There are a number of things that can be illuminated by liquidating them in this way: exercise, labour, prayer. What would they be worth to you if they were devoid of baggage and understood purely as their results? And also if their pleasure was slightly attenuated. That last bit’s the real trick, isn’t it?
It can be difficult to figure out the value of a thing, even in our almost entirely liquified crypto-fascist culture. Especially in our almost entirely liquified crypto-fascist culture?
When I went to check on the stock of chicks we’re brooding I was shown a robin nest complete with three baby blue eggs. The feeling of seeing those eggs, and returning to them to see the robin sleeping there before I went in for bed is not something that can really be liquified, can it?
When I went to check on the stock of chicks we’re brooding I was shown a robin nest complete with three baby blue eggs. The feeling of seeing those eggs, and returning to them to see the robin sleeping there before I went in for bed is not something that can really be liquified, can it?
What could a theme park charge for that? The feeling of your own homestead in Vermont: $200 / day. The experience of walking into your barn to find a robin nesting in the ladder your father in law gave you last year: +$60.
These things, of course, cannot be packaged or liquified. This is inseperable from what makes them desirable in the first place. These robin’s eggs mean far more to mean and to Abby than they would to a hypothetical amusement park attendant.
Mishima’s The Temple of the Golden Pavilion comes to mind. If a thing has been monetized, that can kill it. Even if it isn’t a death sentence, it should be. That is how severe a black mark engaging with capital is. That was in 1956. Today, in 2023, even the potential for marketability is a black mark. If a thing can be monetized it either will be, or it has been for somebody else, and if it has been, then it colors our relationship with it.
I write this blog every day.
It is not a substack.
But the fact that substack exists and that I could and very well may adapt my writing practice to that monetized form colors how I write.
That is bad.