CANTO XVIII

And of Kublai:

Back to China, but from an Occidental perspective:

"I have told you of that emperor's city in detail

And will tell you of the coining in Cambaluc

          that hyght the secret of alchemy:

They take bast of the mulberry-tree,

That is a skin between the wood and the bark,

And of this they make paper, and mark it

Half a tornesel, a tornesel, or a half-groat of silver,

Or two groats, or five groats, or ten groats,

Or, for a great sheet, a gold bezant, 3 bezants,

                       ten bezants;

And they are written on by officials,

And smeared with the great khan's seal in vermilion;

And the forgers are punished with death.

And all this costs the Kahn nothing,

Note how the sea-surge of Cantos I & II

re-echoes even in prosy-looking

passages. Cf Malatesta Cantos

And so he is rich in this world.

And his postmen go sewed up and sealed up,

Their coats buttoned behind and then sealed,

In this way from the voyage's one end to its other.

And the Indian merchants arriving

Must give up their jewels, and take this money

            in paper,

(That trade runs, in bezants, to 400,000 the year.)

And the nobles must buy their pearls"

- thus Messire Polo; prison at Genoa -

"Of the Emperor."

Marco Polo sounds as if he regarded this

kind of interest-bearing paper money as a gigantic swindle.

Later it became known as Finance Capitalism;

Ez calls it Usurocracy. Principals:

1. Monopoly on currency

2. Usury for use of currency.

           There was a boy in Constantinople,

And some britisher kicked his arse.

Imperialism NOT blamed entirely on Usurocracy,

but on ethnic prejudice also. EP's prose

on economic politics usually makes this point

also -- except, alas, when he gives way

to his own prejudice.

"I hate these french," said Napoleon, aged 12,

To young Bourrienne, "I will do them all the harm

                    that I can."

A Corsican Osama bin Laden?????

Amusing/perplexing sidelight on Nap's motives....

and on imperialism and its backlashes,

violence breeding violence.

In like manner Zenos Metevsky.

Metevsky: based on Sir Basil Zaharoff,

super munitions magnate, model for

evil gun merchants in many other 1920s-30s

writings. Cf Robert Sherwood's Idiot's Delight.

One source I can't find now identifies

Zaharoff as the boy kicked in the arse above.

Hence, "like" Napoleon.

EP's villains never driven by

"motiveless malignancy" but usually

by revenge and/or avarice and/or both.

And old Biers was out there, a greenhorn,

To sell cannon, and Metevsky found the back door;

And old Biers sold the munitions,

And Metevsky died and was buried, i. e. officially,

And sat in the Yeiner Kafe watching the funeral.

Another guy was shot and mis-identified as Zaharoff

About ten years after this incident,

He owned a fair chunk of Humbers.

Humbers: EP's name for Vickers, England's largest gun merchants. By then, Z owned banks & newspapers, too.

             "Peace!  Pieyce!!" said Mr. Giddings,

Giddings not identifiable yet.

"Uni-ver-sal?  Not while yew got tew billions ov money,"

Said Mr. Giddings, "invested in the man-u-facture

"Of war machinery.  

EP blames wars chiefly on banks and national

prejudices, but never ignores the profit$

earned by gun merchants,

Haow I sold it to Russia -

"Well we tuk 'em a new torpedo-boat,

"And it was all electric, run it all from a

"Little bit uv a keyboard, about like the size ov

"A typewriter, and the prince come aboard,

"An' we sez wud yew like to run her?

"And he run damn slam on the breakwater,

"And bust off all her front end,

"And he was my gawd scared out of his panties.

"Who wuz agoin' tew pay for the damage?

"And it was my first trip out fer the company,

"And I sez, yer highness, it is nothing,

"We will give yew a new one.  And, my Christ!

"The company backed me, and did we get a few orders/"

So La Marquesa de las Zojas y Hurbara

Used to drive up to Sir Zenos's place

             in the Champs Elysees

And preside at his dinners, and at las once

She drove away from the front door, with her footmen

And her coachman in livery, and drove four blocks round

To the back door, and her husband was the son of a bitch,

Zaharoff had an affair with the Marquesa,

and sold lots of munitions to her cousin,

the king of Spain.

And Metevsky, "the well-known philanthropist,"

Or "the well-known financier, better known,"

As the press said, "as a philanthropist,"

Since Z [Metevsky] served two prison terms

for fraud, this does remind one of how

the corporate media today refer to our

major death-dealers.

Gave - as the Este to Louis the Eleventh, -

A fine pair of giraffes to the nation,

And endowed a chair of ballistics,

And was consulted before the offensives.

And Mr. Oige was very choleric in a first-class

From Nice to Paris, he said: "Danger!

"Now a sailor's life is a life of danger,

"But a mine, why every stick of it is numbered,

"And one time we missed one, and there was

"Three hundred men killed in the 'splosion."

He was annoyed with the strikers, having started himself

As engineer and worked up, and losing,

By that coal strike, some months after the paragraph:

:  Sir Zenos Metevsky has been elected President

Of the Gethsemane Trebizond Petrol.

The Anglo-Persian Oil Company.....

beginning of the "oil wars" still continuing

in the mid-east.

And then there came out another: 80 locomotives

On the Manchester Cardiff have been fitted with

New oil-burning apparatus...

Large stocks of the heavier varieties of which (i. e. oil)

Are now on hand in the country.

So I said to the old quaker Hamish,

I said: "I am interested."  And he went putty colour

And said: "He don't advertise.  No, I don't think

You will learn much."  That was when I asked

About Metevsky Melchizedek.

He, Hamish, took the tractors up to

King Menelik, 3 rivers and 140 ravines.

Example of how even intelligent people like Ez

begin to believe in Vast International Conspiracies.....

"Qu'est-ce qu'on pense...?" I said: "On don't pense.

"What do they think?" "They don't think."

EP's view of England when he left for France, 1919

"They're solid bone.  You can amputate from just above

The medulla, and it won't alter the life in that island."

ARRGGGGGGH, sounds just like my view of

American minds c 2001.....

But he continued, "Mais, qu'EST-CE qu'ON pense,

"de la metallurgie, en Angleterre, qu'est qu'on

"Pense de Metevsky?"

And I said: "They ain't heard his name yet.

"Go ask at MacGorvish's bank."

"But what do the English think about Zaharoff?"

The Jap observers were much amused because

The Turkish freemasons hadn't bothered to

Take the..... regimental badges off their artillery.

And old Hamish: Menelik

Had a hunch that machinery...and so on...

But he never could get it to work,

             never could get any power.

The Germans wd. send him up boilers, but they'd

Have to cut 'em into pieces to load 'em on camels,

And they never got 'em together again.

And so old Hamish went out there,

And looked at the place, 3 rivers

And a hundred and forty ravines,

And he sent out two tractors, one to pull on the other

And Menelik sent down an army, a 5000 black army

With hawsers, and they all sweated and swatted.

And the first thing Dave lit on when they got there

Was a buzz-saw,

And he put it through an ebony log: whhsssh, t ttt,

Two days' work in three minutes.

War, one war after another,

Men start 'em who couldn't put up a good hen-roost.

"Dave" and the men who cd put up a good henhouse

represent what Ez likes in the modern world

in contrast to machinations of "Metevsky"/Zaharoff.

Also sabotage...