How to Swallow a Pig

by Robert Priest

  When this is over the “artist” bows toward the audience, signaling that the “performance” part of the presentation is over. “Are there any questions?” the “artist” asks, smiling, at audience. If anybody asks a question the “artist” screams with frustration and stomps off the stage in a rage.

  BOOK 4 UNSTABLE FABLES

  LIVES OF DAH

  He cried out “Take away my pain” so they covered him in stars. Still Dah hurt and again he cried “Take away my pain” so they made time and put him in it with many clocks to wind his great pain onto, but the ticking only maddened him and he cried out “Take away my pain” so they made the big sack, memory, for him to stuff his past into, but it only increased the area of his pain so they took away his frontal lobes and with x’s for eyes he said “Still I hurt” so they took off his flesh, but the pain was deep and he begged them “Take away my pain,” so they tried to track down the pain but the pain was everywhere. “Take away my pain” he cried till finally they had to melt the white snow of his body. Yet the water ached, stricken of its individuality, each sparkle cut the eyes with agony and to taste of it was to drink dissatisfaction, eternal longing.

  ”My pain!” the water screamed. “Take away my pain.” But it was too late; it was already evaporating. And the agony was piercing. It was already running off, saturating everything. “My pain!” the grass cried. “My Pain” echoed the river bed. “My Pain!” the rain raged and then the terrible thunder spoke Dah’s name.

  THE UNFORTUNATE GENIUS AND HIS “WINKLE”

  For your sake I will say that it was a “penis” he had and that it was fairly normal by most standards of height, breadth, and cleanliness. The problem was that his mind was abnormal — his eyesight was peculiar and his self-esteem small, such that whenever he perceived this “winkle” as he called it, it appeared minute, ineffectual, virtually useless, and embarrassing to him. No matter how much he put it up against the yardstick and measured six and a half inches, it would make him weep. “Why me?” he would whimper. “Why am I one of those who has to be born with a smaller than average winkle?” Of course he had read all those books, manuals, and magazines that said six and a half was average, but it was no good. He couldn’t believe it — he knew who had commissioned and written those studies. Sometimes he would look down and it seemed just a little pink wick-like thing — something you would have to examine with tweezers. Perhaps this ailment of his was not peculiar. Perhaps all men have such doubts. But his mind was abnormal. He was, in a way, an explorer of the self — one of those who could, in desperation, run through strange visions into the endless riddle of his own creation. He could go under in the dark waters of self and come up from dreams in control. It was by this method, through willpower and determination, that he finally reached the source, the very centre of his regeneration, and there, through sheer brilliance, through unheard-of intellect, he reset the winkle control so that its stalled growth function would continue. He never doubted for a moment that the next day it would be infinitesimally bigger. And he was absolutely right. And so on the next day. And the next. After about six months of this he had a real big whopper on him. A great big pink wang of a winkle that he waved at himself merrily in the mirror like an ape who has finally figured out his first blunt stone. Soon he would be able to go out into the world of sex, he thought. Soon he would be entirely adequate, esteemed, even talked about, ogled over. And of course, as usual, he was right. Wearing tight pants he became desirable to a lot of women who liked the feeling of ”being full right up” that a big winkle gave them during intercourse. For a while he was much happier. He realized though that sooner or later he must remake his velvet journey into inner peace and remove the stone of his command. After all, he didn’t want his winkle to get so big it became unruly and unnatural. Alas, by the time he tried this, the way was blocked, the former passes all impassable. Everything had shifted and restructured itself. There was a huge happiness in himself now to support. How could he, drained by it, venture into that canyon of agony again. “So wait,” he said. “Wait till you are unhappy. The way will be clearer then and the will stronger.” So he waited and his winkle grew to the point of becoming a little unsightly. Now only the most bizarre of those who liked to feel “filled right up” came to him. Others began to regard him as something of a monster. He enjoyed their awe for a while but he knew the winkle was just getting bigger and bigger and more difficult to inflate for sex. Was he a little jaded? Sucked out by the excesses of his recent life? Time to exercise the inner muscle, he thought. But it was no good. The way inside was still blocked, almost as though some genius had built a wall against him. Still his winkle got bigger and bigger. He discovered for a while that if he diverted all his other energies against this energy he could slow the rate of growth. But this meant having his mind filled with sex and gender and coitus, and all its words and synonyms. During this time you couldn’t talk to him without him suddenly saying, “Ah yes, I remember, I parted her lovely fucking cunt and poked my great big fucking winkle at her and she fucking grunted and I squeezed it in a little, like it was a snake going down a fucking elephant’s throat and I fucking humped and she fucking heaved and . . .” On and on . . . At first some of the more machismo men would join in with him, but soon he was too nauseating, too single-minded even for them. Still the winkle got bigger and bigger and one day when it began to erect, the blood drained out of his head and he passed out only to wake up in hospital. Here he was lonelier than ever before. After a month the winkle was as huge as the rest of him — a great, flaccid, pink stinking thing that even callous hospital officials and nurses couldn’t bear to look at, but had to keep always in its oxygen tent, pumping in the blood. Soon the rest of him began to wither. It was the law in that place that a person must live as long as anything can possibly make him, so they kept him on the heart and lung and kidney machines. Finally the rest of him just got eaten away by cancers and you could just barely see, hidden in the tumours, his crusty old face, withered there in mortal agony. When, at last, the eyes closed forever, they encased him in a huge box and ten men carried it to the immense hole they had had to dig to put it in. After they had said their prayers over him they put up a tombstone which read: “Here lie the remains of a great big Dick.”

  THE VANISHING BRASSIERE

  I. The vanishing brassiere hung down in the conscience of the “monogamist” with no tits to fill it. If he thought of “Fuck,” it was the wind whistling over a razor’s edge, “ FFFFFFFFFF,” and then a tympani of nuts falling onto tin cans, “ K-K-K-K-K-K!” Like the cratered eyes of some dog he’d maimed, that brassiere haunted him. When would it reappear and relieve him of the ballast of his guilt? Always, no matter what he was doing, he was searching for it and everything that came between him and finding it easily was a razor. The clock was a razor. Every evening was a razor. His wife was a razor — especially his wife, whom he had used over and over again without, he thought, in the least dulling her wit. It was still pebble sharp. But how she slashed him from the mainstream. How she cut him at the wrist of the world. How, where fits should be stuffed in the brassiere, she left only blobs of conscience congealing with his cries. One day he would come home and it would be like a corpse in the closet. Stuffed with two denials. Perhaps one a little bigger than the other. Or he would suddenly see it in a corner of the bedroom like a distant goggle, eyeless at his passion. One thing for sure, somewhere it was waiting viciously to devour the small security he had. Till then, till that last supper it would make of him, daintily he danced on the razor.

  II. After the judge had examined all the tiny marks of countless keys, the lock of lips left undone at her mouth, the red welt about her neck where she had been his boutonniere, he asked, “And is the other woman present in this courtroom?” “Yes she is,” the wife replied, lifting up her finger to point. She had a truck tire for a wedding ring on that finger but still she pointed. She pointed at what appeared to be a huge piece of Swiss or Limburger cheese at the back of the co
urtroom. “NO! NO!” cried out the “monogamist,” jangling a tiny foetal skeleton unconsciously in his pocket. “She is just a razor. A razor. A razor. And you, judge, you are a razor, and my hands — they are both razors and they both cut at me, and every woman to every man and every night in every bed is a razor, a razor, a razor, a razor . . .”

  III. For alimony she got one nostril anvil. Two avuncular aunts without morals or tongues. Three black and white zoot suits with armless and legless dependents in them. A team of interlocking dog legs. A cheese player (stereo) and a yogurt recorder with matching cassettes. A mouse that wore knuckle-dusters made of fetlock and sheep dip. A ship with and without an asshole. Something quite humorous. A lobotomized tomato, a month’s subscription to Lock and Bar. And last but not least, a manila envelope full of circles that were not round. These she put up on the wall, pretending sometimes in her agony and solitude that they were holes winds whipped through when, in the dark, she seemed to feel a chill.

  HIS LITTLE MOTHER

  I knew a man who wore his little mother on a chain ’round his neck. You might say she had pierced ears. Often she would turn around in rage and bite him, but due to the fact that he had tied her little hands behind her back, her teeth couldn’t harm him. As can be expected, this strange behaviour of his did not prevent him from adopting all the newest philosophies of the day. Indeed, this fellow even claimed to be what is called a “Women’s Libber.” So eloquent was he on this subject that he was regarded as something of a saint. Yet, even as he spoke, even as he decried aloud the centuries of cruelty and injustice to women, he would raise his hand to his chest as though in religious gesture and begin to pinch his little mother. He did this so that her tiny screaming might add fuel to his rhetoric. On those nights when he did not bring liberated women home to fuck, he would untie her long enough for her to call him an ungrateful bastard. “I’m sorry, mother,” he would say serenely, “but whatever I am, you have made me. Now go and do your business.” After she had done her business, he would clothes-peg her little legs together so he could get to sleep.

  LITTLE HURTS

  Little hurts gather in his brow, waiting to go “puff,” waiting to go “pop” in a face of rage. Little hurts burrowing down to make room. Compressed voices, things he should have said. Aaaaah, little hurts like grain inside, like fields of broken barley, like dots pushed out. Little hurts on the bead a string of sweat provides. Little hurts on the abacus his fingers move along in dream-time. He is a water that life has plunged to the bottom of, his hand a catacomb of pain, his body honey-combed with grief, with little hurts like pellets, like moles, like darker eyes within his eyes.

  TEXTUAL PLEASURE

  For the first time, the man is alone in the room with the book. Upright, closed, it leans on its bottom edge into the special shelf, its orange spine facing out, its text tucked neatly inside the titillating cover. Knowing it is in the room, there is a pulse in the man’s body that doubles instantly. He almost feels sick at the intensity of his heartbeat. He walks all around his apartment not looking at the book. The erection he had initially has softened somewhat and he is dribbling a bit down his thigh. He can sense that he might be able to have a good one.

  He takes the book into his left palm, face up. He runs his fingers along the top outside edge of the book’s hard cover. He exerts only the very slightest pressure inward and upward — more a question than an action. When he feels the cover give and lift slightly, the man is again hit with a heavy pulse of lust. He knows he is going to open the book. He slides his other index finger down the back of the spine till it curls under the tail end so that with a gentle motion he can the tilt the volume back and open into his waiting palm. Wanton, the book’s front cover now leans wide, exposing a searing whiteness. There is great delicacy, almost tenderness, as he runs his finger up O so lightly around and around the surface of the blank front page. Imperceptibly the circles grow larger, moving closer to the edge. His breath is close. He is blowing softly upon the uplifting paper. He sees the flash of black curling text on its undersurface. He is completely hard. He wants to just yank the volume wide open — go for its middle pages, but for the book’s sake, he draws it out. He follows all the protocols. He lingers here at the lip where the words are slow and compelling, calling him on. His tongue touches just the tip of the first syllable of the first word and a sound dissolves in air. The book grows visibly warmer. The pages, if anything, spread themselves wider apart, expecting a full and delicious reading, wanting to take him into their deepest recesses. All the while as he reads he gently rubs his middle finger over the base of the book’s spine, sometimes curling ‘round and up into the tight wedged interior. The faster his eyes rake off the electric syllables, the quicker he hears the pulsing inside. Is it the book or him? Blood is rushing through something. The book is visibly engorged, lips swollen, reddened, the text stretched in places. The book has begun to glisten. The dots bulge atop the i’s, the o’s almost exude invitation as he buries himself deeper. And now the book has begun to read him. Some sensory faculty enlivened by his observation peers out at what is written in him, what the strings of gut say when stroked over. The man is right in the steaming centre of the story. The text washes all around him. Boat and sea are one. Eyes and text are one. There is no point where the man and the book are separate. Two sexualities collide and consume and magnify and multiply till the text is oozing from the man’s pores. The book has read him right through to the spine. He is crackling with code. He is coming undone in his centre. Still the book reads on as he reads on. They’ve got each other by the root. They’re deep under the tale of language. They’re utterly gripped by one another, can’t put one another down. Friction, fiction, there is no difference. They rub away at one another, scraping off the thin last skin to the breaking light below. The book erupts. It bends back and groans, its spine cracking. The man groans. Suddenly there are words everywhere awash in language and not language. Silence and not silence.

  FABLE OF A FABLE

  He is running and he has the fable. The only fable. Not knowing even that there could be other fables — only this fable about the father and the mother and the land and the stars and the many, many wolves. It should have no weight, no mass, no backend, but it weighs him down when he runs, launching small parachutes from the back of his mind. It slows him down but he needs to deliver it. If he told himself the fable he would have to kill himself. It must reach all the people at once. An equal-opportunity fable with due notice to all. He doesn’;t know there’;s a malfunction in the fable, and though it’;s tiny, this flaw will grow. It should have been streamlined and easy. It came so quickly but now it has begun to rend the universe a bit. It has sunk its teeth into the obvious and already a few things are askew. The potential is awful. Already the people are gathering. Soon there’;ll be no snow, no cold to prevent this. He’;s super sleek. He’;s fabulized. He’;s chrome. He’;s sharp. He shines and that’;s the way he was designed, so he runs while the fable rots in his head, poisoned, unstable, more and more unstable — full of a terrible physics which might leak out. And they are dropping the sky on him. They are rearing up the oceans against him, but there’;s really no stopping him, so they have to stop the people from listening. But before they can get the first word out, he arrives and gets the first word out and that’;s all it takes.

  BIRTH OF A TREE

  Recently a woman gave birth to a tree. Imagine the amazement on the faces of the delivering doctor and nurses when the first of the blue branches began to peek out. Each time the mother moaned and screamed, more and more of the undeveloped twigs, stunted branches, and tiny little leaves came curling out. When with a great push the trunk had finally been passed and the wide-ness of the base emerged, the roots followed with very little effort and the delivery team stared, amazed and frightened at what had come into the world.

  Immediately upon being delivered, the small purpling tree began to writhe, shuddering and shaking. The tiny roots and branches convulsed, clenchin
g in and out like multiple fists, and then the tree let out a cry. A cold lizard-like scream of anguish which seemed as loud as the shriek of a jet plane. A deep jungle kind of screaming, an ancient anguished swamp-infected note that shook everyone with the resonance of its agony. The doctors and nurses stood helplessly while the tree screamed, louder and louder, the blue limbs bucking in the sheets, the leaves shuddering like hearts, like broken mirrors, quivering and shining in the bright hospital light.

  They were frightened by the hideousness of the baby tree — almost incapacitated in their task, but they were professionals and somehow managed to care for the needs of the mother.

  When it became apparent that, by some miracle, she had not suffered undue internal damage from the birth of the tree, but seemed neither more nor less torn up than from the birth of a normal child, she began to cry, “Please, please, help my baby, my baby.” For the tiny bruised-looking tree was starting to split itself open with the exertion of its weeping, coming undone outwardly with a fleshier and fleshier appearance, howling in horror and agony. Thankfully, one of the attending nurses then had a great flash of insight. She wheeled the tree over to the mother so that she could reach out her hand and touch it for the first time. There was a clemency, a cold distilled feeling in the air, a sound — almost a hiss, and then abruptly reassured, the frightened baby tree became quiet.