• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 813 0

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,