LONGING FOR THE UNATTAINABLE: my 1930 penny
Money has everything to do with the real world we inhabit. We all know that money gives us a concrete way to assert the will, achieve our goals, fuel our fantasies for some desired future, and fill our hearts with regret over some past misfortune or folly. We all know the various moods that gather around money, across scale, from jubilation at receiving money to black depression when we lose it. Countless timeless stories in which money is the protagonist circulate through our communities and cultures.
The story I am about to tell also concerns money but I suspect this story is not so well known, for it concerns money that I never possessed yet its very absence has shaped my life from the time of my childhood. Its absence was and remains a palpable formative “presence” in the way my life has unfolded, and indeed continues to be so….
In the 1960’s I rode the bus every day to get to school on the Gold Coast. The fare was four pence—one silver threepenny piece and one copper penny. At lunchtime, I went to the tuck shop with money to buy a meat pie and received my change, usually in copper coins. I tried to get as many copper pennies as possible. I would also cast an eye on the ground looking for pennies. I wasn’t looking for extra money to spend. I was seeking a very special penny—the 1930-penny!
The 1930-penny held a mystique for me, and for many in Australia, it seems—a mystique!—“an aura of heightened value, interest or meaning surrounding a person or thing.” The dictionary is telling us that “mystique” is another word for numinosity, the power to excite our imaginations and draw our attention towards the presence of “divinity”:
Finding a fortune! That was my secret desire. The penny that I only “knew” through its absence fuelled my desire and along with that, my imagination. But what kind of “object” that is no object (since I had never seen such a penny, even in facsimile) could at the same time embody so much mystique for me?
My imagination gathering around this missing coin was quite different from the imagination released by possession of a coin or its facsimile. Suppose we take the hint from the quoted passage and compare my absent coin with a lottery ticket. If I have a lottery ticket in hand, my imagination typically constellates ambitions or aspirations for an imagined future. When I in fact bought lottery tickets for a time, my fantasies began with a kind of bargain with God. “If You grant me this wish I will only exercise generosity towards my fellow human beings!” Then I would list who would get some of the prize money, and how much. I would obviously also pay off my debts. My own needs would of course take last place in this grand display of private magnanimity towards others. I felt that such heart-felt wishes would surely increase my chances of success. The obverse face of this dubious coin with which I tried to buy God’s favour was occluded from my covetous sight. I never considered that, in my winning the lottery, more needy people would inevitably lose out. What if a group of families, all on the breadline, bought the next ticket just after I acquired the winning ticket? The most generous thing to do, according to this unassailable argument would be to stay out of it altogether and let others receive God’s bounty, but I just never argued this way of course. My arguments were entirely self-serving.
I had heard that some people won the lottery when they were shown the winning number. The number presented itself in some mysterious manner, such as in a dream, or by leaping out from a zip code or telephone number, birthday number, etc. This phenomenon intrigued me greatly and I began to engage in an imaginal exercise, trying to distinguish in feeling between the spontaneous arrival of seven numbers and my fancying seven numbers. I was convinced that only the former would have a connection with God’s secret intention. Buying a lottery ticket and having it in hand as a real object also evoked fantasies of transformation: the lottery ticket transformed into money which in principle can in turn transform into any material thing in the world.
But my missing 1930-penny evoked a very different imagination to any of this! I did not, as far as I can remember, engage in any transformational fantasies at all. I did not hold an imaginary penny (or real copy) in my hand and wish for this or that thing in the world. The absent penny was not an imagined means to any desired material end. My imagination was entirely focussed on an absence! And the mood that supported that focus was one of intense longing. I longed for the missing 1930-penny. I did not think about the penny in terms of “any 1930-penny will do.” I yearned for the 1930-penny. There was only one such penny in my imagination. “Is this my 1930-penny,” I would pleadingly ask of each copper candidate that landed in my hand? My disappointment always ran deep as I reluctantly had to turn to more prosaic matters, such as going to the next class at school.
My 1930-penny was only “alive” in its absence. It was a living but negative reality. My longing was never fulfilled, and could not be fulfilled by the appearance of an actual 1930-penny. At the time I had no vocabulary to say anything at all about my longing and the “where-abouts” towards which it was directed with such intensity. My longing was not directed towards any object in the real world yet it was deep and abiding.
The absent 1930-penny awoke my longing, my yearning, for the first time.
My unfilled longing became a path! Oh, I tried to satisfy this longing in so many ways as I grew into adulthood. In this manner, my longing for a “no-thing” pulled me into life, into rich relationships with others, into achievement and failures, exercising my will, strengthening it in the face of adversity. My heart was educated into the ways of the world, through suffering the consequences of blindly following my longing into the world.
While I was so engaged in the pulls and entanglements of life, I also began to receive experiences that originated from the same “where-abouts” as my absent 1930-penny—experiences that, like my absent penny, ignited intense longing in my waking life, again with no possibility of satisfaction attainable with any actual object of this world. This longing was ignited by intense experiences of love, of my becoming an object of love, on another plane of reality altogether, i.e. the plane of my so-called “where-abouts”. In 1982 for example, I dreamed:
I am lying down in a room alone. A large erect cobra is watching me silently from the floor. I close my eyes and remain still. The cobra flicks his tongue in and out of my mouth. As He does so, I feel an indescribable feeling of being loved. Then He leaves.
And in 1995:
I meet my own soul. She is beautiful and glad to see me again. I look at her nakedness and she changes from a man to a woman to a man until I got it… “You are androgynous,” I call out in amazement and joy. There was much joy, tenderness and love in our reunion. We drive in a car together and at one point she tells of her own difficulties—something about seeing a meteor falling through the sky; she says she is glad I had fallen in love again (with whom?); and she licks my face so sensuously that she seemed to become all tongue and I shriek in delight, grabbing for the wheel at the same time, saying: whose driving here anyway?
Upon returning to ordinary reality from these beatific experiences of loving and being loved, I felt utterly bereft. I could only relate to my lover as a longed-for absence, like my yearning for the 1930-penny, so long ago. And so I gave voice to my longing in poetic form.
my loneliness
as vast as an abyss
yet here is where i find you
love inexhaustible
fear comes
warns me of madness
the insanity of isolation
fear becomes terror
gate opens
not to madness
but to you and life
With this poem, and others, the terrible disjunction I felt between the strange negative reality of my absent 1930-penny and the reality of my ordinary life began to melt. They are not separate after all, in my felt experience. There indeed is wealth hidden within, or better, as the “absence” that constituted my 1930-penny so long ago. I am one beneficiary of this wealth, which is also available to all. If the seeker can stay in her longing without extinguishing it in the temporary attainment of an actual object, then she may find herself arriving at a most mysterious outcome, just as I did. I expressed this outcome in a poem around 1995:
lovesong
aching with a sap
coursing
through
my
body
sweet fiery liquid
every cell calls out a love song
i am calling for my lover
who calls for me
is this longing i feel
so different from
fulfilment?
It turns out, I have learned, that the “where-abouts” of my mysterious “absent” 1930-penny has been “here” all along, not separate from the actual world at all. My poems are an expression of this teaching I received, a hint of the available treasures, access to which my 1930-penny, like a coin placed on the tongue of the dead, paid my admission.
There are so many twists and turns in becoming that which we perceive outside ourselves, through dreams, visions, or appearances in the world. Subsequent to these poems and dreams, I continued to feel “a lack”, or “being without”, to privilege the “longing” over its “fulfilment”, which seemed as far away as ever. I was plagued by a repetitive dream over the years. A dream repeats because there is something implicit in the dream that the dreamer keeps missing or avoiding. It’s there, just “unseen”.
And so this year (2020) I dreamed my repetitive dream once more:
I am once in a city, alone, and lost my wallet once again. It had quite a bit of money in it. I do not know what to do, how to survive, wandering about. All too familiar. Then a new detail in the dream: I am rummaging in a drawer through all the old wallets I had lost over the years. I was looking for money but they were EMPTY.
When I woke up a sudden insight after this dream! Maybe I’ve got it all wrong. I have been privileging what’s IN the wallet as holding value (the money) but maybe its the wallet that is now important, ie the container, not what is in it. And to experience this shift in value by psyche, one has to lose everything. This revelatory thought threads into others… the condition for discovery of the “wallet” is an experience of emptiness. All the losses, deprivation, wandering, aloneness is towards an experience of emptiness which leads to the discovery of the “container”. A transformation in what is valued by the psyche!
From things in space to spatiality itself.
A longer version of this essay is available at Academia.
Also see my latest essay on Academia: Overcoming Our Fragmented World for a list of further essays dealing with this mystery.
