This essay is about meanings and understanding. How well can our ideas grasp the things they represent? Are some of the words in our head vague abstractions, while others are clear and concrete? Yes, it’s very meta. But Ezra Pound has an explanation here that kept me pondering for years — so at least it’s vintage meta.
We’ll discuss, as you guessed, ways of describing what red means. Does red “mean”, or is it just what it is?
Ezra Pound was a brilliant eccentric with a lot of darkness in him. I’m more interested in the red stuff, but I give a capsule history of Pound. When someone savaged a book Pound published, his riposte began, "Cat-piss and porcupines!!" If we must wade through so many insults in this pie-monsoon, I wish some of our constant warriors would at least take the trouble to coin original, colorful insults, like Ezra did.
Western vs. Eastern Ways of Seeing Red
The pith and point of this essay are an explanation and an image, that are juxtaposed in the first chapter of ABC of Reading. After reading the book, I forgot it all — except this comparison, which has haunted me ever since.
In Europe, if you ask a man to define anything, his definition always moves away from the simple things that he knows perfectly well, it recedes into an unknown region, that is a region of remoter and progressively remoter abstraction.
Thus if you ask him what red is, he says it is a ‘colour’.
If you ask him what a colour is, he tells you it is a vibration or refraction of light, or a division of the spectrum.
And if you ask him what a vibration is, he tells you it is a mode of energy, or something of that sort, until you arrive at a modality of being, or non-being, or at any rate you get beyond your depth, and beyond his depth.
When I first read this, it immediately rang true. Our culture is imbued with admiration for knowledge, abstraction, and explanations that sound intelligent. We are too prone to listen to men in white coats who appear expert. Even when they order us, for example, to hurt others. When we’re out of our depth, and get fed impressive sounding jargon, most of us fall for it. So we can have a whole industry of economists who mostly know nothing (e.g. can’t see the ‘08 crash coming), but we take them seriously. So tobacco companies and big oil can spend billions peddling lies — and, crucially, backing them up with “scientific” studies — and they sucker millions.
You can almost hear the Western professor explaining Red, going on to specify the range of Ångströms on the visible spectrum where red falls. The second sentence of wikipedia on red says, “Red color has a predominant light wavelength of roughly 620–740 nanometers.” That, since I’ve never seen and can’t well imagine a nanometer, isn’t much use. Pound’s salient point is, we in the West often mistake intellectual jargon for sense, when it is really abstracting itself into a fog. We all know what red is already. After hearing the Western explanation of red, we grow less certain and more confused — our knowledge diminishes.
Pound goes on to show how Red is expressed in a Chinese ideogram. It turns out Pound is wrong about how ideograms work as a general rule, but his theory applies aptly in this case. His theory is, that Chinese ideograms are all pictures of what they represent, and that more complex or abstract words are added together metaphorically from simpler, more concrete words. Thus, the Chinese ideogram for East = the combined ideograms of Man + Tree + Sun. Metaphorically, the sun seen tangled in a tree’s branches, as at sunrise, adds up to East.
But when the Chinaman wanted to make a picture of something more complicated, or of a general idea, how did he go about it?
He is to define red. How can he do it in a picture that isn’t painted in red paint?
He puts (or his ancestor put) together the abbreviated pictures of
ROSE CHERRY
IRON RUST FLAMINGO
That, you see, is very much the kind of thing a biologist does (in a very much more complicated way) when he gets together a few hundred or thousand slides, and picks out what is necessary for his general statement. Something that fits the case, that applies in all of the cases.
The Chinese ‘word’ or ideogram for red is based on something everyone KNOWS.
This is a striking comparison to consider. So please consider it, especially this method of constructing meaning based on what we all know and fully grasp. Please picture in your mind those four elements of redness. Which contain only red, and which have other colors too? The parts that are red: which are closest to the essence of redness, and which might be called other colors?
In our ADHD age, in this information tidal wave, in our urge to know things instantly, to resolve questions and move forward — I fear we seldom take the time to breathe in, breathe out, and truly think, to sink into a grotto of pondering and swim around all of it. I don’t see how we can exercise our intellects and imaginations, and stretch our minds to fully grasp new ideas, if we don’t take the time to engage completely in this kind of exploration. Which, incidentally, is why we all should read novels occasionally, instead of just binge watching the latest Netflix hit.
So please open wide your mind’s eyes: imagine the rose, the cherry, the iron rust and the flamingo; admire and inspect with care and leisure the redness they embody, just for you to imbibe.
Ezra Pound, part genius part lunatic
Ezra Pound is complex and full of contradictions. His long wikipedia entry is a story worth reading.
Working in London in the early 20th century as foreign editor of several American literary magazines, Pound helped discover and shape the work of contemporaries such as T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Robert Frost and Ernest Hemingway. He was responsible for the 1915 publication of Eliot's “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and the serialization from 1918 of Joyce's Ulysses. . . . throughout the 1930s and 1940s he embraced Benito Mussolini’s Italian Fascism, expressed support for Adolf Hitler, and . . . was paid by the Italian government to make hundreds of radio broadcasts criticizing the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Jews, as a result of which he was arrested by American forces in Italy in 1945 on charges of treason . . . Deemed unfit to stand trial, he was incarcerated in St. Elizabeth’s psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C., for over 12 years.
He developed Imagism, which galvanized Modernism. He famously edited The Waste Land ruthlessly, and Eliot was so grateful for that pruning and shaping that he dedicated his masterpiece “For Ezra Pound: il miglior fabbro” (the better craftsman). If you read that wikipedia entry, you’ll find those highs and lows, and much more besides: ‘Macha Rosenthal wrote that it was "as if all the beautiful vitality and all the brilliant rottenness of our heritage in its luxuriant variety were both at once made manifest" in Ezra Pound.’ It’s easy to loathe and discount a writer who says hideous things. The best defense I can make of Pound is, so much of his life was an act, and he did recognize his own ugly flaws in the end. In 1967, talking with Allen Ginsberg, he confessed:
“Any good I've done has been spoiled by bad intentions – the preoccupation with irrelevant and stupid things,” [he] replied. Then very slowly, with emphasis, surely conscious of Ginsberg's being Jewish: “But the worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-semitism.”
ABC of Reading likewise is a hodgepodge, of sharp insight and pretentious bombast, of compendious learning and startling originality. I try to pick books that repay close, careful reading. This is the first review where I skimmed long sections of the book, but then slowed down to really chew on other passages. Pound dwells at length on minor poets who, in my opinion, he vastly overrates. But then he adores Chaucer, and has five splendid pages where he compares Chaucer to Shakespeare and then to Dante. In fairness to Pound, he rescued many poets who had been shut out of the Canon, by translating them and bringing their work back into literary play.
I found reading Pound a little like reading Nietzsche, though more lucid and less exciting: a lot of smoke, shot through with brilliant epiphanies. Here are a few moments from ABC of Reading that got my full attention:
A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.
Literature is language charged with meaning. Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
And it is my firm conviction that a man can learn more about poetry by really knowing and examining a few of the best poems than by meandering about among a great many. . . . I have never read half a page of Homer without finding melodic invention, I mean melodic invention that I didn’t already know. I have, on the other hand, found also in Homer the imaginary spectator, which in 1918 I still thought was Henry James’ particular property.
Men do not understand BOOKS until they have had a certain amount of life. Or at any rate no man understands a deep book, until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents. The prejudice against books has grown from observing men who have merely read books.
How Can We Grasp Red?
When I first read Pound’s comparison of Western vs. Eastern Reds, its message was clear and strong. Westerners made ideas philosophical and abstract, while Easterners made them simple and factual. Western explanations sublimate into the ether, while Eastern explanations bring us back to earth, to the everyday experience we know concretely.
Pound intended that message. It’s not comprehensively true — Taoism is all abstract fog, while Confucianism is full of professorial nitpicking — but it’s a great story. I got it at once, and it stuck with me for decades since. As storytellers and poets, Pound points us in a very healthy direction, looking for meanings in specific, resonant images.
There’s also sleight of hand in Pound’s demonstration, which I never noticed until now. I took away the idea that the Western definition was abstract, while the Eastern definition was concrete. But that Chinese ideogram wasn’t built out of facts, it was built out of metaphors. Cherry and Rose are very red, but don’t mean red any more than they mean their taste and smell. Rust is more brown than red, while a flamingo is more pink. When you shove those four things together, their shared redness leaps into view — but there is still that leap, that poetic grasp of one symbolic aspect out of four many-faceted things.
Red is more itself before we apply any explanation. It’s one of the simplest and most distinct qualities in our minds, one of the words we all share and need not dispute or define. Although rust is red/brown, and a flamingo red/pink, I’ve never discussed with someone whether a particular shade we saw was red or brown, or pink. But I’ve discussed whether a thing was blue or green, whether another was blue or purple, and whether a third was blue or gray. I don’t want this to get too meta, and dissolve into a fog of abstraction. It just seems to me that the red already steady in my own mind is more basic and definite than any explanation or images can make it.
Pound wasn’t aiming straight for the simplest truth, he wanted a resonant and inspiring story. He succeeded — these two pages from the start of ABC of Reading stuck vividly in my mind, and informed a lot of my subsequent thinking about meaning and how we grasp it. Pound needed this explanation as a foundation for his own poetic methods:
Imagism has been described as the most influential movement in English Poetry since the activity of the Pre-Raphaelites. As a poetic style it gave Modernism its start in the early 20th century . . . A characteristic feature of Imagism is its attempt to isolate a single image to reveal its essence. This feature mirrors contemporary developments in avant-garde art, especially Cubism. Although Imagism isolates objects through the use of what Ezra Pound called "luminous details", Pound's Ideogrammic Method of juxtaposing concrete instances to express an abstraction is similar to Cubism's manner of synthesizing multiple perspectives into a single image.
The first time I read this book I learned, slightly falsely but very colorfully, about how wise Chinamen pierced to the heart of meaning in a few bold brushstrokes, while Western intellectuals fumbled and lost that thread. The second time Pound got me thinking about poetic leaps, how Shakespeare and Keats could put aside their egos to pour themselves into characters and scenes from far away or long ago, to magically enchant every detail therein with credible life. There are "luminous details" that, through vision or imagination, are so vivid and true that we feel them concretely inside us. There was at least one wise Chinese person with a poetic soul, who saw that rose, cherry, rust and flamingo could add up to and encompass Red.
I looked up red in my dictionary, hoping I’d find some Ångströms or nanometers in the definition, to confirm that abstract and unworldly bent of Western intellectuals. But perhaps those lexicographers already read Pound’s comparison, and sagely split the difference between poetry and science:
2red n (bef. 12c) 1: a color whose hue resembles that of blood or of the ruby or is that of the long-wave extreme of the visible spectrum . . .