Empty Vessels of Capital
A solstice transmission from Eon Meridian
“Empty Vessels of Capital” is a phrase that has been in my head ever since I heard it on my favorite podcast - True Anon - Episode 540 and with their guest Wendy. Wendy introduced me to this term - “Empty Vessel of Capital.”
Vessel Metaphysics
The second technology, after the first technology — sex —, was the vessel. If you are going to move anything from one place to another, like say a baby, you need to hold it in something - A Vessel. Vessels allow us to move terrain and environments, they allow us to be nomads, and all kinds of things referenced by the philosophers Deleuze and Guattari.
The shadow of “The Vessel”, is duality - there becomes the distinction between the vessel and what is in the vessel. There is the distinction between what is is inside the vessel and what is outside the vessel. I am sure you can think of more ways the vessel introduces a concept of separation - which is duality.
The duality this brings up for me, considering that my cells still carry the imprint of the patriarchy and extractive racist capitalism, is hylomorphism - a fancy term from Aristotle that refers to the distinction between form and matter - the vessel and the thing in the vessel. To quote Douglas Adams from So Long and Thanks for the the Fish: “This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
Empty Vessels
An empty vessel of capital, as Wendy describes it, is the idea that any person (but really/ mostly, young white, US based, cis hetero men, who attend certain schools), can start any company that makes money. It does not matter the company. That is the empty vessel part. The people are the empty vessels and the goal is to just start a company or create a company that can either create money, or create the illusion of being a genre changing industry worthy of Venture Capital Investment.
The error of the empty vessel, is also multiple and varied
I, once, strived to be an empty vessel of capital - although I did not know what that meant or what I was doing - and now that is impossible for me to do -since I am not - as it turns out an empty vessel - no one is.
Empty Vessel of the Day: AI & Cursor
Today my mind turned to the AI start up “Cursor,” now I think acquired by SpaceX for 6 Billion dollars or something. Cursor started life as company that built AI enabled software for mechanical engineers. The founders of Cursor, unable to find “product market fit” , PIVOTed (to learn more about this term please listen to the TrueAnon episode above) towards a AI powered coding interface. This is what we now know as Cursor.
Empty Vessel founders can pivot pivot pivot and create create create until their creation finds a market. Sometimes they just create ads for empty vessels or companies, or tiktok accounts. AI promises the rise of all sorts of opportunities for empty vessel companies to compete with one another to discover something to fill the vessel.
Cursor itself is an empty vessel, at heart an interface around a large corporate Large Language Model. I mean Dropbox as well, was an interface around Amazon’s S3 file storage.
Other empty vessels include money, which Marx talks about as the form of value. Money stands for an empty vessel of equivalence between two things. A shirt is worth 5 dollars. That 5 dollars can be earned doing any number of things, including stealing, extraction, interest, selling covered calls, yield farming crypto, selling soup at the farmers market. You can turn anything in to the monies.
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I’m sure we can think of other empty vessels: the digital computer is an empty vessel of sorts, the Latin Alphabet perhaps, the white stretched canvas, are ones that come to mind.
It is empty vessels all the way down.
Healing our patriarchal racial capitalist cells
You know what else is a vessel, the heart. Organs in the body are vessels - they are not empty vessels, the pericardium that surrounds the heart (and becomes inflamed by Covid), cannot surround the liver. It does not work. Although, the vessel of the lungs cannot be the vessel of the kidneys. The form of the thing is bound up with the function, and there really is no duality.
Although there is holography - everything is in everything.
And since I mentioned them earlier, Deleuze and Guattari’s Body with out Organs is one way to get rid of the vessels all together. In the 5000 year old Yellow Emperor’s classic, an ancient text of Chinese medicinal wisdom, the analogy is that the heart is the king, the liver the general, the spleen the granary. Not each vessel is equal. There is a hierarchy.
As we are deprogramming our cells from all archys - we can turn to D&G and say we have no organs, no vessels, just surfaces with different intensities that are in constant flux. Vessels of potential if not actuality. Is a vessel a vessel if it is not reified? If a tree falls and no one hears it does it make a sound? Questions for another round of Vessel Metaphysics.
Although the calendar makes each day appear the same in a little box, they are not all the same. Today is the Solstace - the longest day of the year.
Go to the field near your house and find some St John’s wort. Rub the flowers, which turn red, on the lintel to your home to protect this vessel against all sorts of ill omens.
Create an oil by covering the flowers in jar with olive oil and letting it sit in sunlight for 6 weeks.
Create a garland and wear it upon your head.
St John’s Wort grows in the wild, we can easily forage for it. When you harvest, gift the plant a song or a prayer or a lock of your hair.
You can gift it money too - burning money - like we did on the graves of the ancestors of my children’s father in the highlands of Hu Bei.
We still need vessels for these things.
Sharing the Love
My old herbalism teacher Rich Mandelbaum sent out a great solstice newsletter this morning. He is doing a workshop on animals and herbs, among all sorts of other amazing things, like plant walks. Check it out: https://www.richardmandelbaum.com/