Editions MSS
Editions MSS
MICHAEL SEAN STRICKLAND
Goldbarg’s Variants
§ 13.
You wear your name like a pornographic mantle, Skid. I should pluck it off you and push you plunging down the pornographic bank into the swift water.

The possible name, Mona, falls not into the same current twice, nor is it ever the same name that falls, nor even the same mantle plucked from your bare shoulders. And the bank from which you plunge is never the same on which you sun your gemmed possibles.

Did you know that B. Rao changed his from some vulgar Intrussyan caconym like Vadobrac or Bradacov or Cobradav or something? Je trouve, by the way, le visage vulgaire of his so-called “algal ontology” to be nothing more than the dowdy demon of vulgar metaphysics whispering ribald lare barg into the recedent ears of credulous philosophools.

Really now, would B. Rao cavil so? Il pense, en effet, si je (his current publisher, passing critic, and cross-grained confidant who could not, by the way, fail to be au courant à l’égard to the Intrussyan demons hiding behind the mask of his fugitive, mercurial, downright algologistic nom de plume) ne m’égare trop, que l’esprit aliéné par les caprices politiques de ce bas monde, en effleurant l’indistinct visage barbu de l’exil, ne devrait pas céder à l’écoulement doux du terremiroir, but should enjoin the lotic demon of ontonatatology to box the running ears of florid nostalgia.

Still, I think B. Rao’s a popular swindler whose popular apothegms are closer in form and spirit to word-burglary than they are to honestly wrought axioms, no? The popular money he gleans his notorious living with by fobbing his filched bromides off on our sublime city —

Yes! I picture his new byline: “B. Rao, debonair barrator of pithy bagatelles, was born in the dissolute land of Blorhn, but makes a flippant living now in our airy city of light, Owlstain.” That’s why the EP trumps the ME in cases like this. No matter how trifling, how frivolous, how hackneyed, inane, even vile, slanderous, shabby, and pilfered the commodity be, says B. Rao, there lurks always the hard heavy sudorific glow of pure unsullied cash, without which living (B. Rao again) would be spiceless, lightless, lusterless, in a word — lifeless!

Such a sexy stream of nonsense you spew! Your eyes lure me to leap into their carnal flame, and my body dissolves in an orgasmic burst of vapor.

The golden flames are flames of gold. The golden eyes are eyes of gold. The golden river evaporates gold, gold, gold, gold!

The gentle face is the gentle truth of each sinking, like hot iron into even hotter oil, into the other. The gentle I becomes a third who answers, watching, the gentler question posed.

Rough riposte of steel hissing in the cold bath. Face, truth, and I temper the triangle’s rough other, the rough three or more that one plus one sums to.

Like skillful sailors, we take the most drastic approach to the downy portals of our most drastic parts.

Ever master of the thriftless entrée, the thorough boatman makes a thorough circuit of each and every thriftless place in the erotic equation.

Alien heat of your hard light lights the hasty way to him, Lord.

Famous heat of him, and his famous ways. You are that alien lord you worship.

It strikes me as a self-evident truth that of all the black hypocrites in that black congeries of CACA, I should hold that black toxophile Swopes in blackest disdain.

Your disdain of Swopes for being a political hypocrite strikes me as hypocritically political. To countenance the toxophile arts of clitalysis their political ends or effects or uses does not thereby invalidate the richer, deeper, broader schizomythic truths they reveal.

So many tintoned tadpoles that particolored pond has spawned! With a full-color burst of protrusive tongues, hideous muzzles, slimy propulsive legs, and clawed webbed feet, their gilled and globular fintailed bulk transforms into a bullybagged cacophony of gray-green grenouilles croaking their hunger and their lust at the water’s edge.

The obscure bodies of the famous frogs in the obscure ditch. Their famous snouts poking warily out of the obscure water, while slightly deeper down their famous obscure feet blur, either by optical overkill or sensory lack, the limits of perception.

When shirtless Gloria takes shirtless Maryam in her arms, the pulsing counterpoint of their gimmaled hearts’ shirtless tale lays bare, so to speak, the form and content of their shirtless will.

Desire that so seamlessly meshes its rhythmic interplay of subject and object, its ludic transposition of active and passive partners, says M. S. Litarn (I paraphrase from memory), throws an old-fashioned flame-tongued scorpion-frog into the narrative machinery, a girtablullu that gunks up the story’s dialectical works with its Tagmo-Norlian guts. To belay the tale’s ineluctable will to symbolic subversion, nos belles cousines must each needs betray, not just her irresistibly voluptuous poitrine, but an impulsive change of heart as well.

Nice folly to quote as I’m so nicely coming. I hate you.

Black madness going between blasé coming and the black hate de cette petite mort tant folle.

And shall the ordinary judge lave this ordinary soul of her ordinary sins?

L’esprit philosophique du connaisseur phonologique knows that a soul purged of all sin loses its identity just like an immaculate disc has no soul.

Yet why should we deprive ourselves of the pretty little pangs we come across when we let memory preen the plumage of experience? The pretty eyes of that girl on Playtoy Bay Beach, for instance. Her pretty hands picking up to let flow and fall, like pretty flames, the pretty sand between her fingers.

With proudly insouciant eyes her hands claw at the substrate of memory with a healthy disregard for whatever stray relics may have soiled it — spiny shells, fish hooks, glass shards, used condoms, a rotting turtle carcass, the putrid scat of man and beast. Rao’s gesture here would seem to efface from the flaming nimbus of nostalgia both the pining relief it brings as well as its combatively aloof dolor.

At ever decreasing energies, the laborious resistance to entropy creates ever increasing structural complexity. Higher energies, for instance, yield the basic stuff of matter — speckled protons, whooping neutrons, and all the other darkly triadic “spark-arks” (ensembles chargés, assemblages polarisés) Muster Mark so overhovedly larked and barked and parked and warked for — while at middle energy levels this harnessing of entropy blossoms out into all the grand structures of the cosmos — galaxies, solar systems, planets, moons, etc. — and, finally, at the low end of the spectrum, we have the laborious processes involving electrochemical gradients and molecular shape changes collectively called “life.” Now, if I understand Rexni rightly, there is, primo, no bottom to this pattern — below absolute zero, as the phenomenon of superconductivity alludes to, there await undreamt of potentialities of structure, perhaps the very face of what we so awkwardly grope at with concepts like “information” or “time” or “gravity” — and, secundo, since at all energy levels, this process involves the basic defining factor of life, viz., the resistance to entropy, we must recast our cosmology and realize that life is not just a process characteristic of the lowest energy levels, but all the way up and down the scale, from superconducting quantum indeterminacy to the inchoate tumult of terminal supernovæ — these are all, however laborious, or perhaps precisely because so laborious — forms of life!

If only Rexni had not left her Nietzsche unread! (“Gardons-nous de penser que le monde est un être vivant,” und so weiter — Gaya Scienza, § 109). Then she’d realize that not only is her supposedly roral Rexnivision® utterly old hat, but that it’s a fundamentally vaporous and negative tautology to boot! For it’s impossible for us, for any organic being, as Darwin would say, to “envision” cet universel syntagme des choses que nous appelons, en les liant, soit “le réel,” soit “la réalité” — from the particolored partouzes of promiscuous monades to the dull dyads of monogamous zoomorphs; from shape-shifting sublunary littorals to photogravitationally tethered galactic plena — through any sensory organs other than the biotic, through any noumenal schemata other than the biocentric. Friedrich “Nous ne demeurons toujours qu’en notre société” Nietzsche’s project to naturalize humanity via the anti-anthropocentric de-deification de cette nature rédimée et découverte comme à nouveau (of which le projet poincaresque du readymade de Duchamp, M., functions as a sort of negative shadow puppet [pantin d’ombre à l’envers]) should arouse in us, not just the Rexnite sentiment of “Absolument rien n’est entièrement inerte,” mais aussi, comme B. Rao pense, “Il n’y a pas d’entropie”!

No sé si no leo, no leo si no sé — that applies as equally well to the frustrated path through the bosky bafflement of the unendurable smugness of F. Nietzsche and those who quote him in the Gallo-Frankish as it does to the frantic way que conduce al lado desaforado de Clonish Niechala y su Chicana Hellions (psst! they’re sitting right over there — don’t look!).

Only by chasing such farinaceous provender with l’ambre ombre of some heady stomachal ambrosia can we endure it, I admit. (Where?) Here, the mellow peatsmoke savor of this cask-aged unshaken pyloric usquebaugh redolent of the skaldo-eddic bard-crofters of the glebe of Lyness (oh, right there) is just the thing to jumpstart the gastric juices and draw all that incommodious chum down and out through the bosky rodent hole of eupepsia.

Let’s make this passionate cave pierced into the passionate marble our own passionate abode. Let us stay (quedémonos, demeurons-nous) bound to this passionate view of sea and stars.

In the cave shall the shifting sea be transliterated into solid icons carved in niches hewn from the marble walls, and the stars transliterated into the lattice- and lacework traceries of granular radiance splayed out through the myriad piercings in the octahedral shells of the clathrate, foraminous, or cribriform lamps we light our dwelling with, the cave itself transliterated into the alveolate sinus of the amulet we wear bound between crotch and navel or dangling between our breasts, the entire dream prospect of which — amulet, cave, dwelling, sea, genitals, and stars — the very machinery of passion, même — will be transliterated into the yantras and mandalas drawn with sea shells, fish bones, marble dust, cinders, and ash sur le sable délébile du plage.

Hot scorn though I’m hot for him. Like a Geladra moth clinging cryptic to a hot blade of grass in some sun-drenched inconspicuous place, keep quiet about it.

Like the futile inarticulate disdain G. Arshile so mutely entrusted to the encaustic croquis of his late lost lamented work.

One of which for instance portrays the jealous rage Uncle Erartsos flies into at the head of the family topchan when he realizes that the sentiments his niece and nephew, Saian and Tawrim, respectively, display towards each other are romantic in a far less allegorical sense than he had hitherto suspected!

Happy cousins kissing so happily behind the raging bald prurient pate of The Uncle.

The uptight chant royal form in which D. I. Swopes opts to recast the tale — the uptight incontinence of its impoverished rhyme scheme; the uptight malice of its rhythmic, repetitive catalogue of improbably death-defying acts of torture; the uptight blame that fuels the narrator’s ire — explicitly evoke the uptight brutishness of covetous old Erartsos.

The cultural blame Swopes imparts to the narrator seems a bit fatally bête-noirish to me. Is not The Uncle’s “incestuous” incontinence cultural rather than personal in scope and motive, and, thus, no instance of malice at all?

With what filthy tinted fashion you paint rape as nothing but a quaintly tinted entanglement of limbs! As if the psychasm of trauma could be filled, smoothed over, effaced by the tinted spectacles of culture!

Filth is filth whether in morose mode or some other. Yet morose limbs may either dig deeper into the morose pit, or attempt to climb out. Naught checks them but their own morosity.

Like a heap of irritated images clutched in lion’s claws, F. Maa lays zoopraxiscopic siege to the irritated town.

F. Maa’s paternalistic collage probes and tests and invents and inverts the paternalistic city as a provisional heap, a paternalistic clutch, a probationary clawing away at —

What a nice time they all must have had while shooting it! Nice pleasure, nice, nice pleasure.

You and the others are so sharp. It was a sharp time, a sharp pleasure.

I guide the others in the unconditional boat. The unconditional prow cuts through the unconditional water.

Deceived guide, I bark back. The others are just as deceived as the water is deceptive. Plough on, deceived prow.

We were speaking the enlightened Ityalian tongue, the enlightened tears of which were lighting our way.

Thin-cut syllables of Ityalian, the thin-cut light, the tears, the thin-cut tears, the enlightened tears, the elite tears, made of us one, made you and me a single we.

You picked up the gnarled glass that time, and hurled it at me. Truth is the gnarled image of it. He hurls it at me.

Any internal semblance between the he I was then and the I I am now is precisely not the truth. The internal glass of time connecting the four corners of the frame I, you, he, me, has shattered.

The occasional cha’abran through the thatched wall of which the boar bursts, its tusk clearing my jaw by an occasional minim, a slow motion sliver of time and space the lack of which I still feel on that side of my mouth.

Gravitational tusk of the almost absent boar moon. Or the side of him that sports, comme je l’avais cru, un dru ulcère on his gravitational mouth.

Thus the gods show us their barbaric side. In the barbaric heart of stone, barbaric demons scourge them.

Brown rock. The demons brown by simple syllepsis. “Out of this brown heart pluck a whip,” someone said. Thus the gods show us their brown side.

I hate your deep genius. I hate this deep memory the Muses, in their deep nobility, have seen fit to curse me with.

The modern genius, my mustig Muse, does not hate the molecular memory of modern worth, nor the molecular whatnot I —

Oh, the baby cranes! So blue and clean! And the sky, so baby blue and clean! And in the distance, across the baby blue heat shimmer, clean crane songs pick up the melody where vision balks and stumbles against the horizon’s baby blue limit.

Repellant fowl, those repressed cranes. The repressed wails and repellant sighs of their reprehensible songs, like the reprehensive streak of greasy smoke in the air when some unclean bungalow burns.

Cynical man. Beneath the cynical skin of your cynical face I can see the reptile within squirm and flail.

But all the rest of me’s spiritual, no? What could be more spiritual than this material body without which spirit would be unable even to breathe, let alone move. And that spiritual serpent that stirs when face to material face our most spiritual skins bare and conjoin their innermost spirit to each other?

That platonic thunderclap that booms and echoes when out of two persons one is born in the platonic force of it. Even giving platonic head, it’s as if life goes to sleep in me, and comes gushing out in a platonic —

Blue thunderclap! That fills the head with its blue force. Oh, blue one, blue person, put me to blue sleep with one touch of your blue life!

Touch me with your knowing hand. Put your cognizant thing into me. Oh, this work, this act, this deed I want to endure and endure, fully aware, for ever!

The nebulous act of the airy hand plighting its atmospheric act of such unendurably short troth.

Forced entry pierces the dismissed lake of La Cuna. Footfalls of the dismissed pedophile at the border of shame, the familiar tiliar tree in the Bêabrûyi Mountains. Its (hers (his)) name, which I had dismissed as irrelevant, is on the tip of my pierced tongue. Tan me came cantabile.

At the border the lake dissolved. Luna, lacuna, laguna, la cuña, comme je l’avais cru, un dru ubac pierces the foot that stomps it. Dissolve again through that word for shame, bêabrûyi, and the familiar name act came ant tame can cat mane mate nach the tree dissolved in a train or at sea.

Singular punishment of my plural nature. Plural words of a singular name. Answer me! Nothing.

Worthless me with my worthless name. My worthless response has no words, no point, not even anything worthless to add. Punish my worthless, my worthless, my worthless name.

[ A not-for-profit instantiation of human imagination and human labor ]
Copyright © 2013 Michael Sean Strickland