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.