Blake and Pound’s Usura
Allen Ginsberg on William Blake continues from here
AG”: “Shall not the Councellor throw his curb/ Of Poverty on the laborious?/To fix the price of labour;/To invent allegoric riches” – (Oh, Ezra Pound comes in here, Pound’s Usura. Remember? “With Usura..” – “To invent allegoric riches.” – Pound’s theory of what was wrong with the world was the Urizenic use of money. Pound pointed out that the founder of Bank of England had written a letter to all of his fellow founders who had put up a little money for this project notifying them and informing that the Bank shall have use of the interest on all moneys which it has created ex nihil. The Bank of England shall have interest on all moneys which it hath created ex nihil
Now what Pound was pointing out in his theory – which Blake is also noticing in this “To invent allegoric riches”- is that what banks do is they bribe the king or the legislature or the State to let them be the issuers of money, to let them handle the money, to take care of that job. And the way they handle the money is, they have one million dollars in gold in the basement, and on the basis of that one million dollars the king says to them, “You give me twenty grand so I’m going to do you a favor – You take care of the money. You have the right to issue four million dollars in credit – paper credit, checks – on the basis of your reserve of one million.” So you’re inventing (money) – you’ve only got one million but you can say, socially, that you’ve got four million and you can loan it out and then get interest on it.
Now this was a big scandal all through history, according to Pound, and it was a big argument between (President) Jefferson and (Alexander) Hamilton, actually, on the power of the banks to take over the operation of money. If the government were loaning out this money, then the government would get all that interest and would have all these allegoric riches or supposed riches – credit, so to speak – but what it winds up is a private person – a bank, say. What’s the name of that guy that (President Jimmy) Carter is trying to put in all the time?
Students: Bert Lance.
AG: Yeah. Bert Lance. Bert Lance got a million dollars, and he pays off the State Banking Authority under the table so that he gets a bank, so he gets together a million dollars in gold and from that he can issue credit: He can write checks that are legal and binding and protected by the Federal Reserve System, too, so backed up by the government. He can write checks for four or six million or whatever the multiple is these days. At one time it got up to twenty to one.
Does anybody know that story? This was Pound’s obsession. He thought that was what was wrong with all of society, and if you could only get rid of usury – and that’s his phrase – usura: “With Usura wool comes not to market. Usura slayeth the child in the womb, it stoppeth the spinner’s cunning. With usura emerald comes not to Memling“.
Peter Orlovsky: “The line grows thick with Usura”.
AG: “With usura, the line grows thick” – (The line of painting grows thick).
It was very similar to what Blake was complaining about. Blake wanted to find a definite line, but not a thick, shadowy line. He thought that was usurious fast-buck painting. That kind of painting was the kind of painting like Rembrandt that you could sell in the five and ten cent store.
So, oddly enough, if you check out Pound’s canto on Usura compared to Blake’s “Asia” you find a tremendous correlation and correspondence of ideas. And if you check out Pound’s hell cantos, you’ll find Blake in there, shouting against usura. So Pound had read or understood this part of Blake. It’s a funny get-together for those guys.
But this is a beautiful line:
“To invent allegoric riches:/And the privy admonishers of men/ Call for fires in the City/For heaps of smoking ruins,/ In the night of prosperity & wantonness/ To turn man from his path,/To restrain the child from the womb.” -(“Usura cometh between the bride and the bridegroom, Usura slayeth the child in the womb” That’s Pound, interestingly_
“To cut the bread off from the city…” – “With usura is no strong wheat, is thy bread made of paper. With usura is thy bread made of paper with no strong flour, no mountain wheat..”, or something like that. [Editorial note -“with usura, sin against nature,/is thy bread ever more of stale rags/is thy bread dry as paper,/with no mountain wheat, no strong flour/with usura the line grows thick/with usura is no clear demarcation”]
“To cut the bread from the city,/That the remnant may learn to obey,/That the pride of the heart may fail;/That the lust of the eyes, may be quench’d:/That the delicate ear in its infancy/May be dull’d; and the nostrils clos’d up;/ To teach mortal worms the path/That leads from the gates of the Grave.” – (So this is like the imposition power)
to be continued.
Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately seventy-four minutes in and concluding at approximately seventy-nine-and-a-half minutes in