Having and Being Had

by Eula Biss

Some people choose their precarity—evidence that precarity is not just a condition of our time, but a response to it. The precariat includes people who have forgone stable employment and retirement savings for temp work and travel and an uncertain future. Their very existence is unsettling, suggesting, as it does, that there might be something worth more than security.

Beyoncé’s grandchildren and their children’s children, as yet unborn, will all be rich. That’s a lot of brown children on your Forbes list, she sings. Her wealth is a grand redemption of a debt long unpaid. But it is not an untroubled triumph. Pay me in equity, pay me in equity, Beyoncé sings. Money is no substitute, really, for equity. And to be coronated queen under capitalism is to claim a domain that comes, as Marx put it, “dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”

I move to the other end of the table, where a man mentions that I might be interested in an essay titled “The Tragedy of the Commons.” I’ve just read that essay, I tell him, yesterday. He hesitates and then explains it to me. The tragedy, he says, is that everyone will always take as much as they can from the commons. This isn’t my sense of the tragedy—the tragedy is that by the time that essay was written the commons had already been lost and the regulations that once prevented everyone from taking as much as they could from the commons had been forgotten. But the idea that the commons cannot be regulated, I know, is the interpretation of that essay favored by free-market capitalists. And that’s what has made it so enduring, despite the fact that it was written as an argument for limiting the “breeding” of the poor and is riddled with inaccuracies and outright falsehoods. Its veracity is less important than its influence, one of my colleagues once said of that essay. Meaning, the lies we want to believe tell us something about ourselves.

I pause over this, wondering what it means to own yourself. And wondering if the very idea of owning yourself requires, as she suggests, imagining your body as capital. Now she’s saying, You know, money isn’t bad. Money isn’t the problem. Money is the stuff that flows through the problem. Money is the blood, she says. You can test blood to find out what the problem is, but the presence of blood alone isn’t going to diagnose the problem.

“When you look at bicycle magazines we’re not on the covers, we’re not in the magazines,” she says. “And yet in any city, there are black people riding bikes everywhere, with a particular kind of style and a particular kind of purpose.”

“When I started riding a bike I realized there’s a real relationship between a body powering itself going down the street and the way you interact with your community,” Smith says. “The violence of the power of a car is an alienating device. It’s the last thing we need in our neighborhoods.”

Bicycles have the same rights and duties as motor vehicles. But being governed by the same laws doesn’t produce equality. A bicycle doesn’t occupy a full lane, is rarely granted the three-foot passing margin required by law, and must use signals that not everyone understands. Bicycles belong to a different class and they can’t expect to be treated like cars. And so, bicycles break the rules, riding through stop signs and red lights. Like the people who occupy neighborhoods that are overpoliced and underprotected, bicycles know that what keeps them safe on the street is not the law, but their own vigilance, quickness, and wit.

A bicycle in traffic must be predictive to the point of clairvoyance, must know the cars better than the cars know themselves, must understand their motivations and their common blunders. Cars don’t always signal their intentions. And cars aren’t always nice to each other, though they usually show each other some respect in deference to the damage they can do to each other. They are like important men in conversation with other important men. Bicycles are sometimes kindly accommodated by cars, often ignored, occasionally respected, sometimes nervously followed, and frequently not even seen. In this sense, riding in traffic is not unlike being a woman among men.

On a bicycle, I’m alert, aware of everything. It’s exhilarating, the narrow margin, the exposure to injury, the steadying force of the spinning wheels. And then, for the sake of comfort or convenience, I get into a car.

But she wants us “to consider the toy, the bicycle, as an actual device of liberation.”

Precarity is not the price of riding a bicycle, I think, so much as what it has to offer. Wind, a rush of blood, fissures and pits in the asphalt, an errant animal, eyes in a mirror, glint of sunlight on chrome, scent of lake water, catcalls, a soaring feeling. But that is not to say that liberation doesn’t have a price.

This was repeated to Emily, who responded with a quote from Robert Browning, Time, why, Time was all I wanted!

The sound of a piano playing in the dark woke a guest staying in Emily Dickinson’s house. “I can improvise better at night,” she explained at breakfast. I’m Emily today, deep in her biography, breathing her air. David gave me this book, his copy, and when I saw the title, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books, I thought, yes, mine too.

“Perhaps the starkest measure of the failure of our economic policies,” Binyamin Appelbaum writes, “is that the average American’s life expectancy is in decline, as inequalities of wealth have become inequalities of health.”

A fragment of a late-life letter to a man she loved but refused to marry, scissored away from whatever else it might have said, reads, “Don’t you know that ‘No’ is the wildest word we consign to Language?”

The tree stands behind me, leaning. As I dig, a single phrase repeats in my head: “Canted vertiginously over the tailrace.” It’s from Joan Didion’s essay about Hoover Dam, where a man from the Bureau of Reclamation takes her deep into the machinery of the dam to see a turbine and then says, “Touch it.” It’s an essay about power, I once told my students, in all its valences. “One cannot serve both beauty and power,” Connolly writes, quoting Flaubert: “Le pouvoir est essentiellement stupide.” Power is essentially stupid.

“Approaching forty,” Connolly writes, “a singular dream in which I almost grasped the meaning and understood the nature of what it is that wastes in wasted time.”

Time and money, this neighbor once said to me, that’s how you know what matters to a person.

Comfortable as I was in my new house, rich as I felt, I didn’t have time to write. Not at first. I bargained for time, I made trade-offs for time, and I eventually sold this book to buy time. “I think writers are often terrifying to normal people—that is, to nonwriters in a capitalist system—for this reason: there is almost nothing they will not sell in order to have the time to write,” Alexander Chee observes. “Time is our mink, our Lexus, our mansion.”

As I wrote this book, I established a set of rules for my writing. One of the first rules was that I had to name specific sums whenever I talked about money. Another rule was that I had to talk about money. These rules were a direct refusal of what I understood to be the rules of polite conversation around money: 1) Don’t talk about it. 2) If you do talk about it, don’t be specific. 3) Minimize what you have. 4) Emphasize that you’ve earned it. 5) Never forget that work is the story we tell ourselves about money.

In 2018, the US Census Bureau designated as middle class households with incomes between $45,000 and $139,000. Close to half the population fell within that range. Barack Obama’s 2012 definition of the middle class included any household making less than $250,000. Congress later expanded that to any household making less than $450,000, which excluded only the top 1 percent of earners from the middle class.

Income alone is a crude indicator of class, as it doesn’t reflect debt or the cost of living or inherited money. Accumulated wealth, or net worth, might serve as a better indicator.