Excerpts from
Letter to the Moon
By Ib Michael
Oluf, Kate and the narrator are in Venice, where Oluf paints and the narrator attempts to write. Zotti is a painter and has rented them his oldstudio on the island og Fiudecca. Here the friends while away their time and experiment with substances such as LSD.
One day - time has flown by - Zotti takes us over to the church on the next island. Ezra Pound is going to give a reading and the television cameras are on the spot for a live broadcast. A film crew has also turned up. Once he was declared insane and this is the elderly poet´s first public appearance in a long time. Haiku, ideograms, sonnets, odes and epistles - Pound is a master of form and bearer of many masks. The war brought him condemnation but the admiration of later generations has long since been reawakened. Ezra Pound embodies more characters than any one person can possibly contain.
Zotti ushers us into the church with a whisper. The marble floor is marked out like a chess board, the organ is supported by columns and there is a brass globe stationed right up next to the altar. There are red lamps suspended on chains from the ceiling, in the nave hangs a cross with a medieval bandirole, the walls are adorned with oil paintings by the old masters.
We are in our seats under the dome when Pound makes his entrance and is guided down the central aisle. The bearded white face has shrivelled with age into a maze of wrinkles, his suit is too big for him, looking like something delivered ahead of time by the undertaker. His figure is frail, but erect.
Pound stumbles along a conduit of helping hands - his eyes fixed on the light penetrating the upper reaches of the domed ceiling. Any minute now one expects to see a dove gliding down the sunbeams. Not until he has been settled at a table covered in a forest of microphones, and the spot lights are lit, does he lower his head to contemplate the mass of equipment with caveman eyes.
Then he starts to read. He pays no heed to the clapperboard, rests his hands on his book and lets the words go to his head without once looking down at the text. Reciting from memory, he has worked his way, in English, through a passage from his Cantos when he gives a faint nod and then falls silent. A murmur spreads throughout the church. There he sits in the high-backed chair, fast asleep.
A professor of literature leaps to his feet and, looking straight into the camera lense, starts waving his arms about, explains PoundĈs significance. The show must - at all costs - go on. The old man´s snores are now quite audible and an air of serenity has come over his features.
Then he wakes with a start, shakes his head and carries on with his reading in a Chinese from the time when the Prince of Chou sent his army out against the heart of the dynasty.
And so it goes on. Each time he falls asleep he wakes up again - in another language. In his mouth the verses crumble into Greek, Latin or a Provençal from the age of troubadours ...
The fuss dies down. Surprise builds into fascination; the poet´s voice issues from some Tower of Babel only to fade into oblivion. Every time he falls asleep he looks more like a child in a landscape of sand castles reduced by the waves to pebbles and shells. Pound has become an ecstatic victim of the entropy of old age.
I am far away. I am aware of his presence as a black hole of wonderful distraction, and his snoring is a tree rising from an undying heart and branching out into the room, heavy with cherry blossom.
All of a sudden the spotlights are switched off and we ease our way out with the crowd. Everyone has been left with expectant faces and wet eyes. Every man and woman with their own distance. The poetry lies not in the images, the rhythm or the threads of the language but somewhere else again, lost in long-gone cadences. It fills the church. Pound is on his feet or rather: He is giddily present amid a forest of hands all stretching out to help without ever reaching him.
I step back into a camera dolly, afraid that I might miss something. In the last glimpse I have of him his nose is once more pointing at the ceiling and I follow his gaze. High above, where the glass acts like a prism, beams of light form mosaics on the walls.
Out in the square I breathe again. Inside the church I was a diver - never drawing breath, my heartbeat brought almost to a standstill. The sun´s disc dances in black and purple negative over a square laid out like a multi-coloured marble chequerboard. And now I know I have missed nothing, because it takes no longer than that to expose the film.
Translated by Barbara Haveland
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