the inmate's journal : the corporation

The church likes to claim some blend of faith, tradition, and reason to support its conclusions.  The academy claims reason.  The beauty of the corporation is that it claims nothing and doesn’t need to; it has power—the one legitimate claimant and inheritor of the earth.

 

The church claims truth and the academy knowledge and both fail because they reach beyond human capacity.  But the corporation claims only money … and achieves it.  In fat heaps of success.  That the corporation is the only truthful institution is its horror and beauty.  The pragmatists, in their metallic way, only appreciate its beauty; the lefties, in their leafy way, only appreciate its horror.  The former have spent as little time outside of the corporation as the latter have in it, thus both speak from their respective cribs of inexperience.  I, however, have spent time in its eye, its heart, its anus, its liver, its tumors, its lint—and an equal amount of time so distant from its body I have had to look at the jpegs on my iPhone to remind me of what it looked like.  Like I promised you, in my journal you get the whole goods, the inside and the outside, no strings or teeny print … right here from Uncle Jude.

 

The corporation does have one pretense, though:  the endless games its inmates play as they jockey for the best cells.  But this pretense, dearest beloved, is an acknowledged and integral pretense and so becomes a strange integrity.  Everyone’s moves, everyone’s words about the moves, are directly or indirectly about this game and about nothing but this game.  Only the innocent hobbits and otherworldly elves believe the values; every corporate inmate worthy of his chains believes the game.  The game is god and all and beauty … and tomorrow’s expensed lunch.

 

You may object—I speak about the corporation as if it’s a single beast instead of an entire jungle of beasts, a veritable planet of screeching bugs and carnivorous flowers, a galaxy of foul stars, a cosmos of disabled stars, …

 

Sure.  Objection sustained.  Just stay with me, okay?  If you’re objecting, you haven’t got the game.  If you’re objecting, you’re never going to make it past senior manager of extra-absorbent tampons.

 

In fact, I’m going to go even further, just to titillate you senior managers of tampons, thou fable-quaffing hobbits, thou bitter elves.  My claim is this:  the closer you get to the center of power the closer you get to the center of truth and the closer you get to the center of truth the closer you get to unity.  And my claim is this:  there is nothing closer to the center of power than the corporation and there’s no corporation closer to the center of the center of power than a bank.  And thus my claim is this:  a bank is the black hole of power and truth and unity; go there to find time and the modern seat of God.  And my claim is this:  I worked for one of North America’s largest banks for ten years—in five divisions, with every department, on every godforsaken rung in the woebegone hierarchy, through cunts and cocks, up strategic ladders, down bankrupt snakes.  Nay, velvet voyeurs, this is my claim:  the world is not large enough to hold everything I did and said and saw in those nickel halls.  The world is too small to hold the stories.  That’s what all that infinite black space is for … to hold the stories that will never be told.

 

Too many claims?  Go work for a bank.  Then you’ll know too many claims.  In the meantime, don’t sentimentalize unity or truth.  Unity is a permanent agon between clashing, often incompatible, truths; truth a shady spot where one has lunch then moves on.  And what better symbol of these than money, which is neither tangible nor static, but as virtual, mobile, and elusive as identity.

 

So strap yourself to money’s invisible back … fly, soar … on a tour of the world’s fluttering wallet.  The cost?—ah, some things never change—your soul, just your soul, your soul, your stir-fried deep-fried soul.  But in the age of the Internet—that soul made visible in two dimensions—such a trifling trifle to lay down for such a heady flight.

 

But enough of all this pompous metaphysical grandstanding.  Let’s pay the price and start the ride.