THE HORSEWIFE IN HISTORY
FIRST MOP, 4000 BC
THE GARLIC PRESS
ACCEPT ROLE, PSYCHOLOGIST URGES
"I AM being followed by a nun in a black station wagon." Bill wiped his hands on the seat covers. "I cannot fall apart now. Not yet. I must hold the whole thing together. Everything depends on me. I must conceal my wounds, contrive to appear unwounded. They must not know. The bloody handkerchief stuffed under the shirt. Now she signals a right turn. Now I will make a left turn. That way I shall escape her. But she makes a left turn too. There it is. That does it. She is following me. Following the spiritual spoor of my invisible wounds. Is she the great black horse for which I have waited all my days, since I was twelve years old? The great devouring black horse? Of course not. Dont be ridiculous, Bill. You are behaving like a fool. She is nothing like a black horse. She is simply a woman in a black dress, in a black station wagon. That she signals for a right turn and then makes a left turn means nothing at all. Dont think about it. Think about leadership. No, dont think about leadership. If you hang a right at this corner. . . No, she hung a right too. Dont think about it. Dont think. Turn on the radio. Think about what the radio is telling you. Think about the various messages to be found there."
THE HORSEWIFE: A CRITICAL STUDY
HOGO was reading a book of atrocity stories. "God, what filthy beasts we were," he thought, "then. What a thing it must have been to be a Hun! A filthy Boche! And then to turn around and be a Nazi! A gray vermin! And today? We co-exist, we co-exist. Filthy deutschmarks! That so eclipse the very mark and texture. . . That so eclipse the very mark and bosom of a man, that vileness herself is vilely oerthrown. That so enfold. . . That so enscrap. . . Bloody deutschmarks! that so enwrap the very warp and texture of a man, that what we cherished in him, vileness, is. . . Dies, his ginger oerthrown. Bald pelf! that so ingurgitates the very wrack and mixture of a man, that in him the sweet stings of vileness are, all ginger fled, he. . ." Henry walked home with his suit in a plastic bag. He had been washing the buildings. But something was stirring in him, a wrinkle in the groin. He was carrying his bucket too, and his ropes. But the wrinkle in his groin was monstrous. "Now it is necessary to court her, and win her, and put on this clean suit, and cut my various nails, and drink something that will kill the millions of germs in my mouth, and say something flattering, and be witty and bonny, and hale and kinky, and pay her a thousand dollars, all just to ease this wrinkle in the groin. It seems a high price." Henry let his mind stray to his groin. Then he let his mind stray to her groin. Do girls have groins? The wrinkle was still there. "The remedy of Origen. That is still open to one. That door, at least, has not been shut."
BILL has developed a shamble. The consequence, some say, of a lost mind. But that is not true. In the midst of so much that is true, it is refreshing to shamble across something that is not true. He does not want to be touched. But he is entitled to an idiosyncrasy. He has earned it by his vigorous leadership in that great enterprise, his life. And in that other great enterprise, our love for Snow White. "This thing is damaging to all of us," Bill noted. "We were all born in National Parks. Clem has his memories of Yosemite, inspiring gorges. Kevin remembers the Great Smokies. Henry has his Acadian songs and dances, Dan his burns from Hot Springs. Hubert has climbed the giant Sequoias, and Edward has climbed stately Rainier. And I, I know the Everglades, which everybody knows. These common experiences have yoked us together forever under the red, white and blue." Then we summoned up all our human understanding, from those regions where it customarily dwelt. "Love has died here, apparently," Bill said significantly, "and it is our task to infuse it once again with the hot orange breath of life. With that in mind I have asked Hogo de Bergerac to come over and advise us on what should be done. He knows the deaths of the heart, Hogo does. And he knows the terror of aloneness, and the rot of propinquity, and the absence of grace. He should be here tomorrow. He will be wearing blueberry flan on his buttonhole. That is how we are to know him. That and his vileness."
WE opened eggs to let the yellow out. Bill was worried about the white part, but we told him not to worry about that. "People do it every day," Edward said. The giant meringue rose to the ceiling. We were all in it. Dan turned off the television set. "You cant cook according to what that woman says. She never has the proportions right, and I dont think there ought to be cannabis in this meringue anyhow." "I just dont like your world," Snow White said. "A world in which such things can happen." We gave her the yellows, but she still wasnt satisfied. Its easy enough to motivate policemen if you give them votes and scooters to ride about on, but soldiers are a little more difficult. More soldiers. Cash their checks. Just because they are soldiers is no reason for not cashing their checks. Philippe laid down his M-16, his M-21, his M-2 and his fully automatic M-9. Then he laid down his M-10 and his M-34 with its mouthfed adapter. Then he laid down his M-4 and his M-3. It made a pile, that hardware. "Well I suppose that identifies you," the girl behind the wall said. Then she gave him his money, and gave the other men their money too. We were amazed that the performance was allowed to continue. There were a lot of things against the governmentin it. We gave Snow White the yellows in an aluminum container. But she still wasnt satisfied. That is the essential point here, that she wasnt satisfied. I dont know what to do next.
THE PLASTIC BAG
INTRODUCTION OF BON AMI, 1892
THE HORSEWIFE: A SPIRITUAL PORTRAIT
"HELLO Hogo." "Hello chaps." "The floor is yours Hogo." "Well chaps first Id like to say a few vile things more or less at random, not only because it is expected of me but also because I enjoy it. One of them is that this cunt youve got here, although Ive never seen her with my own eyes, is probably not worth worrying about. Now excuse me if Im treading on your toes in this matter. God knows I love a female gesture as much as any man, as when, for instance, sitting in the front seat of a car in their bikini, they kind of shrug themselves into a street shift before getting out, or while the car door is open but they havent gotten out yet; and if you happen to be looking out of a window of a house near the curb, or if you can move your window nearer the curb, you can sometimes see one sitting in her absolute underwear, in the hot weather, and then going through that shrugging business, and sort of hitching the shift up over her hips, and then shaking her head to get the hair to fall the right way, and all that. And all this is the best that has been thought and said, in my opinion, or ever will be thought and said, for the only thing worth a rap in the whole world is the beauty of women, and maybe certain foods, and possibly music of all kinds, especially cheap music such as that furnished at parades by for instance the St. Pulaski Tatterdemalion Band of Orange, New Jersey, which can reduce you to tears, in the right light, by speaking to you from the heart about your land, and what a fine land it is, and that it is your land really, and my land, this land of ours -- that particular insight can chill you, rendered by a marching unit. But I wander. The main thing I wanted to point out is that the world is full of cunts, that they grow like clams in all quarters of the earth, cunts as multitudinous as cherrystones and littlenecks burrowing into the mud in all the bays of the world. The point is that the loss of any particular one is not to be taken seriously. She stays with you as long as she can put up with your shit and you stay with her as long as you can put up with her shit. Thats the way it is behind the veil of flummery that usually veils these matters. Now think, I ask you,of all those women who are beyond the moment of splendor. They are depressed. The minister comes to call and recommends to them the things of the spirit, and tells them how the things of the spirit are more durable than the things of the flesh and all that. Well he is entirely correct, they are more durable, but durable is not what we wanted. The terrible poignance of this predicament is not vitiated by the fact that everybody knows it, in the backs of their minds. Ruin of the physical envelope is our great theme here, and if we keep changing girls every four or five years, it is because of this ruin, which I will never agree to, to my dying day. And that is why I keep looking out of the window, and why we all keep looking out of the window, to see what is passing, what has been cast up on the beach of our existence. Because something is always being cast up on that beach, as new classes of girls mature, and you can always get a new one, if you are willing to overlook certain weaknesses in the departments of thought and feeling. But if it is thought and feeling you want, you can always read a book, or see a film, or have an interior monologue. But of course with the spread of literacy you now tend to get girls who have thought and feeling too, in some measure, and some of them will probably belong to the Royal Philological Society or something, or in any case have their own thing, which must be respected, and catered to, and nattered about, just as if you gave a shit about all this blague. But of course we may be different, perhaps you do care about it. Its not unheard of. But my main point is that you should bear in mind multiplicity, and forget about uniqueness. The earth is broad, and flat, and deep, and high. And remember what Freud said."
Ah ah ah ah ah
Emily Dickinson, why have you left me and gone
OXFORD COMPANION TO THE AMERICAN HORSEWIFE
Ill find a way somehow in my lonely room
KEVIN was being "understanding." We spend a lot of our time doing that. And even more of our time, now that we have these problems. "Yes thats the way it is Clem," Kevin said to his friend Clem. "Thats the way it is. You tell it like it is Clem baby." Kevin said a lot more garbage to Clem. Peacocks walked through the yard in their gold suits. "Sometimes I see signs on walls saying Kill the Rich," Clem said. "And sometimes Kill the Rich has been crossed out and Harm the Rich written underneath. A clear gain for civilization I would say. And then the one that says Jean-Paul Sartre Is a Fartre. Something going on there, you must admit. Dim flicker of something. On the other hand I myself have impulses toward violence uneasily concealed. Especially when I look out of the window at the men and women walking there. I see a great many couples, men and women, walking along in the course of a day because I spend so much time, as we all do, looking out of windows to determine what is out there, and what should be done about it. Oh it is killing me the way they walk down the street together, laughing and talking, those men and women. Pushing the pram too, whether the man is doing it, or the woman is doing it. Normal life. And a fine October chill in the air. It is unbearable, this consensus, this damned felicity. When I see a couple fighting I give them a dollar, because fighting is interesting. Thank God for fighting." "Thats true Roger," Kevin said a hundred times. Then he was covered with embarrassment. "No I mean thats true Clem. Excuse me. Roger is somebody else. Youre not Roger. Youre Clem. Thats true, Clem." More peacocks walked through the yard in their splendid plumage.
Ah ah ah ah ah
Ah ah ah ah ah
VIEWS OF THE VENERABLE BEDE
Ah ah ah ah ah
The psychology of Snow White: What does she hope for? "Someday my prince will come." By this Snow White means that she lives her own being as incomplete, pending the arrival of one who will "complete" her. That is, she lives her own being as "not-with" (even though she is in some sense "with" the seven men, Bill, Kevin, Clem, Hubert, Henry, Edward and Dan). But the "not-with" is experienced as stronger, more real, at this particular instant in time, than the "being-with." The incompleteness is an ache capable of subduing all other data presented by consciousness. I dont go along with those theories of historical necessity, which suggest that her actions are dictated by"forces" outside of the individual. That doesnt sound reasonable, in this case. Irruption of the magical in the life of Snow White: Snow White knows a singing bone. The singing bone has told her various stories which have left her troubled and confused: of a bear transformed into a kings son, of an immense treasure at the bottom of a brook, of a crystal casket in which there is a cap that makes the wearer invisible. This must not continue. The behavior of the bone is unacceptable. The bone must be persuaded to confine itself to events and effects susceptible of confirmation by the instrumentarium of the physical sciences. Someone must reason with the bone.
FAMOUS HORSEWIVES
HORSEWIVES ON HORSEWIFERY
VIEWS OF ST. AUGUSTINE
EMERSON ON THE AMERICAN HORSEWIFE
Emily Dickinson, dont you know what we could have meant
Im not her cup of tea Im afraid
