by David Mamet
The Trickster, stealing corn from the farmers, fire from the gods, pages from the Manuscript, this, then, is Ginger, for whom “mischief” always comes first. This is her office in the Canon. It is this for which we are indebted to her, as she embodies for her time, and, so for us, who have enshrined it, the virtues of non-virtue, the wisdom of folly, the instructive component of misadventure, the teleological worth of chaos. This is Ginger.
We contend, here below, each in himself, and, in the macro-consciousness, between the poles “Yes, I shall do it!” and “Oh, what the hell.”
“It is this dialectic moves the whole thing on.”2
Here we have Eros and Thanatos, Reason and Wit, in flux, before us, much as the sea over which Ginger mused, awaiting “Chet’s final verdict” on “the cause of it all”; and, as in the myth, it is her disappointment which gives rise (in the Canon) to the Adventure of the Boathouse, and in the larger picture, to the world at large.
For her “Flight up the Hill” is none other than Raven’s rocketing egress from the Underworld, Prometheus’ (questionable) gift of fire from on high, the opening of Pandora’s box, or Greind’s “Discovery of the Season Tickets” – it is the necessary interjection of that final, last, unnamed and sacrosanct, prerogative of the Ineffable.
The End of the Day
Selah
Or, at the end of the day, we might identify Jane of Trent with (as) the Lady of Spain. We might identify her, with more hope of popular acceptance, but, finally, with not one whit more justification* with Lola Montez, or with the Mother of God. Why not? When all is, finally, arbitrary; for the frisson between the given word and individual discovery or intuition is, itself, open both to interpretation of dismissal, based, yet again, on some adoption or admixture of those selfsame forces which it presents itself to treat.
For how do we feel the processes of cognition? By retreat (yoga, tai-chi, ga-wong-ta, psychotomimetic pharmaceuticals, etc.) by flight, study or absorption in those states wherein that same oblivion, that same selflessness, Nirvana, sense of non-being, becomes, at its fullest, nothing but a (granted, perhaps or necessarily, inchoate) intuition, understanding, revelation or, to make an end, knowledge. What a thing! And how we yearn (do we not, I think we do) to discover and appeal to that higher self, tradition, or being, which would both strive and instruct1 us.
Did the Toll Hound dance? Why? What can it matter? At the end of the day? That such and such a one knew this or that: the history of the Western Plains, the uses of bowline-on-a-bight, the secret vice of “Bootsie,”2 the (lost) ground plan of the Stop ’n’ Shop, etc., till the mind – for past rebellion – turns upon itself, not in disgust, but triumph, and that day is done.
The Poem Reiterated
The Poem Reiterated
D awn, and the nascent, roseate glow.
F riend, if thou art Friend, perchance Foe,
S tand with me in the Light which sootheth all,
S uffusing the now ended slumbers on The Mall.
Only conceive, if it is granted thee,
Those noted years of bootless Misery,
The trials of the Heads of State,
The ceaseless Perturbation of the Great,
The ponderous burden of the few
To license, nay, inaugurate the new
Peregrinations of the Wandering Jew.
But for a moment meditate, I pray,
But for a moment stay.
Encapsulate the figures carved in stone,
Picture the absent flesh, the buried bone,
Hear with your inner hearing that fell tone
Of those controlled by Lust alone,
Of those whom neither shame nor pride debars
From luxury in the vermilion sway of Mars.
Apostrophize, if you will, on the thrall
Of History, and upon the futility of all.
Then may my eyes meet yours. And, for that while,
O, brother, may we not essay a smile?
Lost in the maelstrom of time,
Linked for a heartbeat sublime
Held for the sake of what O’erarching All –
Of what imponderables burnt –
Upon the deepest revelation of them all …
Closing Note
Closing Note
It was not, of course, Jane of Trent. The rhyme could not have been Jane of Trent, as her cult, long discredited, had become, in the era of the Poem’s composition, anathema.
Brave would have been the soul, indeed, who’d dare to allude, with however many layers of deniability, to her, or her (then, of course moot) “Place on the Mall.”
That the Poem was a cunning fabrication was doubted by no one at the time of its “discovery.” It passed from view, in the words of one contemporary historian, because “it just wasn’t funny”;1 and the work here reproduced2 is offered by the editors as a bonne bouche, a loving look at a curious Time Past.
The Editors offer and endorse it not as a work of scholarship3 but, perhaps, as a fit object of study. If not of study, then of contemplation. If not of contemplation, then of wistful sadness, at the oversight, loss, or dismission, or, to put a good face on it, subsumption in the general whole which must be the eventual lot of all.4
The End
Three
From “Weebut’s Selected ‘Thoughts from the Diary’”
“Febr. Elevn [sic] = 2.11.2033 = 2+1+1+2+0+3+3 = 12 = 1+2 = 3. But what does ‘3’ equal?” she said. And so we have the beginning of Modern Numerology. Or, as she wrote, “On this spot was revealed to Ginger H. Kahn the meaning of numbers.”
We have seen it graven on the Monument, we’ve seen it* printed on mugs, caps, clothing and banners, sold (under license) on the Mall; we’ve seen it parodied and lampooned (to cite one vulgar example) upon underwear, where “this spot” is clearly made to refer to the nipples or to genitalia. It has been part of the white or “background” noise of civilization – a catch phrase of the class of “What a shockingly bad hat!”, or “And they are mild” – those tags of yore, now famous, like the Gabor Sisters,1 for being famous.
11 February 2033. A simple date. In which she professed to’ve found mystical meaning – upon which meaning an entire branch of science was established, which meaning, which discipline, which knowledge we now see subsiding, once again, into nothingness.
And nothing will remain.
Neither her insights nor her self-doubt. Neither the clarifications nor the misreadings of her biographers. Finally, not the number 3, nor the propensity nor the capacity of the human mind to perceive or impose order upon that universe which may exist, if it exists at all, but as a freak of an electric system out of control – sprung into being to aid in the production or capture of food, and warped (by what process we cannot say) into a self-elaborating instrument of destruction, hastening, finally, the dissolution both of itself and its host.2
1 – Bobs Merril, Two Trains are Leaving Chicago (Chicago, 2123).
2 – Treated here both per se and, in mythologic form, as “The Death of Chet and Donna.”
* Or was Krautz the pseudonym?
3 – Though an impartial survey of the scholastic blather published on “The Loss of the Written Word” might send one to the dictionary to double-check the definition of “oxymoron.”
4 – Surely even the most vehemently fundamentalist must grant (if only hypothetically) the existence of such, else how explain gin?* (See S. Bronfman, B’lieve I’ll Have a Drink: History of Canada.)
* But perhaps that is a question for another day.
5 – The Moving Picture Boys in Earthquake Land (Boston, 1921).
1 – Or “mime.”A
A – See also Problems in Orthography: The Pocket Guide to the M–N Transposition in Ugartic, Ugantic, and Urdu (The Handy Dandy Jack-a-Pandy “Little Giant of Philology” Books with the Yellow Cover).
For a fuller discussion of which see Roily Nay, Color as Trademark, or Eastman Kodak and the Three Bears. This magnificent (and very funny) wo
rk explores the relationship between the collateral branch of the Warburg family and the “King of Rochester.” I quote, with permission:
In he came, his arms full of Christmas presents.
Ross met him in the hall, bowing with his usual grace, and relieved him first of the encumbering packages, and then of his sable coat.
“How was your day, Mister E.?” Ross asked.
His only answer was a sad shake of the head.
“Troubles down th’ fact’ry, sir?” Ross asked, and was surprised to see his employer, that rock, that stalwart, over-come by tears.
Ross led him to his “evening” chair, by the fire, in the salon. He retired only long enough to pass instructions to a parlour maid. “You have Cook bring his toddy,” he said, and turned back, to see Charles Eastman, feet drawn up beneath him, curled into the big brown leather chair, his back heaving as the grief, as the frustration which he could not hide reduced him to the state of a child.
“What is it, Mister E.?” Ross said. “You know it doesn’t do ‘ny good to ‘keep it in.’ What is it, sir?”
“I can’t … I can’t … I can’t …” the big man said, “I just can’t find the perfect color to wrap my film in.”
“What have you tried?” Ross quietly asked.
“I’ve tried them all,” Eastman sobbed. “I’ve tried them all …”
“Have you tried yellow, sir …?” Ross said.
The ensuing chapter, “The Best Christmas Present of Them All”, is omitted here solely because of limitations of space. It would be an error to impute its omission to any other motive.
1 – Bart Greind (ed.), Laugh Till I Cry (University of Indiana Press).
2 –Captain Bob and the Campfire Girls in Earthquake Land et seq.
3 – Told You So (Santeria World, autumn 2028).
1 – Editions Suhrkampf, 15th fol., Neue Deutschland.
2 – The works of Victor Hugo.
3 – 2011-95.
4 – See The Hidden Meaning of the Bootsie Clubs (Pleasantview Publications, New South Mars, 2111).
5 – Guest Book of the Ipatiev House.
6– Jane Blaugh et al., Of the World, Worldly (Modicum House, New South Mars, 2211).
7 – Advertisement for Carter’s Pills, 20??
* The neo-Formalists.
8 – Although, as he’d written elsewhere (Me ’n’ Bootsie, chapter 12), he had habitually asked them to “shampoo his hair” after a haircut.
9 – I will not tax the reader’s time nor sense of outrage by referring to the omission (even if a “mere sop to Formalism”) of a reference to “bootless Misery” as a homage to Bootsie.
1 – Where A = Acceptance. See Wayne Newton IX, So What? (University of Iowa Press, 2015).
2 – The Poetics, or Dink Stover at Yale, AD?
3 – I am indebted to Morris Watkins Bane for the identification of Snapple and Crack as two late twentieth-century analgesics. Both common sense and recent philologic–semantic matrii reject the identification of Pop as a cognomen of Wernher von Braun. As do I.
4 – The Young Lions.
5 – J. Blota, First See If It’s Plugged In (Mud Press, 2091).
6 – For further work on the phone book, I direct the reader to Anon., Funny Names, No Plot.
7 – O. J. Stimson, Think About It (2002).
8 – Hillary Rodham Clinton Rodham, Highsticking.
9 – Though I do suggest the application of the Merck Manual, 2091-92, and of the 92093 Index, and the obvious use of their formula for “carbon-based literal distillates.” See Merck, op. cit., and The Index (Merck, DC Comics); and, by the way, the stunningly concise At a Store Near You by Antoinette and Francois Pope (University of Melanesia Publications, 2045), and, of course, the film Bunny based thereon. The transformation of the character Kal-El into the friendly Doctor Brown has become a part of the culture and needs no notice herein. I need refer only to the Doctor’s likeness in bronze on the Mall facing the Mud Pond. And would like to take this opportunity to relate an apercu connecting not the film but an incident absent in the film but present in the pamphlet that survived, like the poisons in medicine, in spite of efforts to eradicate it. It was during the third ’mester at the Mud Pond when I found myself, engaged in contemplation of an abstruse zine – the first, or “pirate”, edition of Jane of Trent, bearing, for those of that bent, the renowned spot/pots transposition on page 12 – one evening, in short, before the fall Ordeal, when I found myself before the Doctor, and climbed on the plinth to rub his ears. I looked down, and saw, at some remove, a loved professor, sitting in his barge, and, as I thought, weeping copiously.
I moved to descend, and slipped and fell, sustaining a concussion which confined me to a hospital for several months, where I met the woman who was to be my wife.
1 – Variant: Tribadic (disputed), Smith College Anthology of Humor (2211); see also Funny Bathroom Signs of Wisconsin, op. cit., and cf. “Ramifications of The Joke Code,” p. 29.
2 – Robert Hastings-Burke, I Left My Love in Avalon (Pacific Rim Publications) and You Like It, It Likes You: The Story of Martin Buber, plus “When I hear the word ‘Culture’ I reach for my Browning Automatic,” George Goebbels, Lonesome George (Bath Press, 1959); Do You Know Where I Can Get Scrod?: The Depletion of the Grand Banks; cf. Captains Courageous, with Spencer Tracy as the Beaver; “We’re Here!” by Mr. Jacques of the Ritz, formerly of Brookline Cut ’n’ Curl; and Anon., Toot, Toot, Peanut Butter, or The Imaginary Rabbit (p.d.) … mitigating toward the unitary, in defiance of the quasi-legal sway (certainly the popular primacy) of the 12-step program, Dodecanensis.A,B
A – See Paul H. Patt, Dodecanensis or The Dozens in Action (McGill University Press, 1948) (in the French translation, Les Douzaines: Ta Soeur a ses Prop res Raisons), from which I quote (with permission):
… the small white house, the scent of mock-orange, hanging like a velvet drape in the summer evening heat, the ice-cream vendor’s bell,A1 “Ding dong, ding dong …”, as Billy and Ginger thrust their chairs back from the dining table, and their “M’I’b’s’cused?” came, almost as one syllable, and in unison from their mouths, as they ran from the house, out towards the ice-cream man.
Oh, if you could have been there, to see and to hear that screen door slam in that most American of all summer sounds, and to see sweet Tritzi, the wire-haired dachshund, caught out again, and staring through the screen.
What must the world have looked like to her, Ginger wondered, those long decades later, as she stared, at the world, through a different kind of screen. “Two screens:’ she thought: the mesh security fence and her psychosis.
“What a dog, however,” she thought. “That’s some kind of dog. In spite of that he was a Kraut.”
White white white white, the sky went buttermilk.
“No, it’s just white,” she thought. And, “… Billy: Lookit!”
But he was gone. Into the street, hightailing toward the ice-cream truck, and did not hear the car horn, nor the squeal of brakes, nor the sick final impact, nor the silence afterwards, nor his mother’s moans, nor see his father’s resolution, nor the 1959 World Series, nor …
“Oh, stuff a sock in it!” the orderly screamed at Ginger, who, as always, didn’t realize she had been thinking out loud.
Heaved out of her pleasant reverie, Ginger hawked up and spat, as was her wont, to the four cardinal points, and fell to the floor to curl in her usual “ball,” knees to forehead, feet to buttocks, head to the south-south-west to avail herself of the afternoon sun’s yellow rhomboids on the linoleum floor.
“Wherever would old Tritzi be now?” she wondered. “Dead. Of course. Long dead. Her flesh gone, her very bones, perhaps, gone, eaten by a cat, maybe; or, perhaps (yuck) by another dog …
“And where the hell is Billy, and, more to the point, the Hudson Terraplane with which Mrs. Beal ran him down …?”
(“That put a hole in her shopping day,” she thought, and chuckled.)
Now Marie, the nurse’s aide,
high-stepped over her, and glanced down at the spreading pool of urine. She shook her head.
“I hope to hell that I haven’t got some on my shoes,” she thought. “I hope to hell that I have not.”
“Each of us, in his way, is a valuable citizen,” said Ginger. “Even the dog. Although it only was his job to sit there and look wistful:’
“Clean yourself up,” Marie said.
“And fuck the Nazis,” Ginger screamed. “Are we to demand for ever that their dogs pay for it …?”
Marie shook her head.
“… they’re hardly human. And look how they have to pick up the tab for their bad associations. Well,” she screamed, “I, guess we all do.”
Marie walked to the broom closet. She opened the door, sighed, and pulled out her mop and pail.
B – The Traditional Table of Organization of the CanonB1 (“Riot,” to the Third Martian See) ran, of course:
Chet and Donna
Ginger
Jacob Cohen
The Old Wrangler
The Fantasist
The Redactor
Bootsie
The Toll Hound
Bingo
Bennigsen and Krautz
The Caninists traditionally conflated the Toll Hound and Bingo, as one of the “Six Working Pairs.” Their error persisted, and they persisted in their error until and in despite of Bongazine’s publication of The Settlement of Michigan (p. 67).
The correct identification of Bingo as other-than-canine led to the recognition of the (to our eyes, obvious) Bootsie-Bingo alignment.
That such, however, left the Toll Hound “unpaired” went unremarked until the “Spring Annual” of Bongazine, 2101.B2
A1 – See also “The Ice-cream Vendor’s Bell”, The Poems of Hart Crane.
B1 – Oft considered the “key to section one” (Ft. Worth Star–Dispatch).
