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Solus Impress

Printed in Canada I The Power Trip 3

II Some Vital Craft 169

III Trust in Nothing 227

IV Good Clean Fun? 289

V Simple Crossword 389

VI Wild About What Is 447

VII Just Start on the Round Trip 465

Of power sing, muse, of power unspeakable in the powerless; of perfect art in artlessness; of selfless love within oneself and purity within disease; of truth in mystery, wisdom in innocence, immortality in life.

Still, one there is beyond these paradoxes, damning and at last outfoxing everyone though not negating; simple understanding but not easy; no thing, to which we owe everything.

In lowly emulation of the spendthrift sun’s largess give I to all that want to grow up; yet, no less austere, glare down on, scorch, and cauterize all that, seeking comfort, cannot go without. Cre- ator spirit, creature of some unimaginable nonexistent future, come, welcome who enters, who, shooting the works, cries “Fire away, give it your best shot”—

1 2 I The Power Trip

3 4 Know not nor strive: One sprouts, alive; But know one’s stopped: One’s good as lopped.

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Never a fell godsend, Christ brings not medicamental “Peace” but homemade pruning shears, bearing no cross of bitterness but trees of sweetness. Grace be with one. __2__

In the prebeginning, well before God, is the healthful wordless. Got the message? While eternity had no beginning, it is always doing so: unborn at the outset, deathless now. Indomitable earth is newborn here in all its heavenly heaviness under a potent sun brimming the void. And man, an animal, awakening to time, unquiet-hearted, breaks the silence, saying, “Let there be electric light”: and by some miracle there is electric light. And he sees the electric light, and well pleased is he; all his sexy electronic plug-ins furnish him the fond illusion he holds power. And he calls his brand of moonlight Day, while needless darkness he calls Night. And after break of day there’s morning, morning morning, no more Night, though dreading darkness man be blind, sensing the menace sans the velvet of the great jet panther’s paw descending. And the gnawer sounds off, “I shall make God in my own incomparable image: let Him have dominion over all the beasts of the field, the fowls of the air, and the fish of the sea—so that self-righteously I can usurp dominion over all.” And we create God in our own crazed overweening images, thus we destroy Him, in the image of our selves create we Him, for we are blind to what has formed us and to what deforms us. We say, “We can see abundant savory herbage and most fragrant fruitage growing in this garden; no doubt just for us and ours alone, not for all anthropoids, these blessings have been given as both medicine and food. But nay, may God be damned! our serpentine selves lead us out of cruel need to kill—hence we shall follow, emulating wild dogs,∗ mutilating vulnerable lambs,

* Seizing the dread power of their deadly adversaries, lions, leopards, and hyenas, casting off the role as easy prey in favor of that as chief predators, premen were led by observation, by their wits, to grow more truly dangerous and ultimately “human.” 5 no relatives of ours, whose flesh and blood, at all costs, for our boundless profit, we’ll consume!” And as it was, so is the Faustian bargain struck, bringing to mind the untold quiet times beside kind winter fires brewing broils, holding the furry night at bay. The hearth gave birth to talk and thought and all the social ironies. By utilizing their most mortal enemy migrating hunters (or their cunning helpmates) improvised the igloo, without which no arctic settlement could have occurred. Ice sharpened up the soul that first took fire; the origin of fire-making lay most likely in the sex act and the flame of passion it produced: the soft wood with a snug hole was called woman, while the hard stick rubbed and twisted got called man. Strangest of creatures, he’s a mechanism with a large screw loose. However needful, did not plant foods play a mainly supplemental role in Homo evolution, corpse consumption being the crucial key? Men’s partiality for meat may have grown not from thirst for gore but out of bloodlust, to maintain their tools distended by rich fluids; semen’s rapid re-production was the prime aim, not brains’ swollen overnourishment, the latter proving but an incidental accidental bonus?* If so, what a shame that man obtained his higher functions only by disordering his lower. All the dangers long-appealing constant sex and power pose have sprung from calls for customary butchery?† Were deadly weapons, not just working tools, what helped make sure we ended us? Without stone flakes a frugivore’s teeth never could have penetrated big game’s hides and bones, in turn permitting dietary revolution and thus brain magnification. For good and/or ill manos gave rise to man and to his standard manos a manos: humanoids’ unique manipulative skills, via their crafty hands, took unkown leisured generations to develop out of harmless playing into hurtful tasks, the burgeoning cerebra merely following along?

* Thus the fertile human brain, with all its protean potential, was an evolutionary afterthought, developing as wasteful spawn of concentrated protein residue, a kind of ethologic cancer? The enlargening encephalon and “high”-grade diet fed on one another. Who can tell how primitive the interplay—and incompatibility—between our brains and genitals? Did the swellheaded mind not mushroom like an A-bomb from the impulse to screw others? † Our round-the-year sex activity, with its concomitant allaying of ferocity, suggests our species had a bonobolike ancestry. The bonobos’ prolonged survival probably depended on a localized availability of easy sustenance, fostering matriarchy; else, as in common chimps the domineering males would have produced a species of gang predators, exactly what we have in recent homo “sapiens.” Thus how could meat consumption fail to lead at least to such ubiquitous lethal behavior? 6 Lacking excessive uric acid in their bloodstreams over ages men could hardly have grown such compulsively implacable aggressors, such mad nomads. Hunting* carved our rawest spirits, orchestrated human nature and not just its spear side. Damningly ’twas Cain, not Abel, manged to become our story- book engenderer: is murder not encoded in the human psyche? Males seem everywhere to be keen to kill other males. The pitiless savannah predisposed men not to flee but to attack in order to survive; they learned to emulate the lionesses, not the wildebeest.† As soon as they discovered fire-hardened spears their opportunity to kill at more than arm’s length made whatever inhibitions they’d had against slaughtering prove insufficent to stop lethal strife and can- nibalism running rampant; thus from its emergence the now “ruling” species ran the risk of self-extinguishment. How very fit that weaponry, which made us possible, at last makes us expendable. Each slayer acts out in “self-interest,” not as a hapless victim of a lunatic society. Success of sapiens rose out of genocide, extermination of erectus?‡ How can we ignore the fact that wild chimps are incorrigibly sexist, xenophobic,§ murderous? Must our coincident if distant ancestors have been the rudimental culprits? Nonetheless the hominids have stood alone since they alone have stood. Hence dropping out of a shared forest domicile were ambidextrous preman and prewoman, driven into domineering tribes, first liberated from a simple life of earnest play, and grounded, right-winged, in an urbanized seclusion by the froward madness of frivolous labor are at last enslaved. And now, forever haunted by the lost Elysium, that arboreal dreamtime rooting all religion, an imaginary mammate womblike Golden Age when certainty and bliss, not doubt and terror, reigned throughout the everbloom- ing summer foliage, one may see every thing that we have done and yet are doing, the whole fucking dualistic system, our domain, beyond endurance a lopsided world, the which behold: it’s altogether good . . . for nothing.

* Through prehistory traps very likely harvested more food than hunting expeditions; from the get-go what best characterized humans was less brute force than sheer craftiness. † The latter follow wildcat in the dictionary, if not in life or in evolution. ‡ Not to mention subsequent Neanderthals. Is our unique achievement among Hominidae to eradicate competing species cause for pride? § Possibly from a well-founded fear of unfamiliar infectious agents.

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Ruthlessly we hack at the tree of the mystery beyond good and evil, thinking we can rape our Mother Earth and get away with it without kissing the dust; but not so: we forget the fate of old unwitting motherfucker Oedipus. We plough distressing furrows in her lovely face, assuring future gashes to be gouged in our own masks. We treat the soil—our origin, support, and destiny—like so much dirt, hooting at the possibility of virginity. The greatest of delusions: that the world prefers rough treatment, wills to sacrifice itself to those who trample on and spoliate it.* Power is our prime Faith, promising our payoff. The dream that society is doomed without incessant “progress” has transmogrified into a nightmare wherein it is doomed with and by same. Progressively transformed, we have degenerated from our origin as prey to predator to parasite to world-consuming pathogen; the thing that’s new under the sun’s a cancer on the globe. Impertinently man thinks to improve the universe, somehow to better nature by manhandling it; enraged by his supposed exclusion from the Garden, meanly he has sought out all the vestiges of paradise to lay them waste wherever found. Who but rapacious freaks are dedicated to devouring earth extractively? More deserts than many would guess are manmade—planted by our arbor-deserting selves. Of course the ground is cursed by “God,” by nitwit self. What’s cooking? We are and we are the cooks. Men think they fatten and consume their livestock; but who would have thought contrarily their livestock fatten and consume them? Super-crops are promises of super-famines. See the swollen-eared corn’s as high as the hungry Reaper’s eye. Yoked more than any ox, we turn the sod of our own graves. Breadbaskets full today tomorrow open into vacant dust bowls: overabundant waste produces worst of scarcity. Send me the empty- headed multitude for a week or more and, though I’m provenderless to begin with, none will go home with mouth watering. Truth offers no thing, granting everything. Unburdened by hydraulic agriculture, humankind could scarce have multiplied like mustard seed. The world—the North as well as the East, the West no less than the South—is glutted with starving mealworms begging deities for their daily death, and it will stay so till it’s full of hungry humans growing life. Always to have more than enough to eat is hardly natural. The end in mind for farmers and town dwellers is unending satiation, whereas hunger is the normal state for aboriginals. To be with one in Paradise, one

* Witness all those armchair bullyboys who’re asinine bullfights aficionados.

8 needs to fare on unspoiled fruit of tree and vine. Conventionality demands that we food addicts stick to a well-balanced dying; wisdom bids one live on the forbidden fruit of heaven. Few of us know even roughly when the Dark Ages opened and closed: by definition no barbarian enclosed in one can apprehend it. Gastronomy is still gastrology. The milk is certified as safe, but what about the stomach? Our “researchers,” well-paid hangers-on, barnacles that need scraping off the bottom of society, analyze what perverts gorge upon and then conclude that this is what they should gorge upon; thus the former must want the latter to remain perverts. Why is this? Surely self-interest plays no part in our scientific procedure honeycombed with mercenary rats in upper stories? Satisfied we seem, well satisfied with our bullslinging way of thought and life, but truly one suspects this way’s a way of thoughtless- ness and death. The mangey kingdom of dogs, of mad dogs, of dog-eat-dog, with many a bone to pick, is now at hand. A host of parasites, we’ve reckoned without our own host. Eden was a wildly mixed-crop orchard and Hell is an artificial underworld of punitive carnage.—Hint and foretoken.

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Plaguey politics, that bent toward being right, perpetually ends at odds with right. Authorities are always irreproachable—and irresponsible. Each Abraham is ever willing to the hilt to sacrifice his Isaac; many whiny Neros still are fiddling while Romes burn. The octopus and killer whale seem almost charitable, wholly bearable weights upon the world, after hearing, viewing, hefting, ponderous heads of state or union, loads of footling bureaucrats and notable racketeers. Those most determined to control things drive them farthest out of control. Prevaricators to a “man,” the portly corporate and commie-party oligarchs, by stonewalling reform, necessitating revolution, though undoubtedly the chief administrators, hardly are the prime producers of our instability and peril: it’s “the little folk” conform and execute the cataclysm.* Politicians legislate disorder, penalties encourage crime. Reformatories graduate confirmed outlaws, while mental hospitals create the mad. Have governments not transferred (à la the Final Solution) mental patients on drugs en masse into prisons, where they’re treated not, i.e., mistreated? There’s no need to visit an asylum to observe disordered souls when Earth’s in open view the bughouse of the universe. Nothing more zerking than the sphere of straights.

* Easily 100 million souls have been exterminated this past century by ordinary numskulls.

9 Compulsory treatment is berserk society’s attempt to remold prisoners in its own morbid image. Crooks, if poor or maladroit enough to get convicted, we reform by forcing into regularized raping. First we need to see how we can ever get society, this crooked realm of narks compelled to deal, to go straight. Free of justice, autarchs, jurors, hangmen, GIs dare not stop to meditate, for fear that they may lose what little courage (if indeed any) they possess. It is the characters—nay, lack thereof—of well-conditioned creatures such as Herod and Salome, Eichmann and Lieut. Calley, that permit them to commit their outrages and yet continue drawing breath. A saint’s abnormal, while barbarians predominate. Demeaning every human to the lowest common denominator, laws exact adherence to their letter rather than their spirit, making over individual morality into collective immorality. A lawyer’s role is to present the semblance of real justness; casuistry is the key to any legal practice; law’s directed to protecting loot, not human rights. No law makes order, no mind fashions truth. In fact law was established so that offense might abound. Each specialist in the Law learns how to subvert the Law. For how would learned doctors prosper if, well justified, they could not foster many crimes? Incorrigible justice systems treat street criminality as vice and corporation criminality as business as usual, the goal of which is how much can be got away with. Pelf has got to be the single value operating in our legal mechanism; lack it, and you’re ground up by the shredder irrespective of your innocence or guilt. What licit legal system is legitimate in truth, and which will ever dare plead guilty? Illegitimacy is a bastard concept—authenticity conferred by some exempted and unanswerable manchild. All the pleas copped in plea-bargaining reduce to cop-outs, both officially and personally. How can the do-nothingness of “legal aid” help anybody when the law itself, supported by a public criminally unenlightened, constitutes the validation of hypocrisy and exploitation? Justice in not just supreme courts has a knack for turning turtle. Love dwells permanently on the lam. Why should ferrety attorneys, sharp whipsawyers, than which no more venal, nihilistic syndicate obtains, dispatch divorce, a goose that lays such golden eggs? Yet who while plying his covinous craft, embracing courts, will testify why laws in money matters are the laxest and most nugatory? As a rule a lawyer feels shame, shows guilt, only if he fails to make a fortune swiftly; constitutionally he’s incapable of never making deals. The major course for taking while at law school: how to peculate not just from a few peanut clients—from entire peoples; it’s solicitors who, for the most part, are the pursy

10 write-offs. How malapropos that lawyers, of all agents, usually take their clients to the cleaners. Of all types “professional” the tinpot magistrate, an igno- ramus with few peers, experienced and talented as any haberdasher, gets the most respect though least respectable. Closing kangaroo courts and cashier- ing all badge bandits would remove most highway robbery. It’s law-abiding circles are the crime-producing spheres. The rulers and the old need crackdowns, not the young and ruled. Crime multiplies because our so-called adult populace has failed to offer rising generations the creative education and employment owing to them; first the elders would themselves require to grow up and to realize and demonstrate some risks worth taking and some tasks deserving carrying out. Our institutions try, with more or less success, to fashion creatures suited for this underworld but never a world suited for creators. The most critical decisions adolescents face on love and work embrace the selfsame conflicts “grownups” grapple with. So long as “crime” is but extension of the everyday avarice of scheming marketers, and international imperialism no more than expansion of “the free enterprise system,” how expect the young to draw distinctions? To rule means to fool the public. Thievery and lying, judging from acclaimed big businessmen’s and party bosses’ conduct, constitute acceptable wrongdoing, thus become the standard for a horde of well-intentioned chiselers. Youth’s greatest problem may be not that countless choices now exist but that each option open looks sure to prove mean or empty. In a criminal society young idealism searches desperately for an outlet, since ambition there means being perverse, resembling the impulsion to rise to the top floor of a flaming chemical plant. By accepting the false right of one class—whether whites or males, professors, parents, politicians or financiers—to dominate and exploit another, we make sure our rights are sharply circumscribed. Misdeeds that have diffused into middle-class customs must be penalized yet only in a token fashion: dope fiends as a class die lingering deaths when our “liberal” majority has joined the ranks each member of which must protect a stash. About the ruling class’s use of Acapulco gold no one says boo. The real cause of the law’s crusade to have all grass eradicated is not that society has gone to pot, a fact; but, rather, it’s the clear-cut threat to liquor and tobacco interests; greed, rather than compassion, is as usual the incentive, true to its insensitive retainers. Drug addiction’s never to be rooted out till our ubiquitous addictedness to easy money’s dealt with. If the weed were legalized, the bottom would drop out of one colossal colon of a mobsters’ market. Organized crime—never mind some seizures— is kept thriving by the Market, capitalism’s overladen heart; the ailing carcass

11 is incorrigibly on the take. Americanos travel snowbound on a sleighride to their doom. Since half of U.S. homicides are due to recreational-drug prohi- bition, government is patently the generator of innumerable wasted lives. If power-holders grasp anything, it’s how to insure that weak folk will stay weak. Narcotics are a valuable means of keeping the poor and oppressed poor and oppressed: the Empire utilizes them to fix their users as supporters, reinforc- ers, of the realm of crime. Consumption is defined as seriously wrong chiefly in order for the agents of big business and government to stay casually right at their troughs.* Just as “The War on Terror” means that terrorism is directed at those who resist imperialism, so “The War on Drugs” consists in open warfare on drug victims and above all on whoever dares oppose the traffickers. Unscrupulous “Security” ministries (such as the Cocaine Import Agency) are licensed to eliminate all militant protesting coalitions trying to assist the underprivileged. With towering impertinence the state reserves exclusive privilege to judge what is and is not criminal. It would be best, not only for the platitudinous judge but also as example to his judged, if, stopping sitting with such uninquiring levity in his hot seat, he dared pull a switcheroo and stood upon his empty head; at least some heart might reach little gray cells. How nobly, with what saving grace, judiciaries nearly always pretty careful not to be themselves caught with their pants down still dispose of juveniles with neat probation placements. Which dull manacled recidivist, drunk with power, throwing the book at potheads with unpardonable immaturity, most needs a drunk tank in which he can sober up? And yet, what kind of stretch could ever straighten out his warp? Blinded by self, official justice, authorized by mercenary lowlifes on Supreme Courts, cannot but perpetually constitute the means whereby existing wrongs are certified.

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The surer our defense, the surer our defeat. Intelligence departments emi- nently lack intelligence: each such establishment discloses what it represents, a criminal police state. Si vis bellum, para bellum. “Peace”: the logo that’s applied to periods of relatively bloodless strife. To fabricate our chain of “cleaner” nukes and “safer” cigarettes ensures retention and ignition of both

* For instance: heroin, contrived by Bayer Pharmaceutical and marketed as a cough syrup turned approved painkiller, still ensures enormous profits for our underworld’s “elites.” Another advantageous product, napalm, was invented at that hallowed nucleus of lofty incomes and endeavors, Harvard Yard, a sinisterly secret pen. 12 nukes and cigarettes.* The arms producers and controllers reassure us that the habit’s dying, never killing. Not a chronic rollback’s needed but a remedial shutdown. Smokestacks, true to the rising forces of exhaustion, shrilly advertise their profiteering base. The reason why germ warfare seems the wrong horse to back is that it’s not devastating and dear (i.e., lucrative) enough; the pickings, save in crematories, would be slim. There are no smokers but chained smokers, no fags free from perversion, as superfluous as their castiga- tion. Going up in smoke, man actually thinks that he stubs or snuffs out his maggot and not the reverse? He hopes the habit he “can’t” break will in some magic transmutation discontinue breaking him? The war industry coaxes the young into thinking young and dying young, when what they need is berry juice, not blood stains, on their hands; the shame is that our tyro gangsters can “at best” get no more than do-nothing make-work jobs—a waste of spirit far removed from the creative lives of artisans or aborigines of yore. Do we really believe we’re strengthening the world by arming the “United” Nations, stuffing our mouths with fat sausages and “funny” dynamite cigars before we absent-spiritedly ask for a match or two and blow our stacks? It’s mass passivity permits the individual madness that now guarantees our mass extinction. Silence, golden as a rule, can shade to yellow. Damned are the meekly murderous, for they shall inherit the earth.

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Who fears to be deceived is first deceived. No flying saucer’s going to save us, nor will tea for two stuffed puppets who malinger stupefied in their skulduggery like crocodiles in conference and out of whose malodorous mouths spew many cloying words of politic hypocrisy by reflex spoken at, not to, each other; for the windbags’ jowls and bowels are big and full of abomina- tions. Peace talks are attended by big noises, “who” are great at burying the hatchet in each other. Are the arms negotiators glad their thrashing out of issues is now very near the end of the road? Whether labeled Yank or Chink, our name is Legion and the herd of swine will feed at will until we do some damming in and emptying out of the sepulchral Gadarene gorge that’s the

* Nicotine, like weaponry, amounts to an uneconomical amphetamine without which weaklings cannot suffer stress. Bumsuckers, often photogenic hussies, are hired to spread smokescreens over the crimes of the sick tobacco syndicate. Surely the homicidal nicotine executives are well entitled to a matching punishment.

13 self of each and all. To fathom humankind one must examine what they hate, which tells a great deal more than what they say they love. Forgo that bad faith of humanity: one hairy fabled beast continues nobly to commit himself not, knowing us and what’s in us. Beneath the superfine froth of our sugaring refinement with which countless innocents abroad are undermined bubbles a cauldron of destructive barbarism; behind the façade of such pacific blab lurks greed for blood and what is thought as power. A mouth’s canker is but evidence of a self’s cancer: who becomes ill has for long been failing. The far- rago into which we let our selves be stirred consumes itself along with us. As if our space programs were not canniballistic but disinterested, their aims free of malice aforethought, of the bellicose will to dominate! The demonstrators fired up for universal civil rights we hose down, while the spreading causes of the multinational fire storm that is protested we leave tindery. The origins of famine are scarcely affected—and for certain not removed—by jamming bread down the throats of a few. We seek no reasonable solution of our species’ pressing problems but a self-consoling rationalization of them. Vainly we are striving to protect our distraught selves from strife, for violence returns upon us just as surely as death is our lives’ end. If one can’t trust another’s say- so, how will signing truces ensure trust? We profess to aspire to abolish war by applauding eloquent speeches and by sponsoring bruited treaties, meanwhile unawares exposing our actual sadomasochistic taste with our relished nightly killer-diller thrillers:* murder still remains and rankles in our bellies and hearts, weapons yet accumulate inside our factories—so what significance have specious speeches and tongue-in-cheek treaties in this so-called time of peace? These rituals of our statecraft are pretenses, short-term tranquilizers that permit us to ignore awhile the fetor of our selves, the real issue. Words of love are not love, acts of peace are not peace. Embolisms are not cured by vaseline, nor is a culture’s cancer by some economic sops. Social reforming of collective mayhem is a dream until one’s self wakes up to individual informing. Evil breeds in us most, least outside of us. Blame not a deep contempt of self for causing war so much as unawareness of such discontent—projecting our depravity on others to avoid confronting it within our selves. How can

* Why do people opt for the most brutal prime-time programs? Easy: as a compensation for enforced collaboration, dumb passivity, that all consumption of TV entails. The viewers thus enjoy a simulation of activity and feeling, all the while safely and securely immobile bodily and spiritually. Shallow-witted fairy tales about efficient law enforcement that eradicates all patent crooks induce deep-seated slumber. 14 the universe be whole, hale and hearty if oneself is torn asunder, split in two or twenty ways, into a fragmentary self? Each of us hates and envies; why then wonder why the world is ridden with, instead of rid of, hate and envy? Underworlds are only underworldly selves en masse.

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A world in debt’s a world enslaved: the multibillion-dollar deficits have brought to nothing the pretense that moderns have been freed. The system is designed to keep most toilers mired in dire straits inextricably. The banks aim not to kill the goose, instead to keep it laying golden eggs, bleeding the poor as long as possible. So long as fools pay, sharks lend, and the trap stays sprung. Must every culture sag in middle age into inflation? “Easy” credit’s now the automatic makeshift for due wages: once we labored for our revenue; today we are expected credulously to be drained and keep on being so. Somehow capitalist consumers don’t complain about their sky-high salaries. If the almighty dollar daily shrinks, how come we fail to stigmatize its sneaky graspers’ runaway aggrandizement? Rampant inflation is just amplifi- cation of the ego’s tyranny, a malignant social tumor battening on each grimy cell’s pathology. Under this shroud not only diplomats but everyone must lie in state; the question first to ask: Cui bono? Pathological inflation’s self- perpetuating now that everybody feels entitled not just to security in elderly retirement but also to a yearly raise regardless whether he or she has made a larger contribution: thus a semi-stable pecking order’s threatening to crumble into strife of each against all. To the spoils belongs the victor. Unreined worldwide avarice besieges equity, eroding liberty and undermining social fabrics while precluding any chance of genuine democracy developing. When greed’s become the creed of everyone, no longer the prerogative exclusively of the minority of business larceners, capitalism’s very survival* must come into question. Ominously Socialism’s specter lurks beneath the hypocritical veneer of cheery well-being capitalism’s PR face displays: the dark fear of the privileged elite that the blockheaded workforce may wake up, perceive the immorality and illegitimacy of the status quo, and call a halt to being duped

* The whimsy rightwing mercenaries promulgate of a supposed stateless capitalism is an inconceivability. Remove the institutions for defending private brigandage (courts, prisons and police) and the enormous propaganda factory producing the befuddled public’s consent, and the “free-market” order would collapse like a sand castle on the ocean’s shore. 15 and shafted. How could clever people ever manage to prevail without a lot of imbeciles to serve them? Least support is always given anarchism, since it promises but to make slender means more equitable. God forbid isocracy—keep it in Erewhon. Cherishing a hope for justice, let alone equality or rationality, from cutthroat capitalism surely is what’s most utopian. Unquestionably it’s the economic policy-makers lead in nonaccountability. One potent weapon of oppressors: the myth that the sole alternative to exploitation is starvation, never equity and plenty.* Where in the world would most governments—fiscally irresponsible to their cores—be without the invisible tax of inflation? They try vainly to befog their floods of red ink. Might the very raison d’être of all governments be to facilitate the robbery of many by a few? Each ruling class seeks only this: all the rewards, none of the burdens. “We’ve a lot, we can and shall get more, we want it all.” It’s not the rich who as a rule are soaked or take a bath; taxpayers take the rap for bosses’ heists. Protectionist trade policies of fat-cat nations are imperative to help the world’s poor get still poorer. Pumping numberless mint bills into society enables states to drain each citizen dry, to embezzle as impartially as secretly, thus wiping out the countless toilers’ lifetime savings. We pour wads of pocket cabbage down a rathole. To survive our economic fallout folk must now wear two or three hats? Having swallowed swollen lies, such as that all real values can be pegged in monetary terms, that puppet politicos any more than their controlling nabobs have our interests at heart, and that industrial expansionism—never mind how chronic nor how unrestricted—must bring us stability and health rather than death and chaos, we continue straining to deposit our offspring’s nonfuture. No less fast than the industrial machinery can save our labor the industrial bureaucracy, debasing quality, can waste it. As production gives way to consumption, and goods are surpassed by services, the inefficiency of every economy increases. To give credit where it’s due, consider nonetheless the ingenuity of Yankee commerce in discovering a means for generating endless profits without all the inconvenience of making anything of value. Modern industry, yoked to malignant militarism, gleaning a huge haul from countless corpses, yet will solve our problems? In a pig’s eye. . . .

* Europeans in the 1500s introduced the uses of starvation’s scourge to coloreds; hitherto no one could starve in primitive subsistence tribes—that was a given. The invading soldiery bore not just epidemics but a labor market to the natives, forcing them to keep alive by selling dear their time and energy and cultures. 16 __8__

Do some whimper that they’re helpless to dispose of the proliferating H-bombs and our other “safeguards”? How so? It is we who built them and we who will drop them. What we call the Devil is a handy projection. Hitler may have made a War; yet who but we make Hitler? Therefore present-day Hitlers and wars are both phonies and but symptoms of our own madness. It’s not just the World-Wars generation traveled off its trolley. Addicts try to duck their destined comedowns. Conquering kingdoms has left many a dauntless conqueror still itching, aching, and devoid of self-esteem; a greedy man who satisfies his appetite, albeit sitting fat, remains a greedy man. The stinking-rich hot shots or shits who are industrialists live sordid lives: carrying a lot of political thrust, they nail all of the simpletons in sight—manipulating, though dependent on, the underlying herd. What masters are the Rockefellers of this world—at bollixing it up. Unlike mere millionaires or ordinary grubby sods, such great bloodsuckers gain from both recession and inflation, even triumphing in dire stagflation; they control the propaganda mechanism, so it is no trick for them to multiply their own neurotic avarice into a mass of mammon junkies. What’s this if not the worst congress that money can buy? Not government so much as multinationals have led us into the abysmal sinkhole that is deficit financing. Every global corporation has a vested interest in global waste, in manufactured scarcity, and so promotes public consumption, personal thrift, and corporate extravagance. The sinister conglomerates controlling media and so societies’ perceptual environments, have everything to sell, nothing to tell. Biggest of business mushrooms grafted out of public treasuries, and most real capital—the social property of natural resources—must get burnt up to serve private hoards. The cynosure’s amoral disposition influences every jobber to do jobbery. When will the manufacture of munitions be routinely processed as it should, as lowest treason and lèse majesté? Where in pluperfect hell does fabricating nuclear devices make sense? Can we count on merchants to grasp, better than can commissars, that nukes are far more cost-effective than conventional arms for exterminating pesky masses? It is profiteering, prompted by scarce-conscious enviousness nurtured by the sacred cow of private ownership, that causes every war, wasting our world.* Not God is destroying man but man himself, you and I in person; each of us contains our very

* Were Marx and Veblen wrong to think that Capitalism both breeds and needs War? To terminate the latter we must terminate the former ill. 17 own Doomsday Machine. In plain truth “the free world” denotes an idiotic Christian entity forever consecrated to destructive private avarice and never to constructive public service; corporations are devoted to a sacrosanct relic “they”* call the Free Market, in fact a sociopathic global scheme. Both elitist and collectivist, “capitalism” now protects not private property and profits— rather, managerial security and corporate expansionism. “Democratic” states, now scarcely even trying to maintain the pretense of free competition, have become the overruling sponsors of monopolistic tactics. Cutthroat shakeouts help to shake the money tree. What if not secrecy and falsity yet equally comprise the secret base and explanation of both plunderbunds’ and police states’ power? Any technicist society of privateers that regularly vilifies sarcastically its own honest servants as “do-gooders”† unmistakably is on the downgrade, telling much in one barbarous word about its depredating nature and befitting end in its own military dross. Each aggrandizing technologic kultur’s an imperialist realm: it prates of peace but puts in practice genocide. Is our social corpus only ailing, not past saving? Is this profit-driven, so deluded, all too human race not going to the wall? Technology, potentially provider of sufficiency for all, has thriven on producing obsolescence and equally well under antipathetic ideologies, themselves now obsolete since based on the presumption of continued scarcities. Imperialist states’ “national” policies are determined by and out of class injustice: the disparity between expenditures and profits is the rift between the hoodwinked taxpayers and the brazen plutocrats. “Capitalism” yet is doomed no less than “Communism” was, together representing a continuum expropriating humankind; but insignificant the difference between all such pretentious oligarchies—filthy rich in every faculty save that of conscience—when industrial imperialism‡ characterizes every satellite and “super” nation, disloyal one-hundred-percenter and

* How serviceable is each faceless megalinstitution, whether a revered consortium or an abhorred Gestapo, for concealing hirelings’ infamous activities. † Were we truly selfish, we’d do solely good, since evil-doing generally makes us miserable. ‡ Pleonasm? The demented 1930s demonstrated mighty well how totally unfit the market system proves to offer any helpful link between state-capitalist nations, whether “fascist,” “communist” or “liberal”; all soon abandoned the laissez-faire principles that had “united” them. The fatal constitutional deficiency of th19 -Century society which led to two calamitous world wars was yet not its industrial makeup but its inconsistent self-destructive market bent. Near everyone became deluded that all of societal activity derived from individual volition; economics was equated by anointed “experts” with contractual relations and the latter with folks’ freedom: nothing could be further from reality. 18 one-track renegade alike, and is eradicable not by any movement but by one being alone. There’s no free world but where free spirit reigns; the real Iron Curtain hangs forever inside the cold warriors. Revolution—an unwitnessed and unceasing revolution in our way of viewing and hence living life—is the sole salvation possible today. Man is redeemable not through a “faith” in future goods but through a strict awareness of his present ills. The marble- dome is less our Capitol than each allegiant citizen. The ordinary bloke, no Superman, is going to change things—for the worse, in all probability; just see that one too is an ordinary fashionable masquerader, who alone can change, oneself no thing, into someone better. Look to one’s motives, which bid fair to destroy us all. How can our country and the “power” blocs be totally disarmed unless we individually are likewise disarmed? In order to survive, it will not be enough for humankind to change its attitudes or postures: a neurotic self-destructive world produced by such beings is not healable save by confronting its real needs, by each of us examining as well as experiencing our own deepest long-forgotten fears and lusts and angers. Every infant’s schizoid fantasy that self and world are one errs solely in identifying both with power. All “want peace,” but none wants to be peaceful. What we want is not peace but appeasement of our sham needs. To be up in arms about the actual criminality of militarism is not to be at peace; combating war is not combating it. Moral disarmament would also be material and well worth cheering; man, however, is incessantly rearming his moronic moral self for a peace never to materialize since the source of his campaign, with its maneuvers weighing all the gains against the losses, is the same old warbound ego without insight, all out for its fallout, never-endingly “on the defensive purely,” bending over its roundtable raising the stake with inane dreams of one-upping all the other forktongued prattlesnakes, and yet myopic by its own choice, for it dares not stretch out over and peer down into the stomach-turning pit of its own poison-breeding entrails, thus to see this lethal gambling is absurd and there is nothing to defend or lose or win.

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“But why should I, swindled by tradesmen and professionals alike, give up my arms, my interests, my ambitions? What hope is there anybody else will follow suit?” The answer there is none. There is no hope in actuality, nor will there be any time like the present. Weekly alerts do not suffice for air raids now. When humankind wakes up to the real peril represented by its

19 armored self, it may be so late that it’s forced to go to sleep forevermore. For young and old alike, the future is no longer what it was. Until we try a wholly new approach, we will get somewhere, which is nowhere. Just so long as one expects rewards, one gets them, sure as death. Obstinately loyal to his present Paleozoic stance, man has almost as much chance of creating peace and harmony on earth as a snowball in hell. As long as he retains his vanity, his life’s in vain. All of his switches in strong-arm tactics fail because he lacks the strength in a change of heart. Yet this is just the fact we are not willing to confront, pooh-poohing the increasing probability of total war, denying its intolerable presence and our fast-oncoming doom. More than fleshly death itself, we loathe inner growth; more than by the dead certainty of our vanishment and that of all our descendants, we are terror-stricken by the opportunity to renovate our lives. Deranged indeed that creature aiming to protect its young and itself by destroying both. The business of the business world: to blight the earth. We cannot brake the arms race while mechanically clutching and accelerat- ing our distrust. All natural societies are structured outlets that can safely channel cruel competition; each society among the so-classed higher animals evolved as a defense against aggression; thus cooperation and communication were learned so that beasts would not destroy themselves entirely; as usual, however, man has tried to break the rule and institute a new omnipotent kind of society that egocentrically self-destructs. The arboreal life of casually gathered edibles was independent life; ’twas hunting, with its iron discipline, that introduced food-sharing and the sinister dependency of youths on elders’ teaching how to track and slaughter. Such demands made sires into fathers and created human kinship, giving culture its unbalanced bearing;* fertile in a differential reproduction, culture separates, it strengthens rivalry, racism, conflict; consequently the proliferation of strife and the prevalence of ethnic “cleansing.” Out of liberty and nature patriarchy burst to fashion slavery and the State. History’s protagonist became the male, a minor force among most other mammals; but old mother earth need not depend on hunting teacher or predacious Father dropped from heaven. Such a close reciprocal relationship between dependence and aggression helps account for the peculiar offensiveness, defensive to a fault, of Homo “sapiens”; when every infant’s born essentially a preemie, the potential for deep lasting damage swells, as does suggestibility, susceptibility to zealotry; vindictiveness must over time

* All such crucial steps in cultural evolvement surely must have taken place in virtual incognizance. Still we have not got our selves out of the woods and into the real clearing. 20 be nourished by each tot’s prolonged vulnerability to a humiliating disregard. Created for love, we’re exposed to being made into mother lodes of hate. Perforce our primary caretakers also are our foremost harmers. Giving priority to their own needs and not their offspring’s, women have performed a greater role in growth of inhumanity than anybody might have dreamed or dare now grant. A mother’s murderousness few of her young ever stomach; many must succumb that any may survive. Civilization’s requirement for hierarchies forces parents to serve power by imposing chronic narcissistic injuries from generation unto generation. That plague has transformed our natural need to feel good about ourselves into the task of feeling better than “those others”: thus oneupmanship, all “chosen” peoples, World Wars, and so on. Being socialized means being compelled to govern temper, to relinquish satisfaction, hence by playing hypocrite supposing one’s self the unique select. A world that’s cloven into chosen and rejected is a strife-torn sanguinary one, as each sad soul defends an image of self that s/he inwardly knows is a lie. From real or fancied deprivation breeds self-denigration, from which issue all expressions of the death wish: moralism, sadism, etc. As narcissist, man desperately wages war to gel or freeze his wavery reflection. All aggression’s an attempt to dominate surroundings to achieve a measure of security for the unfathomable hole we call the self. All power constitutes a means of poor defense that’s sought to counteract low self-esteem. We hug our sovereign delusion that, confirmed by personal possessions, a deep sense of power has to be the highest good. Folk treasure military hardware hoping to make their dead souls immortal. The peacemakers such as Jesus, Gandhi, M.L. King, etc., must be eradicated since peace represents a threat to all too humankind. External enemies, never peacemakers, constitute our egos’ “saviors”; thus it’s the peacemaker who becomes the enemy. What generates our wars above all: hidden hates and dreads too shattering for either leader or the led to face. Thus war is made because we’d otherwise have no so-called peace with our phony selves. We will keep on committing fratricide until we stop craving to kill and being afraid to love, till we cease to delude our selves that “they” control a thing. And our lusts and fears can end only if and when we face the present end, the actual nonentity, of every thing, especially our lustful, fearful egos. Meantime vanity keeps our lives void of meaning.

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Men at arms are the least disciplined, the most disgraceful voluntary washouts—captive quitters who, by donning monkey suits, desert the truth. Armed services, hotbeds of homo “friendlies” whose esprit de corps is necro- philia, serve as perversive vices, sir. What army ever issued anything but SOS? The chickenshit in armies and bureaucracies in general is best exemplified no doubt by dressed-up caitiffs jerking juniors around, yanking their chains; in every “security” force, too, the myrmidons will often get themselves off jumping stripling internees. Both courts and armies manage with a vengeance to destroy a host of youths in tanks. The cleanup called for here would have all outworn harness bullies swept away; the finest fuzz or roach with grime on its hands best belongs in any handy trash bin. What if the chief sus lurks in a prowl car? What man’s quite so helpless or unmanly as the bulliest of collared watchdogs or meateaters stout at pushing drugsters into pokeys while collecting liberal drugola? By denomination every flatfoot is flatheaded, every dick a prick that hasn’t got a clue: a hot tip for all female wannabes. Might joining the force first require being a woodentop? It’s no hide off a bull’s back that the justice system’s fraudulent. Not just a rookie constable deserves the epithet of oink or savage. Law and cop-shop work provide their cynical practitioners a string of golden opportunities to act out itchy-fingered pugilistic drives, well shielded by a built-in fix, in glossed arenas. Cops are gifted takers—practically sidewalk snapshot-shooters, specialists at framing mugs. In any land of the unfree police are charged with the hired-gun job of arresting suspects yet not with protecting citizens; four felons go to U.S. jails for every 100 violent crimes committed; three-fourths of all serious offenses are committed by 6% of violent career crooks averaging close to 200 per year. Amerika’s judicial system’s linked to a huge prison racket and commercial legal industry staffed by 70% of the world’s shysters dedicated, for hundreds of billions of dollars, to protecting criminals—the victims be damned. We may deplore the “need” for ever more obsessively imputative enforc- ers, who, good at least at rousting innocents and keeping rap sheets, act best swallowing the Bible and whose shitty jobs compel them to use stoolies; yet it’s our unconscionable selves call for an overdose of shamuses, who represent our sham humanitarianism, sated by punishing others for our own secret desires. Neither we nor the patrolmen wish to hear a rumble boding grimmer rumbles. Nobody can know how many bindlestiffs have been railroaded, buried criminally. Must folk lust for more protracted and sexational court cases?

22 How we hanker for some poor dumb bunny or pariah to commit a juicy rape about which, shivering with delectation, we can hear and read and speculate: that is called vicarious sacrifice. Does anybody really mind if it’s a scapegoat that is nabbed? Continually pandered to by sleazy media, the public’s fascinated by outrageous crimes—a craze beyond acquittal or redemption; neither nature nor a horde of yahoos gives a farthing whether or not justice does get done—whatever that may mean. So many people yet fall victim to the bias that most prisoners deserve their punishments. Too bad we still must get kicks and a quick fix out of these juridical revolving doors or “merry”- go-rounds, keeping the self-flogging errant hotheads going into coolers, out, in, out, ad nauseam—for them, at least, a joyless sort of intercourse. What is not clear is how a vigorous use of the cudgel can arrest our country-wide vice epidemic; what most needs a going-over is not gangsters but their derivation. Hassling town clowns who imprison out of magisterial delusions do some pinching that’s no joke and are identifiably the dangerous cagelings needing most intense interrogation. Yardbirds are controlled by herders, by ward heelers, all timeservers hard to tell apart.

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Who’s ever certain never to be captured dead to rights? Who knows on which side of the dock sit the worst miscreants? Rapists and perverts many a judge has gone easy on—out of unconscious uncharacteristic empathy. With all due disrespect, to do justice to justices making decisions out of ignorance, considering their pedigrees one has to brand them habitual criminals forever jugged. Each prosecutor, meanwhile, aims to nail defendants to the wall. Where’s the deterrent for the killer judge who orders execution and the sadist public that is backing him, demanding from his battery of pens its pound of flesh, approving penalties the most severe for those offenses it holds it’s least tempted to commit? How good does convicts’ degradation in the gulag make the untouched feel? Who can determine that the stretch done will be satisfactory? Deterrence as a criminological theory is a shabby cloak for one’s lust for revenge; it hardly hides the vulgar rancor that being lawabiding brings such scant rewards. Oblivious, the lynch mob swoops upon its prey—a futile effort to avoid its own fate in the mud that is oblivion. Real justice cannot be imposed, revengefulness being vanity, no more. How unmistakable a wrongo to demand that outcast wrongos be denied all human congress. Folk who’d throw away the keys themselves are statically locked up; countless secret

23 deviants are evidently lusting to watch crooks trussed in Old Sparky’s lap. On the charged subject of capital punishment where is the politician really in the hot seat? Surely various worldwide enormities we and our führers daily are conniving at should curl our hair more than occasional electrocutions do. How will Correction Branches manage to correct whole lifetimes of poor living habits in compulsive crooks, including and above all the white- collared? Just how often must the parolee be violated by his officer before being granted rehabilitated status and advised to hit the bricks? Each malefactor is a victim also; souls with the most vicious backgrounds turn out to be deeply human but irreparably mutilated by, impossibly encaged in, circumstances. Even “civil” divorce courts demonstrate society’s schizoid view of life as black and white, of people as of one crude stripe or other, Good or Evil, each requiring either vengeance or else chastisement. Obscene hyenas, masterly at hits below the belt, strip clients of their last few vestiges of self-respect, the better to reduce them to knee-jerking, bum-presenting supplicants, appeas- ers pleading for some fecal scraps, bound to be grateful for the leanest bones flung them by the august bench, the presiding hellhound. Washing our hands of somebody is not washing our hands. What kind of reform is this adding of crime to crime? All capital punishers jump the gun. Prison reform’s self-canceling indeed. Will legal eagles, shysters who’re attaining unsurpassed depths of despicability, defend rabbits from theft? The state prohibits thievery, torture, and murder out of a design not to exclude but to monopolize them, as it does nicotine, alcohol, and other drugs; in more than one way governments determine lawlessness. Oppressive states like China, Russia, and above all Amerika cannot reform their penal systems since the hordes of slaves are integral components of the rotten economic edifice, supplying an immense pool of free labor for production and to callous industry do not present a threat of speed bumps that a well-organized workforce might. The law reserves the right to give “life” to the murderer, however weak and irresponsible he is, however much he may desire to die. Two points that politicians somehow never manage to drive home to voters: first, it’s more expensive executing murderers than keeping them in jail for good; and second, killers as a rule are warped half-witted wasted men most of whom were abused abominably and preventably as children. There’s no punishment removes the cause of felonies, no barrier releases love. The chief accomplishment of our “humane” steel pressure cookers, the inhuman wastebaskets, called prisons: teaching how to hide fury and bitterness; they fail to normalize their malcontents except in making them more wary and

24 distrustful. Punishment instructs recipients on how to have it in for everybody, not just its administrators. Boxed and brutalized, what mutt will not grow vicious? To each prisoner the slammer brings home all our violence.

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Treat people as automatons, and they will react as automatons, toties quoties. Goons may brag in private that the Army’s called them up, but it is down. In World War One the medial mental age of US Army inductees was thirteen; now, with education’s national decay, it may be eight? No soldier but who has become a sad sack by enlisting and who’s sold himself far down the river. Is he eager to make application for the Rot-corps? From some forms of service it’s most meritorious to skip out. Stand and walk tall to reject the 4-F draft board. Every country’s call to arms is in effect its death rattle, a veritable snafu that is sapfu. All the war establishments are states within states, fungi feeding on the vitals of their hosts; the military faith’s indisassociable with the worship of the state. Thanks awfully, but no siree: feeling a draft I’m not so keen to join my ancestors, who—some insist—are now “with God,” nor to attend that damnably bloody “good” mess necktie party, verily a goat fuck. Peace can never break out while weak-minded warriors look for some great breakthrough to it, i.e., so long as they’re in a state of war. The only peace that odds and sods are given after dwelling in a hellhole lies beneath the soil; not just their jobs are on the line. Who would not be a moaning Minnie, sweating bullets, forced to try to last a while stonked within a trench? When all your friends are dropping like flies, is to fraternize such a relief? All too deadly enduring the white-feather syndrome: mothers, sisters, girl friends, wives still press their simpleminded devotees to go and die. The real shame is it’s moral impulse that enables nations to shame legions of unwary striplings into putting their lives on the line for a fallacious “tribe.” Identical the death and muster rolls: tough luck that all those flaked-out on their feet have to be dead instead of missing. Readily forgotten are the hot-shot bullet bait who did their masters’ bidding and became untrue statistics. Out of many unre- ported corpses is gained generals’ prestige. Each officer, the predicated noble no less than the truly petty, is ignoble—never mind how strack and dapperly festooned with decorations; honored murders on a wholesale scale pin on the kingpins’, not just on their gunmens’, wooden chests, an unappealing, unappealable, dishonorable discharge. Blundering megalomaniacs never fade away…they waste the world forever. Military service by its very nature bombs

25 out. Soldiering means shirking work, evading real life and true duty. The best soldiers are outstanding good-for-nothings—disinherited, with nothing to lose.* Those who triumph at expense of blood deserve to be received with rites of mourning. The same overbearing oafs who from the sidelines, saturated with Dutch courage, used to cheer the start of world wars also could as screw-offs live with ease to celebrate their armistices. Now let us recall, lest we forget, the caravans of scalpers who’ve let others sacrifice themselves, then moved in, made takeover bids, like vultures stripping corpses. War comes down from Old High German, thick and indigestible as Krauts’ cuisine, meaning confusion.† Staffed with straight-ahead straight arrows whistling Dixie, all too many unenlightened heavily loaded brigades indefinitely charge to Hades. Gung-ho blind march gung-ho blind into oblivion, goose-stepping sprucely to the chopping block. Casualties in blind- man’s buff ought to be buried face down—so as to see where they’re going. What correlative significance resides in chemical experimentation or medical treatment being undertaken without a patient’s consent if he is “insane,” out cold, a prison convict, or a pawn in the armed forces—in brief, when he’s given no choice but to be obedient, serving perverted sex? If dispossessed of their delusion of a charmed invulnerability, could warriors carry on the way they do? What comfort it must be for masochistic psychopaths among groundpounders to get blitzed. When murder’s shared by many and approved by all loudspeakers, few folk can resist performing it. The lives of infantrymen are so empty that their service grants the one remotely meaningful experience they’ll ever have; some poor forlorn civilians overnight become outstanding PFCs. Why be surprised if ex-Marines excel at murder? Weren’t they trained to gun for enemies surrounding them? “Good soldiers,” geared like surgeons to feel nothing as they perforate human interiors, are functionaries without fear, i.e., with no imagination; totally unfit for any inoffensive duty, grunts are ruling circles’ most expendable investments, ciphers all, identified by number yet minus identity—each, hardly curiously, seldom struck by any stray thought save perhaps the passing whim that he is destined for the quick and easy death of a war hero happening to stop one. How much can it help him to receive a ruptured duck? There must be higher honors than to get a

* Adolf Hitler, lacking home, friends, family, or occupation, was a top exemplar. † “. . . our history . . . more in the nature of a case history. . . .” (Hebbel, 1843). Mayhap the methodicomanic Boche were always shicers on the fritz? Would any people but the blockish squareheads follow that transparent misfit Hitler into hell?

26 wooden cross. In war it’s ignorance and dumb luck that prevails. When projos show up crunchies never know what hit them. Worried raw recruits who have been ordered to perfect their grooming will be blessed with striking luck if in a combat zone they’re not left looking literally shattered or like drowned rats. “As you were” . . . never at attention and a stand-out getting the once-over, all so uniform in blockish dress parades, always Sieg Heiling through bullshit- and-polish, fallen into line at the mass gravesite. How ill-bred are those bloodthirsty mutts that yip and yap, though curtly brought to heel by heelers, top dogs, shepherds themselves herded, all beasts—trained and trainers—whipping out and wagging their tails furiously, thus beseeching to be ordered off on some more sordid, hardly human chase. We have a timeworn heritage of hunts and fears, of kills and rapes, to overcome, the master humanoid behavior scheme: no body can erase the consequences overnight; can any one the causes? Given weaponry, to murder’s easier than apple pie. Sure as shooting, as the dinner gong goes dingdong, we respond, conditioned by millennia of egocentric actions, and start salivating, drooling for the jaws of death. The dietary choices of most moderns, which evince a leaning toward fat, suggest a yen to perish at the double, take the fast track to oblivion. The Missing Link between man and the great apes, inter canem et lupum, is now known to be extant, even common, throughout the mechanized world. Doling out food once distinguished hominids from other creatures; yet today “First”-World folk, resolutely anti-socialist, refuse to share wealth or the means to food in any equitable way. A “well”-informed minority, we Westerners now loiter voyeuristically gaping at the media’s sam- pling of genocide’s casualties as they vanish in the millions. The narrow, self- contained tree-dweller lurks on inside every thickset, widely straying human being. Justice first took root when aborigines acknowledged the necessity of sharing—an awareness lost when simple bands disintegrated into savage masses. Hunters are impelled to share and treat their mates as equals; herders and farmers, to hoard and downgrade them. Warring explodes out of property holders’ exclusionary nature. It’s no small irony that inegalitarian- ism is an earmark of the pastoral and agrarian herds. How vainly people yet associate civilization with security. Discovery of agriculture was no triumph of sophisticated ingenuity; instead, a desperate shift which condemned contented leisured foragers to a state of compulsive labor and ill-fed subsistence after population had grown too dense for the ancient way of life to be maintained. Assuming that without hard slaving humankind could never have survived wild nature’s rigors demonstrates so many citified jackasses’ ignorance

27 and severance from normal lifestyles, which embrace a lot of playtime naps without the hectic stress we moderns suffer. Agriculture and industrial economy imposed not cornucopias but scarcities; the present day’s the “era” of starvation, not the past. Most primitives had few possessions yet were not poor. Poverty’s a status fabrication of civilization that consigns agrarian folk to indignity, inequity, and early deaths that foragers could easily have evaded. Is it a coincidence the “I” appeared the same time states and armies mushroomed out of overproductivity? Did agriculture’s revolution not require domestication—i.e., increased infantilization—of both animals and adult humans? Exploitation and intensification of the normal individual neoteny made drudges of mankind. All groups but one’s own tribe came to be seen as alien species, “justifying” their slaying en masse. Moderns’ lust for status is as crazy and vain as our craving for possessions. All degenerate societies are capitalist, since the market system’s not something created by economists and politicians but the ineluctable result of the desire for property and status, part and parcel of postagriculture’s fatally distorted psyche. Lust for wealth and power plus the lack of empathy for unfamiliar co-humans clarifies the whole of history’s 6000 morbid years. Our species’ Fall—the cancroid overgrowth of Ego—has precluded spiritual liberation, fatally entrapping well-nigh everybody in the yoke of strife. Has war’s unwitting aim been chiefly to relieve intolerable pressure on environments? Or did it burst out of a natural adaptive desideratum to redirect competitive young braves’ in-group pugnacity in order to stave off communicide? Repetitive toil bottles up psychosis, which erupts unfailingly whenever individuals depart their deadly drudgery. Seed-planting man, self- labeled civilized, possessed by property, developed methodized war as a surrogate for the pursuit of hunting he had lost forever;* cloddish farmer boys confounded till the cows come home why they have ended soddish soldier boys should be unearthing their inceptive roots in semiweekly bloodshed, not in all this daily bushwa. Every slaughterhouse requires its builders and its maintenance crew. Was not getting our hooks into nature long ago what tore the once-whole world’s skin into schisms tugged to bloodshed? Swords of war are hammered out of ploughshares; it’s possessions made man mad for

* Rapacity for land, however, probably has powered fewer massacres than fatuous devotedness to catchwords; the worst plague may be not our abetted greed but our innate suggestibility. While symbols have made possible the most creative accomplishments, they’ve also amplified our all but limitless capacity for self-deception. One finds no bounds to the criminality acceptable to this subservient humankind. 28 power, ruined what was once a fairly admirable creature. Greed has quelled the natural immemorial impulse to share as the bands of rovers settled down into unhealthy towns when surpluses accumulated to the point of institutionalizing injustice. Classes of exploiters and exploited formed as monocultures such as cereals and sheep intensified group conflict. The division of labor resulted in displacing sensual satiety; manipulative specialists developed to deal with societal angst. Orderliness and judgmentalism were bred in the village out of dualistic paranoia, dread of ancient undomesticable chaos roil- ing at the heart of wild life and of every cultivator. Primitives had to accept death; moderns generally dwell in terror of life’s multifarious phenomena that are beyond control. Denial of what’s uncontrollable leaves souls as hollow as they’re craven, desperate for some distractive recompense in acquisitions that assuage exactly nothing. Once the comforting delusion of possession had insinuated into people’s minds through agriculture’s introduction, they could not envisage any limits to their aggregating; even the world would not be their oyster. Numbering was cooked up to keep tab of ownership of animals and crops and plots, as foraging got swallowed as our species’ dominating occupation. Concentrating, centralizing power meant destroying both the wilderness and freedom. From distorting dualism sprang the war on nature: everything, starting with crops and weeds, was now deemed either valuable or worthless; drudgery being viewed as normal, aboriginals were seen as indolent and brutish; yet brutality became the civic rule toward, for instance, wives and children. Harrowingly there are mates and paters, and not just blunt bumpkins, one still dare not tell to sod off. Till the gathering-and-hunting bands were overrun the family could function fairly naturally. “Universal” creeds and worldly power feed like parasites upon each other; father of all politics had to be not just earthy tribal patriarch but, more important, flinty military chieftain. The born leaders got the choicest brides for ages, so triumphant genes enhanced the species’ warlikeness. Our ancient forebears did succeed at reproducing themselves while sensibly restricting the accumulation of resources, wealth and power. Since so many of the globe’s intractable dilemmas now derive from the massive maldistribution of resources, wealth and power, one might think societies that manage to sustain themselves unbound by exploitation might have a great deal to teach us. One might think it— power-graspers dare not, certainly not voice it.

29 __13__

All too many jingoists yet jibber-jabber, whipping up support while vaunt- ing their preparedness to die for their demented principles, contending that their vacuous ideas are more vital than their fellow creatures’ lives. With such magniloquence do leaders mislead. Mawkishly ignorant of their inglorious pasts, hawkish patriots prattle in vain about a special plot, a marshal’s plan, to lay down poetry in some foreign field that is forever England’s fertilizer. Old sweats never seem to die: they go on reeking far too long. Mañana y mañana y mañana, on through our endless siestas, roars this daily bullfight promising bigger and bloodier bull mañana. How much longer must we suffer from our viperous, vaporous selves, O generation like all others vain and loveless? We’ve the nerve to look down on some so-called simple folk as idol- worshiping savages; but we lack the nerve to look down on our selves as worse ones, acquiescing listlessly in being regimented. Energetic Stone-Age men, those hurlers of projectiles, lived quite gently, conscious of their bugbears, if compared to our inanimate Hydrogen-Age fuses, to us tinder funguses grown ripe for Armageddon. Substituting prejudices for superstitions is great progress? Moderns aren’t more rational than primitives, merely more rationalized. We congratulate our selves on our emancipation from gross fabrications like the Hebrew God; yet the petty gods of comfort-bent democracy and dia- lectic* after which we’ve gone a-whoring and to which we truckle are but subtler serpents than the priests and kings. Out of Egypt they have led us into a more ignominious serfdom. There’s an exodus that’s vital—from our selves; but journeying with mercenary hopes ahead of us and military fears behind us spreads the desert out illimitably: dashing self-driven into Red Seas, chased and chasers both are swallowed up in gore. We dupe our selves presuming that we’re rid of tyrants by an outward revolution. Nationalization of production can produce nil in creative freedom. Why would there be so much prattle about freedom in our time were serfage not predominating on the planet? Liberty is more than bread and fat, and justice more than law and order. Poverty’s but the most glaring symptom of the pestilence of slavery. Most white-slave traffic jams a longer “freeway” than statistics ever will reveal. Practical politics—piratical politics. High finance? High politics? Where, for heaven’s sake? A real rad is really rad: a down-to-earth man like Laotzu if not

* Doubtlessly Marxist analysis is obsolete in any postindustrial world where consumerism has consumed the Revolution. 30 Jesus may bear fruit, but not our wire-pulling “high” priests and spellbinding politicos rolling drunks, all parties stargazers with their heads in the clouds of self. As a rule higher-ups are ethically lower down.

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In many chilblained dull cold-warring countries one must put up with a lot of slush.* “Great” Britains, Frances, Russias, Germanies, etc., are but projections of our crude abstracted selves obstructing unity: just in-dividual men, women, children actually exist, not vacant footballs we call states, those targets of our ever-kicking selves. Are distant ululating echoes of archaic tribal loyalties not audible in the wild scenes or donnybrooks at big-league playoff contests, as at hopelessly politicized Olympiads?† What 100% American amounts to less than 99.9% pure village idiot? Each nation’s high seat is a baby’s chair, and all those in their second childhood have to come off it by growth or tumble. Countless crippled disadvantaged juveniles in wards like Russia and America are helped by patriotic claptrap—all the foofooraw of anthems, flags, parades, and so on—to accept their disability of blindness, to epitomize the imbecilic national conceit. The greater a society’s injustices, the more imperative its pageantry becomes to curtain them. A meld of narrowmindedness, perversity, and baseness thrives in practically every country, constituting its national character. The root of ethnic vanity and state expansionism lies in

* Should we be grateful for the “Keynesian policies” which have produced a verminous trash bin out of society, requiring maintenance of the unwieldy military megamechanism, a Godzilla that has swallowed the mass of taxpayers’ lifetime energies and assets and excreted them as an unrectifiable pollution of the biosphere? Behold the imbecilities of the superfluous, horrendously protracted Cold War—patently a Brobdingnagian, unconscionable total waste. Need we recall that paltry crew of “leaders” who, through half a century, displayed how derelict and utterly incompetent they were to lead? † How quaint that “Communists” have taken home most of the medals, when it’s ruthless competition always was the name of the game. All too long have athletes been conditioned in traditional chicanery (like execution-boosting drugs) ensuring victory at any cost, including loss of their souls, which the biased judging can’t redeem. Now topping all, our ruling underworld’s cash nexus casts a pall upon the total shamateur proceeding. It’s beyond doubt that “Beijing 2008” has sealed the case on genuine athletics, demonstrating how they have been dictatorially and unpardonably prostituted and perverted by the pettiest big-business interests. Now witness Globalizing’s end: if you won’t come to Beijing, they will bring Beijing to you.

31 idiosyncratic insecurity and immaturity. Nationalism is narcissism: the longer that man lingers over the image of his psychopathic sovereignty, the closer is his future as a mutant flower. Every energy crisis boils down to an ethics crisis: inexpedient abstractions such as decency and kindness, long regarded as the playthings of philosophers, are now with apt ironic justice critical to race survival; even those imponderabilia like life’s significance we ignorantly place at stake in each such contest. Thank the Lord that with his thermonuclear explosives man at last has reached the terminus of his hard-working power- seeking. Though technology crosses national borders unopposed, it can’t prevent outmoded nationalisms from annihilating everything, technology included. The first law of war is Murphy’s: if one thing can go wrong it infallibly will. Ill-equipped to help an ailing world survive, surpassingly impractical are all “practical leaders,” for these eels have not the faculty of coming to grips with life’s nuts and bolts, cannot perceive their nation-nested power promises humanity’s extermination: “patriotic realism” is equivalent to lunatic nihilism. Edgy man’s precarious balance, as on razor’s edge, between dull “carrying on” and breaking down with sheer psychosis is in point of fact no balance but the carrying on with such psychosis: labeled schizophrenics normally are less obsessed with razors than “the normal,” whose minds, even if not quite definitively shattered, are more definitely split by and within fallacious boundaries. Those creatures with pretensions to be our world rulers ought first to attain an all-embracing and less cloven view of it. Between themselves the governments of nations act like felons, flout the rule of law—vile puppets squabbling, brawling back and forth across a squalid stage. Choosing its sovereignty while refusing its security, each polity is ultimately self-destructive. No organization can serve the best interests of both parochial states and the world community. We cannot reach an all-encompassing goal while continuing to think and act so partially. Each League of Nations is a pretext of Great Powers that allows them to evade their moral obligations. All the UN diplomats still drone on, dedicated to preserving their own petty sovereignties and the world’s doom. Our real options are not liberty or tyranny but union or finis; we shall come together or—go nowhere. Wisdom loves its country too much to be patriotic. Leagues of dis-United Nations only can unite when they’re no longer nations, when deluded international brigades come home to earth free of delusions. Is the whole world’s health preserved if a swelled brain ignores its swollen belly or the hand attacks the foot? Can there be no better alternative to the shut-up state prison long condemned to typify the East than the wide-open underworld long advocated as the West? Zeks and bag ladies, each without a pot to

32 piss in, blazon forth the quality of their respective supernation’s way of “life.” Have we no choice but that between a gross police and a gross criminal state? “Left” and “right,” when functioning their best, serve one another without thought of deficit or profit.

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Peacetime forces? Peace-loving nations? Fig-bearing thistles? Each authority demanding that we fight for peace might just as well demand we frig for chastity. If we had really watched and suffered our brothers and sisters being blinded, bled white, and disfigured, gassed, corroded, and incinerated, how could we now hand our savings over to these paper tigers coming unglued who will use them to embowel even blacker pits of horror for us and our dearest? How can we defend our treasures, how did we acquire such hoard- ings to hand over, hand over fist? Those who serve their nations, satisfied to play the old army game, deserve damnation, blowing their selves all the way to Kingdom Never Come. With doltish derring-do imperialists place their fealty in force, a god apt to reward such devotees. Man prays for peace and pays for nullity. Who bellows for the sledgehammer, enthused To have his skull split, is wholly confused. What has been learned from the incomparable barbarities of modern times? Are we still tickled by nationalist adherences, and yet insensible to vacant eye- sockets and sardonic grimaces that have replaced our more naive, proud forebears’ visages? The truth about the universal death our brains have hatched our brains refuse to face. It’s only in each country’s Arlington dwells pax per- petua. Our myths we mourn; but where the keening when truth perishes? For cocky Kennedy, that debs’ delight, we’ve dropped many a wistful or distracted tear into the collection plate;* but for a world of Kennedys, small-bore tor- pedoes, and our selves of cognate caliber, these universal nobodies forever screwing others and disposed of by the ruling Mafia, we hardly could care less and so for some completely ironclad security we game away our topmost heartfelt stakes by sticking to an all too dear Monopoly, forking out piles of lucre to keep every mailhouse, madhouse, and bomb shelter suitably

* Political assassinations are just harbingers of any social organism’s terminal convulsions. Lying in state’s very Presidential. No one can attain the top of a manure pile without some vital sherpas. Who today would care to be presiding over humankind’s conclusive screwup? 33 stocked with rifles and the unofficial bacteriological program aimed at peaceful coexistence running smoothly, storing orders of Kentucky fried and fully loaded gats close by our bedsides just in case, which “conservative” “liberality” tucks in our deathbeds and secures the world’s eradication. Media, masters at overkill, reveal a lot of profiles, little courage. Fitting arrant dastards∗ into the imperial throne—fatal. Raised by thugs means to be lowered into the grave by them; hired by the syndicate, why gasp if your retirement notice is a slug? Cooperatively, like JFK, we common playboy gamblers plus the loogans planted in their grandstand go along for the ride on this escalating roller coaster, giddy over chilling thrills at deadly real Russian roulette. Quite a few favored rotters to this day believe the capitalist motorcade is operating capitally, perking right along while threatening to wipe out quite a few.

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Have we not heard enough from the Love gospelmongers generating strife and grief, not peace and bliss, their vague ideal allowing us to scorn and crucify it in our daily conduct? Love our darling children? No more hogwash, please: we’re up to our ears in it already. There’s no need to utter, “Devil take my country!” What you’d state occurred some time ago. For Satan always ruled the roost, the dung heap; is it any different now? Vox populi, vox Diaboli. Dare one speak of public morality when three-fourths of the people frown on peaceful free assembly and applaud capital punishment? The mob’s defined by its passion for crime; each public’s full of public enemies. Where an atrocity is found acceptable, atrocities recur. Who said “So sorry” after Nagasaki’s disappearance, Japs or US? The majority has pinned faith in the Bomb hair-triggered to fulfill such prayers; and this is a Demoncracy, ain’t it? We kin join the great majority if we choose. Shameless practices, some of us claim, are necessary to attain our idealistic aims; the devilish techniques we use, however, cast a clear reflection of the ugly goal at which we will arrive; indeed, the expedient means that we employ equal the end. A worm will turn and feed upon our flesh. Roasting, crowing over the Jews, heinies thunder jubilantly into the Sahara, where awaiting them the Jews’ fate lowers. How’s the body count, the harvest, the rich rake-off, this week? Why pit armies against one another, those essentially peripheral, spectral phenomena? Why not (instead of rightly tossing them out on their royal asses) rather drop our

* E.g., Reagan, Clinton, Shrub, etc.

34 mincing milquetoasts, the self-appointed führers of the day, into a ring and let them sort it out with mace and sword? A thermonuclear war can be sweet to none save those who have not sampled it. Most menacing of fears is that of being thought afraid; angst makes madmen more dangerous than rage. The losses that are tolerable to both East and West Pentagonal chess whizzes aren’t quite infinite, fall short of every master of delusion. Whose the interest in keeping modern masses pumped full of abstract malevolences? May one make a fresh modest proposal: that we grill only our “own” lambasted youngsters for our dinners, leaving those of “foreigners” alive? For our acquisitive national socialist society, forever in the red but never in the pink, such sacrifice would seem worthwhile: think of the skyrocketing cost of fuel transport we would save while still blessed with good business as usual. Why bother launching that humdinger, that ace in the hole, the Z-bomb, anywhere? Just set it off at “home,” and our glorious patriotic struggle’s over, it’s all one, by marvelous remote control. Who needs great fireballs to turn civilization into desolation? All the world’s arms cannot tender the security of one embrace. If there is not love, aren’t we all as well off dead? Aren’t we already that, already blitzed accomplices in laying to rest the species, thanks to our agreeable mien? We herd ourselves into the cattle cars, abandoning our right to human life. Which is now obsolete—war, or the world? What a grand passion man displays for making life passé.

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Those who control or care for nuking programs yet are to the max unclear about their worth and inutility. To cite an instance of the “logic” that our doc- trinaire professors, quite “a little bit confused” confessedly, have specialized in spieling: “Everything we have . . . could be produced by our present industrial complex in only about three years. . . . Even if . . . totally destroyed in an all- out nuclear attack . . . survivors . . . could rebuild our industrial plant to its pre-attack capacity within five years.” Since the same is presumably true for the “other side,” is this a sort of grand finale, a newfangled five-year plan, pro- posed by otherworldly strategists who clearly don’t have all their switches on to solve the population bomb for all time with a brand-new lunar landscape? Such “objective” marshaling of hard statistics, 100% free of compassion, is exemplary. The very purpose sneaky ball-game tactics were supposed to serve the immature and fascinated armchair players end up managing to strike out. Power-glutted multimillionaires, incorrigible cool-hand psychos, wreaking

35 cataclysmic ruin while invoking God, are plausibly rational, “perfectly clear,” as they passionlessly beef up their hindquarters riding herd on all the super- numerary ragamuffins of this earth, insisting upon having the last word in law and order run amuck. Those famed “conservatives” who swear by law and order scarcely ever hesitate to break the law to make a mint; as private racists, they prefer white money for their public pay; the index is contempt for self commuted into greater, easier contempt for humankind. What neo-con tin god is anything but a new con? The very same respected crooks opposed to governmental intervention as a generalized precept yet demand it for themselves in almost every particular. The deep corruption of our economic system must be kept intact: one misfit shyster’s “pardoned” (paraphrased, got off the hook)* by his approximately licitly approved successor; for the syndicate is not to be bedeviled, discommoded, in its lawful enterprises; that would evidently be obstructing justice—God forbid. Each President or CEO is unimpeachable—a front for massive crime. It’s the self-aggrandizing sleazoid slickster that most Westerners unjustly elevate to noble status and so view as hero; such a mean elected autocrat at best is great at hosing the complain- ing public. Meanwhile the real tragedies, beyond count, are scarce witnessed in more modest recesses. The sterilized anesthetists, employing Nukespeak’s euphemisms, help us overlook innumerable victims to be vaporized, assuring us that “everything’s under control,” that accidents no longer can occur. The nihilists, with their notorious banality, in fact are in control; decisions of the weaponry developers are arbitrary and inept. Considerations of security are hardly operative in imperialist planning, since public opinion’s in effect irrelevant.† The basic issues in world energy strategics, far from being too techni- cally complicated for plain folk to fathom, are tout au contraire much too politically simple for the unrealistic experts, proud of their moral illiteracy, to dare grasp. “Limited nuclear war” means being partially annihilated. Clever crooks who sell “civil defense” augment their and our uncivil offense. War is so profitable to the dunderheaded warlords in their truthproof shelters lined with velvet, so unprofitable to all else. Military intelligence?—An oxymoron. Each insuperable sociopath is supersedable, whereas humanity is not.

* What a national disgrace that he was never duly nixed. † Three-quarters of “Americans” supported a test ban in 1985 but were cold-shouldered by “their” ditzy retrograde Administration. 36 __18__

We dread a serious depression if we slacken off production of destructive engines—so depressively addicted, so inanely riveted, are we to our basic sadistic industries. Time for another Abyssinia or Gulf War to test and so perfect our latest hardware and techniques of massacre? Haven’t we made the grand shemozzle of the Middle East yet volatile enough?* Our government- approved final solution somehow fails in both appeal to and approval of yours truly. If, as we contend, we want a better world, why make it worse? All’s fair in love, all foul in war, and fair is not foul nor foul fair. It’s our “defensive” stand that’s indefensible, imperialist budgets yearly breaking the world record in profligate graft, monster outlays to promote which bêtes noires are imperative. Removing war demands far more than loving our provincial gods with all our heartlessness and soullessness; indeed, to finish off war-making it is undiscerning trust must be destroyed. The magnitude of mental blank- ing out of modern life folk need for private comfort clashes hopelessly with the pitch of anxiety they need to realize collective danger and means to survival. Infantile credulity forever underlies calamitous authority. Preparing for a nuclear war is compatible with ignorance but not with knowledge of it. The colossal bluff, the mad fraud, that’s the arms race promises to fool the foolers also. None of us can fail to find out that it’s fatal to rely upon our emperors’ brain trusts. The principal thing uncontainable in our impenetrable doodle- brained think tanks: real radical thought that is viable. A puzzle palace’s insiders as a rule know full well what’s not going on;† those in the know where all the bodies still lie buried are predominantly great at taking no responsibility for any of the crimes. Those “bright” boys, jokers far from dealing with a full deck, have their dark side, burning to experience the unexperienceable, a final “high” untoppable, in world extinction. Comprehending pseuds’ communi- qués in finance/politics, that shallowness that masquerades as depth, requires learning to read well between the lies. “Deterrence”: doubletalk whose meaning’s mutual assured defenselessness. The leading terrorists recline in comfortable offices directing air raids on the Asian provinces. The official line

* So far the paranoiac Zionists suppose that they can keep their corner on the region’s W.M.D.s unendingly. † Bearing witness: one too many R. Strange McNamaras counting on the numb-brained troops to do the dirty work. (As an even fouler sequel, in his 13-year stint at the World Bank he became a world-class wrecker of the earth.)

37 that every imperialist state puts out is invariably lying. Mediatory rovers and egregious prelates, mercenary warlocks and Tartuffish pipsqueaks, troglodytic diplomats all,* preach of universal wisdom, meanwhile “blessing” soldiers practising provincial madness: we, as cogs of churches and as citizens of states, putting our credence in glib doctors, in apologists for national insecurity,† are thus supporting universal madness. Not just at the start of our two-timing Xian time was homage paid to Janus. “Peace,” O dewy-eyed two-faced, does make a splendid slogan. The blandiloquence of regnant slaughterers secures us no salvation. Must war be unmatched as a release for social tensions? Onward, Christian angels . . . marching as to peace with Gott mit uns engraved on all belt buckles, not just krautheads’. A lie parroted loudly and frequently enough does not thereby become the truth. Like heroes long devalued as antiques, next to extinct, we pseudo-Don Quixotes now promote the dove while still unable to believe those vivifying larks that, up to 1914, wars were utterly misrepresented as are vanished, never to return. Of balmy breezes car- ols our babyish Christmas creed, yet as of old it is our Romish lava rules the waves—for a spluttering moment. Peace is not restorable by bold campaigns, for peace is infinite, somewhat beyond the scope of hireling scientists and carrier pigeons. Great war? When was any war great? Each world war, not just the first one’s plunging into madness for the umpty-umpth time, is inevitable, given all the generating deadweight of insane imperial investments. No war

* Foreign policy is bandied chiefly to relieve (without success) the public’s mastodonic boredom. † Representative incorrigible demon, classic as exemplar of such masterly misleaders and malpractice, of incomparable failure, was that devil-may-care cold fish, Doktor Kissinger, unscrupulous as any white shark, songless in spite of his nonstop jawing, certainly the foremost unconvicted war crimes expert of his glacial epoch. Such Macchiavellian poseurs must be consumed by fatalist despair because, bent on preserving terminally ill hierarchies, managing to ravish, fuck up, on a grand scale, they are faced with, up against it, the Final Solution—a stone wall and ash pit for the human race, including their own godly egos. So few of such well-rewarded scoundrels are aware our kultur’s already gone belly up. Mass murder often will not out: large-scale assassins generally manage altogether “well” to dodge their just deserts. The crackbrained doctrine of “protecting national security” depends upon the credibility of willingness to use the worst of weapons if “our vital interests are seriously jeopardized”; the “realism” of overkillers lying at the base of the Great Powers’ interactions constitutes the rationale of psychopaths; thus each society of simps, in sync with our sick world guided by cynic quacks, is grounded on conclusive moral bankruptcy.

38 ends all wars. But every “great war” does make the world safe for piracy.* All massacres and destitution are fused permanently; war is waged by good state terrorists on evil Terror, never on the grass-roots penury. Many a Mr. Big can be caught shedding crocodile tears about the poor and dispossessed. Uncounted elder statesmen and sleek magnates have excelled at ransacking entire societies but not their own ignoble and insolvent souls.

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Respectable freebooters want both self-respect and freedom. We proclaim full rights for everyone—so long as we retain the right to exploit everyone: equality for all except our extraordinary selves. It’s given to obscenely affluent elites to frog-march vulnerable countries into gross exploitive pacts ensuring ecologic and social catastrophes. The paleface properly can boast that he’s slaved like the very devil civilizing heathens; but what power under heaven ever worked to civilize the paleface? When, if ever, will we get tired of being the world record holders as gross masturbators, milking dry our colonies labeled republics which are gone bananas? Yanks are masterly at yanking others. If our modern way of life affords us no chance to exhibit valor, only poppy- cockish dreams to clasp of charging forth as knights in shining armor, still we’re privileged to appreciate the pinpoint bombers livening the home screen, helping backward gooks grow their own postindustrial wastelands. Ugly mug not yet sewn up, displaying his unnecessary scar, barely consulting with his cruddy kitchen cabinet, a tastelessly bombastic, welching trencherman once promised to wage peace and to defeat starvation in his Great Society, that specially underdeveloped nation, while war and starvation in the greater world were scarcely needed to defeat him. The worst threat to earth now is not African or Asian poverty but Amerikan superfluity, the decadence of artificial mastery, epitomized by Sunset Strip. What hope for any country run by and for those who’ve never missed a meal?† The crime and the dilemma lies not with the countless dying idlers but with us, the counted overfed wastrels. Not just USers identifying with the regal eagle—emblem of imperialists for ages—need to sense their kinship with rapacious creatures. Never was the

* The fact that journalists if not historians for long agreed to label WWI “the Great” instead of the Abominable War betrays their serviceable role as “nonparticipating” armchair mercenaries. † Food is the greatest industry in North Amerika, yet it supplies its fellow citizens food insecurity, since over 30 million souls go hungry; while in feudal states such as Brazil, third on the globe as food exporter, even more are classified as destitute, beyond help. 39 scavenging eagle’s fate or nature to enjoy a gentle finis; in an underworld of plumpies alchemists can only expedite the decimating process. Easy is it to rate nations by their G.N.P.s, yet that which matters, the mean international returns, cannot be measured. We’ve a measureless capacity, thanks to our bogus liberty, for disregarding our productive interdependence with the world’s myriad slaves. As for their reducing gas emissions, presidents and premiers are compelled to dither. Take one guess which self-important problem child among the nations has consumed the most inordinate amount of gas this century. Troubled by gas, we give our glutted selves exclusive “right of access” to all energy resources in the so-called Third World; who will give the empty-bellied latter right of access to our agricultural resources? To protect our right to others’ oil we may have to torch most of it as well as its supposed possessors. Scattered birdwatchers are thus reduced to counting whirlybirds. We once were told that “To divide along the lines of section or caste or creed is un-American”—unless we’re handling Chinese democrats, who don’t, of course, deserve a Chinaman’s chance. To this day the Chinks, at very least their slimy leaders,* who at breakneck pace now “liberate” their overpopulation from earth-oriented lives and carry off untold grand larcenies by means of indispensable extorted cyberpunks’ support, are still associated in some running-dog minds with the mung of nightsoil. “Vietnam,” in Yanks’ warped lexicon, means not a land of long-wronged people but the pesticidal war of all right-thinking U.S. patriots against it. Do the narrow-gauged yet privileged plebeian GIs “going back to the World” from their grudging duty overseas deserve to dwell in this world? Where the dark memorial and mournful hub- bub for the millions of civilians massacred? If there were any justice in our capitalist underworld, the unrevengeful state of Viet Nam would have to take it out of Yankee hides. Barbarities the round-eye devils have committed in their Asian wars excelled those in their Occidental wars: who cares to draw the merited conclusion, that the sao-represented kultur of the U.S.A. is racist to its core? The White Man’s Burden, shouldered nobly in the certainty of his incomparably superior civilization, was the labor of leading lower animals who “knew their place” in hovels to the slaughterhouse or whore-house; now they start to leave him there, having learned the way out while ignoring their

* Blowing away more souls than any known imperium, Maoism is the nicotine of the masses: backed by army force alone, the venal Red brass boost their lethal drug monopoly to over half of their slave citizenry. 40 ancestral spiritual way in.* Power holders always choose to take for granted they deserve it, not that they obtained it by their cunning, ruthlessness, and luck.† The US Space Command’s exclusive aim: to keep deprived folk in line as the gulf indefinitely widens between rich and poor. Free Enterprise demands the rich cannot help getting richer, the poor poorer still. Predominating avarice precludes perdurability. Impounding hordes of colorful folk in corrals while cattle-calling brotherhood and liberty, we draw our colorless, double- talking selves—albinos, freaks of nature—down the rampway to extinction. Television’s bloodshot eye is apt to probe for white society hecatombs worse than wounded knees. In present-day imperialist foreign policy, as in drug- ridden modern medicine, each operation’s deemed “successful,” yet the patient dies. We may pretend to bring enlightenment to “have-nots,” those as well at “home” beyond the pale of our advanced conditions, but in fact we spread disintegration with our coca-colonizing “civilization,” helping them, by siphoning off brains along with fleecings, never to develop.‡ “The developing nations”: that means cultures whose invaluable ancient heritages have been or will shortly be exterminated. Colonists invariably claim the right to shatter indigenes’ immemorial ways of life in order to transform their terri- tories into subject markets. Every parochial public such as the Shamerican is ignorant of foreign cultures, which it thus dismisses; out of ignorance habitual ignoring goes on. Who would dream the loot now owns us looters and our doom is in the pipeline?

* How significant is it that the predominant industrialized people of “the East,” exclusionary to a fault, have had deleted from their history books any mention of the many Nipponese atrocities before and during World War II? For all their xenophobic arrogance the Japanese are perfect representatives of all our cultures’ nebulous and transitory nature (having infested the archipelago from Korea and interbred with Ainu a mere two millennia ago). As technologic “progress” renders the original subsistence modes of life redundant, cultural traditions on which nationalists and racists set so much store tend to vanish like a sea mist. † Most credit owing to historic chance. Few people understand what they are doing; even fewer could explain why they are doing it. However inadvertent, our successes we feel sure are only just deserts for having diligently done our time. ‡ The more deadly sugar that a striving Cuba can produce, the lower drop the prices, and the tighter grips old whoring robber-baron Uncle Sugar’s vise on Cuba’s body politic. Que locos those deploring how all greaseball products seem to be el cheapo—loco as zorros. To a slave petitioning for freedom corporations have but one reply: No way, José. The U.S. ruling class’s patently wrongheaded policy, now over half a century old, against the Cuban liberation from their grasp tells all about imperialism’s vicious aims. 41 Global poverty will not be overcome without the radical reforming of all countries’ economic structures. We must choose between an ever-worsening class struggle or creation of an all-inclusive planetary solidarity, a system non- compulsory of give-and-take less bent on takes. The greedy cannot gain their wealth without oppression and denial of it to the bulk of the globe’s population. Any marvelously wealthy world that’s dead set on begrudging benefits to its poor must end up producing a miserably poor world. Why so satisfied with this our underworld at least half of whose population’s born to suck a hind tit? Multinationals’ investors who predictably expect some decent dividends can generally count on such that are indecent; affluence of the “advanced” is interlocked with deprivation of the “undeveloped.” Distribution, not abundance, is what’s absent. Everybody’s food security is threatened much less by prolific hungry rabbles than by ravening elites that batten on the concentration and delocalization of control of food resources. As for the West’s minuscule ostensible foreign aid, strangely it equals upward redistribution: it amounts to gifts the poorest people of rich countries unawares provide the richest people of poor countries, seemingly a rich joke that is really shock- ingly poor. Our debt-based financial setup in the end subverts commercial balance, turning international trade into war of all against all. Capitalism counts on profitable scarcity and is disturbed by any possibility that everybody might share in the bounteousness. Ruthless competition, touted as the world’s best system, works best when a lot are starved and unemployed to keep a handful overfed and idle. The majority of paupers is expected to be much obliged to slave for crumbs dropped from the banquet table. Maybe the real crumbs dwell not in squalor. Failing to “adapt,” the losers get discarded, hamstrung, on the heap of those deemed needless, while the winners are forced to take double jobs, to cheat on income taxes, and to run to stay on their feet. In each fraudulent planned commonwealth all have a need for food but none a right to it; viewed as less a necessity than a commodity by which to profit, it has been refined into a privilege affordable by few, those by necessity complacent and corrupted. Rising expectations may make revolutions, but as products of self-serving superpowers posing as world benefactors they confront a cruel hoax: the marketeers have trained the foreign poor to want what’s well beyond their means and what exactly will not meet their actual needs. For the billions of pauperized folk Globalization’s no fait accompli but a state yet—probably indefinitely—to attain; dismayingly it universalizes the hope for a better life without providing any sure way to fulfill that estimable longing. Unidentifiable by their own orders, agrichemical industrialists

42 enjoying strangleholds on silent peasant masses find them profitable dumping grounds for substances untested or rejected as unsafe “up” north. A rich dolt’s pet brings greater yield to agribusiness than any unschooled “Third- World” genius. Could creatures in the abbatoir whom this nigh witless mammal, man, has wasted have some rightful vengeance via cancer, though they never taste it? Truly, it’s no human who must be led by the nose. Between acquiring a global gas oven and relinquishing our belly-vision, we have chosen to make a downpayment on the stove. Instead of any temporary freeze on weaponry production we prefer to win a permanent halt via nuclear winter. We’d much rather die defending the disconsolate images in our self-wrought mirrors than love life. It is no accident that rates of suicide (the latter linked to status pressures and delusions) plummet during wars: why kill oneself when one has got a warrant de rigueur to murder others— and thus to regain one’s status in a suicidal underworld? Becoming a mass murderer, a nobody becomes a somebody at last, though loser still, an antisocial beast that must be caged humanely, isolated even further from our unbelievably considerate and rational society. The larger any state, the easier for subjects to “let others do it,” to conceal our own malingering. Starvation’s (“Malnutrition’s”) exquisitely brutal torture, to which annually millions of skells are condemned, we in fat city do not reckon constitutes real violence, because, calculating suffering strictly on our own self-interested genocidal terms, we do not care to take responsibility for every child born on the planet. Can we any longer tolerate the fact that one in every five of earth’s inhabitants now fleetingly subsists in total destitution? Evidently we can do so, lacking moral spunk required to remedy this paramount abomination. Scarcities today exist from lack of will, not means, to solve them. The real failure is not nature’s in support of humankind but humankind’s in not supporting nature. Poverty in general is but pathetic evidence of our inestimable inner penury. How easily we could eradicate it but refuse to. Laissez-faire in reproduction is our natural way of terminating the long anthropoidal tale. The more “efficient” (i.e., gainful) grows our food production, the more people are produced for whom more and more food production is required yet who are too poor to afford consumption. Surreptitious nihilists, we’re confident that man is “nothing but an animal” or piece of meat for turning over, a disposable cheap raw material, so treatable as such, his skin being shaped for lamp shades and the like, but out of insular experience we monstrously misprize our fellow creatures: they—we also—are more wonderful and worth protecting than we crassly think. All flesh is the same flesh; the blood of humankind and beasts

43 and fish and birds is one blood: spilling theirs, we spill our own. Denying our identity with animals entails denying, if not undermining, our crude power over them. If only in our knotted innards, we know that all war is internecine war and all at root intestine. Yes, this was as true before the A-bomb as it will be after it. Originally advertised as efforts to ensure tribal survival, wars have turned into ways to legitimize the military mechanism’s countless employees’ very existence. Nasty, isn’t it, that our aggression now is not just obsolete but also counterproductive? Once lethality was means to an end; now it’s an end, the end, in itself. Human survival (let alone the species’ welfare) now requires a radical shake-up, a sea change in the current underhanded world’s organizational foundations; which in turn demands a flexibility and creativity (never mind honesty) among the double-dealing powers-that-be heretofore undetectable. The ecologic-economic crisis clearly can’t be solved with obsolete existing bureaucratic forms and norms. The hearts of slaves to greed and dread are definitely dead.

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Who cares for youth or for the future as suburbia degenerates into a stark-mad shooting gallery? Obscene extensions of desperate self, the phallic rifles and cheap handguns do provide misfiring hunters and assassins with their fond illusion of recouped virility; the dead shots like destroying brutes in order to preclude throttling themselves. By sacrificing others we have cut down dread of our selves being sacrificed? The sum of equalizers comes to naught. A heater’s made to cool you off for good. Persuaders like a billy club and gunsel’s barrel are vital paraphernalia for a fancy pants or pantywaist. Do dominative “men” feel playtime lift-offs that assault the pure white moon to be real fun and games? Their deadly weapons turn the weakest men, the worst romantics, not just some notorious barbaric ginzos, into menaces.∗ Rifleass ociations that are going great guns, funded by corruption, are an unappreciated shame. Each country that’s bereft of liberty and bravery† becomes a prison block loaded with small arms—all a big repellent bore. By definition countries full of guns are rich too in armed criminals; in lunatic societies not only teamsters may need swampers to ride shotgun. How could cops and robbers, let alone

* Stage heroes like “John Wayne” and Charlton “Heston” need to be supplied with popguns to work out their twisted impulses. † That a phony superpower’s murder rate and execution rate both top the world gets full approval in the land and home of the enslaved and craven. 44 the underworld at large that’s capitalism, function without John D. Roscoe? Is it actually entertaining to go out on the town with your Saturday night far-from-specials? Sadist bigots from the NRA or KKK in terminal capitalism dominate mass media and politics, devouring any hope of reestablishing some kind of wholesome social system. Most assuredly man’s weaponry is fabricated for prestige, not for protection, his idiosyncratic means of displaying not his potency but what a predominant prick he is. Indeed, like athletics’, could war-making’s basic aim be merely to display, as stickout star or stallion, a lustrous cup or glistening dong and win the fanciest mares’ tails? Does every weapon—jumbo fireworks and death rays no less than six- shooters—not strike us as a bit passé, a trifle immature, and rather stupidly conventional for use today? “Naw, naw,” man sulks in one of his usual temper tantrums, the bad loser at a crap game giving away his wholly spoiled nature, “I wanna sit upon your head and I will spit upon it!” All our war games— bagging cops and robbers also—end as they begin: painfully juvenile. So long as, screwing up their lives, we send off “our boys” overseas on mad crusades waged to “win hearts and minds” while losing their own, neither they the infantry nor we the stillbirths ever can grow up. It’s not maturity decides all have a duty to become anonymous statistics. Egoistic, hugging our so-called security blankets, we do not intend to use our healthy nuclear-physic overkill, that lumpishly phallacious war god whose sole function is emotional;* having carefully calculated the “unthinkable” use’s aftermath, we only plan to stock- pile our reserve, both informational and technological, yearly obsolescent, in exploding junk heaps, archaeological sites for future kiddies’ battlegrounds loaded with baleful whimwhams, débris reminiscent of so many peerless infancies. How can these bulging stores of waste, top-heavy and unwieldy, shield us from the burly bully on the block that is each of our selves? It’s plainly for street urchins their last bedtime now, when the whole tomfool shooting match must end.

* Every atomic square-off is a do-si-do, a bout that’s deadly dull beyond belief. Each giant state must flaunt its armory to keep the rest of us respectful, i.e., terrorized; such awe is based on fraud, i.e., Goliath’s helplessness and inability to utilize his deadliest arms. Every top-rank arms race is a puerile stinking pissing contest. To save face, how tempting for each superpower’s terroristic bullyboy to play his ace in the hole (e.g., spitting into the wind with a spate of drone civilian assassinations) when superiority or parity in weaponry has yielded victories on neither battlefield nor diplomatic table. Meanwhile citizens must cling to the delusion that supremacy in armaments makes any difference any more? 45 __21__

Since when were the subdued perforce nonviolent? Passivity in mankind is a domino for vehemence. Accomplished pacifists have militantly mastered every wartime ruse. A decent vegetarian, a dinnertime intellectual, may give no quarter in his business hours, undistinguished by a soul while crunching human spirit. Modern cannibals hardly mean to be cruel—cold comfort for their victims turned to soil. Evil is born out of the best intentions; scared to death of dying, we will not admit our utter insignificance. Killing’s our way of “coping” with our deaths; futility faced with mortality prompts many to enjoy dispatching neighborhoods. Bourgeois materialism feeds on petty fear of personal oblivion; exterminating others en masse, that extremely up-to- date phenomenon, consists in our attempt to stave off inescapable annihilation—no more than a vain stupidity. The most momentous question is not whether we can spare an animal or plant and yet survive but, rather, why we so must spare our vicious selves, why we survive at all. The gravest problem is not to stop murdering but, first, to recognize our idiotic fear: the crimes will cease once the conditioned instinct is dissolved. A sloppily “directed,” hardly funny horror movie overrun with real bad actors, life can be sweeter and nobler than we have so far risked realizing. Violence in some forms we’ve renounced—for instance, fathers’ right to kill their children outright; other kinds we still deem socially expedient—for instance, torture, executions, and imprisonment itself, dispatching sons to fields of battle, and of course pandemic harrying of vulnerable creatures such as women. Where the slaughterhouse that does not give off bad vibes? It’s not I who am superior not eating meat, but it’s superior; a genuinely sensitive soul will find flesh consumption wanting. Hygiene is a matter of keen taste and not of blunt morality; every majority triumphant has atrocious taste. True, it’s hard for those who have been shooting the bull all their lives ever to stop. Too bad, old man, old woman, but a truly estimable person simply does not kill; nor does he or she collaborate in killing through a slew of subsidized assassins, slaughtering at a comfortable distance. Where then, pray, does that leave us? It leaves us self-condemned and, penned in the selfsame cell as our hatchet- men, alone and lost, forgettable but not forgivable, now and forever.

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What has a sun of life, this wobbling orb, to do with law? Obey not creatures nor the self: obey not, period. Laws first appeared when vanquishers, instead of killing captives, sought to make them into bondslaves, workers. Law originated in and hangs on force, unjust coercion. All our laws, including the unchallengeable Laws of Nature, “She” who humors us ere overriding all these muddy conceptions of reality, are devised by men encaged in time and fallible; but oneself is neither man-devised, nor time-constricted, nor prone to error; truth is not encompassed by a vain mind. If our jesuitical Premier makes preparations for war measures, don’t we feel we should make preparations for a different premier, less jesuitical and less Premier? All saber rattling is a show, but far from proof, of power. Zombies govern zombies; it takes countless imbeciles to keep one psycho long in power.* Strongmen are not strong men; sadists, both domestic and world-shaking, dread the depths of others out of weakness hardly stifled. Only the most powerful ego can transcend the ego; lacking the original vice of ambition, who develops virtue? Greatness grows in love, not in mere notoriety. “Great nation”: contradiction in terms. Constitutionally fostering der Führer’s coming out of his shell, politics materialized its crème de la crème. The impudence that such a half-pint spieler and pretender (one more hardly lofty, unrestrained Napoleon in need of institutionalizing) shows by practising the Great Man cult exposes nothing more than the strength of the myth. Through his “historic magnitude” a nihilistic insignificancy unbelievably becomes a monument to the unmastered problems of his bogus personal existence. As fantastic Master of the globe, he can remain in fact a minor clanger with no one detecting it. Illicit violence is mustered and directed by fear-mongering, by smoke and mirrors, of extreme upheaval voiced hysterically in intoxicating, sweeping phraseology designed to bolster turning a blind eye to the foulest of objectives. Nobodies exist supposing they have got free tickets to commit no end of crimes. As sawed- off functionary of the mob, each little caesar, still another Walter Mitty, is

* Leaders normally are lunatics, their followers idiots. Who wage war are already illy at war in themselves. The silly adolescent macho personality disorders of each fascist upstart’s replicated in the like disorders of his minions. Yet putting down our small-beer führers as mad (never mind how accurately) lets society deny its own role in the genesis of deviance and international disasters. Paranoids as a rule have good cause for their obsessions. People suffering from persecution complexes unfortunately did in times past really suffer persecution. 47 a supersedable nonentity; totalitarianism means the dopey masses have dug up the perfect snot or naught, some birdturd, with which they can easily identify. A rotten world depersonalized finds its perfect fit in a depersonalized rotten soul. War frees men from responsibility, it issues licenses to act as mobsters; it supplies each would-be führer both his communal role and illusion of significance. Mob culture is the obverse of self-realization; no flock’s equal to refusing following its leader. As authority of paters has disintegrated, the demand for a new lord and master Padre on whom to depend has grown. In every party paranoiac scum, haloed by natty gnats, predictably emerges at the top: the drive to rule is pure—insanity, masked well by mediocrity. The more nefarious a polity or a psychotic, the less tolerant of criticism, and the more inflexibly it/he must rationalize its/his crimes. As many laws are added, so much justice is diminished; legislation, when elaborated, simplifies dominion. Laws are tinsel draped to gild our brutish folkways. Thus, the more barbarian a people, the more overweight its government, as witness the advanced states of the unholy American Empire and the latest Russian Czarist regime, both nicely mismanaged by superannuated petty bourgeois dummies, dreadful stuffed playactors, masterminding new collapses.* Little wonder that the U.S. made accommodation with the “Soviet” Union, for the “socialists” there were the fascist stamp of government that Yankee potentates by reflex always favor. Endless credit must be given to America’s and Russia’s global management and profiteering disaccord for broadening to an unbridgeable extent the bitter economic gulf between the North and South. Enormous quantities of arms continue to be peddled to “Third-World” elites so they can keep their multitudes of poor poor and subdued, desirably enslaved; those swarthy kleptocrats could not pursue their base careers without collusion with our whitewashed kleptocrats; the oiligarchy, oozing toward anarchy, has its sleek counterparts. The rotten apple in the barrel is the U.S.A. It’s ofay peoples have donated greater wasted effort to their overweight arsenals than to any other cause. What’s made malevolent industrial behemoths “great” is their

* To achieve their privileged positions, such pathetic specimens have to lose the sensitivity and the ability to learn and grow that characterize youthful spirits. All the toadies desperately want their scummy hack god and bad actor, whether man of steel or ray-gun, to appear to be in charge, to seem an undisputed titan of creative thought; delusion’s fathered by the infantile desire; thus is a petty thug (not just in some fictitious 1984) “transformed” into a paragon of tasteful culture—never mind if nonexistent. All of them incomparable as unconscionable liars, Presidents are plainly indistinguishable. 48 superlative capacity to hog and drain the rest of the world’s natural resources. No one’s matched the gas that gray-faced Foggy Bottom long has generated. Military hardware’s but the armor of crass greed. The military-industrial complex, treating irreplaceable capital like fossil fuels as income, brainlessly consumes the very basis on which it has battened. Western liberals’ utopia involves uplifting all the world’s economies to the U.S.’s level of material abundance—a game plan which, even were it possible, could only end in a débâcle grosser than the current one it is supposed to remedy. Should all such plans for ever greater “growth” not be on hold? Lacking the character required to share and be restrained in reproduction, we pretend that further bloat will benefit the poor, not just enrich the already obscenely rich. The root of “privatize” is to deprive; any “improvement” is restricted to the profiteers. Unfortunately every consumer commonwealth itself turns out to be disposable. As belly of the ship consumerism inescapably takes a dive when imperialism finally sinks. Not just Enrons/Exxons—the disintegrating global framework—one can count on tanking. When communities aggrandize past the breaking point, their prized coherence fractures: “superpowers” are truly titanic. Loaded down with brass, we steam—we do not drift—toward disaster; imperturbably, unswervingly, it drifts toward us. Christendom and Communism matched each other as castrating anti-life forces: both opposed free balling, both approved the Bomb, exposing the explosive impotence and bankruptcy of such profane partisan cults, for all their technological arrays. No need to put the whammy on a nether world already doomed. A rising tide lifts all yachts, sinks all lifeboats and all docks. It’s blind amoral Reason, not some idiotic passing ism, powers the enormous engine of our economic underworld. High-level radiation irreversibly deranges every animal’s genetic code; this information, judging from the puffed-up mule deer pair’s locked crowns, has failed to reach the halls of power yet, so snail-paced is the progress of armored intelligence. Above all mucky-muckdom must protect its arms suppliers, keeps its corporate death merchants advantageously out of the public eye and ear, which have become half-witted by design. Who cares if some clodhoppers don’t like their fields planted with so many mines? It’s warheads, whiz-bangs, in each Pentagon or Kremlin, way beyond those in the silos, subs and bombers, long have men- aced all of life. Each domineering soul is a dependent soul. The cureless bane is man’s drive to control, his deep delusion that all wielded power’s real and worth “possessing,” his dream of attaining an unlimited state of invulnerable unaffected rationality—pure foolery.

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Wherever a state has appeared iniquity soon reigned. What government today is not bound to let foxes guard the chicken coops? The State appropri- ates the right to use whatever force is necessary to protect its upper crust; to operate successfully, however grimly, it depends on subjects’ blindness and their powers of reflectiveness remaining comatose. As a deterrent to all restive underclasses “drones,” characteristically crude devices, now are wielded by the diabolic White House strategists assassinating countless wholly blameless women, youths and babies in the poorest corners of the planet; such unpenalized atrocities are prototypic of the Washington imperium, a clique of wussy wily looters unashamed to batten on a wasteful narcissistic dump destined to rot. As government has grown, so violence. There is no natural foundation of legitimacy for a single empery; hence governors project the trappings of wealth, might, and welfare to secure a semblance of societal support. Each modern state preserves itself by cultivating fear and craving; the result: a country-wide protection racket. Our “free world” depends now on a program of state-fabricated avarice that cannot be fulfilled; of angst that cannot be defined; of sex desire that is insatiable; of hatred with no outlet save one’s self, those closest to one, or the modest aspirations of oppressed societies around the globe. Whole generations have been permanently warped by the industrialized military plague; such populations terminally disturbed are now frenetically wasting the world’s irreplaceable resources, fueling their own illness, fouling the sole biosphere beyond recovery. As energy flow-through is maximized, so also ecologic degradation and societal coercion and degeneracy. The planet’s environment is going under as we progress, while the oil corporations make dead sure they “cannot” soon be tapped out. Their command of the petroleum reserves determines global power, but it is exclusively the power to destroy. In any oily foreign policy crude force alone is sure to fail. Each state’s definable as an ingenious if unimaginative apparatus geared to guard coercively both private property and public order: force,∗ given to scummy wiles, lies like a clot at the heart of both the capitalist fantasy of freedom and the communist lie of utopia; both seizure cases clutch material satiety as rainbow’s end, denying their opponents, their extant conditions, any spiritual existence. Moderns’ loyalties remain sluggishly tribal: seeking

* Observing any supernova detonating, must one not conclude that force is nature’s nature— at once the supreme reality, likewise chimera, of existence, its lone law both ultimate and ineluctable? 50 partisans and not impartiality, they stay inclusive—thus exclusive—in both personal and international relations; chronic toddlers cannot but consider people as mere objects save those very few who matter. War for seeming eons has served strictly the needs of the ruling hierarchies; meanwhile peons simply haven’t counted and still don’t count. Various forms of police and thought control are utilized to help the masses stay assured that the existing hierarchies are just and obligatory. East and West alike proclaim Equality; both shit on it in practice. Though the poor are granted the noblest identity, it’s only promissorily: in fact their social worth is nullified by the outsider’s value being nil. Both central planning and “free” markets instigate the antisocial counterproductive conduct of the mob; in such an unsound state it is humane behavior that appears irrational: one tries to wrest as much as one can get away with from a system hostile to one’s needs. Vast fortunes of the few are made by seizing upon like misfortunes of the many. What must constitute the height of pleasure for the whale is horror’s pit for herring; it’s no mystery which poor fish, in a crunch, get sacrificed. Rewards are chiefly hogged by the politicorporate “elites.” Societally the role of anxiety, magical Power’s sire, is to rigidify mores, to ensure conformity in savage populaces. Perfect subjects of the state are not so much committed patients such as Bolsheviks or Nazis as those uncommittable who have forsaken judging right and wrong, who do not care to master terror. Framing a Constitution constitutes a frame-up job: love’s constitution lived well long before the Puritanical Fathers arrived. Establishment of actual durable peace does not depend on foundering fathers, excellent state’s men, any one of which may (one chance in a hundred) be an honorable man-darin, an honest opportunist: it depends on us. Heads nodding sagely, mouths catch flies while muttering, “Yes, yes, of course, how true”; yet all at once we square off, back on shelves goes truth, while out anatomies tramp to iceboxes finaliz- ing personal pogroms exactly as they’ve tramped their moribund lives through. Alacritous consent or ass-ent is so casual, verbal, untrue, for the true requires not agreement with our tongues but acceptance by our sense of taste, which superfluities have depraved. To that degree we have forgone self-liberating while consenting to serve others’ purposes, we buttress blind authority. One’s conflict ceases solely in a constant flying into the arms of oneself. The state/ church will wither away all right, but only after the millennium—our intimate millennium. A government can specify what people may not do, those rights we may not violate; it has no right to specify what we must do, thus violating us. What state provides its citizens the certain right to privacy, to

51 quiet, to pure air? Look not for blood in stone. Since it’s well known that fear of deprivation or loss of resources triggers wars, one might imagine that the globe’s notoriously self-protective rulers would want to ensure that everybody on earth has sufficient water; but some of those looters—and all arms producers—in cold fact much more want more wars since they can expect to profit mightily by them. No matter what political ideal that we endorse, it can mean only mass abuse, and thus are we demobbed, unmanned, bound swallowing goop, gagging on big business’s mounting violations of all personal integrity. The nuclear world is an unclear world—confused deliberately by our governments to keep the utterly insufferable facts from being disclosed. Our age-long dedication to political affairs still fails to generate a civilized state. Wars are far too consequential to be left to whims of deadbeat spoilsmongers. Mired in such imbecile ideals and undernourished parties, is it any wonder that we always wind up in a state? Might not our faith that politics holds the sole possible solutions to our grave predicament present the greatest threat to our survival? Short of radical and widespread change in spirit and in lifestyle the affairs of state stand no chance of becoming actually civil. In what matters most no body can help us: we have to turn to what’s supreme, the one and only true authority, beyond authority—oneself.

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Beyond and yet within one’s minute self extends oneself, which is the whole. Discovering with Copernicus that life is infinite, while we are finite, we despair, devoting all our days to fortifying a nonexistent entity, our “eternal” egos; therefore we have yet discovered nothing. Get the picture? See the undivided spectrum in this panoramic vista? There’s no comprehension lacking comprehensiveness. If we cannot forget our frontiers, they must in due course dismember us. Stick to your guns, to the conceits of xenophobia, if you would be destroyed. In life’s course the most formidable obstacle to overcome is the divided self. No one is separate from others except in delusion: simpletons cannot perceive (let alone spell) their syzygy. Man is free solely in so far as he masters his self without compulsion, simply being himself and seeing stumbling bumbling self without high-flown pretensions. He knows his self when he has no inkling of true self-awareness. View the self whole, watch it wholly vanish.

52 __25__

One’s exalted self is only oneself overblown into some thing. Stalin, that Numero Uno∗ in the killing field, was right in that we must rebel against our own tyrannic states before the rest of the underworld can be liberated. But, mark, not to fall blindly into another stupid state, a deeper pitfall. “Socialism in one country,” oxymoron to crown all, did guarantee additional improved fascism.† “Revolutionary” leaders learned from their own early and unconscionable servitude that citizens can only “thrive” when under strictest domination. How could any despot last without a drove of terror-driven goons to execute his really idiotic nightmare? Freedom fighters learn from fascists whom they overthrow how to extinguish freedom. Liberating now apparently means stealing. Stalin was a true state capitalist—never spreading the few’s wealth unto the many but reserving the extortions from all for the satisfaction of his villainous cabal. All “Marxist” governments got locked into the European crazy house of crash industrialization. Capitalism consists in man’s exploitation of man; Bolshevism constituted the exact “reverse.” Each Communist Party has proved a poor substitute for a capitalist elite. A miserable caricature of a true faith, Kommunism tried hard to eradicate predation by restricting preying on the public to police. So many wrong convictions and so few right liberations. Regular changes in initials of the Cheka-GB tried but failed to dress up its repulsive character; they got precisely nowhere, changed exactly nothing, spelling regular nihilism. As for Stalin/Putin, once a murderous spy, always . . . ditto: altogether nauseating. Under Kommunism rehabilitation meant to be found guiltless after you’d been executed. Once- pink blossoms still lie buried in black commyrot.

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No imperial police state can afford a forum; ruthless secrecy about its true goals is imperative. Official lawlessness, while nullifying any calls for justification, forces on all citizens the status of noncitizens, dehumanizing by bulldozing

* Mao Ze-dung we now know scored that atrocious status; his and Stalin’s countless victims’ relatives’ descendants hopelessly yet venerate the thugs’ unspeakable names. It’s mass butchers like to prate that cooking omelets calls for breaking eggs: one guess which nut case isn’t sacrificed. † Can there be any honest movement struggling against exploitation and injustice that’s not universal? 53 them into accepting utter disenfranchisement. The concentration camp, that realization of our most malignant wishes, yet escapes our concept of a consequential world. All absolutist ideologies are schemas that claim fraudulently to be total explanations of the past and future without any reference to present actual experience. Eradicating the very distinction between honesty and lying, they declare truth’s purely their own fabrication. To maintain illusive uniformity in a mendacious global “order,” the commanders are prepared to perpetrate barbarities beyond belief. Totalitarianism aims to extirpate humanity and dignity, replacing them with rule and power, to make live experience forever unexperienceable. The autocrats themselves are certainly as good as dead, believing in their own superfluousness no less than in followers’, convinced that only ineluctable laws are being executed through the scofflaws. The anesthetizing of both judgment and compassion that accompanies all genocide unquestionably is exemplary for modern statecraft’s executers.

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Who says revolutions are caused by conspiracies and not by general frustration and contempt for those in power? Revolutionists, those leisured theorists, have the least to say in actually changing things; their chief delusion is the infantile conceit that they (or anybody, for that matter) can successfully control the course of human life. Abstracted scholar-prophets definitely can’t foreknow that their own outrage may proliferate indefinitely. Old Professor Marx, appropriately racist, chauvinist, elitist while absorbed in class-analysis, never in self-analysis, could not prevent besotted nationalists and xenophobes in his name making state capitalism “permanent.” Each rational utopia (redundancy indeed) is based on the assumption that hard information must remain unchanged and that all conduct, contrary to all experience, is perfectly predictable; meanwhile the risky real world is forever changing, vicious human conduct unpredicted—hence the transience, the virtual nonbeing of each rational utopia. The fraudulence of any oversimple—i.e., any—history interpretation nonetheless explains the fraudulence of many a state’s total planning, petty rule, and war preparedness. Like Christianity, Marxism won its converts just because ’twas obsolete and inapplicable: both creeds were reassuring hideouts from reality, begun in brave iconoclasm, finishing in cowed idolatry. Each fake religion must depend on figmental historic happenings. True to their gentry-fostered Founder’s militarist frame of mind, the supernationalist Russian Communists, archenemies of proletarians, had to

54 maintain a rigid hierarchic social structure; and the function of the egomaniacal Party apparatus—seizing and retaining, not dissolving, power—stayed the same ad nauseam. To understand the prudish, retrograde, bamboozled Russians, voluntary vegetators to a man or woman, one must realize how each irreformably religious populace is forced to be entirely resigned, equivalently old-line, tempered by a bleak harsh climate, rooted peasantlike in cellar “life,” preserved so well in pickledom. What a calamity when such mongolians are let loose with late weaponry to muck around with the world’s fate. You can remove folk from the country, but you can’t remove that country from that folk. Give serfs enough rope and they’ll willy-nilly hang themselves. The Kremlin’s where the worst of all monopolistic bosses, real nonpersons, always hid—and hide; such postgrads from the human species must forever be past masters at exploiting democratic weaknesses. Totalitarianism triumphs by corrupting every helpless class, affording citizens a semblance of prosperity in barter for their liberty; the secret yet familiar venality of state administrators cannot work without a like venality throughout cooperative masses. Who’s prepared to bring forth a corrective for entire continents of goon squads? “Rest assured authoritarianism will make possible egalitarianism . . . someday”: so imply the pathologic liars in the palaces of East and West. The menace that’s most worrisome to loaded elders is not from each other but from adolescent colonies demanding independence now. Our worst political dilemma may be the intolerable lag between the evolution of fresh institutions and the socioeconomic revolutions crying out for them. In tandem with the disappearing dream of universal plenitude the twin dream of a free and just world disappears. For all monotonously true-blue, dead-red Bolsheviks, broadcasting their fictitious sobornost, not just for well-heeled, paranoiac commissars, the voice of truth, yet not the mono- lithic state, has withered; for those folk long programed to be serfs, to lie is second nature. Unacknowledged as the goal totalitarian schooling sets is to produce a world of androids or obscurants vacant of ideas, not to mention feelings, any being potentially dangerous; if views cannot be formed, official lies will not be questioned, and the prospect of ideal efficiency, perpetual and automatic, looms. Since the homicidal state’s end is exhaustive depersonalization, even the idolatrized dictator cannot be allowed survival. The more thoroughly dismantled any aristocracy, the more thickly armored the succeeding tyranny; perennially pledging to emancipate men, “revolutions” serve unfailingly to shackle them. Each such convulsion’s truly false, invariably leading to a state completely alien to what it promised. “Revolutionaries” suffer from

55 a pathological machismo. Cultural development, in common with organic evolution, calls for peace and quiet, long-sustained gestation far from agitated spear-side power-seeking. Evolution can occasion growth; but social revolution means reaction—hopes and ideals hopelessly betrayed and caricatured, conditioned by the all too present past. Merely to topple any absolute regime means to install more absolute stupidity. It takes more than a crumbled Wall or crashed airliner to eradicate the Kremlin or the Pentagon. Feudality will finish when collaboration with it finishes.

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Rebellion that is truly active grows in actionless rebellion, constant, not reactionary. Nonconformity obeyed spells more conformity. An emperor can hardly keep his throne without his vassals’ dread of their own anarchy. A revolutionary government? —About as likely as enflamed pack ice. The driven organizer’s idea is to reform, to conform, to make uniform; but the real idea, no idea, is to be transforming, which requires the most Draconian measures. The better adapted peoples are, the less adaptable: many a piteous crash descends from a mercurial success. Each cataclysm bares at last the true intolerable nature of a culture. No world blows up every time an ass brays. Fashionable revolutions ration out cheap changes of vermin-infested clothing, but the ailing bodies hidden from view have not been renewed. We alter the moth-eaten waistcoats of our tight conditioning, but to what tattered end still wearing tawdry straitjackets? It is political activity that’s egocentric, private cultivation that is altruistic. Every power group is ego-oriented and, au fond, Establishmental. Lovers, loafers not of any underworld, you’re already united! Into the incinerator with all manifestoes: manifest oneself. Pretending indiscriminate violence produces progress is pretending we can cure by plunging scalpels into bodies, bomb our way to peace. Would fire- brands putting empty office buildings to the torch inflame wet socks or teach unteachables a thing regarding napalm’s nature or calamitous respectability’s? Engage the self in the weaponless struggle for real freedom. Every effort to be free arrests us. Pulling scruffy self up by one’s own bootstraps may leave the soul, one’s unwashed bottom, untouched. Abdicate the all too dated self, and one inaugurates oneself.

56 __29__

On with the Revolution that’s within. Man still is ringing old alarums in disordered streets, but the alarm needs to be sounded inside, where terror begins. The vital task is liberation not politically but in spirit—from the lie that our slave labor is a blessing. Is my counsel war to the death with our own conflicting selves? And swearing permanent allegiance to oneself? No: just surrender unconditionally, finishing the idiotic arms race. Spare me chicken- hearted paper truces here: appeasement leads to no peace, for our “peace-at- any-price” philosophy is bound to win us “peace” at a price that’s prohibitive. Nonviolence appears an ideal policy for all the toothless; when will it be a real policy for the few potent? Can a pacifistic movement jell and triumph only when it’s activated by a common enemy? The worst of enemies we’ll ever meet has to be us. Has any closet not a skeleton? Come, yeomen, shoulder harmless arms and, dying for the fray, press forward to the inner front! No use vamoosing, snaking off to be among the clerks and jerks, yet hoping against hope not to be seen as what each is, a scamping scamp. In this campaign, for once, all conscientious objectors ducking out are rankest cowards, scooting skulkers whom cannot be spared. ’Tis a rare conscript who skedaddles into honor, actual rectitude; the rest, being white-knuckled draftees whose prime aim is to save their skins, are duty-bound to cut and run from truth. The blitzkrieg that must be unleashed falls from no skies but from within. Here is the battlefield and here the adversary, no one but our every and very own Satanic self. Now is the test of man or woman to be out-front, now our one and only chance to taste real immortality, remote from fame. Victory in this private war, the only holy war, the one great and last war, consists in simply seeing through and quitting warring self, at which point unified is chaos and oneself is won.

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Flee not from evil: search it out and welcome it; for welcoming is overcoming. The best is the most demanding. Make things difficult for self, and easy is it to make one’s way to oneself. Life, to be sure, is a will to power. But the vital question is: are we overpowered by that suffocating will, as the self-supporting underworld going kerflooie obviously is—or can we, understanding, penetrating, popping now those gaudy happy-gas balloons, our power-seeking selves, overcome it?

57 __31__

Each god may be at root a sacrifice, but each of us is more than any god: love is no martyrdom, for it has not a thing to lose. Dissecting wooly self, that dyed-in-the-wool woolgatherer, is the worst yet best task one can under- take, an Operation Infinite, inasmuch as it involves knitting what cannot be fashioned, viz., oneself, not just the botcher’s brows. Greatness perseveres— in gentleness: the deeper it’s incised, the stronger unity is growing. Want a shortcut? There is none. The truth demands one be prepared to go the extra mile. Real loftiness can be attained without wings of conceits, but not without untiring legs of resoluteness and long-suffering eyes of watchfulness. The lower three-fourths of this mountain is the steepest; once you’ve climbed that far, you’ll find the going lighter: fewer fears obstruct the way, skill comes with exercise, and one may even catch a glimpse of the top. Liberated are we of the underworld if only we can powerlessly rule our selves. To master is in fact to masturbate: consider all the pampered corporations narcissistically jacking up their prices. No one overcomes the world; but one may see that there is no thing to be overcome.

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The more the measlier. So few are chosen, so few dare to be. Does everybody not wish to be a somebody just so long as that somebody’s not oneself? One unrepentant underground man working patiently like seed near dung out- values ninety-nine “just men” who’re idly slaving in the underworld. What wonder if encephalitic hosts are hard put to educe omen faustum from a single commerce-scorning Nietzsche in hell counting more than all their gilt-edged “saints” in “heaven”?* Few folk can tell truth from migraine. There is greater strength and beauty in the unbeguiling revelation of a secret heart than in a heaven proudly hoarded inside; in an arid solitude wild storms redeem. It’s only furies welcomed can become workers of grace. Something tells one suffering love is second to none, surpassing all the wisdom in the world. Three zillion zeros don’t add up to one, though Number One is valueless. No bigger drawback to being a good sport than the prerequisite of being a loser. Any solitary life, indeed, is worthless and yet priceless.

* The odd one goes to hell who knows full well that need for help grows greatest there.

58 __33__

The moral seek a mean—and end up mean. In earnest they are driving straight along a roadway leading nowhere. Minded, mouthed morality is surely but a buffer against life, a panoply of tinfoil. Mayhap it’s the vain determination to escape our predetermination? Our ideals are truly all I deals. Ethics consists in more than principles. Our watertight, soundproof, stained-glass ideologies sheltering us from the storm shut out the very air and light without which we are dead. Walk away that flabby idealism. Daily one must overcome the moral underworld. Living aloof from life, however, is not living. “Safety first”, “Don’t aim too high”: admonishments of croaking toads that hazard only tiny hops, permanent fixtures in their swampland. Hapless are the happy. Henlike is the language clucking of “more harm than good. To do good out of hidden dread or greed is not to do good. Hell’s road is paved with such good pretensions. The more moral any moralizing, the more problematic the morality of that particular moralizer. Moralisms are divisive, judging and condemning; genuine faith is forgiving and unites a wayward species. Cultivated, motivated virtue is not virtue. Pleasing some find it to get lost in the vain activity of “doing good.” But painless living may be worthless living; worst of sufferings, not to suffer. Agony is evil, true; but is not self-contented “well-being” worse—fruit that’s not going but gone, being bad? Those pillows smother us. La dolce vita saps vitality; pervasive softness strengthens restless- ness through tensions and so enervates. Away with all our soporifics! Have done with romantic elegies of comfortable melancholia in which we are fast losing touch with the unsounded heart of life, the tragic sense. Around this carriage swirl the sparks; to find that flame, alight. Exuberant, full-throated, choruses the snow-born torrent, in its heart never frozen, plashing swash forever re-forming its banks. On high its source and deep its destiny; in shattering falls it nobly rises, showering enlivening spray on pure and poisonous plants without discrimination. Truthfulness does not take sides: the rainbow’s tints are numberless and nameless. Life per se (and who can fairly judge it while a visitor in it?) is neither good nor bad, but feeling makes it one or t’other—deepest, most affirmative, and least self-centered being the best. Unsavored are sweet wisdom’s fruits Unless first grown from bitter roots. It may be through tears’ cleansing that one sees most clearly. Wisdom is indeed to understand pain; but to understand it, must we not withstand it, go into it?

59 Freedom calls for being unburdened thanks to boundless sorrow, total thwarting. Is not personal catastrophe an antecedent, a priori, to humility? Is comprehending less than apprehending? Can death come to understanding without our selves undergoing it? Fear’s function is to stave off death; fear’s overcomable alone embracing death; till death is felt in full the fear survives. To be light- hearted, each of us must dare to bear the burden of our torments, vomit up the virulent self for inspection: if, like some ravenous dog, one can enjoy it, then one rightly will return to it. Before we can get better we must give better, purge our selves; and yet we must have something to purge. To be a blood donor, first be a blood owner. Not to pass beyond our cravings is a shame, and no mistake; not to have any beyond which to pass is bottomless disgrace. Do we wish to forbid the morbid, to prevent the present? Better be a resurrected demon than a buried god. Find me somebody altogether well, and I’ll show you some body altogether dead. The stable animal sleeps all too well; fear has this value, that it makes wild animals alert. The conscious ego is an anxious ego: being aware involves being frustrated. In any settled world where everybody knows his or her place, the fixed identity precludes knowing oneself, let alone others; when each soul is type-cast for life, the performance cannot be distinguished from the actor. Wholly healthy jocks are unaware not only of their bellies. “Healthy” and “neurotic” mean how well or ill resigned; the normal paradoxically are the hopeless; persons “never sick” are dangerously bugs. If life’s a virus, a disease of matter, and man is the highest form of life, what wisdom lives in health? While weeds are testimony of declined fertility, a weedless soil bespeaks a sterile soil. Who cares to grasp the nettle of the self and cast it on the compost heap? Before one sows seeds, one breaks up the ground; after, is still. To master anything, just slave at it. Be sure of victory by unceasingly doubting it. The more one wrestles with a habit, the tighter its grip. The more exacting our discipline, the better grounded our dissipation. Till we face our weaknesses, ’tis weaklings we remain. The good are cautious, but greatness is rash. Excess excels. “Nothing too much” amounts to nothing at all. What class is there but the middling class whose base desideratum is the status in quo? Care above all should be taken to go to impossible extremes. Yes, Mr. and Ms. Milquetoast, these views are pretty far out, all right. “Little boats should keep near shore.” The higher life is a precarious affair. The soul on treacherous ground is who learns how to advance. Does liberty not lean over the brink of most profound awareness? Keeping constantly, acutely conscious of the fathomless abysm that’s oneself while cutting capers with a certain brio, fearless of a fatal pratfall, one can prove a sprightly prancer worthy of the task free of exertion.

60 Life is a dance along a foot-wide ledge— An icy ridge cresting a sawtooth peak Howling in cloud, beaten by hail, a bleak Forbidding stage on which, if wise, we’ll pledge To play the game with spirit, not to hedge When blasts tear blindly at us with a shriek; Not to crouch prudently, nor to be meek And craven, seeking safety in a sledge. Below, on one side, lies our source, the womb: Sliding this easy slope would seem such fun; The other, deep and sheer, presents the tomb: One sleep, one slip, wins us oblivion. What reason for this sport? What meaning here? Adore the dance, and falling all lifts clear. Measure one’s life not by its length but by its depth. To grow is to change; growth brings growing pains. Everything precious is perilous: one must risk one’s self before one can rescue oneself. To learn the value of spirit, plunge. Why are we lolling, limp stranded fish, on the dry shore of distractions? Let us leap untrammeled to our watch within wherein whose depths prevails a soundless night without an end. At first the looming creatures are voracious, but these relatives vanish as we sink and the pressure rises into the immeasurable. Most of us ask nothing more than to savor and splash about like mooncalves overdue for weaning in the wading pond of corporeal greed. A very few, however, fittest when unsuited, venture to go overboard and so be all at sea, sucked homeward in the grip of undertow, exploring undercurrents of denial that come down to an acceptance of the timeless sweat of earth, the boundless ocean of the present “past” and “future.” Vale of tears? Nay, vale of fears. Who dares to welcome every sea change and go under, faithful to a kernel’s nature, to dive underground?

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Each of us, up to the least bobbing on the horizonless gulf of oneself, is going to have to stop clutching for straws or lifeboats, surfeits that are missing— else we’re sunk, one and all. Grasping for more than we need, we’re needy. Foodless, tubby could not hunger; overfeeding stunts growth. Strangely, fasting kills the appetite, while gluttony sustains ill craving. Stuffing beefsteaks into one’s self means to starve, though small the difference between eating like a pig and eating like a horse. Skimpy gleanings characterize wholesomeness. 61 The more we’re able to deprive Our selves, the more we come alive. And yet what deprivation is in love, the fruit of fruits, the life of life? If ele- phantine Fatso, that vast vat of wasted matter gorming without taste in rest- runts, but reduced his thick spare tire, he’d refill no crapulent self but himself, the depthless fount, the ever overflowing cup. Is life worth less than meat and body less than raiment? Does the dumpy insecure blimp that’s observing nothing and so easily shot down eat to keep up his strengthlessness? Why wonder that folk are all tuckered out? Light is the wind but strong in its reserve. Nude are both sea and sky, their sheeny beauty being beyond compare. Frozen may appear the lights of heaven solitarily ironically winking, yet their distant pyres of energy are proffering a momentary sanity to hopelessly industrialized earthlings lost in space.* It’s modern man, peerless collector of disgruntlement, who’s quit life in the open, whose affiliation with the timeless and immediate has evanesced; how truly close the correlation between natural existence under kindly skies and honest personal response we’ll never know. Sustainability and egalitarianism are interlinked: moderns and foragers in this respect are irreversibly disjoined. The latter-day intolerance of primitive life deemed no less irrelevant than inferior has been based on deep-seated envy or ressentiment, in dull awareness of the inaccessibility for us of the unique enchantment, leisure, joy, and liberty our ancestors experienced. Today’s freaks can’t imagine how unnecessary all material possessions are, that once upon a “time” tools were replaceable right on the spot. There’s a contrariety between mobility and property; a loaded soul can scarcely be a liberated one. Quotidian activities once suited unclad human beings down to the ground. Throughout the hominids’ evolution life was carefully observed, nobody owned a mirror, and this lack restrained the vanity and self-delusion nowadays pandemic. In so short a time (called civilized) we’ve lost the deep sense of affiliation with the cosmos and no longer recognize our stamping grounds. The intricacy of their biological relationships prehumans sensed, while present-day exploiters of the earth’s dwindling resources are comparatively crude and irresponsible: our terminal technology cannot be for the ignoramuses known as technicians to control. We have produced—seem to prefer—a drab derivative sort of existence; such a pallid ersatz world the Greeks of yore would have termed Hades,

* Could life have caught fire on the earth from some primeval comet strike? And it eventually will be snuffed out by another random one? We get to take a wild guess.

62 kingdom of the shades, not just the future destiny but also the extant reality of any mechanistic Mammon-dedicated ethos that ensures despoilment of the planet. Primal among catalysts for human evolution was environmental transformation; that too will engender human dissolution. How can we in our frivolity grasp life was once in earnest? Electronic mankind, irremediably snared in moral contradictions, with attention spans attenuated and divorced from any realization of their natural alliances, their faith in institutions having shattered, lack the patience needed for sustained inquiry, also the capacity for lasting and profound experience permitting reverie, immersion in real magicality; estranged from geographical identity, they falter without any vital vision of an individual, never mind a commutual, future. Give thanks there is neither freeze nor drought in paradise, necessitating precious little digging, simply downward shoots. Hard bones are built from living backbones; soft flesh is grown from the red and golden flesh of raw fruits. The self-cleansing stream that flows through our veins rose from our great Mother’s veins; and when we’re one with Her it beats, as it originally beat, in fathomless majestic measures. Are we feeling, are we looking, fit—for the grave? Not the apple gives the pip or causes pipping out. Those melon-bellies mealy-mouthed who “eat well” do not feel well, suffering the woofits; bon vivants both have and are poor livers. Evidently every body has to seek its own particular discomfort level. Negligible ailments like gastritis, halitosis, headaches, constipation, and blocked sinuses, for which no end of nostrums—each a patently unreal solution—are continually groped for, have a single major cause, viz., imbecilic feeding habits. Pimply teenyboppers feed their faces. Stuffy noses are but outgrowths of stuffed craws; how seldom now the young are taught to keep their noses clean. Overfull bellies gallop faint hearts, which, raced, are being run down to earth. Hearty meals, indeed! Those who must put away a hillock of superfluous chuck soon must put their selves away. Four rounds of living liquid may be more fulfilling than three squares of solid death. At eighty many bodies have turned aged, looking most like death warmed over, as if pallbearers were given the slip, yet the years are few. Disordered organisms view the world and act in ways that turn it more disorderly. Not every killer’s red-faced but each ought to be. Convinced one’s self is ruddy well, one rubicund is suffering from an undetected heart disease. No ailing modern, chattering of trifles, can deal now with the gut issues.

63 __35__

Harking, try to understand: many the substances that, entering us, must devitalize; but those that promptly exit us devitalize us not. Who has a nose to follow, let him follow it, if it be not stopped up entirely. But our ears are waxed dull, so that, hearing, we do not apprehend; our eyes are clouded, so that, seeing, we do not perceive; and our hearts are gross, so that, feeling, we do not adore. For from without, into our hearts, proceed corrupting meat, milk, eggs, fish, butter, cheese, poultry, barley, rye, wheat, rice, corn, oysters, and sundry other “delicacies” devitalizing spirit no less than intestines. Nearly every body’s passage is a passing, a progressive degeneration: is it any wonder life-negating notions, “other”-worldly sentiments, world-slandering ideals, have dominated our inhuman history, any wonder that an unspoiled child is who is most apt to be sweet on someone? Babied for decades in a smothering milieu of sterile packaged superabundance, how could poor self-wolfing Homo sapiens, impelled to glut till deathly ill, have the capacity to take the cure and portion out in driblets to himself his true needs with his Mother’s impartial parsimony? How can a monstrosity, dependent on poison for sustenance, secure simplicity? It scarcely takes a rocket scientist to ascertain how ill our species has become. It’s not clear how a monstrous profit-ridden kultur staggering along can ever be swayed to detox. Have we a need to celebrate which we confuse with suffering intoxication, leading us to self-destructive habits like ingesting baneful substances? Why wonder if, habitually dining at some hashery or plushery, you soon are terminal? The wonder is not how many of us develop cancer but how few. Sad freaks require orgies frequently. No trick for modern crips to slip their trolleys. How can one talk reason with a world that’s whacked out? Yet our outward action starts to alter automatically once our inner mortification through unforced examination is begun. The outer evil has no cure As long as inwards are impure. Thence from within, out of our hearts, issue murders, self-wrought ideas, adulteries, perversions, thefts, greed, cruelty, deceit, lasciviousness, pride, fear, hatred, madness. Therefore what goes early out of us strengthens and beautifies us. Primary among our needs, taking precedence over provisions, is the elimination of our selves. Turn the bloated self inside out. As well be dead As be “well fed.” 64 Swollen snakes sleep. From dawn to dusk some dutifully do their pushups— easing from their easy chairs for eats. Men at some time are masters of their diets; men, that is. Pigs will eat anything. It’s not the minutes table-finishers put in at feeding that enlarge their middles; it’s the seconds. What’s one’s moral fiber? Of what stuff, of what infirmities, are we made? “Let not him . . . which eateth not judge him that eateth.” Fresh translation: “Let not our own swinish habits yet be brought to light, else we in shame might be obliged to discontinue and renounce them.” The flesh, cleansed or cancerous, can be ignored by no one but the ignorant. Attend to all your minor aches and pains, and major ills will take care of themselves. A threadless stitch in time saves pointless nine. Perhaps some supersnoopers, boobs-obsessed themselves, have analyzed me as no pipperoo but as a prune or a sad apple crazy about sweets or kid stuff like plump mangos, a vain tootie fruitie stuck fast at the oral stage, seeking a plum in all this? Compensating, also, with a wash for a cannibal heart of hearts? That could be aurally “true;” yet those who, nosey, breathing through their mouths, are not concerned about their way of life may well be close to death. Instead of being preoccupied with the subject, let us be occupied with the object: growing. Loud I hear a literary sleuth, a florid hector ever scoffing needless “goodies,” razz and scoff that, obviously hung up, nitpicking, forever out to lunch* and going ape for fruits, I must be fruity, lust to dwell among the apes or homos, drags all, and my self be easy pickings, fare for monkeys. No, hold on, don’t split your slats, baby, it’s just that I’m fed up with going about pig-headedly like you on all fours. Suffering cats, must we meatballs go to the dogs and be descended from climbers? Who is catcalling, heehawing at the bottom of the class, who the stupid savage? There are creatures, no doubt, that would like to see me bite my tongue and eat my words. I might be panned and roasted, done to a turn, twitted that I must have some scarce-hidden motive for preferring the protective foods, for striving vainly to become as clean as a hound’s tooth. But what protection is afforded now against the deep-dyed carnivores our selves, age after age, like allosaurs, yet hatch? If my pet peeve or fixed idea is complacent killers, possibly I like to live. The predatory life is our kind’s real sin. Granted that irregular lawbreakers are dis-eased; but the predominant infirm at large who won’t confess, revolt, perk up, and make a comeback, getting off the backs of us all, incontestably are criminals more hideous. It’s solely by being really sick of one’s own sickness that one can be really free of it.

* In imitation of Divinity? 65 _36_

Who wishes to stay sick ought to consult a doctor. Who desires to die should get taken in by a bone factory and count on hospitality bedded in the bier: it is no accident that a meatwagon means both ambulance and hearse. The patient gets the grave while the physician gets the gravy. Butcher shops’ “recoveries” are limited to permanent residents’ estates. The evil that a mercenary does lives after him, the good he oft inters with victims’ bones. Many a medicare- afflicted medic has been known to squawk like a spoiled kiddy when his lollipop has wisely been withheld from him. Yet why should a plump pill trafficker be paid more for his services than a lean laborer? The latter works at least as hard and it is only chance that his capacity’s in handling a shovel rather than a saw. But diggers sleep long sleeps as long as butchers lick their chops, administering plain killers. Surely China’s practice of physicians being remunerated only when their patients have recovered—and having to recompense their patients’ families when they don’t—ought to be introduced from China to Peru, even though it’s apt to pauperize most every Western M.D. Shamans not only used to use and to be called leeches: they are, ever will be, leeches. Truly, doctors doctor. Medicine began in sorcerers’ devices tailored to their audiences’ superstition—and stayed there. Originally, at least, a “doctor” meant a teacher, not a dope peddler, a preventer of crime, not an inciter to it. Ethical drugs? Whitish black? Public health? Come, come, smug humbug, plague us no more with this outbreak of illogicality, when what both you and public, this society of druggies, desperately need is not an outbreak but some insight. There is nothing wrong with humankind that miracles—for instance, waking up—would fail to cure.

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Till almost yesterday the darkness that encompassed terminal disease was near absolute; like other animals souls suffering from mortal illness had no inkling of exactly what carried them off. For eons the prevailing lack of information mattered little in a world where water, air, soil, and food were not yet polluted and the population numbers had not yet burst tolerable bounds. Those floebergs of our physical disease that are observable are only horns of the submerged dilemmas harboring our spiritual ills. Yet lunacy may be the bitter fruit of generations of fruitlessness, of insanitation. Cities are snowed under by the thickest blizzards, breed the blackest jungles. Owls, the bushed,

66 cave dwellers, are more rife in a metropolis than in the sticks. O Man, take heed: we have been bestialized in city states. Who walks or runs in corridors, between walls, sleeping in a swank apart-ment, is the local yokel and provincial noddy. Little wonder, with their deadly diets, that our ever-sitting city populaces suffer so from spiritual gridlock. Fearfully one’s feral, overly industrial self, like some cartridge-belted celluloid savior headed for the gulch if not the drink, is racing pellmell, lemminglike and devil-ridden, down the slope in fruitless search of a self-purifying fountain of youth that’s already deep within one.

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Strictly speaking, is not every body presently in-sane? Is that a joke? Pray take this patho-logical self—however smugly bugged on its “normality”—in for a checkup instantly. What difference between the so-called normal and insane save that the latter have been driven farther down the selfsame superhigh- way? Does a greenhouse dweller dare cast the first stone and call someone else punchy or neurotic? Branding others “normal” or “abnormal,” white or black, can only help the insecure feel stronger in a cutthroat fantasy arena? Cruel tags like “paranoid” or “schizo” hurt some more than sticks or stones could, yet are arbitrary bottle stickers whose real function is to suffer us, whom “patients” have been trying all in vain to signal with their conduct, to ignore the content of their messages so critical environmentally, to focus rather on their suppositious dangerousness or defectiveness, both of which of course compel close supervision if not scrutiny. Why is it psychoanalysts’ vocabularies run so rich in terms and images intended to demean and not to dignify? Any behavior-monitor who justifies his jailing harmless if deluded souls is irreformably unjustified. How comforting to hear tell that disorders of the mind predominantly are genetic—palliating any guilt about our inhumanity toward the sufferers. “Tie ’em up, lock ’em in the drunk tank, throw away the key,” mob woman or mob man demands, fictitiously categorizing “the emotionally disturbed” as much more prone to violence than she or he is. Is it really indispensable that we exacerbate the alienated’s isolation? Surely most of us are capable of anything—the best or worst of deeds; “saints” and “archcriminals” dwell in identical souls. What if everybody is unbalanced and untrustworthy, if that’s inherently true human nature, the need to dissemble, always to be playing a role? Perhaps what’s needed is not to give staged performances convincingly but, rather, recklessly to act oneself. Though unshrunk

67 analysts will ferret out of urban plots many a psychopatho-logicality, taking the utmost care in squirrelly training as interned obeisant interns never thoroughly to study or examine health, their oversuspicious efforts to make mountains out of molehills in organic gardens crumble. Representative of an abnormal nonorganic world are its physicians, whose statistical expectancy of life is low; they are trained not to heal stress but to demonstrate it.

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Sick societies dote on the sickly, showing phlegm toward the hearty. Strange as it may seem, it is ill health that causes hypochondria: already ill if good at faking pains, some grimacing martyrs actually tormented by a rash of worries worry that they’ve worried themselves sick. Such prototypical complaints at least provide each ego with a ward against its latent paranoiac bent. How fortunate for mental specialists that they’re so well rewarded simply for being sympathetic listeners, a role that almost everyone could fill. Why are superfluous authorities, the pastors and behavior experts, still enjoying a monopoly on raising people’s self-esteem? Success has been achieved assisting frightened and dependent souls to feel (if not to act) a little better; meanwhile those, the countless malefactors, who cannot control their impulses yet thrive. Psychologists are anchorites hard schooled in suffering, not agents of adjustment hired by boards. Must not the aim of schooling be to break the will, of moralizing to restrict it, of psychiatry to exculpate it? If “neurotics” are no class of sick souls needing cure but only those guilt-ridden wanting heartening, “correcting” them is wholly incorrect. The sole folk who don’t over- rate themselves are the depressed, true realists stigmatized as pessimists. The lamebrained psychiatric high priests, those magicians gifted at the shell game, not their pet test rabbits, are unquestionably quite unable, in the current state of medical obscurantism, to cope with their problems and are who would benefit the most from harsh electroshock, a taste of their own medicine, as brainy cutpurses, cerebral sacrificers, sharps all, concentrating on what cuts they get from juicy melons, might from quick lobotomies. Why, snug within their occidental compounds, would well-fixed father confessors want a single soul to face the sundry socioeconomic causes of anxiety and misery? Many a therapist peculiarly believes that efforts to alter an unworthy status quo are never apolitical and always open to unpleasant censure, but that his own professional acts, most of which tend to condone and reinforce that treacherous status quo, are scrupulously neutral, somehow free of patriarchal screwing,

68 morally beyond reproach. As if one could be concurrently medical and moral! Madness springs less from our frailties than from the power of society’s psychodynamics, double-bind circumstances, and compulsions to control behavior and maintain the norms that be; thus every tamed herd heartlessly defines anew who is unsound and what is not right. Rationalists can’t accept that criminals choose to do evil willingly; it’s strictly deeds the apparatchiks sanction that can have been freely chosen. Generally the rule is: wherever experts’ ignorance prevails a catchword such as “schizophrenia” has to be coined to keep the public obfuscated. Patients tend to be severely diagnosed when poor, particularly radicals: such wrong views must, it seems, be righted. Has the shrinker—a strict law unto his self—the status and credentials needed, as state’s witness, paid informer, and ultimate expert, to commit himself for good and all as ethically undesirable and socially dangerous? Has he a special frenzical forensic expertise helping him to determine (which nobody else is able to) the microscopically fine line of criminal responsibility in every irrational offender, even in his self so long arrested, let alone in others? Such a mercenary has no hesitation to act in his interests exclusively while claiming “the insane” have lost their normal sense and inclination to pursue their own. Collating, classifying criminals as sick apparently legitimizes as both scientific and humanitarian the unrestrained discretionary crimes of captors against captives. Just as Jesus was opposed to rabbis’ power, so did Freud wish to protect analysis from doctors as from priests; we see, however, what has happened: the physicians dominate the victim-littered field. Religion’s less neurosis than neurosis a religion. Health requires dispensing with prescribers and lord gods. Need one dissect physic-ians raking it in to uncover secret passions for carnality? Inside every psychotherapist practises the psycho rapist. Do not well-conditioned, easily milked women make the choicest patients for a cureless chauvinist? Antidepressants he prescribes for myriad complaints of a vague nature cannot better females’ frustrating position in the noncommu- nity. In modern atheist society the witches now are seen as brainsick, slated for correction by a more sophisticated patriarchal Inquisition, which self- righteously still sacrifices every heretic∗ that it can lay its hands on—never mind how diffident she is at heart. Confessions are encouraged, endless talk is favored, whereas independent action is anathema. While on the surface

* There are no “normals,” yet we’re strangely bent upon impounding or aborting freaks, removing any threats to dimwits’ comfort level that they represent.

69 all that’s possible is being done to spare the patient, in fact it’s the therapist’s internalized, tormenting parents who are being spared at the cost of the patient’s failure to unearth her individual reality. Was not “the vapors” a male- fashioned veil for justifiable depression and rage sired by masculist oppression? How can any shrink afford to diagnose “hysteria” in womankind as anything but trauma fantasy if he his self has helped so many children really to be traumatized? Even a mind-examiner cannot afford—let alone desire— to have his natural impulse to play with girls exposed. Suspect psychiatry and the equally suspect nuclear family connive in bed together; the doping profession and the propagative institution cannot but collaborate to undermine and to emasculate the physical health and emotional integrity of youngsters. Might it really be the pedagogues and doctors who put children on unending chains of stupefying toxicants who’re hyperactive bipolar-disorder cases needing to be treated as the villainous offenders they transparently are? Treating their own therapists, patients as a rule evade their own ambivalence, colluding to keep self-destructive impulses at bay. “Transference” is the perfect if unreasonable rationale for specialists inducing credulous dependency in patients. Might the clients actually like being screwed? The common factor in failed psychotherapies is clearly the derangement of practitioners. Psychoanalysis may be most valuable as a means to unmask psychoanalysis. Such “sciences,” explaining everything and nothing too, can hardly be categorized as hard; theories that cannot be disproved as science do not qualify. Each psychoanalytic theory proves to be self-validating: proof lies in the undisguised suggestibility. And yet the mentally ill (i.e., criminally inclined), not their ailing states, are in fact responsible for the “mentally ill” (i.e., behaviorally deviant).∗ Is everyone not socially lobotomized, and when that doesn’t work, chemically lobotomized? Failing in that, some— the obstreperous intransigents persistently resistant to correction—must be surgically lobotomized; then “life” can be permitted to continue without the attendant risks of rude awareness. Practising their ruses in vain efforts to recover from intolerable interpersonal impasses, mental patients are but half awake; psychiatricksters armed with batteries of drugs help them to go to sleep again and to go really crazy. Prick the blown-up fantasy that any

* “Mental illness,” in T. Szasz’s diagnosis, means a self-promoting and coercive strategy that masquerades as loss of self-control, while institutional psychiatry is self-promoting and countercoercive strategy that masquerades as therapy. The languages of madness and mad doctoring are not unlike: both trying to deny their own mendacity, the patient via the hot air of “symptoms,” the physician via that of “diagnoses” and new “treatments.” 70 psychotherapy is better for the gork than would be none; in fact, as with all medic intervention, there’s an excellent chance therapy of any kind will worsen his or her condition. Get it straight, crooky: psychiatric dope is for the benefit of the “care” takers. The “community” the mad supplied with their required drugs are discharged to is a bogus nonexistent entity; the dread of madness motivates our public policies dealing with it—i.e., not dealing with it. In the trials of serial or multi-murderers the disputation rages: “How could any normal soul commit such crazy acts?” Thus our collective mechanism of defense: if only deviants are locked away—in institutions and/or clinical categories—we’ll all sleep so much more “soundly,” never asking how the sickos got “that way.” In our repressive system we’ve refined the crude, outmoded methods of bludgeoning prisoners into blind conformity, stifling their suc- corless rage toward a culture that primarily produced their problems and that with stiff upper lip keeps up arresting and producing. God forbid that there be equal treatment (i.e., an acceptance as real equals) on our nutbox wards— lest patients drop their patience and their helpless roles and get clear. Tending the unbalanced tends to unbalance the tenders. Insane keepers mop up floors but not insanity; that they keep.

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“Health care”—a misnomer which means management of dying. Patients in general—save the substantially well-to-do—apparently have no rights to the best of care; they may or, much more likely, may not be in luck and have bestowed upon them by great God a “cure,” a casual gift from on high. Can some deus ex machina such as a clever soulless pacer truly certify alive a heart that long since failed, congested by its lion’s shares? Clinicians are not able to repair the underworld; thus they proceed to fix the dependent, dumping the more troublous souls on Mt. St. Elsewhere. Like political or religious power addicts presently at large, run-of-the-mill physicians or psychiatrists nurse fantasies of reconstructing mankind; at first the dream of greater freedom is instilled by the subduing drug, while in reality the subject is being fettered by necessity: the dose must regularly be enlarged to bring an artificial “bliss” sufficient to ward off the cancerous presentiment of doom. To flout our highly sacerdotal medicos’ or head shrinks’ labors, mind you, may be but projecting our own sloth and uselessness upon them. We are servants and not masters of the healing process. Neither mind nor body in truth purifies another: lasting healing is a healing by oneself. Homeostasis via egos’ defense mechanisms

71 and bodies’ immune systems does afford one preservation, whereas drug pro- visioners cannot. To seek is to be sick. And how we seek a wizard with some kind of exorcising abracadabra to absolve us from all individual responsibility while in the bargain saving us from our selves: “let Saint George do it. . . .” But we either cut short our own dragons or are swallowed up in fire. Little boots it to shriek, “All is well in this best of all possible” hells! Are we bound, with self-stopped ears, to cheer society’s circus band, regaled to hear it honking, tootling hollowly on within the holocaust—“At all costs let the slaughterhouse continue operating! No, the creaky framework can’t be touched, let alone torn down”—who’s to care how false, corrupt and ruinous it may be? Meanwhile, in any case, the flames are licking our feet and the whole shebang is now collapsing over, under us as, lapsing into moral molds, we keep on hypnotizing our own cotton candy-lapping selves with antics of buf- foons. Dreaming our selves exempt from natural restraints, we want recovery without having to face our ill natures, we demand a sudden panacea after long careers of self-abuse; but if we are to be altogether well we must be equally aware that we are ill and why we are. The problem for each organism is defense: avoiding crippling damages and carrying out imperative repairs. Our foremost allergy is to the truth, now patently a drug on the market.

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The well-heeled “healing” profession treats disease much as most suspects are by lawyers, judges, and police—as aliens and enemies to be destroyed (a lot like theocratic dominators treating sex drives). Present-day fascist society considers “foreigners,” dissenters, anarchists, etc. as decomposing bacteria spreading dangerous contagion, hence requiring prompt eradication. Most “neurosis,” like all other illness self-induced, might well be nature’s offering to right imbalance: it requires no capsule, knife, or jack for changing a flat tire, but limber limbs, self-understanding, an awakening to self. How well the media, encouraging pharmacomania, have programmed us to treat ourselves as if we were machines; for every problem we expect that there’s a matching sop, a pill for every ill, fast bombers to provide permanent peace, barbitu- rates to put us beddie-bye, amphetamines to “awaken” us, etc.—just call our friendly corner druggist. Meantime every central nervous system must exact its rightful vengeance for this frightful flagellation. Not all our vexations have a pleasant antidote; by abnegating our selves to the “mercy” of drugs the real problem is intensified, obscured, not clarified nor solved. The purpose of all

72 medication is to quash our natural responses, to bereave us of reality, impoverishing, weighing down. It is our own protective nature that sees that, when poisoned, we cough, upchuck, sneeze, develop boils, or have the trots. The so-called cure disperses our alarming symptoms elsewhere through our thus degraded bodies, it conveniently screens these early warnings of our Mother; yet the tumor underneath thrives on and spreads the chemical. From dire malignancy we cannot free our selves by filling them with bull, by punishing the creatures, but we can forestall this fright by meeting natural need, by feeding arboreal purity from an early age;* then “research,” “therapy,” and the like euphemisms will be seen to be themselves both criminal and cancroid.

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What cannot be cured can be prevented: first of all, dependence on the butcher tribe. It’s well known that the latter, for the most part destitute of psychologic knowledge, are thus ill-equipped to practise social medicine, i.e., to succor the majority who suffer foremost from emotional disturbances;† but must physicians also totally lack basic understanding of how healthy bodies simply can keep healthy? Can a croaker offer a quick way out of one’s killing habits? Must the expediential and prudential autocrats withhold all information from their prey out of “professional pride” (which means guarded charlatanry)? Doctors lie to patients frequently, especially to those in critical condition, out of dread of facing facts themselves, because they know too well how frequently their diagnoses, hit-and-miss indeed, are dead wrong. “Keep ’em speechless, in the dark” indefinitely is the sovereign prescriptive policy—else questions might cast doubt and light upon the ruling ignorance and fraudulence. Both the evasions and prescriptions are just what the doctor

* Much cancer may be the taboo, long pent-up fury meant for Mother finally erupting. † Most modern illness represents a refuge from abnormal tension, from our customarily repressing troublesome emotions. People choose unconsciously to “fall sick,” to be passive objects of experts’ attention, to resign as active agents of their own. The resignation lying at consumption’s heart is typical. It’s possible that every sickness indicates a yearning for protection by the Mother, a need to retreat to childhood’s blessed irresponsibility. Thus any healer is resented as a menace to the mental construct that’s the malady, which frees the sufferer from all occasion for remorse, displacing blame externally. Might all disease at root be a defense against something supposedly unbearable? Compulsive smoking, drinking, even nail-biting, for instance, are ways immaturely to keep nasty feelings from erupting, means for the demoralized to fend off fresh experience and self-recovery.

73 ordered, a flight from reality. In light of their pretenses to high scientific status, medics yet remain remarkably incurious, resistant to the new; not up on fresh approaches, they assuredly are down on them. Since etiology’s so thoroughly misunderstood, misdiagnoses are the rule. If only we could puzzle out why some souls do “contract tuberculosis” while some others don’t, when nearly everybody has tubercular bacilli in his or her system part of the time, we’d be in a fit position to remove not just TB but all disease. Of course malign M.D.s, the positively pestilential rabies carriers, cannot afford discovery of this simple truth, being so absorbed, schooled by unconscionable pharma- ceutic sutlers, in prescribing nightcaps and in making killings. Every allopath, precluded by greed from providing the solution to disease, viz., prevention, is all “pathos.” Statisticians tell us people get well just as surely whether or not treated: can’t we draw one powerful conclusion from that fact? Bubonic plague was never conquered: it withdrew to redeploy. Eradicating one type of malefic microorganism does improve the opportunities for other budding pathogens. When will we manage, with expensive microscopes, to isolate the germ that’s duplicate of each duplicity-dosing self? Man won’t find cancer’s cause in his laboratories:* it’s in his way of “life,” for long the nucleus exposed. What is important is not learning to “live with” one’s sickness but loving to live beyond it—in truth. Who says “Incurable” is an immedicable pill suffering from a deep-seated superiority complex, a pertinacious malady mitigable solely by excising the interminable case from the scene. Anyone can push up daisies pulling them apart, but who can put them together again? Yes, doctor, don’t you see that you’re a wanted man, accused herewith of multiple manslaughter and of feeding on blood money, a most dangerous escapee in disguise? If any ancient’s creed and deeds have been betrayed more cruelly than Jesus’s, it has to be Hippocrates’. All dope addictors swear a hypocritic oath and are the elusory charlatans that newspapers never expose. God’s medicine indeed. Disorganized medicine dare not discipline itself. What’s undeniable is that the drug trade is big business, that its unapproachable beneficiaries are the syndicate. Professing deviltry called medicine, one signs a pact with evil; practising nonmedical hygienics, one is treated worse than the devil. Let the drugged exhume their drugged. Their kill-or-cure treatment, though “cures” are nonexistent, is infallibly successful. Stinking soaks or stewbums, for example, after being jackrolled, maybe battered by the bluecoats, sunk in jim-jams get their steadfast guidance and perceptive T.L.C. in hoosegows, potomanic

* The cancer industry’s a thriving combine of foul chemical companies, smug medical careerists, and regular bureaucrats. 74 heads bent praying to the porcelain god. In a D & D media-pushed underworld that stinker among livers, the highly offensive rubbydub, is given a low profile wreathed in a blue carcinogenic haze.

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Who can help it if one suffers from a few spied effects and dozens of unspied ones? Possibly some powers that be, beyond help, would prefer to see me buried modestly in the pathetically dogged busywork composing a lab’s “prophylactic” research program so that truth, the child of intuition, could be kept out of their hair indefinitely? Over their own wolfish eyes, however, they are pulling wool, playing sheepish shepherds of humanity while worshiping the golden calf. Their “double blind” experiments, costing billions, are in fact doubly blind. Give all of our well-controlled guinea pigs placebos and our selves the “safe drug,” then we’re sure to get the best results. We are the hybrid rodents, the hopeless repeaters, that are sacrificed to prove the truth. Our X rays fail to show the crosses that we will our grandchildren. Cancer is caused, not cured, by medicine. Aspirin pains, coffee stupefies one. Alcohol, that old home “remedy,” is a poisonous depressant, not a nourishing stimulant, and every pick-me-up irresponsibly lets one down, taking one down a peg. How about a bracing spot of canned heat or an invigorating shot of varnish remover? Inorganic elements are useless to a living organism and sooner or later destroy it—news the chemist and the medic will want hushed; still, life transcends the pushers’ juvenile chemistries and delinquent medicines. Is “objectivity” no more than this obsession with producing early painful deaths? Each scientist knows only some of the essential food factors and even fewer of their intricate correlations, hence is far from able arbitrarily to synthesize a normal diet out of artificial extracts. What a blessing in disguise, could every pharmacist be brought to take a powder permanently. Younkers, thanks to eyes yet clear of bloodshot and minds yet untwisted by traffic with evil, are not mistaken viewing any hypodermicist or surgeon as the very incarnation of Mephistopheles, fiction’s mad experimentalist materialized. One of the late farfetched gospels, that foul mare’s-nest that salvation rests right in the steady hands of sharp medical engineers, is both a technological final solution and a distant dream indeed, more window dressing for a bankrupt business. Now that overmedication with rafts of unnecessary immunocompromising antibi- otics no longer works, the desperate “health” industry and public both seek some alternative elixir. Doctors should be but are never held accountable for

75 decades of compliant dependence on the Pharma hustlers who have regularly spent $10 billion or more a year promoting products for which bribes to those professionals enable hoodwinking the citizenry; almost all M.D.s remain too “busy” racking up their tasteless revenue to spend time sifting through mountains of specialist reports containing contraindicative evidence. In medicine’s use of technology it’s surely the curious ignorance that’s most intriguing. They are doing their best (worst) to outrival horseflies, gnats or hornets with their snake or monkey juice, but they have yet to learn how to remove the sting and venom of their waspish selves. Whose stuck-up faith is buried in shots can, as a riddled pin cushion or bacterium attenuated past recovery, expect a faithful fate, fit answer to his or her prayers. Theopathy, however fantastic, is sounder than homeopathy. Similia similibus creantur. Will iatrogenic methadone addiction fix as well iatrogenic heroin addiction as the latter fixed iatrogenic morphine addiction? Do we hope and plan to rid our goofy selves of drugs by goofing, taking ever larger doses of them, fighting fire mithradatically with fire? Our plan’s hopeless. Do we think that we become immune by paying taxes? Immune if death is immunity. It’s we, poor gullible sitting or dead ducks—prime game for the croaker, for our quack- ish doc—who are the quack-quacks, and for him that is just ducky-wucky. There’s a lot of gold in them thar ills.

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Old Nick was mortified to think that he could not entirely corrupt humanity’s organic constitution; then, in a stroke of angelic inspiration, ice cream was concocted and successfully introduced to unsuspecting millions. Evidently we would rather that our sappy jellybeans consume their own weight annually in denatured sugar, and that with metabolisms so disordered they lose several demineralized kilograms in undergoing subsequent attacks, than see so many “fine” refineries and serum-huckstering laboratories go under. What good sugaring the pill when pill as well as sugar undermine the mind and body? Could it be but a coincidence that most youth is drained of all moxie? Now, then, children, let’s be sure to follow Doctor’s orders, take our medicine and get our necessary daily intake of decalcifying dextroglucose by observing closely which toothsome baby foods we buy next: support our hardpressed local dentists and national insulin manufacturers. What power-

ful amoral cola corporation will help colaholics rediscover H2O, one on the house, as the supreme no-calorie thirst-quencher of them all? The best buy in

76 food processors not on the market: a sound set of pearly whites. Much like tobacco’s syndicate, the false-food industry thinks nothing—rather, a great deal—about how best to gummix up the public belly and soul. We are dead sure that while killing we can nourish: mixing Bloody Marys with fresh carrot juice, however, sobers no one, though some may imagine they see better. One can be on vitamins A, B, C, D, E, F, & G and yet still look like H. As sweet- and-sour compensation for uncounted dietary slip-ups, all of course permis- sible, Mom fakes the family bread unbleached, with added yeast, vitamin BS and black-crap malasses; Doc applies just the most likely risk among free samples of true fads in his choked-up chest of infectants; Nurse is reassuring, with her saccharine smile ever ready, in a flash, to hold down in the torture chamber any body showing lightness or a sign of life; while Dad agrees to all the measures that supine authority sees fit to lay down dead; in brief, every disintegrating corpse still does its nihilistic, piss-poor best. Painstakingly some search their scriptures, their approved, daily gastrology columns, for permission to do whatever they please—and yet they wonder why their souls are tetchy and their flighty lives, fixed by the medical mystique, have to be filled with pain. In one’s own solar plexus burns the star that molds one’s fate. Pains in the ass are never accidents. Until we can perceive medicine’s radical flubdub, all our major operations in life must be irremediably flubbed. In the flesh and spirit of fruit is life and joy; but no elixir of death brings health to vain lazybones. We’ve neither tusks nor cuspids need to be removed, but every chomper suffers from our fluoridating selves. To have a sweet tooth in a world of artifice is soon to have no tooth that is not false. How could a gab filled with phony enamel utter truth? Originally we were given cleanness of teeth, ignorance of bread, but lately certain interests dispensing jawbreakers have tempted and habituated us to daily pain. No better toothbrush than to put nothing into the mouth. It is perversely apropos that upside-down mankind should make something so natural as sugar cane into such an unnatural disaster as cane sugar. Each extraction “liberates” corruption but does not expel it; innocents are hardly liberated, they’re emasculated, robbed, perverted by the pogey bait of ivory hunters and goldbrickers in collusion with the younglings’ false-mouthed elders. Specialists in sang-froid and legerde- main indeed, light-fingered surgeons push narcotics, not their own unconscious sadism. One scarcely need call countless needless tonsillectomies or hysterectomies a medical craze—that’s tautology. Appendices, teeth, tonsils, toes, breasts, foreskins, uteri, all of them obviously useless appendages, the knifers do not think twice of removing when there’s indication of disorder;

77 yet our heads they strangely don’t remove when in a like condition, falsely claiming that we need our buzzing brains but not our whole bodies. Dentists and physicians, like solicitors, are the top experts at exacting undue chunks of revenue from a gullible public. Sawbones carving up their clients manage to extract exorbitant fees from so many gutless wonders, while the victims, coming into surgery cold turkey, are rewarded with generous helpings of ice cream, aptly laying the foundations for more costly operations. Why should medicine men bother to report cases of child abuse, when they are geniuses at it? Why should our ill-educated G.P.s, trained to think without empathy in twenty-minute packages, allow importunately needful psychological services to be expanded, when having more carvers might well mean for all of them thinner cuts from the gargantuan mincemeat pie that is the swelling profit from excessive patients? Only nuts among the rich, extorting executors might explode the myth that all effective psychotherapy calls for a medical degree; and self-analysis, God knows, rings up as insupportably unlucrative. It’s not probing one’s own depths that’s the dangerous business. The search for some sole cure-all, patent and enduring, leads so many patients to pursue one treatment after another, pushed dissatisfied from pillar to post; such shopping around, not merely “getting help,” becomes the actual addictive malady. We moderns have produced an ethos of addiction quite as chemical as spiritual while effectively obstructing any real relief to sufferers. What need for charismatic saviors or dietary disciplines while we enjoy those two most popular demulcent psychiatric agents, TV and the fridge? No gay blade rids one of one’s tapeworm: starve the worm of garbage, and it goes hence. Fighting cancer spreads it; that extortionate campaign’s a war on evolution? Surely humankind’s the overruling cancer on this planet. No thing one does can dissolve one’s gratifying disease: all our “cures” are curses, death masks of the truth; all medicines bad medicine.

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At home in nature dwell wild creatures, while men strive to be at odds with it. Is any agile bear ambling across a highway out of place, or is the highway and its fat slewfooted patrons for the most part jaspers? Man, and not the universe, reels out of kilter. Not just exploitation, which is natural enough, is our aim; rather, demolition. Predators—excluding that most ruthless species of all—prove the most astute wildlife superintendents; prey without a prayer enforce the cryptic regulating. Men, not wolves, waste food—and nature as a

78 whole—for vicious entertainment. Ease of travel now has placed each pristine paradise at countless reckless voyagers’ disposal. Those who would “conserve the wilderness” conserve a phantom: saving something calls for supervising it, and, once all has been supervised, what wilderness can then be left to save? As world-destroyers we have given our selves a blank check. It’s a serious mistake to think the earliest Australians and Americans were wise and natural environmentalists: in fact they self-indulgently engaged in a gigantic megafauna massacre, a scarce-intentional extermination project. Early hunters managed to subdue the world, and we, their arrogant inheritors, devoted to our bloody-minded usages, now toil to finish the job. Primitives to the end, humans raze the land whenever possible, consider conservation only in the twelfth hour—far too tardy. Rapa Nui’s fate remains the quintessential parable for understanding homo “sapiens” as irredeemable producer of damnation out of Eden. Yet the classic instance of our wildest asses ruining the earth: their subjugated goats’ destruction of the Mediterranean lands. Each squinty hidebound herder always works the hardest to preserve his herd, never his range. Nature is on the whole conservative; it’s man who’s question- ably innovative, long made over into a penned cripple, an anomaly the wild would swiftly, healthfully eradicate. By keeping such a creature animate and reproducing, medics now are threatening our species’ future with an ever- swelling burden of congenital flaws. What avails achievement of material prosperity if a huge chunk of ailing people’s lives are spent being fixed up for their physical deficiencies? Might early deaths of socially redundant individuals through psychosomatic illness serve the end of making room for more conformist citizens? Fat is the fertile compost for disease. Domestic beasts, sick substitutes for an organic need, make simple the extermination of the unenthralled origi- nals. Instead of general prevention of fire, we prefer a policy of salvaging each biotype as it burns out, by a bold last-ditch fire-brigade response. Slow-witted bipeds bolt the barn door after all of “their” horses have bolted. The sole beast that can feel shame for killing seldom does. Our foolish faith in greed and endless “growth” embodies not just the prime crime against the planet but our own dead end as well. The species countdown shows that man is capable of taming every animal except—but shortly will include—himself. As chronic dualist, the schizoid creature thinks he lives inside or outside nature, but in fact he dies as it. This weird gazabo fancies himself master riding to extinction gentle maids like manatees. In view of this zoo we have made of earth, who’s not hard put to it to vindicate encaging any creature and subjecting it

79 to the dumb public gape? The zooey hell in which the animals are dwelling herds of all too human devils run. Zoos are imposing gigaflops where crowds of freakish visitors are offered looks at animals but no one ever sees the look of any wild one; once immured, the latter’s vision has been circumspectly immunized to real encounter, thus its gaze deflects, evincing the disinterest of its caged keepers, an impassiveness definitively meaningless and humanoid. Zoo-hamstrung creatures, like their postindustrialized masters, are unnaturally isolated, fundamentally dead on their feet.

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When any nondisciple plants, as everyone to live the truth must plant, one hopefully* will not be like the preying hypocrites who like to mass-produce in the shadow of factories and saturate their fruits and vegetables with the excrement of factories so that their produce may be admired and bought by women shopping at some safeway to an early grave. By polishing such tempting apples, mercenaries have produced already their reward, the only thing preservatives can well preserve, pure death; for they have turned the fruit of truthfulness to hemlock. Willingly suggestible pushovers that we as self-serving buggy-trundling servants are, in numb complacency consumed by supermarketeers, so far from wresting honest livings from a virgin forest, trying vainly to negotiate the plastic maze of poisons, we keep our lardaceous selves incessantly on tenterhooks, on pins and needles, never sure just when the full paralysis is going to strike. Thanks to triumphant industry, our life expectancy has in this century near doubled, yet we feel less healthy than our forebears used to. Indigestion, once rare, now appears ubiquitous: capacity to generate essential enzymes has been—is being—gutted by ingested chemicals. Few folk can understand that chemists’ products can produce a crop of daffydills. The topsy-turvy food-processing oligopoly, as mad as any ignorant lickspittle hatter from the past, maintains it’s up to us, the trusties or consumers, to disprove that given chemic additives are safe. Yet practically nothing’s known—or cared—about the destiny of the degraded products of unnaturally combined synthetic elements. Industrial polluters are unconscionable poachers upon everyone’s preserve. As so much air today is laced with toxins, so our waterways are crammed with stinkpots. The approved pollutants only help assure us bigger harvests of calamity such as widespread sterility, incalculable birth defects, etc.; our herbicidal plots are promising to bear rich crops

* The right, not the corrupt, use of this term. 80 of homicidal fruits. There is no pest like man, that biped whose insecticides but fortify multiped insects, lousing up the earth. What dispensation bends to bail out any muddy-headed ploughman doomed to come a cropper ruining his farm with pesticides precisely aimed at bugs as absent ere as after applications? All our D.D.T.s are but continuations of the customers’ con- taminating fear and hatred, our rejection of reality; we do not care to face the actual state of affairs, which is that love grows in no shopping center or poor food laws but in self-perception and home cultivation. Latest Yankee agribusiness is far less efficient and more deadly wasteful than original organic horticulture. Farmers we expect now to make hay enough to choke all horses. Western corporations demonstrate megalomania pretending to provide security through their extravagant high-energy technologies, when in fact their monopolies in seeds and fertilizers turn exclusively on profits-taking, never mind grave doubts about farmers’ survival or consumers’ nourishment. Promising superabundance, our deranged industrialized modus operandi in reality supplies a choice grossly restricted among poorly nourished flora and fauna. Marketing a piddly few poor standardized varieties out of several hundred thousand food plants prehistoric people once used, extant robber barons have ensured that countless valuable strains must vanish; impecunious countries in a Mammon-dominated underworld lack the “resources” needed to protect their aboriginal genetic wealth. From city-dwellers’ straitened viewpoint “pastoral” life is equated with supernal Nature—pure, idyllic, just ideal. But farms are scarcely natural; instead, a more disruptive, widespread, and severe distortion of the earthscape any animal has ever perpetrated. Foragers expended far less energy collecting myriad wild foods than herders/cultivators harvesting their few deficient substitutes. A biologic toxin’s not invariably lethal: for wild animals clay-eating used to be a natural self-medicating makeshift as old as the hills; our physicists and chemists manage to subvert any such vital safety guard. Slick agribusiness guarantees fertility and innovation in plant breeding but delivers uniformity and chemical dependence, hence environmental degradation as a warranty for global cataclysm. Reckless governmental subsidies, not just for needless crops like coffee, sugar, and tobacco, long have lowered soil fertility, producing permanent pollution of groundwater, also helping ruin the “developing” world by disrupting international trade. Agriculture works best where it’s least perfected; far from that state, we’ve got our selves into deep shit. Farming is itself the growing malady, not just industrialized farming. Land’s forever part of nature; warping it into a market surely was our

81 overbreeding forebears’ weirdest notion and worst blunder. Profitable habits and their cultured outgrowths—in particular that pair of follies, herds and farms—have driven men to spoil their habitat and so themselves; originally our kind were free from possessions, but we’re now possessed. Once vanity led human beings to segregate themselves from nature, they viewed it as some thing manageable and saleable, condemning both it and themselves. They lost awareness that “outside” the wild they’d lost their very essence. Massified, domesticated, sickened, we have scarcely noticed how, in a mere few millennia, our sensibilities have coarsened and our senses—of smell, vision, hearing—have deteriorated, setting the seal on our acumen’s degeneracy.∗ Solely it’s the biosphere where we can be ourselves and not some sad mock animal. Abandoning wild sustenance, humanity forsook its liberty, enticed by wishes, future projects, and ambitions—sundered from the golden present moment, irresistibly sucked into foolish expectations and regretful memories. The ego, seemingly enlightened, activated probably by altered habitat and habits, thus malignantly mutated, in the process nullifying its prior assurance of an everlasting promised land. Unwittingly this creature suffered such a mighty Fall indeed.

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In medieval times the common horde, including noblemen and ladies, saw no wrong in dumping their wastes in the streets, turning them into open sewers; sanitation-conscious moderns now use rivers and lakes to this end while nickeling and diming, pissing away their unreckonable heritage while swallowing their leaders’ unadulterated sludge. Ignoring natural cycles we flush our unbalanced selves and civilization away, going down the gurgler, into biological insolvency. Adapting the environment to our demanding selves, we’re irremediably sabotaging both more deeply than we can foresee; we’re daily frittering away an irrecoverable biospheric legacy. When humans stumbled into agriculture it required abnormal productivity, eventually vast deforestation with more ruinous worldwide results than anything else they’ve achieved. Is ecologic irresponsibility such as deforesting not part and parcel of free-market functioning, obligatory inasmuch as maximizing profits, capital, and power is the scheme’s prime target? Sawdust-eaters who have put the blocks to their lands are stripped clean, in a bind, and fisherfolk who’ve

* The Neanderthals’ brains seem to have been roughly one-sixth ampler than today’s are. Witness also wolves’ remarkable percipience compared to dogs’.

82 wrecked their stocks are stranded, gasping; while the corporations flourish, moving on to new if vanishing frontiers for razing and exhausting. No shit, I don’t give a turd for septic systems such as this the brimful sink stamped “capitalism”; it’s high time to pull its plug. Now realize how in heaven human excretion is not something of which one should be ashamed; for what each nincompoop receives from soil, that must each poop return to soil so others later likewise may taste truth and not be forced to feed on falsity, plankton and mummifried fish. Then interfere no further: nature knows our needs better than we our artificial selves. When someone says “That’s all I need . . .” s/he means s/he needs it not. Can man not see or sense why he, hunched over his potbelly stove producing only ashes, turning earth itself into a ball of cinders, is so half-baked and not baked whole beneath the source of all life? Probity grows sweet and tangy, full of beneficial seeds, like a ripening fig, rich fruit and fertile flower in one, which tires not, for it toils not, yet is clothed such as even Eve was not. Real treasure’s sure to be unearthed not by exploring new fields but by tending our backyards. The less we mind our own business, the less we find out. Riches lie within and only need release to rise. We send our savings down the sewage pipe to sea, evaluating them as doodly- shit, but wisdom sinks its surplus in the land. One already has all the inside information one requires. Bid farewell to the welfare state and greet the state of warfare—with the ever-striving strife-bound self. High living standards are low life standards.

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Excess is the root of all pathology, money merely that of lovelessness, itself of course a gross calamity. As long as we produce for profit, not for use, from greed and not from need, there will be chaos and unjustness. For too long the extrahuman global-market paradigm has excised life’s needs from its calculus, making it a heresy for any misleading economist or corporate kingpin to disclose the catastrophic breakdown each has helped precipitate. More radical and devastating by far than the Agricultural or the Industrial Revolution was the crucial shift from sound subsistence horticulture to insolvent hard- cash agriculture, bringing forth disordered values and disintegrative intercon- nections. Like the land, the farmer’s been contaminated and degraded into multiplying yet not growing green stuff. Usury, that crime of the Dark Ages,∗

* Even in the 17th Century a synonym for usurer was cheat; and since then to sell has meant to defraud. 83 we bright moderns, always on the lookout for a capital percentage, deem as right and decent. Charging interest is interlocked with all industrial collisions and commercial crackups. To get up with profit, we get fellows down with debt and call it credit. Any economic system based on debt is bound to ruin. Surely it’s high time to knock the props right out from under capitalism’s rotten structure. Business societies, corrupt at heart, must be competitive, destructive, never generous, humane. The business end of a gun, fittingly, means business—rivalry at its redhanded end; witness the vile arms industries, triumphant, indefensible. A country dedicated principally to commodity production must run short of room for sensibility, integrity, compassion: selfish pleasure there becomes god, life’s exclusive business, leading social congress into sorry anarchy. So many sally forth for wool yet come home shorn. Depend upon the purse-proud, dyed-in-the-wool mongrels from imperialist Blighty to describe themselves as absolutely topping.* Britain’s and Amerika’s enormous capital was founded on the backs of slaves, millions of them; today’s remorseless class dominion is hardly accidental, it derives from centuries of sanctioned wholesale bondage. Capitalism: that pragmatic British system which disintegrated all traditional morality while glorifying, making sacred and obligatory, every person’s greed. Sustainable laissez-aller—self-contradiction. Poverty’s a status categorization, not a certain small reserve of material assets; as such it’s industrialism’s invention, an invidious if phony class distinction. Terminal capitalism is the, not a, cancer of our world—the substitution of “economy” (ascendancy of buyer-seller victimization) for the genuine society of yore, when so-called primitives, despite occasional jiggery-pokery, experienced sharing relationships. What have we proletarian tycoons and hard-working panhandlers kissing ass to wangle perks and hoping to preserve our keisters ever done to grow a meal for hungry flesh? No, I do not mean lose our hearts in meaningless roles while consuming humankind at gangland jobs, completely out of touch with earth. Outstanding bandits, button-down plug-uglies, sport the spiffiest business suits these days, and everywhere rove the vice wardens supervising holdups. Surely every big cheese is by definition rotten? Capitalism—euphemism for kleptomania? Many a boyhood daydream of becoming a notorious buccaneer one day comes true. To get exceeding loaded, it not only helps to be tightfisted, it’s imperative to have a heart of stone. Success fails to change most

* Note the spanking “games” of those blasé freeloaders—representative of a repulsive spivvish class of Sassenachs that always was perverted. 84 vendors at all: they stay the same grim gouging vultures that they always were. The well-fixed can’t be bothered with small change or, for that matter, any change. Megalomaniacal brigands on the make, who’ve got it made, who’re making “good,” time, broads, a quick buck, some thing of themselves, at last are known as fakers, not as makers. Filthy rich “men of distinction” stink with pelf: what are distillers and brewers of gradual suicide, “relief” pill fabricators, “soft” drink manufacturers, “inspected” meat packers, “filtered” cig sellers, and whoever feeds such hornswoggling hangers-on riding the gravy train of a phenomenally gross national product; what are those moguls—drifters, grift- ers every one, transporting hauls and taking us for rides on a perpetual consumptive splurge—if not plain unconned and unmanly con men? As an ad man, more than slightly mad, a gardenless Madison Avenue square exploiting fears and lusts of other cubes in variously shaped holes, one’s in the know on how to add to, multiply, divide one’s self; but all the while oneself comes out subtracted. Would an honest unpretentious human fill in fat-cat padded shoulders and cheat sheets? Luxury corrupts, necessity corrects. Our cult of foolproof gadgetry but proves us fools, no bright-idea man having yet managed to save time. The more we value time and take pains to save it, the less we’re able to relax and savor it. Leisure’s become too valuable to misspend in idleness, and exercise a fetish, one more symptom of consumption’s scourge. To be preoccupied with doohickeys is surely proof of immaturity. What use are “labor-saving” devices to an artist (no short-change one) who enjoys his labor? No thing’s necessary, life’s best, being creative, costing nothing. A dead giveaway of present culture’s level: that youth’s prevalent celestial ideals are spaced-out rock stars peddling bubblegum* in urbs. In any natural setting the go-getting beatle species—greatest all-time icky pushers of dung—never would have got off the ground, as it most accountably has, swamped by hard coin, in the overconsuming underworld. It takes a socko hit for each of those folk heros flogged as products to make him or her a ware. In music it’s illiterates who cannot realize that acts mean phonies are in town. If protest singers have in fact been revolutionary, each conceiving his self God’s consummate gift to giddy screeching groupies sucking around, it’s been solely as the first such trippy balladeers turned parvenus beyond recall. Are rocksters getting real jolts punishing their pet guitars? Give ear who will to all those jivey and proficient wailers destined to go far—and the sooner the better the crooner, the sooner.

* Music is a sustenance of spirit, rock but junk food. 85 _49_

Envy lies at the black heart of our society; the right to make a fortune—easily, if possible—we hold most dear and sacred. Those who fancy money can do anything can be counted on to do anything for money. Pray for perishable things, and one receives perishable things. While still possessive each is still possessed. When buying land the most disturbing fault not to be overlooked lies in one’s speculating self, a grabby sort of specter after steals. The groping infant loves to glom, likes less to divvy up. By nature man is thief and gam- bler, seeks something for nothing; civilized, he’s made to save and “share”; the e’er-endowing magnate represents the inconspicuous woods dweller’s counterpole. Each Shangri-la is truly an imaginary paradise. The choicest shorefront lodges or estates sit vacant almost all the year round with shades drawn; the sole point of possessing such well-situated watering places seems to be exclusiveness: precluding others from enjoying any of the charms that they command. Are plutocrats known to hire burglars to steal noted works of art for hoarding so that “poorer folk” can be deprived of satisfactions contemplating them? Attempting to relieve their low morale, somehow to justify their sad addictions, avaricious calculators spread the cynic lie that everybody seeks a fortune. Can’t one’s worth be weighed except on money’s scale? We parasites presume that we own and live off the earth, while we can but belong to and live in it. Property is thievery perhaps,* but mental property is kidnapping for certain. Edifices advertise their occupants’ designs. Resplendent mansions are appropriately magnetized by dazzlingly overrewarded superstars. “Possession’s nine points of the law” . . . and ten of the crime? In a business society it’s no great feat to get the goods on somebody. Not our goods have split the world in fragments but our chiseling and grasping for these “goods.” We think we love what we consume, but once consumed it seems to lose its charm, so more must be acquired to keep our lust aflame. Our need to love is not what is corrupting us but lust for some thing more delightful, never given us.

* Most heirs are surely beneficiaries of past thefts.

86 _50_

The more waste we accumulate, the worse our state. The smaller one’s estate, the larger prospect of a real estate. Realty is not reality; snakes in the grass, realtors have lots of suspect value on their minds. Behold the slithery bottom line-fixated property developers who’ve totally failed in developing humanity. All of our paper bonds may be real bonds, certificates of underwritten con- fiscation. Only culls or catspaws can believe the brokers’ unbalanced conceit that social progress is determined by the stock exchange, that those paper- scrap dealers living off the fat of the land, papering over truth (the monstrous hoax of our now universal usury) while trading on innumerable phantom expectations to glean paper profits, have a thing to do with human survival. Movers in the business “community” seek not stability but volatility, since motion per se, even plummeting to global bankruptcy, makes opportunities for profits. Carpetbaggers always made off with their booty. Markets can and do fly high while an economy lies in the doldrums. As a general rule, the more profitable an investment the more detrimental. Violence (as Engels pointed out) is the accelerator of prosperity; for mass economies to thrive much human sacrifice is necessary. War is surely hell but great for business. Genocide’s the engine of good business—an oxymoron with no conscience on which blood could be. Finance in all its guises is superfluous to growth. Lacking the constant irritants of spicy risk—quite irrespective of their losses and their winnings—all compulsives fancy they could never savor their lives’ flavor. Trader—that’s another name for swindler? Are not all outstanding salesmen, those with sumless ethics, necessarily outstanding liars? Gamblers scarcely can correct their personal corruption till they’ve been completely cleaned out; marketeers as badly need to take a bath. The way successful wheeler-dealers see it, where’s the sin in Asia’s countless underage maids being impressed into life terms of grueling drudgery? It’s capitalism’s very essence to expand incessantly venality’s domain. Polluted Wall Street, fueled by fear and greed, can welcome only fully accredited bondsmen; scaling this fishiness merely polishes the slipperiness. One stands aghast at the enormous gambling den of Internet investment presently destabilizing communal life while abetting opportunism in isolates. Investors bear the burden of avoiding dropping bundles. Fool with the stock market, fascinated by its yoyoing, sharing its infantine attention span, and see who is the yoyo and the fool. What goes up must come down; a plague that happened once assuredly can and will happen once again. In the piranha bowls of business or politics who seems the

87 heartiest hail-fellow-well-met or backslapper may be testing where to put the bite or stick his knife. Beneath the hardy-har-har lies a hollow of despair. This funny business fails as funniness. If juggling accurately, who finds gold and silver, those old evils, grand? It’s held a crime to steal—unless one swings a big deal.* Darkest deals are hammered out under the table. Each perverse judiciary regularly probes the bedrooms of a nation, not its boardrooms. He who poaches wildlife from the forest gets arrested, whereas he who poaches forest from the wildlife we give credit, not just free reign, to. Most robbers go to their graves unmolested and unanswerable since nobody’s got the goods on them. Truth inescapably unmasks all short heists as comparatively blameless enterprises. Heist men are definable as racketeers too short of capital to found a corporation; chiefly scofflaws dressed to kill are as a rule who get away with murder. From the cobwebs that are laws big flies break free, while small ones, lacking loopholes, cannot; call girls sometimes end at bar, but next to never their baronial clients. Topnotch tax evaders may be fined and/or dispensed suspended sentences for regular $300,000 thefts; while lowdown burglars, not so dodgy, must be put away indefinitely for their average $300 jobs. ’Tis seldom any capitalist deadbeat can be caught with his hand in the till. How many pikers have regretted that they lacked the brass to salt down untold treasuries in the scumsuck- ing Ferdi Marcos mold? The principal crime lies in being poor; thus to be safe each citizen or con is forced to make sure that he’s rich—by skimming hook or scamming crook. Although the odd offender does “pay his debt”† to society, his victims criminally must get left holding the bag. Yet nobody coughs up repulsive gobs he has not swallowed. Are we sure our shares are our share? Strangely it’s cool operators always do a double take. Those bulls in china shops that buck for smashing killings have got nothing but out-and- out scrounging to kick in. Could getting into others for advances in reality advert to shafting them? Each pigeonhearted cadger’s always on the lookout for some scratch. So many treasure hunters tend to leave no stone unturned. Is bumming, smooching, playing fast and loose, hitting on soft touches for

* Grasping that to practise graft assures one can grab much more than one’s asked to give, one is transformed into a “capitalist,” totally oblivious to right and wrong. Capitalism’s prime aim: to decriminalize larceny; the system’s operation hangs on the extortability of multitudes at risk of starving if they won’t obey their bosses. Surplus-value that’s supplied by millions of serfs’ mandatory toil ensures the efficacy of the Market Juggernaut, the quintessential suicide machine. † The phrase is drivel.

88 “loans” (here read handouts), not just rip-off rapists’ suave though pusillani- mous version of grand larceny? Smooth talkers—lumpish spirits whose soft soap is largely lye. Who mucks about with any shit Is like to put his foot in it. The fly-by-night rat fink or blackguard headed south and, unendowed to give a rat’s ass, assuring one that he’ll be everlastingly indebted, tips his hand, discloses the repayment schedule. A green hayseed’s apt to be downed by a raw prawn. Staking arrant dingos* to some lean green, never to see them or it again, may well be worth it. Ne’er-do-wells who feel deficient feel obliged to rack up such unwieldy debts: thus any ordinary bloke who’s broke, thus every governmental—and the global—deficit, the product of psychopathy.

_51_

Already cracked up crushing rocks in such a rigid boring business, bilker brokers who provoke going for broke are spiritually stone-broke hardselling razzle-dazzle;† some of them are unbelievably high rollers dodging taxes in the fast lane on Uneasy Street. A joint concern that’s “bullish on America” is forking bull. Like Communists, economists are frauds in forecasting indefinite prosperity via industrialism minus love. What all those skills attain is never quite (though close) a perfect zot. Among the globe’s most treacherous creatures, they portray “solutions” they deem indispensable for problems previously formulated by themselves. Counter to what they claim, such well- rewarded if retarded rationalizers of venality and inequality, invested with as insufficient an idea what is going on (i.e., wrong) as what needs doing (i.e., right), are really dismal scientists, not experts in economy; on a scale of dependability such antiquated oracles, befuddled constantly by unpredictability, tread with their nostrums on the heels of palmists stumbling well below most weathermen. It’s chaos theory best “explains” the market’s random motions, as it does our species’ evolution.‡ Glib producers of a ceaseless stream

* Real wolves only at dogging it, they’re most accomplished at the craft of skipping town. † Broker is what one is after having dealt with any. ‡ The acquisitive self-centered “cost-benefit” calculator posited as Economic Man by thickwitted economists (whose lack of hindsight is at least profound) is simply missing from our kind’s immense prehistory—else humankind would never, over unrecorded ages, have survived. 89 of bafflegab, professors in the battlefield of trade, convinced self-interest rules all, are at a loss—despite themselves being mostly “men”—to comprehend the sadomasochism motivating so much mercantile behavior, the malicious suicidal conduct of those driven by testosterone. “Free” markets? Oxymoron, brothel-servant! Why not one that’s truly free—a nonmarket? The function of the voodoo science calling itself economics is apparently to help states in fine- tuning our required exploitation, in particular to vindicate embezzlement. At least the dollar cannot sink as low as the means many use to seize it. Every market’s filled with parasites, being based on getting something (“plenty”) out of nothing, fundamentally a totally false number. “Money makes money”: “Nothing comes of nothing.” Must those predators called creditors, those bloodless cutthroats more efficient than sleek buzzards, mon- eymongers, the dregs of society, remain at large to bank upon usurious self? Conceived in now unrecognized iniquity and born in now forgotten sin, the banking system issues “our” cash out of thin air.* Not just Yankee rubes have long been taking wooden nickels. The prime bankers’ motto: Never give a dollar to a soul who really needs it. The most ultracreditable banks such as the Swiss lack all accountability, since in exchange for secrecy they pay no interest to big-time larcenists, so clean up on the untold stores of dirtiest dinero.† Totally insured by willing fall guys, no bleeding finagler who successfully has exercised enormous caution never to be caught redheaded is a mite less culpable, whether or not he feels it. Loads of guilt are packed by conscientious fools, by those more sinned against than sinning; the real evildoer blinks at the facts. To become rich calls for scant intelligence and scanter conscience. For those few still partly human, conscience is a cur that, while it lets them pass, keeps up its yapping. Strangely, we are likelier to come across an individual prepared to spill his blood for strangers than one willing for the sake of friends to risk his liquid assets. Few things are less firm and more infirm than firms, fewer less secure than lead-pipe cinch securities, fewest of all more untrustworthy than trusts, none poorer company than companies.

* Lord Josiah Stamp, the Bank of England’s ex-director, warned, “If you want to be the slaves of the bankers, and pay the costs of your own slavery, then let the banks create money.” † Corruption rules: the MSM consistently ignore widespread abuse of all offshore tax havens by the most respectable (the filthiest rich) individuals and states like Switzerland, the U.K., and the U.S.

90 _52_

What do we figure our insurance is worth, inasmuch as one cannot insure oneself? That welfare schemes are “private” somehow warrants the insurance racket? How have we arrived at our “personal worth,” decided that our principles and characters are sterling? Many a soul’s standards seem to be a dime a dozen. What real value has our wealth? Might it in truth be something lesser, nothing of the kind? Perhaps the nouveaux riches, refusing to own guilt while shitting in high cotton, fall in fact among the least and worst of mortals? Meddling, muddling, we’ve got others’ services right at our fin- gertips and many a manipulable body prone over a barrel; do we justifiably count our impoverished selves richer, calculating sucker lists or retinues of stooges still embody power? Is collecting various exotic human beings like sea shells harmless as a hobby? Who, achieving affluence, can well believe in the regard won in exchange? The more obtainments, the more doubts about one’s valued status mushroom. Simony transacts no love: from money many can gain everything—save sense. Nor can one hold oneself in safekeeping. Know some thing more precious, fortune greater, than being self-sufficing, free of want? Love is invaluable, but the wheeling, dealing love of plunder’s hardly love.

_53_

Consumerism raises incomes while impoverishing the consuming masses. All too easily consumers can be mulcted when convinced the market’s both hos- pitable and free; each marketeer’s intent is to persuade all shoppers to buy it. Each salesman’s sad assignment: seeking easy makes. The research that’s involved in sugging clearly must exclude all self-interrogation on the part of acting queriers. “Free enterprise” means no free enterprise. All-present mortgage debt’s responsible for pricing out the possibility of sharing jobs, preventing leisure ever being experienced save for a parasitic clique. Consumptive citizens have no control over what is produced and are collectively unable to afford what is available without digging their debt pits deeper. Peonage is what describes a people bound by monetary force to endless toiling irrespective of their hopes and needs. It’s an archaic, grossly insufficient, poorly understood financial system that’s the agent of the ruinous coercion that’s today’s hyper- consumption. Now and then some strive to mete out wages pegged to merit, but our human worth cannot be measured by such faulty scales. Here on the

91 momentary stage, backed by a boundless backstage, what avails the fattest bankroll—never mind how legally filched—when contrasted with the airiest experience of understanding? How one clings to seeming finery like thick mink stoles or seal capes that this lynxlike minx has slunk away with! “Saving for a rainy day”: trying to live by holding one’s breath hard, by tightening the noose. Thrift means extravagance. We think time is money and gold wealth— all minted by our calculating selves. However good a handmaid, wealth’s the worst of mistresses: useful as servant, as a master mean. Those who serve pelf as an end in itself are their slave’s slaves. External objects are for using to acquire life, but life is not for using to acquire external objects. Time is yet our sole expenditure beyond price.

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Butchers of incalculable genius, sleazemongers in the movie industry consider sales, not souls, exacting life exactly as do all “men about town,” hot shots who are hot shit: cranking out schlock, they serve profit, never need; however friendly personally, they cannot make friends. Some given everything, who had it all, are giving and have nothing. “Rugged individualists” like Howard Hughes obtain their fortunes by inheritance’s flukes, by the luck of the draw, but even more by siphoning the public treasury; each cheapskate hard up, in extremity, for love, demands his gross percentage off the top and gets to die upon an inexhaustible if blissless breast that’s untouched capital. To reach a mythical success, it’s neither what your gifts are nor how hard you work but whom you know that finally determines if you enter the Elite. The loaded scarcely choose to earn their melancholy lives; they early must grow cynical imbibing people’s worst side in, first, their servility, last, their ingratitude. Pinchpenny plutomaniacs, in common with all addicts, are propelled by hidden angst; their miserliness principally is toward themselves. Most huge “successes” have succeeded best at masking their despair from both themselves and other sufferers. One might conclude that magnates practically are obliged to be sly gnomes. The greater our capacity to rake in wealth, the lesser our capacity to take delight in it. Those boys continually going into huddles chiefly need to grow up fast. The derelicts the furthest from being helped are top executives, their sumptuous upper-crust suites leaving a bad taste in every mouth; the tax-free lugs and lowlifes called financiers would come first among doughy crumbums, were there a spiritual dole; for who has earned and who deserves the appellation, human wrecks, so well as they, those

92 morally disadvantaged corporate pickpockets who’re looking for more than loose change, in line for gross perks, and O.D.ing on possessing? “What? Equality? Nothing more than my neighbor?” The suggestion palls—appals one, does it not? Always the greedy little ego, serving penally, rears its ugly snout, spoiling for a larger slice of the spoils. Possibly each entre- preneurial wastrel relishes a regular dispatch of fellow citizens so as to obvi- ate having to share meals too large to eat by his self? Why should he give a hoot about all of those ill-fed, dolefully dependent welfare mothers breeding countless future headaches for the country’s budgeteers? Some inmates, mingy to the point of paranoia, have succeeded in padlocking their posh pads almost perfectly. Walled up within their heavily blockaded hovels, desperados cower, profitless clutching their profits, leading—nay, misleading—lives of not so quiet desperation. There’s a mind-boggling turnover that the number- crunchers and their ledger books never account for. What is it that the two- bit fussbudgets guard so jealously behind their bolted doors? The right to hide from meeting one another? Have they—have we—some content within? Where things are valued far above people why be surprised that insecurity is king? How cunningly we coconspirators demand our dibs and drive our bargains, bickering about such matters as don’t matter, vainly trying to ward off anxiety with apathy toward our lack of love. The man of dizziness has made some pretty shrewd investments, to be sure—in house, car, wife, God, ulcers—but will scarcely feel quite satisfied with the returns from same. There’s madness in our method: this the nether world most sorely calling for subversion. Which—who—are the dingbats? Every mind’s a tricky Dick, but it’s a socially sick mind in quest of booty that’s forever bent on shafting others, angling for a killing, finishing sunk in a cesspit trap of its own making. Is the valid measure of success what passes for acumen in extracting ill-got gains from dull gulls? Vagaries of circumstance, inexplicable turns of luck, determine income levels more than most confirmed “successes” (i.e., klep- tos) can afford to grant. Successful traveling salesmen are obliged to sweeten housewives up; those who cajole and flatter are said to suck ass. An opportunist may succeed in sex and business or politics, yet must abort in life. Countless ways to skin a cat; but all skin games are pointless, useless, needless. Sadly threatened, nickel-nursing pikers chain their skinflint selves to the pro- visional doghouses and devour their own hearts. Scrimping, if learned early, is a habit hard to part with. Friendless, sleepless misers hoard lace-curtain misery. Insomniacs are often with good cause insomniacs. When plutocrats claim that they have no interest in money, they mean that they have no interest in

93 spending it. Man reckons his unscrupulous self debt-free, but he does not take account of what he owes himself.

_55_

What pretty toy or trinket are we going to pray or pay for today, folks? A third “economy” sedan? Another snarky yacht? It’s the unpolished souls that are compelled to covet and hoard anything with glitz. Meticulously we have sowed and reaped and stowed and stacked our cards, stashing away in well- stocked storehouses capital, mental and material, against the hard times we suspect are coming thanks to our rapacity; but in this very night, this self- supporting pension plan, we die. If one is jaded and blasé, hung over with a haggard air, worn to a frazzle, maybe one has worked too hard and played too soft, yet not for keeps? Work addicts forced to stop, out on their asses, are clocks wound up tight to spring apart. Are workaholics really reasonable models that deserve our emulation? Each such drone defends his conduct by contending to be building for the future, but he as a rule has none. When, after divers decades of ungrudging drudgery, the gump or plugger with stuck finger in the dyke, afraid to pull it out, has humped and bumped his business long enough, has penny-pinched and socked away sufficient swag, to feel he’s over the hump and safe in retiring, backing out of an entirely tedious job, his chain reaction, faced with no thing and unfit for leisure, is to crack up in an apoplexy of insufferable ennui. Overgrown electric power grids grow powerless all of a sudden; damming streams, the engineers ensure the earth’s damnation. By the time most serfs feel affluent enough to pamper their tastes, those are gone forever. Yuppies soon turn woopies, holding no responsibilities to anybody; they’re consumptive, flush with cash while pressed for time, yet viewed mistakenly as healthy specimens. The principal determinants of happiness have next to no relation to consumption. Our chimeric aim of wealth unlimited is death unlimited; there is a great deal less to seeming men of substance than e’er meets the eye. The more you gulp the brine of opulence, the thirstier you get. Each power program bears innumerable unplanned side effects and costs which corporation managers are overpaid never to think or do a thing about. The mercenary engineer, however brilliant, obtained his training from a loco motive that perforce at last derails. To be sufficiently clever to steal a bundle, one must be obtuse equivalently to desire it. By selling out lock, stock, and barrel, every millionaire has made himself exactly nothing—go figure; and what compensation that he’s looking

94 like a million—every year of it? What kind of legacy can any Babbitt leave? As much as anyone, each manager himself is apt to end exploited; once outside his artificial company, put out by being put out to pasture, he lacks any raison d’être. Though life grows on trees, money grows nowhere: multiplica- tion is not growth. Protracted efforts now are regularly made, by swaying them with golden parachutes, to ease out “upstairs,” tying cans to, countless qualified employees whose pay has shot way too high for anybody’s good. Is not an underworld of undeserved rewards obscene? A lot of wastrels scarce can keep afloat on regular remittances of fifty gees. One’s pay cheque’s size denotes how competent one is—at acquisition, nothing more. The higher shoots the monetary recompense for any enterprise, the lower falls its actual value; every calling’s worth is measurable inversely to its material returns. As for the scandalously compensated megacorporation CEO “fraternity,” the site the topmost pillager attains is nethermost. Celebrities apparently are not ashamed to have become hot properties.* How few cannot now be manipulated and commodified inside the vacant playground of celebrity? Inane hype and distractions serve to fortify vulgar command. According to the Mammon Gospel, if you don’t get paid it isn’t work; yet a real worker labors not for pay’s but for creation’s sake, since that is truly human, what all moderns are conditioned not to be. Creative acts are inexpensive yet beyond price if compared to prevalent activities. No pauper poorer than who will not love.

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Were past—are present—slavers who’ve made fortunes to leave their descendants really doing something praiseworthy or virtuous, as we have been per- suaded to believe? “What fools all of you are to work for a living!” babbles the spoonfed philosopher, an authority par excellence on free will out of his free- loading experience, patting in his hind pocket the rump or legacy the largess of which has both freed him from cadging and befooled him. As a rule the noncontributing outsider always scornful of authorities is first in line when it’s time for his pension application. Each inheritance must molder if the lasting instant is to flourish. A poor little propertied bambino’s saddled with an easily borne burden that all but precludes the exercise that he or she will need for long and fruitful living; as they age the souls of the flush harden as

* Originally the result of real accomplishments, celebrity’s turned into a displacement of such deeds.

95 their bodies soften. Given prime role models that are immature, why marvel that a coddled child remains so also? Wherewithal is scarcely worthless, but it is worth least. Some weirdos’ hobbies are bizarre, such as collecting frog- skins. It’s the fantasizing blind see scads of cash as indispensable for a place in the sun.

_57_

What kind of model (not to mention mentor) is a heartless zillionaire for youth? Why so contented to have taught the young their highest hope ought to be to strike oil? This underworld’s a proper semblance of an adult life? Who claims to pull a number is the most to which one need aspire? An outright inability to sell oneself or ill-advised unwillingness to brown-nose and to parlay scams when setting out in “life,” an obstinate unreadiness to buy into capitalism’s avariciousness, to step into society’s disintegrative mechanism, is presumedly a handicap insuperable. Who says one must always grasp top dollar? Does the eager-beaver bright boy yearn to learn—or but to earn?* And is to long and slave for gains in knowledge really better than to long and slave for gains in assets, ass? Accumulating learning more and more, one’s curiously likely to know less and less. The green-ass driver at the wheel remains a drugstore cowboy, his goal greener envy from the underlings or thicker curtains in his jingle-jangle struggle-buggy or plusher jalopy than most any other tin- horn hero cruising for a bruising has. Do we subscribe to the weak-headed sell that masculinity equals a money-grabbing knack? Or the will-o’-the-wisp correlating higher pay with higher education? Maybe firms are not misleading their prospective personnel when promising them pay hikes to fantastic levels. Have we kept our eyes peeled, keen to see how high the corporate cat jumps, for good and easy marks? Don’t capitalist parents want their children to become great grubbers, i.e., no less swinish than themselves? Can girls no less than boys be taught to ream their victims in a typically manly way? Are we quite sure that to have bought or stolen information, fobbing off our sophomoric smatterings course by course, is to be well schooled? Is human fitness to be rated by our dense endurance in submitting to the academic labor camps’ truncating processes, no matter how remotely they’re related to

* Though human brains do have a practically limitless capacity for learning, from school’s start we inexcusably and systematically teach our young to quit it for unending earning, to devote their lives to gain at the expense of others’ lives. If you’re a screwer as opposed to a screwee you’re held to be home free. 96 survival? Tip for all those dastards and lickspittles who desire to play it safe and get ahead within the underworld: it helps to have a relative with real clout. College race courses may prove useful stepping stones to good bets and guaranteed incomes, but unfortunately the bookies fail to inform one that across the stream of life awaits an arid vacuum and that fearful folly is it not to enter the wild brook, to cultivate one’s patch. Can we call educated boule- vardiers, dock rats, or muckworms plainly out of their element in rows of car- rots? Quarter-educated Yankee doodling dandies end up quarter-educated. Brainwashed early by dark television, that insipid hucksters-tainted mix of “comic” book and tabloid, nearly everyone is now a whole-hog cynic who reposes confidence in Mammon as the only really good god. Blandished to absorb life as a stress-free game, and yet determined to get theirs, most pupils understandably will finish up agreeably free of all awkward spirit. What a failure rutting and semester passes of collegians spell they’ve yet to learn.*

_58_

Why always fancy others hold a fortune greater than your own? Why seek to pull down yearly mints like some predacious cat gone mad? Forever scrambling after more and more while fast asleep unto the evermore, most of us end up fully scrambled and distracted presupposing that we must be loaded down with what we have because we are so insignificant in what we are. Were one, instead, acquainted with oneself and thus emancipated from the sticky- fingered self, no longer overburdened with white elephants, all the sad kingdoms, commerce, knickknacks, in or out of the hallucinated gyp joint that’s the underworld would fail to tempt one. Who claims we must be acquisi- tively bound to wish books? Pleasure goes without, joy comes within.

_59_

Every oniomaniac, of a piece with newlyweds or over-eaters who, deficient in essential nutrients, can’t get enough flesh, does all in his or her power to keep the bottomless gas tank topped up, shrouding in a cloud of dust, rice, fumes, and empty tin cans the self’s drum-tight state of doldrums, driven fast but not toward evacuation. Many holi-days, slaphappy vehicles of aimless discontent, deserve a different name, yet often turn out more demanding and

* At least the fantasy of contact with real nature city freaks can get from their rolls in the hay.

97 nerve-wracking as pursuits than the soft jobs that they “relieve.” Must our main pleasure be like buggery’s, our business so close to thuggery’s? As long as, earning loot by practising commercial hugger-muggery, each unaware materialist accumulates his terminating self, how can he culminate without end in himself? Will any rope go through a needle’s eye? Can any hired burdened beetlebrained piano mover climb or move a mountain? Just so hard is it for one of us—a moneyed knave or harlot, no account—to exit one’s self, entering oneself.

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Each trade originally straight may with hype be made crooked. Not just card- sharps do a double shuffle. Business ethics?—An additional self-contradiction. Business requires that both the act and actor be a sellout. Commerce sprang from piracy—the bandits, as good mafiosi, redeploying into mercantile activity, respectable legitimate outsmarting and defrauding. What if every shop is fundamentally a hookshop? How shall customers and merchants keep from doing wrong if the custom of merchandising, with its rite of gimmickry and built-in rooking, in itself is wrong? A merchant seldom manages to see a thing amiss when selling us the goods. Since everyone likes to believe him- or herself an expert, he or she can easily be hooked by bunco artists offering junk solely to those “in the know” (meaning an unexceptional unknowingness). Not only is the customer not always right, but also almost never right: hard truth is right. If seizing all the profits possible by charging maximum prices while providing minimum value can be accurately reckoned gaining strength, then massive coronary thrombosis must be strength. Many a building owner’s stakey after torching it. Contending like blue blazes, Christian men of business headed netherward require fire, not life, insurance for their lowdown futures.* Countless chief execs attain their occupations’ acme executing human beings: witness the duplicitous milk-formula firms and arms merchandisers. Only ailing creatures are continually hawking. Advertising means concocting “cures” for ailments only just originated. Who can guesstimate why it’s conspicuous expenditure has now displaced possession of a mint as the preponderant advertisement of all supposed success? Or figure out why nearly everything that our magnetic personalities possess is charged? Could

* Anyone investing prudently in governmental bonds for genocidal preparations can look forward confidently to unheavenly redemptions.

98 advertising—in whose absence gross inflation might well lose its punch— be but the smelly motor under loud capitalism’s hood which, hurtling us along, keeps us satisfactorily dissatisfied, incessantly acquisitive, and desperately eager at extortionate cost to amass things we don’t need with money we don’t have? The execrable assignment of each ad exec is to make women dis- contented with what they possess. Promoting mass-produced commodities successfully requires sabotaging self-reliance in the citizenry—undermining the consumer’s confidence that s/he already knows what s/he needs to have health and happiness. The greatest dangers to the advertiser are content and independence, so his goal is to produce disquiet and addictedness; his racket’s object is to fabricate desires countless as the stars. If products advertised, tatty or not, were actually needed they would scarce be advertised. In every market the easiest money is made vending luxuries to the needlessly well-to-do, not purveying necessities to the undeservedly down-and-out. Thus promos constitute the indispensable means of dispensing goods not otherwise worth the disposing of. To shills or advertisers it’s believability—who gives a red cent for the truth?—that counts. The corporations claim that their deceit does not have consequences? Who is grateful that GE trained Ronnie Reagan to be a well-groomed façade that lied and lied and lied? For each promoter the ideal constituency’s stuporous. The worst commercials, the most idiotic jingles, sell the best: effective adverts turn out to be those expressly crafted to insult their viewers’ rationality, the better to breach their defenses. Slick flimflammers rule the airwaves. Advertising has perverted business—away from making things of value toward making clients feel more valuable; marketing’s become a pseudo-therapy in which consumers are the hapless patients reassured by witless psycho-dramas. Utterly devoid of delicacy, advertisers barge into the lives of human beings. Our commercialized society accounts incredible the possibility that anything—emotion, act, or product—may be overintimate for brashly pushing treatment; such a mossback notion is a throwback to those dead days when mankind was ridden by its tutelary inhibitions now shot down, well riddled, as humiliating hangups. Laced with soft-core porn, most TV ads are teaching that if you become a sweepstakes winner, a success in their crass terms, you then can do whatever you wish. Advertising’s the desensitizing sire of nihilism: chronic incredulity and cynicism must result from being force-fed an endless diet of really incredible untruths. The unrelenting dumbing down by corporations and by governments of the consumptive herd serves profiteering splendidly, since greed and inequality expand wherever personal awareness is kept poor. Wasteful economies

99 require majorities of wasteful, duped consumers to survive, irrationality fertil- ized with and fed on irrationality; to thrive, such systems must progressively increase their inefficiency. Without the hordes of hedonists produced by hucksters, must not “enterprise” itself collapse and worldly privilege expire? Only as shoppers are we seemingly respected; but attempts to purchase dignity are futile, for the Market dictates that production’s prices must exceed by far its wages, so our wants can never be permitted to subserve our needs. Is shopping not the only common purpose moderns still share? Marketeers have managed to infantilize most adults now increasingly controlled by whim or impulse. Citizens’ responsibility, the democratic hope, is undermined by crass consumerism. We have swallowed the prevaricating fairy tale that market competition can solve every problem. Functional obsolescence, multiplying superfluities, is of necessity the central driving force or mechanism activating capitalism. In the marketplace 80% of new products fail. The pressure to produce inordinately has its base in industry, not in consumers. Maybe advertising’s crucial role is to make the misallocation of resources typical of corporate collectivism seem both rational and democratically chosen. Our consumptive underworld is driven by made-up desires; freedom to make choices—of possessions, friends, careers, or lovers—is defined as keeping open all the options, making no commitments, thus in practice waiving any real choice or devotion. Our “high” ways are lined with glass, metal, and plastic bric-a-brac discarded as ad signs of our offal mentality. Besides the billions wasted on war, we and our ilk spend more than a fortune on cars, alcohol, tobacco, boats, cosmetics, TV sets, and stereo and sports equipment—illth indeed, all these vain widgets garnered to gain personal titillation and to smother nervous tension; yet we still begrudge having to contribute a comparative pittance for the education—that is, for the vocational training in consumption—of our young. For a society so unashamedly contemptuous toward its early teachers there’s no hope. When every self is seen as mere commodity, accumulation of a store of sex appeal demands investment in expensive “health” clubs—exercise machinery, nutrition tutors, plastic surgery, and so on. To project the ideal image you have to possess the proper assets, calculable in your size of calves and biceps, thighs and chest and waist. The Body Politic as well as Spiritual may be laid low beyond saving, yet the Body Economic booms. Would Lilliputian rentlords not be done away with, driven into earning honest livings on the earth, if only their louse-picking serfs got itchy feet and took themselves right off? But rent binds tenants and may only be removable by all the rentlords being removed.

100 And better yet, as economic cure of cures: putting in force a total ban on monetary loans?* Today most every acquisition, like a time bomb, is on tick.

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To lay a claim to any thing is folly, inasmuch as nothing is our own. The “everlastingness” of everything is silent commentary on all claims to ownership. Communication with the finite calls for getting out of self; unification with the infinite, for getting into oneself. To accomplish things, keep the mind busy; but to understand them, keep it open. Look in the interior of any country to locate its heights. Sufficiency considered poverty may be our hidden treasure, could we only realize it. Satiation feeds emaciation. Our content and discontent are just the two sides of one coin: no one finds freedom coveting the coin. Simplicity lives not in having but in wanting naught. One comes to need things solely after one possesses them. In penury the great are graceful and the mean disgraceful. Owing’s due to owning. We ring our soap bubble-blowing selves with clouds of baubles, hence we feel the need for clouds of baubles. Breathing smokeless air, one sees the “need” for smoke can simply vanish. If we had no buttons to push, might we be less fearful of some energumen pushing unmistakably the wrong one?† Chain reactions can and must occur among vain nuclear-armed nations no less readily than in their weapons’ physics. Could the writer be suggesting that we throw out baby, kit and boodle, with the bath? No, only that we toss out roasting pans that end up blood baths, bathe instead in clear streams, not in this perpetual hot water, henceforth. Many are the manias, impedimenta in his cargo, man must jettison, much the garbage needing throwing over, letting it go down

* Ever since the headaches and hangovers of the Great Depression we’ve preferred to pop pills in psychotic fashion, e.g., to use the euphemism credit for debt, as if, muddled, we could borrow our way out of self-determined follies. Worldwide, governments “escaped” the shameful Dirty Thirties by militarizing, choosing to run ceaseless shameless budgetary deficits. By stepping up pill-popping, always operating on the cuff, we’re hoping to attain a topflight freakout? † What passes for peace in our age must be entrusted to souls (whether politicians or technicians) not just fallible but sometimes certifiable, yet shielded from the scrutiny of citizens by bureaucratic barriers impassable. We are of course forbidden to view Wall St.’s kingpins passing through their penthouse suites, their so-called high life, not quite satiated with innumerable facile swindling acquisitions, yet secure inside the permanent calamity of downtown Gotham. Note the paradox of gloating ruling Capitalism: its unparalleled peculiar toleration of what is intolerable, its appalling ease amid like devastation.

101 the wind, lest he sink like a stone to the bottom. More than a mere brace of shackles must one shed before one can break free into oneself. Not diamond rings or needles, grave last-minute altruists who give less than the widow giving her whole mite, not these require sacrificing quite so urgently as do our diamond-hard hearts. Our cravings are weights well-nigh fettered to us, and our needs are wings: who flies? And are we absolutely certain we’ve abandoned our malevolent indulgences? Or have we only substituted subtler ones for them? All sublimation is not necessarily sublime. Bored stiff by all the booty that we enterprising stick-up men have garnered, we demand the truth, as if it were another bundle of big bills (unfortunately each unpaid) or catalogued commodity to order, one more silly gizmo to be hoarded, glossy plaything to be rattled, ripe for smashing. Basically the nubbins known as gifted handlers of our daily commerce, those whose increment is you-guess-what, remain as anally fixated feces-fondlers, greasy Croesi given to fingering filthy lucre; they have made their piles. Will a jillion smackers quite suffice to fill their long-accumulating sinking funds? How thoroughly offensive the innumerable creatures, like their overfed pets, always doing their business. Capitalists need indeed to clean up. Some may feel the vanity of a specific goal; but who dares feel the vanity of all goals and not just pecuniary? What we seek we’ll find, but it won’t be reality. The problem’s not the objects of possession but the spirit of possessiveness with which the objects are clung to. Security unfortunately tends to ruin. One may pride one’s saintlike self on having dis- owned one’s belongings, but free spirit hoards no pride and neither owns nor disowns. Wealth and poverty are relative to our habituations. Truly the poor are those who want riches. Never getting the red-carpet treatment, princes are but few indeed, especially among the moneyed. Have we never asked our selves what kind of critter, sitting fat or “pretty,” lives in clover? One thing’s sure: s/he’s no prize package. Humankind needs creature comforts—food and clothing, shelter and a name; but likewise a tenacious adhesion to none. Both in consumption and possession rigoristic modesty is natural: the needful’s only moderately so. One never misses what one’s never had: cigars, molls, bloodbaths, or dementia. Forbid no thing, and one desires no thing; desire no thing, and one—possesses all? Nay, maybe loves all.

102 _62_

Much construction—little growth. So many roustabouts’ strong backs, but so few rousing strong souls. Bouncers are uncommonly adept, if nothing else, at stacking asses. Proud each bozo flexing adamantine muscles, but what good are they in absence of a gentle spirit? Braggarts are distinctly strong—around their armpits. Endless energy or pizzazz, working like mad, to defend against depression is a dead end lost to wisdom: loads of zip mean zip; folk tearing up the pea patch never seem to dream that hypertrophic snap might snap. All of our physical jerks can but turn us into quite extraordinary physical jerks;* working out addictively with dumbbells, what palooka flourishing his five of clubs will ever turn out anything but dumbbell? Can exaggerated muscu- larity, from Michelangelo’s divine creations to the crudest snaps in beefcake mags, help fairies find that in which they are wanting? Taller any bigwig may be than the rest of the world by a head, but not by a heart. He may control skyscrapers yet himself be rather small, keeping such a heap of irons in the fire that the fire’s died out. Big shots may in fact be puny; the strong-arming power of arms is not power. How many more years are we assured our vaunted scientifically upped medial or fissile expectation of life? Might attaining a society totally modern prove to mean experiencing a true science-fiction nightmare? Cyberscience burst from martial “advances” made in World War Two, from the necessity of managing the floods of info that engulfed the mega-kill device; so the computer “age” arrived, control by soulless electronics. Cybernetics can indeed deliver “virtual”—to wit, sham—reality: the perfect proof of all computerizing’s imposture. Note carefully the ever-mounting number of computer users, duteous to the addiction model. Thinking to illuminate real living processes by replication, the computer architects are able only to eliminate them. To become computerized a wo/man’s rendered flat, cerebral, isolate, and ersatz. Cybernation’s alien to mortal animals: our finite limitations lead us to seek out transcendence in creation, in relationships—hoping, in vain, for immortality. No doubt invention is the mother of “necessity.” Produced by bloated corporations whose goal’s ever more production, speed, efficiency, and profitability, computerization steers us toward growing instability, inequity, and ecological insolvency—never mind the

* Military exercises such as ironhanded discipines of bodybuilders pumping tools that harden barely hide their narcissistic, homo-knotted roots. The seniors in all armies often have a hard- on for somebody junior.

103 count of credulous consumers online claiming to be saviors of Planet Earth. Computers are toys for the privileged few not yet serious about confronting everyone’s predicament. As with the “food” in supermarkets, the more info overload computers make available the less can be digested, surplus cumulat- ing as societal pollution, maximizing complications and disorders. Latter- day incalculable signaling seems even more ephemeral and insubstantial than the prodigal paper trail that proliferated in the second Christian millenary. Electronic automation, in both “Marxist” and “capitalist” societies, makes for less skill and knowledge, therefore poorer service, lower salaries, more alienation. Technic man’s been off the wall as well as up against it so long now the handwriting’s on him. We have indeed the whole bit—in our choppers. Man’s the king of beasts all right, a beast gone wrong out of its tree, yet up it still; and thereby hangs a tale . . . of gore and gall. Some snicker, “Nature’s not all love and kisses,” capturing their own for zoological display. We bow and scrape before the laws of Science, smugly heedless of the self-transcending liberty that is oneself. Enlightened carriers carry no burdens. Subtle wisdom fuses with our Mother Nature, while simplistic science confuses our mother nature. We show great capacity for clever means, but next to none for wise ends. Man has not quite conquered Nature, Nature being unconquerable; fearing, not revering, he has but ignored his own best nature. Let some pure piss fall out, not this pious pus of radioactivity our jealous Godlike selves at giddy heights unjustly whizz on everybody and about which scarce a soul is pissing up a storm. The hucksters for the nuclear industry have never mentioned that no less than 99% of mutagens are harmful and irradiation’s the most operant of them; nor that the ever mounting ineradicable waste of this malapropos technology insidiously has attacked—still undermines—the human gene pool, sapping our capacity to reason, crippling immune systems irreversibly. The meltdown that’s inevitable sprang from spirit wholly split. All of our guided missiles are misguided misses. User-friendly smart bombs are considerably smarter than their users. The sound barrier has been broken, but the unsound barrier (a boundary protecting boundless death) between us and our world sisters and brothers still is standing firm as any rock. Grandiloquent and robotlike, “unrivaled” champions of “all” the children, glamour boys may stay in orbit till they’re blue in the face, superadd- ing to the jetsam cluttering the shrunken sky; still they depend upon this no-go underworld, each envious featherbrained ego. In a flyby flyboys going over with a bang can fantasize that they’re above the führers. Flying veritably

104 high requires more than earning one’s wings. With what lofty hopes some early aviators took to the air, little realizing how limited their range in truly soaring;∗ how could such a noble, ancient dream and modern, high romance materialize as so trivial and transitory a white-knuckler and vain whimsy? Of all travelers the pilot can perceive the least; the globe’s turned small and windy, vacuous and low-grade, since the plane’s arrival. Promising a dubious survival, that astonishing invention that upraised us closer to the stars has curiously served predominantly to enhance our horrors—witness all those pranging daredevils, dispersal of new viruses, and rising aggravating inconvenience and depthless ennui. The flying machine really got off the ground as offshoot of world war, leading the hayseed herd to buy the farm; increasingly, indeed, whizzy technology itself consists of mere byproducts of preoccupation with developing new means to harm. The next—and last?—”Great” War’s combatants promise to be maniacs’ automatons devised effectually to reduce this matchless earth to sterile rubble. All too readily we’ve failed to recall our Nazified Bomber Command, which leveled cities without qualms. Our playtime bombs can blast whole islands, those big loony bins called nations, even planets; but the time to marvel will be when we manage to blow our atomic selves to smithereens and mushroom into the no-thingness of oneself. Great balls of fire, do we appreciate that half a billion years of dark predation brought us to so brilliant a pass? How damning that life’s consciousness would never have been born without enormous exploitation, without immemorial predacity. Materialism, bondage to the finite, leads inevitably to disintegration of the finite, just as worms incapable of breaking forth as butterflies and winging their way sunwards die in their cocoons. A world that’s fabricated out of obsolescence can endure but briefly. Is mechanickes in fact obsolete as designa- tion for the vulgar or uneducated? Contrary to economic theory, neither our machines nor labor can create abiding values. What materialist civilization does produce is windblown dust. Industrial society is all too well designed to maximize the flow of energy. The greater grows our productivity, the greater the expenditure in energy and costs, and finally the greater the disorder. Science has made all things possible but not desirable. We have unquestion-

* Hysterically 1920s media hyped the overblown Hun Lindbergh’s stunt, passing over the real pioneers (eight years before) of trans-Atlantic flight, Alcock and Brown.

105 ing faith in the Moloch of technology,* in our salvation by material works; techniques, however, are but means and can be devilish as easily as saintly: angels have a way of falling. Moonstruck, some balloonheads urge us to take a cool flight and tailspin with them into lunacy, assuring us that God is the copilot of the new crate. Not on your life, thank you, nor on a vain stooge’s: wisdom keeps its feet on the ground of itself, terra firma but no self. If the devisers and the utilizers both are self-besot and careless, the production will prove a veracious mirror; left to its dynamics, technologic innovation trashes its own products, not just people and their living spaces. How can technological marvels go far if man is spiritually kaput and traveling withershins? Adrift indeed in ether, we’re exerting our ambitious selves to climb a lightning staircase via rocket ships to “a better life” luxuriating on green cheese; but one’s already in the blessed land without force, without going bad. Our “bright” attacks upon the sunrise of truth are absurd. Our “brave” attempts to master foreign spheres are fruitless till we make our own sphere fructuous. However much the scientific laborers unearth, we never can throw over our maternal planet; the fact that so many of us now imagine otherwise is proof of our conceited unfitness for dwelling here at all. Before continuing the vain program aiming to colonize Mars, how about delivering peace and prosperity to Earth? That is by far a greater challenge patently beyond the grasp of any corporation, not to mention states. The prospects for space travel yet remain up in the air, thank heaven; clinging to that primal dream is typical of damaged, soft, or immature brains. Are not TV and the auto glaring doozers as examples of the tyranny inflicted by technology—dictating sloth, both physical and spiritual, to all? Conquest of space means enslavement of the spirit. Science’s function is not to alleviate our species’ suffering and doom but to ignore as well as to ensure them. For a boffin it is downright fun, simply engrossing, to solve technical knots and acquire national prestige working on genocidal projects, while perplexities, predicaments like global malnutrition, overpopulation, energy depletion, or environment pollution hold forth no such ready gratifying honorarium. Black-magic research into weaponry,

* The myth to end all myths is that there are no physical or mental limitations to our changeability. The day is inescapable when all the mythbound, variously aged children with eyes popping suddenly are forced to view their shameless screwy Emperor known as Technology with nothing on—a phallic challenger of heaven getting off and plummeting in puff and vapor trail. Panels of well-trained Wall St. pilots, emulating one deranged Egyptian, loyally mumble their mantras as they take the airship that’s capitalism down. Stock marketeers appear inclined to be delirious highfliers headed for a dive, not just a slump.

106 occult manifestations, powers so called, really send-ups of true power, may not be quite worthless . . . if there’s worth in our distracting our selves from reality. To build such pyramids in the clouds is from vanity to heap too high a praise on death; it’s serving our whim on a grandiose scale to waste all on pointlessness. Our underworld’s space program’s clearly proved an astro- nomic indefensible boondoggle whose key contribution has been to wreak havoc on the ozone layer and catastrophe on earth. The more our scientific world gone into orbit rationalizes its scarcely explicable exploits, the more this world becomes unjustifiable. Behold exploding the scrap heap of space— all the unpardonable rubbish man has spewed around the globe. An overloaded coterie of upscale mini-minded frequent airline travelers contribute disproportionately to the escalating global-heating quandary; though shared, pollution’s not caused equally. Flight is essentially escapist, a rejection of the ugly here and now. Do what we may, we can’t escape the mess, the pande- monium, we’re making of this world once quietly beauteous. Perhaps the most if not the sole significant result of the space programs was the achingly exquisite vision photographs from space provided of the earth’s uniqueness as a living miracle. Our Mother, the old nurturer, herself has to be nourished and supported; she will not be raped and then abandoned without taking all-embracing, pitiless revenge, as in some antique tragedy, upon her progeny. The object of technology is to control the natural world, even ultimately to gain immortality; which means destruction of the natural world. The haughty nation gone ballistic that controls the moon cannot prevent the lowly earth becoming desecrated moonscape.* Remorseless and relentless more than any human tyranny, technology has made today’s mind-sets belligerent, not just subservient, precluding them from circumscribing it. So alien to our natures is this complex artificial milieu that, to cope with it, we techies have sur- rendered our selves and our children’s to a mental merging with it, just as we’ve allowed our bodies and theirs to be permeated with its poisonous waste products. Cancer’s the end product of our hi-tech period, a perfect analog to its fissioning culture. Is it a surprise that such a metaphysically dead world should be physically deadly too? The rulers of our technologic wunderworld know that to make it democratic, as is altogether vital, would be to invite collapse—not just of it but also of their rule. Attaining total power, chained by

* The extant imperium’s predominant plan for settling any foreign planet: to establish an incomparable gulag. Will the potty horde that easily wiped out the passenger pigeon find it difficult to finish off themselves? As rogue states go, the U.S. of A. remains in the lead.

107 daft commitments, superstates prove least free and turn impotent. Imperial overreach achieves the atomizing of dominion.

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Attached to self, one is dead certain one’s detached from oneself. We “love” our belongings—that is, we are tethered to them; consequently we love not our neighbors. We suppose that we own doodads, but the truth is that the doodads do own us. Our fingernails, oxfords, and Fords we polish with unflagging zeal till they are mirrors, while our dull minds’ rapids still are ragged, unreflecting, and immobile. Busy as a humble bee or humbug in his bumbledom, and like some putty-headed beaver, man industriously builds his own dam-nation. Eager are we for promotion and determined to sit in the catbird seat, to reach the top banana spot on each redolent dump heap, to be real suck-cesspool-room tall stories, tooth and nail to get the hang in this enormous butcher shop that is our lavish slavish all-American Way of Lifelessness. Who but the wretched refuse of some teeming shore came from a poor stock and must grub for sudden fortune? ’Twas disturbed old Europe settled the Americas: perforce the emigrants were DPs—driven out, uprooted and detribalized—allowing them to found a “different” allegiance and enslavement in a “New” World; “naturally” they would follow suit by driving out the natives from their homes, uprooting and detribaliz- ing them, spreading the European power-hunting virus they the white trash carried worldwide. Most unfortunately for indigenous folk, greed has been the paleface faith for untold generations; hence the bigot stranglehold on Amerindians. This Amerikkka, once a skookum land of tillicums and free braves, rigorously frugal, simple beyond European throwaways’ means, where spellbinding buffalo herds* broad and dark as vast cloud shadows swept the prehistoric prairies, all we hooligans and bohunks since Columbus, hunting for unconscionable stakes, have made a damnable asylum, a Shamerica, you- benighted States, a kultur positively great at trashing, where the only good native is a dead or a displaced one and a popular way to die is by screech or by lead poisoning.† The evil spirits indigenes had most to fear from came to them in alien bottles. Hard is it to visualize the resilient “Amerindians”

* Most “Indians” actually grew and gathered; they scarce hunted bison. Europeans found no wilderness in the Americas; bearing their plethora of contagions, they made one. † How perfectly befitting that the masterpiece among all early U.S. movies (THE BIRTH OF A NATION) featured brazen vandalism and like lies of both a maudlin and a racist cast. 108 undergoing conquest by presumptuous invaders, had the heathen aborigines possessed a comparable savagery and cut so wide a swath. In fact not plucky enterprise but unforeseen disease, conveyed by vicious voyagers and scrawny Puritans, was what left prostrate the whole Hemisphere; in-geniously introduced malaria produced “Latin” America by its unsinewing of animated native populations with inertia. Americas went wild and crazy chiefly after pusfaces arrived, the wholesome aborigines possessing no conceit of foreign wild life, of a dislocated wilderness. Have “whites” not demonstrated to perfection they possess the darkest nature? Simply see the racist murk congesting Amerika’s failing heart. Was the Northwest Mounted Police set up because of honest Injun trouble or because of weasel-worded whitey trouble? What great spirit first made panther piss, and who is justified in seeing red? With “virginal” hysteria, anticipating sudden nighttime forays by barbarian beasts, every blanching redneck, that approved master at defloration, entrepreneur in hooch, and established vector of crabs, dreads the swarthy Reds,* obsessively projecting his own underlying guilt from having raped America and its original inhabitants and having kept them penned for life on worthless tracts in cheerless ghettos. This Land is whose Land? Equality’s and opportunity’s?† A territory is immeasurably far from being discovered when an ashy prison surveyor first sets shod foot on it. What more magnificent land ever was despoiled than western North America? How apposite that the Americas were named after a fake discoverer. How dare I rock the Swiss-cheese boat or threaten to upset the rotten applecart, when greed and violence already rend this underworld of rampant hedonism so laboriously suiciding? Oddly it’s diversity that makes the melting pot’s insiders most uneasy: nothing mortifies the matey Yankees, reared as positively egocentric, more than alien societies and any ideologies that view the U.S.A. as not worth imitating. Arrogance about their culture’s superficial creativity allows them to ignore its actual destructive nature. To admit the basis for one’s hidden fears would be to admit too much for those same fears to stand; free spirit’s not free to engage in rape. Some typically ugly tourists blest with squeamish taste display unpatriotically a poor appetite for viewing the proud figures of live bison or Authentic Indian Villages vacant save for the slow yet effective smallpox of rotgut. Breaking all the peace pipes, white drug peddlers needing knocking for a row of tall red totem poles have made of human beings wooden mockeries. Possessions being coincident for gringos

* One of those buzzwords acting like buzz bombs. † Mostly for rookie crooks. 109 with identity, the dark-skinned have for long been stripped of theirs to keep them in their places as nonentities; success is gained as soon as cipher acqui- esces in his or her empty status; thus to be a battered indio or nigger means to act compliantly as someone else’s idiotic fantasy. The righteous hoity-toity racist, white with indignation, rationalizes that every Uncle Tomahawk, rolled through sheep-dip, is his own worst enemy: now sleep tight, profit-hunting scalp in pillow, if you care and dare to, buffaloing paleface.

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Freedom, to the swanky Yankees, means not sharing life but keeping one’s own cage. Thinking merely to progress, we take the unrefreshing pause, the short pantie set’s toffee break, wherein our bottled-up, acidified selves must regress. Nor is Great Russia great, but, like Caesar, has feet of clay; for a single pair of boots is not more valuable than the whole of Shakespeare or the heart of Tolstoy. If apparel does proclaim and make the man, what sort of man’s proclaimed and made? Washing machines and hydroelectric dams do not a civilization make. Pragmatism and empiricism: both philosophies that actually, ultimately fail to work. Materialists carry on despite rocks in their heads. Utilitarian value comes close to signifying nothing. Public utilities—private futilities. To manufacture once implied that a creator had a hand in the production; singular repute then mattered. Nothing but machinery stamps out the pride and junks the quality in craftsmanship. No longer is it normal for all human actions to consist in art,* now viewed as some thing quite superfluous, dispensable. Machines removed much drudgery but also brought endemic unemployment and nigh universal ill health in their train. What progress in each joe or jill controlling umpteen mechanistic slaves when master yet remains a scatterbrain? Most folk are now compelled to dwell in squalor and disorder, so inured to such existence they ignore it to put up with it. No longer, in a market whose impersonality is suffocating, do producers need integrity. Goodwill at one time signified reliability and honesty, not “solvency” within an all-engrossing morass of indebtedness. The more remote we get from small-scale neighborhood production, the more probable that services

* As was the case for numberless generations among our ancestors the foragers, who, making things of use with grace, were spared the dreary noncreative lives of high-paid pros and proletarians. A normal craftsman loves to exercise or teach his craft; a modern slave prefers to talk about some ball game, of near anything save his banausic slavery. Now brothelized, sport is the opiate of the masses. 110 as well as goods will prove inferior for lack of motivated personal relationships. The sole hope for youth is to break through all our technical distractions to regain the nigh-lost love of craft without which culture perishes. Producing pins and needles may be necessary; where, however, is the need for guns and bombs—these sword- and shieldlike fartifacts of our most unchival- rous age? Is the supply of drek in our stupendous arse-nal enough to wipe out our pooped selves completely? If not, better add some more to it.

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Mechanics carry us ahead . . . into a groundless pit. How thrilling, having put the pedal to the metal, to be barreling along . . . over the falls. How gratified are many dorks to hit the hammer lane. What breakneck speed, what stinking noise, what tanked-up horsepower without sense, the harebrained duners and hightailing squirrels peeling daddums’ rubber demonstrate going on zippy tears or “joy” rides in their sleek new hardtops, soft-headed neuroses stuck on wheels. Do loud zoom buggies really advertise their drivers’ potency? Why blow our gaskets gnashing gears in thickening gridlocks, spinning our wheels, plagued by all those inexhaustible infuriating road hogs, getting nowhere fast, putting our trust in objects that won’t work, when we can start soles kissing soil? But, serving, not just servicing, our auto idols, we are sure that to ride shank’s mare up hill and down dale would make a nightmare of our harrowing, efficient way of—something called if not resembling life. As emblem of our culture is the “freeway” logjam not exemplary? We’ve failed to gear our selves up to grow free of mechanized insanity; referring to the SUV craze is precise. Could city life itself, each well-oiled gearbox ought to ask himself, be hell on wheels? It seems essential and a gasser for us to exhaust our fuming, auto-mated selves proceeding forward arsy-versy on the rims and dragging on a string of deadly gaspers, hoping to get mileage out of paying through the nose for all this discommoding truck, so indolently waiting upon an undoubted monstrous master, ass production; yet who under leaden skies successfully refuels an infernal combustion engine with the gasless solar power of the inexhaustible, oneself? What and where would we be without grease monkeys? Active walkers in a pristine setting? Or, more likely, soil-bound? Many sallow mates who know no better choose to live with bad breath and clogged arteries their lives through. Why do U.S. sociologists refer to subjects’ lifestyles and not to their deathstyles? Freeway shunts well demonstrate how moderns cannot help but skate on thin ice. Death is nature’s way of telling

111 us to cool it, to slow down. Best be “eccentric” as an isolated mossbeard in the boondocks, a true outpost of civilization, when the centers of the globe, crawling with mankind, are insulated with corruption. Where one dwells in part determines what one is. Guess who or what’s found right down in the bowels of Tyrannosaurus, circulating on the meat rack in Crimes Square? A city slicker’s only the most bumptious bumpkin, the most knowing bushleague rube. He thinks one can’t be cultivated dwelling well beyond some wide place in the road. It’s preferable to live outside even tank towns; waning wisdom yet is not extinct in the tall timbers; on the other hand, it’s not the woods alone are full of woodhicks. Nowherevilles, cities are no more civilized than herds are human; wens or cancers of society, they may at last have to be cut off the face of the map. Overcrowded sheepfolds, centers of enslavement, to this day epitomize the superannuated state. Forms of their governments determine less what freedom human beings are blessed with than do population sizes.* Evolutionarily every superabundant, well-fixed species manifests inertia; less common biotypes, however vulnerable, are more versatile and viable. For ancient foragers the sacred meant the whole of nature; for outdated urbanites technology’s their god and will deliver just deserts. No one is wholesome in a stinking burg; most folk today reside a country mile from normalcy. For the perturbed plurality securing and retaining elbow room is plainly not a high priority. The normal density for human habitancy’s thought to be at most one hundred fifty souls;† hence the apathetic amorality of townsfolk vainly screening out their jostling neighbors to maintain a vestige of sane limits, some memento of a real community, where all their “friends” would not be interchangeable. Constructed for defense and ease of movement and communication, now metropolises are the least safe and most wasteful places to reside or work. Our adulthood we’ve had defined as being employed and sociable, not idle, “antisocial”; yet a myriad apartment-dwellers, rich and poor, live as recluses, quarantined from genuine concern with others’ lives. The cheer that cynic dwellers in fun city best express is Bronx.

* Worldwide ethnic subdivisions had to be subverted, overcome, in order for metropolises to succeed. Inhabitants can talk in umpteen hundred tongues if only they can also speak a common one. Cities disintegrated the cohesive insularity of village life. The civic ethos was transformed from social harmony to rankest commerce only after towns congested past ten thousand members to above a million. Democracy became impracticable as greed vanquished all once-meaningful relationships. † In such a modest group one truly rotten apple spoiled the barrel, thus required prompt expunging to preserve the whole lot.

112 All oversized agglomerations promise to be shortly disappearing, helpless products of our hellbound selves; for urbanization and world strife are Siamese monsters. Is it but an ungermane Semitic legend that first slayer was first city father? Every city may be a sin city, verily a pest hole. Might to run amok be natural once mankind forms mobs suffering from the delusion that there’s safety to be found in numbers? Cram the scurrying town rats sufficiently together in their fast-food joints, and watch the bargain-hunting* madding crowd consume itself; mark how too close confinement tends to cause among straphangers gravest heart disease. As a reaction to captivity, ubiquitous depression may well be a reasonable coping strategy, not the solu- tionless predicament it seems. Our city lights are not light, nor is urban life urbane, real life; trailblazing’s alien to urbanites, who dream of their arrival at the top in swank stretch limos. Man’s an irreplaceable machine, an irrepress- ible farceur who mimics, through a lifelong tragifarce, his weird contraptions, roaring to his doom at full tilt. As inveterate impersonators,† we forge in our artificial deeds our citifried future. Ultimately meaning in the megalopolis resides in burial anonymously. Finally, as from the start, our screwy mechanism’s no go.

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Haste is waste and most aggression retrogression. Who will check our rabid rate of progress? What small headway we are making following our heads. True action’s motionless, true teaching wordless. With their go-go enterprises are not both exploitative big wheels and implemental poor tear-arses real going concerns all going nowhere in a hurry, on the go . . . to hell? Is it an accident, of no significance, that many a teen represents the idiot on wheels? Demonstrably our species is a mobile mechanism with an agitated think-box. Ads promoting vehicles as weapons are for once not so mendacious; Japanese precisely designated them commuting coffins. The car suits man by being murderous; his very nature—witness how he loves to give it the gun—is to be at war. Long before Cain he learned to be a killer pur sang: lustful and uncaring, have we changed since Cain, we pits of vipers such as all our loving Christian sects? Our deep-set violence contains a bitter paradox: how meaningless all killing, yet how meaningful each death.

* It is accurate to call what hagglers bring home steals. † In our “postindustrialism” lifestyle has preempted life as, for the most part vainly, we attempt to act attractive roles. Psychotics often are successful playing at being sane. 113 Too quick are we to swallow the outdated fiction that the present must be more enlightened than the past. Our blinding flurries of industrious commotion clearly punctuate ice ages of more natural quiescence. What’s called Global Economic Progress is contagion. There is no historical nor evolutionary progress, only moral, revolutionary progress, without progression, within oneself. All means are mean. Do not split wood, do not lift up the stone— and there we are, original, in unworked unity. Without raising a finger or an eyelash, everything gets done. Those so disposed to an abrupt browned-off dismissal of someone as a timewaster ought to reconsider first what waste is and what time is for; which is, of course, to earn one’s liberation from its toils. Utopians contend humanity will be home free when rid of labor’s servitude; yet human spirit grows creative solely when our leisure and our work are integral. The mother of invention’s freedom, not necessity. The topmost job is not a job but joy, no chore but “idleness,” no loaf, but fruit; and one’s true home- work is not work but love. No driver but who’s likely to be thirty bricks short of a load. The harder frazzled slouches toil and moil, always tied up, the less they accomplish. Working like mad, what’s one’s mental status? Workaholics, spit-and-polish servants who have brooms in their tails, actually rage against the vanity of all their overscrupulous anal exertions. Moderns, since abandoning the forest, have believed the myth that there’s some special dignify- ing virtue in work, some high purity in sweating out their guts to earn their thoroughly unnatural bread; but have the immeasurable toils and troubles of this era truly profited the later generations beyond mere survival?* Individuals escape the common drudgery by the chance fortune of inheritance, a gift, or craftiness. It’s solely the most minuscule elites have ever benefited from slavery, which civilization necessitated. Slaving as we do, yet somehow proud of it, why wonder that our hands and hearts are callous? Keeping nose to grindstone dulls as oft as sharpens. Any workaholic driver long ago ill trained thinks nothing now of running down his friends. So many peg away till they peg out. How can a working stiff interred in toil up to his eyeballs not betray his rigor mortis? So remote from all-round men of yore, rank specialists—the proletariat of our day, which knows more and more about less and less— are dangerously paralyzing paralytics, profiting the most by compassing the least; it’s not so much the illiterate thugs that threaten civil standards as the scientific products—learned ignoramuses convinced of their exceptionality

* Which the unambitious erstwhile foragers succeeded in as well. In fact, compared to practically every contemporary of ours, any aborigine experienced the life of Riley.

114 while dedicated to the rise of ever greater barbarism. Who dares to examine the horrific probability that there’s a close connection between rising unemployment coupled with decreasing leisure and insidious addiction to consumption? Technical proficiency in thread-thin bailiwicks overshadows any broadly human properties. How mean this underworld which judges people by their jobs, not by their characters. Growth industries—self-contradictions. Industry is unproductive. Those are admirable steps that huffing puffing man is adding to the ladder of the infinite; were he to raise his head, however, he might see what is more admirable, no thing, no sweat, certainly no brainless spit and polish. We have bushels of know-how, but have we a grain of know-why? And, if so, what do we suppose it’s worth? It’s one thing to know how to catch a fish, but quite another to know what to do with it once caught. Efficiency and tyranny have a habit of going hand in hand: prostration under unholy technology is linked directly to perversely screwing up both Mother and brothers. Our dear isolating insulating Juggernaut running on empty gathers momentum irreversibly, ignoring ideologies and revolutionizing lifestyles irrespective of morality, providing everybody with mixed blessings. The special commission is every bureaucracy’s ace in the hole plied to forestall indefinitely any decisive action; regular staff “meetings” cannot be dispensed with to get nothing done. Who needs to hear another squillion- word report? All featherbedding experts ploughing the sand, tiptop manufacturers of bottlenecks who’re feckless busy bodies one and all, are not as yet half deft enough—at doing no thing. Actual nonactivity does harbor one invaluable virtue, that it keeps some demons from the Devil’s work; all work, indeed, may be unwise diversion from the tireless rule of death. Great villainy demands great industry: who, steeled forever and a day against life, cares to match a Torquemada’s or a Dzhugashvili’s dedication? Single-mindedness becomes the be-all and end-all of power addicts, whose deep-fixed suspicious- ness precludes their empathizing with complexities like human beings. The most plausible and noble ideal Good, clenched zealously enough, must spew the most implausible and base real Evil. All compulsive toilers hang tough, hold fast to the perfect sanctuary for ignoring their own imperfections. Are they heroes who are not free not to do their duties? There are many constipated souls whose permanent relief would be a load off all our minds. Most every man with clout is bomb as human. Crime and business pay, but do not lead to wealth. Those who want power gain their object by becoming powerfully bad. Ambition spoils and competition fails. Act after act prohibits

115 all save poverty; arms piled on arms conquer everything but chaos; business pushing business furnishes a craze of waste; and law imposed on law preserves a horde of thieves. Resign the self, quit wholly, and retire into oneself. Serving no purpose, man or woman serves the highest, for eternal life is in fact doing nothing, dwelling upon no thing, penetrating one’s “own” nature. Wisdom wins the day without participating: silent, it is echoed; undemanding, is obeyed; advising nothing, is declared right. What use has the useless, like a lovelife? He or she who is enlightened may well have no earthly use for anybody, no desire for a piece of the action. All of our industrial go-getting occupations tantamount to overridden hobbyhorses may be only frantic flights from the void of reality expressed in bankrupt ego trips and uncreative lives. But if we for once faced it and, by piercing, nailing, seeing through our criminal, transparent selves, lived constantly yet ever suddenly in love . . . what then? Might paradise burst into bloom right now? Witness the present desert without grasping future fruit. Might all those potent demonstrations actually shroud our impotence? All desperation perishes, serenity prevails.

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No saltier sea than the underworld, this wide-open asylum of incurables, aswarm with death: whatever fun for sporting in, it’s hard to swallow. Live in crowds if you must; just do not live like them. Treacherous society’s white water seems exhilarating as it tugs one, leaflike, irresistibly downstream, tending to send us all around the bend; but if one would observe strife’s current, one must first detach the self from it, stop drifting mid the mêlée. Dwelling near a cataract, most people fail to hear its roar. Those who have never led secluded lives are hard put to perceive life as it is. “The soul of collectivity,” that cherished notion of all deskbound theorists, constitutes nonentity; it means humanity dehumanized. Society consists in a machine that shreds each individual and may reconstitute a rare one: the preserved end product is depersonalized, scarce resembling its original. Some folks believe that not all epochs have been equally near our perfection; but, in faith, all epochs have been equally far from perfection, which is neither theirs nor ours. Is history not humankind’s distorted version of its inhumanity? What humans mainly strive to hide is their ignominy. The cardinal truth history has taught: that nothing’s learned from it; since it incorporates all meanings it eventuates as meaningless. The truly great event

116 occurs outside history, inside nature; pageants pass oblivious to naked truth, to private drama. Every nation is in truth a have-not nation. Heaven will con- vene no future gathering of friends or “allies” (mostly lies) but only present love. The boundary of the City of God does not extend beyond black books or brains of town planners without a populace: real men of holiness proceed alone. Gabbles one ubble-gubble of her popular religion?—Undeniably she has the gift of the gabbler, the pitch of the salesman. Public relations are no relations. Don’t expect to find a gentle soul amid a rabble or intelligence announced by ballyhoo. As yattering town crier, one may agitate to get together a disgustion group, confab or gabfest, a bored meeting, of our Higher Self; but that’s a tasteless drugstore notion and not homegrown produce. “Rehabilitation” conferences and “artistic” cults are stagnant marshes, fitting settings for log-sitting frogs and cackling geese perhaps, but hardly apt to foster growth of fruit. To live near plaguey clouds of all too cultured critics—short-lived, dusk-attached mosquitoes which, like savage snipers, backbite, blowing darts and hunting heads—can only drive one wild. Yea, crows, caw while you may; Yet croakers soon make clay. Paramount if not alone among the consolations empty chatterers afford: that death will shortly seal their lips as firmly and as finally as any noble singer’s or true seer’s. Hollywooden movies recommendable for immature audiences, loveless Sabbath “services,” jitterbuggering cocktail fights, vacuous video peep shows, hysterical political auctions, and somnambular spectator sports like group gropes are but sops for idolizing, adolescent convalescents; while the truly adult film premiere, the mountain sermon, and the royal ball, the real show stopper, the election promise, and the playoff match we mobsters never see nor hear is truth itself, oneself. Our mental chewing gum—no matter how innocuous multipotent drugs peddled at cut rates may seem—neither relieves weak nerves nor satisfies our hidden hungers.

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Many wish it noticed to what faction, gang, Community of Universal Sissyhood Limited they belong; but what one notices is that in going along with the crowd they are precluded from belonging to oneself. Exemplary mis- conduct’s needed least. The sons of freedom multiply as hemmed-in barflies who cannot survive without their ladled slipslop would, yet where among the

117 mixers are the fathers more mature than seeming carefree frat rats always fleeing homefelt obligations to their favored guzzlery’s skin-thin relationships? Many a wastrel wants his wastage to be on the house. Each tavern’s customers drink in an unfree-and-uneasy; alcohol abusers have a signally high rate of phobias. Who feels at home amid the persiflage of ordinary human congress in a mousetrap, happy to be able to interpolate one or two ego-buoying wise- cracks through the smoggy fumes of by-talk? Each beer-slinger in such fug is indistinguishable from bull-slinger. Does one relish all those feints and ruses playing social poker calls for? It’s exclusively birds of a feather can be “free” to flock together in some hangout. All varieties of parties, and all partisans, are surely freedomless. Each party literally constitutes a pack of fools living a pack of lies.

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The worst reproach could be to be found squeaky-clean. Conventions are a waste of time indeed. A soul incurably banal must be affiliated, one among the many—there is such incredible security in numbers. Are we in our element enumerated midst a seething mass of maggots? People hop on the bandwagon out of fear of being left behind, out of the heavy money. Craftily we buttress the disintegrating ramparts of our selves in packrat fashion by accumulating book and music, stamp or coin, collections and by taking part in clubs and on committees keeping minutes while they’re losing hours, Chambers of Commerce and similar ritzy public facilities periodically flushed: they fill the vacuum of our deepest apprehensions. Can one keep from falling into depthless emptiness at last by filling many empty hours with matching pastimes? Altruism: secretly self-interest, a self-applied specific for all spiritual destitution. Clean the vacuum cleaner out completely.

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In an age of automatic starters such as mocha no crank’s needed. Bored stiff, mechanized man bundles up his family of squealers—rolypoly sardines in a well-oiled can, denizens of the shallows—for a Sunday drive . . . all famished fish unconscious of their fate. For most of humankind life’s an ordeal to be endured. The bourgeois working stiffs play card games as a means of getting through the evening, i.e., to get the dragging disenchantment over with. As Benjamin observes, “One way of preventing oneself thinking too much about

118 anything is to engage the body busily in hard manual work such as garden- ing, sawing, etc.”—that is, in the unnatural activities. Could there be a more advantageous analgesic, bracer, antibiotic, and opiate—indeed, a virtual or bogus magic bullet—than tough labor? In his inner progress every “nature boy” appears inclined to be forever sawing wood; compulsive narcissistic gardeners, to all appearances innocuous head cases, as a rule one finds particularly lazy spiritually. A specially abnormal animal graced by a garden-variety soul, the foursquare horticulturist digging and planting anally may actually be appreciating sod-all while displaying an attachment to his Mother, lusting for a paradise long lost—indeed that never was—of joy and creativity. Do wingdings, any more than self-coercive tasks, exhibit uninhibited liberty—or flight from it? Such acting out reflexively is done inflexibly in order not to see in. Glancing, shuddering, at a line, glimpsing one’s wasting self in any glass, is less than reassuring; hence, compulsively, like moony rubber ball, the upward-mobile bounder lurches, bounces outdoors and around, quick as a jumpy bunny or a kinky kangaroo, to sample some frivolities like sets of suitably exhausting games of golf or marbles, bowls or tennis, nipping “naturally” away to knock back a few rounds of short snorts, knockout slugs or snuffs concocted to bedim the execrable image permanently: morning after hanging a few on the nineteenth hole, however, there with one’s own spitting image, well illustrative of the world’s screaming meemies, hangs that gleaming mirror over the fat head—a kind of strung-up halter still awaiting one’s performance, without shinnying or getting stymied, teed or hung up by a hoax, of the sole universal rope trick.

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Honest mystics sharpen insight and uniqueness; they don’t, as the potted beer-swiller and grass-eater do, dull them. Melting pots known as schools liquidate the lover while fomenting saps. No soft drug’s hard to get addicted to. Our drug dependency is not the illness but a symptom of the illness. Useful temporarily appears the herd in which, so wary not to straggle, we are following the leader, for it keeps each of us safely in line and from having to depend upon oneself. “The mass”—a serviceable fiction; seeming of use, it in truth is self-abuse. The morals any troop performs lie well below most of its members’. Public conscience—contradiction. A real man joins no thing: himself. Enrolment in a farty party does the gassy self some credit, gives the feisty an apt outlet, but oneself is left limp, gasping. Movements like the

119 Beats are really vital—for the bowels? What a fusty atmosphere, thanks to the dominating flatulent ideas, still afflicts our flabby species. Both political and aesthetic factions serve primarily as screens for personal inadequacies in their followers: plain ignorance, incompetence, naïveté, sheer laziness, or mere lack of talent. Parties thus are suited best to and intended most for nitwits and/or misfits. Listlessly we are impelled to organize; and so integrity disintegrates. Is “teamwork” not a doubtful virtue when our latest Babbittry’s gross booster- ism draws along the younger generation’s funeral procession? Why enlist in cryptochurches that the misinformed conceive as radical political phalanxes and as mental health clubs, all of which are wielded to induce fat yields? Indubitably love’s annulment is not imminent but a fait accompli the moment one enrols in the scheme, a betrothal to a brothel. Any oaths of loyalty signed and sworn are death warrants. Every institute leads one away from oneself . . . even Psychic Research; for oneself’s unsearchable. Reason, that classic property of individuals, has long been lost to aggre- gates. Considering the gross mismanagement of virtually all large orga- nizations, whose inertia serves innumerable vested interests, must one not conclude that unmistakable ineptitude’s, avoidless everywhere men institute mass enterprises? How can moribund megalosaurs manage to grasp the vital need for what a sociologist would term decentralization?* Where the death- locked, monstrous Gila monster that could execute it? Can such a colossal mechanism that’s our near-anarchic international relations be rejiggered? “Globalization” has prescribed an endless free-for-all predictably fulfilling doom for guess-who. Privately we grasp that this is one hell of a way to run a railroad. We may well lack the capacity, if not the means and will, to operate a global order and economy; our vagrant species, like some spratlike Ishmael cast forth by a manic Ahab to spear Moby Dick, may simply not be up to handling the enormously abnormal task now on our hands. No loaded log- ging truck careening downhill with brakes shot can be expected to stop on a dime. The crucial obstacle to understanding human nature’s plainly human nature, self-deception being inescapable; originally it appeared an advantageous adaptation for nomadic bands of early hominids armed with no more than sticks and stones; but in this counterfeit world overstocked with frightful weapons it’s calamitous. A boon perhaps at one time, ignorance (in know- it-alls) is now obliterating our own kind along with one-of-a-kind mother

* Harmony and justice must be pipe dreams till politico-financial power is inclusively dispersed, radically deconcentrated, to be shared by everybody. 120 earth. Our vain attempt to part or disconnect our selves from nature yet bids fair to prove successful. Could society’s afflictions germinate in a deeper infirmity within our cells and souls? The grave dichotomy between our technologic expertise and social incapacity is damning evidence of humankind’s pathology and intimates some fatal biologic flaw at work from our remotest origins. Discovering that life emerged as virus surely verifies why this globe’s undergoing fatal, idiosyncratically human virulence.

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Do those who vote not dote, investing in wax fruit? That which you do not see is what you get. What tolerably mediocre soul can one elect to represent oneself? Perhaps some senile senator, past master and retainer of the bribe, given to snatching more than forty winks? Most folk ignore the sphere of politics as much as possible, while politics follow suit as much as politic to do so. In that fog-enveloped world each “democratic” kingfish finishes up feeling free to operate beyond the law. How can one reasonably look for honor among thieves? Once a thief or prostitute, always . . . etc. Employing the word valiant to characterize any politician practically is unthinkable. Who can afford to care at all about the current ruling class of characterless characters? With politics and commerce snug in bed together, nepotism follows smooth flesh-pressing as the night the day,∗ and dirty tricks like kickbacks and name-calling spew forth from incalculable turnovers. In the public service one lie leads straight to another. Corporations are supreme at the craft of conniving and suborning. When politicasters are mere auto salesmen or attorneys their accountability they cannot comprehend as a responsibility to their electorates, for that’s held incidental to preserving ruling circles’ profit margins. All political strategians are incorrigibly myopic; no more than the herd can they conceive life in the long term. People are reduced to digits by beancounters who have never done a solitary thing creative during their lives. Like their magnate backers, pols take good care not to put their money where their mouths are. Every V.I.P. is shameless taking credit for an orotund speech full of me-tooism knocked out by poor shady ghosts; when mouthing off any rotund stemwinder can consider both the weasel words and views his own, having purchased them. In medicine are mountebanks aplenty, while in politics are nothing else. If statesmen resurrect out of dead politicians, get out and vote for more statesmen!

* Bedfellows make strange politics. 121 Little wonder that, when party-bent mechanics are what choose the candidates, the quality selected slides to such a greasy level and each leader turns out looter. What incomparable “freedom of choice” has the balloter between a pair of front-rank charlatans (two-faced Republicrats) so dexterous at slinging mud while wading deep through slush funds? Does each Tweedledum deserve to be preferred to every Tweedledee? Are there no real fresh figures, no choice dollops, lately thrown up on the nauseating national scene? What a yucky poverty-stricken scenario! While the phrase “Democratic Government” is flattering—and stupefying—to each populace, the rank-and-file constituents have never had any real say in shaping policies. Why boast about our politics being always scrupulously democratic, when our economics—far more fundamental to our real lives—never were? Most damning is the profligacy of the body corporate, not politic. Short of democracy, we have accommodated to plutocracy. The muddle class is always faithful to its vassalage. The presence of obscene plutocracy assures the absence of pristine democracy, insures that practically all the rest of humankind’s obliged to suffer ticky-tacky lives. “Democracy,” in its degraded and degrading guise, above all keeps the poor as impotent as poor. Each party constitutes the folly of the many sponsoring the profit of a few; that’s politics as usual.. The autocratic party structures keep afloat the modern state, most threatened by the dreadful possibility that one day genuine democracy, participating local soviets involving everyone, might spring to life. What government today remotely represents its populace instead of special interests? Delusions such as “job creation” are forever dan- gled in front of the thwarted public, while near half the working stiffs remain part-time. A truly liberated world would certainly engage all its inhabitants in shared activities; and yet, if any were dragooned, it certainly would be no truly liberated world. Democracy’s a form of government that may permit but scarcely guarantees us liberty. A citizenry may become humane when ready for responsibilities, but not while slavering for privileges. Not just hippies wish that everything could be a freebie. All the politicians represent the narrowest constituencies totaling a very small minority; each country’s powerful appear to have no choice but to become a parasitic clique of pinchbeck “representatives.” The operators of today’s political machines are no less helpless than the minions for whose harvest the machines are run. How can one separate the union honchos from the Mafia clones in a hall of mirrors? Are not politics and criminal pursuits without distinction? In a state of graft it helps a candidate to have friends in low places. Mealy-minded “socialists,” fence-straddlers to a “man,” appear so eager

122 to accommodate to capitalist and imperialist premises merely to get quite modest hearings. Spineless “liberal” logrollers, out of desperation never to offend a soul, may hear persuasive radical proposals but keep waffling, sitting on their thumbs, equivocating, and preferring flaccid policies. Determined to win over uncommitted welchers, how few legislators can prove anything but uncommitted welchers? Party hacks we can be sure will show up when they need us. Democratically appointed masters willing to perform their charming acts are yet not ready, not to mention able, to abolish slavery. Political animals of almost every stripe, because they’re both, believe all citizens are either prisoners or prostitutes; nonpartisanship the timeservers can’t conceive. These are the sort of vegetating grafters that discourage both diversity and growth. The shrewdest tyrants manage to instate such stylish borrowed moralistic plumes that tyranny seems right and proper; the renunciation characterizing the elit- ism in all morality makes burning books, for instance, meritorious and just. Divide and govern: how the headpins get the bowlers to knock themselves down, how “honkies” always kept control of “coloreds.” Minuscule minorities, commonly eminences grises, rule every realm; majorities of simps are glorified for their inertia. The true “silent majority” is the 50% or more of “citizens” who never vote, who have been trained to hate or be indifferent to politics. Democracy means the delusion of numerical sagacity—that figures; imbeciles and intellectuals wield equal “power” in the ballot box; majority rule unargu- ably implies that quantity, not quality, of judgment is what matters.* * In Shamerica, one nation under “God”, the Prez rules as the Devil in disguise, with liberty and justice for the few; less than one-fifth of the electorate oppressively carries the day: out of the scattering of fans who do show up one finds the boneheads always rooting for the wrong team on the right. For over half a century a purportedly “most powerful man in the world” has been accorded the potential to make Hades on earth; what he’s never had is the potential to make paradise on earth. Behold the Emperor’s stark naked, one more dissipated washout, and it’s not a pretty site. One cannot take a country seriously that allows a bungling R.N., R.R. (whose real evil head was Nancy’s) or G.W.—what a triumvirate of crips—to play the part of ruler; for a model of democracy look elsewhere. When it comes to their political conventions count on Yanks to put on a good show. . .of courage. Does that public really relish having predatory carpetbaggers’ snouts pry into their own countless sanctums, pillaging their families’ priceless long-term resources? Fooling half the people all the time is no trick with a budget and lies big enough. Observe now passing into history the roving Cheney-Bush scam, how a cabal of venal chickenshitting draft-dodgers, runaway serial psychopaths, can get away with, first, a brazen and humiliating coup d’etat, then years of indefensible waste and rapacious massacring; all those erstwhile sneaks turned prized preemptive-war consultants badly need a fast frogmarching right into the blazing front line. Folk bow to the bush that’s said to shelter them but not for long to one that fails to. That appalling perp, from A to Z out of his depth and pitiable playboy element, apparently believed that ninety wrongs could make one right. 123 Surely more than just one sucker’s born each minute. Civilization seems to be a process of emasculation aimed at keeping humankind infantilized. Thus politicos—never mind their stamp—serve chiefly to achieve this end, appealing foremost to the cornball sector with appropriately catchy phrases. What’s the chance of an election victory, despite our universal suffrage, when most men are women and most women children? Hopping like fleas through electioneering hoopla, voting patsies squeal with satisfaction, playing patty- cake with and accepting candy bars from several dirty old men spieling cowplop. When appealing to their hick constituencies hacks work hardest shoveling the shit. Susceptible to hustings’ make-beliefs, “Yuh pays yer dues and takes yer choice.” One wonders how the candidates put up with all the mandatory unenjoyable juking and jiving: how can anyone whose brain is even partly functioning find of real interest the piss and wind, the posturing, that’s politicking? Thank God for the secret ballot. What embarrassment, if not of riches, of embarrassments we’d suffer, were we held accountable in full for our electoral decisions. The charade of every auction (called election) ought to be a shame to the electorate; but herds are shameless, bawling headed for the stockyard. As for propaganda, technic tricks on TV, not to mention character assassinations, now eclipse ideologic contents in determining the outcome of every republican campaign. Simply observe the media work hardest giving credence to the slickest crooks, which of the parties holds and shells out the most cash. As Dr. Goebbels demonstrated∗ and our own spindoctors keep corroborating, utilizing right (however crude) techniques it’s easy to fool all the people most of the time and most of the people all the time. Today each pious pipsqueak führer of necessity relies on bands of dedicated flunkies in the media to get his lies out there. Is working crowds a form of work—or a coward’s way to worm out of it? The ruling classes, masterful at playing dirty and at plugging into meanest motives, are obliged now to produce and to destroy the news, to make and to shred evidence, in order to maintain their privileged positions. What corruption the malefic media expose is never more than the tip of the iceberg. “Classifying” documents, governments acknowledge that reporters represent potential danger, not in their own right but in the facts they might inform the public of. A never-ending war is waged between the media and politicians to control the information circulating and thus “power” in our

* Hawking Hitler by disseminating dread of violence among the horde. Now negroid or Islamic youths serve as the ideal scapegoats.

124 underworld. Nothing but boodle counts for stuffing ballot boxes, and the role party machines play is to screw the commonalty: stand up, comrades, and so not be counted. Men have always made their gods in their own images; but power-seekers now refashion their selves into adequately shallow images the brackbrained viewers will desire to worship. Farmers are left toiling in the rear by old campaigners laying on the fertilizer. Top-dog legislators are who, barking bunkum, stand for what in fact their disaffected, so wowed votaries will fall for; every measure promised by the windbags is intended to appease the public mind, if any. Strangely people frequently seem lost in thought because it’s unfamiliar territory. Is it flattering to be asked for advice that’s never followed? Splendid platform planks begin to warp as soon as each election has been settled; deaf pols that care only what the polls say stump their states before and afterwards; both specialize in spreading it on thick. Hope is a vicious instrument: the herd’s kept acquiescent, well in line, with anodyne deceitful promises. If voting led to basic change ’twould be verboten. Might all acts or feints of “democratic” despots be no more than grandstand plays? Each country trusts its top-drawer master hand at dealing from the bottom of the deck. Electorates are as a rule well represented by their dim-bulb governors. It’s gaga voters, more than silver-mouthed loud speakers, that are wacky, thronging to return so cruddy a regime. In every kingdom of boors the front- running boob is king; each modern candidate is up and running, spouting fast talk, for the post of horse’s ass. Political activity must be the ideal means of disregarding melancholia, potential for deep intimacy, and great actuating insecurity. Whoever flirts with power is compelled to lie with it. Could politics be always an equivocal defense against awareness of its two-edged vanity? Self-realization’s never possible for any politician: even Gandhi could not but ignore his power-driven nature,∗ for such knowledge would dissolve the underlying violence and wrong in every government. To get his or her act together truly would be to spoil any politician’s game. Sad to report, the worst of overactors are not hams: they’re firstly pols, secondly pros. The former’s pet term of “endearment” for each other—“(you old) whore”—is used in private, not in public, but it neatly sums up what they in fact are. All dominators unavoidably belong all unawares to the huge helot class. A free soul is by definition free from pelf and power. Serious creators will be cagey when engaging in politics’ rites. Did Shakespeare not warn us of those—the godforsaken

* “If love or nonviolence be not the law of our being, the whole of my argument falls to pieces.”—He got it right! Poor teachers are poor at encouraging compeers to think.

125 bulk of our compatriots, including all our facile sovereigns—who “have no music in their souls”? The numinous definitively is outside the law, beyond the business of politics and its bankrupt enactors.

_73_

Many thought respectable have gone to pot; it’s kooks hold every majority. No government is just but laborless management by oneself, and no religion sacred but complete reliance on oneself. Mankind is sacrilegious when in Mass. All Ministries of Health and Welfare are quite lousy if not sick jokes, social murk indeed: out with those pestiferous rags and spongers! We may well raise Cain or fret regretfully concerning the acute if temporary shortage of short-changing, ever-changing social workers—wasted, paper-shuffling human waste collectors, poop-sticks all too long knee-deep in bureaucratic do-do, who embrace an untouchable caste, themselves dispensable, used toilet rolls, long since contaminated by the indelible stain of disrepute and failure soaked up in regular contacts with their grotty castoff clients; yet about a worse emergency—the all but total paucity of individual workers—we remain dumb. Who pays peanuts can’t help hiring monkeys. Standards of performance hardly can be elevated by recruiting extra limp-dick stumblebums, more and more paperweights and throttlebottoms, slackers who are no-show even when they show up. True help in “the helping professions”* calls less for some special training or techniques than for a special empathy and honesty, an unpossessive warmth that many an M.D. or M.S.W. whose practice comes first, even ahead of his or her clientele, cannot confer. Yet not just kindly interest is needed to clear up a country chock-full of neuroses; it will take each person’s ruthless entry into real unsupervised suffering, into private study of the pain reliever-hugging self. What use to enter seventh heaven of voyeurs, some touchie-feelie clinic of “encounter therapy,” hungering for a liberating consummation such as “authenticity,” “community,” etc. if, when all is said

* Well denominated for those helping themselves to fortunes helping others to adjust to their misfortunes, to their exploitation. Disciplines such as psychology began—as they must end— in the need not for understanding self but for manipulating others. Science’s goal is control of nature; every “human” science’s, control of people: what could be more futile or more evil? Sociomedical services keep their actually immoral valuelessness hidden with professedly moral, value-free semantic screens. Our social “scientists” employ their jargon for enhancing the mirage of their pet theories’ mathematical exactitude. “To serve the people”: what’s that but to set one’s self up as superior to them?

126 and done, willing to settle for a psychic striptease spiced with laid-on rub- downs? There are jaded spa guests speed home wholly drained and griping, “Those hot baths and real soap operas are not such healthy spots as people make out. . . .” Are we fully satisfied that we can hire some body to perform our loving for us? Quite sure that deodorants can heal a festering heart? That cancer is controlled by patching up a hopelessly haphazard band-aid system? Are the wimpy social clerks and pastors dutifully serving our grubby jerk- water town not prostituted products of our fear of naked truth, our dread of self-responsibility? Could they in fact, as graduates cum laude from East Jesus State, be merely motes installed to keep any potential troublemakers off the capitalist castle wall? Do squidges such as welfare workers and beheaders quite relieve all public sense of culpability? By neutralizing underclasses’ rage, the antisocial welfare state insures the health of inequality. Our robber-baron rulers act as if their failure to provide each body in the realm with adequate support were of no import and unworthy of any public concern; real welfare of all citizens, including countless minors, must be kept subordinate since secondary to the churchly state’s maintaining unearned profits and its status quo of privilege, carte blanche, immunity from prosecution. Church affairs and welfare programs come about because there is no love—they’re proof there’s none; such heart-free service masks guilt over soulless self-indulgence. Not just medicareless medicos, whose raison d’être is the illfare state, are vac- cinating clients with “assistance” from a running sore in order to preserve them, as in powerful formaldehyde, in a dependably dependent state. The ethics of those serving ruling wealth in order to assist in ruling poverty are less benevolent than plain subservient. To work preventively, for veritable rehabilitation, actual participation and initiative, would be, after all, to start in sawing off the rotten branch on which the slothful king of the castle, unaware that he’s out on a limb, depends. The longer lasts the therapy or aid, the better the results—for therapist’s or savior’s morale and bank accounts.

_74_

Where bona fide scarcity obtains, just simpletons can well afford to love their neighbors. Idealism is a luxury that people fancy when they’re well-fixed. Yet ideals allow us to go on ignoring truth, e.g., our part in helping the world die. Keeping the masses destitute means keeping them controlled. Each quasi- supranational religion such as Communism or capitalism prospers chiefly owing to its spiritually small elite’s materially profiting from it; each such

127 world “faith” obscures its ruling classes’ obligation to provide real remedies for penury. Where widespread poverty is missing neither secular nor “sacred” cults can easily maintain a foothold: the priests function as dry sponges or sops, patrons of abiding tribulation. Spick-and-span tampons, they preserve our purity—at least in image. The historical role of an amiable missionary is to soften up tribes for some wickedly low blows administered by succeeding plunderers and murderers. The trick is with hypnosis to convince the mob its misery is virtue. Our malnourished underworld needs fewer, not more, friars, traders, party apes, commissioned vivisectors getting fat on the plebs. All too many undertakers and cabinet ministers have lined their pockets raising sheep. How could Democracy or Christianity prevail without cocksucking acolytes? The spivved-up Bible-banging clown who, spewing pure rot, threatens congregations with impending hellfire, prophesies his own. It’s no trick for a dogma like Predestination to detain entire nations screwed for centuries. The Mayan praxis led the way for every church and state: the priests live on in comfort, whereas the believing public’s preordained for sacrifice. Escapist fundamentalist religions are nigh perfect vents for dissipating outrage of minorities bloating into majorities. Evangelists, deciphered: evil’s agents. No thing, neither soap, hair “tonic,” eyewash, condom, liniment, nor laxative, is such a seller and perennial specific for all shut-ins as a bottle of mock God; at best it serves to give authorities a boost. Among both party and ecclesiastical careerists ideologic dry rot is endemic. Look not for the love of man or God where much is preached about it: must fraternity and piety not perish schematized in groups of more than two? For where two who are none can come together in love, there’s true meeting, trinity that’s unity, the third being oneself, and no one needs this numerality or that fee-charging go-between. The only concourse we need is right here: the true community is a community of one. Who understands does not preach; those who preach misunderstand. The actors sounding off on love life are not loving life. From sermons no one learns love; words cannot turn selfishness into unselfishness. The priests lack spirituality, the lawyers honesty, the doctors health; but few are short of greed. No term exists for truth in the vocabulary of the devil-may-care Church-and-State, which is the language of the stock market, of the many too many and much too much, i.e., of tedious hyperbole. Most indispensable for church “men” and for busy- nessmen while they speculate is to retain their inconspicuously superfluous sincomes, healthy flocks of faithful sheep to fleece and flay, continued bum- per crops and bulging granaries for burning while our tattered billions starve,

128 plenty of patronage, and well-heeled army boots for squashing any noxious dissidents. Pray count one out, O mulcting impresarios, of those lucrative machinations. Yet what meaning has a mere expendable one to the computing machine? Throughout the underworld state lotteries foment romantic greed, all scams designed to mire the poor in deeper poverty; top winners always are the lottery administrators. The entire merry-go-round of Wall St. banksters’ onanistic bonuses, of their ostensibly performance-based remunerations, is a total sham that ought to be cringeworthy. The fat pot of gold at rainbow’s end amounts to privilege—the status being more important than the loot because denied to almost everybody else. By envying wealth addicts, wrongly valuing their “contributions,” we support their and our malady. “Free Enterprise” rewards the greedy and the chiselers while punishing the frugal, generous, and modest. Any country full of football gamblers dotes on louts who stiff their fellows. This society itself is but a fearfully enormous lottery: the vast majority is called upon to pay (vide W.W.I., etc. ) so that a minuscule elite can hit the jackpot, dominate on an obscene scale, scarcely realizing that they’ve lucked out. Many loyal citizens who recognize state lotteries as foolish means for generating public funds yet gullibly give credence to our rip-off economic system as appropriately rational and warranting support. The common herd does seem to grasp that justice capitalism precludes, that money can beget but money. Lotteries appear to be the foremost masterstroke of capitalist schemes; they demonstrate to the innumerable minions destined never to achieve a thing through labor that it’s only sheerest luck affords them any chance at all of satisfaction. Taxers do their damnedest to shake down yet not to shake up. Guilefully pub-headed publicans demand: “Should we refuse to pay our taxes?” Patience taxed, though not beyond an infinite endurance, one demands the prey of grafters give up Caesar what is Caesar’s, gods what is of gods, and of malicious, pious self all that belongs to it. Are only “grownups” in the paid work force productive? Casting nonparticipation protest votes for true humanity gives no assurance it will be elected to survive. And yet the unbound human, disengaged from gouging, pays no income taxes, his or her integrity earned by enfranchisement from earnings: hard is it for regnant crooks to waste what they aren’t given.∗

* Though they’ve mastered hoovering up revenue galore from sales tolls and such covert caches.

129 What Communion’s holy except self-communion, what Confession valid save confession to oneself? As politics must constitute the science of what’s possible, religion may the art of what is not. The real state is no state, the real religion no religion. Revelation spells self-revelation, and Biblical nightmares tear no veils, can be no angels, only nymphs of maniacs, pathog- nomonic apparitions, dreadnoughts of stern admirals without their papers sailing—in dire need of mutiny—straight on collision courses. Every medium must falsify. Wisdom is not itself but something alien so long as one neglects to make the roadless pilgrimage unto oneself.

_75_

Much speech—little spirit. The lingua franca most needed today is syllable- less, the decibel count zero. Better be tongue-tied than tune no heartstrings. Might honesty perforce be taciturn? Sum up the necessary in one’s speech: in few words much. One need not be an unclamorous clam to sense when to clam up or pipe down. Many folk of few words, sad to say, keep on repeating them. By giving ear to lonely souls, you may get it talked off. Who says that one must gladly suffer blatherskites? The yattering political bigmouth or circus MC ostentatiously flashing his dental plate, horning in, for a million bucks, Does, or Joe Blowflies is dead as the dodo—a drilled huntsman downed by the deafening din of his own machine gun’s yatata-yatata; the actual weapon with which the motor-mouth attacks us is the jawbone of an ass. No bigger mouthful than the simple truth. True eloquence is mute, beyond the buzz-buzz of the underworld, or modest as the quiet cough a massive river in flood makes among some rocks beneath a crumbling wharf. When any cricket chirrs, the mighty mountain stillness deepens. Truth’s a tarn scarce ever visited by human creatures. Bogged down in the dank hollow of his personal indigence, trapped in a morass of posturing, scraunched shivering in a crevasse under the loom of absolute incertitude and solitude, gregarious man revels in the dreary rigmarole of decorous palaver and fore- thoughtful fribbling; nevertheless time will have a stop, each flapping jaw a limit to its term of blatting flapping, and the rest is silence. All the passing moments of our rackety lives plummet into a void breathing their last like spent rockets. Speech’s crystallized, marrowless sugar lacks the wilder flavor still’s mellifluent and wholesome honey bears. Comedians and side-show vendors must prize trifles, while an earnest soul abides by the essential, no thing. Common folk, glued to their gabble programs, are forever hashing over the

130 least nourishing of topics. Some think ecstasy consists in roistering, in grunts and groans; but noiselessness, noninterfering, is the wonderworker.

_76_

Freedom cannot soar so long as one’s committed to defending fearful relatives or absolutes, compelled to keep truth down to a dull roar. Few folk dare to espouse their solitude. How tightly we hold on to our relations out of terror of oneself, out of adherence to our selves; yet wisdom cleaves to its heart’s discontent, deserting the quarrelsome self, emancipating itself from all motives. Our worst enemies dwell in our own households. No wise soul depends upon real understanding from those thought as kindred. Can we love “our” families while avoiding either weak attachment or hardened detachment? Can the love in those shambolic hotbeds of long-paralyzing formulas, be genuine? It’s no free spirit to which any thing is clinging.

_77_

People tend to hear best what is never told them. One will find no better teacher than oneself. Society, afraid to be alone, lacks the capacity to drive one sane. No longer will a dimwit know his self once he’s self-conscious—by himself. Every desolate neurotic wants to be alone—provided it’s alone with someone else; solely creative souls can love real solitude. Ill-fitted eremites become quite fit to climb the wall. Hell’s not community but our dependency on it. “Insanity” is a massy defense against the crushing realness of our unloved solitariness. Increasing distance from the world is just the price we pay for knowing anything about the world at all. The more one grows, the more alone and integral one grows. The more ambitious any spiritual explorer, the more singular his or her destiny. The odd soul finds a greater comfort in austere aloneness than can common folk in all their loose relations and their close-knit family ties. How precious little anyone can do to help another cope with fate. Sufficient as it is unto itself, maturity cannot be found in outward search. In truth, where are the witnesses to getting everything together? Why care what the neighbors would say if we did our selves in? What the blindfolded discern is surely undeserving of regard. Our conduct worries us considerably less than does the rabble’s view of it. Each reputation swings dependent on a gleaming chain of pure chance. It’s no easy lesson to learn that oneself alone can found or damage self-esteem; failing that (our

131 primary test) one’s rewarded for successfully exploiting others. The real mis- anthropes are seldom retirees; they’re usually to be found entangled in the hurly-burly of “experience,” abused responsibilities and privileges. Sleeping and decrepitude use up near half our lives restricted to a private sphere, a state for which we ought to be most thankful. Breathes there any spirit so short-winded that it never sought to crack its own complacent shell? A jumping social party is not the right place for criticism, but one’s peaceful closet is: nobody’s closet lacks a skeleton; and who can live without tasting chagrin, untouched by our perpetual minute indignities? Just what kind of confessional performances do blabbermouths give in their outhouse stalls or pews? Now walk into the privy, drop your load, Walk out: how wondrous is this brief abode! At home in aloneness, far from prideful cavalcades, resides all oneness. Greatness may be melt within society and steely out in solitude, yet a true man or woman must be molten steel in both. Our garrulous selves seem united, confident, but actually are divided, timorous; whereas oneself seems insubstantial, strengthless, but in truth is one, invincible. The softer the crust, the harder the core.

_78_

“Ought” is one word, “able” is another. “I do hope this soil bears fruit,” said a reformer sifting salt out of his hand. Though earthworms were to try, They still would fail, to fly. Our social rank we can escape, but not our native grade of understanding.

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Each clod is like each other clod, But no two are equal, thank God. Outraged by unjust distinctions, moderns threaten to destroy distinction. Robotlike, each proletariat is withering away, laid off for good, without their Marxist destiny of social betterment materializing. Swallowing egalitarianism leads perforce to overrating of the State or Corporation? Myriad industrial 132 helots, far from lean and hungry, long have been made over into well-stuffed bourgeois;∗ most professionals share with the “working class” the motivations of keen squirrels. Veneration for aggrandizement among the witless modern workforce keeps the state of capitalism safe from any threat of genuine reform. The proles are tools of exploitation, products of the factory, conditioned by and as machines; they must remain enslaved reactionaries till as single souls they can transcend and spurn their classbound craving for more military-style discipline—extension of their infantile parental and “divine” oppression. Just like† workers’ unions, which by sweetheart contracts certify the workers are screwed, East and West “democracies” are feudal structures. Each bureaucracy and corporation works—that is, it fails—for lack of any real accountability; their specialism is to pass the buck and give society the runaround. Procrustean paternalistic policies produce social sclerosis. Never will we have a fair world lacking the participation in decision-making of all its inhabitants; until responsibilities are unrestrictedly decentralized, priori- ties and plans will serve the few, not all. War is the mainspring of the modern state: the last must be dismantled ere the first can be destroyed. Ideally we need a society that’s classless? The expression contradicts itself. Real class is individual, unprecedented, nondescript, in a class by itself. Prescriptions for a master breed are fizzles, wet squibs, for a breed, unlike a master, must be tame and specialized. The sole equality among mankind is altogether transcendental, active principally in the saints, all of whom are eternally unknown. Mass education: that’s a contradiction in terms. Must we hear “All men are equal . . .” yawped by those equal to nothing? Yes, “Comparisons are odious”—to the futilitarians and misfits. Parasitism’s the norm in life, not the exception. Evil sees no evil, hears no evil, speaks no evil. Let’s renounce all private property and social classes, by all means— provided we’re prepared to sacrifice as well all privacy, which is inseparable from them. It’s an ant world that collectivism promises for the millennium; that future sphere completely colonized, predictable, and free of discord also will be totally rid of humanity. The civilizing or domesticating process makes invariably for a greater variability; the simpler any organism, the more uniform. Traditionally people knew their roles within the whole; now nihilism rules activities: in each of our unprincipled profane societies today most folk are serving arbitrary functions for which they were never—and are never to

* Witness our time’s triumph of me over we. † I.e., unjust like.

133 be—fitted, and material wealth is considered the exclusive mark of worth. A rationally safety-bound society can guarantee not endless preservation, only what feels too much like it. Throwing bales of folding green at problems hardly solves them. To suppress all contradictions is to aim for entropy, to promise equilibrium in limbo. Raffish uppish classes, nonetheless, are hardly upper classes when a single human being is starving, whether for food or joy. Behind each regular toff hides a knave. Imperialist good-for-naughts unwaveringly count on all of their prerogatives being buckshee. What looks most high-profile in an upper is his or her crust. What idle rich high-muckety-muck, comfortably flush when he should be uncomfortably flushing, has the genuine right to indulge in luxuries while grinding poverty erodes the minds and bodies of hundreds of millions of square Johns and Marias, decent and industrious nonmen- dicants, wanting necessities? First get it up with universal economic equi- tableness; then family planning programs may prove more than downright flops. What to a starveling appears a fortune to a richling is mere chicken feed. All moneyed if not landed gentry are expected to show class and not to flaunt their gross advantages: yea, do a number on the commoners—but not in public. Not just politicians (unlike emperors) have to pretend they do not view their underlings as saps and cannon fodder. Threadbare garments are less ignominious than various threadbare excuses for injustice. Rich folk have a special interest in guarding private liberty and checking governmental power, since they are the foremost beneficiaries of a state of slack restrictions. Few barbarians of the elite ever allow themselves to harbor any genuine ideas, which might trouble them unduly. It’s inferiors—the vast majority— who privately support antiegalitarianism. Equalizing schemes promote not communal collaboration so much as invidious comparisons, discouraging real opportunities no less than real achievements. Envy rules the well-fixed rabble, and our overlords, morally plebs, make sure the grubby poorest, not the filthy richest, take the blame for “getting something for nothing.” Wealth permits one to have privacy; without wealth who escapes being slave or whore for others? Countless Willy Lomans seek their fortunes to be able to buy their and their heirs’ freedom from being forced to mingle indiscriminately with their peers; hence public transport, welfare, schools, etc., all spell anathema to such rapacious zeros. Many bourgeois who would never dream of driving autos more than two years old keep ideological models that were out of date more than two centuries ago.

134 _80_

We want to have it both ways: seeming decent while participating in concealed discrimination, cleaning up from a financial dispensation rank with rottenness. Our affluenza, accurately diagnosed, yet more resembles terminal disease. Are not most privileged souls heels who haven’t dared to use their privileges properly? How can silk-stocking epitomes of the unreliable riffraff who have always dwelt on Easy Street know what it’s like to scrape along residing elsewhere in the urban sprawl—e.g., as smoking discards in the rust bowl? What can a bloodsucking Getty grasp about back-racking toil or going to bed tuckerless? Who understands what exploitation is without experiencing it? Do boozy judges who get slaps on their wrists, for example, mind their momentary stays in clinks? Who cares that rich folks’ air-conditioning equipment heats up urban atmosphere by five degrees, ensuring summer deaths for many of the needy? Not the comfortably cool “alive” content to have the law turn up the heat on the criminal element—meaning of course the poor. What memories but racial can caged inner-city souls* intentionally left behind by the white flight retain of the savanna’s long grass whipped in ripples by the trades like some great cat’s electrostatic fur? Appropriately it’s white women, that strain of rich bitches that once prompted lynchings, who’re compelled to “liberate” themselves with pay, all unaware they’ve forged the vise that crushes ghettos and continues to destroy black families. The liberty of some “open societies” includes the liberty to perish in the open, stupefied, on freezing streets. Who gives a damn that vets who risked their all have ended wretched vagrants? Beggars sadly can—nay, must—be choosers: sleep beneath or off our bridges. Panhandling is no crime but an unacknowledged shame on all the solvent. Our extortionate society cannot permit the homeless homes; since unenumerated, are they really there? The pain they represent regrettably we’re not required to feel. Such totally conclusive tossaways of an extravagant though cheap economy die all but unseen, viewed as tramps by choice, invariably told to hit the road; the pious fraud that efforts always bring their due deserts keeps both the sharp exploiters and the dull exploited unperturbed. Are constipated bureaucrats and taxpayers exasperated that bums won’t show up on time at the slave market—even when there’s squat to offer them? Not much is heard in media of the enormous horse-meat industry, which helps so

* Fixated by a poisoned atmosphere and a concomitant spiritual inertia on their treacherous home turfs.

135 many poor folks to survive—the old and ill and powerless whom liberal Free Enterprise treats barely better than stray dogs. Few seem to have sensed what a gross disgrace our food banks constitute—for everybody flush. Street people, dwellers in slurbs, driven every day to go out slumming, free both to start at the bottom and to stay there, are led to believe that they have failed, but it’s their lowlife leaders, never seen in dingy dives or ratty holes, who’ve failed and who deserve to get the gate: what value has Equality of Opportunity if the sole “opportunity” or “home” alternative to the slum is a poky prison, if the two indeed are interchangeable?* Can someone in a snitzy townhouse manage to grasp that? Do inmates in the gated hideaways that shield them from the dangers of a criminal society that they’ve deserted realize their homes are mirror images of the detention cells with which their decomposing Homeland’s now aswarm? Each such locked compound’s like a child’s sand fortress vainly piled up against reality’s oncoming riptide. Could all fenced “communities” expose how atomized this netherworld’s become, each panic-stricken clubber having fallen trepidant? Those “worthies” who most loudly damn the poor for failing to improve their lot are first in line to drive them deeper down when they attempt to do so. The real overbearing burden to society’s not the impoverished folk but the corporate enriched. The biosphere no longer can afford them, psychopathic enterprises such as corporations and armed forces having long since grown redundant. Not the horde of screwed-up wastrels but our well-heeled screwing underworld has wasted all their gifts. We’re happy that we’re never forced† to view the countless bugs our gumheels squash. Industrial states thrive exclusively by grinding up most of the world’s wealth and its poor into the bargain; neither Communist nor Western welfare state well geared for exploitation need be judged as self-consuming if perceived as bol- stering the parasitic ice-eyed commissar or millionaire. Such polities in fact perdure by silently dismissing the validity of caste awareness and legitimacy of class struggle, glossing over all entrenched injustice as imperative for preservation of the “national security” (translation: nabobs’ spoils). White Houses— Congresses and Dumas both—epitomize contemptuous indifference to

* Imprisonment is what slaveholding U.S. rulership has always planned for coloreds. One in seven “black” men in that country is precluded by medieval felon laws from voting. Three-fifths of young Negro high-school dropouts now have prison records. Calculated disenfranchisement of black youth has elected senators and overturned more than one federal election. The exploding prisons have for decades worsened inequality while shrouding it from public view: how mighty sickly Rome again disintegrates. † We’re “free”—this isn’t Auschwitz.

136 suffering: elites are masters at mouthing compassion while ignoring nearby slumdom. What poor jobs such inegalitarian societies as Russia’s or Amerika’s do proffer hoi polloi yet guarantee the plebs cannot support their families: spiritual vacuums follow upon planned, imposed material conditions. How can welfare generations learn that there’s no free lunch? With their unbelievable nostalgia for what never was, “conservative” Shamericans, truly conceited, idealize the embryo, even allegedly “the inner child,” while leaving real-life ghetto children decomposing in the millions. Under capitalism even freedom’s a commodity, and every manjack can have just as much (no more) of it as he can pay for. Class remains a dirty word— ignored reality—so long as parents care and work exclusively for their own children’s triumphing,∗ not for eradicating the foul current social strife. Do aspirations for one’s offspring’s well-being not afford the perfect cover for one’s greed? “I’m all right, Jack,” crows John Q. Citizen, whose name and brain are both all wrong. The common good under Democracy is fancied as the clash of narrowly self-interested factions. Capitalism cannot foster full employment, is indeed dependent on a “healthy” unemployment rate to hold in hock a desperate reserve contingent of grunt labor that will keep wage levels down. Won’t docking restive sewer rats’ pay bring them promptly into line? Can’t bigitty blacks—patently superior as athletes—be kept in their grimy places with a scattering of sweepstake jackpots clumsily disguised as superstars’ ballooning contracts? Are not dipso lumber barons’ fortunes and depressive skid roads damningly interdependent? Scrungy crumbling shantytowns reflect upon palatial mansions and exclusory high-rises, and most property crimes, bred in ordinary envy, constitute the street-wise poor’s unsystematic income- redistribution scheme. All muggers learn their trade at home in swamps; and deadly serpents yet infest the best-lit southern streets. Who’d think a city freak most apt to hear the birdies sing? Pathology is not peculiar to criminals; the bulk of crime is less a symptom of degeneracy than a fairly normal rational reaction to unreasonable economic pressures.† It’s hard-up unemployed men who of course are usually sexually hard-up. Crazily we count upon pariahs to show greater altruism than society’s elites do; barred from the legitimate pursuit of their advantages, the underclass is yet expected to be

* Note how pushily so many Little Leaguer parents, like stage mothers, football fathers, and so forth, despise all rivals. Capitalism means everybody doing everything they can to guard exclusively their very own asse(t)s. † Nonetheless, unfortunately, victims mostly being fellow outcasts, what makes economic sense for individuals means rack and ruin for the indigent subculture as a whole. 137 grateful to conform to unfair social norms. It’s covert violence that’s organized by our sacrosanct states produces overt violence that’s random exercised by blagger castoffs; the worst ruffians remain the rulers. Rather than examining and extirpating the causes of crime, doing which would surely menace the established order, each “democracy” both West and East* makes use of satraps and of prisons to protect its superstructure of wealth, power, and unjust prerogatives. It’s surely not rock crushers most need to be pulverized. Insidiously, utilizing the enormous powers of the media, conning reactionaries long have pushed the myth of a private economy; devotedly they’ve glorified the Family, deluding commoners that they, and not the corporations, represent the basic unit of contemporary economic life. The modern state, pretending not to interfere with either families or labor markets, is indeed what is corrupting both. Each Washington and Wall St. sync their plans to keep the lower classes sunk. It’s in the interest of private and state capitalists to promote the fairy tale that a “progressive tax” economy plus a rewarding “trickledown effect” in fact exist; the corporate executives expect the multitude of chumps to take the flyers, run all risks, while they the hierarchs make all decisions, reap all gains. No factor that can benefit the lower strata is permitted to endure unless it benefits the upper strata even more. As tyro chef each business bugger is expected to become adept in cooking well the books. What refuge from the workplace can the home be when the former’s stresses and injustices are all but replicated there? Corruption, breakdown in the workplace and the home become the norm through spiritual confusion: can the public be responsible so long as both economy and family are still imagined to be purely private? Surely such dilapidated structures need dismantling. To defend or to extol the “private” family means in effect defending or extolling the inequities “free” markets generate. We have a radical necessity to make employment and personal life compatible and meaningful; subor- dinating labor markets and production to the growth of human beings— replacing the former’s present distortion of the latter—calls for the most fundamental transformation of each economic system, breaking down both communist and capitalist brands of class divisions, which in turn implies real revolution, everybody’s thinking and behaving deeply altering, the welfare of us all become at last the focus of us all. A just society will be attainable once people start to see how totally unjust unequal incomes are; meanwhile

* At least our parliaments allow wrongs to be ventilated though forever unredressed. We should perhaps be grateful that perfidious stupidity and not outright insanity (so far) remains the rule in both electorates and governments despite the former being laced with nutters. 138 we have our public irresponsibility. We’re told the normal family now functions in the hole. Unequal wages too long have been viewed as a legitimate reflection of unequal gifts and efforts, notwithstanding all the ready evidence refuting this. A special skill ought to receive due praise but never a material reward: the past and present gearing of wealth to “achievement” guarantees our world of gross injustice. Superstitiously we still regard our strokes of good luck as no more than merited and our streaks of bad luck as sheer miscarriages of justice. Every moneybags ensures that his employees never get a fair shake. How could crooked capitalism work without its colonies of small-time gofers hired to do the dirty dangerous jobs? All too many of the privileged—so often husbands, overseers, paters—like without remorse to give grief to dependants. How much longer must the poor be held deserving of their poverty and their young punished for what are judged the transgressions of their parents? One will credit each economist and politician as no fraud as soon as he’s acknowledged and ordained the right of all homemakers to an income equal to that of all other citizens. Our governments are now damned as incompetent encum- brances instead of our societies as egocentrically vicious; public honesty about our ruling greed and the disgrace of our inequities is next to nil. Normality may be restored to earth, but not until the immobile jet set plus the millions of moribund millionaires have been removed from it; that does not mean exterminating them; it means providing them with honest work. The worst inequities lie not between trades but within them; hardhats have yet to discover their chief enemy is Big Boss, a gink in high office badly needing to be sacked, and not some fink or scruffy welfare bum. The atmosphere around each kingly soul or uninspired pooh-bah is rank indeed; aristocrats authentically classy seldom can be found in charge. A prudent laborer avoids association with all scissorbills. To seek and find the germs of social violence would mean to recognize the real facts of oppression, which include the presence of oppressors. Untold workers never realize they are taking hos- ings. Jails are full of economic captives, who are there because they can’t afford to hire mouthpieces. Criminal society creates itself the underworld by its denying equal pay or even any. Punishment is nothing if not racist and political—in evolution a phenomenon specifically human and yet absolutely antihuman. The well-nigh immovable obstruction to all vital reformation yet remains the massive sociopolitical conundrum: how to raise and place class differences and economic justice on the global, not a merely and impurely national, agenda.

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Each lowdown high liver has a lot—too much—to live down. Eating high on the hog signifies not prospering and not enjoying the best of food. Already sunk rockbottom on the rocks are drunks still dreaming that on “mountain dew” they’re high. However grade, and man degrades, his self: accept the self as grub, and so it is. What serves to please the swarm pleases the drone. The underworld’s morality can be summed up in the rule, Do as others do.—A horde of apes. Conforming to the ethics of the jackal pack, a jackal one remains as corpus delicti, however many lambskins one puts on. Society approves us on its own terms, not on ours. Mendacious tissues known as ideologies allow all true believers to ignore the grim reality of their enslavement lying underneath the bluff. Adjusting to a monstrous lie, all patriots confirm the fraudulent regime, becoming it. Accommodating to an anxious, greed-run setup only backs up and prolongs what is in actuality a setdown, an uncivilized, stroke-triggering repast. When in Rome, do as a Greek of old would. Self-government means government of all by each, not each by all. Plurality’s not purity: be less reluctant to be singular. The exception puts the rule to the proof. If you so desire, by all means keep down with the Joneses, drudge along, play the good-doing fool and be the laughingstock for jackasses, disposed to dance attendance on Tom, Dick, and Harry foolery. “My gracious goodness, how acerbic, peevish, harsh you are to us poor average small fry . . .” bleat those masquerading as mediocre to attain acceptability and to permit perpetual postponement of self-dying. Liberty, however, like it though the self-enslaved may not, is the prerogative of everyone; yet economic thraldom, dwelling in a tight spot, helps a lot to wedge the strait gate fast.

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We still do everything within our power to ignore our close resemblance and relation to the other primates; worldly and exclusive in our vanity, we even act like what we think* are super-pigs. We do belong potentially to a higher race—the human race. But if we think our selves already human, we’re subhuman. One is not a human being but a human becoming. All men can be brothers only if they realize their uncommon privilege in sharing common Motherhood. Our daily condescending stems from tangled, lifelong roots.

* Pigs in reality are relatively cleanly beasts.

140 To be a victim early helps one to become a bigot later. Racists should receive some understanding toilet training and be introduced to grown-up social life outside their stereotyped cribs.* Such simple souls are ignoramuses, not innocents. Remote from what deliria and all that jazz some marshmallows, as ghostlike “democrats” whose soul food is to scare to death, would have us fancy, niggers, long expected to stay in the buses’ arse-ends, never cottoned to their bondage; it remains shuck in their parlance. Of the continental populations the most varied are the Africans—bad news for racists. What astounds one most is how forbearing blacks have been toward their unabashed oppressors. Africans have long embodied pagan evil as a Mr. Hyde to European Dr. Jekyll; but the honky’s heart of darkness cannot hide its racist insufficiency foreshadowing its massive failure. Rednecks, rather more than redskins, tend to sleep with battle-axes by their sides. Apartheid means to hate apart, each domineering skepsel pale with dread, class-closeted, self-doomed. The fays or grays to this day try hard to ignore the fact of their mulatto culture, one more naturally dark than artificially light. No less than nations, races are factitious entities. Opposing mixed blood, saditty ofaginzies blench at and oppose reality: in fact our “own pure blood,” repulsive though it seem, is interlinked with every body. Were not every “race” a composite of such diverse genetic substance, of so many individual anomalies, it might have some point as a concept; as things are, however, its sole use is as an outworn weapon. Individuals, not “races,” by far differ most; as witness (any obstetrician can attest) how radically disparate are newborn’s temperaments. Interbreeding, not exterminating the “inferior” by those “superior,” marked evolution of the hominids as of the other species. We are mongrels, and our genus’s survival yet requires us to remain so. The best breeds derive from crossing strains. If Ikeys have come over as our most resentable schismatics, that dynamic tribe of our own kinfolk we most love to hate, it’s got to be because they are the archetypal Europeans, bloody versatile and bright, Caucasian as all get out. Racism’s victims are invariably too much like the racists for the latter’s comfort. Like Herr Hitler, that hyper allergic and so lachrymose poseur,†

* From defecation’s “dirtiness” arise our earliest aesthetics and ethics, our latest tastelessness and cruelty. † By his inevitable suicide the madly closeted ex-corporal substantiated his career-long self- repudiating drive. His terror-stricken breakdown in fall 1918 after being mustard-gassed (when the campaign of toxic anti-Semitism took the plunge) foreshadowed his like crackup in spring 1945.

141 habitually we despise in others the degeneracy of our own that we try hardest to hide from ourselves. Those who deny the Holocaust desire another one: repudiating the fact is for them disowning the desire. It’s not the bigot’s helpless victim but his vicious stereotype strikes fear in the former’s soul. By specifying something sneaky, sinister, malignant, pushing, and unscrupulous about the Hebes, insinuating that they’re in cahoots with God knows what bloodthirsty ghouls, the anxious hymie-hater does in faith describe the truth about his self so devilishly circumcised, about our all too inhumane “instinctual” nature; somehow his hostility has been displaced—by complex shame or simple cowardice?—from his initial sheeny god onto conveniently dark abstractions like “the Jews,” who represent his irritating superego censoring his nasty lumpen impulses, and only too well does he sense how senseless, powerful, and dangerous those are. The Holocaust, hardly unique, was an attempt to extirpate distinction, not the Jews alone. It’s envy of the gifted generates most bigots’ malice; hatred of the educated and accomplished readily transmutes to genocide. Unquestionably racism’s prelogical, not ideological, consisting in a bogus pose struck chiefly for emotive dividends, however pale and meager. Socially deprived pariahs who’ve become plutolaters (such as the Moors in Spain, Armenians in Turkey, Huguenots in France, Chinese in Indonesia, Parsees in India, Quakers in England, and the Jews throughout Russia and Europe) suffer persecution aimed primarily at robbery, then secondarily at exile or extermination. Dullards’ envy of a finer spirit always is assuaged by the hope s/he’ll end badly; as witness the posthumous devotedness to Anne Frank. Regularly well-to-do and terrified of competition, all too often not just dolts but also influential persons, anti-Semites to their deathbeds take and nurse an underlying Oedipal frustration and resentment for their conscientious if oppressive Christian (Hebrew) schooling; gelt’s their jealous god, gilded with guilt, beside which no such potent fetish may exist. A hooknosed Shylock is as like as not insufferably non-Semitic. Should the avaricious capitalist spirit, no less WASPish than it’s Jewish, not be seen as base and void of self-respect, as it would have been in more rational antique or medieval times? The hard- nosed Calvinists who have infested North Shamerica continue to view God and Mammon as a single force, viz., as greed-inspired property developer. Reactionary ideologies, the catechisms of vile nihilists, may well be just delayed reactions to parental poisons. Bigotry dies hard; such scorn consists of sneaking homage to admit which calls for greater nerve than the infected one can muster: lust for outgroup members festers out of graven dread of

142 incest. At the root of xenophobia may lie repressed inversion. Racists’ rage embraces everyone, including their disgruntled selves; excluding others makes the insecure feel somehow safer; clutching differential status raises self-esteem which yet keeps sinking. Underlying everybody who feels chosen lurks an equal sense of having been rejected. Racism flags lacking paranoia. Not so strangely, anti-Semitism to this day the product of minds wandering and desperate, originated in the Israelites’ severe exclusiveness;* thereafter Jews taught Christians to be arrogant, unmerciful, and jealous, like Jehovah, not like Jesus. Self-styled Jews have long been ruthless sacrificers, strangers to trees, rootless urban desert folk kicked out of Eden orchard as intolerable sinners by their unforgiving, narrowly denominated deity. The antique Hebrews must be given credit, if for nothing else, for bearing the sole world faith whose chief text says nothing of a senseless afterlife. What is the so-called Jew today, in common with the so-called Christian, but an unrepentant unbeliever, grossly secular, who claims identity with Judaism strictly for its credit rating and its pseudonational prestige? In place of a potentially discreditable nationality a lot of Jews prefer to hold a more distinctive paraphrenia. Shiksas should know that Jews have, if not are, self-mutilated pricks. Self-righteous blocs of treasonous sectarians see nothing base in shmearing congressmen and senators. Almost all “Jews” now join almost all “Christians” with enthusiasm in the absolute iniquity of usury. Brute pastings on their schnozzles teach some gourmands nothing chastening. The Zionists have the unspeakable effrontery to think that “they” (i.e., “their” distant ancestors, a superstitious ragtag troop) invented justice and morality.† As clannish and tightfisted shonikers and exiles they’re distinctly outclassed solely by one group, the unbelievably more deeply prideful Scots, whose actual descendants to this day evince a comparable passion for instruction that’s unfortunately vitiated by a hardly tolerable pedantry. Most modern “Jews,” by far, descend from a Khazar or southern Russian, not from a Semitic, provenance; their Genesis, in very truth, remains a myth—real khazeray. As for entrenched Israelis and evicted Palestinians, forbearance would decree that all the rooted and uprooted Semites, whether “real” or but imaginary, plus whoever is supporting either, be denationalized, banished to the earth. Will building bigger ghettos like bomb-ridden necrophilic Israel help much? Though Jehovah lost his hearing

* Strictly speaking, anti-Semitism, never mind how execrable, is not racism, inasmuch as “Jews,” despite their vainest efforts to stay special and distinct, are not a race. † Israelites did not invent monotheism: nearly all antique philosophers believed in one God.

143 under Nazism, his apparent subsequent recovery of it’s clearly proved misleading: undercover fascists in Amerika and Is-ra-el, idolatrous banditti to a wo/man, now are veterans at hiding torture chambers and internment camps for outraged refugees. No one can gainsay the agelong accomplishments of Zionists, who’ve more than matched their patrons’ topflight lethal piracy; successors of bloodthirsty Anglo-Saxon brigands who invaded and seized North America have insured that no less ruthless Jews could misappropri- ate the land of Palestine from its inhabitants. Such dispossession flouts what Israelites were taught, that all enslavement was wrong: neither souls nor lands were ownable. In imitation of the Brits and Yanks, Israelis now are masterful landgrabbers, larcenists who’ve made sure they have both their own laws and donated deadly force in spades to back their larceny. New York, the capital of Zion, was not built in one day but can be annihilated in one flash. “Who’ve sowed the wind shall reap the whirlwind. Israel . . . now shall . . . be among the Gentiles as a vessel without pleasure.”* Just how kosher is brash seizure of alien homelands in the name of God, an art that model patriot Corp. Hitler tried and botched? Each dreadful “Yaweh,” “Allah” or whatever’s your preferred delusion, desperately needs a decent burial in order to remove the all too human stench. Observe Jerusalem: three phony faiths ruled not by any unitary Deity but by cabals of bloody-minded frauds incapable of bringing peace to anyone. Can that unholiest of citadels be guarded civilly, not criminally, by a lucrative armament industry? Where feisty Hebrews congregate “Shalom” is common—just the word. Those Middle Easterners will not avail themselves of reason even as a last resort. In general it’s true supremacist white people, “safe” above compassion for the numberless street Arabs, are superior . . . superior in chutzpa as in greed and pasty-faced corruption, each a representative repository of our special human (ikey) virulence.

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Behold the lily-livered beadsmen of these modern times bedeviled by red tape, consuming their lives swatting flies while their sweltering underworld disintegrates in smoke: ungodlily and fruitlessly they toil at their lackluster better-paid white-color jobs, distressed predominantly by the dwindling stock-in-trade of poontang in their favorite massage parlors; yet their fairy godfather, the State, provides for them thanks to the triumph of punctilious

* Hosea 8: 7-8

144 beadledom, quite near of kin to bedlam. This may truly be called the survival of the misfittest, of the most apish. Souls least fitted for creating are most suitable for office-holding. Mooching surely is a shame, but is not slaving more so? The industrial complex can use but the minimum of our abilities, insen- sibly can only amputate the rest of them; it must compel us to perform that which we basically detest or are completely bored performing: one is nothing if not average in feeling useless on the job, where personal growth and creative dynamism are not only not desired but present a formidable handicap, where one is welcome to depart at five sharp irrespective whether—never mind one’s value to the bosses as a whistleblower—one’s sole loyalty belongs to higher wages, not to higher interests. Where are the throwbacks to those hardy stiffs and wild impenitent romantics who once rode the rods? Much talk of need for full employment, but no word about engagement of the spirit. Having our most vital qualities ignored so systematically, we are forced into an equal ignorance of them. Being constrained to execute something that’s deadly, totally uninteresting long enough kills one’s capacity to take an interest in anything, especially what’s lively. God forbid that we pay people to do what they would prefer to do. Once upon a time, like healthy soil, gatherers and hunters were engaged profoundly in their occupations, for they worked for those whom they worked with; sharing fruits of our activity now seems a fairy tale, and grownup tasks are but receding memories. Time was when one could take initiative, swallow more than a rare filtered whiff of fresh air; while today we’re not sure there won’t be a tariff to pay if we do . . . and so we don’t. How like old fishwives we keep gossiping about our Government as if it were real and alive, when in reality it is a figment of our dread emasculation. Manikins manipulated, bombs deactivated to a wo/man, we’ve been bought as such and are essentially unemployed in spite of the alleged “good living” we are making. Do the mad days by our selves inside the belly of the juggernaut pass faster lubricated by the dulcifying soda pop of Muzak? Everything’s been prearranged for our domesticated comfort; all we need to do is snuff the air conditioning of our gassed chambers like innocuous, inoculated, loyal lads and lassies, taken in by taking in the spiritual pollution of commercial—not excluding “Public”—TV, which so scrupulously tunes out any portraitures that might offend, threaten, or even move a single stone, including every standardized Plymouth Rock, in the cooped-up multimillion-dollar audience of clucks.

145 _84_

Yes men say No to life, all mob proceedings being a land of Nod; whereas negated thinking constitutes true affirmation. Truth resists becoming a statistic. It is more important to determine what one cannot do than what one can. Is working under widow-makers wise? It doesn’t serve to fly right as a topflight napalm bomber. Choosing wrong work most of us allow our whole lives to become mistakes. The System’s certain that it has one’s number, as in telephone or army or death-camp identity. Whose job, however alien to life, defines a real identity? Disheartening indeed is it to realize that one is identified entirely by what one does, never by who one is. And yet the image of self oddly now seems almost all, one’s actual performance nearly nil. The highest status is accorded the most immature behavior; the leading detrimental daytime practices among ostensibly responsible elites are puerile games, poor trivial pursuits. So many shady acts (like eating shit) there are that one, when economically intimidated, can and will perform to earn a livelihood. What better prospect, for example, if flat on one’ ass end than as always okayed, never kayoed gladi- ator with high hopes of grossing megabucks as sockeroo who’s muscled into the prizefighting dodge, a racket indefensible, thus via hipper-dipper headed flat out for a flattener and flat-out flop if only one will take a dive? Must all punched-out plug-uglies, sausages long caught flat-ass flatfooted, not be strik- ingly slug-nutty long before—as precondition to—becoming boxers? “Take a gander at this sweet gig, at this permanent position,” many a slaphappy rocky hammerhead, dead ringer for a stiff who’s barely semiconscious after lengthy pavement pounding, can’t help smirking in the cushy crypt he has reserved—a hedge against and yet enclosure of decay. What if the scale itself is rigged and wrong? Capitalism’s essence is to hit one when one’s down. The crazy frightfulness of nearly all employments, not just those in sweatshops underlying the clean front-door Cosa Nostra’s stinking rag trade, coincides with the state of die-hard collaborators’ spirits: each graft meets a “need” because the alternate is swifter self-destruction.* Why so pleased and proud to do a job on others? Kept alive by workaholics, the assumed necessity for nine-to-fives is a neurotic symptom and a crutch “required” to assert self-overestimation and alleviate depression in an underworld where slavery’s a luxury and luxury a slavery. In fact few workers are not bored out of their minds with their jobs; most weekly think (if seldom say) “Thank God it’s Friday.” Many small-time captives view

* So many wops prefer to have some goombah wipe them out.

146 incarceration as a sleep, a minor inconvenience. What’s commonly endur- able is scarce enjoyable. Most moil not manual but organizational—for God’s sake don’t leave social service out—exists to magnify the workers’ self-esteem regardless of potential benefits to others. Corporate and government administrators organize the work; professionals appear to execute it; their subordi- nates, routinely female, actually do it: down the line the sluffing top-drawer hustlers generally are remunerated ten times as much as the hardpressed underlings for roughly one tenth as much labor. In Public Relations, that craft of reliable misrepresenting, to impress the syndicate’s top tiers is even more important than to dupe the public. Each bureaucracy per se, perforce, is hostile to democracy: each faceless pecking order sharply curbs the conscience. Every agent must do everything from A to izzard strictly by the book; in any hierarchy each toil has to know its place—never attempt to wag the dog. Inexorably the secret, close to total power of the bureaucratic apparatus undermines all human powers. Anyone who dares investigate the anatomic breeding grounds of serfdom inside a “democracy” risks being pilloried as antidemocratic. First of all to cast stones are those ciphers tops at pressing into service that will-o’-the- wisp, the democratical ideal, to help them pocket privileges for their selves. Imposing anonymity is knotted with demanding unanimity. Bureaucracy is rule by Nobody, where no one is accountable but everyone indebted, genesis of worldwide rage and chaos. Uniformity, the semblance of equality, is prized because it spares the bureaucrats from agonizing choices handling real-life complex individuals. The Munchkins nearly always feel responsible to their positions, almost never to their fellows. Functionaries that in cubicles successfully commit to memory the Book (their regulation manual, a solemn covenant for thwarting any free, intrusive spirit) have effectively forestalled themselves as snurges ever being blamed for bungles. Is it moving and cathartic, somehow tragic, to observe all those masked egos at work giving such discreet performances? It takes a dogged racist sleazebag like J. Edgar Hoover, hateful far beyond redemption, to direct the way ahead for generations of developing Shamericans. To get into life, one may have to get out: hence these boots in the prat. Can a side of beef be thawed inside the locker? How can those submersed in murkiest corruption see or smell it? When all good and ugly jobs are finished with for good and all, the eight-hour day has ended and the twenty-four begun. Meanwhile to the collectivistic wallah or ass kisser that’s lethargic self one ministers, not to oneself, who is humanity.

147 _85_

“We are weary . . .” rue the lazy. So they halt and, in a funk, dejected, hunker down, then languidly slump in the snow. Remorse serves to console the poky indolent for their futility; procrastinators specialize in frittering away creative opportunities. What ails the plaintive slowpokes? Coward-ice? A costive resignation to mean tedium? Plain slackness? Or perniciously anemic ethics? Normally we say No to temptation at least once weakly. Conscience keeps us not from misbehaving but from relishing it. Vigorous morale depends on inner leadership by no one and on integrated aims of no one. Come now, dawdling comrade sluggards, get your asses in gear: that’s more than enough yet of your easy torpor and cold feet. Yes, I know that many really are afflicted with bad cases of the wearies and mean well thus dillydallying, like bumps on logs sitting around on their dilated rusty-dusties, “jest rusting . . . .” Better wear than rust out. Tarry any longer woebegone, snowed under by a static spirit, and you’re apt to “wake up” frozen stiff. A quitter never wins, nor does a winner quit. To wait for optimum conditions is to forfeit the top of the waiter’s own condition. Off your duff and up and over the resistless precipice, despondent one: the summit calls.

_86_ Why make the self so small? It’s not so big. We’d rather run our selves down than pass unremarked. With eyes like pissholes in the snow, the abject alcoholic, steeped in mokus, stumbling with the staggers, he of the imaginary jumbo ballocks, ever taking leave of abstinence and headed for the funny farm, is actually suffering from a giddy hauteur;* but fleeing struggle, getting plastered, only corks up one’s hostility and arrogance. Habitual apologizers

* If sponges’ object is to win their egomaniacal superegos’ daily bawling out, the clear solution is to lose—desert—the wobbly selves that must indulge in such steady reproofs. Are alkis self-suppressive inverts to a wo/man? Thus the mere idea one might dry out petrifies; we may imbibe at bottom mostly out of dread of death. (It’s clear that children have no “need” for booze.) Each puerile bottle-sucker, desperate since stinko for a stream of gargles, burps until his bedpan furnishes relief. How close is the relationship between addiction in its every form and chronic onanism—easy means of shirking real involvement in a frightful stressful world? The clear effect of alcohol eventually mimics the defective parent’s conduct: singing praises when at table, later kicking in the chops. Being addicted treacherously poses as release while simultaneously digging one in deeper. With perversity addiction keeps each addict in the selfsame painful fix that led to it.

148 fish for compliments, slyly compensating for a speciously low self-esteem. False modesty: nothing to be proud of. Must we be such sorry-ass floorwipers, such flat doormats, dragging ass, forbearing to a fault, bowing and scraping, always stooping to concur and eating dirt that heels vouchsafe us? Footmen, faithless subjects, bend their knees enough, but eating humble pie when are they going to bend their spirits? Can’t, can they? Whine they that they’re wretches, filthy things? Agreed: they’re whiners, wretches, filthy things. “I’m so relieved my poor frail miserable self is perishing.”—Amen to that. Enlightenment may mean discerning the delusion that one’s humble, helpless, and confused. Wet legs forever griping are forever griping all. Humility is relatively easy for one absolutely without gifts. Whose groveling self-image is in secret out of this world should in fact be. Wrong the notion that a self- effacer can be happy only sunk in misery, recounting some “new” tale of woe: as much as anyone she stands in need of understanding—mainly by herself.

_87_

Headstrong is heartweak. Ripe for crumpling, falling for all, standing up for nothing, puffed-up puffballs talk big, but are generally fainthearted punks, pretty punk company. Inflating feeble selves by blowing smoke is but a prelude to, a preparation for, their full collapse. Exaggerating sins and prejudice that others harbor we presume will highlight our own virtues and unbiased- ness. Thus by overestimating our compatriots we satisfy our wish to cut them down to pygmy size. Accustomed sovereign contempt conceals a chronically raw skin, overly high notions vulnerable to humiliation. Man craves law and order so that he can relish laying down the one and bawling out the other. Must our knee-jerk reflexes take after bulls’ to scarlet skirts or, indiscriminately, to white flags unfurled? Must one be quite so temperamental (mostly temper but more than a little mental), losing one’s head like a match when lit? Back from the dragging daylong treadmill pushing pen or turning nuts and bolts, resigned to doing time and dancing to the Corporation’s tune, superfluously sweating torturously in the ranks and wriggling tortuously under snoopervisors, hopelessly out of the loop yet “happy” to be hopping through hoops, somehow squirming, squeaking, through the swollen tube unnoticed without having to make even one substantial decision, being superficially obliging and ingratiating out of fearfulness, not kindliness, while all the time pretending not to be rebellious and in high dudgeon, careful not to be caught scoffing on the job—in short, acting ideal acey-deucy apple polisher—now,

149 ere one e’er could utter knife, a lightning-striking highflier in his roaring for- ties can let fly, going like a bat out of hell, as-cend free as any loopy, uptight, split-arse air-farce brass hat fully torqued and fast propelled to burn up and shoot down the airwaves, dodging flak from and escaping being shot down in flames by his implacable superiors, truly caught in the chain of command, vent his own pent-up furies, discharge the terrific overload that threatens his high-tension system, reach the flash point, blow a fuse, release his flaming hate ball, in his pulpit fulminate without enlightenment, revengefully pound table, wife, and youngsters, kick the cringing housepets, not to mention sidekicks, wave about (without pronouncing F.T.A.) his favorite imperialist pronunciamentoes, never mind how smelly, to that load of wind his lordly self’s content . . . until tomorrow morn, when an alarm bell or a squawk box orders grounded ding-ding to arise and race out to the factory, sounding his febrile dread of being cashiered for tardiness in punching the redundant time clock, inexcusable in the unseeing eyes of God-Almighty Work. One guess who desperately needs to be given the boot. To get a piece of quite a few minds is to get a piece of shit. Who daily, nightly flips his or her lid, flown into an astronautically superhuman ire, way off the beam, hits the ceiling, raises the roof, and flops: up in the air like any yoyo’s coup de main, the dippy exhibition-wheel flipflop, all the rage, fails to amuse heaven. Soft replies turn not away wrath from a hopelessly addicted A1 choleric suckling on them: the sole sovereign remedy in such a case is to smite the hip-shooter hip and thigh, to beard that fraidy cat the roaring lion in his den. Some vermin do their damnedest to force co-workers to walk the plank. To get some managerial harriers to lay off, one may be obliged to lay them out in lavender. To take the heat off may necessitate vacating where one is. No body is immune to its goose pimples, and no boastful roughneck throwing duck-fits but who hides at heart a maudlin milksop. Might all kinds of drunks in limine have suffered in a state of jitters? Furious means “frighted out of fear”, according to Will Shakespeare. Generally martinets can dish it out but cannot take it. In the shaking fists of every angry knuckle-headed tyrant or sidewinder tremble fingers of a puny craven slave, identifiable by his severely palsied brain—excessive bone upstairs and insufficient in the back. A vicious dog or rapist runs more deeply scarred and frightened than his prey. What homage-hunting three-letter men, slagging others, seek is recompense for river-bottom valuations of themselves. Many a swaying bucko is so dull that fisticuffs strike him as promising deliverance. The overgrown delinquents who are power addicts as a rule seem driven to retain live-in housekeepers,

150 being incapable of making their own meals or darning their own socks. In raggedy-ass cultures raggedy-ass households are the rule. Vulgarity inheres not in our dress or speech or manners but in attitude, insensitivity. Much miscommunication’s spawned by carelessness and boorishness. Thinking that one is sensitive is proof that one is not. The hypersensitive have least consideration, are the most obtuse. The pinnacle of many a goof’s sense of humor is to cut a fart. Least blushing is done by those with most cheek. Strangely misan- thropes are frequently unwitting, dead sure that they’re victimized for being friendly to all: self-deception is their all too human forte. Innocent youths should be disabused of any hope that less than 4% of present-day society consists of psychopaths. Graduates who plan surveys of flip-lipped churlishness need only poll our surly underworld of normal dopers, those forever swearing off whose personalities are poisonous amalgams, whose best manners aren’t half bad but all bad. Many folk obnoxiously come coated in thick rind. The trait uneducated souls most lack is tact. Political expediency’s crooked index finger beckons to young activists. A gee-whiz tyro social servant soon discovers that the world is lousy, packed with yobs and dipshits, overladen with tat; all of his initial good intentions foundering on crass reality. Lie down with curs, and you’ll get up with vermin. Take care that you aren’t known, as was “Jesus,” by the company you’re keeping. Average folk rank oddly as the most colossal egoists, including you-guess-who. Curmudgeons expert at collecting grievances are able to detect the scantiest trace element of depreca- tion deep inside a massif’s bedrock of regard; proud of their prejudices, they are satisfied that those alone substantiate they’re still alive. Most people are so mean, such warts, that it seems faint praise to appraise one as above the average. The self-contempt and spiritual poverty of humankind determine its contemptible societies and economic poverty. There are no ordinary folk, yet weirdly nearly all, identifying themselves as ethnically singular,* refuse to recognize their servitude to economic class. The most original soul will find others most original. Might everyone be ultimately capable of acts of derring- do? Convinced s/he is the best thing that has turned up since sliced bread, the “ordinary” person is a weirdo and a genius afraid to face that fact, refusing to accept noblesse oblige. Both courage and dishonor generally get evaluated by the standards of a torpid philistine society. Most people dare not trust their inmost force— indeed are scared to death of it. All that some mythic heros ever beat were

* Conditioned, also, by the myth that Revolution is fait accompli.

151 hasty camouflaged retreats. True grit is needed to avow a wholesome fear, for instance to forsake foolhardy chauvinism. A performer with bad nerves can yet prove nervy. Who appears most cowardly may quietly be most courageous—one who welcomes countless deaths in one life, dying to all yesterdays and all tomorrows, living noninflictively today. To be slain does not necessarily embody the most direful fate. A dull or rotten life is surely grimmer, more humiliating, than a swift decease. The conscienceless do not fear being seen naked, i.e., as they are: unprepossessing, tactless, scruffy, mean, of no account. Only one hell; we think? Ah, but our obsequious imagination must be at death’s door! They have been misled who believe democracy a given fact and not a daily onus. Seldom does one try to comprehend confederates, let alone adversaries. Humankind employs thought in the main for circumvention. Idiocracy today embodies nihilism. Freedom, counter to the bland psychosis that we boast a “free society,” is being aware of our abysmal bondage. Sanity necessitates one’s sounding one’s routine insanity. We’re crooked till we sense that we’re distrait. _88_

Entire weakness lies in disavowal of all weakness. Pride not only has a fall: it is the Fall, the sin most unoriginal. Encountering a full-blown narcissist, one’s given to inspect our common human ugliness. Conceit is its own executioner; spite’s shotgun backfires without fail. The bravest warrior does not fight; who least distinguishes between himself and others is the most distinguished, winning hands down. But how exquisite it is to grade our selves as hooperdoop- ers, feeling “them” to be so different from all the rest of drearisome suburbia and hoisted high above the common ruck of specialists; how nobly old-fashioned our cherished names* and comme il faut our stereotyped appearances decked out with thick bird’s-nest soup-strainers hung up to project images of virility, to ensconce our impotence. The most officious offish persons, first- rate backseat drivers, as a rule aren’t bureaucrats; a pack of varlets posing as premiers, so many unofficial sods treat people like dirt underfoot, acting as if their own shit doesn’t stink. A ned, if only in his head, can pass himself off as a nob. Whoever’s tops at snubbing others rates as moral mite. A soul that’s stuck-up, stiff-arsed, may require unwittingly to die to get off his high horse.

* Rooting out one’s ancestry is surely done to boost one’s ego faced with all the damning evidence, especially the world’s supreme indifference. Heraldic clan appurtenances like a plaque just register how sadly insignificant a prole or bourgeois citizen now feels. What is invested in a moniker save vanity? 152 It’s high time every turd who thinks himself King Shit (i.e., who harbors shit for brains) cleaned up his own. The broad demand for deep respect by far exceeds the actual supply. How queer that cleanly prigs characterized by their punctilio can manage to circumvent ever getting their clocks properly cleaned. Leading with their chins, snotty elitists strangely seldom take it on them, yet are stunned if a swat follows. Paranoiacs ever looking down and dumping on their neighbors, even hincty penthouse dwellers, live on bluffs. Exclusive coteries are vicious circles. Masterly as any supercilious traducer, many a high-tony soul who certainly has all the answers is appreciated quite wherever he goes, or whenever. Bores are people that pontificate that people are bores. Should one pity those pissheads whose drop-dead lists are endless? Men describe them selves most sharply when they carp at others. Blinkered narcissists habitually act like disregardful and respectless roadhogs. Uppity, standoffish, people generally do not care to give the time of day to slow wits, bigots, sinners; therefore they are careful not to eat or drink with them.* The sniffy sinners, bigots and slow wits are who? Most deadly sins appear to lose their deadliness when they’re committed by one’s lifeless self. It’s hard for any egotist to know a soul, not least himself. Could what we call our independence be no more than edginess about supposed constraint? A free man’s hedges are but flower beds. Walls are for “safety,” for protecting private property in vain. One’s best defense is no fence, oneself being in need of none. But this we fail to see because we’re keeping up the useless guards of our defensive selves, which are in truth offensive. Programmed self-defenders have a hard time functioning harmoniously in the trenches. No tribe—whether Hebrews, a First “Nation,” Slavs, whatever—ever can acknowledge that it hasn’t the remotest clue whence it originated; so the all-too-humans fashion insular Creator myths, each generation altering the fine points, amplifying their collective muddle. Most folk hardly notice as their culture goes to the wall. Boundaries are said to tranquilize; in fact they alienate: simply hear the hunkies’ sinewy folk harmonies resound- ing from the sanguinary Caucasus or Balkans,† mental landscapes too long

* Institutionalized underlings like soldiers, prisoners, and students are described for what they “are” when grazing. † Eurasia bloodily removed the emperors but left the lust for bloody tyranny in place. Peculiarly offensive is the Central European mental illness—to which we owe two world wars—that’s massive ethnic egocentricity. The Prussians have detested Slavs out of denial that they were themselves half Slavic, much as Hitler hated Jews for the same reason. (How mortifying his very existence ought to have been to all Yid philanderers.) 153 riven with armored divisions. Chauvinistic peasantries are such compulsive schemers out of grim impoverishment. Personalities, not only plants and animals, given the proper imbecilic preconditioning, develop cankers; not so strangely, there are toxic spirits best avoided. Not just the Caucasians and the Yugoslavs are envy-ridden and superb at taking sudden scunners to, then freezing out, their neighbors: our entire underworld is sick with ceaseless enmities, infested with innumerable permanently parched souls thirsting for fresh vengeance for their tribulations and privations. Not much stress is needed to ignite the paranoiac bigotry lurking in every human being; it’s easy to dispose whole tracts of fearful village idiots, brainwashed by ages of perfidious backbiting and blood feuds, to fantasize a menace from familiar outgroups; all the cataclysmal consequential terrorism readily is rationalized in the name of justice or religion. Who’s most anxious to bash others’ brains out hasn’t any. Evening the score with someone is not getting even-steven. All the signs that bid us Yield or Stop we’ve driven through. Yet did we feel our give, few shocks would fail to be absorbed. Let all strange flowers blossom in us, let each garden be eclectic, bountiful and protean; for natural stability dwells in profuse diversity; is not variety of fruits, from avocado soup* to nuts, the spice of life and in itself a cornucopia? One has to touch all bases to be unknown star of stars.

_89_

According to the good book Oxford—bad news for divines and capitalists— holy men are whole men and the root of freedom’s love. Punitive justice? Maniacal wisdom? Is not every judgment vain, including this one? Any soul continually badmouthing, casting aspersions on, his neighbors has himself committed some transgressions, oversteppings which are weighing on him; who considers everyone else to be crappy may subliminally be offended most by his own reek while doing others dirt. What alien who’s narcissist can speak well of the bridge that carried him across? To play God, one must first deny one’s being: so less hard to think for others than for oneself. Playing God (bereft of self-esteem) requires his nibs to be forever passing judgment. Self-distrusters are the peerless specialists at cutting others; each tight-ass is likely to retain a lengthy shit list. Every associate functions as mirror, which

* Solely one Woman has the knack required for preparation of el aguacate, perfect salad dressing that’s simply delish, the only duds (besides their customers) being cooks.

154 corroborates one’s nebulous existence, since one can’t acknowledge inner emptiness, fear of exposure, vulnerability to criticism, in turn leading to self- loathing and perfectionism. Judges judge because they’re poor in spirit, scorn to enter the sphere of their victims. Many hoity-toity “gentlemen” and “ladies fair,” by no means all of them elitist Brits, inveterately perpetuate, with manners markedly piss-elegant, the spiritual equivalent of bumping off their fellows. There are sickos, sad to say, who get their kicks from smearing, even burning, people. The whole law is not fulfilled in just one saying, namely, “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” but in actualizing it. Yet where’s the need for saying or the uppercrust self with which to compare a neighbor if one really is in love? The ever-present, all-pervasive secret is less negative than neutral vision, witnessing impartially and not judgmentally. Can mortals wise up only if they’re forced to? When some long-eared creatures tell one that one has the earmarks of an ass, who listens well without reacting? The reaction is one’s ego and the ass. Wherever one is being tried, at very least two are on trial. Those who sit in judgment as a rule are over their heads. Judge less hastily and heedlessly, for under every vice is hidden virtue and vice versa. When you take the trouble to get to know someone better curiously the bad sort ameliorates and the good sort deteriorates. Conceit, oppression, and injustice are not products of inherent evil but of garden suffering misap- prehended. No such being as “a good soul” or “an evil person,” only honesty and dupes—of self, in shadings infinitely gradated. No label but is limited to being a libel. Scapegoating deforms the truth, disfigures individuality, twists people into effigies for burning or hung punching bags. We human beings are most alike in our despicable pretense of being unlike and enemies. Humanity’s a species of which every member’s a distinct variety. The crime of genocide lies less in the suffering involved, about which its practitioners could not care less, than in the conceit that others are beneath humanity. As among chimps, the world’s divided into “them” and “us,” alleged barbarians and human beings. No matter that “the enemy” presents no actual threat to the clan’s existence; crazily the latter thus depends upon an Enemy; each ego’s actually bolstered, flattered, by a formidable foe.* Driven by angst, the human brain is staggeringly complex, yet is ever oversimplifying, falsifying, masking mystery and chaos, to promote its petty interests and to forestall its liberation. Who’s not hung up rendering simplistic the essentially complex, for instance bound to primitivize the opposite sex? How radically distinct are

* Grinding on in this rut, we face ecological debacle if not nuclear catastrophe.

155 individuals, even siblings; our diversity of gifts refutes all theories of group otherness. Intelligence cannot be accurately shrunk to types. Societies “need” dummy enemies plus biological mystiques to fortify their very own fearfully horny selves. Each pharaoh wields his monstrous powers by concocting and broadcasting world conspiracies. Our gaggling glee observing tar-and-feather slapstick helps us (not least the holders of quills) feel better—at least than the mummers. Nobody is no-good; all are both pure and defiled. Even a decent soul is subject to committing an indecent deed: the sign of honor in a sinner is refusal to repeat the blunder. Fault a malefactor only after trudging miles in his moccasins. Easily as a drum roll does the rule, “Suspend your judgment,” roll off any tongue; but actually to suspend one’s judgment is not quite so easy. Every vain soul (which means everybody) badly needs to take a hard look in the mirror.

_90_

Honey is a product of long diligence, not of like discourse. Humankind produces so much language, creates so little meaning. What one does is more significant than what one says or from what elevation. Souls above all who are all mouth ought to cut the cackle: one responds, “the hell with all that noise.” So few of us will put our money where our mouths are. Praters busy spitting in their fists tend to accomplish piss-all. Words, words: they act not, but acts talk; well-done as a rule outshines well-said. A field turned fully over in the mind remains unfarmed. Bravado is rife, bravery is rare. An ounce of red example’s worth a ton of parlor-pinkish admonition; though has either worth to someone with initiative? Feverish exhortation indicates a chilly faith. Habitual prolixity betrays a need to hide one’s true desires. Humanity may have found voice all right and yet no ear. It’s not sufficient to be well-intentioned; for the consequences of our actions or inaction are what tell at last; not words but lives are ultimately judged. To care with vigor, love without complacency, and serve without servility—who can do that today? To labor under indignation, yet not lose lucidity, nor have recourse to violence—who can do that today? Brute force indeed does change the world—to one more brutal still. Great power involves retaining a green pith. Who can become profound while yet remaining innocent? Most every soul was born endowed with perfect vision; nearly none will die with it intact. The childish mind is not puerile, nor the violent mind virile. One should feel no shame to be dismissed as innocent or harmless. How can

156 tenderness be held a crime? The man who never weeps at all must never care at all. Being thin-skinned is no barrier to being rich at heart. The misery of others makes a few select souls feel a good deal worse than does their own. Real wealth is spiritual scope. Experience broadens but deepens not; hardens but strengthens not. To be soft without fear of force is tough. Most warriors never realize that dispensing and experiencing life, not death, demands the greater courage. To identify real valor best avoid armed forces. Some low-profile souls may prove more resolute than anybody could imagine. One has to be hardy—for it hurts—to be sensitive. A hero can be far from dangerous. A genuinely forceful spirit can appear to be a shrinking violet. The greatest skill may at first blush look like the veriest futility, and real humility appear most shameless vanity. The truly bold find self-defense superfluous, disarm antago- nism doing absolutely nothing. Gentle hands are guided by strong hearts.

_91_

Compete with no one—no one can compete. In thinking that we’re besting others it’s our selves alone are worsted. Frightened skunks are what skunks the world with a fearsome odor; they tend to steal who most dread being robbed. All thievery will disappear when slavery has disappeared but not before: what use for locks when freedom burgeons? Capitalism’s avarice and Communism’s ideology, both organisms most unnaturally stunted crab apple trees, flourish in our genital suppression’s icy loam. Possessiveness is always symptomatic of deep insecurity developed by deficient care in childhood, which results in flawed relationships in “adulthood,” the victim seeking reas- surance by amassing various insentient objects. Where is incapacity to trust in others rooted if not in original neglect? Collectors’ pride in ownership involves display of grievance camouflaged. The children who purloin habitually suffer from a puritanic want of love, a shortage of self-worth, the “crimes” of pilfering being makeshift substitutes therefor and the apprentice larceners’ security-snitching seniors by far the worse offenders, into deeper doo-doo than five-finger discounts; as a rule the pukka culprit is an unapproachable or overbearing martinet who’s never satisfied with dress parades despite his or her self forever failing to be up to scratch. Only be careful that the youngsters you embrace belong to you—if not, you may well be charged with the most intolerable perversion: in our uncouth kultur of coolth warmth of any kind we have forbidden all expression, open fires being so risky in this bone-dry jungle. Fear, appropriate as an attentive defensive reaction to real threats,

157 permitted mammals on the African plains to survive; anxiety, an objectless phenomenon marked by paralysis, is artificial and conducive to extinction. Jealousy, grounded in ownership, dreads loss; while envy, based on nonpossession, fears failure to gain; both forms of apprehensive greed seem predisposed to invite frustration, both are aimed at downgrading associates and lead to sour success. The less respect—equating to potential envy—jealous souls feel for their rivals, the more they are tortured by their presence. Envy typically is disguised—susceptible to self-deception and evinced by self-glorification which the envier denies while denigrating others. Better fall short doing one’s own duty, which is to love everybody, than succeed performing theirs, which is to love oneself.

_92_

Good folk are willing to lie on their bellies, but greatness prefers to stand. The good is the enemy of the best. Insult equality with quality: fight ice with fire. ’Tis easy to be likeable, but not so to be venerable. Is one forced to suffer all fools gladly? Many kittle-cattle wallow in the quicksand of the nonessential and from envious discomfort want to suck one into wallowing with them. The trouble with possessing leisure time is mainly those who would obstruct the use of it. Observe without ressentiment the gnawing envy and lust for revenge of proles. Uproarious reptilian habitués of melancholic quarters like saloons are readier to give a man the glad hand, yank him downwards to their level, than to pull themselves upwards to his. Each creature has to learn its special way not to be trod upon by others. Take care with whom you rub elbows, for mean-spiritedness is contagious. Much can be expected from one’s fellows—much of lowest common denominational opposition. Freedom’s what most citizens seek for their selves and not least what they seek to wrest from others. Many praisers blame you, many blamers praise you. Pity of self constitutes the gravest threat, others’ pitilessness the boon without peer. Yet truth, being tops, lives beyond levels, opposition, threats, or boons.

_93_

Chameleonlike is the mind: be warned. A good deal may depend upon the atmosphere, soggy or crisp, in which one finds oneself: humidity can saturate mind with stupidity. In any mildewed underworld so dismal, periodically inundated by enormous waves of folly, prudence lies in staying high and dry,

158 if possible—close to our species’ upland roots. Preserving equability means keeping cool but genial one’s climate. Even so, a wind or lightning storm, no weak disturbance, clears the turbid or fogmatic outlook. Cold enkindles, heat extinguishes, spirit; though a summery setting seems felicitous for loving. Climate, whether clement or severe, unobviously influences lifestyle. Balmy southlands suit the fading aging, prematurely so or pensioned; anyone requiring little-changing temperatures suffers from a threatened or effete condition; bodily discomfort, educational enough in youth, provides no payoff to the graybeard. Moderately sedentary, simians stay simians in their salubrious preserves;* contrariously, migratory man, abominable snower and wild specialist in uncommitted adaptation curious to a fault,† developed through adversity, via extremes, out on the gloomy fringe or the sharp verge of things, in evil weather, tempered by tempestuous skies—hence his darksome nature always on edge, under a cloud. The high-wheeling sun, the bronzing sire of life yet bringer too of languor, is no friend to thought. Still, not our oppo- sitional surroundings’ drawbacks most depress and frustrate us, keeping us under the weather and between sunbursts, but our own. We put low value on what we possess because we bought it without earning it; we’re drawn toward remote and what we dream are greener hills because we’ve failed to sink roots in the soil on which we dwell. An Eden is revealed as such only to those removed from it. What land on earth is lacking some grave faults? There’s no soil that will not support the weed of slavery. No country, also,—never mind how sordid throughout—but can be a holy land, and truth shows no respect for any ego, striding on beyond the doddering. The chosen people comprehends all people and the promised land, no tragic sequela of some unholy covenant, waits everywhere. _94_

Try to excel yet to remain unknown, at least to keep the lowest profile. To live truthfully may be to hide one’s light under a bushel, though it burn one * Over half of their lives (over 12 hours a day, 22 years out of 40) chimps do absolutely nothing at all: can we vidiots match that? † Might those indefensible intruders known now as the Vikings have been representative humanity par excellence? Superlative adaptability derives from elementary refusal to adapt. Was that what kept not only Jews from vanishing into obscurity but also humankind itself? A dubious success at best. Creative readjustments to an ever-growing alienation in a finite world are problematical, eventually running out of ways out. Homo quaerens: Man the quester—ever searching, never satisfied.

159 up. And yet in truth one cannot hide one’s light, for it’s already hidden to perfection. The divine holds no grudge over being beneath notice. Wisdom never minds being inconspicuous, for weeds outgrow all other plants, and the flower noticed most is castrated. What’s the swagger, for example, of a Yankee literary superstar, that victim of his heady victories and happy fortune, if not compensation for emasculation by his Mom,* a pretense of being other than he is, superinduced by his forced isolation? Thwarted mothers of this underworld, en garde: at whose knees but yours did we learn to fear reality and lust for miasmatic glory? Over fame, as over sexual success, a certain smell of death forever hangs. The curious attempts made by the odd soul at being published, read, and celebrated are flirtations with La Femme, a half-inviting getting fucked, he being at heart reserved about desiring that demise before decease. It may take flackery’s attention to bring down in flames someone insanely vain. Almost by definition dignitaries are unworthy; V.I.P.s are mostly schlepps, nobodies. Every step up in the world is ten steps down in truth. Beware who eulogizes you more than who censures you. The root of prestige is illusion. Loving spirit, when extolled, is frequently transmogrified, unnoticed, into an unloving spirit. One of us particularly is a striking “leader”? Good for landing a liberal mess of whoppers? We’ve dug in and we’ve established our homes and our gangland jobs? Then we may also have dug out and so established our graves in dead Squaresville, making our accommodation with the buried many. We are pioneers, trailblazers, yet expecting to be lauded and surrounded as celebs in our time by ecstatic followers? Then we mistake the true conditions of our calling, such as being alone from year to year and age to age, traveling unaccompanied in frosty reaches of creation, of high strains. No prophet but must be pariah—never honored in his “home”; for all land is, all lands are, to him home. Exile can provide the necessary in to one’s evolving insight. Being infamous, for good or ill, demands becoming famous. Winning favor means one now can lose it. Wanting universal disapproval’s stamp, who can be great? What man of honor cares to nurse ambition in an era when the hoi polloi bestows the honors? If you need fame badly, want it so bad you can taste it, you are sadly apt to get it. What truth-seeker seeks to bask among the glitterati, institutionalized in the glow of nutsos’

* Thus having turned both louse and souse can seem excusable. A male or female chauvinist who’s suffering from chronic braggadocio was years ago denied real warm support.

160 admiration, coveting that most peculiar privilege of being accosted, badgered and besieged, by courtiers, by total strangers? Are we to presume the spectacle of exhibitionistic “solitary” moralists such as Thoreau and Nietzsche cries out for keen lamentation? Better live till ninety happily obscure than half that in a stupid public glare. Who wishes to become a spiritual authority—an oxymoron—wracked by stress? Why crave to get your sticky fingers into the pie of that skyey vapor, “immortality,” or, hearing the sweet sound of critical acclaim, to gain at least a measly notice or two, some petit succès d’estime? What puffs can be less short-lived than short breaths? Who hopes to make a splash in the unbounded pond? Fishing for compliments, man does so want to be the regal center of attention, stretching, bursting, standing out as boffo knockout in a fatally dazzling arena, but it’s not to be: attentiveness is when we don’t attend. What’s utterly essential: never to forget one’s utter inessentiality. Truth’s hallmark never was nor will be fame. Much cackling may proclaim the smallest egg. Each self-anointed superstar one safely can assume is way out of his league. Most of us take for granted that the famous are the great; but every name and all fame may be but vainglory and ill fame, each star far more ephemeral than stardust. Every personage performs as comet blazing momentarily, then gone forever; to become a whizbang notable is not what anybody needs. The meaning of fame’s absolutely naught. Who is remembered by futurity is also in the process dismembered, posterity being what descends, however ill digested, from society’s posterior, dried-up celebrities, stray bits of immaterial excreta, passing dingleberries. Every underworld rewards the evidence of merit, never merit itself, which is not in evidence. For fame requires more vanity than genius, panache than sensitivity, ambition than imagination—and, not least, “good luck.” Posterity accords at least as much regard to evil deeds as to good: Hitler’s apt to “outlive” Albert Schweitzer. Lust for notoriety is rooted in a doubt or loss of the ability to love. A fool may think achieving something or becoming somebody will bring him joy or recognition, whereas only being no thing, nobody special, can assure his recognition of joy. What we choose to call our real achievements may be no more than mere garments worn to hide our naked limitations. Excellence’s guerdon is no gain; for how could one get an award for being free, be given recompense for abiding autonomy? In dynamite lives no nobility, and there’s a Prize more priceless than high praise. To worship and identify with emi- nent personages is to pamper one’s imaginary ego. Takeoffs may amuse but normally are nose-dives. There’s no body in or on earth who is not a Very

161 Unimportant Person. If we really prized what’s noble, would we honor it save by surpassing it?* Unrecognized success is nearest good sports, won by the seats of their pants, when utter failure seems most certain. No success is final, nor is failure always fatal. To save face may mean to lose integrity. After long years of unrewarded hunting one may finally hit pay dirt unaccounted for. All hope goes, then may triumph, for a wonder, come as total wipe-out. Mediocrities succeed, whereas the rightfully ambitious fall short. The most fruitful life is the most thankless; the best gifts of all must find the fewest of appreciators, even their unwonted plaudits for the most part being a sitting on their hands.

_95_

Outsiders travel on the inside track, each loner’s one far from alone. The human brain is a development decidedly peripatetic, hewn from untold rovers’ raids; without the strengthening of limbs permitting an erect mode of progression and far-reaching exploration, thence dependence upon immemorial hunting usage, our minds could not but remain prehumankind’s. Who wanders makes discoveries, while sedentaries are sedate, staid, steeped in seda- tives, salted away. By multiplying their belongings the frustration of nonwan- derers is not relieved. Corruption concentrates where circulation is defective. Branding “welfare” a damn crooked mess is but a facile tactic of displacing blame onto the poor for what is generated by systemic capitalist defects. The minority of material parasites malingering on welfare rolls can scarcely be as scandalous as the majority of spiritual deadbeats and chair-polishers, well- situated vags essentially unreformable and unemployable though for the present paid to warm their seats—all eking out a dying on the dole. No doubt on both sides of the desk the creep is common who is willing to get a free ride. The myth of sovereign freeloader has assumed its throne thanks to an underlying petit-bourgeois dread that all too many joes may choose to jib at hateful joe-jobs we would jib at if we dared. The problem is less starry-eyed “do-gooders” than night-blind do-nothings pulling down the blinds on underworld and selves, perpetually going with the chemic/electronic flow. The true if terminal religion of the Christian young and old alike is quick narcosis; no less than free-wheeling wheeler-dealers do speed-driven tripsters,

* Which does not mean getting the better of it.

162 maundering about without a grip, forever drifty, traipsing rootlessly hither and yon, keep up their debonair appearances with the depression-bred relief of tranquilizers, whether booze or dope;* unconsciously aghast at death, intent on blacking out the nighttime jungle that’s the human soul, both types of deadheads, senseless plastics and long-wilted flower children, dressed “up” in the latest costumes, carry on in their sere circles by hallucinating everything is beautiful, above all seeking peacefulness, passivity, illusory release from tension with a suitably jejune companion, good old trusty T.V. or that willing groupie Mary Jane, or maybe just an analgesic called employment or public assistance; meantime it so happens everything is far from beautiful, and what is needed is real people having natural, not drug-induced, energy who, since they see their ugliness as ugliness, no longer shag around. Each drugster’s truly gone—to blazes. Screwing everyone in sight, like snuffing every hit obtain-able—how very bourgie, citified, ersatz. With great éclat both blockish squares and tripped-out hipsters, cynics and fatalists, exponents of a gloomy doom and tragic magic, have arrived, they know the score; whereas, no less aberrant than abhorrent, truth is still en route and unrenowned, it travels incognito, under sobriquet or nom de guerre, and empty-handed, yet full-hearted, headed nowhere in particular, free of itineraries and crooks’ tours, solely on the lookout for unwaded creeks, for unwatched cataracts. To call this volume, for example, rambling and undisciplined is a putdown that assuredly lifts. Better be a grungy hobo spiritually footloose than a perfumed pillar of society whose head is screwed on tight and wrong. One must be down and out, on the ropes, laying low, before, resilient, one can be up and in. Must every genuine philosopher not be disreputable? Social climbers to a wo/man have yet to sense they’re in free fall.

_96_

Why be “grown-up” if it means one is no longer growing up? Babes deem seniority superiority. A little less civility is needed, please, if we are to become a lot more civilized. Prebreakfast testiness toward one’s self, dispensing with

* Cocaine’s effects are well-nigh perfect as a metaphor for our age: minds are numbed while egos are inflated; idiotic masses dream that being laid-back means being liberated. Many filthy coolies once forgot their hunger and their vermin smoking hashish; still more freaking slaves to this day freebase coke and/or smoke public idols, “God,” or their pet snatch or dork.

163 celebratory beverage and toast, will test the self. Prefer to seem untrue to underworld than be so to oneself. Can’t we be just a wee more inconsiderate of our demanding selves? Whose manners are the most respectful may respect the least their compeers. Most despicable of selfishness consists in never being prepared to abide completely by oneself. To keep one’s own pace, one cannot but walk alone, thus making one’s self scarce. Howls of adulation and of insult do not faze a wise man in the eerie silence of his icy eyrie. In Lubyanka is it not wise to keep one’s own counsel? The canaille succeed in noticing a single failing in an upright spirit while ignoring sundry virtues. Win celebrity, and countless termites crawl out of the woodwork to sustain a flock of flickers. The real temper of all gung-ho fans appears to teeter on a razor-narrow edge between idolatry and execration. Brickbats are as likely as bouquets to be hurled at an elevated spirit. Could praise be primarily a ploy to raise the praiser? Itching after moral vindication, even flattery, but never criticism, people turn disciples not intent to learn from but agreeable to teach their chosen masters. Springbutts push their betters willy-nilly into service of them. Impudently, with much whoop-de-doodle, lionizing a great spirit, even one reported wildly to fling mane about, will fail to make it roar out of its pride. Those shouting loudest in acclaim have scarcely heard the acclaimee. The noble artist to whom many pay obeisance would—if they but “knew” him in the flesh—receive their condescension or disdain. Communities depersonalize each creator, basking in his aura, trying to absorb at no cost his hard-earned, immortal pith. Fame bids fair to be fruit of artists’ work but turns out theft of that work’s fruit. Apparent gratitude may well at base be an unwitting ploy for more. Those who pay fulsome compliments should not expect receipts. Fools’ praise or dispraise sound so much alike: The first can’t stroke one; can the second strike? The crumbs of flattery and the slop of ridicule taste equally flat to this tongue, oneself. Between the author’s soul and yours, dear reader, there is no comparison. Remark how courteous one is, every other inch a gentleman.* Only a fool tries to please everyone. Do passersby experience an idle whim to meet the hung-up curiosity so that, taunting, they can tender his lips vinegar and stack their green-eyed ordure on his tawny crown, which neither has nor needs

* ’Tis drowsy proles who tend to smile a lot and say, “Have a nice day.”

164 a martyr’s aureole? Dissimilar toto caelo, they have only to traverse several galaxies of the mind, as well as to transcend three or four dimensions of the spirit, and they will indubitably locate him. All they lack to comprehend this is a little reverence, plus thirty centuries’ self-discipline near a few odd characters who debarbarized themselves. You cannot learn self-discipline without self-discipline. Who is so certainly deserving of this work? What bel-esprit is coveting some fruit? Be my guest, help yourself. Has truth not swallowed cheekfuls of contempt, Clasped hands to breast while cheated souls heaped hate Upon its head? Has faith made no attempt To drop the self, opening heaven’s gate? Weird world that prates of loving all neighbors Yet in action toils in an ingrate’s chains; Pays lip service to local gods’ labors, But crushes corsages of human brains. Would I had quills to give our freedom wing! Had fins or fangs could help all shred self’s net, No time would most spend in distrust, doubt’s debt; Swift as bright sunlight, then, the aid I’d bring. Alas, Good’s not produced by presents brought: It springs from inside one, or it springs not.

_97_

So, after fingering parts of the grab bag, picking and discarding one’s still steaming brainchild, a few convicts superciliously have resolved to “excom- municate” one? From the booby hatch? All right, then one gives each of them the old heave-ho—from all, that is, but oneself, which is all. None can be deprived of the right to love, nay, not even the most leprous ragpicker or bishop, mother fucker or superior, each of them destined soon to bite the dust. “Your worship must exclusively be within the divine order.” What fraud ex cathedra issues lovers’ permits? True self-seekers seek not and are fewer and farther between than one might think; there’s more in being self-directed than one would suppose. Now like some long-outdated cannonball express each of us chugs on to a necessary destiny. Our every act is fraught with lengthy trains of unknown consequences, but no act can better understanding, blessed nondemanding, ultimate in value.

165 _98_

So far not so good. Finishing this first day’s tour de force, chapter and verse to help lunacy expire, we’re on our knees without a doubt, but, hardly angels, haven’t necessarily fallen from some lordly pinnacle of power: much more likely, we have never up to now been moving high-lone—off our tushies, on our tootsies. Isn’t it about time that we got up, rose to the occasion, time for our infatuation with the underworld to come to a conclusive upshot? What a challenge to get a rise out of any moribund soul dead slow on the uptake. How indeed can all be seen save from an elevation? Surely, having let stress get us down, we’re all performing far below our real potential. So many ambitious human beings, so few great ambitions. Truth is vision heightened without aid of hitched lifts, boosts or uplift. Try to raise the underworld, then look for it to fall upon you as comeuppance. May one have the honor of a solo and impromptu dance for joy, wild highland fling, no blood-suffused world agita- tor’s suppositious gall-incited jig? Annihilating everything can now be done in jig time—we don’t need one thousand years. Promoting give-away schemes of assistance is too close to prodding touchy hedgehogs: wisdom leaves them to pricks who like needling and being needled. As for giving counsel to one’s “best friends,” a droll kibitzer is best advised to shut his trap, for bluebottles make bee lines for warm garbage. Veritable vulnerability means dwelling wholly in oneself, without the fictive boundaries of thee and thine or me and mine. The standoff is “between” our split-up selves. Some teach us to stand off, exalt our selves, stop clinging to our own skirts. But those standing off, exalting, and those teaching must themselves stop. There’s no gazing down upon his self from maintop when man’s gazing on the up and up from main deck to himself, for then there’s neither up nor down, nor main, mast, “his,” nor self. The time for one who’s “all” has gone, the timelessness for all as one has come—to take the helm. Avast, me hearties, look more lively there, all hands aboard, all heads alert! Cast off the gangplanks, get the lead out smartly, loosing every binding rope shove off. Fare well, ye grounded land- lubbers left at a low ebb who will stew among the clams. To sea, to sea! Sniff azure chanties, lads, and clear the decks for action free from sailors’ blessings: not till voyage ends, if end it does and berth be found, till this our spanking new taut vessel—no mere highfalutin overpadded pleasure craft whose gross girth brings to book an ominous top-heaviness—comes breezing home, having fully spun a brawny girdle on a roll round the world’s bittersweet, already swelling waist, shall we dock here again . . . and the whole passage between

166 wind and water, trolled by salty tongues, may well be far from pleasant and plain sailing. Now, under weigh, taking the tide, gracefully with the sun arise and with the freshening sea’s breath launch forth, sail in, out of the hot air of our everyday selves on a truly great natural trip into oneself, every oceanic instant wholly inexpressible.

167 168 II Some Vital Craft

169 170 Plant well, young heart, before the sky is black: There’s no time to retrace your seeding track. v Art is both Master who atones And mistress who relieves our bones.

_99_

Perhaps the will to dominate and not to be seduced originated art? And language developed out of dire need to facilitate exploitation and subjugation, to establish and preserve ruthless elites? Only by ganging up on easy prey—the very aim and guiding principle of modern war—thus by elaborating their communication, could comparatively harmless early hominids have turned from random scavengers into successful predators. Ultimately our sophisticated message systems have developed chiefly to remove all threats, no matter how remote, to the survival of each scummy social crust. Did language burgeon to keep tribes’ insiders in control of unwelcome intruders viewed as suspect foreign species? Any “universal language” is unattainable, not just improbably, since few of us seem keen on frank disclosures. We lack not capacity for perfect understanding but desire for it, sensing the risk in being fully understood. Each of us is an expert at exchanging patter to disguise, not to reveal, our motives. In fact verbal language, as oft as not, appears to be a means of not communicating, parrying with thrusts offensive utterances.∗ How few of the zillion vocables emitted daily are intended for more than mere self-display; the utterers must flaunt their egos, caring not a particle if hearers follow. Small talk’s big among our species: we’ve a need to utter not something but merely anything—compelled to chatter even if there’s nothing telling to relate. Could info be less than germane to most palaver and the latter’s function be predominantly prophylactic, helping keep us from eradicating our kind?† Talk, not a vain lord, implies the scribe of Genesis,‡ was what created humankind. Speech, not intelligence or culture, tells as the uniquely human attribute—like fire controlled, consuming yet illuminating, core of our rebellion against reality. Since verbal lingo plainly falls short of expressing

* Humankind employs thought in the main for circumvention. (Goethe) † Wild chimps slay each other oftener on average than we. ‡ That fabulist never explained how Cain’s wife got conceived—except it had to be in his own private (idiotic) land of Nod. 171 the most fundamental truth, should we congratulate our selves upon possession of it? Reason evolved to detect deception, to outwit competitors; ideas got born and proliferated as means to impose on fellows. Every warrior to each artist is like father to a son. Employing art, man dreams he conquers death; employing death, he knows he conquers man. For all the tardy kudos offered artists now deceased, societies appear obliged to glorify far more those who’ve devoted their lives to demolishing societies; God’s oddly always on the side of greatest slaughterers. Both the creator and the demagogue, a Goethe like a Hitler, are linguist illusionists, but spin hypnotic webs toward remotest ends; while genius is born, rank oratory’s fabricated. The enormous distances between our lives are what is most distinctive of our race. Art beautifies mankind’s repellent face expressed in war and commerce, yet is strangely helpless to change that expression. Bearing happy implications for the arts but hardly for society, effective mastery’s at base monarchical, the exercise of single will. As politics and military forces flourish, true authority and culture perish: free from scruples, führers arrogate to themselves powers unbeknownst to any civil Faust. The carnage that sur- rounds a great creator’s rather less horrific than that spread by any modern pharaoh’s will. In tyranny and terror love and justice wilt and die.

100_

Most helpful and delightful in our childhood is it to be carried pickaback, under his sway, by our not so great grandfather, tottering tradition, up the cold crags of creation; but the sooner one is able to and does climb by oneself the better, since the forebears of deliverance are few, and many not so venerable patriarchs to this day waver and collapse of feeble hearts that fail. Be wary of binding the musty self to bibliomania. Hypertrophic minds are catastrophic: cramming needlessly results in diarrhea. Reading maketh a full—an overfull man or woman; music a harmonious one capable of soaring and of plunging: learning it, young hearts are learning loving. Hydroponically produced dime literature eats away, computer-spewed pop music drains, the last of audiences’ sanity. Fear for all spirits “raised” on jukebox and/or eleva- tor music and their shallow verbal correlates. So many swinging stereotyped songsters sing swan songs that sound as deadly as they look unmoving, and so many scrabbling dictaphony scribblers tell tall tales that taste no less insipid than digest malnourishing. The multitude prefer to spurn the living and insist on mummifying their remains with junk food. Cheesy authors, never mind

172 how sharp, are everywhere, spreading contagion. Fasting is a feat for fools when one can feast upon fruit only. Taste all truths; spit out all but truth. Accept no popular substitutes for oneself. Especially eschew best smellers, for no love exudes from hacks’ productions. Best insist upon organically grown music and literature. We assume that truth comes hard to swallow without seasoning; but no, in its simplicity and purity it melts on the tongue. We are dead sure that there must be something tough about love, that clear breeze through which one sails with flying colors, but the difficulties are made by our stuffy, hardened selves.

_101_

Originally diet meant—and means—no short-lived craze but way of life. Has nearly every diet not been marred by an excess of dough? Who is the fad- dist, who the unenlightened primitive jumbling up staples like flour, salt, and sugar with necessities? Faddishness lies in preparing dishes: normal food is no packaged, passing fancy. One can scarcely fare too simply, frugally, spontane- ously. The wilder the insane, the closer they’re to sanity. Aspiring to survival, one can hardly settle too far from the underworld or too close to the earth. Could each labeled “refreshment” constitute a downer, every bottle emptied measure up as an entire fizzle?

_102_

Why spurn the neglected fig tree, brother? True, it fills nary a net with rotting suckers or sucking rotters green around the gills, a fine kettle of fish indeed. Neither, though, will salty water sweeten porky breath and liverish disposi- tions. Fishy wisdom leaves no option to dissolving bitterness, our fetid selves. There’s no shrimp, no canned shellfish—never mind how critical or dangerous—can ever save humanity.

_103_

It’s muscle-eaters, mutton-crunching muttonheads and hamburgers unable yet to cut the mustard, who, well hooked on condiments, have no taste, they the fanatics who for sustenance must have baloney. One man’s meat is every man’s poison. Wishing to stay well forever and to feast on red flesh daily, we are biting off quite a bit more than we can chew. Such conduct’s quite

173 a stinkeroo; so many animal consumers really smell. Sweet fruits bring into bearing sweeter tempers, gentlefolk of the right kidney; bitter or acerbic morsels make for bitter or acerbic mortals. Does our treasured beef make the blood boil, permitting us to vent our spleens? In point of fact we’re “snotty” since we’re snotty, feeling sore since feeling sore, turgid . . . etc. Pickles pickle people, the end products marinated sourpusses. Acid observations have their sources. Curing flesh is sure of curing no one’s. Is it just at Christmas dinner that one kills enough for three and cooks one’s goose? Who can be satisfied which is the stuck pig? Grouse make man grouse, crabs help him crab; gripes cause his gripes, his bilious aching belly his bilious belly-aching. Galling headaches signal that high-protein building up is tearing down. Yet how that chump, one’s fidgety, mischievous mind, forever plotting monkeyshines while playing tricks primarily on its self, begs for monkey nuts—a goober- grabbing howler no mistake. What’s eating most impatient patients must be suffering from dyspepsia. Put in a nut shell, seed and flesh are eating us. Nuts nourish nuts. Nibble enough nuts and we’ll be deaf nuts. A checkup from the neck up’s not enough. Unbalanced “whole” grains may be only wasteful fragments. Reckless rather more than brave, arthritics grit their blackening molars and, like millstones round their own necks, go on blindly grinding through their groans, undergoing actual though concealed starvation, driven to resort to chewing saddle blankets. Quel goût! Grains are for the birds, pea- heads, scatterbrained. Sorry, but I’ve had to spill the beans that real saints as a rule haven’t got beans. A plodding workhorse may need starchy feed in order to maintain its starch, but need one be a plodding workhorse? Daily filling our breadbaskets, we are feeding inchmeal on the seeds of our own fricasseed destruction.

_104_

Shoppers who haunt delicatessens hunt in vain for delicacies. Tellingly a daily killer will say, “Let’s have trout (subst. steak or turkey) for supper tonight . . .” —the “main” course, however modest in size, being the sole important one. Complete proteins—complete poisons. Cutting flesh, one’s flesh is ripe for cutting: “living” by the knife, one’s apt to die by it. Consuming corpses, a meathead becomes one. Man’s a butcher hanging on his own hook. Those frequenting greasy joints prevent their own from being cleaned; a grease trough serves a certain sort of beast. Some, sterile, view dried fruit as dirty, quite distasteful to their tasteless selves, and unboiled vegetables as bad risks,

174 rabbit food or forage fit for pasturing cattle; but it is the hidebound, steer- bred, beefy blubberheads who’re timorous, fat-witted, and manure-ridden stinkers. In their wishy-washy way the niminy-piminy “civilized,” eternally shrinking like woolens from washing internally, wish every thing be washed before they’ll eat it, even the bloody mess with which they clog their gizzards. Each meat-and-potatoes meal digestively departs from simplest basics. Do the euphemisms, “beef,” “mutton,” “veal,” and “venison,” drain off the bone- close bloodiness from bull, sheep, calf, and deer flesh? Sanitary napkins do not stop insanity.

_105_

By cleaning out the insides of our vessels with the liquids that the sun’s distilled, we find the outsides take care of themselves. No one produces dinkum piss and vinegar without first being pissed off with water made impure. Fouled cisterns must be emptied ere they can contain clear fluid. Readily accepting scientific govern-mental experts’ counsel on strong faith, in wish-wash rats have died in night and day for our selves’ sake we scour our skin; while inly, functioning as total washouts, we continue spoiling, boiling with self- hatched industrial demons far more dangerous than scorpions. Dependent upon dead authorities, we earn calamity although we know it not. Woe to the sighted comes who do not see. Each piece of milkytoast is starting the day in a jam. Our grunts-and-cackleberries break “fasts” nightcapped with cups of embalming fluid,* may make bad eggs good in the underworld’s eyes, but in the eyes of heaven our whipped omelets noncreatively devised to whiplash lickerish wishes are fried menstruation of demonically tortured fowls. What? too much meaty truth? too lifelike a description? just too much to swallow and too many gory details? Nay, not enough, for dumbest clucks are bred and brainwashed from scratch in heart-choking gooey hooey. Why don’t gour- mandizing lardheads go the whole hog? Could pork-fanciers be specially pig- headed? When we purchase meat next, let’s be sure to bring home not only the bacon, well cured to our uncured selves, but also strips of scrumptious liver—everybody surely knows it’s the most nourishing cut of them all—and feast upon them fresh and dripping . . . raw, naturally, so as to get every scrap

* They are brain-dead who to percolate need jacking up by paint remover? People’s coffee craze is proof that they’re determined to push their world’s jitteriness to its terminating witches’ brew.

175 of finger-lickin’ good out of them. How about a smooth slug as a choice preprandial apéritif? This might well turn our stomachs, it should give us a peachy-keen pain; but our hearts are immobile, deadly tranquilized.

_106_

Deodorants destroy not odors but olfactory acuity; who’s lost all basic sense of smell has lost her tiptop taste as well. Just ask a grisly bear if one thinks that ripe fish heads, ants’ eggs, and the like grub are not tasty treats. What fetus of a caribou is not prized meetly as ambrosial? Better the matured blood and guts of some needy Eskimos than the fiberless goop of mushy-headed creampuffs plump as dumplings who have got the gall to call hygiene criminal. Does our golden crisp roast chicken garlanded with real-life ketchup serve to bring to mind our long-gone taste for rawness? Why in the world do we suppose that dental and other forms of decay are rarely seen in very ancient skulls? Surely it wasn’t undiscovered enzymes kept folk sound? Primevally the hardy few survived: one cannot overstress our ancestors were healthier, less cruel, than we are; they killed with many scruples we have lost. Verily in cooking we have got into hot water, settled our own hash or mishmash, which slumgullion becomes the mushgummers, our kooky selves, aching for the flavor of some homegrown corn or applesauce. We spend our shortened days scorching and spicing vivisected creatures needlessly, for what we need most is already sun- cooked and sun-sweetened. Woe is theirs who change the bitter into sweet, for the wages of sin are sufferings. Should getting to one source of violence be kept on the back burner? Hades is the abode of the dead. Expect fryers to pop out of their frying pans but not to pan out. Greasy fingers give away less the ill-mannered greaser than the rednecked sick at heart. Recovery can scarce be duck soup for those who have in effect committed lifelong suicide. Who plays with fire is apt to be cooked, burnt out in short-order fashion.

_107_

Cursing trees, man curses his source and receives an unslaked desert crucifixion as reward. Water is life, but ratsbane is not life. What’s yours? Home-brewed heartburn is relieved by sun-kissed rain, and life’s springtime restored by sun-made sugar; but even unscabby grapes, intemperately used, are strength-sapping. Labeled water of life is dead as a doornail, no less so than coffin nails, perfect sustenance for our neuroses, both effective vehicles

176 for self-destructive drives. To get buzzed, if not to go on a bender, seems to give not just civilian populaces flushes of relief from boredom. “Eau de vie” is a perversion of the living vine, concocted by pissants.* It’s natural that we respect age only when it’s served in cribs and bottled? Parboiled social drink- ers on a steady if unstable jag, sluicing the worries, spiking their own drinks, and magnifying their problems by examining them through the bottoms of their glasses, wish to down unending snifters of illusion and to have it too. First the fool takes grog, then grog takes the fool. The truly dipsy topers fancy soberness means momentarily being off the sauce; but addicts tran- siently straight are twisted still, their anger staying unexpressed. It’s generally a sap-happy crock unloads the largest crock of shit. What a convenient fiction, that most drinking’s done for sociability’s sake; such a rationalization is a pretext for the plain decision to play truant from reality; it makes capitula- tion to stress, taking on a load, appear respectable—if only to one’s self. If solitary drinking is forever frowned upon, it has to be because it offers no concealment of the true escapist motive, the desire to drown one’s sorrows, the aim being to get well away. Who needs one for the road—and crackup? Will some jollop of tequila actually make one infirm jolly? Maybe even widely feted winners hope to hex and neutralize the worm intrinsical in all success by quaffing beakers of the bubbly? Who can be in truth content that s/he’s tight as a drum, full as a tick, drunk as a skunk? To get a skinful will somehow preserve one from getting to be a casketful? A snootful serves to close the conscience down; when wine has gone in wit’s gone out. The sozzled swillpot, barmy on the crumpet, has been soaked indeed and bamboozled by self; but we could hardly care less, being in a similar state. Who escapes our country’s liquored lacquered savage character? Can both bad actors and their ultimate condition not be called the creeps? It’s alcohol, good soft-shell laissez-faire liberals, and not the fractured rounder, that is poison; whereas not the kegs of rum—the sickly rummy—is the demon, who finds his snake poison bracing. Nursing their neuroses, how drunks love maliciously to make their nearest and dearest share their humiliations; they’ve the guts to hit the bottle and their better halves but usually not the bluecoats. Everybody a hell-raiser manages to lower. Mooners are hard up for lunatic attention? Beering “up” under misfortune, squiffy man hallucinates that spiritless liquors raise him, argues that they make him “happy” (read slewed); but they really raze him, lead him

* Least cordial of all peoples are the sopping Frogs; it’s to them we owe froufrou—fashioned to conceal their warts? That costive country has so well refined corruption that its king is graft.

177 shambling to a shambles, sodden to the sod. Sad to relate, no giggle water is a merry joke, and pinkeye’s no mere turn of speech. “Mud in yer eye!” indeed. It’s fit at least to call what’s ordered ale. One swallow does not make a summer, but the swallows many a soul takes do make him fall. So many failing lives have pubs preserved from quicker autocide. Beer-guzzling: getting stiff, a form of self-slaying in distinctly poor taste; “Just a taste” becomes a tasteless slew. Such drowners can’t survive without glugs. If you wish to catch some slugs, put our some grog. The suds or wash will clean the soused out in at least three ways. Intoxication means a smearing of one’s insides with some toxin; but there’s a hair-raising tocsin and hilarious exhilaration that does not depend on gravity-directed toxins, that is all the corking stingo needed for a soul progressively rumbustious.

_108_

Fermentation is responsible for rancid humankind’s favorite foodstuffs: bread and wine and cheese. What do the necessary microorganisms say about consumers, that they’re positively buggy? Never was so much chow chewed as now is, but how much is yet worth swallowing? For every verily polluted juicehead that chain-drinks himself or herself to delicious death with liquid lunch or with pure pig sweat there’s a pie-eyed baker’s dozen guzzle-guts, forever starved of love and fuzzled sleepy, that with mammoth crust are crapu- lously eating themselves there. The more weight people pack, the lesser span they’ve got to do so. Strange that we are not ashamed, shoveling it all down the hatch, to be accompanying such shitbags. Many all too human hippos showed their sylphish natures and like silhouettes—two hundred pounds ago. Excessive loads of damaged souls now threatened find their yum-yum substitute for love in grub. Such whales are most endangered by themselves. Not only outcast fatties have so long been full of crap in suffering their superap- pendant selves to cave in to that irresistible urge to ravage their refrigerators and to pamper their pets as subsidiary excavators. Nothing is more necessary than no thing, than fasting, gutting it out free of fat farms; nothing more neglected—out of fear. The shakes may cause the shitfaced alki’s bibbing, not just the reverse; who “needs a drink” really needs nutriment: the fitter any body is at holding his or her liquor, the more unfit it is in fact. However deadly alcohol is, human beings’ reaction to it may well be just allergy to needless additives and staples from which it is made; moreover, it’s not only groghounds—also foodaholics—are made groggy by their allergenic intake;

178 to prevent the ailment thus requires an idiosyncratical approach to diet altogether alien to drug-dispensing mainstream medicine. Few jellybellies dare to fast—the solitude’s what scares them half to death?—until the fur coating their tongues falls from them; till then the pus-guts, wanting in backbone, will bear the hide of sin* and hardly relish truth. We strip the skin, slabber over the shanks, and squeeze the teats of the cow, that most outmoded of our tribal fetishes. To call lardbuckets hoggish, bestial, would be to insult the lowly swine, all upright beasts; gorillas long have suffered calumny; catty reflects on “humans,” not on cats. It’s humans, never beasts, that practise “bestiality.” Why aren’t we hunks of cheese cheesed off with rat cheese, sick and tired of sickness? Still not pale, seedy, and stinking enough for our liking? We’ve good reason to reject the milk of human illness. Mush or graveyard stew has often been fed dollops who cannot get well. Blandly, blindly following our inhuman vets’ instructions, we force upon our pet ulcers pure white milk and eggs, the glop’s gluey albumen serving perfectly to gum up the works. Save perhaps for “farm-fresh” sterilized dregs laid last spring, what better nutriment can be provided streptococci and their white-frocked like, multiplying ad nauseam, than bastardized filth? Best of all foods is cow’s milk . . . for a calf’s growth and calf’s brain. Nursing phlegmatically on moo juice since we first drank air and mucous, still we wonder why we are so cowed, so cowardly. When will we stop curdling our inner drums with swill of the pap racket and begin attending to the naturally sweet music of our Mother? No, the plumbing won’t accommodate to everything, as many bovine lodgers evidently hope it will. That which milk-livered man—so well deserving to be creamed—slurps is nobody’s business but his own; it’s his funeral. No food is utilizable by any organism that’s diseased or dead.

_109_

Let blessedness be our “bread and butter,” not bread and butter our “blessedness.” Correctness lies beyond our likes and dislikes; as a matter of fact to live rightly is a matter of fact, not of anyone’s opinion: fruit energizes, whereas

* Sin is no single act but a complete misunderstanding, thus wrong way of life. Sin actually signifies “without,” as in sincere, for messages of yore sent forth unsealed. Sin is to separate, to idolize, and to enslave oneself: religion’s origin. Before that genesis shame lay asleep. The Garden is regainable when time stops, death dies, laws end, separation finishes, and loving freedom starts.

179 flesh de-composes, whatever our wasted taste buds, nipped while blossoming, inform us. Mankind does not live by fruit alone—that was its making and this is its tragedy; since weapons made us possible, how fit that they make us superfluous. What irony that human mind evolved not for the end of understanding but to serve the beast’s survivability. Behold, in the simplicity of fledgling swallows swiftly, teacherlessly learning how to kill mosquitoes, the eternal iron justice meted under nature’s law(lessness). The prize is to the swift and sure, not to the ponderously circumspect. Pray, what more normal adage than To kill is to survive? Where now, Mahatma, is your natural Ahimsa?* What? Aren’t herbivores like water buffalos quite peaceable by nature? As for vegetarians,† are they not slower than meat-eaters, duller, so selected by us as our game fare? Natural man: contradiction in terms. We—not just our meals —are real dogs’ breakfasts. Surely the most crucial blow that led to “humans” over- reached that wicked thigh bone brandished by a howling newborn ego, unexampled as a stomp-ass bonehead. When are we, free of all death-decreeing oaths, going to come clean—just for kicks—and, rising up to tap the well- spring of our kind, begin to serve the wholesome fruit and nothing but the fruit? Now? Or never? Now—or else. Next week or tomorrow stand for never.

_110_

“Nothing but”: does that embrace the whole? Must living seed be denigrated? Only is one valuing who under the volcano is creating. Contemplating others’ art arouses artistry; creating one’s own art fulfills it. Critics are partly

* The recommended “suicide” of Hebrew masses somehow failed to “rouse the world and the people of Germany”; the Nazis would have made hamburger out of Gandhi and his followers. No greater failure than nonviolence—save violence. † Spiritual vegetators, they pretend they’re herbivores, yet would themselves be nonexistent had there not been eons when their forebears fed on carcasses. Few gentlemen or ladies care to dare acknowledge the cruel axes and traps around which their breed revolved. Fruitarians are naturally apt to have a hard time getting their bananas peeled. For many a fruit nut, avoiding flesh means sex no less than muscles; solely sapless virgins—those who’ve never savored flesh— can easily fast, i.e., without missing eating? Some food faddists grow right out of their gourds. Life’s no bowl of cherries. The revulsion for meat constitutes denial of one’s own real origin and ruthless beastliness, one’s sexuality and deadliness. When was there ever any Eden, Paradise Lost, save that of our now-forsaken animality? On the savannah, where our species started, everyone was forced to face the risk of being devoured alive; no one could buy impregnability. Disowning our mortality, however moral, never brings us immortality. 180 attendant eunuchs posted in a harem: art they can describe, as also how it’s made, but making it themselves is dream stuff, like silk purses made out of sows’ ears. Great art transcends analysis; its movements savor of wild fruit matured in airy foliage, not of manure picked apart by zealous stable flies. Who desires or aspires, perspiring and expiring, to be one of the redundant titillation-seeking patrons of the concert hall in this enormous pill-brained generation whose infertile hearing fornicates respectably with aid from various devices (safeties for a fact) but never fructifies, or, having been impreg- nated, contemptibly aborts? Not pregnancy’s the ailment but society’s perverted attitude toward it. Earthquakes are the birth throes of ascending heights. Each pang helps deepen the bearer’s attachment, yet pain is transcended when anxiety dissolves and one experiences full enlightenment in natural childbirth. Till man can relax without an anesthetic, how is he to learn that giving birth must knock him for a loop-the-loop and prove the finest act given him to perform? If sacred fetuses offend you, hesitate to cut them out and cast them off; for bearing one and gaining an inheritor is better than to lose, by trying to save, your own soul. Is pie anything simple and fruit something difficult? To destroy is easy; to create, still easier, though not exactly child’s play. At the acme of a life, when soaring deep inside, one travels in high gear. What matters is not what one wants but what one needs to do; not what one might but what one must achieve. Aim high, but not so high you miss the mark. Each of us needs to work as if creating all the world anew. No greater joy than to conceive oneself the inconceivable.

_111_

Want to create? Then let your self go . . . and not bit by bit but altogether. Caring is to perish, cure of cures. Pitch the wooden self into the holocaust of heaven. Conflict is the cradle of creation. Highest pleasure constitutes not pleasure: the loving creator cannot but take infinite pains, deep in labor unremitting overcoming all save death, completely unconnected to postpartum melancholy. All true masters must be slaves to their tasks: mastery requires masterlessness. Strangely it’s the willingness to risk all, even life itself, alone ensures endurance. Pondering the final foodless portion of a homing salmon, battered champion of leapers, one may catch allegorical glimpses of the honest artist’s exigent ordeal. Survival is an aim fit for the shoal; driven by rage, odd fish succumb to immortality. Inscrutable the rare encounters whereby genius gets born—the hazard of the die. Could there be some cryptic fatality

181 whereby each Keats and Schubert is obliged to vanish early on?∗ A family’s tenderer members tend to die young, while the more obtuse end octogenar- ians; longevity attests not character but cravenness? The difference between maturity and old age counts as but a little while: surviving even sixty extra years amounts to how much in eternity? Without precipitate forgetting, few would last for long. The now but seldom filled prescription for longevity: a modest diet rich in nutrients, a wiry but not stringbean build, accustomed lifelong out-of-doors exertions, and undying communal indulgence of a stiffnecked soul particularly imperturbable.† No less than chancy life itself, quite a rum thing, happy-go-lucky genius may be an accident, an adventitious curiosity; but the freaky work of genius is no accident, no preemie, though its parthenogenesis transcends in miracu- lousness any fleshly birth. Nothing can heal grief as creative work can;‡ nothing more wonderful than bringing to the light the deep unique. Once in a blue moon, when a crackerjack is crafting a tough sentence, suddenly the study gels, the tumblers all fall into place, and the safe opens on a priceless cache.§ Amid smug inactivity of many who are sterile there is hidden earnest industry of fecund few. Those choosing to work with ulterior or mercenary purpose actually fail before they’ve started. No way dough that’s winnable by poetry can equal poetry that’s losable in dough. Solely by giving up his self is himself given man, as a wild flower quivers under the pert hummingbird’s long kisses, weeping nectar, moving stilly to fruition. One’s creation gives birth to oneself. Give in, which takes some doing, then one gets in.

_112_

Call no man Master in some “heaven” or on earth, for one who needs no master is oneself. Authentic teachers have no wards; true students are not docile protégés. Free spirits, who become so through a mostly natural meta- morphosis, may be neither guideless nor quite guileless, yet are wholly god- less, happily. Influence means superstition. One may view one’s self as next to useless, as a lump of clay for molding, but truth tells one that oneself is

* The rationalists like the Bernards, Shaw and Russell, owed their long spans to their dyed- in-the-wool sober-mindedness? † How much tougher to live as a spiritual ten than to a chronological one hundred. ‡ Nourishing to art, neurosis yet resists cure by it. § Count this only one more ordinary starlit night, one of a kind.

182 life—self-healing, self-creative. People’s education and experience are mostly got by chance, at random, with no self-direction or self-regulation; hence the chaos into which our culture’s plunging.

_113_

Should we presuppose that education equals some thing we can get, that studying hard will get us straight to college, that going to college will get each of us a good snow job, that doing the good snow job will get all of us to real fulfillment? Can we hope to be transformed into superb induplicable preachers or creators by pursuing some particular snap courses, hoarding so assiduously the irrelevant in “high” schools (truly secondary), following the blueprints drawn by guidance counselors, believing that those joyless institutions know how smart or dumb we are? Ah, dreamers, our ideas are merely academic. To the ultimate postgrad test question both the dead-right proper answer and the perfect given mark are an exasperating goose egg. Wish sufficiently for gross celebrity, and it may get you. Why is it, one wonders, that the generality of youth dreams futile dreams of being illustrious athletes, of being catapulted like outlandish supernovas into an empyreal stadium or stardum, but not of being illustrious artists? God knows it could hardly be related to their batty seniors’ trivialness. Shrieking, “We are #1,” identifying with the winners, we spectating sports fans nonetheless can’t lose our nonparticipating actuality as losers. Pro sports unmistakably do not need any shots in the arm; sports are surely spoiled as soon as they are touched at all by moneymaking or spectators. What ballplayer in his salary negotiations can stay in the ballpark? Any amateur who’s genuine is neither mercenary nor performer. Can a child whose playtime, no less than his cramming time, has been and will be fully organized and supervised ever mature?* Real fertile play requires privacy, freedom from viewers. Doubtless the star complex, whether the ballplaying diamond or the bitch-bite-bitch show-biz variety, whose hopped-up fiction-filled displays incite the most impression- able spirits to nurse an unwholesome, ill-starred lust for notoriety, not to mention for kings’ ransoms, forces the kids’ underrealized overvaluation of

* The passion for all organized sports is regressive: note the close affinity between excesses of athletics and manipulations by elites; spectator sports are models for totalitarian mass rallies; metro homosexuality and predatory militarism (witness Boy Scouts and their priestly leaders, Little Leaguers and their smitten coaches, Nazi youth, etc.) march right in step.

183 heroic gratification to pop out while grounded in the overwhelming under- provision of opportunities for tasting it. Few youths are given to have all the moves, so in a fiercely rivalrous arena must fall by the wayside. By conditioning them to assume that winning’s everything, participating nothing, the idea being literally to beat all the opposition, meteoric superjocks and demigod- desses assist their juniors to be institutionally but not genuinely alienated. Are the fuzzy-nutted now obliged to learn to shave points? All too urgently do parents urge their young to elbow out all rivals. Youngsters badly need to learn that it’s no honor to get great at playing greedball. It’s high time that parents managed to get on the ball. Do children really, like dogs, dote upon predictable routine and safe conformity? Could play be pushed on them by “grownups” wrongly certain that they’re irresponsible and blithely void of cares? Might every competitive sport build up more aggression than can ever be discharged in play? There’s always avaricious work or vicious war to meet the deep requirement of males for hunts, to grind them and their victims into dust. How apposite that the same minds succeed in academic drills (e.g., hitting the books) and in the military field (e.g., hitting the tarmac). Let us give a few aficionados among elementary pupils credit for perceiving that an athlete free of supervision must pass bona fide tests as opposed to an A-scholar. Play is critical for learning; only peers are truly educating. Play’s aim: pleasing one’s self but in concert with one’s kind. For the musician or littérateur the narcissistic impulse to play with one’s friends develops naturally into the desire to play for everybody. Sciolists all, softball elders cannot grasp that youth is playing hardball. Sundry larky childish players are less clearly crackbrained than excessive solemn grinds deluded their routines are rational and necessary. Every true game, utterly inconsequential to “real life,” can liberate the spirit. Ultimately both defeats and victories must matter precious little. Goalless play and art are both free occupations, i.e., voluntary and unprofitable, done from love, for their own sake, and not impelled by hopes for winnings. A creator, like a growing child, is hardest on himself when playing for the joy of it, when zestful and audacious—ready to risk mortifying failure out in left field. Every truly free task is a whole new ballgame. _114_

Why, in order to discover there exists a world of high endeavor, “must” one enter and attend that patriarchal donjon termed a university? Not even grade- school graduates in spirit, nonetheless we think our thoughts are first-rate. Art cannot be taught, yet must be learned: the key is love, which takes no time,

184 as graduating does. Liberally to educate is not for teachers: pedagoguery, no less than medicine or politics a brazen tinkering with people’s lives, tots up to one more power game. How useless and/or harmful is all power over others: it’s the horticulturist or the true artist does the world’s essential work, while Government provides the gangland jobs for soldiers, judges, journalists, physicians, hitmen, lawyers, and police. Of schoolmarms we were told there was a dearth; but learners showed up in shortest supply. Compulsory education is not education but a heartless hoax; in classes rages wretched learning and unwisdom. One becomes great more in spite of than because of schooling.

_115_

It’s oldtimers changelessly underdeveloped who deplore a few odd under- graduates’ rebellion against, refusal of, a psycho adulthood insulting to their human capabilities. Which growing lunkhead wants to work when that means to be means,* when work has been methodically tailored for spayed slaves? Not overeducation is the crying evil but underemployment: what a waste of gifts the “work” (read sleep) world turns out; and how chilling pas- sels thick as hops of quick wits fallen to a standstill from use as dray horses. Meshing schooling with employment would mean intervening in the labor markets, which our privateering enterprise allegedly precludes. Our schools teach both how to compete as sharpie and obtusely to conform, but how to live successfully is left in the lap of the devils. Caring for one’s juniors, for example, is reduced to keeping in detention. So much stress on climbing, filling the top story, and so little on digging, making livable the ground level.

_116_

Crowded lecture rooms, in which querists are frowned upon, display more science fiction than our overloaded news stands. Functional illiterates that leave their classes are not only what are growing—numerically; so are those that lead them. Mastering a language means far more than jotting down the first two letters of the alphabet after one’s name. As for the fabricated Ph.D.s, who needs a “teacher” of the “love” of “wisdom”? Many wooden pedagogues would have their pupils reinvent the wheel. Stale English teachers’ cramming has soured many a potential taste for piquant writing; the dead turn the living dead. The language one inherits gives away the richness or the poor- ness of one’s world. Literature is crafted by the open ear from the vernacular;

* Even the alienated now believe it’s all right to be a commodity, devalued, monetized. 185 the budding author needs a setting richly various in speech, a milieu just the opposite of almost any workplace, with its podspeak, or of virtually all the classrooms, with their poor acoustics, drab aesthetics, and bassackwards preceptors directing one-way-traffic coplike talk in execrable prose to blank boards. How could wisdom fit into the cybernated programs? As technology has triumphed being has disintegrated. Literature’s virtual demise effected by the electronic revolution spells the dissolution of what characterizes us as souls of spirit: humankind thus loses human nature. Le petit-maître to whom classics are closed books, impertinent to everyday life, is himself closed and impertinent—an arid Bachelor, but worse, a vestal virgin, of Arts. Would the furry-tongued long nurtured by gut-rot, ere puffing their selves as well educated and informed, mind wising up to good nutrition’s simplest facts? By all means let us earn our Masters titles in the isolating supermarket multiversity that is this underworld; for then we can enrol in heaven’s one-room kindergarten, wherein all degrees are meaningless and spell no honor. Sheepskins warrant neither real intelligence nor full growth. Where’s the topnotch Alma Mater offering credits for leaving erudition, forebrain chatter, tin-canned learning, stringently alone? What academic course or network program prof- fers genuine deep content rather than superfluous discursive knowledge? Can a true instructor be paid for his services save with entire indifference? Normal schools expel the supernormal: smelt runs scarcely can afford the room that kraken needs. Most teachers, truth to tell, don’t make the grade. Every bureaucracy serves as asylum for the smaller talents; each requires interchangeable parts, not intractable individuals. Like armies staffed with—what else?—small-time empire builders, petty civil services serve principally as sieves, filtering devices, for perpetuating affluent and indigent classes,* hence

* Schools change their victims less than channel them; they categorize more than socialize, thus helping no end to legitimize injustice; the elite academies admissions process, when combined with steep tuition costs, keeps near all working-stiff kids out of the elect—a system geared to rear dependable shafters of the lower orders. Educational success ensues from economic, not the opposite, so long alleged. Are schools not virtually flawless as forms of regressive taxation, prodigal benefactions the poor willingly although unwittingly provide the rich? Such institutions are nigh perfect for deluding masses that they get what they deserve; only corrupt religions have held out like promises of universal brotherhood eternally betrayed. In schools as in the Gospel vantages are given to the privileged, and from the underprivileged they’re taken. The plutocracy learned long ago that, by means of evaluations and resultant shuntings, any herd can be relieved of its most gifted and most dangerous potential leaders. The smokescreen of merit issued by schools is defined by them according to conformity with sick society’s compulsive competition and consumption of unnecessary technologic products, which activities ensure the preservation of a hierarchy of gross privilege. 186 can hardly muster courage, independence, or imagination. Misfits twitched and totally unequal to the challenge educating represents nevertheless are certifiable as full professionals; they fill their roles ideally even lacking all ideals. Professionalism infallibly lowers standards, handing trainees the credentials under which guise they can carve their selves cozy careers inside or outside cutthroat academia. Theology once dominated higher education; now con- sortiums’ scheming governs academe. Have graduates done well to choose zit doctoring or corporation law, the easiest, most lucrative, and least embarrass- ing of callings? Few appear to do good—never mind how many of them do well—given ready opportunities to do ill. Sacred expertness is expert most redundantly in its finagling, conning doodles with some current jargon: eso- teric lingo serves but to preserve the peculators’ power stations. Driven by fads, present-day ill education guarantees that youths fail to discover they belong to a commutual heritage, that they’re related to all kinds of human beings they’ll never meet. Each tenured noninstructor who’s agreed to “publish or perish” first had to pass on. Here in our dream world, where schools avowedly are the sole gateways to success, real scholarship is yet despised. Quite a few students who don’t skip class nonetheless fail to attend. As the veneer of colleges’ enrolment spreads, the value of their product thins. Amerika’s the most, not the best, educated population on the globe, the emphasis long having been on quantity, not quality, of preparation for life, leaving lots of duds with meaningless degrees. Trained teachers, similar to social workers, usually are no better—often worse—than B.A.s at their tasks: what does that say or teach about professionality and normal schools?

_117_

Inferior minds, smart alecks, hired hacks, feel most at home among inferiors and seldom can forgive a jaunty jeu d’esprit. What youth would not contemn sobriety when it’s exemplified by such bright robots regulated in the thoroughly banal and hardly civil Himmler mold for permanent vice- principalship? Hating, stifling the specially gifted registers as normal in a mob society whose dons and garroters are shaky at best in their self-esteem, afraid their scurvy trade, their delegated jobs, will be exposed. Who teaches well can’t help but execute ill. It’s fear-ridden souls with little self-respect and little reason for same by and large who choose to act as schoolmasters; their masked hostility toward inquiry and liberty is practically second nature, and they understandably do their best to make sure that their plastic tiddlywinks

187 slugs never will get flipped out altogether—rather, that they’re kept in their cups, thickly insulated from reality, blocked from self-discovery. A martinet wants everybody to shine up to him. It is the character of master and of man, not the school’s reputation, that determines the value of the time they spend “together.” Teachers regularly give too much attention to their subject matter, not enough to students, who in turn pay too much to the teachers, far too little to what matters. As a poor excuse for an instructor, the devoted servant of his or her self who has no life worth mentioning outside the day- care center labors to secure the vassals’ fealty, not to liberate them from such crippling crushes.

_118_

Who escapes being penalized when torpor goes unchecked but any professedly dangerous responsiveness or disposition to make waves is quickly curbed? All teachers’ birth certificates should be required to be produced as proof that they’re alive. And ought not “normal” students be obliged to undergo psychoanalysis in order to weed out the well-deformed majority that might be better, less destructively employed if tending a conveyor belt? The modern school conditions its thumb-twiddling prisoners for society’s, not the individual’s, purported good, for a “life” time of dispassionate banality as droids on a demeaning treadmill swallowing saccharine barf. Desiccation is the best way to preserve fruit, but for spirit it’s a desecration. Is one fitly pleasant, passive, well-liked, easy-going, cute, cooperative, colorless, one of the boys indeed, good-natured, self-effacing, uninquiring, amiable, meek, a regular fellow, in like Flynn, bored because boring,* bland, compliant, well trained to play ball with one’s owners—in brief, girlish? There’s a good lad, acting most becomingly and prepossessingly. The acid test for making it is not what skills one might acquire but how many years one can endure the process in the mausoleum; this assures each institute a captive audience subverted suitably. Employers do prefer the “highly educated”—and, not inappropriately, females?—as employees since they’re generally easier to regulate.† Beneath the

* Contracted from living on borrowed experience like plastic Mom on her romantic “adult” novelettes and sappy sterilized serials. † Displacing children from the overly intense relationships the nuclear family imposes to the more depersonalized milieu of commercial day-care centers may reduce to some degree the toxic patriarchal reinforcement, but it also tends to turn out shallower, more apish characters— desirable, of course, to governments.

188 idealistic, camouflaging blah-blah-blah of Goody-goody Citizenship, the disastrous system is designed to prolong immaturity indefinitely, strictly geared to grinding out, disgorging steady vitiated streams, a questionable outgo, of cheap labor that dares question nothing but its income—perish the possibility of any power-driven plant enriching personalities impoverished from birth. With intake pukey how could outflow be benign? Computer dossiers evaluate an applicant’s productiveness and aptitudes but cannot gauge the human integer. Schools’ grading schemes are deadly weaponry wielded by teachers in their war on pupils. Any such invidious approach produces failure. Education as a lifelong personal development is incompat- ible with all impersonal assessment methods. True evaluation is determined less by the instructor than by the apprentice, calling for a growth together rather than a fear-inspiring contest that degrades. Academies vomit the lumps, turn out their graduates, like pablum whipped by blenders or like gristly scraps evacuated by meatgrinders. Man must have his children and roast beef and gravy served up elegantly; he does not want spelled out for him what goes on in the schools and animal factories, to hear the infantile squeals of skewered piglets losing fast their souls and lifeblood, swiftly being stuffed into wiener skins; he only wants to gorge at spreads groaning with well-dressed carcasses. The prime aim is to render all the stock insensible. With “high” schools we’ve condemned teenagers to a long unjustified stretch of irrelevance, restricting them to an unprecedented moratorium from the real business of life. Custodial care is provided creatures branded undesirable elsewhere if only by the fact that fences, for a devil of an age, have been erected to contain them: guideless cattle and swine cannot be allowed to wander wild in any sensible, sophisticated commonwealth, clogging the labor market. Short-term ill-paid summer jobs are offered as “solutions” to the crime-producing unemployment of the young, since long-term advantageous programs sound intolerably costly to the selfish adult underworld. So long as revolution—recognizing the truth—is postponed and minors are permitted neither voice nor power, pressure groups will keep on copping out on every promise to assume collective obligations to them. Now more powerful than churches during the Dark Ages, schools are instruments of the state that produce subservience to it. The multiversities are servants of the soulless god, Technology, and of its hierocracy of corporate administration; power is the end-all, never

189 understanding, never wisdom.* To each government child welfare matters merely in so far as it will benefit said government; responsibility for children is viewed instrumentally, valued as no more than a means to profit- taking. Truly private education, public liberation, would produce too rich and animated an end product altogether to square with the social contract. “Socializing” youngsters: that translates as trivializing them, keeping them in the most demeaning subjugation while affording them the proper patronage. “School” means to many children what “home” means to many women: that humdrum place where one need never be taken seriously, least of all by oneself. The pup soon picks up from both premises the indelible lesson that emotional and intel-lectual involvement are not worth the mortifying frustration that disapprobation guarantees. Processed as a mere fraction of a human character, the arrested tot is expected to behave as if this—he or she reduced to shorn lock—were the holy truth. Who is going to specialize in the whole child? The end of public education (in itself an incongruity) is to impede youth from maturing. Primary among schools’ goals: to downgrade self-awareness, to devitalize autonomy, to reinforce the inclination children bring from nursery to shrink from facing home truths, which their elders dare not let hit spang home.

_119_

Fatally we have banned killing child labor and corporal punishment without replacing them with any living challenge. When, if ever, will we offer youth some tasks inspiring self-respect, responsibilities provoking growth? Don’t count on anyone becoming caring without ever having taken care of anyone. Just how instructive is it that there still are people diagnostically alive who “think” that schools should stay in the hands of the law, that from all serious investigation subjects can and must be kept both safe and free? Confronted by

* Pragmatic nihilism has for decades been embraced by the elite academies in Cambridge, Paris, Oxford, Stanford, New Haven, and Toronto, which disdain real intellectual inquiry while diverting callow juveniles from ever raising any awkward urgent questions as regards the actual administrative policies, exchanges, and their consequences not just for the staff and student bodies but for humankind at large. The loathsome military industry has long since triumphed, utilizing mercenary media’s nonstop pro-profiteering propaganda to bolt both the corporations and armed forces to the schooling (drilling) system, keeping the elect safe while electorates, the mostly colored, half-baked serfs, are sacrificed. Nota bene: macho sadism primarily distinguishes this kultur.

190 skull-busters, our young jailbirds’ brief bravado seems completely inadvisable. There was a time when sass was unheard-of, for it would have been suicidal. Though it seems amazing nowadays, among the antique Greeks skhole meant the leisure to pursue true insight. Textbooks may enable us our pencil-pushing selves to reach our objects in passing a myriad of subjects, but they cannot help us one iota in examining oneself, the sole exam that ever matters, which is simple as simple can be, covering neither subjects nor objects, never passed without a blazing mind. To be determined to excel is unmistakably divergent from contriving to succeed. Testing is, correctly, not the pedagogue’s prerogative but the pupil’s: better get that through one’s knob, putting it in a fizzling conscience, there to puff on it a while.

_120_

For some time Westerners* have bought the fairy tale that everything is learn- able from books or from machines; thus we replaced profound intelligence as our ideal with shallow memory. Those primitives or quiz kids who remember much may not be able to discover much; total recall can easily amount to absolute incomprehension. All remembrance suffers from an adamant superiority complex; fiction writers’ forte of eidetic recollection is a normal feature both of early adolescence and of mental retardation. Heads with memories of elephants may well be solid ivory. Can one whose mind’s a sieve remember as a child in darkest Africa tickling the ivories or being stung into honeyed pride by spelling bees? The last test is not final, though in it the memorizing student stops. A straight-A rote grind, when confronted with one of life’s countless, incommensurable contingencies, is not adroit but unresourceful, at a total loss. The laggard institution known as family begets those able only to cope with tomorrow’s problems using yesterday’s expedients. The old coots who have stressed remembering meaninglessnesses are has-beens, used-to- bes, or never-weres whose get up and go has long since got up and gone. The starchy Puritan so proud of his or her retentive memory is apt to have an even more incredible, if less expressible, capacity for keeping hold of filthy lucre, hoarded shit.

* E.g., the Russians and the Japanese, beyond compare horde-followers.

191 _121_

How tardigrade appear announcements of disproof that educators systematically stack the pack against minority and lower-class alphabetarians.* Imperative to all elites’ success is masses’ falling short. Like brilliant mirrors, poorest pupils meet their drillers’ dirt-low expectations flawlessly; remedial instruction’s often badly misdirected—needed far more by biassed controllers than by disadvantaged implements, who by the first grade have learned extraordinarily well how to fail. Intelligence quotients have not measured creativity or actual intelligence, which is immeasurable; primarily the ques- tionnaires, wed to conformity and paring variants, are perfect gauges of the testers’ unintelligence and snoopiness. Society, as credulous as vain, has swallowed whole this utter nonscience. Right in common with opinion polls, from their inception IQ tests have registered that normal designates the imbecile, that average denotes both ignorance and inability to judge; the conehead whose charge is to rig exams sits in the driver’s seat.

_122_

Real learning is sheer play, yet also earnest travail, the most arduous of sports. For youth to learn is only natural; for age to teach, correlatively, artificial. True instruction’s offered, not inflicted, in response to lively curiosity. Read what you want, not what you ought, to read. Talk gibberish if you wish, so long as it’s uncopied and extemporaneous, straight from the horse’s mouth, no horselaugh from a worse-hipped wiseacre. What a man or woman reads is an unerring telltale of his or her wit and insight. Every writer’s work originates in prior reading, ending momentarily encountering a new lone reader. Are these minds our own, or only faultlessly recorded tapes of some all too articulate dolts? Do we think to procreate with our heads? That’s amusing. Listen, fellow fatheads: to create, one needs not brains so much as guts. As any river forms its channel, channel forth new form—unceremoniously, unconstrainedly, miraculously. What a would-be artist needs to learn is less a set of regulations than how to transcend them; for a master can forget the rules yet follow them while throwing self into the game. The truest art’s most truly artless, not a long hard row to hoe religiously but one to keep supplied

* Adolescents normally are rebels; yet those found and treated as delinquent are almost exclusively the poor: what curious discrimination.

192 with mulch that is organic. Stilted feet are stunted. Unsharp language exposes unincisive thinking; spirit is the crystal to be polished. Style consists in feeling, preferably pithy, pungent, brisk, pellucid, zingy, vivid, vehement; the work, if not the author, should be snappy. Who has earned a vibrant mind and style needs no creative-writing seminar; who hopes to buy them there is speculating in paste jewelry. One is a true creator—or is not. Before attempting to portray the human, first be one: whole sentences can’t issue from half- men. Depth soars mercurially above mere art and craft. See if one can do something, for a change, con amore, full of verve. The time a soul of honor gives away is too dear to be marketed. Work done for pelf, without élan, is better not done. Who can’t put some fire into his work had better put his work into some fire. Lacking true love, who blows up a storm? Know that the things we do are less what counts Than that we do them with a joy that mounts. Not he or she who speaks communicates but that which speaks out of intensity.

_123_

Philosophy, consigned in our age to the role of inconsiderable avocation, constitutes less science than art. Wisdom and song may be fundamentally one entity: real lyrics form real insights and a bona fide artist’s a like naturist. Original speech, poetry is meant not for the simple-minded but for simple hearts: if true, it flows from me and not from I. Most authors squeeze a drought of thought out of a flood of words; and vain poeticules cannot secrete strong feeling simply straining to compress their verbiage. A good style does not guarantee great writing, but great writing guarantees good style. Natural eloquence, sounding today like Greek to many, reads like purified speech; written rhetoric, descending from pragmatic Roman hands, rings false. Bad writing’s often fancy-schmancy, full of sediment. Almost invariably writers write more than they have to say. Our up-to-dated ships of avant-garde verse suffer less from surplusage in shopworn wordage, the affliction known as log- orrhea, than they do from shortage of pure fuel; many voyagers are tilting toward keeling over, rolling on the rocks. To run free signifies to put about, reverse direction, sail close to the stiff wind of unseemliest simplicity. Lyric and chant, voices of reverie, depend on repetition to make their impression on the slavish soul; prose, aiming (often missing) at intelligence, avoids it to

193 encourage variety in the liberated mind. Vain is the sage’s thought that can allay no one’s distress. Can one put on a thinking cap that is not old hat? None fits everybody, but the least swelled high-hat gets rid of his wiggy headgear. All impersonal “philosophers” are fossil-lovers, wearers if not makers of wigs that are holey: better dwell outdoors and let the green head grow. The crowning problem with black-tie savants forever talking through their top hats: never do they ask the proper questions. Better not exchange a Dantean spirit for a dozen Aquinasses. All speculation, whether saints’ or gamblers’, is just so much chaff in the trade wind, icebergs in the equator-bound current, of oneself. The sacred lore and locus classicus will not be found in books; real knowledge is nonadditive and nonaddictive. Why should sophistry of sciolistic pundits who’re forever parsing phrases earn praise? We had better pity them for having wandered so far from reality and having wasted so much on flapdoodle. They possess the moldering experience of others summed up in those dust- ridden repositories, their encyclopedic brains; but they do not possess, from moment to moment, their “own” ripe experience, which is terse truth and no sum. We may say that we do not know much; yet understanding is a matter not of much or more but of all in one. Love’s inspired not by multiplying but by nondividing, not from any volume but from the need to create.

_124_

So few attempt to make living their art, so many to make art their living. How insistently we do prefer the preserved predeceased product to the real thing: imitation juice instead of undyed oranges; a novel that’s a hormone- crammed old turkey; less than baffling verses or some treacly soap opera simulating love in lieu of love itself; our favored tome on instant ethics with a certain course of easy lessons rather than what is both simpler and much harder, living well. No human organization matches the divine organism. It’s organic spirit, strange to say, expressed in solitary insights, always is out- lasting the most formidable philosophic monument. A veritable masterpiece springs from necessity, in spontaneity, as vitally as breathing: true austerity is not imposed but chosen where there seems no choice. To fathom life’s thick volume without missing any nuance, one must read between the lines.

194 _125_

Can one imagine a philosopher laureate? Not in this life. Perhaps imagination, unacceptant of the present, grows in an inverted ratio to honesty? In order to attract young fools to his plain charmless daughter, Sophia, the philosoph adorns her with a veil projected to intrigue but which obscures. Great insight charms the most when most remote. Each masterpiece, indeed all art, casts the illusion of communion. Maybe art depends upon hypocrisy, as life upon deception. To be widely read, is one obliged to be a fictionmonger, a playactor, cranking out self-righteous promos, peddling history that’s both corrupted and corruptive? Are not poets, likewise fictioneers, really and truly shameless tricksters, moon-eyed mythomaniacs,∗ masters of self-deceit, players with phantasmagoria? Or is artistic enterprise less a form of superfluous escapism than earnest labor meant to cope with our cosmic anxiety—a key, through sharpening of faculties, to human beings’ survival up to now? Than poetry what art seems more obliterary? Does the poet’s actual vocation spell but precious little more than a preoccupation with her death? In fairness, it’s mortality’s reality creates the fantasy of immortality. The reason why great artists gravitate to magic is their sensitivity to gruesome truth. Some adolescents, curiously, more than oldsters, are obsessed with death; meanwhile the middle-aged “mature” appear too driven by mundane exigencies to be at all concerned. Yet there may be intrinsic value in obsession and distortion as catharsis: viewers’/listeners’ absorption in art objects can facilitate unfolding of a vital self-transcendence. Out of their complexes artists try to get a thing or two— into ours. Observant fans know that a well-directed screwball, simulating the old dipsy-doo contrariwise, can be a pivotal, straightforward, valuable pitch and pitcher. No one but a monster can achieve a monstrous mission. Peerless seer Homer lacked our ordinary vision; offbeat tangle-footed Beethoven could never keep time dancing.† Oddly it’s the errant who make the most fruitful bloomers. The phenomena of art resemble biological mutations: solely “errors,” sports, occasion cultural evolution’s progress, deviators being human nature’s testing grounds, the touchstones of creativeness. Truly a marvelous development is printed language, yet no less a futile effort to

* Like fiction, poetry originated in primeval ignorance; legends were fabricated out of fantasies for lack of facts. To be concise and clear goes quite against the grain of fiction- fashioners—despite the evidence that master spinners of yarns such as Tolstoy and Twain yield. † As for scientists, Alf Einstein couldn’t keep his bank-book totals straight. 195 subdue mortality. It’s manifest that literary mastery, pride of the race, confers no special insight into actually living wisely. Who indeed above all but the highest man—most restless, conflict-ridden, protean—partakes in a natural selection, however unconscious, of the kinds and quantities of foods that will ensure a satisfactorily irritated state, the choicest viands to stick in his craw? Perhaps what’s right and wrong with modern art is what was right and wrong with Marcel Proust as with Glenn Gould: magnificent percipience and masterful delineation coupled with pathetic inattention to organic needs; such cripples manage to twist their bizarre lives and tasks into harmony.* Noetic stalwarts like Prof. Nietzsche may have next to no idea how to live materially, not to mention healthfully. Only by killing do the doctors cure Life, which is growing best when most impure. What officer supplies clean bill of health for genius? The nonpareil’s an invalid—invalidated unmistakably as standard stock. Can wholesome daub- ers churn out only pissy work? Disease is needed to produce a pearl, and vanity to assess its value. Who can doubt his forte need not doubt his forte’s dead. Yet always there appears to be something equivocal, sinful or fishy, smelling bad—yea, rotten—in the state of the “godman,” a mechanism primed to self-destruct when triggered by its faulty servicing. The creativity of artists is their sole salvation and endures despite—yet cannot cure—their singular neuroses, which are not prime causes, only minor symptoms, of their plight as hypersensitives. Although truth’s essence be a honeycomb, its presence is as bitter herbs; for liberating service lives in irritability—ability to irritate. There’s many a rambunctious ’but’ between a chosen battering ram and the slaughter pen. Artistic excellence cannot mature without the driving passion to perfect. Upon the topmost branch a pip’s most apt to mellow. The most promising of artists are the most uncompromising. Only if one is entirely dissatisfied with love accorded can identity with one’s production seem sole means to and sole end of life: the work, become a truly taxing task, thus cannot “fail” without confirming failing self-esteem. Creators are so deeply disenchanted by experience that they’re forever recasting it into something better if not truer; they correct the world by dreaming one more valuable than the “real” one. Art consists of the forbidden fashioned tolerably to our semiconsciousness; it’s

* Without such invalid lifestyles could matchless artistry transpire?

196 wildlife captured and caged for display. Getting away with birth means getting off just for a term. Some crooks use aliases and some writers pseudonyms in order to disguise themselves from the police and philistines. Art is created, crime committed, to become important in one’s own eyes; so each product is au fond primarily a way to justify one’s fantasy of being a cut above the rest of the race? Possibly it’s necessary to believe one’s self better than average at what one does to counteract self-doubt, to reassure one’s self of even average performance, let alone one over one’s head. Seeking out the dilettante’s success, most folk deserve her failure. A peculiar genus, one of a kind, genius is flung before the world a cross-grained throwback to prehuman independence, urged to overbear gametic reproduction; thus his seeming inhumanity. Nothing escapes an all-consuming ultrahuman spirit; every ill and folly, each scrap of experience, is grist to the creator’s mill. His first and last desire, virtually never slaked, is less to love than to be worshiped.* His prime danger, singularly, lies not in a going bad but in his going “good.” Still, in the end practically everything can be forgiven a ripsnorting artist in life . . . even that improbability of all improbabilities, public esteem. As for performers on the lecture circuit, (rather like those who describe their orgasms or defeca- tions) authors should be read, not seen nor heard. Those who declaim their own productions can be read like a book—loud and clear. Note the banality of all biography. An artist’s health and vindication are hid in his living work, not in his mundane life. The greater a creator, the less consequential her or his biography. Accomplishment, not personality, determines each old master’s niche in his- or herstory. Are people generally even able to conceive what a real hero’s “like”? Still waters do run deep. A Bonaparte is known, but who knows Blake? The maid of Orleans is “listened” to, but not the belle of Amherst, Mass. Prosaic folk can’t realize the multifarious miracle that is the world of words. The Sage of Concord, Father of American lit, recognized the Bard of the Open Road but (in common with her sciolistic legal pater) failed to recognize the greater poet housed near in their parlor.† The odd unregarded star plays in a celestial league of her own. Not just Dickinson’s existence can be summarized as Life in Philistia. Best be perfectly perverse like lovely Emily,

* Is the craving for fame but extension of the need for an uncritical acceptance by a parent or a lover never given? Generosity of artists to their pals or audiences may be merely futile gestures to elicit that rare favor. The creator is most likely doomed for life to go on craving, giving, without any genuine gratification. † Was every patriarch not captured then forever now to stand condemned?

197 preferring to remain obscure. What folly for most greenhorns to be entering the lists. One’s swimming in clamjamfry once exposed to readership. Real artists never are performing apes. The truth of beauty is disqualified from popularity contests, clearly cannot be in the congested public eye.

_126_

“This bugsy egg,” a dunghill capon chortles, “surely lays an egg or two, he has a heavy ax to grind. . . .” The old boy’s right: I am a hardboiled egghead of a kind, tough nut or pesky bug but seldom put in anybody’s ear, and also grinding an ax—leastwise flying off the handle, giving him the ax—but inside no one but his frozen self. Does he not like the slant of jocund Rob Hood’s or Goodfellow’s sportive shafts, aimed as they are to slay him? Gags we look for, but free speech? A joshing punster’s probably more earnest and less spoof- ing than most people think; puckish punning does not mean one does not mean it. Fittingly ambiguous, the splicing puns entail can signify both splitting and connecting. Wordplay is no random ornamentalism now and then indulged in by a classic author: it’s in fact his real art. No use issuing a sendup if there’s no receiver. “You are not a caution, just a trifler we can with impunity ignore.”—Speak for your dormant self, bud. It takes more than gloating over a prophet’s impotence to invalidate his insight; sapless philistines, in any case, as grubs are hardly fit to judge. The waxing winter moon which struggles through a glacial lake’s black eddies beams the seasonless sun’s light sincerely. Any tuning fork’s task is to sound out and to separate the hollowly idolatrous men from the dreaming, undeceivable boys—welcoming youth and not merely chronological maturity, which, as some turncoats with their itchy vision see it, turns away from childish things like fruit and its delights to chewing over fishily insoluble cadavers. Education throughout the prehuman interlude has signified a leading forth of growing pricks to hunt, converting playful striplings into qualmless lancers.

_127_

Some resent this as an “ivory-tower” jeremiad, bracketing me as an otiose prim slacker, sidewalk superintendent, or birdwitted pointy-headed culture- vulture, when I ought, like them, to buckle down to the serious practical business of finishing off the world, to help my fellow brig rats wont to rat around make their dashing exertions while they can to scuttle our gigantic

198 liner. Nothing doing: one may be in fact asleep, plainly no slouch at doing next to nothing, yet be working harder than most critters can imagine. To banausic herd mentalities, real spiritual loungers, any fertile spirit seems perverse in lazing life away. Precisely who in fact are the effete and daft, defeating all? Implanting the odd viable kernel in them, sowing the seeds of dissen- sion, constitutes a harvest plenteous; being a poor grafter’s surely no disgrace. Assume they that I want to reach a lot, to stir the greatest number, to become accessible to all the nitwits, that I’m satisfied and proud, like many a sharp spearhead or austere commander of yore, to be rattling cages, shaking up the troops? Heaven forfend. My aim is to make humankind intent and not content, to be a downright boisterous disturber of its peace. And those who do not wish to be stirred or disturbed are duly shaken off like so much dust upon one’s feet: requiescant in pace. Is my mission not to quicken one and, if need be, to sicken one? An artist burgeons eager to stand out in thunderstorms— some would say without enough brains to come indoors when it’s pelting darning needles. Are creators not implacably resolved to get their work done come hell or high water? No good can be born without surmounting ill, and spirit in deep water, up the creek, in double trouble, lives the closest to dark truth. To everyone disquieting Christ seeks to get across. It seems reserved for hung-up souls to be outspoken: without personal dilemmas who encounters universal ones? Thus flowering disablement may be a precondition for self- liberation’s fructifying. Oh, I am a bringer of glad tidings, all right, but the good news I bring is just bad news, devastating, for our sensate (i.e., by and large insensate) and exclusive selves.

_128_

What need for illness? Or could it be but the chemicalized fruit of hedonism, of romanticism, jaded gospel preached by advertisers urging weak-kneed hop- heads to indulge themselves now and pay later, relishing “the good life” in its pain-free unreality without a thought of natural retribution? Clear-eyed spirit cannot suffer stupefaction over the fact that, fed such a bizarre disturbing diet, many make careers out of self-pity and absorbing various narcotics such as alcohol. What is it to the shooters in their so “pragmatic” states that they might double their life spans, also halve their labor, if they sacrificed their own bloodthirstiness, when this would mean quadrupling their distressing leisure time, hence only adding to those already so many heavy hours whose frittering away is their main occupation? What an unpalatable consideration,

199 to be forced to kill at least four times as much time as one even now does with the boring, snoring, frightful, spiteful creature that’s one’s self! How hasty some are to discard the joker in the deck. Nettled, stung to the quick, demanding that this cutup cut the comedy, quit cutting up, old Adam patently has half a mind to kill me, to decapitate the cockatrice. One gag too many and he thrusts it home? The “trouble” is, I come to jugulate him, going (and not jocularly) for the jugular, proposing no less than a total cleanup program to assist him in the healing of his deathbound self, and he’ll be damned if he’ll be healed, for he is doomed if he stops living in death and starts dying to “life.” Truth is clearly deadly to our selves: read it and weep not. Friable microcosms, so-called humans can but ill afford to overlook one’s microfilming them in all their nakedness as microbes in these damning apo- thegms. Speaking candidly, they’re dead against the world who do not want to speak or to be spoken to with candor, given straight goods now straight from the shoulder. There are no thanks for one upfront, rubbing noses in reality. To speak the truth means suffering from foot-in-mouth disease. Whoever tells it as it is at once becomes a shit (the substance of it hits the fan) and so summarily is flushed from purview. Paradoxically, who does most for deadbeats is most likely to be judged by them a parasite most futile. Sufferers from schadenfreude want to witness one dead in or blown out of the water. Many who would be delighted, burning with desire, to view me frizzling in hell might do well to check the temperature and nature of their vantage point. Can’t I be kept confined inside some grubby cubbyhole? Miffed by the cussed maverick Canuck’s obstreperous shenanigans, by wag- gish highland hijinks and swift ragging riffs and Scotch snaps rooted in a granitelike tenacity and fiery Viking temper, there are those would like, by hook or crook, to have this case of purest poison confiscated, taxed out of existence, scotched lock, stock, and barrel, never mind how, maybe haled to court and muzzled, blackballed, hogtied, tarred and feathered if not drawn and quartered, shipped to a “correction” camp and given a good shaking up and shakedown, cooped for “safety” in a cooler or the deep freeze, best of all assassinated by some southern hothead, or else lynched by soulless spooks, but scared at least to death and sidetracked by the veritable vice squad to a filling station off the jungly highway, forced to vegetate in drug (no less well named!) or “health” store, there to guide the cosmopolitan zoo’s helpless, not so great apes like so many instrument-panel knobs, dispensing “harmless” nostrums and herbal “cure-alls” for lame foxes that refuse to spend a trifle extra on a larger, stronger dose of no thing sure to cure them.

200 Meantime humankind needs liberation, not more self-endorsed, “infallible” prescriptions and proscriptions. Are this provender and its provider both not smooth enough, too rough around the edges? Overfed yet famished grubbers are afraid these cumbrous chunks of raw opinion endlessly repeating on them, these ethereal libations that leave inattentive hearers chilly, even spiced with several soupçons of ambiguity among the aperçus, are unfit for our inhumane human consumption, unassimilable, certain to obstruct all puffy gullets and each unpierced eardrum or at least to dizzy and to nauseate, upsetting stable order: that could be, considering how loads of gurgling, unregurgitating gizzards are ballooning with their birdbrain-feeding dead crumbs, droppings and sweepings. Let us take somewhat less satisfaction in our crummy homebaked scones: they may be only stones filling our interred selves no less than store-bought ones. Those most ingenious pastries do in fact stick to the ribs, since the paste-baking waste-makers are stolidly stuck in thick self-indulgence and will do their worst to justify it though their dumpy heads and bellies, coated with the tacky hardtack, swell to splitting point. Why should such fleeting hot-air artists give a fart for lasting values? Maybe people would not gasp and break quite so much wind, nor be gone absolutely crackers, were they less stuck to those cheap rib-stickers? Folk can’t stomach truth with innards brimful of cant. Diabetic dough-heads have bleached flour on the lungs indeed—the flour eaten, not the flour breathed. Some choke with “asthma” or groan with “dyspepsia”—convenient classifications to relieve them of the responsibility of getting better. Verily their state is one of invalid- ity. Herd creatures are debarred from being ruminant. The double-dealing jokers cannot but discard the unknown with poker-faced shrugs. They do not give a hell about the truth, impassibly determined to retain “it all” for their nonchalant selves, like bedpans deadpans all. Hence what has one to do with them? _129_

Authoritarian types understandably detest above all art and irony. Annoyed, with caked blood vessels threatening to burst and minds suggestive of con- gealed crud, the judgmental common ruck of cretinoids upbraid recalcitrant creators for their bluff seclusiveness, branding it selfishness, misanthropy, and irresponsibility, when these reductive labels better fit the former’s own stale barrenness. Is it obligatory for all spirits who have taken wing to be mistaken for—and by—bats? Nothing likelier than for the brain-dead to conclude that wrathful social critics have bats in their belfries. Yahoos, who ought to expect

201 to get the horselaugh, turn deaf ears to a Beethoven, classing him as looney- tunes, but it is fruitless beings are mad. The daffy vanity of any oddball artist cannot hold a candle to that glaring out of every ordinary citizen. True genius is crazy as a fox. What commoners primarily cannot forgive in any solitary seeker is his nervy essay to surpass the ordinary human spiritual bondage. To attain great art, you first have to attempt it. Not the genius was “so ahead of his time” but his own contemporaries, like ours prating the phrase, were and are behind theirs. Art is seldom liked for the right reasons. Dilettantes, self- deprecating while self-decorating, must import impressive gobs of Culture from abroad so as to gain some notice gawking at them; yet it will take more than hoards of money to create a real intelligentsia, a social clime conducive to creation, out of cultural bankruptcy here at home. How profitable to be free to savor all the riches of neurotic artists’ work without having to suffer what made them producible. Most folk are great at wasting time with chatter, cop-outs though at utilizing it for productivity. Creating means excluding much; by definition noncreators fail to concentrate. Procrastinators disrespect the future out of self-contempt compelling them to dwell immobile in the past. Can sage or lover flourish where he’s looked upon as suspect, as an outcast if not criminal? Each Athens that condemns its Socrates as a provo- cateur, as a séducteur dangereux, attests an Athens that’s condemned. What soul of honor in a cesspit of dishonor, asshole deep in alligators, zips his lips? Perhaps societies without exception reach a point in their decline when none but misfits can be fit for public enterprise? When wisdom has been outlawed, only outlaws can be wise. In barbarous times silence may befit best a patri- cian spirit. Greatness curiously gets rewarded strictly right atop the hit list. Wisdom understands it’s big shots pipsqueaks take their potshots at. Real vigor must return to its lair when degeneracy has turned general. Triumphant artists play close to the chest. “Great Scott, man, you are insupportable!” And you are recrudescent, fessing up to festering at last. “So negative . . . what a pity, what a shame. . . .” Much less so than such pitiful and shameful condescension. Though these words may be primarily pejorative, they do pertain to our own everyday ignoble motives and ambitions. No, madam, you’d best not hand your brat live sticks of dynamite or Sunday morning “funny” strips of bacon such as Swift* liable to implode: it’s risky to expose wrong readers to right pages, to an unrelievable contagion, and we must protect inflammable self from consuming contraband, including what’s received the waterlogging stamp of our

* God forbid that, like the Dean, the budding author takes no prisoners. 202 greasy imprimatur assuring every body’s safety, guaranteeing all an expurgated insignificance. “Is this the way you want our children to end up?”—If you mean pregnant, Yes. If cheeky parlor geniuses had their own way, even the Creator would be either muzzled or compelled to gain an authorized committee’s sanction prior to beginning his uncherished work—though God knows what committee would be qualified to serve the purpose. They’d have every prophet come forth hat in hand. One’s not permitted to grow anywhere at all until one gets the green light? Each imperial ring of plump lie-abouts is forced to down-thumb bravest gladiators. To be panned by “critics” may for a great artist represent pure pleasure. Genius travails in quietness that’s positively seis- mic, then gets welcomed by the thundering applause of utter silence.* How can bona fide musicianship be sounded by a tone-deaf examining board saturated with effrontery? Real artists must receive their confirmation from themselves. Their utterances to the modern world are stones dropped in a well so hollow that no echo can be heard. A prophet must, now more than ever, know his place. To wish to be acclaimed and to get laid into the bargain— what could be more philistine or tacky? For the lone love-letter writer who, dismissed as wack, knows it will be returned unread by the mean-spirited no holds are barred. Expecting nothing, dedicated with a purple passion, one can hardly be disheartened. No one gets a slap in the face who anticipates it. The one thing that one must understand: that the vast herd does not. Should genius run bitter when it’s greeted with guffaws? One’s grateful if dark minds make light of one. _130_

“American philosophy”. . . another contradiction in terms. In medieval mediocracies such as closed-minded North America, that omnium-gatherum of undesirables which has not had its Revolution yet, where alienated art is tolerated but not civilized life, one needs the imagination to address a posthumous audience; tenaciously, while biding much, one cools one’s heels through middle age, waiting with superhuman patience for a Renaissance. The true creator’s playful work is a lesser embarrassment than its discreditable non- reception: homespun decency obliges him to be embarrassed for all those vacated spirits miscalled his compatriots and, even more preposterously, his contemporaries. Great hearts fail before it’s generally realized just how dangerous and trustworthy they are. Nobody recognizes genius without being possessed of some; to dig philosophy, one first must grow philosopher; to

* What’s called deafeningly silent is not quite. 203 read a poem well calls for being a poet; to distinguish valiance demands it. Most aesthetic standards are hard-cast by early loves; our first discoveries, we fancy, represent the only real sublimity. Treating masterworks as if they were escapeways or narcotic pastimes is like passing blindfold “through” the Swiss Alps. Entertainment means avoidance of truth, art enhancement of it. Theoretically one’s peers could judge one, were there any. What true artist can admissibly claim a real private life? It seems significant that noblest poets lose their personal identity. Greatest travelers needs must have their tickets to life’s round voided. Creativity is necessarily an agonizing marathon of deep estrangement. To most every reader, quailing, each postmodern masterpiece perforce appears forbidding, indigestible, an unendurable chore. Everybody gazes at the sun when it’s eclipsed. Authentic authors must be buried, it appears, before they’re born—with some help from their friends. How curious that those one’s loved the most should never get acquainted with that which one’s loved the best. People daily can associate for decades without actually meeting. Friendships for the most part are preserved as marriages are, by each party studiously not examining the other’s finest—thus least of all tolerable—qualities. The genius who looks for understanding in a mate is scarce a genius in understanding mates. The reason why those “closest to one” rarely recognize the greatness of a master’s work is not overlong familiarity with his foibles but evergreen envy, albeit unconscious, of his merits. There are deaf-mutes for whom tolerance and longanimity should run out. _131_

How could lands of stone* be anything but apathetic, loaded as they are with

* For instance, constipated Canada—than which what more illiberal, provincial colony exists?—is duplex, well versed in duplicity: both half a continent with most advanced technology and laggard nationette of puritanic kindergarten culture worshiping paternalism’s dreamy past; a puerile world grown decadent without getting mature. (Just witness the absorption in the drivel over the House of Windsor, badly needing some real work.) Canuckdom, like its southern neighbor fixed on testeronic football, is a nation short of realization overrun with juveniles of every age obsessed with hockey, a variety of glorified pinball played by outwardly grown men who, irritated by their inability to hold in hand the slithering elusive puck, turn brutal street thugs to give the spectators charges and to get the grossest pay. Those wussies who can find the novel interesting only after it’s become dead letter are already quite incuriously obsolete themselves; like some historic infarct, a somnambulistic country that acknowledges creators only when they’re out-of-date or fossilized must be just that. Particularly barbarous was the “reception” given real art in archaic twentieth-century B.C. The new kid on the block is regularly knocked about in any really backward culture.

204 stoners, toward what they’ve done to artists and artists for them? When all is said and done, the writer’s role may be at best but as official mourner or embalmer, scrivener of his society’s obituary; his the charge to tell the sorry story with good humor. Poetry is a phenomenon of a civilization’s adolescence, while philosophy of its decrepitude; philosophers appear when it’s too late for decadence to benefit from their productions; sages constitute in history “their” cultures’ drawers of conclusions. Authors granted undisturbed oblivion can well afford to be oblivious of others. Dilettantes reserve their praise for the dead artist: how can their nods be worth dying for? Indifference toward new masters normally consists of three-fourths pity and the rest contempt; attention that’s accorded such creators truly is derisory. Helped by the underworld’s disinterest, a growing idealist reporter’s interest in that whirli- gig’s gyrations gradually subsides. Can one have any use for those to whom one is of none? Once interest in readership is lost can interest in writing be recouped? Republics that refuse to take their finest spirits seriously have the compliment returned.* The longer that the lust for fame is frustrated, the more its consummation comes to seem superfluous. At last the odd soul suddenly grows up, just like divinity dispassionate regarding any notice. The hard fact that great art cannot be supported by a brothelized society, which in fact militates against the powers of genius, is just too bad—for that society, which can’t afford acknowledgement of truth, since that would certainly entail a faltering in the paranoiac screwing in vogue everywhere. To rabbles genius is an irrelevance. Most people don’t and won’t and can’t buy what an honest person has to say because they have been sold on scraps of paper, stamped out to evaluate in terms of currency, of fraudulency. To economists a worker such as van Gogh outside the paid work force does not count—is a nonentity, in “fact” not there; to them only the posthumous exchange of cash can matter, not the living worth of a creator’s spirit. Genius may be defined as an invaluable misfit

* The noble author of one whale of a tale, utterly ignored for decades, ultimately learned to share the general leviathan disinterest. Snubbed long enough, what ego can avoid ending aloof? How ignominious the shameless market culture which thinks nothing of remaindering a Herman Melville, who has to be counted nonetheless among the blessed: he was at least not literally executed but permitted to perform innocuous official tasks while squandering away the peak years of his priceless powers. That sham society has aptly honored phony giants such as “Papa Hem,” a minor Hellenistic lyric poet as compared to Homer; cranky wanky overcompensating drunks replete with secondhand opinions are often true master debaters (read bullshitters).

205 off whom well-adjusted nobodies make fortunes. Once “successful,” artists are expected—and obliged?—to hire drum-beaters. Bozos nourished on a rancid meatballism crave more of the same. Why should not shoddy art be patron- ized in shoddy common-wealths? Does TV not suit a society of hokey souls? Since media reflect the culture that produced them, what good to denounce fleet messengers for mediocrity in messages delivered? Nothing’s special to those who themselves are nothing special. Understandably the nondescript, those with the vaguest sense of taste, prize only nondescript existence. Solely lofty work can satisfy a lofty spirit. Dullards find even the brightest gem dull. Right they are to judge this poem a crashing bore, for boring, not forbearing, it indeed is: horseshit, and no calvary, keeps cavalier troops entertained. The deepest lover’s doomed to raise a firestorm of spite. The fate of prophets is to draw a blank—the blank of antiloving, antilife subhumankind. Some works called unsuccessful are not failures, the flaw lying in each viewer’s vision and not in the looking glass. One’s frisky writing may be less deficient than our leaden reading. Ever asked the incurious self why it prefers to flip, entranced, through lengthy tales of simply ripping whippings, beatings, tortures—all the convulsive Spanish fly of the media—rather than to open up something genuinely serious? Or why, across a scribblemanic country, heads are buried in some happily condensed pageturner—the nonbook-of-the- month disgraced by that unmistakable Hollywood style, its every phrase fresh wrapped in cellophane? Consumerism taints all that it touches. For whom kitsch has formed taste kitsch is food. So few are able to assess art on their own, so few do not require apprising of what is worth reading; the remainder follow wooly leaders like so many sleep-inducing bounders. Scrutinizing which kind of folk write, one sees it’s better not to. To the astronaut cut loose in outer space the publication game, ruled by worldly payola, is not worth the candle in his garret. We now have no time for any one-horse one-man show. A free creation must be on one’s own time and own dime, some would say on the cheap. Unquestionably publishing devoted to high artistry or vital thinking long since lost its soul to the unlimited cupidity of the conglomerateers. Publishers are good at least at hiring great puff artists. Publishing and author- ing, to peddle merchandise and to create a treasure—disparate crafts, poles apart. Can any author/onanist be as offensive as a publisher/exhibitionist? According to successful booksellers, transcenders of an old-maid culture* like Thoreau and Emerson are simply not strong movers. Sturdy and anachronous,

* Close distaff kin tried their best to unman Thoreau and Nietzsche with no real success; all they accomplished was to cart off the cadavers at their menopause. 206 real wordsmiths can’t produce best sellers: it’s impossible to fashion trash, to fake success, unless one is trash and a fake. Conversely, nothing can keep puffing salesmen with the right shtick of combined charm and unscrupulous- ness from a popular ad-lib account. Some would-be geniuses do deserve the merry-ha-ha they receive. Imposture without merit triumphs; merit triumphs only with imposture. Sez who I’m a product needing plugging? It may well be to one’s credit that one is not marketable and can handle brusque rejection. Like a wife, an artist is forced to roll with the punches. But, reverting to the breed of cockamamie deviants continually sublimating, where the artist who is not himself or herself au fond an incorrigible flasher? Where the man of letters not a wayward lover of his mother tongue? In very truth true authors re-create their native lingo; stricken with the irremediable malady of punorrhea, they are given to rejoyce in language. Great artists are the quintessential human beings, not least in using their frustra- tions to enhance indulgence in incessant sensuality. Curiously large souls often are great busts as “lovers” but in their creations dexterous seducers. Rarest insights are reserved for the erotically déclassé one cast off from all public moorings. Being sexually disabled and thus socially deranged is topless succor for a poet’s or a prophet’s growth. It might well be a good thing that a master spirit’s middle leg is lame. Without perversity as muse, how could creative authorship survive? Folk are repulsed by art as by a monstrous gecko off the wall. That double scrud, the very serious disease of unrequited lust, helps love to reach the pink of its condition.* A real lover is recallable alone with real love. Prophets have to realize there’ll be no one there to greet them at the end of the trail, everyone who might have done so having come to nothing. Naturally, on the other hand, each healthy groundling comes home belly rumbling for his nightly sweet patootie. Any prince of animals must bear his fate across a lifescape traveling stag, unattended in high timber by a sympathetic peer. How could a Zen soul not be single-o? To publish risks humiliation, since desire unrequited leaves one mortified. Yet nothing’s better than being truly useless—of use solely to oneself, the whole? Despite genetics what’s unreproducible is genius. Without success in reproduction one is pigeonholed among life’s myriad discards. Not likely that the ordinary clodpate, male or female, can imagine how a Ludwig or an Emily could ever cope without a bunkmate upon whom to work out his or her lusts. Art and literature constitute a finer form of union. The nobler one’s creative gifts, the

* For the information of our current horde of sexually hyperactive innocents, sublimation signifies creating the sublime from one’s erotic nature. 207 uglier one’s social graces? Any visage full of character must be nonaverage, not without blemish; having an unenviable phiz most likely helps impel an artist to shape beauty. Beautiful sentences exact harsh terms. Awareness is a singular whose plural is unknown. The writer’s job is just embracing readers yet unborn. Whatever has gone drastically awry in his or her erratic sex life, the creator may at heart be no more sick nor more irrational than other souls, just more aware and more expressive of the sickness and irrationality. To reach a sentient audience, he or she can only persevere, hopelessly optimistic, flying flat in the face of all evidence. Even one impotent can shoot his wad. What smug assurance reigns that nothing great can ever slip through the cracks, go unrecognized in our enlightened underworld. Without a doubt the public feeds the genius once a decade and the moron thrice each day because it feels its kinship to the latter. Why so many special classes and separate schools for backward children and so few for gifted? Just because society is backward and not gifted? Garbage may be given geniuses, pity morons, both such penny-ante offerings quite useless. Conscious benefactors’ salvos, since self-serving, are those of unwitting malefactors: beneficiaries are manipulatable, corruptible, destructible. Brain-zapped by media, the canaille cannot distinguish greatness from renown; when notoriety’s equated with significance pop “culture” (read scam) has succeeded in producing a ubiquitous dementia, switching over celebrities into projective screens for mania. No one can reconcile the senseless incongruity between society’s rewards and individual productiveness—such as the wages of the latest flashing rocker megastar* and those of Mozart.† Wowsers thrash about in serious straits. Groaners who inflict no earache neither remedy a heartache nor prevent a headache. As for who are the important voices of our time, the jury still is out—in fact the case has yet to be heard. No work of art can be correctly priced. The original cave painter’s motive, deep in earth’s womb, clearly had to be religious—not confined to the grave-shallow prevalent desire scapegraces nurse today to make a name or pelf for self’s sake. Nearly all of modern art, unalterably secular and personal, has been produced by the unqualified, projecting merely idiosyncratic views and serving merely to provoke the shallowest reactions in its

* Master artistes, even if offensively androgynous, are as a rule allowed odd peccadillos; modern idols are forgiven, as were the Hellenic gods, for lapses into crassest criminality if only they continue titillating half-grown worshipers. Most flashes in the pan don’t even flash. † Possibly the most prodigious of performers (e.g., Horowitz) are simply the most gifted or fanatically self-drilled stuntmen? Politicos, jocks, and pop stars badly need to grow beyond their embryonic exhibitionism; they too must experience nonentity.

208 self-admiring audiences. Bourgeoisie and proletariat have melded into one amorphous herd the taste and lives of which are governed by caprice and not by any higher principles. While erstwhile patrons of the arts could sometimes understand their needs and so distinguish fit from slipshod, present-day consumers evidently cannot. Only tiniest elites can treasure truth; for scarcely anyone is willing to make even the most modest effort (emptying self) necessary to earn spiritual plenitude. What sense in having a voice never heard? No more than beauty does nobility depend on onlookers. Not only can no one locate the source of lovelife; but no one is given even to attempting such a search. A last communiqué unto the underworld is well lost. Setting sail a trial balloon can tell one roughly what type of smash or crash a succeeding space ship ought to prove. Whoever cherishes the lofty hope that someday noble art will come to signify all things to everyone unwittingly is cherishing the same hope that it then will signify nothing to anyone. For brute creation great creation can do nothing.

_132_

At no time did the nudist magazine Approximate the family as obscene. Less noise about our civil liberties and more use of them would be news; unexercised, they atrophy. I have a dream . . . of a world guaranteeing the freedom to hear; and a nightmare that’s our actual underworld. Performers, to be heard, need audiences that are live. The slavery of the press won’t permit celebrities that it’s produced to keep their liberty from it. Man publishes far and abroad the freedom of his press but not that of his suppressed, symptoms of his madness. Secretly the old agree with what youth says but publicly will dispute to the death its right to say it; even though confuting truth is hard, at least confusing it is easy. In this as in every age, intelligence is warned to hire itself out as a mouthpiece or else to keep its eyes and lips sealed. But for that very reason, surely, when the editorial content is determined and the artist hamstrung either by fascistically pompous, soulless Commie theologians or by pompously fascistic, faceless clipster advertisers banning all close-to-the- bone lampoons, stray streaks of folly in the wise are meet. Exterminators are engaged to rub out, dry-gulch, any lone investigative scribbler probing too deep. Not just Stalinists know how to stamp out any malcontent as a nonper- son, male equivalent of spinsterhood. The all but soundproof wall between each populace and access to creative spiritual values thickens daily thanks 209 to the methodical, cynical, unfree masons—bureaucrats and hustlers—hired as cultural authorities. Domestic vassals of the media dare not offend their owners; thus in both the East and West promotion of official fraudulence like rah-rah patriotism generates from economic privatism, from familiar old petty passions such as fear and greed.* The real free lance can be neither seen nor heard in (i.e., under) the press; eagle eyes incline to spire above the danger posed by any noisy flack. Scribes seldom get the griff they really need. For every earnest writer writing spells his freedom, readership his bondage. Journalists obtain their livelihood by jawing and by pounding keyboards but have trouble listening or reading, not to mention comprehending. At the spiritual blood bank men of letters’ contributions and newsfashioners’ weigh in as love and strumpetry; most journalists betray the life of spirit. Difficult as it may be to grant today, all true creation is gratuitous; the notion of market society that no one works except for a reward, is backward, futile, sterile, but it suits oldfangled traffickers. Pop culture’s as oxymoronic in the sphere of entertainment as nutritious pop is in the field of food. The unsurpassable success of Elvis flawlessly exposed not poor taste in the 1950s Great Unwashed so much as their unmitigated tastelessness. When culture has sold out and publishing’s an industry controlled by what the public wishes, not by what it needs, is wisdom not ground under and tabooed? Depend upon it, as on publishers’ flunkies with a genius for rejecting chefs-d’oeuvre; truth in time refuses to submit itself to such raff. Sheerest idealism must it be, expecting capitalists or commissars to risk their shirts or necks on honest art, which in its essence or entirety rather than in any partial message threatens their corrupt class interests. The rise to power of a mob of semi-educated robber barons has produced a drastic drop in wealth and dignity of speech, precision, and vitality in language. The everyday denial of art proves that, given the option, most folk will choose ignobility. Mass man, the incoherent silencer of truth for whom, as sure as nightfall, mum’s the word, is a very close neighbor of us all. Composers blessed with chopper and a flair for wit are normally denied a hearing by the waxy public eardrums. Wasting cultures do their best to stifle any potent spirit. Journalism’s the most evanescent type of fiction. That reporters call all

* The meretricious star reporters, those incessant teleliars, in news studios help marginalize any troublemakers like Zinn, Nader, Chomsky, and Kucinich—shut their voices out of all mainstream debates. The hard cash-grabbing, status quo-corrupted media have always specialized in shooting down each messenger of “bad news,” i.e., truth.

210 their dispatches stories ought to tip us off that they deal in pure fabrication, far from pure. There’s infinitely more to life than meets the eye in any media. Mass media encompass all by comprehending nil; while yammering about whatever, they say next to nothing about anything. Grander than any sad voyeur’s slick hucksters’ manual is Life, to which so few Amerikans ever dared to subscribe; and where in prime-time television, whose canned laughter’s fit food for rheumatic funny bones, perceives one undistorted Vision? Newspapers may have some worth as fire-starters, pulp for stoking partisanship, feeding bored, malnourished heads as if with sawdust; but why waste all that sensationalistic ink on them? Overburdened are all bladders, running slow all chronickers: there are no Times that are not out of joint; for gonzo tabloids trumpet but exaggeration of the regular distortion “mainstream” newspapers purvey, scoring their scoops with unbelievable gobs of malarkey. All but unheard-of the newshound that’s a watchdog, no mere lapdog. Journalists go to great pains to give us scrupulous accounts of politicians’ lies; so many fiction writers get their fitting training in such smoggy newsrooms. Almost every story is a tempest in a teapot. Truth can make no copy for news articles, and hosts of trifles snapped up in scarcely digestible two-minute gobbets are not broken down into a meaningful whole. Slanted audience massage in parlors comes on, gets off, as weak substitute for hearty outdoor exercise. In modern times the hardest task may be distinguishing the medium from the concurrent tedium. It does say something that a nobody extraordinaire like Joe McCarthy embodied contemporary journalism’s dream of ideal story-maker; the trade’s meat embodies idle blabber. Throw enough dirt, hacks appreciate, and willy-nilly some sticks. Talk about “professional ethics” in the law or journalism implicates that these games are professions and permit practitioners to judge what’s fair and what’s good writing. Every cub reporter needs to have a nose for news, the trashier the better. Insignificancy, not to mention quasi-literacy, is news media’s real stock in trade. Relieved of effort, we accept as givens and echo conceits on sundry subjects on the say-so of nonentities. Are dumb-ass conversations not redundancies? Do we enjoy the daily sewage floodtide of paid gossiphunters? Audiences with room- temperature IQs are fed liberally with the lingua franca that is globaloney. Better by far to be offline. How much mail aside from advertising bumf does not belong in file thirteen? The most essential and exigent message is a nixie never posted, penned, or even thought. Sure, there’s a time to cable relatives sweet nothings, and a time, more pressing far, to carve memorials to oneself. Submerging soporous selves in the shallow stultifying pettiness that is

211 the daily ruse, all of the views unfit to print, in the unreal “complete” monotonous reports replete with jingoistic babble, with one more “top-level” horror rivaling another, we try to forget, yet only thus augment, our own criminal record and corrupt account of shallow stultifying pettiness. Our specs hang on whodunits, but our hearing aids won’t hear that we’re who done it. So poverty-stricken have become our characters that this humdrum twiddle- twaddle, suitable tripe for scavengers, actually seems to us significant, swell recreation, but it’s only flotsam, spume. Surveying how invariably flackery’s bombardments fail, how futile it would be to box ears to make others “better,” a true unsung hero promptly scuds out of range of the riddling electronic broadsides, imbecilic print barrages, fusillades of paid-for smears, from red, white, green, and yellow sheets—unsanitary rags so fleeting, paper-thin false colors all. Decline the coinages of the tripewriting heelers: as the circulating medium promoted by the scribes, accepted money-changers, they are counterfeit. Such tomtom-thumping might be less alarming, were it only to enlist a scalping party on dead heads, exploiters; but the cannibal’s cooking pot whose fire we’re dutifully fueling with this season’s wholesaled preordained clichés, thus helping semi-literate polluters spread their nation-wide smokescreens of pseudo-events, contains the living world.* The forgery of currency is judged a serious offense, whereas the forgery of words is plainly perfectly legitimate. Do abstract terms such as “civilization,” “democracy,” “fascism,” and “globalization” hold any meaning save perhaps as indicants of rife befud- dlement? Their habitual use produces lots of heat but of light not a shaft. Degrading language, those implements of power called reporters amplify impartially both power and our degradation.† Likewise pandering to pernicious fantasies are silver screenwriters with lucratively overworked yet underdeveloped imaginations cooking up jejune cliffhangers most of which end happily: live viewers jump with joy to see them end. In Tinseltown’s domain of surreality the difference between a smash and a smash hit may be a whal- ing shot of blood and guts. To see one Western’s not to see them all; but once you’ve watched them all it seems as if you’ve watched but one. What filthy rich romancer could conceive the real enormities of humankind? The very purpose of the Media, not just of moviedom, may be to help us to forget, via

* News commentators who, like sports announcers, rave about some datum as “incredible” do not improve their credibility. The imbecilic economic pundits prattling about negative growth do at least describe their own inadequate linguistic grasp. † Vulgar to a fault, most Yankees lazily and carelessly say they lay there without an object. 212 their razzmatazz, the idiocies of the dying day. A wired planet’s a weird planet. There’s a disconnect between yours truly and the shorting current pop scene. Any world where all allegedly are in touch needs all actually in touch with themselves.

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As fast as our communications are exploding, our communication vanishes. Both printed words and sensibility are being quarantined by technological advances; thus today’s, not only yesterday’s, newspaper hawks old news. In all directions (N,E,W,S) the media reports are out of date. The most informed are not the best informed; those full of information may be void of knowledge: as it happens, the apparent need to fill in folk with hottest poo is all too empty. Everybody’s at the mercy of a junk-packed surfeit, the implacable tsunami, of raw data drowning human spirit. We presume we’re rich in valuable information, strange to say become devoid of meaning. Where, now lost in “knowledge,” has our wisdom vanished? Electronics may preclude being plugged into the real world. Bound to using telephones, those clamant ravagers of privacy and killers of composure, we’re entangled in the phonus bolonus. The significance of what’s communicated may inversely vary with the quantity of media transmitting it. The more heard without listening, the less said. When the media barons hold forth on communicating, they mean one-way (which means not communicating), never letting the respondents act in real life, only react mutely, without issue, to half-hour slots of bosh and fantasy. The masses evidently never can discern that all mass media’s class tilt is charged with manipulating them much like debauched bambini. Rockheads go on rolling off assembly lines of the conglomerates. Mass media do not communicate, don’t even try; instead, they garble messages, eradicate unique perspectives and communication between individuals; their aim’s not to relate to but to hook. What makes staccato game or talk shows signal is how unembarrassed, faced with bare-assed bawdyhouses, both the static clientele and fungous “fun” girls seem to be; as entertainers hyperbolic hosts are half comedians, half wits* who, faced with matching idiot boards, hardly can die standing up when they’re already ethically decomposed. The giveaways are giveaways of avarice shared by all participants, not least by gazing plutomanic losers every one. Gongoozlers’ lifetimes dedicated to dumb goggling at such poor grab or gab programs pass, judged by and subject to the law of diminishing returns from

* Most nutty comics’ acts are not all they’re cracked up to be. 213 their very first unnoticed dying minute; it’s small wonder that our juveniles so suffer from the gimmes. Just as long as hardsell hypnotists keep on inton- ing, cornering the market in flagging attention, one is kept aware of what they are not thinking. Multimillionaires or not, shallow interviewers carried well beyond their depth by their own guff are saved by stooge commercials. We’re led to believe that touted entertainers have the inside track and special expertise on any pseudo-controversial affair, advantages not granted to the ordinary citizen; thus chat shows soddenly solicit from the seeming glamorous opinions with no particular redeeming value whatsoever. Steamrollered celebrities are the denatured products of impassive media’s rumor mill. Rituals long served to distract the driven masses from the crude realities of animal existence; but now glibber, more obtrusive forms of blabber and of exhibition are displacing those of fusty priests and temples for a public patently distracted. Who has seen one midnight divertissement has seen ’em all, because producers don’t dare change rock-a-bye formulas, trapped as they are like the devout host in the egomaniacal toils of greed sanctified. While the head pushers to a strung-out currency-junkie country celebrate their liberty to advertise, dosing immobile patients with a tasteless poisonous mass culture in ostensibly redeeming fillers sandwiched between unending insolent commercials, some consumers celebrate their liberty from having to consume a pesticidal medium;* the rest are wet-nursed, suckered, programed to be passive, over nothing all agog, ingesting their stale pap obediently in spite of feedback being forbidden, even if the food be vomit. Hyped-up ads forever cutting in with literally illusory spectacles soon punch the glazed-eyed viewers’ sensibilities hyperkinetic, detonate sensation while convulsing concentration, bringing down retention spans to zero. Who can pay attention when s/he is sleep-“learning” folderol, continuously staring and distracted, fallen in the vacuum of recall that symptomatizes all hypnotic trances? News is spun out helter-skelter, herky-jerky, by the governmental parrots to hold fast the feeblest observation, so precludes sequential reasoning and any thorough contemplation of the issues; such repetitive discontinu- ity permits us snap reactions, never a measured reflection. The beleaguered brain’s flooded with info at velocities forbidding—never mind requiring— some kind of evaluation. Truly, TV blurs one’s vision; promising originally an unequaled access to reality, the medium has made good an equivalent distortion of it. Nearly every soul is now bombarded by an endless onslaught

* Its survival rests upon precluding programs so engrossing or provoking they outshine the vital plugs. Electronic advertising always is in bad taste, not to mention bad faith. 214 of unnecessary data; all the loose talk loosens moorings of what verbal comprehension still floats. Thick perceptual overload is in cold blood injected into programing. When rubbernecking housewives’ wits have gone woolgathering while bound up with their daily chores, bathed in the bland surround of suds- ers, they’re fair game for sharp-set gypsters, since evoked recall, not mindful- ness, determines reconditioning of attitudes and conduct; all the underlying cues are picked up indiscriminately by each simply functional receiver. Are the feel-good programs, pills, or ads really distinguishable? “Life” seems now so rich in stimulus, yet in experience so poor. Predominant among the age’s mental health problems, whether evidenced in drug addiction, sex perversion, street crime, alcoholism, overeating, smoking (name one’s pet stupidity) is impulse discipline—a fact right in sync with the fleeting quality of perception fostered by the media in our sinking “now” generation. Who is going to postpone self-indulgence when long trained to have all problems readily resolved within the one- or half-hour span allotted witless comedies or cop shows? No one need push the MUTE button to observe a dumb show. “Serious television”—one more verbal contradiction. Rather than extending literacy, tiresome TV undermines it. Thinking, no performing art, has little in it for the viewer, thus plays poorly on the screen. The aim of programs, even the most “relevant,” is to elicit plaudits, never contemplation. Intellectual perspectives vaporize where transient sensation is god; what anesthetizes viewers mostly is the sensory incessancy. Passivity’s the order of the—night. Experience itself has been perverted and adulterated by TV— made into a replaceable commodity. With few shared values and thus almost no sense of community, our culture stumbles on—a cripple aided by its video cane, that prosthesis that’s the paradigm of all noncommunal productions. Not the dumbstruck “watchers” but the sly entrepreneurs prefer that goop, a flood of crud, shall be our daily diet. Neofascist merchandisers* flatter their youth markets with the lie that being the latest generation means being somehow wiser, braver, purer than all its progenitors, who managed to become notorious for folly, cravenness, pollution. Laziness and ignorance are thus deodorized, disguised as liveliness and horse sense. Enterprising media of course lean to the dead-wrong Right because, as incommutably big busi- nesses, as licenses for printing money, they have to protect their interests at all costs. Reactionary rags and nitwit networks are obliged to censor language by sharp-eared concern that, if alive and moving, it might puncture their

* Dr. Goebbels, that unbeatable manipulator of the basest instincts, also grasped that everyone’s suggestibility increases in the happy hour. 215 unblemished image—of pure unreality. Free consciences must keep on vanishing so long as industries depend for their survival on fomenting myths. Self-serving, vulgar media perforce promote the superstition that the vital human doings are collective and official, never private and unfunctional; that virtue is a matter of no import. Right beneath the media’s bright surface lies abysmal degradation. At each “highest”-level “peace” negotiation the press fotogs, not just scrambling paparazzi peddling smudges, can catch a rogue’s gallery for our inspection if not our edification. Those forever timely, always tardy newscasts, with their in-depth (shallow) close-up (distant) interviews of talking hairdos and puffed viziers enmeshed in fabricated crises, cast the optical illusion we can hobnob with celebrities, most of whom are in good odor though at bottom arseholes. Are we actually expert and aware when tuned in? So much blather is a bother not deserving bearing. Electronic media have proven a great means of driving folk apart, of insulating individuals and nations from each other. Fraudulent affairs and people daily gain legitimacy thanks to scandal-scouring broadcast- ers. A culture’s decadence is measurable by how fast its airwaves have grown foul. To make a stink is only natural for walking farts, as witness all the far- out static and fanatic backtalk spineless miniminded blowhards trade on call- in radio, overcompensating for their bloated paltriness. The problems of the present, even hornets’ nests like wars, are products of the duly constituted propaganda factories. Each national report can only be parochial, intensifying global bigotry. Yours not to reason why but to accept the daily genocide in your name labeled “liberation” or “our national security.” Must every age’s news communicators willingly collaborate with bush-league juntos drumming up the mob’s absurdities? When craven media have been suborned as well as duped they’ll go to great lengths to protect their backsides and to save the face of their pet führer who’s succeeded in committing a continuum of “world-historic” blunders. “The news” now consists of a polluted stream of pseudo-events whose producers coupled with consumers cannot realize they’ve collaboratively produced. “Our” swingeing media give nearly all their poor attention to the violence of lone offenders while immor- ally ignoring the enormous numbers of souls done to death by their “own” governments. How strongly we recoil from brutal foreign practices while fee- bly overlooking our own rulers’ power to invade our inner sanctums and compel our acquiescence. Is the public not continually being contaminated by the cruel and aggressive cynicism of modern reportage? Do our plump avuncular news readers, always lying, on whom we’re relying try to help with

216 badinage and happy-talk to counteract the onslaught of mad horrors they’re relating, dishing up the scarcely palatable veritable lowdown? Essays in cool nihilism, lessons in dull noninvolvement, network specials anchored by slick airheads globe-trotting among the great names of the era* saturation-bomb us with all the discrepant factoids and insulting platitudes, a never-ending litany of woes, until such numbing data cancel out each other, off the air, in blank equivocality: that’s entertainment or, broadly interpreted, “responsible journalism.” Clearly the hysterical fandangle of the newscasts cannot but disturb each hearer. One gig even phonier than show biz is the news biz. Both the fourth and fifth estates, true to their stupefying function, leave their addicts thinking they are au courant and know more but in fact beyond recall. Being drowned in hallucinatory piffle by rank mediacracy is what is called participa- tory democracy? For profits even politics, that dry-as-dust and characterless sphere, has been turned into a spectator sport. The sacrosanct distraction industry pretends its aims are sterling and its granulated “news” somehow amounts to more than rehashed vaudeville, sheer escapism in snippets, more or less happily lapped-up puke. The most important world-class auto race, that fastest pumped-up nonsport in Shamerika, when automated self comes roaring down the pike, is in no wise important. Desecrated man’s idea of free time has run down to a pit stop. Please be now informed that one or two of us are still alive who, finding that the bad news can’t be countervailed by nostrums’ “good,” choose not to scan the Evening Eclipse, nor to be buried by “our” sleepy hollow government in a Sunset Village sandbox. The paralysis characteristic of this age appears compulsory.

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First experience art, to achieve its understanding. Novices are quick proclaim- ing themselves masters, most admire self-portraits: why the masters are so few. Freed spirit is an unacknowledged swimming champion who’s learned by plunging gladly, with arms rippling, into divers art works; Doe-eyed dilettanti merely wade about, apparently content to dabble close to shore and carp at swimmers, squealing at the rip tides over their heads never to be overcome; while philistines squat on the beach, busily building castles in the sand.

* In a scarce-literate age of fleeting memory and double-talk this term’s come to mean moment, i.e., of no moment.

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How cleverly, with what celerity, the leader readers skim the surface of these lines, once over lightly; how plain is their inability to delve, how glib their verily depthless reportage! Surely they have taken streamlined courses in how to become speedier readers? They are regular skimmers over waters literally dead. What matters it that in scooping up their scum milk they pass over every depth-sounding fish? They probably could scarcely swallow, much less manage to assimilate, such anyway. Balletomanes who love those spritzy strains accompanying anorexics o’er all other are committed to the lightweight.

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Literacy is a useful tool few use. Oodles of nonreading noodles (not excluding lazy bourgeois literary cognoscenti*) can note nothing special about an ability to write. The foremost foes of choice books are not untold blockheads that read nothing but promiscuous cutworms, self-styled gourmets, who will cut off and drop anything so long as it’s served in the form of consumable pulp. What pulp literature’s really literature? When scarcity is no more, priceless- ness is no more too; as publications spread, perspectives dwindle. All opinions are deemed “free and equal” if their objects are inconsequential; thus all holders of opinions, in a world controlled by nihilist nonentities, are likewise set at nought. When all can read none does; when no one’s listening even every jot of Solomon ceases to speak. Traditional offenses such as Socrates and Jesus would today not be worth bothering to execute:† we now have disinfected bins for nuts. Does it make sense to sling the lingo for oneself alone? No less than money, words are useless unless in actual use. Art is not telling till some human soul tries to be told. In absence of great audiences, great creators must

* Self-occluded critics riffling through life studiously disregard both real and false books, but the latter are at least reviewed, even if negligibly viewed. The job such legless souls have undertaken is to teach the art of sprinting. Book and film reviewing are both ideal trades for mediocrities, providing them rewards for having sat in judgment on their betters: in the game they play the dice they cast are loaded. Surely there’s a likeness in most moderns, not just in our criticasters, to such scavengers as vultures and cockroaches. Few great authors can avoid being in their confreres’ bad books. † What does it say about our Western breed and culture that our premier spiritual mentors were in essence suicides?

218 absent themselves awhile upon the vine. Left lying like an old libretto on the shelf indefinitely unsung in our crumbling mansion’s attic, well lost fallen deep into desuetude, forgetting not the underworld and yet by it unrecol- lectable, one’s free to be content, considering the topmost company of Attic wit one keeps. Rich writers must put some poor readers’ noses out of joint. Unkindly truth is a rare curiosity that calls, to be discovered, for the same. No soul can read the same book or hear the same music twice. A classic reads us better than we ever could judge it. An untouched masterpiece, the utter indifference to which is an oft-told tale, speaks volumes for one lively spirit’s growth and many fainéant souls’ dormancy or worse. A classic’s what the reader holds at present in his or her hands or, latent, in his or her heart. The nodding reader’s warned that, to be a true sleeper, any ho-hum tome eventually has to wake up. Lovelife puts most suitors fast asleep before they even start toward its consummation. Leisure blind to letters, limning nothing living, spells extinguishment. Recumbent with eyes trained on yawny flicks or tired sit-coms, who is not yet wearied unto death of them? Each “All in the Family” was recorded on tape before a dead audience. At one stroke the invention of type printing broke the old class throttlehold on culture, giving hope at last for freedom from both ignorance and tyranny. But literature, like liberation, may well be a fugitive phenomenon. Our age, addicted to the passing scene, to what is glimpsed and facilely absorbed, has overvalued pictures and devalued language; the sloppy diction of the witless media gets to be roughly everyone’s. What’s called intelligence, reduced to its essentials, is synonymous with language: barbarized tongues bespeak barbarized peoples. Seeing (reading being moribund) is now believing to the sold-out public. A concern for social justice corresponds in its degree to that for les mots justes. That immemorial nocturnal sense, our hearing, naturally wary, has been blunted blatantly. Photography presents the world as object, language as idea; alien in fact to speech, photography looks at its outset to have been misnamed: it does exhibit life’s diversity, but lacks articulacy to make it intelligible. Image now determines what’s important: in the past an individual’s unique view mattered; people never saw the same standardized lifescape. Now the electronic media leads each lone spirit to be blinkered if not blinded; lies now circle the globe ere truth’s laced its footwear. Photographs serve less to capture than to dislocate reality, wrenching each instant out of its essential context, reproducing everything as atomized—a string of idiosyncratic happenings without a meaningful beginning, middle, and apt end. Repeating one’s exposure to an image actually makes it seem less

219 real. Snapshots suspend us frozen in time—no longer eternally alive; by snapping someone have you not arrested, even shot that person dead? Increasingly remembering is viewed as needless, even undesirable: the camera records in order to relieve us of the task of memory. All photographs perforce conceal far more than they reveal, occasionally pricking but never informing conscience. Cameras furnish us, the safely upscale, with a miniaturized spectacle of the world’s horrors, distancing emotion from its normal source; a moving photo cuts—not just creates—our sympathy. Portraying suffering, photography cannot but neutralize and trivialize it. Overstimulated pupils disregard what does not grab and deaden them; o’erwhelmed by a deluge of images, we grow obtuse in order to retain a modicum of autonomy. Our “educators” keep on failing to develop the capacity for self-determined doings—either recreation or creation; thus most “students” turn out to be drowsy helpless victims of an institutionalized and polluted stream of infotainment. What society of addicts long conditioned to collaborate with their enslavers ever will be edu- cable? A habitual half-listening results in a habitual half-understanding. Why should youngsters tackle reading, when there are on hand such easy options as TV and movies, rock and balling? Are we fully satisfied that generations now are learning little more than how to fuck around while taking tokes on spliffs to keep them-selves at ease? Most concertgoers are arhyth- mic and most moviegoers out of sync. Evocative more than immediate, real art requires intense involvement and response, as entertainment never does; it is the difference between catharsis and narcosis: from experiencer turned onlooker, each inert soul gets fed predigested pablum to eternize its inertia. All nonreaders are confined to judging each book by its cover. Favored forms of fiction are at far remove from the kind of moral inscribing people need. A trendy world consumed with self-amusement can’t produce enlightenment. It’s not for truth to lay them in the aisles. Only a perfect fool is likely to be fractured by the real. Untitillating are both truth and culture, and societies long drenched in trivial diversions neither have the last nor know the first. Consuming, audiences grasp continual destruction; art, however, is nonfunc- tional, created to outlast mortality. As self-consuming freaks, we find it normal nowadays that more is spent in selling either soap or art than in producing them. A ruinous consumptive world by definition is incapable of caring for and cultivating nature, which the Roman cultura implied. Each “culture” dedicated to consumption functions by devouring wholesale, thus cannot afford to care about preserving values: gross inflation and devaluation are its actuating force. For probity there’s no Academy Award bestowed. Classics in

220 black and white, like ripened compost, are but useless dirt—to dead plants. One soul’s treasure is another soul’s trash and vice versa. Libraries, to many who’ve passed through, seem cemeteries; only to the rich in spirit are they still real treasure houses. Treasure, tracked down by the odd truth-miner, is by definition buried: here it is, yet hardly visible. Creators disregarded by society tend to produce but little, which is usually wasted, just as children carry out their educators’ expectations. The potential resting in the souls of countless early retirees remains unknown. Must latent genius so seldom get a chance to strut its stuff? All libraries, all borrowers, in time will disappear; each book, each worm, is destined to become the finest dust.

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From early to late we drop from a lode of boundless hope with few regrets toward loads of regrets with scantest hope. ’Tis said the first one hundred years are hardest. “Down, down with art!” croaks the morose old master, having himself reached the hilltop, hitting the skids and, done with his hard sledding, slithering down the snow slope graveward; sliding downhill’s easy, headed via comedown to hit bottom, ultimately slipping into Lethe. Judging art a purely private shrine, absurd if shared, is judging life as such—a fitting act for decadents. Our “common sense,” that all too common sense, is but a coma in which we repose, and true art is the sundering wonder drug to rouse us—free from all drugs in the purity of loving life. Great works are whet- stones for the dull of spirit, flints from which, forever ricocheting, striking off at his or her own angle, someone long dismissed as flaky yet can scatter sparks and may, if kindling has been laid with care, leap skyward into flame.

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A foundling who has surely lost his way, man toddles on, misguidedly whim- pering for a Master, ultimately blundering into soliciting (of all things) me. With open arms, however, gently I refuse his fawning, firmly I refer him to himself. The hope of this world rests not upon a Messiah but in all of us alone. To enter into paradise, why knock upon my doors? Has one no entries besides these? Keep faith with me? No, lose faith in that idolatrous self. We individually are—or no one is—the savior, who redeems condemning every Pharisaic self. Oneself’s this fated felon come to judge the world. Is any kinglet—even of the underground news—all-important? Who are

221 we? Paul Bunyan? Zarathustra? Cleopatra? Or Napoleon? The Virgin Mary? Rumpelstiltskin? Or could these familiar apotheoses be but manifestations of bald self-hypnosis, rubber-stamped items in our fifteen-cent-store egos, folk- tale figurines, soul-tickling rattles? All our Allahs, Buddhas, Krishnas, Christs are no more than diversions for our selves and from oneself. Take heed lest any body or false prophet may be leading us further astray with subtle excla- mations such as “I am Zeus!” or “Lo, here is Og!” or “Lo, there!” For heaven is no thing to be observed, though we may see that Christ—the real thing, not a thing or name, but all-embracing love, the one who’s with us for good—is within us. No expiring spirit pules, “Lord, Lord,” and enters heaven; but the living one who does no body’s will is there already. Many sheepdogs might approach one in some nonexistent afterworld with, “Lord, Lord, haven’t we preached and salved in your name? and in your name done countless profitable works? Now what is our reward?” And one would answer these, Already you have your reward and you are known: begone, for your work of iniquity is finished, as are all your Lords and Masters. Querulously they persist in query- ing, “But surely you’re the Son of God returned?” One leads some clearly, the blind: before Jesus was one is. Debilitated heads prevaricate, “Such wild ideals may be all very well for you: you’re a damned fool, no blessed genius.” Just your opinion, my good fellows, but what matters that when one can be free, as you are and virtually everybody is, in esse, yet no less in posse? What transcendent genius can touch sound character as vital element within the reach of everyman? Ay, there’s the rub—the “wrong” way on some inflexible scalps, and not so readily as they thought are they to be rid of the persistent gadfly’s goading bites.* Man has no bonnet, but he needs a mordant bee within. Am I not getting under his skin as he’s under mine? Who dares to give a damn for one, responsible to life in future, as one does and is for all of us? Despising virtue, we desire glory; but the will to Christhood is not Christ’s. How vexing, aggravating to our beast-fed eczema, that we can’t profit by truth, get our itching fingernails into the real thing, somehow capitalize on love; how distasteful for a ruck of calculating science-worshipers that neither spiritual depths nor art’s sublimities are measurable. We regressively seek out mother superiors to tell us how to tighten up our safety belts, we wish to be inviolate, secure from suffering. But one releases our supports and is undo- ing the tight hooks of our conventions. Reeling, lost, recoiling in blind panic at the very thought of self-dependence, independence, nondependence, how

* The populace which gads about remaining a great ass.

222 humanity yet craves a sign, an incantation, magic wand, or miracle! And right here it has one, under its nose yet over its head. Anyone can hear the drumming rhythm of these phrases; but must everyone be deaf to the unending echoes, sound no chord responsive, when one strikes notes in oneself? No one’s responsible who is unable to respond. Why do we call some good? For none is good save one—that is, oneself. And even were one Christ incarnate, of what consequence could that be to one? What does matter is that everyone’s oneself and no one merely the Christ that’s a pale reflection of the self. As long as we desire to become God, or “oneself,” or any such conceit, we cannot be one; for true love escapes desire. Angling for strong compliments, tailing an angle, we do manage to catch fish while losing, missing, the truth of the fishing trip—not to angle but to be our selves caught up untangled freely in oneself. Like all the other gulls, these piles of white trash that compose our selves, we flock so greedily around the garbage dumper spreading out his fast-food wares. We wonder what may still be buried by the Dead Sea, but not what may still be borne by the alive sea that’s oneself. A few might be found oohing and ahing over some recluse’s verbal gift and intellectual encompassment, but these are not the gift of love nor the encompassment of truth. Glory is not a matter of the self. One in ten thousand may perceive the grace and harmony and justice of this sentence and then try to crucify and/or to glorify its maker, yet ’twas sculpted not to be spat at or slobbered over but so that one would rejoice in the originally uncarved and incomparable beauty of oneself. Get thee hence, see our ugly slavery.

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One teaches us in namelessness that is oneself, and we do not accept this teaching; but if any oily opportunist teaches us in his own name, him we believe. How can humanity love who, obtaining honor one from another, takes not the honor offered by itself? Who thinks it’s I accuse us to our selves? Above all there is one accuses us, even Jesus, in whom we trust. Were anyone in love with him, it has to be oneself, at one with what he said and did. But having followed his words no more than his actions, how can people follow these fresh writings on the wall outside their selves? What could be an authentic blessing is heard as an unsound malediction. We are born to the fruit of life: who comes to, who comes to oneself, neither hungers nor thirsts for truth, realizing it consists in being consumed. If those who have been offered earthly guidance as regards fruit won’t accept it, how can they receive

223 empyreal instruction as regards creation? Spurning early minor overtures, how could the incurious cocotte that’s humankind, already truly screwed, receive the major body of inestimable artwork from an homme d’esprit? No egocentric damsel out of her depth ever could esteem the real phenomenon sui generis a true creator represents. The odd soul’s not tried yet found wanting. This our whorish world is next to and yet not quite meaningless since graced by genius; the drab meets needs of egoistic tricks but never of sagacious character, joining which calls for rising to the occasion, of which she’s incapable. Enclasping an exacting stylist’s beyond the comfortably deaf and blind. The fallen woman is forgivable save in ignoring unity; her ignorance embraces its own ruthless retribution. Just how often has the self-absolved adulteress stood in that doorway scorning to acknowledge truth? O times past telling, beyond counting. She seeks to be “understood” (meaning indulged), while he to understand: the loveless underworld’s succeeding does not certify that loving understanding’s failed. Triumphant without vanquishment, the secret’s in adoring even though ignored.

_140_

Religion, like industrialized entertainment a necessity for the collective, has purported to provide solutions to a casual, nonrational existence; art, a choice for individuals, less artificially traces transitory loveliness. Religion promises folk future blessings as a recompense for lost pasts; art fulfills the need for presents free of time. Religion has been known to flaunt a blood-stained totem; art endeavors to restore a spring and flow to all our steps and hearts. Where wondrous wisdom lies, in servitude or in release, each of us must discover. As great antique art was naturally sacred, so great modern art is knowingly ironic. Every religion’s chief role may be to relieve the futile many from the fearsome choice of having to create their very own completely new world. People generally learn too late (or never learn) that they produce their own way of life (or death) willy-nilly. Truth to tell, the real faith is what one creates, not some dead foreign creed.

_141_

In a society so saturated with hypocrisy and triviality, both of those classical forms of romance, art and the mystic, lose their credibility if not validity. We’re willing to buy “comic” books, but not a cosmic book; we want our

224 “profit” but no prophet. Hardly ever does one apprehend how dear’s the useless. Sparkplugs such as Jesus X or Dr. Nietzsche are apparently of no use save as public banes, health hazards, to their run-down and misfiring nations. We wish to be solaced and consoled; but wishes will not solder and consolidate. We like to tickle our dull nerves and fancies with “strong” novels, goofball fiction, all that trendy jive; but love bears witness to unmeasured aeons, to unvarnished truth, a chiming in of spacious euphony. For the sake of the humor we demand that, like an empty wind, the muckraking ink-slinger bluster; for the sake of the human one prefers, like blazing sun, to blister. Come with me, and I will make you—a fisher or a tanner of men? No, it’s your responsibility to be fruitgrower and truthplanter. We would rather some imaginary character had said this so that we could twist and turn and slip and slide away from oneself swigging the more spuriously spirituous if fascinating fascist brew of some calamitous tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying our selves. For who, fed to the eyeteeth with escapist myths, hypnotic sells, is apt without surcease to search out fierce nonfiction? Artists proffer their wares to the bourgeoisie as consolation prizes for a false success; whereas an epiphanic moralist sells nothing, preaching unheard of true failure. Our most urgent yen is for distraction’s time consumption, hardly for enlightenment’s transcendence. Why implore the master author to invent engaging parables or pornographic sermons for us? So that later, a lot later, while we publicly laud the raconteur’s game efforts, we can privately dismiss or pigeonhole him as a fortunately distant legend and his testy newer testimony as amusing fables fashioned by some poor provincial dreamer? Yet one comes not to divert but to direct. Can truth be spelled out to the spiritually illiterate? “It says so, right in here,” insist the learned, pointing to their books, and the wise, pointing to their hearts.

225 226 III Trust in Nothing

227 228 There’s scarcely time for man to scorn, No room for his distrust; There’s no time now to be forlorn— So soon will he be dust. v He thought to bless you, white-winged bird, So wisely you took flight. His wave was meant to be a word Of faith and not of spite.

He thought he wished to show his love— You felt he aimed a blow; And now you’re gone forever, dove With wings as white as snow. v Each fails to live Who fails to give.

_142_

Anew a noncommandment’s given one: that by forgetting self one be oneself. Our moms we love? Or only our moms’ love for us our mewling selves? Are sad sacks “lovelorn,” or exclusively self-pitiful, full of belly concern? Our brothers’ deaths are dreadful? Or our own presaged by theirs? And aren’t our fathers’ hollow old performances far too hard acts to follow? Surely not what mortals get out of life most imports but what they put into it. The unloving life, our daily grind, is not worth living. Obviously most of us think that our value turns upon how much we can extract from others, on our larder capacity as consumers solely. We’ve been drilled to think that what we keep determines our wealth and our value, whereas that’s mistaken. Generosity appears unnatural, requiring choice, a radical rebellion. Nature’s inherently self-serving—verily Original Sin’s biological equivalent—yet humankind’s survival now depends on our transcending that predisposition. Have we dauntless ice-cold warriors, rigidified by fear, impervious to our own suicides, helped any neighbors on the other side of our steel-curtained world? Be less forgiving than for giving. Love’s no influx of substantial interest but an outgrowth of immediate care. Greatness gives all one has got, and one’s got all to give:

229 however thankless, never ask less of yourself. To be oneself consists in sharing oneself without stint—the whole drink and not just the head of froth on top.

_143_

Where do we suppose the heart of human life lies hidden? In the pelvis? Give it one more try. Do we imagine reason furnishes the unambiguous reason for living? Fancy one appeals to logic urging that we have done with insanity? Our most rational acts are far from rational. More potent than all of man’s reasons is great heaven. Home of reality is built on the enduring rock of the heart, not on the shifting sands of the head. Our minds can verbalize the truth but cannot be the truth. Benevolence, to be sure, is stark-blind—to trivia. Love views not one nor many, only love. Of little value is our clarity Of vision groping for true charity. Highest intelligence consists in deepest sympathy. By all means, using no means, be devout . . . toward oneself. Yes, clear of gods as well as devils, worship the true sacred heart—of each and everyone. Reserving love for others of our kind is far from loving. Every genuine creator’s a self-crucifier. Greater love hath no man than this, that he give up his life . . . for his enemies. In more than net games love all signifies no score on either side, and taking part without our giving all is jolly well not cricket, chaps. Since welfare’s been abandoned and the state’s now bankrupt morally, it’s surely time that every home became a Sally Ann. Donate not just to “the deserving” but freely to all, like the everbearing fruit tree yielding bounteously, without a set quota. One gives truly if one does not know to whom one gives.

_144_

A drop of living love o’erwhelms a sea of idiotlogical advances. In the stockyard mart of politics all professorial ideals are mutilated beyond recognition. Droves of sheep may approach one with their dripping mouths and celebrate crossed Christ or Marx with opened throats; but heart is far from them, full stopped within their carcasses: in vain they worship God or god, close herded as they are for bleeding by commands of rabidly assured attack dogs frothing, “Death to anybody who dissents, for OUR divinity justifies everything!”—once the crazed battle cry of the Crusades and Inquisition,

230 now of “liberating,” all too Red and white armies and of rich witch-hunting Shamedical Associations, semper infidelis to their motto, primo non nocere, ironing out the kinks by ironing out us. “Trust everyone, but always cut the cards?” Nyet, why attend to cardsharks for advice? Their lowlife parlor games we’ve no need for. Are we sufficiently submissive to obey the will of the Big Bother who is in our Fatherland’s capital? No? Another dosage, then, of radi- ating brain-slopping for us! Rabbinical confessors, whether of the Vatican, the Kremlin, Washington or Peking, fascisti all, the hooded hoodlums of the Klan who hold our purse strings in one hand and a switchblade knife in the other, both in the dark about what is being perpetrated, have warned us that to resist is evil, that we must cooperate, lie passively and uncomplaining, while they do their foulest deeds; but truth suggests that just to turn the other cheek to cynic cutthroats, not to mention striking back at them, is vain. Yet what can aid humanity now save an international conspiracy against the status quo of nationhood, a totally uncompromising situp standup strike for truly higher wages—life and not this universal death with no fringe benefits? We’ve heard it sworn, “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”; but one gives both ears to the barbarian who hacks one off: he gains two ears, appendages of one head, but no one’s hearing, no one understanding. When the wind blows from the west, we automatically proclaim, “It will clear.” And when a cloud rises from the east, conditioned we blurt out, “It will rain.” Satisfactorily we hypocrites discern the ominous face of the sky; then how is it we don’t discern the very groundswell we now ride foretelling planetary whirlwinds that our selves have sown? Our clannishness, that powerful propensity to spurn all strangers, to degrade them without any guilt pangs, once and long served a genetic vantage, but now speaks with an outworn authority, advising whoever dares welcome truth of the raised price of egoistically ministering to id. Perpetually we bemoan the generation gap in order to avoid acknowledging a greater gap in love and understanding between everyone; there is a stinging pathos in far and away most fellow citizens, including parents and their offspring, never grokking, getting well acquainted, in spite of shared genes and tongues.* Few of us know where anybody lives. Man’s sole concern is not that he support all sides but that all line up on his side. We level guns and accusations at compatriots, but we don’t level with compatriots, both we and they the walking

* A lot like lovelife, rare and foreign to us moderns does archaic Gaelic’s furrawn sound (the kind of conversation leading strangers to be intimate). Enhancing intimacy (something not unknown to species other than ours) surely was the primary objective in gestating speech.

231 dead. As we accompany our cozened and accusing cousins to the place of judgment, we must share with them our wealth unmeasured; else we’re sen- tenced to a permanent imprisonment, deprived not only of our every penny: even of our penitentiaries suppurating with impenitents.

_145_

When we should hug we haggle; when our prayer Is for a hug we have to hug the air.

_146_

A rocky coastline helps unfathomed depths climb the sky. Does one feel the river’s sweep less strongly swimming upstream? Hard is it to stanch the wounds inflicted by divinity; as terrible as glorious the glance of any ideal love, foreboding death and immortality at once. Where is great passion without vigorous pathology, voracious love savored without restrained strong bites? Protective caring springs from curbed aggression. Where’s the friend more loyal than a wolf? Compared to genocidal man, the wolf’s a paragon of self-restraint. Wisdom brings out the decent beast or anima in one to inspect and outwit the perfidious human. He who’s always throwing people curves is likely to toss one too many. Who’s untouched by pain who still remains fast held by fear? To do or die? No, do and die. To love is to consent to disappear, for each of us is someone suprapersonal. There’s no love lost between any persons, personalities being masks. In such deceptiveness one could make many a screen idol take a back seat—if one drove a cab. This egoist named Everyman* needs to direct his longing, free of outer direction, toward himself, the whole, who is in truth entirely without identity. Loosen he must the knot of personal devotion, drop all that possessive commitment, not excluding his committal of espousals in cold blood. Deeply one feels how untied one is to the self when oneself is united. No engagement is harder to bear, no consummation sweeter. Once a man is really wed, serving “others” is no burden but a blessing; then he honors them no less than the rest of himself. Brakes become unnecessary and the vehicle entirely mobile if a clinch exists in spirit. Love’s a bond, yet free of bonds, since boundless. Jilting self, one joins the truelove; clinging to self, one meets the Adversary himself. We our disconnected selves incarnate hell, whereas integral heaven constitutes oneself.

* One trusts it is assumed that Everywoman is subsumed. 232 _147_

What good we are turns on just how grateful we are feeling for the least moment of life. Each instant is unique,* and each event a miracle, although we know it not, for in truth it cannot be known at all but must be sensed. To “know”: that is to dominate, disdain, misunderstand. Efficiency is ineffectual. An active slave or robber seldom has his heart in it. Love thrives alone on leisure, not en masse on business. Our downtime actually is our uptime. Market “culture” deems the workless as the worthless. Marriage, but not love, requires working hard at it . . . especially to keep it working badly. Wisdom, which enjoys its horse-and-buggy leisureliness, takes its own sweet time creating. Quickies fail to nourish; bustling breaks the charm of life, and hustling now has broad signification. Tripping, whipping, tearing through things, we delay. Who hurries harries and who hastens hates. Those with too little time or disposition to just talk have just the same to be a friend, since friendship is composed of mostly chat. While like a rattling rocket tempus fugit for us pacemaker homunculi demoniacally hurtling who cares where, old wizard nature saunters along to fulfillment. Who but an imbecile would rush When on the hillsides roses flush? And yet abruptly mental violence evaporates when its own shallowness is seen. We pray not when we make requests but when we give thanks . . . to nobody in particular. Could mealtime grace be but a means of hypocritic elders to display how pious and God-fearing they are to their juniors? What people childishly demand of their Big Daddylike eidola is that somehow two plus two not equal four. Real prayer is wordless inner meeting far from brib- ery, however beggarly the state from which its seed shoots forth. It springs to life in solitary idleness, out of a witless witnesslessness, flowing not toward a single thing—toward some nothing more than anything. There’s no such thing, whatever we think, as oneself. We fancy finite objects can slake infinite desire? Or is our longing limited and not divine? To “love with all our hearts” may mean conceiving others as no more than shades in the resplendent universe which radiates from us, mere silhouettes of our peremptory

* Subliterate society finds it impossible to fathom that “unique” means singular: mayhap the mass of clods refers as well to womenfolk as partly pregnant or themselves as quite infallible? Unique’s not qualifiable, and hardly credibly it’s what everyone is. 233 sensations; such self-centered baby-style love marks “adults” everywhere. We sculpt associates into the likenesses most to our hearts’ content—an art that wins no accolades. Some folk say they have loved so many things, but I say they have loved precisely nothing—till they have loved absolutely no thing. Solely when conceding one is no thing is one wanting nothing; then, and only then, can one cede everything. Think we should withhold something? Soon, however—why not now?—dawns the day when every thing is going to have to be given up. No one can show compassion too soon who is in the dark how soon will be too late. To wait to love till one’s a crotchety old crone or crabbed old fogey is to wait too long. Their real lives are most often those that people do not lead. Each soul’s composed of unfulfilled potentials—split among the individuals that he or she will never be. How few of us exhaust a tittle of our possibilities. Most people perish virtually unknown. Our view of others is simplistic (not to mention of our selves). Each character’s a patchwork fantasy, with many aspects to the hilt ignored and thus “not there.”

_148_

One grasps what is essential when possessing no thing, having lost possession of the hoarded self. We think we give much, pay our dues, forking out money? No, but great enough is our munificence if we relinquish these our philanthropic selves luxuriating in the tallowy charisma of their princely offices. Real liberality is scarce conceivable to ordinary souls, who drape themselves with moral cloaks to hide their vulgar nullity. What’s ethical can hardly grow until one’s quit from advertised morality. The common man is quite unable to forget a favor—if he did it. “Charity begins at home” and as a rule remains there. Where would charities be without sob stuff? The untold “anonymous” donors for whom anything’s no sooner done than said are as retiring as was Vergil’s Galatea, “Who fled, first ensuring she was seen”, hiding her light by kindling the bushel. Scratch a matchless philanthrope, and one illumines a stubbed misanthrope afire for honor. Irresistible for some the greed for gratitude, the “need” to feel superior, to nurse that fantasy which threatens anyone conferring favors. Golden generosity practised compulsively is a dead giveaway, consisting of shamanic gestures aimed at ruling others, making them love one as one, however poorly, has loved them. To be respected one need not be but must seem to be magnanimous; esteem, like lucre, largely goes to those who need it least. Those with a modicum of guilt,

234 to palliate it, talk poor mouth. Humanitarians crying over the poor’s wounds in effect are salting them. Philanthropists intent on doing good finish as they start—good at doing well. Would every benevolent foundation not collapse without its raison d’être, chintzy tax avoidance? The do-good public-relations image is cosmetic, being deployed to cloak all those unconscionable practices that made each fortune gainable. Is stealing half a billion, then returning half a million, really charity? There’s no love token save deep love itself. Accepting graciously is harder still than offering: to look a gift horse in the mouth is nowadays no more than natural. We give with our hands yet without our hearts. Not only will we not give our shirts off our backs; most folk would rather not chip in even their two cents’ worth. In all our tightwad handshakes our hands shake, for we take good care to avoid heartshakes. What function do our greetings mainly serve but to assuage contention? Some of us, as gingerly as fornicating porcupines,* can barely bear to touch others because we dread to be touched in our hearts, thus baring just how tetchy we are in our heads. Those touchiest about being touched are palpably most out of touch with everyone. They can’t lose touch with partners who have never really been in touch. To most men touching’s tolerable purely as a prelude to the real thing, as a priming of the twats for action. “We just love those others . . . just so long as we don’t have to try to live with them.” We’ve thought, for influence’s or decorum’s sake, that we should love our less than charming neighbores quite as much as our own scintillat- ing selves; but actual, active love is free of moldering molds and shouldering “shoulds,” of each and every self-fitting thought and measurement: it treasures nothing more than anything. “This much and no more . . .” is the generosity of grocers, in the gross right out of generosity. Some Reynards are past masters at not picking up the tab; one’s really got to hand it to them. Specious liberals get by with shifty grasping, never steady giving. Our regular take’s considerable, but our give so far’s a disappointment. Aiming for equality, we hit upon the way to nullity; just by accepting our own nullity can we establish everybody’s equilibrium in unity. Two zeros joined equal the infinite. To be unisonant, not dissonant, means giving up the solo kudos. Every body has a soul—is one soul. Flesh and spirit, nature and man, are in essence one. The truth is physical and metaphysical at once. Love sprouts in dissolution of the opposites, in the unification of our disunited selves, in which both “our” and

* How sweet each prickly pair? A single critter slipping from a tree risks dangerous self- punishment.

235 “selves” exist no longer. Life is simpler than one would think—than one could think. Perish the thought of gruesome twosomeness, togetherness: above all cherish all.

_149_

What we adore we are. Admiring truly is being truly admirable. Loving is its own reward. What cure for lack of love but the intrinsically undemanding mystery itself? Those who spit always spit against the wind and wonder, gob- struck, how come they get theirs: time wounds all heels. True satirists unearth unpalatable truths about their selves, then cover others with the revelations. The satiric spirit, that whet of a bared stiletto, must be unfulfilled male sexual aggression finding its “fulfillment” poking fun while compensating for real or imagined defects by humiliating suppositious rivals; wit is a defense against expected ridicule. Best reckon it a small loss that one golden honey of a fleshy melon’s papain might have tenderized the tiger snake’s envenomed meat. Au fond the pun intends to harm, not just to charm. How few one-liners, snap- pers, or knee-slappers are not at some other soul’s expense. Does it do the heart good to slam, excoriate, tie into, whipsaw, or eviscerate somebody with quick rapierlike thrusts, to do a hatchet job with one last matchless squib? What’s in a zinger more than egotism “pure and simple”? There’s a role for raillery but not degraded into wanton sadism. We can always find the time to hurl an epithet but never to retrieve it. Blaming gives the blamed a deadly power over us. Some people gamble, others smell: Don’t punch what aren’t tickets to hell. We reach our best not by our complex selves attacking “the worst” but by drawing close to what is best, simply nonself. Like magnetizes like. Mistreat oneself, and one’s unable to treat fellow creatures gently. By perfecting our selves we perfect the world, the world reflecting our imperfect selves. But how does one perfect one’s self? By concentration on or by dismissal of the self? One guess. What fault’s more deadly than perverse attachment to one’s faults? Nothing but love releases one from personal shortcomings. What we cease to contemplate we cease to prize; what we observe is just what we deserve. Demeaning others means to end demeaned. Those vices we scoff at in neighbors mock us in our fleering selves. Within oneself alone is heard the unsurpassed riposte, forever un esprit de l’escalier. To one adoring, all is possible.

236 _150_

Is pity just contempt for what is loved? More wholesome far is wonderment than pity. Vanity may pity, but reality astounds. There’s in a leaf of grass some substance better than in any wordy social program God or any dreamer can devise. The song of one small bird is worth far more Than all the bestialities of yore. The toil of one small ant humiliates The smugness of a million potentates. The rise and fall of winds, for wisdom, put to shame the Russ and Roman Empires.

_151_

Many a soul will smile and smile and with each smile say “Up yours with a stalk of burrs.” How courteous, how nicey-nice, s/he is to one for whom s/he feels exactly nothing. One cannot draw sweet milk from a straight-faced llama that believes it is expectorating honey. Generally people get along tolerably well so long as their relationships remain shallow enough; it’s only when hopes and demands for candidness arise that unmistakable rejection by the fundamentally self-centered and dishonest bulk of souls occurs. If you are absolutely sure that you possess the objects of your love, be just as sure that you do not possess them, let alone love: one is lost exclusively to those whom one has given up for lost. As long as we hope and want others to change, to love us, there’s no hope of our changing, loving anyone, no matter how much we may also want that. Each neurotic’s totally impossible expectations of love buttress his or her entrenched position that he or she is not truly loved; thus “love life” evidences the same incongruity that characterizes relationships in general: increased need plus decreased capacity. What can one honestly do but love hopelessly, wise or otherwise, prospecting without prospect of success? For hope’s the mother lode, the mine’s main vein or artery, which must be opened. Only fools fight the one really terminal and unpreventable disease.

237 _152_

When thinking we know how or why we worship we don’t worship. Wisdom strolls beside joy’s living stream without trying to trace its sinuous track through the upland forest to its source; to find the latter (were that possible) would be to lose the stream itself. Who follows his wandering mind gets lost. The mountain fountainhead is not one’s head. Every ideal, as every snowy peak, is raised by and conceals a fiery heart. Some tragedies are moving quite beyond anyone’s ken; to onlookers who glimpse them they appear low comedies. Our scratches, not our wounds, are visible. Concealing woe is easy; not so, bliss. Dig for the root of beauty, and one extirpates the plant. The artificial light of consciousness shades man from, if not blinds him to, himself.

_153_

Do we spot others so as to receive? Then, truth to tell, we do not give. Are those said to be “in love” ready to make every sacrifice to get what they desire? Whose close relations based on “mutual need” Are not more truly based on mutual greed? By wedding for enrichment, folk insure they finish up impoverished. Our free trade is not fair, nor fair trade free. Reality’s no matter to be bartered. Every body may have his or her price, but the truth has none. Lovemongers vend poor imitations, insight being unmarketable. Loverly attentions evidently count for precious little in an underworld of trading. Sexual commerce seems almost as prevalent as “love commerce” incongruous; in such a congress scandal is avoidless, sure as death and taxes. Hateful are the wages paid unfreely. Poor man and his neighbor, destitute indeed, employ each other, both ignoring the fact that those things employed are tools and that tools are dead things. He uses her, she uses him, and—is there no connection?—both of them are in despair. What’s worse, drug addicts using people as a means to masochistic ends, or bourgeois hooked on “love” for whom possessing people is the sadist end for sure?* Afraid she’ll be left in the lurch, as he that he’ll be

* To use another seems to work yet doesn’t: what’s possessed is something other than the other person, and the bottom line is being shortchanged. To get free wholly one must give one’s ownership the gate.

238 tethered and forgotten in the doghouse, the odd lady may secure her doggy toy boy’s fealty* by training him in an agreeable bedtime perversion. Aren’t all our gifts Indiangivers’ gifts? How meritorious is rolling out the carpet for our guests one day, then yanking it from under them the next? A mingy-minded isolate, by acting chummy, may ingratiate himself with others solely to extract something from them; a hidden motive or secret agenda lurks when such a creature cozies up to anyone. So many households are constructed out of cupboard love. “You scratch my backside and I’ll scratch yours too . . .” is backward. “Play with me and I will play with you . . .” is play, not love. Joy is a serious affair, no ribtickler to be encountered via entertainment, follies, or belongings. Jealousy in us means love is not. Wisdom consists in love, but love consists not of attachment. Nobody can trust companions without trusting in himself; indeed, whatever confidence one finds within oneself determines that which others feel. Abandoning all vain suspi- cion and fearful embarrassment, who cannot now be truly self-abandoned? Sans souci, throwing caution to the winds, tread on the robe of shame: what genuine lover isn’t curiously careless? Forewarned is forearmed, all right, but forearmed’s foredefeated.

_154_

What fair-weather friend can fairly be called friend for real? Who’d ever guess how many “friends” are out there till you win the lottery or simply own a summer residence? An Inuit learns who is friend, who foe, when the ice breaks. Prosperity produces the perfunctory flatland acquaintance, always one too many; whereas it’s adversity provokes a steadfast cragsman friend, never enough of one. Not friends’ assistance helps most but assurance it can be relied on. Understanding how to keep a friend counts more than gaining extras, casuals. Seldom are brothers friends; but, strangely, friends are brothers always. Yet no friend must be his brother’s keeper, since comradely partnerships, unlike those lust-based, are unfettered. An acquaintance takes up time; a friend demands one’s life. Befriending neighbors ends up unsuccessful as a way to make true friends. The company that misery’s apt to “love” is unlikely to be heartening. Those liked are chosen, not those loved. Appears a friend as Easter’s sun which breaks up all fast-frozen streams, the buckling

* Glossed over as imperative companionship and harmless play, the citified convention of pet- keeping shrouds unmindful exploitation of domestic creatures serving mistresses’ unsatisfied desires. 239 ice exploding like a lion roaring. Love’s an avalanche that swallows the dare- devil self in melting fathoms of fresh mother’s milk from heaven. Who has all for boon companions has none for friend. To live with love is to live without loves. Even the best of friends falls far short of real friendship. Nothing separates people like enforced intimacy. Up a stump over what makes a bore tick, one may still wish that he were a time bomb. He’s most wearisome with whom it is forbidden to be wearied. We can labor but not love under compulsion; modern bondage militates against the leisure necessary if the friendship’s ever to form. Be so kind as not to kill mankind with kindness. Noblest contributions to the social welfare must be made inside our homes. Best of all things one can do to help the world is no thing: simply grow fruit and live simply . . . much less simple than it sounds. A lot of folk have too high (read low) an opinion of their selves to be real friends to anyone. Humanity can be converted wholly only if and when one is converted into oneself. Parallels become united at unparalleled infinity. Love of oneself is always greater than the love of man. Yet in dividing love one does not love. Unfaked philanthropy involves self-cultivation, neither cultivation nor of self.

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Lust’s deepest ecstasies ascend like Roman candles into fantasy. “We are the first to have discovered love!” holler the spoony honeymooners buried in a mineshaft quite as old as the hills. Panting, palpitating, face aglow, at fever pitch, a hazy mooning noctipacer, picking up a piece of coal or Easter egg emblazoned outside and hardboiled inside, dotes upon it, whinnying, “What a diamond, what a real find!” Any woman becomes beauteous in a man’s eyes if delirious desire is in them; the way to his heart is through his genitalia.* In a pinch, given the right curves to ogle, he will go to bat for her as quick as diarrhetic trots to water closet. The lust object, whether in the form of human frame or of artistic “classic,” seems apotheosis or embodiment of every virtue; veneration swells from venerator’s feverish imagination, not from any qualities intrinsic to the object. Many of us hope and look in vain for an equivalent to that unique and “unforgettable” beloved of our childhood as our memories persistently transfigure her or him into a phantom. Lovesick idealists’ romantic images of love, those lingering parental figurines cast as gigantean, exaggerate the difference between one person and another and are less than love.

* One fatal weakness nature nurtures in each strong man, his knee-jerk response to visual sex stimuli. 240 Lustful adhesion potently persuades most spouses to ignore their partners’ glaring character deficiencies. The state of “love”: two souls without a solitary thought. How snogging lovebirds, absolutely crackers, deify each other must defy all reason. Measuring one’s probable profits and losses means to waste all. Learning is unlearning, to be undeceived, and that necessitates deceiv- ability—no problem. Without passing through calf love, so many graduate to bull. Why be a normal fraud, a very caution? Better “err” Than beware. Better be sorry than safe. Deliberation is not liberation. Truly, all our brain- work is an afterthought.

How mauve storms mass above white April peaks, As longing, unasked, masses in one’s gorge. Who loves if, spooked and failing to enjoy beginner’s luck, s/he loves not at first sight, extempore, and even earlier, before the blind date? Puppy lovers who live happily “ever after,” hexed and floating on clouds, live in fairy tales. The “one and only” dreamboats we have sought and found do not exist.* Could gravitating toward one grand passion be but human nature— compensating for a customary desperation, deadly truth being that cross weighed, alleged to be unbearable? Romantic love can scarcely flower lacking mystery, remoteness, ignorance; that lust for perfect unity can function solely in a realm of myth. Adorers must bathe everything about their partners in a pink aurora of perfection, free of any need for absolution, not imputing godlikeness to finite bodies but transfusing absoluteness into all their parts. Romantics’ underlying object is not their beloveds but some kind of spiritual salvation—a delusory association, even when persistence brings “a happy ending,” foreordained for disillusionment. Not every squishy poor fish in the ocean, mouthing lovey-dovey slobber, has the privilege to be caught, smitten, and consumed by us. The dream puss or the perfect screw—for women as for men—is “wholly different” from their everyday associates and not somebody anyone would or could live with all the time. Each dream mate’s doomed to go poof like a dream.

* Love’s origins lie in the lover, scarcely in the loved. Each one-and-only object is a chance phenomenon: many another would have served as well. (The latter point one’s ill-advised to try to prove to the accomplices.) 241 _156_

Bitter honesty, mature humus, is more useful than dishonest sweetness, honeyed hen shit. That mad man (or woman?) who first flung a word of sharp abuse instead of rock or spear may have been the originator of morality and civilization; somehow it was progress for a beast to put a finish on its span, to polish up its lapidating? Man’s such a repellent creature, woman not much better. To speak scathingly to those considered grownups may be to accord the truest of commiseration: there’s a ruthlessness without which there’s no ruth. Some never say a grating word about a soul because they prate exclusively about themselves. Who has no bitterness today has any feeling whatsoever? Pity those who cannot empathize, not she who “overempathizes.” Better “love” to hate than “hate” to love, the worst resentment being preferable to the best indifference; but best of all to love to love. To chew out other indiscriminately, hog-wild, but reveals distinctively poor porcine taste. Be choosier about the objects of one’s most profound contempt: so few, if any, can be worthy of it. Even one brush with a cretinoid must be one brush too many. Hatred is, potentially, too high a passion to be squandered on inconsequential grievances. It should be saved for crucial causes and not wasted on the dead. Can rage be truly great save when its use is free of self, a most unlikely possibility? The dish of vengeance is best eaten cold—or not at all. Misspend no time in finding faults in others: quite sufficient to the self the evils thereof. We’re the bowmen, and the targets are perforce the bull’s eyes in ourselves. Being earnest is being angry with one’s self right from the bottom of one’s heart. A heart that has no animus is dead; and where the lover who is not “demented,” suffering from a foudroyant illness? Truest joy comes solely to the earnest. Many eardrums rumble from odd strains of self-contempt’s reverber- ant recital at a distance, but how rare the tympanist who dares play it himself; most folk are very well content with their futility, thus never love. Who’s most inadequate displays the most hostility. The best-disposed soul is most cogni- zant of its ill disposition. An unkind self-criticism’s kindly; disapproving our selves means improving. Few of us are wise enough to use our foes’ attacks to recognize our defects. Genius can well afford and has the perfect right to treat us to Pfui! There is a fury like—nay, deeper than—that of a woman scorned: that mammoth one, long bridled, of a musth-absorbed rogue elephant or prophet unforgettably, undeviatingly rebuffed.∗ Yet all invective, even of a

* Solely such a creature—viz., a creator—can appreciate how unbelievably congested and slow-witted this our present-age terrain and stamping ground’s become. 242 spiritual behemoth, is infected with the raving of a ravenous self. One must be more than a troubleshooter truculently faultfinding.

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Striving to become nonviolent, man is violent. Now and then a Jesus or a Hamlet, nothing if not militant, acts up sub specie furiae. Even mildest car- penters’ apprentices may get so mad that they could spit nails. “Love thine enemies,” the seer or prince may counsel, scourge or jackass jaw in hand. Great rock-ribbed laborers like Marx and Nietzsche who so loathed the bourgeois order, anti-moralists moralizing like mad, nonetheless exposed their damning closeness to it too. The thoughts and acts of every sectarian, moreover, tend to contradict each other; well-intentioned Christians have been known to dynamite their kindred to gain peace. No fearful fight fans long trained to rope others in rope freedom into being a spirit-wrestling match. The tighter we cap our aggressiveness, the more soul-searing swells our sense of sin. The prohibitionist neglects to outlaw envy and oppression, vices commoner than drinking. Typically anger and depression tend to camouflage each other. One who’s good and angry trying to make others good and happy is not good and happy; solely by being happy one affects associates well. That spirit’s usually sunk who’s got his dander up. Love is an old hater of clicking heels. Totalitarians, contrariwise, deem humor an anathema, a heresy against their primal dogma, the omnipotence of Godlike will. Concealed below the scalding steam Of a reformer’s righteous scream There boils a brimful pot Of envy, like as not. What seems a full ebullience may simply be bull: dump out the bilge water. Certain they have all the answers, never daring to pose any questions, “radicals” such as those fossilized Muhammadans or Marxists hurling their ten- dentious slogans bomb and blaze away at yet do not root out the exploitation, spreading and not quelling their own raging chimney fires; thus, in part, the general havoc. Solitude is loathed by certain souls from dread of having nobody accessible to heap abuse on or to wrangle with. Those who condemn habitually end themselves condemned. Distrusters fabricate others’ distrust. Debunkers early learn denial from their disenchantment with a private idol. Many an irate letter-to-the-editor-writer is at base a sniper at his earliest

243 authoritarian abuser. Ideologic warriors often contradict compulsively for lack of any other means to predicate their sick selves. So dead set may one be to put others down that he just never learns to put his own ideas down distinctly. God Almighty, I’m infuriated by, inveigh against, injustice; but if I were truly furious or vehement about injustice, would I be infuriated and inveighing, waxing more indignant at the hoity-toityness of grandes dames than at the plight of the poor? Nobody ignorant of hunger’s violence appreciates guns in starvation’s hands. Guilt, pity, indignation, accusations—all are useless: solely understanding situations deeply, in their origins, corrects them. Madness characterizes the vain, as vanity the mad. A narcissistic rager’s yet to learn that living well’s the choicest of avengements. Nursing hatred, hoarding ordure, is so gratifying; full of either, people feel so totally the masters of all they survey, experiencing such a swelling corpselike sense of incensed senselessness. Guerrillas with blood boiling need to realize when to hold fire: there’s not just one way to undermine an empire. Dare we not throw over all our settled selfishness and meet the challenge of going abroad as mis- sionaries to our own barbaric state of militaristic salvationism, our own prig- gish state of savagery that’s snivelized past praying for? Professors of goodwill imply them-selves superior in grasping how the ranks of the deprived need help. So many projects to correct things, but how few will not perpetuate the very problems they’re supposed to solve. Some steps commendable may not be recommendable. We’re aching to reform the underworld in view of its advanced condition, yet who if not we the dizzy nauseated shipboard passen- gers, each having scuttled to the rail, stand heaving, railing, in most clamant need of radical reforming? The dilemma and the enemy to draw a bead on is the livid purblind ever-judging self.

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Intelligent family life?—Another oxymoron? Who imagines gender politics— the war between the sexes—is not right at home in every family? Many a marriage is preserved by the birth of a scapegoat. Parents who expect an infant of a special kind* cut out a rocky road, a psyche-splitting kidney-buster, for the child lacking the genius to be other than he or she is. Ripeness and vitality are qualities that fancy paper dolls are definitely not cut out for. Loving’s letting

* Preferring one sex to the other in a neonate intimates immaturity if not incestuousness inside the preferrer.

244 people be themselves, not molding them like putty, nor adjudging them pro- bationers to boot. Who is thy father, mother, brother, friend? Forsake their teachings, for these are not rosaries of grace but wedding rings of chains about our necks with which each generation hitherto has made a bloody galley, if not gallows, of the world. Is truth not come to tear all unlicked cubs from fathers and colleens from meddlesome mothers of law? Some boys and girls could do worse than to go over the wall. But truth is, we don’t dare to break what must be broken, take the suffering upon our selves, go into exile and new life. Plenty of opportunities for youth to play the fool, few to be wise: these must be made oneself. We have presumed those puddingheads, our mas and pas, brought us up on passable food, but no, they brought us down on passable drek. Unmanned, dehumanized, are prisoners not given, first, bum steers, and then bum raps? Cooked-up excuses fail to meet real needs. To rear the young on tripe is to corrupt.

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Why so surprised that sniffy teens are paled-out junkies, in a fix, when junk, shit-all resources, from the outset nurtured them, dished out by fag hags, some ex-hippies, hyped-up hypocrites? Instructing in inadequacy, schools and parents undermine defenses growing spirit tries to build against addiction; never could the latter spread without authorities constricting individual psyches, pushing personal assertiveness while muzzling its expression. Nobody can long proceed upon an alpine trail stoned to the eyeballs. Is it comforting to think the bafflement, dissociation, suicidal disaffection of the young some kind of accident? Fixed parents rage that they’ve produced fixed sprigs. Obsessively materialistic society dreads physical threats far more vehemently than spiritual ones; by having criminalized use of recreational drugs, we’ve displayed more reverence for them than for alternative ideals. You might at least show a touch of remorse that you have misled and mixed up your children to the point that, spirits riven, they—entire dopey generations—now believe peace is attained by getting bombed or smashed, imagine on a toot they’re drinking their selves sober, spending their selves rich. Most adolescents, emulating elders, seek to be destroyed yet not disturbed; to listen means for them to deafen themselves, insulating themselves from all obligations. Noise pollution blazons equipotent loss of sensitiveness and of hearing. Rootin’-tootin’ roosters may need raucous blares monotonously belted out blastissimo to muffle doubts about their mating powers? Silence long

245 rejuvenated aboriginals; submergence in a racket seals the immaturity and premature age of most moderns. Might the role of thrumming rock be but to silence spirit, not just thinking? Was there ever an “art” form that catered so exclusively to minors? The rock industry is dedicated to abetting infantile sex behavior: videos provide prepackaged orgiastic onanistic fantasies that won’t be challenged by an “adult” world now lacking any concept of integrity for counter-adverts. The real upshot of all superamplified sound such as acid rock is, for a blissed-out metal head or wired phonomaniac, disintegration, being blasted, wiped out, while securing exorcism of guilt-shot estrangement by asphyxiating inhibition. Such an apish addict lacks the guts he’d need to tell his governor to stick it in his ear. The hashish blasts are hardly turn- ons for keen listeners but, rather, turnoffs for headbangers gonged and well- nigh deaf: it’s cut and dried that grass cuts dead communicating. Rockfest shindies feature clamor but no contact; “doin’ yer own thing” involves above all shirking depth of intimacy, with its risk of agony. The question is not what turns youths on but what turned them off.* Could drugsters’ intake be determined in large part by how unbearable their first homes turned out as internal turnoffs? Start them off unwanted and bedeviled, and they stand a first-rate chance of winding up poor devils wanted in several states. Societies get the demoralizing states that they deserve; for crooks are microbes activated by the social soil, grown in their proper element. Infanticide, criminal negligence, is commoner, more customary, than one would like to imagine.† I could tell man tales would curdle his blood, freeze his heart, but what’s the use if it’s already clotted, in cold storage? Thank one’s fatheaded old man and woman, there’s a good boy or girl, for all the “normal” childhood indisposi- tions: measles, mumps, and colds uncounted, tonsillitis, dental caries, visual abuse, appendicitis, bronchitis, nephritis, leukemia, etc., etc. A pox on all the righteous buriers of innocence! “The will of God”‡ indeed!

* Is it coincidence that television constitutes but psychedelic self-abuse, the best-selling means of avoiding having to relate to others, the medicament of choice for tuning out? Ephemera erode original constructive values. One of six TV commercials hawks a chemical, and healthy chunks of drug ad budgets are precisely aimed to bag the unfledged. Fed shit early, why should grasshoppers not graduate to deadlier shit later? † Frantic mothers tend by far to be the executioners and seem considerably less remorseful than infanticidal fathers. Courts appear remarkably forbearing, lenient about this crime: newborns’ disposers now may not face even overnight in jugs. ‡ No anthropomorphic nincompoop can grasp supernal will-lessness. 246 _160_

Thinking they mother love, persnickety nice Nellies smother love, suppress the truth, enervate character. Must baby, and especially a son, be merely sub- stitutive phallus to his clinging genetrix? For many a hot devotee her boy can do no wrong despite an underworldful of plain damning evidence. The blackest raven views her chick as fair. The son of she who raised him as an acting spouse is permanently minded to secure an acting mother as spouse: mama’s boy must wind up his old lady’s torment. Baby-faced serial killers with the blood of hundreds of young women on their hands have yet amazingly caused others who escaped being victims to burst into tears in court when the mad ravishers have been found guilty. Bow-tied fetuses still strangled by umbilical cords, notwithstanding regular gemütlich phone chats, are not steeled or ral- lied to cut loose. What thriving creatures can appreciate so carefully prepared, somnific quicksand pits? Is everyone’s relation to the world not just expansion of that to his or her dam? No one escapes being homemade, irremediably operated on, irrevocably screwed, perdurably recast and thus possessed; buried in all of us the awesome mothers of our infancies survive till we’re deceased. Who’ll ever match the man that Mama was? Behind each hateful god lurks fearsome nature: Paw can judge, it’s Maw who executes. Maternal maladies—no matter whether genuine or not—provide such handy clamps* with which to cramp fresh sprouts, instilling in them burning guilt for any independent moves. It’s only early in their infancy that children need no more than nourishment and warmth. No kidding, s/he who must have love from her or his heirs ought not to have had them. Could dishonesty, not lovingkindness, be most modern maters’ chief trait, subject as they are to the prevailing myth that every mother naturally loves her rug apes and their daily rumpus? If abusive mothers are psychotic, it’s exclusively in their demand that they not be rejected by their treasures. The ingratitude of children—who among them asked to be born?—echoes chronically in parental swan songs. Can a mother not feel gnawing disappointment in her offspring—one thing she’s expected to keep to her self? The mater who takes good care of ten children may someday find none of them will do the same for her. From babies bred as prudery’s insurance policies for old age emanate some dubious returns: sure cares but unsure reassurances.

* Complaints they’re called. Not ills themselves but our complaints about them ail us most.

247 The chief incentive to become a mother might be—martyrdom? Intrusively uptight solicitude, endemic among our industrialized kitchen slaveys, signifies systemic perturbation and affectional shortcomings. Some moms want their young to hurry up, complete school, go to work, get married—that is, buried: only thus can all uncertainty about the child be nailed down safely. Nothing so endears itself to one as that for which one’s made unreasonable sacrifices. Clutchy women who resent as evidence of childish- ness so many men’s attachment to aggressive sports* should ask themselves if men regard at least as many women’s affixation to aggressive offspring in the selfsame jaundiced light; which strong dependency, engendered to preserve some kind of dominance, is more destructive? Any competence shown by preschoolers menaces their insecure keepers; so such serious development, dismissed as freakish, is discouraged. Little wonder mothers who cannot relinquish can’t, when they have little else they’ve borne to relish. Each seraphic little bungle heaven-sent inspires, even in old biddies, the desire to cuddle. Procreators hope to yet can hardly master their mortality by having progeny as an extension of their fruitless egos. Never mind how deathly scared of growth, babes cannot keep the truth in leading strings. To love a child is just as simple as to like what he or she becomes is hard.

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How pitifully far from common knowledge is it that our children’s psychological nutrition is determined early—by the quality of understanding and respect afforded by their first caretakers—and that later rearing practices will never take the place of that original deficiency or sustenance. Cold fish got frosted over long ago. Free spirit must depend on unconditional love (the sole kind) as the body on oxygen; how in the world could youth mature without a steady source of both? Give thanks for one neglected child, superfluous prodigy, midway freak, forgotten in the organized neglect of “guardians.” Oh, Hesperus! . . . would that you brought no all too well identified orphan home to his mater’s breastlessness and fewer household goods or overlabored gods and brooding goddesses “protecting” what is “dear.” Since food’s source rests right at the heart of every suckling’s being, a bottle baby’s trained and learns to see the world and self as inorganic and inert—a lesson for some futuristic nonlife? Countless imbecilic nurses by clocked feedings have dehumanized

* Fandom is of course absurd, incomprehensible, to those who’ve never idealized or nursed a passion. 248 their charges, who’ve been taught (through failing to learn crying brings attention) that no thing they do is consequential. Crèche dry-nurses are (if possible) even more useless than dry mothers, not just now but also thirty years hence, when the allergies and psychoneuroses are being reaped;* tension and weaknesses thus feed, from generation unto generation, on themselves. Was suckling so long given a wide berth not only owing to corporate greed and medical brainwashing but, on top of that, because its very sexy nature, evidenced by uterine contractions spurred by nipple stimulation, gave pale Puritans the most unsavory kind of distress? The telltale feature of expanded pupils, natural response to infants, signals too to men that the young pupils wish themselves to be enlarged with young. No longer are the innocents burked in their cribs: time is devoted now to fattening as well as hampering them for market, making bigger better basket cases out of them. How many ugly ducklings who have had the freeze put on them manage to escape their families’ ovens?

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Better breed not at all than broods of miserable blind mice for a future or a present baby-kissing fiend’s ideal experiments, squadrons of fully tested rocket fodder for some life-manipulating, torture-dealing savior’s diabolic four-year plans. Should reproducing lots of satisfactory barbarians remain our top priority? Could joy knobs, in view of the harvests they sow, not be better designated sorrow knobs? Inveterately overrating childbearing, society presumes that every body will produce—in spite of present gross overproduction; that by doing so all automatically qualify as gold-star citizens; and, even more fan- tastically, that not doing so some are debarred from full and wholesome lives. Are women who choose to stay childless necessarily cold, selfish, incomplete? While gladly glorifying motherhood we’ve sadly overlooked the many women with no aptitude for it. A dash of ginger would help but won’t cure those with a lifelong cold. If we could view in toto the vast welter of those higgledy- piggledy tragicomedies long convoluted short of reason that are family histo- ries, if we could witness every relationship dynamic working out in domes- ticity’s chains of command, would we expect our shrinking bachelors and spinsters to apologize for never reproducing themselves? To redintegrate a whole famn damily tree may require its trimming to the ground.

* However infantile, a crybaby is never a real infant, for the latter always has sufficient cause to cry. 249 _163_

How many births have men managed to run—and ruin? The paternalistic obstetricians, finicky and green with envy of maternal power, which gift they, for all their mastery and sharpness, never could approach, are really experts in confinement, “normally”* treat their parturient patients as halfwitted juveniles, calf breeders, or diseased vegetables “needing” anesthesia, profitable and punitive episiotomies, prevention of a natural ease in childbirth as sure as of a kindred exertion in gestation; the predominant objective is to disempower. For whose welfare, never mind convenience, would it be that drugged childbirth makes inert if not inoperative the maternal instinct? Nurses in maternity wards, inattentive to their personal sterility, are masculinely brainwashed to expect—and thus precipitate—the worst. If women generally were to give birth to their babies naturally, nearly all obstetric expertise would be exposed as barren, worse than useless; thus are women generally not to give birth to their babies naturally. “Delivery,” as is only fit, has to be by instruments; horrors! if one had to exercise one’s critical faculty, to bear the truth, to undergo bloody creation, independently of hospitalized depersonalization. Are outrageous bills a reasonable price to pay for stretched rates of brain damage? True to our own diapered natures, we believe our progeny, immediately at birth, “naturally” must be tagged, timed, put on formulas, thus given good starts down the regulated road to syphilization. Don’t expect moronic matrons to appreciate why neonates react against such artificial rhythms. Calmatives will serve to keep both kid and mamma quietly resigned to the efficient, sterile institution. Many bleeding brooders, as a kind of mercy killing pushing those only half wanted under in the troughs, have handed over all their effervescent newborn to crapulous cows or nanny goats, yet call their miscreant selves mothers. Was it really well worthwhile surrendering our children’s birthrights to both love and health for messes of milking machines? A child can hardly toss his cookies without having been allowed wrong food. Home-minders keep the insides of their houses spotless for the sake of infants; why then do they keep the insides of the infants overfull and unclean and their selves, those prisons, no less? Puzzle why, not that, most tabernacles get so early turned unholy. Womankind is programmed naturally to love babies but perverted kulturally to corrupt them. Are we raising families—or lowering them?

* In any normal reasonable time and place a pregnant woman’s viewed as admirable and auspicious, not as a grotesque embarrassment. 250 _164_

Has wo/man no outlets for strong feelings but the weak, those creeping things amenable to taming s/he can dominate and utilize? A mutt provides its owner double-barreled false security, a veritable double whammy: dubious protection from unconscienced burglars plus the means of personally playing God. Tellingly punishments are given those who can’t fight back. Determined to adapt our cute experimental pups and kittens to the socially accepted standard of disease, we stuff and gag their minds and bodies with disease matter; when, however, will we liberate and fortify their consequently colicky minds and bodies? Certainly the time to strengthen limp wrists in resilience is early; yet an overmuscled oaf will find it hard to hold on to robustness. Nestlings need and want much heartening support, exemplary direction, not such waffling, premature bulldozing pushes. Clouting is the way to drill in trusting? Little wonder child abuse remains so rampant, since the legalized assault long euphemized as corporal punishment remains so popular among most adults. We deplore the prevalent juvenile delinquency, direct result of equally prevalent parental delinquency; are runaways not running from far more accomplished, duty-dodging scamps? What luck that we do not recall how we were treated in our infancies—what luck for all our nurses. Who but they could (never will) tell us when any given innocence was sullied? Break the child’s will early, and (you hope) he’ll “never notice” the grave damage done him, thus precluding your brutality’s exposure later. The commandment everyone internalizes as a toddler: Thou shalt not identify what guardians are doing to thee. Many a stolid housekeeper has found her issue, those damned carpet rats, an obstacle to getting the job done. What chore’s all sewn up out of whole cloth by which botchery? The pixy urchin interfering with his or her mother’s “freedom” interferes with everybody’s ultimately. Yet delinquents are bred in paternal more than in maternal deprivation.

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Progenitors who default on setting limits are expressing passively an inadmis- sible antipathy toward their progeny. It’s not enough, alas, to act toward our children without malice if we’re also, sadly, acting without spirit. Are not apathetic dropouts from the task of adolescence simply wearing outworn togs, raggedy hand-me-downs, bestowed upon them by more apathetic dropouts from the task of adulthood? Pubescent pregnancy’s a symptom, not a cause,

251 of a deranged society: the girls arrange to get themselves knocked up as a vain remedy for their already messed-up lives. Were all those folk who have been willing to accept the genocidal horrors of this age originally infants who were misled by their addled parents to believe themselves deserving of their early punishments? The lack of empathy for others victimized originates in lack of sympathy at home: demeaning others is a means of blotting out one’s erstwhile impotence. It’s parents with initiatory volleys are unjustifiably the persecuting prosecutors: pettifogging courts but execute the coups de grâce. With guardians like these, pray who needs Eichmanns? “Children can be so cruel” all right . . . meanies striving to match their perverse protectors. Kids who chronically pick on siblings or on chums do so for fear of challenging and angering their elders, who, themselves long petrified, have failed to teach them open impartation of their feelings. Narcissism’s far from being monopolized by childhood. Who is it requires the pacifier or the pep talk? Who creates—who is—the true unholy terror? Parents take the crown for petulance and flippancy. The most incorrigible of all saucy imps and scallywags, habitually jacking their companions around, producing crops of pissabeds and stutterers, are unmistakably insou- ciant adults, they the infantile whipsters. Where on earth, one wonders, could kids possibly pick up such rude and nasty habits as perpetually butting in and comfortably fibbing, raising Cain and cultivating subterfuges? How strange is it that our tads involuntarily are cringing, suffering from spiritual tics, and yet tormenting smaller boys and girls—when we at every turn make noises loud and give looks black as thunder? Those who cannot but throw hissy fits have failed to qualify as parents. Why do we complain about those minors mimicking our immorality, our unconcern about the pain of millions? Ankle- biters’ bland taste duplicates their governors’: they seldom fall far from parental trees. Look at the mother/father to see what the daughter/son may well become. That child is rare who never has observed a prime role-model rowing with one oar.

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Completely unrealistic, at the same time understandable, the wish of teenaged rebels to defy yet be admired by their parents, whose ideals are usually not so distant from their offspring’s but whose practice of them always leaves a lot to be desired. Lacking adequate paternal guidance, youths become harsh ideologists, arrested adolescents brandishing exaggerated moralizing slogans,

252 in a desperate ambivalent attempt to grow up by remaining permanently immature. Their target, well exemplified by one of their own kind, Herr Hitler, is not bold enquiry or the elevation of society but consummation of la lutte finale. A sicky’s hard put to develop lacking the improper fostering. Recalcitrant delinquents, secretly compelled, act out their loveless parents’ subconscious desires. With booze and/or with blows the innocent are shown how to become insensible. How the confounded young confound the canting old, and vice versa. “Walk straight! Talk straight!” many double-talking crabs command their crawlers, who absorb not what is preached but what is willed and done, including drug addiction and erotic deviation. Liberal in the extreme we have become—regarding nonkin; “morals” are fare strictly for public consumption. Anti-drug campaigners oddly think exactly nothing of giving their associates the needle. Uptight, gobbling poisonous peanuts, some earsplitting eructations have yet the nerve to demand that their pert daughters hugging their pet easy riders quit inhaling aphrodisiacal air.* Committal to a sin bin will solve what? The crime committed is not smoking marijuana at some harmless hop or hootenanny but being different, wanting to divert a world that’s reached the brink of self-destruction; only by an antisocial stance can one appear to be alive in a diseased community that is to all intents and purposes deceased. Society’s laws, hauling in all the unlikely suspects, punish youths for sins committed by society. Wrongdoing is not what appeals to adolescents so much as the heinous orthodoxy to which they’re expected to conform quite rightfully repels them. Pixilated elders have well taught one how to judge, but one must teach one’s imitative self as well how not to judge, how to be free of teachers, imi- tativeness, and “hows.” Like hawks, we watch and keep our flocks of trusting chicks under surveillance, carefully ignoring the no longer little demons that our selves are. “Darling angels” all, deficient parents wander in a sentimental fog, clutching the myth of childhood taintlessness and happiness; that puerile dream of some doomed paradise helps cause the young’s damnation; it’s clear vision that is needed mostly for good parenting. As for “the primal scene,” it’s not parental intercourse that traumatizes but parental violence—viz., rape. The worst disturbed whelp grown too big for his breeches and most urgently requiring apprehension is invariably over five feet tall and views himself or herself as well over fifty. “Misbehavior,” i.e., hale reaction, in the young is

* Apprised his daughter just had been resuscitated, one was heard to trumpet, “Then, by God, that swim chump marries her!”

253 the point or tip of the iceberg’s horns, whereas the major underwater bulk that constitutes community and family causes the shipwreck. Not disordered children need investigation so much as the presently disordered childhoods of their parents: buffets given little folk, like the enormities of our collective unwisdom, are neither felt nor seen, because the lambkins’ paws and madres cannot face the like misusages from their own “distant” pasts. Poor mythbound man still hopes and prays his minor Minotaurs will somehow end up whole, real persons, thus reflecting glory chiefly on their Maker; for this dreamy wish to come true, can’t he see that it would be a good idea and an even better action if to start with he became less partial, more realistic, simply whole himself? Before we can have wholesome eggs we must have healthy birds. First one must learn oneself before, as a pedantic pedagogue or a demented demagogue, one teaches toddlers. Don’t expect our offspring, whom we’ve bred on kills, to live in truth. So huffy and so hot under the col- lars, fit to be tied, we all but choke when our blasted tykes refuse to eat “their” ruined spinach, but to throw fits hardly fits the case: their good taste shames our false concern. What a misfortune not just bunged-up Presbyterians experience when reared on mush. Give youngsters what they need—authentic love and life, not more directives to admire abuse and swallow death—and “need” for fussing stops. How crass and cruel, all those couples who employ their progeny as weapons in campaigns of marital belligerence and who expect them to perform as biased judges in parental quarrels; as a rule this process traumatizes youths and typifies the disrespect their needs and rights in general receive; no wonder that their forte is to diss. No better discipline for children than self-discipline of adults which prevents their acting out anxieties on others, which permits them to support the young without expecting from the latter like requital.

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Whoever revs up making children in a balled-up world of power steering, little visibility, and poor brakes throttles wide-eyed child and embryonic artist in him- or herself. In farming lay the triumph of the family; technology, while promising yet failing to deliver liberty, is burying both. What kind of healthful setting is provided guttersnipes? It’s that nonstarter, our machine world, that disintegrates the living home, the steel-entwined madhouse without that’s turned the mountain blooms within into those dying hothouse plants.

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How could the plastic sugar-tit, TV, that insubstantial opiate surpassing any mate, afford a real experience, relating as it does to only two of more than thirty sensorial inputs? Far and wide it’s used as home hypnotic to keep cod- lings from developing their own identities, to keep Maw firmly in the spray truck driver’s seat. Real life is censored on the screen; most citizens hold service or blue-collar jobs, but fewer than ten percent of TV characters are so engaged. Old folk are made to look eccentric, feeble, ludicrous, ill, and/or sexless, whilst the portraits of minorities and race relations are conspicuously fake. How damning that not only failing senior citizens veg out as vidiots. Would little monkeys, if they but beheld some genuine vitality around them, gravitate toward well-censored war clips, shoot-’em-down-quick machodramas, or so-captioned comic strips the harmlessness of whose barbarities is make-believe, all open wounds and wrenching suffering that human masses face being kept by the petrified producers at a safe and clean remove? The network stunters don’t cut violence; all they expunge are violence’s visible results. With streets all over hell now splattered with young blood, the “funnies” ain’t so funny any more. Do thoughtless vandals need encouraging by glamorizing as exemplars cheapjack gun-slingers such as rock-hard stompers Jesse James and James Bond? Nuances of love and friendship normally are sacrificed∗ in stories televised because the antisocial medium’s long suit is coarse-grained imagery, favoring simple-minded hostile actions over complex challenging feelings, winning market killings by presenting countless shots of superficial death instead of any subtle portraits of profound compassion. The channeled assaults, whomped up to knock our socks off, certainly are excellent inoculants against street criminality: exposure to the sham atrocities boosts acquiescence in the actual barbarities, and such amenability to viciousness may yet prove fatal to our underworld. Producers—not least those of slice-and-dice flicks—must of course deny that such a manifest phenomenon as copycat manslaughter might exist. Anxiety and panic are restricted to exposure of a pornographic culture: youth is prompted seriously to con gross aggression, meanwhile tantalized so “comically” by salacious manufactured teen-time dreams. Escapist screamers and crime dramas, detailed demonstrations for untold susceptible trainees, don’t show but are real crimes; the justice they depict, cop killers being subdued by killer cops, is very aptly fraudulent.

* Nobody can explain what love is, but what animosity is everybody understands.

255 Acceptance of the Dirty Harry model leads us to embracing Hannibal the cannibal too; vengeance as the rule beyond the law makes sociopathy ideal but not less real. Could “adult” egos also be so ill-equipped to cope with all the outrages of modern herd existence that they’ve grown a morbid “need” for surrogate media kicks that killer shows supply? While documentaries and seminars on violence’s harm result in no real change and little pleasure, fictive violence provides mass man and woman pseudo-satisfaction which their artificial natures crave. Desensitized, the captive audiences get off watching others getting offed. Commercial television* is indeed a meretricious medium of dross, a school for trashing; it links flashy broads to varied crookery: perversion is taught children well before they can learn wholesomeness. What pedagogue could e’er compete with the corruptive power of electronic influence? Mass media, so public and yet privatizing and subverting values of the public sphere, are inculcating narcissism, immaturity, disorderliness: throwing tantrums is instilled as fit behavior. Is each couch potato not perhaps a couch case? We’re insidiously brutalizing our young, burning out the tubes of their imagination, ruining their diction, thwarting any threat of introspection, by allowing them to lap up psychopathic lessons from video programs promising, not incidentally, fast fast relief for painful truth, each alien experience that’s dinned into the abecedaries estranging them; a less than half-attention to remote and ever-shifting shapes helps finalize divorce from life; the nonexistent figures on the screens requiring no response, the habit schools all users to consider others insubstantial and unworthy of concern. We train youth to believe it’s normal for most people to be pawns. With an unconscionable willingness we’ve learned from television not to blink an eye while blinking at enormities. Can preschool children’s maters who employ the one-eyed monster as a daily baby-sitter count the cost of present playtime deprivation and of future malaise, drug use, brutishness no beast would put up with? So many distractions in childhood cannot but lead to a distracted adulthood. Yet we, apparently grown up, are no less hypnotized by glassy-eyed announcers, equally desensitized by nightly bang-bangs and incessant

* Its entire financial empire functions on the validated supposition that the audience will emulate the characters it sees in ads. Can one imagine networks warning advertisers that the medium is understood by viewers to be fantasy and can in no way influence their actual behavior? What could better evidence than video commercials aimed at bleary-eyed preschoolers or subteens the real-life immorality of capitalism? 256 flummadiddle, on the omnipresent boob tube, that cool fishy orb and thoroughly obstructive screen fronting a vacant memory bank which ignores our aspirations, stifles inspiration, and degrades us into depthless, mere reserve funds for those rubbernecks, our younglings, whom we cynically let become conditioned to be cynical, practised consumers, that is to say, fatally infected with consumption, kleptomaniacs all. Obviously we prefer that youth should pan out as hardbitten cookies. It is telling that our schools do not teach pupils to become aware and critical of their seduction and corruption by the media of commerce. How alarming is it that TV, the automated daydream and acknowledged menace everybody loves to hate yet almost nobody can live without, remains indulged in quite as much by carping critics of it as by plugging vidaholics? There’s but one thing that can zap it, and that’s education, honest-to-goodness nonschooling; meantime kids get trained in zapping everybody. We gawking boob tubers get a bang sitting in muck, with doo-doo coming out our ears, pipedreaming of growth while confronted by rot. Evidently we see nothing wrong in rearing offspring on a fiberless regime whose underlying virulent ingredient is vanity. That umpteen million toddlers in the kidvid ghettos are being swindled daily, not just Saturdays, by advertisers constitutes no evil? Readily we hand out dough to have the latent love torn viciously out of defenseless flesh in chunks, their tummies kept in stitches, by sleek licensed sharks bombarding into shreds the priceless gift of private dreams.* Imagination must be evolution’s noblest gift to humans and the most abused. The violence in entertaining media suppresses humankind’s best natural impulses. What space opera can raise in space cadets real aspirations? Cyberpunk is truly science fiction, purposively hokum. As spectators, we elect to dissipate, deny our natures over sublimating, cultivating them toward incalculable harvests. Our aggressive fantasies can find fulfillment in creative art instead of in destructive commerce—can but generally don’t. As principal communicator in the modern home, the goggle box has certainly become the pastor of our family religion, viz., marketing, least worthy of all faiths, a brand of polytheism whose irrational effects depend upon the multiplicity of modern primitives. Disintegrative media unable by their very constitution to convey abstractions or inspire intelligence remain dispensable.

* A pundit who imagines he’s transcended dreaming is correct that this instinctive function is above all primitive (infants dream much of the time, fetuses most likely all the time); he glosses over the fact that an insect or a reptile never dreams at all.

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What recompense does puerile age intend to pay for having mutilated youth? None but the “gift” of puerile age. Our farmers give more studied care to raising brutes than our begetters to evolving humans, for the first pursuit fills yawning pockets now, whereas no surety obtains who gains what and when from wise education. Is one’s biological fertility unquestionably the criterion that qualifies one as a parent? Have we an excuse for bringing extra devilkins into this hellish sphere already bleakly stuffed with half-starved waifs? Wobbly excuses possibly, but what good reasons, setting aside lunatic government bribes? Or is the limit of one’s love to feed a precious pet, some special kicking can, at the identical expenditure that could have fed a starveling child? What can redeem a country that spends more on cat food than on baby food? Confusing femininity with infantility or with fecundity, many a woman has got pregnant so as to become somebody of importance, to attract attention and affection to the helpless babe, her self, that darling, dimpled, pink-cheeked, burbling ball of fat and Barbie doll, the zoftig adult in minia- ture. She’s pleased as Punch to think there’s call for pride, some special virtue in the unthinking investments of her parenthood, in building bigger better bombs for export to keep her domestic self, topped as it is with nitroglyc- erin, from exploding. Strangely, birth of woman’s first-born represents the gravest danger to her pet “adult” relationship, since to create a child in truth requires self-sacrifice, and hitherto, ogled at center stage, she’s reveled in self- satisfaction. Each deposit, thus, risks being rated incommutably as underage.

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Why strive in vain to make right over—stubbornly unable to acknowledge an akin perverseness in—“my” child? Stark as a ramrod facing her own home- room class of still unreckoned cipher eyes, incorrigibly wrong in its correc- titude, Mom’s puppeteering self can only demonstrate, while in its heart of hearts jackbooted, the blind impotence of force; but when is she herself, irre- pressibly alive, going to illustrate illuminating power in love? A proper parent transcends the canonical self. Injustice serves not just to cow but to infuriate its victims. How long can one get away with lying facilely to growing girls and boys while obdurately ordering them to express exclusively the truth? “Tell me no lies” makes lying honesty. Dishonest love’s compelled to sacrifice all to itself.

258 When everyone imbibes dishonesty from the beginning, what society can find trust anything but absent to the end? Old-fashioned fairy tales permit us to repress the traumas of our early years without confronting their results today; submitting to “enchantment,” how ingenuous we yet remain, supposing “happy endings” render nonexistent past or present sufferings. We adepts not just at holding conversations but at throttling them as well expect our chirrupy young hopefuls with nary a peep to hear us reading the repellent riot act to them, yet we have never learned to listen. Children should be heard with feeling and not seen with calculation. The chic, long-nailed, and distem- pered hellcat on the prowl who hardly could care less about her neighbors’ guttersnipes climbs as an amazon below the jungle beast. Blank minds believe the myth that black heads suffer less than blonde. Each slum kid’s forced by us to master street smarts. We don’t see till we respect the young, nor love them when we loathe their choice of playmates: partial love is just not love.

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A culture youth-obsessed betrays its immaturity, in fact resents the young and so ignores their needs. Society exposes its hostility toward its youth by its intense concern about the wealth, not the humanity, lost via unemployment. Under the saccharine myth of a child-centered, free society there lies the bitter actuality of a self-centered, class-enslaved one. Other, poorer people’s children generally are considered liabilities, not assets, undeserving of an even break, let alone any public maintenance. Can social justice come to life so long as egotistic parents are demanding privileges strictly for their offspring? Equal educational and vocational opportunities cannot materialize midst a horde of hearts and minds perversely inegalitarian. Mass man despises adolescents, also up-and-coming artists, and particularly funky poets of a matey nature such as Whitman, most of all because, reputedly untrustworthy, musing away their days, they’re likely to unveil the unpredictable and personal (including rapture’s threat) too flagrantly, some of them even making so bold as to feel their pagan sensibilities hold higher value than the mobster’s manufactured goods. Poor red-necked hardhat Joe, having bartered away his birthright for a mess of hardware, is enraged because, perpetually bitten by his very own free-enterprise invidiousness, he is sorely tempted to admit yet driven to deny he’s lost his manhood to technology, been robbed of any real control over his destiny. How irking to find he cannot buy dignity or some sense of real solidarity at ball game, church, or shopping mall. Parading as to war, he still

259 demands commandments—exercised, of course, upon his sons. The average man has a hard time saying “I love you” or “That’s my boy.” Who but industrial man, a real deadneck, is disserving? Having ground out the greenhouse effect, he’s yet amazed his roof now caves in. Rightly he bawls, “I’ll be jig- gered!” Scuzzy or not, any scankie persons oddly dressed or long-haired are snap-judged contemptible from a colorless, alopecia-afflicted sense of values shamelessly displayed and based on the merest externals. It’s the mossy old at heart who, drooling stuff and nonsense, are the sloppy layabouts, loosely designating any juvey sign of growth as “hippy”: “Drat those brats! What in tarnation are you doing?” croaks the long-term devil. How could any moldy fig remotely be simpatico toward the young? What business is it of his, how they’re clothed and groomed? Perhaps he should be minding a more vital, fatal business than this, his corruptive own? “What if a growin’ number of ’em”, storming, he harrumphs, “do show a need for pills, includin’ cyanide? I’ve done me duty, scrimped and sacrificed so bloomin’ much, been givin’ every flippin’ one of my consarned ungrateful little buggers—shit, piles, slews of care’n’fection, all that kinda thing, dammit”; yet real love, remote from the conditional, tin-soldierlike state passing for familial affection, is no thing, nor is it to be measured, and methinks he doth complacently protest too much, demanding gratitude as a dog trainer seeks mechanical response: “Say thank you for the dad-burned junket, damyou!” It is when we love that we become responsible; feeling responsible does not mean that we love. One can—and many do—overdo sentimentality but not love: “it,” inferred as willed, cannot be done. True magic is not something anybody practises.

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Kindly do not pretend that a creep can become neurotic, hostile and unself- reliant, without having served an indeterminate term under acrimonious parental soul-assault, year after year exposed to sudden hailstorms of hostility accompanied by deadly twisters of seduction—education in a vortex; she or he who flounces or withdraws has been trained to flounce or withdraw. For better or worse, undeniably, the way a parent views each young child over- whelmingly determines the way that child views all else for good—or ill. One guess where bastards learn to toss their brickbats. Sons of bitches, insecure at heart, really were sons of bitches. There regrettably are souls, most often men, who are perpetually peeved and well deserve to be called murder. As aplomb grows from example, so the inability to love is generated by a glowering

260 progenitor, the mother/father unable to love; self-blame begets self-blame, for it’s the handed-down conviction of unlovability that shrivels leafing spirit. The more shame and self-debasement stored in childhood, the less sensuality acceptable as adult. Nothing rankles like parental deeds, whether committed or omitted. To become real schizoids, souls must be convinced that they’re defenseless slaves and damned whatever they do or do not; to be beyond caring, they must believe that no one cares a hoot about them. Certainly rejected toddlers, puny and without recourse, can hardly find it bearable to realize no one’s going to come to their assistance, thus are forced to dream up lovingkindness in the actual sociopathy they are encountering, turning all blame for the maltreatment on themselves. Invincible inferiority complexes are feasible by properly berating and disparaging the diffident subjects with barbed strictures at least once too often during their minority. Staying consistently indifferent or hypercritical, assure the child that it’s worth nothing, and it’s sure to wind up feeling worthy only when it’s something he or she is not. Neurotic pride consists not in being moral but in knowing full well how one ought to be. Who brooks examination who was once stamped by the dogma that his crabby parents were beyond it? Nitwits who cannot bear criticism can’t because they’ve worked so hard to be their own worst critics. Doing that which you your self don’t want to do for long enough, and you’re eventually going to want it: self-effacement. Squares, like schizos, will adjust to being as others are; creators are what they themselves desire; while neurotics will not be as others urge them to be. A neurotic has but precious little time for social life, though s/he may squander most of it accommodating others; whereas any genius tends to be ruthless and more honestly self-serving in such matters. To be raised by an instructor in excessive rectitude is problematically beneficial at best. Any lively child in a so-called religious home is likely to catch holy hell, routinely to be hauled over the coals. Lord God forbid that juvenile exertions should be praised, not squelched, that being allowed to share their own views without shame the young should learn it’s possible to disagree amicably; their right to differ is denied by those themselves unfree. No one can “teach” the art of quarreling constructively without first learning it; the teacher’s learning is exemplary. Who’s loath to flatter hardly loathes another’s flattery. An unaccepting parent treats a child ill with snide water or, more truly, acid treatment (“cure” it’s called) and, by insisting caustically that the child take psychiatric treatment (i.e., undergo a quick postmortem), can succeed in making him or her actually ill thanks to confirmed denial of

261 the justification for the child’s resentment, verification that the child is not being taken seriously. Which the headcase most demanding to be checked out? It’s precisely not the young who need to visit the finest consultants for exhaustive bug tests. What authority can want investigated something nasty in the woodshed? Every soul subconsciously down is prone to be down on others. For some reason we’re fixated on discussing what’s imagined to be a pandemic of child sex abuse while thousands regularly die from or are permanently crippled by their caregivers’ vicious attacks and millions are forced into streetside prostitution. Sicklings do in fact get on each snotnosed kid’s case. Confrontation between spouses or between a child and parent by itself solves nothing—all neurosis being internal, not relational. The feelings one experiences are what’s telling, not the stresses undergone with others. Not one’s father/mother/lover one has to discover but oneself. The experts in child care present their theories, but prefer to leave its practice to the ignoramuses in homes and schools; unable to re-enter and to share the sphere of children, they seek high repute for speculations, knowing none will be forthcoming for mere labors. To consent to one’s being idealized and freely criticized is not the same as to impose on them ideals and criticism. One unconsciously rebuffs a child in compensation for a like unconscious grudge against one’s parents: vengeance “finally” is taken on the third generation that the second lacked the nerve to take on the first; and so on. Long after needing a guerrilla strategy to overcome parental tyranny, the dyed-in-the-fuzz rebel yet remains combative in the flagging, unrealistic hope of somehow forcing others to respect and not reject him; while in point of fact his lovelife is a courting of rejection. Yes, this hobbledehoy, originally sonsy, long vindictively intent on winning vindication, this good servant verging on some unnamed robbery, perforce is the beloved son in whom almighty man is well displeased. What looked to be the black sheep of the family may come home, playing catch-up, as the odds- on dark horse on the outside lane, a scrub now scoring as a daystar so long unobserved. Some wish to welcome back the prodigal into their foldup, but the smell of blood in it warns him away. Twice bitten, twentyfold shy. “Give me some light!” cries the King, but not on His Imperial Majesty’s crimes. Drunk as a lord, the Emperor cannot descry himself the commoner. It is not color blindness cripples us and therefore ours but choler blindness. Any creature in a fit of blinding rage sees nothing. Generally it’s a terror-stricken and arrested juvenile who has a shit fit. Hatred is no sin—except when, livid, dead in spirit, not just loco da poco, so mad as to spit blood, one refuses to

262 acknowledge it:* I, for one, confess my monomania, that I hate your guts, redoubted Padre . . . in their present changelessly unholy state at least. You’re here advised to take a running jump right at yourself. The more incapable a soul of standing suffering, the easier for him to live with others’; correspond- ingly, the harder for some to endure their loneliness, the more of it they must produce. All Great White Führers’ fury fuddles all their führerlings.†

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Each militant who daily if not hourly gets his knickers in a twist should get at once a transfer to some totally nonsocial post. Would not a rigid law on pain of death prohibiting the military, veterans and actives both, from found- ing families be a praiseworthy law? For what dense serviceman, save the odd conscientiously objecting, mercilessly overruled and executed, unmistakably shirking draftee, is not demonstrably unfit to carry out such duty honestly? How curious that Vietniks, like leftist beatniks, once their lives are shot and they no longer matter to a soul, turn out to have been wholly right in their antipathies.‡ The military mind, bathetic with a vengeance, disinclined to buck the system, tetched and empty of all empathy, forever drops a bomb, is bent on making absolute miscalculations, having been from first to last dragooned into dehumanizing; never mind how fraught they are with brass and bull and masterful at giving people hell, there’s one thing dugout officers, prime candidates for fragging, are right to the hilt incapable of to get true gen, and that is legitimate inspection, integrative introspection. To the end some misfit paters are unable to give any but a soldier’s farewell. Veterans without exception we’ve perforce a duty to debrief and to report as FUBB. Modern families traditionally, in the farming/churchly/army manner, have been concentration camps, with ruthless patriarchs as the commandants.

* Psychotic souls experience an overwhelming force but fail to realize their long-stored resentments constitute that force, not secretive extraneous antagonists. † Such ruthless chauvinistic charismatic killers as Muhammad and Herr Schicklgruber were reputed to be “gentle with the young”—at least with their own savage tribes’. ‡ The rightist media-whored blowhards who somehow developed bad (spineless) backs during the southeast Asian genocides despicably escape being brought to face courts-martial they deserve.

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Discipline spoils: each disciple is led to disaster. Sadism means pietism given one kind of emotive cripple: rather than watch his own weaknesses, the gruff smellfungus picks on those of others, preferably peewees; he loves helping everyone who’s down get lower, issuing his rockets, lowering the boom on any genial insurgent. Bullies come down hardest on those they are confident will not retaliate. No evil-smelling raptor comes off its perch save to prey. It’s puritans above all get their knocks by causing pain. Can one believe those parents loving who invariably have bugs up their noses? Constipated souls are the most apt to shit bricks. It’s no accident that colon-cancer patients as a rule are neatniks who can’t stomach all that shit inside them yet feel forced to keep complete control of others’. The decrepit drillmaster maintains that family life never can be a democracy, that children are too inexperienced— unlike his creaky-jointed self, which so long has been through the mill—to make sensible evaluations; he is bent on straightening youth out, on keeping it strapped and dependent on him, coaching meaning to him strictly whipping raw recruits into condition; freedom, meanwhile, frightens no one more than the stentorian totalitarian that is his self, that militantly righteous, chronically riled superneurotic no one, least of all the closest of his relatives walking on eggs, dares contradict.* Who’s on the money paradoxically may be perfectly off base. Who never makes mistakes makes blundering seem blest. Some shits excel at pulling others’ chains. Perfectionists, as master pissants who have got their every specialty down pat, require of everyone correcti- tude, cannot abide being criticized, betraying desperate self-righteousness, which means defensiveness; invulnerability which they demand exposes their

* Some modest gratitude may ultimately be owed to redoubtable unmitigated petty autocrats, for they occasionally generate in the odd child some wholesome fortitude, while many parents just don’t give a rap. Mankind’s most fascinating specimens had thorny youths and at least one insufferable parent whom was somehow suffered. Consequently they learned their fate would be irremediably solitary. Can an ear-bashed wunderkind escape a constant earful of cacophany that’s tasteless? To develop genius the right things have to go wrong in one’s childhood. Loftiest intellectual accomplishments are likeliest in those sequestered early from parental warmth who learned mistrust of intimacy, gaining their assurance in detachment. The amount of independence anyone requires depends on the degree of alienation he or she experienced as child and adolescent; thus the paradox that loving homes praised to the skies may not give rise to liberated spirits. Suffering is strengthening if not ennobling. A true artist dwells in agony— and plumbs it. Genius breeds in strong expectations, not in weak indulgences.

264 real, all too perfect vulnerability. The dullest tool’s the soul too vain to suffer anyone incompetent—i.e., anyone bar his peerless self. The trouble with each super self-improver is that even by outsmarting others he can scarce approve himself. As fish need water and birds air, so self-contemptuous souls have to have an ambience of putdowns, of disparagement.* Perfectionists for sure need to be nailed right on the nose; their lectures just obstruct, for each of us must buckle our belts in our own way. No regime that cannot stand being judged deserves to stand. The average splenetic oldster holds that war, poverty, hunger, persecution, exploitation, are unchangeable, because the sweaty little niche plus notchery he’s grubbed out for his very own he dreads change will destroy; so tightly tied to such a formidable stake in the holy establishment, the woodlouse in his crevice hardly can with justice protest being incinerated. Who are those who most delight in freezing innovation and frustrating all our idealizing if not our most frustrate former idealists? Such pessimism is a conscience-salving luxury in which only hoary anciens regimes, museum relics, can afford now to indulge themselves. Resenting aspirations of the young is trying to say “How unfulfilled this life of mine has been.” If brassed-off blighters who’ve withdrawn from love would but withdraw from life, butt out for good, all might be well; such practised hands at croaking could intran- sitively demonstrate it best; alternatively they deserve ideally to be ousted, given the bum’s rush. What better fate for a rust bucket than being sunk? Each down-home despot badly needs to get what for, to be laid low.

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The clear insinuation resident in children owning neither economic nor political rights and responsibilities is that they’re pre- and so subhuman creatures. Courts and schools best demonstrate that juveniles are guilty till proved innocent—by personal experience gangbanged, buggered up, in spanking clean- cut adult institutions. Everyone needs that brand of correction like a hole in the head. Horror of horrors: if we deigned to get off all wetnoses’ backs and granted them the breaks owed to them as peers of our eminence, then we the ill-conditioned would be forced to shape up. “Never!”

* Guilt’s healthy, having to do with what one did; shame, au contraire, relates to what one is. Perfectionism’s source is shame—being indoctrinated early to dread that one never will be good enough. N.B.—Narcissism’s petrifaction in untold decrepit dudes.

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Distrust human nature, and we will have good cause to. Swaddle the babe if, strait-laced, one would nurture still another furious conformist, always in a sweat, screwed-up but good. Should snugglers being tucked in by buzzard dads rest easy in an unawareness it’s the nature of predaceous sires to snack on their own litters, heirs decidedly apparent? “Sleep tight, darling,” i.e., rigid, tense. Break rank, break silence, and you catch it in the neck. Who casts a peanut-brittle spirit cooks up crackup too. The formula for impotence: a domineering pappy plus a doting mammy equals a paralyzed kiddy, quite correct. Such carefully commingled force and fondness does at least ensure his coming hateful lovelife. Is it queer that what’s been whomped up, chaf- ing under despotism, is so pitiful a weenie? Going soon to gobble up the bratwurst? Wallop the resistive manling, pummel him some more, to make immutable that kicked-dog look, to tone up his promising future as a clunk- head if not sorehead. In the name of God don’t spare the rod; pray don’t risk spoiling any tyro killer’s budding rage against humanity. What wonder if, long boiled in oil, he turns out volatile? Have punishers not always taken pishers to the woodshed so as to keep the real stroppy misbehavers’ (their own) kinks from being displayed to all the world? What collaring the scooting jackanapes and giving him cracking sound thrashings, grand casehardening paddywhacks, has done for his flushed parents is unquestionably hard to tell—short of “libel.” Is the hangdog underfoot whelp needed as an outlet for bear-hugging or barefisted slugging by smug owners? Does such use as love- or anger-object justify the trouble and expense of childhood as progressive institution? As for private privileged schools, surely it’s high time we closed down the perverted global (not just English) club of flagellating priesthoods. What beast “lovers” aren’t in fact beast addicts, plying bags of biscuits to secure predictable behavior?* Help the puny pipsqueak feel completely helpless, scared stiff, frozen like a frog about to be ingurgitated, during puberty, that period all too hair-raising, and perhaps, well after it, in keeping with the bonkers family tradition, he’ll become a celebrated sex maniac, a ripping monster, tremulous and in a lather to the end. Might regularly pasting him help his already maddened nature come unglued? Kept long enough ajitter, he can never practise love. Still more effective than to thump him regularly is to crucify him psychologically; there is not just one way to assail, to batter duffs or mash a mash.

* Animal devotees, like doters on preschoolers, principally love their own predominance? 266 Who knows how vital is the role internalized aggression plays in all disease’s etiology? Early suppression fathers later, longer exploitation. “Holy” Mother is the cardinal link for instilling proper terror of the Lord—of the incumbent, that is. Bonaparte declared that “A child’s destiny is always the work of its mother.”—Always, but not totally, thank no God. Faithfully, fearfully slapping the defenseless squirming tot’s exploring fingers, cramping his style, blaring such inanities as “Mustn’t touch!” in tender ears, stoppering his initial, dangerously independent amorous impulses, one can make sure that what little curiosity or ardor he expresses as “a grownup” will be guilt-suffused and sex-obsessed. Not just weak gamblers and drug addicts were forbidden secret pleasures early on. Abuse infers misuse of power, which requires two parties; thus it’s clearly wrong to designate self-pleasuring as self-abuse. A lad who chokes the gopher in a cockeyed culture’s apt to get it in the neck himself. As if we were not “meant” to get our jollies; ’twas not masturbating ever drove folk crazy but not masturbating. The real imbeciles do not lack rod or staff but would prohibit using such. Few human creatures never flogged meat. Everybody’s first love: his or her own genitals; until one loves oneself one scarce can love somebody else. The more repressive any culture is toward premarital sex, the more violent it turns; the greater the affection parents physically give their infants, the less theft and violence engendered in them later. All too common the Rousseau-like misfits who would force us to be “free.” Obedience can be compelled but never loyalty.

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Obligatory love is anything but love. One cannot knock the living daylights into somebody—else youth could do no better than administer immediate drubbings on its inconsiderate seniors. Coercing, dominating others, the Man must misunderstand them. “Show some homage to your betters!” barks a dotard, worse than his bite. Homage where homage is due, O ye scowling Commandant vocalizing all the insight of a beet-red smadge who’s never to be hauled out on the carpet. Who’s the monster and rejectee that cannot pass muster? Souls forever bristling must have learned the trait by long ago enduring denigration? Snarling, snapping at us is a snap; but the alternative self- schooling course of understanding, snapping out of a regular barking-mad state of inattention, is less easy. “Suffer all the little children to come unto Me” . . . for they are ignorant and feeble, thus endearing, by a long shot easier to handle and to overawe than any of their ego-swollen well-warped elders.

267 Those inclined to work with kids depend upon the System to deliver captive audiences thanks to whom they can to some degree remain themselves kids. Offspring still are deemed possessions, property from which security somehow accrues; wives, ditto. How could overlords suspect their every timid ward contains a ticker? Owing to the multiple parental insufficiencies, society insures that there is to be hell to pay eventually. Is it wise to try to stopper a fresh-forged loose cannon? Doubtless we can keep our scrappy nipper well in line with our fists now that he is only knee-high to a grasshopper or mosquito; what about in ten years, when the flipped-out, now scraphappy whippersnapper, having flown the coop, shied outside our exclusively possessive grasp, may have developed his own hopping-mad variety of jump and sting—for instance, an unruly upstart’s heavy arsenal atop a university’s ivory tower? How tactless and hamfisted all Fed efforts to halt violent rebellion in the ranks with shows of brute force—long conditioning in which produced both the reactionary Government and the knee-jerks against it. Might each right-wing trimmer have been knee-capped in a callow state yet present? Having plucked the broken eagle scout, will we swashbuckling old farts still flog the insubordinate dead horse? More likely, consternated, outraged, we’ll prefer to hire the law’s good offices to have the finishing touches executed. That which makes so many time bombs tick we evidently do not wish to learn: we’d rather, munching popcorn, watch the final fragmentation on our home screens. After decades of such retrogressive policies and propaganda, why surprise now over all the ravers in the streets and backwoods? All too easily can moderns douse the most promising lights. Awful is the power wielded over human destinies by parents, whether competent or otherwise; fearsome the military mangling of the young by family influences. Under capitalism children have been no less trivialized than privatized— become inert possessions of unfit producers. Private Enterprise, with its built-in rivalry and minimal supervision of parent-child relationships, makes murderous child care not only possible but probable. Who’s bullied will one day be hard, hard pressed to bully. Is it such good sport to cut youth off at the knees? Fundamentally child-rearing is directed not toward the welfare of the child but, rather, toward gratifying the desires of parents for revenge and holding power. Not the child alone’s affected: all of us end up the victims of this devilish ill-treatment. Whose diablerie demands some urgent exorcism? Ceaseless censuring means putting the skids under not just kids but also our distressful species. Ordinary people simply won’t admit that monsters are produced in ordinary homes, that one child’s sufferings have serious significance.

268 The public is outraged by criminals’ or tyrants’ deeds but not by the down- home abuse that, years before, initiated all the criminality or tyranny. How horrifying that the terror spread by each tyrannical regime derives in good part from a terror-stricken innocent. From age to age Old Nick bestows iniquity upon his sons. The bashing (like the Holocaust in Deutschland) is kept secret and each damn puck’s parents are considered quite within their rights to punish: such is social madness. Everybody pays the freight for children’s long maltreatment. We red-assed hyenas, getting off on reaming smaller asses out, presume that we alone, supported by a criminal society, have right divine over our offspring and, beyond the law, can terrorize them for some venial offenses, belt them, out of our libidinal frustration, just as hard and often as we please with plenary impunity: punitive, threatening because self-threatened, rearing dynamite neurotics, not to say psychotics, we are absolutely part and parcel of the ultimate hot war.* It’s devils like to put the heat on their young. Ruled and represented by trogs, humankind makes certain that its youthhead both is born old and dies young.

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Ear-benders have traditionally been superb at all but twisting off their brats’ ears. Mercy, what a large charge—better far than novocaine’s if not than crack’s or smack’s—the sick censorious self, like some dental intern, gets out of abashing and abasing, kicking its son in the chops or pouncing on him, pinning back his ears and punching, paralyzing, drilling, filling, hammering, taking him down a peg, jumping down his throat, doing its level best to downgrade, browbeat, chop him right down almost to its own microbic size with biting criticisms! What! Not quite as good as gold yet? “Every biff is meant for his own good” . . . sure, sure, as vitriol is good for nursing babes.† A hand’s caresses, exercising sleight of hand, yet cancel not its cuffs. Did clops in the chops ever better anyone’s appearance or behavior? Not a chance in hell.

* Assuming war to be inevitable has to be the most serious of mistakes: among the Inuit to frustrate infants was considered foolish; everything was shared, so dominating hierarchies, territorial disputes, could not arise; such an approach encouraged and sustained a living culture, not a suicidal one. Confessing their iniquities late, fools cannot undo them. † If our political brutality can lie concealed beneath its legal pretexts with the upshot that the brutes themselves cannot perceive it as it is, how relatively simple for our individual malevolence to mask itself in personal relationships, which are so much more deeply complex and world-shaking.

269 The punching bag’s prime lesson striking home: strong hold sway over weaker by brute force. We cannot fool a child—we only disillusion him—with our plain phoniness, bewilder him with our ambivalence. “Why, my old man and woman beat the be-Jesus out of me, and I turned out all right.” Right? Lip-deep concern is worse than no concern. Each buddy-buddy ho-dad is a “pal,” a bon diable palsy-walsy out of palsy of the heart, man of rare gifts indeed who brings home bags of moolah, loads of goods, because emotionally he has nothing much of good to give, incapable of caring for more than his daily grind, most uninvolved in spite of dedication to some superficial sharing, while refusing any recognition of his offspring as unique beings in their own right. He’s superb at taking on, a dud at giving. At what an immense expense are children’s futures mortgaged. What kind of providers are presenting galaxies of victuals but of insight not a smidgen? Posturing habitually, we hide our unsettled inner problems, hugging our collective pet ideal, to be as negligent of love as possible. What have we got to lose, lacking security to put in jeopardy?

_179_

The favored first-born must come first, the upstaged second-born a distant second, and the babied last-born once more first: braced like Prometheus to bear the full brunt of the storms, the blasted whipping boy, bopped into godly scarifying, out of such prosaic happenstance may end up pansified and spending his life striving, bootlessly, to come first. What’s the kind of creature likely to be reared if its chief mentor was as well its chief tormentor? Can a rooster that was once humiliated chick resist humiliating? “Raised” by a compulsive scoffer, how could one not be one? Squaws incline to spoil their initial lovers and papooses, then to ruin the remainder. First-borns almost always turn out “well” because they’re treated as exceptional; the lower expectations of a younger child are also frequently fulfilled but with particular vindictiveness. The elder generally is conforming, unconcerned, and bossy, while the younger’s likelier to be creative, moralistic, and refractory.

_180_

Forever set upon the softest courses, we who call the shots tee off on easygoing teenagers, bent upon ensuring that they never have a ball. It’s wasted and disgruntled minds of every age that crucify whoever’s just now come of age; they

270 stifle passion, individuality, and even kindness in the name of Love, so soon become a dirty word. Brimful with menopausal gall and wormwood, with the gross abomination of their looming dooms, some rabid smut-hounds fear—their fear well laced with furious envy—that one may enjoy what they have always wanted but feared to enjoy, to wit, liberal humpery; hence they foil one and, as chronic hypocrites, decry youth’s normal hedonism, crimp its style, hobble its stride, spike its guns, forbidding each and all to function freely, forcing love into a stealthy, unhealthy expression, making out of shaggy adolescence, which is at its best a trying purgatory, an unnatural inferno. And beyond that smoldering resentment lies the fact that any loosey-goosey child, with its unknown potential, must remind its uptight parent how lamentably the latter’s fallen short of consummating his or her original ambitions. Why should a Johnny-come-lately be permitted to achieve success where his beget- ter tried and failed? We hardly can create a viable culture while mired in denial of our animality, while buried by the nasty moralists’ repugnance for endorsing human nature, long grown hypersexualized thanks to incubated lumpishness, imbalance between fuel and energy expended gleaning it. Denying pleasures means denying needs. As long as we view any basic human need—whether for food, sex, shelter, love, communication, or inquiry—as evil in itself, we must expect aggression as a natural response; thus immaturity answers its kind in kind. One learns to fear loving by being afraid to love one’s close relations, kissing kin who are not kissing kin and therefore have no business begetting. Might each child’s fate be to be fucked over? It’s not incest that’s taboo but, rather, to discuss it; few souls care to open up that can of worms. For incest is an act quite natural, if undesirable: procrustean taboos are proof that acts tabooed could possibly transpire. Prehistorically incest between mother and son has been mythically common,* while historically fathers/brothers not infrequently assaulted—still assault— their daughters/sisters. Prostitutes are born when raped as children; each one graduates from being good victim to being bad exploiter thanks to learning early how to sidestep conflict and smooth over odious experience. What chit would choose to end up blowsy jade? The infamous incest taboo—a canon almost in our blood, engendered over ages to promote the smallish human tribe’s survival—yet has oft been overridden by that shameful fiercer dread

* In fact among all primates, not just hominids, mother-son matings scrupulously are eschewed. Prof. Westermarck, not Dr. Freud, was right in realizing normal humans are averse to sex with those among whom they’ve been reared. 271 of worshiped weakling’s ruthlessness. The search for a mate, too, starts with a sibling, if there be one.* Might there be some close relationship between the crush of sib nonrivalry and growth of the anarchic spirit? Incest, when prolonged, is less the cause than the result—a symptom—of an invalided, ingrown family its leading cripple all too long has terrorized. Age castrates youth, failing to help it find fruitful release, unknowingly an instrument in the production of ongoing slavery. Typecasting at home as submissive is foreboding graver damage than the least pathetic of molesters. Must not training be extended toward trusting our own insight into older perverts who manipulate us? Nearly all erotic problems stem from the Augean task of trying to fix back together lust and love sundered in childhood. “Adults” have no right to rule, “You’ve no right to a sex life until you’ve reached your majority.” Commandments and laws making voluntary sex acts of a minor sins and crimes may well be major sins and crimes.

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Uneasily imagining exposure of their ignorance or their duplicity, many desire surrogates to teach the birds and the bees† to their scions—no gymnastic or affectional realities, purely the bone-dry reproductive theory. God prevent discovery of any fun in it. The learning of erotic skill, like other wholesome forms of exercise, must be self-generated; it can scarce be taught. Young animals withheld from all horsing around, bluff in the buff, may never kick over the traces and run free; those kept from playing never learn fair play. We drill our enfants terribles et perdus in opening fire. What an apprentice arsonist requires is a good lay, not still more self-righteous little homilies accompanied by make-work pastimes, chilly showers, or saltpeter covertly dispensed. What constitutes sex education—that superfluously overheated controversy—is not labored sermons full of hems and haws but how each father and each mother in reality treat one another. When it comes to their own offspring’s birth control, most folk perform as fucking hypocrites. It’s evident that elders as a rule do not like to see their young grooving anything, let alone some bod. The loss of innocence appears a prime obsession in creepy Amerika,

* The computer matchups of two pairs of “perfect twins” are scarcely recommendable considering the narcissistic incest aspect: “like attracts like”?—rather, unlike fosters altruistic growth into maturity. † Such instruction is inestimable aid to one preparing to wed bird or bee. The simpler any creature, the less observation it requires to learn to procreate. 272 where infants’ nudity produces horror and where with barefaced Pecksniffery society “forbids” its adolescents to view those X-rated flicks in which they are themselves the star sex objects; we dwell in denial that our brothelly “adult” underworld corrupts. Like cheater, like whoreson or -daughter. Surely we are setting splendid, simply shining examples for the next whopping generation of incorrigible cannibals. Divorce, that tragic three-ring circus star- ring the vain adversaries and the mindless law, is neither entertaining nor much edifying to the harmless, helpless onlookers still raw at falling to with a vengeance.

_182_

“Civilization” is constructed out of aggressiveness, at the expense of love. Decorum takes care to ignore truth’s rash début, dismissing it as a mere premature ejaculation. Are we absolutely sure it’s lovelife which is brashly premature, unwieldy, not our judgment of it? The most vicious crimes against nature are our sexual verbots, and the most indelible shame is that, out of organic acts like defecating or embracing, we make duties, gratifying most to our manipulative selves. What enema could clean right out the foul mind of the obstipated parent? Blush now for the shamelessness that comes with age, not for that gone with “immaturity.” How absolutely nuts to think that cir- cumcising helpless infants or ripe girls might help make men or women out of them. The source of circumcision, that symbolical castration of the boy- child thanks to his well-meaning parents,* is emotional morbidity in “adults”: murderous desire lurks beneath the customary operation, which may be a literal emasculation, for the offshoots from each such traumatic lopping— sawbones at least can be grateful for the ripoff—are wholly unknown; appropriately self-abuse is aggravated, not assuaged, by this irreparable mutilation, evidence of our fidelity to diabolic Hebrew-Christian-Muslim backwardness.

* Primarily his mater? Or is such a household cynicism merely a displacement of one’s dread of pater’s too real enmity? So many boo-boos in life spring from fright. The sudden senseless falls from grace of sundry grown men germinate in their deep juvenile need to defy their frightful fathers, those potential if not literal castrators, and to foil all competition. Bygone sins indeed do cast long shadows. Years of honorable sweat can thus evaporate in one unguarded moment of rash foolery; a single slip may dog an upright person to his dying day; a good name’s sooner lost than won. As Thomas Browne wrote, “yet is every man his greatest enemy . . . and . . . his own executioner.” What kind of casualty is shooting oneself in the foot?

273 Could all allergic symptoms such as prevalent chronic fatigue be rooted in erotic inhibitions which cause enervating brain-stem stress? So also angst and anger seethe beneath asthmatics’ florid visages? Not only incest terrifies us: every kind of sex appears to threaten humankind, the level of anxiety exactly equaling the level of authoritarian remorselessness. Many a sassy upstart, raising a pert personal erection out of what might have been an abortive general uprising, has shown too much spunk or jism for his horn-mad elders’ liking and as smartmouth is socked in the kisser for becoming way too lippy. Stick your neck out, and it’s likely to be whacked at. Snapping off the comer’s head is only figurative in intention? Breaking any brat of habits now ensures his broken spirit later; we kick him but not the nasty habits he is learning from us—for example, falsifying, taking swipes at smaller people, thieving and not giving. Damaged children cannot but become disordered adults. “Grownups” generally are remarkably insensitive to childhood’s rich imagination and they do their utmost, usually all unwittingly, to blight it sooner rather than later; the bromidic rationale is that the neophytes must lose their tenderness before they’re fully primed for “adult life.” Most queries children pose regarding sex are not at all regarding sex, those limited mechanics of biology, but have respect to the real frightfulness, to the definitive mysteriousness, of our lives as organisms; in brief, youth’s concern is ultimate concernment. How we love to lie denying sex is gravely disappointing as solution to life’s awesome riddle.

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Just as certainly as schoolmasters, parents should from the start consistently be strict—in nonathoritarianism: noncollectors of resentment. Both, however, have defaulted their social responsibilities with their continual demands imprinting upon every child the pious fraud that education spells rivalrous- ness, that cleverness, intelligence, means a device for psyching out, for gaining vantage over, others. Winners glow, while losers are reduced to tragic discards. Every serf, not just each lawyer or “Defense” employee, has been trained to get the sharpster’s edge, to serve dependent on a baneful adversary dispensation. In each technological society the parents are blamed when a child goes wrong, whereas the ruling class gets credited when one excels—at clever service with an eye to ruling. Tremble for the fearful teacher’s pet now headed

274 for lifelong futility as spiritual eunuch ever struggling to achieve defeat; he needs more than this Sunday-school mentality at present no less than he will in future. Normally some form of arm-twisting persuades all but the most perverse runt to support the standing ordure of the day. Adjustment experts ought to stick to fender-benders. Pupils’ current upbringing requires less attention than instructors’ obsolete downputting, their interminable failure to progress. Clamping down is needed strictly in loosening up. Rulers’ intent is chiefly to maintain a stranglehold on any malapert dissent. Intimidation: bogus education’s surest way to a conclusive flunk.

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It’s understandable that screws prefer lags to come to class stoned, to keep disruption at a minimum. Surely those parents who collaborate in medicating offspring to bring their behavior into line with what is institutionally tolerable actually are themselves perverted? As a flaky youth’s troublesomeness swells, the trouble taken over him dissolves like a lanced boil: anyone who’s a mite irritating finds himself viewed as a nasty bug slated for crushing. Nonparental teacher ass-ociations often enjoy some inoffensive shitchat to determine which difficult chits or bellyfuls can be most profitably expelled. Many a cap- tious parent, too, has unctuously dispatched a scapegrace child, scuppered his best aspirations, only to have the greasy remains, discombobulating all one’s worst-laid plans, still disagreeing with one. It’s an undemanding craft most young bloods evidently learn best: how to poot around while jiving, how to hang out bitching. Locked in an incestuous embrace are growth-retarding family and school, those fashioners of will and intellect, together bringing forth that world-consuming monster, Inequality, each institution propping up its mate’s disintegrating carcass. What wage-earner or -examiner mired in the hierarchy can provide or study the hard truth about how our inequities are instituted? Does not youth rebel against precisely that sort of parochial analysis precluding comprehension of why youth rebels? Predictive psychological tests prove that economically disadvantaged means potentially criminal: what integral perception, what indeterminate sentences! Those veteran poseurs who cannot for the life of them love children worry about how to handle them. As well-trained gunners, the vets settle for a systematic strafing of the streams of blooming parachutists.

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What can one expect of generations processed by a stupid school (reflecting the societal) establishment based on the cruel premise that its taws taught wisdom? What but more stupidity? All sterile teaching staff, emotive ignoramuses impressively confusing learning with corrosive discipline, express their infertility in failing their most uncooperative students, levying personal tolls out of their own libidinal perversions. The odd pedagogue and führer rightly seems not to have all (that’s both) his marbles. Uninquiring inquisitors, demanding to hear our convictions and pronouncing them for us, cannot arouse inquisitiveness. In a real school nothing human would be foreign to inquiry. Like a glitch in the power corporation’s operations, a buttinski with genuine intellectual problems costing sweat and tears, if not blood, interrupts the orderly productive disposition of the classes but is easily defused under the feudal system; while his complex questions call—cry out—for more than simplistic replies. “We’ll teach him to be so percipient!” Emotions in the young are dangerously indeterminable, consequently to the old repugnant. Blazing pupils light upon obscurest evilness.

_186_

The bright inductee who gets out of line and dares excel his hidebound drill- er’s expectations does so at his own risk. Jumping all over him, we drum into “our” boy how he is to skin his neighbors while licking their boots, and if he does not learn so well, we tan his hide, give him his lumps, flay him alive too, for good measure. Where the mystery if lazy parents roll out deadwood? It’s no wonder well-drilled drummer boys develop into lifeless drummers. Why must they be urged to join the ranks of the pod people? We demand the klutzy little shaver be scaled like a log—regardless that he turns out to be pulp. The blocks at loggerheads that most need knocking off are nearest to the knocking knotheads, so emotionally hard that they’re impervious to burning up. Each tyrant’s in the greatest need of having his head handed to him; whereas sonny needs, in order to ensure he fits, to have the screws put to him? It’s a piece of furniture that shines and beams following a shellacking. Is the grade that, under pressure, our lad has achieved as A-1 egghead reason for our own stuffed heads? What matter that in being put through the wringer he break down with high anxiety, the energy he needs for everyday

276 stresses being sapped to cope with unresolved internal conflicts, to repress what should not have to be repressed—when the examination marks are all that count to us, the true class dunces? Ever ponder, not to speak of figuring out, why he cannot stand the gaff or cut the mustard, why he’s catatonic, destitute of his grandfather’s gumption? Maybe he could hack it if Legree dared hand him a machete. “When I was your age . . .” exposes an intolerably smudgy aim to stamp the child into a spotless carbon copy of one’s unread- able self. Clad in the proper set of threads that’s dealer uniform, is he by accla- mation judged most fit to go to seed? A schizophrenic replica, the very spittle, of our own inimitable failure? An astute novitiate in the important business of snowing the dumb public? Has he quite enough ants in his pants to chase industrial rainbows with the same vaulting ambition and fervid fatuity shown in our dismal unforgettable examples? Will he with alacrity obligingly follow our suit, tearing apart his fellows piecemeal, limb by limb, engaging with both kith and kin in a continuous devout vendetta? Has the little bleeder learned befittingly the art of looking daggers at us, been indoctrinated in the properly amoral mores?* Are we training him as a high-mettled gamecock or two-fisted gimme-pig to be a great competitor, a states-man or top criminal, a grand gang-bang b.o. success? Impressing him into becoming that which each of us regrets (so wrongly) never having managed to become, indomitable stuporman, magoo, or perfect fool? Or does he lack the necessary greed to take the Mammon gospel in? What cause for pride that we have got a groping air cadet desiring to go over big, a ball of fire, like Pop? What reason for congratulation when our former trusty paperboy, a shameless wonk, goes to the top of his class getting to be mayor, the most highly suspected personage in the community? Advancing to the head of a line, any sailor could report, may merely be unloading shit or getting a trick turned. Should folk be proud to have produced some precious ponce? One can be on top of the world short of wielding formidable clout and being a world-, son-, or wife-beater, buster. If we loved, we’d treat him and them otherwise—without the slightest treatment: forcing growth results in vapid vegetables with a fine appearance only.

* E.g., schooled by slasher movies? Breakdown of traditional morality has introduced not new morality but absence of it; youth, which naturally longs for clarity, for its humanity, thus has its highest hopes dashed and, however well-to-do, can count on living ill.

277 _187_

Could the lad’s intense “identity crisis” after having had the squeeze put on him come to no more than a striving extra hard to ascertain if he’s at college for himself or for his mama? What use all those years of loyal physical attention if at last the move to independent life is grudged? And what a souring disillusionment to learn, for all one’s offspring’s great potential, that they’re destined to remain nonentities, forgotten flashes in the pan. Each generation’s forced to watch the next one passing up its choicest opportunities. Do parents naturally have to blunder into viewing their young as reality, not as mere facts fated to pass from sight? Must children bear the burden of their elders’ unlived lives? Must sons and daughters be vicarious atonements, instruments through which the powerless fulfill their passions? Who can doubt that dropping out of a cold squirrel cage, this most preposterous outrageous “adult” (here read venal) underworld in which unrivaled slovenly conduct has been institutionalized, is the wisest move that youth can make? Such dropping “out” may be at heart a dropping in, and all the good conformists only properly enticed into inoperable deformity. Attempting to evade that fate worse than death, the odd brave young hopeful may elect to be buried in books. What upright neophyte can prove to be more than one more statistic when the state’s unkept stats now are rising to incomparable levels of underemployment? In a wiped-out underworld success amounts to degradation, and withdrawal’s noble in its helping to cut our exceptionally G.N.P. Who cares for sensual or spiritual experience when social status is at stake? Our youngsters’ popularity in class or triumphs on the labor market must reflect on us, redounding to our blessed credit, vindicating our own barren lifescapes; screwed up with self-conscious insecurity, we necessarily encourage him and her, shoehorned into a smelly slot, to fit in unabrasively, to date young and thus to deteriorate young; “the innocent” we screw up, grooming them as good slaves, urging them to be, like us, fearfully vain and hypocritic, on their so-called best behavior throughout the prestige rating game, concealing their most uncongenial idiosyncrasies till after each gay wedding day, reluctant to discard a fiancé(e) because “I am so wonderful it would be a hard heavy blow to lose me.” Some think they can marry whom they please; the trouble is, they please nobody.

278 _188_

Saturated with forktongued guff from birth to “maturity,” how can today’s kerflumixed students be expected to be anything but cynical and trivial? Yet why, after all, should we be concerned with the state of their spirits, when we’ve never even been concerned with that of ours? A truly good heart grown at home is worth no end of goodlooking heads mass-produced at school or in the prejudice manufactories of our gnawing selves. Since when did academic execution or a suck-off’s suction measure anyone’s ability to do a job? Not college makes the man but home: academies can merely add wax wings to the main building, sound or shattered, stalwart or ramshackle, as the case may be. Do crisp diplomas at the finish smooth the beds of death? Are preppies well prepared exclusively as poor pre-yuppies? If their breezy parents can’t, a prissy finishing school will, complete the job of spoiling girls. Mass “education” is an organized attempt to disestablish parents’ obligation to care for their progeny, an essay that fails and a truancy for which there’s no excuse, for the home is the school, the source of our deepest-seated mendacity. Where else do ciphers learn that they can’t count? After the age of six it’s too late to supplant implanted unintelligence. Few people want their young to see the darker side of life, of their own natures, how most wrongs are born in anger and anxiety, conceived in selfishness. Some fozy specimens express dismay that youths behave so gravely immaturely, even though neither have ever been confronted with a single real test, having been conditioned forcefully on every side to dodge stress, not to face it, decadent society being wholly hooked on credit, wondrously subsisting way beyond its sentient revenue. A customary solitary disciplinal grief no longer tries to make one human; puberty rites once turned primitives responsible; now youths have mostly rites of impasse to confirm their worth. Societies, for their part, breed and foster bands of toughs armed with war weaponry—unnatural in the extreme. Honor and dignity no longer are acquired involuntarily via time-honored roles, but now depend upon each individual’s persistent efforts to emancipate his or her self. Becoming a real man or woman calls for making a great trial of oneself. Schooled without spirit, modern Westerners succumb to irremediable undevelopment.

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No stronger vanity than any father’s vanity. Paternity’s a devilishly rare and recent evolutional phenomenon in mammals, merely 3% being monogamous.

279 Most pappies show no sign they care about their couplers’ welfare, let alone their offspring’s; sexual emission’s all they seem to reckon is of consequence. A rara avis, strange bird viewed as cuckoo (this variety close to extinction), is the male that’s fit for family life—most apt, curiously, to be a bachelor deficient in ambitions and thus unattached, worst social misfits and emotive casualties being well embalmed in marriage and career. What people wish for they unfortunately often get. It’s only he truly assured in his tenderest masculinity who qualifies as nurturer. It’s hard enough for those few paters who try not to throw their weight around, considering the terror monster males tend to inspire in babes. How selfish those neurotic dames who choose to bear young minus spouses;* also, those delinquent bastards who choose to breed juveniles yet not to father them. Whatever women do is never quite sufficient for men well-nigh starved for some paternal sympathy. Is the distrust that fathers have of their sons justified? It’s probable zoo daddies get what they deserve from progeny—according to the poor examples they have set. It’s not one’s breeder who is most important but each father figure whom one chooses. Few folk understand their sires any better than they’re understood by them. Had Hamlet ever really seen his father, would he have made such an awful fuss about somebody fool enough to marry Gertrude? A good father’s better than the best ruler on earth and almost as uncommon: strange indeed to find a pardner in a pater. Patriarchal media have long indoctrinated dads to fail their offspring, to be Dagwood Bumsteads. Why should children have respect at all for fathers, when they almost never see them at work? Why should they have any if they did? The “best of family men” may well prove to be the basest publicly, and vice versa. Cloddish paters all too often give their families one hell of a pain. Tragically, in his earth-eroding, gratitude-destroying conceit, as any doited old goat or inveterate consumer of junk and producer of crap would, man molds his kids exactly like his mulish self, cantankerous as billy or irascible as donkey; but, all kidding aside, were the paterfamiliass wise and no jughead, he would yet be young like them. If only every constipated soul would take a hike. Who cannot sport in badinage with nearest kin grows readily familiar as Mr. Dull to strangers too. The deadliness of families escapes most folk; yet hordes of children have been systematically bored to death by prudes in trumpery parade reviews at stuffy bourgeois dinner tables; is such dismal

* The rationale (read the excuse) that lesbos proffer for rear-ending children “on their own” is that kids are a joy while many men are not—a judgment that’s no problem to reverse.

280 “home life” not too dull for words?* Does the phrase “family values” not imply subordination of the weaklings—women, children, working stiffs—to baleful influences, chiefly sacrosanct control? The aim of the infernal family is not enabling love but, on the contrary, ensuring domination; far from holy, it’s imperialist. The hell of it is that so many misfits and scrimshankers, more than one can shake a stick at, to this day insist on breeding but not raising brats. In any animal a prime sign of intelligence is playfulness. Those dead to creativity are alien to play; ’tis freedom that they envy in them both. So many pushing fifty are decrepit, whereas a few nonagenarians are actually livelier; unfortunately there are speechifying fuddy-duds at any age. Hostility may be coeval with senility: the aging process starts once hating has been mastered? Middle age means when minds’ broadness and waists’ narrowness change places? In high hopes for any fresh relationship one’s yet a child; in disillusion over that relationship one swiftly turns curmudgeon. As one’s childhood dies its corpse becomes an adult. Growing up involves not growing old but ripening from passion to compassion. An old son of a bitch is no less an SOB. Puerility persists in cranky adulthood, and fatally the two remain as one. Above all what the surly emperor thumbs down is not just the young gladi- ator but no less the spoiled child that he himself once was and yet remains. Over the years most people change but little: silly girls and foolish fellows tend to stay so; dolts in May are apt to be dolts in December. Once a prick, almost always a prick. Some neurotics, sadly, never mellow out until they’re doited. Most folk just go through the motions, dying as they lived, most likely suffering, assuredly confused. Wisdom can come with age, but for most age arrives alone. Remove the pretense of maturity, and maybe mankind can outlive its infancy. Neurotics sense their contacts with coevals represent a danger; they are driven to attempt relating mainly to those either a lot older or else no less younger than themselves because they haven’t yet resolved their disillusionment with their engenderers. Until one’s parents are forgiven, given up, one’s not oneself released but must conceive one’s self as and behave as child; their

* Children once required to be seen and not heard could learn by eavesdropping what humbugs their elders were. Reared in Philistia, any decent youth quits the place at once upon graduation. With its fuggy atmosphere, that of a forcing house, was not the comfort- suffocated pharisaic family of the more than century-long Victorian age, in which the young were expected trustingly to read their plates, the breeding ground for sternest insurrectionists? Prince Valiant is drawn to leave behind the figures in a comic strip.

281 phantom power prevents one’s growth in love: the fond delusion that one day, miraculously, both of them may start to care sustains and justifies one’s self- inflicted misery. Recovering the depths of filial attachment is discovering the heights of freedom to adore the whole; but almost never does a juvenile grow up. What most amazes many educated youths on entering the Big World is the great nugacity of most behavior. Achievers’ flopperoos are staggering. Whatever their age, “adults” generally function as would egocentric urchins; the press of quotidian expedience seems to forestall their slightest fundamental growth. Outside, man’s home’s his castle; inside, it’s his nursery. He who appears an ordinary pisser may in private be a real one. Learning to give care to younger children, male youths might well be obliged to stop being children. Really growing up is likely to be very hairy. To prove our true manliness, we have to do far more than pop off, let off steam, or pop our corks, Pops. Must the petulant old man teach biddable young dogs, use them as vents for, his abominable old tricks? Guess who is just not up to snuff. Pray kindly refrain from teaching your grand children to suck eggs. It’s surely time at this ungodly hour to sprout some depth, not only umpteen gray hairs. Even hotshot sawbones cannot plant a sage head on young shoulders. Try attaining radiant celebrity among wild flowers. Come, as wormlike heroes from a childhood nightmare, let us irresistibly now push out of the graves of our pugna- cious selves and crawl into the cradle of oneself, the fairest mud of nature.

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Nobody lacks the blossom that’s the heart, but nearly everybody lets it wilt. No commoner crime than to break a heart. Must corsairs, cads of both the sexes, leave those heaving chests upon the face of the deep, indicating topsail schooners lost? Where in the storms of love the angels fear to tread the brutes launch forth. Are matings any less haphazard than road accidents? There’s a fortuitous and incommensurable aspect to erotic magnetism that is enig- matic. Who in any harum-scarum battle can help with whom one is bound to fall? Who knows what serves to ring somebody’s bell? How unaccountable is passion’s path and inexplicable its chemistry; how singular that purest lovers are the surest to be ravaged and laid out by those they love. Devotion that dies unreturned is that which burns the longest. The heart’s puberty, amazingly, predates the body’s. True emotion ages not; passion can now and then survive a lifetime. Curiously one who’s never been possessed may yet belong to us the most completely. Strange: a man may lust his life through for a

282 beau ideal who’d never give him any satisfaction, let alone the time of day. A dreamer’s told he must get over her. Woman is generally more pragmatic, less romantic. Truth and beauty must, from first to last, experience estrangement? Beatrices normally remain indifferent to or ignorant of the idealist infatu- ations they’ve evoked; astoundingly they’re absolutely without interest. It’s best those take the low road who can’t rise to the occasion. It’s master spirits are most fascinated and ought most to fascinate. To any luster, genius or not, what seems to be severe contempt is more apt to be vacuous indifference. The hypothermic variance between disdain and disregard is scarcely measurable, surely negligible. Wanting the beloved to be happy, love wins all its “happiness.” Reciprocated love’s a dream come true—for some a cinch, for most an untieable knot. An honest lover sees well; jilted, suffers well: his heartburn’s sharpest who perceives his ardor has been tendered to one unworthy of it. His mistake’s termed accurately the pathetic fallacy. Is anyone “in love” a decent judge of character? Some minor solace for each tender soul who apprehends love as a nightmare: every dream eventually must evaporate. A prudent man will take care not to get in his grand passion’s hair. When physical attraction gets reciprocated and a link established, fervor’s objects cannot but emerge as alien: each lover craves propinquity which, if accomplished, forces partners to confront phenomena both unexpected and unwelcome. Love’s intrinsically tragic: while transcending the empirical world it’s yet subject to that world’s bitter contingencies, which give it birth and sustenance. Thank heaven that, denied association, visibility, and contact, foolish passions do abate. A drea- rier fate than to lose a treasure is to clasp it and to find it null and void. Disheartening indeed must it be to desire so long and hard, then at last to lay, some body free to offer nothing else. Scores of alluring boxes out there, to be sure, attached to unreceptive brains. Who’s anything but helpless, wholly remediless, when the object of one’s longing, for whom one exclusively has eyes for, is a disagreeable soul one can’t even like? How devastating to discover the soul to whom you’ve unburdened all your warmest weakness is at least as weak but cold to boot. What folly to sink one’s own happiness in someone else’s, and especially a fool’s. Most prospectors for partners never learn the two most worthwhile qualities to seek are kindness and intelligence; unfortunately what is wisest seldom seems desirable. How difficult not to be simply mad about a soul. The line between delusion in psychosis and in “love”—in brief, to have it bad—is so thin as to be well-nigh invisible; where close attachments are concerned irrationality if not insanity’s the rule. When passion reaches its extremes it’s indistinguishable from common heartlessness.

283 Being crazy, torchy, carrying a torch with shining eyes, for someone blind is nothing but romantic indiscretion, maybe just what’s needed. Seeking others’ qualities we’re sure we lack leads us to “fall in love,” but to acquire those traits requires self-cultivation, not alone embracing the companions. The problem is, most folk are not particularly lovable, their failings lunging forth at anyone whose wits are yet alive. It’s futile to love someone vicious since the aim is destined to be frustrated. What’s vital (if scarce possible) is to determine others’ defects, not just excellences, in advance of falling for them. Having snitty folly spit in one’s eye ought to help one wise up and kiss it goodbye. ’Tis hard, however, to grasp there are doors that one can knock and knock on without ever getting any answer. Love’s excesses dissipate soon, but its disap- pointments seem to agonize forever. Joys we try the hardest to remember get forgotten, whereas woes we wish most to forget cling longest to us. Superficial feeling in a heartthrob breeds the most profound disturbance. Knockouts there are so obtuse they can be struck by bolts from heaven and not know it. Wenches on the whole think nothing of flushing infatuates down the WC. An unleavened dreamer who asks “his” girl for “just three little words to leave me walking on air” may well be obliged: “Go hang yourself.” She puts on airs while giving him the air. That’s all she wrote—no single word—because subliterate? When stood up one should take the hint and skip. Does she just love it when a boy is that way, viz., lovesick, hopelessly gone, over her, when she can witness his discomfiture and hangdog eyes as she repulses him? What pleasure’s hers inflicting pitiless humiliation on the suppliant once he has made a declaration of lust and so cut off his retreat. She’s highly gratified to see him deeply mortified. Impossible to tell how many men—most likely a majority of them—over the ages have declared their passion and received in kind the triggered backfire of delighted scorn from damsels hard as nails. One’s aptly said to suffer from a crush. The younger woman’s a receiver that is marvelous at tuning others out; a master at the art of telling suitors to go fuck themselves. It seems the nature of that beast barely to notice any but the most aggressive candidates. The pain that’s suffered in the company of one adored is practically as severe as what is suffered when deprived of it. To live too close to any idolized rejecter is intolerable. Hence some choose removal of themselves.* Even lightest verdicts by beloveds, levied casually by a single thoughtless gesture or remark, give dreamy ardency the hardest time, cut to the quick, irreparably lacerating. Single reprimands can harm some more

* For no lost soul can it be quite worth suiciding.

284 than many stripes hurt most. Who keeps or breaks a tryst does not begin or end the world. Yet take it hard enough, and it’s a cakewalk not to give again. Perhaps the thwarted ego or hardbitten self itself had best die back before the glacial glance and frosty kiss-off? Thus a withered loser may turn out a blooming winner. Better a fresh friend than one turned stranger. Generally it’s the relatively undesirous partner who precipitates a breakup is left the less bitter; ditching, kissing off a pal, dissolving fellowship, one renders unto him or her the choicest insult. In vain poor folk cut dead others, but themselves in the discarding are less easy to escape from. Time forgets love’s blunders and for- gives its sins, reserving hell for apathy’s inaction. Empathy, to be experienced, requires self-assurance. Lack of empathy results from disaffection, discontent with one’s lot. To be kind you have to drop your grasping. Those without compassion need the most. Rancor feeds on fright, and fright on wounded love withdrawn; we early learn to hide our rage for fear of losing love. Ire hatches in conviction of inferiority. Man rages out of puncturable pride, afraid of both exposure and denial of his self’s inflated claims. While danger breeds fear, anger breeds in conflict. Dread of impotence ensures its maintenance as fact: the mind begets, as well as being begotten by, its trepidation. Who is anxious hesitates, who hesitant reflects. Reflection reaches no conclusion; solely inner rays clear up confusion. Love is not the great deceiver but the commonplace deceived. How singular: our most absurd delusion—that one person stands out greatly from another—yet contains our most sagacious value. Love’s significance lies in its stirring hope, unrealizable, of a fulfilment that’s eternal. Truthfulness is not for knowing: we must leap, unpushed, and plummet out of our soft nests’ security if we are going to soar, astonished to discover wings, into full- fledged serenity. Those truly in love travel safely anywise; those caring not a straw never take wing. A crush at (or before) pubescence—consummately natural. Deserted by our cleverness, we’re arid, lost; but just observing the heart’s soloing birds, whether disregarded robins or long-missing sheilas whose once-fetching features, lovesome in lofty imagination, last as keepsakes for susurrant nurses crooning mortal wonder, one locates oneself, never fear. Heart-searching flops, consumed in sizzling waves; heart-watching risks all, diving, swimming in pure ozone.

285 _191_

Could solitude be, after all, a perfect blessing? Will not there be lots of time for that within the grave? If we insist on keeping our indulgence for the fault- less only, are we not bound to keep it forever? Do folk hold their finer feelings hidden deeming those blooms far too precious for displaying? Never will one win a true friend if one will not be one; getting well requires feeling well. It’s highly likely that, if living by and for your self, you’re being corrupted by the company you’re keeping. On the other hand, a sage asked how he could endure so solitary a life might well answer that he was in bracing company until the questioner arrived. Some moralists have such a lofty estimate of friendship that it’s they alone could qualify for the relationship. To love, one cannot merely crave for love. Many a sullen recluse fasts on his own urine. He whose dog is in fact his best friend must be in desperate straits.∗ Felines that escape contracting uteromania may develop ailuromania. May not beastly pride (unique to “human” beings) preclude animal lovers loving any fellows? When will we see that there never has been, nor could there be, separation between one and all? Simplicity is frostfree, unobliged to break the ice that isn’t there. Not isolation causes our frustration but our pleasure-hunting faith in isolation’s virtue, our consolatory fear of integration. Is the heart in the right place—or in the mouth? Saneness resides not in some freedom of or from the will but out of freedom past the will, in outright fearlessness. Since when does love require volition? Since no when. Each individual’s dividual, sequestered, an invidious product of our mad ideal of some completely independent ego, at heart ill-willed, sore against the grain.† Does wisdom mean: Paddle your own canoe? Napoleons campaign for independence, rocky isle without a beach. The highest hope aspired to by the modern underworld is freedom for each self; that by the old organic world was freedom from such vanity. Real liberty’s the power of imposing obligations on oneself, a privilege accorded humankind alone. Is absolute autonomy in actuality the ideal state, given that we are more interdependent

* Meanwhile commonly dog-haters are misanthropists, self-haters, out of touch with both their animality and their humanity. † To illustrate, how could a psychiatric counselor (read voyeur) who’s normally sophisticated cynic loner dedicated to entire autonomy help disunited partners reunite? Like many a lay person, he’s presumptuous advising others how or what they feel or understand, something no one can fully apprehend about another. Ultimately understanding not the mystery that is oneself, one scarce needs others’ “understanding.”

286 than all other animals? Dissociation’s now our be-all and end-all because most folk become so hopelessly dependent once they have “matured”? We seek not universal love but to be loved exclusively. As species we are shaped out of one clay, as individuals insist on our precious uniqueness. What’s more urgent than the union of one’s separated self? A high wind this fall may teach us at last that all of mankind are leaves of one tree. Humanity at last is going to have to grow up. We must recognize that all those “others” are—the Other is—ourselves. No one comes into this world; everyone comes out of it, like some wave from the bounding main. Genuine passion comprehends appreciating the inestimable treasure of this momentary life, wholly unhoardable. As midnight’s tempest gathers, intimacy grows, unknowing where the wordless argument is leading. In the hour of pulling up the dragging anchor of the wily self, and only in that hour, will one fathom one’s true deep, unheralded audacity itself.

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Perhaps to swear oaths really is a sin? “Thou shalt,” “I shall,” are grave mis- understandings of old-fashioned willful self; as willers unto death, we are the solitary beast that will not understand. Professor Schopenhauer was as little drawn to “life” as orderly Nietzsche was to “power.” What both of them wanted was goodwill, a contradiction if there ever was one. So with us and everybody in all ages, alien ships passing in the night upon the high seas. Human life is a will to be loved—a psychopathic order minus love. What more degrading lust, the ultimate perversion, than the “love” for power? Who’d believe that every master politician is at heart a cureless deviant as well as lummox? Dominance and caring, in fact, suffer an inverse relationship. The rule in any union: who loves the most rules the least. The magical (mistaken) view of Love is that it conquers: “All you need is love”—construed predictably as meaning being subservient. The greater grows our calculated power over others, that much lesser wastes our undesigned love for those “others.” Love produces but does not originate in blindness. Being loved one must endure; while loving’s welcoming being consumed. There is a terrible finality in love disdained. To die for means to have a very strong desire for; immortal loving calls for wholly giving up.

287 _193_

Enthralled, a race of shallow breathers now is willfully blind humankind, scarce voluntarily gregarious, whose smoke-filled lungs must wither with the willies. Willy-nilly self can but will not acknowledge, I am willing but unable. For one to inspire, willing must expire. “Free will” implies desiring, making choices. Or is such a soul merely confused? When wholly clear one’s surely clear of any choices. Superhuman life consists in unspeakable love, an unde- flatable afflatus, willy-nilly will-less, free as air. To be transmuted beyond recognition’s given everyone. Shazam!

288 IV Good Clean Fun

289 290 Who digs a pit Will die in it. v Who feeds on dirt Becomes inert. v His thirst sustains Him who abstains. v Time has no end Love can’t transcend.

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Really to marry is to love. But bonds of matrimony are unholy; wedlock whose links Church or State forge constitutes a padlock, making us not triumphs but stale mates, the reckoning deferred sine die. In the dark, undressed, confused, we think our selves most “natural” and “liberated”; mystifying sex we’ve made the ultimate retreat from imitation life, which yet constrains us to screw well-nigh all our neighbors. At first blush asocial, then, the act in fact epitomizes to illusory perfection masculine supremacy, the long-held whip hand. For more than one weird millennium the whanger has been known as—not to mention wielded as a wicked—weapon.∗ Sadists seem to love to give it to their victims. Might any erotic congress implicate callous victimization? Woman plowed—laid, pounded, and transfixed—is prototype for all succeeding wrongs; under man’s thumb, moaning, she is held by his deep- rooted envy of her corporeal creativity. Above all who but males are driven to get their legs over underlings? While sharing food is democratic, copulating’s autocratic: honkies long have humped the coloreds, turning meals with them down cold. Enthralling screwing, the big pom-pom or boom-boom, must be the master metaphor for what is mad and vile around the globe—the blood-infested “need” to be on top of things, competing, conquering, and quelling all cooperative joy. Authoritarian society, I’ll tell the cockeyed world, keeps hammering hand in glove with compulsive marriage, that imperious

* From the start did stabbing hunting not incorporate a vein of carnal motivation? Big-game hunters know that in extremis a male mammal’s member grows tumescent and secretes his last bestowal. 291 means whereby all the donkeywork gets executed. Are we really on top of the problem that atrocious patriarchy poses? State strategians must glorify maternity to justify and ratify enslavement of each country’s “clear” majority. Should governments not keep their noses out of personal concerns like passion? The moronic state has demonstrated mighty well its failure to solve our collective problems without being asked also to mess up our private matters. Wedding evidently means: to promise what cannot be promised? “Promises, like piecrusts, are made to be broken.” Give much thought to the institution, swearing to love, and you may wake up one day in the institution loving to swear. What myth more baneful than that wedded union should be self-contained, that partners somehow can and must meet one another’s every need? “Thou wilt hold dear this special bloom and none besides” excludes love altogether. To monopolize a person is perhaps to disrespect that person. Vows, implying that disloyalty is likely, hardly can embrace a virgin future, for virginity is now or never. Without freedom man is only beast and marriage a miscarriage, a mirage. Relationships collapse because we gradually fabricate our partners, who then drive the real ones out the door. Our wishes in the end become demands. To live with any living creature, not with its dead image, calls for an extraordinary liveliness. Love grows in voidness, not in likenesses. Must all affiliations be but quests for better—or worse—effigies of our selves? Disinterring, celebrating one’s own in a partner’s image rightly is termed loving? Common souls, sadly enough, are less attracted to a counterpart than to reflection of their selves in those bedazzled eyeballs; such caressing comes to little more than onanism. “Intercourse” may mean two solitudes coinci- dentally manipulating. To become complete one marries; then one’s finished. Merging with “another” is disastrous if one is not whole oneself.

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A marriage breakdown’s likely to befall the partner who demands what only a good parent could provide. Divorce may be just final stillbirth of misun- derstandings, last in a long chain of splits conceived in specious norms of gender swallowed early by both inmates; each such stereotype dupes both men and women, who thus judge themselves less masculine and feminine, respectively, than they “should” be. Is love not an explosive-rigged cigar we’re eager to inhale? The nuptial compact that fails usually has been dedicated to paying off an old score or two, as witness the close to infallible likelihood that divorcé(e)s, wanting more than moieties, will manage to remarry

292 personalities as good as duplicates of their original, ill-chosen better halves. Deep in their goose-bumpy hearts a bride and groom are mainly after insula- tion from the endless winter night; au fond they sense their selves are wisps of smoke the wind’s dispersing. The bulk of souls tie the knot* because they are at loose ends, lacking self-direction. When the Sexual Overture is played, most youngsters, not least boys, go gaga sucking face; they cannot get enough of rumpy-pumpy. Being alone and unknown seems like torture; thus youth, desperately yearning for firm ties and warm supports of self-applause, can hardly wait to get wed (in fact don’t); perform a rush act to go out together, rarely in; stampede, wild to go steady, which means to have off and on a mutual crush out of insecurity, like drowners clutching one another by the throat. Infatuated, we employ the other as a prop in a pipe dream about ourselves; the real delusion’s less about that ideal darling than about one’s self, what’s really unbelievable. Those green pairs clamped like coupling leeches strangely are the likeliest to come unstuck. The lower one’s ambitions and intelligence, the sooner one is likely to be bagged. How splendidly does sexual discharge make up for personal lackluster. When two honeymooners pounce upon and lay hands on each other, don’t they demonstrate what is to follow? Hot pants who can’t get enough of it are apt to end up sparking fireworks. Newlyweds are seldom bored in one another’s company despite their twaddle being constantly about themselves; they hang on one another’s every word, yet hardly could care less what’s being said. What vanity lies in being much desired; would one so welcome it, were one aware who else is in demand? If love’s securable and sealable so easily it can be felt for someone after merely one night’s escapade, what is it worth? Noisy rejoicing celebrating nuptials is malapropos: it’s not enjoyable beginnings but fulfilled conclusions warrant tributes and ovations. An absurd severity about divorce goes arm in arm with a like laxity concerning marriage, cruelty and sentimentality marching welded down the aisle. Oddly it’s the sentimentalist who, out of cowardice and/or dishonesty, is blocked from feeling; every sentimental person masks a sickly scorner. The best verbal wor- shiper of women can prove their worst actual desecrator. How appropriate and useful, having a dull pater faithfully presiding at the funeral service after one has got into the box. Are burial rites no less necessary, to be well and truly laid, than conjugal duties? Why knock suicide or matrimony till one’s tried it? Could the altar to this day remain a

* To witness double suicide is far from an agreeable experience.

293 place of stupid, horrid sacrifices? Shotgun ceremonies promise unions riddled with doubts. Willingness to marry surely calls for a considerable foolishness, a readiness to disregard the silliness of all family “honor.”∗ Spouses don’t in sequence meet and marry; first comes mating, consummating, then the meeting—nearly always head-on. Marry in haste to repent at leisure. Making out, more or less half-screwed, crying to be spliced, most adolescents are agog to get engaged—in war, to welter in some juicy, half-assed hassles, never mind how pleasurable to their engorged loins, whose nature is to be magnetically tugged like pairs of mule deer’s antlers into locks in mortal combat; still, love is no temporary friction separating end of dating and commencement of intimidating. Mutual consumption—that’s the way the cookie crumbles. Cannibals today are two-backed beasts. To go around together means to go screwballs together. Is it heaven where with flaming cheeks we stoke each other’s passions? We fall not ass-over-tip in love but in desire.

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How telling that society prates endlessly of having sex and not of giving it. Feeling involves far more than feeling up a frustrated svelte filly for a honey- moon’s duration, something on the order of a nine days’ wonder. Only the putz flexing his love-muscle’s admirable? All the culture brides anticipate their grooms contain is apt to turn out physical. The plighted lass exchanges the attentions of innumerable men for the close inattention of but one man. Any nymph convinced she’s made a perfect match cannot foresee he’ll burn cold though forever lit. To catch a pyro’s surely a mistake to which she’s tied. Who dares propound we aren’t for good and all stuck on our sweeties as on pulling taffy, and most so when plastered? All those highballs help keep boozers’ balls low. Wrenching away gossamer-veiled roses, we catch thorns as bonuses. Lots of sex proposals, precious few love; many body habits, but what spirit needs? To screw is just as easy as to love is difficult. They are mistaken who suppose that they’ve got hitched without a hitch. Most marriages folk perpetrate “for love,” yet practically none has anything to do with it; in fact the mover is convenience. A lot of seeming human beings are strangely capable of caring for fucking well nobody. Who is really ready to perform in love’s trapeze act?

* Blindfolded commitment follows anserine itineraries.

294 _197_

Marriage might acceptably be a mutual admiration society; but need it also be a tedious exercise in schadenfreude and a systematic crucifixion, cheek by jowl, of one another by two thieves? So many single scoffing atheists have learned from wedlock to believe in hell; too many souls devoutly wish for it—for other souls. At dusk of marriage blue self-pity tends to deepen into black vindictiveness. A heart of stone or of corrosive sublimate congeals in vengeance for the cooling partner’s failure to fulfill one’s deepest dreams. Indifference, assuredly not love, results from resignation, from avoiding conflicts. Having linked your destiny with someone, you ignore that spirit at your peril. Must a marital relationship imply that unconditional mutual life-and-death policy of sharing everything, including three meals a day plus snacks for a pair of turtle doves turned jawing vampires rioting in gravy piping hot? A month of mythic honey, a half-century of veritable vinegar. Cohabitation needs must be the squalid process whereby two learn more about each other than they ever wished to know? How strange that it seems hardest to see clearly those who mean the most to us. The truth is, almost no one wants to learn the full truth as regards a spouse ahead of time, to do which unmistakably would throw cold water on the pressing plan. The stronger grows one’s lust, the fuzzier one’s vision? The love object that’s seen through does not exist. Nature prefers that lusters blunder into irreversible commitments unsuspectingly. At first each partner is as happy as a pig in shit. Monogamy allows exhaustive study of another’s imperfections while accepting minimally living with one’s own. In friendships, too, the worst thing is how ready friends are to let each one see the other’s worst side. It is vital to friends to believe that they’re completely frank with one another—and as vital to their friendship that they’re not? It’s hardly wise or kindly to give anyone the works. Yet criticism can be healthful when constructive and if read as such. Thus wounding (not to mention torture) surely is not requisite in friendship’s commonwealth, as evidently it is in love’s tyranny. Queer how a flawless carpenter is driven to dispose of a fly on his best friend’s forehead with a hammer. Caring for somebody does not mean accepting unconditionally everything he or she does. Occasionally one should try—with caution—to improve a friend or partner: human natures can and now and then do change. A passerby or an acquaintance, though, who lightly interrupts a couple’s heavy breathing is unwise. When rivalry in a relationship has reared its head above the billows it’s safe to assume that love is going under. Those forever striving to express the greater passion fail

295 to fathom that in love no one is “first” or “second.” Usually one if not both of a pair likes having tother on toast. It is incontestable most marriages wind up two problems grappling hard with topping one another, striving vainly to get the very last word in first; but are even “love affairs” forced to be gory wrestling matches, spiky sparring bouts billed as the friendliest of skirmishes, debasing contests to determine who can tweak or deck whom, who talk whom to death, with digs and low blows?* Guess who, trading thrusts while squirming, is the fiercer, less fair combatant. Were Democritus or Hippocrates far off calling coitus “a minor epi- leptic fit”? Coition: a five-minute warm-up, a five-second discharge—thus producing insatiety. The sex life of a person matters almost not at all, the love life almost all. Our sex lives are an unexcelled expression of pure selfishness, with all the aftermath expectable from such a source. A simpleton would like to think that “love” could be a hoot. Might sex be something other than an inbred outlet for our barely hidden sadism, matrimony more than a facility to serve our bellies? Surely sweet peas are for admiration rather than consumption? It’s not just venomous spiders will consume their mates; some can’t survive a day without a shootout. Many couples simply seem to love to tangle, even roughhouse; from the start they’ve really hit it off. Like civil wars, domestic ructions tend to be the bloodiest; yet each heart- rending knock-down-drag-out dogfight of looped fliers only demonstrates newfangled World War II.† Becoming hot and bothered, getting steamed, can mean either libidinous or mad; a pink head readily turns purple, and such indicants of anger and of sexual arousal as bared teeth and flushing bear an ominous similitude.‡ At humankind’s creative peaks not lightsome laughter but unruly tears of joy are shed. What action better typifies the life of beasts than their convulsive procreation—our mnemonic finises? Might all lovemaking token no more than leave-taking? Skeeters are voracious since they sense how soon they’ll be evaporating? A streak of barbarity well illustrated by the gauntlet runs right through the gamut of animal sex, and slavering lovers with a penchant for devouring one another with their eyes or smearing one another’s neck with hickeys cannot but recall the evolutionary recency

* Does one need any more sexual experience than had Thoreau or Nietzsche properly to grasp the nature of our sexes’ jousting? † A fascist triumph over fascism: the fact that the Falangist cutthroat Franco failed, in 1945, immediately to be overthrown, passed sentence on and shot, that he was coddled, kept in power, another thirty years and more, is damning proof. ‡ What to make of the fact that twice as many youths are coitally sadistic as are not? 296 of dinners made on neighbors’ vital organs.* In more distant mists it was the hunt and love sport in the end engendered humankind; both kinds of venery, of vigorous aggression, led to passionate denouements, to demonic climaxes. The fundamental stunt of cunning woman always has been to attract assault and yet somehow transform it—never mind how incompletely—into tenderness; by entertaining violence she dissipates it. Could religion’s basic function be to keep some leverage upon the fearsome energy contained in woman’s lust that made man king of beasts? By anciently preferring men with status and resources, women served to fuel both bitter competition between men and gender inequality. Now that bold science is our chief faith, any fancied instinct for self-preservation ends up superseded by ambition for prestige: blowing the world up gets priority over nurturing life. When aggression in a woman meets fear in a man, the stress created kills the horniness that might have joined them; dread tops raillery in dampening down eros. “Love” and torment are inseparable? Any sensible man, knowing the nature of the rattler, toadies not nor gets hitched, in hopes of getting along famously, to a bejew- eled star, the show girl apt to be more show than girl, so good is she at playing roles, so poor at being herself. As old man Socrates might well inquire, who cares to be trapped with a chronic scold? To squander one’s life mollifying a bitch or son of one amounts to sad extravagance, a catastrophic screwup; briefly, that’s a don’t.

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Many a wedding has made an abduction seem respectable. A wise few marry not from greed, nor for romance, but in true friendship. Passions between males and females have been idealized and overrated, made hallowed preserves and sacred cows. Just fancy all the red-hot clinches of the depthless past, and sense the basic insignificance of them in eternity’s cold eye. The act may be less noble tragedy than vulgar comedy of errors destined to a lengthy run yet absent any audience. Most men may overvalue sex because it seems the sole arena (save for bygone sport or outworn war) in which they are allowed to let their hair down and be passionate. Romantic love was once a pre- or extramarital affair, a high adventure; now a vulgarized routine, it is regarded as the raison d’être and imperative precondition for a wedding.

* Many a cracked cranium to this day can be turned up. Such devotion still fails magically to incorporate departed character.

297 Sure as fate, many a crabby pair, originally prepossessed and vowing permanent commitment, pays dear for its marriage license. Marrying for sex— unequaled blunder. Slavery has been pronounced dead but not prostitution. What essential difference inheres between selling one’s self to one and renting it to one or sundry thousand? In both cases selfsame self or piece of trade, however hot a number, must remain though marketed; the bride’s twat, as an inside butcher’s cut, merely escapes being tagged SOLD. Harlotry is easy well-paid work befitting those who’re lazy. Wisdom can’t be had for pseudo- love or money. Using sex to get what they want, countless wives make all the pros look amateurish. Marriage makes one seem mature without requiring that one be mature; it is the perfect camouflage for permanent adolescence: one need never grow up playing house when one’s reputed by blind custom to be already “a grownup.” Motherhood completes the fantasy of adulthood, smothering the lonely ennui that the thoughtful household head slaves to provide. It’s no less common for a lass to make a fool out of a man than it’s unusual for her to make a man out of a fool.

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Dishonest unions are inclined to be most durable? Perfect compatibility—a phantom, which ne’er was nor e’er can be. Who’s everything to someone else—save someone gravely marred? The secret of an ideal marriage is that it is not; love is ideal and marriage all too actual. The perfect pair embraces: she a headache, he a pill. Does every stable arch have to be founded out of two contrary weaknesses, a kind of complement of sycophants? Lovers are damned to view as virtues their beloveds’ faults. The pleasures in lust and the comforts in enslavement help both dreamy sexes to ignore the nightmare side of their attachments. Only unawareness of how well our nearest (if not dearest) understand us may enable us to go on living with them. Scared stiff of losing their ego bonds, most spouses grow thick-ribbed defenses to forestall their recognizing any major shortcomings in partners, which acknowledgement might well disrupt their unruffled relations; thus the prevalent folies à deux. Must “love” be a kind of manic attack that ends in deadly enmity? Could every love relationship force each participant to serve or else be served? Indeed, do all human relations not seem in the last analysis immutably intractable? Must man and wife—which pecker in what pecking order?—always be either squabbling turtle doves, henpecked and cockpecked, playing cock in the pit, scratching one another’s eyes out, or else, boring beyond belief, a

298 goose-cackling double-talker* talking up a storm and bent on showering a peck of kisses? Like some monastery metronome pronouncing its portentous old yackety-yak, the armchair radical, a horny bull fed under habit’s rule who’s mastered the dumb trick of sounding off, monotonously reads aloud to his “good little woman” (which, to him, means bovine, brainless, servile, unselective, prostrate, awe-struck) the pretentious, ponderous, political pop- pycock, the latest cliché-clouded opium of the people, by means of which the haranguer, who’s unhappily an untaped loudmouth, muffles the still small voice cheeping of his own deficiencies while mounting and depressing, stamping on his ductile audience his sharp peacockeyed image, representative of a tyrannic test-tube culture not to be called into question, least of all by a shrill crowing coxcomb, an immoderately bigger bore than any subway, who is never—save at bedtime—hauled off his damn soapbox or “debating” rostrum, all steamed up and foaming at the mouth, to get his proper banging. What an unapproachable instillment and inurement for kids forced to hear such blustering, such windy tirades, through their most impressible years. Too bad such a gasbag lacks olfaction. How does a subscriber to sales catalogs called liberal magazines become torchbearing “rebel” in the vanguard of enlightenment while unobliged to fire or duck a single shot? Stout “Marxists,” much like rednecks, count on unpaid slaveys, thus on the de facto underclass. Close interest in politics surely betrays a narrow character and fearsome rage for power deaf and blind to the antithesis of progress and realpolitik, humanity and masters. Under patriarchy women make the trivial decisions—where to live, what kind of diet is ingested, how the budget’s to be handled and the younger generation educated; whereas men decide the really vital issues, such as who deserves to win the Presidency or the Super Bowl. Where the archaic goodman not relieved when his goodwife’s abed, completely safe and soundless? Is he king and emperor to her, a blood-red Viking jarl, a regular Henry VIII? Bully for him. By all means let us wreak our wills, employ rough tongues and paws or doubled fists, on our unstrung yet hotsy-totsy kicksie-wicksies, punching Judies to our hearts’ content—if we would never meet them until death do us unite. Malevolence, increased by schizo “I,” becomes male violence. Many a shrew has got a shiner or two for not being timid as a mouse. Mad batterers, themselves out cold, occasionally can be heard ejaculating, “My wife’s a

* Partners who strive to think alike might better try to think together. He or she who lacks a spouse to echo his or her self endlessly may still achieve the same end writing books.

299 real treasure, worth so much I’d never switch.” Unbeaten wives, according to some old louts long arrested as delinquents, must be out of whack. It’s thwarted moderns commonly use mates as punching bags; primeval foragers in fragile smallish bands would not waste time on such unfruitful asininity. Those canines uninhibited from striking out at bitches are not trustable near pups.* Most lethal are booze fighters prone to blow their corks and hang one on; too often boozehounds’ spouses also end up hammered. It’s quite possible for man to love one woman all his life . . . provided he expires as youth? Eventually men make out their selves allied to nagging allergies and menor- rhagia, while women come to see that their real partners are the malfunction- ing prostates grouty grizzlies nurse with backs up. A walkover is it to join up to the march of stirring marital or martial strains, the warrior’s heart singing with glorious insanity, but more a plain strain to sweat out the term of serving, making the best of a bad job. It’s a rare and shrewd tactician carries through a long engagement, to expose the weak points, the soft underbelly, of the enemy. Prenuptial attractions can and do transmute into postnuptial distractions. Disagreements that seemed piquant during courtship often sound like insults, like dispatches of repudiation, after years (or days) of married life. A trial concord that turns out a trial is no crime. Himself, however, that stern patriarch dead sure he never in his life once erred, still keeps a helpmate who in hers most grievously did. Once the trap’s been sprung, consideration’s apt to fly off. What a transformation typically takes place after wooer, wed, turns master: well-behaved hillbilly overnight becomes domestic tyrant happiest when pitchforking his haybag. Clods tend to dig any kind of hoedown; macho goops routinely go off half- cocked. No swain but may be unmasked as swine. Cussing the blamed hussy out something all-fired fierce is obsolete indeed; as is a dang dang utilized as scourge. How difficult for feuding mates to see their differences as merely differences, not as stigmas, marks of insufficiency. How happy couples seem to be to get their jollies bandying such hardly subtle stings. Most spouses know exactly where to push each other’s button. The most sentimental people regularly punish “loved ones” in ways they would rarely even dream of

* Reports of battery in marriages tend for some reason virtually to exclude those wives who flatten fellows. How could stats on beatings given men abed or swacked be kept with any accuracy? Who’d collect, and who’d provide, such data? Every deserving brute, shitfaced or not, unfortunately does not get a chance to hit the deck. Assaults that lesbians frequently engage in also are not seen as suitable for notice by the mainstream press—unless it’s a bulldagger’s stab at infamy. For anyone to fuck around with husky butches, going toe to toe, might well be rash.

300 doing to acquaintances or strangers; cases of chronic sadistic “love” should be referred to clinics. Married people do go round and round in puerile scraps, but they’re not merry. All too many couples seem to dote on chivvying and needling, taking cheap shots: dearest darlings manifestly cannot part until sufficient damage to each other has been done. It takes a garbage-nosing critter always to be scheming to get someone’s goat. The game that human sexes most like must be dirty pool? No need to call for their complementariness, could one but count on even their compatibility. Does most communication ’tween them have to mean an exercise in power politics, the more aggressive of each pair controlling conversations—interrupting arbitrarily, determining the tone, the topics, and the resolution? Normally a marriage will degenerate into reciprocal surveillance: everything one soul desires is forbidden to the other. Regularly slaves are counted on to serve, to dote on, and to entertain those who have never served or doted on or been remotely entertaining. Where are the chief pleasures power yields us, over and above oppressing, if not in tormenting? Wedding may one day be recognized as no less barbarous than duel- ing, once considered proper conduct. Let us put the kibosh on each deadly thick beef-stew fiasco whose one half is always beefing while the other’s ever stewed. For the sake of the children hadn’t we better separate than stay cleft “together,” soldiering on, hopelessly marooned in time by the tragic drag of our fatal duties? Is it best to pass off living scorn for one another as concern undying? Far too long that meld of smoldering resentment and deep-dyed dependency has been confused with love. Nothing but death can free self- guarded pairs whose homes are permanently closed for altercations. Why choose wedlock, why prefer a souvenir of ardor? Marriage is the placement of a briefly lustrous glass over the flaring candle; love, a fever snuffling marriage has to put to bed and “cure”? Better burn than “marry.”

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Female anchorite? A prophetess? Are these not contradictions in terms? Can adoring, can true solitude, mean anything to those aware of themselves only in conjunction or entanglement with others? Really laying bare means giving up one’s natural illusions. Does not woman, bound by her biology, belong as literal retainer to the species? Could she suffer from compulsion inborn to connect at any cost? It’s easier by far for man to flout the parenting imperative. Females seek stable families; males, novel females. Women desire goods

301 and services such as protection in exchange for sex; more simple-minded, men desire sex. Being gravid, like breast-feeding, does intensify excitement in the crotch; hence incubation’s popular regard? Perforce all self-awareness has a masculine cast: weanlings of both genders gain first individuality in their divergence from their mothers; hunting for the truth is markedly a male pursuit sprung from the requisite forsaking of Maw’s comforts. Men are threatened by proximity, and women by abandonment; men’s topmost challenge, thus, comes in relationships, while women’s lies in individuation. Rare the woman who—ne’er mind how short on wit—cannot be great . . . with child. But goodness and not greatness, safety rather than adventure, has to be the goal of pussyfooting patsies. Locked within her hope chest, rooting woman wants her marriage to be a tight circle snake ranch, a snug little feathered love nest, whereas rangy man resents being clipped as titmouse, caged, corralled, curtailed from flying high and far; at heart he’s an escapee from domestic obligations. Commonly the boys, however, much prefer to have—one might suppose could not survive without—their meals and sex routinely served by motherly domestics; so much nurturance and succor in bed women give males in their infancies and primes and dotage. Normal lives, sociably clean and tidy, may not be the best lives. Pressured to achieve, cast into antisocial molds, forced to suppress expression of their souls, males are more vulnerable to extremes: being born deformed, feeling superfluous, becoming radical or criminal, opting for suicide; developing gender identity, they do betray the greater frailty.∗ Twice as likely to be inverts, they are also apter to leave no descendants, all in all evincing larger variance in biologic fitness. Yet rich genius, no matter how penurious, is the real third sex—no less feminine than masculine, as hetero- as frequently as homosexual, resisting facile sex-role compartmentalization. Swinging both ways, pendu- lums mark vapors. Save for our initial eggs and sperm, our bodies’ every cell is ambisexual, characterized by the diploid amplifying of primordial duality intrinsic to sex. Nature takes concealed precautions to prevent complex her- maphrodites from reproducing. Culture tends toward transcending or ignoring its originator.

* What can it mean that only male frogs croak? Most men project their femininity upon their favorite women, while the artist keeps it to himself; thus his arrant vainness? Possibly because men never have to suffer childbirth they’re more likely to be gripers; they in general fear death more, bear news of a fatal illness much worse, and indeed prefer unwittingness to knowledge of a terminal affliction. Women are superior at taking it, enduring fate’s inclement buffets.

302 _201_

Blessed with their incomparable crystal vision, men view women as pinball machines and are forever tempted to lump womankind and sex together as if all the blame for human evil were owing to them, none to old Adam’s shlong. Eve, sex, and sin are bound up in one fuzzy ball by the Pandora and the Eden myths all but immovably embedded in male psyches. After man came woman, and she’s ever since been after him. Contrary to megalomanic Hebrew myth, all males develop out of females, not the obverse: clitorises are less rudimental phalli than the latter are the former pathologically overgrown. Man certainly deserves never to live down making woman from a spare rib, a pale chippy off the old auctionerring blockhead. Demonizing all lovemaking, canting popes and priests and theologians, themselves by and large queer, have always been the veritable demons. Christianity,∗ from its inception, has assumed with stunning homophilic vanity that woman was a misbegotten male, embosomed by tradition as derivative, and women (always covered strictly “for their own good”) have had to endure this verily despicable fabrication. Wedded hand and foot to moonshiny ideal, how could an alabaster nun descry that her flesh cries out for some warm sun’s overlay? The chain of fresh recruitment for the sisterhood could scarce be kept intact without incessant lez bewitchment and claustration of complaisant vulnerable maids. Should we rebuke the child who spots a prioress behind a grille and asks naively, “What would she do if they let her loose?” What’s signified by novices being cautioned, “Follow forms, and you will lose the essence”? All is lost. Doing its damnedest to drain all relationships of their erotic marrow, the Church trivialized and dehumanized most. It has been man’s pleasure and a peerless comfort to do much lying with his maidservants, keeping them knocked up and out of commission, tractably, distractedly in traction: his

* Like Islam and such fearful manic offshoots of the vulgar Hebrew cult. The so-called honor that fanatic idiotic men have buried in possession of vaginas has made countless Trojan Wars imperative. Each “honor” killer needs to execute himself, yet still could never recapture a single shred of it. The holy truth, however, spells out not peremptory Commandments but the silent wilderness. No war is holy save that waged on self. The three Judaic creeds, by nature egocentric, man-made, and so warlike, turn each fertile crescent over into a full desert. What more fiendish manifestation of belief than monotheism? Genocide was sanctioned by the Old Testament god and to this day remains subliminally sufferable to the Jewish/Christian/Muslim mob. Mad Jews and Muslims also are past masters at the savage patriarchal rite of sacrifice. Exemplary, no doubt, the Saudi clan’s rule by male-chauvinistic pigs.

303 decaying double standard has served his anxiety that women might find other men more appetizing. He demands his bride be “pure” because he does not care to be compared with others and found wanting and ridiculous. Ready availability in women as a tactic for securing top-drawer hubbies tends to backfire, since it intimates a wantonness hardly desirable in wives. Without man’s dread of his own mate’s desertion or abduction, marriage surely could not have evolved. Paternal care in the odd anthropoid develops out of sexual attachment to the dam. Must men be so besottedly possessive as regards “their” women that their very offspring (sons primarily) must represent a menace as competitors? Repudiation of unfaithful wives, as against (or right in line with) faithless husbands, follows from identifying wives with holdings, hostages to fortune.* Sir-names serve exclusively to tag the holders’ suppositious offspring? Interhuman violence no doubt originated in erotic competition: possibly one-quarter of prelingual men got themselves killed in contention over sleeping partners.

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“Whether I should mate or not” means “Which way ought I to be ruined”: damned if you do, damned if you don’t. One is always wed too soon who gets a bad spouse; no one ever weds too late who wins a good one. Who remarks that s/he has half a mind to marry scarce appreciates that’s all is needed. Marriage is a banquet at which usually grace has better taste than has the meal. A man with foresight knows a drooly heifer soon may be a silly moo. Beware the ordinary hussy, not the extraordinary spirit. Won’t the most aware soul, male or female, be the wariest about its marital selection? A Kierkegaard or Nietzsche, nursing lofty as opposed to modest expectations, cannot but examine objects of his lust with such acuity as to preclude its consummation; he detects minute flaws commoners’ impulsions would make seem irrelevant. Keeping a spouse content is quite as huge a challenge as most any gifted artist can negotiate. A great creator quite considerate of others (if that be no paradox) and who would husband his resources may not couple, holding a gut feeling that it would be a gross error and an unforgivable unkindness; which is not to say he never loves with strokes of genius; he just does not

* Who taught whom possessiveness, that least forgiving of human disorders? A betrayed one’s rage may hang on viewing spouse’s cock or cunt as the betrayed one’s private property. Male jealousy, surely the origin of lust for power, leads to the most active copulator having higher status plus more progeny displaying the same vein. 304 want to spend his life entertaining unresponsiveness from some Gawdelpus. We intuit our comparative worth in the competition for a partner; moral monsters such as the above-named realize just how impossibly invaluable they cannot help being. Grooving on creation—surely ultimate in insults to the opposite sex? Might a husband be defined as what remains of each keen lover once his nerve has been removed? Among men solely mystics can experience the high tide any woman may. The pity all too long directed toward such a downbeat spirit as Beethoven or Brahms always was unwarranted: a classic life requires no “salvation” by the hearts and flowers of romantic comforters. True art demands all the time life can spare. As sexuality’s a socializing process so creation is an isolating one. Each joyful master Mahler is no less a gloomy Gus. What earthly lover ever got his partner off as an incomparable music- bearer has his cosmic audience? We seek and treasure countless pleasurable moments, while eternity embraces none but this ecstatic one scarce bearable. Few creatures channel their love into something higher than mere private parts. A woman’s likely to use children as a plausible excuse for doing little with her life. Is filling a few cribs and coffins cause for pride as well as joy? Could she whose destiny is more than bare biology break out into Olympic heights unaided by anomalous testosterone? A poetess will also gain advantage in performance naturally hyperdosed with androgen, inclining her to invert appetites. Must the creator, like the athlete, be exceptionally mannish, have hot rocks in the head, to be great? It is unusual if not unnatural for any woman to show spunk. All honor to the female artist who, no longer expect- ably anxious that if she won’t gossip she’ll have no friends to speak of, creates alone; she need not hug, as dilettantish feminists do, the delusion of some culture disrelated to the male’s. Intelligence in personal relationships most artists, like their duller fellows, seem unable to achieve. Art is a part of life apart from life, sharing in human folly by essaying to immortalize the apprehensive ego mortal to its “core.” A genius cannot but get up almost any nose. The more profound a spirit, the more disagreeable, and the more difficult is it for anyone to dwell where he or she dwells; for a prophet—praise be—is completely and incorrigibly undomesticable,* belonging in no family bosom. One can live not only “cheaper,” also deeper, than can two. Apparently true love amounts to single heart-engulfing misery. Is freedom from delusion possible for anyone not celibate?† Romantic love’s fantastic, disabusing marriage real.

* Truly unlike hardly can be made like, which assimilating means. † Is freedom from delusion possible for anyone?

305 The most profound exposure of oneself may be precluded by the ingrown intimacy of cohabitation. Happiness seems easily achievable—provided love is absent. Happy couples, common-law or not, commonly have common backgrounds, common hobbies, and most common goals. Those in hog heaven as a rule have good health plus poor memory. The happy always take good care not to take things too much to heart; a happy love’s most likely less than love. Sometimes a homicide occurs among mates to whom quarreling never occurred. After long years of decorous acquaintanceship the underlying magma of true passions, when push comes to shove, quite unexpectedly explodes. There’s no long-suffering elastic band that won’t eventually snap. All of a sudden one is thunderstruck by the soul with whom one’s cohabited ingenuously all that time. Severe depression’s rooted in intense repression of hostility toward somebody all too close. Between two ciphers reigns eternal peace; between two characters runs the unceasing possibility of timely strife. A truly formative relationship rallies each party to pursue, unhindered, independent interests; yet the superior team often comes to grief through striving for perfection, e.g., trying to remake a teammate in the image of some false parental idol. “What a blunder never to have married!” sighs a centenarian moored in his tranquil cove. It’s wigged-out youth, gone zonkers, gulps a thrill a breath on shoot-the-chutes; they can’t imagine that in fact they’re going down the chute. Youth is engrossed in tangy coitus, not in bland servitude unto decrepitude. All that most eighteen-year-old souls can think about is sex; while all most eighty-one-year-olds can do about sex is think. Marriage is no safe smooth road to happiness; rather, an erratic vehicle that bears forth each new generation of venturing fools. The purpose of most marriages may be to sidetrack partners from consuming one another in their folly; all the ordinary duties of familial existence serve to keep mates providentially apart. The niceties are dispensed with in your average union, which, strange to say, lacks intimacy or real sharing; it’s not just acquaintanceships are shallow. Delicate attenders don’t enjoy as good and sound a daily/nightly cymbal-clashing fracas, opting rather for a steadily mellifluous hush; seldom are authentic lovers likely to have words. What better way to clinch a marital dispute than for the ornery disputants, who have problems with each other, simply to hug? Winning a draconic spitfire as his bride, not losing one, can lead a man thus burned to cleave, athirst for respite, to indulgent firewater, ending vulcanized. Medically advised he must have rest and quiet, freedom from vociferous disturbance, to avoid being driven over the hill, one may well obtain a soporific—for his

306 helpmeet suffering from catfits, always in a flap. Snakes in the grass who used to crawl ravening to bolt each other have come to regret they didn’t. All that those who once wed for wealth want now is a little change; illicit sex affairs are mostly desperation clutches. Best be freed from old “love” ere ensnared by new one. Oddly, not the maladroit old bachelor but the straitened husband is more often making up his own bunk and then lying out of it. Man’s most resistant not so much to tying himself down to one dame as to cutting himself off from all the rest. Monotony may not so wrongly be defined as having but one mate; requited love may be life’s greatest bore. The only way to get rid of a certain kind of pest may be to marry him; some males will tailgate till they are racked up as mates. Few people take a shine to somebody already bright. To some you’re quite as stupid as the most appears to you. In courtship it’s the more intelligent participant, a hopeless sobersides, who tends to bore the less; the former, viewed as dweeb, must fail since not striking enough? The one who gets the nod may best suit a somnambulist. Could solely the percipient soul be so foolish as to fall in love, and only the insensible be wise enough to welcome being loved? Some surveys hold that married folk live longer, but it merely seems longer. Most (and not just bourgeois) homes are crammed unventilated waiting rooms in which stale air and tedium are mandatory givens. What unites most couples “permanently” is less pressing need than ingrained habit. Long-enduring unions as a rule disclose that notwithstanding having such a marathon under the belt neither partner’s dared to grow a whit since wedding. Growing is not popular, since it requires shattering the icon of one’s self, not only that which “is” one’s housemate. Marking time in a relationship is a poor way to measure its success: the role may be a parody and both cohabitants ghosts. Usually love gives up the ghost not from starvation but from indigestion. Marriage may solve untold sensory dissatisfactions but not the communication problem: loneliness is no less characteristic of the hitched than of the unhinged. If in fact more married jerks play pocket billiards than, proportionately, loners do, it must be that the former need the fantasies to compensate for their all too routine connections; onanism thus is not in fact a stopgap for a nonexistent seminal vent? Those long used to company must suffer from its absence more than one who’s had no expectations. Customarily square, the long-lasting alliance tends to warp with age. The function noncommunication serves: to hide what at least one soul dares not face. Underworld figures operate beneath an emotional blackmail that keeps countless rotten partnerships intact; more shattered vessels founder on expressive than on sexual or financial reefs. Can partners who cannot be

307 candid with each other outside bed expect to be so inside it? It’s not inept sex causes nearly every breakup but inept coping with conflicts; for the more the airing of aggression is avoided, the more deeply troubled has to be the union; anger, when released, reveals what or whom the one angry cares about, however foolish that concern may be. It takes intelligence to love but not to fornicate. All the imagined wasted opportunities shrugged off by solitary damnation may in some strange fashion match in value all the actual wasteful responsibilities shouldered by wedded bliss. A fiction overly widespread, that one has not lived or is not normal till one’s undergone connubial intoxication, till one’s sampled the strong opiate a spouse congenitally is, gets its most active propagation by those—often already or shortly to be parted—who have settled . . . sex feet under in their sensibilities; hard they labor pressing their divorce suit with its seamy side exposed. It’s not unwonted in a stressful wedding bond for one to come apart completely at the seams.

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How can the excellent enjoy many affinities? To whom can anyone ever be quite akin? Few partnerships succeed without much tolerance of quirks; respect for goodly traits will not suffice without an equal sufferance of shortcomings. Keep your eyes wide open ere your wedding, half shut afterward. Rate happiest the coupling of deaf husband with blind wife. The nearer one draws to another, the more unreservedly mysterious that being. Who is it grasps these phantoms that we are? Between the best of lovers yawn such monstrous gulfs. The better that one fathoms others, just so much the better does one recognize one’s differences from them; each personal probe intensifies the universal sense of being unique. What a coincidence when any but the simplest spirits somehow dovetail. Ordinary couples, strangely, are no longer normal: mobile—i.e., rootless and unstable—present-day society pitches together markedly unlike potential partners; thus most spouses constantly are fighting to stay friends with strangers, to find and keep common bonds; thus, also, self-development poses the greatest threat to any match? Who has come into flower is a dubious recluse among confirmed voluptu- aries; to the power-wielding underworld, a pansy flanked by its posterity, like single blessedness itself, has to be useless and anachronous. Swarming is normal in a nursery, as in a slum; whereas seclusion, the aristocrat’s estate, distinguishes maturity. A childless woman, like a blind man, may acquire a

308 wisdom closed to those who breed and see but precious little, hiding behind the veil of her domestic seemliness if not felicity.* Experto non crede: curiously not the dub—the cracksman or practised man of affairs comes last among those to consult for love lore. Christ is not bound by the pleasures and demands of the inhuman family, the familiar menage-rie; wisdom shuns an institution boasting built-in turmoil. Next to never can the female monkey be a loner; in all primate troops childrearing is a tribal exercise. Unconsciously constricting love’s embrace to the contiguous and blood-related circle makes all members refugees from social life, encouraging them to settle timorously for furniture in fashion, false jollity, and blank respectability on the installment plan because they cannot gain the genuine article, real love, the supraconscious; arid enclaves sought as cozy sanctuaries from the heartless underworld turn into mirrors of it; as a enemy of sociability the family becomes society—a narrow gauge of widespread narrowness, confusion, and injustice. Nuclear families† indeed! The god of Family’s as apt to be destructive as creative. Those who hold the family is all-important blink at the fact that parental influence is no less likely to be curse than benison. If a specific marriage hasn’t vibrancy and ecstasy, what has it got? Wishing it could offer more than bed and boredom as emolu- ment for chambermaid employ will never make it. Each attempt to win fulfillment by producing progeny resembles joining in a crapshoot.

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Loyally enacting an archaic Mars-fucks-Venus myth, the sterner sex has always gone off to disintegrative war in a vain effort to forsake home territory, to secure his “freedom,” to desert that someone close to him gone once too often on the warpath. Do the trivial pursuits—each juvenile pastime and wartime separation—not provide a wonderful excuse for either sex to fool around? Must woman’s role be mainly to massage man’s ego? Is she dear to him in any but the coarsest sense of cost or quarry? Why should ever-butting

* Yet barren brooders, frustrates to a woman, may be likeliest to prove adulterers. † With atomistic egos at their base; such institutions constitute a fitting hotbed for the nightmare of our endlessly exploding technologic “progress.” Only simpletons, however, can believe that communes, like more massive collectivities, will not inflict oppression on their members no less viciously than families.

309 she-goats work so hard to break the male bond, that immortal camaraderie* that’s bound to lead to reveling in woe-breeding war-making, when they are the patent welders of it, ever the auxiliaries to lunacy and frenzy? Can a girl explain why youths are apt to struggle harder for girls’ “honor” than girls do? Beauty contestants who have lost now plainly count as nothing and cannot cash in; but she upon whom fortune’s smiled and granted the crown is ordained to tour the troops abroad and peptalk them toward being slain and slaying with a better spirit, old-time standard army practice of destroying without searching. Weird the forward woman who tries to escape from prison, who repudi- ates her being possessed. Yet how desirable the hoary mandate of propriety demanding that a lass be no more than a bedtime toy or a stuffed yes-girl and not let her individuality stick out like a sore thumb? Why is it women seem to lose their womanliness when alone, at no one’s beck and call, when failing properly to service some unlikely scrunty dork? Lassies able to articulate cogent opinions constitute for most males indecorums or faux pas, like calling cards of unhousebroken pets. Those with a gift for blind faith, hero worship, snooping, wheedling, and “self-sacrifice” make ideal totalitarian subjects; acting noncompetitively is rewarded with apt nookeries in man’s pitiless profit-bound economy. Even though most and the best cooks are women, the chefs most esteemed are men—and not just in chauvinist France. The generational and gender hierarchies of each family infect, are reproduced in, every social institution; sexist marketplaces are prefabricated and kept functioning by sexist parenting and schooling. Everywhere you turn—the old boys’ network. Lesson One for janes if not for dicks: those always in the right get left; and those deficient in or destitute of oomph get left right out of every paramount affair. Still, being stood up or set awing may be the best thing that can happen to an unsuspecting squab. To be creative, females generally must be fecundated from without; but can they not be more than echoes or appendages, subsidiaries, of the men and children in their lives? Indifferent to verity, almost without exception women have for ages parroted the opinions, never mind how imbecile, of dearest benefactors, closest seconders. Are they genetically programmed to be johnnies’ betters at the hackneyed histrionics of conformism? If foolishness

* How tolerable, let alone desirable, to womankind that men are happiest on all-male outings. Who is it resents each normal boy’s search on the playground for one noble friend? We bond to compensate for fathers’ absent nods of approbation, to avert their violence, to seize their power? 310 seems manifested in a lovely torso oftener than in a rugged one, it’s apt to be the sly and specious, not the real, variety. Girls have a tendency—no more— to act affectionately;* boys, aggressively. A woman needs and seeks communion, a man prestige; thus love and vanity so often pair. Was it predominantly fear, profound and warranted, that made most human females masters of the art of stroking? Or is the latter merely near-instinctual extension of the need to nurture? In the sexes’ interaction is it incidental that the social lubricant of laughter’s more than twice as common voiced by softies? Cometh the day when all women will be free—not to wed? Not likely. Freedom is the rarest flower to find in a maiden’s head, more subtly scented than the privilege, obtained from parents long uptight on dancing, for her daddy’s girl to get, first, her allowance and then uplift sneaking naughty jig-jigs. Why does much-exploited woman almost invariably bend over backwards to support the upper class, conniving with the inner circle? Surely not from joy in her manipulation or in getting thorough lickings from a strapping rock-’em sock- ’em partner, finding laid-on rod and staff a holy comfort? One might almost postulate she has a need to engineer a cockup. Why is she so satisfied† to stay in what is really not so sumptuous a cocoon? Colluding with the foe appears to be the fate of every oppressed soul or group, whether “female,” “colored,” or whatever, for it introjects oppressors as the boot tops rightly triumphing, meanwhile devaluing its own position under heels. Invariably victimizers hunt for frail jobs to provide them daily grease jobs. Sacrificing one’s life is not worth a rat’s ass. Only if denied a matching masochism will machismo droop.

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Through tangible accomplishments a teenaged buck can be compelled to grow free of his elders’ estimations; through cosmetic inactivity a junior miss must be permitted to remain dependent on her seniors’ approbation. Thus the mere frill seldom can develop any sense of self-esteem; she’s given little chance to learn that her conformity won’t always be rewarded, she’s kept vulnerable

* Lasses are less considerate than lads—except when their affections are engaged. It seems their very understanding’s naturally circumscribed by the extent of interest in them they sense in fancied counterparts. Lacking the bloom of charm, a woman lacks the vital grace? † The seeming satisfaction of most folk with their unsatisfactory relationships confirms the real unjustifiability of human congress as a whole?

311 to parental disapproval and incapable of measuring her own attainments, even the most modest. Any genuine drastic commitment would disturb male chauvinism’s dull proceedings like a pistol shot in church, and raising an ambitious ruckus, pissing up a storm, is “far from dainty and demure enough, my dear.” In many not so subtle ways each girl is made to fear worldly success, which means offense against male interests, warned that even one overt aggressive action will endanger her affiliative satisfactions. She is pressured to obey by hints of possible desertion; it’s the specter of abandonment ensures her permanent enslavement. Personal possessiveness is measurable by degree of insecurity, anxiety that one’s unable to survive alone. Self-generation is an arrant no-no; even moderate conventional initiative actually is discouraged sans a patriarchal go-ahead. It’s only by accepting men’s assumption she’ll stay cleaved to some protective structure that a filly can fulfill the craven image. She’s expected to restrain herself completely or else readily to spread her legs for all and sundry. Trained as clawless pussycat, she is the dream of every rapist’s worst desires.

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“What do women want?” First, more than ample income; second, sedulous serviceability in bed; and third, a close conformity to current modes of sociability. The lifestyle of a Beethoven cannot pass muster in the manual of any woman, since maturity’s clandestinely defined by one’s devotion to the social comfort and convenience of womankind. Could the conservative and common woman be perhaps the only woman—the uncommon, unconservative, not being “woman”? For how can approved appearance profit by unadvanta- geous truth? The ladies do give the appearance of being more intuitive and sensitive and loving, also less aggressive and courageous and promiscuous, than do the gents. No fewer women may be fools, but fewer will allow it to be seen. When feminine deceit and masculine veracity collide, appearance tends to be triumphant, vanquished truth to vanish. It is anybody’s guess how many matrons, over all the ages, have been lesbians and their lives lies. Innumerable deviants have married to secure a quiet life. Serfs to this day trade barely wanted intercourse for contact, fucks for hugs, they really want. ’Tis women are erotically more diverse; the prevalence of LUGs in colleges suggests that only lack of opportunity keeps most of the globe’s squaws from practising their natural bisexuality—a fact that’s bound to be repugnant to the male-predominant mainstream.

312 Where is compulsive lying learnt if not at home? In mastering mendacity Eve could and did leave Adam toiling far behind. Lies help us all to lie down: flattery will often get one somewhere horizontal. Lying is ubiquitous in humans, starting early—in each toddler if not infant; to exude deceit is normal; learning probity’s an arduous long labor. Honesty in man* dismays or else perplexes woman; briefly it may call forth unaccustomed forthrightness from her. Ideals appeal as fearfully funny playthings, yet, for sure, security is sought and not a musing, skeletal museum piece, no scraggy scarecrow broom nor undernourished, washed-out celery stalk, but a hefty hunk of shallow surf-bum or swank uniformed horseflesh to hump and deride to death in private: that’s the bare bones of it, of all bobbing trusty steeds that get their oats. For instance, Royal Canadian Mounties are renowned for their upstanding, active members: dim bulls always get their woman . . . well, nearly always. Most adroit at frisking, even tough shit-kicking county mounties in their prowl cars, not just smoother urban officers or pussy posses, are commanding daily opportunities to get AIDS, not just give aid. In a toxic fluid world one simple dip can score you an enduring dose. How powerfully swinging “lady” wrestlers putting all the moves on starching their opponents and then clutching heaps of hunky muscle meat, go for those smitten adversaries that are well-hung knuckle-draggers, and in the event the dickbrained heavyweights’ yangs come with fat and gristle as a bonus, that’s OK. So many minds are ossified indeed—turned unto bone. Some buttheads also go for heavy cream—no matter that it smothers them. Are women gratified by friendships with men any more than ambidextrous carny tumblers are by playing tiddlywinks? Adulteresses captivated by fond memories of lovers’ ministrations have as little interest in men as friends as in their humdrum husbands. Cheaters, male or female, almost never dare express regret for their behavior. The more gratifying an affair, the less guilt does the fornicatrix feel; her ego’s titillations smother any vestiges of conscience she may once have held regarding marital devotion; her neglect of or example to her children may cause her some minor apprehension, since those creatures are extensions of her narcissism, while her spouse she views as not

* Fools who reveal their true aims, even to themselves, are fated to be losers in the vicious sport called love. Could truthfulness and consummated reproduction incarnate unsatisfactory helpmates? Sustained awareness of potential mates’ real motives is no option for us, natural selection having long disfavored any steady insight as a social strategy; thus self-deception willy-nilly is a given.

313 her better half but as deservingly deceivable because he is so unadventurous, a fixture too familiar, unable to imagine, let alone risk, going round the world. Defensive to a fault, unfortunately she cannot afford to check her moral poverty. The pathologic paradigm (employed by Alice James to characterize Sarah Bernhardt) may as well be apropos: “a moral abscess, festering with vanity.” Many a woman manages to lose her reputation without missing it. Pulling no punches save in fun to sock it to you zestfully below the belt, I rib you not, Professoress, once-lovely Eve who craved the leaves of knowledge, which shroud what is best in you. Ogling big beautiful goo-goo googly browneyes can occasionally compensate for holes in prattling floozies’ heads; but topless bathers giving suitors no more than an eyeful tend to fashion letdowns, plunging necklines as a rule being more attractive than the necks themselves. What decent normal skinny wolf or wildcat dares ascend out of the streets into the hills and care for nudity? It is not satisfactorily “stimulating” for synthetic products, primped dry-goods department dummies, public statues lacking privates, natural as plastic lilies of the retail field, who are draped to appear as they are not. Homeovestism, women’s self-adornment as sex objects to incite their prey’s excitement, is far commoner than transves- tism in men; it remains “unnoticed” by society in view of its craven taboo on recognizing female lust.

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Tight as O’Reilly’s balls, the typical abnormal sadist long has loved to keep his every victim strapped for funds while giving her sordid injections in her pocketbook. What, if not the cash nexus, binds women to men? ’Tis said a fool and his funds are soon wed; rapacity and folly oft mate in two little ticks. Is women’s constant grouse that they’re ignored by partners purely vanity? They scout around for spouses for their wealth potential—as the route to unrestricted shopping sprees; the joe who can’t supply that’s apt to be left on the shelf. A suitor’s poverty disqualifies him. An ugly oaf’s desirable to many an attractive woman—if he’s got the loot that counts. Breadwinners can be as cracked as they please—so long as they’re not stone-broke. Blemishes miraculously vanish in the glow a treasure trove casts. Ladies often choose to steal rich husbands than to settle for impoverished bachelors. What makes a fluff- head so sure that she needs a schmuck to make her feel secure—her empty clutch purse? Primed and at the ready to put her trust in a man provided he puts all his holdings in trust for her, she was early schooled that her chief

314 challenge in life is to snag a verily dependable bondsman who’ll fill the bill yet little realize how the dynamo is destined to charge everything in sight. Kits pick up quickly that the way to get minks is the same way minks get minks. A taller prick tends to be richer—a fact that cannot escape most huntresses. In close conjunction with most strings of pearls that are come by are matching extortionate clasps; given presents, “girls” get pasts. Collectors of rock candies often find them sweet to cash in. Stellar status hardly rubs off after latching onto one more sparkler. Why should any male, on wedding, be expected to assume the burden of supporting for life or till debt does them part someone equally capable of maintaining herself? Why should he alone, got by the balls, be held responsible to bust his butt in feeding, clothing, sheltering their brood? Why she alone, to care for them? Is alimony, with or without acrimony, just a ransom that parolees are obliged to pay? So many spouses, not just yogis, end up standing on their heads to serve a thankless deity. Swains flock to buy the bill of goods that they can’t thrive without female domestics, swallowing the sell that bagging a veiled toxic chalice makes all else, including life itself, worth sacrificing. Mainly it’s mazuma gets plunked in the kitty. Will he really like to have her in his pocket? Not just O.J.s love as well as loathe to give their puss- ies lots of smackeroos. Never dreaming upkeep could spell downfall, can a lifelong convict be acquiring such a super bargain in the heavy date or jail bait now established as his everyday bedmate and mother surrogate, or is she in fact an “intuitively” successful, pick-and-shovelless gold-digger who’s exploiting her sex no less cunningly than any dowdy bygone dame equipped with dowry, offering her flesh as if bestowing some inestimable treasure, all hers? As a rule each lady gets the gold mine and her gent the shaft. A mark discovers too late he’s been snookered; sugar pants get highest rating on most sucker lists. For man a mate may be the best of fortunes or the worst; “selecting” wife or watermelon at a glance is surely quite a chancy proposition. The safe havens or wombs into which innumerable weary sailors have heaved often turned out strangely hollow. Many a tormented sap cannot acknowledge his mate is a captress. “First you get a string of storches nuts about you, then you pick the Herkimer Jerkimer who acts the biggest jackass over you for your pet hitch plug . . .” Who cares if he is or has a good head? Men must take their wives for better or worse, but those wives can take men for most everything. Waltzing their consorts dizzingly around, so many wasteful housewives manage to turn goodmen mean.

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Those bimbos ready to expose themselves in the right places cannot but meet boars aplenty. Practised hands at tipping, as suppliers of the sugar most men having questionable taste (i.e., most men) prefer to eat where dishes serving, more than served, look luscious. Those habitually hooked on fashion plates must suffer malnutrition. Understandably seductresses resent the fact that generally males appear attentive to them chiefly when requiring spongy fuck sacks. Nearly every bedded woman is convinced the man in question lied about his feeling toward her so as to be successful. Yet the speech most brilliant and beautiful that any woman ever hears is simply her name voiced with passion. For most studs a lollapaloosa only can refer to a cooperative mare acquired for night riding. Few men pay any attention to what women wear; dresses and jewelry, etc., are weaponry deployed in ruthless intergynic strife. As the incomparable queen among matchmakers, Mother Nature is opposed by fools, deposed by no one; countless, though, are Satan’s daughters trying so hard to make two ends meet, trained in the ancient, honored art of coy cajolery, gunk-coated striplings whose simoniac stripteasing for a matrimonial killing, not a manumitted living, is restricted not to stages but to highest bidders. Don’t be shocked if, set to triumph at strip poker day in, day out, hoping they can make it big big bigger, biggest, bingo! hitting the jackpot with some bang-up dealer of a poor deck, slam-bang the cockteasers lose as well as gain more than their shirts from dipsy-doodles. Hearts, not trumped-up trumpery, neither clubs nor spades nor diamonds, count most in the real-life game. Flip heads we’ll lose, our upward tails we’ve lost, but meanwhile mint hearts win. There is an accident, fortuitous mutation, in the cards far more head-stopping and heart-turning than any casual sexual contact, marital contract, or London Bridge that may collapse. The love game’s one in which the vanquished party does not score. But scalpel-happy scalpers, flaunt- ing war paint, are bent upon scoring, rated by their nightly bags of thrills. No call for traps if one will keep a hellcat, a self-winding ratcatcher happy to lap cream. Once any likely mouse is caught beneath her paws (how rushed the squeaker to get in a hole! what flurried bewitchery in flirting with death!) it’s down her alley to toy with him and, dragging him by the tail, present him like some undesired infant at cathousehold doorstep, purring under pettings having captured the schmoe, her meal ticket, whom, to meet the needs of the hour and the needlessness of his heart-skipping life, needs must be worried a long time into insensibility, dressed fit to kill. It’s scarce a mystery, to be

316 sure, that she her self dresses to kill and, quite apt to get caught in her own cheesy mouthtrap, cooks alike. What matter if the cat’s-paw househusband be wasted, driven into the ground while collecting crumbs of cake, provided pussy’s hotbed or nest egg is seeded? She won’t pine if loved and left—if left enough. Might anyone who’s been seduced be wise to smell a rat?

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Why should a ruttish kitty trouble to have kindles of blind kittens, when they’d keep her from her favorite nocturnal gallivanting? Nymphets and snow bunnies summering in the piney north and wintering in the palmy south spring to fall everywhere. As the delivery costs escalate, how singular it soon becomes to pick up any first-class male. What if the vesicle cannot deliver, coming in dead letter, what if any given flight of zoomy FLUF is cancelled? The sleek flighty zazzed-up jetsetter, a confirmed adventuress who’s yet unlikely e’er to give a flying fuck while doing all of her minute reflection on the fly, can always switch like a computer to another airline whose bags are stacked up awaiting their descent in bits and pieces. Who cares where her excess baggage ends up, which poor john she will decide to go to? Any third or fifth wheel helps ensure that she’ll get where she’s headed. Many a pathetic dolled-up trollop, wearing such tight dresses that the grilse or gudgeon barely can breathe, breezily sails dangling strings of pearllike trolling lures with patience in the moldy soup of her exclusive brothel, stringing along some unwitting chum while dreaming that in an impossibly illimitably liberated fashion she will gaff a mythical yet live, prodigious and yet malleable, captive, one incomparable lunker, ere long all played out. A man who’s willingly been reeled in suddenly may catch on that he’s on the hook. Do sportswomen enjoy recapturing their catches mainly to be able then to toss them back, since they have bigger fish to fry? Which fissured fisher is not meretricious keptie with a heart of gold, not hoyden temporarily become fast-pleasing whore before becoming permanently harridan? To many sweat hogs thronging to pro sports events the game at hand counts less than their real meet and match. So close to stars, collegiate chi- clets who make all the teams deserve their lettered sweaters sans diplomas; some grads, gamy campus punchboards, meantime, get passed putting out for profs. Is it so vital to be well endowed? Why, spoiling for an endless private rush, go rushing after any sorry university sorority, snobbery’s under- graduate workshop, majoring in alibiology and cultivating alma-matriotism,

317 all too busy honing the sharp razor of a surrealistic clean-limbed superficiality, when actually, in one’s insides, one despises ivory-domes? Brains can boost gals’ bed activity . . . provided they’re kept under cover. Demoiselles want Romeos, not Hamlets, for their tragedies’ protagonists. One truth that ladies hardly need whorehouses to teach them: that partners are apt to prove interchangeable. Most women, for that matter, could not tell Jesus from Adam; every male, to them, is a manipulable screw. Les femmes wage matrimonial engagements strictly to win personal security; the vehicles or tools to that end matter less. What the smooth shemale seeks is a pliable lump of plasticine, a tractile ware hard to procure. First feel some genuine respect for questing spirit; aim for something loftier than being an airhead pinup or looking a well-favored clotheshorse stationary for fear any motion would calamitously muss up your coiffure; then real communion may be possible. Why pose as a hip natty smarty-pants longing for “culture,” hoping to cut quite a figure, when in fact, like the Venus de Milo, one is beautiful but not quite all there, when no less contented than one’s gingerbread houseboy with a barbarous, money-maddened state? Culture is crafted through the sublimation of cruel venery; consuming woman relishes it—just so long as its creator hard at labor sublimating does not happen to be her pet lay; then she insists that only after bringing home the bacon, servicing her main needs, can he shoot his load. That womenkind become horrific when “in love” remains unmentionable; then they’re capable of anything, while everything and everybody unconnected to their passing passion they ignore if not despise. The only thing profound about the common woman, held in common with Maw Nature, is her ruthlessness; with wild birds ladies, not just harpies, share both loveliness and total unconcern about their prey. Man-eaters can be counted on to take the closest care of Number One. Why must the outcome of most marriages depend so much on the archenemies’ income? The mastery of housekeeping mysteriously is confined to keeping the house after each divorce. Some wives must be unmatched performers in the sack, considering that as housekeepers they’re useless tits. When all else fails, a vixen tries to win her freedom on the ground the huntsman’s alcoholic rheumatism (he gets stiff in every joint) is ruining her life. What any seething soul divorce-bent mostly settles for is settling spouse with suitable revenge. Perhaps we need to recognize that there are hommes fatales out there. Each raging rough-ass tough-cat O.J., quite a tiger cutting up rough juiced on juice and claiming never to have laid a glove on her, tries hard to nullify, not mollify, his X, ending up boring many fairly sane to death. Astoundingly,

318 as racism progresses, a gray nigger now can hack off slices of white meat without being lynched. In every primeval band any such treacher would have swiftly been dispatched (most likely with a poisoned arrow), so to jettison the menace to maintaining the egalitarian integrity imperative for mutual survivability—a concept unintelligible to today’s hysterical uprooted egocentric populace. It does take two to tango yet but one, most likely a spoiled power- house, to outrage. Many killings are not crimes of passion but about possession. What a foul abuser loves most is to see each victim tossing in the towel. Smoking guns apparently prove only that bold lying slime-bags got their nuts off. Some vain fuckers are not satisfied until—or even after—they have got the full spread. Shitheels known to sport shit-eating grins, surrounded by scum-licking scavengers who’re masters at getting predators sprung, can evidently be extremely handsome, frightfully rich, madly sexy, fabulously charismatic, super-smart—in guise, and unbelievably dishonorable. In the U.S.A. you’re innocent until you’re proven stone-broke. There are batterers restrict themselves to tens or smashers for their quarries; seeming to be real ten-carat partners, they themselves prove far from twenty-fours. Such loaded vermin need not run, can walk—all the way to the bank. To be guilty as sin must one feel it? As a pettifogger like Rich Nixon could but never would attest, those moneyed folk who most deserve to dwell in concrete blocks invariably manage to avoid them by stonewalling.∗ Failing to bow out can be the greatest of dishonors and of XXs: single love and suicide, not double murder and dissemblance, call for fortitude.

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Loud garments or wild stunts a con gal who’s all gussied up can pull off, casting her webs of deceit, but self-perception? Women see through one another well but seldom look deep in their looking glasses. Staking status claims on physical allure alone, most indoor budgies, baby faces with like brainpans, let those qualities that could make up for the inevitable fading of their photogenic charms go undeveloped. Must the most delicious piquant carnal morsels be commensurately the most tiresome bores, like juicy larvae prized primarily by unsophisticated savages and birdbrained woodpeckers? Guys whose broads are very narrow cannot get around much.

* “I am not a crook . . . (so much beyond that).” Not least an exemplary production of your blithering mass media.

319 So many conniving “graduates” of the monstrous marriage markets known as colleges are spiritually such skin-deep and blank pages; architec- turally they’ve expanded no domes, little more than drafts for bubbles, false fronts, gay deceivers. Doctorates assure nobody of intelligence or of health; quite the contrary. Do pulchritudinous butchers’ assistants think that somehow they can make love keenly with cleavers or knives, that operating is the way to be real sweet hearts? What’s accomplished, if not what’s cared most for, is that many get cut dead. Sharp minds, narrow and cutting, run the risk of bleeding feelings dry-as-dust and stone-cold, and a critical habitude sported by either male or female shrike, discriminating bird of picky eyes that picks its friends—to pieces, seldom is protective asset in a marriage. Masochists often enjoy feline amenities. Do most of us think we can make love? Does a soul among us think—love?

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Whoever heard of ageless tattletales, of dolls all ears that leak and are design- ing into the bargain? Human language may well have originated not among archaic hunters but amid their mates, the grooming gatherers, who found cohesion and increased security in pioneering chatter. The three quickest methods of transmitting info: telephone, telegram, and tell a woman.* Gossip spreads inversely to its accuracy? Many a snoop neither has nor is a dick. Each gatemouth who divulges all she knows divulges also all she does not know. Between you and me and the gatepost, secrets told in confidence are almost always retellings by confidantes. No vessel can contain pure scuttle- butt. “Smart” cookies putting deadly tidbits onto others’ linguae should try taking equal loads off their wagging own; could every yakky critter’s childhood protein staple have been boiled tongue? Let’s cock our ears for Skookum Chuck’s remark, “When two or three old hens are gathered close together no man can tell when the end will be.” Each flapjawed mistress of monopologues must always fail to have the last word, for she cannot reach it; with her one gob, one word, leads to a plethora, all uttered like a blue streak. Maybe modern fizgigs do top men’s august ejaculations with undying heated spates? Not only limited nonfeminists conducting whispering campaigns are laboring

* Tittle-tattle’s no less a means for alleviating stress as for exchanging information. Powerholders have traditionally denigrated women’s gossip because it tends to allay anxieties, the latter in the masses being a great boon to their masters.

320 their hardest in the rumor mill. Who’s free of any vice she’d rather no one got wind of—a tail she could not stand being tugged? Not every theater can well afford to boast a full-blown prima donna built like a brick shithouse; how malapropos that a corn-fed canary’s every silvery birdlike aria should issue out of such a husky bulbous area, from that great pair of lungs. The question may be to what kind of use a splendid set of pipes is put. The horror of most soloists’ chin music swoops upon us out of helter-skelter flights gone skidding flarply too high too long. Brazen blue jays leave few scraps of quiet. Do all blatteroons desire to keep their deepest feelings secret? Secrecy is superficial and attached to its temptation. One expects the world to keep one’s secret even though one’s nattering self can’t. Betraying confidences surely matters little. The real Secret, all-embracing love, is not for telling and cannot be pried out by the prideful, insecure, suspicious souls most prone to regular backbiting. Having had one’s ear well-nigh talked off, nerves rasped raw, and skull all but split by yammering jackhammers, bursting shells at twice the clip that anyone can listen, may one offer to yaps sold on shooting off their mouths—revolvers? Can we not be more than targets for each barb and sally? Narcissists are the most apt to wax loquacious.* Some caged chickadees whose voices chatter inextinguishably on the blower ought to have line service (granted an odd break in use) called to remove the trouble sources. Solely a sound spirit’s capable of ringing off. A chirpy phone-hugging pubescent’s apt to amplify into a heavy-duty menopausal phone-hog dishing dirt and equally disquieted by solitary silence. Slews of trilling or fatmouthing Flos who spew in steady streams are unsafe springs, questionable effluents running off at the mouth, that only death can dry up and are spilling their guts, indisposed with oral diarrhea; rattlebrains that rattle off their heads but without missing them, telling one all they know—most notably those who know nothing. It’s a calumny to state that only bitches can’t stop woofing. Actually, if the truth at last be told, men beat their mates all hollow at gum-beating as they probably do at log-flogging.

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“Love” affords men an unmatchable rationalization of their exploitation by subalterns, and vice versa. Why dream that some silly billy/bally sally will solve all one’s problems? Who can easily distinguish male from female when

* Speaking as one with some acquaintanceship.

321 a rodent, trapped in the steel grip of dreamy bedroom eyes, confronts a serpent? It is chaps who never make advances, those who do not know shit from Shinola, of whom harpies tend to take advantage. Some of the expedients— shifts, whether close or loose—employed to snare a mate are so unconscionable that empathic souls occasionally hesitate a jiff before employing them. It’s evident that honking faggots of both sexes, counting on some palimony, love to get into deep pockets. Diligent gold-diggers sometimes look for all the world like men: the poodle-faker or the leeching gigolo attached to ugly dowa- gers or termagants provided that they’re old enough is only satisfied when he’s inherited the cash cows’ wholes. Collecting rent’s nice work if one can get it? Panting dogs who, desperate to get a leg up, think they’ve taken spouses have in fact been taken; courters love pursuing till they’re captured. Once upon a time a woman chased a man until he “caught” her. At the craft of waging psywar women must be recognized as equal to men—usually more than equal. Acrimonious misandrists are more than a match for acrimonious misogynists. In cultures like ours in which liberty’s purportedly prized it’s the canny female, not the strutting male, who manages selection of a partner; almost always she is also who initiates divorce—because she’s got considerably more to gain from it than he. With her few eggs she can ill afford repeatedly to make the wrong choice; whereas with his countless spermatozoa he invests far less in copulation; hence his normal promiscuity and her traditional monandry? In the larger scheme of things he’s incidental. Males could well afford being choosier but aren’t, while females who fail to be choosy do so at their peril. Women are far less dependent on male ruggedness than men on female staying power. Jealousy’s a litmus test that fillies do their damnedest to evoke in boyfriends to determine their commitment grade. A major motive, also, for wives’ infidelity’s to goad their spouses into paying more attentiveness to them. Men for variety are biologically programed to stray when- and wherever the risks and costs of doing so are lowest. In most tribes polygyny prevails; and men, unlike their mates, are grossly variable in the quantity of offspring that they sire. Yet the female’s manifest capacity for juggling bedmates is no less enormous than the male’s. Genetic evolution, sexual selection, is the perfect process for enhancing humankind’s myopic selfishness. What’s animal life but a monstrous constant reproductive arms race that makes promiscuity a useful hedge against potential infertility in partners and thus cuckoldry a commonplace? The orgasms of women were evolved to help control whose sperm goes where. Men’s pet idea that by nature women are monogamous could not be wider of the mark. Much of

322 his life man’s apt to spend in being rejected, for it is a woman’s market, even when she hawks her mutton. Mainly it’s man’s weakness is exposed when a relationship collapses—he’s a lot more lost, depressed and lonely, in denial, hanging on unto the bitter end, while she’s far readier to “move on.” In those matters like romance combined with propagation he plays idealist, while she maneuvers as utilitarian; she’s great at making hay while the sun shines. Animal husbandry implies the beast, while housed and fed, is chiefly utilized. Eve’s daughters take expedience as their sole helmsman, so are seldom given to remorse. Few ladies ever have had windmills whirling in their brains. In general, as masters of the venerable hunt, men turn out shyer, less impelled toward relations, than do women. Almost any babe ignored can get attention by emoting, in particular by turning on the tears. Can women’s expertise at intimacy be reduced to working overtime to mask their partners’ actual dependency? Machiavellian despots, masterminds at psyching out, will dress themselves obsequiously “up” as helpless servants with sob stories all the better to preserve their Machiavellian despotism. Does the owner train the bitch or she the owner? In trench warfare what’s more standard than to sandbag? Burly or not, women have their own variety of suckerpunches. No surprise if a young bitch becomes an old one. In the charming sixteen-year-old ingénue there dwells the beefy thirty-year-old master actress and dictatrix, mistress of all she surveys. Eve has the best intentions and a wicked nature, whereas Satan has the worst intentions and an amiable nature. Matriarchy rules a realm of hoary legend merely? Maybe it is normal for the bedroom cabinet to be in charge. What if not stealth made possible success of feline species? Who hold least authority are most prone to intrigue for power. For those valued only sexually sex can be their only power. For a woman’s seeming helplessness to stir a man’s compassion, it’s imperative that she be comely? Lacking lust, then, few men can feel sympathy? A man desires and cares for (“loves”) a blooming maid for whom what’s urgent is to bear a child—projection of her puerile self. Was this—a lecher coupled with a doting genetrix—the rule for “love” and compass of compassion through the course of Homo evolution? Had the finger wringers less anxiety and more confidence in themselves, they might not need to play their con game. To deceive is second nature in the so-called weaker sex: thus unresourceful twinks or gender-blenders, titi- vating peristaltic hairdos, thrive on artifice, on hanky-panky. Not all weirdies and beardies but some weak sisters or weedheads, cream of a crop of campy freaks homogenized coeducationally, wear their hair long not because to a man they are bi-guys or want to seem different, but in order to be like others,

323 viz., lanky quiffs, desiring callow twins, not complicated lovers, out of dread of being themselves alone. “Bisexuality”: a myth conceived by fertile homos itching to locate a home in a repellent homophobic realm? The distaste of the younger set, so epicene, for surnames may derive not only from a personalis- tic reaction to mass urban pressures but at least as much from lack of any real identity: computerized, they didn’t lose it—never had it. Those who’ve always stayed loose may have also stayed lost. Through abnormal culture genders are distinguished by polarity, whereas in pristine nature sexes are known by identity. The more decided is its variance in sex roles, the more human any primate. So-called norms for Norms and Normas, the “true needs” of man or woman, are a fabrication, since our sexuality is singularly variable by deliberation or conditioning. Going to bed together much resembles going shopping likewise—either browsing or else looking for distinct commodities. Perhaps the end result of unisex conditioning’s perforce disunity? The radical discrepancies between our sexes have been—still are—masked or minimized by the demands of communal survival; male and female aims and strategies are so divergent, in such conflict, that we have to try to “meet halfway” in order to enable any workable relating whatsoever, let alone profound communing. Over ages men and women have pretended, diplomatically if pathetically, to share more of their ideals and motives than they ever in fact could or can. Yet individuals differ the most, not races, positively not the sexes: greatest of unlikeness lies within the genders, not between them. Look-alikes, unless unrecognized identical twins, are unlikely to be much alike under the skin. Vive la différence, howsoever inconsiderable, if it tends to unify. Like tonic art, woman excites and pleases; Philosophy is passionate: it seizes. Angels simmer along into subterranean quakes, while beasts erupt; the lava and the earth, however, are not separate. Is sight man’s swiftly probing lance, and tactile feeling woman’s all-engulfing shield? Pub-crawlers, often enough wittols, “think” of males as doers and of females as mere be-ers. For brutes love means an imperious impulse, while for nature it may point the bearing of her being. What offends men chiefly is a public cuckolding; for women it’s emotional betrayal. Loves begin the grand affairs of women, whereas grand affairs finish the loves of men. Resembling Mars remote from Venus, fierce and, to mild moles, repelling glance the rays of the equatorial sun, but fair the face of the full moon to behold.

324 _213_

Does any dollface any more deserve some credit for her looks than would a landscape for being lit up by a lightning flash? A woman’s beauty’s less a gift to us men than a bribe. A belle’s conditioned to believe that her worst lapses in taste or morality will be condoned. A ripe tomato far from canned goods and not artificially raddled overflows with truer sweetness than a tart when squeezed; if not, ’twas surely badly raised and now is rotten. Bruised fruit may be sweetest, turning on how long it’s lain neglected. Get thee not to a nunnery; heaven save thee from that fate. Yet streamlined chrome-plate outside is but vanity without a classy chassis inside. Who adores a woman values chiefly not her features’ geometrical precision but her countenance’s lineaments or singularity, the depths her eyes appear to open into as through space fond glances crisscross. Chastening the realization that each damsel’s individual arrangement of eyes, nose, and mouth is vital only to attract males to her nipples, clitoris, and vulva, to ensure conception. The deluded bull-like ego ordinarily is touchiest about his wife’s attractiveness, above all cannot suffer any intimation that his marital “choice” missed being peerless. Swanking cocks who gravitate toward the most delicious chicks are, oft as not, simply mistaken that their reproductive wagers were the best; for many a dish proves a mediocre mother, not to mention tedious companion. Wisdom and good looks are seldom constant soul mates; beauty usually couples with crass vanity before it can discover any better linkage. Well-spaced features as a rule command attention if not fealty. Good-looking wenches break hearts; just great- feeling ones can mend them. Dames cannot be equaled at the art of taking pleasure or of spreading sorrow. Certain women (not to mention men) are so completely self-devoted that it’s only rankest flatterers can win their loyalty. For mates most women choose those men most petty since they match themselves. To win the favors of some cunt’s the raison d’être of each prick. The gander that many a goose of a girl waddles forth to take is more than likely mirror-deep and at her self. A glamour-puss’s handsome head is likely to contain a heartless void. The slipperiest of creepy souls may well present a fascinating face. Far better wed someone with a good disposition than a good physique. One naturally is judicious when eschewing lemons. Being loved is to be beautiful, but being beautiful does not mean to be loved. Body and soul are pivotally disparate. How slovenly and ugly featherheaded knockouts can be, how considerate and exquisite the odd plain jane without a speck of sex appeal. Fact is, a saintly genius may be a pruneface. Any veritable lulu,

325 someone truly good, is likely to remain a hidden treasure, since she’s curiously seldom sought. For gorgeous sparrowbrains gratuitous allowances are made. ’Tis wondrous strange that creatures quite so lovely yet can be so hateful. Solely if “the perfect woman,” just another pretty face, can realize that she’s a nonentity and no vain chattel, is she truly perfect. Perish the thought that such a silly dilly may incarnate the proverbial blithering idiot or good time had by all, so little intricate that anyone who tries can grasp her. Every stunner is afforded matchless opportunities to witness asses strutting upright. Lookers commonly see poorly, are born short on insight; those who’ve always been desirable are next to never understanding. It’s a rare bird to whom plain sense in potential partners carries as much weight as bodily contours. A good- looker’s scarcely ever a good lover: pitiless self-admiration proves the prime deterrent. Strangely no one is more shallowly oblivious of others than one broadly worshiped. Special beauty in a woman is a stumbling block to her self-cultivation, an obstruction to her liberation; if the fetcher overcomes this handicap she’s really admirable, truly special. Oddly the ideal in facial beauty’s actually average: across the planet a subconscious composite’s preferred to features genuinely individual—one of a kind indeed. Thus ordinariness is paradoxically what appeals the most to us, despite our adamant delusion that we choose incomparable creatures for our passionate attachments. Those who take a fancy to a peach are not prepared by nature to take in its imminent rot. Character may bloom as charms must wilt, though most unlikely. There’s no surgery can deepen skin-deep beauty. Magnets fade, but wisdom goes on growing; how remote to it the thunder in those mountains. Wisely sapphic twosomes as a rule won’t let raw beauty (or, more commonly, the lack thereof) obstruct their happiness; they’re rightly apt to view most men’s criteria of female comeliness as superficial and delusive indices of women’s true worth. The more spirited a wife, the less resigned she is as full-time household stewardess.∗ Apparently euphoric periodically, she has to be superior to man at loving? Or, at best, simply better conditioned in the act of fawning when in love? In that impulsive state she throws her pride right out the window, meantime mentally making a note on where it landed. Girls score higher in school owing to their faster learning how to curry favor. Many a lass seems so lastingly and truly stunning. Unmistakably lust’s magnetism leads to slews of fatally bad matchups with their retrogressive repercussions even in genetics,

* Housewifery requires endless energy while countless faculties are gone to waste.

326 not just in behavior.* It’s gents in a constant haze who view their spouses as real angels on the doubtful basis of their always being up in the air and harp- ing endlessly upon whatever clouds sail through their vacant souls. Whether or not they’re two-timers, women bent upon enlarging on their husbands’ faults are not diminishing their own. Credulity about the bounds of house- mates’ favors surely is what’s truly marvelous. Could it be just as well for some men that they never have suspected the untold, unhearty, unprofound indifference if not contempt in which their wives have held them? Nonetheless uxoriousness is usurious luxuriousness. Widowhood may be the single hope that can keep up a wife’s low spirits. Many a bastard yet is bred Upon a creaking marriage bed. Many a husband passes his life under missed conceptions. Man’s dream that his mate will somehow remain indefinitely fresh and lovely, generous and loyal, must die hard; he may well come to understand her truly for the first time after meeting her in court. He’s who’s been had. A man who gets to know a woman better is most apt to get to know her worse. Now heavily involved, he asks himself: “How did I ever get to have a tigress by the tail?” The difference between domestic and wild cats is slim. Imagining some grand adventures seafaring, each maritime cadet had better make allowance for all moody oscillations of the female which flow in accordance with her menstrual tiderips; not just monthly megrims menfolk suffer.† Who thinks damsels aren’t explosive should try dropping one. The wife, however, who resorts to homicide has probably been coldcocked once too often; and it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. Nearly all physical abuse of women always has been prompted by men’s envious compulsion to constrain their mates’ erotic exploration; whereas the occasional attack on men remains more likely to result from that habitual despicable abuse. So many wives who’ve suffered whalings in a blue funk (whether or no flooey) never have dared yell blue murder; some, one might conjecture, dote on dozers, actually may prefer louts who like getting physical.

* Conjure up all those countless aimless rutters throughout Homo evolution who were masters at disseminating misery while simultaneously overpopulating and misbreeding; all those bored folk whose sole interest in keeping on above ground lay in getting their rocks off. † Could Premenstrual Syndrome and the menopause both be concocted illnesses, thus lame excuses for much inexcusable behavior?

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Must woman’s soul at bottom be not much more than her body? Thus her fadeless disposition to adorn herself at least gives the appearance of being natural. Was clothing fashioned first for warmth or for display? Concealing flesh parts by adornment obviously draws attention to them. Is flirtation’s formula not simultaneous denial and consent—a cover-up while aiming to entrap?* War paint’s applied ere sallying forth to count coup—sport with a deadly earnest underside. Lipstick’s a porno tool whose function is to flaunt availability of lower lips also inflamed. It’s woman’s insecurity, and not her vanity, that her cosmetics most of all display, revealing that her real face, unless floured, is judged beyond the pale; for general consumption must she glam herself up, put on a good face? Why is she so afraid she looks a fright? One should perhaps be grateful, in this underworld of Holocausts and Hiroshimas, if one doesn’t look like something that the cat dragged in. Is makeup not ideally emblematic of man’s roseate will to be deluded, as face surgery is sheerly symptomatic of woman’s cosmetic reformation? Those raccoons who wear eye shadow may be deep-dyed bandits: caveat emptor. Few pusses dyeing nine times can face being seen as unsightly. An old mophead never fades: it just dyes away. Competing desperately for the choicest patrons, aging ladies squander fortunes on cosmetics, facials, jowls jobs—pretty well all in vain. Many a “girl” who casually announces she has just turned 23 vera- ciously is 32. Pathetic she fain to employ whatever artifices might fill out her fuselage, for it’s a sham dame. Snow-white gowns are a poor stand-in for live purity; and sumless getups never will go out of style: season after season they’ll look equally preposterous. Such spectacles may be discardable if only we can see to it that girls are given cause for bona fide self-esteem, which need not call attention to itself. Meantime the lasses get well trained as loyal capitalist narcissists: to aim, while looking permanently juvenile, for triumph over all their rivals at all costs. Compelled to carry and to study mirrors all the time, they follow the rule, Any gal who isn’t irresistible had best not be seen striving to be, homeliness now being a major sin. Were women ever less contented with their lineaments? What can redeem a culture almost all of whose young women look on shopping as their favored pastime? Who’s determined over half the population must be viewed as objects of indulgence and embellish- ment? He-men as well as -women like to get tattooed up to their teeth.

* Witness the low-cut or half-open blouse as calculated come-on on the part of women begging to be hosed. 328 _215_

Come-on glamour, joy-juice, rock-’n’-roll, tight sweaters filled with falsies, bennies and love potions, massacre around the peepers, natty baiting suits being modeled at the seaside, of these we approve; but life, the “illegitimate” result of this, our wiggle-waggling sex-is-fun program, we taboo and cast out. Not the bastard is a shame but our irreverent behavior—permitting, even prompting, harebrained youth to get a fix in salesmen’s dope. According to Mad Ave. the mini-mind is a success when wed: what’s good for business has to be good for us, each wedding making umpteen cash registers positively tingle with content. We learn with our mothers’ milk (from the Dairy Quean) that ’spinster’ is a sinister word, that Everyone Wants Happiness, that It comes in a package marked Marriage: for shoplifters scarce a bargain, while for all the disappointed squares no refunds are available but exchanges for new packages may be. Man’s favorite dish, his daily crèpe suzette called cheesecake, served as a free show, nurtures an ignored corruption. Starved, hung up on drug-filled jugs so round, so firm, so fully packed, shown quite a lot of cheek, he’s given to banqueting on tantalizing photographs of well-stacked feasts. The media’s engrossment in sex does seem genuine; only the sex is not. Entrepreneurs, creating fetishes like boobs by making breast-feeding a no-no, hold a vested interest in reinforcing mammae worship, infant greed; maturity in vision and behavior is for them bad news. Dress cleavages are fancied sexy and inviting, whereas showing dugs being sucked by babes is viewed as crude and odious. Current reports of sex life’s constant indispensability are grossly exaggerated; nowadays the lust for flesh embodies not a natural instinct but a manufactured craving. Sexploitation, through its jiggle genre, has produced a plastic consciousness of sorts that’s imaging false masculinity, which in turn must parade conspicuous salacious if not sexual consumption—just the thing for breeding impotency. The commercial engineers’ prime aim on gravy rides can only be to maximize carcasses’ titillation yet to minimize their actual partaking—thus no end of needless products can be jammed into impatient gaps. The ever-over- stimulating technostructure carries all before it by eliciting addiction while precluding any real absorbing satisfaction. Not just udders-and-crotch peri- odicals are mind-fucking admen’s delights; subliminal screws are now twisted loose most everywhere, including high-toned glossies’ spreads, turning at large the latent peek freak in us all.*

* Each Peeping Tom eyeballing hard is so ashamed of his desires that he’s driven to confirm the shamefulness of others’. 329 Is sex completely safe if always shown as casual or zipless shag, portrayed as trivial as finishing one’s toilet? Made erotomaniacs, we’re in the market for exposure of fast-dying flesh, not of a living heart. A main attraction to being photographed is that, retouched, one can look more attractive than one really is: photography, the quintessential “art” of modern times, which promised growing honesty, has fostered foolish misconceptions most of all. Photography abstracts; pictures do lie. How vital a discovery has printing’s reproduction technics proved—for generalizing and commercializing eros, making soporifically banal what was once entrancingly personal. Internal is the womb, mere empty space, of little use for flagrant advertising purposes, not to be dolled up, taken out and grasped at will. Were vice-prone com- stockery ever right, it had to be for the wrong reason, since pornography is not a vivid stimulus to action but a tatty substitute for it, eroticism being suggestive, not explicit. Countless souls see no obscenity in silly sitcoms teas- ing yet not stripping; only empty heads fail to find T-&-A plays empty. How much nuder than nude can we get? Are brutal porno stimuli, themselves surpassingly monotonous, now needed, like so many workday drugs, to give relief from tedium? True to the present massive technocratic onslaught on the human spirit, hard-core porn producers work at violating vital privacy. Their product’s profitable to the few, dehumanizing to us all. It’s hardly strange why any multi-billion-dollar business like porn is sponsored by the Mafia when its own violence and exploitation, typifying the modern age, are so appropriately dressed, so suitably expressed. Our moneyed sex religion verifies the nihilism of our fashioned world.

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Cocksurely putting on the ritz, the really poor are prinking, preening, their peacocky selves. Are they still spellbound by The Big Piece? When will they awaken to the larger peace of love? With active lips we’re free enough, but with our fickle hearts? The charity a charity girl gives is selfishness. Can anything fruitful come out of a coffee-grinder, anything high out of a constantly falling pickup? What avail slick new techniques in coitus aiming exclusively at more splendiferous orgasms, when the star burlesque performer’s calculating from the start and the automatic consummation fails entirely to fulfill? Less emphasis on clockwork execution might—God save the mark —trip actual transport. To make marital sex durable, it may have to become less goal- directed and more playful, pirating the lure and motivation of adulteries, to

330 dare experiment in pleasure to potentiate it. That a premature ejaculator seldom is told to increase his coital activity betrays society’s perverse view of our animality plus an alarming misconception that each male contains a finite pot of semen that’s at risk of running dry. To downplay the traditional equation of true manliness with potency—that major source of male anxiety—might well amend most sex lives. Hearsay has it women seek one man to meet their every need, men every woman to meet their one need. Yet ’tis a myth that men want “only one thing.” Our hysterical obsession with coition and orgasm as obligatory goals in all encounters keeps relations focused on mechanical behavior patterns. Men’s instilled distaste for feeling makes it hard for them to grasp that prolongation of desire may be preferable to a rushed release from it. How difficult for most of us, so long infused with the male hormone, to accept passivity as wise and requisite in many situations and relationships despite its being now politically incorrect. So many virile spurters, dead last in their dead heats, make laps as if they were going out of style. Straining less strenuously to be great at loving, let’s be grateful if by great good fortune we are loved—and if we’re not. Who cannot live a while without kicks ever dwells in limbo. Greater sacrifice than boning up on, poring over, some late how-to manual is needed to restore the magic light lost by employing sex as weapon or means to an end. Sex function turns on psyche more than physicality; the test is less how the flesh handles matters than how spirit treats the flesh. We know that we cannot love all the time; but what makes us think we can any time, at the press of our bellybutton dials? Timebound “lovers” who impulsively began their “loving” fancy they can willfully break off as well. Since when was caring some thing artificial that, like a hot-water faucet or bright videot box, one is seemingly at liberty to turn on and turn off at one’s caprice?

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Can anything be more exasperating for one free to satisfy an appetite than finding it begins to fail him? Chastened at best, he’s more likely maddened. Christers oddly may at last unfold as not the wettest blankets: all too often wild-assed speedfreaks, geared-up dipsticks, prowling highways hunting raw mink spring the falls, spark the hellbenders, mess around with minors, making bloody messes in gas-guzzlers. Killer drivers usually are wrecked before they strike out. Does the drive to hell around not lead to—guess what? Every speeding bolter not quite soon enough runs out of gas. Being dubbed no

331 party pooper but a heller, scream, or riot may not be so complimentary. Most making whoopee, such as proms’, is premature indeed. Run not to seed yet: grow less old than up. What huger boner can be pulled than being deflowered before one’s fruit has set? Regression, no less than aggression, characterizes the human species, and repression the cultivated breeds: those who mature too fast, regressing in the seminal state to the closest womb, do not mature. It’s human to wish to get naked, animal in fact to get it off. To grow up favorably every infant should be snookums, since s/he needs the utterly unreasonable adoration with which healthy mothers greet their newborns. So-called adult love relationships repeat this pattern of delusion; folk require such intimate ties ministering to their narcissism, making them feel special even though in fact they’re very ordinary. Tits and Ass: milk and honey in one dripping carnal package. What is more becoming than the lisp- ing baby talk (that lingo used to speak to pets) so oft conjoint with playing kissy-poo and wriggling bedfellows? Matrimony in the main is mummery? Some men cannot forgive those who rekindle infantile sensations of fright and humiliation. Women, winning husbands, quite as frequently are only shifting their subordinacy to them from their mothers. Much misogyny, and maybe all of patriarchy, germinates in woman’s close relation to the supernatural: not only bright small boys perforce are disillusioned by the wonderful divini- ties whose boundless love the tots initially believe will never let them down; then most deny the disenchantment, bury their vile grudges. Is our dreadful sentimentalizing of maternity perhaps just a defense against the overpowering anger—never dared to be expressed—that Mater once inspired? All infants, aged whatever, raise defenses aimed at quelling their fear of desertion. We neurotics bear anxiety more easily than impotence. Could every two-timer be a tad too puerile to be stomached? One may well have no choice, if to grow great, but to be cheated of one’s youth. Whose cradle is it that’s most irretrievably robbed? Beneath the premature senescence wedlock seems to leave in its wake churns emotional attrition, intellectual atrophy, and/or simply physical disillusionment? Few in the wake of lifeless bodies or like institutions surface wide awake.

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Must all the strength of women rest in their charm, all the charm of men be exercised in their strength? Where’s the sin if maids, hung up on rud- died hang-downs, frequently become enamored of extensive horseback riding

332 for its gripping groinal stimulation and as solace for their lack of mastery?* Graced with less than great gams, hippomanic draught mares, hungry for their donkey dicks to come, can only strive to mimic stallions, nagging hyper- tensively from a prepotent, extrarational, yet haltered, procreative impulse. First and foremost, sires are summoned by dams as by sirens. What’s the nature of the female beast if not that of earth’s ageless procuress or a natural secret police officer arresting and pressing draft dodgers into propagative service? Roommates often are half-serious about the marriage game: one is, the other not. For years a twosome may plan a runaway wedding, but each time the plant is set he stalls and runs away, shags ass since disinclined to put his on the line. Even a shack job some find too demanding. Yet where any man’s agreed to marry, if not where a head of state has rolled, cherchez la femme. From a domestic slave or famulus originates the family, love’s prison, a well- nigh fictitious stronghold where obedience and lies hold sway. The family that preys together slays together. This most basic institution, as destructive as instructive, must depend not so much on kind sentiments or sexual passions as on executed duties. Comforting are the illusory rewards of growing cannon fodder for the robber oligarchy. Surely it is spiritual sleep that wisdom shuns most in the nuclear group and accordingly in its chief emissary; the real trouble with family life is that it lacks fertility. In most beasts curiosity and learning cease when breedability begins; inquisitiveness usually peters out once chastity is gone. Creative souls can scarce survive being yoked. Strange, how the heyday of la femme arrives so early, that of l’homme d’esprit so late. However freed from messy motherhood, she labors still beneath a mammoth burden in her rampant physical nubility, the sucking rut of polymorphic sexuality. What irony that it’s the very life-sustaining qualities her physiology inflicts on woman that prevent her fighting for the political power needed to forestall man’s suicidal enterprise. How consummately fit that male lust’s ensign is a stiffened member—microcosmic emblem of the spastic corpus’s coming condition. Love may spiritualize man; woman it needs must materialize. In the fearsome “frailty” of her flesh hides woman’s power, in her need for affirmation of the putrefaction in her groin; thus truth, for her, must mean approving death, equating life with wastage flushed out. Lust, incited by amoral physiology, dictates our frantic race must go on to its paroxysmal finish. Heartless Nature did “contrive” that woman would become the optimum enjoyment mechanism all the way down to the worst

* Landscape painters, too, come by their fascination with tall rooty pine trees naturally.

333 of suffering in childbirth. Human sex’s raison d’être is to guarantee our species’ endless reproduction, even under the least favorable circumstances—not to offer carcasses and egos transitory pleasure. What is crystal-clear about the urge to reproduce: its blindness. Sex life has to be an unexcelled expression of sheer selfishness, with all the aftermath expectable of such a birthsite. Chief of executioners was always Kali. “Eve,” routinely sloughing off unwanted offspring, would today be classed a felon unforgivable, yet fathomed bitter wisdom now forgotten. Inside every woman lies the automatic expediential uterine generator, which cares more for giving birth than for the choking creatures spawned to die like rats in a superfluous experiment; thus Nature, with its profligacy and inexorable disregard,* desiring to be tickled pink but also to discharge, has been becomingly personified as Mother. What “She” ultimately seeks is the production of another split-up disproportioned organism, yet another Amadeus or mayhap another Adolf? In our heart of darkness dwells predacity, not sharing; at the core of our primordial reptile brains remorseless violence and sex lie locked in a weird gripping concord. It’s a flat-out tossup which sex is the crueler. Few folk care now to acknowledge the interminable prevalence of female-aimed and -targeted infanticide; ’twas born in customary tribal warfare and tried to rebalance the skewed gender scales.† Surely women once had—still have—an organic obligation to provide care, and men to protect the rights of others? Women seem so loath to stop bearing, men so eager to start perishing;‡ for man was born for woman more than she ought to be sacrificed for him; man’s borne by woman, yet has hardly borne her. Biologically men contribute rather little—none of mitochondria or cytoplasmic DNA—to offspring. Does paternity not constitute predominantly vanity? The power of the mother-daughter bond is primal, social life and love relationships having been dominated by the females even in the

* Most mutations are not salutary—rather, lethal, tending to eradicate the bearers: ponder what this says about Yehovah, not to mention his scarce human product. † Incomparably greater are the individual discrepancies within the genders than the group discrepancies between the genders—just as with the “races.” Those who now believe that almost any woman would provide superior compassion as world ruler might recall that once a thoroughly bright, Euro-nurtured Secretary of State felt that, to bring a repulsive tyrant to heel, executing half a million Asian tots was “worth” the negligible cost. ‡ Men groan foreseeing premature deaths; women moan remembering receding births. The odd man, too, enjoys the state of pregnancy, as witness how a magnum opus that’s forever harboring newfound unfilled interstices demands its author’s death before it ceases growth.

334 earliest of primates, males all but irrelevant.* Softhearted woman is most lovely not as the original temptress but as a blessedly no longer virgin mother of herself; while hard-assed man’s most deadly earnest not as the base hunter but as a forever lively grower of himself, uncultivated as in the beginning. Woman long has been a benefactor and man an antagonist: the giver and the getter. Hunting came to mean for him not just to garner food but to pursue, to struggle for, and to secure the focal prize of his being—viz., a mate; solely the great artist can seek deeper for more valuable quarry. Unregenerately for the most part have the sexes made use of the lower, not the higher, of each other’s faculties.

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Few flies perceive the captivating webs of illusion women spin—and fewer, joyless traps that master thinkers build. The first attractive insect passing by is snapped up by the Venus’s-flytrap. No virgin grasps how pitilessly Eros makes a woman act. If women have appeared less cowardly than men, is it because to date they’ve had less need for courage? But to prey upon, and to be preyed upon, is not to love. Maybe man-eating entrails have to be transformed before the tigress’s glittering eyes can melt in flaming night? A Nonseeing Eye dog worships its mistress with never a growl about all her unmentionables; peabrained herds cannot imagine that their popes or queens need ever wipe their butts. No Liz nor fair Elisabeth but sits On toilet seats: here the poor seer quits. But need there is to see the shameful self as foul—one’s entries, bowels and heart, not every body’s. Even grimy porkers may be lovable, although untouchable. Guess whose the skivvies never seeming to get clean.

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One’s admiration for a woman, as for a conjuror, flags fast once the tricks of magic are seen through. Unfortunately, just as girls get early training in dissimulation, women are constrained to be female impersonators; they’re accomplished most at lying—on their backs or “upright.” Does the fact that

* What matters most to females: a reliable access to food, permitting their successful reproduction; to males: any access to females.

335 missies learned to gush, “You’re absolutely wonderful, fantabulous . . .” or “What a perfectly lovely day . . .” attest their loves and lives are actually wonderful and lovely? Why would it be the sweet, fresh-faced, artless, beaming, tender toy domestic goddess whom men are inclined to worship? All too long has cutesy-poo behavior, acting like a twisty Shirley Temple, been identified as feminine. In movies the adorable moppet or totsy’s there not for his or her peers but for the pedophilic audience; enticement is the end in view for any voyeuring society that’s prurient beyond recall. The pampered baby daughter curling kittenishly on the sofa, able to play kissy with and twist her pap around her little finger, someday may secure a husband who discovers that her undulating curves and wiggling moves are not quite unexampled after all. To most maids plummy baritones are well-nigh irresistible. Perhaps it’s natural for every damsel to develop a crush on some older godkin? Each such pash is doomed to crash and vanish. No girl’s likely to be satisfied to dream and cream for long. The more naive a buttercup, the likelier that she’ll choose the wrong mate. Deceiving all her life, she ends up forty and deceived, alone and desperate for any partner that she need not fool. Her inoffensive lapdogs tell no tales. A woman may be knowing (Biblically speaking) from the earliest age, learning to fudge, yet stay curiously ignorant of all her serviceable bedfellows. What ungainly boy can match a slinky girl at playing stinky-pinky? Truest innocence is not, eyes fluttering, coquettishly to simper, blush, retreat, titter and tease, more flustering than flustered, eager to play footsie- wootsie or come-hither—in short, mere innocuous dalliance—but a fresh, impartial insight, deeper far than time can tell, than day has been aware, within yet well beyond the irresistibility of mindless infants and the blan- dishments of spazzy adolescents, grown strong in immediate maturity. Characteristically one-dimensional, the young are charming but such boring company because they bear the awesome load, as yet unlightened, of their urgent vanities. Does coquetry, this leading men on, e.g., with the shimmy, give the saucy teasers a real feel of power, that of generating blue balls, gaining throbs of self-esteem by their untrue enticements? Tempting mince pies must presage dyspepsia. Whatever their age, how can flirts beset with cases of the cutes renounce their very sickly nature geared to getting rises out of victims? Curiously she who gives the glad eye may give it to all and sundry, not just to a lone deluded suitor. Fetching backwoods maidens may in fact at sweet sixteen be no less hot to trot and hard-boiled opportunists than when seasoned sluts, spoiled by experience, at thirty. Used to being besieged, most fillies soon learn “all they need” to learn about man when desire has him by the throat.

336 Most nubile women actually have their partners by the balls. As shy as shy can be, do sloe-eyed leggy deer and cuddly bunnies not relentlessly despoil young orchards, lay waste gardens late as well as early? Any hotcha really threatens many a palone.

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Is it no biting commentary on our breed that men so often practise brutal sexual assault, most other species’ intercourse demanding some compliance on the part of females? Sadly rape’s a standard primate strategy for many a subordinated and frustrated male whose only opportunity for mating lies in snatching quickies; mindsets of female gorillas focus on possession by the most determined harem-master who dispatches any prior offspring. Ruthless power seems the rapist’s lust, not cordial pleasure; his desire’s not to delight but to degrade, to punish without any retribution? Rape existed long before its legal concept shaped by men to guard their precious holdings; it’s appropriately loss or threatened loss of handy spermic outlet that most often triggers rapists’ jumping bones. Attackers tend to be socioeconomic losers—in so grossly unfair a society a slew of males lack status and resources needed to compete; meanwhile their quarries naturally are pickier than them; the consequence: a realm wherein most women have no scrap of interest in some men keenly interested in them—read the formula for widespread rape. In trials it serves not just lawyers but all rapists, real or latent, when the victims are forced into being the defendants. Beasts of venery may stand half a chance if and when the judges and police as well as juries are consistently half female. Generally men prefer to see rape purely as a woman’s problem, vainly trying, Pilatelike, to wash their grimy hands and heads and hearts. Men as a rule rape only when expectant of escaping punishment; confronted, rapists typically will deny their crimes, lie even to themselves. Men’s cynicism toward rape victims’ claims is surely rooted in their lurking apprehension, “There in the dock but for the grace of opportunity slump I.” Their underlying dread is hardly pleasant, so repressed whenever rapists’ shameless terroriz- ing is exposed to public knowledge. God forbid that the habituality of rape in marriages be mentioned; freak tricks’ victims seldom can acknowledge they’re cohabiting with monsters: that fact, quite aside from the insane behavior itself, is too degrading; and there’s often guilt about imaginary provocation of the outrages. Nor should it be surprising that whores often get the business. Although abhorrent, rape is common, not aberrant but embedded in

337 our social norms, a grim reminder, reaper, and result of clashing masculine and feminine mystiques.* The gang shay has to be misogynist man’s favored form of rape because it helps him feel fraternally secure while countering his fundamental cowardice. What lynching so long was to Negroes rape remains to women: that brute curb upon their noncompliance that’s dead sure to slow them down. Not only stalkers lay for victims when they’re on the make. That most coercive sex acts never get reported is an accident? The damning moral of the venerable parable of rape: conform, obey, depend. Desirability in women thus turns on their knack for rolling over and playing dead, performing their roles as the walking wounded. Nature made woman a target, so man shafts her. Seldom will nonlesbians proclaim the ever-present threat of male coercion, since to speak so plainly would perforce antagonize most men, those avenues to wealth and status, “normalcy” and “safety.”

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Not all outraged women are as abstinent and blameless as they would like to appear. If women are perceived as merely sexual and scarcely human beings, country houses perpetually getting planked, what—or who—is responsible? How did the lady who claims all men are alike discover that? An iceberg’s apt to hold that sex’s fiery force is easily subdued. The feminists would have us fancy no such critter as a vamp exists. Do they contend that every normal female does not charm the pants off menfolk, sashay forth and send out various unconscious signals (whether auditory, visual, or odoriferous) to stimulate masculine interest? Who can deny that women also are coercive in relationships? What of the common intimate connectedness between some sex crime victims and their violators? Odd and scandalous indeed that all their erstwhile guardians and educators—not forgetting the self-conscious if unconscionable media hirelings—never need exoneration, never get brought to court for contributing to mopery. Society successfully corrupts the innocent; most pedophiles fall not among the masters. Failures at seduction tend to turn into abductors. Paradoxically the most dangerous of sex offenders sexually are least dangerous.† The really threatening and most pernicious entity is

* Some form of sadomasochist behavior seems customary among all too human beings. Imprisoned rapists, tested, generally turn out normal in appearance, personality, comportment, sex drive, and IQ, though somewhat “faster on the draw” than ordinary dudes to rage. † Every superegoless sex killer’s always seeking some unlikely pricey package. Murder fundamentally may be a fearful stopgap for real gratification, self-extinction. 338 not the solitary secko but the common, cruddy, potent institution known as marriage, stressing individuals—not to mention families—to death. Though strangers perpetrate but 4% of rapes, the media have guaranteed that public grasp of the crime is entirely inaccurate. Considering statistically all of humankind’s domestic cut and thrust, one should feel safer on a city street than with close kin. Both inside and outside our vicious, time-abusing prisons the sex criminal seems hated more than any, even if (as usual) nonviolent. The screwy mob’s desire: that anybody venereally short-circuited ought to be strung up and/or fried in hell. Assuming that the most unhurtful deviant has got away with murder helps us live with our own decadent desires. Can he be cured—but will a bridewell and a team of sexperts serve the purpose?—or be barred from all activity by salutary stake-out, tracker, knife or drug? The “best” we tend to offer is to put him in the hole, a kind of slow fire at the stake: what kind of masterful preventive therapy is that? Punishing by impris- oning without treating only can increase—it won’t diminish—the chance of repeat offenses, since he’s supercharged already with conviction of inferiority and culpability. Who knows why a recidivistic pedophile would nurse a yen for some impossible recapture of a long-lost childhood fairyland? Perversion means attempting to become what one is not and cannot ever be. Eventually every sad debauchee represents a threat to nothing but his notoriety.

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It’s only nasty men that specialize at giving pain while taking pleasure? “Gentle” women commonly will tear strips off their spouses. What if males are not alone prone to rapacity? How damning that girls have been used for ages as decoys. Seducing of the gawky young by older womankind, an everyday affair, is judged beguiling, inoffensive, even funnily commendable; whereas the odd conspicuously shleppy diddling old futz who’s nailed fla- grante delicto has been lucky to escape being lynched.* ’Tis noteworthy that matrons, sometimes even howling for blood, generally nurse a murderous disdain for every nonce despite the latter having normally been bred by a manipulative maw. Those who declaim what they would like to do to child molesters sound aroused all right, are coming close indeed to the real crimes. Why would there be so little curiosity about the origins of pedophilia, so little agitation for preventing rather than suppressing it? There might be some

* Women’s erotic pleasure rises with age, as their satisfaction with it falls. Thus it’s the Dirty Older Woman we ought to have worried over all these years? 339 chance of curtailing it, were there a comparable outrage in society about the forces that produce it as there is about the deviants themselves. Might women loathe all pederasts more than most rapists, seeing that the former are a lot less liable ever to gratify them? Paradoxically womenkind hate the child-lovers who fear them, yet fear the rapers who hate them. The criminals folk wish the most to punish are precisely those least apt to benefit from punishment; thus acts of vengeance by the “justice” system to placate a vicious public, not to mention every pardonably angry victim, are just futile exercises. Crime requires prevention, which in turn requires genuine child care. If we surmise that deviance is tantamount to wanting love, would not the remedy be to assist the sinner to be loved? How can rape be eradicated if its origin lies in abuse by trusted female relatives? Honest-to-evil rape can be abolished only when the ugly rapist in each seeming manly mechanism is not just unscrewed but never screwed, precluded through wise rearing from engendering; child molestation is prevent- able by keeping every possible molester’s—which means everybody’s—love life unmolested right from infancy.* It’s pedophiles, more than their victims, who are immature. Prolonged childhood dependence swells erotic guilt, improves the likelihood of deviance developing. Early on a pervert is denied his place and sense of power in the hierarchy: dominance-denial trumps fulfilling sex. The predilection adults have to use their offspring to meet their own puerile needs remains so prevalent, taken for granted, that no one refers to this kind of libidinal abuse as a perversion; it is held as merely one more way of exercising (i.e., exorcising) precious individual rights. Most child abuse has less to do with rape by some rare monster than with how the ordinary parent, victimized as child, turns out to be a pitiless oppressor.† Pedophilia seems both the end result and an expression of misuse of power; the condition’s key in both females and males: that they were made to feel inadequate and disempowered? Is it not a fine line of distinction women evidently have a special gift to draw between the heinous crime of child harassment males are guilty of committing and the wholesome rite of fondling nursing mothers relish? The * For having unearthed infantile eroticism—the fact nobody is either safe or innocent—the worthy Dr. Freud earned a perpetual opprobrium. † 70% (or more) of assaulted youngsters have been victimized by relatives or “friends” and not by strangers, media’s stereotypic sex offenders. Might the Law not better concentrate on violent abusers (e.g., O.J.), who are twice as apt to reoffend as are sex criminals and far more difficult to treat; indeed it is debatable the former ever ought to be released save peradventure in their dotage.

340 canoodling socially prescribed for women threatens men with terms behind bars: what was natural for eons—males’ unwitting reproductive strategy consisting in caressing and impregnating the youngest soundest females—now in our asylum has perforce been criminalized. Could the incidental sapphism among “heterosexual” women be at very least as common as the petting of the young by “grown-up” men? Does sexual abuse originate in large part in the socially conditioned impermissibility of touching on the part of males, a thou-shalt-not resulting in their commonplace hand trouble, not to mention inability to practise hands-on caring? Most men cannot let their hair down, but it’s not because they have so little. It’s not just religious parents manage to absolve themselves for letting every girl but no boy feel. No one’s “a man,” apparently, unless the motor’s sexually roaring while the vehicle’s emotionally curbed? Promiscuous by nature, we are nonetheless not born shoplifters or extortioners. True venery, unlethal, is pursued beyond vanity, by being wholly dissolute. Seduction is no sin, provided there is no seducer. What is called seduction signifies one taking captive without giving of oneself. Verily lovers die when love is born, not after.

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Like your tails, sylphs and nightingales. Goblets of fair proportions, quaffing you would one fulfill you. “More wine!” yelps the panting foxy-hearted hare, thumping the tableland. How I, inimitable lady-killer, long like some Count Dracula arisen to drain such exquisitely cut cups of suffering to the lees, swinging through the constellations tongue aflame in lips afroth. . . . “But truth is formless,” reason will cavil, “and, while the finest wines lift up, they let down, veil the vision, kill you as they fill you: swallowers of sweet must swallow bitter. What’s it matter how ambrosial the first few spicy swigs are, when the last one must consist of dregs, the acrid end? Moreover, are not love cups property? All too soon they own their owner: once down cocktails and one must down cocktails. Wise men are content to drink plain water as their cordials, drunk from their own hands. . . .” Yet what spirituelle fool would be wise? What dummy-beating coward? Who has made himself a eunuch for which kingdom? Wrestling with the snake is normal in a man; to choose to chop its head off, asking questions afterward, is morbid. Maybe we’ve offended our eyes and not our eyes us. Is our officially earth-splitting Heaven as real as sex-actuality? Are “frailties of the flesh” frailties? What sin to dip one’s wick into the honey pot? For depth

341 of penetration, what great thought can touch soul kisses or a royal screwing? Doubtless good sex is the linchpin lubricant required for easing frictions that must come to every union. What better exercise than bush patrol? Could sexual aggression, mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, be a boon and indispensable, upending all our holy tenets? Were the willful and deserting Desert Fathers, spite of their searing asperities, the fathers of—life? Why should anyone take pride or comfort in that nadir of all creaturely unfitness, the unwillingness or inability to breed? To measure fitness it’s not bodily condition but accomplished reproductive mission that’s the yardstick evolutionists and pontiffs unparochially use. In the larger “scheme”* of things does anything we leave as contributions to life really matter save our DNA, transmitted to the future by the swollen breeding segment of our species? Even the troublesome mind seems desperately driven hard to reproduce itself. Out of dis-ease and not a sterile equilibrium is living flesh created. The worst waste, however hygienic, is being niggardly in spirit. Sex can flourish quite apart from love, but can love equally untouched by sex—such as the raptured pianist who, stretching out, gets off and makes delightful music with his instrument hour after hour? “Romantic love,” an otherworldly heaven, is a product of repression first by parent figures, then by loyal self; some bachelordom sprouted in alarm at power at last blooms in repudiation of it. Some of us recoil from a world of wolves forever plucking chickens. What man seated with a woman when the power fails jumps to repair a fuse? Right—the pucker-assed short-circuited. A poor performance on the grim erotic battleground may be forgiven, but decampment from it cannot be. Some tender souls are just not cut out for the vicious rowdy- dowdy cut and thrust of wedded bliss. A gentle soul may be unwilling to do constant battle with an unremitting stormy nature. How unpleasant to be captivated yet scared spitless. Might one have been forced as a child to swallow the olive? Failing to be adequately brash was always a considerable obstacle to any man’s achieving reproductive actualization. Among primates females are compelled to mate with the survivors of dominance battles; thus the macho strategy the average male uses to the hilt. Half-hearted fellows who would never harm a single hair on a fair lady’s body never win fair ladies’ bodies; give such stymied, hardly ballsy duffers a below-par chance of holing out in one. The problem for the odd allergic specimen is not sustaining an affair but even starting one, by pitching woo to make it to first base.

* The term implies a schemer—a humongous lapse.

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Queerly many fornicators are not turned off by gross paunches. Our own ugly reproductive apparatus we feel cannot but be beautiful: if conjugation had depended on our genitals’ aesthetic charm the race would have long since run out. Consummate coitus turns on confined awareness: he who sees his own shortcomings and excrescences too clearly or is overconscious of the ris- ibly revertive, exhibitionistic antics intercourse entails* is not likely to get past the preliminaries. All too knowing that bloodsucking flies are nearly always female, threatened by the wraith of vagina dentata,† he may nurse the sneaking hunch swelled into certitude that woman’s lust for those thick-coming, overpowering climaxes boils down to a dark appetite for someone else’s, if not also her, the femme fatale’s own, summary quietus, more than une petite mort. If in fact childbirth gives the most powerful of orgasms, and women feel as strengthened by their coitus as men feel weakened, what does such a power transfer mean? A symbol of the coming age nigh gone? Although by no means necessarily desiring specific studs to bed them, women do desire them to desire to. What tom cares (or dares) to oust the self-esteem lodged in a pussy? Women generally let men be their “masters” in the sex act—never, though, their equals. Each miss dwells so long expectant of fulfillment in ecstatic combat, in that magic refuge from aloneness, that, however ignorant, she shows no shock, feels no remorse, and barely can conceive any moral connection to her conduct. The retarded public seems unwilling to accept that women regularly make significant mistakes. Men generally are held to a standard of accountability as individuals, while women tend to be absolved of almost any actions short of murdering their children; as a rule they get let off the hook—save in the crazy realms of Muslimite theocracy. Might woman seek not to be raped but to be freed from all responsibility? “He made me do it. . . .” Sometimes a gal nags unmercifully hoping her halfhearted partner will react and treat her with an energy that might excite her. “Violation” by some sheik who’d carry her off is the deepest wish of every nonlez lady, even

* One thing engaging in sex plainly means: being indifferent to looking silly. What appears burlesque in a cool bystander’s eyes seems completely different to the stagers’ darting about at the mercy of a five-alarm blaze set by tireless gremlin hormones. Would romantic love not vanish missing dopamine and norepinephrine? Few love affairs’ stupidities most folk can stomach save their own. To have sex means to get egg on one’s face. † e.e. cummings told the story of a man cursed with a mother complex who envisaged every vulva with a fishhook lurking in it. 343 of the masochistic damsel in distress unable to respond to any male;* still, when “submitting,” heartiness finds culmination in less physical than spiritual ravishment. The shallow pleasure fantasies of rape provide is voided by the depthless pain that actualities of rape deliver. The strong silent unreal motion-picture swashbuckler or perennial jock, similar to Hemingway as tufthunter and tenderfoot in spirit, graced as louse entrenched in war by soldierly reserve and spiritlessness, briefly in a snit but ever icy under fire, reputed by one source to have cast-iron balls, is forced to get well gassed, pot-valiant, before his invincible vanity will “open up” to anyone, including his fittingly sycophantic housewife.† Souls who, gnarling, must unwind by worsting others can be styled twisted. Each such football “hero” strives obsessively to take his fellow players out. Can trophy cockfish somehow compensate for the net of illusory inadequacy in which the compulsive’s caught? Success as screwer proves but chickenshit success. Only a wobbly dumbbell will contend that writing’s most important quality is punch. A no-frills style may cloak an old sport’s soul which is in fact unmanly. Might all nature lovers that are chesty big-game sportsmen loaded for bear nurse a deep-set and malignant passion to shaft their not so dear mothers? He who “always” loathed his mater is least likely to love any woman for long. Every minge reminds each hunter of his primal passage through that irresistible wound into this terrific world. Could every gobbler’s wallowing in oral deviation, dining on furburgers, be a weird and vain attempt to get back to that warm dark sanctuary? Sex for state-of-the- art comers mainly is a head job. Fouled-up playboys always on the hunt for bevies, coveys of beddable quail or foxes and to whom emotional surrender is strictly effeminate have been defeated in the contact sport par excellence of sexual maturation; multiplicity of conquests meters the desire to remain autistic. Freudians can have a field day jockeying with sports symbology: a frantic soccer fan can’t penetrate and shoot it in, a near-deaf basketball nut under full-court press can’t get it up and with the hot hand slam-dunk down the hole; each dashed aficionado of el beisbol dreams of driving, sliding Cobb-like into home, with a big bat hot-dogging it, etc. How popular the home truth that such numbskulled “body-contact” duels as hockey, football,

* By turning choler into fervor, killer instinct into lover insight, changing sex into a year- round sport, prehuman womankind—no patriarchal wisp—was truly maker of mankind. † All depressives may be clinging to a fantasy of ceaseless union with Mom, refusing to accept their separation from her at birth? Could so infantile a wish lead to addiction generally, not least to the destinies of sots and junkies, mammyrammers to a man-ikin? 344 wrestling, boxing are sustained by hordes of rink rats, field mice, ring worms, all those “unmolested” deviates? Indeed, in any kultur in which naked force is worshiped it’s no wonder that each slugfest proves so palpable a hit. What power play, from entry-level Little League to internationally wielding the big stick, is not an avatar of sexuality?*

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One wonders who dreads death more, who enjoys less wife expectancy, the most obsessive beaver hunter† or the best of pallid puritans? Shame-ridden moralists lust and call it sin, while shameless sinners simply lust, as deaf if not as dumb as posts. Which cocksman is the prouder of his precious ying- yang, which the more defensive of his family jewels? More than likely the rake’s insecurity must take the cake. An angel’s life seems no more than a dream without a single lover in it, while an active demon rides a string of nightmares into the ground. Sex appears to be addictive: those who have it have to have it. Lust’s gist lies not in its consummation but in its anticipa- tion. Mammal males, both satyrs and self-celebrators, seldom get unstuck from given ruts of rutting after puberty. Those in full flight from lifetime union, fancying perfect freedom in bacchantic escapades, flee inescapably from being unmasked.

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Asexual organisms “strive” but to exist immortally, to ingest, not to propa- gate. Can lifelong abstinents take solace in being spared the special torments of divorce? Many said to be sacred celibates are, more truly, scared celibates— older, sadder yet no wiser women, made so by their fearful fathers not in heaven. How deliciously ironic that it’s angry autocrats deserve most of the credit for producing Percy-panties. Out of an insuperable bashfulness protective of delicate purity, ridiculous‡ old Don Quixote, anxiously reluctant to profane his passion by confessing it to her who had inspired it and so being obliged to execute its crude conclusion, oddly ends up the unrivaled hero

* This quite apart from the notorious whorishness of ballplayers; some tough hurlers always were bruited abroad to have hard stuff. † Such obsession’s apt to be an outgrowth of a weak desire to have done with himself and with his nagging embryo of guilt. ‡ Cervantes certified his honor in self-mockery. 345 of the age,* the last improbably finishing first. Lacking the courage of his convictions, professorial to a fault, spirit’s most intrepid truth-seeker—self- crucifying out of craving pity from the happy few—may be flesh’s most timid gull, a strangely gutsy, yellow-bellied species. Cagily avoiding any intimate entanglements, extreme neurotics can retain the solacing prerogative of passing judgment on both sexes and their grievous follies. The lone jerk’s attack upon white sheets he hopes will prove more procreant than being prone to playing with his self? Can one be fairly blamed for self-destructive urges? Who has never felt tempted to tie the knot? Attempting to remain imperishably pure, many a holy soul has turned unscrewed. Can any deep or real adventurer not be distracted by a wench? Even the purest saints who’ve got complete hold of their selves are known to lust . . . and not the least; nor are they lacking in merciful pride protecting them from committing marriage. Could a hands-off policy be calculated to forestall pain? Dreaming of bliss may well be inferior to suffering the nightmare of unholy matrimony. Empty is the hope that by eschewing intercourse pud-pullers somehow can annul death. Nature will out: flight from this old amatory coliseum may be natural and yet impracticable. Baboons in captivity regularly masturbate. As Mrs. Earthy felt, “What a shame: a good body going to waste!” Yet what a pity: umpteen million spirits gone to waste, so many “lives” spent hugging pillows, never human beings. Outworn is the ascetic myth that sexual ejaculation equals loss of stamina. The spiritual dissipation conjugate with coitus lies not so much in its demands on vital energy as in the time required for such devotion and the narrow concentration on one evanescent object. Celibacy’s benefits for saints and artists thus have precious little to do with their either lacking or enjoying orgasms. Could piety in either sex mean no more than a counterclaim for loss of beauty? Can it—must it—be ignored that feminists who most vociferously call for blotting out all porn are ordinarily the plainest of dames? Plagued by raunchy recollections, woman is inclined to give her self to God as soon as Satan’s left her in the lurch. In every woman lies a sinner; once her crime’s committed, while still lying, she succeeds in feeling like a saint.† When horns

* So also Hamlet spurned the transparent Ophelia, “we will have no more marriages . . .” and an earlier man of sorrows told the scoffing Sadducees, “in heaven are no marriages. . . .” Each far-fetched story has it that both youths were “sent” to do their fathers’ wills. † Try as she may, no fornicator can prevent some elements of her or his identity escaping, leaking in or out, during the act, thereby engendering pollution of a fictively pure self.

346 are lost—at least ignored—it’s easy to sprout wings. She uses her church as it uses her, as ideal outlet for an arid spirit and unfocussed impulses. Adultery and Church have a long history of mutual dependency, of being in bed together: there’s no tribe, save one sin-ridden, ends up with oppressive ideology. In males a patriarchal creed can rationalize perfectly the most outrageous macho conduct; while in females what is called holy conversion generates from the high-powered tides of sexual drive that highlight puberty or menopause being blocked by a thick wall of guilt about such racy feelings, which dike in turn has to be the outcome of undue restrictions in the lost child’s earlier conditioning. Erotic inhibitions must be learned: repressed hysterics have to be trained to deny themselves love and so to deny their consequently sterile lives. Should one be grateful to one’s padre for permission to jack off forever? What a gutless cop-out, that self-stimulation has been cunningly declared innocuous in order to secrete the damage done by disallowing adolescents’ normal intercourse. The latter envious religionists dread will defile our nonexistent pure selves. The plain reason moralist authorities forever recommend youth marry is to cut down their carnal activity in general, because restricting fornication to one partner cannot but curtail its frequency. Considering some subsequent black bucks’ hyperkinetic satyriasis, how droll, how positively rich, that Dr. Naismith of the YMCA hatched up basketball as a cold-shower damper on all budding lust, a substitution to divert youth from organic satisfaction. Imbecile agrarian society, inspired by idiotic theocratic prigs, traditionally treated the Sex Question with all stress on propagation and the risk of pregnancy or some disease, but never on the really vital issues, viz., that both coitus and onanism are completely natural goings-on and that erotic pleasure is essential for a healthy life. Out of neurotic jealousy and festering nostalgia our mainstream underworld fears and refuses to acknowledge its own small fry’s sexuality. Unspoken in our militarist world of superannuated herder- farmers is the operative Rule: suppress, deny, starve, punish, crush. How sad the fearful need for love that seemingly the family alone could possibly provide, yet one remains an exile from it so as not to reproduce the viciousness it taught. Initially scared half to death by elders who, themselves constrained by unconfronted fears, the sensitive pubescent boy or girl retreats into erotica, family-produced fantasies and autoerotic activities that help a lot as shelters from the fright of interpersonal intimacy; having so well learned the home- work lessons, “Nothing ventured, nothing lost” and the unspoken “Never give a fuck for others,” he or she is left ayearning for communion with some

347 nifty charmer but with no ability to realize it. One’s absolutely sure of wedding beau ideal when—that is, if—one grows up. Just as those unseasoned socially when young are apt to alternate between absurd overassertiveness and like retreats when older, so those unversed in the art of sexual expression suffer all-or-nothing plunges into and flights out of love on a regular schedule. The pathetically sentimental overvaluing of womankind results from systematically frustrated desires. Keeping youth surrounded, hemmed in, by soured prudish iron-maiden superegos for its first fifteen years,* weirdly we are puz- zled why, genitally deranged, it fails for life to reach maturity, why it turns out to be normally nonmale or unladylike dudes of our time; cooping up sexually energetic creatures in a sterile puerile limbo into their twenties has achieved success primarily as strategy for storing, shoring up, their total rage: no one becomes real short of becoming responsible. Perversion grows in tandem with the growing gap between young flesh’s and minds’ self-determination, with the ever-lengthening delay between youth’s sexual and intellectual autonomy. Succeed in making sonny think of sex as sin, and chances are good he’ll succeed in making it a crime. If caged with twittering or screeching birds for long enough, a short-changed young offender turning chickenhawk must be reduced to praying for an indefinite term of taciturn anomie, with street time off for good ornithicidal stalking. Show me any human who can come out of the industrial closet wholly unperverted. Is our racial segregation carving any deeper lesions than our sequestra- tion based on age or sex? Overintense, untruthful parent-child relationships, characteristic of our egocentric bourgeoisie, are fertile soil for filial disown- ment of all adulthood. The young need noble models who are trusty friends, not trussed-up tough birds, made-up old maids of both genders dwelling in the Never-never country. Viciousness is bred in impotence, in love that’s choked. The youth industrially dammed-up was too dearly damned; each dreadful virgin’s screwed, blewed, and tattooed.

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Suppressing, no less than unleashing, sexuality—like secret suicide, what almost everyone is “up” to though none would be caught dead heralding it†—seems somehow too easy. Guided chariots are more fit than runaway

* Such flitty fledglings, if discriminate, must ever after sense that liberty implies escape from distaff influence. † Dying is the last thing most of us would dream of doing.

348 or slaughtered horses—wisdom holds its; yet truth travels on swift wings of song. ’Tis not intactness, fancied purity, that’s priceless but love’s fruitfulness, beyond all temporary rifts and spats. Virginity* is seldom lost, most often gets misplaced. The maiden state counts least to maidens, most to men who’d willingly expend it. Picking cherries would be a good fortune and no theft, were cherries seen to be a source of pleasant vigor, not of ugly profit; each hard seller who grafts killings out of stone fruits gets to be the pits as grower. Celibacy can be opportunity instead of deprivation, freedom rather than constraint, if living one’s life to the fullest is seen as more vital than (as in the crippling “Christian” West) achieving some mundane goal. Chastity is ludicrous primarily to and in those who lack a lofty bearing to and in their lives. Only in love, in caring now, is chastity fulfilled. Go, practise chastity, Not incapacity.

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Is psychoanalysis not a waste of couches, let alone of shekels shelled out, breath expired, and spirit spent? Might every inconceivably passionless paradise and likewise sexless Heaven—gelid, hostile to life, in the clouds—lack the Creator? “Flee all stimulants, O ye concupiscent spawners of vamps and vipers rampaging in the fleshly quagmire,” urge disgusting old Augustine and Tolstoy as, underneath their robes, like rakes these avid killjoys, hipped on haunches, claw their raunchy privates. Yet the devil is not sex but bondage to it, to the belly. How the stuffed shirts—big shots, little squirts alike—still impotently backbite frigging frumps, having bagged sufficient buxom hussies to sate their own worn-out abdomens and now repelled by the scrawny kine or overladen scows their concubines or wives have been tugged into being, seraphic belles transfigured into spindle-shanked or pear-shaped beldams, all those early hourglass figures in which the quick sands of time have run down to the bottom and foul deltas. Sewers might be necessary to assure the wholesomeness of palaces . . . if only palaces were necessary. Anybody who enjoys condemning the allegedly corrupting rather than actually corrupted call girl, judging her unfairly on scarce evidence like flashy working clothes, should weigh as well the hopeless waywardness of nannies-chasing hubbies, fading hot pants, that supply her income.

* Its very concept may well ever have been inconceivable until the cockeyed Fall (4004 B.C.).

349 Sex performances free of personal animation help depersonalize the performers. Hanging around with no matter whom, each ranging swinger’s spiritually twisting in the wind. The body count one beds in life is faithful gauge of fineness or of coarseness in one’s spiritual fiber: the fewer the finer. It is sheep excel at tupping.* Chiefly death’s what levels people, makes them common, as does copulation; it’s the deviate, like Leonardo, who’s apt to achieve distinction. Sensual fulfillment gratifies our appetites; but does it strengthen anybody’s understanding? From the loins a lot is earned but precious little learned. Sex is no solution to our problems but a tranquilizer for them. Many a marauding “man” patrols his territory like an ever-rutting tom- cat after scratch and must sire lots of litters to prove he can copulate: for cat- erwauling lionhearted second-story sneak thief that’s a feat? Without a doubt it’s misfits reproduce themselves with least restraint. Success in hunting does confirm the acquisition of a posthuman position if not territory by each man who has it made; it acts as countervail for lowness on the social scale. There’s an infinitude of creatures even the most fabulous of fuckers never loved. The hunky ripoff merchant whose prescribed jogs are his jags may, bored stiff slap-bang like some rickety fence, run around a lot, yet finishes where he begins—by stripping off, displaying his ugly interior; gals marvel at how well he dresses—and how fast; knee-tremblers may be all he’s got time for. The office magistrate loves stenos less than dictating and ends his every sentence with a proposition; if his latest coffee-brewer can’t be sweet by day and just a little tart at night, he’ll saccharin the morning. Under patriarchy those who, like most women and unmoneyed men, do not take charge have to expect dismissive treatment. Hairy-assed harassing Harrys are scared shitless that they’ll lose their heads or be denutted; in fact some harassers in reputedly high places need more than their knackers severed. Business or military men are apt to deal with personal concernments by the numbers. Commonly a lordly hustler’s stipend will go to four figures—to four working broads. The average dork makes time, never the eternal, with confederates. Most men are working hard to make a play for any body whatsoever; they contend that women can be sexually free (i.e., available as slaves to sex) without being also economically free. The ordinary clod’s prime dream: a virgin who’s concurrently a whore.

* Who loves thinking more than fucking may be more intrinsically human, for the latter verb requires an object manifestly animal. Mild retards no doubt can give wild performances at shindigs or in bed. To shake a wicked calf can go a long way toward snagging a shlump fit to do one’s bidding. Most folks are so bored with their selves that they’re always looking for some action. Potent beasts tend to be washouts as creative spirits. 350 Tribal societies are as a rule polygamous. Not just the parasitic primitives that are Islamic men imagine Paradise as plushy suite, as glorified bordello.* When a woman goes wrong more than one man goes right after her. So many bosses seem to relish giving dressings-down, then going on the town and taking in a meat show. Each incomparable Frances Farmer, Billie Holiday, and Judy Garland speaks for countless spirits silenced, buried unrecorded, in extortionate seraglios past and present. Men apparently prefer that steamy jungle bunnies, if not sleeping dictionaries, do the pillow-punchers’ chores, performing with off-color bibble-babble quickies on the side. Perhaps the pimp, no less than the go-getter, typifies the capitalist system to perfection? Wall Street’s unconvicted wizards cannot brook analysis of their incestuous relationship with harlotry. The untold takings from uncounted male-pack rackets—from bellhopping to judiciary—certainly require that prostitution never shut up shop. In transient encounters the impersonality and anonymity appeal the most to customers, who, safe from social criticism, can suffuse the hired dummies with whatever qualities they fancy while avoiding any obligation to learn and meet partners’ real needs. Does the laid-back poule-de-luxe expediently answer to the uninspired john’s ludicrous hallucinations? Countless nameless randy souls get georged, then rogered. It’s whore-hoppers, most of them short-timers, not poor slatterns, keep a honky-tonk or rub joint in the chips and are who, as the most deplorable affront to public decency, should first be outlawed, subject to a shutdown. That for every synonym of overpaid whoremonger there are five at least of underweighed whore (who is totally outnumbered) equals proof, if proof were needed, of the macho nature of our lingo and thus of our very $thinking. Far more women (not to mention men) are hooking off the streets than

* To describe Muhammad as “the perfect man”, considering his maladies and reproductive irresponsibility, would be too killing for words, were it not so execrable—quite enough to make a preacher swear. Who’s absolute as ruler’s also dissolute: depraved society colludes with every despotic patriarch. In penetrating modern warped male conduct, not to mention character, one must give credit owed to Mungo Park for his account of Moors in Africa: “Their [women] are regarded as inferior species of animals and seem to be brought up for no other purpose than that of administering to the sensual pleasures of their imperious masters. Voluptuousness is, therefore, considered as their chief accomplishment, and slavish submission as their indispensable duty.” Are these overbearing masses of asses not still prevalent throughout the— and not just the Muslim—world? Is his two-century-old report of rampant bigotry, brutality, credulity, intriguing, indolence, and banditry not to this day all too familiar to all you mixed- up Semites? 351 on them. Going whoring’s less a flesh jaunt than an ego trip: the Oldest* Profession but “confirms” the basic smuttiness, the gross contemptibility, of women as a whole, those beastly witches bent on riding joysticks into the ground with nocturnal orgies. Tops among a stable’s sporting ladies lies the bottom woman. “Gentlemen” try hard to get the jump or drop on girlies. “Cower sweetly, grovel coyly at my mercy, my proud beauties . . .” hoarsely growls hard porno hobbyist dehumanizing subjects and forever flicking off the lights to see what may develop. Is it a foregone conclusion that a maid who dates a shutterbug’s a snap? A nymphomaniac is any woman sex-obsessed to the extent of every man. Nymphos are made by men failing to care for them as girls. Women at least appear less likely to consider others humps. Do bitchy bowwows on the whole seem formed of finer stuff than male curs partly from the former’s living with the curse? Most horndogs fuck the dog before they get hitched, and then after, other dogs—a rank display, to green-eyed pooch of rarer breed. Whoever’s said “I do” seems to feel licensed to do it with all and sundry. Undiscriminating copulators seem as proud and happy to be laid, relaid, and parlayed as if they were shooting fish in barrels. The statistics on adultery have proven women now to be pragmatic opportunists quite as recreant and shifty as men. Stepping out with’s tantamount to stepping out on. Countless women have had countless husbands—over and above their own.† Such lengthy lines of ladies-in-waiting have had “my” Prince come—and go. Some women to this day exist who’ve never known a man, but few who’ve known but one. Though ignorance is less than bliss, it’s only prying fathers, not wise husbands, quiz “their” womenfolk about their best-kept secrets. Thus what through the grapevine are believed successful unions are dependent on delusion? Generally intercourse gives the illusion of security and closeness, but its universal popularity does not depend on their reality. Most people couple well-nigh indiscriminately: what a tipsy overload of chance in such encounters. Not perhaps so oddly, wedded folk are readi- est to fall on bedding others. Anonymity in modern urbs has made adultery

* Defined as an exchange of sex for benefits, most likely prostitution’s been around for a good twenty million years. † In chinwags, over coffee, chortling ladies love comparing amatory defects of their multifarious bedfellows, who are viewed as dickheads; curiously, such behavior is not construed as sexist chauvinism. As for sisterhood, the reason female cronies clash consistently if unpredictably is that they sense each other’s motives so much better than do males; the friendlier such a pair, the more treacherous their tie. Might fellowship of women, similar to men’s, be a mere pause or lull in the hostilities?

352 so easy that fidelity now seems perverse: both men and women (most of all the first) deceive themselves about their actual conduct, whether acted out or daydreamed; they evince a marvelous capacity for tolerance of their own indiscretions. Some souls much prefer it that their spouses get their sex outside the marriage beds, and by no means all infidelity is motivated mainly by the outwardly unfaithful partner. Those who fight betrayal’s fire with fire are apt to finish up with ashes. Need we call for help—perhaps somebody kin or else a Kinsey—to keep close track of our paramours galore? Now that orgasm is everybody’s right and duty must progressive mates, as good lay therapists, prescribe two-timing for each other? Is it really so absurd, unrealizable, to be a oncer?

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Courting, i.e., courting disaster, all too humanly one spruces up, embellish- ing, leaving one’s wormy apples at the bottom of the barrel. The time to be disillusioned is before, not after, the wedding day. But how can a skirty-flirty swain no longer virgin in his soul when wed or dizzy Lizzie in an equally uninteresting condition be a true master or real mistress? Modern man and woman, well conditioned to the rabbit habit, find their selves driven to such a broad experience that they arrive at the most shallow insight. Making our diverse connections on a madly overpopulated globe, there’s no doubt our superfluous electric plug-ins do provide us with the clear illusion of resplendent power. It’s unlikely that those given to experiencing coitus (or life itself) will care to give themselves to speculating on it. All experience, despite its popular esteem, may simply be a peephole through which, now and then, odd glimpses can be caught of the eternal. Is an old hand preferable if exclusively at masturbating? Does one need to be a murderer to know what murder is? To get free must one know the ropes? A questing virgin who’s arrested at the point of first committing fornication is the perfect candidate for ana- lyzing, synthesizing, summarizing our kind’s close to criminal calamitous lovelife. Each coupler known as lover who from time to time comes up for air has largely learned fuck-all about love; what s/he knows is dick. In coitus the borders of awareness are contracted, care for others in the process vanishing. The first words after intercourse, like coffin nails, bring partners back again to mundane “consciousness,” priming each for repeated couplings: “Hello there” or “That was SO GOOD.” Fuckaholics cannot but compress their treasure, holding worship at the shrine of the pudenda as they fuck their

353 brains out, getting all their starts and stops in poverty of soul. A Kafka cannot but have problems, while for most clods wooing is a turkey shoot. Is everybody not expected to become a dedicated screwee in both senses of that term? Beginning as a sexual utility, must every spouse end as a spiritual liability?

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Perhaps it is less primal lust that prompts most passing bum-rubbing scrim- mages than petty curiosity? Maybe tension reduction, and not pleasure, is our sex drive’s basic object? Mammal young look cute and lovable to help ensure they’ll get attention and survive a while (same goes for nubile women); thus affection’s no doubt vital in life’s early stages.∗ Yet the concept of amicable sex is, quite simply, childish: adult sex is manifestly less affectionate than for release of pressure. Thus bed-hoppers hop out of internal stresses, simply to relieve them-selves? Or is the main attraction more to exercise control, to make another person squeal? Coition’s valued by both sexes for the fantasy of power it provides. No wonder wives tend to view husbands as mere fucked-up boys, since women’s main role in life so long was to screw their spouses (and sometimes their young). Forbidden fruit seems what at seedtime is the most desired; still, harvests are not for spring’s delectation but for autumn’s. Winter, full of angst that it may never see another spring, yet also full of hope that flavorsome debauchery awaits, rides out hot in pursuit of green, impressible fifteen- year-olds because they represent no menace to an ego of identical maturity. Machismo, like its kindred, bullshitting, is now passé but far from past. A solely retrospective hero’s fit for no more than a one-night stand barely as long as Custer’s last. Then there’s the odd mesmeric type with age-encrusted pego who is fungus-faced yet draws magnetically to him nothing but such ditsy raving beauties—nut farm rejects all. Even a stoutish runt, stretching his toes in bed, conceives him self as towering. The bigger the prick the more mesmerized the minor ginch. Are hypnotists not master liars whose defenseless subjects play along with the compulsive lying, readily agreeing to “enjoy” being screwed? The crudest of slick flannelmouths’ maneuvers brings to bed the mass of hippoed lady folk; such speedsters pour it on and knock ’em dead. Grasping whatever zatch happens to be at hand, the winners in the sport of shafting are invariably horny fibsters; with their brazen flatteries they manage

* Childkind live but briefly, in a blip, then disappear, metamorphosing into the dull years of indiscretion. 354 to bowl over cupcakes, making them wavering pushovers. So much blood’s demanded for a man to think or to maintain a hard-on that he can’t apparently perform both acts together. Women long ago observed how manageable men became when their tools stiffened; thus were pricks manipulated with ease to assist securing food supply plus all the comforts of home. The originary link between coition and speech is betrayed by intercourse’s double meaning? Women tended to select men who were the best meat-suppliers as well as ingratiating gabbers over inarticulate and unproductive hunters. Gross tongues and like frames appear to be attractants for a lot of dolls, not only for bimbettes. How baffling that a swinish bruiser or a knavish dummy, even a consummate geek, so often triumphs in enamoring a lovely woman, while a one-way guy of honesty and understanding almost always fails. A sports car and a fat portfolio can turn a frog into a prince in countless damsels’ eyes. How weird that lumpy muckers, cavemen or commandos who give gals the least respect while boffing everything in sight will get from them the most. Worse still, might every fucker, male or female, truly be a liar? Lust thrives not just in the dark, in secrecy, but also in dissembling. Those who fail to find a mate are poor deceivers. It may be no accident we lie in bed.∗ Thus any honorable truthful spirit cannot but remain an innocent? Is it a pity that the inexperienced yet curious naive sweet girlishness to which innumerable honey-fugglers are susceptible† can only be ephemeral, the slender, lithe, scarce nubile nymphets nearly overnight transmog- rifying into pudgy, duties-commandeering grubs? Each infantile lothario’s fixation’s nooky-nook. It is their own lost unlived youths that make those cradle-snatching wasters, masters at sweetmouthing, want such tender lambs or crave canned goods. Are women not, as melons are, best served when fully ripe? Lacking the stamina of women, men find their libido mounting as their fitness for performance fades with age. They seek fresh fillies whom they

* Reportedly sex partners lie to one another one-third of their time together, “more than people lie to their best friends.” † For altogether too long youngest brides have been man-aged by oldest grooms. Genetic programing apparently accounts for men preferring juicy younger women—a reality not liable to change by laws or preachments: nature seeks not comfort for the female population but proliferation and survival of the race. Girlchildren evolution fashioned well-nigh irresistible to bolster reproduction of the healthiest stock possible; boys were and are bewitched, hardpressed to take the bait. If males seek youth and beauty in a mate, while females wealth and status, are we sure the former’s object is the more despicable? The more the latter get, the more some of them (e.g., Jackie Kennedy-Onassis) “need.”

355 could not satisfy; meantime the older woman’s lost the superficies that would hook or keep cotemporaries on hand. Women are as old as they’ll admit to feeling. Inescapably both sexes gravitate toward asexuality as they decline. As lifespans lengthen, one vexation is less that some women fail in “femininity” than that the latter fails as an ideal. To have sex problems may be normal and long lives of mutual fulfillment naturally rare; from one cause or another most relationships are cut off short. Each partnership originating in deception is impelled in truth to end.

_232_

Men censure the inconstancy of women when they are its victims, yet find it endearing when they are its beneficiaries. They claim women cannot take it in some workplace pressure cookers—never mind the stress endured in childbirth. Man’s inclined to curse Eve or the apple—fruits of his one-track, dirt-track mind and tunnel vision—for his suffering, though they gave him life; his suffering, however, issues from his seething self, from his own stews. Are masters of the culinary skills, those buttered-up pancakes or overdone hot tamales hardening softies’ cells, forever catering to male “needs,” truly blame- able for our erotic culs-de-sac? Some leaders and lots of nonleaders of men do their mediocre best as followers of women, exercising hardest doing pub crawls or when jouncing from brass bed to bed; when they’ve resolved to take a wife, their single problem is whose wife to take. No better vengeance on the rogue who’s swiped your mate than to encourage him or her to keep the booby prize. All groping cunt-struck Santa clawers who will not leave hosiery alone keep pawing, pulling at their painted dolls’ cheap dresses, driven to get into their drawers, till the secret of each bit of fluff’s real stuffing has to spill out; every such undies-fascinated nitwit needs to keep his mitts to his self. Underlying all misogynistic scorn, especially in specialists in grabarse, may well be a mother lost—envied and terrifying; the contempt for womankind betrays a shaky self-esteem bred in a lack of mother love?

_233_

Those males who go into their amateurish songs and dances obviously lack the expertise of cuties on the q.t. in selecting the right yarns with which to pull the wool over their spouses’ eyes. Adultery’s so common it comes home a deadly bore. The very concept of it’s now denied—especially by those

356 accomplished at it. Any wrong suspected is a wrong that the suspector’s apt to have committed: he who peers beneath a bed must be familiar with the spot himself. Undoubtedly there are more cuckolds than stray roosters, biggest cocks on their respective blocks. It’s a wise capon that knows its own chick. Does one learn how to derogate from tother? Many a liaison has been set afoot with the pathetic confidence, “That bitch/That s.o.b. just doesn’t understand me!” Often a distressed dame blames a man for getting her tit in a wringer. Women crave to be misunderstood: thus all their whims are vindicable. Bullyragging hazers in a moral haze can only love initiating cat- echumens in due condescension, trained as good little sufferers to end up big bad discipliners steeped in envy thickened into spite. I fear at least one sadomasochist may lie in every bed, not exclusively among the leather crowd in love with punishment. And every partnership is a re-acting of or to each partner’s parents’? What if games of slap and tickle on the winkie, not to mention Slaves & Masters, are routine ubiquitous behavior? S and M may always have been all the rage. Armed to the teeth, how foxily we smack our lips, surveying tender breasts of cooped-up pullets while exclusively intent on relishing the rib joint and appeasing appetites long pampered; genuine hunger—for the fruit of the living being, la pièce de résistance—we know not. Though hogs may often call for, they are seldom offered, table-grade tomats. Our love lives, beds of ruses, are but “love” of death, for we sink teeth or meat-hooks far more constantly than tender lips or tongues. To look for easy lays, to whack thick marbled slabs off, hardly lifts a slob’s so low-lived love; whose mastery of love amounts to knocking off a piece leaves much to be desired. Having tugged on and discarded many ashen butts is no good cause for pride. Not only blow-hard fishermen shooting us lines can be caught hauling in prize beauties by the tales. How apt it’s thugs refer to girls as twists. What screwers care if a wolfed piece of crumpet is off hers? Might porno vanish overnight were women to behave as indiscriminately as men do? Coldblooded parlor serpents or lounge lizards cannot but perceive woman as cooz or ginch, a hunk or mindless gash, a snack or nookie, bits of crackling, poundcake made to be consumed, a jewel to be burgled, skirt for lifting, or fleshed cuspidor or urinal; they must conceive her as a succubus, a piccolo player, or a flapjack for the flipping, as an instrument of their own gratification; if, however, maids are mandolins, the maestro, like the wind within the Aeolian harp, is nowhere to be seen, the music made is all, it’s infinitely more than organ grinding or than ploys by harpists minus ears to bend who’re vigorously pulling strings to get ahead

357 and always getting tuned. Can any catgut scraper sans the art of pizzicato rightly be held artiste, can a tender touch but difficultly be acquired? Many yoke-mates destined never to forget their maiden tumbles yet are doing their damnedest to. The sex job challenges one’s prowess less than any hasty inept stud can fantasy while trotting out to saddle up in skittish fashion for another nightly moment of self-service. How, in such a case, could pillow talk be cared for? What go-getter in a rush, unable not to pop his cookies, great at spending, not conserving, can secure real staying power? When each sexual encounter is a test it’s hard indeed for anybody to relate creatively or freely. Keeping modern woman gratified is quite a ticklish proposition, grappling as it were not only with a most moot problem but, alas, almost with a pile driver, she who given rein will peak so often it’s small wonder next morn she looks peaked.* Each stout tumbler that gets drained is left adrip with dew; after blood-sport exertions cocks lie shagged out, limp and desolate. The pressures to provide the pleasure ride entirely upon the male: inert and noncommunicating, woman in her seeming wisdom wants her partner to do all the work and read her mind as well. Indulged, securing all her life, taking for granted foreplay yet uninterested and unpractised in it, she refuses to share the responsibility to gratify. The golden rule’s not practised as a rule; the race between two bedmates is but seldom nip and tuck. Such lengthy sex performance, constantly expected to shake a leg, may debilitate a man less rapidly than does a woman’s lack of love. Regardless of the frequency of their sex congress, nearly all men are not satisfied with it; could such dissatisfaction stem less from their ignorance of what will satisfy their partners than from failure of the latter to provide what’s really needed, caring? In spite of St. Valentine’s Day boosters rarely has the rule of loveless sex in nature ever been breached. One suspects at base all sex expression’s self-love. Curiously, real love isn’t sexy. Since most men have let their self-esteem become contingent on their sex performances, and those become poor substitutes for hearty contact, is it strange that rapists and adulterers are rife? What if men turn to whores for love more than for sex? How damning of “nonwhores.”

* Pressed hard, one’s inclined to feel that the insatiate vagina (it’s the womb that’s most demanding) may be only a male fancy—a projection from being driven hard to get his nuts cracked; woman’s need for psychic intimacy tends to strike man as unnatural, emasculating, symptomatic of neurotic insecurity: “How can I pump as hard as her heart is demanding?” Constant closeness makes him gasp for freedom.

358 _234_

Those handsome he-men (some of them rich kultur heros) who regard their shrimplike penises as salient objects of wide envy must be blades who suffer dreaming of wombs, who above all fear the severing of those very penises; if prominent authorities require tweaking, it’s because their chauvinism is bred in the bone. Does heeling patients mean the process of imposing on them the Old Testament morality from which they suffer well enough already? Being hostile toward one’s oppressor is a healthy sign; yet curiously shrinks describe it as a symptom of an illness termed lesbianism—a severe cold help- lessly induced by the “heavenly” father’s long cold spells?* To be successful as a harum-scarum sex practitioner, one needs must be pure bastard? What a letdown for each braggart prince among gorillas to have to confront a comely female who is not immediately floored by his incomparably topping powers! Tough titty, kiddy. Thus he settles for some tipsy hussy more susceptible to tumbling. “What a solace women would provide could one fall into their arms yet not into their hands”; so surmise the dorkheads. Women’s essence has been misconceived so long as lying in being properly boffed by reputed pistol Petes that any unenthralled nymph is presumed to be a lezzie: plainly butches “must” be desperately sick and ugly inside at least, shifting uncooperatively to each other for manipulation or some merely quasi-groovy cunnilingus inasmuch as they cannot obtain that hugeous pumped-up prize of prizes, the tumescent, mighty rank, poleaxing prong of King Kong, all the bone in whose spine is bunched in a lump atop it.† Is one’s johnson towering and truly magic, always on the ball, looking to run-and-gun—or that winning grin a death’s head?‡ Jocks have more than average success at casual sexual encounters, not long-term relationships; consider what this says about the eager-beaver rooters, who are evidently less gung-ho to watch than to play bouncy-bouncy. Lesbians are winked at, as the flits are not, because our patriarchal underworld, so cocksure that the former “just need a good humping,” feels no threat in them comparable to its own latent homosexuality. Many a closet queen with cotton

* A safe assumption, since men in the mass are such topflight if dour doers, getting off their chests good coughs or sneezes, the sum of their loving; like most alienists, they apparently are capable of caring next to nil for anything beyond their business. † How ludicrous and yet pathetic is priapic pride. Does infantile identity depend on one’s crown jewels? ‡ It seems queer that northerners have long been fascinated with as also fearful of the negroid shaft?

359 mouth, hugging his bottle and inappetent for box lunch, desperate for more than a taste, holds that only dolls are proper dicky-lickers. Who has plugged so frustratingly long that hoary piece of propaganda, who’s upheld so loweringly the myth of vaginal orgasm over every outbreak of clitoromania, if not spear- side lechers? Is it strange an indigent gal’s most apt to receive a royal scragging? Dominance by mashers, all those stiffs or walking phalli females always have sought out, both sprang from and will perish with their exercise of war and rapine, their role-playing punkoid skinheads offing victims: each conscripted prick trains dying to ram up some bloody giggy. _235_

Moderns dust and fondle custom stereophonic consoles, sets supposed to offer top reception, but their planked stained spouses, once nice little articles of furniture, to whom they’ve got all too accustomed, are in greater need of careful cleaning and considerate consoling. Do electrical vibrators wired with gutta-percha seem quite satisfactory rubber substitutes for human animal contact? Does it truly reassure, really allay anxiety, to get in close touch with such masterly masseurs that are machines? Do plastic dolls, despite affording hollow satisfaction, yet in fact deserve to be preferred to realer bubbleheads because, along with their good looks and modest cost, at least the mockups do not smell or sound so gross? Bad listeners in bed are always mouthing “Come again?” Many a wife has laid back like a smoldering log, waiting for some forepleasure never to come from a butterfingers, boiling forever over her underdone half-minute eggs. His licks and promises just never seem to hit the spot. What kind of climax, for that matter, can a series of half-hour tearjerkers reach, when the erotic finesse, following hard on such spurts, after never mind how many decades of smarmy devotion by a dull galoot all thumbs who’s still familiar with each erroneous zone, rests in a quick turnoff and turn-over, so sedate to sleep? Such anticlimaxes leave lots of lasses feeling murderous—another impulse they’re expected to resist. Defining womankind as blondes, brunettes, etc. displays such typically profound and subtle masculine discrimination! Men expend more time and effort in deciding what cars to buy than which baggages to wed.* The snappy

* Meeting an amorist exclusively for evenings out is as reliable a test of worthiness for family life as judging a jet filly by wine-clouded candlelight. “Distance lends enchantment to the view.”—Myopes, beware!

360 car-ad broad’s far from an accident. Is it enough knowing to push the proper buttons, exercising power to make engines race? People rush to have autos serviced by mechanics, they lift hoods to look at motors that misfire; but what negligence of failing marriages. Adjudging tootsie-wootsies lifeless things we “have,” dingbats to fling about, appurtenances, lusterless hubcaps or worn radial tires for our run-down hotrods, merely objects of affection, readily available makes, playthings, slinky models to be traded in every few years (the material nowadays being so expendable), is mechanically to proffer more inanimate utensils, our inutile selves. Why all the pride in having driven our old heaps into the ground? Rather than to get our selves lubricated or our oil regularly changed, we need a totally new kind of car. The champagne trick or sugar daddy, having had his ashes hauled times without number, babbles with nostalgia about the pyrotechnics of his old flames, having pyromaniacally, one by one, hosed and doused them all, genu- flecting to none but those sainted cunts. For years he hunted for a trusting, tall, willowy doe; but now he’ll settle for just any butterball that’s willing. The transcendent vanity of womanizing man is hardly worth a harlot’s hello. Almost unheard-of the girl the fuckhead isn’t proud and glad to be obscene with. So familiar with countless bodies, sore pressed to locate and pluck a daisy of a daisy chain, a rip attaches next to no importance to them. Who deems others quite unworthy of love, in his eyes mere quims or passing fan- nies, diagrams his self, accessory demimondaine.

_236_

The scientific Xian who inquires, “Why should not a virgin bear a child? . . . And how do we know that the hen may not form the germ as well as the cock?” will discover, after beheading his cock, how many eggs are laid and young hatched by no spring chicken at all. The local god who circumcises is a sightless idol and the circumcised heart a crippled heart, unsanctified. May one suggest to barbering barbarians, self-interested apostles, hairbrained clip artists who would scissor all maids’ tresses, that they inwardly slice off their own lackluster heads instead?

_237_

How scrupulously some have their scalps massaged and stray hairs trimmed, while inside all is choked with weeds. Sharpwitted, snippy, shaven, pushy,

361 playing it cool, warming up to nobody, controlled efficiency personified, many a scold, refrigerated as a chatterbox, prefers to classify her bitchy self as an emancipated woman. Just a single gnawing doubt remains: is any nonchalant quick-on-the-flaw slick chick known as “emancipated woman” who’s now master of a chilling standardized career carved out as if by some male chiseler—a woman? One cannot but wonder, when her fears are nourished if not fabricated by the advertising industry, conditioning her to a very fashionable if debased conformity with marketable products. Thus purveyors of both self-indulging edibles and antidotal slimming aids can only profit by obliterating any deeper craving for a sustentative spiritual purpose. Could every peckish dieter, noshing through thick and thin, be inevasibly bulimic, a determined binger? Must she be so terrified that she’ll become a superseded buffalo butt? Only a distraught society that is emotionally starved as well as morally insolvent could push greed and also counterpoisons—countless needless “foods” or “goods” plus diet clinics and aerobics courses—playing off the public’s appetites and guilt and helping to produce the plague of anorexia.* Thus, too, do vaginal-deodorant sponsors push and prosper from anxiety, urging their audiences to be sexier than ever yet to smother all the venereal odors: as fast as the natural juices flow they’re to be overpoweringly flushed away with chemicals; the tampon industry helps to produce the very anguish it claims to allay. Both sweat and hair of underarms are deemed unfeminine by soap- and razor-peddling Puritan society, signs of impurity in a creature somehow a nonanimal; no wonder women, well immersed in such tight double binds, in such denial of our mortal animality, fill up the fish bowls that are schizo wards. As feeblest guys are the most arrogant, so bitchiest gals are the most dependent—disinclined as indolents to tackle the hard inner labor needed to grow free. Thus it is sloth, not fear, keeps women twice as apt to suffer from depression as men are? A big-ass soul need not in

* Neurotics such as anorexics crave emotional connection—firstly with at least one dominating parent who taught that to cast a shadow’s wicked—but flee social give-and-take while vainly hoping to protect their selves and midriffs from entanglements and probable additional rejection: fasting is for saintly purity’s sake, fatness representing sundry folds of uncontrollable desires satisfying which could well bloat the being with guilt; the skeletal ideal is an invulnerable self without needs, totally secure by making no demands, hence never risking dashed hopes. Each cadaverous lass proud of her self-deprivations ought to realize that her mouthfuls can be more than pecks and that she need not shape her life according to somebody else’s dumb-ass cooked-up image—rather, first of all needs to attend to her own needs. The temper tantrum her condition represents requires redirection from her frame.

362 flesh be fatass, may indeed be slender as a reed. Like soldiers, hordes of willing matrons, terribly removed from their ancestral foraging roots, do their monkey drills to seem in fancy like gazelles. In any normal tribal milieu seldom ever were real women ravishing; to torture countless girls as advertisers do with fantasies of being impossibly attractive is no less obscene than vile. Who knows how much of modern woman’s angst flows from her ads-inoculated worry that her body image flirts with flab? Shape does mean state of health, not merely form. Many a dieter with thunder thighs who’s dying for a pig-out dwells a long time in a stew. For plastics the molding is all: neat doctors’ helpers, for example, (which estate embraces not just diesel dykes but equally nice little holy sisters) thus presume—too much—that they know what is best for all. Women excel at bandaging—and wounding. Every nurse feels helpless, lost, without somebody to manipulate. If a male’s inability to comprehend his mate* seems almost surely a misfortune, her presumption that she comprehends him is most likely a disaster. Wedding hoping to reform a man was always a humongous blunder: that’s what our reform schools were for. Inexplicably a wife will work for years to change her hubby’s grating habits, all the while complain- ing that he’s not the man she married. Choose to love a woman or to know her: drop the dream that you (or anyone) can do both. No man (save perhaps a fairy) can unravel what peculiar features cause a jill to cream her silk- ies. Neither men nor women clamor to be told about the universal crime of rape—by women of men’s spirits. As a rule wives want to hear not what their husbands feel but what the wives want them to feel. When men do break their mothers’ tempered molds that kept the former from expressing their emotions, women more than likely spurn the latter since they’re missing from imprinted lists of those acceptable; a lot of topics, too, men find forbidden as unwholesome in the stodgy family domain. The brassy managerial virago, pulling rank and ruling household with an iron hand, acts out her fearful role as Superwoman, dominating with particularly niggling standards her spawn’s lives, forever prying into their affairs, requiring that their every moment be accounted for; scarce-tolerated hubby is the hub of no one’s universe, but just the dildo that is clutched, the debtor who must pay the bills. What wonder that the greater world regards as less than admirable the unnatural aggressiveness of norteamericana amazons, punkettes at heart, ball-busters to a man?

* How curious a blessing in disguise that, after peeling layer upon layer from a woman’s soul, one penetrates at last to a dark veil. So close together dwell man’s paradise and purgatory— inside woman’s flesh and heart.

363 _238_

What frightful, unapparent power women wield, the power to make or break their mates. No man (except a caliph or the most tenacious rapist) can be sure of getting laid on any given day; but any woman not a snaggletoothed gargoyle can do so. Though cows look black at night, man yet believes a daytime wench turns Venus in the dark. The pressure’s on each woman to snag a resourceful mainstay well before her menopause—failing which she’s out of luck; her reproductive shutdown drops her market value to near zilch. Even the ugliest of dogs seems able to get pregnant, if not married; swallowing a watermelon seed is not a tough trick. Nearly every man depends upon the disposition—goodwill or else ill will—of some dame. Misogyny breeds in exasperation about women’s veto power over sex, in male resentment of the compromises bargainers must strike to get exclusive ready access to unbridled bods. Pray do not think that woman can have nothing to do with a man’s becoming miserable flop as lover boy. The vulnerable prick lies at the mercy of the pussy, and her inconspicuous clit gives her the inexhaustible potential to delude him. If in fact few women do not fake their orgasms, man’s hoary image of La Femme as actress and deceiver must be perfectly correct. Did she not write the book on artifice and subterfuge? “Conjugal rights” of course have to include the right of wives to say No; doing so enables them to keep some dignity and self-determination. Yet many a lady has undone, annulled, laid waste her gentleman in bed, by her aversion making irreversible his impotence or else obliging him to get a little on the side. Can any woman not withhold her amorous cooperation if she knows that this will devastate the man she’s trying to penalize? What crueler action, next to physical brutality itself, than to deny an amiable, famished partner sexual fulfillment? Homicide takes sundry forms, and wives have often been successful, loyal to the death, without the awkward presence of the least incriminating evidence. Some pussy-whipped breadwinners lacking in ambition nonetheless are driven to destroy themselves with stress; they bust their guts or asses, ofttimes literally; hence the yawning if unbruited gender gap in our longevity? When Mom embodies dominance, to leave home so to found a family means for a boy not to inherit obligations and prerogatives but, instead, to shuffle them off on a newfound dominating matron. Man, in fine, must constitute the indispensable backbone of his family and community—or else the fragile wishbone picked clean as a whistle, a mere broken, hardly merry

364 merrythought.* What kind of marriage can be fashioned when the man already is, to all intents and purposes, an absentee? Most men experience an overcast of impotence, since actual potency involves being unafraid to expose oneself. Patriarchy’s poverty decrees that they feel little sense of power, even less of love, while forced to fear rejection by their fellows should they dare betray the system that’s exploiting them. Committing to a single woman in an ultimate relationship becomes thus a demanding challenge. Their delusion of held “power” derives from not being willing to express themselves, remaining loyal to the macho myth. Who cares that well-nigh all the opportunities for far-flung enterprise today are concentrated in a few cold-blooded hands atop the giant corporations? By precluding almost everybody from decision-making the “free-market” system manages to frustrate virtually all human potential. The Depression was indeed Great which attacked the self-esteem of countless menfolk by divesting them of their role as reliable providers for their families. An ever- shrinking sham elite of overly Big Brothers now monopolizes the traditional male powers of decisive action; by defining man as absolute appropriator is expropriated most men’s masculinity. Deprive a man of all authority, dis- qualify him as a man, but pray do not then disapprove that he behaves with no responsibility. Has the heroic mold not already been shattered beyond possible recovery? Our fragile social construct has no room for rebels who think and act independently whatever the risk; both the Odysseus and Jesus characters face liquidation in today’s unreal world, which demands adjustable uncritical “electors” (read consumers). Freedom of decision is deflected into the trivial spheres of pastime sports, directionless tourism, haphazard eroticism, and above all pseudocultural life (mainline TV-sucking). Real dynamic mastery (somehow still projected as a masculine preserve) can only be increasingly irrelevant in a society hagridden and devoted to compulsive acquisition of commodities. Producing offspring in a self-consumptive orbit clashes with “the independent lifestyle” that’s the standard; the result: a sharp decline in birthrate save among least-educated couples and the warehousing of both the very young and old in the most cost-effective institutions, finishing with minimal interference in maximal private† indulgences. The profit motive turns each noble enterprise into a total loss.

* What real threat’s posed by widespread female infiltration on the job? Must man be so dependent on an unequivocal prestige and a conspicuous virility? Maybe the phallus, in sharp contrast to the vulva, makes essential such blunt visibility. † The root of idiocy. 365 _239_

Could sexual “fulfillment” be invariable foolery? Mature sex: that means what? A purple sacred cow? Is it conceivable, not to mention realizable, or a gross contradiction in terms, when (an obvious though underlying assumption of this our disoriented underworld) “social maturity” implies being able, sans remorse, to screw one’s neighbors blind? Can some pursue, vie, and exploit, yet still be womanly? Or, for that matter, manly? Those who regularly play with boobies tend to grow much like them. Is the favorite event of overgrown bambinos not the breast stroke? “Men” appear to favor soccer balls for playthings over softballs. Poor old Michelangelo and Beethoven: they must not have realized that real men suck nipples and squeeze hooters nightly. Seeing darkly through dark glasses, the cool snobbish psychopathic element prefer the casual, hit-and-run bang—running down the opposite sex, an extension of self-screwing—over a commitment to a mutual sexuality that might well weaken their illusively unlimited autonomy. Since opportunities for intimacy are so rare in daily life, and since unmasking is unfaceable by most of us, the bulk of serious social intercourse consists in playing games, in plain deceit. Sex has been liberated; only human beings have not. The “freer” we are with our flesh, the better bound in spirit. The sex “revolution” revolutionized no more than commerce, which, now uninhibited, is booming and corrupting both the older and the younger generations. Fleshly “liberation” can be very useful to each “brave new” ruling class—by sapping energies that otherwise might be directed into efforts to eliminate the empire. Surely every woman needs to be no longer willing to play second fiddle. What real freedom can exist in sex as long as economic slavery continues? Does the latter not ensure unending crops of wheedlers? Obsolete men cannot stomach being under a directress. Men remain on top in politics, in bed, in salaries, in all too many women’s psyches. What appears as freedom may in fact be boredom. “Wham, bam, ‘Thank ye, ma’am,’ ” is only roughly six inches on the trip to infinity: come on now, let’s go all the way. The novelty of sex with someone strange soon wears off like some past year’s epidermis, but love is no novelty or passing fancy—never mind how fresh and flabbergasting it may be. To come across, far more exhilarating than to come, is harder than hard-nosed financiers or play- girls prompt at playing nightly instalments on their mink coats can imagine. These get-rich-quick schemers, having no idea how to clean up, yet are always ready to help dreamers get poor quick. The prosty, classified as such or not,

366 is seldom red-hot mamma, having been produced by mercenary lovelessness, thus shunning any loving man: she gives no one the brush-off as she does integrity. The crime of drabs is not their cunning coldness but the fact that in life they’re in business of any kind. All bawds know what to give men who have everything: encouragement. Johns pay a prostitute not merely for the physical release supplied but so that she will leave them be after their deeds are done. Who’s really kneaded in a massage parlor? And who needs stiff hookers to help one defrost? Men tend to fall for cool performers, not for hambones, since the former put on the more satisfying acts. If ladies lack trust which permits them orgasms, why blame their mates instead of facing justified old pique toward their mas? The issue’s not female “frigidity” but male ham-fistedness. There are no frigid women, only those still unawakened who, unable to communicate, are rooted in unconscious blocks and held in heedless hands of nescience; what each disappointed Aphrodite needs to ask her unevaginated self is: “What am I doing bedded down with a man I don’t desire?” The problem’s one that neither partner can manage to put a finger on. Girls under patriarchy are indoctrinated to appreciate sex as a Government-approved God-given good but never masturbation or a like perversion such as friends caressing—strictly the prescribed old Missionary in-and-out. If Greeking and postilioning are indeed quite commonplace in marriages; if human intercourse—uniquely frontal in position, eyeball to eyeball—is no more than a poor man’s way to masterbate while risking needless pregnancies; if woman’s often no less master than a fag at playing on the skin flute; if an orgasm is not in fact the ordinary outcome of her copulating, so that it does not take “a real man” to make her come; if her best highs result from digital or oral twiddling, not from any hulking male tool;* and if self-arousal is instinctive and superior to coitus in either sex for reaching strongest climax: must we not conclude that wo/man is by nature and by definition the perverted if not double-gaited beast? Are invert pairs computing 69 at work to hatch a form of higher math? Indeed, the very fact that female orgasm is not a natural but a learned function gives the lie to “normal human life.”† The latter constitutes perpetual repression and denial, it’s exclusionary and ignoring, serving a divided straitened ego, from the cradle to the grave. “Normality” in human

* More than half of female orgasms in fact occur in absence of male partners. † As for who or what is unnatural, two-thirds of 76 societies examined by an anthropologist and a psychologist view same-sex intercourse as normal and have no term such as “homos” to designate nonheteros. More bad news for extant buggered-up bigots. 367 sexuality, as Dr. Freud deduced, entails derangement? Do we find this world of peter-eaters and muff-divers really to our fancy, welcome as the roses in May?

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Girls today are mostly B-girls and not A. “A good girl’s apt to be a faithful wife.” But who is apt to be a good girl? Bridebed’s now indeed an archaism. “Does she?”—Yes, yes, dosed and overdosed, she does, yet does not love.* Pure maids are born, but tricks like her are made; our underworld will make her master all the wiles in the book—and a few out of it. Loaded with dough, her pill-box fortress totally impregnable, the top-drawer tramp, that lush mush that can tender no lush mush, whose job is just a piece of cake, is nonetheless so void in head and heart and oven of ferment—no matter how pneumatic nor how much she has passed round—as to be driven to compete in the executive race up to nowhere at all costs. Above all, sleeping round the clock or globe, as expert rigger any bucko or gallant who likes a little port in every girl (and little sprog in every port) must never let his or her underworn slip of warm weakness show by crying with real joy or sorrow. As a woman the “successful woman” seldom is successful; as a man . . . ditto.

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Better murder the expected child than risk losing one’s invaluable form and irresponsibility. Motherhood is fled by some—if not enough—matrons who are unfit for it; but what have they done to become fit save to watch their weight—go up? Thought wrongly to be overeducated when they’re really educated wrongly, they’ve been schooled in digging dirt on others but not for them in a fruitful soil; to be well-reared carries a weightier burden than exhibiting a striking stern. The imposition of picayune roles and finical routines on petti- coats without provision of organic and ongoing interests (except for dabblers) after obligations of childrearing are met guarantees a multitude of husbands disenchanted by being served day after day, year unto year, no cuts but hot tongue plus cold shoulder. What’s more understandable than that a hausfrau should revolt against continuously being cooped up with ignorant preschoolers? Could the isolated household and the degradation of each housewife be

* If only lovelies with no love to give provoked not love!

368 connected? Worse yet, with her skyline circumscribed to shopping center, kitchen sink, and telly, the truth is that the incipiently alcoholic, parasitically idle padwife, by her drab role bored to tears, a bag with a big sag in spirit if not bosom, scarcely gets content by going out to work in shop or office: this can only mean being occupied, as a rule, in some equivalently cloistered form of neurasthenic barrenness.* You’ve come a long way, baby—to a noisome, cut-short life. Fearing a public flop, as like as not the farrow milch cow is to be found lolloping to seize protrusively upon another “accidental” pregnancy plus its sequential afterthought, yet one more fuckup unmistakably.

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All bellicoseness is adjudged unladylike—especially toward the flawless goddess of our babyhood, Mom—hence is as a rule denied and ends up being displaced upon a later deity and brood. Many a daughter privately comes to despise her mother for resigning herself to whatever was doled out to her. Besides humiliating woman, such victimization mutilates the maiden seeking clues respecting what it means to be a woman. Sexy is supposed to mean unmotherly,† so girls are made to learn to be at bottom ornaments and actresses; small wonder that misandrous wives and lesbians abound. Most mothers prettify and fidget over daughters from the cradle on, thus keeping womankind convinced they can’t be satisfactory as they are. Mom directed all her highest hopes toward her son(s) for the vicarious fulfillment of her thwarted gifts. How can the girl forgive the puppet she’s been prepped to be?

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Can any woman be not only womanly and motherly but also a creative spirit? Can those mechanized femmes bent on acquisition and expedience escape frustration and futility? Contentment cannot be reached by pursuit. It’s natural that women have a problem keeping separate their pro and personal identities. Infighting at the workplace undermines the myth of nurturance. Career colleens who’re casually cast in full career yet out of their cast-iron control careen, fast operators pulling swifties whether as executrices handling the males or as cracks of doom pursuing the overall phallacy, dependent as they

* “Work” relieves domestic isolation, possibly, but not interior sterility. † Men hardly can conceive their mothers actively enjoying sex; success in doing so would rub their polymorphous recollections the wrong way. 369 are on picking up many a male trick, have to be veritably fucked up, tried and found wanton. “Who” comes next on the disposable agenda? Working girls continually on the job, to carry on, must fantasize that they’re not working, that it’s they who, feigning climax, screw their customers and not vice versa— some exploit, whichever way one views it. Loving, on the contrary, requires effortless renunciation of one’s power over others. Strident women’s rightists unreservedly convinced of their emotional superiority as women, suffer from machisma. How could chivalry survive in any world of liberated—if this means opinionated, arrogant, self- centered—ladies wearing waffle-stompers? Women have in fact held men enslaved to their sex organs for an eon or two. Worst of all, that may be merely Nature’s uppity real disposition. Like it or not, even tightlipped “women’s lib- bers” cannot get divorced from mankind, nor can muscling men escape being members of “their” womankind. Perhaps it is a sham to claim that Woman is oppressed by Man; decapitalized, in the flesh, the former has to be responsible as often as the latter for exploitative relationships. How urgent is it to relieve downtrodden lackeys who outlive their coarse oppressors by an average eight years? Those misanthropic nonconformists miss the revolution who enjoy espousing causes more than humans. Liberation movements—loads of crap. Real freedom is an individual and not a mass potential; legislation may facilitate the process but cannot enact it. In exchange for equal rights as an efficient wage serf,* woman has won “independence,” i.e., equally empty, dead-alive employment. Is she managing to challenge worms on their own turf? What shall it profit anybody to be free to vote if she remains a slave to authorized inequity? Now damsels, not just tomboys, hanker after posts as firemen or as dogfaces. Where the country that’s relied predominantly on female combatants? Swamped in an imaginary Amazon? Without the fabricated image of his work achievement, modern man imagines himself impotent; and woman lusts after a similarly vain position? Is she working hard to pull the choo-choo? Why, to be sure, should she settle for being a mere moll when on the threshold beckon big-time jobs in her own right? Too long dismissed, laid on the shelf, she suffered from show- offish schizothymia; momentarily acknowledged, she claims instant wholeness. Kept behind a veil as menial for ages, Cinderella’s now relieved and proud to have pulled it off, slipping her loser and proving her lissom self no less adept than any man in running a computer; but the crystal shoe is on

* Rooted medievally in envy, vying’s linked to lying.

370 the other foot: the I.B.M. runs her and off her feet, however “high” those hobbling heels have raised her in the male-run Hades. What have crippled ladies to lose save their man-ufactured chains, the chief of which is egocentric lust for power? Not just status-seeking through one’s spouse or children needs removing—even status-seeking itself, status per se; losing it, one finds all one could look for. Having to raise one big boy along with several small boys is one big handful. Nothing but our public patriarchal underworld of “screw thy neighbor” keeps most boys boys and from ever getting enough mothering in the made-private sphere of the affections.* Consorts are who make the stellar actresses, the gracious princesses performing suit and service while affecting tearless reigning in their unreal castles, to the manor born with faces lifted.

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Damsels should be warned off giving their hands to wet dishrags. Sinking into his arms, she ends up with arms in his sink. Each loaf in the oven promises a mountain of hard labor. Most men ought to hesitate to order their wives to rustle their bustles. Working mothers—as if, outside every country’s parasitic peerage, there were ever any other kind. When husbands volunteer some household help, it’s as a rule with what is relatively interesting, such as watching children, not with what’s entirely monotonous, like scrubbing floors or ironing. Might work-shy royals best be crowned with rolling pins? The endless work performed by womenfolk, no matter if it’s lavatorial in function, empathetic or whatever, always was more vital to the family and race than the odd jobs performed by menfolk. Where the wife run ragged who’s not oftentimes wished she could clean the floor with hubby? Whether working out or not, our scullions and hash-slingers, viewed as but preadult creatures, are forced to accept indignity and prisonlike milieus—with low or no pay to boot—since they are supposed to require neither independent income nor actual esteem; thus in that context they are rightly and properly the first to be hired and the last to be fired. Marriage may no longer be a lottery essentially obscene when all our incomes have at last been equalized. Inferior wage levels serve to keep most females off the welfare rolls yet also without power doing unpaid scut work. Communists apparently would liberate all women into

* He who weds a nurse has to be archpreservative or buttoned-down “by nature,” i.e., by conditioning.

371 new, scarce recognizable routines of exploitation. Engels,* like the chauvinistic bourgeoisie, uncouthly managed to equate work with wage labor and domestic tasks with immateriality. The problem—so far unaddressed—is not that menial jobs must be done but that the pay for them does not yet equal that of everybody else. Until such equity’s a fact throughout the world, to prate about a Just or Great or Free society is utter vaporing. Can any capitalist enterprise succeed or, for that matter, any state exist without cooperative women’s servitude? And how can slaving mothers ever bear a race that’s truly free? Is much misogyny not born in brooding, ruminating over bedmates on the rag? Many a shop has locked out female workers on the shaky grounds that they too frequently fall off the roof; the graver danger’s that the foreman falls down on the job. Female hysteria is a defense reaction to sex-cloven politics; depression and oppression are close-linked. The myth that women are more dexterous and patient than men was and is promoted to keep tagtails tied to the most tedious and unrewarding tasks, grateful for any fill-in drags- ville gig. They make but low-grade supervisors and executives yet topnotch nurses, store clerks, and stenographers because they are so sensitive and more agreeable, much better at toughing it out, than men.—So say men. When sensitive to others’ needs, a woman tends to seem unstable, even though such sensitivity or seeming instability has stabilized those others, helping them to stay insensitive. Innumerable single women counted on to work their buns off and to grind the coffee hope that, once they’re married and their muffins nightly being devoured, their blues will have lifted; married, they find themselves no less gofers, still expected to work their buns off and to be coffee grinders, serving as mere outlets for male spigots, always doing good while feeling bad. A sane society would lack so many spots for rusty, yellow-eyed spittoons. What forces rammy runts to ram or flush utilitarian kazoos or scuppers? Few domestic workers ever dared engage in walkouts. As if they still constituted a minority of pushovers, kits aren’t supposed to fight back—no more, that is, than a titillating pseudo-struggle; they’re viewed as no better than they fought to be. What wonder that it’s diaper-changers get to do most shitwork? Damningly as any dark-skinned cipher, outworn trulls and housemaids of

* A great theorist may be petty in his personal relationships as well as an egregious judge of character, leading one to doubt his theories’ greatness. Shouldn’t the fact one’s a total budgetary mismanager at once call into question one’s ideas?

372 all classes are kept economically degraded and enslaved in order to fulfill the white schnook’s ego’s gentlemanly wet dreams. “Hell and damnation: they’re no longer willing to wear girdles and high heels . . .” designed to bring to bear the fitting pelvic tumefaction, not to mention stupefaction. Yet may it have suited a few well-heeled women, not just men, to have imposed Victorian repression, since it helped free them from drudgery, providing status as genteel ideal lay figures? Airily doffing a hardly haloesque top hat to frilly fillies, to those close- cropped dames envisioned as but moonish bodies, hazily exotic, iridescent, and angelic, bares one’s bald illusion, like some bubble-gum balloon, that one has got them by the short hairs. Although constant losses from both top and bottom in fact stand in close relation, trimmed Samson’s loss was surely a fable; that is, it bears a strong moral for the unclipped snips who need not fear imaginary castration, for the unplucked quails whose skulls are not yet barren, not for platinum-ringed numskulls.

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“Ask no questions with respect to sex, for your body—end and beginning—is but an abomination, food for worms,” impart the elders, those who’ve made it so, who’ve framed such dirt-cheap claptrap for one. It’s the puritan streak that is dirty, diddling, and self-centered. Cultured persons hyperconscious of germs who compulsively bathe daily try without success to wash away unconscious guilt about a fancied-filthy life impulsion. Septicemia, however, is less rare than the syphilized scoundrels who wear white cloaks like to make out. “Onan” fantasies in every home, an antisocial letch in every body, and no family is free from spiritual perversion; love of onanistic selves is not love. How we hanker after leisurely picking our noses! Does our manufactured and conspicuous waste, though outrageous, overflow and choke us quite as much as does our massive inconspicuous waste? Who exercises no frugality is who is cheap. Some sneer at one retiring early: do they fear retiring early? For in that sleep who knows what self-indulging, conscience-pricking dreams may come? Must nocturnal emissions always be pollutions, monthlies foul discharges, seed life’s surplus of waste matter? Dare we contemplate our kind’s uncountable blown noses and orgasmic sneezes? Must the urogenital tract stink to such high heaven? Is the yummy tummy’s jelly roll, whose very codfish presence holds one smellbound, good enough to eat? Just get a load of that delicious tuna and delectable manure pile.

373 Munching hair pie, plunging into thatches, would be less off-putting* if the filling were less putrid, if the forest were balsamic and not scrubby, fairly free of smegma fighting with deterging. Rare the meat today that has been sun- cured. Perfume’s now necessity for every modern sink? Cunt is no gutter term without a cause. How shameful, sleazy, stinko seems the cooch, but maybe only while one stays stuck like a leech to self. The thought of bearing young can nauseate some only because their unfruitful selves, bellies and heads, are nauseated, their flesh tainted. What can childless women learn from boning up on the fact multiple orgasms are enjoyed most rarely by them and most frequently by multiple-birth mothers? Fear of giving life is basically fear of giving love, la tâche sans tache. Could nausea in early pregnancy be simply warning to be cautious dietwise, a hint that modest feeding may protect the embryo? Regrettably for most the morning sickness marks a round-the-clock disease knowing no period that is congruent with complacent capitalism’s pathology. In fundamentalist Amerika there’s an appalling blockage of the facts of menstruation; books are banned and ignorance and muddlement preferred and so ensured. A woman’s body was “designed” to have considerably fewer monthlies than its current modern version does: for nearly all our breed’s existence womenkind were either pregnant or lactating. “Change of life” requires quotation marks. Beginning fragrant, who foresees the lass will finish frowzy? Nothing simpler than to waste away . . . except to grow young, which is simpler still.

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Fasting is for living younger, not just longer: it rejuvenates, having profound if unappreciated repercussions, lancing as it does humanity’s death-in-life impulse at the tap root. Though appearing to be suicidal in intent,† when

* Lust reportedly makes any bodily liquid palatable. Feasting on the blooming bosoms compensates for the malodorous bottoms? Nature must have “wanted” lust to triumph over male disgust with “her” key generative apparatus; woman’s program, unlike nature’s, calls for maximal clit-licking, hoovering of all the juices present. “Mother” simply “wishes” man to take the bait hook, line, and sinker, visually hooked and yet led by our sniffers. Indispensable the greasy odorific venereal equipment without which the bulk of women (not to mention men) would lose much of their fascination. In our immemorial hormonal witchery by vaginal aromas rings the call of our wild origins. † Surely zealous mystic fasters such as “Jesus” long for death no less than for eternal life? Which saintly heros dare drain horror’s goblet to the dregs?

374 practised with discretion it is in effect animal life’s primary restorative. Nature holds wisdom lost to human freaks. Most people presuppose that no one is more unnatural than who in seeming health abstains from all comestibles when every kind is close at hand; such common speculators dream that fasting fourteen days means only to lose two weeks, that the process is a stunt performed for morbid or voluptuous visions by some weirdy ravenous for a fresh vulval cut; but the less gossipworthy, more phenomenal, plain truth is that real balance is restored, the eyes cleared, vision earned, though while reclin- ing all one’s orifices body forth a noisome inner state, the overweight brain churning with withdrawal symptoms like a washing machine. Abstinence is great performed in moderation; the best appetizer/aphrodisiac is rest. A fast’s chief danger is not physical but that it flatters sado-masturbatory ego, it intensifies tormenting and delusory self-centeredness, the ingrown toe- nail growing onward inward. What each autocrat needs is to stop at nothing, to go all the way . . . not with some hot sugar pie but with the fast to the death—of self. Going the limit may not be going far in spirit: physical images fail to enclasp moral imagination. Lust is doubtless sacred, but love is a whole, not just a piece: as long as we think there is more than one sex, there is only sex; for total love is when division stops.

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Unknown the eyes of innocence while streets gape full of fangs, we quitting our lairs as seldom as possible. Blessed the day when pig meat is no longer sold, when fucking is no filthy word or act in any filthy body’s mind, no cashing in on excremental need. To eff and blind broadcasts a gut befouled. Gross-witted cusses who habitually fling oaths flaunt and hug their self- regarding habits, haunted by fear of their own violent cravings. Generally it’s incorrigible fuckers—very masculine of course*—who hurl the epithet of douche bag. Few louts struggling not to end up rough trade realize what they’re insecurely asking for when telling one to “Shove it, chum” or “Up thine with turpentine.” How sadist jokers seem to relish goosing comrades. For some mutual jack-offs boring holes in pasteboard walls it gratifies enough to get a hand job or the short end of the stick. Male fantasies of perpetrat- ing rape divert from other men the threat of violence. Pornography serves up its unrealistic images, its infantile conceptions, of how the “two” sexes

* As a rule male diction’s proven malediction; indisputably what malefactor ever could match the male factor? 375 actually do relate; it fortifies the juvenile’s pathetic dream that sex is no more than what man does to a slew of “girls” and they for him. The main aim of both rapist and four-letter word-wielder must be to downgrade women generally in the vain hope this may somehow upgrade their own bottomless self-disrespect. The dirty joke or tale relates not just the leering crisco’s, crap- per’s, or fourflusher’s simmering castration-angst but also his pervasive pueril- ism. Basically “shit” expresses self-disgust, “fuck” hate of others : a forthright revulsion at the ordinary dirtiness is not so eloquent of warped repulsion as the underlying animosity. Vile talk but intimates the foulmouthed speakers’ impotence as serfs in uncreative roles. Who cares to learn about their latest more than questionable sexcapades? So long as children are unlovingly, unwisely dealt with and their actual carnality denied, our everyday terms of sex and elimination will be swear words, sewer traffic, ricocheting bullets of the tongue.* Cock-and-bull stories are told and sold everywhere, but telling how both cock and bull are daily being used and abused is thought obscene. To nurse and to copulate, those primary drives and animal acts of feeding and of mating, surely the most pleasing, reassuring, beneficial of experiences that an infant and an adult human can enjoy, warm sanctuaries in a chilly world, indeed the very nuz- zling functions by grace of which we survive on earth,† are judged most needless and debased: thus in an oral, voyeuristic culture “human” nature, death on anything raw, has to judge itself perverted, scarce worth damn. We must, it seems, indulge the little steer-reared rascals getting practice as commandos and cow-suckled angels playing with their dolls, despite the soaring crime rate and live population bomb that threaten everybody’s future. Yet watch how parents explode if kids explore their genital distinctions or rehearse, by playing hide the weenie, sexual intercourse, the one ubiquitous activity that still requires cooperative conduct. Dry runs or humps in either first or second childhood any sterile underworld must needs condemn.

* Excretory and reproductive actions got distorted, frowned on, “sometime” during treebound preman’s transformation into a terrestrial beast; heretofore elimination and sex were purely instinctive. Hence the real original sin must have been forsaking arboreal habits, quitting cold the tree of innocent mortality? Revulsion grew in deepest recesses against his dissolution. Killing suddenly made him aware of what a sickly crud and sodding shit, mattering diddly-squat, he was to make out of himself? Until we face the moldy fabrications of approved belligerency that produced our self-contemptuous society, we cannot better it. † Though there’s no need instinctually to have children—that’s behavior learned.

376 _248_

Common as dirt, do so-called queers more deeply dread the darksome fur or bleeding slit of womankind than cruising coppers or gaybashers, scorning to accept that giddy gorge or never-quenched tarantula’s throat as the passageway to every wonder of the womb? Out of belittlement of their pet cobras, they become entranced by others’ waving wands; thus denigrating leads straight to such misplaced glorifying? Are they fascinated by a masculinity and adequacy that they wrongly fancy they are lacking? Are we forced at weaning to transfer our passionate attachments from maternal nipples to our pater’s penis? And to worship Phallos leads so many to prefer fellatio to other genital activity? Queer humankind, both male and female, thus becomes obsessed with being near the macho icon; that explains why most folks end up no more than prodigious putzes? Angst about imaginary ravenous sharp-snapping suc- cubi dressed to the teeth may not be altogether unrealistic; it might come from noticing how readily one’s peenie shrivels to a dinky corpse; on top of that an actively volcanic mate—a monster from the deep—might well bite any pippy-poo head off. Do men perchance hang out exclusively with other men in all those bull sessions to compensate for their delusions of inferiority, of being castrated?* Emotionally short-changed and lamed, faggots may well nurse a grudgement toward loving people; rather than effeminate, they’re immature—boys destined never to reach manhood free from vengefulness. The more neurotic any soul, the more s/he is preoccupied with status, and his or her sexuality distorted, to serve power drives instead of seeking sensual satiety. It’s males, not females, suffer most from penis envy, brainwashed that their sexuality depends upon their phalli’s size. The lengths to which some swollen dorks go to enlarge their rods must leave one absolutely stumped. No man is measurable by a ruler. Poofters must have hope that dieting on beefcake, hugging their own ilk, will strengthen their own shaky frames. No doubt each mobster, for example, feels more cocky with a gunsel by his side. If nothing else, some fetishists may at least give good head. Could every pix be keen on pix? Each narcissist’s nostalgic for a paradise nobody every occupied. A guppie’s apt to be unbearably fastidious, a neatnik who’s compelled to gussy up his wardrobe, pad, and vehicle, etc. Very fraternal superficial ties

* Could homosexuals, like Orientals, be in fact superior in IQ, aspirations, social gifts, and economic prudence—oddly the genetic carriers of mankind’s best proclivities? Like Jews, however, or like women, pretty boys really like picking holes in one another.

377 with women may well veil a lacy fratter’s deeper chill toward them; sharing their role as prick-suckers,* women yet feel fruit flies don’t endanger them? A mincing smirking peacock such as glitzy Liberace† rouses irresistible maternal sentiment in and vast puerile backing by girls old and young; not only silly teenyrockers dream of making it as starfuckers. Each error of direction that turns up at puberty was programed in some years before; without enfeebled same-sex parent image and like ego, deviance has difficulty in developing? Supposed inadequacies stem from ineffectual paternity/maternity? Yet who can know with certainty what vagaries or influences, social or genetic, in fact cause it? Whether sexual orientation or a terminal disease, fate chooses one; one hardly chooses it. To overstress distinctions and inculcate narrow images in children may engender most anxieties and kinks in adults. All “perversions” may be strategies of masquerade—pathetic acts permitting one to flout the arbitrary halters with which every hypocritic underworld hampers its youth, to parody the artificial split between aggressive domineering masculinity and passive yielding femininity. Psychiatrists must have a skewed view of inversion, since they never normally see (save within some mirror) a bull specimen of homo nor a macho one of hetero. Fact is, a queer may not be a queer fish at all. Despite discovering that swishes are in no profound sense different from us, for instance in attachment to boyish antiquity, to narcissistic transience, we all the same proclaim them “ill” in order to insinuate that their clandestine conduct’s well beyond control, thus aggravating everybody’s fear and ostracism of them; we appear bound to incinerate odd faggots with our favorite witches. Homophobia is rampant in most cultures since all men are composites of masculine and feminine attributes and young men are far more confused about their sexual identities than are coeval women. The chief reason for gaybashers’ prevalence: “straight” youths are threatened by—unable to acknowledge—their own factual animas. We’d rather flush fags down the toilet than face their enjoying swapping spits. The straightest of the straight feel that fellatio sucks rope. Our primitively punitive society is queer for seeing deviates pay for their pleasures with distress. The most perverse defenders of the military’s “no-gay” policy must have their way in matters that involve deep national insecurity.

* Could both misogyny and homophobia, indeed, derive in good part from identifying women and queers as such irredeemable scumsuckers? † Outwardly denying his own faggotry to keep his homophobic mater “happy,” that soul did at last concede, “the whole point of celebrity may be the spectacle of people forced to tell transparent lies in public.” 378 It should be no surprise that fairies, striving vainly to become invis- ibly conspicuous, so frequently have been accomplished actors;* many, all the same, could not help dropping beads while seeking to slip almost any body a quick length. To open up or come out probably means only to get bunged- up. Over ages most pricks have cared bugger-all about the plight of deviants. In order to give aid for AIDS,† we’ve got to get it? Quite a healthy hunk of Gay Lib, blithe youths plunging through the bushes reckless of the killer serpents, has succumbed condemned to melancholy. Each soul called gay (as a sick joke) has long been abandoned up the river, up shit creek without a paddle. How inapt is it that buggery can mean perdition? Homos snipe at one another with the epithet of “evil,” not to mention “sad-assed,” tipping off their self-debasement; fooling around’s a fit rather than queer phrase for their activity, since it can hardly have the weighty repercussions of a birth. Sodomy, immeasurably older than old Sodom, is an act more than a bit of a drag. Flits try vainly to forgive themselves for being real buggers, horsepricks lusting to cornhole fuzznutted faunlets. Like a hetero adulterer, a lah-di-dah is likely to deny the sticky sort of hole he’s in. It’s only queers would call the poop chute rosebud. Any tony nancy may appear as pretty witty, while his life as a whole, circuited by pederasty, by manipulated pogues or bumboys, must be really pretty hideous.

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Are perverts necessarily unhealthy, maybe only nonconformists in a moralistic and repressed environment? And yet, the clash between morality and sexuality arises from within the individual—not from without—to bolster his integrity.‡ Why is sex perversion such a touchy subject hard to give a

* What great invert fictioneer appears to have a problem in transposing his characters’ genders, rendering his own atypical (indeed, bizarre) desires acceptable to ordinary readers? Strangely, “gays” and lesbians have got a simpler and less inauthentic track to travel, being freer from the various accustomed intersex constraints—the taxing, complex, and accommodating ballroom dance “straights” must perform; hence inverts’ greater chances to develop artistry. Were stardom and bisexuality not always inextricably linked? While all actors operate in a purported monosexual world, the great ones are invariably characterized by their gender ambiguity. † For AIDS-battling professionals the monstrous challenge that bisexuals pose is their ubiquity—present in every land and culture, and yet frequently invisible, even to themselves, thus undetectable until too late. ‡ It is to outcast Rank, friend of artistocratic art, we owe these aromatic insights. 379 whole new twist? It may be one of nature’s ploys to check wild population growth, an otherwise inscrutable experiment that takes place commonly and naturally. Could such deviations be attempts to snap the chain of reproduction and thus of paternal domination—efforts to prevent the reappearance of the hated pater who continually has disrupted the libidinal perfection of the mother-offspring idyll? Might erotic aberrations constitute but honest protests, plucky challenges, against determined racial uniformity, ingenuous rebellions against the tyranny of primitive relationships? A key trait postu- lated in perversion is rejection of the guilt that sex, born in incestual and homicidal wishes, carries clinging to it. Very possibly the Oedipal desire represents the budding individual’s desperate hope for wombbound freedom from the common fate, compulsory submergence in the monstrous species; and the corollary is that all libido conflicts, from the simplest masturbation to the most diverse perversions, also all our clumsy dodges aimed at keeping secret sexual matters, may be no more than quite wholesome, all too human tries to personalize the indifferent collective, just defiances of every dutiful role into which each family, reactionary past recall, inserts its young.* Might humankind be wholly offspring of sex deviants—all fetishists of nursing boobs? In fact the disproportionality and incongruity between our far from normal mundane round and the hardly determinable thrust of every kind of sexual experience baffles the world. Society suppresses infantile sex acts because acknowledging them might well bode ill for its own continuance? The likelihood of social chaos looms. Lust constitutes a threat to undermine the very infrastructure of a socialized existence; thus the overwhelming fear as well as fascination that attaches to erotic liberation. Obsolete industrial society’s harassment of the invert population has been rooted in the State’s dread of our growing infecundity and its will to compel folk to make babies, future factory fodder; thus have masturbation and premarital sex, contraception and abortion, also been suppressed throughout a productivity-mad century. If the generic immortality that’s ordinary sex’s pride and joy comes out illusion, is the solitary lastingness that deviance less noisily lays claim to not as vain? For every phenomenon is an ephemeron. Even a Shakespeare’s destined for annihilation, leaving not a jot behind.

* A precept preached and even practised by our trendy (Third?) Reichian teachers/parents: “Thou shalt screw and so be screwed.”

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Those myriad engagements roving homophiles partake in* underscore their sameness, not their individuality, and so dispel the sought-for novelty; such synonymity makes for like anonymity, such liberal morality for amorality. The glaring promiscuity of “gays” and the comparative constancy of lesbians betray the fundamental lay of so-called normal male and female populations. The most faggoty of souls would like to fancy that no less than one in two, not merely one in ten, out of their sex are pansies, preferably knobbers masterful at doing knob jobs: that would much enlarge their prospects, multiply their opportunities, for more inconsequential bunghole bunny fucks, for satisfaction of their ceaseless nutty urges. Do all fusspots, tearoom queens or flaming fruitbars have fun playing checkers at stroke houses or, more likely, circulating, pirouetting, at drag parties? Might they have a predilection for observing comrades taking shit? Fairies do seem to be proficient at backbiting and at reaming out; they love to ride each other and will cut near any body a new asshole. Inverts often seem, like egocentric “fellow” poets, to reveal among themselves a goosey green-eyed spitefulness, finding it hard to get off one another’s back; each evidently needs to have his partner’s ass. The line between fags’ hypersensitivity and ordinary snarkiness is very thin. Cocksuckers seem obliged to be real ones. Those of the two-faced Comstock or E. Hoover stamp are able to divert their own depraved ambitions and revolting bigotries into career campaigns transforming a state service into a giant T.rex spreading waves of panic through a continent of relatively decent folk while also laying waste their lives, depriving them of the least joy. Monogamy was long required and homosexuality tabooed to keep the public suffering; the bona fide bisexuality of everybody’s been denied, proclaimed impossible—well, impermissible, nay, inconceivable. Yet not just sodomites incline to be impersonal, asocial, tight-assed, and malicious, sticking it to ’em, tangling tailbones, thus notoriously incompat- ible and mutable in their relationships. All couples’ conflicts are engendered not least by the ruthless competition with which genders in our kultur are imbued. The selfsame dread lurking in homosexuality—dread of the isolating consequences of one’s own aggressiveness—lurks equally in all neurosis and prevents correction being sought: how extricate so intricate a self from such

* One hyperactive dickbrain is reported to have registered nearly fifty casual encounters in a single evening.

381 a trap or impasse that embraces and encases it? How can analysis heal one addicted to one’s own? Contempt is given birth by the early subversion of the genital. Unsexed neurotics dare not see that their only castrator is internal, that real coupling—that is, unifying—frees one from, and does not force one into, danger: sauve qui peut. So many of us, femmes at heart, still fear to face the ultimate emotional bankruptcy of our unbending sociosexual disorders: “Better cut my losses, better some thing than existent nothing.”

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The straightest are at heart the kinkiest. Who—save some fairies—want the commonness of dog-style coitus exposed? Are “well-informed” thick mat- tress knights or courtesans not ignorant, their stylish selves not less than seemly? Who’s so screwy? “What a lowdown dirty shame this lewd vile evil and reviling mind you have!”—You said it, sister. Truest scales divulge the power censorship’s bald prohibitions exert. Right beneath each strong taboo there lies an equipotent itching. Motives of those driven to exact revenge on lawbreakers take after those of the transgressors. Why have all prodnosing moral guardians forbidding us to think licentious thoughts never stopped to think that no one—least of all they—can succeed in not thinking something without first thinking it? Perhaps because learning to think has never been appealing? Is it not wholly abnormal to find loathsome gazing at buck-naked bodies? All too truly mothers, censors ofttimes relish nasty duties. Porno lit, like sexual perversion, is far more concerned with dominance than with voluptuousness. Solemn laws against insidious pornography invariably fail to ban escapist paperback romances or detergent operas,* lurid confession mags or costumed rock contortionists, because the masterly lawmakers, surfeited with their privy collections of spread beaver, see no need to seize what goopy trash gives puffy matrons and lean teenyboppers the hysteric hots. Suggestive “lyrics,” more than jungle beats, call forth the kits’ fantastic ruts. The sexes

* Most of the time women lack the opportunity for crying jags, yet hanker for them; hence their countless ill-advised romances, most of them rank gluey fictions. Mediocrity finds mediocrity enthralling. Weepy heroine addicts seek to blot out the sterility of their own real-life choices, not to alter them: thus men and marriage stay enormous disillusionments. The moral of all such moronic tales and drippy melodramas: that domestic trivia and personal exchanges are eternally the heart of nearly every woman’s life; a pious fallacy of weepers reinforces the admonitory message, viz., that her one important mission must remain securing straight-up Mr. Right while steering clear of countless wrong gees.

382 differ in their taste for cuts: men need more tender loins, women more tender hearts. What women want’s identity, men anonymity. Can skin flicks really help those with the blues? To clean up men-directed porno, might estab- lishing official bawdyhouses in all our communities serve? But to clean up women’s, it’s the total power structure and economy that must be revolutionized. And then will either sex be satisfied? The fact is, many tasteless creatures, not just groupies, seem to thrive on garden-variety goo or hocky. The bored cannot feel what is so boring. Porn, like dreams, consists in a polluted stream of characterless sludge, with now and then a memorable serendipitous stroke of charm amid the meaningless incessant dreariness. The sex act’s trite and negligible as material for literature, whereas sexuality’s the very atmosphere that all creative writing needs to breathe and thrive. Presented as a caricature of consumers’ own dull sexuality, the spectacle of porn provides an intimation of the desperate ennui industrial society endured ere its decease. A mouthy lady, once aroused, athirst to find her own divining rods, like chimp in estrus lays bare an insatiable appetite all right . . . but not for truth. Each hymen finds it hard to keep from greeting, or to hold off entertaining, many. Curiously the most virtuous, not just evil, tongues spread slander. Who’re unable, nursing coprolalomania, to button up which lips? Is asking for a little labial restraint from dippermouths too much? To feel more than a self-directed tolerance or feckless forbearance is necessary, Missus, for the task of discovering one’s motherloving self is really and truly a son of a bitch. Are the all but headless fouled-up chickens, shitting green and mad as wet hens, not offended, grossed out, by all the facetiae—each ribald double entendre, every prankish verbal somersault—benignly gamboling as on some long-lost vernal sward upon these pages? Then by all means let us tear the fearfully libidinous tongues, not just the intolerable scurrilities, out of our wound-up selves and cast them from us, lapsing back to easy slumber mid flumdummery, mummies. Is it better to be blind and dumb (as any sound seer could tell you) than to see and speak ill? Would a smothery carnivore such as a sow or she-bear like, by any chance, to stifle me? Keep your shirt on, sweetheartless. Mildly jolted by the caddish rough stuff, must she yet prefer to see her dashing son, of whom “we’re so damned proud,” keep mum and so be honored as well-shredded meat or mutilated cadaver for distinguished service to “his” country than as an ornery cuss guilty of openly breathing, blurting risqué phraseology or ideology? A rorty Rabelaisian mouth is both event and servant every silent majority, even the horde of talk-show ratchet-jaws, delights in scrubbing. Can

383 the conduct of the odd sad deviate be quite as terrible as the interminable vengeful onslaughts launched by nosey parkers of the “moral” right? Most folk are busybodies dead sure they can recognize true virtue; but, when scouting more the scabrous contents than the classic style, such scatologic stickybeaks and tin-ears can’t distinguish right and proper writing, let alone reat and com- pleat pure speech. The language that appears uncouth is at root but unknown. “Obscenity” will have been banished permanently when rebellion, inquiry, human birth, have too been duly banished permanently. Giving old bats such as Mrs. Grundies—those grimalkins whose vocabularies leave so much to be desired—fresh conniption fits, however, may itself be obsolete. Prissy Shamericans endure a kulchur unbelievably, unpalatably prurient; when they say they are “seeing” one another they mean they are screwing one another. God forbid that there be any candid discourse on TV regarding sexuality: in squeamish straitlaced North Shamerica none can be permitted, only titillation cooked up to drive hyping and public anxiety, now one and the same thing. Instead of actual sex lives thus people are afforded shopping “lives.” Smut is a problem only where the soil needs enriching. What’s most horrifying to the arrière-garde when male or female impersonators are displayed: the fact that gender differentiations are entirely arbitrary. Must the flibbertigibbet stay in such a rigid frame of mind, such a tsk-tsking tizzy? Why so narrow, shrunken, and seclusive, Maw? Still hopelessly confined, forever infanticipating, in that disinfected lying-in facility? Does bearing children crack, empty the shell like some once fresh, now pan-fried egg? Or was there no mind there worth mentioning to start with? Mother wit: Mamma mia, still another contradizione?

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What do moderns dread more than travail? Is living’s meaning not to fill with meaning, to make pregnant? Could it be abortionists—those in the family way more than the hired killers—who are the abortions? The remunera- tive embryo-purging racket has provided countless copulators with a ready method of evading the responsibilities of either birth control or giving birth. The fate of fetuses must mean significantly less than the convenience or the experience their brief retainers can enjoy. Our latest relics do their best to cover up reality with sheaths or coffins, but they fail: success in adding kicks minus creation is success? Control of procreation was for long considered “much too delicate” a subject to be raised in public, but on such a potent subject only silence still resounds as utterly indelicate. An unprotected maiden’s

384 apt to end with her ass in a sling. At last effective contraception snapped the inelastic link between the yelps and moans of copulation and the shrieks and groans of childbirth. The pride in prolific parenthood is nowadays the unambiguously wrong emotion. Surely such spectacular spurts in some populaces are no cause for joy? What is the portent of the fact that in our well- provided state most pregnancies are still unplanned? The truism that pullulating human beings are more irrational than other animals? Traditionally women have been held responsible for pregnancy while simultaneously disal- lowed dominion over it. Who if not tomfool pricks opposed to using rubbers have long forced “their” fillies to abort? Unworthy even of anility, a pervy clique of monks with no balls, loving out of vanity and greed* the folly of such overpopulating copulating that’s involved in Vatican roulette, determined the Pill’s immorality, while the majority of women is determining its efficacy; full-gutted posterity, if any, will determine just how well the new god has destroyed both monks and women. How unbreathable a mystery that those for whom officially the primal sin remains to have been born should urge so anxiously the solemn herd to multiply. The vital role of sex is not, as numbnuts priests and primates would so naturally have it, impregnation of submissive country lasses but genetic variegation; for the laws were made through the impartiality of natural selection, not by the self-interest of neutered “male” authorities. Peculiarly popular with women, Xianity remains the perfect Faith for criminals; for every sin (the serpents tell us) is forgivable, including spousal battery or rape. Real women would not have agreed so long to be the main support of all those anti-feminist yet pedophilic men, such weak-kneed mafiosi. Waywardly, however, to think birth can be avoided through pill-popping ritual is just as cockeyed as and no less petty than lethargically to dream death has been evaded by injecting blunder drugs, the marvel being if one improves in spite of their effects. Our chemicalized sterilized society long used to firing blanks demands the reproductive prostitution, the exploitatory process, that is surrogate maternity. How pregnant that ’twas dope that stilled the dread Victorians properly had of V.D.† plus the ugly, sickly, double-hearted view of sex that they passed on to us.

* Call it Church policy dressed up as sacred doctrine if you please. Many have justly found “the Holocaust” incomprehensibly intolerable; whereas I too stand aghast at the remorseless countless executions of our reproductive politics. † No one quite credits either Cupid’s curse or true love till its onset, its maiden attack. In desperation to preserve monogamy, Puritanism mushroomed in reaction to the ravages of syphilis.

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Our sexual problems are not genuine, for, like all other problems, they’re projections of our masturbating selves—no matter how many vaunted “conquests” we have made, nor how few have not been imaginary. Belly power is as impotent as brain power to bear love; a warm heart throbs more vitally in man or woman than a blazing mind or steaming flesh. Commercialized society devalues older folk, assumes they’ve lost their joie de vivre and that the better any man’s erections likewise has to be his love life; yet a long and firm devotion plays a larger role than countless lengthy hard-ons in the best creative life. Many a good tune’s playable on an old fiddle. In our postindustrial age thinking too hard of remaining hard is hardly hard. As long as we’re unready and unwilling to devote as strong an effort to improving quality in our bequests as we now do to maximizing quantity, we’ll make a mess of childrens’ lives. Until man has more frequent movements (bowel and soul) of which he is unconscious, life will stay a dark and hard obstruction to himself. Habitually it’s denied that sex dwells inter urinam et faeces and is oftentimes far from ecstatic. Tough shit, old folks, but we cannot rid our selves of prut and open up a truly new world out of plugged-up organisms sitting in bound meditation on their regular ethic of expedience. Better get “fixed,” as might some popular tabby, than get “caught;” but better still to pay the debt to nature in creation at the right moment, now or never, now and ever. Powerful aversion may well spring to life toward a partner found to be infertile.* Far too many tubes are tied—in spirit. Till we’ve lost our foaming anxiety about engendering, dying in the ring, we can have no conception, nothing but some contraception, of the boutless event that love is, no mere thrashing blood sport. We have with “good reason” feared it as the gravest threat to freedom, sensing that to love must spell the end of us; but what an incomparable relief would be our getting our incorporeal rocks off—summum bonum. When our threatened whalelike egos disappear, then flowing vitals, heads and sperm, may be conserved. People profoundly err who fall asleep the moment they have turned in. Dry-nursed and trained to repose alone, they mastered self-abuse, not inter-course; they die like kings, in perfect privacy. Replete, a mate appears to have solved the dilemma of oneself, while incomplete selves keep each at a loss as pairs of fools: a matter of perceiving now or then and whole or not. Fair slumber may well

* Women have traditionally been blamed for childlessness. How galling it must be for many louts to have to recognize that male sterility exists and may be commoner than female.

386 be life’s cream—next to a winsome woman.* Having passed up the experience of witnessing some little missy shuddering beneath the diligent palpations of the Master Lover must be an inestimable deprivation? Deadly sin, the one and only crime that’s unforgivable, consists less in a loss than in a miss: to not love, hopelessly amiss, ab ovo waste, deliberately to miss the essential. One of humankind’s pet pastimes: crying over spilt milk. Lo, behold the awful permanence of every transient involvement, whether undertaken or evaded. Fact is, losing one’s virginity is a far cry from loving. Having masterfully balled this world up, man’s rewarded with sweet F.A.

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Slake thy thirst with the life of the fruit that cannot be forbidden, from the tree of the mystery beyond good and evil. What is it but living flesh, uniquely rolling over in eternal clover, that inspirits us? Against black Thanatos’s back- drop studding Eros lays bare, breaks her incandescent secrets. Girding up our loins and pressing forward to the penetralia, let’s flush the entries and flow into oneself, musky succulence itself. Enter this covenant of seminal principles wherein no creature’s unwell, no blood shed nor pain inflicted, and inside one, in the altogether, there dwells genuine heaven on earth, where and when enravishment is fearless and the good time dateless, each in a pair for once being both, the ultimate within the intimate. Believe it or not, there are no blue days in heaven. Nor is there intercourse with—rather, union of—the dislocated self when one adores, a graceful if unguarded miracle, the infant savior risen out of an adult corpse fallen in delectable desire. Now, as the wild night wind rises, roll away like Thor himself disporting in Valhalla, fleshing out his storm track. Nighty-night.

* Or is that but ultimate illusion, the best being the great Naught—naughtier by far, beyond conception?

387 388 V Simple Crossword

389 390 Truth is a matter of the heart; Some catch a glimpse of it in art. v We strain to grasp what can’t be grasped, What must be wave-kissed to be clasped. v The mind Is blind. v The tree of knowledge we forget; It grows within the garden yet; One only wakes in paradise With silent mind and open eyes. v One’s life is given a new lease When reasoning and willing cease.

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Ecce Sol. One can behold the sun, at least odd sunblinks; scarcely though, by staring at it. Too much superficial light is blinding, draws down deepest madness. Whose the light by which the fiery eye is seen?

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Before truth’s hoary question can be popped there pipes up love’s fresh answer. In truth there’s no question/doctrine/rationale of love—all contradictions in terms. Credible faith dawns beyond belief. The problem lasts no longer than one’s failure to give it complete attention. The sole vexing stickler to solve, to dissolve: each problematic self. But how about our pet aversion, that all too familiar “race” or “national issue,” “Negro” or “Jewish problem”? We have segregated people as abstractions out of disregard for them as individuals, for example tamping adolescents into racist categories such as “juvenile delinquents.” There’s no splitting headache, surely, but the lonely hate in us and our compulsion to protect it with rich “building blocks” that turn out blockbusters. The antiseptic for dark anti-Semitism and like psyche-sapping plagues is earliest organic liberty; belated sexual liberation is no antidote for impotence.

391 We and the quandary are one: we are the quandary, the quintessential hangup, and all quondam loves are not. Our worst—because our subtlest— trouble is that we’ve imagined ideas to be real; for sin, like psychological disease, consists in our aberrant, self-distorting notion of it. If immersed in every moment’s action, who can agonize about the universal senselessness? The pregnant mystery is manifested not in brooding over but in bearing living; not in any problem solved but in reality experienced. Evaluating one’s experience is an uncommon, questionable gift.∗ Now love life more than any meaning of life, probably demeaning. “Love” of “truth” can only be produced by self; the truth of love must grow out of oneself.

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The truth’s an open secret that consists in fervency—a wild yet fragile self- sown flower whose bud lies latent in oneself but which bursts out of no one knows where: cultivate it simply doing nothing. Nobody successfully trans- plants reality: just let it grow and effloresce where it resides—in us when we are absent in it. The essential is not the smell of our selves during fasts but our essence afterwards. We can enjoy it, swept aloft by heaven-storming scents of earth in skirling swirls of highland updrafts after rain, but we cannot possess it, we can’t capture it within our fists. By bottling it, one will discover what a failure, what a waste, all one’s preserves are. To experience transfiguration can present no more a problem than to breathe pure air. What natural line of demarcation separates nonliving substances from living? Everything’s alive and the deep secret shouts for very joy in every place, dare one but hear it. When the vital rhythm’s felt, one moves to music that still sets the stars in motion. All is so, all is assimilable. Pray, in what direction does infinity not shine? Man may indeed be most impressed by it, but it may never be expressed by man. Communicable is disease, not urgent truth. Seize love to keep and, like a drop of deadly mercury, quick as a wink it shoots away—a silver sliver, streaking meteor or UFO gone from the corner of your eye the selfsame second you’ve caught sight of it;† a shimmery mirage that fades and vanishes into thin air as, thirst-racked, you go lunging after it. Yet hesitate or waver, and it gives you the slip. Sparrowlike, it flits off with

* As Nietzsche darkly long suspected, all those venerated philosophs, “the Nazarene” and “Socrates,” “Buddha” and Schopenhauer, seemed to be a bit too much bewitched by death. Less wisdom’s needed than somehow to love this cureless illness, life. † Some “things” one has to witness to believe. 392 the fleeting moments; hawklike, it takes captive at one fell swoop. So elusive is it, you would swear it was illusive. It’s not sense that can be known but knowledge that has to be sensed. By holding the glowing brand in our hands, we learn the wisdom in beholding it. Think we that we can know and thus control things without blasting them, our selves included? At the point of origin the question of creating or destroying is impertinent. Kindly do not blame the author for truth being as oblique as it’s elliptical. How needful to be mindful of the real original heart that’s oneself. Awareness is no longer being conscious of the self. To grasp the trap, first extricate your self. A true philosophy is no less skeptical than magisterial. Who is it that seeks liberation from the very notion of it? “Nothing matters” means that nothing is what matters. One knows most who knows least.

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We turn our taps: at once warm water flows; But why we turned our taps, nobody knows. To see the unknown as the unknown, that is veritable knowledge. Can the unknown, through the known, be knowable? In this inheres our most deceptive, not just questionable, liberty. Can cagey man be freed of his self via finite mind it self? It’s no use to ask others, for one learns the answer only by oneself. We never reach the New World unless we push off into the unknown sea. What matters it if the ocean that we sail on is uncharted and outlandish? Strangely, that is just what matters, that the sea is vast, unvanquishable, fertile. There’s an undiscovered country closest of all coasts to us whose copious, nay, infinite resources lie as yet entirely untouched. And those unestimable predators now bidding to exploit Good have confirmed their reservation for a flight to hell. Already it’s too late to veer off, to change course? Who could have made our every destiny such a fait accompli? However light its traffic, it’s each one-track mind it self that is the pileup.

_259_

Truth encompasses all our mental divisions and surpasses every choice vision. Was not everybody once a gleam in someone’s glimmer? Every coupling’s doubtlessly a crapshoot. Don’t our sires vanish into, as they once appeared from, inexplicability—like very strangers? Even “planned” conceptions, fatal fruits of quite unlikely confrontations, are mysterious accidents of 393 unpredictable proximity, chance flings and falls of genetic dice, imperfectly determined spins in unobserved roulette. No better proof, moreover, of the ingrained randomness of human pairing than that identical twins don’t fall for the same mates.* How exquisitely sharp are all those stabs of our lost opportunities. The most enormous word in English: if; the most unrecognized is neverness. Genes’ and conditioning’s cards dealt us in our early years are few, restricting our lives’ destiny; ambitions and ideals can only lift so much. We only think we’ve chosen our affectional affairs. The concept of free will is no doubt more a heartfelt wish than a rock-hard reality. Wisdom dwells not in brooding over that which might have been but in creating here and now. Turn windward, steadfastly pull forward stroke on stroke; Unflappable, quail not when unforecast squalls strike. The hurricane, a fire-breathing, unchained mariner, is our top galley hand; for coming through, the ballast needed is an empty hold. Every event may be inevitable, but none can be in all respects foreseen. Some worthies seem to want one actually ashamed to have a hunch. “No one is free,” bemoan the dungeon-housed. Not many inmates are prepared to go over the wall. Who knows to what extent experience originates within us and our every encounter we subliminally choose? Far from grown up, we blame the tables that we bump against and call them fate. When woe betides us it’s no accident. Bone-lazily man fiddle-farts around, concluding that his ignorance is caused by others’ viciousness, and not his viciousness by his own ignorance; but both exist because of his bone-laziness: no risk of charley horses in his brain. Determinism—could that be, perchance, but rationalized cowardice?† So many causes, yet so little meaning. There can be no twisted thought without a twisted thinker. Is our strongest fear perhaps of—freedom? Can we bite the bullet, welcome unresentfully, serenely, our inalterable sentences of lifelong unimpris- onment in sol? An anile life-termer, when pardoned, may be all too well conditioned by necessity willingly to vacate his unlocked cell; “free” men doing time call him stir-crazy. Normally we choose to overlook life’s flukey

* Conditioning and segregation in society—by race and education, income and location— radically cuts the number of available potential mates for any given individual. † Marxists and Freudians, note well. Since the appearance of the Quantum theory, i.e., for most of a century, the mechanistic world-view of naive, determined old determinists has been anachronistic, and materialism’s claim to scientific status has proved nothing if not spurious.

394 nature. Could the chancy measureless present tense by any chance alarm the modern mechanist compelled to quake before the shades of total isolation? These are only phantoms of the fatuous self. The compulsory is never difficult—quite the contrary. Break the illusory cold fetter of cause and effect, or perish in one’s cubicle. Those resolutions deemed acceptable and scientific are predictable; but truth is not predictable. Reality consists of single process, not of countless afterparts. Presuming every now ensues from then, we yet confuse one and the same event. Real understanding, ultimate non sequitur, is neither a result nor a reward: it’s in the very a priori instant of annihilating insight. Contemplation’s import’s in itself, not consequential. Spacey minds barred from reentry think that LSD can change them, keeping them on cloud nine; sorry, sad to say they’ve started too late in a zone of idiocy: no thing changes cloudy minds. The earth or Zen man is already stoned, thanks all the same. It is machines that are switched on or off. The switched-off may have never been tuned in. Those who imagine they are floating on a cloud may actually be floating in a cloud, each going over like a lead balloon, their nebulous selves clear as mud.

_260_

It flatters us to seem self-disciplined where we are no more than automatons—exempli gratia, sanctifying lust with the insignia of “love.” Our pasts and futures are not vital but mortal: the what was and what will be must give way for the what is to be. More shafts are left in the straight-arrow quiver of oneself than are dreamt of in our philosophies. We bracket nature as but one of many realms we now control; but nature’s one and in it there are many realms we’ve not envisaged and will not control. Completely secret is the truth to cleverness and just as sealed from smugness. Keenest pleasure, sharpest pain, deepest reality, must be experienced at unawares, by no experiencer, in full silence and obscurity. A prudent prophet keeps the awful gospel under wraps. Significance is incommunicado. Some say that it grows as gradually as a giant fir or cedar yearly, imperceptibly adding another ring to the subtle fragrance and aloof grandeur of centuries. Its lowly birth, however, as a rule ignored, comes closer to that of most delicate of flowers suddenly, without forewarning, blooming in the wilderness. Content is an uncomplicated marvel, similar to water, of which we are seldom conscious. Swifter than swiftest fish’s leap asea, Fresher than freshest fruit on vine or tree.

395 For truth, so like the long, unearthly love song of a timber wolf that’s soaring into crystal midnight, is as evanescent as perennial: no drawn-out dawning, but a startling lightning flash—mercurial bolt from the blue that leaves one thunder-struck, like scorched earth, burnt to a crisp. Light-years of partial blindness are outlasted by this very instant’s wholly blinding vision of the real. Any true apperception hits one like a ton of bricks.

_261_

Who thinks his splintered self profound and a freethinker? You must contradict your dummkopf superego, Herr Professor, putting on trial an ersatz life. Do you have some original ideas? Not so; for ideas cannot be original or owned. Feel the futility not just of positive but of all thinking. Truly the sole true thought is not thought. Deep understanding rests in simple wonder; yet what’s real transcends what is imagined. Screwing up his self into a concentrated crystal ball in order to examine undistorted that cheap looking glass, his mind, man is distracted by the forms reflected in it; grabbing for the forms, he finds precisely nothing there but the flawed mirror. Peering into the most powerful of telescopes, one sees a glittering eye peering back: it’s one’s own glassy squint eye. In our educated ignorance we view light as originating outside. What if there’s no out there out there? It is I create the universe, but thinking thinks up me. One unknown being, oneself, is both knower and known, one’s self. Nature is but a spiritless machine . . . to spiritless machines. The world outside is actually nothing seen from inside. We are really dwelling within naught, the cosmos having sprung not out of nil but inside “it.” We have supposed the world could well enough exist without our selves—to say the least, an understatement. Strange to say, the real is when no thing exists, when we our selves are not. To wake up, drop off into dreamless dreamland. Sleepwalking’s commoner than many think—when many think. Those owly-eyed may be less stupid than we think or, thinking, are. Poor Reason clutches for truth like an avid infant reaching for the harvest moon.* Astride a blind ass, man pursues the phantom panther. Strain to net and hold the oceanful of actuality, and you catch slippy self straining your brain. As ergomaniac, I think I am, ergo may well be not. Could one but see one’s self as others do, would one not vanish on the spot? Beautiful Truth, a nimble nymph, eludes pilgarlicky Pure Reason, a typically flaccid, purblind scholar

* How fascinated “men” remain with globes, particularly those attached to full-grown “girls.”

396 who, galumphing graveward, skirts real issues with sagacity and balderdash; chuffing along, the blundering leadfooted wonky cueball lumbers like a wal- rus after her, only to discover that for shambling goggle-eyed thickwitted nympholepts who muff their every opportunity she’s always just around the corner.

_262_

Truth can be kissed, but not by shrinking, Nor by an effort, nor by thinking. In the darkness quavers spirit’s burning mouth. No one observes the real but who is wholly fearless, free of violence. We wish to gain understanding without danger to our selves, but cannot have the one without the other. Truth is, greatest of all dangers is encountered in attainment of the truth, in digging her up. It is when our deserts jell as billabongs that we’re in deepest water. Faithfully, fearfully, each mind follows its familiar channels; thus it can’t immerse it self in joy, which flows in devious oceanic currents far from our electrographic zigzags. Need is not to reach the other shore but to get off this shore, to be in midstream, forever au courant. And yet, beyond what’s “right” and “wrong,” these “truths” and those “delusions,” there’s no “other shore” nor “this shore,” to say nothing of a stream in which to be. Neurotic, we go on mouthing narcotic formulas, obediently practising our drills, but these mechanical routines of our wired brains lead to sterility, not to reality; no one can be led to reality. A programed electronic mind is also geared to gronk out. A great recipe for “heavenly” ragout one can cook up, but for heavenly raging—storm of sweetness calling for no additives— there’s none. Religious practices, spiritual exercises?—What but contradictions in terms? Come to the end of the mind’s tether: oneself is a bronco that cannot be broken in, let alone lassoed. When riding actuality you need to take it by the horns. Who terminates the prison terminates the sentence.

_263_

Many a dogma is seductive by a dim electric light, but how does it look out here in the sunlight? Any myth’s true power lies in its remaining shrouded. If truth seems too racy and sunshiny for some gimpy groundhogs, those tame lamebrains may belong back in their holes. Why so stumped, halt, and blind, why so sawed-off, hobbled, and arrested? Normal ordinary invalids 397 that we are, and in the hands and teeth of medicine men and loan sharks hoaxing us with their distracting mumbo-jumbo and sharp hocus-pocus, we think we need our beliefs; but man will never understand and stand on the feet of himself until he flings away each and all of those dry-rotten crutches. Sweet appear the sugar-coated sleeping pills known as convictions, pleasant seem these hoodoo vaccinations, for they keep the pain our ignorance begets within bounds, well below the toleration point; nevertheless they but forestall the day of one’s awakening. Failing to find health via med-men, folk turn and head for the nearest health-voodoo shop—for any sort of resort but oneself. Fat chance mealy tubs of lard, irreducible to lean, will ever follow nonstop their reducing diets. All the latter help thin in the former is their tempers. Each dump with most surplus gone to waist, plump in the middle of a slimming program, easily could lose a stone of excess blubber, were decapi- tation executed; each such case of German goiter has been long disfigured by a strange growth on the neck—his noddle. Why so necessary to be a big personage, a no-neck carrying a lot of weight in eyes of others? Really classy, gutsy folk are seldom squat, and never lubberly. Is most fat no more than resentment now solidified? Obesity, that badge of insecurity, impelled continually to eat crow or humble pie, requires no diet but to stop altogether. Even could fools fly, they could not fly light. Thickos always putting on the feedbag seldom say a mouthful. Only the most callow or obtuse soul has not learned one can have too much of a good thing. Wisdom clearly has to be abstemious, but also free of straining to be. Is the bodily ailment what needs spending on, or the spiritual aliment, which costs no thing save self- expending? Fasting, throw out all those palliatives and refuse each dainty; taking the cure, give one’s lard-assed self up to oneself without fear of starvation; and the pain departs, one’s Cross is gone—no swordlike banner waved by blood-supported courts or churches, but the carpenter’s keel for a sturdy sailer, backbone for a home of wholeness, most abundant life. Christ bears less suffering than joy abounding. Love is hardly integrated, simply integral, not made whole but whole to begin with. The more stupes treat wounds, the more they fester. Eyewash, it is clear, is just that—eyewash. Do no thing, and nothing’s undone; every incrustation falls away. To get wise, one must lose faith in partial solutions and rely upon oneself, the true imponderable whole.

398 _264_

One ponders anguish, asking Nature why; But wordless are these woods, heedless the sky. v Where am I? Who am I? Why am I here? The questions echo like some answering jeer. Is everyone not dwelling in the middle of nowhere?

_265_

Prudence searches the skies for imaginary signs of Providence; wisdom spies clues to its overprudent real improvidence. This clueless self is now the only sleuth or truly private eye that may detect the mystery who is oneself. A rat or snitch is less effectual than the confederacy-free informant sussing out the whole that is oneself. The reason for living may well be that we cannot know the reason for living. The fable’s burden e’er consists of weightless baggage. Truth is definitely not an explanation, and if we are to understand it, we must not be satisfied with explanations, however ingenious, “need” for the known being produced by dread of the unknown.

_266_

How, without boosts from science or superstition, can one proceed on from the top of a hundred-foot pole? Warn I, “Look out”? Or “Look in”? No, but “look” not. If one looks premeditatingly, with motive never mind how grand, why bother looking, having found already, without serendipity, one’s corpu- lent belly’s projection? _267_

Something there is that won’t be understood: understanding this, we understand enough. Prognostication of behavior, mostly actuated beneath consciousness, will always be imperfect, since one lacks full knowledge of each individual’s experiences (as does s/he). This underworld is not for grasping, only for intuiting: what we can scan and sketch is not the actual terrain, merely a map. Thinking that we have faith, we have no faith. Believe we don’t believe, and we believe. To say that life is quite meaningless is quite meaningless. Not Nature but one’s self holds heartless emptiness. Who finds himself 399 most innocent is not least guilty. Could all thoughts consist in an identifying what can never be identical? Not even those twins dubbed identical are truly such, each being unique. “There’s no conception but seems a deception, no assertion’s true,” asserts the blasé nihilist, pulling the trigger at his empty temple. Many sore pressed to blow out their brains could do worse, having precious little thereby to lose. Everybody “in the know” achieves misunderstanding. Those who are convinced they comprehend what is incomprehensible err infinitely. It is crackpots that think they have found God. Cleaving to something for dear life leaves it cleft. That one alone who grasps nothing is given to grasp truth. No thing’s self-evident. But everything is no thing. Being is not some compartmentalized thing. When people isolate the truth they lose sight of the truth. By staking your claim, you mistake your claim: pursuing a definite end means reaching it. Our choice of route both roots and routs us; thinking, we have thought our own rewards. The destiny of every dualist is self-decreed. Exploiters end exploited; jailers are compelled to be more on their guard than prisoners. The hunter and the trapper are them selves eternally beset, caught tripping. Every marksman at war is a marked man. Why so sure that on your own you have arrived at a conclusion? And so proud to dwell inside your very dusty nation? Is there any thing to come to a foregone conclusion? Truly thinkers’ quests are inquests. We attempt to organize the truth, already through and through organic; therefore we dis- organize it. Man “produces” electricity, obscuring himself under lamps, but light outdistances all electricity. The sun has no need of our lambent candle power, of our evening’s performance as lackluster fireflies. We try to carve life into perfect shape, to cut it into ideal paper-doll-like patterns, and yet in our muddleheadedness we’re discomposed to learn that it’s no longer life, which in its infinite diversity cannot be reproduced. Why do we want to know why flowers bloom? Dissecting warblers’ throats, some of us hope to find out how they sing? You sing? Then sing, all hail to thee, blithe spirit!

_268_

Most essential is discovering, not proving, something. We don’t prove, deny or doubt that we can prove, deny or doubt the truth, but what we prove, deny or doubt is not the truth. The sole irrefragable argument can be no argument. Although some think that they desire perfection, what’s desired or thought is not perfection. Does one actually expect to pinpoint some thing in the center of those onions? He does know his onions who leaves peeling them to those

400 who like to weep. Our minds are more than meditators of our sorrow: they are its initiators. We are the inventors of our misery, the authors of our grief. The more we ask, the less we can receive. True meditation is not voluntary. Man can’t find the truth: it finds him when he’s not “looking” for it. First the wonderer has to discover the right question if it’s to be answered; of this there’s no question. What we’re looking for is what is looking. How to understand when next to none of us can stand what under-stands us all? Man is the mammal who learns early to read others’ interactions and reactions so as to deceive and so survive. Disguise in nature whispers truth to humans in its untrue word to hunters lying doggo that prey is not there. Reality to any creature’s senses is not “what is there” but what it’s useful for that creature to suppose is there. To find that which cannot be sought demands each seeker seek not that which can be found. In grasping nothing one is grasping all. Some think that truth lies in the quest for truth. Truly it lies there; but it lives in dying, not in hunting. Hard, incredibly hard to accept is the cold fact awaiting all God-seeking suckers: that all their regressive years of search, refusing to grow free from Mama’s breasts, have been in vain.

_269_

The way to understand the Way? Why, by not asking how or why. The way of understanding’s not a way to it. Away with all of your utilitarian demands. Impossible equals inevitable. The initial question never to be answered: what necessity was there for any world at all? Is that need there was “then” what there is now? We seek a lot, But truth is Nought; We search for light, But truth is Night: It floods unsought One lacking sight. The ultimate has no end. Every thing is relative and all things are only an absolute. What is completely other seems all too indefinite: each limited subject is dependent on its every object being equivalently limited. The absolute may be defined as that which may not be defined: it’s absolutely unimaginable. 401 _270_

”What! Then what of God?” some squeak. I tell them that the God they think they worship is neither demanding nor magnanimous, but that I’m both. While I may well forgive, torrential truth does not forgive. Yet how alluringly consolatory it feels to be curling up, smug and as snug as bugs in a rug, in our oh, so comfy “living” room, kneeling and beek- ing in front of the fading fire that is our all too concrete, self-fed God . . . mollycoddled, rocked to snoredom by the cozy radiation from those hypnotizing glowing amber embers, while how comfortless and nasty now seems thrashing nature—the tumultuous out-of-doors, unleashing razor-sharp and unpredictable divine gusts, which, though skirling down and laying low life’s botches, lift up hearty souls, who, breathing deeply, with high gusto greet their inner sun and need not cringe near kitschy images. Fling up the sun blinds! Yank out the cheap stuffing of those rag-doll deities! Feel free to miss the shooting stars of news and sports and show fizz. Genuine piety may consist in cocking a snook at, then voiding one’s bladder on, all Gods—from a considerable height. Overturn all idols, and their hollowness may in turn help one to turn to the overself, oneself. No words in time convey in very truth the wondrous horror of our being. Who can it be alone endures beyond this wild gale-bitten point, immitigably lost to any beacon blinking in the all-consuming dark and charging breakers bursting on a granite headland ceaselessly. One’s given to know when at one godawful gulp one’s downed the heavy sea now running.

_271_

To mature himself, man need not starve his senses; nor, to free the spirit, bind his breath. Until, however, he has taken leave of, lost his senses, he will not have come to them. ’Tis empty vistas fill us. Keeping our heads and yet losing our minds—yes, without drugs blowing, going clean out of, our wretched minds—we may regain our balance. No one fully grows up till the soul is emptied, till the ego is obliterated. Using not the mouth or mind or body, still express oneself. Who is it hears the soundless sound, that one hand clapping, and who sees the sightless sight, this lone heart leaping? The authentic entity is what no eye has seen, no ear has heard, no finger felt, no mind believed. In very truth we’re the invisible, inaudible, impalpable, incredible. Divinity touches us most with its intangibility, and murmurs in a dulcet undertone of

402 utter silence. What one’s hearing over headphones is not high fidelity. To listen calls for redisposing all of our words’ letters, so being silent. Stillness hovers deeper than a temporary mutedness: the shushing hearer must be absent for real silence to be present. Pull in both long ears! One cannot make the spirit quiet; it is quiet; one must simply pay attention to the clatter, all that jabber, one’s allowed to drown it out. True joy defies being plumbed and piped, easy as ABC, in any alphabet’s vest-pocket store of letters strung out learnedly to mask the width and depth of our incomprehension. Clever maxims trip off lips, but verity is dancing voicelessly and formlessly, outsmarting, ravishing, dumbfounding. Ere the slipshod tongue moves, the mot juste is spoken. As the mind yearns, one of full many a slip betwixt the cup and lip, the find is lost. When one’s mouth yawns for the baited hook, one’s as good as gutted. What we name spells far from the unnameable. The most precise of phraseology yet coarsens and betrays psychic activity; each tongue is fraught with snares that kill or cripple truth. Oneself remains struck speechless, whereas no tongue moves but out of dumbness. Ultimately all our languages are dead. Words incoherently con- fine, music significantly liberates.* Creation lies forgotten in the scripture of oneself, printed in invisible ink. Sages hinting that they hold the hidden key to life may tantalize but always keep their secret. Who can recognize, when heard, one’s own voice? Thus is life unto itself uncanny. Actuality’s a spell so exquisite that all conspires to break it.

_272_

With what desperation we’re still mouthing memorized timeworn clichés, so mesmerized are we by frozen words. The vapor trail of language determines feelings and so actions, normally for ill. Each language’s “purpose”: to describe a sphere of rich diversity yet imprecise significance. “Truth” represents a microscopic if unique and treasurable site in the domain of eloquent communication, so much of which is both extraverbal and unconscious. Coming to terms with all means abandoning all terms. Remove the verbal thought, and clarity’s restored. One’s newborn when one sloughs off the

* Least rational and natural, most sensual and human, of the arts is musica, forever feminine. Strange as it seems, it’s imprecision in musical speech that most intrigues and animates the soul. Music’s at once completely meaningless yet utterly significant, suggesting the conclusion that the sciences can never probe and chart humanity’s experiences adequately. Music represents the classic training for life, also the ideal escape hatch from it. 403 meandering tatterdemalion mind’s skin. Unlimited the harvest if and when one ceases slaving in the grain fields of insane pale consciousness and starts to let salubrious love’s flushing fruit trees rise. Man hopes to solve his problems by working them out, but won’t and can’t succeed, for working itself constitutes his problem. Some folk, anxious to be cultured persons, are off base, having touched none; fresh truth is no thing cultivatable but more than anything needs leaving alone to mature. Artificial fruits are false fruits. Shake off all the flimsy tinsel of opinion, strip bedizened self of frippery and reach-me-downs. What fop or model, wearing out the watchers, can display drapes that are not, quite simply, duds? Obliged to put your glad rags on habitually, you’re in serious adversity. The best-dressed lie can’t trump the naked truth. A mule spiffed up in a tuxedo yet remains a mule. How well attire such as a penguin suit can screen the true unfit unloveliness of almost everybody’s shape. Who can afford to run without a stitch? Identity’s garb comfortingly covers up self’s nudity; but trusting in one’s nakedness is what makes possible recurrent switch—or, better still, dropping—of robes. Weave no more chintzy, washed- out fabrications: step into the silky, brown, unfashionable birthday suit that is oneself, sartorial splendor itself. Are zazzy fashions not a public’s means of disregarding private tastelessness? Skirts are manipulated pornographically up and down for a few’s grossest profits’ sake, and popular beliefs obey the same law. Fashionable society has always cut a figure that’s immeasurably leaner, meaner than le vrai beau monde. Virtue is solus et in puris naturalibus. Not merely stripped-down is the simple truth but absolutely starkers. Propagating small talk calls for closing, bolting all the exits of one’s self except the basement door; but is the bandied chitchat, the canned garbage, called for? Open up the skylight to oneself. Whoever sees a single thing as it actually is—without the stale censorious self intervening? Memories are fantasies we fashion while in transit; we deceive our selves that there is anything secure about them. Memory belongs to the imagination, functioning less by recording than by fabricating. Better have the poorest memory than no originality. Remember that you’re destined to forget all you remember, also all you don’t. We all complain about our memory but none of us about our judgment. Heaven’s immemorial, and photographs of life are far from life. The clearer man’s remembrances, the cloudier his insight. Humankind seems cleverest at disremembering what’s vital; lacking our habitual amnesia about our crimes, societies would quickly break down. Seldom are we free of backgrounds and alive in foregrounds, quit of hindsight and playful

404 with foresight. It’s abstractions are the deadliest distractions. We look at life through the curtains of our pet presuppositions, thus we do not see life as it is. Even our cryptic expectations over which we mull are mortared out of clay experiences. Naturally people think all things as they once were cannot have got as they now are. Stuck in the clutch of automatic retrospect one locks one’s self in from oneself. Can anyone wholly escape being mired in time—caught in a mortal culture by the toils of bounded knowledge and experience? How clamped our myriad impediments, how cramped the cluttered headquarters! Let the jerrybuilt prefab walls of recollection fold, and all is seen anew. To chew the fat’s to celebrate dead days; but each day can and should be a red-letter, festive, thundering good birth day. True discovery’s a gut reaction. There’s no way to learn this but by heart.

_273_

Gadabouts, the carriers of wanderlust,* pick up a lot, not just turista, while they’re traveling—a lot of trivia; for instance, straggling roués sample countless trulls and touch most every point of interest. There’s nothing quite like touring, always shifting in the thick of time zones while paying obeisance to time-honored artifacts, to narrow any spirit. Tourists are the sort of shallow folk compelled to flock for fleecing at a royal wedding. Businessmen are always going places, never coming home free. Being rich upon return from world-wide rambles calls for being poor upon departure. Animate consign- ments presently DOA were formerly DOD? Travelers who find all foreign turf inferior, including those who must reverse themselves once back, exhibit all in vain their own inadequacies. Has the globe become one since we now can circumnavigate—and, too, contaminate—it rapidly? However far or fast we move, traversing continents without experiencing anything, we do not thereby reach our neighbors’ territory. Trippers fundamentally are prone to accidents—or plain psychotic? One learns all one needs to learn by going nowhere, listening with rapt attention . . . to oneself, the rattlesnake and hermit thrush worth pricking up one’s ears for. Most demanding is the simplest, most original the freshest. Our prime is primeval, undisclosed and passing. We think, temporizing, given time, we’ll understand, find out what makes us tick. But in time we will never understand, not even in a donkey’s years. What is eternal? Death of all that’s

* All chronic peregrinators were maternally deprived?

405 temporal, however inconceivable. Our errant if remorseless watches are reminders of mortality. That time appears to pass more swiftly as we age confirms that it’s no more than a phantasma, all that changes being our ebbing expectations from, our waning interest in, events and their effects. It’s we who pass while time remains, unstoppable; we may delay but time will not. Early in modern times timekeeping and its rationing resulted in timeserving and -enslavement. Men could scarcely guess that, learning to count numerals, they’d someday find that solely numerals had come to count. We use up and abuse time, yet are trapped in it and it in us. Could well-nigh everybody be caught in a time warp? Minding what the time “is,” one is unaware. To read Time is a greater spiritual loss than intellectual gain: distorted facts are not superior to lucid insight. For industrial productions, for unnatural creations, all vital activities—save death or birth, of course—must be mechanically scheduled. Mark you well the unremitting darkness of the temporal underworld, a cuckooland forever clocked, where riling holdups are the rule in every sterile rush-hour state and frantic ticked-off runners of the gridlocked marathon contest the race to their heart failure with but few, if any, holding a stop watch. Whoever yet is conscious that our tickers have quit cold? Like clockwork, like obedient clock-watching clerks perennially killing time while counting down, some ask each other what it is or what the Times’ capital “news” grown whiskers happens to be; all, however, that is currently report- able here’s just an ageless flash of now which no unending excremental ticker tape elucidates, none other than eternity, time out of mind.

_274_

Embracing all—that’s entering oneself. Acknowledge one’s own no-thingness, and everything’s already added unto one. Resisting no thing, all is ours—nay, us—though we are not. Those with soft hearts are thought ridiculous, but since there is no living heart that is not soft, it’s those “without” are more pathetic jokes. Man can seem hard as rock, a crusty and unyielding hardhead, when he’s dead (be careful not to peek inside); but truth is loose as any goose and supple as the blushing skins of apricots, soft as the down above a maiden’s lips. One can grasp objects beyond pricing only if one sees that they are passing—going, going, gone—out of existence and are like, likable, like oneself. Our quarrels quit us when we quit our selves and see things eye to eye, vis-à-vis, with oneself. Humanity needs no appointment for a personal interview with itself: this very moment will—must—do.

406 No thing is self-contained: one only fails to listen, wholly undemanding, for its true relation. Worldlings, in profound naiveté, believe that there is more than one truth, one land, and one all-encompassing ocean; thus in naming “them” they veil what is. For all is one, many are nothing. Some of us consider these distinctions arbitrary, artificial? Yes, but so are all distinctions. Those who try hard to avoid discriminating fail to. When one has to choose, it’s all one to oneself. Eternal truths?—Endless ambiguities. These crowds are obstacle indeed for those who cannot find the forest for the trees. Not merely two but numberless the “sides” of the sun, depending upon where we stand, as numberless as suns we seem to see dancing on moving water’s surface; yet one sun, one light is it, one sun, one light alone. The highest mathematics exercises no division. Meaningfulness wells forth indivisible and undevisable. The human plight is universal; only nomenclatures vary. Every theory, the most seeming seaworthy included, suffers wreckage in the typhoon of life, wherein no saw saves. Analysis breaks down, while understanding braves destruction. Soaring axioms avail nought in the hellish throes of war or passion. Various and winding are the ancient deer paths to peace, to oneself, but they require no signposts and need not be strictly followed, inasmuch as all lead upward; whereas each bright, straight, flat, span-new street of science ends in violence, in a blind alley. Where reality is, there is no path. Scientists, it seems, cannot perceive that the sole facet of the moon that can mean anything to humankind is moonlight. Having filled a quantity of thimbles with a river’s water, how can we conclude we now possess the stream itself? Statistics point to countless tendencies but not to truth. Applied to life as representative of all life, facts turn into superstitions. Who can scrutinize what is inscrutable? What dreamer gets to the bottom of things by casting a loose supposition down into the soundless well that is the past? It’s easy to locate and lose the trickle of time, but the ocean of eternity runs way too broad and far too deep to be located, let alone lost.

_275_

“My truth,” “your truth,” is self-contradiction. It falls short like an arrow shot at the man in the moon. It’s merely the part of the tree above the ground that we can see; the vital thing is whether the tree seen is ever green or, poisoned in its roots, already dead. “Illusion” is illusion, and the self’s one’s sole hallu- cination. What you see is pretty plainly not what you get. Schizophrenically fantasizing his invisibility, and so preoccupied with being seen, a pop star

407 does in fact for once see lucidly. Forever leaning toward a completely empty mirror clouds it with one’s pressing breath. Perhaps this world itself’s just a reflection and behind the glass there’s nothing, which is what all things in essence are? To fish their element is clearly absent—till they’re out of it. How can the origin of everything be anything but nought? Yet actuality beggars description. If smart asses are so certain that the pallid cool abstraction they have labeled “love” lifts them above the rest of mankind, standing tiptoe on taut wires of ideality, they ought to be assured that smarting behinds, if not sore foreheads, are in store for them. Thinking of infinity is one thing, but infinity “itself” is quite another thing that’s altogether not a thing: non est. Oneself is neither this nor that, nor “emptiness” nor “fullness,” fish nor flesh nor fowl, nor rhyme nor reason; thus, in truth, “oneself” is not oneself but something else, greater than great. One has to develop the negative before the picture can come clear. There may be no human nature yet, only all too human natures. A rose is not a rose is not a rose. Reality is not repeated . . . save perhaps at definite eternal intervals. Every dogma constitutes a piece of make-up that’s designed to hide an ugly motive. Every desire seems like a queen: Her lackeys are beliefs, I ween.

_276_

Wishing to seem astute is apt to keep one otherwise. Are fools not those who fail to listen to their doubts—or those with none to hear? Our every assumption spells presumption. Granted, quite a specky few of us have perfect vision—up to the tips of our noses. Ignorant are crafty mavens—arrogant, nil-knowing know-it-alls. “I now possess the works, total control, a monopoly of the truth,” gloats the bankrupt, as unruffled as a fool hen. Some uncharitable souls, in hibernation so as to remain imperishably virgin, think the sun shines solely for their gardens; even chains of scorchers may well leave them in the dark. Being settled means to be imprisoned; the whole point of life may be embracing our unsettled bearings. Bragging with ads of their verdant private islets as “the one and only” paradises, out of pride of place they have discerned merely the surface of the sea and not the earth beneath that joins their narrow sand bars to the main land. Must we be so partial and export so many noxious pufferies? Set sail, pinched brother hermit crabs, and so desert all those straw-hut, stick-in-the-mud conceits. Yes, I know there are 408 things of which our surly selves are perfectly, unshakably assured; but that is not the point: are either perfectly, unshakably assured? If not, permit me now to shake the fruit loose. Anybody so conceited as to think s/he is enlightened unlike everybody else is manifestly unenlightened. How few of us care enough to venture fathoming our selves. Religious seekers glued fast to pat phrases bind themselves tight even when they have no rope. The most decided hard-core dogmatism shows its shaky hand of deepest insecurity; to end up obstinate one has to start off terrified. Anxiety induces anger, which obscures the former in all doctrinaires. Dependent on a single thing, one’s altogether insecure. Obsessions are bred by uncertainties; believing something one suspects may not be true leads to ignoring first-hand evidence, to turning stubborn faced with troublous facts. No one’s more regularly wrong than who can’t bear to be. The surest cinch is useless, as is all the pull in the underworld with big wheels, if the pack mule will not budge. The surer anyone’s conviction s/he knows right from wrong, the plainer that soul’s tastelessness; such utter certitude betrays the dunce and churl within. The narrower a creed, the less it matches the real world’s complexities, and the less minded any living spirit can be to conform to it. Each ideology requires delusion that it comprehends each unknown quantity. The sillier a notion, the more strenuously the crusader pushes it; a zealot’s who shoots faster after having lost all aim. The more logically leakproof any statement, the more patently absurd. “That there is no phenomenon of nature whose explanation has been omitted in our treatise, this is certain.”—How content, how irrefutably content. This self-congratulation, acting with all the aplomb in the world, is a trifle premature. Who thinks she’s absolutely with it may well be entirely without—yes, not right there at all. The clot who fan- tasizes that the world’s his oyster can be just about to gag and drop. No use to preach of the great briny to toads in a sink. “Now we are safe on this cool whisking magic carpet of high certitude,” strut the showboating ants on the anteater’s tongue. Zip!

_277_

To give the media their due, presenting us with the beliefs of the uneducated does at least prevent us losing touch with clodpolls’ hard-held ignorance. To countless tergiversators skating on the thin ice of “broad” polls parading only the most overdressed-up postures, changing their persuasions more often than their odoriferous shirts, it seems important to establish a nonsensus of

409 opinion scented off and on with a volte-face. Few people really think what they tell pollsters they believe, relaying shallow and inconsequential prejudices costing nothing. “Right” and “wrong” mean little and less: it’s how more than what we speak that matters. There are matadors win all their arguments but no friend: what a pity being “right” at the expense of love. The truth is utterly incomparable. To absorb the sun-shot breezes of oneself, one has to sail out past the fog banks of both good and evil, true and false. Objections end up overruled, for real creation is no object but experience as unremem- bered as it’s unforgettable. Evaluations fail; No judgment can avail. There is no fact That is exact; Only a guess, A more or less; Think not to find A flawless mind; See that the truth Is simply youth. Hearken not to the words but to the melody. Never mind the instrumenta- tion: it’s the leitmotif and tout ensemble that count. Words are only shells; but have we not held these to our ears and heard within the resonating shingle of oneself, the hush-hush soughing of our hearts? Who has not caught my drift, felt this prevailing wind, hence understood the meaning? Many are those who hear the deep keynote through half plugged-up ears but who are stone-deaf in their hearts. One asks me, “What is truth?” I ask one, “Who is truth?” Having told a lie is regrettable, to be sure, but having lived one is incorrigible.

_278_

Man is chasing truth as mongrel chases tail. As well attempt to catch one’s own shadow or to clamber after one’s own echo. Doggedly men run the squirrel cages of their creeds. The simplest path is plainly the most arduous to take: it leads into upcountry districts, and few hikers take the risk of treading it. To follow it, one has to be still. The best walker, singularly, leaves no tracks. Who is the sitter for the painting of oneself? Can’t one be quiet, rid of

410 maya’s teeming jamboree, that roily mix-up? Observation that can comprehend complexity is pure and simple. Settle body, to inspect the turbid mind; settle turbid mind, to clarify oneself. The simplest hardest clarity involves the void acknowledging the void. The calmest lake most clearly mirrors heaven. When the sky clears, all it held is nothing. Wipe the mirror clean of worldly dust. One’s fooled so long as one’s convinced one can escape the world: the truth is, there is nothing to escape. Enlightenment is no thing to be got but simply vision given once your blinkers have been given over. Truth comes zooming by when one stops, looks, and listens. Love prepares itself when cooks don’t stir. The phoenix may perch on a head, but only till it’s moved. To realize oneself, one has to realize the unimportance of the self, studying one’s skull, though it make the flesh creep. Yet the truth’s a matter for close study? Nonsense, non-sense. _279_

Who really needs a clutch of “friends” to recognize and ratify one’s being? “Identity” surely derives alone from intercourse with others. Spending so much time and energy striving for such authentication leads us to consider the conditioned status (i.e., our appearances) as our most valuable holdings. We assume that, lacking such attention, we would “cease to be”: on that confusion and delusion are the failure to love and the dread of death both grounded. The most fundamental “fact” of our existence—that we’re individuals—appears to clash with our conception or experience of fellows. Humans know far less about themselves, and far more about other people, than they realize. To grasp ourselves, we must inspect our selves in mirrors that, unwitting, others hold before us. While obliged to recognize my self I cannot meet myself. When all is seen as one and one as none, then no thing more needs to be seen. Perceiving that one is no thing that matters, zilch and no more, one’s got everything that matters. No thing needs to be on the front burner. Zero in on the deep sense in absence. Reaching not is how is won the unget-at-able.

_280_

The further anybody seeks, the further s/he has wandered. High and low we hunt for truth, while all the time it ticks within our undervests. Become familiar with and get next to oneself—nearest and dearest of all relatives, than whom one has no bosom friend more intimate, found in the recesses of spirit, closer to one than one’s neck vein.

411 Why do we die of thirst while standing chin-deep in the real lifestream? Pine not for paradise: it’s in the lap, not a hair’s breadth away. We pass our lives all but wholly unaware that heaven’s near at hand, incredibly close to us every moment. In obscurest details does divinity dwell; it unfolds from lowliest minutiae, between two breaths or blinks, the opportunity not for recapturing; so give heed, give one’s self pause, always. Momentary lapses, and not just in turnpike pileups, oftentimes determine souls’ fates. ’The eternal powder keg explodes precisely in the nick of time, nowhere but between here and now: it’s omnipresent. Truly, only trifling pinheads separate reality from falsity. How near the far, what depths in superficies! Nothing easier and commoner than seeing truth—and overlooking it.

_281_

Men think their masquerade conceals Their souls; poor fools, it but reveals. Convictions are the fool’s gold of the soul: the true ore, wholly unexploit- able, lies measurelessly deeper yet equivalently higher up the slope. Past controversy heaven’s treasure hides. The higher one climbs, the more rarefied the company and subtilized the atmosphere; life shoots up, thickens, most abundantly in shallows. As the truth’s equivalent to death, so surely vital is belief and thus delusion in maintaining or regaining health. Most animal communication has been crafted out of sexual deception. Any creature that cheats gains a goodly if unfair advantage. Lying naturally favors individual survival. An increasingly complex prehuman social life produced our brain, with its deceitfulness and calculation. Culture, indispensable to human life, is immanently self-deceptive: what makes us unique is our unlimited proficiency at outsmarting ourselves. Denying illusion’s validity may well mean denying existence’s. Authentic characters evolve commensurately lone. Creators with no audience enjoy and suffer liberty unlimited. Truth teaches how to lose “friends” and to alienate people. Honesty’s the best impossible policy. Nothing succeeds quite like deceit;* this underworld is full of rogues with no depth fit to

* Thus the incorrigibly single state of each veracious Kierkegaard and Amiel (ineligible bachelors indeed) in every age. The saintly soul may keep a journal, while the sinful never has the time. No one loves learning save who has learned love, an unrepentant kind of sadism close to contempt for others. Genuine psychologists, steeped in self-irony, are bored sick by their fellows’ minimal capacities and far too self-obsessed to manage captivating so-called lovers. 412 get on swimmingly. In politics—not only there, no doubt—success corrupts. No person easier to fool than self; liars contrive best to deceive themselves. The man of action is an actor and his life a travesty of life. Most troubles rise from what one does, not what one does not do: thus abstinence is apt to keep a soul clear. Who would ever act if knowing fully what would follow? People always are implying more than they are comprehending. Ignorance determines all our destinies. Most actors pay attention solely when their own performances are being paid attention to. Not where the action is is where it’s at. What room for a square shooter on a globe all shot to hell with crooked- ness? Integrity is turning irony upon one’s decomposing self.

_282_

Our slingshot idealism nearly all the time hangs drooping. Flexing our elastic biases however juvenilely for our fellow vandals, we cannot do anything but damage and we’re still the same slack twisted rubber bands forever destined to be snapped and scrapped. Recovery requires better effort than faint spasms of remorse, sporadic epidemics of goodwill. Take care to see the glassy-eyed self as it is in all its ratty squalor, and oneself will take care of oneself. By means of their distractive pastimes folk persistently avoid inspecting their selves out of silly fear of solitude, their very own eternal state. Lying to others—not the least to children or the dying—on the pretext of being kindly toward one’s inferiors is done from cowardly reluctance to face truth one’s self. We civilized expose our young as soon as possible to the (“Is that all?”) facts of life while sheltering them as long as possible from the (Is this nothing?) fact of death; our subterfuges are used to support our infantile taboos.∗ Behind alienation lies the rationalization (i.e., falsifying) of oppression—either by denying or else by concocting several “good reasons” (knockdown arguments) for its continuance.

_283_

The heights are scaled sheer inter pares. Who feels genuine affection for those unappealably inferior? Yet gratitude is meet exclusively among unequals; gifts leave us beholden.

* Without believing it themselves, our drilling elders hammered into us that Jesus had to die so we would “never” need to. 413 _284_

Being honest about is becoming aware of. Slavery cannot be squeezed out of our selves save drop by drop, alone. There’s no such public entity as “freedom,” solely the unceasing private act of liberating “self.” Let there be love, and fruit enough is added unto branches. Truest speech is speechless and has least need of an oath. Trying to be sincere means being both trying and insin- cere. It seems so difficult to be simple. Try as one may, truth’s born of itself; it leaps to life each moment in the simplest of events. Drop all pet poses and be single-hearted; let it all hang out and, out-front, lose with gay abandon all misgivings. Can we leave our lives like ever open books for anyone to read and to rejoice in? Honor’s for oneself alone to guard: we can’t save or protect another’s. Must so much we feel be off the record? Why so many jackets when oneself, no dapper dandy, scarcely needs one? When creative, one relates simpliciter, reflecting nothing, limpid as a purling alpine pool. Each sufferer is overwhelmed by the sense of uniqueness. All the same watch: no deception is more ruinous or more insidious than that engaged in by one’s cunning self. No one escapes our human destiny of grappling lifelong with deception, even if most of us either long since gave the struggle—or else never took it—up. A veritable psychopath can easily pass lie-detector tests. A mad man is sincere as well as wrong; and what well- meaning bungler can correct wrongheadedness, shortsightedness? Sincerity and truth: two quite discrepant entities, as witness “personals” amid brief ads.* And yet a little taffy now and then seems harmless while it’s making the world sweeter just a bit. Hey presto! “something” clicks and in a trice, in half a shake, the self is gone. How? There is no way. When? There is no time.

_285_

Smell deep the silent sea, the gleaming night . . . See deep the noiseless crickets, voiceless gulls . . . Hear deep the blossoms blow in warming puffs . . . Feel deep the moving moon, the sparkless stars . . . Know this peace passeth. . . .

* How sad to see so many Roses with their bloom lost desperately hoping to be clipped for permanent secure (if all too likely arid) vase existences. Some late premenopausal dames are all too ready to insinuate their selves conveniently into any propertied man’s quarters.

414 _286_

The greatest mortal—be he never mind which god’s or goddess’s chosen one—remains perforce a mortal. Just as bugs alight wherever save in fire, so minds cling to anything but perfect insight. We are terrified by nothing more than our no-thingness, thus we phantoms clasp our prejudices and possessions; but these too, no less than the remainder of our selves, are doomed to swift extinction and oblivion. No thing’s a sure thing, indisputable and immutable, true for good. That soul’s run dry that thinks it can cross the same river twice. What else is new? No less than everything. All cells are renovatable with each heartbeat. Even the speed of light is iffy and may alter any splitting second now—in spite of brainwaves hatching in our keenest intellect. Life seems continuous yet is discrete, and nature’s always taking quantum leaps. However, one who worships not the sun by daily service under it is the full mooner and idolater . . . a city-drowned and bedbound house hound. Neither unadulterated nor adulterated, truth’s a salty, more than mere unsullied sea. In the external slumbers the eternal. Every thing’s substance is unchangeable; still, only change is changeless, only the flux endless. No one remains the same person from one moment to the next; the notion we nurse that we are undeviating in our lives’ divergent situations is a sheer delusion. Fixed to fluctuating consciousnesses, tethered to our butchers’ and our bakers’ profits, anchored to such heavy concrete viewpoints, we cannot help being swamped with dire confusion. Prudent gardeners pull up their grass- or weedlike fixations. All our states must stop, for us to live in process. Come, be fluid, like an ocean stream, able to flow in all directions fathomlessly. Once aware of oneself’s ever-changing nature, who can say, “I always . . .” or “I never . . .”? What one knows is less what matters than being able to abandon what one knows. Who thinks abstractions have the solid indestructibility that our lives lack? Those dragged ashore by so-called saviors needs must throw their selves back headfirst in the salt chuck to be free. Expecting man’s conformity to but a single pattern means attempting to repudiate his special role, viz., becoming universal, all-embracing being. Is one above all wishing to be finished with the wheel of change? Then one condemns one’s self to everlasting chains. Life’s nature is to nurture innovation, to transcend confinement. Buddha is not something permanent or stationary. Human jellyfish would like to swim a waveless gulf, some body free of heartless undertow.

415 _287_

Life’s greatest problems are insoluble; it’s futile to seek rational solutions to them; yet transcendence through examination can occur. “Humble thyself, impotent Reason,” reasons Pascal. “Rations, not rationality, decide your fate,” ratiocinates the housebroken dietitian. Making rules invites them to be broken. Insight makes the right moves for nutritionists no longer puffed-up, just as instinct saves grammarians from blunders, not analysis or rule-making; in both cases mishap must derive from the prescientific schooling. Typically a dream’s less absurd than its bizarre interpretation. Rationalists cannot but be fearfully, hopelessly time-bound. Absolutists to a man, the gods are who make rules; but wisdom understands that fertile life’s unruly, ineradicably miry, and cannot be codified. For some polluted with compulsion cleanliness is godliness. Who’s never made an error’s never truly made a thing. Boring perfectionists, incapable of loving, which requires messy creativity, obsessively demand that everyone and everything be neat and clean and orderly beyond all reason.

_288_

Right thinking—nonthinking. “Curiosity killed the cat.”—More explicitly: “Curiosity would disturb our coma.” Man desires make-believe; but fairness is not come to make believers. In a make-believe world in which life’s a go-go lottery the goal is orgasm in passion’s absence. Facing our factual selves might change us, but to cling to ideal egos, pinning hopes on cretinous electorates or loftier hereafters, merely props up our incomparably trivial present existences. We grow absurd exclusively affecting to be what we’re not and ne’er will be. It’s not by staging headstands, changing colors, that one is made upright but by seeing topsy-turvy self as wrong side down. Some noddies issue proclamations that they’re saved, having trust in what is not nor can be; but trust in words transforms no body and has altered no one’s actions, consequently it’s inconsequential and those trusties are not saved, simply enslaved. Strange, how proud most folk are of being loyal to some unionized psychosis. Nothing stabilizes the soul like abandoning persuasions. Solely a philosopher needs no opinions falsifying the significance of fate in order to endure it. Sheep who fancy themselves “found,” “safe” and “sound” would be wiser to get lost. “Faith” usually means abiding by fallaciousness. The more conviction the more ignorance. Who has

416 convictions—so close to addictions—stands convicted; pinioned are all the opinionated, not to get the benefit of the doubt. Vampires lullingly have whispered to us that we should believe, be happy. Diametrically, sunny truth wants every snoozer, all the slugabeds, to question, to wake up. So few of us live otherwise than fast asleep, infected with a chronic sleeping sickness, motionlessly trafficbound within perpetual haze, beneath a lifelong canopy of brain clouds. Count on medicos, whose bread and butter is letheomania, to classify such stupors as benign. Blessed indeed are those who see and hence need not believe. Weasels have wheedled us into agreeing and obeying, so that we rest assured, stand pat, and lie under ether. Justice, though, demands that everyone start to observe. Agreement, obedience—that is euthanasia. The function of belief: to blunt awareness of humanity’s predicament. Thank hellbent thinking that the chloroform of “faith,” such customary durance, is no longer universally taking. Are not evil and live opposites? To die, to sleep . . . a consummation too devoutly wished. Opinions are alive and visions real only so long as they’re unknown to memory, susceptible to the disease of cross-examination: once immune, they’re fossils, false, and form a mindset. Better putrefy than pet- rify, admit disease than submit to decease. If life is not abrasive it is not life. Talented sack artists who deserve a sacking aim still to preserve their thought for good by freezing it, but only hit the mark in paralyzing it, hence rendering it permanently useless. Some clowns are so dull they cannot even entertain a doubt. Being tranquilized is not to meditate.

_289_

To lack great intellect can be excused, But not if it’s possessed and never used. Of our umpteen∗ billion brain cells practically all are unemployed. Most curious is how incurious most people are. A sharpster ever shifty-eyed has opportunities to learn that hoodwinked “true” believers never have been given, yet how seldom does he take them. Better have no thing than have much and give it to no one. Come, cast pearls unto the swine; for pearls are not important, but the casting may be. To release our riches may release us from our riches. Unreflecting eyes are stone-blind eyes. We do not see because we do not look and fail to hear because we fail to listen. Heads supposing growth of hair

* Near 100 way back when.

417 can be maintained indefinitely without daily stimulation of their scalps are doing fuzzy thinking. Holding the view that rose-tinted glasses must improve impaired sight is a fatal misreading of the entire text.

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We flaunt what we grasp while ignoring what we do not grasp. Whoever puts faith in the boxed-in battery henhouse behaviorists of aversion therapy has laid a proper egg.* The psychiatric trouble is invariably something that the patient or the patient’s prime tormentor, lucratively getting down to cases, has not seen. Who’s in the worst bind’s not aware of it. The leading blocks to cultural growth in society are the restrictions on change in the individual imposed by unexposed neurotic processes; most people fail to see the ogre in themselves that finishes them off. “If ye were blind, ye’d be without sin”; thinking we see, we remain in it and our eyes on the blink. Could all myopia, if not all peepers problems, be but a stressful displacement from genital life in striplings cut off from their normal animality? Messiahs recommending blindness fail to mention that it’s a thin euphemism for castration. To the blinded lovelife generates much heat but little light. Poor visibility in clouded minds cancels all flights. Off with your blinders, dobbin who needs spurring. In a spiritual sense most men are stillborn or at best born sightless, and the greatest genius is but a squinting baby. Simple folk are apt to perish early from deficient knowledge; the perverse sophisticated, from possessing too much. Might depressives suffer from a deficit in self-deception, viewing life too accurately for their own good? The more complex grows our apperception, the more readily we risk delusion. Hence the “highest man” must finish as an utter fool? “Great vision—that is all the world requires.”—Thus spake Batman, alias Dr. Foureyes, peerless Protestant emeritus, to the nth power Christlike,† tragic vehicle for the Zeitgeist, a foregone fatality and world-upending squealer on his totaled self. The brightest beast, now coming to a screeching halt, turns out the beastliest. Before attempting to instruct blind folk, try living with your own eyes shut. Who sees best does not see well.‡ Spirits most profound

* Such reconditioning techniques as biofeedback may well reinforce and worsen psychosocial problems rather than alleviate them. Any program that requires domination tends to skew an organism further from its normal state. † Championing suffering while giving his command performance front and center. ‡ However unobservant myopes generally are, one may at least deserve a modicum of credit for observing that. 418 fail to grasp their profundity. Are we free agents striving to comprehend the cosmos, or no more than means whereby the cosmos starts to comprehend itself? Some groping creatures think life’s purpose is that poor blind nature may begin to see; but it is they their strictly conscious selves that are bespec- tacled with shades and always taking a dim view of things. So very limited is the capacity of consciousness: out of the flood of sensory data flowing nonstop into our brains we perceive one or two drops. Experiences one becomes aware of have already passed. The self’s incensed if it’s made conscious of how little it is ever conscious of. The insight that our shallow minds have less importance than most people would like to suppose may offer a transforma- tive redemption to a globe now terminally ill. Most often changes for the better are disfavored; new shoes tend to pinch. We welcome the truth so long as it pleases, thus we welcome not the truth—a wasp not unlike Cupid, stinging on the wing. True words are hardly palatable; palatable words are hardly true. We may acknowledge petty faults, but chiefly to avoid acknowledging our crucial ones. Validity of any real nonfiction lies in an inverse proportion to its general acceptability; solutions are the more dissatisfying and more disillusioning, the more correct they are. Unpleasant truth holes up in lovelife passim. Let each frontiersman skin his own skunks. Insight is composed of suffering turned inside out. Who bears love’s brand has borne love’s burn. “You’re very thought-provoking, quite provocative. . . .” We’re very act- revoking, plain provoking. “You talk as if the truth were something for the heart to feel.” We act as if it were something for the stomach to steal. Passion is no thing with which a secret pix or impotent defiler via stroke mag periodically titillates his gonads, no fresh pinup girl or muscle beachboy, such as some pathetic fake-blonde bombshell “Marilyn”* with scant identity befittingly both doped and crossed up, far from goddess stature, that elated junior sadists can triumphantly, repeatedly drool over and pin down like a straw butterfly upon their beds or boards. Conditioned to require constant mellow vibes, we want to “live” in rock- ing chairs, but what life needs most is electrifying. Birth’s a sword to swallow without tricks, a kick in the crotch. Open up! Home in on, be at home to, all home truth, no picnic. Wrestle with the inner angel with no holds barred. Character breaks through like sunrays solely at the point at which self breaks

* Not only bimbos, even princesses, such breeding mares as Jackie or Diana, are expected not to open their traps save to read from cue cards, sounding childish, or to groan in gratitude while on their backs. 419 up. Under stress one is born, in a bed of roses one will die, relaxing cosseted in permanent, postcoital, depressive lassitude. Faced with a cobra, wisdom’s unentranced, recoiling PDQ.

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What if any are the limits of awareness? Who is it can recognize one’s creaturely restrictions? How much space can spirit hold? The better one can bear to ask oneself those questions most unanswerable and unaskable, the closer breathes the unequivocal truth. No doubt one’s first indentation must be shallow; but does one become profound, or only pockmarked, digging hard into oneself? The deeper in spades that one delves, the simpler things become in the whole ring-dang-do, the center being pure flame: one is both flame and digging, dig me? Pray do not beware of being aware. Just do oneself the favor of removing dull self’s shadow. There are those who also stand in the sun but, backs turned, stay shady. Face the music . . . of oneself. Can one be savvy yet not cynical? Insensitivity keeps no one safe from truth for good. No Philistine dares recognize reality, because it threatens to subvert his or her comforting if ruinous routines. No remedy exists for sloth save spiritual strife. The body craves for spells of drowsy happiness, but spirit grows in throes of wakeful suffering: nul bien sans peine. No greater foozle than to feel no pain. The more addictive the more efficacious any pain reliever, and the more assuredly disabled the sad addict. Anguish victimizes fewer minds by far than languish. Human life’s a schooling in intense frustration: may mind’s prime objective always have been circumventing? Well-being’s not conducive to reflection; questioning and affliction—Siamese twins. Hardship, nota bene, marks the memory forever, while excessive heartsease makes it easy for hearts to forget; health rapidly ignores its pains once past.* Losing one’s pet illusions proves more fruitful than locating any truth. If truthfulness be difficult, stupidity is easy: almost nothing puts a stop to torment, whereas almost any trivial distraction cuts short ecstasy. One truly well is strangely ill at ease.

* Pain stems from poena, punishment; so seldom it awakens guilt or being accountable. We’re quick to let some novel form of pleasantness possess us and, absorbed in satiation, pay no heed to paradoxes or antagonisms. Our pains proffer to teach how enthralled and fugitive we are, how life can instantly turn into its own enemy. What’s pain but life’s penumbra warning us of our exacting limitations and shortcomings? 420 _292_

Committal to explanatory systems constitutes agreement to be proven wrong; refusal to doubt premises promotes irrationality. Consistency characterizes paranoia, at heart suicidal; schemes secure catastrophes. Our self-destructive programs, those subversive bureaucratic rubrics, all are go. Above lies a veneer of order; underneath—sheer chaos. We think reams of specs correct our faulty vision? Personal insanity is not incorrigible, but collective madness hardly is for rectifying after it’s been instituted. Orderly Confusionism’s grip yet holds the copyright for manufacturing our global mishmash. Only wholly organized states can expel their scapegoat undesirables entirely from human status; to decentralize to truthful singleness emblematized by Pan appears beyond the power of tragic mankind. A World Government, far from initiating universal peace, might only guarantee a total turmoil; huge- ness equals weakness. The débâcle’s spiritual, visceral, not just political, ideological. Beware, O youth, of the insidiously enervating power of routine. Good habits?—Show me one. Our every rite is wrong. It’s customary hebe- tude’s most lethal for our wretched race. Each rule is fated to be overthrown. Established verities?—Far from established. What pious observance can survive a penetrating observation? Queries sages raise date not; it’s certitude that ages. Death’s no certainty, but certainty is death. All that is certain is the unforeseen. Eventually everyone’s confusion reaches resolution in the single dead cert, which is mystery.

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The further from the present and oneself one strays, the less are sensed life’s probabilities, the more one’s certain of what one in fact knows nothing of. We fancy that the truth can be acquired; But it is lost when last we have inquired. Doughty honesty cheerfully makes enemies, always vigilant, trigger-happy, ready to commit self-treason and correct all errors, winnowing out every dissimulation, never blinking at existence’s bitter contingencies. Freedom expires in skepticism’s absence; where there’s no doubt there’s no hope. Beginning the adventure of enlightenment, one must distinguish false from true; at “journey’s end” no one discriminates. The human intellect is indispensable . . . to realize its own monumental limitations. Loftiest content bursts forth in most

421 profound dissatisfaction, source of living ethics. The intent dwell without solid roofs or coffin lids above their heads. Slack are the strings and dull the tones of the self! Still so sluggish, lamebrained, static, consti-pated, we deadasses have remained in our best moments, suffering from chronic cases of the blahs; one bids us in our club- footed perception now to dance, though it’s no waltz. All creaking stiffness of most office-holders dedicated to debilitating duties, like all indoor stuffi- ness of most churchgoers sleeping out instead of in on Sunday, constitutes a blasphemy against the holy spirit. Laid-back, unconcerned minds are sedated minds: the bowstring without tension hits no targets. If one’s totally detached, dispassionate, dispirited, devoid of zing and any spark of interest in this world, what is one doing in it? The back door is open.

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Many a wondering young hopeful stoked on life we’ve chilled, dis-couraged, made crestfallen, dampening the spontaneous combustion of his spunky indignation which had taken fire Prometheuslike, smothering the slow burn of his smoldering ardency with cautions of inept expediency as we’d quench a salutary bushfire. But the red alert here sounded warns of a sky-leaping conflagration that decrepitude may find more troublous to distinguish and extinguish, since, though in myself, it’s no less in yourself, indeed in all, down in our junk-stuffed basements as well as abroad. Thrust hand and heart into a fire-eater’s every burning question. How wise is it, hanging fire, never to be wholly burned up, suffering asphyxia while fizzling, all wet, as pipe-puffing burnt-out pensioner? To fume is not enough: one needs to spark and flame— at risk of finishing a clinker. Do some actually proud of having been first fired up, then snuffed out, now wish me peace of the somnambulant and quietness of the grave, motions but divested of emotions? What live wire at concert pitch or tuning fork fit as a fiddle would be toneless, playing second fiddle, and not vibrant, midst the strident fiddle-faddle of a haywire factory? A really sound door is utterly soundless, not unhinged but hingeless, boltless, and cannot be shut.

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Let the dispiriting dispirited remain in hell if so they choose. Disinterestedness lacks interest. Even tempers are all very well, but let’s not let ours be too even.

422 We have level heads, perhaps, but level with what? Up to whose mark? Who is leveling and on the level with oneself? On the tightrope of truth poise matters most, not straddling. Yet mere information sterilizes. Hesitate not to exaggerate: patience lacking, love exaggerates. “Extremists”: everybody whose views are more penetrating than the labeler’s. To learn to swim, go jump in off the deep end with the self. Knowledge wells forth as a good cold drink, if rather flat; only a drip will stick to it alone. Gray matter by itself is colorless; a dram of headiness—the wild kind, not the nappy—is no evil. Alcohol, contrariwise, means grease that oils the wheels of sex, which make the underworld go round, steamrollering the ugliness of so much fleshly factuality— altogether quite a rum go.* Inebriation’s less disinhibition than myopia: it makes perspectives pinched and cockeyed. Moonshine turns carousers bleary- eyed or blind, befuddled, sloppy, senseless, fou in Scotland, France, and in fact everywhere; how well can bingers understand that they will wallow in one boozeroo too many? Barrooms—well-named jail cells.† Rumdums have to have the jug, the anesthetic or embalmed state; but lush wisdom senses life’s already brief enough, and there’s a rare old untapped cask now swelling not with vinegar blink but with living wine that leaves one well, uncorked, a corker last in chairing the symposium, not paralyzed or blotto, blanked out like a light beneath the table, if one samples it. Those clobbered actually need another slug? To go on bats is bats indeed. The greatest spree springs free of soppy self, a cureless sot in need of being permanently flagged. A small beer or rum customer seems bold when fighting bottles, yet he dares but keep his stewed potbelly, not get his ossified brain, fermenting. Never wonder why you’re groggy, destined for a piss-up, downing popskull? Ask the “weaker” vessel if uncertain that creative means receptive: see that one is a receptacle, an empty bowl not begging like some poor prescription merely to be filled with swipe, becoming more than half-crocked, but instead to open into overflowing heartwise. Leave behind all those low spirits and, imbibing the best of good cheer, forever sailing higher than a kite, four folded sheets to the wind, whole seas over, decks awash with absolutely no thing, naturally zonkers, now serve up oneself. Thus all man’s dignity consists in something more than thought and something better than being preserved as dee-dee dipso.

* Closing eyes while kissing also helps one concentrate on a fantastic self-indulgence, helps prevent distraction by the flawed, complex surroundings. † Shysters, take note. 423 _296_

Messenger of patriarchs, fleet-footed Mercury perennially, yea, till doomsday gives the reins to science, eloquence, commerce and robbery. The greed and power-lust propelling science bar enlightenment: what a great charge and shame for us to have been born in this intoxicating and incomparable Dark Age. Practical science is devoted to assaulting nature, aggrandizing profits and possessions, and exacerbating war; the natural sciences, since requisite to technologic progress, are trapped in an unremitting process best described as an exploitive pogrom targeting the biosphere. Must Western man’s inquiry, begun as a brave enterprise to liberate and educate, end as a weapon of oppression in a stifling atmosphere of secrecy? Our greatest need is not for modern science with its supersaturating but for ancient silence to be exorcising. Science barbarizes without conscience; note with caution how the most methodically pseudoscience-oriented superstate, cherishing a mili- tarily correct fetish of rank, mummified fanatical unholy terror in its chief archangel’s tomb;* its cure for scapegoat heretics, if not quick liquidation or long-term interment in cement blocks advertised as disinfected wards, was the withdrawal of all privilege save that to breathe. No airtight certitude, however, either dignifies or fortifies a single one of its proprietors, no such credulity being ever warranted on scientific grounds. The same blind faith provides new ruling classes with more opportunities for exploitation and for rationalizing it; the self-serving nihilistic ideologues use their revolutionary rhetoric to paper over their systemic inequalities. What perfectly electrified life’s lived under the tsars? Was it strictly coincident that Nazis ruled the

* The non-Soviet experiment (the soviets Ulyanov found he had to crush) remains ideal historical material for any study of a theocratic masochistic culture, of a xenophobic mystified society totally militarized; fear and bad faith hold sway in such organisms’ every cell. By universalizing pecking orders with ukases, everyone ends up paid no King’s ransom as a bureaucratic busybody hard at work inflicting inconvenience and misery on fellow citizens to make up for one’s own unending hardships. In a state of terror any unsigned slander sent to the police or press can doom the innocent, no one being immunized against the noxious gaze of a dim nettled neighbor. Shades of the unalienated “total man”—a humming proletarian, of course—of whom the patriarch Marx dreamed. Raped daily, reared on hatred, people come to “love” the rapists, giving birth to paranoia. It’s appropriate that Bolshevism led north Asia to become a dead-end underworld whose idol finished up a carefully chemicalized cadaver in that mausoleum. Can the vegetating Slavs—can any collectivity?—be freed from ancient suffering, when all they’ve learned from it is to be dedicated to a slavish status quo?

424 world’s top scientific state? Could genocide be just the ultimate expression of a revolution to which reason freed from conscience’s constraints gave birth, the quandary of population superfluity demanding a solution issuing as an ongoing miscreation?* Much like Calvinism, Darwinism to this day provides an underlying rationale for keeping happiness as the preserve of few while misery is left for many; useful are such ideologies when surplus populaces call for economical disposal. Mastering pain, masterminding science masters the infliction of it; thus the “secret” police torturers rely on biochemists for increasingly infallible techniques. Pray don’t forget that, lacking scientific sophists’ contributions, we could never have developed such an ecumenic Juggernaut. Inexorably graspy science generates its own momentum, sliding on sub- rationally, thoroughly oblivious to consequences: blind amoral Reason, and no ism, is the engine of faith driving our world “forward.” Surely the idea of a “neutral science” must be mythologic. One line of investigation seldom followed: who determines who works on what projects with what aims? Who pays the piper calls the tune: at the base of all “practical” science lies undemo- cratic profiteering. How soon must the universities’ corrupt corporatizing deal a lethal blow to unfettered inquiry? Here and there a few imaginative, conscientious scientists try to consider implications of their work on various stink bombs; the rest plod on from day to day while recking no more of the wider issues than most bank clerks are of monetary policies. What value in the researchers’ truths if their lives have been unconscionable lies? Queries about their patronage appear to be precisely what such functionaries of state criminality don’t want to hear, let alone ask themselves. It takes but one perturbed soul who’s empowered unwittingly by science to bring the globe to catastrophe; with the perpetual advances of investigative leagues it’s no more than a matter of time ere that creature’s fateful opportunity arrives. Could scientists sit in the dark along with us regarding what the future holds?† Unquestioningly the scientific and the lay communities both posit that all new-won knowledge must be per se always to the good. How rare the recognition that, controlled by immature brutes, technic know-how leads straight

* The British prisoners shipped to Australia, so like the Africans abducted by barbaric European traders to enslaved America, comprise a kind of excremental mass projected as far out of sight and mind as possible. Every capitalist has and holds a pathogenic rage to conquer . . . everybody save his sick self. † Lord Rutherford, his period’s top physicist, dismissed all practical potentiality in nuclear energy as “moonshine.”

425 to disaster, to mass tragedy; how purblind the belief that scientific priesthoods can determine wisely the fate of mankind and life itself. They’ve certainly materialized our wildest fantasies, but they can’t deepen our sense of reality or help us build a reasonable society. A myriad of genes can be manipulated to create new forms of energy, to cure some ills or raise IQ, yet in the process evolutionary wisdom of immeasurable eons must be irreversibly expunged. How odd that science is the discipline most credulous assuming that existence is explicable and rational; exploded metaphysical traditions have not been replaced with any adequate coherent explanation of creation, let alone our role and/or responsibility within it. Nearly everything we learned at school about the world was fundamentally mistaken. The real macrocosm is so par- alogical and labyrinthine that the simple formulae convenient for teachers and their term exams are always insufficient to describe it. Curiously, as the cosmos is cracked open, physics finds it empty: the more comprehensible, the more unmeaning. Dwellers in the Darkest Age by definition pass obliviously through it. Unmistakably the rationalists’ ultimate illusion: that the core of existential mystery will soon be bared by our unlimited brainpower, if not by our birdlike vision, doglike hearing, overall insight. With what precision—all the lunatic exactitude of any lunar landing—science takes the measure of infinitude. With far more data on the cosmos than our ancestors enjoyed, we’ve got more convoluted explications yet scarce deeper understanding of it than they had. Not only learning, even literacy, is not needed to reap seeming benefits from new technologies. The paramount political decisions now are for the technocrats, our Eichmanns and sleek oil magnates, to take care of. Truth to tell, highflying science has no modus operandi for relating technical solutions to the basic needs and aspirations of humanity; by virtue of its own unswerving method it is forced to dominate the human species, not just nature, hence it guarantees our world’s mercurial fatality. What’s known as knowledge splinters into specialists’ incomprehension of each other’s specialities; conveyed by dialects now masterable by increasingly less common minds, communication breaks down through proliferating information warring with misinformation, broadening the inky gulfs of silence. Vistas science opens art contains; disturbing art conjoins and livens, whereas reassuring science splits and grinds to atoms. Moral science—final, all too final contradiction in terms. Science for a certainty has helped us understand at last the mystery of human origins and ultimate extinction. Through the analytic monocle one can perceive how

426 insignificant is humankind, how little all things matter.* Contrary to scientific doctrine, there is one unique world, not two segregate spheres tabbed “objective” and “subjective.” Scientific theory has at least a certain veritable verisimilitude. Equating objectivity with truth may be dead wrong, for objectivity depends on its demonstrability of proving false. “Objective” stands for self-deluded and dehumanized. The more a psychoanalyst succeeds as “scientist,” illuminating various neurotic symptoms with a rigorous dispassion, the less adequate his understanding of the human being, since the latter calls for deeper insight than mere objectivity affords. The scientist who’s sure his work is value-free may not be wrong. The awful truth, wonderful past understanding, dwells not in terms or contradiction, nor is it quite final. “You’re the limit!” Do not be too sure.

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“Have you no fear of God?” Honest to goodness, no—thanks be to heaven. Goodness based on guilt before our gods is far from goodness. Spooks we’ve “seen” are only our anxieties envisioned; nightmares but denials of the dreamers’ anger: most alleged political conspiracies are carry-overs from the boogeyman, and most intelligence from recently departed spirits manifests as hiccups. Immaturity survives as long as narcissism, driven by death, makes one mimic narcissistic pseudo-adults.† Cannot humankind subsist without a positive philosophy, i.e., personal hangup? More exigently, can it survive with one? Hearken not to the pathetic self’s melodramatic stereotyped dreams. And if telepathy or levitation were actual, so what? Who has received—thus en rapport with all—what messages or traveled where? Whose life is then any the lovelier? In light of cosmic physics’ bafflements, do not parapsychol- ogy’s enigmas seem plumb tame? Communication, being on the same wave- length, calls for hearing more electric and less short-circuited than our minds’ telegraphy. Some screech their petty threats about some “powers other than our God. . . .” They mean their selves? Must they serve such a pitifully personal fake deity? He fashions the whole world, yet can disclaim responsibility for all the evil in it? That smacks most suspiciously of our own scientific method.

* In fact how immaterial all the minutiae quotidian material existence constitutes. † The discovery of life’s precariousness probably comes earlier than ever was imagined, surely at birth if not ere it. Solely a mature soul—no neurotic—can embrace the newborn truth. 427 Disembodied “God” sounds all too much like somebody’s despotic self blown up. Even “oneself” may be just another pitiful encapsulated formulation of one’s self, in which case oneself has to go too for eternity to last. The praiser of the Lord may be a godforsaken ego. This Te Deum to one’s self is tedium. If “God” is a volitional being similar to humankind, then only those folk “in his grace” can ever have communion with him and receive his revelations. Sensible souls like the Buddhists radically differently comprehend that ultimate reality extends in everything throughout the multiverse; thus there’s no human with no chance of coming into contact with that truth. If we were really and truly made in God’s image are we not obliged to pity Him? Or the poor Virgin Mary, by this time a rancid gammer somewhat smooched? Should we not show compassion for our failing bent cadaverous old daffy buzzard of a grizzle-visaged Grandpa, Yawah, puerilized, all washed up, next to nameless in a Kafkan nursing home, the grumpy bedfast geezer in his anecdotage scratching his bald wizened pate and through his clacking dentures wheezing one last rheumy rumination, “Wonder why the devil I am here?” The devil only knows the answer, Gramps. If the Big Bang indeed began things could the end point prove to be a shrinking pop? God’s silent now he is an atheist. There is no Satan . . . save whoever finds it necessary to invent him. God and demon “are” one entity. Who’s maker of this black-magic world if not each of us schlemiels? Why blame the shaving or the boudoir mirror for one’s artificial face? Yes, if man has not yet beheld the Devil, he had better watch his self. The dithering, lumbago-stricken gaffer off his rocker literally had no idea what he was doing—least of all the immolating ramifications—when he recklessly conceived a sun, thought yellow and not white-hot to its core. The bloody idol that can sacrifice his son has carved out his own lot. God’s judgment that his son’s a bogus sage means nothing, for the Lord’s the master mold. How fitting that the old fart has found his Creation N.G. There’s no doubt it’s high time to laugh all the gods out of this world so that beatitude in it can be revived.

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Some call me shameless if I query what their rubbertired god was up to, yea, what binge or couch the foozling fossil was on, in between creating heaven and earth? Are they blameless, overweeningly imagining they understand how even earth came into being? I’ll be a monkey’s uncle if the young continue to endorse their elders’ imbecile beliefs. The infantile assumption that

428 the globe was formed to serve our petty needs persists—despite millennia of countervailing data: the desire to have our egos stroked by some “Big Daddy” or Ma Nature overwhelms the cold facts of determinism; the delusions of divinity and demonism keep intruding in spite of all contradicting evidence. To puerile ignoramuses each pater seems omnipotent creator, a colossus bearing all tarnation on his towering frame. Lacking this deluded humankind, what world sustains a god? Not everyone can realize right off that nobody’s home. Slow-witted primates, all slow learners, find it hard to count beyond six thousand,∗ let alone ad summum anno mundi. Most folk simply cannot tolerate the sui generis yet adventitious nature of our species’ evolution. It is scarcely accidental that Creationists should also be brash nuclearists, for each stand, like Custer’s last, evinces desperate dishonesty and/or confusion; aptly it appears those hard-shell bugs would dearly love to crucify whoever demonstrates that men are merely beasts among beasts. Darwin, whose nonanthro- pocentric perspective still drives Bible-thumpers ape, admittedly uncovered purely a truth, never mind how awe-inspiring, not the truth. But who is vain and shameless, who besmirching the unparalleled, forever sacred Unknown with the sappy attributes of Homo sapless? Truly, all authority is rickety Godhood, a moldy shroud indeed. Divinity is no more equal to one of our gods than love to rulership. Retarded on his pension, “God,” the moldering Field Marshal “himself,” has to guarantee coercing, to demand bootlicking, and to threaten firing or court-martialing; this crude ancestral view of our still stratified, dark, warring underworld whose rigid narrow rungs of rank lead nowhere, of innumerable hectoring commanders-in-chief and antedilu- vian blood baths, befits a vassalized age of sclerotic insight striving in vain to explain away its total state of discord. Who but phobic mothers, sons, and daughters still revering arbitrary bastard fathers ne’er to mellow now ensure injustice will continue reigning in the home and through the world? Many a brute has managed to postpone unto oblivion exposure of his real brutality; domestic tyrants all too long have gone to their graves without ever being reproached. It seems unlikely that skunks at their deaths regret being skunks. Regrettably alive still is the powerful old impulse to let some grim blustering dread-ridden Führer take “protective custody” of everyone’s emotions, since our Papa, “knowing best,” takes all our sins upon his strapping shoulders—heaven help all emulative innocents. Society’s entire mental structure

* How apt that prelate Ussher’s calculation, with its fatuous ignoring of our multimillion- year-long foraging tradition, very roughly coincided with our species’ Fall into corruptive agriculture. 429 characterized by corrupt inept authority* is bred in fear and loathing, in a craving for imaginary safety. Humankind looks vainly for clear absolution in blind absolutism; the rationalist intellectuals who claimed that decadent monarchy’s decline would end the herd’s demand for necromantic rule have proven dead wrong. Godhead is more than our headshrunk godlets, greater than all of our all too stable (leaky, reeky) explanations. Far better be a dog, alive, Than any god man can contrive. How we talk and scribble drivel about God—yet we do not know what we’re talking about. As if we were right-hand angels dancing on a pinhead! What both God and his immoral maker manifestly are in need of in the worst way I your humble servant volunteer now to deliver: a haymaker, solid, heartfelt, and enduring.

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Show me the man who is man’s God, And I’ll show man that man’s the fraud.

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Do tell us more about your particular god: does he ever squat like the rest of us? Indulge a peter?† No? A great mistake! They say that he can walk on water? So can skeeters, so can water skaters. And he rises into the sky? But so does dust. So much for the mirage of unapproachable ascendancy. Beyond a doubt we have succeeded in watering down to sneaky pete the wine of truth. Mirabile dictu, all the mountains move . . . of their own accord with nature’s unruly reality; but horribile dictu, all our lawful faiths are immovable—dead as stone. Our edited, accredited “miracles,” tricks of a seeming genuine fakir, show wonderfully clearly that we’ve never watched the sun rise.

* Double redundancy. How hard to stomach that it’s dunderheads remain in charge. † The Church always has required Christ to be unequivocally gendered (i.e., definitely male) but never sexual: this is positively ponderable stuff and nonsense.

430 _301_

Jesus died for irresistible unreason, not for our miserable gluttonies. Footloose and fancy-free, the son also rises, falls, and hastens to his rebirth, but all of us is vanity, for love is not our sedentary, anthropomorphic selves. It is a vain and limited mind, callow thinking, that conceives man as nature’s crown and thornless to boot. Has heaven no westering sun alive? Is it a family extinguished quite, without an heir? Splitting a shaft already smack dab in the bull’s eye is denounced as tampering with divine vision. One star strove to instruct his disciples; now “another” might illuminate us, did the truth not so eternally, like a light ray, rebound whither it originated or, like a sound wave, go in one ear and out the other. If the Little Pastor’s destiny was to embrace and summarize old Europe’s domination of the so-termed nineteenth century, so a littler professor’s might well be to grasp and signify the West’s unstinting demolition of the twentieth—both estranged alumni curious end products that, for all of constipated capitalism’s best pains, have proved obstinately unexpellable from its low school of hard knocks, hellish workloads, and crucial experience. “Genuine charity requires sacrifice for the good of the species”. But, though God proposes, Christianity disposes that nobody any longer need be sacrificed, imposes regimens designed to universalize insensibility, to still hunger forever. True love, far from such drugged states, is inconsolable. Real passion’s possible solely for someone or something from whom or which reciprocation’s not. Without consideration some consider their selves now redeemed and yet are damned. Accepting the vain dogma of eternal virtual life, Xians hence must take responsibility for getting there intact by incessant repentance and obliviousness of their stark mortality. In spite and because of their doctrine of vicarious cowardice, they will have their reward, please God.

_302_

It’s solely in the truth-teller that every master ogre meets his match: a gimlet- eyed exposure of each screwer. Caesar and Christ—irreconcilable antitheses,∗ yet both eagle-beaks now excrement. Jesus didn’t stop Rome: Rome swallowed him. He stipulated separating church and state; whereas the popes sought to

* Treasure the legend of the warlord Alexander’s audience with the incorrigible philosoph Diogenes, who still spurns not just the desire for power but, more tellingly, the power of desire.

431 displace the kings and “rule the world.” His auto-da-fé has cleansed no one: it’s polluting everlastingly. Atonement by him is puerility, at-one-ment with oneself reality. Pray spare us this now rancid unforgivable idolatry of “Jesus Christ,” this fabricating a sole mortal idiotically absolute. It’s solely fouled souls who are hung up on impeccability. No body is impeccable. Snuffling, knee-benders gush that he was the Son of God, no illegit, somehow a spotless man: that is a sacrilege beneath contempt, if not beneath pity. Profitably cut “corrective” lenses must have given people double vision. What if he were a bastard and a fruit* to boot?† What think we that would prove? That we’re legitimate and straight? Bespatter humankind no more with such emasculate conceptions. Even droppings are divine; but every deification is a defecation: for God’s sake do not defile and smear the earthly. Fortunate indeed, by heaven, was the boy whose birth has had to be removed to Bedlam . . . fortunate, that is, in not living forever so as to be forced to view the cursed caricature his followers, his swallowers, have fashioned of him. If the Lamb of God, if that forbearing lion thrown to the slavering Christians, actually could return to life, he might not care too much for the brand of “tender loving care” he would be bound to get, God willing, in this mercenary underworld. Religious prophets are apt to emerge inside congested “trading” centers stinking of unnatural loot and injustice, driven to expose the monied thieves who rule; the prophets’ heirs are likelier to turn out preying priests. The ruling interest of every lord of Christendom lies in pecuniary gain, to Christ a total loss.

_303_

Presumably Saints Joseph, Mary, Peter, and Paul have a good time simper- ing up in the stratosphere—of irredeemably unbalanced minds? Rolling their Pharisaic eyes, with the kingdom of greed within them, “worshipers” by unimaginative rote have made their maudlin vow: “We’ll imitate Christ. . . .” Yet “the carpenter’s son,” troubled if not racked by his arcane paternity,

* Is there not something queer in Robin Hood and his merry troop and Jesus and his poor band being presented to young children as their primary social models of camradery? † Note for Gandhians: Jesus too was impotent, no invert—one more peerless author having no lead in his pencil? Whence, not far to seek, their nonresistance doctrine. Impotence, then, a condition to be—nay, not proud of but, yea—grateful for? Great God! Perversities like ruining friends’ marriages, seducing “daughters” into lives of pure hysteria, and tyrannizing over sons can be prevented simply by not having any friends, daughters, or sons? Rejecting one’s son, one betrays an incapacity to love.

432 worshiped no earthly man, but rather, his supernal Father; thus the fate of filius nullius among men. Who latches onto love as life’s great panacea but who lacks it most distressingly? When one sad mastiff howls below the moon, in two shakes of a lamb’s tail, hard upon it, packs of baying ketchup- mongrels congregate to hound and savage the strange barker in the dark, wolfing him down as well. Exaggerating one soul’s painful doom allows the monstrous zealots to ignore all other souls’? It’s theomaniacs think Christ was God Omnipotent; but “He” is love, all-vulnerable, crucifiable. The grievances of history’s innumerable victims, even when forgotten, live on, time-proof and accusing. Odd—or is it?—what a froward, outcast angel and anathema, yes, how unevangelical and unacceptable a devil’s advocate, the Nazarene was and oneself is to one’s self. Entirely mystified, the bleating flock cannot perceive its bellwether’s intriguing life as parable—of genius relating to the flock. When truth is mobilized it is not truth. The “silent,” “holy,” saturnine night of our Saturnalian pissed mass celebration* is a night in deed. It’s lights out for that shady character, the bosky drugster hung and lit up like a Christmas tree, who feeling light yet fails to see the light, having cut down and out enlightenment. By definition Xians are excluded—have excluded them selves—from ineffable nirvana.

_304_

Each church confines true Christ no less exclusively than it confines infinity. The dolce far niente of Creation is as far removed from the industrial insanity of Protestantism as from the slumbrous retardation of Catholicism. Pray-ers keep their eyes closed and their minds the same to their real lives and motives. With religiosity, which means well fastened, fingering their beads or jujus, fearful souls file woodenly in their election queues into protective pews; still, wisdom’s not in social outings but in personal innings. And, while sirens wail through streets, the stiffnecked bourgeois plutocrats, truly sinners, opulently feculent, sit wrapped in their anodyne comforters, sucking on their sundae mindlessness, as at some concert hall or courtroom silenced by unnatural

* The Nativity today produces quite the biggest killing of the year for traders whose sleek predecessors “the Lord” once drove from the Temple. How absolutely apropos, as Xianity’s second millennium grinds to its terminus, that Karl Marx has been given his quietus and that the slave state of capitalism, reeking of greed and corruption, now has “conquered” all.

433 compulsion, gripped in the dead calm administered by the soft-pedaling pipe organ of their power-fettered organization, never kneeling spiritually, yet fallen in the undisturbed state of the well-fixed dopester. Have we wormed and wangled our selves into being on the very best terms with J.C.—practically business partners—so as to insure wall-to-wall coverage of our future lives as fat night crawlers? Most reliant, all too outwardly reliant, we believe in the things of religion, which are not religion. Social rouges fail to screen decay in spirit’s features. Jesus grasped that virtue is obliged to be poor as a church mouse; meanwhile vice congests the temples. Sanctity is not some thing that we can get and have and hold: it’s more than something one must give. Let’s give the Xians credit for one thing: they do believe in and are tops at taking. Peerless pharisees, they love to hang their Master by his heels: it’s others they seek to see undergoing pain, as witness their “pro-life” and anti-euthanasia stances. “Right-to-Lifers” regularly clamor for obligatory executions; unbelievers “the saved” want in hell forever tortured. The most marked trait of believers is their willingness to prey till doomsday. Prayers are means the mean use to evade God. How are stage- struck hypocrites, takeoff artists, going to clean up their acts? Jesus may have loved us (this nobody knows), but not because the Bible tells us so. Reciting Scriptures is like “satisfying” hunger by perusing a thick menu. Verily one tells us that our Scriptures are the work of men long dead, but that life now is the work of oneself. Man was evolved for the sake of the truth and not the truth for the sake of man. Every Religion crucifies religion. Curious, by Jove, how universally—yes, in faith, how catholically—Jesus was betrayed and what a mystery this is to many.* For the truth he was as well as witnessed has itself remained apocryphal. Unlike Old Scratch, God is so hidden that “He” clearly is not God at all; those always prating of “Him” have precisely nothing to say. Love, the unknown, is forever born in a manger and crucified: we daily, momentarily murder it. Jeez, what pagan irony that Freya, eponym of memorably evil Friday—in whose spell so many nitwits, not just micks, are moving—was the Norsemen’s fancied goddess of love, beauty, and fecundity! A krauthead Lucifer, a master pietist and crony of usurious oppressors, once decreed that “God made Adam lord among live creatures, but Eve spoiled it all.” Now learn, instructing dolt: Divinely woman tries creating and nurturing wisdom, only to have that demented Simple Simon, man, religiously destroy it. Even while defaming, one comes to subvert Christ strictly to objec- tify him, who is us at heart.

* Nothing easier for blind belief than some dumb mystery. 434 _305_

Let Churchianity fall. Each of the pompous, worldly stones of Rome, those worse than senseless things that are the dotty dominoes, will soon be tumbled down and crushed, so that none is left standing upon another. Rattlepates may wish to fit one in as cornerstone or keystone of their dull casino after pulverizing him, but there is no need for their musty edifice, for any vanity- inspired pyramid honoring death. They may declare that their ecclesiastic cit- adel is safe and sound completely after all, untouched by centuries of truth’s attacks, vital and flourishing; nevertheless the dead, whether stuffed trophies or curators, are notoriously unaware of their condition and their housing in dilapidated sepulchers. How could funereal chateaus inhabited exclusively by ghosts be bulwarks ’gainst the murk surrounding fact-mad science-worshipers? All churches* are concretions of benightedness; each organized religion is but simulation of the love for common folk. To church the faithful flee from what “their” Master taught. Self-righteous whoring hierarchs and honorable pimping lowerarchs, all cureless curés of iniquitous inequity, poor hirelings, criminal lawyers every one forsooth, are bound to earn their vicious victories, not sideless justice: must they, must we, go on judging and condemning our selves as our forefathers judged and condemned Jesus? He was a man, just unlike us. His drawing power, his appeal to all too human sadomasochism, still is unsurpassed: so many must have loved to see his theist eidolon evaporating in articulo mortis. Those who worship that obscenity par excellence, the Cross, expose the void that is their nihilism. Separation of him from humanity is proof of separation from him. If he was really and truly Christ, he lived and died discipleless.† One seeks in vain to reach and teach the unkind mass of humankind. Society of Jesus? Church of Saints? These smell like veritable lies, fine names for dark dens of professional thieves and enormous conclaves of bright popinjays. Judas Priest! let us call spades spades, corpses corpses, humbugs humbugs. Where would the hood be without mammon-laden Christianity, that Hebrew swindle burnished with a Latin varnish? Surely popery but rein- stated Romans’ version of good business rapine.

* Such as sundry political parties. Unanimity is only reached by force within a glove of propaganda. Each such corps foments the nursery tale that all legitimately instituted power argues sacredness. And every heresy, arising from live spirit, gives away the institutional demoralization. † If Krishnamurti’s precious, what of Krishnamurtians? 435 That faithless faith is not just Roman: it’s romance; Its rootless root is no longer fine: it’s finance. White as new snow was the Essenic robe, but blackguards very like our selves have dyed it dried-blood dark: whitewashing walls will not wash and does not remove the stains. Our justice is not justice, for it is not love; our understanding is not understanding for like reason. Chuckle deluded apes of whorship in the One True Church? And also in a Court of Justice? Enough, pray, of panjandrums’ codified mummeries, rotten through and through. The snooty snout of regal infallibility is a nose fallen in. Holy shit, why promulgate more papal bull, your Holinass? Quick, spread the word to all the priests that this book is contaminated and thus must be kept from every pious, kept soul so agreeably poor in spirit. Yet it’s we, with loaded bellies, dice, minds, speech, and hearts, who are contaminated, loathsome, unregenerate, fellow prigs. And truth cannot be kept, being wild papaya or fresh watercress, unharnessed to our sterilizers. Cleverly one may be egged on to expose the clever clergy throughout Christendumdum so that we our impious selves can escape exposure behind the robes of their imposture; but it’s we who have robed them and robbed them of light, we who have made their priestcraft, their fraus pia, possible. Fish-eyed Friday “fasts” memorializing a fishy fetish but amount to passing funny money on the forgers.

_306_

Woe be ours, lovebreaking lawmakers and Godmolding ministers, servants of your selves, alas, yours also, spineless pedagogues and heartless sawbones, hypocrites! for you have swallowed truth’s key and will neither enter yourself nor let those who’d enter go in. Mercy you’ve shown none; how can you expect it to be shown you? Guilt belongs to self-obsessed heads, likewise retribution. Vengeance is not mine but ours. Do I damn you? No, we damn our selves. Be not deceived—oneself is not mocked: what we sow we reap.

_307_

The cheaply purchased purgative known as Confession may relieve us but does not release us from the bitter fruits of folly; fact is, it ensures our future follies and worse blockages. Disposing, going through the motions, of the Eucharist each actor leans, as blind as gelded Oedipus, upon a staff of death; it’s superstitious savages, quite palpably fed up with humankind, that hope to tear 436 off portions of their fathers’ force by eating them. A lot of “Christians” take “Communion,” yet strangely none becomes a bit like one-of-a-kind Christ. So many half-and-half and poisonous have followed Jesus to the breaking of bread, but how many to the drinking of his passion? Early we indoctrinate the young in our macabre cutting of throats, we submerge them in a tepid bath of turpitude in which each formal oath the novices are pressed to swear can only be profane, annunciating torture’s decency, not genitality’s. Very cunning of such furtive cultures, to confirm conformists who have reached the age of discredit if not discretion. Cracking up a brisk business as usual, O captains of religious and war industries who’re hugging, purse-proud, that grand total of unbalanced books? It’s given to God-botherers, the hornswoggling Billy Grahams of this underworld, to grasp the knack of saving most indefinitely. What “religious” audiences, like political and sporting congregations, do not care to hear is that the cradling masses’ numbers furnish more security than do the glib hosts’ callow rantings. Folk should thank their lucky stars who’ve never had to witness any idiotic God squad. Hordes of giddy poor fools press to swallow drivel, fall for fallen angels’ pitches; but what need for hordes of giddy poor fools? Are the airwaves not dis-graced by canting mountebanks exploiting the herd’s loneliness and ignorance? Begad, what a monstrosity is televangelist “religion” the dogmatic content of which fundamentally is fucking well nil and whose slick techniques are pirated from spinmeisters’ subliminal soliciting: its gospel is procured self-gratification—practically as remote from Jesu as it’s possible to get. The country fairly oozes fake faith: poverty, to the compulsively acquisitive right-wing majority of citizens, bursting with scattershot dementia, is certain proof of personal unworthiness; no attitude could be more Christian nor less Christlike. Well-paid preachers haven’t got a prayer of getting any better. The hereafter is a haven that’s ideal . . . for spiritual cravens. Verily is Xianity the ultimate in petrified religion, every reverend being grounded in subsoil of garden fear. Plucking fast-fingeredly, the priests, whose paters of yore fittingly were the first brothel keepers, harp upon the sure-fire box-office hit-parade tune of the dread of death; but it’s their theme song that is killing. The beginning of true wisdom’s not the fear of God but realization of nonbeing. When morality (immoral in its marrow) falls away, then mortality falls away, cadaverous Christinanity petering out, crumbling with its termite-riddled Cross. The creed itself proves so much more pathetic than does any of its litany of sins.

437 _308_

Not Roma but its opposite, amor, is aeterna. Have we no faith in being enlightened in this life? Have we no love for life? Why, let us shop, then, at the holy fishmongers’ if what we want is bliss unlimited guaranteed after we decom- pose entirely, plus, passed down for our crossed-up descent, another two or few millennia of conscientious double-dealing. What folk praying immaturely ask of their Big Daddylike eidola is that two and two not equal four.

_309_

All prayers and ceremonies are but skeletal remains of sentinels yet clogging the defile through grace; grinning, plastered like saints, some souls finger carrion and snore midst weathered bones when they’d be better sweeping off those stumbling blocks from the internal highroad. Yes, they do in fact partake of the flesh and drain the blood of divinity. Without compunction humankind deserts itself: the more decided and assured our verbal backing of the Master sage, the deeper is our daily stupor in the garden. Christians, the antipodes of Christ, are the impostors, loving most of all to bite the hands that feed them. Haven’t valiant crusaders done enough of their blunt hammering? Why do the casketmakers, so oblivious to what I have been driving at, ask me to stop hitting the nail on the head? Life embraces all of us, but none of us embraces life. Love is totally in touch with society, which is totally out of touch with love. Godforsaken Christ dies on the Cross, impaled by law-abiding Christ-shuns who prefer to die in bed. What’s more despicable than stuffing younglings’ minds, which are discovering the world, with such inane conceits about some “other” one? It was no schmaltzy English angel wrote the Bible, nor was Jesus a blonde Aryan cherub. Jeepers Creepers, Grandma, what a big voice and a blue nose you have when you talk of Christ and truth! How many million inoffensive lambie-pies’ throats has this age slit and sucked dry? My, we certainly like our cuts rare, don’t we? Cross-tians share their faith by screwing, crossing up their neighbors. “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” dutifully recites the Xian, crossing himself and wiping his sword. All our skewered sacrifices equal vanities, for love delights not in the blood of lambs. Truth lives in mercy, not in sacrifice. A shibboleth such as observing the Sob-bath was made for and by man to flounder in, forswearing until dinnertime his weekday, everyday sins. Chicken every Sunday is served in its own schmaltz to clucks chicken

438 every day. Dressed in their Sunday worst, sniveling, they cry “Encore” to the Crucifixion. Under the Cross of the “devout” they huddle, hoping the crowd will hide what they devour. Heavenly Days, how we cherish Jesus—once he’s hanging, ripe for exe- gesis, quite securely from the spikes. How sharply kikes are envied their intan- gible resources! Keen indeed are requiems chanted for the surviving selves, not for their sainted victims. Pharisees are those who think their selves religious. Anti-Semitism’s origin might well lie in the idiotic fantasy that Jesus was our species’ “Savior.” Hence Xians always hated Jews because the latter understood so well what rot that claim was—and is? Anti-Semites for their mind-sets need the Semite no less than believers need their idol: bloody crucifying plus pure-white resurrecting must be kept up endlessly to justify the goys’ existence; thus not every yid is calcined, nor is Jesus ever suffered to expire in peace. The scapegoat Jew seems far less dolorous To sacrifice than lusts that lurk in us. The cruelest criminal is no more cruel than we our selves are; no beast quite so bestial and wild as man or woman: translated, “bestiality” becomes “humanity.” Clean and complacent we may be on the surface, but inside, ghastly charnelhouses swarming with worms. _310_

So charmingly are chanted soothing-syrup psalms with fruity accents by mouths stained dark red with death; but to intone does not attone. Apologies subserve to ease the Sunday mourning superego’s enteralgia, abetting us in acting asses Mondays after doing the same Saturdays. Strike bargains with the Devil as you will, he’s never going to let you off the hook.* Some start to see when nothing’s left to see. Obtuse confession in the twelfth hour, when a wreck’s reduced to sipping gnats’ piss, hoping to be saved by the bell, comes a trifle late, goes in the wrong direction. Sinners most need something, all right, but it isn’t absolution.† Genuine remorse, anxiety about making a fool

* Try begging your “own” banked-upon extortionist when your home’s mortgage crucially has been foreclosed. † Many women in confession, since deceit for them is practically second nature, lie with no shame: love, to them, is God’s own best-kept secret. Nuns especially are masters at the craft of keeping their own chamber counsel. Women’s secretiveness and their unpredictability at least reveal their confident intention to avoid complete control by so-called fathers. 439 of one’s self at the last, may be misplaced—at least mistimed; the way one dies exhibits only the most tenuous connection with the way one lived. If you can tell a soul about your folly, rest assured it’s not the worst of deeds you ever did. It’s not at long life’s end that deep experience survives, when only trivia remain fixed in a failing memory. Deathbed repentance bears no fruit; and isn’t such penitence but pretense? Well past belief the unalloyed pretentious- ness that padres demonstrate by rushing to be near all native infants in extremis prior to expiry purely to deliver them from the ever-projected Evil One: once sprinkled with the body snatcher’s lukewarm uric acid, any petal’s welcome to fall into its “eternal happiness.” Extreme unction is smoothly mouthed by chaplains good at burying those who have kept the Faith of paying well. As battlefield first aid is tardy aid, so last rites sine cura rob each soul of his or her first rights. Our tainted tongues repent with unctuous mumblings, but our hearts? And what about our hands? Imbrued are they in underhanded blood, though rectus in curia we, suborned by unguents, are forever greasing itchy palms with the pure fat of trees. An oily tongue bespeaks too slick a mind.

_311_

It takes more than some chrism to legitimize grave crimes. Are we not steeped in sanctimonious hogwash and the hideous madness of butchery from the very hides cramping our swollen feet hellbent for leather to the furs supporting double chins in such a spuriously high society? Yea, seldom a pheasant or other bird falls to the ground without the will of a blunderbussing Christian who, contending he’ll scare up his meat, must beat about the bush, refusing to talk turkey even while he’s spouting gobbledygook of devotion to his favorite Dog. Is it not the hunter who fills in the duck blind, the same muscle-bound escapist simply scared stiff to go after what’s the really big game? Plunking easy prey is pleasant, reassuring, for they cannot fire back. By eliminating species’ choicest specimens, each gunman loaded for bear plays his godlike role almost instinctively within the Grand Design which now imposes such unnatural selection, weeding out the very fittest for the mausoleum that’s his “living room.” The open season never terminates on helpless reason; it’s not violence but reason men use as a last resort. What seemly humanitarians we are to outlaw slaughtering of certain creatures at appropriate times of year so that the proper quantity is kept conserved and always some variety in stock for us to slaughter. Each sports fisherman’s a jerk at one end of a line who’s waiting for another at the other. Man’s himself a gone goose in the bag on a

440 wild-goose chase after peace and goodwill with blood in his belly, mind, and vision. No fox, turning tail, flying the coop, can keep the human race’s long- range natural turnabout from turning—toward either psychical or physical effacement, both involving self-annihilation. Hunters who get their comeup- pances are as a rule as loaded as their rifling cold steel. Some invariably wind up ventilating anybody happening to be in their vicinity. Those dum-dums whose peculiar shot is shooting count their killing sport, they call their slew of victims game: among the varmints whom is there hope for, fellow clay pigeons? A bird in the bush is worth more than two in the hand. Kindly do not kill two birds with one stupidity. The gun has made the jobs of hunters and assassins all too easy meat. Some rate me “a wild man”—some cannibals. Despoilers have the impudence to lecture me on smut, enjoining me to “have a heart,” be merciful and tolerant, not so revolting.

_312_

”Conservatives” are not conservative of soil and fruit, nor “rebels” yet rebellious enough toward their selves. So-called conservatives cannot but serve inane anachronistic institutions like the military or a monarchy. Christ is too catholic to be Catholic, far too protestant to be Protestant, too communistic to be Communist, much too liberal to be Liberal. Could every labeled faith or ism be a false faith, all our “ologies” and schisms no more than mythologies, inflated mental currency of an empty go-for-bust age. Like dead Communism, dying Christianity consists of less than one-tenth practice, more than nine- tenths sanctimony. Any church’s, any party’s, fundamental function is to keep its members feeling reconciled—to being holier-than-thou. To track down perfidy perfected, one must search out those demanding perfect faith. Non- Buddhists think that there are Buddhists and non-Buddhists; a real Buddhist realizes everyone’s a Buddhist, a nonentity.

_313_

The everyday and the original soul are not—never was—apart. Once free from everyday delusion, one sees there is neither mind nor truth, all opposites being vacant. Unmistakably each contumelious pair of twits fixed at opposing poles, at daggers drawn, still have at least one thing besides locked horns in common: feuding, at cross purposes, both souls are frozen stiff, both hearts precarved. Two souls are better than one—save when they collide. No war

441 determines who is right but only who is left. It takes two clever fools to start an argument but none to finish it. Deceptive vicious egos of dialecticians can prove anything at all they have decided to. Exactly how interminable our hairsplitting disputations are, and how headsplittingly indeterminable intel- lectually, we have no idea yet. Awake now, folks, and shake off all those lice. Faith is the harvest not of any argumental reason but of all-embracing spirit, fruit that’s set to flourish well above the toadstools of confessions and convictions. Bona fide faith dwells beyond words: who expresses it betrays it. A babushka once demanded, “D’you believe in God?” Asking a silly question, she deserved a matching answer, e.g,: Can a jailed bear shit in the woods? Best instead inquire: Are we in love? And if not, why not? Could it be because we’re no less dead than our redoubtable God of belief? What sells like hotcakes is not best but cheapest; that’s why “faith,” which costs so little, is forever held so dear. The faithful who don’t doubt are infidels; fanatics are fey doubters who don’t dare let their snarls of doubts surface.

_314_

Theism harbors nihilism, Xianity fascism. The plight is not of man stricken without God but of man stuck with God. What but our God-Almightiness now seals our doom? “How good it is to weary and exhaust oneself in hopeless search for the true good in order to stretch one’s arms out to the Redeemer” . . . as a last- gasp dose of sodium chloride ere the chowderhead, no longer stirring, deep in the soup, downs the fishy slop in which his noodle, kidneys, and adre- nal glands flounder. Resignation to the bromide of “God’s will” is just what Godly shepherds like to see at shearing time or on a market day. Those “wise” guys aim to lead us simpletons, strung along because willing to string along, down the concrete garden path, to grip us tightly, like vices, reforming us bit by bit, bite by bite, or holus-bolus, in a squeeze, as boa constrictors would. Guilt, that peculiarly womanly condition, forges followers: why else were sot- tish doctrines like Original Sin pushed for ages? Psychologically Xianity forever has been unprofound indeed, imposing guilt upon its minions for their sinful thoughts—a fraud, since consciousness cannot control the upsurge of desires, solely the decision to fulfill them. Nothing can excuse predestination having so long been a useful dogma for deceitful parasites to plug; sad multitudes have endlessly been—and are still—kept subjugated by the plausible canard of posthumous perdition. Never wonder why all tyrannies of

442 state and church have made humility the highest virtue. Every “pure” serpent wants us to submit our selves to the spirit of the Lord-serpent, to renounce our independent self-love and be humble, hooked, albeit writhing, on God’s medicine, yielding obediently to his urgent personal demands. How can we question His reality when he’s palpably screwing us?

_315_

Frenetic efforts to prove that one’s god exists prove only that to one essentially nothing exists, much less oneself. What signifies most is not whether or not such a beastly humorless cartoon as “God” exists but that we see why it is so significant to humor us. What’s our motive in our affirmation or denial? Love must soar away from every self-created and self-crucified man-god, past the one God of Hebrews, even well beyond The One of Hindus, into Tao and Zen and— Life beats deeper than our mouths and loftier than our brains. All faiths are tolerable save those narrow, vicious, and self-righteous, atheist or monotheist creeds like Kommunism, Xianism or Muhammadism that attempt to proselyte—by force or rancorous deceit. Religion’s essence is that no one but one’s self in part in toto is oneself. Christ is oneself, whoever one may be, no matter who. All co-religionists are irreligionists: the priests and politicians spout vague generalities, whereas truth is unique, and there is no common approach or destiny. Theodicy surely derives from idiocy. The foolishness of God must be stronger than the wisdom of men; for God hath chosen the ever-scheming, such as fractious Saul, to ruin the would-be liberating, such as fabulous Jesus. It’s not the original glad tidings of great joy now that debase but the Pavlovian gospel, the conditioning of the future nirvana, the ever-and-ever Never-Never Land “beyond” our self-constructed, self-constricted prison ceilings. One might sympathize with Paul’s affliction, his conceits and wanderings, were any evidence on hand he ever cared a whit for Jeshua as human. What apostle of love’s e’er so hollow as to whisper flattering sweet nothings into nymphs’ ears? How could any be a real-life lover? All apostles are apostates, and buzzfuzzian divines confuse but aren’t and can’t divine, though wizards at odium theologicum. In the Dark Ages, stoic wisdom was replaced by an abstractive wizening Scholasticism via universities wherein professionals trained profs, rank specialists rank specialists, and tutelage became no longer aimed at forming fully rounded individuals. However clever gods may seem web-weaving catchwords, luring the unwary into the nets of their schemes of things, they are themselves stuck to

443 and caught in their own sticky trappings, while truth hovers, having scaled all clouded summits like a gliding condor, in a beautiful unwoven web. Pray don’t be hoodwinked by the preybound fairy tales of that degenerate halluci- nator, Paul, or of the main drag that’s our wall-eyed village priest or shrink: one just must learn the truth oneself. Christian belief—but not unutterable faith—consists in the illusive certitude of being loved. Absurd theology is affectation, while sublime faith’s plain affection. Love’s not an abridged ontol- ogy but a bridge out of it. Inside our temples framed with bones of contention lies the grey matter of death, inside our hearts flows the ruddy stream of life. Dismantling, tearing down chimeras, those preposterous conjectures that are theological castles, we can settle, get down to the nitty-gritty by some neoteric love taps on old earth at last.

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Flatulent dotards giving themselves airs rage that I am insufferable, coming to destroy their “faith”; but what need is there to destroy the vapors from a tempest in a teapot? Speaking of love is one thing, experiencing it another—not a thing, simply unspeakable. A healthful atmosphere is a fresh atmosphere, and all real food is best eaten alfresco: censors, fuddy-duddies, take note. Shooting the breeze, one expansively may belch forth windy eulogies, suspect effluvia, about the virtue of compassion passionately, but a randy blowhole’s lip love is just so much noisome hot air, bad breath, broken wind, beside another’s silent deeds of real compassion. And immeasurably greater than both goodly words and saintly acts abides oneself. For truth depends on no thing East or West, neither on sitting bloodlessly cross-legged nor on crosses bloodied with our dark mendacity. Not kosher, love-directed Christ but ill, God- fearing monks bore dietary regulations into carnal Christianity, rendering it flyblown: pietists grown insecure and fallen crippled cannot “live” without rules. Rational asceticism linked to denial of hostility tends to produce not a lively new heaven on earth but the malign old hierarchy of unending strife and desolation. May we be delivered, too, from egocentric parasitic spiritual pretenders spawned by Buddha, as from the myth à la mode that out of an agrarian simplicity or the delusory ideal of self-sufficiency can only be born amity and virtue. Even fools, if silent, can be fancied to be wise. Free spirit needs no sacred places, moral disciplines, set schedules, proper postures, or specific meditating objects. The experience that’s genuinely holy calls for no special conditions or directives. One can simultaneously be politically right

444 and psychologically dead wrong. Nothing’s commoner than ignorance pur- porting to be knowledge. Making out of something warm and simple some thing hard and chilly, many seek religion in a set way of life, but none finds it save in the wonder- working way of love. One asks us not to follow a way but to lead the way. Yes, truly all the orthodox sectarians, omniscient and beyond redemption, knowing and half-witted, aridly encrusted in salvationism, are the salt of the earth—the pure fruitlessness of the earth. But as every deadly habit-forming grain of salt dissolved in water loses its own savor, just so every problem is resolved when, losing our identity in holy presence, struck by prescience of the whole, unseasoned we discover everything, no thing, oneself.

445 446 VI Wild About What Is

447 448 No wisdom ranks above Ability to love. v Best is an attitude Of purest gratitude v There leaps infinitude In sheerest solitude. v Madmen resort to force, Wisdom turns to its source. v Blasphemers boast, “God is!” Honesty quests, I wis. v That one is dumb Who holds wisdom.

_317_

Heaven and earth unite, and sweet dew falls. Terrestrial and cosmic Mother, you are loved unutterably and none other. What’s life’s value without feeling, what is feeling’s without nature? Mean the man or woman who does not live close to that which lies behind the stars. We realize virtue’s nature only if we realize nature’s virtue. At last wisdom heads north, exiting into the wilderness’s sanctum. The one truthful church stands ever open, free of charge; its nave’s a fruitful garden and its minister oneself, its hymns are mystic breezes and its dome’s the flawless heavens. Listen to the moving music of the spheres sung sotto voce in a forest when no wind stirs, all the sound one’s inmost inborn veritable nonesuch of a nonself breathing. The eternal springs or falls to earth in the remorseless progress of each wondrous season. Deepest spirit does not dwell upon the other side of nature, not at all: pulsating as would distant thunder, it flows inside nature, whence one may sense reigns a preter- natural, imperishable, power-free quietude.

449 _318_

How can man have a god becloud himself? Why make an image, either graven or visualized, of oneself? Misnomered man has taken the name of himself in vain: why make a name for oneself? As if a moniker could even outline, let alone distinguish, essence. Thus all names are pseudonyms; whereas the book of life’s anonymous, and the name of the game anomalous. If we remember not every day, it may be holy; idly labor every day to give birth to oneself. Honor our true mother and father, earth and heaven, by improving upon their examples, fostering our fruit and flower, sons and daughters, that their days prove plentiful upon the land. Our innermost degeneracy, recognized or not, is visited upon our children and our children’s children unto the last generation of débris. Human beings kill not—save those too feeble to prevent them. By ignoring the uniqueness of each growing thing, we cannibals can consciona- bly swallow all at will; our tolerance as omnivores must be sui generis. Let us commit adultery if we can’t bring our selves to commit suicide. Who plots adultery commits it, but where rare love is there can be no transgression. Stealing what belongs to others, one is caught no longer in possession of oneself. Who thinks of theft commits the theft. Who thinks of slander slanders. Give an ear to base tales, and one shortly puts a mouth to them. Confined to thinking, like most Jews and Christians, one’s confined to coveting.

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It may be only due to topmost folly that our deepest wisdom surfaces, lovelife being the springboard, primum mobile, for entries into depths, for launching potent depth charges. Our sorriest faults, given sufficient clarification, can prove our most admirable qualities. The greatest vice and virtue share a most unlike obliviousness. Maybe honesty and gullibility go hand in hand? To pull a blooper has been known to win a game; to drop a clanger can lead to sweeter performances. Truth’s often if not always tumbled to quite by mistake. In quarantine’s night, deep beyond the paleface, man may stumble

450 over himself; in inoculation’s twilight, stuck up in half measures, he side-steps himself. Ignoring others’ suffering, one need not face one’s own. To get wise implicates observing foolery, especially alone. Whoever hopes to understand had best expect to be misunderstood. It’s cause for gladness, not alarm, to find oneself beyond the pale. The universal penalty for sense called solitude has to be paid contentedly. The highest virtue is against the law more than the lowest vice, laws being made out of fear, not out of hope, and thus protecting vicious inclinations rather than promoting virtuous ones; fined for speeding, we learn to watch out not for pedestrians but for the gendarmes. Wisdom tries hard to steer clear of reckless run-ins. He who seeks to drown avoids the shallows. Truth is scarce intelligible, wisdom more than sensible; truth is ineffable, and wisdom affable. Without experience of deep imbalance, no one scales the spirit’s heights. Break out of the asylum, and one is described as shut-in and insane by all the crazies out there who dare not break in. He is hateful Who is fateful. All the world, it seems, resents the whole world’s lover. Any genuine unmask- er’s apt to go to the wall. Truth engenders mortal animosity. Counseling mad men, “Kiss your enemy”, means to become that enemy and be given the kiss of death. Almsgivers rarely are forgiven; the aided almost always count on something in return. Assist the troubled, and they won’t forget you—so long as they’re troubled. Finding flaws in one who’s helped us does alleviate the burden of guilt we lug thanks to our unthankfulness. The greater any spirit’s gifts, the greater the ingratitude presented him or her; the loftier one’s work, the longer fumbling humankind requires to recognize it. Noblest trees are struck first; finest music falls on deafest ears; and freest souls are soonest bound and stoned.

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What’s easier than to misjudge who’s living and who’s dead? Many a wise man has been widely held a simpleton; repute is no proof of validity. Exterminating him, we only smash the mirror that exposes our immoral images, magnifying them. Honesty is ever envied and defeated but never destroyed: what better action than what’s thought the worst offense, forgetting one’s self to a fare- thee-well? No matter what the coarse (including one’s self) may decide to do,

451 oneself, that genius whose slighting is the least condonable, remains intact. Integrity is scarce discouraged by the worst volleys of obloquy the underworld discharges. Unlike realpolitik, art never is a reasonable process. In the short term—i.e., historically if not evolutionarily—the Will to Power does describe the real world: Stalins triumph over Mandelstams. Our censures of an autocrat resemble spitballs flipped at a rank alligator. Artists perish, yet locked up within their work the energy of life lies waiting for its lovers. Flesh can easily be minced or barbecued, but the high-running stream of bliss we can embody, sweet air, hovers indestructible beyond the tribal feast—a midsum- mer blizzard of thistledown flowing wherever. Pawky wisdom knows above all what to overlook. The more one can remain unconsummated in experience, the greater are the grounds for hoping that one’s essence can transcend fatality. Placidity is cherished by one who can rise above disputes of no concern. The most exceptional intelligence may rest in knowing not to mind. Spirit upon the empty seacliff, down Drift fallout’s flakes with nothing to surround. While man is vanishing a greening season may begin. Preeminent though some of us may seem, we’re no more than one or two in a million million million—merely foaming wavelets in existence’s unearthly ocean, a few coruscat- ing notes in the unfinished symphony that scarce was or will be the universe: gather oneself and break, ring clear and pass. From those unkindest to one can be gained the most. Forgive them: angry souls may well be blind souls and the power of wrath vain; for if we will not or “cannot” forgive them, we share their blind vanity. Forgiving sins for the sake of the sinner frees both sinner and forgiver. Unmatched is love’s value even when its object’s undeserving. Liberation from aggrandizement, though fairly difficult, is yet no big deal. Wisdom meeting wisdom takes not just an I for an I. What is needed is tremendous patience with prehumans and a furious impatience with one’s savage ego. Wised-up spirits always take their lives’ endeavors earnestly, yet somehow manage never to take themselves likewise. Jovial greatness bears no grudges, and it’s only what’s forgotten that’s forgiven. Memory closes as the endless opens. Time’s no healer; love alone can heal. The only just one is who judges not, and deepest wisdom is to love what is.

452 _321_

How clever is it to be good, how good to be so clever? Nothing dafter than demanding everything be rational. “Reason must rule, ye chuckleheads. Thou shalt not play.” Thus serenade disabled old restrictionists swelling with warts. Yet virtue reigns beyond authority. It’s heaven but no god that can decide, “Let there be mirth.” Most infamous of texts would have us solemnly believe that the Creator’s merely quizzical, permitted to laugh solely up his sleeve. In a world so woe-ridden, to indulge in merriment is sinful and not wise? Thank heaven for what is ridiculous: a stitch in time may help forestall a buttonholer through eternity. What’s sillier than always to be sober-minded? Brain-dead puritans deem rollicking no less than japery intolerable. Wisdom is by nature genial and debonair, not bound to keep its countenance. Few bothersome things really merit bothering with. Reason’s misdeeds always have surpassed the crimes of passion; if we did not torture, maim, and murder save when driven by an actual desire, this globe would be not wholly free of violence yet fairly full of peace. The mind may counsel but will dictate at its peril; drives may listen to a guide but will assassinate a tyrant. Doubting is the threshold, not the be-all and end-all, of wondering. Freedom lives beyond, not at the end of, mind control. Restrict not thought nor feeling: liberate them both; for oceanic tempests are as needful to the life of the earth as halcyon highland days; in season lachrymose convulsions are more apropos than arid catalepsy. Dreams in ocean’s darkling belly may be quite as vital to our breed as heaven’s rarefied light. Still, unbalanced man has missed the boat, the point of sailing, thinking truth an idea or love a passion. To rely on such contingent entities as feelings is foolhardy. Trust not the affections but affection. Wants preoccupy the masses, passion moves the few. Love is the smokeless flame of spirit, truth its honey-golden light; one need not concentrate on dancing visibly and gracefully enough, forever straining fitfully and so fast guttering out: lambently, without flamboyance, simply rise and shine.

_322_

Broad is the gate of one who needs no saving; spiraling are the sparrow’s borderless highways to heaven. To be open-minded may be to be empty- minded, but the open heart is full, the free of spirit far from destitute of spirit. Uncaged birds are constantly alert, yet just as constantly at rest, aloft or

453 perched. In truth nonaction’s not inertia, and in trances self-induced there’s no intelligence. It’s idiotic thinking, virtual nonthinking, lies behind our every damfool action; to avoid calamities we need not cleverness but to avoid stupidity—i.e., to watch our use of words used by beliefs, treating the latter as the underlying plague they manifestly are. An error made once constitutes experience; made thrice it’s botchery. We manage to learn from experience about as well as moths seem to from candles; as taskmaster, it gives lessons late, tests first. Could prudence be a comb that life provides those who have lost their hair? In action how like worker ants, in apprehension how like oxen manifest- ing all the nimbleness of sloths! The more we need advice the less we want it; and to benefit from good advice demands more wisdom than to offer it. A Monday morning quarterback is absent, drowsing in his armchair, on a Sunday. Should one try to steer the fate of others, when to navigate one’s own is hardly possible? Each meddler’s driven to hit others with gobs of unsought advice. Vanity dozes. He whose lungs are farthest gone believes them sounder than ever, but no prayer nor radiation can preserve them or him. Geese are too “foolish,” surely, to dream of themselves as swans. A human being might get wisdom if s/he only were not so convinced that s/he’s already got it. No small part of rationality is to avoid confusing our pet notions with it. We are searching not for counsel but for confirmation of our own conceits. “A fool” means anyone hooked on a brand of folly differing from one’s own. Potentially any zany may be wise, but no one’s will is to be wise. Where there’s a will there’s no way.

_323_

A droplet of stupidity, a tincture of vainglory, for the soul with taste, can alter a whole glass of wisdom. Best not probe too keenly into the lives of “known men of probity”—else one may find their unimpeachable integrity disintegrating. “Men of conscience”: those who have been most profoundly inculcated with the ruling dicta. Many seem too good to be true—and, sure enough, are too bad not to be. Those personalities the most admired are known least well. Invariably worship is conceived in and mothered by ignorance. The best of men are merely men at best. Behind each glittering celebrity there lies the finite human, warts and all. Great mountains look the loftier the nearer they’re approached, unlike alleged great men. Among the luminaries, none can prostitute his mind quite like the politician, selling out

454 his independence, always having to think of what others may think, taxed by crass expediency. Hard is it for our sleek emperors to call their souls their own; hard driven are the shallowest of personalities to seek the spotlight as “security” against an onset of solo depression that might deepen them. No prize the work that stands in need of prizes. What prize can a genuine composer now respect save an authentic reader? Where are greater humbugs than self-styled heroes, man-appointed men of God or wisdom? What amazing vanity and inexperience all gurus of the church and state display in claiming to be able to save our doomed race. Intelligence completes its work but claims no credit, much preferring that true merit should remain obscure. Real saints or sages are as good as not, because they never know themselves as such nor crave for headlines, medals, or huzzahs; the true aristocrats are nobodies. A peerless soul’s obliged to be compassionate toward each feeb. Distinction must dissolve in suffering; mature, one sides with skeptic sub- tlety, with Socrates, and less with trustful passion, less with Jeshua. Hellenic valor faces the real foolish human world; Hebraic sentiment seeks some false otherworldly sapience. We scarce need their examples to confirm there’s nothing in life quite so moving as the leaving it. Was Xian pity what unmanned the Greeks, and lack of it preserved the Jews through the millennia? Before extolling someone’s modesty, make sure there’s any ground for him to feel pride. ’Twas not Jesus whom some Romans executed any more than it was Goethe whom some Europeans have exalted.* Even the most realized human being contains so many facets destined to remain unborn forever; we’re born naturally equipped to live no end of varied lives yet are condemned to live one only. Human greatness as a concept implicates delusion: there exist great gifts but neither gods nor goddesses. The “perfect person” is no one at all. No one grasps genius while still accrediting some person with its work. Save for the magnifying of one’s peccadilloes, the worst aspect of world-wide acclaim must be the sheltered lifestyle dwelling in a goldfish bowl imposes; riches, too, depress because they give such full defense against fortuitous experiences; what is called success works out to be disaster. Specially deplorable is old age holding power: isolated, idealized, while secretly despised, provoking underlings to grumble, “While there’s death there’s hope.” A miser’s scarcely fun to live with, yet as ancestor becomes sheer cheer. Most personages, strangely,

* Guard us from the patent arrogance of Europeans, certainly the all-time masters at marauding, who for centuries have ruined Earth yet claim to know it all. Pray spare us stifling any longer on this surfeit of Dutch uncles.

455 are not truly self-reliant and prefer to be surrounded by protective company, lacking interior resources one requires to recreate oneself. Folk can see farther but not deeper on the shoulders of a spiritual giant. Hanging out with (i.e., onto) an approachable celebrity, self-seekers can secure their own chimerical identities. Egoism’s not contingent on our economic status: a poor sod can be as vain as any billionaire. It’s who you are, not what you have, that counts: a wise soul knows s/he’s nothing. Wisdom waives ambition, thus is greatness realized. Truth will not be caught dead in the limelight, for validity’s touchstone is that one stays undefined through all the alternations of eternity. It’s apt to take society a devilish long time—as like as not forever—just to find a hero out. The truest word e’er spoke or writ may ne’er be heard or read. “Saint” is a label necessary to identify the tinned preserve, and latterday “sainthood” effuses the distinct aroma of so many grimy greenbacks.* Most any mentor who disclaims all personal attachments nonetheless is hammering home that self-defeating hope of freedom. While insisting I’m a somebody, I see my self as rather special, rather virtuous . . . an illusion, for there are no special virtues, and I’m no thing whatsoever. As for wisdom, there is really nothing to it. Ordinary mind by a revived name may well earn renown minus distinction. Conscious humility is not humility, nor is our private parading of virtue virtue.

_324_

Homo faber, man the fabricator, thinks him self the pride of all the mammals, wiser than any other vertebrate. What innocence! Not the Dark Continent was ever dark but the wan, four-eyed species—none more germinal nor more verminous—that it spawned. Unfortunately (sad beyond reckoning) truth is not accessible to all the beasts . . . called human. Were “wolf-children” not sheer fantasies, one might admire the attempt to civilize such savage breasts, school them uprightly in the most prestigious military colleges, and so on. Animal existence also has a grisly cast, but cannot hold a candle to our expertise at killing. At all costs we became the critter on the make. Other mammals can leave mankind toiling in the rear, but manic humans, paramount in their roles as shit factories, as chemical latrines, can never leave their animality behind. In fact ejaculation—and thus human propagation—may depend on

* Such counterfeits could scarcely be more alien to either the Levant or Christ.

456 proper bowel pressure; fasters are transpicuously impotent. Without their private parts as chimes, most souls would need continual reminding that they’re still alive. Unlike wild creatures, which supposedly cannot control their reproduction and survival, we ingeniously arrange it that our poorest stock outbreeds our best. Imagining himself to be life’s raison dêtre, man has scarce begun to be aware; for he, whose fittest specimens have fewest offspring while affording preservation and protection to his least fit, is proficiently evolving in reverse. The debt we highly maladjusted moderns owe to countless slightly maladapted, hence eradicated primates over eons is incalculable. There’s no skill some other species has not better mastered than our own—save that of spinning and of weaving phrases to entangle our selves. Stubbornly vainglorious over his divergent insight, which is as vestigial as his tail, man is the creature that falls short of understanding, he of the retarded or neotonous development, an idiot savant, the great striped-ass ape that has lost the capability of growing up, in cold fact an invertebrate, the hairless animal and rootless vegetable who by degrees takes more and more B.S. degrees that qualify him as exceptionally tedious. For is the worm indeed worth less than we are and the tortoise distancing us slower than are we? Exclusively among the beasts vain man has made his compeers into his serfs, he alone being capable of unfathomable self-contempt. Denatured and destructive, we have not yet even mastered that most elementary task of how to feed ourselves, to parry famine: if that’s prudence and intelligence, more power to some simpler genuses. Our origin we owe to sharing food, and failing in it we approach our finis. Hell for human beings is as emotive as climatic: cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey. This frustrated species, struggling through a blizzard of anxieties, desires in mad despair some messianic panacea for its earthly problems of goods distribution; yet each savior in power, promising abundance, ends providing no more than delusion and extinction. Humankind is not more valuable than are other animals, only more obligated.

_325_

What more pitiful phenomenon under the sun or in the underworld than the printed-word addict? Possibly the rumpus-room or poolroom fixture? Want to get as far away as possible from nature? Go to any public beach. For what’s more artificial than sunbathing for a tan? A genuine animal is less superficial, certainly never put to the blush, its sense of value being more than skin-deep. Let us laugh at potty nudists if we must, but not at nudity, for the “poor

457 dumb” beasts put our shady modishness to shame. A real cat or sunny chick is not cool toward living. What well-read, well treaded, tired-out tires we baldies are—incapable of living save out of our smooth swelled heads.

_326_

The deep gulf separating private from official lives, the steep disparity between our mental talents and their social consequences, makes a mockery of our purported freedom. Depth of observation makes for tolerance but not reform; the broadest comprehension must inhibit action and be inapplicable to education as to criminology, which are unchangeably collective practical trades geared to training wills, those deadly executors; socially truth comes out harmless if not wholly useless. The intellectual Is ineffectual. There’s no dunce like a learned dunce. One’s learning can be catholic, wide spread abroad until the surface of the whole best-smelling underworld is slick with its veneer; but wisdom radiates within oneself alone. Verbally we can decide anything, and devils quote well enough; but understanding is another matter—that of spirit, that which matters. Understanding’s scarcely feasible in a society that values facts so far above ideas. Learning can be genuine and fruitful solely when it corresponds to individual needs. Brainy souls are capable of goofy doings. Wisdom is a fruit that’s fit to grow, not some monstrosity to be collected, like stuffed owls. To have the smarts takes more than a strong will or a large brain. Only if knowledge stops can wisdom start. Who savvies? Not to grasp* demands intelligence, not intellect. Those who tell someone “You know better than that” disregard the fact that fools’ perception regularly is obscured—by fear or lust, etc. Upon the upper trails are tramping heads whose eyes are on the bog below. Quite a few roughly know the Path, all right, but how few follow it; the safest track to tread turns out the straight and narrow, so light runs its traffic. Veritable common sense is what’s least common. Prudence will associate primarily with those whom it can learn from. Less in short supply is ripeness than in short demand. The more experienced one gets, the more uncertain that being so means aught. Once learn that in both work and play it’s quality, not quantity, that matters; then the senseless quest for better information and for more experiences ends.

* While fools take things as they come, wisdom lets them go. 458 _327_

In the affairs of others even fools can seem wise, whereas in his own a sage is known to err. Though wisdom must be solitary, solitariness may not be wise. One fool breeds many fools, one sage few sages. Urban misery is what makes history, that haphazard, pseudohuman rat’s nest of compulsive horrors; would no end of fabled Jesuses make anyone the wiser? Wisdom, being reluctant to go public, keeps its heart clear of those who are not joined in its private journey. Finest genius bids fair to be by all odds most aloof, to fight shy of its incurious origins. When folly has become the norm will ordinary people not stampede to practise it? The blind convinced that they have potent sight cannot but generate fresh stillbirths. Sanity’s voice strikes a soft note scarce heard in the uproar fanning out from droves of desperately unregardful ninnies, a diminu- tive comma or clean pause between the paroxysms of delirium, the harrowing cacophony, our comatose state is agglomerating in its crematorium. From evolution’s standpoint we all share one tongue, linguistic differences being wholly insignificant. A universal language might help relieve humanity’s mis- understandings and divisiveness; but where among the fast-expiring seven thousand lingual minorities to find the requisite collective will or rationality to learn it? Language is a two-edged sword which made us human to begin with, ends up cleaving coalitions, raising barriers to any kind of understanding, not to mention loving-kindness. “Peace” perforce can only be imposed by bloody force? With all respect to dullish wisdom, what the world prefers is to be shaped, cleft, chopped up by sharp fools. The first thing one has to get clear: how hazy most folk are, smogbound somnambulists meandering toward their dooms. The war is over, yet they fight it still. For quite some time mankind has undertaken genocidal enterprises sanguinely and for some hallowed (never mind how harebrained) cause, all those waxed warriors waxing one another. People evidently are as eager to kill for a senseless creed as they’re reluctant to live by its strict commandments. Might there be a streak in human nature that necessitates a social order properly confused and adequately stultifying to produce frustrated personalities impelled to violence? Could humankind be driven to impale itself upon its own innate inanity? Might every hellacious holocaust be a reminder that our species is not just intensely stupid but no less unnaturally cruel? Worse still, could this heart of darkness in us typify the icy whole? That nearly everything’s invisible can

459 only represent a thoroughly dark matter? The totality of suffering that per- meates this planet baffles any thoroughgoing contemplation. The proclivity of individuals to violence we overestimate, while communal perversity we underestimate; we’re damned if we’ll accept that there is no depravity that common wo/men otherwise apparently innocuous and easy-going cannot demonstrate. Amid the social pother who now notices this torrent of blood flushing the whole biosphere? What started in the darkest mystery Won’t finish in a brighter history. If human beings so soon forget atrocities, will nature keep a scrupulous account? It’s “human nature” to deny the problematic character of life. The deeper implications of our vomitrocious species’ madcap venture, of this mammoth misadventure’s inner strife and savagery, its contradictory and nihilistic essence, must escape us: why the devil, elsewise, would we throw these dreadful selves tormented by our finitude so casually if not gaily as manipulators into family “life” and getting “ahead” in this mephitic underworld, this mingle-mangle of bad eggs? Of mankind one must say we’re mostly narcissistic ingrates; in which case who cares to be the best of a bad lot? If all our kind can muster as credentials is our carnage, lies, and looting, we had better never been evolved. Out of the human mire have sprung a few divine phenomena; out of the rubble now and then a living monument arose. Scattered through vasty time and space the souls of spirit, frolic gales, keen cyclones wheeling who knows whither next or why. Our shady world—indeed, the very cosmos of blind force—goes on unreeling, while enlightenment is cycling nigh unseen. The maddened masses in a plaguesome underworld are led to crave perverse diversions, never irksome insight. Wisdom would not go to war for all the tea in China.∗ Truth, the fearsome inner sense of lovesome innocence, lives past and out of time or space, beyond these soundless vastitudes, and yet now here—or nowhere.

_328_

We’ve ideas, it is true, but who’s aware? One may have wit enough, but where the wisdom? I’m a virtuoso, it could be, but virtuous? Man may be playing

* Searching for Asia’s uplifting heritage of folk sagacity? Then track down Nippon’s kultur of yakuza: witness the cesspit of scorpions which makes la Unione Siciliana by comparison seem almost rational though quite as shallow.

460 vigorously on his instrument, but is he with the orchestra, his tempo con- sonant? Presuming that one’s the sole player on life’s stage, the only pebble on the beach, one fluffs and spoils the whole production, though the surf is laughing. Any body’s lovelife is no more than marginalia upon the shore of the deep’s real text. We contain hearts that are fluttering; still who would call us hearty? We are dead sure that we have a civilization; are we one? If so, what sort? The breathing or the throwaway beer-can variety? Only a deucedly retrograde Flat-Earth inhabitant—far too fanatic, outré, in his scrupulosity— today dares to declare that taking drugs or mercantile interest or embryos’ lives constitutes a culpable sin, let alone a heinous crime.* Some shlubs extol this as the Golden Age, yet it is no more than an age of gold, another era of infernal self. So many make a living, dissipating their days at pursuits whose only rationale is income, but who dares to make a life?

_329_

Prate not of jet-age progress toward wisdom, man, when what you mean is still more groveling in prudent folly. On such modern specialties as diets, campaigns, binges, airplanes, one is wisest to let others go. Why so proud of being a professionally trained—seal? It might be an honor to be unfrocked, elevating to be rusticated; wisdom may well welcome walking papers. We deem our torpescent selves devoted workers, yet inquiry takes far more energy than these routine stunts, pastimes, or escape valves on the level of unlettered frosh or sophomores who’re coasting to felicitously genteel C’s. Diligently, with such clownish, seeming-modest efforts keeping to the grindstones, connoissewers sharpen the proboscises of their $pecialization$, but to what end? Surely not to be able to smell better their own freak-beaks’ limitations? Sporting upswept prong like Cyrano’s, who needs a lancinating pen or lightning cutlass for defense, for righting wrongs? How devilishly vain the many Dr. Mengeles regarding their refined techniques and value-free professionality. Professions are pretensions; it’s the unerring professional, pen-driven, knowledgeably self-enclosed, who’s immature and who pretends, the amateur who loves and for whom we ought to be pro, not contra. “God”: could that mean anybody boasting a degree and well pleased with the perquisites of his position? Self-understanding and

* Abortion will remain an issue till we all are naught. Spontaneous abortion, nonetheless, is natural: in nature more than half the time involuntary miscarriages occur.

461 authoritative office tenure are irreconcilable, preclude each other. Every lecture chair or pulpit is the coffin of philosophy or faith, each dais or lectern cradling a mind in a daze—full mazed if unamazed. As empire-builders twits think they hold tenable positions, but the tenable positions in reality hold them. Where most of us observe a humble civil servant honesty observes humiliated civil slave. Working a steady grind is tantamount to shirking life.

_330_

Nothing enrages man more than to be cheated by another; yet nothing pleases him more than to cheat his self, by pandering continually to it. Discovery of oneself is to forgo one’s games of solitaire. Pursuing an ideal, such as some art or social welfare, as an end and not as means, one may grow happy by the way—never by fixing aim, as most folk do, on gratifying their selves. Real satisfaction calls for sharing worthy goals and tasks: first we must have some worthy goals and tasks. Materialistic man, a house mouse, dreams when he deduces that the giving up of youthful dreams, the settling for suburbia’s amorphous trap, is part of growing up. Getting on with exploitation is not getting it on. Scratching that itch seems unlikely to relieve it. Rest assured that those allegedly too busy to give one the time of day are actually too indolent to be authentically engaged. Nurds who refuse to serve internal truth, who view poetry as frivolity, find themselves forced to serve impersonal lies. It’s the bourgeois mockery of life, not garden living, that boils down to sterile selfishness. Existence is more meaningful than megafactory or vast vacation camp. Our superanuated culture worships crassest novelty, imposes a steel duty on us to be and to stay insatiably grasping, while the flower of the young direct their hopes toward a wiser, older lifestyle. Happiness consists not in obtaining minimal advantages but in avoiding whopping inconveniences. Liberty involves more than escape from labor: prodigality all right, but of self-mastery. Whoever quits his role as student never was real student. Many playing around play into Nemesis’s hands—those least alive who, till too late, are not in deadly earnest. Even superficial spirits hold most awful depths, although unplumbed. Without developing imagination who can comprehend what others feel and who they are? The soul who treats life frivolously life treats likewise. No one kills time without disabling eternity. None of us any longer can afford, like some appliance, to put himself or herself off or on.

462 _331_

All meaning is surrounded on all sides by meaninglessness. Don’t suppose that life has some high purpose ready-made for us. Uncanny loving does not come in cans. Illumination gleams but sparsely in the pluriverse; and on “our” globule few endeavor to kindle a flame, to light the matchless ray of heaven’s sparkling dark. Significance, spontaneous as Renaissance virtù, that excellence in action virile in perennial viridity, is not creatable save by oneself. Just learn to brood, to pay attention, to inspect. There gapes a great Grand Canyon in the spirit which invites indefinite exploring, wondering; there is a rock that is before rock was, that rocks for aye. Undimmed however dark, gaze deeply into the well of oneself under whose murky surface twinkle tears no one is shedding. Stupefying ’tis to speculate on the innumerable souls that over eons must have gone to dust—scarce noticed and fast, utterly forgotten. Gloomily, in sightless dead of night, one rubs one’s eyes and sees the light. Confounding everything, it may be at sixes and sevens that lucidity flares forth. Corkscrewing down the depthless maelstrom is a soaring out of this world. After “never-ending” blazing days one comes to welcome nightfall: in the arms of restfulness Maternal, sleeping à la belle étoile, life is renewed, like mellowing summer fruit nestled in a swooning stillness. Look, out there, in here, behold the myriads of dancing orbs bespangling that/this boundless soundless vault, no firmament, the pristine silver sands that cream lips of an ebony ocean singularly lacking charted margins, seeming dead grains and yet haply really dormant embryos of liberated psyches sans end! Are we not such stuff as long-exploded stars are to be made of—fragments from some “future” big bang? Who can tell why we hold dear this tragic drama? Ah, my foredoomed Mother and my disenchanted Brother, what a heart-catching, brain-baffling, true enchantment is this fleeting apparition, life “unlimited,” in fact a spasm nolens volens finite and unchangeably unique, grown in a causal labyrinth, this curious, gigantic, yet minute metabolism of erratically spinning solitudes, these momentarily united molecules, receding into mot- ley passages; but more enchanting still for us motes dancing in a shaft of light than any subtle thing about it, like some unknown fragrance, always is the simple miracle, mystery within mystery, that it is at all. What is? One is. Who is? Not I, nor you too. Now let us segue into Sunday.

463 464 VII Just Start on the Round Trip

465 466 Few understand there is no start nor end; But those who understand cease to contend. v Why do we fret at our approaching doom? Why curse the fate that sends us to the tomb? Our words are wind, yet, more than wind, in vain; For what’s fair death but pain that ends all pain? v What’s life but what we want yet cannot have? Is death not for this itch the perfect salve? v Death dies the instant we our selves live not, Persists and thrives while anything is sought. v Most wondrous truth is that we are not here, Most horrible that we may reappear; Their variance an ignis fatuus Whose unity in us is yet not us. v One may know death is his, But none knows what it is: The rest without an end, Or end without a rest? v Stumbling along this pitch-black tunnel, I With flickering torch feel helpless, penned. I watch my lamp’s oil running dry. I wonder, has this tunnel not an end?

_332_

While death with dignity grows into a great mystery, ungainly birth falls into a far greater one. “Life offers no beginner’s class”; the toughest nut one is required to crack right off the bat: each from the start may apprehend that gaping pit of quicksand, the dark hazard of abandonment? To sex we owe life’s variegation, but the price we pay for our distinction* is extinction.

* The sole thing all people have in common is uniqueness.

467 Death resides inside us all, incessantly assuming mastery of every carcass. Deep in every brain and spinal cord, genetically programed, lurks expiry; from life’s multicellular inception it’s been merged with dissolution. Homo sapiens is here today and gone tomorrow, no one knowing what’s to be the last straw bound to break our kind’s back. Probably no more than deadly bore the depthless chasm that forever yawns before us all: does living genius not most intrigue? What wonder springs more sanguinely than man and woman, they of the electric power spanning the obscure abyss? Creative work may never make us whole, yet it remains our deepest consolation and sublimest glory. Love cannot suspend doom, but it can fulfill life; in its sunshine one learns to accept the fruit of earth and air, which is to perish. Death can carry meaning solely since each lover bears it. The vast gulf between discussing and experiencing widens, also deepens, as one moves inexorably from the chance of loving unto the necessity of dying. Every dead soul slipped the net of dissolution; only animate beings undergo such toils. No animation but is destined to transmute inanimate. Ere quickness fades to quietness again, one has the opportunity to realize one’s absolute dispensability. Real living constitutes bidding farewell to every thing each moment, truly out of this world; wisdom loves the extraordinary present, comprehending that precisely nothing in time’s unremitting passage may be recreated. Even a great artist can fall victim to the fond illusion that the past has been recaptured. Love this hourglass our hearts fill up as our brains empty. Nobody at all in fact can scrub the slate clean.

_333_

Count not on Jehovah’s Judgment Day, some passing crack of doom: the dicey trial, with the typical untidiness of fate, may here and now be in eternal session. At love’s inhumane high court all of our rights end up abolished. There is no empyrean Judge, only hordes of fuddled sinners plus a few who try themselves for understanding. Death is not another passing rendezvous; but, as Montaigne averred, a scene played with a single character. Every tie save truth is destined to be torn asunder. Better not expect to find some body able to accompany us all the way: anticipating no thing, giving up illusory hope, go entirely by oneself. Dissolve anxiety in fruitfulness; we’ve one true guardian on whom we can depend at all times and that is oneself, unkept by time. While most of us are moping our lives away worrying about self- preservation, nothing can destroy oneself, our no-thingness. It’s those who

468 never grew free of their parents during adolescence who must suffer most from losing them. Many dependants faced with truth are desolated and like jigsaw puzzles just go all to pieces when bereft of spouses, at a loss without their main squeeze, but their prior integration was unreal. What sight more poignant than rheumatic careworn nags picketed to pathetic splinters from fragmented families, or unmetamorphosing moths sempiternally chewing the rag? How telling that perhaps the most appreciated family reunions happen after funerals. What keeps the multitude enslaved is a hidebound attachment to investments—in belongings, offspring, and the like. The last of comforters most folk will part with is their “love lives,” those moth-eaten crazy quilts of interwoven lusts. One learns that orthodox existences consist of tiresome stressful day-to-day traffic in perishables, whereas what endures is seldom what we thought we knew or chose to register. Is life of no avail if it leaves no enchanting memories behind? What certain value has remembrance to a life well lived? The task most taxing is to face the lack of any cosmic sympathy for our concerns. Rejoice that it is given us to live and thus know heartache. Many a soul prematurely perishes out of ambivalence and dashed hopes. Actual life turns out so different from what in trustful childhood we anticipated. Love’s the death of everything that’s ours. Evidently nearly everyone believes possessions can be carried to the grave and kept; but shrouds come with no pockets. There’s no larger mansion, when one’s number’s up, than deep six—all in all a measureless demesne. Below the plaudits that accompany attachments and accomplishments there lurks the final emptiness. Is deepest disenchantment tantamount to genuine enlightenment? A handful of descendants’ memories scarcely postpones our forthcoming oblivion. The last of all the guests arriv- ing, Death, requires welcoming in spite of being a feelingless gate-crasher. Curiously no one gets the last dance. Wisdom is just grateful disillusionment; our highest good, higher than self-possession, nonpossession, quality without any possessor. Dissolution does indeed reveal all.

_334_

Desperately the lost little sheep gone astray are bleating, jittery without a shepherd, ever more convinced, as premonitions crystallize as certainty, that the end of the world approaches. Just ignore them and compose oneself: it’s only the end of a world, an underworld. It looks to be a deathly ailing globe, all right; but positing so, we are looking at the inhuman sphere, not the

469 natural sphere. What have we ever done for our magnificent Mother besides despoiling her resources and ravaging her beauty?∗ Patiently, with lovingkindness and long-suffering, she has borne us and will bear us till the day our insults reach the breaking point—our breaking point. We miss no water till the well’s gone dry. Is the whole ball of wax not threatening now to dissolve? With each child born we ratchet up our pressure on the earth; by screwing up we’ve cranked a closing vise upon our selves. Man is the time-scarred driver evidently doomed to fall asleep while at the wheel: the moment when he wakes up is the moment when he goes to sleep for keeps. Humanity may get a mirrored glimpse of itself only when it’s cracking up and vanishing much like a melting glacier in the polar sea. The Sunday punch is as a rule the last. It’s usually far along in their lives people push the panic button. Every civilization known has failed to recognize the factors that determined its fate till it was too late: what hope that we, who’re well along at racking up one more, can yet prove more perceptive and behave more prudently? Think you that everything must end with your own death? Best guess again. One feature nature has is lots of timelessness, unlimited “amounts” beyond the grasp of fumble-fingered humankind. All human history consists in what a naked-eye glance vertically into ocean’s deep reveals. Our thorny stem tested for eons, indefatigably, till the first rose saw the light. There is a time for carking mundane cares, but there’s eternity for liberty from them. Duration of joy in existence cannot be increased, since never present anytime but now. Time hurtles past us all through pointless night, Eternity moves inwardly alight.

_335_

Stopovers in this port tend to seem short. As prematurely crow’s-footed non- Inuit who cut no ice, must we, forever blubbering and goose bump-stricken, plead with sinking feeling in our stomachs’ pits for one more year, one more day, one more moment? What, after all, is each aping of a life in the earth’s life? Is a feeble candle worth less than a roaring forest fire or the sun’s inferno when one casts one’s eyes beyond, into the staggering immensity of lightless

* ’Tis remarkable how beautiful a body moribund or even dead can yet remain, exposing frailties of the departed soul but not of omnipresent Mother Nature.

470 space? We sometimes wonder when we’ll die but seldom where or how. The time of death means nothing, while the endlessness of it tells all. To anyone condemned can time count once the fantasy of being eternal’s vanished? Yet infinity—what if “it” too were an illusion? That, as all of us, both victims and survivors lost, are borne alone downriver to a not so great beyond, would really be the last straw, wouldn’t it? Fresh life is laughable, whereas old truth strikes dumb, makes silent as the grave.

_336_

The wind whirls leaves around a tomb, While down the beach the breakers boom; The shadows lengthen; from this hand These tears drop traceless to the sand.

_337_

So man, distracted, still insists from time to time that he must live forever? Surely he does not suppose that life is given gratis? That’s demanding quite a bit. When it’s ripe, wisdom clings not to the bough. Who thinks that immortality is literal and automatic has another think, a different kind of comeuppance, coming. What hope is there to get out of this life all in one piece? How folk vainly love to hope the never-ending swoon is not life’s opposite but its progression. All our goods—ay, and our lives themselves—are only loans: be ready and willing to return the favors daily, hourly, momentarily. Death lets us out of school, announcing it’s vacation “time.” Ironically no one relishes the long-lost present gift when greedy for eternity. The fatal lust for perpetuity feeds on a foolish dwelling in the perished past. What could bore others more than oldsters’ parrotlike remembrances of flings past? When somebody’s always spouting of sweet Immortality, suspect a sex drive strangulated slowly. One needs special glasses—of snake medicine?—to see a rosy future. There’s no afterlife, since after death where is the time to follow? Some think they can buy time, but they’re dead broke. It is temporizers who have failed to savor life’s tang who find they must have some demiurge or savior to mollycoddle them with an insipid substitute unendingly. Most people perish ill-prepared for death no less than they’ve lived—ill-prepared for life. Those waiting to escape death life eludes. Those anxious to get into heaven should instead endeavor to get heaven into them. Whoever has no sanctity nor sanity within

471 his or her self seeks it in vain without, lost to oneself. Does “immortality” mean sempiternal wakefulness? Who’d care for that? ’Tis a rare soul wants consciousness intensified, not just prolonged. Do we deserve our pensions as a compensation for our having lived a long time—an entire lifetime—ago? Or for our never having paid our dues? Some there are, traveling late, who even earnest prayer and fasting cannot save, spiritual cancer being an irreversible condition notwithstanding its deferrable consummation. Careful not to think or laugh, which very likely would cause and leave creases, signs of life, that inexcusable affaire de coeur, we corpses on parole are nevertheless dying to become eternally young, to keep on hand the latest wrinkle such as instant wart-remover plus a cosmeti- cian for our inhumation; meantime one would rather we could be eternally mature. The worst pain in becoming old is found in that part of us aching to remain forever young. Life’s brevity an aged soul sees best. The secret of perennial youth? Lying about one’s age. Sensing intima- tions of mortality, we think that we recall recherché pleasures, distant tremors, of some bygone life, and in a sense we do, for in nostalgic dotage, hugging remnants of an erstwhile splendor, we revert to earliest of childhood, once more pooping in our pants. Folk shrivel as they age, retracting ultimately to the infant stage of not being able to give others thought at all. Each codger finds himself at risk of being once again involuntary widdler. How most oldsters love to reminisce about the follies of their vanished youths; how pitiful that they have only follies to recall. Now all those all-night revels of yore long are over, comes the silent rest. Death teaches that the past is nothing and the present all. We idealize our pasts, dreaming of character we once possessed, in a vain effort to reduce our fears of future suffering, to justify our vacant souls and shallow lives. It’s private efforts matter in the end, not labors done to pay the bills. Our memory, that longest-term confrère, it’s wisest never to trust to a fare-thee-well. Scant wisdom rests in a devotion to remote attachments, iter- ating empty names of souls long since transformed from what we ever could have worshiped,∗ reassuring ourselves that we’ve remained true while time’s flux around and in us has betrayed those dreams. Our very lives are now receding into thickening mists of forgetfulness. In old age, if one’s memory remains intact, one’s livelihood is apt to wane in value, while one’s loves and failures to love, haunting and tormenting, flood the now-enfeebled soul. Strange, how one changes without changing, fleetingly transmuting from sheer innocence back to sheer innocence, passing over from one hole, one matrix, to another.

* Ordinarily souls can’t help turning out caricatures of themselves. 472 _338_

When, if ever, are we going to grow up? Only the most minor portion of us ever seems to, while the rest continue puerile into and through old age. What can age one faster than the nagging needless worry that one’s aging? Immaturity means ignorance of personal nonentity; few of us care to gaze into the void. Most people would prefer to die than have to ponder death. Who is it wants to see that at death all awareness goes out like a light? It may be nature wants us to lift up our heads to tree tops bearing pure love, not to bury them, like mythic ostriches, in grains of dirt. Why make the least and not the most of life? We venerate our dead; why then did we not venerate them while they lived? Too often it takes one’s extinction to uncover “hidden” worth. As for attending funerals, pray let the dead service the dead. What benefit are pompous services to corpses over and beyond their gratifying those considered still alive? What classy sendoff can redress a life of exploitation? If a burial is well attended, it may be to satisfy survivors the deceased is really dead. The shrillest keeners privately proclaim the strongest, overlong, undercover guilt and anger. Best obits are brief; for silence is the keynote of true grief. Why venture not to venerate that quintessential and incomparable vacancy, oneself? Some flatter their ambitious selves by dying as witnesses for the broadcast “truth”; but when’s one going to praise oneself, yea, all creation, living as a witness of the real unspeakable?

_339_

Our lives and loves are flights of snowflakes, fugitive and fragile as the very cosmos. Every such crystal scintillates uniquely. Nothing easier than death, nothing harder than dying—the most seemingly real yet the more certainly incredible fact we face, the one experience that we cannot experience. Before it, all creeds and deeds are but teetotums for tots. Each man thinks all men mortal save himself: “It can’t happen here.” How facile is our intellectual recognition that mortality’s assured; whereas emotional acceptance of its factuality is hard indeed. Our blood knows that it’s necessary to drown, that even now we’re going under, but our brains maintain precautions not to know it too well. Why try vainly to deny that every woman jill and man jack of us is marked for annihilation? Thus we lie to our selves to grasp for them some impossible survival, to avoid the fact that everybody’s end is grisly. Human minds deny unbearable experiences; the unconscious—dreamer of

473 bliss during horrors and of wartime when at peace—reflexively protects each self from its final disintegration. To sing “We are not afraid” but verifies our fearfulness: courage requires no proclamations. Lamely, having often fallen off the wagon, many make brave New Year’s resolutions going in one year and out the other. Man is whistling in the dark to keep from wailing, whooping it up as a preparation for a lengthy nonmonastic term of utter deaf-mutism. “At all costs any distraction . . . than contemplate my destruction.” Any thing but the repugnant present permeated by that which is not present. Surely we need to transcend the primitive compulsion to adjust reality to our dreamt myths and fables, a fixation rooted in our time-bound dread of death when sleeping. At the last there’s always what can never be disclosed, the true unspeakable, particularly to this deaf imperfect ego. Slipping toward death, already at one deepening remove from life, sagacity falls silent, realizing that all verbal intercourse is ultimately mere inconsequential quibbling.

_340_

Quick, closed-coffin funerals or clean cremations are appropriate denouements to a truth-evading “way of life” replete with rank skulduggery. Suburban folk are alienated from natural cycles, caught in the mechanical round of competing and acquiring and consuming that, impersonalizing relationships, robs old age of nobility and death of its tragic dimensions. The traditional community has been replaced by an enormous mass of atomized individuals unwilling or unable to take charge of their deaths. As the dying process has been medicalized so the act has been degraded and near everybody cheated of their own finales; few can still experience their dearest present when depart- ing. After decades of dissimulation no surprise if the hospital staff tend to collude with carrying on the lying. They cannot eliminate death, but they can expensively, excruciatingly prolong it, meanwhile treating it as insignificant, unworthy of deep feeling. Suffering, the very heart and soul of humankind, it’s medicine’s end to extinguish. Evidence is lacking that top medical technology has elevated humans’ maximum longevity at all. The ugly sights and sounds of dying our squeamish society “cannot endure”: a septic hospital’s a swell place to secrete the unbecoming invalid. We are obsessed with covering up our mortality, denying its reality, dispatching terminal cases (as if we were not all such) as antiseptically as possible into private wards, bustling and shunting those long in the tooth into invisibility, thus treating death as an obscenity, a transcendent mystery no more, but merely a formality and routine work for

474 backside-padding engineers (our stout physicians and morticians) supervising “nature’s” planned obsolescence, cavalierly relegating badly used machines to the elemental scrap heap. The caretakers take the most care not to be themselves disturbed; a noisy or dramatic, even dignified, demise must be avoided at all costs, for such would surely discompose the institution’s orderliness and the personnel’s emotions—God forbid. Age itself is feared more than bubonic plague, alarming some so deeply they turn brunet overnight. To be a narcissist, to envy if not worship youth, is only natural for those a culture has judged obsolete and rendered function- less. To grieve in public has become indecent no less than to masturbate; each exit’s now expected to be irreproachably discreet. Can puritan authorities permit their selves to be exposed condoning, let alone conceiving, any oldster still enjoying active sex? Nobody healthy’s too old to experience erotic satisfaction; yet there’s precious little recognition that the young at heart of any age can and ought to succeed at love. Who wants to dwell in Wrinkle City and to be completely disempowered—helpless, self-preoccupied, and destitute? Degenerate society prefers its elderly to be infantilized and kept in stuffy warehouses or fancy playpens since it has no use for understanding, time for mellowness, nor market for maturity. The tested wisdom that in tribal life brought one authority in any megalopolis leaves one ignored as an obscure statistic; in a nether region there survives no inkling of what live profundity may hold out in oldtimers. We don’t care to celebrate the deaths of seniors—only immature unfortunates now qualify for mourning. Secretly some of us seek to put away∗ our elders privately detested. We feel great when for a time our sterile technocratic underworld preserves, by forcing oxygen or artificial stimulants into, expiring persons, but then narcotizing them in order to preclude any commotion, holding them suspended as proof of their animation as of our inanimation; that they might retain odd sentiments of dignity and thus resent being lowered by this pre-embalming to the level of nonhuman junk is none of our affair. The roses face a battle to hang on to life unless their dearest face the obligation to let go. For everyone the time must come at last to douse the glim. Despite the droves of pietistic torture-lovers, suicide’s a basic human right; society needs urgently to grow up and die decently. “Pro-lifers,” fundamentally dead, want folk—others, that is—first and last to suffer; that desire’s what keeps them going, hoping someday to feel good inside. Examine carefully the shallowness of those, remote

* As in “put down.”

475 from Socrates, who are convinced the highest good is our survival at all costs whereas our vanishment’s the greatest evil. Laws may salvage the abandoned soul’s life physically, but they cannot make that life worth living. No power can preserve us ultimately from our singleness. Who than our selves, frightened out of our wits, press more importu- nate demands for geriatricks? Failing patients still insist their warlocks offer interim reprieves. Opulent caskets represent a sentimental effort to “protect” nature from nature, to prevent nakedness, emptiness, genuineness. Unlike pagan graveyards where wood markers soon turned earthward in a natural cycle, whited sepulchers display their tombstones in an obdurate rebellion against extinction of the individual identity. How desperately puerile and hysteric is so many Christians’ attitude at death, in contrast to their theologians’ glib pretensions that they proffer conquest of it. Nothing’s present now, as every number is contained in zero; all dwells here in nothingness. Yet folk are terrified of yielding unto that redemption: lifetimes spent in needless frantic money-grubbing are no useful preparation for a necessary steady nonpossessive insight. To a wise soul life’s its own end, groundwork for and prelude to exactly nothing. Who is lying in the slumber room of euphemisms? Cryogenics will not thaw one frozen with anxiety, nor plastic hearts and flowers resurrect a crucified spirituality. Destined for high places in the annals of grand infamy, those mercenary specialists in charge of undeclared, indefensible wars whose deeds of slaughter bear the name of chivalry contend it’s often necessary to destroy the patients just to “save” them. Uninformed, the medical confederates impose upon society their blunt assumptions that dissatisfaction signifies disease, that inconsistencies in bodily functions ought mechanically to be banned, and that disease has not the same right to existence that health has; the “naturalists” pretermit the nasty fact that experientially many a crippled state may not preclude but even foster a wholly viable, if eccentric, even fruitful mode of life. Exclusively esteeming increase, we view all the processes and products of decay as outright wasteful, which is what precisely we in our decadence are. Who’d want his final “act” to be a last wrong-headed contribution to pollution of the atmosphere instead of an enriching of the soil? Should one resist being fitted for a wooden overcoat? Unbearably revolting to our vanity the foul suggestion that we’re doomed soon to depart, to go the way of all the earth, becoming so much wormy humus—the perennial as well as current friable condition of our inwards. Hence our preference for cremation as an international undertaking?

476 _341_

“This thing perishes; therefore it’s no good.”—Human, all too human. Decadence’s queasy guts revolt against the acrid truth that life, this confluence of happenstance, at heart is nothing if not sphinxlike, enigmatically tragic. Everybody’s life, probed deeply, proves to be a horror story. Some are fated to disintegrate before they integrate, never to mature in nature. Blameless death of the young, sound, and lovely is the crowning insult, a profound affliction, to the rational mind; randomly effaced, deep-sixed by fate, a casualty slips out of causality into oblivion. What’s worse than having to watch someone you’ve loved deeply die? How hollow ring all phrases of condolence to one utterly distraught. Conjecturing some farfetched explication for a pointless tragedy makes no less meaningless the whole. The ultimate in truth is far too cold for living protoplasm to absorb. It’s hard to contemplate all of our best exertions being destined to go down the drain. So seldom are we conscious, while forever well aware, of the primordial futility of life.

_342_

“I am a miserable mortal; therefore everyone else must be miserable mortals.”—That’s inhuman? True, but also all too human. Who has little use for any person living missed his true vocation as good-humored funeral director. Pray have done, O “mightiest in the world,” with bringing down the universe around our ears in this ecstatic Götterdämmerung. Supposing that being shat upon meant consummation, that pronk Adolf wanted everyone, not just himself, to eat shit; in the Nazis’ colosseum everybody got the thumbs-down. Certainly more than enough born losers among our triumphant masterminds already have displaced and channeled their vile hangups into personally therapeutic communal catastrophes; each uptight if Utopian compulsion to impose complete control from on high, absolute obedience from below, originates in self-inadequacy—quite as ruinous in individual as in collective destinies. There still is the odd costive soul whose permanent relief would be a load off everybody’s mind. Would tyrants need to murder tens of millions had they been able to rebel against their paters’ cruelty? Yet in the end no corporal’s guard of self-assertive criminals whose value is damn all seems destined to destroy the human race but, rather, a horde of self-sacrificing super- patriots. A dreadful Hitler is remembered, hardly any of his countless victims or collaborators—thus is history forever nullified. Perforce one stands back

477 from this species of flagwavers wholly mystified: the impotent perverse punk rabble-rouser gets immense support, though punking out at last, and is successful in demolishing the world; while 1900 years “apart” the virgin prophet of love is condemned to die ignored. How curious our kind’s propensity to self-destruct; unconscious of that drive, you don’t possess it—it possesses you. To our awareness solely does the prospect of a planet rid of humankind mean anything, and such enlightenment alone is all that can prevent our natural eradication; sooner than we think the crunch is certain to occur. Most likely accidental death is not. Perhaps all living things possess a secret yearning for the inorganic state? Many a would-be suicide appeals to one important person to provide some reason—that is, some compassion— to endure. How hard for one’s fate to be free of any other’s expectations. A lone choice and act can cover up a multitude of sins and “reasons.” Self- destruction may well constitute the vainest hope, an immature confused flight from reality, a stab too late at winning recognition or compelling caring, and the ultimate, though very briefly satisfying, means of “getting” vengeance on a personal adversary. He or she who fails to kill an enemy still kills.

_343_

“Lo, now I’m free from every tie to the disgusting body,” cries a flimsy levitat- ing soulish kite, snapping its string and spinning to its doom.

_344_

“We few illuminati cannot but be chosen thanks to our angelic purity, and all the rest of you accordingly consigned to a grim lightless airless purgatory. . . .” Thus pronounce those spiritless snobs who, despite dark glasses and long- shrunken lungs, are predisposed by the fluorescent bulbs and air conditioning to view their padded cells as crystal palaces. A spate of modern woes results not from souls being unable to stay sitting quietly like corpses, sightless and asphyxiated, in their ill-illuminated and ill-ventilated rooms but from their failing utterly to get the hell out into sunlit airy gardens, not least vital moving there. Look for contentment to be wrecked where organic activity is curbed. Intelligence calls for the benediction of an earthbound domicile. Wisdom is thankful for the balm of piney atmosphere, free of commotion, o’er a lilt- ingly laved strand. Society’s divided into insiders and outsiders: the former are invariably city dwellers; peasants migrated there to become “successful”; the

478 odd sensible youth travels in reverse to get truly inside. Ensnared in our hor- ripilating megalopolitan mechanism, human nature, formed by simpler yet far more demanding and rewarding circumstances, is made an anachronism wildly hunting for some sacrificial hits while natural places for the living, dying, and dead are precipitately, irretrievably passing away.

_345_

“Free from the burden of Karma and rebirth is the flawless man, whereas imperfect men must be born again and again. . . .” Then by all means friends, let us be imperfect men—and women. And may all the sinless sages, never mind how fishy their purported sinlessness, be freed from Karma’s burden so that we may now be free forever from the burden of them. ¡Viva la vida !

_346_

Ungrateful is the constipated enemy of joie de vivre: his malignant view of graceful beauty well reflects his own graceless ugliness. He adjudges all existence and our species futile, doomed, when it is but his personal existence and his specious self are futile, doomed. He rates this spheroid of surpassing loveliness unreal and worthless, when it’s only his set attitude of egotistic grasping that is unrealistic and unworthy; he, rather more than the macrocosm, is short-lived and disappointing. Those who scorn the times as out of joint, perpetually griping everybody’s butts, ignore the fact that they, conforming to the times, have gone sour, stewing in their own juice. How some blinkin’ critters like the viewpoint from a sty! Before one can run one must learn to walk. First cleanse your own eyes, your own nostrils; then tell us what cesspools our eyes are, whose underwear needs changing.* “Life’s an utterly valueless affair,” pisses and moans the cankered pessimist, sipping his wine. “Pity those poor dupes of the flesh,” lugubriously sighs the dehydrated ascetic old grouch, fit to hang himself, wearily shaking off some ashes from a verily sad sackcloth winding sheet, settling himself more comfortably in his hair shirt for a short snooze on the couch of rusted nails while never getting down to brass tacks. Why not give up breathing too? Deny the world has any place in your life, and you may ensure your life has no place in the world. Some strivers have

* People tolerate so easily their own distinctive smells, not those of others.—Parable for egos.

479 succeeded in a sense in plucking out their eyes, but not in plucking out their selves; that calls for real pluck, perfectly beyond all discipline. Resisting the resistant self is hardly nonresistance, nor is freedom from some thing real freedom. Have the Yogis who enjoy that most spectacular capacity for lunching on plain plaster and for dining on ground glass managed to make their selves saints and transparent? Those renunciations that your Highnesses have made—of home and truck and wench and soap—are pretty good, all right . . . if you can get away with them. Living permanently in rags, on nettles, is not what one needs but loving constantly in nakedness, on fruit. Desirelessness is not to desire not. There must be no clinging, not even to one’s no clinging. Brief and pitiful is life on earth—because our thought is brief and pitiful, because our thought is thought, our feeling nearly always so-so. We are dead against a lot of things and many folks, but what (if anything) or whom (if anybody) are we living for? Clearly forgotten is the species’ future. Yes, it is a low and woeful incarnation, a small world indeed . . . to those confined to looking out. Man seems a dwarf simplistically when expected to be giant. Crystal-eyed, inspect his actual dwarfishness and, strange to say, the wonders never cease. It’s neither under the sun nor under the daisies that there’s nothing new but under the congested snouts of our myopic vision. All the bitterness lies in cloacal selfdom. Sitting tight may not be where it’s at. Shit or get off the pot of dismal self, come on outside and breathe the keen sweet breezes of oneself. “Like dew is man, which falls in unseen drops To earth, which briefly clings to blades of grass, But which, beneath the blazing sun, will pass . . . A film of bubbles sparkling: soon each pops. Insane is life—a lie, a lust for joy That ends at worst in pain, at best in sleep.” Thus speak worldly savants who deem life cheap; Smiling, they view it as an infant’s toy. But one, too young for quietism yet, Would turn upon such prudence and retort: You think that life is worthless but forget That free souls feel it priceless, though so short. One tells you there’s no value but in love; And there’s none underground: it’s all above.

480 _347_

The older the old get, the more inflexibly they tend to hold on to existence; naturally those on death row are less cheery than those younger still “at liberty” for whom being boxed remains a vague and future threat. Some relicts chatter about an eternal life; might whinings or malaises of fey egotists cower behind these fantasies? Each clutching the pet crotchet of an ideal coming state, we satisfactorily have obscured our dread of death so soon to swallow up our exquisitely precious selves? Have we attained an age, bent over, noticing we’re slipping, when it’s profitable to begin to spurn ambition and to look for choice places in heaven? Having failed at heart heretofore, no matter how accomplished practically, now we opportunists fish for cozy niches in a nonexistent after ward. We start to feel some gouty twinges, nips of conscience’s unswerving worms, unpleasant qualms about an everlasting penalty for countless bloody sins; but with an ultimate indulgence in the back of paltry minds, we do our selves more than a little too much honor. Each of our demises not “God” but genetics has timetabled, yet we all advance them with our follies. Is this underworld not crammed with folk whose quondam deeds were dark enough to gag a maggot? We want promissory notes for giving up our selves; but that is not to give—only more pitiable “gains.” Truth is, our vices are rewarded as they should be and our decomposition is irrevocable and proceeds apace. The desperate seek death or its avoidance needlessly, for it finds everyone with ease. It takes no genius to hop the twig. To perish is not punishment but law; who shuns all funerals will not shun one. One or the other, brother: either our incessant follies pass away . . . or we. No, rather, both must pass away. Until our selves are not, are null and void, the mystery is not disclosed. Man’s lonesome tortures are the net result of his own trifling pleasure-casting; no transgression of organic limits but must be arrested. Winning fortunes, for example—that’s as easy as hell. Our dad-blasted lives are our creations, not our fathers’: in the beds we made we lie. How to get out from under evils we insist on bringing down upon ourselves? One likes to blame “the germs,” a generality, for personal contagion, but the carrier is one’s self. Furiously nul- lies curse the world for their impending doom as if they did not ask for it; yet they are their own hangmen, and who but their ghoulish selves deserve their curses? Misery’s begotten by the self. All are unjust, yet oneself never is, for we are whole only when we are wholly not.

481 _348_

Deferring dying is deferring living. We are not willing to die, although willing to live; therefore we are dead. It may be that enlightenment flares up through inner death alone, in an instant seeing. Maybe waiting for death is the worst mistake, and one should go to meet it, sprouting wings within? Man’s destiny is to rebel against physical dissolution but to be fulfilled in psychological dissolution. His dull nausea from the flesh must give way to bright joy from the spirit. Love is no more than a little moment, just a succulent sec, yet it’s everything, the very quick of life. In seven years one’s cells may be renewed, while less than seven seconds can suffice oneself to be. “Oh, you must mean my private orgasms?” Sorry, chum: attachment to our lusts dies hard, but I refer to one nonpersonal organism. Is one happy as a clam at high tide? Who is yearning for eternal bliss, some kind of never-fading climax? Gawd! What could be worse? Kindly do not lament, “How long” or “How Short is my life.” For all that is is now. One reason why a dog’s so keen to join its master going out: deep in its bones it knows that this safari may well be their last. Perforce the valuable’s likewise terminable. Many think they see the Kingdom of Heaven as infinitely far away, to hell and gone, as some thing high and mighty, an exceedingly resplendent state, to be ushered in with flights of avenging angels and all-deafening fan- fares of celestial trumpets; still, as natural as divine, heaven is not a kingdom but a garden in which reigns neither noise nor dour, sour-grapes craving for revenge. What is thought and called paradise is a utopia, an orgiastic paradise off limits: venture to enter it, and one finds nothing like the palmy picture tourist-trap brochure blurbs paint*—in brief, no paradise at all. We figure mystic vision must be some thing misty, quite extraordinary, since it is so rare. But how can what is always be out of the ordinary or in need of so much fuss and foresight? Heaven’s not hereafter—here within. To sods the miracle of the earth must seem trite indeed. Some mumble, zizzing, that they’re here below, held by an incubus? Hoho! yoyos, snap out of it, quit repining, sleepyheads entranced by dreamy destinies in swansdown: you are up above. Some never know when they’re well off because they never are. “But surely evil is unreal and

* Most travel agents’ tours are accurately advertised as checking in at fabulous locales.

482 life a mostly pleasant dream, a butterfly’s shadow flashing by, a phantasm. . . .” Tell us more, blinkered steeds, when you’re riding through the night, bits in teeth, in the grip of migraine wisdom toothaches. No grave can be cozy sleeping bag: each is undifferentiated vacuum. One’s self, body and mind, is immaterial—not oneself.

_349_

What is of moment is not from whom we’ve descended but what we’ve descended to. The tragedy is less what may become of us than that which we have let our selves in lethargy become; the danger’s less of losing freedom than of passing without earning it. Not death makes blood run cold but lovelessness. All efforts to kill time are futile, for at last it finishes each killer off. Can our increasing speed-up really make up for lost time? Most of us act as if each of us had more than one life to live. The saddest thought is not that we’ve so little time but that we waste so much, indifferent like nature to the individual.* How we time-killers love to shoot the breeze. The best part of our every day We regularly sleep away. Enough of all this bunk and shuteye! Every lifelong sleeper finally— hosanna!—has to turn up his or her toes. Every swellheaded battler in life’s round is forced to take the long count. Punkinrollers may have to hit the hay early; but need we night fighters hug the fart sack round the clock? Must man so seldom watch the dawn’s maturing countenance? What better time can be had than to dwell eternally while yet one’s carcass vibrates? Real maturity eludes age; it is reached whenever one’s attending to the timeless. Truly it is curious and yet unbearable that for most folk the moment of awakening, ces- sation of sleepwalking, comes to pass at the point of departure. It seems rather late in the day for career somnambulists to be now contemplating shifting into high gear. When will death researchists dare to study new dimensions of existence one can enter during life? Successful gardeners never stop growing. Everbearing spirits, for example Michelangelo and Beethoven, are everlasting even after striking bedrock, the work of demonic love transcending elemental anguish. Steadfast wizards

* Nature’s rule is failure, not success. Amoral to a fault, old Maw Earth loves devouring all her animal and vegetable offspring, grinding them up in her dark jaws, casting them forth in divergent forms. 483 growing older yet grow younger; lazy unproductive people are the fastest to become decrepit. To the vicious death tastes rightly bitter as gall; to the honorable can it not be fare more tolerable? Even under grimmest circumstances a creator of integrity hangs tough, won’t hang it up, stays in there pitching. Who says one must end up, after loads of shaky dos, as crippled bomber brought down to hedgehopping homeward? Life is long enough if one lives every moment of it and croaks freely, with one’s boots on, ending one’s days unspousebroken, perky, spry, sharp as a tack, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, rarin’ to go, not discontent to be extinguished come the evening. World- weariness, if ever pardonable, is perhaps so only in the odd perversely inde- fatigable metaphysician who, plugging along, all in yet not as yet dead to the world, has grown alive to the old ineluctable ambivalence of passion, to the agonizing chaos at the heart of humankind. True artists master puerile daydreams, thus transforming merely private conflicts into universal object lessons. Finding oneself gravid as one’s self approaches death has to be cause for real elation. Everybody’s destiny is coming home to Mother. Now is not for ever, yet forever’s now.

_350_

More senseless than the act itself, the laws against self-slaughter do evince the State’s distrust of man, if not a confidence that it controls his destiny. Beneath self-righteous pieties, we all know there are circumstances under which committing suicide is justifiable and far from cowardly. Who says a butchered suicide is not the living end? One’s better physically than spiritually stone- dead. Can it be wise to zone out, shut one’s eyes to or pass over the fact when the time’s arrived to check out? Only living souls, not dead ones, get to face death. It’s the weirdest evil, for it liberates us from all evils, whereas age deprives us of our pleasures while allowing us to keep our appetites. We dread our deaths, which cannot be avoided, while desiring prolongated lives, which cannot be assured. We ought to thank our stars for death, since in its absence earth would swiftly burst its seams. Senility can be construed as beneficial, as a natural redemption from the fear of dying, thus as blessing in disguise. It’s life that’s problematic more than death, which is a boon at last, to be preferred to finishing as biologic wreck. The lot of mortals physically they decline while morally promoting it—to rot. Most people die before they come to birth: initially they’re dumb, and ultimately they stay dumb. Paralysis, the death before death, is a luxury we all can ill afford.

484 How can the dead find a security nowhere existing? A confused mind scarcely loses its confusion cleaving to some long-lost momentary clarity. Our bodies travel in one-way nonstop trajectories; but spirit, that incurable zig- zagger, backslides no less readily than it advances. Tidal time, deceptive to the end, each moment sweeps us back and forth from one age to another. Better go right underground than be left out of touch with oneself in the lowland of the so-called living. What we learn in all our born days is no more than so pro- tractedly interrupted spans allow. When respiration fails, one conks out . . . and when inspiration fails. Our lives should not be gauged by counting the breaths taken but by savoring those moments that take breath away. Death is life’s end; but need it be life’s goal? In that unbounded haven nothing more can happen to us—truism to top all truisms. Nil admirari ne plus ultra est— i.e., mors. Whenever should one not be psyched up? Dully some folk scratch their cokey noggins over why they’re quite so dopey and (albeit shallowly) down in the dumps, why their hearts are so weak and minds so muzzy. Can it be that God, that Providence, has diabolically done this to them? Surely it was not our favorite straw bosses or our latest public idols? Nay, the truth must out: it’s woozy we, the Sleepville residents, who’ve caused this fast-failing condition by surrounding, filling our selves with expensive rubbish, with a lot of rot. Mankind will perish by chance no more than it was created. What jinx is not suppositious? The term, “accidents,” denotes results whose roots and motives have just not been deeply enough probed. There’s more than meets the eye with bleary vision inside any judgment “the Creator” passes down.

_351_

Come, keep the love feast of passover into oneself, pouring no more of our stale vin urinaire. Those sourpusses able to preserve themselves exclusively by being pickled in a home-brewed stupor certainly are as good as consumed. From living skins drink up new tooth-pressed wine: this is the blood of truth shed to free us by washing away our sins. And follow it with the flesh of sun- dried fruit or fresh-grown herb and tuber: this is the body of truth bestowed upon us, the potato too hot for protuberantly hoglike omnivores to handle. Do this not in memory of any mortal but in celebration of oneself. However holy, this no ceremony needing regal cerements but a natural function all the fruits of which are best served without dressing. Nor is it a sad Last Supper: double-crossing gangsters are yet welcome to continue gnawing that by themselves in their consecrated boneyard. Independent of the bogus doctors and

485 their bogies, turning thumbs down on all registered palm readers, counterpoi- son pedlars, spiritualists, sawyer-lawyers, gooroos, “justices” of the so-called cold war, charm sellers, pie-in-the-sky priests, and other undertakers who are trading on anxiety and do not want to see us buried without benefit of coffin at a nominal price; freed from such hocusing parasites, just execute this inner baptism once or twice or thrice a day, the only blessed sacrament we need perform besides love’s action. Failing though in this, by lacking truth’s fruition we’re recalled. Baptism can’t alone initiate: one must adore. Could solely rapture be immortal—the immeasurable, by which we are measured? Better is a modest meal of dead bread, if compassion’s present, than much living fruit devoured in its absence. Postulates highflying like fruitarianism may be fine and dandy; but one ought to give thanks to share and have even lowly wild greens, ageless simples, upon which to sup.

_352_

None of us can recapture strains of magic music save by getting out of earshot of our clattery selves. Shed those husks and nestle in the stillness that invites real transformation. We’re convinced the sandpiping of our pipsqueaky selves is ringing true, sounding significant; but do we seriously think that in a hundred years—hardly a twinkling of the world’s eye—we and all the piddling mounds of whimsies we’ve so diligently piled up, all the seeming depths of sorrow we’ve probed and imprinted, the “immortal” hen-track lines we’ve scratched, will be commemorated, not erased, obliterated, wiped clean, wave after washing wave, off the slate of the forever thundering ocean edge? We’re blips on the screen of infinitude; once dead, we’re all as if we’d never been. The scenic-drive graffiti artists scarcely leave a mark upon the world. Realize that one is dead, and life begins. Security, to breathe, requires forsaking our terrified craze for it. “But what am I to do to reach salvation?” Drop dead! Finally try no thing: simply see the truth, which is that we our selves, the moribund worrywarts, adepts at borrowing trouble, cannot possibly be saved. By no means can we manage to avoid death. No thing, neither noblest will nor latest drug, will salvage us in the eternal reckoning now. Steel is forged by passing crude ore through the crucible of nothingness. Come, scale the skies above the valley of the shadow of our subterranean selves, which we fool assuming that they’ve risen free from Babylon, whose horny tentacles stretch into every distant hermitage as well as nearby hotels, coiling round and clutching the least likely personages’ hearts—egoism’s fallout showering

486 upon and shared by one and all. The profit motive is less easily removed than idealists would think. Vainly some seek a refuge in eroding hills, assured no safety there: the one secure retreat abides within oneself, in nonabiding. Strive to stay afloat, and one sinks; strain to sink, and one floats.

_353_

Why so fearful of a brain storm? Love to live under the thunderbolt. The best brain functions best in shade, the best heart anywhere, infinity’s circumfer- ence being nowhere yet its center everywhere. Trimming ship, sail unflinch- ing straight into the teeth of the typhoon, into the furious tornado’s eye. True, fiercest passions fastest fade And sink in memory’s sea; But fools are wise, not being afraid To lose eternity. In the grim emptiness man shrinks from flares the fullness of life, at storm center. Practically no one’s desperate for peering into the vertiginous abyss. Over the untroubled stability of the plain choose the precarious vertigo of the precipice. Let’s face it: most of us flee solitude and leisure hopelessly, for we will not escape our staunch pursuers, shadowers relentless. In fact solitude’s a privilege reserved for living souls: in death one joins the great majority of indistinguishable atoms, fragments from the suppositious Big Bang. Never going to have to come to grips with oneself? That is what each is inclined to think. What always seems forgotten is the nemesis of timeless midnight, ebb tide of requital following this flood tide of approved confusion. Silly folk see nothing odd or wrong in madness; they hope that salvation will descend from some God out there in the ether—maybe from some supercivilized imaginary UFO-borne race amazingly conversant with our own incomparable tongue and mores? What in fact is wished is that our decades, centuries, millennia of bankrupt policies and of unconscionable conduct can now be glossed over and ignored indefinitely. Crassly and complacently we mask our lonely selves to seem respectable, but comes the instant of true revelation when no longer can we manage to disguise our meanness, when our lives must lie exposed to all eternity, at last clear unpremeditated portraits in our flesh and spirit, honest as the searing sun and wind are honest. How pathetic all our maladroit maneuvers calculated to negate the fact we’ve made a mess of living on

487 this planet. All the pet contrivances or manacles we’ve molded to evade the truth—our bigotries, belongings, poses, dissipations—profit us exactly nothing, for they do not even intermit the retributive crisis of our underworld, the necessary showdown in which all the chips are down, ready for cashing in, and not a thing is there to win. Our main habituation’s trumpery while death is stalking all of us. No raft of rickety rationalizations can help one already sunk. The sands of life are running out on man, love’s gold dust flowing like a cascade through his lustful fingers, whipped away by a tongue lashing from sardonic heaven. Inexorably the date approaches, nearer than mañana, when the jig is up and he has no choice any more but to accept the final summit conference, the zero option, and the last of one-on-one games—face to face- lessness now with himself.

_354_

Do we, dull-eared, enjoy this lull before the storm, when eyes in hours* cannot discern what hearts in all eternity do? Come, start the countdown to the end of game, beginning of adventure from which there’s no turning back. A hissing tidal wave, a mindless monster of resistless force, the time (no time) is beating, gathering momentum, headlong snowballing toward our atoll and now crests and breaks, abruptly shattering, when apocalyptically to the dying calls the voice of joy, and those who hear the cry and rise may live, while those who, locked with dread of banshee howls and death knells in their rat- infested suites and cellars, will not listen are already dead, far from the source of life. Beware the noontide light, night creepers, for it can cause cancer of the brain. The day of destiny, the zero hour summoning us to be zero cool, the poignant moment sans duration, is fast coming, stealing steadily closer, hanging grimly over all, when each is going to be judged, absolutely without mercy or reprieve, by oneself. To shake spears or our bones with vigor at relentless nature’s supreme court avails naught. Listening or not, who in time can dismiss the final sentence? Only sentimental cravens feel compelled to controvert incontrovertible divine necessity’s hegemony. For this to ring a bell, no one need be a shaken ding-a-ling forever dinging fellows. Hell’s bells, manchild, ask and fear not for whose dinosaurian predicament their plangent clangor tolls and soundless truth tells. Still unmusical, unready to ring some

* Where the needed honest leader who will act with courage while in office, not just talk with courage when he’s leaving it? For each shoo-in to lose the candidate can only be oneself.

488 real changes in one’s ring-a-ding-ding lifestyle? Pray be on the qui vive in this underworld eclipse for the bright olden sun returning every now and again, paying attention to the brazen eye-opener of praecognita if you don’t mind.

_355_

Very soon—just how soon, who can tell?—the twisted self is fated to return to oneself as a long-journeying river empties into the unsounded sea. And this, the sweeping backwash of a pauseless past and causeless present term, down to the last exasperating scrap of a detail of infinitesimal cause and effect, even this very Ponderosa’s many moonlit cobwebs overhanging a lone throb- bing skull withdrawn in the unconscious shades of wide-eyed lemuroids, after an inconceivably long-spun-out passage, will perhaps come round once more and, like some cosmic LP record that is finished yet not finished—stuck in a flawed groove—with an unquenchable persistence replay out the flyspeck of one’s life in the divinely earthy tragicomedy again, over and over and over unendingly, around, around, around ad infinitum, the machine triumphant in perpetual motion, just as life itself, rebelliously unmechanical, must rise and fall and flow in an unceasing cycle, year to year, eon to eon, on and on and on. Gadzooks, what’s this? Eternal Recurrence? Another vanity, flimflam, self-consoling supposition? One more labeled curio for our cluttered museum of completely mummified beliefs? A final, hollow lifesaver and wound-up wrap-up fabricated out of calculating cowardice and avarice? That’s what a time-housed cuckoo thinks. Sure, there may be a life beyond; still, if so, what’s it but the very misspent life one’s living now, this anxious daily round of endless, needless soul frustration? Every fucker wants an instant replay,∗ but the game that’s kicking off contains no final whistle. Like the prospect? All those not in favor please say yea for every thing to come to be quite as it is, without an atom changed, world without end. All torrents rise out of the briny, yet that deep is full, a drinking bowl abrim with all the tears our kind have ever shed. Now do we understand? Wholly oblivious of our selves, of how old we are and how young we yet may grow, can’t we recall what is beyond recall? Addicted to our onetime selves, we’re fated to freak out forever. Clearly it is only when one realizes individuality is smotherable in its infancy that one will start to nurture it and raise it to be ultimately liberated from itself. Man’s absolutely peerless and unique, without an equal, save in

* “You can say that again!” 489 all eternity. The evolutionary flash in the pan hasn’t seen this yet—because presuming it unbearable—but everything turns hard upon himself, upon this irrecoverable moment when the heavens, bitter cold though blazing, reel, sending a chill down the spine and taking the breath away. All is at stake in this quick longshot combination of perfection immolated. No step taken— not excluding the most trifling miscue—fails to meld with and help form our destinies. Each “going forward” means a going backward; engineering evolution makes for devolution: what we need is to go inward, to revolve, to come back to what we actually are at present—so as to be altered totally. No one was ever anything but free; how come, then, we are seeking liberation? All conformity results from insecurity, from the delusion that security exists. “Deliverance”—when nothing’s there to be delivered? Why all of this rage to be secure, when no thing can achieve security? A soul of intrepidity can scarce be scared; for who essentially is there to die? Who dreads desires imprisonment in some outer asylum or a rut in the interior where one could only stagnate and breed sorrow: overflow vanity’s bounds, burst every bond, and rush rejoicing to the source of living, the resource of giving. Bring the toxic self to a head, break out into truth. Soon is high noon, a white night after morning, without any shadows cast by yesterday, tomorrow, or all of the irretrievable yesterdays to follow tomorrow. How soon? Now, O knowledgefulsome fellow fools. A second in this world may be more precious than an eon in “the next.” It’s solely realizing the fact one’s already, in a single instant of existence, had all one could ever have, that one is able with composure to resolve, My life is over, old friend, why fear death when love is right now? Panic-stricken, sitting on their asses, a shitload of putters-off, while puttering away their lives, protest, “Not yet, not now”; yet now’s the hour when scheming man is dying, he who never puts off till the morrow what can be put off forever. Thus to wait for more propitious circumstances to create is to be patient too long. Common as bugs, paralyzed procrastinators need to fish or cut bait. People wooden-stake their real experiences, filing and forgetting their unique encounters with love. Everybody makes mistakes; maturity’s test is to find the fortitude to learn from them, to use these opportunities to grow.∗ We won’t discover and evolve a new world till we stop malnourishing, as well as stop malnurturing, our young. The dead need to be dragged kicking and screaming into the millennium. Those who

* Some ninnyhammers never miss a chance to miss a chance (e.g., Israelis, Palestinians, Republicrats).

490 are not for growing, for unfolding, are against it: by accepting no part in a spiritual reconstruction, a real mondo mission, one accepts all of our social breakdown.* Each allegedly progressive kulture now produces a dull isolated creature most distinguished by habitual avoidance of entanglements and obligations. Cynic satisfaction people feel with ordinary human selfishness keeps profiteers in power, yet is learned and can be unlearned. The same ocean that called us to birth invites us to extinction. Here and now’s the moment when we are obliged to be all full by giving out, kicking the bucket, emptying our snaky selves into oneself. It has to be high timelessness for us, including every vet so dry behind the ears from all those bootless wars, to get our feet wet in the salty truth. Who can transcend the final overwhelming confrontation with contempt that’s death? Now whose the term that’s ebbing? Some salt’s who’s well seasoned in interior storms? Never ask, recalling the finality of life, the time the sea change comes. No one can live eternally who can’t, rounding the cape, die momently. Nowever’s when enlightenment must dawn.

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Have we no faith in life’s rebirth? Come, watch the sun rise from the earth.

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Love, and one’s tomb Becomes a womb.

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When the new sun emerges in the east, Bringing the hope of balmy days and eves To Hamlets hanging over their own graves And dreading dropping into putrid waste; When the long shadows creep out of the west, Bearing despair of ever keeping loves To Romeos who feel their souls as sieves.

* It will take considerably more than luck or some grand gesture by a phantom god to save this globe from ruin. Is the tragedy not being writ right now before our eyes and by our hands?

491 Lamenting all the joys they must have missed; When in the blackest midnight, under stars Dimmed by the mists drawn out of fevered day, One sits alone in wonder at what steers Them and the seeming self, when each will die; Then, breathless, one may glimpse infinity— This deathlessness some call divinity.

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Eternity is instantaneous. Unseasonable death turns out to be a lifelong, all too drawn-out process, while galvanic love acts lickety-split, recurrently but unforetellably, like greased lightning. Prima facie the beginning of life comes before we’ve time to think, when there’s no time for mind to function. Heaven’s brought to earth by overcoming gravity, inhaling buoyancy, expanding aspirations. Have these fillips, has this artificial respiration here performed, each hearty body blow delivered to the solar plexus, not helped to revive or animate humanity, elicited no shock of recognition, got no rise out of you? Growth has surely ceased; but is there not a flicker of life left, no sign of breath to be detected on the mirror? Clearly it is time-lessness to clear out. Take off now: the time’s come to go winging through that window in the clouds, an aperture into the veritable thingless. Swiftly come, swing into rapture. Why so laggard and so low? One’s got to go for it. Pray stretch the spirit, shape up and ship out! Showing some genuine get-up-and-go, spring up and get it on, go down and out with a good grace, resigning one’s self in an all-out sudden walkaway. Stay seated, and one stays defeated. Budging not, borne down by vis inertiae, man only bulges his behind. No one remains perfect, but everyone can be perfect, as oneself is perfect; for perfection is a going forth, a going out of self that’s not outgoing. To be sent in fact requires one not be present. To be truly seasoned: to have come and gone both often and intensely, going it alone. Being real entails being really gone . . . on life— a veritable goner vanished Venus-like behind a jet-black mountain down the skywest or a tumbleweed cartwheeling out of sight. To see through fame and wealth is to obtain a modest and yet priceless rest; to see through life and death is to earn all-consuming yet eternal go.

492 _360_

Give it a go. Dare to create, renounce, depart, and wander burdenlessly, breaking trail: remember that dead creatures do not move; nor will they reappear . . . for quite a while. Still there is nothing keeping us from being reborn now—no thing, that is, but each of our uncreative selves. What’s the ultimate end of all our striving? Just what’s ours when all our striving ends, when suddenly we’re truly active, pregnant. Realness safely lands, can one but stop; for there’s no effort in what is divine, and none of us deserves an A for even utmost effort.

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We can never be unborn, but we can always be reborn. In ending one is in this world without end. Never will one even see oneself without a revolutionary homestead renascence. But how can anyone fast aging, with glazed vision, manage to recapture youth? Unless and until we’ve spring-cleaned, aired out the halls and washed the floors of our condemned selves with pure wind and water, hardly can we enter truth oneself; and while we fear awareness of our aging and improvement of our vision, not at all. Approaching the incalculable calls for an impetuous soul, reckless, in fine fettle, free to live because ready to die. Take up these mental swords and metal words and break them, beat them into pruning clippers; rise, refuse to follow me, realizing no one needs me, go your own way, giving all unto the poor in spirit, the great unwashed, whom we always have with us; failing to take these steps, who can be worthy of oneself?

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Who’d have me see for them? Heaven prevent. Uncountable are my adher- ents as the hairs on any head of cabbage. The disciple I desire is one not following my phrases verbatim et literatim but led by oneself to love. For I give man no law as the lawgivers do, lest he be bound by it. We may be subjugated, not just captivated, when enthralled. The Lovelifer is a prison lifer and no liver: eat your hearts out, non-Prometheans. Disgruntled over sentences like pencils fitted with erasers at both ends? Where I go some may follow, yet to follow is to die. What the non compos, faced with such an overladen banquet, need is

493 not another inoffensive RV nor some extra Greek or Latin alter ego, Hebrew or Teutonic doppelgänger—all too heavy-burdened Christ-bearer, long-buried bard, mishandled thingumbob, or sun-bright robot, one too many subbing front names—but more growing compost piles. Far greater work, nay, play, creation, greater far than I, can anyone do if s/he be oneself, pure earthy gold and not the paper-tiger counterfeit that is some self. On paper love is altogether simple, not in life. I only indicate the Way; I’m not the Way: no one but oneself can be That. These images may be real, these ideas true; yet they are not the real, the truth, but only inklings of perfection, signs and symbols pointing out the trackless trail “to” oneself.

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Practice makes excellent but not perfect. Unblemished art works crop up as improbably as blotless lives: the loftier one’s aim the higher shoot one’s chances of humiliating misses. Every performer, for that matter, gets the chance to take a pratfall. Would some cankered tenth-rate critics, minor irritations like fleas, tidy little artists manqués jaundiced within earshot of a golden tongue that they say sucks, not “love” to rub him, rip it, right out of existence? They dismiss with crude razoos his bleeding heart’s drops as a prolix zany’s overly abstruse, quixotic, poetized pastiche, the merest bagatelle, just one more case in point of impertinent curiosa, nothing but a mystifying muddle and psychotic diatribe, vituperative if cathartic self-indulgence, indecipherable doodling of a pensive poison-pencil pusher from the lunatic fringe, yet another circle-squarer well deserving failure: clearly they have not yet started reading. Many cracks on walls are made by those who cannot scale the latter. How can one be a grandstander when there’s not a single viewer, let alone a grandstand? “Way too much extraneous matter here . . .” whine those who’ve given up the ghost: I must remember to remind Montaigne and Melville, Emerson and Dostoyevsky, that their like shortcoming of larded long-windedness*— their blasted iron lungs be blowed!—can only indicate an orthopedic ghost- writer. Tongues out, the unprincipled canaille are quick to put one down as a dog-eared Diogenes without having taken one up; discarding one as but a worthless nut, they never savor the true nonpareil. This earnest MS seems a

* Our fabricated multifaceted microcosmos may demand that both the great creator and his work be unmistakable monstrosities.

494 fascinating, albeit a jealous, bitch permitting only one admirer. How truly does a single solitary soul, indeed, admire this overladen homily of secondhand farfetched reflections? (What crime if the odd one’s lifted?) Who’s elated to be served up a warmed-over rehash of leftovers? Do you seek enlightenment from inky scratchings? Would a conner rather bask beneath an ultra- violet lamp while healing sunlight beats down on his or her radioactivized “shelter”? Who will pay one’s scot for this old homespun patchwork quilt of plain conundrums, this eventually threadbare tapestry, mosaic of unmatched paper morality? Who thinks these sayings are real sexy, really deep-think? Truth is sexier and deeper still than thought can plumb and not a saying, nor for studying, yet inviting tacit cognizance, intense attention. Talking, writing, thinking, dreaming of love is not loving. All abstractions—even Zen—must go, for truth to grow. Can wisdom be distilled? Or must it, like a flower’s spontaneous response to sun, be listened to by heart? Lovelife’s a verb and not a noun, no split infinity, a painting always better than the public’s view of it—so long as the diversifying palimpsest is constantly being touched up, polished off. Who’d care to sew the corpse up, put the finishing touch to it that’s a match? No one’s forbidden to experience a liberating surge and, soaring, to see from its flashing ice-blue eye’s precisely pointless viewpoint. Surely each of us is now left wholly empty, naked to a fare-thee-well within, without a thing to hold on to . . . beside oneself. But how voraciously, rapaciously, our teeth are grating for some thing to grasp—a plump rump or long piece of tail-end pope’s or parson’s nose, something with plenty of bloody meat not on its snotty conscience, any thing but the veracious no thing. Have I not, like some revolting corporative government, provided loads of ammo to upcom- ing enemies?* Appreciate the virtue of self-treason: every earnest work of art’s a two-edged sword, cuts deep both ways, not least against the grain of its creator. Dorms are not for snoozing solely: readers should be sure in passing to urge their grandchildren, when the latter are at college, not to miss or pass up cracking lovelife—the reality, much meatier than jousts under the covers. Who thinks this no more than a gargantuan leg-pull? Being reborn is agony, brave pressing through a strait gate, the defile of this world; tight we huddle in unwholesome cavities, resisting our release. For Christ’s sake don’t get stuck in entries as humanity, with a tenacity betokening insanity, has been stuck hard and fast like so much crud to gospels, hearing

* A cereal tycoon deserves thanks for confessing, “Our competitors are . . . friends, our customers . . . the enemy.” 495 without listening, blocking the way without entering itself. Confused by masters, many broken-down rips are entirely sure of their footing bantering but less so cantering; then they’re irresolute, bewildered, restive, knock-kneed, tipsy tipplers not quite scared to death, but tottering and shilly-shallying on the threshold of awareness, on the rim of insight’s well, balking at letting go their selves, at plunging into depthless inquiry, which presupposes more than nimble wits or slipshod sensibilities forever blowing hot and cold. Look not for truth from tracts or tomes, for truth is deepest life, a knotty pine that suffers not being cut, whereas our tracts and tomes are deadwood, fuel for modest fireplaces. Scattergun attacks can never bring down heavily defended ruling classes. Neither book nor bomb, however absolutely smashing, can awake mankind, but only living wisdom, love-directed. Art’s not living, just the use of living.

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Put all kinds of seeds or germs—no matter what a batch of eggs one’s laid in given clutches—in one basket, then disseminate the lot of them. A precious- gem collection can be polished and repolished—adding to one’s life a patina of glamour?—only for so long. The best of shields may have been forged and burnished only to be dug up and reburied by some future archaeologist in a museum time capsule. Give up, give away this thickening headdress of bright sun-singed horsefeathers, fond mementos of one’s flights to heaven, sparing one’s self the incomparable vanity and ultimate illusion of possessing knowledge. Have I, the late unlamented author, not in rallying informed somebody with the truth unquestioned, then? No, no one can or should try doing that. Where ultimate inscrutability’s concerned your own guess is as good as mine. Reality refuses to be carved in stone. Respice finem, see the next installment for the heart of the matter: Sunday’s last breath osculates with Monday’s first one. Need one recap what’s been said over and over? What is true is truly magical, one for the book, requiring no one’s commentaries; only gossiping selves “require” commentaries. Where digressive academics need thick volumes to explain themselves (yet in the end remain vague mysteries) I sum up all in a pentameter; for wisdom one word is more than enough. What use to read a book, to chew a prickly chestnut bristling with contentious issues, if beforehand one has failed to grasp its innards? Progress sails out off the top of one’s head: there’s no way to play life but by ear, by winging it. Conception’s

496 glorious, whereas the finished art work’s a death mask. Were lovelife real, not a grotesque shadow play smelling of the lamp, what scrupulously orchestrated treatise would need be? Bastions are built out of anxiety. What urgency to enter if one is oneself already? All these fulcra are but simulacra. Where is every uttering transporting us—to nowhere in particular? They’re only words and, words being merely shadows of the wordless, these but a foreshadowing of the uprising sun. The time’s approaching when the whole text must be Xed out. Still, advance beyond our selves, and freedom, that most unrespected vagabond, is ours—it’s us. We are in fact what lived long before God; creating Eden’s up to us, not up to any fancied “God.” The original sin is that with which our pet adders solicit us at every turn: the wish to have or be some thing, the will to languish unaware of self. But truth means consciousness of consciousness, the finishing with languishing, willing wishes. Choicelessly choose, last of a vanishing race to reappear, either/or. Love life or die? No, simply see we are not and love is. Victory requires unconditional surrender. Leap into creation—in the void. Come to an end with cowardly quibbling over quiddities: merge with the resurgent sun. Humanity, this present seed plot of malignancy, enormous store of nuts and high explosives squirreled away and begging to be detonated, is the latent insurrection and the life: if it, if we but dare solely to be itself, not selves, though “it,” though “we” die, yet in it, in us one and all thrive. So easy it is to announce one’s presence, blowing one’s own horn brazenly as any bleating rasher-splasher of an infant or anachronistic capitalist can, clinging to one’s favorite gewgaws, striking ideological poses for attention while devoid of intellectual integrity; but, curiously, how much easier, renouncing presence, to discover absence that’s one’s essence. World obliteration is what’s hard to make endure. Heaven and earth will pass away along with all those time bombs that our brains contain, but not so this broad spanless bridge beyond destruction, the eternal bomb beyond construction. Indissoluble, always present, is the passing rainbow of enlightenment, a mystic sign of torrid tempests no more past than to come, standing not for our mad greed for war but for our sad need to adore—an oval, rivetless arch at the end of which there waits no pot of gold, nor any impasse, for there is no end, each sun-shot step uniting fast this very moment and this very “future” moment, over and yet no less under the unbelievable, deepening lapis lazuli of the old empty ocean, the sole truly blue blood of the world, which raises resonant magenta thunderheads in pearly skies at eventide, whose singing combers course on with a perfect soulless equanimity. Forever there is only now, when all our forethought goes

497 for nought, when yesteryear is next though never. Who likes dreaming that indefinite duration’s a criterion of value, that the best is future? Inconceivable all concepts of the future when true vanity dawns. Back this fire-spitting forktail-swallowing nonmythical sea serpent brings us at length to the end and origin of everything, more beautiful than any long-lost African or Asian Eden; back to the beginningless First and the finishless Last, older than all yet the youngest—here in the immediate, this everliving everloving now.

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Enfin voilà tout? Yes, untouted dobby, pick of the card pounding down the homestretch, sounding resoundingly like savage symphonic drums, still from the sharp report that spells the word “go” one, while coltishly horsing around, explodes from out the starting gate, where there’s no place to rest the head perpetually champing at the bit save in oneself, all chance of being scratched forgone forever, and the mad race or wild chase that’s to be run cannot be won, consisting in, not leading also-rans like nags or dragtails to, power and glory at the front of the pack, spurred herein down to the wire with no halt. Many a soul wants to rerun what is over when already past post. Alien to natural proportion, the poor dog-tired white-faced big-game hunters, gnashing their teeth, appetites unwhetted, all but lycanthropic, sick of labored struggle trek- king overland, perdurably outstripped and bushed, cry lamely for the lupine spoor to run out, for a final decrescendo in the tireless tundra “trophy” lone wolf’s ululating clarion call, yet—not to worry—soon enough may see the one and hear the other. Why so desperate to get rid of the wild card? Might the craving everybody has for permanence in love or art insinuate some natural if deep-fixed predilection toward death? The sole thing permanent about love surely is the wondrous doggedness with which we hunt it—futile to the finish. Ultimately all is destined to be swallowed up by that great Black Hole “in the sky,” that cosmic maw itself doomed to annihilation. Some would like a fixed conclusion, no concern how superficial, but in adoration follows no conclusion. There is that which has no journey’s end, never a coda, and it’s not to be unearthed in any ego trip or volume, fat or spiny. Clasp the closing book opening up; the sunset that is not sundown; the evening of the seventh day heralding the dawning of the initial day now breaking, never failing, rather more than thirty thousand thousand centuries. The problem with the past is that it never alters; with the present that it never stops. In every dying day is night a-borning, and conversely.

498 Think me inchoate, yet finished, dead beat, down for the count, fucked out, all my pristine passion spent? Expect this kid to poop out, call it quits? Funny boy, that leaves me—best of cards for openers—a gamer dying laughing, game, not hard. No weekend this, but an inceptive entranceway designed for rebirth: till we have demolished all our airy antiquated castles, we can hardly plant alive foundation stones in understanding acts. Our foremost “nonobligatory” need is not for sex, nor for approval, but to live enlightened. We have come full circle on the great wheel here, and every sun is one sun: sinking like life’s last sigh, it’s yet rising in a first great gasp. Here bound no ups nor downs, for every path is one Path, every way a right of way, so high above the clouds that all is crystal. To be “inside” means no more than to be “outside,” both a falling by the wayside. Face the truth or taste death? Not quite: face the truth of timeless death and relish temporary health, as death’s inherent in one loving life and fruit is as unconscious of its debt to worms as health of its to fasting. Giving daylight, not more martyrdom,* we grow most generous, each pomegranate shrub thickset with gleaming globes ripe for the plucking: drop them, burst them, scattering their bittersweet seeds borne to quicken. Putting forth, extending the heart, bounteous with heavy boughs, being swallowed up by one knows not just what, one lives for good. When growth is ultimately realized one is universal spirit, and the very thought of worship of superiors or fellowship with peers no longer is conceivable. Oneself and it (scarce knowing it) are one, a single process, fruit being no more raised on trees than trees are raised on fruit. If flowers had never blossomed no bliss could have. Close at hand, closer than we would or could think it, so close that we need but reach down and turn over new leaves, is the moment when chill death is not the victor, when there is no victor and no victim, when the hatred in us is as night soil nourishing gardens bearing fruitage young with bloom born of springs of perpetual renewal. Sunday is the term for optimal if terminal occasion. Effortlessly make the best of efforts to embrace the whole by claiming no thing and, exultant, grasping the enormity of the continuum that is existence, free of will vow now, beyond beloved hokum, to return from alienation to this life and death indefinitely, ever and anon. Never say

* Pray let the legends die that all the Jesuses and Joans of Arc earn immortality by dying violently. Sacrificing altruists helps institutionalize stupid cruel oppression. No one seems more virtuous and noble than when dead. Addiction to celebrities killed young is proof of addicts’ own arrested growth.

499 never, ever sing ever. Here words fail, mind swoons, and the poor insightless self dissolves. Compelling time to test its teeth in vain, stamp the eternal seal, inked with personal absence, into every second, which comes first. Cry encore, each unworshiped Christ—real love—being reborn, to no end of the refrain. Postpone integrity no longer, since our period is all but gone. Fact is, our selves are only so much sunstruck, hardly purified, but plainly activated sludge, and once they have rejoined their own, dropped back into the term- less dustbin, what return is there for us, wild complications of the primordial slime? Might even the state of serenity in ecstasy be merely ultimate delusive- ness? The omnipresent dead and their familiar heebie-jeebies can dwell only in the tomb of memory, that monstrous charnelhouse of perishable haunt- ings. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, if you’d care to, hoping against hope to gain some faint if final trace of narcotizing satisfaction from it. Surely even the rare sweetened flesh and blood, not only normally embittered skulls and crossbones, cannot but pass into blank futurity, and yet— who after all knows?—reproduced via an incommensurable curve may well recur, in which case every fragrant paradisal fruit grove we have cared for and each fetid hellish cooking fire we have ignited in our nuclear selves, sure as fate, will grow again and yet again, each rosy afterglow a lucent foretaste of the sunborne truth, and all the ambrosia and all the gruel we’ve lapped night and day we’ll lap till artificial time and scorching suffering stop; meanwhile, avoidlessly as escort shadows never to be shaken off, the multitudinous long- vanished vanquished ghosts of the apparent past whom we have wronged in careless moments are anew resurging, renascentur, destined for so many unrightable wrongings more, each soul arrived home from the ceaseless circuit, damned yet graced by perpetuity. Though crucial, this tip’s no excruci- ating crux but, rather, crossing over of all bitter drinks: if tears be shed they speak of ageless joy too great for frenzied jubilation, they lay open starshine and ultramarine gulfs surpassing vision, even though the shafted bull’s eye casts a gimlet glance atop the world upon a vastitude now overcast encompassing all the ambiguous vicissitudes of fortune, all these glories of our heavenly existence passing. From this thorny rosebush pressed home by fate’s fickle finger who has got the sanguine point, whom has it penetrated? And are many really happy at wit’s end, still plowing the nightmarish deep, sunk in the penumbral views and analytical amnesia condemned to overlook the cosmic energy’s supernal déjà vu? Perennially awake now in extremis, like there’s no tomorrow, no more daze (this being no leap year), yet foresensing the fall into depthless vacuum,

500 one breasts and surmounts the cruel peak, no singing spur again penultimate, this dreaming horn of far from otherworldly rock above an infinite terrain leaping with waitless light, and, heart-whole, taking heart by giving away “one’s own,” wind-swept clean beyond the fumes of smogbound self, vaulting and soaring hale and hearty through the undepleted ozone of a drugless, classic-weather high, at long last at the point of no return, where for a wonder all in overview returns, one gets, no—yes, one is, both first and last, oneself, scot-free while rapt, once and for all a sight for sore eyes and the best view. One word more to cap it all, one punch line ere this mouth be filled with dirt, a bracing ride-out for the wild and wooly orphic overture the final grace note of which ushers in, drawing no curtains on, allowing no siesta to, a corny Western lover who, unblinkingly open-eyed and breathlessly agape before an out-of-date horse opera, no longer free at crack of dawn to catch elusive houris’ prick-song snatches sweetly fading from remembrance, dreaming not an instant longer of the glowing russet flanks of some Hesperian sierra now for good impenetrable, rises ardent for another showing, never mind how deadly awful, here to hymn the zesty clincher: Let there be life, ecstasy unsummoned, prodigy passing strange, wonder past telling. Incipit mysterium.

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infinis

501 Reared in B.C. by successful 19th-Century Scot Highlander descendants with farming and medicine in their backgrounds, Virge MacLeod began defying our morbid society and composing this post-Hebraic testament circa 1954. Long disregarded, Lovelife’s philosophic aphorisms after Schopenhauer & Thoreau are now accessible solely online gratis. Yours not for another bogus “revolution” but for the obligatory inmost transmutation. S.I.

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