from Untimely Death Is Driven Out Beyond the Horizon
Brenda Iijima
A short ineffectual lecture on money (the conceptual basis thereof)
Can you see the rope? Peoples without monies can’t purchase the wishing well. Money is a slippery commodity. You can make it with algorithms. Money is invisible but once someone gets it they can flaunt it by being healthy, eating nutritious foods and living long lives in seclusion down long, petroleum-based driveways or pretty tree-lined chambers. The fact that animals don’t have money is one indication of money’s relationship as one-sided leverage and tool for one relatively new species, the homo sapiens (compared with the shark which has existed on earth for millions of years). The findings are shocking: pollution, anoxia, warming, acidification, overfishing, hypoxic conditions, and species extinction. There is absolutely no possibility of equality amongst peoples (and animals) if there is a system of value exchange that uses money as its gateway drug. Without the endorsement of money people might live in a relationship of mutual reciprocity though there might be thuggish outbreaks. Women, historically did not get paid for their work. Their work is now called affective labor because of this clinging history. People with more money have money do their work for them, people with little money have to use their bodies in difficult, tiring and dangerous ways to get some money only to perpetually run out and be forced to generate more from abject positions. A human is customarily paid the least for the nastiest work. Slavery abounds: the indenturing of others. The ones with more money make most of the rules/laws (need this even be iterated!). Money has a vast media entourage. Money may dress and undress. Money can easily attach itself to ideology. Money is an illusion in that it creates the condition where some people feel superior to others (especially to animals). Money manipulates perception and insinuates itself on skin. Weaponry costs loads! Money amplifies voice, as they say, money talks. Fallacy of rights. 1 billion a week to war Afghanistan, and just what does an Afghanistani citizen take home? I don’t want you to think it is not, or that it is—money has no internal affect nor does it display emotion, only secondarily, through exchange. Pillar with propensity, a mad rumination…
…even if hell could respond as a kind of midway point…
“Kneeling on the blood sack as if it were a robin’s breast can only be seen as an image in one. It’s isolated." (p. 67, Leslie Scalapino, The Front Matter, Dead Souls)
I wanted to hear you talk about that.
The punctuation.
To talk about awareness and one’s own volition.
To talk about protest cages.
How shall we discuss the bio-political model?
The killings but we are here, on a sofa.
It is physical theater.
Your thoughts appraising the body are what I need.
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Leslie: Thus…
Brenda: Deinotaton…
Together: The strangest…
Leslie: Yes, delay, rose. Questions. Frequencies. Now? Yes, for you, cinematic impressions, or? Layerings of time. A seeing inside with no screen.
Brenda: Trembling but also glowing. Keyed in. Expressions arising out of body. Out of our bodies!
Leslie: Uncertain passages, floating, which is a concept. I am not floating.
Brenda: I didn’t figure you were.
Leslie: Truly embodied, but in the human sense disembodied…
Brenda: Sure…
Leslie: Tilted, askance. Frequencies as time sound meets up as envelopment.
Brenda: Space ecologies!
Leslie: Space.
Brenda: The liquid-covered worm that is transforming a person, who has to sleep, in daylight—your words, p. 93, The Public World/Syntactically Impermanence
Leslie: Relativity is so much more [pause], yes!
Brenda: I sense the word complex but what you mean is more complex, unworded…
Leslie: Relations as communicative, outside language, language is infantile, yet. Open.
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Brenda Iijima is the author of If Not Metamorphic published by Ahsahta Press and other full-length collections.