Rosmarie Waldrop
from Driven to Abstraction

Thought Provoking Matter

Middle English gramarye, grammar, or book-learning, came to mean occult or magical lore, and through one Scottish dialect form has emerged in our present English as ‘glamor.’ Spell cast by women.

Grammar girls with words that spell power to cast spells. And provoke matter. So a black panther treads at my side and above my fingers there float petal-like flames. Words with a nimbus, a glory, a sphere of radiance. Beyond the horizon called definition.

But writing is the tool of the negative. (Through which meaning comes to us?) Effortlessly it burns all substance off the blue shapes in the east. To a density less than thinnest cloud, the word “hills.” Without body. Though with form. Therefore not like God. A nothing that foams on the inkplate.
The word’s power to kill—I’m not thinking of white-gloved White House memos—its violence against what it names, what it can name only by taking away its materiality, destroying its presence. Is death itself speaking.

Or is it? If the word both kills and shows “a certain slant of light on Sunday afternoons” that we’d search in vain anywhere else? If the word “horse” boils the animal down to the concept, and yet, in the way of hunger, hallucinates four legs, a mane, and folds of flesh? Then maybe this death is not a simple matter. And must hold a kind of life the way fog holds light?

Some say it’s because the daughters of the gods came down from the heavens and mated with humans that the order of the world was thrown out of joint and opposites became entangled. So that, without the letter that kills, there is no spirit to give life?


Xenomoney: From Promise to Tautology

One thirty-fifth of an ounce of gold for a dollar. The treasury was obliged. Till 1973, when the US Government canceled. Such obligation. Since then exact resemblance for exact resemblance, exact same bill for exact same bill. And nothing, neither gold nor silver, in back of the mirror. (If there had been would it reveal scenes of Vietnam? Reasons of the fourfold increase in the price of oil?)
Cut loose from any fixed equivalence, the dollar sets sail and floats off-shore on market forces. Into uncertain foreign waters and computer screens. Xenomoney.

No more physical reality of a country to guarantee it. Xenomoney belongs to international business that trumps princes and States. No history or traceable origin. Like zero outside ‘natural’ language. Anonymous. A bubble from no sinking ship.

Here creditor does not know debtor. Though they are joined together in one long chain. He cannot examine balance sheets of every link. He can only bite his fingernails. And remember a river in Poland or New Jersey.

Of course it’s long since money went beyond being pure medium of exchange and infiltrated the category of “goods.” Itself bought and sold. Both object and medium, thing and token, commodity and sign for a commodity, it signifies itself. As if a photograph could not only lose its reference to your dead wife but make you forget what is a face.

No more “grounding” of money signs in some prior, natural thing. Just as zero did for numbers—what “thing” could zero possibly refer to? Though Mesopotamia is split crosswise and dollarwise.

Money now creates its own significance. In the only terms available to it. Money is time. And can be bought as a financial future. According to qualities that are precisely not according. And are thought to burn open sexual parts.