The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [157]
In his sober moments Pound does not oppose abstraction or symbolic thought, but behind his argument lies the longing—and it is a poet’s longing—to pull the whole world into the imagination. Money itself is a crime against that desire.
The nineteenth century, the infamous century of usury … creat[ed] a species of monetary Black Mass. Marx and Mill, in spite of their superficial differences, agreed in endowing money with properties of a quasi-religious nature. There was even the concept of energy being “concentrated in money,” as if one were speaking of the divine quality of consecrated bread.
We are back with Müntzer condemning Luther. When a writer declares that “money alone is capable of being transmuted immediately into any form of activity,” Pound exclaims: “This is the idiom of the black myth! … Money does not contain energy. The half-lira piece cannot create the platform ticket … or piece of chocolate that issues from the slot-machine.” To speak as if it does is “the falsification of the word” and portrays a “satanic transubstantiation.”
Pound’s remarks on the image are typically cited in explications of his aesthetic ideas, but their meaning cannot be accurately conveyed if they have been removed from their original context, an ongoing argument for a spiritual economy of the imagination:
The power of putrefaction … seeks to destroy not one but every religion … by leading off into theoretical argument. Theological disputes take the place of contemplation. Disputation destroys faith … Suspect anyone who destroys an image …
And in the same line:
The theologians who put reason (logic) in the place of faith began the slithering process which has ended up with theologians who take no interest in theology whatsoever.
Tradition inheres … in the images of the gods, and gets lost in dogmatic definitions.
When Pound asks, “Who destroyed the mystery of fecundity, bringing in the cult of sterility?” he himself might have answered, “The Protestants and the Jews,” but let us say, rather: the rise of market-value as the form of value. Karl Marx once wrote that “Logic is the money of mind …; logic is alienated thinking and therefore thinking which abstracts from nature and from real man.” Both men discern this constellation: logical thinking, detachment from the real, and cash exchange. It is one and the same country where the form of commerce allows financiers to enrich themselves by juggling the general against the specific, where faith is replaced by logic, and where images have lost their life to layers of abstraction.
What is to be done? Pound offers two solutions (in addition to those we’ve seen—stamp scrip, state banks, and so forth). First, we must speak clearly about money. Over and over Pound quotes the reply that Confucius gave when asked what he’d do first if he were boss: “Call people and things by their true and proper names.” Money is nothing but a “ticket,” it has no real worth of its own, it does not create, and so on. Pound has nothing against an abstract currency so long as we call a ticket a ticket. The tricksters won’t be able to dupe a public that knows precisely what money can and cannot do.
But more often Pound does not want to clarify the nature of symbolic exchange; he wants to get rid of it. Notice how he uses the word “just”: “The issue of credit (or money) must be just, i.e., neither too much or too little. Against every hour’s work … an hour’s certificate.” Or conversely: “It is unjust that money should enjoy privileges denied to goods.” Justice demands an hour-dollar for an hour-work, perishable money for perishable goods. Pound would like to reattach the symbols to their objects. Thoreau once wrote: “He would be a poet who could impress the winds and streams into his service, to speak for him; who nailed words to their primitive senses, as farmers drive down