OUTSIDE OF CONSUMPTION

INFINITE SUNDAYS

David Graeber attempts to synthesize the insights of Karl Marx and Marcel Mauss. He sees value as a model for human “meaning-making”. Starting with Marxist definitions of consumption and production, he introduces Mauss’s idea of "objects that are not consumed" and constructs a list of things that are neither consumption nor production. Graeber’s list includes those human activities that are not consumption, in the narrow sense of simply purchasing something, and are not production, in the sense of creating or modifying something intended for sale or exchange. It includes:
0. cooking a meal
0. extinguishing a fire
0. dressing and undressing
0. applying makeup
0. watching television
0. playing in a band
0. falling in love
0. reading
0. listening to music
0. going to a museum or gallery
0. taking a photograph
0. gardening
0. writing
0. conducting a coming of age ceremony
0. going window shopping
0. doing sports
0. acting
0. turning around in a circle
0. teaching
0. Having an argument
0. Playing games
0. Having sex
0. Attending a religious service
Looking at old photos
-Wikipedia

I walked a lot. It was Sunday in Seoul and the summer July sun had come out between the typhoons. I loved the rain but now the hot sun was almost tropical as it beat down on all Sunday beings. The Adjumas wore their turret-like sun visor well over their heads and the older Korean men were dressed up in their suits and ties…. some of which had a healthy dose of polyester in them so I wondered how they baked in the sun…like barbeque garlic in sesame oil with salt in a foil roll, perhaps.
In the scant patches of green through this gigantic city I heard the cicada…. my signal to that point that is between the finite and infinite. Cicada listening…for those who partake …stands outside of consumption…. it stands outside of the fetish to freeze time. It is time. It happens simultaneously all over the world where summer is full in decay. He signals a time where they mate and where his dormancy will pull him in for five to seven years. It is a signal that the baking sun is finite for the year and the year is half over…. those ambitions for the year had well better be in place and the frustrations you feel attempting to complete them will be soften by this high whizzing cry in the hot loitering sun on a Sunday where everybody seems to wish to touch something…consider their spending on something as their good luck to be spent upon and make the cold winter months count with riches.
The cicada follows. Usually in the trees…the trees of NYC, Tokyo, Rome, and Seoul. Singapore too yet in that land of perpetual sauna the cicada is weaker for its nostalgia for the sleep of winter. There are other insects there and the wild orgy of birds in the morning happy to see the sun rise. All seem to be unaware of the cicada and the traffic and the asphalt fight against it but where there is a patch of green…. some tissue that breaths for the encrustation of the city…there is the cicadas. In Rome they are all over…. they sing all the way up the hot Tiber in the trees and in the copious boulevards. It is nice to hear their ancient wine against their ancient city. In Kyoto the dust and the signing is the same. Out side the ancient silver temple with its mock volcano as a scale replica of potential disaster it sings and I found one I still have in my possession over fifteen years later. He was black and crusty and spent. So I tucked him up in a bamboo jar and he resides in my office ever since. In Pompeii the music of the cicada is mixed with the smell of Rosemarie and hot yellow dust. Death is a type of sweetness there as it is one of the few places we are reminded of the death of death: the wholesale annihilation of a city. There the bug sang for millions of years and probably the day or afternoon after the cataclysm. They speak of the zeno’s arrow between what we will assume will be ‘always’ and what always changes. Their music is the purest exuberant expression of infinity yet it acquaints us of a beginning and a cessation. It is sameness in its frequency when it is on…rising to a crescendo…and it is difference when it is over