The Odor of Things.

        

       Like one of Ron Sukenick's Rabbis, strange things happen to me as I am reading, and I suppose I have strange reading habits, though what strange is, well.. Like in beginning this, I wanted to reference a large wall piece I saw recently at the Dallas Contemporary which was made by pasting up hundreds of sheets of newspaper and painting out all the things which did not interest the artist. That area of disinterest became the color of the sky. What was left, was a sort of bricolage or flat Wunderkammern calling to mind, visually and / or morphologically, a line-less musical staff inhabited by leitmotivs (light-motifs) of spheres and mythic statuary among other things. But I couldn't find the artist's name when I began writing this (yjod), but found instead a picture of myself I had not seen, and which was quite recent, here. That little shock of seeing myself was also repeated earlier, or perhaps it wasn't myself, but rather, any or all selves, and not exactly the _The Shock of the New_, or the shock of the news, but the shock of nous itself. I was reading Curtis White's story called _Bonanza_ and particularly the section called:


THE WILDFATHER TELLS ALL
(and maybe it's one paragraph in..)


"Before every episode, the Cartwrights would ride by, fearlessly, joyfully, riding straight into the heart of this forest fire that had consumed the entire region. Well, every single time I'd come up out of my gully yelling and waving my hands trying to catch their attention. I wanted to say, 'Hey, who the fuck do you think you pretty boys are dumping all these twigs and sticks in my gully? And ol' Ben he'd just sit so stiff and proud in his saddle and say 'Ignore him, boys. That's the Wild Father.' 'Just ignore him,' he says. Oh that makes me so durned mad! Why couldn't they take me with them?"


and Curtis goes on with the story.


Basic action. And you could say the whole world is a fire. I guess that's what I was talking about in a recent poem where I mentioned a Crimson Hospital, but I think the building I really meant was the Crimson Tanz Akademy in Suspiria which is actually something called "Zum Walfisch" ("The Whale" in German).


And somehow right then I knew, something, or nothing. I guess I remember a dream that gave an image of the brain I had which was called a "T-whale." And I guess it meant a large body of connections, but it just kind of washed off the wall when I was reading Richard Brautigan's _Hawkline Monster_ to the sounds of Goblin:


Then Professor Hawkline passed electricity from the battery through The Chemicals and began the mutation which led to an epidemic of mischievous pranks occurring in the laboratory and eventually getting upstairs and affecting the quality of life in the house. Then Brautigan goes on to mention 


a piece of pie suspended in the air.. 


suspended, just like the nodes in the original bricolage,
and suspended, sounding like suspiria.


pi, pyre, suspire, suspend, pyrite, judgement, music.


Odd cousins.


Ideas, like people, like me, like anyone, just standing around in the basic miasma,
noticing each other, or perhaps not noticing, or perhaps actively ignoring. I've been ignored before,
like the Wild Father. I was ignored by Eric Charles White, who I don't think is any relation to Curtis White,
but I could be wrong. There is an interesting section in E.C. White's _Kaironomia: On the Will to Invent_
that puts the scene into a periplum, as it were:


The following passage is Chuang-tze's version of the paradox that threatens to empty Derrida's argument of its positive content.


There was a beginning. There was a time before that beginning. And there was a time before the time which was before that beginning. There was being. There was non-being. There was a time before that non-being. And there was a time before the the time that was before that non-being. Suddenly there is being and there is non-being, but I don't know which of being of being and non-being is really being or really non-being. I have just said something, but I don't know if what I have said really says something or says nothing.


The diacritical oscillation of contraries thus extends to the very statement that would express the contradictory nature of reality (relaity?). Even the position that claims to be no-position is haunted by nostalgia for definitive truth. Différance becomes an equivalent term for what Edward Said has referred to as the pure intransitive beginnng of consciousness, "perhaps our permanent concession as finite minds to an ungraspable absolute." Derrida's intention must therefore remain a utopian one.The farceur's freedom from nostalgia and self-serving delusion is a perpetual task. Even the recognition of the differential nature of meaning issues from a tragically divided consciousness.


The knowledge that farce provides is thus tragic in spite of itself. The strategy of the farceur is already the strategy of the tragedian.


//


But what of Arsewers and Fragedians? What of Stratediums? What of Sarceurs?
or Sorcerors? Saracens or Forcerors?


or Farcery? Scarcery? Tragesty.




Special Thanks to Judy Lochhead, The Symphonie fantastique, and to the Creatures of Prometheus.


Discontinuities often multiply, or don't, often their non-multiplication multifies, or may even


discontinue.