Amnesia, Lower Appalachia,

December 28, 1998

My Imogen:

I was taking a stroll on Sunday, a Sunday stroll of you will, this sounds so self important, I hate it, how about Sunday I took a stroll, with the simple and elegant ‘s’ alliteration, I must remember this is simply a letter, not literature, I am not writing this for publication or posterity, it was a gloomy, cloudy, drizzling Sunday, there is a street in Amnesia I walk on on my way to Hades Park, on my left the hospital’s parking structure with its toasted waffle architecture, the private memory dream of a childhood’s morning to give comfort each new morning as adult in the workforce: abstract art, to please him, to torture me with its absence of baroque deviations; a sawed off piece of home for him, discarded food for me, and now the butter splattered on the waffle has slipped off into the street, notice here how we’re playing with abstraction of sizes, the immensity of the waffle versus the mere smattering of the butter or ice cream, the severe civilizing effect of the diamond cut of the gray wall waffling at me with a frozen sneer, while across the street, the forest, infinite and poetic severed by the despair engendered by the freeway slashing across it.

And here I was again, at the time I spotted the butter, or the ice cream, a prisoner of your illusionarium, supine in my doublet and hose, the tip of my tongue in infinitesimal congress with the silk of your soles — I am mixing here sensuality and politics — your soles of translucent black silk, your lucifer deceivers whose deception I craved, whose deception is the only reality I crave, and wondering:

Why was I

viewing myself

in such

dark light

for this craving?

There I was, my tongue, its surface, was gliding along the silky surface of your sole, the silky surface of your black stockings over your sole. I know, I know I am repeating myself and it makes me squirm too to repeat it, to write it down. Yet no matter how much I try I can’t seem to transform this longing into art! Unlike Borges, I chided myself, who, with the power of thought and imagination can conceive the constructs and constraints of a complete civilization instead of being enslaved by these erotic constructs and constraints!

I was under the weight that all my thoughts led to one thing, that is, a desire to produce pornography, that is, I was ensconced, more, prisoner, of images at whose mercy my mind trotted and art wasn’t forthcoming to rescue them, no, Baudelaire, Dostoyesvsky, weren’t rushing to the rescue, I was the prisoner of a mechanism which now made me nauseous, made me want to throw up, I was laughable, I don’t even know why the stockings were black this time instead of white.

Buddhism teaches us all phenomena are mutually identified: one is equal to all and all is equal to one. The hidden and the manifest complement each other to make one entity. All phenomena are ceaselessly permeating and reflecting one another, like reflections in the jewels of Indra’s net. This is a net said to hang on a wall in the palace of Indra. At each interstice of the net is a reflecting jewel which mirrors not only the neighboring jewels but the multiple images reflected in them. In this context, kissing stockings of beautiful women, more, kissing the soles of the women one loves, kissing your feet, my Imogen, is equal to all phenomena; one is equal to all, all is equal to one. The mystery of your stockings reflected in the dictator’s eye in whose eyes are reflected the longings of the people; his longing for power is to raise the longing of the people from desire for stockings to desire for spilled guts and glory, statues with hands raised as though greeting the coming of the prophet. In other words, greeting a prophet with vague promises of an uncertain future, but pre-designed, instead of the certainty of the stockings salesman.

Yet could I be blamed by critics for repeating ad absurdum the ostinato notes of my delicious & delinquent desire?

As I said, I was meditating on the commingling of our ethereal bodies, diaphanous bodies, imponderable bodies, when the cream colored pool or paste on the wet gray ground on my stroll by the concrete steps I was passing like thick impasto, a word I learned from reading Van Gogh’s letters, stood out in eye-catching expressionist abstraction relief across from the parking structure’s waffley windows: it could be melted butter, or ice cream, I reasoned thoughtlessly, or merely the barf of a dog. It must have been my mood on such a moody day, to not accept it simply as an eye catching expressionist abstraction and admire the mystery of the shape and the deep impasto, the corrugated edge versus the flat of the concrete, the accident splurging aristocratically atop the contrivance, but to fall into the trap of interpretation by reason, that the most general eye falls into, you know what I’m talking about? when you’re at the museum with Ma & Pa Kettle — this is very abstract already, I have no Ma & Pa Kettle kin, why would I oppress myself with thinking of them? — and they ask, no, not ask but, like the yokel before the Pollock, condemn, mock, sentence, with their: what is it? Well, I too had to ask, perhaps condemn, sentence: what is it? Well, a mystery, that’s what it is, really, an unresolved mystery though I can’t say I’m going to worry too much about it. But the impulse was there, for an instant, to rush tongue out and taste it. When I say I’m not going to worry too much about it, I’m being facetious. No, I’m being dishonest. Like I said, I will reveal myself to you completely. Tear out the brocaded redingote of fabricated facade, wrench away the houpelande of contrivance flung over the soul’s meretricious assemblage, so you may see it — the soul — unadorned — the whole coterie of charlatan personages parading their colored cullotes in the couloirs of my chest; tear it out consistently, constantly, readily, so that it never grows back. I don’t really mean that, I love this coterie of charlatan personages parading their colored cullotes in the couloirs of my chest; but I think for a moment I was pressured by the invisible coterie of personages bereft of personality cluttering the psychic passages of this protestant enclave. Yes, sweet Imogen, my Imogen sweet, it could have been ice cream. Though on the ground, perhaps dropped by a child, it would have still preserved, even mixed with the ground, a sweet pleasant taste. In that case, even bad ice cream would have tasted good. Bad ice cream, in comparison with good ice cream. I am philosophizing now. Because, even with bad ice cream, the kind whose taste you have no experience with before you take it home, you just decided you’d go for a new brand that evening, and, taking it home and expecting to be sent, the tongue flung out in welcoming embrace, but instead it shocks you with something disappointing, even with bad ice cream of the kind I just described, I can’t give specific brand names for fear I would be sued, don’t laugh, this could easily happen, even in private mail, that’s the kind of world we’re living in nowadays, and I’m in no position to pay a lawyer right now, even with bad ice cream, the surprise of the welcoming sweet to the tongue, sweet on the street, sweet on the sidewalk, that would have made it a good ice cream. The rains came last night, it is gloomy now but dry and it could be the rains washed well the ground where the ice cream lays, a creamy paste, cream colored, and what it is spotted with could be could be bits of chocolate or cookie crumbs, or crumbled little bits of pavement. On the other hand, if it is dog barf, the dog hurled one just before he crawled back into the house, or the forest, well, I never tasted that, dog barf, but a lot of the way we look at experience in general is contained in my hesitation. A lot of how we look at a situation when we’re faced with embracing a new experience. Certainly before I jumped I would want you to appear from behind me, sneak up behind me and save me, grab me from the collar and opening your bra to me, your lace bra, you would have me suck that instead. (Note here that I began reading Freud’s “Civilization and its Discontents” last night.)

I don’t belong to society, but to passion.

Because there is this to consider, I am placing before you on a pedestal the philosophy to consider, it’s important, it’s important becasue, I don’t know why I keep writing becasue instead of because and I have to stop myself and correct it all the time, but it’s important because freedom is important. What I mean, impulse, because where does the impulse come from — I know dear dear Imogen, my Imogen, this is your slave writing to you — salve from your slave — and what is wrong with slavery, I ask you, leering philosophoes, mind excavadores — exposing all & mocking everything, leaving no stone unturned, picking up every stitch, I know that when I ask this question about impulse, a colloquium of tooth gnashing shrinks suddenly stop sucking on their pipes and prick up their ears, prick up their ears, or rears, and knowingly clear their throats, they know they’ve got their man — you would do well to mirror the faults of your own fashion rather than paint strangers with the bleary eyed hues of the perhapses that perplex your own lives — but is not their man, it is your man, my Imogen, it is me, your Julian, your man, your dear sweet man Julian, the man who loves you truly. They will leer and gnash, because what else can be expected of them to do with their lives except spend it in the function of their infernal profession as society’s inquisitors, civilization’s dandruff police, the mockers of the genuine, because how best to oppress and imprison if not by mocking, or by pinning a label on you, a label on which they painted their caricacature and gets the easy laugh from the nouveaux near literati, secret spokesmen for the common march, as well as from the leering muddy-mettled masses of ignorantis whose leering tongues are pre-fabricated adfixtures of the common march, but it don’t scare me, I’m not the fool, not the masochist, not the fetishist, not the unrealist, not the idiot, not the general who betrays his army for you, who, against all advice, against all clues, against all reason, flings himself before you, places himself at your feet, do with him as you will, yes he is, he’s placing all of himself before you, on the altar before you — can’t they see I am simply a man who loves, yes a man who loves deeply, not as society dictates a man should love, not society’s reduced man, civilization’s quartered, but passion’s man, not the reduced couvade of a passion engendered by TV ads but the true passion unleashed from the bone march of society’s prison — the impulse I had to leap at the puddle of ice cream, the concoction I mean, whatever it was, on the ground of somber wet, where does this impulse come from if not from the stirrings of freedom at the root of my being, not the concept of freedom, but the true stirring of freedom, gnash on your pipes, you pricks, La Phantom du Liberte herself, always there, always goading me on to attempt new standards, leap at new experiences, etc, etc, the kinds of things that the stirring of Freedom herself goads one on to attempt, cut out etc, etc, the whole sum of which I can’t think of this moment, but you know what I mean my Imogen. Yes, impulse to freedom, free unencumbered action calls, and you think what if it’s dog barf. Why this desire to deny yourself by denigrating your aim? You’re about to make a statement for freedom, against the straightjacket of society, against societal restraint, you’re put in the position to break out of, with one single leap, the hopples of the common hora, and you think What if it’s dog barf. And all the while teeter-tottering, balancing on the teeter-totter of making up your mind if you’re trying to say dog barf or dog bark, I actually almost wrote down dog bark, and the closeness, the kinness, in sound, between the two is so uncanny at a moment of such moment as this, that it takes a long moment to decide which is which, which is it, dog bark, dog barf, dog bark, dog barf, dog bark, dog bark, is there even such a saying, a saw, as dog barf, or is it just like any other two words you’d normally couple in attempting to make yourself misunderstood. I meant understood. Take note, you barking shrinks, Fifi Freudian fanfaroons, Lacanian lap dogs, derisive Derridian Dalmatians. Yes, knowing there is meaning in both, with pen in hand, perplexed because there is meaning in both, perplexed I stood on the teeter-totter, teetering to one side, dog bark, tottering to the other, dog barf, back and forth like that, perplexed on the teeter-totter, and all the while I was doing it for you, for you my baronessa, my Imogen, my queen, attempting to make it out, to distinguish it, out of the dark edge of my horizon, attempting to make a point for you, it was to you I was talking, there on a street in Amnesia, and perhaps, I had just vested myself for you, an instant before lounging at the liquid, the yuckster swill on the sidewalk, I had just vested myself in my slave’s vestments, the doublet and hose, and here I was on the teeter-totter peering into the darkness, reaching fearfully into the centers of meaning in my brain, asking them to spit something out, to shine a light on the pickle of my dilemma, after bargaining for meaning for some time there at the border of all meanings, having finally severed the barbed wire of quartered meanings, finally the void barfed or barked out the correct meaning, as it always does, sooner or later, the void having chosen recently to be kind & generous to me: barf, dog barf. But the issue of freedom remains unsolved here, on the sidewalk, in my life: because this question presents itself: why make the assumption the barf before you, whether it’s melted ice cream, or dog barf, or even child barf — a possibility I hadn’t considered before — the child living in that house, or another house, walking by with mom, could have gorged, in spite of wiser advice, him/herself on French vanilla adorned with chips or crumbs and suddenly, whammo! booof! — why make the assumption

1. that it is dog barf

2. that it is, whatever it is, bad for you, and from a grander, more

philosophical perspective that:

3. what’s on the ground before you, because it appears to be the mere hurlings

of an unknown another, that you should too ignore it, not study it, not

research it, not even philosophize on pain of being monikered a saprophyte

by fascistic Freudians, pipe-smoking Lacanians, derisive Derridians, and finally, perhaps most

importantly:

4. excommunicate your impulse to the garbage bin of your unconscious, classify

it as trash, as ridiculous detritus and not worthy of attempting, along with

many other impulses which, were we to follow them, we would perhaps

end up living a freer and more adventurous life. (see Freud, prohibition against dirt, civilization and cleanliness). It is true our life is made

up of much to avoid, plenty detritus, but why avoid the ground and not the

television, for instance? (Here the prohibitive mother, the interrogator of each and every impulse, is employed in the service of the

state). Can you convince me that the internetting

of TV commercials in your brain is less damaging to your system than dog

barf? What if the dog had the ice cream? I think this last is the most likely

solution. A truly foolish dog.

I want you to know that I took longer than I thought I would take with this above passage because the formatting was difficult. However, after formatting it, I took a quick scan and saw it necessary to make a few corrections and after making some corrections on the corrections I got tired and left the bits that got unformatted the way they ended up on the page. Besides I saw a certain visual potential in it. (I am transcribing my notes from the notebook where I wrote them down in immediately upon experiencing this trauma.) Of course, we must not neglect the thought which presently disturbs us that there are those who will claim up and down, (up and down?) that ice cream itself, whatever tributary turns it might have took (I know I should have wrote taken, but I just felt like writing took, ‘cause it sounded better) after forsaking its origins, dished out of the bins, spooned out cartons, or splurting out of canines, is plain bad for you. But there is no challenge there, no confronting a MOM prohibition, so to speak, in choosing to eat the ice cream, if you choose to ignore the warnings of those prophets and prophetesses of doom, who trumpet the sugar and the milk composing the sweety frozen goo is poisonous and carcinogenic, etc. After all, who’d want to fight with five thousand years of Chinese civilization? However, no regulation manuals exist to assist those spontaneously wishing to lick ice-cream barfed by dogs or others on the ground. Would it be any easier if I knew who the hurler was? In the background, at the piano, Mozart tinkles Andante Grazioso; you, on the brocaded couch amidst the pillows, where, from the bottom of your circassiene of sea green unbosom your ankles of white silk, while from the top, above the alabaster of shoulders, uncharacteristically, in sudden splendor, cascade, on the marble floor, the ice-cream not yet digested you ingested from the crystal bowl indifferent in your marvelous fingers, and the coterie, in couvadic stupefiando, burping with disdain; and I, whose love’s imploring was disdained by you only moments before — admire me in the motion of my stirring prophile, the way I quickly cross the centuries for you, see the crimson heels of my pumps gracefully on the marble scuffling to the sofa; periwig patted I bow, and begging the bestowal of permission, I bend, unhesitatingly exposing burgundy breeches and buttocks to the rightfully awesomed assembly, & begin to lick your expulsion most delightfully. O Imogen, I adore you so! I keep on licking and licking and licking, on the floor and on the shoe and on the ankle and on the metatarsals showcasing through the silk above the toes, the metatarsals cleverly forced to showcase, to reveal, revealed by the clever designer of the shoe who deemed them to be revealed, who dreamed them to be revealed, showcasing through white of the silk of the stocking, jabot begrimed of your spew, the silk of my jabot feathering the silk of your begrimed ankle I now lick, and I lick and lick and lick long past the moment when all hurled cream is licked and long past the moment when all is clean, and it is not about cleaning here anymore, because I had already cleaned it all, it is not about doing the work of the servants, it was about surpassing the work of civilization, I had here surpassed, long surpassed what was proper, I had long surpassed making a point, I kept on licking and licking, it was not as though I wanted their world to be clean, because I had already cleaned, I had already licked clean your hurly, your cream hurly, your hurled cream, which was ice no longer, I just kept on licking long past proper, my jabot luxuriating in your hurled drool, the hurly burly of the assembly a distant rumory murmur, and only the precise curled angles of your ankles, delineated by the severity of the alabaster of your stockings, their insistence on assuming such surprising shadowy hues at the furrowy ripples of the metatarsals and the splashing of pleats circling the ankles, the rippling of metatarsal clarinets, yes, I minueted enslaved by the siren maidens hidden in the rippling valleys and hills there, but it was even beyond the implied eroticality of the moment even though I had removed your lovely shoe and had licked it, had licked its sole and hand licked its insides and had left that and placed it on the licked clean marble, and was now licking your silky soles, licking and licking and licking long past improper now, and you had understood, but it was even long past your understanding, even though you never stopped understanding and you let me go on licking and licking and licking your silky soles, in ostinato, cruising for a bastinado, you can see here that I was doing a thorough job of it; I must momentarily pause here to comment that you may feel as though, even I feel as though, I am wasting my time, that I already said what needed to be said. But how else, except through repetition, through incessant repetition, through mantric repetition, can I convey the intensity of what I am doing? It is the repetition repeated past what is tasteful, past what the assembly considers good taste, that the glue holding the assembly together can be made to come apart. Didn’t the early Christians time after time walked to the lions? It is the repetition of their gesture which caused the Roman empire to fall, though it’s a pity their philosophy wasn’t a tad more imaginative, so that the Roman empire could not revive itself by incorporating it into its vampiric structure. In repeating my action, in doing my best to express it to you, I am also corroding the empire, lick by lick, transcending civilization and its discontents, lick by lick, long past improper and they could do nothing at that moment, that long extended moment, except to watch, and watch and watch, as I was licking and licking and licking, and could not even if they had wanted to, could not turn away, that was the moment of my inglorious glory, ingenious inglorious glory, as the sole licker of your soles before the assembly and its ilk, I licked the silk of your soles all the way to your soul, to their soul, I had your soul on the tip of my tongue, I had all souls on the tip of my tongue, I had transcended all of the western civilization with my licking, and eastern, I had licked it clean, with my tongue lashing, I was giving it a tongue lashing, I was giving its souls a tongue lashing, and you were a part of it, you and I together, we had transcended western & eastern civilizations, we had gone clean past it, licking with all my might way past improper under the stupefied stare of the assembly and its ilk, I had transcended the food, the consumption, the purpose of the consumption, and the intensity, the determined march of my action was such that no one could look away, my determination was a subterranean partisan forcing everyone to look, my determination was a guerilla force, my determination was Che Guevara, I was electrifying in my determination, my determination was de Sade, Danton, Artaud, Rimbaud, Lautreamont, Baudelaire, they were electrified by my licking action to such an extent that it electrocuted them, they were helpless hostages to the electrification which was engendered by my action of licking. Borges describes a scrupulous man scrutinizing the world for the engenderer of a gesture; a gesture of great nobility — soul’s nobility — he observed in a scoundrel; a gesture he intuited was a copy; a copy of a copy perhaps, or of a copy of a copy of a copy; and he made it his life’s work to scout out the originator, the engenderer of the original gesture, because he intuited there was such a person, and this person must possess the secret to the enlightened consciousness he was seeking. One late afternoon at the end of the world on the cracked pavement of a plaza in ruins a complete scoundrel of a pimp will be stealing a contemptuos lick of a dead whore’s foot, one he just slashed, to amuse his companions; yet the scrupulous retina of a scrutinizing youthful seeker intent on piecing together a new world out of a vague notion, of something he only suspects will reflect a glimmer of my determinate action. Because I had transcended all prescribed and proscribed modes of social being, that is, I had transcended the straightjacketting of the being itself, thus I was deserving of a statue or statues to built to my acts whose repercussions and reverberations were to be many; there are the snorting gentlemen, like crows on a fence, and the ladies too all crowing and leaning to peruse through their lunettes, finding it progressively impossible to maintain the posture of insouciance in whose service the European Cultural Machine had invested its best teachers and teachings: the banishment of emotions in public! this banishment with its sister, shame, can only engender an inimical stance toward our own selves; the only conclusion we can draw is that we are no good and we must train ourselves against ourselves to feel good about ourselves; to feel good about ourselves being determined by how good a show we can put on in front of everybody else; this mode of behavior, this cultural construction, constriction, achieves its highest degree of baroque stylistics in macho, the Italian Mafia, the Mexican Mafia, Hip Hop, the black gangs, etc. They are forms most removed from the true ticking of human emotion, life itself. This leads to fascism: emotional displays such as group, or very large group singing and shouting at massive social events are enforced, shaped according to bizarre baroque stylistics of the lockstep mentality; but free displays of personal emotion is discouraged and punished. I don’t mean by emotion the cinematic sentimentality true life is shunted into by films and TV, you idiots. As for me, in between licks, I am staring into your eyes, my Imogen, I am in the staring regard of your Imogen eyes, I float in the staring regard of your Imogen eyes, in between the licks, the passionate licks I commit upon your soles and even the marble floor, the smooth marble floors which I lick clean for you and for your sake so that you do not have to suffer the derision of the no longer insouciants, the humiliated insouciants, the insouciants whose insouciance I have destroyed through my public licking, through shifting a private act to the public domain, not simply gesticulating it but shifting it into the realm of a true act surging as it does from the life force itself, not mere commedia to be performed for public enjoyment and derision, but an expression of the life force of humankind itself, a new definition of the human being bursting free of social straitjacketing, stepping out of the common activity lockstep bone march leading to fascism and the corporatization of the being, using judaeo-christian entreaties to downtrod the inner being. Thus a statue must be built to me and you in which we will be represented in marble in our respective positions and we will be known throughout eternity for our transcendent act. And don’t think this act is simply a personal transcendence only whose achievement is the achievement of others before me and no more. This is the original engendering itself, a wafting of the amber imponderable itself, not an act to be depicted on dowered porcelain china showcased in living room cabinets of formica, where the Watteau Directoire is depicted in alabaster and pink to titillate like silk undergarments underneath the industrial fist we’re forced to raise to survive