… to have made a start …
“Benito, there was soldier
& a statesman, understd. Art
Economics
& Poetry of his kind
which is in the proper balance —
non crede
né alla possibilità
né all’utilità della
pace perpetua.
Kilt of course
& they like to have kilt me the same — “
Wrong, all wrong, wrong from the start…
But to have made a start, at any rate,
to have had a vision…
A thirty years fury,
China and Pisa conflated,
Jefferson and Mussolini conflated,
H. Adams and Odysseus,
Hell in England,
Satan in Usura, —
To be
To be the stone
To be the stone that splits the in-rushing tide,
And was, some would say he was like that stone —
on which many a foot would stumble,
which could not bear the weight of being builded with,
which, having been spit out from the earth,
returns to earth —
Of such stone, to make Paradise —
Paradise!
Always it comes to this notion of Paradise —
To make Paradise, or “a paradise,” any Paradise,
it is necessary to have had a vision,
it is necessary to have had some plan in mind
And to find Paradise (or any Paradise), it is necessary to walk a long road,
for Paradise is not close by,
and Paradise is not given easily,
it is not a thing given —
For Paradise exists already
and Paradise must be builded;
Paradise must be discovered, and
Paradise must be invented also.
In this it is like a mystery.
O,
it is very like a mystery.
Image: Hieratic head of Ezra Pound, by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (ca 1914); photograph by Jim Killock, published under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0) license.
Bag of Anything 
Out concept of Paradise is such a polyvalent memeplex, isn’t it. Originating from a Middle Eastern ideal of a lush garden — maybe even hunting grounds — amidst mostly arid surroundings, it’s now symbolic of something aspired to, a holy grail of place or being.
It’s also inextricably mixed up with that myth of a Golden Age, a perfect existence that we can get back to if only we are actively fighting or opposing, or destroying and then building.
And it’s all a chimaera, of course — all we, the human race, can look forward to (if we survive that long) is … entropy.
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(from Canto LXXIV)
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