Animal Money

by Michael Cisco

  “We should read our papers to each other.”

  And that was what we did, the next day. We all turned up with our papers, determined to recoup the cost of the trip and accommodations, as well as the suffering our injuries were causing us. Thank the Surfeit we did not get injured in the US! My report was neatly bound in a regulation binder, that of Professor Aughbui likewise with a great many appended charts to pass around and beautifully executed too I freely agree, the first Professor Long brought hers in a well worn leather portfolio, the second Professor Long brought his battered bescribbled and heavily-amended pages in a roll half crushed by the rubber band that held it together, and Professor Budshah read from miraculously uncrinkled translucent sheets elegantly inscribed in longhand.

  That was a memorable afternoon. The bar was empty. Even the bartender was gone, away on his lunch break. We each read through our pieces, handed around what handouts we needed, and jotted down our notes and questions in whatever way was most convenient. I read well, if I do say so myself, hitting each time index in the margin exactly according to my watch. Professor Aughbui presented an interesting paper in a rather wooden monotone without looking up from the page. The first Professor Long gave a succinct, almost bird-like reading. Professor Budshah spoke with a measured eloquence and poise rather marred by his wired jaw, but I could see how formidable an opponent he could be, even if I found his rather glib dismissals of certain cherished ideas of scientific economics highly annoying, I daresay even incensing, so that I found I had to make an effort to remain impassive during his talk. The second Professor Long, I confess, exasperated us; it was probably all for the best that he did not have the opportunity to address a larger group. He fumbled, retracted, adjusted, even started over.

  We discuss each paper, even the latter. In the criss-cross of our conversation the idea of animal money appears. None of us can account for it, none of us can take credit for it.

  The idea silences us for a while, as we try to grasp it, each within ourselves. It really is only a chance coupling of two words, but they seem to call to each other. It is immediately obvious to us that animal money does not refer to the age-old practice of rating wealth in head of cattle or otherwise using livestock as money; there is something new in our minds.

  We spark out mangled phrases, riddled with gaps and words that melt and combine, flop, groping. Try a new tack. Anecdotes. Straining against his bewilderment, the second Professor Long describes an exchange he witnessed between two squirrels in his back yard a few days before he left for this ill-starred conference. He had tucked it away in his memory, thinking it might “cute up” (sic) a lecture one day, and had not thought of it since. Two squirrels facing each other in the grass of his lawn. One reaches inside its mouth and pulls out something deep blue, like a sequin, round and flat, and hands it to the other. The other squirrel receives this thing, puts it in its mouth, goes to one corner of the garden, digs up an acorn, returns to the first squirrel, removes the acorn from its jaws with its paws, places the acorn in the open paws of the first squirrel. The first squirrel then puts the acorn in its mouth and goes “arching away.” Was that one squirrel buying an acorn off the other? But, then again, the second Professor Long says a moment later, he supposes he might have dreamt it. For that matter, he goes on, he can not be sure he is not making things up.

  But it turns out we all have such stories. For my part, I saw a cardinal count out three roughly identical flakes of something white, confetti I supposed at the time, on a tree limb, take them in a talon and hand them to a big crow, who received them in its talon and tucked them away somehow into its feathers, exactly like a man tucking his wallet into an inner jacket pocket. The crow flew away, but later I saw what I think might have been the same crow, harassing and driving off some hapless sparrows, while a cardinal—perhaps the same one—sat watching unmolested nearby. Did I in fact observe a cardinal paying protection money to a crow?

  If I could retrieve a specimen of those white flakes, would I see the avian profile on one side and a venerable looking nest on the other? I find I am not warming to the second Professor Long. This facetious suggestion originates with him.

  The first Professor Long tells us about the repairs underway in her street, which considerably disaccommodated her getting to the airport. The pavement was torn up, and the soil beneath exposed to the sun for the first time in a very great while, uncovering a sizeable termite excavation which fascinated the workers. The pavement had been the roof of the uppermost portion of the colony, which consisted of large chambers “shaped like lozenges” linked by tunnels. The first Professor Long never actually saw any of the termites themselves, only their hastily-abandoned city, but was particularly intrigued by one unusually rectilinear chamber, in which she noted countless tiny chips of mica that had been neatly stacked in ascending order of size and arranged in narrow piles with slender aisles between them all. She remembers having speculated at the time on the resemblance between a storehouse of bullion and this arrangement.

  Having arrived in San Toribio some time before the commencement of the conference, Professor Budshah explains that he decided to visit the famous swamps not far from the city. The weather had been surprisingly cool and autumnal, he says, and he wanted to take advantage of the torpor of the mosquitoes. While there, he explains, he observed at dusk, in a large pond, what appeared to him to be a dark ribbon in continuous rotation. He shone his light on it, and discovered it was composed entirely of shredded water plants, kept together and in motion by several frogs. Some of these kicked the water with their hind legs, which induced the current to move clockwise, while others drifted with the ribbon and held it together with their forelegs. While it was a single loop, this ribbon oscillated between two spots on opposite banks, where many more frogs crowded densely together. Now and then a frog would produce from somewhere a rag of a water plant, leap into the pond to an especially loud outcry from his companions, insinuate the rag into the ribbon, then return to his place. Frogs in the opposite group would then leap in and take some of the plant material from the ribbon, also to a chorus suddenly in rough unison on that side. Professor Budshah says he found it difficult at the time, and indeed now, to resist the temptation to imagine the far bank crying “sell! sell!” and the near bank “buy!” ...?

  Professor Aughbui has a rustic streak, and keeps a dozen chickens at home. One recently having died, he, being an egg-eating vegetarian, cremated the body in a small kiln he claims was left behind by a previous owner of the property. In any case, the other chickens observed this proceeding, and Professor Aughbui maintains without a trace of humor that they remained subdued and even solemn for days afterwards. One week after the death of the chicken, Professor Aughbui happened to wake in the middle of the night and went to get himself a drink of water. Through a window, he caught sight of a group of several chickens gathered together out in the open, one of whom stood before and facing the rest. Among those present were all of the offspring of the deceased chicken. The chicken standing apart had beside it a heap of something that Professor Aughbui could not identify; it clucked quietly, and a young chicken approached her. The black hen carefully scratched some of the heap toward the young one, then stepped back, allowing the young one to scratch this matter aside, whereupon (Professor Aughbui said “whereupon”) it settled down on this smaller heap. This action was repeated for all present in turn, until only a small consideration was left to the black hen, who settled on her allotment finally. This appears to have been the probation of a legacy?

  Perhaps these observations of ours subtly goaded us toward the chimerically portentous phrase: “animal money,” but what really seems important in the concept itself, if it is a concept at all, is that animal money would be animal, not just money used by animals. Alive, to put it briefly. Too briefly, perhaps, but baldly, there it is, living money, possibly special, possibly not special.

  What is life? It is not increments, not units, not math. Life is qualities in action, verbs, as well as
nouns. Animal money would have to be qualitative, rather than quantitative, but we unanimously agree that this would not mean anything like the exchange of red for purple or hot for smooth ... not necessarily. That would be, I think it was Professor Aughbui made this observation, barter, or something essentially no different from barter, rather than the exchange of money. To be genuinely qualitative, the quality must not be arbitrary; a quality is an experience, a posteriori. Quantities could be experiences, too—this was an interjection from the second Professor Long and typical of him, and we were not so sure either way—Professor Budshah asked by way of rejoinder if, when you are caught in a torrential downpour of rain, the sensation is quantitative, the number of raindrops hitting you, or is it qualitative, the ‘downpour-feeling’ rather than the ‘drizzle-feeling’? But, in any case, the quality certainly must be experienced.

  Well, so the quantity is still a part of feeling ... So this distinction ... you see ...? (gesturing, as if to say, come to me, or work it out for me). This was the first Professor Long, who tends to leave her sentences hanging in just that way. To persist in being sympathetic to this, rather than provoked by it, is an effort. I trust I will be repaid for my tolerance. I know to my cost how easy it is to be misjudged by others.

  Living, animal money, might then mean handing someone an experience. That, we reasoned, would mean giving an exchange of time, in different flavors. The flavor would be exchanged, not the moment. What does this mean? It is the adverbial way in which a moment is a moment of a certain kind. Not a past moment, that would be like handing someone a recording, a photo, a film, an album. It would be a present time-savor, perhaps like—again this was the second Professor Long, who has, I note, the depressing Californian obsession with the word “like”—like stepping through a wall and into a place, a time, and even a self; it would be escape-money. One plain difference, perhaps the key difference, between qualitative and quantitative money would be that, with qualitative money (we kept saying qualitative when we meant quantitative and vice-versa, the two words are too easily intermistaken) there would be no “grey limbo of exchange” (the phrase is coinage of Professor Budshah) where qualities are rendered indifferent and therefore equivalent and exchangeable. You would not wait for animal money. Or you would wait, but differently, like someone waiting quietly on a hotel balcony after breakfast, to see what the day brings.

  In an animal money economy, each would have its own particular money. Professor Aughbui, who speaks just at the moment with a giddy, exhausted excitability that contrasts with his ordinary taciturnity, you could only spend your animal money if it remained with you. It would not operate like a battery of value, susceptible to replenishment, but instead as half of a link of exchange as a component part of an experience. The exchange, someone notes, would then be more like making a baby with someone, and the more we think about this, the more apt the analogy becomes, until we realize just now that it is not an analogy, but that very exchange itself in its most distinct manifestation (albeit abstract). Hence, our idea is rather at variance with the concept as Klossowski outlined it. In an overzealous moment we call it the true, the real exchange, of which the quantitative is only a counterfeit. And it seems to us, going further, that this kind of thing, this kind of talk, whatever you may call it, is also an indispensable aspect of animal money, namely the discovery that what appears to be a metaphor or a symbol or a representation or a figure of speech of some kind, far from bringing two things together, is actually an unnecessary and cumbersome division introduced within a thing. It is more like quantity. We are getting a bit carried away.

  “Where is the ‘within’?” Professor Budshah asks gnomically. While he does not put on airs, he does have this annoying propensity to waft an atmosphere around himself.

  Animal money would have to be exchanged in much the same way we have just resolved a figure, conception of a child, by positing it as the exchange, unmetaphorically. That is the way the exchange of animal money would have to work, with ‘the resolution of a figure’.

  That latter idea looks increasingly uncertain. Even the second Professor Long, with his lamentable blurriness, can see that. He calls the idea “iffy”—a puerile term but not incorrect.

  Unfortunately there are other analogies that work as well but are more perplexing: the exchange of ideas for example. It seems obvious, particularly to me and to Professor Aughbui, that the naive model, in which I come along with an idea in my head like a cookie in a box, and, meeting you, I take the idea from my head and put it in yours, is wrong. For one thing, having given it to you, I do not forget the idea, the idea can be in as many heads at a time as there are heads, provided infinite contact among heads. At least as many, the second Professor Long says. He is always saying things like that, things that make no sense, or make sense only to him. Everyone has had the experience; explaining an idea you are certain of, you suddenly become uncertain of it; said into the air it does not sound the way you expected it to sound; now it seems no more convincing than any other idea on the same topic would be. The result: abashed affect. You feel stupid. Were you stupid? Were you stupid for liking that idea, or was it that you articulated a good idea in a stupid way? Posing the question means giving up on an answer. How can the articulation be distinct from the idea?

  How curious this is! How curious! I am utterly unable to locate a thinker. The thoughts are developing without a thinker to think them or a mind to contain them.

  The idea has to happen between two people, but it is not entirely external to them any more than it is entirely internal to one or the other. There has to be enough external so that it is possible to have agreement. If animal money works this way, then this would mean you can not do without some physical money as the external, or part thereof.

  “We can’t simply ‘money’ at each other, from one inner redoubt to another,” Professor Budshah announces. “If we were going to ‘money’ each other, we should have to do it in both ways, on the inside and on the outside.”

  He is speaking loudly, but, to be fair, we are all of us shouting at each other. It is necessary to shout, if we are to make ourselves heard over the unbelievable din of the booming sound system, which began its cachinnation at six PM, because this lounge converts to a discotheque in the evenings. We have been apparently deep in consultation all afternoon. Although we can all walk, we nevertheless tend to wait for the nurse to guide us one by one back to our rooms, and she has not come. Or perhaps she did come, tried for a time to get our attention, and then, failing that, gave up. Actually, I think I see her dancing over there, but it is difficult to be certain of recognizing her out of uniform, and with the uncertain illumination of the stroboscopy of the pulsating lights. I turn my attention back to the others, and colorful spangles swim over the ragged, arctic terrain of their bandaged heads, dip in and out of their injuries like tropical fish flitting among the cavities in a reef. The speech of Professor Aughbui is muffled by the booth anyway. The second Professor Long keeps one hand pressed to his bandages to keep the dubstep from vibrating it too aggressively, while the first Professor Long, on the other hand, sits up straighter. I hear the treble rake directly across the crack in my skull, like a crystal rasp. The first Professor Long, with her one bandaged ear, has some measure of protection and continues to converse more or less normally, although she has to raise her voice to a bleat. About Professor Budshah there is not much to say; he sits impassively with his head erect and both feet up.

  The unit of animal money, a kind of lexspecie—and here too I do not know which of us put together that word, or if it was spoken by someone else we overheard in the cacophonous din of the club—would be the ‘copula.’ Up until this point in time, monetary exchange has been a matter of substitution. The copula ... well, on the other hand, would be money-that-is-a-verb ... People keep bumping into me and I am not able to see them because my bandages interfere with my peripheral vision. The value in the historical exchange to date—BUMP—is constant, both parties retain equivalent va
lue and only swap the bodies to which that value is attached. A sudden chill spreading acutely across my scalp suggests to me that someone here has just sloshed a beverage on my bandages. It is something of a relief, because the air conditioning has failed and the room is like a sauna. We are all gushing with sweat, our faces glisten like glass. The value in animal exchange is also constant, but it increases in the exchange to a higher level across both parties. There is more value irrespective of surplus value, and the ‘copula’ is not lost either because it is not noun money it is—BUMP—verb money, so it is not exchanged but it is the activity.

  By now we are all convinced that the Latino, or whatever they decide to call it, should be lexspecial rather than money of the usual kind, and, after a lot of screaming and mutual assurances, we decided to author a paper jointly and present it to the conference. The nurse has still not come; she must be regaling herself as part of this ridiculous display. Fortunately, I have on me a sheaf of take out menus that have about three inches square of blank space on one side. I distribute these in the absence of any other paper, and we begin to write out our thesis and supporting arguments based on our respective specialities as best we can with the stub of a pencil, an eyebrow marker, a fragment of chalk that Professor Aughbui managed to pry out of the seam of his jacket pocket. Our monument! Someone elbows me in the back of my head and I howl out loud; in blind haze of pain and outrage I pull my shoe from my foot and swat backwards with it and the next thing I know I am tumbling headlong out of my chair with an invisible burden on top of me belching cigarette smoke. I struggle back into my seat. Battered, ducking, shouting, we continue: conventional static money is a denatured metaphor, while animal money would metaphorize naturally. We do not explain this to ourselves because we all already see very clearly what it means, even in the middle of a light show, namely that a metaphor ... “the lake is a mirror” ... “my love is a red rose” ... does not have to reduce two things to a single shared quality, it can compound them. The mistake comes in making that only rhetorical counterfeiting. The first Professor Long wants to know if animal money eats, and does it eat other animal money or would it have to have plant money or plankton money to eat?