Editions MSS
11 cour du Coq : Paris | Owlstain : Château Methuen
A slutty mind entails a smutty memory. Or vice-versa. We’re still trying to master all the various smutty or slutty implications of Goldbarg’s memory. Or vice-versa.
One thinks of M. S. Litarn’s vain stab at shedding light on all the various circumvital conjunctures involving Goldbarg’s mold-loving ant entangled, writhing, gobbled on the alien mountain by the melos e artes of his firing-pin antlion (Formicophagus maa Goldbarg, 1933).
Others might cite M. Lienant’s early study of the terse “mesh-and-shadow” style of Goldbarg’s late work evoking the recursive or regressive or retrograde light in the parrot-choked reflection of his Tixputo jardim where he tried to cultivate various instars of ditto.
The Mountain Fukari root for which, at, Goldbarg giddily recognized as a fiercely parsimonious translexicization of the sand-muffled “Pop!” due to the Bernouilli effect of the rampant psammophilous thing’s jaws snapping furiously shut it made when after it had lain as if starkly catatonic in wait for days, even weeks perhaps in its vertiginous pit in the areneaceous ledge along the manic brook’s bucolic bank it seized its attine prey the quick and delirious death of which in truth was actually an impetuous blessing as otherwise as if some long-suffering soul of a vehemently unrepentant sinner had metempsychosed into it it would have been driven mad and dissolved from the inside out by parasitic Puccinia mold.
Recall also that Goldbarg detribalized out of their lingo roots typically not pronounced in truth by the detribalized sinners living near that creek but only in myth by shamans differentiating the 1º, 2º, 4º, and 5º larval instars of that sand-living doodlebug, respectively, qat, qōt, gat, and gut.
If only the awkward misery of Goldbarg’s curse were not so clearly evident in this hardscrabble place. The awkward lack of able-bodied men, the grotesque aspect of so many of the boys and girls gracelessly mouthing their ponderous impotent prayers.
Foreign misery in this inaccessible place. Their alien aspect, their extraneous prayers belie the genetic lack inherent in Goldbarg’s ingrafted legacy.
Blue road in a blue country. My blue heart breaks.
The gimmaled cycle of your unconscious heart beats same and different, same and different as and from so many in this unconscious country. By unconscious ways the unconscious road ascends to him, your unconscious ancestor.
I hate him on the dark-moon glebe. The dark-moon gesture his finger makes. I hate him. On foot we cross the narrow bridge. Beneath a full moon we should be, but we’re not. I hate you.
Strange tribe — Gir Berek, is it? — meaning exactly that. Strange footbridge — hateful finger stabbing from darkness into glebe.
Drowsy ditch clean in the dark, between black and black a slice of richer, deeper black. In the sleepy servants a somnolent power glows, transparent will behind the fatigue their tiresome preparations have obscured them with.
Pensive agents of a pensive force. Foreqight, I suppose it’s called, or clean deduction. Pause above the pensive ditch.
Not away I go nor turn sideways so as not to watch. Her natural mane moves over him, a nefarious otter, skunk-toned, nectarous and necrotic.
Your relative, Gasa Albiano, is repugnant to me. She slithers against me, a repugnant otter indeed, her reptilian shock of hair reproachful.
Real life is like that. A the lip of the well the foot slips and there’s no real bottom to it. The valley that blossomed into a lake, a sea, an ocean, harbors no real shore of safety, refuge. The belt breaks, and we are naked.
Harsh, harsh! Your soft bottom’s a soft valley in which no soft lover’s foot will tread, for all the harshness you strap to your body from the harsh well of words you draw from like the soft shores of life itself — I am lost.
Brown man, seeing is sympathy and sufferance. I endure them, not to spite the sensitive furor of your own brown beast, but simply for the quivering brown thrill of the obstinant brown business we must endure if we’re to — endure it!
Sensual beasts we are, engaged in a sensual enterprise. Seeing them, I can better endure it, and become more sensual, and more human.
Pierce me backward in my banal place. Tail to tail by backward degrees this banal inferno consumes us.
Your ripe tail is the ripest hell I’ve ever pierced! A systolic place, ripe and graded.
To hold him uncursed, unwounded, in my silent arms. Virtuous arms to wall him from this bloody beast of a world. Envelope his pure tail in my lushly bloody one: virginal mountains, love’s lava, sheer shedding fuck me voiceless this monthly bitch.
Silent world indifferent to the arachnal beast within which we wall ourselves indifferent to it. Tentacled arm tastes flowing tail, voiceless moan mounts. Mountain’s tang of its indifferent ferrous molten ore.
A rage so vast, complex, multifarious no cool speech can contain it, can grant it the cool merit of serial expression.
Tight speech is the lie others value simply because they get it, word after word of tight, abstract rage.
Death is no secret to the man outside. At the margins of social life, par delà la foi, ou en dehors de la foi, ou avec la foi du dehors, he sleeps outside his pariah role, his parish beyond the Pale, where the I lives already outside, exiled from the self.
Common secret of the daily office. The common man’s quotidian faith equates death with common sleep, daily strength with the common I of everyday life.
I’m always pleasantly surprised when artists overleap the limits of their chosen genre. Here, listen to the opening of Velasto Prastier’s latest opera sirvente, The Rapist’s Elevator:
“From his post near the fountain, the porter salivates as he eyes her subnuvolar striptease on the hotel’s pivotal terrasse overlooking the lake. After midnight he spies her again, puffing her cheeks impatiently amidst the queue for the elevators. «Quelle foule! S fasz parasztok!» [1] «Madame?» «So many glum pastors!» «Par là, éviteriez-vous la queue, madame. Je vous y conduis?» «Mais certainement, mon gars!» In the servants’ lift she cannot help but take pity on the bipolar travesties of the clunky platform clodhoppers that fail utterly to compensate for the subastral poverties du galbe his low birth, no doubt, had inflicted on him. The illiterate’s vapors flood the confined space of the lift like fetid, stagnant waters. Elle sourit et souffle, «Paszat!» [2] Suddenly, between floors, the elevator stops, the parasite revolts. «Összepá láffu!» [3] «Mais c’est quoi, ça? Rapt, viol? Terrassez-vous moi, connard?» «Je vais te travestir, salope!» Deft as portative lasers, swift and sharp as irate asps revoltingly hypnotic, his hands tear off her skirt (under which, he knows, her œstral privates — bald, bedewed, bejeweled, and uncinched — purr and pout like the winsome lips of a deliciously drugged cherub, l’offrande infâme of some Cyprian debauch qui, sur le plot, rêvasserait avant que le bourreau lui tranche la tête) and pin her against the wall of the lift. And into her surprised, dark, Szekelyan eyes, her wide Carpathian pupils, he stares prolatively tandis qu’il enfonce all the vorpal treatises of his restive, pastoral lust en elle jusqu’à la garde.”
Malheureusement, ma chérie, en tressant leurs œuvres, souvent les artistes varlopent trop les aspérités insolites du style. Regarde comme Prastier veers into the mundanely macabre, the militarily maudlin tropes of the typical Carpathian mystery novel:
“His ‘lad rage’ glutted by her lap’s restorative, he ends his violater’s [4] repast with a real dagger dont elle ne se la gare des coups.” — Sounds like the refrain of some Kakanian hussars’ ditty, no? “Dont elle ne se la gare des coups.” — “«Et maintenant, à travers les poitrailles, salope!» As if she were perceiving from afar, through a wind-billowed sleave [5], portraits of surgeons in action in some distant operating theatre cum art gallery, she hears, rather than feels or sees, an overwhelming sense of déjà-vu, a numbed memory of burst waters preceding her daughter’s birth, her ovaries splatter on the stainless steel floor of the lift, and he stoops to gather, as if they were two packets of pervert’s solatia she had tossed him from the statuesque heights of her window of wealth and beauty, the precisely resected viscera, wrapping them in the torn chiffon of her red gala dress. Hydraulic whirr and suck (szopás fefalu) [6], clatter of door, click of key, he deposits her inside the seuil of her suite. Downstairs, la fiesta en l’Hôtel Tetrapolis raves on. Several patriots in the lobby bar, like some ribald operetta’s rival seducers, exchange louche quatrains of bouts rimés. The porter, malgré sa démarche torve, lasse, pria-t-il gentiment du barman un petit verre d’eau, s’il te plaît, which he drains d’un seul trait. «Qué sed tenaís, amigo! Another?» «Non. Assez. Off, Paul. Night!» And beneath the cloud-veiled moon il se met à s’envoler. Trépassait-elle, en haut, with encarnadine jets pumping out of her like the festive fountains del Dia de la Independencia? No, she will be found, still alive, prostrate, soaked in a lake of her own blood.” — And here’s where your “artist,” despite all his Proustian allusions, fails to overleap the military blinders that, à l’égard de l’injustice, can imagine no other response but the larvate ripostes du roman policier: pursuit, capture, vengeance — the tortuous hackneyed plot of which takes up the remaining 300 pages!
Short laws the short world effects, affecting, in short, people like you and me.
Whatever natural relation may obtain between natural people like you and me, it does not follow that this natural world enacts any natural laws at all.
Yet the head limns its body, twins its liminal pelt, from palm to sole, to the deeper subliminal me in and through which it dwells.
Like strict siblings feuding in the strict tent they pitched, the strict me disputes its strict dwelling: foot, hand, head, tail, heart, mind.
Fine faculties of whoever confronts the fine world there.
Whoever rubbed the world there, robbed it of its wealth.
Each lyrical devil incises with his lyrical blade some sort of lyric there.
The mean blade of the mean sword of verse. Mean devil of a mean class.
The familiar snow was falling. Familiar flakes of it. All were gathered round the familiar fire. The familiar wind blew sand, all too familiar, into our eyes. Thus we reached, we made camp on the familiar peak.
In the distance always radiant Mount Gimmor glows, lit by radiant fire at sunrise and sunset. Radiant flakes fall radiantly, the radiant snow. More proximal, the radiant sand of the beach.
The Arathu’s black water there. Black sound of him I —
Compassionate water, compassionate sound.
I love him. Red guide in the red boat.
Supportive guide in the heart-shaped supportive skiff.
Justice hates the beautiful depths. Falsifies its ministry by making whatever’s beautiful rise to the surface.
I hate the whole concept of “moral justice.” Show me your moral depths, Mr. Minister, Sire! Moral falsifiers all.
Stupid wigs of stupid counsel. Make a clean break with it.
I stood in the wings, watching him clean the stage, resolved, convinced —
Moved by the weird, wide trumpets, the wide drums, the wide bells, the weird gestures, all the weird things in that weird castle.
Stifled again, I’m steamed! Let’s just move all our things into this castle: pennants, bells, trumpets, whistles, drums — all our steamed and stifled things!
Here’s where they flogged the life out of him, on the rock-hard terre battue of the courtyard. I see his rock-hard face.
Idealistic grounds for a pragmatic vision of him. Idealistic flogging of his pragmatic face.
Steady the course through the unmoored passage, poet, itinerant and heedless — the siren thrall of peripheral hubbub tests your navigational worth.
And bears the indeterminate swell and fugue of brine, fog, spume, cancelled wave coursing the blurred passage from crest to trough — vague poet mired in vague virtue.
Marital pain pierces the massive circle of marital space.
Weak space, weak pain, weak circle.
Visible dogs claw invisible fleas or visible flies. Summer whimpers its visibly flyblown snout.
Common deer flies. Common dogs. Common summer.
Betrayed wounded thwarted crushed by others the body’s needs bleed bitter rage into the mind.
Causative rage compels the body to act — on the minds, bodies of others.
Death, a lurid harlot, stands in the lurid doorway of the most meretricious hostel en el barrio de los lupanares, and luridly courts with her lurid eyes tous ce qui ne veulent pas céder à son vice lugubre — truly a lurid bane, she is!
A frozen hospice, rather, where, on the wintry tundra of a gelid cha’abran, elle sert aux désespérés, aux inguérissables, aux condamnés, aux perdus who do not dare glance at the unthawed harlot’s vision of her glacial eyes, the icily fixed stare of the vicious millennial eternally frigid slut she is — she serves them a frosty infusion of wolf’s bane (Aconitum vulparia), black henbane (Hyoscyamus niger), dogbane (Apocynum cannabinum), and spotted cowbane (Cicuta maculata).
This continuous culture of constant (or, per Ouida, the constant losing of) virginity — this earth, like a continuous marshland of mucus and tears choking the lash of the socket, the swamp bowl of the ocular orb — and all the inhabitants who continue to inhabit it —
The cheap virgin’s tawdry fen. Worthless. The gimcrack swamplands of ersatz culture. No wonder it swarms and seethes with so many trashy inhabitants, this garish land, this bogus earth.
Strong heart of robust relationship. Sturdy guide of firm connection.
Aesthetic heart, aesthetic guide, aesthetic relation.
The shimmery bottleneck of a skewed birth ratio dwells in the chimeric bosom of Goldbarg’s curse. Whether genetic distorsion or epigenetic mirage, it winks in the refracted face of botched fertility — so few males are born, fewer still thrive, and yet the occasional singularly sleek and shimmery face and breasts of a rare beauty like Ouida —
Like you! Like you! It’s been linked, perhaps, to an excess electronic charge on the so-called “cytosine neck” of an X-linked allele, some developmentally crucial homologue involving, somehow, face and fate, brain and breasts (and possibly breast-feeding), womb and the wider sociophysiological world that a womb-bearing descendant of Goldbarg’s — You mean a woman? Yes. — dwells in.
Editions MSS
11 cour du Coq : Paris | Owlstain : Château Methuen