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USURY
by
Professor
Robert O'Driscoll
With
usury has no man a good house
made of stone, no paradise on
his church wall
with usury the stone cutter is
kept from his stone
the weaver is kept from his loom
by usura
Wool does not come into market
the peasant does not eat his own
grain
the girl's needle goes blunt in
her hand
The looms are hushed one after
another
ten thousand after ten thousand
Duccio was not by usura
Nor was 'Calunnia' painted.
Neither Ambrogio Praedis nor
Angelico
had their skill by usura
Nor St. Trophime its cloisters;
Not St Hilaire its proportion.
Usury rusts the man and his
chisel
It destroys the craftsman,
destroying craft;
Azure is caught with cancer.
Emerald comes to no Memling
Usury kills the child in the
womb
And breaks short the young man's
courting
Usury brings age into youth; it
lies between the bride
and the bridegroom
Usury is against Nature's
increase.
Whores for
Eleusis
;
Under usury no stone is cut
smooth
Peasant has no gain from his
sheep herd.
(Ezra Pound, from Canto LI)
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Plate
13:
With usury, St.
Hilaire at
Poitiers
would not have its
proportions',
intricate stable
unornamented
arches, a
perfection that
has never been for
sale, but which
testify to the
beauty of art and
to the depth of
man's faith in the
divine. |
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We begin this book with
these 26 lines from Ezra Pound's
Cantos which resonate with many
meanings. Pound is accepted
throughout the world as being one
of the three greatest English
speaking poets of the twentieth
century, the other two being W. B.
Yeats and T. S. Eliot.
Let us consider for a
moment the palimpsest of meaning
in the extract which is from Canto
LI. Usury (or, as Pound preferred,
'usura'), like all middle men in
commerce, intervenes between the
spontaneous instinct of the
labourer and what he produces,
whether it be the building of a
house, the shaping of a piece of
cloth or wood, or the decorating
of the wall of a church. With
Usury or Usura, everything becomes
abstract, divided, a matter of
manipulation. The desire to
produce is killed in the womb - or
rather tomb - of the imagination,
and the fruits of labour are no
longer a delight, the result of
the natural energy or inclination
of the labourer.
Style, our individual way
of doing things, is, as W. B.
Yeats has it, the energy that
remains after the dictates of
necessity have been satisfied: it
is, for example, the foam on the
beer, not essential to the beer,
but a sign of good beer. Usura,
Pound concludes, 'destroys the
craftsman, destroying craft.' Over
time he becomes a slave of the
middle man. His real will to work
is sucked out of him and he begins
to labour for survival or profit.
The 'azure' of inspiration and the
heavens has been infected with
cancer.
The extract quoted above
concludes by extending the power
of usura to interrupt love and
procreation: 'it lies between the
bride and the bridegroom,' as
material considerations always do.
Usura turns love into an exercise
of the mind where the main
objective becomes the outfoxing of
one's partner. 'Whores for
Eleusis
,' Pound says, and that one line
communicates the sense of
profundity when women become
calculating machines.
Eleusis, the site of an
ancient Mystery School, had at the
heyday of Greece a magnificent
temple north of Athens to which
all Greeks flocked to participate
in the mysteries: the gradual
unfolding of the higher faculties,
the awakening of the spiritual
light of which matter is a lower
manifestation. 'The mystery of
wheat and sex celebrated at
Eleusis and by medieval
Christianity,' Professor Massimo
Bacigalupo reminds us, 'has
degenerated to whoredom (i.e. a
love that can be bought), to a
macabre banquet of corpses.' As
Pound puts it in Canto XLV:
Usura
slayeth the child in the womb
It
stayeth the young man's courting
It
hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth
between
the young bride and her bridegroom
CONTRA
NATURAM
They
have brought whores for
Eleusis
Corpses
are set to banquet
at
behest of usura.
Sexuality and religion have
met a joint death. Once we have
understood the references in those
lines, Pound's irony is as clear
as crystal: otherwise the lines
are opaque. Scholarship has a
purpose.
Of other particular
references we can note that
Ambrogio Praedis and Angelico were
Italian painters and that the
twelfth century cloisters of St.
Trophime at Arles and the
ornamented arches of St. Hilaire
at Pontiers were manifested out of
the deep faith of the people
rather than out of the thought:
'Wouldn't it be nice to construct
a church in the village for our
children.'
The reference in the line 'Duccio
came not by usura' is to the
Italian painter, Agostino di
Duccio's figure of Flora.
Annotators of the Tempio
Malatestiana called her 'Botany'
because she fits an allegory of
the Liberal Arts. The figure is
etched in Rimini, Italy - a
favourite haunt of the troubadours
- on what some commentators call
the most beautiful stone in the
world, creating a luminousness
from, as Professor Hugh Kenner
from John Hopkins University calls
it, 'the irradiation of ambient
light around the high polish
Duccio gave her tranquil gaze, an
arcanum and temple of Light.'
The
Usura Cantos 'would be
more comprehensible,' Pound
writes, 'if people understood the
meaning of the term 'Usury'. It is
not to be confused with the
legitimate interest which is due,
Del
Mar says [in A History of Monetary
Systems,
London
1895], to the increase in domestic
animals and plants. The difference
between a fixed charge and a share
from a proportion of the
increase.'
Elsewhere, in his ABC
of Economics, Pound defines
Usury as 'a charge for the use of
purchasing power, levied without
regard to production; often
without regard to the
possibilities of production.'
James Laughlin Pound's
publisher, suggests that the
poet's insight into the nature of
Usury goes back to the canonist
writers, principally St. Ambrose.
Professor James Wilhelm from
Rutgers
University
has located the linking passage in
Ambrose's De Tobia (Patrologia
latina
, vol. 14):
The De Tobia
attacked usurers who ruined
farmers with high rates of
interest on crop loans. (Duke
Leopold of
Siena
was one of Pound's heroes because
he limited the Monte dei Paschi to
3 percent on loans to the
peasants). Pound had nothing
against bank loans which support
any kind of production at a fair
rate. And he had nothing against
service banking. In fact, all his
life he had a savings account at a
bank in
Jenkintown
,
Pennsylvania
(Marcel Smith and William A.
Ulmer, Ezra Pound: The Legacy
of Kulchur, p.79).
Summarizing Pound's Cantos,
Professor Chang Yao-Hsin (Chairman
of the English Department at
Nankai
University
in
Tianjin
,
China
) writes:
A major thematic concern of
the Cantos is the treatment of
usury, which takes up an enormous
amount of space. Canto 12 talks of
banks not likely to ease
distribution. Canto 30 mentions
how money debases the arts and
customs of
Venice
. Canto 34 records the fact of
banks breaking all over
America
and prostrating every principle of
economy. Canto 37 registers the
pernicious effect of the Bank of
the
United States
deranging the country's credit and
controlling the public mind.
Before the denunciation of the
malpractice of the Bank of England
in Canto 46, Pound lashed himself
into fury at usura in Canto 45. In
short, to Pound, much of the
Western disease is derivable from
usury and ink money. Hugh Kenner
is right when he says that the
first fifty cantos paint for us a
picture of 'the complete and utter
inferno of the past century,' and
so is Angela Jung, who sees these
cantos as a vehement condemnation
of the cardinal crime against
humanity (ibid., pp.90-1).
Pound's friend, the British
philosopher Herbert Read, notes in
his book on Pound that there were
two points on which they always
agreed: 'the evil wrought in
mediaeval society by the Church's
admission of the principle of
usury, and the dependence of any
social revolution on its ability
to deal with the monetary
problem.' As TT puts the point in
The New World Order and the
Throne of the antichrist:
'They collect from the poor and
unfortunate, of course - mostly
when they are at church; they
launder the money by means of
narcotics, prostitution, gambling,
and by buying out politicians' (p.
188).
Usury is the creation of money out
of nothing. Money educes a sense
of false stability in a world in
which everything is in a state of
flux. Usury perverts nature by
ignoring the purpose of nature,
creating ex nihilo - instead of by
the rhythms of nature and cyclical
ritual - consumer societies,
debased dollars and coinage with
no real goods behind them. In
modern times man experiences
alienation under capitalism and
sees 'his productions, his food,
his love objects, all equally
reduced to commodities.'
Usury has its roots in the
Manichean separation of the flesh
and the spirit, its hypocritical
insistence that the flesh is
sinful, and only the flesh. This
perverts nature. The energy so
released in this perversion of
true Christian doctrine is
diverted into other radical
perversions: profiteering through
money, power, war, or - in Freud's
interestingly capitalistic term
-'reinvesting' it: we see the
total irony of the situation when
we observe the wealthiest in a
parish regularly take up the
'Collection' at Sunday morning
Mass.
Usury
is seen by Pound as the root of
all evil, 'a vice or a crime
condemned by all religions and by
every ancient moralist,' a
departure from the divine and
natural order of things and 'more
than faintly connected with such
unpredictable criminals as FDR
[Roosevelt].'
Unlike usury and politics,
art does not attempt to create
something out of nothing, but
reveals the shape and rhythm of
what is already there, within the
propensity of the paint, words, or
living stone to express, as Pound
suggests, what is 'in the mind of
heaven.' Usury, James Laughlin,
writes is 'the excremental
doppelganger of [potentially]
poetic gold.'
The connection between
excrement and usury is clear in
Pound's work. In the ABC of
Economics Pound refers to the
/economic mess'. In Guide to
Kulchur, the nineteenth
century is described
simultaneously as the 'age of
usury' and 'mainly mess'. In Gold
and Work 1944, middle-men -
usurers - are considered the 'most
stinking dregs of humanity.' In ABC
of Economics, disorder in
America
is described as a condition in
which 'Their dung has covered
their heads', and [in National
Culture, A Manifesto 1938]
the usurers find themselves in
'filthy and damnable control of
the
Union
.' 'The usurers,' Pound concludes
in A Visiting Card, 'in
their obscene and pitch-dark
century, created this satanic
transubstantiation, the Black Mass
of money.'
University of Wales
Professor Alan Durant concludes in
his book on Pound, Identity
in Crises: ‘In Gold and Work (1944) this usuriocratic, Hebrew-Christian perverted
and infernal blend is intertwined,
by way of the nineteenth
century’s designation as an era
of usury, with Marxian economics,
“a species of monetary Black
Mass.”
Usury then for Ezra Pound
– and many of his predecessors
and successors – is associated
with number, measurement,
containment, inversion, evil and
murder: swift murder of the spirit
as well as the slow murder of the
body with mortgages,
etc. In Cato’s De
Rustica, we find the following
piece of dialogue:
And what do you think of
usury?
What do you think of
murder?
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