III.1.  Chuang-tse on the Academy vs. the CafŽs.  While sitting on the banks of the Hsien & Lan River, Chuang-tse was approached by two representatives of the Prince of Ch'u, who offered him a position at court.  Chuang-tse watched the water flowing by as if he had not heard.  Finally, he remarked, "I am told that the Prince has a sacred tortoise, over two thousand years old, which is kept in a box, wrapped in silk and brocade." "That is true," the officials replied.  "If the tortoise had been given a choice," Chuang-tse continued, "which do you think he would have liked better--to have been alive in the mud, or dead within the palace?"  "To have been alive in the mud, of course," the man answered.  "I too prefer the mud," said Chuang-tse.  "Good-bye."

 

                                      

Der †bermensch. --He is already with us.  He blows his nose in aluminum foil and scoffs at our idle cafŽ chatter.

          --Thom Smit, Maxims for Morons

 

III.2.  Diogenes on the Academy vs. the CafŽs.  --Here follows a text in Greek-- ... --  [This bit about the--several words quoted in Greek--makes me think of my friend Abraham in Vera Cruz, who wrote me the following of a neurosis that descended upon him in the course of his studies in that disreputable town: "...I began to be belabored by the most ridiculous delusions.  I felt the city was collapsing around me, and that only my own personal mystical studies could hold it together.  I would study at the cafŽ by the cathedral where we had our last talk.  The world I was beginning to glimpse through my studies was under siege by the criminal element in Vera Cruz: they were on to me.  One waiter there, particularly deferential, would smile at me with his silver teeth.  I was not to write certain things.  The structure of my soul was becoming one with the structure of the crime that infested Vera Cruz and simultaneously with the structure of a nascent mystical insight.  It was at this point that I met Celestina at the apartment of Se–or Rojas.  The world glimpsed by me was under attack by the criminals: they sought to shatter it before I could learn more.  Eventually the only way I could hold it together was if I kissed Celestina's neck the right number of times on certain days, and if I drank the right number of coffees on certain days.  But as my peril increased, the numerology became confusing, leading to excess.  And the waiter's smile grew more and more sinister, as he became ever more deferential, mocking me behind his dirty silver teeth.  The criminals' sexual intentions concerning me were clear.  I didn't dare tell Celestina everything, but her neck was beginning to chap from my hundreds of kisses, and her eyes perused me more and more suspiciously, full of dread.  I would go to the cafŽ in the morning and in the course of the day would order the precise number of coffees needed to hold my body of mystical knowledge together.  But the number--what was the right number?  I recognized the importance of threes and multiples thereof, four however being somehow uncanny, suggesting a sort of balanced femininity that was clearly threatening.  Particularly threatening in that if I didn't go on and drink the fifth coffee, the balance inherent in the four would invade my being and upset the balance of the knowledge I had with such difficulty acquired.  This was just what the criminal element and the waiter wanted, so that I noticed the waiter always hesitated to bring me the fifth coffee, sometimes having recourse to another waiter, and I would drink it ostentatiously.  But often it felt that I didn't quite drink it correctly, my swallows and movements didn't have the correct rhythmical sense, and so I had to drink a sixth coffee, a multiple of three you know, which was doubtless rather dangerous, being precisely two (or a couple: perhaps Celestina and myself) times three--and I didn't want to bring her into it--and so I ordered and drank the seventh coffee, but seven is a number with terrible power, the kabbalists and everyone has known it, and so the eighth, TWO ROUNDED FOURS, then the ninth, three threes, the tenth, a number so safe that there must be something wrong with it, something hidden, then the eleventh coffee, two people standing but not touching, I then drank the twelfth, one plus two equals three, thirteenth, oh!, the fourteenth coffee, my birthday--January 14, 1956, the fifteenth coffee, and so on...."  The sequel to poor Abraham's tale is far too horrible to recount here, reminiscent, as it is, of Poe's Berenice.] --Here follows a second text in Greek--  Puzzle for Sam Slote.

 

 

CULTURE AND SOVIET SOCIETY:

A MINI-SERIES

 

"EN-LIGHT-EN-MENT: FAILED WESTERN WEIGHT-LOSS TECHNIQUE."

                --telegram from anonymous "Coup" leader

                              [Lukyanov?] to Barbara Bush

 

III.3.1.  Culture and Soviet Society Before the "Coup": 

       "WE HERE AT THE EUROPEAN WAY LIBERAL

                         REVIEW..."

 

It has come to our attention that the Soviet Bolshoi Encyclopedia has neither an article on Freud in it nor an article on the unconscious.  We bring this up only because it is one of the more glaring omissions, not because it is in any sense the only omission.  Why do the Soviet encyclopedists shy away from the good Dr. Freud?  The most obvious answer that comes to mind is that the unconscious is by definition beyond state control, and that the Soviets would not want to acknowledge the existence of anything beyond state control.  But we are being unfair.  An exile friend of ours insists that there was indeed an article in the Soviet encyclopedia on Freud.  After reading it, however, the Soviet editorial board decided to shred the article and use the shreds to make the binding of volume "F".  Our exile friend comments: "They see this as their way of doing service to Freud's idea of the unconscious, sort of keeping it in its place as an absolute Other, as an unassimilable base of the more 'conscious' material within the volume."  

     And it must be true!  We find that the state of the collective Soviet psyche is to be seen in their very bindings.  Grab hold of any volume of any Soviet encyclopedia, and you will find that the bindings are so poorly made that when you shake the book the pages go flying off in all directions.  

     Boris, our exile friend, writes from Basel: "This loss of pages is doubtless what causes the heaps of unsifted papers and piles of neglected documents that clutter the basements and clog the air vents of any reputable Soviet library.  And the clogged air vents are themselves responsible for the oppressive heat of Soviet reading rooms in summer and in the warmer republics.  One Soviet author insists that this musty heat makes reading an erotic experience, as it should be, particularly if one is reading socialist-realist summaries of ancient works describing Roman orgies or Saturnalia."--quoted from The European Way Liberal Review, Jan. 33, 19--

 

III.3.2.  Culture and Soviet Society During the "Coup":

         --SHOCK TROPES, or TANK BALLET

 

   You just can't find good coup leaders these days.

                               --Meg at the CafŽ

 

Throughout the morning tanks and armored personnel carriers lumbered to critical crossroads of the city, four of them spinning wildly in a circle outside the Bolshoi Theater in a roaring display of force that left passers-by crying "Shame!"--as quoted from the NYT, August 20, 1991

 

III.3.3.  Culture and Soviet Society after the "Coup":   

                                                       --Yeltsin

 

Yeltsin shows up drunk at the police station, mysteriously soaking wet, carrying a ragged bouquet of flowers.  This giving him a more "human image."  

     Yeltsin chooses economic plan for his platform without reading economic plan.  Just sounds good.  

     Yeltsin signs peace accords with California New Age Superpower.  

     Yeltsin seen selling Whoppers from the nave of St. Basil's.  Gives proceeds to safe-sex efforts of Ukrainian nationalists.  

     Yeltsin, theorist of the carnivalesque, does ads for Honda Spree with Lou Reed.  Russian folk music and bread and salt.  

     Yeltsin condemns hardline theoreticians and favors speedy popular theoretics as seen in Western video.  

     Yeltsin donates his scrotum to "popular" high school dissecting classes.  Question of how he can donate one to each school.  Still offers to do so on popular evening news show Vremya.  "Whatever it takes for the people!" heard to declare heroically, waving gold-colored Western credit card like a little razor.  --Findings not yet in.

 

III.6.  Those who cannot look death in the face will spend the whole of their lives looking him in the ass.

 

III.7.  On the 12 of September, I began working full-time at the cafŽ, finally getting my hands on the espresso machines, steaming the fresh, cold milk, scooping the powdered coffee out of its bucket to make pot after pot all day and into the night.  My cleanly clipped nails go home holding a thin line of coffee dust to the tip of each finger.  My hands are getting callused from the hot water and the hot metal of the machines.  At eight or so free cups a day, I am finally drinking a bit too much.  

     Five days after starting work, I dreamt that Lenin's body had been stolen from its mausoleum and was being hidden in the cafŽ basement, still in its glass case but stood upright against the wall.  Why all the Russian dreams lately?  I'd come downstairs to get something, in a fearful rush, and one of the greying men down there who were steaming milk put his finger to his lips to indicate Shhh! then knowingly brought my attention to what was behind the boxes of coffee machines he was moving.  There, against the wall, was Vladimir Ilyich in his glass case.  The upright position had forced his body forward so that his head was against the glass.  He didn't wink, but his forehead didn't crumble either, and as the man moved the boxes back to their positions covering the great revolutionary, some of the other men looked to me with pride and solidarity, as if they were saying: "How bout that, kid?  Eh?  And you thought we were just down here steaming milk!"

 

III.9.  If I want to imagine a fictive nation, I can give it an invented name, treat it declaratively as a novelistic object, create a new Garabagne, so as to compromise no real country by my love (though it is then that love itself that I compromise by the signs of literature).  I can also--though in no way claiming to represent or to analyze reality itself (these being the major gestures of writing even here in Madison)--isolate somewhere in the world (faraway ) a certain number of features (a term employed in linguistics), and out of these features deliberately form a system.  It is this system which I shall call: Medieval Europe, or, say, Russia.

 

III.10.  Around the day in eighty "wlds."  The world has lost its or.  The world as an army of metaphors, etc.  Read the etc., which we can't.  Either the world is dead, or its or is dead.  We no longer have the either/or.  So the world is dead.  Around the day in eighty "wds."  Eight wds.  Six.

 

III.11.  Clearly Chuang-tze did not really dream he was a butterfly.  He made it up.  Poiesis, the Greek word for poetry, is also the Greek word for making.  Are philosophers poets?  Or vice versa?  An old question of great importance.  

     But it is true that after reading Chuang-tze I was led to have a similar dream.  I dreamt I was an earthworm, driven out of the ground by a heavy rain.  And like many such earthworms in our paved "world," I was forced to squirm across a wet, oil-slicked street, hearing the Apocalyptic roar of cars as they flew over me like gods, aware that I may be destroyed at any time.  

     And since I woke up I have never been sure that I wasn't just such a stranded earthworm dreaming I was a Western writer.

 

III.12.  The world--it is really a massive auto accident.

     When I was younger, nuclear weapons made me fear the end of the world.  Now I just laugh.  

     We get our kicks listening to the last shards of glass tinkle to a slow-motion halt on the cement.

 

III.14.

 

Oh, Golden Years!

 

I grew up in a neo-colonial pseudo-mansion on a huge landfill hill.  The farmer kids in the valley called it the White House.  And indeed, it looked quite a bit like the White House.  More so even than the White House itself!  --A visitor from a distant land, you approach the front door with the brass eagle knocker, noticing that the paint is peeling from the post-Ionic columns.  --"Huh?"  --Grasping a piece, you realize it is latex paint.  --Grinning a bit nauseously, you start to peel it off in strips, longer and longer strips, revealing the grey metal underneath.  --You rap on the columns, and find they are made of hollow aluminum siding.  --"Rat tat tat," rings the land you suddenly find yourself in.  "Rat tat."

 

i.

Oh, the fond memories of my youth!  Idyllic age!  Sylvan youth!

     I used to shoot chipmunks with my pellet gun.  Robins, squirrels, and gophers.  Once even a golfer. [1]

     I was a regular St. Julien Hospitalier.

 

ii.

Oh, innocence!  Oh, our pure and shining brows!

     We were twelve.  I showed her mine.  She showed me hers.  Finally I tried to put a jujubee in it.  She demurred.

 

iii.

Oh, natural piety!  Oh, wet wordsworthian years!

     I sat in front of the television watching the Flintstones, Leave it to Beaver, I Dream of Genie, Gilligan's Island, The Flying Nun.

     And my sustenance for these daily entertainments?  I would drink Half-and-Half straight from the carton while sticking Nestle's chocolate morsels into the globs of peanutbutter I ate off a silver spoon.  Over and over and over.  By Saturday--"cleaning day"--the floor was littered with Half-and-Half cartons, empty peanutbutter jars, dropped kisses,--all for the cleaning lady, sweet-tooth Gwendolyn.

 

iv.

Yes, reader--my youth, like yours, finally exploded into the acne of American Teenage Shamefaced Idiocy.

 

 

     Oh!  Oh, youth!  Sylvan years!  Etc., etc.

 

 

Note 1: I am suddenly forced to remark that the typical golfer as I knew him was himself little more than an oversized gopher.  The resemblances are various: they both have puffy cheeks, they both squeek when excited, they both tend to sport spotted coats, and they both spend their time seeking out little holes in big grassy spaces, the gophers more radically trying to insert their whole selves in these holes, the golfers just their little white balls.  --Such great and undeniable similarities clearly somewhat justify my bagging of these larger beasts.  I say somewhat because they are, after all, so much larger than gophers, so much slower, so much more stupid on the uptake, their teeth, what's more, being usually more crooked and more poorly cleaned.  It is thus not exactly noble to hunt them, being such easy prey, and rather worthless for mounting in any case.  Who, after all, would want the head of one of these beasts gracing the wall of his study?  --The flesh, I am told, can be quite toothsome with the right wine, but recent legislation makes it illegal to dine on golfers, trying to establish, no doubt, that they are some sort of endangered species, the new law being a transparent attempt by the bourgeoisie to give these overgrown pets a prestige they hardly deserve.

 

III.16.  A file containing seminar notes (Helleslicht's 1991 seminar on de Man) and a brief mock Romantic epistolary novella is re-edited by a software systems error.  The text is entirely reset as a little icon appears Rousseau An Aman Said on the screen of a little black Sick Sue Forty Rorty bomb of silent film vintage with the words "Sorry: a systems error has occurred." The Fork out following is an unmodified from the file Foucault Hay gal "A" gel Hegel Own head. a l n eft a l n acn efe a l n eff a ce n eft a l n eft a l n eft a c n eft a l n eft a l n eft al n eft a c n eft al n eft al n eft a l n eft al n eft a l n efe a l n efn a l n eft a l n scep e sc eas tec tec l thusly et ter iKlara a ce o eee n ef acn eff a c e n eff a ce n e fao a l n eft a l n tt fa l n eft a l n nt ace o nn ace one ace o nt ace o no ace o ap edited. --B.B. --Sigmund Freud a l n efl al n elThe Anaximander fragment.  ace nef fa ce non eft al n eft al n nnMallarme was an extremely careful reader of Hegel. ace n tilmagination is another name for death. ace neff a ce nnnrWe're not empowered to judge between art and truth. ace n eff ace n o Wherever you want to put the subject--under erasure, under the table--wherever. io wherever the hell you want. ace ort of November 9, 1989 (This is Not One of the Poems) et l n thlt ntp lne fla lne far aln efa cac eol nef ace osrsaoacafioirtc fac eoe eft ace oef eta ceo efe ace oef eac eoe fea ceo efe ace oen Helmut ace o podauitint reaciiaeidintc f ace oef fac eoe ffa cen neH.: "...the unifying, harmonious--whatever." ace nef fac en enTactics.  Dactyls. ace nef ace nrnAesthetics is one of those thumb-sized bananas you get in Morocco.  ace nef eac eoe fea ceo cfI don't know how to tell you this.  I won't be able to make it home for Christmas.  I am going to Paris with another student who's working on reception theory.  It is purely academic.  I miss you so much.  ace oef eac eo irhacaeitaetc f ace oef eac eoe fea ceo efa ceo efe ace oef ace oef eac eo aKlara ace oef ace nef eac en naNietzsche's Superman forgets the anyhow.  Or does he? ace nef eac en riThe "anyhow" as the foundational trope of Comp Lit--the mise-en-abime.  ace oln efa lnn nef acn efa ln frraoaeitt rsaoacafioirtc f ace oef ace oef eac eoe fta l n arB.: I apologize for all the lacunae, but that's what de Man says you're not going to escape anyhow. ace nef eac eoe fla ceo efe ace op Helmut ace o hoiadirast rcavaotc f ace one fta lne fta lne fta lne fea ceo eee nef tal nef eac eoe fla lne fla lnn efa c n deI have been worried about you.  Your letters seem to be from someone else.  I hope the university environment has not changed the Helmut I knew.  ace o odI'm sorry about the poetic excesses in my previous letter.  Would like to hear from you. ace oef eac eoe fac eoe fea ceo efl ace oef ace oef eac eoee Helmut ace o hoiadirast rcavaotc fna ceo efa cen efe ace n roWhy are there beings rather than nothing?  Why does her neck look so ace nef eac ene fea cen efe ace ntt fac ene fla lnp

 

III.18.  Galeano: "The doctor is Ernesto Guevara, known as Che, who apart from his nickname has retained certain Argentine customs, like matŽ and irony.  American pilgrim, he joined Fidel's forces in Mexico, where he settled after the fall of Guatemala to earn a living as a photographer at one peso per photo, and as a peddler of little engravings of the Virgin of Guadelupe."  

     In Che, we have some of the elements of the kind of revolutionary we sadly need today.  He or she must be a doctor capable of irony who lives through the peddling of sacred engravings.

 

PROSE POEMS IN THE TINY TRADITION OF MAX JACOB

 

III.19.

 

        EVERYTHING THERE WAS A PARODY. . .

 

Everything there was a parody of the way it was in the grand old capitals.  The prima donna had only to step on stage for the audience to burst into irreverent chatter about the weather.  Ladies tossed their lace camisoles from the balconies, or threw curling irons if they disapproved.  Most of the vendors could be had for a reasonable fee.  You could tell the ones who were kept by the huge fruit baskets they wore on their heads.  One evening, a row broke out just below our box.  My date goosed one of the ushers to alert him, and soon I found myself in the street, without a pfennig to my name.

 

 

III.20.

 

        TRUE GRIT

 

The one thing I hate is a man who tries to put out his cigar on your leg.

     You were a hussar in the Crimean War, an Egyptian jeweler under [          ], and a bandit from the real Sherwood Forest.  I was Marie Antoinette, the Earl of Rochester, and an actor in Pericles' Athens.

     In the Middle Ages we jousted for a jade necklace.

     There ain't room in this town for the two of us.

 

 

III.21.

 

        BEFORE THE RECITAL

 

A severed ear lying silently on the coffee table.

     "If you don't know whose it is, don't touch it!" my mother whispers.

 

 

III.22.

 

        THE TOWN WITH THE LITTLE CANDLES

 

Even though you've got miles of shoreline to go before you reach the town lit by the little candles, you stop to gaze out at the dark sea.  The sound of the waves lapping on the sand almost makes you want to sit down and cry; to forget the little town, to forget Maria and the child.  But your brother will be there and there will be music and pi–atas.  And besides, you are the Mayor, and you are expected to give a speech.

     When the dream dissipates there is only the crying of gulls, and two thugs standing over you with a shotgun to your head.  What to do next?

 

 

III.23.

 

THE DELUSIONARY SPIRITUAL LONGINGS OF

      KATHRYNE THIESENHEUSEN, TENURE-TRACK

      MEDIEVALIST

 

Next time around she wanted to be born into a world without typos. For years now she had reproached God bitterly for not using a spellcheck in the Creation.  And the question of Backups!

 

III.24.

 

        95 THESES CONTRA SHEHEREZADE

 

73. Those Arab flying carpets are sheer superstition.  How could one go fast without being blown off the back?

 

III.25.

 

        OH, HOW LOVELY!

 

All across America overweight middle-aged women go back and forth between each others' houses and say: "Oh, how lovely!  Where did you get it?"

     Their daughters roll their eyes up into their heads and say: "Like, give me a break!"

     The fathers, one and all reclined before their televisions, scratch their testicles indifferently, reaching over their bellies which bloat up their untucked white dress-shirts like the wind filled the white sails of their far-distant ancestors.  These ancestors were known as The Last Men.

     It is only an occasional pet parrot that has the audacity to utter this fated name, distorting it "Brast Wren" just to be safe. 

     So that, finally, only the poets truly remember.

 

III.26.

 

        TERROR IN THE ELEUSIAN FIELDS

 

"When you get to the Eleusian Fields, Parker..."

     "Who, me?" he said.

     "Yes.  When you get to the Eleusian Fields there is a little patch to the left I would like you to mow so that it is even with the rest of the fields."

     "Have you flipped your nut?"

     "Just do it, Parker.  It is this little patch that is ruining my dreams."

 

 

III.27.

 

        IN THE GARDEN

 

Eve was a plump redhead with pale skin and bright green eyes.  She had the thick cheekbones of a Norwegian.  She stood on a well-lighted stage with painted tropical plants all around.  There was a granite fountain in the corner representing a waterfall.  In one bite she devoured half of the golden delicious apple, winking into the camera as she did.  The cameramen were astonished: though Eve hadn't put on her makeup yet, there were already lipstick smears on the apple's other half.

 

 

III.28.

 

        DR. SURRƒALISME

 

"The musings of the Doctor are never to be questioned at," said Mishi, the Doctor's shriveled brown servant.  "We always follow exactly what the Doctor says, be it anything: frankincense, myrrh, a little spin in the red jalopy--anything!"

     I noticed a red parrot in the vestibule, deformed and fighting for its life against dozens of horrible cockroach-like creatures.

     "Oftentimes the patient dies," said Mishi, "but the Doctor never promised success to the patient--at least not success from the patient's point of view.  The Doctor promises results!"

     I decided to leave at once.

     Outside the sun beat down and the dust of the road got all over my black suit; I was almost tempted to go back.  I held my course, though, and walked straight to the sea.

     There's a limit to everything, I figure.

 

 

III.29.

 

        WHY THE ENGLISH LACK A SENSE OF GRANDEUR

 

It all goes back to a story told me by my grandmother when I was young.  My grandmother was a hundred percent German, of course.  It seems that a certain couple living in England, Guissepe and Pamela Verdi, nŽe Pamela Windsor, were having marital troubles of the first order.  One night, at the dinner table, their little son Piero asked his mother:

     "Mummy, where does God live?"

     "Oh, God is everywhere, son," replied the mother.

     "Even in this cup?" said young Piero, holding up an empty coffee cup.

     "Yes," said the mother, "God is even in that cup."

     Then the boy quickly slapped his hand down over the top of the cup, and cried: "Got 'im!"

     NŽe Pamela Windsor was horrified at such impiety in her son, and Guissepe Verdi got up from the table and sulked off to his studio because the English lack a sense of grandeur.

 

III.30.

 

        AT LAST

 

Two men suddenly enter in threadbare dinner jackets.

     Where is death? says the one.  Where is your sting?

 

III.31.

 

        BOHEMIANS IN A FOREIGN LAND

 

When we were young, we thought to give a slap in the face to public taste.  Oh, fiery youth!  Oh, idealism!  Reaching maturity, it became a question of who would step forward first.  A slap in the face to public taste!  A slap in the face to public taste!  My comrades, perceiving my virtues, egged me on.  Finally I raised my arm and swung, only to find my hand suddenly stuck in a buzzing red motorotorooter, already part of a candid hardware safety demonstration. 

     Alas!  My hand, Hardware Harry!  My hand!

 

III.32.

 

        ENVOI

 

Many have splayed themselves out in this way, spliced themselves on a rickety bridge, draped themselves over a thousand black, broken ladders, dropped thumbs and eyes down damp, unplumbed wells--PLUNK--or left behind them, for sorcerers, traces of blood and fingernail clippings...a single curled hair...a Chinese fortune...the few lines of this hardly mysterious poem.

 

III.33.

 

        THE ROSES OF DR. SPALLANZANI

 

Oh, there were many of them!  They stretched miles upon miles over his many lands, though he had been but a shepherd when young.  I can see him then, balanced on the head of a pin, heavy humming moon in the sky, him on the head of the pin, moon changing tides, causing births and rapes, metamorphoses, sticking its fat belly at us obscenely, him on the head of a pin, herding sheep, hoping for a mansion of rosebuds and pianos, a mansion of the necks of young women with collarbones and voices aching with tension, passion, and sex, him on the head of a pin, her lying back nude with a red rose lying lengthwise on her belly, the bottom of the stem just below her navel, the flower resting just between her breasts.  And they would make love that way, with the thorny rose crushed thus between them, throwing them into fits of ecstasy.

     When you would ask him why, he would tell you: "Because they're the perfect symbol for erotic love.  And people wonder why!  There's good reason they are, I'm saying!  They're red, the color of blood, the color of life.  Their soft petals are like soft lips and skin.  They are beautiful and yet much of their beauty lies in the thorns, in the tension between inviting beauty and the threat of pain.  And the pain is always a self-imposed pain, as one must grab the rose oneself to feel its thorns break the skin.  There is thus in the rose softness and comfort and the piercing ache of passion on the very edge of its peak.  La petite mort, as the French say."

     It is thus from Spallanzani, and from the favors of his daughter Nastassia, that I learned the meaning of the rose and so became a poet.

 

 

APPENDIX: TWO THAT ROLLED FROM

         THE TABLE, OR--  HELL          

 

III.35.

 

        ACƒPHALE

 

Sysiphus was a dung beetle anthropomorphized by Ulysses' dog Argos as the master himself stood at the gate in rags.

     "There, there, good boy," said the great tactician in rags, as he stroked his own penis with an Aztec torture device.

     Eumaios--O my swineherd!--was meanwhile ripping his guts out with a nailclipper, while Telemakhos watched from his tower window through a cracked mirror.  "Bloody disgusting!" Penelope heard him say.

     "What's that, hun?" said the wise Queen, stepping brusquely into the room.

     (The question at this point was whether or not Telemakhos should give up the farce.  He did.)

     "Your king's back, Mother.  Look at him down there by the gate with that Aztec expender round his bloody tool.  He was gonna acephalate the suitors today, m'lady."

     "O rocks!" said the Queen.

     Down by the dungheap that wily man's eye was drawn from Argos's cancerous anus up to an omen, a white eagle perched on the roof of his own long-suffering manor.  His eyes beheld also the image of his lusty Queen, with her fine sculpted breasts, her mouth smiling.

     "I think I'll keep these rags," said Ulysses to the bleeding corpse of Eumaios, the yellow rot of leprosy working its way through his neck.

     The great king was just positioning himself to sodomize old Argos when the rot got through to the other side, and his head rolled off to the left.

                                                                            --E.M.-L.        

 

 

III.36.

 

        ENFER

 

i.

I am the baobab of the flesh, my halo is black, I am the rajah of weakness and the nabob of scandals.

 

ii.

Barbazel was a serpent of red velvet who ended in a pig's head in red velvet, he had little eyes and five little teeth, white and irregular.

 

iii.

I am of red velvet, my maw is that of a porcupine, I have the teeth of a fish, the eyes of a pig, a cow's tail of red velvet and a crutch.

 

iv.

The woman had a steer's head with purple bands around the eyes and horns.  Her body was invisible.

                                                                         --Max

 

 

 

Romance

 

III.37.

 

Chapter 1.

An Asian family is sprawled out over two tables at the cafŽ.  The women are quiet while the men discuss.  The men are debating something it seems, and one of them is making some crucial point.

 

Chapter 2.

I walk by and almost trip over a little girl who looks up at me helpless.  Nee how ma? I ask her in Chinese--"How are you?"  She smiles.  The man making the crucial point says to me: "We are not Chinese."

 

Chapter 3.

Well.  So I pause and look them over.  "Sorry," I say.  "You're Korean, right?"  "Yes."  I exchange smiles with them, put my hat on one of the little daughters, and go to sit at a table some distance away.

     So the daughter loves me, and they're obliged to be sure she doesn't spill on my hat, or drop it.

     And where has he gone, and why has he left us the hat?

 

Chapter 4.

After several minutes, I notice that the daughter is peeking at me from around the corner of a wall while I read my Bible.  She has my hat on, and I feel it is unfair that she is thinking of me while I think of the Bible.  So I call her to me with the plan of making her a folded paper bird--a presumptuous plan as it turns out, for she comes down as I'm half done and tells me she  knows how to make that, and a peacock, and a spaceship.

     "Well, honey, you'd better sit down and show me how to do the peacock at least."

 

Chapter 5.

So here we are falling in love and making peacocks out of my earnings statement from the cafŽ.

     She's about eight, I ought to mention.

     I love to watch her tiny fingers, half clumsy, half deft, pressing down the folds.

     Her fingernails are dirty and so are mine.

     Her mother buzzes by with the other daughter pretending to look at teapots, but of course she's really seeing what her Daughter of the Peacocks is up to.

 

Chapter 6.

Eventually the father buzzes by with one of those massive Asian smiles that are in Western minds associated with flashbulbs going off, so that when one sees the smile one wonders where is the camera.  I smile massively back, sort of a Just here folding peacocks  kind of smile.  He asks: "She's not making any trouble, is she?"  And I reply smiling (it just came out; I couldn't help it; it was already there before he ever came up): "Not half as much trouble as you make."  He laughs nervously, but chummy all the same.  And I laugh too.

 

Chapter 7.

But the daughter doesn't care for this, and points out that I'm messing up the tail, something one can't afford to mess up on a peacock.

     Eventually the father goes away, and we move on to the spaceship, which doesn't interest me much.

 

Chapter 8: Conclusion.

There is a stage one goes through, just before the break, when everything is always becoming an allegory of everything else.

     Half of the break is the normalization of this stage.  The other half is the recognition of the Divinity of Christ.

     The third half is, for some of us, writing.

 

III.40.  Fellows,  We must work out a coffee ceremony, like the Japanese tea ceremony.  We must get right on it.  We must work out a  

 

 

Musings for Hui-Ling, with whom I

     have found a beginning

 

III.49.1.  Des chinoises.

     I have solved the mystery of the Chinese, with much help of course.  

     This important solution (I am tempted to call it a solvation) lies in large part in a change in my previous feeling that there must be a mystery of the Chinese.  

     This important solution lies in my stunned recognition that the Chinese actually are what they appear to be.  

     In the practical sense, this of course means that after trying so indefatigably to get to the bottom of things one ends up in precisely the same stuff one had at the top of things, or that, to use the classic geographical metaphor: If one keeps digging straight down all one's life, one will end up in China.  But the main point is that one will end up in the same China if one simply flies there on Air China, and forgets about the digging.  And flying there takes only a day, not a lifetime, and the stewardesses when one gets on the plane are already Chinese--and besides, there are Chinese all over around here too.  

     But I feel that it is too early to write the first sentence of this last paragraph, and so I will further prepare for it by writing some more.  

     Because of Hui-Ling, and because of the benign influence of Hui-Ling's Christianity--(a benignity without which I would doubtless be damned today, as I am still a bit singed)--because of this, I myself have begun in China.  Thus it will be understood that my struggle to solve the mystery of the Chinese was made all the more difficult by the fact that it was a Chinese woman that introduced me to the Great Mystery.  

     I will also quickly write the following before I forget it: I hope I can be confident that everyone at least recognizes the mystery of the Chinese--recognizes it in the same manner that we recognize that none of us knows what to do with haiku when we first read it.  

     There.  --But I hope I am not offending any of you who think you are beyond such mysteries.  

     And you certainly must not think by this that I am such a boor to confound the mystery of the Chinese with that other mystery of the Japanese.  I am not such a boor--not at all.  Know that I have gotten to the point that I can tell the difference between most Asian languages, and can distinguish a Taiwanese from a Hong Kongese from a Korean or San Francisco Japanese simply on the basis of a handful of movements, or the hairpin they wear.  In the last year, I have been wrong only once out of many guesses.  So there.  

     So you can see how hard I am working at this, and you will surely agree with me that I am qualified to reveal to you the meaning of the mystery of the Chinese.  

     Finally, then--I will repeat regarding this mystery of the Chinese what I said above:

 

--The Chinese are what they appear to be.

 

     "Hmmph," you may reply, perhaps thinking this sentence doesn't seem to you to be yielding much.  But to me, let me tell you--  to me--  IT IS DUMBFOUNDING, STUNNING --  I ALMOST SIMPLY CAN'T HANDLE IT.  

     And I can't tell you why it is so dumbfounding, as this is the part of the mystery that remains.  

     So that this Western inability to accept the revealed as the heart of things--this finally is the mystery.  

     And this Western mystery points to a great Shame, to our horrible and unthinkable bamboozlement, the most contemptible farce in history.  

     But I can write no more on this now.  For the farce has here rendered me speechless, so much do I feel that it is precisely this Western farce that is no longer funny, but is rather a farce that must be vigorously heckled off the stage.  

     And who can pull off such a heckling? --I leave you with this.

 

III.41.2.  You have struck the depths of my being like no other.

     I will tell you the moment--a moment when the pain in my heart never wrung with more tenderness and more of a feeling for the perilous thrownness we suffer.  We were lying on the bed together, and I found suddenly that you were crying, your chest heaving and your arms quivering.  Finally, after some time, you could tell me that you had been told in your mother's letter that day that your parents would sell the house in which you grew up, a house in a block of houses which your extended family shared, in the little courtyard a pond in which your uncle raised frogs, the block of houses in a maze of little streets and alleys now part of an "old neighborhood."  I understood your pain, and could feel it with you, but then you told me the real basis of this pain.  Your family was actually finally selling the home containing the loft behind the kitchen in which you were born.  You pointed out the place to me once, indicating that a curtain had hung there, and that you had also slept there when you and your brother and sister were children.  And there is something so pained in your tone, you here in America speaking English to a foreign man, speaking with an accent and a pain I can feel, speaking the words over and over again--

 

It's the place I was born.  The place I was born...

 

     In that small loft behind a curtain, a midwife had helped to bring you into the world from the womb of your young mother.  And I suddenly know that there was no more beautiful moment than the moment when my love was born into the world, there was never a more tender and gentle moment or place than the one where my love was born into the world.  

     And I had to hold you in your pain, feeling this pain and loss and distance in my own throat and chest, and knowing silently that I myself had been born in noplace, in a hospital, which is noplace, a team of doctors with masks on their faces to protect me from this dangerous place which is noplace.  

     And so I could be truly born only along with you, Hui-Ling, and only at the moment you were suddenly mourning the loss of this place, suddenly shaken by its tenderness and eloquent distance.

 

III.41.3.

The smaller the object, the more likely it seemed that it could contain in the most concentrated form everything else; hence his delight that two grains of wheat should contain the entire Shema Israel, the very essence of Judaism, tiniest essence appearing on tiniest entity, from which in both cases everything else originates that, however, in significance cannot be compared with its origin.

       --Hannah Arendt on Walter Benjamin

 

The Chinese and the Jews: obviously they are the same people.  But are the Chinese a tribe of Jews that wandered east, or are the Jews a clan of Chinese traders who ended by settling in Egypt?  

     In either case, the Jewnese were doubtless at some time a tribe of the Tigris valley that specialized in small, precision work of all sorts: watch repair, safe-breaking, building ships in bottles and then sailing them out without so much as cracking a teacup on board.

 

Recent archaeological dustings would suggest that the well-fed Jewnese male grew to a height of about five inches, and either wore himself out young in dissipation and scholarship, or lived to a wise old age.

 

Their name makes one want to read into the history of the Javanese as well, as a possible case of the purest surviving descendants of the original Jewnese.  

     What's more, studies of the religious iconography and ritual dance of many of the islands populated by the Micronesians would suggest that they in their turn were perhaps in origin a Sunday afternoon club that broke off from the Levites to pursue an enthusiasm for windsurfing.  Drifting further and further East, these Levites ended by settling on the islands in question, where their highly refined mysticism was absorbed by the local cultures.  Some may have continued their mystical quest even further, landing finally in what is now Southern California.

 

But why this sudden concern of mine for this particular lost or at least unreadable race called the Jewnese?  

     It is thus: having been myself a Jew for many years, I am now become a Chinese as well, giving me a special calling for the careful work of reconstructing the paths taken by this tiny people.  But even beyond this blood connection, their charm and care for all things good has in itself earned them a special place in my heart.  

     But at this point I can go no further than to reassert the founding equation of my work--namely, that the Chinese and the Jews are obviously the same people.

 

Sympathize with me, reader.  For I must reverence my God as a good Roman Catholic, while reverencing also my Jewish and Chinese roots, roots with which I can grip to the cracks of my fallen world, roots which allow me to sit with comfort and ease in the holy cathedrals of Europe, sometimes with the flicker of flashbulbs fading the altars even past the recognition of the careful and delicate eyes of the more tired and dissolute among the few Jewnese to be found in these sacred places, now in our most barbaric age.

 

III.45. Das plumpe Denken.  The great German theorist wrote: "The main thing is to learn how to think crudely.  Crude thinking, that is the thinking of the great....  There are many whose idea of a thinker is a lover of subtleties.  Crude thoughts, on the contrary, must be part and parcel of our thinking, because they are nothing but the referral of theory to practice....  A thought must be crude to come into its own in action."

 

III.52. Dante, Villon.

 

III.53. Russian is the West's most erotic language.  And it is hardly even the West's.

 

III.54. Martin writes me from Austin: "After years of study, I finally learned deconstruction from my uncle's dog.  I pointed to the squirrel in the yard, but the dog looked at my pointing hand.  The more emphatically I pointed, the more the dog looked: at my hand.  Derridog."  

     I believe all of it, except the first eight words.

 

III.55. Six foot six.  Former circus strongman.  Celebrated plunderer of Egyptian funerary papyri.  Italian Giovanni Belzoni writes of his work, circa 1810: "The purpose of my researches was to rob the Egyptians of their papyri of which I found a few hidden in their breasts, under their arms, in the space above the knees, or on the legs, and covered by the numerous folds of cloth that envelop the mummy."

 

III.56. New decaf flavors for December:

 

Swiss Almond Vinyl

 

Toasted Lasagna Nut

 

Fluoride Menthol Fountain

 

Perch

 

Magnetic Raspberry Foil

 

Sweaty Lemon Lint

 

Kiwi Tuna Banana

 

 

Tentative Minutes

of the First Meeting of Scribes

 

III.57.  November 20, 1991, Madison.  Gregory:  I am sorry to hear that you are ill, now during such an important time.  Karen told me at the cafŽ that because of overwork your defenses were down and that finally you were laid up in bed with shivers.  

     The first meeting of scribes is recorded in the following minutes, which I offered to write.  You were missed by nearly all.  The minutes of this meeting are still sloppy to be sure, but I give them as I wrote them down.

 

Tentative Minutes--

 

The scribes agreed upon a list of rules, appended to these minutes.

 

The scribes said that three languages are worthy of scribes: Hebrew, Chinese, and Greek.  But who among the scribes would think it good for oneself to write in all three of these languages?  Who has such ability?  And so choices must be made: one must decide on one or two of them.

 

It was agreed that the most important verb in Greek, the thrust of the whole Greek offensive, was phaino, to appear.  The most important verb in Hebrew was to write.  (I forget the appearance of the letters of the Hebrew now, and don't know the romanization.  Of course our computers only come with Greek and Roman fonts in any case, so I couldn't give you the Aleph Beth even if I knew it.)

 

A pitched battle had been going on it seemed forever between the Greeks and the Hebrews, a battle the scribes were going to settle once and for all.  This battle had finally come down to certain verbs and songs.  In short, everything was at stake.

 

One of the scribes present insisted that he would write his way back into Greek, back into the pre-Socratics and the early songs.  Once there, he would start to occupy the Greek in a rabbinical or Hebraic fashion, writing it away from phaino and into writing, thus tearing it down into a healthy or Hebraic scriptedness, or at least bringing its scriptedness to light, so to speak.

 

Could it be done?  Could one really read in ancient Greek, think in ancient Greek, and write therein, so as to think again therein as a scribe?  And of course to do so would not be starting over in any case, but would simply be scripting in a certain area.  Or would it?  Could the scribe really be a scribe without writing into this particular area so as to erase it?  Thus were some of the questions.

 

It became obvious by our talk that the Greeks were our enemies, for it was they who pushed the Old Law into moving pictures, thus setting the stage for Cecil B. DeMille and the other moderns.  Thus a joke.

 

The more secular among us were quick to point out that the Old Law wasn't simply the Hebrews, but the Canaanites, the Syrians, and all the other spawn of Mesopotamia other than the people who said phaino with that certain Hellenic accent.

 

I was quick to affirm the Chinese here, for fear the Greeks would find some defenders amongst us and soon the scribes would be moving to opposite corners of town, an inauspicious start for so small a group.  What of the Chinese? I asked.

 

But I had miscalculated in this move, for in our midst was a small and disgruntled group who took advantage of the shift to reassert their belief that Latin should be a language taken up by us scribes; that, in short, our three chosen languages weren't enough for them.

 

This was the sect that called themselves the Britannists, for they looked not so much to antiquity as to Victorian England for their clues.  They had decided upon a dogged commitment to a certain project.  They were going to force antiquity onto the nineteenth century so as to freeze it in its place, thus allowing them to return to it as an ancient history in its own right.  After this preliminary work, they would give it their listening reverence as such.  The Britannists!  They claimed to have discovered the lost epic of Britain, and that it consisted of the following texts, in order: the novels of Jane Austen in chronological order; the novels of Charles Dickens in chronological order; the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, A to Z;  H. G. Wells' Outline of the History of the World; the novels of Virginia Woolf in chronological order.  These were to be set on a shelf, in order, and then they were going to set about translating this epic into the more proper Latin Vergilian epic verse.  And so one would have The Epic of Britain in a massive work of Latin verse, to which the Britannists would turn for all purposes: history, science, philosophy, pride, and prejudice.

 

We of the Three Tongues booted these people out by the end of the fourth hour, thus giving us the peace needed to return to our considerations of the Greek, the Hebrew, and the Chinese.

 

Yours in Writing,  E.M.-L.

 

Rules for the Scribe-- 

 

The scribe does not allow him- or herself to be represented by television, or radio, or moving film of any sort.

The scribe is tattooed in an appropriate fashion.

The scribe chooses the site of his or her burial, and the fashion thereof.

The scribe is never heard to whine.

[In American English, the scribe obliterates the words fun and interesting from usage.  The scribe never refers to his or her writing as stuff, as in: "I have some recent stuff I'd like to share with you."  The scribe does not share writing with, but gives writing to.]

The scribe holds dear to his heart the words Toujours travailler.

 

 

REPRISE

 

III.58. What is literature?  Literature is revelation as language.  It is enthusiasm.  As such, it gives the Law, promotes the Law, or breaks the Law.  

     The Law is often seen to be--or seen to have become--Literature.  Which is to say what?  That it is always already Literature.  And vice versa.  

     Literature and the Law travel about together like a couple of highway robbers sweet on each other.

 

 

Scribal, Historical,

and Religious Texts

 

III.59.1.  I write prosetry.  I am a prosetrist.

 

III.59.2.  The Historical Mary.  Her closeness to Our Savior rubbed off on the mother Mary in various and troubling ways.  There were the migraines and the periods of forgetfulness, the dreams in tongues she had never even heard, the chaotic swings in her menstruation for the rest of her fertile life following His birth.  

     Mary knew these swings in her cycle were not really a chaos, but try as she may she could not figure out the new liturgical calendar on which she ran, a secret timing setting her apart from other women, disrupting the course of her days.  

     Mary moved to a village in what is now Turkey, to settle down at the margins of the movement.  She awaited death, but death did not come.  

     The movement paid hardly any attention to her, this relative distance being her only comfort after the terrifying machinery of His life had run its course.  She only wanted to return to Him now, to the place that He had promised her.  The others had long since returned, and why did He wait to take her?  

     Mary had been stung by eternity, and eternity wouldn't let her die a peaceful death: her body lived on and on beyond reckoning and tolerance, worse than the patriarchs of old.

 

Facing hard times in various Anatolian villages, Mary took thought and finally took flight as well to the Italian peninsula, seeking work.  Her status and linen made her particularly sought by religious painters wanting to do Madonnas with Child, and so Mary quite naturally fell into the profession of model.  

     How many painters did she have to sit before over the rolling centuries! some of the masters hiding her true identity from their apprentices, so that the apprentices made shameless suggestions to her, and taunted her that she didn't put out like the other models.  

     How many squirming children on her knees! most of them being painted as dwarfed and lamb-faced adults anyhow, often depicted standing up in the finished work when they had slept peacefully on her lap through the sittings.  --Mary noticed that it was the squirming and troublesome infants that were always painted in peaceful repose, whereas the sleeping infants ended up standing imperiously in the final work, a single digit raised to the fallen world.

 

After the thousands of sittings and the decades of stiff inaction, Mary was gladdened that the Italic painters were finally trying to capture the material beauty of Mary's face as it truly looked to her, trying to capture it at the same time as they began trying to paint the infants as infants truly looked.  But Mary continued to age slowly, so that while the beauty of her painted image was heightened in her eyes, the reflected beauty she saw in pools and polished brass mirrors was slowly fading as the decades passed, a tiny wrinkle here and there, her great fatigue finally beginning to show itself to the world.  

     The world was moving farther from the truth of her Son.  And perhaps it was thus, thought Mary, that God had much to worry over and was finally going to allow the vase from which He brought Himself to die a respectable death like the corpulent and fertile women all around her.  The women around her laughed during their short lives, while Mary laughed less and less often as her life gave her more and more time in which to do so.

 

When the religious wars began to rage in the North, and when the arrogance of the new style of painters had become nearly intolerable, most especially hot and demanding when the Italic painter for whom she happened to be sitting knew that she was truly the mother of Christ, Mary left her millions of belching southern babies and the rotting walls of Italy for her villages in Turkey, where the air would be better for her spirit, and the sea looked always more peaceful.  But of course Mary had to disguise her age and identity--not to mention the heretical profession she had followed for so many years--in order to return to the new Turkey of that magician Mohammed.

 

Mary died in a small village on the Aegean, leaving her linen to a young girl who had befriended her.  The body wasn't found, so that the villagers assumed that in the course of the night the melancholic foreign woman who had been in their midst for it seemed so long now must certainly have drowned herself in the sea.  

     Mary's will was written in chalk on the wall by her pallet, in a childish Turkish hand that both delighted and puzzled all who came to see it.

 

III.59.3. Cuneiform inscription sent to former president Gorbachev.  Inscribed around the body of a primitive clay sculpture of a bear, the lines of which suggest early Sumerian sculptures of oxen.  

     Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, honorable and idealistic former leader of the USSR, you are perhaps wondering how best to spend your days following the resignation.  

     Mikhail Sergeyevich, you ought to move to a small village in Italy and dedicate yourself to the creation of traditional Russian lacquer boxes.  

     Acquire a good teacher and master the technique of these boxes, finally bringing your own soul and vision into your work.  The world would see these boxes with warm fascination, and perhaps with a sad humor in their hearts, for here, they would know, is a man who understands the mystery of largeness and smallness.  

     Written in the City of Madison.  Scribe E.M.-L.

 

III.59.9.  Madison is a Sacred City.  Does it not strike fear into your hearts to realize this?  Does not the weight of this responsibility--the responsibility born of walking the streets here during the time when the sacredness of Madison is being recognized--does not this weight press upon your shoulder like a lead feather?

 

III.59.10.  If Madison retains nominal inclusion in the empty regime of the United States, it is only a bit of practical politics that any good Madisonian will laugh at if pressed on the point, waving his or her hand in dismissal.  Secession of our City-State on paper would mean secession in reality, whereas inclusion on paper only half means real inclusion.  Being that our City sits within the territory of a massive behemoth of technical and military force, any move toward paper secession ought presently to be seen as little more than youthful fantasy.

 

III.59.11. No people are more tolerant than the Madisonians.  They are used to others coming to their city to see and to observe.  And whether out of pride or indifference, they do not try to impress their customs on anyone.  What is even more extraordinary still, is that during Holy Week above all, many scourge themselves, and yet do not mind that the church door is open, and that others can come in while they whip themselves.  Madisonians do not bother about other people, they do nothing to attract attention, but refrain from nothing because they are observed.  They always head straight for their goal or their pleasure without suspecting the existence of a feeling called vanity which has no other pleasure or goal than the need for applause.

 

III.59.13. "But what do you think of theory?" he said, posing the question in good liberal fashion.  He was a graduate student of English literature, all in favor of "theory," as if one could treat it as an identifiable and unified object, and then vote either for or against it.  His question meant: What is your position on theory?  Or: What is your opinion of theory?  

     My opinion was, after all, just as good as his, and being so was worthy to be heard and voted upon by the others present, five or six of them.  

     "But what do you think of theory?" he said, posing the question in good liberal fashion.  I answered him in a manner implying those elements of "theory" most important to such a group, those elements which, when they come to the fore, doubtless make these people feel the most enlightened, as if they had learned something.  

     I said: "Theory, from Greek theorein, to spectate, to watch, as in the sentence: 'We watch TV all day.'"  

     This produced a most predictable response.  They told me that arguments based on etymology were "meaningless," that "theory" has nothing to do with the Greeks.  To this I said that I wasn't basing my argument on etymology, but hearing my argument in etymology.  I insisted that, in any case, the Greeks were all over the place, that half the homes in Madison were Phonecian ruins, that the Vatican was a Semitic site occupied by the Greeks, that we must treat the Vatican as if it weren't a Greek site, that we must speak through its Semitic heart, the sacred heart of Mary, the blood of Christ, and so on.  

     This produced a most predictable response.

     Then we spent an hour arguing over the value of the mass media, and I went home most enlightened.

 

III.59.15. Reading through a collection of letters translated from cuneiform, I come across the following from one prince to another, found in the archives of Ugarit.

     Tell the Prince of Ugarit, my lord--

     Your servant Takuhli sends the following message--

     Twice seven times I prostrate myself before my lord, even from afar.

     While here everything is well for the Hittite King and myself, someone should inform me whether everything there is well with you.

     What is this, that you keep writing to the Hittite King as follows: "Herewith I send you lapis lazuli."  The King has become very angry.  He got hold of me and said: "Is this man making fun of me, that he keeps picking up such stones from the ground and sending them to me, declaring: 'Herewith I send you lapis lazuli.'" 

     Is this true, that what you are sending the King is lapis lazuli?

     I wish you had not sent anything, and had not selected such stones [here is added an incomprehensible West Semitic gloss], and had not sent them to the King, with the letters that read: "Herewith I send you lapis lazuli."  I wish that you had not made the King angry with you.

     Now then, try to find some good lapis lazuli somewhere and send it to the King so that he will not be angry with you anymore.

     Furthermore, when I was recently very sick--I was within an inch of dying you know, but now I have recovered--the god Absukka of the city Irhanda appeared to me and asked me to become his special associate.  Now, everybody who wants to perform the sacrifice to this god, so that he will be in good with this god, has to bring many gifts, especially fine blue-purple wool.  Hence, my lord should send me fine blue-purple wool.  For if my lord does not send me fine blue-purple wool, who else will send it to me?

 

III.59.16.  Christians must refound the material.  Deucalion and Pyrrha.

 

III.59.17.  At the beginning of writing, one finds fixed or frozen pictures.  At the end of writing, one finds moving pictures.

 

III.59.18.  Writing is never clean.  Great writing is dirty.

     Genesis has it: "And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground."

     The Sumerians had it:

     O my mother, the creature whose name you uttered, it exists,

     Bind upon it the image of the gods;    

     Mix the heart of the clay that is over the abyss,

     The good and princely fashioners will thicken the clay.

Writing, it is never clean.  Great writing is dirty.

 

 

DAYS

 

III.64. To publish, here and now, is to send out into a black silence.

 

III.65. Poetry is the writing of the law.  And if the law is uncertain?  If the law has been worn to nothing in the dishwasher of world laws, what is poetry then?  Then poetry is the writing.  

     Antony mumming vigorously beneath the disk of the sun.

 

III.66.  Perversions--  i. Bataille affirms that power is constituted by the power to lose.  Grace is the state of those who lose all with joy, whose loss is the dance in the jaws, then ecstasy.  

     Original sin is transmitted through language.  

     Thus we are led to consider Bataille as one of the saints.  Who will paint a St. Georges and the Dragon?

 

ii. Le narrateur du Premier Livre regrette que le sot peuple se rassemble plus volontiers devant un saltimbanque, ou un porteur de reliques, qu'autour d'un "bon precheur ŽvangŽlique."  Le scriptor, celui qui comprend, ne le regrette point.

 

III.68.  Following copied for one Helen Leung, who wanted Grammatology.  In a culture that has for some time believed in revolution and progress, those who consider themselves progressive revolutionaries tow the most conservative line.  Though they may put great store in their supposedly more advanced and subtle theoretical tools, and though they may see themselves working for a different people, a new people in need of their help, they nonetheless conserve the style and mood of the status quo.  And we know now--we have finally learned--that style and mood are everything.  

     I am thinking, of course, of that totalizing and aggressive culture of the European merchants: in other words, the culture called Enlightenment.  For the culture called Enlightenment is this lethal tone, this endlessly armed confidence and theoretic praxis, this mania for total salvation.  

     I am thinking also of the priesthood of the merchants--their priesthood, and the sacred groves of their priesthood.  For these are of course the "intellectuals" and "revolutionaries," and the academies in which they are found.  For these are none but the advanced guard of Mall Culture International--the progressives and modernizers--the Enlightened Ones of the Hundred-Trillion words.  

     And it must be asked, it will be asked here, in a tone of great gratitude:  Where would we be without them?  

     Perhaps, just maybe, we would still be somewhere.

 

III.69. Through my teenage years I remember hearing of rock records that, if you played them backwards on certain tracks, you would get satanic messages.  I tried this with several of them, and the needle would scrape harshly in the groove and skip, but it was true that in some cases jumbled phrases could be heard.  

     Likewise with the work of Walter Benjamin: if you were to play it backwards, in some places, you would get my work.

 

III.70. If Judgment Day came, and the sky opened up in the East to reveal to our eyes the heavenly hosts, would the air-raid sirens go off?

 

III.71. A nation of finks.

 

III.72. The best laid tracks of mice...

 

III.74. A Humanist Prospectus.  The losers in the next half-century will lose harder than any losers have ever lost before.  In their regions, the earth itself will groan with their loss.  

     The winners in the next half century will have to be so vigilant that they will be constantly wondering whether it is worth it or not.  They will moan: "Disappear, sad ape!  Oh, just disappear!"

 

III.78.

Greque

Grecque

 

III.79. It is not at all that God is dead.  Rather, it is that the world is dying.  The kettle calls the pot black.  

     The gods, and then God, withdraw from a dying world.

 

III.81. Language is far more heard than spoken.

 

III.82. Polycarp to the inquisitors: "My voice--you believe that it comes out of my flesh--that wind moves over cords vibrating.  But I tell you that my voice, at this moment more than ever, comes directly out of my soul.  And so I answer you with a calm that shows for naught your notion of whence my voice comes.  I answer you: No."

 

III.83. Lacan: "The worst kinds of dreams are those where someone is dead but speaking."  Why?  

     Hamlet: "Yorick, I knew him well."  

     I want to speak as Yorick rather than as the father.  

     Really.

 

III.84. L'Žcriture fŽminine: a psyche fatigued into babble.  

     The pen and the penis.  Are they really the same root?  

     L'Žcriture fŽminine.  That's when the space of the paper gets the better of penmanship.  

     "The task of the poet is to do better than the blank page."  Hm.  

     The blank page is divine; there are pages justement Žcrits; there is also l'Žcriture fŽminine, in other words the page abandoned like Babel.  

     No one does better than the blank page.

 

III.85. AMERICA.  Busloads upon busloads, trains carrying, jetplanes full of, cities upon cities of smart-mouthed, 20-year-old bitches.  

     They have plastic coffee mugs dangling from their backpacks.  

     Yap, yap, yap!

 

III.86. Jack's remark upon hearing I'll sit in on a class on the archeology of the ancient Near East: "You can have your clay bits and your sand and your pressions.  Give me the Cairo Geniza any day over the whole million tons of it.  Just set me loose in the Cairo Geniza, with my scissors and a bit of solvent, lunch breaks at 3:00.  Ah, that would be the life!  Like going through the bottom desk drawer of the whole Mediterranean."

 

III.87.  The New Berlin Walls.  The walls of New Berlin have finally come down.  Even the mayor (what's his name?) can see clearly from the parking lot that the highway, the offramp and the stoplights timing the whole thing--that all of them are little more than part of a huge capillary system, complete with a still almost vigorous heartbeat.  

     "I wonder if truckdrivers will someday be born with their trucks around them--like shells," says what's-his-name.  (For once the media is impressed.)

 

III.88. I must allow the validity of the claim made by tradition, not in the sense simply acknowledging the past in its otherness, but in such a way that it has something to say to me.  This too calls for a fundamental sort of openness.  Someone who is open in this way to tradition sees that the historical consciousness is not really open at all, but rather if it reads its texts "historically" has always thoroughly smoothed them out beforehand, so that the criteria of our own knowledge can never be put in question by tradition.  --Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 324-25.  

     In Gadamer's sense, the Enlightenment is of course not a tradition.  It is not a tradition because it demands "progress," and because it thus points its followers to constant revolution.  Constant revolution can only mean constant degradation, or at least it can only mean such to the extent that it is successful in obliterating ever more and more the values of the tradition.  

     The tradition calls to the moderns to heed its call, and these enter the Academy to study the tradition.  Once there, however, the Enlightenment spirit forces them at all turns to silence the call of the tradition through the smoothing out, the silencing, that Gadamer calls "historical consciousness."  Rather than help the tradition in its call, the academic is put into service "demystifying" the tradition, or silencing its ability to call.  The academic is the demonically subtle censor of the tradition, the functionary put in charge of transforming the call of the tradition into heaps upon heaps of silent information.  

     Fearing for their freedom to publish and discuss the findings of their endless fiddling with flames, telescopes, beakers and metals, the eminent scientists who stood strong behind the radical political agenda of the philosophes had, more than any desire for the "truth," the far more understandable desire to say to the clerics: "Ah!  So you dare to censor our pleasures!  We will one day censor you back!  Just wait and see!"  It is upon this taunt that the Age of Reason was founded.

 

III.90. In its high offices, it is a nation of finks;

     In its intellectual centers, it is a nation of riffraff;

     In its religion, it is a nation of fat housewives;

     Cynical business cads--three hours television a day--are its bulwark.

 

III.92.

pests

busybodies

good old boys

prudes

 

III.93. Ismaragd

 

III.94. Mocenigo, Contarini, Tiepolo, Morosini, Foscari, Loredan, Cormer, Grimani, Madisoni, Dandolo.

 

III.95. L'oeil arrachŽ ou l'oeil volant dans les Žcrits de Georges Bataille--c'est un pressentiment corporel de l'oreille scriptive.

 

III.98. To watch a film is to coat one's eyes with the cold semen of death.

 

III.99. Benjamin is here.  

     He says: "When you feel a gaze directed at you, even behind your back, you return it."  

     The expectation that what you have heard also listens provides the aural.  

     Aber ich bin ein gross kleiner Sausage.  I manage a Radio Shack in the Bolshoi.  No schlanke Linie for me.  Und du?

 

III.101. i. A death's head explodes above the city: like rain it showers down, in useless shards.

 

ii. Formula: writing out of writing.  Writing under the complete elimination of theory.  What only B. in his paleological writings attempted.

 

iii. Method of the work: lost aural mosaic.

 

III.102. Alexander of Abonoteichus?  No, not a bit.  The bottom has fallen out of this kind of thing in my soul--absolutely.  

     Grace, not cunning, allows for this clowning on the abyss.

 

III.103.  I preach the Man-Baby.

 

 

III.104.

 

          WRITTEN FOR HELLESLICHT

 

Urscript wedged.

 

Soft music of writing-reeds.

 

The Chinese sage a tiny fencer.

 

Tupsarru--

tiny gravedigger.

 

"Different birds."

 

 

III.109. There are so many against me--among them those who are rich and those who are nearly mad--that were something to happen to me, were I to disappear, no one could be certain where to pin the blame.

 

III.111. The city is full of cartoon men, educated on one or another branch of postmodern theory.  When these men speak to you, you feel yourself drifting, hardly able to listen.  They suffer from an irony so entrenched, so puerile, that they cannot speak from the soul, for they themselves are not certain that they are not irony to the core.  The worst of it is when they do attempt to speak from the soul.  For then you had better take cover!  Their brows knit terribly, they are confused, they shake, they look at their sweaty hands....  It is not even a pitiful sight.  

     They are short-tempered and prone to theatrical tantrums similar to those of spoiled or hyperactive children.  One cannot tell if these tantrums are staged or authentic.  Neither can they themselves tell, things have gone so far.

 

 

     DESERT BREW PURGE LIST

 

III.112. Do not serve the people on this list.  If there are any questions or any problems getting them to leave the premises, talk to a supervisor.

 

Swaying Man

Inga

Honey

Francis the Whiner

Spare-Change Man

the Honey Nurser

Cuban Rhinestone Tooth Man; and Friend

Silent Preaching Man

Scribbling Man

the West High Punks

Raspberry Man, alias Michael

Ali

Decaf Ed

Scanner Dan

Baby Voice

 

III.113. Sumerian priest ordering au-lait made with skim milk and Akkadian cocoa-fig decaf.  OIMA12332.  Chicago.

 

III.114.

 

I asked a thief to steal me a peach.

The thief said: "Bourgeois lies!"

I asked a lithe lady to lie her down.

"Piggish harassment!" she cries.

 

An Angel dropped in,

Was mugged by the thief,

The lady, noticing the scene to be evidence of class struggle, defrocked the strangled Angel, and, finding nothing under its wispy robe, thought to write her Dissertation thereon.  This Dissertation won the lady great renown, and has been translated into French: Moi et la mi-voix des demianges, Seuil, Paris, 1992.

 

 

Bis nach tausend Jahren

einbricht in das Wrack

Geisslerscharen

zementiertes Pack...

 

III.115.  Thom Smit, to think he is a student of Engineering!  

     He is blonde and small, of muscular build.  

     He is a great reader of Gilles Deleuze, yet speaks of the prevalence of a pop spinoff condition he calls deleusion.  

     Of course he is a Nietzschean.  

     If you want to know, he is to some extent the model for the Childgod in the text of that name.  

     One of his upper canines is oddly chipped.  "A gnawing accident," he says, "like life."  

     The following text is from Maxims for Morons, and gives us Smit's writing of beginnings:

 

Once upon a time there was the Word.  And the Word was without form, and void.

     In short, the Word was many words, and sometimes even things.

     One could not tell the difference in any place, for all the words and things were different; they were all different from each other, and they were even more different from the Word; which in turn, needless to say, was different according to whom you asked.

     What's more, all was such that one could not fix one's eyes on any thing, or fix one's ears on any word, and expect it even to stay the same as itself.

     In short, all words were different from themselves, all things were different from any words, and also from each other, and also from themselves.

     Even one's eyes were different, the left one from the right, and either eye was certainly different, very different, from either ear; and the ears protruded from each side of the head--in short, very different.

     Then Thom Smit was born.

 

What is a Christian to say of this?  --Scissors, paper, rock!  --Rock, scissors, paper!  Parisian lawnmower accidents of the heart--I feel their allure as do you, Thom.  But you know our differences.  

     Dear Thom Smit:  I have read Deleuze's book on Nietzsche, and it is, as you say, a very sharp if pedagogic explication of that nasty old codger's work.  Nietzsche was brilliant--I recognize it more than ever--but he was stone deaf.  He was our greatest skateboard punk--don't you think?--complete with headphones cranked.  Deleuze brings out the gist of this differential metaphysics of the active, he brings it out in a manner that hits Nietzsche's current importance on the head--aristocratic radicalism as a rap band--: You look to the stage because you want to be exalted.  I am on the stage because I am exalted.  My booty don't stink.  

     I have also read much of Deleuze's essay on the superiority of Anglo-American literature.  What do I think of it?  Psssh!  I am writing up some notes for you.  I will send them with your Christmas card.  

     But for now I would like to ask you what you think of the video I sent you, the TV special--GILLES DELEUZE AND THE SOLID GOLD DANCERS.  Can you believe it made it prime time?  

     You really should have known, Thom.  

     E.

 

III.121.  To be an academic is to be a priest of the Enlightenment.

 

III.123.  Helleslicht tells Hui-Ling that his ideas concerning literature are close to Art for art's sake.  Close.  I believe this is to say that he would always put forward Art without a sake.  Am I right here?  For there are so many sakes taken up as standards--and made standards for art, which thus becomes a standard--that one is led to forsake them altogether.  Art when it is art rather takes up the artist and others, and this taking up it does not do even for the sake of art.

 

III.126. Max Jacob. Each of his poems is a ritual in which language is allowed to gather a certain amount of reference, but in which finally, after the cattle are all in the works, so to speak, a most violent and hilarious vengeance is taken on the signifieds and their presumption.  A virile slaughter takes place for the sake of the hard rhythm that herded these cattle in to begin with.  

     Max Jacob was the high priest of this ritual fury, the officiant who knew when to pull the cord, who pulled the cord precisely when the axe was to fall, and only when it could fall to the most valuable effect.  An economist of the sacred values of words as they gather.  A priest with the most delicate sense of the time for the sacrifice: not merely the week or day, but the instant.

 

III.131.  Johnny Fragment Seed

 

III.132.  Before the impact, there came, with oratory, the epoch of the urge toward totality, of parades and collective cults, the epoch of revivals, or turns to the past, the epoch of history....  Upon impact, however, an unexpected calm made itself felt.  Shards of glass tinkling to a halt, the glint of a movie-prop sun--it all seemed so easy, hardly enough to be sinister.  The non-epoch lorded it everywhere, suddenly, with a styrofoam fist....  Even the past seemed to some to have bobbed to the surface, as if it too were made of this same light stuff.  The ears of others registered a terrible rumbling, a stirring and plotting at the root of things, and their mouths remained silent, their hands inconspicuous and waiting....  The races performed a medley of carnivals and pageants, beamed across the hemispheres in the guise of holiday or uprising, almost strictly Sunday affairs however, for during the week the mutations continued at a....

 

III.133.  Through my Tempe two brooks trickle softly.  Bees alight on hyacinth and fuchsia, and butterflies flutter by fragrant lilac.  There is a grove of apples, and one of sweet lychee.  I recline on tufts of soft grass, in the shade.  A huge black hawk surveys the whole.  There is a harem of Japanese air hostesses.  

     You see?  I'm not so hard to please.

 

III.134.  Would one rather find three consecutive tablets or five tablets whose texts are unconnected?  Or are all the texts connected?  Or rather are no texts connected?  

     Would one rather find the three or the five?  

     The former is more significant, but is it more desirable?  

     There are those who would rather find a hundred broken shards than seven consecutive tablets.  

     There are those who would rather watch a sparrow flit from place to place.

 

III.135.

 

The gesture of the eye watching another.

 

The gesture of the mouth in uproarious laughter.

 

The gesture of the hand inscribing marks.

 

The gesture of the ear silent on a moonlit volcano.

 

The gesture of the eye puzzling over traces.

 

The gesture of the sinews grasping furiously to snap the bonejoints of pale Eros.

 

And the non-gesture of the one adrift, gritted teeth, in [     ].

 

III.136. Scriptive Abbey.  The monks and nuns are of a stunning physical beauty.  They live as a co-operative, each however with his or her own room.  Their bodies are covered with texts from the Book of Madison, tattooed upon them in cuneiform script.  They are dedicated to amours, study and prayer.   

     There are three tattoo-scribes who work in the entrance hall--the Roman alphabetic transliteration fully legible on each of their six wrists.  The various pictographs or ideographs that come to be used in the increasingly scriptive text will be translated over the rest of their bodies which over time will become reference works.  

     Those who come to read our text pay by the hour, and must decipher it as they will, the reference works being called up to the individual rooms by patrons for an added fee.  The religious pay their way being read.  

     Of course there will be bodies of text preferred by each patron, either for the text itself or for the ensemble of the book as it gathers the text.  Patrons will have to make appointments with each book to be read, and books cannot be taken out.  

     With each generation the task of this reading becomes more difficult, as the script becomes more scriptive.  Patrons must then arrange to meet with an older book so as to corroborate their reading of the text under scrutiny.  The text as a spoken word is held in the keeping of scribes and the religious, who may, it is true, eventually lose it themselves.  

     Such employment would hardly succeed in America at present, though the abbey or bibliothque or brothel may work in Paris, Berlin, or Tokyo.  The book needs relatively few hours of availability in order to pay its keep, and can spend the time thus gained in study, amours and prayer.  

     Many a book will not allow him- or herself to be handled before he or she has been well read.  

     NB: Prospective books have no choice of what text or texts they are made.  The tattoo-scribe chooses to copy what and where he or she will.  The full text of the Book of Madison must be preserved--i.e. legible--in the library at all times.  

     Je m'adresse ˆ BŽatrice AndrŽ-Leickmann, ˆ Jean-Louis de CŽnival, ˆ Jean Bottero, ˆ Christine Ziegler, ˆ Ake Sjoberg, ˆ vos Žtudiants, aux parisiens choisis: j'ai besoin d'artistes de tatouage, de jeunes hommes et femmes dŽvots, d'une grande maison pas loin du centre-ville, d'un traducteur, et de votre collaboration dans la scriptivitŽ continuelle et progressive du Livre de Madison, i.e. je vous prie de m'emmener ˆ Paris pour Žtudier lˆ-bas.  --Eric Mader-Lin

 

 

III.137.  petites philauties couillonniformes petites philatelies cunŽiformes

 

 

III.139.  The late mystic is one who knows that death's cold semen holds all the sparks.  

     I am an early mystic: I will not give up my object.  I will laugh it into flames.  A Phoenix.  

     The aural as tactile.  The Word made flesh.

 

 

A BIT OF THE GAY SCIENCE

 

III.140. They attack me because I quote Cosmo di Madison's religious and social views as if I believed them to be admirable.  They attack me as if I believed his laughing and maniac violence to be something admirable, something worthy of our attention and thus respect.  And, well, I make no bones about it: I admit from the start that not only is Cosmo di Madison my best friend, he is at times almost my hero.  They really can't believe I am "serious" in this: a reaction I am used to by now, particularly from earnest liberals and PC hipsters, for there is hardly anyone among them in tune with my own notion of seriousness.  They insist dully that Cosmo di Madison is "crazy," leaning on the usual polemical value in that measly assertion, and confident, of course, that we are all quite sure about the nature of crazies and craziness, as sure, say, as we are of our own sane nature.  And then their argument contra Cosmo takes that most ridiculous and hypocritical turn, the kind of turn one expects from sloganeers, activists, intellectuals.  They reiterate that Cosmo is sexist, nationalist, and imperialist.  I point out that he is no feminist, true.  But, I continue: You are all thoroughly soaked!  You have just made a point of labeling him crazy, as if this discounted him from the realm of the serious.  And now, suddenly, you are onto his politics, which politics you consider a serious matter, as is obvious by the grave faces you pull as you bring it up.  But tell me, please: how is it you expect a madman to be PC?  

     And I point out something to the whole table of them--whining clichŽ mongers and sandbox Stalinistas all--something of which I am proud, a fine little barb, which is both fine and yet easy enough for even "serious" people to understand.  I say: Just because so many PC people are mentally ill doesn't mean you can expect the mentally ill to be PC.  It's a logical problem you've fallen into, an understandable one, here in Madison at least, as there's such tremendous overlap between the two groups: the mentally ill and the politically committed.  After all, isn't it true that the institutions responsible for these two groups gaze upon each other over a small distance of water: the Humanities buildings of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the inpatient buildings of Mendota Mental Health Central?

 

III.141.  Recently, in Stillwaters Pub, I overheard a young American woman, probably in the last couple years of college, engaging in a most fascinating kind of literary criticism.  She seemed to be concerned with both deprecating certain important writers and pointing out to the others at her table that, in fact, each of the writers in question simply wrote the same thing over and over: their writing was just all the same thing.  I was drunk as I listened to her, and her speech came to me through the clinking of glasses and the din of Stillwaters Pub almost as if her literary critical method were founded on a sort of fugue structure.  As follows:

   All those Dostoyevsky characters--they're always killing people and then repenting.  Finally they end up going to Siberia.  Hummph.  

   They're either doing that or they're gambling all the time.  They're gambling or having fits.  What's that called?   Epilepsy?  

   They have epileptic fits, they drink until they can't walk, gamble, have more fits, murder people, repent, and finally they all end up going to Siberia!  And Dostoyevsky is a great classic!  

   And those Kafka characters: they're so passive.  They don't do anything.  Finally they turn into cockroaches.  

She went on and on like this--I remember she also spoke of Shakespeare and Dickens--and it led me to wonder what it would be like if she were to write a history of world literature.  I think the Department of Comparative Literature should find her and commission this history.  But it won't happen, I know.  Such projects--worthwhile projects--in short: projects discovered by me--never get proper funding.  

     Her book would be on the short side, and it would be called: From Sumer to the Postmoderns: It's All the Same Thing.

 

III.142.  Just before closing time, at the bar at Amy's, a biological anthropologist was filling me in on the recent debates concerning early Homo sapiens.  A rather silly fellow drinker lamented that writing hadn't been invented in those early ages, for if it had been--"We could read the literature of early and proto-man, using this literature as our main means of study."  I came up with the plan to write a Homo neanderthalis spy novel--a sentimental kind of production--and in my drunkenness I even discoursed about a rough plot.  Surely the novel would be a smash hit with biological anthropologists, and surely as well there'd be a movie and I'd end up rich.  

     But now, sobered up, I wonder how the field of pre-history would look had writing been invented back when my fellow drinker suggested.  Of course, we wouldn't be calling it pre-history: that's the most obvious difference.  But what else?  Suddenly I have a vision, for certainly, had there been proto-Homo sapien writers, literary scholars would long since have entered this field of study--this field now safely known as pre-history.  And what would be the result?  

     I realize--with a pit in my stomach, with a lump in my throat--that the problem of the periodization of early and proto-Homo sapiens would be solved in an entirely different manner, and that complex divisions would suddenly arise where previously there had been only bones.  Were one to look into a textbook on early man, one would probably--horror!--encounter something like the following: Paleolithic--Mesolithic--Neolithic--New Neolithic--Paleolithicism--High Postlithic--Late High Postlithic--New Lithic--Off Lithic--Off Off Lithic.  

     And so on.

 

III.145.  THE GOOD SOLDIER--in which the novel of the late Mr. Ford is summarized for the student through a tiny sketch on narrative technique.  The best of life was in the womb: you can be sure of it.  After that it had been one false lead after another.  Ah, those idyllic days!  

     There was one problem I need to acknowledge, for I would now be known as a poet of the first rank were it not for this.  In the womb I was wont to pass my days writing poetic verses: rondeaux, sestinas, most of an epic, a sonnet sequence.  Having no tools with which to write the verses down, I was compelled to commit them to memory, so as to be able to publish them post-natally.  But alas!  After all the work I had composing and memorizing them, the shock of birth itself proved so traumatic that I lost every last trace of what had come before.  I did not anticipate this: for how was I to know what was to come?  I am thus known as a third-rank poet by those few who even call me a poet, all of them, needless to say, post-natal acquaintances.

 

III.146.  During the last decade of the 20th century thousands upon millions of young people worldwide gathered to march under a haddock hung upon a long pole.  But no, it is not true.  They wouldn't even gather round the haddock.  

     And so we went from there.

 

III.147.  Ivan tells me of when he started to be Ivan, and why he is Ivan.  He was in New York for the first time, and saw a little blonde girl in a bus window, an absolutely darling and curly-haired little blonde girl of about five years.  Ivan was gazing at the girl, delighted by her.  And finally, the girl was looking at Ivan too.  She was like Shirley Temple, though blonder and more darling.  

     The girl became more and more fascinated by Ivan, so that her attention was for him alone.  

     And then, as the bus began to pull away, the little girl suddenly scowled furiously at Ivan--"almost as if she were in some great pain"--and then backed-up her sudden scowl by meanly flipping him the bird, her little fist rigid against the bus window.  Can you imagine it!  

     Her scowl, her little fist, the little finger sticking out the top of her clenched fist--all of it held steady as the bus moved slowly out of sight.  

     After telling the story Ivan laughed, then stopped laughing and looked round as if perplexed by the presence of the others reading or chatting in the upstairs of the cafŽ.  

     "And so after that I was Ivan," he summed up in a sort of pensive confusion.  "From that moment on.  You know?"

 

I didn't then tell Ivan the thought his story provoked in me.  Perhaps it was because my thought was rather imprecise at the time.  I know now that it was something like the following:

Ah, I too must change into Ivan!  I too must change my name--to Ivan.  Now that I think on it, I can say that I would even like us to become, all of us, eventually, a whole city of Ivans! 

For such, Reader, is the Most High Delicacy of our humor and our terror--our constant, pained wonderment in face of each other.

 

 

III.148. Ulamo: the Message Bearer.  . . . . My name is Ulamo.  I have carried these messages for four great Kings.  I am well retired for a bearer; nearly all of me is covered with writing.  Most do not last till my age, but die in mid-journey.  As for me, I rest here off the court, cared for by children of the servants, fed well, bathed often.  

     My forehead was my first message, to the King in Arbin.  My cheeks, my back, my arms and belly and legs bear messages sent over decades.  I cannot read them, and most of them, when they were sent I didn't know their import.  

     Now in my age I have found the time to be told what all of my messages mean, and I have had the leisure to memorize them.  I am often taken into the court to be read: for of my messages I have the most responses written clearly next to them.   

      There are only five of us here: five that have made it so far.  

      I have borne my messages well, careful at every crossroads, always sure to show the banner no matter what men I found myself with.  

     I have been copied into the court library on hemp skins, and onto the skins of animals well-preserved.  I am all used up, as you see, from my head to my feet.  

     I have borne much of great import in my life, and have been much ventured.  

     What, then, do you want to hear from me?  Do you want to hear the messages?  Or do you want to hear of my many journeys?. . .

 

 

THE COMPLETE LITERARY WORKS OF PUMPKINPUSS

 

III.150.  Editor's Introduction.  Most of us knew Elizabeth Zechel as a talented painter of tortured bodies and slabs of meat.  Those who didn't know her painting knew her as a cafŽ wit of the first order, whose jibes and antics did much to keep at least one Madison cafŽ from sinking into the humdrum impersonality favored by customer service amateurs.  Well...  

     Up until now, scarcely any of us knew anything of Elizabeth's poetry, and unfortunately the few poems I've managed to collect here can only hint at the range and scope of her work.  Well...  

     In short, this edition is the best I can do, having gathered what work of hers I could before her recent flight to New York and art school.  We will miss her terribly, for she was truly, as Cosmo di Madison remarked, "the iciest of pumpkins." --E.M.-L.

 

III.151.  Ms. Zechel's Only Known Letter.  --[The following letter was addressed to the editor and his wife sometime during June, 1993.  Ms. Zechel was in Madison, the addressees were with family in Taiwan.]--  Pumpkins--  I'm writing you from my little Cart-House  --or my little House-Cart  --on Campus--selling my little rolls and muffins  --and thought of you--  

     --So I am in my little house and all of these little girls have been walking by--thousands of little 16-17-18-year-old little girls  --and they really really bother me  --I stick my tongue out at them--and they giggle and pull their hair --I want to frighten them  --but I need a bigger tongue  --so I throw straws at them  --and they run--  

     --I dyed my hair blue  --Okay, no I didn't  --it's red  --No  --black actually  --yes yes black-black-black  --black hair  --black eyebrows  --I was after that mysterious Audrey Hepburn look  --but I looked more like Anne Frank  --It made me sad  --so I changed it back to a soft dusty blonde  --La La  --Well!--  

     I'm reading Dostoyevsky's White Nights and The House of the Dead  --He's such a depressing little man  --It made me sad  --but I'm knitting a scarf  --Dwell

 

[Here the letter continues on paper bags. --Ed.]

 

I'm in the cart!  A box  --cart-box.  --box-cart.  --It's small and little and small and I have no more coffee!!  La La La

 

               by myself

 

So I have 8 thousand projects going on--actually 2 drawings and 1 2 3--4 paintings half-finished  --my apartment is filled with half-finished stuff  --I should have a show of half-finished stuff  --so anyway  --little Jamie stopped by my little cart  --he was sad  --so I gave him a cookie  --His Bimbo broke up with him  --actually  --it's the same Bimbo that Dave had the hots for  --well well well  --and--apparently--Allison is back from Italy  --La La  --and has also broken up with her man-boy  --boy-man  --well well  --and our little Jamie thinks she's pretty cute  --so hmmm  --So apparently Steep and Chew has a new supervisor  --from the outside world  --and everyone is a bit miffed about that  --fancy that--  Nancy's pissed at Mark  --and at Dave  --Bleh Bleh  --Dean's pissed at Kathleen  --I don't believe Sharon's pissed but you never can be sure  --everyone is just pissy pissy pissy  --and what do you know about that  --really  --one has to be pissed at something  --it's not natural for people to be happy  --pisses me off to see happy fucking babies  --they're not really happy you know  --It's a lie  --lies  --lies under their dreadlocks and beards  --under their drippy tie-dyes  --in their fucking soy milk  --Lies!  --Lies!  --Just wait another 3 to 5 years  --wait and see all these greenpeace guppies down in their own pissiness  --They'll explode!  Beads and hair flying everywhere!  

     I await your return with muffins in my hair  --I'm growing Basil  --we're all excited

 

             with hope--       Pumpkinpuss

 

Editor's Note: This letter was written to the editor nearly two months after Ms. Zechel had been fired from the cafŽ ("Steep and Chew") for being rude to customers, and nearly two weeks before the editor, overseas, would return to discover that he himself had been fired from the cafŽ in absentia for being rude to customers.  Ms. Zechel had in the meantime acquired a situation selling bakery goods to university students from a cart, or "cart-house."  

     Of particular interest in this letter is the break inaugurated on page 2 by the word "Dwell" (see photocopy).  How are we to read this break?  Is it meant to call attention via Heidegger to the writer's "unpoetic dwelling" in the cart-house, to her knowing, somewhat bitter lack of a more suitable situation--be this either in a stark Bavarian farmhouse or upon a rocky Mediterranean crag ˆ la Hyperion?  Is the word somehow, with its graphic drop into the large black dot, a reference to Joyce's passage of the splotchy "roc's auk's egg"?  Further, what are we to make of the fact that the letter, once resumed, is not on writing paper, as are the first two pages, but is scribbled rather on white paper bags--bags presumably intended for cookies and muffins?  I raise these questions as perhaps being of interest to scholars.  I am well aware that any eggy certainties would at this point be premature.  E.M.-L.

 

The Poems

 

[Note: The manuscripts in the editor's possession are printed here word for word.  Ms. Zechel considered some of these poems unfinished, as indicated.]

 

 

III.152.

 

                                     Unfinished  --eek.

 

Bellyhouse bagboys

copies of junkskin

cold pricks

and pure eye

ruin the milk with fingerfun

and vaseline smears

 

Behind the house

given over barefoot

scotch

all sweetness and light

with downey heads

dressed in gauze and latex

 

Soft toys

dividing untimely unions of silky spots

between

forehead and thigh

 

 

III.153.

 

                                     Unfinished--

 

I'm very focused

in a natural sweet kind of way

oooh baby

groaning over your stack

 

A nearsighted case

makes me real irritable

bitten off bimbo

right over your nose

with natural sweetness

singin

head to the ground

chompin on grass

fallin back on a bit of raw glass

this man's gettin a bargain ya know

Bleh Bleh

 

 

III.154.

 

                                      (My finest verse  --bleh)

 

There once was an imp

Who lived in a sink

So many miles away

 

On top of a hill

Far from the mill

He sang his heart away

 

For though he was safe

In the sink he did live

It was only of grass and clay

 

And the rains did come

He sucked his thumb

And was washed away

Down

     through

         the

             drain.

 

Bleh.

 

 

III.155.

 

Scraped my knee on the racks after this conversation I saw.

 

Realizing my psychopathic ambition

I presume damage

and walk home.

 

 

My buzzing innocence attracts naked men.

 

2 in a corner

 

3 in a hole

 

soft white on my back.

 

 

As rows of crimes were committed

I watched holding a finger

and left you fucking in the park.

 

 

I pass your house at 4.

 

Sit holding an orange at 5.

 

 

At 6

a damaged hallucination

sold

cheap and thin

after one more bloodletting

and a couple of shitty nights

of raw beauty

sitting there

all in 8 minutes.

 

Nothing tasted so sweet.

 

 

---------

VOL. IV.

---------

HOME

---------

Email: inthemargins03@hotmail.com

---------

This page is ahttp://www.necessaryprose.com/

---------