The sunset offered itself freely to me, and the most of its light that I captured, well I offer it to you.There were no copy rights listed to the sunlight, no sticky black ink of those accounting clerks, with their special sleeves and all those ledgers.
Sunlight thus is offered as "free" at least to those of us who can abide in the sunlight for a moment.
Is there anything we will be able to see or experience that we cannot buy? When we have bought everything and sold everything: not only with the marketplace: we will have sold ourselves into slavery. That is the real threat. So when speaking of what is "free": well we think that the air is free, and we will deny it to no prisoner. We will not deny air to a prisoner. Sometimes we let the prisoners go anywhere and hang themselves there. In that case they have denied the freedom of air to themselves, of their own free choice. (In a world where public hanging by the state is not generally condoned.)
So we could say that we are waiting for the last dog to be hung in capitalism: waiting for the moment when we say: "No not even the air is free." The problem with Capital thereby is its infectious quality: it is the greatest contagion we have ever known existed. No sooner have we had experience than we seek to commodify it.
Now we know that we exist and thrive on a planet with other beings who/which make it possible for us to live. (These other beings are a "which" only insofar as their reality is not ontic, belonging to the realm of every day life, the life that Capital seeks to conserve upon every object it comes in contact with.) The inter-relation with these other beings necessitates that we exact some price of living when we set them aside: when we cut down all the forests that make it possible for us to have the air we breathe. The effect of the insane expansion of the human race, six to seven billion and counting counts as a cost to the very air we breathe. The ecologists, not the economists, are the first ones to tally the cost.
Now there is to imagination the possibility of meditative insight: that insight that remains sufficiently in the present, and does not seek to do anything with this experience (no, not even write about it). Meditative insight constantly seeks to return to the present, and to the breath, which is life, which is "free," isn't it?
There is plenty of time, means that we do not have any specific need to immediately and literally act: we are not abandoning insight to fate (Geschick). In other words, there is room to breathe.
Room to breathe can be contrasted with the rhythm of the breath seen in Oppermann's essay on Anaximander. Rhythm implies something of this action that is enclosed in itself: it repeats. It is the repetition of the same. We all know that reality is changing: this is the Heraclitean fire meditation.
Time exists, and not just time as consumption, but as the pre-existence of leisure before necessity: time exists as a sense of distance to the horizon. There is no time on the horizon itself, the time is up.
We could say that the sunset is not free. We could say that really it is worth sacrificing just a little bit of life to this sunset. That the time spent in contemplation of such a wonder: well it is spent and consumed: but we are spending life now, principally our own, and not just money. Life's expenditure is time, and implies the wearing and weathering of time: what was familiar becomes patina'd in the corrosive elemental elixir: and this temporalizing is the source of the most profound beauty, not just sentimentality: an exquisite suffering that Robert Walser attributes to the essence of music: the most beautiful passing of time.
By contrast to the exquisite suffering of the burning love-making of time, money lives in instantaneous transaction: ownership passes over instantaneously, though it be ownership at first without soul, such ownership determines destiny in an instant. The effect of money is instantaneous and is not affected by time.
Admittedly money can mature and devalue through its contamination by being related to a history, a sense, a nation etc.. Who in the world does not know that the "almighty dollar" does not buy in the world what it used to! You cannot sleep a night for a dollar anywhere but the poorest or most sanctified spiritual establishments: everything costs rent, costs money and the rent keeps going up and up, we acknowledge to deal with the problem of inflation.
So we know that money inflates. Money inflates: the coin of Rome, I think the Denarius went from being worth a week's worth to being worth virtually nothing. The historical account in Wikipedia runs:
"The denarius was first struck in or about 211 BC during the Roman Republic and at the same time as the Second Punic War, with a weight of 4.5 grams on average at the time. It remained at this weight for a while and then decreased to about 3.9 grams during the second century BC (a theoretical weight of 1/84 of a Roman pound). It then remained at almost this weight until the time of Nero, when it was reduced to 1/96 of a pound, or 3.4 grams. Debasement of the silver began under Nero. Later Roman emperors reduced it to a weight of 3 grams around the late 3rd century [1]. The value at its introduction was 10 asses, giving the denarius its name which translates to "containing ten". In about 141 BC it was re-tariffed at 16 asses, to reflect the decrease in weight of the as. The denarius continued to be the main coin of the empire until it was replaced by the antoninianus in the middle of the 3rd century. The last issuance for this coin seems to be bronze coins issued by Aurelian between 270 and 275 AD, and in the first years of the reign of Diocletian. For more details, see the article 'Denarius' in A Dictionary of Ancient Roman Coins by John R. Melville-Jones (1990). [2] [3]"
The "As" (originated in 280 BC during the Roman Republic) is a coin with an image of Janus: a two faced Mercurius. Mercurius was the original god of the marketplace, if I need to become didactic. But Mercurius himself, a divine force was worn out by the time we came to the Denarius. We can from this take that the Denarius, the 10: is an amplification, the introduction of the 10th Item in a base ten system (prior to the invention of "0"): x.
Ten for the Romans, was a cross, an intersection. Only with the invention of Zero did (and "0" is in some manners the very sum of invention: the shift from non-zero based counting to zero based counting may be the paradigm of "invention" in our culture: a place holder, and nothing more.)
The highest coin of the Roman Empire was the Aureus, valued at 25 Denarii. It was issued in the 1st Century AD, before the Empire became Christianized. In large the Aureus probably came about as the first Roman theological response to Christianity. The Denarius was invented around 210 BC in the time of the Roman Republic. Two hundred and fifty years later, Nero was busy in his George Bush way depleting the Denarii to nothingness during his lifetime (Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus (December 15, 37 – June 9, 68), also pleasantly placed after the birth of Christ (some referred to him as the Beast, 666). But enough of this Apocalyptic mumbo jumbo. We can still say that we venerate Gold for it's immutability: it can be placed on things like excrement, but it itself remains golden.
Gold brought into currency in our epoch, in part because of the rise of Christianity, which would be the most significant spiritual movement, based itself upon the Eastern Religions: Christ is essentially an oriental divinity (read: Chinese) placed on the template of barbaric western polytheistic culture. One could say, well, barbaric as opposed to what? Is not one dream as good as another?
When we get to this spirit, who rose with the dawn, this spirit was breath, and the spirit was free.
Jung (lest we forget him) has something to say as well about the "denarius," however he intends it to be about an alchemical image, not about some damn Roman theurgical-necromantic coin. I however am interested in the coin only because it is of less and less value, such is the coin's unhappy fate. (There are numismatic societies who fetishize ancient and de-circulated currencies. These currencies are themselves capitalized upon, based on the exacting mapping of desire according to rarity or uniqueness of a given currency or currency error). The Jungian denarius means nothing about money, but we must cite the man if only to be somehow frustrated in some sense by who he is and what he has to say:
"The denarius forms the totius operis summa, the culminating point of the work beyond which it is impossible to go except by means of the multiplicatio. For although the denarius represents a higher stage of unity, it is also a multiple of 1 and can therefore be multiplied to infinity in the ratio of 10, 100, 1000, 10,000, etc., just as the mystical body of the Church is composed of an indefinitely large number of believers and is capable of multiplying that number without limit. Hence the Rebis is described as the cibus sempiternus (everlasting food), lumen indeficiens, and so forth; hence also the assumption of the tincture replenishes itself and the work need only be completed once for all time. But, since the multiplicatio is only an attribute of the denarius, 100 is no different and no better than 10." ("The Practice of Psychotherapy": "Psychology and the Transference; paragraph 526)
What may irritate me the most is that the Church as a further multiplication becomes simply a multiplication of a single breath: and it is an admission that each breath is finite. The question remains as to whether each breath remains singular. The question would be whether we have to acknowledge that the universe is not infinitely creative, as Nietzsche hints at in "The Will to Power." Infinite creativity would be a creed, an escape hatch, a breath of fresh air: otherwise the breath will remain the same, and then we really will be caught, doomed and defeated to becoming nothing but the same. This really would be hell, because the world hangs in such a balance: it is the tormenting of tormenting. What makes us "hang in there" (and not in a holding pattern, or hung as the last dog will be hung at the final accomplishment of capital commodification of the air we breathe) is our hope to bring a fragment of kindness, the smallest sliver of faith, love or grace into this tormented world.
I could lie, but this picture is an image of the dusk. This is an image from the West Coast of America. We have continually asked our sons, our European sons to "Go West." Some of us have really got there, and we are sitting laughing, saying, don't you know that the earth is round? But the citizens who live on the next ledge of the world: well they have already got their own idea of how to live, and we cannot really invade their lands now, can we? Isn't it interesting to think that America was bought by European conquest at the cost of the inhabitant's blood? But isn't it interesting to note what will we do? What is the Shicksal of our Western Civilization if we do not turn West again?
Well we can say that modern technology and capitalism is born of the libidinal filling of the gap: of being able to turn and invade another any more: primitivism and our own lack of resources kept us from turning this into one planet. And we may be thankful that we did not have any further to go, that there was no more land, that the ocean between us could not be bridged. It gave everyone time to catch up.
Now Japan may essentially be becoming one big suburb: a kind of vestigial result of imperialism embedded within capitalism (again, noting how coins are issued principally, at first to... armies.)
There was one imagined destiny that never was met. This was the destiny of the very first explorers: that somehow they would never cease from their exploration: that somehow they would keep encountering "benign tribe after benign tribe," keep assigning them to the empire, until they somehow met with themselves. What would in fact happen that one fateful day when Cesar's armies marched from Rome all the way round the earth to conquer... ROME? We have not lived this possible but unlived future, and this unlived future may be a very important counter-dream compared with the hand we were in fact dealt.
In point of fact the natives were never very pleased to see us. There were no benign tribe after tribe. In point of fact they had pointy spears and arrows, lots of barbs. Why the hell should we be let in? So that we could give them all three televisions and a family car, and maybe a sofa? So we could give them a wife and three kids? So we could give them computers and Web logging screens, I mean WHAT NONSENSE!
They wanted their ways, and the ways that belonged to them. The degree to which we, we of the empire of coinage, disaffected them, and I mean all of them, to their own ways is the degree to which we can experience their addiction in and to and through current popular culture.
Who holds these brief images?
Who holds this torrent of words?
Like the torrent of hard rain
Sung by the poet singer, Bob Dylan
There the sun set on the West Coast
The Pacific wall of the Western dream
The sun according to this dream is still free
Because it lies across the empty dreaminess of waves
The last attempt that Cesar made
To march off in conquest of Rome
Has been thwarted
As a horrible perversion and catastrophe of itself
So now the dream turns back on itself
Turning and turning away from any direct line of conquest
And now the son from the East
The Son driven West has no where left to go.
Oh well, the Myth can go onwards and upwards
We can conquer the mountains of the moon
For a million dollars a day we could send someone up there.
Money is getting devaluated.
American capital did not really have that much to do with the Devaluation of the Denarius, no. Rome fell and Christianity permeated out like some holy mist (could be swamp gas?), blowing dust and smoke billowing out from the collapse of Roman edifices.
America, the dream of America, Nero, devaluator, America is just another acknowledged empire, and the World turns its back on us, and the value of the Dollar goes down, and we think, oh well trade protectionism at work there! There is no need for all those Japanese motor cars and TV's that we told them how to make. We can sell our goods to them cheaper, and more dollars we will make. So much for importing any more ideas. The ideas as the living element of Capital now will begin to cost too much.
But did anyone Object to Rome so much? Did they object to Rome in the manner that we object to the United States? Rome was a theurgical-political construct: part born of Western "gods" and part of the excrescence of Death: another one of our gods: who translated himself into money. America has become one and the same empire, perhaps it is objectionable because it began with the principles of the so called "Enlightenment": promising "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of ...Property to every man: that there should be no more slaves. But we have already stated we are slaves to our money: to the epidemic of commodification. The United States promised some life that we might live beyond the dominion of kings and slum lords alike: it promised us the beauty and enlightenment of light (see image of sunset inserted above). That damn sunset was free anyway, free as though I could give my life to it and it could give it's life to me.
In the face of this epidemic, where we ourselves are moribund, contaminated with capital through and through, our option is to write as dying men, still pointing to the red felt stamped with gold that forms an outer protection to our scrolls. We can still point to our "Ateliers": we are the stricken men in a plague: the horrified prince, struck down at the end of Edgar Allen Poe's Masque of the Red Death. -This is what it means to live as an intellectual in the eschaton of capital (!) ... the endless eschaton of capital, the essence of a "bad infinity." Money is the condemnation of the soul to death.
Katalepsy, now who really wants that? It's a disease, and we have doctors invented to keep us from going insane, becoming "cataleptic." I have begun to suggest that the only "salvation" I find in this life is when something seizes me, when something breaks in: it could be my guilt and it could be my rage. At these moments, at one with the current of violence in the universe, I am aware that this Being is neither Good nor Evil, it is closest akin to whatever energy sets me aside from me.
The quest for "objectivity" of the true man of science: is the quest for that which is "Beyond Good and Evil." Two great characterizations of this sacred "Objectivity" were Thomas Mann's "Settembrini" in "The Magic Mountain," and Nietzsche's character of himself, "The Antichrist."
My friend once was called "the epileptic," a sister, a kissing cousin really: she said that to become "epileptic" was the feeling of being raped by the Devil: I find this akin to Katalepsy: being merged with the current of violence in the universe.
A digression into the current music: Robert Johnson: my sense is that though he supposedly sold his soul to the devil, that is, the current of unaccountable violence in this world: my sense is that he still asks for a pittance of mercy and kindness: his music has taken on the figure of a intransigent blown this way and that by that free air we breathe. Now it is a curse that is said when we say of someone that "they will inherit the wind." As if all their value will become Hades dust and blown away, but I see that Robert Johnson still begs for the current of Mercy that also works its way through the universe through the ache of our hearts at the sound of true music and at the rise of dawn and the fall of the sun.
But once again, with violence there is no room to breathe, and the threat with catalepsy is that held in the essential violence of being: held in its grasp we will not be able to escape. I say that beyond Katalepsy there must still be room to breathe. The breath will become finite, once again, re-duplicated, in other words, breath's focus and force will diminish in it's re-duplication: each repetition will somehow make the first breath just one of many. The first breath was the ultimate miracle of life: it's negative, counterpart from death, is found in the "invention" of Zero. "0:" a number that by itself adds nothing to the condition. But the Zero, an Arab invention, is not itself inherently evil. It is an extremely powerful abstraction, a deterritorialization of "counting" into a form of intensity that we use everywhere and every day. Zero, and the violence of the universe? A zero is an act of violence insofar as it is a "deterritorialization": some Gestell is ripped up and reframed: counting itself becomes counted: the zero accomplishes just this.
What is counted anyway? Ultimately lots of items: there is always behind this an operation of counting tithes, or tribes, the numbering of ships, or the numbering of the tribes of Israel: number of heads in a gang: where number is relative quantitative power of one versus another assortment of heads. Counting implies that the quantities are countable: that's what we have computers for: exquisite loads of counting in order to frame and represent. Now that the immense calculations are provided for us by these machines, we continue to exist in an aether of ideas: we continue the struggle of life for compassion, to be free, to breathe one single free breath in gratitude... and commodification of the very air we breathe, suffocation and death.
Now I am a humble man, and, to be honest, I ask for a pittance of grace and charity in the face of the immense cruelty of the world. I cannot think of myself as asking for anything other than from the lap of charity and kindness. And I want to ask how far, how far does one really have to go?
But what saves me sets me aside from myself. What saves this whole predicament, this "waking-dream-predicament" is to deal with the current of violence once again.
We keep saying that the "Good" is pre-ontological: in other words we pray that what is at the center of the universe, the heart of everything we experience is goodness. Beyond any experience of its profound indifference. But what if this violence were pre-ontological?
We all know about the violence of the despot: the one who set out to conquer the world and set it into order: one word, one realm, one currency, one language, ordered and controlled, regulated nation under "God." We know that the despot always hides the violence in the mystical foundations of the state.
I still, defiantly, ask... no, my friend, I am down on my stomach, prostrate, I pray for a share of compassion and mercy, like that final light that pours in rays through the sunset. I know that the dream will go on and on, it never stops for anyone or rests for a single moment: like a vapor of smoke heading West it rebounds and goes on its way: up of back towards the East. What I ask for is not offered to me from above: but rather is offered when the sun itself sinks nearly to my own level: that is my poor perception, yes, I know, here on Planet Earth, but that is what I believe, when I turn and face the sun, and I am on one level with this being of great light, facing the eternal violence hidden within a path of stars, praying for a shred of mercy in all this torrent of grief and light.
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