“The Heaven-Sent Leaf”:
On Poetry and Money
Katy Lederer
“Money is a kind of poetry,” Wallace Stevens once wrote, which, as Dana Gioa remarks, is “not an allegory, but a metaphor.... Money is the one thing in society you can turn into almost anything else.” [1] Or, as Kant says, money “represents all goods, since it is conceived as a universally accepted mere means of commerce [and has] no value in itself as opposed to things which are goods.” [2] In other words, money—perhaps contrary to the popular belief—is fundamentally neutral, a figure or lens, a means by which we magnify our motives and desires (in this it is a form of humanism). There is a kind of nonsense to it—money (“a poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have,” Stevens also wrote). It can be like religion (a conveyance of prayer) or language (a means of expression) or love (one can lose oneself in it). I do not fault money for my desires, though society may fault me for desiring to have money. It isn’t money that’s the root of all evil—no that’s a misprision, a form of humanist (a paradigm not coincidentally concurrent with rise of the great banking family of the Medici) self-loathing—it is the love of money that’s the root. There must be a passion, a surfeit, some kind of excess to make money qua money a sin; in this, it is really like anything else.
Or not—for it is this very quality, this representational facility, that makes money precisely unlike so much else. It is everything or nothing, what you want and what you cannot have. It is made and made up. We agree to believe all those pieces of paper are actually worth what is written upon them. “There is very little in economics that invokes the supernatural,” the influential economist John Kenneth Galbraith once wrote:
But by one phenomenon many have been tempted. In looking at a rectangular piece of paper, on frequent occasion of indifferent quality, featuring a national hero or monument or carrying a classical design with overtones of Peter Paul Reubens, Jacques Louis David or a particularly well-stocked vegetable market, and printed in brown or green ink, they have been assailed by the question: Why is anything intrinsically so valueless so obviously desirable?... Surely some magic is involved; certainly some metaphysical or extraterrestrial explanation of its value is required. [3]
In its sheer malleability, its creativity, money is as human as language [4] and yet we have, historically, believed that it is evil, supernatural—a trick. Consider the following passages from Act 1 of the second half of Goethe’s Faust, which take place after Mephistopheles has persuaded a financially desperate Kaiser to start printing paper money (“the heaven-sent leaf”):
Chancellor:
Who could ever have dreamed such happiness
Would come this day of my old age to bless.
Listen! and look upon the heaven-sent leaf,
That into joy hash changed a people’s grief.
“To all whom it concerneth, and so forth:—
This note of hang, that purports to be worth
A thousand crowns, subjects to such demand
The boundless treasure buried in the land
And furthermore, said treasure underground,
To pay said sum is, whensoever found,
And wheresoever, firmly pledged and bound.”
Kaiser:
Audacity unheard of!—foul deceit!
Who signed the Emperor’s name to such vile cheat?
What punishment can for such crime atone?
Treasurer:
Forget you, Sir, the writing is your own?
This last night you were in the character
Of Pan: we saw the Chancellor prefer
The suit. He said, “A few strokes of your pen
Will bless the people over whom you reign.
Do make them happy on this festal night.”
And then you did take up the pen and write.
No time was lost. A thousand artists plied,
A thousandfold the scroll was multiplied;
And that the good to every one might fall,
We stamped at once the series, one and all.
Tens—thirties—fifties—hundred off we strike!
Never was anything that men so like:
Your city, moldering and in despair,
Has caught new life, and joy is everywhere.
Long as your name was by the world held dear,
Never did it so brightly shine as here—
The alphabet! What is it to this sign?—
To this “hoc signo vinces” note of thine?
[….]
Mephistopheles:
Once used to them, men will have nothing but
These leaves—so easy to receive and spend;
And the realm circulates, from this hour out,
Jewels, and gold, and paper to no end.
Riddled with not-so-subtle allusions to writing (we see notes, signs, a taking up of a pen and a multiplication of a scroll; there is a climactic mention of the alphabet and a rather clear equivalency made between “jewels and gold” and “paper to no end”), these passages clearly draw a parallel between the making of money and the production of literature. [5]
Marx in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 also cites Goethe’s Faust (along with Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens) in order to illustrate a very different point—that money is in fact “the alienated ability of mankind.” He begins his argument elaborating upon the ways in which money is a powerfully creative force (a kind of poesis): “If I long for a particular dish or want to take the mail-coach because I am not strong enough to go by foot,” he writes:
Money fetches me the dish and the mail-coach: that is, it converts my wishes from something in the realm of the imagination, translates them for their meditated, imagined or desired existence into their sensuous, actual existence—from imagination to life, from imagined being into real being. In effecting this mediation, [money] is the truly creative power.
Marx continues his argument at money’s expense (pun intended, I suppose), however, positing:
That which I am unable to do as a man, and of which therefore all my individual essential powers are incapable, I am able to do by means of money. Money thus turns each of these powers into something which in itself it is not—turns it, that is, in its contrary. [….] Money, then, appears as this distorting power both against the individual and against the bonds of society, etc., which claim to be entities in themselves. It transforms fidelity into infidelity, love into hate, hate into love, virtue into vice, vice into virtue, servant into master, master into servant, idiocy into intelligence, and intelligence into idiocy. [….] Since money, as the existing and active concept of value, confounds and confuses all things, it is the general confounding and confusing of all things—the world upside-down.
Of course there is a glaring flaw in Marx’s argument, which is that it assumes that all power (for in the passages I cite above, money is more than roughly equivalent to power) is corrupting. Might we wonder, for instance, if a virtuous man might not become even more virtuous (“virtue into more virtue” to use Marx’s phraseology) by use of money? And if so, is this magnification still a corruption, an alienation—a lie? On the one hand, we have AIG, Lehman, Bear Stearns, and Morgan Stanley first “making money” and then “making money up” by leveraging their assets 40 to 1; on the other, we have, as the poet Frederick Turner puts it in his book Shakespeare’s Twenty-First Century Economics: The Morality of Love and Money (Oxford UP, 1999): “even holy and unworldly persons, like Mother Teresa and the Dalai Lama [raising] money to pursue their goals of mercy and charity” (p. 5). Unless we dispense of money altogether, are we doomed to live in an exaggerated, unjust world? And, by a similar logic, unless we dispense of the making of literature altogether—another kind of “making,” “making up”—are we doomed to live in Plato’s imperfect Republic?:
Yes, Socrates, that, I think, is quite true.
Then must we not infer that all these poetical individuals, beginning with Homer, are only imitators; they copy images of virtue and the like, but the truth they never reach? The poet is like a painter who, as we have already observed, will make a likeness of a cobbler though he understands nothing of cobbling; and his picture is good enough for those who know no more than he does, and judge only by colors and figures.
[….]
Certainly.
And what is the faculty in man to which imitation is addressed?
What do you mean?
I will explain: The body which is large when seen near, appears small when seen at a distance?
True.
And the same object appears straight when looked at out of the water, and crooked when in the water; and the concave becomes convex, owing to the illusion about colors to which the sight is liable. Thus every sort of confusion is revealed within us; and this is that weakness of the human mind on which the art of conjuring and of deceiving by light and shadow and other ingenious devices imposes, having an effect upon us like magic.
That is, again to quote Marx (on money, but, for my purposes here, he could just as well be speaking about writing):
Money as the external, universal medium and faculty (not springing from man as man or from human society as society) for turning an image into reality and reality into a mere image, transforms the real essential powers of man and nature into what are merely abstract notions and therefore imperfections and tormenting chimeras, just as it transforms real imperfections and chimeras—essential powers which are really impotent, which exist only in the imagination of the individual—into real essential powers and faculties.
Of course the parallel isn’t all neat and clean. While Marx’s corrupted spender can transform wishes and desires into actual objects that exist in the world, for instance, Plato’s artist can only imitate said objects (thereby distorting and ultimately diminishing them); while Marx’s spender uses money as an extension and enlargement of his intellectual, emotional, and corporeal selves, Plato’s artist uses representation mainly to make of the objects he writes of or paints that much smaller, less real—less ideal. Both the spender and the artist, however, are cast as deceivers in these texts; both are morally suspect, unworthy—magicians. And yet both are also fundamentally—and irresistibly—creative. Just as we can’t help but root for Mephistopheles in Faust, so too, I would argue, we are infinitely charmed by both the spender and the artist. They are mythic in their trickery. We venerate their power.
We are living now in an unprecedented era—both for money and for poetry. […]
* * *
Notes:
[1] On the one hand, it strikes me as odd that, after making such an assertion (that money is this malleable, this creative), Gioia would have written a poem (called, literally enough, “Money”) composed entirely of clichés ; then again the clichés are themselves (as clichés will be) either metaphors or similes and are therefore, I suppose, a (perhaps brilliantly, perhaps not) literal enactment of his assertion. Best bit: “Money. You don’t know where it’s been,/ but you put it where your mouth is./ And it talks.”
[2] See also Hume for a similar sentiment: “Money is not, properly speaking, one of the subjects of commerce, but only the instrument which men have agreed upon to facilitate the exchange of one commodity for another. It is none of the wheels of trade: it is the oil which renders the motion of the wheels more smooth and easy.”
[3] Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went. Houghton Mifflin Company: Boston. 1975, p. 62. “The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled,” he also wrote.
[4] I like this quote from Gertrude Stein. One can never tell if she is kidding: “The thing that differentiates man from animals is money. All animals have the same emotions and the same ways as men. Anybody who has lots of animals around knows that. But the thing that no animal can do is count, and the thing that no animal can know is money.” The Saturday Evening Post, August 22, 1936.
[5] In furtherance of my reading, see also this wonderful foreshadowing passage from Knabe Lenker, the Boy Charioteer (AKA “poetry”), which comes just a few pages before:
I am PROFUSION—I am POESY.
I am the POET who feels his true power,
And is himself, indeed, but in the hour
When he on the regardless world hath thrown,
With lavish hand, the wealth, peculiarly his own.
And I am rich—am rich immeasurably:
Plutus alone in riches equals me.
Through me his banquets charm, his dances live:
That which they could not else have had, I give.
* * *
In other news (and I guess I'm paying for it now), had interesting last couple of days. Yesterday, had lunch with an agent friend who turned to me before we started eating and remarked—rather coolly considering the context: "last week was the Armageddon of the book industry."
The woman's forehead says "shit is coming":
Two nights ago, went to the D. E. Shaw Christmas party (in the whale room at the Natural History Museum). During especially depressing conversation about the economy with a fiancee of one of the traders, was reminded of the Cavafy poem "Waiting for the Barbarians":
What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?
The barbarians are due here today.
Why isn't anything happening in the senate?
Why do the senators sit there without legislating?
Because the barbarians are coming today.
What laws can the senators make now?
Once the barbarians are here, they'll do the legislating.
Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting at the city's main gate
on his throne, in state, wearing the crown?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor is waiting to receive their leader.
He has even prepared a scroll to give him,
replete with titles, with imposing names.
Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
and rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.
Why don't our distinguished orators come forward as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and they're bored by rhetoric and public speaking.
Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion?
(How serious people's faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home so lost in thought?
Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.
And some who have just returned from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.
And now, what's going to happen to us without barbarians?
They were, those people, a kind of solution.
Constantine P. Cavafy (1904)
Here is a picture of Andrew Hultkrans and Zelimir Galjanic, both of whom were at the party (I used to manage Zelimir, strangely enough). Zelimir is a refugee of the publishing industry (used to work at Grove and Penguin—got out several years back, however); Andrew used to be the editor of Book Forum. It is interesting to me how closely linked the worlds of publishing and finance really are...
Aren't they handsome?:
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