SOME TIME AFTER THE FRENCH LECTURE
2. SOMETIME AFTER THE FRENCH LECTURE:
1. YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT – THEREFORE EAT WHAT YOU ARE:
Sometime after the French - and this is the hardest part for they were eating well - ‘gourmand’ being the word they use (unfortunately and in-aptly) for gluttony which is still supposed to be one of the seven deadly sins and representative of the folk wisdom about nourishment – versions of which wisdom can be found in all cultures – both commendable and sound attributes everywhere as SURVIVAL itself is too and for HUMANS of course eating is or should be yet a matter of survival as befitting the grand old days but HUMANS have instead devised according to their various cultures numerous ways of preparing and concocting an assortment of foods thought appealing to body and mind alike and that very art of nourishment in fact has nurtured the human spirit and human industry for thousands of years and that ancient pursuit itself has relieved both pain and anxiety wherever it has been found easy to acquire (and continuously painful and with great anguish among those in hunger or in need) and has revealed TO THE FRENCH as it was said the great JOY which they have taken to calling ‘la satisfaction gourmande’ and part of that definition of ‘gourmand’ is or never has been found to include ‘to excess’ and has become in fact a positive term – much unlike its supposed equivalent term in English German Italian Spanish and other tongues – so that therefore its ‘semantico-theological’ significance is quite different (in English for example the seventh deadly sin was translated as ‘gluttony’ – it being that ‘la gourmandise’ has of course no English equivalent - while the same condition in French would really be referred to as ‘gloutonnerie’ or ‘voracite’ and the Italian version of same being ‘gola’ which also means gullet and connotes piggishness and the Spanish ‘gula’ is roughly synonymous with ‘gluttony’ and in German the word ‘lusternheit’ signifies the act of eating like an animal that does not know when to stop or with unbridled appetite or like someone who inhales his food) SO YOU CAN SEE all these words call to mind the ‘unbridled appetite’ of gluttons of face stuffers of scarfers of chowhounds of epicurean swine and are really and utterly foreign to French culture and to ‘la gourmandise’ which remains the admirable activity of the gourmand – a powerful catalyst of virtue imbued by its creators with a spiritual state of as high a quality nearly as their gourmet creations within a sphere of humility and pleasure which are also essential ingredients of simplicity and kindness and this incriminating shadow (on the other hand) cast by the condemnation of ‘gluttony’ for ‘la gourmandise’ has myriad disgraceful consequences for gourmands but especially for those involved directly in the creation of gourmet dishes – mothers fathers and cooks and fishmongers meat roasters bakers chefs caterers cheesemakers sauce chefs pastry chefs sommeliers – all because food has made their lives fruitful and meaningful and the value of their varied know-how is intrinsically seen as above reproach when exhibited in their preparation of meals AND SO therefore it is proposed here and TO THE POPE of the French Catholic People that in the French version of the catechism the word ‘gourmandise’ be officially changed to ‘gluttonnerie’ and although the word ‘intemperance’ conveys the idea of condemnable excess equally well ‘gluttonnerie’ would have the advantage of harmonizing the French with the theological terminology of other languages and the case against this semantic impropriety calls for – we feel – favorable consideration and we ‘especially solicit for help MOST HOLY FATHER in liberating gourmands from the purgatory of verbal ambiguity in which they have suffered for hundreds of years and from which they have incurred serious harm’ - as written and reported here by one Lionel Poilane dedicated humble and devoted servant to his grace the Pope (Lionel Poilane was a prominent French baker who sent this message along in October 2002 and who later that same month died in a helicopter crash)…NOW though I found this all to be somewhat interesting I even moreso found it all to be more a pile of garbage (or as the French would perhaps say ‘Gahr-Bahge’) still it got me thinking swiftly and hard on the origin of the word and reference I’d heard of ‘unbridled’ (as in ‘unbridled appetite’) and I began to think if perhaps this wasn’t an expression of some greater antiquity and a great throwback to the earlier ages of mankind when it was still dependent upon and interactive with ANIMAL power and ANIMAL energy and exertions for productivity and PERHAPS the idea was that if a horse or oxen was let go (‘unbridled’) meaning CONTROL was taken from it than it was felt that same animal would (in ‘unbridled excess’) run riot through his oats or feed or crop and in complete animal energy and excitation would (shall we say) ‘OVERDUE’ it – and I found myself wondering more than anything else what and where the origination of that word could have stemmed from French lecture be damned.
2. THE CULTURE OF THE OVERFLOW:
"In the history of the French there has always been indecision on the ‘real’ physical plane and an absolutism in the metaphysical and as the mixture of these two things never goes very well there has historically been a constant struggle between the two and inasmuch as struggle precludes progress they have culturally advanced in very slow ways and in erratic fashions - philosophy and religion being mere exceptions - exemplified in so many ways including the bizarre designs of Citroens the bizarre intellectualism of Deconstructors and New Critics and all the rest and the overlapping multi-dimensional claptrap of existentialists rationalists negativists positivists and all the rest ART DESIGN ARCHITECTURE and from each of these has developed a particular and peculiar French attitude of momentary displeasure mixed with some form of long-range composure disguised in an almost hedonistic fashion of living correctly in the ‘old’ ways - and this can be witnessed most easily in the examination of ‘what’ is a Frenchman – a category really of no existence anymore as the mixture of peoples present there has overtaken and now over-rides any national type – we have great and disparate mixes of North Africans and people of the Middle East we have Orientalists and Muslims in great numbers and insofar as time passes we have a complete sub-strata of blacks and North Africans which actually now is an older stream of entry than any of the newer and this old stream mixes into the French bloodline now in constant fashion (we make very little distinction anymore of peoples based on ‘color’ designations it being so prevalent and perhaps our ‘blacks’ would be Pakistanis) and what can you expect anyway of a nation and a people who once used as police vehicles both Citroens and Peugeots anyway the entire situation too is now at vast cross-purposes as the borderlines get dissolved yet at the same time people become more conscious of them (‘Paradox entre nous’) the line between France and Germany being as it is almost a new Berlin Wall of existence and curiously enough here now as I visit America I am struck even more by the weirdnesses I witness - (just the other day French-speaking East Indians the woman in customary robes the men in western attire having some trouble parking their vehicle in a broad parking lot where they kept hitting the concrete barrier upon the ground which is placed in American parking lots in order to mark the spots for the front of each car and when they finally parked I watched as it took them nearly ten minutes (I counted) of a particularly odd silence to attempt repeatedly to unfold and open and lock a large plastic baby stroller they had with them (they seemed totally incompetent) as well as a plastic car-seat for same baby which for some reason they were attempting to fold into the stroller and this went on for some time after which they took an equally long amount of time getting things out of the car including the child in order to place it into this stroller contraption in order to wheel it and the child and the four of them into a Rite Aid Pharmacy and during all this time the two women between them studied as well a colored circular of the day’s particular ‘bargains’ and sales in Rite Aid while eventually the older gentleman of them wandered away in some wistful daydreaming composed of simple staring and dumbfounded observation and occasional gazing at the sky and this as I said was all conjoined with French and English being mixed (whatever happened to their original East Indian language I wondered) and yes eventually they did wander into the nearby store all the while talking away but I wondered WHAT are these people WHO owns them actually and from WHERE have they come what exactly do their papers say and what lineages and personal histories do they hold and I find this all very difficult to understand - even this HERE in yet another land neither French nor Indian this localized American version of something I haven’t yet decoded but the particular Frenchness of all this too is something I am interested in determining both for the dilution-factor of what has happened to the French and the broader factor of Americanization across national lines and in addition the concepts of travel and distance and co-mingling and meanings between cultures."
3. BUT SO MUCH FOR EXPERTISE:
Right off the bat there were a few cultural differences which arose pertaining to the French and the Americans - things I thought of from the very first as confusing and which this speaker was at least touching upon (obliquely in his fashion) - the first being – as he mentioned – the strange difficulty he continued having in referring to ‘Indians’ for as the French were used to using the words without the confusion which arises in the American idiom when he meant Indians he just assumed it referred to East-Asians and the subcontinent of India yet here in America he was confronted with the odd problem of having Americans refer to Indians when speaking of what he thought of as ‘Aboriginals’ or at least ‘Native Americans’ and that confusion consistently caused him trouble even though as I was thinking to tell him it’s really just a predilection of Americans to portray the rest of the world as first beholden to them and secondary in all respects and therefore if as we are all taught or HAVE BEEN in our past textbooks that the peoples upon whom the first explorers stumbled upon (those explorers who were after all ‘Europeans’ and numbers of them ‘French Europeans’) were taken up as certainly expendable creatures of the earth mostly not even worthy of living if they were in the ‘way’ of settlement and further exploration SO therefore we CALLED them ‘Indians’ in most part to portray their essential role in our local drama as the people who had to go in order for us to achieve our destiny - melting pot mixed cultures and all that falling by the wayside MOST CERTAINLY in the case of Indians for they never were ever included in any mix or vision of our ‘Peoples’ and therefore to ‘dignify’ them as something outside of our use and decision-making power would have been to give to them more power and importance than we as a ‘peoples’ were allowing them to have THEREBY they became our ‘Indians’ – essentially a people stumbled upon by accident and in the way on OUR way (which was really the way of old European nation-states) to the orient where as it turned out other Indians lived BUT NO MATTER insofar as trying to explain something of this note to him would have been difficult as it seems to take a very peculiar and certain ‘American’ point of view to accept for calling them ‘Indians’ advanced our narrative in a perfectly orderly and non-fictional way even as it was incorrect (a word used often in juxtaposition to using the word ‘wrong’ which advances a different narrative and brings forth an entire other raft of conditions – which is evidently a set of conditions we’d never wanted to deal with) – and ANYWAY I’m not sure what nomenclature things go under in France but I’m sure they’ve had problems of their own in issues of assimilation and empire (can you say Algeria? Morocco? French Indo-China? to name but a secondary three) so on certain counts like that maybe we’re even BUT another issue which got me was the issue of ‘French Girls’ or women who’ve always been burdened it seems here in America with the notion of being ever-ready for sex always in the midst of sexual pleasure always being provocative and in arousal and lithe svelte femme fatale and all that yet by such thoughts I’d have figured he too would be under that same impression but his reference instead was to the pleasurable beauties of American undergraduate girls I suppose he meant the basic college babe to whom he spoke and the difference I saw there was that American ‘females’ were seen as willing and ready and sexual in their benign youth – something ending at about 28-30 perhaps – while the enduring lesson of French seduction was and is that a woman seduces as a woman even it means 50 years old - so strong and domineering is the French proclivity of pure carnal sex and intended orgasmic seduction so that HIS IMPRESSION basically was that American females – unless they are young – are useless for sexual pleasure ‘FRENCH MAN DENOUNCES AMERICAN WOMEN’ I thought I could almost see the headlines now and started chuckling to myself for I realized that in a political context that notion or one such notion as that could be politicized and made Marxist or anti-Marxist or Utopian or pragmatic or sexist or reactionary all ad infinitum for such are the ways and the errant joys of the journalistic world when it decides to pounce on something there’s not even a chance of salvation for the perpetrator once portrayed has not a snowball’s chance in Hell of getting his or her self out from underneath the rubble which is brought down upon his or her head by a mis-speak or a wrong-felt attitude God be praised and Heaven help us all but that’s the way it is and I therefore felt as if I was sitting on nails just waiting for this guy this poor fellow to slip up to say something mistaken to befoul his charmed Frenchical character by denouncing or misrepresenting an American notion or shibboleth or understanding and then I got to thinking at the same time about all those Charles Aznavour types the tres-seductive French men he personified (and others like him) being smooth and wise and crafty and able and willing in love and having massive success and love-fests in every conceivable way with lesser women I thought ‘how well does that portray anything real?’ and perhaps the notion exists too that if the French were not a nation of lovers they’d not have such problems of mixed population or crowded races crawling over and ‘into’ one another and the great French race would not thereby dilute itself or be diluted so as to make still some other hybrid race of whatever now passes for French - indecisive frothy strangely offensive insincere - whatever today’s collection of ‘types’ are seen to be and the more he talked the less I felt he knew about anything except perhaps a survivor’s experience of wartime (his supposed field of expertise) but even that seemed to belie the reality of his age which I could not figure out as more than 3 or 4 years of age in 1945 so what the hell would he know for even by then it was all different and all over anyway and whatever experiences he could recall probably had more to do with early shitting or sucking his mother’s tit-milk than anything else BUT SO MUCH FOR EXPERTISE!
4. ‘AFTER ALL I AM ONLY YOUR CHILD’:
Another time another place – I’m somewhere by the sea and the night sky above me is dark and Mars is at my left and the new moon is on my right and the sheer commingling of such two events in their own singular way shows me all of what hasn’t occurred in so many many years NEVERTHELESS I’M HERE and yes I am melancholy and filled with loathing and at a station I can never leave and between poles I can never duck and the great radius ending of my time and days seems severed with situations and is heard talking like a cat to missionary doctors and small wrens beneath Irish eaves and I lounge back upon some soiled grass to watch the ice cream sky above me spinning deep and morose and solid dark and heavy with planets and stars and the Jupiter fallions of a million deeds and all around me is silence pure unabashed and without circumference and everything opens up wide and great and wild and broad and I simply heave with longing alone and think back on corduroy times of kings and mastiffs and song-men with twenty handles and within my heart still dwells a caveman running and the torch-light flame above my head is more than circumstantial and whatever seems way above is far below at the same time as I sensate decree that space is curved and time is dense and morning light arrives between two darknesses ‘both of time and of intent’ and the Master’s eyes proclaim the fury of destruction in the glimmer of Creation’s moment and seeing no difference between even the two the entire place moves once along the way and I am left behind (so it seems again alone) and listening for that fearsome pronunciation only known to me THE SHIBBOLETH of secret code the distinguishing test of pronunciation the singular test of a group (and I surmise too just as our universe warps so we together warp the each other in each of us) and this vast COSMOS around me I take in and amorously embrace (‘I want to rotate my fluctuations on her tempestuous body’) and I think back to the day of the awful Frenchman singing (‘repudiate salubrious wretched excess roiling’ I think I heard him say) and confused as any other I motion for life to go on and with or without me it most certainly does "BLACK-WINGED NIGHT into the bosom of Erebus dark and deep laid a wind-born egg and as the seasons rolled forth sprang Love the longed-for shining with wings of gold…and first there was Chaos – the vast immeasurable abyss – outrageous as a sea DARK WASTEFUL WILD!" and so much comes through that I relax myself again on some St. Peter’s grass by Amboy’s grave and listen for the withering onslaught of all the world borne by deadly fissure and cracked "and I Sir must say how much you’ve done how little and the words just fall but I understand none at all and what labors are you trying to say and how and why and DO YOU NOT WANT ME TO UNDERSTAND ? perhaps ? yet what is the shaker of your potion and who holds the cards in your deck by what meaning and manner and which circumstance do you face ? for AFTER ALL I AM ONLY YOUR CHILD."
5. NIGHTMARE OUTRAGE CATERWAUL SCREAM!:
"I must change here for one other comment in the midst of all this for it was when I got sick that everything changed and I was no longer able to take care of myself and go on without pounding pain and the feeble acts of a dying old man left to himself THAT is when I reneged on everything and realized I had met this all before" the French dichotomy rational Descartes and all the rest with its opposites the ideas of both certainty and doubt together the all-pervasive nonsense of unreality and rational thought the expansive ideas of space and religion and the after-image of the bright light lingering in the eyes something having to do with surrender some Vichy leftover regime of compromise and weakness and bald-headed women shaved as a curse and an oath the lines of coffins at the outside of the Auberge Cathedral each waiting to be brought in by armed guards for the stupid sprinkling of holy water upon them a ritual so vapid and stupid as to make a laughing stock of any catholic country and we see the pictures of the Pope all reptilian-looking and withered and disappearing hunched down in his cloak and they are posted upon the walls in small cheap frames and all are for sale for thirteen francs each or now I suppose some other engagement of Euros and all that but no one took notice and the pope we were sure had already died and was buried and on the third day had arisen to sit at the right hand of the father and was ejected for slurping with his tongue against the Lord God and Master’s fearsome face AND THEN the three Russians come walking in accompanied by two beautiful porn stars of the old French Republic - one named ‘Chastises Repuissement’ and the other ‘Carneval Briouche’ - which are both theatrical names for within the industry for ‘spitting back’ and ‘swallowing with verve and joy’ but that’s never been made too public especially in the American South where for some reason these two girls are big sellers especially in bible belt Christian areas and these girls as it turns out are only falsely French they too being rather Russian dames making a buck franc euro or anything else and she starts (the taller one) reciting in English badly a ditty of some sort "a man stands on the bridge there LOOK! and he seems like a Mother-Fuck! then out of nowhere drawing near see Fuck-Yourself-In-The-Mouth appear!" and the waiting crowd (it was noted in the press) roared with laughter as the man with the pinochle captain tray and blue holders comes quickly around the corner and at once appeared again the Russian three who whipped out Kalishnikovs and sprayed the crowd with rapid fire as they killed too the two porn girls nearly dismembering their bodies with sprays of fire and the pulverized pieces of all that remained of both Chastise and Carneval were all about the room itself now filled with the dying and dead AS THE THREE RUSSIANS FLED ! and as this occurred their strange tongues spit out what appeared or was heard to be a rapid string of Russian oaths : "Yob tvoyu mat! Polny pizdets! Upast! Yobnut’sya! Pizdanutzsya! Khuyaknut’sya!" which was all later translated rudely as "a dog fucked your mother [which Americans might call a ‘son of a bitch’] go fuck yourself [literally ‘go sit on a prick’] fuck the devil go into the cunt you low-life no good useless prick stick go jab fire beat the pine needle[Russian euphemism for jerking-off]" and of course in the confusion these Romanosky Brothers Three escaped and the newspapers the next day all headlined something like "Massive Russian Triumvirate Murders Crowd in Senseless Obscene Fury!" or words to that effect (One New York Tabloid of course put it ‘Russians To Crowd – Go Fuck Yourselves’) and one of the two girls – who actually died instantly but who was portrayed here as having hopes of French refinement and assimilation and even of becoming erudite and educated was quoted as saying by her last words (totally non-existent) ‘Dying Words of French University Starlet: She was heard quoting an American author Joyce Carole Oates’ title ‘Where Am I Going Where Have I Been?’ (which is of course all wrong as the actual title is ‘Where Are You Going Where Have You Been?’ but who before has ever quibbled over pronouns?) and anyway the entire scene was somehow reminiscent of a 1960’s communist melodrama as seen on any American department store TV battery of screens the sort you used to see in shop windows and such with groups of silly people clustered around watching some breaking news story of space-flight assassination nuclear confrontation or Marilyn Monroe death or whatever unseemly capitalist illumination made them at that time better than the Communist farcical nation itself with its overweight matronly women and its GUM department store selling the most basic wares for mostly the apparatchik elite who weren’t actually even supposed to exist – DACHA this and DACHA that notwithstanding : but all that was long ago and everything’s been relegated by now to the technology museum of time (leaden olden slow and tired) so nothing matters (in this case EXCEPT the French).
6. THE STORM OF CATEGORY FOUR:
The way the body takes care of itself is to restructure the reality around it which is why the horrendous burden of hospitals remains so pitiful built as they are of ponderous material brick mortar and stone and now involved intensely in huge agglomerations of bureaucracy paperwork authority and procedure - all things which go against and defeat the ostensible purpose of renewal and re-birth and fresh growth - however and in spite of all that the body and its many wisdoms can go on from that point and remake the consciousness of the world THROUGH consciousness itself which is the foundation (truly) and the basis of all life as we know it ("a planet that is a giant brain capable of generating visions and hallucinations in anyone who approaches it – a truly monstrous field" – when Stanislaus Lem wrote that in his novel ‘Solaris’ he little knew how closely he was paralleling that which is CONSCIOUSNESS itself) and therefore of course we blindly careen along thinking (merely) that we know that which it is that we know WHATEVER that may be and as that curious form of ‘spatial’ exploration takes place the world we as creatures and spirits inhabit changes because of and in spite of US and the odd French dichotomy (I think) which that guy was just before mentioning gets even stranger as - if it is realized - the two levels work within each other to form the great constabulatory conflict itself FRENCH PHILOSOPHY French keys French kissing French pastry and all the rest - LOGICALLY to wit a Descartesian illogic which permeates things in that the sensate creature enabling itself pridefully announces that ‘things are’ because HE can cogitate them (meaning one is never sure if by that is meant that he has brought them into being by his thinking of them – thus taking credit in some absolute way for all creation – or instead if he merely means that his cogitation has brought to recognition that which is) in any case taking credit for one’s mistakes (as well as achievements) can only go so far for it is always the human tendency then to ignore or dis-claim things which are to no one’s liking (but which one is then stuck with by this logic) and at the same time - for all its vaunted gauziness and romanticism and all that Rousseauian stuff - the great French mind always manages to seem to get stuck between the two worlds of ‘creation by decree’ and ‘creation by necessity’ which is in another sense (the ‘by necessity’) a perfect summing up of the old and famed Sartrean Existentialist credo of leftover people re-determining the rules and ethics of living their personal lives for and by themselves in times of extreme situations and conditions and inasmuch as none of this has really ever had to be answered for the long philosophical argument has gone on and on and been long and drawn out by factors of many and the weary and tiresome aspect of it all has most certainly wilted the world - as well as the world of conflict between the always ready to simply ‘get up and do it’ American ethos of action power and might and that of the slower more deliberative and certainly more ungainly and ponderous FRENCH world of thought action and idea (superseded at any one time by its sister version of acculturation CALLED SURRENDER) but anyway it was asked from the audience (I recall hearing the voice) "what did the French ever invent anyway?" and yes there was an answer to that given but I’d have to go look it up and after that point I lost interest for the conversation somehow got onto space and space exploration and the French were once more being belittled for their lack of prowess and participation in space-flight and even (again as I recall) in naming any planets – as if that was a qualitative factor in national self-worth – but anyway after a certain point I just didn’t see much of any or ANY value or interest (what the hell – having never even been there).
7. THE HITLER BROTHERS BOWLING LEAGUE MEETS THE FROG PRINCE OF HEAVEN:
Much like Hitler myself I have burned my asshole shitting out poisons and I have left behind the shambles and rubble of my temporary digressions YET in a way I am much easier to take than old Adolph ever was - inasmuch as I leave people and things standing whereas he burned whatever he could (not that others would not have done it in his stead) and be you sure I defend no one neither Amerikanis nor Russkis for their own damages immersed in blood wine (and the pickled juices of forced excuses) and thinking now of all this after witnessing the carnage and drivel of the ‘other’ Russian assault I remark to myself how astounding it is that the brutalist crass coarse and murderous regime of Soviet Russians was YES YES present in space just like the bloated self-absorbed scientifically myopic Americans ever were (with their sweat-sock science and prescribed mannerism and enforced beliefs in only the most feeble side of everything IN THEIR lifeless and wasted and totally non-creative exploration of space) and I wonder about the French (instead gallantly ensconced in culinary school whittling mushrooms with only an occasional glance skyward to CHECK the moon for romance and all of its potentials scuddering hopelessly around and around the Arc de Triomph of Love and Excess the Eiffel Tower of Coitus and some errant version of ‘La Triage’ performed under the ancient Parisian Tree of Life) - who then in so hard-hearted a fashion seemed to have had everything turned on them and against them and found themselves dwindling like a tired old hooker to nothing but a mere bit-player on some playful sex-stage from Hell or wherever it may be but no one ever said a word ABOUT ANY OF THAT and life went on and time and place dwindled and the broad world still spun around in its carded oasis as people talked and debated and discussed and went on with their affairs UNTIL each at one point DIED quite away and that was the ending to all of that and perhaps anyway "who but the French" as I heard it being said "would have the stupid-assed fucked over audacity to posit the idea that there are finer levels to thought and idea than those brought forth by four thousand years of philosophy drama epic odes and poetry?" and the man saying this I saw was a tall dark Negro of quite African dimensions speaking with a very French accent aloud to the assembled crowd as he stood (and I mean stood – at some six feet eight inches I’d bet) and many of the words he spoke were coming out oddly to me "vit ees ze constitchuency de parabolerius that has maakede the potenzial of unhe very great dee-saster do you see?" in such a way he was speaking that myself I could understand much not and of course by that situation gone grave went merely upon my way once more when the next thing I knew I was immersed in a crowd of quite vibrant graduate students or diplomatic workers or exchange college people or something and all I heard from there was quite a mish-mash of everything current (I’d suppose) : "speaking of all this French shit I saw an ad just last night in some French magazine and the ad itself played off the Descartes thing – it was a sexily and scantily clad young woman stretched out flat on her back on some sort of very expensive looking bed and she was dressed in what appeared to be some very sexual and quite red silk robe or something – anyway she was ready for action – and the caption said ‘I sense-therefore I am’ and I thought that it was a fair send-off of all that French clap-trap but it also made me laugh" and someone else was talking rapid-fire "it’s a new day and hey I’m good and I’m also going to school here and now so is my boyfriend what ? I’m taking art art history and fashion classes and I’m making a film and working in acrylics too and it’s all really new to me so it’s all a lot of fun I’ve been here now about two and a half months and really enjoy it the places and all the people and oh ! my movie’s a comedy of sorts and I’m in it and I’m 24 now but I play a 14 year old ! and it’s all so much fun ! and I’m afraid really NOT to do it because then that would be letting someone else pull it off and I’d miss out so I’m certainly not going to give someone else the chance and besides I LOVE the costumes ! and you know what else I’m finding out is fun ? FACES simple faces they’re so different and beautiful all and you know that GRIN has never really ever been fully investigated in film before and my boyfriend he’s in a band too (did I tell you?) it’s called Die Berlin and they play really good music - what they call ‘symbiotic’ music - and it’s all quiet and intense and if you want to hear something really funny – even though they didn’t use it – I’d given them the idea to call themselves ‘The Intention’ but they chose ‘Die Berlin’ instead and I guess it works but I’m never sure if they mean ‘die’ like in death or if that word is some kind of German article of speech or something but they said ‘The Intention’ was too severe or too concrete or something I forget" and I kept listening (all the while stirring a very old coffee and just otherwise standing around in only that way that college forums or big cities allow) "and what makes any band interesting anyway is the marketing money it’s never the name or the songs or anything like that anyway" and another girl then piped up "I had a friend in a band once and it was called ‘Manson Clover’ but I never really knew what that was supposed to mean either."
8. AFTER THAT POINT MOST BEAUTIFUL SEX:
"The more carnal the animal the more fiery the temper and what’s more the fiery the temper the less certain any reactions so we can already see the main impetus of most any situation turns out to be essentially sexual and carnal or erotic anyway so once a person or a society owns up to that AFTER THAT POINT everything changes and if you think about it that can only be for the better because the recidivist and repressive aspects of any society - whether blemished by religion or myth or fear or autocracy - are mostly reactionary and always repressive in regards to sexuality because NO ONE knows how to own up to any of it and because of it the later entire structure of events and acts becomes twisted and always seeking avoidance and once that proverbial lid blows off all hell breaks loose and there are no longer any reference points and YET THEN even later a decade or so perhaps it turns out that no one gives a hoot what is said or shown or discussed and even sex - in its organized way - becomes very boring or trite and once it is that MERE SELF-INTEREST steps in and takes its place then there’s very little except greed and striving to replace it and everything else suffers - there’s bad art bad music bad writing bad everything as the creative world drops to a bad frenzy of near boredom" and as he spoke that I actually listened while watching the river traffic nearby roll by along the windows facing the East River along Beekman and Sutton and underneath the bridge - scows and tankers being pulled by tugs which seemed really to be struggling to pull (not push) as it appeared it was all against the tide which seemed rolling IN (uptown) which I’d imagine made the difference for the tugs between pulling and pushing myself having seen both and the cargo in each case seemed very heavy and flat but I’d think it to be much easier with the tide than against it but this guy’s voice kept my attention so I continued to listen nonetheless "and I’ve always wished it thus and to imagine the situation consider this idea : the reason God made the sex act so inviting or so delicious or so rewarding so that men are seemingly always on the prowl for coupling was that if it was not so the base SELF-INTEREST of men (and women incidentally - who also desire sex) would take over and greed and acquisitiveness ruling the day there would be fewer and fewer sexual offspring and the race would dwindle SO THAT in some perfect plan of God the ongoing sensuality and desire to mate overcomes any other desire or at least takes first place - which is why as I always say you find everywhere couples dragging strollers and walkers with two or three kids in tow even the sort of people you’d think to be the very last to seek families and the like even they become mama’s and papa’s soon enough and in spite of what other bullshit they may tell you" and I figured yeah well maybe that’s close enough to something else to be true but what matter anyway this guy’s taken the very long way around to say that if sex was boring no one would ever want to fuck which is - I’d suppose - a fairly debatable point (which point is probably the reason they brought him here to speak it being a guarantee of endless years of stupid graduate research and paper and monographs over the subject FODDER FOR A MILLION CANNONS TO BLOW FORTH to use a sexual metaphor).
1. YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT – THEREFORE EAT WHAT YOU ARE:
Sometime after the French - and this is the hardest part for they were eating well - ‘gourmand’ being the word they use (unfortunately and in-aptly) for gluttony which is still supposed to be one of the seven deadly sins and representative of the folk wisdom about nourishment – versions of which wisdom can be found in all cultures – both commendable and sound attributes everywhere as SURVIVAL itself is too and for HUMANS of course eating is or should be yet a matter of survival as befitting the grand old days but HUMANS have instead devised according to their various cultures numerous ways of preparing and concocting an assortment of foods thought appealing to body and mind alike and that very art of nourishment in fact has nurtured the human spirit and human industry for thousands of years and that ancient pursuit itself has relieved both pain and anxiety wherever it has been found easy to acquire (and continuously painful and with great anguish among those in hunger or in need) and has revealed TO THE FRENCH as it was said the great JOY which they have taken to calling ‘la satisfaction gourmande’ and part of that definition of ‘gourmand’ is or never has been found to include ‘to excess’ and has become in fact a positive term – much unlike its supposed equivalent term in English German Italian Spanish and other tongues – so that therefore its ‘semantico-theological’ significance is quite different (in English for example the seventh deadly sin was translated as ‘gluttony’ – it being that ‘la gourmandise’ has of course no English equivalent - while the same condition in French would really be referred to as ‘gloutonnerie’ or ‘voracite’ and the Italian version of same being ‘gola’ which also means gullet and connotes piggishness and the Spanish ‘gula’ is roughly synonymous with ‘gluttony’ and in German the word ‘lusternheit’ signifies the act of eating like an animal that does not know when to stop or with unbridled appetite or like someone who inhales his food) SO YOU CAN SEE all these words call to mind the ‘unbridled appetite’ of gluttons of face stuffers of scarfers of chowhounds of epicurean swine and are really and utterly foreign to French culture and to ‘la gourmandise’ which remains the admirable activity of the gourmand – a powerful catalyst of virtue imbued by its creators with a spiritual state of as high a quality nearly as their gourmet creations within a sphere of humility and pleasure which are also essential ingredients of simplicity and kindness and this incriminating shadow (on the other hand) cast by the condemnation of ‘gluttony’ for ‘la gourmandise’ has myriad disgraceful consequences for gourmands but especially for those involved directly in the creation of gourmet dishes – mothers fathers and cooks and fishmongers meat roasters bakers chefs caterers cheesemakers sauce chefs pastry chefs sommeliers – all because food has made their lives fruitful and meaningful and the value of their varied know-how is intrinsically seen as above reproach when exhibited in their preparation of meals AND SO therefore it is proposed here and TO THE POPE of the French Catholic People that in the French version of the catechism the word ‘gourmandise’ be officially changed to ‘gluttonnerie’ and although the word ‘intemperance’ conveys the idea of condemnable excess equally well ‘gluttonnerie’ would have the advantage of harmonizing the French with the theological terminology of other languages and the case against this semantic impropriety calls for – we feel – favorable consideration and we ‘especially solicit for help MOST HOLY FATHER in liberating gourmands from the purgatory of verbal ambiguity in which they have suffered for hundreds of years and from which they have incurred serious harm’ - as written and reported here by one Lionel Poilane dedicated humble and devoted servant to his grace the Pope (Lionel Poilane was a prominent French baker who sent this message along in October 2002 and who later that same month died in a helicopter crash)…NOW though I found this all to be somewhat interesting I even moreso found it all to be more a pile of garbage (or as the French would perhaps say ‘Gahr-Bahge’) still it got me thinking swiftly and hard on the origin of the word and reference I’d heard of ‘unbridled’ (as in ‘unbridled appetite’) and I began to think if perhaps this wasn’t an expression of some greater antiquity and a great throwback to the earlier ages of mankind when it was still dependent upon and interactive with ANIMAL power and ANIMAL energy and exertions for productivity and PERHAPS the idea was that if a horse or oxen was let go (‘unbridled’) meaning CONTROL was taken from it than it was felt that same animal would (in ‘unbridled excess’) run riot through his oats or feed or crop and in complete animal energy and excitation would (shall we say) ‘OVERDUE’ it – and I found myself wondering more than anything else what and where the origination of that word could have stemmed from French lecture be damned.
2. THE CULTURE OF THE OVERFLOW:
"In the history of the French there has always been indecision on the ‘real’ physical plane and an absolutism in the metaphysical and as the mixture of these two things never goes very well there has historically been a constant struggle between the two and inasmuch as struggle precludes progress they have culturally advanced in very slow ways and in erratic fashions - philosophy and religion being mere exceptions - exemplified in so many ways including the bizarre designs of Citroens the bizarre intellectualism of Deconstructors and New Critics and all the rest and the overlapping multi-dimensional claptrap of existentialists rationalists negativists positivists and all the rest ART DESIGN ARCHITECTURE and from each of these has developed a particular and peculiar French attitude of momentary displeasure mixed with some form of long-range composure disguised in an almost hedonistic fashion of living correctly in the ‘old’ ways - and this can be witnessed most easily in the examination of ‘what’ is a Frenchman – a category really of no existence anymore as the mixture of peoples present there has overtaken and now over-rides any national type – we have great and disparate mixes of North Africans and people of the Middle East we have Orientalists and Muslims in great numbers and insofar as time passes we have a complete sub-strata of blacks and North Africans which actually now is an older stream of entry than any of the newer and this old stream mixes into the French bloodline now in constant fashion (we make very little distinction anymore of peoples based on ‘color’ designations it being so prevalent and perhaps our ‘blacks’ would be Pakistanis) and what can you expect anyway of a nation and a people who once used as police vehicles both Citroens and Peugeots anyway the entire situation too is now at vast cross-purposes as the borderlines get dissolved yet at the same time people become more conscious of them (‘Paradox entre nous’) the line between France and Germany being as it is almost a new Berlin Wall of existence and curiously enough here now as I visit America I am struck even more by the weirdnesses I witness - (just the other day French-speaking East Indians the woman in customary robes the men in western attire having some trouble parking their vehicle in a broad parking lot where they kept hitting the concrete barrier upon the ground which is placed in American parking lots in order to mark the spots for the front of each car and when they finally parked I watched as it took them nearly ten minutes (I counted) of a particularly odd silence to attempt repeatedly to unfold and open and lock a large plastic baby stroller they had with them (they seemed totally incompetent) as well as a plastic car-seat for same baby which for some reason they were attempting to fold into the stroller and this went on for some time after which they took an equally long amount of time getting things out of the car including the child in order to place it into this stroller contraption in order to wheel it and the child and the four of them into a Rite Aid Pharmacy and during all this time the two women between them studied as well a colored circular of the day’s particular ‘bargains’ and sales in Rite Aid while eventually the older gentleman of them wandered away in some wistful daydreaming composed of simple staring and dumbfounded observation and occasional gazing at the sky and this as I said was all conjoined with French and English being mixed (whatever happened to their original East Indian language I wondered) and yes eventually they did wander into the nearby store all the while talking away but I wondered WHAT are these people WHO owns them actually and from WHERE have they come what exactly do their papers say and what lineages and personal histories do they hold and I find this all very difficult to understand - even this HERE in yet another land neither French nor Indian this localized American version of something I haven’t yet decoded but the particular Frenchness of all this too is something I am interested in determining both for the dilution-factor of what has happened to the French and the broader factor of Americanization across national lines and in addition the concepts of travel and distance and co-mingling and meanings between cultures."
3. BUT SO MUCH FOR EXPERTISE:
Right off the bat there were a few cultural differences which arose pertaining to the French and the Americans - things I thought of from the very first as confusing and which this speaker was at least touching upon (obliquely in his fashion) - the first being – as he mentioned – the strange difficulty he continued having in referring to ‘Indians’ for as the French were used to using the words without the confusion which arises in the American idiom when he meant Indians he just assumed it referred to East-Asians and the subcontinent of India yet here in America he was confronted with the odd problem of having Americans refer to Indians when speaking of what he thought of as ‘Aboriginals’ or at least ‘Native Americans’ and that confusion consistently caused him trouble even though as I was thinking to tell him it’s really just a predilection of Americans to portray the rest of the world as first beholden to them and secondary in all respects and therefore if as we are all taught or HAVE BEEN in our past textbooks that the peoples upon whom the first explorers stumbled upon (those explorers who were after all ‘Europeans’ and numbers of them ‘French Europeans’) were taken up as certainly expendable creatures of the earth mostly not even worthy of living if they were in the ‘way’ of settlement and further exploration SO therefore we CALLED them ‘Indians’ in most part to portray their essential role in our local drama as the people who had to go in order for us to achieve our destiny - melting pot mixed cultures and all that falling by the wayside MOST CERTAINLY in the case of Indians for they never were ever included in any mix or vision of our ‘Peoples’ and therefore to ‘dignify’ them as something outside of our use and decision-making power would have been to give to them more power and importance than we as a ‘peoples’ were allowing them to have THEREBY they became our ‘Indians’ – essentially a people stumbled upon by accident and in the way on OUR way (which was really the way of old European nation-states) to the orient where as it turned out other Indians lived BUT NO MATTER insofar as trying to explain something of this note to him would have been difficult as it seems to take a very peculiar and certain ‘American’ point of view to accept for calling them ‘Indians’ advanced our narrative in a perfectly orderly and non-fictional way even as it was incorrect (a word used often in juxtaposition to using the word ‘wrong’ which advances a different narrative and brings forth an entire other raft of conditions – which is evidently a set of conditions we’d never wanted to deal with) – and ANYWAY I’m not sure what nomenclature things go under in France but I’m sure they’ve had problems of their own in issues of assimilation and empire (can you say Algeria? Morocco? French Indo-China? to name but a secondary three) so on certain counts like that maybe we’re even BUT another issue which got me was the issue of ‘French Girls’ or women who’ve always been burdened it seems here in America with the notion of being ever-ready for sex always in the midst of sexual pleasure always being provocative and in arousal and lithe svelte femme fatale and all that yet by such thoughts I’d have figured he too would be under that same impression but his reference instead was to the pleasurable beauties of American undergraduate girls I suppose he meant the basic college babe to whom he spoke and the difference I saw there was that American ‘females’ were seen as willing and ready and sexual in their benign youth – something ending at about 28-30 perhaps – while the enduring lesson of French seduction was and is that a woman seduces as a woman even it means 50 years old - so strong and domineering is the French proclivity of pure carnal sex and intended orgasmic seduction so that HIS IMPRESSION basically was that American females – unless they are young – are useless for sexual pleasure ‘FRENCH MAN DENOUNCES AMERICAN WOMEN’ I thought I could almost see the headlines now and started chuckling to myself for I realized that in a political context that notion or one such notion as that could be politicized and made Marxist or anti-Marxist or Utopian or pragmatic or sexist or reactionary all ad infinitum for such are the ways and the errant joys of the journalistic world when it decides to pounce on something there’s not even a chance of salvation for the perpetrator once portrayed has not a snowball’s chance in Hell of getting his or her self out from underneath the rubble which is brought down upon his or her head by a mis-speak or a wrong-felt attitude God be praised and Heaven help us all but that’s the way it is and I therefore felt as if I was sitting on nails just waiting for this guy this poor fellow to slip up to say something mistaken to befoul his charmed Frenchical character by denouncing or misrepresenting an American notion or shibboleth or understanding and then I got to thinking at the same time about all those Charles Aznavour types the tres-seductive French men he personified (and others like him) being smooth and wise and crafty and able and willing in love and having massive success and love-fests in every conceivable way with lesser women I thought ‘how well does that portray anything real?’ and perhaps the notion exists too that if the French were not a nation of lovers they’d not have such problems of mixed population or crowded races crawling over and ‘into’ one another and the great French race would not thereby dilute itself or be diluted so as to make still some other hybrid race of whatever now passes for French - indecisive frothy strangely offensive insincere - whatever today’s collection of ‘types’ are seen to be and the more he talked the less I felt he knew about anything except perhaps a survivor’s experience of wartime (his supposed field of expertise) but even that seemed to belie the reality of his age which I could not figure out as more than 3 or 4 years of age in 1945 so what the hell would he know for even by then it was all different and all over anyway and whatever experiences he could recall probably had more to do with early shitting or sucking his mother’s tit-milk than anything else BUT SO MUCH FOR EXPERTISE!
4. ‘AFTER ALL I AM ONLY YOUR CHILD’:
Another time another place – I’m somewhere by the sea and the night sky above me is dark and Mars is at my left and the new moon is on my right and the sheer commingling of such two events in their own singular way shows me all of what hasn’t occurred in so many many years NEVERTHELESS I’M HERE and yes I am melancholy and filled with loathing and at a station I can never leave and between poles I can never duck and the great radius ending of my time and days seems severed with situations and is heard talking like a cat to missionary doctors and small wrens beneath Irish eaves and I lounge back upon some soiled grass to watch the ice cream sky above me spinning deep and morose and solid dark and heavy with planets and stars and the Jupiter fallions of a million deeds and all around me is silence pure unabashed and without circumference and everything opens up wide and great and wild and broad and I simply heave with longing alone and think back on corduroy times of kings and mastiffs and song-men with twenty handles and within my heart still dwells a caveman running and the torch-light flame above my head is more than circumstantial and whatever seems way above is far below at the same time as I sensate decree that space is curved and time is dense and morning light arrives between two darknesses ‘both of time and of intent’ and the Master’s eyes proclaim the fury of destruction in the glimmer of Creation’s moment and seeing no difference between even the two the entire place moves once along the way and I am left behind (so it seems again alone) and listening for that fearsome pronunciation only known to me THE SHIBBOLETH of secret code the distinguishing test of pronunciation the singular test of a group (and I surmise too just as our universe warps so we together warp the each other in each of us) and this vast COSMOS around me I take in and amorously embrace (‘I want to rotate my fluctuations on her tempestuous body’) and I think back to the day of the awful Frenchman singing (‘repudiate salubrious wretched excess roiling’ I think I heard him say) and confused as any other I motion for life to go on and with or without me it most certainly does "BLACK-WINGED NIGHT into the bosom of Erebus dark and deep laid a wind-born egg and as the seasons rolled forth sprang Love the longed-for shining with wings of gold…and first there was Chaos – the vast immeasurable abyss – outrageous as a sea DARK WASTEFUL WILD!" and so much comes through that I relax myself again on some St. Peter’s grass by Amboy’s grave and listen for the withering onslaught of all the world borne by deadly fissure and cracked "and I Sir must say how much you’ve done how little and the words just fall but I understand none at all and what labors are you trying to say and how and why and DO YOU NOT WANT ME TO UNDERSTAND ? perhaps ? yet what is the shaker of your potion and who holds the cards in your deck by what meaning and manner and which circumstance do you face ? for AFTER ALL I AM ONLY YOUR CHILD."
5. NIGHTMARE OUTRAGE CATERWAUL SCREAM!:
"I must change here for one other comment in the midst of all this for it was when I got sick that everything changed and I was no longer able to take care of myself and go on without pounding pain and the feeble acts of a dying old man left to himself THAT is when I reneged on everything and realized I had met this all before" the French dichotomy rational Descartes and all the rest with its opposites the ideas of both certainty and doubt together the all-pervasive nonsense of unreality and rational thought the expansive ideas of space and religion and the after-image of the bright light lingering in the eyes something having to do with surrender some Vichy leftover regime of compromise and weakness and bald-headed women shaved as a curse and an oath the lines of coffins at the outside of the Auberge Cathedral each waiting to be brought in by armed guards for the stupid sprinkling of holy water upon them a ritual so vapid and stupid as to make a laughing stock of any catholic country and we see the pictures of the Pope all reptilian-looking and withered and disappearing hunched down in his cloak and they are posted upon the walls in small cheap frames and all are for sale for thirteen francs each or now I suppose some other engagement of Euros and all that but no one took notice and the pope we were sure had already died and was buried and on the third day had arisen to sit at the right hand of the father and was ejected for slurping with his tongue against the Lord God and Master’s fearsome face AND THEN the three Russians come walking in accompanied by two beautiful porn stars of the old French Republic - one named ‘Chastises Repuissement’ and the other ‘Carneval Briouche’ - which are both theatrical names for within the industry for ‘spitting back’ and ‘swallowing with verve and joy’ but that’s never been made too public especially in the American South where for some reason these two girls are big sellers especially in bible belt Christian areas and these girls as it turns out are only falsely French they too being rather Russian dames making a buck franc euro or anything else and she starts (the taller one) reciting in English badly a ditty of some sort "a man stands on the bridge there LOOK! and he seems like a Mother-Fuck! then out of nowhere drawing near see Fuck-Yourself-In-The-Mouth appear!" and the waiting crowd (it was noted in the press) roared with laughter as the man with the pinochle captain tray and blue holders comes quickly around the corner and at once appeared again the Russian three who whipped out Kalishnikovs and sprayed the crowd with rapid fire as they killed too the two porn girls nearly dismembering their bodies with sprays of fire and the pulverized pieces of all that remained of both Chastise and Carneval were all about the room itself now filled with the dying and dead AS THE THREE RUSSIANS FLED ! and as this occurred their strange tongues spit out what appeared or was heard to be a rapid string of Russian oaths : "Yob tvoyu mat! Polny pizdets! Upast! Yobnut’sya! Pizdanutzsya! Khuyaknut’sya!" which was all later translated rudely as "a dog fucked your mother [which Americans might call a ‘son of a bitch’] go fuck yourself [literally ‘go sit on a prick’] fuck the devil go into the cunt you low-life no good useless prick stick go jab fire beat the pine needle[Russian euphemism for jerking-off]" and of course in the confusion these Romanosky Brothers Three escaped and the newspapers the next day all headlined something like "Massive Russian Triumvirate Murders Crowd in Senseless Obscene Fury!" or words to that effect (One New York Tabloid of course put it ‘Russians To Crowd – Go Fuck Yourselves’) and one of the two girls – who actually died instantly but who was portrayed here as having hopes of French refinement and assimilation and even of becoming erudite and educated was quoted as saying by her last words (totally non-existent) ‘Dying Words of French University Starlet: She was heard quoting an American author Joyce Carole Oates’ title ‘Where Am I Going Where Have I Been?’ (which is of course all wrong as the actual title is ‘Where Are You Going Where Have You Been?’ but who before has ever quibbled over pronouns?) and anyway the entire scene was somehow reminiscent of a 1960’s communist melodrama as seen on any American department store TV battery of screens the sort you used to see in shop windows and such with groups of silly people clustered around watching some breaking news story of space-flight assassination nuclear confrontation or Marilyn Monroe death or whatever unseemly capitalist illumination made them at that time better than the Communist farcical nation itself with its overweight matronly women and its GUM department store selling the most basic wares for mostly the apparatchik elite who weren’t actually even supposed to exist – DACHA this and DACHA that notwithstanding : but all that was long ago and everything’s been relegated by now to the technology museum of time (leaden olden slow and tired) so nothing matters (in this case EXCEPT the French).
6. THE STORM OF CATEGORY FOUR:
The way the body takes care of itself is to restructure the reality around it which is why the horrendous burden of hospitals remains so pitiful built as they are of ponderous material brick mortar and stone and now involved intensely in huge agglomerations of bureaucracy paperwork authority and procedure - all things which go against and defeat the ostensible purpose of renewal and re-birth and fresh growth - however and in spite of all that the body and its many wisdoms can go on from that point and remake the consciousness of the world THROUGH consciousness itself which is the foundation (truly) and the basis of all life as we know it ("a planet that is a giant brain capable of generating visions and hallucinations in anyone who approaches it – a truly monstrous field" – when Stanislaus Lem wrote that in his novel ‘Solaris’ he little knew how closely he was paralleling that which is CONSCIOUSNESS itself) and therefore of course we blindly careen along thinking (merely) that we know that which it is that we know WHATEVER that may be and as that curious form of ‘spatial’ exploration takes place the world we as creatures and spirits inhabit changes because of and in spite of US and the odd French dichotomy (I think) which that guy was just before mentioning gets even stranger as - if it is realized - the two levels work within each other to form the great constabulatory conflict itself FRENCH PHILOSOPHY French keys French kissing French pastry and all the rest - LOGICALLY to wit a Descartesian illogic which permeates things in that the sensate creature enabling itself pridefully announces that ‘things are’ because HE can cogitate them (meaning one is never sure if by that is meant that he has brought them into being by his thinking of them – thus taking credit in some absolute way for all creation – or instead if he merely means that his cogitation has brought to recognition that which is) in any case taking credit for one’s mistakes (as well as achievements) can only go so far for it is always the human tendency then to ignore or dis-claim things which are to no one’s liking (but which one is then stuck with by this logic) and at the same time - for all its vaunted gauziness and romanticism and all that Rousseauian stuff - the great French mind always manages to seem to get stuck between the two worlds of ‘creation by decree’ and ‘creation by necessity’ which is in another sense (the ‘by necessity’) a perfect summing up of the old and famed Sartrean Existentialist credo of leftover people re-determining the rules and ethics of living their personal lives for and by themselves in times of extreme situations and conditions and inasmuch as none of this has really ever had to be answered for the long philosophical argument has gone on and on and been long and drawn out by factors of many and the weary and tiresome aspect of it all has most certainly wilted the world - as well as the world of conflict between the always ready to simply ‘get up and do it’ American ethos of action power and might and that of the slower more deliberative and certainly more ungainly and ponderous FRENCH world of thought action and idea (superseded at any one time by its sister version of acculturation CALLED SURRENDER) but anyway it was asked from the audience (I recall hearing the voice) "what did the French ever invent anyway?" and yes there was an answer to that given but I’d have to go look it up and after that point I lost interest for the conversation somehow got onto space and space exploration and the French were once more being belittled for their lack of prowess and participation in space-flight and even (again as I recall) in naming any planets – as if that was a qualitative factor in national self-worth – but anyway after a certain point I just didn’t see much of any or ANY value or interest (what the hell – having never even been there).
7. THE HITLER BROTHERS BOWLING LEAGUE MEETS THE FROG PRINCE OF HEAVEN:
Much like Hitler myself I have burned my asshole shitting out poisons and I have left behind the shambles and rubble of my temporary digressions YET in a way I am much easier to take than old Adolph ever was - inasmuch as I leave people and things standing whereas he burned whatever he could (not that others would not have done it in his stead) and be you sure I defend no one neither Amerikanis nor Russkis for their own damages immersed in blood wine (and the pickled juices of forced excuses) and thinking now of all this after witnessing the carnage and drivel of the ‘other’ Russian assault I remark to myself how astounding it is that the brutalist crass coarse and murderous regime of Soviet Russians was YES YES present in space just like the bloated self-absorbed scientifically myopic Americans ever were (with their sweat-sock science and prescribed mannerism and enforced beliefs in only the most feeble side of everything IN THEIR lifeless and wasted and totally non-creative exploration of space) and I wonder about the French (instead gallantly ensconced in culinary school whittling mushrooms with only an occasional glance skyward to CHECK the moon for romance and all of its potentials scuddering hopelessly around and around the Arc de Triomph of Love and Excess the Eiffel Tower of Coitus and some errant version of ‘La Triage’ performed under the ancient Parisian Tree of Life) - who then in so hard-hearted a fashion seemed to have had everything turned on them and against them and found themselves dwindling like a tired old hooker to nothing but a mere bit-player on some playful sex-stage from Hell or wherever it may be but no one ever said a word ABOUT ANY OF THAT and life went on and time and place dwindled and the broad world still spun around in its carded oasis as people talked and debated and discussed and went on with their affairs UNTIL each at one point DIED quite away and that was the ending to all of that and perhaps anyway "who but the French" as I heard it being said "would have the stupid-assed fucked over audacity to posit the idea that there are finer levels to thought and idea than those brought forth by four thousand years of philosophy drama epic odes and poetry?" and the man saying this I saw was a tall dark Negro of quite African dimensions speaking with a very French accent aloud to the assembled crowd as he stood (and I mean stood – at some six feet eight inches I’d bet) and many of the words he spoke were coming out oddly to me "vit ees ze constitchuency de parabolerius that has maakede the potenzial of unhe very great dee-saster do you see?" in such a way he was speaking that myself I could understand much not and of course by that situation gone grave went merely upon my way once more when the next thing I knew I was immersed in a crowd of quite vibrant graduate students or diplomatic workers or exchange college people or something and all I heard from there was quite a mish-mash of everything current (I’d suppose) : "speaking of all this French shit I saw an ad just last night in some French magazine and the ad itself played off the Descartes thing – it was a sexily and scantily clad young woman stretched out flat on her back on some sort of very expensive looking bed and she was dressed in what appeared to be some very sexual and quite red silk robe or something – anyway she was ready for action – and the caption said ‘I sense-therefore I am’ and I thought that it was a fair send-off of all that French clap-trap but it also made me laugh" and someone else was talking rapid-fire "it’s a new day and hey I’m good and I’m also going to school here and now so is my boyfriend what ? I’m taking art art history and fashion classes and I’m making a film and working in acrylics too and it’s all really new to me so it’s all a lot of fun I’ve been here now about two and a half months and really enjoy it the places and all the people and oh ! my movie’s a comedy of sorts and I’m in it and I’m 24 now but I play a 14 year old ! and it’s all so much fun ! and I’m afraid really NOT to do it because then that would be letting someone else pull it off and I’d miss out so I’m certainly not going to give someone else the chance and besides I LOVE the costumes ! and you know what else I’m finding out is fun ? FACES simple faces they’re so different and beautiful all and you know that GRIN has never really ever been fully investigated in film before and my boyfriend he’s in a band too (did I tell you?) it’s called Die Berlin and they play really good music - what they call ‘symbiotic’ music - and it’s all quiet and intense and if you want to hear something really funny – even though they didn’t use it – I’d given them the idea to call themselves ‘The Intention’ but they chose ‘Die Berlin’ instead and I guess it works but I’m never sure if they mean ‘die’ like in death or if that word is some kind of German article of speech or something but they said ‘The Intention’ was too severe or too concrete or something I forget" and I kept listening (all the while stirring a very old coffee and just otherwise standing around in only that way that college forums or big cities allow) "and what makes any band interesting anyway is the marketing money it’s never the name or the songs or anything like that anyway" and another girl then piped up "I had a friend in a band once and it was called ‘Manson Clover’ but I never really knew what that was supposed to mean either."
8. AFTER THAT POINT MOST BEAUTIFUL SEX:
"The more carnal the animal the more fiery the temper and what’s more the fiery the temper the less certain any reactions so we can already see the main impetus of most any situation turns out to be essentially sexual and carnal or erotic anyway so once a person or a society owns up to that AFTER THAT POINT everything changes and if you think about it that can only be for the better because the recidivist and repressive aspects of any society - whether blemished by religion or myth or fear or autocracy - are mostly reactionary and always repressive in regards to sexuality because NO ONE knows how to own up to any of it and because of it the later entire structure of events and acts becomes twisted and always seeking avoidance and once that proverbial lid blows off all hell breaks loose and there are no longer any reference points and YET THEN even later a decade or so perhaps it turns out that no one gives a hoot what is said or shown or discussed and even sex - in its organized way - becomes very boring or trite and once it is that MERE SELF-INTEREST steps in and takes its place then there’s very little except greed and striving to replace it and everything else suffers - there’s bad art bad music bad writing bad everything as the creative world drops to a bad frenzy of near boredom" and as he spoke that I actually listened while watching the river traffic nearby roll by along the windows facing the East River along Beekman and Sutton and underneath the bridge - scows and tankers being pulled by tugs which seemed really to be struggling to pull (not push) as it appeared it was all against the tide which seemed rolling IN (uptown) which I’d imagine made the difference for the tugs between pulling and pushing myself having seen both and the cargo in each case seemed very heavy and flat but I’d think it to be much easier with the tide than against it but this guy’s voice kept my attention so I continued to listen nonetheless "and I’ve always wished it thus and to imagine the situation consider this idea : the reason God made the sex act so inviting or so delicious or so rewarding so that men are seemingly always on the prowl for coupling was that if it was not so the base SELF-INTEREST of men (and women incidentally - who also desire sex) would take over and greed and acquisitiveness ruling the day there would be fewer and fewer sexual offspring and the race would dwindle SO THAT in some perfect plan of God the ongoing sensuality and desire to mate overcomes any other desire or at least takes first place - which is why as I always say you find everywhere couples dragging strollers and walkers with two or three kids in tow even the sort of people you’d think to be the very last to seek families and the like even they become mama’s and papa’s soon enough and in spite of what other bullshit they may tell you" and I figured yeah well maybe that’s close enough to something else to be true but what matter anyway this guy’s taken the very long way around to say that if sex was boring no one would ever want to fuck which is - I’d suppose - a fairly debatable point (which point is probably the reason they brought him here to speak it being a guarantee of endless years of stupid graduate research and paper and monographs over the subject FODDER FOR A MILLION CANNONS TO BLOW FORTH to use a sexual metaphor).
posted by gary j. introne at 4:19 PM
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