The Gift (41 page)

Rather than separate spirit and empire, Pound combines them to arrive at an ideology of the state which has in it elements of both tribalism and the medieval church.
*
But here his troubles begin. Canon law could rest on the assumption of a common and lively faith in the Lord. But the modernist, in assuming the structures of medieval law, must allow the state to stand in for the deity. In the community of faith the Lord gave us our daily bread, but in “the perfect Fascist State” the state distributes purchasing power. Where “Apollus watered and God gave the increase,” the workers work and the state pays national dividends. And where does stamp scrip go when it dies? Not to heaven. In ancient times the first fruits were returned to the Lord in smoke, but now a hundredth part goes to the state in stamps on the first of the month. Under the natural economic order the gift circles into neither nature nor mystery; it circles into bureaucracy.

In Pound’s favor we should remember that the character of state power was not as obvious in 1930 as it is now; nor was he the only writer in that decade who felt moved to combine commonwealth and state. But the course of this century has revealed a strange equation: state power + goodwill = state power. The reason is simple: at the level of the state the ties of affection through which the will becomes good can no longer be felt. We
touched on this when speaking of gifts as anarchist property. There are definite limits to the size of the feeling community. Gift exchange, as an economy of feeling life, is also the economy of the small group. When the commonwealth is too large to be based on emotional ties, the gift-feeling must be abandoned as a structuring element. For gift-feeling is not impartial. It will always seek to suppress its opposite. Small groups can absorb such antagonism because they can also support affection, but the antagonism of large groups is organized and cold. All commonwealths are wary of the stranger, but the huge ones—especially when threatened—put him to death.

One of the issues in the Peasants’ War of 1524–26 was the introduction into Germany of Roman law, Roman property rights, and Roman cash purchase. Taken as a whole, these represent the forms of alienated thought, property, and exchange which are necessary in the organization and operation of a state that is
not
a commonwealth or brotherhood. Hermes, now the Roman Mercury, springs to life in such empires, for it is Hermes who will make connections when the scale is too large for affective bonds. In separating church and state, Luther and Calvin gave some space to this god.
*
If you
accept the large rationalized institutions that emerged after the Reformation,
if
you accept in particular the idea of the state, you must also accept some amoral stranger economics.

In terms of intellectual history, the transition from the Middle Ages to the modern world marked a new emphasis on (or need for) symbol-thought and symbol-exchange. Modern logic and the rise of the scientific method quickly followed
the Reformation. Less than a hundred years separates Descartes and Newton from Luther and Calvin. But as I suggested two chapters ago, just as “logic is the money of mind,” so is the imagination its gift, and Pound was correct, I think, to mark this as the moment in which the imagination was wounded by abstraction. And he was also correct in connecting that wound with the rise of market exchange and its servants—usury, foreign trade, monopoly, and “detached” units of value. The peasants of the Peasants’ War were fighting the same battle Ezra Pound fought, the same hopeless battle.

Ezra Pound schooled himself “to write an epic poem which begins ‘In the Dark Forest,’ crosses the Purgatory of human error, and ends in the light …” In his vision of the form of the
Cantos
, there was to be a descent into hell followed by an ascent with error burned away, “bathed in alkali, and in acid.” But Pound did not return from the underworld.

In Virgil’s story of the founding of Rome, Aeneas, too, makes a descent into hell. After the war with the Greeks, Aeneas is buffeted about the Mediterranean until he beaches at Carthage, where Dido, the queen, falls in love with him. They spend one happy season together, but in the spring Aeneas grows restless and sets sail for Italy, abandoning his love. Dido is brokenhearted. She kills herself for grief. The Trojans can see the light of her funeral pyre as they slip over the horizon.

Once he has returned to Italy, a sibyl offers to guide Aeneas into Hades so that he may speak with his dead father. As they cross the river Styx, he sees Dido’s ghost. But she won’t look at him; she turns her head away, still resentful over his betrayal. Aeneas pushes on to find his father, whose prophecy tells him how he will establish the city of Rome.

The
Aeneid
is the myth of the founding of a patriarchal urban culture. In the background lies an erotic connection cut
off by politics. The love affair is destroyed for the sake of empire, and the feminine figure is left as a suicidal, unredeemed, and restless ghost. Aeneas’s descent into hell is meant not to heal that wound but to seek out the father and his advice about government.

Ezra Pound’s father was an assayer at the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia. If a man wanted to know if his gold was
real
or just fool’s gold, Homer Pound would weigh it and drill it and tell him the truth. The most luminous memory from Pound’s childhood concerns a time his father took him to visit the mint. In the enormous basement vaults, four million silver dollars lay where their sacks had rotted. “They were heaving it into the counting machines with shovels bigger than coal shovels. This spectacle of coin being shovelled around like it was litter— these fellows naked to the waist shovelling it around in the gas flares—things like that strike your imagination.”

Like Aeneas, Pound descended into hell on the side of the father. A memory of
eros
lingers in the background. There had been a desire to live with those “who thought copulation was good for the crops.” There was a man who had once turned into a tree. There was a gifted man, moved by the undivided light of Eleusis, who brought his consciousness forward to the Renaissance and who, wary of the centuries of usury that followed, descended into the underworld to try to bring that gift out again in its clarity. But this was a modern man, living at the height of the patriarchies, wary of his own emotions, classic by temperament, and given to willfulness. He chose the
via voluntatis.
Rather than revalue the gift through affirmation, he undertook the hopeless task of changing the nature of money itself. And so he met no Tiresias in hell. He met no boy lover, nor did he see the face of the beloved. He met, instead, his own devil, a Hermes/Jew whom he chose to fight man to man: he fought bad money with
good money, bad will with goodwill, politics with politics, and avarice with power, all in the name of generosity and the imagination.

In 1961 Pound fell into silence. For the last eleven years of his life he rarely spoke. When visitors would come to his apartment, he would shake hands and then, while the others chatted, sit in silence or disappear upstairs. Toward the beginning of these years a newspaper reporter came to see him. “Where are you living now?” the man asked. “In hell,” replied Pound. He never came up. He lost his voice.

In October of 1967 Allen Ginsberg visited Pound in Italy. Pound was eighty-two; he had been in his silence for six years. Ginsberg spent several days with him during which Pound hardly spoke at all and Ginsberg told him stories— told him about his Blake vision and drug experiences and Buddhism and what was happening in America. He chanted sutras for Pound and played him phonograph records of Bob Dylan, Donovan, the Beatles, and Ali Akbar Khan. On the third of these days, in a small Venetian restaurant with a few friends, Ginsberg having been told that Pound would respond to specific textual questions about the
Cantos
, they finally began to talk. Ginsberg later recalled part of the exchange:

[Ginsberg and the others objected, Ginsberg concluding:] “Williams told me … in 1961—we were talking about prosody … anyway Williams said, ‘Pound has a mystical ear’—did he ever tell you that?”

“No,” said Pound, “he never said that to me”—smiling almost shyly and pleased—eyes averted, but smiling, almost curious and childlike.

“Well I’m reporting it to you now seven years later— the judgment of the tender-eyed Doctor that you had a ‘mystical ear’—not gaseous mystical he meant—but a natural ear for rhythm and tone.”

I continued explaining the concrete value of his perceptions. I added that as humor—HUMOR—the ancient humours—his irritations, … against Buddhists, Taoists and Jews—fitted into place, despite his intentions, as part of the drama … “The Paradise is in the desire, not in the imperfection of accomplishment—it was the intention of Desire we all respond to—Bhakti—the Paradise is in the magnanimity of the
desire
to manifest coherent perceptions in language.”

“The intention was bad—that’s the trouble—anything I’ve done has been an accident—any good has been spoiled by my intentions—the preoccupation with irrelevant and stupid things—” Pound said this quietly, rusty voiced like an old child, looked directly in my eye while pronouncing “intention.”

“Ah well, what I’m trying to tell you—what I came here for all this time—was to give you my blessing then, because despite your disillusion …, [my] perceptions have been strengthened by the series of practical exact language models which are scattered thruout the
Cantos
like stepping stones—ground for
me
to occupy, walk on—so that despite your intentions, the practical effect
has been to clarify my perceptions—and, anyway, now, do you accept my blessing?”

He hesitated, opening his mouth, like an old turtle.

“I do,” he said—“but my worst mistake was the stupid suburban prejudice of antisemitism, all along, that spoiled everything—” …

“Ah, that’s lovely to hear you say that …”
*

Later, Ginsberg and the others walked Pound back to his apartment. At the door, Ginsberg took him by the shoulders and said, “I also came here for your blessing. And now may I have it, sir?”

“Yes,” nodded Pound, “for whatever it’s worth.”

In the history of the creative spirit in America, this encounter seems as significant as the day, thirty-five years before, when Pound handed the
Cantos
to Mussolini. For here the Jew—or rather, the Buddhist Jew (for he has left the judge behind)—came to exchange a blessing with the bitter servant. There were Jews who thought that Pound should have been put to death for his broadcasts during the war. But that would have been no more of a solution than the killing of the Jew in the fairy tale. Rather than fighting devils with devils, Ginsberg managed to change the form of the drama itself, and a light suddenly fell from a window no one had noticed. The story of our poetry need not be finished in one man’s life. Ginsberg calls the light out of Pound’s labor; the forces of decay will strip away the “stupidity and ignorance.” The servant of the gift may yet regain his voice and feel, with each word that leaves his body, his own worth return to him as undivided light.