Value

(February 2022. Begun in Quartzsite, finished in Swansea. A meditation on the problem of value, which Nietzsche declared to be the great problem of philosophy.)

What is value?
What do I value?

I value myself, I know,
But what is myself
But a collection of correspondences
From everything that has touched
This body⁠?⁠—
The story I could tell.

I am a vast unit of species processing,
Nearly worthless or a limit of infinite value
Depending on the closeness of contacts
Of a chain of touch.

Volatile I launch with valor
Through a fluid world touching,
Accruing through a growing membrane,
Semi-permeable, the edge of the universe
Floating in some center
One of many.

Value is a balancing
On the living edge of death
Of a choosing center with
An outside imagined,
A believing begat by action
In the moment of choice,
An instantiation of what worlds
Are worth to me this instant,
Flying alive of a habitat
An attempted optimization
Of reachable resources
In four dimensions integrated
In the limit death

(And all things are resources
And all things return to source
And all things are reachable
Through source where all things touch
And even infinite space
Is scarce and beautiful
Under time.)