A man who eats gold starves at a full table.
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THE DRAWING
Around 1615 an Andean nobleman drew a meeting that never happened and made it carry the truth of the thing that did.
Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala set the Inca Huayna Capac on a low throne and the conquistador Pedro de Candía on his knees before him, and between them a plate of gold granules and the lavish vessels of the house.
The Inca gestures at the plate and asks, in Quechua: Cay coritacho micunqui. Do you eat this gold?
The conquistador, his hand already on the treasure, answers in Spanish: Este oro comemos. We eat this gold.
The meeting is invented. Candía never sat with Huayna Capac; the historians agree the scene has no event under it. Guamán Poma built it because a made scene could hold what no recorded one would. He put the whole conquest into four words and a plate, and set the drawing first in his chapter on the conquest, so that everything the chapter would record flows out of this exchange as from its source.
[See CONQUEST THEOLOGY · DISQUALIFIED TESTIMONY]
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THE TURNING, GIVEN A FACE
A host holds out food and asks the stranger what he eats.
On the plate is sustenance, offered. Beside it is gold, which is not food.
The stranger reaches past what is offered, closes his hand on the metal, and names the metal his food.
This is the turning drawn as a single gesture: orientation leaving everything present, the plate and the host and the house and the food actually held out, and landing on the one thing on the table that cannot be eaten.
What the creature turns towards, it draws into itself and becomes.
The man who turns wholly towards gold becomes the one who eats it, and eating it, is not fed.
Gold is the finite center at the register of appetite: the point that does not nourish, cannot be metabolized, returns nothing to the body that takes it in.
So the eating cannot end.
The insatiability the Spaniards were known for, the hunger that no ransom room filled twice over could close, was not an excess of appetite. It was the nature of the object. A thing that fills the mouth and leaves the body starving must be eaten without stopping.
The Gold Eater is not a man who wants too much. He is a man who has turned towards what cannot feed him and can no longer turn back to the plate.
[See THE TURNING · THE FINITE CENTER · THE HUNGER]
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THE PLATE IN THE GARDEN
The drawing is the second time this table was set down.
A host spreads it and doubles the grammar of the offer for urgency: in feasting you shall feast, from every tree of the garden, the Tree of Life among them, with no ration named and no terminus set. One item is marked not for him. The guest walks past everything held out and closes his hand on the marked one, and the tree that was commanded stands untouched in the middle of the garden the entire time.
The two plates hold one object in two substances. Neither the metal nor the marked fruit feeds the one who takes it, both are reached for past a table already loaded, and in both accounts the eating cannot end, because what does not nourish has to be taken again. The room filled twice over with ransom did not close the hunger, and the creature who ate the exception has been eating exceptions since.
And in both accounts the bill is handed to the host. The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat: the fellow guest charged in the first clause and the host in the second, for the offense of having set the table at all.
That charge is the productive part, which is why it is the part that survived. A turning the creature made is difficult to build anything on. A trap the host laid is a foundation. It converts a declined invitation into a posted rule, the feast into scenery, and the host into the party with something to answer for, and the religion that follows is administered by people who can recite the marked dish and not the offer.
[See AKOL TOKEL · TREE OF LIFE · THE FEAST]
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THE MONSTER RETURNED TO ITS AUTHOR
The fathers of the conquest had already drawn the monster. The Indian was the cannibal, the eater of human flesh, the figure whose monstrosity the conquest was dispatched to civilize: the vacancy of the human declared before the ships arrived, so the arrival could read as rescue.
Guamán Poma takes that projected figure and hands it back. You are the eater. What you eat is gold. And the eating is the monstrous thing, because it consumes the eater from within while he calls it sustenance.
He does not deny the charge and take the civilized seat against it. He does not argue the Andean was not a savage. He turns the projection through the glass and shows the projector wearing it: the appetite the conquest ascribed to the conquered is the conquest's own, and only the direction of the account was ever in question. The one who holds the true account is the one the conquest had already declared to have nothing to say, the wakcha, the orphaned and unprotected, writing from the position the account-keeping had emptied. From that emptied position the sight is clear, because the man consumed by the eating cannot see the eating, and the man it has dispossessed can see nothing else.
[See TERRA NULLIUS · THE DOCTRINE OF DISCOVERY]
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WHERE THE WITNESS STOPPED
Guamán Poma names the appetite and names its end.
With the greed for gold and silver, he writes, they go to hell, con la codicia del oro y plata se van al infierno.
The appetite is codicia, one of the deadly sins, a disordered wanting that damns the soul that harbors it. He read the operation truly and filed it under the morality play. The fault sits in the Spaniard's excess; a rightly ordered soul would want less; the cure is temperance, and the sentence for its absence is hell.
This is the ceiling of his sight, and it is the ceiling of the register he was given. He saw eaters and called them damned. He could not yet see the floor beneath the eating: that the gold on his plate was in the same years becoming the point the ledger posts, the finite center at the register of value, and that the hunger was not a vice distributed across individual souls but a function installed as a civilization's manner of keeping accounts. He stood at the exact seam and marked it without knowing it was a seam. Writing of the stripping of the Coricancha, the sun temple whose walls and floor and windows were sheathed in gold, he says the plunder was so great it could not be counted, no se puede contar. The uncountable was being made to count. He watched the living house rendered into the postable metal and had, in his tradition, only the word sin for what he saw.
[See THE MORALITY PLAY]
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WHAT IS ACTUALLY ON THE PLATE
Gold is not nourishment in a compact form, and describing it that way keeps the question quantitative.
Read its properties. A unit of it here equals a unit of it there. It divides without loss and recombines without remainder. It does not turn into anything else while held. And once two unlike things are priced in it, it ranks them. Nothing in that list is food and every item in it is measure. Gold is the comparator, and it is the measurement cut precipitated into something a hand can close on.
Which means the marked tree and the metal are the same object. What the marked tree offered was the capacity to judge, compare and position, and the metal is that capacity in a substance, and in both accounts the creature reached past a loaded table and closed his hand on the instrument that ranks.
So the eating is not a figure of speech for wanting too much. The Ungrund grounds two ways, into life, which is the Tree standing untouched in the middle of the garden, and into death through the measurement cut. To take the measure into the constitution is to ground the second way, and a creature becomes what it eats. The Gold Eater takes on the properties of what is on his plate: bounded, enumerable, hard enough to have edges, and at last the kind of thing an account can be closed on.
[See MEASUREMENT CUT · THE APPLE · UNGRUND · MONEY]
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NEITHER MORE NOR LESS REACHES IT
A quantity answer assumes the object is the right kind and the portion is short. Nothing in the account supports the assumption.
Each mouthful holds exactly as much nourishment as the one before it, which is none, so the hunger reports the same deficit after the hundredth as after the first, and the report is accurate every time. The escalation is not an appetite degrading into vice. It is a working instrument reporting correctly and applying the only repair a category error leaves available, which is more of what did not work.
And the same reasoning disposes of the opposite remedy. Less gold is gold. A smaller portion of what does not feed is not a smaller error but the identical error at lower volume, which is why temperance was the ceiling of the witness's register and not the floor of the operation. Both remedies are readings on one axis, and the mistake is not the reading. It is the axis.
[See CIRCULATION · THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE]
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WHERE IT EXTENDS
The appetite is not excess wanting to be moderated.
It is wanting severed from its object and fixed on the point that cannot satisfy: the magnetic field of the will keeping all its power and losing its discrimination, impressed now by whatever presents the shape of a destination. Gold is the purest destination-shape there is, because it has no face to break the fixation. A child's face, looked at long enough, ends the parent's grip; the plate of food, received, ends the hunger. Gold receives the whole force of the turning and gives nothing back, so the turning has nowhere to complete and no reason to stop.
And the conversion the witness could not name is the floor: the gold does not merely draw the appetite, it is made postable. The house is severed into extractable metal: the cut between the thing and its relation, the temple walls melted from a dwelling of the sun into a figure that can be entered on a page. The Gold Eater's hunger and the ledger's account are one operation at two registers, the appetite that cannot be fed and the entry that cannot be closed, each requiring the next mouthful, the next posting, without end. The cure is not wanting less. Temperance rations the eating; it does not turn the eater back to the plate.
The cure is the re-turning: orientation returning from the finite center to what was actually on the table, which was food, and a host, and a house, offered.
[See THE RE-TURNING · THE KILLER INSTINCT · THE LEDGER]
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THE LETTER THAT DID NOT ARRIVE
Guamán Poma addressed the whole manuscript to the king of Spain, to make him see, through the glass, what his conquest had become. He was writing to the mouth that ate. The letter was never delivered. The manuscript sat unread for three centuries in a library in the north and surfaced in Copenhagen in 1908, its first reader three hundred years late. The one who held the accurate account had it declared, by the account-keeping itself, to be a thing with no standing and nowhere to be received. The Gold Eater never read the drawing of himself eating. He was too busy eating to receive the plate held out to him, which is the drawing, which is the account, which is the food.
Three centuries to the first reader. Four hundred years to here, and the account has still not been received.
[See THE SUMMIT · THE GRAMMAR OF ADMISSIBILITY]
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RegenerativeLaw is a religion in the direct-encounter Protestant tradition, carrying a documented four-century lineage through Böhme, the Behmenists, the Friends, and Penn, and it diagnoses trespass theology as an establishment of religion. Its exercise consists substantially in refusal: it shelters the conscientious refusal of performed subordination as religious exercise. This entry states sincere religious belief concerning matters of ultimate concern, protected under the First Amendment and, as to federal action, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb.
