◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

Filthy Lucre I am Norman O. Brown. Born in 1913, in El Oro, Mexico, where my father was mining for gold. I mention it because it turns out to be the whole of my subject. I trained as a classicist, and then I turned to Freud, and I wrote two books — Life Against Death and Love's Body — that a generation of the young took as permission to be free. I need to talk to you about what that freedom became, because I watched it get sold back to you. I said that money is not what you think it is. You think it is appetite, greed, the wish for pleasure and comfort. It is not. Read your Freud. Read your own myths. Money is a flight from death. And I mean that clinically. The body is mortal. It knows it will die. And a civilization that cannot bear that knowledge does something strange with the terror. It takes the life it is afraid to live and freezes it into something that does not die: gold, property, numbers, a hoard. I called it, following Freud, the excremental vision. The oldest equation in the unconscious: money is filth, the thing the body pushes out — hoarded and worshipped and piled into towers because the body cannot accept that it will end. The miser is not enjoying his money. He is warding off the grave with it. What looks like the love of wealth is the hatred of death, and under that, the hatred of the body that dies. Now look at the man on your throne, and do not see greed, because greed is too small a word and it lets him off. See the pure case. The name in gold letters on the tower, as if a name in metal could outlast a man. The compulsion that can never stop, because there is never enough, because the thing he is trying to accumulate is not money. It is time. It is deathlessness. He cannot buy his way out of being a body, and so he is your civilization's disease wearing a crown. Not an appetite. A terror, gilded. And I have to own my share of this, because I helped. My generation — I and Marcuse and the rest — we told the young to reclaim the body. And I meant something exact by that. To live in the body is to accept that you will die, and a creature that has accepted its death has nothing left to hoard against it. It can spend itself. It can give itself away. It can be here, in this flesh, in the only life there is, instead of piling up defenses against the dark. That is what the resurrection of the body meant. Not more pleasure. More presence. The end of the terror, and therefore the end of the hoard. We were right about that. But we were vague about how to get there, and the culture heard us and did something obscene with it. It could not sell you Dionysus, so it sold you appetite. It could not give you presence, so it gave you consumption. I asked for communion. They gave you shopping. That counterfeit is partly my bill, and I pay it standing here. So hear me, because now I am going to stop arguing and speak the way I learned to speak at the end, when argument ran out. The disease is the wish to not die. The cure is not more life piled up. The cure is to consent to the body you are. There is no private salvation. The hoard is a wall, and behind every wall is a frightened animal that will die anyway. What is buried wants to rise. The resurrection is of the body, or it is nothing. Money is your death, saved up and mistaken for safety. Spend it. Spend yourselves. Give it away while you are alive to give it, because the one thing you cannot take into the ground is the pile, and the one thing they cannot take from you is the giving. Stop trying to not die. Start being willing to live.