OURS rose with the
perception
that dead men do not EAT.
Ezra-Pound-Speaking
Art, economics, pathology.
You need to know MORE about all of 'em.
Need to GIT out of this war, need to stay out of, or prevent the next one, need to change the stinkin' old system.
ROT in art, art as pathology, university delays. How come class war? What is it the professors don't know? Got to choose between two or four subjects or I will git nothing over in any one talk. Very well. I will start on: How come. Two bits of ignorance that have recently been rubbed into me by a mob or congress of professorial persons. NO . . . let's start on something that HAS been discussed IN America for twenty years, 30 years, Doctor looks at literature. All this quite silly talk about the diseased mind back of modern painting.
It bored me like hell. It was mostly poor stuff. BUT the fault lay in its limitation AS criticism, not in the main worry that caused half educated
? medicos to go into it. What was wrong with the criticism was lack of proportion.
HEALTH is MORE interesting than disease. Health is TOTAL. Beauty is MORE interesting than distortion.
We have most of us been buffaloed, or at any rate the intelligentsia is mostly an ass. NOT from having no brains, but simply from partialism in the original sense of that word. Intelligentsia is mostly a nuisance because it runs on snobisms and fragments.
At [the] age of 15 a consumptive gave me a copy of Salome? with Beardsley's illustrations. I cut 'em out, they were so ugly. But for more than ten years of my life I considered this an act of genuine fanaticism. I came to see the . . . damn it all, call 'em merits of Beardsley's distortions.
GROANS from the effete, elite and superior sophomores.
Later a distorted but amiable female presented me coyly with an inferior Beardsley, that is, a volume of distortions by a pink nailed esthete. The significance of THAT act was apparent even to me. I don't think it was conscious on her part. The book probably gave her relief or comfort that she could not have derived from Praxiteles or Botticelli. At any rate I was older, and the drawings weren't even good Beardsley. AND I wasn't interested in pathology. So I have never mentioned the incident before.
The medicos who started worrying about the disease behind modern art were right. That is, they were RIGHT to worry. They were mostly silly in their statements of detail, and this was due to ignorance, lack of cultural heritage. But they were on the right line.
I affirm that future art criticism will be able to tell the component of usury tolerance. How far the TOLERANCE of usury prevailed, or did not prevail when a given picture was painted. Sense of design, precision of LINE, will give way to interest in detail. Suggestion of luxury will
? augment as people lose an ethical basis of life, as they lose passion for justice, love of real distinction between one idea and another. Diagnosis will replace love, analysis will give way to squalor. There are steps and slopes downward toward Avernus, falsification will enter. Honest men, when a dogma or style has been falsified, will turn analytic. They will be partial, the first ones emphatic and vigorous. They will aim, that is, the best ones will aim at health.
For example, Manet, fed up with falsification of color in painting, Manet reduced to analysis of light and color. Both making distinct contributions to world art. Manet one of the world's greatest.
But what is temperament in a sound man becomes by excess, disease in a weak man. Unbalance, hard to divide at certain point, and if one drifts with the current, one grows tolerant first of weakness, and then accustomed to weakness, and then plops into squalor.
Mediterranean sanity and beauty, order. TO KALON, the world was saner when the cult of ugliness did NOT engage the attentions of anyone.
I know all about chocolate box, pseudo beauty, etc. BUT a deflection of the AIM is a decadence. It is a false ripening, it is green fruit going rotten. Beardsley was a sick man, knew he had to make a name quick if he wanted to make it. Personal wish, NOT belief in what art is or ought to be. Knew he hadn't time to learn to PAINT. HIS sane youthful impulse was to pre-Raphealite beauty. Early drawings, Burne-Jones, that's what he WANTED.
Yeats asked him why he hadn't stuck to it. Beardsley was no slouch, he was a courageous invalid. He was a heroic invalid, up to the point of his force. He didn't lie to himself nor to his friends in private. He answered:
Beauty is so DIFFICULT.
? We have all seen the cult of beauty turn to slop. Esthete: an artist who won't take pains, who will NOT face the work needed to paint a good picture, or write a good novel or poem. All fragmentary, nothing total. And the GREAT perversion, the great decadence, when the painting is made to sell, when the artist stops wanting to live. Worth his hire, MUST eat, but EAT secondary AS desire, to will to paint, or to make. Then to git rich, that is the END, the absoloot end of a painter. Few men can resist the lure, we all like comfort. That is my weakness and I have seen men who can do without it. I know no American will much believe that, and some of the men who can do without it are lunatics and fanatics. And snobbism doth make coneys of them all. So far as I know, nobody else had the courage to point out that the German pavilions at the Binennale di Venezia four years ago was the best. All the little daubers in the shops, doing Monet and Renoir 60 years late were shocked by the hardness of outline. It was almost the only pavilion not rotted with slobber, some more, some less.
The futurist rooms are always an affirmation of propaganda that could get along by itself without any painting whatever. I mean the main line of futurist propaganda is an idea, the painting an adjunct. An adjunct that proves the idea has other dimensions than the merely ideologic. It is a good idea, it is NOT a WHOLE idea. But it needs plastic expression: it has imperfect plastic expression, which is a sign of its force. But it does NOT arise from a plastic need.
Health is CRUEL, or rather health is often accompanied by what seems cruelty to the baccillus. The man who is totally healthy don't worry about baccillae. He isn't perpetually surrounded by patent medicines, bottles of disinfectant.
For God's sake LOOK at your art. When art is subordinate to the picture dealer, the museum in the United States gets what is LEFT after the European connoisseur has taken the pick of the billing.
? Ezra Pound speaking.
I know I haven't got very far in this talk, so wait for the next one. HEALTH, damn it, think about HEALTH in the interim.
#53 (July 10, 1942) U. S. (B67) HOW COME
HEALTH! I said health, last time. Don't you let anyone kid you out of it. Don't let 'em kid you out of looking for health in art. I am now goin' on to: How come.
CAPITAL does NOT come exclusively from labor. Not one man in a hundred EVEN in Europe has digested that truth and its implications. But what happens when a man who is living on the part of capital that does NOT come from labor first finds out what he is doin'? He gets scared as hell. He starts trying to conceal the cause of his privilege. HE starts the class war; class war does NOT come from the bottom. The man who is doing an honest day's work feels his strength. He feels the justice of drawin' his pay. And until he's nearly starved, until he is worried to death by fear of losin' his job, you cannot get him to DO anything at all about what is taken off him. Nothing is rarer than a peasant revolt. Save in the most atrocious circles. The peasant never does more than grumble a bit, he never bothered about his overlord gettin' something. So long as he ate he was happy. And LONG after he ceased to get a just portion of the returns from his own labor, he was certainly wholly innocuous.
What happens on the other side? MAN finds he hasn't justice on his side, and gets a panic. He sets up university chairs in economics to bamboozle the public. And this he does from sheer lack of culture. The concept of the cultural heritage took a long time to crystallize. The phrase is fairly new. I don't recall a CLEAR formulation of it in pre- Douglasite writing. It is latent in medieval terminology, but that
? terminology was invalidated when the so-called aristocracy came to include such a vast mess of what was anything but the best. Aristocracies ROT, they fall under usurocracy. That is their pathology, their slop- down, their decadence. Now in spite of lean years, and how, I have always enjoyed a large share of privilege. Got stocked up with University advantages. [Great? ] deal of mental pleasure. Always could bask in the best of what had been written and thought. That was nice for me, and it delayed my public utility for a decade. I had a nice time, but I contributed singularly little to curin' the world's diseases. I don't 'spose I worsened 'em any. Let me keep to the rich man's panic, the bourgeois panic. This panic starts when he begins not to KNOW. Lord it don't start as a clear perception. He begins to smell that CAPITAL comes from something that isn't an honest day's work. And he is scared out of his pantelettes at the idea of what it would mean to him if he had ONLY what he could earn doing a workman's work. Knowing he couldn't do it anyhow.
It takes a Whistler to reply to old Eden's lawyers, "NO, not for an half hour's work, for the knowledge of a lifetime. " But the cultural heritage is NOT merely the piled up skill of a master craftsman. You can't think clearly or see clearly till you get WORK into THREE brackets. The work a man does today. The anterior work that piles up into SKILL (material skill, handcraft, hand sleight, knowledge, discrimination. ) And the WORK done by men, now dead. Work done by the family, by the race, before you started workin' or loafin'. An instinct for the justice of the claims of ANTERIOR work leads to the craftsman's pride. It leads to family pride, and that ROTS when the man or family loses the passion for justice.
Man with passion for justice, or even a sense of justice, or an uneasiness about the existence of justice, starts rootin' round, starts trying to delimit the claims of the three orders of WORK: 1) work today, 2) work yesterday by the folk who are still livin', 3) work by the departed. And ONLY on that basis can you have sane law and society. But I have sat in
? on a professorial conference of several hundred persons, and not three of 'em had any glimmer of this simple tripartite division.
ALL purchasing power does NOT come from labor. All real wealth comes from natural resources PLUS labor. The shyster wants to hog natural resources, and sweat the hide of labor. That is the cause of unpleasantness. There is no wangle or dirty wheeze that the shyster won't think up and use to get a monopoly, to violate the just price, to keep labor sweatin'. And the shyster is pizin'. He is the sworn blasphemer, false swearin' and cheatin' FOE to all labor, past, present, and labor to come. And you better discover this. You better kick him out of your hemisphere. You better invent some bug poison that will eliminate him from your system.
That's what non-shyster Europe is drivin' at. The shyster got hold of Russia. He sweat the hide off of labor, he built the Stalin canal, and I advise all readers of the N. Y. Herald to GET the official reports of the treatment of human MATERIAL, carloads of "human material" dumped into the making of the Stalin canal.
One kind of shyster succeeds another: shyster penetrates ANY organization, church or state for the sake of livin' on the Purchasing Power that DON't come from labor. Shyster joins EVERY new movement so as to be there when it gets big and to be at the exploitin' position. Gangster shysters, medieval orders of chivalry rose to combat the gangster, to combat universal brutality and injustice in range of the individual knight. Or the body of chivalry rose to an idea. With these two forces, i. e. , gangsterism AND chivalry, the feudal system developed. As law it was a RESPONSIBLE system. The DUTIES of the overlord were enormous. They required DISTRIBUTION of wealth. Naturally this annoyed greedy overlords, and weak overlords, and the shyster entered the system. Ready to sweat out taxes, to sweat the hide off of labor, and to collect money interest. In fact the shyster is always a rent collector. And the worm ate into the fruit. Reniou, provenc? al word
? meanin' interest on lent money. Gangster barons kept and lent all right whenever they could so wangle it. Greed, violence, nothing new about vices. When the two had rotted the world long enough, there came an explosion. The difference between OUR American Revolution and the French was enormous.
OURS rose with the perception that dead men do not EAT. That is, with a perception that there is a just limit to the rights of work done by men [who] have ceased to breath. Jefferson said it: the earth belongs to the living. As He did not say: the earth belongs to idiots. But on the other hand, he did not clearly assert that the management of the earth requires the intelligence of men who are prepared, and FITTED to govern. An assault on mortal man, an assault on the exaggerated privileges accorded to the whims and greeds of the dead was NEEDED. It came.
Naturally the Revolution was betrayed. BUT it lasted sixty years. Or rather the government set up on that basis lasted 60 years. Count it longer dependin' on when you count the start of our revolution as from 1776 or 1750? Or 60? The French revolution flopped in a hurry. The Napoleonic dream was not merely a dream of conquest. To witness the CODE, code Napoleon, Napoleon's law code. Desire for justice, Mediterranean sense of justice. But a lot of good sense got lost. The guilds, the anti-trade or ganizations, with their grades of apprenticage, got chucked into the discard. They were NOT 100% innocent. Against the feudal greed, trade greed developed. Nevertheless the guilds left a dream. Left THEIR code of sanity, code of sense, necessity of order and preparation.
There is now a new code in Italy. STUDY it. Is it better than Napoleon's anti-feudal, anti-privilege demonstration? It is a matter of interest, something you ought to know You ought NOT to be in this war and that CODE is a proof of it. Proof of what you are fightin', but that you DO NOT know you are fightin'. All the hopes of Ruskin and William Morris, work being done, work done by men still livin', work done by the departed. includin' in the latter two brackets ALL the masterwork, all
? the cathedrals in Romanesque style, and in Gothic. (The first lot the more satisfactory. ) Henry Adams got to Chartres. Ought to have seen San Zeno, and Cathedral of Modena. All the best work of the great authors, all the best painting. All that has place and right, has its rights in corporate order.
And the shyster is out against it. Against all order, all beauty. Against all work? And you ought NOT to be on the side of the shyster.
#54 (July 12, 1942) U. K. (B72) FREEDUMB FORUM
Prof. Laski out of the Talmud by the beast of a thousand legs, usura, pulling the legs of a couple of simple hearted blokes named White and T. Young. Such was the Freedom Forum of the B. B. C. : White and Young for the classics, etc. apparently NOT knowing the protocols and not seeing Laski ONE hundred percent Talmud, wanting to annihilate all history, substitute programs of the future precisely to PREVENT the masses or any one else learning LIFE as recorded in Demosthenes.
I. e. the effect of kikery, the Talmud, the perpetual forgeries in bamboozling simple-minded Saxons. The classicist NOT realizing that Latin went on being written after the demise of the Roman Age and that Salmasius wrote it.
The London School of Economics does not want to teach history but conceal it as the Whig endowments concealed it, wants to prevent a knowledge of PRECISE problems, such as interest on money, the way it is made. All specific issues to be shelved in generalities such as the forum ran on about May 29th.
Then when White, I think it was, came back about the labor leaders trying to get a culture to equal or at least ersatz the classics, what does he trot out but the Bible, meaning the Protestant Old Testament, choked
? to the eyes with Jew mentality; and Milton, another already poisoned from the same source.
The really super naivete? of the poor old gents, dealing with the cockatrice, and NOT recognizing that ALL Laski's program IS the Protocols, whoever wrote them, i. e. , whoever garbled that particular form of Talmudism in order to claim later that it was a forgery, and the kike is slandered.
Why don't the gents, still let on the British air, listen to some of the poison that accompanies their song and dance in foreign tongues, exhortations to assassinate in three languages; while tender messages to the kiddies in Canada float on the ambient, in the most chocolate box accents: oh quaite Engliash, while the yittisch female, claiming to pee vrfence entuneth in her nose-full tunefully about Hun consfiscations of Rothschild's embezzled tapestries and bibelots in the occupied territories, with no reference [to] the French background, as say available in Drumont du Camp, or the Goncourt.
By May 30, we say that England's only hope was in a few Yiddish assassins. Not only the last youpine whom the mild English accept as French, not only the ghetto sweepings, but right up to Westmonster itself, the dirty voice of Walter Elliot, like a bit of yesterday, day before yesterday's salad dressing left on a plate, unsound but still creamy.
Westminster, the tocsin, for a few attentats-- --. No proposal of military action. ELLIOT encouraging the duped workers in the belief that a Paris riot will save England. Well, what about the Rothschild money in Skoda? Did THAT save Europe OR England? Disgust and tragedy. YOUR tragedy is that your able bodied men were killed in the last war. PUSHED into war by the financier whose race is not uniformally 100% British. The men who ought to KICK out your Walt Elliots, your Priestlies, were killed in the first three months of 1914. Noticed it in Paris literary life, in another way. No elders the young could respect.
? That is the way the alien race wormed into the system. Kills off not only a government system but the race itself. It has taken my generation the whole of its time, 1910 to 1940, to discover the meaning, I mean down to [the] bottom of the word corruption, social corruption, corruption of a race and of national order. The continent is a few decades ahead, France is in decay, the French have been studying the effect of Jews on France for over 50 years. Germans found out what it meant, reacted, serious STUDY of the Jew AS problem.
No longer haphazard programs. Serious study of what Dr. Laski means, I don't mean what Laski tells you, but of the phenomena, PENETRATION by Talmudic tendencies, bacilliae carried by a particular hostile, but whining race, humiliation doctrine, doctrines of humiliation, doctrines of shame, none of your Aquinas, santo atleta, as Dante called him. None of your Christianity conceived as intense luminous thought. The tensity that built the romanesque cathedrals, none in what is called romanesque style: duomo di Modena to St. Hillaire of Poiters,
Mr. BowWowWow Steed in his dotage, saying that it will be a WIND, really! ! For 25 years Steed has resisted abundance economy, derided, refused to read economics; and now he hears it from Perkins, that AFTER the War, after the Jews get control again, Geneva at 60% usury; interest on real deposits, then the old bleeders will all be Christ child, and Santy Claus.
Really ENGland needs something younger, something that WILL answer straight questions, re economic control. The slavery that Europe will NOT reaccept is slavery to the money monopolists, with no race, or no avowable race. Mouse nose or hwousse hnosse Hwood: or was it Falls telling us the Kharkov battle wasn't sufficiently serious, and the Germans forced to bulge out their line at both ends, eventually incurring the risk of encircling the Hroosians, a tactic or strategy which he deplored, hephlored, and so on.
? As to the really good historical, reconstructions. NO one despises your Wilberforces, BUT they have been dead for some time. Their modern equivalents are NOT on the BBC. NOR are they respected in England to the point of giving them any power. Sierra Leone does not excuse Smuts, nor the DEBeers, nor the exploitation of English colonists IN Africa, by a government, local, colonial entirely in the hands of the kikes.
The example of France, the example of Poland, apparently taught England nothing. The weekly "Truth" nibbles at an edge, corruption of France, a by-word, but meant nothing. La vie de Bohe`me, romanticized. You make normal conditions, family, etc. , impossible BY economic pressure, and THEN preach, is no use.
The ROMANCE of La Bohe`me was that a few individuals of high sensibility are forced into poverty. IN those impossible conditions, the fineness still persists, or the consumptive simulacrum of refinement, not from desire toward eccentricity but they wear picturesque clothes, because these are the only clothes they can get, or what chance has thrown them. Then all that is falsified, vide W. Lewis' continual harping on the APing of la Bohe`me by the rich. Also the artists "dare" wear 'em, those clothes, because no clerk in an office, no office boy (remaining office boy till age of 40 or 60) would be allowed to wear 'em.
The CONtrast of the refinement with the need gives the romantic formula but does NOT make the accidents of la Bohe`me a NORM of life, as which the false romanticism set it up.
Naturally, if there were no bait, fish wouldn't bite. Drugs, advertised alcohol, spirits where there is no nutritive wine. Plenty of preaching but no potentialization. Ridicule of the middle class as bourgeoisie, etc. all fits in, boredom exploited. Attitude that [it is] "all part of the game" whenever one gets to bedrock re the vice of usury, snarl from the
? London School of Economics products. Really bad, not to say vicious temper of these brutes when their private beef or bone is menaced.
The insurance RACKET, yet when an insurance man with a sense of humor really says something to a banker, the banker has but one word; and that word is HUSH. First silence, then babel to drown out the reality, then daily papers of 80 pages an issue, to HIDE what can't be excluded absolutely.
Arthur Meyer said to the Compte de Paris, vot uou needt iss an agenzy, hence there was Havas. Havoc of France.
Now, say I am incoherent, say I have not given you a formal discourse. Let us be CLEAR. YOU COMPARE Laski's total program with the total program of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (without going into the sources of that document). COMPARE the two programs, and then come back and tell papa.
Oh, you want to know what I am talking about, well it is this. You get a couple of nice cultured old gentlemen, and they have lived in Oxford, and dined, and breakfasted in the shades, and they have read the so- called CLASSICS, without much curiosity, and they have not burrowed into the dirt of history, apart possibly from a few pawky bits of Latin pornography. And they are innocent as babes just born of the bearing of certain phenomena. Such, for example, as the getting rid of Latin studies, or the lowering of interest RATE, while increasing the total burden of interest to be paid.
The TOTAL going mainly to a very few, and strictly NON-patriot, non- national centres, whereas the lower rate of interest merely lowers the political potential of what is left of the responsible class that used to govern England nationally, instead of as a HED [? ] company for high Jewry. These points escape you, and you and the nice old gents, neither of 'em having read the Protocols, DO NOT recognize the symptoms of
? Laski. You fail to see what he is up to, and HOW exactly it fits into the program of high kikery.
That is your sorrow, or somnolence. You have heard that they are a forgery or a plagiarism, and you haven't stopped to ask what they are a forgery or plagiarism OF.
God know they are not pleasant reading. They are heavy, no style, very dull, but do you know what is in 'em? Have you looked at Lord Sydenham's preface? Naturally not, that is, very few of you have, and so when Laski starts being clever you DO NOT see what he is aiming at you fail to detect the point of his aim, which of course he will deny; I mean he will swear blue, green, and pink that his aim is other.
But watch him.
#55 (July 13, 1942) U. S. (B68) DARKNESS
You are in black darkness and confusion. You have been hugger- muggared, and carom-shotted into a war, and you know NOTHING about it. You know NOTHING about the forces that caused it, or you know next to nothing.
I am in the agonized position of an observer who had worked 25 years to prevent it. And I am not the only observer who had so striven.
Apparently NO man could prevent it, that is up to the point that it was not prevented. A belief in destiny does NOT necessarily imply a belief that we have NO duty, that we should NOT attempt to learn, that we should sit supine before age-old evil.
? Given a little more knowledge, given the elimination of a small number of shysters, the war need not have happened.
Well, Europeans who ought to have known more than American farm boys got toppled into it BECAUSE they were ignorant. Books may sell 15 editions in 40 years without penetrating the mind of a nation. Some things that I say are NOT new, but I believe they are all necessary to knowin' which way the wind blows. You have got to learn some things or die, got to learn some things or perish.
All purchasing power does NOT come from labor, shysters try to live on the part of purchasing power that does not, that does NOT come from labor.
There is enough of purchasing power based on labor, and on labor only, to RUN all the culture, to keep up all studies, arts, all the amenities, the good life in toto. The extra purchasing power does NOT create these things, it corrodes them. It does NOT create what makes life fit to live, it attacks it. It spoils it. It rots it.
A thousand years of European thought went to makin' what is best in life as we know it, or as we HAD known it before the last two outbreaks of bellicosity.
As outbreaks they were NEEDED, needed to bust the fog, the stink, the fugg, the chains of monopoly. There was NO intellectual need of the liberation being conducted by cannon, tanks and machine guns. That is to say, human stupidity and chickenheadedness were so dense and so wafty that without the explosive publicity humanity evidently would not understand, and would not even turn its attention to the roots of the evil. Europe is fightin' for the good life, the shysters are fighting to prevent it. Even British minorities are muddleheadedly gettin' obstinate over some phases of the amenities. The decent English fight or urge others to fight in the name of a few amenities. I admit that the public voice in Britain
? pretty well keeps off of this topic. But there is a squashy, soft, vague underlyin' feelin' in England that something would get lost if the Axis licks 'em.
That view is an error. There is MORE sense of the good life in Italy than in England. England don't know it. England does NOT know the good life in Italy. Italians are different. They even criticize one another.
Talk of organization, I mean to talk of organization. BUT there is no use organizin' till you know what you organize FOR. You ought to organize against world-wide sabotage, sabotage of everything that makes life fit for human being and for a sense of justice. Sense of justice corroded for decades. Corrosion gets in its work LARGELY because people don't know, and fear is begotten of IGNORANCE. WHAT are you fightin' for? Fightin' for the congressional system? Fightin' for parliamentary system? I doubt it. Democracy? What do you mean by democracy?
A man might fight for justice. Many men fight from greed . . . not their own greed. Fight from instinct. That's O. K. up to a point. Fight for survival, that's health. Man ought to fight for survival, and for RACIAL survival.
ROT in art, art as pathology, university delays. How come class war? What is it the professors don't know? Got to choose between two or four subjects or I will git nothing over in any one talk. Very well. I will start on: How come. Two bits of ignorance that have recently been rubbed into me by a mob or congress of professorial persons. NO . . . let's start on something that HAS been discussed IN America for twenty years, 30 years, Doctor looks at literature. All this quite silly talk about the diseased mind back of modern painting.
It bored me like hell. It was mostly poor stuff. BUT the fault lay in its limitation AS criticism, not in the main worry that caused half educated
? medicos to go into it. What was wrong with the criticism was lack of proportion.
HEALTH is MORE interesting than disease. Health is TOTAL. Beauty is MORE interesting than distortion.
We have most of us been buffaloed, or at any rate the intelligentsia is mostly an ass. NOT from having no brains, but simply from partialism in the original sense of that word. Intelligentsia is mostly a nuisance because it runs on snobisms and fragments.
At [the] age of 15 a consumptive gave me a copy of Salome? with Beardsley's illustrations. I cut 'em out, they were so ugly. But for more than ten years of my life I considered this an act of genuine fanaticism. I came to see the . . . damn it all, call 'em merits of Beardsley's distortions.
GROANS from the effete, elite and superior sophomores.
Later a distorted but amiable female presented me coyly with an inferior Beardsley, that is, a volume of distortions by a pink nailed esthete. The significance of THAT act was apparent even to me. I don't think it was conscious on her part. The book probably gave her relief or comfort that she could not have derived from Praxiteles or Botticelli. At any rate I was older, and the drawings weren't even good Beardsley. AND I wasn't interested in pathology. So I have never mentioned the incident before.
The medicos who started worrying about the disease behind modern art were right. That is, they were RIGHT to worry. They were mostly silly in their statements of detail, and this was due to ignorance, lack of cultural heritage. But they were on the right line.
I affirm that future art criticism will be able to tell the component of usury tolerance. How far the TOLERANCE of usury prevailed, or did not prevail when a given picture was painted. Sense of design, precision of LINE, will give way to interest in detail. Suggestion of luxury will
? augment as people lose an ethical basis of life, as they lose passion for justice, love of real distinction between one idea and another. Diagnosis will replace love, analysis will give way to squalor. There are steps and slopes downward toward Avernus, falsification will enter. Honest men, when a dogma or style has been falsified, will turn analytic. They will be partial, the first ones emphatic and vigorous. They will aim, that is, the best ones will aim at health.
For example, Manet, fed up with falsification of color in painting, Manet reduced to analysis of light and color. Both making distinct contributions to world art. Manet one of the world's greatest.
But what is temperament in a sound man becomes by excess, disease in a weak man. Unbalance, hard to divide at certain point, and if one drifts with the current, one grows tolerant first of weakness, and then accustomed to weakness, and then plops into squalor.
Mediterranean sanity and beauty, order. TO KALON, the world was saner when the cult of ugliness did NOT engage the attentions of anyone.
I know all about chocolate box, pseudo beauty, etc. BUT a deflection of the AIM is a decadence. It is a false ripening, it is green fruit going rotten. Beardsley was a sick man, knew he had to make a name quick if he wanted to make it. Personal wish, NOT belief in what art is or ought to be. Knew he hadn't time to learn to PAINT. HIS sane youthful impulse was to pre-Raphealite beauty. Early drawings, Burne-Jones, that's what he WANTED.
Yeats asked him why he hadn't stuck to it. Beardsley was no slouch, he was a courageous invalid. He was a heroic invalid, up to the point of his force. He didn't lie to himself nor to his friends in private. He answered:
Beauty is so DIFFICULT.
? We have all seen the cult of beauty turn to slop. Esthete: an artist who won't take pains, who will NOT face the work needed to paint a good picture, or write a good novel or poem. All fragmentary, nothing total. And the GREAT perversion, the great decadence, when the painting is made to sell, when the artist stops wanting to live. Worth his hire, MUST eat, but EAT secondary AS desire, to will to paint, or to make. Then to git rich, that is the END, the absoloot end of a painter. Few men can resist the lure, we all like comfort. That is my weakness and I have seen men who can do without it. I know no American will much believe that, and some of the men who can do without it are lunatics and fanatics. And snobbism doth make coneys of them all. So far as I know, nobody else had the courage to point out that the German pavilions at the Binennale di Venezia four years ago was the best. All the little daubers in the shops, doing Monet and Renoir 60 years late were shocked by the hardness of outline. It was almost the only pavilion not rotted with slobber, some more, some less.
The futurist rooms are always an affirmation of propaganda that could get along by itself without any painting whatever. I mean the main line of futurist propaganda is an idea, the painting an adjunct. An adjunct that proves the idea has other dimensions than the merely ideologic. It is a good idea, it is NOT a WHOLE idea. But it needs plastic expression: it has imperfect plastic expression, which is a sign of its force. But it does NOT arise from a plastic need.
Health is CRUEL, or rather health is often accompanied by what seems cruelty to the baccillus. The man who is totally healthy don't worry about baccillae. He isn't perpetually surrounded by patent medicines, bottles of disinfectant.
For God's sake LOOK at your art. When art is subordinate to the picture dealer, the museum in the United States gets what is LEFT after the European connoisseur has taken the pick of the billing.
? Ezra Pound speaking.
I know I haven't got very far in this talk, so wait for the next one. HEALTH, damn it, think about HEALTH in the interim.
#53 (July 10, 1942) U. S. (B67) HOW COME
HEALTH! I said health, last time. Don't you let anyone kid you out of it. Don't let 'em kid you out of looking for health in art. I am now goin' on to: How come.
CAPITAL does NOT come exclusively from labor. Not one man in a hundred EVEN in Europe has digested that truth and its implications. But what happens when a man who is living on the part of capital that does NOT come from labor first finds out what he is doin'? He gets scared as hell. He starts trying to conceal the cause of his privilege. HE starts the class war; class war does NOT come from the bottom. The man who is doing an honest day's work feels his strength. He feels the justice of drawin' his pay. And until he's nearly starved, until he is worried to death by fear of losin' his job, you cannot get him to DO anything at all about what is taken off him. Nothing is rarer than a peasant revolt. Save in the most atrocious circles. The peasant never does more than grumble a bit, he never bothered about his overlord gettin' something. So long as he ate he was happy. And LONG after he ceased to get a just portion of the returns from his own labor, he was certainly wholly innocuous.
What happens on the other side? MAN finds he hasn't justice on his side, and gets a panic. He sets up university chairs in economics to bamboozle the public. And this he does from sheer lack of culture. The concept of the cultural heritage took a long time to crystallize. The phrase is fairly new. I don't recall a CLEAR formulation of it in pre- Douglasite writing. It is latent in medieval terminology, but that
? terminology was invalidated when the so-called aristocracy came to include such a vast mess of what was anything but the best. Aristocracies ROT, they fall under usurocracy. That is their pathology, their slop- down, their decadence. Now in spite of lean years, and how, I have always enjoyed a large share of privilege. Got stocked up with University advantages. [Great? ] deal of mental pleasure. Always could bask in the best of what had been written and thought. That was nice for me, and it delayed my public utility for a decade. I had a nice time, but I contributed singularly little to curin' the world's diseases. I don't 'spose I worsened 'em any. Let me keep to the rich man's panic, the bourgeois panic. This panic starts when he begins not to KNOW. Lord it don't start as a clear perception. He begins to smell that CAPITAL comes from something that isn't an honest day's work. And he is scared out of his pantelettes at the idea of what it would mean to him if he had ONLY what he could earn doing a workman's work. Knowing he couldn't do it anyhow.
It takes a Whistler to reply to old Eden's lawyers, "NO, not for an half hour's work, for the knowledge of a lifetime. " But the cultural heritage is NOT merely the piled up skill of a master craftsman. You can't think clearly or see clearly till you get WORK into THREE brackets. The work a man does today. The anterior work that piles up into SKILL (material skill, handcraft, hand sleight, knowledge, discrimination. ) And the WORK done by men, now dead. Work done by the family, by the race, before you started workin' or loafin'. An instinct for the justice of the claims of ANTERIOR work leads to the craftsman's pride. It leads to family pride, and that ROTS when the man or family loses the passion for justice.
Man with passion for justice, or even a sense of justice, or an uneasiness about the existence of justice, starts rootin' round, starts trying to delimit the claims of the three orders of WORK: 1) work today, 2) work yesterday by the folk who are still livin', 3) work by the departed. And ONLY on that basis can you have sane law and society. But I have sat in
? on a professorial conference of several hundred persons, and not three of 'em had any glimmer of this simple tripartite division.
ALL purchasing power does NOT come from labor. All real wealth comes from natural resources PLUS labor. The shyster wants to hog natural resources, and sweat the hide of labor. That is the cause of unpleasantness. There is no wangle or dirty wheeze that the shyster won't think up and use to get a monopoly, to violate the just price, to keep labor sweatin'. And the shyster is pizin'. He is the sworn blasphemer, false swearin' and cheatin' FOE to all labor, past, present, and labor to come. And you better discover this. You better kick him out of your hemisphere. You better invent some bug poison that will eliminate him from your system.
That's what non-shyster Europe is drivin' at. The shyster got hold of Russia. He sweat the hide off of labor, he built the Stalin canal, and I advise all readers of the N. Y. Herald to GET the official reports of the treatment of human MATERIAL, carloads of "human material" dumped into the making of the Stalin canal.
One kind of shyster succeeds another: shyster penetrates ANY organization, church or state for the sake of livin' on the Purchasing Power that DON't come from labor. Shyster joins EVERY new movement so as to be there when it gets big and to be at the exploitin' position. Gangster shysters, medieval orders of chivalry rose to combat the gangster, to combat universal brutality and injustice in range of the individual knight. Or the body of chivalry rose to an idea. With these two forces, i. e. , gangsterism AND chivalry, the feudal system developed. As law it was a RESPONSIBLE system. The DUTIES of the overlord were enormous. They required DISTRIBUTION of wealth. Naturally this annoyed greedy overlords, and weak overlords, and the shyster entered the system. Ready to sweat out taxes, to sweat the hide off of labor, and to collect money interest. In fact the shyster is always a rent collector. And the worm ate into the fruit. Reniou, provenc? al word
? meanin' interest on lent money. Gangster barons kept and lent all right whenever they could so wangle it. Greed, violence, nothing new about vices. When the two had rotted the world long enough, there came an explosion. The difference between OUR American Revolution and the French was enormous.
OURS rose with the perception that dead men do not EAT. That is, with a perception that there is a just limit to the rights of work done by men [who] have ceased to breath. Jefferson said it: the earth belongs to the living. As He did not say: the earth belongs to idiots. But on the other hand, he did not clearly assert that the management of the earth requires the intelligence of men who are prepared, and FITTED to govern. An assault on mortal man, an assault on the exaggerated privileges accorded to the whims and greeds of the dead was NEEDED. It came.
Naturally the Revolution was betrayed. BUT it lasted sixty years. Or rather the government set up on that basis lasted 60 years. Count it longer dependin' on when you count the start of our revolution as from 1776 or 1750? Or 60? The French revolution flopped in a hurry. The Napoleonic dream was not merely a dream of conquest. To witness the CODE, code Napoleon, Napoleon's law code. Desire for justice, Mediterranean sense of justice. But a lot of good sense got lost. The guilds, the anti-trade or ganizations, with their grades of apprenticage, got chucked into the discard. They were NOT 100% innocent. Against the feudal greed, trade greed developed. Nevertheless the guilds left a dream. Left THEIR code of sanity, code of sense, necessity of order and preparation.
There is now a new code in Italy. STUDY it. Is it better than Napoleon's anti-feudal, anti-privilege demonstration? It is a matter of interest, something you ought to know You ought NOT to be in this war and that CODE is a proof of it. Proof of what you are fightin', but that you DO NOT know you are fightin'. All the hopes of Ruskin and William Morris, work being done, work done by men still livin', work done by the departed. includin' in the latter two brackets ALL the masterwork, all
? the cathedrals in Romanesque style, and in Gothic. (The first lot the more satisfactory. ) Henry Adams got to Chartres. Ought to have seen San Zeno, and Cathedral of Modena. All the best work of the great authors, all the best painting. All that has place and right, has its rights in corporate order.
And the shyster is out against it. Against all order, all beauty. Against all work? And you ought NOT to be on the side of the shyster.
#54 (July 12, 1942) U. K. (B72) FREEDUMB FORUM
Prof. Laski out of the Talmud by the beast of a thousand legs, usura, pulling the legs of a couple of simple hearted blokes named White and T. Young. Such was the Freedom Forum of the B. B. C. : White and Young for the classics, etc. apparently NOT knowing the protocols and not seeing Laski ONE hundred percent Talmud, wanting to annihilate all history, substitute programs of the future precisely to PREVENT the masses or any one else learning LIFE as recorded in Demosthenes.
I. e. the effect of kikery, the Talmud, the perpetual forgeries in bamboozling simple-minded Saxons. The classicist NOT realizing that Latin went on being written after the demise of the Roman Age and that Salmasius wrote it.
The London School of Economics does not want to teach history but conceal it as the Whig endowments concealed it, wants to prevent a knowledge of PRECISE problems, such as interest on money, the way it is made. All specific issues to be shelved in generalities such as the forum ran on about May 29th.
Then when White, I think it was, came back about the labor leaders trying to get a culture to equal or at least ersatz the classics, what does he trot out but the Bible, meaning the Protestant Old Testament, choked
? to the eyes with Jew mentality; and Milton, another already poisoned from the same source.
The really super naivete? of the poor old gents, dealing with the cockatrice, and NOT recognizing that ALL Laski's program IS the Protocols, whoever wrote them, i. e. , whoever garbled that particular form of Talmudism in order to claim later that it was a forgery, and the kike is slandered.
Why don't the gents, still let on the British air, listen to some of the poison that accompanies their song and dance in foreign tongues, exhortations to assassinate in three languages; while tender messages to the kiddies in Canada float on the ambient, in the most chocolate box accents: oh quaite Engliash, while the yittisch female, claiming to pee vrfence entuneth in her nose-full tunefully about Hun consfiscations of Rothschild's embezzled tapestries and bibelots in the occupied territories, with no reference [to] the French background, as say available in Drumont du Camp, or the Goncourt.
By May 30, we say that England's only hope was in a few Yiddish assassins. Not only the last youpine whom the mild English accept as French, not only the ghetto sweepings, but right up to Westmonster itself, the dirty voice of Walter Elliot, like a bit of yesterday, day before yesterday's salad dressing left on a plate, unsound but still creamy.
Westminster, the tocsin, for a few attentats-- --. No proposal of military action. ELLIOT encouraging the duped workers in the belief that a Paris riot will save England. Well, what about the Rothschild money in Skoda? Did THAT save Europe OR England? Disgust and tragedy. YOUR tragedy is that your able bodied men were killed in the last war. PUSHED into war by the financier whose race is not uniformally 100% British. The men who ought to KICK out your Walt Elliots, your Priestlies, were killed in the first three months of 1914. Noticed it in Paris literary life, in another way. No elders the young could respect.
? That is the way the alien race wormed into the system. Kills off not only a government system but the race itself. It has taken my generation the whole of its time, 1910 to 1940, to discover the meaning, I mean down to [the] bottom of the word corruption, social corruption, corruption of a race and of national order. The continent is a few decades ahead, France is in decay, the French have been studying the effect of Jews on France for over 50 years. Germans found out what it meant, reacted, serious STUDY of the Jew AS problem.
No longer haphazard programs. Serious study of what Dr. Laski means, I don't mean what Laski tells you, but of the phenomena, PENETRATION by Talmudic tendencies, bacilliae carried by a particular hostile, but whining race, humiliation doctrine, doctrines of humiliation, doctrines of shame, none of your Aquinas, santo atleta, as Dante called him. None of your Christianity conceived as intense luminous thought. The tensity that built the romanesque cathedrals, none in what is called romanesque style: duomo di Modena to St. Hillaire of Poiters,
Mr. BowWowWow Steed in his dotage, saying that it will be a WIND, really! ! For 25 years Steed has resisted abundance economy, derided, refused to read economics; and now he hears it from Perkins, that AFTER the War, after the Jews get control again, Geneva at 60% usury; interest on real deposits, then the old bleeders will all be Christ child, and Santy Claus.
Really ENGland needs something younger, something that WILL answer straight questions, re economic control. The slavery that Europe will NOT reaccept is slavery to the money monopolists, with no race, or no avowable race. Mouse nose or hwousse hnosse Hwood: or was it Falls telling us the Kharkov battle wasn't sufficiently serious, and the Germans forced to bulge out their line at both ends, eventually incurring the risk of encircling the Hroosians, a tactic or strategy which he deplored, hephlored, and so on.
? As to the really good historical, reconstructions. NO one despises your Wilberforces, BUT they have been dead for some time. Their modern equivalents are NOT on the BBC. NOR are they respected in England to the point of giving them any power. Sierra Leone does not excuse Smuts, nor the DEBeers, nor the exploitation of English colonists IN Africa, by a government, local, colonial entirely in the hands of the kikes.
The example of France, the example of Poland, apparently taught England nothing. The weekly "Truth" nibbles at an edge, corruption of France, a by-word, but meant nothing. La vie de Bohe`me, romanticized. You make normal conditions, family, etc. , impossible BY economic pressure, and THEN preach, is no use.
The ROMANCE of La Bohe`me was that a few individuals of high sensibility are forced into poverty. IN those impossible conditions, the fineness still persists, or the consumptive simulacrum of refinement, not from desire toward eccentricity but they wear picturesque clothes, because these are the only clothes they can get, or what chance has thrown them. Then all that is falsified, vide W. Lewis' continual harping on the APing of la Bohe`me by the rich. Also the artists "dare" wear 'em, those clothes, because no clerk in an office, no office boy (remaining office boy till age of 40 or 60) would be allowed to wear 'em.
The CONtrast of the refinement with the need gives the romantic formula but does NOT make the accidents of la Bohe`me a NORM of life, as which the false romanticism set it up.
Naturally, if there were no bait, fish wouldn't bite. Drugs, advertised alcohol, spirits where there is no nutritive wine. Plenty of preaching but no potentialization. Ridicule of the middle class as bourgeoisie, etc. all fits in, boredom exploited. Attitude that [it is] "all part of the game" whenever one gets to bedrock re the vice of usury, snarl from the
? London School of Economics products. Really bad, not to say vicious temper of these brutes when their private beef or bone is menaced.
The insurance RACKET, yet when an insurance man with a sense of humor really says something to a banker, the banker has but one word; and that word is HUSH. First silence, then babel to drown out the reality, then daily papers of 80 pages an issue, to HIDE what can't be excluded absolutely.
Arthur Meyer said to the Compte de Paris, vot uou needt iss an agenzy, hence there was Havas. Havoc of France.
Now, say I am incoherent, say I have not given you a formal discourse. Let us be CLEAR. YOU COMPARE Laski's total program with the total program of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (without going into the sources of that document). COMPARE the two programs, and then come back and tell papa.
Oh, you want to know what I am talking about, well it is this. You get a couple of nice cultured old gentlemen, and they have lived in Oxford, and dined, and breakfasted in the shades, and they have read the so- called CLASSICS, without much curiosity, and they have not burrowed into the dirt of history, apart possibly from a few pawky bits of Latin pornography. And they are innocent as babes just born of the bearing of certain phenomena. Such, for example, as the getting rid of Latin studies, or the lowering of interest RATE, while increasing the total burden of interest to be paid.
The TOTAL going mainly to a very few, and strictly NON-patriot, non- national centres, whereas the lower rate of interest merely lowers the political potential of what is left of the responsible class that used to govern England nationally, instead of as a HED [? ] company for high Jewry. These points escape you, and you and the nice old gents, neither of 'em having read the Protocols, DO NOT recognize the symptoms of
? Laski. You fail to see what he is up to, and HOW exactly it fits into the program of high kikery.
That is your sorrow, or somnolence. You have heard that they are a forgery or a plagiarism, and you haven't stopped to ask what they are a forgery or plagiarism OF.
God know they are not pleasant reading. They are heavy, no style, very dull, but do you know what is in 'em? Have you looked at Lord Sydenham's preface? Naturally not, that is, very few of you have, and so when Laski starts being clever you DO NOT see what he is aiming at you fail to detect the point of his aim, which of course he will deny; I mean he will swear blue, green, and pink that his aim is other.
But watch him.
#55 (July 13, 1942) U. S. (B68) DARKNESS
You are in black darkness and confusion. You have been hugger- muggared, and carom-shotted into a war, and you know NOTHING about it. You know NOTHING about the forces that caused it, or you know next to nothing.
I am in the agonized position of an observer who had worked 25 years to prevent it. And I am not the only observer who had so striven.
Apparently NO man could prevent it, that is up to the point that it was not prevented. A belief in destiny does NOT necessarily imply a belief that we have NO duty, that we should NOT attempt to learn, that we should sit supine before age-old evil.
? Given a little more knowledge, given the elimination of a small number of shysters, the war need not have happened.
Well, Europeans who ought to have known more than American farm boys got toppled into it BECAUSE they were ignorant. Books may sell 15 editions in 40 years without penetrating the mind of a nation. Some things that I say are NOT new, but I believe they are all necessary to knowin' which way the wind blows. You have got to learn some things or die, got to learn some things or perish.
All purchasing power does NOT come from labor, shysters try to live on the part of purchasing power that does not, that does NOT come from labor.
There is enough of purchasing power based on labor, and on labor only, to RUN all the culture, to keep up all studies, arts, all the amenities, the good life in toto. The extra purchasing power does NOT create these things, it corrodes them. It does NOT create what makes life fit to live, it attacks it. It spoils it. It rots it.
A thousand years of European thought went to makin' what is best in life as we know it, or as we HAD known it before the last two outbreaks of bellicosity.
As outbreaks they were NEEDED, needed to bust the fog, the stink, the fugg, the chains of monopoly. There was NO intellectual need of the liberation being conducted by cannon, tanks and machine guns. That is to say, human stupidity and chickenheadedness were so dense and so wafty that without the explosive publicity humanity evidently would not understand, and would not even turn its attention to the roots of the evil. Europe is fightin' for the good life, the shysters are fighting to prevent it. Even British minorities are muddleheadedly gettin' obstinate over some phases of the amenities. The decent English fight or urge others to fight in the name of a few amenities. I admit that the public voice in Britain
? pretty well keeps off of this topic. But there is a squashy, soft, vague underlyin' feelin' in England that something would get lost if the Axis licks 'em.
That view is an error. There is MORE sense of the good life in Italy than in England. England don't know it. England does NOT know the good life in Italy. Italians are different. They even criticize one another.
Talk of organization, I mean to talk of organization. BUT there is no use organizin' till you know what you organize FOR. You ought to organize against world-wide sabotage, sabotage of everything that makes life fit for human being and for a sense of justice. Sense of justice corroded for decades. Corrosion gets in its work LARGELY because people don't know, and fear is begotten of IGNORANCE. WHAT are you fightin' for? Fightin' for the congressional system? Fightin' for parliamentary system? I doubt it. Democracy? What do you mean by democracy?
A man might fight for justice. Many men fight from greed . . . not their own greed. Fight from instinct. That's O. K. up to a point. Fight for survival, that's health. Man ought to fight for survival, and for RACIAL survival.
