ghost of cohosts past

of those continuities of letter whose economy are only matched by their substance on the nature of economy, let's exaspirate together with:

"Ah! How cheerfully we
consign ourselves to perdition!"

A line that has not left my imagination since I first heard it, quite near the beginning of Moby Dick. It's a funny thing, but possibly the most ultimately human of all emotions (and what a rare idea that is), to establish that perdition exists... and cheerfully consign oneself over to it! Perhaps it will be helpful to explicate our terms: cheerfulness is that thing that juliets have, when they are not too maudlin; it is characteristic. It is like sunshine: every day it comes, regardless of the weather. To consign something is tied up in the very meaning of the word history, l'histoire; to pass something over, with a mark of its passing (that mark being the story that makes history anything at all and time possible.) Ownership and possession are factors of distance; the sign is the establishment of those factors with the factor of history that is time. Perdition is where you and i must go, as they say; damnation, if it exists. That's an intervening if, not a subjunctive one; damnation may or may not exist, and I am not establishing doubt or proof here, just that if it did, this is what it would be.

Put together: we, as the sun, establish in history the transfer of possession of our selves to the damnation that may or may not exist. Thank Melville for a sentence like that! But the originating paragraph provides further context:

It's possible that I am too partial to this, but I am aptly summated in this short phrase. The idea that money is the root of all evil, and tying it in to those two orchard thieves and their pivotal tree is such a fantastic botanical idea. Who are the two thieves? Not the two thieves of which one of the thieves was saved, but those two thieves of which one of the thieves was a woman; that is, Eve and her Adam, who pass down their sin through the annals of time, consigning it to us in history. To call that sin commerce is a divine joke funnier than any divine comedy.

We arrive at a use of the twin meanings of urbane, much like "urbane to comfort them", but using a different two meanings. To pass money in ownership from one hand to another—that critical function we call economy—is the center of civic life, of the city as a construct, and so it is urbane once. But to be urbane, to be refined in that courteous way, is also a necessary part of handing out money: you have to have money first to spend it later! Not that the wealthy are in any way more gracious, but that to have any money at all (to be able to pay) is naturally a heightened form of being, even if it is everyday to us in the present. If all texts—both Moby Dick and the Bible, though I'm sure there are others—were true, then perhaps what Jesus says about a rich man going to heaven applies to everyone with more than one cloak and a ducat in their pocket. I should think that unites all of us, however we might like it not to be so. And so, what shall we do, together, passing our five-dollars around? Cheerfully, take it in our turn, and consign ourselves readily with our siblings in sin to a place that thankfully, sits in absence rather than flamingly await us.

and yet, and yet... Borges would say "and yet, and yet... Time is a fire that consumes me, but I am that fire," and I think this is so! We are always already in the hell our money has earned us; no future fire awaits more than our hands, warm in our pockets, until the next moment we can outstretch them to hand that hell to another for their Time, in turn.