encyclopedia of the second hand: breathing (notes)

 When, like another Hans Christian Anderson, I imagine a stone's experience, I imagine a little person in the stone.  I populate the world with little persons, all of them breathing. If there were such a thing as a infant metaphysics, guess at the way the world would be. The world would be  filled with little peoples.  A crowd of atomic human figures.

 A stone’s experience of breath.

When I was in high school, I was on two teams. I was on tennis, and I was on cross country. I ran, for a while, every morning.  This was after I had been suspended from school for stealing a van. It was Mikey McCall’s father’s van, and since Mikey was in on it, Mikey’s father didn’t press charges. Still, it was a lot of trouble, and though I felt that stealing the van had definitely been worth it, since I got to see some country, hang out in Austin, which is where Wilburn, the other guy I stole the van with, wanted to go, and meet this girl, I felt like I better straighten up a little. Dad and Mom were both very pissed off. They kept telling me they couldn’t believe that I’d do something so stupid. I wanted to repeat a few of the stories Dad told me about his adolescence, what he and Uncle Henry did, but I didn’t, partly because that really hadn’t influenced me at all. I just wanted to do it, and I knew what the consequences were going to be. So I really tried to get into cross country as a sort of penance.  I’d been a halfassed runner before, missing practices and always coming in around the middle, but it was in cross country that I met Wilbern, who was an excellent runner, and I felt that, now that we’d had this van experience together, I ought to try to come up to his level on the running front, which was obviously how Wilbern was going to get through college. They had let Wilbern choose to get off suspension by doing school good citizen work. That way he didn’t have to miss any of the meets. I missed most of them.   I made it my goal that summer - I was seventeen - to come in at least fourth in one of the meets in the fall.    

 I felt good and military adhering to the discipline I’d outlined for myself. I felt like Mishima or something. That summer I read a biography of Mishima and Sun and Steel,  his essays, which I found a used paperback of in the Dekalb Junior College Bookstore, and I felt that here was a darkly attractive figure who understood balancing the death drive against the life drive, and how that required a regime of spiritual and bodily exercises. So ‘military’, which had always meant something bad to me - stupidity, blind obediance, repression- meant something different for me that summer.  It meant strength, purity, will.  I’d get up and get out around six, and I’d run my route. I went down from our court into Gladstone Drive, turned left on Verona Park and turned left on Shiloh Mill, ran a half mile down to the Shiloh Mill Baptist church, ran across the church grounds, jumped the creek that separated their property from the Salem Golf course, ran in the path that snaked among the pine trees around the course, hit Dial drive, then took Naman’s Way back to Verona Park, which I crossed and went back to my subdivision.  I concentrated, as Coach Fregee told us to, on breathing, the in and out, and I also tried to hold a certain balance within myself of energies, thinking that I was being very samurai.  I liked to hold back and hold back the moment when I finally had to mouth breath, as opposed to nose breath, then I’d coordinate my rhythm to the way my lungs felt, thinking of them as two living animals inside me.  My goal was to prolong nose breathing while I picked up my pace a little more each day, so I tried to cut off mouth breathing as soon as it occurred.  The first incident of mouth breathing, I’d change my pace, get back to nose breathing, then speed up. I concentrated just on these things, I tried to keep my mind from straying beyond the confines of my immediate body situation. This, too, I thought of as somehow very Zen. I would concentrate sometimes so much on my body I’d feel like I was going cross eyed.  

I’d chosen my course to give me a variety of landscape. Long ago, during a phase in the six grade when I went around with an almanac and was always pulling it out to mull over random and insignificant statistics, I learned that Atlanta was exactly 1,050 feet up in the air (although, admittedly, I wondered whether they had just averaged out heights and depths, or whether that was the highest point, or what, since obviously there were dips and rises all over the city). That meant that Gladstone, as a suburb,  was about that high or higher.   Coach Fregee, who came from Chicago, said that the times in Chicago were almost better on the average by a minute than the one’s in Atlanta, because of the altitude difference. So I was aware of that.  I turned left on Verona Park each morning because I wanted to hit the hill there as soon as possible, thinking that it was sort of a merit. I was really convinced that I gained virtue every day just by making my body do things that put stress upon it, that required will on my part. Although I knew enough to see that there was a paradox here - I asserted my will over my body in order, eventually, to submerge myself in a balance of energies. The threshold to that energy situation was shucking the idea of will, or of individuality, or of the possessive “my” , as in “my body”. There was only the balance, the weighing of light and darkness, the hard muscle, the readiness to use it. It was like I was going to become a gunslinger, instead of a mediocre cross country runner.

   I liked to compare, while I was running, the effort it took me to get up the hill to getting up it, as I had done hundreds of times, in the car. It was then that I discovered what I didn’t like about cars, what in fact I still don’t like. In the car, I was divorced from the power of the hill.  Now that power, I thought, was in the set and of the type of the power I wanted to feel in my body. When there is  nothing resistant about the hill, the power there is broken, but one’s body’s power is injured too. The car is never quite as germane to one’s  body’s issues as the hill, the valley, the stream, the meadow. It was a matter of  exposure, I thought. To put myself against the hill, to bend to it, to experience it and remember it in my legs and thighs and with my lungs, that seemed to me a human necessity. It was taken away by the car, you were stripped of your own  power, thinking that power was at your fingertips. Trading in muscle for speed.

I was against it, at the time.

You know that when you go down this slope, you will be traveling at a sort of frightening speed. The wheels will whip around so fast that if you apply the brakes suddenly, the bike will probably flip over. Not that this has ever happened. Also, the pedals will go around so fast that it will be impossible for you to connect their motion with your will. Your bike is your horse, and sometimes horses are wild and you can't bridle them. What you will end up doing is taking your feet off the pedals, and you will scream. The scream will be like the scream of a brave: WOOOOOOOO.

The rush down the hill isn't just for fun, though, because you want the impetus of that speed to help you up the opposite slope. If you started from a dead stop at the bottom of the hill, you would never make it. The mass of the hill over your head is in itself enough to take the fiber out of you, enough to tire you, you just have to look at it and you will, as if defeated, dismount, as though the hill had almost toppled over on you. The thing to do, then, is not to look at the whole thing, but to stare at the space just before your front wheels, so that the hill is put together increment by increment in your consciousness. Soon you have slowed down to the point where you are only moving forward in laborious spurts. You have to put all your weight on the up pedal to force it down, you feel your leg as a lever, a primitive machine no different, except in its being flesh and a part of you, from the components of the bike itself. And your breath comes in pants, your breath, that immaterial thing, suddenly has weight and a rudimentary shape in your throat.  It is like you are having to swallow fistfuls of air, and having to breath out fistfuls of air. The image of the fist is appropriate because it is as if something was clenched in your throat, something was working against you. Near the top of the hill, your breath comes out punchily. You punch the air into the air, and the air hits back. At the top of the hill, you run out of air to punch with. You are out of breath. Being out of breath is sort of like being out of gas, which happened once when you were with Mom going someplace. The car suddenly lost its dreamy power, its seamless flow, and died, and Mom had to guide the thing, suddenly all dead metal and rubber, to the side of the road. When you run out of breath, you have to stop, you have to get over to the side of the road and breath heavily, in great pants, like a dog, your mouth open and your tongue flapping. 

Now you are in high school, and you are running because you are part of the cross country team.  You are running down a road that follows a railroad track, you are running, or at least this is your plan, as far as Stone Mountain, and then you are turning around and running back home. The street that follows the railroad track is undeveloped, so that older houses with big lawns line it, and it is shady and quiet.

You are trying to breath right.

You are trying to breath with a certain rhythm.  It is as if breath were a scarce commodity that you were doling out, like bread in a famine. You think okay, I'll take a breath now, and you take it.  You want to luxuriate on this air, you want to let it go deep into you, and then you want to breath out. Breath out now, you say., and you want, for a moment, to be balanced on the emptiness of your lungs, the vacuum within you, rippled only by the movements of your heart. Your legs, white, skinny grasshopper's legs, pump up and down, up and down, making a patter upon the surface of the road, and your ideal is that there will be a correspondence between the pace you achieve and the breaths that you take, that eventually you will find a magical balance, one that will allow you to run forever.  The point is to be able to notch up your speed, so that you can increase your pace until you are doing as well as, say, Wilbur, the star of your team, for long stretches of time. Of course you don't expect that you will keep up with him forever, he is the kind of athlete who, just when you are losing your grasp, or better, your gasp, finds that extra bit of speed. What keeps you back is that you lose the crucial link between breath and motion when you speed up too much. Your breathing goes to hell, it takes on a panic rhythm, it stampedes out of you, your heart and your lungs throb like stricken, epileptic creatures, like a cattle drive gone awry.  Really, you still have that bestiary way of thinking of parts of your body, as if your physical being were a zoo of different, separate creatures, the heart in it's cage, the lungs in the lung house, the legs roaming around in the leg area like gazelles, etc.

You speed up a little, you think you can comfortably pick up the pace this afternoon.

At a certain point, you couldn't speed up any more. When you make a dash, go go go, trying to push past your man from another high school the last one hundred yards, and you pass the finish line, your legs wobbly at this point, when it is over  and you stop, your heart will operate like a overworked pump. Imagine an abandoned pump in a sinking ship.  Maybe when you die, if you die of a heart attack, that is what it is like. You will lean over, put your hands on your knees, and try to reassemble your breath, try to steady your legs, try to come back to your throat and chest, try to cool down. Your face burns. Your breath scrapes out from your throat, the sound of it will be in your ears.  A little body of breath, a homunculus of air, climbs out of your body through your open mouth, and has to breath in, to fill itself with its blood element, and climb back into your body again.

You are on top of Julia . You look down on her face, you look into her eyes.  You lower your face, you hang there right above her nose, your face is a dirigible.  The you lower yourself and your lips graze her cheeks.  Your lips clasp her lips.

You are panting.  Julia is panting.  She rocks forward, she arches a bit, she brings you into her.  It is a question of magnitudes and proportions, of too little and too much, and in your panting delight you are thinking that your stuff is just the thing for her, for her thingness, for the thing between her thighs. Traditionally, a nothing, but this is another delusion. Another tricky, stupid construct. It is an inlet, an ocean, a freshet. The thing between her thighs is the crux between being in a thing and being, for a moment, out of a thing, the thing. You are emanating a honey-heavy power. You are in that portion of fucking, it is the power trip part of it, and when you look for a comparison what you imagine is that you are watching some heavy drop of rain dribble slowly down a window pane, and that its very sluggish, zigzagging path leaves a slightly glistening residue, and then you imagine that you are in the drop, that it is enormous, and that it trembles with power, the surface tension of it is the tight quivering coherence of your sex, and the moment of really dissolving, really falling, really following gravity and fate, is musically upon you, the culminating flourish.

You seem to have forgotten air.

No, it is in my mind, still. Air. Breathing, panting. I want to show you in  different situations in which air becomes a concrete concern.  How often, after all, do you breath during a day? Your traffic in air is continuous.  It isn't asthmatically impeded, and thank God, nothing is wrong with your lungs. It is a clear current running in and out of you, it is your invisible and intimate attachment to the world, you are part of this river, but unlike your bloodstream this river is not self contained, not solid state, but your connection to a larger system.

You pant, then, your mouth on Julia's shoulder.  You are half biting her, half drooling. Your body jerks, it shudders and you imagine a serpent, full of coils, rippling slowly out of them, showing itself in almost it's real length, an enormous, regal beast. And what else? Come now. The bluntness of skin and flesh, its final bumbling. If only your dick could think a little more interestingly, give you the last shred of information about its mission, its sensation.  That would be nice. You feel that everything was there, approximately, but that there should be more... more color. It should be an historically important thing, this fuck, like the veil in the temple being rent, but the moment passes in which it could be, and it isn't, it is just satisfaction. And then you become aware of your shared breathing.  You are both panting and gulping, and the first of the sensations that returns to you, after all that rumpus,  is how hot the breath is on your face, her breath, mixed with a sort of cooing sound she is making, a baby baby, oh yes sound, and how heavily you are panting yourself. Now this is surprising, or at least a bit surprising, because it isn't as if you were doing anything that required lifting or running, you weren't working, and yet you are both in a sweat, both out of breath. So what was it, exactly, that you were exercising?  What has been riding you, what in the world has gotten you to this point?

encyclopedia of the second hand: breakfast

1.

 Mom has to hurry in the morning, she has to make the coffee, get you up, slice the grapefruit, put the flakes from the silo-round oatmeal box in the boiling water, hunt up the milk, take down variegated boxes of cereal (the Captain Crunch, the Fruit Loops, the Rice Krispies) from the cabinet above the stove and set them on the table. She has to put the bread in the toaster, pour the coffee, set a place for Dad who comes into the kitchen smelling spicy from the white bottle of Old Spice. You’d rather he used the other kind where in the ad you slap it on, Slap! Slap!, and then all these girls in bikinis come out of everywhere, but how would Mom make that much breakfast at such short notice? Mom says Jack sit down when he peers into the refrigerator and says Liz, I’m going to clean this out for you tonight, holy Toledo. Mom says there is nothing the matter with it when Dad gets the orange juice in the plastic pitcher and lifts the top and smells it, sniff, how long have we had this orange juice. Then Dad says where’s Street?          

The cereal boxes are grouped in a sort of circle on the table.  The different colors remind you of birds in the bird book your Aunt May bought you for your eleventh birthday.  The blue of the Rice Krispies reminds you of the blue of the Indigo Bunting. The blue is background for the cartoon of the three baker elves, who you dislike because of their hair. That way they are depicted with their blond hair coming out from under their bakers hats in a bob and sweeping towards the right, it is really queer.  It was something they did to boys in the fifties, making them do that to their hair. Dennis the Menace has that same sweep of his hair.  You hate Dennis.  And the thirties, too, you’ve seen pictures of Dad when he was little, he looks queer, too, with long ringlets.  A Buster Brown. God.  Also you don’t like the way the Rice Krispies boys smile, their smiles are sort of monkeyish. The red of the Captain Crunch box (whose physiognomy, blue admiral’s cocked hat, drooping white moustaches, you do approve of) is like the red of the Scarlet Tanager. The Fruit Loops box already has a bird on it, a Toucan.  Although the bird looks to you like a Great Auk, which is extinct. Sometimes, though, they find animals they thought were extinct.  You plan on finding a surviving Great Auk someday when you are older and can go on expeditions to Labrador.

Somehow, in between all the things Mom is doing she is drinking a cup of coffee (last night’s coffee warmed up - Jack gets the first cup from the fresh pot) and listening to Paul Harvey’s Elmer Gantry tones on the radio. She  spoons out pink pithy bits from a half of a grapefruit as she goes back and forth from the table in the dining room to the kitchen, listening to this in from Los Angeles and missing the middle and ...the jury awarded her one million dollars... Her grapefruit gets all mined out until there are only a few seams of pink attached to the inner wall of the fruit.  There it sits on one of the butter plates next to a grapefruit spoon - which is a thin spoon, with a serrated scoop - in the sink, where Mom will discover it this evening and throw it into the garbage. 

Now it used to be that she would not finish the grapefruit until after she'd driven you to the busstop.  Then she'd make herself some more coffee, put another slice of bread in the toaster, ease into her day. You have a picture of what this looked like from when you were home sick. If you weren’t too sick, there was something slightly romantic about staying home and lying on the sofa in the living room in your pyjamas and spying on Mom. The house was slightly different, then, the atmosphere in the house was slightly unfamiliar, charged with an unsettling exoticism. You used to have a daydream that you would go into Dita’s room (which Dita only used when she was home from college) on a day like this and find it hung with tapestries and lounged around in by harem girls  wearing semi-diaphonous pantsuits. On those days you saw how Mom changed from the nightgown at around nine o'clock, it was when she would say to you time for me to get moving. She'd clean the kitchen, she'd say let's go out to eat lunch, what do you say, honey? She'd take a load of clothes out of the dryer and set up the ironing board, hey I found twenty-five cents in the wash, you boys (meaning Dad and you) never take the change out of your pockets and you know what that means, and you is it mine and she no it’s mine now, finders keepers.  She'd watch tv, ironing.  But she has a new routine, one that has been going on for four months, ever since you started sixth grade. Mom has to  be at work just like Jack, she says she's a working girl. So that means a blue dress and red high heels, a red dress and blue high heels, no the blue dress and the blue high heels,  that means into the bathroom (Jack saying this is getting like Grand Central Station!) and when you get in there not only is there the fecal smell and the aftershave smell, there’s the perfume smell and the hairspray smell, and all this with another cup of coffee, which maybe will be there next to the bathroom sink when you get home in the afternoon, a lipstick lip crescent on the lip of the cup, as you look down into it your eyes, blacker pools in that black, oily surface, (you love this, you love all the surfaces in which you, in whatever form of distortion, are mirrored - the scoops of spoons, the windows of parked cars, the lid of a pot)  reflected in the little remnant left there.  You edge into the bathroom  to brush your teeth, foam dripping out of your mirror-mouth in hideous smile, maybe you are dying of... of rabies, what would you do if you had rabies? (spit).  Well you’d race around and be afraid of water, whenever you saw or touched water (your hand out under the stream from the faucet) you’d immediately shudder, your hand jerking out and splashing water, Mom saying Street! I don’t have time for any of your nonsense this morning, you’ve dripped water on my... and out she goes, switching to and we have to get going soon, hurry up, we have to go go go.  You don’t have rabies yet.  If you ever do have rabies, and just now you notice a little caterpillar of toothpaste got onto your shirt and you take a towel and carefully get it off, it will be because of Norman’s dog, which bites. 

  

encyclopedia of the second hand: borrower

BORROWERS  Roger Gathman

                              1.

     The  idea that there is some directing  homunculus  in

your  brain  has  always struck me as  the  most  poetically

accurate  image of the mind.  Sherlock Holmes' gray  matter,

which competes with it, doesn't really capture the image  of

how  the  mental is a personality, a style. Gray  matter  is

sponge, really, fog, obscurity, dirt on the windshield,  the

mop's  residue  in a bucket of water.  When we  couple  gray

with  life  we imagine something tentacled and  viscous  and

probably  viscious, a squid gliding stealthily  through  sex

and  metaphysics,  or  perhaps through  the  obscure  London

streets,  stalking victims.  Does it matter that the  victim

be  a barmaid or the butcher of one?  No, it is gray  matter

engaged  with  gray  matter, squid  against  squid  at  some

unutterable depth, some breathless and amoral depth, and  we

can only see the dejecta of the loser as so much  pollution,

fit for the crematorium.  But not intended for any  glorious

resurrection, surely.  No, Christ never died for squids.

                              2.

    Dita tells you about borrowers.  Dita is seventeen, and

uapproachably  distant  sometimes,  a  hostile  tower  on  a

darkling  plain  bristling  with  archers.   You  will   say

something and zap, the shaft is unloosed and there you  are. 

Hey,  and  you  are only a kid, you  are  ten  years  almost

younger.   For  instance,  when she goes  to  her  room  and

listens  to her records, all you can do is sit  outside  her

door.  It is shut.  You listen to the music. Even though she

is  supposedly babysitting you.  Even though you  know  that

that  means  she is supposed to be there, like what  if  you

decided  to  plug  in the toaster and put  down  the  little

handle  thing  and stick a fork in one of the  slots.   What

then. Why, you'd be electrocuted right in the kitchen and it

would  be  Dita's  fault, since she  was  listening  to  her

records, right? Mom would come home and you'd be there,  her

son, looking like toast, black all over. Toast in the middle

of  the  floor!  Mom would say my son is  toast.   And  then

she'd  have to kick Dita out of the house for murdering  her

brother.

                             

encyclopedia of the second hand: Arrogance

Arrogance                                                                           

                      

                              1.

     Sometimes  a  desire  will  detach  itself  from   you.

Sometimes a  desire will become hard, impervious,  separate,

like a ball, a  calculus, a cyst, and lay in you, automatic,

wiggling its legs around like a dying bug.  That is what you

feel in the nerve, that bug s movement.  It makes you sweat. 

You  say  to  yourself I don t want to  obey.   You  say  to

yourself  I won t obey.  Your internal dialogue sounds  like

the  usual  script, the kind of thing that goes  on  in  the

minds   of  criminals  and  prophets,  the  merry  band   of

exhibitionists, voyeurs, addicts, beggars, sniffers,  heads,

fetishists,  collectors, gamblers, veterans of  suicide  and

moral cretins of all types. From Isaiah to Jack the  Ripper,

from  Rimbaud to Gary Gilmore. Archetypically it is  the  B-

movie mad scientist shadowed by his gibbering assistant, and

then  there's always the sacred horror movie in  the  serial

killer's  head.   Not  that for a second  you  are  in  that

league.  But you have intimations of that mania,  sometimes. 

You  look back at certain points in your life and shudder. 

You ll have five minutes panic. Because there s nothing you

could have  done about it, that bug kept wiggling its  legs.

You  might say why am I here when you know why, the bug  had

gotten  you  to go, you don t want to admit it.  All  a  big

mistake  you  say.  Afterwards you say why do I  keep  doing

these things, the horror, the horror, out damned spot,  when

you know about the bug good and well. The bug just keeps  on

dying, spastic, in the far reaches of the enormous nerve.  A

nerve like a hospital corridor.

     Okay, so you ve had that feeling before, it makes  your

stomach  hurt, you keep walking hoping it will go away,  you

get  in  a  car and drive and try to  listen  to  the  radio

thinking that if you don t think  you won t think about  it,

if  you drain the ocean you kill the fish. But that  doesn't

work,  of course, the bug is too stupid to be  tricked  like

that,  the  bug has no attention span so to speak,  the  bug

only  has its instinct. What you want to do is step  on  it,

crush it, then wipe it off the bottom of your shoe, all that

compact life popped.  You d like to see that little staining

spot of bug juice, death s watermark.  But you can t do  it. 

You are that bug.

                              2.

     When  self went off to college his choice was  dictated

partly by the urge to escape, get away from Atlanta and from

his  parents  with adolescent angel wings,  as  he  imagined

himself,  long  blondish hair and slender  hips,  a  Blakean

outlaw,  and divided elementally from the  capitalist  beast

around  him.  Dedicated to failure and  failure's  distance,

that most important of high school discoveries, oh yeah, his

own  distance, like Billy the Kid discovering  the  trigger,

dedicated to whatever curse it was (hoping it was a curse, a

palpable  difference) that seemed the freshet in his  blood. 

Most of his friends at Gladstone High were going to  Athens,

which seemed cool enough, with its camp Confederate trumpery

of white columns and shady porticos, self had cruised around

the  town and eaten burgers with his friends where you  were

supposed  to eat burgers and snuck in and had a  beer  where

you  were  supposed to sneak in and have a  beer,  gleefully

flashing your fake ID in that hangdog teenage way, and  then

the tumultuous drive back to Atlanta, all of you drunk. Self

wanted  autre pays, autre moeurs, which he thought he d  get

in Austin. He’d been there, of course. He’d run away at seventeen,

in a van stolen by a friend from the friend’s father, and they’d made it

to Austin. He’d already met Julia. He’d had a vision of himself and Julia

making the scene. They’d talked on the phone, late at night, when his

parents were asleep.  Mark was the one who finally turned him on to the

idea of going to Austin rather than Julia coming to Athens.

This meant a little family crisis, Dad saying why pay  that

much  tuition  and not go to Virginia, which  is  where  Dad

went.    They  even,  father  and  son,  made  a   trip   to

Charlottesville   together,   self  feeling   very   Stephen

Daedelish about Dad s trip down memory lane, even looking up

an English professor, now retired, who faked a memory of Dad

writing some paper for his class on Melville, fall of  1950.

All  too much - Dad, self, this rather dirty, toothless  man

standing  there in his pajamas in the doorway of his  house. 

Hard not to notice that he hadn t buttoned his fly. Then Dad

and self visited Aunt Lane in Maryland, and then came  home. 

All  this by car, which was a little too  much  post-Oedipal

time with Dad.  Once they were home self said sorry.

     Luckily  Mark  had a bundle stashed away  from  selling

pot,  mostly, at school, so he said he d loan self  tuition. 

He  said  we ll get jobs on the side, it isn t going  to  be

that hard. 

     Once  they  got there Dad started  sending  self  three

hundred a month anyway.

                        

                             3.

     Freedom and power - these were the dominant factors  in

your   mood  at  this  time,  more  than  mental  images  or

metaphor. You were  actually living in a zone where you were

up  against  these  things every day. You had  no  time  for

trivia,  for mediocrity, for  idleness disguised  as  making

money,  for  papershuffling, for that hesitancy  before  the

consequences, for all the ebbing hearts of ebbing men.   You

felt  in  consequence  very interesting -  as  if  you  were 

making  extremely important discoveries.  You felt like  you

were  a   celebrity, living  in your little bubble  of  pure

access.  Although  it sounds crazy, you felt like  you  were

plugged  into  other  minds,  that  instinctively  you  were

receiving  from the collective unconscious circa  1982.  For 

this reason, the problem of making money took on for you  an

aspect   which,  at  other  times in  your  life,  has  been

mediated by your less  concentrated, less uniformly pressing

purposiveness.   You   didn't   want   to   dissipate   your

inventiveness,  your purity, your year zero,  in   something

minor,  something merely remunerative. Especially since  you

were a star.  It poses a metaphysical problem - stars depend

on  discovery,  the  moment of discovery is  the  moment  of

stardom, but what is discovered is star quality.  Maybe this

is  the ability to be discovered, the zen like emptiness  of

the  infinite regress, mirrors reflecting mirrors.  But  you

were  there,  you knew it, you felt it,  flashing  from  one

tained  surface to another.  So you needed enough  money  to

eat,  to buy paint with, to get gas for the old truck you  d

bought  so that you could go around collecting junk, and  to

buy  books.  You were reading like a madman in a  Dostoevsky

novel  - that is to say, you took seriously  everything  you

read.   Everything  you  read  was about  you,  it  was  the

criteria.  Toss the book away if it wasn't about you, if  it

wasn't  about you the very ink the book was printed  in  was

the  track  of  some  disinherited turd  and  none  of  your

concern.  You'd stay up until three reading a  chapter  from

one  book  and then dropping it and reading a  chapter  from

another  book.  You let the books pile up in  mounds  around

your  bed. You  were willing to make this money by  cleaning

things, hauling,  digging - anything but such work as  would

abuse your brain with  ineffectual and alien concerns.

     On principle you were - and are still - arrogant  about

not earning a  living. Leona Helmsley said that only  little

people  paid taxes,  and at that time you thought  the  same

thing  about  earning  money.   Power  goes  if  you   don't

establish  in  yourself  certain  standards,   let  yourself

become  arrogant  in certain ways. If  you  start   thinking

there is any justification external to you for what goes  on

inside  you, if you fall for that line, you're fucked.  It's 

like  the relationship between the best punk and the  record 

companies.  It's  a  question  of  who  uses  who.  But  you

understood  that  this power was conditional upon a  certain

humility,  upon a  willingness to beg. To mooch. It was  the

thing  of  the two poles  of abjection  and  sublimity,  the

sanctioned things being  untouchable, unclean. God protected

and  unclean at the same time.  And the difficult  thing  is

that  you were always conscious of the  price one  pays  for

the  things one borrows - a certain loss of   generosity,  a

certain loss of self-esteem, a gradual entanglement  in  the

complex  casuistry  of excuses, of  separations  from  one's 

acts, of disavowals ultimately damaging not so much to one's 

honesty  - which is always an iffy thing you can't  put  too

much stock in, since the thing about being honest is it goes

usually with being dishonest about the function of  honesty,

pretending that it doesn t have any, which is an up the  ass

kind of business - but to one's integrity, one's ability  to

suspend  judgement as to the rightness or wrongness of one's

situation-of- the-moment, and to loop out of oneself,  come

back  to one's  present and familiar courses as a  stranger.

Do you know how important that is?  It is everything to find

yourself  the strange buckskinned man on your own  doorstep,

because  once you loose that art is a career and  you  worry

about NEA grants and other such crap. The whole point is  to

usurp the freedom of a character in the funnies.  Sometimes,

not having  enough money at the month's end to pay my  rent,

you would give Dita or Mom a call and ask for money, or  even,

after events that you are about to describe, Annie.  

Annie, Julia's best friend. 

Oh that bug!

                             

                              4.               

     Self is getting ahead of himself - yes, slipping out of

his  own  grasp  like an eel, like  a  dialectician's  magic

trick, naughty boy. Mentioning Margarete already. That wasn't

in the contract now, was it?

     Self,  in his eighteenth year, went West, like  many  a

young  man  before him - Billy the  Kid,  Huckleberry  Finn,

Rimbaud,  we'll count Rimbaud, an honorable  desperado,  for

whom  West  was any dive on the road, any  travelling  freak

show or graffitied message on a bridge.  Since this time  he

no  longer likes to think of himself as having a home.  Self

thinks in imperial terms about himself,  Emperor Street,  he

thinks of his life as a zone of rule having capitals in  the

full imperial sense, cities into  which the whole essence of

the  culture  is distilled:  Austin, New Orleans,  Santa  Fe. 

This flight west with Mark, all his things and Mark's  piled

in the U-Haul  which trailed behind them, attached to self's

huge  blue Plymouth, signified a shift in the whole  balance

of  self's  life. Self had two guides  then:  Patty  Smith's

music  and Rimbaud's poetry, and he felt  obscurely  aligned

with  the  message there.  Il m'est bien  evident  que  j'ai

toujours ete race inferieure. Time to prove it.