To me there's something perversely, despairingly beautiful in the image of a creased dollar bill lying lengthwise across the labia of the stripper's (ahem, ... "sex worker's") upturned vagina. The beauty, I guess, rests in its maddeningly paradoxical implications: an intimacy that is truly estrangement, a contact that is not, that simply recalls to us the immense gulf between a being and all other beings. Metonymies, always metonymies, in an endless, centerless network that can never include entirely the being in her Being.
The above-mentioned image eternalizes, hypostatizes an existential problem akin to that of the figures that are the subject of Keats's meditation in his "Ode to a Grecian Urn"--a meditation that culminates in a chiastic circularity: "Beauty is Truth; Truth Beauty." The sex industry offers a homologous circularity: "Sex is Power; Power Sex." And perhaps, pace Keats, *that* "is all ye need to know on earth."
Marriage, then, seems no more than a wishul attempt to slow this dizzying circularity, to establish or imbricate some sort of Foucauldian heterotopia in which we comport ourselves to an imagined fullness and authenticity that the world, in its true character, denies.
The creased dollar bill upon the upturned vagina is, finally, the *conditio humana* redacted to its essence.
Remember, on that dollar bill there is also a symbol of incompleteness: the unfinished pyramid.
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