Madonna,
"Informal statements the difficulties of ownership and customs surprises you by being Love exchanges paint it understanding brown boys without a penny I was bandit headgear And the question of yesterday waiting members clinging clear milk of wanting fever hidden melted constabulary extra innings of danger hides under the leg résumé clip chrome method decision of the sacred Rota muscular dream basket gesture Kiss the paper with it tufts more interesting than children painful texture of interesting children offensive candor lesion hanging mirror They only want window boxes moving with clean, careful shrubs Manner in which the penetration was Excited groans stifled under blankets upset A parliament of less-favored glass doors closed extra"
SNOW WHITE received the following note from Fred, tossed over the wall:
BILL has dropped the money. He was carrying the money neatly separated into 10S, 20S, 50s and so forth, a bundle totaling a great deal of money I can tell you that. He was on his way to the vault with the money bundled into his armpit, wrapped in a red towel. Henry had wrapped it in a red towel. Hubert had bundled it into Bills armpit. Dan had opened the door. Kevin had pointed Bill toward the vault. Clem had given Bill a kick in the back, to get him started. And Edward had said, "Dont forget the receipt." Then Bill had moved through the door out into the daylight in the direction of the vault. But somewhere between the house and the vault the money hurled itself out of his armpit in a direction known only to it. "Where is the deposit slip, Bill?" Edward asked, when Bill returned. "Deposit slip?" Bill said. "The bundle," Dan said. "The bundle?" "The money," Kevin said. "The money?" We all rushed out into the air, then, to recover the bundle. But it was nowhere. We retraced Bills steps as best we could. Some of Bills steps led into a bar & grill, The Fire Next Time Bar & Grill. We retraced there a hot pastrami sandwich and eight bottles of Miller High Life. But of the bundle there was not a trace. Luckily the matter is not serious, because we have more money. But the loss of equanimity was serious. We prize equanimity, and a good deal of equanimity leaked away, that day.
FRED
DAX
"ALL right Jane get into the car." "Hogo you are making stains on my new white-duck love seat with pillows of white-on-white Indian crewel!" Jane regarded the large black stains. "Thats all you know Hogo isnt it. How to take a thing that was white, and stain it until it is black. Thats a pretty strong metaphor Hogo of what you would like to do with me, too. I understand. If you think for one moment that your capability of staining the thing you love has escaped me, from the very beginning, you have grossly misperceived our situation. Get out of here Hogo forever!" "All right Jane get into the car."
VAT
Additional reactions to the hair: "To be a horsewife," Edward said. "That, my friends, is my text for today. This important slot in our society, conceptualized by God as very nearly the key to the whole thing as Thomas tells us, has suffered in recent months and in this house a degree of denigration. I have heard it; I have been saddened by it. So I want today if I can to dispel some of these wrong ideas that have been going around, causing confusion and scumming up the face of the truth. The horsewife! The very base-bone of the American plethora! The horsewife! Without whom the entire structure of civilian life would crumble! Without the horsewife, the whole raison dêtre of our existences would be reduced, in a twinkling, to that brute level of brutality for which we so rightly reproach the filthy animals. Were it not for her enormous purchasing power and the heedless gaiety with which it is exercised, we would still be going around dressed in skins probably, with no big-ticket items to fill the empty voids, in our homes and in our hearts. The horsewife! Nut and numen of our intersubjectivity! The horsewife! The chiefest ornament on the golden tree of human suffering! But to say what I have said, gentlemen, is to say nothing at all. Consider now the horsewife in another part of her role. Consider her sitting in her baff, anointing her charms with liquid Cheer and powdered Joy which trouble, confuse and drown the sense in odors. Now she rises chastely, and chastely abrades herself with a red towel. What an endearing spectacle! The naked wonder of it! The blue beauty of it! Now I ask you, gentlemen, what do we have here? Do we have a being which regards itself with the proper amount of self-love? No. No, we do not. Do we have a being which regards itself with the appropriate awe? No. No, we do not. We have here rather a being which regards itself, qua horsewife, with something dangerously akin to self-hatred. That is the problem. What is the solution." Dan spoke up, then. "I could cut your gizzard out, Edward. You are making the whole damned thing immensely more difficult than it has to be. I put it to you that, without your screen of difficulty-making pseudo-problems, the whole damned thing can be resolved very neatly, in the following way. Now, what do we apprehend when we apprehend Snow White? We apprehend, first, two three-quarter-scale breasts floating toward us wrapped, typically, in a red towel. Or, if we are apprehending her from the other direction, we apprehend a beautiful snow-white arse floating away from us wrapped in a red towel. Now I ask you: What, in these two quite distinct apprehensions, is the constant? The factor that remains the same? Why, quite simply, the red towel. I submit that, rightly understood, the problem of Snow White has to do at its center with nothing else but red towels. Seen in this way, it immediately becomes a non-problem. We can easily dispense with the slippery and untrustworthy and expensive effluvia that is Snow White, and cleave instead to the towel. That is my idea, gentlemen. And I have here in this brown bag. . . I have taken the liberty of purchasing. . . here, Edward, here is your towel. . . Kevin. . . Clem. . ." Chang watched sourly. That was the trouble with being a Chinese. Too much detachment. "I dont want a ratty old red towel. I want the beautiful snow-white arse itself!"
EQUANIMITY
THE bishop in his red mantlepiece strode forward. "Yes, we are in a terrible hurricane here," he acknowledged to the wrecked cries of the survivors. "If we can just cross that spit of land there" (gesture with fingers, glitter of episcopal rings) "and get to that harlot over there" (sweep of arm in white lacy alb) "pardon I meant hamlet, we can perhaps find shelter against this particular vicissitude sent by God to break our backs for our sins." The "flock" moaned. They had been eight days without. . . The sudden pall on the fourth day had been the worst. There was a silence. Silence. Everything silent. Not a sound for six hours. Nothing. "This is the worst," they murmured to one another in sign language, not wanting to. . . break the. . . A few young men of good family crawled away into the night to find help (tingle of mace against bone). The Marchesa de G. had fainted again. Blockflutes were heard. "So this is Spain!" Paul said to himself. "I never thought I would live to see it. It is intelligent of me to hide from the Order here, in the episcopal entourage. And it is intelligent of me to hide from the Order here in this hurricane. So much intelligence! So little of Gods grace!"
EBONY
SNOW WHITE regarded her hair hanging out of the window. "Paul? Is there a Paul, or have I only projected him in the shape of my longing, boredom, ennui and pain? Have I been trained in the finest graces and arts all my life for nothing but this? Is my richly-appointed body to go down the drain, at twenty-two, in this horribly boresome milieu, which even my worst enemi would not wish upon me, if she knew? Of course there is a Paul! That Paul who was a friend of the family, who had, at that point, not yet assumed the glistering mantle of princeliness. There is a Paul somewhere, but not here. Not under my window. Not yet." Snow White looked out of the window, down the hair, at the two hundred citizens on the ground, agape. "Ugh! I wish I were somewhere else! On the beach at St. Tropez, for example, surrounded by brown boys without a penny. Here everyone has a penny. Here everyone worships the almighty penny. Well at least with pennies one knows what they add up to, under the decimal system. No ambiguity there, at least. O Jerusalem, Jerusalem! Thy daughters are burning with torpor and a sense of immense wasted potential, like one of those pipes you see in theoil fields, burning off the natural gas that it isnt economically rational to ship somewhere!"
ASTONISHMENT
THEN we had a fantasy, a fantasy of anger and malevolence. We were dreaming. We dreamed we burned Snow White. Burned is not the right word, cooked is the right word. We cooked Snow White over the big fire, in the dream. You remember the burning scene in Dreyers The Burning of Joan of Art. It was like that, only where Dreyer was vertical, we were horizontal. Snow White was horizontal. She was spitted on a spit (large iron bar). The spit was suspended over the big fire. Kevin threw more wood on the fire, in the dream. Hubert threw more wood on the fire. Bill threw more wood on the fire. Clem basted the naked girl with sweet-and-sour sauce. Dan made the rice. Snow White screamed. Edward turned the crank which made the meat revolve. Was she done enough? She was making a lot of noise. The meat was moving toward the correct color, a brown-red. The meat thermometer registered almost-enough. "Turn the crank Edward," Bill said. Hubert threw more wood on the fire. Jane threw more wood on the fire. The smoke was acrid, as it always is. Antonin Artaud held out a crucifix at the end of a long pole, in the smoke. Snow White asked if we would remove the spit. "It hurts," she said. "No," Bill said. "You are not done yet. It is supposed to hurt." Jane laughed. "Why are you laughing Jane?" "I am laughing because it is not me burning there." "For you," Henry said, "we have the red-hot iron shoes. The plastic red-hot iron shoes." "This has nothing to do with justice," Bill said. "This has to do with animus." We regarded Snow White rotating there, in her pain and beauty, in the dream.
TRIUMPH
Hubert picked up the note in the yard. "What is this note doing here, wrapped about a box of Whitmans chocolates? For whom is it intended? After I have read it, I will know." Silently Hubert opened the box of chocolates. "Should I take one of the ones covered with gold foil, always the tastiest? Or should I instead take one of the plain American ones?" Hubert sat down in the yard and looked into the box, trying to make up his mind.
SELF-REGARD is rooted in breakfast. When you have had it, then lunch seems to follow naturally, as if you owned not only the fruits but the means of production in a large, faux-na?f country. This is doubted only by eccentrics, and on the present occasion their views need not be taken into account. That country in which you are loved for yourself is expanding now with the further development of books, a new kind capable of satisfying the tactile wishes even of old people. Our engineers are at a loss to understand what their engineers have done. Still, insofar as they are trying to sketch future trends, even the most rigid empiricists among them are obliged to make projections, and then plans. Such is the impact of technology upon the fabric of inherited social institutions that breakfast is almost forgotten, in some countries; they paint pictures instead. I read Dampfboots novel although he had nothing to say. It wasnt rave, that volume; we regretted that. And it was hard to read, dry, breadlike pages that turned, and then fell, like a car burned by rioters and resting, wrong side up, at the edge of the picture plane with its tires smoking. Fragments kept flying off the screen into the audience, fragments of rain and ethics. Hubert wanted to go back to the dog races. But we made him read his part, the outer part where the author is praised and the price quoted. We like books that have a lot of dreck in them, matter which presents itself as not wholly relevant (or indeed, at all relevant) but which, carefully attended to, can supply a kind of "sense" of what is going on. This "sense" is not to be obtained by reading between the lines (for there is nothing there, in those white spaces) but by reading the lines themselves -- looking at them and so arriving at a feeling not of satisfaction exactly, that is too much to expect, but of having read them, of having "completed" them. "Please dont talk," Snow White said. "Say nothing. We can begin now. Take off the pajamas." Snow White took off her pajamas. Henry took off his pajamas. Kevin took off his pajamas. Hubert took off his pajamas. Clem took off his pajamas. Dan took off his pajamas. Edward took off his pajamas. Bill refused to take off his pajamas. "Take off your pajamas Bill," Snow White said. Everyone looked at Bills pajamas. "No, I wont," Bill said. "I will not take off my pajamas." "Take off your pajamas Bill," everyone said. "No. I will not." Everyone looked again at Bills pajamas. Bills pajamas filled the room, in a sense. Those yellow crepe-paper pajamas.
"WHAT is that apelike hand I see reaching into my mailbox?" "Thats nothing. Think nothing of it. Its nothing. Its just one of my familiars mother. Dont think about it. Its just an ape thats all. Just an ordinary ape. Dont give it another thought. Thats all there is to it." "I think you dismiss these things too easily Jane. Im sure it means more than that. Its unusual. It means something." "No mother. It doesnt mean more than that. Than I have said it means." "Im sure it means more than that Jane." "No mother it does not mean more than that. Dont go reading things into things mother. Leave things alone. It means what it means. Content yourself with that mother." "Im certain it means more than that." "No mother."
PAUL was explaining music to the French citizens. "When we turn our amplifiers on," he said, "already cant is forming over some peoples minds, like the brown crust on bread, or the silence that crusts over inappropriate remarks. I think there ought to be, and remember Im talking normatively here, I think what ought to obtain is a measure of audacity, an audacity component, such as turning your amplifier up a little higher than anybody elses, or using a fork to pick and strum, rather than a plectrum or the carefully calloused fingertips, or doing something with your elbow, I dont care what, I insist only that it be relevant, in a strange way, to the scene that has chosen to spread itself out before us, the theatre of our lives. And if you other gentlemen will come with me down to the quai, carrying your amplifiers in boxes, and not forgetting the trailing cords, which have to be plugged in, so that we can turn on. . ."
BLAGUE
Lack of reaction to the hair: Dan sat down on a box, and pulled up more boxes for us, without forcing us to sit down on them, but just leaving them there, so that if we wanted to sit down on them, we could. "You know, Klipschorn was right I think when he spoke of the blanketing effect of ordinary language, referring, as I recall, to the part that sort of, you know, fills in between the other parts. That part, the filling you might say, of which the expression you might say is a good example, is to me the most interesting part, and of course it might also be called the stuffing I suppose, and there is probably also, in addition, some other word that would do as well, to describe it, or maybe a number of them. But the quality this stuffing has, that the other parts of verbality do not have, is two-parted, perhaps: (1) an endless quality and (2) a sludge quality. Of course that is possibly two qualities but I prefer to think of them as different aspects of a single quality, if you can think that way. The endless aspect of stuffing is that it goes on and on, in many different forms, and in fact our exchanges are in large measure composed of it, in larger measure even, perhaps, than they are composed of that which is not stuffing. The sludge quality is the heaviness that this stuff has, similar to the heavier motor oils, a kind of downward pull but still fluid, if you follow me, and I cant help thinking that this downwardness is valuable, although its hard to say just how, right at the moment. So, summing up, there is a relation between what I have been saying and what were doing here at the plant with these plastic buffalo humps. Now youre probably familiar with the fact that the per-capita production of trash in this country is up from 2.75 pounds per day in 1920 to 4.5 pounds per day in 1965, the last year for which we have figures, and is increasing at the rate of about four percent a year. Now that rate will probably go up, because its been going up, and I hazard that we may very well soon reach a point where its 100 percent. Now at such a point, you will agree, the question turns from a question of disposing of this trash to a question of appreciating its qualities, because, after all, its 100 percent, right? And there can no longer be any question of disposing of it, because its all there is, and we will simply have to learn how to dig it -- thats slang, but peculiarly appropriate here. So thats why were in humps, right now, more really from a philosophical point of view than because we find them a great moneymaker. They are trash, and what in fact could be more useless or trashlike? Its that we want to be on the leading edge of this trash phenomenon, the everted sphere of the future, and thats why we pay particular attention, too, to those aspects of language that may be seen as a model of the trash phenomenon. And its certainly been a pleasure showing you around the plant this afternoon, and meeting you, and talking to you about these things, which are really more important, I believe, than people tend to think. Would you like a cold Coke from the Coke machine now, before you go?"
My men have left me now. They have gone I suspect to the union hall to institute proceedings against me. But I dont care. There is nothing in life for me except being in your power. I have swooned several times this morning, sitting on a bench in the square, thinking of you and feeling those iron bolts with which our souls are bolted together forever. Will you speak to me? I will be in the square at four oclock by the cathouse clock. Dare I expect, that you will come?
SNOW WHITE saw her hair black as ebony hanging out of the window. "I suppose I must respond in some way to the new overture from the seven men. They think they are so merveilleux, with their new shower curtain. They have been posing in front of it all day. As if I could be swayed, in my iron resolve, by a new shower curtain, however extraordinary and fine! I wonder what it looks like?"
