Thinking is amateur
The revelation of train rails.
From 0 to 1,000,000. From. One to the zero’s oubliette. And back again. Forwards we go; into the affront of nothing. Out of the fright of some. Two arrive. Finally. Nothing = Something. Omega egg. Crack of doom. At first sight.
Originality. Talent. They walk hand in hand. (Cf. how ‘talent’ meant ‘money’ originally. And originality too, being its shadow: for money originates the actual: in which we duly live as dark animals: its very substance the minatory.) So ’something from nothing’ (i.e. money). So. Infinity. The finite. Sweeping the finite table clear of finite objects. So nothing but infinity: that remains. The tablecloth. The granular striations.
I was sitting on a bus staring blankly when it came to me: the word ordinary. Ordinary. Ordinary! As though it were an insight. How ordinary … Nothing here is special, nothing is unique, nothing individual - This is just a bus journey – everyone takes it … The feeling of used-ness that the seats seemed soaked in, of life obliterated by the anonymity of sharing space with people who (frankly) one would never want to share space with, repetitive, quotidian, the cheapness of it, the human attention in these circumstances at its lowest ebb. I felt like a chicken in a coop. (If only I were rich!)
But slow this down … it seems a good example of something; and this is that it shows us the process of Linear Thought.
What is needed is a Witch’s Broom. Let’s sweep it away.
Opposites that are perpetual, symmetries that are eternal -
Where the good implies … the bad; the left the right
Where the right implies the wrong; and up down;
Like the carpet in a waiting-room, the carpet of the very every-where: it is worn, stained, tasteless, used. Tarr-y olive-green patterned - and seems to have always been there. Looking at it one can’t imagine the world without it.
… Poached carpet? Do you mean like a poached egg? A stream of bubbles stretching out. I like a poached egg.
Debt (money being a species of debt).
*
Where we must begin from is the idea that debt – money – is not perceived as debt, identified with that finititude, but on the contrary is identified with life - infinity - itself.
… in the circumstance that one lives “in the world as it is”.
In this circumstance one lives a kind of illusion.
A kind of bi-polarity is understood of the world in which one lives: that is to say, where either one is free in that world in which one lives in having money, or (for example) in the world in which one lives, is a wage slave: the world becoming, being this singularity. What I mean is that since as value money is a finitude - purely instrumental - but yet seems otherwise …
Or what I mean is that this is what everything becomes; or this is what everything is, regardless of one’s ostensible attitudes or feelings about money or values in general.
In other words, a condition is inherited whereby the world, and the things in it, are known only instrumentally; but in the form that this entails, which consists in the admixture of daily life, it is next to unrealisable how this case works; since it all connects with life either directly or indirectly and so the virtue of money as an idea of limit tends to be lost sight of, ‘money as being’ becoming what things are without limit: infinite finite.
(Becoming the whole horizon.)
What occurs as ‘knowing the world’, the things in it, or being in the world, is instrumentally understood and – in spite of ourselves – not otherwise understood.
… The ideal, which is the living moment, will be achieved by money. The thing we want we will be freed into accomplishing - by money. Whatever it is. The thing adequate to itself; the thing that exists as enough in itself. That is, this is supposed even if the supposition, the view about this thing that can be enough in itself is quite fantastic. It stands before us like a line between two points: what prevents us from making the straightforward journey between them - is money, we think. By contrast the infinite, the end in itself, actuality, is random.
All that the actuality of the ideal amounts to is possession. The concept of infinity that we are discussing which is embodied by the concept of things that can stand as ends in themselves, is misidentified with the idea of ends that exist only instrumentally. This sense of possession therefore that the ideal demands just confirming the existence of money rather than any actuality: the thing that obtains the ideal.
Namely, so the idealism that we seem to have which is the idealism of being alive becomes a finitude: and so a kind of deadness ensues since nothing is sufficient to itself.
*
An end in itself is an infinity.
A concept delimited but fathomless.
Now, it is possible to construe this …
*
To what extent ought money to be identified with power?
Someone unfathomably rich is possessed of a power.
– But so, then the wealthy are unfathomably in debt.
“The world of the wealthy man is finite un-fathomably.”
I see so you mean that the world of a poor person is finite fathomably – in contrast?
“At least the poor person knows he lives in a world of debt, and what that means.”
“A wealthy person has the power not to acknowledge the limited nature of his life.”
I see, so money frees you into the illusion. It does not free you. It frees you into a kind of refinement of being where certain sorts of attention become possible that are not otherwise possible, a certain kind of time or a certain sort of space is available along with different new accessories …
*
In other words, what I suppose is a platitude: this is not an argument against money; but its perception as something that can be identified with life whereas …
… for this is the great question of course, the scale of this as a problem is illustrated by the seeming inevitability of human poverty in the world (which is a kind of off-shoot or side-effect of human greed ie is not a money problem). That human power should be power instrumentalised – is our issue.
In a stranger’s house I look in a mirror
it hangs over a sideboard whose sideboard?
a cloth in a sink ragged featured
that is the face of the stranger I see
who is not who I imagined
*
The Future: here we are but where is it?
The tang of zebra stripes evapourates.
This is a sort of island surrounded by mist.
A befogged candle-lit dinner. The roses gleam.
And brushing through the air like feathers: the bus.
And a mind shrunk to the margins of a wood.
“The story that’s emerging is there is no story!”
*
And a man who jumped down the stairs when he was ten.
And at dawn the orange bowl and it is full of fruits
that find their echo in how I once shouted at a wall
and it is full of blue apples the stripes of a zebra fish
are splashed again
with the effect of the moth torn curtains.
Money: it represents a specialised aspect of the human attention: a kind of inertial pragmatism whereby things have to work. Nothing can work without it. If he isn’t paid the bus driver wont drive the bus. The bus too, it would be without petrol, it would remain unbuilt, if it didn’t exist as the money that it is. There would be no transformation. So what is it?
Well, it is the bus; and it is the bus-driver. It is the supermarket; and it is the road; it’s the shop and the t-shirt, the shoes and the socks; the arrangement of the flowers in a public garden; the water and the salt; the book; the sound.
You can tell, in the gloss of aging pop stars, let’s suppose from their confidence and how they look how their lives are folded into it like berries in jam. Money. They look expensive. Like aging racehorses; physically impressive if in a dead situation.
This is where money’s value comes from: it is that aspect of the human attention in which we owe or others owe us.
In money life is acknowledged as a medium of debt.
(Its value hangs always on what is owed; on indebtedness.)
“But isn’t the value of money a consequence of the world of work, which generates its objects?”
In so far as work is only a form of the human attention, no.
In Fassbinder you can see that there is conflict about this. He knows he wont succeed in making this equation, in which the value of money is understood to be the consequence of manufacturing and therefore of working class activity, even though everything in him seems obliged to argue that the equation is all and to show its inevitability as the truth.
Remittance. Remuneration. Revenue.
Insurance. Investment. Interest.
Tax. Invoice. Receipt. Bill. Tab. Item. Merchandise. Goods.
Work = Play. Pay. Cash. Cheque. Card. Plastic. ATM. Pin.
Money.
Think of instances of where your attention fails.
Of where you get bored. And even bore yourself.
“I’ve got no money and I’ve got no hair.”
Question. Does a fear of financial debt amount to a fear of recognition: that is, the recognition one is alive?
The way Turgenev blithely ‘loans’ someone ten thousand rubles in the knowledge that it will never be repaid. Were I as rich could I be as indifferent? Example. N.N. owes nothing to anyone. No one owes him anything. He owns six houses. He is rich. But he lives off bread and beer. Never holidays. Example. Up to her ears in debt. Owns nothing. No clear idea of how her finances stand. On perpetual holiday.
Could one call these states two different forms of fear. Two different instances of quarantine.
Two different forms of attention/inattention brought on by a need to merge unnoticably with the background. (Like snipe on the muddy banks of a stream they are impossible to see.)
Imagine a white china dish; containing boiled rice with a pitta bread. It has been left out, standing there for weeks. The rice is edged with black. The pitta shows a hard brown patina. Green. Dead. How could this be worth money?
But this painting goes nuclear, imagine: it becomes the most famous art work ever in the Western world.
There is a kind of time table for the world in this painting, look this bowl of rice illustrates its major intervals.
…
We who graze the mild squares of London
Like leaves the size of scurf …
“This patch of land is worth millions.” I look at it. Some old iron railings. Broken paving. Weeds grow.
Real estate. This locus of attention.
Real inwardly; real outwardly. Neither.
Down this street where people walk: these millions.
Tear the cloth off the mullioned windows. Wipe away the soot.
My gaze is directed inward, an outward show: my words say,
They say pay me.
