Money

MONEY
LONG BEFORE HE HAD GIVEN UP HOPE, back before it was too late, The Man Who Loves Provo embraced the passions that matched his words; his actions equaled his desires, his loves his life, his hopes his dreams. He would sit, often for hours at a stretch, writing the words he loved in the notebooks he kept on the shelf above his desk. They were poems mostly, sometimes stories, occasionally a little essay, but increasingly just paragraphs and sentences. Before long, after he realized that no publishing house would ever print his works, that no managing editor would ever read his doomed and untamed prose and verse, that no critic from the New York Times would ever review his books--indeed, that a Pulitzer Prize was not in his future--he discovered a more effective and independent way to distribute his writings: He began scribbling his messages on money--on the green, crisp currency of the United States Treasury. The limited space, he found, forced him toward a precision--an exactness--he had never known before. After awhile, he felt that his mastery of the language had reached such a point, such a height--a sublimity even--that his messages soon began to consist of nothing but individual words: "is" and "was"; "go" and "went"; and "now" and "the" and "neo-colonialism." He developed a profound admiration for prepositions: "in" and "on," "at" and "to," and "before" and "after"; and found a startling poignancy in the conjunction "or"--the choice it demanded and the risks it held. Sometimes he’d capitalize an entire word, or throw in a punctuation mark: "HELP!" Other times he’d omit the word altogether and just write down some little diacritic: "~."
He never used one dollar bills--too common, he said--or anything more than a twenty--elitist, he thought. Tens were best, but he had a fondness for Lincoln and the five as well. All he had to do was write his words--or word--on the money and take to down to the store or the market--or even the bank--and exchange it for whatever he needed. The clerk would look at the note, smile perhaps, and then file it away in the cash register, to be circulated later in the day to another reader. Since the words themselves were worth much less than the bills they were written on, no one kept the poems for long, but instead passed them on for others to read. In this way, The Man Who Loves Provo became the most widely read, though at the same time the most little known, American poet of his day.
Years later, after he’d come to realize the limits--and perhaps the futility--of the words he wrote, he sensed a need to relate his art--and his life--more directly to the pragmatic world, away from the ambiguity of money and metaphor. He would walk the streets of Provo and note the decay. The city was in ruins, he saw: the high density housing, the increased--and increasing--number of street lights, the chain stores, strip malls, fast food joints; the steady line of married couples trying to reinvent the family; the polluted, toxic air, and the land being covered and smothered with concrete and cement and lawn. When he saw these abuses stretching out--and saw not the least bit of resistence or concern from those who claimed to love Provo--he set out one morning on a project: a bucket of paint in one hand, a brush in the other, and a target in his eye. He found his first object immediately, calling out his name almost: an advertising agency. Across the front facade he swabbed, in big, bold, dark letters, the one word: "UGLY."
Each morning thereafter, he set out, searching for a place to leave his work. He had no difficulty finding the appropriate location: a new apartment complex, a country club or health spa, a freshly lined and paved street, the military recruiting office, the Fourth District Courthouse, a church or a real estate office or some new home improvement center. Vehicles, too, offered up their canvasses: a minivan, an SUV, a bulldozer. Or, more to the point: a BMW. And always he would inscribe his same urgent message, the one-word warning: "UGLY."
At first The Man Who Loves Provo went undetected in his deeds, but eventually he was discovered in the act and arrested. Following the trial--in which he was convicted--and after both the county prosecutor and the judge reprimanded him harshly and told him that he was confused--he promised to never do it again.
And for years he behaved himself.
In public.
During the day.
Until he got restless again.
And then he returned to poetry. He returned to the poetry and the money that had, years before, helped him to understand the value of exactness and precision: the importance of clarity of thought and expression; the economy of language. He opened his billfold and searched for the largest denomination he could find. He found it: the twenty. He looked at the face on the front: Andrew Jackson. Almost immediately, a poem emerged, and The Man Who Loves Provo wrote the one word across the large, sinister face: "Racist." The next day, on another twenty, he wrote another poem: "Genocide." And another day: "Civilization."
He continued to write poetry for the next two weeks. Then he modified his approach. He still wrote on twenty-dollar bills; and he still wrote single-word messages across the ridiculous face of Andrew Jackson. But now the words he used were no longer poetry. Now he wrote prose: simple, non-metaphorical essays; one-word treatises; lone philosophical monographs: "Money." And "Power." And "Racist" and "Genocide" and "Civilization."