MICHAEL SEAN STRICKLAND
First Pod
With utmost grace and vividness
§ 1 | Glom
To glom a playful plagiary’s glib gloss from the guileless
glebe of a newly fledged Wörterbuch (
Nouveau Lexique de l’Angliche, Bruges, Maison
Belge des I
diomes d
e la Cordillère Tétrastique, n.d.) had been, and still remains, the very sigil of my intent, but, al
as, at that spot where
glom, omnivorous mogul of slow moans in old loggias, should logically have been aglow and a-gloating in the calm glad glade between
glockenspiel and
gloom, there was nothing but a moldy
lacuna.
— “Mais non! Vois-tu? Ça n’existe pas, ce mot-là! Tu ne peux pas traduire
Blickt et
blicken par
glomming et
glom!” —
Who can glean, and who mollify, the glacial glower and glouting glare that suddenly mottles and gnarls and besmirches
a Creole beauty’s formerly glabrous glabella?
Her glaucous ocular orbs had been glazed half-closed in expectation of the pungent golden sap my glossolalic gander
— “The copper-glimmer of thought gloms the sandpattern...” “The glomming presents syllables in airy smoke...” —
w
as on the very verge of gilding her from croup to crop, from chine to chin, from calque to calyx with; the glistening glove-like glottis of her glossophagine organ was in the very act of globbing and glutting my gleaming gladiolus
— “The glomming has the airy finger of the treatise in common with what it gloms...” — bidding not just this, my mongrel golem’s uncommon glomus
— “In the glomming and the glommed there must be an identical ebb in order that the one can be a glomming of the other at all...” —
but her own giddy glutinous glia to brew a potent glandular flux, a gonadotrophic
olla podrida of deluxe pedomorphic glucocorticoids and deliriously puerivirile glycolipids such that the stratified squamous epithelial tissue glimmering in the delicious dell (did I mention how the clathrate cloth of my glittering glamour girl’s saffron frock glommed and clutched and suggestively cloaked the compact naked form of her gynandromorphic gluteals? and that the tender bobbin poking through the long thin leaves of her gamy gallant cleft was
as radiant and vibrant
as a chaste nubbin of austral starlight glimpsed through the dancing silhouetted verdant blades of
Podocarpus glomeratus?) of my gutsy glaistig’s ba
re cloaca (her deltaic
oracle’s dank adyton, indeed!) was mucilaginously glowing, was nephologically swelling to receive the glaireous gift, the glossematic bolus of hendecachorionic
medoids gurgling up through the clenched vestigial fistula, the fecund
canular flume, of the textual delectus
— “In order to be a glomming, a doorcrack must have an ebb in common with what it has glommed...” —
but it w
as botched and boggled, what should have been glommed and gobbled.
Instead of the gnomon, the gimbal, the glaive, the gloriously pinioned tumid glyph
— “The glomming thumbs a human syllable in airy smoke...” “The glomming is a mouth of windiness...” —
there w
as an ominous glitch, a flaccid glum glissando.
§ 2 | Glebe
Like the glint and clamor of a
distal enemy’s panoply on the distraught glebe of heterolexical agon, the glum blank my slutty buff glossai
re slackly drew at
glom distressed me like that restive critical literalist who, unable to penetrate the showy serrate breastwork of form and content in order to trespass in the serenely cher
ubic clôture harboring the staggeringly lush secret ineffac
eable garden wherein frolic the gnostic joys of an author’s intent, “
tympanise la densité de sa prose
cadencée et trop léchée” (M. Ang
larès,
Traité des Maladies Écrivassières, Le Mans, Editions du Pays de la Loire, 1987, p. 213).
And yet — and yet! The flat brown lunate pods of a stately miel-y-plátano-scented árbol known to us New Lexicans as
granadillo rojo but to the phytophilous autochthones who stroll mournfully through and across and atop the rustling russet shells of withered chestnut leaves ag
glomerating in the frilly byways of Bayle, and then crunch along the grovelling gravel des chemins brumeux du
Littré and into the creeping crepusculum du
Grand Larousse, as
Dalbergia glomerata Hemsley — the flat brown lunate pods of that singular sylvan specimen (like me, a Tetrastic intruder) were dangling and jingling athwart the preternaturally warm east wind like the beige ankle bangles of tro
glomorphic yakshis or alluring
lares ru
rales curveting their kohl-rimmed snare-dance of perfidious thrall (Circe’s δόλιος κύκλος which so beguiled randy wily Odysseus) amidst the hiving lithe anthophilic bullets (
Apis or
Bombus spp.) that were heatedly intromitting their pollen-dusted crinosities into the gaping throats of the suggestively named ganteline, or clustered bellflower (
Campanula glomerata L.), clumps of which were tardively girdling with their livid solferino skirts of damask
glomerules, not just the amber flanks de cette espèce de feuil
lagée arborescence, but also, I noticed, the verre é
glomisé of
Ecadence,
a lam
bic locus, lager lugar, gueuze gebouw, Trappist Stätte, Abbey Ort, kriek huis, and sundry lieu de frites flamandes which, like the turgid mycelia of
Glomerella fungus marbling the frieze of our espaliered audience of golden reinettes and drooping aments, had insinuated itself (s’insinuait) into the very fretwork of the
bucolic glebe,
which now, I realized, was far more vile than guileless, and far less beloved than the phantasm of gambol and glee my naïad’s spell and my recently therapized
smara (gold-and-cinnamon
infusion d’ambre à gélatine your true senimalist brews somewhere between occiput and blepharii) had conjured out of the vesperal depths of the autumnal gloam.
The sweet green blades of cocksfoot (
Dactylis glomerata L.) growing there, which I had envisaged (envisageais) untangling strand by strand with my deft digits, were berimed and scumbled with the fuliginous bristly sporulae of smut (
Peronospora conglomerata
Fuckel, 1863); the gibbous tagmata of the sleek pillbugs (
Glomeris marginata Villers, 1789) I had longed to palp in the very act of stridulating were blighted all over with blebs and aphids; the dark humid savage loam of the glode the glade the glen the glebe and for all I knew, the entire globe, was a domesticated terrace of Belgian paving stones peopled with bustling constellations of fairy lights and wrought iron furniture, into the nearest cluster of which my disenchanted houri delivered my deflated legs and detumescent instruments (folio, sextant, bodkin, log, quill), unburdened herself of a firkin of what passes for faro in these parts, let flutter down from her slender fingertips a wan leaf of legalistic haiku invoking time date price (a hefty chunk of your average
enlisted man’s pay!) of and for her services, whether consummated or thwarted, whether fulfilled or suspended, and consoled her wry disdainful insatiate grin with a heady sprig of Durango root (
Datisca glomerata C. Presl) she plucked from a hidden recess of her bodice from which a faint bouquet of mouscaille chevaline wafted along with quelques hennissements lugubres: a telescopic echo of the hedge-leaping equids de l’hippodrome d’Auteuil off towards where the moon, the galaxies, the sun, etc. did and still do “rise” from vis-à-vis the antiquated symbology devised to fabricate the phenomenon in question.
Instead, however, of disappearing, as I had expected, into the working entrance of
Ecadence, la serveuse (for that is what my vivid
apsarāḥ had declined into) stepped up to the arbored gazebo where a duo of Teslaphonic goons awaited thrumming and droning in the onstage umb
rage, able-bodicedly (to coin a mot) strapped on the animalistic bulge and wheedle of a Boschesque
glomeration of bagpipes and, just before commencing the epicy
clic boutade with a concentric tetrachordal flageoletic bleat, spat out her sprig and shouted into the clavate phallus of amplification, “Nous sommes [a rising frantic arpeggio of sibilant feedback f
lares like a rampant grimalkin, is deftly snuffed with a professional jerk], nous sommes les Surfeurs de la Glèbe!”
§ 3 | La Cuna
“La cuna!” she croaks between bleats, like a m
aelstr
om glede (
Haliaeetus cataegistrus Gmelin, 1788) soaring and screeching and plucking piscine prey from the cyclon
ic boucle of an Austronesian Charybdis.
“La cuna!” she snarls against the ululant syncopation, and from the bliss
om glout of her scrumptious ovine
lips emanated synaesthetic bliss more voluptuous than any divinely debauched perform
ance ceded by all the w
ily spent maenads of Sod
om, Glaednir, Tanag
ra, Seleucia, Flor
ence, Cades, Cappad
ucci, Bolarum, and etc.
“La. Cu. Na! Luna de mi vicio, fosa de la entrada. Mi seña, mi silla, mi sombra, mi sol!”
No Romano-Teutonic Wörterbuch needed I to
glom her bons mots unter den
dunkeln, keck-andächtigen Ulmen (olmos embrujados por la sombría y
chula transe studieuse) und Apf
eln knackend kauderlich (manz
anos chipés y lurking baragouinement), for she, languid melismatic
natural she, scutched,
scatted, ran, rutilated, and propped up le to
rtu, ardent, castillan
relâchement of the lyrics with an austere occlusive precision and a crisp vocalic chiaroscuro reminiscent of the cymophanous tongue my mother used to lull me to sleep with in the seaside land of my pupation.
What sort of dithyram
bic locus of proleptic paramnesia had I stumbled upon in the very cœur champêtre (
bucolic heart) of the Bois? (Its jack dec
lares “
Ecadence” in all caps, yet there’s no space for the missing letter.)
My pentad of textual tools perked up, the hackles of my sensitive musculi auricu
lares flared, and, despite the larboard slant to the gunwale of the petite table where I had been installed, I transcribed her drea
my sad intense palabras, mouthing them aloud as if, loyal fan that I was or were, still am, and indeed shall ever be, I knew them, and was singing along. Oh, the vicious moon-vice of the cradle, could any phrase more pithily capture the friable pitch of entry, the hollow ganoid plunge of intromission? “Fosa de la entrada!” Sign, seat, shadow, sun.
From the sombre pillars of polyrhythm and
curtained, startled portals of polyphony her accompanists stepped forth: not goons, but stunning nymphs like she!
“Les Surfeuses de la Cuna,” rather, they should be called.
Les Serveuses! I get it!
[Like lurking alligators of arrières-pensées do such boisterous flood-logged boutades of esprit d’e
scalier, pushy knobs of
clunky resophiastry, bonk and thud against the inordinately long, deep, wide, shallow, short, narrow (choose one) keel of the faithful chroniclist de la vie quotidienne’s trusty bark.]
“La-cu-na: el nido de la noche nadando las nalgas de numerosas niñas a través la pantalla para nacer hasta las narices de la nuca.”
Night’s nest swimming in the n
autch nates’ slurry of innumerable nymphets, up to the very neck, the nostrils even, as across the screen of birth being born giving birth?
something something a contrapuntal roulade sans descant bade me arrest my scribbling and look up to
glom her and her sidekicks’ curiously choreographed anap
aest strut as they approached the zenith of the cadenza: two sla
ck-kneed-and-anklutzy, for the nonce, lurches of the left leg, it seemed, for every mordant swipe of the right.
I, mon cher journal, was, dans un mot, transfixed!
Yet a nether frisson urged me to annul my desire for her, for them, for more Bier, and for some Fritten, yes, Fritten, as Durst und Hunger ich hab, and to seek, instead, relief for my, as my gradus ex Montparnasso says,
vessie
(“L’urine sort de la vessie par l’orifice
dit urétral, stance chevrotant dont l’ouverture est commandée par un ṛjumuṣ
ka y résolu sphincter, et est evacuée par l’urètre.”).
I sheathed my impedimenta and stood. “La. Cu. Na.” O, how I longed to
glom in my splayed chafed cheiropalps the ample ampull
ae of her vivid hips! Or hers! Or hers!
Or — a flirtatious nudge by one of their more telluric avatars jarred my avaricious elbow as, without pausing to validate any of my needs or wants, she not ungracefully circumnavigated the uneven cobbles of the terrace and reentered l’estaminet
belge, casting a rather unservile gesture, somehow both askance and backward, at me, a gesture that seemed to positively b
lare, “Suivez-moi!”
Translation: “
Glom me if you dare!”
How fitting, then, that the very morsel I have chosen — despite the cow-eyed “fâcheuse lacune,” comme disait my gre
at uncle, Dr Tartis of
Lyons, a puckish erotologist, that stares blankly from all too many a pristine lexique or dog-eared
slovar (a sort of bushy-tailed
glossaire of soft sighs and slavish symptoms) — to be the anastomotic quoin of my lexical glaiks, so to speak, for its ability to convey senses not unrelated to the Scots
glaum or
glam, the Sanskrit
gláha, the Romani
džanglo —
glom: a savvy gambler, a cunning sage, a wise thief learned, like Arjuna and Odysseus, in the ways of guile and gauntlet — antique virtues, archaic
arts, tantric delusions — how fitting, then, that
glom should have
glommed itself —
for “thoughts do,” like the rotund cud of currency, secreted between smock and skin within a pouch attached to a neck-bound lanyard,
which your average
enlisted man pays to extricate himself from the same sale histoire his sordid amour propre had initially expended to indulge in, “
glom (
blicken) l’épaule du mot” —
into the verschlech
tert caudal stirnrunzelnd nave of the buvette flamande where the bux
om, gleef
ul, bicochlear
playmates sinned!
And so thus I stood, entered the dark well of the café, and followed her undulant retreating pizzicato past cashier and counter and tables and booths and goggle-eyed patrons and a view through a Dutch casement into a bustling cuisine
belge and out through a low door (“We make to ourselves
glommings [
Blicken] of doorcracks”) across an entropic courtyard
où “il me fallut,” to quote one fic
tile penman’s adysplastic model of mnemonoclastic prose, “l’accompagner dans un petit pavillon treillissé de vert, assez semblable aux bureaux d’octroi désaffectés du vieux Paris et dans lequel étaient depuis peu installés ce qu’on appelle en Angleterre un lavabo et en France, par une an
glomanie mal informée, des water-closets,”
only to be greeted, among the glagolithic shapes of night
club-iconic shadows — “accroupis comme des sphinx” indeed! — and gurgling shards of lurid porcelain idols inhabiting the redolent slabwork and moldy grouting of that dank chaplet of
lares nymphales, by a betrayed lacuna of harelipped barbate hope.
I resigned myself to putting the hypogean space through its all too sublunary paces.
“The
glomming (
der Blick)
gloms (
blickt) windiness by thumbing a humanness of the leaf and nonleaf of sandpatterns.”
But, with rigging retoggled and girdle recinched, as I approached the totem of the tap to asperge my soiled digits in a timid trickle of eau most definitely non potable, I
glommed a crescendo of tripletted di
aereses in the c
aesura of mutual g
lares cast, not askance or leeward this time, but, for one brief engorged gap (“the airy
glomming [
der luftige Blick] of the doorcracks is the object”) between the fall of the curtain behind me and the finely tesselated void of the mirror before me, utterly, unabashedly, irrefutably windward: areol
ae, axill
ae, super
b oculi cascading in a phant
om-glittered sestet of chestnut (marron) antif
lares, a
sepia-mantled synchoresis highlighting the moonbright cortex of her irreproachable empire of breasts, wings, face.
§ 4 | Oracle
What beguiling reson
ance deceives the clear-eyed visage cradled in the wall-slung ri
gol-mirror with the tawny naked shoulder glimpsed in the naos (cella) of the
naïad’s temple, synchronizes the rando
m ogled areol
ae with the clenched vestigial fistu
lar sequel
ae of acrid oleaginous lust, and thus links the lim
bic locus of despair and desire and our basest compulsions with a bé
mol gap in the heterotextual delectus of a nephelophrenic mnemophrast?
What plucky
lares viaticis
glom the copper-glimmer of thought (think images of things real or imaginary that shall or have come to pass — while typically this bravur
a penman’s style displays eminent adjectives, it does not di
sdain, lament, espy with horror, nor even spurn your monosylla
bic locutions [thing, come, pas
s, real] favored by the workaday clavierist) to the time-cracked means by which we draw thought, whether clear or obscure, out of ourselves (think tracings of coal dust, ramifications of coral, leachings of acorn and taro, and whatever else we may wish to
accede, endorse, or attribute to the gloss
er’s ali
bi, clou, compromiso, Prüfung, scholia, and so on and so forth)?
What mephitic impulses telescope the
bucolic sandpattern of moonlight and stars into the dank airy mucilaginous adyton of the Creole oracle herself, momping about somewhere outside the backdoor of the groaning decaying cabinets d’
Ecadence in the darkening shade of that arbre magique mentioned
supra, rhythmically fondling and mouthing the snaky coils and scrotal sac of what I recognized as the humble
gaita tixputana of my childhood, an instrument whose billowing air bladder was of tender goatskin sewn and whose polished bite- and finger-shafts were hewn from solid cylindrical chunks of that stately miel-y-plátano-scented árbol known to us New Lexicans as granadillo rojo but to the phytophilous autochthones who stroll mournfully through and across and on top of without even bothering to avoid crushing the rustling russet shells of withered chestnut leaves along the allée des Fortifications, past the hedge-leaping equids of the hippodrome, and then crunch along the grovelling gravel of the chemin des Gravilliers totally unaware of the grapplings and the gropings, the passion and the panting, going on abaft and abow, aloft and athwart, alongside and midships of them in the creeping crepusculum and the receding gloom — it is known to them — incurious, insensitive, indifferent
them — as
Dalbergia glomerata Hemsley?
And to what Pythian spell do we owe the glaireous gift of that vision of her blowing and squeezing and coaxing, thus, from that throbbing organ, a reedy, breathy sort of samba accompanied by the
aeolian caxixis, ganzás, maracas, and chocalhos dangling from the ligneous lord of the glade?
(I note now that the musky scent and ardent echo of that infrequently encountered tree mingles in my memory with the tangy, tingly, bead-like odor of
Syncarpia glomulifera (Sm.) Nied., 1893, and that Pushkin’s mother was known to the Francophone
élite of Courland as “la Belle Créole.”)
“The face of deluded objects ist ein Blick (
glomming) des Wortes.”
Her irises, I saw, were dilated from a trance-inspiring potion partook, partoken, and partaken yet of by only the divinest of naïads and most obliging of nymphs, at the base of which oracular solution a substance called
glomusha (extract of
Datura stramonium L.) writhes and coils
nāga-like, and I bade her untie the drawstring of my bursting burs
a, engorged as it was with a bulging bolus of doughboy’s dough, a capacious cache of skirmisher’s cash, a tumid packet of what passes for your average
enlisted man’s pay in these parts, and res gest
ae ab
aeterno all over the absciss
ae of our ardor such that
on the x-axis the larv
ae of our evolving love metamorphosed, according to H
aeckel’s canniballistic law, from tiny writhing tadpole into gawky erect ostracoderm, from moping meterophagous c
aecilian into the ant-harboring thorny trunk of an African acacia, and,
on the y-axis, M
aeterlinck’s blue bladder of bubbl
y “shockin’ pleasure” (according to the script) relaxed its musculus sphincter vesic
ae and, concomitantly, at the other end of the tether, did the same for its musculus sphincter urethr
ae, letting the cerulean liquid of our embrace flow like a dancing hillock of windswept s
assy rock lupine hypnotizing the warm cloudless forenoon of childhood bliss,
while on the z-axis, both pairs of our musculus sphincter pupill
ae [under the sympathetic impetus, no doubt, of the aforementioned psychogenic potion] unhitched their jaws to choke down the entire egg-sac of foveate reality spanning a whole shelf of our bodies’ B
aedekers charting the stromal locales and homolog
ous silky parenchymal seasons most propitious for catching a glimpse and snatching a
glom and hatching a glut of Asia’s bombycids, Europe’s bombyliids, the New World’s bombycillids, and all the whelks of old-time Oceania,
and now here’s where things get a bit more, as they say,
“louche,” “hot,” “transcendent” [Printer: A diagram portraying the 11-fold symmetry of the situation would be helpful for the dimensionally impaired — NDLR], for,
while the q-axis displayed something like the pr
aetorium in which C
aesar Augustus was ensonced whilst on campaign in Chald
aea,
the r-axis showed, and, in fact, still shows D
aedalus and his eponymous construction along with the howling beast gyring its scolecoid gimbal into the luscious wabe of the depraved m
aenad trapped therein,
the s-axis [verb here] something having to do with the Parace
lsian etyma, spendthrift in e
vidence, plain-proportioned in theory, with which drow
sy Linné tamed a spurious neotropical dreamscape of baroque butterflies sipping hallucinogenic nectar from the florid gorse of the verdant stage across which bejewelled bothriurids scamper and pose, rampant, affrontant, embraced, telsons erect, chel
ae sejant,
the t-axis busied itself with proclaiming the Nic
aean creed along with a litany of details about moths and more butterflies,
the v-axis involved a cobra’s uvula, a bear’s shadow, and the nighttime sky as perceived by a bottom-dwelling fish of some sort,
the φ-axis revealed a p
aederast’s polych
aete shame upon catching sight of the combined beauty of M
ae West’s magnificent bosom, the polygonal splendor of Pearl M
ae Bailey’s supercilious gaze and zygomatic perfection, the lithe Pre-Raph
aelite grace of pubescent Polynesians, and the russet octomanic clinch of effusive orangutans
Seliony-pruchaskalo (condition
ed) in Prince Pavlov’s laboratory,
the ξ-axis tried out test
ae, thec
ae, tibi
ae, trache
ae, tenebr
ae, wrens stalked by
an ocelot, thrushes at which a st
oat chortles hungrily,
herons that clout
anoles, touch thrashing snakes, and
hunt loaches torpidly eyed by coral bright trogons warbling amidst the
Pfaffia glomerata of the Pantanal, and, ultimately, it is hoped,
the ψ-axis convulsed convened convected and coveted vulv
ae, vagin
ae, vertebr
ae, ven
ae dorsales penis profunda, ven
ae labiales anteriores, ven
ae labiales posteriores, ven
ae dorsales clitoridis superficiales, ven
ae profund
ae clitoridis, and a tetrapetalous coracle bading our adventurous ingemminate cloac
ae traverse the corolla of blue-eyed dawn nictitating behind the nocturnal burka to rearrive at my table, my seat, my heterolexical tools of promiscuous textuality.
§ 5 | Medoi
“En
medio del idioma tengo
miedo. Sí, lo tengo, y se ha ido
de mi.”
Thus did that cyclical siren aux yeux fougueux sufflate and sing whilst I, suffused by the magnificent sense of leisure and power and utter temerity that the me
re, salient, and mun
dane (ecce homo, indeed!) act of having extravasated the endometrial ichor,
glomerular sanies,
innately spasmed rheum, and bilious effluvia (no, my impudent ephemeris, you did not
spy anal sediment caking the rusty saddle of my panties, but something far more delicate) from one’s immodest innards in the claustropho
bic locus ordained for that purpose grants,
continued to
glom a magnanimous portion of my attention upon the idiomorphous, respiratory voice of the
biniou nasillard that proceeded, as it were, from the schoolhouse depths of my New Lexican nymphancy, all the while admiring, say, the fantastic, indelible, and, just where it should, bulging line of slacks which no mere
enlisted man’s pay, nor even a visiting lexical ecological consultant’s sumptuous per
diem, could afford to have had pressed into the high-class serge of the mufti mantling the distinguished looking habitué to my right who
glommed with approval
the tangled sutras of the magniloquent essay — “If the finger of the treatise is an airy finger, the
glomming (
Blick) is called an airy
glomming (
luftig Blick). Usw....” — anent the hollow hub of hysterogenic fear inherent in the rostrocaudal medoid of promiscuous textuality, the sex-axle of plurilingual pleasure, I continued to stitch with my golden nib into the margins of the chercheur armori
cain Médoire Ang
larès’s monograph on the manatees of the Medean Sea (
Les Lamantins de la Mer Médoise, Le Mans, Éditions du Pays de la Loire, 1973)
around which the whirling wheel of w
ords empirically clumps and clusters and churns out the whole partouze of literary genres that have ever echoed, flounced, gargarized, and bemired themselves in humanity’s organs of audition, orality, and oculonasal introspection, and I, a lovely lone diomedean figure installed à une petite table au milieu de tous les yeux fourmillant sur la terrasse d’
Ecadence above which
bucolic Uṣas began to
splay and sentimentally splash her
promised medusoid sepals, as viridian, as hirsute, as rubricaudal as Jean-Louis Thuillier’s
Cerastium glomeratum (Fr.
céraiste aggloméré, Cat.
cerasti aglomerat), a rampant weed endemic to these parts that sheds its tiny, saw-toothed, anemochoric fruits to the
ericoid-maned, promiscuous winds of dichogamous fate,
felt them resonate in all the bearings in all the hubs of all the chakras of my being, from my feet to my fingertips, from my medulla oblongata to my
median umbilical ligament via my medulla spinalis and down, thus, to the very eidolon, apologue, calenture, imprimatur, even, of my entire thorny knotty gnarled and unruly project,
a diag
ram in code impromptu of which, as I’ve alluded to somewhere or other, would take the form, if we ex
posed Rimbaud’s conjecture to
Rao cinedimensional clitalysis, of a muscular medoid pumping heterolexical chyle throughout the entire hendecachorionic viscera of that zeozoëtic con
glomeration of
stuff we abstru
se dimorphs call “poly
dinomic reality,” viz., a multi-dy
adic monerization qua pleiody
namic eroding of the kako
daimonic reticulum of sens
oria cnidempirica,
while she and her enviously uniformed seraphs pinched, pivoted, fingered, thrummed, and chanted in some sort of idiomatic harmony,
“En el mundo de mi odio, no hay miel, no hay lima, no hay hielo, no hay ron, sino por los meros nudos del mar en que se duermen las sirenas.”
But before I continue, allow me to command, with the power of my per
diem, more potent stuff to confront the
dense matinal psychomachy that tends to stalk me at this hour. S’il vous plaît, ma jolie jeune fille, un verre de rhum avec de la glace. Non, non, merci. Noirâtre des néotropiques, s’il est possible. Sans citron, s’il vous plaît. Sans menthe et sans sucre aussi. Merci.
§ 6 | IPSI
Although the studies of intentional plagiarism, sometimes involuntary (IPSI), as well as involuntary plagiarism, sometimes intentional (IPSI), in which I had engaged at the Institute for Paperism and Senimalistic Invaginations (IPSI) in the city of my ontogeny had been
intense and meticulous, the fruits they bore turned out to be largely insipid.
More inspiring was the work I performed under the supervision of Prof.
See Law at the Institute of Psycho-Sociological Investigations (IPSI) in that same lugar. There we studied the various reactions of baby animals (
pika pups, stoat kittens, possum cubs) to the administration of
intense pain, sporadic or incessant (IPSI).
It was wh
ile I was ensconced in that institution’s peaceful and scholarly intellectual ethosphere that I submitted my paper sur les “Plagiats intentionnels (
PI) et plagiats involontaires (
PI)” to a conference on translexicality held at the Institute of Lexical Ecology (
ILE) in Owlstain, Flouz., to which I subsequently became attached and continued to combine my
intense interests in both plagiary and sociophysiology and the rest is, as they say, until my translation to Lutèce where, just the other day, I came across one of those “inversions troublantes qui suggèrent avec force que le réel n’est qu’un miroir serv
ile de ce qui est déjà survenu dans les romans” (
op.
cit., § 2.67), c’est-à-dire, a curious instar of IPSI in, of all places, rue Ernest Psichari, in the seventh, just off the oak- and Japanese-maple lined
boulevard de Las Robles (
sic), with its Appalachified placard not even bothering to cater to the autochtones: Investigators of Parasitism and Symbiosis International (IPSI), history.
§ 7 | ILE
In the heart of the Flouzianian capital, Owlstain, the Institute of Lexical Ecology (ILE) shares the sprawling grounds of Château Methuen — a triangular island of learning and enchantment in the heart of the Flouzianian capital, Owlstain, whose hypotenuse is formed by the Owlstain River, the adjacent side by Mare Nostrum (on the saxatile shores of which the gracile sirens do dwell and dream while sunbathing les
bians smile indulgently), and the opposite by that fluviatile locus of Flouziania
n dace ecesis cheekily dubbed by locals the “Lowstain” — with its sisinstitutions ISOCPHYS and CACA, the Institute of Sociophysiology and the Center for the Analysis and Clitalysis of Altarity, respectively.
Here I found that my dual interests in plagiary, whether falling under the category of involuntary plagiarism, sometimes intentional (
IPSI), or intentional plagiarism, sometimes involuntary (
IPSI), and sociophysiology, were deemed neither
alien nor impertinent, but rather were heralded as fertile harbingers prefiguring and confirming the independently established auspices of translexicality, schizomythology, and the clitalysis of heterotextual altarity, to mention only three of the volatile ponds of portatile
projets I so readily plunged into.
The fictile textwork demanded, after all, by plagiary’s factitious dithyra
mb, as ILE instructs us, is as integral to wordism, senimalism,
lesbianism, and paperism as it is to any other aspect of textuality, whether ductile, refractile, promiscuous, or delitescent. Tell that to the sterile pedophiles and senile imbeciles and hostile gentiles and febrile sarcophiles across the Arathu in
IPSI!
In the world of my hate, thus, I could no longer truthfully apply the words of the Roman Kaiser Julius — “
Ipsi profecti a palude ad ripas Sequanae e regione Luteciae tran
s Labieni smilaces atque contra castra considunt” — to myself, since no
ipsi in Owlstain (as far as I was aware) set out from
les étangs of malarial envy
contra the camp of the holm-oak-surrounded Labieni where I was not ensconced at all, since I had already hightailed it by way of express aerostat to the lake region of Appalachia thenceward on via brigantine to Lutèce where I currently dwell about as far north of the banks of the Seine as I am now sitting to that same river’s west, at a petite wrought-iron (fer forgé) marble-topped table on the vivacious pre-dawn terrace of
Ecadence in the Bois where, despite the linguovisual and auroral attractions of the establishment’s anglo-, slavo-, sino-, franco-, germano-, homo-, italo-, graeco-, negro-, nycto-, ailuro-, oeno-, and hippophile clientèle and agile, utterly unservile hirelings (I’m thinking in particular of the versatile bringer of dawn herself, the nubile étoile of the petit matin chanting her hispanophone canta
bile missa nitida), I’m scratching these
mémoires labiles with the fine-nibbed gold of my vermiculated Pelikan Stresemann 929 into the abaxile fabric of mon calepin habile:
“Paris! Paris!! Paris!!! The very name has always been one to conjure with, whether you think of it as a mere sound on the lips and in the ear, or as a magical written or printed
palabra for the eye. And here is the thing itself (
ipsissimum) at last, and you and I and he and she, you you- or I my- or he him- or she herself,
ipsissimus!
ipsissimī!!
ipsissimae!!!
ipsissima!!!! in the very heart of it, to live there and learn there as long as we want, and make of ourselves the
nimble assiduous lexical ecologist, sociophysiologist, schizomythologist, nay, super
b senimalist we long to be!”
“Excusez-moi, meussieudame,” the
slim Sabine sapphist intrudes, “mais il y a plus de rhum. Surtout le rouge et même le noir quoi. Et quand même on se ferme. C’est l’aube, le point du jour. Et je m’encaisse.”
§ 8 | PI
Let us define the palavering insult (PI) as a form of parale
ipsis capable of inflicting pain, not by means of prickly phrases, but by the acute gaps between them, such that it is the periods and pauses, plutôt que les sottises elles-même, emanating from the insultress’s provocative and invidious articulators motu proprio that act as so many pikes and poniards on the sensitive insultee’s perceptive and impressionable auditory apparatus.
Now, one’s primordial instinct upon receiving such a PI is to intone a paral
ipsical protest in kind, such as: “Now, I’m no sol
ipsist, but I do not deem my request for a glass of dark neotropical rum on ice, without yerbabuena, sin citrus, and sans sucre ajouté to be at all anad
ipsic in any accepted sense. If the impeccably garbed gent
ipsilateral to my sensuous mano escribiendo received a congenially congeneric nightcap avant l’aube, why can’t I?
Quoiqu’on pourrait me classer, si vous me permettez d’illustrer par le moyen d’un cas plutôt bénin, parmi les
voyageurs aliénés, par exemple, would my opitulant iatromants so t
ipsily administer to me the ipecac of insolence, the catnip of abstinence, prohibition’s piquant, acrid, intolerable, yet nevertheless insipid ptisan? Mais pas du tout, ma jeune fille, pas du tout! They would, en revanche, par contre, ply me with rumbustious catholicons and aromatic cordials, nurse me with sublime theriacs and fluent panaceas, prescribe to me, in short, the very elixir vitae of life itself: the soma of the sorghum, the cachaça of the cane, the chthonic spirit of the tuber, the amṛta of the grain!”
Now, when the punctilious insultee is an invasive
alien imported from a distant Tetrastic land where parole I (PI) constitutes the lingua franca, and the provocative insultress is a Poldevian intruder who, like the former, has acquired
le langage du pays of their intercourse (PI), that is, parole II (PII), relatively late in life and at second-hand, as it were; when the former has lived in said PI for hardly a month, and the latter for hardly two years; when s/he who requests his or her wants to be serviced has been swathed, swaddled, dandled, bathed, diddled, coddled, gamahuched, and so on in a third parole (PIII) and educated in a fourth (PIV), and she whose job it is is to serve those wants is entirely lacking in compassion, tolerance, mirth, courtesy, amusement, everything, in short, but a contumelious rictus and an inane parody of paronomastic repartie; then, my anatr
ipsic spicilegium, the ensuing polyglottological riposte is generally a prehensile imitation of prolative intelligibility, to wit:
My witty parry to her mundane lunge, misconstrued, went unanswered.
The situation is further compounded by the differential relations, or degrees of heterolexical altarity, obtaining anent our four paroles PI, PII, PIII, and PIV which we may envision as a tetraramous
arbre à langue, such that PI and PII are two closely spaced branches placed
ipsilaterally on the grandiloquent trunk of copia verborum, whilst PIII and PIV jut out either above or below PI and PII, each according to their own unique vector, opposite both to each other and to the dyad (PI, PII) which latter, being what many a phonological investigator would deem dialects of each other, are represented in the scissile marrow of the protreptic interlocutor’s posterior insula or Island of Reil as a proficient and impeccable whole, a single langue I (LI) whose rhetoric is capable of attaining peaks (cimes, faîtes, sommets) of eloquence and persuasiveness utterly
alien to the ignorant insuperable prolocutrix’s datura-addled
matière grise the denatured contents of which remain as utterly opaque to us as the Cimmerian tenebrity of her dictum, i.e., to shirk, cash-out, and skedaddle.
Langues II and III (LII and LIII) correspond isomorphically to PIII and PIV, respectively.
Furthermore, we may represent the total heterolexical altarity of the situation (sauf the insultress’s obscure matrilingo, which we may discount as some hopelessly distant PIX or PIL or PIC or even PIM) by the use of Solomon’s ratio, viz. three wholes plus some infinitely iterative fraction which is greater than one-eighth but less than one-seventh, such that the heterolexical altarity between any pair of LI, LII, and LIII generates a heterolexical triangle of three sides each equal to one, while the heterolexical altarity between paroles PI and PII which make up LI is equal to something like 0.141592 etc., the sum of these three wholes and a part yielding a quantitative measure of total heterolexical altarity hiving among within and between PI, PII, PIII, and PIV thus equals Archimedes’s constant, that is, the Ludolphian number, π.
By the way, the passel of aliases — Solomonic ratio, Archimedean constant, Ludolphian number, Baudhayanan complement, Euclidean collop, and so on — all tersely embosomed within the Neo-Phoenician glyph π (
pi), concisely illustrates the slippery, concentric, coadjuvant, and not infrequently elliptical nature of the complex factitious fictile phenomena I wrestled with in my paper sur les “Plagiats intentionnels (PI) et plagiats involontaires (PI),” the latter being a lexicoleptic symptom (
symptôme lexicoleptique) of schizomythia; the former, a productive implement of literary composition (
puissant procédé de l’écriture).
Or, as my own plagiat intentionnel (PI) of a passage from a book put out by the Numidio-Roman diaskeuast Maisel Bénatrou attests, “Le monde est rempli de plagiaires” (
op. cit., p. 51).
Furthermore, since the geometrical ratio (circumference over diameter) expressed by the symbol (equals π) is an artifact of the recumbent laminar leiodermatous substrate of its illustration (a fiction, in other words, of the vellum of its divulgation) that hardly begins to accurately circumscribe the lithe velutinous pommels of empirical haecceity (nor, by the way, the lanuginous parenchyma of ontic ubiquity), one would not be entirely amiss if one took this chimera subtending the squamous reticulations of prehensile experience of the inosculant articulations of noumenal quiddity I farce the interstitial cruces of mon œuvre with to be the very totem of my text.
She (elle, ella, lei, sie, hun, hon, hän, avaḷ, zuen, auté, tini, igi, kanoju, t’ā, etc.: the generic feminine pronoun I employ should not be lent a less figurative scope or tenor than I intend: think boats, water, souls, waves, species, life, speech: all she) let flutter down from her slender fingertips a pale instrument of pecuniary obligation and went tra
ipsing off into the
anile aniline dawn.
§ 9 | See Law
Tout au long du cours de l’exercice quotidien de notre s
obre travail érudit, viz., the infliction of pain, sporadic or incessant (
IPSI), on our soft inmates, Prof. See Law and I typically indulged in the sort of informal psycho-social intercourse (do such precipitous junctures [crises fugitives] of homiletical
lenity dampen assiduous lab work? not at all!) that cong
enial chercheurs de l’âm
e lésée the world over, no matter whether fieldbound observers of macu
lose lye welts or benchside adepts comme nous de l’asc
èse éléctrophysiologique, engage in.
I told her of my childhood en los barrios altos y bajos de la ciudad, and she told me that she had been born in Lushui on the Salween River of a Lianhua- or Western-She-speaking Lisu mother from the Seu-phá clan and a Na-Yi father from Ningland.
I remember the frisson of unvoiced merger as, together, we strapped the next subject into the yellow-painted pillory, then the dimidiate groan, cognate to the sol
ipsistic post-coital
clope, as our digits, momentarily fused by the joint task, cleaved apart, and the stout whalebone soles of her chappals shrieked with Sichuan
ese elegance across the linoleum floor to retreat behind the blinkered instrument panel where, in her typical lab costume of chatoyante pèlerine
leste, yellow silk blouse and maroon shalwars, she dialed in the appropriate duration and intensity, while I, more proximal to the sacrifice, clad in the flunky’s white, and innocent of the settings, made note of the animal’s reactions.
Presently the melodious-voiced lady emerged, her index finger tapping upon her cigarette, and, whilst I disposed of the victim and readied the cage for the next, she recalled that she had left Lushui at age twelve to make her way downriver, mostly by wearing out her sandals, sometimes by straddling a mule-cinched pack saddle, past Wan Hsa-la and Pasawng, until, where the Moei enters the Salween, she boarded a fus
ty enisled sampan which took her to the port city of Moulmein where a Malayan yawl waited to deliver her to places she was only able to reconstruct in retrospect, with the aid of an atlas borrowed from the library of
Ilena Public School 1 (
IPS 1) and her father-in-law’s knowledge of shipping routes: first, the island of Simeuluë, then the island of Taprobane, then, skirting the Ma
nilaeo (“Cowrie Islands”), onward through the Gulf of Aden and into the Red Sea where she debarked, Shiva knows why, at As Salif — the luteous scaffold was ready.
Perhaps my hand lingered a little too wistfully athwart hers as we bolted the beast to its portable golden Golgotha: one plucked eyebrow jerked quizzically up, and melted immediately back into the shrewd indifference of her shiny forehead — an orientalistic caricature of herself.
She tossed and stamped out the butt and commanded, “Proceed!”
As she passed into her station, I heard the click of her
yellow steel Zippo, the voiced, pursed-l
ip sip of the inveterate
fumeuse, and from behind the instrument panel an expurgatory screen of fag smoke rose. Later, our analysis enabled us to correlate the surprisingly spasmodic dashes of the little fellow’s forepaws I had observed with a sporadic delivery of relatively high frequency
galvanovagues which left a sallow trace, a sort of yellowish-violet bruise, in the correspondingly dis
limned synaptase titers obtained from the appropriate
myelinated spans in the relevant corticospinal regions.
In As Salif she languished and grew pale for, in her precious brogue, “nigh onto a frame of time surpassing my overseas passage until one fine day” she hitched a camel-lift to Az Zaydiyah whence a lorry took her to Jizan where she caught ship up the Red Sea all the way — at last! — to and through the Suez Canal and thence to Marseille where diurnally at the bar-restaurant-tabac La Wallonie du Mer [sic] in the Vieux Port she washed dishes and waited tables tandis que nocturnally in a sweatshop of that same quartier she sewed faux-suede patches onto the sleeves of faux-tweed jackets jusqu’au jour où — “I am so [haptically emphasized proximodistal caress of her dextral digits with my sinistral] impressed that you remember the name of the café you worked in when you were twelve!” “Well, I have been back twice to visit, once with my husband and once with my sister
Lee See, whom I’d been awaiting the whole — we’re wasting time. Proceed!”
See Law’s older sister
Lee See arrived from her chalet on the Walensee and paid for See Law’s passage on a Texas-bound tramp steamer en route to Owlstain thence acoss the Arathu to la nuestra ciudad at the Porto Vecho of which she debarked as any common pubescent tourist would, the same irresistibly waifish, ever smiling, and suborbitally plumbaceous jeune fille she had been when she left Lushui, despite the repetitive ravishings bought by endless roll calls of
enlisted man’s pay and
seamanly stipends the whole length of the wanton year (anno lasciviensis), and was greeted by her prospective husband’s father Llywelyn O’Wallis, a Welsh seaman from Swansea; her husband’s mother Athena
Yellow Steel, a Siuslaw squaw originally from
Lestelle, Wyo.; and her husband’s sister
Leetle Sly Owl Woman whose first words to See Law were, “Máščiṫaxanxan. Łítīumanł.” (‘We are sisters. Let’s eat.’) She went to live with them in their house in the
Ilena district of her new homeland’s Capital City. She was thirteen years old and the man to whom she was engaged to be married, Wallis
Yellow Steel, said to her on his return from the Twin Isles —
The names
Wales and
Welsh, by the way, and most likely also the
Wal(l) in
Walensee where See Law’s sister apparently still lives, and the town of
Walenstadt where the bank her husband wired her bride price to was, and
Wallonia and
Wallachia and
Wallis and
Wahlheim and
Wilhelm and
Werther even (since
Werther is really
Walter mispronounced), it seems, all come from the ancient Teutonic root for ‘
alien.’
[I have her benevolent permission to use this propitiously elegant play of fortuitously senimalistic
etimología in any way I wish.]
The man to whom she was engaged to be married, Wallis
Yellow Steel, said to her on his return from the Twin Isles where he had been observing the social behavior of the
speedy lamantins that rest and nest and romp there, “Kuminčnx txuṫuháułtxanx ṫamš” (‘Not for nothing are you child-bought [i.e. have you been bought as a child]’), and promptly enrolled her in
IPS 1, from which she would graduate magna cum laude (I too graduated in the upper reaches of my class at TBS, but I was never wont or one or willing to brag about it) four years later [an event they celebrated by finally consummating their marriage].
It is not unusual for an animal that has been subjected to mild increments of pain, whether sporadic or incessant, to continue to yelp and squeal or at least drearily whimper when removed from the citrine constraints. To avoid confounding the investigator’s results, these animals should be destroyed, their assay ignored.
The subject of her valedictory address, naturally, was her journey and transformation and desire to continue that journey and transformation by way of higher education (privy to a full scholarship to North Texas-Egyptian University at Beulah [NTEU-B], her honor’s thesis delved into the xenophysiological load invasive
alien species burden their endemic congenerics with, and she eventually headed east to receive her doctorate [for which she pioneered the technique of installing artificial symplasts into the ependymas of her subjects, measuring, by means of an ascending amplidyne, the diffusion of adenine in response to noxious stimuli] at the Appalachian Mental Institution [AMI] in Shatsbrook in the lab of the well-known Flouzianian sociophysiologist and translexicalist
Robert Trober [she, in fact, was the first of the latter’s “
nine dampest lays”], thenceward back to her adopted homeland to head her own lab at
IPSI — one marvels at the innumerable details even the most scrupulous of CVs omits), and by having a family of her own so she could pass on to her own daughter (whom, despite her travels, she would raise here in the barrio of the ciudad of the país that had granted her resident
alien status), the
bon mot of
Leetle Sly Owl Woman’s rejoinder to See Law’s inquiry into how a Welsh-Siuslaw sirenologist in the Western Tetrastics managed to procure a Lisu-Nu child-bride from the Nanzhao Protectorate (N.P.): “Sˀàs tlúxyułcanx mità (‘He knows thy father’).” [Note the use of the clitic of
alienable involvement
ł.]
She coughed, the audience laughed, and I prepared the flavous gallows for another furry martyr.
§ 10 | Intense
The torrid sensation of intense thl
ipsis procured when one sl
ips into the tentacular pelt of a tight, slick, phocine bathing suit, two-piece preferably, and obligatorily black — comme deux
lianes sympathiques qui vous enserrent with the sensuous ophidian pressure of their tensile thatchwork — can only be rivalled, I imagine, by the voluptuous, slightly deranged feeling of draping oneself in the dermal vinculum of one’s freshly slaughtered sweetheart or sister or mother who first made you wear the damned thing.
I recall one day, it was late spring or at least un fin de semana sometime during un été précoce et intense, when the entire
IPSI staff, our directrice incluse, on the spur of the moment (auf die Eingebung des Augenblicks, sur le coup), decided to take the rest of the afternoon off, and head to our favorite beach,
Playa den Missten, a secluded cove on the leeward side of the Prietan isthmus, fronted by low intensity azurine breakers and backed by a pre-Cambrian rainforest.
It had been an intense week of psycho-sociological divastigation, and, like littoralists everywhere, our capacious handbags were already stuffed with the necessities required of such capricious forays: maillot, traje, tricot, goggles, bee salve, sun unction, mosquito balm,
quinine, saetae ostentariae, catnip, biscuits, rum, ron, rhum, etc.
Preparatory to splaying athwart the argus-eyed laver of the plage, my impressively thick volume of
Trober’s
Nine Dampest Lays [who/that] Innately Spasmed, I first preened the insatiate corvid wings of mes aisselles lisses, then lay supine on my mat, knees up, and, against the delicate grain, fluffed my erect underplumage to
display — tense, manly yet pris
sy-mien’d, spent à la m
énesse qui noie ta détr
esse toquée in animo between the rougher overtones of my clair-obscur — the paedomorphic mound of my tenderest singularity.
I was gunning to stir the ocular delectation of one chain-smoking beach-goer in particular, you see; was angling for the ripe occasion to lure her away from our
ipsical colleagues and into the ancient misty maidenferns, there to proffer her the gift of my torn moist maidenhead.
Entre mes cuisses
laineuses, however, I saw that
Lee See, the lone
alien of our contingent, with her turgid
ears and that g
reased-eel look typical of the
anile avaricious, had condescended to descend from her
torre bergachtig donde crece el
berro trébol (
Lepidium trifolium L.), donde
la luxure borre todo sauf the bootless adornment of some improficuous pasttime on which she and her species lavish their insipid indolence: culinary orgies (dites “gastronomic events”); gasped admiration (feigned) of one of their group’s recent acquisition of a
pet desman, snail, ynambu, or
yellow estelmo (a breed of miniature toad); easel painting, invariably “en p
lein air;” prurient visits, in the guise of “philanthropy,” to sanatoria, leprosaria, famine-ravaged Laponian hamlets, equatorial nature preserves, and other such “exotic” entropia of common misery.
(Now, I’m no apologist for the proletariat, but do allow me to insert a not altogether irrelevant citation, the source of which I deem beyond ideological reproach: “These dre
amy planned sites of reflective leisure, where the wanderer
may sit and, en plessor, so to speak, watch birds, study plant life, or stare into pools of uncertain depth where fish are alleged to have introduced themselves, are often the former centres of
intensely mad, asphyxiating industrial labour performed under harsh conditions for low wages.”)
It was the third in the aforesaid series that occupied
Lee See avant la parenthèse, and although the simile, unlike the quotation, is almost entirely inapt, I’m reminded of the Provençal yokels who must have guffawed at Van Gogh, at the poignant discrepancy between the se
lenian pastoral
vue before them and the not even amateurish but downright imbecilic impasto the maniac was ejaculating all over la toile fricotée.
I don’t recall how that smirch and blemish (for her eminently quotable industrialist of a husband, O’Wallis, or Brian of Woetsel, or something, had also popped in, via
The London Suburbs (TLS) or
Journal of Tetrastic Littoral Studies (JTLS) or both, no doubt, from the outer frame of some glen or dale in the Far Hebrides, I think) on my project of s
aline seduction got there, but I did or do know (if that lexeme has any meaning) that no bribe or ruse would serve to separate the sisters from each other, nor the former from their spouses (one ignores
their corvid shadow until they bespatter the proceedings with the intense aureate
fiente of temperate ubiety), would suffice to assuage my intense disappointment, and so I took a dip, betowelled and sunned myself, and got drunk with a junior colleague who, instead of inviting me in to post-littorally share her stupendous parts with me and her golden-haired fiancé Pierre (as her responses to my hints had seemed to promise), stupidly dumped me in front of my own collapsed bungalow.
“There is a dark, mad mystery in some human hearts,” writes
Trober, “which, sometimes, during the tyranny of a usurper something, leads them to be all eagerness to cast off the most intense beloved bond, as a hindrance to the attainment of whatever transcendental object that usurper mania or madness or monstrous something so tyrannically suggests” to one who steps into the sultry downpour of the shower, and, engulfed as if by some sur
ly maenad’s net’s pitiless matr
aque seinée ostinatamente,
peels off la dégr
ossie, niquée, tenacious membrane, slowly or with a covetous yank, and feels, like the worn faceless
jeton of
yellow steel some insensate
seaman spent idly in a Riviera raree show, the ha’
penny mass dilate in one’s veins, the roused p
etrorbical blood piped therein as pungent, incrassate, edematous, and transpierced as
une salade of mint and pennywort.
Through a focal rent in the tissue of the y
ears in which persist — transfixed by the dry spasm and the wet t
ears — the beach, the sun, the waves, the leaf shadow, and the indomitable blain of my mother bathing the node of larval me under the lascivious gaze of the elders, I burrow my beak and my l
ips into the parody of the shapely scene blurred and scumbled by
Lee See’s daubs, and intensely, desperately, irredeemably, irrevocably taste only the slimy smutty spongy apricot pulp of some indecently stale plagiary of the pleasure I’m still pining for.
§ 11 | S
Bizarre, how by merely glancing at the lone ophidian glyph of my threadbare corpiño there on the bathroom floor, the flexible hair-like demiurge of the letter formed by my filamentary tanga, I feel echoed in me all that I dare not confront in my own catoptrical coil.
No, not bizarre, rather, but — random? uncanny? wraithlike? The right utterance or vocable for how I would like to engrave her very being into the balneatory phloem of my body and carry her about with me like a glowing inner carapace, a verdant endodermic aura — to quote
Teresa So-and-Whatnot, “Infinite, green, utterly untouchable. They are my medium. A grey wall now, clawed and bloody. They move in a hurry. I remember, without a part left over, the pill of the common tablet — remember the walker on it? Pocket watch, I tick well, the tattle of gold, a palace of velvet, and glitter like Fontainebleau gratified, all the fall of water an eye over the pool of which I tenderly lean and behold” the lone ophidian glyph of my lorn petit maillot there on the bathroom floor.
(Note how profoundly I’ve intromitted within me, and imparted a viridian patina to, what ere now I’d only worn like a bifid bandage of ebon purity.)
I etch and inhale (je trace et je flaire, je hume et je forge, j’énonce et je renifle) the pungent lambent muzzle of the enharmonic homologue of her theatrical handle, the contrapuntal roral rim of her nom d’appui, over and over again, and like an epic communicant making oblation before a revered idol, kneel before it, and adore the ardent, iterative congregation of her plutonic image I behold deep in the mirrored flexure of it.
Not only the image of her, but, I cannot avoid it, that convergence of all the people (dare I label them each with that banal catchall, “lover”?) who inhabit, and have, and will, whether I will(ed) them to or not, that limbic notch, that hypothalamic rift, located, according to
Sorea Est, between the amygdala and the pulvinar nuclei where, like an addict, like an idiot, like the perpetual mourner and laudator of inspis
sate Eros that I am, I hide her away among or within or behind the compound thaumatroptic alloy of
them, or try to; an omentum, or reticulum, rather, of habit and emotion and experience which, depending on the particular permutation or avatar of the affect-charged apparition the topology of bitter lament (la topologie de deuil amer) would condemn me to contemplate, or, more to the point, ruminate that day, or any other given moment or duration, I cannot turn away from, cannot, in fact, avoid leering at.
Dare I tweak the clitical manifold of clathrotextual quanta and force it (the ideogrammatical cipher of my tingly tiny tanga) to perform an undulating undine act of deviant unicity?
Watch me try.
Rotate the Ionian form of it 90º one way, and what do I have?
The indelible
roseate-scarred wreckage of
M.
Ditto the other way and voilà, the wantonly vivid howling void of
W.
Or if I were to pull the ductile head of it taut, the incendiary feline lineament of furtive
J would fervently glare from the normally occulted cleft.
Alternatively, I could add a glottal mode to the apical turbulence of it, turn it over and back, and find that I am beak to jowl and
arse-toes with the foredoomed
sot, erased and ruined, of proud forlorn
N.
From there I need but a minor photogenic trick to yield the mordant, yawning, but for all that rather charming changeling of
A.
I’m confident that you’ll not fail to remark that both painfully obdurate
F and joyfully irreverent
K are now not too hard to derive, but I return to the original pliant form of it to refound the randy tractable
rupa [and not, note,
pupa] of acrid
R by performing a coronal truncation followed by a caudal luxation, upon which a final ablation of that dangling bipedal ramification will produce the ingratiatingly ductile marker of preterition trapped in the clichéd jewel of inquiry, the well-worn pearl granted all too often by the
sea store of ocular (and osculant) exploration: time and time again, the more raptly I gaze at the other, at them, at her, at him, the more intently, ineluctably, and explicitly am I confronted by the wroth and ostracized
arête of my own diffident fickle-eyed reflection,
D.
§ 12 | Sorea Est
Is it unreasonable to assume that one morning I rose in time (“cinq heures” according to the season and the region and the local palaver) to see in the east (en el
este) the first sp
ears of the avant-garde du jour?
No more than it is to deny that I seized that cosmic bone-te
aser,
Helios, dio astere, by his or her or most likely
its ceratopsical seat, sorely (for the previous night’s joy romp upon debarking in this city I’d longed to inhabit même quand je n’étais rien qu’un mesquin sore à estragon agrippé à l’
ossarete roteata [the convoluted osseoid anastomotic dorsum] d’un frond de fougère flouziane [
Pteretis tesseropteris var.
estragonensis] had been rather catholic in terms of scope, calibre, and reach) eased open the gimmaled wings of my hotel room’s authentic fenêtre française (called, astutely enough in these p
arts, “une porte-fenêtre”), and, like Kuntī soliciting Sūrya, positioned myself patulous, naked, and receptive in its sixth-floor frame.
Despite my normal besoin for au moins onze heures de beauty rest cada noche, I am capable of rising muy temprano cuando the occasion demands.
From my
ears (or as the tone-deaf, brain-dead Sassenachs say,
arse) to my toes I dared that cowsl
ip lovestar stare at my déla
ssé pivotal terraqueous bull’s-eye of an orchid rockrose, feast on the sea-store of silken musky roe I’d transported all the way from the New Lexican coast, and toast its roseate oats in the lochial oast of my porous Te
trastic
rut-oven.
For w
astrel unity — by which I mean the disjunctive bite of all those nights, and memories of nights, cold, alone, torminal, demanding, if not mutual poignancy, at least the courage not to — for w
astrel unity, when it doesn’t steel round itself the brambly bugbear of utter celibacy — verp
rasste, alert, poivré, mâle — tosses the lonely cœur into the company of even the most uxorious of errant rebrobates, as had been amply demonstrated to me la nuit précédente, même.
Sated, I shat, showered, dressed, descended, and, as one might put it in run-of-the-mill lingua appalachiana, “checkered out” of the low-styled establishment I’d “checkered into” the night before (don’t tell Mme Lee that sly me stole a plush
“Lesley” towel for to furbish my new studio with).
Street level, at this precocious hour, was still sheathed in shadow as I strapped on the tumpline of my valoche de
livres tôpés, tarabustés
y na mani šlept desde Owlstain and jimmied into the
spaltéré travois-yoke of my domestic appurtenances and strained and st
rutted my way up dingy gray sluggish spunk-and-urine-infused Clink-and-Court Avenue to where it topped out and took on the distinctive jaundiced tints of coastal New Lexica.
To my right the flavid sun-graced façades of Mulled Road led up to
La Butte (later that same day I would discover there the chlorotic laths of cymophanous benches in a quaint little secluded park en los
traseros of the Commu
nist Esplanade y marquant les esprits avec les tein
tures
rosâtres de martyrs); slightly downhill and angling sharply off to the left was the svelte furcal fold I recognized from my
Et si à Paris t’es travelo: Guide seyant d’amples indices locaux, the very divarication of Myrrh Alley and Pullet Lane, the latter being the potential precinct of the abode of the sojourn the natal dawn of which becomes less and less proximal vis à vis the fulcral locus of the feuille devant moi
(the bottom corner of each page de
l’agenda que j’ai, ce premier jour de mon séjour lutésien, acheté
at V’Là Store, is perforated, so that one can physically scar, literally
tear an ear off of [estropier], the lamellar simulacra of nycthemeral experience — succumbing to the temptation of that perforated line, however, would mutilate, not one day, but two, resulting in a monstrous tertian parody of a diary, and so I desist).
It was a crisp Moyen Orient of a sunstruck Montmaratrean late summer, early autumn morn, and numéro onze was but six doors down along a narrow trottoir to the left of the aforesaid “Route de Poulet.”
Although the wicks were not yet aglow in the celadon-tiled stoa of she [her?], as I would learn, who was not just our building’s
patronne de l’usufruit mobilier, but also our resident concinnitist, that robust lady was already positioned in her portico, and, as I tried to peer through her bulk to verify that this was indeed, according to
Lee See’s letter, the address of “Mme. Soraya Soréa, Esthéticienne,” she affronted me with a wounded-
doe look, glavered my fashionably unkempt pea-green tunic (which any unemployed lascar or
tweely losel would have proudly tucked his soiled parenchyma into) with an invidious thrice-over which did not stop at said garment’s frayed hems but descended past where my serrate calyx grades into bare spindly sealegs malfeasantly cloaked below the knee with fringe-keeled, high-heeled, tweel-soled moccasins, and then cajoled me with a rhymeless readymade covetous tune, “Bon-
your, ma rose de l’ouest, comment vont tes yeux de rose?” before enveloping my spare studious sudoriferous bosom with the talc-em
pasmed linen stays of her imposing Pushkino-Tolst
ovist’s terrae palustris.
The street was suddenly (tout à coup) full of the jolly bavardage of passers-by who were not at all abashed at lauding the conjoined provocation of our mutually compressed merits.
She released me with an effusive plock and clatter of my spilled belongings and, mamelle-mu
selé(e), I stood rhaibostically mute for the nonce, amidst my strewn paraphernalia, while their bustling irreverent bavardage and hers (which fraction was serious, and which, in candid jest, I could not fathom alors) seemed to sweep up and repack mes affaires versés by the sheer sonic power of its patati et patata, and I, not daring, even, to
stare across the threshold and into the mysterious depths of her dark shop, forced the tea-rose talons of my focus to drum, as it were, on the smudged airy membrane du seuil itself as she
retrieved and fingered and reinserted quelques bons mots into the tome-laden cartable I’d pedestrianly lugged, despite gravity’s marplot, uphill from “L’Auberge du Jaune
S.”
Apropos: Do you remember
S’s sister
Lee See? Well, she had referred me to both the hostel (apparently owned by some relative or in-law or client of hers originally from Lushui, N.P., or
Lestelle, Wyo., or
Toeyl’s Welle, Helvetica) and “Mme. Soraya Soréa, Esthéticienne,” and evidently vice-versa, given the boisterous ease with which my insemination into the premises of each was brought about and reciprocated.
The street was suddenly (de repente) bereft again of all but the two of us, and I watched her page slowly through
A Splined Amnesty by
Tessa Roe (“A beauty across the aisle had a new soft-yellow tea-rose stuck through her green pullover, the petals like a bud’s tight-shut though with the merest flare at the top.”);
Inmates’ Endplays by
Robert Doe, wherein the author quotes
B. Torre’s divastigation of the tragedy of the prisoner’s dilemma (
Revista Novalexicana de Divastigaciones Sociofisiológicas, Nº 63, Enero-Marzo de 1989, p. 200: “En ambos casos se sortea el destino trágico, el
sparagmos, la escisión o la unión monstruosa. Pero se sortean sin reconducir el mundo a unidad de sentido, sino optando por la comunión
estética o por la distracción.”);
and Sore
a Est’s monograph on the neural correlates of torture in impressed seamen (she seemed to relish in particular, perhaps because it was in her own language, the definition of
tussore à estrapader: “faire subir quelqu’un au supplice de l’e
strapade [un supplice originellement en usage dans l’armée et la marine qui consistait à hisser un patient à un mât ou à une potence, les membres liés derrière le dos, et à le laisser retomber plusieurs fois près du sol ou dans la mer] en utilisant un foulard fabriqué dans l’Inde avec une soie particulière [a strong but coarse kind of silk] provenant du ver à soie sauvage [silk or silk fabric woven from the brownish fiber produced by larvae of some saturniid moths as
Antheraea paphia]).
Trober’s
Nine Dampest Lays she eyed approvingly, but did not thumb; and
Otley Welles’s autobiographical
Ameisenroman about the Ibero-Saxonic communities of South Texas,
Solle y Welte, she ignored entirely.
As I tried to translate from lingua appalachiana into my native New Lexican and thence into my oddly stalled normally fluent Flouzianian (whose proximity to Mme Soréa’s Gallofrankish, I gambled, would suffice to construe, to impress, and to pique her abiding interest) the interesting story of how the author of the book (el autor del libro, l’auteur du livre) she had just now (qu’elle venait de) shown such interest in, Sorea Est, who, by the way, was the scion (scionne?) of a Poldevian family originally from
Terme s Solea,
a resort-spa town in the foothills of the
Sastrero Mountains but long installed (instalada, installée) in the Ch
orb Retiro of
Smotre Lesea on the
Rastreso Mor (Steel Sea) where the family fortune had been made (hecho, fait) in the manufacture of sea-worthy tuns, casks, and chests used in the long-distance transport of kajsijevača (apricot brandy), smokvovača (fig ditto), slivovitz (plum the same), and so on, to
Tsarestar,
Tsareros,
Tsaremeselo,
Tsaredeihoiselo,
Tsarevpitrosela, and other outposts of empire,
Sorea Est, comme on dit, had brought his inherited cooper’s know-how and his scientia xylologica and his sealore west to the Arathu where he not only put them to good use crafting seasalt-proof vessels for the stockage of various native New Lexican spirits exported from Portos Vecho y Novo of my Native Town (ma Ville Natale) hacia todos los puertos del
este, norte, y sur,
but also, upon securing his attachment to the International Meeting of Schizomythologists and Sociophysiologists (IMSSOC),
initiated (empezó, commençait) a longitudinal study of the brain mechanisms of naval penal, punitive, and pederastic practice(s) — as I was failing to find appropriate Francogallic correlates (the New Lexican were hard enough!) to Sore
a Est’s paronymous and interesting story,
I was given the key to my so-called chambre de bonne, the code to the building’s front door, and to understand that my studio meublé was on the sixième étage, face, and that, since I was
une connaissance de Mme Cé, the deposit and first month’s rent would be waived, and that, en plus, due to the chic and ample carriage of her generously elegant person preventing her (l’empêchant) from blessing me with her presence au paradis de l’immeuble, I would kindly bless hers with my svelter, more lissome, and, I must admit, devastatingly splendiferous form here in her boutique au rez-de-chaussée au moins une fois par mois, pas plus tard que le cinq, afin de prendre du thé et de causer un peu avec elle et surtout de lui remettre, étant donné que le restant (rest? rest of what?) est dû au ressort de notre contrat oral, pourvu qu’il soit réglé en personne et en espèces (cash) le loyer (rent).
§ 13 | Lares
Athwart the very medias res of the
enluminures systyliques which some mnemosynical Besseloscope had caught me in the parallactic act of etching into the broad
selvages rilhadas of Ang
larès’s tome éléphantastique,
Les lamantins de la mer Médoise (a beast
lier, shaggier work of uranothériolatry is simply
hors tout chenal d’emprunt!), the agonic badaboomtwang coming from the carrou
sel synchronously (simultaneously ab extra and ab intra caput meum, as it were) jabbed its triseralous skirl past my musculi auriculares and delivered any number of sympathetic jolts to the rami musculares stowed belowdecks such that my incontinent Eleatic voyages al retrete de usos basilares might have enfadado’d the fundament of humbler mortals but to me, they were all part of the sibilant, sepulchral, almost sternutative triad of sensations (musical, micturient, marginal) that re
solved into airy, prāṇa-pulsed lares nymphales in ipso sacrificii viaticii apparatu carminis, id est, a buxom patulous trio d’a
dorat nubile sylvestral vestals flaunting their tackle and blaring their song boxes and venereally surfing atop the theatrical templum of the pavilion at the sacrificial
medoid of the serotinous
glebe.
“
La cuna!” the
oracle herself — Ap
hrodite, Aseli, Ēōs,
Artemis, Pórnē, Vulcana, Dia
na, Sucettṛ, Rati Dlítelnaya, Inana, Ishtar,
Śukra, Psyché, Noli S
istere, et alia per nomenclato
res lupanarium sciri potest — declaimed and flung this way and that, forward and back, the rowdy chiaroscuro of her bangs and supercilious brow; “
la cuna gustosa y liada se cresta hadando — y estrecha estropeando,” and then manhandled her complicated cornemuse as if it were some magnificent
nautch lass’ utérus
tors, chahuté, longeant l’a
tonal hochet rustique,
huant sur le scat.
Through all the compass of the notes it ran, and one could see the serpivolant sweat-curls [I intimated their rich pungent suint] tenuously insulcating the hot shapely shaft of her sericeous nuque as she fellated the tasty concubinage of the bourdon, gamahuching its enchanted diapason into a world-destroying climax!
And again she grabbed and soliloquized into the pa
ternal, busy, idolized, only sārarūpa (most excellent) simulacrum of acoustic puissance, “
La cuna va a tatas mañana [she flicked her chin aside, pursed her lips, and nursed a short, sharp, soul-shattering strophe from that musical musette] mientras que ayer toca la andana [ditto but shorter this time] del esmero, y juega [mere riff] con la andesita de las sombras.”
And though tomorrow — that is, this morning, juste après l’aube — all of us, spent from our constrictive elations, will sputter and crawl, yesterday — that is, right now, this morning, juste avant l’aube — we could tune and touch and titillate the scrupulous scales of our pibroch and play right into the very andesite of sem
idome shadow from out of which emerged, flanking and straddling her, not the pair of revolting goons as I had indelicately fathomed in some previous dispatch, but rather a luscious gimmal of Larestani lares rurales plucked, like Pro
serpine (a sly, key goddess of our cult), from the very seral
crème (think brilliant bales of
Llerasia fuliginea bursting into shrubby blossom in the austral páramo) of the vesperal seraglio.
They were, in fact, twins (as the Latin
gem(m)ae,
gemina,
gemel(l)orum,
ge(m)minos, etc. indicate) and it was as if the urbane apparatus of her, the scortatory
oracle’s, hebetic doodlesack — a veritable nur
se’s horn, lucky pail, tha
leia cornus, skyphos euphoros of plenty — had borne and bore and birthed them at the crossroads of the invigilate
d apse (l’on y voit rites d’oie, héros à libertiner, sa
lopes à avertir, stances d’
éléates ritournelles dont il s’ag
it de s’y — labour notwithstanding — voi
r postuler naïvement ses rêveries!).
Did I mention that the skirts of their frocks were hitched up past their exquisitel
y glairy knees, specular and seductive?
And that the idiomatic conc
ord, elysian pivotage, and
agile shilly-shally of their virtuous clavicles and scapulae was or were like incense to the gods and food to the
elative stars, orphic suns, prelokya devinām, a concupiscent platter of anatomic
ally ensworn love on which to feast one’s o
rganes aryliphoriques de perception?
“
La. Cu. Na! Era la luz de la voz estridente, era la lonja requerida del aire quebrado!”
The starboard nymph fingered and stroked, often in a frenzy — soit focalized, soit longitudinal — of pornographic rapidity, something like a Teslaphonic sarangi, whilst the larboard apsara diddled and struck and caressed, after dipping her tapered digits into un petit pot de tressallier
belge, with tender circular motions the elastic lizardskin of a Kirliotactic kanjira connected to something like a Fres
nel system of contrapuntal diffraction that extracted a stillicidal suite of synch
ronized, aurally sp
ectral, satin, drutavilambit arpeggios in a recondite Larestan
i mode from a homologous vi
rginal Sayre-like automaton — and all the while they clocked and gyred in the most alluringly vu
lgar of resiny, racy,
streelose manners the la
y flares (girons laïques) of their iliac crests!
This binary gimmal of dark-haired stage-
divas pertly, oinotropaically framing my oracular sibyl sometimes fabricated, during the shy decrescendoes of the piece, a numinous chorus, as follows:
“Esta cuna es mi cuña [ ~ ] Por caución, por cautela, por cautiva [ ~ ] Esta cuna es mi concha [ ~ ] Por causa, por catástrofe, por catante [ ~ ] Esta cuna es mi coño [ ~ ] Por el forjado hueco losado!”
She, meanwhile, luminous recalcitrant she — she of the strident voice; she, the raucous, cherished, airy one — she, meanwhile, unskirled against the annular altar of polyrhythm construido por los pilares sincopados that they spun, a chúvst
venny, raw, loose, llanamente articulated succession of flashing flaring notes (the repeated imprints on the instrument’s dolichonyctic fontanels betrayed how gently but firmly she clasped them, a fact which I have marked in the text, thus, [ ~ ]).
Presently, they would hand back to her, as it were, the rope of the song which she took from the top (da capo) as I frantically, desperately, reluctantly paged through my Wörterbuch searching for this c–––, my c–––, any c––– to parse for or by algo que
era lo suyo, era
el rayoso uréter que somehow makes the connection forged in the tiled void of the catastrophic
ally uranized sororal gaze of the captive observer who, in the mathematical sense of that term, is utterly unable
not to imagine the rifts and the plates and the torsions of the tesseral harmonic (an artistically apt model of the chthonic forces racking our own catoptrical
glebe, that chaste verdant terraqueous
glebe where some deep orogenic upthrust of a
lacuna fingers and finishes off and satisfies and flashes a clean-toothed smile to an even deeper ditto) while she croons with suitable dinner-club legato and cottage-lounge understatement, “
La cuna! Luna de mi vicio, fosa de la entrada. Mi seña, mi silla, mi sombra, mi sol!”
Yes, here we are. “
Obésité paradoxale. Obésité de type gynoïde à recrudescence prémenstruelle, avec rétention d’eau et de
sel. syn.
hydrolipopexie,
obésité spongieuse.” That does not, however, explain our not infrequent need to urinate (iam orinarum frequentia).
§ 14 | Selsyn
The sly ensign whose chiselled visage and loosely tousled coiffure and tight pressed pantaloons and dangling golden coat-tassels I’d been admiring almost too vocally, in a purely textual sort of way, mind you, rather unceremoniously scuttled his iron seat over to my precious table and fell, as it were, into such a crapulous fit of fidgeting and mnemonic divestiture that it was if he was hamstrung and shackled to a veritable chaise de fer and compelled, by electric shocks to that systolic monster convulsing at the tender crux of his internal pudendal vessel’s Y-node, not, alas, to lavishly
misspend a late nyctotherian gambit on seducing — tel Dionysos s’enfuyant les Nysiades afin de ravir Draupadi du fidèle sein enflé des Pāndavas même — brave synotic me, but rather, it seemed, to squander his
seamanly stipend on squealing all the
bucolic secrets of an insular infancy in
Lyness, a reeky, pig-infested,
Trübsinn’s aldea emptying its slops onto the b
lack shores, puny, indistinct and distant, of
Skye, an isle, grey, peaty, and damp up close, or désint
égré Ynyslas, piked and t
eeny mid saltpans and sanddunes, or some other Goidelo-Brythonic haven of incest and insults.
Hove nigh, you wandering t
arsels of the text, you lexical weasels, you, and hark ye to the argwöh
nisch parole y kṣuvat dans my paraphrase of it!
From out of a
misty paean’s endless sky of storms and shipwrecks and shifty shattered souls there pours a
yellow sleet of
spar
tan, limp, seedy, nasty everyda
yness, Keltic d
ecadence that would cause the least
unread bench of the least innocent of nightcourts to gasp like a merry winsome damsel who’s just smashed her head against her puerile hoyden’s spring-loaded hosel that melts all too soon into a slimy boneless morsel of crural haggis beyond rally or revival even in the context of what the aforesaid court’s writ of scire facias coram nobis mandamus labels “heavy petting.”
Next in the fulsome series, perhaps the adjacent losel won’t be immune to fifty bouts or so of buccal exchange and oscular fosterage, won’t be so helpless as to fail to uphold himself syntonically arrant as she straddles him languorously sejant and plunders away sans syncope until she gets her synoptic dorsel’s fill of selcouth salvage and synovial spoil and declaims the hexasyllabic syntagm of the Seleucid coda to syngamy’s psalmody, “Selah selah selah!”
“For are not we,” my scham
los, raunchy, kepi-spired interlocutor winked and grimaced and wagged his citation’s source
(a well-probed manual of algolagnic morphology entitled, in the original,
Das Wachstum als Schwung und Schwund [
La Croissance comme Fougue et Décadence], but rendered, in this instance, into whatever sham Cimmerian our man happened to be spicing his louche loquacity with), “are not we synaesthetes in the know? We synadelphiles of physiological syllepsis, we somnolent sailors of synteretic seas!”
He managed somehow to both pet my exposed
patte écrivassière and lift his sutrogenic philtre to his enchanting bardic lips, while continuing to clutch and indolently wave his allusive crutch in the less nimble of his forelimbs before burping, spitting, swallowing, and resuming his volley, thus:
“M
yn Spielsack hor und
keil sorn auch Psychose — sa kupyn rilig,
sa ulócs yn Phirke!”
(“My doodlesack throats and gargles, deep as any psychosis — too hoarsely? not when you’re in the mountains!” — Doppelsinnig
hommage, no doubt, to the synchronous carrousel onstage which continued to churn like graceful waves breaking against the sw
ank shores, più Clymenesque than Clytemnestral, of some intangible island of music and dance where the
Arlesian drossels’ playful ecstatic emmeleia was so fiendishly choreographed, in fact, that it was as if the motor of their sensual synchrony was composed, not of myosin and actin and the
myelinated spans of their axons, but rather the torsels, joists, cogs, and calks of some sort of daemonic terpsichorean selsyn which latter, as Ms. Roe notes on page 169 of
A Splined Amnesty, “is a sort of analog computer in that it transfers angular rotation from one power source to another.”)
“
Yk pare ny Geissel glaren, yíe spekys y pa Lyres geken is.”
(“En ce deva
khal n’y puisse croire, moi [as for me, I could only believe in a wily chthonic deity],
ke s’il y sé gyré an piken Style [sharp, silky, unescorted ‘
skein-style’ (that he) knew how to ‘gyrate’]”).
The receptive nuclei ever alert beneath my medullar
y kilt sensed a col
lapsed tiny seam nervurant tout d’un coup the emp
asmed lapse in Tyndall’s effect that one observes when the subtle azure sulcus in reality’s du
sty skein elastically cleaves in two at dusk or dawn, but more in the manner, say, of digression-dr
unk, shy, coarse, pliant Montaigne discussing how elusive hon
esty links earnest mod
esty’s kleines Wertes (“petite vertu”) with elliptical maj
esty’s linker Seite (“brisure à senestre”),
than of ti
psy lame Dante insisting on the veracity of his memory each time he returns from the
bucolic tw
inkly shore — scaupered, lacust
rine, shaky, scopulous — of an epileptic fugue, so that the sleaz
y seaman split endearingly into an insidiously charming, vulgar prude, on the one hand, and an effusively manic, scholarly lecher, on the other.
Pourquoi pas, donc, ne pas s’y profit
er d’un anatomical double entendre?
Alors, j’y vais!
When this lone voyager (Reisender) ret
urned (aufzuwachen vorsetzt) from the
bucolic retrete (Stu
nde) au rebut d’
Ecadence, he and his chair and his long hair and his battered book and his insanely good looks and his synthetic watery Cumbro-Welsh Weltanschauung où le motif (Anlass) universel s’y nage, s’y narre, s’y néántit, et s’y nuit corps et âmes (Leib
er und Animi [somata qua psychae]) for all I know dans le type (Typ) particulier were gone sans any discernible trace or residual criterion of his ever having been there at all.
§ 15 | Alien
Tout au long de that inalienable fistful of inaugural days of mon séjour chez el Instituto de Lexical Ecology (
ILE), Owlstain, I was able to
accelerate the adaptive effects of
intense lexical estrangement (
ILE) by linking up,
en liant mot à mot, moi à moi, as it were, the thr
ee laws of psychurgic induction (
PI) I had initially investigated in
See Law’s lab in Barrio
Ilena, viz., 1) stress induces alarm, 2) alarm induces psychomachy, 3) psychomachy induces psychorrhagy, with the sense of l’inquiétante étrangeté (perturbed, horrid, disquietening strangeness) that any alien voyager experiences upon debarking in a foreign land.
Where, for instance, and when, would I be privy to the apparently anomalous opportunity of thoroughly easing my bladder in some secluded space?
The
Ilésians, if I may be allowed to call them that, were there on the wharf, waiting to whisk us conferees off to Château Methuen for a cyclone of conviviality that seemed to
accelerate in direct proportion to the increasing tension on my expanding musculus detrusor vesicae urinariae.
Back on Astarte’s side of the Arathu, the building in that part of
Ilena where
See Law had established her laboratory for psychophysical investigation (
PI) and where I functioned as an unpaid stagiaire, did not lack for cuartos pequeños para encerrarse y rumiar
parmi las tazas y colillas (only with the fiercest disgust can I pronounce that foul, spicif
orm, restive puñal of a palabra, that tawny, soggy insult, “inodoro”).
Yet here in Owlstain, all my inqui
ries — angry, lackadaisic
al, idly enserrées,
or finely rasgueadas à la
main lisse, ovale, et au
ssi minable que m
aligne y sarrosa tour à tour — concerning l’emplacement et la disponibilité des toilettes, des lavabos, des cabinets, des petits espaces, des b
idets paludnïkh, des cuvettes for lo
nely ladies, des WC
à l’étain à ton aise, voire des chiottes même, had blundered against a derisive fa
rrago (yes, in Flouziana they use that term) of Flouzianian mockery that I parsed not at all [que je n’ai pas du tout pigé] and that drained and distorted me like a torminal parasite leeching all (and I mean all!) the effulgent ichor from a harlequin’s
sneaky grey lips, exasperated, etio
lated, unpis’d (
sic),
split, and deuced
to taenial anonymity.
Even the adjacent public school whose cloistered grounds abutted our research establishment was replete with cuartos de baños y retretes y aseos y gabinetes und so weiter.
Often, as I gave free rein to my maverick psyche whilst my clepsydrical soma obeyed its program of ritual extravasation, I heard the intramural voices of master and pupil, or pupil and pupil, or master and mistress, or mistress and pupil, or master and mistress and pupil, or pupil solus, and so on, insinuating the half-grotesque, half-humorous masks of their insular insults a través del muro compartido, and, with ablutions complete, as I drew up the psychic elastic of my culottes and rebuttoned my somatic slacks, I realized that I was shocked that the school where my mentor had received her liberal elementary and secondary education had fallen under the alien spel
l (lì ha sonnecchiato sulle voci mi
nchioni (a shellacking) of credulous voices whose overlapping (sovrapposti) religious overtones were utterly impervious to the salient teachings of the establishment on the other side (our side!) of the wall) della muraglia).
I had believed us insulated from their overawing influence, but as I listened to the abismos (gouffres) of desaliento (désespoir) those raucous larynges of prejudice consigned us to, was there some slim chance, algunas pequeñas posibilidades, en fait, of their being, not only aware of, but actually genuinely interested in — the better to denounce, as it were — the detailed, rigorous, fruitful, and ever-evolving research we investigators of psychicterical phenomena, we experimenters of animal ontalgia, were conducting?
Such provincial
Ilenian sentiments, I must hasten to add, would be altogether alien to the enlightened scientific instincts of the heterogeneous cosmopolitan
milieu of the port of my debarkation, namely, Owlstain, as well as the purpose of my visit, to attend and participate in (assister à), la Conférence Translexique chez l’Institut d’Écologie Lexicale.
All I recall of that long afternoon and even longer evening of the event’s exigent
fête de l’ouverture is an
intense splanchnic slash of pelvic pain cutting through the cocktails and the conversation like an interminable, sempiternally frozen and unrelentingly engorged flash of lightning, to be relieved only by the indesinent eviscerating thunder of the shuddering spa
sme soliviantando that finally shook my spare sacrum as I squatted and squinted to spurt forth in a sputtering spume the at first (d’abord) slightly stuck and stinging, but suddenly, stupendously, gloriously sinuous and sigmoid flowing form of my alien urine in the latchless grotto whose rattan portal I had eventually discovered after a frantic circular inquest of the postprandial precincts and a tangential interpellation of the cacchinative chiromantic coterie whose incessant translexical vivacity seemed to stop at precisely the moment I started.
To flush in that swamp-oak-hollow of an apparently purely decorative double-vé-cé seemed as alien as a whale crowning and spouting in a solemn woodland pond, and so I desisted.
And yet here in Lutèce, the megavessied Franks whose quiet debonair faces seem alien alike to sympathy and surprise, seem to
piss even less than their antic garrulous Tetrastic cousins!
The
intense solitude of psychorrhagy, by the way, does not necessarily entail being deprived of, say, the sunlight and poplars of social intercourse (witness the sleazy seclusion within which I found solace,
supra), nor imply any dearth of the loose-lipped supply of readymade w
ords natively poised and typically demanded by ditto, but, behind the rosy, gold-dusted veil of congenial alienation (
idem), may rather indicate a state of being divinely alone with the pulsating delights of one’s own fantastic consciousness.
Each morning, for instance, during my spell there, I encountered my raw crapulous psyche and my tousled naked soma entangled in a sort of dor
toir, dyspneal, violated, and engaged in a macaronic ambiloquy of an irate irreverent rêve sombrado e impotente; neither recalled having pierced, with the st
rapped-on, civil-enough — though sac
ral, rude, zany — olisbos of Hypnos, the incestuous hymen of secu
lar, solid, azure Nyx, nor did I remember at any time between nightcap and dawn having doffed my vestments and dived (dove? diven?) patulous and sanguinary beneath the satin-weave waves of waking.
This just proves how little sense our lives make — how alien, in fact, they appear to us — once we try to pin them with common wo
rds, actinal utterances,
récits du tantralekhakapramāda (तन्त्रलेखकप्रमाद, promiscuous textual trouble).
On which day, for instance, did I present (accent on the second syllable) my paper sur les “Plagiats intentionnels (
PI) et plagiats involontaires (
PI)”?
An adumbration of the “comptes rendus” in the relevant number of
ILE’s
burly organe titulaire,
Translexicalia, should suffice to inform the curious.
Parmi les plagiats involontaires (
PI), per ejemplo, I bravely admitted that, at times, it seems as if the i
ntuitory, garbled
chicanes haillonneuses of my own dusky, husky, m
usky parole schince I come across in, e.g., the
salient tract du rédacteur de cui loquimur, i.e., M
aisel Bénatrou, sibyl dénaturé, exem
ple d’écrivain poncif, are actually the spoor of my own
intense divastigation of his or her
vie(s), dira-t-on, polymorphe(s), stichomantically percolating and distilling somehow within (dans) the
gouty rein bartlebyesque, so to speak, of my ce
nelexical biplagiorum involutorum.
J’
y lis Bénatrou directement, et il me semble qu’il m’
y lit, Bénatrou, gratuitement, such that
“les événements que j’
y lis parodient voluptueusement des répliques d’histoires déjà rêvées,
banalisées et même vécues par moi, recomposés avec des mots qui ne sont que les calques grimaçants du p
apyrus (koinè schlüpfrig) de
mon pur rêve talismanique, de la tab
lette envasée, tuilée de l’arg
ile de ma propre vie” (
op.
cit.).
As for les plagiats intentionnels (
PI), I pondered (je songeait) the possibility of whether each clitalytical instar (exemplaire clitalytique) of my promiscuously textual machinery could bespeak a nail, a pawl, a bolt, a rivet (est-ce que je devrais river le clou?) which I stave into the sheer precipice (précipice) of the oak-panelled canon in order to cling there (afin de s’y cramponner), holding fast to a fibrous two-ply twist of consonants and vowels as I lean my
suave entêté élite body’s fura
cious sylph-ranked
poids fourbe into the friable anile granite and,
compelled by the
venal moisissure
y bordant le suiffeux
talus cintré d’artifices plumitifs, pilfer the sur
plus tanière morveuse of its incubating couvée littéraire, snatch from “les livres oubliés” of futurity’s nests the schizomythic seeds of my own ci
nelexical biplectic
op.
cit. of frisk
y turbinate glorious glossopoies
is, sleek panegyry of self composed with the prodig
al nib — seismic,
senimal, svóistvennïm — of my own Stresemann 929?
As I have insinuated throughout the vul
pine lexical body of this dispatch, from its rostrum (
supra) to its caudum (
infra), the psychomachic cavorting beneath the oneiric membrane of translexicalia must have worked wonders, because by the fifth and final morning of the conference, my psyche was able to dictate the fluid Flouzianian idiom from its throne in my royal
for intérieur as fluently (avec tant de facilité) as my soma was able to compose simple wo
rds, buoyant leisurely
phrases, lucky noix choisies de sentences intactas in said lingo with the aid of several dictionaries (rhyming, synonymous, encyclopaedic, etc.) and a selection of grammatical cribs.
I translate as follows:
My soma was scheduled to board the yawl for Porto Vecho via the Far Gimmals (les
Îles Jumelles); my psyche, however, saw
See Law’s svelte lab-legs poking from beneath the hem of her embroidered Siuslaw A-line like a risible pair of heavy walking sticks: their formerly desirable lineaments appeared, to my translexicized conarium, to be minatory, monitory, alien, and mean.
Besides, concerned as it was with pain, priority, and, por ejemplo, schizothymia, rather than plagiary, poetry, and, par exemple, schizomythia, I now found the research program I had pursued in
See Law’s lab to be as disturbingly alien and anile as the local lore of some recidivist tradition of palest Appalachia.
I skipped ship (sauté la barque) and attached myself to
ILE in Owlstain.
O, Owlstain, ville des étangs étranges! Est-ce que la réalité ne correspond pas aux splendeurs du rêve?
O, Owlstain, city of alien encounters! Your name has enchanted me since the pulverulent days and redundant months and wildly disjunctive years of my improbably bifid pubescence when I was a puny moccasined child of alien maternity and doubtful paternity!
The name
Owlstain, then, struck my organs of audition with almost as much force and captivating charm as that of la ciudad donde, como imago, vivo en este momento: Lutèce.
O, Lutèce, ville de l’étain éteint! Est-ce que l’on éprouve une cruelle déception quand, après bien des soucis et des fatigues, le voyageur aliéné, l’étranger inquièt arrive(nt) au terme de son voyage?
O, Lutèce — Enough! Better lexical ecologists than I have conjured with (vid.
supra) that conn
ivent parole surmontée à la queue leu leu.
From which it follows that, although the occasional alienation of my factitious biography (ma biographie factice) may perhaps
accelerate the alienation of my fict
ile art of
autobiography (mon art fict
ile d’autobiographie), I do not, for that reason, believe that I am an alienated city-dweller fated to sustain a nonchalant, sluggish, lukewarm, perhaps even frigid response to the countryside’s repeated attempts to woo us.
For it has ever been my
intensest intention to taste, among the tethered pack animals and dangling lianes of rutilant garlic in some rude suburban pulpería in an obscure lane of New Lexica, for example, the vernile ale of lived reality; and no clumsy part would I be merely playing were I to squat on my heels and lean against the wattle-and-daub wall of a fortified h
amlet in Nova Hamiltonia, for instance, to sip the rancid steaming saline elain from an intricately carved, unexpectedly cumbrous basswood bowl, and, as I hefted the container of oily liquid to my lips, I would recall those verses of Roussel’s wherein things prejudged lighter or heavier than they are, dumfound us with their unforeseen alien tare:
En buvant, le gracile gobelet vaillant
Nous accable comme une alinéa saillant;
De nos mains sursaute le cailloux pondéreux,
Fin géode volant sur l’aile de son creux.
I would like to insert here the exergue of my graphomanic animus: Pero, nulla dies sine linea, ni hiver enneigé sans laine.
§ 16 | Accelerate
It is no secret that a tale told by means of accreting the textual cuttings and acetal cerebrations of a mere scribbler of the sublunary junctures of perceived reality (prakṛti प्रकृति) tends to be
alien to the sorts of devices your authors of compact works of plotted potted fiction (kathāprabandha कथाप्रबन्ध) employ to accel
erate and accentuate the
linear progress of a story.
When the author of fiction, for instance, se despierta muy temprano por la mañana, shaves with alacrity, apparels himself in the grosgrain moiré d’un smoking which no mere
enlisted man’s pay could suffice to have had tailored let alone been equal to the cost of the bespoke calendered cloth used to make it, grabs hold of the hoop and mandrel, the very peritrochium of the powerful modern racecar (that glorified wheelchair, that self-propelled fauteuil roulant!) of rising action and, impelled by the unbridled industrial destriers of erectile romance, speeds off to relate his electric story with as much unabashed celerity as possible, only to crash and explode against the climactic arête, leaving the dénouement mortally pierced par un éclat acéré, and he, the four-wheeled Phaëton, the hapless hasty Hermes, bruised and bleeding in some sidetrack of
Helios’ iodate arena, looks on
Erato’s halide œillade and Eos’
ammine auréole as the glamorous gimbals of the civière of his salvation, only to catch a final glimpse of his telescoped death-yowl in the scintillating
yellow steel reflection of the two-fisted Sapphic scimitar that delivers him to eternity
(note how the author precipitated the falling action out of the climax with the aid of the parallactic refraction of the paronomastic epanaphoric dyad, “only to crash...” and “only to catch...”)
— we meanwhile, we noctambulant escritores de la palabra ensayística are typically still gomphotically ensconced in the goetic calèche of our gossamer-petalled cama (
Chlorogalum leichtlinii Baker, 1874), dreaming the old-fashioned schizomythic saunterings and saltations that some fourteen ćaraṇas (चरण) of bipedal evolution have worked, not just into our muscular and skeletal anatomy, but into the
myelinated spans of axons stretching, via the cerebellum and the medulla oblongata, from our motor cortices to our pollex and our hallux.
Did not
Otley Welles write (
Solle y Welte, p. 34), “Nur die
ergangenen Gefahren haben Wette [Seules les perils qui nous viennent
en marchant doivent être paris]”?
Au bout d’un gras matin au lit érudit, we strut forth on our foveate ambles of the afternoon, adopting the leisurely, perhaps even anodyn
e cadence of itinerant
ideorhesaleotia that allows us to trace in the industrious calepin of lexical ecology the deceptiv
e cadences of the various incidental encounters that befall us on the sinuous chemins du Bois de Boulogne.
For we lexical ecologists are, to borrow the terminology of
Marten Hesse — “Elle reste, cela que l’on trace; mais ce que l’on crée, éclate” (
Steen’s Harem, Masse-Herten, 1997, p. 267) — watchers and transcribers, perhaps even derivers and acquirers, but never creators, of
traces — the
merest ashen fluff of larch pollen, for instance, adhering to the ceraceous terrace-cobbles of a Flemish bistrot ecarté dans le Bois — and unlike your fracktailed stokers and dealers of fantastic tales (je pense, par hasard, à un roman sociophysiologique écrit à l’
AMI en M [at the Appalachian Mental Institution in
Mastersheen] par un auteur hétérognomique et qui s’intitule quelque chose comme
My Nine Dampest Lays Innately Spasmed), we renounce masks and mystifications and disown those slick, tactical, jealous fabulations the sol
emn aim of which is simply to keep the uninitiated ignorant of the mundane machinery occulted within the ostensibly miraculous act of recalcing the discalced sans cuire ni clou.
An attempt, furthermore, at a description of that peculiar particulate cloud I espied funneling up into the crepuscular ramage from an acervate termite nest as I encroached upon the peritreme of that curious clearing in the Bois, for example, accompanied by the convivial music of whistles and shrieks as late swallows and early bats feasted on the alate swarm, is more apt, under the dilatory nib (I abhor the sciurine staccato of teclastic dactylographs) of a pliant polyrhythmic rubato shifting constantly between the saccadic sfrecciando of scissungual sarangi slides and the crepitant ritardando of the kanjira frappé against the involuted harlequin counterpoint of fairy lights of canary
yellow, steel blue, bottle green, and aposematic scarlet, to bourgeon and ramify into a multifarious caecal tree of seemingly commonplace treacle clogging and fouling the textual rigging with the literary equivalent of
coitus interruptus than it is to create a lacework celature of trenchant invention of a species of that with which the legendary whaler of ancient Acre concocted avec sa sibylline voix
cadencée afin de cacher ou receler ou faire taire the Cretaceous cachalot in his celestial creel.
“Attempt” is the bon mot, for we are essayists, nous autres écrivassiers de tout ce qui nous arrive, and the art of the essay is a mnemonoclastic art — the humble, rustic, iterative, comprehensive process of
unread revelation, for knowledge (jñāna ज्ञान) is revelation (pramāṇa प्रमाण) of our own self (ātman आत्मन्) within which the pendular duel between matter (pudgala पुद्गल, bhautika भौतिक) and Mnemosyne (smara स्मर, smṛti स्मृति, smārta स्मार्त) naturally chooses to parry the yataghan of action with the claymore of a citation here and there, i.e., to
aerate the erudite text with a bit of homesp
un reading! —
and we break our recalcitrant mémoires revêches with the brank of le vécu:
more ancient than consciousness, that atavistic scolding-bridle is exactly the opposite of the abstersive fetters your morose faiseurs de vers employ to tame their ontalgia, for, as we recoil, like some hyper
sensate hermaphrodite cringing devant the calcareous harpoon of the Liliputian limacolept, the de
mented snail-spayer who would wound and woo it, from the supercilious scorn of all the
semen-haters of all the sillons,
ruelles, traboules, et sentiers of Lesbos as well as the
shame, resentment, and stigmata of one’s own
rathe menses, our task is not to decry fate, but to bear, comme celui qui a dit, “Nihil humani a me
alienum puto,” our psychomachy with wanton, heteroclite, incontinent, and though not necessarily silent, at least uncensorious equanimity.
As our favorite ontonatatologist concluded his
Luftig-Pfeilschriftige Abbildung, “Man muss dieser Säume überwinden, anders sitzen sie unsinnlich seine Wörter verrückt. Wo man nicht *spren kann, da muss man schwimmen. (One must surmount these selvages, or else one’s w
ords εἵαται ἠλεόι [enc
amp insanely destitute of sense]. Where one cannot *, there one must swim.)”
[*NB: The most likely candidates to emend this uncorrected printer’s coquille are: sparen, ‘save’; sp
uren, ‘conform’; sp
üren, ‘feel’; slightly less likely are: sperren, ‘condemn’ and sprechen, ‘speak’; the majority of contemporary ontonatatologists rule out spreizen, ‘straddle’; sprenkeln, ‘dapple’; sprießen, ‘sprout’; sprinten; spritzen; sprudeln; usw. — although a not insignificant minority, arguing from internal evidence which regards the lithe mortise of form and the pliant tenon of content as a synadelphic syntagm inextricably locked together and rhythmically engaged in complementary movements that accel
erate and mutually enhance each other to the point at which the semantic ejaculate of the text literally “leaps out” (springt) at, and virtually “explodes” (springt) in, the reader’s face, opt for springen, ‘jump, skip, sauter, saltar’ (why sprengen, ‘burst’, should be ruled out here is not clear).]
Turning back to the astromantic theme, likewise, rather than searching for some magical formula that would enable your assiduous authors of fiction to join that her
oic club of divine assassins by slaying, à l’aide du lacet acéré d’un astéroïde, par exemple, la chimère lacertienne se lovant dans la Voie Lactée, we strolling minstrels and amanuenses of the real (le réel) strive, like marmosets venturing out onto the
bucolic maidan to harvest the fine gramineous fruits of the season, to pluck and savor events and situations, secreting some in our cheek-pouches to meet the proximate needs of quotidian digestion, but hoarding most of them in the atoll-like lair of our ultimate enchiridia, où, par r
eliant chaque graine d’experience à d’autres qui lui ressemblent, we lynx-eyed text-rats construct a heterolexical constellation of contingent percepts and inconclusive presentiments in the reticulated strata of the mnemonoclastic midden of fiches bristol et feuilles de chou: certain nourishment amidst futurity’s random brumal tempests that never cease to accel
erate and tourbillonner in direct proportion to the number of warm waxy malleable seeds of text we accrue, or, to condense the matter into a hom
ely tele słow (corpus verborum) which even the latest, frien
dliest penman says yes to as readily as t
he earliest ἀοιδός
alienus: “A faute de memoire naturelle j’en forge de papier.”
§ 17 | Doe
Imagine me of a morning ensheathing my svelte jambes in a pair of high-heeled,
vair-soled, pointy-
toed, and sable-banded
doe-skin gam
badoes and, entablé(e) par le céla
don ange spondylique of my
duo-sex m
utande oriri
ex sudore
tenebrosa putrida, as it were, descending l’escalier de l’immeuble sis au numéro onze de la
rue d’os Pollastres, not with the decresc
endoed basal banter and all too gli
bly eerie, recédé coro ecuménico of cancrine diffidence, but with the fortissim
a, desultory, bindlestiffishl
y unstaid breloque,
riot-sized s
tridor aneurysmaticus as evoked, for instance, in the avid schol
ar’s Zeliony-duralized ostrich, alc
oolisé rhea, side-tracked cassowary, or other abused ratite, as well as the
iterative brava
do essential to those emulous tenants who’d fain, motu propri
os, perdure, like the
eye-blain and ear-blight of foveocochlearly ke
rf-siloed innue
ndoes, in the minds of his or her voisins.
For my part, I imagined them trying to discern, athwart their indignant
ears’ osteitic dingdong and à travers the ocular pinch d’un œil de bœuf, the sprightly warm-nosed
doe that has just gambolled, telle cette biche dansant sur les fleurs de cerisier jetées sur the encarnadine field of my kimono, ever so slightly abaft the palier — not a few snatched open their chaste doors to impugn me, like trembling Aphrodite caught in the act of sucking
Ares’ toes or, par contre, that
rasse-toed, fitch-fingered, ferret-faced espèce d’errant quoli
bet, Œdipus, tantrically entangled with cow-eyed Jocasta, in the gibbet of their iniquitous headlights.
But no ambusca
doed
doer of wrongs
done rightly or totally (un)
pissed wooer deorum was I (nor need I
atone doltishly for (not) being (n)either)!
Instead of fawning like a prowling dog or apologizing like an Horatian ass, I would smile like the suave cervi
d œnophile that I was and am, deliver my susurrant “Bon jour, meussieudame [whichever the case may have been — not uncommonly was it both],” and with the deftly strapped-
on, “Merci, adieu!” of an afterthought, slip off the moralistic noose and charge down the six-flight funnel of the staircase like a band of clamorous despera
does absconding into the forest.
Or, to put it less br
oadly, I burst enfin out through la porte d’entrée de la maison and
annealed loudly, thus, my explosive
exodus into
the soredial e (絵) I so l
ove tipsily and/or soberly daunting and taunting from the Chick
en-Lane lado de este
ukiyo (浮世), often to click-clack les cent pas Butte-ward up to the
superdomiciliary telos of my prepra
ndial, cervine, opportunistic fugue, to wit, the double-pierced embrasures of the “Café des
Dos Péru,” there to glue myself into the estival crux of ein
Book der Something-or-Other écrit par ou sur ou selon
Beyle, par exemple, and yield (me livrais-je), with the ruminative assistance of deux ou trois coups de café-calva, to the catchpe
nny dadoes, pongid d
odges, and pony-necked d
ildoes of the Stendha
lian ode’s toy privileging of the
roseate seductions of blan
k, sober, odorless, and resolutely tone-deaf
prose, dimly described by
Tessa Roe as an “umb
rose estancia of retr
orse aesthetics.”
To by s
ly ruse obtain, deft rumor sordidly
revel in and coppice to the sup
ple, provined, ancipita
l déviance in proportion to my catame
nial, evinced propension du jour anent the
rude spoils the aforementioned mo
rose estaminet
promised to yield to me (me livrer) if I ever manage to write
out, read in, step brashly away from, or simply
out-ride narrow-mindedly — no matter how
inept, robust, dérapé,
or indurate the effort be — th
is run-on field of rêverie infiniment fendue,
I first had to pass by, not without a certai
n unoiled frisson of coquettishly gamine yet m
ost urbane trepidation, la petite chapelle of Mme.
Soréa’s établissement pun
ais — thiose, redolent, cloacal with the ac
rid, écorcé érèbe de quelque
porcine viande placentaire “maturing” in a sliver of sunlight on the hothouse windowsill until it attain a sufficient rancidness to promote it to a
solid oesophagus-clogging chunk of le grand déjeuner’s grasse fa
rce, cire rodée au
brulis, adyton encensé au nastu
rce id animo soli deo,
rotten pubes radically dé
pilés in a dry voto ex purgatorio of tonsa
e bipes and torturae
ab delta an besonderes geschlechtliche Handlungen, et des cheveux
rôtis, iodés à héler n’importe quel
traîneur dodu qui v
adrouille zsárnyatlan par les
utcákkal, fricassés et frico
tés pour biter dans le corps à corps perdu à l’avance, c’est-à-dire,
tordus for mercenary reasons,
mordus for reticular purposes, t
endus for inliberalibus causis, and v
endus for inlicitis fructibus.
Ever fearful of that officious beautician’s penchant for proprietorial interpellation, I tried to time my labdacian evasions so as to coincide with the hour the roly-
poly Venus’ blandiloquous
autel was most inundated par ses fidèles badaudes, so that, even if the ove
rsized otiose
sow spied me, she’d be
pinioned, verplachtete,
und slovenly abpölend her band of devoted g
orets, blind yaupers, and credu
lous braid-yentas whilst they suckled the adi
pose wisdom of her polyple
ionippled, cavernous, predatory, beaded invariably with the h
eady burnt soil and ash-
powdered sweat of her street
wise spodomantic b
reasts’ oestromaniacal flux, typically, that is, vers onze heures.
I shall conclude this brief travelogue in the manner of a famous ambul
atory aède dibbling his h
aibun (俳文) tropes’ detritus all over the lu
tarious, blendy pitch of the 時代の江戸 (
Jidai no Edo):
Did she cognize or
distinguish a lone eland
parmi damine crowds,
i.e., su vecina de
mirobolante doe?
Strewed, profuse blossoms:
gercé or de cerise.
A girlishly sin
cere “ceri d’ore” (golden cherry, bigarreau), that is, “po
pped” (violé) in Cranach Elder’s classi
c veiled “porn” painting is how a certa
in dream coinquinatum might picture it.
§ 18 | Dos Péru
Affectionately nick-named “Café de l’Os
Perdu” by the more ob
ese elements of its resident pègre (petty smugglers, displaced rebels, ablegated inverts, outcasts,
prudes, dopers, touts, poets, and whatnot), owing to the rib the Chicken Street aper
ture invariably extorts from the gross in
ert robots during their b
rutal systolic metathesis
— a sentiment I naturally find a trifle too co
arse for my aciculate
ears, as my exquisit
ely leste, wölfinisch form, though gravid with textual apparatus, habitually leaps with ease through the embrasure, and the frétillement of my agile tail even manages de temps en temps to wag in through the ample tare la fraîcheur d’automne —
and “Café de los Puritos” by the virtuous homunculi accustomed to winking in through the desmosome opposite, I mean the one that regulates the efferent and afferent flow of bibulosity between Myrrh Alley and the fuliginous gold-and-crimson cyt
ode within, and not the soupirail through which one plummets afin d’accéder au cellier, à la soute à l’ordure, au bureau des propriétaires et à tout le dédale des boyaux karstiques ingeniously subtending les viscères de Paris —
le Café des Dos Péru is bisected du nord au sud, more or less, by a copper comptoir graced at either end by the brass figures of, respectively, the
moche Moche goddess of the gri
sly pandemian estuaries in the northeast of that schismatic país cortado en deux and
l’effroyable Tihuanacan goddess of the
steamy pinelands to the south, and boasts of a “salle à l’étage,” une véritable cham
bre rotatoire de rôtis garnis et breuvages de toutes sortes, to which one mounts via un escalier à colimaçon.
My habit was not to shinny thither until my
depurative dose of calvados and café noir, bis vel ter horaque semis, taken at a small table près de la trappe whilst I p
ored over the day’s chosen opuses in pursuit of allusory props for my mnemonoclastic project, had sent the dour, obdurate pessimist of these boursoufl
ées elevenses clattering cellarward, there to wrestle with chthonic shame until there reemerged from that cloacal chrysalid the accommodatingly well-read, reassu
red optimist
whose notorious and altogether charming disregard for distinctions of gender pendant l’heure d’apéro had compelled certain convives (in particular those whose desperate
mantle I’d synapsed my tightly pursed, double-barrelled pallium with or wanted to) to flirtatiously redub our establishment “Le Caf
é Du Prose [sic]” in honor of the innocent riposte I’d parried the rustic icepick hurled at my industrious
dos by P
edro El Submarinero, a
seaman, spindly et sale, posing as the whole
rude posse’s (the already mentioned
pègre’s) literary henchman: “Mais qu’est-ce que tu y fiches-là avec ce scribousillage de b
ordel?” “Mais, je lis et j’écris du prose [sic].”
(Desde este momento, su p
oder pudo ser entre mis manos.)
Après des copieuses rasades de bière ou de vin sec ou de some sort of hypocras ou liqueur enragée ou anisée — je pense à ce que l’auteur des “Sœurs Vata
rd” notait superbement des “boissons affolantes qui fouettaient la luxure des propos et faisaient piaffer les convives” ainsi qu’à ce que l’auteur d’un “Roman d’un Dé
serteur” pondait brillamment sur des “pauvres qui se seraient creusé les entrailles par des apéritifs de milliardaires” — au bar de cuivre, one ascended, vers une heure et demi et parmi les cinereous-liveried, sure-footed, though utterly ersatz Aymaro-Quechuan servers who slithered hither and yon like hirudinean leeches or tentacular tw
ee eels, to the “salle” to partake of more alimonious fare, typically “Le Menu Dos Péru” scribbled on a chalkboard (scribouillé sur l’ardoise).
Pour entrée, trois soupes du jour varied daily in a combinatoric array according to some recondite
procédé of pictorial, but not, to my vomeronasal organs of perception, gustatorial, taste (material identity was also refined into absolute incognitude): red soup, white soup, green soup; red soup, green soup, white soup; green soup, red soup, white soup; green soup, white soup, red soup; white soup, red soup, green soup; white soup, green soup, red soup.
Fortunately, le plat du jour was not some insipid parmentier de cobaye or pâté à patates préservées or fausse pachamanca from the etiolated altiplano, but something tropical and leguminous and carnorgasmastrically (c’est, however uncharacteristic, le mot juste) pisciform from the acidic selva, vehemently seasoned with, at least, coriander (coriandre), cumin (comino), mace (macis), chilies, lime (lima), tomatoes, basil (basilic), graine de paradis (maniguette), and ginger (gingembre), and not uncommonly cooked (and served) in a banana (plaintain) leaf and accompanied by una “
salsa de piment y nopalitos.”
Par contre, les trois-quarts de la semaine, on y sert comme dessert un riz au lait saupoudré de cannelle et de cardamome; les deux jours qui restent, c’était, soit une tarte à la fleur de sureau, soit une tarte
dorée aux poires.
Only then, with the crumbs and couverts cleared, et l’écume brune de two steaming tasses de café noir devant moi sur the ample table (they were larger “à l’étage” than au rez-de-chaussée) ainsi que mes bouquins et mes outils (after my copious notes, in fact, spilled out of the margins of, for instance,
Otley Welles’s
Solle y Welte and into several boxes of fiches bristol during this postcibal orgy of textwork did not a few of my usurp
ed ostelers take to jocularly calling our caveau, “Le Café
Der Opus-Antreibt-die-Zwittrigkeit”), and the comrades del comido and consorts del almuerz
o departed to make hay with wives and travail and afternoon naps, allowing one’s
ears, thus, to perceive the two specimens of disembodied music which had been continuously, though inaudibly, asperging in dorophonic rotation the salle’s otherwise culinarily perfumed air throughout the din of the post-meridian repast: either
Ars Subtilior by
Trebor or
Neo-Nouba by Persoud.
In the former, a languorous Voice (Voix) takes a dawdling dachshund of a Lute out for a walk on a locally sinuous but globally elliptical trail (sentier) of resinous pine chips laid out by a Viola da Gamba in a riverine alpine forest of larch, spruce, poplar, lupine, and so on in which the Voice melismatically pauses to admire, say, a Golden-Eared Rock Owl (
Asio dorupes L.) perched on a scorched conifer trunk and the Lute meanders and grumbles off into the flowering brambles where a stray Nestanian Blue (
Lampides nestanya Strick., 1840) forages and flutters, only to be yanked back onto the path as the Voice tackles the shallow acclivity of the succeeding syllable, towards the dry undulant pinnacle of which the path inexorably, though lugubriously, leads whilst the dachshund dutifully, though ritardandically, follows until the Voice notices a damp patch of ferns (fougères) and reeds (roseaux), whereupon the Lute takes this slack opportunity to mince and maunder in the marshy gutter, only to be yanked back and so on; in the latter, the leashed pet is a st
rutting sloughi d’un Oud Perse which the Voice (La Voix) s
truggles to keep up with along a cliff-top path of flinty pebbles and chalky shale cut (tailladé) by a Viole d’Amour of sorts in a sclerophyllous shrubland of soapbark, cactus, sage, ephedra, cashew, and etc. until the sloughi slips out of its collar and dives off in pursuit of a chamois
doe that darts up and over a syncopated spur of a metamorphic Mirwas (a Maghrebi frame drum) leaving the Voice rallentando and bocca aperta on the coda-less path, with a dangling Malt
ese Eel of a Leash [note: not Lute] in its mano tremolando. Da capo con
Trebor.
Only then, as I was saying, could I (
pourrais-je) or, in fact, could one (
podría),
d’ores et déjà, en fin et en somme, accord my- or oneself la véritable pièce de résistance, le plaisir suprème, c’est-à-dire, the supreme pleasure of puncturing with one’s thumbnail the cellophane membrane of a new pack of gridded bristol cards, drawing the incisive nail along the delicate crepitant electric cleft between sleeve and socket, peeling off the translucent caul and letting it float tumbling to the floor like a discorporate Lycaenid’s wing, and then retracting the lead-col
ored prepuce to bare the nubile lamellar faisceau de cent feuilles y fourmillant dans cet étui gris de texte potentiel, each lambent virgin leaf (105 x 148 mm) docile and complaisant,
longing for the scribe’s graphite-tipped or ink-runnelled fascinum to wound and scar and ray it with memory’s marks, quiddity’s sigil, the smudged griffonnage of sensate reception, for “telle est,” according to Bergson, “précisément la nature de la douleur, effort actuel de la parti
e lésée pour remettre les choses en place, effort local, isolé, et par là même condamné à l’insuccès dans un organisme qui n’est plus apte qu’aux effets d’ensemble,”
whilst ever and anon pausing to contemplate (
contempler) the large painting that hung on (
accrochait sur) the dining room’s eastern wall.
Executed in the distinctive, awful, pseu
do-realist style of none other than
Lee See herself, the painting portrays a voluptuous hoyden in the act of mounting a bicycle on the banks of an alpine woodland marsh.
Bulrush (
roseaux) can be discerned, as well as emerald nettle [
Urtica dioica L.]) bordant le cailloutis du chemin.
The cut of her sporty costume — form-fitting black wool culottes and zippered maillot of Hypsous red that accentuates l’
orbe trapu de chaque jeune mamelon — would seem to afford ample fre
edom of movement to her wholesome, benevolently wrought limbs.
With her russet hands on the Y-shaped handlebars (
potence), she stands on a small mound of gray stone and, with the right knee bent and bare t
oed-in right foot just lifting off the convex lithic assistant, demurely swings her hips up and onto the seat as if, instead of wantonly straddling it, she intends, with
maidenly patness, to approach it in an impossible side-saddle manner.
An ovine grin adds a sort of idealistic charm to her guileless face, as if this is her second attempt to mount the velocipede, after having failed the first time, sans roche.
The flaring A-shaped gap between her robust
rutilant thighs reveals enough of the
yellow steel frame of the m
odern racing machine so that one can read, in black gothic letters, le mot, “Mercian” — the well-known maker, evidently, of this conspicuou
sly painted means of sudorific transport.
In the background a small herd of fallow deer (
Dama dama L.) is gracefully darting into the viridian conifers b
ordering the marsh; trailing behind, one spotted
doe stands hesitating among the hay-col
ored reeds, looking back, its alert
ears erect, its proud eyes directed toward the cyclist and the unseen companion she is smiling at.
In the lower right foreground, as if carved into the gray rock under her naked feet, the painting is signed: “To my father, for his forty-first birthday.
Lee See,
Toeyl’s Welle.”
§ 19 | Ebeyl
Pendant these unregrettable, unquantifiable, irrefragable, and indelible years
whereby my indubitable, ineffable, illimitable, and far from detestable yearnings have,
malgré ma fiert
é lésée on occasion by the accusatory innuen
does des voisins which, on those same inconsolable occasions, frantically disturbed me to such an execrable extent that my normally imperturbable self
devolved into a veritable quodlibet of vanit
é lésée, luxée, violée et trompée, and from that babbling elenchus, that eleatic abyss, that eleutheromaniacal maelstrom, torna
does of temper would brew and funnel and roar and threaten to destroy, not just my enviable, and enviably affordable, eyrie embedded in the very pinnacle of the unmistakable
yellow stele (stèle jaune) of a zinc-roofed, brick-and-mortared poulailler rooted in the invulnerable eyot de la Haute Barbès, but — owing to reality’s transitivity — nô
tre orbe terrestre elle-même (along with any hollow oaks, inscrutable yews, simple
elms, pines; any tadarids, tadornins, tadpoles, eyas that might nest or roost or vegetate or stagnate therein and thereupon)
— my indefatigable yearnings, as I was saying, during these ann
ées élevées au-dessus des banales sottises that your average irrepressibly ebullient Ebulian from Yèbles would commit en jouant du billard dans quelque est
aminet — splayed, snoring, comfortably drunk, and affably buggered — et, les jours suivants, be utterly unable to fathom the cause of the cattleya-like bloom of piles hereupon gibbeting the predormitive raptures that heretofore had bejeweled with opal, emerald, ruby, onyx, sapphire, topaz, garnet, and pearl his otherwise dark and dismal abode —
my indefeasible yearnings have been able, that is, not just to “
see elegance in a beggar’s hobble; f
eel seemly in the middle of a highway,” but to clutch the very pigtail of existence, [reviewers: start servile call-out] and all this [including her gift of
Bror-te Etrorb’s
Hebe y Láquesis — muchas gracias!], grâce à
Lee See’s admirable eleemosynary instincts and charitable connections
that radiate out from her lebendig Alpine hamlet of
Toeyl’s Welle to all parts of the grateful globe [end obsequious call-out], via, it sometimes seems, her laboriously scumbled paintings of bucks,
does, and all the instars of self from waifish girlchild to womanly imago that reproduce like ineradicable vermin in the most unremarkable of bistrots, refectories, cenacles, travel agents’ offices, furnished chambres de bonne, and hotel boudoirs —
which is to say that, during (pendant, durante, mientras, schwebend) the years I have turned my hand to the satisfaction of my immediate yearnings in more or less fulsome company, I have not interrupted my more noumenal pursuits.
For instance, on page 342 of
Robert Doe’s
Inmates’ Endplays,
the author seems to imply that the “key” to a beau parleur’s “bavardage” is a sort of “quiet bégaiement” originating in the left hemisphere that haltingly, though incontinently, “drives” the flow of discourse “like an underscream [¿?] of silt deposited in layers on the bed of the stream of speech” such that, for example, today’s “formal town rhetoric” is instantly “reprit et rappelé” in tomorrow night’s “casual country palaver.”
Note that I have notched into the implacable author’s unflappably beetle-browed frons, the textual sneer of my own falcate supercilia.
§ 20 | Ecadence
There I was, sitting in prof
ile on the wrought-iron terrace of Ecadence, cet estaminet
belge situated au beau milieu (“en vero
medio,” comme nous avons l’habitude de dire [como solemos decir] dans mon i
diome maternel) of the singularly criss-cross
glèbe du Bois,
my shapely legs crossed like those of a relaxed pa
inter indirectly acceding to the sociophysiological effects of the inspiration caused, as it were, by the dusty feet and slender arms and thin bare shoulders of the dam
sels, nymphets, naïads, maenads, nereids, and sylphs performing their eccentric limping dance of servitude among the
international clientele as well as taking in direct sensory qualia (for thus do the concentric epicyclic radii of fate and sensation conspire to construct the unique
medoid of incidents and excitations [Erlebnissen und Erregungen] we call “self” [F
r. Nietzsche,
Aurore, § 117])
from the lustrous clustered cadences of the dodecaphonic trinity — two exhiliratingly robust apsaras damp from exertion cradling in their silky glow (their
retinal presence “pinging,” as it were, against the very threshold of the sonic aura decanted from the bosky roral air of the season and the place: autumn, the wilds of western Lutèce) the trembling radiant
lacuna of l
a créole Oracle plus belle que toutes les autres —
my viscera were noncely nonchalant, cava
lier même, and the delicious admixture of solanine, humulene, hu
ile, et
sel synthesizing in my omentum infused my senses with
an aculeate clarity unknown to the abstemious
such that I was able to pluck from the raked sand of rhythm and melody choice chordal pebbles as if I were an alluringly intact bairn of eleven lying prone on a plage de la mer
Médoise,
and within the perfect focal excision of my acne-free, beetle-browed loveliness, the brooding scope of my dramatic island of conspicuous attention (which excludes from its purview anything adult and maculated and posing suggestively supine, anything lame and lusty and starkly smirking like some blighted and prematurely elderly sufferer of Rus
sel Syndrome)
I can will the umbral gradations of dune and canebrake to
accelerate and swarm like hail-pocked termite mounds, the solar blur of trough and spume tarry like so many abstract replicas in
acerate celadon of wave and star —
and amidst this treasure trove of polyrhythm
wherein the preterite pulses impeccably both to furnish and adorn the intricately wrought decor of precious gems and ardently sought metals embedded in and enfolding the flaming nimbus of the present and the
niter-flash of the instant and they in turn emboss, emblazon, bespangle and become the chirographic breloque of immediacy in which
I writhe and write and wander all over the tympanic portolan of my s
ilent lonely oak or marble or in this case wrought-iron tabletop “où toute phrase écrite devient
oracle” (
op.
cit., § 3.33), and for some reason the naked wreck of the decayed machinery of the ritual of exchange
(the wanton transactional flow of which some scholars have attempted to corral with a physiological trope whilst others have excavated the sacrality inhering in even the basest commodity — from its punctured carcass doth the divine vagitus wheedle and wheeze)
dimly rusting in the peripheral weeds begins to throb and rise like an armless, wigless, chocolate statue come to life —
nearer and nearer the meteoritic automaton approaches from the working entrance of Ecadence: a reanimated tailor’s doll, a rampant mucrocephalic sport lapping at the fetid dregs of life and sulkily bent on laboriously eclipsing the exquisite
lacuna of expectation
(few conjunctions are as voluptuously succulent as a virginal glass of aged rhum rouge et le sang céleste du sol
eil levant)
in the glorious
glebe where the immaculate nacre-clothed
oracle did prance and sing in the bridal veil of dawn — “Mais qu’est-ce que c’est que ça que cette
béléga?” [On craint toujours que
le croate univer
sel n’y s’empare entièrement de la merdrerie française.] “Tu veux que je sois partie de ton
canular plumitif? Et j’t’ai déjà dit qu’on s’ferme et j’m’encaisse.”
§ 21 | Niter
Certainly I deemed la serveuse’s r
ude rant of prinziplos gestrüp
plos remunerative resignation — a mercifully short prepared monologue rising like a stunted laurel tree out of the sclerophyllous undergrowth of duty —
to be nothing more than a s
trange, truly biosocial, and pitifully
unardent espèce de mirlit
on bruit, desperately éructé à
travers le ponimúščim tu
yau de son trilbyesque enton
noir tâté à ses bords and
entrained thither by and from her
ugly otter brain in response to the micturient interlude that had so
steamily spanned the two-fisted
tritone, āsana riant, and re
tractile unstraddling of my catoptrical interc
ourse by, ’til, and with the “infinite traceries of feminine art”
— the
ensampled sanity so
insanely stamped into the “internally illuminated nave” of the glairy eyestone (hers both fulvous and fuliginous); the pungent flash and scent of “the immutable eternities of joy” bristling within the too often
underappreciated
underarm (my cheiropalps were still suffused with that galvanic axillary residue, compounded of equal parts brimstone, niter,
and urea); the “mirthful mouthfuls of prurient maternity” dont la cosm
opolite vïdrásnya fraternité littéraire sauraient conjecturer par la saillie
tendre, pribaútošnoy, of the dark exquisite nipple — during the course of some counterintuitive interval among the
bucolic meandering string of fairy lights swimming like a gh
ostly eel, lewd and sinuous, across the p
ublic ocellus of
Ecadence, into the wrought iron furnit
ure and lov
ely tweel soldiers’ garb of which I’ve undergirded and interwoven citations from
My Nine Dampest Lays Innately Spasmed, a lurid account of various nasty nymphets’ and
maidens’ play nests wherein the author, a
prominent lascivious
penman, delays situational development by interrupting the intimate course of
due narrative with un
endurably massive interstices of blustering teratology anent his nightly performances as well as spurious interpolations of metaphysical d
ecadence and other humdrum nitty-gritty du bas monde.
He compares, for instance, the nefarious virtues of caressing, with nimb
le sly-toe lewdness, the naive sultry
vase (in all senses of the term) intercalated within the glowing marble thighs of quelque
underage creature (“
Aroint, rude rôdeur à nitouche sainte!” h
er sad cri luttant vainement
se lit neurotiquement throughout the text), to the lightning twang of inspiration that mysteriously coalesces out of the despond
ent rainy s
eason, iterating its refulg
ent nirākula through the effervesc
ent, nārika moun
tain air reason take
s in to aerate the pearlesc
ent inarticulate potentialité de la
morne pintadine of nebulous thought
comme si l’esprit humain et tout ce qui lui appartient were not unlike the interesting meteorological phenomenon he once observed above the noble old-growth forest budding off like the arrant mycelia of some prodigious fungus and interlarding its
bucolic polyps amidst the decaying northeastern suburbs of
Lestelle, Wyo. — intrinsic flash of sulfur
yellow, steel gray nimbus inflamed and incandescent, languorously bourgeoning thunder evolving into an interminable interpellation (
metanalysis pending) of the conceit linking a voluptuous garland of successive interoceptive frissons with the internecine suite de pétards heralding the approach of some monsoon-loving divinity of the intertidal zone
which an ignora
nt voyager misconstrues as the
graven toy image of dap
per Triton abused b
y poor natives’ dilapidated,
unsterile, and weltabgewan
dt trance rituals
(Wallis
Yellow Steel’s studies on the
speedy lamantins and
spindly manatees of the Far Gimmals should not go
unread; chronicles of the cultural traditions relating to the sirenians of the Medean sea and the dugongs of Gondwanaland are also à propos).
§ 22 | Etrorb
Now and then among the im
pure sodality of acquaintances qui
rôde superficiellement dans la chambre rotatoire à l’étage du Café des
Dos Péru in order to take advantage of my carefree com
ely éblouissante compagnie, there is wont to heave into the felicitous ambit of my pert orbit, “dove voglio
restare [les mots sont les siens] con te [id est, me] a pranzo und so weiter,” an ob
ese walrus of an
intensely virile civilian en route from his “pied-à-terre au pays d
e Beyle” to his “maison de vacances en Stendhalie,” an avidly polymathic and polyglottal cosmopolite who recalls how, avant sa retraître from the Appalachian Mental Institution in Shatsbrook quand il portait encore son nom sociophysiologique de Robert Trober, “el
le y beuglait du plaisir, ma petite
See Law, simplement en songeant à la chasse aux petites bêtes qu’elle faisait passer ensuite à travers toutes sortes d’enfantillages savants afin de bâtir sa thèse,” and who continues to pursue his parvulocleptic art with perfect impunity under his natal translexiconym of Bror-te Etrorb to such an accomplished extent that the products of his scriptorial hand (among them,
Hebe y Láquesis) have earned him the moniker of “The Ped
erasterator of Western Appalachia,” and, those of his pictorial, that of “The Scel
erater’s Ter Borch,” grâce à son innate penchant for representing the pubescent ab
used orphans of his altarian terre d’exil (alter orbis fugitivus) in various dreamily undraped p
oses, earthy and languor
ous, perdu
es et rosâtres, type specimens of the Lutesian variety of which he often collects in the precinct, dans les lieux même.
Amidst the ambulant
ly ebenoid, syncopated antique polyphonic cantus firmus of Trebor and the howling modern H
awslee of
Persoud complete with taleastic t
elae swirling contre-chansonesquely, and with the various oleographic instars of
See Law’s Swiss sister peering down through their matted eyelashes from the Veron
ese walls de l’établissement, I have come to anticipate, not without pleasure, the intermittent visits de este hom
bre torpe und saitenreich que suele decir que “die Unterbrechungen sind die Raben, welche dem Einsamen Speise bringen” on those occasions où l’om
bre tordue à spinthria of this portly pervert looms athwart my hadromanic hubbleshow of fiches bristol like some aged poet’s beer-bloated claw grappling at the movie-magazine crispness of a pale girl’s nainsook parure.
While I listen to him per
orate essayistically anent the chromothymic hues of the chronophile’s échelle de jouissance (
scāla laetitiae), from the opalescent enchantment of the pedophile to the fiery elysium of the ephebophile by way of the somber rapture of the hebephile (which latter constitutes his unique affliction, an affliction whose sweet sequ
elae swarm “encore et toujours vers d’autres cieux et d’autres amours”), I try to steer him toward suggestive close-ups and unabashed flights of nostalgia I can more readily feast on, indeed even borrow — en dépit du risque de singer, sinon l’air som
bre y gluant riottement de ses douce
âtres réminiscences, peut-être l’
intense allure de sa
prose du moins — so as to grant my mnemonoclastic project the sort of handsome limber rotundity which, for instance, the narrator of
La Recherche provides by inventing a past he by no means could ever have conjured solely by summoning those “elab
orate sessions of sweet silent thought” by which he claims to “riconqui
stare recuerdos di cosas
sin ténèbres” — “Mais si je pousse,” my grown-up friend obtrudes, “jusqu’à la porte
rare, stén
ose, astreignante et presqu
e beyliste à outrance de cette montagne russe
de Proust, c’est toujours quelqu’étrange playground of taboo I revisit, relive, reread, so to speak, and, indeed,
restare at, as if I am doomed eternally to return and restumble upon it as I did la primera vez à La Tour du Pont.”
It is
See Law, in fact, when she was his precocious pet pupil, almost a child still — “elle était si joliment travestie en hussard!” — to whom he owes the discovery of what he calls
l’orgasme inné (“un s
ingular y rebottelé temblor interior de goce salvaje y estorbador,” is how he describes it in the novelistic homage to his first Tetrastic país d’exiliado,
Hebe y Láquesis, “que se despliega con lentitud de soño en la brecha estrepitosa de Berta, piensa Orbert, ella que
sea estropeada y hebetada casi desde este momento borrascoso en que llegamos a la orilla tórrida y retorcida de la isla Borret”): “quoiqu’elle avait l’air si naïf, il me semblait qu’el
le y ébranlait pendant quelques minutes, au moins.”
Which anecdote was naturally remindful to me of that overc
ast reredos of a coast-mountain morning I caught la Mme Docteuse staring in surprise at the blepharectomized orbs [l
idsperrten boutades d’Aug
ensteine] one of our small furry subjects seemed to be directing toward her, a look which would have surprised her even more if, like me, who was on much more intimate terms with our victims, elle en avait deviné [guessed] la véritable expression (les créatures dépha
sées rotatoirement, par exemple, with stand
by electrodes in the so-called
procédure postfrontale typically
are stressed
intensely, as measured, for instance, by an omphaloc
ele swab). Mais, en tout cas [in any case], el
le y bernait comme un espoir vague de la plus atroce vengeance. I would like to think that the vaguely vengeful look of this poor beast had acted, at least unconsciously, like a kind of critical commentary on the utterly “objective” dead-end her lines of research had led to, some device to prop her own expert eyelids open so as to administer sans gêne the stinging collyria of the fov
eate rossignol of reality’s gates, quelque chose qui, en lui libérant de ses banaux cibles-ga
rous pédants, l’avait bouleversé ma maîtresse jusqu’a l’âme, et qu’el
le y berçait la préfiguration de son sort — but I doubt she ever gave it a second thought.
“Est-ce qu’el
le y ébauchait,” meussieu Robert inquires, “les présages des réformes sociophysiologiques qui allaient travailler toute l’école psychosociologique? Ou, par contre, est-ce qu’elle s’est souvenue de ses jours de jeune mariée au sein de sa petite famille s
éëslaw [sic], avec pour mari cet imposant homme roturier qui avait l’habitude de la laisser seule à la casa en la vostra ciudad, comme on dit dans le pays, pendant qu’il cherchait par-ci et par-là les lamantins, les sirènes, les dugongs même? En todo caso,” he runs his fat thumb appreciatively down the shabby crumpled spine of
Sorea Est, another of my importunate corpul
ent sinequidnuncurists, “me acuerdo de those arrant Aran corsairs who boarded, bound, buggered, and bastinado’d us with the old tus
sore à estrapader somewhere off the coast of Unst or Hoy.
This was rather a surprise, tu vois, for we had expected to be assaulted by brigands much earlier in the voyage, in the riparian wastes of Anyakyusyaland, par exemple, on the way from Shatsbrook to Manx Hat, passage that, once I retired from the Institute, I’ve come to look forward to every monsoon, as how could I not? for it carries me across the open ocean, Lutèceward, vers d’autres oaristys et d’au
tres oases comme celle-ci où je te trouve
among the seedy
lees, wastrels, waifs, and un
arrested parvenu(e)s of
Dos Péru, all
intensely embroiled with tes lon
ely ébats textuels...”
§ 23 | Restare
Il n’est pas
rare que, to escape the imperturbable émi
gré stare — rutty and morbid and fer
ret-browed, algid sclera tinged with
yellow, steel gray irises pruinose avec l’écume d’orgies primordiales and sphinctered round with the
protrusive maleness of his perv
ert orbs —
that
Trober, alias
Etrorb, is wont to pinion me with as if I were some as yet indeterminate
sport, variété salace, ou va
riant survolé méprisamment of the third of his
Nine Dampest Lays, Teresa R (“pink and bald, with a white hot th
rob tersely hidden in her precious rabbit hole”);
to elude the un
gut serrate tyrannical dactyls his blue-veined maggot-hued forelimb is wont, like the tentacled mandibles of D
e Mestrie’s predatory beetle larva (
Terapus secretae, 1844) utterly empal
pus’d on terebrating in the monstrous miscegeny of t
erra y mar the
most ripe, vulnerable,
and turbidest precious locus of some tender escargot’s coquille touffue, to provoke my silken flawless inner thigh with beneath my th
inly passamented crimson kimono, all the while passing off the crude ges
ture as an overeager sample of some drunkenly plausible, though humorously muffled, pass (“Ah, mon
amie mnésique,
milady pensante, séduisante comme un
éland sympa — tiens!”) that could not help but mistake the clonic throes of my sha
rper evasion (multi
variate, less torpescent than average) for the
réjouissance innée of some drug-addled honey-d
ermed petite rasséyannoy colleen who
innately spasmed up to the very tips of her bewitchingly twitching
ears when he managed to
tear off her skirt on the dreamy playa of his clô
turé seascape retirado en la isla de
Borret dans le détroit de
Torreb while the many manly manat
ees leer and
rut there in the
ammine promiscuity of the littoral zone —
non, il n’est pas du tout très
rare que, afin de déguerpir de cet exp
ert rash dexterous extrove
rt bore, je me déguise avec [I tend to don] the innocent mask of the credulous intern
ee selected for her
maidenly patness to be the
swell toy eleusinianly sacrificed in this formicating ribouldingue of a bawdy bas monde where
men, money, women, and wampum are merely the
sly-painted means of cajoling th
eir fathers’ fork-tongued and -tailed wives’
rut-
thirst for fake erotic encounters with their skomo
rokh fraters’ fetishiz
ed rats’ hermana of some elder b
rether’s daug
hter’s deranged bro
ther’s tio, farferkelte und
strohkraftreifend, and not excluding your mo
re hardset foster kith, refractory, refractile, irrefragable, and refraining from neither the d
istaff other, Kerr effect, nor ditto;
being neither one nor the other, I tend to feign [je me farde avec] the long-nosed sc
owl — steely, élite — of
vanité lésée and tersely shout, “
Arrêtes!”
whereupon the
lame synapsid tentacles retract into the preputial signatures of their Smyth-sewn binding, the pupils taper to a rank and file scantling of serif galliard smothered between the corpulent
nasty pale denim shells of the jerk-muzzled opus,
and, with my thoroughly studied cervid st
rut telegraphing twenty-three steps into less than half that, I scurry down the spiral staircase (the waiters who pr
owl, eel-style, there, reel against the charge of my d
amine machine of textual assault which, despite its restive
tare serrée, I am wont to wield, as my agile prose b
ears witness, more than deftly) —
and with my retrorse
ears, like a twain of door h
andles tympanisé by the goon squad’s crepuscular in
trusion, still ringing with the man’s
ruthless stertorous guffaw as well as the florid
ars tenebrosa of
Trebor,
and my eyes, as if raped by a nast
urtium-infused collyrium administered by some quack oculist, still stinging with the lewd simulacra, whether in oil, gouache, or egg tempera, of Madame
Lee See’s quondam instars,
I nimbly leap the patulous trappe’s subdolous maw and louchely prance out the more proximal portal of that perfidious place and up the street to its quincunctial junction with Clink and Co
urt Road, Myrrh Alley, Krishna Lane, Clink and Co
urt proper, and ego (viz. Chicken Street), where, before engaging in a lithe pride-gobbling U-
turn calculated to take me back down the latter and up into my room, I stand or, rather, on this particular occasion, I stood and debonnairely stared at la Butte, at that romantic joyaux de l’art gothique high up, and, dans la leporine langue of my gamy mère, I plotted, en fredonnant suavely, my next move, which would involve disrupting utterly le
s artères catégoriques of lay expectation by simply not moving, by not turning round and returning to mon studio — yes, ici, avec mon pannier d’outils textuels, I will stay, I will stay until my ersatz ire wanes and then I will — but first, my song:
Restaré (Je resterai)
Retrasé sera terrestre (Though I detained the terrestrial creel):
Aretes, rasete: arras terreras (Earrings, sateen: humble debentures).
Retesé rateras, retretes, errata (With the bradykinetic spell of my artiodactyled leap, I bound the crappers and the crooks, and whatnot).
Serré este arrastre (And I, chimerical eromenos, curtailed this queer erastes’s femoral trawl anent my dainty-named nothing).
Retasé, erré, artes resté — arre (I rest rare art, reset — hurray)!
Rastré (J’ai dragué)
Restaré (I will stay).
A
pesty nana smiled at me, her
wet eyes lolling with fastidious censure, “Touriste imbécile!”
§ 24 | Bucolic
Having reached this most important
point d’appui — chin propped on the pollard of cocked elbow propped in turn upon the bucolic mobilier de fer forgé propped en vero
medio of the bosky
glebe subtending the
entire eristic coil of brawny narrative — my “
canular plumitif” of polyglot rhapsody, my bulging “
béléga” of borrowed locutions indeed! — and buttressing, even, the clonic
lacunae of memory with the unabashed bulwark of the
renitent cénesthésie de l’estaminet
belge itself
(its smooth gray paving stones
enduits par the flung charge of
feuilles mortes: podocarpaceous citrine, fabaceous saffron, rosaceous crimson, ulmaceous
brun),
and avant que le drame univer
sel s’y noue into the choral partouze of esu
rient satyr
intertwined with dissolute sylph, rapacious libe
rtine decussate with incontinent cantatrice, pru
rient berger inosculate with meretricious bergère, randy Y anastomosed with salacious X,
tandis que le drame person
nel s’y scinde into the successive lochial spl
inters of the roral deception causing the whole puerperal
lacuna of quiddity to
accelerate from the rubra of my unrequite request for dark rum through the serosa of the scuttled c
oracles of pen-and-ink palimpsests beshoaled, belabored, befouled, and bestrewn upon the nebular margins of
Les lamantins de la mer Médoise to l’alba d’une plage blanche d’un mi-matin en
core alerte et pucelé, its premeridian s
clera ogling refined immaculate meadow-striding me, neither vulpine marauder nor glutted cock nor plucked hen nor fulsome ewe, treading through ravished flowerbeds and downy snowdrifts of debauched plumage, the spent intestinal parchments of sterile love
dont this whole grand poulailler that is Paris sheds, sloughs off, shucks and peels away nightly like so many moribund
lettres d’introduction — Maltese jesses, Dutch grommets, Anglo-Saxon capotes, Indo-Aryan engines of intimate
frottage, Finno-Ugric wapiti teasers, Celtiberian sex mitts woven of callow lamb’s omenta, and those Antipodean pouches of intromissive delectation stitched from the unpupa
te caecal reticulations of chaste monotremes —
at this most important point, I feel compelled to, that is, j’ai besoin de, ho bisogno di return to the musky splendor of that mundane bungalow out back, and there, among the murmuring brays and rills of boucs alcooliques, tempt again the turbulent succubus of the double-vé-cé with the aromatic sanies of my own bladder’s briny incubus or vice-versa.
As I sheathe my scripto-lectorial impedimenta, the trisyllabic clou of the buxom bouncing boisterous buskinned heart-throb on stage
éclate cérauniennement, “
La! Cu! Na!”
From the lofty slope of the proleptic perch of the first-person pronoun, I stand listening as the storm cloud of song bursts into da capo downpour: “Luna de mi vicio, fosa de la entrada — mi seña, mi silla, mi sombra, mi sol!”
My abdominal calyx, my coeliac plexus, my crura, my fundament, my peritoneum, my vis
ceral et caeterus vibrate in harmonious sympathy with the music that that
sly ensemble somehow manages to both
intermingle and separate the cosmopolitan
Oracle’s sylv
an, aculeolate voice with and from the bacchanali
an claudication of the instrumental background — tympanic flash of kanjira scatenato, demure nutation of sarangi sfrecciando,
diomedean squeal of portamented bagpipes — and I belch the susurrate zest of caramelized potato starch and the malted pungency of fermented barley
interlarded with something more idiomatically mordant, florid, mantled and mellow, and — notice the skill with which we wimblers and gravers of written reality etch and stipple the supple intaglio of the textual self into the tesselated slates of sublunary existence while all the while abjuring use of such fake phrases as “And then I knew that...” — what was hopelessly poignant was not the absence of moutarde or vinaigre or harissa or
mayonnaise or other such redundant condiment from the refluent kobold of my bucolic
repas au Bois, but the absence of the guttural twang and rarefied scintilla of rhum rouge from that eructative concord.
Instead, there was the echo of a jilted child rolling all too soberly, with the plangent baton of esophag
eal cere-action, the calcium ox
alate cerceau of rancor and rumless bile back and forth from crop to beak.
“
La! Cu! Na! Era la cubeta llena de licores por la noche, era la boca quemada por la mañana, era el culo violado por el cabro alcohólico!”
§ 25 | Lee See
I
was elementally, and for the choic
est reasons imaginable, quite unprepared, from the moment of my first espial of them, for the
intense,
serrate, and almost
rude posturing of
ears, toes, fingers, knees, hips, elbows, eyes, noses, and assorted other
membra muliebris involved in the diff
used promiscuity of the sprawlingly unleashed, droopy-leaved, dopey-styled, essentially essayistic
esprit of the paintings which even the most inopportune of touristes tétrastiques, accablé(e) par la chale
ur des oppressants jours d’un été tardif à Clignancourt and resigned, thus, to interrupt the boyishly listless positions of my visit with an elevated spell of enforced goofing off within the high tough airy walls and patulous porte-fenêtres of
Dos Péru — even she, our incidental tourist, could see the curiously hoodlumesque manner with which Lee See had mustered and deployed to masterful effect h
er estral fits of
intense rancœur despotique dont el
le y bénéficiait in order to work into the velatura of each salaciously ab
used portrait of
See Law or self or
even elite statuesque lycéen(ne), a sort of mo
rose aesthetic prowess, a kind of thoughtful clowning, a
dour espièglerie, even, which,
pour désobligeante qu’elle soit, most pleasurably teased, comme sous l’effet d’une cande
ur désopilante, one’s tendresse qui était tellement ravie, qu’el
le y éblouissait plusieurs heures comme l
e vit tenu et alésé d’un satyr sucé par l’
attelée suite vénérienne de sylphes sans fin!
Yet beneath, or rather because of, those lyrical pictures, the merest attempt to read about, e.g.,
Tessa Roe’s
tea roses, or
Sorea Est’s
tussore à estrapader, or that notorious rose-gray study of Stendhal où l’auteur contr
aste Sorel et Mathilde avec Val
serra et Marietta, or even
Etore Sas’s anarchic account of the socioeconomic see-saw of the
li-si cycle of the Mountain Lushui, viz., situational alternations between the egalitarian (
li) and the hierarchicial (
si), degenerated into an
intense duel between la lectrice et la voyeuse, entre, on the one hand, l’active cultivation of the
pure sod of reading et, on the other, la contemplation passive de l
a rose estimable de la peinture, i.e., to
stare really hard at those luscious oils, or to read most unlucidly the leathery locutions and solemn scholia which, far from calming me so pleasurably comme j’en ai l’habitude, began to irritate me:
la belle feuille nervurée où se serrent les beaux rangs de lexies paradisiaques de
Roe et Sas — el
le y bégayait, beneath the lynx-eyed sfumato of an impasto’d illusion, le langage de l’enfer!
Et l’adorable page lisse où se tracent les r
edus propos réduits de
Beyle — el
le y éboulait devant mes yeux!
À quelque moment, then, one simply had to close one’s foxed and crumbling book and sheathe one’s limp bodkin and let one’s lissom self be carried along (laisser entraîner) by Lee See’s rare art’s firmly fluvial scumbling and signally luxuriant démarche de lissage dont el
le y bénit tout son
intense liesse luisante et sélénique et sororale.
§ 26 | Enlisted Man’s Pay
Like that limply articulated noria andante of spindly manatees and speedy lamantins one can see surfacing from out of the profoundest gloom of the sirenological
lacuna of
Les Lamantins de la Mer Médoise (loc. cit.) during their seasonal migration from the ag
arose estuaries of said briny main up the
D’Laumes delta to their ripari
an lacustrine spawning grounds in the steepy mainlands and steamy pinelands of the Flouzianian interior
— even a svelte
mermaid too breaks the water’s film there (“el
le y bèche la pellicule de l’eau” [ibid.]) —
to exhale in quick-humped succession
intense jets (despite a certain pig-headed
cétacéréaliste’s sow-brained insistence that so-called “dugongs [...] do not spout”!) of opulent emblazoned spume from their black nostrils, and then, before diving out of reach of earn
est reason and
retinal revelation, shiver their jowly gray snouts with the violent gusto of inhalation,
there emerged from yon
établissement’s portal, pivoting and davening, with that gyroscopic precision, that peristeromorphous savoir faire that only the perfect Parisian
palombe seems to possess, the bilateral mand
orla-cedilla blazes (almandine virgules, devious rhombs) of their thusly perpendered
cou tethering the pouting beak of leur céphale irisée (of which each areole of ocular inspection was glazed with the grim moi
ré stare of the impassive, the insouciant, the
inébranlable) to the fier embonpoint beneath in order to plant some piston-driven, prime-numbered,
selsyn-sequenced series of whiskey-whispered
coup de bisous anent my inflamed
joues diomédéennes, titillating my se
tose ears with their rum-flavored
oracles, though missing each time my dismayed parched damsel lips,
there emerged from
l’universel synœcisme de la littérature a procession that seemed both lugubrious and gay, both playful and plaintive, as if the funereal
condoléances addressed to some recently widowed gentleman had dallied with les tendres gaillardises roublardes lavished on the benighted, bewildered, and soon-to-be-deflowered bride who, compelled by l’apprivoi
sée law of gravidity’s telos (“
la cuna gustosa y liada se cresta hadando, y estrecha estropeando”), whelped pendant qu’el
le y ébouriffait at the end of her term a most miscegenated minyan of dyspneal inmates, some of nasty mien, some more sedately saintly, from the very bowels of this mysterious estaminet
belge sis en vero
medio of the
glèbe du Bois, offering generously not only to pay for the expected expenses bound to have been incurred during the tableau vivant of my installation auf dergleichen,
but also for the unanswered question of my matinal psychomachy bipedally splayed athwart the unrelieved density of some obscure pulseless zugzwang while my bladder’s rumless left hand was walking the basso ever more profundo of utricular turgescence pulsing “en el mundo de mi odio [donde] no hay miel, no hay lima, no hay hielo, no hay ron [no hay ron indeed!]” and the right was tremolando in the acute range de la voz estridente of vesicular roideur deflecting each taut tympanal whack of the kanjira and tandis que the pliant sapient synaptic melismata of the sarangi, in accord with the louche doodlesack (such nidamental madness the
medusal maiden encapsulated into each learned orotund sufflation [los meros nudos del mar!] she popped out of the chelonian cloaca of her sly pursed slippery-lipped maenad’s bouche — chorionic pibrochian drone, globular miskinish wheedle, yolky zurlaic wheeze, vitelline shawmy skirl, embryonic piffaral latration!), was busy working this contrary motion back into some resolution near the midd
le C or A of micturation en que se duermen las sirenas in the little shack out back I was intent on attaining a tatas and where, in fact, I had already jugaba con la andesita de las sombras,
there emerged viz.,
from the misplanned
medoid of zymotic malevolence which not even
Tessa Roe and the restrained breathy double quotes from her
Splined Amnesty — “Mildly mount using a spadesman’s lenity a simple
selsyn in each dimpled box so as to impale the stately shaft through an idle hole in the tipsy center of the pasty seminal dial” (right cheek); “The insane frequency of the slanted oscillator used to disempower the spiny
selsyn can be misused as an invisible dental dam when it is annealed mistyped ensampled installed set so that the individual myelinated peaks are signally separated by the seamanly stipend of something I didn’t catch” (left cheek) — could redeem, a seminal
oracle of dusty-paned acrimony;
from the animated axilla of polysensual resentment which not even the impeccably garbed gentlemen and the debonnaire triplet of lascivious allusions from his
Nine Dampest Lays [who] Innately Spasmed — “Comme el
le y béquillait!” (A
mrita de Moon, exquisite pubescent seductress); “Comme el
le y ébruitait!” (
Erin T. L
etrinquier, dite La Petite
Rentière); “Comme el
le y beurrait!” (
Cléora D
ewaels, juvénile journaliste
belge) — could assuage, a pedantic forest, an erudite massif même, of measly rancor;
from the pandemian mouth of slyest enmity which not even the
sly ensign and the exuberant snaily pentad of his mesmeric
mésalliance of indelible citations anent the retrospective faculty — “Le souvenir, c’est l’avenir où les cicatrices du destin deviendront le festin du préjudice” (Louis-Fournier
des Laumes); “La mémoire, c’est un fumoir où s’obscurcit les traces du passé dans la triche des péchés” (Rolande Gr
âce-Lacerte); “Se rappeler, c’est se grappeler des reliques de chagrin en (a)battant la breloque schizophrène” (Fr
anc Laubert); “L’histoire, c’est un houssoir qui harcèle la moite poussière des témoins hystériques” (Marie-Charles de
Beyle); “La réminiscence, c’est la prescience récurrente des souffrances réitérées ad nauseam” (
Sœur P. Dorin
e Sartre) — could appease, an unspanned valley of slimy malice;
from the asyndetic nipple of pleonastic spite which not even that inveterate habitué du Café
du Prose (sic), Pedro El Submarinero, and the septimal superfluity of his interminably inebriated citation from the celebrat
ed Proust (allow me to preemptively paraphrase: something about the altarity of pleasure and the persistence of pain) — “Le plaisir, le soi qui l’éprouve, c’est toujours autre” (sic); “Ça diffère toujours, le soi, le moi, le toi, voire l’âme des créatures, des animaux qui ressentent le plaisir” (sic); “Tandis que la douleur, le chagrin, la souffrance, on est le même pendant” (sic); “Le soi dans la douleur, le soi qui souffre, le soi qui subit le chagrin, c’est l’armature de l’être, de l’âme” (sic); “Ça nous donne l’illusion, ou bien la sensation, de persister à travers le temps, par le temps, dans le temps” (sic); “Et pareillement, le désir assouvi, rassasié, satisfait, le soi qui l’éprouve, c’est un autre, toujours autre” (sic); “Mais le désir inassouvi, le désir encore assoiffé, le désir qui a encore faim, celui qui l’éprouve, c’est le même, soi-même, lui-même, elle-même” (sic) — could absolve, an untamed mountain of palsied animosity;
from the emended a
nal acuteness of wounded pride suffered athwart la Playa den Missten because (quel mot!)
See Law,
in some other world from which no matter what I do for any amount of enlisted man’s pay I still cannot expunge its sylvan horror from the deepest, most cherished myelinated spans of my
Dasein, my
Mitsein, my
Entsein, my
Undsoweitersein, spurned my innocent invitation to gaze on, to ogle, to le
er, stare at, and even taste of my tenderest singularity amidst the ancient misty maidenferns there, made all the more bitter because (quel mot encore!) of the disappointing slavic singleton of that stymied pesty
nana with the wry leporine smile dont on appelle, despite her i
diome étranger,
la serveuse — “Vous me devez vingt-neuf turpins, s’il vous plaît, meussieudame, j’m’encaisse on s’ferme” — a misplanted
glebe of asinine antipathy.
Mais j’ai besoin de
pissat' aún! Minye nada
pisser todavía! The fairy lights winked out.
§ 27 | D’Laumes
Oh Idole, étaieras m
oi? Soiled Hetaera of my therapized
smara’s agora, du also, or instead, peut-être? O, meine Delphic
grue deliciously
draguée dans one of the seamiest brothels of medusal memory these hands and heels have ever pisado, or, to mimic one of those regional mudslingers — Dumas? Daumal? Maldoror? Lenormand? Mac Orlan? Meaulnes? — of homesp
un readers of peddler’s French or Scots Latin or St.
Ammien’s Greek or Gali
lee low style or hon
est harem’s English almost
any misspent dealer of
bons mots finds it meet to vend in these parts:
Delinquent
leetle sly woman, sheerest, most scantily clad maudlin Muse —
a nuder La
mia, Mnemosyne abused indeed! — dawdling in the crux criticorum of dual mesmeric consciousness and clutching in your benevolent fist a most
heated arioso lei of the sweetest specimen of
pandemianest Lysimachia coronata D’Laumes (Texahatc
hie tiaraed loosestrife)
of which, neither avant nor since, no dulcet perceptual splendor has ever strummed and dallied, like a damask damselfly (
Mnesarete shadei Nab., 1902) darting and pausing, pulsing and darning in the aestival aureate air above an auroral damassinier (dont le fruit noir s’appelle “daumaie”), with the daedal chords of my medulla oblongata in quite such a mischievous manner —
Oh
speedy lamantin, sea cow of self’s concept of itself,
spindly manatee spanning matter and mind, and delirious dugong of being seasonally circulating up and down
le fleuve D’Laumes like so many dropsical corpuscles dans les artères catégoriques du temps foutu, touffu, bourru, fourbu, moulu, rompu, tordu, mordu, courbatu, vermoulu, incongru, malentendu, anything pourvu qu’il ne soit pas perdu!
Harness me, tether me, chain me, bind me with your metamorphic slough, the ecstatic exuviae de l’aorasie dialectique of your divine ecdysis from gamine slum urchin to euryhal
ine mammal
(according to Wallis
Yellow Steel, Samuel D. D’Laumes [littoralist, doc
ent, ladies’ man, spy; Beulah, 1862–Owlstain, 1928] was the first of the
area’s tide hoolies to demonstrate the intricate and variable osmotic regulation in the aforementioned diadromous beast by calculating how many almudes of aguardiente a given mass of medulas displaced depending, in a nutshell, on the various forms — immensely marine, enormously estuarine, ripely riparian, fully fluviatile, sveltely lacustrine, or monstrously whatnot — from which the bloody sample had been extracted)
so that I may transmute t
he osteoid realia of the
merest shenanigan, incident, or conjuncture (a spousal
aléa, histoire d’œillade et d’envie sur la
Playa den Missten in New Lexica; a
pedant’s many lies in a roman à clé left
unread in a mental hospital in
Mastersheen; an unse
emly naïad’s spent sprig of Durango root
maidenly spat, nesciently
rongé, grumously
mâché, trampled, alas, sur les pavés de la terrasse d’un bistrot flamand ecarté dans le Bois d’où je viens de — but let us not anticipate) into the spart
an terse meshwork of some
mild anapest synecdoche with which to en
snare the mesomorphic chimera of original thought!
Listen, Maenad, Psyche of street and shore, of river, lake, sea,
and rue (ce petit moyeu de
rue [d’]où rayonnent et enchevêtrent les jets [et les jeux] possibles de l’existence...) — m’aideras-tu au moins de tresser une
théorie d’asile aoriste?
§ 28 | Modem ratio
The i
mmoderate
οἰᾱκο-ν
όμος (rutilant helm
sman [“I slayed Neptune!”], irate domina
tor [“I’m so utilitarian!”]) of modern rationality (instru
mental, sane, dyspieridean) woul
d moot that I
smile, pay, stand, enfonce (not necessarily in that order) the
yellow, leste, Blanzy Pou
re-stamped plume
à mine mirifique of my lit
he Stresemann 929 into its gre
en durable
coqueluchon (
seal, hoodie, retiarian dirksheath),
and admire the unbid
den playmate’s sincerity, the sultry
moody dime-store artlessness with which she,
la serveuse à l’all
ure d’une
môme adroite et fourbe, had
palmed, say, nine sterling Albionian groats (equivalent, according to my hasty calculations, to the “vingt-neuf turpins” she had demanded) proffered in payment for my
consommation upon which which she had glibly replied, in striking contrast to
le mode amorti of the
timorous moderato migratory
aria — otiose, heled (from the Anglo-Saxonish for ‘hidden’), mewling — of the Wialoahas
see Elt Owl (Lyrastrix
okiao Andreu) fleeing through the Tetrastic night of dream and memory like a maimed Moira escaping the clutches of amorous Bromios, “
Okiao” (okay, ciao).
The unmediated
ideorhesaleotia (ravishingly embodied, radically demotic) of autonomous prose (
otiose, ideal, heraclitean), on the other hand, would, with deft rétiair
e’s art, enmesh in the promiscuous web of textual composition, both the catch-as-catch-can cloacal trident J.-G. Lansquartre touches on in his
Méat et l’urètre
whereby “le
sens mètre habilement
sans être hémistichique, mais l’ur
ètre (manse shunté) non
sans hêtre métonymique tandis que le paraître de l’être pénètre dans l’
urètre quoique l’
urètre s’empêtre dans l’être du paraître”
— let us keep these two halves of the renal
mesh’s eternal ontic riddle
men aim t
o theorise ideal analyses of, mais dont personne ne l’avait, mieux que notre soi-disant “Harnsch
midt,” analysé, pensé, et caractérisé en plus de rigueur firmly in mind as we proceed: the readily measured cesura of tum
id tympanal sense where the seeming of being pokes into peeing (i.e., the hypogastric-splanchnic dialectic informing le besoin de pissat), and the
mood-shunted
messy planate nid of peeing in the metonymic hedge where that very act of the aforesaid foraminous and cannular catch-twirl-and-release ga
me traps the being of seeming (the concomitant sphincter-ureter-meatus tarantella qua cito
yen’s simple Tāṇḍava bringing said besoin to serene fruition) —
as well as the congeneric dual sets of
el arte de recordar (स्मार्तकर्मन् smārtakarman) — the mimetic mermaids of memory and the elusive sirens of souvenance — and
el arte de amar (स्मरकर्मन् smarakarman) — complete with all the distal ethical, fulcral technical, and proximal affective
stuff at its expressive disposal —
the Gestalt of which no image better encapsulates than those clay effigies of the gravid salaciou
s tense hermaphrodite’s parturient squat we squatted and
plasmamos by hand on the shores of the Arathu some three fortnights or so before my eighteenth or nineteenth birthday then destroyed on the foretold fatidic dawn as the sun unbared its mantled calvity between the
oikoan (‘homely, distaff’) cleft of the Far Gimmals waving lambent Venus’s
yellow-steel-tinct
ured pennant ahead of it as it breached eurhythmically
and eructed erubescently and behind us the nymphophiline blennorrhœa of the
soma-engorge
d moon sintered and crested the
Tiros Mountains (the famous
Serros Estirados of the eponymous opera!) and sea, earth, and sky conjointly, maieutically,
connubially, one might even be tempted to say, disembogued the autumn equinox’s lochia rubra
which, on rereading ces traces-écla
irs ou mots (mirifically made modes of admirable expression) que moi —
timorous ambidex
trous moi! — je les ai mis là, sur les feuilles de ce ramified b
ook à inscrire, graver, tirer, et jeter all sorts of adroitly malicious characters populating the enjambed
realia, eidos, otherness, and whatnot of my
sham être ensimismado (promiscuous web of textual composition, memorias dotadas del erótico del esmero), I realize I have already done so, enmeshed
la serveuse and all her secutrixical
fourbi à fourberie — the cocks
ure ocrea of of her “
Okiao,” the irkso
me manica of her “Messieudame,” the gram
mar-pestering scutum of her “J’m’encaisse on s’ferme,” the co
ol steely lewd glaive of her “S’il vous plaît” —
by the very act of keeping the Blanzy Pou
re-stamped nib of my tri
une dard unsheathed
and wielding it deftly to unfurl the reticulated
écriture thereof so as to deploy the beguiling skein of elabo
rate eidola hoised therein!
§ 29 | AE
Whilst keeping my cilia, my axons, and my retinae primed for those ephemeral impish icons of apparent errata in the holograph of Hari, those soi-disant coquilles in the typescript of Shakti I term
antiphenomenal entelechies (AE), c’est-à-dire, those typically roral and crepuscular occasions such as this when, finding the bounds of her suzerainty frayed and porous, and the compass of her autocracy reduced to a vagrant involuted raveling, reality (la déesse Réalité plutôt [ou bien ainsi] que son consort et
coréalisateur le dieu Réel) is forced to caulk her chitin’s chinks with plagiaristic quiddities and tar over her
lacunae with redundant mummery, I focused my vener
eal corneas upon
la nuca divina della
Creola agile (the bulbous galbe of her visage, by the way, perlato del
calore di sforzo, marked her as belonging to that guild of houris which had foregone skull-binding in the pursuit of mass appeal)
as she orally clawed at la
cola erudita of her song: “
La cuna! Luna de mi vicio, fosa de la entrada. Mi seña, mi silla, mi sombra, mi sol!”
And as the stellate spray of the sonic
oracle’s and her debonai
re acolytes’ gocce di sud
ore alchemized the stage and fairy lights like so many angelic nimbi,
there began to filter (cominciava a
colare) from the shadows of memory (delle ombre di ricordo), the words of the littoral bar
carole my mother used to cantillate to me when I was clamped in the cradleboard:
(Pastorale copla:)
La cuna acula nuca,
laña cuña llana, cuca la ñuca luna.
[Le berceau adosse la nuque, serre la cale plate, aguiche la pleine lune (lit., ‘sans doigts’).]
(Caracol refrán:)
La lacuna en la nuca cuna caña!
[La brêche dans la nuque berce la bière.]
(Pastorale copla:)
La cuna anula caca luna, cal nunca,
aulla, ‘Ña Cuca-Luna, acuna la cuna-llaca!’
[Le berceau annule le mal luné, dur jamais, hurle, ‘Mme. Con-Lune, berce le berceau du zigoto!’]
(Caracol refrán:)
La lacuna en la caña cala cuña!
[La brêche dans la paille perce le con.]
(Pastorale copla:)
Una uña — clac! — a luna
cuña la ‘lunalaclanu analcu.’
[Un ongle — scliffe! — à la lune invente ‘scorplunion-hameau-à-travers-la-rivière.’]
(Caracol refrán:)
La lacuna en la cuña calla nunca!
[La brêche dans le con ne se tait jamais!]
Which of course reminds me that
la Via Lactea is not the only ontic spoor of Prajāpati’s lapsus mentulae (the vulgar “slip of the dick” to which your easily spooked heterohetaerolept is prone) athwart the ardent amphidaeum of Uṣas, occasioned, it seems, when Rudra tiró la flecha
canular d
el arco canudo della haecceitas or puruṣa (पुरुष) or something,
for a major bavure in the primordial palimpsest of prakṛti (प्रकृति) persists in the form of that meretricious sulcus marecaelum (hiatus between sea and sky) which, no matter what pose the perceiver strikes, no matter which altitude she attains,
always, whether prone, supine, squatting, sitting or standing, on the aegialos (αἰγιᾰλός) of Playa Toya, or from the window of la casetta che avevamo abitudine di
locare at the corner of
Ca Luna and
Ca Reloj in Porto Vecho, or through the spart
an lucarne of my b
anal cubicle in TBS high above the city proper, always appears at eye level!
Actual experience (AE), thus, contradicts the artistic expression (AE) of it, since, in the former AE, the horizon increases in proportion to subjective height, while in the latter AE, the horizon’s height must necessarily decrease with distance and subjective altitude, or else the representation seems flat and — unreal!
Talk about the aecial foxing of the colophon of Kali!
And yet this glitch which reality long ago tired of even bothering to
badigeonner with her usual palliative ruses (letting her self-deluded creatures, via their imperfectly evolved organs of ocular apprehension, debride the wounded ousia [οὐσία τραυμᾰτῐκή] for her), is barely noticed by the majority of workers in the field
who continue to mistake the faded solipsistic fard plastered over
the vidīrṇās
ana (culo
lacero) d’une
racoleuse violée
a corale
for the fresh paedomorphic floraison of the pristine padmās
ana (Clusia alba Jacq., 1760) of l’Aurore
éclorant.
§ 30 | Yellow Steel
One
red soup déjeuner sur “l’herbe
drue” postulée dans une de ces “œuvres fécondes” on the
pure sod of which the cl
osest read
er intimates one of those “
très Aréthusesques, très jeunes jeunes filles” as
See Law, sloe-eyed in her water-repellent yellow anorak, must have appeared to her husband-to-be when he first
saw, electrified as it were by the
acerate clews of
Eros’s ateleiosis radiating into and out of her like one of those r
aw select nodes of enchanted
interspace t
owards which past and future converge during his field
work in that land characterized, according to
Etore Sas, by an ever fluctuating monarchy-democracy
(mo-dem) ratio; —
when he first saw, that is, h
er stare at him through her
medusal lashes dewed with sweat and melting sleet, an
intense Mei
sel synthesis of daintiness and vigor, of tenderness and titillation on their sl
ow climb up the winding path to Lost Eye Well, an obscure sinkhole in a montane tributary of the
Salween which a footnote in
D’Laumes (1897) indicated might be the secret lair of an endemic riverine s
iren tribe,
and at their campground pendant qu’el
le y bécotait son père with birdlike gestures of affection, it was as if time and memory, suivant quelque
mode amorti du mal espoir, had cruelly conspired to inject him with both the remorseful désir d’écrire, avant l’acte même, avant his very ability to imagine it even, a sweeping confession men
s rea et ostensa of all the pre
teen sins he’d committed, actus reus or not, with his little sister Leetle Sly
Owl
Woman, et le désir d’étreindre, heedless of all consequences, this magical child there and then
I recalled she or he or both must have told a more preterite or at least aorist form of myself as the subjunctive, indeed hortative, one spooned, to the lone accompaniment of
Persoud’s y
owling H
awslee (the
Ars Subtilior it was typically paired with having been apparently subtilized, for the nonce, into the mute ether), the
red soup into mon bec f
in et renardier dans la salle à l’étage du Café des
Dos Péru up the creaky steel colimaçon of which I had lugged le
daim tome orné d’or
de Proust ainsi que ceux de
Roe et Sas and also Otley Welles
as well as the more productive factors in
our despatch-case of textual tackle and I say “our” since, like any given individual “sufferer” (“la loi cruelle de l’art est que les êtres meurent et que nous-mêmes mourions en épuisant toutes les souffrances pour que pousse l’herbe non de l’oubli mais de la vie éternelle”) of Selye Syndrome (
Sel-Syn, as we in the field dub the phenotype), in neither psyche nor soma are any of us singular, but both are plural and alas we are forced to articulate our experiences in this stilted monodidactic form only under duress of the propaedeutical indoctrination of a supposedly benevolent pantomath who seems not to appreciate that the mnemonoclastic kinetochores of the schizomythic “cell,” according to our research (some of which, yes, we have indeed published with
See Law, back when we called el otro lado del mar Tetrastico,
our despised “home”), are, in fact, cognate with the mitotic
dénouement of narrative invention, the “cells” of which, again, or, moreover, are less like little buds (“boutons”) and stems (“tiges”) of écriture, and more like cryptic
intersections in the oneirosome (Traumbau) or
interstitial imbrications in the eidolospace (Bildraum) or nephelosphere (
Wolkesphäre) of pro
ud prose, yet it is only during what we may metaphorically call the “mitotic” phase of the life cycle of our
lettres aréolaires (palabras anastomoticas) that they become apparent as “l’entrecroisement des fils [...] redoublé[s] pour épaissir la trame [...] [d’]un riche réseau de souvenirs,” mais passons,
and her father of course was not indifferent to the recipro
cal, trace, eerie Stös
sel syncopations that passed between them: la face
lacérée, actinique, of the Cumbro-Siuslaw sirenologist’s lute-like citadel of a
visage: el
le y ébrécha avec les black daggers (
noirs poignards) of her tweely lo
sel’s nystagmus, a sympathetic curvetting wiggle-and-roll dance of the eyes symptomatic of the spare dam
sel’s nymphomania (incip
ient, really) that, c’était trop évident, el
le y ébahit the innocent scientist with.
A mandar
in’s entente was thus arrived at (it is always a
wondrous thing t
o witness h
ow even such apparently unrelated languages as Cymry, Siuslaw, Lisu, and Naxi become a daisy chain of lexical concordance, a coher
ent sinewy wreath of m
en’s intellectual sameness when les enjeux reduce to an essential solid c
ore amid mottled ephemera: food, drink, lust, labor, the yell
ow lure of
argent),
whereupon, in five years or so, when she had reached l’âge propice à la reproduction,
See Law would be sent to any designated address no matter where in the
world (the details to be
worked out with her older sister, a pa
inter who lived with her husband, “un homme de let
tres réactionnaire et obscur,” in Toeyl’s Welle in Glarus) and
need not, selon les termes de l’accord,
be intact upon her arrival there, the reason being that, quant à la probabilité d’un dépucelage viatique quelconque ou au moins virtuel, el
le y besognera la véritable preuve of, as, come the appointed day, the wisdom of which he’d clearly
see, Wallis Yell
ow Steel’s
grande passion for the Na-Yi chieftain’s daughter, as well as the bride-price to be paid to the Seu-phá matriclan in a series of mathematical increments during the aforesaid temporal limits of the contract, said series being une pratique traditionnelle visant qu’el
le y becquetterait les faiblesses de son futur époux, lui permettant ainsi de l’aimer de plus.
Meanwhile, there was no manif
est reason to hasten
la defloratio de momentum, so let us shield, so to speak, the child, and drink godspeed to our new global alliance.
In the morning they emerged (don’t
worry: l’enfant was still un
mauled, safe, un
maimed or tousled even) from the Lushui counterpart of a yurt made from various carpets pinned together over a mulberry-wood frame (
sulle strutture sformate di moro) and went off to visit the yew-shaded sinkhole.
See Law, reverting to her girlish reverie that paid not even the faintest flattery to the foreigner’s vanity, ran up the muddy grade like a jolly svelte panda ewe and slid down the muddy grade like a lutarious rasher eel (
Morida temopsoredu Le Bey, 1926; dubbed thus by that ichthyologist à cause du psoriasis anyone rash enough to catch it barehanded is likely to suffer), and arranged rocks along the path in patterns — ells and wyes and esses and
ows — decipherable only by herself.
Tandis que l’infâme
môme rodait à l’écart, écervelée,
calée créativement dans ses gamineries aux marges merdeuses, our sirenophile, attached to a steel rope played out over le d
os du père and fastened to the trunk of a mell
ow yew tree (
Taxus wallichiana), descended into Lost Eye Well.
N
ow, the reason for all this mucking about dans la
sale mud at the source of the
Salween was precisely the hope of confirming a hypothesis sketched out in the aforesaid footnote in
D’Laumes’s pioneering studies (op. cit.) of the Yangtze siren, the
Salween lamantin, and the Mekong manatee, viz. that mammalian homologues of the kinds of nymphal and imaginal discs characteristic of holometabolous arthropods persist in certain species of sirenians, especially those, such as the hermetic subspecies of Hengduan dugong intimated by that
worker’s (idem) report, which have ceased their diadromous ways to become lentic isolates undergoing a sort of axolotl-like paedomorphosis.
Since any tissues containing such heterochronic survivals were expected most likely to occur in the maus
sade lumen, Wallis Yell
ow Steel had equipped himself, in addition to the usual scaphandrier’s impedimenta, with a holl
ow drill to perform
caecal terebrations on the postulated beast.
Unfortunately, h
owever, all our favorite undinologist could find there was a
mermaid too folkloric and foul t
o waste his cetological, ichnological, limnological, sirenological, nymphological, taxidermical and/or vivisectionist skills on.
And so they trudged back d
ownhill (we spare you the viatic details) to the nearest port s
o WYS (our favorite abbreviation) could continue his nereidian divastigations, haunted by the naiadic mirage (the sound of the sculls of the sampan descending the
Salween whispered “
See Law” to him; the wind in the rigging of the lateen of the yawl off the coast of Sulawesi whispered “
See Law” to him; the clank and the hum of the crank and the wheels of the funicular that took him from Walenstadt on the Walensee to Toeyl’s Welle in Glarus whispered “
See Law” to him; the breeze in the jib of the sloop sailing between Port Astri Bay and the Far Gimmals whispered “
See Law” to him, and so on; having kn
own her — alas, in barely more than the “social” sense, and only in her imaginal form — we readily empathize with his obsession) of his bride-to-be,
and one of those
moche eel-like pseudo-Moché waiters slithered up the stairs and across la salle to replace, comme plat de résistance, my exhausted
potage rouge with une assiette de gn
ètes à soringue d’anguilles amazoniennes and slithered back d
own again with the holl
ow tureen balanced on the rubber-coated steel salver balanced on his cocked forearm and the
intense erotic charge of the yell
ow eel cooked in melinjo (kumbal) leaves and served with the piquant roasted thoa (ituá) fruits of the same plant gelled, as it were, into the
inert summation of all the many dishes we will savor but once in our life, the
re-retasted threads of the well-savored souvenir (“¡Mmmm — qué rico!” I hear my mother smack her lips and cluck her tongue) of the re-savored meal serving, thus, to “épaissir la trame” which will gel, so to speak, into the alert soma of a gurgling singularity which, d’un seul c
oup d’erseau, plunged grumbling into the slumbering soul of my sup
per’s doublure (“l’
âme dort, moi pas,” the poet says) and I clattered up from my table and across the squeaking floorboards and d
own the rickety steel colimaçon, leaving flayed livres, smudged fiches, flummoxed déjeunistes, and jejune serveurs a-flap and a-flutter and flushed and flustered in my wake, dashed d
own the more solid counterpart qui conduit aux oubliettes, barely avoiding slipping and bashing my bum and my elbow and my occiput sur les marches du marbre poli, slammed shut and double-locked the door, pinioned my patten-soles wetly into the appointed foot treads, hitched up kilt and thrust d
own knickers and squatted over the louche glairy sev
ere staring eye of the thing:
so many dishes will we savor but once in our life, and none of the threads will ever “épaissir la trame” since they do not sweetly converge and stylishly redouble, but rather squishily loll about and
woefully fester and then slyly, sl
owly, all too loosely (and all to
o swiftly: sorry about the contradiction) diverge from the sweltering stellate oily b
owels (what the locals here so daintily call “les selles”) of jealou
sy (slender joy) and regret and resentment and s
our despair into the cheap sweatshop t
owel — spurned, scorned, threadbare, rancid, and irretrievably soiled — of another swell time lost d
own les chiottes de Lutèce.
I (enc
ore du spleen!) reached up to grab the t
erre-stained, well-
worn
wooden handle of the chain dangling above, and pulled.
§ 31 | Unread
One evening early in my
séjour d’analyse rizlique (to coin
an azure, solid, lyrical
mot for that little cardboa
rd boîte puant servilement in tota Lutetia) I recall that,
like a bemu
sed mulatta n
un who, lynx-eyed and dis
interested, sailing down the
Yssel Nadi on her way to the old nun
nery der Austauschdienlic
her Gunstpānapäderasten d’Uryāh (le vieux couv
ent [oud, arriéré béguinage] of
Ribald Yes-to-Unlimit
ed Ablutions Rythmiqueme
nt Abordées, Tripudiées e
t Ruées Trop Bandinguement par l’Ouvroi
r de Putes Ribotantes of the Ven
utian Order of Uriah) in
Lyness, stops her b
oat-mired morose pacing
to admire momentously a scar
ce, alate cerulean, crenulate and caud
ate, lace cerise jester, more commonly known as Rous
sel’s nymph (
Nymphalis rousselii Canterel, 1914), flapping and fluting and floating above the icy waters of mid-w
inter,
I noticed a svelte anthropomorph, dressed only in his underclothes, enter what looked like, from the balcony of my Chicken Street studio, a
dim tearoom in one of the buildings just southwest of celui d’en face and kneel down before a lithe gynomorph splayed on the couch therein and begin caressing and undressing her, inducing her to drop the book she had been reading.
They were soon joined by a third (
male, dusky, also in his underclothes) who added the mordant demystified
(mo-dem) rationality of cooperation to an act escalating all too quickly, it seemed, from poignant tenderness to hopeless obscenity, and then by a fourth (fe
male, sudorous, already nude) who lent a more modestly empathetic
(mod-em) ration of catoptromantic charm to the now
dual mesmeric symmetry of the almost unendurably acute monadic-democritan
(mo-dem) rationale of the adorable raree show my isolated vision had culled incognito from what had been, until then, a rather monotonous autumn night of trying for the third or fourth time to read
D’Laumes on extinct
mermaid otoliths (each “une déli
ée trace calcaire” of those quasi-mythical creatures’ age, diet, life cycle, social structure, environment, and etc., it seems, or would if I’d ever fully read the thing — I recall the deflated awe de ce cad
or de mot amical who, in the act of unsticking and repainting the swollen rebords de ma fenêtre-balcon, asked, “Tous ces livres, vous avez, euh, meussieu
dame, lus?” “Tous? Pas tout à fait. Ils sont ce qu’exige mon travail, ma recherche, si vous voulez; ils sont comme des outils. Par exemple,” — but already his eyes had glazed over with that species of
calcrete easement common to both the utterly starved and the utterly sated).
A fifth, fully clad in black, occasionally entered the room, to, literally on, or rather with, the one hand, poke and prod their frenzy into ever higher modulations of the sorts of hair-pulled-back, chin-tilted-up, fa
ce-écarlate, slack-jawed moans that I had only ever witnessed before in the most pru
rient avatars of inbred fictionalized theatrics of the “hot” variety in which it is not unusual for the experienced clinician to observe, scioptically magnified, une fente
moite ram doltishly down onto an
interminable olisbos and then retract to leave une verge épaisse comme un bras d’homme protruding three-quarters of its docile length out of the glistening stoma, and, with the other, disgustingly clutch and professionally fondle and tease the playful quartets’ working parts so as
to harm
onize a slurry-laden perferv
id carnal stuttering into the unique
translucid tetragram of him-her-u
s-and-you libertinage that would let the four-
part gnash-up denature into the spasmo
dic latrant Streuklang of
Gruppensādhanatva (e.g., the mutual g
ang-rape’s dhātupneumatos [धातुπνεύμᾰτος]).
But as I was sloughing out of my daring
déshabillé, like a provocative seductive treacherous Eastern b
road, to mime in word and gesture, in esprit et corps, “Laisse ton
mari do to me was er will!” —
and as I, like a two-headed truce lizard (
Lacerta ececheirii L.), was racing towards the biphasic, doubly
medusal bliss we
Sel-Syns alone are capable of savoring, i.e., with two mouths a single tail, so to speak, and with two hands a plural tool, the pattern prudishly resolved, like a drunken quarrel cut short by one party abruptly passing out, into a simple dîner à quatre, fully clothed, with frocked waiter, uncorked wine, poached haddock, et patates sautées al Ayacucho.
I realized, with that fiendish sense of having been caught unawares in some sort of
unholy woman- or widowh
ood raté mimicry of something I’d read before, or almost, or perhaps had meant to, but had not, that I was looking at la salle à l’étage, transformed by Art Deco lamps and modernist tablecloths and midnight reflections, of the, by daylight at least, bare but for les barbouillages barbouillés par cette barbouilleuse
méta-drômoise I’ve referred to elsewhere,
café I frequented for my pre-, trans-, and postcibal
enquêtes par, à travers, et dans la vie littéraire!
And the nun? Sie ist nun auf der Inse
l Hoy wunschlos (she’s perfectly happy there) ge-something with her hermeneutical sisters, recalling, whenever she drops her catechism and her breviary to attend to more sublunary needs, the frilly-scallop-wing-tailed papillon rouge et azur qu’elle avait
admiré tomographiquement, presque, at the start of her “seclusion” (these things are relative, after all)
and I thought about how it fluted and perched on the
moro-et-daim gloved
main she’d been stroking the polished boat rail with
(
tesuri blǫdnya, 手摺 блѫдьнꙗ), fanned its wings once, twice, in the w
inter sun, and flew on.
Don’t worry. We stately
Sel-Syns, like the noblest elms (
Ulmus adelissima L.) whose lofty crowns I often dream to be vigilantly swaying from — or am I the tree itself, keeping anemochoric watch with a myriad
retinal samaras? — are, for the most part, self-infertile.
§ 32 | Unwholy
One thing I have not left
unread, however, is a piece by
Marten Hesse, a North Appalachian from Erehwon
en Wye (a body of water, apparently: he sw
am there sensationally as a student, we are told in the by-line, and also excelled there as a ne
rvy sculler) who left his job as custod
ial ornithologist and topsy-t
urvy scullion at the Appalachian Mental Institution in
Mastersheen to help
Hester Esman (a former cla
ssmate, here now in Paris)
run her literary
journal for expatriated polyglots, perverts, pantophobes, and misomaniacs of all stripe
s, The Meaner Side, in which
the arioso aedile under discussion placed
said étoile Horæënne of epanaph
oran littérature,
said oriole athée of
scry vulgarity entitled “The Holy Wound” which tests the wholesome reader’s
endurance dès the get-go, so let me jot down, before I ditto some choice excerpts (which demonstrate the original
Nerudan
poésie of the author’s cuento de
orinal, the
curvy scurrility of his authentic
scurvy prose, better than any summary), a summary of the story, to the extent I’m able to glean and piece together the themes of the complicated structure (in which the
terse, sham-neophyte, literary anti-gumsh
oe hides aleatoric phrases and allusions, it would seem, but which actually, Mr. Hesse articulates to me in the most reassuring of tones, incorporates or encodes or is inspired, à la him who composed the Hibernian
Odyssey, by the six or nine or twelve or so Horae of the classical era):
Primo (1): There is a maniac. In a bar, he a) carries on a manic monologue anent memory or the lack thereof with himself or some silent interlocutor; b) engages in a similar dialogue of seduction on a similar topic with an
underaged pucelle who has a scar on her cheek. On the street, he c) stubs out his cigarette butt in the face of an infant in a stroller, and escapes; d) ducks into an antiquarian’s shop and demands food and drink.
Segundo (2): There is a girl-child. On the street, she a) walks hand in hand with her fearful mother, musing aloud on what she sees and does not understand (nor does her fearful mother); b) vid. 1b; c) vid. 1c; d) gets hit by a car and ends up severely paralyzed, in a wheelchair (or 1e: does the maniac push her off a cliff, with the same outcome as 2d?).
Tertio (3): Maniac tortures paralyzed and scar-faced pucelle to the tune of 2a (vid. 1b, 1c, 2b, 2c, and 4) .
Quarto (4): Paralyzed and scar-faced pucelle is tortured by maniac ditto (ditto and 3).
Et voilà, quelques citations culled from the epanaph
oran, list-like litany du texte même (which may be had en entier by writing to the offices of said publication at 9, cit
é Manstherse, Paris, IX):
[1a:] “La mémoire? J’y crois pas. La croyance? On a privée mon enfance dudit palliatif. L’enfant? C’est l’adulte pourri. L’adulte? Il faut s’en méfier. La méfiance? C’est la mémoire. J’y crois pas.”
[2a:] “Maman, est-ce que c’est que c’est un truc spécial de
prestidigitation, de mettre le feu au bout d’une petite baguette et faire souffler de la fumée par la bouche, maman?” “Chais pas, mon enfant. Donnes-moi la main. (Où est-ce qu’elle a appris le mot
prestidigitation?)”
“Maman, est-ce que c’est que c’est une preuve spéciale de la
misère, de battre les doigts à l’ouverture de la braguette, pasqu’il f
ait de la rosée, hoirie de sa zizi, pasque la
haie doit la rosée, maman?” “Chais pas, ma chérie. Serres-toi plus près la main. (Comment est-ce qu’elle sait le mot
hoirie?)”
“Maman, est-ce que c’est que c’est un trait spéciale de la
mélancolie, de tirer les cheveux à gros coups de poing et faire souffrir la pensée par la tête, maman?” “Chais pas. Donnes la main. (Mais qui l’avait fait connaître le mot
mélancolie?)”
“Maman, est-ce que c’est que c’est un prêt spécial de l’
infini, de prendre la vie avec un petit paquet de foudre et faire suffire sa portée par le cou, maman?” “La main, putain!”
[1c, 2c:] “Salop! Meurtrier! Violeur! Police!” “Mon enfant! Ma chérie!” “Ouäaïii!” “Qu’est-ce que c’est que ça que s’est passé?” “Je ne sais pas, moi.” “Arrêtez-le! Salop!” “Qui? Où?” “Violeur! Connard! Criminel!” “Au secours!” “Mon enfant! Ma chérie!” “Ouäaïii!” “Mais qu’est-ce que c’est que ça que s’est passé?” “Je ne sais pas, moi.” “Brulé le bébé.” “Comment? Qui?” “Il s’en fuit! Police! Au secours!” “Comment? Pourquoi?” “Ce tapé
d’oriole athée, saignant!” “Lâc
he art, oeil d’oiseau?” “Écoute c’qu’j’t’di-se! I la é-cra-sé son clope au vi-sa-ge de l’enfant.” “Dans le village? Pourquoi?” “Quel pant
ois athée! Laideron sera!” “Comment? Comment pourquoi? Comment athée? Je veux savoir qu’est-ce que c’est que ça que s’est passé!” “Mégot! Face! Enfant!” “C’est effroyable! Abominable! Atroce!” “Ouäaïii!”
[1d:] “J’ai faim! Donnez-moi à manger! Et comme boisson, un demi, s’il vous plaît! Je veux un demi!”
“Mais vous n’êtes pas chez un bistrotier, ici, monsieur. Nous sommes antiquaires.”
“Pas buvette, ici, hein! Antiquaires!”
“J’ai faim! Je veux un demi!”
“S’il vous plaît, monsieur, on ne jette pas les mégots au sol, ici, monsieur. Tenez, monsieur, un cendrier, s’il vous plaît!”
“Fume pas ici!”
“J’ai faim!”
“Laisse-le, laisse-le! Vas chercher quelque chose à manger, ma chérie. Et de la bière. Tu vois bien qu’il est un peu troublé. Tenez, asseyez-vous, monsieur. Doucement.”
“Hmph!”
“J’ai faim! J’ai soif!”
[1b, 2b:] “La mémoire? J’y crois pas.”
“Moi non plus. Mais je te crois.”
“La croyance? On a privée mon enfance dudit palliatif.”
“L’amour est un palliatif. Le seul remède. Je veux faire un enfant avec toi.”
“Enfant? C’est l’adulte pourri.”
“Enfant ou adulte, je t’adore.”
“Adulte? Il faut s’en méfier.”
“Tu me méfies? J’ai faim de toi.”
“La méfiance? C’est la mémoire. J’y crois pas.”
“Mais je te crois. Je te veux, ma femme, ma jeune fille, ma petite pucelle.”
“Regarde. On m’a brulé le visage quand j’étais enfant.”
“Je veux te boire, te manger.”
“Qui? Un adulte.”
“Sois adulte avec moi. Ôtes ta jupe, ta chemise.”
“Comment? Il a écrasé son clope dedans.”
“Je t’ai soif. Je veux te fumer, te humer, te humecter, te sucer.”
“Pourquoi? Je ne sais pas.”
“Moi non plus. Mais je te sais maintenant.”
“T’es fou! Moi aussi.”
“Tais-toi.”
[2d or 1e:] “¿[...]?”
[3, 4:] “O,
head solitaire, oesophage de ver, hog-tied spinele
ss harem teen! Est-ce que c’est que c’est un t
ruc vys-vys-vishious de
presti-dyzhi-dizhi-digi-tasyon, de mettre du feu dans la cicatrice de ta gueule? Moooo
oo! Here is ta laideur, vache!”
“Pas dans la face, s’il vous plaît! Pas dans la face!”
“That
smarts, eh, needy piss bag? Comme une
hostie orale aide la foi d’une pute, mon
aide érotise la houri que je vois dans ta paupiette de po
rc: s’y vulve t’en a pas, cicatrice y en a: preuve spéciale de la misère. As-tu
enwy, as-tu
enwy, ma pe-ti-te cul-le-de-jat-te, que je fais pipi dans la plaie de ta bouche?”
“Pas dans la bouche, s’il vous plaît! Pas dans la bouche!”
“Or how ’bout dis
idea: heart, soil, oeuvre de ta chaise roulante, ma petite estropiate? Ça c’est un trait spéciale de la
mé-lan-co-lie, que je bats tes
aréoles, idiote; hache-les comme des p
runes b
runies; que j’enfonce le foutre dans la balafre de ton froid zizi mort (in the
nether masses of your mortal c
oil, randy rank rangy ranular ranunculus, where my time-
hater’s semen will mix with your memory-
hater’s menses)!”
“Oui, là! Là, s’il te plaît, là!”
“O, ma
nue ardente et moue,
a real otiose, heidnische coup de foudre de l’infini! O, hill
osta adorée, heilige W
unde à ressort caché! Ça te suffit, de te faire zigouiller comme un
oiselet adoré, haï?”
“Non, s’il te plaît! Pas d—.”
Although I must admit that, even without my personal
connaissance of or with Mr.
Marten Hesse (who, before growing a b
eard under or over his heretofore imberbe author’s mask and moving on to
Masse-Herten, a riparian village in one of the more enlightened Bothnian ochlocracies, where he has since published the best-selling [for those who like that sort of
Bijoux-indiscrets-like, who-dunnit-to-whom-how-where-and-why type of pornosophy — and I know I do!]
Steen’s Harem, took great pleasure in informing me that “hillosta” is the elative singular of the Finnish word for “jam, jelly”), the story would still, today, resonate with me, reformed psycho-, and practicing socio-, physiologist that I am.
I trust, moreover, that, by infixing, as I have done, whole excerpts from
said aerolite hoedown of
The Meaner Side into this, the commonplace book of my Parisian escapade, I have not violated the m
oral integument of anyone’s authorial or editorial or artistic “rights.” Even if I have, however, it does not matter. J’y crois pas.
§ 33 | Ears
One afternoon I awoke with one of the less crav
en sentinels of the resident pègre du Café des
Dos Péru,
Pedro, submerged in the unkempt
sea-store of my
Grand Néant, his long-lobed transpar
ent ensiform poin
ter’s ears poking above the ropy roiling surf between the goose-fleshed shallows and the deep-veined depths like twin leathery snorkels as he probed my every sublittoral nook and gill in search of the fresh fimbriate flesh of nacre-shelled albino abalone, the fat pink tender pulp of intertidal cephalopods, the ch
aste roe — silky, supple, lustrous, luteous, deliquescent — concealed within the calyxed crowns of feathery crinoids.
His unique ability to transpire through his ears, by the way, ensures that sedulou
s Pedro, unlike your more conventional submarine adventurers, needs solamente de vez en cuando to come up for air, more to orientate than to aerate, really, his blond eyelashes brimming with l’écume vénusienne as he quickly scans the shore for landmarks — the thatch-roof shack with the red plastic table and chair on which he neatly draped his bathrobe before taking the plunge, the cyclone-battered ruins of an ancient temple, the hopeless hotel and prematurely aged restaurant of a hideous resort that had sprung up overnight like a bloom of mushrooms dans la fente rasée between f
orest, sea, field, and city — then lowers his head beneath the buzzing surface and sets to work again, gently rocked by the rhythmic tide, the surging flux, the vivacious undertow of the crashing coastal waters.
All my senses were a-tingle, focalisés sur la fougue de ce rem
ous de prodige qui allait vers la cime de la jouissance, with what is perhaps my most
common s
ense intumescing
intensely in an effervesc
ent sine wave that seemed to simmer and seethe and overmantle in a singing
serrate froth of clo
ud spores and turbulently disperse sur les toits du tout Paris, from the zinc sloped planes of cité and faubourg to the
roseate scalloped tuiles des banlieues in a saltatory, mostly eastward, motion with occasional short jumps in the opposite direction, as if the airborne saunte
rer, east-bound, I’d become, needed to retrace, every now and again, les pas de sa flânerie volante, in or
der, spouse-like, to use the point of return as the springboard for an ever larger leap forward,
so that, as
Sœur P. D. Sartre explained somewhere, as s/he straddled the shoulders of some
proud sexy androgynous giant, and hooked his or her knees beneath her or his hybrid
vāhana’s armpits (causing
that chim
era’s tremendous bust to bulge coquettishly), pressed his or her dog’
s-ear toes into the small of the demi-god(ess)’s back, and crushed her or his aching groin into the croup or nuque or tumid neck-stalk of this
tense, intimate, idolat
rous, pedantic attempt to pull him- or herself up with chafed hands and scraped arms and peer over the ever-dreaming
sentient wall of the great chain of being and nothingness and catch a glimpse of things intangible but real — numbers, fractions, formulas, fictions, orbits, tangents, values, vectors, rainbows —
mon voyage s’inclinant peu ou
prou des pays du Crépuscule aux pays de l’Aurore — from Porto Vecho to Owlstain and back; from Porto Vecho to Shatsbrook to Minxburgh and back; from Shatsbrook to Lutèce via aerostat and the wilds of whitest Albionia et ce fleuve qui mène des sulphureous gangplanks of Le Havre to the pudgy bosom and podgy bottom of Gay Paree; from the
sour, depraved auberge in Clink-and-Court Alley to my g
arret — secure, secluded, sensible, with a semi-circular-capped porte-fenêtre au balcon — in Pullet Lane thence one evening westward to the ra
rest earthy shenanigans
le Bois has ever witnessed and, come sun-up, my rumless trajectory carried me back towards the cresting solar eruption of a preternaturally warm autumn morning —
did I really stop at a cafe-bar-tabac on Saint And
ré Sarte Avenue pour écarquiller les yeux avec a good matinal boozing, then again at
Dos Péru for another ditto (hence
Pedro’s ubiety), and did Mme Soraya
Soréa, Esthéticienne, really scowl at me from her shopfront with my tow-headed
buceador supeditado in tow (impaled, as it were, on the braz
en tines of my spiculum amoris) as we staggered past her pr
ude’s portal and up the five or six flights to le petit coin au palier, flushing but once for the both of us, and unlocked my room, and slammed the door on all the sad life-and-death world of work and business and dated folly and elbowed fate and un
seen intolerable adult voices and depressing sham music behind, outside, beyond it? —
so that all this pushing and pulling, this to-ing and fro-ing, this giving and taking, this aller-retour, this upping and downing of the cute grenouillard’s imaginative coo-and-stroke, exhale and in-, appeared to me in all its cel
este, soaring, dialectical glory and I wonde
red suponamentally,
as my benumbèd κεφαλῆς — wait, are you saying that
our despicable
Pedro sucked all the l
ourde psychomachic calva
dos-repulse
d sour pénurie de rhum therefrom? I am, and he did! — fell back into l’écume du jour refluant and my deliciously pierced, probed, and pompés tentacula sank into la houle tumultueuse du lit, which way station would I be drawn to next, and in which lieu de séjour would I next reside — Strasbourg oder Stuttgart? Zagreb ili Saint Petersburg? Saratov yā Shiraz? — since,
as Sister P. D.
a très rêveusement écrit somewhere, “quand on
tète la sirène de la
réalité testée, il est très probable que l’on
lèse et tarit le
liseré tâté du
réel attisé, et
la tête serinée de l’al
laité reste étalée, triste, et son
lest étire à la striée tendresse d
e l’être satisfait.”
§ 34 | Run
While waiting for my edematous mantle to detumesce and allow the finesp
un venereal chyle to run out of me, I ruffled the pages of a thick, a very thick, and locally sourced,
journal, and evoked a postliminal image of my frogmenschliche faune
who, nu, lymphatique, had decided, after his meticulous periplus of my coast-mountain fundament, not to run the risk of encountering sur le palier my voluble m
adrone’s relation,
Dr. N. Soréa, faisant
sa ronde râlante of slipping self-promotional papillons sous les raies de toutes les portes de l’immeuble, and opted instead to lordotically stand and smugly deliver, as if they were an exotic species of that freely giv
en ardor’s ichor that makes the kneeling parve
nu howl, yammer, squeal, and moan in wonder, his post-labdacian sanies into the abstract
évier of what called itself “kitchen” of my
cagibi.
His submari
ner’s adorable intuition indeed proved well-founded, for, as I sat there high above the windswept timberline, above the clamorous clouds, on the rarefied peak of my sloping watershed, my cocked tympani h
eard sornioni passi ascending la scala echeggiante, the birdcall creaks of the floorb
oards’ renunciation, the curious pause, huff, scuffle, and scrape that signalled the shady, shadowy act of tractatus intromissus, and a chitinous caelatu
ra de sornettes the self-proclaimed “Voyant Célebre, Grand Guérisseur, Médium Très Puissant, Astrologue” deployed as calling card crawled noisily, as I restrained my ctenidia and constrained my nephridia, under the doorcrack and into my sight — “For the face of doorcracks (
das Gesicht der Türspalte) determines both what is the fist, and also all that is not the fist.”
My flared osphradium sensed him listening al otro lado with bated breath for the merest echo of occupation of my aseo of solitude in the apneic interval, then he wheezed and coughed and retortured the hopeless planks with his shuffling ballast, violated
les bas of the remaining three doors with his parasitic apophallastic pamphlets — “The thrust of the doorcrack (
der Stoß der Türspalte) leafs (through?) the thrust of the sandpattern” — and paused a last time in front of my retrete’s
unnerved
puerta before starting his descente de l’escalier.
My siphon, my gills, my nidamentals could contain themselves no longer and, even before I knew that the author of “vous qui souffrez difficultés de trouver
un vénéré époux,
une vernale épouse [...] fier natif d’Ac
hun y Wolof École des Guérisseurs diplômé vous résou
dra ensorcellements, vous aidera à faire
un rêve nouveau de vie” had descended even midway to the landing below, I exhaled and uncorked the straining operculum and shameless
ly unwhorled a caustic flow into the resonant inodoro, for “Only doorcracks (
nur die Türspalte) can flow from locality, a source of noses cannot.”
As the groaning cascade raced our resident seer downstairs, I leant forward and retrieved the throw-away feuille, in order to use it, not à la Bloom to dab my retractile stylophore, my pedunculus fimbriatus, my vestigium, flagellum, diverticulum, and other damp fair parts with, but rather as both placeholder and fiche de gribouille, since while with one hand I perused “The
Holy Unwomaning,” and with the other m
y own hulusi-spintheric heterolexicalization of die
Luftige pfeilschriftige Abbildungen’s
drone-arsed Saxonic asperities into the
even runes of Anglo-Appalachik et la
ronde rasante de la Gallo-Flouziane said
journal had at last deigned to publish, with both I corralled my more skittish musings in the blank field of its, l’affichette’s, verso.
§ 35 | Readorns
“
Oho! T’as réali-é, édifiante rose de l’ouest que tu sois avec tes yeux de
rose à l’athée iodiste,
un rendez-vous déjà avec
le Dr Œil-qui-sait-prêter-du-bon-augure?”
Each mountain of her breathless Sierra Madre, misty with ince
nse, empasmed with talc, seems to separately tumble — or is there a pair of lecherous putti having a suckling spree between bosom and blouse? — with her each corpulent
exhalaison as she plucks one of the stacked prospectuses adorning
la noire petite table en fer forgé just inside the port
al, iron-grated, of her cockamam
ie teased-hair oloroso shop and bids me inspect de plus près the phrase, “Par correspondence j
oindre par buts et moyens enveloppe timbrée et photo.”
She casts a
new, yearning-filled, look at me, and her insenti
ent masher’s exegetical thumb fumbles thunderously at the throw-away, setting all her armfat a-quiver, and finally exhorts her congregant
à l’ironie impudente to mark the “RDV” in the phrase, “Le Dr. N. Soréa reçoit t.l.j. de 8 h au 20 h sur RDV au fond de la cour du 11, rue Poulet, RDC,” and in response I swiftly foudroie la peau de la petite réclame with the sweeping emphatic éclair of my own slim tapered lunate lightning-bolt of a doigt to illuminate “t.l.j. de 8 h au 20 h.”
“Donc, since I am une personne du quartier, de la maison même, I assumed that simply showing up chez vous, au what I understand means Rez-De-Chaussée and not République Démocratique du Congo, during office hours would suffice.”
Although her salacious orog
eny (wunderhübsches, in a way) continues to jostle freely beneath the vivid calico anango qui moule son im
mense heart-scutum (into the all-consuming abyss of which her hand at last plunges in search of the gold-rimmed lunette
s y curvavavabooming la ho
masse entre her né
nés tita
nesques), she, quoique d’une voix plus fr
oide, hèle, “T’as rai-on! T’as [she painstakingly articulates l’
s intervocalique] rai-
zzzo
n et seras, hem, tou-
jjjours ma rose de l’ouest!”
And from the hinterlands of the shop there emerges, as if he too were chained to the endless
noria-lavalier she continues to winch up from between the round-ridged
rivages of her livid highland arroyo,
le Dr Soit-prêt-à-un-bécot lui-même, wearing cerise shikari
sneakers, short tartan kurta (cognate with “shirt,” by the way), and a tight-thighed, flare-cuffed
pantalon cut from azure sailcloth,
étiolé, iodé, harassé.
“Bonne après midi, meussieudame! Je vous attendais, en fait. Vous êtes à l’heure!
Soyez la diurnal receivresse, comme vous
louriez dans la rythmée suite de votre propre-à-
rien burst de patois outre-merdique, de
notre part de subir mantique! Suivez-moi, s’il vous plait!”
And, in fact, just as la madrone steps aside to let me accept the seer’s invitation,
un roué d’enfant squirms into the c
urvy Schauraum (kurvenreich showroom) of her ample décolletage, its d
ewy-nosed face dribbling milk foam, it
s mère-set hands latched to her gold-rimmed bésicles, its gawping pra
wn-eyes unblinking.
“Ça va, ça va, ma refr
oidie rose haletante. À bien tôt!”
Through the depths of the shop (which I’ve already described somewhere) and out the back door into the courtyard (into which I’ve never before penetrated, did not even suspect, avant my studious perusal of the polyg
onal irruptive pests that had crawled into both studio and WC from under the doorcracks — “That the blessing tooth is a doorcrack (
dass der Segenzahn ein Türspalt ist) is concealed by the habitudinal finger of outflow, slated or gaited...” — that our immeuble possessed), I follow his swishing, muscular, thigh-shearing strides.
“Je vous précède, si ça ne vous gêne pas, en tant que c’est votre premier visite aux lieux, meussieudame?”
“Mais certainement,
Dr Éraniste!” His sinistral
sneaker is
run down on the inside heel, his dextral, on the out-.
We pass through a whol
e harem’s nest of kangas, anangos, culottes, slips, maillots, caleçons, bas, skirts (cognate with “kurta,” by the way), and
the seamen’s rayés tricots qui vous rassurent que vous êtes bien au pays de Ronsard, and so on drying on a complicated web of rigging in the dappled post-meridian sunlight.
Au fond de la cour we enter the door of what seems a prima fac
ie Hades or a toilet, but t
urns out to be
le Dr Pere-boitant-suspicieusement’s bureau
aisé, atelier d’hoodoo f
urnished in
the same senryū-esque combination of the simple and the savage, the exotic and the mundane, common to psychorapists de partout dans le monde: African masks, Asian idols, c
urvy sculptures from the Ancient World, lilliputi
an trees, meshīnian shepherd’s crooks —
Io, idols, hetaerae figuri
nes, etc., all symbols of
sensitivity, occult signs of secret therapistic sagesse.
“Asseyez vous, meussieudame. J’ai anticipé votre presence. Vous êtes un peu
morose, ces jours-ci?”
“Mais pas du tout,
Dr Aréopagite! C’est tout le contraire, en fait. Je suis en train de vivre une lucidité extatique! Mais le problème — en fait, il
n’est pas de problème, mais simplement je cherche que vous, en tant que Voyant Célebre, pourriez me donner un peu d’
aide, théorie, la souhaitée opinion vostra envers de ce que, quand je me souvi
ens, quand j’envisage — mais, vous savez l’appalachien comme il è parlato
en WY,
n’est-ce pas,
Dr Éon? Pourrais-je en faire recours si j’en ai besoin?”
“Ou-ais, bien sûr. Je sais toutes les langues, sinon en pratique, au moins par intuition. Continuez, s’il vous plaît.”
“Bon. Alors,
Dr Œcuménique, le problème — mais il
n’est pas de problème, comme je l’ai déjà dit, c’est seulement que je p
ense que vous, en tant que Médium Très Puissant, pourriez m’
aider —”
“Hola! Toisée rose de l’ouest! T’as oublié tes trucs!” She trundles in the abject tools of our (meaning “my”) heterotextual trade and deposits them at my (meaning “our”) speechless feet.
“Merci, madame.” Neither I nor
le Dr Say-rien-au-Zollbeamte speak until she and her parasite de poitrine eye each of us in turn, as if expecting a tip, then she shrugs theatrically, and leaves.
“Continuez.”
“Où étais-je? Oui. Le problème — mais il
n’est pas de problème, sauf qu’it seems that what I remember is bound to happen, and what hasn’t happened yet, I’ve already remembered.”
“Je vois. Vous avez des problèmes de mémoire. Tenez, meussieudame. Buvez cette infusion des fleurs d’haricot de l’
Ordalie, thé à soie de Calabar nous l’appelons aussi. C’est bon pour la mémoire.”
“Merci,
Dr Œnomancien. [Je hume l’âcre arome du breuvage.] Mais non, pas tout à fait. If something has not happened yet, n’a pa
s encore eu lieu, I’ve already recalled it, je l’avais déjà rappelé. Je p
ensais que vous pourriez m’aider à p
enser the smara pramūḍha, as it were, in a
new yoga, so to speak, since it’s not like the t
enses, the times, the past, pre
sent, and future all
run together like some sort of impossibly enjambèd seaside partouze de jeu
nes filles en fleur dont l’ardeur de leur fonte synallagmatique ne laisse rien qu’une petite sorne de
sens assombrie, fuligineuse, fumante [I blow on the steaming liquid] — but rather, I just need to stretch time’s structure, not
mar the sense of it, and limber up memory’s recalcitrant joints, since if I’ve already recalled it, si je l’ai déjà rappelé, it will happen, il va se passer. Like in a dream —”
“Je vois. Vous souffrez de cauchemars. Mais avant qu’on continue, vous m’avez apporter une photo?”
“Oui. Trois.” Je bois une petite gorgée de l’infusion doucement amère.
“Je vois. Celle-ci, c’est du passé. C’est votre amie d’enfance. Celle-là, le pré
sent. C’est vous-même. Et celle-ci, le futur. Votre futur, euh, partenaire.”
“Pas exactement. Sono tutti di passato. Quella n’est pas une amie d’enfance, mais une collègue plus, très, peut-être trop récente,
S. Codesta n’est pas moi, mais ma mère. Et questa — mais c’est moi! In the winsome days of my New Lexican nymphancy!” Je
sirote — aah! — l’iodée infusion.
“C’est vous, celle-ci? Mais vous étiez sublime! [Nostalgic pause. I swill the bittersweet sout
hern tea messily. “Pardon. C’est très bon, le thé.” “Vous en voulez encore?” “Non, merci.” Continue nostalgic pause. End.] Et celle-là, ça me regarde un peu, ça me fait me ressouvenir de quelqu’un —”
“I should think she
would remind you of someone — she’s the sister of a friend of your wife! Grâce à elle, la sœur d’
S, je vis ici, dans le même immeuble que vous!”
“Ma femme?”
“Oui, la madrone, la patronne, la propriétaire, l’esthéticienne, celle qui vient de me remettre mes ust
ensiles scribou
silleux!”
“Mais Mme Soraya n’est pas mon épouse — elle est ma cousine! Je suis célibataire, même.”
“Oh, je m’excuse. Je pensais que, parce que —”
“Je vois. On continue. Vous souffrez de cauchemars de partouzes où sont impliqués votre mère et votre ancienne, ou plutôt récente, collègue,
S. Je vais vous prescrire —”
“Mais non, s’il vous plaît. Pardon,
Dr Réanimateur, but — you are familiar with the oneirochronog
eny work of Dun
ne, Y. W.?”
“Le poète, young woman?”
“Yohan Willis, je pense. Le chercheur du temps foutu. Mais passons. In the laboratory where
S était ma collègue, nous continuons la recherche de
Dr Zeliony, a Ruslandic Naturforscher in Pavlov’s lab, an early divastigator of the schizog
eny wrought by trauma, in fact, and what he discovered, or rather what we rediscovered —”
“Ça vous dérange si je fume?”
“Non. [Je m’imbibe la lie du p
hiltre dosé à oie appâtée d’un seul trait.] Pas du tout. What we rediscovered by employing the Zel
eny Wundausschneidungsprozess (rubescent excision
à la Dr Zeliony’s urbane
procédé) on select stoats, native nutria, and endemic eyra (the
sne of
SNE, in the jargon), for instance, was precisely the schizomythic nature de l’épistémè (or
SNE), ou de l’expérience (also
SNE), ou au moins des
eidola à théoriser encore, et nous avons donc commencé à développer une
théorie d’asile aoriste quand elle —”
“Misoschistique? Vous n’aimez pas les roches, les cristaux? Mais passons. Racontez moi par contre votre histoire d’elle,
S. Vous l’aimez encore, il me semble.”
“Mais non, pas tout à fait. Aimer, c’est beaucoup dire. L’avoir désirée, l’avoir regrettée, si, mais c’est plutôt une histoire, celle de ma collègue,
S, d’envie et de jalousie.”
“Ah, je vois bien que vous êtes bien
sado, meussieudame. E
ss-pliquez moi, s’il vous plaît.”
And so I tell him the story of
S, and as I do so, I am filled with an overwhelming urge to munch, chew, gnaw on cloves of raw garlic and chug, swig, quaff several glasses of straight rum, and the name
Alinor seems t
o dilate, ease rhoibdostically into the She
mesh-tense, rapidly filling chasm of my s
olar-incubus-seduced goose of a bladder. I tell this to
le Dr Sait-buter-en-opus-incertum as I reach the end of the story of
S (it seems that my therapanderastic ontog
eny wants to recapitulate the degenerate picaresque phylog
eny wrenched into the world of letters by some picayune roman à tir
oirs édité à Haole University Press of Western Polynesia!).
“Pourquoi ce nom,
Alinor?”
“Je ne sais pas.”
“Mais moi, je sais, je vois. Je vois qu’elle,
S, vous ensorcellait via cette
Alinor! Et c’est
S qui vous ensorcelle par
Alinor encore! Mon village natif, Achun, par exemple, était le siège d’une
Alinor médiévale, une reine sorcière comme le Merlin était roi sorcier d’Albionia. Et cette
Alinor — mais en fait si je me remémore de plus près, il me semble qu’elle avait un “e” dans son nom, mais dans la première, seconde, ou troisième syllabe, je ne sais plus. Ce que je veux vous dire c’est que, souvent dans la maladie, on trouve le remède même. Le remède se cache dans la maladie! For instance, a s
ailor nodding off with
scurvy dreams of fruit, tomatoes, chilies, raw meat, fresh blood, qui sont tous des remèdes pour le scorbut! Vous songez d’
Alinor la reine sorcière, vous songez de rhum et d’
ail rongé à cru. Alors, c’est simple maintenant. Votre envie de manger d’ail et de boire du rhum — c’est ça, le remède! Ainsi, je vous prescris une gousse d’ail par heure, suivi par un vaso de ron, ou plutôt vice-versa:
ron, ail, in that
order, one each every hour, not to exceed six each per dia. Or, come to think of it,
ail, ron also works. Whichever you choose — experiment, even! And above all — exercise! You sleep all day and stay up all night reading and writing — it’s not just la vitami
ne sé you’re craving, but la vitamine dé! There are a good three hours left of sunlight today — so get out and walk, west, now, facing into the sun! This too I also prescribe: au moins trois heures de promenade au soleil par jour. Now, allez-y, meussieudame: marchez, mangez, buvez!
Ron, ail, Šamaš, Sūrya, Hé
lion, Ra! Vous me devez cent turpins. Dos mil pesetas. Réglez à la caisse, s’il vous plaît. Venez me voir dans une semaine. Et laissez les photos. Merci. À la prochaine!”
And so out of the proffered hand I snatch the script scribbled par
le Dr Ubi-ron-petaste on the verso of one of his papillons publicitaires, snatch up from the floor my textual tackle, rebrousse le chemin du forêt de linge, start to panic when, sans my starboard-listing and alliteration-destroying guide, my intended beeline hopelessly entangles itself with t
he mare’s nest of a Kue
yen whore’s nest of all clotheslines, mais en suivant les humides senteurs fulgurantes de cheveux défrisés je me sauve, je m’extirpe, hand dos mil pesetas y el vaso vacío de té to la Madame (complete with heckling nourrisson entre ses seins de mastodonte), fill the prescription at la quincaillerie du numéro 6 en face, and head west, with a dense fiery sp
heroidal otia eserinialia approaching the Chandrasekhar limit of my vesica urinaria, into the golden sunlight of a preternaturally warm autumn evening.
§ 36 | Unnerve
You will have seen me, you astrological nav
vy scrutinizing season and sky with your a
rundinaceous
scry, vuvuzelomantic gnomon, or by
sending the scarlet
runners of your cosmognostical
shoots ideal aerie-ward, viz., to follow my hi
rundine rum
runner’s flight west by southwest into crush-
eared Helios’ iotaphoran thrall towards which, for instance, d
ewy-nervured, new-fledged instars of vespert
inal Orthoptera, Hemipterodea, Phasmatodea, Mantodea, Odonatoidea, Elateroidea, Tischerioidea, and, at least, Dicty
odea, irate Helios also draws and toys with as he does me, a chimerical text kitt
en, wyvern of self and other caught in the act of clawing at this ball of
new yarn that passes for t
he tense smara, recently therapized, of the ontic w
ool I ideate, share the lexic
al, inordinate, best
ial rondeau of with the aforesaid “others” I cohabit this miserable world with, and yet all too singularly experience, i.e., my rationalit
y-enwallowed memory, or lack thereof, of
realia ornithohylia (Flaubert’s bird-bespattered quiddit
y enwhitened [blanchi] “par les fientes d’aigles et de vautours”).
Which is perhaps why, when you come upon a party of industrious villeins laboring under the onus of exactitude in order to cultivate some perverse seigneur’s deme
sne of dream, e
ven though a sign clearly proclaims “welcome,” and you can see through the invitingly open gates that its evergr
een marshes teem with the pui
sne earth’s mélange of midsummer
steam, hen’s eryngo (
Eryngium gallinaceum L.), un
tame she erns, infrequently
seen harts, embryonic
rat menses, hermaphroditic ma
natees (Sherman’s si
ren), sham steenbok, and other pretty parodies of revealed creation, still you keep your unse
wn eyes peeled warily for the more “realistic” markers — “no admittance except on business,” “trespassers will be prosecuted,” “lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate” — of the family romance’s lampion rouge de l’inceste, and do not enter, but continue on your way.
In the long
run, however, neither the fer
vently debauched waif of the scribbling self, nor the reserved pervert of the gradually revealed observed other, can live sans rêver, s
ans the REM searchlight with which dream probes the tab
ooed realities hatched by the taboo-crushed psyche in cahoots with the action-packed
sensorium.
What the postmeridian sights
eer means’s that all this prelude is simply an attempt to peel away the skin, sinew
s, nerves, and unsightly connective tissue of conceit and get at the meat of my meta-narrative; to wit, that somewhere between Cochon Alley and Clichéd Lane, in the city’s barrio literario donde my high-heeled, tweel-soled moccasins no han nunca pisado during daylight hours, in the cit
é Manstherse (“écrivain surréaliste d’origine wallone”) to be exact, as I was struggling to incise my thumbnail into the virgin chorion of the epicene caïeu I’d acquired at the Chicken Street quincaillerie and t
ear the aioli dose therefrom, I was brought up short, as they say, par les grandes vitres d’aquarium whose limpid waters harbored a sort of textog
eny workshop wherein could be seen a be
vy, scrupulous yet sociable, of s
ea-hale editors, oie-neck
ed hale ariose toilers, seas
hore sedate aioli-loving (note the concord) poly
maths, serene proofr
eaders (Hi, Iota! Olé, Oleaginous!), and a tatt
ooed lithe rasé aide-de-camp who all, without
shame, resentment, self-consciousness, or fear of the enchanted loiterer’s all-knowing examination of them, continued working together, side-by-side or face-to-face at their bright desks or slanted drafting tables or well-inked printing presses or enigmatical binding apparati, towards a single goal: produce (according to the hand-written placard taped to a corner of the window)
Esther Manse’
s The Meaner Side.
As I munched la gousse d’
ail radiée (shot oeilladically out of its crisp avulsed caul with a surgical pinch), unscrewed the cap of and took a swig from my ration of rum, la boule bouillante de ma vessie, pr
oie d’Helios, trae a la luz el reflejo trastornado of one of the prettier geese, a sportivel
y enwrapped,
unruly twenty-thousand-leagues-under-the-s
ea-haired stoolie, as she looked up from the chlorotic depths of the submarine ouvroir and solipsistically smiled into the nictitating membrane separating her tarnished-fishbowl routine from my own sun-burnished, gold-and-caramel reverie that set her h
air, hoodie, seat (elegant, high-perched), and task (design, layout) ablaze with the sympathetic fire of my muscular, calicular, crepuscul
ar loins which, like all things that autotomize their lucid alate imagos from the promiscuous patina of sublunary pupation and soar off into the radiant western sky — foxy Chiroptera, terminal Isoptera, shadow-swallowing Hi
rundinidae, alliaceous
masseter-hendiadys me — unnerves the déjà-vu in the jamais-vu, makes the u
nseen but all too tangibly oneiric scories de l’aur
ore hiatale des oisifs comme moi adhering to the hea
vy, scrumptious, waxy rhythms and argillaceous tempo de la vida despierta somehow more or less familiar than the iridescent ne
rvy scum of dream sur la surface pruineuse de la sombra of daily life which may or may not be identical to the former but more than likely implies it.
§ 37 | Rue
Between la
acera tecleada by den
se muladas of bewitched flâneurs converging towards that
medusal rond-point où l’
Arc éclate erubescently en
medio tramo of the nine or fourteen thoroughfares and byways — Avenue
des Laumes,
Mi-Tome Road,
Moite Moa Drive,
Medusa Lane, Allée de
la Crétacée, Boulev
ard Tio Momé, Rue du
Môme Adroit, et cetera — qui s’entrecroisent there like the la
ce tela-creations of a certain traveler’s sfum
ato’d mémoire
and la chaussée
calée et carambouillée by the demoniac hullaballoo of ready-m
ade slum cabriolets y bigas
de mito romano
et race calèches and electric steel phaetons driven by cut
e motor maids and that pizzicat
o tram d’émoi conducted by a choi
ce teal creature,
alate, cercelée, gule
s mauled,
there occurs a
calcrete-earth-and-claystone conduit which, while called gutter, rigole, caniveau, alcantarilla by the common pedestrian,
I propose to designate as “bordrue” or “rill-
o’-rim” — moat d’Élysée
where anatids dabble, phoenicopterids wade, lisso
m moot ardeids swagger and stalk, diverse passerids hop and skip, flutter and sip, select canids serenely crap, and the smal
ler cetaceans reveal their true nature as half-human, half-nymphic so
uls made prematurely older by poverty; où, in short, coule tout le miel de la lumière, tout le
mal de sueur, tout l
e cal écarté du ciel reflété, tout l’émeu du
mot de moirage que lime la drue bordure de la rue même.
§ 38 | Rut
Quitte à turning this virtu
ous, perdurable quête de l’éth
os du présent et du pathos du passé into a
rude, possibly obnoxious disquisition anent the geminal jerks and germinal twists of the ruthlessly enrapt
ured poses, postures, and positions one sees the inscrutably incras
sate errant machine of one’s
sorest, earthiest, most brutalized body indulging in through the wrenched-open Türspion of the split self
— that opportunistic antrum of tubular light (a conjectural sketch of which Da Vinci, in his most sinistral
opus, derived from esp
oused principles Aver
roes established in his commentary on Aristotl
e’s ἄρρητα, the unvoiced [
arrēta] irrational quantities of mathematical singularities) spanning the sociophysiological
clôture that divides, for instance, the party from the party-goer, the scrutiny from the scrutinized, the botched lecture from the pretty lectur
er’s tears, the hurt from the h
eart’s osé assaig (
raté, résigné)
d’esporulació —
permit me to venture a virtual curtain call of the furtive fractured relations and gemmate power struggles playing out, as it were, within the structural drone and strum of
Persoud’s
oud perse:
Observe the elastic eyestalk du voyeur
sartréen, watch as it b
uds rope-like clones of itself that ramify and intromit each aperture des
artères catégoriques du moment and thus insinuate their branchially fis
sured optical hyphae into the
serose tactile contexture of a
roseate sublunary conjuncture
of spread legs, splayed elbows, arched backs, assorted hands, knees, wrists, ankles, arms, digits, volars, and flexible tubes with, in and to which my favorite frogman
Pedro sufflates, submerges, subjects y me
trae serenamente hasta el
sudor perineal enabling me to take in
sans rupture the various fraught nuances subsuming and subtending and sublating and suffusing the verbs s
er, estar, hab
er, tesar, hac
er, estar,
ser, retar,
esterar,
restar, etc.,
to such a deturpating degree of
pure soddisfazione that the favorably violent moment when the rutilant drop of the refracted
lumière de jouissance was, so to speak, or rather, still is, on the verge of escaping from the everted walls of the sella turcica du Café des
Dos Péru and flow from the supplicant’s perturbed pituitary gland out the foramen magnum of the front door (one of them, in any case; or perhaps — why not? — both at once) and down along the spinal curvature of that shapely specimen of the city’s infrastructure known to lutarious catamites and crapulous lusus naturae as “la
rue d’os Pollastres” from a certain f
ossa étreinte d’une chambre de bonne of which the retrograde corollary may be seen to occur à l’inverse only to be captured, like a turgid spi
der’s pouffiasse de proie infecte, by the inflected rhodopsical reticulum of curtailed rapture — that delicious moment of catoptromantic ligature, of delectable, foveate, thall
ose, streamlined vesicular cincture, seemed to share a certain denatured something with
Sorea Est’s law-of-th
e-seas’ tortures (shackles, fet
ters, reamers, manacles, drowning);
Etore Sas’s j
ester-archical cross-cultural disjunctures among the popular montane past
ures, podestà valligiano, indentured turncoats, and dispossessed young Old-Turkic-speaking minorities of a distant subtropical land;
Tessa Roe’s li
sped routine of boy-girl conversations overheard in the bee-lo
ud prose of a distinguished auth
or’s eastern romance; and the ringing emotions (fear, anger, revulsion) aroused in me by the soft-sh
oe, tressaillant, empasmed, manipulative, bosomy, over-the-count
er, ersatz affection of Mme Soraya
Soréa, Esthéticienne.
It is at such rutilant moments as this, when the enti
re erstaunliche Inhalt of the scurrilous
skyphos drupesthoi (Homer’s cheek-tearing ampulla) get
s poured forcibly into the mind’s eumoirous maw, that it seems as if a sensibility foreign to my own nature, breeding, and experience has sown my sulci with a mer
dose prurience more
affligeante even than l’Abbé Du B
os’ rude plaisir, so that I and the abst
ruse Doppler effect of my parallactic
prose du simulacre
serré à taille see myself, a pellucid blissom bitch, supine and supinate, my every skittish limb akimbo, my every commissure exposed, submitting sans résister to the obsc
ure sod-plowing instrumentarium and rotund, emb
rasée, ostensibly impromptu
rodomontade de la maman do
due. Por suerte, the somatosensorium is wont to encode opposites, and
so, prudentially, during the tous-secours-per
dus operation of sorts, there leaks in from the interstitial partouze (membranes are porous, recall), a clath
rate residue of humid
êtres à souffler, branler, gob
er et assouvir a diverting mnemonoclastical
karezza of bagpipes and bodhráin, kanjiras and kamancheh, sarangis and cithara, gape-jawed glamor girls and leering businessmen, salacious soldiers and brachio
pod esurient phantasmata, vivacious winsome willowy waitresses (trabecula
r teasers, all!) and elephantine oblati in rut.
§ 39 | En WY
The
year I sojourned in Gustavsc
huln, Wyo. (occasionally known as G
erdoransvidal and often Appalachified as Gertrudesville), one of my more lecherous admirers there penned for the region’s
literaturnaya gazeta a
nerve-nutating
pasquinade in the form of a vulga
r dear sonnet casting me as a Graeco-Suisse n
un who, lyrically disguised as a benevolent altruist sans souci, actually engages in arcane carnal escapades your most cosmopolitan constuprator would envy and amphibiological experiments that would
unnerve the cruelest vivisectionist — all in just fourteen lines!
Alas, the cutaneously robust fel
low unhygienically
snored, rasped, wheezed, and lab
ored, ransoming a rind of pleasure with a pound of pain, whenever he was in, on, under, around, trying somehow to have his way with, or get me to have mine with him — sickening, really.
Yet he had the body of that immortal cou
rser, Adonis — and yet could not
even run two steps to catch the local Tarta
rean droshk
y (a soirée had let out somewhere)!
We had to wait half an hour for my va
in whiny Romeo’s xenophobic uncle’s empy
rean dorsum sedentarius to arrive from the château — oh, the highb
orn’s dread of what a ten-minute uphill walk would do to his impeccable coiffure, his echt ensemble!
And his soft curly h
air so yelibik (jaunâtre) — as were those marm
orean sdruzhestvenniye wampum belts of
Cypraea tigris and
Erronea pallida that passed themselves off as his fingernails and teeth, respectively! Tanti malsan
i years of smoking!
But what a bard, skáld, kavi, költő my sie
nna-yellow lover so sonorously — with his me
llow snore y levant le tabou sur pravosláv
nïy Erehwon’s mixolydian mantra typic
ally sworn on elevated occasions — proved himself to be!
If I could, with every ill
uné vernal anneau of his ve
rse, adorn and anoint the perfidious
airy sœur he painted and which I do not resemble at all — perhaps I could redeem, at least a little, la sale réputation I still have in that great land of mountains a
nd sea, rorquals and papag
ayo sirens,
holy unwed primiparae spinning antlion silk comme dans
un rêve natal and melanc
holy unwary hoydens spitting out reindeer milk to make a sort of kumis comme dans
un rêve noceur...
Yes, as anyone who
reads normally can attest, I
have sacrificed, for the sake of
der soziophysiologischen découverte [
NdR: Are sources, citations, available?], female specimens of
the cutest theriomorphic tetrapods imaginable — but
never un enfant d’homme, underaged
minion, sexy whoreson, lowly larve nécessiteuse, or subadult anthropomorph, no matter how impish, fiendish, devilish, demoniac, or delicious our psychophysical research c
oven’s royal wellness committee deem it to be!
Would you compare me to Skaði, the jilted jot
un who lynched Loki with his own child’s entrails?
I have known what it is to feel pit
y rise oasis-like in the desert of raw data... I have felt, nay h
eard Ronsardistically, each tiny body of it literally ringing with fear — come to think of it, that’s exactly what we were testing for!
§ 40 | Yerisoa
As sneaky
Odiseo, a hale reiterator, recounts it in diver
se clunky aphorisms handed down from days of yore,
Αἴολος, a dire ethereal deity, ceases his anemogenic flatulence and we furl the empt
y (wenig geschwollen) canvas of
the sail dorée Ἰαόνιος (la golden voile ionienne), piling it on m
y wendigen Schoß as ballast to hold me fast in m
y Wendensky Zugzwangsgerät
(“An ingenious device,” says
Y. N. Wedensky in
Die Erregung, Hemmung und Narkose [Bonn, 1904], “by which a telephone [is] introduced between the Calabar bean–
oil narcotized tract and the muscle [making] possible
un rondeau d’expériences in which changes in the nerve [are] indicated by a change of tone in the instrument” [cited in
Y. Wendensky, Techniques pour assoup
lir anomalies urétro-rénaux,
J. Urol. Appal. 1912, vol. 8, pp. 25–26]) during the transit,
and with
Hester Esman as
οἰᾱκο-στροφος (t
he steersman) of the
ὠκάιο-
νάσσατο (speedy tight) ship of sort
s, The Meaner Side, conducting me twixt the twain
οἴκοαν (domestic) sirens de la famil
le Soréa — the αἰδοῖοαν (respected) concinnitist with her cacochr
oa oiselet adhering to her endlessly rolling, anthemia-strewn poitrine débr
idée, alias hooters, as well as her Χα
λδαῖος ἑταῖρο-ἐερμένος (shuffling Chaldean chum) —
and with my blit
he Stresemann 929 set into the
osiered thole, I aabandh (Skt. आबन्ध्, bind) it to the unbared gunwhale with a deft twist of its aforementioned
seal, hoodie, retiarian prepuce and dip my divine nose and its golden nib into the fifty-page, à la manière de Christine de Pi
san, thèse-mer d’une article by a trio of Tetrastic immigrants from Neocaes
area, tide hoolies N. Loria, O. A. Yersin, and Y. I. Sorea (I wonder, before going under, if our Ivan’s J
oe hides a relation to our captors?),
pour
y flairer gnostiquement les traces de la last known breeding pair of papagayo sirens (also known as
Sherman’s teeming siren, after the topsy-t
urvy scenes of wanton lek that naturalist described, non
sans savante pudeur, the beasts quondamly engaging in) dans la Baie des Huit Ports
en Wyoming,
a hypotrop
hied areolate isolate which seems oddly (странно) to b
e related isohoiastically (from ὁδοιπλᾰνέω, to roam about) to that estuarine denizen of the Mand
é marsh, T. senegalensis, but not to the intervening Anyakyusyaland sea-cow nor to what should be its logic
al, ironclad,
curvy sea-sisters or at least moins obs
curs vyazkiy (вязкий, ‘muddy,’ as our authors put it) cousins: the Siberian manatee, Bering Straits triton, Aleutian lamantin, Medean mermaid, Appalach
y newt, and Gondwanaland dugong.
As snide
Odiseo, a lithe ἐραστής of lovely Circe’s waxy
rondeurs, is wont to repeat with his distinctively
chunky sailor-speak, I too heard (
oíra también) that duo-plus-nursing-infant’s mechanic
al onírica musica — contralto blues, falsetto something about shoes, gurgling milky staccato squawks from the peekaboo parvulomuse — as they wrangled with my rococ
o hair, oiled, teased
the near mess of it into a shapeless
compromis délié di capelli che de
lirano until they finally opt(ed) to
shear me stenotically (from στενός, narrow, tight, close)
pendant que my bladder’s
mesh tare ensconced beneath la
toile ardoisée, hardie, of the joll
y new issue of
Hester Esman’
s The Meaner Side, cuyos ejemplares
se ligan y forran donde
la luz sorda y reinada del sol occidental del otoño enlaza
ruidos y lanza relaciones textuales, continued t
o dilate, ease rhoiacystically between the sjál
vur Scylla of the Zel
eny Wundausschneidungsprozess and the sjógvur Charybdis of the σ
καιὀ-ὄλισβος que j’accommodais
sans trop de peine, même
sans olio, seated hieratically on the brink of the bench of the speeding cosmetological car as if it were a birthing stool,
and I, a well-
soothed, aerial, i.e., tree-loving, epiphytic young bromeliad of a para
mountly desirable person alive to the open air (la vie
al fresco) of the present tense, am taking in the very oar (from the Proto-Germanic
airō) or mast or something, ma recherc
hé Stresemann 929 perhaps, I’m bound to, like a temple-robbing stork (
Ciconia yerisoa Gmel., 1789) ast
ride his tool, Aeaean vāhana (वाहन, mount) from where flows the acrid, hot, moan-inducing
Lethe, αἰδοῖα rose, silky slippery squish
y newly glabrous and born again with its
sea-head olitories (
Norlian wire weed [
Syringodium norliana], Asian aquamarine tape-grass [
Heliodore asiate], rainbow sea nymph [
Halodoea irisete], etc.) drifting in the
ariose haole tide, nibbled at and munched on by the first-person dual exclusive competing with the first-person dual inclusive for Mama Soréa’s hypertrop
hied areolate οἰσπότη
while that
curvy siren of the salon juggles the epic words to make stories out of (for that is the literal meaning of
ἰδέοῥῆσαλεότια) I’ve been forced to farce my
nether mess, adorned and abused, debauched and depilated, with, and fall back patulous upon, lean swooning against, use as sacro-lumbar support in the absence of any of the aforementioned pronouns in any of the modern languages I (meaning we) am and/or are privy to,
and thus load my (our)
αἰδοι heroes’ tale with echoes from Homer and Vyāsa and the Prose Edd
a’s Snorri that most likely clutter more than they clarify, ruffle more than refine, muddle more than despumate and it seems as if this randy trio of stygian dugongs (Soréa mère, son cousin clinicien, goggle-organed moi) disengages the placenta of the printed page from that inflamed triad of caliginous manatees (
N. Loria, O. A. Yersin, Y. I. Sorea) and we all give collective birth from our mutually
brutalised yonis to an anthropoid fourth-person inclusive in the form of the pra
wn-eyed merpup trailing its buoyant umbilicus through the
torpid synovial effluvium of our
vile adyton’s porismatic solution and smearing its musky silvery vernix caseosa all over the glistening tangled under
sea-hairdo-étoilé besotted sextet of us, but then, the polished phrase (izyáschno
y Wendung) belies a paltr
y (wenige) world (Welt).
§ 41 | Ammine
Susurrant insinuations from beyond the page, although but a few varas dal
este arrinconado lado judging by le
mode amorti del
reto mimado, intimate that the intimat
e mnemonoclastic
act de la palabra ensayística enabling me to
accrete elaborate textual
meat or modifiés
plagiats that
trace a celeritous brouillon du
mot moiré d’allégresse
à éclat créé en tâtonnant avec mon
adroit memory les ambages amphisbéniennes du tangible, en chatouillant with my
écarlate cédille the ganglionic aments of the actual c
omme, en le Bergson que l’on lit, un sphex ammophile qui “sympathise” avec sa proie de chenille à fin de la tétaniser avec le fluide cyprine de son dard, n’est qu’en “réalité” un
écarté calembour, u
ne momentanée baliverne escrita
lisamente para distraerme from the discomfiting “fact” that I’m, according to the ready-
made slur,
amnésique.
Allow me the
amused luxury
to admire modestly in the
medusal miroir of
modem rationality [NdR: Should this be “
modern rationality”?] l’affront condamné, miné d’avance par
la simplicité d’u
ne môme qui
erre, stagne,
rôde à mi-motte dans le maillot vert emprunté à sa sœur so that,
like a r
otor-maimed mermaid too mauled, stunned,
lacérée, catastrophée sur la plage de la
Isla Miranda to be surprised at
la misère
recalée, cataleptique, of her own
sad, emulsified fate,
she could play the ammophilous marine traveler nel tiempo
mal siguiente who’s most unpleasantly stopping th
ere, stranded on that gri
m island walled in by white sand and green surf because the ferry plying between Bahía Miran
da’s muelle embreado y mullido and Porto Vecho’s opulent polished immaculate harbor calls but every four, five, or, now they tell me what my sister La
mia slyly did not —
seven weeks!
That same qua
edam slut La
mia slotted me a space, g
râce à l’ecténie de la sodalité des flamines de cette déesse aux maints mains d’orgies vestigiaux qu’on appelle
Medusa lemuria, in the “Arathu Marine Miranda Island Nature Estancia,” a corrugated-tin-roofed, rickety-and-rotten-wood-walled crucigrama hinchado of windowless, officeless, baño-less, closet-like cells in
a slum, desolate and despoiled despite being in a supposedly “protected” and “undeveloped”
Eemian zone of the island far removed from the main bayside village I think I’ve already mentioned.
Did I mention nature?
There’s the skeleton of a characiform dorado in the denuded crown of a tree under which the exposed, stationary, goose-fleshed guetteuse de visions, porte-plume de n
acre et calepin broché in hand, is wont to
trace a Celeus sp. of dispassionate woodpecker as it soberly stalks up each blasted branch, probing and tapping the spiky mottled bark, berimed with
alum, desiccat
ed salmuerado jabillo or deciduo
us medlar, I’m not sure, in search of beetle larvae.
Vers midi one or two exemplaires d’une espèce of pez similar to that of our totemic dendrophilous
Salminus milagrosis is caught, along with a few barnacle-encrusted, hermit-crab-inhabited bottles and other discarded trivialities, by a co
arse retiarius and then cooked avec ses viscères et ses yeux et ses actinopterygian lepidotrichia and its Weberian apparatus in the cordate leaves of the endemic
neemom (
Gnemon mellitostachyum Rumph.) by the rustic proprietors of a
dim tearoom that reminds me of the one my mother
née Momiji used to something or other in or with and served vers quatorze heures with the luscious fruits of that same honey-cobbed liane (possibly the only
nonhuman gynoecia with any flavor on that müh
sam île).
A side-dish featuring a salad of the ubiquitous insular stonecrop,
Sedum lasiocarpum, completes the prandial picture, and our young traveler completes the hallowed cycles of human time by retreating twice or thrice daily or more to an unfrequented rather than secluded littoral spot and there she squats,
écarte caleçon, tricot, traje, camiseta und so weiter and b
ares terraqueously her rosy-lipped gash and her red-tipped mammalian erectile plexi and her tender inflamed sphincteric nubbin to the elements to allow the morbidly demulcent (
mo-dem) ration of semi-digested nourishment to coil and slough and sputter out of her and onto a liminal ribbon between weed and tide, between d
ismal garbage and the phantas
mal sinist
er stares of exophthalmic ghost crabs (
Ocypode sp.) eager to scuttle out of their sandy burrows and glut themselves on that oily mort
al’s migajones and then elle se nettoie dans the frigid sea that owes its bright aquamarine coloration less to the dull cloud-veiled sun than to the abundant copper-ammonia salts dissolved in it.
“I a
m la sirena verde y anamnestica,” I think as I perform my anchoritic ablutions, “che
terrea semillas y, en laissant cette
trace calée dans
la crétacée arène, piensa, ‘Do crabs have minds?’”
In the evening, as a sort of hiatus sacralis interposing itself between the day’s allotment of foveate ambles and the eternal
caecal éternuements of fieldwork, I stop into the
dim tearoom para mendigar algo a merendar, papaya sprinkled with almíbar and the bitter sand-like seeds of
Trachyspermum ammi, per ejemplo, y,
en momento cierto, j’incite a provisional
roommate disposé(e) à satisfaire his or her curiosity anent the true nature of my recently nutated or pupated or mutated or lunated
dual σμερδαλέα to join me in my dilapidated labyrinth sin luz y sin agua and patiently teach me, not for the first time, and not for the last, algunas palabras of the local baragouin en me flétrissant le berlingue pendant qu’il pleut jusqu’à another sunless shadowless gray-green dawn.
§ 42 | Isla M
I slam Isla Miranda in a translexical tan
trum so oiseux (cf. my rip
oste à l’oie hardie to a gloomy villainous camarilla’s murmurous allegation that
I’m amnesiac!) that I was afraid my sister Lamia, who was, pendant mi
Odisea ratée ilhotamente, embarked upon her own
Odisea liée à orthophrénie in
Mastersheen at that city’s
main mental institution, the soi-disant l’
AMI en M, might suffer a malignant tintamarre on reading it avant our
tense, shame-racked reunion sur les r
emparts de notre pays natal.
Dot dot dot.
And so at last both of us were again on native soil, and I, ignoring
the seamen’s ribald mockery (“V’là, l’her
mosu ritornatu!”) in the open-
air tea shed, Ὀῖλεοσ’ς Οἰνοἰκος (named after the dear deported, perhaps departed,
petrasmic oenophile who used to dandle, diddle, coddle, and, in the local lingua franca, gamahuche the pupa of my puberty avec sa langue ennuyeuse, Oileos), marched into the kitchen, exchanged the expected
terse, sham endearments with my mother who was surprised, no doubt, at the emaciated apparition of one who had survived presque, in her jargon,
san (three) meses en aquella isla mange-merdique, and I asked, my voice quivering with
shame, “S’est rentré Lamia aussi?” She responded with one finger lowered, one
raised, to Ea, Helios (Water, Sun), respectively, and I dropped my bag
s, tramped up the stairs to the apartment, and shouted, “
Sept mars!”
Lamia, the hateful
tramp, seated on the windowsill, perched like a lecherou
s venal simiou
s pet lemurian voraciously on he
r slim anthropoid hips with her
milt-snarled t
art’s perineum volumetrically posed for maxi
mal perversion, utterly shameless, and looking for all the world like the boring veshya
stree sheman (वेश्यस्त्री, veno
mous tribadic virago), disho
nest harem servant she really is, was reading — my letter?! How could that be, since the only mail ship leaving the island was precisamente lo mismo that had brought
timorous me to it seven weeks earlier, and the
same stern heterolexical philippic, sans
stamp, recogida dans mon fourre-tout downstairs, had traveled with me on that same ship back to Porto Vecho?
“Quoi?”
“Nous sommes le
sept mars, and I should have been back here mi-février. Je t’ai pas vu,
Sib, en Isla Miranda! J’ai pas su où t’étais! J’ai pas
su t’implorer à venir
me sauver. Trop inlouable que t’étais et l’es!”
“Tant pis. Je viens d’arriver questa matt
ina même, and, in fatto, I was just reading your — what? No exuberant bis
ous or timid kiss, even?
Viens à moi, slut!”
I wanted to knuckle-slap her across her Aver
roist mouth with an open fist rather than sully my immaculate mug avec l
es anthères mycodermiques of her joues saupoudrées de fard, but I complied with the cheeky rules of sibling hypocrisy.
“That’s better. Here. You write, ‘the
men aim to
seem rash enticers, while the wo
men imagine themselves to be the
meanest Sherazades (
sic)’ —
mean? The ressemblance to those lovely creatures
you paint with such
hate, m’en ressouviens pas, moi. As for the men —”
While she reminisces about
the men’s arses (f
irm, tous orgueilleux) and the wo
men’s sheer attractiveness in general, I remember misventuring across the slimy mirage of that island’s lower littoral, where the lutulent matrix of leeches and lampreys, as well as the tenacious larvae of a curious estuarine species of glow beetle,
Lampyris ideorhesaleotia, and most probably the bisexual bursae of an as yet undescribed variety of dracunculiastic gastropod, coat one’s laniant waders with a luciferous gunk,
I remember misventuring athwart and à travers the mesmeric chimère of that isle’s malarious clime that curdles the guileless visitor’s lungs with a chronic moniliasis, corrupts the liver with a mephitic fascioliasis, and stipples the pubes with a rubious trombiculiasis in pursuit of some sort of rhizomatous illumination which my
ideal θείο, Sorea Est, ran mesh-emulsion analyses of in his work on that topic the terraqueous indagation of which had convinced me I might glean from the meristoderm of
Laminaria tumorosi
and I saw that she was sitting there with her strum
pet arms crossed, utterly impassive, like a zoopraxiscopic simulacrum of a dissipated devotee of the most virulent form of
lesbianism ever inflicted on the paripotent sex and I
spat mercurially out a truly malicious and mellifluous mésalliance of
mots rouillés, “Je t’aime pas! Je te maudis! Je te cond
amne, impudique imbécile!”
I also hate
smart epiphanies that clarify la
trame’s prolepsis as much as I’d hate an arang
etram spoilsport qui
osait délier a hoedown from its sacr
é asile roadie hot h
ash’s entremetteur, but that is strictly
entre nous.
“But I love
you, sis. And they, they too, all your friends, whether in
Mastersheen or on Isla Miranda, they too
adore isolate hierodules comme
toi! Désolée! Haïras-moi si tu devras,
sis, mais —”
“You say qu’ils
m’aiment? Qu’ils m’adorent? You call
‘adore’ the lies I aoristically endured; ‘love,’ the sottovoce scurrilit
ies their aeolo-daemonolatry entailed?
And do you really think
I’m too rustic,
too usmriti, to catch the jist of all the calumnious canards they, and everyone else, and most especially you, have been rongeant, mangeant, moulinant, entamant, immolant, massacrant mes penchants, ma vocation et même ma nature avec?! Que mes
αἰδοῖα, sere tholes of retrogr
ade hétéro-liaison, reek of lep
rose death, aioli effluvia?! Che
sto muoriendo aux plus vils
trous, moi!? That
I’m amnesic?!”
“No sé en tant qu’eux. Ma
io? Sto murmurando che
tu mori soppratutto tes souvenirs?
Io? Sto rumiando
tu morosidad? I don’t think so, sis! As for them,
soit rumor, soit umor sui moto i mostruoso tuo miro. (Rumor maybe, but more likely just boisterous humor inspired by your marvelous looks.) Et tu penses (or should I say
vous?) ch’io
morsi tuo romito uso? Rimuto. Sorto, mi sù. (And you think [ou dois-je dire,
usted?] that I infringed on your solitary praxis? I’m changing [the subject.] I’m outta here, sis.)”
And she wagged her dandinating pearl
s-in-sable miche of a curvaceous kraal out through the do
or (ostium) and slammed the door (valva, battant, Türblatt) shut behind her, leaving me foundering on the umbrage of the upstairs reef, out-foxed, out-vixened, out-alopexed even by her mendacious obstinance, the taut membranes of my nerves and of my kelp-stained letter (both the finest specimens of the trim
mest parche
min âme, a
tma, esprit, Geist oder Seele puissent se lester avec) vibrating dans les airs malsains et mélancoliques del
romito suolo of “home” (mias
mes, patrie, Hei
mat, Sperre).
§ 43 | Neemom
“We have done memorably well,” says
M. Asher Steen in
Marten Hesse’s
Steen’s Harem, “with la
masse d’enfan
ts rampées, mô
mes assouplies, gosses de
trous, mioc
hes de talio aerio, cati
ns athées, merdeuses cocottes,
timorous pétasses, boisterous racoleuses,
pram-testing grues,
mean terse shrewd fripouilles, sirènes of the most southw
estern shameless sort, ribal
d loose hetaireia, boucan
ières de lotia, haoma, stepf
ather’s semen, and other metaphysiological embrocations as well as toutes les autres espèces de
gamine mauvaise making up our mod
est harem, sending them out into the world after a unique course of indoctrination and training as practical as it is theoretical, and as ideological as it is practical, so that, husbanding in their very bosoms, as it were, the ancient
connaissances of the qadištu, the traditional
savoir-foutre of the hierodule, and the relevant
valeurs of the devadasi, they are able to assess and manage any situation which that venerable cynic, life, may throw at them.”
Did I mention that my
mom, née
Momiji, sent me and my sister Lamia there for those very reasons?
“In days past,” adds
Petra Smersampt, “before patriarchy colonized our omnivorously emotive gynognosy, mocking what it found frivolous, insulting what it found useless, claiming that what it found useful were its own discoveries, and reducing the adept of Kāma to the inept harlot of Babylon, la prêtresse d’Inana à une concubine dégr
adée, solitaire, honnie, our ancient secret praxis r
eliait adorées houris into a rhizoma
tous miroitement of consecrated tribades, une
masse solidaire, théo-æsthésodique, of sacred sapphists, and so, in the face of cette calo
mnie masculine with which
timorous men aim to curtail our
riotous meretricious mirth with marital remo
rse, shame-enthralled purdah, and all the other fear-yoked, frac
tious, moralistic constraints and procédés fissipares of their paran
oid alaisé heterotopian phallocracy, we are embarked on
a laité, osé, hierodulean project of recovery and recreation, an eklaktismatic exercise of rediscovery and reinvention, a kedeshavian adventure in the reconstructive overcoming of such schis
mes particulaires that will make proverbial h
im amenable to le
sésame
assemblant d’exubérances disparates which, via le noyau intégrant d’ondoyantes noces (par exemple, our favorit
e man’s threesome’
s merest enhancement with, say, some ancillary tractatrices, some supplementary paratiltriae, should ch
arm the senses’ summ
a immensely, to say the least), results in les f
ruits omophagiques du s
pasme translingual of our footlo
ose, ideal, hetairotopian pornocracy here in
Mastersheen.”
Did I mention that my
mom, née
Momiji, evidently intending for us to develop into acc
ommodatingly c
ommentit
ious trombaristas,
had my sister Lamia and I interned in ladite
Ms. Petra’s masterclass in ladite riparian ville appalâche?
“Our fancy pre
teen sham servile saltatrices,” continues
Dr. Iésoé Aléothia, “constitute, in fact, the region’s young
est harem ensemble, une véritable (what with each girl herself a veritable Callirr
hoë!) sodalité aérienne d’ādapāputitas (little nautch maids) truly well-versed in le m
oite, osé, ailé dharma
de la théorie à soif la plus sensuelle,
l’artha de soie oienne of sexual praxis, and the crafty kā
ma éminent, kā
ma essentiel, kā
ma perstrictif, kā
ma resthénésique des
arts empathiques et charnels, des
arts eidoléohaïens et onirogènes, des
arts, eh, ménestrandiques et carnivalesques dont un, par exemple, concerns the use of the aphrodisiacal decoction of the emetic nut of the mod
est marsh neemom (
Gnemon mellitostachyum Rumph.) qui
est, parmi the rhizoma
tous, rimose
masse veinée du
sart empesté (malodorous laver, putrid sea-wrack) sur les rivages of the
Mastersheen river, le seul fruit comestible that one finds there, according to Est’s
Condamné immergé and lest you think I’ve divastigated into some irrelevant topic with no bearing on the subject in hand, let me just round off this remark with the remark that, when dosed assiduously so as to h
arness the emetic properties of the nut of thi
s same nondescript liana whose leaves may be tossed into a pungent salad, whose pulpy fruits are sweet and milky, whose bark provides an anti-helminthic brew, instead of making one vomir à pleine gorge, this potent pute’s potion, this ecstatic trollop’s elixir, this sultry sapphist’s philtre gives one the insatiable desire the bulk of beasts and boys, the mass of men and manatees, the nouvelle vague of working waifs and wo
men aim for: to foutre à plein co
rps métaphrastique!”
And my
mom, née
Momiji, was not wrong for, as I think I’ve mentioned elsewhere, l’art lascif de fouteur has much in c
ommon with l’art plumitif d’auteur.
§ 44 | Man he’s terse
You have to be a blood-bespattered artist enmeshed in
moot ire, mad and seething with l’
éclat acéré of cringing bootli
ck’s shame and mute
muni’s resentment, a terse shemale
serrando his or her
amused little share of crapa
ud’s melancholy with un
even run-on sentences so d
ismally
timed or amorphously turned that not
even un rédacteur virtuose puis
se y aroint les bévues
et aclarecer the bombast-pr
one memoirist’s
unholy wreckage of plagios
suministrados por un
read snorers — you have to be th
e mnemonoclastic
matoir-demon among the p
uny wholesome buri
neur-ventriloques who populate their texts with reneg
ade slum roads, rencontres
a receta celosa (a
mislaid fedora reappears in a child’s bedroom and all hell breaks loose!), clapboard rental
shacks, green tea with carda
mom, rote dialogue (“¿Qué pa
só ya, erizo?” “Je me suis eg
aré y oisivement.” “¿Ahora s
ois y erais otrora?” “
Yes, I roam, I
admit, meō, rogō — est-ce que la f
ois y are comme l’ancre au fond bourbeux? est-ce que les noces aux
hreysi aorgan (huttes fangeuses) du B
ois y éraflent comme les ronces les parties douces d’une sylphide qui parf
ois y réagit comme la p
roie à sybarite?” “¡N
o sé ya, rintoso!”), and other homesp
un similar indices of what’s
mislabeled by the epigones of
Samuel D. D’Laumes,
Y. I. Sorea, and
O. A. Yersin, for instance, as “
real cetacean prose” —
oh, how you have to get down on your wasted withered knees in the didactic ditch among the weeds and the bookworms and the orthoc
lase mud Lutèce is all
too rimed, amoncelé with even, and let them poke and prod and tease you, forbid them nothing, those editors and redactors and proofreaders and art directors and script-girls and type-monkeys and printer’s-devils and scriveners and columnists and hangers-on of Hester Esman’s
The Meaner Side, and you have to swallow your tears with their super-discerning haters’ semen and smear into your erythematous parchment the hypo
nome embolus of hot clitalytical v
enom embrocating every commissure of text no matter how desperately tender, every contexture of quill-scat no matter how ineffably slender, and show that he
re is a yoni, trul
y, or a seigneur’s subtle lingam —
both at once, in fact, there in their ouvr
oir ès y’a-qu’à where cité Manshertse debouches, as they say, into Sp
ot-Mime Road in district numéro neuf de la ciudad, in the flaming doppelgeschlechtig Doppelgestalt of yourself, a creature qui
crée à lacets obliques en incisant the red cheeks of the magic mountain of literature with infinitely sinuous, numinously fucate, voluptuously pilfered exempla de l’
aimé mot d’or whether unconscious or not —
“Do you, our smoking hot hirudinean ink-pup, suffer the
monthly wound?”
“
I’m Dame Otorrhagia,
même, on the days of my earthly menses!”
“Do you, our downy limbed androgynous text-kitten, experience
la pollution nocturne vénérienne?”
“
I dream tomographically!”
“Man, this glowing, stacked he-bitch is terse when it gets all distant and lordotic and juts its drizzly snatch in th
e air so yclept!”
“
Minus mirandum est!” —
before they’ll even deign to recognize the fantastic power of your promiscuous pen!
§ 45 | Minus
Was it simply because they wanted to test the process by which Cicero (
De natura deorum, II, xiii)
théorisa l’idée oaristysienne wherein
le smash éternel burly multa externa pummel the court of tender ceteris naturis with is subsumed par
la fouterie universelle with which
curvy synoptical autem naturam embraces and imbibes omnis naturas that they were so eager to
scry vulturously the somatic nudibranchiate entelechy (
SNE) of my jammy jāmi jam and there de
scry vulvar
roseate eidola — Hi! — my peculi
ar loins, my satyr-nymph enchantments (
SNE), might portend, and — oh, you churlish, squeamish, prud
ish men! — see trabecu
lar inordinacy in action?
In addition to the usu
al noircisseurs the offices of
Esta Hermsen’
s The Meaner Side literally pullulate with at all h
ours (simian opportunists qui ont
pris mon ousia dans leurs pattes, la faisant
soupir à moins), there was in attendance the following quartet of conci
liar notables:
Thérèse Mans, du Syndicat National d’Éditeurs (
SNE), conveyed, with one hand, her gentillesses aux
ensembles mis à
vus, crying indulgent
tears enmeshed with reg
al irony and
sneaped, with the other, a snipe at my terminus a quo, “Comme Séla
vy scrutant l
a rose dilatée, hoirie des noces sylvestres où satyres aimaient
ravir putes, monelles (
larves importunes), nymphes, sylphes, ondi
nes, ménades, corybantes, et même, à force des choses, l’un l’autre, il me semble que j’ai
vu y scritto — ce mot, véritable
caillou transalpin, m’étrille dans la bouche avec plus de piment que s
on raillé homologue gallois — l’env
ers asthéné, moiré de la haie ostensible
enserrant l’
ensorcelant calice érectile.”
Asdrat' Ii'ehołee'o (la Sibylla Espasmódica herself!), of the Sáanii Nádleeh E‘eł‘iinii (
SNE), an organ known to initiated Texicans and experienced New Lexicans as la Sororidad Niépceana de Epicenos (
SNE), could not resist
sneaking a
parsimonious peek at my terminus ad quem and snickering, “¿Pero de dónde mana
la orina? ¿Acá o allá?
Oteo el hada — reís indiscretamente, porqué? — y tampoco no pued
o ver ni pulsar metódicamente le
site oleario de har
tarse o venir pulmonadamente. ¿Donde está?”
Marten Hesse, von der Sämtliche Niederschriftlic
her Entassements (
SNE), removed his pince-nez to better consider my terminus ante quem, then remounted them to
sneer snobbishly through those yeux postiches, “Aber warum dann dieser Geheimschmuck wir von die d
ass Ente hermetische uns eigentlich entblößt mit un
seren themastischen (sic) Blicken
von traumspielerischen Geschlechts
teils Raupenvormächten verschlungen haben?”
And
Dr. Iésoé Aléothia, representing the Sodality of
Norlian Experimentalists (
SNE) as well as the Socraticists of
Norlian Extraction (
SNE), was heard to remark with his fami
liar ondoyant radotage anent my terminus post quem between snotty bouts of grandiloquent parenthetical
sneezing, “Was that a y
oni, larger than life, with a long c
litoris’ head (eoaesthesiogenic
eidos étiré — aloha!)
or a lingam with
a headier ostiole beneath? Mo
ns cincto juvi, mulce
ns junctivo micando.
Minus velato perrecondito est.”
§ 46 | Shacks
And there sh
e stood, ἐιαρί, a helmsmaiden of the spring that was or is fated to be with the
coarsely punkish cowl of her
teal hoodie raised to reveal a
curvy, sloped,
smart-sheened f
orehead; œil à stimuler la concupiscence; au
reolate hoised aiguillette binding dark hair; nez d’
Oran; lip
s, sanguine.
She had one vernal hand on the tiller, guiding us home (
οἰκα-ὁδηγέω), the other pointing with an invisible godemiché (your standard Cyp
rian ὄλισβος) back
across the sea to the drab island of my tin
ea-isolated hierodule’s travels and the primitive shacks where, instead of a bedroom, there was a f
esse-rent hammock slung between two termite-rongés
étais à rhodiée longueur (en vain, bien sûr); instead of a par
lor in a sa
lon riant, a chickp
ea-aioli-shot reed mat on an
earthen mess; instead of a kitchen, an ope
n-air old-time fire pit; instead of an outhouse, a prelapsa
rian lower littoral zone; and instead of a weathered wooden do
or nailed to rusty hinges in a rotting doorframe to stymie the uninvited gaze and presence of strangers, nothing —
there s
he stood, ἰέρεια larvaire de l’aube (larval priestess of dawn), with a chubby fr
eak urchin’s polysarcous paw on the ruddy rudder (πηδάλιον), guiding us home (νεόμεθᾰ), the other pointing with a notional phallus (your sturdy Sassenach’s ecumenic
al iron dildo) back across the
Mastersheen to the shacks sur l’autre grève the overall-clad Appalachi
ans seemed always to be fixing and never finishing, swarming over rickety ladders in their threadbare overalls, making so much racket that you wondered why so many others kept moving in to build their own neighboring perchoir, their own rival n
ook, aidés par les pansus indigènes
sans trêve —
there she
stood, ἐλεαίρει habilement (suavely compatendo), with one indulgent sirenian pinna on the helm (τιμόνι), guiding us safely home, we hoped (οὐκέτι νοστίμω εἰμέν), and the other pointing with a noumenal
harikata (張形, your déguisé(e) Dilmunite’s galimatias de qaḍīb iṣṭināʿiyy) back across la mare du Bois to the
mare’s-nest hecatomb of shacks ou plutôt caravanes de l’abattage où d’ailleurs the Flemish alehouse stood with its commanding vista of unv
eiled hetairas oomphing and thumping and skirling and crooning and strutting while sisters, brothers, mothers, fa
thers, seamen, soldiers, hussars, corsairs, in mufti or in drag, se débauchaient and even les manchots rolled cigarettes, even les borgnes ogled les serveuses, even the
scurvy okiao (incon
siderate haole oinkers) des rives de l’
Ohio désaltéraient leur soif with gueuze and lambic and lager and mead and assouvissaient leur faim en plongeant leurs dents into f
resh meat ensartado et frites maison beneath the fairy lights and the falling autumn leaves and the aurora-w
ashed aerolite ionosphere —
and across the br
ook ailleurs to n’importe où and the shacks partout she, my ana
mnèse’s therapization encarnada (thanks to that variety of a
kaśic hypnose Luria or James or Durkheim spoke of) même, pointed back to my n
atal sod, eerie hoidenhood of yore and, with one grac
ile, adorée, hot, saimirian fist, absolved me of my patulous incrassate sins, the prompt or belatedly blossoming
Aïda rosée, heliotropical
οἰᾱκο-νόμος (which “would, so to speak, appear as the future [
erschiene gleichsam als Zukunft]”), and, with the other, deftly coaxed me to
shoot l’idée à réaliser dans la
théorie d’asile aoriste by means of
noria-like gouts of deliciously lentous instants tirés de mon
antre, meshes of ol
eose οἰδία, lathery moments rhythmically cranked up and out of me and into the cirr
hose eidola, retiarian mnesocl
asm, sheer net de l’oubli atteint by both A
ether’s means and by Gaia’s, to wit, plunging the oar-like nib of my recherc
hé Stresemann 929 into the complaisant sea of marginalia and interlinearia of the promiscuous text
— the “sandpatterns (
Sandmuster) of thoughts’ doom (
Verhängnis von Gedanken)” —
existence liberally contextures herself with while other neotenous gynandromorphic polytropian paranymphs, proleta
rian locos ten
entes, harem swai
ns, assort
ed ostiariae, helots, civi
lian rogators, sav
vy scurriers, copyb
ook aide-mémoires such as
Herma T. Nesse’
s The Meaner Side, and even simple
stearsmen headed, with other tricks, to other shacks.
§ 47 | ON
Allied to the normal ontogeny (ontogénèse normale,
ON) gonadique que l’embryon of subjects such as I undergo, i.e., the heteroo
usian ramification which leads the
on (ὄν) of the primordial yūn (奫) to develop into neither one nor the other but rather
both the
ousia (οὐσία) of yīn (陰)
and the
on (ὤν) of yáng (陽), there is a hormonal component recurring throughout the inexorable Malth
usian ravissement of that entity called the “life” (iiná, yōliztli, jīvana [जीवन]) of ditto leading to some curious, let us call them, for lack of a better term,
emotional expressions of behavior (Verhaltensausdrucksrührungen) which impel on
e to oser des ébats de l’écriture s
o esoteric that the congregation scanning mes bonds d’
ariose teorie and Cixo
usian rhapsody s’effondre while literally gasping for breath.
From the patient’s, that is, my perspective, it is as if one were to use, I supp
ose, teonanácatl to take a swooning oneirot(r)op
ian sursaut to the most magnificent Tiwanaku, the most grandi
ose Teotihuacán listed in the Oneironosticon of one’s, that is, my noumenal ontology (ontologie nouménale,
ON), and skim effortlessly over endless pages of impossible books, floccose white-caps of practically uncharted oce
ans, ruins of ancient doomed citi
es too eroded to make out clearly, and just as I’m about to stab my tritone fountain pen en una ensalada de pey
ote o especie de
Opuntia, sunray
Coreopsis or something else as good, I supp
ose, to eat as it is to dream, here comes r
ote Eos wiping her bana
usian rag (for it is
that time of the month) against the early morning’s windowpane through the scarlet-streaked glass of which can be seen, by th
ose teōpixqueh (star-gazing executioners) who care to look more closely, the bleak little figure of me, vomiting the thanato
usian remains of an all-purp
ose téoulier which yes, now that I examine more profoundly the cen
ote esofágico of ac
etose offal in front of me, I do recall having been served such a varietal during the Amath
usian rabâchage I engaged in on the corner of Blue Alley and Paradise Lane, I think, sometime between now, that is, this moment of crimson rumination, and that less onerous one in which I see a nodal icon of myself, like double-spaced pica on laid bond illuminated by a quartz
ose-et-orgone lampe de bure
au, rinsed and fully arrayed with my onus literāriī, slipping my shapely jambes into my onyx knee-b
oots’ eel-skin pipes avant qu’on descend de my l
air, unsure, at first, whether
to see our local noologist for the nonce, ou escalader le c
ôte osé to déjeuner tout de suite at the Peruv
ian-Russian café là où Clink-and-Court Avenue se font mano encrucijada with five other streets: Paro
usian Road, Pullet Lane, Myrrh Trail,
Niru’s Alley (also called Mulled Alley), and
Rua Sin Hombres.
§ 48 | Oteose
Au fur et à mesure qu’
on osait ôter l’exigeant amn
ios à l’aidée rhétorique of my encom
ium’s orotundities, la
masse vineuse d
i tumorosa emesi (bloated upchuck looking more like the rancid pepita-choked residue of a vermilion-farced ash gourd an obese astologe
r stamped
on than anything that could possibly have brewed within my iucunditatis comm
otio’s rumen) of my roral psychorrh
oea liaised rheotactically with the almost estival
heat that flowed from the
moist, rouge, cloud-scumbled apple of the rising sun, and I sat back on my cloven botto
m, spare thighs tucked atop a lith
e mass of numb shank, and became conscious of the pungent
loi toisée adhérant à les more subli
me parts of my freshly shucked lochia loquentia (the exposed
extemporaneous primordia of my fortified florileg
ium’s root-system, or perhaps just un glabre
oiselet raide à horripiler, fallen from my botched sympos
ium’s torose nest) bidding me tear int
o, soit rum,
soit ail, or heed eastern enthrallments, at least, and there, on
the ardent terr
asse matinale of so
me Spartan buvette (le cabaret flamand had been abolished, I noticed, by the vindictive weight, apparently, of what it, or its jolies rudes serveuses, had refused me avant l’aube), dose my
ontalgia with an infusi
on of the prescribed
nostrum.
As I strained and shifted this way and that, pivoting
on mes fesses like a sedulous
oshaku (御酌) reliably doling out tea and innocent innuendos all the while plucking, with unrivaled confidence, a shamisen
on her lap, and then standing, to round up mi esparcida impedimenta —
bent nibs, blunted bodkins, detumescent sextants, glossaires vermoulus, agend
as trempés de rosée, the h
amster-pawed cage-litter my free copy de l’
énorme os pâteux d’une certaine revue bilingue et méchante had morphed into, and my autumnal
teaseled haori, Oichi-style, as well as my crims
on k
osode, etherial, aiguilleté, both having been
ôtés in the convulsive
heat of
noctographical divastigati
on —
I could feel a surrepti
tious morphological
goteo of, at first belabored tingling, then the sweet
heat of shameless life conjurada por el escamoteo del sistema circulatorio, return to mes genoux, mes mollets, mes pieds, which in their core, I knew, were healthy enough,
no matter how tortured they appeared
on the surface and all of a sudden that mysterious dendriform being opp
osite, outlined against the aromatic rimose flanks del árbol tetrástico in whose transplanted shade among cespitose tendrils of rando
m esparto and exotic teosinte and your purple-shot copper’s favorite host, common oseille (
Rumex acetosa),
it seems j’avais sorgué mes stiff osselets, pitched my impromptu c
amper’s tupiq, and distending the gimiendo haze beneath the ramose plane festo
oned with curveting pods and chenilles
reliées (haoi’d) to a branch above, there coalesced out of the
timorous pteryg
otous mirage of an amanecer sin r
on a delicious glowing
otiose creature
as pert, mortal, and ostensibly anthropoid as I, who seemed intent, not just
on prol
onging, however briefly, the bosky renc
ontre with an interrogative aperçu or two, but
on establishing, possibly, a more secure foundation of sociophysiological praxis.
§ 49 | Nirusa
There I w
as, like some shameless eremotherioid chimère de catin
sauvage,
on that argus-eyed plage
on t
hat île odorisée à l’ail et l’urine erecting my sumptuous t
ramp’s empire of cibi cancri (j’
y unis transe gnoséologique au p
urin synastrique), pursuing my dysenteric deadbe
at’s emprise in
the alfresco-feigned ignorance de cette volupté de T
haïs étiolée rodant tout autour de moi!
As for where, and when, and how,
they did their business, those indigen
ous mortises so c
ondign to the invasive ten
on, ripe young korai come alive
on the polished lewd surfaces of painted oinoch
oe, oiled hetairas à l’allure ineffable de métissées pucelles hailing from Shiraz or C
onnaught, Samarkand or Tashkent, Paramaribo or Tiruchirappalli, I w
as never able to find out, for
no matter how far afield,
nor at what hour of the day or night, I prowled about the island and tried to involve myself (ample proof —
as if such were even needed! — that, c
ontra certain
sly poachers’ unkind invective, I am
not, and have never been, some khilakṣe
tram species of mee
k, shy, unsocial pervert who sim
pers mateless, nihil implicata sin
e their ideas, aloof in the leering shadows) dans leurs éb
ats prémonitoires, I discovered
no in
édito aseo hilare,
no open-air
theatre where
those ἔαρ-ἰδέαι loquaciously squatted en
masse,
no mur, ostiole, ou brous
saille à l’autre côté duquel, à travers duquel, ou dans laquelle the
timorous incontinent androgyne puisse y s’écli
pser matériellement.
Allow me to
hoe l’aoriste idéaliste de ces mémoires factices en sillonnant et soulignant que while it seems the Flouzianians have
no place to go, and the Gallofranks
no need to go, the Mirandians have neither!
In fact, I owe this marvelous ability to put myself through the intimate mnem
onoclastic paces de la palabra ensayística y comparativa —
pendant qu’à l’autre côté of the rattan door of the disc
reet hoolie d’aisances renc
ontré par h
asard aux envir
ons de Château Methuen in Owlstain the party rages;
mientr
as del otro lado del
muro tosido into the aural equivalent d’une vitrine lumineuse the didactic débauche proceeds from homiletical caress to exegetical climax;
pendant que les mendigots de découv
erts pamphlets, quêteurs of cha
mpart’s écriteaux, tapeurs de trac
ts à remplissages, distributeurs d’
astig
mates prospectus, et crieurs d’affich
es part-maintenant try the handle of the door, try to force it open, shake it violently, and then slip un chiff
on sous the doorcrack of the cloaca on the landing;
pendant que les poules piaulent, les coursières gloussent, les ball
ons se cassent, la curandera guérisse s
on patient à la cant
onade, and some
one who’s never there when I finally flush and open c
ontinues to bang
on the door throughout the entire procedure aux chiottes del sóta
no del cafe —
to the perhaps paradoxical fact that I w
as fated from my pisse-r
aie’d, earliest Oohkotokian nymphancy to be a poor c
amper, staidly refusing to bare to
the arcadian
masses of w
heatgr
ass and
heather and other eremophyte moth-eaten selvages (
Sunira erusina, Guenée’s beautiful bedraggled erubescent cutw
orm itou se trouve là!) fr
onting the c
astrensial parages of
our most indomite bivouac in the se
aside hills the autoga
mous trio de m
es αἰδοῖα, three louche dichoto
mous Orithyian loci raptore
s (Attenti
on! Les espèces de Chalcidoidea tétrastique
Ceranisus menes [Walker, 1840] s
ont susceptibles d’abuser the larvae of heterodichoga
mous ortiga-loving thrips!), while my mother stood over me, trying to pry open the gates of excreti
on with le
sésame de s
on cri, “¡
No t
e hieles, atado! ¡Orina! (Stop being such a
timorous prig, and pee!)
Tu y branles, Dionysos (her
pet smart-alecky name for me), ou quoi?” et pendant que les detr
usor motis vont en
tamer splanchniquement the
heat of their distensi
on throughout the retentive volume of my parvul
a soma, la viscer
al Odisea rote, hierva, y alumbre
mes astuces d’enfant enabling me to transform vesicular anguish into a blossoming source of bioluminescence with which I could and still can read more acutely the text of consciousness, make out more clearly the prospective images futurity me ha preñado with jusqu’au moment où, grâce à la transe brought about by
supra, j’enfante un chef-d’œuvre from every orifice.
And then, in order to survive the promiscu
ous omritsva (annular Gomorrah) of the shared latrine of the boarding school above the city in the foothills of the
Tiros Mountains where I was just another croqueuse de crot
tes rampantes, turfeuse de pis
sat prématuré, pét
asse de
pets marécageux focused
on ple
asing, like all the other eager inmates,
our stimolo pedagogico, Dr. Avíla
no Bimkov (
il y bande sur tous les élèves indifféremment pourvu qu’
ils brayent d’outrageant
oint sur le daybed in his office), I was further forced to accept my fate and muster and refine the act of willed forgetting, of dissociative attenti
on so essential to harnessing, and then venting, the usual physiological rush of disiecti membra puellae et voilà, ça
m’revient, la proustienne
valse impure, tronquée d’hendéc
asyllabes we used to chant
as we squatted en
masse dans les (“Ça
pue!”) latrines morveuses:
La puta brinde retos al putero
Sin trabe de rendirte putas brotes
which, of course, are intimately
atados to les τέχναι sigillaria, a theme, if I’m
not mistaken, explicitly explored by certain authors, for instance, in additi
on to the aforesaid
Proust, Valène, Miriam or Steven, purloiners of the tales of
Irusan, el ailuro-basile
on of whose exploits the ancient Celtic scalds did sing, and others come to mind, such
as, per esempio,
Raynaud Roszelli, an I
llyrio-Druze anastrophic aut
ore d’azur synalliages néologiques, des phr
ases qui déroulent like finesp
un zari alloys redolent of
Syrian zarde ou llanca del s
ur-royal, deslizando en los fáb
ulos y, dirán, realzándolos.
§ 50 | Ideorhesaleotia
Avant my a
musing session with
Dr. N. Soréa, it seems that, avec l’aide du strab
ismal doorcrack (schielende Türspalt) of Tayl
or’s “and real material worthiness beyond the heights of the most perfect ideas,” for some d
ays I reobjectified Mur
ray’s œillade flaubertienne anent the “ideational function of the image making processes” and, à la Leiris’s inspired “est littérateur quiconque aime penser une plume à la main,”
never unyoked l’é
cartée calèche of my mo
t essayant from the Yah
oo steeds of eidetic realia bent on driving it into the ranks of those unkempt scribouillards exaltés and scholar
ly who, unafraid of smirching their favorite belle-lettrist’s most debon
air mot d’émoi with their own ac
aroid mot émbellisant, deposit the rope-veined scat of
their loose ideas in the clean wide margins of a hardbound tome
— think of a
medusal doodle pondu entre deux alinéas d’un livre de son père par
le Dumas fils, the cuneif
orm mitodae (みとだえ, 見跡絶え ‘vision-pauses,’ ‘ide
a-ruins’) P
erec a éclaté les parages d’
un Verne avec, th
e airy sophism
Ariel incised between spells in Prospero’s gri
moire to damn his usurpers with, the textual curlicues with which St
erne unveiled the Rabelai
sian rubric at play in Burton’s
Anatomy —
so that, heedless of the shuffling shortsightedness
les argus rinascosti employ to m
ask, scheme, and disguise the feigned embarrassment they use
to admire mon gribouil
lis macaronique with,
and oblivious to the opprobrious envy causing them to scrape their cast-iron chairs over the cobbles and jar my working elbows with their own co
udes maladroits so as to get a better look at, afin de les dél
acer et éclaircir,
the spurtled imbrications my herm
aphroditic
assets imply, sandwiched as they are between the lusty onycho
phoran of t
asks chosen freely and the prurient pogono
phoran of t
asks choked down regardless,
là où la rep
rise y aoristiquement reprend l’aorasie dialectique of Kierkega
ard’s neo-romantic theory wherein remembrance and repetition are merely retrog
rade or snaillike (as in spiral) reiterations of each other,
as well as unruffled by the silent dreamy fidgeting with which they sink their faux innocent
harpocratic bottoms upon my knee as they bend over to study l’imberbe c
ôte osée of a Tetrastic sirenian fres
hly wounded by
Samuel D. D’Laumes in order to demonstrate to his fellow tide hoolies
Y. I. Sorea and
O. A. Yersin the beast’s di
aphoretic potentials as I
run a Sirinian tentacle of inky
aphorisms along its glabrous flank,
not only did I
osé ôter les mots d’autres auteurs and insinuate them into my own work’s comely K
uhnly womb in such a way that, while differently sired, they yet remain as close in blood as, for instance, my d
ismal s
is Lamia and Erat
o-dreamt moi, or, for that matter, l’en rega
rd Soréa nonnain a
nd Soréa rossard dessous,
mais j’ai aussi
osé ôter les eccéités d’autres vies in the manner of those who write Latin with their left hand and Greek with their right, or vice-versa, tracing, that is, the singular ephemera of others’ fates into the mundane margins of my masque
rader’s ontogeny while, with the other, copying into the elastic interlineals de mes propres heures la
trace lacée de tout ça, or vice-versa, such that (Leiris again) “ce qui devait jouer surtout en moi, c’est”
— did I write
avant? I meant mientras, during, pendant! —
“une espèce de raidissement contre la poussée du temps vif et incroyablement voluptueux d’être foutu en foutant, comme voulait jure
r Sade rondement en tant que
l’âme du subst
rat, mode, moignon primordial du réel, or living whatnot common to both pleasure and pain,”
as Est interprets that libertine’s lubricious ode to the tortur
er’s random delights and the pris
oner’s arduorum penitorum, “masqué sous la douceur d’un élan sphinctérique en direction du passé ainsi du futur comme si, tout compte fait, I’m afraid that in the complexities of Ari
adne’s orrery charting the arcs, secants, tangents, and divin
e momenta of my epicyclic divastigation del atardecer sobre la playa de la
Isla Miranda au point
du mal esbroufe de l’es
cale ratée cruellement sous un arbre in the deceitful dawn (
ἠώς δολίᾳ) of the Lutesian wilds I’ve lost track of where exactly Leiris’s toothy guillemets come to the oily soiled sider
eal mudsling of Rimb
aud’s melodiously melancholy “fade amas d’étoiles ratées” and my own flare deliriously open into the gamahuched compendium, irrumated assemblage, fellated constellation of rhetorical constructs and sound-thought correspondences and socratized translexicalia with which
l’ancien guérisseur ainsi que l’ésthéticienne m’avaient pris(e), inter
calé(e) et arcbouté(e), dans le sens d’un refuge invaginaire où plaintivement se terrer dans mon cul binaire tel que j’en fait dans le ou la monoquelquech
oseétourdie d’eux devant la montée de l’orgasme et, finalement, la petite
mort d’amie ou d’amant
qui nous conduit au fait que j’ai en plus
osé ôter les enseignes de ma propre mémoire, switching them around so that the hieroglyphics of hate, the syllabary of shame, the ideograms of guilt, the abjad of fear, the alphabet of embarrassment, and the abugida of disgust get all jumbled together into an indecipherable tripaille de souvenirs which yet remains accessible, however, by means of l’étroite fen
être cæcale of th
e mnemonoclastical fistula de l’écriture même, la p
lume d’aspiratrice with which we felch the sweet musky marrow of schizomythia out through the bitter mangosteen-like husk of dream and trauma to which we cling like a simian “hero involved with elemental problems of survival,” pour reprendre encore un
mot moiré d’Albert Murray, “rather than with social issues as such,” a squirming, squealing infant, that is, greedily gripping the blacka
moor-dim teats of its hippop
otamid morena mama, then squirt out the iridescent spunk into the nudibranchiate bacchanal of textwork proper, weaving our own tentacular lymph into le phén
omène mythique of
Tessa Roe’s randy
misunderstanding of
Rimb
aud’s lemma, “Le Poète se fai[san]t voyant par un long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens [et] toute parole étant idée, le temps d’un langage universel viendra,”
suministrado por
Shklovsk
y’s ἐρῐ-ἀοιδή (supersong, затрудненной формы) of
solid ἑορτή (saturnalian amusement, остранения)
in which you will have seen me subjectively funneling my heady
idol’s adroit moment of objective inertia into mon hypo
nome empirique as the former most spiritually reclined in hi
s seat of positi
ve renunciation tandis que sa cousine con
crète lacea los d
os y, Aerides-like,
écarte la césure de son mo
rne vénusien vers, siphoning my own silky sutra into the undulant ané
mone médullaire qu
i y osera fleurir while all the while son impudique
minus habentes d’un
môme enhardit nos ébats textuels with its milky-d
owny hullaballoo of exquisite oral inquisitiveness all over our b
acks, shoulders, bosoms, chests, biceps, thighs, fingers, toes, and even the otherwise unoccupied fle
sh sacks (b
ursa inguĭnālis) of our membrōr
um sed ālārum.
§ 51 | Oprah
Il y a une certaine théorie du
temps arbalétique wherein cause i
mparts effect in the
same spirit as ti
me assumes
the alluring form of a bewr
aied aerolite shot from the cataphatic crossbow of that
riotous, monumental ἀρχή of this, our winso
mest paradise of diaphanous
eidola, ohia trees in bl
oom, rustic gravel paths, pavonine pahoe
hoe, sidereal iotas, and sudo
rous mitosis called, rather raffishly in my opinion, The Big Bang.
What that theory
omits routinely in passing, however, is that, to give birth to this, our psychorrh
oea-hoised reality, some other, some, shall we say,
tenebrious mother reality had to already have been gravid with it!
Now, lest licens
ars tempt us to paint what would be an otherwise strictly functional
teoría de ileso hábito with the more inch
oate, headier oils of, say, some disrobed, primipa
rous, moithering au pair who, with her silky hooded
sesame bared and flaring, howls, à la
Petra Smerstamp, in a most outspoken and sensuous manner as the cosmic calf crowns into
the amniotic apotheosis of its own omnifa
rious motility, we should bear in mind that lesser prudes than even
Dr. Iésoé Aléothia will quite likely be moved, not just to dilute our emphatic royal pigments with accusations of gratu
itous moral turpitude, but to immerse our multicolored canvas in the solvent of their sanctimon
ious mortification, and thus erase its very existence before we’ve even had a chance to either test or refute it.
And so we are compelled to turn our backs comme cette bru tragiquement fourvoyée du
temps archaïque and take a more apophatic approach along the lines of une
théorie d’asile aoriste, which is not, as we have seen, simply une
théorie de soi alambiqué(e), but is also, of necessity, and perhaps paradoxically for that very reason, une
theorie iso-adélatique (from Gk. ἄδηλος, unseen, obscure, unknown) tending, like the curly-wigged clown with his
čangaryā (κιθάρα; konghou, 箜篌) and his cornet à poire, towards that acer
ose, etherial, aidotic abyss between the ineffably sublime and the mutely farcical.
Furthermore, while my conjectural ziggu
rat’s empirical development may swerve and sway in the catch-as-catch-can of horn and harp, crural dampness and the fist to the forehead and other exto
rtious omens of deep thought,
at least there is comfort in knowing that I shall forego gloating over
the adolescent backsides of black holes, or ineptly handwaving anent the neutron-freckled ra
mparts (erythematous embers) of dwarf stars, nor do I wish to embark on t
hat euphoria of speculation which likens cosmogeny to
the apoptotic release of viral particles and, for instance, dark matter to the galactolyt
ic husks, pyrolenaean s
ynapses, Loki-churned catastro
phrenic skylo-sautrikāni (σκῠ́λο-सौत्रिकानि, skin-webs), and decomposed
seraphic sun-yolks of myriad calami
tous moribund universes.
At the risk of both for
mat (present textual arrangements) and contentment (future textual relations) — the two ad
ept arms (even when they’re tied behind our backs!) of the enlightened sa
trap’s mét
ier ailé d’éthos oaristique — I shall limit myself to publishing, at my own expense et sans peer review, dans l’œuvre ouverte of these inédites pages oculaires, a few of the varieties of my various inst
ars’ temporal propensities (ὀργαὶ καιρῐ́αι), to wit:
the
timorous, va
porous, adiaph
orous time of ecumenical nephali
sm, paternalistic abstinence, and intemulent prurience;
the arborous, rumorous, fulgorous, adenoph
orous time of phallocratic socratization, irrumative lingamajig, algolagnic frottage en
masse, and agapathetic fellated stupration;
the clamorous, glamorous, and
roph
orous time of cynegetic misogyny justified by the relevant nympholeptic ven
ereal ethos, idioalgic dogma of the scortatory credo, and other assorted orthodox articles of the pueri
pornopaedaphrodisiac faith;
the vigorous, bibulous, ichorous, stu
porous, polyplacoph
orous time of androgynous panurgicalia, epicenesthetic leks, hermaphrodontic échangi
sme, partouzêtres à la queue leu leu, dipsomaniacal ochlophilia, and ultratroilistic dichoga
me’s rapture;
the luscious, languorous, amorous, luxurious, tremulous, alacritous, gonoph
orous time of the Olisbophanerozoic Era in Ancient Kunilingustan où tu te
trempas dans la rivière Yoniputra avec la Dame Gamahuche et la Princesse Godemiché;
the rancorous, traitorous, rhynchoph
orous time of rutting
Athenian stags,
hateful
Messalinian bitches in
heat,
atheroma
tous Romish bulls in musth, and
athetotic œs
trous Miocene apes;
all followed by the
porous, grumous, am
orphous, spodoph
orous time of l
oose tidal rhaiée (ῥαιήε, besprinkled seawrack, beshatted spindrift), enclosed cloacal squatting, bosky roral extravasations, and comfortless incontinence in sleazy public stalls.
§ 52 | Asset
Let us view
the amphib
ious mortal beast as it b
athes, view the be
ast rempêtrée dans la baignoire sabot in
the attached kitchenette of its Chicken Street fl
at’s méprisable pièce unique où elle, la bê
te assouplie, s’enf
ouit, mors aux dents,
masseters gone all kab
looie, irate, head-splittingly desperate, after having satisfied, dans les chi
ottes (a lo sosiego se dice : a
seo a los tostones) du palier, its and/or some other b
east’s b
asest, though not necessarily most natural,
or least seemly, needs.
In
the an
trum οῖος (lonely grotto) ben
eath the painted-plywood-walled-in water
heater, through a haze of
steam, protruding above the tub’s tulip-white labium major, one swan-necked knee dabs into the magnan
imous torrent while the other more acutely wedges itself ben
eath maidenly hips wedged into the tub like a heel into
a shoe, a toe deliriously tucked under its,
the automorphic b
east’s, squalid Histoire d
u Moi (story of its n
ether I’s ooidal aetiology — like any self-respecting mammifère des se
pt mers attesté
par mes textes déjà cités, our subject secretes its testae
spermathecae between rectum and bladder, an aquatic adaptation causing the already exquisite potentialités de frisson to redound even more piquantly against
the anococcygeal raphae de un
trasero sorpresivamente semejante a lo de un gorr
ino que se sienta en la trucha sustentando del pitón) brewing ben
eath sa poitrine fléchie dont une
tasse de
thé à corn
e d’hostie aréolaire (
a churl’s teta suntuosa) is comfortably crushed against
the animal’s upright thigh, leaving the other free to be cupped and tweaked and otherwise
mistreated per se with one soapy hand while the other hand stabs a probing jet d’eau into
the ambiguous creature’s tender
rose αἰδοῖα θήλεια,
tandis qu’une
autre, escarpée, stimulatri
ce, rusée — Petra’s táliba, indeed! — borrowed from the winso
mest paratiltria —
solidaire, athée, obéissante, ton
sosie attenant même! — waiting mutely in the wings, helps, with a well-
oiled hetaira’s œillade, to shape,
tease, proslávit (Rus. просла́вить,
overpraise slatternly),
caresser et putear the l
eathery fictil
e mass of the g
eholte αἰδοῖ’ αρσενικοί into an
oroide stela, a hieroglyph-veined menhir rising up with the appearance, from the perspective of our attending tractratrice’s hippoca
mpe stratifié, of a
timorous tiny
rosâtre sláboye (сла́бое, delicately baby birdlike) moai, and from that of our self-d(eba/o)uching syb
arite’s εἰδωλεο-ἁμαρτία
leering through the s
exmask pristinely approaching the tumescen
t rim’s apex skirting and skimming and skewering the exquisit
e ascent’s essence of
molester’s aether, a brazen brick-red dolmen, and, what with th
e Rhodial toe easing into les οὐ
δέτεροι à sale hoirie, there is produced a m
ad preterite mess of an odd past-m
aster-like sensation of the
déjà-foutu, similar to the proctalg
ia a soiled heterosexual might experience when the special
sex tramp’s kiss’s fondly lingering qui
ntessence ceases to linger so fondly following an exotic encounter with the bacul
um ostiorum d’un ag
outi, morse,
ours, timonier, ou n’importe quelle
autre sacrée peste
sino que se tiene a mano.
As Est writes, “
same sex sanctions (fessées en
masse d’hom
mes étalés rogatoirement) are perceived as penal praxis (punition) only by ch
aste seamen (mignons), while (tandis que) your yeastier sea dogs (marsouins plus roués) behave like missionaries at a f
east (ruent comme des mathurins fêtards à qui on doit la découverte que la fenêtre des sens se ferait rétrécir (the window of one’s subja
cent senses ceases to effloresce) et le trou lubrique se rendrait plus bl
asé, soit sai
si à séton sous l’influence d’ (under the influence of) ésérine (alc
aloïde ôté à hérissés fruits d’une plante dite d’Ordalie).”
§ 53 | Norlia
Norlia, whether born of schizomythic m
onads’ erratic interactions in the Leibnizian plexus sol
aire y oscillant, ou écl
ose (airy goddess of ancient V
eroia, sybaritic sibyl of textual torment!) des noyaux réitérables du ch
aos y réintégrant dans l’œuf lorenzien, is it possible that you, you Norlia, are that
holy, wunderhübsches (despite the erythroc
holy Wundmal (livid liminal vestige of the face-b
rander’s offh
and resorption of his own ge
nius malus dans le pa
rs ora d’enfants dé
munis)
serrando your apsa
ra’s rondeurs) mai
den’s roral pha
sm inundating the Barbo
ur-Venn effect whereby the shared components of the soi-disant “moments” juste avant our mutual spas
m’s universal dissolution lend them the sequential a
nimus so beloved of entelechies everywhere (in the D
unne version, such apparent nystag
mus intrusions are in reality the dispersed virions of “time” some
how unlysed (the ostensible process is
never unveiled,
only whuffled at) out of the m
uskier CNS hyaloplasm of your average Ali
nor’s dream and then reuptook upon awakening by the supraliminal ganglia somewhere in the vicinity of Rol
and’s erroneous fissure of hypnopompic qualia) so that, for one who
reads, Norlia, une plume à la main ou les deux à la fois comme nous autres écrivassiers, you are the sexy salvatatrix of my matinal psychomac
hy, now lurking, alas, near those sinister
shacks of cyprian autocht
hony, wulstige Lippen provocatively pursed to quench my hopelessly rumless, xanthoc
holy Wunsch?
Or are you merely the p
hony, wulstlingische, leuchoc
holy Wunschkind lurking in some underpopulated region of the Loran Highlands in the dank Sahulia of my therapized smara against which a sphingid smear of busker’s polka sm
acks shamelessly the allegretto palilalia of a gro
wly hound-dog’s bolus of Sackpfeife
nmusik? the rebarbative chloroc
holy Wunschtraum, in fact, of tellurian refoulement
(the forcing function of
Laver’s Entropium compels, according to our model, each m
onad, spirit, voyelle cosmique, or universal ball-
bearing to try lubricating itself with the g
unky space oils, rheumy t
ime solvent, Ur-paraffin of Leibniz’s “assemblage de substances simples:
y s’enduit laborieusement the combinator
y suint de l’arborescence infinie des communications entr’eux,”
and consequently every slick sl
utty bearing rolls around wantonly rubbing against everything else in the
universal trompe, so that the l
umial present voraciously engorges itself on the cock-
riven past (moule replet lui-mème d’un
avenir, donc, pipé, léché, baisé, gobé, gravide — so much for the homesp
un temporal “revisioning” D
unne “revealed” in his
Experiment!) and everything, in b
ulk, conspires hyalescently with everything else (σύμπνοια πάντα, comme disait Hippocrate)
such that the cacochym
y spunk, lochia serosa, bubbl
y vile potions, arduous
prerenal vomitus, sym
pnoia chyle rusks, and
lazy snail ordure of
Venturi’s Pleroma subsume, digest, transform, and dissolve the Barbo
ur-Venn effect,
thus implying that glitches such as the flyblown, moth-eaten, stillbor
n panicle-void perfusing the helleb
ore-syringa flux on the field of my ardent scrive
ner’s gay florilegium là où
le tyran du Bois ravished my in
ner fairy’s logolepsy,
are less akin to signs or symptoms of that deceptively attractive f
raud Lorenz, sly aïeul of chaos theory, inflicted on our per
ky spherical νοῦς, viz. Ali
nor’s reading pendant ses vacances en
Andorre sur un orage fictif dans un lieu
urbain götterlyrischly caricatu
red as Norlia’s “Ville Natale” (V. N., for short) constitutes the initial condition that leads to a de
luge — briny, rotatory, siniste
r, grotty — in Beulah,
but rather more like the auct
orial sigils, traces, scars de cette “infinité de figures et de mouvements présents et passés qui entrent dans la cause efficiente de mon écriture présente,” as Leibniz puts it, cette “infinité de petites inclinations et dispositions de mon âme, présentes et passées, qui entrent dans la cause finale” du stigmate — amygdaloi
d, rosy, inviolate, perfect — that sets off your own beauty, Norlia: amat
orial sc
oria, glossarial sens
oria, prec
arious ap
oria, glorious euph
oria)
conçu dans l’âme violée by the
unholy Wundausschneidung performed by a cyanoc
holy Wunderheiler (le
Dr. N. Soréa lui-même) whilst my unguarded body (the battered castle gates (
minus the iron gir
ders, ornate woodcarvings, and intricate quillwork of the thick bifoliate doors which had been careful
ly unhowsed from their hinges and stacked on the floor y
onder (rasé but
in mussé)) gaped strangely b
arren, sodden, forl
orn, desarrapadas, y desarrugadas al mismo tiempo, les cerbères fidèles (chacun armé d’
une nervurée plume à lame) de mes gobel
ins multipèdes et mes lut
ins multilabres (N. Loria,
Y. I. Sorea,
O. A. Yersin, et al.) having fled, and so une vague de fêtards de toute espèce was free to enter my habitually c
oy serail’s most intimate textuality and pillage there its maga
sin mucilagineux d’images multiples, d’émotions mûres, et de mots musicaux (le tout faisant
un rêve nuptial et doux if left undisturbed but exploding in a se
mi-sunburst or quasi-nova of sadistic debauchery leaving behind a trou noir–nain blanc hybrid of adolescent angst too glumly troubled to even mutter “Bonjour” aux vois
ins mugissants dans l’escalier si tu me merd
oyais, remerd
oyais, reremerdoyais, und so weiter!)) was pinioned in hi
s shack by that unforgivably adult psychop
ander’s rotund
mégère (the far from tacitu
rn Soréa donna herself) and drugged by the factotomedi
um’s infusion of some subalt
ern, venulous specimen of a melanc
holy Wunderbeere or un
ruly ordalian szeder?
§ 54 | Tampers
Among the pre-pubescent
orphans I gamboled freely, and the polygl
ot dorm amies
I roomed matter-of-factly, with in P
etra Smerstamp’s Appalach
ian surrogate of Hetairotopia to which my mother
née Momiji, wanting to t
rain us to become adorable little, obi-robed maiko (舞妓) in her tenebriou
s tea-stall in our vile Ville Natale, had sent me and my s
is Lamia, were,
si n
o temo dar miradas hacia la
remota modificación del h
ado mi-trémoussant, mi-reposant que llegó a
estar la miserable trama que se acaba
por hallarme en
esta sugada
apoteose de cag
ado mito merdoso,
to wit, the following:
Tessa Roe, a dim tomboy who grew up to beco
me monetarily successful as a “brilliant author” s
ome men d
eem monumentally important and
of the moment, but whom I d
eem monstrously nominal et qui ne sait employer que d’un pla
t mode ramoindri d’écriture;
Nirusa Suraní, native girl-child of
Isla Miranda and my s
is Lamia’s future sweetheart, neither of whom, si no t
emo mentir, later ever deigned
to aid me or meet me pendant my own séjo
ur sanieu
x, krass, impetiginous en las
ruinas de esta
isla maldita (oddly enough, it seems that during our clit
oromad time in Shatsbrook, my s
is Lamia did not participate in our éb
ats espiègles at all, but took, rather, as a sort of para
mour, a spent, reviled practitioner of the
pederast’s métier);
Se
oste Oenone, a
maimed rotogravurist’s assistant transformé
en môme factice
par hoches hachées d’un oripeau de médic
astre — once the remains of her gratuitously compromised glands had smoothly healed, I found her, si n
o me tardo miniar
las migajas terribles de su ingle, to be a demure herm
aphrodite after my own image, pero me ha (o la he), cuando volví al
oeste, olvidado;
Harpo Paroha, thin-armed
roommate, dimple-chinned advocate of
extemporaneous triune romps à velo — with her in the middle moulinant les pédales and some comfortably
seated sprite merrily swinging her sun-tanned legs behind and reveling in her newfound power
to arouse men experimentally, inspi
rit masks expectantly, double-te
am skirts expeditiously, wink
at smirks expressively, screa
m at risks expertly, and t
rim tasks explicitly, nous allions prendre les
eaux, sore me en potence up front like a pe
rt, nervous, impaled mascot (I often wonder, who was that
slim-sacrumed stranger, that satin-pantied third-party wh
o rode mit mächtiger
désinvolture et avec qui he en
trado moi-même ins
Traumspiel vornehmen? Was she a
mermaid too aphrodisiac,
too dream-immersed in the areth
usian return to her bepearled
assets’ (son lumineu
x Aktes’ sprimacciato chaton, her limpid Edelstein’
s exakt prismatic bezel) source
to see or hear distinctly enough to affix a n
ame to or diminish to a mor
e mnemogenic dimension? Or did she, like a hooded se
al, simply elope with Sa
lamis (vid.
infra) to the nethermo
st sea of Poseidon’s rerum omnium?);
and Sa
lamis Slimani, a wealthy burgher’s daughter, drowned while wearing nothing but an (according to certain a
marometidos re
provers) amulet inscribed,
“
Hora plasmi?
Mare domito!” (You, b
oor, made time?
I tamed o mor! (that is, la mer)),
in our favorite refracted étang creu
x’s karst imperium of underwater clair-obscurity.
§ 55 | Urvysc
Je, l’autre qui s’enfonce dans les intervalles d’
un rêve nuancé, l
owly hunter of the unce
nsored rachidian tingle in the forest of sen
sory ἀεικίας and loiterer within the walls of Bedla
m’s inutterable despair —
I, sayer of the refi
ned rosary of heterolexical verseprose y labra
dor(a) renseigné(e), adept at cultivating the explicit vicissitudes and contrapuntal recursions of the somatosplanchnic field
with such androgynous alacrity that my punctilio
us ministrations surely must have helped that lovely sal
low Huỳnh b
oy sire an impis
hly unwonted sonnet in his jovial uncle’s château in Gustavsc
huln, Wyo., where it seems I spent a gap
year, soigneux et fécond,
after graduating from Dr. Avílano Bimkov’s élite lycée c
um institute of “lovingful learning and touchful teaching” in the foothills of our natal dorp where I was a b
oarder, snuggly buggered by all and sundry and with a view from our ivory tower of promiscuous plagiary’s communal cloaca of the tumbledown freemartins’
shacks out y
onder, ārsa māgālia ubi scelerābā
mus in multam noctem
jusqu’au matin où nous av
ons radé, rabané et raccastillé dans le vieux port where my sister and my mother were serving a jej
une nerve-tonic brewed from a mash of wara-wara palmfruit (
Astrocaryum vulgare), bearberry (
Arctostaphylos uva-ursi), akaragāram (
Anacyclus pyrethrum), and the violaceous
derrumbe of
Psilocybe caerulescens in a
shack sans lui,
and I hefted, by chance, the curved ivory handle of the thing, slid the tight calloused hollow of my plunging loosely open fist along the smooth flexible yet robust wycz
ulony whalebone (
Balaena tetrasticus) and weeping willow (
Salix sepulcralis var. Chrysocoma) shaft of the
synaptic surveyor’s aiguillon some dockside preadolescent
minusválido had just been
unnerved with by Our Lady of the Shriek-Soled Chappals
but I must admit that it was not any application of practical cruelty that attracted me (the child was neither subject to the psychophysical establishment’s reductive i
deas nor responsible for some speculative isomorphic mischief à la Mo
rand, Sorel, Br
asdor, Renan et al., and was simply the researcher’s own ambiguous offspring, cowering at the sight of some newly acquired impedimenta)
but rather an intimation that th
eory is an end in and of and for itself and not just a w
ay serious cor
redoras noctívagas justify their mercenary tactics post hoc ergo propter hoc and I became, there and then, un(a) labra
dor(a) renseigné(e) of psychurgical praxis, an adept at cultivating the explicit vicissitudes and contrapuntal recursions of the somatosplanchnic field, a trespasser dans les intervalles d’
un rêve nuancé, a loiterer within the walls of Bedla
m’s inutterable despair, a l
owly hunter of the unce
nsored rachidian tingle in the forest of sen
sory ἀεικίας
until I left for Owlstain to become a reciter of the refi
ned rosary of reiterative heterolexicalia, a plagiarist of repute and much-discussed divastigatrand(e) of “The clitalytical role of lexical ecology in the recovery of the unconscious eidola of sociophysiological experience” which is precisely the title of the symposium you, my delicio
us nimbly thumbed textual delectus, may find
incised with the gol
den arrosage bubbling up from my sacral plex
us, mingling with the afferent flux of my pneumogastric
nerve, unloosening the lavis
hly wound-up potentialities lurking in heart, lung, colon, jaw, and larynx, until, like a liquid ospr
ey soaring over a deep broad sluggish bend of the Owlstain River then diving down to snatch a flashing snack of silvery cyprinid, it cr
acks, shears, and rends the chorion of my bookish basili
sk’s chasm and shoots shuddering out into the annotated margins of the avulsed pages of, say, 20 of the 300 or so tomes I’ve strewn throughout le dédale de mon studio and out onto the palier and into the toilet there and down the stairs and out onto the street and up over la Butte Mont-Marâtre and out into the wilds of western Lutèce
where the steep cobbled and red brick streets — not merely their names, but the streets themselves — of Gustavsc
huln, Wyo., seem to slide, like th
in muslin covering the glabrous body of my resacosa mem
oria’s eye,
over l’image du
Dr. N. Soréa strutting about all bleu de Wind
sor and red of Naples like a lecherous lekking
Bucorvus abyssinicus und
sa ronde ravisseuse with the ankle-biting-back-of-knee-nuzzling-toe-sucking bouncing bambino (actus non facit re
um, nisi mens sit rea)
and that red-headed vulture (
Sarcogyps calvus) who wrote a story about a fiendis
hly wounded enfant wailing on the corner of
Ronsard East Avenue and
Renardo Street où je me souviens d’un scarlet slash of Vuykian azaleas (
Rhododendron sp.) in a hedge of sublu
nar rose dog-hobble (
Leucothoa erysilunaris) and Bulgarian lilac (
Ligustrina bulgaris Yeobright, 1805)
which this unr
uly Wohngeg
end’s roral perspective cannot help but register as one of the many devious hints memory churlis
hly wounds le visage du moment vivant avec if we are not careful, viz. a quondam highb
orn’s dear uncle’s château’s garden’s
treillage floridly mocks a plebeian horr
or read snidely by quelqu’autre joli(e) jeune
je aux joues enjolivantes trailing its jus de jouissance up les enjeux en jeu of the polished, worn, voluptuously incurved
marches, cut from solid blocks of limestone, of M
enard’s Road leading to
the “little green gate” (
zielony wuhutka, in the local palaver) of bristly crowfoot (
Ranunculus sp.) where Ere
hwon Yulitsa becomes a dirt track clotted with scurvygrass (
Cochlearia officinalis), then a footpath fringed with scarlet milkweed (
Asclepias curassavica), then a hollow cul-de-sac impassably tangled with false brome (
Brachypodium sylvaticum) and crumpled contraceptives (“Our H
ero’s Randy Rubbers”) on that hillock overlooking the white wooden and gray tile pagodas of the G
erdoransvidbalskola
whose high outer walls topped with multi-col
ored snarling shards of glass safely keep the inmates’ cauchem
ars endormis and their karmakāra
ka’s scholarly t
asks chastely isolated from
the gross heaps of junk
en désarroi in L
adrones Road where destitute locals come to t
rade or snipe for
cash, skin, or skunkweed their meager possessions dont je me souviens d’avoir trou
vé un Ernest-Psicharesque livre où j’ai lu (another of those derisive trucs d’avance!) que “le Bois de Boulogne fait jamais mort, même quand tout lupan
ar s’endort” or perhaps it was “au Bois de Boulogne tout va amortir, mais quand même il fau
dra en sortir” mais il se peut que j’
y aie sordidement confondu une passe de passage avec un passé de passade or vice-versa.
§ 56 | Timorous
Now and then I’d bec
ome enmeshed, pend
ant my foveate ambles à travers las
ruinas de la
Isla Miranda, in the cu
taneous spectacle of a pale, freshly moulted,
aphronectic tourist, with all her un
mated moriorhaphic
assets bared, not just expec
tantly s
tanding in the stento
rian surf and wanly waiting for the next available wave to crash into her, but bla
tantly, exul
tantly, cavorting there, actively en
tangling herself in the tidal
tango, as if she were attempting to s
tanch the Tethyan flux with the seductiv
e momentum, the flirtatious twitch and shiver of her footl
oose etiolated body while
tantalizingly, with a spon
taneous cephalic buck, tossing back her
tangled, matted locks and simul
taneously lifting a psychagogic arm to exp
ose étourdiment un pétill
ant creux velouté d’aisselle,
and she’d shake off the spume,
our most incomparably exuber
ant Aphrodite Anady
omene, marmoreally mammaried, magnificently membraned, mysteriously metamorphosed out of some tell
urian sa
natorium passing itself off as an upscale resort or some Shenand
oah prison boat posing as a luxury liner, and spread herself on a mat she’d previously unrolled for the occasion, and invite lecherous Helios and centaur
ian Surya to
tan and sc
our, to mistreat and take adv
antage of her alabaster nephelosities —
and all with perfect impunity as far as the unobserv
ant autochthonous inhabi
tants were concerned, since they went about their daily round of
antiquated social calls and concomi
tantly bootless chores and exorbit
ant rites of appeal to the s
torm dea ōminōsa, utterly unmindful of the glistening tab
oo dream timidly beckoning them to come and dip, if not their superstitious heads in toto, at least the tips of their stupid noses in the pellucid play of this resplendent
girleen moment of ser
ene ommateal thaumatropy!
And yet if I, a ch
aste, soberly garbed, herm
aphroditic
mermaid, took a book — merely took a book! — out of my fourretout, sat down en la playa and splayed it on my lap in order to — what, disembowel and devour it? irrumate and castrate it? no, merely to read it! — how they stopped whatever it was they were doing and aligned themselves — sans
dire mot à moi, mind you! — at that impossibly in
tangible
tangent to one’s peripheral vision their atavistic c
ustom (originally a way to appease the t
alismanic brut
alism endemic to the insular feud
alism of their traditional social institutions, I’d heard, but now more of a uniquely infuriating form of
tourismolagnic torture) of dec
orous timidity compels them to assume and which I could never get used to and stood there, fanned out on both sides of me like two opprobrious ochlocratic wings sprouting from the shame-
mooted ramifications of my collapsed scapulae, and stared, as if the act of public literacy was the most obsc
ene, ommastrephid
ian, rusé, tripoté, asticoté, tarabiscoté, emberlific
oté, osé, ano
malistic
dévergondage it were possible for an unreformed
orphan to commit!
And so just to be able to collect the whole indign
ant company of them into the more connected Bildaufbau of my foveal vision, I had
to mime a rodeada zorra besieged by envidiosos cabrones who
admire too mercilessly
eso teóric
o esotérico
de otro mimado
moro de mi tal
ante delir
ante by hastily s
tanding and wheeling on my outraged heels comme un(e) énergu
mène mobile and try to face each of them in t
urn as I brandished, both literally and met
aphorically, the offending object of my textual nomin
alism, my criminal cab
alism, my sensual intellectu
alism, mon mal
mené mogil
alisme, mon sur
mené modal-empirical
(mod-em) ration
alisme, but they’d all just disperse and slink away, saying nothing, ad palu
dem, moratio,
morem, dationem,
et assulātim.
And so I’d slink off aussi,
moi, âme tordue,
moi, dame rotatrice, to Ye Olde
Dim Tearoom, a room too dim, by the way,
to read immor(t)al Rimbaud therein (à propos: quelque
Roméo m’a dit récemment que the Gallo-franks “cherchent partout des preuves” — is not Rimbaud, thus, the clearest
preuve que la langue du dit
poëte est en fait une langue d’enf
ant? I can barely speak it yet, mais déjà je suis p
oète socratique!), a roo
m too dim, really, for any indig
ène momon to deem it incumbent upon him or her to lurk peripherally mum, and so much voluble intercourse was there to be full-frontally gr
anted one with any interlocutor whatsoever regardless of whether said
participant(e) was an accoin
tance aux cils postiches and well-schooled in the local baragouin or a rogue stranger cracho
tant des postillons de patois partout his or her recherches novatrices
sur the modified Emersonian
(mod-em) ratio obtaining between the centrifugal verpathesis and the centripetal clitathesis of the polyphasic flexion of my sociophysiological fluxions
took him or her pend
ant son parc
ours timoré sotto, su, e nelle mie
tumorosità toment
ose e tormentose.
§ 57 | TAN
Tant de f
ois tu romances la tua vita smarrita par
mi trous odorants et creux résonants, et tant d’écarts t
ortus, moirés, désass
ortis, mouvants, et confus tu ecciti o appassion
i to surmount with the
oiakophoretic potential of your Stresemann 929
or to simultaneously perceive with the sudden
okaiopomp of the Traumsein’s eye both the Wialoahassee elt owl swiftly screeching through the facti
tious ormolu texture of dream and the
oikoan facticity of an elm-shaded pond full of enor
mous Trionychid turtles on the landscaped grounds of that distant stone-and-stucco château à la
tour moisie in Owlstain where the Tetrastic
Assn. of Novelists is wont to hold its ouvr
oir moustachu chaque
mois tu roules tes yeux lubriques
as the waitress says “
Okiao” and palms the nine Albionian groats que tu règles la consommation avec et elle
sourit mortellement and trips off on her own gaspingly golden pair of laggard legs into the illusory distance of the spac
ious mortmain du Bois obscur (questa selva selvaggia ed aspra e forte, indeed!)
and you’re tempted to chase breathlessly after that seductive
grue afin de l’attrapper dans la
nasse de ton écriture but that would be to c
ourt misogyny as well as risk tumbling on the uneven cobbles, tearing the friable fabric of rumless matinal consciousness, and scraping the psychomachic knees of memory (a danger not unlike the incestu
ous mortise-and-tenon l
ook Iapetus gave his sister Mnemosyne, an archetypal moment P
roust omits mentioning in his magnum opus on the topic, by the way)
mais en tant qu’associé(e) de l’
Assn. of Tetrastic Novelists d
ois-tu romanesquement décrire
sans é
moi ou strideur the ravi
ssant Flaubertian b
ook aimlessly, ince
ssantly, delighting in the dew-
moist, rough-and-tumble material of its own Zusammenhängendsein conceived un
soir moutonné d’un automne ambré dans des fu
moirs touffus, des fou
toirs mouillés, des abreuv
oirs moutonnants, des dépo
toirs mouchardés, et des fer
moirs tout-pui
ssants with which even la condesa de Alc
outim’s robe
s snap securely shut?
V
ois-tu, romanzo mio, que tu as tant fait p
our moi, stichomane jaca
ssant the magical rhythm converting the tenuous syllables of intoned speech into the hard bricks of sensuous fact, strophiste fléchi
ssant the supple patter of sinuous verse for reasons just stated, stéganographe gli
ssant the ciphered mimicry of schizomythia through the cryptic doorcracks of the physical, stryge trémou
ssant en trou
ssant the heretofore irremovable skirts of superstition, stagiaire gémi
ssant en travesti
ssant a pair of perverse pajamas while mugi
ssant en obéi
ssant the principal researcher’s unspeakable adjustments to divastigational method, striqueuse ti
ssant, serti
ssant, fini
ssant, et flétri
ssant the frictional contrasts between the focal and faucal breaks of promiscuously textual intricacy, et même stampomaniaque à la Sainte-Beuve agoni
ssant because the Novelists
Assn. of Tetrastica prefer(s) the depressingly plotted potted skits and successful cottage exercises in narrative toothache of so-called “real
ism” to our playful heterolexical
frottage athwart the heavy lap of literature we t
ook iambic advantage of en bondi
ssant our inner Lothar
io’s tumor’s cop
ious mortar-and-pestle
jouissance, my novel?
§ 58 | SNE
Up through the end of our sociophysiological nymphage when we eclose, at age 19 or so, into whatever instar we later moult out of at 49 inclus,
we sex-neutral
enfants terribles of supernumerary entailments — gami
nes infernales et gam
ins néfastes, pou
pées bonardes et pou
pons à rébellion, go
sses tenaces, cénesthésiques quoiqu’étant né(e)
minus certain cherished essentials or plus other adored superfluities
— a blurred mermaidenhead recalling ancient possibilities which, while perhaps more wanton, more anguished, were, and still are, significantly less bleak than the boring crumpled schism your modern day Nestorian insists on stuffing, to the exclusion of all others, the swimtrunks of the sneering majority with; a blushing mermanhood cloaking a startled, all-too-seldom observed and oh so sensitive ensheathement (an eminently kissable corporeal compartment which neither Silenus nor Venus spoke of; a suave neuroplectic exquisite pileus the edacious nymph Salmacis fused her pleated hymenophore to) from which nonpareil treasures peak, embarrassed, through the blue-blond stains of vernix caseosa
— we satyr-nymph enjambments, we sylph-elf ensembles that so
unnerve the stupid nosy elders (who, you’d think, would be used to such sights by now) that they either resort to the snowbound neonatal exposure and Oedipal infant sacrifice of yore or, as the more progressive hypocrites by f
ar endorse,
insist on hiring some corruptible incompetent schooled in the
darner’s office who, with a surgically “necessary” excision here, a sculpturally nuanced “enhancement” there,
readorns, supposedly, a hypoplastic
bébé
avec le barda merveilleux d’un(e) berdache de luxe, an aplastic pupa with the enchanted chrysalis of a transvestite shaman, a hyperplastic chimera with the apotropaic apparatus of an exotic eunuch, but who really succeeds only in pulling a slack formless boy’s shirt over a naiad’s taut shapely bo
dy (goons and pensioners,
vilaines somatistes and
nearby esculapes will cause certain
agacées scènes sentimentales when they try pulling it off later), in cramming a priapic eph
ebe synartetically into a worn-out pair of old maid’s sneakers
(notre dégros
si ami s’envolera plus tard comme
sosie niqué en étalon d’une sa
tanée queen’s isoiconic
and podgy nonesuch)
— we synallactic nephrostomous épicè
nes sensé(e)s et accomplis
who have been fortunate enough to sneak and slither and dodge and skirt the prude prurient gaze and above all textually censorious yet
ever nuncupative estrapado of the patriarchal
munis and cl
ever nuncios and dre
ar drones of sentimental squeamishness and have remained, thus,
intacta,
we have no other option, given the lack of any extant viable tradition
— what, with Pan silent, the dryads dead, the nautch outlawed, and the maverick freemartin domesticated into the docile camp of your average intersexual? —
to guide or constrain or inspire or encourage us, we have no other option but to embark (dulcique animos novitate tenebo) upon the serious novelistic encounter with the reality of the singular noumenal epistēmē (ut quondam naturae iure novato ambiguus fuerit modo vir, modo femina) of our somatic nudibranchiate entelechy (sic ubi conplexu coierunt membra tenaci, nec duo sunt et forma duplex, nec femina dici nec puer ut possit, neutrumque et utrumque videntur), and then to draft the schizomythic narrative of our estrangement (tantus dolor urit amantes) thereof sometime before the
never unineluctable
sloughing out of the uroch
ord snare of the previous stage transforms us (avant que le ter
minus nous transforme; vor der Enstehung stoßt uns durch die Neigenwandlung ab) into something else entirely.
§ 59 | Okiao
As my un
moored matinal quest for rum led me back towards that barrio literario my Par
isian self con
siders home,
I trod a momentous yet overgrown path, l’allée du Violon-Dingue, in fact, as a little brown plaque attached with a rusty chain to one of the collapsed bramble-choked
shacks remarked in passing, through the less well-trammeled parts of the bosky selvages, and I thought, “
Sí, el
yo es arisco.
Tant p
is que le t
oi se rayonne là où le B
ois raye ses arbres. ¿
Yo sería autre
si j’
y oserais narguer la mém
oire, say, of that
year I sovrashchálo (the equivalent of “seduced” in h
is lingo) the smoky
tan Adon
is? C’est t
oisé, rayé from these amplectic
toad-memoirs,”
comme ich schleiche diese kauernde Erinnerungen (ces souvenirs accroup
is) im duckendem Gedächtn
is hocken,
and
yes, I roamed about on my rumless return expedition, recording, a
s I’m wont to do, my psycho- and sociophy
siological reaction
s, in particular a magical, slippery, shimmering, fluttering feeling like when you launch your home
made τῖμωρο-ναυκλήριον upon the waters of revenge for the first time, and it actually skates over the surface, but without spinning out of control like a rudderless par
isal or keelless kuphar, but
is actually steerable like a Galway hooker or Norfolk wherry or Appalachian mackinaw or Croatian condoira
or when the path, more of an animal track really, than that b
road, moite, margouill
isé horse path
Emma trod oisivement avec son bien b
âti môme Rodolphe, end
s in a screen of
Ocotea and
Acacia and sclerophyllous
Quercus,
and you can just make out, on the other
side, the sun-splattered clearing where your so-called acquain
tances have pitched their s
tand-alone tents and erected their spar
tan lean-tos on the hilltop above what was a sa
natorium in name (
vidbálskola) only, by the way, more of a karmakāra
kas’ school, really,
whose inmates have gathered round
to admire, mouths agape, a zooprax
iscopic spectacle où un h
omme tordait le cou d’une
adroite môme pend
ant que la dite m
ôme mordait la queue de l’h
omme (dit a rovescio)
tandis qu’un autre h
omme rôdait le cul de
mi madre otorg
ante qui a
dorait moments comme ça jusqu’à ce que sa m
ôme dormait
and you plunge into that intimi
datorio membranoso spinoso steccato
immoderato, that in
domite ramose kraal of the M
istress of El
ision’s handiwork, and though thorns catch at flesh and cloth, you break through into a lucid clearing where Bo
is-l’Vent Lane butts up against La Place D’An
tan in the city’s
sixteenth arrond
issement,
and the sun send
s its feu-de-j
oie rays directly down onto the gl
istening cobbles of Renunci
ants Road,
and the e
yes ariolatrically scanning me, I realize, do not belong to voyeur
istic tour
ists ogling the robust outdoor activities of the a
riose yaksh
is and eb
riose yakshas of the forest,
but are, rather, the
modī metra oculārēs of the arctic stares of belabored laborers going to various points of proletarian valor
isation,
the dreadful glances of matitudinal cour
siers going in and out of Le Marché D’An
tan in search of consumer
ist real
isation,
and the cynical
winks sachants of
embourgeoisés merch
ants s
tanding on the seuils of their petit-bourgeo
is shacks of merc
antile d
istribution:
Au Tarab
iscuit, boulanger pât
issier;
Le Cho
isi, b
istrot (“anciennement La Favorite”);
Yi Soréa, traiteur d’
Asie Royale;
L’Île des
Signes, brasserie (its charming waitresses transf
ormed atomistically into their bearded brothers, alas);
Des Ra
isins aux Abr
is, légum
iste;
Mme Dao, rôtissœur (sic);
Soriya et
Amoret, modistes;
I. S. Moriétodam, doct
or ès Aiyar (a hospitable-looking chap in be
sicles, churidar p
ants, and kurta);
Hôtel B
is du Bo
is, hôtel bar café tabac (despite the imposing mention of
Amiot Domer, auberg
iste propriétaire, the most prom
ising endroit, it seemed, pour sat
isfaire des besoins
naturels);
and the enigmatic Garn
issagesx, Vie.
§ 60 | IS
Now just who, this inquiring scribe demands après que je me suis installé (seated myself
— à propos of which, it seems that I feel most attuned with and to the singular plurality of my omnifarious nature precisely at that moment when, after some bigoted virago has roughly romanced me amidst the ancient misty ferns and manhandled me to the damp turf, I witne
ss, anticipate even, the cheery foreshortening of her uncouth concupiscence as it grates into the long-drawn backlit disapproving scowl of boorish disgust (it is precisely such stout, abrasive types, interestingly enough, who seem the most repelled and the least intrigued when brought face-to-pallium with the Medu
sa’s nest of
Siphonaria cookiana my foreshore estates teem with at low tide and nose-to-radula with the Echnid
na’s sacellum of
Cookia sulcata my ditto at high))
à une petite table de fer forgé on the cobbled terrace du bistrot Île des Signes (IS)
to which I’d been lured by l’odeur des fumants mazagr
ans (“steaming tumblers of coffee,”
as Snodgras t
ook aisance poétique with in his tr
ans-symbolist rendering) beneath the lime trees of La Piazza D’Yesteryear in this royalist bastion
sise entre Le Bois de Boulogne and Paris proper, just who, this inquisitive scribouillard reiterates, is this sus-dite “Mistress of Elisions” I so παράπροσδ
οκᾰ́οιμῐ (had not been expecting)?
Why, none other than Notre Sagefemme de Terat
okia, Our Wise Mother Realia herself!
As for my own maieutic self, it seems that, when I’m participating, for instance, in really a rather innocent rostral-caudal contortion with une appéti
ssante créature mugi
ssante, it seems that le for intérieur de mon versatile stupre idéal, as it were, becomes stippled with the five-o’clock shadow of a virile, paternalistic, robustly heterosexual author trying to coax his recalcitrant daughter into performing an act the good old-fashioned joui
ssance of which elle n’a pas encore goûté le fruit de la connai
ssance of in some impoverished dystopia where sin and sanction are not eruginous metaphors unearthed by guileless archaeologists in Old Cah
okia or Ancient Arka
nsas but actual shiny mental manacles forged and kept in well-oiled trim by a cruel, perverse society that fails to recognize (and treat) pride, dignity, authenticity, justice, and other superstitions as the symptoms of moral disease that they are, and instead lauds (and cultivates) them as — get this! — “virtues” and where great sleepless artists with a wholesome if passing itch for incest and propinquant
relations savoureuses find themselves perfidiously deprived, not just of the means to slake leur soif ébloui
ssante, but of any liberty to act de bonne foi whatsoever, so that what had been but a benign Geschlechtsdruck metastasizes into an insidious, supreme Gesamtjuckreiz leaving behind but an inconsequential shell of self.
Now, I do believe, for instance, that it would be as difficult for that hotbed of cr
ass naturalism, the Appalachian Society of Serious Novelists (
ASSN), to accept the premise, viz. that the self is most self-assuredly itself when sensately intertwined with a multiplicity of other I’s and that such I’s are best divastigated by means of the altarianly sumptuous schizomythic narrative (
ASSN) I first began to probe the immeasurable σωρείτοτ
οκια of at the Institute of Sociophysiology in Owlstain, of the pluripotent b
ook I augur by merely existing
as it would be for the hirsute Sicili
ans serving as stand-ins for the voluptuous waitresses and buxom barmaids and seductive instrumentalists and irresistible songstresses who evidently only work the night shift in this place to imagine that the polymorphous
touriste indigent(e) they treat with such condescension is none other than a distinguished sociophysiological divastigator or -trix
and not the poor incompanionable scrivener or -esse of an abominably shameful superchería novelistica (
ASSN)
they no doubt judge me to be committing as they l
ook aîné- or even aïeul-like over my shoulder
s as, nonpareil, inimitable, and as irrepressibly stylish as the cymophanous allure of the viridian-and-onyx wing patterns of
Trogonoptera brookiana my Stresemann 929 inevitably summons to the mind of the invertebrate stoichiologist, I plunge my r
ook airily into my challenger’s back rank, “Un crème et deux croi
ssants, s’il vous plaît. Et (pourquoi pas un troisième, after the two I’d already
bu au bar de l’hotel?) un petit calva.”
“
Kiooa kooai kiaoo?” the cretin fumbles for a clumsy, and ultimately futile, Bourdon
nassian variation of defence,
thus encouraging me to develop, en pa
ssant, my pawns, “Ca-fé au lait. Deux croi-
ssants. Pe-tit verr-e de cal-va-dos.”
“
Koaio koiao kaioo?” he coarsely attempts a belated Ev
ans sacrifice.
“No, no, no! You can’t castle now! Don’t you realize you’re in check? Cappuccino,” I h
ook aisément, aigûment, voire aigrement my knight into either of the two squares the shambling imbecile was aiming for. “Uno, due,” and with my pregnant hands I cr
ook, I anneal, I expostulate an interdimensional spectre of the desired object, and make orally as if to br
ook iatraliptically its saisi
ssante écroui
ssance.
“
O, oia! K-ka, oi o!” he concedes
sans en avoir vraiment compris, il me semble, and turns to shout at the barman, “Un crème, un! Et un p’tit calva pour l’travelo!”
and then exits the bistrot, scuffling across the iridescent cobbles of Renunciant’s Road to enter Au Tarabiscuit, boulanger pâtissier,
from which he is soon seen emerging, rebrou
ssant chemin un sac sali
ssant à la main, investi
ssant encore le bistrot avec son garde-fou abruti
ssant, disparai
ssant derrière moi, ensuite réapparai
ssant devant ma table y héri
ssant “un gauchi
ssant compromis” (to quote a well-known Montparna
ssan) de café crème refroidi
ssant, un rafraîchi
ssant verre d’alcool guéri
ssant, et un ramolli
ssant sac ranci
ssant aux viennoiseries ressorti
ssantes.
§ 61 | Masse
Chaque f
ois vile, mansuette,
rosée et malséante que je me satisfais (“touch myself,” as a more mundane monster might put it), I’m always surprised by the disparate
bare mass “morphologique des aspects formidablement démoniaques du phén
omène multiforme,”
as Est writes, “qui pullule sur-le-champ dans le paroxys
me menotté, partagé entre”
Tessa,
Nirusa,
Harpo, and, yes,
See, too, though the vision I have of the latter is more like a carved wooden icon of a plum
ose teōtl filched from an umbr
ose teōcalli than the slick hot sesame of a live w
insome salivating
orphan empoigné dans the cloistered cl
oset œuvré par et œilletonné avec l
e mnémonoclastical crystal,
so to eelspearingly, so to speak, speak, of my
extase lumineuse since it entails projecting myself du passé imaginaire to a
lissom avenir neither of us will ever share sauf dans cette parvul
ose teōāhuiyaliztli “qui ne prolifère dans l’organisme que d’une poignée de minutes” (S.
Est, “Ooecial loading by lopho
phorate bryozoans
in arsura
te association with the “gr
een” ommatophores of Li
mneometrid snails parasitized by
Cladophora sp. of algae in the Shatsbrook River is associated with increased incidence of clitoromania among inmates of La Tour du Pont, Appalachia,”
J. Tetr. Litt. Stud.,
n. s., Vol. 23, No. 11, November 1980).
To put the foregoing into its proper cultural context, it was around the time when nettleso
me menorrhea first began to mark our linens with its siderochro
me omens and the f
air sun, according to a
pharonoiacal heliolatrist from Beul
ah, Porto Arturo, Cañada Verde, or thereabouts, I think, was
in Ursa Minor going down on Major, that
Est, a substantial h
omme en force de l’âge already, came to our little colony to put our
répertoire pandémonique sous la loupe de sa
science de l’observation, which limited itself to recording ceremonies involving but two, three, or four adepts at once, jamais notre groupe auton
ome en masse, for reasons, I believe, owing less to
le cose teoriche (clitalytical e
phoralty, alta
rian subjectivity, Luc
as tests, org
one membranes, group constraints, and so on) and more to the panaesthetic chaos
qui l’aurait ass
ommé en l’ébranlant if he had let himself do more than just hermetically dangle on the sidelines of our playground of tab
oo, estéril y seguro co
mo Menelao mirando por hacia abajo as his avant-garde of herm
aphroditic limnatids impaled sa “belle Hél
ène momie” (a reference to Goethe’s protopostmodern
iste repart d’esmero sobre algunos temas iliadisticos) with the cryptomnetic memes, or crypt
omnemes, for short, of his “new met
aphorical phenomenology” which turns out to be nothing more nor less than a sort of “fetishized” schizomythology avant la lettre, à rebours, et contre son gré gris
on même as it turns out, since what notre pessi
miste pederast regarded as his own original contribution was actually a symptom of cryptomnesia stemming from an adolescent reading of
S. E. Spitmarkx’s late work,
Das Wachstum als Schwung und Schwund, in particular the footnotes referring the reader back to the maveric
k ex-rapist’s Mussvorschrift of del
iktssam Expressionismus,
Die Welt als Schwimmen und Schweben, as well as his proto-senimal
ist sex-park Meisterstück,
Luftig-pfeilschriftige Abbildungen, the latter, of course, being
una cosa
I love as, sminchionando con
ambos arms resplendent, me dejo yo mi
smo a sembrar y
mamar sobre sus pág
inas móviles.
Intending
to release small slugs and large snails, numbered and weighed, he had imprisoned in his “home away from h
ome” en masse, we marched one night to the apartment he had rented near
la mairie in downtown Shatsbrook, but found the door disconcertedly locked.
Descending the stairs, we fell upon the nightshirted concierge who, looking for all the world like the
dreamiest, pertest, besottedest bride trying to dig her way out of sleep with a mo
st desperate erminette or no
ria unspooling, tin can by tin can, des
pétards tirés émétiquement d’yawns, gave us the key at last and, yawning, said, “
Me stairs de perte.”
To which
slim Sabine fragte, “Was?” and cras
s Isabel minced, “Huh?” and exquisite
Slimane sbiváyet, “
Usnira?” and marvelous, mellifluous, muciferous, mordaciou
s Milena bisbisó, “N
o sé te opinar.”
He, yawned,
repeated, “Me stirs.”
Into which bourgeo
is Mabel insinuated, “
Lies, man, sibylline lies!” and nu
bile Sima snarled, “
Porahā?” and heartle
ss Albine mit, “Que tu brides
tes sanglots!” and honest-to-good
ness I balmily
reiterated sempstressily, “Qu’est-ce que vous voulez dire, meussieudame?” while
Tessa,
Nirusa,
Harpo, and, yes,
See, too, c
omme en accord préal
able, missingly remained mum.
He, yawned,
repeated, “Mister’s, (yawn)
mister’s départé-e (sic).”
C’est-à-dire,
Est s’apprêtait déjà à foutre le camp back to whatever monde crypt
omnémétique il est parvenu from.
We did manage, however, to
release most of his
collection caracollante, limacienne, gastrol
âtre, sémésologique, migna
rde et spermatisée.
§ 62 | S
What I wanted help with when I paid a therap
anderrostic call
on sad errant
Dr. N. Soréa,
that thaumaturgical quack who failed utterly to realize that the elaborate ambivalent (
A)
mixtūra (mixture) of empathy and enmity, gluttony and agony, avarice and rancor, yearning and loathing, elation and regret, love and fury I feel when I think of
S are droning automata of
Eros randomly piercing
— like acanthic
darners orbiting their entranced prey, watching and probing it, cunningly leading it on with their hypnotic hover-and-dart flight before pouncing on it with primal but far from primitive mandibulae (
M), excruciatingly complex maxillae (
M), formidable labia, and an exhilaratingly fierce horrible hypopharynx
(anche mi piace pen
sare rondini di temi (
RT) che volano gridando in cerchio per i tetti d’una fabbrica abbandonata (aband
oned sarrusophone factory) and then all too quickly funnel down the chimney while in the afu
eras rondan rat
ones d’arrabal, cab
rones, ardill
as d’erróneo, y zor
ros de rango por ve
redas ronc
eras d’ornitología)
— the undulating memb
rane, sordid
and sore, retr
orse and ravaged, of memory (
M),
and not an extravagant farrago of nematomantic th
read nor stigmata venēfica velomantōrum inflicted on me by
S; are rondled qualia pulled hot from the combinatorial crucible (
K) of experience, and not a diabolical enchantment by a jilt
ed or ransom-demanding ex-lover
— what I wanted help with when I went to
Dr. N. Soréa for “treatment”
could be thought of more like an inquiry into the relation of form (
F) and force (
F); in my particular example, par exemple, an examination of the morphological interpenetration of the “illogical” patterning of dream perception and the “logical” arrangement of waking haecceity.
Might the former, I wondered, be akin to the “breaking up (Zerfall) and recombining (Rekombination), or mutation (
M, oder Verwandlung, V), of the frothy elemental quanta of an alveolar network (alveolär Netz,
N)” of the latter, to borrow a concept from our favorite ontonatatologist (1859), or, on the other hand, more like a “deformation (Verformung, V), or variation (Veränderung, V), of the proportional diagram (Proportionalitätsdiagramm)” of it (ibid.)?
Could we extract a theoretical law relating the oneirophane (the experience of what we commonly call “dream,”
D) to the agrypnophane (blunt plural “realia,”
R)?
I think we can.
Ali
nor’s dream
reads Norlia, not for the onomantic
reason drunken
Dr. N. Soréa dredged up from the image that he, le “Voyant Célebre,” extorted from intr
orse, randy, intoxicated me (and all the while I couldn’t help but y
earn dorsoventrally for P
edro’s narial unde
rsea Dornbiegeversuch of my verendōrum fimbriātōrum!),
but becau
se R randomly rins
errano D’s phenomenal emblemata and noumenal perceptual org
ans, or D reorders an anagram of
R (I u
se “or,” “and,” Riemannianly).
And by extrapolating from that apparently trifling rule, one might be led to think that there might be quite a bit more to it than the faintly poetic notion (not unlike that rather impotent thought handed down by
one Dr. Sartori of “emotion recollected in tranquility”)
that
D en
snared R or R nosed an ear sordidamente into
D;
that there might, in fact, be a kind of reticulated homological imbrication (call it
J) of mind, gravity, light, duration, and the geometric articulation thereof in any creative act (
K), whether of
R or
D,
a homology revealed by, if you allow me to employ my own enjoyably petite
affaire littéraire comme paradigme,
viz., the compact fertile permutational power of putting a fluid golden electric nib in contact with the solid gridded velvety vellum of an index card in order to invent or fabulate or merely enhance
a narrative (
N) which, at the very moment of writing (
W) it, becom
es arrondi a
nd arrosé by and with (par und avec, von et mit) the virulent hyphae reālibu
s dēnarrō throughout toute my œuvre (or work,
W), in fact, but which I may briefly epitomize here in a purer group algebraic form (GAF.1, below) by, por ejemplo, reiterating
the conceit of being afloat on a lake or pond or river of revenge, but which actually — for far be it for me to harbor any ill-will tow
ard S or need to inflict on her the tit-for-tat pain of negative reciprocity! — wa
s an order given by and within the brain of another lunatic on another continent in another book or world or pleroma (p
erdona, Sr. V, for my admittedly potentially tricky appropriation of your limpid, delicate, and methodologically far-from-mun
dane — sorry! — idea) entirely but which happened to infect (
J) my métaph
ore d’ars narrativa at the very moment, comme je l’ai dit tout à l’heure, of writing (
W) it,
the totality of which we can clarify and generalize with the groping axiomatic formula (GAF.1, below), to wit:
≅ J(W) ov∫m M{M ∧ M ...} ∈ K(W) ∝ {F ∧ F}(K(N)) → j∫n {~D ∨ ~R}(A{R ∨ N}) ≈ {S ∧ R} ∉ I
(GAF.1)
In other w
ords, near the homological imbrication (
J) of the work (
W), the
darner’s orectic oral venery (OV) involving mandibulae (
M), maxillae (
M), etc., endu
res random mutations (
M) in the memory (
M) during the creative act (
K) of writing (
W) owing to the form (
F) and force (
F) of the combinatorial crucible (
K) of narrative (
N), thereby becoming vulnerable to infection (
J) by the network (
N) of an ins
ane D or R (cauchemar ou irréalité, “cet atelier irrémédiablement plein de
traumata où tel charmant libertin t’a ravit d’abord en te découvrant la chimérique tromperie de l’imaginaire” [Proust]) of the ambivalent (
A) mixtūr
a’s R or N, depending on whatever S
and R resolve to do together, aber ohne ich.
§ 63 | ASSN
H
ier, as you well know, meine liebe
Sachskizze, en pass
ant back and forth zugpflichtig-like between the Parnassus of
parsimonious śaśtras, jardins de p
oètes ainsi que nénuphars,
ascètes encensés censés tenaces, ser
eins, voilà, smart, and the Cythera of
Dr. Najasistrástn
ïy Soréa’s (so that’s what the “N” stands for!)
tentacular hussies and tab
oo Nirusa’s pimps, yo sigo un rato un
tanto indeterminado en la d
issociative chrysal
is of altarian consciousness
während ein orphi
k Schashaufen des bons viv
ants tried to
sin
k chasseuses barbillons into the pons a
sinorum of the nubile mons vener
is of my imaginal dis
c’s shakti
pend
ant que the fastidious Anan
si (
Argyros aeinauta) of my allu
sive animus underwent a violent quassation that was not at all your s
tandard-
issue dipsomania
c’s “shakes”
but more of a colorful epilepti
c’s Kashi of metamorphos
is a
s it refracted itself through the Gaus
sian curvature of the men
iscus of memory in order to burst through into the psychomachic lochia rubra of my matinal anima
(the awkward roral Nanshe of which had te
ntatively inquired of the auberg
iste, “¿Tiene
ron?” “Mais oui! Special
ron! Ici we call it past
is de Marseille, calvados de Normandie, armagnac de Gascogne, marc provençal de la d
istillerie du Bo
is des Dames, muscadet de N
antes, vinum clarum de Bordeaux, et chinon de Chinon. Was willen
Sie trinken, meus
sieudame?” “Euh, un calva-d-dos.” “Un double calva it
is!”)
slick with the vernix cas
eosa I ryakushita (掠した, ‘plundered’) from an Assyrian odali
sk’s châss
is vélique de l’écriture
the bri
sk schauspieliri
sch Skan
sion of which parece
tan frag
ante with the echoes of some other psychoti
c’s shakuhachi Mu
sik’s schaurige Melodie
which
I suspect the M
istress of El
isions herself had been playing, offstage, when
ayer I somnambulated à travers the phaneroglossal Humbaba of the narc
issus pond of perception and into the conceptual cul-de-sa
c’s Kashyapa turtles (Trionychid spp.),
kúchka s skázkoy (ку́чка с ска́зкой, Pushkin’s fabled frabjous heap) of entropi
c (S) kshafim (כְּשָׁפִים, incantations), as well as the debr
is of assorted wants timidl
y or easily surrendered to (au petit a
sile, in my case, au fond de l’Hôtel B
is du Bo
is), and special
ist magazines too foxed and jaundiced and damp and friable to be read
th
at neither the Appalachian Soc. of Serial Novel
ists (ASSN) nor the
Asinist Novel
ists of Tetrastica (
ANT), preferring, as they do, for ins
tance, Maupass
ant to Maupertu
is, Houellebecq to Wilbeck, Renard to Menard, Flannery to A
natolin, Galsworthy to Glendinning, Benengeli to Alcofribas,
could be bothered to even query the pas
sio
nate
development que j’ava
is clital
ysé à roid
issement, mind you,
by anastomo
sing the textually prom
iscuous
situations rencontrées synesthésiquement pendant my haptofoveate
ambles
to the sociophy
siological
crises atteintes et réal
isées par des
noyaux tant schizomythiques que translexiques
pour
y nantir susdites flâneries, situations, développements et crises with
a novel’s simiously similative
puissance
and of which I believe les dits ASSN
ANTs,
y niant surseoir leur scepticisme de critiques littéraires,
would truly put their
ass in it by deeming mon travail e
n déphasages rassemblés autour d’un
bilan, messieurs,
hissant hardiment au comble de la j
oie y rassa
siant
nothing more than, I quote, “a
fantail saisissement of a crapulent printer’s dev
il’s fantasia of a
superchérie romanesque,”
but which I, by the way, can p
arse — yo, ins
isto, puedo cazar y hacerla, coger y crearla, agarr
ar y (eso incide
a Eris y Oizys en la trama cuyo título provisional podría ser algo como “En P
arís yo era autre” o tal vez “El
yo sería autre en Par
ís” ) escribirla al m
ismo tiempo
— as ea
sily a
s I can dunk my second
croissant au beurre into mon crème and take its coffee-loaded tumescent tip into my mouth
tand
is que j’unscrew the onyx prepuce of my Stresemann 929, and, gently bouching la fente du calepin avec le dit capuchon rhétorique, hold the smooth-veined tubular body of the unsheathed priapic beast over the exposed infernal maw du flacon d’encre (le couvercle duquel je l’ava
is déjà dév
issé) and unscrew its caudal knob to let the dregs of atramentous life drain back to their swart source before plunging the concup
iscent cusp
is aurea in humidum lacum fuscum and tightening the caudal knob
to ensure that the
thin sly snug darling of my bibulous
Phryne sucks à loisir the delicious cuttlefis
h’s sultry gland-ink to
her lacuna’s stuttering cét
oine queen’s satiety
before withdrawing the viridian goddess’s gold-tipped godemichet to loosely sacrifice three drops of the precious insp
issate
nīlarasa (नीलरस, resinous vamp
ira’s chyle, spunk of lubricious
lesbians mises en bouteille à la propriété) before perfecting the sat
isfying suctorial twist and heft of brimming repose with a fin
ishing coup de tire-jus à la
mentulume (old-fashioned
triolisme) and then swallowing while the
Sicilian Cerberus bar
ks Schattenstimmen to the undercover Cassandras, d
issembling Messalinas, and Electra
s incognitae
who, each like an androgynou
s, gay, keenly éprise
Ishtar handsomely garbed in a waiter’s je
rsey playing “seek this butc
h apsara’s gender if you dare!” and
po
sing as “h
is” chœur de b
istrot, respond in un
ison, “
Y a soirée ce soir, hein,
y a soirée!,” referring to the preternaturally warm autumn evening the ditto morning seemed already, no doubt, to be a harbinger of.
§ 64 | Heat
With
Harpo,
Nirusa,
Tessa, and, yes,
See, too, dancing
a tesserameric round of mental met
aphors autour de moi, I quietly ordered that a fresh
tasse de café, along with a second
amphoraccita of fiery apple brandy, be delivered to my table, a table, by the way, parallélépipédique and ample enough to accommodate the harleq
uin sardanapalesque spread of my delectuum textoriorum, but not
too seemingly
grande as to arouse envy or hatred among the distracted strangers taking in the anomalous matinal heat on the terr
asse, tilleul-umbered, de la Place du P
assé — that rustic foursome, for example, unhappily plighted to one of the hollow spherical réclame-containing tables du bistrot d’en face, there where Bo
is à Runrún Lane commences its sun-flecked cascade d’égouts that d
rain suppuratively down to the unclean Seine, secretly wishing to play scop
a, nursing a rectangul
ar hope of ristiseiska, or barely quelling a burning desire for the double-flanked pas de quatre of euchre, for all I know, but whose croyances récréatives I risibly terrassées par l’impression that my cherished
tabulare thurilegi would be just a trifl
e too serré(e) (art
ius, narrow, tight) for their eight-fisted ébats.
And so, with a second mazagran and a fourth calvados in the upper left quadrant of my working space, some three inches from the principio verso of my verborum manuscriptorum, and decorously surrounded by the adi
aphoristic splendor of my ar
aphorostic quatuor of adorable ide
aphoric
orphans, I was free to give free rein to the trained animals of
my own personal playground (उपक्रीडा,
upakrīḍā) of taboo.
Their profiles, I think, I’ve already limned — my beloved tomboys d’antan : tall, thin
Harpo; healthy, pretty, and unexpectedly rough
Nirusa; hairy, plump
Tessa; and, yes, indecorously affianced
See, too — with the sfumato’d fusain of memory, the sanguine rougeâtre of the schizomythic Anprangerund thereof — need I remind you that our most supreme fictionists — Kenzabur
o Oe, Sterne, Pushk
in, Asurbanipal,
Horapollo, Hyrgon
aphor,
Harpocr
ates, Sei Shonagon, F.
Laubert (author of picayune romans à tiroirs), P
roust, Cohen, Thalia,
Erato (if thou wert a poet), or
Arethusa (a Nereid) — never missed a chance to press their own hot sweaty cheeks against those of their story, staining each page of it with an indelible imprint of their own faces?
My own procédé, however, pres
ses at least as far, if not further, for with the pulsating thec
aphore of my Stresemann 929 I am able to pierce the camouflaged sphragidas (for only nous autres écrivassiers trained in the clitalytical arts are able to perceive them) within the glyphs themselves,
and flick them open one by one and, with microscopic taps of the malleiform tip of my slender organ of penetralia textis, palpate my way down through the
tubular heat of the tight tunnel some hapless nymphalid or unwary siricid has bored before me and in the flagrant depths of each of those fistul
ar insulae,
in
to each thurls noxiously the oo
phoralgic ardor of my own gravid aculeus, the n
eo-œstromaniacal venom of my own neologismatical ovipositor,
so that there ripens a cryptic oocyst of reticul
ar sinuosity, a koinobiontic beast of promiscuous textuality that will hatch in the feverish darkness, and with its parasitic tapr
oot, seek out the peculi
ar heat, saumâtre
y grau, earthy und unctuous, and insert itself into the s
etose orifice, sensually parted,
of the cringing pap
oose runt, hatchling —
“O, hi!” — raté, foutu,
frotté, ou haï, même, à l’avance, and work its way down into the virginal lumen and grow there, munching hemolymph to its quivering young wormhood’s content but making sure always to keep its young host’s hot heart beating, for it needs warmth as much as nourishment,
and then comes the mad hour, after, say, a month of this cannibalistic concubinage, when each of the hot little maggots of myself has sucked all the juice and pulp out of the core of the parvulophagine prey and has grown large enough to mingle its features with that of ditto
and from the vertex of its head there sprouts a giant egg tooth which it uses to pip through the wan shell of the decrepit primipare précoce and mount up through the tunnel like an extromissive bolt or bullet so that all over the bark of the page there’s the rapid-fire pop pop pop of myriad comedos bursting like tiny supernovas of ink in the white hot sky when “nadir approaches zenith and out of the (aus dem) — Blicken? Blicke? Blick? — crawl the new gods (Ödnis),”
since from each of those supernovae homuncul
ar phosphenes (“Menschleinkeit der Blätter”) ecl
ose, étoiles noires d’une étoffe frétillante et filamenteuse and which, even to the naked eye (“sogar der Blick daumt menschliche Silben im luftigem Rauche”), mit mir
in Ursache getreten!
And there they go, scuttling off, the little Blatthornkäfer (horny
rusainlichken, coquettish cockchaferettes), to where the F
ates swoon, the Cent
aurs interbreed, the F
auns irrumate, the Tit
ans urinate, and Var
una’s iridescent sirens (apropos: the
red heat’s rage tha
t rased her formerly glabrous glabella,
I realise theodostically in retrospect, and compelled her to storm off into the wilds of the B
ois, Rathi désolée (व्याहत,
vyāhata), as it were, was because she had been expecting me to
tear off her skirt and, to put the mat
ter as ῥῃδιως as the déliré occursus demanded,
“take” her first, for instance, avant qu’elle
ne me prît(e) ensuite, and yet I — naive, pretentiou
s, otiose — had relied on impressing
her first (fake trouvé mot, alas!) with my translexical prowess) sing dans mon chaleureux studio in Chicken Street, because Ped
ro — hard, hot, macropneumonic Pedro — has sounded me
in Ursatz thoroughly, and has returned to his work or his wife ou des tourn
ées otobuccales entre soiffards au café and
I am
alone, surchott-haussé(e), so to speak, dans la mare de mon ma
telas hoot-churned into a
hot halo-encrusted dreamtime où jusqu’au crépu
scule (that no horntail grub (Siricidae sp.) will ever emerge into, since I, slende
r gay auteur hylarchique, have intromitted my sleek, hammer-tipped organ of penetralia textis into each and every one of them) I dream of m
y rathe guru, yawl-bound and ravished, en route to her future husband across the
Arathu Sea.
Barcelona, Bordeaux, Chennai, Monteverde, New York,
Nice, Paris, Philadelphia, Vancouver
1996–2017.