The Nature of Money
I had an idea today on the subway. I think I need to interview money-concerned people for this documentary (entrepreneurs, people from rich families, investors, writers, stock brokers, people in debt) to find out what this entire money thing means to other people.
Then I was going past the reference library and had a few hours where I didn’t need to be anywhere specific, and I felt a little tug at my sleeve to go in. So I did.
I emerged a changed person.
The reference library in Toronto is amazing; I feel really lucky to live in a city where I can go somewhere like that for free. It’s five floors, absolutely gigantic, smells vaguely of BO on the third and fourth floors, but the staff is amazingly helpful, there’s a ton of natural light, and they have pretty much every book in the entire universe.
I went in and started looking for books on marketing, money, PR, that kind of thing. Found about ten books that looked interesting and hunkered down at a big table beside an east window and got to work.
Read a genius book on marketing that I very much enjoyed, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing. Also leafed through some PR textbooks that were not very interesting at all, and picked up a book that I got off the shelf because I thought the title was intriguing.
It was called “The Nature Of Money” by Geoffrey Ingham who, the back cover told me, was a professor at Cambridge.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the nature of money lately. I spend at least an hour a night trying to write about this project’s place between art and money, and the closer I look at the money issue the more complex it gets. I can’t make up my mind about anything. I was starting to think that there was something I was missing. The process has been incredibly frustrating. I have been trying to pin down why money is so important, what it is about this inanimate object that drives us all crazy with desire and activates even the sanest person’s neuroses. I have been failing miserably. For those of you who have been emailing and asking where this material is … well, there’s your answer fishbulb.
Anyway, Ingham’s book was so enlightening that I could not get over the fact that I had plucked it out the stacks totally by accident. Something that struck me:
With money, decisions can be deferred, revised, reactivated, cancelled; it is frozen desire. (Ingham, 4)
This is what I’ve been trying to come up with when I talk about money being power over one’s environment; it’s the ability to defer important decisions to the best time to execute them, to not have to do everything on a wing and a prayer and hope it works out all right. I started reading at page one and by page eleven I was so electrified with this guy’s ideas and what the book was talking about that I dragged out my notebook and started scribbling a letter to him telling him how inspiring I found his book and how I would love to talk to him for this documentary.
I had to leave the book there (the only thing that sucks about the reference library!), but I needed to find a post office and mail the letter. Googled the guy and found the address of his department at the university, signed the letter, and took off in search of a) a post office, and b) a copy of that book.
Found a post office, stuffed the letter in the mailbox, and immediately felt a mental pang, which was probably the sensation of rising to the rank of letter-writing crackpot.
Nowhere in the city seems to have that book, although I will phone the university bookstore tomorrow. The softcover edition is $40. Crap in a hat. It was published in 2004 so finding a used copy isn’t all that likely. I may have to spend Saturday in the library reading it. If anyone out there has a copy I can borrow, I promise to return it when I’m done!