Fragments & Extracts

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Axolotl

     There was a time when I thought a great deal about the axolotls. I went to see them in the aquarium at the Jardin des Plantes and stayed for hours watching them, observing their immobility, their faint movements. Now I am an axolotl.

     I got to them by chance one spring morning when Paris was spreading its peacock tail after a wintry Lent. I was heading down tbe boulevard Port-Royal, then I took Saint-Marcel and L'Hôpital and saw green among all that grey and remembered the lions. I was friend of the lions and panthers, but had never gone into the dark, humid building that was the aquarium. I left my bike against tbe gratings and went to look at the tulips. The lions were sad and ugly and my panther was asleep. I decided on the aquarium, looked obliquely at banal fish until, unexpectedly, I hit it off with the axolotls. I stayed watching them for an hour and left, unable to think of anything else.

     In the library at Sainte-Geneviève, I consulted a dictionary and learned that axolotls are the larval stage (provided with gills) of a species of salamander of the genus Ambystoma. That they were Mexican I knew already by looking at them and their little pink Aztec faces and the placard at the top of the tank. I read that specimens of them had been found in Africa capable of living on dry land during the periods of drought, and continuing their life under water when the rainy season came. I found their Spanish name, ajolote, and the mention that they were edible, and that their oil was used (no longer used, it said ) like cod-liver oil.

     I didn't care to look up any of the specialized works, but the next day I went back to the Jardin des Plantes. I began to go every morning, morning and aftemoon some days. The aquarium guard smiled perplexedly taking my ticket. I would lean up against the iron bar in front of the tanks and set to watching them. There's nothing strange in this, because after the first minute I knew that we were linked, that something infinitely lost and distant kept pulling us together. It had been enough to detain me that first morning in front of the sheet of glass where some bubbles rose through the water. The axolotls huddled on the wretched narrow (only I can know how narrow and wretched) floor of moss and stone in the tank. There were nine specimens, and the majority pressed their heads against the glass, looking with their eyes of gold at whoever came near them. Disconcerted, almost ashamed, I felt it a lewdness to be peering at these silent and immobile figures heaped at the bottom of the tank. Mentally I isolated one, situated on the right and somewhat apart from the others, to study it better. I saw a rosy little body, translucent (I thought of those Chinese figurines of milky glass), looking like a small lizard about six inches long, ending in a fish's tail of extraordinary delicacy, the most sensitive part of our body. Along the back ran a transparent fin which joined with the tail, but what obsessed me was the feet, of the slenderest nicety, ending in tiny fingers with minutely human nails. And then I discovered its eyes, its face. Inexpressive features, with no other trait save the eyes, two orifices, like brooches, wholly of transparent gold, lacking any life but looking, letting themselves be penetrated by my look, which seemed to travel past the golden level and lose itself in a diaphanous interior mystery. A very slender black halo ringed the eye and etched it onto the pink flesh, onto the rosy stone of the head, vaguely triangular, but with curved and triangular sides which gave it a total likeness to a statuette corroded by time. The mouth was masked by the triangular plane of the face, its considerable size would be guessed only in profile; in front a delicate crevice barely slit the lifeless stone. On both sides of the head where the ears should have been, there grew three tiny sprigs, red as coral, a vegetal outgrowth, the gills, I suppose. And they were the only thing quick about it; every ten or fifteen seconds the sprigs pricked up stiffly and again subsided. Once in a while a foot would barely move, I saw the diminutive toes poise mildly on the moss. It's that we don't enjoy moving a lot, and the tank is so cramped—we barely move in any direction and we're hitting one of the others with our tail or our head—difficulties arise, fights, tiredness. The time feels like it's less if we stay quietly.

     It was their quietness that made me lean toward them fascinated the first time I saw the axolotls. Obscurely I seemed to understand their secret will, to abolish space and time with an indifferent immobility. I knew better later; the gill contraction, the tentative reckoning of the delicate feet on the stones, the abrupt swimming (some of them swim with a simple undulation of the body) proved to me that they were capable of escaping that mineral lethargy in which they spent whole hours. Above all else, their eyes obsessed me. In the standing tanks on either side of them, different fishes showed me the simple stupidity of their handsome eyes so similar to our own. The eyes of the axolotls spoke to me of the presence of a different life, of another way of seeing. Glueing my face to the glass (the guard would cough fussily once in a while), I tried to see better those diminutive golden points, that entrance to the infinitely slow and remote world of these rosy creatures. It was useless to tap with one finger on the glass directly in front of their faces; they never gave the least reaction. The golden eyes continued burning with their soft, terrible light; they continued looking at me from an unfathomable depth which made me dizzy.

     And nevertheless they were close. I knew it before this, before being an axolotl. I learned it the day I came near them for the first time. The anthropomorphic features of a monkey reveal the reverse of what most people believe, the distance that is traveled from them to us. The absolute lack of similarity between axolotls and human beings proved to me that my recognition was valid, that I was not propping myself up with easy analogies. Only the little hands . . . But an eft, the common newt, has such hands also, and we are not at all alike. I think it was the axolotls' heads, that triangular pink shape with the tiny eyes of gold. That looked and knew. That laid the claim. They were notanimals.

     It would seem easy, almost obvious, to fall into mythology. I began seeing in the axolotls a metamorphosis which did not succeed in revoking a mysterious humanity. I imagined them aware, slaves of their bodies, condemned infinitely to the silence of the abyss, to a hopeless meditation. Their blind gaze, the diminutive gold disc without expression and nonetheless terribly shining, went through me like a message: "Save us, save us." I caught myself mumbling words of advice, conveying childish hopes. They continued to look at me, immobile; from time to time the rosy branches of the gills stiffened. In that instant I felt a muted pain; perhaps they were seeing me, attracting my strength to penetrate into the impenetrable thing of their lives. They were not human beings, but I had found in no animal such a profound relation with myself. The axolotls were like witnesses of something, and at times like horrible judges. I felt ignoble in front of them; there was such a terrifying purity in those transparent eyes. They were larvas, but larva means disguise and also phantom. Behind those Aztec faces, without expression but of an implacable cruelty, what semblance was awaiting its hour?

     I was afraid of them. I think that had it not been for feeling the proximity of other visitors and the guard, I would not have been bold enough to remain alone with them. "You eat them alive with your eyes, hey," the guard said, laughing; he likely thought I was a little cracked. What he didn't notice was that it was they devouring me slowly with their eyes, in a cannibalism of gold. At any distance from the aquarium, I had only to think of them, it was as though I were being affected from a distance. It got to the point that I was going every day, and at night I thought of them immobile in the darkness, slowly putting a hand out which immediately encountered another. Perhaps their eyes could see in the dead of night, and for them the day continued indefinitely. The eyes of axolotls have no lids.

     I know now that there was nothing strange, that that had to occur. Leaning over in front of the tank each morning, the recognition was greater. They were suffering, every fiber of my body reached toward that stifled pain, that stiff torment at the bottom of the tank. They were lying in wait for something, a remote dominion destroyed, an age of liberty when the world had been that of the axolotls. Not possible that such a terrible expression which was attaining the overthrow of that forced blankness on their stone faces should carry any message other than one of pain, proof of that eternal sentence, of that liquid hell they were undergoing. Hopelessly, I wanted to prove to myself that my own sensibility was projecting a nonexistent consciousness upon the axolotls. They and I knew. So there was nothing strange in what happened. My face was pressed against the glass of the aquarium, my eyes were attempting once more to penetrate the mystery of those eyes of gold without iris, without pupil. I saw from very close up the face of an axolotl immobile next to the glass. No transition and no surprise, I saw my face against the glass, I saw it on the outside of the tank, I saw it on the other side of the glass. Then my face drew back and I understood.

     Only one thing was strange: to go on thinking as usual, to know. To realize that was, for the first moment, like the horror of a man buried alive awaking to his fate. Outside, my face came close to the glass again, I saw my mouth, the lips compressed with the effort of understanding the axolotls. I was an axolotl and now I knew instantly that no understanding was possible. He was outside the aquarium, his thinking was a thinking outside the tank. Recognizlng him, being him himself, I was an axolotl and in my world. The horror began—I learned in the same moment —of believing myself prisoner in the body of an axolotl, metamorphosed into him with my human mind intact, buried alive in an axolotl, condemned to move lucidly among unconscious creatures. But that stopped when a foot just grazed my face, when I moved just a little to one side and saw an axolotl next to me who was looking at me, and understood that he knew also, no communication possible, but very clearly. Or I was also in him, or all of us were thinking humanlike, incapable of expression, limited to the golden splendor of our eyes looking at the face of the man pressed against the aquarium.

     He returned many times, but he comes less often now. Weeks pass without his showing up. I saw him yesterday, he looked at me for a long time and left briskly. It seemed to me that he was not so much interested in us any more, that he was coming out of habit. Since the only thing I do is think, I could think about him a lot. It occurs to me that at the beginning we continued to communicate, that he felt more than ever one with the mystery which was claiming him. But the bridges were broken between him and me, because what was his obsession is now an axolotl, alien to his human life. I think that at the beginning I was capable of returning to him in a certain way—ah, only in a certain way—and of keeping awake his desire to know us better. I am an axolotl for good now, and if I think like a man it's only because every axolotl thinks like a man inside his rosy stone semblance. I believe that all this succeeded in communicating something to him in those first days, when I was still he. And in this final solitude to which he no longer comes, I console myself by thinking that perhaps he is going to write a story about us, that, believing he's making up a story, he's going to write all this about axolotls.

   -- Julio Cortázar [Literaria, 1952]

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Harry

Is that my Richard Ney of the green and blue congress teepee, In Nancy Mitford’s biography of this Louis d’or, as well off Greer Garson, the red whore dressed in pink and noir, morning glory buddy. My only Danny, of the railroad tracks’ union suit, solicitor trespassing only steel band Belafonte               totally on I made my own career, not in Gerde’s Folk City, or Five Corners Beverly Glen but by the mind and pen from Barney’s Beanery to Black Mountain, a true Bessie Smith married to Jimmy Doherty, without money or children. From Buffalo to California Eddy on foot and bus with Howie paying room fee monthly. Now you know who you married, Teddy boy, only Joan of Eunice Kennedy. I am not at all angry at Rose tea leaving me or that Rosemary forn- doing Jackie. It’s my birthday present Getty oil, Baron of Caroline. Linda Kasabian can suck my asshole out Manson’s                                                      dude durkee? or Gregory brick chimney, W.E. Hutton’s truckery along Henry Hudson’s log jamming barge Washington Bridge before the Niagara Dam’s broken through saboteurs of Germany’s                                colored employees.    -- John Wieners [Little Caesar #9, 1979]

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THE PIPES OF PAN

    Magic calls itself The Other Method for controlling matter and knowing space. In Morocco, magic is practised more assiduously than hygiene though, indeed, ecstatic dancing to music of the brotherhoods may be called a form of psychic hygiene. You know your own music when you hear it one day. You fall into line and dance until you pay the piper.     My own music turned out to be the wild flutes of the hill tribe, Ahl Serif whom I met through the Moroccan painter, Hamri. He turned me on to the Moorish fleshpots, the magic and the misery of the Moors. The secret of his mother's tribe, guarded even from themselves, was that they were still performing the Rites of Pan under their ragged cloak of Islam. Westermark, in his book on pagan survivals in Morocco forty years ago, recognized their patron: Bou Jeloud, the Father of skins, to be Pan, the little goat god with his pipes. An account of their dances led him to conclude they must be celebrating the Roman Lupercalia which once occurred in the first two weeks of February, but had attached itself to the principal Moslem feast when the Arab invaders turned the calendar back to the lunar year. Westermark never saw the dances and believed they no longer took place.     Pan may soon stop dancing in the Moroccan hills but I first saw him there in 1950. Later I ran several times in the panic of the Lupercalia. It is the <<holy chase>> of which Julius Caesar speaks in Act I, Scene 2 of Shakespeare's play: <<Forget not, in your haste, Antonius, to touch Calpurnia for our elders say the barren, touched in this holy chase, shake off their sterile curse.>> Marc Antony should be wearing a fresh, foul-smelling goatskin. <<I saw Marc Antony offer him a crown: yet 'twas not a crown neither, 'twas one of those coronets...>>     Bou Jeloud wears a yokel's big, floppy straw hat, bound round his face with a fillet of ivy. <<... it was mere foolery: I did not mark it.>>     Pan, Bou Jeloud, the Father of Skins, dances through eight moonlit nights in his hill village, Joujouka, to the wailing of his hundred master musicians. Down in the towns, far away by the seaside, you can hear the wild whimper of his oboe-like raitas, a faint breath of panic borne on the wind. Below the rough palisade of giant blue cactus surrounding the village on its hilltop, the music flows in streams to nourish and fructify the terraced fields below.     Inside the village the thatched houses crouch low in their gardens to hide in the deep cactus-lined lanes. You come through their maze to the broad village green where the pipers are piping fifty raitas banked against a crumbling wall blow sheet lightning to shatter the air. Fifty wild flutes blow up a storm in front of them, while a platoon of small boys in long belted white robes and brown wool turbans drums like young thunder. All the villagers, dressed in best white, swirl in great circles and coils around one wildman in skins.     Bou Jeloud leaps high in the air on the music, races after the women again and again, lashing at them fiercely with his flails. <<Forget not in your speed, Antonius, to touch Calpurnia...>> He is wild. He is mad. Sowing panic. Lashing at anyone; striking real terror into the crowd. Women scatter like white marabout birds all aflutter and settle on one little hillock for safety, all huddled in one quivering lump. They throw back their heads to the moon and scream with throats open to the gullet, lolling their tongues around in their heads like the clapper in a bell. Every mouth is wide open, frozen into an o. Head back and hot narrow eyes brimming with dangerous baby.     Bou Jeloud is after you. Running. over-run. Laughter and someone is crying. Wild dogs at your heels. Swirling around in one ring-a-rosy, around and around and around. Go! Forever! Stop! Never! More and No More and No! More! Pipes crack in your head. Ears popped away at barrier sound and you deaf. Or dead! Swirling around in cold moonlight, surrounded by wildmen or ghosts. Bou Jeloud is on you, butting you, beating you, taking you, leaving you. Gone! The great wind drops out of your head and you hear the heavenly music again. You feel sorry and loving and tender to that poor animal whimpering, grizzling, laughing and sobbing there beside you like somebody out of ether. Who is that? That is you.     Who is Bou Jeloud? Who is he? The shivering boy who was chosen to be stripped naked in a cave and sewn into the bloody warm skins and masked with an old straw hat tied over his face, HE is Bou Jeloud when he dances and runs. Not Ali, not Mohamed, then he is Bou Jeloud. He will be somewhat taboo in his village the rest of his life.     When he dances alone, his musicians blow a sound like the earth sloughing its skin. He is the Father of Fear. He is, too, the Father of Flocks. The good shepherd works for him. When the goats, gently grazing, brusquely frisk and skitter away, he is counting his flock. When you shiver like someone just walked on your grave that's him: that's Pan, the Father of Skins. Have you jumped out of your skin lately? I've got you under my skin. Up there, in Joujouka, you sleep all day - if the flies let you. Breakfast is goat-cheese and honey on gold bread from the outdoor oven. Musicians loll about sipping mint tea, their kif pipes and flutes. They never work in their lives so they lie about easy. The last priests of Pan cop a tithe on the crops in the lush valley below. Late in August each musician slips away up to the borders of Rif country to take his pick of the great, grassy meadows of cannabis sativa enough to last him the year. Blue kif smoke drops in veils from Joujouka at nightfall. The music picks up like a current turned on. The children are singing, <<Ha, Bou Jeloud! Bou Jeloud the butcher met Aisha Homolka, Ha, Bou Jeloud!>>     On the third night he meets Aisha Homolka who drifts around after dark, cool and casual, near springs and running water. She unveils her beautiful blue-glittering face and breasts and coos.     And he who stammers out an answer is lost. He is lost unless he touches the blade of his knife or, better still, plucks it out and plunges it into the ground between her goatish legs and forked hooves. Then Aisha Homolka, Aisha Kandisha, alias Asherat, Astarte, Diana in the Leaves Greene, Blest Virgin Miriam bar Levy, the White Goddess, in short, will be his. She must be a heavy Stone Age matriarch whose power he cuts off with his Iron Age knife-magic.     The music grooves into hysteria, fear and fornication. A ball of laughter and tears in the throat gristle. Tickle of panic between the legs. Gripe of slap-stick cuts loose in the bowels. The Three Hadji. Man with Monkey. More characters coming on stage. The Hadji joggle around under their crowns like Three Wise Kings. Monkey Man comes on hugely pregnant with a live boy in his baggy pants. Monkey Man goes into birth pangs and the Hadji deliver him of a naked boy with an umbilical halter around his neck. Man leads Monkey around, beating him and screwing him for hours to the music. Monkey jumps on Man's back and screws him to the music for hours. Pipers pipe higher into the air and panic screams off like the wind into the woods of silver olive and black oak, on into the Rif mountains swimming up under the moonlight.     Pan leaps back on the gaggle of women with his flails. The women scream and deliver one tiny boy, wriggling and stumbling as he dances out in white drag and veil. Another bloodcurdling birth-yodel and they throw up another small boy. Pan flails them as they push out another and another until there are ten or more little boy-girls out there with Pan, shaking that thing in the moonlight. Bigger village dragstars slither out on the village green and shake it up night after night. Pan kings them all until dawn. He is the God Pan. They are, all of them, Aisha Homolka.

   -- Brion Gysin [Gnaoua, 1964]

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Blabbermouth

Hello. O I was just telling Hap when you came in that an uncle of mine was down here a week ago today and said we ought to go over Cuba with 1200 jets.  What you think that would do, eh?        Which uncle was that? Unle Ike. We should go over Cuba with 1200 jets. So I said, are we such gods? As long as Battista was in Cuba just a playground with boys running around with guitars but when Castro got hold right away the up-and- at-come American Press scrambled down there and started asking questions every day about free elections and so forth. So things went from bad to worse. Then we got to talking about society being wasteful, we're going all ways to Sunday, the disc-jockeys 24 hours all the time on the radio, and the newspapers eating up the woods and forests. He said he was only glad we had it to waste, that's all, and I said, what are we, gods? So I said it again. You see, once it's a joke, but a thou- sand times it's not funny. And then, Kennedy such a good Catholic, shooting the moon instead of going after the population problem, and even the sun.     Did you ever read the Tempest? It was on the radio last night.    -- Larry Eigner [Floating Bear #11, 1961]

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UPON DANTE SEEING BEATRICE

Your visitation salutates sepulchral recollection as commentation over suspension’s congress before dark vision unwinds its misdirected labyrinth, a heightened perforation among perpetuated adoration, as tenebrous tallows sun before cloaked approach, without reproach your single touch allows amount of subterfuge to glow forthrightly investitured                                                                    porch the past ingrained power as imagined laved tiered scaramouch appears affront the citadel; perhaps a muzzein or farouche. To mock deception, unmask truth, surrender passion for rebuff oh no, as error immerses detection bleats plaintiff your                                                                      tartuffe    -- John Wieners [Little Caesar #9, 1979]

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You Were Perfectly Fine

      The pale young man eased himself carefully into the low chair, and rolled his head to the side, so that the cool chintz comforted his cheek and temple.       “Oh, dear,” he said. “Oh, dear, oh, dear, oh, dear. Oh.”       The clear-eyed girl, sitting light and erect on the couch, smiled brightly at him.       “Not feeling so well today?” she said.       “Oh, I’m great,” he said. “Corking, I am. Know what time I got up? Four o’clock this afternoon, sharp. I kept trying to make it, and every time I took my head off the pillow, it would roll under the bed. This isn’t my head I’ve got on now. I think this is something that used to belong to Walt Whitman. Oh, dear, oh, dear, oh, dear.”       “Do you think maybe a drink would make you feel better?” she said.       “The hair of the mastiff that bit me?” he said. “Oh, no, thank you. Please never speak of anything like that again. I’m through. I’m all, all through. Look at that hand; steady as a humming-bird. Tell me, was I very terrible last night?”       “Oh, goodness,” she said, “everybody was feeling pretty high. You were all right.”       “Yeah,” he said. “I must have been dandy. Is everybody sore at me?”       “Good heavens, no,” she said. “Everyone thought you were terribly funny. Of course, Jim Pierson was a little stuffy, there for a minute at dinner. But people sort of held him back in his chair, and got him calmed down. I don’t think anybody at the other tables noticed it at all. Hardly anybody.”       “He was going to sock me?” he said. “Oh, Lord. What did I do to him?”       “Why, you didn’t do a thing,” she said. “You were perfectly fine. But you know how silly Jim gets, when he thinks anybody is making too much fuss over Elinor.”       “Was I making a pass at Elinor?” he said. “Did I do that?”       “Of course you didn’t,” she said. “You were only fooling, that’s all. She thought you were awfully amusing. She was having a marvelous time. She only got a little tiny bit annoyed just once, when you poured the clam-juice down her back.”       “My God,” he said. “Clam-juice down that back. And every vertebra a little Cabot. Dear God. What’ll I ever do?”       “Oh, she’ll be all right,” she said. “Just send her some flowers, or something. Don’t worry about it. It isn’t anything.”       “No, I won’t worry,” he said. “I haven’t got a care in the world. I’m sitting pretty. Oh, dear, oh, dear. Did I do any other fascinating tricks at dinner?”       “You were fine,” she said. “Don’t be so foolish about it. Everybody was crazy about you. The maître d’hôtel was a little worried because you wouldn’t stop singing, but he really didn’t mind. All he said was, he was afraid they’d close the place again, if there was so much noise. But he didn’t care a bit, himself. I think he loved seeing you have such a good time. Oh, you were just singing away, there, for about an hour. It wasn’t so terribly loud, at all.”       “So I sang,” he said. “That must have been a treat. I sang.”       “Don’t you remember?” she said. “You just sang one song after another. Everybody in the place was listening. They loved it. Only you kept insisting that you wanted to sing some song about some kind of fusiliers or other, and everybody kept shushing you, and you’d keep trying to start it again. You were wonderful. We were all trying to make you stop singing for a minute, and eat something, but you wouldn’t hear of it. My, you were funny.”       “Didn’t I eat any dinner?” he said.       “Oh, not a thing,” she said. “Every time the waiter would offer you something, you’d give it right back to him, because you said that he was your long-lost brother, changed in the cradle by a gypsy band, and that anything you had was his. You had him simply roaring at you.”       “I bet I did,” he said. “I bet I was comical. Society’s Pet, I must have been. And what happened then, after my overwhelming success with the waiter?”       “Why, nothing much,” she said. “You took a sort of dislike to some old man with white hair, sitting across the room, because you didn’t like his necktie and you wanted to tell him about it. But we got you out, before he got really mad.”       “Oh, we got out,” he said. “Did I walk?”       “Walk! Of course you did,” she said. “You were absolutely all right. There was that nasty stretch of ice on the sidewalk, and you did sit down awfully hard, you poor dear. But good heavens, that might have happened to anybody.”       “Oh, sure,” he said. “Louisa Alcott or anybody. So I fell down on the sidewalk. That would explain what’s the matter with my—Yes. I see. And then what, if you don’t mind?”       “Ah, now, Peter!” she said. “You can’t sit there and say you don’t remember what happened after that! I did think that maybe you were just a little tight at dinner—oh, you were perfectly all right, and all that, but I did know you were feeling pretty gay. But you were so serious, from the time you fell down—I never knew you to be that way. Don’t you know, how you told me I had never seen your real self before? Oh, Peter, I just couldn’t bear it, if you didn’t remember that lovely long ride we took together in the taxi! Please, you do remember that, don’t you? I think it would simply kill me, if you didn’t.”       “Oh, yes,” he said. “Riding in the taxi. Oh, yes, sure. Pretty long ride, hmm?”       “Round and round and round the park,” she said. “Oh, and the trees were shining so in the moonlight. And you said you never knew before that you really had a soul.”       “Yes,” he said. “I said that. That was me.”       “You said such lovely, lovely things,” she said. “And I’d never known, all this time, how you had been feeling about me, and I’d never dared to let you see how I felt about you. And then last night—oh, Peter dear, I think that taxi ride was the most important thing that ever happened to us in our lives.”       “Yes,” he said. “I guess it must have been.”       “And we’re going to be so happy,” she said. “Oh, I just want to tell everybody! But I don’t know—I think maybe it would be sweeter to keep it all to ourselves.”       “I think it would be,” he said.       “Isn’t it lovely?” she said.       “Yes,” he said. “Great.”       “Lovely!” she said.       “Look here,” he said, “do you mind if I have a drink? I mean, just medicinally, you know. I’m off the stuff for life, so help me. But I think I feel a collapse coming on.”       “Oh, I think it would do you good,” she said. “You poor boy, it’s a shame you feel so awful. I’ll go make you a whisky and soda.”       “Honestly,” he said, “I don’t see how you could ever want to speak to me again, after I made such a fool of myself, last night. I think I’d better go join a monastery in Tibet.”       “You crazy idiot!” she said. “As if I could ever let you go away now! Stop talking like that. You were perfectly fine.”       She jumped up from the couch, kissed him quickly on the forehead, and ran out of the room.       The pale young man looked after her and shook his head long and slowly, then dropped it in his damp and trembling hands.       “Oh, dear,” he said. “Oh, dear, oh, dear, oh, dear.”    -- Dorothy Parker [The New Yorker, February 23, 1929]

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Poni

It’s the penetral spider web, the unoure haire Where-ere the veil, the anal plaque of anavou (You take nothing from it, god because it’s me you never took anything like that from me. I’m writing it here for the first time, I’m finding it for the first time) Not the membrane of the vault not the member left out of this fuck, descended from a depredation But meat turned, beyond membrane beyond where it’s hard or soft Ja passed through the hard and soft, spread out this meat turned in palm, pulled, stretched like the palm                    of a hand bloodless from holding itself ridig, black, purple from straining toward the soft. But what’s it all about, you madman? Me? This tongue between four gums, This meat between two knees, this piece of hole for madmen. Yet precisely not for madmen, for the well bred, who polish their delirium to belch rot everywhere, and who from this roast meat made the leaf, Listen closely: made the leaf at the beginning of generation, in the cobwebbed meat of my holes, mine. Which holes? Holes of what? of soul, of mind, of me, and of being: but in the palce where one doesn’t give a shit, father, mother, Artaud and metoo. In the humus of the theme with wheels, in the panting humus of the theme of this void between hard and soft Black and purple, rigid spineless and that’s it. Which means that there is a bone, where                       god climbed on the poet in order to sack the ingestion of his verse, like the head farts that he extracts through his cunt, that he would extract from the depth of history, down to the depth of his cunt hole, and it’s not a cunt trick that he plays on him in this way, it’s the trick of the whole earth against whoever has balls in his cunt. And if one doesn’t get the image -- and that is what I hear being said all around me, that you don’t get the image which is in the depths of my cunt hole, -- it’s that you are ignorant of the depth not of things, but of my cunt mine, although since the beginning of history you plash all around there like one runs down an insanage plots an incarceration unto death          Re re ghi          reghé ghi          geghena          a zoghena          a gogha          riri Between the ass and the shirt Between the jism and the under-place Between the member and the false jerk between the membrane and the blade between the lathe and the ceiling Between the sperm and the explosion tween the fishbone and tween the slime between the ass and everyone’s                       seizure on the high-pressure trap of an ejaculation rattle is neither a point nor a stone burst dead at the base of a jerk nor the member chopped from a soul (the soul is no more than an old saying) but the staggering suspension of a pant of insanity raped, shaved, thoroughly sucked off by all the insolent riff-raff of all the turdcrammed queers who hadn’t any other grub          in order to live          than to gobble          Artaud          Mômo          There, where one can screw faster          than me          in myself if he had taken care to put his head on the curve of that bone located between anus and sex           Of that hoed bone that I speak in the dirt of a paradise where the first one duped on earth was not the father nor the mother who in this cave remade you           but           I screwed into my madness And what possessed me, me too, to roll my life there?          ME          NOTHING, nothing Because I           I am there           I am there and it is life that rolls its obscene palm there         Ok and now?         Now? Now?         The old Artaud         is buried in the chimney hole he got from his cold gum the day he was killed!         And now? Now?         Now!         He is this hole without frame that life wanted to frame Because he is not a hole           but a hose always a little too good at sniffing The wind of the apocalyptic          head one sucks on his clenched ass and how good Artaud’s ass is for pimps in penitence And you too you have your gum Your right gum buried         god you too your gum is cold since that time so long ago when you sent me your innate ass to see if I was going to be born           at last since the time you were waiting for me           while scraping           my absentee stomach           menendi enenbi           embenda           tarch enemptle           o marchte rombi           tarch pai et           a tinenptle           orch pendu           o patendi           a marchit           orch yorpch           ta urchpt orchpt           ta tou taurch           campli           ko ti aunch           a ti aunch           aungbli    -- Antonin Artaud (trans. Clayton Eshleman) [Caterpillar #18, 1972]

[fragmentsandextracts]

California Native Flowers

In this spring of 1968 with the last third of the Twentieth Century travelling like a dream toward its end, it is time to plant books to pass them into the ground, so that flowers and vegetables may grow from these pages.    -- Richard Brautigan [Please Plant This Book, 1968]

[fragmentsandextracts]

ROSE IN A HURRICANE

for Philip Lamantia i enter your birds and your gardens i enter your mountains of salt your eyelids of water i enter the sound of invisible bells the crazed light of your energy i open doors to lost hallways to invisible bedrooms i am lost in the telephone call of your voice that        solves nothing i am lost in the desperate clouds of consciousness        and the paths of dark bicycle wheels i enter the hurricane of your long dark hair like an unbuttoned shirt i am lost in your journals i belong to what gaze like a graveyard  that issues        in caves where light never enters i belong to the darkness of your drugged dis-        appearance i enter the changing shores of your eyes like a        reflection of shadows i enter the slope of your nose your stomach your        forehead i enter the pain of old age climbing the stair i enter the eyes of the black and white dogs        running forever i enter the warm uncertain evening in velvet and leather and whatever destinations separate us like identical mirrors split open in pain whatever field and stream i enter becoming autumn        we cannot reject i enter the long empty streets of a hazard the        city of gold the houses of dark windows in passing i belong to the verbs of your arms and your eyelids i belong to the adjectives of your gentle shoulders relaxed im confused to what nouns at the place you begin like an object in shadow where conjunctions emerge and connect like a clause i enter the sentence with an imported switchblade i belong to your twelve languages speaking at once with the        language of silence i enter the untouchable parts of your madness related to mine i remember what loneliness is remembering too the long night and the sand and your arms and the harbors dark searchlights i remember my life existing without me because i shall have to i remember the nights but nothing distinctly i remember so much experience for this dark pain thats within me i remember your hair of ecstasy in an invisible wind this way and that as you leave through the door i once entered while slowly the comforting winter of earth comes to pass circa 1961

   -- Gerard Malanga [Ting Pa #3, 1973]

[fragmentsandextracts]

LA MONTE YOUNG AND MARIAN ZAZEELA INTERVIEWED BY GERARD MALANGA

GM: Maybe we could start out by talking about The Beautiful Book cover you designed, and how that came about.

MZ: I think it was probably a good example of Piero's eye, because he noticed a little drawing which was lying on my table in my house. I lived on East 9th Street at the time. He had found a little house behind a tenement building, and it was a charming little house if you took it out of its surroundings. He had rented the top floor and at the time I met him l was living on Avenue C. Somehow I found living on the ground floor very satisfying. It seemed like that would be the answer to all my problems. So I took the floor beneath him.

GM: When was this?

MZ: It was in 1962 in the Spring. There was nothing in the house. I mean it had a sink, and summer was coming and cold water…

GM: It was a little two story building

MZ: Yeah, in a courtyard and so I moved there and I got to know Piero and Angus better. They were living upstairs.

GM: You met both of them at about the same time?

MZ: I must have met Piero first and then Angus. Anyway he saw a little drawing, about 2x3", and he liked it and said he wanted to use it for the cover of Jack's book

GM: Did you know Jack Smith at the time?

MZ: Oh yeah. All the photographs were already taken.

GM: Did the photographs in The Beautiful Book come before Flaming Creatures?

MZ: Yes. At the time of the still photographs I think Jack's movie camera had been stolen, so in the fit of not having a movie camera he started doing some still-work. That went on over 6 or 8 months, from the fall of '61 all the way through the spring of '62. Then he was getting back to film work. He'd done the script to FLAMING CREATURES and wanted to film it. In fact he painted the set for it in that little house where I lived.

GM: At the time that Piero zeroed in on the little drawing that was on the cover were you aware of Piero's other endeavors with the Dead Language Press?

MZ: If I recall correctly THE BEAUTIFUL BOOK was done much later. I think he took that drawing and kept it quite a while. He and Jack made all the prints and really put the book together by hand. They're all real contact prints. I'm pretty sure that was being done later in the summer and a lot happened inbetween, a lot of events that were pretty important in my life. I’d seen some of Piero’s books. Of course later La Monte and I became very close to Angus and really lived by his calendar. When Piero published the calendar it was very helpful because we had a guide to go to find out what the name of the day was.

GM: At the time you moved in was your relationship with Piero a casual acquaintanship or did you really get inspired by each others’ work?

MZ: I think there was a certain amount of mutual admiration in the relationship although it wasn't in any way a deep relationship or lasting.There was a certain cammeraderie. It was more like he was making contacts and bringing people and events together.

GM: Like as a catalyst.

MZ: Yeah, because it's very possible that he met Jack through me. He was in some of the shooting sessions, not any of those used in THE BEAUTIFUL BOOK but these photographs were culled from months of weekly shooting sessions that Jack arranged at his apartment and Piero did participate in some of them.

GM: There's a flyer... Perhaps we could pinpoint the date of... This is marked 1963. I somehow think there may have been a benefit of some sort when Piero was living on Ludlow Street.

MZ: That's when he put together THE BEAUTIFUL BOOK.

GM: I don't know whose address this is.

MZ: It was a loft and I think that may have been the premiere showing of FLAMING CREATURES in its completed state because I remember seeing in a loft somewhere.

GM: It's quite possible. This is dated February 25th, 1963 and I saw Flaming Creatures that  summer for the first time.

MZ: It was shot in the summer of '62. It must have taken him time to edit it and put it together. We went out to California in the fall and came back in the winter. I think this must have been the first showing of it in more than just rushes.

GM: Flaming Creatures was shot in an old movie theater on Grand St. called the Windsor.

MZ: That's right.

GM: At the time I saw Flaming Creatures I didn't know Piero but I was told later he was in it and I discovered the movie still shot of him. Was he working on the set the entire time that you were working on the film?

MZ: Jack actually wrote the film as a vehicle for me. I was supposed to star in it. Right around the same time he was painting the set I met La Monte and started to live with him and it became sort of a big conflict. It just seemed I had to drop out of the film. So he cast another woman, Sheila Bick, to play the part. I guess we had a big falling out and then we made up or something and Jack decided to commemorate his work with me by including some stills of me in the film.

GM: There were stills in the film? MZ: Yes. If you recall every so often for quite a long time there is a held still. Actually I think Piero is in that still.

LMY: The ones she’s referring to were actually stills in the film. There were long sustained shots where nobody moved. They were unique in the film because she didn’t do the original role that he had planned for her but he still wanted to give her a special place. I thought these stills were an extremely inspired part of the movie.

MZ: They were used in most of the publicity for the film. So actually I didn’t participate in the film at all except this one day when I came over and we did one commemorative shooting session.

GM: In a piece by Sterling Morrison which he sent me for the issue he mentioned your participation in a piece that was presented at the Cinematheque, called Rites of the Dream Weapon which had something to do with Angus.

LMY: It was a benefit for Angus in fact. We gathered a group of musicians together and improvised for some considerable period of time. I was there and I think Terry Riley was there.

GM: Sterling mentions you in another section of that… I guess he mentions you in context here with John Cale. He says, "John was already a member of La Monte Young's Cosmic Ensemble. which was drone music with myriad harmonics and used slide projections.”

LMY: I can only remember the part of the benefit I played in, which had me and Angus and you (Marian) were in it…

GM: He refers to two ritual happenings at the Cinematheque called The Launching of the Dream Weapon which was written up by Archer Winston of the Post. Then there was another celebration which came later called Rites of the Dream Weapon

LMY: Sounds like we would have been in the second one.

GM: You say this was a benefit for Angus?

LMY: It was something like that. It really was a long time ago.

GM: I think Piero’s films were being shown in the background when he was reading poetry or playing saxophone.

LMY: Not during the part where we played but it may have been a big long program. It's very fuzzy.

GM: It sounds very tribal with Piero and Angus and you...

LMY: I was just looking at this l’M FALLING INTO THE DEER'S MOUTH. I remember seeing this book very early.

MZ: The prologue is 1958.

GM: Maybe that's when the book was actually published.

LMY: That would make it possible that it was one of the first things I saw of his back at City Lights when I was going to Berkeley in 59 and 60, which is where I first came across his work and Angus's.

GM: This was before you ever met Piero?

LMY: Yeah, I met him around 60, 61, 62 in NYC. I think I probably met him at the 10th Street Coffee House.

GM: It's funny. I came across Piero's work first in two magazines, New Departures, edited by Michael Horovitz in London and in Locus Solus in which I had also appeared. I think I was a freshman in college. I was attracted to his work and I had this image of Piero because of the way his name sounded, that he was this 50 year old poet. Then I had gone to a party in summer of 63, a party that John Wieners had given while he was staying in Frank O'Hara’s apartment on East 9th Street. John said "Say hello to Piero Heliczer" and I went up to him and I was so totally surprised as he was so different from what I'd imagined him in my mind's eye to be. It's very funny.

LMY: He's the type of person who always seems very young. He seems very informal and once you meet him you feel you probably knew him all your life. I haven't seen him in a long time but I had the impression he would always be boy-like, eternally youthful. I guess I might be quite surprised if I saw him now because I don't know what's become of him.

MZ: He also carried himself like a poet. He was always very poetic in the way he moved his hands. He had a certain delicacy. I was amused to read that he was a child actor in Italy.

GM: Right, that's his big crowning achievement (laughter). He's always pushing that.

(break in tape)

GM: The most recent photograph that I've managed to collect is a picture where he's crowning himself the Emperor of Europe, which corresponds to a letter he wrote in a Dutch magazine. Here it is. Piero always thought of himself as a monarchist. I always think of him as a Chaucer type character.

MZ: Right, with his cape…

LMY: It's in his very lifestyle. He's very idealistic and the practical may perhaps escape him a lot of the time. His way of talking is totally in the clouds. His way of talking in… let's say, this monarchist way of life, is in everything he says. It's coming out all the time. It makes you wonder whether he could make it to the restaurant and buy a sandwich (laughing). It's great for being a poet.

GM: Up to a point. (general laughter)

LMY: For the poetry, let's say. Not so much for being a poet.

GM: This picture was sent to me by someone who knows Piero in Amsterdam. This letter is dated 1974 so I'm not sure if this is a separate event from the letter. This photo might be more recent.

LMY: He's picked up some weight.

GM: Yeah. Piero was always putting weight and putting off weight. When I had come back from Europe in 68… Oh, this is the houseboat that Piero lives on in Amsterdam… and when I came back from Europe I discovered that Piero was commited to the psychiatric ward of St. Vincenet’s Hospital. He had had a nervous breakdown. This was in March or April of 68. I went to the hospital and Piero’s mother was there and Paolo Lionni was there. He had gained so much weight. I still remember the vivid image I had of him when he left the hospital. He reminded me of a Marlon Brando type. He had really put flesh on his arms and body. It was very weird. I'm not sure what he looks like now. He did come visit me about 3 years ago with his Dutch wife from whom he's since divorced. He was a little on the stout side. These pictures here are from 75. This is really typical of Piero with the crazy, mad smile. The thing I hadn't known about Piero or had taken for granted was that he was very musical. He played musical instruments. He was kind of a child prodigy. He had all these incredible grades, A's in Science, Chemistry. It all shifted to poetry.

LMY: I didn't know so much about his musical talent other than through conversation. I know he was very interested in music. I can just imagine him playing Elizabethan music. I think he did, in fact. Either I recall seeing him with a lute or recall his talking about it.

MZ: So you're not sure what he's doing now?

GM: All I know is that he's living on his barge. I guess he's traveling around Europe as he's always done, like a vagabond showing his 8mm movies. He's kind of like a minstrel poet. I look at his kind of existence and it seems so vulnerable.

LMY: Not everyone can do it. In so many ways I'm so middle class. I've gotta have a home. I really am like a tortoise. I have a type of admiration for people who can really just wander all the time and make wherever they are their home. Apparently, to the degree that he thrives, he thrives on it. Apparently he isn't looking for the other way at all.

GM: Perhaps it's a very deep rooted, serious intention on his part. When I was talking to Piero's mother on the phone she hit upon the same idea that I hit upon which is based on his whining all the time that no one is taking his work seriously, and she said, in almost the same way I was thinking about it, that because of the transient type of personality Piero is he makes himself very inaccessible.

LMY: A lot of people have their own built in mechanism for keeping their relationship to the world the same throughout their entire lives. Look at my case. Why do I avoid the public so much? I have success on various levels yet I can manage to avoid putting out a record. Still, at the age of 43, l don't have a record out with a major American company yet. How do I do it? It's obvious if I really wanted that record out there as much as I wanted some of my other musical achievements I could have probably managed it, even though I don't like dealing with record companies because I think they have the wrong slant. I have this rationale about why haven't done it.

GM: But in Pero's case and perhaps in your case also a kind of cult notoreity of fame develops, which is actually very enjoyable.

LMY: You can have various aspects of success and, you know, who's going to measure your achievement? You can be measured by your best friend or your colleagues, the people you admire...

MZ: More importantly I think it allows you time to continue your most important work without a lot of distraction from the public and being forced to perform what the public thinks it should hear from you. Piero will be totally surprised to see that he's gotten any attention at all.

GM: Right. (laughter)

MZ: He'll probably sue you for defamation of character.

GM: I wouldn't put it past him. (laughing) Actually, this project got started in correspondence between me and Anselm Hollo, who's great admirer of Piero's work, back in 1970. Then it sort of fizzled out because we never really made the connection of who was going to do this. There was a press in Iowa that was going to bring out a huge collection of Piero's work, then it fizzled out. I think Anselm got distracted by other things and I was also involved in a lot of other things but in the back of my mind it always stayed with me that someday I was going to do this for Piero because I realised as the years went on less and less was going to be heard from Piero because of his vagabond life. By that happening I felt he was sliding into some kind of obscurity and oblivion.

MZ: Also extreme paranoia.

GM: That too. I felt that the only way to counteract that was to do this gathering of writings by people who had some sort of contact with him. Finally it came through this magazine that I've been sort of spiritual godhead or contributing editor to for the last few issues. So an issue was given to me. I thought I'd better take advantage of this situation now. It's remarkable the kind of responses I've been receiving. It's like being an archaeologist. There’s that Charles Olson phrase “The archaeologist of morning”, of dealing on a contemporary level. The more you delve into the personal history the more material is dredged up to the surface. Only last night I was with Allen Ginsberg and he said You should write to Gregory Corso because Gregory had introduced him to Piero in Cambridge in 58 which was the last year that Piero was up at Harvard before he got kicked out. So I’ve dashed off a letter immediately to him. I got such hell when the interview with Piero came out in Interview because Paul Morrisey was so anti-underground cinema and he wanted to treat the magazine as if it were just some Variety, Hollywood type tabloid. Paul was tearing his hair out. He was fit to be tied.

LMY: I think it's very important that someone like you enjoys publishing and compiling and editing and putting something together totally for your own pleasure. It's obvious you have nothing to gain except the satisfaction of doing a good job and to make a compilation of something on Piero that's really going to be very interesting and show an aspect of his work that probably most people are totally unfamiliar with.

GM: Yeah, so much time has gone by that one has to think in terms of generational periods. There are very few younger poets or artists who are aware of Piero's work, perhaps a little bit with the cinema aspect but not the poetry.

LMY: Look at me. I was young and totally unknown and searching through City Light Bookstore just to see what attracted me. Like what was I going to find in this place? Piero's book and Angus's book back at that time.

GM: I've never seen Angus's books.

LMY: I wonder what the first thing of Angus's that came out was.

GM: According to the list of...

LMY: STRAIGHT?

GM: I thought it was the calendar. (title, YEAR)

LMY: The calendar was early but not that early.

GM: Oh yes, Straight is listed here. That's 1959 in Paris.

LMY: And what did Piero have out at that time?

GM: Umm...

LMY: Was it FALLING INTO THE DEERS MOUTH?

GM: No, that book's not listed here. It's funny because the responses, three or four of them, all mention that book.

MZ: GIRL BODY is another book, I think. But this is a different book.

GM: The Beautiful Book is listed. Straight is listed. The calendar is listed.

LMY: THE BEAUTIFUL BOOK and YEAR were after I came to New York in 1960.

GM: This book is 1959.

LMY: Oh, and STRAIGHT is 59 also?

GM: Yeah.

LMY: Those were the things...

MZ: GIRL BODY you don't have here.

GM: It turns out that Girl Body was a long broadside and I had a copy of that at one time and put it in a plexiglass stand. It cost me $50. Then one day someone knocked it off and the plexiglass broke. it didn't tear anything but the piece was sealed in plexiglass. I didn't know what to do with it.

MZ: It's a relic now. It's probably the only existing copy. You should xerox it.

LMY: Well, I was impressed with the work at that time. It must have been around 59. Piero wasn't still around when we did the DREAM WEAPON piece you referred to earlier, was he?

GM: Yes, according to Sterling Morrison.

LMY: That was in late 65? Yeah, I guess that could be.

GM: That's when Andy and I got involved with the Velvet Underground, coming from a different angle, and I had no idea Piero was involved.

LMY: And Terry Riley was singing in my group, The Theatre of Eternal Music. GM: Maybe we could discuss what exactly went on at the Rites of the Dream Weapon concert.

LMY: The main part that I remember is the music that I performed in.

MZ: I remember Hettie going around lighting incense and making designs out of make-up, making up people's faces

LMY: While we were playing?

MZ: Yes, sort of as a dance.

LMY: Terry played saxophone and I sang and Marian sang. Angus played drums.

GM: At one time I performed with Angus when he was recruited by Lou Reed who was laid up in bed to fill in on a gig we were scheduled to do for about two weeks in Chicago back in 66. I learned percussion from assisting Angus during the performances. He was one of the original members of the group back in 65 but got booted out because one night he decided not to show up for a gig the Velvets were playing at a coffee-house in the West Village. Lou fired him on the spot without a second chance. Lou made it very clear to Angus at this time that he was being asked to come back only on a temporary basis until such time as he was able to get back on his feet. Instead of dancing for the group at this period I became assistant-percussionist. It was a terrific experience.

LMY: Angus is a very inspired drummer. I always enjoyed working with him but he often didn't make the gig or came at the half-way point or something like that. Speaking of these images of one's self or actual personality characteristics that one takes with him through his life, Angus thinks of himself as being very free. Either he is free or wants to be free or both. So whenever structure comes into the picture he doesn't want to participate. He’ll say 'Okay, I'll do it", but he won't.

GM: That's interesting because last December I ran into Angus, had a beer at Mickey's place and I told him about the project and he said he would write a piece for me on the Dead Language Press. I've since sent him many letters and I'm so shocked and surprised that he hasn't followed through.

LMY: I'm sure he'd want to do it.

GM: He was in New York for a week and he didn't call me or anything

LMY: We saw him. It was a very short time he was in New York.

MZ: He was trying to sell his special handmade paper. That's his business now.

LMY: It's an exceptional paper, have you seen it?

GM: I was in an issue of a magazine called Tingpa and he was its editor and publisher.

MZ: I told him we'd met you. He said he was going to do it and he attributed it to some mix-up between the two of you. Maybe he wanted some money. That was it, he thought he should get paid.

GM: Well, I agree with him on a certain level, except this is a little different.

LMY: This is clearly a situation where it has to help Piero and this item itself has so little commercial...

GM: He's the big missing-gap except for Michael Horovitz who is sending me his piece in a few days. Have you had any lasting impressions of Piero's writing?

LMY: I think my most lasting impressions of his writing are of that original book that I saw at City Lights. I felt that it was very inspired and with Angus's STRAIGHT they were a breath of fresh air in what I was finding in the stacks there. Of course what was in the stacks there was the very best. It was like the most interesting material that was being written at that time. That was probably the most important store in the west. There was no other store like that. I think that it was very important that he published THE BEAUTIFUL BOOK and a number of the publications the Dead Language Press produced, but after this book of poetry apparently none of his poetry took me in quite the same way. I don't know if it's that I saw less and less of what he did over the years and… Somehow our paths completely separated after somewhere in the mid-60s I don’t know what happened. We didn’t see each other that frequently and our work took us in directions that didn’t bring us together so often. I think this is not out of line with the reason you’re doing this article. This part of his personality that he represents to reality and the real world of publication and a realization of his work is a lot the way he manifested himself to me, too. We didn’t continue a lot but he probably introduced me to Angus. GM: I think all the relationships, if you take Ira Cohen and Paolo Lionni - they were a team in a sense. They knew the same people. (Marian comes back into the room.) LMY: Marian, I was just pointing out to Gerard that my most lasting impressions of Piero’s work was Piero’s first book and that I didn’t see anymore of his work.

GM: For me it’s come to a complete standstill, with the exception of one poem which was published in a friend’s magazine about two years ago. I haven’t seen any of Piero’s work except what I have on hand. LMY: I think it would be interesting to analyze why he made the strong public appearance he did at that point. Think about why did he change. To get into City Lights at that point, even though you could be far out or experimental or underground, it took something. GM: My theory, which might not be too far fetched although I sometimes question it, is that at that time - 1958 - there was an under-population of poets whereas now there’s an overpopulation. There’s like 200 small presses and magazines and writing programs. Everybody wants to be a poet. At that time, it’s like having fewer people on earth. At that time he really stood out perhaps as a freak because he was the first person at Harvard to wear a beard and also to do small press books.

LMY: Oh, to do something like that at that time was very special. His work in publication was very precocious. And you know, this is not uncommon in the personality of prodigies. In music it's documented.

GM: It's like a very short-term kind of existence.

LMY: There are certainly examples who had the combination of an understanding of the situation and the talent too and they put them together and went on to be models for everybody else.

GM: Also Piero was unique in his own right back in 57, 58 because he could have survived on a very dull scale, gone the way of the academic poet, but instead he went the way of the bohemian poet which was kind of rare at that point.

LMY: He always had trouble with money

MZ: Joan Adler reminisced just before you came that she remembered Piero living on James Street Chinatown. The two of them had nothing, like pennies. LMY: Piero and Stanley Alboum were living there?

GM: I was around when he had that apartment in Chinatown.

MZ: She remembered Piero saying that he was going to Europe and she was wondering how on earth he could possibly get to Europe when he hardly had a nickel.

LMY: But he traveled all the time. I see, he had money. That's how he did it! That's very interesting

MZ: So he's an eccentric.

LMY: Many of these prodigies do grow up in this kind of situation where they have all of the support from the parents and financial support and that's why they're able to achieve some part of what they achieve. It's one thing if you have to work a construction job all day and then come home and write poems as opposed to being in the Maharaja's court and sitting around writing poetry all day and wandering in the gardens.

GM: The court poet. (laughter)

LMY: That's it, you know. If you get started out on that it's very difficult to deal with the real world because you didn't have to do it at a time when you were developing all your talents and primary learning patterns which were going to be in effect for the rest of your life.

GM: But in Piero's case, with his art he was able to break that barrier but in his own personal turmoil he was not able to. That's why he made it seem he was a pauper.

MZ: lt fit his image of himself.

GM: It didn't affect his art, it affected his psychological viewpoint.

LMY: So you think he was successful in financial terms with his artistic productions? In other words it was easier to put out really esoteric things and never get into the major avenues...

GM: But as the years went on he wanted to have that kind of recognition and fame. Perhaps he woke up and found that he created a trap for himself without knowing it and all of a sudden he realised he wasnt getting the recognition that he thought he would achieve.

LMY: It’s rare that you attain the recognition either you deserve or you think you deserve when you do esoteric things like that. I have many times created works which were rather esoteric and you think that the world is somehow going to find out that you did this and later recognise you for it, but it’s rare when they actually do.

GM: It usually happens much later, which is all part of the cult process…

LMY: If at all. Many things like that go overlooked.

GM: Completely until the artist is dead. (laughter) It's all part of the feed for a kind of cult as opposed to a popular type of thing. (Looking at photographs) That was a still from a silent film of Andy's called Couch in which we were just sitting there for three minutes. We really didn't do anything. Piero was playing dead, sleeping, and I was just sitting looking at him in an admiring sort of way. The film was shot at Andy's Factory on East 47th Street.

MZ: You really look like Elvis Presley in this picture. Did anybody ever say that?

GM: Well, not in this picture but people have remarked about that on a couple of occasions, that I look like Elvis Presley (laughing). These are a couple of shots that Don Snyder took of Angus and Ira. Don pointed out to me that this is a very characteristic shot of Angus because he needs glasses and when he doesn't wear them he's always squinting.

LMY: What were your most lasting impressions of Piero's work?

GM: First of all, I thought it was very original, that no one else was writing exactly like Piero...

MZ: A string of abstract images...

GM: ...and all lower-case letters and no punctuation, which is really very characteristic of Piero, and long lines and, as you said, all these incredible images, kind of surrealistic in places and the poems were always very romantic. I also found them to be exotic because he always had these fantastic titles that had something to do with Latin, a kind of Latin involvement in his writing, and these very exotic references that I really didn't know anything about or understood but somehow tuned into as being kind of unique, and very much the master of his own craft. They weren't carelessly strewn together. They were very carefully put together but at the same time they seemed spontaneous. When I looked at the very typescript it almost seemed that Piero had typed the poem as it came through to him, that there were no successive drafts after that. The word magic comes to mind when I think of Piero's poetry, and it's romantic exotic, colorful and it's esoteric too.

MZ: This line, "I remember all of your poems" really characterizes the sort of whining wistfulness of Piero's attitude toward life and people and I think he was a very outgoing, innocent person and the kind of relationships that one has to make to make lasting and successful impressions in life... He's somehow too demanding in some ways.

GM: As you were talking before you even said the word 'demanding’ I was already thinking that Piero thinks that when he leaves a place and he goes away for two years and all of a sudden he comes back that he's going to be able to pick up where he left off and doesn't realize that if you become inaccessible in the sense that he has by traveling, being here and there and everywhere and totally scattered, time passes you by. Time doesn't stand still. Piero thinks he's going to be able to pick up where he left off. Some people can do that. I was able to do that. I went to India, traveled around the world for two years and came back and picked up where I left off but Piero's made himself inaccessible. I still don't understand that inaccessibility.

LMY: What I’m feeling now is something I felt a little earlier in the conversation but didn't mention it until I heard the two of you talk some more about Piero to see if that same picture of Piero was coming back to me. Now I'm starting to think this really makes sense. Maybe it was my relationship with Piero but I felt that, not in his poetry but in real life when Piero spoke that there was very little communication going on. This may have been my problem. When I talk to people I'm usually only interested in the conversation if it's very specific and direct, and if the communication is immediate. Sure, there are times when I just talk; but I feel, if I feel like having a certain kind of conversation, somehow it seemed like… The first impression I had of Piero when I met him, as with his work, was my strongest impression and I really had good feelings being with him. We went off to his place and he showed me his apartment and various works of art he had there. The impression diminished and it seemed that his real ability to communicate with the world in terms of making the kinds of connections which would have made him accessible wasn't in his everyday speech. I felt that he either didn't want to talk the way I wanted to talk...

GM: Sort of like a prima donna...

LMY: ...Let's say I would be talking about dollars and cents and he would be talking about a totally unrelated thing. I wanted to settle whatever it was we were talking about and he was waxing poetic.

GM: Waxing poetic? I don't really know what that term means.

LMY: What I mean is that we didn't communicate. After the first few meetings our communication, in terms of one person talking to the other, it wasn't able to happen. I think that his communication ability is related to his inability to develop anything lasting, as you were saying. It has to do with the kind of communication ability you have to develop at an early age. Let's say that your parents provide you with enough that you don't have to learn how to ask for things or to get things.

GM: You think maybe he put all that energy into his poetry so when you or I came across his poetry it was like he was really talking to us through his work?

LMY. Yes. In fact the first meeting of the man is like his poetry because at the first meeting he's the image of himself. It's nothing practical. The first meeting is all images, his ideals and your ideals. Two people come together and exchange ideals. You don't accomplish anything except meeting the person. With some people the juxtaposition of images work. It’s harmonious. With other people it doesn't work. In this first meeting the exchange of ideals was perfect, everything was really high. All idea were the same and any additional ideals could be agreed upon. Then practical life developed such as dealing with him on the publication of a book, it didn't jell. You couldn't deal with him on that level.

MZ: I think that THE BEAUTIFUL BOOK is one situation where his relationship came to a successful…

LMY: Oh, it did.

MZ: ...so this is a collaboration, let's say, and his eye worked in enlarging this very small drawing and now we still have this impression. To think! It was very good and fitting that I do the cover of the book.

GM: Was Piero aware of your music when you met?

LMY: Oh yeah. I met Marian at Angus's and Piero’s. She had the apartment downstairs. Angus was playing in my group. One day we went to Angus's to rehearse. Also we were playing some Balinese records, I believe. Marian heard the records and came up.

MZ: It sounds corny but we never really left each other after that day in 62.

LMY: I feel that there's this trend coming up that you're beginning to notice in his personality and I think it might be the kind of thing that won't change. Often these things are taken out of the person's hands.

GM: In Piero's case it's not so important to have a ‘commercial success’ because the art was so good to begin with.

LMY: You don't really think, in other words, that the reason were not seeing more of his work has anything to do with a lack of funding for his projects?

GM: No, not at all. I just think that psychologically he's gotten himself into a deep hole.

MZ: It seems to me the letter to the Queen is very paranoid. It seemed his boat was either stolen or ransacked while he was away and he wrote a letter...

GM: There's an interesting story there. Piero writes this letter and there’s another version as to why that happened, that is, I don't have it here with me. Piero had been given some money to guest-edit a magazine. He did something else with the money and these people were going to get even with him and so they ransacked his barge and stole his typewriter and taperecorder as ransom until he paid back the money. I was always concerned with Piero, the way he was living. I said someone's going to break in and take your tapes and you don't have any prints of your movies and they'll rob your original footage and manuscripts bla bla bla. So as the years went on I began collecting all his manuscripts and have pretty much all his writings except for maybe the last few years in which I haven't seen him but once or twice. Four years ago when he came to New York he wanted me to give him all his manuscripts that I had so I made him a xerox of one manuscript and gave that to him because I know that he would just lose them or they would get stolen or they'd get stuck in a storage warehouse and he wouldn't pay the bill. They'd be lost forever. With his work there was always this vulnerable element.

MZ: Are you going to print some of his work?

GM: Yes, besides reprinting the only interview ever done with him. I'm going to print one long poem that's never been printed before called Soul Searching Institute. It's a very long poem, because all the other work of his I have has been in books and magazines. Even though not too many people have seen that work I wanted to print something that's never been seen before. I’m also printing a very long prose piece called Purcell A Textbook, sort of a take-off on Henry Purcell, and also his play Bessie Smith. Also the letter he wrote to Paolo Lionni when he was “busted” back in the 60s and then I'm going to reprint this letter.

MZ: That's right, he and Jack Smith were busted.

LMY: For what?

GM: They got busted trying to protect a friend of theirs, Jack Martin, who got busted for dope. The cops came in and they were wrestling with the cops and were arrested for resisting arrest. Piero's girlfriend at the time was also arrested because she got in a brawl with the plain clothesmen who wouldn't show their badges. Allen gave me all this material this morning. So today Allen gives me these two pieces which are by Jack Martin who's deceased now and a piece by Piero about the bust called Life Is A Poem. LMY: Do you think Piero intended the letter to the Queen to be effective?

GM: I'll tell you the truth. I think that in the back of his paranoid mind he thought he was going to get some action resulting from this letter (laughing).

LMY: This is what I mean about his communication. He thought that he was writing a letter to the Queen and he presented it in very noble terms and you can see that as soon as anybody reads this letter the secretary won't even bring it to the Queen's attention. It's very poetic. There's poetry all the way through it and the stories are so wild about these types of sabotage and how they involve him personally.

GM: I was thinking while I read the letter that if it brought any attention to Piero they'd probably start investigating him. This kind of traitorous act against the government of Holland is...

MZ: No, but he endorses monarchy.

GM: Oh, he does.

LMY: It's like a crank letter. It's related to the kind of crank letter that people in offices get all the time.

GM: Except it's very well-written.

LMY: It's beautifully written. The technique is exceptionally funny. This is high level humor. It definitely represents an aspect of his best work.

GM: It's very funny, last year I get this form in the mail from the Guggenheim Foundation. Piero had put my name down to recommend him for a Guggenheim. They sent me a copy of his proposed project which was very serious but he was talking of $50,000 to document all his writings and to put his files in order and all these weird things and I was thinking to myself, Oh my God, the Guggenheim people have read this and they're going to think he’s totally nuts. So I called them up and asked in what category Piero was applying. I think they said to me that he was applying in poetry or I might have made that decision on my own. So I gave him this whopping, incredible recommendation and they know my name because I've applied so many times, so they probably wondered where I was coming from? I stuck to my guns. I knew he wouldn't get it. I just wanted to clear the air for him to show that his work is something I do appreciate.

LMY: That's interesting. I guess then when we say he's not dealing with the real world we mean the world of recognition. He's not being recognized for his work. Isn't that it?

GM: Yes, that's of the things. But it's not like he doesn't understand one the mechanics of sending work to a magazine with a self-addressed envelope.

MZ: I think that his way was through personal contact, knowing people who were "in" and running things at one time. That same electricity isn't operating now.

LMY: Where is he now?

GM: He's in Amsterdam.

LMY. What is he doing there?

GM: I think what he's doing is showing what's left of his films. Perhaps he's still writing poetry. He did give a reading where he was photographed crowning himself the Emperor of Europe. I just don't know what the extent of his recent work is.

MZ: We never saw any of his films.

GM: Really? On, they're so beautiful! They're these pastoral b&w, grainy 8mm films. These stills here are the only things that survive. This is Ted Berrigan here. This is called Joan of Arc and I play Joan of Arc at one point (laughing) or I play her lady in waiting. This was shot on his rooftop on East 11th or 9th Street. Everybody had to wear costumes and have swords and guns and cowboy hats. Everything was so eclectic, all these images clashed and lumped together then he would have soundtracks. He had a soundtrack of a tape of yours that I doubt he still has anymore. He was playing it one night as background music and I said Who's music is this? This was really great. And he said La Monte Young. He never had a sound on the film so whenever he showed it he had the taperecorder. They were great, really beautiful, little delicate gems. You could never achieve that with 16mm. It was these big elaborate productions. And he had a little 8mm movie camera. It's like putting a Cadillac engine in a Volkswagen. It was that kind of misproportion. It was very odd. In fact this is a shot where I play Lord Byron and Paolo was chasing me with knife in the shape of a fish all over the rooftop. This is Susan Bottomly, a fashion model. This picture was taken the last time I saw Piero. This was at The 1974 Avant-Garde Film Festival at Shea Stadium. Piero was out there showing his movies and I went with a friend of mine, Jed Horne. I got the two of them in this picture together. Anyway, this was the last time I saw him show his films. They’re little gems. As you say, he really has an eye, a film-making eye as well as one for words. This is from the Screen Test book which he also used in his last book The Soap Opera. That's 1967 and it was his last book. I'm trying to start a  publishing company with Daia to do four books a year. I’d like to do The Collected Works of Piero.

MZ: Do you ever hear from Kate?

GM: She's in London and I received a letter from her. She’s responsible for putting me in contact with Piero's mother. His mother lives out in Forest Hills. She has an importing business and keeps an office in the city.

LMY: I think his imagery of himself is very good... but the verbal relationship. He's into a land of fantasy and that’s very interesting.

GM: I was looking at Canterbury Tales with woodcut illustrations. In the magazine I’m going to reproduce this woodcut of a knight on a horse. It really relates to his poetry.

LMY: It takes an eye like yours to see the extent of this image of his work because any one of us seemed to have just our own relationship with Piero but by you're taking an interest in archiving his work you’re able to examine many more aspects of the work than it’s possible to see from our point.

GM: I’ve enjoyed his work for so long. I always recognised the increasing lack of availability of his work to the point where it is really unavailable. All his books are totally out of print: He hasn't been published in any magazines recently except for one or two places. I feel that his work is that strong and valuable that its not for me to horde and enjoy for myself. Other people should see it. So now at the end of it he'll hopefully quiet down and not complain. (laughter)

LMY: You will probably be presenting this overall view of his work to anyone else besides yourself for the first time. Nobody else has perhaps this complete image of Piero. How many other people had archives?

GM: Really no one. Piero's mother told me on the phone that somebody was collecting his work at Harvard. He’d told her this, but that sounds farfetched to me.

LMY: They might have some of his books or something.

GM: I just don't know who would know of his work outside the few friends and acquaintances. So guess this is the first time for Piero on any kind of grand scale. The magazine... it's a neat little literary magazine. The editor is very young. He's twenty-five and a really good poet, and I got him interested in Piero's work. He’s turned over one issue of the magazine to me.

LMY: Well, it’s a major work.

GM: Yeah, it's never going to be complete. When go to press at the end of the month it'll be a large thing but...

LMY: Well, it can be the introduction to THE COMPLETE.

GM: Yeah, this could later be reprinted as a book and by then maybe Angus would chip in.

LMY: Apparently Angus tries to live over there on next to nothing. That’s a lifestyle. Some people wouldn't want it any other way. I don't know when or where I got all these middle-class tendencies.

GM: Well, you don't travel light. (laughter) When I went to India, and I think I might have been there when you were there… when I started travelling I knew this was a major journey and put everything in storage.

LMY: You can't take everything with you, but we take a few crutches with us when we go. We've been to India four times. You notice again and again there are certain things that should have brought with you.

GM: My philosophy is that if you let things go they’re always going to come back to you. I had a terrific library collection and sold it to Phoenix when I went off to India and three years later I amassed another book collection, almost as fine as the first.

LMY: It's not the things that are bad but the attachment to them

GM: Yeah, it was like a test for me because before I got to India I sent back my cameras to America. For me to do something like that, relieve myself of the ten pounds of metal… Let me ask you one more question. Being that I’m dealing with Piero and all the different aspects of him like Angus and yourselves, we haven't really touched on Ira Cohen - how all that came about.

MZ: We never knew Ira very well.

LMY: No, but my image of Ira is that he must be one of the most organized of the three. He can make a film and all sorts of things.

GM: But he is also a vagabond like Piero. MZ: One of the things that brought us together is that my ex-husband married his ex-wife, so we’ve always felt this kind of bond but actually we never really knew Ira very well.

GM: There was no real artistic connection?

LMY: No participation, no. We appreciated him.

MZ: Did you ever know Irving Rosenthal?

GM: I met Irving out in California. I was living with Pristine of the Cockettes in 72 and I was taken to somebody's house by Harold Norse to meet Irving Rosenthal and Irving couldn't care less. Harold was very paranoid about Irving's stuff, Irving's becoming a guru of a cult of guys dressing up as girls. They were like if Jack Smith had a few babies, glitter and dust and angel hair. But I only met him once. I guess Ira knew Irving

MZ: Right. Ira published something of Irving's. I was very close to Irving and he was a mentor to me and sort of guided me through a very depressed period of my life. I met Jack through Irving and he suggested that it would be worthwhile for me to do some modeling for Jack. Naturally it was very involving. These things always happen you know - conflicts just when everybody's getting together. There was a very serious rift. It seems like all the events of those years were very heavily charged.

[Little Caesar #9, 1979]

[fragmentsandextracts]

ON ANGER

INVOCATION OF MY DEMON BROTHER.     A film by Kenneth Anger.                                                              Soundtrack by Mick Jagger.

frenzy of magician / mitrailleuse / machine gun is also a woman / savaging the invoker’s breath /                                                                           star arms / a skin / wrapped & unwrapped for Lady Babalon / enstasis of the woman’s face / a conscious Falconetti lifting her blue eyes, brown nipples / drip with light If you’ve got good news, burn it. That’s the news, turn everything to conscious fire. / The dark magician becomes Magus /                                                 The abyss                                                 was syntax                                                 & we lost our way. But our way was fire & we learn to burn. We do not have to go that way again. Juggler in red pants & old books led us out. Grand Canyon, red strata flaming streets up to the blue who who you / sky / to whom her arms /                                 exult / face knowing the silence behind the music / science / as a man would enter a woman knowing only the beginning /                                  Boys sulk naked on the sofa. Bacchuses flaccid. Rouse them. The breath of the magician wakes them / the flicker (heartbeat of an eye) wakes them. Pain would rouse them but the pain is gone all over into the magician / electric light poured from an urn, he burns his message in the cold grass * brown nipples touchstones truer / Red Devil / White Devil / Brown Nipples / dirty fingers do a joint / the skull allows            the smoke / allows the magician / reads it all in his pain, crosses the abyss & burns his hands. Stay in there. Lubed anus clenches on a star studded seedcock /                                 my lady ‘s a star, an eye / inside me looking out one eye / for all my travelling    . * this is the movie of what phallus sees coming to its furnace, nest where it dies & up it flies, these images up the spine / Eye of Horus / Lord / who sees in us such liberty.                                                         RK -- Robert Kelly [Caterpillar #10, January 1970]

[fragmentsandextracts]

HYPODERMIC LIGHT

It’s absurd I can’t bring my soul to the eye of odoriferous fire my soul whose teeth never leave their cadavers my soul twisted on rocks of mental freeways my soul that hates music I would rather not see the Rose in my thoughts take on illusionary   prerogatives it is enough to have eaten bourgeois testicles it is enough that the masses are all sodomites Good Morning the ships are in I’ve brought the gold to burn Moctezuma I’m in a tipi joking with seers I’m smoking yahnah I’m in a joint smoking marijuana with a cat who looks like Jesus Christ heroin is a door always opened by white women my first act of treason was to be born! I’m at war with the Zodiac my suffering comes on as a fire going out O beautiful world contemplation!

It’s a fact my soul is smoking!

*

That the total hatred wants to annihilate me! it’s the sickness of american pus against which I’m hallucinated I’m sick of language I want this wall I see under my eyes break up and shatter you I’m talking all poems after God I want the table of visions to send me oriole opium A state of siege It’s possible to live directly from elementals! hell stamps out vegetable   spirits, zombies attack heaven! the marvelous put down by   martial law, America fucked by a stick of marijuana paper money larded for frying corpses! HERE comes the Gorgon! THERE’S the outhouse!

         Come up from dead things, anus of the sun!

*

old after midnight spasm juke box waits for junk round about midnight music combing bop hair getting ready to cook Jupiter wails! heroins of visionary wakeup in light of Bird and The Going Forth By   Day the pipe’s spiritual brain winters off the Nile old hypodermic needle   under foot of Anubis                                          Mother Death I’m at the boat of Ra Set I’m Osiris hunting stars his black tail of the sun! It’s the end of melancholy       sad      bop      midnights.

*

They shot me full of holes at Kohlema’s hut! It’s your who’ll be butchered in my precise imagination It’ll be hard to withstand the reasoning of peyotl Rack

  many times my song went downstairs, people of entire hate and I burned you in basements without tearing my face up O people I hate the most! glass automobiles snake by to decay decay is   living anthill where yr automobiles lift their skirts and stiff pricks of dead indians going in reverse automobile graveyards where I eat fenders, bodies I crunch mustards of   engines I devour whole gallons of molding chrome I whip cheese   from cannibal hoods

O beautiful people of hate! your money fenders how creamy! your electric   eyes stinking! your geometric reconstructions against my   destructions!

   -- Philip Lamantia [Destroyed Works, 1962]

[fragmentsandextracts]

Something For The Touts, The Nuns, The Grocery Clerks, And You...

we have everything and we have nothing and some men do it in churches and some men do it by tearing butterflies in half and some men do it in Palm Springs laying it into butterblondes with Cadillac souls Cadillacs and butterflies nothing and everything, the face melting down to the last puff in a cellar in Corpus Christi. there's something for the touts, the nuns, the grocery clerks and you... something at 8 a.m., something in the library something in the river, everything and nothing. in the slaughterhouse it comes running along the ceiling on a hook, and you swing it -- one two three and then you've got it, $200 worth of dead meat, its bones against your bones something and nothing. it's always early enough to die and it's always too late, and the drill of blood in the basin white it tells you nothing at all and the gravediggers playing poker over 5 a.m. coffee, waiting for the grass to dismiss the frost... they tell you nothing at all. we have everything and we have nothing -- days with glass edges and the impossible stink of river moss -- worse than shit; checkerboard days of moves and countermoves, fagged interest, with as much sense in defeat as in victory; slow days like mules humping it slagged and sullen and sun-glazed up a road where a madman sits waiting among bluejays and wrens netted in and sucked a flakey grey. good days too of wine and shouting, fights in alleys, fat legs of women striving around your bowels buried in moans, the signs in bullrings like diamonds hollering Mother Capri, violets coming out of the ground telling you to forget the dead armies and the loves that robbed you. days when children say funny and brilliant things like savages trying to send you a message through their bodies while their bodies are still alive enough to transmit and feel and run up and down without locks and paychecks and ideals and possessions and beetle-like opinions. days when you can cry all day long in a green room with the door locked, days when you can laugh at the breadman because his legs are too long, days of looking at hedges... and nothing, and nothing, the days of the bosses, yellow men with bad breath and big feet, men who look like frogs, hyenas, men who walk as if melody had never been invented, men who think it is intelligent to hire and fire and profit, men with expensive wives they possess like 60 acres of ground to be drilled or shown-off or to be walled away from the incompetent, men who'd kill you because they're crazy and justify it because it's the law, men who stand in front of windows 30 feet wide and see nothing, men with luxury yachts who can sail around the world and yet never get out of their vest pockets, men like snails, men like eels, men like slugs, and not as good... and nothing, getting your last paycheck at a harbor, at a factory, at a hospital, at an aircraft plant, at a penny arcade, at a barbershop, at a job you didn't want anyway. income tax, sickness, servility, broken arms, broken heads -- all the stuffing come out like an old pillow. we have everything and we have nothing. some do it well enough for a while and then give way. fame gets them or disgust or age or lack of proper diet or ink across the eyes or children in college or new cars or broken backs while skiing in Switzerland or new politics or new wives or just natural change and decay -- the man you knew yesterday hooking for ten rounds or drinking for three days and three nights by the Sawtooth mountains now just something under a sheet or a cross or a stone or under an easy delusion, or packing a bible or a golf bag or a briefcase: how they go, how they go! -- all the ones you thought would never go. days like this. like your day today. maybe the rain on the window trying to get through to you. what do you see today? what is it? where are you? the best days are sometimes the first, sometimes the middle and even sometimes the last. the vacant lots are not bad, churches in Europe on postcards are not bad. people in wax museums frozen into their best sterility are not bad, horrible but not bad. the cannon, think of the cannon, and toast for breakfast the coffee hot enough you know your tongue is still there, three geraniums outside a window, trying to be red and trying to be pink and trying to be geraniums, no wonder sometimes the women cry, no wonder the mules don't want to go up the hill. are you in a hotel room in Detroit looking for a cigarette? one more good day. a little bit of it. and as the nurses come out of the building after their shift, having had enough, eight nurses with different names and different places to go -- walking across the lawn, some of them want cocoa and a paper, some of them want a hot bath, some of them want a man, some of them are hardly thinking at all. enough and not enough. arcs and pilgrims, oranges gutters, ferns, antibodies, boxes of tissue paper. in the most decent sometimes sun there is the softsmoke feeling from urns and the canned sound of old battleplanes and if you go inside and run your finger along the window ledge you'll find dirt, maybe even earth. and if you look out the window there will be the day, and as you get older you'll keep looking keep looking sucking your tongue in a little ah ah   no no   maybe some do it naturally some obscenely everywhere.    -- Charles Bukowski [Crucifix in a Deathhand, 1965]

[fragmentsandextracts]

Alba

Crouching in my arms against this old army shirt,      breathing the tin taste of my day's weat, she      says nothing and concerns herself with her pre-      carious balance, the tightwire she walks from      fleshcage to fleshcage. This is her scene, and it is quite right among the      bongos sounding through the wall, John the Lush pounding bad riffs on a borrowed drum,      splintered, frenetic, out on the slippery edge of      dementia, And up the airshaft sounding the toilet-edge vomit      of a nameless drunk, Gallo tokay, you can puke all      day, tired past dismay. This is her scene, this quiet crouch within bad sounds,      surrounded by her ten cent shoes and her yesterday's      pants and her just-in-case jar of peanut butter, this      crouch against my shirt with her nose in my sweat. She is nervous on three bennies and has tentative soft      fantasies about spooks and she will stay a little      while if I don't hold her too tightly. I have lived like a priest in this bare room three      months and to have her here, a sad tired robin,      well, I feel honored and a little incredulous. Orange lipstick on my pillowcase and the smell of her      in my beard are enough to make me hum in private, a      luxury of long ago. And if the poem fails it is not because her smile is      not beautiful to touch.    -- John Thomas [The Floating Bear #13, 1961]

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Fireworks

   "Is it your glasses?" said Jonna without looking up from her work. After a while she said, "Have you looked in all your pockets? The last place I saw them was in the bathroom."    Mari said nothing. Her steps went from the studio to the library and back again, to the bedroom, to the front hall.    "Tell me what you're looking for."    "Oh, some papers. A letter. It's not important."    Jonna stood up, went into the library, and looked under the table. There lay several sheets of blue paper covered with writing.    "She writes on both sides and doesn't number her pages," Mari explained. "Do you have time to talk?"    "No," said Jonna amiably.    Mari gathered up the papers.    "Okay, what does she want?" Jonna went on. "A brief summary."    "She wants to know what's the meaning of life," Mari said. "And she's in a hurry, she says."    Jonna sat down and waited.    "She thinks I have life experience, like you're supposed to have when you're old. What should I say?"    "Well, how old is she herself, this person?"    "She's not old - barely fifty."    "Poor Mari," said Jonna. "Say you don't know."    "I can't. And I can't say work is the most important thing because she doesn't like her job."    "What's her name?"    "Linnea."    "How about simply love?"    "Won't do! She's completely alone; no one loves her."    "And there's no one she cares about? No one to take care of?"    "Not that I know of."    "Does she read? Is she interested in world events?"    "I don't think so. Now you're going to ask if she has a hobby, but she doesn't. And she's not religious."    "This happens all the time," said Jonna. "Again and again. Now, once and for all, try to write down the meaning of life and then take a photocopy so you can use it again next time. I'm sorry, but I'm afraid you're going to have to deal with your Linnea by yourself."    "Oh, that's just wonderful!" Mari exclaimed. "Thank you very much. It's all very well and good for you. What do you care about the meaning of life? You don't have to explain it and don't get hard letters from people you've never met, and of course won't ever have to meet. And you've got someone else to compose your thank-you letters and sympathy notes and politely decline all the invitations you don't care for. Marvelous!"    Jonna stood with her back to Mari, looking out the window. "Of course. You're right. But come here a minute. The harbor is lovely in the fog."    The harbor really was lovely. Black channels cut through the ice all the way tot he distant quays where the big ships lay barely visible.    "So terribly lonely," Mari said. "But Jonna, try to help me here. Could I write to her about experiencing very simple things...""    "Like what?"    "Well, for example, that spring is coming? Or just buying pretty fruit and arranging it in a bowl...Or a great, stately thunderstorm moving closer..."    "I don't believe your Linnea likes thunderstorms," Jonna said. And at that instant a skyrocket rose silently into the air far off across the harbor. The winter sky began to burst with repeated explosions of color that paused for a few seconds in their beauty before sinking slowly and giving way to new multicolored roses, a lavish splendor repeated again and again, softened by the fog and for that reason more mysterious.    Jonna said, "I'll bet it's some foreign cruise ship entertaining its passengers. My, they're far away. Now a white one...That's really the prettiest because it makes the harbor look so black."    They waited, but nothing more happened.    "I think I'll go and work a little more," Jonna said. "Don't look so worried. Maybe your Linnea saw the same fireworks and it cheered her up."    "Not her! She looks out on a dismal courtyard, because her neighbor got the whole view of the harbor..."    "Neighbor?"    "Yes, a woman who just goes on and on about what she should do and what she should wear and what food she should buy and how to file her taxes and so on."    "Really?" said Jonna. "Remarkable. It seems to me there's a lot of affection in all that. I begin to suspect that maybe your poor Linnea did get a look at the fireworks after all and that she's getting along just fine. Write to her, now, and get it out of the way."    Mari sat down and write. When she was done, she went into the studio and asked if she could read it aloud.    "I'd rather you didn't," Jonna said. "Your juice is on the spice shelf. And take the torch, the light's out in the attic. Are you going to the post office tomorrow?"    "Yes. Do you want me to pick up your parcels?"    "I'll get them later; they're too heavy. But could you pick up some tomatoes and cheese and detergent on the way home? And mustard? I Made a list. And put on something warm; they're saying it'll be down to ten degrees tomorrow. Now don't lose the list, and be careful on the street - it's going to be really icy."    "Yes, yes, yes," Mari said. "I know, I know."    On her way across the attic, Mari stopped as usual and gazed out across the harbor. She thought absentmindedly of Linnea, who knew nothing about love.    -- Tove Jansson [Fair Play, 1982]

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The Beautiful Day VII

the wild man broke                                 into the room where                                                                    she cringed like a child in                                    a corner 'the crew'                   was also there, bravely                                                          watching, their faces sopping up                                       the air. he screamed,                          "say one                                         word & die!!" his hand crushed                                            her two lips together to                    assure she didn't. he scream went back                                      in. then, when                     all was moss                                             & fresh linen           he licked the                                 blood from her lips   — A.B. Spellman [The Floating Bear #13, 1961]

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the beautiful day VI

came down from the sky & settled                  on my eye.    this is what snow                           does.    there you go, an object                                    of snow the day              melts into water.    -- A.B. Spellman [The Floating Bear #13, 1961]