yeah you broke my fucking heart but i still want you

the subject line pretty much covers it at this point. it's making my life quite miserable.

in a totally separate note: recently, as part of my job, i've been looking at the book collection of a psychologist named jerome kavka. he had recently gifted (bequeathed?) what i can only assume to be his entire collection of books to the library and i had to go through a significant portion of it. unlike many other gift collections, it is perculiar in its single-minded dedication to one topic, or rather to a single person: ezra pound.

initially, i had assumed that kavka was a literature professor of some sort. the gift slips merely said dr jerome kavka, and plenty of gifts involve extensive collections in their field. however, kavka had the habit, like many collectors, of labeling his collection. he also used many random slips of paper as bookmarks, including leaves from a prescription pad and a namecard with the address of his practice. that made me somewhat curious, since it's not everyday you come across a psychoanalyst who also happens to have a complete library of every book by and about one of the 20th century's greatest literary icons.

the main link between psychoanalysis and ezra pound? pound was incarcerated in a mental institution, st. elizabeths, for 12 years. the reason for that, in the bluntest way, was to avoid executing him for treason. pound was a massive supporter of mussolini's government and became a propagandist for the axis powers. to avoid prosecuting him for treason, since he was a united states citizen, they allowed him to make an insanity plea and, eventually, after his time in st. elizabeth, he lived out the rest of his life in italy.

now here's where it gets interesting. we might assume that kavka was merely interested in pound as an interesting case. after all, it is widely believed that pound was never really crazy, and the insanity plea was merely to avoid an embarrassing trial and a more gruesome outcome. as a psychoanalyst, pound's work would be interesting as a way of considering whether someone insane might have produced work like his, or whether his work reflected some kind of mental illness.

however, i came across a book with a personalized dedication to kavka, from a dr j. j. wilhelm. wilhelm is a literary scholar and a biographer of ezra pound. a quick look at the foreword gave a much more interesting story. not only has kavka met pound, he was a resident at st. elizabeths during pound's incarceration, and provided expert opinion against pound's insanity to wilhelm and other pound scholars.

now imagine you were kavka, a (presumably) young resident confronting an intellectual giant who the state has deemed insane, and every bit of training you have convinces you that he is not. hence, you are faced with one problem: why would he commit treason? why would he turn his back on your country, to become the supporter of what is considered an evil regime? among the literary books were also a handful about treason, which perhaps point to this question.

but it doesn't quite stop there. the collection is almost ridiculous. there are multiple copies of many books. many books are in there purely due to a passing reference. there are annotations in many of the texts, and these books have receipts from as far away as europe. going through the collection now, the only thing i can feel is a total obsession. i have no idea what kavka was trying to do, or what he must have felt about pound. did he consider pound a puzzle to be solved? what was he trying to figure out? some of these books were published in the 90s, so we are talking about an interest (to say the least) that spanned decades.

i have no real idea as to where i was going with this. i guess it's just something that distracted me this week. given the point at the start of this post, i needed it.