The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [153]
I see no advantage in this system over the ancient Roman legion, NO individual worth saving is likely to be wrecked by a reasonable and limited obedience practised to given ends and for limited periods. So much for commandments to the militia as superior to psychic sessions for the debilitated.
In short, the best physic for a man with bad dreams is a hitch in the army.
With Pound’s own righteousness coupled to such an attitude toward the psyche—no wonder Hermes never got out of the shadow. As with the servant, the insult Pound felt to his own worth turned into an unending bitterness; what had been singing fell dead. An obsession with money and political thinking began to cut off the poetry, as Yeats had feared. Then everything escalated. Pound took the growing dead-ness as caused by the Jews—Jews were cutting him off from the news, Jews were stealing the gold, Jews were destroying the crops, Jews were fouling the nest. Like the servant, Pound never turned to face the Jew as a part of himself. He called for the judge, for men with a will toward order who could enforce “public morality.” By the 1930s he could write a whole treatise on sharing the wealth with not a drop of compassion in it. And by the 1940s his hobbled imagination could only produce the old solution to the old story—kill the Jew:
Don’t start a pogrom. That is, not an old-style killing of small Jews. That system is no good, whatever. Of course, if some man had a stroke of genius, and could start a pogrom at the top …, there might be something to say for it.
IV • Imagist Money
In Federico Fellini’s movie Amarcord, one of the workmen building a house pauses to say a little poem:
My grandfather was a bricklayer.
My father was a bricklayer.
I am a bricklayer.
How come I don’t have a house?
In London before the First World War, Pound became involved in an economic reform movement called Social Credit. Organized around the ideas of a Scottish engineer, Major C. H. Douglas, the Social Creditors sought to answer the bricklayer’s question. Credit refers to our trust in the ability and intention of a purchaser to make payment at some future time of a debt incurred in the present. With credit, earning power over time can be concentrated in the present so that a third-generation worker might own outright a house his grandfather once bought “on credit.” “Credit is the future tense of money,” says Pound.
To explain why the bricklayer doesn’t in fact own a house, Social Creditors distinguished between “real credit” and “financial credit.” Real credit is the purchasing power of a group over time—all that comes of labor, technology, and the gifts of nature. Financial credit is the same thing expressed with money. Social Creditors did not oppose the monetary expression of credit—large industries and nations cannot operate without that abstraction—but, they said, financial credit should equal real credit. What happens instead is that self-interested bureaucrats take over the management of financial credit and it begins to become detached from the real. If money managers with houses begin to appear alongside bricklayers who can’t get a mortgage, then something is the matter with credit.
Pound, in his elaboration of these ideas, rests financial credit not only on real wealth but quite specifically on natural increase. “What constitutes a sound basis of credit … was and is, the abundance, or productive capacity, of nature taken together with the responsibility of the whole people.” In the comparison of two banks which I mentioned some time ago, for example, the bank of Siena was a good bank because it based credit on natural abundance. As Pound describes it:
Siena was flat on her back, without money after the Florentine conquest. Cosimo, first duke of Tuscany …, guaranteed the [bank’s] capital …
Siena had grazing lands down toward Grosseto, and the grazing rights worth 10,000 ducats a year. On this basis taking it for his main security, Cosimo underwrote a capital of 200,000 ducats, to pay 5 per cent to the shareholders, and to be lent at