Imaginary Speeches for a Brazen Head by Philip Whalen
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NUNC COCNOSCO EX PARTE THOMAS J. BATA LIBRARY TRENT UNIVERSITY Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation https://archive.org/details/imaginaryspeecheOOOOwhal by Philip Whalen SELF-PORTRAIT, FROM ANOTHER DIRECTION MEMOIRS OF AN INTERGLACIAL AGE LIKE I SAY MONDAY IN THE EVENING EVERY DAY HIGHGRADE YOU DIDN’T EVEN TRY THE INVENTION OF THE LETTER ON BEAR’S HEAD SEVERANCE PAY SCENES OF LIFE AT THE CAPITAL -I A Novel Imaginary Speeches For A Brazen Head By Philip Whalen BLACK SPARROW PRESS LOS ANGELES 1972 Trent UniyTsify PETERBOROUGH, Copyright © 1972 by Philip Whalen Photograph of Philip Whalen by Gordon Ball Black Sparrow Press P.O. Box 25603 Los Angeles, Ca. 90025 SBN 87685-096-4 (paper) SBN 87685-097-2 (signed cloth ed.) Burden. I tell thee, Bacon, Oxford makes report Nay, England, and the court of Henry says, Thou’rt making of a brazen head by art, Which shall unfold strange doubts and aphorisms, And read a lecture in philosophy . —Robert Greene, M.A., The Honourable History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. these two with great study and paines so framed a head of brasse, that in the inward parts thereof there was all things like as in a naturall man’s head. This being done, they were as farre from perfection of the worke as they were before, for they knew not how to give those parts that they had made motion, without which it was impossible that it should speake . —The Famous Historie of Fryer Bacon The Brazen Head. Time is. The Brazen Head. Time was. The Brazen Head. Time is past. (A lightning flashes forth, and a hand appears that breaks down the Head with a hammer.) Mites. Master, master, up! hell’s broken loose; your head speaks; and there’s such a thunder and lightning, that I warrant all Oxford is up in arms. Out of your bed, and take a brown-bill in your hand; the latter day is come. —Robert Greene, M.A., The Honourable History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. Imaginary Speeches For A Brazen Head Tom was carefully building a cigaret while he listened to Dorothy read the latest letter. When she stopped, he asked, “Is that it?” Dorothy looked at him as if he had just entered the room. She said, “Yes.” “I don’t know,” Tom said. “I was just thinking about how fifteen or twenty years from now, he’ll still be writing to you, whenever he’s out of town or whenever we’re traveling.” “He’ll stop, after while,” she said. She turned to face the win¬ dow, walked into the tall embrasure and looked out. The flat white light of London hit her and she backed up a little. At that mo¬ ment, Tom saw her lose all coloration. She appeared to be a flat, black and white picture. “But I like his letters,” Dorothy con¬ tinued. “He always answers my questions and tells me what’s happening and where everybody else is. And they’re partly to you, too.” “I guess I could live without his creepy messages,” Tom said. “He’s always liked you,” Dorothy replied. “That’s what I’m talking about. He’s got some kind of morbid, masochistic kind of kick going. He doesn’t care anything about me.” “Oh, Tom, who’s a masochist now? Come on—let’s go out.” “What time is it?” Tom asked. He was standing in front of the mirror that hung above the fireplace, rubbing his chin. “Maybe I ought to shave.” “How should I know? I guess there must be some pubs or bars open by this time. Move just a little.” Dorothy had joined him in front of the glass. She began re-securing the pins in her hair, which was a peculiarly metallic blond color and quite wavy. She wore it in a complicated arrangement of rolls and soft braids; it was very long. Tom looked at her, expressionlessly, and said, “Hello.” Dorothy grinned at him in the glass. “Hello,” she said. She kept on fiddling with her hair. He watched her. Suddenly she was hugging him; she kissed him across the mouth. He kissed her in return. “I like you best, after all,” she said. “I love your big round old head.” She kissed him again. “I guess your old man is pretty good,” Tom said. “I’ll say,” Dorothy told him. “Let’s go.” 9 At the Nepalese Young Gentlemen’s Elegancy Academy, Clifford Barlow stood before a class of adolescent boys. “This,” he said. “This.” and he inscribed a large % on the black board. Facing the class again, he repeated, very clearly and distinctly, “THIS.” Forty-five rich, dark, and handsome Nepalese young gentlemen looked Clifford right in the eye and replied, clearly and distinctly: “DISS!” B 16 W The Grand Mahatma says: “SHE comes along and lights up each of our senses, then SHE selects a different partner and moves away. The numbers on the watch dial glow for a while after they’ve been exposed to the sunshine, then their light finally dies away. They remember for a while, then they rest. The circula¬ tion of the blood, the flow of the breath, what did I have for breakfast—each of these trips a different brain electric relay net¬ work chain, brain clouds of light, the great Andromeda nebula, other universes outside this one which we usually think of as true and real, which we in fact keep insisting is the only one . bright billowing clouds that mix together into “I,” “I want,” “I see,” “I remember,” . and more of the same sparkling fog produces this earth we’re sitting on, produced Queen Victoria, Ashurbanipal, the cobalt bomb, all kinds of gods, buddhas, uni¬ corns, the fried egg sandwiches we shall eat for lunch.” Dorothy was trying to answer Roy’s last letter. Clifford was rav¬ ing and shouting in the kitchen. At last, Dorothy got up from her desk and went to find out what was the trouble. “Wild beasts of the forest are invading my kitchen!” Clifford pointed to a very small slug on the floor near the sink. Clifford seemed to be in a fit of some kind, a thousand miles off. “Well, just don’t keep shrieking about it,” Dorothy calmly re¬ plied. “Take it outside.” “My fingers are too big,” Clifford said. “I can’t get hold of it without hurting it!” Dorothy found a table knife with which she carefully scooped up the slug. She handed the knife to Clifford, who regarded the slug with a worried gaze. “There,” Dorothy said. “Now take your little friend outside.” Clifford turned to regard his wife with his great brown eyes. He tugged at one side of his mustache. “Is he all right?” he asked. 10 “Of course, ninny. He can walk over the edge of a razorblade without hurting himself. See his little horns peeking out?” “I’ll put him on a leaf,” Clifford said. “He’ll eat your entire garden,” Dorothy called after him. Clifford made some sort of unintelligible answer from outside the house. At a bar in Sausalito, Roy Aherne kept drawing great circles on the oilcloth before him. It was already inscribed with various hieroglyphs, gargoyles, mathematical equations, graphs, astro¬ logical signs, Chinese ideograms, chemical formulae, and bars of music signed “Johann Sebastian Bach.” Roy had a great felt pen full of Magic Ink. Wreathed in fumes of banana oil, booze, and tobacco, Roy wept with the beauty of his visions. “Down through the flames of Hell and Torment, all that screaming and torture, all our dismal evasions and failures and mistakes—but he says ‘RISE!’—and up we come, translated out of that earth, breaking out of that garbage, mortician’s wax, and pickling sauce into STARS! You must see, at last, that the circle is only a circle if you keep looking at it from one direction. If you turn it only a little, you discover that it is a helix: the circle’s bounded in one dimension, but there’s really another one to it— the CYLINDER! The Worm Ourobouros! The Angels have to fall, we all have to be here, but we don’t have to stay ...” One of the young men who had been reverently listening to Roy set a fresh drink in front of him. Roy took a sip of it and sighed. He rested his heavy hawk face against his hands for a second, then slowly passed them backwards across his kinky red hair and clasped them behind his imperial head. “It’s so beautiful,” Roy said. He smiled and his big green eyes appeared to be dark and warm for a moment. “You realize that Blake actually showed it in his pictures of Jacob’s dream ... a SPIRAL stairway from Earth to Heaven, with men and angels ascending and descending in the midst of starry clouds; the Bible says ‘ladder’ . now it’s all owned by some English earl. Of course, Blake had read about the Gnostic idea about the Zodiac being a giant water-wheel that carries the Soul through the great circle of all the worlds and heavens and hells. Naturally the Church put the Gnostics down very early—first or second Cen¬ tury A.D.—the Church said the Soul can go only two ways, down or up—and must eventually stay up with God or down with the Devil, absolutely, for eternity. You certainly have beautiful 11 breasts, my dear,” Roy told the girl who was sitting directly across the table from him.