The Mortgage

Though it has taken me some time, I have come to the conclusion that the theme of craftsmanship against usury is fundamental, not just to Pound's poetics, but to all poetry. Originally, we owned "the house of being" outright.

But something happened, some arch "bank" got into it and established a separation of credit and creation (finance and production). This involved also an alienation from death, which is why Lorca insists that true creativity occurs only in the proximity of death. It is a romantic notion to be sure, as Jonathan warns, but I think that it is exactly in the proximity such kitsch that art is produced. Good art must be produced at the risk of kitsch. (Something Flarf, if I may bring it up again, seems keenly sensitive to.)

This post is really just an attempt to tell a bad joke. If the duende is the true "master of the house", the "real owner", if Dasein seeks the event of its own appropriation, its authentic moment of coming into its own, the moment when I own what is, in each case, always already mine, and if this moment comes only in the face of the "ownmost possibility" of my being, i.e., of my death (in each case to be appropriated without being actualized) then my inauthenticity, my alienation, the real kitsch of my ideal craft, is the measure of my death, the gauge with which I plumb the depth of my dying, my dead pledge, my mortgage.