The Brooke-Rose Omnibus

by Brooke-Rose, Christine

  — No.

  — Or a wish to get it declared null and void by some authority that pretends to speak for a higher perhaps in whom or which you no longer believe. In other words something other than yourself, your own annihilation having no validity at least for you?

  — Annihilation?

  — Well let’s face it you destroy. You know like Helen destroyer of men destroyer of ships und so weiter.

  Troy I, Troy II, Troy VIIa. How very disappointing.

  — What rubbish, who believes in that femme fatale stuff these days, not men certainly. Everybody destroys to some extent. One has to reject some things if they don’t belong. Or if they destroy.

  — Unless perhaps, ah! Yes. No, surely not. You don’t want to marry again do you? Or do you? Pining away all these years for some virtuous Catholic who has reawakened your deep buried faith so that you can’t have each other except set and sealed by the finger of God before the altar in the bosom of Mother Church? Tell Uncle Siegfried.

  — Nnno.

  — Hmm? But you might. Well, well, surprise surprise.

  — Thank you for the charming compliment.

  — Now now you know I didn’t mean it like that. Aber natürlich you don’t look a day older mein Lieb and you might pretend the same about me for old time’s sake.

  — Pretend?

  — As a matter of fact I don’t feel too happy about meeting in Amsterdam. Anywhere else, but here I know too many of my wife’s kith and kin and this restaurant particularly—

  — Oh really Siegfried. Old colleagues?

  — But you know what they’ll immediately think.

  — Let them. Who cares? Let them follow us even and see that we do nothing they would like to imagine.

  — Ah but they wouldn’t follow us to see, they would merely imagine. Besides, I would like to do more than imagine. Wouldn’t you? Again, Viellieb, ancora?

  The hands lie quite still on the white table-cloth in this restaurant particularly, where middle-aged couples or men alone come to eat vast plates of piled up food with tall glasses of beer or no liquid at all, or sit in fondo a sinistra transfixed by the flickering local variation in the presentation of opposite viewpoints on every aspect of an instant world through faceless men who no doubt have acquired faces for them in Dutch although not to the pale bearded young man in fondo a destra at the long low-lit desk who works with a notebook next to the newspapers cast aside and a large legal tome. Unless a book of physics or a dictionary perhaps looking up semantics enthusiasm crisis with a small cup of coffee. The thumbs press each other towards the body forming a squat diamond space with the other fingers touching like a cathedral roof, the ankles crossed under the tablecloth to close the circuit and who do you suppose wants to get at you mein Lieb? Apart from me I mean? No-one? That shaking of the head does it mean yes as in Turkey Bulgaria Greece? Or no as in the more dialectical West that has turned civilisation upside down?

  Let’s face it you destroy. Troy I, Troy II. Ephesos early became an important centre for Christianity. On the city mount of modern Selçuk the Ajasoluk (a bowdlerizing of the Greek “Hagios Theologos”) the grave of St. John remained and between the 4th and 5th centuries the people of Ephesos built churches over this grave. Between the theatre and the public baths stands the notice BROTHEL. FREUDENHAUS. ASK EVI. Yes well ask her why not as God said to the serpent. In 263 the Goths destroyed the temple of Artemis. At the end of the 4th century the people destroyed or readapted most non-Christian temples on imperial order. But Justinian took the famous green marble columns from the ruined temple of Artemis for Santa Sophia in Constantinople. As the Islamic religion began its victorious conquest of Asia Minor a long period of peace for Ephesos came to an end. Probably during this period wherever particular people congregated you wanted them to commit themselves to your latest enthusiasm whereas nothing, rien, niente deserves a flow of rash desire love loyalty ambition marriage of tradition and progress. In the early nineteenth century the German poet Clemens Brentano took down the visions of the stigmatic nun Katharina Emmerich poor alleinstehende Frau who dreamt of the exact spot near Ephesos where the Virgin Mary lived her last years and archeologists found the remains of a 4th century chapel built on an earlier rubbish of course though fitting that Stella Maris the moon-mother-earth-water goddess on her silver crescent should continue to have a cult there. What enthusiasm? Surely one can expect a little interest and less disparagement of the sort of things which your Church for instance. All truths get institutionalised sooner or later and die, it happened to the Greek gods the Roman gods the Hebrew god, even Christ got angry about that and probably looks on now in desolation at his dead desiccated bride my sweet. How dare you talk like that? You know very well that it means something quite other, to do with childhood and that my sweet the people have destroyed or readapted most temples to their vulgar need for dogmas and static images, banalising the great and ancient myths of fall, descent, and rise into innumerable instructions that translate time space death rebirth into a narrow channel of salvation according to those instructions only, no better or worse, as instructions for living, than say, your Zodiac language, which has the same ill-worded beautiful irrelevance but at least it amuses. One must laugh, what else can one do? Yes well thanks to you all that aspect has gone anyway let us not talk about it. Not that we ever talk about anything these days without quarrelling. You quarrel my ernst German Mädel you quibble everything I say, you destroy. Because you turn everything into a joke, a poor joke usually or dirty so that now we never discuss anything at all even the places you go to the conferences the conventions broken the congresses where the Greek lady says she has no need to look up the word semantics in the dictionary because semantikos in Greek simply means humanity, fraternity, tutungerie, a bowdlerising of Saint Theology for the building of which Justinian took the famous green marble columns from Ephesos, biding his time to pick up the broken bits didn’t I Liebes, his hand having drawn electricity unfelt and battericamente pura from the pulsing wrist-base of the cathedral roof mistaking the long silence for what, where when to whose heart did one do that?

  — Oh, what difference does it make let us not discuss it.

  — All right we’ll change the subject. Hmm. You change the subject my mind has got stuck on the one and only, and when I say my mind I mean three channels at least and more than my five senses.

  — Do you know anyone with the initials B.C.?

  — B.C.?

  — Someone who seems to know about the racket, can find out where one goes or will go, though too late.

  — Me of course. Incognito.

  — Du Witzling.

  — True I’d turn up on time. Unlike you mein Liebes do you still not wear a watch? I really must give you one, or a travelling clock.

  — No please don’t. They get lost or broken.

  — So you still live anticlockwise?

  — Of course not. Clocks hang everywhere.

  — They never agree however. Hence your unpunctuality.

  — Never at work though.

  — Only at play, ah well. Er, man or woman?

  — Bărbat.

  — So you know he has a beard?

  — Witzling. No. Just a Man.

  — Merely a man. Well, let’s see. Some cher collègue pursuing you eh? How romantic. I thought they had replaced us almost entirely with gorgeous young computers. Forgive me. And does he keep finding himself on another plane?

  — Not exactly. Though he lives on another plane all right look at these. Do you know that writing?

  — No. Oh, but wait. Yes. The style. Aha. Natürlich selbstverständlich. Ma chère collègue but you have made a somewhat belated post-factum conquest of dear old Bertrand retired if I may say so several centuries ago.

  — Bertrand! Good God.

  The cloud has cleared. The jet exhausts invisible in their power save for a tremor on the blue or the propellers invisible in their speed save for a hinted halo che fa tremar dì claritate l’âre, no man-made
object passing to show that the heart flies immobile at eight hundred and ninety kilometres and no man to come and bring you out of this or that zone of tickled fancy inside the distant brain way up with a tremendous force of a love lost or never gained lying forgotten under layers of civilisation thickening sensibilities such as for instance a language that actually means something in the light of that love or vice versa, but only a decrepit fond old man well sixty-five and plus whose surname you never remember do you Liebes but then no wonder in this case he always fell in love with young secretaries inaccessible, writing them flowery letters full of Provençal quotations about fin amor lonhtano and the princesse lointaine so that we used to call him Bertrand de Born.

  — But didn’t Rudel write about the princesse lointaine?

  — Oh, you know everything my pendantic Liebes. I travel in electronics now not simultaneous interpretation, remember me? Or have you closed the circuit?

  Et au départ, n’oubliez pas qu’en roumain “la revedere” signifie “au revoir” et que le sourire avenant de la Roumanie signifie “à bientôt” in the lively rhythm of a prodigious development representing only some of the accents of the renovating present.

  Whereas in modern Greek elios means sun and gyneka means woman. The meaning has remained. Logariasmo parakalo for that matter means the bill please according to the phrase-book in a mere smattering acquired with the Wolga Boatsman Hara-Kiri Roumanian Cocktail Bloody Merry Whyte Lady in low square black armchairs the bar lit up like a reredos vous prendrez quelque chose chère madame? Nothing at all, just personal effects like furry eyes and the fact that in this air-conditioning the body floats in willing suspension of loyalty to anyone inside the giant centipede where I want narrow trousers. Without folding-up. I prefer it double-breasted. With two buttons. When shall I come for the rehearsal? In six days I go away.

  Or did you want to test by means of engagement?

  And we saw yesterday afternoon mesdames messieurs, in the Byzantine Museum of Athens, a remarkable example of this inversion by double negation so typical of the imaginative function in its descending aspect of depth, night, femininity, container which becomes contained, swallower which becomes swallowed, as opposed to its upward masculine aspect. Je fais allusion au Saint Christophe cynocéphale, dating from the 17th century, and represented with a dog’s head. Two myths converge here, that of the man-eating giant with the head of a dog and that of the passer of souls, Cerberus, a transposition of the Egyptian Anubis. Here the Christ carried by death inverts the meaning of death, coming down through the neutralised transmitter in the brain behind the closed eyelids which open to catch a glimpse of Sandra working so young so fresh into simultaneous English with eyes ears voice and un amour de soutien-gorge no hands as she watches the speaker through the glass booth accompanying mortals in their perilous journey, et qui devient symbole de l’in-ti-mi-té dans le voyage, as well as protector and talisman against death itself, especially violent death. The mythical imagination invokes death against death in a characteristic double negation. Le Christo-phoros porte le Christ. And in a gulliverisation typical of giant myths, as for example the Gargantua legends, the swallowing mouth gets euphemised into a sack, a basket, une hotte, a container, which, like the mandala mentioned in Professor Strebbing’s excellent paper this morning, represents a sort of porte-manteau centre-of-perfection, prêt-à-porter si vous voulez, like the prayer-wheel or even the prayer-rug, a miniature temple, cavern, womb, stomach, belly, vessel, vehicle, ship, sepulchre or holy grail, with the same confusional sliding from active to passive, from swallower to swallowed, from container to contained that we find in all the myths of depth, night, descent and femininity. They come so young nowadays, doing the same work with ease and careless poise from the start who have known no war no national groups as when les grandes personnes talked of la Guerre l’Allemagne and yet not like that at all, a different species altogether who can learn from simply living simultaneously all channels alert at all levels unless they merely block off different ones, witness le complexe de Jonas with which I dealt briefly earlier on in the foetus position with diagrams of a fish thrown upside down on the screen the lantern-slide projector behaving like an antipodal eye telescoping time with an error, la pointe pressed home on the meridian of the heart C7 here on the wrist which stops hysteria at once and the vessel of conception CV 52 as a recommended alternative for relaxation and absolute calm.

  The black arrow on the left inside the disc points up, the red arrow points down. The grey-lined bus full of structural imaginations nevertheless swings out to pass the lorry with TIR on its bottom and over the blue number-plate E plus six figures in white stretching interminably with Transport International of something past already as the bus cuts in quickly aslant the eyes of a black car ahead switched on in anger unless perhaps alarm. Sometimes however the number of the key drops down from 412 to two times two equals four times two equals eight times two equals sixteen ad infinitum which makes one very sad. Away from the road a path leads into a deep cleft between the two masses of the Phaidriades where lies the famous Kastalia spring. The visitor’s attention turns immediately to the sanctuary of Apollo situated on the higher slopes in five terrace-like levels. The visitor’s attention turns immediately to the androgynous goddess.

  For let me make it quite clear, the myth of the androgynous divinity, present everywhere, does not until the later cults of the masculine god, express the idea of the Father transcendent but rather that of the feminoid Son. Most lunar and vegetation divinities have a double sexuality, Artemis, Attis, Adonis, Dionysos, even Adam and his rib, not to mention australian, Chinese, indian and nordic divinities. Hence the curious bearded goddesses which pass through the neutralised transmitter in the brain in French and out into the mouthpiece in simultaneous German. Or through the younger carelessly poised transmitter between the long lank hair and un amour de soutien-gorge qui pigeonne all channels alert with ease and out in simultaneous English. Hence the invocation of Sin, the babylonian lunar god as both matrix and merciful Father, principle of harmonious reunion hence ritual castration breast ablation hence the mythical origin of the Amazons hence into the mouthpiece in and out, in and out, slowly and round the eternal cycle of l’ourobouros, the snake eating its own tail indefinitely, not merely as a ring of flesh but expressing the material dialectic of death and life, life and death, death out of life, life out of death in an endless inversion echoing the agro-lunar drama of months and seasons, the sacrificial substitution permitting, through repetition, the exchange of past for future and the domestication of Chronos. Did you want it for eating love? Leider haben wir keine.

  Between existing as a woman and working as a man in charge of the young a different species altogether, eyes closed, watching the words as they pass through the neutralised transmitter in the brain and hence, in and out steadily and round the eternal cycle sits an androgynous douce inoubliable dame desolate at the death of hope faith charity to any rib torn from her chest any small foreign body out of entrails for the forming of a language that actually means something in the light of that death. Or else inside the whale who knows for we must surely acknowledge that these vital lies have more energy than so many of the fragile truths that surround us in this supposedly rationalistic age so dominated by masculine upward myths, and that the essential truth of these Lebenslügen reintegrates us in totality by virtue of an onto logical recognition present in all of us. Can we call mensonge un mensonge qui a tant de vitalité?

  The broad white arrow crosses the blue disc diagonally. The arrow changes into a black band diagonal across the disk. On the left of the broad yellow arrow that points down from corner to corner of the square card the razor-blade, printed in green, has a white narrow slit dented with short vertical bars and two small circles on either side of the diamond-shape in the centre. On the other side two pink lips slightly separated echo the white and dented slit in the green razor-blade. Pour le démaquillage et pour le rasoir. Sometimes German comes first then English then Fre
nch with the language of the country Rumanian Russian Greek always first however such as Toaleta unless TOAΛETHA or even TOYAΛETTA with care not to enter Bărbaţi when the door bears no skirted figurine or high-heeled shoe in the mere smattering acquired with Acqua Minerale battericamente pura that cleanses ancient matter as it passes through the body because naturellement nous pouvons considérer toute alimentation comme transsubstantiation. Boiled rice, du lieber Gott. Couldn’t you save in other ways than lining your stomach with a great hole of emptiness, for example the gulliverisation of St. Nicholas with his sack, a close parallel to St. Christopher and the good giants out of the man-eating monsters and the god-eating Titans. Witness the ships in nutshells, bottles, boxes within boxes, tabernacles in temples und so weiter weiter gehen through the indiscrimination of the mouthpiece at nineteen or forty-seven even.

  The disc encloses three curved black arrows forming a circle anti-clockwise au schème de l’ourobouros, the snake eating its own tail indefinitely, not merely as a ring of flesh but as the material dialectic of death and life, death out of life, life out of death in an endless inversion echoing the agro-lunar dramma dell’ agnosticismo con tutti gli ingredienti storici filosofici e sociali determinanti la involuzione in atto nella nostra civiltà. The English they applause their speakers. The Gairmans they applause their speakers in le mensonge vital which sits back desolate at the catastrophe it has provoked. And the Japanese, don’t forget the Japanese. They praise, yes mademoiselle, also. Presumably everyone comes for that. They certainly don’t come for information. Information? My dear good girl und so weiter and each speaker waits impatiently for his turn, each more concerned with output than intake. Ah, output, intake, god, verr god, mademoiselle. My card Bertrand de Born dont le coeur tremble de fol espoir. Where when and with what araignée du soir? How long have you stayed away, lost touch and more than the five senses out of this zone or that not applying il numero di codice lying under layers and layers of vital lies through mulieris simulationis and a shaking of the head nai for yes or a vigorous nodding ohi or yok for no sub specie aeternitatis unlike this our masculine-dominated civilisation turned upside down.