It is kisstomary to cuss your bride.
Heartiest Citation. Thus far.
So. Another day. Another. A Tuesday.
And I’ve shuffled through my manuscript again. I lift the sheets and then I lay them down. It may be that I’ve accomplished only half my task. I have not, like my colleagues, overlooked the real arena, but haven’t I given my results the neat and compact body of a book? Haven’t I arranged my weeds like a court garden? Certainly I’ve not rescued God’s Great Blueprint from a pile of soggy discards. I’ve not done that. I can’t offer the reader Nature seen as a dump of divine signs. Only the foolish and the cruel can believe in Supreme Sovereigns now. I haven’t pasted up some poster showing a litho-nippled Providence grimly dicing us home as though we were counters on a board game - nothing so trivial or so grand. Yet, despite my care, my misgivings… I’m afraid that willy-nilly I’ve contrived for history a book’s sewn spine, a book’s soft closure, its comfortable oblong handweight, when it ought to be heavier that Hercules could heft. History is relentless, but now it has a volume’s uninsistent kind of time. And hasn’t the guilt and innocence I speak of there become a simple succession of pages?
We read, and therefore see before us a great mound of earth which bulldozers have gauged from the ground; only, of course, prisoners have dug the hole whose hollow it represents, just as these pages, I notice, pile up to mark my new obsession. In front of the mound: a mile of naked strangers. In groups of twenty, like smokes, they are directed to the other side by a man with a truncheon and a whip. It will not help to ink his face. Several man with barrows collect clothes. There are young women still with attractive breasts. There are family groups, many small children crying quietly, tears oozing from their eyes like sweat. In whispers people comfort one another. Soon, they say, Soon. No one wails and no one begs. Arms mingle with other arms like fallen limbs, lie like shawls across bony shoulders. A loose gray calm descends. It will be soon… soon. A grandmother coos at the infant she cuddles, her gray hair hiding all but the feet. The baby giggles when it’s chucked. A father speaks earnestly to his son and points at the heavens where surely there is an explanation; it is doubtless their true destination. The colour of the sky cannot be coloured in. The son is lied to right up to the last. Father does not cup his boy’s wet cheeks in his hands and say, You shall die, my son, and never be remembered. The little salamander you were frightened at first, and grew to love and buried in the garden, the long walk to school your legs learned, what shape our daily life, our short love, gave you, the meaning of your noisy harmless games, every small sensation that went to make your eager and persistent gazing will be gone; not simply the butterflies you fancied, or the bodies you yearned to see uncovered - look, there they are: the inner thighs, the nipples, pubes - or what we all might have finally gained from the toys you treasured, the dreams you peopled, but especially your scarcely budded eyes, and that rich and gentle quality of consciousness which I hoped one day would have been uniquely yours like the most subtle of flavors - the skin, the juice, the sweet pulp of a fine fruit - well, son, your possibilities, as unrealized as the erections of your penis - in a moment - soon - will be ground out like a burnt wet butt beneath a callous boot and disappear in the dirt. Only our numbers will be remembered - not that you or I died, but that there were so many of us. And that we were
we were, weren’t we? we? we were, we were once, we were, were
- orderly, quiet, dignified, brave. On the other side of the mound, where two young women and the grandmother are going now, the dead have placed themselves in neat rows across an acre-square grave. The next victims clamber awkwardly to the top of the pile where they’ll be shot by a young man with a submachine gun and a cigarette. Some of the dead have not yet died. They tremble their heads and elevate their arms, and their pardons are begged as they’re stepped on; they want to be shot again; but the bullets bring down only those above them, and for a few the weight is eventually so great it crushes their chests. How nice and white death is. So serene. I close the book to answer the phone.
Sometimes a foot slips on the blood-wet bodies, and a fat woman slides face forward down the stack when she is hit. As the next line climbs, there are quiet words to the wounded, and the occasional caress. From the gunman’s end, of course, the mound looks like a field full of false hair. Millions die eventually, in all ways. What songs, what paintings, poems, arts of playing, were also buried with them, and in what number? who knows what inventions, notions, new discoveries, were interred, burned, drowned? what pleasures for us all bled to death on the ice of a Finnish lake? what fine loaves both baked and eaten, were lost, acres of cake, what rich emotions we might later share; how many hours of love were lost, like sand down a glass, through even the tiniest shrapnel puncture?
Of course one must count loss of a lot of mean and silly carking too. Thousands of thieves, murderers, shylocks, con men, homos, hoboes, wastrels, peevish clerks, shysters, drunkards, hopheads, Don Juans, pipsqueaks, debtors, premature ejaculators, epileptics, fibbers, frigid females, faddists, nags, nailbiters and bed wetters, frumps, fanatics, friggers, bullies, cripples, fancy ladies, got theirs just deserts, and were hacked apart or poisoned, driven mad or raped and even sabered, or simply stood in a field and starved like wheat without water; and we shall never know how many callow effusions we were spared by a cutthroat; how many slanderous tongues were severed, what sentimental love songs choked off as though in mid-tone by the rope; the number of the statues of Jesus, Mary, or the pope, whose making was prevented by an opportune blindness of the breaking of the right bones; what canvases depicting mill wheels in moonlight, cattle at dawn, children and dogs, lay unexecuted on their easels because of the gas, talent thrown out as if it were the random pissing of paint into a bedpan; so that, over all, and on sober balance, there could have been a decided gain; yet there is always the troublesome, the cowardly, midnight thought that a Milton might have been rendered mute and inglorious by an errant bullet through the womb; that some infant, who, as a precious young man, might conceive a Sistine ceiling for the world, and humble us all with his genius, as he made us proud of our common humanity … well, there is always the fear that this not-yet youth has been halved like a peach.
- William H. Gass. The Tunnel.
The only reason Lenz didn’t burst out laughing was because he wasn’t alone; his movement - which seemed hidden now inside a second glove, the body of the injured soldier - were mockeries of themselves. Lenz felt as though he was engaged in a kind of manual labour that for him, deep down, was like manipulating shapes in clay or working a piece of wood. Any feelings of empathy were dissolved in professional expertise and in the recognition of his triumph in relation to the body lying on the stretcher. Lenz was alive, on his feet, with his reason intact, and still in control of the use of language: in that room he was the person who determined every Yes and every No - and he had long known that controlling such extreme words was a source of undisputable power.
A startled nurse was asking Dr. Lenz whether he wanted her to pass him another scalpel, one with a fine point, and Lenz replied: No. No, no. Yes, yes,yes.
Let us say that “organic craftsmanship,” the most basic craftsmanship, often filled him with enthusiasm. Lenz knew that bullets or bomb shrapnel - in short, all the pieces of metal that find their way into our bodies - were only looking for what any living creature looks for: a shelter, a final home, a home where they can be left alone, where they feel secure.
- Gonçalo M. Tavares. Learning to Pray in the Age of Technique.
“We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind — mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality.”—
J. G. Ballard (“Introduction” to French edition of Crash in 1974)
The censor pretends he is protecting tender hearts, shielding children from sex and violence, keeping the righteous in the right path, guarding against temptation, preserving virtue. How? by burning books, tearing out tongues, stretching necks, stoning women; through torture and imprisonment; by threats of violence against the victim’s friends and family; by force-feeding his own people a philosophy not only false and wicked now but false and wicked the day it was first announced by some imaginary lord and used to purchase or preserve his privileges and hoodwink the world.
-William H. Gass. The Tests of Time.
On the muddy, polluted foreshore of Martin’s consciousness, the cultural waves slapped limply; towards the horizon a ruptured tanker wallowed in the curdling sea. Martin had grasped the magnitude of the disaster at dawn, when he saw the thick slick of wine, beer and vodka gushing from the tanker’s hull, and the dark pall of dope smoke overhead.
-Will Self. The Sweet Smell of Psychosis.
“My dear fellow,” Burlingame said, “we sit here on a blind rock careeing through space; we are all of us rushing headlong to the grave. Think you the worms will care, when anon they make a meal of you, whether you spent your moment sighing wigless in your chamber, or sacked the golden townes of Montezuma? Lookee, the day’s nigh spent; ‘tis gone careeing into time forever. Not a tale’s lenght past we lined our bowels with dinner, and already they growl more. We are dying men, Ebenzeer: i’faith, there’s time for naught but bold resolves!”
- John Barth. The Sot-Weed Factor.
Your love springs from your incompleteness, but also reduces you to another’s prosthetic attachment, calcified by the Medusa’s gaze of his need.
-David Foster Wallace. Little Expresionless Animals.
-Don DeLillo. Ratner’s Star.
and human brings are known universally as the only animals capable of lying, and while it is true that they sometimes lie out of fear and sometimes out of self-interest, they also occasionally lie because they realize, just in time, that this is the only means available to them of defending the truth.
José Saramago. Seeing.
(via anotherword)
The words we hear are travelogues of gossip; they are slogans, social come-ons, ads, and local world announcements; phatic, filling our inner silence, they produce an appearance of communion, the illusion of knowledge. Counterfeit, they purchase jail.
-William H. Gass.
“Some one said: ‘The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.’ Precisely, and they are that which we know.”—
T. S. Eliot, from “Tradition and the Individual”
“‘People don’t like themselves today. We’re a rentier class left over from the last century. We tolerate everything, but we know that liberal values are designed to make us passive. We think we believe in God but we’re terrified by the mysteries of life and death. We’re deeply self-centred but can’t cope with the idea of our finite selves. We believe in progress and the power of reason, but are haunted by the darker sides of human nature. We’re obsessed with sex, but fear the sexual imagination and have to be protected by huge taboos. We believe in equality but hate the underclass. We fear our bodies, and above all, we fear death. We’re an accident of nature, but we think we’re at the centre of the universe. We’re a few steps from oblivion, but we hope we’re somehow immortal.’”—
p. 139, Millennium People by J.G. Ballard (2003)
(Source: junkbondtrader)
The people lived almost entirely by instinct, men of my father’s age could not really read. And the pit did not mechanize men. On the contrary. Under the butty system, the miners worked underground as a sort of intimate community, they knew each other practically naked, and with curious close intimacy, and the darkness and the underground remoteness of the pit “stall” and the continual presence of danger, made the physical instinctive, and intuitional contact between men very highly developed, a contact almost as close as touch, very real and very powerful. This physical awareness and intimate togetherness was at its strongest down pit. When the men came up into the light, they blinked. They had, in a measure, to change their flow. Nevertheless, they brought with them above ground the curious dark intimacy of the mine, the naked sort of contact.
-D.H. Lawrence. Nottingham and the Mining Countryside
Words. Slova. Sõnad. Verba. die Worte.
”I will not,” Enderby said, turning to him, “read out all your poem, which may be described as a sort of litany of anatomic vilification. Two stanzas will perhaps suffice.” And he read them with detached primness:
“It will be your balls next, whitey,
A loving snipping of the scrotum
With rather rusty nail scissors,
And they tumble out then to be
Crunched underfoot crunch crunch.
It will be your prick next, whitey,
A loving chopping segmentally
With an already bloodstained meat hatchet,
And it will lie with the dog turds
To be squashed squash squash.
“One point,” he said. “If the prick is to be chopped in segments it will not resemble a dog turd. The writing of er verse does not excuse you from considerations of er—”
“He says it will lie with the dog turds,” Ms. Tietjens said. “He doesn’t say it will look like one.”
“Yes yes, Sylvia, but—”
“Lydia.”
“Of course, thinking of Ford. Sorry. But, you see, the word it suggests that it’s still a unity, not a number of chopped bits of er penis. Do you see my point?”
“Yeah,” Lloyd Utterage said, “but it’s not a point worth seeing. The point is the hate.”
“The poetry is in the pity,” said Enderby. “Wilfred Owen. He was wrong, of course. It was the other way round. As I was saying, a unity and rather resembling a dog turd. So the image is of this er prick indistinguishable from—”
“Like Lloyd said,” said a very spotty Jewish boy named Arnold Something, his hair also cannibalistically arranged, “it’s the hate that it’s about. Poetry is made out of emotions,” he pronounced.
“Oh no,” Enderby said. “Oh very much no. Oh very very very much no and no again. Poetry is made out of words.”
“It’s the hate,” Lloyd Utterage said. “It’s the expression of the black experience.”
“Now,” Enderby said, “we will try a little experiment. I take it that this term whitey is racialist and full of opprobrium and so on. Suppose now we substitute for it the word er nigger—” There was a general gasp of disbelief. “I mean, if, as you said, the point is the hate, then the hate can best be expressed—and, indeed, in poetry must be expressed—as an emotion available to the generality of mankind. So instead of either whitey or nigger you could have, er, bohunk or, say, kike. But kike probably wouldn’t do—”
“You’re telling me it wouldn’t do,” Chuck Szymanowski said.
“—Since the end words are disyllabic or er yes trisyllabic but never monosyllabic. A matter of structure,” Enderby said. “So listen. It will be your balls next, nigger, etc. etc. It will be your prick next, nigger, and so on. Now it is the structure that interests me. It’s not, of course, a very subtle or interesting structure, as er Lloyd here would be the first to admit, but it is the structure that has the vitality, not all this nonsense about hate and so on. I mean, imagine a period when this kind of race-hate stupidity is all over, and yet the poem—perennius aere, you know—still by some accident survives. Well, it would be taken as a somewhat primitive but still quite engaging essay in vilification in terms of an anatomical catalogue, the structure objectifying and, as it were, cooling the hate. Comic too on the personal level—It will be your balls next, er Crassus or say Lycidas. Rather Catullan. You see.” He smiled at them. Now they were really learning something.
“You think,” Lloyd Utterage panted, “you’re going to get away with that, man?”
“Away with what?” Enderby asked in honest and rather hurt surprise.
“Look,” Ms. Tietjens said kindly, “he’s British. He doesn’t understand the ethnic agony.”
“That’s rather a good phrase,” Enderby said. “It doesn’t mean anything, of course. Like saying potato agony. Oh I don’t know, though. The meanings of imaginative language are not the same as those of the defilers of language. Your President, for instance. The black leaders. Lesbian power, if such a thing exists—”
“He understands it,” said Lloyd Utterage. “His people started it. Nigger-whippers despite their haw-haw-haw old top.”
“Now that’s interesting,” Enderby said. “You see how the whipping image immediately begat in your imagination the image of a top? You have the makings of a word man. You’ll be a poet someday when you’ve got over all this nonsense.” Then he began to repeat nigger-whipper swiftly and quietly like a tongue-twister. “Prosodic analysis,” he said. “Do any of you know anything about that? A British linguistic movement, I believe, so it may not have er gotten to you. Nigger and whipper, you see, have two vowels in common. Now note the opposition of the consonants—a rich nasal against a voiceless semivowel, a voiced stop against a voiceless. Suppose you tried nigger-killer. Not so effective. Why not? The g doesn’t oppose well to the l. They’re both voiced, you see, and so—”
“Maaaaaan,” drawled Lloyd Utterage, leaning back in simulated ease, smiling crocodilewise. “You play your little games with yourself. All this shit about words. Closing your eyes to what’s going on in the big big world.”
Enderby got angry. “Don’t call me maaaaaan,” he said. “I’ve got a bloody name and I’ve got a bloody handle to it. And don’t hand me any of that shit, to use your own term, about the importance of cutting the white man’s balls off. All that’s going to save your immortal soul, maaaaaan, if you have one, is words. Words words words, you bastard,” he crescendoed, perhaps going too far.
“I don’t think you should have said that,” said a mousy girl called Ms. Crooker or Kruger. “Bastard, I mean.”
“Does he have the monopoly of abuse?” Enderby asked in heat. “It’s he who’s doing the playing about, anyway, with his bloody castration fantasies. He wouldn’t have the guts to cut the balls off a pig. Or he might have. If it were a very little pig and ten big fellow melanoids held it down for him. I say,” he then said, “that’s good. Fellow melanoids.”
“I’m getting out of here,” Lloyd Utterage said, rising.
“Oh no you’re not,” Enderby cried. “You’re going to stay and suffer just like I am. Bloody cowardice.”
“There’s no engagement,” Lloyd Utterage said. “There’s no common area of understanding.” But he sat down again.
“Oh yes there is,” Enderby said. “I understand that you want to cut a white man’s genital apparatus off. Well, come and try. But you’ll get this sword in your black guts first.” And he drew an inch or so of steel.
“You shouldn’t have said black guts,” Ms. Flugel or Crookback said. It was as though she were Enderby’s guide to polite New York usage.
“Well,” Enderby said, “they are black. Is he going to deny that now?”
