Composition.

The mountebank is professional. That’s the difference. He plays a part but never comes to pieces; he’s whole in every suit, entire in each attire he chooses. Hilarity forces its fool way out of me, forces its life. I am embarrassed (it’s like pulling down my pants before a stranger), if I’m serious with myself. Take note. Position. Another defensive noise, a whistle for the graveyard. Stones to mark the selves that are no more. Note. Note. Surely there are ghosts in every grave (except the ones the Germans dug, ghettos underground which snuffed out even spirits), and one may suddenly materialize, condense on the side of the sky like moisture on a glass . . . and there I am, dead all these years, a little boy in knickers, flat sailor hat and scarfy tie, whiny nose and easy bladder—what a weapon that bladder was! how brilliantly I peed in every place—yes, that’s one ghost, and it may wet me yet, at fifty, as I pass among my selves . . . and thus he peed, the brat, in pews at church, the little turd, or in the Palmer House, carefully apart from the furniture and urns, stickered trunks or lazy bellhops in their servant’s suits, spittoons afloat the risen ends of logs on the lobby floor, far from the little leashed dogs of the dogged guests, so there’d be no mistake (credit where credit, he already thought), hosing from a trouser a protesting lake, no thumb allowed to dutchboy up the dike and win renown, but with both wrapped inside his fingers as though they were the puissant instrument itself, he turned the tap, urging strength and volume on the liquid. Thus he spoke his piece in elevators, restaurants, and offices, in the front seats of autos stalled at crossings, in trains negotiating trestles, at teas, at bridge, at ladies’ luncheons (every showing-off, he showered), on Ferris wheels or chute-the-chutes, at fairs while hurling halls toward bottles, watching Tom Mix make his six-gun smoke or listening to the Shadow. In schoolrooms he would leak reciting Latin, while at the grocery he always put a puddle by the pickle barrel. Again when playing catch or house or doctor, he’d release at a critical moment. In playgrounds he washed down the slides. Oh, then, too, from cats he learned the trick of standing liquidly in sandboxes, and very often, finally, from bravado, anytime, in fun, when dared, for bets, he pissed along his leg. But my god I never wet my bed. No, I was not incontinent in that fashion, for this was fully purposed protest pissing, the sort Jesus should have used in self-defense (the Jews could have, the Dukhobors, Mahatma Gandhi); in fact, that’s how I read the gushing-waters incident, when the spear is supposed to have entered His side.

 

I should begin anew because my mind careens.

Mountebank: does he wear a waiter’s dress suit one year, SS uniform another?

When I divide I get no thinner. It does not help me to get out.

Time slides by, thick as a dirty river. So am I . . . bridge and both banks— people crossing—crates in the brown stream passing under . . .

Lou. Lou. What do I remember? do I remember my protesting? Do I see the self I had? see Tabor now? the boots throw up their image? What do I remember—honestly. No, that won’t do—not right. I’m such an easy fool? Dreams grip me. Wait—not right. What do dreams do? do dreams grip? . . . grip? . . . grip who? I had a figure in a dream, the dream gripped, I remember. On my page the light is drying. The letters themselves seem to fade. My own marks move inside themselves, away from me. I look up and find the window’s gray. Well, there’s always the bright electric. Toward whose shore slides an ocean of cloud? And I remember only what I dare to . . . titles on the dimming spines of books. What really remains to me? a hand on my desk, dark and loose as a glove? these reveries? O dreams wind, envelop, wrap up, compass, cloud, close down upon, blot out, fog in. Don’t they? they and their illusions? I’m not certain. Tabor does not disappear: there’s the glisten of my wedding ring, the pale face of the paper . . . Suppose I were signing warrants? would that be any more real? Lists, names, numbers . . . numbers for the futureless . . . fragments, titles,

William Frederick Kohler

wounds. And are these objects any more than sensory consignments, shipments

William F. Kohler

of shop goods?

W. F. Kohler

W. F. K.                      The truck was making for an open ditch;

oKk                             the doors were opened, and the corpses

Bill Kohler                 were thrown out, just as though they

Billy Boy                    were alive, to smooth win their limbs.

Will K.

. . . so smooth were their limbs . . . like marble, I suppose—they always are.

Kay

had a figure in a dream, the dream gripped, I remember.

Wilfred Koh

Whiff Cough              They were hurled into the ditch, and I

Whiffy                         can still see a civilian extracting teeth

Willko                         with tooth pliers. And then I was away—

Herr Rickler

And by inventing pliers, prevent speech. Excellent. Excel— No. Wait. Wait.

413-012

287-30-5088                  I jumped into my car and did not open

896-7707 Ext. 3311      my mouth again.

3708 015575 21009

No. I don’t know. O shit shit shit I’m not certain. No heart should hold its blood like a cup.

They lay first in the air where their dying seemed to make a skin of them, and then in the earth where only a vagrant odor, passing through one’s nostrils like a shiver, served to say they were breathing; and as these dead decayed like seeds sown in a drill, they grew to resemble their grandfathers—marvelously framed and similarly pale—and then their forebears at an even greater and more simian remove and reach of time, till finally they became as naked and innocent as Adam, thin as a thought, smooth and incorruptible at last, as it was written originally in their own book. We lie with the Fates from our first conception; for it is said—and truly too—that the flesh is built up over the bones at birth by the caresses of those star-guarding harlots whose pawed passage clings there like a cloth, just as the soul in our life is the silted delta of the senses, their accumulated fat; and it is Clotho whose touch becomes our tissue, and Atropos who trims it to the shape we’ll take, and Lachesis who then stitches it about us like a shroud; so when we go to ground, as eventually we must, we lose our lusts with our linens, arising on the last day as clean and shriven as the one on which we were begot. Consequently the Boche took out the teeth because they were the bones that bite, that inform, that dream; and which bone, indeed, do we dream with if not the dream-bone? yes, the bone which Moses blew to dream the Lord. No gold-filled molar has a majesty to match it. Dice made of dream-bones rattle in the dice box; throw down a pair of tyrants shaped as double dots; cast Christ’s lot; toss out a series of sevens or those boxcars Jews were packed in. And I remember that soldier’s hand sticking out of my shellslide like a shrub. There was a pale ring where his ring had been, and his cold blue nails were chewed. The earth slid slowly over us, I remember, and I survived because my nose was shoved in a coffee can, like Pooh’s in his honey pot, by the stealthy mud; consequently I could use that lucky tin lung to huff and puff in while I kicked, flailed, and flopped sufficiently to unboat and unbury myself. By the time the rain had sluiced me clean, and I had huddled in an open space, regardless of rifles, gasping as though I were still in the whale, and feeling grateful for a sky couldn’t see, the other soldier had been covered many hours, hours before I took hold of his stiff exclaiming fingers and saw he’d been already robbed. Such was the substance and the symbol of that adventure, and I realize now that sums are what I most remember upshots if I remember

                                         shot                   shot                         shot

anything—the quality of additions what anything amounts to. History is just

                                                                                                          shot

such a sum; the upshots of upshots. For what is not a sum is not in history,

                                         shot                   shot                         shot

although these stealthy totals hide behind their columns like that missing ring,

                                         shot                   shot                         shot

or milk around the mouth, the semen that bears the blame.     shot

                                         shot                   shot                         shot

All right, then, let’s off-load these stealthy Jews from their trains.

                                         shot                   shot                         shot

Line this data up for death: my research. The veining of the marble, I remember

                                         shot                   shot                         shot

that, and the lines of gold which edged the scrolling capitals above the

                                         shot                   shot                         shot

columns, I remember those (everything official in Germany was Greek),

                                         shot                   shot                         shot

and the heaviness of the hang-

                                             hang-

                                             shot                    shot                          shot     hang

ings, the gold tassels on the pulls, the glistening hoots, I remember them and

                                             shot                    shot                          shot     hang

the slowly drifting schools of people . . not a single historical thing. Wait.

One.                                     shot                    shot                          shot     hang

 

That everything official in Germany was Greek. A perfect sum. Yet as rudely

                                             shot                    shot                          shot     hang

belched up as something spoken by the belly through the borrowed services of a

                                             shot                    shot                          shot     hang

gastriloquist. Still, an honest en effet. The color of the drapes was plum.

I’d gas                                 shot                    shot                          shot     hang

like to look below my eyes and see not language staring hack at me, not

gas                                       shot                    shot                          shot     hang

sentences or single words or awkward pen lines, but a surface clear and

gas                                       shot                    shot                          shot     hang

burnished as a glass. There my figure would appear as perfectly as any Form

gas                                       shot                    shot                          shot     hang

reflected in Platonic space—as those tail soot-black boots which I remember

gas                                       shot                    shot                          shot     hang

grew inside the marble. I am so old, so far away, so thin in my fatty

amplitude, gas                   shot                    shot                          shot     hang

I must starve the image in order to fit it in me. The boots gleamed; they always gleamed; and that

gas                                       shot                    shot                          shot     hang

gleam lay back within the image of the boots like fish asleep in shaded

water. gas                           shot                    shot                          shot     hang

Oh, god help me what a liar!

Where, after all, is Germany?

Should I begin when I was born as history would have me—a child of time—to come between two ticks into the world with only tocks to follow? Yet I did not begin when I was born, but later; then just once, in love, I was where nothing was before, or after.

In the old days, before beginning and in order to continue, they always asked for celestial aid: bless these boats and make them safe; guide my faltering steps; strengthen my arm and sharpen my sword; preserve my penis from the pox, O Lord. Like pants from a weakened waistband, there has been a certain sliding down of expectation. Homer wanted the whole of Ulysses’ wanderings whistled through his lips——vain, greedy man—the way, according to his friends, the soul of, perhaps it was Pythagoras, might be heard lamenting in the howls of a hound. ¶Well, the [I|my|me], the total absorption of the blind, is well known. They expect the world to move aside and not bump. ¶Did he sing without pencils—this jongleur, Homer? And where was the cup? ¶They’ve had a hard knock, so now they want a soft touch. All that pity in place of milk has switched their skin and bones. What do you deserve, though, but darkness, if you’ve failed to pay the electric? ¶He had the stare of a statue without the excuse of stone—this raconteur, this Homer. ¶Oedipus didn’t keen, who put his own out the way some gouge holes to plant bulbs. What light do they shine, down there in the dirt? down there in the dirt? downstairs? ¶My stars, these poets are so petty despite the high opinion they have of themselves. Virgil—a yokel, tubercular it’s said, dark, tall, raw, didn’t he moisten his quill with lung-pink spit? yeah, well, he merely wanted help with fakes and fibs . . . excuses for his hero’s dismal dillydally, the unremitting malice of the gods. Hatred is a habit of the heavens, hadn’t he heard? whirlwind and hail and parching drought, drenching rain and the blinding white pelt of the blizzard, the shout that scars trees, fog like the film from my own feelings settling slowly over everything, chilling, dampening, obscuring the world with silence, releasing it from every relation, setting it adrift . . . He should have come to me. I know all about regretfullys. I hold the High Chair of Disclaimers. I receive excuses the way silos are funneled grain.

dear Prof

My grandmomma died so I’ll be unable, Friday, 3 I think we had arranged (1 cough 2 knocks), to squeeze your penis in my lotioned palm. Tough tibby, o my weakly weenied chéri.

Dear Dad,

I didn’t get in on time last night because Anna K & Sister C & me & Madame B ran out of road rounding a curve and had to walk home through five miles of concatenating cloud, frequent patches of millinery damp and Disney trees.

Hi there, husz –

I regret very much any inconvenience or dismay my oral reluctance may have caused you, but I was poisoned once by a spew of sperm from a sick imagination and had to spend a fortnight with some local dentifrice. It gags me to think about, though it was winters ago when I was only the spring of a summer girl.

I’m sure a sweet shit like you will understand.

Hey K

—got lost in my graygreen grassblue overcoat with the Austrian stitching and the military collar and consequently didn’t quite make the meeting . . . feel in my sleeve, the grease where I slid is still slick as a slide for otters.

Bill, after turning and tossing it over I’ve decided not to honor your father and mother any longer or remember a thing you’ve said or be obedient to your command or respect a single belief you’ve been blind enough to believe or wave your flag or share in any sense the same feeling you might have felt or think a thought you might have thought without first wiping off the seat because even when I touch you it will be to touch myself the slow circular way a bear rubs its back and behind against a tree to scratch its back and behind and not the tree, and no, my fur’s not for you, baby, I’m keeping it flattened in the fat of my thighs like a leaf in a Holy Book, bet your boots, so that’s my answer when there’s been no question and that will be the reason why I am continuing to employ and otherwise keep oiled and up to snuff—in short—in service, all those habits you intolerate and would have had me fire even though they’ve been with me as long as my boobs and like with Rastus my relations with them have always been all right and responsible and floppy-hatted, gentlewomanly, and say, they have families, habits have, you realize that? relations like uncles, alcoholic and hateful, who screw nieces with the same passion they’d use to pissin a bottle, always brawn and ancient with old booze, that’s what you bring to my bed, come to think, an old brown bottle-nozzle, well, I tell you, instead let’s pretend we’re two new copper-colored pennies thrown on the world at random by the US Mint and let’s have just about that much to do with one another now or in a future which is to be fuckless between us as furniture.

OK, Koh? OK?

Dear Professor Kohler:

I was unable to continue or complete . . . I have many monetary problems . . . a bleeding bride . . . horns on my head and corns on my feet . . . and besides I was made wretchedly ill recently by raw data . . .  disingested tabulars and shat words . . . The Dean has my doctor’s diagram and dossier if you’d like to see it.

O you must believe me. Kohlee, I was coming, coming, coming, when I was caught in a column of kiddie cars ... and kept . . . and kept . . . the kids, the cars . . . and couldn’t, couldn’t ...

The fallen sky oppressed me quite,

I could not get to sleep last night

The muses of excuses? I am the National Repository. And I take in no more than I pay out. A securely failing institution, books so finely balanced there’s never been a profit. Façade of granite and custard. I should call upon Mme. de Girardin, perhaps, La Muse de la patrie, or a lesser but likelier sort, La Muse Lintonière, whatwas her name? Charlotte . . . Bourette. Well, there’s nothing my firm doesn’t know about weaseling. Procrastination a specialty. President by my own acclamation, I’ve made a profession of putting off payoff. Why diddle Dido when you can found Rome—-is that the question? What dumb dong could not contrive a dozen reasons? I’ve run out of ones for nonfucking the wife, though. It’s been a slow, that is to say, a flaccid season. Lust no longer a loss leader. The same stock stands on the same shelves, nightie after nightie, as I make a joke of it, this life without tumescence, my wile’s response beneath a layer of talc. I’m overculpensating; that’s my problem. But if she would suck at something other than a soda straw. If I could get one pant when I took off my trousers. If she would slide her tongue’s tip tightly along the long bone of my back as Lou once did. If once. Once. Ai! that fat bitch . . . that wet basement, barnyard, Yankee slit, French trench . . . that German ditch . . . if, once . . . she lit that faithless cosmopolitan clit . . . but once. Ai! Ai! That ham’s hock. Length of light like a pencil in the passage. Down there in the dirt. Down there. That ox’s muzzle. That cattle’s chest. Ai! Ai! Ai! There’s a Homeric yawp; but what’s the use of howling? who will hear and what will change? Marty remains, and Marty’s large, hard, hidden tummy, pale as a vampire’s victim, once belonged to a turtle—that’s my claim—and the shell’s not even charitable in soup. Believe me, she carries a cow’s cunt below those fatty stairs of hers like someone boarding a bus with a bursting bag . . . her shy lower lips like a rooster’s wattle. I should crow in that?

Then Milton, also suffering from batteries gone shineless against the guarantee, had to ask twice like a kid for his candy. ¶Nonetheless, those ancient bards, they had their Heavens and the ear of some Almighty, a palm, you might say, to put a petition in; but poor Rilke, remember? could only wonder who would hearken if he did cry, Help me! to the angels.

O goddess of the risen gorge . . .

Everywhere nothing now but a revocation of the muse. Cancel Clio, cross out sweet Calliope, for history’s been buggered by ideology, and farts its facts in an odorous cloud, while poets have no breath whatever, are in another business presently, where Parnassus is a pastry, and produce their poems promptly on request like short-order cooks shake forth a batch of fries. Mark out Melpomene. The lines of the anonymous are nothing like the lives of the saints; a celebrity is but a draft from his fans; crooks establish dynasties on stolen dimes, and slips of policy feed greasy Sicilian Caesars who are all, one hopes, predamned the way our postage is prepaid; then politicians, nowadays, are as unlikely subjects for tragedy as dung dropped from the bronze horses of their predecessors; while the otherwise so-called great have all the substance of a cunt-encouraged cheer from the stands. Of Thalia make a laughingstock. Erase Erato as well, since sex is Smut (a kind of commercial cleanser); Euterpe too, because the flute which gladdens is a kid’s kazoo, and comedy a laughingstock. Tear Terpsichore in two like a losing ticket. We do not dance these days, we march. We stomp. As for Polyhymnia . . . where everything’s a sewer, what is sacred? soccer? and the heavens, like Urania herself, were buried long ago beneath the battlefield where we did in the planets and drove the constellations like fattened cattle to the abattoirs.

Shall I call up the crafts of conservation: lemon and brandy, honey and sunshine, salt and wine, the lava and ice which slew and saved the sabertooth; marooned Pompeii’s indulgent daily life on an isle out of time? Should I muster all the ancient arts of preservation: disembowelment, embalmment, mummification? the dry stone tomb, Etna’s immortalizing crater? Can my crabby complaints, my discontents, be stored like grain against that unlikely lean year when there is a famine in misfortune? Can my curses be kept calm in a cool cellar; my harvest of sour grapes tanned like a vintage; and can all my cruelty of mind come powdered in a package like dried milk or Jell-O? During the Depression, when my family bought canned fruits and vegetables by the case in order to save, it was my job to arrange our hoard on shelves in the basement. But is there anything in life now I wish to Leninize, so mobs may march by and be edified; anything I would like to bottle and lay down for the next decade to enjoy? Have I some favorite fish to barrel, smoke, bury in brine, release in an ocean of oil? Flounce from your stew, you sluttish muse, and bring me a pleasant subject. It is true, too, that fragments from the great artistes come high: a tone of voice, a flash of tinsel, the place a graceful shadow fell, a cough, a vibrant stride. Relics are also dear, though there’s still no absence of supply: towers which have been shrunk to the size of infant Eiffels, rolled out upon postcards, blown in hankies. With one of those I’ve wiped off all my tears. Yes, fragments from the great artistes come high, but I know where to buy my first kiss—yours as well as mine now—in the liplike shape of an ashtray, or find a tantrum tie-dyed as a scarf, or a youthful ideal to put up as a pennant.

O sing O muse—cognate with mind and all the acts pertaining

(though in truth you muzzle too, you mock, you jest and tease, you cause us to gape and loiter, to lose every decent sense of time, to stray from the normal gnaw and chew of everyday, from the honest toil, the peaceful sleep, the customary healthy shit and needful screw of ordinary life, to slip into the silent empire of Elea: full, round, reasonable, yet for all that, quite insane)—

O brood O muse upon my mighty subject like a holy hen upon the nest of night

(that endless dungeon of air which held pure extinction prisoner till the word released it by striking the first light, and on that order, out of Nothing, nothing came);

O ponder the fascism of the heart

(that “glorious phrase”);

Sing of disappointments more repeated than the batter of the sea, of lives embittered by resentments so ubiquitous the ocean’s salt seems thinly shaken, of letdowns local as the sofa where I copped my freshman’s feel, of failures as frequent as first love, first nights, last stands; do not warble of arms or adventurous deeds or shepherds playing on their private fifes, or of civil war or monarchies at swords; consider rather the slightly squinkered clerk, the soul which has become as shabby and soiled in its seat as worn-out underwear, a life lit like a lonely room and run like a laddered stocking.

Behold the sagging tit, the drudged-gray mopped-out cunt-corked wife, stale as yesterday’s soapy water, or study the shiftless kid, seedy before any bloom, thin and mean as a weed in a walk;

smell the grease that stands rancid in the pan like a second skin, the pan aslant on some fuel-farting stove, the stove in its corner contributing what it can to the brutal conviviality of close quarters;

let depression like time-payments weigh you down; feel desperation and despair like dust thick in the rug and the ragged curtains, or carry puppy pee and plate-scrapings, wrapped in the colored pages of the Sunday paper, out to the loose and blowing, dog-jawed heap in the alley;

spend your money on large cars, loud clothes, sofa-sized paintings, excursions to Hawaii, trinkets, knickknacks, fast food, golf clubs, call girls, slimming salons, booze;

suffer shouting, heat rash, chilblains, beatings, betrayal, guilt, impotence, jail, jealousy, humiliation, VD, vermin, stink.

Sweat through a St. Louis summer and sing of that.

O muse, I cry, as loudly as I can, while still commanding a constricted scribble, hear me! help me! but my nasty echo answers: one muse for all the caterwauling you have called for! where none was in that lowlife line of work before?

It’s true. I’ll need all nine for what I want to do—all nine whom Hesiod must have frigged to get his way, for he first spoke their secret names and hauled their history by the snout into his poem. For what I want to do . . .

Which is what—exactly? to deregulate Descartes like all the rest of the romancers? to philosophize while performing some middle-age adultery, basically enjoying your anxieties like raw likker when it’s gotten to the belly? I know—you want to make the dull amazing; you want to Heidegger some wholesome thought, darken daytime for the TV, grind the world into a grain of Blake.

O, I deny it! On the contrary! I shall not abuse your gift. I pledge to you, if you should choose me, not to make a mere magician’s more of less. I have no wish to wine water or hand out loaves and fishes like tickets on a turkey, Misfits, creeps, outcasts of every class: these are my constituents—the disappointed people and if I could make them close ranks like a fist, strike as hard as any knuckle.

Hey Kohler—hey Koh—whistle up a wind. Alone, have I the mouth for it? the sort of wind I want? Imagine me, bold Kohler, calling out for help—and to conclude, not to commence to end, to halt, to -30-, stop, leave off, to hush forever to untick tock.

Imagine. Here, on this desktop, just beneath my nervous fingers and my trembling eyes, imagine—done into witty decals—lie all my lies, almost as many as the postage in an album which arranges by face value, color, and year the entire collection. No diaries for me, no leather-covered couch. No. I’ll dismiss the past as brusquely as a dishonest servant. I’ve small need for recollections. I have Bartlett’s Quotations. Do I consult that? Like a wonderful physician, will it prescribe for me? so many drops of Proust, a tincture of Old Testament, daily dose of Freud, and I shall peel off my past like a sticker warning FRAGILE. I have Roget’s Thesaurus. I have Skeat. I have a wall of histories, cartons of bones and rotting linen, as in the catacombs. Find Germany. It’s here somewhere. Between George Sand’s Indiana and Conrad’s Victory Why does anyone remember? Why, out of the active emptiness of everyday, why draw Tuesday’s plate of pork and beans, one word in anger, bitten finger, brittle dream? I remember a nipple through a sweater—just the bump—and it gives me pleasure. Yet that nipple is of no more use to me. I remember a day during the war when I dozed off in a warm glade. Then I remember a roll of wine through my mouth, my first Cézanne, the blues and green, a line of Pope which rose from the rest to strike me:

Our proper bliss depends on what we blame.

No more use to me. I remember London firemen pouring great gouts of water on a flaming hoarding while a whole wall went up beside them as if that other burning were some sort of social gaffe which ought to be ignored. I remember the hours I spent with my children collecting butterflies—the immense . . . relief it was—but why? I scarcely know the difference, now, between an admiral and a painted lady, and when they flutter from flower to flower in the garden, they rarely detain my eye. No more use . . . than the hollow of the inner thigh . . . to me . . . to me . . . that delicious muscle shiver.

Ah, yes, why remember . . . well,

(1) to match a past perception with a present image: Martha, hungry, mouthing my mouth as if it were an ice >< Martha rubbing a bit of lipstick from her teeth with the tip of a paper towel;

(2) to make tolerable a painful present with some pleasant recollections, such as thinking of Lou while screwing the wife;

(3) to entertain friends, because even the war is wonderful and funny as a story, and all my army buddies—those callous louts who made my mind crawl the way gunfire pressed my chest into the mud—they are cute cartoons and funny figures now: cronies of consciousness;

(4) to compile and order grievances, preserve insults, register slights and injuries, to husband hate;

(5) to number, name, and know by naming, to characterize, stereotype, sterilize, to poison the mind with a phrase, to be able to say of Marty that she has a codfishy caze . . . a codfishy caze . . . a codfishy caze;

(6) to retain a desired identity, to support our vision of ourselves as Julian Sorel or Saint the Joanie, the Count of Monte Cristo, Casanova, Mother Courage . . . ei! . . . Huckleberry Finn, or, in my case, the Hector Berlioz of History; and

(7) to share and compound a self, so that the isolation of the ego can be disguised as a joint venture, the way married people imagine they remember a common past (our porous apartment in Indiana, for instance), or Germans believe they share the same Frederick (and possess his greatness), or can look back together, proudly, at Barbarossa; and this is why the memory must be trained not to fetch up a disabling image, but must be lapdogged, and why history is so important to the vanity of nations.

. . . first Zeus begot Remembrance by stealth: in the guise or her own gaze he enveloped her fair body from the inside of a mirror; next Meditation was brought to birth by buggery, though the god entered slowly, with a phallus suitably reduced; then, finally, Song was several times engendered by spitting in the mother’s mouth—the spit, however, of a god .  . .

O yes, we think we know why he wrote: Proust, Mann, Mad Meg, Lawrence, Rilke. The Parisian needed the security of absorbent walls and heavy blinds, the warmth of cottons, quilts, and flattery, the way the bed bent at the edges of his body, rose like pastry dough to swaddle him; and as his nervy sickness drew him through its fist his backbone grew soft, eventually, as old rags. Go ahead. Call upon Apollo. See if the mouse-god can cure you. Holla. Holla. So of the flatterous Frenchman we say we know why: to make some sense of what would otherwise have been a life of almost suffocating triviality, a round of parties as predictable in its undulating course and frozen forms as a platter of painted horses (a bloodless ring o’roses, ring-a-lievio), huge heavy wooden and plaster creatures, yet they slide on shimmering pins which fix them through the belly like butterflies . . . we know why: to justify those visits, the calling cards which snowed the silver trays of the socially fortunate, the customary country/seaside/mountain trips, resorts, those spas, the sojourns in enchanting Venice where the sun was seen to sink as Ruskin had arranged it must, from orange to purple, past to present, not omitting pink, in the square where pigeons feed like falling dust, where the Titians, Caravaggios, are coveted, where I felt the need to keep my pornographic NSDAP books concealed near my penis, though they caused the coverlet to swell there like bulbs left burning between seasons (what do they do down there in the dirt, down there?) (is not the work a pardon for a misspent life? a rescue? the creation of substance from shadow? for value occurs only in order, only in art and mathematics, science and the Third Reich, the work of bureaucrats like me and Alfred Jarry, Rosenberg and Ike).

O sure, we know why Proust wrote: to justify one man’s sordid sadomado ways to the interested asses of other men. And that, as we also know, requires an endless book.

 

 

To say—see—              Weep you no more, sad fountains;

          Why need you flow so fast?

            Look how the snowy mountains

what I have written;    Heaven’s sun cloth gently waste!

To hear—feel—               But my Sun’s heavenly eyes

         View not your weeping.

what I have said:                That now lies sleeping

       Softly, now softly lies

     Sleeping

And because I have dithered musically for nine lines (and shall venture but one verse and nine lines more in my life), and because John Dowland, has set me to such sweet and docile measures, I expect my soul to be redeemed; I expect I shall forever be remembered, and eternally esteemed.

 I built, of blocks, a town three hundred thousand strong, whose avenues were paved with swine-colored rug and decorated by large leaves outlined inappropriately in orange, and on this leafage I’d often park my Tootsie Toy trucks, as if on pads of camouflage, waiting their deployment against catastrophes which included alien invasions, internal treachery, and world war. It was always my intention, and my conceit, to use up, in the town’s construction, every toy I possessed: my electric train, of course, the Lincoln Logs, old kindergarten blocks—their deeply incised letters always a problem—the Erector set, every lead soldier that would stand (broken ones were sent to the hospital), my impressive array of cars, motorcycles, tanks, and trucks—some with trailers, some transporting gas, some tows, some dumps—and my squadrons of planes, my fleet of ships, my big and little guns, an undersized group of parachute people (looking as if one should always imagine them high in the sky, hanging from threads), my silversided submarines, along with assorted RR signs, poles bearing flags, prefab houses with faces pasted in their windows, small boxes of a dozen variously useful kinds, strips of blue cloth for streams and rivers, and glass jars for town water towers, or, in a pinch, jails. In time, the armies, the citizens, even the streets would divide; loyalties, friendships, certainties, would be undermined; the city would be shaken by strife; and marbles would rain down from formerly friendly planes, steeples would topple onto cars, and shellfire would soon throw aggie holes through homes, soldiers would die accompanied by my groans, and ragged bands of refugees would flee toward mountain caves and other chairs and tables.

On Saturdays I would sometimes walk to town down Market Street, lingering in front of the long lawns which lay rolled out like rugs before the Orphans’ Home and the City Hospital, their faintly yellowish, underfertilized grass dotted with dandelions and defined by whitewashed rocks, sprinklers jerking and spewing like pinwheels during the dry days, and the blackbirds and robins stalking between the circles of spray like preachers ignoring a rain. Market Street was made of brick back then, uneven as a turbulent stream, sensuous and beautiful and better than the cars it carried. I’d dawdle near the windows of the pharmacy, which might have trusses or other obscurely obscene devices on display; and when at last I went by the church where Jerry jobbed for Jesus, I’d study the title of the sermon I might have to hear the next day. Across the street there was a small Italian grocery which, I remember, was regarded as intrusive when it first appeared. The owner’s son played football for the high school team, so now it was like passing a place where some local dignitary had made his mark; and tins of olive oil decorated with exotic designs in silver filigree and dark outlining, gold roses and medallions of victory on a pink ground, were stacked at the site like a trumpet’s flourish. To me olive oil was something that came in skinny little bottles and was shaken over lettuce in discreet drops like perfume, consequently the effect of those towers—and the wide red cans of tomatoes, the long gray ropes of garlic and sheaves of thin brown barley loaves, the sausages as engorged as snakes, the big dark barrels of sardines, I supposed, pickles, olives (who knew what else lived in those salty ponds?), the huge smooth cheeses and jungle-colored peppers, purple eggplants, queerly shaped squash in white, orange, yellow, and green (nothing my mother ever let in the house), the frankly naked hams and raffia-webbed demijohns of wine—was somewhat the same as a carnival: the display was loud, vulgar, bombastic, and unbelievable, and was at once frightened and tempted, intimidated and drawn. I went inside the store once with my father to buy beer, and I can still remember how my senses were assailed, my eyes blurred as though by brightness, and I can still see the waxy white paper speckled trouts were laid on, and a scatter of flat white boxes everywhere on which

No.2 WhiteFish.

was darkly stenciled, not as a simple identifying label, but as an irreproachable judgment and an unimpeachable statement of fact.

I would leave before noon, so there was no need to hurry, the matinee didn’t begin till one and though I knew the route better than my own toes, I looked in all the windows as if someone were undressing just in back of the glass. Manikins might move in the right light, my face swim away in a flannel suit. I always started out prepared to be surprised, but the unexpected was, in fact, quite exceptional. I was witness to an accident once, when a bread van struck a neighbor’s trike which had rolled, unridden, into the road, and one of its red wheels flew through the air like a Frisbee. A Frisbee . . . memory sees what I saw so differently. Another time a man keeled over outside the Malt Shop, blood spilling from his nose; and an ambulance with flashing lights raced twice through the Palmers’ wide semicircular drive for no reason I could ever accept. The Palmers were wealthy, we thought, because their son, Dickie, played golf at the country club. Garages, swollen with what I imagined were shiny black Packards and shimmering Cadillacs, guarded the rear of the finer homes built along Market Street for that elegant half mile, but behind them were modest frame houses of the common kind I lived in, mostly inexpensive five- or six-room rentals now that there were so many people without a job or on strike at the mills. Tramps, if they had no luck with the sassy servants at the big back doors., would come to ours asking for some sort of work, and my mother would trade a raked front yard for a can of tomato soup she served with crackers, a paper spoon, and rum and Coke in a Dixie cup. The Concord grapes, which everybody’s grandmother had planted.,.-now sprawled over dilapidated arbors, and were eaten by small boys and birds. In forty years I haven’t seen a buckeye (shiny as a nigger’s nip, we said), or one of those big yellow and black butterflies too beautiful to be real and too delicate to survive, or an oriole’s nest hanging loosely from a limb like a snagged sock. Folks watched their asparagus and rhubarb with a zealous eye, and were mean and vindictive about stolen fruit. Despite our landlords, who clutched a flat purse, properties were neat and carefully kept. We were all rich in hours off, if nothing else, and everyone puttered and rooted and diddled about, even the dogs. There were some broken back steps nearby, including one of ours, with treads about as rigid as a ripe banana, a perilous condition which further bespotted the neighborhood’s wopsloppy Dalmatian name, my father said. There were a few rusty gutters, some cracked and slid shingles, and a lot of sudsy paint, but the windows were whole and well curtained, if too chintzed; gravel drives were raked, front walks stiffly broomed. Privet was the principal hedge; grass generally was coarse and crabby; most of the soft maples had crotch-rot and too many dead limbs (I knew from climbing them); while forsythias were often tangles of bloomless stems. Indeed, a shabbiness I neglected to notice, since it had come on as gradually through my miserable teens as my occluded complexion, had settled over the entire town like the smoke did when the factories were fired up. No one enjoyed our sweet, clean, sky-blue sky anymore, and complaints about soot on the sheets or furnace fumes in sweater wool went the way of that second cup of coffee. Still, sidewalks were shaded, the lawns mowed, the porches occupied by rockers and swings; summers were moist, hot, and quiet, the tar soft in the streets, their bricks warm as a cheek even well into evening.

Inside Giovanni’s glorious grocery, the world had lifted its skirt, and I could look at what I ultimately learned was eggplant, marveling at the beauty of the soft glossy fruit, at its obvious inedibility, its incomprehensible name; and there, too, I would enjoy the braggadocio of those wonderfully garish tins I’d seen Governali’s handsome halfback boy put up in a pile like letter blocks and towers for my towns.

* * * * * *

OLIO DI OLIVA

100% ITALIANO

IMPACCATO IN LUCCA

* * * * * *

MED. D’ORO ST. LOUIS 1904

GRAN PREMIO MILANO 1906

* * * * * *

ESPOSIZIONI  INTERNAZIONALI TORINO 1911—GENOVA 1914

* * * * * *

A Few steps farther on (Oh-lee-oh, I sang, Oh-lee-vah), the sidewalk was no longer broken by the large oaks and elm trees whose roots undermined it, and you ran out of shade at precisely the moment it let your eyes up (to vocally envision Loo-cah—Mee-lann-oh—Tor-een-oh through vowels long as telescopes) and the street descended rather steeply toward a weedy set of Erie tracks (Jen-no-vah—Sent-Loo-eese) which determined, in traditional fashion, the better quarter of town. (Ess-poh-ziss-ee-oh-nee . . . Ess-poh-zits-ee-oh-nee? Inn-terr-nah-zee . . . nah-zee . . . oh-nah-lee.) Beyond them, as if the rails were a stream, the road rose up a hill which held the courthouse and its square, around which had gathered the grandest stores, the biggest bank, the most rococo movie house, an Episcopay-lee-an church like a fly at a feast, and a public library—on its steps an oddly styled stone lion with a gift horse’s doubtful mouth.

Not here, but back in the Crawl, which is what we called that ratty Erie RR cut because of the exasperating start/stop and shuddersome crawl of its freights, was my grandpa’s furniture store (conveniently near a siding I never saw used, although that was presumably why FEENEY’S FAMILY FURNITURE wasn’t ensconced on the square); and I would make a point of inspecting its displays when I walked by to see whether my father might be folded over in one of those decorator chairs they featured like something bloody spilled on the cloth; but even when he was in the window like a soul on sale, he never looked up, never saw me; his spirit was not in the game, and I was glad. It completed my anonymity. I was usually singing “Addio a Napoli” anyway.

For lunch I would stop at the Malt Mart and have one so thick the mixture rose more slowly than temperature through my straw. I’d also order a hamburger rare enough to bleed when I bit it, with quarter-inch rounds of pickle laid over it like tiles across a porch. I had to suck hard, softening a chunk of bun with the malt and chewing calmly as a cow. I studied the world from a point almost outside it, since I was now an image in the glass for all those people swimming busily past, and my only worry was that I might meet someone I knew. However, the risk was small; the Malt Mart’s countermen were changed as often as underwear, and the two girls were as plain and serviceable as one of the stools. My sort didn’t go there; the place was too square, though ‘square’ is not a word I would have used. I must remember that the memory always writes in an old man’s language. Then I purchased some of that solid chocolate they sold in rough hunks like stone from a quarry, and went off to watch Errol flash his Flynn in Captain Blood, or Leslie Howard fool France in the guise of a foppish fag. The movie melted in my eyes the waythe chocolate melted sweetly in my mouth. And what could have been more wonderful than those innocent images, those black and white accounts of the lawless enemies of tyranny—among whom I was proud to count myself?

Later I would tear myself away from the second feature (often a country comedy) and come blinking into the light like someone newly born. There, in the unreal glare of afternoon, I would sail away around the square, just as Plato said I could if I faced the Forms (such allusions are also an old man’s hobby), a cutlass thrust through my sash that was sharper than any store-bought blade or low-grade image, since it was created out of concepts, made of metaphors instead of metal; for when I slashed the mainsail with my sword and dropped lightly onto the deck like Douglas Fairbanks, it was upon the word ‘toes’ I landed, legs alert in their harem pants; it was im-pah-cah-toh in Loo-cah, I sang while I swooped; and lo! at the rightly sung word there were all about me towers of stone, hillsides covered with flowers, cold lakes, ocher earth and planted fields, poplars lining the roads, cypresses surrounding the cemeteries, ancient churches, laden vines. The movie made a lousy muse.

So I strolled around the square, shopping for shadows, looking for illusions in the windows, following my face as it followed me, until I reached the library, another lotusland; but I had been hard and swollen for it the whole day, invariably beguiled and brought erect by the promise of print, the volumes of Carlyle I might carry away, perhaps, books bellied by his flatulent style like Falstaff’s shirt, and sinking from asides and the weight of his ponderous lines; yet where Frederick may be seen walking through some scrubby Potsdam woods with a fresh-cut stick and soft cocked hat, or where sight of a bored queen can be caught sneaking a pinch of snuff during the coronation, so that the new king has to hurl at her a look of well-merited fulminancy—the word by itself enough to dampen anyone’s dickie.

Roads with honest, common, sawed-off names like Park, High, Market, Main, went out from the square like legs. On Bank there were still banks; Hill Street was dutifully steep; Central and South were matter-of-factly geographical; Erie and Ohio paralleled the tracks and Mahoning followed the river, intersecting Ferry a block before Bridge; while Chestnut, Maple, Elm, and Oak once represented real trees, and were reserved for the first ring the city wore—the one which married prosperous businesses to stately homes; nevertheless, it wasn’t long before names became liars like the people they served, and signified the presence of the developer like a measle the disease. My walk back I was on paths of increasing deceit. The tacky, curbless, oil-and-cinder streets which made up my neighborhood were called Adelaide and Bonnie Brae, Woodbine and Belvedere, and the appeal of their signposts to our pretensions was as glib and easy as the dreams they invoked were vulgar and cheap. Oak Knoll destroyed both the knoll and the oaks it was named for; Meadowbrook ran beside a dry ditch; I don’t know where Cumberland came from. Even then lines on speculators’ maps said Peachtree and Inglenook; boulevards and avenues and elegant circles were already disappearing in favor of drives, courts, lanes, ways, terraces, and hollows. Already the suburban mentality (Satan’s lazy servant) was in sorry evidence. Formerly roads went straight when they could and curved when they had to, but now it is salesmanship and cutie-pie caprice which causes them to curl up like wounded worms. Well, I think with pleasure of the day when whorehouses will fill Squire Lane, antique shops dot Ellenwood, Sagamore will smell of fries, grease, and gasoline, and in the windows on Hillandale Drive little propped, dime-store-designed signs will say ROOMS. My infrequent friend, Henry Herschel, has a house on Litany Lane, but the fact does not appear to disturb him; he says “Litany Lane” without a grimace or any sign of shame; but it pained me, even as a boy, to admit I lived on Bonnie Brae, or to write on letters my return address.

Although Elm Street has long since lost its trees to disease and its fine old homes are dental clinics, cleaners, barber and beauty shops, or mortuaries now—their spacious front porches nailed meanly shut or glass-bricked up like bars, their large lawns little parking lots, their façades at night lit by a loud, harsh, pearly light—its name still stands for a past that was energetic and objective, like Freight Street and Brewery and Court; so even if Memory Lane and Happy Hollow date like dresses, and we can place them in their period the way we can calendar kids called Ozzie or girls named Cheryl, the sort of history they contain refers exclusively to states of mind, to fads and furbelows, to illusions, and points only at the people who chose them, and never toward the things or persons they stand for: not at MarJean, the timid little math whiz, or Junior James, the football star, or Fat Freddie, the schoolyard bully, but to their thoughtless, arrogant, tasteless parents.

I would return over the slow roll of the hill about as rapidly as the shade did, prolonging my liberty and my pleasure. About halfway home there was a drugstore which kept a stock of Pocket Books in a round wire rack, and I would spend my final twenty-five cents on Lost Horizon, which had been published as #1 and therefore honored above the rest, or on a heavy red-edged tome like An Outline of History, thick as a steak, or on The Story of Mankind, one of the earliest. These glistening little books stole the breath. Their covers were made from a kind of cellophane which had been bonded to the cardboard, and this created a surface so protective you could safely set down on it a sweating glass, although the dye they’d used to stain the edges of the pages would redden a warm palm; and in time, too, the cellophane would loosen and be sloughed off like old skin. Still, the type was crisp and sprightly, the paper didn’t yellow, the backs cracked only occasionally, the print of the previous page left a pleasant afterimage the way the chocolate lingered in my mouth, and the books could be collected like baseball cards or bottle caps or stamps. I desired a full set in the worst way, and I fed my quarters into the series as though it were a slot; but, of course, the enterprise expanded quickly from its first ten toward its first hundred, so finally I had to call a halt (at #92, The Pocket Bible, I remember), and with that decision I lost all hunger for completeness despite the fact I still had gaps (The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, for instance). At least wouldn’t have to purchase #107, The Pocket Book of Etiquette, which had been announced. The cost of my hobby had also risen with the enlargement of the published line, and required an increasing number of small thefts—loose change from pockets, sugar crocks, and drawers—which I feared were finally being noticed, and suspicious watches set.

Indeed, chance was queen and happenstance the king, for I found #65 (a work which had eluded me) quite by luck on top of a pile of trash in the alley behind The Rainbow Art Glass Shop where I sometimes scrounged for chartreuse, scarlet., or raisin-colored shards through which I could perceive a transformed world. #65 needn’t have been O. Henry; it might have been a mystery just as well, or someone’s autobiography, or a kids classic like Pinocchio. I read them all, in any case; it was my morality. If, in the set which was filling my shelves, #20 was missing, I’d look up the title in the list they printed in the back of every book, and speculate about The Return of the Native, or shiver with anticipation at owning, someday, a copy of The Bowstring Murders.

My appetite was innocent and indiscriminate. I went from The Story of Mankind to The Corpse with the Floating Foot with scarcely a blink or hiccup. Imaginary murders amused me as much as actual ones. The past was as fictional as the future. For writers like Van Loon or readers my age, mankind had a history because its history told a story; there was an incipient “working out” in all things human which encouraged the hope of a happy resolution, even if it was only discovering the guilty, which G & I is devoted to doing, just like Charlie Chan or the other sleuths in those paper-covered books. Certainly I could not understand, then, how completely the world survived as the word, or that it was the historian’s duty to outshout Time and talk down Oblivion. Nor could I know that the last little existence my Malt Shop might have (or this spindle-like rack with its beckoning books, my stupidly named and simple streets, those shining tins of imported oil, their golden roses and musical medallions) would consist of a few foolish sentences, these random jottings, a small sheaf of loose pages carefully concealed from any likely reader.

The particular pleasure a day like that gave me, the freedom from all concern I felt, and the lightness of spirit which followed; the sense that my life lay wholly inside me where I hoped it would redouble itself and resound like music in a church; that it could not, in such sacred circumstances, be harmed or hampered; that the hours ahead of me were mine the way my breath was, and consequently had to be sweet and fulfilling beyond any other’s; and that my companions (my walk, my malt, my movie, my paperback book) had been thoroughly tested and could be counted on absolutely, inasmuch as I needed them—needed them mightily—since I opened the world and went in naked when I took my stroll, watched the screen, entered O. Henry or the life of Cellini (#42); and because my friends would not fail me any more than Virgil would have forsaken Dante (why should they? those chunks of chocolate had no better mouth), I could pass through the furnace and come away unscathed; life could be lived from the inside out as it ought to be, and savored, witnessed, even saved, no matter what otherwise it was: these youthful feelings, these exhilarations, are really gone for good, and cannot even be represented now; for now I know too much; now I know precisely how momentous, how right, how rare, yet how ill-fledged and formed of illusion, they were; how Spinoza would have regarded my tawdry little props, my shallow pleasures, as negations, as fears, as pure passivities, and replaced them with a much more phallic and constructive love, a love for thought, for relevant theory; no resplendent tower of oil for him, or dreams confined in sausage skins, but ideas resembling a regiment in review; I know how Rilke, who also understood the importance of ponds and blue days, who had felt the tug of a balloon at its string, the ever-so-sweet ice melting slowly in the mouth, would have agreed about the way the balloon brings that terror and its relief together in one fragile sphere of lightness, and in his dark punctilious garb and girlish mind, I know how he would have grieved for the agreement; yet these magical moments of complete release were burst almost as soon as they were shaped; they were never bees, and there is no map for their return, not even as Ulysses, so that a song-abandoned book might smell a welcome-home in childhood hands again; nevertheless, though presently as flat and ready for the sink as the dregs of a party, these emotions were powerful and plentiful then, as the first f^izz is consequently, when I got home and went to my room to read (#20 that day in my catch like a fine fish), I was carried past my aunt’s offer of taffy in unremovable wrappers, my mother’s worried questions (what have you got there? did you enjoy your day? will you be down for dinner?), and my father’s complaints (what did that cost? you’ve been out of the house all day! I thought I asked you to cut the grass), by the continuous uprush of my passion toward its fated pop; and then until dinner I would die down, as no lover would later let me, in the language and lap of Shakespeare or Carlyle or Mann or Cervantes.

In order that I would not be given a false sense of their reality, the characters who pretended to breathe and move about and talk in #20 were called Clym Yeobright or Grandfer Cantle, Wildeve, Thomasin, Fairway and Susan Nunsuch, Diggory Venn and Eustacia Vye, and I must admit these silly artificial names were repellent even to my eager and injudicious ear; nor was the cover any inducement, for it showed a vacuously handsome young man dressed in a conservative blue suit, white shirt, and floppy bow tie, who is gazing over his shoulder toward some pink hills on which there improbably appears a marble edifice resembling the Lincoln Memorial, while an equally empty and conventionally drawn young woman with windblown hair is pulling on and otherwise beseeching his other shoulder, as if to say: do not dream of such things . . . come away . . .  come away; nevertheless, the first words I read when I opened the book were on page 357 (as Fate & Hardy had arranged it): A Lurid Light Breaks In Upon a Darkened Understanding; and how could I (or anyone) resist that? Besides, just below the mausoleum, William Lyon Phelps, in white type, is quoted saying “I have always regarded The Return of the Native as his masterpiece,” and who could remain unmoved by William Lyon Phelps—in white type? Furthermore, the initial page, always crucial, passed every test, with its promises and divisions, its portentous opening paragraph like the great door of a church, its exotic setting and strange names, the rolling orchestration of its prose.

BOOK FIRST

THE THREE WOMEN

Chapter 1

A Face on Which Time Makes But Little Impression

A SATURDAY afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight, and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment. Overhead the hollow stretch of whitish cloud shutting out the sky was as a tent which had the whole heath for its floor.

Between the ages of twelve and fourteen, I should say, this sort of thing is irresistible, and a word like embrowned is every bit as stirring as ‘fulminancy,’ Carlyle’s piece of cheese. Anyway, I went for it, and until I encountered the text again (in London, during the blitz), I had been encouraged by the critics to believe that this work might be, indeed, a masterpiece; but then, when a whole wall of books blew about like leaves, and Hardy’s novel gave me a hearty clap on the back like an old friend, the mendacity of the literary mind was shown to me in something resembling a revelation as I flipped through the book’s pages and grinned . . . and laughed sourly . . . and grinned again. I had been duped. I was a dunce. And those others—they were educated, older, they knew—they were liars. It may have been at that time that my ascent of Mount Parnassus slowed, and I began to turn toward history.

Now, though, as I hold #20 in my hand for I have it still, and The Four Million[#65] as well as others, most with the pages white, their Perma-Gloss intact, and covers firm), I am brought by chance to passages of somber, quite bombastless beauty, and I find that my present feelings, like the rest of my life, are in a state of insecurity and confusion. I shall copy it down, because that’s all I can do, But ‘bombastless’—there’s a word Carlyle could not complain of.

There lay the cat asleep on the bare gravel of the path, as if beds, rugs and carpets were unendurable. The leaves of the hollyhocks hung like half-closed umbrellas, the sap almost simmered in the stems, and foliage with a smooth surface glared like metallic mirrors. A small apple tree, of the sort called Ratheripe, grew just inside the gate, the only one which thrived in the garden, by reason of the lightness of the soil; and among the fallen apples on the ground beneath were wasps rolling drunk with the juice, or creeping about the little caves in each fruit which they had eaten out before stupefied by its sweetness. By the door lay Clym’s furze-hook and the last handful of faggotbonds she had seen him gather; they had plainly been thrown down there as he entered the house.

Find Planmantee. Somewhere he’s smiling like a half-opened tin. The books begin at the floor and continue to the ceiling as species do in Aristotle. They span the doors, in stacks crowd the closet, consume every corner, ring the radiator: four walls and a window full of als ob:models, fictions, phantoms, wild surmises, all the essential human gifts: dreams, preachments, poetry, and other marvels of misfeeling. There are books in the drawers, on the desk and table. Cheap. Fat. Tattered. Innocent. Grim, Piers Plowman. EIPHNH. Three Weeks. Céline. Alone. In disrepute. In mobs. I could not live in such proximity with any person. With Unamuno, the beautifully named, with Marlowe—yes. Aquinas. Schopenhauer, Galileo. Bede. Call each to me with a finger that tickles the top of the spine. They play into my hands like cards. They breed.

O giant me one ripe time;

the strength,

just once,

in one brief line,

to shake the sacred tree from whose thought-quickened

boughs oar earthly beauty hangs

till all the orchards of the world,

as though in a wind of sympathy,

let fall their fruit onto the apron of the ground,

for any deep sweet bite to make its momentary mouth

eloquent with the juice.

Willkommen dann, o Stille der Schattenwelt!

Zufrieden bin ich, wenn auch mein Saitenspiel

Mich nicht hinab geleitet; einmal

Lebt ich, wie Götter, und mehr bedarfs nicht.

Froissart. Adams. Gobineau. Like checkers, some king the carpet’s squares. Sober books. Bawds. They preoccupy my armchair like an injury. They press in. Ockham. Austen. Von Frisch. Pound. In overcoats. In satins. With illustrations. Aprons. Pindar. Heavy. Worn. Hardy, Hawthorne, Hazlitt, Hemingway, Henty, Hopkins, Housman, Hume. With loose bent torn dry yellow pages and broken glueless backs, some shaken outside of themselves, Webster, Ford, Lombroso, Chapman, Cleland, Chaucer, Berkeley, Boccaccio, Swift, by time, humidity, rough handling, their ferocious contents, Flavius Josephus, Bussy D’Ambois, some scratched, some marred with annotations, underlinings, exclamations, thumbprints, smears, Poe, Thomas, Plautus and Petronius, stained, checked, dented, mottled, eaten. Ibsen. And if anyone I knew—Chekhov, Veblen—were like that, I would flee them. But from Bradley? Burns? Bernanos? Browning? Gilded edges? Gaudy. Slick. They know how to age—each—they fly through time like a stone. King Lear. Colette. Une Vie. Le Corbusier. La Rochefoucauld. I have thrown them. Yes. They have broken me. Slammed them down. Been brought low. “The Good Anna.” Keller. “Boule de suif.” Embossed. In suede. Defoe. Received for birthdays, with aribbon or a tasseled string and soiled by dedications, nameplates, erasures like rapacious moths, librarians’ pastes and inks. Great Expectations. We speak of their backs, their fronts, their spines . . . their bodies. Funny. Flatulent. Forsaken. Fielding. Frost. Find Planmantee. He’s somewhere—living his life inside a life like Madame Bovary—somewhere where nothing else is as it is, where everything’s as something else is, resembling the resembled to infinity—in metaphysics, mathematics, magic—where all are kith and kin and none are kind. I see Homer. He’s ceased singing, and sirens now warn us away. My lines suffer interruption, and these covers close over me. Hegel. Iamblichus. Pliny. Plato. Where is the Western Front now, you foolish old man? that trench of entrancing shadows, cardboard cutouts, supple fires? Don’t lie to me. The pokey where Socrates swigged his Dramamine was a hole in a hill. And Plotinus is also a cavern. These days the darkness that lies under the mind like the cool shade of a stream bottom yields our only safety, for to rush to the light is to Gloucester-out the eyes; bedazzled by death, to go over the top at someone else’s whistle and war shout, to fume up and fizz fast, die dirty, die young. Chatterton. What is a book but a container of consciousness, a draft of cantos? Through a curtain of concepts I watch blemishless girls, young Kierkegaard in all his disguises, Empedocles as a fish, bird, and girl, Stendhal and Byron like boys about their boasting, Boswell accosting his whores, Cellini, another braggart, honest Casanova, Pepys at table, Henry Miller, Gide committing Chopin and other indiscretions, Cudworth, Claudel, Jeremy Taylor, Mörike and then Baudelaire—the most beautiful name of all. Vico. Verlaine. Michelangelo—the most beautiful—Mallarmé—the most beautiful—Sophocles—the most beautiful name of all. The names of idols, vandals, heroes, lovers, cutthroats and cutpurses, gods . . . of guttersnipes and villains, thugs, poseurs, seducers, patsies . . . drunks . . . ¶Hear me, Hesiod: to sing of what will be, as well as all that was,takes more than the gift of a voice, these days, it takes a stomach stronger than a tomb. ¶The gods speak only of the gods. ¶In those days, then, what are we to do? What have we done? Villon. ¶There’s Demosthenes polishing his teeth with stones. Quintilian. Cicero. ¶O we’ve had speakers of such spectacular speechifying power Gods word is but a cough before a sneeze beside them. Who, if not Hitler, like a wind through wheat, made the heads of the masses dance as though their hats held feet? Isocrates. Calhoun. ¶I am the thimble of History, Mad Meg said. I drive the needle in. ¶What did the Muses want of you when they offered that olive-fruiting stick? compliments in front of every song and flattery following. Ah, they make me sick. Simonides. Theopompus—not the nicest—and the names of fairies, tarts, and sister-suckers, people of paper, paper people, Acton, Lecky, Maitland, Froude, Jewboys, jack-offs, niggerlovers, Thoreau, Twain, men of means and men of parts, Marcus Aurelius, Chesterfield, King James, whom have you Muses so lightly laureled? verbal farts and fiddle-scrapers, every kind of diligent compiler, pipsqueak, nail-biter, fact-fucker, dissolute tutor, bombathlete, hairy bluenose, cheat and bore . . . let me think my way along this wall . . . Clarendon, Longinus . . . cutaways, cutesies, castoffs, creampuffs, chokethroats, alley cats, cowards, turncoats. hounds from hell, boys from Harvard, kids from Yale, and other godsends (as they say they are and pray to be), saints, archangels, showoffs, sycophants, suicides, and some like me: desperate failures, resentful assassins . . . yet here—as nowhere—even one’s enemies are friends, even one’s superiors are unenvied. Dreiser. Dumas. Dilthey. Hart Crane. Rimbaud. Ronsard. Is there a richness anywhere to match this? ¶O yes, O yes, O yes, O yes, I am aware, O how I know, that there are those who write like tenors, stock their books as though each were a fish pond, dry goods, hardware, or a pantry; who jerry-build, compose sentences like tangled spaghetti, piss through their pens and otherwise relieve themselves, play at poetry as if they were still dressing dolls, order history as though it were an endless bill of lading; but there were genuine bookmen once: Burton, Montaigne, Rabelais and other list-makers, Sir Thomas Browne and Hobbes, in the days when a book was not just a signal like a whiff of smoke from a movie Indian or a carton of cold crumb-covered carryout chicken, but a blood-filled body in the world, a mind in motion like a cannonball. Spinoza sent our freedom flying through just such a trajectory. Kant rearranged our thoughts forever. Calvin did us in. ¶How many volumes of Magus Tabor? Ten of Wordsworth bound in blue, gray, and gold. Twenty-five of Parkman. Lermontov: two. When I complained to Tabor that my contemporaries were mostly contraptionists, he grinned. Never mind, my boy; a book is a holy vessel—ah, indeed, yes, it will transmogrify a turd. Nordau. Gentile. Husserl. Hartmann. Bentham. James and John Stuart Mill. And of Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, Schelling—how many? Outside I hear the power mowers mow the snow. Of Herder, Heidegger, Heine, Helmholtz, Spengler, Werfel, Weber? Open any. Karl Jaspers. Ernst Jünger. A crack like a chasm. Vega. Natsume. Quevedo. The creaking door in a horror story. Gorki. Heliodorus, Apollinaire: the most beautiful names of all. Every cover lifts as though it lay above a cellar stairway, hid a hold. A hold. There’s the one in Conrad’s Typhoon, full of Chinamen and their money flung about in the darkness by the storm. Our cellar doors are warped and difficult to lift. Rain leaks in, leaves collect, insects prosper, mold forms. Do descend: come in, the witch says, smiling with her slit. Do. D’Annunzio. Chamberlain. Carco. Krafft-Ebing. Huysmans. Sacher-Masoch. De Sade. All the dirty old gentlemen and their Victorian foreskins. I could not in my life remember so many of my friends. Southwell, for example. Shelley. Donne.

In eaves sole sparowe sitts not more alone,

Nor mourning pelican in desert wilde,

Than Sely I, that solitary mone,

From highest hopes to hardest happ exild;

Sometyme, O blisful tyme! with Vertue’s meede,

Ayme to my thoughtes, guide to my word and deede.

The man of action has a destiny, a star he follows, and it draws him on like the Magi, or so it’s said; the taillight of a car, it’s said; the flag of a deer. The creator courts the muse, pays tribute and pursues: sucks, sips, sniffs, puffs, pops, screws—for the favor of his Fancy. The visionary sees the future like a dream-draped dressmaker’s dummy, as silks pinned to the canvas skin of a shameless wire-veined manikin. But we historians, we poets of the past tense, we wait for our tutelary spirits to find us; we sit in one place like the spider; and until that little shiver in the web signals the enmeshment of our prey, we look within for something to lighten our nighttime, the weight of our patience: the fluorescent face of a bedside clock, for example, enamel nailshine, bleached sheet.

What a glorious ring it had once—the call: Come, sacred company of Muses, let us unite our voices to accomplish the fullness of the song, I Phoebus of the thick hair, singing in the midst of you.

The savvier painters rendered the star in the form of a fiery crucifix, but for we historians, we poets of consumed time, it is just the reverse: we begin on the cross, hung in our flesh like the crossed sticks of the scarecrow, and end in a highchair deciphering our cereal box, receiving the fabulous gifts of imaginary kings, and predicting an unbearable future.

There are Muses for the several sorts of writing, but none for any kind of reading. Wouldn’t one need divine aid to get through The Making of Americans, Ivanhoe, Moll Flanders, or Grace Abounding?

When I was in high school I had to write an essay duplicating the manner and subject of Bacon’s “On Reading,” and I remember including all the comfortable clichés. I said nothing about how books made me masturbate. I said nothing about nightmares, about daydreaming, about aching, cock-stiffening loneliness. I said something about wonder and curiosity, the improvement of character, quickening of sensibility, enlargement of mind, but nothing about the disappearance of the self in a terrible quake of earth. I did not say that reading drove a knife into the body. I did not say that as the man at breakfast calmly spoons his oatmeal intohis mouth while words pass woundlessly through his eyes, he divides more noisily than chewing, becomes a gulf, a Red Sea none shall pass over, dry-shod cross. There is no miracle more menacing than that one. I did not write about the slow return from a story like the ebb of a fever, the unique quality it conferred which set you apart from others as though touched by the gods. I did not write about the despair of not willing to be oneself or the contrary despair of total entelechy. I did not write about reading as a refuge, a toy drug, a pitiless judgment. Ah, Walther von der Vogelweide, Wolfram von Eschenbach. You could read in the roses just where my head lay. Nor did I say anything about plating magical words in my mouth such as Hausen or Morungen wrote to make a medieval miracle of my mind; because I became the consciousness that composed the poem or the paragraph: I grew great and ornate like Browne or severe as Swift or as rich and thick as Shakespeare, snappy as Pope. There is Büchner, Raspe, Richard Dehmel. There is Stefan George and Stephen Spender. Ah, Guido Cavalcanti. A cave. A cunt. Camus. The gentle muse of Hartmann von Aue or that of the Nightingale of Hagenau—Reinmar—

Nieman seneder suoche an mich deheinen rât:

ich mac mîn selbes leit erwenden niht.

is also the muse of the madman; Smart, Clare, Cowper, Blake . . . thought, word, deed . . . Nietzsche, Hölderlin, Hitler. The most beautiful name of all Oh? So? Gotcha now. Which name? Whose? What’s that you say? Lorca and Calderón? How convenient. How classy. José Garcia Villa. Just the other day these lines of exiled ink raced like motes from Hopkins’ kind of Catholic eye across my specs:

To-fro,angel! Hiving,verb!

First-lover-and-last-lover,grammatiq: Where,rise,the,equitable,stars,the,roses,of,the

zodiac,

And,rear,the,eucalypt,towns,of,love:

—Anchored,Entire,Angel:

Through,whose,huge,discalced,arable,love, Bloodblazes,oh,Christ’s,gentle,egg: His, terrific,

sperm.

Behind a wall of words I watch the girls. Pavese. The streets are dry and a light is burning at the back of the pharmacy.

One of the shames of my childhood, one of the signs of my unstable sexuality, one of the sources of discontent and provocation, was my weak whistle. It carried, like a whisper, mostly wind, and could flutter a candle on a cake, but never beckon a dog, achieve attention, turn a head in a crowd, signify excitement. I foozed and muffled and whoo’d and wet the air without achieving a single acceptable male-made expression of amazement, nor could I do the forked-finger bit, causing my breath to scream like some banshee as it squeezed between my teeth. Even at my present age I can barely carry a nursery tune through pursed lips. So what am I thinking of now, as I try to whistle up a favoring wind? Who, among the gods, will hear a hooosh?

From the womb of

Memory as Eros from the

wind-egg, emerged the Muses, three

originally, called Castilia, Pimpla, and Aga-

nippe, and likened frequently to the freshets, to

the mountain springs—quick, clear, sudden, sparkling,

cold—which bickered down the slopes of Mount Helicon

and Mount Parnassus. They were in order of their birthdays:

Recollection, Contemplation, Celebration, later corrupted three

times over by unnameable panders and innumerable pimps, cock-

bauds, ass and cunt collectors, who were satisfied simply to

enumerate areas of inspirational activity rather than

illumine its dark conditions, elements, and causes,

and went about it all so recklessly that soon

there was a muse for spilled milk as

well as one for premature

ejaculation.

To perceive . . . to ponder . . . and to praise: rühmen, das ists!

In my youth . . . my sacred youth . . . in eaves sole sparowe sat not more alone than I . . . in my youth, my saucer-deep youth, when I possessed a mirror and both a morning and an evening comb . . . in my youth, my pimpled, shamefaced, sugared youth, when I dreamed myself a fornicator and a poet; when life seemed to be ahead somewhere like a land o’ lakes vacation cottage, and I was pure tumescence, all seed, afloat like fuzz among the butterflies and bees; when I was the bursting pod of a fall weed; when I was the hum of sperm in the autumn air, the blue of it like watered silk, vellum to which I came in a soft cloud; O minstrel galleons of Carib fire, I sang then, knowing naught, clinging to the tall slim wheatweed which lay in a purple haze along the highway like a cotton star . . . in my fumbling, lubricious, my uticated youth, when a full bosom and a fine round line of Keats, Hart Crane, or Yeats produced in me the same effect—a moan throughout my molecules—in my limeade time, my uncorked innocence, my jellybelly days, when I repeated Olio di Oliva like a tenor; then I would touch the page in wonder as though it were a woman, as though I were blind in my bed, in the black backseat, behind the dark barn, the dim weekend tent, last dance, date’s door, reaching the knee by the second feature, possibly the thigh, my finger an urgent emissary from my penis, alas as far away as Peking or Bangkok, so I took my heart in my hand, O my love, O my love, I sighed, O Christina, Italian rose; my inflated flesh yearning to press against that flesh becoming Word~a word~words which were wet and warm and responsive as a roaming tongue; and her hair was red, long, in ringlets, kiss me, love me up, she said in my anxious oral ear; I read: Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour; for I had oodles of needs, if England didn’t; I was nothing but skin, pulp, and pit, in my grapevine time, during the hard-on priesthood of the poet; because then—in my unclean, foreskinned, and prurient youth—I devoutly believed in Later Life, in Passion, in Poetry, the way I thought only fools felt about God, prayer, heaven, foreknowledge, sin; for what was a poem if not a divine petition, a holy plea, a prophecy; and in that BrassBrite Tomorrow, that FineLine time, having left my youth with a leap as Hart Crane had his life (a simile which should have taught me something, which should have been a warning), I believed I would finally be what I believed in; I would really live what I had dreamed of; I would rape and write and enrich myself; tongue a tender ear, a velutinous cunt, kiss and compose with one mouth, in the same breath, and maybe fly a plane like Raoul Lufbery and learn German so I could recite my Rilke during daring Immelmann turns, during any break between books or other coital excesses: kannet du dir, I’d chant, kannst du dir denn denken dass ich jahre, so . . . a stranger, a pelican in desert wilds, no to-fro angel, hiving verb, though poets were the bees of the invisible, Rilke said, and everybody religiously repeated it through my dubious youth—ein Fremder unter Fremden fahre—a stranger among strangers, myself the strangest, Kohler the kookiest, because I could never bring myself to enter adolescence, but kept it about like a bit of lunch you think you may eat later, and later come upon at the bottom of a bag, dry as dust, at the back of the refrigerator, bearded with mold, or caked like sperm in the sock you’ve fucked, so that gingerly, then, you throw the mess out, averting your eyes, just as Rainer complained he never had a childhood—what luck!—never to have suffered birthpang, nightfear, cradlecap, lake in your lung; never to have practiced scales or sat numbly before the dentist’s hum or picked your mother up from the floor she’s bled and wept and puked on; never to have been invaded by a tick, sucked by a leech, bitten by a spider, stung by a bee, slimed on by a slug, seared by a hot pan, or by paper or acquaintance cut, by father cuffed; never to have been lost in a crowd or store or parking lot or left by a lover without a word or arrogantly lied to or outrageously betrayed—really what luck!—never to have had a nickel roll with slow deliberation down a grate, a balloon burst, toy break; never to have skinned a knee, bruised a friendship, broken trust; never to have had to conjugate, keep quiet, tidy, bathe; to have lost the chance to be hollered at, bullied, beat up (being nothing, indeed, to have no death), and not to have had an earache, life’s lessons to learn, or sums to add reluctantly right up to their bitter miscalculated end—what sublime good fortune, the Greek poet suggested—because Nature is not accustomed to life yet; it is too new, too incidental, this shiver in the stone, too novel altogether, and would just as soon (as Culp prefers to say) cancer it; erase, strike, stamp it out—this dubbed in youth, this gicky GroBoy time—so that I would never have been jeered at, called Bullocky Bill on account of my tiny testicles and puny weenie, had I not been available, or caused to cough in a long naked line, to spread my rash-eaten cheeks to the amusement of a hundred eyes, or in a park in Prague gently jacked off by a boy who fondled me from behind a newspaper (or was it a magazine?), napkin neatly in his idle hand; and shame need never have lit me like a match, as I burned my slender Being back then, in my old cold youth, until its head was black—best never to drag a breath out of the competing wind, the Greek poet advised, because Being is basically made of heartless hunks and soulless flabs; it is inert, resists flow, dislikes disturbance, distrusts goals; in fact, it is fat as a Buddha, sluggish, still as statues, and as pitilessly bronze.

BEING. Holy word. Being cannot be recognized unless it succeeds in Seeming. So Gorgias asserted. Yet Seeming, itself, will be weak and ineffective unless it succeeds in Being. Paradox #75.

Your skin was an ocean of sky sliding toward me. There’s ink on my thumb. Plato and Gorgias—Lou—yes, you and I—suddenly Thucydicles—are names that occur to me. There’s the unstraightened deck of my manuscript. Mad Meg. The thick rug under me. Anxiety. The tunnel of my sleeve. How can history be a record of οὐσία? of life in a chair? Endless journey. Yet I had her in it. Act pleased. I did act pleased. Don’t hold back. And I groaned as I was coming. There, between her parted hairs, I acted out my pleasure. So she was pleased, and pretended to come, too, to please me. Aaaaaaaah . . . etc. And if I like a lover lie, and the lie’s believed, hasn’t ½ of appearance become reality? Then, Lou, as you turn to me, full of the love I’ve laid inside you like a shiny ceramic egg, I am ¼ informed by the feeling I originally bewinded; love rolls round on my love like a spindle winding, enlarging me with what is mine until I fatten up from

BEING. Holy word. Being cannot be recognized unless it succeeds in Seeming, So Gorgias asserted. Yet Seeming, itself, will be weak and ineffective unless it succeeds in Being. Paradox #75.

Your skin was an ocean of sky sliding toward me. There’s ink on my thumb. Plato and Gorgias—Lou—yes, you and I—suddenly Thucydicles—are names that occur to me. There’s the unstraightened deck of my manuscript. Mad Meg. The thick rug under me. Anxiety. The tunnel of my sleeve. How can history be a record of οὐσία? of life in a chair? Endless journey. So I paid the kid off in cigarettes and candy. I was pleased. But I didn’t move a muscle, make a sound. The boy knew how. My face was that of a fellow perusing his paper, sonny beside him on the bench, sort of asleep at his side, shaded from the sun by the big man’s jewspaper. The air was as cool as his clever fingers. He knew how. Then the boy giggled and said, Mister, you’re no bigger here than I am. I didn’t mind. Perhaps it was enough like his own to give him skill, tenderness, and a tight grip when the time came, and he caught me like a shortstop grabs a grounder. Sadly I fell from

Seem to Being. The actor is reacted to, thus acts, so is, and history cannot close itself to dream and every night’s hypocrisy. I said I’m such an easy fool. It was an easy thing, to say. But I am not easy. I’m sly. I’m all difficulty like tangled hair. I admitted the charge and wrote down the sentence callously. Shouldn’t I shake when I write such lies? Mad Meg shook. For Meg was mad. Shook until he died. Of aspenation. Rattle of wind in the lungs like leaves. But I’m not father to myself to hold in fear and trembling. In fact, when I am caught by such a judge as I am when I am over me, both of us are pleased. So much for that. So much for honesty.

O such a small thing! Pooh! I have fattened up, though my cock still cannot cast its shadow and rarely comes out. Why bring up, fuss over, mess with, such a small thing? pshaw! small lie, small confusion, a little weakness, brief forgetting, tiny distortion . . . I return like someone on a swing . . .

Mad Meg in the Maelstrom

If I bent every hair on the head of history in the same way, its skull would he cheerful and curly.

Well, I saw him often after that: at his home, occasionally in the park where he walked, and of course in that absurd great hall where he lectured.

Look at me, Kohler. I’m small, eh? even tiny, you might say. Yet I’ve the bones of a giant. I limp. You see? I limp. Yet I’ve enormous speed. My voice is high, ja? feminine, some call it—all right—I’ve overheard the jokes—it’s light, it’s thin. But it strikes a blow like a truncheon. Then my head, Kohler—see?—my head is white where it isn’t bald; my face is bent and creased and quite caved in. And my eyes protrude; my nose is hairy. Hah—shit—god. Ugly, ja? And I’ve this sickness inside me. Yet I am handsome as a Prussian prince, and like them, immoderately loved. Oh, Kohler—greatness—let me tell you, Kohler, because they’ve got it all wrong—greatness—greatness doesn’t lie in health or size or stride or carriage. Hoo—no—tee hee, William, tee hee—how absurd. Running, jumping, throwing spears or inscribing lead plates . . . god-a-mercy. Greatness doesn’t rest on any quality of thought or kind of mind like a teaspoon on a table: on subtlety—hebe jeebee Joseph—on precocity or quickness—jammay! kiddies, what a concept!—ah! on the strange, unique, original, profound, then—such holy ghosts, eh?—or the vast and threatening Sublime somehow—what immaculate blah!

I had to walk quickly to keep up, I remember. Tabor half-skipped, milling his arms, turning his torso back and forth—facing front, then facing me as I tried to stay alongside. He was like a pointed stick you might spin to start a fire.

Consider Little Hans, Kohler—do—do—oh, ja, yes, do con-sid-er him. He does long complicated sums aged one, reads Greek at three, plays Beethoven at five, although his bitsy feet can barely reach the pedals . . . well, he’s insignificant. Who cares? Will he reason any better, when he’s grown, than your John Stuart Mill, a prodigy too? I—and history—shit on him. No. It doesn’t depend on (O O O O, they are such imbeciles, Kohler! how can they manage to breathe? they are such im-be-ciles!)—no, oh no . . . no, not on the fertility of invention, or the charm of an active fancy. It’s nothing crude, Kohler, like a cockster’s skill. They are bumspittling lickhicks who think thus. And it’s not divine, no, not sent from some on-high like piss out a window—never—you know, like faith or grace or peace or purity or charity—they must have bald and pruny monks’ cods to think so—O no never. Then let’s be practical, shall we? Say we shall. Let’s come to earth; plant our feet; touch what’s real; let’s be—let’s be—concrete. And what is real in that way? right you are! only a warm blood-flooded prick. So say it’s . . . wealth. Shall we be swiftly done, get right along, and simply say it’s wealth? Hoo. Wealth. Wealth cannot purchase it, neither can beauty. Greatness, Kohler? Of course not. Not a feel-up, not a look-in, not a peek. No! Not if Midas’ pee were liquid gold, if Aphrodite split her cunt among the thieves or sold her bosom for the silver. Not if Jesus shat in the hand of God and buggered Nature at both poles. That doesn’t get it. Fawning, smirking, smiling, sniffing, fouling the mouth, dirtying the teeth, the tongue, the swallow-tube, the stomach next, not last nor least (when I go fast, Herr Kohler, as you see, I squeak), by going down on cunt, cock, dung hole, knee, for favor, when in heat, or out of courtesy . . . courtesy! ah, sunning in asslight till you tan—sweet summerlong vacations in the South—or otherwise to crawl, dart, sneak, or pander, be of use, oblige, and with the nose and ears to simper, playing rabbit to the snake, quail to the hunter—oh, to fake! to fake! and bravo with limp hands—or otherwise by grinning, or by clowning, fooling, fondling, cooing, oh, O, OH to scrape and scrape, to tip your head like a hat with a public handle, yes yes yessing like these cockhockkissing spermspitters always do, wagging, bowing, niggering and knaving, purring like a Yiddish cat: that THAT doesn’t doesn’t get it either. We were speaking of GREATNESS! Kohler . . . oh . . . it isn’t character or luck: it isn’t fate, clan, or family; though patience is part of it—persistence—pride. Yes, yes, yes—yes, possibly . . . pride. But a man might as well fuck mud to fertilize an empire, or a woman lie with a battery between her thighs and hope to feel a little lightning in her belly—hah, god, just as useless, just as wise. Our Great Leader, the Thunder Führer, you remember, could only get an Adam by some similar exercise. No .  . . ach . . . Look at me, Kohler. I’ve the bones of a giant. I sing like a siren. I make intoxicating dreams. Then—then men listen. Enchanted, how they listen. Oh Kohler—greatness—greatness isn’t sensitivity or vision, Kohler—no—take it from me: GREATNESS IS PASSION!

We of the German nation               so new to be a nation

                                                                   so new to be a self

How often did f hear that pompous introduction?

We of the German nation       light rose through the sky

                                                                like a swarm of flies

As often as I heard ‘transcendent’ or read the word ‘pure’ in their works of philosophy?

I gave up poetry for history in my youth. I gave up smoking; changed handwriting; traded stamps which I’d collected in my childhood for tables of mature statistics; seldom drank; was torn between the ethics of the Stoics and the ethics of Immanuel Kant; no longer moved to music; wrote out rules for my behavior and rigorously kept them, assigning grades; thought abstract thoughts and shrank from women; cultivated bibliographies in paper pots; lived in a house of heavy books. What led me once toward Germany—Hölderlin and Rilke—remained pure imagery. Hölderlin went mad. Rilke’s blood decayed. I gave up youth.

 Umkehr

sicher for safe and sicher for certain                      sich eingraben

wirken    

German = now it is our turn.           Deutschheit  emergierend      Heil!  Heil

hellen   Heller    hellig    Helligen    Helligkeit    hellios

If I do not write these absurd German words in that thorny German script, they sink into my English and lie hidden like a lot of   lot of   leucocytes   poor Rilke unlidded, petaled finally  epistles to the Fraus of princes, counts, and barons, those endlessly lettered and hyphenated ladies with their suitable chalets and villas, châteaus, castles, lodges, cottages, estates . . . and the engraved calling cards of the well-titled muses:

The calling cards which snowed the silver trays of the socially fortunate

I cherish the memory of your castle rooms, the walks in the gardens, the charming view, the space I Flew through when I flew out to my muse.

How often have I heard that pompous introduction?

Frau Gertrude Ouckama Knoop, Fräulein Imma von Ehrenfels, Ilsa Blumenthal-Weiss, Frau Amman-Volkert, Frau L. Tonier-Funder, Ruth Sieber-Rilke, Ellen Key, Helene von Nostitz, Ellen Delp,

Did these women live and grow in him? Were they his blood, or his disease?

You could say, I suppose, that I died at an early age. But it is literature to say so, only emblematic; the idea’s faded—frayed and dented like a decorated pillow.

But why should a rose be so remembered? Dandelions gray before they shatter; suit the life they stand for. Isn’t emblem all there is to any flower?

I begged to have the Countess to myself. We climbed the Mount Solaro.

Freifrau Anna Münchhausen, Anni Mewes, Lili Schalk, Rosa Schobloch, Ilse Erdmann, Clara Rilke, Mimi Romanelli,

I hear every noise in my body, and I live among squabblers.

we climbed

The heaviness of the hangings—I remember them.

Ausgeseizt auf den Bergen des Herzens. Rilke deprived himself of everything but solitude and poetry.

In a state of Nature, Mad Meg said if you and I are throttling one another, at least we have our reasons; there’s nothing artificial about our fears; and then we have that terrible tension in our tentacles, eh?

What love was as a word was so much more to him than love was as a feeling. Towers, bodies, you could only dwell in. What was “dwelling”? It’s l’homme to l’homme, you might say, Kohler, back in that imaginary country. I was torn between the Stoics and the ethics of Spinoza . . . changed my hand, altered every character into something German.

 Though he declared that trees, birds, blossoms, buildings, patiently awaited seeing, he knew, too, that words, with greater urgency, claimed our devoted saying.

But in a modern State, you don’t have to hate the man you’re murdering; that’s no longer necessary; orders are permissions, cancel pangs, promote remissions—don’t they? Read the Marquis, Kohler.

Consider Heydrich, Tabor. Heydrich, the technician, who hated the men he murdered no more than the pistol hates the suicide who sucks its barrel. It’s a job: going BANG! Yes. Consider Heydrich, the technician, who loved the woman he screwed no more than the frigged prick loves its frigger. An act like eating, it represents a need, and satisfying that need is just a job: oh, ooh ooh aaah! o-o-h. Umm. Ausgesetzt . . . Outcast on the mountains of the heart . . . You don’t smoke? Like you, it makes me cough and stains the fingers—here—on the innersole of the index. Ah, Kohler, I have few pleasures now—my age, my illness.

Listen, Herschel, I’m not wrong about Heydrich. He didn’t hate the Jews. He just loved his work.

So I set down rules for my behavior, then like a soldier kept them, assigning grades and fixing to my narrow chest awards: blue green gold red silver stars in celebration and atonement of my cowed fidelity and fearful stamina until before me burst my Sunday self in light, opening the ahs of thousands.

Octopi, Mad Meg would mutter. Scorpionfish.

There’s no height to the hills of the heart, Rainer. Na mountain flower or muscle grows there; slopes slide without rising, and joy is a downfall; there’s an end but never a start.

Yes, it is eye who sees so; it is I who says so.

Hobbes, yes—strange armada-stricken man—should have said we ought to give up all our feelings to the National Passion, artificial sovereign of the inner self, emotional Leviathan, for what are rights that anyone should care about them; what are merely outward powers? it’s what’s inside us that we count:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Out of the solitude of poetry, Rilke composed our loneliness. Hier blüht wohl einiges auf; aus stummen Abstruz blüht ein unwissendes Krautsingend hervor. Seeds sing like lutes strollers played in past ages. Blood no one believes in blusters out a flower. But I know of no departures in fragrance. No victories iris their flags up in vases.

A cannonball, once cannoned, the Great Jew said, may feel quite free within its own trajectory: it rises as we all do, then descends without agony or remorse or warning like a fool.

Dirty habit, too—ashes over everything.

Well, the rifle puts you at a stainless distance. At the same time, it permits a dangerous indifference, a lassitude toward duty, if it is not replaced by hatred at a higher level; thus we make an image of our enemy; or rather, Kohler, it’s our enemy we make; otherwise our soldier loses heart.

History has no truck with either loneliness or poetry, so out of loneliness I chose it, became intimate with multitudes, and studied time and distance with Mad Meg.

Myth murdering myth: that’s war these days.

Aber ungeborgen, hier auf den Bergen des Herzens . . .

Pretty Epictetus: we should live each day as one who goes in fear of ambush.

The Old Jew knew—see how he fooled us? When we replace our passions with ideas, it’s true, we no longer live in a human bondage.

I signed my name another way, improved my spelling, gave up dancing. Kohler, not even a pipe is allowed me now. My age. My illness.

Kohler! don’t go to doctors, Kohler—ever. They save your life by saying no.

in here it is dark

Frau Julie Weinmann, Frau Hanna Wolff, Sofia Nikolaevna Schill, Lisa Heise, Lotti von Wedel, Inga Junghanns,

oh reiner Widerspruch

Why should a rose be so remembered?

No flowers, Madame, I entreat you, their

presence excites the demons which fill the room.

Was it wise for all these titled husbands to indulge their wives with poets?

CASTLE CAVALCANTI

SARAZANA

1.  1.  1300

My dear Mandetta:

Change for the sake of change, Countess; do not leave me (Lou, love, do not leave), for you will find your background’s only moving like a standing train; your age itself will age, thighs thicken, eyes dim, darling, ears wane, hair gray; your life will window by you; you will see pale faces merely out there deep in magazines and anxious thoughts of somewhere they imagine they are going, just as you imagine all the latest fashions on you, page by page, while you travel toward a town or country lover who will want you otherwise, completely clothesless, not a coverlet between your skins, the buttons of your breasts quite loose by this time, teeth afraid, your whole body hanging by a thread  (he will not mind, my dear, my Lou, death swallows like a dog, indifferently, whatever mouthful); still, if you stay with me, dear lady, we shall confine our growing to one place, and put eternal beauty in us, exchange our tired flesh for language, live anew in letters read and written daily just as long as passion lasts; not alone in us, but as it lingers on continually in man as worsening diseases do (they, Lou, always have a bed); and all those lives they have persuaded to the grave make them, instead, immune; make them, like love, almost abstract, almost—so safely do they step from death to death—immortal. Admittedly (my Lou) this argument is shaky; so is the wire we walk, dear lady; yet there’s no drop that ends in breaking if we fail to cross, no chance worth greater taking than this gulf we span in every line of poetry. Countess, Countess . . . dearest Madame . . . we’re replacing our two lives with verse; it is our soul, like Socrates, we’re shaping. Where’s the loss? Does it swim in the wine of your lover’s mouth like a stupored fish? Such a tongue I’d never trust. Or do you like your heart reverberating in another’s chest? Echoes, my Mandetta, merely . . . second sounds. Or is it loving eyes that lay a beauty on you like a curse which will make you yearn and dream . . . and tumble; for who can live so—placed as high and perilous as that? Perhaps it’s simply coming to a pitch and pouring forth in private quaking every physical possession; perhaps it’s simply those insane convulsions in lovemaking, Madame (from sensations found that fully only in sensation), when the prisoned inner body, as a state of total feeling, finally flowers out. (The violet, dear Lou, contains the purest burning, heat men say.) Ah, in that case, Countess, really what’s the loss?

that’s what I could say

This book is intended to make you a mountain. From such a mountain you may see

dead Jews

Now I know it has destroyed me

thousands of days’ dedication

to death on the printed page

And I have been the helpless butt of filthy jokes, the face in the hole at the fun house, the bull’s-eye on the dartboard, the court dwarf.

from such a mountain you may see

Mad Meg’s pucky face

Bill, are you still making book on the Boche? Governali carries his head on a plate down the hallway. Day after day. The same songs. The same singing. Culp’s next door, Dear god. Culp.

O the dirty Hun has all the fun . . .

The Frenchman thrives on neglected wives . . .

He sings.

And Herschel lives across the hall, haunts his office like a hapless spirit, his gray bulk a gray bulk behind the glass.

I gave up poetry for history in my youth.

Why?

(1) I gave up youth.

Why did you give up youth?

(a) I was no good at it. Have your youth later, I said, when you are better equipped . . .

Poetry stood for order, rule, and regulation, didn’t it?

Not in my mind.

 -i-   It represented riot and wilderness and inner regard.

-ii-  It represented fire, war, wonderment, and faithful dedication.

-iii- It stood for what might, what could, what would, what should essentially Be. It was written as if from the future. It saved with praise whatever was passing, while history hurried it along, and lowered life into its grave with solemn pontification. An event enters history because it is over; dead, it is buried in blame like a pigeon in its own shit or a gull in its guano. It should be clear—plain to any person—open to any eye—that historical chronicles are chronologies of crime, and that any recital of the past constitutes an indictment.

You appear to hate history.

I love History because I hate Time and all Time contains. I gloat on its going. I perform the Himmler Fling. I jig on the graves of all those days: July 6, 1415, for instance, when they burned John Hus; or Dec. 7, 43 B.C., a day on which Anthony’s thugs murdered Cicero; or July 21, 1946, when President Gualberto Villarroel was hung from a lamppost, like the symbol of a pawnshop, with three globes; or Jan. 29, 1938, when the elevator took my mother to the floor reserved for the crazy ladies.

What are you going to call it, Bill: Apologia pro devita jua?

That’s Oscar. Os. Oscar Planmantee.

From the peak of my book death stretches away like a valley crossed with lazy streams.

And I have this tension in my testicles, this pressure in my groin.

Your history is your only individuality, says Oscar Planmantee. His glasses dangle from a string around his neck.

You must understand, Kohler, Herr Belden said, that we Germans have an immense sympathy for mountains. We did not destroy a single mountain during the whole war.

*     *     *

Life in a chair

Beyond my book the machines are still mowing. I must ask about Herr Tabor. When Mad Meg died, I followed his coffin to the grave. I must ask, though I’m afraid. A nightmare woke me early, the great mound of my wife bulked beside me, the undrawn curtains like a fog across the windows, and the light pale where it puddled on the carpet. A soothsayer that’s what I need, someone to read the creases of the sheet, the design in the shadows, my entrails, dreams. I was about to fall from a great height into the sea, and I was wondering how I might contrive to strike the water so as to cancel consciousness completely, if not to die away at once like a friendship or a humiliated penis. Memory. Martha: she was once a maiden. Just imagine. Memory. Mine is fragile . . . fragile . . . only paper, my sanity, film thin. I am not a dreaming man . . . not normally. Daylight dreams, of course, consume me, but generally I fall asleep the way a peach is eaten. Between my eagerly approaching jaws there’s not a squirt of feeling. Martha. Maiden. Just imagine. The eyes at the end of my teeth suck nothing seen. Her thighs as a child are slim, her face is rosy. I was once a slim boy, too. No. I was fat as a baby, fat as boy; fat as a balloon, cub scout, school bus, hall monitor, frat pledge, army major. Fat as. Fat, I fall asleep. It is an ancient ambiguity (friend or enemy?): this slowing to a stop of all sensation. Torpid, I lie like a length of digesting snake or a long unillustrated book. In my dream I am hung in the sky like a dangle. Something flashes from me, streams away. The sea is the color of slate and rough as a roof, yet it seems to roll up the side of the sky as if I were looking at it through a bowl, perhaps as a fish does, which is puzzling because my perch is that of a bird. I decide to fall spread-eagle. In my dream I dream of drowning; that is, I consider it; I imagine drowning, think ahead, project; and the terror of it wakes me. It’s as if I were back in the army and my fall were a part of my duty. Odd. My wife is somewhere, and my children. I sense their presence indirectly: a whir of wheels behind me on a highway. The height is frightening, the trial falls are also awful—the rush of wind is very real—but the envisioned smother of the water: it is horrible. The sea—the sea as I sink is like gray porch paint, thick as treacle. This is a rehearsal. I know, but next time I shall open, swallow. The whole ocean will spill into me, drum like rain on the bottom of my belly. I decide to fall spread-eagle.

To dream of drowning: that’s old hat.

I woke with a sense of having been warned, the flesh of my wife piled beside me, curtains glassy, light stale, a single shoe in the middle of the room like a ship at sea. I went downstairs, distracted, like a king in Israel, as if in search of a soothsayer. Often when I’ve dreamed, though I dream rarely, I’ve dreamed I leaped from dream to dream as fancy lets me skip sometimes through books: as goats do crags, they say, boots leagues, clouds peaks. They’ve been dreams in which a sleeper who is dreaming dreams still further dreams (and that’s old stuff, old stuff indeed), like doors receding down a corridor, until he reaches one in which the sleeper is awake stiff, staring, hair on end—awake in a room full of fleshy mist and ships like lonely shoes; dream rooms opening through translucent doors to terraces where one might view along the lineless edge of a crystal cliff the eternally fresh rise of Reality—a plenum circulous with shit—just as, with his customary metaphysical clarity, Parmenides did (old hat upon old hat): each dream in the shape a stone that’s pelted into water takes, multiplying always from the inside so that the first sleeper reached is the last one dreamed—another Eleatic irony—because even after the original knot of night-thought has obdurately passed beyond the bottom by penetrating silt, its farewells persist in fainter and fainter prints, in wider and wider widening rings.

it was like falling into the sea

to pass that open door

a wind like cold water

space a cold glass

flights of fish

surprise

my nose

my ah!

breath

goes

f

a

s

s

s

t

and all this has happened before

The relentless regress: just how old-hat is that?

I wonder what the warning was. My memory is delicate, obscene. Mad Meg in the Maelstrom: shouting through the jostle, yelling at a shoulder, addressing a chest, demonstrating handholds, grips on history. Susu’s slit is long and thin, as she is (a shameful same), and lined with red like a bloodshot eye, eyebrows on either side (so the photos show it), as if quizzically raised. From Mad Meg a spray of speech, a spray of spit. Imbecile. Yes. The story was too good to keep. Yet I remember protesting. I protested. I did not idly acquiesce. Yes. The marble tries to gleam, but shadows fall on shadows there like played cards. Meg cannot gesture freely even as an image on the floor. And above him, where his voice has risen, there is an equally obliterating babble. When I grumble about my work, Martha moves in., smiles across the breakfast table, wags the spoon she’ll use to stir her coffee, ungut her grapefruit. How I hate that imperious gesture. Intemperately, Tabor reiterates, tries to make himself heard. The spoon which wags will, in a moment, stir. The light that was glowing in its bowl floats on the surface of her coffee now like cream. And I re-create him, including his ear fur, the hair on his hands. You really don’t want to finish that Big Brutish Book, Wilfred. What would you do then? What would you do? You’d be a knitter without wool; you’d be a hotel with a left-out lobby. Martha’s mind has this habit of incessant example: first a horseless rider (easy), then an Easterless bunny, a Mellon without money. You don’t want to—for fear of—fear of finish, Wilfred. What would you do? You don’t have a hobby. You hate to teach school—your students pester, annoy, and bore you—so the only work for which you’re paid turns out to be workless. ([Is Billy supposed to admire this pun? Well, Billy don’t.]) You have refused friends, my help, the advice of your sons. ([{The advice of my sons!}]) You won’t do anything but dub around the house. Will you trim shrubs, grow flowers, comb the cat? I don’t blame you for holding back. You’re simply afraid of retirement, of living in a vacant lot, behind a billboard ([and Billy, as bored by all this as the buffalo on a worn-off nickel, is supposed to admire the pun; well, Billy don’t]), in some weedy, windy, empty place. Muffin crumbs have made my saucer unsafe, the butter tweedy. Martha’s face is full of freshly scrubbed blood. The wall is acrawl with paper vines. I wonder would one of them hold me. Martha’s crack, in contradistinction to, is now so wide the nut’s milk is seeping. Imp without evil, she smugly suggests, that’s what you’d be. Dispitched, my fork simmers in a broken egg. I’m not allowed to lick my knife. So let me mow the snow on the weekends, Daddy, for a dime. I lift my fork to salute the devil which I serve. My dear Martha, I had a paper route. And a change maker fastened to my belt. My dear Martha, I say with a syrupy lilt (although I allow my fork to clatter), my dear Martha, grow—flow—flourish. I used to let the nickels drop. Snick snick two pennies snick a nickel snick a dime. My dear. Longer ago than that, it seems, I looked on your face with fascination. Now I see in you what you see in me. The quarter: I never had too many of those. Snick a penny. I do the dishes in this house and so I care about the cleanliness of tines. I also put the pitchfork in the earth. I hoe. I rake. You cut. You trim. You train. You snick. I clear away the vines. The good old days. I wonder would one of them hold me. Click. Smick. The once fine times. I sold the Journal door to door. Liberty. The American magazine. My dear, you already fill each tiny crawl and cranny of my life as though you were sweetly reconditioned air. Her rich lips quiver slightly. It’s a little late to pay attention to the kids, but you might at least learn to drive the car. (As if I didn’t know how to drive a car.) I remember protesting that there were too many Jews. Ah, Kohler—Tabor touches his trousers—there are too many Hindoos. Birth has always been the bane of bodily existence. And here I am entering fifty as though it were the outskirts of Moline. I lift my fork in salute but observe it covered with yolk. Still, there are so many things I might in my general lateness learn: how to wiggle my middle finger on the sounding string. I would pedal my bike over half the town trying to collect. My customers were crooks. With my past safely past me, I could scale mountainous sums to look on numbers formerly beyond expression. All those free reads, though. In the American a feature-length mystery every month. I’d like to learn to weave rugs whose mystical designs would snare the shoe. So many magics remain, my dear; there is so much to feel and see and do—to move and shake—accomplish and perform—there is always a forelock left by which to take Time; and where simple things have gone quite plainly wrong, there is the opportunity to make long, incomprehensible repairs. Our breakfast cloth is sticky with honey rings. I stroll my eyes like a pair of poodles from pale blue square to square until I reach the milk. She knows that I’ll drink nothing held in place by cardboard ballyhoo and boozle wax, but she carries carton after carton in the house

as if our kids were still kids

and lived with us like pampered cats

ate graham crackers after school,

licked jelly off of jellied fingers,

and wore mustaches made of milk

to sour slowly in the fridge and slip like vomit down the sink. Left hand in her lap . . . I reach the precipice .  . . is she wearing hers, or am I to infer that a restless and rebellious soul struts and frets behind the curtain of her flesh this morning? When she’s fed up with cooking for me she will leave her rings in a clutter by the stove, together on her bedside table as a warning not to touch, or on the lid of a can of scouring powder so to say, “I shall not scrub,” and when she does her face she drops them in a dish of slid-out soap because she’d forsake her mirrored visage too, the girlish blond plumpness gone, the long braids gray. The diaphragm she inserted last night in a spirit of pure speculation (I smelled the jelly on her fingers as her torso turned like a roll of snow from the center of our marriage to the bed’s left edge)—has it been removed? Likewise, the first furnace this house had is still in dust and ash down there, left over, abandoned in a corner of the cellar

like

a stack

of old mags

like a hollow

paper octopus,

paper because

the asbestos wrapping

like a thought

that’s consumed

its subject

resembles

paper

when it isn’t

wound to

resemble

a

dirty bandage

or a

mummy’s slumber suit. The stairs creak as I descend to show Mad Meg around. The walls slope as his shoulders did, though his were dry and brittle in the bone, shivering slightly as his palsy overtook him: tortoise to the hare. Little do you know, dearie, what I do, what I have done, all that I’ve concealed from view like that condom at the bottom of my dresser’s bottom drawer (the sentimental hope of my old age), hidden by the hankie I’ve usually spilled my sperm in (and she says I have no hobby), and which she’s innocently, ignorantly washed so many times without ever realizing she was laundering her rival; a square of linen delicately laced at every edge with leaves and tendrils, blooms and bees, designed to make snot social. The cellar’s moist cool air is somehow soothing, the old stones contribute to an atmosphere of adolescent mystery—Dumas pére.

The burgeoning of her body even then, the delicious dents her girdle left, like the faint depression where a shadow’s slept, seemed to signify a generous and overflowing nature, for hers was flesh which rose to meet you like a man’s. I misread that feature as I did so many others. My wife grew more evident only in order to disappear. She was brightly stickered, richly wrapped and gaily ribboned, happily festive and tissuey; but open, the promising package looked empty, and if there’d been a jewel in the box, it had slipped beneath its velvet cushion. No question she seemed highnessy, with her regal chest, piled hair—a formidable Wilhelmina. Had I displeased the queen? She kept me so far from the capital there was never any news—flab saw to that—and when I stroked or struck her I was nowhere near a nerve. Under the spell of private urgency, how foolish I was to exclaim: I love what poops beyond your underclothes; or give myself so freely away with some coarse lover’s uncouth praise: you have boobs for a bottom, baby, you are nothing but tit. I ought to have been alerted by no less insistent a signal than her speech itself, since hers invariably held warnings, not warmth; it promised pain, not pleasure; it pinned disapproval blindly to you like a donkey’s tail, not commendation with its doubled kisses like the croix de guerre; and if my compliments were phrased in smelly cabbage and meatpie prose, always steamy and direct (though plainly I admired the poetry of the double-O), her castigations, her complaints, her commands, weren’t one verb better, merely a number of lame nags longer: Koh, you lethargic shit, you forgot to pay the bloody monthlies, she would say, our gas will go, you uncomic clown, the taps wheeze, lights dim, trash grow, jesus, no one will phone, water will weaken our whiskey, milk skim, and who will plop the paper on the porch, Koh, eh? who will deliver my dress? She would curse me out and call me down and rip me up as though we were still in bed, but I must admit she was never a very dedicated bitch. Lazy at that too. Codfishy caze. Yes, my dear Martha is stubbornly desultory about everything except the snuffle-up of origins, the pull-out of roots—whatever, in German, would be prefixed with ur. Skeletons, sinisters, stains on scutcheons, family spooks, cowbirdy malfeasance, mésalliances, cuckoos in elegantly cabineted grandfather clocks, black sheep, ugly ducks, adulterations, and dirty down-and-below- stairs doings, Romanian romances, French fucks, all mulatto offspring, fatal inheritance, squandered dowries, poisoned genes: they still stir her like a swizzle. She’s always wanted to be more than a prick pasture or a tongue towel, and thought that her ancestors would provide her with a self. Skinflinty cooze. Be sure to put a spade in that garden, Whiffie, before you finger me again. Touch that puddymuddy, Marty? I’d rather jar worms. There was a gaiety in the way she put her grievances which snipped their effects as surely as a cry for help composed in hexameters is scissored of its urgency no matter what it says. I no longer know why she’s such a snout about the past. Reliable as a truffle pig though, the faithless squint. Well, we’re never guilty of these hokey-jokey vituperations now. We seldom argue, seldom shout. Not since our beds parted and grew their own rooms. However, our insults remain ornate though more rarely delivered—why not?—we’ve the remainder of our lives for their construction.

The lingo of our early years together . . . well, we were so proper, so strength and health—unsturm, undrang—and I was a young professor with as much real dignity as a dimpled knee . . . consequently, I think we felt the need to be a little dirty, a little vulgar in our privacy. Behind doors, beneath covers, William Frederick Kohler became Wilfred Koh, Whiff Cough, sometimes—Marty was Mule—while we both called my cock Herr Rickler when it rose. Outrages, body counts, retaliations, sadistic ins and outs, the sexual deviations which I calculated as you’d calibrate and table all the temptations to a compass of nearby metal and the far-off pole, all the meek statistics of my enterprise: they fell easily under the head of the Great Judaic joke—GGJ, we said in code—tee hebe hee—and it seemed to work. I think my mind was fairly clean then. We had our humorous sense in hand and were able to cackle at all the classically funny ones: how in the camps, as Goering told it, the prisoners had grown so hungry they now gnawed the paper from the walls to get the glue, sliced their belts for bacon, fried the thin soles of their shoes, and then began on one another. Amusing enough, the Reichsmarschall said, but also serious, because in one place they had also sautéed a German sentry, beginning with his balls. Yes, those were the good old obscene days. I taught Mule the difference between Gesamtösung and Entlösung so well she would propose a total solution to the cockroach or the Kleenex question as readily as I might suggest a suitable final solution for the dogs and children of our neighbors, and she has never forgiven me for that contamination. Well, I kept my head. When she wanted the yard mowed or a loaf in her oven, I accused her of planning my I elimination by “natural diminution.” She knew it wasn’t entirely a tease. Here comes Herr Rickler once again, we said. She called herself the Bill Collector. And I protested. Those Hebrews taught me how to be a bigot—yes—but I got over it. We do. We get over everything—the good old obscene days. Aufgehoben. Ja. We transcend. Although crippled from childhood by wealth and kindness, eventually we conquer our natural inclinations to reach the impoverished safety of the callous. There are even moments in our present life together when I don’t dislike her. Amazing. Consider how hard it is to hate—persistently, continuously—how hard. Injuries heal; the cause can be forgotten; the point dulled; the yield mistaken; the profit lost. People generally parade their strengths, and Martha is as regimentally fat as a line of march. What is there left to discover by living next to next (her deaf ear, my mealy mouth, her cold crotch and my remorseless mind, her full soft breasts, my small stiff cock)—to acquire and collect—but emotional pox and moral smegma? Nevertheless, in spite of our spats, I really know her the only way I know the Congo—through pictures taken mainly from the air. That’s really what she is: a great ungainly volume of travel photos. Even naked—stretching—about to floor her fingers—she looks like a native squatting in the weeds. Considering our present condition, our persistent penalization of one another, our jokey defensiveness and intermittent meetings, the dismantled community of our common life, well, it strongly resembles these mishmashed pages, my refusal to come to grips with my subject, in fact, my chaotic lack of focus, my nervous dithering—oh yes, I recognize it, my postponement of ultimates, my pileup of periods, my refusal of denouements, those moments when I find myself filling an entire page with one pronoun: my my my my my my my my my admittedly rather fetching when softly sounded my my my not an expression of mild surprise or disapproval but my my my my my not of grief but of bountiful possession my my my or doodling or designing flags or making up limericks my my my my my my as if whatever prompted me to write was important, when, of course, the opposite is the case, no one, nothing, not even I, need these words, not one more ‘I’ ‘my’ or ‘me,’ either, or another disquisition on the many off-rhymes of life no no no nevertheless I have an increasing hunch that I’ll want to have a private page to hide between each public page of G & I to serve as their insides, not the tip but the interior of the iceberg, so to speak, why? why? why? beyond that I couldn’t say except that I feel a chill a chill a chill just my height, distinct, mine, my body’s width wide, drafting toward me from every side, as if I were about to slide into a long sorrow and blue surround of ice. To be morgued there through centuries. And only my inside sorrow still alive. My women

I

say

mine to

hide the

stubborn fact,

the acrid irony, the

unpalatable point,

the mournful and

the bitter truth:

that they indeed

are mine, and I

must consequently

face and feel and

fuck, own up—my

god—own up, own

up, own up to them.

My women belong to

my faculties, each to

a separate specialty:

Marty to                                           and Lou

perception, to                                   to goowallowy

“being there” with                          romance and tender

such insistence, such                       feeling, while Susu’s

aplomb, even Martin (Marty)        impressive but imagined slit

Heidegger could not explain her            grips my reason till its fixed,

solid presence to me; then                       cold, callous concepts gasp

Rue belongs to a bully’s                           against their will and

lust, and phallic                                        come (One ball al-

pride, Plato’s                                             ways hangs a little

low soul;                                                    lower than the

other.)

LOOK! I have Martha by the playful throat. I am persuading her to follow me, enter my operations, become a criminal as I have. THINK! I command like a public placard. I want you to think. Return to the time where I am. Get out of this insipid Indiana town and fly to Germany where murder is the muse. I want you to imagine, thoroughly envision, precisely picture, clearly see. I want you to see—are you looking through your fingers like a fence? —I want you to see a Jew’s cock—hatless, raw-headed, red as an alcoholic’s nose—rise. Any Jew’s will do. They are famously the same. Call one up. You get the joke? Well, laugh then, so I’ll know. Consider the wrinkled daddy-dinkums that you’ve made. Feeling qualmish? I want you to watch it while it slowly swells, twitches throughout its formerly flaccid length as though a little link of sausage were alive. I want you to watch closely while it shivers from a hairy thigh and lifts, enlarging as it goes, straightening, becoming stiff as a pole for the German flag, but bearing another banner, oh yes . . . and so . . .

sickening the swollen veins, the kosher crown,

the sticky bead like sweat that rises to its tip like bullet grease to lubricate the dome . . .

ah, is it not this image hideous and tummy turning?

. . . oh yes, but why?

. . . because it means more Jews. I hiss this last in my snakiest tongue, looped as I am on a lower branch, but Marty gags rhetorically. So? she says, so? so? Anyway, you’re describing your own sweet weenie, Willie. That careless slander called for an outraged outcry: I don’t require a forged foreskin! I have my own passport to purity! I tell her there is nothing essentially Semitic about me. I do two things Jews never do: drink and go down. That shuts her up. How can she answer an unfinished fact? The naked truth is the best lie. Ask the Dukhobors. And anyone is a Jew who believes to his caca-kosher bottom two things. Like Winston I V my fingers. Two things: clannish allegiance and the letter of the Law. I crook my V into a hammer’s claw. Two things: blood and ambition. I pull a nail from the wrist of Our Saviour. Two things: money and the mind.

The muses do not look below the moon, nor we, now, much above it; but there may be fallen angels of artistic bent and interest who might hearken if we cried out in the right direction, briskly beat upon the plumbing till, from some deep distance, tunes returned, and we could rhyme again, or at least curse with relish and a remnant of conviction. There must be muses of malfeasance and misuse who bring on our vulgar verses like a sickness, inspire our musicals and movie scripts, our lying adverts and political bins, thundering the tongue about in its mouth like a storm on the stage. Yes . . . dwelling in our sewers and our dumps, squalid divinities surely remain to encourage the profanation of the absent gods. There have got to be a few to celebrate the abuse of the spirit in its sweet fat flesh; who teach schoolboys how to masturbate; who are the divinities of daydream, and excite in reverie what reality can no longer claim (for what stirred Pietro Aretino into song? not Erato or anyone from Helicon). Given the copycolor concepts of our time, we can be confident that there are still some agents of inverted inspiration left, demons of exhalation, dullness, torpor, cliché, titillation, stench, whose noxious farts become the genius of our clay, and, with that backward breath, disanimate it slowly, just about the way you might let mildew strike a tent.

Ink has stained my fingers for so many years, I take the color to be normal as my flesh, and the callus where my pen has rested is of no more moment than a corn. Even the points and prints I sometimes leave upon the page no longer look like a labyrinth where the very identity its pattern is supposed to guarantee in fact threatens to lose me in its aimless turns and tangled threads. Nevertheless, each smudge makes a mysterious and magical map, and if I let my mind be dizzied by its designs, I may suddenly find I’ve pierced the paper like a sharpened nib. So:

I walk into the day upon a path which cowplop has endangered. Water stands below the weed tops and lets the light spread like a swamp. The grass is brown, and the scorched crowns of the trees warn off the birds. Ice lies in liquid sheaths around the trunks. That’s beauty for you, and it’s through such cracks I slip into the world of real remembrance where events are recomposed to please me.

So:

My words swan the page as I recall, in England, waiting to invade, how I once saw that stately bird coast across the middle of a meadow as if the creature had turned the land into a lake or I was seeing a mirage. I approached, and in a moment saw the sunken watercourse she floated on as silently as a barrage balloon, carried by secret currents and the concealed intention of her webs. As ungainly on the ground as I am in my flesh, she knew how, in her element, to compose herself, and her sudden calm white silhouette let my heart leap up as though its shoulders had been pinned by bullies an entire life before. She was a song.

But feares are now my pheares, greife my delight . . .

Crashaw, for instance. Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Bunin. Pnin. Pope. I began my book in love and need; shall I finish in fear and trembling? Open any. Melville. Pater. Eliot. Ford. The mouth of Moloch has a lovely flicker: it’s like a butterfly against the darkened trunks of bathing pines—that flicker. Perhaps a distant tongue of flame. Step into a page—mind the give—and pray for safe crossing. This craft is like the bark of Virgil. The raft of Medusa, I think, Os says. The bark of Fido, Culp cackles. The swan boat . . . The . . . Although the muscles of the larynx labor ceaselessly, the consequence is quiet, a pronunciation so exact it utters nothing. I can’t complain. Not all of us can be Ben Jonson or Jane Eyre—the most beautiful name of all—and it was one line of Ben’s which made me give up poetry for history in my youth. Bad books are made from noble sentiments, Gide said. If so, G & I should be a lulu—not a noble sentiment in sight. Why hold back? I gave up noble sentiments for truth. Perhaps my long German book was an exterior, a façade, for which I am now constructing an inside, un livre intérieur, as Proust put it; but from my point of view he had things backward, didn’t he? because in le moi profond there was a richness of revelation emerging from the muck (as the family bog yields Martha bones), which rescued the impoverished and aimless and dirty social surface; there was operating under the slack and patchy skin of things. (to alter the image) a fully articulated anatomy, the way waves dance wildly to the tune of lawful forces (to maneuver the metaphor); while if this “book” were to be the bottom one, it would not even stand (or remain, I suppose I should say) as the skull’s grin beneath beauty’s ripe red lips (to return to an earlier notion), but rot as a core of rot within, mud and wind and black night at work like a witch behind the serene and reasoned clarity of day (to shift the perspective). Hold back. It’s hard. Some writers rope themselves up peaks, some motorcar, some bike, some dive. Cavafy. Durkheim. Gertrude Stein. Every terror has its own terminology, and I am used to terror . . . to Cervantes . . . in my life in a chair. Tolstoy. Trollope. Kepler. Mann. When your Milton invoked the Muses, Mad Meg said, gesturing toward his library with an arrogant flick of his hand—it had the snobby flutter of a courtier’s hankie—this—this is what he meant. I went hunting in my head for that beginning. Think how he wrote, the Meg insisted, bending with the weight of the word. THINK! Not life. The lamp . . . The lamp. The language.

Ha’ you felt the wooll of Bever?

Or Swans Downe ever?

And one had written just those two lines in a life, though living like a rat in a sewer, would the misery not be worth it? not ever?

Who is it? Is it Mr. Mallory? the prisoner? or Raleigh? Condorcet? Who thus constricts my chest? . . . Confucius? that old chink? Livy then? Gibbon? O la! Tacitus? Gilgamesh. How many times have I fallen inside a sentence while running from a word? Winckelmann. Kafka. Kleist. You would not believe that long bodiless climb from Descartes to Leibniz. Lewis. Lemuel Gulliver. Catullus. Gogol. Constant. Sterne. I live on a ledge—a sill—of type—a brink. Here. Pascal. Alone. Among the silences inside my books . . . Frege, Wittgenstein . . . within the rhythms of reason . . . the withheld breath, the algebra of alliteration, the freedom of design . . . Dryden, Zeno, Stevens, Keats . . . the perpetual hush, blood in the penis, the deductions of rhyme . . . Here. James and James and James the Joyce: a firm of marriage brokers. Charmes. At the quick edge of space. In The Faerie Queen. In “Jabberwocky.” In the slow mind of time.

Mater Matuta, I beg you, let me come out alive.