by David Mamet
We must take him at his word, begging the question of the existence (Y/N?) of that antagonist, or deutero-self, that Ur-self, that psycho or psychotomimetic Doppelgänger, that respondent or “dear Reader,” that “imaginary Friend,” which is the, the the the, the the the the bollard to which the deranged or literary mind moors that craft (i.e. its imagination), in which it reposes its hope of seaworthiness.
How alike, might he* have said, are the two endeavorst† – all compact of shit and stink, of rapine, pillage, of the setting-as-naught of compunction. What joy!
The offending term, then, “goldfish,” presents itself for our contemplation.
How will he deal with it?
We see that it may be approximated in either its rhythm or its sound. An attempt to capitalize solely upon an introversion or “harmonic” in its meaning absent that obeisance to rhythm or sound (or rhythm-and-sound, in the perfect case) must traduce, we hold, any possible worth in the line-as-jest.
And here rests the problem. And here rests the problem. In the middle term. Where we see* “Goldstone. No. Goldberg. No. Worldbank” – the last word underlined three-several times, and followed with what he, in his enthused state, surely must have intended as an exclamation point.
For it was here he broke through, sacrificing the surety of the concept “Gold,” for the greater good: the worth of the line.
He sacrificed what is (now) seen to’ve been the false term and stood, clean and whole, grasping in his hand, as if fresh returned from a journey to the Underworld – or to the bottom of the pond, or of the bathtub or what-have-you, some such metaphor for consciousness of some such “thing” – grasping, triumphantly, I say, if not the Completed Thing, that thing to the artist far superior, the sense of the way to that thing.
Not without, not without, I say, that sadness – not only remorse for the necessary excision of what might have been said, had its creator been more adept, gifted, inspired, rested, but, still, in sorrow for the state of a mind bent to such sick frivolity; a mind so bereft of order that it gropes and grasps and delights in the similarity in the accidental and useless, cobbling together such where such does not exist.
And sadness, too, for and at the simple act of completion, that post-coitum tristere known to all who’ve ever had their ashes hauled. But to return to the problem, which, as he saw it, rested, then,† in the unfortunate (to him, one may well suppose), insupportable lack of agreement between the proper noun (U Thant) and the verb, which, if the line is to have any worth and not merely rest as the recipient of that license a depraved world increasingly grants to the approximate to pass and pose as Art, must (one would have thought) must stand in the third person singular past tense.
That he made the world fresh for wogs lacks and must have lacked, of course, to his mind, both the “snap of recognition,” which is the sine qua non of humor (which must, at the end of the day, be considered as nothing less than delight in derangement) and the labial and aural delights of the fricative.
Here, then, we may see him, as it were, “break through,” and hit upon the device which “renders the whole thing whole,” the solution to the content lying, as often it must, in the mastery of the problems of form.
His application of the colon, “U Thant*: make the world fresh for wogs” (as seen in pencil, in the margin) and the final “U Thant: make a bold wish for wogs” only just less memorable than the postscriptum,“Garbage day today. Going home.”
Dear Diary
Mentioned in Whippies, or Life at a Long Remove as being found in the Capsule;1 cf. ‘In the Capsule’, p. 205.
Dear Diary,
I am surprised that I am surprised any more.
One would’ve thought that since that time we moved and the milk-man moved with us that nothing in Mother’s life or demeanor would have awakened anything save resignation.
But by such and by such only is philosophy attained.
Of what use is it, then?
We say it is good in itself. But is it not merely – if and as we examine its inception I fear we must say it is – an analgesic?
How much more preferable to’ve gone without the milk. (Though even at this (oh, so long) remove, I could regret the Double Gloucester …)
How we would prefer, each to have forgone the tragedy, the treason, the tests, the “life.” In short (as Bishop Berkeley had it), to’ve lived unaware. In bliss. In a garden (though what better paradigm for death and decay, for transiency, and for corruption; for betrayal, treason, perfidy …?)
(I speak not here of her (increasingly frequent) retreats into the box hedge, the gazebo, with this or that retainer, schoolchild, tradesperson, horse-coper, gypsy, and so on, but of the more quotidian – the round of birth, anxiety, degeneration.)
These degenerations then, we might say, more than the “life” of the garden – they are the garden. Toute entière. The worms, the various blights, the aphids, moths, moles, rusts, frosts, drafts, supply, do they not, all one might need to know of application of that natural force which might as well be enmity, which, at the last, must be counted stiff-necked opposition and intent to persuade without guidance, without correction, unabashed – to grow in its own way and only in that way.
How like her wantonness – the record of which I would have thought incapable of further elaboration, but in which estimate I would have erred by what I must now admit to have been several orders of magnitude.
Et cetera.
January 25th, 19—
“I shall not wear the blue.
“I shall not wear the beige I shall not wear the kerseymere – I shall not wear the taupe nor the mauve. I shall not wear the lawn. I shall not wear the lavender –” and so the list continues, one would say interminably were it not that a glance down its rhythmed column reveals, as it must, an end.
An end, and that end shocking beyond any power one might have vouchsafed her (at this advanced date) to’ve shocked.
And neither do I approve of the craze for perennials, nor account it filial piety to continue in their cultivation.
A close observation, an extended contemplation of a flower bed yields nothing superior to a cursory one.
Granted, a stay in its environs can, by turns, soothe or refresh – but so can drink, in submission to which one does not risk self-application of the sobriquet “effete.”
To return: how can one ingest or adapt to the unacceptable?
Through, only through a form of negotiation – no, it is not wisdom. It is not philosophy – there is no such thing. There is that fatigue born of repetition, hope deferred and the subsequent extinction of desire (yes, even the desire for revenge), and there is “time.” And the negotiation takes place between “now,” and “then” – “then” being both the past and future, the affront, and the eventual cessation of its sway – both juxtaposed against the present sordid and interminable moment of what might be felt as a self-sustained injury; for, as philosophy informs us: who continues to injure us? None but ourselves.
No, no. I will not follow her in her (twice nightly?) – yes, I find myself defending her: “… but only during dinner parties …” – recursions to the topiary.
I will not “sniff,” as it were – “sniff” nor otherwise examine the (to what end …?) flowered borders crushed beneath her (but not solely her) bulk.
Nor continue perusal of this note found in the pocket of a dress she had expressly forborne to’ve worn (the lavender) not even this shall, no no no no no.
[indecipherable line]
“Surprise” is but pique at one’s inability to immediately assimilate the unforeseen. There is no magic to it.
“Come Smoke a Coca-Cola”
or: The Musicality of the Times Explained
A “Report from the Capsule”
One refuge was the thought that all was rhythm – as it must have been, given the incessant throbbing of the machine.
Which of us has not been moved by (the surviving) strophes of his “Ode to the Capsule,” compa
ring the susurrus of the servomotors to the (imagined) rustle of the leaves in the wind – based upon what, I ask you, that Stakhanovite Act of Invention, based upon what but those stunningly purple passages, the “Chet’s Boathouse” scene in Newport Summer, and the beating of his own heart?
His only other knowledge of periodicity was the mechanical – he who, of course, had never seen a sunset. And, yes, he wrote of the woods, and the “watch-bill of day-and-night,” of the “‘égarements’ of the animals,” creating (imagining) an outer world based on an inner, and who is to say which the larger?
“Come smoke a Coca-Cola,” he wrote, with the dateline, as always, In Ovo.
And as we read we must remember that those allusions commonplace to us were, to him, subjects of mystery.
“Come smoke a Coca-Cola” giving rise to two volumes upon his (mis)understood knowledge of the Riots, which, who, who has not seen, has been left undiverted by his efforts to parse?
“Drink Ketchup Cigarettes” …
… but this concerns itself with rhythm, for which disquisition I must recur, once again, to the Capsule’s “reading shelf,” on which we find Buchalter’s Musicology for the Beginner.
I will draw the reader’s attention to its chapter on notation, page 1; in the margin, to the left of the subhead, “Drawing the Staves,” we find, in his hand, “Like the beat beat of the tom-toms,” and that ‘pointing hand’ symbol (), directing our attention to the facing page, and his essay, “Hatikvah, Imber, and Al Jolson’s ‘Anniversary Song,’”
Was it an ignorance of orthography, a defaced line of type? What was it to’ve caused him to misunderstand the line “Could we but recall that sweet moment sublime?” and to’ve given rise to his essay, “Who was Wee-Butt?”?1
We now proceed from the confusing to the arbitrary.
EPICTETUS, WHO’S MINDING THE STOA?1
The Wobbly
Let Us Consider the “Wobbly”
or: An Early Connection to “Cola”
Gone off to meet Joe Hill,
Gone off to meet Joe Hill.
Worked my life worried, and I’m worried still.
Gone off to meet Joe Hill.
‘SONG OF THE WOBBLY HUNG FROM THE BRIDGE’
This verse is, unfortunately, all that survives of the original. And speculation on the identity of the “Wobbly” has, therefore, been based (until now) upon and only upon those facts im-and explicit in the verse itself:
1 That the Wobbly is going off to meet Joe Hill;
2 That the Wobbly has spent his or her life “worried”;
3 That he or she is still worried;
4 That he or she was hung from a bridge;
5 That he or she sang.
Bridge hanging was, of course, a form of lynching or impromptu capital punishment. Popular as not requiring the (seemingly endless) tedium of judicial procedure, lynching flourished up to the twentieth century, and enjoyed a brief subsequent popularity during the time of the Riots.
Now, what might the Wobbly have done to bring this “lynching” down on him-or herself.*1
We don’t know.2
We know only “this is a mystery,” as the ancient religious wrote. “It is a mystery.” But is there not, in this, an odd comfort …? To be able to “identify” the unknown, to negotiate the transition from terror to consternation, which is the essential work of society?3
One school, then, holds (we must say conveniently) that “it is a mystery.” And then, there is the “anecdotal” tradition, which confutes the Wobbly with the Toll Hound.
Was it because the Toll Hound danced?4 Was the tradition based upon the merest association of “dance” and gyration (“wobbling”)?
Might the Toll Hound have hung from a bridge?
Might the Toll Hound have been “worried”?
May we consider5 dancing work?
Who was Joe Hill?
I refer here to the monumental Surtees and the Hunting Life by A. Bassett: “… neither can we ignore the possibility that ‘Joe Hill’ was a corruption of ‘John Peel’, that imaginary6 master of foxhounds” –
D’ye ken John Peel, with his coat so gay
D’ye ken John Peel at the break of day
D’ye ken John Peel, when he’s far far away
W’his hound and his horns in the morning.
Might we not suggest that the Hound was “gone,” to a “Hill” – the personification of a hill, that the Hound was, then, “gone hunting”; and that a later time, ignorant of that MFH, of fox hunting, of foxes, of gentility and grace, of everything, in short, corrupted “John Peel” into “Joe Hill” and, thence, into nothing?7
Mrs. Bassett does not address – indeed the work is neither intended to address, nor would it be an appropriate vehicle in which to address – the issue of culpability, i.e. why was the Toll Hound hung?
But I will advert (and future scholarship must try the case) that there is worth in the pursuit of the connection between the Hound and the Cola Riots.
Musicologists may consider the virtual identity of the song “John Peel” and the twentieth-century jingle “Pepsi Cola hits the spot” (1950-60, and resurfacing, of course, as “The Song of the Republicans” during the early days of the Riots).
“Like Shrimps that Crash in the Night …”
From the original Errata
If you put enough monkeys at enough typewriters, sooner or later they will bash out promotional material for a pharmaceutical concern.
There is no help for it. It is an ongoing process. All the king’s horses or all of their men1 cannot deter them. Nor can they accelerate the process. They can only “stand by,” some with their cigarettes, some with their oats, and wait upon the pleasure of their betters.
A Poem
A Poem1
They say that Bennigsen
in propria persona
Never habited the Capsule.
Infamia, they scream,
and Fraud.
Their screams
Are music to our Jaded Ears.
O, Ears. Most outboard of appendages.
Who praises thee?
(Yes, this or that aurally fixated swain,
Be-smitten of the Lobes. But otherwise?
Oh, please.
And what is Poetry?
Or Truth …?
But the rain, Beating on my …)
et cetera
end of section one
The Library
The Library
In which the investigation turns from the quest for information per se, to perigrinations on its transmission.
What of that bloke who burned the Library in Alexandria, Virginia – the Library or the Stop ’n’ Shop?1
How must he have felt, could he have realized that his deed, too, would and must be forgotten?
A list of names in which his may have been found – the catalogue card (discarded) in Moving Picture Boys in Earthquake Land, The Humphries Memorial Library, Alexandria, Virginia, shows four removals in the years 1951-75. It has been remarked that as the stacks were open, anyone could have removed the volume at any time and simply “taken it home.”
They could, additionally, have simply (and legally) taken the book down from the shelf and sat at one of the solid oak tables we are sure we wish the Library to’ve possessed, and there, in a moment of distraction or inattention (or absence) on the part of the Librarian, scribbled in the book those words which indicate to us its (possible) presence in the hands of the incendiary: “I want to burn this shithole down.”
But can we think that the malefactor saw fit to inscribe his name and intention in a book leaving what even the merest pyro-criminologist must surely understand as a “clue”?
Why would a fellow do that?
Well, an ordinary thief, a rapist, public official, sodomite, sophisticator of beer, war criminal, etc., one who, in short, looked to enjoyment with impunity as the sine qua non of a successful outing of his particular freak, such a one would not, it is true, choose to
advertise.
But is it not in the nature of the incendiary, of the arsonist, to, perhaps, wish to have credit for his deed? And if not of the arsonist, then, of this particular arsonist, who, we know, torched the joint specifically to get the credit?
“They can stuff the volumes in, but who will be remembered longer, them or me, who burnt the joint down?” he2 is recorded to’ve said.
Well, anybody who believes in “Last Requests” is missing the whole point of being dead.3
But this gent thought it good to torch the repository of learning, to take upon himself that office usually reserved for history (wars, floods, volcanoes, things of that nature) and to strive for immortality through an act of eradication – his (presumed) suicide, his (certain) disappearance giving rise to that contemporary hit single, “You can only be immortal during your lifetime,” which anecdotal evidence identifies (one must say, not without weight) as the (at that time) State Song of Indiana.
But to return. His act seems to’ve had a lasting influence upon Greind (Bennigsen) who alludes (how slyly!) to it in his suicide note,4 in which he writes:
Helen of Troy
The Library in Alexandria
Napoleon
… what’s the use?
Why do I employ the adverb “slyly”? Because he knew what the “use” was, or else he wouldn’t have written. He would have shot himself.5
And why the Library, rather than the Stop ’n’ Shop? Because, gentle Reader, good Reader, Reader so ready and moist, Reader so […],6 we just don’t know.
It could have been one of the four, bent on the eradication of all knowledge.7 It could have been a disaffected clerk, or manager, or customer, put off by the “mood music”; or a young, say a young couple, sneaking in after the store had closed to make love in the aisles, and drink wine, and, perhaps, to light a can of SternoTM “Liquid Heat” to enhance the experience, their bodies picked out in the half-dark,8 who, perhaps, “knocked over” the can in their fumblings, and, perhaps, it burnt the grocery store down, and spread to the Library next door, eradicating all knowledge.
