“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
– Ray Bradbury

If you can’t pursue a subject in depth on your blog, what kind of world are we living in? A pondering line that eats away at me is the Danny DeVito quote from Heist again and again and again and again. Surfing I found this line :

… a line in the excellent 2001 David Mamet film Heist. Danny DeVito’s character, Mickey Bergman, says: “Everybody needs money. That’s why they call it money.”

Mamet’s intended effect with this line is clear; it perfectly captures Bergman’s obsession. If anyone knows me they know I love Mamet’s writing and twists… It’s as if, to Bergman, even the sound of (the word) “money” is … well, for lack of a better way to put it, is synonymous with what the word means.

To me, this misses what makes DeVito/Bergman’s statement really funny. For it’s not just the idea of the meaning of the word ‘money’ being carried in the sound. It goes deeper: it’s the thought of the power of the concept itself - the object, money - as having passed over in some sort into the word. I don’t know whether David Mamet actually had that in mind - money as thing with inherent power - but it isn’t a new thought in mankind’s history. In a famous passage from The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Marx quotes Goethe and Shakespeare (in turn here):

[1] Six stallions, say, I can afford,
Is not their strength my property?
I tear along, a sporting lord,
As if their legs belonged to me.
…..
[2] Thus much of this will make black white, foul fair,
Wrong right, base noble, old young, coward valiant.
… Why, this
Will lug your priests and servants from your sides,
Pluck stout men’s pillows from below their heads:
This yellow slave
Will knit and break religions, bless the accursed…

And Marx cites these lines in support of the thought that…

… money is… the object of eminent possession. The universality of its property is the omnipotence of its being.

He goes on to develop the theme like this:

That which is for me through the medium of money - that for which I can pay (i.e., which money can buy) - that am I myself, the possessor of the money. The extent of the power of money is the extent of my power. Money’s properties are my - the possessor’s - properties and essential powers. Thus, what I am and am capable of is by no means determined by my individuality. I am ugly, but I can buy for myself the most beautiful of women. Therefore I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness - its deterrent power - is nullified by money. I, according to my individual characteristics, am lame, but money furnishes me with twenty-four feet. Therefore I am not lame. I am bad, dishonest, unscrupulous, stupid; but money is honoured, and hence its possessor. Money is the supreme good, therefore its possessor is good.

And so on. Marx here sets out an idea he would later elaborate further in the notion of commodity fetishism: in the present context, the nub of it is that money is endowed with power, but this is a social and not a natural power (Marx writes: ‘Money is the alienated ability of mankind’). People, though, come to think of the thing just in itself as possessing and exuding that power.

As the thing to the social power it is endowed with, so the word to the thing and, via the thing, to the same pervasive power. That’s why it’s called money. The word itself sings out the very power, almost magical, that it stands for - sings just like Liza Minnelli and Joel Grey in Cabaret:

Money money
Money money
Money money
Money money…

Is God an a priori condition for the existence of reality? What is prior before prior? The cosmic primordial field exists because it exists. I am because I am is the first statement of God. “The T.V. screen is the retina of the mind’s eye.” God is exploring the inner anatomy of himself. Dive deep into the sea of mind and find the gem of love.