Thinking is amateur
A stranger’s house - I look in a mirror
dark on white tiles
a cloth in a sink rock featured
and see
it is not who I imagined
*
The Future: here we are but where is it?
Zero-ed in evapouration.
This is a sort of island mist.
Candle-lit . The roses a gleam.
And brushing through it a bus.
And a mind shrunk to the margins of a wood.
Money: a specialised aspect of the human attention is represented: a kind of 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, the shirt, the shoes, the socks; the arrangement of the garden flowers; the fish in the bowl; the water; the salt; the book; the sound.
Aging pop stars, their lives are folded into it like berries in jam. Money. They look expensive. This is where money’s value comes from: that aspect of the human attention where we owe others or they owe us in the flux of push and pull.
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 actively generates the objects that it buys?”
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.
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.”
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.
The need to merge unnoticably with the background. (Like snipe on a muddy bank they are next to impossible to see.)
Imagine an egg white china bowl of boiled rice and pitta . It has been left out, standing for weeks, congealing. The rice is edged with black. The pitta shows a patina. Brown. Green. Dead. How could this be worth money?
But this painting, imagine: it is the most famous art work in the Western world and by far its most costly.
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; outwardly - real. 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 a time, says my lawyer; just for one quarter hour. And he earns every penny, incidentally. Cheap compared to most. Do you hear that? Those who intend stealing these stars, my words, with the cloudy-headed thought on a windy day smacking of images perfumed with the flavour of locks and keys taking them without payment because of the belief that they cost nothing. The clown with no hair marches on.
My dentist charges £150 a drilling.
The baker charges £1.20 a loaf; £0.80 gets eight scones.
The Independent cuts £0.80. It’s worth, a packet of crisps.
You meet someone and wonder at how they earn their money; then think - realise - that in their place you would view things much the same way; the same taken for granted perspective would be instituted. Just as say, with reading a newspaper. It doesn’t matter which newspaper; after a while you just get used to it. Your mind takes on its shape; and you editorialise by precisely this principle so events, people and scandals find themselves quivered into the columns and pictures of a given relative importance even though - in the next aisle as it were - another newspaper quarters its columns and pictures and squares its news in a way utterly different and indignation rings a quite different set of bells to Sunday.
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.
