A game. A dorky playing behind etymology game involving reading the OED app against the grain a bit. The violence of definitions, and the traces and gaps visible between the supposed density and absolute reality of those definitions: a made history in which the erasures, willed-forgettings, and silencings can reappear.
(Another silly image: the master-tapes weren’t 8-track, they were 124, and we finally got a mixing console capable of fading those never-mixed tracks back in).
Wih much love to the Oxford English Dictionary app (I’m not sure how one buys this any more), here are two screen grabs of two words: There’s a scandal lurking:
First, Patrimony:
Now, matrimony
See what’s missing? Matrimony covers at least a couple of scandals. Literally looking like it means “mother money,” with a little finesse depending on how you go about reading the various possible meanings of “-mony,” it hints at the ritual action that affixes quasi-divine status to things and people, and relationships. Which suggests (sorry for the sketchy grammar—we’re at the limits of how things are articulated) that “money'“ emerges as the stuff that makes those states of perception happen.
Nowhere in the definitions—only in the enacting of them, with varying levels of bluntness—do those details emerge as baldly as they do in Evelina or Romance of the Forest or any of the marriage-market books that simply presume that matrimony is a commercial exchange . . as stated so romantically so many wonderful times by Collins in Pride and Prejudice.
But, even more scandalously, looking at them side-by-side, the possibility appears that the first definition of ‘patrimony’ was also the originary meaning—or a valid and valued one for ‘matrimony.’ So, an “estate or property belonging by ancient right” to one’s mother or maternal ancestors siumultaneously appears as a logical inference. But an inference, not so much prohibited as simply ignored as unthinkable or inarticulable in the greco-latinate conceptual laws of association that we have been told are reality and not just formed laws of asociation.
One way to see this is to look at OEDs origin of "money” as a noun: “{ORIGIN: Old French moneie . . . from Latin moneta mint (in rome), money, orig. epithet of Juno, in whose temple the mint was housed.] Wonder how this noun might relate to the “(not productive)” suffix -mony, which, the OED [obtusely] informs you forms “nouns chiefly of action or state from verbal stems, as alimony, ceremony, matrimony, parsimony, sanctimony, testimony.” You outta luck. Just as somehow someone decided to omit patrimony from that list, whatever it is that mony mony does to those things hides behind scrupulous generalization and abstraction.
But it sneaks in, kind of like how Callie Khouri has Vivi Walker re-direct the flow of patriarchy by putting the ring her father gave her (with much trauma) on Siddalee’s wedding-ring finger and be the one to approve of her marriage in Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood: the patriarchal capture of memory, imagination, and money through the figures of Mnemosyne and Juno Monete expropriates generation and genealogy, but it always fails at least a little.
K. K. Ruthven in “Keats and ‘Dea Moneta,’" (Studies in Romanticism, Summer, 1976, (15, 3): 445-459) came, I’d like to think, oh-so-close to almost seeing that Keats saw beyond the complete failure of the explanations of how Juno got the epithet “monete” and became the goddess most associated with money, but as with Keats’s failed poem The Fall of Hyperion, “alas, the vision faded” before the recognition took form in words that could challenge that her capture and exploitation figures the capture and exploitation of all of our memories in order to make the patronage discourses of mastery work.
Ruthven notes, “The name Moneta was similarly problematic, challenging ancient etiologists to account for its presence among the titles of Juno well as to explain how Juno Moneta first came to be associated with the Roman mint” (447). After detailing Keats’s complications with trying to gain access to a financial inheritance, Ruthven links his change of goddess from Mnemosyne to Monete as being involved with a changed understanding of the responsibilities of the poet in an emerging capitalist state—one that requires “looking unflinchingly at life in the present age of gold” and leaving behind the assumptions of a Sydney or a Spenser. But in the extended quote that Ruthven chooses lurks the hint of the founding expropriation:
“For a brief moment, the conflict between making poems and making money seemed to be resolved in the person of this terrible goddess, whose wisdom is confused with immense wealth:
As I had found
A grain of gold upon a mountain's side,
And twinged with avarice strained out my eyes
To search its sullen entrails rich with ore,
So at the view of sad Moneta's brow
I ached to see what things the hollow brain
Behind enwombed. (1.271-77)
“But alas,” writes Ruthven, “the vision faded. A mere twenty lines later, Keats had so lost touch with it as to begin scouring Hyperion for ready-made lines to keep the poem moving, lines which took the poem inevitably along a different route” (459).
“The hollow brain behind enwombed”—that brain being Moneta’s—or Juno’s—makes Keats ache in contemplation of his avarice of discovery and gold-hunting—a hunt which only makes sense if the material has been converted into that symbolic economy we all know, because gold is otherwise basically useless.
The expropriation of generation and genealogy, I’d like to think, is what drives Keats’s certainty that Juno is sad, and her generation of the imagined associations of capitalism are rapes upon what could have been, and might, still be, with a whole lotta rethinking, a renewed matrimony.