Fuck my cunt, she screamed in orgasmic boredom.
But he told her to shut up, and put it in her ass.
Count Lev Tolstoi was not a giving man, nor was he a patient man. He was singularly proud of never having consciously provided another human being with even a modicum of physical pleasure.
So he was understandably riled when the browncoat bemusedly walked into the main bedroom at Yasnaya Polyana as the count was fucking his wife. The browncoat of late was very prone to such malapropistic entrances and was often struck by the ludicrous nature of the places to which he was inexorably driven by his homelessness and instantly visible lack of a stable daytime activity. Of course such inane sociologies could never fully frontalattack the essence of brownback and be stretchered off victorious, and Tolstoi knew it for he despised comte. But the Count was angry nevertheless, and he jumped off the marital bed and covered himself with his beard and slapped browncoat hard and brutal. But the Count’s first slap had unfortunately been of the noiseless variety, and as the Count prepared to rectify this incongruity he looked upon the browncoat. And he read the browncoat’s first face and he could not tell how it would end, how the browncoat would end, and this pacified him. But the Count was also a biblically incompetent judge of face and character.
And Cunt Lev Tolstoi asked no pointless questions of the browncoat but told him to sit down and demanded a list of the first ten books the brownback had read as a child. And brownback said the legends of Mount Olympus (brownback’s anthology somehow snuck in a queered up version of Kneazi Igor towards the end, right before Romulus and Remus and immediately after the editorial corrections to the first labour theory of value) and the three musketeers and advanced phrenology and the rest were a blur. And the Cunt said mythology was a useful skill to peddle and inquired of the brownback if he had any more. And brownback told the Cunt he was Mother Russia’s least skilled labourer, a pair of hands so unskilled it had never even occurred to them to try to support themself through his own efforts, and that he had subsisted hitherto solely on the old man’s imprecations. And the Cunt informed brownback that he, brownback, wasn’t such a young man any longer and that dilettantism added a rosy glow to his complexion and that specialisation and professionalization and the ever-increasing competence of the professional classes in narrow segments are the mummification tools for the Russian soul, and that money, sexy smart money, was its sarcophagus, a sarcophagus with a touch so light ‘twould be a shame for the soul to object it wasn’t quite ready to die and be immolated yet. And the soul didn’t want to ruin anyone’s enjoyment so it obediently crawled into money and money cradled it and swept it across green oceans and green mountains and green riverbeds and whispered sweet green bedtime stories and the soul fell asleep and slept on forever and money was too fucked up in the head simply to kill the soul outright and the soul would lie there, forever there, forever snoring, forever flying across money’s sick fantasies, and there would be no prince to clip money’s green wings and kiss the soul awake, and browncoat wasn’t that prince was he, of course not, not princely material and besides he couldn’t kiss anyone awake could he only time he’d been kissed on the mouth was when his nanny raped him whom browncoat or the Cunt it doesn’t really matter actually. And even if some amorphous expectoration of princely material adopted this quest as his little pet quest, maybe during sophomore year in college when workloads are giving and résumé building requires pet causes, and challenged money for custody and protection rights over the soul with shimmering spear aloft, money would simply swoop down on the prince and rain down great fireballs of green moneyslime and the prince’s noble steed (a rental) would trip on the moneyslime and the prince would be intoxicated by its fumes and dream the sick dreams of money and turn his horse back and remember the dreams of money and write books about them as he grew out of his princely youth.
And browncoat asked the Cunt whether he truly thought there were no greater and hungrier hic-sunt-dracones whites than money to black out, and the Cunt replied that money and its cognates and its undefeated myrmidons and its writers of books were pervasive and immodest and would cook all of civilisation over a lazy fire just to ensure it was adequate safe and full ready for mass consumption, for remember how life expectancy jumped five hundred per cent when man started cooking his friends, and money did not like judicial exposure over a civilization that taught man words like dyspeptic and how to use them in an expensive suit. And the brownback was curious if the Cunt had an alternative, and the Cunt said to eat raw meat and like it and would say no more on the matter. And the brownback had an aha moment, and said this all went back to Shakespeare didn’t it, and the Cunt threw his pound of flesh off the shelf in saying that there is something strange, and which wd. now be thought very affected in the language of Shakespeare whose common thoughts are expressed in uncommon words, and that yes it did go back to Shakespeare for Shakespeare lacked awareness, and when pressed on the meaning of awareness the Cunt said consciousness, and brownback speculated that a man as well-bearded as the Cunt surely thought such miserly consciousness as was pickled in humans could not fail to be propped up by an higher truth and higher powers and higher orders of what humans misname consciousness and that all forms of consciousness, of which art is the highest, and the easiest to sodomize, knew it as their duty to bind man and his consciousness tighter to this higher truth, and this higher truth so said the Cunt could not fail to be either god or a parody. So was the Cunt affirming that Shakespeare had, among other items, invented the unconscious (since most higher truths and values were too busy playing five finger fillet with Hamlet during the première of Coriolanus to show up on Shakespeare’s stage) through his refusal to lend words and scripts to the higher truths exiled into man by god, exiled so as to roam man and plant their flags in his desert and in his hungry mouths so their higher flags could create new sand hills and pretty pearls, sand hills and pretty fake pearls vaguely shaped like flags and silent truths. No, the Cunt was simply saying Shakespeare lacked consciousness and therefore his art could not fail to be deficient in matters of consciousness also. And the brownback wanted to know why pick on Shakespeare in the first place, and the Cunt ejaculated that Shakespeare had been auto-da-féd as the mascot of the human and of humanism to such an obsessive extent that it was indigenous to each new generation to discover humanity in and through Shakespeare, and so a lack of consciousness in Shakespeare made it fathomable and even sadly preferable to build one’s humanity in a sandcastle where consciousness was nothing but the moat. And often enough, consciousness, which is in effect religion or at the very least spirituality, was found inimical to the expansionist projects of humanity, and the patient little (paratactic) x of consciousness was unsolvable in their universalist, elegant little equations, and so they feared it and expulsed it from the things that really mattered to them. But what was so painful about the Cunt’s humans was that without consciousness they were no higher in terms of being than stones or insects or fish or the wind, they were objects and true they had their precious objectivity but had attained it by being fucking objects, objects like a rock, and money was perfect at juggling objects because for one atavistic reason or another it was still immoral to sell conscious human beings openly at least nigger them up make an effort show someone cares, and having shed the metaphysics of consciousness they had nothing more interesting to occupy them than political philosophy and the fungi of postmodernism, and another thing consciousness is morality and without consciousness there is no morality and there is instead only the law, and the law is not founded on the higher but on the immanent which happens to be self-interest.
And the Cunt was also against over-population and hence vaginal intercourse (a gutted dislike he shared with both Shakespeare and Lear, surprisingly).
And the Cunt also thought that no man should model his body on the shadow or the cloud of god and pretend the form is rightfully his.
But the browncoat told the Cunt that he only directed an heavy traffic of negatives and did he not have
any positivities and guidances and novel moralities to offer and that criticising is always easier than actually fucking up or even unfucking the upfucked thing that ends up being criticized. And the Cunt acknowledged this by telling brownback it was a lazy objection to make and he would hear no more of it. And the Cunt decided it was time to make conversation and he asked brownback what he thought of the Moscow Metro, and brownback said he loved it because it spared him the city, the actual city; for him, it was always axial to be always never knowing of his host city, never emerging from the damp of the subterranea. Always coursing through the underground like a drunken bacterium through a cirrhotic's veins. No bloodstream, no lifestream under the sun. The Cunt retorted that art and life in general would be infinitely easier and much more interesting if only one could, in kindergarten, in school, in the club and in the lecture hall, identify the ones who are meant to fail, spectacular wipeouts etched in penknife on the reverse of their foreheads just behind their petroleum eyes themselves lanthorns lighthousing their failure into the world and the future, and befriend them in advance instead of having to read them off the front page of the times. In fact, it often struck the Cunt as tragic how much easier and simpler life and art would be if they just for once in their useless existence just listened to him and did exactly what he’d tell them to do and thought exactly what and how he’d tell them to think and then it was inevitable, logically inevitable, that they learn to love it and grow into loving it and they would just carry on like that without him and the proper way would be instilled in them forever and most things would be right at long last. And browncoat suggested that you sometimes just have to bid them free float and even self vaporise, even the laziest and stupidest of the begotten, and the Cunt nodded and told him he didn’t have much sympathy for the browncoat after all, the only reason he was still tolerating him was that he was slightly less arborescently rooted to his recurrent fate, every single time you open him, than a blood Nietzschean in the throes of pubescence. And the browncoat masticated through this in silence and finally told the Cunt that he was right on Shakespeare but not much else, Shakespeare really was bullshit, and the Cunt sniffed that it truly didn’t matter whether he was right or not, it would take the West well over three centuries to get rid of Shakespeare, bloody Darwin would die out before Shakespeare even hints at displaying the slightest sign of weakening, and they were all paragons of egotism and such people couldn’t be reasoned with because one can never reason with the axiomatic centre of the universe. But hadn’t money displaced man in the centre of existence in a transCopernican shift wondered the brownback, and the Cunt said that for all money cared existence itself might be uninhabited, and money needed no centre and wanted no throne and didn’t want to get its moneyed face dirty with the attention of dependent lower beings and the brownback said for all he cared existence might and should be uninhabited, in fact he was quite convinced it was. And as brownback fed on the Cunt’s membrane of rebellion their minds lay prostrate at their feet, and they lay there without moving, and under them all moved. And the Cunt sermonized at length on the indispensability of a fiery pillar of consciousness chaining man to god like an inverted Babel, and when god would shout at man through the hollow pillar the echoes would make man’s ear bleed and man would cower in fright as if at thunder and through man’s blood god’s instructions and wisdom would cake themselves around man’s being, and this consciousness would keep god and man coagulated. And browncoat asked the Cunt why would man desire to enslave himself to his own creation, to a fickle dream of power man had created in his own image, and the Cunt said that obviously browncoat hadn’t it in him to understand the mysteries of creation and explaining such matters to him was self-evidently a philanthropic dissipation of energies an old man such as the Cunt could ill afford in his advancing senescence. But this was a cheap swat and the Cunt knew it and being a garrulous fellow he could never retreat from the podium in so noble a renunciation so he told the brownback that despite his the brownback’s general immobility and aboulia and inability to engage the environing world in a genuine stranglehold deep down even he the brownback acknowledged somewhere in his embarrassing places that we are stuck inside ourselves like statues in a block of stone, and so we have to sculpt our way out and we have to force each other to do it if necessary. And the brownback wanted to ascertain what exactly had persuaded the Cunt that his the brownback’s statue for instance was in any way preferable simply to a block of stone and why retch his own personal statue upon the world and that most people’s statues would be Rodins anyway and that he personally much preferred the image of the genius sculptor sinking decades into the one perfect sculpture and caressing the stone and sweating black marble sweat all those decades and the statue would finally be ready and it would be so perfect even Borges’s one-word poem would be unworthy of sandaling or licking its feet and the genius sculptor would discard or destroy the brilliant statue and gather up and keep and forever treasure the chippings and refuse and all the black marble sweat he had sweated during the labouring on the statue. At this the Cunt stated that to think outside good and evil is cowardice, and the browncoat said that to think inside god is castration, and the Cunt said aha so the browncoat at least admitted that to think was an important and vital component of man that like his testicles is vital to his perpetuity and progress and the browncoat said no but thinking, like castration, is painful and unnecessary but fun and the Cunt underlined how little sense this made and the browncoat told the Cunt he was welcome. And the Cunt asked brownback whether he, the brownback, understood anything about art and literature at all, and brownback almost smiled but didn’t and assured the Cunt that he, the brownback, did know about art and literature and said in his best paper tiger that one needed to murder one’s darlings and find one’s voice and write what one knew. And the Cunt did not even bother scoffing and brownback hastily wiped his mouth clean of failure and the Cunt emphasised how writing what one knows was already what one’s parents inevitably end up doing – writing their sorry creations, writing their sorry creations’ story like they know, in the only language they speak – that of safe materialism. Each man may or may not live out his life as a character in a story told by someone else, but why indulge Freud and have one's parents write the pre-biography, why give them creative control over the first draft of one’s biography asked the Cunt. And thus writing a novel about what one knows is not so very different from writing a cheque for tuition or a permission slip for P.E. class.
And the brownback told the Cunt that he was being exceedingly theatrical and that the immaculacy of his desire to stage a show for the brownback was so intense its crystal had become transparent. And the Cunt said ah, what were the brownback’s preferences in matters of shows and theatre, and browncoat was in fact expecting this divagation and he replied that he had none not really but he still liked theatre better than reading books because books reminded him of the one book, book one, the great one that was eating his livers and sitting fatly on his kidney and whistling and refusing to come out and trace its ink across the brownback’s face and blacken his wrinkles and sculpt his decaying teeth into paragraphs so they could bite sharper and always one writes one’s best books using one’s own fallen dragon teeth. And the Cunt said not to fret about the book since it would starve on his liver eventually and would come out and lock the shadows in a cave, but it was interesting that brownback had a weak preference for drama over literature since this was an issue that the Cunt had grappled with repeatedly in the past without stitching up a proper conclusion. And only recently did he have his epiphany and now finally he knew why he consistently found the stage inferior to literature, why Shakespeare live was mostly drivel and embarrassing slapstick and rudimentary tumefied kinematics whereas on the page he Shakespeare was prone to self-induced foaming consumption, why the Cunt almost always felt guilty upon leaving the theatre, almost as guilty as if he had just ingurgitated a feuilleton or sold a moiety of his library and a quart of his progeny for a foaming ra
cehorse. He had finally found it: theatre, as opposed to literature, had too much life. Life is mobility and creakiness and mostly the desire to remain alive (and sometimes even to take another’s life just to see how it bleeds… into the blender), and the Cunt held its life, theatre’s superior leash on life, radically against it; books depended on the reader, on the Cunt, for their Athena’s breath, he was their life and thus, as soon as he lifes them, they are – like him – lifeless and sour and bloodless and pathetic and slow-burning and angry, infected by him and reflectively infecting him right back, infecting him beyond the pettiness of his individual hatred to an hatred of cosmic and theogonic dimensions, and that is why he likes literature, better than theatre at any rate. And the brownback declined to investigate this new and brutal manhandling of Shakespeare for Shakespeare was uselessly fondled and seduced and violated in just about every grammatical thought he or anyone else had ever had and the Cunt was dionysiacally entitled to his savaging if he wanted it.
And the Cunt persisted in talking at the browncoat until he the browncoat felt he was only listening so as to weigh his brain with his skull and of course he was weightless at first such were the rules of the game but then the Cunt did not stop talking and the Cunt talked and talked and talked and the single point that was brownback’s position and reference point and site of dwindling consciousness within the conversation became smaller and smaller and the Cunt’s drool – for the Cunt spat as he talked, and generously – finally wipewashed the single pencilgray point that was brownback’s position and the brownback no longer had a position and consequently no opinion and no say and point from which to listen and such a situation was novel to him. And try as he didn’t he was incapable of computing his current situation and his brain could not see itself as affixed onto a nothing, within the conversation or outside it, it simply was not built for such thoughts for no one can conceive of nothingness not really one simply visualises blackness or blinding seraphic whiteness or screeching white noise but the brownback was well and truly a nothing dissolved in the Cunt’s discourse at that point and his brain was overflowing and his skull felt the weight of impossibility and the inner pressure hugged his walls and it became heavier and heavier and was expanding as the brain had decided to counter the nothing by becoming more and more of a something, an undeniable something, and the intensity of the brownback’s nothing thoughts electrified his skull chamber and proceeded to loosen the bolts holding the thoughts in their ineffectual cradle.
But just then as in Lear or just the opposite a storm of tridents incapacitated the tabernacle and the Cunt’s speech became nothing and could not be heard athwart the furies and the brownback hearkened the winds. And the great concert of winds called him out by name, the winds spelt out his name, glyph by glyph, leaf by horrible thump of fallen leaf. And the browncoat took the Cunt’s outstretched hand and with his uncut nails the browncoat writ upon the hand
“in his head there is a book – his book. in his book there may or there may not be characters
if you have any feelings for his characters, he has failed
if you have any feelings for his characters, you have failed”
And the Cunt did not read what was written on his hand but he licked at the writing and it had the sound of seawater and the Cunt nodded his head and fell asleep.
And it was time for the Cunt to serve his guest tea, and he brought out the scalding tea set and they bedrank of the tea. And the Cunt’s hands were wrinkled into formlessness, affixing the teacup as through osmosis. And the Cunt told the browncoat, whom he now referred to as his child, that all shall be forgiven his child, if only he his child would now swallow the saggy bread and drink the saggy wine and kiss the Cunt’s saggy hand. And the Cunt offered a new outstretched hand, and the brownback was expected to kiss the Cunt’s saggy hand, the scene of his the brownback’s writing. And brownback could not kiss his own writing and he grew very nervous and he almost started sweating and he was driven to the edge, almost, of (having) a thought. And there was no ego scriptor in his signature so he was not equipped to deal properly with having a thought, the appropriate course being of course to abort it instantaneously and drink the amnion, and he told the Cunt that he the browncoat would rather moisturize a speeding bullet using his cerebellum than kiss himself into the offering. And Cunt Lev Tolstoi laughed at this and told the browncoat that they are of the very same texture, blood and ink, in fact the ink screams through the blood whenever the blood is spilt and vice versa, and if one drinks both at once one is cleansed of authority and remembrance. And the reason for seeking freedom and absolution from authority and remembrance is that temporal authority reheats the shackles of one’s allegiance to the current world and the current world is not consciousness but hay fever, and remembrance dilutes the barriers of the consciousness-ignited self against the onslaught of the temporal and the self is washed off by the temporal and is similarly absorbed by the world instead of ordering the world to conform to his moulds and facilitate the falls of consciousness. So was the Cunt advocating the abdication or removal of temporal authority and the flattening of remembrance in favour of thinking the atemporal the brownback wanted to clarify and the Cunt said his breathings were rather crude and left an horrid skid mark on his the Cunt’s mental pyrotechnics that made them sound forty years stupider but yes this was what he thought.
And Cunt Lev Tolstoi recalled, to neighed pangs of the browncoat’s infelicitous mirth, how once when he had been a young man his own father a nobleman had taken him to the circus and the young Cunt fell in love with the geriatric strongman who as it turned out doubledipped as the circus act’s sole clown and after some boring felines and some flightless pretties it was time for the trapeze act. And it was an highly complex trapeze act solo and no safety net for which the Cunt initially thought the trapeze artist an arrogant prick but then the trapeze artist commenced jumping and twisting and interlocking and skilfully flaying the air and the impressionable Cunt was won over absolutely. And after five minutes of careless mortality the trapeze artist performed his most complex trick and it was so impossible and homosexuality-inducing that the young Cunt burst into wild clapping and the whole circus had been silent except for the splitting of the dusty air by the trapeze artist’s sharp body and the clapping was so loud that the trapeze artist forgot himself and slipped at the most elementary of trapeze switches and fell to his death. And the young Cunt did not even try to suppress the most innocent and vernal gale of laughter his contrarious body would ever birth in the Cunt’s long bearded duration. And the Cunt’s noble father shielded him from the circus peasants’ gaze and wrapped him in his coat and sped him out of the circus tent.
And the Cunt summoned his youngest and it presented itself with diffidence and difficulty of balance and the browncoat nodded and the Cunt asked him what he thought and the browncoat said nothing and the Cunt said his youngest reminded him of his second. And his second had been such a long time ago. And his second was for eleven months, and his second had been an extremely precocious baby who grasped speech and facial expressions and could speak good Russian and fluent French and could laugh at the Cunt’s Homer, or at least the Cunt’s initially mendacious Homer, for his second would have none of the ad usum delphini fustian the Cunt had attempted to proffer; also he laughed at the Cunt’s improbable Oxford Anglo-Greek. And his second could understand, could honestly and truly understand humans and thoughts and ideas, and especially thoughts and ideas and was always fascinated and stolen by their incorrigible endlessness. And most of all the Cunt’s second was a thrall to death and liked to talk of it when others talked around it and the second knew dying. And the fully conscious second opened a window in the mansion two weeks before his first year and he did not even stare down or up but dead ahead and he stepped off the window-sill and he travelled three storeys and this had been neither accident nor blind children’s curiosity but knowledge and the Cunt knew that the second had known.
And the Cunt had always hated his seco
nd, before and after the window, and the second had always probably hated the Cunt, particularly during the window. But this nugatory hatred accunted for next to nothing in the grandiloquent scheme of things nor did it fashion the window of itself so the Cunt did not bother telling the brownback of it and the second did not bother leaving a note on mind asps and hatred and the brownback quite simply did not bother with anything at all.
And the Cunt offered the browncoat a position as maid at Yasnaya Polyana and money was good and the browncoat would sweep the Cunt’s rumblings and deliquescences into the fireplace and manuscripts would burn in the fireplace and burn in the Cunt’s gastric acidpouches and right would be right and evil would be evil and adultery adultery. But the browncoat felt he had spilt enough words into the variegated fireplaces at Yasnaya Polyana and bade Cunt Lev Tolstoi excuse him but it was time for the browncoat to sing in spit bubbles elsewhere and the Cunt was most serene and understanding for such was his noble way and he merely grew out his strong white beard as the browncoat weighed the book in his head using his skull and left Yasnaya Polyana with an elastic step and a ragged new oldnovel philosophy to chew on under the microscope lenses of the Moscow streetlights.
Chapter vii