Coin Stars

The cost of a ferry ride between Seattle & Bainbridge Island: $9.05 for an adult, 19-64. The cost of a ferry ride across the Mersey: £4.90. The cost of a ferry across Lake Michigan: $50 for car and driver. The cost of a flight to Mars: less than $500,000, says Elon Musk. The cost of a boat ride across the River Styx: one obolus. See Charon, ferryman of Hades. Bring a change of clothing.

An obolus is roughly one-sixth of a drachma. I’m not sure where either coin may be found. Maybe Charon takes credit cards. Though money borrowed from a future that doesn’t exist is problematic.

The oldest coin in the world is a 1/6 stater coin and is more than 2,700 years old. It’s on view at the British Museum, & is made of electrum, a naturally occurring alloy of gold & silver. It was discovered in Ephesus, an ancient Hellenic city near present day Selçuk in Izmir Province, Turkey. The coin is hand-struck with the image of a lion on one side. The lion has an odd bump on its forehead known as a “nose wart.”

I usually go around with a bunch of change in my pocket. I’m often too lazy, or in too much of a hurry, to work out the exact amount of money when I’m making a purchase. I hand over the appropriate amount of paper currency & stuff the change into my pocket. When the bulge grows embarrassingly big, I put all the change into a ceramic jar, & then at some point in the future we take it to a Coinstar to have it converted into cash.

Money in the United States is weird. It bears no relationship to reality whatever. It’s impossible to put a true value on anything, particularly in a world so obsessed with quantifying everything, while remaining stubbornly oblivious to anything intangible, like quality.

Example: Wall Street has been going like gangbusters while the rest of the country is enduring catastrophic economic losses due to the Covid virus. The disconnect is breathtaking. Speculators live in a world of irreality, attempting to profit from stocks, bonds, commodity futures, real estate & fine art. Arbitrageurs trade fungible instruments in markets of extreme volatility. It’s a world of pure mathematics; nothing has any real existence. Goldman Sachs employs particle physicists from places like CERN to work on highly complex financial instruments.

Wall Street has been exemplary in helping to turn the United States into a Hades of bankruptcy, corruption, extortion & fraud. Things that once had real value – honor, honesty, accountability – are non-existent. Vanished like steam. The kettle is everything; the power that made the water boil means nothing. It’s a world of extreme nihilism. Nothing transcendent has real value.

But what about art? Art is a viable investment. This may be the one exception. But how a work of art finds its value – it’s financial, not its intrinsic aesthetic value – is recognizability. As soon as an artist becomes a celebrity, the art has value for the investors. It’s not a sophisticated world. It’s a world of vulgarity and deep ignorance concerning the real value of art.

Salvator Mundi, a painting by Leonardo da Vinci depicting Christ holding a sphere of crystal in his left hand & making the sign of the cross with his right hand, was auctioned at Christie’s on November 15^th, 2017, for $450.3 million. The crystal sphere represents the sphere of the heavens, “the court of the Great god, the habitacle of the elect, and of the ceolestiall angelles,” according to 16^th century mathematician and astronomer Thomas Digges. “This orb of stars fixed infinitely up extends itself in altitude spherically, and therefore immovable the palace of felicity garnished with perpetual shining glorious lights innumerable, far excelling our sun both in quantity and quality the very court of celestial angels, devoid of grief and replenished with perfect endless joy, the habitacle for the elect.”

The orb in Christ’s hand is mesmerizing. The glass is pure. There’s no distortion. There are three white dots inside, which may represent the constellation Leo, and the palm of Christ’s hand, obscured by a multitude of bubbles. Some believe the orb may represent the philosopher’s stone of alchemy, the substance capable of concerting base metals to gold. The lack of distortion caused a degree of contention over the authenticity of the painting, since it was uncharacteristic of Da Vinci to eclipse scientific reality. But if you look closely, and use a little imagination, you can see the interior of the ball doesn’t conform to material reality; it’s the entire boundlessness of the universe. He isn’t holding a glass ball. He’s holding eternity. Which is light as a feather, and worth nothing whatever on the stock exchange.