Money and Its Needs: Monica McClure’s _The Gone Thing_

The Gone Thing, by Monica McClure (Winter Editions, 2023)

If the political subject is formed by the relation between the social and the psychic, “consciousness raising” might be described as the recognition of new values, beliefs, or desires related to social power. What role can literature play in this process of heightening awareness? How can a writer inspire others to look at their lived experience in order to connect themselves to the social structure? How can poetry show us better ways to be in relation to those around us?

The Gone Thing by Monica McClure follows the contrapuntal lines that divide our personal and economic realities: labor vs. leisure, production vs. consumption, home and family vs. alienation. Rage, finely processed, mounts against a shallow, pill-induced tranquility. The modern economy iswound up with dehumanization, a lack of intimacy and authenticity. Separated into five sections, this collection of poems rises like a metallic yet living thing welded of the corporate and the pastoral, braced against uncertainty and instability. Dreams are tied up in “money and its needs”:

But I'm no longer my own agent
I belong to the land and it belongs to me

I belong to my money and it belongs to this tree
You belong to my dreams
Which belong to a god
Who slithers through the weeds
Of our money and its needs

I'm possessed by a landman
And that landman is me

Bound to the material of the world, an animal driven by survival and smelling of the fluids we both ingest and release, the body as an aspect of earth takes precedence over language:

A body's memory is not so
Distorted by language

And then:

Terranean worship of my body as a passage.

This is a rooted yet expansive, interconnected view of the body to ground us, recalling Silvia Federici's magical conception of the pre-capitalist body. Federici writes in Caliban and the Witch that capitalism could not take hold without conducting a historical battle against anything that posed a limit to the full exploitation of the body, starting with the web of relations that tied individuals to one another and the natural world:

A precondition of the development of capitalism was the destruction of the magical conception of the body of the Middle Ages, which attributed to it powers that the capitalist could not exploit.

“Pleasure is an identity requiring consumption,” McClure writes in a similar spirit, identifying our consumerist impulses as a coping mechanism, a necessary salve for the alienated body inscribed with its own loss, lack, and exploitation, numbed to its inherent magical capacities.

Early in The Gone Thing, the rush of detail or debris is upheld as “valuable” in that it latches onto the mythic and holds on for dear life. Temporal dissociation unmoors the reader as memories arise, as if from the afterlife: “And we moved inside a system that suffered / But never died.” Ironic if not vitriolic diction is placed within situations where the gendered, moneyed power structure would dictate subservience: “When they handed back my underwear I said thank you.”

Throughout the section of the book called “INHERITANCE,” defiance is disguised as realism and repetition with variation holds narrative density at bay. Family roles determine what is given and what is received. Fast life through capacious eyes stuff these rewards and consequences like pillows:

… Their weight loss journals
their savings their hangovers and schemes the husbands
with second families on an island our sugar daddies
our cocaine straws I'm wearing the dress she wore to
her mother's funeral It's black and white I keep it …

I am waiting for the break, to see what remains: the remains. McClure does not disappoint. Death rises before, but also as, the speaker's daughter, holding a scythe. This figure, with its transformative impulse, guides us into the section that follows.

The speaker, having ascended through the economic system from low-wage jobs to high-paying employment, considers work with the wryness of stark necessity:

Suck my dick I am no longer poor I'm high-salaried

My work is seated now and dignified

Back then work had a weight, you could feel it

I've lived like a poet
And worked like a man

So long as you work, you, too, can be a luxury consumer, and likely already are:

… Joy is
Sharing domination and the art of everyday terror
With a spouse with whom you've made
Irreversible mistakes that still feel trivial but someday,
This day, will become a whole life of wrongheaded impulse buys.

Such macroscopic takes on American life telescope to the microscopic, as when nestling birds become “cotton burs.” The system of the poem moves like a feeding snake, shedding collective delusions. Economic security, the leisure it affords, becomes a dehumanizing trap, swallowing the hours:

It is a kind of leisure to watch the figures you once knew
Become hallucinations in the long waves of a spent day.

Perhaps these hallucinatory figures from the past are the “RISING FURIES” noted by the poem's title.

In the face of the “small” or “wrongheaded” life of capitalist production and consumption, McClure's text craves upheaval—the churning of land, the transformation of culture, the renewal of human connection—while accepting those cycles and trajectories beyond human control:

And soon very soon I know the stomach of civilization
will rupture

When the poems get decorative—I am talking about the (very contemporary) strobing through images as in “BAKED ALASKA BOMBES”—I feel a temporary disconnect, although the excess may, for some, illuminate a relationship between capitalism, appetite, and wreckage. Regardless, the writing consistently reclaims my attention with spare lines of conceptual clarity:

You're a long arc knifed between what I know
And what I suspect is always happening.

The fearless self-doubt of this thought points to genuine intimacy, or at least an acceptance of how separate subjectivities introduce counter-melodies that both undercut and reinforce our own—a kaleidoscopic, if tenuous, at times uncomfortable, arrangement.

Near the end of The Gone Thing, financial bondage finds relief in alternative forms of relation, like the promise, the gift, or the simple “golden rule”:

Money, they say, is uninhabitable

But I promise
My sheep will guard you as I have guarded them

And in this way, you'll never owe

Gift (and theft) are alternative ways of existing in or despite the market society, where alienation might refer to an involuntary severance of oneself from one's latent creativity because we have to pay rent and buy food and clothing. If artificial scarcity were to give way to abundance, could the gift be a gesture of pure generosity? Marcel Mauss, theorist of the gift economy, might say the emotional impetus of the gift is not always so simple, but does kind treatment not imprint itself and self-replicate like any other?

The speaker in The Gone Thing makes definitive statements that seem to indicate a kind of defeat: “All that was going is already gone.” I know the sentiment well. But conventional cynicism and nostalgia, anger at or fear of the empty venture and wasted existence, are not the core of my reading, even if, at times, they dull the surface: “We marched and didn't progress.” As I make my way through McClure's work, I am thinking of how we might build the new in the shell of the old, until the old no longer makes sense. I am not thinking only of a seismic revolution, but more cunning modes of resistance, a kind of justice that could recuperate and balance the scales, not serving the powers that exist solely to tip them:

At best, I can do an interpretation of justice
And hope it doesn't go up in smoke.