Paisley Porkstein plied the peach from the pile and then plopped, with preterminal ponderings, to the pavement. The pig was about to panic as pickups and Plymouths and Peugeots passed by on the parkway, but the pungent perfume of the peach calmed him down.
Paisley Porkstein peered ahead to see Peggy and Polly and Penelope Porkstein disappear in the pink pickup from Paul’s Porkorama.
The paunchy pig then picked a path through the pickups and panel trucks and Pontiacs until his plumpness was panting at the shoulder of the parkway. “Phew!” he said. “Not a pretty picture.” Paisley Porkstein pondered his pitiful plight. “A particularly putrid predicament and all I got was this piddly peach. This is the pits.”
Paisly Porkstein looked at the parkway and then at the roadside and saw it was planted with portulaca and pennyworts and periwinkle and he thought, “How pretty.”
Then a pleasant pair of people in a puce Packard paused at the side of the parkway to peruse the put-upon pig. “This is no place for a pig,” the pleasant female person said.
“Positively not,” said the pleasant male person, whose potbelly protruded much in the manner of Paisley Porkstein’s.
Paisley Porkstein presented the man with the pit of his peach and said, “What’s to eat?”
“Perhaps we should take this porker home,” the woman said. “He’s positively precious.”
“Perhaps,” the man said. “He has no poncho and I sense precipitation. Let’s transport him to our pad.”
And so the pleasant people took the pathetic pig, one Paisley Porkstein, to their palace by the Pacific, which for the potbellied porker turned out to be paradise.
donne lieu
locus classicus
If I make a noise in the woods and there is no one around to hear it, am I real? How could I make a noise if I were not real? Is the noise real? Can the unreal me make a real noise? Can the real me make an unreal noise? Can the real me make any noise at all? Can there be an unreal thought? Can I prove there is a god by kicking a large stone? Have I written myself into existence or have I doomed myself to an unreal fictional planet? Am I Ralph or Ralph?
Suppose a cantilever beam of length Q and that it has one end built into a wall, while the other end is merely supported. If the beam has a weight of R pounds per unit length, its deflection y at distance x from the built-in terminal satisfies the equation
where T and A are constants hinging on the material of the beam and the configuration of its cross section. How far from the built-in terminal does the maximum deflection occur?
mary mallon
Not only did Madam Nanna take me outside into the sunlight and fresh air, but she took me into the world. I was strapped helplessly into a buggy and pushed along the small, but bustling rues of whatever sleepy little town I was being held near. What Madam didn’t know was that I had spent most of the previous night not reading, but writing note after note that read more or less the same:
Help me! I am a kidnapped baby and this woman is not my mother. We have no relationship beyond captor and captive. Please get help.
At every opportunity, and they were numerous, I would slip a note to someone. People kept leaning over my buggy and making faces while coming close to tickle my chin with index fingers. I watched Madam Nanna and when she looked away I slipped a note into a hand. And to a person, each would brazenly open the message in plain view of the Madam and read it aloud. Madam Nanna appeared unbothered by the whole business and would simply share a laugh with them. “His older brother,” she would say, shaking her head.
A couple of people, however, though they didn’t seem to grow suspicious of Madam Nanna, did display discernible discomfort with me. We strolled on; she began to whistle as I slipped into what I think was my first depression.
pharmakon
writing poisons truth
sophistry knows no station
The geometry of this text is more than metaphorical. This I say so that the reader will understand the direct spatial implications of the work. I want the reader to trouble herself over structural analysis. I want there to be questions about orientation and location, dispositio and locus, praeceptum and datum. The shortest distance between two meanings is a straight ambiguity. There are prime signs that are divisible by only themselves and one.
a plant emits a visual message
there is only one bodily posture
no gesture stands alone
anfractuous
His name was Billy Joe Bob Roy, Colonel Billy Joe Bob Roy, and he was commading officer of the Division of Exploitation of Potentially and Reportedly Trainable Mentally Exceptional Neophytic Tikes, DEPARTMENT Department of the Pentagon, reporting directly to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the President of the United States. Colonel Bill Roy wore on his chest all two hundred sixteen Purple Hearts he had been awarded while “fighting the yellow threat” in Vietnam. The Colonel listed to one side because of his medals and both moved and talked as if he had experienced a mild stroke. The mission of the DEPARTMENT Department was to detect, isolate, convert, and exploit any gifted individual, especially children for service to the armed forces of the United States of America.
Colonel Bill Roy was six-feet-three-inches tall and broad in the shoulders. His shoes were shined to distraction and he wore glasses with dark, reflective lenses indoors and out. Colonel Bill flew his own F-5E Phantom II jet all over the country and had once received a reprimand for buzzing the tower at O’Hare. Now his fighter jet was parked in a hanger at March Air Force Base outside Riverside, California. From March he had taken a spanking new olive green “Hummer,” driven north to Carmel where he and his team, the Tike Evaluation and Manipulation team, the TEAM team, had set up shop in the abandoned offices of a failed investment firm. The TEAM team of the DEPARTMENT Department worked around the clock tracking down leads and determining whether certain children were worth a commitment of government resources and time.
Colonel Bill never slept. Colonel Bill took his clothes off only once a day, to shower, and then put on a clean uniform. He did push-ups, sit-ups, and chin-ups in his uniform. He ran three miles and then swam six laps in his uniform just before his shower. Colonel Bill always held a pipe clenched between his very white teeth. Colonel Bill had a booming voice and he whistled his s’s.
“How’s the subject, Nanna?” Colonel Bill asked. He moved his pipe from the left side of his mouth to the right.
“He’s coming along,” said Nanna. “I think he’s the one. He’s truly gifted.”
Colonel Bill nodded. “How long?”
“I can’t say yet. He’s resistant, but I’ve got him confused. He’s terribly bright, but at least he’s physically helpless. Sleep deprivation won’t work, since he doesn’t sleep. He doesn’t care much about food. He loves books. He reads everything and he’s very critical. He will not be easily tricked.”
Colonel Bill had lowered himself to the floor and was doing push-ups. “Sounds like you’ve got things pretty well under control.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Twenty-seven.”
“Are you going to want to see the subject soon?”
“You decide. Thirty-three. I think we should take it slow, as planned. You get him dependent on you and then we work him.”
bridge
To scribble is to produce a mark that will constitute a kind of fuzzy mess that is in turn productive in the way of constructing obscurity, that my future dissipation in principle will not deflect from operating and from capitulating, and capitulating itself to scribbling and deciphering. For the scribble to be scribbled, it must continue to function and to be a fuzzy mess even if that creature called the author no longer receives blame or credit for what is scribbled, for what he appears to have marked, whether he is conditionally truant, or if the victim of self-inflicted death, or if in general he fails to brace, avec his unequivocally rampant and fashionable design or regard, the repletion and amplitude of his signification, of that very thing which appears to be scribbled “in hi
s name.”2
try, as you might, to in my absence read,
but here am I, before you, now and in every line,
like nobody with me in the balloon’s basket,
nobody alone in the stretched and empty time.
defer, ad infinitum, to the fact that I am here,
between every word, yet nowhere to be seen,
not a present being, but a trouble to your mind,
a scribbler, a mugger, obscure and obscene.
ennuyeux
deceit
deixis
descriptor
dead
divisio
Madam Nanna managed to stroll me through the village without anyone raising an eyebrow. It seemed, in fact, that she had made a favorable impression on nearly everyone and that I was everybody’s darling baby boy. In one store, there was a television glowing behind the counter. The clerk watched, eating some kind of crunchy food all the while, and Madam Nanna browsed through a rack of blouses and such things. On the television screen, policemen were pushing and shoving, what the newsperson called “escorting” Dr. Steimmel, Boris, and Dr. Davis into a police van. A few steps behind them, also in handcuffs was Ronald the chimpanzee. Standing nearby were my parents and with them was Roland Barthes, a cigarette dangling from his lips. A reporter stuck a microphone in my mother’s face.
“Please, whoever you are, bring our baby back to us. You can have everything we own. Just bring our Ralph back to us.” She turned and buried her head in my father’s chest.
My father said to the camera: “This monster, this Steimmel, stole our son. Now, please. Please bring him back.”
Then the microphone was in front of Barthes, who smiled, said, “It’s the doubleness of the matter that perturbs me. That a child, at least I believe he is a child, and so should you, should be abducted, then rescued by abduction, yet never rescued, because the second abduction, much like the second coming, if you think about it, is only abduction, and the child possibly for only an instant was free, in that synaptic space between the hands of the abductors, like the instant between having a thought and not having one—well, it must be very confusing and yet illuminating for the little fellow. I’m French, you know.”
The news reporter said, “And there you have it, the bizarre story of a baby kidnapped from its kidnappers. Here is a photograph of Baby Ralph.” The picture looked like any baby in the world. How could anyone recognize me from that? Mo didn’t mention that I could read and write and that was the only thing which separated me from other very short incontinents. The clerk looked right at me and smiled.
“Cute baby,” the clerk said to Madam Nanna.
Madam Nanna strapped me into the car seat in her station wagon and drove me back to wherever the hell I was being held. Back in my room, I found that I felt more relaxed, a state my captors were no doubt seeking to cultivate. I didn’t think they believed that I would adopt the nurse as a surrogate mother, but it was clear to me that they were attempting to bridge the gap between us by a fostered dependence. In a way, I suppose, it was a necessary consequence of the intense and prolonged isolation, and the singular and sole contact with Madam Nanna was bound to nourish a kind of familiarity. I was like an inmate in a remote desert prison; if lost outside the walls, I would have to crawl back to the only place in the landscape that for me existed. Their plan was not without merit, but I was Ralph.
supplement
Writing, even in my little hands, was not dangerous, did not exist “in the place of,” did not seek to address the “deficiency and infirmity” of speech and thought.3 My writing was no threat to my thinking, no threat to my meaning (as it was my meaning) and was in no way oppositional to thought or internal language or any fixity of meaning. It was what it was and that was all it was because how could it, like anything else, finally, have been anything else?
Day 12, in the desert without water
I had no agenda. I had developed a set of values, not out of my living with my parents, and not from having observed peers and coming to understand what behavior was expected, but from reading. I understood the logic of decency, categorical imperative, and all other statements of the “golden rule” aside. “Don’t shoot at me and I won’t shoot at you” seems far less effective than “I’m not going to shoot at you.” But then, of course, dead is dead. Giraffes got long necks and turtles got shells, but humans got avarice and vanity and religion. Death occurs for no other reasons. The three enemies of thought. Perhaps they are nonthought. At least, they are corrupted, malignant, putrid thought. Burros and elephants can smell water miles away.
libidinal economy
Colonel Bill was just pulling himself out of the swimming pool when Madam Nanna came up to him. He dried his hat with a towel and placed it back on his head and patted down his uniform.
“Good evening, Nanna,” Colonel Bill said.
“Colonel, the boy has a photographic memory. And he’s able to understand the most complicated scientific material.”
“Yes?”
“Don’t you see?” Madam Nanna said, staring at the way the Colonel’s darkened uniformed hugged his muscular thighs. “He’s the perfect spy. He can look at the plans for anything and understand them, remember them. Perhaps he can even make them better.”
“Hmmm.”
“Imagine it. Mother and child visit nuclear-arms factory and take the group tour. Child waddles off. Child sees plans.”
“Does he trust you?”
“Not completely. He’s still resistant.”
“Okay. Very good.” Colonel Bill looked at Madam Nanna’s eyes. “Are you looking at my artillery, Nanna?”
Snapping to, “Why, no, Colonel.”
“I think you were, you little vixen.” Colonel Bill shook a playful finger in Madam Nanna’s face. “You’d like to see Mr. Howitzer, wouldn’t you?”
Melting somewhat. “Yes, Colonel, I would.”
“Well, you can’t.” His finger was withdrawn. “Never mix business with pleasure, I say. And this sex stuff, well, it’s business, finally, isn’t it? I’d open up a barrage if duty called, but only if that business presented itself.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Very good, Nanna.”
“Thank you, sir.”
peccatum originale
Larynx
The great vessels
lie patiently
on either side,
the triangular box,
flattened behind,
the organ of voice.
The pomum Adami
is a vertical projection,
subcutaneous,
more distinct in me
than in my mother.
Her throat is smooth,
her organ lies narrow,
placed higher in relation
to her cervical vertebrae,
bounded,
in front, by the epiglottis,
behind, by cartilage,
it whispers,
it calls, it cries,
it makes those sounds.
exousai
“How is young Ralph this morning?” Madam Nanna asked as she entered my room. She lifted me and took me to the potty. She left me there while she got my meal together on the tray of the high chair. I had gotten good with my toilet and was pleased and comfortable with the lack of demonstrable praise from the nurse. In this regard, she was completing her intended mission. As I was bored with the room and the single relationship, I decided that I would cooperate, or at least give the appearance of cooperation, so that we could move on to whatever next stage there was.
So, while she fed me I smiled. I wrote polite notes to her, asking for certain foods, certain books, telling her what I thought of Frege and Husserl and Hjelmslev. And she responded by softening, in a rehearsed and totally unconvincing manner, and giving me what I wanted. I wrote panicked notes asking her not to leave me and even contrived a bogus journal, which I pretended to hide away in my crib beneath my pillow and new teddy, that gave the
clear impression that I was pining for her company and protection.
last night was a very long night where is my Nanna? there are noises outside frightening noises maybe some other men are coming to get me Nanna brought me The Crying of Lot 49 it put me to sleep, but she brought it to me i wish Nanna would not leave me
vita nova
The sky was robin’s egg blue, clear, with some woolly white clouds far off. I was bundled up in a little parka and I could still feel the crisp air. It felt good to breathe it into my throat and lungs. We had walked out through the front door of the building in which was located my bedroom. It was an office building and there was a blank sign where a sign that was not blank must have once hung. Madam Nanna let me out of the stroller and I ran around on the grass of the front lawn. She chased after and I squealed silently with mute laughter.4
There were a few passersby, but they were all on the other side of the street. Many cars traveled the road, one of them being the dark sedan and the two dolts who had grabbed me that night in the rain. They drove by again and again, from the north and then from the south, staring as they rolled by. Then a man in an olive drab uniform and dark glasses came walking along on our side of the street, turned onto the lawn, and approached us.
“Hello, Nanna,” the man said. “Who is our little friend here?”
“Oh, Uncle Ned,” she said. “It’s so nice to see you. Uncle Ned, I’d like you to meet Ralph. Ralph, this is Uncle Ned.”
“Hello there, Ralph.” Uncle Ned patted my head and smiled down at me. “He’s a handsome lad.”
“We’re just out enjoying the day,” Madam Nanna said.
I shied away from Uncle Ned, ever so slightly, and hid behind Madam Nanna’s ample legs, hugging her hose and smelling baby powder from somewhere on her body. I stole a peek at their exchanged glances. Uncle Ned was pleased and offered Madam Nanna a quick nod. She smiled, a haughty, self-satisfied smile and reached a hand down to touch the top of my head.
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