Poetry for Tomatoes

This evening, while walking back from the English building on campus to my dorm room, I was thinking about how inspired I feel when I walk around in outside in the dark, especially if I'm wearing flip-flops (which I was).  I thought about how nice it would be to write a poem about this or that and how I wish I could go back to my room and just write and write and write and write.  I thought about how I would write a pretentious poem about how I am especially inspired under such circumstances.

I considered it for a half a second before realizing I had obligations.  I have roughly ten psychological articles

This girl and I feel equal enthusiasm for doing
homework this evening: none.

sitting on my bed waiting to be read so I can write a paper on the evolutionary advantages of gossiping.  I have a novel to read by Monday and a two-page response paper to go along with it.  I have reading about Buddhism to do.  I have all of these things I have to do.

And then I thought, well, why do I have to do these things?  Yeah, I need to do them to get good grades, but why do I need to get good grades?  Well, I need to get good grades because I need to graduate in a good position, I need to be at the top.  And why do I need to do that?  To get a job, of course -- a good job.  Okay, but why do I need a good job?  So I can support myself, so I can live at the level of comfort I have become accustomed to.

Oh.  I see. (I thought as I went between a row of bushes and the gym.)

Money.

It always comes back to money.

Frustrated, I wondered for a half second if it was possible for the world to stop existing and relying on money.  If, instead, we could trade goods and labor for the things we needed.  People who loved to farm would farm -- but perhaps they could not write poetry, so they would go to their local poet, exchange a tomato for a poem.

I like that.  The way it works now, we are forced into doing things we don't really love or aren't really passionate about because we're obligated to earn money in order to eat.

I realized, rather quickly of course, that my fantasy economic system was impossible.  A full stomach, in the long run and from an evolutionary perspective, is far more valuable than a mind full of poetry.  Unfortunate, but true.

But maybe it's not so true.  Perhaps not in the case of poetry, but in entertainment.  If entertainment were not so valuable, we would not pay such a high price for it.  Admit it -- you have paid more money on a concert ticket or a sporting event ticket than you have ever paid on a copay to go to the doctor, who might have just saved your life.  To me, this suggests we value entertainment more than we value our lives.  At least in some ways.  I recognize that if someone gave you a choice between having surgery that will save your life or going to a sporting event, you would choose surgery -- that is, if you have $1,000 to spend and you need surgery, you aren't going to buy a ticket to the World Series.  Still, people who can afford to do both often do.  They spend that money on a game that lasts three or four hours (seven if it's a Red Sox/Yankees game).

I can't buy this with poetry.

So once again, I return to the question: why can't we trade our creations and abilities?  Is it because it takes a farmer a year to grow a crop and it takes me an hour to write a poem?  Is it because if people did what they actually wanted to do "for a living" there would be an imbalance of workers in various fields?  Is it because if we all did what we actually wanted to do, too many of us would get lost in the noise of people doing the same thing?

I just want to write (okay, I genuinely want to be a librarian, too).  But I can't do this because it doesn't pay enough (the writing part, not the librarian part -- but forget the librarian stuff for a second, because there are days where I don't want to do anything but write and that won't be possible in the future).  And I need that money for food.  I can't leave a poem on the table when I leave a restaurant.  That would probably result in my arrest or something.

I'm not an economist.  I am sure there are plenty of economists out there who can answer this question, but I'm just going to lament it.

In the mean time, if anyone wants to offer me dinner in exchange for a short story, you know where to find me.

Both images courtesy of Free Digital Photos.