Thinking is amateur
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.
It can be a puzzle what people are worth.
£250 an hour, says my lawyer; just for his precious time. And he earns every penny, incidentally. Cheap compared to most. Do you hear that, you who intend stealing these words, my words, with the thought in your cloudy head of images perfumed with the flavour of locks and keys taking them without payment because you believe they are simply free? Beware! Beware the clown with no hair.
My dentist charges £150 a filling.
The baker charges £1.20 a loaf; £0.80 for eight crumpets.
The Independent is £0.80. It is worth eight crumpets.
Walking down the street, on what do I bestow my attention?
Where is money to be found? It drifts about like leaves, leaves the size of scurf in the mild squares of London.
Let me blow a tune on this piddling flute.
Aufmerksamkeit. Achtung!
Ladies and Gentlemen, I have here items of daily necessity, items you should never be without. Let me demonstrate.
What holds the attention, what makes one pay attention, in effect is a form of debt. That sounds strange, in so far as saying this seems commonsensically wrong; and that one’s attention is bestowed on things, gifted. Granted. But the case is contrary to commonsense. Most of the time we give it only in the allowance of money in return: which is to say in the recognition that debt is involved … Granting attention is seen as a transaction in which others owe us - for that they should owe us money for this - seems the only fair outcome.
One stands in debt.
Talking into one’s mobile - looking at it, restlessly pressing the buttons, wiping its screen. Switching it on; off.
Watching tv, viewing a film, listening to an mp3.
Reading a book, scanning a newspaper. Seeing an ad.
The things that store it, like a battery stores electricity.
Like battery acid. Like the acid colour of plastic.
On a DVD I have the first three episodes of Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz. Attention is stored up on it; value ….
Attention exists as a form of indebtedness.
Or, to the extent it can exist as that it is that.
Or it becomes that.
For instance, this writing is ‘free’ in that I pay no one to host it and no one pays me to write it.
It makes it nugatory. How can it have any value, being free - ?
Supposing that the following conditions obtained:
i) that this were part of a course
ii) that a charge were to be levied for services rendered
It would then be conceived as a form of debt: you would pay attention to it; you would owe it something - simply by the fact of having paid money for it and its being institutionally or formally conceived (which is to say conceived in terms that entail specific parcels of time). As it is, since it is free, since you pay it nothing, you pay it no attention; you owe it nothing.
Or at best it is a kind of black market writing. Surreptitious; clandestine, furtive. Time borrowed; or time stolen.
What makes money money?
The human attention.
The value of money is its dynamic as a living force.
Up to a point things have value because I say they do.
Up to a point, because others say they do.
(The dynamic of ‘finding things interesting’.)
But:
Money is a species of debt.
“If we all pull together.”
How about this:
Capitalism is based on an idea of us not all finding the same thing interesting, so that it is in our different ways that we find a common interest in it. Whereas Communism … there is only one thing of interest. Each doctrine contains a ‘common theory of interest’. And so some might argue that only one is actual or practicable, in so far as the idea of a single overarching shared interest that determines all the others is phantom.
But of course the same can be argued of Capitalism too.
“Advertising is Capitalism’s drill diamond.”
Complete the phrase
“I can no more … “
For example, “I can no more lift the board on which I am standing because I am standing on it than change.”
A simultaneous push/pull. The push defeats the pull.
I can no more lift myself up by my own shirt-tails. Pull myself along by my own bootstraps.
… Than - ?
Quarantine, a subject raised all too rarely, provides the evidence of the ill we suffer and all too secretly wish to publicise as a matter of course in the diminished interstices of the mundane as the sole complaint of the essential human truth, to forward that dream that things would be otherwise were it not needed, but which in any case since it is leaves us choiceless in a paradoxical world of our own choosing.
To simplify.
If I dropped the tray of glasses CRASH and said n-o-t-h-i-n-g that would demonstrate - I believe - a greater self-awareness and perhaps make it less likely to happen in future; since perhaps the function of **** is to blame things on fate. In this case self-censorship equals responsibility …
The real thing to be understood however is what have I in quarantine that is itself symptomatic of the illness? In other words, what don’t I wish to talk about but which I should?
Clearly, much of what it is is the past, the same for everybody. Many of those nameless things that happened and that affect me still, but still secretly, still undivulged, even in this era of Freudian self-consciousness, let’s admit it.
Early period Pink Floyd is better than middle or late Pink Floyd.
The Adventures of Odysseus are better than The Adventures of Bilbo Baggins. Flat cartoons are better than three dimensional …
Why is it more interesting to say “There you will find the desert” - the void - than “There you will find djinns”?
The mirage condenses into a - fantasy. Towers, castles and princesses. The intangible is literalised; anthropomorphised. Nothing that isn’t part of the human image remains. The ‘escape’ is only an escape back into the human image.
The first Pink Floyd is just psychedelia. No image condenses from it. Sense is suspended in the intangible inordinate.
Early Pink Floyd is better than middle or late Pink Floyd.
