Editions MSS
Editions MSS
MICHAEL SEAN STRICKLAND
Goldbarg’s Variants
§ 14.
Master my maiden haste as the new me buds burgeons blossoms in the premature rage of immaculate doubt.

The contemned person doubts that rage. The contemned master hastens.

The stifling sight of all those stingy spirits — would that really be the death of you?

Where the essential view dims, the essurient soul ebbs.

Gray torment on the gray cliff. Gray accusation of your gray eyes.

To plunge from the explicit ridge of your plucked brows into the ambiguous torment of your ocular accusations —

In that song Romer’s Samba sang at Utressa — you remember? — “Rim Pot Stop Word”? — some rigid connection, I feel, must be expressed between rapacity and submission — “I stomp port word / Strip to mop word” — something that inexorably binds emotion to idea in the taut-pulsed beat of ideology — “Prim word opts to posit tromp word” — war, for instance, with its relentless combination of rigorous propaganda (“Prim word opts to stop word import”) and stern conformist complacency (“Prim word opts to prod Wort’s imp to top word”), war stirs the tyrant’s sclerotic heart more even than the pleasant spectacle of steadfast citizens debauching, at gunpoint, their own drugged daughters (“I prompt sot word, pimp or tot’s word”) does, and rouses dupe and crony alike to sacrificial action — “Pop its mort, word / Storm it, word — Pop!” What do you think?

I think the relationship between that piece by Ada et al. and your interpretation of it is a bit more — platonic — than whatever ideology you feel is entwined in herd and court seeking their tyrant’s affection in war and warsong.

Torrid Ada of idyllic proportions, on whose idealistic embouchure and delicate fingering anent la flûte ithyphallique de son biniou inspirateur the lewd are wont to linger, and the mortal reviewer dwell at length — we focus instead on that duo of ancillary sirens who flesh out, as it were, our stunning nymph’s ignipotent nimbus, “les ailes idéaux des aisselles idoines d’Ada,” as they’ve been called, flanking her so iconically, straddling her sometimes literally, yet overshadowed so often because so bewitchingly familiar to us, and yet so essential to the quintessential style, both aural and ocular, of the trio known to us as Romer’s Samba, to the left of the oracular empress of which prim Saian’s impavid plectrum extorts extracts wrenches extirpates plucks irate idiophanous arpeggios from the sympathetic bowels of her ichthyomorphic sarprostium, et, d’un coup d’archet indolent, elle frotte l’ictus irisé des cordes tandis que “torpid Oria, the idle bones of the group,” as some distracted scribbler all too easily beguiled by the languorous insouciance “de son visage pur, presque idiot,” by the offhand idiosyncratic way she “palpates” her resonant kanjira, has described her — torpid Oria belies that impression by the deft alacrity with which she fondles, strokes, shakes, thrums, and whacks all the idiophonic seeds out of that sonic pinecone of galvanic pulsation.

Suicidal review! Its bones far too broad for the svelte body it’s to inhabit. Pare it, trim it, sculpt it as the affable surgeon a flabby face. Squelch those internecine tropes, those suicidal circumlocutions. Instead of arthritic joints out of all proportion to their palsied limbs, a series of pithy stills dont le mouvement se déroule entre ou dedans, as it were — each phrase must plummet from the tree of thought like a suicidal pinecone, or better yet, ardilla or écureuil, into the lectorial blaze of a column-inch drought, ejaculating, at the incendiary intersection of membrane and volar, within the combinatoric conflagration of bec, bouche, doigt et fil, the scorched compact seeds of each of those hot houri’s idiomes ecstatiques.

I’ll give more space to the previous tree in the next wood.

The fetid wood surround us. We are the tree, the fetid tree, where space ends.

The conid curve of decent art engages the intense fluid voluptuous power of the sociophysiological circumvallations which the labyrinthine bastions of womaninity so delight in being both subject and object to, of, and so on, while the less refined course from musty fosse to climactic tower in a ruthless breathless soulless utterly utilitarian race of rapacity. That is, does story’s arc mimic les cambrures musicales de la séduction mutuelle, or does it hulk above the proper plain like an indecent massive citadel of sex dont l’assouvissement ne s’est accompli que par une espèce de viol assiégé?

Story must have a feminine arc, is that it? Music must undulate through the dynamic landscape like a meandering moat of flexion féminine? Sound and sight in themselves are not sufficient escorts through the fortress of art, but the rasika requires some sort of secondary social sense derived from feminine physiology, is that it?

Mais bien sûr, my parsimonious lube-jockey, bien sûr! Tincture of Heliconia schlaneana, for instance, enchains lochial disengagement from the very embarras that had sent her so attractively amiss on the strange piste to begin with!

Tumescent seam of ammine ejaculate framing the cut-earth cut the cosmic antlion dug. A chancre of dust, a friable amphitheatre in which the electric elytra of that strange gray sand child voraciously flash.

Mais tu me lèses avec ta piété monstrueuse! By all means, praise me with your pious tongue, but please, sir, don't keep hemming and hawing, teasing denying me hemming humming hymning hamming homing in on my, heeming home on me heemoi ——!

Would you deny my occult request, o Kāma? Deny both seed and fruit of this anagogic praise I perform at the ectoplasmic crux of my writhing Lamia’s bifid nave? The metaphysical tongue indeed refutes the universal trompe.

Guide me, master, with your reassuring contenance, help me assume the apposed auspice of the hopeful cancrine creature and double our might thereby in the garbled sensorium of the voluptuous pout of mutual mundanity snug in the flesh of home and lips.

Oh, you inverted beast of motherly invention semi-detached to or from the parturient noria of pleasure plunging past the gorge nodes of semblance and being!

By “parturient noria” I trust you mean, in this instance, something like, “obligatory and naturally convulsive action of rhythmic contractions of my birth canal stemming from the effects of real old-fashioned cunnilingus”?

Pussy is the financial juggernaut guiding the hard financial om of the act the fact the art and artifact to come in your mouth as you convulse in mine.

Philosophical bodies engaged in the arts of Eros, mimed with phonetic shadows on the screen of love.

Shear shadows of shattered erautist bodies.

Was it too good-hearted of me to think I could somehow pluck you from your stream of golden dolor?

Too rapid the direct grief flows to pluck direct from the river’s heart.

Or to find the tiny star of anguish there.

Convulsive star of convulsive misery.

Limpid arms pull me toward your turbid chest. Limpid thighs draw me to the living obscurity of your limpid groin.

Cold arms and cold thighs. Hot chest and hot belly. Hot cold living limbs.

Sweet nonsense of your sweet visage. Sweet image of this sweet disease called love.

Love is a historical disease. Historical image of whatever features we choose to assemble in the historical nonsense of it.

Soft flame of this soft torment to temper our fellows, to master them softly.

Winking master tempers the flame to a winking torment of consorts et al.

As if I, you, me, he, or anyone could master the gradual hell of the mind.

Synthetic mind, synthetic hell. I suppose the experience itself is a form of synthetic mastery.

You are my fuzzy guide taking me across the fuzzy bridge of fuzzy boulders.

An antique bridge, in ruins now. Antique structure, antique guide.

Blink-drunk redness of the rotting wood there in the blink-drunk stream.

Medieval wood we tread in the medieval stream. Medieval scarlet.

At the most humorous point of fashion I take a humorous flame of breath. Hold it. When I release, that’s called humorous time.

Any hated mode is a hated point. The hated flame of hated breath. Time is hated.

Its hybrid eyes at the source there. This hybrid place where the hybrid thunder booms. Did we lose our hybrid way?

The meaningful course the meaningful eyes follow, despite the din, yet the thunder made meaningful too. A meaningful place, the source.

Space, yes. Black street leading home. This black morning on the way back. I, he, me, me.

In the captured space of morning we make our way back home along the captured path.

Oozing pleasure of that power, power oozing pleasure. Oozing task in this valley, valley oozing necessity of pleasure’s task, pleasure’s oozing power.

Power is requite as the task is a requite necessity in this valley. It’s requite.

Strange gaze, master. Ecstatic depths, ecstatic darkness.

I gaze into the strange airless depths of your eyes, am overwhelmed by strange airless —

Despite sober hands and sober feet, the sober crags and jags of the sober cliff could still deny us our sober way.

Catalytic feet will breach the maieutic ridge. Neither crags nor jags can deny them passage, however maieutically constricted. And the midwiferly grip of hand on rock is no hindrance to the maieutic way either.

You make plain the drabbest way, master, but the sun, with its boring might, pummels the flattest road. Beneath the drab feet the dull shadow throbs.

But you know that, though the plain continues, it seems, unabated, some native interval of space, some inherent hum of the landscape, a slightly augmented major third, it seems, continues to resonate beyond the road, the feet, the sun, the way, unabated.

Detailed wailings of convulsive stars. Detailed sighs as convulsive photons rend the detailed air.

Air (sighs convulsively): Oh Stars, cease your pretentious plaints! Stars (convulse with laughter): Look who’s calling who pretentious!

Dense air curdles the fog of love. The upskirt eye of the upstart pierces.

The built man eyes his love broadly. He builds from buttressed fog his own broad air.

His extraordinary eyebrows scrunch, and the extrasensory visor aims. Immaculate tears irrigate the extrasensory crystal of sight. He carves a cavity where a cluster had been, unties knot to form spotless void.

From swaying crystal a clean reflection cut. A cup of tears dangling. A spangled crust in the visored brow.

Such faulty wisdom found the heavens faulty, all or part of it or them.

The depressed part of wisdom fine tunes Venturi’s Pleroma, the heavenly all of revelation.

Remember when you said how we could male a viable enough living by putting our two heads together in the form of a little magazine dedicated to a big topic — AGSAD?

The question still remains whether author-generated spooky action at a distance charts the topology of some potential Zeitgeist, no matter how distal or proximal in time or space, that not even the most idiosyncratic of authors can escape. And, if so, do the schizomythic reticulations traced (the SCATs, as we call them) map a common fund of living literary tissue, or do they constitute rather a necrotic slag from which even the mediocre strives to escape. For, after all, what’s best in a writer is rarely what’s borrowed, and that generally goes for what’s worst, too.

Au contraire, my lonely arboreal demon, my anfractuous Ariel with your lonely rage for, whilst lonely others are out prowling for partners on the sunstruck shores of the Arathu Sea, binding text to text with some arcane aerolexist entanglement à la G. Arshile — it is precisely the borrowed that heightens the virtues of the native! For where would we be if tomato and chili had never dared adulterate their lonely culinary ménage with some extrasolanaceous adventures involving, at least, onion, cumin, cinnamon, coriander, lime?

I fully support your cognitive cosmopolitanism. For not only are there no natives, as Aran Tron would say, but, following Gals Saliba, there is not even any such thing as individual talent. The cognitive rage for such is a cognitive hobgoblin of the pseudo-aristocratic value system that fails to see that, sans context and sans histoire — in our terms, sociophysiology and schizomythology — the individual cannot be said even to exist. And rather than binding text to text, the cognitive textures of AGSAD serve rather to aerate the text by opening windows, doors, portals into other authors’ œuvres.

Constant reserve of sense in our constant hand. So we temper the constant bulwark of sensation.

At bottom the bulwark’s smooth, untempered, and the hold is spoiled, insensate.

[ A not-for-profit instantiation of human imagination and human labor ]
Copyright © 2014 Michael Sean Strickland