Utopia & The Way

"I have put belief in Utopias afar from me. Either this world is a sort of incubator out of which we hatch into some other better or worse state of being, or it is not." (48, Pound, Patria Mia and the Treatise on Harmony)

"One wants to find out what sort of things endure, and what sort of things are transient; what sort of things recur; what propagandas profit a man or his race; to learn upon what the forces, constructive and dispersive, of social order, move; to learn what rules and axioms hold firm, and what sort fade, and what sort are durable but permutable, what sort hold in letter, and what sort by analogy only, what sort by close analogy, and what sort by rough parallel alone." (48, Pound, Patria Mia and the Treatise on Harmony)

"The artist paints the thing as he sees it, real or unreal, he gives his interpretation or he makes his more fervent statement. He must be as free as the mathematician. If he is by chance a great artist he will want to present as much of life as he knows. He will have no time to make repetitions." (25, Pound, Patria Mia and the Treatise on Harmony)

If taken in combination with the above, the artist MUST make repetitions in order to show that he truly understands the workings of nature as he sees it. And let us not forget the mathematician. It must be both what endures and what is transient, and Pound's "Cantos" are a perfect combination of those two concepts. "Patria Mia" alone is a struggle between these two points, whether he should stay on focus with the writing of the America of his time or veer off into the transcendental.

And when he mentioned the mathematician, the first thought that popped up in my head was the geometer from "The Manuscript found in Saragossa" by Jan Potocki.