Don't blame me for the way the river meanders
Ok.
I’m broke.
Interesting way of putting it – broke. Broken, poor, destitute (not that serious). I’ve had no money so long that it seems normal, like this is universal, like no one drives luxury cars or dresses in expensive foreign suits, doing all they can to not smell themselves, not touch themselves, put the fabric and fragrance in between, let it slip in the crack and protect you from you.
Money is the ultimate holiday destination. That’s what it feels like when you have none. You work a bit and some works its way towards you and for a day or two it seems as if you inhabit another dimension, further from home, alien in its detachment from the present. Money gets you thinking of then and later, what you have bought or experienced and what you will buy and experience tomorrow, you can’t occupy the narrow confines of this moment or this thought. Thoughts are too expensive when you have money, they preoccupy you when you could be doing so much else, doing so many other people.
It’s my guilty pleasure that I, at times, enjoy being broke, it feels like being fixed, feels like health and presence of mind. I can read a book without thinking about what book I should buy next, listen to this CD and drift into its subtleties without edging towards the next one and only catching the sledge hammer obviousness. I can watch this film and then find the current taking me onto the net, what’s the director done before, what’s the story, the history, where does it fit?
Someone once gave me a present of four old volumes of philosophy. They handed me something tangible and odorous, something finite and enduring. I love books as presents, the give other people to other people, it’s like introducing one acquaintance to another, knowing that the two will get along. Sometimes it’s allowing someone to have a part of you when you know distance will soon intervene. They can imagine you flicking the same pages, pausing on the same passages. A book as a gift can be the longest kiss. It allows you to taste someone, more than the salt on their lips or the thoughts on their mind. It allows you to answer the question – where does this person live when the lights go out.
This person didn’t just give me a wonderful collection of books, they gave me hours. They gave me time. Uninhabited and unpopulated, simple and transparent, hours where I could forget that things cost, that things are important, that catalogues are the world’s greatest source of reading material.
“A spirit is one simple, undivided, active being: as it perceives ideas it is called understanding, and as it produces or otherwise operates about them it is called the will.” – Berkeley
“…we understand that, as nature has graven her image and that of her author on all things, they almost all partake of her double infinity.” – Pascal
“That which knows all things, yet is known by none is the subject.” – Schopenhauer
Each of the sentences above is an infinite puzzle, a single lines with many aspects, many angles. Each represents a withdrawal from the world of things, from this state of brokenness, a deficiency in the eyes of the world, and it would be wrong of me to say that this perception of deficiency is not mutual.
More importantly, each makes me feel immeasurably wealthy and it has made the giver of these gifts a benefactor, someone who imparts benefit, someone who gives more than they intend, who can never be thanked enough for this impartation, who I hope understands that the giving has lasted long past the gift.
I am more than willing to admit that I am defective, broke, in my own way. I suffer a lack of something that is considered essential, that has altered the meaning of the word survival. I fail to survive. I fail and flail, sink in dense water, I can feel my individual poverty rising around my neck and it feels too much like a tie (and remember I use the qualifier of “individual” for my poverty, my family is not poor, I do not starve).
But! I occupy this presence of mind, the present mind, accounted for and not AWOL, not frolicking with things that are meant to augment me, but will only detract, subtract. All the things that could make less of me and have made less of me every time I have used them.
Expensive clothes scare me as I never feel myself in them. I always feel that someone else should be occupying the manufactured space and I would hate to think that my self esteem and confidence would be tied to something as flimsy as a stitch, as measurable as cloth by the metre.
This is how I feel about all things that are measured first by their price tag and then by their utility and then by their standing in the eyes of others. Their space is not mine and vice versa. I hate possessing things and it would be silly to think that such things can possess you. If you have ever reached the point where you fear for your soul, when you imagine the inanimate possessing you, don’t worry, there is nothing left to possess, nothing left to sell.
I hate possessing things.
I would hate having to be exorcised from something that cares neither one way nor the other who its occupant.