THE POET AND MONEY
factory of light, factory of darkneess
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.
