by David Mamet
In an hour?
A half-hour?
Could he but strike a bargain with the Almighty, what would he give for the assurance of an hour? Of a mere hour … He who had nothing to give, nothing to promise, nothing, oh, nothing in the world save terror and concomitant self-loathing, the last diminishing as the first grew, as if they rested in a balance and himself the fulcrum.
What was that sound?
And why, he asked, and was immediately rewarded with the answer, did he seem to smell beeswax?
The grate shifted in the window, and he saw the form of Nissim, greasing the hinge with a cake of what could only be beeswax, and it transported him back to the vicar’s study, the soft, butternut panels of that book-filled room, and the vicar’s hand, so lately holding Bishop Atherton’s Ruminations, descending toward his knee … toward … et cetera …
Soap
That which cleanses though, itself, made from the unclean.
J. COHEN
… which is the same problem with the soap, or so it seems to me; for, at what point do we replace it, and in vain to wish one were the sort of folks to melt it down as with those engines seen of old in the downmarket catalogues – to shape it into what? Round balls? (As if there were any other kind!)
Well-then-I-ask-you. Whilst, on the other hand, the non-disposed has, it has been said, the capacity to indict, as does the other. Indict for the one equally as for the other. For, as and when we let it fester – yes, all innocent, the cleansing agent itself! – it speaks to our capacity for restlessness at the least, and, like it or not, to our social and our economic status.
With the Small, so with the Great. And, sure, there is a point, where, ever the unfortunate, the vestigial, the blah-blah, if you will, legacy of one pinko-lefty forebear long passed on and only by that act shut up, where such, I say, such legacy speaks again: “Make it last, make it do, do without”, in their one-trick, their weak, their life-long obeisance to their long-past philosophic ancestors, the workers. There is a point where even that abusive whine, presented as clear as if harsh philosophy, must, although presented and presenting itself as a friend-of-one’s-tribe, must be put upon to stand down and so allow one, in a simple human, unaligned, and, yes, why not, sui generis, act, to throw out the soap.
That time must come. Not at the cusp between usefulness and its lack, but no, sufficiently beyond that to have stilled the co-dependent if internal forces of liberal cognition, or, as our time has come to know it, “error.”
No. No. There must be some waste. Is not the Perfect (as each civilization frames it) the foe of the Good?
So then if Evil is, as it is, the enemy of Good, and if Perfection is the enemy of Good, what remains to stand as champion of the Good, save the beleaguered, unromantic, pressed and, yes, reviled orphan of metaphysical states, the Good?
So he thought as he looked at the soapdish.
Was it not better to, then, lope along with the gag? As at the Mayan ziggurats, the First World War, the AIDS crisis, the nauseous multitude of invention, and the trillion natural shocks to which we’ve tried any brief moment, any hour not presently engaged in building up the fire, gathering water, staving off wild beasts?
Was it not then quite the better thing to shrug and throw out the sliver, and change the goddam soap (for, surely, that, of the two, was, of course, less productive of anxiety, or, if you will, productive of less anxiety once the decision had been made), to change the soap, and, for that Sisyphean moment, yes, to commit oneself, not unlike the Hindu Bodhisattva or whatever that Eastern thing may have been called – to the Great Round – the Progression drear enough to make one embrace composting …?
Did the soap stand for the human corpse, and was the dialectic, then, between the Christian and the more Judaic view?
So ran his thoughts.
The Old Wrangler
The Old Wrangler
It has become a matter of form to preface any treatment of the subject with the ritual asseveration, “I like the Old Wrangler.”
Having acquitted myself, I continue.
I confess that I have a personal connection – not, of course, to the Wrangler himself, but to the phrase.1
My father was one of those at the Ski Lift in ’98, when the First Fragment was discovered.2
How the Old Wrangler and Bootsie Met
These stories are, it has been observed, an inversion—elaboration of the “Bootsie” canon. In Whence This Sudden Rush of Wings, in fact, the Old Wrangler (temporarily in the guise of Ting-An-Chou-Tah) himself expatiates (comme raisonneur) upon the selfsame subject. I quote (with permission):
“Long ago, when the world was young, before animals could speak, and before evil – in the form of Chee-Too-Lan-Wah – entered into hearts of men, there lived a very wise old man.”
“What was his name, Grandfather?” little Po Witt said.
“His name,” the old man said, “his name was …”
Here, of course, occurs the famous “cigarette-burn lacuna,” which has permitted a commentator nameless here to advance the theory that the missing name was “Bootsie,” this being, should one feel the need for same, a prime, nay, perhaps a perfect, example, to my mind, of “loping the mule.”
Why, in a genre piece, where much* care has been taken to construct, if not an accurate, an acceptable, aboriginal tone† why would the author suggest that a primordial mentor figure bore some publicschool cognomen, as if he (the storyteller) referred not to one of the (as it soon is revealed) “gods of the morning” but to his fag!!! This beggars imagination.
How can we account for such behavior?
The oh-so-deserved “arrogance, ignorance, self-absorbed fatuity, presumption,” etc., can only take one so far; the failure of the psychoanalytic paradigm has, of course, long ceased to be an acceptable subject of parody, let alone scholarship.1
What remains, save the (religious) platform, view, or intuition of man’s inherent worthlessness: that same issue the Old Wrangler made fair to address!
What a world.
The Joke Code
The Pet Door
From: Introduction to the Joke Code (Sportsman’s Press, Undershot, LA, 2131)
The presence of anything is merely the absence of its absence.
Thus to ask, “What can we learn from the absence of X?”,1 said question posited as a rhetorical indictment, is to exhibit ignorance of the nature of the world. For things either are or are not – each state being not merely a complement of the other, but the definition of its Doppelgänger.
Binomial theory defines “zero” as being “not one”, and the “computer,” for all its abominable propensity for evil, defined “lion,” charmingly, as “not tiger” (“bear,” “plant,” “pasta,” “color,” “idea,” “continent,” etc.).
Similarly, the genes, the molecules, neutrons, and like minutiae, which are the “building blocks of all life,” resolve, and must resolve, in the final analysis into X or 0,“no” or “yes.”2
You may ask, “What of the indeterminate?”; “What of that which is neither ‘yes’ nor ‘no’?”; “What, finally …” – in that which you are free to see as a reductio ad absurdum (but is this not a prime tool, not only of the philosophic theorist, but of the matrimonial lawyer?) –
“… what of ‘maybe’?”3
The world, then, is “yes” or “no,” and the middle ground is “yes” or “no,” as are the questions whether this, this selfsame dictum you read here is “yes” or “no.”
And a thing’s absence or presence, being indicative one of the other, are the same.4
Let us, then, take two seemingly disparate propositions:5
1 Never trust a Jew in a bow tie.
2 Women like basketball players, because they dribble before they shoot.
From Muuguu
“Thoughts on Awakening”
There is no Joke Code.
There is no Inner Code.
There is no Capsule.
There is no Mall.
Now there is naught but grim
Denial. Now there is not even that.1
WALTER STEVENS, MUUGUU
The Missing Page
The Missing Page
Greind
He wrote that he hoped there “would be found that fragment which would make the whole thing whole.”1 How close his dream came to fruition!
And how differently it might have ended had the Woman in the Bookstore not forgotten her bag.
What is Chance? What is Coincidence?
How often do we curse the apparently accidental, only to find, in retrospect, that we beheld, in fact, the operations of our own character, or the will of some superior Force or Being – or, if you will, the great, the ultimate confluence of the two, which confluence reveals us – not less than the object of our wonder or investigation – to be part of the Whole.
It has been suggested,2 of course, that Bennigsen was himself the “missing page”; that it was only in his “self” that the disparate elements were “made whole.”
The sounds themselves are not displeasing, certainly, but what do these words mean?
And, should they be found, by the jejune, sententious, academic, bored or criminal mind, to possess meaning, does his death not beg the question?
The Page is Game
The Age is Gone
The Wisdom of the Sage is Gone.3
And Bennigsen (Greind) is gone.
“And we are left to weep,”4 laments the herald, and we find in the next column, TWELVE-YEAR-OLD BOY BUILDS WIND-POWERED SCOOTER.
But, looking back, he must have seen that, looking back, it had been inexplicable, for what could explain it?
Save the human capacity to find safety in amalgamation, trusting, as any animal, to the multiplied force of the individual survival mechanism.
But the survival mechanism in their case was just intelligence – which, in groups much larger than a dinner party, can only become consensus.
The individual responds earlier to danger than the group.
The individual who responds earliest (i.e., most effectively to danger) would be that possessed of the best, the most acute senses – the highest capacity for flight, ferocity, etc. Among the human beings, however, the individual lauded as most prescient is not him of the greatest intelligence, but him with the most power to convince.
So, it was that combination which led to the species’ demise.
Their intelligence enabled them (potentially) to assess and withstand a threat. But the survival of the herd instinct led them to squander any advantage in obedience to (what they each hoped was) the will of the group.
And humans, being what they are, learn they can achieve status and power through the manipulation of the falsification/fabrication of consensus.
Such were not only incapable of but uninterested in threat assessment (i.e., the health of the species) but only in their individual survival and prominence.
And their survival skill was, again, not that of the group to which they belonged (intelligence), but that of the rogue: distraction, falsification and treachery. And their power came, strangely, from a lack of fellow feeling, enabling them to exploit.
They had nothing to offer save the false assurance that they spoke for the group. They were good, in short, only at “getting elected.”
Now, the horror felt at that time by the general (cf. the Cola Riots) has been (rightly) said to’ve been a displacement over the wellnigh two hundred years of what they were pleased to call “advertising.” Whomever it was – he or she can only be accounted a visionary – who discerned that the process of statistical analysis itself engendered such a feeling of awe in the public, that, rather than cast oneself on the mercy of statistical “results,” one could with, indeed, less expenditure of effort, simply elect which course he wished the populace to pursue, and publish “facts” designed “to make the sheep obey” – that person who saw the superfluity of the intermedian step – that person was a genius.
… in the place where it all meets. Where this would become clear: that we were enjoined to be patient not until things should improve, but until they should be over.
Then what difference in a length of life? For, in eternity consciousness must leach away – for how could we be conscious through eternity?5
That being so, what was the “intermediary term”? What was the length of life sufficient to the mortal mind? Something “longer than this,” but not indefinitely expansible?
What was that length? Or, if one could deduce that it did not exist, then was not all anxiety revealed as greed? Greed for sensation? Could one not, then, theoretically, banish it by an act of will? Could one not perceive that the “necessary term”6 was not a “length of days,” but a state of peace? And could one not, again, and always, theoretically, replace “greed for sensation” with “longing for peace?”
Or, absent the strength to proclaim it, that that magic term, the Missing Page, at which one would announce, “I’ve had enough,” was a function not of time, but of will … would that perception render it incumbent upon one either to embrace or to renounce that same apotheosis?
Greed, Greed. Greed mingled with fear. Like the bored, disaffected rich – who long for the new thing but lack the courage to renounce the old – who lounge in terrible, in maddening, in soul-destroying luxury, repining for that release which they must know will come, if it comes, not from novelty (for what is novelty to them but repetition?) but from renouncement, from …
“Ben? Ben? Shut up,” Roger said.7
L’Envoi
L’Envoi: The Noted Fighting Prowess of the Cottage Queen
Cut into the Plinth, on the Mall. This quotation, awarded the highest endorsement of its universality, is there found, unattributed. Any schoolchild, in the Time Before the Riots, would have looked at a request for its source as the act of a madman.1 And it was, in fact, this request which alerted, first, Billy, and, then, the Park Police to the arrival, in their midst, of the Old Wrangler.2
When cornered, like the boar, the stoat, the bull, the cottage queen, it has been noted throughout history, will turn and fight.
Sun Tsu, in his Art of War, cautions to leave one’s adversary a “golden bridge” over which he may retreat. Its absence, he avers, must at the last prolong and may, in fact, unbalance any conflict, tipping the scales of victory away from the stronger, and toward the more ferocious. So with the cottage queen, discovered at his moment of pleasure,3 nay, perhaps at the zenith, or the apogee of the aforesaid moment, as the Vice Squad, in their butch black jackets, kicks in the door (would it have killed them to have knocked?) (or were they brought up in a barn???), now roused to fury, and his very lust, if you will, but seeking a new channel, for, crested, as it was, unable to subside, turned from its proper debouchment, bay, tidewater, egress, in short, but yet still mounting, must, like that same aqueous element invoked in this conceit, discover or fashion a new escapement. Roused, I say, to a perhaps previously unsuspected pitch of bellicosity, the spirit turns from the quest for flesh to the pursuit of blood.
Where the Sea Ends, There the Land Begins *
“Or, perhaps, it all comes to naught.”
“No, no, there’s no ‘perhaps’ about it,” Chet said. “No ‘perhaps’ about it, Ging— … Look out the window.”
Ginger did as she was asked, and there she saw the surf on the shingle, pounding the rocks into sand, drawing the sand back to redistribute it.
“To what end?” she wondered. “To what end …?”
She felt assured that Chet would draw his text from it, and illuminate it in some way she’d, perhaps, “seen,” but never before “noted.”
What, she wondered, would he adopt for his subject? The interconnectedness of the organic and the inorganic, perhaps.
She mused on the obviously constant flux of a life, of a world, of an existence each attempted – some through philosophy, some through neurosis, some by science or art, to capture – through that skill and for that moment suffic
ient to bring them a compass of peace, to still the nagging anomie for that one millisecond, and denominate it triumph. Or would he adopt the ever fruitful “evolution” as his theme – the restless, constant change, elaboration, decay, renaissance, in all that lived?
Or, could it be, she wondered, that his subject would be the interface, that less-than-real, that, finally, imaginary intersect between the sea and land; or the mimetic “breath” of the sea, as it expanded and contracted once again into itself?
“It is going to piss down out there,” Chet exclaimed, and farted.
Who were these demi-gods? These – the late twenty-first century mind-habitants of the Pantheon – Donna, and Chet, and the everallusive Ginger – who were these, whose, finally, domestic squabbles, offered, to that time, a “new vision” of the world?
For, is the human mind not constantly reiterating the familial constellation?1
Now, as the Ancient Geeks, now as the “Tribes,” of Jewry, now as the signs of the Zodiac, now as the “residents,” or the Books in the Capsule.
Did Ginger actually exist?
There are, of course, two answers. They are “yes,” and “no,” and these two answers are traditional.
There is a third: “What difference?”
She “exists” now. She “holds the place,” or, more to the point, her Canon holds, or awards to her (and, by extension, of course, to her Adherents) the place of the Trickster: of Loki, Raven, Pan, who “created the worlds,” or Brer Fox, Léon Blum, et cetera.
It is her “job” to confound, confront, and, through these operations, to create that primordial state, that chaos from which, and only from which “the new thing” can arise.*
