Wilson

by David Mamet

  “It is a picture of possibilities, and the ink now drying in the blot(s) on the page, the image of fixity, which fixity, however, was, in being accepted as ‘phenomenon’ is deconstruct(ed?)(able?) again – just like the army, into component parts, each standing, just as will the demobbed ‘doughboys’ as irreducible phenomenon.”

  He heard her heavy tread upon the stairs.

  Greind

  Psychotic

  From: The Toll Hound, Archives of the Academy (by permission)

  He was a true psychotic,

  and an artist only by courtesy.

  BURTON LASALLE,1

  of Greind (op. cit.)

  One step forward, two steps back, one step forward, two steps back. It describes not only the progress of Humankind toward the Light, but the rhumba.

  What was that fat Cuban doing with that little brown dog? Could he not learn to conduct with a baton like a Christian …?

  Now, class, we are convened today to consider our friend, the Flat Pass.

  It will be seen to be your job to lure the good, estimable Oppo, yes, forward, as if for the Screen, and, then, to scoot, as if a dog was a-nip-pin’ at y’r heels, out five yards, and over ten.

  Head for those sidelines, and, if it comes your way, get those good hands on it, turn upfield, and run like hell for the uprights.

  Now let us talk about diet.

  You have all heard of the five major food groups. I will not bore you with reiteration of their various, and, finally somewhat arbitrarily assigned characteristics. Wake up there, Ryzybski, wake up! I know how to wake him up: SEX!2 Thank you. Where was I?

  The Parking Meter Problem

  From: Greind, Grundrisse

  … to recur to the Parking Meter problem,1 beloved of twentieth-century educators, and the horror of all that era’s students of philosophy. A contemporary compilation of responses2 was a period bestseller, and graced many a rich and modest shelf.3

  I am indebted to that rife trove of anecdotal and statistical information, and draw, from it, the burden of today’s lecture, i.e., the (I believe, remarkable) prevalence of the response, “Raise the price of the ticket”

  18% where

  Cf. “Don’t know,” 11%; “Walk to work,” 4%, and “Get fucked,” at 3.5% a figure surprising even given the (presumably) grateful THERE IS NO ANSWER.

  What sort of person, having been, in advance, so shriven, would search (presumably, so effectively) for a counter-example sufficiently provocative as to void the pre-facto absolution?

  The answer may surprise:

  Swedes

  22%

  Persons of Japanese extraction

  12%

  Maori

  5%

  etc.

  The incident, lost, of course, among the lurid “reminiscences” of incest, bestiality, sodomy, and ritual sacrifice by “Members” of the Court, is told with a style and pace sufficient to have included it (and was, in fact, discovered in) Let’s Write Creatively (Scholastic Press, 1999 etc.)

  What can we know of a man?

  We can know his shirt size, but, though we may infer, we cannot even deduce from it with certitude the size of his neck.1

  LAO TZU

  Binky Beaumont

  Binky Beaumont

  From: “Haunted Hill,” Binky Beaumont and the One Big Union; originally, “Binky Beaumont,” The House on Haunted Hill

  Chapter Two: Those Frenchies Seek Him Everywhere

  In which Ryzybski’s Dream and the Mud on the Spikes are conflated with the Original Nomenclature of the Mud Pond.1

  It was, as it must have been, a both unhappy and perceptive soul which first called that protrusion “Haunted Hill.”

  The name, however, having adhered to the place, what sort of man must it have been to build there …? What freak of malheur, anomie, depression, nay, self-loathing could have informed this otherwise incomprehensible act of situation – on the steep, inhospitable, northern slope, subject to the invariable cold north wind, and, similarly, to the drafts, vapors and miasmas issuing summer and winter from the noxious pond below?

  “A true six-burner wanker,” Binky said. “That’s the sort of man … that’s who!”

  He did not realize he’d spoken aloud. His ejaculation merely the unwilled conclusion of that dialogue begun upon his first view of the spot.

  “Well, no help for it!” he thought, and continued his climb.

  “Aroo, aroo, arooo, arooooo,” went the dogs, chained to the faux portcullis, “aroooooooo,” their teeth bared, their eyes following the progress of the solitary figure up the hill.

  “Oh, stuff a sock in it,” he thought – but did not omit to skirt that area his accomplished eye had determined as the utmost radius of that chain he hoped was to prove as stout in practice as it appeared in rest.

  Clang, clang, the beasts threw themselves against their bonds, leapt, flew, teemed toward the approaching stranger.

  “Oh, suck my dick,” he thought, but stood still, for the moment, to assess the final certainty of the limits of their leash; and then, sanguine that, as least in so far as it concerned these beasts, he’d find no danger here, he pressed on.

  Then, to the snap of the chain, and protesting animal screams of frustration, was added a third note: the crunch and weench of metal and masonry parting company. His eyes searched wildly for its source, which he immediately found in the ringbolt securing the dogs’ lead into the wall.

  To most of us forensic pathology remains a happy mystery. We are content to leave to the professional the identification of remains, etc. Who but a ghoul, in short, would occupy himself with the operations, nay, even linger in the precincts of this most grisly of endeavors?

  So thought Inspecteur (Provisoire) Jean Ravigote that April day. His thoughts were interrupted by the appearance, in the antechamber of the morgue, of a tall, obviously English gentleman of middle age … etc.

  You take it from here. (Don’t forget the scouring pads.)

  The Tie

  “The True Meaning of Fairy Tales” or “The Mud on the Spikes” or “Low-Fat Cookery for the Ages: An Exhaustive Application of Bernoulli’s Principle, Proving the Existence of God and Also Useful for Removing Gum1 from Mohair.”

  A tie is like kissing your sister.

  PTOLEMY THE YOUNGER, 204 BC

  But a tie is more than that. Certainly it closes the collar – but a button or a stud can do the same.

  And certainly it points the way down to the genitals – those organs of joy or confusion. But a tie is more – much more.

  A tie is a statement of taste. It is proclamation not of personality, no, but of the individual’s understanding of his personality. What could be more revealing? For, yes, this modern heraldry blazons not only the possessions (of wealth, of taste, of experience, in choice of cut, of fabric, of the knot itself) but of that which the inheritors of those ancient quarterings, on shield or pennon, on the lists, off on those protean conventions, the Crusades, could never have dreamed: choice.

  […]2

  … and what of Mars? What of that red, desiccated orb sacred to the God of War? What of it, huh? What the fuck of it? What’s it to you, in this Vale of Tears?

  (Pause, intervention of the Bailiff.)

  Shouts of “Order.”

  The restitution of order.

  Silence.

  Passage of Time.

  Death of the Dinosaurs.

  Birth of Liszt.

  Wrong-way Corrigan

  The Transistor

  The Future.3

  … should we consider it a surfactant. But, no, I consider it an oil, and the hell with it.

  So thought Reg Palmer, as he looked down at the empty stadium.

  “They’ll never know,” he thought. “They’ll never know.”

  Upon the teak desk lay the drawing, the glyph he hoped – so fervently – would be adopted as the new logo of the school he loved, the team he helped to mold, The Fighting Olympians: a pair of greaves.

 
“What better?” he thought; and, at the same time, “No, it will not do,” which polemic was stilled (for the moment) by a third voice, that sweet voice of reason saying, “hush.”

  “Hush, Reg,” it said. “The fault is not with the logo – the logo is fine, and beyond fine – the fault is with your childhood; and there’s nothing you can do about that.”

  “Yes,” he thought. “Yes. I must learn to take pleasure in my achievements – just as I do in my plans …”

  He adjusted his tie – the school’s burnt sienna, in a tight half-Windsor.

  … this wonderful knot – named for that fornicator …” he thought. “But this ever has been a corrupted, sinful, world.”

  Below him, on the field, he saw the band – so droll in mufti – forming on the twenty-yard line.

  “March on” he thought; and, “Look at that fruitcake drum major. How I would like to bend him over this same conference table, rip his corduroy pants off, and …”

  He turned to the sound of the conference room opening.

  He put the smile of anticipation on his face; but saw not the expected kindly visage of President Wilson, no, but a shape, a form; he could not force his mind to interpret it as a “being,” no, not yet – it was for him, in this first instant of contact, nothing but a swirling, inchoate mass of – tentacles? limbs? What, shapes, finally, and he thought, “Oh, that’s just a …” And it was only then, only now when his quick, his inventive mind, taxed to the uttermost, could offer no completion to the thought that terror set in.

  His last thought, before he disappeared into its maw, was “Mars.”

  And what of the Mud on the Spikes?

  Binky Beaumont, Greind [Bennigsen] and Ryzybski were of course “The Three Men” to whom the Fantasist alluded.1

  The Capsule

  In the Capsule

  Jacob Cohen, University of Southern Wilson, New South Mars

  … these psychiatrists, psychologists, psycho-orthographers, and “just-plain-psychos,” who thought they could adduce the existence of the soul from that “one word” in the thirteenth session.

  Well, we all know what became of them.

  But what (after the derision) became of their argument? That is the question the Old Wrangler raised; and it was, of course, for that that he was exiled.1

  His production, in the “exile” years is irretrievably lost to us.2

  It remains to attempt to determine the content and scope of his revelations (for revelations they most assuredly were)3 from his movements.

  Starting with his first remove (i.e. starting from Media, P.A.), let us draw a line to Boise. Let us now intersect it at the Golden Mean, leaving the bulk of the line to our left (or the west), and draw a perpendicular of equal length, itself bisected by the Media–Boise line, we find, at this line’s northern terminus, Ottawa, and, at the south, a point in the Gulf of Mexico zoo miles SSW from Tampa, Florida: THE POINT PREDICTED FOR THE CAPSULE’S RE-ENTRY!

  Are you surprised? Are you overcome? Well: welcome to the club!

  For it is not simply a “Christian” outlook, to “find a meaning in things.” It is not, as has been (unsportingly) suggested, a “survival” of “The Great Chain of Being,” no, it is the nature of the world. And it was this that the Old Wrangler knew, this which was the cause of his exile, and this which he, in his very peregrinations, strove to communicate to us, and this is why I have chosen him as the subject of my paper.

  Relics

  In which is discussed the notion of the Capsule as a reliquary

  The Stoics said, “Who rides, decides:” The sentiment reappears in the Time of the Riots (or, as it was known in the period afterward, “in those days”): “Whatever gets you off.”1

  That which, in this case, “gets us off,” dear Reader, is the issue of the Capsule qua reliquary.

  It is not enough, I feel, to aver to those (granted, widespread) instances of “the Death in Life.” The literature of the submariner, the miner, and this author’s first marriage furnish instances abundant of the same.

  And, indeed, nowhere are they lacking. It was Ralph Waldo Emerson himself who said, more than once, that “most men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

  Now, the cases of the submarine explorer, the luckless astronaut, et cetera, granted, “raise the stakes.” In these the issue is not “how many times a week is it healthy or normal to have sex?” but whether or not one can expire gracefully in the absence not only of water, food and air, but of an audience, an overseeing power, or its ideation, for whose benefit or, at the least, in whose sight, or in the light of the idea of which, the display or impersonation of stoical dignity might give, to the sufferer, if not a philosophic mitigation of the throes of death, at least an interest in the progress of those throes which, absent other diversion, might be enjoyed as entertainment. Many, I say (aping Emerson), lead lives et cetera. But few have the site of those lives turned into a “dime museum.”2

  What is gained, finally, by what may be not only a factitious presentation – contrived through its very recourse to the dramatic – but a factitious presentation of a spurious article.

  For the presentation of the artefact, though it would seem to improve if not supplant the experience of the historical, and, so, intellectual, and, so, metaphysical, and, so, moot, with the experience of the actual,3 in fact can engender, at its optimum, not “understanding,” but belief.

  For must one not exercise belief in the authenticity of the objects displayed in order to undergo that thrill which, the candid must admit, is the whole point of the exercise?

  It is my thesis that this tressaillement comes not from proximity to the historic real, but as a chemic, glandular result of our own self-exal-tation – of the exercise of our power to endorse, of our “beliefs”

  What can it mean that Krautz, or Jacob Cohen, what could it mean if the Old Wrangler himself saw or sat inside the Capsule?

  It could mean no more than that this or that writer, recognized as an “authority” (by, of necessity, no one more exalted than “another writer”) proclaimed such to’ve occurred.

  And why should we presume in our historians a skill or veracity greater than that discovered in the average of any trade, group, coven, or profession?

  Well, then, what are those people looking at? Who is to say it is the Capsule? Who is to say those are the Books?

  And though I am not the first, I yield to no one my pride of place in being the most vehement in proclaiming that the true locus of the Capsule is not (pace the writers of greeting cards) “on the Mall,” but in the Mind.

  Folderol

  Folderol

  or: “In Defence of Bennigsen” by “Praetor”

  Yes, they had translated it as “folle de roi,” and thought themselves beyond reproach (though who might have reproached them is beyond this writer’s understanding) (with the blatant exception, of course, of this writer himself) (and thus, perhaps, they weren’t so crazy after all) (on that point).

  How like, then, the academic mind to strive “to make a showing,” rather than “to show the truth.” For, to that mind, that sloppy, lazy, weak, co-opted, hypocritic, self-ignorant, destructive, non-account-able, finally craven, mis-marriage of synapses, there is no truth, no truth save: Get through the hour; and: Keep your job. For how dare they, those “professors” of the Romance tongue, those soi-disant philologists, sprung or appointed as by fell parthenogenesis, from the gross Body of Their Own, how dare they count their work “done,” or “exhaustive,” or, in fine, apply to it any adjective indicating a worthy or successful completion, when they’d overlooked the blatant, glaring, obvious, the essential progression.

  For, if folderol to folle de roi; then, of necessity (the merest amateur of Scrabble(r) could see it), folle de roi, in a retrograde intuition,1 into foi de roi.

  For, was it not the faith of Louis Onze, who sent Priedieux (and, thus, his dogs) (and, thus, Bienguele) into Louisiana?

  No, it was not his folly, but his faith which sent
them there.

  Faith, I say, which has the power to move men, mountains, bowels,2 and that about covers it.

  The Sun shone down

  The Moon shone down

  The Eyes of the Soul-Sick Loon shone down

  The Wrath of The Almighty soon thrown down

  Upon Louisiana.

  A. LOMAX, Bayou Days ‘n’ Ways, Library of Congress

  (reconstructed from “The Stop ‘n’ Shop,” 2111, © the Editors of Vogue)

  And here we find a sly allusion to the source of the King’s faith. (Or, better, we might say, the “catalytic moment,”3 for who can say what is the source of his (or anyone’s) faith? As it is, or as we perceive it as* a “recognition,” must we not say that it (the faith) was “there all the time” – that it is “immanent,”† that it, perhaps, is neither a “hint,” nor a “memory” of God, or the Godhead, but that it is God HimSelf? And that that’s why we like it?

  (Let us say, therefore, rather, “an important moment in the King’s spiritual development”.) It (the verse) refers to the King’s revelation at the telescope, the references to the Sun and the Moon being rather clear, the soul-sick Loon referring to the King himself,4 the “Wrath of The Almighty” being, of course, the grand mal to which the King was famously subject; thus, “upon Louisiana” leaping into stark relief as “Upon Louis Onze.”

  How thrilling, how dear, how sweet, that seventeenth-century French ditty survived in the New World, in the Bayou songs, as a (not unpleasant) nonsense rhyme, which, though all its singers were supposedly ignorant of the King’s “revelation,” and the part played therein by Botté (his épagneul de Bretagne), became part of the ritual of the tolling party, and, in fact, was first anthologized in the Modern Era in The Song of the Toll Hound.5