Your Silver is Cankered
Vanitas with Coins, Teeth, and Shattered Glass, by Neal Auch
“Your gold and silver is cankered;
and the rust of them shall be a witness against you,
and shall eat your flesh as it were fire.
Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days.”
– James 5:3
As the story goes, the Vikings made themselves rich off the slave trade. Human chattel were sold for silver, alongside commodities such as wax and honey. The vast majority of the wealth acquired through this exploitative practice would never be spent. Instead, the Vikings hoarded their riches. They ferried incalculable sums of money away to the island of Gotland where, in the end, it would be buried and left to rot.
This curious practice seems connected to Viking beliefs about the afterlife. Under Odin’s law, whatever was buried beneath the earth could be reclaimed after death and carried into Valhalla. This idea might sound primitive to some readers; however, historian Timothy Snyder has argued that our current political moment contains clear echoes of this particular brand of paganism. The billionaire oligarchs of our era do not hoard their riches on the island of Gotland, of course. But they are hoarders all the same…
It must be understood that money serves an entirely different purpose for oligarchs than it does for the rest of us. Beyond a certain threshold of wealth, the acquisition of money becomes a philosophical pursuit rather than a pragmatic one. Let’s illustrate this point with a thought experiment. Doctors and lawyers are probably the wealthiest members of society most of us will ever encounter under ordinary circumstances. But even these well-to-do professionals would experience a profound impact on their standard of living if, by some miraculous turn of fate, their net worth were to double overnight. Suddenly, our hypothetical lawyer would have access to privileges which had previously been unavailable to her; perhaps now she can afford to take some extra vacation time, or purchase an even fancier car, or send her kid to an elite private school. The same is simply not true for an oligarch. If Elon Musk’s net worth were to suddenly increase from 360 billion to 720 billion, that windfall of good luck would have absolutely no meaningful impact on his life whatsoever. The reason is simple: nothing was inaccessible to Musk in the first place. Getting more rich would not grant him access to any additional privileges in the way that it would for most of us. For most oligarchs, the starting point of this thought experiment is already a sum of money so vast as to be inconceivable. Even if you burnt 30 thousand dollars every single day, it would take you an entire lifetime to lose just one billion; for someone like Musk, even such a lifetime of obscene squander would barely impact his bottom line whatsoever. This is part of the reason why so much of the wealth being hoarded by oligarchs sits untouched in tax shelters. Contemporary billionaires might not bury their ill-gotten fortunes beneath the earth, as the Vikings once did. But the result is exactly the same: The money rots.
It is no coincidence that the Vikings’ hoards of silver are associated with the promise of life everlasting. In The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker argued that almost every facet of our psychology can be connected to our unwillingness to face up to the fact of mortality. He conceived of the human as a creature divided against itself. On the one hand, we have a symbolic notion of the self: a name, a station in society, a desire to create, an excruciating need to love and to be loved. At the same time, however, we are plagued by our physical self, by what Becker calls our “creatureliness.” We are just animals, after all. We’re just sentient meat, destined for no greater purpose than to one day become food for the maggots. Unable to reconcile the contradictions between the symbolic and creaturely self, many of us find solace in what Becker called “immortality projects.” In short, we pour our limited time on this earth into some noble pursuit which we imagine might outlive us. In this way, we seek a kind of immortality for the symbolic self, if not for the physical body. An artist’s immortality project might be a novel, a film, or a collection of paintings. For the oligarchs, just like the Vikings, there is only one worthwhile immortality project: the acquisition of more and more wealth.
Unsurprisingly, the deification of billionaires like Elon Musk and Donald Trump has come hand in hand with a new mythology of immortality—one so stupid that no Viking would have taken it seriously. Instead of promising life everlasting in Heaven or Valhalla, contemporary grifters suggest it is possible for the body itself to persist indefinitely. The tech billionaire Bryan Johnson, for example, hopes to “bio-hack” his way to immortality using a complex regimen of vitamins, dietary restrictions, and blood transfusions. It goes without saying that Johnson’s claims have little grounding in medical science and, in any case, literal bodily immortality is precluded by the known laws of thermodynamics. Wellness influences make their money hawking a similar promise of perpetual youth and vitality via questionable nutritional supplements, banana peel facial rubs, infrared light testicular treatments, and other silliness. None of this is new, of course. Stories about a mythical Fountain of Youth have been recounted all around the world for thousand and thousands of years. The myth of immortality being sold by silicone valley bio-hackers today will be forgotten by tomorrow—just another failed idea in the dustbin of history. In the centuries since our species has been self-aware enough to fear its own demise, not one person has ever found a way to cheat death. And no one ever will.
The Vikings are long dead. And their hordes of buried silver—paid for with human lives—amount to little more than an archeological curiosity. No warrior, not matter how brave, ever managed to bring his silver with him into Valhalla. “We all come to the end of our lives as naked and empty-handed as on the day we were born,” according to the author of Ecclesiastes. “We can’t take our riches with us.” Figures like Musk and Trump loom might large in the popular imagination right now. But their fate will be no different from that of the Vikings. In time, all their hordes silver will rot just as surely as the flesh on their bones.
The Vanitas image which accompanies this essay must be understood in terms of its juxtaposition of coins against the bones of the nameless dead. Like so many similar compositions before it, this piece serves as a visual reminder of the wisdom of Ecclesiastes. Time is fleeting. Every empire is destined for ruin. No person—no matter how wealthy or powerful—can deny the maggots their birthright
I Wrote a Book!
If you enjoy this particular blend of nonfiction essay with still life, you might be interested in checking out my book, All is Vanity. The book contains approximately 250 high quality images (some new and some old), along with 20 different essays (totalling about 27k words). Physical copies of my book are now available for purchase at Amazon.
The unfortunate economic reality of printing a 412 page full colour art book on 8.5x11 paper is that the price point will be inaccessible to some folks who might otherwise be interested. So I’ve made an inexpensive e-book version of the text available for purchase at my website. Unlike the e-books sold via Amazon, this file is yours once you’ve purchased it; you can read the PDF or ePub versions on any device you want and no corporation can revoke your access to the thing you paid for at some future date. (The images look great on my laptop screen; be aware some e-readers might compress the pictures or only show the images in black-and-white.)
Advanced praise for All is Vanity:
“In his brilliant photographs, Neal Auch has captured the eternal lesson of vanity vs time. Deeply inspired by Flemish still life paintings of the 17th century, his provocative compositions seem rooted in another time, yet utterly contemporary. As culinary designer for television’s Hannibal, I also drew inspiration from the uneaten prey, over-ripe fruits, and overblown bouquets of Flemish art, examining the liminal space between sumptuous excess and decay that Auch brings into exquisitely measured focus in his new collection. Each image whispers a warning that is cruel but, ultimately, extraordinarily beautiful.” — Janice Poon, graphic designer, painter, sculptor, food stylist, and author of Feeding Hannibal: A Connoisseur’s Cookbook
“All is Vanity combines text and art in an extended meditation on the conundrum of existence. Using the still life as a mirror to show the absurdity of self, culture, politics, and wealth, we're confronted with classically-styled images of unlikely objects (such as viscera, fast food, and sex toys) that are simultaneously lush, ironic, revolting, and gorgeous. Auch’s photographs burst with gruesome beauty like the abundant rot of a bloated corpse.” —Joe Koch, author of The Wingspan of Severed Hands and Invaginies
Vanitas with Bones and Coins, by Neal Auch