天涯在线书库《www.tianyabook.com》 《Snow White》 Back Cover: "Probably the most perversely gifted writer in the Uates, Donald Barthelme has created a new99lib. form of fi. Snow White has everything, including William Burroughs cutups, words posing as paintings, ribald social entary, crazy esthetic experiments, and edy that smashes." -- WEBSTER SCHOTT, Life Snow White is Donald Barthelmes raunchy and hilarious rew of the classic fairy tale. Eschewing the formalism of earlier genres of fi, Barthelme experiments with style and voice, taking the well-known characters of childhood aing them as sexually active and psychologically plex paradigms of postmodernist satire. His writing possesses a fantastic humor marked by a straightforresentation of the absurdly grotesque, indig the irrational nature of our everyday world. "We hear the singing dwarfs of our childhood, and the voice of a splendid writer who knows how to turn spiritual dilemmas into logid how to turn that logito edy which is the true wised-up story of our time." -- Jack Kroll, Newsweek This book is a work of fi. Names, characters, places, and is either are products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblao actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely tal. Cht ? 1965, 1967 by Donald Earthelme; cht renewed All rights reserved, including the right of reprodu in whole or in part i藏书网n any form. This book first appeared, in slightly different form,in The New Yorker. Certain portions also appeared, in slightly differe.99lib.nt form, in Harpers Bazaar and Paris Review. for Birgit Part One-1 SHE is a tall dark beauty taining a great may spots: one above the breast, one above the belly, one above the knee, one above the ankle, one above the buttock, one on the back of the neck. All of these are on the left side, more or less in a row, as you go up and down: * * * * * * The hair is black as ebony, the skin white as snow. BILL is tired of Snow White now. But he ot tell her. No, that would not be the way. Bill t bear to be touched. That is oo. To have aouch him is unbearable. Not just Snow White but also Kevin, Edward, Hubert, Henry, Clem or Dan. That is a peculiar aspect of Bill, the leader. We speculate that he doesnt want to be involved in human situations any more. A withdrawal. Withdrawal is one of the four modes of dealing with ay. We speculate that his reluce to be touched springs from that. Dan does not go along with the aheory. Dan does not believe in ay. Dan speculates that Bills reluce to be touched is a physical maion of a metaphysical dition that is not ay. But he is the only one who speculates that. The rest of us support ay. Bill has let us know in subtle ways that he doesnt want to be touched. If he falls down, you are not to pick him up. If someone holds out a hand iing, Bill smiles. If it is time to wash the buildings, he will pick up his own bucket. Dont hand him a bucket, for in that circumstahere is a ce that your hands will touch. Bill is tired of Snow White. She must have noticed that he doesnt go to the shower room, now. We are sure she has noticed that. But Bill has not told her in so many words that he is tired of her. He has not had the heart to unfold those cruel words, we speculate. Those cruel words remain locked in his lack of heart. Snow White must assume that his absence from the shower room, in these days, is an aspect of his not liking to be touched. We are certain she has assumed that. But to what does she attribute the "not-liking" itself? We dont know. "OH I wish there were some words in the world that were not the words I always hear!" Snow White exclaimed loudly. We regarded each other sitting around the breakfast table with its big cardboard boxes of "Fear," "Chix," and "Rats." Words in the world that were not the words she always heard? What words could those be? "Fish slime," Howard said, but he was a visitor, and rather crude too, and we instantly regretted that we had lent him a sleeping bag, and took it away from him, and took away his bowl too, and the Chix that were in it, and the milk on top of the Chix, and his spoon and napkin and chair, and begaing him with boxes, to indicate that his wele had been used up. We soon got rid of him. But the problem remained. What words were those? "Now we have bee sug the mop again," Kevin said, but Kevin is easily disced. "Injuns!" Bill said, and when he said that we were glad he was still our leader, although some of us had been w about him lately. "Murder and create!" Henry said, and that was weak, but lauded, and Snow White said, "That is one Ive never heard before ever," and that gave us ce, and we all began to say things, things that were more or less satisfactory, or at least adequate, to serve the purpose, for the time being. The whole thing apered over, for the time being, and didnt break out into the open. If it had broken out into the open, then we would really have bee sug the mop in a big way, that Monday. THEN we went out to wash the buildings. buildings fill your eyes with sunlight, and your heart with the idea that man is perfectible. Also they are good places to look at girls from, those high, swaying wooden platforms: you get a rare view, gazing at the tops of their red and gold and plum-colored heads. Viewed from above they are like targets, the plum-colored head the ter of the target, the wavy navy skirt the bold circumferehe white or black legs flopping out in front are like someone waving his arms over the top of the target and calling, "You missed the ter by not allowing suffitly for the wind!" We are very much tempted to shoot our arrows into them, those targets. You know what that means. But we also pay attention to the buildings, gray and noble in their false architecture and cladding. There are Tiparillos in our faces and heavy janglis around our waists, and water in our buckets and squeegees on our poles. And we have our beer bottles up there too, and drink beer for a sed breakfast, even though that is against the law, but we are so high up, no one be sure. Its too bad Hogo de Bergerat up here with us, because maybe the experience would be good for him, would make him less loathsome. But he would probably just seize the occasion to perform some new loathsome act. He would probably just throw beer s down into the street, to make irritating lumps uhe feet of those girls whht this minute, are trying to find the right typewriter, in the correct building. NOW shes written a dirty great poem fes long, wo us read it, refuses absolutely, she is adamant. We discovered it by act. We had trudged home early, lingered in the vestibule for a bit w if we should trudge inside. A strange prehension, a boding of some kind. Therudged inside. "Heres the mail," we said. She was writing something, we could see that. "Heres the mail," we said again, usually she likes to paw over the mail, but she reoccupied, didnt look up, not a flicker. "What are you doing there," we asked, "writing something?" Snow White looked up. "Yes," she said. And looked down again, not a pinotion c the jet black of her jet-black eyes. "A letter?" we asked w if a letter then to whom and about what. "No," she said. "A list?" we asked iing her white face for a hint of tendresse. But there was no tendresse. "No," she said. We noticed then that she had switched the tulips from the green bowl to the blue bowl. "What then?" we asked. We noticed th藏书网at she had shifted the lilies from the escritoire to the chiffonier. "What then?" we repeated. We observed that she had hauled the Indian paintbrush all the way out into the kit. "Poem," she said. We had the mail in our paws still. "Poem?" we said. "Poem," she said. There it was, the red meat on the rug. "Well," we said, " we have a peek?" "No," she said. "How long is it?" we asked. "Fes," she said, "at present." Fes!" The thought of this immense work. . . Vacillations and fusions of Snow White: "But who am I to love?" Snow White asked hesitating, because she already loved us, in a way, but it wasnt enough. Still, she was slightly ashamed. THEN I took off my shirt and called Paul, because we were planning to break into his apartment, and if he was there, we could not do so. If he was there we would be reized, he would knoe were, and that we were carrying his typewriter out into the street to sell it. He would know everything about us: how we made our living, what girls we liked, where we kept the vats. Paul didnt answer so it wasnt necessary to ask if Anna was there -- the prepared name we were going to ask for. Paul sat in his baff, uhe falling water. He was writing a palinode. "Perhaps it is wrong to have favorites among the forms," he reflected. "But retra has a special allure for me. I would wish to retract everything, if I could, so that the whole written world would be. . ." More hot water fell into th藏书网e baff. "I would retract the green sea, and the brown fish in it, and I would especially retract that long black hair hanging from that window, that I saw today on my way here, from the Unemployment Office. It has made me terribly nervous, that hair. It was beautiful, I admit it. Long black hair of such texture, fineness, is not easily e by. Hair black as ebony! Yet it has made me terribly nervous. Why some i person might e along, a, and ceive it his duty to climb up, and dis the reason it is being hung out of that window. There is probably some girl attached to it, at the top, and with her responsibilities of various sorts. . . teeth. . . piano lessons. . . There is the telephing, now. Who is it? Who or what wants me? I will not ahat way, I am safe, for the time being." THERE is a river of girls and women in our streets. There are so many that the cars are forced to use the sidewalks. The women walk ireet proper, the part where, in other cities, trucks and bicycles are found. They stand in windows too unbug their shirts, so that we will not be displeased. I admire them for that. We have voted again and again, and I think they like that, that we vote so much. We voted to try the river in the own. They have a girl-river there they dont use much. We slipped into the felucca carrying gage in long vas tubes tied, in the middle, with straps. The girls groaned uhe additional weight. Then Hubert pushed off and Bill began to beat time for the rowers. We wondered if Snow White would be happy, alohere. But if she wasnt, we couldnt do anything about it. Men try to please their mistresses when they, men, are not busy in the tinghouse, or drinkihs, or having the blade of a new dagger chased with gold. In the village we walked around the well where the girls were dipping their trousers. The zippers were rusting. "Ha ha," the girls said, "we could tear this down in a mihis well." It is difficult to defeat that notion, the ohe village girls hold, that the boy who trembles by the wall, against the stones, will be Pope someday. He is not even hungry; his family is not even poor. WHAT is Snow White thinking? No one knows. Today she came into the kit and asked flass of water. Henry gave her a glass of water. "Arent you going to ask me what I want this glass of water for?" she asked. "I assumed you wao drink it," Henry said. "No, Henry," Snow White said. "Thirsty I am not. You are not paying attention, Henry. Your eye is not on the ball." "What do you want the glass of water for, Snow White?" "Let a hundred flowers bloom," Snow White said. Then she left the room, carrying the glass of water. Kevin came in. "Snow White smiled at me in the hall," Kevin said. "Shut up Kevin. Shut up and tell me what this means: let a hundred flowers bloom." "I dont know what it means Henry," Kevin said. "Its ese, I know that." What is Snow White thinking? No one knows. Now she has taken to wearing heavy blue bulky shapeless quilted Peoples Volurousers rather thaight tremendous how-the-West-was-won trousers she formerly wore, which we admired immoderately. An unmistakable affront I would say. We are getting pretty damned sick of the whole thing, of her air of being just about to do something and of the dozen-odd red flags and bugles she has o the dining-room table. We are getting pretty damned sick of the whole thing and our equanimity is leaking away and finding those tiny Chairman Mao poems in the baby food isnt helping o, I tell you that. -2 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SNOW WHITE: IN THE AREA OF FEARS, SHE FEARS MIRRORS APPLES POISONED BS IN addition to washing the buildings, we make baby food, ese baby food: BABY BOW YEE (chopped pork and ese vegetables) BABY DOW SHEW (bean curd stuffed with ground pike) BABY JAR HAR (shrimp i藏书网n batter) BABY GOOK SHAR SHEeet roast pork) BABY PIE GUAT (pork and oysters in soy sauce) BABY GAI GOON (chi, bean sprouts and cabbage) BABY DIM SUM (ground pork and ese vegetables) BABY JING SHAR SHEeet roast pork and apples) That is how we spend our time, tending the vats. Although sometimes we spend our time washing the buildings. The vats and the buildings have made us rich. It is amazing how many mothers will spring for an attractively packaged jar of Baby Dim Sum, a tasty-looking potlet of Baby Jing Shar Shew Bow. Heigh-ho. The recipes came from our father. "Try to be a man about whom nothing is known," our father said, when we were young. Our father said several other iing things, but we have fotten what they were. "Keep quiet," he said. That we remember. He wanted more quiet. Oends to want that, in a National Park. Our father was a man about whom nothing was known. Nothing is known about him still. He gave us the recipes. He was not very iing. A tree is more iing. A suitcase is more iing. A ed good is more intere..sting. When we sing the father hymice that he was not very iing. The words of the hymn notice it. It is explicitly ented upon, iext. "I UAND all this about Bill," Henry said. He had unlocked the locks on the bar and we were all drinking. "heless I think somebody ought to build a fire under him. He needs a good ki the back acc to my way of thinking. Couldnt we give him a book to read that would get him started. It bothers me to e in at night and see him sitting there playis or something, all that potential being pissed away. We are little children pared to him, in terms of possibility, a all he seems to want to do is sit around the game room, and shuffle the Bezique cards, and throw darts and that sort of thing, when he could be out realizing his potential. We are like little balls of dust under his feet, potentially, and he merely sits there making ships itles, and doing scrimshaw, and all that, when he could be out maximizing his possibilities. Boy I would like to build a fire uhat boy. Ill be damned if I know what to do about this situation which is vexing me in a hundred ways. Its just such a damned shame and crime I t stand it, the more I think about it. I just want to go out and hurl boxes in the river, the more I think about it, and rage against fate, that one so obviously chosen to be the darling of the life-principle should be so i, impious and wrong. I am just about at the end of my tether, boys, and Ill say that to his face, too!" AT dinner we discussed the psychiatrist. "And the psychiatrist?" we said. "He was unfivable," she said. "Unfivable?" "He said I was uing." "Uing?" "He said I was a screaming bore." "He should not have said that." "He said he wasnt in this for the money." "For what then?" "He was in this frins, he said." "The expression is unfamiliar." "There were not a million grins in my history, he said." "That was shabby of him." "He said lets go to a movie fods sake." "And?" "We went to a movie." "Which?" "A Charltoon." "How was it?" "Excellent." "Who paid?" "He." "Was there pop?" "Mars Bars." "Did you hold hands?" "Naturellement." "And after?" "Drinks." "And after that?&quo>藏书网t; "Dont pry." "But," utting down the duck, "three days at the psychiatrists. . ." We regarded Snow White, her smooth lips and face, her womanly figure swaying there, at the window. Something was certainly wrong, we felt. "Most life is uraordinary," Clem said to Snow White, i. "Yes," Snow White said, "I know. Most life is uraordinary looked at with a womans desperate eye too it might i you to know." Daelling Snow White that "Christmas is ing!" How he be killed most easily? With the fewest stains? THE pretty airliewardess regarded Clems chest through his transparent wash-and-wear nylon shirt. "He has that sort of fallen-i many boys from the West have, as if a cow had fallen on him, in his early life. Only one shirt. The shirt on his back. Hoealing that is! Surely I must do something for this poor Westerner!" In the rear baggage partment Clem sweated over the ironing board Carol had made out of a pile of old suitcases. "Snow White waits for me," Clem reflected while ironing his shirt. "Although she also waits for Bill, Hubert, Henry, Edward, Kevin and Dan, I ot help feeling that, whehing is said and done, she is essentially> mine. Even though I am aware that each of the others feels the same way." Clem replaced the iron in the bucket. His shirt looked fine now, just fihe aircraft landed softly, just as it should. The stairway fell correctly onto the landing strip. The passengers followed protocol iing off, the most famous emerging first, the most ignoble emerging last. Clem was in the lower middle. He regarded the Volkswagens crowding the Chicago streets, the children freaking out in their Army surplus, the black grime falling from the sky. "So this is the Free World! I would so like to make love in a bed, just once. Making it in the shower is fine, on ordinary days, but on ones vacation there should be something a little different, it seems to me. A bed would be a sensational y. I suppose I must seek out a bordel. I assume they be found in the Yellow Pages. It is not Snow White that I would be being unfaithful to, but the shower. Only a colle of white porcelain and shial, at bottom." -3 THE SED GEION OF ENGLISH ROMANTIHERITED THE PROBLEMS OF THE FIRST, BUT PLICATED BY THE EVILS OF INDUSTRIALISM AND POLITICAL REPRESSION. ULTIMATELY THEY FOUND AN ANSWER NOT IN SOCIETY BUT IN VARIOUS FORMS OF INDEPENDENCE FROM SOCIETY: HEROISM ART SPIRITUAL TRANSDENCE BEAVER COLLEGE is where she got her education. She studied Modern Woman, Her Privileges and Responsibilities: the nature and nurture of women and what they stand for, in evolution and in history, including householding, upbringing, peace-keeping, healing aion, and how these tribute to the rehumanizing of todays world. Theudied Classical Guitar I, utilizing the methods and teiques of Sor, Tarrega, Segovia, etc. Theudied English Romantic Poets II: Shelley, Byros. Theudied Theoretical Foundations of Psychology: mind, sciousness, unsind, personality, the self, interpersonal relations, psychosexual norms, social games, groups, adjustment, flict, authority, individuation, iion aal health. Theudied Oil Painting I bringing to the first class as instructed Cadmium Yellow Light, Cadmium Yellow Medium, Cadmium Red Light, Alizarin Crimson, Ultramarine Blue, Cobalt Blue, Viridian, Ivory Black, Raw Umber, Yellow Ochre, Burnt Sienna, White. Theudied Personal Resources I and II: self-evaluation, developing the ce to respond to the enviro, opening and using the mind, individual experieraining, the use of time, mature redefinition of goals, a projects. Theudied Realism and Idealism in the porary Italian Novel: Palazzeschi, Brancati, Bilenchi, Pratolini, Moravia, Pavese, Levi, Silone, Berto, Cassola, Ginzburg, Malaparte, Mapalarte, Calvino, Gadda, Bassani, Landolfi. Theudied -- "I AM princely," Paul reflected in his eat-in kit. "There is that. At times, when I am down, I am able to pump myself up again by thinking about my blood. It is blue, the bluest this fading world has known probably. At times I startle myself with a gesture so royal, so full of light, that I wonder where it es from. It es from my father, Paul XVII, a most kingly man and personage. Even though his sole aplishment during his long lack n was the de-deification of his own person. He fluttered the dovecotes with that gesture, when he presented himself as mortal and just like everybody else. A lot of people were surprised. But the ohing they could not take awbbr>..ay from him, there in that hall bedroom in Montreaux, was his blood. And the other thing they could not take away from him was his airs and graces, which I have ied, to a siing degree. Even at fifty-five he was still putting cologne in his shoes. But I am more experimental than he was, and at the same time, more withdrawn. The height of his ambition was to tumble the odd chambermaid now and then, whereas I have loftier ambitions, only I dont know what they are, exactly. Probably I should go out and effect a liaison with some beauty who needs me, and save her, and ride away with her flung over the pommel of my palfrey, I believe I have that right. But oher hand, this duck-with-blue-cheese sandwich that I am eating is mighty attractive and abs, too. He eculiar, my father. That much safely be said. He knew some things that other men do not know. He heard the swans singing just before death, and the bees barking in the night. That is what he said, but I didnt believe him, then. Now, I dont know." HENRY was noting his weaknesses on a pad. Process parable to searg a dogs underbelly for fleas. The weaknesses pinched out of the souls ecstasy one by one. Of course "ecstasy" is being used here in a very special sense, as misery, something that would be in German one of three aspects of something called the Lumpwelt in some such sentence as, "The Inmitten-ness of the Lumpwelt is a turning toward misery." So that what is meant here by ecstasy is something on the order of "fit," but a kind of slow one, perhaps a semi-arrested one, and ohat is divisible by three. "Should I go to Acadia and remove my parents from there? From that parking place where they have been parked since 1936? It is true that they are well ected to the ground now, with gas and water lines and geraniums. The uprooting would be siderable. The fear of the fathers frown. That deters me. He is happy there, as far as I know; still I have this feeling that he ought to be rescued. From that natural beauty." Then Dan came in. "Dan, what is an interrupted screw?" Henry asked. "An interrupt99ｌｉb?ed screw," Dan said, "is a screw with a distinuous helix, as in a on breech, formed by cutting aart or parts of the thread, and sometimes part of the shaft. Used with a lout having corresponding male ses." "This filthy," Henry said, "this language thinking and stinking everlastingly of sex, screw, breech, part, shaft, nut, male, it is no wonder we are all going round the bend with this language dinning forever into our eyes and ears. . ." "I am not going round the bed," Dan said, "not me." "Round the bend," Henry said, "the bend not the bed, how is it that I said bend and you heard bed, you see what I mean, its inescapable." "You live in a world of your own Henry." "I certainly improve on what was given," Henry said. "THOSE men hulking hulk in closets and outside gestures eventuating against a white s difficulties intelligence I only wanted one plain hero of incredible size and soft, flexible manners parts thought dissembling limb add up the thumbprints on my shoulders Seven is too moves too mud is absent partly different levels of emotional release calculated paroxysms scug dissolve thinking parts of faces lower area of Clem from the noses bottom to the line, an inch from the cliff not enough ever Extra difficulty! His use of color! Firmness mirror custody of the blow scale model I cede that it is to a degree instruments adequate distances parched to touch eae with invisible kindly general delivery hands, washing motions mirror To take turns and then say "Thank you" gress of eyes turning with a firm, soft glance up Edward never extra density of the blanched product rolling tongue child straight ahead brokeerior fag natural gas To experience a definition plaeatly where you t reach it and higher up Daytime experiences choler film bliss" JANE replaced the Hermes Rocket on the shelf. Another letter pleted. That made twenty-five letters pleted. Oeen more letters to plete. She had tried to make them irritating ireme. She reread the last letter. She was trembling. It was irritating ireme. Jaopped trembling. There was Hogo to think about, now, and Jane preferred to think about Hogo without trembling. "He knows when I tremble. That is what he likes best." Hogo drove Jane dow Street in his creen Pontiavertible. Nobody likes Hogo, because he is loathsome. He always has a white dog sitting upright in the fro of the car, when Jane is not sitting there. Jane likes to swing from the lianas that dangle from the Meat Street trees, so sometimes she is not sitting there and the dog is sitting there instead. "Fods sake t you stay put?" "Sorry." Jane fingered her amulet. "That aille Hogo. If he wants aic girl like me then he has to put up with a few irregularities from time to time." Hogo is not very simpatico -- not much! He ged his o Hogo from Roy and he wears an Iron Cross t-shirt and we suspect him of some sort of shady underground .e with Paul -- we havent figured out exactly what yet. "Hogo I have an ice cream -- a chocolate swirl?" Hogo took the chocolate swirl and jammed it into Janes mouth, in a loathsome way. His mother loved him when he was Roy, but now that he is Hogo she wont eveo him, if she help it. "IT is marvelous," Snow White said to herself. "Wheer falls on my tender back. The white meat there. Give me the needle spray. First the hot, and then the cold. A thousand tiny points of perturbation. More perturbation! And who is it with me, here in the shower? It is Clem. The approach is Clems, and the teique, or lack of it, is Clem, Clem, Clem. And Hubert waits outside, oher side of the shower curtain, and Henry in the hall, before the closed door, and Edward is sitting downstairs, in front of the television, waiting. But what of Bill? Why is it that Bill, the leader, has not tapped at my shower-stall door, i weeks? Probably because of his new reluce to be touched. That must be it. Clem you are dht ai those blue jeans and chaps! Artificial insemination would be more iing. And why are there no in-flight movies in shower stalls, as there are in ercial aircraft? Why t I watch Ignace Paderewski in Moonlight Sonata, through a fine mist? That icture. And he resident of Poland, too. That must have been iing. Everything in life is iing except Clems idea of sexual gress, his Western fusioween the cept, pleasure, and the cept, increasing the size of the herd. But the water on my back is iing. It is more than iing. Marvelous is the word for it." THERE were some straw flowers there. Decor. And somebody had said something we hadnt heard, but Dan was very excited. "I praise fruit and hold flowers in disdain," Apollinaire said, and we trasted that with what LaGuardia had said. Then Bill said something: "Tor the face." He was very drunk. Other people said other things. I smoked an Old Gold cigarette. It is always better when everybody is calm, but calm does not e every day. Lamps are calm. The Secretary of State is calm. Each day just goes so fast, begins and ends. The poignant part came when Edward began to say what everybody already knew about him. "After I read the book, I --" "Dont say that Edward," Kevin said. "Dont say anything youll regret later." Bill put a big black bandage over Edwards mouth, and Clem took off all his clothes. I smoked an Old Gold cigarette, the same one I had been smoking before. There was still some of it left because I had put it down without finishing it. Alicia showed us her praphic pastry. Some things arent poignant at all and that praphic pastry is one of them. Bill was trying to keep the tiredness off his face. I wao get out of this talk and look at the window. But Bill had something else to say, and he wasnt going to leave until he had said it, I could see that. "Well it is a pleasure to please her, when human iy ma, but the whole thing is just trembling on the edge of monotony, after several years. A. . . I am fond of her. Yes, I am. For when sexual pleasure is had, it makes you fond, in a strange way, of the other ohe oh whom you are having it." SNOW WHITE was ing. "Book lice do not bite people," she said to herself. She sprayed the books with a five-pert solution of DDT. Then she dusted them with the dusting brush of the vacuum er. She did not bang the books together, for that ihe bindings. Then she oiled the b..indings with s-foot oil, applying the oil with the palm of her hand and with her fingers. Then she mended some torn pages using strips cut from rice paper. She ironed some rumpled pages with a warm iron. Fresh molds were wiped off the bindings with a soft cloth slightly dampened with sherry. Then she hung a bag taining paradichlorobenzene in the book case, to inhibit mildew. Then Snow White ed the gas range. She removed the pah the burners and grates and washed them thhly in hot suds. Then she rihem in clear water and dried them with paper towels. Using washing soda and a stiff brush, she ed the burners, paying particular attention to the gas orifices, through which the gas flows. She ed out the ports with a hairpin, rihem thhly and dried them with paper towels. Theurhe drip tray, the burners and grates to their proper positions and lit each buro make sure it was w. Then she washed the inside of the broiler partment with a cloth wrung out in warm suds, with just a bit of ammonia to help cut the grease. Then she rihe broiler partment with a cloth wrung out in clear water and dried it with paper towels. The pan and rack of the broiler were done in the same way. Then Snow White ed the oven using steel wool oough spots. Then she rihe inside of the oven with a cloth wrung out in clear water and dried it with paper towels. Then, "piano care." -4 WHAT SNOW WHITE REMEMBERS: THE HUNTSMAN THE FOREST THE STEAMING KNIFE "I WAS fair once," Jane said. "I was the fairest of them all. Men came from miles around simply to be in my power. But those days are gohose better days. Now I cultivate my mal..ice. It is a cultivated maliot the pale natural malice we knew, when the world was young. I grow more witchlike as the hazy days imperceptibly meld into one another, and the musky months sink into memory as into a slough, sump, or slime. But I have my malice. I have that. I have even ied new varieties of malice, that men have not seen before now. Were it not for the fact that I am the sleepie of Hogo de Bergerac, I would be total malice. But I am redeemed by this hopeless love, which places me along the human tinuum, still. Even Hogo is, I think, chiefly enamored of my malice, that artful, richly formed and softly poisonous work of growths. He luxuriates in the pain potential I am surrounded by. I think I will just sit here on this porch swing, now, swingily in the moist m, and remember better days. Then a cup of ese-restaura 10 a.m. Then, bato the swing for more better days. Yes, that would be a pleasant way to spend the forenoon." AT the horror show Hubert put his hand in Snow Whites lap. A shy aive gesture. She let it lay there. It was warm there; that is where the vulva is. And we had brought a thermos of glittering Gibsons, to make us happy insofar as possible. Hubert remembered the Trout Amandine he had had the day the ball was stig to Kevins leg. It had beeremely tasty, that trout. And Hubert remembered the versation in which he had said that God was cruel, and someone else had said vague, and they had pulled the horse off the road, and then they had seen a Polish picture. But this picture was better than that one, allowing for the fact that we had experiehat one in translation, and not in the naked Polish. Snow White is agitated. She is worried about something called her "reputation." What will people think, why have we allowed her to bee a public sdal, we must not be seen in publi famille, no one believes that she is simply a housekeeper, etc. etc. These s are ludicrous. No one cares. When she is informed that our establishment has excited no special i in the neighborhood, she is bitterly disappointed. She sulks in her room, reading Teilhard de Chardin and thinking. "My suffering is authentiough but it has a kind of low-grade crete-block quality. The seven of them only add up to the equivalent of about two real men, as we know them from the films and from our childhood, when there were giants on the earth. It is possible of course that there are no more real men here, on this ball of half-truths, the earth. That would be a disappoi. One would have to tent oneself with the subtle falsity of color films of unhappy love affairs, made in France, with a Mozart score. That would be difficult." Miseries and plaints of Snow White: "I am tired of being just a horsewife!" DEAR MR. QUISTGAARD: Although you do not know me my name is Jane. I have seized your name from the telephone book in an attempt to enmesh you in my s. We suffer today I believe from a lack of e with each other. That is on knowledge, so on in fact, that it may not everue. It may be that we are overected, for all I know. However I am ag on the first assumption, that we are underected, and thus have flung you these lines, whiay grasp or let fall as you will. But I feel that if you hem, you will suffer for it. That is merely my private opinion. No police power supports it. I have no means of punishing you, Mr. Quistgaard, for not listening, for having a closed heart. There is no punishment for that, in our society. Not yet. But to the point. You and I, Mr. Quistgaard, are not in the same universe of discourse. You may not have been aware of it previously, but the fact of the matter >藏书网is, that we are not. We exist in different universes of discourse. Now it may have appeared to you, prior to your receipt of this letter, that the universe of discourse in which you existed, and puttered about, was in all ways adequate and satisfactory. It may never have crossed your mind to think that other universes of discourse distinct from your owed, with people in them, disc. You may have, in a on-sense way, regarded your own u. of d. as a plenum, filled to the brim with discourse. You may have felt that what already existed was a sufficy. People like you often do. That is certainly one way arding it, if fat self-satisfied placy is your aim. But I say unto you, Mr. Quistgaard, that even a plenum leak. Even a plenum, cher ma?tre, be peed. hings rush into your plenum displag old things, things that were formerly there. No mans plenum, Mr. Quistgaard, is impervious to the awl of Gods will. sider then your situation now. You are sitting there in your house o Street, with your fine dog, doubtless, and your handsome wife and tall brown sons, ceivably, and who knows with yun-colored Plymouth Fury in the driveway, and opinions passing bad forth, about whether the Grange should build a new meeting hall or not, whether the children should bee Thomists or not, whether the pump needs more cup grease or not. A fortable Ameri se. But I, Jane Villiers de IIsle-Adam, am in possession of your telephone number, Mr. Quistgaard. Think what that means. It means that at any moment I pierce your plenum with a sielephone call, simply by dialing 989-7777. You are correct, Mr. Quistgaard, in seeing this as a threatening situation. The moment I i discourse from my u. of d. into your u. of d., the yourness of yours is diluted. The more I i, the more you dilute. Soon you will be presiding over ay plenum, or rather, sihat is a tradi in terms, over a former plenum, in terms of yourness. You are, essentially, in my power. I suggest an unlisted number. Yours faithfully, JANE -5 PAUL: A FRIEND OF THE FAMILY "IS there someplace I put this?" Paul asked indig the large parcel he held in his arms. "It is a hing I just fioday, still a little wet Im afraid." He wiped his hands which were covered wi?th emulsions on his trousers. "Ill just lean it up against your wall for a moment." Paul leahe hing up against our wall for a moment. The hing, a dirty great banality in white, poor-white and off-white, leaned up against the wall. "Iing," we said. "Its poor," Snow White said. "Poor, poor." "Yes," Paul said, "one of my poorer things I think." "Not so poor of course as yesterdays, poorer oher hand than some," she said. "Yes," Paul said, "it has some of the qualities of poorness." "Especially poor in the lower left-hand er," she said. "Yes," Paul said, "I would go so far as to hurl it into the marketplace." "Theyre getting poorer," she said. "Poorer and poorer," Paul said with satisfa, "desding to unexplored depths of poorness where no human intelligence has ever been." "I find it extremely iing as a social phenomenon," Snow White said, "to hat during the height of what is variously called, abstract expressionism, a painting and so forth, when most artists were grouped together in a school, you have persisted in an image alohat, I find -- and I think it has been described as hard-edge painting, is an apt description, although it leaves out a lot, but I find it very iing that in the last few years there is a tremendous new surge of work being done in the hard-edge image. I dont know if you want to ent on that, but I find it extremely iing that you, who have always been sure of yourself and your image, were one of the earliest, almost founders of that school, if you even call it a school." "I have always been sure of myself and my image," Paul said. "Sublimely poor," she murmured. "aper," he said. They kissed. We trudged to bed then singing the to-bed song heigh-ho. She was lying there in her black vinyl pajamas. "He is certainly a well-ied personality, Paul," she said. "Yes," we said. "He makes tact, you must grant him that." "Yes," we said. "A beautiful human being." "Carrying the mace is a bit much, perhaps," we said. "We are fortuo have him in our try," she cluded. THEN we went over to Pauls plad took the typewriter. Then the problem was to find somebody to sell it to. It was a fine Olivetti 22, that typewriter, and the typewriter girls put it uheir skirts. Then Gee wao write something on it while it was uheir skirts. I think he just wao get uhere, because he likes Amelias legs. He is always looking at them and patting them and thrusting his haween them. "What are you going to write uhere, Gee?" "I thought perhaps some automatic writing, because one t see so well under here with the light being strangled by the thick wool, and I touch-type well enough, but I t see to think, so I thought that. . ." "Well we t sell this typewriter if youre typing on it under Amelias legs, so e out of there. And bring the carbon paper too because the carbon paper makes black smudges on Amelias legs and she doesnt want that. Not now." We all had our hands oypewriter when it emerged because it had been in that pure grotto, Pauls place, and tomorrow we are going to go there again and take the elevate this time, so that he t e down into the street any more, with his pretensions. "YES," Bill said, "I wao be great, once. But the moon for that was not in my sky, then. I had hoped to make a powerful statement. But there was no wind, no weeping. I had hoped to make a powerful statement, coupled with a moving plea. But there was no weeping, except, perhaps, cealed weeping. Perhaps they wept in the evenings, after dinner, in the family room, among the family, ea his own chair, weeping. A certain diffideill gs to these matters. You laughed, sitting in your chair with your purple plywood spectacles, your iced tea. I had hoped to make a signifit tribution. But they remaiony-faced. Did I make a mistake, seleg Bridgeport? I had hoped t about a heightened awareness. I saw their smiling faces. They were going gaily to the grocery for peanut oil, Band-Aids, Saran . My sus of tears was still inplete. Why had I selected Bridgeport, city of cealed meaning? In Calais they weep openly, on street ers, urees, in the banks. I wao provide a definitive at. But my lecture was not a success. Men came to fold the folding chairs, although I was still speaking. You laughed. I ?should talk about things people were ied in, you said. I wao achieve a breakthrough. My peing study was to have been a masterly evocation, sobs and cries, these things matter. I had in mind initiating a multi-faceted program involving paper towels and tears. I came into the room suddenly, you were weeping. You slipped something out of sight, uhe pillow. " What is uhe pillow? I asked. " Nothing, you said. "I reached uhe pillow with my hand. You grasped my wrist. An alarm clock spread the alarm. I rose to go. My survey of the ince of weeping in the bedrooms of members of the faculty of the Uy eport was methodologically sound but informed, you said, by too little passion. You laughed, in your room, pulling from uhe pillow grainy gray photographs in albums, pictures of people weeping. I wao effect a rapprochement, I wao recile irrecilable forces. What is the reward for knowing the worst? The reward for knowing the worst is an honorary degree from the Uy eport, salt tears in a little bottle. I wao engage in a meaningful dialogue, but the seminal thinkers I tacted were all shaken with sobs, wracked is the >?９9ｌiｂ.rd for it. Why did we ceal that emotion which, had we declared it, could have liberated us? There are no parameters for measuring the importance of this question. My life-enhang poem was mildly meretricious, as you predicted. I wao substantiate an unsubstantiated report, I listeo the Blue work, I heard weeping. I wao make suitable arras but those whose lives I had thought te did not appear on the appointed day. They were deployed elsewhere marg and ter-marg on fields leased from the Police Athletic League. I erhaps not lucky enough. I wao make a far-reag reevaluation. I had in mind laung a three-pronged assault, but the prongs wandered off seduced by fires and s. It was hell there, in the furnay ambition. It was because, you said, I had read the wrong book. He reversed himself in his last years, you said, in the books no one would publish. But his students remember, you said." -6 THE REVOLUTION OF THE PAST GEION IN THE RELIGIOUS SCES HAS SCARCELY PEED POPULAR SCIOUSNESS AND HAS YET TO SIGNIFITLY INFLUENCE PUBLIC ATTITUDES THAT REST UPON TOTALLY OUTMODED CEPTIONS. PAUL sat in his baff, w what to do . "Well, what shall I do ? What is the hing demanded of me by history?" If you know who it is they are whispering about, then you usually dont like it. If Paul wants to bee a monk, thats his affair entirely. Of course we had hoped that he would take up his sword as part of the Presidents war ory. The time is ripe for that. The root causes of poetry have been studied and studied. And now that we knoockets of poetry still exist in reat try, especially in the large urbaers, we ought to be able to wash it out totally in one geion, if we put our backs into it. But we were prepared to hide our disappoi. The decision is Pauls finally. "Are those broken veins in my left cheek, abbr>bove the cheekbohere? No, thank God, they are only tiny whiskers not yet whisked away. Missed ierdays scrape, but vulnerable to the scrape of today." Besides, most people are not very well informed about the cloistered life. Certainly they have light bulbs if they want them, and their rivers and mountains are not inferior to our own. "They make iing jam," Hank said. "But its his choice, in the final analysis. Anyhow, we have his typewriter. That much of him is ours, now." People were caressing each other under Pauls window. "Why are all these people existing under my window? It is as if they were as palpable as me -- as bloody, as firm, as well-read." Monkish business will carry him to town sometimes; perhaps we will be able to see him then. "MOTHER I go over to Hogos and play?" "No Jane Hogo is not the right type of young man for you to play with. He is thirty-five now and that is too old for i play. I am afraid he knows some kind of play that is not i, and will want you to play it with him, and then you will agree in ynorance, and the will be in the fire. That is the way I have the situation figured out anyhow. That is my reading of it. That is the way it looks from where I stand." "Mother all this false humility does not bee you any more than that mucky old poor little match-girl dress you are wearing." "This dress Ill have you know.９9ｌib? cost two hundred and forty dollars when it was new." "When was it new?" "It was new in 1918, the year your father and I were ireogether, in the Great War. That was a war all right. Oh I know there have been other wars since, better-publicized ones, more expensive ones perhaps, but our war is the one Ill always remember. Our war is the ohat means war to me." "Mother I know Hogo is thirty-five and thhly bad through and through but still there is something drawio him. To his house. To the uninnoce I know awaits me there." "Simmer down child. There is a method in my meanness. By refusing to allow you to go to Hogos house, I will draw Hogo here, to your house, where we smother him in blueberry flan and other kindnesses, and generally work on him, ahe life out o藏书网f him, in one way or another." "Thats shrewd mother." THE poem remained between us like an immense, wrecked railroad car. "Toug the poem," we said, "is it rhymed or free?" "Free," Snow White said, "free, free, free." "And the theme?" "One of the great themes," she said, "that is all I reveal at this time." "Could you tell us the first word?" "The first word," she said, "is bandaged and wounded. " "But. . ." "Run together," she said. We mentally reviewed the great themes in the light of the word or words, "bandaged and wounded." "How is it that bandage precedes wound?" "A metaphor of the self arm itself against the gaze of The Other." "The theme is loss, we take it." "What," she said, "else?" "Are you specific as to what is lost?" "Brutally." "Snow White," we said, "why do you remain with us? here? in this house?" There was a silehen she said: "It must be laid, I suppose, to a failure of the imagination. I have not been able to imagine anythier." I have not been able to imagine anythier. We were pleased by this powerful statement of our essential mutuality, which ever be sundered or torn, or broken apart, dissipated, diluted, corrupted or finally severed, not even by art in its manifold and dreadful guises. "But my imagination is stirring," Snow White said. "Like the long-sleeping stock certificate suddenly alive in its green safety-deposit box because of new ior i, my imagination is st藏书网irring. Be warned." Something was certainly wrong, we felt. -7 THE HORSEWIFE IN HISTORY FAMOUS HORSEWIVES THE HORSEWIFE: A SPIRITUAL PORTRAIT THE HORSEWIFE: A CRITICAL STUDY FIRST MOP, 4000 BC VIEWS OF ST. AUGUSTINE VIEWS OF THE VENERABLE BEDE EMERSON ON THE AMERI HORSEWIFE OXFORD PANION TO THE AMERI HORSEWIFE INTRODU OF BON AMI, 1892 HORSEWIVES ON HORSEWIFERY ACCEPT ROLE, PSYCHOLOGIST URGES THE PLASTIC BAG THE GARLIC PRESS BILL has developed a shamble. The sequence, some say, of a lost mind. But that is not true. In the midst of so much that is true, it is refreshing to shamble across something that is not true. He does not want to be touched. But he is entitled to an idiosyncrasy. He has ear by his vigorous leadership in that great enterprise, his life. And in that reat enterprise, our love for Snow White. "This thing is damaging to all of us," Bill noted. "We were all born in National Parks. Clem has his memories of Yosemite, inspiring ges. Kevin remembers the Great Smokies. Henry has his Acadian songs and dances, Dan his burns from Hot Springs. Hubert has climbed the giant Sequoias, and Edward has climbed stately Rainier. And I, I know the Everglades, which everybody knows. These on experiences have yoked us together forever uhe red, white and blue." Then we summoned up all our human uanding, from thions where it arily dwelt. "Love has died here, apparently," Bill said signifitly, "and it is our task to i once again with the he breath of life. With that in mind I have asked Hogo de Bergerae over and advise us on what should be done. He knows the deaths of the heart, Hogo does. And he knows the terror of aloneness, and the rot of propinquity, and the absence of grace. He should be here tomorrow. He will be wearing blueberry flan on his buttohat is how we are to know him. That and his vileness." HOGO was reading a book of atrocity stories. "God, what filthy beasts we were," he thought, "then. What a thing it must have been to be a Hun! A filthy Boche! And then to turn around and be a Nazi! A gray vermin! And today? We co-exist, we co-exist. Filthy deutschmarks! That so eclipse the very mark aure. . . That so eclipse the very mark and bosom of a man, that vileness herself is vilely oerthrown. That so enfold. . . That so enscrap. . . Bloody deutschmarks! that so en the very aure of a man, that what we cherished in him, vileness, is. . . Dies, his ginger oerthrown. Bald pelf! that so ingurgitates the very wrad mixture of a man, that in him the sweet stings of vileness are, all ginger fled, he. . ." Henry walked home with his suit in a plastic bag. He had been washing the buildings. But something was stirring in him, a wrinkle in the groin. He was carrying his bucket too, and his ropes. But the wrinkle in his groin was monstrous. "Now it is necessary to court her, and win her, and put on this suit, and cut my various nails, and drink something that will kill the millions of germs in my mouth, and say something flattering, aty and bonny, and hale and kinky, and pay her a thousand dollars, all just to ease this wrinkle in the groin. It seems a high price." Henry let his mind stray to his groin. The his mind stray troin. Do girls have groins? The wrinkle was still there. "The remedy en. That is still open to ohat door, at least, has not been shut." KEVIN was being "uanding." We spend a lot of our time doing that. And even more of our time, now that we have these problems. "Yes thats the way it is Clem," Kevin said to his friend Clem. "Thats the way it is. You tell it like it is Clem baby." Kevin said a lot marbage to Clem. Peacocks walked through the yard in their gold suits. "Sometimes I see signs on walls saying Kill the Rich," Clem said. "And sometimes Kill the Rich has been crossed out and Harm the Rich written underh. A clear gain for civilization I would say. And then the ohat says Jean-Paul Sartre Is a Fartre. Something going on there, you must admit. Dim flicker of something. Oher hand I myself have impulses toward violeneasily cealed. Especially when I look out of the window at the men and women walking there. I see a great many couples, men and women, walking along in the course of a day because I spend so much time, as we all do, looking out of windows to determine what is out there, and what should be done about it. Oh it is killihe way they walk dowreet together, laughing and talking, those men and women. Pushing the pram too, whether the man is doing it, or the woman is doing it. Normal life. And a fiober chill in the air. It is unbearable, this sensus, this damned felicity. When I see a couple fighting I give them a dollar, because fighting is iing. Thank God fhting." "Thats true Roger," Kevin said a huimes. Then he was covered with embarrassment. "No I mean thats true Clem. Excuse me. Roger is somebody else. Youre ner. Youre Clem. Thats true, Clem." More peacocks walked through the yard in their splendid plumage. WE opened eggs to let the yellow out. Bill was worried about the white part, but we told him not to worry about that. "People do it every day," Edward said. The giant meringue rose to the ceiling. We were all in it. Dan turned off the televisio. "You t cook acc to what that woman says. She never has the proportiht, and I dont think there ought to be abis in this meringue anyhow." "I just dont like your world," Snow White said. "A world in which such things h..appen." We gave her the yellows, but she still wasnt satisfied. Its easy enough to motivate poli if you give them votes and scooters to ride about on, but soldiers are a little more difficult. More soldiers. Cash their checks. Just because they are soldiers is no reason for not cashing their checks. Philippe laid down his M-16, his M-21, his M-2 and his fully automatic M-9. Then he laid down his M-10 and his M-34 with its mouthfed adapter. Then he laid down his M-4 and his M-3. It made a pile, that hardware. "Well I suppose that identifies you," the girl behind the wall said. Then she gave him his money, and gave the other men their mooo. We were amazed that the performance was allowed to tihere were a lot of things against the gover in it. We gave Snow White the yellows in an aluminum tainer. But she still wasnt satisfied. That is the essential point here, that she wasnt satisfied. I dont know what to do . The psychology of Snow White: What does she hope for? "Someday my prince will e." By this Snow White means that she lives her own being as inplete, pending the arrival of one who will "plete" her. That is, she lives her own being as "not-with" (even though she is in some sense "with" the seven men, Bill, Kevin, Clem, Hubert, Henry, Edward and Dan). But the "not-with" is experienced as stronger, more real, at this particular instant in time, than the "being-with." The inpleteness is an ache capable of subduing all other data presented by sciousness. I dont go along with those theories of historiecessity, which suggest that her as are dictated by "forces" outside of the individual. That doesnt sound reasonable, in this case. Irruption of the magical in the life of Snow White: Snow White knows a singing bohe singing bone has told her various stories which have left her troubled and fused: of a bear transformed into a kings son, of an immereasure at the bottom of a brook, of a crystal casket in which there is a cap that makes the wearer invisible. This must not tihe behavior of the bone is uable. The bone must be persuaded to fiself to events and effects susceptible of firmation by the instrumentarium of the physical sces. Someone must reason with the bone. "I AM being followed by a nun in a black station wagon." Bill wiped his hands on the seat covers. "I ot fall apart now. Not yet. I must hold the whole thing together. Everything depends on me. I must ceal my wounds, trive to ap99ｌib?pear unwouhey must not know. The bloody handkerchief stuffed uhe shirt. Now she signals a right turn. Now I will make a left turn. That way I shall escape her. But she makes a left turn too. There it is. That does it. She is following me. Following the spiritual spoor of my invisible wounds. Is she the great black horse for which I have waited all my days, since I was twelve years old? The great dev black horse? Of course not. Dont be ridiculous, Bill. You are behaving like a fool. She is nothing like a black horse. She is simply a woman in a black dress, in a black station wagon. That she signals for a right turn and then makes a left turn means nothing at all. Dont think about it. Think about leadership. No, dont think about leadership. If you hang a right at this er. . . No, she hung a right too. Dont think about it. Dont think. Turn on the radio. Think about what the radio is telling you. Think about the various messages to be found there." Im not her cup of tea Im afraid Ah ah ah ah ah Ill find a way somehow in my lonely room Ah ah ah ah ah Emily Dison, why have you left me and gone Ah ah ah ah ah Emily Dison, dont you know what we could have meant Ah ah ah ah ah "HELLO Hogo." "Hello chaps." "The floor is yours Hogo." "Well chaps first Id like to say a few vile things more or less at random, not only because it is expected of me but also because I enjoy it. One of them is that this t youve got here, although Ive never seen her with my own eyes, is probably not worth w about. Now excuse me if Im treading on your toes in this matter. God knows I love a female gesture as much as any man, as when, for instance, sitting in the fro of a car in their bikini, they kind of shrug themselves into a street shift befetting out, or while the car door is open but they havent gotten out yet; and if you happen to be looking out of a window of a house he curb, or if you move your window he curb, you sometimes see oting in her absolute underwear, i weather, and then going through that shrugging business, and sort of hitg the shift up over her hips, and then shaking her head to get the hair to fall the right way, and all that. And all this is the best that has been thought and said, in my opinion, or ever will be thought and said, for the only thing worth a rap in the whole world is the beauty of women, and maybe certain foods, and possibly music of al?9９lib?l kinds, especially cheap music such as that fur parades by for instahe St. Pulaski Tatterdemalion Band e, New Jersey, which reduce you to tears, in the right light, by speaking to you from the heart about your land, and what a fine land it is, and that it is your land really, and my land, this land of ours -- that particular insight chill you, rendered by a marg unit. But I wahe main thing I wao point out is that the world is full of ts, that they grow like clams in all quarters of the earth, ts as multitudinous as cherrystones and littlenecks burrowing into the mud in all the bays of the world. The point is that the loss of any particular one is not to be taken seriously. She stays with you as long as she put up with your shit and you stay with her as long as you put up with her shit. Thats the way it is behind the veil of flummery that usually veils these matters. Now think, I ask you, of all those women who are beyond the moment of splendor. They are depressed. The minister es to call and reends to them the things of the spirit, and tells them how the things of the spirit are more durable thahings of the flesh and all that. Well he is entirely correct, they are more durable, but durable is not what we wahe terrible poignance of this predit is not vitiated by the fact that everybody knows it, in the backs of their minds. Ruin of the physical envelope is reat theme here, and if we keep ging girls every four or five years, it is because of this ruin, which I will never agree to, to my dying day. And that is why I keep looking out of the window, and why we all keep looking out of the window, to see what is passing, what has been cast up on the beach of our existence. Because something is always being cast up on that beach, as new classes of girls mature, and you always get a new one, if you are willing to overlook certain weaknesses in the departments of thought and feeling. But if it is thought and feeling you want, you always read a book, or see a film, or have an interior monologue. But of course with the spread of literacy you now tend to get girls who have thought and feeling too, in some measure, and some of them will probably belong bbr>?to the Royal Philological Society or something, or in any case have their own thing, which must be respected, and catered to, and nattered about, just as if you gave a shit about all this blague. But of course we may be different, perhaps you do care about it. Its not unheard of. But my main point is that you should bear in mind multiplicity, and fet about uniqueness. The earth is broad, and flat, and deep, and high. And remember what Freud said." -8 THE VALUE THE MIS ON EROTIEEDS INSTANTLY SINKS AS SOON AS SATISFA BEES READILY AVAILABLE. SOME OBSTACLE I.S NECESSARY TO SWELL THE TIDE OF THE LIBIDO TO ITS HEIGHT, AND AT ALL PERIODS OF HISTORY, WHENEVER NATURAL BARRIERS HAVE NOT SUFFICED, MEN HAVE ERECTED VENTIONAL ONES. "Which prince?" Snow White wondered brushieeth. "Which prince will e? Will it be Prindrey? Prince Igor? Prince Alf? Prince Alphonso? Prince Mal? Prince Donalbain? Prince Fernando? Prince Siegfried? Prince Philip? Prince Albert? Prince Paul? Prince Akihito? Prince Rainier? Prince Porus? Prince Myshkin? Prince Rupert? Prince Pericles? Prince Karl? Prince Clarence? Prince Gee? Prince Hal? Prince John? Prince Mamillius? ９9lｉb?Prince Florizel? Prince Kropotkin? Prince Humphrey? Prince Charlie? Prichabelli? Prince Escalus? Prince Valiant? Prince Fortinbras?" Then Snow White pulled herself together. "Well it is terrific to be anticipating a prince -- to be waiting and knowing that what you are waiting for is a prince, packed with grace -- but it is still waiting, and waiting as a mode of existence is, as Brack has noted, a darksome mode. I would rather be doing a huher things. But slash me if I will let it, this waiting, bring down my lofty feelings of anticipation from the bedroom ceiling where they dance overhead like so many French letters filled with lifting gas. I wonder if he will have the Hapsburg Lip?" PAUL stood before a fence posing. He was on his way to the monastery. But first he osing in front of a fehe fence was covered with birds. Their problem, in many ways a paradigm of our own, was "to fly." "The engaging and wholly charming way I stand in front of this fence here," Paul said to himself, "will soon persuade someoo discover me. Then I will not have to go to the monastery. Then I be on television or something, instead of going to the monastery. Yet there is no denying it, something is pullioward that monastery located in a remote part of Western Nevada." Lanky, generous-hearted Paul! "If I had been born well prior to 1900, I could have ridden with Pershing against Pancho Villa. Alternatively, I could have ridden with Villa against the landowners and corrupt gover officials of the time. Iher case, I would have had a horse. How little opportunity there is for youo have personally owned horses itom half of the tweh tury! A wohat we U.S. youth still fork a saddle at all. . . Of course there are those horses uhe hoods of Buicks and Pontiacs, the kind so many of my trymen favor. But those horses are not for me. They take the tan out of my cheeks and the lank out of my arms and legs. Tom Lea or Pete Hurd will never paianding by this fence if I am sitting inside an Eldorado, Starfire, Riviera or Mustang, no matter how attractively the metal has bee." SNOW WHITE let down her hair black as ebony from the window. It was Monday. The hair flew out of the window. "I could fly a kite with this hair it is so long. The wind would carry the kite up into the blue, and there would be the red of the kite against the blue of the blue, together with my hair black as ebony, floating there. That seems desirable. This motif, the long hair streaming from the high window, is a very a one I believe, found in many cultures, in various forms. Now I recapitulate it, for the astonishment of the vulgar and the refreshment of my venereal life." THE President looked out of his window. He was not very happy. "I worry about Bill, Hubert, Henry, Kevin, Edward, Clem, Dan and their lover, Snow White. I sehat all is not well with them. Now, looking out over this green lawn, and these fine rosebushes, and into the night and the yellow buildings, and the falling Dow-Jones index and the screams of the poor, I am ed. I have many important things to worry about, but I worry about Bill and the boys too. Because I am the President. Finally. The President of the whole fug try. And they are Ameris, Bill, Hubert, Henry, Kevin, Edward, Clem, Dan and Snow White. They are Ameris. My Ameris." QUESTIONS: 1. Do you like the story so far? Yes ( ) No ( ) 2. Does Snow White resemble the Snow White you remember? Yes ( ) No ( ) 3. Have you uood, in reading to this point, that Paul is the prince-figure? Yes ( ) No ( ) 4. That Jane is the wicked stepmure? Yes ( ) No( ) 5. In the further development of the story, would you like more emotion ( ) or less emotion ( )? 6. Is there too much blague in the narration? ( ) Not enough blague? ( ) 7. Do you feel that the creation of new modes of hysteria is a viable uaking for the artist of today? Yes ( ) No ( ) 8. Would you like a war? Yes ( ) No ( ) 9. Has the work, for you, a metaphysical dimension? Yes ( ) No ( ) 10. What is it (twenty-five words or less)? _____________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________ 11. Are the seven men, in your view, adequately characterized as individuals? Yes ( ) No ( ) 12. Do you feel that the Authuild has been suffitly vigorous in representing writers before the gress in matters pertaining to cht legislation? Yes ( ) No ( ) 13. Holding in mind all works of fi sihe War, in all languages, how would you rate the present work, on a scale of oo ten, so far? (Please circle your answer) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 14. Do you stand up when you read? ( ) Lie down? ( ) Sit? ( ) 15. In your opinion, should human beings have more shoulders? ( ) Two sets of shoulders? ( ) Three? ( ) Part Two-1 PERHAPS we should not be sittiending the vats and washing the buildings and carrying the moo the vault once a week, like everybody else. Perhaps we should be doing something else entirely, with our lives. God knows what. We do what we do without thinking. Oends the vats and washes the buildings and carries the moo the vault and ops for a moment to sider that the whole process may be despicable. Someoanding somewhere despising us. I springs of Dax, a gouty thihinking, father five them. It was worse before. That is something that safely be said. It was worse before we found Snow White wandering in the forest. Before we found Snow White wandering in the forest we lived lives stuffed with equanimity. There was equanimity for all. We washed the buildings, tehe vats, wended our way to the ty cathouse once a week (heigh-ho). Like everybody else. We were simple beois. We knew what to do. When we found Snow White wandering in the forest, hungry and distraught, we said: "Would you like something to eat?" Now we do not know what to do. Snow White has added a dimension of fusion and misery to our lives. Whereas once we were simple beo藏书网is who knew what to do, now we are plex beois who are at a loss. We do not like this plexity. We circle it wearily, prodding it from time to time with a shopkeepers forefinger: What is it? Is it, perhaps, bad for business? Equanimity has leaked away. There was a moment, however, when equanimity was not the chief sideration. That moment in which we looked at Snow White and uood for the first time that we were fond of her. That was a moment. Rea to the hair: Two older men standing there observed Snow Whites hair black as ebony tumbling from the window. "Seems like some hair in outa that winda藏书网 there," one said. "Yes it looks like hair to me," his panion replied. "Seems like there oughta be somethin to be done about it." "Yes, seems like it oughta be punished with a kiss or something." "Well were too old for all that. You need a Paul or Paul-figure for that sort of activity. Probably Paul is even now standing in the wings, girding his pants for his entrance. So I guess Ill go along to the hiring hall, where I hear there might be some work." "Ill go along with you," the other man said, "because even though I aint a A.B., I am a B.A., and maybe in the dimhe ohing will be taken for the other, and we ship out together." "I hate to go away and leave all that hair hanging there ued as it were," the first man said, "but we have a duty to our families, and to the trys mert fleet, some vessels of which are now languishing at their berths doubtless, doier 27 and Pier 32, for the lack o the likes of us. So farewell, hair! Fare thee well, and if forever, still forever, fare thee well!" Rea to the hair: Fred the rod-roll bandleader addressed his men. "Men, something happeo me t?9９ｌｉｂ.t>oday on Mo Street. I saw a wall of hair black as ebony falling from a high window. A girl, a look. . . Men, everything is ged. I am ged. I am no lohe Fred of former times. And I say that things must be different with you, too, because you are my men, and I am your leader. Now it is quite clear to me that you men wish to play the buffalo music of your forefathers rather than the rod-roll atented, amplified, advertised and been paid for. Now I want to say right now, that thats all right with me, the buffalo music I mean. From this day forward, until the end of time, it will be nothing but buffalo musi all the dromes of the world. I dont care a rap, thats how all right it is with me, this freedom that I freely grant you, that ray hides have been hankering for. Now that, with a look, this mysterious dark beauty has ged my life, whieeded to be ged, we are, in a strange way, opeo ourselves, and to buffalo musitil the red slag of the nooisphere desds to cover everything with the salty finality of love. So go forth now with your amplifiers and all, and revise your lives upward, as I have revised mine. Put the question mercilessly: Where have the buffalo gone?９9lｉb." Freds men exged silent looks. "Its always like this," the looks said, "in the spring. Its always this way, when the green es again. Our leader suffers a spiritual regeion, from a bad man into a good man. Its always some girl, who looks at him, at which he falls into her power absolutely. We are tired of having for a leader one who is nothing else than a damned fool. Lets go down to the union hall, now, and write out the specifications frievance against him, under Se Four, the grievance se, of our union stitution. And we think of other things, too, to add to the list of charges. That will be amusing, writing out the charges." Rea to the hair: "Well, that is certainly a lot of hair hanging there," Bill reflected. "And it seems to be hanging from our windows too. I mean, those windows where the hair is hanging are in our house, surely? Now who amongst us has that much hair, black as ebony? I am only pretending to ask myself this question. The distasteful answer is already known to me, as is the significe of this act, this hanging, as well as the sexual meaning of hair itself, on which Wurst has written. I dohat he has written on the hair, but rather about it, from prehistory to the present time. There be only one answer. It is Snow White. It is Snow White who has taken this step, the meaning of which is clear to all of us. All seven of u.９9ｌib.s know what this means. It means that she is nothing else but a goddamn degee! is one way of looking at it, at this plex and difficult question. It means that the not-with is experienced as more pressing, more real, than the being-with. It means she seeks a new lover. Quelle tragédie! But the essential loneliness of the person must also be sidered. Each of us is like a tiny single hair, hurled into the world among billions and billions of other hairs, of various colors ahs. And if God does , then we are in even graver shape than we had supposed. In that case, each of us is like a tiny little mote of pointlessness, whirling in the midst of a dreadful free eveer pointlessness, uhere is intelligent life on other plas, that is to say, life even more intelligent than us, life that has thought up some point for this great enterprise, life. That is possible. That is something we do not know, thank God. But in the meantime, here is the hair, with its multiple meanings. What am I to do about it?" Rea to the hair (flashback): Paul sat in his baff, uhe falling water. More hot water fell into the baff. "I would retract the green sea, and the brown fish in it, and I would especially retract that long black hair hanging from that window, that I saw today on my way here, from the Unemployment Office. It has made me terribly nervous, that hair. It was beautiful, I admit it. Long black hair of such texture, fineness, is not easily e by. Hair black as ebony! Yet it has made me terribly nervous. Teeth. . . piano lessons. . ." -2 EBONY EQUANIMITY ASTONISHMENT TRIUMPH VAT DAX BLAGUE Lack of rea to the hair: Dan sat down on a box, and pulled up more boxes for us, without f us to sit down on them, but just leaving them there, so that if we wao sit down on them, we could. "You know, Klips was right I think when he spoke of the blaing effect of ordinary language, referring, as I recall, to the part that sort of, you know, fills iweeher parts. That part, the filling you might say, of which the expression you might say is a good example, is to me the most iing part, and of course it might also be called the stuffing I suppose, and there is probably also, in addition, some other word that would do as well, to describe it, or maybe a number of them. But the quality this stuffing has, that the other parts of verbality do not have, is two-parted, perhaps: (1) an endless quality and (2) a sludge quality. Of course that is possibly two qualities but I prefer to think of them as different aspects of a single quality, if you think that way. The endless aspect of stuffing is that it goes on and on, in many different forms, and in fact our exges are in large measure posed of it, in larger measure even, perhaps, than they are posed of that which is not stuffing. The sludge quality is the heavihat this stuff has, similar to the heavier motor oils, a kind of doull but still fluid, if you follow me, and I t help thinking that this downwardness is valuable, although its hard to say just hht at the moment. So, summing up, there is a relatioween what I have been saying and what were doing here at the plant with these plastic buffalo humps. Now youre probably familiar with the fact that the per-capita produ of trash in this try is up from 2.75 pounds per day in 1920 to 4.5 pounds per day in 1965, the last year for which we have figures, and is increasing at the rate of about four pert a year. Now that rate will probably go up, because its been going up, and I hazard that we may very well soon reach a point where its 100 pert. Now at such a point, you will agree, the question turns from a question of disposing of this trash to a question of appreciating its qualities, because, after all, its 100 pert, right? And there o longer be any question of disposing of it, because its all there is, and we will simply have to learn how to dig it -- thats slang, but peculiarly appropriate here. So thats why were in humps, right now, more really from a philosophical point of view than because we find them a great moneymaker. They are trash, and what in fact could be more useless or trashlike? Its that we want to be on the leading edge of this trash phenomenon, the everted sphere of the future, and thats why articular attention, too, to those aspects of language that may be seen as a model of the trash phenomenon. And its certainly been a pleasure showing you around the plant this afternoon, aing you, and talking to you about these things, which are really more important, I believe, than people tend to think. Would you like a cold Coke from the ae now, before you go?" Additional reas to the hair: "To be a horsewife," Edward said. "That, my friends, is my text for today. This important slot in our society, ceptualized by God as very nearly the key to the whole thing as Thomas tells us, has suffered i months and in this house a degree of denigration. I have heard it; I have been saddened by it. So I want today if I to dispel some of these wrong ideas that have been going around, causing fusion and scumming up the face of the truth. The horsewife! The very base-bone of the Ameri plethora! The horsewife! Without whom the eructure of civilian life would crumble! Without the horsewife, the whole raison dêtre of our existences would be reduced, in a twinkling, to that brute level of brutality for which we shtly reproach the filthy animals. Were it not for her enormous purchasing power and the heedless gaiety with which it is exercised, we would still be going around dressed in skins probably, with no big-ticket items to fill the empty voids, in our homes and in our hearts. The horsewife! Nut and numen of our intersubjectivity! The horsewife! The chiefest or on the golden tree of human suffering! But to say what I have said, gentlemen, is to say nothing at all. sider now the horsewife in another part of her role. sider her sitting in her baff, anointing her charms with liquid Cheer and powdered Joy which trouble, fuse and drown the sense in odors. Now she rises chastely, and chastely abrades herself with a red towel. What an endearing spectacle! The naked wonder of it! The blue beauty of it! Now I ask you, gentlemen, what do we have here? Do we have a being which regards itself with the proper amount of self-love? No. No, we do not. Do we have a being which regards itself with the appropriate awe? No. No, we do not. We have here rather a being which regards itself, qua horsewife, with something dangerously akin to self-hatred. That is the problem. What is the solution." Dan spoke up, then. "I could cut yizzard out, Edward. You are making the whole damhing immensely more difficult than it has to be. I put it to you that, without your s of difficulty-making pseudo-problems, the whole damhing be resolved very ly, in the following way. Now, what do rehend when rehend Snow White? rehend, first, two three-quarter-scale breasts floating toward us ed, typically, in a red towel. Or, if we are apprehending her from the other dire, rehend a beautiful snow-white arse floating away from us ed in a red towel. Now I ask you: What, iwo quite distinct apprehensions, is the stant? The factor that remains the same? Why, quite simply, the red towel. I submit that, rightly uood, the problem of Snow White has to do at its ter with nothing else but red towels. Seen in this way, it immediately bees a non-problem. We easily dispeh the slippery and untrustworthy and expensive effluvia that is Snow White, and cleave io the towel. That is my idea, gentlemen. And I have here in this brown bag. . . I have taken the liberty of purchasing. . . here, Edward, here is your towel. . . Kevin. . . Clem. . ." g watched sourly. That was the trouble with being a ese. Too much detat. "I dont want a ratty old red towel. I want the beautiful snow-white arse itself!" SNOW WHITE regarded her hair hanging out of the window. "Paul? Is there a Paul, or have I only projected him in the shape of my longing, boredom, ennui and pain? Have I been trained in the fi graces and arts all my life for nothing but this? Is my richly-appointed body to go down the drain, at twenty-two, in this horribly boresome milieu, which even my worst enemi would not wish upon me, if she knew? Of course there is a Paul! That Paul who was a friend of the family, who had, at that point, not yet assumed the glistering mantle of priness. There is a Paul somewhere, but not here. Not under my window. Not yet." Snow White looked out of the window, down the hair, at the two hundred citizens on the ground, agape. "Ugh! I wish I were somewhere else! On the beach at St. Tropez, for example, surrounded by brown boys without a penny. Here everyone has a penny. Here everyone worships the almighty penny. Well at least with pennies one knows what they add up to, uhe decimal system. No ambiguity there, at least. O Jerusalem, Jerusalem! Thy daughters are burning with torpor and a sense of immense wasted potential, like one of those pipes you see in the oil fields, burning off the natural gas that it isnt eically rational to ship somewhere!" "Informal statements the difficulties of ownership and s surprises you by being Love exges paint it uanding brown boys without a penny I was bandit headgear And the question of yesterday waiting members ging clear milk of wanting fever hiddeed stabulary extra innings of danger hides uhe leg résumé clip ethod decision of the sacred Rota muscular dream basket gesture Kiss the paper with it tufts more iing than children painful texture of iing children offensive dor lesion hanging mirror They only want window boxes moving with , careful shrubs Manner in which the peion was Excited groans stifled under blas upset A parliament of less-favlass doors closed extra" THE bishop in his red mantlepiece strode forward. "Yes, we are in a terrible hurrie here," he aowledged to the wrecked cries of the survivors. "If we just cross that spit of land there" (gesture with fingers, glitter of episcopal rings) "ao that harlot over there" (sweep of arm in white lacy alb) "pardon I meant hamlet, erhaps find shelter against this particular vicissitude sent by God to break our backs for our sins." The "flock" moahey had bee days without. . . The sudden pall on the fourth day had been the worst. There was a silence. Silence. Everything silent. Not a sound for six hours. Nothing. "This is the worst," they murmured to one another in sign language, not wanting to. . . break the. . . A few young men of good family crawled away into the night to find help (tingle of mace against bohe Marchesa de G. had fainted again. Blockflutes were heard. "So this is Spain!" Paul said to himself. "I hought I would live to see it. It is intelligent of me to hide from the Order here, in the episcopal ente. And it is intelligent of me to hide from the Order here in this hurrie. So mutelligence! So little of Gods grace!" SELF-REGARD is rooted in breakfast. When you have had it, then lunch seems to follow naturally, as if you owned not only the fruits but the means of produ in a large, faux-na?f try. This is doubted only by etrics, and on the present occasion their views need not be taken into at. That try in which you are loved for yourself is expanding now with the further development of books, a new kind capable of satisfying the tactile wishes even of old people. ineers are at a loss to uand what their engineers have doill, insofar as they are trying to sketch future trends, even the mid empiricists among them are obliged to make projes, and then plans. Such is the impact of teology upon the fabric of ied social institutions that breakfast is almost fotten, in some tries; they paint pictures instead. I read Dampfboots novel although he had nothing to say. It wasnt rave, that volume; we regretted that. And it was hard to read, dry, breadlike pages that turned, and then fell, like a car burned by rioters aing, wrong side up, at the edge of the picture plah its tires smoking. Fragments kept flying off the s into the audience, fragments of rain ahics. Hubert wao go back to the dog races. But we made him read his part, the outer part where the author is praised and the price quoted. We like books that have a lot of dre them, matter which presents itself as not wholly relevant (or indeed, at all relevant) but which, carefully atteo, supply a kind of "sense" of what is going on. This "sense" is not to be obtained by readiween the lines (for there is nothing there, in those white spaces) but by reading the lihemselves -- looking at them and so arriving at a feeling not of satisfa exactly, that is too much to expect, but of havihem, of having "pleted" them. "Please dont talk," Snow White said. "Say nothing. We begin now. Take off the pajamas." Snow White took off her pajamas. Henry took off his pajamas. Kevin took off his pajamas. Hubert took off his pajamas. Clem took off his pajamas. Dan took off his pajamas. Edward took off his pajamas. Bill refused to take off his pajamas. "Take off your pajamas Bill," Snow White said. Everyone looked at Bills pajamas. "No, I wont," Bill said. "I will not take off my pajamas." "Take off your pajamas Bill," everyone said. "No. I will not." Everyone looked again at Bills pajamas. Bills pajamas filled the room, in a sehose yellow crepe-paper pajamas. "WHAT is that apelike hand I see reag into my mailbox?" "Thats nothing. Think nothing of it. Its nothing. Its just one of my familiars mother. Dont think about it. Its just ahats all. Just an ordinary ape. Dont give it ahought. Thats all there is to it." "I think you dismiss these things too easily Jane. Im sure it means more than that. Its unusual. It means something." "No mother. It doesnt mean more than that. Than I have said it means." "Im sure it means more than that Jane." "No mother it does not mean more than that. Dont go reading things into things mother. Leave things alo means what it means. tent yourself with that mother." "Im certain it means more than that." "No mother." SNOW WHITE received the following note from Fred, tossed over the wall: Madonna, My men have left me now. They have gone I suspect to the union hall to institute proceedings against me. But I dont care. There is nothing in life for me except being in your power. I have swooned several times this m, sitting on a ben the square, thinking of you and feeling those iron bolts with which our souls are bolted together forever. Will you speak to me? I will be in the square at four oclock by the cathouse clock. Dare I expect, that you will e? FRED Hubert picked up the note in the yard. "What is this note doing here, ed about a box of Whitmans chocolates? For whom is it intended? After I have read it, I will know." Silently Hubert opehe box of chocolates. "Should I take one of the ones covered with gold foil, always the tastiest? Or should I iake one of the plain Ameri ones?" Hubert sat down in the yard and looked into the box, trying to make up his mind. THEN we had a fantasy, a fantasy of anger and malevolence. We were dreaming. We dreamed we burned Snow White. Burned is not the right word, cooked is the right wor..d. We cooked Snow White over the big fire, in the dream. You remember the burning se in Dreyers The Burning of Joan of Art. It was like that, only where Dreyer was vertical, we were horizontal. Snow White was horizontal. She itted on a spit (large iron bar). The spit was suspended over the big fire. Kevin threw more wood on the fire, in the dream. Hubert threw more wood on the fire. Bill threw more wood on the fire. Clem basted the naked girl with sweet-and-sour sauce. Dan made the rice. Snow White screamed. Edward turhe k which made the meat revolve. Was she done enough? She was making a lot of he meat was moving toward the correct color, a browhe meat thermometer registered almost-enough. "Turn the k Edward," Bill said. Hubert threw more wood on the fire. Jahrew more wood on the fire. The smoke was acrid, as it always is. Antonin Artaud held out a crucifix at the end of a long pole, in the smoke. Snow White asked if we would remove the spit. "It hurts," she said. "No," Bill said. "You are not do. It is supposed to hurt." Jane laughed. "Why are you laughing Jane?" "I am laughing because it is not me burning there." "For you," Henry said, "we have the red-hot iron shoes. The plastic red-hot iron shoes." "This has nothing to do with justice," Bill said. "This has to do with animus." We regarded Snow White rotating there, in her pain ay, in the dream. SNOW WHITE saw her hair black as ebony hanging out of the window. "I suppose I must respond in some way to the new overture from the sevehey think they are so merveilleux, with their new shower curtain. They have been posing in front of it all day. As if I could be swayed, in my iron resolve, by a new shower curtain, however extraordinary and fine! I wonder what it looks like?" BILL has dropped the money. He was carrying the money ly separated into 10S, 20S, 50s and so forth, a bualing a great deal of money I tell you that. He was on his way to the vault with the money bundled into his armpit, ed in a red towel. Henry had ed it in a red towel. Hubert had bu into Bills armpit. Dan had opehe door. Kevin had pointed Bill toward the vault. Clem had given Bill a ki the back, to get him started. And Edward had said, "Dont fet the receipt." Then Bill had moved through the door out into the daylight in the dire of the vault. But somewhere between the house and the vault the money hurled itself out of his armpit in a dire known only to it. "Where is the deposit slip, Bill?" Edward asked, when Bill returned. "Deposit slip?" Bill said. "The bundle," Dan said. "The bundle?" "The money," Kevin said. "The money?" We all rushed out into the air, then, to recover the bundle. But it was nowhere. We retraced Bills steps as best we could. Some of Bills steps led into a bar & grill, The Fire ime Bar & Grill. We retraced there a hot pastrami sandwid eight bottles of Miller High Life. But of the buhere was not a trace. Luckily the matter is not serious, because we have more money. But the loss of equanimity was serious. We prize equanimity, and a good deal of equanimity leaked away, that day. "ALL right Ja into the car." "Hogo you are making stains on my new white-duck love seat with pillows of white-on-white Indian crewel!" Jane regarded the large black stains. "Thats all you know Hogo isnt it. How to take a thing that was white, and stain it until it is black. Thats a pretty stroapho of what you would like to do with me, too. I uand. If you think for one moment that your capability of staining the thing you love has escaped me, from the very beginning, you have grossly misperceived our situatio out of here Hogo forever!" "All right Ja into the car." PAUL was explaining music to the French citizens. "Wheurn our amplifiers on," he said, "already t is f over some peoples minds, like the brown crust on bread, or the silehat crusts over inappropriate remarks. I think there ought to be, and remember Im talking normatively here, I think what ought to obtain is a measure of audacity, an audacity po, such as turning your amplifier up a little higher than anybody elses, or using a fork to pid strum, rather than a plectrum or the carefully calloused fiips, or doing something with your elbow, I dont care what, I insist only that it be relevant, in a strange way, to the se that has chosen to spread itself out before us, the theatre of our lives. And if you entlemen will e with me down to the quai, carrying your amplifiers in boxes, and not fetting the trailing cords, which have to be plugged in, so that we turn on. . ." -3 ROME. ANOTHER DEFEAT. PAUL HANDS OVER THE GREEN-AND-GOLD ARMBAND. THE ITALIAN POSTAL SERVICE ABIDES NERS IN ITS RANKS. WELL Paul is bad he has decided to stop fleeing his destiny and he has given himself up at the Nevada monastery and drawn his robes from the supply room and now he is home on leave in his robes. Paul came to the party in his robes. He wasnt allowed to eat or drink anything, or say anything. That was the Rule. We went to the howling party sitting primly along the side of the room in a row, the seven of us and Snow White. Our social intercourse for the quarter. We discussed the bat theory of child-raising with the mothers there meanwhile paying attention to a vat of rum uhe harpsichord. Edward didnt want to discuss the bat theory of child-raising (delicate memories) so he discussed Harald Bluetooth, king of Sdinavia during a certain period, the Blue-tooth period. But the mothers wao talk. "Spare the bat and the child rots," said the mothers. "Rots inside." "But how do you know when to employ it? The magient?" "We have a book which tells us such things," the mothers said. "We look it up in the book. On page 331 begins a twelve-page discussion of batting the baby. A well-worn page." We got away from those mothers as fast as we could. There were a lot of other people talking there, political talk and other kinds of talk. A certain pt for the institutions of society was exhibited. Clem thrust his arm into the bag of sciousness-expanding drugs. His sciousness expanded. He trated his sciousness upon a thumbtip. "Is this the upper extent of knowing, this dermis that I perceive here?" Then he became melancholy, melancholy as a gib cat, melancholy as a jugged hare. "The tent of the giraffe is giraffe meat. Giraffes have high blood pressure because the blood must plod to the brain up te of neck." There were more perceptions and blague. Edgar and Charles wanted some too. But they were not allowed to have any. All they were allowed to do was hold Pauls robes, when he walked around. "Take me home," Snow White said. "Take me home instantly. If there is anything worse than being home, it is being out." "YOU shouldnt drop yarbage out of windows Hogo," Jane said. I uood what she was saying. But Hogo is a cruel parody of ultimate . His garbage falls on Northerners and Southerners aerners alike. "I had a dream," Jane said. "In the dream we were drinking a yellow wihen the winemaker came in. He said the wine was made of old copies of the National Geographic. I had thought it tasted musty. Then he said no, that was just a joke. The wine was really made of grapes, like every wine. But these were grapes to which the sun had not been kind, he said. They had shriveled for lack of the suns love. That was why the wine was like that. Thealked about lovers and husbands. He said the lover eats his meat with his eyes not on the meat but on the eyes of the beloved. The husband watches the meat. The husband knows that the meat will fly away if not watched. The winemaker thought this was really a funny story. He laughed and laughed." Hogo got ready to say something despicable. But it was too late. "Thats pretty careless," Hubert said, and we all agreed that if you were going to have a girl tied to a bed, then at least the knots should be secure. I had already gotten the flashlight from its plader the sink, and was w on the brilliant yellow and scarlet and blue bandages. We had hoped to slip into the hospital without being challenged, but the doctnized us right away. HENRY had unlocked the locks on the bar and we were all drinking. It was time for a situatio, we felt. "She still sits there in the window, dangling down her long black hair black as ebony. The crowds have thinned somewhat. Our letters have beeurned unopehe shower-curtain initiative has not produotable results. She is, I would say, aware of it, but has not reacted either positively atively. We have asked an expert in to assess it as to timbre, pitch, mood and key. He should be here tomorrow. To make sure we have got the right sort of shower curtain. We have returhe red towels to Bloomingdales." At this point everybody looked at Dan, who vomited. "Bills yellow crepe-paper pajamas have been taken away from him and burned. He ruihat night for all of us, you know that." At this point everybody looked at Bill, who was absent. He was tending the vats. "Bills new brown monkscloth pajamas, made for him by Paul, should be here month. The grade of pork ears we are using in the Baby Ding Sam Dew is not capable of meeting U.S. Govt. standards, or indeed, any standards. Our man in Hong Kong assures us however that the shipment will be superior. Sales nationwide are brisk, brisk, brisk. Texas Instruments is down four points. trol Data is up four points. The pound is weakening. The cow is calving. The cactus wants watering. The new building is abuilding with leases c 45 pert of the rentable space already in hand. The weather tomorrow, fair and warmer." "HELLO? Is this Hogo de Bergerac?" "Yes this is Hogo de Bergerac." "Well this is the Internal Revenue Service, Baltimore Office, Broat. We have your letter here in which you offer to inform on Bill, Kevin, Edward, Hubert, Henry, Clem and Dan for 17 pert of the monies collected. We deeply appreciate yetting in touch with us but I must tell you that we pay o pert." "Eight pert?" "Yes Im sorry I know thats low as these things go around the world and in previous years aid more, but its standard now and if we paid you 17 pert all the other informers would demand the same. You imagine." "Eight pert!" "Yes, well, but of course theres patriotism involved too isnt there." "Eight pert! Thats damned little for doing such a vile and dishonorable thing, damned little." "Yes I know but what is the nature of your information? Youre aware of course that its not enough just to allege. You have to be able to provide supportive evidence or at least suffit material to lead to a strong case and ultimately vi and/or colle." "Eight pert!" "I might also point out that it is your duty as an Ameri citizen to e forward with this information if you have it." "Eight pert, eight pert." "Did you hear me? I said it was your duty as an Ameri --" "I am not an Ameri citizen. I am under Panamaniary. So just fet my duty as an Ameri citize pert. No, I dont think Im talking to you any more. There would be some pleasure in doing the thing just for the pure vileness of it, but there is more pleasure in spitting on yht pert. Goodbye, Baltimore. Eight pert. Goodnight, Baltimore, and bad cess to you." STANDING iten bathroom, we regarded the new shower curtain. It had two colors, a red and a yellow. The red the red of red cabbage, the yellow the yellow of yellow beans. It had two figures, a kind of schematic peahen, a kind of schematic vase. These repeated, in the manner of aper. There were eight of us standing there iten bathroom, including the visitor. The visitor who had said that it was the best-looking shower curtain in town. Ho ho. That was a chiller. We had known that it was adequate. We had known that it was nice. We had even known that it was "splendid" more or less. That was the idea, that it be "splendid." But we had not known that it was the best-looking shower curtain in town. That we had not known. We looked at the shower curtain with new eyes, or rather, saw it in a new light, the light of the esthetis remark. The visitor was aheti, a professor of esthetics. Even those of us by no means a minority who sidered esthetics the least ballsy of the several areas of inquiry subsumed uhe term, philosophical thought, were affected by the esthetis remark. First because it had as subjeething that was ours, there iten bathroom, on little silver rings, and sed because the speaker rofessor of esthetics, even if there is nothing in it, esthetics, as is likely. As we stood there shoulder to shoulder iten bathroom, the eight of us, a sort of hunger arose, to know if it was true, what he had said. Felt I daresay by all of us, including the estheti. He must be curious sometimes to know if it is true, what he is saying. We swayed, momentarily, there iten bathroom, in the grip of the hunger. A thousand problems flashed through our mind. How could we determine if it was true, what he had said? Our city, the arena of the proposition, is not large but oher hand not small, in excess of a huhousand souls swelter here awaiting the Last Day and Gods mercy. A sus of shower curtains ossible but to duct it we would be forced to he vats and that is something we have sworn o do, he vats. And to duct it we would be forced to leave the buildings unwashed, and that is something else we have sworn o do, leave the buildings unwashed. And granting we mao gain access to the rotten bathrooms of all huhousand souls who swelter here, by what standards were the huhousand shower curtains hanging there, on little silver rings, to be assessed? A shower-curtain scale could be structed with the aid of the professor of esthetics, or with the aid of shower-curtain critics recruited from the curtaining journals, if there are such critid such journals, I do not doubt it. But even with these preliminary aplishments, empa of shower-curtain critics, from far and near, sus of shower-curtain-hanging homes, the quarter-finals, the semi-finals, the finals, we would not be out of the woods yet. For woul.９９lib.t>d the decision, broadcast over all media, published throughout the land, not be taken as diddled, in view of the fact that the Olympiad was staged by us, backers of the no doubt winning shower curtain? There was another solutioru of the estheti, who had made the inal remark. This thought sighed amongst us, seven heads turned as oard the eighth, that of the estheti, sweating in his velvet collar, there iten bathroom. But destru of the estheti, however attractive from a human point of view, would not also ensure destru of his detritus, his remark. The remark would remain in memory, in our memories. We would then be forced to wipe ourselves out also, a step which we would hesitate to take waiting as we are for the Last Day and Gods mercy. And how could we be sure after all that he had not made the same remark to someone else, someo of our circle, some stranger unknown to us? Known to him but unknown to us? And that the remark would not remain unwiped in the brain of this stranger? And how could we be sure that this stranger was not, even as we were standing there, iten bathroom, relaying the remark to some other, even less reputable stranger? And that this sed stranger did not have friends, all of an even filthier repute than himself, to whom he intended babbling the remark, at the first opportunity? And that we might not expect a quorum of undesirables, sitting ihouse square, to be rubbing and smearing this piece of intelligeh their ruin before six p.m. by the cathouse clock, this very day? We trembled, there iten bathroom, thinking these thoughts. "I ADMIRE you, Hogo. I admire the way you are what you are, rocklike in your immutability. I also admire the way you use these Pontiavertible seats for chairs in your house. But mine is unfortable. Only because I am glued into it with several pounds of epoxy glue. Oh I know I laughed when you brushed it onto my hips on Wednesday, saying it was honey and I was honey-hipped. I laughed then. But I am not laughing now. Now it has hardened, like your heart toward me, Hogo." "It was honey-colored I said. No more than that. It is because I want you near me Jane for some strange reason I dont even uand myself. It must be atavistic. It must be some dark reason of the blood which the sind does not uand. That is the stinking truth, Gods Body but I wish it were not." "Stop it Hogo stop it lest I fet who is the glued party here. Stop it a me some hot water." The ape-fingers of Janes familiars peed the -link-fence walls of Hogos house. Looking through the walls, past the apes, one could see Jane and Hogo, having a talk. "Hogo this house is an architectural masterpie a certain sense." "What sense is that." "In the sehat you get a sense of from these -like-fence walls that is entirely appropriate to your enterprise. I meaerprise of being a bad fellow. And to make the ceiling of General Motors advertising was a brilliant stroke. When one bears in mind that General Motors is Pontiad Pontiac is your middle name." "He was an Indian chief Jane, hero of a famous spiracy, the spiracy that bears his name in fact.&qu.99ｌib?; "I know that Hogo. Every schoolboy knows that, and many schoolgirls too, thanks to the democratization of education in our try. How fitting that your ceiling should be named for a. . ." "I thought it fitting." "What is to bee of us, Hogo. Of you and me." "Nothing is to bee of us Jane. Our being is done. We are what we are. Now it is just a question of rog along with things as they are until we are dead." "You dont paint a very bright picture Hogo." "Its not my picture Jane. I didnt think up this picture that we are fronted with. The inal brushwork was not mine. I absolutely separate myself from this picture. I operate within the frame it is true, but the picture --" "How old are you Hogo." "Thirty-five Jane. A not unpleasant age to be." "You dont mind then. That you are not young." "It has its buggy aspects as what does not?" "You dont mind then that you are sagging in the dire of death." "No, Jane." HUBERT plains that the electric wastebasket has been overheating. I havent noticed it but thats what Hubert says and Hubert is rarely wrong about things that dont matter. The electric wastebasket is a security item. Papers dropped into it are destroyed instantly. How the electric wastebasket aplishes this is not known. An intimidation followed by a demoralizatiouating in a disiion, one assumes. It is ied. There are not even ashes. It funs with a quiet hum digesting whatever we do not wish to fall into the hands of the enemi. The record of Bills trial when he is tried will go into the electric wastebasket. When we sidered the destru of the estheti we had in mind the electric wastebasket. First dismemberment, then the electric wastebasket. That there are in the world electric wastebaskets is encing. Kevin spoke to Hubert. "There is not enough seriousness in what we do," Kevin said. "Everyone wanders around having his own individual perceptions. These, like balls of different colors and shapes and sizes, roll around on the green billiard table of sciousness. . ." Kevin stopped and began again. "Where is the figure in the carpet? Or is it just. . . carpet?" he asked. "Where is --" "Youre talking a lot of buffalo hump, you know that," Hubert said. Hubert walked away. Kevin stood there. "That enter did not go well. Perhaps I said the wrong thing?" Kevin blushed furiously at the thought that he might have said the wrong thing. Red blushes sat upon his neck. "What could I have doo make it go? What is this gift that others have, that I do not have, that chokes The Other with love, at the very sight of one?" Kevins pre-enter happiness leaked away. He had been happy before the enter, but after it, he was not. "My God but we are fragile." SNOW WHITE hung her hair again out of the window. It was longer now. It was about four feet long. She had just washed it too with golden Prell. She was experieng a degree of a male domination of the physical world. "Oh if I could just get my hands on the man who dubbed those electrical eale and female! He thought he was so worldly. And if I could just get my hands on the man who called that piece of pipe a nipple! He thought he was so urbane. But that didnt prevent them from making a hash of the buffalo problem youll notice. Where have the buffalo gone? You go for miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and hundreds of miles without seeing a single one! And that didnt prevent them from letting the railroads grab all the best land! And that didnt prevent them from letting alienation seep in everywhere and cover everything like a big gray electric blahat doesnt work, after you have pushed the off-on switch to the on position! So dont e around and accuse me of not being serious. Women may not be serious, but at least theyre not a damned fool!" Snow White took her head out of the windoulled in her long black hair which had been dangling down. "No one has e to climb up. That says it all. This time is the wrong time for me. I am in the wrong time. There is something wrong with all those people standing there, gaping and gawking. And with all those who did not e and at least try to climb up. To fill the role. And with the very world itself, for not being able to supply a prince. For not being able to at least be civilized enough to supply the correding to the story." Part Three-1 SNOW WHITE had anlass of healthy e juice. "From now on ..I deny myself to them. These delights. I maintain ahetic distano more do I trip girlishly to their bed in the night, or after lunch, or in the misty mid-m. Not that I ever did. It was always my whim which goverhose gregarious enters summed up so well by Livy in the phrase, vae victis. I gratulate myself on that score at least. And no more will I chop their onions, boil their fettui, or mariheir flank steak. No more will I trudge about the house pursuing stain. No more will I fold their lingerie i bundles and stuff it away in the highboy. I am not even going to speak to them, now, except through third parties, or if I have something special to announce -- a new nuany mood, a new vagary, a ravagant caprice. I dont know what such a policy will win me. I am not even sure I wish to implement it. It seems small and mean-spirited. I have flig ideas. But the maihat runs through my brain is that what is, is insuffit. Where did that sulky notion e from? From the rental library, doubtless. Perhaps the seven men should have left me in the forest. To perish there, when all the roots and berries and rabbits and robins had been exhausted. If I had perished then, I would not be thinking now. It is true that there is a future in which I shall iably perish. There is that. Thinking terminates. One shall not always be leaning on ones elbow in the bed at a quarter to four in the m, w if the Japanese are happier than their piglike Western poraries. Another e juice, with a little vodka in it this time." "I HAVE killed this whole bottle of Chablis wine by myself," Dan said. "And that other bottle of Chablis too -- that one uhe bed. And that other bottle of Chablis too -- the oh the brown dle stu the mouth of it. And I am not afraid. Not of what may e, not of what has been. Now I will light that long cigar, that cigar that stretches from Mont St. Michel and Chartres, to uhe volo. What is merely fashionable will fade aw.ay, and what is merely new will fade away, but what will not fade away, is the way I feel: analogies break down, regimes break down, but the way I feel remains. I feel abandoned. After a hard day tending the vats, and washing the buildings, one wants to e home and find a leg of mutton oable, in a rich gravy with little pearly onions studded in it, and perhaps a small pot of Irish potatoes somewhere about. Instead I e home to this nothingness. Now she sits in her room reading Dissent and admiring her figure in the mirror. She still loves us, in a way, but it isnt enough. It is a failure of leadership, I feel. We have bee sug the mop again. True leadership would make her love us fiercely aingly, as in the old days. True leadership would find a way out of this hairy imbroglio. I am tired of Bills halting explanations, promises. If he doesnt want to lead, the us vote. That is all I have to say, except one more thing: when one has been bending over a hot vat all day, one doesnt want to e home and hear a lot of hump from a cow-hearted leader whose leadership buttons have fallen off -- some fellow who spends the dreamy days eating cabbage and watg ships, while you are at work. Work, with its charts, its lines of authority, its air of importance." "THE refusal of emotion produervousness," Bill said dipping into the barrel of det absinthe. "Remember that. You are tense as a wire-walker, Hubert. If it is still possible to heave a sigh you should heave it. If it is still possible to rip out a groan you should rip it out. If it is still possible to smite the brow with anguished forefihen you should let that forefinger fall. And there are expostulations areaties that meet the case to be found in old books, look them up. This ation of outward and visible signs may I say may detonate an inward invisible subjective correlative, booming in the deeps of the gut like an Alka-Seltzer to produce tranquillity. I say may. And you others there, lounging about with expressions of steely un, you are just like Hubert. The disease is the same and the remedy is the same. As for me, I am out of it. I have copted out if you want to put it that way. After a life ri emotional defeats, I have looked around for other modes of misery, other roads to destru. Now I limit myself to listening to eople say, and thinking amby it is, what they say. My nourishment is refined from the ongoing circus of the mind in motion. Give me the odd linguistic trip, stutter and fall, and I will be tent. Actually, when you get right down to it, I should be the monk, and Paul the leader here." "We have eaihe notion," Hubert said. "THEY treat me like a rube if they wish," Clem said holding tightly to the two hundred bottles of Loar at the Alamo Chili House. "I suppose I am a rubish hayseed in some sense, full of down-home notions that tradict the more sophisticated notions of my colleagues. But I notice that it is to me they e when it is a question of grits or chitlings or fried catfish. Of course these questions do not arise very often. I have not had a whiff of fried catfish these twelve years! How many nights have I trudged home with my face fixed for fried catfish, only to find that we were having fried calimaretti or some other Eastern dish. Not that I would put down those tender rings of squid deep-fried in olive oil. I even like the squarish the olive oil es in, emblazoned with green-and-gold devices, flowery emblemature out of the eenth tury. It makes my mouth water just to look at it, that . But why am I talking to myself about s? s are not what is troubling me. What is troubling me is the quality of life in reat try, America. It seems to me to be deprived. I dohat the deprived people are deprived, although they are, clearly, but that eve are deprived. I suppose one could say that they are all humpheads a go at that. I am worried by the fact that no one respoo Snow Whites hair initiative. Even though I am at the same time relieved. But it suggests that Ameris will not or ot see themselves as princely. Even Paul, that most princely of our poraries, did not respond appropriately. Of course it may be that princely is not a good thing to be. And of course there is our long democratic tradition which is anti-aristocratic. Egalitarianism precludes priness. A our people are not equal in any sehey are either. . . The poorest of them are slaves as surely as if they were ed to gigantic wooden oars. The richest of them have the faces of cold effete homosexuals. And those in the middle are wonderfully fused. Redistribute the mohat will not ameliorate everything, but it will ameliorate some things. Redistribute the mohis be achieved in only one way. By making the rich happier. New lovers. New lovers who will make their lives exg and ri a way that. . . We must pass a law that all marriages of people with more than enough money are dissolved as of tomorroill free all these poor moneyed people ahem out to play. The quid pro quo is their moheake the money and --" EDWARD was blowing his mind, uhe boardwalk. "Well my mind is blown now. Nine mantras and three bottles of i repellent, uhe boardwalk. I shall certainly be siorrow. But it is worth it to have a blown mind. To stop being a filthy beois for a space, even a short space. To gain access to everything in a new way. Uhe boardwalk. Those cream shoes clumping overhead. I uand them now, for the first time. Not their molecular structure, in which I am not particularly ied, but their saess. Their trality. They are the ter of everything, those shoes. They are it. I know that, now. Too bad it is not worth knowing. Too bad it is not true. It is not even temporarily true. Well, that must mean that my mind is not fully blown. That harsh critique. More i repellent!" -2 IT WAS NOT UNTIL THE 19TH TURY THAT RUSSIA PRODUCED A LITERATURE WORTHY OF BEING PART OF THE WORLDS CULTURAL HERITAGE. PUSHKIN DISPLAYED VERBAL FACILITY. GOGOL WAS A REFORMER. AS A STYLIST DOSTOEVSKY HAD MANY SHORTINGS. TOLSTOY. . . IN her chamber Snow White removed her coat, and then her shirt, and then her slip, and then her bra. The bare breasts remained. Standing by the window Snow White regarded her bare breasts, by pointing her head down. "Well, what is there to think about them? Usually I dont think about them at all, but think, rather, about on occurrences, like going to the bowling alley or seeing, in the sky, the wingspread of a gigantic jet aircraft. But ret events, or lack of events, have provoked in me a crisis of fidence. But let us take stock. These breasts, my own, still stand delicately away from the trunk, as they are supposed to do. And the trunk itself is not unappealing. In fact trunk is a rather mean word for the main part of this assemblage of felicities. The cream-of-wheat belly! The stunning arse, in the roirror! And then the especially good legs, including the important knees. I have nothing but praise for this delicious assortment! But my curly mind has problems distinct from although related to those of my scrumptious body. The curious physicality of my existence here oh is related to both parts of the mind-body problem, the mind part and the body part. Although I secretly know that my body is my mind. The way it acts sometimes, spontaneously and sdalously hurling itself into the arms of bad situations, with never a care for who is watg or real values. No wonder we who are twenty-two dont trust anybody over twelve. That is where you find people who know the score, uwelve. I think I will go out and speak to some eleven-year-olds, now, to refresh myself. Now or soon." Snow White regarded her nice-looking breasts. "Not the best Ive ever seen. But not the worst." BOBBLE was one of the boys who was there. He had a hair style that, I dont know, some of you may not like, and there were other things wrong with him too. I had thought that in terms of mettle he would glister like a fire escape. Whereas in fact he was a sack of timidities. That much was clear. But we had sent for him so we had to talk to him. "All right lad this is what we want with you. Your mission is this: to go out into the world and pull down all those ele posters. We have decided to stop voting, so pull down the posters. Lets get all those ugly faces off our streets and out of our elective offices. We are not going to vote any more, no matter how often they e around with their sound trucks and statesmanlike gestures. Pull down the sound trucks. Pull dowstretched arms. To hell with the who９９ｌｉｂ?le business. Voting has turned out to be a damned impertihey never do what we want them to do anyhow. And when they do what we dont want them to do, they dont do it well. To hell with them. We are going to save up all our votes for the wenty years and spend them all at oime. Maybe by that day there will be some Rabelaisian figure worth spending them on. And so, raw youth, with your tentative air, go out and work our will on the physical world. We are going to go whole hog on this program, to a certaient, and you are our chosen instrument. We are not particularly proud of you, but you exist, in sh way, and that is enough, for our purposes. You are sub-attractive, Bobble, and so are your peers there, but here is the money, and there is the task. Get going." Uhe tree, Paul stood looking through the window at Snow White, with her bare breasts. "God Almighty," Paul said to himself. "Its a good thing it occurred to me to stand uhis tree and look through this window. Its a good thing I am on leave from the monastery. Its a good thing I had my reading glasses in my upper robe pocket." Paul read the message written on Snow Whites uned breasts. "She is just like one of those dancers one sees from time to time on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, and ied areas of other cities. In the smaller cities the dancers are sometimes forced by the police to put on marb. But without garb, these girls bring joy, with their movements, laovements. . . Dang is diverting if you are watg, and also if you are dang yourself. But how you dance yourself? Is self-dang the answer? I was fond of stick dang at oime. There was some joy in that. But then a man came and said I was using the wrong kind of stick. He was a stick-dang critic, he said, and no one used that kind of stiy more. The stick of choice, he said, was more brutal than the one I was using, or less brutal, I fet which. Brutalism had something to do with it. I said, fuck off, buddy, leave me aloh my old stick, the stiy youth. He fucked off, then. But I became dissatisfied with that stick, subjected as it had been for the first time to the scrutiny of a first-rate intelligence. I sublet the stick. And that is why I have bee everything I have bee since, including what I now am, a voyeur." Paul looked again at the upper part of Snow White. "Looking through this window is sweet. The sweetest thing that has happeo me in all my days. Sweet, sweet." Paul savored the sweetness of human unication, through the window. -3 PAUL HAS NEVER BEFORE REALLY SEEN SNOW WHITE AS A WOMAN. HOGO pushed Paul away from the bloody tree. ";You are a slime sir, looking through that open window at that apparently naked girl there, the most beautiful and attractive I have ever seen, in all my life. You are a dishonor to the robes you wear. That you stand here without shame gazing at that incredible beauty, at her snowy buttocks and so forth, at that natural majesty I perceive so well, through the window, is endlessly reprehensible, in our society. I have seen some vileness in my time, but your a in spying upon this beautiful unknowy, whom I already love with all my heart until the end of time, is the most vile thing that the mind of man ever broached. I am going to set a rat chewing at your anus, false monk, for if there is anything this world affords, it is punishment." "You have a good line, fellow," Paul said coolly. "Perhaps you would care to make a few remarks about unearned pessimism as inal sin." "It is true that I am generally in favor of earned pessimism, Paul," Hogo said. "And I have earned mine. Yet at the same time I seem to feel a new vigor, optimism and hope, simply through the medium of p my eyes through this window." "It is strong medie, this," Paul said, and they put their arms around each others shoulders to look some more, but Hogo was thinking about how he could get rid of Paul, ond for all, permaly. HOGO began to make a plan. It was to be a large plan, a plan as big as a map. Make no small plans, as Pott has said. The object of the plan was to get ihe house when no one was there. No o Snow White. Hogo played Polish musi his player. Theuck pins in his plan marking points of entry and points of eje. Pins of red, blue, violet, green, yellow, blad white bespattered the plan. The plan oozed out over the floor of the living room into the dining room. Then it ran into the kit, bedroom and hall. Plant life from the bursting nature outside came tard the plan. A green finger of plant life lay down on top of the plan. Jaered trailing a shopping cart filled with shopping. "What is all this paper on the floor?" Hogo lay atop the plan, and atop the plant life, attempting to ceal them. "Its nothing. Some work I brought home from the office." "Why then are you making those swimming motions on top of it?" "I was taking a nap." "It doesnt look like a nap to me." Harded Jane. He noticed that she had her graceful cello shape, still. "This cello-shaped girl still has some life in her," Hogo reflected. "Why dont I spend more time looking at her and drinking in her seasoned beauty." But thehought of the viola da gamba-shaped Snow White. "Why is it that we always require more, " Hogo wondered. "Why is it that we ever be satisfied. It is almost as if we were desighat way. As if that were part of the ic design." Hogo gathered up the plan and packed it away in the special planning humidor, structed especially to keep the plan fresh aing. "Maybe I should make cigar ers of this plan, to ceal it from its ehe cigars to be smoked in a particular order, and in the clouds of smoke arising, the first faint dim blue outlines of the plan. I wonder what the chemistry and physics of that would be." Harded the packed plan, in its humidor. "It seems to have ots. The possibility of resistance from those within." Hogo imagihe resistance leader in his black turtleneck sweater. "Ill wager I never get into that house destinely, the resistance will be so stiff. For people who have a treasure, guard it with their lives. What a wonk I am, planning-wise! I will have to think up a new abion to punish myself for thinking up a plan this poor -- playing the accordion, possibly." "What are you thinking about?" Jane asked holding teo the handle of the shopping cart. "Playing the accordion," Hogo said. THERE was no place for er and frustration to go, then, so we went out and hit a dog. It was a big dog, so it was all right. It was fair. The gargantuan iron dog ee high orating the one huh anniversary of the iion of meat. . . "Have a care," Kevin said. It was a brisk day, more brisk than some of the others weve had. The girls were ing their heads in cloths again, bright-colored cotton going around the top and the back part and tied at the bottom of the back part, where the sweet neck begins. A few derelicts and bums were lying around in front of the house, staining the sideretty well. Bill looked tired. I gave his fae additional looks. Then some other people came up and said they were actors. "What sort of actors?" "Do you mean good or bad?" "I didhat but what is the answer?" "Bad, Im afraid," the chief actor said, aurned away. That wasnt what wed wao hear. Everything was plex alike. The stain was still there filtering through the water supply and the pipes and carried in suitcases too. The old waiters brown suit had ponyskin lapels. That was depressing. Hogo has annouhat Paul is standing in the middle of his, Hogos, Lebensraum. That has an ominous sound. I dont like the sound of that at all. We had a few more Laughing Marys and radishes. Hogo was sharpening his kris. The whirling grindstone ground the steel. There was a noise, you know it perhaps. Hogo tested the kris against his thumb. A red drop of blood. The kris was funing correctly. After Hogo finished sharpening his kris he began sharpening his bolo. Then he sharpened his parang and his machete and his dirk. "I like to keep everything sharp." THE President looked out of his window again. It was anht like that night we described previously and he was looking out of the same window. The Dow-Jones index was still falling. The folk were still in tatters. The President turned his mind for a millised to us, here. "Great balls of river mud," the President said. "Is nothing going to ght?" I dont blame him for feeling that way. Everything is falling apart. A lot of things are happening. "I love her, Jane," Hogo said. "Whoever she is, she is mine, and I am hers, virtually if not actually, forever. I feel I have to tell you this, because after all I do owe you something for havihe butt of my unpleasantness for so long. For these years." "The poet must be reassured and threatened," Henry said. "In the same way, Bill must be brought to justice for his bungling. This latest bit is the last straw absolutely. I see the trial as a kind of analysis really, more a therapeutic than a judicial procedure. We must discover the reason, for what he did. Whehrew those two six-pailler High Life through the winds of that blue Volkswagen --" Paul ied Snow Whites window from his underground installation. "A lucky hit! the idea of installing this underground installation not far from the house. Now I keep her under stant surveillahrough this system of mirrors and trained dogs. One of my trained dogs is even now iigating that overly handsome delivery boy from the meat market, who lingered far too long at the door. I should have a plete report by first light. My God but I had to spend a lot of money oraining. Aimated two thousand dollars per dog. Well, one assumes that it is money well spent. If I uook this project with urained dogs, there is a good ce that everything would go glimmering. Now at least I rely on the dog aspect of things." Snow White was i, sg the meat. "Oh why does fate give us alternatives to annoy and frustrate ourselves with? Why for instance do I have the option of going out of the house, through the window, and sleeping with Paul in his pit? Luckily that alternative is not a very attractive one. Pauls priness has somehow fallen away, and the naked Paul, without his aura, is just another plat beois. And I thought I saw, over his shoulder, a dark and vilely pelling figure not known to me, as I looked out of my window, in the mirror. Who is that? pared to that unknown figure, the figure of Paul is about as attractive as a mustard plaster. I would never go to his pit, now. Still, as a possible move, it clutters up the board, obsg perhaps a more exg one." "NOW I have bee sug the mop again," Jane blurted out in the rare-poison room of her mothers magnifit duplex apartment on a tree-lireet in a desirable location. "I have bee sug the mop in a big way. Hogo de Bergerao longer holds me in the highest esteem. His highest esteem has shifted to another, and now he holds her in it, and I am aloh my malice at last. Face to face with it. For the first time in my history, I have no lover to temper my malice with healing balsam-sted older love. Now there is nothing but malice." Jane regarded the floor-to-ceiling Early Ameri spice racks with their ly labeled jars of various sorts of bane including dayshade, scumlock, hyose, azote, hurtwort and milkleg. "Now I must witeone, for that is my role, and to flee ones role, as Gimbal tells us, is in the final analysis bootless. But the question is, what form shall my malice take, on this occasion? This braw February day? Something in the area of interpersonal relations would be iing. Whose interpersonal relations shall I poison, with the tasteful savagery of my abundant imagination and talent for co? I think I will go around to Snow Whites house, where she cohabits with the seven men in a moe travesty of approved behavior, and see what is stirring there. If something is stirring, perhaps I arrange a sleep for it -- in the er of a churchyard, for example." "BILL will you begin. By telling the court in your own words how you first ceived and then supported this chimera, the illusion of your potential greatness. By means of which you have mao assume the leadership aain it, despite tons of evidence of total inpetehe most ret instance being your hurlment of two six-pailler High Life, in a broer bag, through the winds of a blue Volkswageed by I. Fondue and H. Maeght. Two utter and absolute strangers, so far as we know." "Strao you perhaps. But not to me." "Well strangers is not the immediate question. Will you respond to the immediate question. How did you first ceive and then sustain --" "The ception I have explained more or less. I wao make, of ?.my life, a powerful statemec. etc. How this wrinkle was first planted in my sensorium I know not. But I tell you how it is sustained." "How." "I tell myself things." "What." "Bill you are the greatest. Bill you did that very nicely. Bill there is something about you. Bill you have style. Bill you are macho." "But despite this blizzard of self-gratulation --" "A fear remained." "A fear of?" "The black horse." "Who is this black horse." "I have not yet met it. It was described to me." "By?" "Fondue and Maeght." "Those tere at the trols of the Volkswagen when you hurled the broer bag." "That is correct." "You cherished then for these two, Fondue and Maeght, a hate." "More of a miff, your worship." "Of what standing, iime dimension, is this miff?" "Matter of lets see sixteen years I would say." "The miff had its genesis iioo you by them of the great black horse." "That is correct." "How old were you exactly. At that time." "Twelve years." "Something said to you about a horse sixteen years agered, then, the hurlment." "That is correct." "Let us make sure we uand the circumstances of the hurlment. you disbosom yourself very briefly of the event as seen from your point of view." "It was about four oclo the afternoon." "What is your authority." "The cathouse clock." "Proceed." "I was on my way from the -operated laundry to the Door Store." "With what in view." "I had in mind the purchasement of a slab of massif oak, 48" by 60", and a set of carved Byzantine legs, for the stru of a cocktail table, to support cocktails." "Could you describe the relation of the High Life to the project, stru of cocktail table." "I had in mind engement of the High Life whilst sanding, screwing, gluing and so forth." "And what had you in mind further. The court is ied in the array or disarray of your mind." "I had in mind the making of a burgoo, for my supper. Snow White as you know beiant in these days to --" "As we know. There was, then, in the broer bag, material --" "There was in the broer bag, along with the High Life, a flatfish." "The flatfish perished in the hurlmeake it." "The flatfish had perished some time previously. Murthered oar of erce, acc to the best information available." "Proceed." "I then apprehended, at the er of Eleventh a, the blue Volkswagen taining Fondue and Maeght." "You descried them through the winds." "That is correct." "The winds was in motion?" "The entire vehicle." "Making eed." "It was effeg a stop." "You were crossing in front of it." "That is correct." "What then." "I reized at the trols, Fondue and Maeght." "This after the slipping away of sixteen years." "The impression was indelible." "What then." "I lifted my eyes." "To heaven?" "To the cathouse clock. It registered hard upon four." "What then." "The hurlment." "You hurled said bag through said winds." "Yes." "And?" "The winds shattered. Ha ha." "Did the court hear yht. Did you say ha ha." "Ha ha." "Outburst will be dealt with. You have been warned. Let us tihe winds glass was then imploded upon the passengers." "Ha ha." "eous i resulted in facial areas a b d d." "That is correct. Ha ha." "Fondue sustained a wou in the viity of the inner thus." "That is correct." "Could you locate that for the court." "The jun of the upper and lower lids, on the inside." " Inside meaning, we assume, the most noseart." "Exactly." "A hair from which, the ball itself would have been promised." "Fatally." "You then danced a jig on --" "Obje!" "And what might the obje be?" "Our t, your hoies, did not dance a jig. A certain shufflement of the feet might have been observed, product of a perfectly plausible nervous tension, such as all are subject to on special occasions, weddings, births, deaths, etc. But nothing that, in all charity, might be described as a gigue, with its otations of gaiety, carefreeness --" "He was observed dang a jig by Shield 333, midst the broken glass and blood." "Could we have Shield 333." "Shield 333 to the stand! "e along, fellow, e along. Do you swear to tell the truth, or some of it, or most of it, so long as we both may live?" "I do." "Now then, Shield 333, you are Shield 333?" "I are." "It was you who was officiating at the er of Eleventh a, on the night of January sixteenth?" "It were." "And your mission?" "Prevention of enma of school-children by galloping panteis." "And the weather?" "There was you might say a mizzle. I was wearing me plastic cap cover." "Did you observe that mahere, known as Bill, dang a jig midst the blood and glass, after the hurlment?" "Well now, Im nae sae gud on th dances, yer amplitude. Im not sure it were a jig. Coulda been a jag. Coulda been what do they call it, th lap. Hae coulda been lappin. Im nae dancer meself. Hem from the Tenth Prect. Th Tenth dont dance." "Thank you, Shield 333, for this inclusive evidence of the worst sort. You may step down. Now, Bill, to return to your enta of former times with Fondue and Maeght, in what relation to you did they stand, in those times." "They stood to me in the relation, sasters." "They were your sasters. Entrusted with your sent iain dimensions of lore." "Yes. The duty of the sasters was to reveal the systeries." "And what was the nature of the latter?" "The systeries included such things as the mystique of rope, the mistake of one animal for another, and the miseries of the open air." "Yes. Now, was this matter of the great black horse included uhe rubric, systeries." "No. It was iure of a threat, a punishment. I had infracted a rule." "What rule?" "A rule of thumb having to do with pots. You were supposed to scour the pots with mud, to them. I used Ajax." "That was a systery, how to scour a pot with mud?" "Indeed." "The infra was theao systeries?" "Stated in the most general terms, that would be it." "And what was the response of Fondue and Maeght." "They told me that there was a great black horse, and that it had in miing me." "They did?" "It would e by night, they said. I lay awake waiting." "Did it present itself? The horse?" "No. But I awaited it. I await it still." "One more question: is it true that you allowed the fires uhe vats to go out, on the night of January sixteenth, while pursuing this private vea?" "It is true." "Vatricide. That crime of crimes. Well it doesnt look good for you, Bill. It doesnt look at all good for you." -4 SNOW WHITE THINKS: THE HOUSE . . . WALLS. . . WHEN HE DOESNT. . . IM NOT. . . IN THE DARK. . . SHOULDERS . . . AFRAID. . . THE WATER WAS COLD . . . WANT TO KNOW. . . EFFORTLESSLY. . . SNOW WHITE THINKS: WHY AM I. . . GLASS. . . HUNCHED AGAINST THE WALL. . . INTELLIGENCE. . . TO RETURN . . . A WALL. . . INTELLIGENCE. . . TO RETURN. . . HES COLD. . . MIRROR. . . "YOU have to learn to spell everything right," Paul told Emily. "That is the first thing I found intolerable, in other tries. Who spell Jeg f?ler mig daarligt tilpas? And all it means is I feel bad, and I already know that. That I feel bad. If it had meant, for example, The jug is folded uhe darling tulips. . ." "I uand," Emily said, but she didnt, because she was an animal. Not human. Her problems are not our problems. Fet her. "I try to be reasonable," Paul said, "civil with the telephone pany, brusque with the bank. That is what they have earhat bank, brusqueness, and they send me all the zinnia seeds in the world and I wont c?hange my opinion. But now that I am a part of the Abbey of Theleme, uhe thumb of our fat abbot, I do what I will. That jolly rogue and thi is drunk again, and does not know that I am here, at the catsellers war, earning a penny as a correspo for Cat World. Too bad Snow White is not here with me. It would be good for her, and good for me, and we could crawl behind that pile of used arquebus wads over there and tell each other what we are really like. I already know what I am really like, but I dont know what she is really like. She is probably really like no irl I have ever known -- unlike Joan, uitia, unlike Mary, unlike Amelia. Uhose old girls, with whom I spent parts of my youth, the parts that I left with all those priests, in all those dark boxes, with little curtains and sliding doors, before I threw in with the Thelemites, and began to do what I would. In all siy, I am not sure that I am better now than I was then, in those old days. At least then I did not know what I was doing. Now, I know." "PAUL is frog. He is frog through and through. I thought he would, at some point, cast off his mottled wettish green-and-brown integument to reappear washed in the hundred glistering hues of priness. But he is pure frog. So. I am disappointed. Either I have overestimated Paul, or I have overestimated history. Iher case I have made a serious error. So. There it is. I have been disappointed, and am, doubtless, to be disappointed further. Total disappoi. Thats it. The red meat on the rug. The frogs legs on the floor." "I LOVE YOU, Snow White." "I know, Hogo. I know because you have told me a thousand times. I do not doubt you. I am vinced of your siy and warmth. And I must admit that your tall brutality has made its impression ooo. I am not ued by your Prussian presence, or by the ed s you wear looped around your motorcycle doublet, or by your tasteful scars on the left and right cheeks. But this love must not be, because of your blood. You dont have the blood for this love, Hogo. Your blood is not fine enough. Oh I know that in this democratic era questions of blood are a little de trop, a little frowned-upon. People dont like to hear people talking about their blood, or about other peoples blood. But I am not people, Hogo. I am me. I must hold myself in reserve for a prince or prince-figure, someone like Paul. I knoaul has not looked terribly good up to now and in fact I despise him utterly. Yet he has the blood of kings and queens and cardinals in his veins, Hogo. He has the purple blood of exalted station. Whereas you have only plain blood in your veins, Hogo, blood that anybody might have, the delivery boy from the towel service for example. You must admit that they are not the same thing, these two kinds of blood." "But what about love? What about love which, as Stendhal tells us, seizes the senses and overthrows all other siderations in a giddy of irresponsibility?" "You may well say a giddy of irresponsibility, Hogo. That is precisely the state I am not in. I am calm. As calm as a lamp, as calm as the Secretary of State. As calm as yiddy." "Well Snow White your blouments are pretty potent, and I reize that there is a gap there, between my blood and the blood royal. Yet in my blood there is a fever. I offer you this fever. It is as if my blood were full of St. Elmos fire, so hot arical does it feel, inside me. If this fever, this rude but grand passion, in any measure ennobles me in your eyes, or in any other part of you, then perhaps all is not yet lost. For even a bad man set his eyes oars, sometimes. Even a bad man breathe and hope. And it is my hope that, as soon as you fully prehend the strength of this fever in me, you will find it ennobling and me ennobled, and a fit sort suddenly, though I was not before. I know that this is a slim hope." "No Hogo. It does not ennoble you, the fever. I wish it did, but it does not. It is simply a fever, in my view. Tirin and a glass of water. I know that this is onplace, even cruel, advice, but I have no other advice. I myself am so buffeted about by ret events, and s, that if events give me even one more buffet, I will simply explode. Goodnight, Hogo. Take your dark appeal away. Your ingly-wrought dark appeal." WE were sitting at a sidewalk cafe talking about the old days. The days before. Then the proprietor came. He had a poli with him. A poli wearing a black leather blackjad a book by Rafael Sabatini. "You are too far out on the sidewalk," the poli said. "You must stay behind the potted plants. You must not be more than te from the building line." We moved back behind the building lihen. We could talk about the old days oher side of the potted plants, we decided. We were friendly and aodating, as is our wont. But in moving the table we spilled the drinks. "There will be an additional charge for the staiablecloth," the proprietor said. Then we poured the rest of the drinks over the rest of the tablecloth, until it was all the same color, rose-red. "Show us the stain," we said. "Where is the stain? Show us the stain and we will pay. And while you are looking for it, more drinks." We looked fondly back over the io where we had been. The poli looked back over the inches with us. "I realize it was better there," the poli said. "But the law is the law. That is what is wrong with it, that it is the law. You dont mind if I have just a taste of your stain?" The poli wrung out our table-cover and tossed it off with a flourish of brass. "Thats good stain. And now, if you will excuse me, I intuit a felony, over o Street." The poli flew away to attend to his felony, the proprietor returned with more stain. "Who has wrinkled my tablecover?" We regarded the tablecover, a distressed area it was true. "Someone will pay for the ironing of that." Then we rose up and wrihe entire sidewalk cafe, with our bare hands. It was impossible to tell rong, when we had finished. JANE gave Snow White a vodka Gibson on the rocks. "Drink this," she said. "It will make you feel better." "I dont feel bad physically," Snow White said. "Emotionally is aory of course." "Go on," Jane said. "Go on drink it." "No I wont drink it now," Snow White said. "Perhaps later. Although something war to drink it at all. Something suggests to me that it is a bad se, this drink you proffer. Something whispers to me that there is something wrong with it." "Well thats possible," Jane replied. "I didnt make the vodka myself you know. I didnt grow the grain myself, and reap it myself, and make the mash myself. I am not a member of the zano Vermouth pany. They dont tell me everything. I didnt harvest the onions. I didnt purify the water that went into these rocks. Im not responsible for everything. All I say is that to the best of my knowledge, this is an ordinary vodka Gibson on the rocks. Just like any other. Further than that I will not go." "Oh well then," Snow White said. "It must be all right in that case. It must be all right if it is ordinary. If it is as ordinary as you say. In that case, I shall drink it." "This drink is vaguely exg, like a film by Leopoldo Torre Nilsson," Paul said. "It is a good thing I have taken it away from you, Snow White. It is too exg for you. If you had drunk it, something bad would probably have happeo your stomach. But because I am a man, and because men have strong stomachs for the business of life, and the pleasure of life too, nothing will happen to me. Lucky that I sensed you about to drink it, and sehat it was too exg for you, on my sensing mae in my underground installation, and was able to arrive in time to wrest it from yrasp, just as it was about to touch your lips. Those lips that I have deeply admired, first through the window, and then from my underground installation. Those lips that --" "Look how he has fallen to the ground Jane!" Snow White observed. "And look at all that green foam ing out of his face! And look at those vulsions he is having! Why it resembles nothing else but a death agony, the whole se! I wonder if there was something wrong with that drink after all? Jane? Jane?" "Ohing you say about him," Fred said, "is that Paul was straight. A straight arrow. And just by looking at him, on those occasions when our paths crossed, at the bus station for instance, or at the dist store, I could tell that Paul had a lot of ginger. He must have had a lot of gio have dug that great hole, outside the house, and to have put all those wires in it, and ected all those dogs to the wires, and all that. That took a lot of meical iy, to my way of thinking, and a lot of teical knowledge too, that shouldnt be uated, when we are making our final assessment of Paul. I might mentiorust that Hogo placed in him, as evidenced by the large sum of money found on him, ed in one of Hogos bank statements, when they ged his clothes, at the funeral parlor. Of course some people say that this was get-out-of-town money Hogo had given him, but I dont believe that. I choose to believe that Hogo placed a great deal of trust in Paul, more trust perhaps than the best judgment would suggest, strictly speaking. But Im talking like a banker now, in a shrill and judicious way, and I dont want to talk like that. sider Amelia, who is sitting here in the front row with a black cloth over her face, waiting to see her late lover tucked away uhe earth, in the box that has been prepared for him. Imagine ones feelings at such a moment. No, it is too difficult. I shall not ask you to imagihem. I only ask that you empathize with this poor woman, who has been deprived, at a stroke of the Lords pen as it were, of a source of ine and warmth and human intercourse, which we all regard so highly, and need so much. I leave that thought to sti your minds. As for myself, I am only Fred, a former bandleader spitted on a passion for Snow White, that girl ihird row there, seated o Jane. She will not eveo me, even though I am in her power. It seems that being in someones power implies no obligation on the part of the one in whose power one is, not even the obligation of sparing one a word now and then, or a yellow half-smile. But that is my business, and not the business we are gathered together here in the sight of God to execute, which is the burning of Paul, and the putting of him into a vase, and the sinking of the vase into the ground, in the box that has been prepared for it. Some people like to be scattered on top, but Paul wao be put uhe ground. That accords with what else we knew about him." -5 AIZATION OF THE WORLD IS NOT AE RESPOO THE WORLD. TRYING to break out of this bag that we are in. What gave us the idea that there was somethier? How does the cept, "somethier," arise? What does it look like, this som..ethier? Dont tell me that it is an infants idea because I refuse to believe that. I know some se infants but they are not that se. And then the great horde of persons sub-se who heless ceive of somethier. I am thinking of a happy island. Ie Bill moved toward his lack of reward. We have raised him to the sky. Bill will bee doubtless one of those skyheroes, like Theodid Rime, who govern the orderly rush of virgins and widows through the world. We lifted him toward the sky. Bill will bee doubtless one of those sub-deities who govern the calm passage of cemeteries through the sky. If the graves fall open in mid-passage and swathed forms fall out, it will be his fault, probably. BILL has been hanged. We regret that. He is the first of us ever to be hanged. We regret it. But that was the verdict. We had a hard time hanging him. We had never hanged anyone before. But fortunately we had Hogo to help us. Bill was hanged because he was guilty, and if yuilty, then you must be hanged. He was guilty of vatricide and failure. He leaped about on the platform quite ..a bit. It was evident that he didnt wish to be hanged. It was a fearsome amount of trouble, the whole thing. But luckily Hogo was there with his quirt. That expedited things. Now there is a certain degree of equanimity. We prize equanimity. It means things are going well. Bills friend Dan is the new leader. We have decided to let Hogo live in the house. He is a brute 9９lib?perhaps but an effit brute. He is good at tending the vats. Dan has taken charge with a fine aggressiveness. He has added three new varieties to the line: Baby Water Chestnuts, Baby Kimchi, Baby Bean Thread. They are moving well, these new varieties. Snow White tio cast chrysanthemums on Pauls grave, although there is nothing in it for her, that grave. I think she realizes that. But she was fond of his blood, while he was alive. She was fond not of him but of the abstraotion that, to her, meant "him." I am not sure that that is the best idea.天涯在线书库《www.tianyabook.com》