Yearly Archives: 2009

the mythology of the rich

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“The mythology of the rich in the overproducing nations that the poor are in on some secret about satisfaction – black ‘soul,’ gypsy duende, the noble savage, the simple farmer, the virile game keeper – obscures the harshness of modern capitalist poverty, but it does have a basis, for people who live in voluntary poverty or who are not capital-intensive do have more ready access to erotic forms of exchange that are neither exhausting nor exhaustible and whose use assures their plenty.”

(Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, p. 29.)

like bread made with chemicals to keep it from perishing

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“I must add one more word on what it is to consume because the Western industrial world is famous for its ‘consumer goods’ and they are not at all what I mean. Again, the difference is in the form of the exchange, a thing we can feel most concretely in the form of the goods themselves. I remember the time I went to my first rare-book fair and saw how the first editions of Thoreau and Whitman and Crane had been carefully packaged in heat-shrunk plastic with the price tags on the inside. Somehow the simple addition of air-tight plastic bags had transformed the books from vehicles of liveliness into commodities, like bread made with chemicals to keep it from perishing. In commodity exchange it’s as if the buyer and the seller where both in plastic bags; there’s none of the contact of a gift exchange. There is neither motion nor emotion because the whole point is to keep the balance, to make sure the exchange itself doesn’t consume anything or involve one person with another. Consumer goods are consumed by their owners, not by their exchange.

The desire to consume is a kind of lust. We long to have the world flow through us like air or food. We are thirsty and hungry for something that can only be carried inside bodies. But consumer goods merely bait this lust, they do not satisfy it. The consumer of commodities is invited to a meal without passion, a consumption that leads to neither satiation nor fire. He is a stranger seduced into feeding on the drippings of someone else’s capital without benefit of its inner nourishment, and he is hungry at the end of the meal, depressed and weary as we all feel when lust has dragged us from the house and led us to nothing.”

(Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, pp. 11–12. Cf. Duchamp’s eau et gaz.)

alcove

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Is it possible that spring could be
once more approaching? We forget each time
what a mindless business it is, porous like sleep,
adrift on the horizon, refusing to take sides, ‘mugwump
of the final hour’, lest an agenda – horrors! – be imputed to it,
and the whole point of its being spring collapse
like a hole dug in sand. It’s breathy, though,
you have to say that for it.

And should further seasons coagulate
into years, like spilled, dried paint, why,
who’s to say we weren’t provident? We indeed
looked out for others as though they mattered, and they,
catching the spirit, came home with us, spent the night
in an alcove from which their breathing could be heard clearly.
But it’s not over yet. Terrible incidents happen
daily. That’s how we get around obstacles.

(John Ashbery, p. 33 in the 20 November 2008 London Review of Books.)

that spiritual condition

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“ ‘Purgatory is not a place, sweetheart. Purgatory is that spiritual condition of restless yearning in which the dead, having in the moment of death caught as it were a first-last instantaneous glimpse of the face of God, are denied a second look – which will distinguish them – so long as a single living soul remembers them – as they actually were, that is to say, not as represented in—”

(James McCourt, Now Voyagers: The Night Sea Journey, p. 512.)

all animals are expert

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“All animals are expert, yet we use them merely as help. If only we knew how to get the best out of them – each in its special capacity – we would be infinitely more successful at holding off the machines that threaten us with creeping destruction.”

(Malcolm de Chazal, Sens-Plastique, trans. Irving Weiss, p. 173)

thoroughly naive in their hopes

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“The Greeks wanted to know everything so that they could think better and the Romans so that they could act better, but the medieval Christians wanted it for the greater glory of God and the remission of their sins. To us today, faced with a knowledge explosion of truly staggering proportions, all three of our ancestor cultures may look thoroughly naive in their hopes. We should be cautious in out conclusions, however; as their descendants, we carry in the strata of our minds all sorts of fossil gifts from them.”

(Tom McArthur, Worlds of Reference, p. 67.)