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Well, I didn’t quite get fired, but I got one serious, formal write-up, and my manager, the head of HR, tried to write me up for something else, and she ended up looking really, really stupid.But still, it was obvious I needed to get out of there, and grad school was what to do next. It was already April or so, thus most schools would not accept me. But I got an excellent GRE score, and blasted that score out to maybe 50 schools with rush/priority or whatever the option was called. Eventually I found a decent (in the top 25 or so) program that had rolling admissions.Anyway, back to the job. It was the HR department. It was my first “real” job after I got my BA. Occasionally I noticed old (at least 5yrs old) org charts indicating that HR once had had a VP and Sr. VP, but when I was hired, Manager was as high as it went, and she reported directly to the President. I think she got her BA at a very mediocre-to-bad place, since she had no formal learning about HR. The lightbulbs got changed, and she was checking in on staff whether they were an improvement to our working conditions. I made some off-hand joke about the Hawthorne Effect. She didn’t get it even after I explained it to her.We were a good sized credit union, Federally insured, of course, and had some sort of special relationship with the military because we had branches in some odd places just so a military base could have a financial institution. Well, an African-American disgruntled applicant (or pre-disgruntled person, since she actually never applied in the end) wanted to see our Affirmative Action Plan. The manager never actually spoke with the disgruntled person; rather, I, the youngest and least senior member of the department (and also the only male) had to shuttle back and forth from the Manager’s office to the front desk, repeating lame variants on “Well, it’s a secured document,” “We do not have access to it at the moment” and excuses like that. Eventually the disgruntled lady left in a huff. I was the worst possible person to be trying to calm her down, because of my skin-color (I’m white), gender (I’m male. While I am far from intimidating, and really tried to keep the situation low-key and collaborative, using a male is more likely to bring about escalation of conflict even in an office setting. My age didn’t help (many people consider it insulting to be forced to deal with an a person who is inexperienced, powerless, and likely somewhat incompetent due to their lack of experience. All these issues were exacerbated by the fact that the Manager’s office was right in plain sight about fifteen feet behind the front desk and I kept going back to her office for advice/support.Many of you may not know much about required Federal filings in the US, but Annual EEO-1 reports are required if a business meets any requirement listed below:We were more than large enough >500 to require one just based on the simple number of employees, regardless of anything else.We were a financial institution, almost all of which must file. We met all three of the possible criteria for filing. If you even meet one of the criteria, you must file (besides the # employees issue by itself).Held Federal Contracts >$50,000. It’s remotely possible that I’m wrong about this one, but with our branches on bases, I’m pretty sure we had *some* dealings with the Feds, even just “who will pay to resurface the parking lot” or other minor stuff that could exceed $50,000 pretty easily if you add them up/Federal Depository in any amount. I am almost certain we handled direct deposit for military members on several bases in AK and WA, and the Philippines until Pinatubo erupted.Again it’s possible I’m wrong, but I think we handled savings bonds and Notes.So. We should have been filing annually. They’re not fun, but not terrible either. The manager didn’t do them because she had no idea what they were or that we needed to file them. We also needed an Affirmative Action plan, updated annually. This was the report the disgruntled lady wanted to see, and while the EEO-1 is considered confidential, disgruntled lady had a Federally mandated legal right to read our Affirmative Action plan. But there was no such plan to read and we hadn’t been one for years. . .Anyway, I did not get in trouble for that one, although my manager was not happy when afterward I pulled one of her BLR binders and showed her the requirements for EEO-1 and Affirmative Action (BLR binders documented every HR-related law or regulation. They came in print and provided extensive commentaries/explanations/clarifications. Once a month, a packet would arrive for updating the binders. Those binders took up a *lot* of shelf space.).The reason I was able to easily pull out exactly the right binder and go to the right section was that I was enrolled in an HR class that was part of the MPA program at the University and had studied the issues surrounding discrimination, Affirmative Action, and sexual harassment recently. With her permission I used the BLR binders as a resource (if you’re curious, an MPA is a lot like and MBA, but is meant for non-profits and government workers). Anyway, I filed the required paperwork for tuition reimbursement once I had my grade in hand. The main requirement for reimbursement was that the class(es) you were taking needed to be related to your current job. Guess who oversaw the reimbursement program? My manager, of course (ultimately the President signed the paperwork, but she decided which which ones were worthy of his signature). My reimbursement denied of course. Recently I had gotten a small promotion for handling Employee Benefits instead of screening job applicants. I still had the same co-workers, same horrible boss, and only moved to a desk about ten feet away from my old one. She explained to me that benefits were more of a payroll issue than an HR issue, and since I was no longer an truly an HR worker, the class was not related to my job.Oh, two really nasty situations arose while I was doing benefits.We had a recently hired teller who became pregnant (she probably had 90 days on the job, since that’s when health insurance and such kicked in). My manager was dedicated to proving the pregnancy was a pre-existing condition. Evil. And the manager handled it like the disgruntled lady.The other benefits nastiness involved our retirement plan. *now* I understand Annuities vs defined benefit vs defined contribution, but back then I didn’t know much of anything about retirement plans. We had a defined-benefit plan. One day a fairly high ranking employee called me to ask about a lump sum immediately vs. letting his money ride (I don’t know how he could pull out his retirement money and keep working, but somehow he could. (I think it had to do with being the director/CEO/President of a company that was technically separate but wholly owned by the credit union). Anyway, he was concerned that his lump sum value might shrink soon. I discussed it with my manager,and she didn’t seem to know much either. When I told her that he was insisting on a solid answer ASAP, she finally gave me a definitive answer: your retirement funds will never decrease. The plan provides defined benefits, so the value is not affected by the stock market. Your benefits just keep growing while you are working and will never go down. I called the man back, and while he didn’t seem entirely convinced (my utter ignorance and confusion in the previous call probably didn’t help).A little while later, probably after a month had passed, I heard from him again. He was absolutely fuming and ready to sue. Apparently the value of the lump sum *had* decreased, and by a large enough amount to make him extremely angry. My boss was out, so I directly called up the company that managed the plan.I didn’t know how lump sums vs annuities vs regular defined benefit plans worked, having had no exposure to retirement products at the tender age of 20 (I actually did already understand in a basic sense how defined contribution plans because they are basically just investing with pre-tax dollars and maybe a match from your employer). Anyway, the kind and patient representative of the company that managed our retirement plan explained that a lump sum was calculated based on the total amount of money you would expect to receive from the plan if you lived your full predicted lifespan, adjusted for assumptions about what investments would yield during that period. If investments in general were doing well and were expected to continue to do well, a lump sum might go up, but if investments were doing poorly and expected to do so in the future, a lump sum could go down. Or perhaps they pegged the yield to the prime rate or treasury bonds. In any case, the expectation of return on investment the company used for calculating lump sums had gone down bit, thus causing the amount of a lump sum to go down. BTW — this was 1993 or ‘94. I think that the company used some sort of rolling average, and they had just included the 1990 recession in the years they were using. Or maybe it went down for some other reason.In any case, I managed to regained the trust of the person who had lost money. I confessed my ignorance and apologized for any harm that came from it, and basically told him what had just been explained to me. He already understood the issues, since he paid attention to his statements and understood retirement plans, but at least now we were on the same page. With the boss out of the office, I couldn’t do anything to solve the problem but we would see once she returned.When she returned to the office, she blamed the whole thing on my having overstepped my bounds and made promises on behalf of the organization that I was not authorized to make (going back to her statement that “Your benefits will never decrease,” etc., only now, she said that I had made up the erroneous statements on my own). Luckily, I did not get written up or fired. I think it was because I knew that the lump sum guy had been made whole using funds from the Credit Union (not the retirement plan), and that a VP or above had back-dated the check to make the amount match what it would have been in an alternate universe. I’m not sure exactly whether they committed a crime or not, but the manager wanted to keep it hush-hush, so she did not retaliate. At least not immediately.Shortly thereafter, I was written up for violating company policy and state labor law. I was accused of arriving early, sometimes taking lunches more brief than allowed, and also, I sometimes worked late to complete a task. I probably showed up ten minutes early every day because the penalties for tardiness could quickly lead to termination. I admittedly had the habit of failing to use my last five minutes at lunch. Staying late could vary, but I usually left and 5:00 and if the task was going to take more than 20 minutes or so, I’d just leave the work to be completed the next day. By engaging in this unauthorized behavior, I was creating a dangerous legal liability for the Credit Union. I might be keeping track of my extra work time, planning to sue for failure to pay me for the extra work, and also attempt to gain a punitive award. I thought it was a very, very strange accusation, but I was clearly guilty of the behavior she had documented.So: one strike. Two more write ups meant termination.The next attempt to write me up was based on the accusation that I had misrepresented my access to the Credit Union President while conversing with one of our branch managers. I did have a conversation with that manager regarding a Tuition Reimbursement taking longer to process than she had expected. I told her something along the lines that the forms for that program needed to be signed by the President, and due to busy schedules, apparently my Manager had not had an opportunity to meet with him recently.My Manager accused me of having told the Branch Manager that *I* had not had an opportunity to meet with the President lately. The hierarchy was very rigid; only once in three years was I allowed enter the top floor where the executives were, and that was just to quickly drop something off with the receptionist on my Manager’s behalf. So meeting with the President would be absurd for somebody of my stature. While my Manager was preparing my formal reprimand, I asked if we could call that Branch Manager and get her recollection of the conversation. My Manager was convinced enough about what she had heard that she agreed. It would just be more damning proof of my having said what she had overheard.We called, and the Branch manager could not recall the conversation in complete detail because it was such a routine non-event, but she was certain she would have remembered if I had claimed to be having meetings with the President. So it was my memory and the memory of the Branch Manager against my Manager’s memory. I had narrowly avoided my second formal write-up.After that incident, the Manager and I experienced levels of defensiveness and hatred that I never knew existed. I had generally been rather obsequious and deferential if it looked like her anger and hatred of others was likely to surface. After my “win” from the Branch Manager backing up my side of the story, those who knew about the conflict were glad. She had always been erratic and sometimes just made no sense, but this was the first time (as far as I knew) she had been called on her bullshit and had her power and judgement questioned.Now, I just didn’t care. I spent much of an entire week attempting to get our magical new Laser Printer (bye bye, dot matrix!) to communicate with our mainframe accounts and the terrible, horrible software we used for managing some of our information about employees (the bulk of the information was still stored as hard copy in about 15–20 filing cabinets).I did it! The mainframe could print to the Laser Printer. Much of my time had been spent typing letters notifying individuals about significant changes to their benefits (gaining health insurance after 90 days, bumping up to the next level of the defined benefit plan after ten years, COBRA eligibility upon termination, etc., etc., etc.) Many different events, each with a separate report from the mainframe. I didn’t need to type the whole letter; we had the various notifications created by a printing company on CU letterhead, so I generally just needed to type their name, one or more dates, and maybe a little more for some of the letters. Anyway, once I had it going, I started with the most common notifications and worked my way through the different types of letter. It was a *very* annoying and error-prone job to get the mainframe to put the names and dates and such in the proper parts of the letter, but it was possible, and a lot more fun than typing them. In addition, it really ticked off the Manager. IT staff had connected only her terminal to the Laser Printer. But they set it up in a communal area surrounded by our staff. When she finally noticed what I was doing, she was angry, but the staff were glad to be able to get away from the dot matrix, and were looking forward to automating processes like I was doing. It was such an obvious improvement to the speed, accuracy, and appearance of our work that she backed off, which had seldom, if ever, happened before. I suspect that word of her going loony-bird about meetings with the President had made its way to the executive suite and she may have been told to calm down or something. Or, she was just having an unusually nice day. I dunno.About a week later, I was accepted to grad school. There was still time to participate in the summer construction-and-related-activities boom that happened each year in Alaska. So I left the Credit Union, planning to get the highest paying job possible for the Summer. Thus, I became trained in hazardous waste labor and earned more money in ten weeks than I would earn at the Credit Union in a year. Then my life really began, upon entering grad school.If you made it this far, great! Thanks for paying atten for so long to a relatively uneventful story.That manager was a vicious person who was probably in HR precisely because her position allowed her to be a bully as an adult. The pre-existing condition issue for the pregnant teller, was just one little event out of many. There was a young married couple in the building; she worked in the branch doing something more than a Teller but less than a Loan Officer or Management. Member services Rep, I think. He worked as a groundskeeper mowin the grass and such at first, but it turned out he actually was educated, intelligent, and diligent, so he moved to a much better position in Real Estate. A move that dramatic was practically unheard of. The birth announcement about their first child was proudly communicated to the whole organization by somebody important. If that was on a Monday, then fast-forward to Wednesday, two days later. She fired the husband for his third tardy of the year, just two days after we celebrated his child’s birth. He was not very tardy, less than five minutes I believe. The Manager in Real estate didn’t want him fired, and I believe it was that manager who brought the absurd situation to the attention of somebody on the Executive floor. The new father’s termination was rescinded the same week it occured.In another brazenly cruel situation, HR had an employee foisted upon us from Insurance. Our new co-worker had apparently worked in insurance for much of her life, but was new to the Credit Union. She had been working in Insurance for perhaps a month before she was moved to HR. It was soon apparent why the Insurance department had wanted her gone. She was probably in her mid-to-late 60’s, and I suspect that she had been a rather odd character for her whole life; her quirks were probably not due to her age. She was one of the kindest, warmest, most loving people I had ever met, but she simply could not think on her feet and get complex tasks accomplished. She wasn’t particularly useful, but she made a decent receptionist (she loved to smile and greet people coming through the door.) She could take messages just fine, and efficiently operated the receptionist phone with multiple lines to forward calls. I never did understand how to work that device very well. apart from being friendly and greeting people, we would occasionally assign her simple tasks, such as stuffing a bunch of envelopes or alphabetizing 1000 job applications. She was rather slow, and sometimes got hung up by minor complications that most of us could simply work around. So: not a fast and efficient employee, but a wonderful person who was able to contribute to the organization, just not by doing complex tasks. Attacks began. First, our Manager forbade her to have a water bottle or snacks at work. The lady countered with a note from her doctor that declared that she needed water and snacks available at all times; might have been diabetes I dunno for sure.This is the longest post I have ever created, and is one of the few with any type of narrative. Please comment about what you thought. Good, bad, boring, enjoyable, painful, whatever!

See note at end about international wire transfers.Rules for bank accounts vary between countries. Generally, though, there are three kinds of deposit accounts:demand deposits, commonly called “checking accounts”savings accounts (in credit unions, these are called “share accounts”term deposits, commonly called “certificates of deposit” or “CDs”A demand deposit account is a “transaction account”. You can have a large number of transactions. You can initiate such a transaction by writing a check (or “cheque” to the British), whereby you direct the bank to pay the preson you are writing the check to, a certain amount to be drawn from your account when the check “clears” your bank. You can also have a debit card which you use for making purchases, either where you physicall present the card, such as at a store, or you can use this online.You want to avoid writing checks or having transactions for more than the “available balance” in your account. Otherwise, your check may “bounce” for insufficient funds, in which case the bank charges you a large fee, and whoever you wrote the check to may be charged a fee, plus, they will be upset with you for giving then a bad check. So you have to be careful when you use a debit card and may have “outstanding checks” which haven’t yet been debited from your account. The bank may honor your debit card transaction, because the bank has no way of knowing that you’ve written a check that hasn’t cleared, thus they honor the debit card transaction and then wind up bouncing the check.If you do write checks, you should keep a record of the checks you’ve written in a check register, and mark off checks when you know that they’ve cleared, so you know which checks are still outstanding.Now the other two types of accounts, savings accounts and demand deposits, you can usually not make transactions on these accounts except at the bank (though you may be able to do some online transfers). In the U.S., savings accounts are limited to a few transactions a month. Technically, the bank may require that you wait a period of time for a withdrawal, though the bank almost never exercises this right. A savings account ordinarily earns interest, though the amout of interest is generally fairly small.For term deposits, you are making a deposit for a specified term, such as 1 year (terms will vary from 30 days to 5 years or longer). The interest rate you receive for the entire “term” of the deposit is set when you make the deposit. If you want to make a withdrawal before the end of the term, there can be a penatly, either reducing your interest or possibly eliminating it entirely. The bank may even refuse to allow you to withdraw your deposit. But people are willing to do this in order to get a higher interest rate, particularly on longer terms.Banks and other depository institutions are generally regulated by a national authority, but each bank may set its own schedule of fees and other charges. Sometimes, a bank will have several offerings for the same type of account. For instance, for a checking account, one offering might have a small monthly fee, which is charged regardless of the balance you maintain, and another offering, which has a larger monthly fee, but which will be waived if you maintain a specific minimum balance. Yet, you can often find another bank which will offer a checking account with no monthly charge regardless of your balance.Finally, whenever you make a deposit to a checking account, make sure you understand the rules on funds availability. Depending on the form of your deposit (e.g. check, cash, electronic transfer), there may be a delay before the funds are available, and so you may find a debit card transaction is rejected, or that the check you write today gets bounced if the person tries to cash it too soon.International wire transfers:The comment stated: “my university credit union … doesn’t allow me to make wire transfers to non-credit union accounts.”I strongly suspect that the person you spoke to doesn’t even know what a wire transfer is. That person heard you say “wire transfer” and just thought “electronic transfer”. There are indeed some networks that are specific to credit unions, or perhaps they were thinking of credit union “shared branching” operations.My experience is that Wells Fargo is the most expensive of the major banks for consumer banking, so if I were choosing one of the major national banks, it would be almost any bank other than them.Now as for this transfer, wire transfers (especially international wire transfers) are generally economical only for transfers of at least $5,000. There’s typically a sending fee and a receiving fee ($25 to $50 each is fairly typical), plus in the case of an international wire transfer, there is a foreign exchange “spread” for exchanging currencies.If this is what you really want, most credit unions will do this. However, you might want to check out a third-party foreign exchange service, such as www.ofx.com .For many transfers, there may not be any explicit fees, they are making their money on the spread, but you are paying that spread in any case.OFX will take some extra steps to set up, but you should be able to use it with your existing credit union, as long as it has a routing number (and if they offer checking accounts, they have to have a routing number). I’m pretty sure that you will find services such as OFX will be economical for much smaller amounts (such as $1000) and may be economical even for smaller amounts. And if you’re doing this on a repeated basis, I don’t think you would want to be using expensive wire transfers unless you absolutely had to.

I apologize beforehand for any blunt mistakes of various forms due to the lack of editing on my part.Man who adorneth Modernism and revileth nigh all thereafter. Not necessarily my preferred era, nor the poet, yet both enjoy my unique adoration.This will be a slightly longer answer, in which I will gently touch the views of Ezra Pound, including philosophy, which can include a rather larger life-perspective in loose terms, therefore, I shall implicate literary views, religion and occultism, beliefs and biographical changes, as in radical shifts in his views during selected years. Due to the nature of these things, at times offensive and open to interpretation and partisan revision, I may offer my takes on it. Mind, I shall offer my reasons, and I cannot stress this enough, his views presented here are inherently blemished by my colour-prism, and as such I may tread too lightly on certain topics and be too harsh or faithful with others. Particular issues my veer me off-topics, either as a pointless divergence on my part, or more positively, to offer some background, more explanation, or alternative mindset. I shall also say I am not known for coherency, from one bud to the other. —-—— From Notes for CXVII ET SEQ, the capstone of my love for verse.EconomicsPoliticsReligion & Occultism & MysticismAmas ut facias pulchram.ECONOMICS“In the gap between Price values and Income is enough gunpowder to blow up every democratic parliament."— A. R. OrageMoney as Historical development and first appearances in his early troubadour poetry. Poetics → EconomicsSocial CreditPerishable currency & Miscellaneous"Octave" marks what is to my knowledge the first occurrence of the term "usury" in Pound's poetry; the manner in which it dramatizes poetic utterance as a medium of exchange is quite characteristic of much of Pound's early work in the troubadour mode. The Lady's precious attributes (symbolized by gold and silver) are exchanged for (or repaid by) the poet's song, which remits the interest or the "golden usuries" that "her beauty earns as but just increment"-just as the sustained metaphorical structure of the poem produces a series of tropic exchanges between the aesthetic, the erotic, and the economic. ( In Pound We Trust: The Economy of Poetry/ The Poetry of Economics, Sieburth )Most of what follows is drawn from Eugene Vance, Professor Emeritus, French, Comparative Literature, and Comparative Religion, and the relations between troubadour lyrics and early capitalism.Metaphorized exchange of amorous and erotic to economic, is, perhaps surprisingly, quite a common feature of courtly love. Many examples can be found in Pound´s early verse, where the poem can be viewed as, perchance as a contract, pledge, pact, or a covenant between the courtier and the Lady, in which the poem serves both as a medium of conveyance, a manifestation of the covenant, and a measure of value, where its aesthetic excellence denotes the factor of courting. If I use Vance´s term, there is a fundamental tension within, where the aristocratic liberality and love as purity, elevated above other emotions, battles earthy notion of a love poem serving as monetary transaction, and as such, not love, but profit becomes primary motif. As the poem becomes such an object, so does the poet. ( This notion of art for money and art in service of money is arguably one of the important notions that constitute Pound´s world-view and relations throughout his life. ) Thus the poem converts into "a fetishism of verbal signs whose economy depend[s] upon the poet's ability to sustain the body of the poem as a serious rival for the feminine object of desire whose absence the poem celebrates” - “ In other words, the object of the poet's desire is less the Lady than that which he can make of her, be it song, image, idea, or (in the etymological sense of facere) fetish.”I myself am no subscriber to Freud, and would pick Jung any day of the week, his influence, however, is remarkable;"All art begins in the physical discontent (or torture) of loneliness and partiality. It is to fill this lack that man first spun shapes out of the void. And with the intensity of this longing gradually came unto him power, power over the essences of the dawn, over the filaments of light and the warp of melody".To take into account later rabid rancor against putrid usury, the symbolism of early verse is especially important, as it plays in stark contrast. The element of compensation, gold, a universal signifier of homogeneity between mind and body, objects and subject and so forth, an alchemical idealization serving as a frictionless lubricant between states, without chance of degradation. ( Gold - more about esoterism, alchemy and occultism later. )Almost ironic, such inflation would Pound later voicefully denounce. The glamour without ende, rhetorical expansion resulting in impotence of words, both as singular or in phrases, which results, to later Pound, in reactionless sterility. Repetitive and excessive breading of words at the end renders them ineffective. Fetishistic creation ex nihilo - usury.As expected, later poetics are concentrated on the means of direct exchange between the subject and the object, starting with the imagisme.Direct treatment of the "thing", whether subjective or objective.To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome."As to Twentieth-century poetry ... it will be harder and saner ... 'nearer the bone'. It will be as much like granite as it can be ... It will not try to seem forcible by rhetorical din, and luxurious riot. We will have fewer painted adjectives impeding the shock and stroke of it.... I want it austere, direct, free from emotional slither.”Certain parallels, like economics and poetic method, are of vital importance. Similar shift happens with implementation of occultism, which does not die off, but rather transforms. There is some profound interconnectivity that Pound sees in essentially all things essential.Here, the phrases like "take a chisel and cut away all the stone you don't want” and "surgeon's knife of Fascism” that is used to terminate all intermediate, i.e those unnecessary - Jews and gold.Same goes with Vorticism:"Emotion seizing upon some external scene or action carries it intact to the mind; and that vortex purges it of all save the essential or dominant or dramatic qualities, and it emerges like the external original.”By now some may ask why do I focus on poetics, not economics. They both, in the centre, inhabit the same idea;Jacques Derrida observes [in "White Mythology"] that usury, or usure, carries contrasting and simultaneous meanings. Usury is a using up, the erosion or effacement of the inscription on the face of the coin, the loss of the coin's value. Usury also means the supplementary product of a capital, the redemption of loss, surplus value of all sorts. The term usury thus denotes the unity and simultaneity of loss and profit. There is also a "systematic tie" between usury and the operations of language, a tie which manifests itself "whenever the theme of metaphor is privileged."Insufficient attention or erring portrayal, Pound renders economy of art to economy of market, although in certain points he loudly warns and seeks to accomplish complete dissociation between the two, he eventually merges them.By and large, Pound's early Cantos sustain this divorce between aesthetic and erotic communion on the one hand and monetary exchange on the other. And, significantly enough, it is gold, metonym of the transcendent fire of the sun, that most powerfully figures the pure ideality of divine or poetic vision in these initial Cantos-whether it be Circe in her "golden girdles," "bearing the golden bough of Argicida" (1:5), Danac awaiting "the golden rain" (4:16), or the work of the artist "weaving with points of gold" (5:17). As Jean-Michel Rabat (from whom I borrow these examples) points out, not until Canto 26, with the introduction of golden forks to the Doge's table ("bringing in, thus, the vice of luxuria") does gold begin to acquire unmistakably malevolent connotations. No longer an emblem of the luminous, ethereal fluidity of the nous ("gold, gold, a sheaf of hair"-4:14), gold increasingly takes on the inert weight of reified matter and is assimilated into the subterranean (or anal) phantasmagoria of the Hell Cantos.As they progress [ The Cantos ], the old & wise reflects and notices the deterioration, perceives the defect, and the decline in confidence and lost transparency emerges with the very thing it wishes to disavow - mediated exchange both in poetics and economics."It is an outrage that the owner of one commodity can not exchange it with someone possessing another, without being impeded or taxed by a third party holding a monopoly over some third substance or controlling some convention, regardless of what it be called.” ( Quoted in Stock, The Life of Ezra Pound, p. 322 )"History, as seen by a Monetary Economist, is a continuous struggle between producers and those who try to make a living by inserting a false system of book-keeping between the producers and their just recompense.”Before I turn to the Social Credit, an interesting section that may shed some light:Accordingly, one of Pound's favorite nostrums from 1934 on involved the "stamp scrip" currency proposed by the German monetarist Silvio Gesell. Gesell's Schwundgeld (literally "shrinking" or "disappearing" money) was a form of paper money to which a stamp (or tax) representing one percent of its face value would have to be affixed every month by the possessor of the bill. Pound calls stamp scrip "counter-usury" or money that bears "negative interest" because it is impossible to hoard it (or to make a profit off time): the currency loses value every month it lies idle or unspent, and after one hundred months becomes utterly worthless. Whether or not stamp scrip would actually accelerate the velocity of money in circulation or provide an efficient means of taxation remains open to question. (Pound, at any rate, claimed to have seen the scheme work in the small Austrian town of Worgl.) More interesting than its feasibility, however, is the very idea of money embodied by stamp scrip. The attraction of a self-liquidating or self-castrating currency (stamp scrip, Pound noted, was money that "eats up its own tail” - [ ouroboros - more about occultism later ] indicates the extent to which he desires to dematerialize or disembody the medium of exchange, to reduce it to an evanescent mark or trace, to insure that the code or scrip-ture of money will not take precedence over those messages (or goods) it is meant to convey.Money as such would be an economical manifestation of his poetics, and above all else natural, with perishability, velocity, cyclicity,… "The natural object is always the adequate symbol” - one of the tenets of imagism, money in such a from would serve as an adequate symbol - etymological “equal to” - to its object of representation.Another one of interesting takes is his differentiation of goods, where he also suggest different monetary means for different categories of goods;1. Transient: fresh vegetables luxuries jerry-built houses fake art, pseudo books battleships.2. Durable: well constructed buildings, roads, public works, canals, intelligent afforestation.3. Permanent: scientific discoveries works of art classicsDifferentiation would break up the monopoly of one currency ( gold at the time ) & "various degrees of durability ... could conceivably (but very cumbrously) be each represented by money that should melt at parallel rate". Also, one notes Pound strict adherence to what he perceives as a “natural dynamics”, where a system molds and adopts to greater efficiency, and does not maintain a strict set of axioms. The question is what aggregates to this Natura, which can be encountered notably in The Cantos. — All those who have read them surely remember the phrase Contra Naturam.M. Foucault:"The essential problem of Classical thought lay in the relations between name and order: how to discover a nomenclature that would be a taxonomy, or again, how to establish a system of signs that would be transparent to the continuity of being."Pertaining both to money and language - Pound´s interest in Chinese ideograms as ideal representations.Peirce's Theory of SignsIcons - things that stand for something because it resembles itIndices - sings that possess a real connection with the objectSymbols - depend neither on resemblance nor on contiguity, but on "mental association or habit," that is, on social convention.The latter emerges much later in Pound´s poetics, and takes the form of logopoeia, beside phanopoeia or melopoeia. This lack of multiplicity in early theories results in partial elimination of psyche, both individually and historically, and conveniently stations “Natura” , in effect overlooking historical and social conditions of creation and exchange. Similarly, same deficiency can be seen in monetary theories.Paradoxically, his enthusiasm for ideograms, not only possess natural connection to the object, but also materially manifest that for which they stand. Yet, if we transfer the same characteristic to monetary sphere, where an ideogram results in a reservoir, " a treasury of stable wisdom, an arsenal of live thought" ( Nicholls, Politics, Economics and Writing, p. 153. ) - meaning, an idolized form of concentrated clogging. The thing he is allergic too. This also is the nature of his criticism of Marx, through misreading: "Endowing money with properties of a quasi-religious nature," adding that "there was even the concept of energy being 'concentrated in money,' as if one were speaking of the divine quality of consecrated bread”.2. Social Credit“In the gap between Price values and Income is enough gunpowder to blow up every democratic parliament." — If I return to the original quotation, Social Credit, in its center, aims to eliminate precisely this ( Similar to Marx - surplus value ). Horrid simplification; “The state makes up the difference between the number of available goods and the amount of available money or credit by distributing a mixture of subsidies to industry and national dividends to citizens. The money or credit thus created by the state will in turn "bridge" the "gap," fill in the widening "gulf," and restore to circulation the purchasing power that was somehow "sucked up, or absorbed or caused to disappear" by the black magic of Usury or the legerdemain of accounting-the metaphors of castration that haunt Pound's economics have been explored at length by Casillo and Alan Durant.” —-Pound´s turn to Fascism is the ultimately the result “to narrow the gap”, as it renders impossible "to collect ... interest on money that represents nothing at all, money that is just FLIGHT of an airy fancy” and functions as "the representation of something solid and deliverable, since it is not merely a sign of abstract gold but rather a certificate of available goods or a credit slip signifying work done for the state”.A + B Theorem, from THE ECONOMIC ETHICS OF EZRA POUND, A. Lanteri:In all of its simplicity, the theorem states that every factory either makes payments to (A) individuals, in the form of wages, salaries, and dividends or (B) organizations, in the form of bank charges, raw materials, and other production costs. B payments are made at an early stage of the production process so that, by the time the final product reaches the market, these payment will have been spent and the only purchasing power available will be A. In order to cover all of its costs, however, a factory must sell its products at a price higher than A + B. Therefore, at any given time, there will be goods on the market for a value larger than A + B. As said, however, the outstanding purchasing power will be only A and so it will prove insufficient to clear out the all of the production. Douglas (1935) lists “at least five causes” for the deficiency of purchasing power:1) Money profits collected from the public (interest is profit on an intangible); 2) Savings; i.e., mere abstention from buying; 3) Investment of savings in new works, which create a new cost without fresh purchasing power; 4) Difference of circuit velocity between cost liquidation and price creation which results in charges being carried over into prices from a previous cost accountancy cycle. Practically all plant charges are of this nature, and all payments for material brought in from a previous wage cycle are of the same nature; 5) Deflation; i.e., sale of securities by banks and recall of loans.According to Douglas, the capitalistic productive process is discontinuous and it creates a shortage of resources to purchase all the goods. To avoid the collapse of the entire economy, some system has to be devised that makes A incomes sufficient to purchase all the commodities. Exports may work, but only as a temporary and local solution. Failing exports, more money need be invested in additional future production so that it can be paid out in the present as salaries and wages. In Douglas’ view, capitalism has an endemic deficiency of purchasing power, and so it has an inherent drive to economic growth (Hutchinson and Burkitt 1999). Such growth must be stimulated by bank credit.During a speech at the Oslo Merchants Club, he recounted how after the founding of the Bank of England (A.D. 1694) world debt had started growing. During the 17th century it increased by 47 percent, during the 18th century it increased by 466 percent, and by the end of the 19th century it had increased by 12,000 percent. According to Douglas (1935), this happened “in spite of the numerous repudiations of debt, the writing down of debts which takes place with every bankruptcy, and other methods used to write off debts and start again”. Moreover, this had happened not in spite of the economic growth of those centuries, but – quite surprisingly – because of it.The theory is today, of course, debunked, and the fallacy in clearly exposed. ( Breit and Elzinga 1980 ). However, his recognition of the importance of aggregate demand should not be discounted. J.M. Keynes, among others, acknowledged it; along with Gesell and Karl Marx – Douglas had understood “the outstanding problem of our economic system – that of Effective Demand”.Douglas, no matter how flawed the system he built may be, was driven by similar incentive as Pound; “to question the necessity for economic growth, while seeking reasons for the failure of industrial technology to deliver a comfortable lifestyle for all, free from long hours of labour and perpetual insecurity.”During the economic growth, if the money supply is not increased, the prices drop as the currency becomes more valuable, therefore the money supply should increase for the prices to remain stable. There is only the question who should regulate the money supply, as currently, privately owned banks create – and so also possess – the newly created money. It truly gets problematic when we speak of public debt, where the taxpayers have to cover the loans and interest to private entities, while the government could issue its own credit. Douglas argues for the transition of legal and moral rights to create money from private to public, to the community. Pound falls quite squarely with the same opposition, and with great recurrence quotes William Paterson, a co-founder of the Bank of England, to whom he attributed: “The bank [of England] has the benefit of interest on all moneys it has created out of nothing.” As such, net benefits of expansion and development belong to the community, not the banks or other private entities. And a portion of necessary created new money should be equally divided among the citizen, and the remains, to counter inflation, redeployed for a “debate” program, - “which amounts to a system of subsidies to the producers of goods and services – in order to keep prices low.““The effect will be a drop in the price level, while at the same time the producer and the business man will not be losing money. They will enjoy the dividends and the increase in trade which comes from the ability to charge lower prices. They will not lose money as they would if they had to lower prices without the aid of the creation of national credit.” (Douglas 1935)3. Perishable currencyUnification of Social credit and perishable currency based on Gesell’s proposal, that is, stamp scrip, - “it is a currency whose nominal value must be upheld by purchasing a stamp and attaching it to the bills. The stamps are due on fixed dates and in fixed amounts. This way, the holders of banknotes end up paying a tax on currency. In order to avoid paying the stamps, bills holders must spend (or deposit) their money – and in this way, they promote economic activity.” ( THE ECONOMIC ETHICS OF EZRA POUND, Lanteri )The main difference is, it has to be circulated and engaged, thus cannot be passively hoarded, as the money itself is subjected to periodical taxation. Keynes, beside some problems or unanswered questions, like that of of liquidity-preference and liquidity-premium, - “if currency notes were to be deprived of their liquidity-premium by the stamping system, a long series of substitutes would step into their shoes — bank-money, debts at call, foreign money, jewellery and the precious metals generally, and so forth.” With time, alternative means of payments would arise which would be needed to be suppressed.- Otherwise, sound.Another thing it boosts is the velocity of circulation; since the total amount of money available in an economy is lower than the value of the goods and services exchanged in a given period of time, money has to change hands several times. The speed at which this change takes place is the velocity of circulation of money. So, if everyone hangs on to money, velocity of circulation is lower, and this causes a decline in economic activity. During economic slowdowns, velocity drops dramatically, as the proportion of money that is kept in storage tends to increase.Ultimately, the notion of perishability has one great vulnerability, that it is perishable. It opposes the long standing tradition of Aristotle, and Locke, to name two giants.Not that Pound propagated the idea fiercely, he looked at it as a means of education or enlightenment, that would make “the banking fraud would stand exposed”. It is sound and convenient way to expose interests, and bury them.This short overview only further shed light to the problem that Pound was not an economist, but a humanist of which economy was interest due to the moral and cultural importance. However, he is one of the rare individuals who integrated two competing views, Social Credit and stamps, into one system.“Oh, blessed money which yieldeth sweete and profitable drinke for mankinde, and preserveth the possessors thereof free from the hellish pestilence of avarice because it cannot be long kept or hid underground” .( Pedro Martir Anghiera, On the New World, 1530 )Man´s devotion to art was nigh unparalleled;Yet fierce and unyielding;POLITICS - “Liberty is not a right, but a duty.”Firstly, I will let him speak a few important words you shan't forget;Here we meet the man at his lowest, radio broadcasts.The disgust reached a peak after the Great Depression, which was not a solely a fascist attitude, and the meltdown of both economical and political ideas followed in the 30s. The existing vitriol against Western economy, banking & bankers, financiers & usurers ( He almost equated with the Jews ) only augmented. It should also be mentioned that he lost two of his best friends during the war, for which he blamed the above mentioned, T. E. Hulme and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. Being a sensitive man, albeit he might not seems so, it took a great toll on him and shifted his occupation, one of the reasons surely to never let such a thing happen. Well, I shall lose no words here… Sad what cameth of it!From Hugh Selwyn MauberleyIVThese fought in any case,and some believing pro domo, in any case...Some quick to arm,some for adventure,some from fear of weakness,some from fear of censure,some for love of slaughter, in imagination,learning later ...some in fear, learning love of slaughter;Died some pro patria, non dulce non et decor” ...walked eye-deep in hellbelieving in old men's lies, then unbelievingcame home, home to a lie,home to many deceits,home to old lies and new infamy;usury age-old and age-thickand liars in public places.Daring as never before, wastage as never before.Young blood and high blood,fair cheeks, and fine bodies;fortitude as never beforefrankness as never before,disillusions as never told in the old days,hysterias, trench confessions,laughter out of dead bellies.VThere died a myriad,And of the best, among them,For an old bitch gone in the teeth,For a botched civilization.Charm, smiling at the good mouth,Quick eyes gone under earth's lid,For two gross of broken statues,For a few thousand battered books.Fascism, a brewage of quasi left-wing egalitarianism and right-wing authoritarianism certainly brought new dimensions to authority and community. G. Stein once said about Pound: “A village explainer. Excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not." The perimeter of his village was not bush-line or anything similar, but a zone where one idea ended and the other begun. He certainly was deluded and prejudiced, and he saw a fascism, as nazism, democratic authoritarianism, that is, leaders were the men of the people, will of the people, almost a divine embodiment of it. The idea was hardly new, the term volonté générale, ( Rousseau ), the general will, which was used a good hundred years before during the French Revolution, used akin seeds.Pound was in search for a political thought, like many other intellectuals, if I use the term, that would see the value of European cultural heritage and tradition in harmony with the slogan “Make it new”, be open to Oriental influx ( India, China, Japan - the latter two can encompass a whole chapter when it comes to influence and so forth ) and provide the aspirations of workers and peasants for economic justice and flourishment. God forfend, Fascism came the closest for him.1) a generalized unhappiness over the destruction of the social bonds that traditionally joined men and women together and joined both to the soil,2) a vigorous protest against the inability of the Western nations to end unemployment and make full use of their productive capabilities,3) a rejection of the Marxist theory that economic distress results from the attempt of capital to preserve its control over labor, and of the Marxist belief that only in a classless society will poverty and unemployment disappear,4) an attempt to find in the nation-state an alternative to the socialist concept of the working class, as a model of an organic community,5) support for the use of the full power of the state to stimulate economic development, to end unemployment, and to ensure that the basic needs of people for food, shelter, and clothing are satisfied,6) a cult of the Great Leader who incarnates the nation and whose indomitable will carries the nation forward toward its destiny,His total dismissal of arbitrary lines of ideology can be once again demonstrated:At the time, he still hoped to win over the left, and to implement the ideas of Social Credit. No matter how we turn, Fascism was at the time socially progressive, implementing various reforms, such as: ( To quote Pound )Yet even here the political naïveté got the better of him, thinking that Fascism turned from “productionism to distributivism”.Odon Por, and the two books, Guilds and Cooperatives in Italy and Fascism were another great influence. If I borrow two short sections before a commentary:The benefits of Corporate state and Unions, where each worker is represented by a man of his own profession & trade - experience, as such it cannot fall into the same gutter where a man is represented by professional politician. British Guild movement and syndicalism as two corollaries or akin with origin, yet there is one important difference with its implementation in Italy, — Mussolini was certainly influenced and had studied Georges Sorel and syndicalism — at the end, unions were voiceless and subordinate to the political party, which in practice rendered them ineffective, well, almost, they served as masquerade.By the end of 30s, he already modified and adopted Douglasian liberalism to Fascism:On a more general note henceforth:The extent to which you can even delegate power is probably limited by laws as definite as those which govern the strength of current you can send through an electric wire of given thickness and texture.Power, customs exist prior to the will of the people, and order is inherent, or rediscovered, rather than obtained. Pound rejected the notion of “contract theory” for various reasons. Society is a product of deliberate fabrication, and here a parallel to economics can be drawn, and a same suspicion with money created ex nihilo, or in political theory, contract and order ex nihilo. Natural state of society counters the artificial state of contract. Just government - peace, order, egalitarianism - take precedence over liberty ( Traditional conservative thought ). Active political participation is necessary and is a moral obligation, not for a struggle to power, as authority is not the exercise of some “arbitrary force”, but a tradition of political structure producing stability, without the need of exercising force.The structure wielding force is therefore indirect, the shift from early liberal to later fascist guild system is remarkable, but even there, guilds serve as a indirect - intermediary objects. Pound is here much closer to American Enlightenment ( They occur frequently in his writings, even radio broadcasts ), where the right to rule and structure is extracted by culture, not by power. That is, the knowledge of ruling is mediated in history, culture, law, customs,…Authoritarian state that rose, in Pound´s view, cannot develop from “self-generating system”, as such systems are based on transcendence of such pesky “self-sustained systems”. The right to rule thus cannot originate in a person and his charisma ( Weber´s theory ), but in which those closely and actively engage with historical and customary knowledge and language, the two mediators of continuity of tradition, which in turn generate a climate of naturalness and confidence - legitimize the rule.Tradition and custom opposed ideology, a body of new-born abstraction loosely assimilated or completely baseless to historical continuity. “Government has undergone revolution of modus and instrument. Ideologies float over this process. Emotions, appetites, are focussed into political process.” ( E. Pound ) If ideologies are baseless and factitious abstractions, what about the process and knowledge? If we transform two notions, that of technical and practical knowledge ( See Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism and politics, 1947 )( technical - learned by heart and applied mechanically with logic ; practical - can not be taught nor learned, only imparted or acquired ) through Poundian lenses and made less extreme, that through chaotic, that is, non-rationalistic method with false or twisted historical documentation might render the concreteness and naturality to that which has been ideological. In doing so, it has the power to liquefy the solid political order only to have it reappear as an ideology of concrete form with the mark of naturality. —- Any revolution or tumultuous period has gone though that ( English civil war, French Revolution, 20. century )Shift in politics and pretending of natural ethics only relieves one ideology for the other. From Canto XXXVI:Authority comes from right reason, never the other way on.( When I get around, I will make a series - close reading of the Cantos - because there is much treasure in those lines )Not only is the truth of a given idea measured by the degree and celerity wherewith it goes into action, but a very distinct component of truth remains ungrasped by the non-participant in the action.And this statement is at diametric remove from gross pragmatism that cheapens or accepts the “pragmatic pig of a world”.As much as this might seem ironic and false, now, years later, looking back, Pound spent his political activity battling what he thought of as Ideology. As opposed to tradition, beside epistemological difference, ideologies are immaterial ideas - representations, and as such unnatural. They induce unnatural behavior and rule. - Yet if we today evaluate, most would say Pound was the most ideological of them all, both in politics as in literature. His circular empiricism of material - natural and obvious transcendence - that is, with almost self-evident manifestation, ultimately rendered him blind to his own shortcomings.I do not know how much of Giovanni Gentile has Pound read, as he disliked formal and academic philosophy, but he was, at least superficially, acquainted with his ideas, and both shared intellectual contempt for “abstractions”.Fascism is not an ideology [ Pound would agree, or did agree ], it is not a closed system, and it is not really even a programme, if by programme one means a plan conceived in advance and projected into the future… Fascism is a spiritual attitude rather than a fixed content of thought [ dogma ]. ( Gentile )It is hard to understand the revolutionary fervor Pound experienced:“The lira was based on the word of the Duce. For me a much more secure basis than other people´s gold.”Word - graspable and real - language - opposed the ill-used abstractions of money.Mussolini´s words do not need footnotes, so clear are they in letter and spirit; they run straight and engrave themselves on the soul and heart of the reader as vivid human truths.Not Pound´s quote, but we can easily imagine it being said by him. This is the essence of Pound´s poetry as well, or at least how he has seen it, or what he wished to accomplish. The Cantos - the most complex of the poems - without notes…This was not even a pebble of Pound´s politics and the climate of the time.3. Religion & Occultism & Mysticism“The images of the gods move the soul to contemplation and preserve the tradition of the un­divided light.”Influenced by G.R.S. Mead, A.R. Orage, J. Theobalt, A. Upward, Olivia and Dorothy Shakespeare, and W. B. Yeats ( He lived with him, and was his secretary )( From Canto LXXXIII )As Kenner said about Pound; ” To see gods was a way to see nature, not to use an antique way of talking.”I believe in a sort of permanent basis in humanity, that is to say, I believe that Greek myth arose when someone having passed through delightful psychic experience tried to communicate it to others and found it necessary to screen himself from persecution. Speaking aesthetically, the myths are explications of mood: you may stop there, or you may probe deeper. Certain it is that these myths are only intelligible in a vivid and glittering sense to those people to whom they occur. I know, I mean, one man who understands Persephone and Demeter, and one who understands the Laurel, and another who has, I should say, met Artemis. These things are for them real. ( Pound, Psychology and Troubadours )Pound interest in occultism is nowhere near as researched and popular as his trodden politics. His attitude was rather ambivalent at best, and crossed out at the start some practices as wacky and useless:My stay in Stone Cottage will not be in the least profitable. I detest the country. Yeats will amuse me part of the time and bore me to death with psychical research the rest. I regard the visit as a duty to posterity.He disliked theurgy, psychical research and spiritualism, and Yeats at the time actively pursued practical magic and before mentioned theurgy. Pound was a by-stander, listener and learner, but was never proactively engaged with any of the groups. And interesting account of one of the members, W. T. Horton:I was & am very sorry for Ezra because beneath all his many wrappings I see the Real Man who sorrows deeply over the antics & perverse lucubrations of his distracted charge. Watching & listening to Ezra I could see, as it were, a something slimy crawling over everything that is beautiful & noble & of good report & leaving behind him an unquestionably glittering but at the same time foul track of slime. I am sorry for him because of what he must go through, for Love-in-Death is approaching who will open his eves & those of his Moon & other satellites.What is astonishing is that you do not see what Ezra is to you . . . .Ezra was your guest last Monday as were others so I did not think it right & proper to say anything but at same time I cannot allow my attitude to be mistaken. I gather from you that one cannot be a Poet & a Hero; in other words to be a Hero you must be a Zero. Well I prefer the Heroic Zero to the Olympian Poet on his sham Olympus . . . .What you or Ezra or anyone else believes or says matters not one tittle to me but I do know we are all in the hands of the Living God & sudden & quick & drastic will be the Event.I have a word for Mrs Shakespear. Sundrv of her accounts are being made up. the balance is being struck-she will soon know on which side it is to be.Ezra was not welcomed by some of the regulars of London occult circles, neither did he wished to be, as he saw most of them as charlatans and tricksters.But if one reads the Cantos, the esoteric tradition and influences are present. There is a fine line between hogwash and a real thing. Section of a letter, correspondence with Dorothy Shakespear:. . . What you mean by symbolism? Do you mean real symbolism, Cabala, genesis of symbols, rise of picture language, etc. or the aesthetic <symbology> symbolism of Villiers de 1'Isle Adam, and that Arthur Symons wrote a book [Svmbolist Movement in Literature] about--the literary movement? At any rate begin on the "Comte de Gabalis," anonymous and should be in catalogue under "Comte de Gabalis." Then you might try the Grimoire of Pope Honorius (IIIrd I think).There's a dictionary of symbols, but I think it immoral. I mean that I think a superficial acquaintance with the sort of shallow, conventional, or attributed meaning of a lot of symbols weakens--damnably, the power of receiving an energized symbol. I mean a symbol appearing in a vision has a certain richness and power of energizing joy--whereas if the supposed meaning of a symbol is familiar it has no more force, or interest of power of suggestion than any other word, or than a synonym in some other language.Then there are those Egyptian language books, but O.S. [Olivia Shakespear] has 'em so they're no use. De Gabalis (first part only) is amusing. Ennemoser's History Of Magic may have something in it--Then there are "Les Symbolistesl'-- french from MallarmC, de 1'Isle Adam, etc. to [Remy] De Gourmont, which is another story.It is quite obvious, however, that the occult was in service of his poetics, of immediacy, as opposed to Yeats aimless imaginative meanderings, which necessarily took away science - exactness - method - from arts, poetry,…Pound was genuinely religious, he thought of Divine Energy as a real thing, a constituent mode of reality. He recognized the importance of remembrance and continuity of divine tradition, the mixture of mystical and cultural. Across different cultures is an archetypal image, common to all human - divine encounters. He draws heavily from Greek, Roman, Chinese, Early Christian theology and Gnosticism.Gods float in the azure air,Bright gods and Tuscan, back before dew was shed.Light: and the first light, before ever dew was fallen.Panisks, and from the oak, dryas,And from the apple, madid,Through all the wood, and the leaves are full of voices,A-whisper, and the clouds bowe over the lake,And there are gods upon them, … ( Canto III, line 10→ )And From Canto LXXXI, line 520→He respected & adorned so many Gods from various traditions one can safely call him a Pagan, although not in etymological sense - pagus - village. In this sense he is very much in line with Maximus of Tyre;“If Greeks are stirred to the remembrance of God by the art of Phidias, or the Egyptians by paying worship to animals, or others by a river, or others by fire, I will not quarrel with their differences. Only let them know, let them love, let them remem­ber.”Images are the mediator of the divine experiences, and theirs contemplation. This can be seen as one of the reasons for his hostility towards dogmatic theological and philosophical abstractions, as they are baseless, of sorts - without image.“Tradition inheres . . . in the images of the gods, and gets lost in dogmatic definitions.”From there also sprouts his disagreements with major institutionalized religions, Christianity and the Church, as, beside dogmatism and adherence to scripture, seek monopoly and exclusive dominion over various other traditions. Thus it is no surprise Pound does not see history linearly and a stomp of progress, and beside empirical disagreement , there is the existence of the divine, and a society is measured by the attunement with it.( From Canto XIII )Confucius, another important figure.I should also note - Pound vehemently defied novelty for its own sake, and that it should arise from the past and tradition. Pound was, among the modernist, the most devoted student of the past. English Anglo-Saxon poetry - Made anew, French Troubadour poetry, Sestina form, modernized and imagized translation, Chinese poetry and translations, and so forth. There is much more to be said, Alas. —I am tired.From Canto LI:[ ( Pound´s Occult education ) ]More about Pound:Jan Špenko's answer to Can you write an answer, in prose or verse, that illuminates and analyzes the relationship of sound to sense? If you choose to write verse, it must perform what it teaches — as, e.g., Coleridge does in his “Metrical Feet” (see link).