Gone
is the time a man looked at the sky and, from that light, knew
immediately what he must do. Gone are many of a man's immediate
reactions. Now he waits. Now he calls it risk. He gives names to the
spirits and the numbers, the numbers that appeared in his dreams
thousands of year ago, he gives numbers to the spirits. And now with his
machine, now his
machine gives numbers to the spirits, all 7000 of
them.
It is a lost art, then, to look at the "equities"
like my father once did. To open up the annual report, to read the story
of the company, to think about the company in the context of the
history of commerce, to think about the men who comprise the company and
to think about the men and the societies that buy and sell these things
the company produces.
Christ, when the western woman asks a
man what his goals and objectives are, just as he is about to go into the wilderness.
When she knows the number of her frequent shopping card but not what
makes her child happy or her man happy. She, too, has 'managed risk.'
Risk
management is about slowly turning off the oxygen to one's heart. One
lets the intravenous drip of cold metal flow into one's veins until the
flesh of the heart is destroyed and all that is left is a mechanism
which pumps but does not feel.
My father was first given wonder by
the spirits and sought them in the forest. Then, over time, when the forest was
denied to him—or when, in defeat, he
concluded that the forest had been denied
to him—he let the cold metal flow deep into his veins until it choked his
breath and his once-beating heart. To see your own father die. To feel his
leaden death in the words which no longer come from the spirits, but the 7000
numbers. To touch a woman at night and to no longer feel a breath and
anticipation from the sun-- from her man, from her child, from her village--but instead
from the numbers that have fallen on her skin like ash and have frozen deeply
her soul into the metal artifice of this matrix.
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