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.