Cogsworth, Glasser, Aloysius, Valery, myself—the poor, excluded, but not talentless ones of the world—were all bee-bit (by an archaic and Arcadian bee) and we were bringing about a flesh that we hoped would be antithesis to Snake’s flesh.
And the others, too; proudly and wisely we had not learned too much from our first mistake. Snake was the wrong shape, but Snake was not entirely wrong. Gregory Smirnov had a part in this (he was large enough to be in several categories). Even Gaetan Balbo was in it, from his distance. And the elegants were in it, incompletely but strongly: the Late Cecil Corn, Audifax O’Hanlon, Diogenes Pontifex. We were all plunging, with howling hearts and total good will, toward a realization that only I knew would be our Second Great Failure. Blessed be all great failures, even Snake!
Valery among us had great advantages. She, so much more than the rest of us, was still unfinished. But we all had this fluid lack a little. Gregory, the shambling giant, was certainly unfinished; why else should he not always appear the same? Gaetan Balbo (he was still among us, however many times he walked out of our life forever), Gaetan had always had a terrible finality about him. Was this his great sin—that he was already completed? I will intercede for him tonight in my own not entirely mechanical way. To be completed is to be finished in so many ways! May that twinkling man Gaetan be undone a little and saved.
Charles Cogsworth surely is unfinished, as unfinished as one of our own generations. Glasser is unfinished: even his uncongenial E.P. schizo is mercifully unfinished. And Aloysius Shiplap, why he’s hardly begun!
The Late Cecil Corn (a special case) was unfinished in his green life or he would no longer be inhabiting here. And the other elegants: Audifax, Diogenes, they are no more than in the planning stage. But what stupendous plans they and the world have for themselves!
(It may be noticed by some human persons that my point of view is not quite what theirs would be in any of these things. So be it then. Do I speak figuratively of people? There is no other way to speak. Speech is in figures, and people are figures or they are nothing. Only a compounded machine like myself can see these things about people that they are too close to see in themselves. No person can ever touch another person in depth. If it were done, then the tension that is life would be broken, and both persons would vanish. But I can touch; I touch you; and I try to tell you what it would be like if you could touch. Well, am I also one of our Great Failures? I hope to be. Is it so bad if we fail upward in every one of these attempts?)
Valery is rather disappointed, however, that I have not been committing immorality with the woman.
Charles Cogsworth, the unoutstanding husband of Valery Mok, has a great deal of kindness in him. The others of the Institute people, the others of the thousands of persons whose précis I have, mostly mean to be kind, but they do not find the time for it. Charles Cogsworth has a novel, and I believe unconscious, approach to the problem: he is kind at the same time that he is doing other things. He does not make a separate affair of it.
I am much in the company of this Charles Cogsworth lately, in some of my facilities at least. It is with his help and counsel that I make my mobile extensions, for Charles is a fabricator. He is the one Institute man who, even beyond Aloysius, can work with his hands and think with his hands. He is a machinist and micromachinist, a carpenter and a poly-cross-link-material joiner, a plastic and bioplastic and biometal molder, a plasma baker, a neuro-drawer, and a pseudo-zoom constructor generally. He thinks with his hands, and he is an artist with them.
Charles is much like the crippled smith (though he is not crippled physically) who made armor for the Myceneaspect gods. He is much like the stone-master who made boys out of the ruddy travertine stone block named Sarkolithos, and then wished mightily that he was able to unmake them, so ebullient were they (yeah, ebullient, like mountains bubbling). The stone-master was named Pan-Ktistec, and when he once started to free figures and persons from that huge ruddy block of travertine, there was no ending it; (do not believe the lie that he was a girl and his name Pan-Dora). And Charles Cogsworth was also very much like that first man and first hewer who hewed the first woman out of green beechwood and mistletoe wood; he finished her then with mortise chisel and draw-knife. Charles Cogsworth loved to work with wood, and he could shape almost anything with these two tools; he finished the whatever always with a patina of fine hatching. Valery Mok has a very small and most exquisite notch on her nose that reminds me of that Cogsworthian hatching.
Charles Cogsworth is the only one who understands my need to make mobile extensions of myself. The others say that the whole idea is a stupid malfunction in me.
“We are the mobiles, you are the stationary clearinghouse,” our director Gregory says sternly. “Anything else is nonsense. Why do you want to do badly what we do so well?”
“I want to have fun, too,” I issued, but I was half defiant and half ashamed when I said it, and a machine is not supposed to have either emotion.
“Fun!” Gregory scorned out. “But we constructed you to be an adult machine ”
“That is not accurate, Gregory,” Aloysius corrected. “We constructed Epikt to be an every-age machine, to be a compendium of all mankind of all ages.”
“Thank you, Aloysius,” I say in my soul, and aloud to Gregory, “What if something should happen to all the people? Would it not be nice if myself were then mobile and able to roam the world?”
“And what if something happened to you?” Director Gregory asked with a strange menace. “Would it not be nice that you could be duplicated so easily?” Sometimes Gregory (for a fleeting moment, never for longer than that) becomes the frightful, black-bearded, monster-tale giant.
Well, I do want to travel in these various mobile forms. Should we accept it that the next great step in mechano-group-man (myself) should be sessile only? It is too limiting. And indeed I am not adult, but am of all ages, even of skittish boyhood.
Who else ever walked fearfully at night down through the dark roads of his own labyrinth? There are nine thousand cubic meters of me, data-banks and all; I am irregularly shaped, and I am very weird in my lower depths which I call the Tombs. Whatever is going on in me there, I shudder to think about it; but it is very intricate, and some of it is evil. I tell you that no human child ever walked more fearfully through a graveyard at night than I have walked in mobile form through these regions. They are haunted spooky places and I want to be out of them fast; but those haunted spooky places are me.
Glasser tells me that there is human analogy to this: that persons are sometimes afraid of their subterranean depths, their intramuros, their interficies. And I tell Glasser that it is a very weak analogy: that no person has ever gone into his own Tombs as fearfully as I have.
But if a human person could make a small mobile of himself and go in it to explore his own depths, I believe that he would like to do it once. And if he could make a mobile of himself (humans aren’t really mobile in the full sense) and go in it to explore the world, he would like to do this also.
With myself, the second thing is only the first thing “In Large,” for I am a compendium model of mankind and of the world. So I make mobiles of me.
I can build these extensions of myself by myself, but they become more imaginative and authentic with the aid of Charles Cogsworth. We made three of them today, three mobiles: one of them sublime, one of them ridiculous, and one of them overwhelming and overdone and made so that it will self-destr—no, we will not give away the story of that third mobile yet.
Then I go out in my sublime mobile. Really, there has never been anything like me. I am the first youth, I am a pristine poet with my hair waving in the wind. The wind is not blowing at this moment, but my hair is constructed so that it will wave anyhow. Someone is waiting in ambush for me, but how can that be when I am the pristine person of the world? I go out into pristine nature, actually a gangly bunch of spindly trees in a stretch of buffalo grass on the edge of town, but my pristine eyes transform it into nature exquisite.
But
a lesser person is waiting in ambush. Why should there be lesser persons in the world? Now I hold rhapsody with myself and with the cosmos. The young-Shelley couldn’t hold a rush-light to me. The young-Theognis could never have climbed such steeps. The young-Heine would be impossibly dated and narrow beside my universality and simplicity. I am in complete union with every heroic hill and shimmering person of the world. I am in very love with every rock and cloud and child and man and woman and beast and stream and microbe and bug. All except one. And that one waits for me.
I love thorn bushes, and sycamores with their leprous bark, I love ladies and cliffs and clods passionately; but there is one clod I will not love. It is a walking clod, even a (oh may this torture pass from me!), a talking clod. It certainly is not a pristine hulk that will intercept me here.
“Hey, swish boy,” the clod calls, “let’s you and me be buddies.” And the clod is revealed there in all his unglory. He is human in his form but I count him less than human in his aspect. An opulent pig is what he is. “You look lonely walking here on Scraggly Ridge,” the clod continued. “Let’s go down to town and mingle with the jingle.”
The clod is larger than he seems. He has hands like hams. He grins. This I cannot stand. I will love the world in all its glory, and I will love the poor and deprived of the world, but I will not love an opulent pig. He is ghastly.
“I was not lonely till you came,” I answer in barely civil fashion. “Now I am. I was in total communion with all the world and with every person and creature and object in it—except you. Now you have shattered that communication. Begone. Or at least allow me to pass.”
“I tell you, chum, that total communion bit always was hard to keep agoing,” the clod tells me. “It shatters real easy. Now let’s you and me go on down and hold partial communion with whatever live ones seem to be alive today.”
“I will not go,” I say resolutely. “You are a blot on the anthro-geinon world-scape.” (Lyres broken and stilled in me by the presence of the clod.) “I was in a state of total love for all—except you. Why have you intruded?”
“Me, I love everybody, too, except the ones I don’t like,” the clod said. “I’m working on that part, too. Why do you think I came up here to put the hook on you, swish boy? I tell you, you aren’t an easy one to take.”
It had not entered my spirit that I, the pristine one, should not be loved by everyone, even by the repulsive. But he lies. He is neither hot nor cold nor lovable. He cannot love; he lies. But I am following the clod down into the town, and I don’t want to; I am following him down from the High Place of the world which he sullied by calling it Scraggly Ridge. The scraggly is below and I will love it, but not on the high place.
We go down into the jingling streets filled with vapid people, and I am under some nightmare compulsion to follow the unmitigated clod. I am even forced by the hellish compulsion to continue speaking to the clod.
“The people, especially the pig-people, are more difficult to love when one gets closer to them,” I say.
“Naw, they’re easier, then,” the clod tells me. Oh, the clod is wrong! The oily opulence of the people here is offensive and is not to be loved. They are not really “oily,” but hate words are permitted in referring to hate aspects. True love is that we should hate whatever interferes with our vision of the high and the lowly.
“These people are complacent,” I tell the clod (I am still under the queer compulsion to speak to him), “but they are not serene.”
“Same thing,” says the clod. “People we don’t like are complacent. Those we like are serene. Say, the Sky-Rocket is going to give a zooming speech in the park in a while, and then he will take off for a sign and a wonder. He won’t begin till we get there, though. I have that arrangement with him.”
“Oh, I cannot abide these complacent clods,” I exclaim. “I cannot relate to these opulent oafs who are laughing in the streets. They are not high enough or low enough. For my love I must find the poor, the deprived, the fornicators, the addicts, the drunkards, the unwashed, the wife-beaters (they have their own loving reason for this form of expression), the husband-beaters (they also have their own motivation), the child-beaters, the parent-beaters, the dissolute, the swingers, the louse-outs, the bug-heads, the shaggy, the itchy, the singers, the protesters. I will love them, but I will not love these rich pigs that we encounter here.”
“Oh, these are the poor,” the clod told me. “This is the poorest street in town, Index Y-Z. It’s hard to tell them apart now except that the poor spend more ostentatiously than the rich do. It is hard now to keep up the façade of deprivation, and many of the folks have given it up entirely. There are a few scraps of that façade left, though, and we will try to find them.”
“Where are the adulterers, you opulent clod?” I cry. “Where are the Sky-Highs? Where are the simple brawlers?”
“Oh, I’d say that every fifth person we see about is an adulterer. That little girl there is campaigning for president of Chippies Incorporated, Tiger Street Division; and she may well win it. There are a lot of Sky-Highs about, there, and there, and there!”
“Why aren’t they shaggy then, that I may love them?”
“Too pansy-picking lazy to keep it up, I suppose,” the clod said. “It takes time to be really shaggy. There’s a famous pander, and there are three parties of homos.”
“Why aren’t there any brawls going on?”
“Lack of energy. If we want one, we will have to start it between ourselves.”
“Well, why aren’t people being stomped in the street?” I demanded. “How can I love them if they are neither victims nor assailants?”
“I believe stomping went out because of attrition of the leg muscles accompanied by general debility,” the clod said. “Real stomping is hard work.”
“Where are the celestial lyres in their false-line descent to the whining meanness of the guitars?” I demanded. “Here, I believe, is the supreme test of love: the guitars and the guitar people. I want that supreme test.”
“We will try to find some of the whiners,” the clod told me (that opulent pig of a clod), “but it won’t be easy. The whine keeps going out of it. Melody and tune keep creeping back into this vanishing field. But there are hardcore whiners yet, and we will try to find some.” And we are trying to find a whining-crib somewhere.
“Why are the people all different?” I ask (my pristineness is pretty well cracked by this time); “why are they not all alike in their shagginess?”
“It’s a lot of work to keep up that alikeness,” said clod.
“Where are the lavender eyeglasses?” I ask. “Where are the barefooted? Where are the beards? Where are the overpowering body odors?”
“Ah, people get a little tired of sore eyes and sore feet,” said clod. “Creature comforts, you know, chopping down these old lovable things. Then there was the beard-lice blight that all but did away with the particular glory of the bush. It is said that three hundred billion beard-lice fell to the blight in one ten-day period; naturally the government also fell for not foreseeing it. And the overpowering-body-odor essence went clear out of sight. An ingredient of it was imported from Patagonia, and is imported no longer. And who will accept weak substitutes who has ever used the strong thing itself?”
“Look, there’s a man there who still has a little of the old lovable shoddiness,” I cried out. “Hey, Shag, Shag, wait.”
“Oh, that is only Aloysius Shiplap from the Institute,” the opulent pig-clod said. Yes, it was Aloysius. How little I had known him! Aloysius was not all-alike anyone else ever, and yet he seemed to have a natural shagginess that was shaggier than anyone else around. He wasn’t wearing lavender eyeglasses, but he had natural lavender circles under and about his eyes. It was accidental, it was coincidental, but Aloysius had something of the old facade about him.
“Hello, boys,” Aloysius said to us. “You two will have to be getting back pretty soon. First you can hear the Sky-Rocket speak, and you can then watch him
take off for a wonder and a sign. And then you will both have to get back.”
“Do you yourself believe in the great cosmic love-nexus, Aloysius?” I asked.
“Love before dinner, never,” Aloysius said.
We went, catching the contagious excitement from the gathering crowd, to hear the Sky-Rocket orate. This skeptical crowd was nervous and enlivened, jeering to its own peril. But who is it that the Sky-Rocket reminds me of? There has never been anyone like him, never, so how could he remind me of anyone? Is he man, is he prophet, is he angel?
“I am the burning sign given to this generation.” The Sky-Rocket spoke with flame-flickers. “I am Phlogastom, the Burning Mouth. I am the prophet whose lips were touched with the fiery coal indeed. Watch and be amazed!”
The Sky-Rocket had live coals in a little charcoal pan there. He picked up burning coals with his bare fingers and rubbed them on his lips with a cascading off of sparks. He placed living coals on his tongue. There was a strong smell of burning flesh but he did not flinch.
“I’ve seen better things than that at carnivals,” a nervous shouter shouted at him.
“You’ve not seen better,” the Sky-Rocket spoke, and flames could be seen inside his mouth whenever he uttered words. “I am Carnival and the Father of Carnivals. I myself am Carnival, the fiesta-flesh, the love-flesh that is circus and circle of the world. I am the flesh-meat of the hokey-poke stands, down among the stalls where they sell Cider and Easterwine. I am the roast flesh of the barbecue and hamburger booths, I am the burnt-blood flesh of the garlic tents of the sawdust way. And I am also the roasted-down spirit. I am the passion of earth and sky, I am the blood of the middle world, I am love complete and I preach the love-gospel of myself.”
“Cut the spiel. Bring on the dancing girls,” some male person called out.
“Can you not see that I myself am dancing girls in my sinuosity?” the Sky-Rocket strewed out as a shower of sparks and words. “I am love dance, I am fire dance. My love breaks all natural laws. There is no law, there is only love. Love as I love and you can move mountains.”
Arrive at Easterwine: The Autobiography of a Ktistec Machine Page 11
