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Ezra Pound in a Cage: A One-Man Play

He spent months in a U.S. military detention camp near Pisa, including three weeks in an outdoor steel cage. Ruled mentally unfit to stand trial, Pound was incarcerated for over 12 years at St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C., whose doctors viewed Pound as a narcissist and a psychopath, but otherwise completely sane.

[The stage is dimly lit, with a single steel cage at center stage. ERZA POUND, disheveled, bloodied, and beaten, sits inside the cage. The sounds of echoes and the faint rustling of leaves fill the air.]

ERZA POUND: "Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down."

[He recites his own words with a mixture of defiance and despair. He paces within the confines of the cage, his movements restless.]

ERZA POUND: "In the gloom, the gold gathers the light against it."

[He speaks to himself, his voice echoing off the walls of the cage. His once sharp intellect now struggles to grasp reality.]

ERZA POUND: "Scant room for raiment but for body room."

[He gestures to the cramped space around him, a bitter irony in his words. The weight of confinement presses down upon him.]

ERZA POUND: "Touch for touch in equal scales, leaves balance."

[He reaches out to the bars of the cage, his fingers tracing the cold metal. His touch is tentative, as if seeking connection in his isolation.]

ERZA POUND: "Usura slayeth the child in the womb."

[His voice trembles with emotion as he recalls his own condemnation of usury. His thoughts drift between the personal and the political, a tangled web of memory and madness.]

ERZA POUND: "Turn your eyes to the light."

[He looks upwards, his gaze searching for a glimmer of hope amidst the darkness. But all he finds is the cold, indifferent sky above.]

[As the play progresses, Pound's mental state deteriorates further. His words become fragmented, disjointed.]

ERZA POUND: "Make it new... make it... new..."

[He repeats the mantra like a desperate prayer, clinging to the last vestiges of his poetic vision. But the words ring hollow, devoid of meaning in his fractured mind.]

[The sounds of the outside world grow fainter, replaced by the echoes of Pound's own voice. He is trapped in a labyrinth of his own making, lost amidst the shadows of his own words.]

[The play ends with Pound huddled in the corner of the cage, his body racked with sobs. The lights fade to black, leaving only the echoes of his despair lingering in the darkness.]

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https://youtube.com/shorts/bY4XU_HngRA?si=jDptp-Y-zm_zaAQ5

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Turning Snowboard into a Longboard

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This is my copy of AFU, I picked it up at the Virgin Megastore in London, back in 1997. I gave it as a gift in 2006 to a wayward friend, a talented musician/junkie that got kicked out of his apartment and loss all his stuff in the process, then in 2017 I find this same copy on a table for sale in Bushwick....

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A BEAST UNBONED!

 The moment I was approached to create this artwork, what flashed to my mind’s eye was The painting, Hide-and-Seek, by Pavel Tchelitchew, which is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art here in New York City. Using that painting as a starting place for the composition, I began.

I work completely intuitively, first impulse, the first image, color, sound, connection, word, spark, that world will not fall apart in two days, no Philipkdicking around here. I see it in my head the whole total sum, that is always the pebble that the temple is built upon. 

What is a Feast Unknown, except the game of hide and seek taken to an apocalyptic scale. What is this moment in the middle of the book, transformed, unfolded and idealized, to the absurd as Farmer reached in the Text. The book has become the holy bible of some future civilization, Always the same but different, always the union of opposites, the fusion of Technopois and Exotica. 

Working digitally twice to scale with layers upon layers of digital drawing, actual painting, collage, three-dimensional rendering, actual photographic printing, real scissors and glue collage with my hands with rubber cement and piles and piles of color laser prints…

What is it to make an image? If not a game of hide and seek what was I seeking to create a penultimate invocation of my absolute favorite book of all time. Throw everything and the Kitchen Sink at it.

My intention, is to create images that have a life, veracity all upon themselves, cause I am always, always thinking about this quote: 

"Those who create images of life, would be punished on the Day of Resurrection and it would be said to them: Breathe soul into what you have created. When they fail they will be thrown into the abyss." - Sahih al-Bukhari

Iason Ragnar Bellerophon

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