to ashes. Books with margines like fjord coastlines, rolled, folded up, swollen like an old woman’s ankles, dog-eared.
My mother’s books. She spent her last months reading them over and over.
Now I read them too, sniffing them, trying to trace a DNA print of her, listening to the rustling of their crispy bodies, feeling their skin eroded like the surface of the moon. I make shelves in my heart for her books, they come with wheelchairs, walkers, crutches, balding from chemio. I don’t want them to feel crippled. I give them all my love. I don’t want them to be forgotten. But they will be because with me they’ll go to the never-never land of death. It was in one of these books where I read of the Mayan Goddess of suicide. They used to have such a goddess named Ixtab and her suicide method was only one: by hanging. Since a child I was always terrified of choking, that petrifying moment when no oxygen is penetrating my airways. How many times I had swallowed buttons, batteries, small plastic balls, licked on sequins ripped from my mother’s dresses. I excuse myself to mighty Ixtab for I am going to resort on something else, something more endurable and elegant. For a moment I got afraid that I won’t be able to do it myself but then if I can’t bring myself to do it it won’t be suicide, would it. Why not? How about by proxy? Hire someone to finish me off. That seems a brilliant idea. I start to relax, a faint smile appears on my lips and I am sure I can even detect a smile on my mother’s lips on the portrait. I wonder whether she harboured suicide thoughts and put on a brave face just because of me.
She loved you.
Too late now to ask. The past is gone. The present is stalling waiting for me to act. Perhaps one final act and I’ll be ready. Then I remember that to hire someone to kill me I have to pay. The fact that I haven’t got money even to pay for my own death sounds more distressing than anything else.
I get up and look for my pills. There are eleven left, all antidepressant prescribed by my Indian-born GP with lustrous hair and skin plumped with thousands of years natural care secrets. I hope eleven is enough.
Then I look for some leftovers of my mother’s pills. I don’t read the labels, no matter what they are, they’ll do the job. I fall on my knees in front of her portrait. “I love you, too” I whisper but I don’t cry because soon, very soon we will be together.
I am about to get water when my eyes fall on something shiny, long and purple. The thing I bought with my first earned money for someone special. The horrendous shawl I bought for my mother. I hold it and bury my face in it. She has kept it all those years among her books of all places.
See? She cherished that you expressed your love through money, your first money!
I have forgotten about Liam. Does it make me sane?
LIAM
I wonder what The Thinkerwas thinking. Sex? Money? These are presumably the bulk of the billions brain impulses a person generates in a day. It might be also disappointing to realize that while a very few are after your love everyone is after your money. Think of the advertising industry, the one created to lure you to buy streaming and screaming at you. You have to live with the belief that you are a statistical consumer and you can’t quit. You live in a commercial break all your life. The survival of the civilization is your responsibility. Your purpose in life is to spend money in order to keep the economy thriving. You earn money to spend it. Spending, splurging that’s what is required from you as a disciplined citizen. And if you haven’t got enough to spend according to the expectations there’s credit, loans, mortgages. The system you live in is a money system. Your dreams and your conversations are all about money and don’t think that that alternative niche of people declaring themselves to be spiritual and refusing to participate in this money madness can exist without paying their bills. Avoid the money trap don’t hate money, don’t drug yourself with it. Only a few are not money addicts. The more you have the more you want. It’s a passion second to none and don’t bring in sex. How many minutes a day you spend on sex and how many on money: touching, paying, transferring, borrowing, talking about, asking prices, browsing for a bargain. Money-abusing, money raising, money giving away. Money, the magic cursed word.
And please don’t think that Black Friday is a shopping event only, a day on which you can satisfy your craziness for spending.
Black Friday actually comes from one particular Friday in 1840 in England when a minor bank’s balance sheet showed for the first time more losses than profits. The bank, of course, wanted to sweep it under the carpet but “The Finance Gazette” got wind and had the story splashed on their pages. Then, on that Friday the bank woke up with panicked citizens blocking its door demanding their money. The rest of the story goes that a man by the name of Walter K. came up for the first time with the clever idea to calm the clients by making the bank of England pay off the troubled bank and the debts of the bank. Always remember that in troubled times the ones with debt will benefit while the savy ones will very likely soup it. Fear, panic, greed and more extreme emotions are behind the financial picture of the world. Making money by borrowing heavy loans is a well proven way to build a business empire. Anyway, if you are in debt you’ve never been alone. Nearly 2000 BC in Babylon when they wrote law codes asserting the role of money, the amount of interest on debt was also set. Some historians go as far as to say that money was invented for the mere purpose of paying debts.
You probably knew Newton as the bloke with the apple, as the legend goes he was hit by an apple while lazying under the tree and “discovered” gravity, but Newton was also Master of the Royal Mint at a time when England was losing silver and gold to Asia. Sounds familiar?
Oh, money, the old Phoenician symbols! I can retire tomorrow if I want, this mega softwear company bought my app advertised as AN APP A DAY KEEPS THE VIRUS AWAY, said to you that teenager who thought that you should burn the marshmallow before offering it with his latte. You thought it was a joke but he carried on quite arrogantly. He already knew the power of money.
Because without big money man couldn’t have landed (mooned) on the moon, the pyramids wouldn’t have been built or the Taj Mahal, that symbol of eternal love. How about the Suez and the Panama canals, the satellites that create and support the Web, the airplanes that bring the world closer to home? The Olympiads that bring people together couldn’t be organized, not that they can stop wars like they did once in ancient Greece. The breath-taking beauty of the New Years fireworks over the Brisbane river or over the Sydney Harbour and the fairy-tale beautiful Sydney Opera House, or the flamboyant festival of the kites in Thailand could not have existed without money, neither the movies we love or the video games we play. Life-saving medical equipments could not have been designed, nor research in archeology or human DNA, nor programs to eradicate wars and hunger could have been conceived. Last but not least, we wouldn’t be walking around with our phones in hand, touching them as the statistics show two thousand four hundred something times a day, far more than we touch our loved ones. That’s the big picture which makes people see the good and useful application of money.
In this respect money can be a sacred thing. Small wonder the word was coined from the name of the goddess Moneta worshiped by the Greeks and coins were made only in the temple dedicated to this goddess of memory and the mother of Muses. How very appropriate. So in a way we can interpret money as a muse at least for some of us, fellow money addicts who think big, admire Steve Jobs who by the way said once: “Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me…”
Museums are full of ancient coins some made of cheap alloy but still precious. Archeologists love to be photographed with coins in their hands still dirty from the digging. From a single coin they can build back a civilization like from a cracked pot and that’s the hidden beauty of money coming down from millenniums to tell us stories, to tell us that humanity hasn’t changed much, perhaps not at all, still made of rich and poor, still giving loans and borrowing, drowning in debt, still squandering lives and money because
