The H.D. Book (79 page)

•

“I shall have no peace until I get the subject off my chest,” Pound wrote, sometime in 1932, in his
ABC of Economics.
He was never to have that peace. The subject itself was to lead him from the
claritas
of this little book, with its interweavings of ideal and practical views, on to the disturbed and then contentious pamphlets against those great
windmills of the capitalist order—the usury of investment capital and the economy of war. “After about forty pages,” he wrote in the
ABC,
“I shall not ‘descend,’ but I shall certainly go into, ‘go down into’ repetitions and restatements in the hope of reaching this clarity and simplicity.” “ ‘Capital’ for the duration of this treatise implies a sort of claim on others, a sort of right to make others work. My bond of the X and Y railroad is capital. Somebody is supposed to earn at least 60 dollars a year and pay it to me because I own such a bond.”

•

What he wanted was to restore time for the communal good. The necessary work must be distributed among all able to work. This would mean a shorter working day and time for creative work. It meant production for social needs, not for speculation. What Pound wanted was not the pursuit of happiness but the pursuit of the good. This taking thought toward the distribution of goods was an extension of early democratic thought in America. It meant finally that all men must be citizens, living in the imagination of the common good, against privilege. Which Adams saw “requires the continual exercise of virtue beyond the reach of human infirmity, even in its best estate.”

•

“Any spare time not absolutely obsessed by worry can be the means to a ‘better life’ ”: this was the crux of Pound’s concern. It was 1932. The Depression—the meaning of “worry”—was economic (as now it is psychological and becoming apocalyptic). For the poor, enslaved by want, idle hours meant jobless hours. For the rich, idle hours meant time to waste, money to waste, profit to waste. Men selling their hours, so that labor came to mean a commodity of so-much time and not a means towards some good, struggled to get more of the profits, to increase the price of work-time, or feared for their livelihood. We have left from the waxing twenties, fat after the holocaust of moneymaking in the war, records of what life was like for those who had lost the goods of the intellect for the commodities of a cultured sensibility: the deracinated drift of Scott Fitzgerald or the inhabitants of Eliot’s
The Waste Land.
Capitalist society, as Marx had rightly pointed out, exploited materials and men’s labor towards a profit that was empty of meaning. The whole speculative possibility of the market grew up around panics of inflation and depression, sales-manias, war-manias, and time-wasting.

•

“Leisure is not gained by simply being out of work. Leisure is spare time
free from anxiety
”: that was one side of Pound’s sense, quickened by his knowledge of how men were wasted in the job-commodity market, by the spectacle of drifting rich and destitute poor in the early thirties. The corollary of such leisure as Pound wanted was not only time freed from wage-slavery by a shorter working day but time free for work, for what the artist, the poet of
The Cantos,
knew as his life work, as other men wanted time free for their households or hobbies. Hours that might be the means for poetry, for taking thought, for singing about the piano in the evening, for crafts, and for the variety of exercises—these leisure hours depend in turn upon hours devoted to the common goods, to the raising of food, the furnishing of clothes, houses, minds, workshops, to distribution and transportation. The two are interdependent. Where anything was done at all, vision and work cooperated in one act. Such leisure could not be earned or given; it could only be created. The rest was exploitation, or obsessional competition in which men strove for an evil or hold over other men, a politics and a business that drove the souls of all before them with threats of war and unemployment.

•

There is a sense in which men’s hours are their souls. This buying of men’s hours under the threat of poverty and war rises in the same history that saw the new order of the devil wherein Mephistopheles buys men’s souls with the lure of happiness. In
The Zohar
, Moses of Leon in the thirteenth century sees a man’s being as his space and time. Not only must a man care for and account for every cell of his body, but he must account for every second of his life. A man’s being is not his but a communal property, for “his” body and “his” time are held in trust to be returned to God. These men, the Abrahams or Davids of
The
Zohar
, are creatures of a communal imagination. They have no right to themselves or right in themselves. They can not even, we read, judge; for the judgment was with God: it came from their communal identity.

•

What time is, what man is, what work is—these are elements of a use we make of living. Pound’s thematic concern with the nature of economic evil and good must be ours too where we are concerned with evil and good at all.

•

In the late thirties, when I was just coming into young manhood, men still thought and talked about some total social good. Even while “Socialism,” “Communism,” and “Democracy” were written large on banners of contending nations in war, and total turned totalitarian, we had known—as younger men now have not known—a time when it seemed there could have been the choice for a peaceful economy. We had seen the good cast down and a convenient evil taken up and followed. Now in the “Communist” countries and “Democratic” countries alike a new era of military rule begins.

•

H.D., like Pound, shows scars of the experience men had during the Depression years. In 1933 she went to Freud to undertake a work or to become able again to return to work. She was in a depression. The term here is psychological, but the terms cross over—it is economic too. Thus: “obvious sentiment,” she lists in her cross examination of her limits in
The Walls Do Not Fall:

folder round a spiritual bank-account,

with credit-loss too starkly indicated,

•

There is a thematic continuity we must keep, a sense of the appointed work and its time, to which our imagination and our making or poetry must return, to release life from its disappointments. We too, if we would restore the streams of vitality that in the dream are called the
spring in the first direction or the spring in the right direction, must know no peace but work in a scene of war, as once men worked in a scene of depression. My sense is not figurative here, for our world economy and politics moves now not by the threat of depression but by the threat or hope of war; and the work to be done—to bring back the place and time, the event or conjunction we have called in this study the Presence or the Present, or to bring ourselves to it—means a change at the roots of the world-order for the good in the place of an evil. As men came to know the depression on a psychological level, we will experience in our turn the war within the psyche.

•

Where the hour, the work, and the body are thought of as terms of outer and inner economy, we begin to understand the burden of Pound’s theme in
Thrones:

The temple is holy
because it is not for sale

and we see that it is not accidental that it follows upon:

In a buck-board with a keg of money: Damn you, I

                                 said I would get it (the wages).

•

From the “Time is not money, but it is nearly everything else” of
ABC of Economics;
from “The temple is holy because it is not for sale” of
Thrones,
we may see deeper into the tenor of Pound’s
Usura
theme. But now I would gather here another tenor of correspondences where economic practice is a key to spirit, so that to imagine a new spirit, we imagine a new economic practice. So, we’ve got to go to the roots of things, to find new terms or new orders. From H.D.’s:

Let us measure defeat
in terms of bread and meat,

and continents
in relative extent of wheat

fields;

thru Olson’s “Variations Done for Gerald Van de Wiele” which brings forward into the contemporary world Rimbaud’s
Season in Hell:
“Le Bonheur! Sa dent, douce à la mort, m’avertissait au chant du coq,
— ad matutinum, au Christus venit,
—dans les plus sombres villes:” “what soul / isn’t in default?” Olson takes up Rimbaud’s words in his own:

can you afford not to make
the magical study

which happiness is? do you hear
the cock when he crows? do you know the charge,

that you shall have no envy, that your life
has its orders, that the seasons

seize you too, that no body and soul are one
if they are not wrought

in this retort? . . .

•

In the dream of the spring it was the work itself that was the magical study.

•

This work, this sense of what happiness is, is somehow missed or mussed in American experience. The O.E.D. gives among the roots of the word: Old Norse
verkja, virkja,
to feel pain; Danish
virke,
to operate, act, weave. Greek
organon,
organ;
orgion,
orgy. Work then was once of the earth that brings forth in travail and is still, where the real work is done, where the fields are tilled and planted, the clothes are worked with pains-taking craft, the stone cut to fine measure, the sentences brought to their exacting senses. And we’ve to hold this happiness, against the prevailing sense in which happiness is when and where we do not suffer or take pains. As against that Declaration of Independence, we must remember now the communality we have with all men, our interdependence everywhere in life.

•

Is there
vir,
man, and
virtus,
manliness, in the word
virkja,
suffering? Is there
orgaeo,
to swell and teem with moisture; is there
orgeon,
“a citizen chosen from every demos, who at stated times had to perform certain sacrifices, being in fact a sort of priest”; is there
orge,
“one’s temper, temperament, disposition, nature, heart”; is there
orgizo,
“to make angry, provoke to anger, irritate,” among the roots of this idea of Work or Life, as the O.E.D. tells us there is
organon,
“an instrument for making or doing something” and
orgion,
“secret rites, secret worship”? What part has that Man-God upon the Cross that is also the Life Tree in our American right claimed as the pursuit of happiness?

•

In the Gospel of St. John at Ephesus, the Christ tells John: “And if thou givest ear to my round dance, behold thyself in me the speaker. And when thou seest what I do, keep my mysteries silent. If thou dancest, ponder what I do, for thine is this human suffering that I will suffer.”

•

For most Christians of church faiths, their Master suffered for their sins, a surrogate. Here Christ is Redeemer. It is this truth: that in our concern to redeem, to save or keep alive the wholeness of what we are alive, we discover the work to do.

•

For the Gnostic Christians, their teacher was two—the one, the human Jesus, suffered, and the other, the divine Logos, did not suffer. Here again there is truth, for to know suffering as an act of the soul’s drama is something other than suffering, is more than a happy thing. Ill hap or good hap, the happening or chance, belongs to the inertia of man’s pleasure or displeasure. But in searching out what we suffer or enjoy not as happening to us or belonging to us but as belonging to a design or creation, taking our strength there, we discover a new person who does not suffer but who creates in our suffering, coming into an increase of meaning.

•

So, for the poet, for the man already transformed in making some work of art, for the carpenter, the meaning of the crucifixion scene is not the unhappiness of a lynching party nor the mere suffering of a passion, but it belongs to a poem in the actual world, the fulfillment of a prophecy or story-form. There is in the man and in the god a perfume and a radiance, a flower that portends; and in the passions of the two in One upon the cross or tree, we see the ripeness of what the story demands, the mystery of the whole thing in which nails, blood, and the cry, the
Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani
are designed to fit, to charge with meaning to the utmost degree, the crisis of the poem enacted.

•

In our work we lose our selves, our independence, the
Jesus
of each one, or it is fused and enters into the radiance of another power of the same being, another person we imagine in the community of language and our work there, that we call the poet. It is in passion, in suffering, that, even as we cry out, we become workers, organs, instruments of our Art that is fateful or formal. The Christ is the music, the sense of needed form, the “over Love, a new Master.”

In the
Gospel of John
it is called the Round Dance. “If thou wouldst understand that which is me,” the Christ says: “know this: all that I have said, I have uttered playfully—and I was by no means ashamed of it. I danced, but as for thee, consider the whole. . . . ”