JOHN

They lied? They lied? Okay. Do you know what a lie is? Do you know what a lie does to the social fabric of La Rez? A lie limbers one’s manhood, puts one in the Mahmood for love with anyone who can be bought off to fudge the results of John’s tox-screen.

Sire, you are no sovereign. We tire lately of your popgun sanctimony, your Sauconys, your bony-assed profligacy. Louse is the plural of lice, so to speak. Louise is the Grolier’s chief arsonist. And you couldn’t fog a barn’s broadside with the business end of a jetpack. A beaning, a bashing, a clocking, a clique. It’s true: people just click their thick tongues and comb through the abridged Catullus for his culinary hearsay regarding gourds. Tell us, Private Snowball, when your clitoral pearl is about to blab, to blubber, where will it tickle you—which of your blisters will you wish was the world’s rawest bunion?

What we call “Horse Country” today was once referred to as “John’s spare john in the neighboring apartment.” Or, even more laboriously: “the place no woman enters without becoming a godless girlchild again.” Thank the stars for Horse Country.

Like a nightjar in a gin mill, a sundae shaking off its pox of rainbow jimmies, like a toy conifer uprooted from its airy mound of icing…

The new news is great and all, but you are still at large. And I for one won’t be sleeping any easier until they run you to ground and slap the bracelets on, or zipper you into a dirt nap mummy bag.

John: White Afrikaner, Black Heart. John is “justice” in Afrikaans. As Shelby Foote put it, “Butter doesn’t melt in his mouth.” John is in the pill-grinding grip of the Arab Spring, a ragamuffin princeling, playing the clerics against oil-rich carbon brokers in the West. What’s next for this pervert, this bloodless profiteer?

A malcontent Jamaican street youth in the 60′s, John was lieutenant of the subculture that would come to be known as the Rude Boys.

The anticipated date of John’s peak maturity is nearing. The dingus will be brought to him and placed at his feet. He knows the burden of sin’s thousand-fold disgraces. He knows illiteracy is manhood’s handmaiden. Even god looks good in his girlfriend’s underwear. John keeps America primed for a boneless future of chick fillets, pork fritters—all that glistens, all that glitters.

John, again. His economic recovery is breeding his neighbors right out of existence. Their tots lick his beer cans in obeisance, noblesse oblige. When John is electioneering at dressage tourneys, his patrons are salting away their blacklung’d dead for the lean times. John’s folks considered it a social blight that their boys be seen pushing a lawnmower. Cause then that it be another’s business. Our boys’ business is BUSINESS, and death has been good to us. Goo has been red to us for eons and our green is evergreen, Episcopalian, sailin’ on summer breezes like that commie David Crosby’s Southern Cross. When you see the Southern Cross for the first time, look well astern of the cordage’s ribsy shadows, brown bodies bobbing in its wake. It’s morning again in John’s America of crypto-Reaganomics. Finally it’s his turn to bloody the public fountains, to stick a little of his bread in that gravy while it’s still hot. Where were you looking, John, when the Romanian gymnasts sold their asses to a pervy Jap? What part of your part in it all did you get wrong?

Let’s try another. In this one John is armed, looking from a duck-blind into the endless overlapping leafiness in KY’s low country. Be realistic, and be warned. The Fort’s Commerce Dept. plans to convene a taskforce of forensic accountants to crawl up the backside of the dark side of that gin-mill you and Corey call “the world’s navel”, willing and able, the talk of the town. John and Corey. If one had a list of all the safewords these two have used over the years, it would read like the unconscious confessions of a hunger-striking sylph held hostage in a boulangerie. It’s the same old cliche, “is that a woman or a Mayan? I don’t think they’ll make the parish line.” The truth you might be running from is so small. Think about how many times you have fallen. Even the enemy’s unclean gods look good in your girlfriend’s underwear—but they cannot save YOU.

John is a mouth-breather, a leather fiend, a cheese eater, a tit man, a fan of frijoles negros, a backup roadie in Toot Sweets’ brass band tour of the motherless South, a lawn jockey polishing croquet balls out back of Georgia O’Keefe’s adobe atelier. John’s a grief junky, a sock monkey’s seminal best chance at motherhood. Pillows have been bitten within his legal domain. Rats fuck. Hens cluck. Ex-cons do it family style in the toilet stalls his toughs are paid to police. Ryan Evans still takes it “Kelsey Style” in the Isle de France—now a mile-high clubber wildly behind in his dues. John parks his camper in the dunes and does his best to undo thousands of years of deglaciation. John likes hoofing a nice, slow samba in his camp-moccasins for the right combo of braided inflatables. He scrambles jet squads to keep Reagan’s tomb safe for his nephews’ relics.

More in the coming weeks on John, John’s weaknesses; John, the modern day Lee Atwater on the side of the angels, this so-called “Atwater Angelicus”. This J.C., this political greyhand (almost Lincolnian in bearing) who delivered a deeply bruised cutlet in a buttonless blue blouse to the RNC HQ of his native Indiana.

John Blondell. The bruiser from Worcester. Iconoclasm’s undentable idol. His metal has shape memory—even if the grog has robbed his lost dog of it. Animals. Animalia. I tell my cat—Guy deBored—that his tail sometimes strikes me as snakelike, that his tail looks like a snake’s tail. Guy says, “Snakes don’t have tails. A snake is all tail, no snake.” Better than Yoda. John, keep this in mind as you tomcat it around La Rez tonight: only the left-leaning left-behind burden Monday’s morality with Saturday’s unclean pretensions.

John is a propertied man, and very clannish. Cadaverous before two—childless until seven. He’s a spokes-bot for the Me Generation. When John was in cha-cha land, he let his fiddler roll. He’s a darling of NPR, billed thereon as a “mid-western gothic folklorist”. His fingernails are ghastly, ghostly—like chrysanthemum petals fallen onto petit fours of frozen blood. His name was a war cry in Cabrini-Green. Now that the Dash 7 has touched down on a clean stretch of ‘cago tarmac, here are a couple more: Steve Albini’s praise for John’s melodic bombast—and his grill work—are a matter of record. Of John,

Studs Turkel quipped, “After jawing with that guy for a couple hours, I came away feeling almost goddamn Randian by comparison.” John likes a napkin in the collar and a napkin in the lap. This way the side-projects have plenty of sailcloth. He is regularly, ritually concussed, stating—with ludic esprit—that concussions “resurrect my dead Pligrim. They balance my ab-Norma psyche. They are a kind of Ablution, set to the tune of ‘Rib Room Jezebel Uber Alles.’”

John has always been a steward of the Tradition of Radical Poesy—not unlike the Stewarts of Covington Lake, the old guard, Big Nance bringing up the rear, bedecked in plaid. John would like to see her grandkids grace the banquet platters in Chad. He’s begun passing on some other things, too—beyond the low-grade v.d.’s that are coin-of-the-realm among his crew. He’s started sharing a bit of the age’s visionary freight with select youngsters. “Now look at the sunlight, read it, morbidity as optical code. Most everyone just lets the TV or the calendar tell them what spirit the days have. But look at that light. Things are shutting down, man. Call it summer if you want to. Summer sneaking away between the headstones for one last piss in the yews.

DAVID

David, David, David.

Always some hare-brained scheme or another.

It is one thing to engage in badinage with these beardless youths, but some of what you say could so easily be misunderstood, misused by the tentacular feds like so many dead serums from last flu season. Think back on your days in the clink. An ace street-shrink on ice—you were missed. It’s legacy time now, baby. How about a little less cafe au lait and a bit more of that vanguard backcountry sagaciousness we could all use in this our summer of the Muslim Spring.

People are always asking me how they might accelerate their understanding of Davy Mac. So here it is, here’s how I did it—and today, with the ease of access to televisory archives it’s easier than ever to earn your Ph.Dave. Simply commit to emotional memory the plotlines and themes of these two landmark TV series: “Fame” and “The Waltons.” I recommend studying the programs in alternating doses, one Walton, one Fame, and so on—a technique termed elsewhere as “the zipper effect.” To strain a metaphor, I’m not sure if it’s a body-bag being referenced here, or David’s vast record of sexual success. In any event it should become clear after only a couple viewing cycles what an important portal onto Big D.’s soul these series can be—bucolic thrift and wholesomeness vs. urbanely puerile artistic ambition; home-schooling and patchy overalls vs. electric pink spandex and ethnic teens bejeweled with dog collars. These and countless other warring images and ideologies are key to understanding D. Mac’s wantonness and wizardry.

David braves the heat and comes within a breath’s width of moral imprisonment. David, behave, be hearty. Halve your breadfruit to cover the voyage. Your goyim will come of age. David caves. He’s blessed, prepossessed. David aspires to a blanker, more brutish knavery. No navy would have him. Not too lazy, not pelt-clad, not booby-footed on a ropewalker’s roof-deck. No cannery would can him. Not yet. Fret.

David is a spritely conversationalist, and heir of the arch 80′s Dangerfieldian repartee. My wife’s name is Jen. He asked me if Jen wasn’t perhaps “short for genitalia?” Adding, “if it is, that’s cool ’cause genitalia is something I’m nice and long on.” Charm city, blown in from Whispering Pines.

David drinks now mostly with the after-work crowd—somehow identifying—through his leisure—with labor’s exhaustion, its relief and glory in a pint. It is of course their labor which underwrites his self-indulgence, the time and space he uses to perfect himself, the time and space he and they—working together, in a sense—endow him with. The “sudsy subsidy” he calls it. Calumny so call it the Soothsayers.

David is the maidenhead of a tramp steamer anchored half a click beyond the eel-rich shoals of the Cote d’Avid. Spume salts the forecastle, the launch’s oarlocks are embrittled, groaning. A merman farts twenty yards astern and the sailor on watch pulses about, panicky. Time to balm your boots’ apple-blight. Belowdecks the human freight is furring and your Birmingham irons are cladding them a little looser each day. Seawolf, Nautilus, none of them or their supernumerary crew will lead-proof you. Whatever desperate mischief is being cooked up down there, it is not the stuff of a troubled black metal-head teen circa ’79. This homesick fearsome cargo is black like me. Things have settled real fucking far from remedial. Blood calls for blood.

I like David’s royal unresponsiveness to these texts. Of course, if I had a nanny-goat’s teat cycloptically grafted to my forehead, and said tit was bikini’d in a vet’s gangrenous arm-sling—and if Dave thought there was the slimmest chance to plant that echoless divot aka his mouth around that tit, those old niggardly thumbs would be pecking the keypad overtime in reply.

David waves alike to all the goners and to those fighting to make the world safe for gynecocracy: palms faceward, wrists twitching, imperious, sissified. Reptilian webbing ‘twixt the fingers. The purple and gilt maturity of self-knowledge. Titular loftiness sans title. He knows who he is and where his vitality deserves application. Let Rick go all impish Boswellian on me. But why the strained embellishment, why the mean fiction—when the concrete unadorned FACTS of my person are replete with apocrypha? Well. The facts would come off as cartoonish if forced on just about anybody else. No one should even want to contend with the wreck of coolness I wake to four days a week. Could use a forklift—shit, the cool. Because I got out, lived and loved in the city where Jim Jones handpicked his last batch of American veggies, his own empurpled agency to the stars. My god did he live—and love. As I’ve loved. It’s masculine to be moved by music in a mascot town. I like telling my own story. I’m not some curly-fry cook or some credit score—I’m DAVID.

In the house of seven Davels all Davel-bodied men are henpecked beyond all earthly measure. But this evening David is prince of the deck. Better not be there after sundown.

The bongo, the tambourine, Ben Kenobi, Ben Vereen. These are David’s war persona and the instruments by which they are presaged, licked to life in death’s experimental dream theatre of the mind. The thing to know about David is that David knows what’s literature and what ain’t. And it isn’t a matter of taste—any more than, say, a beast of prey weighs taste when considering a kill. The beast David has become simply knows the difference—lives on the difference—between nourishment and filler, Phyllis Fondiller, the difference between blow-holes and gill-slits in a torch lined slough of hell’s last abattoir. All true, but he’s a bit of a twat too—because in his own art he never risks the frivolous, never breaks character, always skimming along side-saddle—and on time—to the church of profundity’s nutless understatement.

The Oak Room in which David dwells is only oak in the same way that asphalt is the no-fault asscrack of a chambermaid in Minsk. In other words, David is about as exotic as a doughnut in Arkansas. Do you know how many mangy burros have forsaken sex until David re-inserts his sweetness into NYC’s beery blood drive? David aphid. He is here to prune back the promotional fescue, salve the burns. He’s a cabana-boy’s cabana boy. Ascot patcher to the Nazarene paterfamilias. Darn my stockings, sucka. De-grease the seat of my riding britches. Hey David, when you die can I take over the payments of your cellphone plan so I can keep cyber-bullying you from beyond the grave?

David averts uterine catastrophe by way of a timely, taut colostomy bag—well placed. I have no opinions about that, I have neoprene footsies more vexing than your yard-art homages to de Kooning, d’Arte Sauvage. Classless. Citified. How much longer will you allow the unglamorous to be entertained—edified, in fact—by glamor? How much deflationary wonder fluff can you refill the asylum’s mattresses with? The bone-setter’s talents have gone rubbery with drink. Sorriest rube to ever bang a bent chassis back into the true. Clout-conscious rose of Killarney. Words like “berm” and “buffant”. “Antwerp” and “purgative”. They are no anthem but you can’t do this in music. It’s why women don’t like it. How better to tease ova from the mucousy deep?—the world’s original crusty spittoon. How better to butter a burn in the arctic summer’s impossible dark? Pencils down, radio on. Radio ON. Music my peter, litre by litre. Lyric the ladies’ holsters with prewar gun songs. Sling slaw on a liner beached ten slips from its native pier. Discover Michigan—David’s Michigan of Belle Michele and beet meat, subcultural off-ramps, pop-operas, dirge arias, I, Clavdivs-inspired can-can numbers—and all tenor of venality not known to the Hispanically reclaimed soccer fields of NC.

David’s handle on the counterespionage circuit Davey Cave Canum. His paymaster crushes boxes out back of Payless. He has a zero-tolerance policy for farts that have a so-called “uneducated” quality. For him there’s no better sex than the arrhythmic crush of man and woman ringed by coppers in riot-gear slapping their nightsticks in the gloved palm opposite. Drink it off, David, drink it off cleaner than a hound’s tooth. And don’t give me any more shit about the unaffordability of the text. Your kind killed the text, and all its dubious pleasure, its wing’d minions bridging Mammon and Marmaduke. You are not the first savant to staple the panic button to a lambchop—just the first I’ve met. Congratulations.

JASON

“I decided long ago never to blacken anybody’s mamba.”

I’ve long ago blackened everybody’s mamba.

Jason. You speak of “invisible chains” binding your wrists to your ankles.

You speak of racy female undergarments clogging the exhaust manifolds and gumming up the break assemblies of every touring vehicle that’s ferried you from gig to gag.

You live and you love.

You wear your humbleness like Adam Ant wore his cropped tee-shirts.

Why can’t you confess to being part of the American sickness, to being heir to one of the engineers of its peculiar overbite and bile?

Most of the art you honor has a place in the marketplace. Or it seeks a place in the marketplace. It LIKES validation, an audience, visibility, people.

I am working on things that are immune to human praise. Tree frog canvasses. Centipede torch songs. That’s artistic fearlessness, art made for an audience immune to marketing. Could there be a clearer confession of anthropocentric insecurity than this, the fact that musicians keep playing their music for people? People brush their pets’ teeth with toothpaste made by people—and no one sees the weirdness of it all. Jason, do you have the courage to brush your teeth with toothpaste made for people by retired dray horses? I just bought life insurance for my niece from a company originated and staffed entirely by snow leopards. PEOPLE (like you) think that’s foolish. But that’s what love is, the new LOVE.

Do you have the courage to stage a show that forbids admittance to anybody who is not an aardvark? Of course you don’t. You are STILL part of that sad old creative platoon that needs to entertain its own. And you wonder why the whole of existence has issued divorce proceedings against your ass?

Maybe I’m having a gynecological response to an experience which only requires an emotional response, but, without the capacity to generate appropriate emotions, this is all I can muster. And although in our social interactions it is true that I suffer perpetually from what Freud termed Witzelsucht, or, the joking disease, I have considered your performance here in earnest and posed the following questions in earnest. If you would respond with equal earnestness to at least a few of my points I would be most appreciative.

Is this music the kind of thing that’s really only for other musicians?

Is this the kind of music that’s more fun to perform than to listen to?

Do you feel music that doesn’t sound like yours is weak, and does it deserve the peculiar punishment the strong reserve for the weak? Or could one’s artistic pleasures really be broader than the art one makes?

Isn’t part of the challenge of being an artist to make things that are fascist-proof, in other words, things that could in no way be co-opted by fascists? In other words, could you really persuade yourself, for example, that no skinheads could find anything inspirational or attractive about the sound of your music? Is your art therefore politically irresponsible? Are you perhaps a crypto-nazi? The bombast of your music, the extreme volume which annihilates thought, are these not elements of fascist anthems? My art (in part) seeks to expose and humiliate my inner fascist, whereas yours seems to celebrate your fascism. If so, fine. But have the courage not to confine your fascism to your art, have the courage to live it in social and/or political reality.

Is this music the sonic equivalent of the torturer’s unclean exhilaration as he lashes his prone and squirming victim?

Is it music meant to persuade Jesse of your masculinity? Or, another way to ask the same thing, is it music meant to persuade the gods of your potency?

If the lives of everyone you love depended upon you making and maintaining a shrine in your home to honor me or Jesse, you would choose Jesse and in so doing you would be choosing correctly. But what are some of the reasons that lie behind this supremely correct choice? Please help me understand Jesse’s shrine-worthiness, and why is Jesse ready to accept shrines in his honor? And what kind of person accepts as a friend someone who is ripe to be treated as a deity?

Is it music made by people to which bad things happened in a quiet and music-less place FOR people to which bad things happened in a quiet and music-less place? Is music of this volume, vigor and darkness a kind of sonic amulet worn against the fears—past and present—of the performers and audience alike?

Addendum, 17 Sept. 2010, Brooklyn, NY: Considering the cruel inclemency of yesterday, occurring as it did one week after the performance of Hallux, was this storm not nature’s coda to y’all’s music? As if perhaps nature itself felt provoked, rivaled, and so musicked the winds into something unrealized by Hallux, a cockless masculinity that knows no shame?

PATRICK

“How do you thank someone who’s taken you from crayons to perfume?”

Pat’s politics are a pileup of boeuf tongue grazed on lavender. The reek of Pat is a foretaste of the twister’s aftermath. Pat’s a polymath packrat batboy safecracker. Pat’s a pill, Pat’s a pinhead. Olbermann is on call as Pat’s orificial bullhorn. Porn peppers Pat’s sisterless past in San Fran. Pat sans beard? Now that’s wack. While boning up on the ivory trade Pat takes alternating pulls from port and dry sack. Obama as the Beatles comes to receive counsel from Pat in clogs and a caftan. Pat preens for an unfolding barbarism that flattens him whole. Rack of Pat. Rack of Pat, please. The mockup of Pat’s tombstone is heavy with latrinalia. Pat’s dishwater is the netherworld’s mat-shot. We are not married, so why does Pat lie to me? Pat spends more and more time in his off-hours playing lollipop with his dad’s old service revolver. Mallowmars are the form mold takes in Pat’s dream of a Patless future. Pat lays a slim ribbon of ketchup the length of each fry. Pat lies in 90’s-era black slang to tell Belarus’ truth, believing it his truth, and thus cosmic, a colonic, an untapped firkin of faux blood fueling his Papa’s funny car. There are no fathers, Pat—only fatherhood, the dim dynamism of fluid bearing us all, adagio, into the Patless future. Pat flatters defanged tomcats with his toothy appeals to home school dentistry. Pat’s dead pets hold a vigil for his stepbrother’s sex life. Pat’s dream pony refuses to canter. Pat prefers a decanter to a samovar—it’s complicated. No itch ever had a Pat that Pat couldn’t scratch. It’s good to establish a safeword before tangling with old Pat. It’s good to Pat-proof your dignity before entering into any kind of friendship with old Pat. Ton-dar is Pat’s ancestral pronunciation of thunder. Pat ambles unmothered from wound to wound. Pat’s legacy of tough love leaves him cornered in spots from which love’s riches recoil. Pat has Roman hands and rushin’ fingers. Pat has a hamper. Pat’s genius is vouchsafed in cupid’s undescended testicle. Pat is chieftain of a defunct fromagerie. The bawds of Whippany never stacked grief higher than Pat’s austere ankle tat. Mistah Pat, he sheds. Pat the palmist. Pat the mist. Play misty for me, Pat. And play it slow, charmer. I doubt the airworthiness of Pat’s prognostications. Pat’s the kind of woman who’s locked in a blood-feud with her roommate over the last of the Vagisil. Pat likes people who like to have a good time and are up for anything. Sleep can never get too much of Pat. Pat’s really only another vic of the sys, overcaffeinated, emoting behind the babyweight. If in the dream the anteater eats order, it would starve eating Pat.

We knew for long the mansion’s look
And what we said of it became

–Wallace Steven, from “A Postcard from The Volcano” (1936)

A RIVER

A girl and a boy and a boy and a river. All speaking the same language, congruently, but forgetting how to return the favour. A girl standing in the river trying to swim it and tame it. A boy trying to tame a boy in the river trying to tame it. A boy following the river currents currently and incorrectly. And a river not speaking. If one person is quiet long enough, someone else around them might speak. If this is true, then there must always be a person in shock raving about last night’s dinner. Look at the facts: A girl made the dinner. A boy was in the stables when the dinner was being prepared. A boy was wondering what to eat for dinner. A river ate all of them. A river never stops raving.

A GIRL

 He would ask me about the horses. Who was winning, who was losing. He was keeping tabs of it in his head, maybe, for later gambling. I walked barefoot around the barns because I wanted straw scratches on me. He would have my feet against him and ask about the marks. I would say: Horses.

I would pull his feet against me and ask about the marks. He would say: North.

I removed my shirt in front of him and showed him my chest. I’m changing, I said. He looked at my chest and didn’t say anything. I grabbed him by the wrists, slowly, and pulled his arms up to me. I made him touch me where I was changing. His hands were sweating at first, but they seemed to dry out the longer he was in contact with me. I let go of his wrists but his hands stayed there, getting heavier, just where I had placed them. I reached down towards his pants and fumbled with the button and the zipper for a moment before pulling them open, and pulling him out. You’re getting bigger, too, I said. He got thicker in my hands. He leaned in and whispered to me: Blood. It’s all blood I’m filled with. I leaned closer to him also and replied: Water. We’re mostly water.

I had to hide the bloodstains on the bed from my mother and father. I did not want them to see what was coming out of me. I kept putting more and more pillows on my bed to cover it up. They were fresh and white. I could still smell it, though. What had come out of me and what had come out of him. It was stale on the sheets no matter how many times I washed them.

He would run off to the bathroom immediately after to remove the latex that we had between us. And every so often I could hear him throwing up, and I would ask him about it. He would say: I am sick and the doctors can’t seem to figure out why.

There were two boys strangling one another in my stomach. My mother was in the bathtub, watching all three of us. The most beautiful sound was this noise in me. Coming out of my head at night.

I tried to tell him about this. I said: Songs. He said: Energy. We said: Horses. We said: Sleep.

He was heaving, once, in the backyard, leaving all of my mother’s dinner in the flowerbed. Immediately after, he mentioned something about how he didn’t know how to get it out of me. And I asked him if the porkchops were that bad. He grimaced and turned away, throwing up again, contorted over the lilies.

A RIVER

The heirloom is inserted directly into the mouth during sleep: it is tradition. Through the cortex. Through the tying down of the hands and the feet. One family member must stand in a hallway in the crossfire of stereo sound, and the rest of the family is in separate rooms, gliding between the hallways, trying to court them to dance. The music that is played is sometimes referred to as transition music. A father can make an heirloom from any part of his body, it will carry on the disease involuntarily. Some family members like to take photographs of this occasion, while others prefer only to close their eyes at night and remember it how they’d like to remember it.

A BOY

He had a ring of milk around his mouth. The ladder leading to the attic looked longer than the length of me and shorter than the river. I stared at him from the bottom of it, looking up into the wooden room above me filled with heat and milk. I will turn the lights off, he offered, extending his hand to help me up. I told him to leave the lights on.

I ascended the ladder which was also ascending the breaking of my body somehow. When I reached the top, he handed me a glass of milk. Decisions were not made between us. We did not ever discuss what we were doing, or planned on doing. We drank the milk and glue and did not need to open our mouths again. Our top teeth grew into our bottom teeth and formed a mouth shield.

Sometimes we would argue, grunting, about which one of us had more hair on his body. The arguments about this grew less frequent over time as it became more obvious visually. As it became easier to smell the hair growing under the arms, thicker on the legs, briefly over and around the mouth.

The shield protected us from saying what we really wanted to. So we did this: exchanged the body instead of words. And then we would watch the window. From the attic we saw her helping her father re-paint the garage door on her house and eating popsicles in the yard.

Once she asked me if we could leave the lights on, but I unplugged the lamp from the wall entirely, taking her instead in the black, rubbing the shield of my mouth against her chest, and her the entire time shouting out the dictionary like she memorized it to fill in the silence.

A RIVER

Your parent cells are swimming the deepest ocean looking for the perfect house. A house underwater is difficult to maintain due to certain amounts of pressure on the walls and pillars holding the structure of the house in place. Depending on how far down your parents decide to live, also, electricity becomes more expensive, because at a certain depth there is no more natural light, which of course means running the lamps longer. You are too preoccupied to notice this because you have not been born yet, you have not been made a good daughter cell. Your parents have slept through binaries and have tried to furnish one hundred empty rooms for you, limp-wristed zygotes, screaming as you appear as if from nowhere in hospital beds, onto the floor. This multiple birth process is eventually confusing because your mother starts to forget which child you are and you are orphaned back into the ocean. There are only so many children she can take care of. Your fraternal brothers and sisters cannot follow you. A family cannot stay together in this situation. Fertilization has not yet been governed by the great sea. You are only one small part of this process, and you must fend yourself. Your brothers and sisters will certainly try to find you, to put your bodies back together again, but you cannot let them. Who are they anyway? Do you know? If you were to even want to call out their names, which in the water is difficult to do as the sound is denser, would you know what to call them?

A BOY

 I asked him if he had measured his length and he said: No. I asked him why not and he said: It’s just skin. I told him I had been measuring my own and that in the past year it had grown over an inch. He pointed at the river and said: It will never been as long as a river, the distance between one land mass and another. I thought aloud: Maybe a small brook or creek? He looked at me, clean, and told me that what was between his legs was just broken branches and sticks, kindling for campfires, it would never be the length of any body of water.

The thing is that he was not the kind of person to name birds or ask about what colour you thought the sky was. He scattered his diction in variation, he said: Let’s fuck each other back into solids, I want to be solid. He preferred what came easy, what he could control. He would readily admit things like, I’m scared shitless, but he would never fill in the blanks.

I was very direct looking at him and said (pulling his body): You are solid these are your bones, but he pulled away skeptically, disrupting the bedsheets.

He would ask me about the stomach ache and I would say: Yes there is this metal sitting inside of me I think my stomach is going blind. The bed would stay the way it was, pillowcases covered in crusts of us, leaks that were transitory, and he would say: I can cure it just fuck me back into solids we’ll do it to one another and there won’t be any pain anymore.

He drained all of the sweat from my skin, jutting between the grass and the thorns, waving his arms wildly. He left bruises on my back holding me inside him, like I would never return.

I asked him: How come we have everything? His hair was lengths cut into meat, arranged neatly around his face. He would tell me: I am proud of every mark I’ve made on you. Assuming they were all his. I was proud of them, too. The marks that I had given him in return, though I knew that most of his were collected from other men.

I asked him how can I pull things out of you and I don’t mean my cock. All I wanted was to draw out the noise from his head. To sonata him somehow. To make more out of his language, somehow. But he just said it again, I’m scared shitless, and he didn’t ask what I meant, pulling the matches from the cupboards, looking for glasses of water.

A RIVER

A challenge is presented: how did one body break into three, how did they come from so many different mothers everywhere in rooms undressed, how do you shove them all back into each other simultaneously without breaking the skin, is it important to leave the skin intact, are all objects made up of smaller objects and how do you know where they meet and fit together if they are always moving. A father stands between two electric wires and it changes the fluid that comes out of him later. It breaks apart into three.

Last Night Innocent III

–Brian Kubarycz

• moby dick: chapter lxxv abridged•

&
as our temples,
mostly water,
flood
with god’s blood,
we have to dig
our foundations
out & build again

Just as a perspective need not be actually perceived by anyone,
so a ‘life’ need not be actually lived by anyone.

– Bertrand Russell

So, what exactly is Virginia Woolf saying about the need to get over gender? Clearly, she has read the feminist writings of the generations which immediately preceded her own. We know this because she refers directly to the work of Florence Nightingale and John Stuart Mill. And, more generally, she refers to the various instances of progressive political activism of late-19th and early-20th centuries. No doubt Woolf herself benefited greatly, both as a citizen and as a potential writer, from key advances made by women and men laboring for social justice. Nor should we imagine that Woolf believed the work of progressive politics had been completed in her own day and an equitable society achieved. Because Woolf, though she mingled from her youth with her nation’s greatest minds (the famous Bloomsbury Group), never had the benefit of a formal higher education. Women in 1900 did not get to attend university. Why then, does Woolf seem so opposed not only to the macho political writings of her day, which she saw as intrinsically fascist, but also to women’s political writing? Why does she seem to argue that women need to get over their gender? Why does she insist great writers must become androgynous?

The answer to these questions is very involved. Let me attempt here at least a partial answer, and let me begin by referring to Woolf’s avowed admiration for the ideas of the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who figures so prominently in A Room of One’s Own. Coleridge, to this day, is broadly considered the father of English-language literary criticism. His ideas in many respects are uniquely English, nevertheless in numerous crucial respects they derive from the ideas of Immanuel Kant. Working off of Kant’s notion of the autonomy of pure Reason, Coleridge famously developed a theory of “poetics” which argued that the mind is an organic form which veritably brings all external reality into being, actively shaping that reality through a force which he called the “esemplastic power of the primary Imagination.” This power can demonstrate itself in a mediated form as it concerns itself with Utilitarian worldly affairs such as politics and economics. The mind is able to reveal itself, its active and autonomous efficacy, in it purest and most immediate form, only in the creation of art. In genuinely great art – which exists not for any moral, utilitarian or political purpose, but strictly for its own sake – we see the mind functioning at its highest level.

All of us live the vast majority of our lives in quotidian reality, caught up in the cares of the world. However, a small number of us are at times able to rise about the fray and sweat and anxiety of the world and occupy and exalted purely mental realm of artist creativity, one in which the think and to act become identical. It is only in these instance that the mind reveals itself to be a living force whose true habitation is not the physical world of solid objects such as table and chairs, but rather a purely mental world populated by “phantom” tables and chairs which exist in the modality of pure “percepts”. The world itself, Woolf believed as a result of her interaction with the logical-positivist philosophers best represented by Bertrand Russell, was nothing but the totality of these possible points of view, along with the mental sensations which they occasion. To dwell unperturbed in this realm of unencumbered consciousness as fully and frequently as possible, this was, for Woolf, in the most literal sense, to live the “life of the mind.”

Woolf, though she recognized that her access to the intellectual realm depended enormously on the work of her activist sisters, nevertheless refused to see their progressive political goals as ultimate ends. The Women’s Movement did not bring women political freedoms, but it was only a necessary precondition to the possibility of women experiencing the highest form of freedom, which could be experienced only in the realm of the intellect. To experience true freedom, and to create aesthetic objects which would offer a lasting record of the experience of true autonomy, each women needed “a room of her own.” Yes, this did indeed entail a some sort of literal physical retreat from the cares of the world, but more properly it meant an intellectual retreat from anything that did not concern the free activity of the mind itself.

I have argued that Woolf inherited these notions of hers from key philosophers, in particular Kant and Bertrand Russell. Nevertheless, it is also important to acknowledge another tremendously important source of Woolf’s ideas regarding aesthetics and the life of the mind – modern painting. Modern painting, as I mentioned in class, was first brought to England by Woolf’s close associate Roger Fry, who organized several important exhibitions of French painting in England, the very first to be held in that country. The body of works Frye brought home from France to exhibit in London was compromised of artists and styles extending back to Manet’s Modernism, and Pissaro and Monet’s Impressionism; and forward to Gauguin and Cezanne’s Post-Impressionism.

Paul Gauguin
Self-Portrait with The Yellow Christ, 1889
[Christ as wallpaper? B.K.]

Woolf considered Frye’s discovery and exhibition of these paintings, and the purified “non-objective” aesthetic which they represented (they were not “of” objects in the world, but simply used these objects as “occasions” or materials upon which the mind could direct is plastic powers) that she wrote a book entitled Roger Frye: Biography. Many readers today find this book highly austere, singularly lacking in the kind of minute detail which is the very stuff of serious biography. But Woolf’s book must be understood not as a somatic biography so much as an abstract intellectual portrait. The book must be highly abstract, because according to Woolf’s understanding, there is no other way to produce an “image” or pure apperception of an utterly unique are highly sensitive mind.

Though Woolf’s prose never becomes fully non-objective, though it always retains some slight reference to the external world, it is nevertheless important to situate Woolf historically, not only alongside Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters, but also the rising generation of purely abstraction painters such as Kasimir Malevich, Wasily Kandisky and Piet Mondrian – each of whom writes an influential manifesto of the nature of non-objective painting. Woolf’s own writings, whether fictional, biographic or essayistic, should be read with this famous manifestos of modern painting clearly in mind.

It was a time of national hardship during which The Canadian understood he was not like other Canadians, regular Canadians, in fact, a terrifying time for many of margarine scarcity, painfully remembered by most Canadians over a certain age but officially denied (it is a crime, in certain parts, to speak of it—an uncle of The Canadian was once briefly incarcerated in Alberta over its public utterance, where, even though to this day Alberta is a strict but otherwise barbaric “law-and-order” province, they were particularly sensitive to the matter, despite the high number of cows per capita close-mingling there, under better stewardship an otherwise natural hedge against margarine’s hegemony had they the sense to capitalize upon it; Canadians are notorious, and notoriously ridiculed, worldwide, even in insignificant countries with dismissible histories, for living against their own interests. During this shortage, as a substitute one morning, in his own home, The Canadian was served, for the first time, butter, so shocking to him that it was as if he were participating in an act of high treason, the pale, yellowish, already-sheared-by-his-father rectangular block tilted towards him almost reluctantly from a chipped dish, freshly peppered on its surface with the daily burnt toast scrapings The Canadian’s father, his head down, had laid waste to after his aggressive back and forth spreading, taking, spreading, re-taking and re-spreading of it, the grating against the blackened face of the toast unmistakable; and The Canadian, in spite of the limited capacity given to most Canadians, but in particular to The Canadian, whom, it was often repeated by his “teachers” in one form or another, “was a follower in a land of followers”, “too-eager-to-please”, “disruptive”, “unkempt”, “without focus”, “a nodder”, “a spitter”, “lousy” (literally), “statistically a likely criminal” (predicted at six by a visiting government official on his weekly house check), and “lacked a serious tone about important matters”, immediately understood, however difficultly—it was as if he were going against his very artificial Canadian nature—upon tasting its wild, grassy, unmistakably bracing churned-cream-flavor (in Canada, an unpronounced “u” follows the “o” in  “flavour” and most other words), unsalted, the palate-impairing burnt flecks of spent Saskatchewan winter rye or spelt aside (The Canadian was accustomed to these charred filings in his margarine, although he could never fully disregard them, considering particularly that The Canadian had asked his father, meekly but repeatedly, without success, to cease the practice so as not to infect his own spread), at a time when cream still legally flowed freely from grazing, hand-milked Canadian cows, that in his life, wherever it may take him, whether he become the violator or violated or some combination of such, butter would be the preferred version—ideally virgin, untouched by his father’s burnt toast scrapings—to melt generously upon his slice and not, in all its Canadian manifestations, the ersatz, pallid margarine of his early Canadian life, with all the false, common-sensical promise of good health, better energy, butter-competitive flavor, and the longevity that its purveyors malevolently boasted. Elizabeth may have been the pinched and puckered Queen of Canada but Margarine was its unctuous King, the hailed and hallowed glue at Canadian family gatherings, village get-togethers, farm animal festivals, farm equipment festivals, and amateur hockey games of which everyone spoke, partook, and put on display, the comelier the hue of plastic tub in which this insidious viscosity pooled, the better. The Canadian—he was guilty, guilty, guilty: guilty of regicide. If it were freedom from the royal unguent he would be seeking, it would be upon him, until death, to churn, or procure somehow at his own sufferance, the butter he loves.

This comestible rebellion of sorts did not sit well in The Canadian’s house—with the cold, wet, snowy, sunless, windy winter hitting hard for the third time that summer, tension high in the streets and in the homes with hockey being in its two-week off-season—particularly with The Canadian’s father, whose devotion to hockey was absolute, whose silence was law, the questioning of margarine’s place in The Canadian’s household quickly put to rest with the zealous coming of another bootlegged tub sneaked through the porch door in a greasy paper bag, followed remarkably soon after by yet another, as the “family” quickly emptied one tub after the next in digestive celebration of margarine’s furtive re-emergence—on toast, cereals, wild berries, foraged mushrooms and roots, hot rye stalks, roast elk, grilled whale meat, poached baby seal, acorns, mince tarts, Nanaimo bars, and dessert salmon squares soaked in maple syrup, served in the skin—the typical Canadian diet of the time—with small, semi-frozen pats of it fitted onto the lips of plastic drinking “glasses” like lemon wedges on birthdays and holidays and significant hockey victories (chunks scooped from big, communal buckets or entire freshly unwrapped sticks fixed on large toothpicks were plunged or dunked directly into plastic vats filled with cold, Canadian malted ale the year “Canada beat Russia” in a hockey series for the first time, the partly-melted margarine later to be savored—savoured—slowly on raw buckwheat waffle cones; even The Canadian, not yet a proselytizing hockey hater (for which he would be later deported—voluntarily, of course), was swept up in the celebration and helped himself to at least a yard of margarine relatively barf-free, at the time much pleasing his father). Year round, The Canadian had faithfully raked the pine cones, salted the slugs, beat the icicles off the gutters, scrubbed the mud from under the truck, sanded the abundant puddles, squirted the squirrels off the roof with vinegar, peed the frozen locks, changed his gonch almost daily, shoveled the snow, made sure the silent “u’s” faithfully followed the vocalized “o’s” at school, cleaned his room, to receive, after much beseeching, a coin, running the range of penny to nickel, begrudgingly mustered from his father’s pocket. But this was no more, no matter how many times, chores complete, he asked for it or a put a cherry on top of his pretty please. The scorn heaped upon The Canadian, however silently, was deafening, a function, it seemed, of his stark, culinary opposition to his father’s margarine wishes, once abided, now discovered, then resented.