Flying Lizard

When the forests have been destroyed their darkness remains..

Rain falls into the open eyes of the dead..

The nights disappear like bruises but nothing is healed..

Overhead the seasons rock
They are paper bells
Calling to nothing living

The possessors move everywhere under Death their star.
Like columns of smoke they advance into the shadows
Like thin flames with no light
They with no past
And fire their only future.

--W.S. Merwin

[This reminded you of Calasso's 'American Woodsman'-the Man of the future, because he has no past, no time to see anything grow, has no patience for the slow circles that he think have bound us for so long. What is human, truly human, is the ability to break out, escape, from all that is 'given' and perhaps this amounts to the same thing: destroying what is given. ].

Which is another way of saying: we can possess time. And to possess is to control, order, manipulate and, ultimately, quantify and sell: time is money.

If Le Goff is correct then in some sense the beginnings of capitalism start with credit (must go back to Graeber). Religious condemnations of usury were not, you suspect, simply a result of such trades being considered exploitative, asymmetrical in nature ('asymmetric warfare') but followed from the presumption that human beings owned time and could trade it, could know what the future would bring in terms of gifts, productivity gains and that these 'returns' could be priced today. Contracts and other such binding arrangements are at the heart of it about managing risk, taming chance.

But here we are, with the looming environmental crisis on our backs, a shadow that is about to make a special guest appearance and we haven't got a clue. That's partly because we can't imagine an alternative future to our own glitzy present and partly because political thinking is in thrall to 'the now'. And because it's harder to think about anyone but ourselves today, it becomes harder to think about anyone in the future. The narcissism-whether fundamental to human nature or not-is now the only game in town. Show or be shown up. 

In the end of the day we were only really addicted to ourselves and everyone's got their price (those two are not unrelated). We congratulate ourselves on our supposed clear-eyed intelligence that is streets ahead of the other animals but, really, is that true?

In the Islamic tradition the devil warns God, implores Him not to send down human beings to earth because they will only cause mayhem and havoc. 

That, as it turns out, isn't the whole truth because it hasn't only been mayhem, but there was something there in that statement, right in the beginning, that makes you wonder.

'The best things in life are often free.
But you can give them..
Money, that's what I want'
--Flying Lizard.

'I wonder if the ground has anything to say.
You have made me drunk, drowned out
the world's slow truth with rapid lies..
wherever you have touched the earth, the earth is sore.'
--Carol Ann Duffy.

'We'll have Manhattan,
the Bronx and Staten
Island too.' 

Fire, 'the Fire,' our only future? A scorched earth policy. 

When all is said and done, I think the forgotten wisdom of the Red Man will haunt America.