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um dia digo-te, sim.
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i wake up suddenly in the silence before dawn in a strange hotel room. when you wake up in the middle of the night – unexpectedly – when you wake up at an odd hour in a strange place – don’t you feel afraid? you see, i like to hear the bow of the violin cut into the string. i like to go out at night in a cosmopolitan city and sit in a dark auditorium watching dancers fly into each other’s arms. and i can’t stand the way people say, “when i was a child, i loved elephants,” “when i was a child, i loved balloons.” are they trying to say that if they stopped and looked at a balloon today or at an elephant today, they would not love them? why wouldn’t they love them? i think we still love what we always loved. how could we not? and one of the things that i always loved was the wonderful way that valuable small objects – the christmas presents and birthday presents that adults always gave to each other – were wrapped, were packed. say the present was a small china cup or saucer or a tiny china vase. first, there’d be a brown cardboard box from the shop that looked like it ought to have a rocking horse or tricycle inside, because it was just so big – except that, if you lifted it, it was always incredibly, miraculously light – and you would always imagine that the big brown box had been packed up and sealed up by some sort of huge and muscley industrial workers who were completely indifferent to the contents of the box. and then someone would make a cut with a knife in the brown tape at the top of the box, and when they pulled the two halves of the top apart, there would always be a huge sort of industrial snapping sound. and then inside that big cardboard box you’d find another box, wrapped in thick shiny paper and tied with some brightly colored thick shiny ribbon, which wasn’t really needed to keep the box closed, and you would naturally imagine that this inside box had been wrapped by some very refined and modest-looking lady whose hands were softened with sweet-smelling cream and who very definitely cared a great deal about whatever it was that was inside the box. and then when the paper and the ribbon were undone and removed, and the box itself, with its smooth surface like clear milk, was finally revealed, someone would take off the top of the box, and you would hear at that moment a little rustling or nestling sound, like the sound of a hamster moving in its cage, and that would be the sound of all the tiny little pieces of squnched-up paper that filled the box giving a sort of quiet little sigh as the taking off of the top of the box gave them some sudden extra breathing space. and then the most exciting part of the opening would start, which was to attempt to find out what in particular was inside the box aside from all the pieces of squnched-up paper, if in fact there was anything else inside there at all, because at first you always thought, well, really, this time there is nothing else. so then someone - maybe you – would plunge their hand down deep into the box as if they were a diver searching a pearl, and eventually they would come upon something hard, something tightly wrapped in a different sort of paper, and when that last bit of wrapping was finally undone, there would be the cup or saucer or tiny little vase, just suitable for one little flower. an anonymous present on my doorstep – volume one of capital by karl marx. the beginning was impenetrable. then i came to a phrase that i’d heard before, a strange, upsetting, sort of ugly phrase: this was the section on “commodity fetishism”, “the fetishism of commodities”. i wanted to understand that weird-sounding phrase, but i couldn’t tell that, to understand it, your whole life would probably have to change. “twenty yards of linen are worth two pounds”. this coat, this sweater, this cup of coffee: each thing worth some quantity of money, or some number of things – one coat, worth three sweaters – as if that coat, suddenly appearing on the earth, contained somewhere inside itself an amount of value, like an inner soul. but what really determines the value of a coat? the coat’s price come from it’s history, the history of all the people who were involved in making it and selling it and all the particular relationships they had. and if we buy the coat, we, too, form relationships with all of those people. a naked woman leans over a fence. a man buys a magazine and stares at her picture. the destinies of these two are linked. the man has paid the woman to take off her clothes, to lean over the fence. the photograph contains its history – the moment the woman unbuttoned her shirt, how she felt, what the photographer said. the price of the magazine is a code that describes the relationships between all those people who commanded, who obeyed. i love the violin. something – a part of myself – has been hidden from me, and i think it’s the part that’s on the surface, what anyone in the world could see about me if they saw me out of the window of a passing train.
..[the fever_wallace shawn]
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