Pound the Agent

There is nothing more dull or sterile than culture theories.  Pound is not a poet really, not a philosopher, but a cultural attaché without an embassy.  

I'm not so unlike Pessoa - a writer of business letters in three languages, a writer of business letters without a business.

In the morning we had dream cake, seen only from one side, the front.  In the afternoon not just in the dream - from all three sides.

Pound in a Canto equates USURY (USURA) and SODOMY as the most despicable plagues of mankind.  An English poet and critic took umbrage at this coupling - he did not like it - not at all.  Sodomy is one of those sexual means of expression of a more enlightened age.  Pound thought he could curry favor with such a damnation.  Not in England he can't.  Probably he found both sodomy and usury to be unproductive forms of multiplying or as a Badiouist might say - multiplicity.  Sodomites multiply by converting non-sodomites into their own species.  They aim for a world made up only of sodomites but cannot (via sodomy) reproduce themselves biologically. In this sense they are like any sort of hybrid.  Similarly, USURA or finance capital does not increase value, they merely suck it into their hoards by virtue of the law of hoards.  Having that much disposable cash is necessary to oil the whole monetary body.  I just wonder if Pound had any means derived from USURA.  Without usury there would be no rentier.   Money without interest is like letters without the postal system.  Everyone could deliver his own letter rather than pay this absurd usurer's price of the postage stamp.

The enemy of the borrower (debtor) is not the usurer - it's the rentier.

   

    Pleasure Bookie 1