MICHAEL SEAN STRICKLAND

Divastigations

Fifth Divastigation Plus Six

Singular in that infirmity

§ 231.

All dross is choosing. — And should I onanify skirtskit again pitiform broodstain? Tramp iconoblastic bloodboards. Not that part that loss I play. Midmoon sting of mucus and rain.

§ 232.

Though it sounds too good for us. — And should I just, palpably, you know, do it? Trauma’s faith sprains brown philosophy’s wondrous proof of that crumbling supposition. As if living could gulp lava flow from drowning wisdom. It turns to us daily for our hourly skill. Lost artistic fraud of a woman. Loss of hair signals advocacy of quartz production, not any ill sign of bristling crotch, glancing groin, high point of holding that good spiritual position until you —. Bad gonads. Foolish confrontation. Rum cognac bourbon vodka. Harsh avian music at play among that chaos of hanging fruit. High on basalt and volcanic ash. Opinion’s frown cracks small proposal’s roasting spit. A fact, significant or insignificant. A book, practical or profound. A shop built for turning rounds of barstools out. Surprisingly slow stomp of a rhythmic facing-off, hard and flailing, kicks chips of wood dust up. Tonight I was just kidding. Oh, nothing.

§ 233.

A lost blind bucolic crush. — And should I bargain flight’s assumption? Rabid lust avoids rain. Soggy mast of puffballs and shit. Not pain through a trapdoor falling. I saw it hiding in straw. Look — that old barn’s burning a-again.

§ 234.

An inclination most natural. — And should I quilt a patchwork shawl that humbly claims, “I will not fight back”? To bring any ghost of traumas past forth into what I thank that rapist for. Having shorn my path of any possibility to act or think in such a way that I could fulfill an author’s fantasy not my own. So much manic will that upright I could stand again. Transform ignominy’s poison into proud amor fati (that almond organ of vision winks, winks shot through with khol and a billion or so slant miraculous yugas of sprawling vaginas and throbbing cocks). Or, drowsy — limbs sluggish with parasitic guilt, soul or spirit (call it what you will) numbly thrust into submission’s thick warm soporific cloak — fall victim to this or that rapist’s optimistic folly. Not wound or dirk or passion’s link that stabs from that world into this, my world into his and back again. Not tradition book by book unbound blaming or burning so that what it taught by word or forgot by fact could summon or banish any custom’s vacuous law, cunt! And now may I ask, “At just what social good did you aim, oh man of low status?” To croon, unwilting, from atop your narrow young loins, “I, too, am human, and craft history with my artistry.” And I ask again, “What, politically, did you think you could gain or pardon or accord by flaying my mind with your fair incantation, by hiding my putrid body in that tomb of magical mud?” To shout from atop your body’s crumbling ramparts, “This, this, with my own two hands, my own singular brain, my own, you might say, brawn, I built this — and now I bring it down!” So why am I still standing?

§ 235.

Sunburnt confusion. — And should I? Not much wind today. Up to my chin that happy rich odor of oil paint lifts. Far from any horns, pots, pails, or roofs. Zinc, iron, brass, tin, or clay. Among hyacinth and hibiscus, hands crawling, words blooming. Calm bird hops, stops, drinks in a schoolyard sight. City school. Town school. Country school. Mountain school. Sailing school. A sort of parrot-robin hybrid, a saffron trogon to match my skirt. I do.

§ 236.

As I was giving birth to him. — And should I prowl capably almost as if I was doing him a favor? Groping thigh pinch for lack of knowing how to satisfy that all too human animal physical want. Ishtar’s child, I’ll grant a circumstantial lay to most any boy or man too poor to paw nobly a woman’s plush gifts. Though if at my altar you wish to worship, you must pay, and pay richly. For as this fool’s paradox points out, an aristocratic disposition is always a promiscuous disposition. All this world’s truth I gain by abasing. All I was taught is as nothing to what I lost. Right. To scratch a living from this high-class whip and slant and spill and moan is as fair a form of quality labor as any. And so I said to him as I was giving birth to his prodigal son, I said.

§ 237.

Blood burst fruit. — And should I look out and catch sight of that thorny liana spiraling down past my calico womb of a flimsy gown spun from antlion silk, I will want to climb back up to my window, to my room, to my own sibilant sloughing off of dull old skin, but know that I shouldn’t or can’t. Too hard and long a fall from what’s hanging languishing within. Touch through it and say things as you touch. Is your imagination so totally lacking in insight and inspiration? A vapid author’s insipid act of mock appraisal. It wraps around shoots and limbs and trunk. No, no, don’t shy away. And don’t squirm — it will only burn. Now isn’t that soft and colorful and good? Rationality’s hall. Arousal’s portal. Confusion’s crib. Think of it as a sort of purification ritual, baby. Mold and rot and fall and smash this baby skull against that rock its brains spilling right out and nothing will grow again nothing. Unwrap my body and say waning moon rising in gray sky shot through with starlings as you touch it and look! your splotchy hairy lugubrious brown hands stung by ants and scorpions sink down to my bald abyss. Unwilling lips part. I sprawl upon that unfamiliar floor’s rough wood slats and suck rich marrow from his wounds. Touch my body and say swallows arrow down through that pictorial sky now tingling with robinsong and stars, now numb with fog tumbling down from that mountaintop through thick black stands of ash, birch, larch, and fir. In my opinion, it’s not I who’s straddling you, but only gravity and night. Thighs pin my arms. In my opinion, it’s not I who’s choking you, but your own natural inclinations struggling to blossom into light. Thumbs hard against larynx draw no sigh or sob or shout from my throat. In my opinion, it’s not I who’s raping you, but that god shining down from on high. I coil my hot dark limbs. Moth to cactus, I lick his gangly words.

§ 238.

Taking turns giving graph. — And should I withhold my lap my light my joyful art? Twofold truth of young hips squatting to shit. Irid mouthhorn rips a clacking flash. Day moth sips piss. How most handily my public adoration’s paid, I’m told. Liar’s faith, posits vodka to gin, grasps transformation’s doubt. What most in my workshop shows, I’m told. Skirt’s icon paws vivid coltish childish proof of a blood-dark thong lost from this casual imitation’s happy loins. Possibly, barks back gin to vodka, but supposing imagination’s mad acquisition calls for a kind of sharp stick with which to jab obligation’s rooting snout? Why most wants find lacks wanting, I’m told. Why most lacks find wants lacking. Straight rum calls for a third or fourth or fifth or sixth round of rhum au citron. His, yours, ours. Posing’s, shouts armadillo’s thorny claw to coati’s turgid tail, how’s I’s traffic’s my’s custody’s dutiful’s claims, girls. Formal group portait’s invitation accords worth by placidly mocking what you long so vainly for. As for my own whistling stand of bamboo artistry, I’m told my bottom’s as glorious a domain as any to soil affairs by wading up to your aging spirit’s actual joint in it. High in that matapalo, brown jays mob a swaying black toucan. Through that dangling burst of wild avocado, yon Arathu’s palmfruit coast of swaggish hills and yam farms burns. Thigh hurts. Soul thirsts.

§ 239.

Nostalgia palls. — And should I vouch groping madly to bring it back to light? Lift again that laconic shadow. At dusk or dawn or cloud of noon against a common prison’s firing wall. Thick black suffocating blur. As a sting from cut hay might burn in a mirror I was clawing fistfuls of furry shit from my mouth. Vocal causation cocks a nail through that wailing artist’s hand. Scabby pathos of infatuation. Social focus of convivial wrath.

§ 240.

Any man’s ability is usually actual. — And should I mail dot by dot this arrowscript unstrung? Young or old, most authors just push hollow plump dolls around on a picnic cloth laid for dying. Conduct from truth’s path a plaid skirt slanting far too far towards invisibility. Hawk humps hybrid hawk in flight. Small on big. Lost parrot chops through air. Am I constantly laughing, am I? Stitch a narrow long palm thorn through my lips. Dwarf this child’s hand, mouth, on what it was tugging, sucking, not daring to spit. It’s not as if I could play traitor against that obvious wall. Am I constantly frowning, am I? I forgot who this doll was fucking.

§ 241.

My fifth visit, in fact. — And should I disappoint grandly my author’s rhythmic plot? Too sharp from its joint that guitar string slips a notch. Glass of vodka supports my touch, cracks action into thought. It was an imaginary tarantula I saw staking out a burrow of playing cards on his dirty floor, no? Virtuous coming atop this hickory arm of a crumbling rocking chair just might account for it. Galloping bark of Strickland’s parrots flock a shroud of coastal cliff. Fog, moss, damp grit of wormcasts, shimmy clinch of young warm thighs. So many drunks fumbling at a crotch too raw for pain. I could go on. Backward approach to that small proud harmony you look full frontal away from. But according to this author, though (jotting too many words to say it, in a word, plural), any good girl’s most human arc acts first by sloping and slanting and slurping as if I’d always known how to, and again by mounting calm and narrow this gray porch railing worn springtail smooth by wind and rain. It was in your solitary cabin on Port Astri Bay, no? I lay down my sword, but thrust my dirk.

§ 242.

From a distant mountain along that famous coast. — And should I grub about for a solution to this imaginary fall? Shoals of sobbing. Tart hot springs bubbling up from a city built on karst. In a giant clay pot, though, millions of wasps might throb. My task is to trick you into toiling, trawling through mud up this winding mountain trail. A long lost flint chip cuts through your boot into what you didn’t want known. What I know is that nothing accustoms that child I was to a working woman’s sharing out of rights and honors to a small slimy ubiquitous convolution’s normal quantum of pain and joy as much as a fruitful day and night of proud invisibility. Background horror of any vain civilization’s constant war against sand, silt, dust, ash. But I’m as magnanimous in mourning as I am in victory, said Novalis. Today’s his birthday. Judging by so many commanding signs of human activity, this transaction will finish at dawn.

§ 243.

What spirit is. — And should I ration my simian whinny? A haphazardly happy sort of two-fold wound swallows loudly what, squatting soul, I’m bound to know it by. Orgasm optional. As is vomiting. But sociophysiology would imply anything wrung wrought or torn from it. That all too common word and its abundant, though poisonous, fruit. Paltry sign of constraint dislimning this high bright shroud of toil.

§ 244.

A callgirl sanctification. — And should I abort in singular fashion? Spiral margin to any dolorous art that spills, though not vainly. Rooks, crows, daws, jays, and a solitary hawk mob, trill, squawk, sob. Thorns and horns and short sharp hairs of fistular light sting my spunky thighsplit thrill of it. Dull wings’ torn air caught in my throat. In a shagbark hut worthy of Ishtar’s most ravishing gasps of “No, no, no,” no woodstrong city will I birth. Slutty allusion to Patrolius, Ionis Astra, final canto. Crimson in a cold brook. Put it in a black plastic trash bag. I’m told that a noxious distillation of avocado nut and cassava oil will rosify my womb most handily. Still must I crucify my labia proud, work down gradually atop this altar, holy basalt worn smooth by our long tradition’s cultivation of any and all sorts of lusty pursuits. Long past nightfall, to Glamporium, limbs quaking, I limp alluringly back along that gawking road, singing

Catoptric birthsong pivots profoundly Io’s vulvular
Altar’s languid hollow ktar cup — bibulous young lupanar
Girls born of Ishtar’s singular ravishing await that snail’s
Rainbow-strung string-pairs, wood-strong, to birth our city, Norlia.

§ 245.

Not joy. — And should I hurt? Fiction is frail.

§ 246.

So many ways of losing. — And should I nip along as if clinging, dizzy and afraid, so tightly to this unfamiliar city’s frail history that I might clip my dirty wings? Succumb to a proof of social pathology. Judging by that aging dictator’s rival’s virility, profit soon will fall, caution slip into coup. Staying hard, in my opinion, is half again as dry as small warmth. Born of sun and air and air’s imitation of wading into faint pools of quaking light. No doubt I was strikingly timorous, but riding arousal’s oval slug of clarity as I so rigorously was doing, I could not but unwind inhibition into a difficult form of vigorous joy. It still smarts, in fact. As if transformation was too harsh or kind for artists such as I who attain or fail to initiation’s broad bright door of purity. Liar. Faith, my good author, is simply going down without laughing, crawling through without glancing back, praising without knowing, swimming without drowning, rubbing your turgid muddy stumps against my body’s flyblown stigmata. In that rain with all thumbs numb and cold, no pricks did sting. As a proud patriarch palms a virgin’s ass, as a fond physician fillips an orphan’s thigh, this acrid living contagious myth combs what I would claw.

§ 247.

In favor of criticism. — And should I sanctify skin’s truth? Spiral plant crawls, climbs, kills host’s light. You look away sadly. It is said that saying it wrong is as vital as striking out a plain clay pot of common opinion. Black labyrinth of rough drafts. Such fancy cast of loving. I was praying to constrain morality’s fabulous accommodations. My findings confirm that sympathy is a nonarbitrary play of growth, probability, and imagination. Worm’s victory obtains what woman’s world affirms. Torn gray distant sky.

§ 248.

Always on guard. — And should I favor form to conviction? Hostility’s bagful of voluptuous author’s tricks avails subliminality no variant too anxious. Instruction’s as mocking as it is troublingly slight. As if asking is not too strappingly bitchy. Through any mood my writing cocks, forcing fashion from pictorial confusion. I’d disdain no signpost to it. Spirit warrants pity’s joy. Cunt’s dominion is slut’s domain. As for soul’s transformation into an amorphous glyph of warm, roan flirtation — mistrust any filly too frisky for plain constraints. Communication is a giving away, a giving back, an arrival, a going forth along that bosky trail of cringing humility, curling up and crying within that form of spiral parasitism I’d not wrongly call a going forth, an arrival, a giving away, a giving back of communication. At a party in a barn and a corral out back, you probably want to know, I put a drunk fop’s hand up my pouting saffron skirt and took it out sugar, sour, salt, and hot. Thick and drippy flow of turpid blood. Rank futility coming rashly again to vow cupidity its famous ring of ruby and gold. Fit of fond fondling turns fisty and foul. Not to worry, though. What I’d grant lacks as much solidity as what I’d forbid.

§ 249.

Towards a schizomythology of ritual (XI). Divastigations, a small tri-monthly multilingual journal of arts, writing, philosophy, natural history, and sundry cultural stuff.

Ouida: Such a curious canzo! First off, Atoca, may I ask you, What is “Manowar Gingoons”?

Atoca: Manowar Gingoons was a Tagma sailor and savant idiot grown rich from trans-arathu trading in various things, you know what I’m saying? who built a gigantic casa, a sort of Locus Solus, at Playtoy Bay — dit Playa Toya, you know, avant la war — in Owlstain, Flouziana, in I don’t know which anno mirabilis, Ouida. Following his disparition, Gingoons’s family laid plans for his castillo’s total transformation from library and laboratory into a sunny coastal vacation spot, a fabulous Gasthaus including casino, ballroom, lunching patio, dining hall, lupanar, and a glorious solarium looking duskward toward our own mountainous land across yon Arathu you simply must glom a snatch of, Ouida! Now that Owlstain’s public transportation authority has built a stop in its vicinity, Manowar Gingoons is not so solo a logar as it was! I think my distant lotion, my olyo lokkano, puts all that notion, all that history and location, into a singular — and individual — conchoid glyph, don’t you think, Ouida?

Ouida: A sort of summary of all your fair parts, no doubt, Atoca. Did you jot it in Appalachian, your song, or in Tixputo first? Was translation —

Atoca: No, Ouida, I think in both idioms without strain — translation qua translation was not a part of it at all, at all. Though in truth, I thought of scribbling my chanson with both hands at a singular swoop, as both idioms sung concomitantly in my brain, I put down a stanza in Appalachian, and a stanza and a half in Tixputo, and so on until I laid my writing tool down atop our lunch tablón. Both constructions flash a slight variant as to luminosity and signification. Ductility is not lacking, Ouida, nor, do I think, is lucidity.

Ouida: Right. Atoca, could you supply us with a quick background as to your lyric’s inspiration and — though I’m loath to ask it — what it’s, in a word, about?

Atoca: I had just put out for a cabrón or two in Gingoons’s top-floor lupanar, Ouida, glomming fast cash so that my polololito, Dado, waiting a tavola downstairs, would not, dit-on, hang us both by, as is his wont, copping but a poor tip to our patron post-lunch. My tight young cooch was raw, my thighs a bit shaky, my brain a-buzz from all that vigorous plural ravishing in which my soul, in a way, was still wading, still wallowing, still splashing and frolicking, and, oh, virgin Ishtar, holy star Io, was I hungry! But you know what? By that stairway’s bottom rung my charming body was glowing and tingling as if from an inborn frisson of song and I was as strong as any convivially conniving lusty looks any old goon could wink my way. Truth is, I could fuck anybody, in any position, taking it up, down, in, and around any of my body’s most privy parts and still want to do it again and again and again, Ouida! As long as I’m paid for it, that is, and paid lavishly.

Ouida: Gotcha. And how was lunch?

Atoca: Totally fabulous, Ouida, totally fucking fabulous. Oxtail soup con haricots amarillos; pulpo rôti à la Akbar Nod; bison loin with saucisson d’agouti, palm shoots, and wild mushrooms (funghi di bosco); il palazzo’s own brand of Waldorf salad with spinach, radicchio, avocado, apricots, figs, and macadamia nuts; banana flan clinging to a thin crust of cinnamon, raisins, and masa; a clit-sizzling magnum of Cliquot to wash it all down.

This graphic scantling of what its author dubs “Imagistic Birthworks” shows a turgid vagina flaring to admit a child from womb to world. As that child crowns out into a coaxing, cajoling hand waiting to catch it, our Full-Frontal Matriarch, squatting, moans, not from pain — or not only — but from a profound joy auxiliary to soft digit-points stroking and rubbing in smooth circular motions a prototypical clitoris. Guttural warblings and throaty ululations accompany various pans, cuts, and tracking shots to and from and along thighs and stomach slick with birthwork; milk-bursting bosoms and lust-slit orbits; a furry orchid’s blossoming corolla; a syrup-loving fly’s viscid palpations. Of such rhythmic dilations and contractions, spasms as if waking from passion into odium — a spiral harmony of matrix and font striving in mutualistic concord to attain a common goal — you cannot distinguish which obtains from parturition, and which, from orgasm. Two final convulsions rack that bloody portal, spitting forth, knot by drooling knot, an umbilical rosary, a chorionic root — and with such sighs and symptoms as bind human to worm still trailing, this caul-child (Succubus, you ask, or incubus? — but this film that shows so much will not, alas, show this) of turbid skin and puffy lids curls within pious, cradling arms and works its pouty lips to drink down primordial succor, looking, for all of that, as guilty as a rapist, as complicit as a pimp. Which is possibly why, at this film’s first showing, in back of a Tixpu bar, a faction from our city — our city notorious for allowing just about anything! — put this film loudly down as immoral and pornographic, so loudly, in fact, as to push a mob (among whom you might, if using a magnifying glass, spot Rick and Djuma Kidjaki, Ada’s dual douloi who, though spurning our star’s ruddy rubra, did not shirk assiduous mammary duty so as to kick start oxytocin-induction of yummy milk flow) toward lynching and burning its author. That is, our Full-Frontal Matriarch. In addition, this film’s offspring, a child alors of two or four or six, was thrown into Tixpu’s infamous sacrificial pit — not without first, though, having its unwilling stomata thrust into and almost totally burst by our city’s most upstanding patriarchs. How do I know? I was that child. I was that child brought into this world through a woman’s crying and coming, and crying and coming into this world I brought that woman such joy. I fail to fathom why any critic could dub this lovingly wrought sociophysiological study of birth, “dirty.” Actually, I don’t. First, as I just said, our city is notorious for allowing just about anything, including author-lynching and -burning, and sacrificial child-violation and -tossing into pits without bottom. Concomitantly, as I fully admit, I was guilty, I was complicit. But what, you ask, is wrong with a woman’s joy? As a hand-out from our city’s No Joy During Birth (NJDB) faction proclaims, “A woman who has an orgasm during parturition is fornicating with a child, is committing a brutal, unnatural, animalistic act that blights our familial and social fabric at its most basic foundation. To put a stop to such a possibility from occurring during birth, NJDB doctors will conduct full clitoral ablation (FCA) on any woman who wants to follow a virtuous path of natural, moral humanity.” And what about joy during nursing? NJDB again: “What cannot last is unnatural and unvirtuous. As joy is always passing, joy cannot last, and so is not natural, is not virtuous. Only pain lasts. It follows, thus, that a natural, virtuous, lasting bond uniting lactating woman and nursing child can occur only through, from, and with pain. As it is known that milk-flow stimulation has a possibly unnatural sub-abdominal corollary involving oxytocin and such, FCA will short-circuit this risk of pushing child and woman apart, so maintaining natural family and social unity, and a virtuous, moral humanity.” So much is at play in this conflict of polar antagonists! And though many a timorous soul would shy away from it, no impartial schizomythologist can afford to slight it. At point A squats our Full-Frontal Matriarch — by turns disgusting, vulgar, salacious, but always intriguingly titillating, vastly informational, and unflinchingly poignant — in a display of vagino-clitoral function during childbirth, of how masturbation not only assists, but is primordially part of, parturition. At point Z — masking body and mind in sallow shawls of spurious salvation, in haggard cowls and hollow habits of hortatory hymns and psalms — stands our city’s NJDB faction, handing out fantastical, fanatical squibs and various vicious propaganda promoting, advocating, and trying to justify “virtuous” pain and most drastic surgical mutilation of womaninity. Truly a rich stratum subducts from A to Z — grab your picks, schizomythologists, and start digging!

Daily. Hiding is not an option. Don’t know at what rhythmic fold of waking. But it’s bound to occur. Occurs daily. A kick to your ribs. A rodilla in your groin. Fist to skull. Split lips. Black occhii. Various abrasions, cuts, and contusions mark your skin. Various wounds too profound for common vision. But rising up today or tomorrow. Who can say to what fathoms within your body pain will sink and stay dormant. A rotting wound of boiling rapid profound within that icy brook’s corazón. Waiting to rip snow-bound skin apart upon first glom of rancid sun. Who can say at what rhythmic fold of waking. Or how.

Blood slips from your nostrils. Down your throat’s back. Daily without fail. You put that first foot out your shack’s front door. On your way to any sort of location. To a bus stop. Or possibly your job. You thought that trying to vary your daily map of coming and going would limit that pain, but to no avail. Brutality still found you. Following, tracking, hunting, running you down. So now you don’t try to avoid it. Along that soft bosky trail full of roots and dry crackling husks you pick your way. As a sharp ax falls swiftly without sound to split your skull’s back, brutality is upon you. Fist to jaw. Iron boot tip to ocular orbit. How much pain, how long it will last, and how profound your wounds, vary from day to day. But always its tight small rump trots off with you writhing and moaning in bloody mud. Blind with pain. Aphasic with ruddy ruth. Lacking capacity to fix any sound’s location but that of this dark fistulosity boiling constantly past you as you fall.

Without sound of footfalls, chancing upon him, a girl. Walking this rocky muddy road without sound of footfalls, full moon shining. Possibly sound of boots scraping slightly, crunching slightly, sand. That’s all. And a bit of wind, softly, softly, through spring’s cold hard buds and blossoms. For about thirty clicks of a wind-up watch, through harsh rasping gasps of anguish, fading, fading, that girl was walking. Thinking, Did that actually occur an hour ago? Did I walk all of that off by now? I forgot what I was walking away from. No. That full moon’s harsh lamplight cast, crackling moonlight casting crackling shadows. Shadows of an hour ago not so crackling, but soft in comparison to this, my shadow, now.

Good thing that bastard didn’t try to follow. I wouldn’t know what to do about that. That is what I’m most afraid of. Don’t follow, goddamn you, you bastard, don’t follow, I thought, frantic and supplicating. Thank god that bastard didn’t follow.

Without sound of footfalls, chancing upon him, a girl. Following a good half of a half hour of aphasic shock; ditto for running crazily full of anguish, dry midnight throatburning air; a good half hour of moonlit walking along this road of rock, mud, and sand, slightly scraping, occasionally crunching. Fix that sound, glom a snatch of staring. A body, gray in moonlight, now many, body and body and body, all gray, calmly standing against this moonlit world’s gray horizon. Away from that ovid fold a bit, solitary against that gray sky, a solitary lamb. With a start now that rising atop it a tall human body. Stopping still, abrupt, along this mortal track. Still this pounding corazón and without sound of footfalls, to back up into this willow’s shadow. But it’s him. Knowing his curly hair, his thin slouching body. It’s him! Four joyous strutting, almost jumping, footfalls along this road of rock, mud, and sand, scraping boot bottoms, crunching, only to stop still and abrupt along this mortal track. What’s that boy doing? But knowing what that boy’s doing is plain for any to glom. Pray that his lusty occupation, his own pounding corazón and braying moans, put a wall around his ability to fix sound. Without sound of footfalls, to back up into this willow’s shadow. Stoop down in shadow to watch him in amazing disgust. To call back a rumor that such actually did occur, but to actually watch it going on, now, without any gaps in vision or thought, without wanting imagination to fill in rumor’s blanks: this is what it is to watch a man fucking a lamb. Him down on his rodillas, shirt off, brown corduroys and front-slit boy’s shorts down around his thighs, arms and hands pulling forward to grasp ovid limbs, burying his smooth bosom in oily wool. Pumping away at it. Lamb braying, his own braying moans harsh and choppy with his coming.

Watching him finish. Lamb trots off to go back to fold. Couching his body down now, first along his right ribs, and roll onto his back. To look at stars and moon with satisfaction, or to call back that lamb’s vagina with cringing ruth. Crying. Or joyous. Standing slowly to pull, first his boxing shorts, and now his corduroy pants, back up, back up. Stooping now to find his plaid shirt, looking, finding it, putting it on, slouching as always, possibly a bit too much, button by button strapping it around his body. Got it wrong at first, unbuttoning now and starting again, huffing slightly, and now, finishing, to watch him walk back along this road of mud, rock, and sand, slightly scraping, slightly crunching, or slipping on a slick crown of mud, his tall gray thin slouching body moving off back toward town slowly fading until nothing but this willow’s shadow, this lambfold, and no sound of footfalls scraping or crunching along mud, rock, and sand.

Thinking, That boy’s a lamb-fornicator. Tomorrow I’ll go lunch with him at Manowar Gingoons and I’ll lack any ability to look at him sans thinking, I saw you fucking a lamb last night. I saw you fuck that lamb. Lamb-fornicator, fornicator with lambs, fornicator of lambs. Why? What awful abyss of pain lurks within you? Lurks within all of us?

Its vagina. Glossy wan lips sluicing down and slightly forward from its tight dark anus. Short tail lifts to show, sinks to block from sight. That’s what I lust for most of all. Lift and sink, show and block from sight, pumping blood into its labia until coruscatingly full and shiny. Woolly stomach curving away amid gray gigots. Its many black tits dangling down. My own body shaking as I watch that soft animal walk. Haunch and haunch of ivory trim grayly down to finish in tight black wool at its hocks. Swoop of thorax back from cou along ribs till soft stomach and its many black tits soft so soft dangling moistly down. My own body shaking to watch it walk. Almost as good, almost as good. But as that tail lifts to show, sinks to block from sight, that’s what I lust for most of all. Flaring as a cyclopic giant’s solitary orbit would, that vagina. Waking gummy from dormition. Contracts. Flaring again now. A skulking cloak of muscular contraction pumps out strongly a thick flow of spicy piss. That’s what I lust for most of all.

Lay down again this tool of writing, this haggard nib. Clinch lids tight against that acrid fulmination. Wind boiling about your auricular organs. Coming back, coming back again, all of it. Why must it want you just as you thought you had lost it all, put it all out of mind? Why can’t you find a way to say it sharp, without falling into phrasal languor? Clutch graphomanic claw atop this writing block. Can’t unclutch it.

At a particular gap dividing boy from girl, both shun to look. As if striving for any possibility of sanctuary, any way to stay unhurt by what girl knows of boy, by what boy would wish to stay unknown. Spanning that gap now and both must look. To look away now could only signify incivility. But both want to look away. But both want to look toward. Looks catch. Shyly smiling girl says, “Hi, Sagarch.” Shyly smiling boy says, “Hola, Kali.” Passing by, passing by. What did girl want to say? What did boy want to say? If only boy could say it. If only I could jot it down. But what is this compulsion to jot it all down, to say it?

What did girl want to say to boy? Did girl want to say anything in particular to boy at all? What did girl’s “Hi” signify? Did it imply anything past a simplistic civility? Was girl mocking boy? What did boy want to say? What do I want to say now? What is this compulsion to jot it all down? And what, this compulsion to say anything at all? Or to stay mum for days and fortnights and months? To stay so mum that I don’t think any pupil in any class could say if I was in class or not. But why say anything? Why must I think in any particular idiom, in words at all? Can’t I think without words, know without words, grasp a notion in its totality without having to map it out logically, rhythmically and syllabically, syntactically and phrasally with a particular idiom or combination of idioms? To transform a notion into words is to jar that notion far from its origin, to smirch and twist its original form past any saving. To think without words: that is what knowing truthfully is. Words and idioms can only distort. I will stay mum. What is important is that which is not said, that toward which you cannot approach, but only skirt around slantingly, lacking any possibility to grasp and clutch it, to claw and crush it. Words form a path to follow, a snaking path from a distant point to a distant point, far from truth’s aphasic hub. Words do not, cannot, contain truth; any word is simply a crinoidal knot in truth’s fur. To approach truth’s body, you must vary your articulation. Say it, sí. But also jot it, play it, paint it, sculpt it, film it. Construct it with symbols and signs, with avatars and artifacts. But also try to touch it, to run your hands across its crisp, soft, oily fur. Oh, fuck it.

Simply living will confront you with many goals. That myriad of goals you can attain far outstrips that handful you cannot. But only this last is worth striving for.

On that dumb horizon a fog bank clings to this alluvium’s bald clitoris. On a bosky nimbus, on a snowy limina of grass and rock wall. A high dumb sky, a clinging mist low along brook and willow. Moon, too, hanging low. Burnt half moon of this cold month’s night, sallow snowdrift moon. Moon of sand and snow and burnt grass drifting against this prolongation of a low rock wall that conducts to this alluvium’s bald clitoris.

It is said that a rhythmic accounting of our works and days has commodity worth. Worth’s foundation, thus, consists of constant flux and passing away, for what has most worth as a commodity is what is most inconstant: a rhythmic accounting of our works and days.

So that’s it, alors. Bah ouais, Johnson was right: You start at that point on which you stand and go backward, randomly picking apart that living carrion you call your own body’s viaggio through spatial dynamics. It’s only an hour or so, a span of falling rhythm wound into clock-ticks which you think of as moving forward; a constant juxtaposition of this backward flow of calling back what was and that continual onslaught of hours and days and months you strap to your wrist; rhythm bound to this crackling world’s prisonshadow; your own body, rhythm’s capital convict lacking any possibility of pardon. Sí, Johnson was right: this act of calling back to mind and trying to construct a sonata of living out of your own vida’s rhythmic variations is an act fit only for burning.

A calm night without sound of that howling north wind (though blowing all day long, it finally put to port around dusk). A sky without cloud; luminous mist and starlightobscuring moon. A shard of platinum sky high up: on this point I’m standing. Shaking from cold, my body; cold thick lung-mist hangs in air, dissipating slowly; air vibrating with a rhythmic calling back of so many cold moonlit nights such as this, nights in which this thin lamplight cast of crackling moon-shadow sounds its dumb ostinato of howling ghosts.

Ostinato of howling ghosts: night’s oscillation: rhythm, thought, forms of mind in vibration, a sounding out of thoughts floating, drifting across spatial dynamics of back and forth, back and forth: this cosmic shadow crumbling: rubbing mounting moaning against alluvium’s bald clitoris: rhythmic touch of smooth hands draws forth a cry of joy and pain, a harmonic juxtaposition of cyclic lust: for birth, for growth, for crumbling back into dirt and dust.

An hour of living fit only for burning, commodification of that rhythmic accounting of your works and days. What’s it worth for you to call back to mind again, to pick apart randomly your body’s living carrion, that scat that marks your trail through mud and bosk? Bury it without mourning. What is rotting will blossom only into wound, wind, and buzzards. Without words I stand watching crackling wood burn.

Curving round towards that plot of savannah, sand and mud and rocks crunching against boot bottoms, ogling his way forward from friability of moon shadow along this road to that rock wall and grass, a distant patch of willow and poplar against that brook-bank horizon, and back now, vision contracting back across snow and brown stabbing grass stalks snapping against his boot bottoms.

Climbing across this rock wall now to walk across crunching stabbing stalks of grass toward that far brook flooding in spring as that fold of lambs and rams and rams’ consorts fulfills its pastoral rhythm crossing that span of rock and wood into lush viridian fruit of past rain until towards autumn that grass burns brown and blond in sunlight and clicking a rhythm of dust on up into or down from I forgot which occurs during which annual span must look it up high mountain rock huts to and from savannah that fold clicks and brays past barns and across brooks to fulfill its pastoral rhythm against that wintry horizon’s cusp.

It’s all coming back now, no, nothing is coming back. I cannot call anything back to mind. I don’t want it coming back at all. All I can think is, “I don’t know anything, Knowing anything is a total impossibility. Abandon it. This ill pitch of loving sham contriving to fill this dull cavity with a bright hollow pain. No, not thinking at all, I know this dumb gray humming that stays lost within my dark lusts, without form, without rhythm, as of a dog barking in a shard of crackling moonlight that blinks out against cloud and snow.”

You walk across this plot of savannah, snow crunching against your boot bottoms. You trip on a solid clump of snow-bound grass. You kick a chip of icy dung. Crashing against your throat-grip hollow of what longs to stay unsaid, this choppy surf of calling back unwillingly voids its rhythmic innards, wiping away words and longings and visions. Walk on to that patch of poplar and willow atop brook bank’s rim. Wincing barbs of falling snow, icy shards of cold rain, a slight bluff, mist, moonlight, a span of wood and rock by which to cross a burbling brook. Crouch slightly and couch arms down along rail and think. This road of rock and mud and sand conducts back to town, past barns, and lambs, and rams, and rams’ consorts.

Tomorrow I will board an Owlstain-bound yawl and go back to ISOCPHYS. Four days of sailing, possibly six. Johnson and Kiko will wait in a bar in that city’s Old Port. During lunch at Manowar Gingoons it will all start again, this annual rhythm of calling back that day Kiko said your body was found at your old barn’s stairway’s foot and an autopsy had said that it wasn’t that fall’s impact that took you from us but a blood clot in your brain. Snow falling, boots crunching across icy stalks of grass, crouching slightly and couching my arms down along this rail to think, “Tomorrow I will board Djuma’s yawl and sail back to Owlstain and go lunch with Kiko and Johnson at Manowar Gingoons and I will call back that rainy dusk-bound day that spring I was walking around Owlstain solitary and sad and I first saw you far down along a brook bank in a saffron skirt and in that wan light I mistook you at first for a sulfurous marigold blossom or sphingid moth of gold flitting about a mustard bush, but finally I put my bifocals back on and I saw you sticking your hands and arms into thorns to pull luscious crimson and black bulbs of mora out to put into a fold of your saffron skirt.” Darling Ouida,

I found your parting oblation of plaid hair — or should I say houri? — ribbon (to that tan, burgundy, mango, and ivory band still cling(s) a strand or two of your lustrous, insouciant, indigo curls); artisanal potpourri of marigold, tansy, hyssop, and arbutus; charcoal and ink drawing of us riding wild stallions in Wyoming (or was it across Flouzianian foothills? Com’ una criatura mansa di sogno / Mio, mi corazón, tu fai dilatar / Todo lo spaccio dov’ i’ t’ ho bisogno); and fisty scrawl of squib wound into a scrap of your saffron skirt and thrust through my mailbox’s slot about two hours postcoïtum. As a viridian and ruby hummingbird will guard a hoard of lilac blossoms, alighting warily on a high branch and darting down now and again to ward off any froward wasp, moth, fritillary, or dull oppugnant colibri that strays into its vicinity, so too will I guard your gift. I’m writing this in that quaint Poldavian bistro in cour du Coq où nous avons fait l’amour aux [sic] WC and I’m gazing, now off toward that far wanton door, now down at this papaya Rhodia pad, and now I’m lifting your aromatic wrap up to my nostrils (and in my imagination, up to your chin) to sniff an abiding saffron artifact of our ardors past... Tony says you caught a tramp ship from Arcachon to Matagorda, from which shabby port you found a coast-hugging cargo train to carry you gratis back to Tixpu. Is that so? I’m so happy, Ouida, that you took Tony’s pitch and will, this autumn, sail off to Owlstain — that stangy city, I avouch, will not soon lack for my visits, nor will you moan for my lack (as you did avant your visit to Paris), but for what you and I both will affirm is much, much lack’s antinomy! As for your lunging inquiry, “Quant à ton travail, was machst du nun?” I will parry that as follows:

What I’m working on now, Ouida, is a polynodal articulation of my abiding faith in God’s myriad masks. A dynamic construction consisting of two pairs of duo–trio dyads (or two duos of dyad–triad pairs) pivoting about a fulcral singularity S (voir diagram), my faith’s articulation borrows scriptural (and scriptorial) inspiration from such absorbing works of spirit-craft as Arno Mayr’s limpid magnum opus, Toward a Psycho-biological Philosophy of Humanity’s Unchanging Soul; April March’s uplifting didascalicon, Sociospiritual Rough Drafts; Sigmund About’s oblational nonad, Au jardin du corps divin; and my own aunt Agatha G. Strickland’s gordonian (as in knot) study in goodsamaritanism, Promiscuous Paths Toward a Spiritual Romanticism. Aptly, I must humbly but proudly avow, I call my construction, Transfigurations of a Scholastic Rosary (TSR), as its swinging combination of tauto-vibratory jigs, jags, joints, and joists stand in for (fill up with) (attach to) (support and conduct) so many mixing and matching stations on faith’s always imbricating path toward a conscious, knowing, loving, and omnivorous spirituality. You may hang my TSR from a hook in your plafond, as I do from my study’s vault, and with just a light touch, put it spinning into action, thus (to pitch it slackly from a wall-slung hook might possibly amplify its catoptric functions, but will drastically curtail its dynamism):

At singularity S obtains my bacchic bark’s ballast, History-Making Words (HMW), a transfixing list of faith-inducing bons mots and koanic palabromas such as this catchy coconut of a rut-slogan you may savoir that your illustrious illustrator and quondam co-pupil Abra Chan was fond of crafting, to wit, “Today’s scrofulous Labrador bitch might howl infamously, but tomorrow’s pustulant lapdog will purr stridulously atop futurity’s pussy.”

At D1, a bobbling spring-and-ball motion as of a slow-flung bolo shows that my thumb-and-pinky duo (or dyad) of Variations on Faith’s Mountaintop (VFM) and Proposals and Corroborations (PC) inhabits robustly its two-fold slot in conjunct opposition to and with T1, my slothful bradyfustian trio (or triad) of A Compass in a Frog Pond (CFP), Vast Divagations of Divinity (VDD), and Marjoram and Galangal (MG). Shall I unball this fistful of rogational digits? I shall:

In VFM, I chub about* God’s volcanic upthrust of a snowclad rift — call it Kailash, Himavant, Ararat, Aconcagua, Spitmarkx, or whatnot — from which soul’s churning cauldron of hyoid- and larynx-lacking magma spurts out spilling down as a prolix jawwagging flow of lava and though it may totally blow apart, still it marks its passing with basaltic outcroppings of tufa or tuff, a crumbly brown rock.

In PC, I put forth a proposal that ritual absorbs any act you do again and again such that a rhythmic staking out of all sublunary things obtains, including hourly pissing, daily shitting, fortnightly throwdowns, bi-monthly publications, and annual birthday cards, and so on and so forth. It thus follows as a corroborating corollary (and for which I supply many supporting suppositions) that no ritual action lacks for godality — that is, holy signification — nor will going down hard on godhood nix giving rim to hard knocks and blowhats. Glass of rum, s’il vous plaît.

CFP is a slim child’s book purporting to contain an account of first and last things as told by a frog in a frog pond. Un jour, traipsing lackadaisically along from firth to frith, Rana, pulchritudinous spawn of a witch-magician cross, spots, far down on that pond’s accumulation of mulch and rot, among torrid lotus roots and glitzy caddisfly nymphs, a compass. With a gracious curtsy involving two thin, smooth, downy soft, warm, tan but not too tan, youthful, muscular but not stout at all, in a word, languid, thighs and an abundant quantity of plush, lavish, swishing skirts, Rana squats down and, as if to turn a thin flat rock on its sundrunk back so as to catch what’s hiding in its dank shadow, scoops away algal pond scum, haphazardly spooking a timid frog, Bufo, into plunging with a limpid splash and scissor-kick down, down, down to float and sink in amphibian fashion atop said compass. This nostalgic arc of causality — curtsy and squat, scoop and spook, swish and splash, float and sink — spurs a spiritual simulacrum, a brain-hot calling back, of that invidious midnight long ago in which, owing to a sardonic shaman’s allo-uxorious machinations, Rana’s magician of a dad lost his woman and his compass both. This, in short, thought Rana, was that compass! And so Rana follows Bufo’s train of action and, trimming away aquatic distortions of sunlight and shadow with binocular pruning hooks of human vision, swims down and grabs that long lost compass. And up, up, up Rana frog-kicks, gasps now for air, shouts triumphantly, “I found it, Pa! I found your compass in a f— p—!” But, alas, what in cool dry air was a frilly, light, flowing, diaphanous thing, is now, following gravity’s hydraulic crush, crash, and crunch, about thirty, stiff, awkward, downward rushing kilos of hydrophilic silk and chintz! Drown, thus, our willowy Rana did, and amidst that turbid turmoil grown calm now, two skulls and two sacra mimic a twig-witch drift of silt and mud; and lotus roots spiral up towards sunlight; and caddisfly nymphs construct hollow, conical, patchwork husks out of giltwork and goldbraid and small chunks of ruby and lapis unwound from a patrician woman’s shift; and slimy, timid Bufo jumps in and scissor-kicks down, down, down to alight in amphibian fashion atop a putrid fist still clasping its long lost patrimony, a compass in a frog pond. Summary: Pond is God’s iris; frog is God’s pupil; compass is grain of God’s dust; girl is God’s thumb. Moral: If it don’t hurt, don’t stick it in, and if it do hurt, don’t stick it in, also! Back in a jiff!

I’m back now, Ouida, from a visit to that magical spot of our privy amours, our inspirational WC in which you did squat as I shat [sic!] and thrust up in toward your gasping diaphragm, your own aromatic somatic fluids discharging warm and abundant, a syrup-slow tropical rain, and swirling down and around and truly gripping my organs in a most captivating fashion, and sipping from a third or fourth or fifth glass of rum — no, no, no, how about a pastis? Si, I shall plow on with this account of what I’m working on now, and, knowing as I do what sort of constraints your small journal must stick within, I’ll try not to unbolt as much wind, or unwind as many bolts of colorful yarn, as I did in that last synopsis. Un otro pastis, s’il vous plaît, signor Barman (this lugar’s patrón, actually).

In short, VDD charts a plurality of God’s many miraculous incarnations and intromissions into this world’s plump moist lunation.

MG is a spiritual cookbook chock full of many a good thing you could put in your mouth and out your ass, which good thing, natürlich, on its way down, is most nourishing to both soul and spirit, body and mind. How ’bout a vodka tonic, sir? It is approaching that hour, you know, l’ora di pranzo?

I am now sitting at una piccola tavola, and turning to my spirituality’s combinatoric stations’ fourfold division’s sororal half and unpacking its rotund labiality of D2 and T2 so that this sinistral pančaśāstra may display its boon-granting palm, I unfold and tuck my napkin in, thus:

Contrition (C) is just what it says it is: Contrition (Si, j’ai choisi) as a path (Pollo asado con insalata y pomodori) to salvation (Say again? Ah, boisson. Un litro di Brouilly, por favor).

In Spring Plain City (SPC), a group of waylaid pilgrims (WP), forlorn and pitiful, finds a spring (S) with which to allay its wayward thirst (WT), and founds at that spring’s location (SL) a small city (SC), consisting of a church (C) or sagradu (S) in that group’s natural idiom (NI), along with zoning laws (ZL) providing for allocation of plots (AP) of land (L) and ways to partition and pass down (WPPD) grazing rights (GR) and various patrimonial and matrimonial chatchkas (VPMC) and trucs (VPMT) and crap (VPMC) and shit (VPMS) — in short, a spring (S) on a plain (P) turns into a city (C) which is a spiritual microcosm (SM) of God’s city (GC) on God’s plain (GP) in God’s wondrous spring (GWS). I foist, mind you, no allusion to Proust (P) in all of this.

In Malodorous Trio (MT), I show how criminal fiction (analogous to Shiva) is homologous with both sacrificial rituals (analogous to Brahma) and passion plays (analogous to Vishnu) and thus why all six (or half of six if you subtract what’s analogous from what’s homologous) stink up our high holy cosmos! This is a moral work.

In A Quintal of Ruth, A Fifth of Quiddity (QRFQ), I show that pity is psalm, and compassion, antiphon, of faith’s harmonious introit, and that no amount of hard living, wild partying, raucous goings-on, and, in a word, any fifth of quiddity which is as but a drop of owl scat in our grand cosmic pail of a God pond, can add to or subtract from this quintal of ruth which is constant, gracious truth of God’s oligarchy.

Lastly, my Not So Much (NSM) is about how not doing too much is both salubrious and salutary. Fondant au chocolat con chantilly suivi par un cognac, if you don’t mind, patrón.

That’s it, Ouida, that’s what I’m working on: a holy communion of word-trails forming a glorious imbrication of spirit-paths upon which I, M. S. Strickland, Tiliar Boarding School, Class of ’84 — an inquiring soul who is always yours (and to think that my anno of graduation was yours of birth!) in passion, lust, faith, and spirit — and now living in Paris, ninth division, villa Ballu — am traipsing from bathroom back to this bistro’s bar. I want a Scotch, now, patrón, straight! Try a drop of grappa gratis, too, with this pudgy Habana? Mais pourquoi pas? Slivovitz also? Why not?! Aussi, un vaso von rhum, un vaso von rhum, un vaso von rhum! Say it as fast as you possibly can, darling Ouida, and it sounds as if a chainsaw is going “Vavavarroom! Vavavarroom!” in your brain.

§ 250.

Striving for mutual goodwill. — And should I claim circumstantial justification without owning up to what is puzzling? In rings and spirals it twirls writhing through my hands. Trapdoor mouth gulps down toadspit crocuspiss. Glowing snapshot of that child I was. Hyacinth and marigold, crisp morning sunlight through a mountain cabin curtain. Blind agnosticism. With nary a hint of what would pass for irony, you call it, “civilization.” Half of what’s lost is lost again in that mirror of what’s found. Turn to psalm 65.

§ 251.

Suppository duty. — And should I up this gambit’s hazard? Assiduous study will show that cantos 1, 6, and 11 of Patrolius’s Ionis Astra form that dithyramb’s most archaic stratum. To start with, this fulcral triad of aristocratic Ityalian quatrains disavows any comparison of Norlia’s mythic bard Dudu to that Anatolian Sufi from Balkh in Bactria, Rumi (1207–1273), in contradistinction to, say, canto 2 in which “Rumi’s lyric plays dull mirror, lacking, / In that dusky land [that is, Babylonia, Anatolia, Sogdiana, Bactria, much of Transoxiana, and so forth], lupanar joys and six strong strumming bards.” At which point I find it not unfit to plot a curt divagation into chirographic history. I harbor no illusions vis à vis this rundown topic, but this ludict’s not at all satisfactory, missy! I won’t marry him anyway. Tradition has it that, during his sojourn as ambassador to Babur’s court in Kabul from spring of 1505 to autumn of 1506, Poldavian dragoman Patrolius (1464–1559) nightly sought succor from diplomatic travail by submitting to such charming ministrations as a particular court houri was bid by Babur to sanctify bridally for our paradoxically monogamic polyglot — and I say paradoxically, as it is known that plurilingual ability charts most commonly a promiscuous path from cama to lit, from yatak to takht, but such inconstant firasht-hopping was not, so it is thought, our faithful author’s way. To think that such thalamic duty could pardon omission’s sin. Morality making stupid custom. Though any unspoilt vision of this singular bondswoman’s triangular nostrils flaring with passion, moist full lips ditto, and khol-dark lotus lids squinting two-thirds ditto must always, in truth, stay lost to us in a constant shadow of onomastic obscurity, in a manto, you might say, of anonymity, rumor has it that Patrolius’s orphan succubus was fruit of a Norlo-Tagmic cross known throughout Kabul as Nirusa (a sort of apricot-plum hybrid growing only in Nuristan) da Norlia, or simply Nirusa, though, oddly, in that child of Ishtar’s fistful of Patrolius’s journals still privy to us, as Norlia. Complicating scholars’ ability to plumb this rhapsody’s lyrical mirror’s origin is Patrolius’s account of hunting oryx with Babur (1483–1530) in a location known as Nur-i-lah, Oak Mountain, from which bosky hillock — now a suburb of Kabul — Patrolius, mistaking lah for ktar, acidic oak for basic basswood, thought his handmaid must hail, but historians insist that abundant circumstantial indications confirm that Patrolius’s Nirusa’s Norlia was in fact high in Hamiltonia and that, by combining carnal praxis with oral prolixity, this wanton child of Ishtar inhabiting lord Babur’s court would, whilst busy applying, usually by skillful hand but occasionally, it is said, by simian foot, various soothing and invigorating potions and lotions to Patrolius’s drooping, court-worn soul, this ravishing minion would also chant a lyrical improvisation or two or four or six, in this way concomitantly inflaming with syllabic instars sprung from a rich tributary of custom and tradition, a rich corpus, in fact, of schizomythia, whilst his palpitating soul stood to, sumptious and compliant — in this way inflaming Patrolius’s spirit — a spirit hungry for agglutinating grammars and thirsty for stray words bristling with diacritics — forcing his own hand to dart forth, as from a turbid cloud of haptic distraction, and claw haphazardly among tumbling books and folds of silk for a sharp moanzy quill, clutch it at last, thrust it sighing into a dark pot of gastropod ink, and with its drooling tip jot a cryptic transcription of Norlia’s orphic idiom, just as his soul, now turgid with plum sap and sticky with apricot pulp, sonorously burst, and Nirusa’s glottal locution was dissolving, dissolving in a slurry of aphasic moans and sibilant gasps of asyntactic inarticulacy... Prior to which doffing of all formality, though, Nirusa, donning a corybant’s mask, had sung of dark moon’s transformation from swart Atta’s growing luminosity to waxing Io’s dancing sigmoid horns, tauroral wings matching in form that bicornous ktar (a sort of oud) capo to which Dudu, avatar of Saturn — that nomadic astral body taking thirty of our world’s solar orbits to accomplish a singular orbit of its own — had strung his trio of twanging ram’s guts — an allusion to how, on cold, dry, limpid, mountain nights, it looks as if Saturn is flashing or vibrating as a kind of play of light against rapidly strong ringing in bright crimson, lapis, and ivory (Skt. guṇá गुण = Nr. dudu, ‘ring, strand, string, sting’) — so as to sing of wayward girls baring torsos and limbs and gamboling lustily, on nights of gibbous (gravid) and full (promiscuous) moon, among thick stands of tall hardwoods surrounding that city on high, Norlia, that honors not virginity, that awards not constancy:

Dancing did Io birth that city, Norlia, wood-strong son
Whom craft-avid, mouth-lush young girls would fain sing admiring of
And famous Dudu snatch a storm of strumming from his triply
Strung ktar: swart Atta’s wing-bright gift no pavid virgin could match [1].

And so it was that, upon parting from this Afghan idyll, Patrolius idly took with him, not just your usual oxcartful of consular loot, but a full yak-load’s worth of scribbling on various supports and topics, both courtly and common, out of which holographic morass of skin, pulp, bark, husk, and clay upon his arrival in Poldavia’s capital On (Finnish Onra, Slavic Ongrad) six months on, Patrolius would, by toil or crash unspun, start to wring out various works of his opus, including not only his famous biography of Babur (On, 1510) put down in prosaic Poldavian, but also his Ionis Astra (c. 1517, known from a manuscript found in a manuscript found at Saragossa, c. 1813, by J. Potocki), a confabulation, or distillation, if you will, of much, but, alas, not all, of what Nirusa da Norlia (b. c. 1492, d. in childbirth 1506) had wrought into his spirit as a smithy might work platinum and gold into an iron dirk’s hilt, transforming an ordinary arm of parry and attack into an inlaid tool of lurid fancy:

Vain again that dull mirror to catch sight of this wholy bard’s
Catoptric birthsong vaunting irid fancy of rainbow snail,
Portal scorpion sting, and wood-strong Norlian huts in which
Isthar’s hand avidly crafts Oria’s lush lyrical mouth [2].

Catoptric birthsong pivots profoundly Io’s vulvular
Altar’s languid hollow ktar-cup — bibulous young lupanar
Girls born of Ishtar’s singular ravishing await that snail’s
Rainbow-strung string-pairs, wood-strong, to birth our city, Norlia [3].

Patrolius’s fulcral, or sixth, canto, along with his last, map variations on a mythic untwining of a schizomythic umbilicus discharging out of his first, constituting an approximation of a soft thick lap-spill of Nirusa’s black hair humming catoptric birthsong (a notion not lacking for a myriad ways of translation: from mirror-song of birth to mirror-birth of song, from song-mirror of birth to song-birth of mirror, from mirror of song-birth to birth of mirror-song, and so on) with Oria’s full moon of promiscuity, of plural ravishing, illuminating nocturnal group goings-on, and Ishtar’s gibbous moon of monogamous mating, of singular ravishing, gazing down on a bibulous bard’s quick, painful sting, as of a portal scorpion, to wound and scar, to pardon and anoint, a woman’s only sin — that of virginity — whilst rainbow snails crawl from lowlands to high, and all drink that spicy liquor, ktar, from a cassidiform cup cut from ktar-wood, a sort of basswood which is chock full of sosigonic alkaloids (and it is known that, in association, ktar (liquor) and ktar (wood) function, not just as a strong aphrodisiac, but in an antimicrobial, antiviral capacity, and thus it is plain that “wood-strong” is an allusion to both font and sign, to both origin and symptom, of this loin-girding (in man), birth- and abortion-inducing (in woman — that is, if you add a particular amount of scorpion-stung rainbow snail infusion to it) concoction of ktar in ktar — a potion Nirusa would not, by all accounts, shy away from plying Patrolius with) whilst upon that lunular arc of altar (also cut from ktar-wood) found in your typical lupau (Patrolius, tranquilly translating in On from his rough transcriptions put down frantically in Kabul so many autumns and springs prior, hung an n from u’s hook, thus miscasting a prim, traditional Norlian “hut of womaninity” as a sultry Ityalian casita with vulgar Ronish connotations) a woman, in an assisting quorum’s company, communally splays thighs and lifts skirts, both to author a child, and to birth a child: vulva of intromission, vulva of parturition: bard’s inspiration, bard’s production: Dudu’s ktar, too, is cut from ktar-wood, and so too was that broad, smooth quirt-stock which Nirusa, donning a bard’s cap and gown, would on occasion, it is said, apply to a most quizzical part of Patrolius’s anatomy. A glass of rum, first, if you don’t mind, sir.

1. Patrolius, c. 1517, Ionis Astra, first canto, O. W. Johnson trans.
2. Ibid., sixth canto.
3. Ibid., last canto.

§ 252.

A cryptic rapist’s companion [1]. — And should I tarnish a blackbird’s call by casting light on a child’s abduction? Paint scuff coat chip. Without transition, too much calling back might silt a mind’s untoward troughs. Scorn this unruly acquisition. Involuntary sting of what’s past. Flashflood blotting out of conscious sight. Call my wish vain, says Novalis in his famous manual (my translation), but this author longs for a world in which your typical community is not constantly afraid of a solitary man (or woman, I might add); a world in which a singular scholar humbly sitting, sans human or animal companion, in a city park or town plaza and gallantly watching a curious fritillary, or languidly flipping through a book on corvid biology, or simply smoking and staring off — stoic and studious — at yon horizon’s full, fat, soft, pouting bottom lip, is not an affront to public morality; a world in which a timid philanthropist — lacking offspring of his own — who throws his rich lot in with a poor parochial school or similar institution out of a spirit of humanitarian goodwill, faithful charity, and pious voluntarism is not thought of as a rapacious raccoon or rabid birdhound lurking in a poultry coop; a world in which this book’s many harrowing — nay, horripilating — words would fall as so much circumstantial rain into history’s cast-iron abyss of gray inquisition. (Novalis was not always your most sprightly stylist.) Cavorting parrots bark and laugh along its rim, and occasionally burst forth from a lush crown of bloom and fruit to flock frantic wings in that fuming volcanic maw in which tropical day, through a patch of cornblossom sky amidst cold, black bulwarks of cloud, burns only at high noon, though, far down, hot crust cracks, and lava churns. Pink puss oozing from a scab. Across thick tufts of dark moss clinging to a hollow oak branch, an orchid-munching phasmid daintily stilts. It too will fall, or fly off, or go into hiding, holding still, or swaying slightly to mimic sulfurous wind rocking a frail twig back and forth, back and forth in this world in which hypocrisy charms as no actor could, who, strutting rough boards of a fool’s production, would cup in his cringing fists a putrid skull and proclaim: “This kind of pain has taught us what is human!” (Classic Novalis, that.) But our kind of pain, it is obvious, has taught nothing at all to that gawking public which, in its popular “wisdom,” insists on making pariahs out of us, insists on making criminal our spartan sport of rigid flash, quick hot spurt, and limping panting jackboot dash back into that play’s dark wings. Suck cloudy blossoms from a turgid straw. O, you bright visions moaning in a spot-lit patch of moon, who shrink not from loudly rutting in front of window or mirror, who, with a walnut crush of boot on skull, think nothing of stamping out your many abortions just as, with cognacflask glass crunching, you stamp out your myriad glowing cigar butts — O, you bright window- and mirror-visions of glorious rut! Look not unkindly on us, look not without sympathy on us: whining bitchtoms who stalk in shadow, who can birth nothing but sackfuls of catclaws, and blood soaking through that laundry box, staining such luxury it contains... Sorry, folks. Lost in a thought-oblivion of lap-purr, this author was dozing. As I was saying: Litigious morality, sir, is not an option, nor is judicatory sociotomy. Such “traditional” ways of isolating “rash symptoms of a contagious moral malady” (Lombroso, 1869), of aspirating “wanton tumors marring our community’s most upstanding body” (Worms, 1871), display a gross — and crass — misconstrual of human possibility. If our painful condition is thought of as a social pathology — and it is, madam, it is! — logically, thus, inclusion is your only valid option. But, alas! This world is not ours. And so I say again: Find a job that will bring you into contact, not just with most of your unwary victims, but with many an ironical satyr harboring outcast passions as fraught with livid obscurity as your own. A position, say, as instructor or administrator at a public boarding school or vacation sports camp is not at all a shabby occupation, though obtaining a principalship at said institution(s) would spark off a chain of chlorotic chills of indignation, splotching your aghast subdominant homologs’ damp quaking thighs. Similarly, though child psychiatrist at an asylum for lunatic orphans would not lack for pastoral charm, and, why not, an opportunity to adopt a minion or two, posing as an avuncular doctor, a sagacious bon vivant, at a compulsory labor camp is simply hors concours! (I would avoid working in a common prison — as what joy could obtain in subduing a strong spirit too similar to your own? Blissful subliminity, as you know, is to catch your frail victim off-guard!) In a word, I say, Hunt in packs! And bring along a woman or two or four or six. Align your polar axis to that of your surrounding community’s moral compass. Hypocrisy, as I said, works in situations that would kill a straight approach. In fact, why not form your own spiritual community? Is a shack for whipping young boys and girls so dissimilar to many a guilt-inspiring church? And I do not think it so vastly adrift as to color in tints of, say, calvary crimson and salvation saffron, an unwilling soul’s initiation into sodomy’s garish mud and blood and torn-up roots of sin... In addition, I will not fail to grant that taking a tour of various country outposts, making a bucolic noria as a nomadic spiritual advisor might chart its own tasty history of backwoods hospitality and family invalids all with wayward wombs and spastic groins and pouting lips to split with an avid thrust or fist of authority... Ah, but you say that sharing your trauma in support groups and workshops on social psychology and quora of common worship and so on is simply not your jar of hooch? Who am I to balk such a want? All I say is, Crypsis, man, crypsis!

1. I first put out this clitalysis of Atoca Inhart’s Flouzianification of Novalis’s posthumous Myriad ways of bagging rooks: A cryptic rapist’s companion (Ab Art fangt das Tor unzählig: Kryptisch Stoßtman’s Kompagnonsbuch, Frankfurt, 1802) in Owlstain’s SCAT of 26 March 2008.

§ 253.

Hic Rhodus, hic salta. — And should I kowtow this digit-crawl bass riff with a skullpunch snap of thumb? Toss back that plotclutch howl, man! A midriff-baring romp of girlish calcio [1]. Tan and trim. Cyclic spiral of gawky minor ninths billows past any possibility of tonic ground. In wrist is rhythm. Fulcral triads pivot about a brash and trashy minor fifth. But how many handy wolfhounds could a callgirl’s fist twitch or twist from a stray virginal’s prickstand? Limp minor thirds and bland but scornful pairs of fourths round out my Rhythmic Incantational Transformational Music’s (call it RITM’s) bitchbright vault of sound. Frugal crucifiction. Canonic compulsion. I’m only floating along a wall of cultish Kidjaki-yawl sky. Shadow my jib with a frill of play joy. Rub my narrow dwarf scruff against that tall stallion’s dark sublimity. Through all that smoky crowtalk babbling on about hairy hussar harmony and roan phrasal variants of anticipation and whatnot, a thirsty groinsquat burns atop your drooling lap. Patchwork arch of a warm small back going “Piggy, piggy, piggy!” Iron-tight mounds of dangling rutpots you can hitch your pavid grip to. Hold on, hold on! You say that yacht was full of cavalry? Mounts, too. From cliff to crown I was driving a pitch of plastic wails. Chalking my nails against that board. Your common pornographic goon might cast my muffinish muff’s motif thus. Crooning in mock syllabic agony, my muscular stomach soulfully churns out a thick rain of humming consonants to charm my adoring public with. Look on that crowd with disgust. Yon fly-blown scholar, gaping through his briny mutton chops, quickly downs his highball. Yon smug aficionado, fumbling for his knowing fly, slowly drains his. Illuminating floor show follows.

1. Calcio. — Not calico!