I think it was early in his career that Pound wrote his essay, ‘I gather the limbs of Osiris’. And if I remember correctly, it predicated the development of the Cantos, that personal summa of world culture. I use Pound as a pivot and a whipping post. While he acts as one of the epitomes of the turn from the modern to modernism or the neo-modern, he also tells us the reality that culture has fallen apart and we have to find our own way. Every artist or thinker has always postulated his or her own lineage. But, while we face a new renaissance, in which every developed urban culture – particularly the Asian cultures – now become part of the cultural mix, just as the Rome and Greece of antiquity were raised up and adopted into the European culture during the Renaissance as the humanistic response to the church, we now face the profound cultural disintegration that we desperately try to mask by such artifices as ‘postmodernism’. So now the postulating of a lineage becomes almost as much an art as the penetration of the craft itself to its creative core. Or rather, the two acts are one. The god lies dismembered and strewn about – our ishta deva or personal deity – this and that from our own, mixed in with the carnage of all others. Finding the creative core of the craft is finding the self in the forms of the world – today, a derelict heap.