CANTO XII
And we sit here
under the wall,
Arena romana, Diocletian's, les gradins
quarante-trois rangees en calcaire.
Back to the Roman arena [Canto IV] with
its
43 steps, watching history pass before
us.
Baldy Bacon
Francis Bacon, an American businessman Ez met in
1910. He thought Ez wd admire his
cleverness;
Ez liked his optimism but felt appalled
by his
lack of ethical sensibility.
Baldy Bacon
bought all the little copper pennies in Cuba:
Un centavo, dos centavos,
told his peons to "bring 'em in."
"Bring 'em to the main shack,"said Baldy,
And the peons brought 'em;
"to the main shack brought 'em,"
As Henry would have said.
Parody of Henry Newbolt, EP's personal
choice
for Worst Poet of All Time.
Newbolt never wrote
"to the main shack brought
them" but he did
perpetrate "He stood the door
behind"
Nicholas Castano in Habana,
He also had a few centavos, but the others
Had to pay a percentage.
Percentage when they wanted centavos,
Public centavos.
Monopoly
of coin or currency, with
the
power to extract interest therefrom –
The
definition of usury as seen by Pound, Dante
and
the individualist anarchists. As Ben Tucker wrote:
First in the importance of its evil influence [anarchists]
considered the money monopoly, which consists of the privilege given by the
government to certain individuals, or to individuals holding certain kinds of
property, of issuing the circulating medium, a privilege which is now enforced
in this country by a national tax of ten percent, upon all other persons who
attempt to furnish a circulating medium, and by State laws making it a criminal
offense to issue notes as currency. It is claimed that the holders of this
privilege control the rate of interest, the rate of rent of houses and
buildings, and the prices of goods, - the first directly, and the second and
third indirectly....
--Benjamin Tucker, "State
Socialism and Anarchism"
for more details see:
http://flag.blackened.net/daver/anarchism/tucker/tucker2.html
Baldy got his monopoly without State
sanction, but the mechanism
of usury remains MONOPOLY OF COIN OR
CURRENCY, however
said monopoly obtained.
Tucker and Pound appeared regularly in
Harriet Shaw Weaver's
individualist-Feminist-"modernist"
magazine, The Egotist, c 1912-1915 and I
assume they read each other.
Baldy's interest
Was in money business.
"No interest in any other kind ov bisnis,"
Said Baldy.
Pound's view of Usurocracy as inhumanly
narrow
& perverse paideuma [reality-tunnel]
summed up by a practitioner.
Note the marked contrast between Baldy
and Sigismundo Malatesta
[Cantos VIII-XI] and KungfuTse [Canto
XIII], immediately
before and after Baldy -- and between
Baldy & all the characters
EP admires.
Sleeping with two buck niggers chained to him,
guidia regia, chained to his waist
To keep 'em from slipping off in the night;
Suggests slavery, which EP always associares with usury.
Being by now unpopular with the Cubans;
By fever reduced to lbs. 108.
Returned to Manhattan, ultimately to Manhattan.
24 E. 47th, when I met him,
Doing job printing, i.e. agent,
going to his old acquaintances,
His office in Nassau St., distributing jobs to the printers,
Commercial stationery,
and later, insurance,
Employers' liability,
odd sorts of insurance,
Fire on brothels, etc., commission,
Rising from 15 dollars a week,
Pollon d'anthropon iden,
Major themes of Cantos: [1] what Ez
likes and don't like
in Western individualism; [2] what Ez
likes and don't
like in Oriental holism; [3] synthesis
of best in both
traditions.
Knew which shipping companies were most careless;
where a man was most likely
To lose a leg in bad hoisting machinery;
Also fire, as when passing a whore-house,
Arrived, miraculous Hermes, by accident,
Two minutes after the proprietor's angelos
Had been sent for him
Saved his people 11,000 in four months
on that Cuba job,
But they busted,
Also ran up to 40,000 bones on his own,
Once, but wanted to "eat up the whole'r Wall St."
And dropped it all three weeks later.
Habitat cum Quade, damn good fellow,
Mons Quade who wore a monocle on a wide sable ribbon.
(Elsewhere recorded).
Quade, a friend of Baldy, tried to dress
like his idea of an English
"gentleman."
Dos Santos, Jose Maria dos Santos,
Hearing that a grain ship
Was wrecked in the estuary of the Tagus,
Bought it at auction, nemo obstabat,
No one else bidding. "Damn fool!" 'Maize
Spoiled with salt water,
No use can't do anything with it." Dos Santos.
All the stuff rotted with sea water.
Dos Santos Portuguese lunatic bought it,
Mortgaged then all his patrimony,
e tot lo sieu aver,
And bought sucking pigs, pigs, small pigs,
Porkers, throughout all Portugal,
fed on the cargo,
First lot mortgaged to buy the second lot, undsoweiter,
Porkers of Portugal,
fattening with the fulness of time,
And Dos Santos fattened, a great landlord of Portugal
Now gathered to his fathers.
did it on water-soaked corn.
(Water probably fresh in that estuary)
Dos Santos got rich by "natural
increase"
[pigs create more pigs] and shrewdness
[seeing a use for water-soaked corn.]
Contrast with Baldy: cf Shakespeare:
"Is your gold ewes and lambs?"
Go to hell Apovitch, Chicago aint the whole punkin.
Like the "buck niggers" [which
seems "racist" to
careless readers] this represents
adjustment
of style to subject. Did you think Baldy
& friends
shd appear in same style as Odysseus or
Eleanor?
Jim X...
Based on John Quinn, Irish-American
lawyer
and art collector. Due to Ez's criticisms,
Quinn
stopped collecting dead artists, who
cdn't profit
from his money, and started collecting
moderns,
who badly needed cash in those days.
in a bankers' meeting,
bored with their hard luck stories,
Bored with their bloomin' primness
and the little white rims
They wore around inside the edge of their vests
To make 'em look as if they had on two waistcoats,
Told 'em the Tale of the Honest Sailor.
Bored with their proprieties,
as they sat, the ranked presbyterians,
Young EP detested Calvinists because of
their puritanism.
Later, he disliked them a bit more
because of their
central role in American banking.
[Calvin: first Christian theologian to
declare
usury NOT a mortal sin.....]
Directors, dealers through holding companies,
Deacons in churches, owning slum properties,
Alias usurers in excelsis,
the quintessential essence of usurers,
Second in importance comes the land monopoly, the evil effects of
which are seen principally in exclusively agricultural countries, like Ireland.
This monopoly consists in the enforcement by government of land titles which do
not rest upon personal occupancy and cultivation. It was obvious to Warren and
Proudhon that, as soon as individualists should no longer be protected by their
fellows in anything but personal occupancy and cultivation of land, ground-rent
would disappear, and so usury have one less leg to stand on.
--Benjamin Tucker,
"State Socialism and Anarchism"
for more details see:
http://flag.blackened.net/daver/anarchism/tucker/tucker2.html
The purveyors of employment, whining over their 20 p.c.
and the hard times,
And the bust-up of Brazilian securities
(S. A. securities),
And the general uncertainty of all investment
Save investment in new bank buildings,
And not likely to ease distribution,
Bored with the way their mouths twitched
over their cigar-ends,
Said Jim X...:
There once was a pore honest sailor, a heavy drinker,
A hell of a cuss, a rowster, a boozer, and
The drink finally sent him to hospital,
And they operated, and there was a poor whore in
The woman's ward had a kid, while
They were fixing the sailor, and they brought him the kid
When he came to, and said:
"Here! this is what we took out of you."
An' he looked at it, an' he got better,
And when he left the hospital, quit the drink,
And when he was well enough
signed on with another ship
And saved up his pay money,
and kept on savin' his pay money,
And bought a share in the ship,
and finally had half shares,
Then a ship
and in time a whole line of steamers;
And educated the kid,
and when the kid was in college,
The ole sailor was again taken bad
and the doctors said he was dying,
And the boy came to the bedside,
and the old sailor said:
"Boy, I'm sorry I can't hang on a bit longer,
"You're young yet,
I leave you re-sponsa-bilities.
"Wish I could ha' waited till you were older,
"More fit to take over the bisness..."
"But, father,
"Don't, don't talk about me, I'm all right,
"It's you, father,"
"That's it, boy, you said it.
"You called me your father, and I ain't.
"I ain't your dad, no,
"I am not your fader but your moder," quod he,
"Your fader was a rich merchant in Stambouli."
Pound follows Dante in making
"sodomy" akin
to usury. He never showed personal
homophobia,
and seems to use the medieval
sodomy/usury equation poetically to make
another echo of Dante's Inferno, where
both groups
reside in the same circle of Hell. Sorry
about that.
One of the gay artists Ez promoted &
publicized,
composer George Anthiel, wrote Sonata for 28 Violins
and 2
Airplane Motors, which either inspired or
reinforced EP's mixture of melodic and
un-melodic
elements in the Cantos.
Joyce also appeared regularly in The Egotist, and pronounced
Tucker "the clearest head ever, in politics."
[Manginello,
Joyce's Politics.]
Joyce combined Tucker and Tostoy into his own brand
of egotist/anarcho/pacifism.
Ez rejected the anarcho part of this as impractical and
went looking for an honest governor.
He found Mussolini.
---------
Does anybody see what I see?
Is there anybody there?
Does anybody care?
--1776
Just looked at a terrific video of the protests
against the World Bank in Prague last year...
WORLD BANK AND IMF UNDER SEIGE.
Almost every protestor interviewed seemed
to restate some of the major themes of
Pound's Cantos, altho' I doubt that one
in ten thousand of them knew that....
Amusingly, Ez detested Thomas Aquinas even more than
other Occidental philosophers ["words about
words about words..."] but one sentence
from Tom got into the Cantos [Canto XLV]:
-- usury destroys nature.
Almost every interviewee in Prague
had a variation on that.