Fennel Plunger

A small procession of wounded men were going drearily toward the rear. It was a flow of blood from the torn body of the brigade.

To the right and to the left were the dark lines of other troops. Far in front he thought he could see lighter masses protruding in points from the forest. They were suggestive of unnumbered thousands.

Once he saw a tiny battery go dashing along the line of the horizon. The tiny riders were beating the tiny horses.

We’re leaving again of our own volition
for bogus-patterned plains, shreds of maps recurring
like waves on a beach, each unimaginable
and likely to go on being so.

But sometimes they get, you know, confused,
and change their vows or the ground rules
that sustain all of us. It’s cheery, then, to reflect on the past
and what it brought us. To take the stone books down

from the shelf. It is good, in fact,
to let the present pass without commentary
for what it says about the future.
There was nothing carnal in the way omens became portents.

Fact: All my appetites are friendly. I just
don’t want to live according to the next guy’s trespass,
meanwhile getting a few beefs off my chest,
if that’s OK. The wraparound flux we intuit

as time has other claims on our inventiveness.
A lot of retail figures in it. One’s daily horoscope
comes in eggshell, eggplant, and, just for the heck of it,
black. ‘Nuf said. The deal is off. The rest is silence.

“The lion is back,” Lucy said. “I told you, it’s not a lion. It’s a bobcat,” I said. “Well, whatever, I saw it this morning sitting up on the hill, staring down at us,” she said. “It won’t hurt you. It’s afraid of grown-ups,” I said. “Yes, but it carried off the poor Frasers’ little boy last summer,” she said. “He may still be alive somewhere,” I said. “And he’s killed every outdoor pet in the neighbourhood over the past three years,” she said. “It’s much quieter,” I said. “Keith,” she said, “I think you’re on his side. That’s awful.” That was the end of that conversation. I was on vacation. I was supposed to paint the house, but I spent most of my time watching the bobcat with my binoculars. I watched him kill three rabbits one morning, and he popped down mice as if they were bonbons. I loved his quick, agile movements, never doubting himself, as most of us do. When I heard Lucy coming, I’d hide the binoculars, and quickly pick up the paintbrush. “He’s there,” she’d say. “Who?” I’d say. “The lion,” she’d say. “It’s his hill,” I’d say. I tried not to provoke her, but I often did. Then one day she said, “The Meads’ little girl is missing.” “Kelly?” I said. “Yes, Kelly. She’s not been seen since Thursday,” she said. “What do the police say?” I asked. “They suspect kidnapping. They’re doing everything they can, but they can’t do much until there’s a ransom note,” Lucy said. “Oh, dear,” I said, “this is so sad.” “It’s the lion, you know,” she said. “Oh, no,” I said, “I’ve been watching him. He’s very content with what he has up there, rabbits and such.” When Lucy went to the grocery store a little later, I knew I had to climb that hill and see what I could find. The cat watched me for a while, but then when I got about halfway up, it disappeared. I wasn’t afraid of the cat, but part of me was afraid of what I might find. I was out of breath when I reached the top. It was scraggly and wild up there, full of boulders and fallen trees, and here and there several caves. I came across the skeleton of a deer, and then one of a fox, and even one of a porcupine. I was anxious now, in spite of myself. There was a piece of blue cloth hanging from a thorny bush. And more bones, bones everywhere. I knew the cat was watching me from somewhere. I could feel the coldness of his eyes, and it gave me a slight chill, as if I had a fever. I called out Kelly’s name. And I remembered the name of the Fraser boy, Adam, and I called out that, too. Surely they would come and leap into my arms if they were here, if they were alive. I called again and again. It was a ghostly place up there, and I had to keep myself from running. I didn’t want the cat to think I was frightened. When I got back home, Lucy asked me where I had been. “I just went for a walk,” I said. “You went up there, didn’t you?” she said. “Yes, I did,” I said. “It’s lovely up there. We should go for a picnic sometime.” “No sign of Kelly or the Fraser boy? she said. “No sign at all,” I said. “Just wildflowers and butterflies.”

Indeed, it is the force of testimony that presents itself at the very heart of documentary proof. And I do not see that we can go beyond the witness’s triple declaration: (1) I was there; (2) believe me; (3) if you don’t believe me, ask someone else. Ought we to make fun of the naive realism of testimony? It can be done. But this would forget that the seed of criticism is implanted in actual criticism, the critique of testimony bit by bit taking over the whole sphere of documents, up to the ultimate enigma of what presents itself under the name “trace,” as the sign-effect of its cause. I have said that we have nothing better than our memory to assure ourselves of the reality of our memories — we have nothing better than testimony and criticism of testimony to accredit the historian’s representation of the past. [278]

In all plays, even Hamlet, the scenery
is the best part. Battlements, wintry thickets
forcing their edge on you, cough up their promise
as the verse goes starry. You will leave empty-handed,
others will know more than you. Time’s aged frisson
gets to me more and more, like mice
in a pantomime. And then the prompter
throws up his hands in dismay. You were mortal,
so why didn’t you say anything? Back to brick basics
for you, my man. We’ll see another day
the wave coming up short at water’s edge,
which in turn justifies our divagations:
We were once, right? Whichever saint calls out
of an awning is ours to succor and molest, else
why harp on the differences between us? Why
castigate
what divides or loll on the boundary
that was almost always there?

Infantas

would now intuit better fortunes if all
were copacetic between us, the corona lift its shape
into our ken, less warning than appraisal.
Now even the farthest windows have gone dark.
And the dark wants, needs us. Thank you for calling.

There is not a world of images and a world of objects. Rather every object, whether it is presented by external perception or it appears to inner sense, is susceptible to functioning as a present reality or as an image, depending on the centre of reference that has been chosen. The two worlds, the imaginary and the real, are constituted by the same objects; only the grouping and the interpretation of these objects varies. What defines the imaginary world, as with the real universe, is an attitude of consciousness.

Literature can transcend this dilemma [that it is bound to obscure what it seeks to reveal] only by keeping faith with unsocial, banned language, and by learning to use the opaque images of broken rebellion as a means of communication.

We must therefore listen attentively to every whisper of the world, trying to detect the images that have never made their way into poetry, the phantasms that have never reached a waking state. No doubt this is an impossible task in two senses; first because it would force us to reconstitute the dust of those actual sufferings and foolish words that nothing preserves in time; second, and above all, because those sufferings and words exist only in the act of their separation.

The finest of all, it seemed to me that afternoon, was a picture by Pietro Paolini, who lived and worked in Lucca in the seventeenth century. It shows a woman of perhaps thirty against a deep black background which lightens to a very dark brown only toward the left-hand side of the painting. She has large, melancholy eyes and wears a dress the color of the night, which does not stand out from the surrounding darkness even by suggestion and is thus really invisible, and yet it is present in every fold and drape of its fabric. She wears a string of pearls around her neck. Her right arm protectively embraces her small daughter, who stands in front of her turning sideways, toward the edge of the picture, but with her grave face, upon which the tears have only just dried, turned toward the observer in a kind of silent challenge. The little girl wears a brick-red dress, and the soldier doll hardly three inches high which she is holding out to us, whether in memory of her father who has gone to war or to ward off the evil eye we may be casting on her, also wears red. I stood in front of this double portrait for a long time, seeing in it, as I thought at the time, an annulment of all the unfathomable misfortune of life.

But what can we know in advance of the course of history, which unfolds according to some logically indecipherable law, impelled forward, often changing direction at the crucial moment, by tiny, imponderable events, by a barely perceptible current of air, a leaf falling to the ground, a glance exchanged across a great crowd of people. Even in retrospect we cannot see what things were really like before that moment, and how this or that world-shaking event came about. The most precise study of the past scarcely comes any closer to the unimaginable truth than, for instance, a far-fetched claim such as I once heard made by an amateur historian called Alphonse Huyghens, who lived in the capital of Belgium and had been pursuing his research on Napoleon for years; according to him, all the cataclysmic events caused by the Emperor of the French in the lands and realms of Europe were to be traced solely to his color blindness, which made him unable to tell red from green. The more blood flowed on the battlefield, this Belgian scholar told me, the greener Napoleon thought the grass was growing.

Personality

Technology, they say, is the changing “nature” of “human” “experience.” Indeed. I would like to see it do so in more amusing ways. What if we were to introduce into our diet a chemical that causes even the slightest traces of piss to emanate a neon orange glow. This would mean that our hands and our clothes would often — just how often would be the mind-boggling thing — have a piss-glow. Gas station rest-rooms would glow so deeply and thoroughly that entering them would be like entering into dream-space. Candy bowls on the counters of Diners — always tinged with a piss-glow. Soon we would come to understand ourselves differently — we would be the always pissing, piss-cleaning, piss-covered, piss-drenched thing. We would be the natural (which is to say, mindless) gatherer of that glow. The flow and the glow of selves would be clearly parallel to the flow and the glow of piss, and we would struggle in one, the other, or both directions. Our inability to establish complete control over said flows would glow — neon orange — and we might learn to accept that glow as our very own. Such acceptance would become either celebration or the dignity of rugged endurance, and in many cases we would not be able to say which. Concurrently, of course, there would always be the mainstream, those who struggle nervously to lack in the glow, and achieve, here and there, that lack.

I called the routine “The Man with the Glass Head.” It was a weird performance where Peter Lorre, believing anyone could see into his glass head, was going to the electric chair. The lights came down. I did what I do best: pure Rickles, making it up as I went along. I took on Lorre’s voice. I grabbed my head and started yelling, “Warden, stop looking into my head! Stop looking into my head!” The audience was stunned. But after a few seconds, they broke into applause. They couldn’t believe I had the courage to try and sell dramatics in a strip club. To anyone who’s interested in how I developed my style.

A few times I found pleasure in the city. . . .

I remember one such encounter not for the sex we had, but because of a sound that came into the room as we made love, the sound of car engines revving over and over. I asked my partner — I remember a dark-haired man in his thirties with white skin — what the noise was. He brought me to the window to show me the police station opposite and the cars outside, driverless, but still revving, with wires going from the engines to the basement of the building. They need power, he said, but I still did not understand. They need extra power for the cattle prods, he said. I still do not know if what he said was true, if that was one of the centers in the city to which people were taken, and if we fondled each other and came to orgasm within moments of each other to the sound of revving cars which gave power to the instruments of torture. It made no difference then, because I did not pay much attention to what he said, and I remember the pleasure of standing at the window with him, my hands running down his back, more than anything else.

. . . the world had been newly created, and everything was so basic that nothing needed explanation. If you wanted milk, you simply milked a goat and drank; you’d say “horse,” then mount it and ride away; you’d contemplate “evil” and Satan would appear and convince you of the beauty of murdering your own father.

Why, Petruccio is coming in a new hat and an old jerkin, a pair of old breeches thrice-turned, a pair of boots that have been candle-cases, one buckled, another laced, an old rusty sword ta’en out of the town armoury with a broken hilt, and chapeless, with two broken points, his horse hipped, with an old mothy saddle and stirrups of no kindred, besides, possessed with the glanders, and like to mose in the chine, troubled with the lampass, infected with the fashions, full of windgalls, sped with spavins, rayed with the yellows, past the cure of fives, stark spoiled with the staggers, begnawn with the bots, weighed in the back and shoulder-shotten, near-legged before and with a half-cheeked bit and a headstall of sheep’s leather which, being restrained to keep him from stumbling, hath been often burst and know repaired with knots, one girth six times pieced, and a woman’s crupper of velour which hath two letters for her name fairly set down in studs, and here and there pieced with packthread.

I should mention that this beautiful volume, which was such a pleasure to hold, began its tale with a dazzling abruptness, as if the reader had just emerged from a dark tunnel into another world, a perfect world whose ground was a hot white plain of salt upon which the words lived their eternal lives.

I need say nothing about the plot, whose involutions (it’s a tale of obsessive love) progressed like the nested terraces on a Buddha-studded tower which narrows perfectly into nothingness. Once I visited a certain wat in Bangkok where although the day was exhaustingly hot and bright I grew enthralled by the sensation of wandering on a high place somewhere in the mist, a plateau exploding with ornately weathered crags. There were many towers, just as in this world there are many perfect books.

It is difficult, out of friendship and care, to find details disappearing into details rather than into meanings.

. . . it is certainly not in the interest of good design to say “Make love not war.”

There are, however, people who are against war. They are not willing to be killed by rockets (although, when asked, they cannot say what kind of death they prefer). Such people are prepared, in the interest of peace, to accept bad design. They are downright pleased if rockets, paper-knives and arrow-heads get worse and worse and thus become less and less elegant, less and less convenient. They are good people in a totally different sense of “goodness” from the one intended. These good people are good for nothing but for simply existing. They are anti-designers.

Admittedly, when you see them at home using the pavement designed in spite of them, one gets the impression that they nevertheless do design things: jewelry, for instance. But they cannot keep this up for very long because one cannot “make love” forever without lapsing into “making war.” One cannot at the same time be “good in oneself” and “good for something”; one has the make the choice to be either a saint or a designer.