Standing, appreciably, in the corner of the room with the gray trowsers trundled up to the corner of his chin. It's a world of gray flannel and, don't you know, everything that is specific to gray trowsers, must be ordered according to exactitute.
Writing aggregious little notes of everyday concern, as if it were possible to write these little notes everyday, and confessing, as, my dear, we must confess, too much, indeed overmuch, in the bright syllables of the mind. It may be possible to write smaller, not really wanting to write at all, but then why write? But writing in mass, a mass of tangled syllables and jangling rhymes that stroke each other with the obscene intercourse of the organs hidden inside one's very body. I have hidden myself from writing (making bizarre little collections of beatles distilled in bottles) every word itself does not seem to make sense (a killing jar of thought)
At each location one could feel it, clearer and more distinct, along with the rythm of prose that became by turns more paranoid and at the same time more adroit:
"What will we do with him?"
"-We'll stick him on the end of his mother!"
"Oh, no, you mean to say?"
"-Yes, his mother again!"
(It was clear from this that Dr. Ayres was quite insane...)
(...but only salvingly so: Dixi et animam salvave, "I spoke and saved my soul." -Queer sentiment, Good Friday and all that, Lord's supper is quite a feast, and nothing even the most distant thing that one can truly remember.)
Deep into the woods there is only strangulation, suffocation, the fornication of instinct, and how my typewriter keys seem to linger over those words with a certain relish: well at least there is that, somewhere in this consciousness there are pleanty of fetid pools.
I really thought about writing a fictional work about the future, one in which everyone actually got it right, hopefully far enough beyond our neurosis, we met an alien race, and started to interact with this race (hmmmm.... could I be speaking of we ourselves interacting with each other compassioinately?) in a manner that seemed kind and resourceful, and replete with the imagery of our own dreaming and weaving and ritualizing round some sort of a shape of fire because even though it does not have to burn us at this exact moment, life itself is this fire and, well it actually does burn us.
But this does not pursue with sufficient frequency the image of the man in the gray flannel trousers... but haven't you heard enough of him? He is sitting here tapping away at the computer keyboard, sometimes his fingers do the flying, sometimes he wakes and listens to the strange stories that are being whispered by the nematodes in his brain, and sometimes he forgets them. Again it's a matter of rythm. But the fact remains clear that the moment we think self-consciously, well, what is it in fact that I am doing, that somehow we slip on those gray flannel trousers again, and we apparently leave off dreaming for another dream.
And wasn't that what I chose to wake up from? Some kind of dream of bigotry and religious hatred? Walser would never write about that! And maybe he was right to, because, after all, one might say, why put in that sort of effort into defeating all the causes of injustice to "humanity" when, after all, we know that at bottom humanity itself is unjust, and what we might try better for is taking up the position of being a valet for the rest of existence, stepping through the doorway of our own fragile, ferbile perceptions, God (and this may be the god of the dysjunctive syllogism) bless it! But what I was saying:
"The wise is one... that manner in which all things are driven through all" (Heraclitus fragment)Here is the thing, it takes a certain amount of momentum to actually get into writing, and that momentum can be carried by time alone, by a stiff drink (not advised), by a smoke of something (not reccomended) that gets you in the damn mood, because you have to move that damn steamship over the mountain, even if you or your crew simply are not in the mood to do it. That is where the pain and the suffering begins (as if it ever really ended), an intoxicant is placed in the path... or else one has the intoxicant of language, the spell of a written word or phrase... where would you rather be, reading or writing?
Reading one happens to simply slip back into the manner of things, writing one takes a step forward.... as if to say, well, dammit all I am sick of reading this man's (particularly Ayres') onanistic excretions. Life is too short, I am going to do some of my own! Well then jolly good for you! "For those who are limited, El Topo is a limited film...." speaks the poet Alejandro Jodorowsky, but now we are entering into the realm of criticism and comparative literature and I wanted so much to entertain you with endless hours of the travels of the man in the gray flannel pants: that somehow would creep around behind the backs of the intelligentsia, of even having something decent to say, of even participating in a decent damn day of work, but no, I sit here writing and dreaming, divided from my pay-producing employment, somehow ready to sneak out like some mischievous young mortal instant, on the back porch, smoking a Gitane (no I rather despise those cigarettes, once they even made me sick to my stomach, I won't smoke Gitanes, and that is that!) Maybe it is the simple pressure of just being as one is. Perhaps this part of expression is somehow neglected, and now it emerges as something, that at least for me in this moment is subversive: I dream of the man in the gray flannel pants scribbling something incomprehensible, some impossible design in his little steno-pad notebook, looking, taking stock of the distance between himself and the stars in certain galaxies, far, far away, indeed very far away.
Don't say it's the end! (and indeed it isn't, passing on in a hurried jog beside the mirrors of windows on a 1950's avenue in daytime, when men still wore fedoras and were respectable with their gray slacks) What I write here is a matter of some aspect of myself still eeking its way through to survival, and it is said by our noble preachers and ministers that "part of a man must indeed die, outright, during his own lifetime. " We know that part of what our ministers (and indeed even you, Herr Doktor Jung) speak is a lie or an internal contradiction, "we must die so that we may live, and we must live so we may die" (speaks a black minister here in South Central Los Angeles). But that isn't enough: "Hoffentlich, aber gibt es tatsätlich das Böse?" And here is the problem that we didn't want to think of because any gain here at all is to be treasured, ah yes, the problem of evil must be dealt with sooner or later, and it does not grapple with something essential here: maybe a Nietzschean sense of vitalism (Jenseits... etc. etc.). Something else, something else, something else, something else, something else. Maybe as I go through these repetitions and they sound more like some kind of adolescent angst, that I turn and suggest that there is something lighter than that, freed of the complexes of my adolescence, but on a roll of energetic blasting about into the unconscious cuneform of ideas and impressions.
Write because we must, even though we do not have to? Isn't that a little too much? Why such wasted effort, furtive, for the sake of an idea that once was clear but now remains clouded? As if the productive portion of my life at moments seeks to eclipse or extinguish the great amounts of my life that are stagnant or languishing, and must languish in their sheer voluptuous abundance, I mean, this is it if one actually has bustling fields of wild sea grown mustard plants growing on a hillside in the fog pierced by early morning sun in one's imagination, and the sea is busied with burrying the rocks once more in the roll of ocean waves, swallowing up stones once again and then sliding away from them as the passionate embrace fails and once again seeks them. Somewhere in the distance of the ghetto some pathetic man steps into his hotrod and lets his engine tear into the 3:00 in the afternoon glaze of a Good Friday afternoon: "tearing it up, homie!" "Yeah, well f--- that, whatever! Screw you and your big reving motor car and your need to screw everyone around with your noise! I hope you run your motor into the sea and the waves can ply you with seaweed and your engine will turn into a solid block of rust and iron ore. I hope your kind dies out and I hope we never see you again. One more big engine bites the dust from some sort of idiot in the ghetto, one more George Bush bites the dust as a president of bluster and cluster bombs, out and out stupidity, I hope you bite the dust, I hope you go home unbidden and close your doors and shutters and go to sleep and never wake up, I hope that you nightmares will finally go to sleep."
And maybe I write as a final sense that there is something in me that lives in between the words (it always does, between) restlessly looking for a way in between. And have I really spoken well as to what I thought I should be? Did I fall into a rage? Did I act as too much of an idealist and thereby condemn myself to the oblivion of naïveté? But it is not something so much "greater" that waits to slip out from between the lines, as some kind of a narrative, a speed of swiping, a blur, a cat's paw swiping through the air, all teeth and claws, leaving a scratch and red marks, necessitating immediate medical treatment, of course, not just bandages and merthiolate but a full trip to the doctor, lest the bite contain infective bacteria and you'll have to lose your whole arm in the end: that's what I meant to say before life stepped in, like some Robert Frost poem:
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows—
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
I know you will say that this is overly sentimental, and it does not deal with those incredibly naughty boys with cowboy hats and drag racers burrying bombs in the Iraqi desert under the heat of the noonday sun, I mean there is a time for such things and this is not one of them! I mean there are boys bending birches, somewhat modestly at least, and there are boys that should probably be burried in the earth, somewhere deep down. They probably came out of the earth too soon, they came out of some sort of a dream with their Harley Davidson motorcycles and decided to raise hell for the rest of us. And all I can do is to think of burrying them? Chain of their motorcycle, chain saw ripping down forests, I mean WTF? I say a good chain saw to the neck will solve the problem... only it is my neck I see there on that chopping block along with the branches of birch trees.
What I was going to say before Truth came in with her attendant glory, and Reality came in with its rather (...shitty...) predicament is that we must write something that is glaring out of the hedge rows of our perfectly conformed lifestyle in the modern age: there is a man dying of civilization, dying right beside a man who is dying of savagery, and the middle way lies in between, but that is the problem with Eastern thought, laughs the man in the flannel trousers, this time wearing a white shirt and a red silk tie, really quite dapper... laughing with other men in gray flannel trousers and different sorts of shirts with ties and no-ties, and so on, as if this dialogue could go on forever but anyway one laughs and keeps the covers up to one's cheek, disapproving for the moment of any nasty play in the bedroom one sticks one's nose and tongue out at all the pretty people passing by, and all the nasty visions of orgasmic sugarplums that dance in one's perceptual horizon, so that it really is astounding until one is just about ready to get that...
