Excerpt from The Ego:
Pains, shooting far into the darkness of proximity and even farther into a man’s soul. No, there is no need to ask. No politics reaches that far. No hope. It is only an impression, twisted. A vision, gone mad into cloaking the ordeals of swift ambivalence. It prompts me to moan and groan and jump over my shadow while I wait patiently to have my cheeks kissed, to picture them clown like, sober, innocent. To have! My eyes, too, get to be shaded from within (without?), in blue and violet, pitch black, while my chest unscrews itself from the nuts of passion. There is nothing I can do but scorn myself doll-like. Molded and hairless, mute, in charge, possessed by head and shoulders and nothing else, no strings attached to the verticals of lower desires, no grudges, nothing but a smoothly plastered bust, almost a portrait, a hue without its moments, its life, its questions; without movement either, for it breathes very little (so as to convince itself of its lack of proper knowledge), it never sleeps, never eats, walks, or speaks to anyone but itself.
“A good night kiss, dear?” Certainly, my companion’s question is not in the least credible. It cannot be. Not now! Dolls don’t kiss. They look on and keep silent. They get to be shelved, boxed, delivered to the most perfect autism, in no time. No time! Al…as! The kiss is salty. Wet. Fringed. It might require an additional memory altogether. A nostalgic cipher perhaps, a jolly penitence, in any case, something other than two tongues entangled in lymphatic dew.
There it is: an embrace, either (grammar-free!). A strange de facto proximity of limbs. And then the drive, the door, the staircase, another door, the hallway, the hanger, the living room, all dipped in unsolicited acoustics. Mine, as it were, ravaged, quiet, no name. No radio ra(n)ge. No TV set. Only satellite movement, serene, smooth, distant… My apartment, my!, suddenly ditched in a sensorial cell with “NO” scribbled on the walls. No geometrical ado for the blind. No cerebral flux for the deaf, the mute, no (!), no emotions gone astray on a limbo of infinite indifference but merely a sad existence, a wi(n)dowed bluff of being essential, chained, more, less, forgotten, without starts and fits, without keynotes for lamenting voices, without!.
My existence sprouts from fever, from neglect of gossiping verbs, and from so many failures of conduct, diction, faith, so many wounds of hopefulness, so much melancholy, so eloquent a desertion, my!, so intense, so insignificant… my, it almost passes for “me”, “I”, my name, myself, if, if-not. If I could just turn on the TV! But there is no TV. I have to remind myself, there is no “T”, no “V” in the picture of my present existence. There is nothing but my-self. ME: inside-out. In flight-over. Me: falling from the clouds of doing into the honeycombs of faking, shhh!, faking, pfff!, the very dismal strings of no return! The strings of no pain, no-fear. Who can imagine them? They coil faster than commas. They chisel and lave: mind to mind. Mind my body, since it happens to crack open the unlucky shell of Being. Oh! I apologize. I am truly sorrowed. Though, I am sure there is no need to worry: I am not a woman! I am a stone. A river stone stuck to a temple. A gothic nausea of wounds. I am – not! – woman. I season my days with archaisms and I move utterly unfriendly…
De facto and de jure, I move from the edge of my bed to the window, from the window, down, in front, to my desk. My back is always bent, my head clouded, my hands superfluous (except for no-wage activities). My world is upside down, my desires guilty as charged, my!, I am sorry, I have almost passed for myself. No-man! Wo-man neither. Road, yes, yarn, door, grave, fatigue, anything. Anything to distress the produce wooers, any-thing!, except one’s free persona as the ultimate bluff of serendipity. But as I said before, I am not a woman-so, lo!, my tongue tricks me and slips into the ghetto of syllables before I get a chance to scrub its blunt papillae. It is a wholesome business!, believe me! I am no wooer, no woe-r either. I am certain of it, I feel it in my bones, my domes?, archways?, arcades?, floors?. I do, I certainly feel the stir (!), it sickens me from below, from behind, from everywhere, though it is just a stir, a species of air, AIR, which sometimes I refuse to breathe, it is not mine to breathe, I have none, no metaphors to spare on it anyway, no faith, no grace either. I sleep like cats, with my tongue stuck between my teeth. I-lo!, slipping again into the ghetto, hoping to recover an impression, ah!, yes, I do seem to play a lot, it is a comfortable habit, as per capita, per effect… perfect for recovering my infantile selfishness.
Though I am no self-samer either. No matter what people say, I see myself different(ly) in spite of all invariables of substance. I am certainly no square bill, no envoy either, nor any man’s reflection on deductible shapes and volumes. It is probably my right, my obstinate reservation against nature and men, mice and men too, yes, I can say it, I am a cat (remember?). I stick my tongue between my teeth and keep silent while descending in the lo!, below the standard of verbal emancipation. That is to say, in my electrified apartment, just below the line of the horizon, just below, though it is situated very close to the ground, but it does not matter, it might as well be buried underground, it has no need for windows, nor for some wooden square resembling an exit or anything of the sort. It is an apartment after all, tons of iron and concrete poured into cubes, made to look inhabitable by virtue of some strange affinity to the aforementioned line of the horizon, though there is no need for it. I have covered my rooms with wallpaper, with blue, sagacious seas and sandy beaches, shrubbery, forests, steppes, deserts, all-inclusive. No need to inquire, it is the best of deals. I know it for a fact: “all destinations are on sale…”
I must have glimpsed the commercial on TV and it struck me as credible (how else?). The pub where I have seen it must have been owned by a male because it had lots of windows and tables, chairs, tableaus, doors, in a word, it seemed real, it hosted us while drinking and smoking cigarette after cigarette (if only the government would have let us!). About a dozen other clients were caught in the same limbo, mostly males watching the sports channels and cheering the way they always do. It was only a pub, no doubt, but the devil in me kept whispering something about not being in the right place, nor at the right moment, and as a result failing to understand what was missing from the commercials. What sort of destinations were being advertised, for who, why, and to what purpose. “No matter,” I kept saying to myself. No matter, for the devil had to step back and I forward, to get out and have a smoke. It was a sterile pub after all: NO SMOKING. Perhaps NO GOVERNMENT, either. How else to be tricked into buying drinks and then tricked again into being prohibited to smoke them out of your system? No matter, my wallpaper is smoke friendly! They can pass as many laws as they can dream of in order to prohibit smoking in all the ordinary places. NO SMOKING!
Maybe the devil was right!, this is not the right time for me, nor the place, none of them are, perhaps they have never been, perhaps I can make an effort to remember clearly, they have never been, these inner-outer limits, never, and if worse were to come to worse I could convince myself to smoke somewhere else, tax free, emancipated from the Friday night creed, from its govern-maids and -egos or its ultimate demo(n)s: “all destinations are on sale…” Whatever it means: Smokers not included! Obviously! They will have to step out, step away, step freely, never get tanned, never get invited to a terrace, never walk on a deck, never, never… But I am not going to say more.
There is no need for poetry at this point, no need to rebel against the status quo, it will only make things look deformed: the world, the advertisements, the specimens, everything, as a matter of fact, yes, every single thing. Not that there is much to be done about it, but as a principle, there’s got to be something. An idea, for example, it is always a nice conveyor of doing something. It always bespeaks itself as it were and there is no need to get tanned, terraced, decked anywhere in particular. Space becomes just a matter of caprice, no more, no-less. It triumphs over itself without the slightest sign of disturbance, it almost seems feminine, lyrical, musical, but do not get deceived, it is none of these things, there is a lot of smoke involved in the process, heavy drinking as well, and no philanthropic poems, slogans, or God knows what other publicity specs for Darwinian faunas.
“Wrong!” Darwin was a genius!
And so shall we! Idea or no-idea, it is all a matter of symbolism in the end, a sign translation ’cross borders!, A CELEBRATION of noise and vigor, stammered (both of them stammered), written, yelled, whispered. No matter!, a human celebration is always better than a species, always for better or worse, as in marriage. No pun intended, Darwin & Co must have officiated it, they officiate everything, even commas, though there weren’t any commas on the walls of pre-historical caves and temples, nada!, sorry to say it. There weren’t any, they must have invented commas for the scrolls, the parchments, the waxy documents (if any of any significance), but there weren’t any commas in human pre-history, I am sure. Dead Sea stuff, a if b, a’ if not b, a’’ ifneither a nor b, and so on, ad nauseam and, and?, and what is most perplexing: no commas! If you can believe it, because I cannot, it is not my job to get perplexed, it has never been. I rather count to three, to see if I can remember anything. As a thumb’s rule, I do. I always seem to remember things as if belonging to something or someone, to a category perhaps (?), a purity of vision or else to a desire of ending the conversation, the translation, the graphologic transference from a to be, from a-prime to a-second, tertiary, four-folded, famished, fetched, even foaled to the sixth degree of separation and cajoled back into Cartesian storytelling. Some dry logs must necessarily crackle in semi-obscurity, perhaps many of the words, too, while the letters get to be scribbled by hand: left?, right?. No matter, philosophy is too much for the future, let’s get back to business.
I am convinced René Descartes did not know anything about anything. He knitted his ideas by the fire, complacent man. He merely thought and immediately believed himself to be. Deluded devil. Visionary. Poor. How else? Indeed, how? He merely invented a new category: the species ego! By the fire: crackling, writing, thinking, hellish. Hellish! Wow! What a tour of force, what a preview of the human condition, the human, the condition itself, if one thinks about it, the condition: t’s nothing. It blows in your face and perplexes you. It summons cart & esian together, while aiding the superego, by the fire: crackling, thinking itself hellish. It is nothing and yet, something way worse than that can happen, not by the same fire, true, but does it matter?, does it matter?, in earnest, does it?. No, of course not, it is all in Descartes’ mind. It was. It will be in whoever’s mind once Descartes will be asked to evacuate his French grave and walk all the way to Alaska to pick and purchase (if he can afford it) his own books… With his own hands, as they say, directly from the flight deck, mumbling excuses for the inadequacy of currency, for his early retirement, his lack of a valid passport, his alien origins, his zombie diet, his, his, his discourse!. Or even better, his meditations!, for which he will be accused of wearing an all too comfortable house garment and a pair of old slippers, yes, it seems wholly inexplicable, wow!, in Alaska?, it cannot be, it is a discourse on method, on “how”, really?, how did he get there. It did not seem Cartesian, no, not at all…
I do not like Descartes. There is nothing personal, believe me, it is only a feminine principle based on how I choose to look at things: blindly, surreptitiously outdated and fresh, fresh to an infinite degree of sublime indifference. This happens only because I like reading into people’s books and letters. I am a lazy financier of the human condition. I enjoy reading and nothing else, nothing that comes my way anyway, t’s too lo! in the ghetto of reality, too wallpapered to risk a pronoun for it and get tanned on some illicit coast on which they dash a little bit of blue, a little bit of gray, green, yellow, to make it look like a syndicate owned paradise for the traveling guild. I am no traveler, either. I am afraid of being asked to befriend Descartes, by the flight deck, in Alaska! I am afraid! That’s it. I am convinced they will try to sell me Pirandello. They’ll ask the devil to unearth his sextant bones, loveless!, hideous bones!. God-Forbid! Pirandello’s dusty bones!, unearthed!, wow!, please forgive me, I, i, i never wanted to be loveless, it’s intellectually scary!
“I am, like everybody else, genealogically mortal.” How else?
Though, it is certainly not my idea. Someone else must have invented it, not me. I am a woman, I only think in questions and answers, at the most in words, in pinching echoes, burning, freezing, devilish echoes that come and go by dint of an abnormal design. I wonder too much, so! they say. I have no manners, no morals, no sex, and yet, I have managed to survive based on statistics alone, alone!, at least this is how one gets from the status of a mineral to that of a woman. It is all fake in the end but is worth the trouble, it makes them scratch their heads: neither stone, nor woman, what can it be? A nightmare! Hence the beautifying industry, the complex geodesics, the cosmos turned up side down on account of an inexplicable fright: there are women living among us! How many? Please, remain calm and try to count them: one! Good, it is a simple case of arithmetic. Two! How? Three! Why? Four! When? Five! What-for? Six! Already? Six women have successfully multiplied in a single bodied organism!?! That is impossible! Has REASON gone to sleep, for good?