smogesis

'With the grace of a corpse in a riptide I let go.
and I slide, slide, slide, downriver.'

The corpse is a body without a soul. Movement comes from without. There is a certain grace to the purely material. There are no motives, no psychologies, only a way of being. Death does not restrict movement but merely renders it passive. The 'letting go' is both a loss of reason and a loss of intention. There is also the image itself: the corpse dragged (drug) downriver.

'With an empty case, by my side,
An empty case, that's my crime."

Empty case as: lack, empty pride, unfulfilled potentiality, silence. The body written here as body without soul, an 'empty case.' Yet why, by his side, is it a crime? If love is what is meant by the empty case, as love-as-representation, empty of the object-beloved itself, as Truth Serum* suggests, then his crime is loving his representation of the world, rather than the world itself. What if love comes from memory? We could say that inside the case is memory, love for the world, the soul of the body. The separation of body and soul becomes his crime.

"And I sing 'Say Valley Maker' to keep from cursing,
Yes I sing, 'Say Valley Maker' to keep from cursing.
River oh... river end.
River oh... river end.
River go... river bend."

Water is low, what is valley is forged by river and glacier. Water is essential to all life. The river clearly represents becoming and the dynamism of life, Bergson's elan vital. To sing or to curse: Pound writes that art either loves or hates. By letting go as a corpse in riptide, we make peace with our dying nature, we come to understand the separation of mind and body, to understand our 'crime' in framing what is inherently empty: object a petit.

"Take me through the sweet valley, where your heart blooms blooms blooms,
Take me through the sweet valley, where your heart is covered in dew."

Hey valley maker!

"And when the river dries, will you bury me in wood?
Where the river dries, will you bury me in stone?"

Genesis: you are the dust of the world breathed into by the holy spirit. Will you bury me in a coffin, sealed by stone? Will you prolong the decay of my death? The case will be tossed away. All that will remain come death is the body.

'Well I never really realized death is what it meant to make it on my own'

Two very personal interpretations of this line: first, everything we do is in part because of others. There is only death in the personal, the individual. It is through our work in collective that our creation takes on life and is recognized.

Another: it was only after the fall that death entered into paradise. With death, or rather the conception of our own death, humanity takes its fate into its own hands and becomes creator.

"Cause there is no love, where there is no obstacle,
and there is no love, where there is no bramble.
And there is no love, on the hacked away plateau,
and there is no love, in the unerring.
And there is no love in the one true path."

Love occurs with differentiation. Can an asexual or hermaphroditic organism love itself? Love occurs at the gap between, precisely when he 'lets go and slides downriver.' Love needs obstacles, bramble, love needs distance and a space between ourselves and the beloved. When we ask the Bergsonian question, 'Why this rather than that?' we could also ask, 'Why love this rather than that?' Love comes at the desiring of that which we do not have. Love takes us over, love is love is love is erring in the bramble on unhacked plateau off the one true path.

"Well I cantered out here, and now I'm galloping back."

Travel, the movement-image, Bergson. His becoming presents the world in which matter is constantly changing, only stopped in this process by duration. The life breathed into us by God now splinters, quakes, geysers, phoenixes.

"So bury me in wood, and I will splinter,
bury me in stone, and I will quake.
Bury me in water, and I will geyser,
bury me in fire, and I'm gonna phoenix,
I'm gonna phoenix."