factory of light, factory of darkness

TH_E P^O_ET AND M^ON_EY

fact^ory ^of light, fact^ory ^of darkn_eess  

(in elusive instalments)

I am unable to separate art from god; so my desire to see and be seen can only be met in life—which is the attempt to love and be loved.  Art, like god, is of a space so pure it is committed to creating a detour around the rights and tears of eyes.

Art is the shadow of god, even as god is art’s shadow.  Life—its eyes, the igneous eruptions of love—is the shadow of neither god nor art; it is the shadow of nothing and casts no shadow, for it only bears a blood relation with death and death is death only be virtue of being a shadow of itself.  This is what justly terrifies us about life:  it is eyes, random lava and hardening—in which we seek for shadows, for shade, for respite, but find only the endless onslaught of light.

            Goethe’s reputed last words … more light, more light …

                        The gooey comfort of the television, the internet, storefronts, the city in its effulgent sleeplessness.  Life’s bloodless consummation.

Money, in its minority tangible and majority intangible (electronic, digital) forms, gathers from across the globe’s currencies into a virtual factory, whose only output is light.  Poetry too (for it must) transacts with this factory and is not unacquainted with its procedures—aspects of the poet’s utility.  But how can the poet be in love with this factory, its productions of light, its standards, exchanges and white blindness?  The poet is in love with darkness, the darkness hiding in the kernel of words, which money—despite its machines of volition, its trucks of drugged desire, its insured and polished efficacies—has not yet been able to penetrate, drilling though it has been for millennia at the cunning smoky shells of words.

The poet, like the merchant, politician, custodian or butcher, has its task—eternal, unalterable, from certain angles; constantly adapting to its shifting contexts, from others.  Like all professions, it allows for various temperaments and orientations, yet still is oriented in its own ineluctable ways.

We could say that the merchant is oriented toward exchanging services for money, the politician laws for money, the custodian cleanliness for money and the butcher meat for money.  So—whether we venture into prostitution, priesthood, the professoriate or podiatry—we find that money is the one side of the scale (of human justice, in a sense, as it maintains a rough equilibrium between individuals, classes to which they belong, society at large, and even—for the enduring professions at least—what we might call civilized history).

Money—society’s common denominator and sacred language (sacred, for it is not spoken, but speaks itself)—provides the mobile ubiquitous generalized legitimacy for more transient localized and specific legitimacies.  (While the Internet challenges certain notions, particularly of space, it has not yet fundamentally altered them).

By money it is certainly not meant any reduction to cash, or even money in its now primarily virtual forms.  Money is a structure of the soul.  A structure that is oriented toward using words to the end of things that are not words; it wishes to trade words in for other things.  In poetry, the soul is not an exchange but a lake without borders, without land, unrippled in itself, vulnerable to being disturbed by words.  Money is necessary to maintain the holy ecology in which the lake resides—what we might call flesh—an ecology which seems to seek language, to disturb, it seems, the lake.

So in money the body is composed of money; in poetry the body is composed of seeking, seeking for a vision of a lake brought to life with words and stilled by silence.

The poet, however, regardless of how it lives, what it says, how much it talks, bypasses money in its vocation (which is, most wholly, its life); it encounters it by accident and so must find justice by other means, the seeking for this law and balance a frequently treacherous and sometimes deadly enterprise, one which society is typically indifferent or ambivalent to, as the poet seeks for what society can only provide transgressively—outside of its sacred apparatuses, those established and maintained by money.

The poet, then, seeks to balance its work—not butchering, mopping, legislating, arguing or haberdashing, but language—not with money (the common trade) but language and so, in this balancing of like with like, but a like that in its vastness includes myriad subtle unlikenesses, it falters, as the structures and processes of language—so readily available, encouraged and rewarded for the butcher and lawyer if they are the least bit competent or fortunate—are vague, elusive, and discreet for the poet; it must seek with shifting, unlabeled and often unexpected and unknown tools, reaching frequently into the realms of the dead and yettobeborn, with the usual risks of such enterprises, excavating, sourcing materials, fuels, that find their way into its shop to manufacture materials, fuels, of equal worth and substance.  Considering the extreme and bulky irrelevance and unworthiness of much of this material, and the rare impossible glorious malevolent concatenations of the divine, the poet can spend much of its time vainly seeking and sorting, weighing, overcome with doubt, overcompensating with arrogance, flung like bills in a storm between environments not necessarily described as hospitable.  That the butchers and politicians attempt to pathologize the poet and remedy their imposed pathologies with an array of pharmaceuticals, operations, ostracizations, marriages, religions, incantations, forms of weighty and innumerable description, then wonder in astonishment or scorn (if they are still capable of wonder [they are still capable of scorn]) why the poet wails, rants or hides against or from them—well, the able poet must use even unusual inputs as material, if it can.

If it can? It must.  Poetry, like money, is a factory, transforming the world’s jewels and garbage into words.  Poets are workers in the dark factory of words, even as merchants are workers in money’s bright factory.

Money, as a vastness, as that which can trade in language but not subsume it, as a democracy which hierarchizes itself through social scrimmage—devout negotiations:  building and maintaining given and battled-for positions—demands to be a totality and so, in its reach, desires to embrace its only true competition (not God, as Jesus would necessarily have had it [necessarily because of the way time unfolds in space] but language, as that which birthed God).

Language, as a vastness, as that which can trade in money—at least as but one of its aspects—as a democracy which hierarchizes itself through scrimmages in the void, demands, though in different voices and on different paths, to be a totality and so also reaches to embrace its only true competition.

One can reconcile this seeming dispute between two seeking totalities by modifying Jesus’ clever retort to the scribes and chief priests and say, with and beyond and before him—Give to money that which is money’s and give to language that which is language’s … and this is not untrue.  (No Manichaeism, unless you want it to be; this bifurcation can just as easily be the secrets and manifestations of desire, diverging in name as they issue forth, mystery and gateway and way of ways.)

We might also attempt to resolve the seeming antithesis of these totalities by discovering a more legitimate or antecedent claim by one or the other.  Did money, for example, precede language in time, even as First Nations preceded Europeans in North America?  Does language have a greater or deeper share of being than money—or is this a question only language can ask?  And what might the criteria be to judge any historical or ontological merits?

But.  Should we not stay on the shores of this dubious ocean, on the edges of the waters of knowledge, frolicking in the sands of doubt, building castles of words alongside knowledge’s monsters?

So the poet is always between the elements, between land and sea, air and fire, forced by blood to trade in competing factories, of dual citizenship, exiled into no particular home or habitat, a sojourner in the darkness that is the bed and roof of stars and worms alike, seeking to make itself, its very soul and body, a hospitable environment not for itself but words in their farflung hermitages across the inarticulate infinity of space.