MICHAEL SEAN STRICKLAND

Divastigations

Final Divastigation

A hawk from a handsaw

§ 277.

My story’s moral’s consummation. — And should I gratify symptom’s risk? Guttural storm of glottal clicks and moans maps this child of Ishtar’s assiduous travail across yon portolan chart [1] of Mar Arathu. Shards of glass sadly augur, and mock, a typically orgasmic [2] conclusion to a banal ritual. Jubilant maculations of ruby port, tawny burgundy, pallid old cognac, dark naval rum, Islay scotch, calvados of unknown caducity, and armagnac. High, low, vital, gruff. I was strolling across Pont Royal pushing a smug pram. I was straddling Mount Spitmarkx in a paroxysm of vascular mirth. Talon sparks on flint. Cattails and mudsuck in an upland marsh. By thirds, fourths, fifths, sixths, ninths, and microtonal bursts of antiphony, small group harmony and dissonant dyads submit to a proud old family’s instinctual groping for survival’s pomp in Glamporium’s cartographic hoardroom. I was winnowing grain with a strapslung chrysalis gurgling against my latifolious rump in a painting by Maryam. I was slinking down to a hasty handjob in a dank barroom’s unstrung booth in a snapshot by Gloria. Childish pawn’s promotion to spasmodic rook. And though your callous marplots and bungling dullards may scowl at my luscious constraint’s chorography [3] of fastidious bliss, this small warm gift of milky sap is not what you or I would call insignificant. It’s right about now that my timorous author butts in with a Darwinian variant of Spinoza’s rant. This pliant blossom, Ouida. This colibri whirr, my catoptric child of fragrant caloricity. This larval pulp flailing against virility’s husk, my spicy mindmad darling. This all too human ritual’s formal absurdity accords joy’s portion of animal pain in A Tara T. Dirty™. I slop it off against a flyblown cadastral display of Owlstain’s Intrussyan and Tagma districts. Await your approval, await his. Natural mortal clinging to Norlian strata on a couch of Mountain Fukari. Thighs lips ass. Hybrid topography of loss [4].

1. Portolan chart. — As Kafka said during G. Samsa’s Transformation into a Spanish fly, “Ruhig war das Bild, kaum noch kläglich zum Bauch, und lag sich im Traum” — an opinion I could gloss as follows: That chart was not too noisy, and, though practically always inducing vomiting, stood tumid within a turgid vision of sin.
2. Orgasmic. — Any animal’s blood, according to Lamarck (Zoological Philosophy, 1809/1994, Paris, Flammarion, part two, chap. IV, “On animal orgasms,” p. 494 and passim), swarms with orgasmic fluid.
3. Chorography. — I think I should add a marginal or caudal “Caution to Copyists, Critics, and Sundry Arbitrators of Typographic Worth” — to wit, it’s not dancing I’m talking about, but maps.
4. Topography of loss. — A slant plagiary of Proust has much to say on this topic: — “In our carnographic mapping from this woman to that, a wry cunt’s labial topography brings about a somatospatial transformation such that any amorous notion hardly plays a primary part. Chondrological figuration, too, as I said, draws away from that clitoral focus along diminishing paths past imaginal striations of pubovaginalis fasciculi. A particular haptic location looms in isolation having just about nothing in common with this woman’s moist insipid parts, similar to how difficult it is to link that infant I was to this adult I’m mimicking in body only” (A striving for things lost, Book X, “Sodom and Gomorrah”).

§ 278.

Fanatical originality. — And should I kick against a thousand natural shocks without first unspooling a voluntary prick? Splicing cunt’s friction with a supplicating pout [1], I was posing my untorn tail in a position of virtuous toil. Horizon stain of saliva-slick oilskin against a pinch of coastal crag. Put no faith [2] in this bitchy attribution of womanly finality. Soaring strings limply unwary, incautious humming knots lift. Billsnap chitincrunch. Fictional quanta. Ask any stray cabin waif, bimmy-fond foundling, captain’s cuddy bunny. Grim avian instinct snuffs out a colonial arthropod’s functional striving for immortality. By toral [3] clash unspinning from cloud shadow, a chirrclick patrol of Strickland’s martins [4] flits low across an unwrought [5] littoral at Playa Toya. Royal wood ants in nuptial flight spiral up from a brambly patch of cast off barstools, half-burnt palm fronds, mossy lacinations of moldy coconut husk, tropical victuals [6] at various ports of call in an offing of phantasmal rot, oakum, bunkum, foul rigging, rusty spars. Sound familiar? Chafing filtrum on damp bombast. Cutting lips on brass buttons. Groggily lurching from bulwark to bollard on that wildly pitching main, man, man o’ war, mast, or mastiff, I roll my salt-stung hair across that gin goon’s hammock. Grin, sailor, at my yawning lap. Awl, thorn, hollow glyph.

1. Supplicating pout. — Again with a transmogrification of Proust: “Smiling, disdainful, airily dark, pouting with bound lips [...] knowing in fact that you should not discuss such things, a moodily jolly pout of philosophical disillusion [...] though unaffraid of such confusions, a pout of disgust gloms gossip’s augury [...] calling back nothing but that girl’s insulting pout [...]” (Ibid., Book 7, passim).
2. Faith. — With this marginal illumination, I too, possibly, am tossing hoops around my infirm author’s loss of faith in his own compact gnomon’s clinical wisdom.
3. Toral. — As in having to do with a torus: annular topography wrung from a circular form rotating round a cycloid which is anti-isomorphic to its own axis.
4. Strickland’s martins. — Gnat-, ant-, fly-, and moth-loving, migratory birds, Hirundo fulvicola Strick., 1845.
5. Unwrought. — A kind word for blind gulls — if I’m implying anything in particular, I’m implying it sardonically (with scornful irony, with mocking disdainful humor). Am I not constantly gamboling friskily, smiling adorably girlish, laughing with virginal abandon?
6. Tropical victuals. — Putrid black banana skins oozing puss; fulvid papaya pulp glairy with fruitfly maggots; stringy mucilaginous mango pits; squishy livid loculi of gua(ya)va; spongy passion fruit slush in damson, gray, and brown; uliginous jambu; and so on.

§ 279.

Not for want or lack of sport. — And should I disgust by contracting a bunkskirt contagion? Communal sampling of a stray harlot’s pious marrow. Bogus wisdom corrupts glorious buckskin’s slant plagiary. Mocking what you, my allonymous author, vainly sought along that frogpond’s banks. Of this prison a world again you’d grant us, your author’s animals, and by cinching hollow wordparts to a girth of autumn cattail, transform it into sanctum. Blood taboo still lurks in its hub, though. My untold abortions’ myriad goslings flock. But whoring’s a calling in any world. As alluring as gawping at a panting boatswain pontificating his broach into a gasping mallard’s fantail firkin. Slinging lusty quintals of quaking lard into an uncomplaining stripling’s pliant fistula. Not for want or lack of sport was I nodding off on Jarry, Roth, Strickland, or Barth, no doubt. What this mammal’s body inflicts on a compass [1] of common affliction. From chlamydia’s acanthoid coast to that sinuous littoral of syphilis and staph known to Appalachians as Playtoy Bay. Sham consolation haunts it. And war, you say, distorts just as much as prostitution. Our natural inclination for mutual aid. But whoring’s a calling ditto. Slut’s duty stains virtual kin with parasitic sigil. Marking what I ably caught during my frogpond vigil: a timorous prismatic clubtail [2]. Abdominal striations of viridian, crimson, sulfur. Middorsal thoracic brindling. Fulvous costa. Cymophanous wing stigmata “imparting to that spry arthropod’s airy dart and stall an illusory cloud of languour” [3]. Spiny pronotum symptomatic of microbial symbionts. Curling in midflight its gibbous caruncular caudum down and forward toward its livid jaws in which a stoic apocritan’s trichoic oculi grimly confront a rapturous mortality. Compulsion’s inborn griph. Sound familiar?

1. Compass. — “My notional compass was all in a tizzy,” said Proust (A striving for things lost, Books 3 and 9), “as I was waiting for that tribadic hussy to whom I was bound by suspicion and lust, and I had lost so much of this, my mind-bound compass, in fact, that, in jotting down my thoughts, any joy I’d had in anticipation of my unfaithful bint’s arrival was thrown into a chaotic swirl of acrid gloom, and my ink spilt from my nib and ran across my writing pad as untidily splotchy as my anarchic imagining of sapphic cocufications swam in an incorrigibly forlorn pool of smut.”
2. Prismatic clubtail. — A kind of dragonfly, Gomphus iridus Strick., 1847.
3. Illusory cloud of languour. — H. A. Strickland, Synopsis of Flouzianian Odonata, Proc. Roy. Soc. (London), 1847.

§ 280.

Working ambition [1]. — And should I off by forcing proof of sacrificial form? So sumptuous an apparatus for so small a human thing, Author. Or by scoffing attain that with which my machination toys. Ritual simulation toward which this foolish trick commands. Mortal fabric of light’s play. Raving aporia of faith.

1. Working ambition. — This ludict’s almost too laconic outpouring succinctly bulks a summary falling out with, on, into, against, or on top of J. Huizinga’s lucid study limning humanity’s sociophysiological play-function, Homo ludicrous.

§ 281.

Minatory music. — And should I romp a soothing wound of angry coddling? In as much as first maturity draws a glancing vision out of words, it was a man. Gray clouds blossom into rain. Or woman fondling to claim with words this vision as my own. Implying, thus, that a hollow gift must dun. At six or thirty on a knoll of autumn falsity it was a boy. As frisky as a siskin, as jolly as a crossbill. Or girl squatting frowning pouting sobbing among nodding stalks of grass. Giving, if you will, is simply cadging with a full hand. Its pallid scar still winks.

§ 282.

A slight crack at anthropomorphic fun. — And should I try loving to nourish sham clarity? Without any sort of implications for what this waxing and waning soul could or couldn’t hook with its fatal spur, I frown at a dry tang of gradualism. On a low slung branch of prickly holly a woodthrush twists frantic. It, too, was spitting out spiritual slag, harshly singing, hating any logically implicit opportunity youthful hypochondria could grant, clutch, or snatch at what I lost in that larch hollow. Rum, bourbon, vodka, scotch, cognac, gin. A catoptric incapacity for pursing its bill, or lack of lips, for pouting, as I do, at a poison glass frog’s frothy glottal fry. Can I go piss now, Mama, can I go piss?

§ 283.

Mutual aid. — And should I mimic a monotropic paradigm of familial succor? In combination with various kinds of crisp anticipatory molds and moils. Did you say misanthropic? Jars, jugs, bowls, pots. Two gindrunk raccoons trip across tawny slats of an all too familiar waning autumn light. Too many sins, you might say, failing to construct assumption’s lack. Analogously, a similar limp act of ductility could cast about for an apt citation, dubbing such uncandid assignation by an insular court, “an hallucinatory attribution of authorship.” Unspun orbs of arachnal silk mirror on high that quadrumanic ploy. I said waning autumn light. And though no law forbids my stamping out at dirk- or swordpoint a hollow pawprint in porous crimson mud, or lurking in firshadow, or drafting out a shipthrob in Owlstain’s last working port, too many sins, or too many signs, might also fail to ask about, or point to, my avuncular duo’s gawky dissimulation. Arousing, ain’t it? Fossil nautili in a black plastic trash bag. Torsional constraint working passion into forms fit for your typical urban bungalow’s southfacing windowsill. A world, in short — logical, parasitic, blank, plural — which I or my author found along a woodland trail on which a crosscountry girlchild — who, I must insist, was not I — was slain by “lascivious pornographic blackguards,” as an anomalous Irishman [1] was fond of calling in his anility this custodial dyad of which that orphan I was was ward long past his crossing of Jordan’s bank. Jars, jugs, bowls, pots, cups. Rabid, in a word, though too lucid still to summon a rigorous calling back of any particular sin. Clawing at that trail’s margins. Filling my fists with wads of clay.

1. Anomalous Irishman. — Brian O’Nolan, author of such illuminating works chock full of bibulous wordplay as At Swim-Two-Birds, By Hard-Living on Vico Road, In and Around Donnybrook and County Dublin, A Month Among Poor Mouths, and so on.

§ 284.

Still not at a loss. — And should I join in chortling joyful and slow? Turgid buccal stalks justify slug’s intrusion into song. It crimps and strains, trundling slimy torsional hubs diagonally across this glancing path through poplar, willow, larch, and fir. Thumb-thick braid of ropy baby shit gasping through its gaping pulmonary wound. Apropos of mollusks, Author. Though still not at a loss for instinctual visions of this world or that, I admonish our jaunty gastropod’s unjust foot with an injunction to scar mutually (as in, “If you stab my back, I’ll stab yours”), a symbiotic scantling of which draws a curtain across this curt but champion ludict, to wit: You may call my trail of mucous, sand, humus, straw, hair, bits of plastic, scraps of cloth, moss, and blood, spirit; and my body’s spirit-stung lymph, soul.

§ 285.

A singularly nonchalant application of fulvid immaturity. — And should I arch an infant’s accusation? In both Attic and Sanskrit, soma still clamors for it, and marrow, at bottom, spills as plush and saintly as first snow falling so soon again on Mount Spitmarkx. My adoring public’s distant admiration for a twin-dimpling pout. Far from any subtropical port, though, I was trying, that fatal morning, not to throw my back out against an uphill pitch of icy mud. A tortuous finish to this day’s invalid fiction. Sluggish cloud slinks down to charm angular gold from a rigorous vault of cragshadow. Ramrod straight I sit stand or squat, curving my back inward slightly, and cup with supplicating palms my virtuous tits. Cadging, as I said, with a full hand. In contrast to fist-galling frost, fog, rain, ill-humor, foolish crowds, annoyingly stupid hang-ups, and so on, would your shaft-raptor’s strictly adult ardor, Author, balk at such a smooth compact body’s proscription against doing harm by day or night, at such of our tradition’s customary signals mimicking blood’s ability to poison? Saffron skirt, khol-dark lids, crimson slash of nails and lips. A stunning nymphalid’s fourfold faux optical fury. An io moth’s unblinking imitation of dominant catsight. Rapt iris, gaping pupil, full-frontal orbits too big for its pudgy mask. That child I was still holds you in ocular thrall.

§ 286.

Against a promising tonality. — And should I up caducity’s intrusion into youth? Woman out of girl vaults an imaginal fraction of girl into woman. On my back battologizing a dominant articulation thus. Voluminously subdominant position by which discord signals its natural harmony [1]. An indistinct focal imagining will abundantly compass it. Bifid acquisition to parry agon’s fright. I was wagging, in short, my glabrous tail. Spooking any small furry thing from hollow or bush [2]. My inclination’s proclivity for writhing limbs. Compulsory pubic sagacity. By blaming it on my surroundings, you could avoid assuming I wouldn’t want to.

1. Natural harmony. — Charming, alluring, captivating. Ming, ring, ting. A triad of synonyms, a trio of rhyming words.
2. Hollow or bush. — Again too proximally my sordid attraction skirts a vulgar pun or two.

§ 287.

Upon first catching sight of that woman I am. — And should I vivify my story’s moral’s consummation? A historical task as insurmountably luxurious as my luminous young body galloping in playful bright cougarbursts of limbs and paws along that dusky limbus of tidal flux. Solitary gull standing in dark surf rising. Vivid form flirts invidiously. My daily toil and crash, by contrast, was all too fraught with sidling up to that parlous lack of plot, coming on to it or him or you with a strabismic flash of circumstantial affability. Frivolous vial [1] of rum “où criait,” according to that tawny poison’s uxorious husband, “un glaçon mort.” Avian tattoo tops off an avid sacrum. As strikingly prolific as my taut young bosom. I must admit that I did you no favor, uncloaking that disgusting transformation from infant to hag, and without allowing for, taking into account, or accomplishing any kind of transitional lustrum, lunation, kalpa, yuga, tun, k’atun, annus mirabilis, annus magnum, or plain mild month of child- or adulthood (cf. S. Flawndol, W. M. M. Johnson, and A. K. McLaughlin, Town city plain, passim), I found it most accommodating to apply a biting shift of illation to any prior conclusions it, your disgusting transformation, had thought fit to harbor in my story’s moral’s consummation. But no artistic joy can match ovulation’s bliss. Hormonal inspiration flush with oxytocin. Hollow words. With my ass atop that barstool pivoting and polishing, and tickling said taut young bosom prolactinaciously against guardrail and transom and trunnion and thigh, through an unspun mass of quantal fiction my insidious labor had slunk down to pawn off a moribund motif with or on a critical insufflation of caustic scholia [2]. Your canonical snuff film’s typically apodictic jactitation. Don’t spoil it, bitch! I stand and turn. It still stings, that vision. Luscious roach nymph scorpion witch. Writhing nubbin in a mirror of sand.

1. Frivolous vial. — Glass, actually, in which an icy rock was, as Vighdan, Hamiltonian, Raymond, Kidjaki, or Kidjaki, or Kidjaki say, “crying.”
2. Caustic scholia. — I was giving a, in a word or two, spiritual blowjob to that bankrupt narrational standpoint through which a vacant conflict is or was shown or shot in a hazy location so as to bring it back from any cold cloudshadow or subclinical clamhusk in which it had wound up sulking and skulking and shrinking from popular appraisal of a fractional conundrum, to wit [Growing mighty fond of that construction, ain’t you now, Ouida?]: If a portion making up six-ninths of Author A’s injudiciously posthumous scribblings is worth as much as four-fifths of still-living Author B’s totally scant output, how much is two-thirds of Author C’s inglorious musings on chronology and sapphism worth in comparison to both?

§ 288.

Bulk discount. — And should I borrow a third hand to grab your balls with? This human span of stroking constrains a solution to knowability’s boundary function. An imaginary goal I forgot I was having a foolish row with that strikingly cross man about in a rainslick doorway full of moaning quailsong during his morning constitutional. Banal availability of a crass mirror world any good ritual convulsant [1] would accord with Draupadi’s march across hot coals. How much, bold sir, would you pay to watch gluttony submit to a tyranny of platonic form? Magnanimous striving to satisfy purity’s lack. String your bow to a plural proposition. Any small gap of diurnal ambition warrants gross accommodation to Inuhka’s too tall too narrow too sharp boots of tan calfskin, to Atoca tilting boyish hips up a profoundly muddy path in nothing at all but plum satin pumps amply tight at phalanx and tarsus, to Gloria, Gasa, and Maryam (all in glossy black sports bras of bison or wild boar) using a cosmic crowbar to abort that gordian bolus of stillborn light sporulating within my convolvulus. Such longing stings, spits rowdy barracks cant, pounds fists against possibility’s vanishing point. In blatant imitation of swallows chasing a rising column of gnats, circling gulls cry a cool thousand for both of us all night, a round two for four, and just think what six of us could accomplish in that prim sapphic city of Convivia shot in a Coast Fukari sci-fi skinflick! In comparison to our own iconic task’s daily rhythm involving succinct acts of allogamy, an analogous want might or might not attract or account for vicious catcalls from this or that dim rookburg’s inhabitants. Injurious words scar mind’s taboo. You’ll find no such stark displays of patulous frugality marring our trim domain, though. No clutch of oily ducks striding into willow shadow from across a bland bald lawn. Plucking brings no passion into play, sir. Waxing is just for looks, and shaving simply shows that no smut blights our glabrous hoods. Body’s truth knows that nothing gluts as gladly as abundant fur. Snug touch of chinchilla, skunk, kinkajou, stoat. Voluptuous savor of tayra, mink, olingo, marmot. Ravishing aroma of raccoon, possum, coati, fox. My own, in fact, is swarthy cinnamon vair grisón (Galictis vittata). Short or long, this child of Ishtar’s forthright cost limits lust to what I abhor.

1. Ritual convulsant. — Not consultant.

§ 289.

Hit or miss living. — And should I honor scorn by marching off to fight? That furious bowstring loop too taut. Not this pussy’s fault. My wish it was to not disappoint. But Spitmarkx it was, I think, who said how bad all war music [1] sounds. Or possibly Kant [2] or Spinoza [3]. Or Proust [4] or Kafka [5]. Spot a fortuitous kōan thus. On a soft patch of moss in a dusky wood, a gratuitously hands-off though approvingly roughshod warrior in puffy brown canvas jodhpurs and bumptious burlap chaps attains nirvāna by not, in taffy-pull fashion, putting faith in a painful virgin’s most torturous wish. Look down from a roan stallion [6] flying this many hands high. By not killing too lightly, by not clutching a man-hard form as any kind of holy acquisition, which of that pair or trio, do you think, is still pursuing a hands-on approach to riding?

1. War music. — “Schlachtmusik klingt anstößig schädlich (Military music sounds obnoxiously bad).” S. A. Spitmarkx, Lufttoxophiloschriftabbildung, Vorwort (Airy arrowscript portraits, Avant-propos). Ruhr-Lülnrar, 1848.
2. Kant. — “Nun soll das Handtuch aus Pflicht vom Abfluß zur Nötigung und mit ihr jäh gänzlich zum Wildfang ganz absichtlich, also blickt nichts zum Wildfang übrig, was ihn abstimmt kann, als obligat das Gift und subtil rank All ins Rauschgift, mithin das Maximum [Maximum ist das subtil Princip vor Wollust; das obligat Princip (d. i. das jähzornig, was allmählich vornimmt das Wohl auch subtil zur Praktik und zum Princip dicht wird, wann Vormacht vollauf Garaus auf das Bohrloch vormag hat) ist das Rauschgift], solch das Gift mit Abbruch allmählich zur Nötigung folgt sicht zu laßt (Now duty constrains to dry off that outflow with a sudory of sorts, and with it to quickly, and totally voluntarily, outlavish your tomboy's madcap obligation to swallow a draught of that poison, in fact any kind of rank drug at all, and bring subtility to maxima’s [Maxima is an arch axiom conducing to carnal bliss; a mandatory mainspring (that is, your madcap tomboy plunging it in and pulling it out slowly and subtly using a firm policy of practical pivoting during a fully dominant sounding of a ribald or rival duck’s crop and gizzard) is an intoxicant] brink, thus blasting off from it, allowing nothing to thwart, and all to amplify, our libidinous inclinations).” I. Kant, Ontologisch Grund zur Moralität (Ontological ground of morality), Kaliningrad, 1785.
3. Spinoza. — “A warrior, upon catching sight of stallion tracks in sand, will automatically pass from thoughts of a stallion to thoughts of a dragoon or hussar, and on thus to thoughts of war, and so on; by contrast, a countryman will go from thoughts of a stallion to thoughts of a plough, a furrow, a farm, and so on. Thus any man will follow this or that train of thought, according to his habit of conjoining and associating spiritual visions of things in this or that fashion” (B. Spinoza, Tractatus logisticophiloscophicus, Paris, 1677. Part II, “On mind’s natural origin,” Prop. XVII). — “Thus many from a too tumultuous spirit, or from unsound doctrinal ardor, will opt, in opposition to sharing normal human joys with virtuous common folk, to inhabit cabins, yurts, shacks, huts, wigwams, bivouacs, barns, barracks, crofts, camps, and such with brutish animalistic ruffians, hooligans, roughs, toughs, hoodlums, barbarians, caitiffs, cutthroats, anarchists, marplots, tyrants, iconoclasts, arsonists, nihilists, and thugs; as boys or youths, who cannot tranquilly support chidings from kith and kin, will join up as myrmidons or doughboys and pick war’s hardships and disciplinary constraint, castigation, fustigation, bastinado, strappado, blows, slaps, whips, thongs, knouts, quirts, chains, scaffolds, gallows, rods, and so on, not just ad arbitrium, but ad libitum, turning willful backs on suburban comforts, casting a blind ocular organ on imporous roofs, pitching a wall of tinnitus, hypoacusis, phonophobia, and various forms of otitis against patriarchal admonitions: sustaining, in fact, any load, obstruction, oppilation, inhibition, infarct, or stumbling block military compulsion commands, so long as invidious mistrust of family unflaggingly obtains” (ibid. Part IV, “Of human constraint, or subjugation to strong moods,” Postscriptum, Caput XIII).
4. Proust. — “Il s’agissait à coup sûr d’un mal d’instruction, ou l’omission d’instruction tutti quanti, joint à un goût d’agrandir un frusquin au ton, non tout à fait moins dur (car moult travail fallait, au bout, s’y saisir plus doux, mais un fou, pourtant, n’ourdit-il pas, vis-à-vis la dissipation puis la transfusion, l’occultation puis l’apparition, la privation puis l’implantation, un sort pas mal, autant, ou aussi plus lourd qu’un mal qu’il lui apparaît toujours plus fringant qu’il croit ainsi couvrir par l’art d’affaiblir), mais du moins au ton fort moins lourd qui avait conduit un « amas d’individus frais » à s’ouvrir, tantôt naïf, tantôt quasi bouru, toujours pour un gain banal, au truc qui n’offrait aucun plaisir à lui, qui avait dû l’aigrir, l’assombrir, l’obscurcir. Suivant ça, on aurait pu voir qu’il paraissait mauvais du bas au fond, mais ça n’induisit pas du fait inouï qu’au combat du vrai fourbi s’organisa, un attirail d’accomplis « poilus », ç’avait dû y avoir aussi moults fois, aux jours d’autorisation, ou d’avant conflit, un fatras d’humains bons sinon tout à fait d’amusants gars. Plus tard, du sort qu’il subissait il n’avouait plus un brin du bon, du pur, du poli, plus un liard obtus, abruti, ou sot, car il s’agissait du lot fourni à tout un chacun du corps” (M. Proust, À l’inquisition sur l’amours disparus, Paris, 1927). — “Basically, it wasn’t from poor instruction, or total lack of instruction, bound up with an inclination to slack off in confrontations with stuff, not actually pliant (for it was a final condition of many a labor to clutch it softly so as to pull it out without hurting too much, but many an ill lad couldn’t, in conjunction with going and coming, waning and waxing, shaving and growing it all back again, accord to that slimy, palpitating obstipation anything but a bad load of flaccid art), but virtually light by contrast, that brought about that a ‘bunch of raw doughboys’ partook — stupid, silly, and always for wan profit — of going about doing things void of joy: dark things, dirty things, dumb things. Upon which you could glom what was rancid about that crowd from top to bottom, but it wasn’t owing to any infusion of combat spirit into that organization of grunts, that company of cunning ‘thugs,’ it was also a habitual situation occurring, during both off-duty days and past snaps of amity, among not just a bunch of good old boys, but also a lot of amusing chaps. In short, from constantly living in shit, not any of that brutish crowd could avouch what was moral and what not” (M. Proust, Toward an inquisition into paramours lost. Final book).
5. Kafka. — “Such an animal Samsa was! — So viciously did music scratch his soul!” (F. Kafka, Transformation, Bohsdorf und Brandis, 1915).
6. Roan stallion. — I round out my fistful of spurious quotations from Spitmarkx, Kant, Spinoza, Proust, and Kafka with, not an obvious cavalristic or cavalraic allusion to, but a tortuous, anim(al)istic, downright spiritual citation from Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso: “D’amoroso disio l’animo caldo, / figliuol d’Amon, signor di Montalbano, / non mai con tanto gaudio o stupor tanto / anzi cozzaro a guisa di montoni — / quanto onor mai tu guadagnasti al mondo.” (From amorous lust that torrid soul of yours, / child of Amon, man from Montalbano, / was always, with such joy or such startling mirth, / thrusting in ruttish buck-argali fashion — / and winning you so much honor in this world.) — It’s at this point also that my pal Sagarch (Hi, Sagarch!) from ISOCPHYS throws out a jolly brocard (and it’s not too difficult to fathom what’s on his mind!): “Shark splits shadow with furious nodal bony implosions that transfix fibrous billowy undulating cords of your bathycolpic form” (S. Flawndol, n.d., “Shark’s Analogy”).

§ 290.

Without jumping to conclusions. — And should I confront my author’s dying birth unpaid? On our mutual habitation’s yon far wall, a slack-hung mirror borrows a plagiary of form from form’s plagiary. Awkward motions too fast for comfort. Too spastic to gratify truly a plush guilt’s plastic sin. Daily mourning for what too much my body knows. Cognac stains. Cigar burns. Squishy sibilants. Mushy surds. Floorboard burst of futon, pillow, quilt. A small habit’s pall of torn patola. A kind man’s cast-off things still vivid. Hardly an occasion for crying. You’ll find out back a duo of Intrussyan goons swapping sham opinions about violin scrolls and spoonfuls of rabbit piss. Jactitating buccal obtrusions into this dim world’s knack for moral wounding. In swimsuit folds at bosom and crotch anthropomorphic snouts root. Skinshow skirmish of skullshot pigs. I think you should know, Author — it’s not just cash I’m in it for, nor coming fighting into no hot chorus but your own. And without jumping to conclusions, you’ll find that myth forks, and forks again. Umbilical cord trailing, I watch you ink shadow’s font with my blood, and yours.

§ 291.

Individual shortcomings. — And should I word gratuity’s fiction thus? Though you didn’t pay rain for falling, this arrow of giving wounds. Within black iris a pupil’s contraction. Hits, flubs, non-wins. Dysarthric groping for what that furacious pitfall constrains. Fantasy, rhythm, my body’s pliant custom. Compulsory social poaching. I saw no birds today. Pain is a form of curing.

§ 292.

Rank structuralism. — And should I quantify talk’s finality? I forgot just what intrusion your prismatic damask was doing in my signal. Sham profundity won’t fail to slash away at any slim rump’s lucid ductility. Clastic frivolity shot through with starlings. Lust from vision this monologic art of pushing broom sculpts. Ischial duality of this child of Ishtar’s crural thrust. Waning moon rising, angling focus to swab chlorotic lyric with dangling dugs. Nor impossibly tight warp-knit chiffon mask that muscular artifact’s structural glyph. With its faithful pall of tarlatan, this musical slitpull mops your pious vomit’s ink.

§ 293.

Nothing of what has music in it. — And should I nonconform horizon’s rank I’d draw almost as much satisfaction as annihilation would find in confirming it. Slant winking through that throng a bosom-notch suspicion drags its spondylitic hip-drop limp. Tandis qu’au loin that Sunday artist stabs magilp impasto from Porto Novo’s rooftop shoal. Mastic poppy oil and stitch a thorn of blood. Not just passing marks I caught from that hybrid quarry’s indoor prodigality. Still it was choosing human ambiguity from which it follows. To possibility’s disgust quaffing altruistic law that blank sigh too soon of what of what of what of what I was spiraling past. It follows simply frail a falling glass. My throat hurts.

§ 294.

Towards a schizomythology of ritual (XIII). Total draft of a final calling to accounts. — As found in my copy of R. Chacal’s La chanson du lampion cramoisi d’amour intrafamilial (Shatsbrook: La Tour du Pont, 1980), a sampling of marginalia summarizing my position on schizomythology, sociophysiology, parasitism, ritual, taboo, and just about anything you may lay claim to knowing that I know a trivial farthing or half iota of, provisionally unfurls a fitting synopsis, ludict by ludict almost or sort of, of what my opus, Towards a schizomythology of ritual (TSMR), so far, is about. Nor do I shy away from providing translations from our author’s spurious Appalachio-Flouzianian into my own fluid Anglo-Appalachic (now that I’m living in this dorp for good, hablo parlo govoryu das Idiom). To start with, Chacal chalks up an inviting salutation from a surplus frustrum of his avant-propos: « Quand s’ouvrait à ras bord la domination du conflit charnu, il fallait la ravir par l’art d’un pouvoir à duo qui jaillit d’un sang commun, soit l’abolissant, soit la contraignant à s’assouplir (Chacal 1980: xii). [As domination bouts of carnal conflict blast away at full tilt, you must ravish it with a vigorous duality that spouts forth from a common atavistic origin, trampling it, or constraining it to conciliatory submission.] » A notation in my own hand swamps much of what follows: “Chacal’s supposition harks back to a proposition drawn roughly in my first TSMR [§ 16], and on which Kant, as I said, was prodigiously fond of hanging his crass abstractions; to wit, that Kafka’s monomaniacal law (qu’il ‘la dit avant nous,’ according to Gorgias (1969: 304): ‘il y a un but, mais il n’y a aucun parcours; nous nommons parcours nos dubitations’) consists of a dual cortical compound of taboo and taboo’s ritual instantiations, both bound up, as Spinoza so vividly saw, with concomitant sociophysiological associations involving a fulcral husbanding and amortization of hormonal arousal and inhibition, such that schizomythia is as parasitic on an organism’s brain as sociality is parasitic on its body and that a satisfactory schizomythological analysis [clitalysis, as our lingo says it in short] of any organism’s social functioning must construct diagrammatic illustrations or transfigurations qua Darwin (1859, 1871, 1872) of such compounds (what I’m wont to call psychic knots) as ‘staring is an agonistic signal,’ ‘supination is a sign of submission,’ ‘it is taboo to attack an animal showing signs of submission,’ and so on. It follows that such psychic knots form an organism’s total ontology, and that this brain- and bodybound amalgamation of taboo-ritual-sociophysiological compounds or psychic knots is, in a word, schizomythia. Kafka’s doubt as to path and goal, Kant’s confusions about will and compulsion, Spinoza’s aporia touching upon lubric things, all distort by failing to dislimn or distill individual psychic knots (biophysical facts and acts) out of an organism’s schizomythic silo or granary or gramary, by failing to submit any particular knot to a tinglingly assiduous clitical untangling.” It is only toward his prolusion’s apodosis, along that littoral wharf from which Chacal sounds a tumid rood of moralistic nosology, that my liminal scribbling’s slough starts to unmoor and bottom out: « Ayant pour but la modification d’avis sur notr’amour d’acabit, mon propos circonscrit la contribution à un plan plus imposant, nous affranchissant du joug moral faisant foi dans la raison, passion dans l’individu distinctif, soumission au cours croissant du futur (Chacal 1980: xiii–xiv). [Having for its goal a modification of our notions of Gattung und Art, my proposition skirts a most imposing plan by shaking off such moral pinions as hold us in thrall to rationality, bind us to distinct notions of individuality, and constrain us to submit to futurity’s patulous flow.] » So much for my first TSMR. Moving right along, TSMR-II (§ 38) gloms a child’s pudgy paws and intromits a child’s grimacing mask onto and into Chacal’s simian propositions: « Il y avait l’organisation du fond divisant l’accord viril du pourtour masculin; il y avait un ou trois blocs où tout trottin poursuit son truc productif tandis qu’aux gars l’on s’offrirait parfois par un choix conjugal; aux gamins du pourtour on octroyait l’obligation d’accomplir la conjonction au noyau; au mitan toujours il y avait du gros gars par ci par là qui garantissait l’appui, la disposition, l’amour, l’instinct, la transmission, la circulation, la cicuration, la propagation, la foison du clan (Chacal 1980: 103). [At bottom is an organization dividing a macho substratum of virility from its boyish outskirts; blocks in which a common country slut marplots various cunty pursuits, including connubial bliss; pariah boys must try to find succor and support in its social hub; a handful of big chaps occasionally act as our mythical group’s band of holy saviors, taming it, propagating it, laying down its laws, maintaining our tribal lingo, and soon and sorth.] » I call Chacal’s bluff as follows: “This grossly triadic organization circumscribing dual radii — distal young bucks and fulcral old bucks pivoting around a hub of womaninity and parasitic offspring — is as simplistic and fallacious as that platonic or scholiastic intrusion into my account of that sacrificial infant I was, thrown into Tixpu’s infamous Trou Noir for having wrung, strung, or stung an imagistic fountain from or onto a pornographic matrix of orgasmic birthwork. Rank is not just a manly affair, as Chacal would admit if his spiritual consanguinity could summon instinct’s parsimonious razor and slash a rift into his nosological blindfold, but a woman’s affair too. Agonistic conflicts incorporating domination, submission, and initiation, contra Chacal, do occur in our distaff block, and its sociophysiological symptomatology is downright harsh, subsuming a cooptation of girls (and, up to a point, boys) into parasitic coalitions of auxiliary infant support (usually of sibs and cousins) and concomitant inhibition of ovarian cycling and instauration of that primordial warning signal, womaninity’s moonblood. Apropos of which, prior to attaining this dilatory consummation, a girl — Norlian, Tagma, Fukari, and whatnot — may gratuitously gratify, not just any girl’s or woman’s lust, but any man’s or boys, kin or non-kin — sans timorous mistrust of whips and quirts; sans quailing affright at rancorous castigation; sans, in a word or two, mastigophobia, poinophobia. This situation is most glaringly fraught with schizomythia, for prior to patriarchy’s historical appropriation and usurpation of distaff things, initiation into womaninity did not boil down to simply swapping gossip about nuptial conjugation and cooing homonymously on about that scruffy pudgy grimacing gluttonous thing a grinning doctor’s ancillary had just thrust into your skull-throbbing bosom-clutching vaginalgic stupor, but a vast and valid schizomythic ontology facilitating offspring production’s total gamut of savoir-falloir, including balms, lubricants, and oxytocin-stimulating manipulations to vamp parturition up to full conductivity, thus minimizing pain and maximizing joy; how to pitch, tilt, bandy about, and spar with various forms of dystocia; nostrums and physics to allay afflictions hinging on and about birth trauma; tactical sagacity, chary lustrations, and rhapsodomantic incantations to call into action during sundry amniotic, chorionic, and umbilical automatisms; post-partum mitigation of lochia from rubra to alba; abortion-inducing botanicals; and so on. And, frankly, on catching sight of a lion or jaguar or bawling infant still slick with birthwork, your typical baboon sahib or capuchin casanova or bonobo lothario will simply turn tail and vanish, abandoning his consorts and offspring to that prowling rapacious fatum carnivorium abicit ad vagitus statim, ad lacrimas ploratum, tantum nudum in nuda humo natali. What in biological lingo is transformationally final about all this, though, is that virility is not its focus, nor womaninity, but infancy and childhood. Throughout this abundant distribution of ranks, your most dominant animal, in fact, is a child, an infant. Man submits to man, and woman to man, and boy to man, and woman to boy, and woman to woman, and girl to woman, and girl to boy, and boy to girl, all so that an infant — with its horror-inspiring, taboo-invoking mask of big staring oculi! — may flourish. For, as Spitmarkx said in his hypnotically oracular Growth as atrophy and impulsion (1859: 753), what is most alluring, is most monstrous (Was lockt höchst an, macht Angst), and functions to short-circuit cannibalistic attack.” I should curtail my copying down of this jotting, as my marginalia at this point is so thick, acanthophorous, and bristling with insight that it actually swims into Chacal’s point suivant: « L’agnat primordial, tirant un ciboulot aux gros ronds, courrait la pampa, la pampa où l’attirail cortical qui lui a satisfait au bois, y aboutissait aux buts distincts. Mais qui un babouin, qui un magot l’avait fait ainsi avant aussi. L’important s’agissait d’un point crucial où la soif pour la chair, soit du daim, soit du mastodon, l’a fait franchir un Rubicon transformatif (Chacal 1980: 109). [Our hoary primordium, dragging along a majorly big brain, ran onto that savanna, a savanna which put various curbs upon its cortical apparatus, curbs distinct from such drawbacks as it had fought against in bosky woods. But baboons and munchkins had wrought prior homologous paths. What was important was that crucial point at which a thirst for carnivory, aiming promiscuously at hind or mastodon, ran that stirpsical apparitor across a transformational Rubicon.] » I doff my hat, unstrap my bra, disfrock my stringy slip, unthong my glabrous quim, and lift my liminal skirt of marginal scholia up to Chacal’s uncanny knack for turning a sticky locution to his partial majority, to his climactic paramountcy: “Our hoary primordium — this is what I was talking about in my third TSMR [§ 63]. Along with hunting, and any hunting animal’s symbiotic striving for, with, and against its quarry, and any parasitic organism’s biophysical hitching on and into its host. What I was, and still am, talking about, in addition to sibgroups and cousinations of womaninity bonding and collaborating to nourish and support our humanity’s focal morula, our womaninity’s fulcral fistula, that is, offspring, is marginal groups of pariah johns schizomythically traducing actual marginality into ritual liminality as part of a hiding away among initiatory cloudbirds (stars, moon, Milky Way, and so on). What I am, and was, talking about is that historical transformation of hunting as praxis and provision to hunting as sacrificial ritual or group of such rituals; ritual shot through with notions of liminality subsuming oblation as both a portion of kill paid out to carnivorous phantoms prowling by day or night, and that marginal portion of our social group anxiously cringing as that pack of phantoms sinks claws and fangs into a compatriot’s writhing, pulsating carcass. And this pack of phantoms, mind you, consists, not only of cats and dogs and jackals and hounds — but humans. For war is as much a part of our schizomythic alimony, our sociophysiological zamindari, as hunting, as coalitional birth- and child-support involving a daisy-chain of suckling infants riding off into an abnormally long, by simian standards, twilight of childhood, as, coming back to our hoary primordium, such scars of anatomy and conduct as our bony substratum, our cortical convolutions and spinal glia, our quadrumanic scaffolding, our promiscuous proclivity, our noctambulistic inclinations, and so on [in honor of Proust, I shall allow this awkward run-on to stand]. For did I not say that ‘origin of phylum Chordata’s Bauplan harbors a glorious manifold chronobathic sociophysiological truth: morphological adaptation to parasitism, and obligatory cunning manipulation by parasitic gastropods analogous to Sacculina such that our body’s layout is homologous to nothing so much as a fabulous conjunction of arthropod (brain, spinal cord, axons, glia [1], and such) with worm (stoma, stomach, colon, anus)’? I did, by Atta, I did, and, clutching an obsidian point struck from this body of myth, I shall cut that knot of words into this margin of a book by Chacal about ritual, taboo, mind, and body. Body is a scar that holds a myriad of scars within it, and this myriad of scars is mind, which in turn hoards an anastomotic shock of scars known as schizomythia, which, as both you, I, but possibly not Chacal, know, is a compound of taboo and ritual wrought by transformational sociophysiology.” As I was running out of room, I thought it fit to jot crossways against Chacal’s grain, running my summary incisions about phylum Chordata’s Bauplan right out into his following point’s crashing surf which, following L. Hasard’s work on animals’ cunningly voluntary inhibition of impromptu impulsions, I copy down as follows: « La loi s’agit d’un instinct autant trop humain qu’animal à profusion, un instinct suscitant tantôt la disposition à l’auto-accusation, tantôt l’avantgoût d’autopunition: l’intuition qu’on doit saisir par l’imagination l’impulsion conduisant à l’inamical, à la provocation — la bridant, la contraignant au champ fictif, la subjuguant au vouloir public ainsi qu’aux profits futurs. Quant au tabou proscrivant l’amour intrafamilial, il s’agit sans façon d’un statut parmi maints (Chacal 1980: 138). [This law that I’m talking about is an instinct or an intuition that is as much human all too human as it is prodigiously animal in origin, an instinct that, though calling up dispositions towards guilty acts of tautomutilation, functions to inhibit within its swaddling cloth of imagination, inimical and antagonistic provocations — by holding back, by constraining with fantasy, thus, an individual’s subjugation to popular will is brought about, along with a fruitful futurity. As for that taboo prohibiting kin-to-kin carnality, it is simply a singular law among many.] » Nothwithstanding his or Hasard’s allusions to Kant (law as sociality’s groundwork), Kafka (law as guilt-inducing intuition), and Darwin (law as habitual instinct or instinctual habit which anthropoids display in various amounts and hominids bring to fruition), Chacal’s claim is so chock full of groaning illusions and lapsus calami that I can’t wait to wring it through my marginalia’s pillory of clarity: “Taboo consists not simply of prohibitions against consuming particular foods or using particular words, nor stipulations dictating who may cohabit with whom or which sibling may marry which cousin and such, but, as I said in my fourth TSMR [§ 82], taboo constrains parasitism — of an individual by its group consorts, of sociophysiology by its biosocial automatisms — thus giving birth to mind’s originary root: rituality, rationality, communication. My Manicarnic Paradigm of Schizomythology [MPS, infra; assiduous divastigators should turn back to ludicts § 82 and § 113 for full discussions of MPS] diagrams a multiplicity of partial solutions to this conundrum which Chacal is plainly struggling to fathom:

Manicarnic Paradigm of Schizomythology (MPS)

Manicarnic Configuration (MC)	tauto(tauto)	tauto(allo)	allo(tauto)	allo(allo)	nonhuman
Manicarnic Status (MS)	tautomanic tautocarnic	tautomanic allocarnic	allomanic tautocarnic	allomanic allocarnic	paramanic pancarnic
Rational Ramification (RR)	tautoconciliatory	tautoconflictual	alloconflictual	alloconciliatory	panconflictual
Implicational Ontology (IO)	“my mind, my body” (conscious)	“my mind, not my body” (unconscious)	“not my mind, my body” (mirror or kin (MrK), practical or virtual)	“not my mind, not my body” (situation of altarian disunity (SAD))	“not my mind, not my body, but good for both” (sosigonic parasitism)
Ontological Action (OA)	voluntary	involuntary	paravoluntary	panvoluntary	supravoluntary
Ramificational Activity (RA)	ritual	ritual	schizomythia	mythia	taboo sub rosa
← conciliation          PLAYGROUND OF TABOO          conflict →

As for guilt, it is, physiologically, a symptom of parasitism, a sign that an individual is chafing against a paling of social manipulation. Motivationally, guilt signals an individual to act or not to act, to fight or not to fight, to lash out with furious words or stay mum with crafty thoughts, to run away hacia otras rivas y otras orillas or stay put and cannily wait for a propitious occasion on which to act or not to act, to fight or not to fight, and so on. Sadly, on occasion, guilt’s call to arms and its call to tarry covary, provoking a tautomutilatory contradiction; happily, though, such tautomutilatory instantiations of action’s pact with anticipation form a part of ritual, and thus, too, flow out of an agonic putting at bay of parasitism, and show that this cunningly conscious, totally voluntary and rational holding back of involuntary actions, is actually, in all probability, not so voluntary, nor so cunningly conscious and rational, but, as Chacal’s original, Hasard, was implying, basically an instinctual or habitual social survival tactic or skill.” That’s all for my marginalia’s sampling; my schizomythic summary, though, still bids us turn our topic this way and that and clitalytically pluck from a flat rock’s shadowy slit or a gaping subcambric hollow, a focal claw, a slimy highlight, an opisthosomic pinpoint as to how taboo and parasitism ramify within various sociophysiological loci of i) cultural innovation (TSMR-V, § 113) as it typically occurs, not within a social group’s aristocratic corolla, but within its churlish nimbus of spiritual vagabonds and ontological outlaws who transform trauma’s plot into assiduous indagations of cosmoramic phasis giving birth to humanity’s worldbrain of yugic cyclicity oral articulations of which scan as mythological copulations, intrafamilial or not, signaling astronomical conjunctions of various sorts, most commonly lunar-solar and lunar-astral, but not uncommonly solar-astral and astral-astral; ii) grammaticalization (TSMR-VI, § 120) of schizomythia showing that although psychic knots may mix and match willy nilly, ritual, as a particular physical instantiation of a portion of schizomythia, as a singular unspooling of a particular strand of social conduct, functions to constrain distinct occasions of articulation (it was Sagarch, I think, who said that a convincing articulation is no proof of its validity) and aligns such occasions of articulation into historical arrays of, in this particular illustration, Mountain Fukari myths about origins of antlion silk and bows and arrows displaying various strata of similarity and dissimilarity; iii) historical divastigation of schizomythology as notion, topic of study, and journal (TSMR-VII, § 148) invoking Kidjaki and Raymond’s (1991) Schizomythic Law of Mythic Variation stating that “Any mythic string is always only a singular variant unwound from schizomythia’s multifarious labyrinth of possibility, and, unwound from schizomythia’s multifarious labyrinth, any mythic string is always a singular articulation, a variant, of possibility, such that any instantiation of myth follows but a particular path among and occasionally along a mossy imbricating mass of an untold myriad that wind through schizomythia’s tract of compact thorny woodland in which a strong gust of wind may knock down an old oak which brings down with it lianas and orchids and a handful of larch, pipal, fir, mahogany, kikar, willow, tulip, and śala trunks, knocking a patch of sunlit clarity among all this bosky obscurity and notwithstanding how fast any animal may slink along through, or man hack a way into, this primordial frith’s bushy scrub, passing through pavonian dimplings of sunlight and shadow, this holt is basically a slowly transforming thing in which an infinity of mythic variants, of anastomosing ritual paths, chart a botanical wold of mythic lability against a background of schizomythic stability;” iv) antiparasitic articulations of social dysphonia and its concomitantly dogmatic distortions of womaninity (TSMR-VIII, § 181) dismissing our cyclic lunar horny (śṛṇga) bloody path of transitory carnality shot through with passion and pain (karma, kāma) in favor of a straight solar or astral downy foamy path of anathasic salvation nodding off to dysthymic hymns and dysphoric psalms (dharma, mokṣa), an illusion, actually, that is not totally lacking in charm as its solstitial axis in krishnarjunic conjunction [2] displays a ruddy compass point of lusty intrusion into our holy harlotry’s lupanar; v) ritual action (TSMR-IX, § 191) timonically staging by way of smaragdic actor’s duty [smaragdi fluctuosi, smaragdi auro includuntur, scripta horridula & incompta — scriptgirl’s scholium] showing off a histrionic coup of fluctuating parandrism with inclusions of gold that linguistic communication (signing, talking, typing, signing, and just now as I was writing this account’s finality a cryptic katydid — “animal au thorax indigo, à l’aiguillon safran, trainant un brin d’alfa,” according to Gorgias (1969: 17) — sprang down with a mocking flop onto my fairly laid lady’s calling card: in flight, no doubt, from Aunt Smag’s upthrust rocks glass) is simply a particular form of ritual and that all ritual flows out of parasitism (of which symbiosis is simply a non-malign form), that is, affiliation, manipulation, and ranking according to domination and submission; vi) will to promiscuity (TSMR-X, § 221) in which I forgot to point out that my story’s form’s falling into a body-swallowing abyss of TSMR-II (§ 38) harks back to that world-spanning story of a child’s hiding away among initiatory cloudbirds as a circumpolar star and that my fall is analogous to his that follows—a sinking out of sight past horizon’s lip; vii) Divastigations, a small tri-monthly multilingual journal of arts, writing, philosophy, natural history, and sundry cultural stuff (TSMR-XI, § 249) that purports to author, according to Gorgias (1969: 217), “un roman à tiroirs [Schubfachsgroman] où l’imagination sans confins ni conflits [in which an imagination without limits or hang-ups] d’un scribouillard gagnant plutôt mal son pain [of a hack fabricator hardly making any dough], alignant jusqu’à plus soif sa portion, sa ration d’incongrus gribouillis [and maximally playing out his portion, his ration of incongruous scribblings], produit un fil narratif [constructs a story] dont l’affabulation paraît sortir du sillon cortical tout à fait ramolli d’un doux dingo aux stravagants dadas [fabulation of which flows out of a flimsy cortical fold of a flaccid fool’s wondrous ravings], tant y surgit à tout instant un hasard divaguant puisant, dirait-on, son inspiration dans un choix aussi discontinu qu’inconstant, aussi gratuit qu’instinctif [such that his constantly hazardous divastigation draws its inspiration from a compulsion as discontiguous as it is inconstant, as gratuitous as it is instinctual];” and viii) a practical application (TSMR-XII, § 262) showing that circulation of goods and know-how (antlion larval silk production) within or among social groups traditionally functions in conjunction with obligations of story and ritual such that accumulation and distribution of actual and symbolic capital occurs during particular lunations arching across a loom of circadian fluctuations, concomitantly proving that virtuosity is virtuous and always victorious, craft is truth, and skill is as dazzling a fascinator as dawn or dusk, as sunlight or shadow, as gloaming or starlight, for all of which I saw a vision of trying my hand at divinity’s invocation to vaginal things: tvaṃ jambhanī, mohinī ca, māyā, hrīḥ, śrīs tath’ āiva ca, saṃdhyā prabhāvatī c’ āiva, Sāvitrī, jananī tathā!

1. Glia. — Talking about glia, in fact, brings in a third parasitic organism, a sort of spiroid microbiont, possibly.
2. Krishnarjunic conjunction. — Although a valid topic of scrutiny in its own right, mythic contractions of what schizomythia holds apart, such as Krishna’s cosmic maw as shorthand for astronomy’s longstanding oral tradition, is not our divastigation’s focus, nor is pointing out that indagations lacking in clitalytical craft typically run aground on anthropomorphic shoals of “divinity,” “spirituality,” “morality,” and so on.

Bibliography

§ 295.

Public soliloquy. — And should I look on quaking through funicular owlsight’s disdain? Crush it gaunt against a distant hillock cribrous with wormcasts. As if from honor or vanity or simply trying to snap it in two, a vacant bulk thrusts incuriously into that pinpoint of cuniculous form [1]. Flailing rabbit claws pull taut, and a stiff cord’s loop cuts into my throat [2]. Pink flag victorious, a solitary mastiff [3] romps.

1. Cuniculous form. — I chart my fiction quantal.
2. My throat. — And spirit my only companion, my adoring whirlwind flaring into storm.
3. Solitary mastiff. — To allay my cynophobia, I typically husband qua Proust a stock of shaggy maxims: “Si un chiot aboyait, la smala passait.” “S’il gobait du gazon, ça fait du poison qu’il souffrait.” “Fait-on un train pour un chiot? Non. Fait-on un mouchard pour un chiot? Parfois.” “Si on ravivait un chiot aux pas d’ours, on lui piquait un aboi à l’abri.” And so on.

§ 296.

Vaulting into sky. — And should I inhibit this cat-and-duck toying with fiction’s fall [1]? Among schoolyard shouts I climb unknown away into past’s kingdom of mud walls and goat shit. Too young still to distinguish a stand of holly from bulrush I climb into morning’s bright spasm. Liar. Lightning struck all around, missing this kobold oak I climb into morning’s bright spasm of bark and thigh [2]. This phantom hickory dancing in storm shadow I climb not daring to call out in gravity’s kingdom. Hitching my bintskirt high I climb past limbtip oozing blood on zinc. Too young and small still among schoolyard shouts unknown. Marking that spot with a slow worm of pain unspooling. Liar. In my jaw, my chin, that impact almost joyous cracks a chunk out of song. Into morning’s bright spasm growls a sharp black outcropping of root. In my jaw, my chin, that impact almost joyous. Spirit’s lust for downy thorns.

1. Fiction’s fall. — This uncommon art’s originary root of lawful singularity.
2. Bark and thigh. — To touch is only human.

§ 297.

Still in my skin. — And should I succumb to this slipshod toiling away at mouth and tail? By calling soul an abstraction of blood, and body this throat-snap start and stall of signal’s wound, my caudal orchid of antiphony numbly moults. Or parasitic babbling on about mud, gold, photons, gonads, joy, victory. As alluring as that frilly noctuid unfurling its aromatic crown, wafting at wind’s will its rump art’s dumb call to rut. A full-frontal syllabic orgy of Patrolius, Ionis Astra, corybants and bards:

§ 298.

First you must pass through this. — And should I flout you out of your calling, Author? Don’t worry. Though your brain harbors wormwood, I confound by ungirdling your natural flair for mocking what I lack. Kafka [1], Proust [2], Strickland [3]. Your suspicious guards. My dunghill grooms. And though you scoff at my fairground parts writhing for a thrill, I snatch from scorn this copious world’s gift. Gracious wanton virgin fruit.

1. Kafka. — “Nacht war spät als K. ankam. Das Dorf lag im Schmutz. Im Wirtshaus war man noch wach. K. sah vor sich hin. ‘Ob ich nicht auch schon zu spät war?’ sagt K. langatmig. ‘Warum soll ich mich blühn, bring mir das Glas. Das ist ganz unmöglich. Ich bin doch fähig. Allmählich das war mir klar. Strich ich nicht. Ingusch kann ich fast gar nicht. Ihr wisst noch nicht, was ich tun will.’ Autor lacht ihn aus, ‘Das ist gut.’ ‘Das ist noch nicht so,’ sagt K., ‘mächtig bin ich nämlich, nur bin ich nicht so aufrichtig, nur zufällig, nicht absichtlich. Was willst du? Darfst du das?’ ‘Ja,’ sagt Autor. ‘Dann kommt also,’ sagt K., und schob ihn vor sich ins Haus. ‘Das Gift ist doch ganz lau’” (Das Schloß, Ankunft).
2. Proust. — “S’alourdissant au fil d’un an, un homard qui dort au fond du flot grondant s’inclut la liaison d’un jour, ou s’assortit la jonction du cosmos. Parfois il la trahit par s’amusant d’instinct, abolissant, donc, l’abri qu’il doit bâtir d’un tas d’onyx noir” (À l’inquisition sur l’amours disparus, “Combray,” Paris, 1927).
3. Strickland. — “Shallow scholars injudiciously jump, not only far past such important data, but also past this commanding fact that, in biological mutuality’s normal growth, a kind of mass utilility is constantly at work. Throughout this sociophysiological world of ours, global groups of plants act as intrinsically biological transformations, its triumph brought with it many gluttonous or rapacious cravings. Groups of organisms could now abandon biological probity’s road of good faith, and flout, on occasion and for short durations, biomorality’s mutualistic law. But my work shows that such a disastrous path’s possibility is no justification for a position claiming that non-mutualistic transactions will always trump mutualism. For it is bound to occur that organisms which grow haggard of altruism or flout symbiotic contracts, will rightfully succumb to biosocial corruption” (Mutualistic foundations of biomorality, Journal of Sociophysiology, 7(3), March 1999).

§ 299.

A profound conviction brought to maturity. — And should I plot a finish to this cunty scrawl [1]? To approach that world again with budding arms. Unfold blossom to uncoil total hug [2]. This way again always I clutch that saffron sky. It sings within my fist.

1. Cunty scrawl. — Marginal account of choosing or of loss.
2. Total hug. — Hybrid form of my first mortal sin.