This morning, this very late morning, after trolling through some of the locale's ferment of realty, that supplement to reality upon which one is presiding, I am provoked by the scraps I have gathered, the louche scrappiness of the fragment, its imperatory scategorisme' recalling perhaps, some mumbly lines from Barthes' Sade | Fourier | Loyola, that odd trifectum of Perversity, Pragmatism, and Paradox:
(the italics are Barthes')[the paradox is mine to wield]
I write badly means: I think well.
Surely, this one phrase needs its context to function, but is its context worthy of the fragment? Yesterday, I made the offhand gesture recalling some sense of the stoned autonomy of organs, that feeling of having some inner voice unable to speak, yet existing as the churdling of an inner other which can only speak indirectly. Both louche and scrappy have this doubled quality, but there is a slight difference. According to the OED, louche's entry reads:
Oblique, not straightforward. Also, dubious, shifty, disreputable.
The two senses are combined. But for scrappy, each sense receives its own number. Hence:
Scrappy 1: Consisting of scraps; made up of odds and ends; disjointed, unconnected.
Scrappy 2: Inclined to scrap or fight; aggressive, pugnacious, quarrelsome.
If we continue with Barthes, we learn that these co-inhabitants of sets require a lubrication:
and he gets ever more lubricated after that, requiring me to roll the eyes, and look for
more louche materielle, something to continue our Loyolan Exercises, which as Barthes
correctly notes, were considered "disconcerting," "curious," and "bizarre," by the Jesuits, the order which Loyola founded which recalls perfectly and doubly, the unsilent, yet wordless inner other ala autonomy,
and this parodical eucharisma found in Michael McClure's _jaguar skies_ from a ditty called
Anacreon's toothache:
MY TOOTH
insults
my bald
pate.
Then he goes on to dance drunkenly to a cicada's song
and to reach out for the furtivity of the form, the between, the nectarine, of the gap of the mark
and the unmark, perhaps..
I'll
dance a state-
ly step
to
cicada's song
whilst
I
imbibe
the
grape.
Ah, there goes
a lovely shape!
Hey, wait!
And there is something medieval in all this, something of Rabelais, and of the Goliards,
so it wouldn't be much of a leap to confound in all this the reflexive, again, pulling out of
scrappy and louche, some sense of Paul Scarron's The Fruitless Precaution, or pushing further,
of unalloyed duplicity, Tartuffe as totem. And also to confound criticism itself with a passage like:
Oh no, my criticism! (Hey, wait!) [subtly: Onomacritos]
Molière responded to criticism of Tartuffe in 1667 with his Lettre sur la comédie de l'Imposteur. He sought to justify his play and his approach to comedy in general by underlining the comedic value of the juxtaposition of good and bad, right and wrong, and wisdom and folly. These humorous elements in turn were intended to highlight what is actually rational. In his Lettre he wrote:
The comic is the outward and visible form that nature's bounty has attached to everything unreasonable, so that we should see, and avoid, it. To know the comic we must know the rational, of which it denotes the absence and we must see wherein the rational consists . . . incongruity is the heart of the comic . . . it follows that all lying, disguise, cheating, dissimulation, all outward show different from the reality, all contradiction in fact between actions that proceed from a single source, all this is in essence comic.Criticism employs a sort of music of dogma, a whiff of the rational disguised as the correct, it wields in the guise of a virtue, composition, the ancient synetheken. Onomacritos is said to have taken the "name of the Titans" from Homer, and to have "composed" (synetheken) "orgies" (mystery actions) of Dionysios. He invented (epoiesa) the story that the Titans were responsible for the death of Dionysios. Scraps. It's funny, whenever I think of the Dionysian, I often think of Jim Morrison, for example. To me "stoned," means: dionysian. And then there's that Doors song. You're Lost Little Girl.. which is like some elegant re-stating of Blake's poem The Little Girl Lost.
Tell me who are you?
(Grave the sentence deep)
I am Lyca.
I am like an (Hey, wait!) [Onomacritos]
aithale (sublimated vapor) [soot]...
But drunkeness is not the Venetian way. One must have the best interests of the city
as well. Oh fucking tyrannical Venice, fucking tyrannical Mallarme', fucking tyrannical idealisme'!
Isn't this body, city enough? Isn't this organismic orgy, mystery enough? Even the Count Robert de Montesquiou let in some trash to lounge with his precious curios:
A noise of secateurs within the gloomy orchard,
This small grey net the shade of mountain-flax...
Collections.. Scraps. Loucherie..
In Robin Walz's Pulp Surrealism, which I have a signed copy of, there is an odd object in the secondary section of the title: Insolent Popular Culture in Early Twentieth Century Paris.
Insolent.
Algernon Moncrieff:
Why is it that at a bachelor's establishment the servants invariably drink the champagne?
Lane:
I attribute it to the superior quality of the wine, sir. I have often observed than in married households the champagne is rarely of a first-rate brand.
This comes from a play whose title means exactly the opposite of what it says.
What are the assumptions? What are the critiques?
Why not break earnest itself
into
EAR-NEST
to whit:
I'll
dance a state-
ly step
to
secateur's song
whilst
I
imbibe
the
grape.
Or to choose earnest Irronism, hear? (The silent Orgons)
| Tartuffe | Orgon's houseguest and a hypocrite |
| Madame Pernelle | Orgon's mother |
| Orgon | head of the house and husband of Elmire |
| Elmire | Orgon's wife and object of Tartuffe's lust |
| Dorine | Orgon's housemaid and confidente of Mariane |
| Cléante | Elmire's brother and Orgon's brother-in-law |
| Mariane | Orgon's daughter, in love with Valere |
| Damis | Orgon's son |
| Valère | in love with Mariane |
| Laurent | Tartuffe's servant (either unseen, or present but non-speaking) |
| Argas | friend of Orgon; entrusts Orgon with documents that Tartuffe steals and attempts to use against Orgon (never seen, only spoken of) |
| Flipote | servant of Madame Pernelle (non-speaking) |
| Monsieur Loyal | a bailiff |
| A King's Officer |
or reverse it (STENRAE)
to dig the chumble of a "STEN-RAY" or the arc of a sten gun's indice:
1949 Koestler Promise & Fulfilment:
There is no conceivable justification for Sten-gunning the representative of an international body.
1961 Times 8 Mar.:
The Tunisian stengunners outside the luxury hotel: the Hiberno-Scandinavian-Afro-Asian chatter in the café below United Nations headquarters.
-Marcel Breuer (non-sequitur)
