewis chose blindness
            rather than have his mind stop.
Night under wind mid garofani,
            the petals are almost still
Mozart, Linnaeus, Sulmona,
When one’s friends hate each other
            how can there be peace in the world?
Their asperities diverted me in my green time.
A blown husk that is finished
            but the light sings eternal....

                        (Canto CXV)

And this from the very end of The Cantos:

Do not move 
            Let the wind speak
                        that is paradise.
                        (Canto CXX)

Pound’s shifting away from the “Over There” mentality is a shifting of metaphors. Mental activity does not have to be understood as war. Male sexuality does not have to be understood as war. Yet it was very difficult for Pound, as it is very difficult for anyone in our culture, to get away from the idea of the warrior as hero, whether that warrior is, as it was for Pound, Odysseus, Sigismundo Malatesta, or Benito Mussolini, or, as it is for us, John Wayne, Dirty Harry or Luke Skywalker. In a military culture, value tends to be expressed in terms of war: “That’s killer.” War not only structures consciousness: it creates consciousness. Images of war pour forth in situations which in fact have little to do with war. In the sestina we read a few moments ago, Bertran de Born’s jongleur, his minstrel, stands next to him, admiring him. He sees de Born as, in Pound’s phrase, “the live man among the duds.” De Born is the physical embodiment of the active intellect. How is it possible to evoke the active intellect without evoking war? How is it possible to represent the activity of peace?

The great poet of mental energy, William Blake, wrote in the 18^th century,

I will not cease from Mental Fight,

Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In England’s green & pleasant Land.

                        (Milton)

Again, mental activity as war.

Pound’s lines, “Do not move / Let the wind speak,” are beautiful lines, but they are lines about silence. They understand peace not as the generator of speech but as the ending of speech. In these lines, to be at peace is to listen.

How can we change? What is the basis of our warrior culture? Where does our desire to make war come from?

The crucial, defining event for Classical Greece was The Trojan War. And since Greece stands at the beginning of what we think of as “Western Civilization,” war stands at the beginning of Western Civilization. Homer’s Iliad became the pattern of the truly ambitious poem, the poem with which to transcend the merely personal and to tell the tale of the tribe. Such a poem, again and again in our culture--with a few significant exceptions--has been a long poem about war, an “epic,” a word which, incidentally, goes back to the Greek word for “speech.” When in the seventeenth century John Milton wrote Paradise Lost, his subject--the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden--had no obvious connection to war, and so Satan entered the poem as a major character. Milton could then include--though there was very little mention of it in Scripture--the War in Heaven.

Even the erotic tradition in the West has something martial about it, tends towards conjuring up, not pleasure but the war between the sexes--or, beyond that, the New Testament’s “war in the members.” This is what passes for a love poem in the Western Tradition:

I find no peace, and all my war is done,  
I fear and hope; I burn and freeze like ice;
I fly above the wind yet can I not arise;
And naught I have and all the world I season.
That looseth nor locketh holdeth me in prison,
And holdeth me not, yet can I scape nowise;
Nor letteth me live nor die at my devise,
And yet of death it giveth none occasion.
Without eyen I see, and without tongue I plain;
I desire to perish, and yet I ask health;
I love another, and thus I hate myself;
I feed me in sorrow, and laugh in all my pain.
Likewise displeaseth me both death and life,
And my delight is causer of this strife.

That is a sonnet by the sixteenth-century English poet, Sir Thomas Wyatt. Another of his poems is titled, “How the Lover Perisheth in His Delight as the Fly in the Fire.” Wyatt’s poems are an almost exact equivalent to the Biblical passage about the “war in the members”:

            From where come wars and fightings among you? Come they not here, even of your lusts that war in your members? 
            Ye lust, and have not; ye kill, and desire to have, and cannot obtain; ye fight and war, yet ye have not, because ye ask not.
            Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts.
            Ye adulterers and adulteresses, know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God? Whosoever, therefore, will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God.

                                                                        James: 4

Wyatt’s poetry, which took the Italian sonnets of Petrarch as its model, was a brilliant solution to the “problem” of Western eroticism. The Biblical passage just quoted has nothing to do with the sexual love of a woman. It condemns adulterers and adulteresses. Wyatt’s poem has everything to do with the sexual love of a woman, yet it expresses sexual love in terms which unmistakably recall a passage from the Bible which condemns sexual love. Sexual love is thus at once triumphantly expressed and triumphantly denied: the “solution” of the West! The poem is a kind of “battleground,” a field of “war” in which desire and guilt are the endlessly vying combatants. “There never was a war that was / not inward,” wrote the American poet Marianne Moore during World War II; “I must / fight till I have conquered in myself what / causes war” (“In Distrust of Merits”). Moore’s lines are a secularization of the war in the members passage, and their metaphor for conquering war is--war. Thomas Wyatt’s friend, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, was the inventor of the English heroic line, what we call “blank verse,” the meter in which Shakespeare and Milton wrote their finest work. He invented it specifically for his translation of Virgil’s Aeneid. With Wyatt he also  brought into English verse the eroticism of the sonnet. War and Eroticism, Mars and Venus are thus linked in a tradition of verse which continues for centuries.

Pound, alive always to what he understood as “tradition,” as “ancestral voices,” was in poems such as “Sestina: Altaforte” essentially the vehicle of that martial, erotic tradition. And yet, even within that tradition, there are other factors at work. In an amazing moment in the sestina, Pound pictures the sun as a warrior:

And I love to see the sun rise blood-crimson.
And I watch his spears through the dark clash
And it fills all my heart with rejoicing
And pries wide my mouth with fast music
When I see him so scorn and defy peace,
His lone might ’gainst all darkness opposing.

In his late poetry, Pound conceives of the mind not as a warrior but as “light,” the product of the sun:

Charity I have had sometimes, 
            I cannot make it flow thru.
A little light, like a rushlight
                        to lead back to splendour.
                                    (Canto CXVI)

And again--moving momentarily entirely outside the warrior tradition— “To be men, not destroyers” (Notes for CANTO CXVII et seq.).

Diane di Prima’s great poem, Loba, was greatly influenced by Pound. This passage, from “Song of Heloise,” identifies the mind with fire, light, and fountain:

from out of the body of fire,
             the body of light
out of the wind, virtu
 
the light that is in the mind
these essences
moving
           pale color

al fresco
            a homecoming       (clarities
from out of the passion
               crystal, spiralling
 
books open within the Word
                          small windows
light within light
                     “space is a
                           lotus”
 
from the body of light
                          like dayspring
ineffable breath
 
 
& out of the crystal,
                        the fountain      
                                                jets like sperm

It is at such moments, with all their rhythmical variety, that we can see the figure of the warrior metamorphosing into the figure of the dancer. To think of the mind and of sexuality not as a battleground but as “light” is to think of them as connected in a deep way to the world: to the sun, to nature. “Make light of it,” wrote William Carlos Williams. To think in this way is precisely not to think of the world as the Biblical James thought of it: “Whosoever will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God.”

There are of course difficulties with this metaphor of light as there will be difficulties with any metaphor or myth. But it comes, I think, closer than the metaphor of the warrior to our current needs: the problem of how to connect the activity of the mind to the world at large; of how to perceive the mind as an aspect of nature and not as its enemy.

Pound wrote at the end of his life that he “lost his center fighting the world.” But it may be more accurate to say that he lost his center by conceiving of the world as a place to fight in.

Poetry presents not truths but powerful ways of seeing reality. War tends to structure the consciousness not only of those who participate in it but even of those who are opposed to it. What is needed is myths which are adequate to our humanity. “To be,” as Pound says, “men, not destroyers”--though Pound’s own example is by no means the best one. His extremely vicious and well-known anti-Semitism has a continuing and degrading effect on even his best work and his best sentiments. These words of his might apply to the author himself--with his hatreds: “When one’s friends hate each other / how can there be peace in the world?” Yet Pound suffered greatly from American militarism and imperialism, and we can learn much about those subjects from his work.

[VOICE OF EZRA POUND, READING FROM “MAUBERLEY”]

Jack Foley