The Mindless Glories by J.W. Aime

An Epic Tale
Canto 1

Language collapse, 2003
But it's happened before, countless times
From one annihilation to the next

Still there are actions to do, to make
There's kill & torture & rape
As she wriggles her slim waist
In vain to escape control.

I press
Eat & swallow kidney stones
The result, a punctured bladder.

Look away, look away: gasoline
Burns, computers whirr
And electricity turns.

The most beautiful world order is a heap of dust
said Heraclitus, kallistos kosmos, dick cheyney
Know it all egghead turned dangerous
And harmful to the so-called Republic

With service to capital the main game
Logos grows on its own
Plouton the god of death and wealth
Collects his deposits like the world bank.
Its capital structure of fraudulent accounting
A confidence game of appearances
Videt 2008
Works its dance of life and death,
The laws, the aroma around the cafes
Of Europe and America.
War the master of gods and slaves
The impotent rage of Achilles
Who longed to be nobody
Toils the dirt of the land on an unknown farm.
But the king, the regis men came to take
Its prerogative and your money’s no good
Rich prince in the end
While weird perverts in a billion dollar
Holding company--bankers--calculate the last penny
And its potential for increase

If they don’t want to fuck you in the ass,
Lassie, they’ll spend the night
Count up their money

2.
All the nice Americans enjoy a good life
on a cool spring afternoon, kids out of school,
moms still in boots and skirts and bikes,
strollers, bare skinny legs, dads and boys
and meanwhile tax debts are blown
to smithereens elsewhere for purposes
best left formulated in slogans like freedom,
democracy, liberation. So one entertains
cosmological questions as if it were possible
to form any intimation of any value
better than the great moral and political
philosophers of our time,
Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, boys
schooled in the paranoid vision of Henry
Kissinger and Leo Strauss
Preen like stuffed poppies and peacocks
with their armour of power, Arnheim
success, imbeddedness, perverts
with smiling faces useless to all
but the priests of capital. Fools
Are serious men with serious ideas
formed and shaped by
delusions of grandeur and fear.

In New York City, village cops grimace
and walk the streets; residents prefer small dogs,
people just want to live in pleasure,
unnoticed except in the way
they make consumer choices.
False optimists kill the world,
in the global security state,
make a cowardly new world,
stepford wives in fairfield county connecticut.
Petronius Arbiter's perception of corruption,
the visible sheen of power,
completely unquestioned and uncontested
Imperial bureaucracy
Pleasures of the moment
Her face is money in a crooked compact mirror
held in the manicured fingers
of a borderline desperate girl
as she checks her makeup,
8:30am.

3.
David and Paul—s&m best buddies
Dream of command and control
Force majeure,
The most dangerous game,
War, and the hunting of men
The constant battle score
Of winning & not winning
Humiliation and the pleasure
as someone labors beneath me
As parent to child
Discipline to indulgence

The secret lives of policemen,
In plainclothes, they only feel
comfortable with each other,
not even their families,
separate from and circumspect of the public.
Auctoritas granted by the symbol of the uniform.

Spring foreshadows the penultimate future
Sunlight streams at higher and higher an angle
But the winter men do not disappear,
They do not fade away
But continue to poke out their long
Bony limbs to harvest the lambs.
Grandfathers, the rule of the elders,
Stultify the future.

Habet and musica splenum
Look out on saltwater
Where oceans meet rivers
And human beings build cities
Of such splendor and size
Yet such little men live their lives
And rule their wives
And govern their cities
Money lenders
Like whore master pimps
Incomparable to dog breeders
And the hum and roar and drum
Of motor and engine whisper of oil
And energy and centuries, no
Millenia of naval engineering
And vigils of tidal waterways
From here to the Red Sea
And Mesopotamia. So you work and you
Slave confused and scattered
Your energy and juices flow
For the crumbs and cakes
And kidneys that your city
And its masters come to dribble like spittle
Of a language long dead and forgotten
By all but a few stultified scholars, heat
Their frail bodies smoking stoves
In wooden rooms 'cross the wide
Oceans and the phrases flutter by
Like particles of dust in gray and smoke
And fog and there's someone’s attempt
Someone’s effort to set a foundation
And point it to the sky and touch
It perhaps or at least indicate God
As if that mattered
But he’s too mysterious
Remote and closed and nonexistent
To make any difference to your
Poor petty plight, too removed
From your lust and desire and anger
Wrath and rage and military might.
No, there isn’t a god for you or for you
Or for you to find consolation,
And meaning and purpose.
A feeling of justice or mere justification,
An opinion you hold dear.

The mindless glories
Erupt, disrupt reveries of rapture
Bankrupt bankers impoverish nations
And heap up feces into piles of majesty
Erecting a new world order, kallistos kosmos,
So beautiful its dazzle blinds our eyes


4.
If language is an ocean,
Who are the people I see
On the streets? In war
Success breeds contempt
The more to protect
The more pressing the cage.
The champions of the field
Field deep resonant voices
Resound like heralds trumpets
Messages come from puppets flicked
By madmen, perverts, paranoid religion
Seekers—inhuman, man, woman and child
Fear not they lack god and power but
Their own bodies and estates
Of acreage so numerous they will never have it all
Even now the locals trespass, play
Dangerous games of hunting and humiliation.
Who feels the need to sequester
Himself on 70,000 acres, a millionaire’s
House sitting in the middle of it, on a rocky hill,
Where his daughter’s a dyke and his wife his high school
Sweetheart—recruit, command and control
None of them know to where they are heading.

War, the hunting of men, corralling them like wild horses
Then killing them or blowing them up. But killing is madness for them, not an art or a skill, but a mass production process, a game of trigger fingers and false patriotism of old men who’ve reached for what they’ve grasped and whose women have stood by them and whose children hate them and love them and imbibe the air of nationalism. The fatherland, the motherland, the homeland the dominance and subjugation—who will eat my dust—I ask Jesus and Abraham as if some old book held the answers that are held in no other book, the dirty words of translated Latin and Hebrew and who knows what and all the while the blood continues to gush, like a journalist’s mouth who fills up and chokes then swallows down the draught his dream to serve the masters of nothing.

Stupid blonde cunts leave their cum splotched all around the place, on the couches, the sheets, the towels, feeling entitled to have others wipe up their fertility, safe and secure that the powerful will love them and if they can pay to fuck them, ok, or strip for money or maybe get married to a successful banker or an artist or rock star, yet that’s now a joke, as only egghead and his texas fag boys get the dime now to fuck the cow cunts of their loud mouthed but cowed christian wives.

Glory’s whores accept better pay like the boys and the men who come to texas and New York from mexico to work and send federal reserve notes back home thinking as we all do we’re storing value when where just lending and extending credit, belief, faith, to the rich old eggheads who sit atop midasian piles of croesus’ wealth, gold and jewels and paper promises—whatever it is—the name of God being papered over and again proving that he does not exist except as a blank slate that anal man splatters with his twisted desires and fears and some hoarse rabbinical cry as if time didn’t exist and babies were born out of nothing and gods in our imaginations didn’t cackle and groan and flatulate seeking nothing but eternal festivities ready to eat man on a stick or spear like shit.

The mindless glories: dick ch---- fucking his wife lynn up the ass but then he gets so excited he’s having a vision of his future as one of the numbskulls brought in as a slave to the power elite of nothing, the magical realm of mammon by which you collect wealth like it’s shit and wield the levers of power in paranoid secret places all the while cry to jesus on Sunday and probably really pray, hope and pray that you’re right after all, morally, you’re justified, deserving of the storehouse of goods you so cluck for and he sticks it up her cunt from behind and keeps having the vision and on that night conceives his offspring furthering the animal existence of dick cheney.

Hatred for the mindless glories excites the poet, but does not relieve the suffering, why should it, no sympathetic leanings, human pathos. The mindless glories, victory of vanity and the success that answers all arguments and the animal happiness specific to humans sets in. War, the tipping point, the moment of uncertainty, wherein the unexpected reveals itself, as in any event, the movement goes on, you don’t always trip and fall. So the bastards win, chalk one up for the fasces, whether they’re the good guys or the bad guys strictly a matter of us or them. The fascist assholes suck everything into themselves and the mindless glories unroll.

Magic power—youthful spring
April the cruelest, the most cruel
Black night rich fecund as death
And fertilizer, manure the
Earth, the fields, to the woods
Where the blue quail nest.
Civilized man, educate your city
But I won’t be surprised
When you launch upon the sea
To destroy yourself
In comedy. Lacking knowledge,
Acting kings, ignoring
Perception—simple—instead
Feeding the flowers of opinion
Flourish and bloom
In the city of man’s
Make
poetry
According to laws
Divined by nature and ideas
But each miscalculation
Failed understanding,
Ignored perception leads
The city further astray
Until lost in the woods
Mired in some dark
Unknown night or at sea,
In mountainous wood
In the desert bleak
We stumble and grope rely
On intelligence, resource
And organization and prevail
We shall but another
Part inside collapses
Emptiness instills itself,
Watch yourself,
In yet another compartment.

Move it, Dick, the numbers, man, the numbers. They must pile up. The numbers aren’t adding up! What do you think this is, a math problem with a gold star for the right answer? It’s a business. The only right answer is more, more results, the bottom line. Do it.

The Mindless Glories

Canto 2

Language becomes disposable

The slight murmur whirrs through a room,

a whisper, a whistling shuttle clicks,

vibrates, hums, the beats per second

varying pitch and tone, like a radio

you can barely hear

unless you tune your ear to its bandwith,

a buzz just audible,

bagpipes in the distant mountain pass.

schoolchildren two blocks away,

shout at the top of their lungs,

becomes the chatter of socialites in the next room,

but the sound twirls through the atmosphere

enters your ear canal, strikes the tympanum

and the sound registers in your mind once, twice. . . .

Your eyes flicker, come alive in a spark

from a dull glaze, deadened, blinded, the worn-out state

of having seen enough, the mind numb from processing it,

organizing it, the tragedy, the comedy, the philosophy,

the sarcasm, cynicism, irony, surprise, logical articulation,

sonorous nonsequiturs, and the bombs let loose over cities

and the hypocrisies of the homeland residents

who like to think that the good is simple and true like them.

When I worked for the rich, they handed me money.

The fire burns up, leaves a crisp corpse,

scattered by the breeze as the sun heats the air,

pushes it eastward to the sea

evaporates and condenses moisture,

the ocean stretches, reaches, lies lovingly there

and the wind blows cooler, drier over the plains.

There’s a fetid swamp to the west,

a cursed land of riches and uncounted wealth,

carpeted by black oil extract,

pebbled over for personal transportation,

and on the seaboard, in a drained wetland,

sit the façade of buildings of accumulated capital,

a couple of handfuls of generation of fresh starts, ingenuity,

can-do mercantile exploitation of opportunities and resources,

land, forest, pasture, livestock, men, slaves

men, natives, men, savages, the women either whores

or high-priced whores from back East

and religious zealots to make the common fate that much the worse.

Meanwhile, three hundred years later,

language has become disposable,

like everything man and woman make,

the best thing generated from sperm and egg

what logos spills forth from the jaws of children

grown wild while the first class customers cross legs

not in knitted, but white sweat socks, sneakers, sweatpants,

soberly scan news of corporate America

in the wall street journal while baby boomer hippies clutch surfboards

and scowl at the immigrants think

that nature and nurture have gone wrong

somehow and only a god can save us now

and death is not such a bad thing

but certainly not a good thing

and he is so lonely and of course

there is nothing good enough to write

home about, while his father sits blind,

terrified, unable to walk or hear as the bombs drop

and the people go out for a walk on concrete

cluttered with garbage and the wrecked detritus of the global marketplace.

Language becomes disposable, everything is made to be consumed,

then piled in a heap, like newspapers, and letters to shareholders

and press releases and official statements, reports,

documents warehoused in libraries,

in file cabinets, then filed in Macintosh or Dell servers,

like tube high fidelity receivers

sit one to another in rows of thousands,

electricity dances through integrated circuits,

flips off and on, pulses a million times a moment

and then racing through fiber optic cable from here to Canada

Beijing then Calcutta, Baghdad, Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, London and back,

forget about Africa where evolutionary biologists think we all came from

who cares about that when all we can think of is….

and our mother? To slip the dagger in the sheath once more,

an old CEO warrior in his sixties and the twenty-nine year old

gold digger, class of ‘69, wants what? To marry him?

Just stand around and look good and love him

for what he can do for you and you for him?

Moral virtue, yes, that tired-out bitch,

well just listen to the Marquis de Sade,

what he has to say about that old maid,

clucking away and frittering like an ice pick

twirls around on its tip, slashes through the ice,

waits for the champagne to cool,

Rupert Murdoch gets a blowjob one more time,

and the money is secured like a shot of freezer cold vodka

and a young junior leaguer, a comer, brags to her friend

and the older ladies about a park

restoration project, digging up buckets of dirt

wheel barrows in wood chips,

stands around, tall and lanky

wonders what they’re doing this for,

I don’t even live in this neighborhood,

but my husband works at the bank.

The classic struggle in America,

New York City,

we’re too entranced and enthralled to the thought of sex

money, drugs, making it,

securing the conveniences of life and oh yes

the children our children our future,

the jungle gym, the jungle of the american ideology,

you hope, brother, and sister, that it holds up

at least till you’re dead and gone.

Class struggle on the fat of the land

or the flat of your ass,

Dead and gone and left,

who’s left around here to walk these hard streets—

oh the empty country, let’s pave it over

and get old Walton in here, drive, baby drive,

burn the gasoline, pollute the river, the fish,

who cares, the trout, they’re dead already,

except a few tucked away here or there,

but oh I guess it’s not that bad around here

and there the state stocks the streams every spring,

oh yes, the boys and old faggot hillbillies cruising

in beaten up old pick-up trucks, bodies long gone

to decades of eating at MacDonalds and working,

working, no one has a job that pays much of a cent,

just hope the property boom keeps resounding

I hear this is the Hamptons of the Catskills.

Media softened brains, fatted with information,

and the saws of old wisdom just don’t seem to have any point or edge,

so they don’t pierce or cut. What’s needed are explosives,

a cutting edge is useless now, except for close-in fighting

of course. A small pistol, a canon.

But now, the big guns are needed,

bombs dropped from planes,

money dropped from helicopters.

Meanwhile, at the mall, teens ride elevators, reading Musil,

and Esquire, but wait, Esquire sucks now,

there’s only the new jork times to read now,

liberals across the country scouring it for interpretations,

listening to NPR for what to do, what to think,

while drink coffee and wait on the weekend,

secretly suspect and, later, around the barbecue,

admit there’s nothing they can do

but hope to keep paying the mortgage.

Parmenides translation by W. J. Aime

Parmenides translation
by W. J. Aime, 2004-2006


1.
Horses, mares, carry me and send me as far as my heart desires.
Driving me on, they come to the famed road of the goddess
Who bears knowledgeable men through all towns and cities.
And there was I brought, for there did those sharp-sighted horses carry me,
Straining the chariot, virgins leading the way.

The axle blazing in its sockets whirred the song of distant pipes,
Spun by twin circles on either end, and then sun-bleached maidens,
hastening to send me into the light, left behind the house of Night,
their hands brushing aside the veils from their heads.

And there stood the gates of the paths of Night and Day
Framed by beam above and threshold of stone below.
These gates, high in the air, were closed by heavy doors
Whose interlocking bars the vengeful goddess Justice guards.
And the maidens coaxed her with sweet sounding speeches
And cunningly persuaded her to push aside the bars from the gates.

The opening of the doors created a gaping chasm
As pins of bronze turned in hinges on both sides,
Fastened down by bolts and rods. Through this opening, holding a straight course
The virgins led the chariot and the horses down the way.


And the goddess greeted me kindly, taking my right hand in hers,
And spoke the following words: O, Youth,
Accompanied by immortal charioteers, you come to my house,
With horses bearing you. Welcome; it is not ill fate that has sent you forth on this road
Far from the path of human beings, but it is right and just.
You must learn everything, both the unshaken heart of well-rounded truth,
As well as the opinions of mortals, even though therein lies no credible truth.
Nevertheless, this too you will come to understand: the things that seem to be,
It's right that they all seem to be interconnected with each other.




2.
Come then and I will tell you, and you hear it and take it into account,
these are the only two ways of inquiry to grasp with the mind,
one, the road of being, on which there is no “is not;”
it is the path of Trust, for it leads to revelation.
the other way is the road of non-being that says it's right for there to be an “is not,”
this road, I will point out to you, is untrustworthy, a dead end,
for neither can you think that which is not, for it cannot be grasped by the mind,
nor can you point it out.

3.
For to be and to think is the same thing.

4.
Look, no matter how far something is, to the mind it is securely present.
For you will not cut the hold of being from being,
As it is neither scattered everywhere throughout the cosmos
Nor something holding itself together.

5.
…it's all the same to me
wherever I start, for I come to the same point over and over again.

6.
The right thing is both to say and to think that which is.
For it is being, but what is not is nothing. This I urge you to see for yourself.
That is the first path of inquiry which I warn you from (the path of what is not),
Yet there is another, on which mortals know nothing
They wander in vain, like doppelgangers. Clueless, their twittering minds
Rush around their breasts; they are pushed around
Deaf and blind, completely stupefied, an uncritical mass,
To whom being and not to be name the same thing
And not the same thing, a path that turns everything back on itself.

7.
For do not ever dare that what is not is,
But keep your thought away from this road of inquiry,
And do not let habit, with its wide experience, force you down this road
To trudge with dull eye and an echoing ear and tongue.
Instead, use the power of speech to discern this much contested argument,
Launched from my arsenal.

8.
There is but one road left to account for, the road of “it is.”
And there are many signs for it: without beginning, indestructible,
For it is whole, motionless, and without end.
There is no past and there is no future, since it is now all the same,
One, continuous, for what birth could you seek for?
How and from what could it grow? Nor will I allow you to say or think
That it came from what is not, for it is neither sayable nor thinkable
That what is not is. And what necessity would start it
Earlier or later, beginning from nothing to grow?
Thus it is right that either it is completely or not.
Nor is there any reliable force in saying that from being
There comes to be some other thing besides being
For why would Justice loosen her fetters and let anything
Be generated or destroyed instead of holding fast?
On these things the decision comes down to this:
It is or it isn't.
(etc.)

thefacultyformakingmoney

…the faculty for ‘making money,’ as it is called, that is to say, the instinct that leads to accumulation on the part of a few, is absolutely necessary to the comfortable subsistence of the many. Disparity in the possession and direction of capital is apparently necessary to its effective use.

--Edward Atkinson, The Industrial Progress of the Nation, (New York, 1889,) 111: in J. Livingston, Origins of the Federal Reserve System, (Cornell Univ. Press, 1986, 54.)

You borrow as much money as you can, and they you borrow more, but it’s not in your name; you externalize the debt to the corporate entity.--Mark Price, 2009

1.

Mark Price pulls a steel handle, jerks open the heavy glass door, and steps into a gray building where his father, Bill Price, is dying, in Edison, New Jersey. The long halls are carpeted in dull gray and pale purple; they muffle his step; glowing yellow walls painted with floral images, white ceilings and soft white light streams from flattened spheres hanging from pewter rods. He turns the corner past the family room and down the west wing to the room his father’s in.

--How are you? He just stared with hollow eyes.

I was cynical, he said, picking up the story in his mind, as it occurred to him, about what we had done at American International, I didn’t really believe in it, but we did it to get ahead, to make money, and now it doesn’t matter. I used to think it mattered and I tried to pass that on to my son, you, the importance of winning the game that’s being played, and to do that you have to know what the game is. But now my son, I’d be able to tell him all this. I wanted to be accepted by him. Now, look at me. And Jane, does she still hate me? I probably fucked her over yes in a way, but I had to at the time, it was my happiness on the line, but did I ever end up hating Gertrude, that bitch. Hell, the two of them together are getting all of me, however much that is. But the money, I don’t care about it anymore. They care about it, they have to. It’s for the living, not for the dead. All virtually my money is gone.

--You’ve made it this far.

The one thing I learned from my father, the great lesson: make money. Ben Franklin. Business and thrift. Innovation. Marketing. What does that make me? My mother did get money from him, but not much. All the money was pissed away in legal fees, personal liability insurance, and now the insurance company is bankrupt, for the India disaster. I’ll take what’s left, and then what my mother had left over when she died. But Gertrude, his second wife walked away with the rest. But what is money worth today with financial inflation, you need so much of it just to take a shit if you expect to wipe your ass indoors.

--O the bankers on Wall Street. We were the trough they fed on, pigs eating pussy. Fiduciary obligation, they called it, self interest, financialization. They sold us the dream of ever greater return. But business operators need someone with confidence to front the money to get the ball rolling. Now the banks own the property. And they’re leveraged thirty forty times to other people, and those people are thinking, what the fuck, they owe me money, debt, legal obligation, and the banker is thinking, what happens if he doesn’t pay it back? Kick the can down the road. Steinman’s company: American Can Company. And war is trying and failing to ignore someone in the room you’re stuck with, you hate, but there he is. Political Science. Global Vision. Cyclops. Global Poly. For me, the move to Danbury, following the accident, the tragic events, in India; the evolution of my function at the company, from engineering management to policy writer, over the course of a couple of years. Policy is language as an evaluating process. The company imploded, which was not my fault. After all, I had saved—well, helped save the company. Wasn’t that the genesis of me taking on the new policy role? When Steinman raided us later, we were vulnerable, conditions converged to make us victim of our own success. The amount of money he put up was vast, and he seemed to have unlimited leverage from Drexel, we just couldn’t keep up with the new financing structures, all that debt, how could we have seen it coming? We didn’t understand what was going on. You could borrow that much money? From whom? Chemical, Manufacturer’s Hanover? Drexel? And with our legacy costs, all those costs, all those plants I helped plan and design way back when fifty years ago and run and manage, the result of all that effort and work, they were now just liabilities, entities devaluing. They still threw off profit, but in the whole it wasn’t enough. It was confusing at the time, but in the end, looked at pragmatically, you defer to whatever works, you don’t argue with success—it’s words and rationalizations against money—and I personally did quite well, as I said, in the end, for a guy who started with next to nothing; my parents owned their house; like I said, by middling standards I was a rich man—but now I am almost dead and almost broke, not that it matters now, being in here—so yes I became a rich man, it took my whole life. Whatever you get, whatever you do, it takes everything you’ve got. How many years was I there, at the company, American International Management and Chemicals? I can’t count them now. Twenty-five? So yes I made it through even though I never was the top guy at the company, always reported to Warren and I did get a piece of the buy-out, a large sum of money; of course Warren got more, when we were taken over by Global Vision, and in the end I was happy to get out; I had had enough and the business was changing beyond recognition. But we believed in what we were doing, and that’s important, isn’t it, belief in what you’re doing? Making substances that people needed, not just marketing an image or creating new ways of financing ourselves. I can accept it. The world changes. It’s not up to me to like it or not. There was a new generation, a paradigm shift. We benefited from the previous regulatory environment, but when the rules change, newer companies come up and develop within the new framework, and older companies, unless they can change essentially, like Global Vision has, well they are operating according to an old paradigm. It’s not evil, no it’s just cyclical change, creative destruction, you know, Kraw? Are you there?

--It’s Mark. Your son.

--Where’s Kraw?

--I don’t know.

--That’s what he always said. What a thing is depends on where you’re standing looking at it, from how far, in what light, at what angle. I couldn’t stand him. Then the lawyers came, clustering around the disaster like true professionals. They were making money at it. Antos, Kraw, was just occupying space, claimed he was accumulating knowledge: harmless, innocent. But the lawyers you couldn’t ignore. We fought them at the beginning, undermining the foundation of their claim, not just on the matter of culpa, but the entire foundation of their class certification. They tried to file a class action, but we disputed the basis of the existence of the class—how could all these people, the victims, be a class? There was no real class characteristic, just a hodgepodge mass of individuals jumbled together by the American lawyer who came in on his own to hit us. Sure they all lived in the vicinity, but it was a shanty town, terrible health conditions there, you could never prove. . . . They all had individual health conditions, circumstances. Yes, there was an event. And this collection of people claim they got sick. But the cause hasn’t been determined. The effect, well, that’s uncertain too. If the cause is undetermined, you can’t rightfully talk about a logical cause, can you? With such a perforated causal relationship, we argued that to allow the class certification, whether eight hundred or two thousand—we had numerous class actions filed against us before finally the whole thing was gathered together into a single class action, which we still dispute, though the liability belongs to Global now, but the principle of the matter, is there any such class—we’re still arguing that in court to this day as far as I know but really I don’t know what’s going on with it anymore, as you can imagine, in here, and I guess it doesn’t matter anymore at least to me. We fought every single individual’s right to be a member of the class. They’re still arguing it. I’m out of the game now, retired, thank you, now I’m here, waiting to die. Am I happy about it? What can I do?

When we moved to Danbury, Mark was fourteen at the time, so he didn’t know the full context of what was happening, but he did grasp the moral context. What could we do? The situation we were in, the state of affairs which we found ourselves enmeshed; Jane and I—there were already states of affairs on which we didn’t see eye to eye, but how can you ever, I mean, different people see things differently, don’t they? How can you expect two people to see things in the same way? Let alone a man and a woman. But because of the crisis, we pulled together for what was it, six more years, after that though it was costly, for both of us, because through the trajectory of events, we already had pierced the illusion of our images of each other, so we perceived each other’s hypocrisies intimately, not regarding the quotidian matters but on this larger scale. She supported me and the company so thoroughly I lost the last remnant, as I said, of respect for her, not only seeing her as fundamentally deceitful but also loving me or not loving me but supporting me morally and emotionally even though we both knew it was an evil thing; or not evil, but just unfortunate, a misfortune, even a tragedy. Then over the next couple of years I grew to hate her, and she knew it and she had already started to feel contempt for me, so when the crisis passed, I got a large pay out and had already met Gertrude.

The problem with my wife wasn’t simply that we both knew we were lying, but that we came to know that lying was merely a general case for all the obscuring, diverting attention away from certain facts, prioritizing certain other facts, ridiculing and dismissing facts that did not support our side, and of course, simply denying the most basic facts. The truth of lying came out between Jane and me. I saw she was depicting the facts in just the way I had to see them, the morality of the situation framed in complete perspective and for all my thoughts on enlightened self-interest, most of which I didn’t even bother to share with Warren, that would be too hypocritical, but my staff, yes, everyone knew that though the basic narrative of the facts was true, we were basically engaged in an effort to shape the outcome, legally, pragmatically, empirically, consequentially, as a matter of corporate policy, of what had happened and what would happen, which we didn’t succeed in, when the company was acquired by one of our main competitors, which was exactly what we were trying to avoid for years, though, it must be said again, the landscape of the business had shifted, financially. But the whole affair was difficult. Of course we were pragmatists. What else could we be? We wear the clothes that fit us and fit the situation to get things done.

Now I’m ready to die. Jane and Gertrude were both bitches, but otherwise, who the hell marries some neurotic basket case? They were both pragmatic let me tell you why type of American women and I can’t believe I survived them, maybe that’s poetic justice, made life hell for them, I gave everything I had, but not more than I took, but now, there’s no one around to take care of me, I can’t hardly move a goddamn part of my body, dick just leaking out piss with a tube stuck in it, my son, he comes to visit but just sort of clicks his tongue and nods and sighs sympathetically; I know he cares, and I guess that’s the best I or anyone can expect.

What I did, I saved our asses during the India disaster. He helped his company survive the worst chemical disaster in history. I got a seat at the board for four years and management for fourteen, served as chief policy writer at the end, and sold the company to a major competitor for a god damned good price. For all that, the main thing was to keep a cool head. It’s all psychological, after the event, and you have to go on, I mean, survival is the thing, isn’t it? And during the crisis times, that becomes clear again and again. To thrive you’ve got to survive and to us that meant, at the time, one specific thing, stop the beating we were taking to our public image, threatening to bring the whole company down, stock price dropping, we had to transform it into an opportunity, you know what that means, the value of the company was in play, and you better bet our competitors were watching that. But all that seems ancient history, never went to visit India, no thanks, it’s not like I did it, no, but I did clean up the mess--the meaning of karma, cleaning up someone else’s mess—and yes like I’m saying we took responsibility, bit it’s not like it’s my fault; I’m indemnified damn it, the corporation paid for it, how many millions, four hundred and twenty million god damn dollars all right? And I’m sorry but we can’t go on paying and paying, we had to move on, that’s life, after a disaster, and we did, we moved on, yes, I felt horrible, that’s what I’m saying, but the story goes on, life goes on, we have to pick up the pieces and move forward, we.... There’s nothing like having circumstance work out for you, in fact, that’s what we do all day, all our lives, fight and try and strive and contrive to make things work out, makes you happy and satisfied, but it’s not easy, and it doesn’t just happen on its own, of course, you have to shape it, the sequence of events, your life. But it’s good in the end, a new inflow of investment, another layer of funds. I know they shot the dollar, turned it into toilet paper, but so what? The system works, doesn’t it? You’ve got your Fiat cars in the past, remember when they came out? Wasn’t it around that time? The Italians, they’re funny, you should hear my son, Mark, talk about them; he’s in corporate security. And then your life just goes by, day in day out and then one day they say you’re dead, history has passed you by, but not really, because your life was history. Nixon, Reagan, Clinton. Bush. What a sequence of names. Caesar, Brutus, Augustus, Cicero, look and you can see the system, the logic and architecture of the social networks and that’s it.

Earlier that day, Mark Price walked to his car in the city before driving to see his father in the nursing home. It’s winter, but not particularly cold. The early morning newspaper readers and heroin dealers along with the old tai chi health club circulate through the park, the heart of the neighborhood. Local economics, global media images, individuals with their personal problems—how many have gone this way? Cynics and idealogues and people getting through the day to pay their mortgages. Americans, Europeans, Japanese struggle to their office jobs to do marketing or client service or information technology management, writing code for software, copy for television, writers handle found objects and ready made plots. A corporate manager father of four makes the long strides to or near the top and then sits out his retirement in a gated community on the shores of Florida or an expensive suburb in New Jersey or North Carolina, high taxes and maintenance expenses paid to the home owners association, paid for by the pension and from investments and of course social security, the maximum, which adds a little bit of money to the bar tab—hell, he worked for it—but eventually he’s too old and sick to drink even beer, the alcohol makes his gut sick, and he putters around staggering trying to be useful. Was he a net producer or a consumer? Who is god?

What is the medium of exchange for a person’s life? An actual commodity, money, transformed into a state unit of account—it pays the bills—a notional abstraction, it must be a counting unit of something; abstract value, the abstract notion of value or exchange value, constantly in flux, like the river, in relation to all other commodities, but itself not a real commodity. What is value? Why do we value one thing over another? Because it shines and gives itself radiantly, like gold or the sun? Fiat money, though, now, based on mere credibility, confidence. System of economic exchange, all the market exchanges based on confidence, belief, that the currency holds, stores some value, some backing by some entity, authority, auctor, that has some power to enforce and regulate and adjudicate disputes perhaps by law—the law of property—and if not by law, then by force, the carry through, fulfillment of the transaction.

Account, a novel, by W. James 2009

Account
A Novel, Part Two of Money is a Language
By W. James


Credit
Part 1


The laws are lies, but the truth escapes us. Just myths, fairy tales told to children, and to the rulers--they’re children too. In fact, there are no adults, alive, just the dead. It’s a misunderstanding. We’ve just confused things, man is a political animal, and it all just flowed down a ravine like water draining a mountainside. Then the river dried up, like a cracked desert, all the trees chopped down, and they, we, killed off the people who understood. But we’re always doing that, we extinguish the ones who can see through or look away from the thickets of nonsense, bombast, the hyperbole of the market, a pricing system, a microcosm, ordered and disordered, social relations, people buying and selling, using some medium of exchange, money, words, pictures, for transactions that are collaborations, each individual bargaining for his own self-interest, collectively bringing about a common goal without--and this is the funny part, I’m laughing all the way to the bank--without even having that intention; human activity the whole business, that’s the vanity of vanities, man’s intellect, as if the great men of state or business have some grand power of comprehension, mind, purpose, that they can straighten out all the contradictions and see through the obscurities and assign a cause. What that says about my fellow man, the human drama is a texture of lies, nested one within the other, a constantly fragmenting whole, a tale told by someone, anyone, a historian or a drunk in a tavern on a Cretan seaport now left to tourists who come from the new world or England to stroll in light colored clothing from mail-order catalogs or the web, feel the Mediterranean breeze ripple on white skin along old wooden quays crusty with barnacles and rocky caverns holding cafes and restaurants as in the palm of a cracked hand of a man of the land who sits observing the global parade drinking thick black coffee bitter like unamusing musings and a glass of plain bottled water, who has left his wife and two small children for the day fourteen miles inland in a small modern cement block house built by the regional agency for economic development financed by the European import and export bank, and the man has come to look at the tourists, English girls, Americans, the Germans, and hear their barbarian voices echo as they are filing past the restaurants and shops tucked into the rocky mountain right on top of the sea for as long as there have been strangers traveling or as long as the modern economy has produced tourists.
But the naïve man thinks the laws are something more, and he is right, a table of value judgments tallied on an abacus, an interpretation of what is good, an assertion of what is virtuous, morally superior or pragmatically effective, necessary and useful, but not in the those terms, but as in Anaximander. The unlimited. The aperion. Don’t be a fool, nobody is going to know anything about what you are talking about, beyond a few students, the ones who want to be left alone in the library to read Cervantes through twice, laughing the first time, the non-stupid ones stubborn enough to become scholars, the ones who weren’t social climbers, to write for some think tank with the word freedom in its name or in law school exploiting federalism or libertarianism, thinking all the while incomprehensibly that somehow they are not serving the state, that they’re getting ahead, the ones who didn’t serve time as acolytes needing to be told that it’s okay to serve themselves and feeding the illusion that they’re one of the Ubermenschen, Nietzsche, happy to be dead, like the Epicurean gods he used to joke about, laughing at the predicament we have gotten ourselves into. Did I say we? I meant me. Every single one of us, except those of us who are pragmatists, modern day utilitarian stoics, never affected by anything, Christian fatalists or naïve believers in science and technology and the economic progress of mankind, while the gods turn their backs on us as we devolve into malicious beasts of prey and dull beasts of burden; oh yes you think you are some eagle or a hawk with your hip replacement operation, but you’re really just another ass loaded down with stone or corn or water or fertilizer. --Antos Kraw

1. Old Men Dying
It was the middle of the day in June, the sun blinding and everywhere glare reflecting off the cluttered entities within the field of vision, the light shooting every which way, and then we saw the old man across the street in front of Citibank stumble and fall.
He grasps the railing, thick iron pipes painted with thick blue paint, streaks dripping down, the color of an early night sky, propping up protective scaffolding cloaking an old brick building being repointed, the ground floor retail space, a bank gathering deposits from the plebs, dispensing fragments back to them in cash machines, leveraging ten times the rest. The old guy collapses, his knees, hips, legs rigidify, stultify, and his walker goes out from under him, flies like an angel away disappearing, exiting the scene and his ass goes backwards, his back goes down, but then suddenly his entire strength, everything that’s left in him besides the glimmer, a slip, thin skim of consciousness which then becomes fear, the remainder of his corporeal vitality and manly virtue, quickens to his hands, his wrists, thin and bony, veins thick and wiry, through his forearms up to his elbows and a sinewy whisper in his shoulders; as he grasps the railing and stops his own fall, his grip tight as necessity itself, and the tendons and ligaments and fingers harden and freeze into paralysis, but they are locked round the pipes, the railing of the scaffolding cloaking the building for its two hundred and fifty thousand dollar contract, but Citibank’s rent is twenty grand a month, so the holding company that owns it is fine, two guys from Staten Island and one of their father’s investment fund from the mob. The old guy’s elbows are cocked like chicken wings, he’s hanging, legs out in front of him, but feet still on the ground, god damn it, eyes clear as the sky. He knows what’s happening. He’s positioned like a heavy branch of a willow tree brought down by lightening or just wind, sheared from the big wide trunk, a gleaming white scar, but resting on the last, biggest, lowest branches of the old tree, hanging there, suspended, its natural grave motion stopped in time. But it would fall, inevitably, he sees it clearly. The fear that envelopes him translates into anxiety, he must not hit the ground, the concrete base, the sidewalk, under which the asphalt, under which god knows what cavernous empty vaults for water and electrical mains, pipes and wires, inflow and outflow, waste, sewage, shit and piss and juice, power, caverns and crypts, catacombs beneath the city, the dead, the water, the fire, the rats, the moist worms seeking out the mud shrouding the bedrock—he must not fall and hit the ground—because because he might get hurt, the pain, this is how it all started seven years ago, that fall in Hawaii, on vacation, his knees went, and the pain, and the getting up, could he? No he probably couldn’t, and here as in practical matters generally, probable knowledge was good enough. It’s all there is to go on until, of course, the event happens. Then knowledge is easy: you just get through it.
And I just walked over across the street and, grasping him at the armpits, helped the old man get up. O, drama, action—as a young man—and as I said, the lighting was terrific, tall summer sun bouncing off every surface. But what I’m saying is: that was me, the old man who fell, bad hip, bad knee, everything, the cartilage all dried up, lower back collapsed from sitting all day long.
The old guy fell, that was me.
He has died.
--Is that right?
Yes. It is. He’s dead. It happens to everyone, eventually. You weaken, your body breaks down, gives in to gravity, disintegration, the toxins, the wine, the bad food, even the good food, unless you devote your life to being healthy, but who has time for that, we have things to do, things we have to do, no choice, really, unless you want to end up poor and old without any material support, cushion, no social security, no nest egg; unless you become a yoga guru and live till you’re a hundred and forty.
So, as I said, I just walked over, still a young man, and helped him up. Or it could have been me, thirty or forty years ago, when I was a young man.

Two invalids used to sit together in the nursing home for ten months in Edison, New Jersey, lived two houses over from each other in Amagansett for a decade.
--It’s not just helping yourself to the goods, that’s not doing much at all. Of course, then there are all the people who don’t have anything because they have failed to understand how or that they could help themselves to the goods, just a cut of course, a sliver of the action, but yes depending on what you do you can take more or less of it.
I’m not talking about easy money or getting rich quick, here, no that’s a whole other subject. It’s painstaking, methodical, requires tenacity, discipline, creativity, and usually, a thick skin.




2. Philosophy is preposterous. All my ideas have poured out, years ago, like blood spurting from a cut artery, like a stalk scissored by the gloved hand of a suburban gardener, rough prickly nubby texture bleeding a milky spot of semen staining the plain gray suede pigskin dark brown, iodine, iron, the moisture mixing with, what, my sweat, cut this weed back, I don’t like it, it has every right to exist, grow, survive, but this is my property and hence it’s my right to exercise my will to enjoy it at my convenience, arbitrary and capricious it may be, but I obey or create my own aesthetic intuition, a vision of beauty that I have dreamt. No, it comes from without, a beauty walks by, her spread out ass I can barely remember yes here it comes the softness of the flesh, the gentle smoothness, the delicate hole, the soft fragile hair become bristly protectors but still pliable and gentle oh so gentle the inmost recess to her core.
Organic chemistry, the amygdala and the hippocampus, juices running through the limbic system of the brain buried deep within the cerebrum, where the most basic elements and primal emotions cluster like gel—fear trumps desire, desire protrudes beyond fear, reactions. Survival, reproduction, all that matters; there’s only me and mine, and everything else I don’t care about.
But this is my garden, I own this property, however small it may be or large, oh I can make it better, enlarge its borders out into the mountainside just a big hill, what else can I do? It’s do or die, and there are weeds I shall I will eradicate, handle this tool what’s it called, a little fork, use it like a lever, a shovel, stab and poke into this black, red earth, mud clumps of clay, dirt, here’s some water slithering worms and insects everything alive in this mud it’s ugly but it’s not ugly it is what is and we all come from this prime dirt my son tells me this is where we all go the impudent bastard referring to my demise as if I didn’t know about it glancing at his watch but I don’t want to think about it—what’s to think about—isn’t that Parmenides’ point—thinking and being are the same? Plato’s theory of ideas isn’t really in opposition. All the staging and displaying of this monstrosity entails what? That you can look at it and see it for what it is. The forms can be separated out by the mind temporarily to see what they are and are not and what they entail and exclude, but as you go farther, you stumble out on to the ground: each cannot be on its own. Plato’s criticism of Parmenides is a critique of his own hypothesis.
The sun is burning; the Greeks didn’t have white skin, they were deep tan, dark brown men; they’re black on red vases, Americans blinded by skin color they don’t even know it, Amerigo Vespucci, what’s that, an Italian scooter? Pericles? Socrates, Milhous Nixon, Petronius Arbiter, who cares? Old men set themselves up like authority figures, the abstract concept of the author, a little auctor, the abstract as the diminutive of the real thing.
My children maybe I pushed them too hard, my poor wife, but that’s what I can do, exert will, impose form on this inchoate mass, ouch, grimace at the pain, my back the body tinge and convulse, the body, well, try to keep it going no matter what, at the end, death and then nothing, who knows, no one really believes in Jesus, do they, except them, housewives and smiley faced men with pink skin, folly and foolishness eating away at the dead, the blood slathered around the jaws, eyes feral, pupils dilated, and they think their pure souls—innocent, but really naive—are floating up around in heaven, but down here it’s all the taste of rust, iron, the sword, the digital satellite targeting device, black spear chuckers become legislators, writers of the code of Hammurabi, then software writers, throwing stones, aiming at targets and projecting intent, Thales S.A., claiming ownership, asserting jurisdiction, the right, oh have I got something for you and don’t forget what I’m doing goddamn it, what I’m about I’ll show you, prove it, to the whole world, foolish mass of clumpy clay and soaked up dirt red like in where the men wear large hats for no reason other than showing off who’s outsmarted whom like on Wall Street, Goldman Sachs, a collection of Jews and Arabs and Indians mixed in with a few Presbyterians supposedly running things while all the Irish are over at Merrill, or used to be, my son says, the entire bunch of them regardless of who they are contriving ever new instruments but playing the oldest number game in the book, a song, I’d like to interest you in everlasting salvation, opportunity and wealth, he’s a smart ass, though, thinks he knows it all, boy, is he in for a surprise, but what do I expect in the end—you want your sons to do well, flourish, be full of success, make you feel like you’ve got something, gotta get some satisfaction out of this world, hell, even heaven, the reward for the grandfather, who’s dead before me, I don’t want to think about it, there’s nothing to think about, or maybe, maybe, that’s what you think about, the object of thought is nothing, or how and in what way being is itself nothing, oh I don’t want to go on like this abstract philosophizing, dialectics gets you nowhere—you need an interlocuter to plant ideas in and effect a reversal and recognition both together. Get right back to poking this steel stick into this muddy clay, look how shiny it is in the sun, sparkling, poke it into the ground, root out these weeds, no friends no one to talk to, I don’t have anything to say anyway and there’s no one to listen, god knows I don’t want to listen to any of these people around here, I’d rather go deaf, the deafening white noise of the English language, the old Brits, an object lesson in greed and smug superiority, a bunch of mollycoddles fucking each other to rape other people’s land, whispering lies to foolish American rulers now, but we are stuck with the language unless you bother to learn Attic or Chinese or Arabic hell even Spanish, they’re all dead in the long run, English the worst, just echoes of some logos muttered through the cooling lips of that corpse trampled under hoof but, but at least the sun is warming us up now, and what lo and behold I’m breaking a sweat. Orange spotted white and black flecked, ornamental goldfish and Japanese koi, it’s pleasurable to watch them float up and smoothly swish through the lily pads, bred for centuries to be visible, to move to the hand that feeds them, the landscaper, sure the Chinese and the Romans have been doing the same thing for centuries, western civilization, which way is west, don’t they know the globe is roughly spherical, there is no west no east but, but here we are, swinging dicks running around trying to make a living, digging up dirt on someone to sell advertising space to companies whose products you wouldn’t need if they didn’t suck your cock or your mind to get you to come and then they swallow the liquidity for will to power, my son, the banker, my daughter, writing a book on Homer, the product of sex, reproduction, well well we say to our children, try to be content, satisfied, filled to the full, but it goes against the nature of being, desire itself, eros, you’re never satisfied with what you’ve got, get rid of desire and the soul is nothing. Thales said the soul is like a magnet because it has self motion, like water. But the soul isn’t water. It’s like water. The soul in a sense reaches for being, said Aristotle in De Anima, and then it can do nothing other than imagine a picture, fantasia, an image ultimately in speech, there’s a logical relationship, I’m not the only one out here thinking these things, am I? People are reading Aristotle, right? The analytic philosophers, interpreting Aristotle’s notational Greek to fit the logic of post-imperial Britain. But who cares about the . . . educated elite, that’s the biggest joke of all, man’s vanity of vanities, his own intellect or civilization, pure silliness. A philosopher is hated by most people. No one, least of all the day’s intellectuals, cares what he is saying, obvious they dismiss it as. The future has to happen, and experience, master of fools, us, has to be digested before people will come along and say ah yes it was obvious all along what he is talking about. What’s happening now is the future. The future is no different from what is happening now, if you care to look. Like Thucydides on the great shake-up, the seismic kinesis, Aristotle’s Physics, or everyone, as any writer worth a shit saw and was saying—the sky is falling over Europe, the sky is falling, and what do you know, it turned out, it was, it did. The aristocracy of kakania in Musil. Not everyone was blind to what was happening. The sky fell. Europe destroyed itself, went bankrupt, cities bombed and firebombed, so much for the telos of western civ, left in ruins, rubble literally, then America took over and then oh happy day California in the 60s and 70s, why, you should have been there, how warm the breeze, how clear the light. I remember hanging out in the desert and in the mountains and set up camps, a hippie kids, undergrads, musicians, a couple of trailers and pick-up trucks. Drop acid in American desert, watch the sun go down and stay up all night, people playing music whenever they felt like it, and then the sun would come up all colors violet and ultraviolet and the temperature would slowly rise, steadily heat us up, but the malaise was hitting us, my generation, war dragging us down, the economy, but overall it was still expanding so if you could get close to sober, as a straight white guy or at least if you were in the closet, you could get something going, shuck and jive if you wanted to, get yourself a piece of the economy, find a group of people, get into marketing some aspect of the hip lifestyle, peace love maybe the new American way or just something that we could take pictures of, pretty girls in hippy clothes, marketing Coke or Bud, use words and pictures to sell whatever eventually just credit cards to the masses. You didn’t need hundreds of thousands of dollars, let alone millions, to get started. But while we were burning out, struggling to get to our feet, march through the trough of the business cycle, the conservatives were still there quietly putting out their magazines, young Republicans, and twenty years later they had all their ideas on television. At the time, I didn’t care—I mean, I had my pleasure, not my fill, perhaps, but that wasn’t what was at issue, you can always have a good time, anyone can, hell look at the passed-out alcoholic on the park bench, skin so dry, cracked like parched earth, a golden tan desert, his hair a tangled birds caught in a mass of clear monofilament, smell like the jungle mixed with depleted fear and sweat not sweet like some beautiful girl making love with her lover but sweet and toxic, and that’s just the surface, forget about his story, about which no one in fact cares, despite all the writers walking around this city that’s no city, a modern city, since even anyone else who arrives at the end of his rope, no one cares about his story either, or hers, maybe his sons and daughters if he has any or if he’s someone famous a second-rate journalist or even a first-rate writer might for a while but that will just end up a tale but at least they cared. Little solace, however, lying on a piss soaked blanket in a rickety old bed with aluminum hand rails. You grab them with what little strength is left in your wrists. It’s mostly gone now though and you grasp the rails and your body convulses, you shudder and rattle the aluminum rails, hollow pipes, smooth and cool to the touch, but you don’t cognize it because it doesn’t matter so you don’t even feel it. Your mind, what’s left of it, is distracted towards trying to say something, the railings rattle slowly at first then more quickly, building to a crescendo, vibrato lurches toward the lower register and you look out through your eyes, or are your eyes you actually, not just the windows to the soul, but the surface itself of the soul itself but a thin gauze membrane through which everything is sieved, it’s so thin it’s almost invisible, but it’s there like a shine on the surface or a plastic coating, lamination of some cheap advertisement copied a million times in some industrial printing plant computerized, digitized, controlled by software written by some slave who’s lucky to be able to comb his hair but he thinks he’s the smartest guy in the room until his boss’ boss comes in and he goes all servile because that’s his true nature—Aristotle’s Metaphysics Book One—plastic coating laminate, the invisible soul of these fools, imbeciles, suckers, walking around serving the wealth and numerical databases of their masters but—that’s what you see through your eyes, is it? Or is it not what you used to see, and now what do you see, sitting, lying, trying to pull yourself up with your frail dried out emaciated arm up to a sitting position on the rickety hospital bed, the rail shudders and rattles, thrums, that’s you, the cause or it, a self-moved mover, giving off it’s last retort, it’s last entreaty, even to do or say something but it’s too late now the time is past for that. You can’t say or do anything. Maybe later but you don’t have much time before you die. The price of beer is still cheap even today after inflation started for real in ’72, a quart of beer is what, a dollar fifty, a dollar? The opiate of the working class, Budweiser, the state religion for the masses—it’s got to be affordable. You don’t have to give into it, no, no, it’s almost always possible to save yourself—what’s it take, a couple of hundred dollars, yes unless you’re zeroed out, a junkie, but sometimes you worry, are we slumping towards national socialism, or am I just drifting into a paranoid dream, like Stepford in Connecticut? You don’t know what’s going on outside your general field of action.
--You’ve got it wrong, Professor. It’s not a matter of knowledge, it’s a matter of control. I studied philosophy too, at Madison, then I went on to do something real, went to Purdue for industrial engineering, and then as an executive, don’t forget, I had to examine ideas all the time and communicate then to other people, and moreover persuade people to do what I needed them to do.
--I don’t care about control. Don’t you see the vanity of it? Why don’t you just let people do what they want and come to their own end? What do you get controlling all those . . . resources, people, organizations?
--That’s how you get things done. You’ve got to put in place a structure for human activity, he snorts a weak breath, feeble as an infant. People need to be told what to do, otherwise you dissipate any unified effort. The mass needs to be organized. It’s just not going to be labor or the communists who do it—actually, American liberals, what they actually want is individual expression and ease. They’re not serious about organizing the activity of a large economy.
--I thought it was supposed to run on it’s own.
--Wrong. There need to be stewards. The socialist dictators understood that was the job. But that’s what I like about you intellectuals, you never really do anything, just sit there. When it’s time for action, you’re just talk, no organization, no planning, you just yield the right of way and we roll right over you.
--Yes, but you’ll just come to stasis against one another eventually.
--Well so what, you’re already dead. At least we live to fight another day.
--Till you’re dead. And we’re not really dead, we’re just off to the side.
--Yeah, well, stand aside then, stay out of the way, because maybe I’ll be knocked off, but you’re not even in the game.
Hate those corporate business guys. Know it all, clinging to their false little opinions like authorities, like some little abstract god—some little god like a carved wooden totem used as a dildo by matriarchs while the men are away slaving; well at least someone’s getting some benefit out of it. But you can not argue with success—who said that? My wife? My mother? Or my wife’s mother? Did they all say it? Well, it’s true. These guys end up with all the money or in control of it until they retire and end up in here in diapers like the rest of us.

Installment 5 of the novel, Compensation, 82-95

GINA NEVER CALLED ME BACK, and by the time Friday morning rolls around I am already out in the Hamptons. Allen and I have driven out from Accabonac to Ditch Plain in Montauk to surf. Allen surfs now, for the past couple of years, when he shared a house near the beach with a younger crowd. I am not a surfer, but am giving it a try. Donning truncated scuba suits, we got up early, eight, propped two of Allen’s boards to his 1966 Mercedes convertible and strapped them down with bungy cords. We’re relatively clear headed. The cool air blows through our heads on the drive, giving lift to the surfboards lashed to the windshield which starts to rattle uncomfortably, but we ignore it and just stick our faces into the cool morning wind. Ditch Plain is one of the best surfing beaches, and gets crowded early. We found a parking spot on the second of three lots. The scene is already in progress: bodies tanned through June, male and female, hedonistic, heads everything from closely trimmed crew cuts to ratty shoulder length blond streaked hair to densely matted virtual blond dreadlocks, the bodies are milling around hulking sport utility vehicles, smooth, muscular swimmer bodies, pumped up in the gym, stoner eyes, naked kids tanned brown getting into swim suits, hippie vans, Volvo station wagons, Long Island accents.
Grabbing our boards, we walk on to the beach. Allen looks around. “I wonder if George and Peter are here?” They usually are by now. Oh well. Let’s go.” I am wearing plastic prescription swim goggles and feel like a geek. My body isn’t nearly as built up as those around me; even Allen, I notice, looks pumped up, superhuman. We jump into still cold water in June, early, not yet in to the heat of the summer, froth sliding on the surface of clear water revealing the tan and brown and golden rubble on the bed, smooth and slippery to the weight of foot. The heat of the day is just rising now, the sun already blinding, throwing glare off the undulating shifting glass sheen of the sea.
“Follow me,” said Allen. “We’ll paddle out to the rip, there.” He pointed to a slot of foam flowing outwards from the beach back into the distance of ocean. Once there, our boards flowed out too, as if sucked out on a conveyer belt. Swells breast the beach. The sun is up and hanging now, sky severe clear. Swells roll beneath us. Foam hisses around. Air masses pushed by the waves lift us and pressure us with cool caresses. Back behind us, water pounds the rocks near shore.
“It’s simple, Mark. Just watch me. If you think you can get on a wave, jump up and do it.” It is quiet four hundred feet out, the thin crowd of early beach goers miniaturized, insignificant. Rocking over swells, looking back and around for waves, surfers nearby left and right mount their boards and hit or miss the opportune moment.
“I’m taking the next one. I hope you’re ready.”
“Go ahead. I’ll be fine.” I’m not quite, not knowing what the hell I am doing. It looks easy enough, and I figure, already out here, I might as well go ahead and try to ride one in. I mean, how else do I expect to get back?”
“I’m taking this one,” Allen repeats himself. He hops upright on his surfboard—a gymnastic trick, as you must push yourself up from a face down prone position. Allen catches the crest gracefully and skirts down the foaming face of what looks to me a 12 or 13-foot wave, angling left to stay high on the wall of water. The air cools as the wave pushes in, under then upwards to the beach. You lose sight of a surfer as he crests the face of the wave while you descend its backside. Alone now, I figure I’d better do it before I lose my nerve. Allen says there is no way to prepare for your first wave other than doing it. That’s how he has learned from George and Peter, “locals” out here, Manhattanites who put their jobs in the city on hold for the summer to live the surfer’s life in Montauk.
I don’t want to ride a big wave, so I look back for what I think I can handle. I take the next one. Stumblingly, I press myself upright, wavering, wobbling the surfboard with my quivering triceps as it begins to slide down the front of the wave, zipping and zagging. Through luck and instinct I get up and point the board down the wave and am suddenly in it, a much larger wave than I expected. I lean instinctively and guide myself slightly up and around to avoid crashing straight down at what looks like shockingly shallow water, the trough of the moving wave. I can see the interspersed rock and sand bottom where the wave has drawn in all the water at its foot. I try to straighten my body, thinking of what I look like, as if that matters. Unsteadily, I am now riding the crest of the wave and close to sliding down the backside when I catch sight of Allen waving his arm and pointing, signaling me to turn back down into the front. That’s when I rush into what is later described to me as a beautiful curve down and across, like a skittering bug across the face of a 20 foot wave. I feel the spray, warm in the sun, but the air I breathe is wonderfully pure and quiet and cool. Water surrounds me, as if security.
It lasts seconds, then I topple out of the wave in five feet of water and the ocean crashes on top of me, and the surfboard waffles, shakes. Thousands of gallons crush me, swirl about in jets, and shoot the surfboard at an angle like a rocket or a watermelon seed pressed between your fingers. The line tethered to my ankle grips and pulls. Body and board fold round one another and we are whisked on the sand, twisted. My body tumbles laterally in the foam. The tethered anklet snaps off and I am released from the oblong surfboard and I shoot away and through the surf, hit the bottom with my right shoulder and crumple. Stumbling, I struggle to stand up, spitting and swallowing and inhaling salt water, which stings the back of my throat.
Allen cruises by and sweeps down off his board to grab the other. I drop amid the rocks some hundred yards from where we entered and blow snot and saltwater out of my nostrils. Before Allen can say, “Dude, that was hot,” I mutter, “ I need … a moment.” Hoarse, coughing and stuttering, heart banging in my chest. Allen laughs and drops back into the water.

Later we meet George and Peter. George has long frizzy hair and a surf honed triangular body. Peter was skinny, with short dark hair. George works part time as a model in Manhattan during the rest of the year. Peter is an independent film director who works for advertising agencies and film production companies. George with the long blond hair says, “These waves are pretty tame, really. You should see it here in October when hurricane season is really humming, heaving four hundred feet of white water, ten feet deep along the beach. Novices go home. Only the hard core then.”
“When I first started,” Peter says, “I wouldn’t go near the water on those days. I’d rather go wind surfing at Napeague instead. That’s a rush. But now, there’s no comparison to the open ocean during a fall blow. Within reason. Sometimes a real Nor’easter still scares me. You could be blown away literally and washed out and shattered in those rocks.”
“What are you guys doing tonight?”
“Maybe going to the Tiki Bar or the sushi restaurant. “
“Come back at sunset. We’re having a bonfire and Joe is bringing somne mushrooms from the west coast.”
Sunset, orange sky. We’re there with 20 other people, all good-looking, or at least passable on closer inspection. The chicks bare their midriffs, all tawn and down, to the cooling eve, chat about whatever. Allen is talking to Jill, a woman with smoked sun-bleached hair and baked skin. She's petite and chirpy, a slightly raspy voice. I like her. She’s older, sculpted body, smokes, and drinks a vodka and citrus drink. She’s not interested in me though. She is interested in Allen. But I can tell he is indifferent. George, the surfer, long yellow hair flowing, holds court amid a gaggle of novices. He is a veteran, it appears, and the girls really like him.
Peter and I sit by the ice chest full of Budweiser and Bass and other ales. The fire is going strong as the wind blows it up. We are grooving on mushrooms and John Coltrane out of the boom box. Joe has brought some ecstasy in his stash and has been giving it out. I’m tripping on mushrooms and ecstasy. I can hear Allen who is tripping on mushrooms and talking to Jill who may or may not be tripping. Allen, standing about fifteen feet away, is talking about me.
“Mark’s problem is . . . in fact I like him a lot. He’s one of my best friends. Nice guy. Very smart, but he doesn’t try to lord it over you with his brains or anything, his education. Well maybe a little. I ask him a lot of questions because he usually knows the answers. And when he doesn’t, he let’s you know he’s not sure. He’s always saying, “at least that’s what I know,’ or ‘it might be,’ or ‘I don’t know for sure, but my guess is.’ We got the house on Accabonac because we are both single and date a lot of girls and are into partying, me probably more than Mark. And we feel comfortable with each other. Sometimes I wish he weren’t so critical all the time and negative about people he’s just met or about what’s trendy. He’s an intellectual. I am more like let’s just go with it and have a good time. Really, what else is there? Who cares about the bigger implications of some merger in the media industry? How does that really affect the quality of my life? Sure, I may make money on it, but come on! Relax, forget about it, live in the present. For instance, he scoffed when I talked about getting a Porsche or a BMW, even though he drive s a Bimmer, but when I found this 1960 convertible Mercedes, he loved it. Mark thinks he’s not trendy, but he’s really just as pretentious about all the usual things, cars, women, money. He will only date smart professional chicks, lawyers, MBAs, doctors, etc. Oh, he’ll fuck younger girls and he’ll date them for awhile, but if she doesn’t live up to his standards of brains and beauty, forget her. Plus, they usually end up dumping him or flirting with me. Younger chicks want to have a good time. Not that Mark doesn’t know how to have a good time. He’s done a lot of L.S.D. and ecstasy, more than anyone I know, well not quite, but just about. He drinks a lot of alcohol too, beer, wine, scotch. Funny, he’s a real snob when it comes to wine and scotch, but he drinks Bud like he’s some joe sixpack guy. Once we were tripping at someone’s penthouse in the city. There were about ten or twelve guys, ten or twelve girls, and more people showing up. I hadn’t tripped for a while, a year or more, this was between Christmas and New Years, and we were drinking acid punch. By the time we realized we were tripping, we knew it was going to be intense. Everyone was starting to sway pretty hard; a couple of people were on the verge of freaking out and were pissed off, not looking forward to having a good trip. What a night. I hadn’t tripped that hard ever. I was hanging out with this chick Valerie. Hendrix on the system. I had met this chick the previous season out here. She’s out here now too. She’s a friend of George's. Do you know her? She has a share at the beach. She’s supposed to be out here later tonight. But anyway, we really are tripping hard and I look around and see Mark who was as surprised as everyone else about the punch, and he had drunk a lot of it and I know he’s out there by this point, but he’s having this discussion or even argument with some guy in a suit. We’re hours into it at this point. I can barely stand, Valerie and I are pushed back into the cushions of the couch, immobile. I mean, it was under control. I knew we would be ok, but we were riding out those hours after peaking while you just sit there trying to relax, listening to music and drinking beer, smoking pot, whatever to keep you comfortable. I don’t really like acid. Anyway, I watched Mark with a girl whose head was thrown back. He was obviously fucked up. I watched him snake his arm in and around her skirt. I could tell he was fingering her. They were in the den on a couch with the TV on and music on. There were a bunch of other people in there too, but I couldn't see much. Mark, however, looked up and smiled. He looked very drugged out, but somehow completely sober. I couldn’t believe it. I could barely walk, and Mark is making it with this chick on a couch with a bunch of people sitting around. I have no idea what happened. I was lucky to get out of there and make it home that night. I slept for like two days after that.”
Jill stares at him and says nothing for a second. Then, “ Wow. I used to party a lot, but I’m into health now. I drink occasionally, but it kills my work out the next day. I should really quit smoking.”
“Yeah, I hate cigarettes. I work out too, as you can probably tell.”
Later that night, high on mushrooms and ecstasy, I meet Valerie, the girl Allen is now potentially in love with, and I see that she is, in fact, the girl in my memory from the New Year’s Eve Party at Jeff’s penthouse on Fifty-first street. She shows up at the beach party around eleven or eleven thirty in a bikini top and a light button up shirt and nylon shorts, waistband folded down over itself; I see her come up to Allen and say hi, kiss, he takes her under his arm and she stands there for a few minutes, then turns away to get a beer out of the cooler. Most people are fairly high at this point, the music is being blown by the wind and the bonfire is flaming, flickering orange moments against small white waves cresting. I have just gotten out from a swim in the ocean, trembling from the combination of psilocybin and ecstasy, dry in the throat, and I thought a dip would be clarifying, which it was. Allen and come up to me as I’m shaking off near the fire, the salt starting to get sticky as my skin dries and I put on my clothes.
“Hi.”
“Mark, Valerie. You two met at New Year’s.”
“Yeah, I remember,” I say.
“Hi.”
“The water feels great, really warm in the night.”
“Are you tripping yet?” asks Allen.
“Pretty substantially. Yes. But I feel great.”
“I’d like to get some x,” says then smiles a crooked grin, teeth peeking out.
“I don’t know what’s left. Do you Allen?”
“No, man. I took a tab of x a while ago, but I’m not feeling much yet. Let’s go talk to George.” They go over to George, who’s squatting on the beer cooler with an empty look in his eyes. I shiver a bit from across the party and move even closer to the fire. There are about twenty people around, murmuring in a kind of group high. I see Jill, the woman who Allen was talking to for awhile now hanging out with Peter. I see from across the bonfire scoring mushrooms and surprisingly x, but I don’t see any money changing hands.
“Did he charge you?” I ask her when they come back around.
“Nope,” she says and smiles and gives me a tough, puma stare in the dark, challenging for such a petite girl. Bob Marley live comes on the boom box, and Allen and Valerie shift over to hang with a couple of her roommates. After about forty-five minutes, I feel like leaving, but don’t quite think I can drive. Val walks me over to her house to get some water, we walk in sync side by side, the night above cavernous. When we finally get to her house, after walking through what felt like long dark streets but couldn’t have been more than a quarter of a mile from the beach, the dark trees towering around us and quivering in the breeze, lights glowing and rock music emanating from other houses, I fall into a soft white leather couch, it’s cool, and she hands me a cold beer half of which I swallow immediately. We smoke a joint which I don’t even feel and she turns down the lights and turns up some layered brass jazz pretty low and I lean my head back and close my eyes. I’m not sure how much time goes by, but on the occasions that I open my eyes and look around, I absorb the warmth of low lighted colors, shadows, more and more people from the beach moving around, quiet, the music getting progressively louder, rock and roll from the beach, sixties and seventies, hippie music, the thick aroma of marijuana drifting through and at times filling the room along with cigarette smoke, the quiet murmur of voices echoing around inside and out of my head. I look over and see Allen standing and swaying to the music near the stereo, his skin gleaming but his eyes bulging, holding a bottle of beer. At one point, Valerie is sitting close next to me, I can smell her sweat, she’s tripping heavily I sense, and then she’s pushing against my side as another person sits down on the couch. I look over at her and smile into her eyes and her eyes stare back at me for a second and then go blank. My head crashes into hers, knocks her hair down around her face like a curtain around us.
I don’t know how many hours later, people have left, the light is the color of watery urine, Allen, Valerie, her roommates Jane and Lucy and a guy named Vincent who seems to be making Jane, are there. We shut the lights down completely, someone lights a couple of large candles. Coltrane comes back on and I get up to move around a little and end up crashing in Valerie’s bed with Allen and Valerie, we’re all schlumped together but I think me and Valerie are the most tripped out on the combination of psilocybin and x, though Allen seems to be pretty far out there with us as well. I recall Allen going out leaving me and Valerie in bed, at times wrapped around each other and at other times curled away from each other as the drugs pushed us through waves, sweating then feeling chilled, unable to get up we just lay there and feel the chemistry surge through our bodies. I smell her sweat through the bed. Around five in the morning or so—I have no real idea what time it was—Valerie gets on top of me and starts rubbing her crotch against me, but I’m so high nothing’s happening and she pulls her face down on to mine, her hair hanging down around my head like a curtain and kisses me with her tongue which is all soft and warm which is interesting to me because I feel cold and dry and then my dick starts to get hard and she reaches down and pulls it out from my shorts, spreads her pussy and mounts me lightly and I feel myself go into her and she’s all soft and warm and wet and as we sway together she gets hotter and hotter and then she kisses me again and after an unknown amount of time I come inside of her and she collapses onto me sweating and we breath each other’s smell into ourselves.
When I wake up, it’s bright out already I can tell as the yellow light streams in to even Valerie’s cavernous room on the ground floor of her beach house and I smell her all around me, her stuff, light colors, strewn about, clothes, toiletries, a mirror draped with silk, a couple of paperback novels, literary fiction, a mini component stereo, compact discs laying around, but she’s not here. I can barely remember what actually happened. Eventually, I get up, straighten my clothes, put on my pants, look around for socks as my feet are cold but then I remember the beach party and that I don’t have any socks and I wonder where my sandals are and then I just say fuck it, button up my shirt and walk out. It’s cool and I find no one in the house, just burnt out candles, ash trays filled to the brim, empty beer cans, their stale smell clinging. I walk out of the house, down to the beach but there’s no one there either that I know. I see neither Allen’s car nor mine and honestly cannot remember where my car is. So I strip down to my swim shorts and jump into the water and swim out beyond the breakers and lie on my back floating until my eyes start to burn, and I feel as if I’m going blind and I can feel the sun roasting my chest, so I swim back to the beach, find my clothes, try to dry off and walk up on the bluffs. I guess it’s around ten by now—I don’t have my watch—and the beach is starting to fill up and I look down and see a few people I know, some people from the party last night, but my jaw hurts from the x and my stomach feels vacuous from the mushrooms, so I warm myself up walking on the bluff overlooking the beach, find a green path back to the street and after taking several wrong turns finally find my B.M.W. convertible parked in the other parking lot with the top down, scratch into my pocket and am surprised to find my keys after all. I start the engine, smooth comforting thrum, and drive back to Accabonac, the sun thankfully on the back of my head and I can see very precisely as the pupils in my eyes are still dilated from the drugs, and I breathe in the smell of Valerie the whole way even with the top down. I pat down my shirt and grab a piece of it and smell it. That’s where it’s coming from. When I get back to our beach house, Allen and Valerie are there, as I see from Allen’s white circa 1960s Mercedes convertible coupe. They are hanging out on the deck.
“Dude, what’s up?” says Allen. Valerie splits a crooked grin at me, brown hair stringy around her face.
“I was fucked up last night.” My head is an empty cave echoing the sound of my own voice coming out of the back of my throat. “Where did you go?”
“I hung out for a while but couldn’t sleep, so I went back to the beach, but there was nobody there, so I drove into town to have a Margarita. Then went over to George’s. By the time I got back you two were completely crashed out.”
“Yes,” says Valerie, “I was really peaking and I could not move. It must have been the mixture of the x and the mushrooms because I’m usually fine when I’m tripping.”
“Yeah,” says Allen, “I just left you two crashed out. I met George and Peter at the bar. They weren’t that high anymore. Then I went back to Peter’s and fell asleep on the couch.”
“You’re kidding.” I say. “I can’t find my sunglasses anywhere. Do you know where they are?”
“Did you try your car?”
“They’re not there. Shit. I hope I didn’t lose them. You know, I feel surprisingly okay now, but my head feels kind of hollowed out.”
“I know what you mean,” says Val, and laughs lightly. She’s wearing next to nothing and looks lighthearted, with a slight smile just breaking on her face, looking straight at me and I have to look away and palm my face and go inside to find another pair of sunglasses. Inside, I stumble on a pile of beach towels, then my briefcase with a cache of papers I was supposed to review this weekend, and think for a second about what I need to do but I know I won’t be able to look at them at all. I know I’m still fucked up because when I close my eyes, I see purple and red twirling around in paisley patterns.
“So, bud, how you feeling, Mark?” Val teases me when I get back out to the deck, puts her arm around my shoulder.
“Good. I guess. I feel pretty fucked out, if you know what I mean.”
“I think I do,” she smiles. “You were really out of it.”
Now, Allen’s bustling around inside the house, talking about fixing some food and even though it’s not even noon, he’s making motions to cook some steaks on the grill, except we don’t have any steaks. The sea air fresh surrounds us.
“How are you feeling, Valerie?” I ask. “You were pretty tripped out, too, last night.”
“I sure was. I’m still recovering, Mark. I feel fine, though,” she says moving close to me.
“When did you get up?”
“I’m not sure. I guess around eight.”
“Did you sleep at all last night?”
“Not really. I mean, I passed out a couple of times.” She stares into me.