Ezra Pound, social anxiety, and the coherence hidden beneath perception
When Fear Becomes the World
I had such severe social anxiety that at certain points in my life I was unable to even walk outside my front door.
The world felt as if it were constantly judging me and I was always falling short.
I knew that every car that passed driving down the street was looking at me as I walked by and that out of every window of the homes and businesses there were eyes constantly on me.
I would walk into a coffee shop and feel as if everyone was talking about me a moment prior so that every look or laugh or smile was a form of pity for me.
As I write this I can see that I just had extreme self-centered fear and yet as a lived experience, it felt as if I were seeing reality, as if this was actually how the world was.
I was simply seeing my own division and my own judgments and I had mistaken my perceptions for reality.
The world appeared as a divisive and judgmental place because I had entered it already judging myself, and thus the people appeared to mirror back to me my own internal conversations around myself.
The hostility and hate I felt towards myself was reflected back to me through another’s eyes.
The world is never experienced as a raw and real thing, it always arrives through the way we have positioned ourselves in relation to it.
We see the world through our own eyes, mediated through our own perceptions.
The Hidden Order Beneath the Dust
In the Pisan section of Ezra Pound’s monumental and unfinished, The Cantos, when he has been arrested by the US forces for treason and thrown in an outdoor prison cell, he asks, “Hast ‘ou seen the rose in the steel dust (or swansdown ever)?”
In the middle of the complete destruction of his way of life, and dream for a unified Italy that has dominated his thinking for the last decade, he asks a question about our ability to see the coherence already inherent within the world.
He is using the image of a magnet put to the iron filings, which immediately shifts and orders the iron filings into the magnetic lines around the magnet to suggest that order and coherence is always there, whether we see it or not.
The magnet, by its very nature, is ordered, and yet we can’t see it.
In this line, Pound is asking us if we are able to perceive the coherence beneath the disordered chaos and fragmentation that may appear on the surface of life.
How much of my life have I seen only the brokenness and fragmentation in the world because I refused to acknowledge the coherence beneath?
What Perception Refuses to See
When I am consciousness divided against itself, the fear and division have already organized the ground of experience before my experience can happen.
I lived a lot of my life in an experience already structured by shame, so that where there were people, connection, and laughter, I could only find judgment and ridicule.
The world had coherence, but I refused to perceive it because of my own constructions within myself, so that my perception created a separation between myself and others, and more importantly, within the very moment.
I was fuelled by this anxiety and was simply outside of my own life, watching myself being watched and then mistaking this fractured perception for the truth of how reality is.
The Rose Is Not Optimism
Thus, Pound is asking a question of our consciousness in this line, of how we ourselves are in complete ownership of our own constructions of the world given our perceptions at the moment.
His rose in the steel dust image is another articulation of one of the major themes of The Cantos, that there are gods who walk among us in this magnificent divinity, and yet we ourselves have chosen not to see them.
To read this line simply as an expression that beauty can be found in the detritus and discord is to limit the project that Pound has built around this line, and to deny him the magnitude of his genius, whether you agree with his politics or not.
The magnet does not impose an order in the steel dust, as if imposing order onto the chaos of life, but it renders visible an order that has been present yet subdued all along.
He is asking whether we have ever seen the rose in the steel dust, meaning that once we have perceived this implicit coherence in the world, our sight has been forever changed, and now we are in ownership and responsibility for how we are choosing to see the world.
Again, I’d like to point to Pound’s poetic genius, because this is not simply some pathetic form of optimism or looking through the world with rose-colored glasses, but to really take responsibility that my perception is limiting in this very moment, in that the rose is always implicit, that it always coheres.
The Dust Was Never the Whole Truth
Once I can take full ownership and responsibility for my very viewpoint, I can now look back into my life and see that the implicit coherence has always been there.
When I was dominated by social anxiety and the whole world felt hostile, I could only see division, but once coherence becomes visible, those periods of my life can no longer appear as regret or wasted opportunity because they become powerful illustrations of how perception can obscure the order already present within experience.
Once I have seen the rose in the steel dust, my orientation toward my life shifts, and the past no longer appears as a series of broken and discordant shavings of steel dust, but reveals a coherence I was not attuned to while I was inside it.
Perception is not only the lens through which I view the here and now but also the ability to see that those periods of anxiety and fear were just as important as the periods of happiness and freedom.
They become part of the fabric through which a life takes shape, and showcase that the coherence had always been there; I simply did not yet have the perception to see it.
Where in your own life have you been seeing only the steel dust, when there may have been a hidden coherence you were not yet able to perceive?
Dr. Samuel Gilpin is a poet and essayist working at the point where language meets experience, where words are not used to explain life, but to enter it more honestly. At samuelgilpin.com, he writes for those who feel the quiet pressure to fix themselves, offering a different approach: not optimization, but a return to what has been covered over or pushed aside. He holds a PhD in English Literature, but his work moves away from analysis toward something more direct, reading and writing as a way of loosening what has become too tight. When he’s not writing, he’s returning to Four Quartets, rewatching The Wire, or lifting weights.