AND Ignorance hung on a blind crab clinging to a net blinkered by centuries of darkness but if you want sex don’t go to Henry Miller don’t go to Proust try out The Story of O and you’ll live longer with a raised clitoris I mean what to do I know Is not love what makes the world go round and round and yet no one really knows anything about it except that it works Oh Mother Teresa what is your secret Is the Mona Lisa really winking at me at us as if a nod from her meant eternal love Oh baby baby and the Man without Shoulders who can’t lift his weight in butterflies is now in charge of the world And is there any reason to watch the World Series on TV while this is going on as if the fate of the world were on the Men with Shoulders out there on the Field of Dreams as if a bases-loaded home run could change the fate of the spinning world spinning with a curveball or one-hundred-mile-an-hour fastball to wipe out our enemies and save the world from whatever Yeah play the “Star-Spangled Banner” and sing about “bombs bursting in air” to show “our flag was still there” Yeah Yeah ain’t it the truth boo-boo boo-boo who will save us from total obliteration if not the Men with Big Shoulders carrying big bats phalluses dominoes over all Oh exquisite corpus feet of clay! but this is no zibaldone summarizing the ultimate incoherence of life on earth as she is lived by us but in that very incoherence we can discover those happy errors or illusions that give life meaning, for it is in the physical and instinctual, not in the mental and rational, wherein complicity with illusion-happiness lies—and so and so, take that you hairy old philosopher in your cubicle and let us be off to the lands of the living and breathing and loving! And yet and yet it could be said that there will never be heroic generous and sublime action, or high thoughts and feelings, that are anything other than real and genuine illusions, and whose price must fall as the empire of reason increases Oh yes oh yes indeed how true, how true! but the World Series is on TV and the Boys of October are swinging their phalli bats and the lovely blonds are laughing in the bandstands the lovely blonds with perfect teeth are holding out their arms to someone the sun is bright upon them one and all fifty thousand humans on a sunny Sunday in Fenway Park in Boston where the bums still sleep under the linden trees in Boston Common Ah yes the greatest generation so dubbed by a journalist speaking of those born 1919 or thereabouts like John F Kennedy and others like meself yes indeed what a group and did they not fight the good war and did they not etc etc Yes World War Two it was and they in the flower & flour of manhood not to slight the ladies me lad like on a sunny morn when I saw a fine one with her skin like peaches and cream singing to herself in an open window a voice so pure a lilting voice the voice of her race when predatory capitalism hits the fan! Oh that was a moment of light in the universe but then comes the darkness as our country turned to a Stark Time of Haves and Have-Nots in a fractured land while at the same time astronomers are reporting that their Dark Matter probe has detected absolutely Nothing.
AND was it Lyndon Johnson who said “Ah never trust a man until I got his pecker in my pocket” oh man Didn’t he have the skeleton key to everything right there when he put his finger on the pecker in the pocket yeah for the Pecker is indeed the Fourth Person Singular and the vagina is also a Person speaking out and the Voice of the Vagina is heard throughout the land in vagina monologues while where the pecker heads go ye shall follow and look how it led to the ruin of many a president and many a king Pecker rose and made its irresistible demands and bang goes the egg money Wow and Woe Woe! Woe!
SO I am a man of a certain age And old memory all gone and twisted into reveries like Krapp recording his Last Tape and I’ll have none of that Let the doomsayers be doomed and my mind warring with everything Life & Death and the older one gets the more the mind wars with All while I am trying to discover the plot of my life and can’t be bothered trying to find the plot of life on earth and the only part of my plot I have discovered so far is that I am growing older by the split nanosecond night and day and all grows and grows to its fruition my fruition and even my nose grows when I’m asleep (the historic fact of noses growing while everyone sleeps discovered by the Russian poet Andrei Voznesensky and revealed in a poem whereas it should have been published in a scientific journal) and anyway I simply can’t stop growing up and over and I shall wear and I shall wear the bottoms of my Levi’s rolled and walk and walk upon the beach and hear the mermaids singing each to each whilst still I know those ladies with flippers for legs are in fact still singing to me Ah yes je me souviens and you were wearing high heels and sheer stockings that day in Ojo Caliente and nothing then to do but loudly sing Gaudeamus Igitur as if the whole aim of life on earth were to find pure love and me hiding in plain sight for all to see Oh blind man’s bluff…
AND so the end of all my traveling toward the sun great god sun in charge of all And the isles of Greece which I never reached, nor landed on, ah the isles of Greece the isles of Greece the Delphic mysteries the Golden Fleece The light upon the seat eternal The horses of Achilles weeping for Achilles The loves of Sappho in the night The songs and cries of Sappho The Delphic prophecies The Eleusinian mysteries The sound of revelry by night on Mount Olympus The orgasmic cries of Dionysus The high breasts of Helen The long fair hair of Helen Her darkened eyes The longing eyes of Penelope Aie! Aie! Ulysse! And “Audiart Audiart where thy bodice laces start.” “There is none like thee among the dancers.” And then the cawing of crows mixed with the cry of nightingales at the Fountain of Castalia And then the anger of the gods And then the dire prophecies The wailing of sibyls and sirens The cries of the vestal virgins The cries of Icarus falling from the sky The foundering of ships at sea The cries of the blinded Cyclops in his cave And the sun the setting sun over the isles of Greece And the sound of axes in the wood in the sacred grove And the Golden Bough unfound beyond us still The dancers gone under the hill Ah let the Golden Age return before all ages end And we must burn!
AH “Memory Foam” which remembers too much including dreaming for we remember snatches of our dreams while we are returning to consciousness yes snatches of our former or future lives, real or imagined, and my head made of Memory Foam remembering everything as for instance that time in Avignon when a fair woman got off the local train her arms full of lavande the lavender flower of Provence that is in its glory everywhere in late summer and it seemed she headed straight for me and offered lavande and herself to me and it turned out that she was an existential editor’s wife getting away from existentialism as far as possible but back in Paris she embraced existentialism while embracing me that is to say she used existential arguments to disabuse me of my youthful romanticism and time flew by and then one day she moved with her husband to teach in a French colony and I never saw her again but existentialism was still with me like that time I spied Jean-Paul Sartre with Beauvoir in the Brasserie Lipp in Saint-Germain and me living on sixty-five dollars a month on the G.I. Bill and could never afford to even sit down in the Brasserie Lipp and so what am I to do, go right up and greet the great Sartre and the great Beauvoir and join easily in their conversation as if I had the slightest idea what they were talking about Oh yeah sure Bonsoir, M’ssieur Sartre etc etc ha-ha before he signals the waiter and I am evicted and I’m back on the street heading for my hole-in-the-wall in Montparnasse where a cold pot-au-feu awaits me for dinner as I imagine Monsieur Sartre staring after me thru those thick lenses which I always suspected prevented him from seeing anything at all in the real world ha-ha and me still a romantic in spite of it all my Memory Foam full of romantic failures but enough not-failures which kept my romantic self alive Ah me the treasure hunt for love never ends and always begins again and then when you find it again ain’t it sweet as apple pie made with spring apples and the sap rising in your blood?
BUT now that I have heard everything that I have to say about everything it is high time for a great epiphany or for the Alpha Mom or the Alpha Dad to appear and enlighten us as to why exactly we are here on earth and what is our hidden destiny and so in the beginning was the word and t
he word was Godot and the world was coming to an end even in the beginning every moment a new beginning and the way forward is the way back and in order to arrive where you are not you must go by a way you have never been and oh nevermind those fine old phrases Let’s get back to the present where the world is coming to an end for the millionth time but this time it’s for real yes sir I’m not giving you some Old Wives’ Tales by Irish washerwomen gossiping in the dusk while washing their clothes in the River Liffey while night birds twitter and far-off field mice twit
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