Volume 2 Number 1
THE FALLING LEAF REVIEW
SPRING 2017
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SPRING 2017
Volume 2 Number 1
SPRING 2017
Cover Photo: Lake Ontario, Toronto, 2014
THE FALLING
LEAF
REVIEW
A QUARTERLY LITERARY REVIEW
COPYRIGHT (C) 2017 JAY VICTOR RUVO
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The Flatiron Building, NYC, 2016
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THE
FALLING LEAF
REVIEW
PUBLISHING & CONTRIBUTING
EDITOR
JAY VICTOR RUVOLO
AN ALL FICTION ISSUE --JVR
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Montauk, NY, by Jay V. Ruvolo 5
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"The Pass" Plaza de Toros, Madrid, July, 2012
by Jay V. Ruvolo
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Plaza de Toros, MADRID
July, 2012
by Jay V. Ruvolo
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
FICTION: SHORT STORIES [ALL]
MY SHADOW WAS MY CHILD ..................................................................
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OTHERS MUST THINK ..................................................................... 18
IN THE WAKE ................................................................................... 23
HOW TO MAP THE WORLD ............................................................ 25
ANONYMITY, SHE SAID .................................................................. 26
RAIN OUTSIDE A WINDOW IN A MOVIE ........................................ 33
TATOO ............................................................................................. 39
DEAD AHEAD .................................................................................. 46
MADNESS AND CIVILIZATION ....................................................... 50
AMNESIA ME .................................................................................. 54
WRESTLING WITH DEMONS; OR, PANDEMONIUM IS NOW ....... 57
THE GREAT SALT SEA ................................................................... 70
GARY T. IS AN ENEMY OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION ................... 72
UP TO THE MINUTE ...................................................................... 76
ETYMOLOGICAL FALLACIES AND OTHER FICTIONS ................. 78 8
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'Record,' the verb comes from the Latin recordare, as in the Spanish recordar. Recordar, Galeano reminds us, is to pass through the heart again. In all matters of recall, of recollection, or of remembering, we pass through the heart once more. Heart, another's heart, the heart of the matter, all of our core experiences--herein we assume greater synonymy than is in actuality true. There is an element of again and again, but what gain is there from memory in itself functioning as memory, another mystery to me? Imagination, I'm sure, needs heart for it to function as imagination should, and I have not dispensed with should(s) in order to raise in esteem my personal whims and fancies. This would be deluding myself. There are no hierarchies of Truth, or of Beauty, or of ethics, or of anything else, epistemology? What do you know? What do I? Imagination is eternity is easier to solve than imagination being infinite. It has always been easier to reach the eternal than infinity. Infinity can never be reached, can it? It is impossible. Possible and impossible have little to do with probable and improbable.
My Shadow Was My Child PROLOGUE Passing Through the Heart Again Memory is as much fiction as it is non-fiction. The boundaries separating one from the other are difficult for anyone to trace. Remembering to see and say I know fact from fiction, what could it mean? I remember "The Earth is flat" was once a fact. So much the better or the worse for fact-making; facts from the factory? How do I recollect what I remember, separate what I remember from what I recall? How is each different from the other; to remember, to recollect, to recall, each the other, what, when, where, how? Documentary is another genre still--is memory a genre? The photos I have taken over the years, with film, by digital imaging, what do they mean? Questions breed. The generic boundaries of remembering are what I thought was distinct from recollecting, as I had recollecting from recalling, recalling from remembering; yes, of course this is true; each a sub-genre of memory. How many of us watch documentaries and suspend our disbelief--we do not take what we are given cum grano, do we? All remembering is recording of a kind, but all recording is filtering, no? There is a frame, a process of cropping, of editing.
If we look at the history of the earth, if we take a paleontological account of its life from the beginning to the present, we will certainly see more extinct species than all the living species here on earth at present. Death is the rule, extinction the one unwavering maxim of Life. If the center cannot hold, if the second law of thermodynamics is the rule of maximum entropy, then why are we always so certain of remembering? 9
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Of being able to recollect faithfully; persistently and at will. When will we ever? What I remember, what I recollect; how and why do I recall anything at all anywhere, any when? I'm not certain of their synonymy. I'm sure they possess connotations that leave them distinct, separate, incompatible as interchangeable lexical items in all contexts of usage. Synonymy, or the lack thereof, is not in itself antonymy. I have always imagined that it was appropriate to throw confetti at the turn of the New Year. I imagine there are numerous minor New Years of the mind. How do we record anything mentally? What brings something to bear on my present from my past? We don't lie to ourselves as much as we unavoidably create a past out of the confetti with which our minds are left. Imagine pasting the confetti of your life together, piece by piece. What abstract design would be revealed, what surreal revelation of our unconscious would come to the forefront of our thoughts. There is no time or place where possibilities are infinite.
points at something and acts as a filter of this something. There is always a mise en scene, is there not? There is always a context created. I Hypocrite Reader Can is able to, can is allowed to, can is know how to, and this has everything to do with what gets recorded. Cain is Abel's brother. The history of DNA is not what was initially recorded or acknowledged by the Nobel committee, or passed down in other historiography, finding its way into textbooks and then taught as the truth and nothing but the truth. But we know witnesses lie. We know there are conspirators who lie or manipulate facts or withhold facts in trials. We know that there is ideological warfare being waged in the world. We know that there are many campaigns of dis-information and mis-information, which is not to say that all news or most news is fake. We know prosecutors have ignored information on purpose to get a conviction. We are a generation of liars with overlapping generations we could not have generated also joining in the chorus of lying. The Academy lies and lies and continues to lie about its lying; faculties of liars on the faculty of lying, deceiving themselves as they do others; yes, deception, deception, their selfdeception, born of self-importance raised in a culture that devalues the intellect, the prime efficient in all other intellectual deceptions. Everyone loves a game of hop-scotch with the Truth. We love to play ping pong with our slogans, with our cliches, with our
Memory is as much fiction as it is documentary--yet all documentaries learn from fiction, are in fact fiction in as much as they are things made as are facts. The madeness of facts does not point to them as lies or un-truths, I do not want to split hairs, but they do sometimes split on their own accord, or by conditions, as we have seen of them in frayed conditions. It is so much other than the latter. We must never forget that documentaries have a unique camera eye, a lens that frames as well as occludes, that both 10
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he said, she said--projection on projection on projection . . . to see Orwellian nightmares drawn only on the left or the right will only bring us deeper into the Orwellian design. We know innocent men and women have been found guilty in court's of law, and we know how much this has helped undermine our faith in Truth and our faith in reaching any truth. It has gone a long way in perpetuating a culture of doubt, a culture where doubt has become the highest form of wisdom, where instead of beginning with Socrates I know nothing, we conclude with it, leaving us with the belief that knowledge is impossible. Do I have to be somebody, as when we say somebody as if everybody else might be nobody, in order to have the right to say what I do here? More questions? I could ask one after another continuing on and on in perpetuity, and depending how long I lived, this would determine how many questions I get to ask. We miss the point about time, about history; history is not exactly time, it is not what we think it is when we assume what we do about how it exists, the thing it is in our pre-thoughts. I am X, Y and Z, as well as A, B and C. I am everyone everywhere all the time. I am no one; I am anyone you could imagine. When I tell my story, I am testifying. Testifying as all witnesses do. I was testifying to my life, to my Self . . . I am in every way I communicate with others, communicate with myself, in my head, in the mirror, on the page. Why choose to tell non-fiction or fiction? The blankness of the page before
me with pen in hand is exciting for me. I am filled with hope and anxious expectation. Who I am to tell my tale? I would like to know. This tale, one told as I choose to tell it, herein without verse, without elaborate or conventionally accepted modes of conveying fiction? I like the word mode, from the French for style, for manner. Who do I have to be to tell a tale other than a teller; all speaking a way of telling something, no? But the tale, the story, what of this? Who does anyone need to be to believe that what he has to say he should say and not only say, but tell. To say is intransitive; to tell is only transitive. What have I told you? What have I said about me that could let you know something you think you want to know, sometimes think you need to know--who needs to know anything about anyone anywhere at any time? We all want to know more than what is good for us to know, all of us wanting to find out what we should have better sense to inquire about; but the things we should know about, know more about, we are content to remain oblivious about. If there is no Truth then all we have is the Will to Power. Remember, there are no longer any universals, so then there are no universal human rights, only the Will to Power. Why shouldn't I get a gun and then shoot the fuck out of everyone at work? No, really; you have chopped down all the trees of Truth, of Universals, of Transcendent values; all we have left in the barren wilderness are stumps and the Devil to chase us without a place to hide.
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father. Notions of time, of infinity and of eternity must be handled appropriately and not within the narrow constraints of contemporary semi-literacy that is passing for literate enough. I do not watch calendars or clocks--I pay more attention to the sun, the moon and constellations passing across the night sky in what I like to call the con stellar clock. Keeping my father alive in memory is not the same as keeping his death or dying or having died alive, none of these latter variations on the theme of being dead the same as the former, keeping the memories of his living alive. He does live in me as he does still talk to me. I hear his voice as I hear mine now as I write. I really do not need anyone around me telling me what and where and when or how I should remember . . . but what do I remember, recall, recollect, re-memory functions in mysterious ways, does it not? Of course it does. I was working that day--the anniversary. I do not recall what else had transpired that day or any of the days leading to this day I should have remembered . . . I do not--cannot--recollect what else significantly transpired. I think perhaps I had gotten sushi take-out to bring home that afternoon--or was it evening--I do not even recall now if it were my Saturday afternoon class or my weeknight class, which site I cannot recall either. There is one place we take-out from that is on the way home from one site I teach at in the evening. I do not know what this says, and I am not asking this because I need to ask it, nor am I asking this question because I must know the answer-knowing in this pedantic way, this way that is necessary only by being pedantic.
II Phases of the Moon and Other Lunacies In memory alive, or in memory dead, what is that? I would like to know. I do not have to say it to you, that I know keeping him alive as I do day in and day out is far and above what marking the date on the calendar proves or disproves. This is a fact I assert most pronouncedly: I did think of him that day as I do and have done every day since the day he died, a date whose numerals I play when buying Mega Millions or Powerball tickets. I do not think of his dying except as but one of many images of my dad when recollecting him. The calendar is not part of the remembrance; it is not necessarily so that I must mark the date every year to appropriately remember him, pay homage to him, pay my respects to my Dad. I wish I could convince you otherwise, if in fact you disagree with me, but then that wish is just what it is and remains where it belongs, in the realm of wishing. All wishing is a past tense assertion for a present time lack, and in the end remains as useless as wishing for water from the moon. Remembering happens when it happens--recollecting is something that helps remembering or is the result and thus the after effect of having remembered. That I did recall at all is what matters. The pedantry of counting days or of marking them is not where my heart beats for my 12
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I have more in the way of a response than can be dreamed of by most people's philosophy--everything comes back to Hamlet in the graveyard. We make graveyards out of so many things, so many places--even so many people. We do not people our graveyards as much as we graveyard the people in out lives. I contemplate Death, being dead, what an angel of death would be, would look like, could . . . the moon in the sky above the leafless tree in silhouette behind the streetlamp glowing softly amber I think I should say, the moon full in the sky clear and crips, crystal, we like saying, the face of the Man in the Moon distinct tonight, the shadowy patches forming its face, now all of sudden, the Sea of Tranquility comes to mind, my dad telling me where we were going to land, there, that shadowy patch, he added words for me to find what he was pointing at, we were going to land there, on the moon, I recall thinking that I recollected this.
idiots are full of both, signifying nothing. All of our telling the telling of the idiot who signifies his nothing by sawing the air and belching and bellowing--out, brief candle. How I am not this idiot is a question I do not ask. How are each of us not this idiot? Not a clinical idiot, no; a literary idiot, for sure; you do not know this? The word 'universality' comes from the word 'universe,' or, in its etymology, one line. Yes, all universality is about one-lineness, a kind of singularity, or unilateralness; that is, everything linear, everything in a state of linearity, one dimensionality. But is this the chief component of the universe, or what is uni-versal. Yes, universality exists through an extension of another and another and another--all in the petty pace? Does universality have to go on in petty paces? Again, we find the extension that is a line in what is universal, every line extends, a straight one-dimensional figure having no thickness and extending infinitely in both directions. What? Essential to the idea of a universe or something universal can be found in the term 'another.' There is an in-perpetuity in what is universal. I wish I had a handle on my universe, this cosmos of mine, let alone this one of ours, this one of me. There is nothing so difficult I recall having read somewhere where someone said Picasso had said. Yes, nothing so difficult as a line; to draw a line, to draw the line, what lines are drawn--how then have we come to this confusing state, these confusing times--how can a time be times, each of times another and another and another creeping each of us, one of them, this him
III Another and Another and Another I remember my Dad reading MacBeth to me when I was a boy, one of the Folger Library editions we used to use in school, one of Julius Caesar we used in 7th grade. I was maybe 7 when my Dad read MacBeth to me. I remember noting that Faulkner had taken the title of his novel The Sound and the Fury from MacBeth's soliloquy upon hearing of his wife's death, how life is a tale told by an idiot, yes, an idiot's story, full of sound and fury, of course, all stories told by 13
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or that her (why do women get that and men get this?) There is enough of what we believe that the Power Elite need use help foster in our education to make us think that it is the status quo of Friedman's neo-liberal world order that is in order--and if the useful idiot in the Oval Office is not part of the design, he is thus in effect the cause of what will only amount to greater control by the masters of manipulation. For social tranquility, as Jean-Paul Marat had said, at least two hundred thousand heads must be chopped off. Fear in the hearts of aristocrats; ours have no such fear. We should have the furor, the frenzy, the tenacity, the savagery of the French peasants of 1789. Vive! Les Jacobins. Unlike Hamlet's undiscovered country, the death Macbeth faces is plebeian; it is ordinary in that it is the same death everyone meets. By this, Macbeth's tyranny, his usurped kingship, is made low. To die is the final democratizer, everyone equal before the laws of Death. Level is flat, even thus balanced. What is in balance is of equal weight. Death is equal unto us all. Another and another and another passes, out, out brief candle . . . and who escapes Macbeth's soliloquy on another-ness, how is life not full of sound and fury signifying nothing for every man and woman facing death, facing the absurd. There are no universals without extending another and another and another . . . all universality dependent on this state of another-ness . . . and what to do with the palpitating hearts of the Elite but to devour them? We should be so lucky to be so en-
gaged as the French peasants of 1789 . . . contra nous de la tyranie. Macbeth shares an association with this state of another-ness, perhaps born out of his state of otherness which derives from his choice to kill the king. Macbeth's estrangement, his state of being other, other than who he was before the murder, other than what has become of the kingdom since the murder, both inward and outward states of otherness is intensified by his coming to grips with the banality of anotherness, a most fundamental another-ness in the days that creep so likely in their petty paces, as do tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, yes, how they creep, once more, in their small steps, yes, all of them to the last sylla-bell tolling, we sometimes ask if, of recorded time . . . asking for whom the syllables toll, are we? Yes, we are done, John. The record from beginning to our doom, his doom, the end of all records reaffirming the likeness of day in day out existence repetition-repetition-repetition. Yes, all of our yesterdays, together, lumped as one, the great monolith of past time, the same yesterdays of everyone else that light every fool on his way to death, death the great and final another-ness of every one of us. Who is like unto Death? How do we imagine the Angel of Death, how to write the angel of death, Lang suggested that the Angel of Death would be the gentlest of angels, no? It has started to rain. One of the days I am remembering. Yes, rain, rain go away-we know where this is going. We know from where it has come. Come again another 14
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day. Another day infers a day has been had before, that there is one from which an extension into another can be made. Another and an other do not seem to be so different. The former is made of the latter, but then children are made of their parents, we could say. There are limits to their sameness or even their similarities. There is some common-sense in assuming the sun will rise tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow . . . Otherness and another-ness are distinct, the latter sharing something of the former, while the former is apart from the latter. Separate is this other, always separate, exclusive even at times, in places, what situations could we draw to illustrate. Another is always possessed of something of the former in the series. Another is serial; other is not. Another makes a line; other is a point. Another primarily shares in and while other primarily shares in but. It is not as if you cannot say this and that other or you unable to say not this but another; you can. It's just that I am speaking of their primary associative condition. Come again another day, and I will explain it all to you. I remember the showers we took in the rain in the summer in Pittsfield in our bathing suits. I see the spider and his web in the window sill. There is a fly caught in it, I still cannot imagine another happiness as sweet as the happiness when I was boy in the Berkshires, the summers I'd spend up there in the Berkshires, at Aunt Mae's . . . I was told that when she was young she looked a lot like a young Katherine Hepburn--Katherine Hepburn always reminded me of my Aunt Mae--does still today every time I see her . . . I am remem-
bering the time I went to see the Vatican Collection--was it one day, or did I go more than once--I do not recollect. I swore for a time after I had seen the statue of the Emperor Augustus from Prima Porta that I had seen it breathe, yes, breathe. It did. It took a breath. I saw it. I did too. I did not imagine it. IV Archetypes and Repetition Once having read Kerouac's description of the rising Merrimack River rushing overflowing--what? There I was in the middle of things, she had died all of sudden, how is any death not all of sudden even at fourteen? I was in Lowell--we had made it to Lowell after the funeral. I made it to Lowell with my cousin, my godfather, who I had only recently found out had dies several--or was it seven--years ago? I had already begun smoking, both. I imagine I could think that I went by the Merrimack looking for Jack's ghost, or that I could think that I might want to go by the river looking for his ghost--and I am not even sure if I had known anything about him when I was fourteen. I would have liked to think so, at least some time ago after-after the fact. I felt better having burst in the dark before the dying embers of the fireplace at my cousins, listening to Dinah Washington singing, I forget which ballad, deep, soulful we used to say not knowing exactly what we were meaning, and over and over I did, return the needle with precision to the be15
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ginning, replaying this one song I cannot recall how many times, nor can I the name, how so was it titled--my cousin Godfather's father having played jazz for many years, jamming with musicians that made it to the Berkshires for Jacob's Pillow. I used to play songs sometimes to make me sad, el llorono, I imagine me saying in Spanish, a dream I had had of Garcia Lorca talking to me on the shore of the Mediterranean--staring at the dying embers of the fire, I used to wish I had a fireplace, under Dinah's voice, breaking into pieces. I recall I had spoken to Jimenez in a cafe near the shore in Barcelona. I know I did, but imagination is far more important than knowledge? I was in the town Ti Jean was born in, after the funeral--I had helped carry the casket, lead blue, I used to say so many things about the funeral I have since forgotten (I swore I heard her voice come from out of the dark of my bedroom one night sitting in the living room in my father's leather recliner meditating on the hum of my refrigerator about 1-teenage-AM). The subject of another trial is all about tribulations--every trial, an essay--every essay a trial. Another trial and another trial, all of them creeping in petty paces, syllable, after syllable, all of the records of time. Time in the mind, time on the clock, time descending with space in a metaphysical parallax. There is a parallax in the mind too. Her hands were bent, were knotted, twisted by arthritis. I see her holding a fork and with that fork beating into Andean peaks of meringue, egg whites in a bowl, someone's life passing before one's eyes
happens in stages throughout one's life I presume. It does not happen all at once all of a sudden. I cannot imagine how long the montage would have to be for all of it at once to happen in the minutes or hours before death, whose death, her death, his death, their deaths were different, were the same, were what were when were how--no, their deaths are! I held my mother's hand until her heart stopped beating.I slept at my father's feet like a Viking dog the night before the morning he died. That is all. The way we once knew the cosmos was recreated the moment the shofar was blown--eternal return, all religion is a linking again with the One, the True and the Absolute. You scoff? You mock? You click your tongue? As if you know, as if you were able. I am not going to bother. V Alive in My Mind My father's photo? In a frame on my desk? I miss him. I see him clearly when I focus. I do not have to close my eyes to see him. I do not though see him as I do a person sitting on my couch. I can see him as he had sat on my couch, talking as he talked, gesturing as he gestured, whenever he talked as he would with his hands and his arms and other bodily inflections to his speech. There really isn't a day that goes by when I do not think of him. Or so I say because I imagine I must think that I need to believe that I believe so . . . and so I do. I am not always at my desk, not every day. But there are so many things I do that I would have done with him, both myself as 16
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an adult and recollections of myself as a child. But then I have said before that a lot of memory is fiction, what we make out of fragments in memory? What then must I say? I do miss him. I do talk to the photo of him as I do talk to him, and yes, sometimes I am able to speak but to have conversations as we had; not recollected conversations, but new and present conversations. How are the dead not alive in the mind? My Dad is alive in my mind. He visits me in my dreams; this is certain, I am sure, yes, sure in the way you are I am whenever it happens that way, certainty--you know.
fact of imagination my mother's father, Delphine's boy, was Pablo's bastard. How is it that I am not supposed to say that I cannot fathom if this is true or not, I do not know? I have said much in the past about the limits and the limitations of memory and of remembering; how one or the other functions, not nearing why either functions at all. I know animals are not supposed to remember as we Homo Sapiens do, although I cannot say how differently we as humans remember. I do know that recollection is supposedly a human endeavor, although I wonder how recollecting would function for our primitive fore bearers. I don't exactly recall what I have said, as of late, of my time in the Berkshires, the same cord as that of Vermont's Green Mountains, the same mountains I would later spy across the waters of Lake Champlain from the window of my seat on a car on the train I'd be taking to Montreal, how many times I don't recall and probably won't bother to recollect until after I have finished this essay. The last several or more years, and especially since my mother and father's death have been oddly unreflective, except when directly applied to the writing of a poem, a journal entry or a short story or an essay (the latter of the variety herein exposed); but then what is reflection? We imagine it a kind of looking back, but the word infers a kind of mirroring. What exactly do we mirror when we reflect? What we feel, how we feel, what we think, itself a kind of personal seeming of things and persons and places. It seems to me is the reflective pose. I do not know what I think un-
VI Monkeys, Word Processors and Infinite Time When my Great Aunt Anna Mae was young she looked a lot like Katherine Hepburn when Kathrine Hepburn was young--did you ever see photos or films of Katherine Hepburn when she was young . . . they were practically the same age I think I recall having learned, but maybe not. How could I have expressed it all right down to the threads in every fabric. The atoms? What is there on the atomic level I could say? Could she have been the bastard sister of Kate? I have imagined that my mother's father who was born in Paris--and I think I have been told, yes, I was told that he had been born in Montmartre--the year Picasso arrived ...and what is it that I imagine of my great grandmother, Delphine, born in Geneva? I imagine that she had had an affair with the wild Catalan (who never really learned to spell well in French), and that in 17
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til I write--I'm still trying to know. What seems to me? Let me write. A dog has dreams, no? Chimpanzees, though, make tools and fuck face-to-face. But do they write poetry? And if they do or could--what then would we think, would we do, say? I do remember a group of chimps with infinite time and as many typewriters as their numbers and how after an infinity of passing time they would type the script of Hamlet. I see monkeys with their index pushing keys at random in offices across America? I hear the news about a team of monkeys having typed out the script of Hamlet in their infinite random typing. I head straightaway to the nearest of taverns I can endure and have a pint of Old Speckled Hen. I like their fish and chips.
on the sand on the beach near the water behind the line of sea weed marking one extent of high tide. She rolled over, she turned to me lying on her back, the breeze blew, sand swept over her belly. I thought I saw her shake her head slightly barely visibly resting on her elbow as she would, her bikini fluorescent orange. I adored her in this swim suit, her skin slightly tanned not fair as she was lying on her side facing the waves somehow making her tits appear larger--her lying on her side, not the waves. I adored her in skirts, in dresses, formal, informal, whatever else you have in words to say what kind of dress a woman is wearing, sun dresses, one I think I can recollect that had begun to fray on year, I think she had it cut and sewn. The waves came one after another today as they have come one after another after another after another for days into days into weeks and months and years and centuries into one millennium following another and so on, her curves the arcs the parabola women are roundish men are squarish she said, listening to as much as watching waves clouds horizon sun breeze blowing sand seagulls hovering squawking jets above land over sea approaching Kennedy crossways the bay peninsula lights blinking jets turning distance over ocean star burst sky ink water night as if a billion squid had bled to death one midnight moonless lights of jets coming over the peninsula but at present this morning the water looks like aluminum foil rippling bright reflective wavelet caps of ocean another gull rising soaring floating over the surf as I stand with sinking
THE END
OTHERS MUST THINK To think or not to think–– that is the question?
The edges of the blanket, the sand getting hotter, don’t cut the orange, she said. I paused. I looked away. I looked back to her. I watched her there on the blanket 18
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feet watching at the shore on the beach as I recall walking as I did when I was younger on low tide surf sand some mornings I can hear them calling dinosaurs these birds are dinosaur gulls all of them ungainly birds as we walk to Ditch Plains here in Montauk, and we call each other loudly piercing other seagulls squawking coming like dinosaurs I’m thirsty you cross them taking deliberate steps the way dinosaurs would as we have re-imagined them doing the new paleontology at the shore repeated over time hour by hour days into weeks into months into years water everywhere into centuries not a drop into millennia could I drink millennia into ages into eons and so on the waves to be inside a wave each wave together with all the others one sequence repeating more than overly enthusiastic she told me of the time she had visited her cousin in California and of how when we were on the beach at Big Sur we’d watch the surfers surf all morning from just after sunrise to near noon and of how the waters of the Pacific would swell from just beyond the swimmers and come coiling in a vortex twisting violently. I recalled the morning at Ditch Plains waves turning in on themselves roaring down thunderous crash everything always seems to become so much less even at the moment we are adding accumulating sometimes subtracting to add the sounds of the ocean surf echoing off the wall of Hoodoos below the cliffs of Shadmoor a new imagining she is looking at panorama as I did felt watching waves from as far out as I could see coming memory clouds water she would in the eyes seen light in waves emotion in waves all passion in waves violence
in waves the waves that came to the shore with one or two lone successful riders out of the dozen or more surfers who tried but failed to complete their run along the parabolic arcs of water new waves what is a wave what do all the waves in the world amount to world and universe wave after wave we are waves love comes in waves one in a million ten hundred billion million a thousand waves of water this morning at the shore watching the surf waves of space gravity displaces space as ice cubes do water in a glass space ripples warps bends turns in on itself folding over like fabric like radio waves microwaves electromagnetic waves sometimes light particle not a wave sound in waves and light in waves too as air in what we would call wind storms in waves super cells tornados like tsunami in air when love comes at all it comes in waves one commotion after another itself in waves a prop flight to Rochester and the breeze shook the branches as the curtains rose in a flip once twice a third time of course all of a sudden straight almost to the floor in folds of fabrics in space as space itself like fabric all of space one everything divisive in the folds ripples parabolas the three dimensions we are so certain that define space in its limits, three dimensions are limited not limitless time the fourth dimension of our universe, all of it one as all of space across all of time is one? Questions beget questions as I have heard her say before after her friend Jay, she said. I never met him, her friend, Jay, the poet, a thinker, a human-being as she said he liked to say of himself, saying of himself as others say you should say of 19
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yourself unless you want to be unknown and then say nothing because no one else is going to praise you which is why we are no longer generous with what we say to others. Space has more than three, has to have more folds than three. All evidence points to more than three dimensions; time divided into three phases, past present future all of them illusions. How does a person ever get to know another person, what another feels imagines suffers discerns remembers, what is committed to memory is put out of mind, to call back, how do we collect the surplus in the mind there was this junk drawer we had when I was a boy I recalled how many times I could barely get it open so much stuffed in kept there without cause many drawers a reflex started one I know of first for the things we were sure we would need in the future in an emergency then two a second I recall two junk drawers I had a whole junk closet until I was about sixteen all the things you think you need you are certain you will miss cannot live without I had a dream when I was fifteen and hopelessly in love with a girl who lived around the corner from me that I would cut out my heart at least once a day and hold it in my hands as I came to her bearing it as a gift instead of chocolates or flowers and she took it as a woman would flowers or chocolates and people in villages have sheds out back somewhere behind their hut their hovel a thatched roof something else it is we live in does another person ever keep in mind what you remember, even when the two of you have--what do you have?
You and I have experienced the same event at the same time, she said in hypothesis of simultaneity, and what is what anyway, how? But why do we assume so much for experience? Experience in itself affirms nothing, you know. It is--so let it be. What is, is? Direct experience dogmas ruling every way and every time we try to think. It's awful. How many people I see every day today from one or another village somewhere else in the world, and I’m trying to figure out how this is better; what about the junk drawers or attics of the mind, one’s memory sometimes like that junk closet I had when I was in my early teens. I do not oppose; I question and then question again without concluding doubt being something I should end my inquiry with as so many I talk to seem to have already done without realizing it. She turns over on her stomach. She mumbles something now and then inaudibly, sound spilling her lips the ocean over. The water looks like aluminum foil. The water rippling little bright reflective caps of aluminum foil wavelets reflecting shining; she whispered about the waves that came to the shore with one or two lone successful riders out of the dozen or dozens of surfers who tried but failed to complete their run along the parabolic arcs of water; waves and more waves—what is a wave? What do all the waves in the world amount to, she thought, the world and the universe in wave after wave of waves of water, of space— gravity displaces space you know as ice cubes do water in a glass. You never know anything about what another might know on the subject of yet 20
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another I know, she knows, who knows anything who anything where anything when what I think I know or what she imagines another she is acquainted with might think might sense might feel might yet daydream remember want to recollect to collect again all the pieces the fragments it is fitting that we throw confetti on New Year’s Eve most remembering like picking up pieces of broken shells along the beach at the edge of the shore tossed about in the tumult of low tide pebbles broken shells wave worn glass in the surf yes little pieces of beautifully colored wave worn glass how it was I collected them and gave them to her she remained still, she remained silent, skeleton fingers are ready to grab you to grip you to take you from behind my room dark obscure foreboding I thought she must think I liked waking and spooning with her from behind gripping her from behind pressing to her from behind her hips their knobs protruding skin stretched taut I paused and sat and watched her watching the shadows on the wall we are all pursued I said every one of us followed, stalked, hounded, hunted, haunted, whichever one first the others ensue, how are we not related not the same in some way perhaps on that horizon of meaning I had imagined a parallax for words related, seemingly parallel as we are where thought do we exist? Everything in mind descending in a parallax; remembering has a horizon too, all memory a world of its own with a horizon. I got vertigo looking into her eyes but having spent time with her long enough I learned how to keep my bearing when falling. I landed on my feet. Tumbling over myself
into her eyes; I had built-in gyroscope I would weather my descent into her head first and free fall right side up. I remember Goya's Blacks at the Prado. I had seen Jesus on my Aunt Catharine’s crucifix dive off the cross and into my eyes a dream I had after having fallen asleep, sleeping, what slumber waking quickly thereafter I tried to mean it was true the story told as if it were true but with more ambiguity than I felt after I had spent some time sitting in the dark of my Aunt Catharine’s upstairs bedroom wondering if what I had seen I did in fact see were a dream nightmare waking vision hallucination. If it were a dream, what then? If it were any of the other possibilities, what then? Jesus takes a dive off the cross, Olympian divers in the Olympics from the high board. She spoke about the river she’d swim in when she was girl, how she and her friends used to swim in the river, and he remembered the photos from the depression and boys diving off piers into the East River on hot summer afternoons wondering how anyone could dive into those waters then most likely not as clean as today the choice a person makes in determining his I-ness amounts to an oppression of the many other selves; it results in a Self as well withdrawn in its attempts to reach out to others, remote, reticent, inhibited even, although these others be like I. This I cut off from the many that populate the Self. Yet a question arises in the practicalities of our confusion. How is it that someone so awkward in mediating the fundamental nature of my Self could allow another to enter my being, 21
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to ask another to become a part of me? How could I or she, or you or I, dance without tripping up my partner myself, her partner, yours and mine? 'I' remains persistently we. In that, this 'we' becomes each one of us in singularity. I am we the people as you are we the people, as I am, as she is; and if each one of us is we the people simultaneously with every other person in the whole collection human-beings in this world, we can a very potent People. Can here be any validity to our Freedom? The rhetoric of singular and plural herein is clear I like the panorama here at the beach. I like looking out on the ocean the land across the water what land is that? I bear in mind a moment or more and just as quickly no. There were we’d go to the beach in the morning when out in Montauk, the summers we’d go for a week or more, their time there adding up to nothing much other than tranquil days on the beach lying in the sun walking in the surf or taking a trip out to the point to see the lighthouse or just sit and eat bar-b-q in the back grass or go to Amagansett for the afternoon and have a beer? When to enter and when to exit; there a thousand ways of exiting. Belief and knowledge are not the same thing, she said; nor are belief and faith identical either. She too used to kneel by the side of her bed when she was a girl and pray to God to keep her soul, take it, if she should die before she woke. She called out to Him, Master! She did. Do we recoil form this? What do Buddhists in the monastery call their teacher, Master! Do we want a friendlier Jesus, a Jesus who walks with us as a friend, as
someone who could be our equal, as someone who doesn’t think he is better than us, as someone who supports all of our dogmas about democracy, our democracy—it’s amazing how bourgeois and capitalist Jesus has become? We are full of shit—it’s amazing how often too many of us talk out both sides of our mouths without realizing it, how many times we express our thoughts without probing what they stand for, what the inferences are, the inferences that can be finished by anyone with half a brain, but are not by most because we have become so sophisticated at denying what we really need to know really need to think, saying so much other than and offering so many more trivial things to worry about to discuss to debate endless debate rebuttal after rebuttal disallowing anyone the force and power of refuting what we say each the other content to say but, but, but, but, but, and so on and so on and so on. What I hear, what I see, what I stand under, to stand under stand for something, do any of us stand for anything, do we believe in anything really or is everything all of it everywhere just advertising the art of the sell, package package package, putting a bow on a pile of shit . . . denying what we see, the lunacies of administrators everywhere, in government, in business, in any of the agencies of state. Fuck you and fuck me has become our mantra has become your mantra what mantras do we like best listen to most say most frequently in the times we should say other, say nothing as the most appropriate other to say.
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I don’t want to sound like some kind of lunatic, she said, on a diatribe, she added; to tirade or not to tirade, she thought. On this or on something else--to be someone else. How can anyone be other than who she is? She asked. The tirades I go on and on with are not here the words as they are assembled. I wish I had read more when I was younger, she said. She often sounded like she was a lunatic, she said she knows others must think.
which her house stood. Her desk faced the window, not up against the wall, but a few feet from it. She took a breath, an audible one. She stepped back. She closed the curtain. She turned and went for the door. She said to herself under her breath that she was hungry. She wanted lunch. She then said to herself, I watch a seagull on the sands matted by the wakes sweeping the sands again and again. Low Tide? I stand and watch him run up to the water's edge and then rapidly retreat from each on-coming wake . . . it is not summer unless I spend a week in Montauk. She speaks of her boy running laughing playing on the beach. Waves come. I stumble; I totter and almost fall as my feet are sucked under the surf's sands, rapidly rushing, the wake of a wave back to the sea . . . to see or not to sea, what I see in the sea I see with my eyes closed, primordial, foreboding, I used to imagine was the ocean, my fear of the unknown keeping the night light on. I am so glad that I have more than a nightlight on in my head. No one knows who I am, I am certain, she said. Who I am for anyone other than me, who I am for myself when I am myself and when I am not myself. How is anyone ever really not herself? She paused. Who are you in the mirror that you are not in my eyes? She asked. She paused. You are you? She asked. Second person, first person, third person; all the persons and personalities; the selves in the
THE END
IN THE WAKE "He helped carry her–– lead blue, one very humidBerkshire-June morning."
She stopped, imagining she was only going to pause a moment and then continue. She did not continue. She put down her pen. She closed her journal. She picked up Sterne's Tristram Shandy that was on the reading table next to the chair she was sitting in writing. It had arms, the chair, one she had picked up from her father's after he died, her mother said she should take it. She did not open it, the copy of Sterne's novel she had since she took a seminar in the origins of the novel. In a few moments, she put it back from where she picked it up. She walked to the window, her room looked out onto the roofs below the hill on 23
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Self she said she remembered having recollected she read in Milton. I am. Woman is. She said, The fool's question begs why, why, all the time asking why, why, why once again, he asks with conviction, knowing no doubt as to why he should ask his question why. Every fool faces what he needs to see the way he sees foolishly, seeing what he needs to face, when? Ms. Stephens asked, would ask again. She asked, How could it be otherwise for the fool but to see as he knows he sees what he needs to see the way he has said to himself time and again and again, no gain, the ironies we speak without knowing them . . . nothing is the same, ever the same, identical has nothing to do with identity in spite of what every father thinks for his son. But what is the same; truth finds its expression in tautologies, I am I; I am you? Puzzled. Angular features--she had sharp features but an uncommon what some might call beauty, yet others an unusual attractiveness, either of course admitting that her good looks were both uncommon and unconventional. What else was it that Ms. Stephens was going to say on the subject of being a fool, something she did and at other times did not count herself as one, a fool, yes, she said, The fool denies all in losing the arsenal of his fear, my fear, I have said before that fears are not to be rejected but held close, understood, I should have said stood under, she said. She said so, I know; I recollect her having said the same, words repeated often,
monkey hear, monkey say. It was an afternoon in Madrid, the temperature was 114F, we were on our way to the Prado. It was the day we saw the Goyas that were called Black, Ms. Stephens said. I do get to say what she said, what she has chosen to say I then choose to relay. Who wrestles with himself except in the dark? She asked. Who knows what he knows, his way among people too strange for him to see himself in, she said, To see himself through? What reflections, those refractions, friends and loved ones are prisms for our light? She asked. Is that true? She paused. What Ms. Stephens says, she says with pen and paper, often times though thinking out loud in her room overlooking the hill down to her neighbors she on occasions sees and says hello to without much conversation. Speech is ephemeral; writing? Permanence? The sun is approaching noon. The skies are clear. The blue is crisp. The blue is pristine. The sky is unspoiled by humidity. It is dry today. It is as dry as sand today. Blue as when there is nearly 0% humidity, you know. I do. No clouds to speak of except thin wisps of cirrus . . .
THE END
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way she is happy. Really, she is . . . this is already too much for a person that most people who know now will forget in time. He does not mind her diversionary tactics at times; she has had a special dispensation for denial. He really can't stand that she can't stand when she is happy; it makes her uncomfortable, like being in strange surroundings. He only likes her enough to tolerate her when she is sad and depressed. He can only show love for the woman she is when she is happy, but sad and depressed what she is most comfortable with, most familiar with, her mother being nothing she has ever imagined her to be, or says to others, only wonderful . . . like the parent who tells everyone he meets how brilliant his idiot son is, never the word idiot passing his lips, no longer in his head, this imaginary parent of a kind that has to lie to himself because every one like him he surrounds himself with has this penchant for lying, lying, lying; that's all they ever do, wear masks on masks, the masks every human wears by nature . . . yes, human nature . . . but then masks on masks, which is why everyone who has ever dealt with people has determined that people like this are two faced. She only wants him around to berate or belittle as she does every day without her being aware enough or strong enough or secure enough to admit that that is exactly what she does every day; yes, day in and day in again and again and again, over and over ten times at least every day or more, sometimes ten times in an hour, for sure he is, out of her mouth, asshole, piece of shit, idiot, disgusting, everything her mother
HOW TO MAP THE WORLD . . . with the life of a woman I have always loved maps and the idea of map-making, charting the world, pawing pages and pages of atlases I kept on the dining room table I did not eat on, one book an extra large format book you could only use on a table; about 3 by 2 feet, 3 by 4 when opened on the dining room table. So did he, love maps, when he was a boy, the many atlases he kept in bookcases, and the maps on his bedroom walls, running his tongue over her body, flesh, skin he used to say . . . he loved the taste of her skin, the texture of her skin, tongue to skin, a full mouth of her in the morning, who does not prefer sex in the morning to the night, how every day he used to imagine guiding his tongue, tracing her skin, a new kind of topography he understood. Happy people aren't worth the trouble to write about them. He too is happy, you could say, he would say at the end of his life with her that we are not going to get to, no. Why should you imagine that you need anymore than what you have been given, when, as others too have said, another me and another me and another me, each of us coming to the last syllable of his recorded speech . . . yes, when the author too has said many times: There is nothing outside the text. Of course, Beyond this point, there be dragons This way she has of turning every opportunity to be happy into misery is the only 25
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said, has said and sometimes continues to say to her; a martyr she becomes in a selfaggrandized image of herself, what she needs as antidote to the poison .. . something contrary to the polarized image she carries with her into the pit, the hole, the abyss of her soul. Everything in there is black. No one would want to be her; no one she has ever known has ever envied her. To be sad or not to be sad has not become her to be or not moment. She is and that is enough for her---she does not question her sadness, except she does blame others around her for her sadness, her unhappiness. It has always been quite simple for her: the origin of her unhappiness is only a moment away, seizing the idea that others want nothing more than to see her unhappy, that others close to her conspire to make her unhappy, or keep her unhappy, the latter being as close to self-knowledge as she comes. She only needs him, she would say (as you might hear her say, as others would hear her say, whenever someone could catch her talking aloud to herself, which she does not do often enough for this catching her to be more than just a possibility, a remote one at that [so why then the aside, the insertion in parentheses?]), if she were to think about this, which she is never going to do, when I am sad. When she is not sad and depressed she does not notice her husband, herself looking to everything or everyone other than he for her diversions. Her husband only loves her when she is sad and depressed, which she is enough of the times for many others to think that she
is a sad and depressed woman, but that her husband must love her very, very much.
THE END
Anonymity, She Said Prologue i Anonymity, she said, He says (something he wishes he understood better than he can, better than he suspects he cannot). ii He says, I wish I understood you better. She says, No you don't. You say you do, but you don't, not really, not ever, only words you know I might want to hear. He says, Why do you say that? iii Another lame account amounting to nothing, and you will say the same tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, every day after day in petty paces kept, just as it was true yesterday. You make my skin crawl when you speak as you do about me, about wanting to understand me, about what you think I want to hear, syllable after syllable, and I wish I were deaf, she says, snuffing everything out in me as if I were a candle. I Thinking about something, about its meaning, what it means, what it intends to convey, to indicate, or to refer to (a particu26
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lar thing or notion); to signify. What then is it to be mean or not to be mean, all meaning therefore in the meaning, its intention, although intentionality should no more restrict meaning than etymology should, which does not mean we should ignore what the parameters of intention were in what a word means, or what a word's etymology is that could then help us to understand its meaning. What an author intends should not preclude interpretation; author intention is still a proscription of sorts. All words carry past residue of lost meaning. To define is to set limits; here the limits of understanding meet the limits of knowing? To know her or not to know her, that might be question to ask, I could ask, would ask if . . . I am genuinely asking if semantics is governed by epistemology in an absolute way? More questions. She examines what she knows, what she thinks--in fact she has said that she does not know what she thinks unless she writes, puts it on paper--she has said enough times in the past that the way she was taught writing was a way in which thinking gets taught. Yes, she would insist, there is a way to think, a how to think. I know that there are too many people who believe otherwise, but then listen to them talk, listen to them thinking--read what some people write. It is frightening, she would say in other words. But this notion of anonymity, what it is , how it can be understood, what its significance has been for women historically, as she would say, is important to flesh out, give it something it has been denied . . . is that what she is doing here has done here,
in these pages of word after word after . . . all of this is and so on and so on. What is it that she has done here can only be answered by reading what she has written here and elsewhere, put in words for you to understand . . . but mostly for her to know what she thinks and how she thinks because it is impossible for her to know exactly what she thinks she believes without having written, a dialectic of selfhood she would say she has written said almost similarly just the other day--I do not record her, although I am a very, very close friend and confidant, whatever that means. What she says she says how she says and remains completely inimitable. As for a woman's anonymity, what it is, how it is, when and where it is has been seems as if it will be . . . more and so much less at the same time is said, has been said, needs to be said. The questions she raises she does so without equivocation. She is not apologizing for her opinions which are more than mere opinions--the mere-ness of any opinion is not in the opining but in the opinion of those prejudiced against opinions in themselves. "How many methods of discovery do we employ in our self examinations?" She used to ask often. "To discover is the opposite of cover, but is it to uncover what is as is? How much woman is she when she is, woman?" She used to ask; the used to here does not mean she no longer does so because she does and will do so, I know. Virginia said so, she said, that a woman is anonymous, or that the history of anonymous in literature was the history of woman's literature or that the history of 27
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woman's literature was the history of anonymous, but then there has always been a kind of anonymity for women of women in all societies, some more than in others for longer. Can you say without offending anyone that black Americans have suffered only what women have suffered here or there longer or shorter, greater or lesser, woman has been the prime nigger of the world, and continues to be in many, many places still. "I repeat myself, I know, when I say that a woman is and in this is everything is. Yes, she is; this woman or that woman, firstly and lastly, is. What she is is another endeavor; who, when, where, why and how are all of them together subtraction," she said, and so far how can you disagree? I do not. You should not if you wish to keep your mind opened--and yes, if you disagree with her ad hoc then you are close minded--if you disagree with her on principles that are apart from her saying what she is saying being what she is who she is then this too might be closed minded, I mean what is there to disagree with in her words herein phrased as they have been? "I am, I say," she said and would say and has said often, in one or another context, but mostly in her talks about being and existence and the differences there between the two. "I am not this or that when my being is concerned," she said. "I am; I exist, although I know that to exist and to be are not exactly the same thing." To be without the complement not to be. Whether named or unnamed, this woman is, she is. Hamlet's soliloquy herein referenced is also every woman's soliloquy. She
is not further removed from Hamlet's Cartesian inquiry than I am because she is a woman. "How is Hamlet not relevant to me?" [You should pause here briefly. Take a breath.] II "Now, the history of anonymous is the history of woman; or is it that the history of woman is the history of anonymity?" She asked.I have asked as well. You should have asked. She believes and has believed for a long time that this is an investigation worthy of everyone's pursuit. Nonetheless, as she has said, has asked, "Woman is anonymous? She is in anonymity? Anonymity is a place history has reserved for woman? The history herein is one and the same whether it is written or unwritten, irrespective of whether or not there is a historiography to support it in the way all historiography has a way of aping Moses descending from Sinai," she wrote. "How much is left unknown at the end of a relationship?" she has asked in this and in other contexts; it has appeared in many pieces written by her. "What is a relationship where the woman or the man or both are perpetually becoming other than each is. How much do the happiest spouses really know about one another, or the unhappiest (we do imagine misery is wiser which might explain the propensity for misery we all have). A lover dies, a spouse is put in her tomb and who was she? No one was; the one who is is not who she will be when she becomes who she was. But traditionally 28
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woman has remained a modified man in the collective unconscious of men. In this, they are part not whole, except of course in the homophonic, hole. Women then are . . . what? What? What are they? What is she? [Who is more important than what?] No, I demand as she has said I should demand that they are not what, but who. So then, Who are they? 'They' is too big to manage? Are they? As I am we, woman is they? Does this make any sense? I imagine it does, but then this I I am is macrocosmic to the many that make up the subject complement we in I am we. I know the arguments for I am we are rooted in understanding a selfhood that is plural, a many selves Self, I recall my father having said Milton had said. Every person should be able to say this with conviction, I am we. It is true for each of us, but then that is not exactly what I am saying when I say, A woman is they. This woman here, this woman now, the one in front of me with a world of inquiry and response between us, potentially, is what, is who, is when or where, these are the dimensions of this they she is when we know, like I am we, she is they . . ." to continue with what she has written (what she wrote) might be fruitful, but space here is a consideration and quotes handled correctly--or should I say appropriately--will suffice to reveal something more than just a bit of what she thinks. "Place and time as much as the things we are or the persons we are, become the dimensions of our world projected outwardly toward the world, into the world; this world, we know, is a stage. Yes, each of us
to its many parts. But the selves of the Self are microcosmic to the greater Self we are in its singular totality. These are thrust outward and take place around us in the effect of details, she wrote. "The I, I am is I am; the I am is macrocosmic to all details of our world or any world or all the worlds together in the one larger greater all encompassing world we mistakenly think is larger than us because the physical dimensions are so much greater than each of us is," she has written. III "The [fore mentioned] 'they' inside her is encompassed by the she we use for her, this one and only woman who is herself and every woman as well, both, yet sometimes neither, sometimes someone else. All the time she is who she is whenever she is anyone she is, all the masks she wears inside or outside dependent on the ones worn inside[,]"she wrote. "[A]ll the parts she plays, the players she becomes--in the sense Shakespeare asserts--they are, she is; women and woman are. That's it. She is. I am. They, them, those people, women. We know no one, not really--who do we know? I ask. Do we know the people whose minds we cannot know completely, whose lives have been lived independently of ours, whose eyes we do not see the world through, whose shoes we do not wear, whose ears we do not hear with, listen with? I ask; I am really asking. Examine this . . . [,]" she said. "What?" She asked. "Who do we know? How many of our selves in the Self remain hidden? 29
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How can we know anyone? So how could we know any woman?" She had written before she wrote again what you have herein. "Who is she, again, the question gets asked and if asked . . . I contend that asking is not always to look for an answer, and not every response is an answer as we should know from their etymologies, although I do not want to enforce meaning through etymology. And oftentimes asked without the intention of waiting for an answer, a particularly annoying contemporary trait we have all acquired. But how many of us avoid asking any question like this at all? Responses are not answers; I've asserted this above and before in other essays. There are plenty of responses we give, we feign attachment to or connection with, but the answers we seek--do not answer a question with a question she used to say, a woman I once knew. No question is an answer, yet we offer questions as answers, responding as we do not with the rhetorical questions that answer, but the questions in responses that avoid answering. Everything to avoid answering. Irrespective of any answer to any question, She is. To respond is not to answer but to put again, to place once more. To put once more is a placement nonetheless, it is a choice of arrangement," she has written. "A woman is" should be the first line of discussion when any thought of her right to choose anything arises. In her is, there is no longer any subtracting devices such as who, what, when, where, how or even why. None of these questions are pertinent or relevant to her inalienable right to choose.
There should be no equivocation for anyone sane enough to want to save a woman from the unnecessary horrors that existed before Roe versus Wade. I've said this in essays before, and I will reiterate it again and again in essays to come. There were horrors before the law got behind a woman's right to choose safe medical procedures rather than the rock or the hard place in back alleys, and yes, there were back alleys; curtain rods and all that sort of letting the air in. I'll never forget the end of Goddard's Masculin et Femminin, or Hemmingway's "Hills Like White Elephants," where the word abortion is never mentioned. What am I saying? How can I say anything for her? How can I not? How can I afford to disallow myself the ability to speak rationally for woman? Defending a woman's rights is an obligation I take seriously, which sometimes sounds as if the one asserting the severity of the responsibility misses the point. I assure you I do not, but then who am I to you or for you? I do have an obligation to defend a woman's rights as I do anyone's rights because I exist as a moral being. Not to defend human rights in any way anywhere is to reduce one's self in one's moral stature. Even if it is at a dinner table in face of indifference or diffidence or ignorance or prejudice, she has written, we are reading. There will always be dilemmas for her, even if aborting an embryo is legally sanctioned. This is not to say that legally sanctioning abortion is a fool's errand. To each woman her own personhood, her own psychology rooted in her biology, her physiolo30
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gy and her experiences? She has reason; she is capable of reasoning, of being rational or irrational; capable of being passionate or dispassionate. She will have different levels of education, different jobs or careers; her income will vary, as will her home situation, her relationship status, her religion, and so on and so on. But the roller coaster she rides will be hers to ride when and where she chooses. "To decide or not to decide should be her question and hers alone. I have shifted gears quickly, but we cannot see any effort to control abortion or the availability of safe medical procedures for induced miscarriage as anything other than controlling a woman's body, her right to reproduce or not, which when centered in the opinions of men might be nothing less other than Uterus envy. It was through the womb of a woman that in Christian Theology, God becomes man; the Son of God, begotten not made before time and creation is gestated as the incarnation through the uterus of Mary," she has written, has said in other words some of what has been put down here, words, words and more words she has formed reformed, shaped---what was it our friend Addie used to say about words? Shapes to fill a lack.
come other than true? Roe versus Wade is just as strong in support of pro-choice whether or not the trial was justified on its factual merits. A trial is just that, an essay on a thesis, and whether it was factually justified does not undermine the results of the debate. The text could have been fabricated entirely by a novelist and placed in a novel. Would that make the argument irrelevant, invalid, sociologically? The argument would maintain ethical, moral and sociological veracity through--even in spite of--its verisimilitude. Fictional truths have as much valency as actual. I should say that veracity in fiction is deeper than verisimilitude; it carries metaphysical weight; it has epistemological density. But this is not solely the point. Hypotheses are presented all the time in politics and law; the sacred law of our land delivered by Divine Providence, itself a holiness above every insipid conception made by illiterate minds twisted in their bleak deserted imaginings of a God whose baseness as a Lord can only muster an angry call to human intelligence to submit humanity and all humane being to a fearful jealousy, born of barbaric cruelty, fueling a misogyny greater than all traditional hatreds of woman, coupled everywhere it has spread like a virulent venereal disease of the mind, all vicious, all violent, all consumed by hatred, severed forever from any connection to the One True Transcendental Holiness, a Wisdom of Love, Compassion, Redemption and Forgiveness, way beyond the lame and guttural recitations of a most contemptible and corrupted re-connection with God . . . and all of the United States when subject to rati-
IV "Now, if Roe versus Wade were a complete fabrication, if it were a docudrama, would that mean that the majority ruling was somehow made weaker, argumentatively? Would the truth of it, whether true or not in the most pedantic sense of trueness be31
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fication was a hypothesis, then subjected to the most critical examinations. It took a great deal of intellectual effort to get The Constitution ratified. The majority ruling in the Roe versus Wade does not become invalid for us epistemologically or ethically, no; it remains valid in its thesis. Nonetheless, the prime thesis here in any discussion of a woman's right to choose is a Woman is. Here must be a first and last step in all reasoning about human beings (human being, being humane), and for human beings, that asserts loudly and clearly He is; she is; thus, I am. This would be the primary and teleological determination for all ethical considerations of each and every one of us, and there has to be an us. Why does a woman deserve respect for her person, for her choices, for the integrity of her selfhood?" She asked, she wrote, has written in these exact words, although rearranged now and then for reasons other than just avoiding redundancy. Or . . . there are always ors? In others the same nevertheless . . . what? If you were her, one thing known or understood; if you were I, what then? "Because she is, she exists should be First Feminology; her to be following is all of her metaphysics and physics," she has said time in and time out, the same and not the same. I wish she were the kind of woman . . . what? What do I wish specifically? I could or I could not imagine her; I might or I might not speak her into being, an existence existing like a tree exists in its existence--but
a tree is not as a woman is. She has being; the tree does not. If no one is present to hear a woman falling, does her having fallen make a sound? Epilogue We understand this is often too much for any one person to handle, all that he is, that he has been, is being, will be, will have been, might have been, could be, should be, would be if or when; what has happened to should have been? I should have been what, could have been . . . I will have been; I would have been-then what? Author's Afterword Who is she? You ask. Who is the narrator? You ask. Who am I? I would not ask; you might. Who are you? I should ask. I could, whether I am who I am at the moment writing this, or whatever I become, thus am, as I speak this to you; the you who hears it or reads and the you, you are every day, I assume, but these assumptions are often in error. There is a real world you and a you who reads the text not as a real you, you, but a you, you become in the text. You could spend some time sorting all of this out; but I do not us spect that you would want to, so leave what you have read as it is and o not consider this author me wearing a mask of authorship for you wearing a mask of readership. It's all about the world and all of it a stage and all of us 32
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merely players, many players, a player playing many parts, parts together equalling what whole, an entirety rhyming with hole, the great abyss we all fall into?
pretty sure I have heard some such flourish of elephants trumpeting their arrival or approach. ii I see you reading a book I have read before. I feel as if you know something of me I haven't wanted you to know. I don't ask myself why you are in the room at this moment. It is unimportant why you are in the room--I want to stay, I want to remain still. The rain outside today is torrential. Rain outside a window in your life is not incidental. I read my life as I would a novel, as I do a film. I want to leave the room. I want new toast and coffee? After you finish the toast and tea I made for you after the toast and tea I had made for you.
THE END RAIN OUTSIDE A WINDOW Outside a Window in a Movie . . . and it was raining and raining and raining and there was nothing anyone could do about it or in it. Prologue It had begun to rain again. i The rain was coming down in sheets it seemed at one moment, in torrents the next, gutters were awash, overflowing. When in sheets you could see the folds in the body of the rain like curtains in a breeze; then the skies opened and the strength of the falling rain broke the curtain and just poured like a gargantuan faucet. We had to close the window that looked out from the bedroom onto the mini courtyard below, the window facing east, as we have to make sure to close the curtains at night before sleep so the morning sun does not come blaring through like some kind of elephant trumpet flourish, yes, the morning sun like a stampede of elephants, if sight can equal sound , and not like the elephant stampedes you hear in movies, but the real ones you can hear on safari or from one of those nature shows documenting the ways of habitats far from here in New York. I am
iii Windows on the world, windows peering, windows looking out; I watch the people sitting below my bedroom window on the bench in the mini courtyard. I recall having written a piece about a room, my room, perhaps. I no longer remember if the piece began as a short story or an essay, whichever one does not matter now. What I am writing about is having written something I called "A Window," a short piece I found among a collection of writings, and inasmuch as my first person narrative fiction has many of the same features of syntax, diction and voice that my essays have, it is difficult for me to discern just where this piece had its origins,
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in prose fiction or in expository prose nonfiction. This suggests that there might be something in writing we could call expository fiction?
movie is never incidental; nothing of all the images collectively adding up to something in the frame are incidental, not really, and if they are placed there without thought, without having decided before hand what their purpose will serve in the summation of the shot, then so much the worse or accidentally better for the makers of the film.
iv I understand that these do not matter now, not for what I am focussing on herein, that is, the window I use to look out onto the world, a world, what world in what context with what populations and landscapes to fill it? The world is only what we see--what do I see? To see or not to see--what I understand is what I stand under whether or not I can see. Tiresias sees other than how I do, although I do in ways he cannot. And this is certainly not only what I see, but how much more could it be if seen the way I have been taught to see, and we have been taught to see, instructed in our seeing, grown accustomed to seeing what our eyes might tell us we do not see if we were to listen to our sight alone and apart from outside influences, every influence a kind of influenza? The world and myself are a symbiosis.
vi But how to or why to when to where to what to do? All of them not necessarily in this order--what order though? How to decide the order of the questions, we like to imagine that we must ask who, what, when, where, why and how--does how really come after why in some pre-notioned order of how to ask questions, we do though imagine that we must ask who what when where what . . . and then how and why not necessarily in that order, sub-orders within larger orders, set theory and theories of concentricity, what questions I will ask against the questions I should ask. vii I made new toast. I poured more tea from freshly boiled water. viii You say you have to go to the store; you don't ask me if I want anything. I wait for you to come back. Infinite possibility is a kind of living death. One year later you still have not returned from the store. I imagine that everything I said to myself you too had said to yourself. I have begun to think of other things when I used to think of where
v Am I to write on window-ness? This is more like it, what windows represent, and what this window in my room represents, or could represent, any window, yes; but my window, certainly; and what windows look out on, the scene, the view, the framing. What do I see when I look out my window? It is raining now. Rain outside a window in a 34
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you might be. I don't think I will see you tomorrow; I don't wonder anymore if I will.
make about something more substantial is a puzzle . . . how I puzzle things out, solve one or another puzzle in my life in a magazine in a book on an exam.
ix I turned on the water for tea; I turned off the water for tea. I decided to make a pot of coffee instead. I put it on the stove. I looked out the kitchen window to the mid morning sun on the fire escape, shadows of the bars on the fence oblong across the platform. There was a bird's nest atop the cable box outside on the wall that runs perpendicular to the wall my kitchen window is within, I heard the birds chirping--I hear them every morning I sit at the table in the kitchen to have my coffee. I remember the bull fights at Plaza de Torres in Madrid.
xi I will think of you, watching the birds. I will think of you thinking of me, watching the birds . . . time future collides with time present and time present with time past, multi dimensional being, to see beginning and simultaneously is a godly vision. xii I am thinking of you while I look at the birds and I am thinking of you setting your eyes on the birds, and I see you as I have before, with you are thinking, how you look while you think.
x I see I will leave you in years many years from now. I don't know when or if it will be in my lifetime. If we were together forever, you said, that would be torture, horror on horror, you said, eternally yours is better. I don't know what this means to leave someone after one's lifetime, my lifetime--will you leave me when we're dead. I don't know if I can take you after we are dead. To love someone beyond your death. Hamlet realizes too late? I think he always knew, was always in control of his method; yes, methinks there was method in my madness, all the way through, everywhere I feigned . . . to think or not to think, what seems to me, all thinking about keeping up appearances? What seems to me is what I think; thinking only ever about appearance, how to
xiii The birds are small, I see you watching birds in my mind, my mind now preoccupied with extensions, what my mind will permit me to consider, how much of what we are able to think has to have an infrastructure for the thinking to held up, we could say, matter accretes around gravitational centers, somebody once told be that gravity is the displacement of space and how bodies act and react in that warped environment-I've been in some pretty warped environments. I see us I imagine watching the bulls and the matadors on the sands. xiv I think of us. I think of how we have been, how we have acted toward each other, how we have been you and I and sometimes an 35
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entity apart from you or I, this something else, we . . . I am I and you are you and you and I are you and I but then we are we apart from yet a part of this you and I that stands differently for everyone toward everyone with everyone, no?
where I am . . . I am here and I am there, here and there are mutual, reciprocal, interchangeable, connected. xviii I remember having left the room. I remember having gone to the kitchen. I remember having sat at the table. I remember having attended my toast and tea, your toast and tea, the toast I had made for you with the tea now lukewarm, and the toast cold and hard. I don't like lukewarm tea. I hate lukewarm coffee. The cold toast I give to the birds that flock outside our window. No birds today on the fire escape platform outside the kitchen window. I think I want more coffee. I'll go and make some with the espresso machine we bought how many years ago already has it been I cannot say at Macy's. I remember having done all of these before having made new tea.
xv I think of the toast. I wonder what other visions I have held of you that I could have held for you for me, the where we are going, the where we have been, where we were going, to go or not to go, and the how long it will take us to get there when we do go. Everything seems to be taking forever to do. xvi Eternity is now, now is the only door onto eternity. Infinity is not eternity. You can't get closer to the eternal by living forever, no closer than you are now. Forever is never reachable, no one can count as high as infinity. Infinite time, infinite space, either of these is not possible. The skies were clear and blue, deep blue, a jewel blue I heard me say in another incarnation I brought to the present in mind in my journal, the one I kept mostly in the mornings having coffee on Gran Via a few blocks from our hotel.
xix She liked tea, had tea often, drank tea in the afternoon or in the evening, not drinking coffee after morning . . . I never used to do this, drink coffee after the morning, but now, recently--what means recently, I mean, what is recent geologically and what is recent for the whole of a life and what is recent for this year, and what is recent for any term considered determined delineated; concentric circles reverberating into other concentric circles reverberating into yet other concentric circles, Venn diagrams of concentric circles overlapping, one another?
xvii Possibilities cannot be infinite for anyone living in finite space or finite time. No. A person can, though, from his limited finite world, reach the eternal. Eternity is a transcendental reality that uncovers its pathway here, now, in this place at this moment 36
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xx I am in the bedroom. I move forward from where I stand. I pause, I turn back, I walk back around to the window by your side of the bed. I remember our room this summer, a month ago almost already. I see me in position to look out the window of our room, past the balcony, out over the beach to the ocean. I watch the waves coming and going, a series of back and forth, undulant curve rising tumultuous fall to the shore then again out ocean seawater you used to say was what made you feel whole. I look to the sky gray in all directions, no rain, below the horizon I imagine it tucked. I hear you turn another page in the book I watch you reading. I look carefully to see if you see me. I remember you sitting the other day turning the pages of a fashion magazine in French. You cannot read French. You asked me to translate some passages. Some I could, others were very difficult. I couldn't. I tried. I had moderate success. You did not seem very pleased. I said nothing more to you.
not clean the windows. You add without having been prompted that you plan to take the windows out of their frames and wash them this weekend. I ask you if you want me to help, and you say before I finish my offer of help that of course you want me to help. xxii How is it I could not understand you wanted to help me, only want to help me, you must wonder why I cannot get it, no I do not get that you only want to help and cannot help but imagine that you are either evil or not in control of some really fucked up way of thinking--evil to him who evil thinks, I remember and drop all this nonsense, as I then call it, about what it is you must be doing when you annoy the shit out of me, mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. xxiii I hear the light pitter-pat of the rain on my air-conditioner in the bedroom window. . . it was torrential just a few minutes ago. The streets were awash. I like that word, 'awash.'
xxi The skies gray in all directions to the horizon. I walk to the window. I want to close the window. You say, Don't close the window. I turn away from the window. I walk to the other side of the bed, my side of the bed, the side of the bed next to the wall on the side of the building facing North-Northwest. You say you want to look out the window. I do not ask why you cannot do that with the window closed. You add to the discourse that the window is dirty and needs to be cleaned. I do not ask you why you do
xxiv You say you do not want to finish the tea when I ask you if you want more tea from the tea that I made for you in the pot we bought together at IKEA I don't remember when. I do not ask you why you do not want more tea, or why you did not finish the tea I brought for you with the toast you also did not finish. I usually ask you if something is wrong; I do not do so this morning. I note this to myself, thinking to myself that I have 37
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been changed by you, by your persistent desire to know why I need to know all the time what the matter is.
xxvii The weather in Madrid was beautiful, even the day it reached 119 F. No rain. I did not expect rain. I don't remember from High School Spanish how much rain Madrid would get annually.
xxv I think I want to go to the kitchen to make new toast, have more coffee. I am always thinking of more coffee in the morning until I cannot have any more, until I am physically unable to bring the cup to my lips. I have had coffee this morning already. I always have several cups of espresso, black, no sugar, the regular coffee cup cups you hold by the hook, filled halfway up, maybe about two espresso cup sizes.
xxviii Like I have said, rain outside a window in a movie, like rain in a dream, is not incidental. xxix I do not recollect if I heard the bull's, I must have heard them snort, I imagine that I cold that I did but I do not I am not able to recollect hearing them snort as they must have snorted on the sands in the arena which is like saying I was laying on the sands on the sand on the beach, no?
xxvi I watched a movie the other day, sometime last week, and in the movie the rain was pouring outside torrentially and in the movie you got the impression that the rain was not incidental, that rain in movies is never incidental, that rain in movies has the same interpretive value as it does in dreams, it is a purgation image, and that when you see rain in a movie, there is something being purged or cleansed or in need of cleansing and remains an irony in the film, that there is something the characters or a character is not getting at or getting to or not saying that he should, something that would amount to a catharsis, and that that is important and that that must be understood, nd probably is understood whether we put it into words or not, and that this might be universal everywhere the same, as human as is bread, as polygenetic too.
xxx What else do I have in the way of expressing the conditions for rain, how it rains when it rains and what rain represents not in nature but in the scene, the mise-en-scene of rain, in a film, on film, in a book, a story where the rain figures symbolically? How to read rain? xxxi I used to read my life the way you would a novel. xxxii That was something else for the people in my life, living my life with others this way.
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xxxiii What I see, I have seen, I then can say I saw; I could then say, as I then said , that I had seen what I had; although, what I did see then was only what I had been taught to see when seeing is was more about closing one's eyes than opening them.
TATOO I I do not recall the last time I said the "Hail Mary" with any devotion; nor do I the last time I recited it aloud in Latin, as I had been taught to do by my dad, a Puccini-loving cop from Brooklyn who used to walk the Fulton Street beat and was the 80th precinct mid-wife. I recall the times--what? What acts events persons wants desires needs do I recall? All of them or some of them at least in fragments now? What of or what about my Dad and I do I recall, could I recollect . . . together sitting around recollecting times he delivered babies in cabs, on buses, in coffee shops or other stores; or on the sidewalk on Fulton Street in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Too many people did not call an ambulance, instead my Dad or the Precinct, which then meant my Dad if he were on duty. Do we do so today, call an ambulance; or do some, when possible, call car service? I also recall--and you do remember that recalling and remembering and recollecting are all of them not the same things, recollecting not standing for another or the yetother. Yes, I know, all recollecting is remembering, but not all remembering is recollecting---brandy and cognac, no? How was it that I had adapted the Latin of the "Hail Mary" to my own purpose? Devotion in prayer? Devotion in sex. What time was that when . . . when what? Having fallen in love, as I imagined then, all about love was in the realm of imagination; the pathway to eterni-
xxxiv I see you I saw you I will see again if I think of you, you are still vivid in my mind how I recollect you is still in details there will come a time I imagine when I will not be able to recollect you except vaguely, perhaps in silhouette or soft focus, so much of my life is in soft focus, out of focus photography is very close to how memory fades loses its sharpness. xxxv The rain outside my window again today falling in torrents, sheets from the sky like sometimes I see sheets of water down the wall perpendicular to the wall with my bedroom window that used to be our bedroom window. Epilogue It had rained before; it was raining again.The rain continued.
THE END
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ty. And not only with a local corner grocery store owner's daughter--but I did do so with her, fall in love, at least . . . Her tits were glorious, yes GLORIA IN EXCELSIS. I did imagine I had a crush on her for reasons other than her tits. When I first saw her I imagine I recollect I stared at her tits, stared at them before my dad had the opportunity to tell me not to stare a woman in the tits, yes, that looking her in the eye was preferable than staring her in the tits. But in-love, yes, of course I was in-love as we think we understand falling in love, to fall or not to fall could be a question every youth must answer or ask. I was with her in mind and in mind with her tits; or, her breasts. No, I preferred to say tits, Ave Mammales Plena Gratia. Breast meat was what you had on roast chicken. What you paid extra for in pieces at KFC. What the hell is he saying? I had no notion that a fixation on a woman's tits might be less than how I should have considered her--I was fourteen and a nearly pornographic perception of women fit my preoccupation with sexuality when not singularly fixated on sex, sex and sex, erect dick in hand--taking your life in your hands was something I understood. You certainly should not stare a woman in the cunt, unless naked as she has chosen to be with you, then an upfront appraisal of her cunt is in order, and mostly, as you will find out, because there are still too many women who have never looked at their cunts, or others who have not looked at them and said beautiful when they did happen to examine their vaginas. I cannot tell
you how many times I thought about fucking when I was fourteen, how many dreams I had had about sex, although none of them were wet. I was a boy, a male Homo-Sapiens, and as I have said, one of fourteen--what was it like then I think I remember although it is difficult to recollect; what is it now that I can say, need to say, about what, though? Her blonde curly hair? Her glorious . . . yes, Gloria Mammalibus in Excelsis? It was not that I could not consider her as a human being, fully autonomous and with complete sovereignty over body and mind-I was fourteen and overwhelmed by desire, and this girl's tits were part of the ero-geneity. Whenever a girls tits were full enough, cleaving the pen was a sport I loved to play . . . the desire to fuck is love, I have to interject. I'm tired of bourgeois morality and residual fucking Puritans when it comes to sex. Recall all the ways we call sex dirty or nasty or some other really disturbing metaphor or grotesque image attached . . . Puritans and prudes; and look at pop culture. That should tell you how uptight we are about sex and sexuality; if we weren't, we'd handle it differently. I want to fuck means I want to love. Nonetheless, nevertheless, moreover, however, yet . . . he was short, the grocery store owner, her father--and this has nothing to do with his daughter's tits in earlyseventies tight sweaters . . . beautiful, marvelous, gorgeous, fully formed, the arc in those sweaters, I wished even then that I could sculpt. God they must have been beautiful.
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He had thick glasses; his daughter did not; he had black hair still at his age, and his twenty year old daughter did not . . . and if she had had glasses, I still would have only seen her absolutely glorious tits, or so I said later when describing her, or trying to describe her--I do remember when I was sixteen, my father saying never stare a woman in the tits, always look her in the eye. If she wants you, there will be plenty of time for looking at her tits later. My Dad also said, let the woman choose--he later told me that that's because the sex will be better if she has chosen rather than having relented. Tits were either glorious or not glorious. If not glorious, they could still beautiful, but maybe only pretty, which is not to say that pretty cannot be more attractive than beautiful, if you understand what I mean. They might equally be sweet, the tits in question, or luscious, yes, tits can be luscious, delicious even (and of course, either in the mouth or in the eye, and sometimes literally in the eye without piercing the closed eyelid, although pushed by an erect nipple). Beauty, deliciousness, sweetness, is in the eye as well as in the mouth--the paths to God are varied. How could I not say how glorious her tits were? Exclaiming, I was, proclaiming throughout all the land to to all the inhabitants thereof, Liberty, Beauty, Mammaries. I was 14 when I declared to myself under my breath leaving the store, Gloria Mammalibus in Excelsis as I have already said here. I had the capacity to express women's tits in religious terms: Hail Mammaries full of grace, the spirit of the Lord is
with you, and blessed are you on everywoman, and blessed is the fruit of the desire you inspire. I have many more--I went through the entire Catholic missal revising hymns and prayers pornographically, or in some instances, just in praise of Sex, in praise of love . . . I want tits and nipples and cunt and lips and earlobes and necks and collar bones and armpits and tongues and fingers and palms and belly buttons and protruding hipbones . . . and the clitoris, don't forget the clitoris . . . I remember an episode of a very popular television sit-com that hinged on the latter's rhyming with Dolores. A strange metonymy takes place in pornography, part for whole, or part equals whole, which equals woman in some form of extreme close-up, eclipsing the woman in her entirety. Yes, whole becomes part; part in this extremis becomes her hole? The hole of a woman is the whole of the woman in pornography, but this is not what this is here--the focus is on inspiration, how desire becomes act. II I used to go to this grocery store owner for ham sandwiches, Boar's Head with tomato and mayo on Italian bread. I recalled something of my Catechism. It had no bearing in my desire for her tits that she was Jewish; I did not imagine praising her tits in Latin phrases some old women in my neighborhood still used for God was an affront to anything or anyone. I am sure there were Jews who knew Latin. Human tits were human tits and needed to be praised. Ave Mammales Plena Gratia . . . 41
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Her tits, they really were glorious, magnificent, how many times am I going to say the same thing, repetition becomes motif. I closed my eyes and roamed over her tits in devotion, a kind of chivalric romance of the tits--how many times I imagined my lips around the aureole . . . now we're getting into soft porn? Interesting how this is also used for halos, no? Saintly tits--I prayed with renewed vigor when before the statues of saints as I knew, though, would pale in comparison if ever I could kneel before her tits. Kneeling, praying, praising God, the Queen of Heaven and large firm tits. I would like to say that I lit candles in church in prayer to her tits, but I am not so sure this happened that way, how I used to light votives in church before asking for intercession.I couldn't very well ask Jesus or Mary too help me in my quest fro her tits, a kind of quester hero I imagined myself, Yvain, Perceval, my Holy Grail was this girl's tits, kneeling and sucking cunt has been a devotional act, one that has always brought me closer to God, who is a woman, by the way. I believe in one God, God the Mother, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. Hagia Sophia became my intellectual mistress when I was an undergraduate. God, I can still see her tits today--yes, I thanked God for her tits. God was the author of all beauty in the world and at that moment, her tits were two of the most beautiful things in the world. Now, in front of me almost--no, I cannot see her face, nor can I see her in tight jeans--but those sweaters and those tits . . . he was Jewish, the man who owned the store, as I have
already said. I knew an Irish-American girl I had an infatuation with at the same time-her tits were--I'm looking for another word to describe her tits. I do not want to use the same word, glorious, but I guess I'll have to--yes, her tits were also glorious when I was fourteen. I don't wonder what her tits are like today or how much they have sagged, or if they have. Whose were the first tits I ever had in hand, and not with sweaters between? I am not really asking. I think I know, can close my eyes and see, darkness and light, an opening iris like in silent films? He had two slicers in his store; one was kosher, the other was non. Occasionally he'd roll up the sleeves of the button down white shirt he always wore, with a tie, black, also always. Yes, always a white shirt covered by an apron; always a tie. I had been in his store I don't recollect how many times before I saw the numbers tattooed on his arm--he did have numbers tattooed on his arm. I don't remember the first time I saw them; really I do not. I do not recall what I said or what I thought. I only recall that I did see them, and I do not know if he saw me when I saw them. I do not have any idea what my face must have looked like--I am not going to venture a guess. I was still more curious what his daughters tits looked like under her sweater and bra than why this man had numbers tattooed on his arm. She had to always wear a bra--her tits were big, must have been heavy--I cannot count how many times I fantasized about them, holding them in hands like scales weighing fruit, of course melons, we would say, did say, often said in 42
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aside among other boys objectifying women because we could easily then, and still do in what we like to think are appropriate places to be inappropriate with those we allow ourselves to be our worst selves, or so we say in an attempt to acknowledge that we know we are doing what we are not supposed to be doing, or so I imagine because I think most people would rather be bad than stupid or ignorant, the latter with or without the connotations we have given it that stand apart from what it speaks in etymology--I do not know if I had ever thought of them, hers as I had imagined them when I finally made it to a pair of naked tits with my hands and lips. The underwire in most bras makes them contraptions of minor torture I concluded the last time I helped my wife shop for a bra. I would never put on my balls anything made for them the way most bras are made for women's tits. It's awful; it's a very subtle misogyny. I do not recall what I said or if I said anything or if I asked anyone anything about the numbers tattooed on his arm. My Uncle Sallie who had spent I forget how many years in the U.S. Navy after World War Two--he was in the Battle of the Leyte Gulf, in the 16-inch gun turrets (the shells were sixteen inches) of the Battleship Iowa--yes, Uncle Sallie had tattoos but not numbers, simple numerals, black, in a line, the grocery store owner's tattoo. I had no idea when I was ten what they meant; I understood the anchor on Uncle Sallie's arm, as I understood the anchor through the globe on my father's ensigna from the United States Marine Corps. He was in the bat-
tles of Guam, Saipan, Okinawa, as well as the occupation of Shandong, China. What does this have to do with this girl's tits? Nothing, really; but . . . I never asked Joe what they meant or why they were there or why anyone would tattoo numerals on the forearm. I am not even sure if I remember that a friend later told me what those numbers meant. I think I recall a friend who has since died telling me; I don't think he knew because he was concerned for history or for Jews. Jews were still curiosities for many in my old neighborhood, still mysterious, not helped by the fact that history has caused Jews under even the least hostile environments to wear masks on top of the masks each of us wears by nature or familial conditioning. The word for person and the root of the word personality comes from the Latin word for mask, persona. This fact of tattooing was just another piece of trivia; the Germans tattooed them in the camps. Everyone wears a mask in any situation––this is nature; this is common to the human animal, that Homo Sapiens 98% identical with a chimpanfuckinzee. I remembered the U.S. Army film footage of liberating camps in Eastern Europe and the horror show it was for us at fourteen . . . I think I recall the skeletal frames of the victims, I hesitate to say alive, surviving and living are not the same things . . . surviving is always beyond living, what it means in its etymology, sur vivir in French . . . and let me tritely say that what is beyond living is not always good. No horror film for years after that had a similar effect; nothing could be as grotesque; how 43
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could this full-framed living, let me say vibrant, man have been one of those I saw in those films someone thought we needed to see in our school auditorium when we were fourteen? I don't know what happened to Joe, the grocery store owner, after we moved away. I'm not sure if he is still alive; his daughter was four or six years older than I was, maybe she was only eighteen the last time I saw her, a thick voluptuous mass of curly blonde hair tumbling to a green blouse that could not hide . . . Ave Mammales Plena Gratia . . . Mammales Dei qui tollis-Yes.The sins of the world . . . Miserere nobis . . . Repetition, repetition, repetition. I really cannot see whatI saw then; I can imagine what I saw, now understanding that I did think as I have said I thought, now seeing snippets and fragments of persons, parts, place . . . do I hear old voices that have faded in volume, all memory is in part fiction? I have asked this many times remembering. Not only what we choose to insert, but what the mind that houses our many selves chooses to insert from among the many echoes bouncing off the walls within from the cacophony of voices voicing sound and words and fury . . . No amount of praying to her tits, for her tits, could accentuate appropriately just how worthy of admiration and fame her tits were, and I know this even if I cannot see as definitely now as I know I did then . . . to repeat what I have already said in these and other words said, yes, illustrious tits, her tits; yes, magnificent tits, her tits, those tits, my tits,
really. Hers were marvelous tits; they were superb, spectacular, sublime--yes, her tits were sublime . . . lovely, delightful, very, very fine, too much is less a girl I knew in college used to love saying. Perhaps this is enhanced by distance rather than obfuscated--or perhaps it has been obfuscated in a way that allows for a more greatly perceived fondness? I do see what I have said I saw; but it is other than video tape and other than complete fabrication. If there is fictional Truth, there is also memorial Truth, if you get what I am doing here. I don't remember whose were the first tits I ever had out of a bra. I've said this already. I don't know why I should remember or why I should have forgotten. I often thought about how many tits I have seen, how many I have handled, fondled, played with, caressed, kissed, cuddled, sucked . . . where was I for my first tits I cannot say--I think I might have an idea who, but discretion, discretion, discretion . . . (the man who used to answer his front door naked or semi-naked is worried about being discrete-this is rich). I really do not remember the first pair of tits I had in hand. I mean naked tits, bald tits, out of blouse and without bra. There were tits inside of these, either of them--I knew a girl who had tattooed a small heart on one of her tits, I think it was the left tit, or was it the right tit--no, it was the left tit, it was my right hand, then upper and lower lips, one at a time then both . . . There must be a great difference for some to have their tits out of a blouse in a bra and out of the bra. mean, I can see how there are those who see a great differ44
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ence--I'm not sure a girl's father would imagine the difference if she were under eighteen--I'm not sure he would if she were over eighteen. We are still horribly prudish. I'm not. I always managed to get at the underneath of tits, the bottom of tits . . . Upon first writing this, Joe might have been alive; the chances of Joe still being alive are slim, yet men living into their late nineties is not unusual. The daughter with the fabulously great and glorious tits most likely is. I used to imagine many years ago telling a woman in some future that I had had a crush on her when I was a boy. Nonetheless, I don't know if his wife was older or younger. I never saw anything on her arms; I don't know if I ever saw her arms. He was closed on Saturdays, opened regular hours on Sunday. I don't know what I could tell him, or even if I should tell him anything, if I were to see him again, if he is alive, probably not; I thought the other day about his grocery store. I thought about the girl whose tits I had fallen in love with when I was fourteen, a girl who lived near the grocery with the girl with curly blonde hair and a pair of wondrous tits, fantastic in as much as they were the subject of many fantasies. I know I'll forget this soon enough and perhaps remember it just as easily only to forget it again just as quickly once more. What could it have meant to me even if I were Jewish in Brooklyn, what I saw? How many Jews here were touched by the Holocaust; but I knew later that we were all supposed to be touched by it, but then we believed in a pan-humanity, or at least we imagined we did. We don't today, in spite of
what I think, what we say, not as sub-divisive as our diversity has been allowed to become; multiculturalism has been allowed to degenerate into justification for tribal politics. This is not the place for diatribes on politics and culture. When isn't the place, where isn't the time? Lip service, easy enough; lying to one's self easier. If Jews believe that when a person saves another person he saves the world, how many worlds did the Nazis destroy, I could ask, but I don't. Do any of us through omission help destroy worlds within worlds. We don't say enough of what we should say because all of us spend so much of our time chattering away, twittering away our time inanely on social media, hoping that there can be a cumulative effect on our lives, our collective future, as if linearly progressing toward an infinite future will bring us closer to a solution, an absolution, a resolve, a conclusion of enormous magnitude, enormous satisfaction for good. Infinity though is never reachable, never attainable, never ever to come and all efforts at reaching these infinite possibilities that we have become enamored with are destined to fail. One billion to the one-billionth power no closer to infinity than three. Our hopes our rocks up the mountainside? Sisyphus, as I have said before in another piece of essaying what thesis, at least had his rock; we have only our illusions and delusions . . . This is as true interpersonally as it has become or has always been collectively. Preaching is easy, though. I like to preach. This I know from experience. Yes, again, I love to preach. Practice, though, is 45
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always hard enough when done to make things perfect. Her tits were perfection for me when I was fourteen. Maybe if men remained devotional about women's bodies they would not need to repress or oppress them--fear of sex, of woman's sexuality, of woman as person has become master over our humanity. I should not let this become what I had not intended it to become; to be or not be is what we have come to be or not come to be by our choices made, our choices confirming our fates? Mine. We do pay for them, our lives, that is, and quite readily by our choices . . . and not choosing has always been a choice. To choose or not to choose is not really a question; to have made an active choice or a passive one is about all you get in the question of choosing. I am not of the age when it would be likely that I slept with a woman who had a tatoo on one of her tits.
we try to mean about Nature, which we have never really adequately defined? I wish this were easier." She puts the pen down and closes her journal. What she thinks she thinks for herself and no assumptions should be made about what the author thinks or anyone else thinks or even what she thinks except what can be concluded from evidence in the text. You understand this, don't you? Nothing outside of the text. Later she writes in continuation in a new paragraph, "I know that most of my Muslim students would be right at home with Oklahoma's anti-abortion bill, but I am not going to get into that." She teaches English to non-natives in a government funded program. She faces everyday the endemic misogyny of the non-natives in her neighborhood, Pakistani, Arab or Chinese. She understands she is not supposed to say this. She thinks that this could be one of the reasons she lost touch with her college friends, many of them furthering what she must have concluded somewhere along the line was just too much naiveté. "You cannot imagine that everyone is here to be free when they are coming here primarily to make more money or just be safe, which of course is a way to be free, but you should know what I am driving at, and that's our naivety. You should imagine that there are perhaps some of them who think you and I are stupid because they do. They look at what we do as either stupid or foolish or not serious enough for them, which is another way for them to say severe. We're too nice . . . but I shouldn't get started because I will
THE END DEAD AHEAD She adds to her journal soon after closing the book; "Habit too long endured mimics nature. I have real problems with what we call nature, but then what has been habit masquerades or is interpreted as nature, thus the ways men have defined women have coincided with how women have adapted to their oppression? How they have been taught--trained--to be or not to be? I also have problems with what we refer to as nurture when compared with what 46
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go off on one diatribe after another, and there is plenty of fodder for diatribe after diatribe in the actions and reactions and thinking of too many of people I meet daily in the businesses run out of the assholes of their owners because they have no desire to do anything in a different way because the one great change of their life, flying ten hours here, is the only change they are going to make in their lives. I do not want to sound like one of the lunatic Trumpeters of a new conservative dawn because they're fucking idiots. But I do see every day how racist many of the recent arrivals are in my multicultural neighborhood, so do not imagine that they are living some wonderfully free and democratic life together and that we in the bureaucracy must save them from an endemic racism that is wholly, purely and singularly American because there are enough of the non-natives in my neighborhood that do not like either white or black people and both are equally disliked because of what they are or what we are not, which is what the non-natives are. Us and them persists everywhere in the world. It's like a friend of mine used to say a friend of his had said, if everyone in America woke up black tomorrow, we would still have racism. The horror is in how human it is; that is, when human is a synonym for homo-sapiens and not humane. What the Homo-Sapiens does with identity is not what we should do with identity as humans who can only be so if humane." Another friend of hers used to say that if everyone in the old Jim Crow south were white, you'd still have lynching and you'd still have
hound dogs, and you'd still have chain gangs; having black people only made it convenient in the racist dynamic. You'd shift the rhetoric, but the tone would be the same. It wouldn't be racist but it would still evoke power, power, and more power protecting money. "I wish we could still––still what? And it is not as if I have objections to raise against the better angels gathering in a multicultural paradise, or those for whom the dogmas of diversity are as strongly held . . . [,]" she writes in her journal afterwards. Or as strongly "believed, imposed, or disseminated as were any of the dogmas of monotheism anywhere," she continues writing. And that's "whether Jewish, Muslim or Christian," she adds. "[A]nd all have had their dogmas; it is not only the Catholic Church that has or makes or imposes or enforces dogmas. The Rabbis in Spain wanting to burn Spinoza is indication enough. I cannot bow to the demands of universalism anymore than I can to the blind demands of diversity, ironically the anti-university, today, no?" She asks and puts the pen down to sip her coffee. "Truth demands that I question dogma wherever it rears its hideous . . . I do have to put a check on the hyperbole . . . [,]" she writes. "I do not like the fish-out-ofwater cliche, nor do I like allusions or overt references to dinosaurs. They are lame. But I am a dinosaur," she says on the page. She pauses. She finishes her coffee. "I believe in one Humanity," she says quoting him, smiling as she does often in reflection on those days when she was an undergraduate. 47
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"I repeat myself, I know. But Human Rights do have their litanies." She remembers that she liked that. She remembers that she liked everything in the speech. After having just re-read it, she knows why she kept it, but has no idea why she never kept in touch with the author of the text. "The only reason we still debate this issue is because we are still unsure if women have the same inalienable rights as men, or because we unconsciously insist that women are not other than modified men, thus need further modification [,]" she reads what he said that he had written. "Democracy demands that everyone is entitled to have his opinion and has a right to express it; it does not demand that I entertain that opinion beyond its due, past its value, nor that I accept it. The opinions herein are not acceptable or unacceptable because they have been expressed. It is simple enough to say, but still hard for us to understand--I can't live with her decision, only she can and will. I have said this before in other words, these words too in the same and in others, around and around I go, we go, another merry-go-round with women's rights." Is there an intelligent person anywhere who can disagree with this? Is it true that everyone who disagrees with this is stupid? "Abortion is a dilemma, even under the most pristine conditions, in the most favorable circumstances," he said. "[S]tones and other ultra-firm places," he added. "In this choice she has before her, in this choice she makes, she is beginning and end of everything. How can anyone intelligent or educated, as I had once believed university
educated should make a person, consider otherwise." She does not know how it was that they did not get together, as fond of him now in recall she is imagining she is as she might have been. What do we know now of what was, she wonders in other words, more images passing in montage. "A woman faced with this life-saving decision---and it is a life saving decision because I do not think that any normal woman makes this choice flippantly---is not helped by any argument from either side of this human rights issue. (I carefully and purposely do not to call this a debate.) As I have said in other essays, most women faced with the dilemma of choosing an abortion are faced with fire--something is going down and about to crash in flames." She recalls how good a writer he was. She recalls how they had taken classes together, worked together in the club, had lunch together, went to films together with others they went to school with, but how they never slept together, never dated, never kissed. "A woman's integrity displaces me from the dark waters of her decision to have a baby or not to have a baby. I have not arrived at a place where an embryo is in itself a baby, nor have I concluded that a fetus is a baby or not a baby. The argument of viability has its merits, but then I am sure that life begins at mitosis. Both are true; both need to be considered as variables in any abortion equation." She pauses. She thinks of this, of what she has just read that he had said. "There should be no equivocation on either side of this argument [,]" she continued reading. "There is too much intellec48
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tual ping-pong played where and when profounder considerations must be engaged. The darkness of these waters I refer to here is reflective of how deep the human soul is, and is not a reflection of any judgement placed on her decision. There are reflections in the shadows. The ethics of her decision are hers and hers alone to manage, to live with. Yes, it is easy for me to talk; just as it is easy for any woman to talk in her defense, just as it is for legislators in states to countermand normal human decisions on whether a woman should have full sovereignty over her body." We talk endlessly around and around this topic, she thought, remembering something he had said to her in a conversation they had had one time she thinks she remembers was at the coffee shop just off campus. "The brute reality of a woman's biology displaces me from ultimate considerations where her right to choose an abortion is the subject. I am not a woman, and even if I were a woman, a woman is not in herself a womb." She smiles. "I am not a woman and thus do not have a womb and thus cannot bear children and thus will never have the dilemma of abortion before me; but a woman is what she is, irrespective of where she is, when she is, who she is, what class or religion or profession she belongs to; and this is not limited by her having a womb or being able to bear children. She is a woman and more than this, she just is. A woman is; to give attribute here in this way in this place is to limit her, to attempt to subtract from her which is what gives some the desire to limit her by laws." She recollects that he paused. She can see him pausing, the
way he would, how he would stand, the confidence he exuded, she thinks as she reads. "Woman is woman not man, obviously enough; yet the distinctions of biology do not countermand her equality in humanity. I am not herein referring to mandates of civil human discourse, but to decisions made in the final hour, and every decision to have or not to have an abortion is one made in the final hour." Another pause. She holds the text of the speech in her hands; she sits on her couch behinded by two windows that look out on the morning sun. She reads the text of the speech and wonders what has happened to the person who gave it, having lost contact with the members since, over the years, the many that have passed, what would she say to any one of them now if she should come across anyone. She can almost here him now as she reads, she thinks or is it that she imagines this, thinking and imagining not being identical, right? This does not really need to be asked she does not say to herself in these or other words. A speech that was given at a Woman's Studies Program Club Symposium. The speaker was one of the members, a male member of the club. The semester was the spring semester; the year was 1985. The text of the speech was found in a folder at the bottom of a cardboard box of one of the members, at the bottom of her closet at the head of her living room as you enter it from the front hall. She was cleaning out the closet and came across the box which she must have made from how many moves ago. It looks old enough, the box. She went through many papers and flyers and other 49
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mementos from her time with the club; she was the treasurer, and so, like the secretary and other officers of the club, she kept track of all their events and their doings, only for another purpose, let's say, than the secretary would have, except all of them would have wanted to have mementos, only for how long--how long did any of the others keep such things? She has perhaps kept some longer than any of the others have kept what they reserved as mementos of their time together and for the only reason she would, which is because she is who she is as she is when she is persistently over however long anyone could be talking about being themselves, yes. You know that this is true for you as well, how you are only yourself for however long you persist in being yourself, and of course we would be talking about what when we said ourselves, yourself, myself?
has stood under more often, no one put down by more weight, than woman? Prison jargon has crept into common parlance. This is not new. This is not alarming. It has been so for some time now. How is it that you do not see? Ah! To see or not to see? The question raises new questions. New? The jargon of other professions--and it is a profession in America, 'prisoner'-- has crept into common use. We use as metaphors expressions from golf, from baseball, from football, from pool, from horseshoes. We say something is par for the course when that something happens in a manner expected, or with the usual result; we say when someone has failed, that he has struck out, to strike out; three strikes and you're out. Anyone who needs to focus has to keep his eye on the ball; we are always tackling problems because we do not want to find ourselves behind the eight ball, although the latter might also be avoided in another circumstance by running with the ball. Mistakes are fumbles; to fumble the ball is sometimes also another way to fail at something, but usually reserved for some active mis-take, which sometimes happens in football on a hand-off, a mis-take from the quarterback results in a dropped ball. Another mantra for success: Don't drop the ball, I say, others have said, in this or that occupation other than American Football. I played a lot of football when I was a boy; we played it like rugby, without helmets, without pads, only maybe a cup. Getting back to prison terms, though, in common speech, it seems that in politics
MADNESS AND CIVILIZATION How do we not understand? Perhaps because we are not willing to get close enough to smell another of another let alone get close enough to carry him, to hold him up with any one of us underneath? Everyone who wants to understand must be willing to stand under what he wants to know, they are all-of-piece to understand to know to feel to think. Women believe they are more understanding because no one
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this crossover might be the most appropriate use of jailhouse speech, and that the most appropriate terms or should I say connotations of jail house speech come to us into our politics with the terms 'punk' and 'bitch,' I remember a girl back in college who hated the word 'cunt' and the word 'bitch,' and she'd get very uncomfortable, visually physically uncomfortable, whenever she heard anyone using the words. Now all states are, in analogy, jailhouses of one kind or another. Governments are the wardens, every warden a guard, every guard an enforcement of the prison status quo. Prisoners themselves also the wardens of each other, a kind of common law in the prison that the guards often turn an eye from. So it is not far fetched to assume the state we live in is a prison of a kind, and that this prison house of State has a hierarchy of rules or behavioral codes as in any social environment, human or otherwise. They are often enforced independently of the law. Any analogy to a prison system can be cross referenced and drawn in other directions. Any institution can be analyzed along the lines of a prison, all forms of order working against freedom and liberty. Information is in itself in formation, the informed are in form. Cast; die-cast? This is not to say that the only freedom that can exist is an an-archaic freedom, but then anarchy as I understand it has little to do with the chaos envisioned by those in society too fearful ever to question authority or rule, or those entrusted to enforce the law, whether that law is South African Apartheid, Jim Crow, or laws imposed by fanatical Muslim theocra-
cies or Puritan ones in Salem Massachusetts, or by Congress or State Assemblies here in present day America. It is really the President who enforces Federal law; it is the President who can bail out banks. Now no President is one of the alpha prisoners--at least not in a long time, especially if the man has come straight outta nowhere. No matter how virile you imagine his rhetoric to be, or how virile a man he might be, a great husband and father notwithstanding this analogy. He has no clout, he has no cache in the power-dynamics of Washington insider dealing trading playing. What we see is all there is to see, great orator, father, family man not-withstanding how the game in the Capital City is officiated. Capitalists--that is, big time capital from Wall Street, and not the profits the guy on the corner in his pizzeria hopes to make-these are the Alpha inmates. In this rhetorical schema, our President is the Bankers's Bitch? Now, whether you agree or not, is not the issue? This is not an effort at consensus taking? More questions aligned with who where and when, for what and how . . . nobody knows just what is said is done is agreed upon behind the closed doors where politics is politicked still. Who is who from where, but how the who becomes who is important. Who was he before he became who he is as President, anyone becoming President owing somebody else something at some time. Having no cache leaves you at the mercy of being able to do nothing all the while you must still promise to do--what? Something? Just as the current imbecile has no cache as well, which is why he owes the 51
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extreme right as much as the man before owed the Banks and the banks very big. We could say that every politician is one kind of prison punk or another? How so? No? Yes? I won't say, maybe. In the Big House that is government; or is it the Big House that is America? Whatever it is, however it is, whenever it is, all elected officials become punks for the monied elite, and that's Obama, Biden, Pelosi, Cuomo, Christie, De Blasio, whoever, however, whenever, wherever politics is politics and politics has become and continues to be . . . and go on, name someone, anyone . . . and so on and so on until the last tolling of . . . oh what's the use? Yes, politicians are the bitches of big money, one way or another; an oligarchy of the Monied Elite on Wall Street and an amalgamation of corporations that our once democratic America has become. Bush II was not the bitch of the bankers because he was the son of the oil gangsters? He was one of theirs? He was no more the bitch of Wall Street than a Mafioso's son is an Alpha inmate's bitch. Never, of course not? You saw Goodfellas. But please, no President of the last fifty years was as conservative as Obama––except for Ronald Regan, and maybe Bill Clinton––Trump is an anomaly even for conservatives. And everything was about his blackness––liberals in America of any ilk did not critique Obama nearly enough because he was black; and the conservatives did not support him any where close to almost enough because he was black. And both of those occurrences should offend black people––it offends me.
And the oil companies are gangsters for their legacy is not far from the oil companies that sold oil to Nazis Germany out of Mexico, from wells dug in the gulf, the same Gulf of Mexico that BP seems willing now to try to save after having nearly destroyed it. Hindsight on hindsight is hind sight. Precaution is not a prime consideration in anything we do; it never will be for any corporate capitalist venture like BP's, or any corporation, who is now a personal entity with the rights of persons and the protective shields of law reserved for persons. Milton Friedman and Alan Greespan would be smiling together, and perhaps will be, or is it only my imagination fueled by Dante's vision of eternal Justice? No one can tell me that any man without cache does not bend over for whomever got him elected because he does. Wall Street––what? Owing Goldman Sachs everything, just as no one owed him anything coming into the White House with negative value cache. [I don't think I need to italicize this word . . .] The Banker's something we could say. I do not want to say because I liked the man . . . what we like about a President often not even what it is about him as President but in the marketability of his image? How Presidential he appears, appearances everything, settling on a book because of its cover booksellers know we do––no, yes, right, of course? We don't. The President sells us the idea that what he did was to save us. In bed with the bankers, queer for Goldman, which is not 52
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disparage being queer. His largest campaign contributor--a whore house the white house--a new kind of White Slavery? And this is not a disparagement of prostitution because marriage as we have had it traditionally rarely has anything to do with love when love is love not necessarily the animal husbandry we have in traditional marriages . . . but men and women who love each other love each other in spite of marriage, and they fail in their relationships when they fail in their relationships for all of the same reasons anyone would could or does irrespective of being married or not being married. I still want to know why Gay couples want to be married unless it is to say that marriage is finally about love and not breeding. But I have not yet told you about my views of marriage, traditional marriage--no one on either side of the issue of gay marriage seems to know what the fuck he or she is speaking about, spouting about, spewing, whatever it is that disallows every one including myself sometimes to forget that the anus and the mouth are linked in an unbroken connection and that it is impossible for anyone to avoid talking shit, or speaking out of his asshole. But anal rape in prison is not the same thing as anal intercourse as an expression of love, and just because it is two men in prison, and thus is apparently homo-sexual, does not make the act the same as what two men can feel if and when they love. The relationship between the President and Goldman Sachs is questionable; yet, it is not as questionable as the current Chief Imbecile's investment interests and his conflicts of them, and just who he is beholding
to . . . oil? I don't think President O. was queer for Goldman's Lenny, do you? Did the banks foresee the economic debacle and buy a government bailout ahead of time? This is the same Goldman Sachs that spearheaded the stocks on margin debacle in the 20s. Is being anti-Goldman Sachs actually being anti-semitic like one as*&^le in a bar on the Eastside in Manhattan said to me as I ranted against Goldman Sachs, and then Lehman Brothers and then Allan Greenspan, who, as the head of the Federal Reserve, should have known better. But then when I accuse Bloomberg of Cronyism, I too also occasionally get the question, "Are you sure you're not being anti-Semitic?" Few and very, very far between, but still a question raised. See what I mean––you do not? No one can say anything about anything or anyone else in that or another anything that some other asshole is not going to go off on some kind of rhetorical tangent about––or should that be mock rhetorical? Goldman Sachs is what it is and independent of what the directors on the governing board are, what the CEO, the President and the Veeps are, they are the monied power elite, our oligarchs, or the alpha prisoners in the prison house of America, and do I want to think that our president is their bitch? No? Should I not critique the Power and Monied elite because some of them happen to be Jewish– –or is it the Jewish members of the Power and Monied elite that we must avoid criticizing because that is what seems to be the
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protocols of critique?Is that how I should say it? What then must I do? I do recall what Malcolm X was alleged to have said to his wife the moment he heard the news that JFK had been shot, The chickens have come home to roost. And roost they will again because We the People of the United States cannot stand so long a usurpation of our freedom. I imagine that guillotines are needed; or as my spiritual kin, Jean-Paul Marat, had said, something along the lines of . . . to insure civil tranquility, nothing less than 200,000 heads must be chopped off. Yes, he would say, Monsieur Marat, that bankers must be dragged out of their boardrooms and have their heads chopped off, and that it must continue until enough blood flows in the gutters of Wall Street to wash away the pollution of its own corruption. Yes, kill the CEOs, the Presidents and Vice Presidents, all; murder them and their wives and their children--pit their infants on pikes--and do not forget to kill their parents-taking the old fathers by their reverend heads and bashing in their skulls, perhaps-and their brothers and sisters too, we must get them and their children as well, and their spouses and their spouses's parents and grandparents too I say without vehemence or anger or a rise in the decibel level of my voice. The impure blood must flow down the sewers of every financial district in every city in America. Or so I imagine I think I want to believe I could participate in.
Amnesia, Me What visionary company could I keep? I keep visions close, have company with them; stir about inside of me with these images. I close my eyes. I see all that I see behind my lids. I lay me down to sleep, there for me is a screen for another shadow play. I am the star mute prophet in me. Where is this wisdom I've been waiting for? I've led myself to believe I would not mock the man who made it out of Plato's cave, to see the world by the light of day. I do. We have. For how long have I been living with my shadows inside of me. No light is on in there? I have been convinced that I live with more than a night-light on inside of me. I have led myself to believe I would not prefer the shadows to the sight of things in the light. I have lead myself to water many times in my life. Drink, horse! What other deceptions could I engage? I have been deceiving myself for some time now left uncounted. I cannot remember. I had a man ask me how much time I spend speaking in my classroom. I could not answer the question. I did not understand where he was coming from.I remain guarded when speaking to supervisors--I never trust that I can express what I think, whatI know, what the background is because it has not been filtered through layers of second hand and third hand and fourth insipidities amounting to a refusal to accept or an inability to process what I know from where I know it––I always suspect that if they think
THE END 54
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I am ignorant of what they are saying it turns out better than if they even suspect that I might be more intelligent or just better educated, at least in some matters they are charged with taking responsibility for . . . to take responsibility especially when government mandates must be met, which are never much better than letting unqualified bureaucrats run the show. Where then does this leave me as to how I measure myself? No yard sticks in the darkness. There has to be another sensitivity born of a new sensibility. When then do I come to this other me? Grave yards inside. How much digging is done by us in us? Not nearly as much as the digging Europe did in World War I, a continent digging its grave. We have been buried alive ever since? Americans are hopelessly at the mercy of their gluttony, their laziness, their stupidity born of these, and the obesity in physical and metaphysical being. How to avoid this? Good luck with what we have thought was going to save us. Not likely to have ever happened as systematically under-educated as we allowed ourselves to have become. I visit dead selves as I become the walking shadow, the other poor player who frets his time upon the stage he has erected inside. What if I were myself? If I woke with amnesia tomorrow, wouldn't I still be me? That's who I have to find. Who is that person I would remain if I were to suffer total amnesia? And I can be me in spite of forgetting everything there ever was about me that I
had assumed made me who I was. Who is that person I would remain if I were to suffer total amnesia? That's who I have to find. If I woke with amnesia tomorrow, What if I were myself? Wouldn't I still be me? What if I were myself, another? I visit dead selves as I become a walking shadow, the other poor player who frets his time upon the stage he has erected inside. When then do I come to this other me? Graveyards inside; skulls in hand; memento mori moments with me. I see the skeleton in the mirror. There has to be another sensitivity born of a new sensibility. No yard sticks in the darkness. Where then does this leave me as to how I measure myself? I could not answer the question. I had a man ask me how much time I spend speaking in my classroom. I cannot remember. I have been deceiving myself for some time now left uncounted. What other deceptions could I engage? I cannot understand anyone who asks me how much time I give them to answer a question . . . and ninety seconds was offered as an example, and I recall having said that that is far too much time, and I really cannot abide fools who imagine they are being sensitive by reflexively responding in contradiction as if they were exhibiting a great and deep sensitivity, implying of course that I am the opposite of this by saying that giving anyone more than ten seconds to respond before asking the question again in class is interminable. I have lead myself to water many times in my life. I have led myself to believe I would not prefer the shadows to the sight of things in the light. I have been convinced 55
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that I live with more than a night-light on inside of me. Not a light on in there? For how long have I been living with my shadows inside of me. I do. We do. To see the world by the light of day. I've led myself to believe I would not mock the man who made it out of Plato's cave, "Where is this wisdom I've been waiting for?" Drink, horse. My room is a cave. I stay in my room too long? I do not write enough? I do not read as often as I would like; how I would like is certainly enough--there are other things to do beside read, but just what do any of us imagine we are supposed to be doing when it is literacy that is the foundation, practical and metaphysical, for all civilization--and do not get to the place where you conclude that I have concluded that anything metaphysical is impractical, although I would not agree to making matters of metaphysical considerations utilitarian. Metaphysics, like art, is and must remain utterly useless. There is no utility in being; there is also none of the utility, imagined by those enamored by utility, in becoming. To be or not to be is to be or to become; the one the other categorically mutually exclusive although they can existentially co-exist simultaneously. I am the star mute prophet in me. There for me is a screen for another shadow play. I lay me down to sleep. I see all I lay me down to sleep. I close my eyes. I keep visions close, have company with them; stir about inside of me with these images. What visionary company do I keep? There for me is a screen for another shadow play.
I lay me down to sleep. I see all I lay me down to sleep. I close my eyes. I keep visions close, have company with them; stir about inside of me with these images. What visionary company could I keep? None to those I have to defer to in maters of things I have much more experience with and education of and for; how so the ways we muster and master the matters of our business, our affairs. All of this has become vague. More than anything I would like to know who it is I would be if I were to forget who I am--but does anyone forget who he is or does he only forget who he was. He recognizes himself in the mirror, he just cannot remember his name or the relationships attached to the person he knows is himself in the mirror without a name, anonymous me he becomes--he is, when he looks at the reflection. Like a chimpanzee he has recognition; he is not like a dog who cannot recognize its own reflection in the mirror. What do I see on the mirror, not in it? How do I transform into this two dimensional me with the illusion of three dimensions. I do not understand the proliferation of vanity on social media, the images shown, exchanged, liked. Photos of me I recognize anonymously? THE END
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PART ONE: HOW THE JACOBINS WILL RETURN
WRESTLING WITH DEMONS; OR, PANDEMONIUM IS NOW
To understand the grossness of the oppression on the people of France by the Aristocracy, to get just how deep the resentment was felt, to know how profound the contempt for the Aristocrat had become and persisted in its vehemence, how this then bred in the people a savagery in their violence, you only have to see that tanneries were set up in France to make leather out of the flayed skins of those who were guillotined. Yes, leather products were made from the skins of the aristocrats and then sold as such, quick to be bought by those with money enough to pay for such a new luxury? A People's luxury? Human skin was unusually tough when tanned into leather. Good for wear, lesser worn when worn for long. I wonder if the meat of the victims was ground into the slop for their pigs. If I were a French peasant in the Reign of Terror, I would have; or should I say more accurately, if any French Peasant were this man myself who would grind their flesh into slop for pigs, sell it as such to anyone who would relish the notion of feeding Aristocrats to pigs. Or maybe not--to feed the meat of slaughtered aristocrats to one's pigs would be to alter the meat of the pigs that you would then ingest after you slaughtered a pig, butchered him and ate him. If
Preface I write a disclaimer. I do not know why I think I need to do so. It might seem as if it were necessary; it does seem so to me. But then, why should I write one for you? You ask. You do, my readers, my hypocrites. More questions, what do they do? Do they unfold, do they become multiplicative? Here now on the ensuing pages please find a fictional essay--ah! What is it? The "fictional essay" seems clearly enough said. That is, then, what it is, a piece in the form of an essay set in a fictional context. Yes, for sure? No? Other than? Do I not know? Of course, it is a fictional essayer that the Expositor is . . . what am I saying here that could make sense to anyone other than the few I am actually talking to . . . and who will remain unnamed, and unattached to me, the author, just as we are supposed to separate Henry Fielding from his Foundling, Tom Jones. I, the author, convey to you, the reader, the essay of a fictional expositor. Is that all I have to say? I imagine some might have expected me to be more conciliatory. But then what does that mean, could it mean? Please understand this as I have drawn the design here.
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the aristocrats were of the impure blood as the Marseillaise notes, then perhaps you should refrain from feeding the aristocrats in slop to your pigs. I do not know exactly where I stand on this point.
of a genuinely insidious neo-liberal globalization that has had no respect for organic identities, whether they be of race, of ethnicity, of nationality or of labor, or any of these identities that coalesce in an organic democracy not geared toward running against or over individual liberty, or particularly, the four freedoms, or the Bill of Rights, anything that does not support the new global order as framed by their messiah, Milton Friedman. . . definitely designed and disseminated through conduits by those who control finance and media and have no loyalty to anything other than themselves and those like them, each other aligned by greed and a diseased love of money, impoverishing nations or large population groups in an effort to maintain the status quo for the Monied and Power Elite. "Jefferson warned us about banks more than 200 years ago: More dangerous, he said, than standing armies. Enemy soldiers you can shoot with impunity; you can cut their occupying throats in the night; but Wall Street Bankers in suits and ties who are made into models of what we aspire to by too many in the media and the government, it becomes more difficult. Is this a mistake?" He asks, has asked, will ask again in these exact when not other words, or those loosely arranged on their theme. Is this the reason the nut cases only shoot up schools instead of Wall Street boar[d] rooms--how is it that no CEO has ever been assassinated? Or are the schools shot up by CIA or NSA human drones, assets controlled one way or another through brainwashing or other manipulation . . .
What he says most people he knows do not listen to, do not respond to if they do listen, halfway always the way most anyone listens to anyone else; so what then do we say, can we say, if we were to think about what we could say about him, when it came about, a time when others would seek to hear what he had to say, and that's not had to as in the past of have to, an easier way for Americans to get their ears around what they should do, if not what they must do? No one must do anything in America, that is until it is too late to do anything, even the nothing at all they had the luxury of doing for too long. He has said much; he will say more; he takes the responsibility, as he has said, seriously. But words as they are formed by him usually amount to one or another in diatribe or tirade or polemic; he would never ascent to all of them being of one piece, a string of mutually interchangeable in all contexts of use synonyms . . . murder, killing, assassination, slaughter, genocide. When and where he speaks is of no never mind for you, therefore cannot be of any for me, what I say he says is verbatim, quoting as I do exactly what I hear when I hear it how I hear it added in what amountS to a paragraph addendum after each . . . He does say now as he has said for some time, "Trump is a grotesque flip side 58
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I do not want to descend into conspiracy hypotheses, and that's because none of them are theories. He goes on to say that this New World Oder "had no better press-secretary-spindoctor-carnival-barker-demagogue than U.S. President Barack Obama," as he then adds how "we talk about Trump denigrating the Oval Office," something he says he does not "disagree with." He goes on to say, and that he will in the future "wax more eloquently and vehemently in my verbal attacks on Trump than any of you who have said as much about how we might be imbalanced in our attacks on Trump if we do not have a seriously honest look at Obama; but do not imagine that Barack Obama has been good for the American Presidency in a way so unique that we now praise him as if he were the coming of a political savior." More self-deception, like the mass selfhypnosis he said he saw at "Obama's two Inaugurations," he says. The mass hypnosis performed by Hitler, Trump, Mussolini, Eva Peron even more and better than her husband Juan in Argentina. But please do not confuse the dictatorships of Mussolini in Italy or Franco in Spain or even Castro in Cuba for the totalitarian structure of Nazis Germany or Bolshevik Russia. No, not even close enough for confusion for anyone who knows the distinct differences and how Totalitarian Societies function, operate, manage, control. There is no one from Europe, he says, "that I have talked with, anyone who has half a brain, who has not and does not believe that Obama had been bought and paid for by Goldman Sachs and Wall Street."
You disagree? I am not so sure I do or do not. "Wall Street is as much the enemy of freedom and identity," he says, "as any of the oil gangsters; and there has never been a President deeper in the pockets of the Banks than Obama. And Hilary would have solved this? Trump? You imbeciles--I am appalled at how stupid we have become, en-masse. He pauses; he continues, "And do not imagine that Obama was not owned by Goldman Sachs because he was; but then do not imagine that the Republicans are not heinous, or that Trump is not dangerously stupid, just the useful idiot the Alt Right needs--or would that be too kind. He is insidious--and he's German, since it is right now to point out ethnicities and race as negative, subtractive or otherwise pejorative markers of a person's character. Methinks Gertrude protests too much about the Queen in the Murder of Gonzalgo. Everything about American politics has shifted monolithically right of center. Sanders is an old New Dealer and his Party mocked him--why? Because Bill Clinton did everything he could to destroy the New Deal and undermine the Great Society. I would love to chop his fucking head off." He goes on to say, "Clinton was a megalomaniac bent on Party hegemony." You disagree. I do not. And then he says, "Check again his record. Clinton let the Banks loose on us. Clinton's Pro-WallStreet deregulatory actions, began while Democrats were the majority in the mid 90s, beginning with the appointments Robert Rubin and then Larry Summers in the Treasury--yes, these deregulatory mea59
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sures were more responsible than anything Bush did, or conspicuously did not do, playing a game of peak-a-boo with himself. Bush II's animus must appear as an Ostrich, his favorite thing to do?" And that is not a genuine question, he reminds us. You have to feel the sharpness of its rhetorical edge. You do not? Does anyone recall Clinton's dissolving the Glass-Steagall Law from the Great Depression, barring Investment Banks from Commercial Banking activities? No. I do. Does anyone recall the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, "which left the derivatives market a laissez-faire Wild West,” according to the Columbia Journalism Review? I do. "With Riegle-Neal," he says, "Clinton gutted State regulations of Banks leading to grotesque bank mergers and the too-big-tofail mind-set. And yes, responsible directly for more deregulation that lead directly to 2008 than any President . . . recall Obama blaming George W. for 2008? I do. But next to Bill Clinton, there has been no greater friend to Wall Street Greed in the Oval Office than OBAMA." He pauses. "The Jacobins," he reminds us, has reminded us, "would put Trump's head in the guillotine along with Hilary's, Obama's, Bush 2 and Bill Clinton's, all of them gleefully participating in constructing a new world according to the gospel of the socioeconomic-political messianic Milton Friedman . . . an order to the detriment of everyone else." You disagree. I can tell. "Friedman, Greenspan and Bill Clinton are in the pit of my American Inferno. Don't
worry--there are many rings in my Inferno," he says said will say again has said many, many times," why bring Friedman in with Greenspan and Clinton when Friedman was the most severe critic of Bill Clinton's charades and masquerade. "Obama and Hilary and Bill are the Middle-Class nobodies who get to rise financially through power, influence and authority and play with the monied elite, exactly the way upper bourgeoisie in France got to buy titles in the aristocracy. I wonder what a leather jacket made from whoever's skin would look like, feel like? Clinton leather; Regan leather; Friedman or Greenspan leather?" What then must we do? I ask. Not him. He would not ask this question. "J'acuse Messieurs Presidents Obama, Bush II, Bill Clinton, Bush I and Regan . . . " he says. "Let's throw Hilary and one of her Pimps into the mix," he says. "Leonard Blankfein," he says more emphatically. Contra nous de la tyranie. How can anyone who loves America resist the call . . . but with rifles instead of Trump, he wonders? Trump is safer than lunatics with rifles? PART TWO: A NEO-LIBERAL GLOBAL ORDER “No, liberty is not made for us: we are too ignorant, too vain, too presumptuous, too cowardly, too vile, too corrupt, too attached to rest and to pleasure, too much slaves to fortune to ever know the true price of liberty. We boast of 60
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being free! To show how much we have become slaves, it is enough just to cast a glance on the capital and examine the morals of its inhabitants.” ― Jean-Paul Marat
But what appears as random and may even be calculated as random does not mean it is not contingent with speculative ventures gambled by those who can afford to gamble, gambling what they have cornered by figuring out how to give back less to the societies from which they operate in order to maximize profit for the few. I know from where I speak, of what I have spoken, at when I will say again the something I know I have seen, again, to see or not to see is to know in a way we do when we carry a man for a mile, without having to wear his shoes which may not fit. I do not hesitate to become post to another's lintel. The Neo-liberal (New) World Order is a notion we--I--have taken from the back of our one dollar bill . . . I know others around the world have, their minds being focussed on our money, the most frequent artifact of American culture they handle? An idea we have held for ourselves as model for a long time; and all you need to look at is the Eye of Horus, which is a Masonic symbol [and I'm not pointing to conspiracies], at the pinnacle of the pyramid, and look to the bottom where is written in Latin, Novus Ordo Saeclorum, or, The New Order of the Ages. Yes, America is everywhere, American, everything; everyone and everywhere becoming one or another American imitation. Now, when I say Neo-liberal New World Order, I do not mean Democrat Liberal, but Neo-liberalism as a political philosophy, a term coined and defined by the anti-Messiah of everything Hilary mock-genuflects to, Milton Friedman; and a place, albeit a metaphysical one, where Regan, Bill Clinton, Bush 1 and 2 and Obama become all
Do I take the world to be an insidious place? Of course, I do. Do I imagine that there are forces of control in the world that are nefarious? Certainly I do. Do I imagine Trump and Bannon, although they might be successful, are boys playing a mans game trying desperately to look like men while doing it, the reason why they are doing. The Oval Office is not the place to work out your psychological problems. Anyway, nonetheless, nevertheless, I'd be daft if I did not. Where then does this lead me? To conspiracy theories about groups or organizations? Not exactly. Do I think that elites in a society can control without having to be conspiratorial, without having to band together in thinker-thanthieves SPECTRE-like plots--yes, I do. The world is not the world according to Ian Fleming, which is not to say that everything in the novels is exactly how it was drawn in the films, especially the most outrageously made in the 70s and the 80s, or so I say in my non-critical opinion. Where then does that bring me, bring us, what I have to say about what I have seen and understood for decades, stood under in ways the intellect can, with a body we say in analogy or in metaphor, another beyond the beyond we look to when mystery is the best we handle, dissatisfying randomness, most likely. 61
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of piece, indistinguishable. For how long have others around the world been reading that, seeing that, trying to understand it, translating it correctly, interpreting it appropriately--appropriately? Adequately? This New World Order of Neo-liberal Globalization is marketably multicultural so long as it is Americanist, Bourgeois and greedy Capitalist under the rainbow colored costumes of multiculturalism, the later only allowed where it is the dress up in this masquerade. It is, has been and will remain for the 1% and only for the 1% . . . just as you know the mock-Baron in the White House (and here is a bit more muck-raking racist discourse for our impostor in the Oval Office: he's German.Oh yes he is! Yes, fucking German as in German-American Volksbund? My Dad had German-American Bundist family living next door to him in Brooklyn. Any more ironies we care to see as coincidence? And fuck Merkel too. She's Obama's bitch. And I have as much tolerance for her as I do for any other world leader of the Neo-Liberal World Order that respects nothing and no one but the Monied Elite of every kind. Yes, that is their multiculturalism for you. It is as inorganic and de-vitalized--it is the multicultural equivalent of mass produced bread . . . I know that the above reference to the 1% has become a cliche, which is the point of how poorly so much of our print media is allowed to be in its dissemination. Obama wanted to play with them--Michelle, for certain, not adverse to spending, spending and spending some more, or so we began to hear in the lower voices of the media . . .
often times managed in comedy spin--too much of late night TV was an Obama lovefest (and Jimmy Fallon is another sycophantic schmuck puckering up to NBC Corporate assholes as they openly move to the right, but then they've always been right of center, and their news is cutting edge in keeping Power in the shadows . . .); and I liked him, I did, genuinely; and I still do, the man. Now that he is no longer President, perhaps I can like him again? And fuck Mr. Stewart, he says. Asshole entertainment millionaire telling us that Clinton was not the lesser of the two evils--fuck him, as if he speaks for me or any American in any way differently than deep-in-the-pockets-ofMoney Matt Lauer of Today. Fuck them both. Takes 30 million dollars and buys a home on the East End of Long Island-Lauer is a Corporate Bitch--Prison Punk. Who the Clintons have been playing with, and how, would fill a gothic novel; their past is another Castle of Otranto mixed with Vathek and perhaps Shelley's The Cenci with Byron's Manfred also mixed in . . . but then I praise the Clinton's too much. All of whom the Bush Oil Money is a part of--you really imagined Hilary Clinton was not the something of Babylon? Obama not the something of the Bankers'? The buffoon that Donald Trump has been, as I have said, as I have seen in the media, especially here in New York, is the Court Jester of Satan (or so others have said [recently and further ago in the past]; I always mistrust anyone who wants to be President of the United States; I would immediately hold my brother in suspicion, if I had one and he had become President?). 62
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No one of us escapes our Puritan past, our Puritan images, the frames too we put around those collective unconscious motivations from Salem to today. No one of us in New York took this draft dodging solipsist seriously--and I am not going to, so fuck all the people who say we have to get behind our President--the way he has gotten behind us, the way some prisoners or guards get behind other prisoners in the Prison Houses of America, this America now a Prison House of Prison Houses. One and only one, the whole fucking place; every State a kind of prison managed by the government. Someone should grab him by the balls and shake some sense into him, but then Putin might have him by the balls . . . and so many delicate sensibilities from Trump supporter buffoons howling how disgraceful it was to see projected images of a naked Putin caressing a naked and pregnant Trump on a wall of a building in Manhattan. Ah! What evil lurks in the hearts of men and women who beat their chest and hide behind a flag like some pseudo-devout assholes I have known hiding behind rosaries or the Star of David or any version of the Cross or of the Crescent Moon. Will Trump become a fool for the Millennium? Or is he the useful idiot of the Alt Right? Alt Right? Again I repeat myself--I repeat myself when I repeat myself over and once more and once more until the last syllable of the last word of the last phrase I speak: Alt Right is not proto fascist in exactly the way that Kentucky Fried Chicken has ceased being fried chicken because it has become KFC.
Only time will tell--I have the suspicion it will be a lot earlier than anyone could believe. I do not see the Devil in him; he'd be a slicker operator if he were. Compare God in Paradise Lost with Milton's Satan in the same. Trump's administration––and I do not believe the claims about their IQs, unless we want to believe that someone needs a high IQ to make a lot of money when most of what he wants to do is make a lot of money and that that motivation subsumes all other motivations, including a conscience for people, for the People, the People of his nation (these people have no nation, no national feeling), or the country within which you operate with the overriding desire to make a lot of money and even more money than the already far too much you and several of your future generations will never spend. If I may heap on the images, Trump will be a grotesque flip side of a genuinely insidious globalization that has had no respect for race or ethnicity or nationality, anywhere; and whose images and ideas were designed and disseminated through conduits by those who have no loyalty to anything other than themselves--and you know that they care more for their international comrades in ledger books; their profits are what they care for the most or exclusively at all . . . and only others like them helping each other to make more money insofar as they can do work together in trying to . . . Wall Street CEOs will always care more for the rich of Russia or China or Saudi Arabia than the poor of America--what kind 63
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of people are like this--what kind of men, what kind of man, what person thinks like this. I do not know anyone like this. How could I? I cannot believe this carnival barker of a man is still playing in his reality TV show, only in the Oval Office. Donald Trump is President of the United States. I'm embarrassed? I was also embarrassed by Jimmy Carter and the latter is a thousand times more Presidential than the latter. All of the elite in seats of power, influence, authority or investment are aligned by their greed and a diseased love of Monied control of government policy, corruption, corruption by even more corruption, and corruption does not need conspiracies to thrive or multiply, anymore than mildew needs conspiracies to thrive. Let us look at his sidling up to Wall Street which never loved him, never really respected him, with whom he was never a player--but now they have to listen and his desires will take control of him and he will fuck all of the imbecile Americans who imagine being fucked-up American kneejerk conservative is an answer for the real or imagined fucked-up knee-jerk liberals, and there are both, because most conservative supporting lunatics in America are not well-read enough to know the difference between what they imagine is a liberal and what actually has transpired as a liberal or even what I know a liberal should be which is neither the American actuality nor the realism of their imaginations. I would say God hep us, but I imagine he has left us to our own devices, loving Free-Will as He does; and please spare me the reflexive alphabet-
ically limited appraisals of what you imagine Free-Will is in contrast to any determinism because I do not think my gray cells can take such an onslaught of the savagery some of you call thinking, which is never playing hop-scotch with words or randomly passing images in the mind. They care for how Trump will make them more money or hurt them in making money, and only when the latter happens will they say anything, and even then, it won't be for the people, of course not, who could imagine that Power and Money do anything except think, sometimes together, at other times in concert, but never really conspiratorially, on how to make even more money while acquiring more power. If selling everyone into slavery would be the prime way for them to continue to make a whole lot more money, there would be little hesitation . . . recall Winston Smith, the now-man in the mirror? The elites of power and money are linked through a contempt for anything traditional or national anywhere, our grossest mistake, as part of their largest deception; and this is what gives us the gross and grotesque nationalistic reactions politically; perhaps with the exceptions of play-acting at traditions they have never been a part of at any time. Jefferson warned us about banks more than 200 years ago, how they were more dangerous to a People and their Liberty than standing armies. Occupy Wall Street because Wall Street is occupying us? That is US as in the U.S. Wall Street is as much the enemy of freedom and organic identity as any of the oil gangsters. And the People have a right to deal with their Op64
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pressors by devouring their palpitating hearts. 200,000 heads chopped off would do more than any Know-Nothing Populism like Trumps--contra nous de la tyranie! And do not imagine that Obama was not owned by Goldman Sachs because he was; and don't imagine that the Republicans are not heinous devisors of a new corporatocracy because that is just what they envision, and Trump's Cabinet is the beginning. You fools--all of you idiots who voted for him . . . forgive my outburst? NO! Do not–– what? What should I not do, should you not do? I am unyielding in this.
to enter the national political arena it was Bill and Hilary Clinton, each the other no better than poor white cracker trash wanting to live in the big house. But then we have Melania Trump, a Grade-A fool for the century, who only wants the same multi-million dollar opportunities Hilary has been benefitting from, and will continue to benefit from, having been in bed with bankers as had her boss Obama--yet still, Obama managed to present Presidentially in a way Trump has not managed, being beset by the job he really was too stupid to understand. How could anyone trust that he actually thought this through? He will break––just wait and see. Let's say what is, and that Obama was smarter about being a tool for the banks, knowing his position, bent-over in the shadows with power, while Trump, being a useful Idiot, imagines himself greater than he is, more powerful than he can be, and will suffer more ignominy. If there ever was any man who should never have been allowed to enter any Public arena it has been Donald Trump. Every New Yorker has known this for decades; we better than anyone else, unless you moved to Jersey, then all the toxic waste sites present in Jersey landfill, if they haven't affected you, then they have probably affected your offspring in horrors I do not want to imagine because Jersey is home to more toxic waste sites per square mile than anywhere in the world, not just America. New Jersey leads America in cases of autism, and that's not coincidental. Do not imagine that Fat Chrissie has helped you in this. He has not. The future will not be kind to us, the idiots we are.
An idiot, Aristotle reminded us 2300 years ago, is someone with no general or deeper social concerns. Everything about American politics has shifted monolithically right of center; just as Israel's politics has shifted as well, and it seems so many other places in the world. Sanders is only an old New Dealer and his Party mocked him--why? Because Bill Clinton did everything he could to destroy the New Deal and undermine the Great Society, the truly oiliest man ever to occupy the Oval Office; a bigger liar than Regan could ever have been––was Regan really a big liar? Why do we ask this question of Presidents? Why? The peculiar thing about Regan is that he did not lie as much as some imagine him having done. He actually said what he meant and meant what he said. He was a disciple of Milton Friedman as much as Peter and Paul were of Jesus. All anti-messiahs have their disciples too. If there had ever been any two politicians who should never have been allowed 65
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Allons enfants de la patrie! Where have you gone, mon ami, JeanPaul?
keeps talking incomprehensibly, except to the impossibly feeble-minded, about partisan politics. He has no constituents except the one per cent. Adolph represented the Krups family of industrialists much much more than he did the German people. But then, we sold oil to the Nazis out of Mexico, from our wells in the Gulf. So, it was American oil that American oil companies made millions on, that was used in German Subs that sunk our ships in the Atlantic, the same companies Trump is the best friend of . . . and call this what you want--I know that this will be called propaganda, but I am not a news agency. I am a simple separate person . . . and if I enter polemic or tirade or diatribe or Jeremiad, so be it. That was too much? The above? You are distancing yourself from the more virulent of polemic. And I do not want to hear any more from the even-keeled American who wants to wait to see what Trump is going to do, like the imbeciles who want to wait to see what the final effects of global warming are going to be (and again, I do know that there are many points offered as proof by those who believe global warming is a phenomenon that have nothing to do with proof; nor are they, in themselves, definitive or correlative?). Nonetheless, Jean-Paul Marat is my mentor. And in post script, another imaginative interlude passes in my mind, fictively, whereby I believe that if we had functioning guillotines in the squares of our cities, the Power and Monied elite would be more responsive to the needs of the People, the needs of the country, which is not always the State, the latter often set in diametric
PART THREE:
KFC IS NO LONGER
FRIED CHICKEN
He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself. ––Thomas Paine
I Am a bit puzzled about the conservative opposition to Obama as an authoritarian, which I might not disagree with as many I call colleagues will . . . but how is Trump an answer for that, unless it comes from the naive understanding that anything that wraps itself up in the flag is good, great again! Or is it that anything that speaks gutturally as if too long has been spent in a bar with other water-buffalo holding pints from the tap must be right, true, prescient. . . . Unless it comes from a narrowing of the mind, a closing of the heart, an undermining of reason. Or maybe it comes from a simple desire to play ping pong with slogans and hop-scotch with the Truth . . . or maybe it rose from some racist reflexes as if by twitch . . . Trump is going to screw each and every one of us, and that is no longer a suspicion but a great fear of the impending. And, please, my fellow New Yorkers--we knew he was an idiot forty years ago. What happened in the mean time? Yes, my friends-he will screw everyone all the while he 66
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opposition to the People, the State whose weight is put in counter-balance of the People, the State that often seeks to get the People to abandon their responsibility to themselves as the People of the People for the People by the People . . . often by getting them to adopt more fully the role of the Public, which must never be confused for the People. This was fundamental even in Roman Political Science where Populus and Publius were not synonyms. Yes, the Public is composed of the People functioning for the State--the People are; the Public is--that in itself should tell you much. There are far, far too many who confuse being alphabetic for possessing literacy; who confound superficially skimming pages, for reading; who desire not to learn or to discover or to understand by their skimming the pages, which they would be challenged to accomplish, but desire only to glean bits and fragments in order to then hurl them at their perceived opposition or enemies as one would stones in a primitive defense of one's cave. And notice that I am using 'we' and not only 'you' or 'they.' But let me shift from my point and point a finger . . . this is 'your' Republican Revolution, you very disgruntled, semi-literate, under-educated--let me stop. If you still do not think that Trump is dangerous--very, very dangerous--then you are not a citizen of a great nation of compassion and freedom, but denizens of a dark order of thinking where resentment, belligerence, intolerance, narrow-mindedness, short-sightedness, semi-literacy (where it is not illiteracy), hate mongering and violence are all set against humanity . . . never hu-
man without humane. You do not get to call yourself human just by having been born, just by being a member of the species Homo-Sapiens. Human, as inhuman, is a choice. It is political ping pong that We the Imbeciles of America continue to play to the delight of the Power and Monied Elites who in their coalitions amount to a new aristocracy in the Republic . . . and with politicians being in the pockets of corporate money or investment banking money or any of the other elites, then we are being taxed without representation. Jefferson's call is for the People to dissolve this . . . and that would include Bannon and his goons and Trump and his greedy idiocy. Nonetheless, I am obligated by good sense, by Reason, by a commitment to Truth, which I have never abandoned, a commitment to a universal humanity that I have never lost faith for nor belief in . . . I am obligated to make this response to a post by AMERICANS stand against Trump. Let me open very simply by saying that Statecraft is stagecraft. Now, that having been said . . . Please do not forget, my fellow Americans, that the single greatest reason we are in this malaise/quagmire is because the Democrats at first slowly moved, then more quickly moved to the right, as if half of them becoming what would have been moderate to midstream Republicans 30 to 40 years ago was going to work? Unless the party just sold out to Wall Street Gangsters in a way the Republicans have been centered in the corruption of the Oil gangsters . . . and
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do not think that Trump is ally of the People because the first thing he did was open up the DAPL . . . because he had money invested in it . . . and do not think the banks are not going to be in love with him soon enough. Heinous. But let us not forget that what we liked about Obama most was that he was Presidential because he still surveilled Americans more than even Bush II, but mostly because he could, with tech advancing as quickly as it had. Let us not forget that he deported more people than any other President in U.S, history, and it has been said more than every other President. Trump has a long way to go to catch up. Obama initiated more US Dept. of Justice investigations and criminal charges against Americans than EVERY other President Combined. Obama got us involved in more military conflicts than Bush II; spread the drone assassination campaign around the world, assassinating more people worldwide than any other President, perhaps every other. He spent one trillion dollars upgrading and expanding our nuclear arsenal, making 50 years of arms talks irrelevant and potentially destabilizing any future arms discussion. Obama tried to worm his way into Ukraine as if tweaking Putin's nose was a good thing--and you know that if the Russians had tried to negotiate with Mexico in half the way we entered Ukrainian politics, setting up in the region, we would have been at war already. Hilary's pet in Libya as has destabilized the country of Libya to the point where it can no longer maintain its borders and making worse a refugee exo-
dus from Africa that has caused enormous strain on the EU. Trump is the enemy of the People; but to listen to millionaires like Jon Stewart tout Hilary as more than just the lesser of the two evils, I know our country is equally lost. The Democratic Party and its supporters have not left the narrative of failure, the narratives of Friedmanesque Neo-liberal World Order that put the Democrats in bed with Wall Street and made Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert exactly like men like Matt Lauer, Bi%&*es of the Monied Elite, the Power Elite and/or the Corporate Media Elite--and do not forget that 90% of all media is run by 6 corporations. To imagine that there has not been a corporate undermining of education in America, allowing the nearly psychopathic needs of the corporate elite dictate through influence and money the standards of education, aligning themselves with politicians who inform how the bureaucracy manages state funded education . . . please do not delude yourselves; and if only six corporations run virtually all media in America--how narrow and continually narrowing is that . . . and of course that is going to be good for Democracy, for the People, and keep Power out of the shadows and money in the light of day. We are like the denizens of Plato's cave where we retreat from the light of day. Allons enfants de la patrie? Contra nous de la tyranie? All from The Friend of the People? I am a friend of the People. But in another post script, let me ask that you remember that Trump is not Orwellian--he is too transparently an imbecile. The real Orwellians were Regan and even 68
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more so Bill Clinton and finally Obama. Read 1984, my fellow Americans; do not just skim the pages to glean a point out of context to suit your next tirade spawned from your solipsism, your pronounced idiocy (an Aristotelean term) or ignorance born of a systematic under-education where being merely alphabetic is confused for literacy and reading is perfunctory always all the time. This just might be the Uber-ploy by Power to get us to think that we are actually moving democratically--but when millionaire media talking heads talk for US when they are talking for Power and Money, I know the people are lost. Power (also being Monied Elites, especially Corporate Media Elites) creates a space for subversion (or what appears as subversion) to emerge in order to control it? Manipulate it? Hand puppets, all? I mean if anyone had ever listened to Obama and took in the content, he would have remembered that the man Obama admired most in Politics was Ronald Reagan. Wow--now that's an idea--we have finally come to where Democrats and Republicans can hold hands?????? Where did we think the Republicans were going to go if the Democrats were taking not just rhetorical lessons from Regan, but substantive content policy lessons from Conservative Republicans-you F#%$in' idiots!!!!!!!!!! The Democrats cannot even decide if they want to do anything for the People and not for Power and Money--that's why the focus is on racism, to distract from the fact that the Democrats do not really want to tackle the elites any more than Trump will as he had promised. They will play ping
pong because they have us playing policy ping pong as well as games of hop scotch with the truth. Democrat or Republican? Either supports the corporatocracy from one or another slightly differing angle of policy. It will not further democracy and will only enforce how much less democratic our country has become. If you imagine that Obama or Hilary are Liberals, that is the first step, the pre-step, in our loss of democratic governing, a step in making the Monied Elite more powerful and the Power Elite more monied and influence mongers richer than anyone ever needs to be. Nobody was a bigger Bit#$ of the banks than Obama--Obama, O bankers! Trump will never solve those problems; he will either entrench them or give us a new set of them to make us think that we need Wall Street Marionettes like Obama and Hilary. All the while, both sides (sides???????) will continue to get rich and richer still and more powerful in their massive control of world wealth. Le sangue impure??????? Anyone who imagines that . . . I'm tired. America is tired. We are insipid and effete. We do not have what it takes to face the burdens of Democracy.
THE END
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She had been on the bed since dinner. It was true her mother had said, Magdalene was the first to recognize Christ. When did she say it? It does not matter when. When is an obsessive pronoun, so fixed on the unimportant as it could be?Time is useless in memory; memory is atemporal. The story of Christ’s resurrection was in the Gospels. The story of Magdalene and the Risen Christ was told in the Gospels; nowhere in the Gospels is she a whore, a prostitute. If you recall, you said you wanted to, I said, she listened, across the table, afternoon, Muscadet, lunch, calamar grille, oysters, simple Blue Pointe. No one sees with another’s eyes. How could another see with another’s eyes not being able to stand in another’s place— whenever you stand where one had once stood, you are thus standing in another place; you only ever stand where you stand when you stand how you stand, never as another at any moment is another; and as soon as another is not, you can never again be or become that person was. It’s not enough to be exactly on point where another stood; you have to occupy the same spot in the same moment, pure simultaneity. You cannot even stand in the same place you stood once ago; once ago and now are different spaces. I thought time was unimportant. It is; and it is not necessarily time we talk about when we talk of duration. I'm getting nowhere in this. And nobody ever gets anywhere. We are all of us together at once in one time; all of it, you know, is one, past present future just illusions, no?
THE GREAT SALT SEA The Apostles were neither deceived nor deceivers, she said. Neither of these options makes much sense when examining the birth of Christianity, the birth of the Word as birth of the world—Christianity born in resurrection or in nativity? When, where, how the world transformed, she used to say. But how many of us play hop-scotch with truth, this truth, that one, the Truth, so help us all, God . . . she continues (I continue [who else continues and continues and continues creeping in their petty paces until the last syllable of the last story told]): The entire notion of there being any kind of truth, or of the Truth--what then is it that anyone says of anything related to defining truths or absolute Truth, maintaining this idea and keeping it, holding fast to the quest for Truth, that is the question of all questions, every question in itself a quest, just as Perceval or Hamlet were on quests, the quested hero, every picaro a quester too, that’s why Sancho is with Quixote; Hamlet is too a picaro. What we would have had to endure, the Apostles--every apostle in quest of Truth, of Absolution for the world; every quester of this order an apostle of Christ she said. What the odds were on doing what we did —we’d all have to have been insane. Jesus spoke to her three times before she recognized me. She did not move. She set her eyes forward on the wall opposite the foot of the bed. Magdalene did not at first recognize Me. 70
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To bear the weight of another with your eyes, hold the weight of the world in your eyes; I thought her eyes were full enough the world of sorrow, the mother of sorrow the man of sorrow one of the mysteries of the universe in sorrow. To see, you know, is to understand; to understand, to stand under, to bear the weight, to carry, as Atlas carries the world, as Christ bears the sins, carries his Cross, as every scapegoat sings at the close of every tragedy, itself what is at the end, carrying the sins bringing catharsis, singing goats and singing women, where is woman’s tragedy in the ancient sense, or is the only thing left for women, the absurd. I fixed my gaze and I see nothing in front of me everything gone white for a moment, how I can blot out the world, white it out. I fixes my eyes, focuses them acutely I think, set them as we zoom in so to speak, how eyes are sometimes almost zoom lenses, but not, yet we are I imagines, remembers, enlarging what is in my field of vision, bringing them closer until we all near me becomes washed out away whatever else we have in words to describe what I sees knows I cannot see everything gone white completely blotted out. And how many of us herein accused will agree with what is said and not see themselves in this —the beam in your eye my eye his eye our eye and eyes who eyes the world who sees the eyes of the world looks into them can bear their sorrow their something else wordless we say wordless we know try to mean at when we do say something about it about them . . . what is it now? How is it? How does it seem to them, to you, to me?
Herein our American sense of democratic freedom is in truth adolescent, but then for fifty years or more we have been the consumerist culture of all consumerist cultures whose only ethic is driven by the marketplace which is mostly driven by teenagers. And we don’t suspect we’re lost mainly because every choice we make, every option we choose is framed in a set of alternatives and decisions that have been determined by our anti-metaphysical metaphysic of doubt, of contradiction, of negation—a deep, permeating ignorance that leaves us automated . . . and adulthood, when does it come? Sometime in our thirties we think, we used to say sometime in our mid to late twenties, but isn’t forty now the new thirty which means we delay that delayed growing up even further, how about death-bed rights of passage into adulthood, adulthood will become the new transcendentalism, the new transcendence, a new heaven to eventually doubt and discard and disbelieve, lost forever then trapped in the prison of adolescence, teenagers in perpetuity unto nausea after nausea after more nausea? And he said to me to him in front of others present for many differing reasons, explanations, reservations, preoccupations, predilections, prevarications, monstrously absurd hopes, wishes made in those constructions that expose their futility, their absurdity? I wish I were, I wish I may, might, whatever else have we in rhymes out of the nursery. I ask, genuinely I do, asking, asking, asking always asking. I have stopped ask-
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ing why, so futile, so utterly useless (don't need the "utterly"). Now I lay me down to sleep. What is left for me to utter here? To utter or not to utter . . . uttering names and actions and thoughts and places and events and smaller and bigger happenings . . . what then must we do, must I do, who am I in this montage of selves parading inside and outside the Self . . . Watching the waves coming one after another and another for how long I usually leave uncounted. Prayers, I could say my
them. This age or another age--what age is this that we find ourselves in? And yet to the question, once more my brothers. Close the gap. Do we find ourselves in an age or with an age, all about us this age and yet that one there, not here as is now: of all the unities of time and space, the oneness of the two; here now, not there then . . . no? Which one is it? This one here, that one there? More questions. Inquiries abound. Any other before is there . . . only now is here, and here is now.and time is not an ocean, I have said before, again before as everything in regression of time is less. Every age that has ever been has been in each age, which is an awkward way of saying that everything that has ever been thought has been thought in each age by at least someone somewhere at some time . . . yes, how is it--what? What was I trying to say? Graphing is another expedition, how so the matter of this making when all about me I hear in my head echoing the methods of others who could not hold my pen--no, they could not hold a pen to me, to mine, what gives life to thee--when I am old I will take down these books of mine and slowly read what I have written or more pretentiously, what I writ--writing is a writ of habeas corpus in a way, no? I wrote, I wrought, and I have wrought well, long and hard and arduously. Thousands and thousands of pages of essays, stories, vignettes, reports, letters, notebook entries, journals, emails, memos, poems; and then there are the novels and novellas. I read so much contemporary trash, not because my selection
prayers. How are they mine anymore? I could pray? I think I have forgotten how.
THE END GARY T. IS AN ENEMY OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION? How so this hyperbole? Wherefore art though our enemy? He speaks. And what he says . . . to say what he says or to bite his tongue and thereby end all discourse on the facts of Shakespeare--funny coming from one who imagines that facts are not possible to discern? That is not what he imagines, is it? But he does equate facts, facts and more facts with factory made things; yes, facts are made and being things made, they are fictions, if you follow the course I am running here. How is it that a man like and unlike other men his age--and he is like them and he is not like them which has nothing to do with how much he dislikes them, too many of 72
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process is challenged, but because so much of what is written today is crap. Yes, every thought that has ever been thought has been thought by someone somewhere in every time throughout all of history and before what we think we call history. Here we are now discoursing on Shakespeare--and we--why we? We is awfully pretentious, is it not? I have discoursed on him (should I say Him, a hymn for Him, I have--I cannot say now how many times-sung his praises, lifted up my voice, my pen . . . a pen, a pen, a kingdom of praises for this pen). And the discourse for scholars on Shakespearean discourse has reached-what does it reach, what do they reach for, teach us in their stretching, for all that I know they may not even stick out their hand to take down his book and slowly read. Do we read anymore? To read or not to read. Hamlet is a prophet of our contemporaneity--no, for all of modern history. The religion of the book--what book, all books being one book; the Holy Literary. Nonetheless, all discourse only one or another way of going astray? Dis-course, of course. Discourse, discourse, my Shakespeare for dis-course. I have veered off course herein; every essay is a wandering through a woods? Make a path and others will follow. He announces, this man not so unlike other men; he pronounces, his name, other names, no names, what names are there, everything to be named or not to be named, that is Adam's question . . . and until the last syllable,. silly bells ringing our their rhythm, their rhyme, their reason or mine?
He bellows with a bombast reminiscent-he cannot say, he does not say, of what it reminds him. To come to mind again; do you kind? I mind what you say even when I do not mind the meaning or the intent. To be mindful, you know means something other than to mind when to mind is to take offense? I do take offense to Gary Taylor, he might say after me, following or imitating . . . me, of course. Let us now discourse on me? Analogies he needs not indulge, he thinks, does not say to himself exactly, although these words would find agreement with him, almost as if he could say that he would not have minded if he were the one to say them. He is at the bar in a Bar on Saint Mark's in the East Village--he has had a bone to pick with Gary Taylor's closet or latent elitism, something he has said he has suspected for many years now. He goes on to say, "Gary Taylor is a twit. I can't say that he's an asshole, but an academic twit" caught dripping, he would say, "in the residue of a particularly insipid kind of political correctness, a nearly virulent type of iconoclasm that accompanies this, advocating, ironically, a kind or renewed anti-bardolotry that had once been discredited, the kind of the latter anti-bard arguments" that find themselves peculiarly elitist in their effect. What say you, you Post-post Structuralist twits? "Taylor has become one of the most sophisticated of the neo-anti-bardists. Bardolatry not being something I have ever sponsored; not the way it had been used politically by schools, a pedestaling of 73
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Shake that kept him distant concurrently with offhandedly praising him, much the way many religionists keep their God-praised and remote, especially from their hearts," he pauses. Eternal Liberty; I'm with Keats when it comes to reading; Bloom, too, I could say. Yes, as much as Bloom would say he himself was Johnsonian, I could say that I am Bloomian? I am a Bloomian Shakespeareanist? Now is the fall of my discontent, made gloomy winter by contemporary cultural studyists making or mocking bad social science instead of literary criticism, which was never in itself always good reading . . . (you are following me, are you not. I am beginning to think that I am only talking to Literature majors, or those who have done Graduate work in literature). "Mr. Taylor's devotion to Marlowe's having authored parts of the Henry VI plays smacks as much from the old argument that Shake could not have written his plays, given his schooling, but must have been written or largely rewritten by someone of a university education, someone like Marlowe or Middleton, even, this later Elizabethan being one of Taylor's chief sponsorships." I too have been Marlovian. I, myself, had advocated for Marlowe when I was an undergraduate while everyone else was talking Shakespeare. Ah! To be different; to be unique; to be in the minority opinion. Just as great as Shake? Now that's a question? Will in the world did learn a lot from Marlowe. I had always known this.There never was a conspiracy while I was an undergraduate to keep these suggestions or
thoughts from anyone. Most of what multicult(i) have sponsored as part of their designs for hegemony did not exist, were not an issue or a problem. But I am mistaking the tangents point connection to the circle for inside the circle, for being with the topic at hand. He pauses. That is, the man pauses as I too pause--and who am I to this other you read here, hear here, is here filling out places in the text--every text has texture, you know. I have said this many times before now in my life: Don't be fooled by the flatness of the page or the overt linearity of the words in lines. Do you hear what I hear? I know seeing is believing, but what about hearing? Is it too believing? He said, or is it he says? "When I was an undergrad, any professor who taught Shake in the university always said that Shake did not invent the forms or the stylistics within which he worked; it was always insisted that it was Marlowe who was the Tudor theater revolutionary. I don't even object to Marlowe being credited with co-authorship in the very early written or wrought Henry the VI plays, having gone through my own Marlovian period as an undergrad, announcing at times that I preferred Marlowe to Shakespeare--never Middleton, though. However, Middleton did have a sound and crediting reputation from Elizabethan scholars and the professor's of Shake at my college. Especially in grad school, you would have come face-to-face with the reputation of Marlowe and Middleton--maybe Taylor laments that Middleton does not 74
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have the rep that Shake has among the public, or more specifically, the troglodytes Taylor teaches in Florida, not to say that everyone from State Universities are troglodytes, but the way we have systematically undereducated in America, with what passes for reading . . . there are far too many undergraduates who have been left unprepared or under-prepared for university learning, most exactly by how elitist schools prior to college have become, basing all pedagogy on a pedagogy of failure where cream will rise to the top. Now that's elitist. and how I just do not trust anything Taylor puts his hands on or has his fingers in-reading him is like taking a proctological exam. " He does not pause. He is not kind. But you do not need me to say that. I say that because I do know that there are enough readers who cannot help but confuse character and narrator and then narrator with author; author with man is another debasement. Advances in electronic technology have not added to our ability to read; textual scholarship and the ability to read and analyze and compare texts I do not imagine has gotten much better or far superior, in fact of my own sense, I imagine it probably has gotten worse. The alphabet is the technology that has helped literacy and is the only technology a reader needs to employ in reading--and I do not imagine that the ever increasing degradation of standard reading from what we once understood to be hierarchically arranged higher literacy and what we now should call general and pervasive alphabet-
ics even on university campuses has become anything less than appalling. "Yes, PhDs like Taylor must champion Oxford educated men in a grotesquely politically correct attempt to debase the old favorite of the old ivory tower. Of course Taylor will insist that Middleton must have revised a couple of Shake's plays; no one can say that this Lord or that Lord wrote what so many have examined and have found enough consistencies to say that they have been authored by a single author. I do not imagine that anyone as hyper politicized as anyone from one or another grotesque branches of cultural study political correctness like Taylor could have less of a political axe to grind with tradition than those from the Ivory Tower allegedly had axes to grind for a conservative tradition." He pauses. He hesitates, mumbling unintelligibly, as if he were going to speak, but no. He stops. He pauses however long you think he should pause before beginning again without appearing to have spoken in one stream. Disjunction; continuity should be apparent, even if there is disjunction in rhetoric. "In the spirit of having another pint of ale, let me say: Death to Gary T., Long Live Shakespeare? Is that what I mean to say? Is that what I wanted to say? How so to say or not to say what is on one's mind? I never know what I think until I write? Unless I write? I must write. My to be or not has been for decades, to write or not to write." I too loved Marlowe as an undergraduate English major. I too made argument for the greaterness of Marlowe, at times. 75
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More what? More greatly? Greatlier? Is that a word? I like More Greatly. I wish I knew. What? What do I wish I knew? I wish I could wish I knew, wishing as well that I could know what I have known and what I have not known--now that's too much: for anyone to wish that he knew what he did not know, that he knew what he has not known, what he had not known at a time before another when he knew not what he knew . . . Wherefore art thou Shakespeare, deny thy father? Refuse thy name. The author of these plays by any other name should still read as sweetly as any other author by a disguised name . . . I have forgiven myself, for I certainly knew not what I was doing too many times.
take or not to take, no; make, give, let go of? We do not take coffee when we have it, drink it; why do we take a shit when we make it? Having a shit? I sometimes have shit-fits. Taking a shit can't be the same as taking a shower; take can't be the same, except we do both in matters of minutes. We do spend time as well as money; minutes are money; time is money; why do we get paid by the hour---it should be by the minute. I worked sixty-seven minutes; I should get sixty-seven minutes of pay. I want a dollar a minute. I should get a dollar a minute but my supervisors will only exact minutes from us without paying us. Minute to minute; minute by minute; up to the minute; everything minute is in the moment, part of a minute. Maybe we actually live in the seconds; the moment of orgasm, right? Which came first, the minute or what was minute; what was minute giving us the name, minute. Spring arriving is a moment, not a day, not an hour. The summer solstice is another moment, this minute it comes. It's not the destination, it is the journey. The fucking, not the orgasm alone, right? Minutes? Woolf talked of the hours, focused on the hours; but it is as it was the minutes, sometimes the seconds. That's how we live, not in the hours or the days or the weeks or the years––how many minutes in a year? Multiply sixty minutes by twenty-four hours, then multiply this sum by three-hundred and sixty-five, and that's how many minutes. How many minutes of waves to the shore have come these last several millennia? How many minutes has the earth been around; how many minutes of sunrises
THE END
Up to the Minute How many minutes? How many minutewaning days? How are our days spent? My days are spent in the minutes. We live life? I live life in the minutes, not the hours, not the years, not the days--weeks and weekends are absurd as well. Sun up to sun down. What do you want to know about what I have seen in these minutes I have lived, I have spent--spending time, spending minutes, the dollars of our lives, what value do we put on minutes, the minutes we spend with our children, the minutes we spend sipping coffee, the minutes we spend in the shower, minutes sitting on the bowl taking a shit--why is it we take a shit? To
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have humans seen on this planet? How many minutes of walking have I done in my life, minutes of reading, line by line by line . . . the line in a text does not take place in a matter of hours. I read most poems in minutes not hours. Even when I do do something for hours, I did it for hours minute by minute, each minute, second by second. The birds on the window sill this morning chirping singing as they do; the sun through the branches and leaves of the trees between my window and the sunrise happens as it happened this morning in the minutes. I teach a lesson in an hour, but my hour is fifty minutes. How many minutes is Hamlet's to be or not to be? How long does it take Juliet to kill herself? For Romeo not to put a mirror to her nose? I cook an egg in minutes, boil water in minutes, cook pasta in minutes, take how many minutes to shower, to brush my teeth, to fall asleep, to make a pot of espresso, to wash the dishes, to walk around the corner to the store, to wait for my slice of pizza to heat up, to get my lottery tickets, to add money to my metro card, to wait for the train to work, to clock in, to do the attendance for my class, to wash my hands, to kiss my wife good morning or good night or hello. To order a beer; to drink the beer; to watch the replay of goals scored between periods . . . To cook a burger on the grill, to get the coals going on the grill. I hold her hand for how many minutes? I recollect holding her hand along the promenade at the bay for how long? I think about wanting to hold her hand. I think about liking holding her hand. I
think about humans holding hands and chimpanzees holding hands. For how long? Chimps copulate face to face. Jesus spent three days on His Cross, but his agony was every minute, moment to moment. This that I write is how long line by line, sentence after sentence, prose is faster than verse they discovered in the 18th century I used to say, leaving a lot out of that encapsulation of an observation made from reading about the rise of the novel as a form. Minutes, minutes, minutes; what then is this about living in the hours? Sorry Virginia; it's all of it in the minutes. How long does it take for waking up again that makes me smile immediately ensuing? How long in recognizing that I am happy or that I am sad, shedding a tear or two or more, for my mother's heart to stop beating while I hold her hand after she has been disconnected from the machines that have been keeping her breathing, not necessarily alive? How long it takes to get the weather. to get the traffic, to find out if the D train is running this Saturday morning are all questions I could ask. To do the steps in a dance; to take a piss in the bathroom at Bar Six; to wait for the D back home from West 4th Street station was how long the other night? To ask my wife if she wants sushi for dinner; to look over the menu; to order; for the food to come; to get a second carafe of sake; to drink the sake and order a third; to drink the cognac we drink honoring my wife's mother who has been dead these last three and half decades; to toast my dad on his birthday now five years after he died. Mrs. Dal77
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loway's Moments? Mrs. Dalloway's Minutes? Yes, The Minutes? Everything is in the minutes; to start the car; to stop the car at a red light; to wait for the light to change; to cross the street; to chew a bite of my sandwich, to nibble your lover's ear, my wife's; to say I am sorry, to say I love you, to say I am going to kill you; to kill a person, to shoot them once or three times or to stab them twenty four times in the chest and the neck. To fart, to burp, to sharpen a pencil; to slice a tomato; to wash an apple, to soak blueberries and then to put them in a bowl with yogurt. To wait for a room to cool down after having put on the a/c. To listen to a song; to sing a song; to play a song on your trumpet or guitar. Not to roast the Thanksgiving Day turkey. That last wave I saw from here on the beach, the sands I dig my feet in, the time I take to watch this seagull hovering the incoming waves like a kite; watching a child with her dog whose back is almost as tall as she is . . . I get up and stand facing the ocean as the waves continue one after another and another and another continuously continuing to keep on keeping on, rising, swelling turning, curling falling, tumbling crashing in one thunderous crescendo after another and another and another not so much in petty paces but in a great epic rhythm here and now and now and again now, Odysseus's adventures are played out moment by moment line by line, the waves coming in and going out, the tides and the surf in its tumult as it has been then and then always evermore repeating itself for millennia after millennia into ages and eons
of minutes . . . how many minutes in a millennia of minutes all of it all of them momentous moments of moment to moment second after second ... as I stand for how many minutes I have forgotten until I turn and decide that I have to go to the IGA to buy things for lunch later eaten in minutes after having been prepared in minutes after having been brought back from the supermarket (that Julian Moore shops at) in minutes, after having been packed in minutes, after having been paid for in a minute, after having been rung up for a few minutes, after having been shopped for in how many minutes, after having walked to the IGA in minutes, after having decided in a moment that I would go and get things for lunch as I stood for a few minutes after having sat for a couple of dozen minutes on the beach at the shore near the surf. How do you spend your day when you lose count of the minutes passing?
THE END
Etymological Fallacies and Other Fictions Remember I said. What is there to remember? I asked. To be a member once again… of what, of where, of when, with whom? I genuinely ask, asI have suspected that I might not be doing such.Renewing one's membership--to be a member of society or not to be a member of society? Again, questions beget questions, and so on and so on . . . everyone I speak to, everyone everywhere every-when, yes, everyone speaks in cliches, or they talk in one-after78
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another trite expressions, received, as they are, through the media. We have destroyed the folk in America; Europe has destroyed the folk. The Bee Hive State is now. What is there to say about being a member of any group? Every group has to have boundaries, of course; limits, for sure; everything within the boundaries is the group--are there such things as categories? We ask, we do, I do, as I also ask if there is a capital 'T' Truth, but then I know that there is. We ask if there are any absolutes we can believe . . . categories as there are sparrows outside my window? All Women's bathrooms have urinals; this bathroom has a urinal; therefore, it is a woman's bathroom, no? The in-the-world rightness or the wrongness of any premise has nothing to do with the truth value ... all literary reviews are dangerous manifestations of the manias of their editors; this is a literary review; therefore, it is a dangerous manifestation of the editor's manias. What is it about this review I wanted to say? Needed to say? All the stories, yes, how the word 'stories' is used, used as 'story' is used, with the sense we carry to the word, give to the word, impose on the word 'story'; thus, what is fiction and what . . . yes, a thing made. Every fiction is thus a history of a kind, every history a story, every story . . . round and round we go. Gira, gira, the world turns and turns and turns. Did you know that the moon's rotation is in synchronicity with its orbit around the earth? That's why we always see the same side of the moon. What is fiction is a big part of what fiction is, of what it has been, has-been fiction
demands new forms, does it not? We try to give them, offering what? We imagine we have succeeded. Our ignorance flatters us. There are no new forms under the moon, are there? All things that have ever been thought have been thought in every age? A thing made is . . . what? All telling is a kind of composing, a making in the process; thus what is telling about this telling of yours? Interposing compositions; a manner of posing or positioning, conventionally or unconventionally? Fiction is a mask, paranoia is a mask, schizophrenia, masks, are they not? Everyone has to get behind the masks he wears inside; mask is persona in Latin; every person an elaborate masking. Personality takes on revitalized meaning. Which is an appropriate fiction to live and an inappropriate one to live, to perpetuate. Are we good or bad authors of the Self? Every com-position, what gets put, placed, set, now I lay me down to sleep . . . to lay things down in fiction, for fiction . . . every prayer a fiction . . . impressive expressions, expressive impressions; even in paint, or in music, or by dance, each one a thing made, to make or not to make . . . all philosophy, fiction, no? This has nothing to do with the truth-value or the metaphysical veracity of philosophy. What more is there to say? I do ask genuinely. I have forgotten film. A short story we say is fiction; an essay we say is non-fiction, but how is it that we can say that, or do say that, about an essay, that it is not fiction when the first or the last or the first and the last thing about fic79
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tion is its made-ness; yes, of course, I want to say, a fiction is a thing made, to make or not to make would be a question a poet asks--all poets makers. Playwright means play maker, builder, as in wheelwright, shipwright; to wright is to make as to write is also making, although less literally, although literary is a possibility. Literary shopping lists? I say what I say how I say it about fiction particularly in the way I mean fiction when a story is thus all made up--but then so is an essay, in away, all made up, just as a woman remains who she is whether she is all made up or not . . . fee, fie, fictio fum. What about lists; are they fictions too? How does this help what I am driving at? Yes, words sit, words run, words drive at as they do drive to something somewhere. Non-fiction is fiction in a way that fiction is also fiction; constructively; the words not the things or the persons described, shown, told, said, presented . . . all as re-presentation? What then do I say about how a sandwich is a fiction? Make no mistake about this; all within here are fictions of one kind or another, of one order or another: kind, order, class, category? How is sandwich making not an art. Ligare or legere as the root of religion. I have been with Cicero on this; I have presented this before, elsewhere. Make no mistake that in the essays, the essays are essays formatively, but are fictions as are short stories herein; which does not mean there are fewer truths or less Truth in them. On the contrary, I do not adhere to the notion that truths or Truth are equal to and
synonymous with "what is true" in the basest sense of trueness. Legere as an origin of read, to read or not to read I ask after Oscar; Legere also means to go through which could mean to plot, thus, to mark the course or to connect the dots between two places, thus in a connotation, to link together, or to gather, thus collect, which is ligare, to bind, or to fasten together. The origin of ligaments in the body? Religion is then what? Religion is what helps the joints in the body politic function? In the essays, that are thus fictional essays, thus like short stories, some of what we expect from whatever is called fictional, some of what we bring as readers to fiction is to be brought to the essays, just as when an essay appears under the heading, fictional essay or essayistic fiction. Some of what we bring to the reading of an essay must be brought to the reading of the story; something of what is brought to the reading of a story is to be brought to the reading of an essay, any essay, but most surely those essays called fictional essays. The expositor can be as wrong as any narrator. But for a reason, or what we might call reason, for want of a better term. When it rains in fiction, it is never just raining. This has always been true in what I write; the why I write will not get addressed herein, may never get addressed. To dress is another making, other than making up, what happens when women put on make-up? To make oneself up, huh? One or other THE END 80
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BACK COVER PHOTO: "UNDERCOVER"
BY JAY V. RUVOLO
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