THEN we went over to Paul’s place and took the typewriter. Then the problem was to find somebody to sell it to. It was a fine Olivetti 22, that typewriter, and the typewriter girls put it under their skirts. Then George wanted to write something on it while it was under their skirts. I think he just wanted to get under there, because he likes Amelia’s legs. He is always looking at them and patting them and thrusting his hand between them. “What are you going to write under there, George?” “I thought perhaps some automatic writing, because one can’t see so well under here with the light being strangled by the thick wool, and I touch-type well enough, but I can’t see to think, so I thought that . . .” “Well we can’t sell this typewriter if you’re typing on it under Amelia’s legs, so come out of there. And bring the carbon paper too because the carbon paper makes black smudges on Amelia’s legs and she doesn’t want that. Not now.” We all had our hands on the typewriter when it emerged because it had been in that pure grotto, Paul’s place, and tomorrow we are going to go there again and take the elevator cage this time, so that he can’t come down into the street any more, with his pretensions.
“YES,” Bill said, “I wanted to be great, once. But the moon for that was not in my sky, then. I had hoped to make a powerful statement. But there was no wind, no weeping. I had hoped to make a powerful statement, coupled with a moving plea. But there was no weeping, except, perhaps, concealed weeping. Perhaps they wept in the evenings, after dinner, in the family room, among the family, each in his own chair, weeping. A certain diffidence still clings to these matters. You laughed, sitting in your chair with your purple plywood spectacles, your iced tea. I had hoped to make a significant contribution. But they remained stony-faced. Did I make a mistake, selecting Bridgeport? I had hoped to bring about a heightened awareness. I saw their smiling faces. They were going gaily to the grocery for peanut oil, Band-Aids, Saran Wrap. My census of tears was still incomplete. Why had I selected Bridgeport, city of concealed meaning? In Calais they weep openly, on street corners, under trees, in the banks. I wanted to provide a definitive account. But my lecture was not a success. Men came to fold the folding chairs, although I was still speaking. You laughed. I should talk about things people were interested in, you said. I wanted to achieve a breakthrough. My penetrating study was to have been a masterly evocation, sobs and cries, these things matter. I had in mind initiating a multi-faceted program involving paper towels and tears. I came into the room suddenly, you were weeping. You slipped something out of sight, under the pillow.
“ ‘What is under the pillow?’ I asked.
“ ‘Nothing,’ you said.
“I reached under the pillow with my hand. You grasped my wrist. An alarm clock spread the alarm. I rose to go. My survey of the incidence of weeping in the bedrooms of members of the faculty of the University of Bridgeport was methodologically sound but informed, you said, by too little compassion. You laughed, in your room, pulling from under the pillow grainy gray photographs in albums, pictures of people weeping. I wanted to effect a rapprochement, I wanted to reconcile irreconcilable forces. What is the reward for knowing the worst? The reward for knowing the worst is an honorary degree from the University of Bridgeport, salt tears in a little bottle. I wanted to engage in a meaningful dialogue, but the seminal thinkers I contacted were all shaken with sobs, wracked is the word for it. Why did we conceal that emotion which, had we declared it, could have liberated us? There are no parameters for measuring the importance of this question. My life-enhancing poem was mildly meretricious, as you predicted. I wanted to substantiate an unsubstantiated report, I listened to the Blue Network, I heard weeping. I wanted to make suitable arrangements but those whose lives I had thought to arrange did not appear on the appointed day. They were deployed elsewhere marching and counter-marching on fields leased from the Police Athletic League. I was perhaps not lucky enough. I wanted to make a far-reaching reevaluation. I had in mind launching a three-pronged assault, but the prongs wandered off seduced by fires and clowns. It was hell there, in the furnace of my ambition. It was because, you said, I had read the wrong book. He reversed himself in his last years, you said, in the books no one would publish. But his students remember, you said.”
THE REVOLUTION OF THE PAST GENERATION IN THE RELIGIOUS SCIENCES HAS SCARCELY PENETRATED POPULAR CONSCIOUSNESS AND HAS YET TO SIGNIFICANTLY INFLUENCE PUBLIC ATTITUDES THAT REST UPON TOTALLY OUTMODED CONCEPTIONS.
PAUL sat in his baff, wondering what to do next. “Well, what shall I do next? What is the next thing demanded of me by history?” If you know who it is they are whispering about, then you usually don’t like it. If Paul wants to become a monk, that’s his affair entirely. Of course we had hoped that he would take up his sword as part of the President’s war on poetry. The time is ripe for that. The root causes of poetry have been studied and studied. And now that we know that pockets of poetry still exist in our great country, especially in the large urban centers, we ought to be able to wash it out totally in one generation, if we put our backs into it. But we were prepared to hide our disappointment. The decision is Paul’s finally. “Are those broken veins in my left cheek, above the cheekbone there? No, thank God, they are only tiny whiskers not yet whisked away. Missed in yesterday’s scrape, but vulnerable to the scrape of today.” Besides, most people are not very well informed about the cloistered life. Certainly they can have light bulbs if they want them, and their rivers and mountains are not inferior to our own. “They make interesting jam,” Hank said. “But it’s his choice, in the final analysis. Anyhow, we have his typewriter. That much of him is ours, now.” People were caressing each other under Paul’s window. “Why are all these people existing under my window? It is as if they were as palpable as me—as bloody, as firm, as well-read.” Monkish business will carry him to town sometimes; perhaps we will be able to see him then.
“MOTHER can I go over to Hogo’s and play?” “No Jane Hogo is not the right type of young man for you to play with. He is thirty-five now and that is too old for innocent play. I am afraid he knows some kind of play that is not innocent, and will want you to play it with him, and then you will agree in your ignorance, and then the fat will be in the fire. That is the way I have the situation figured out anyhow. That is my reading of it. That is the way it looks from where I stand.” “Mother all this false humility does not become you any more than that mucky old poor little match-girl dress you are wearing.” “This dress I’ll have you know cost two hundred and forty dollars when it was new.” “When was it new?” “It was new in 1918, the year your father and I were in the trenches together, in the Great War. That was a war all right. Oh I know there have been other wars since, better-publicized ones, more expensive ones perhaps, but our war is the one I’ll always remember. Our war is the one that means war to me.” “Mother I know Hogo is thirty-five and thoroughly bad through and through but still there is something drawing me to him. To his house. To the uninnocence I know awaits me there.” “Simmer down child. There is a method in my meanness. By refusing to allow you to go to Hogo’s house, I will draw Hogo here, to your house, where we can smother him in blueberry flan and other kindnesses, and generally work on him, and beat the life out of him, in one way or another.” “That’s shrewd mother.”
THE poem remained between us like an immense, wrecked railroad car. “Touching the poem,” we said, “is it rhymed or free?” “Free,” Snow White said, “free, free, free.” “And the theme?” “One of the great themes,” she said, “that is all I can reveal at this time.” “Could you tell us the first word?” “The first word,” she said, “is ‘bandaged and wounded.’” “But . . .” “Run together,” she said. We mentally reviewed the great themes in the light of the word or words, “bandaged and wounded.” “How is it that bandage precedes wound?” “A metaphor of the self armoring itself against the gaze of The Other.” “The theme is loss, we take it.” “What,” she said, “else?” “Are you specific as to what is lost?” “Brutally.” “Snow White,” we said, ?
??why do you remain with us? here? in this house?” There was a silence. Then she said: “It must be laid, I suppose, to a failure of the imagination. I have not been able to imagine anything better.” I have not been able to imagine anything better. We were pleased by this powerful statement of our essential mutuality, which can never be sundered or torn, or broken apart, dissipated, diluted, corrupted or finally severed, not even by art in its manifold and dreadful guises. “But my imagination is stirring,” Snow White said. “Like the long-sleeping stock certificate suddenly alive in its green safety-deposit box because of new investor interest, my imagination is stirring. Be warned.” Something was certainly wrong, we felt.
THE HORSEWIFE IN HISTORY
FAMOUS HORSEWIVES
THE HORSEWIFE: A SPIRITUAL PORTRAIT
THE HORSEWIFE: A CRITICAL STUDY
FIRST MOP, 4000 BC
VIEWS OF ST. AUGUSTINE
VIEWS OF THE VENERABLE BEDE
EMERSON ON THE AMERICAN HORSEWIFE
OXFORD COMPANION TO THE AMERICAN HORSEWIFE
INTRODUCTION OF BON AMI, 1892
HORSEWIVES ON HORSEWIFERY
ACCEPT ROLE, PSYCHOLOGIST URGES
THE PLASTIC BAG
THE GARLIC PRESS
BILL has developed a shamble. The consequence, some say, of a lost mind. But that is not true. In the midst of so much that is true, it is refreshing to shamble across something that is not true. He does not want to be touched. But he is entitled to an idiosyncrasy. He has earned it by his vigorous leadership in that great enterprise, his life. And in that other great enterprise, our love for Snow White. “This thing is damaging to all of us,” Bill noted. “We were all born in National Parks. Clem has his memories of Yosemite, inspiring gorges. Kevin remembers the Great Smokies. Henry has his Acadian songs and dances, Dan his burns from Hot Springs. Hubert has climbed the giant Sequoias, and Edward has climbed stately Rainier. And I, I know the Everglades, which everybody knows. These common experiences have yoked us together forever under the red, white and blue.” Then we summoned up all our human understanding, from those regions where it customarily dwelt. “Love has died here, apparently,” Bill said significantly, “and it is our task to infuse it once again with the hot orange breath of life. With that in mind I have asked Hogo de Bergerac to come over and advise us on what should be done. He knows the deaths of the heart, Hogo does. And he knows the terror of aloneness, and the rot of propinquity, and the absence of grace. He should be here tomorrow. He will be wearing blueberry flan on his buttonhole. That is how we are to know him. That and his vileness.”
HOGO was reading a book of atrocity stories. “God, what filthy beasts we were,” he thought, “then. What a thing it must have been to be a Hun! A filthy Boche! And then to turn around and be a Nazi! A gray vermin! And today? We co-exist, we co-exist. Filthy deutschmarks! That so eclipse the very mark and texture . . . That so eclipse the very mark and bosom of a man, that vileness herself is vilely o’erthrown. That so enfold . . . That so enscrap . . . Bloody deutschmarks! that so enwrap the very warp and texture of a man, that what we cherished in him, vileness, is . . . Dies, his ginger o’erthrown. Bald pelf! that so ingurgitates the very wrack and mixture of a man, that in him the sweet stings of vileness are, all ginger fled, he . . .” Henry walked home with his suit in a plastic bag. He had been washing the buildings. But something was stirring in him, a wrinkle in the groin. He was carrying his bucket too, and his ropes. But the wrinkle in his groin was monstrous. “Now it is necessary to court her, and win her, and put on this clean suit, and cut my various nails, and drink something that will kill the millions of germs in my mouth, and say something flattering, and be witty and bonny, and hale and kinky, and pay her a thousand dollars, all just to ease this wrinkle in the groin. It seems a high price.” Henry let his mind stray to his groin. Then he let his mind stray to her groin. Do girls have groins? The wrinkle was still there. “The remedy of Origen. That is still open to one. That door, at least, has not been shut.”
KEVIN was being “understanding.” We spend a lot of our time doing that. And even more of our time, now that we have these problems. “Yes that’s the way it is Clem,” Kevin said to his friend Clem. “That’s the way it is. You tell it like it is Clem baby.” Kevin said a lot more garbage to Clem. Peacocks walked through the yard in their gold suits. “Sometimes I see signs on walls saying Kill the Rich,” Clem said. “And sometimes Kill the Rich has been crossed out and Harm the Rich written underneath. A clear gain for civilization I would say. And then the one that says Jean-Paul Sartre Is a Fartre. Something going on there, you must admit. Dim flicker of something. On the other hand I myself have impulses toward violence uneasily concealed. Especially when I look out of the window at the men and women walking there. I see a great many couples, men and women, walking along in the course of a day because I spend so much time, as we all do, looking out of windows to determine what is out there, and what should be done about it. Oh it is killing me the way they walk down the street together, laughing and talking, those men and women. Pushing the pram too, whether the man is doing it, or the woman is doing it. Normal life. And a fine October chill in the air. It is unbearable, this consensus, this damned felicity. When I see a couple fighting I give them a dollar, because fighting is interesting. Thank God for fighting.” “That’s true Roger,” Kevin said a hundred times. Then he was covered with embarrassment. “No I mean that’s true Clem. Excuse me. Roger is somebody else. You’re not Roger. You’re Clem. That’s true, Clem.” More peacocks walked through the yard in their splendid plumage.
WE opened eggs to let the yellow out. Bill was worried about the white part, but we told him not to worry about that. “People do it every day,” Edward said. The giant meringue rose to the ceiling. We were all in it. Dan turned off the television set. “You can’t cook according to what that woman says. She never has the proportions right, and I don’t think there ought to be cannabis in this meringue anyhow.” “I just don’t like your world,” Snow White said. “A world in which such things can happen.” We gave her the yellows, but she still wasn’t satisfied. It’s easy enough to motivate policemen if you give them votes and scooters to ride about on, but soldiers are a little more difficult. More soldiers. Cash their checks. Just because they are soldiers is no reason for not cashing their checks. Philippe laid down his M-16, his M-21, his M-2 and his fully automatic M-9. Then he laid down his M-10 and his M-34 with its mouthfed adapter. Then he laid down his M-4 and his M-3. It made a pile, that hardware. “Well I suppose that identifies you,” the girl behind the wall said. Then she gave him his money, and gave the other men their money too. We were amazed that the performance was allowed to continue. There were a lot of things against the government in it. We gave Snow White the yellows in an aluminum container. But she still wasn’t satisfied. That is the essential point here, that she wasn’t satisfied. I don’t know what to do next.
The psychology of Snow White: What does she hope for? “Someday my prince will come.” By this Snow White means that she lives her own being as incomplete, pending the arrival of one who will “complete” her. That is, she lives her own being as “not-with” (even though she is in some sense “with” the seven men, Bill, Kevin, Clem, Hubert, Henry, Edward and Dan). But the “not-with” is experienced as stronger, more real, at this particular instant in time, than the “being-with.” The incompleteness is an ache capable of subduing all other data presented by consciousness. I don’t go along with those theories of historical necessity, which suggest that her actions are dictated by “forces” outside of the individual. That doesn’t sound reasonable, in this case. Irruption of the magical in the life of Snow White: Snow White knows a singing bone. The singing bone has told her various stories which have left her troubled and confused: of a bear transformed into a king’s son, of an immense treasure at the bottom of a brook, of a crystal casket in which there is a cap that makes the wearer invisible. This must not continue. The behavior of the bone is unacceptable. The bone
must be persuaded to confine itself to events and effects susceptible of confirmation by the instrumentarium of the physical sciences. Someone must reason with the bone.
“I AM being followed by a nun in a black station wagon.” Bill wiped his hands on the seat covers. “I cannot fall apart now. Not yet. I must hold the whole thing together. Everything depends on me. I must conceal my wounds, contrive to appear unwounded. They must not know. The bloody handkerchief stuffed under the shirt. Now she signals a right turn. Now I will make a left turn. That way I shall escape her. But she makes a left turn too. There it is. That does it. She is following me. Following the spiritual spoor of my invisible wounds. Is she the great black horse for which I have waited all my days, since I was twelve years old? The great devouring black horse? Of course not. Don’t be ridiculous, Bill. You are behaving like a fool. She is nothing like a black horse. She is simply a woman in a black dress, in a black station wagon. That she signals for a right turn and then makes a left turn means nothing at all. Don’t think about it. Think about leadership. No, don’t think about leadership. If you hang a right at this corner . . . No, she hung a right too. Don’t think about it. Don’t think. Turn on the radio. Think about what the radio is telling you. Think about the various messages to be found there.”