J.H. Prynne - Sketch for a Financial Theory of the Self lyrics

1. The qualities as they continue are the silk under the hand; because their celestial progress, across the sky, is so hopeless & so to be hoped for. I hope for silk, always, and the strands are not pure though the name is so. The name is the sidereal display, it is what we know we cannot now have. The last light is the name it carries, it is this that binds us to our unbroken trust. 2. So then, we should not trust the hope that is merely a name for silk, for purity untouched by any Italian hand. The celestial routine is begging, & a nasty toy at that; the stars are names and the names are necessarily false. We choose to believe in the flotsam, the light glance pa**ing and innocent because unpriced. 3. Which is grossly untrue, because we pay for it well enough, I have squandered so much life & good nature I could hardly guess the account. The numbers are out there in the human sky, the pure margin which are the trust we deserve. And we should have what the city does need, the sky, if we did not so want the need. 4. The name of that is of course money, and the absurd trust in value is the pattern of bond and contract and interest-just where the names are exactly equivalent to the trust given to them. Here then is the purity of pragmatic function: we give the name of our selves to our needs. We want what we are. 5. And not silk except for ties, or the sky as even for exchange, the coin of the face we look up to as a vault ready for trust. That much is trickery, but the names, do you not see, are just the tricks we trust, which we choose. The qualities then are a name, corporately, for the hope that they will return to us. The virtue in whose exercise we retain the fiction of air, silence, fluid round the hub of the week. 6. How could this be clearer? The items are, that we are bribes and that silk is a random but by tradition a costly gift. Quality is habit. 7. What follows is where we are now, or where I am. The old cry about chastity, that we are bound by the parts of our unnatural frames. The median condition is the city and not the travel or the remoteness of travel, in sound. Music, travel, habit and silence are all money; purity is a glissade into the last, most beautiful return 8. And how much we hope for it is the primacy of count. This is the shining grudge of numbers, the name we will not lose to any possible stranger: the star & silk of my eye, that will not return.