the narrow dagger, the wedded death
Distant in your hidden bed,& glad dreaming; dreaming far away from hulking despicable writer bear, conning tower raised high to broadcast useless were-animal plans to a patient world of would-be friends & enemies. All noise, no thinking; all failure, no trust in he that broods like a chameleon in the self's cavern.
That he sits late, hiding, is known to the agents of the angel. That the weight of the planet Jupiter crushes him in the not-quite-heard melody of the Mississippi is known and true. That all this coming to pass is unlikely & that his betrayals are only surrenders: this is true and sad and butchered by his terrible stupidity.
And there are cries, angelic friend. Surrender, go to the post, give something once and let it go at that. I hear too much in my ice age. I cannot let the well enoughs alone. I shrug my coat off trying for death by exposure. There is no switch to throw for self electrocution, no decent home lobotomy kit to take care of these thoughts. My legs are falling asleep with the messages of spear wounds from other worlds. I have to stand, to stomp this flesh. It won't cure it, but you have to try.
And none of it will ever work. You won't come in a radiant vision this callous midnight. There will be no golden heat, no sun in sympathy, no rain to keep the measure: failure, failure once again. The list grows. The measure of worth, the image of a prayer. The coulds, the maybes, the broken promises, the wedded death, the ways this world conspired to prove my instant loss no matter how I'd take & shake the cylinder, holding it to the light trying desperately to see in—to be in—side of you.
And all this silly martyrdom leaves no cloth to cover me. No flag to drape on this thin-lined box. So silly, so absurd, so ridiculous in the breath that stops me now. My hands, the children's game I've made of it.
I gotta quit scrawling these midnight notes. The lists are crude deceptions later on. (Soon enough) I'll know in spirit how close to the wall erected in these words I have come.
No love tonight. But g*d is a well-known fascist, in any incarnation. Your loving disappearance is the melody of my loneliness. We are all, I guess, scared. The bombs of these thoughts are necessary though. You cannot make that omelette without you break some eggs (clear, clear viscuous membranic sheet of semen is a cloth falling open like a curtain. Should I grab my cock and make a poem of this pain? All the standing fluid starts to rot inside, like witheld rain).
She'd sometimes see me, simple lusting eyes. So well trained, but not this fear, now. No, she shirked no sacred duty. Her hands like time machines described the arc of many days and several years and held a narrow dagger to my heart—she promised to tear me open when it seemed fitting. There was respect in that.
You always knew more than you let on, old friend.
A notebook entry from 1977, perhaps in the fall. Other parts of the entry note that it is about five a.m. on Scarritt Street and I am trying not to make any noise in the household. At the time I was a devotee of Aleister Crowley's Book of Thoth and the deck of cards that goes with it; the egyptian tarot. Whether there was any tarot in egypt or not (it's pretty unlikely), the cards are wonderful and the Book of Thoth, Crowley's explication of the origin and meaning of the various archetypes embodied by the cards is quite worth the struggle through Crowley's seemingly endless bullshit. He speaks, repeatedly, about the spirit who guides the supplicant, the person using the deck to find out truths in this universe. That spirit he characterizes as the Hru angel. Yes, there's a longwinded explanation why this spirit has this weird name, but all that order of the golden dawn stuff is full of this sort of almost sensical b.s.
Of course quite a bit of it has that old Jungian subconscious archetype stuff going on in it, so leave me not appear to write it off entirely. I will say that one of the things I found from my trips through the cards is that the angel can lie to you and will. Now you can argue with me and tell me that it's my subconscious trying to manipulate me and I will nod my head and say, sure thing. But it doesn't make any difference what the explanation for it is, it is true. And once you've divined that you can walk away from the kind of information you get from these games knowing that it could all just be an illusion. We mostly hear what we want to, isn't that true?
Of course the two themes of this piece are the golden girl and the suicide I wanted to be. I've tried in my life a few times, but never that seriously, except for the time Bradway brought me to in 1993. I think I am past that need; the years are getting short anyway. Jerzy Kosinski committed suicide in his fifties, afraid of getting old and not being able to do it. He pulled a plastic bag over his head and breathed carbon monoxide. It's said to be a very calm and peaceful death. Hemingway, of course, blew his own head off with a fine shotgun, because (if you believe the scuttlebutt) he couldn't get his weiner to work anymore (with the girls, man, with the girls). I can understand how that might depress someone. I don't want to think about the time I am past sex. Perhaps that day is a figment of my imagination. You cannot know these things. And it's a good thing, too. Imagine how pissed we would all be if we had a firm date for the dissolution of the self?
That he sits late, hiding, is known to the agents of the angel. That the weight of the planet Jupiter crushes him in the not-quite-heard melody of the Mississippi is known and true. That all this coming to pass is unlikely & that his betrayals are only surrenders: this is true and sad and butchered by his terrible stupidity.
And there are cries, angelic friend. Surrender, go to the post, give something once and let it go at that. I hear too much in my ice age. I cannot let the well enoughs alone. I shrug my coat off trying for death by exposure. There is no switch to throw for self electrocution, no decent home lobotomy kit to take care of these thoughts. My legs are falling asleep with the messages of spear wounds from other worlds. I have to stand, to stomp this flesh. It won't cure it, but you have to try.
And none of it will ever work. You won't come in a radiant vision this callous midnight. There will be no golden heat, no sun in sympathy, no rain to keep the measure: failure, failure once again. The list grows. The measure of worth, the image of a prayer. The coulds, the maybes, the broken promises, the wedded death, the ways this world conspired to prove my instant loss no matter how I'd take & shake the cylinder, holding it to the light trying desperately to see in—to be in—side of you.
And all this silly martyrdom leaves no cloth to cover me. No flag to drape on this thin-lined box. So silly, so absurd, so ridiculous in the breath that stops me now. My hands, the children's game I've made of it.
I gotta quit scrawling these midnight notes. The lists are crude deceptions later on. (Soon enough) I'll know in spirit how close to the wall erected in these words I have come.
No love tonight. But g*d is a well-known fascist, in any incarnation. Your loving disappearance is the melody of my loneliness. We are all, I guess, scared. The bombs of these thoughts are necessary though. You cannot make that omelette without you break some eggs (clear, clear viscuous membranic sheet of semen is a cloth falling open like a curtain. Should I grab my cock and make a poem of this pain? All the standing fluid starts to rot inside, like witheld rain).
She'd sometimes see me, simple lusting eyes. So well trained, but not this fear, now. No, she shirked no sacred duty. Her hands like time machines described the arc of many days and several years and held a narrow dagger to my heart—she promised to tear me open when it seemed fitting. There was respect in that.
You always knew more than you let on, old friend.
A notebook entry from 1977, perhaps in the fall. Other parts of the entry note that it is about five a.m. on Scarritt Street and I am trying not to make any noise in the household. At the time I was a devotee of Aleister Crowley's Book of Thoth and the deck of cards that goes with it; the egyptian tarot. Whether there was any tarot in egypt or not (it's pretty unlikely), the cards are wonderful and the Book of Thoth, Crowley's explication of the origin and meaning of the various archetypes embodied by the cards is quite worth the struggle through Crowley's seemingly endless bullshit. He speaks, repeatedly, about the spirit who guides the supplicant, the person using the deck to find out truths in this universe. That spirit he characterizes as the Hru angel. Yes, there's a longwinded explanation why this spirit has this weird name, but all that order of the golden dawn stuff is full of this sort of almost sensical b.s.
Of course quite a bit of it has that old Jungian subconscious archetype stuff going on in it, so leave me not appear to write it off entirely. I will say that one of the things I found from my trips through the cards is that the angel can lie to you and will. Now you can argue with me and tell me that it's my subconscious trying to manipulate me and I will nod my head and say, sure thing. But it doesn't make any difference what the explanation for it is, it is true. And once you've divined that you can walk away from the kind of information you get from these games knowing that it could all just be an illusion. We mostly hear what we want to, isn't that true?
Of course the two themes of this piece are the golden girl and the suicide I wanted to be. I've tried in my life a few times, but never that seriously, except for the time Bradway brought me to in 1993. I think I am past that need; the years are getting short anyway. Jerzy Kosinski committed suicide in his fifties, afraid of getting old and not being able to do it. He pulled a plastic bag over his head and breathed carbon monoxide. It's said to be a very calm and peaceful death. Hemingway, of course, blew his own head off with a fine shotgun, because (if you believe the scuttlebutt) he couldn't get his weiner to work anymore (with the girls, man, with the girls). I can understand how that might depress someone. I don't want to think about the time I am past sex. Perhaps that day is a figment of my imagination. You cannot know these things. And it's a good thing, too. Imagine how pissed we would all be if we had a firm date for the dissolution of the self?
Labels: Alison Gaughan
posted by As Bjorn at 8:35 PM
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