IV God Damn the Repo Man

[alice wellintown]

In Metaphysics, Aristotle, "The Philosopher's Philosopher,” declares
that money is by nature
"barren," He argued that the birth of money from money is therefore
"unnatural."  Consequently, the taking of interest
is to be censured and hated.

Plato, Plutarch, Cicero, Seneca, and various other leaders of ancient thought,
arrived at much the same conclusion.

Medieval thinking, in theology as well as in law, went well
beyond Aristotle's views in these matters. Aristotle had acknowledged
the importance of private property and the need
for money in the functioning of the state, but he condemned retail
trading as unnatural and usury as worst of all. The
same mistrust of merchants and their work is found in Peter Lombard's
Sentences, where he says that soldiers or
merchants unwilling to give up their professions should not be
received as penitents because they could not exercise
those professions without sin (4, d.16, q.4, a.2).

But the major thirteenth-century commentators on the Sentences,
Albert, Aquinas, and Bonaventure, modify his position considerably.
They recognize that countries are not
necessarily more self-sufficient than individuals and must rely on the
services of those who can procure supplies for
them, that in a complex society one cannot always buy directly from
the producers.

Dante's attitude towards commerce is essentially a moderate one,
accepting it as a fact of life, a potential benefit to society, as
long as it serves the common good and does not
harm the community in order to advance individuals. He presents the
distribution of wealth as the result of divine
providence in the passage on fortune  and justifies craft and
manufacture, hence, implicitly, trade, in his description
of art as the daughter of nature and granddaughter of God. The
importance he accords both to personal property and to a
stable currency is manifest in his treatment of their abuses; he
discusses in some detail a variety of economic
and monetary sins, not just greed, but plunder, squandering, usury,
fraudulent buying and selling of different kinds of
goods, theft, and counterfeiting. Each one appears in a separate
section of Hell, and several are attacked in
Purgatory and Paradise as well.

Dante employs the technical language of commerce literally, in
connection with the
abuses, and metaphorically, applying it to spiritual treasures and
moral debts. The technical language and
commercial details would have been a particularly effective means of
reaching the members of the audience attuned to
them and would presumably have added a whole other sphere of
application to Dante's message. The metaphorical use of the
same language seems to be Dante's way of countering "corporal usury,"
which is forbidden, with "spiritual
usury," which multiplies the benefits of God's gifts, a distinction
made by canonists and theologians.

Pynchon also employs technical languages with great effect: coal,
dyes, pressure…and the technical jargons, rates, flows, costs profits,
interest…The engineer poet polyglot is satirized  . . .Brock Vond's
physiognomist  . . .history, engineer poetry and the inanimate ….the
sick crews conversations at the spoon . . . Freudian cant ….

So the smoke-stacks have Earned the compounded interest bearing
capacity of Berkshire and Gold Coast monies. Money profits and
proliferates through interests and trusts like a Slothropian estate.

The irony is, that money is not barren, people are.

Abstractions procreate and generate, are fruitful and multiply,
machines are alive and "YOU think you'd rather hear about what you
call 'life': the growing organic Kartell," but Slothrop-the
“protagonist” of this black phallic comedy ---for all his sexual
conquests, can not even, like Oedipus discover himself, though he
searches with his penis for his Frankenstein.

"Death converted to more death." THEY would have their pound of flesh,
and YOU would have a rocket with your name on it.

The langauge, the trechnical language, the shop talk, jargon, business
and profession speak, the TV-talk, the movie talk, discussion of film
and acting, so on, these are not "just the way folks talk" and
Pynchon's great ear and ability to write authentic dialogue.

God Damn the Repo Man to Hell. Larry wants to hire some dude did the
waves for him, the natural waves coming to the shore blown by the
breath of God.