Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Or ask what a modulus is, Amy — a constant, expressing like a steady fraction of itself how much a certain property is possessed of something, or a constant factor — a multiplier! for the conversion of units from one system to another (yes?). Or Amy ask to be made to laugh because the last time Amy came — the last time you came, Amy — one felt in the hand a mixed feeling, a tender chill and in the gray-green eyes something put in place of something else, and she wished to know how well one knew Jim Mayn, politely anxious, not just trouble-at-work but, in the line between what showed and what didn’t, a void or nerve (of fear?) which one could not figure, just as, to be frank with oneself, one hesitated to broach the question of sex.

And so between the propensity to save what has happened to one yet to spend it, one found oneself so close to one’s blonde twenty-three-year-old potential girlfriend far from the harsh junta’s bulletin of progress toward independence, found oneself telling her a tale of the long day— como le va el dia? how goes it? — dreaming for Amy’s entertainment that one memorable long day — when the new network of the mixed market mechanism seemed to go haywire or beyond itself joining what, among random appointed curves, had not been seen to be connected. For the Chief himself on some royal and ancient green with just the shadow of satisfaction in his frown that somewhere his advisers are handling the economy as a strict father balances his family budget — purses his lips and bends over his makable putt. He has, he thinks, stepped secretly inside his own production-possibility frontier to let the world slide on without him while he takes a bit of recreation. But he does not know what lies baleful between the putter’s ridged-steel face, the dimpled ball, and the cup no Secret Service could have thought to check out beforehand.

And so the Chief starts the ball rolling along a curve he has foreseen for the ball should break left; yet some presence is missing, he must ask his advisers, some gravity — for long before he can send the ball on its way, a "big board" (they nostalgically call it — a big board down Wall Street way) has so previewed this event through sequences that can yield it that the Chief and this event have been pre-established as actual. Now, this "big board" (which actually has almost nothing in common with the old Stock Exchange) is neither one board nor a board. Instead it is a new global network constantly creating itself in numbers, template curves, possible consequences, and desirable equilibriums, as the locus of all Congruences filling the mixed-market mechanism. That one-time mystery which Smith had said to leave alone and Keynes had said to intervene in now by its mutual Mind constantly projects its own destined Congruence which at each "big board" center is all plugged in but actually more conceptual to the touch; do you see, Amy? Each misnamed "big board," then, is not at all two-dimensional except in samples momentarily abstracted for experiment — say, the effect of womanpower relocation-and-job-training plans on the stubborn Phillips curve that ties decreasing unemployment to wage hikes — not two-d but a system that predicts and that is known by those who know it best as a field of all possible curves whose constant changes occupy like a position that roughly resembles a headless, torso-less human form, armed and legged, a four-d field of intersections always but secretly mindful both of the crossings of such old slopes as the Demand and Supply, and the absolute refusal to cross one or another of the curves (or schedules) that compose an Indifference Map—

an Indifference Curve showing one’s inability to choose between, say, dinner with one’s mother at a feminist restaurant and six holes of golf with one’s father, or two such meals and eighteen holes, and so on; or, along another Indifference Curve, one’s inability to choose between one pro basketball game at the Garden and the promise of one phone call from Amy, or two games and an actual call, or four games and a call in which one consistently interests Amy even in the name and address of someone else, an older man, a journalist whose relative substitution value may be greater because since he may travel to any point on the globe at an hour’s notice he tends to be scarcer than oneself. On this future day, then, the "big board" constantly reconstituting itself all over the globe, simultaneously reaching every direction with mutations potentially infinite yet hugging the Earth’s globe of flat horizons, outdoes itself, transactivates its parts to plot a collaborative global act by which both Gravity and Government are divided by both Agency and Anarchy.

One’s father peers through the wall of the next room and through the back or crack of one’s head trying to shine the hint that one take a two-hour break — an economic pause — from all this homeboundwork to "take in" (one predicts he will say) "a flick." He cannot envision much less see the dark-eyed blonde who hears only one, not him.

Now normally these electronic models plugged in to one another across the nuclear family of nations rule the mixed markets by foreseeing the multiple effects upon, say, Velocity of Money or upon the Global Consumption curves, of any event such as a drop if not a plunge in steel or water production or a local change of Mind. Amy, where is your heart, your hand? — this system devised by forethought beside itself, which controls, say, the arms while seeming to leave free the hands and digits, has so impressed the multinational oligopolists with themselves that they think to transcend those wise Quakers who are said to have gone to the New World to do good and ended up doing well, and they have ceded to the new system a strange measure of what would otherwise have been the Business-as-Usual Profit, fifty-five percent on a new transcontinental Third-World Sewer, one hundred percent on turning surplus soy into air, five hundred on a compact laundropod for nuclear waste. All such foregone! foregone! Forget the Phillips curve — the period’s competitive but transcapitalist. This global grapevine and decision system forestalls the old demand-pull inflation in which a certain curve goes too far and spending exceeds what the economy can come up with; and at the same time the parallel concept is available in the economatriculating templates of the system’s constant Future — namely, it forestalls any ghastly increase of Money, hence of MV in the exchange equation Money times Velocity of Circulation equals Average Price Level times real GNP — for as Rail says to a class suddenly still but for the mixed whisper of pencils and ballpoints chasing him along blue notebook lines, in this type of old-fashioned inflation too much money chases too few goods.

But wait — in a future where buyers’ inflation would be only an all-too-easily-contained beginning, this simul-system, Amy, this world manifold of instant models filled with instant information, can be trusted to expose and defense against cost-push (sellers’) inflation too. Here wages get forced up by unions despite widespread unemployment, so employers raise consumer prices before the worker’s spouse with five extra bucks in her purse consumed with what is to be next grabs someone else’s pushcart and starts down the aisle to the strains of free music. But this inflation, like other mishaps including unemployment itself, can’t happen under the new mutual controls; and while some argue that all the foreseeable futures created by the conceptual templates in conjunction with the vast input of productivity data, infra-red photos of rivers and mountains, and weather-satellite prediction have turned not only a mixed economy into a steady state but life itself into economics, still the system contains not so many future threats as it itself might have been expected to foresee and may be prey mainly to a normal human desire (in some people) not to see what’s coming.