ccf@cbosgd.UUCP (Chuck F.) (03/30/84)
Before broaching my theme, I think it stupid that it should be necessary (I imagine not everyone will be of my opinion, if I am mistaken) for me to set beside me an open inkwell and a few sheets of unspitballed paper. Thus it will be possible to begin, with love, this final article, the series of instructive articles I have longed to produce. Articles of a relentless utility! Our hero realized that by frequenting caves and taking refuge in inaccessible places he was transgressing the rules of logic and setting up a vicious circle. For if on the one hand he thus encouraged his repugnance for man by the compensation of solitude and distance, and passively circumscribed his limited horizon amid stunted bushes, brambles, and creepers, on the other hand his activity no longer found any nutriment to feed his perverse instincts. Consequently he resolved to draw nearer to human agglomerations. The radiant past has made brilliant promises to the future: it will keep them. To scrape together my sentences I needed to employ the natural method, regressing to the savages so they may give me lessons. Simple and majestic gentlemen, their gracious mouths ennoble all that flows from their tattooed lips. It has been proved that nothing in the world is laughable. Droll but lofty planet. Grasping a style some may find naive (when it is so profound), I make it serve to interpret ideas which unfortunately may not seem imposing. For that very reason, ridding myself of the light and skeptical turn of ordinary conversation, and prudent enough not to pose... I no longer know what I was intending to say, for I do not remember the start of the sentence. But I know this: poetry happens to be wherever the stupidly mocking smile of duck-faced man is not. First I am going to blow my nose, because I need to, and then, mightily aided by my hand, I shall again take up the pen-holder my fingers had let fall. Without resolving to go further, I am wondering whether I spoke of the way to kill flies. I did, didn't I? It is no less true that I did not speak of the destruction of the rhinoceros. Of flies: one crushes them between the thumb and forefinger. If the reader should find this article too long, I trust he will accept my apologies; but let him expect no servilities from me. Anyhow, how do you know you won't like it? I suspect it will delight those twin hideous holes in your unspeakable snout; your nostrils, dilated with sublime content, will ask nothing more, for they shall be sated with a perfect happiness, not unlike the ecstasy of angels living in heaven: It was a spring day. Birds spilled out their warbling canticles, and humans, having answered their various calls of duty, were bathing in the sanctity of fatigue. Everything was working out its destiny: trees, planets, sharks. All except the Creator! He was stretched out on the highway, his clothing torn. His lower lip hung down like a soporific cable. His teeth were unbrushed, and dust clogged the blond waves of his hair. Numbed by a torpid drowsiness, crushed against the pebbles, his body was making futile efforts to get up again. His strength had left him, and he lay there weak as an earthworm, impassive as tree-bark. Gouts of wine swamped the ruts trenched by the nervous twitches of his shoulders. Swine-snouted brutishness shielded him with protective wing and cast on him its loving look. His two slack-muscled legs swept the soil. Blood flowed from his nostrils: his face had hit a stake as he fell. He was drunk! He filled the air with garbled comments I will refrain from repeating here; even if the Supreme Drunkard has no self-respect, I still do. We will never know how difficult a thing it becomes, constantly to be holding the reins of the universe. Sometimes the blood rushes to the head as one strives to wrest from nothingness a new race of spirits. The Mind, overstimulated, retreats and perhaps once in a lifetime may well fall into aberrations. Let us withdraw silently. I have forgotten where I was. To construct mechanically the brain of such a somniferous tale, it is not enought to dissect nonsense and mightily to stupify the reader's intelligence, so as to paralyze his faculties for the rest of his life by fatigue; one must, besides, make it somnambulistically impossible for him to move, against his nature forcing his eyes to cloud over at your own fixed stare. I mean -- not to make myself better understood, but only in order to develop my train of thought which through a most penetrating harmony interests and irritates at the same time -- that I do not think it necessary, in order to reach the proposed end, to invent a style quite outside the ordinary course of nature, whose pernicious breath seems to unsettle even absolute truths; but to bring about a similar result (consonant, moreover, with the laws of aesthetics, if one thinks it over) is not as easy as one imagines: this is what I wanted to say. If death arrests my efforts, I want the mourning reader at least to be able to say to himself: One must give him his due. He has considerably cretinized me. What wouldn't he have done had he lived longer? -- Let those touching words be engraved on my marble tombstone. But I have gone on long enough. It is time to curb my inspiration and to pause a while along the way. It is good to inspect the course already run, and then, limbs rested, well.... To complete a stage of a journey is not easy, and the wings become very weary during a high flight without hope and without remorse. Let us go no further through the minefields of this impetuous article. The crocodile will not change a word of what gushes from his cranium. It can't be helped if some furtive shadow, roused by the laudible aim of avenging the humanity unjustly attacked, surreptitiously opens the door of my room and, brushing against the wall like a gull's wing, plunges a dagger into the ribs of the wrecker, the plunderer, of celestial flotsam! Clay might just as well dissolve its atoms in this manner as in another. *<--- chuck --->* cbosgd!ccf BTL Columbus