The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [154]
And the lesson is the very basis of solid banking. The CREDIT rests in ultimate on the ABUNDANCE OF NATURE, on the growing grass that can nourish the living sheep …
Pound’s stock example of an evil bank was the Bank of England. In a book by Christopher Hollis called The Two Nations Pound came across a quote attributed to that bank’s founder, William Paterson. A prospectus written in 1694 for potential investors included this sentence: “The bank hath benefit of the interest on all moneys which it creates out of nothing.” Pound repeats the sentence over and over in the Cantos and in his prose. Here value is detached from its root in the natural world; here lies the seed of the dissociation between real and financial credit. Money “created out of nothing” cannot have real value or real increase, but the “hell banks,” through abstraction and mystification, make it appear to have both. Once such false money is at large, it secretly gnaws away at the true value that rests on the growing grass and the living sheep.
Pound divided all goods into three classes:
1 transient goods (“fresh vegetables, luxuries, jerry-built houses, fake art, pseudo books, battleships”),
2 durable goods (“well constructed buildings, roads, public works, canals, intelligent afforestation”), and
3 permanent goods (“scientific discoveries, works of art, classics”).
In phrases reminiscent of our description of a gift, Pound adds that the goods in his third group “can be put in a class by themselves, as they are always in use and never consumed, or they are … not destroyed by consumption.” The only change I would suggest in these groups would be to move vegetables—or any life that is cyclically reborn—into the last category, in the spirit of Pound’s own lines from a late canto: “The clover enduring, / basalt crumbled with time.” Clover endures the way art endures. The verb is the same as in the usura canto, “no picture made to endure nor to live with / but to sell and sell quickly.”
Pound felt that as long as we are going to use money as a symbol of value, there should be different kinds of money to stand for different kinds of value: clover money for clover and basalt money for basalt. “For every bit of DURABLE goods there ought certainly to be a ticket [i.e., a piece of money] … But what about perishable goods, stuff that rots and is eaten …?” he asks. “It would be better … if money perished at the same rate as goods perish, instead of being of lasting durability while goods get consumed and food gets eaten.” He sought, therefore, a currency “no more durable than … potatoes, crops or fabrics.” Until the symbols of value accurately reflect the various kinds of wealth, we will always have the unfair situation of some folks having “money wealth” that increases in their bank accounts while others have “potato wealth” that decays in their larder. So Pound proposed a vegetable currency which, like the bread the fairies leave at night, would perish in the hands of those who did not use it.
He was particularly keen on stamp scrip, a form of currency proposed by the German economist Silvio Gesell. As Pound tells it, Gesell “saw the danger of money being hoarded and proposed to deal with it by the issue of ‘stamp scrip.’ This should be a government note requiring the bearer to affix a stamp worth up to 1 percent of its face value on the first day of every month. Unless the note carries its proper complement of monthly stamps it is not valid.” With stamp scrip, you lose money by having money. Whoever has something in his pocket on the first of the month will see it shrink by 1 percent, rather than grow. If you keep it a hundred months it will perish completely. (Stamp scrip is Schwund geld in German, “shrinking money.” Pound sometimes calls it “counter-usury,” and in letters to Mussolini refers to it as “transient currency” and as money that bears “negative interest.” It’s money