Impure Blood? [a short story]

Impure Blood

[A Short Story]

Prefatory Remarks by an Authorial Voice

More remarks after the fact. Everything before a story is after the story. What is a story–true or fictional? I hesitate to say un-true for fictional story. There are many kinds of fictional forms. I am not going to delineate them here. I understand that there is a form of epistolary novel–that is, a novel in letter. How much of this novel mentioned here is actually in the letters; how much is in the narrative? There is always some amount of dialogue–letters are speech on paper? What is a letter in the manner of a liar lying–there is something of fiction there, no? I am talking of letters in our lives presumably true expressions of feelings, of ideas, of experiences, no? What of the essay as a form? Couldn’t a character in a novel write essay after essay and the author weave the essays into the narrative to give expression to the character in a manner distinct from dialogue or interior monologue–first person narative is all monologic, no? Or are there other manners of first-person narrative? But expository prose is not narrative, is it?

And it is not exactly dialogue as we see in novels inside or outside of quotation marks, or in the manner presented in plays, is it? I am not exactly certain where this preface is taking me–who am I speaking to you here–am I the Publishing-Editor, J.; or, am I the author J.; or am I the narrator or author-character who is created by the author me who then writes a preface to the story he authors with a narrator or narrators who are not really narrators but expositors–the essayistic novel I have tried and failed at–at least in my Schubert like manias, I have failed at what I would consider a success in writing an essayistic novel–but then the essayistic story–a story that is all or virtually all exposition, and essay that also propels a story of a kind . . . to write a fictional essay is the same as writing an essayistic story–maybe not?

What then is this? Even if I say what I do herein, I make no wedding vows–this is a fictional essay, something I have half in mind all the time I am writing one or another personal essay–who does not use fiction in supporting his life’s tale, the one told by the idiot or idiots inside, full of every kind of sound and all kinds of fury . . . yes, I am satisfied at the moment with this: a fictional essay (I am a Satyr alive and well in the City of New York, 2015).

Satyrs work in satire, no?

“Impure Blood”

I

The greatest trick the devil has played on us has been to convince us he does not exist, he says has said will say in these and other words, as words are formed in the mouth . . . he always mouths the words he thinks to write . . .

He says what he says about what he should say, “What then should I say, can I say, what do we say, do we do, can we–what is it then that I should think we can do–what can we do? Should, would or could–all conditions preset; all conditions established by a deeper sense of rhetoric. Three fools wandering the world, I have said. We know and we do not know—what do we know? I know sometimes simultaneously, what other confusions can I breed from being . . . I mean being as in to be or not to be, the opposite of becoming, this being, this to be, what I have been but may not be at the moment; or sometimes, this not to be which is also equal with what I become. To become is simply put, not to be. If you think this is circular, maybe it is circular for no reason, or circular for a purpose you may not see, yet? It could also be that you are semi-literate and should be reading only the sports pages of tabloids so you do not have to think. Please stop reading if it is the latter.

Questions do follow questions, do spawn other questions, do instill a love, or an aversion for them, asking or answering –do we say something, saying anything after a question asked? Do we actually answer questions and see what happens, what the responses will be may not be the answers sought. Do we seek answers by the forms our questions take? . We do only simply respond as we have grown accustomed to doing, after questions.

More questions come? I come, she used to ask me to come inside of her, she used to say that the vagina needed semen to be healthy. A kingdom of questions for an answer. Yes, an answer, and an answer, and another answer . . . my kingdom for an answer,” he says. The Devil will always come to you in a guise you desire, I remember he said she had said to him. To ask or not to ask is sometimes a persons being wrapped up in the moment, what is next, the vacillation a way not to be without becoming anything. Devils do  not come to Jews in the garb of Priests.

He continues, “So then, what must we do? I ask, genuinely, I ask. Is it we? I am we here; I am we in the mirror; who is not. I am I; I am you; I am he; I am also we. Yes, I am we in my soul; I am we in my mind; I am we in the Self of selves as I have said and said again and will say and say and say. You cannot–I used to read Luke, re-read Luke, the Gospel of Luke, the prettiest gospel, the best written gospel–I remember having said a long, long time ago, that the Canonical gospels–that Canonicity did have everything to do with the quality of the writing. The Canonical Gospels are better writing than The Gnostic Gospels. Maybe the Gnostics failed because as writers they were not as good.

I stopped reading Luke, what then must we do? We must have a solution–there are no solutions. How can we make our problems solvent, to solve our problems we would have to kill the motherfuckers fucking every mother’s son under the sun–nothing new, we know, I knew then too, why there were no answers–I mean there were answers but none for the giving, none put into words any one of us could speak. I remember reading on a wall in a bathroom in a bar–or so I say another says. . .” he says. He says so much, has said so much so often, was saying so just the other day, just before, any time before now, any time after . . . past, present and future are really illusions we cling to desperately; vanity and hope; all is vanity and hope.

“It’s all that I can do to keep my focus . . . Kill,” he says he heard said, “Kill the motherfuckers–yes, we must kill the motherfuckers, all the motherfuckers everywhere there are motherfuckers, and you know they are everywhere, that is, anywhere, and in this country, motherfuckers have elaborate spin to show how they are not really motherfuckers but what everyone else should want to be because if you do not want to be them then you belong with all the stupid motherfuckers because what the motherfuckers have succeeded in doing is showing you that there are no motherfuckers except those who do not want to be motherfuckers like the real motherfuckers who are the most dangerous motherfuckers,” he says. Voices are everywhere heard, everywhere spoken, everywhere voices reverberating, echo, after echo, after echo . . . I would have been able to guide Eurydice out of Hades without looking back. You know, as a friend of mine has said elsewhere in another piece of writing, that the pool loves Narcissus perhaps as much as Echo does.

“Am I to believe that we must do as has herein been said, stated, pronounced–there’s that spelling again, how to spell is how to speak is how to pronounce the words necessary to make the spells work, no? Suiting word to action and actions to words. Without this, no magic, right? What is written on bathroom walls, subway walls, somewhere anywhere invisible people congregate in groups or alone, yes, with themselves, himself this one person invisible congregating. I am congregate; I am a congregation of one of many; I am we, again,” he says. Everybody’s in a play within a play; all the world’s a stage, and all the space on this world stage has other stages to perform on, everywhere we go, everywhere we are, everywhere we have been, will be, when we do, when we make, when we take, what do we take . . . ?

To be mistaken or not to be mistaken; am I taken with you and are you taken with me? We ask.

He says, “Hamlet is my father. What the fuck does that mean? I can hear you asking, can hear others asking, another and another and another creeping in its petty paces. In their petty paces. Who are they? What are they that creeps about this stage I play my life upon; a poor player, I am. I heard what has been herein said above, words following words–be careful what you wish for a girl friend had said to me, the same who warned me about being careful for whom who I had affinities for . . . what could this mean to anyone today, kill, kill, kill, all of them, the mother fuckers? A man asks, should ask,” he says. “I was reading a lot of Artaud and Grotowski, taking Bill Packard’s playwright’s workshop at HB Studio,” I say he said. I’ve read them too.

I worked in Off-off Broadway theater for a time, seeing a number of one-acts and short dramatic pieces, vignettes produced on stage. Yes, I was a stage manager, a set designer, an assistant director, a playwright; but how much respect does she have for this has not registered in anything she says to me, says to her friends, says to anyone she has high anxiety with about how I am going to behave, I refuse to walk on egg shells around her or for her, the control freak she lets herself become; no one more self-indulgent than the neurotically anxious, the insecure, the horribly self-centered and docile, too afraid to be so they become what they imagine others want them to be, only later to secretly and quietly hate and resent these others for making them be something they would not ordinarily be, except that they really have no sense of Self, nothing in them but darkness, a soul more empty and bottomless pit than pure being, no actuality.

He sometimes wishes that the people we love were not as full of shit as they sometimes are, I say about me, referring to me in the third person—who isn’t first or second person in the mirror; if easily first or second, why not third? I am I, I am you, I am he in the mirror as I am we in the Self of many selves as I have said time and again, over and over, here, there and elsewhere in my writing.

“Simplistic?” He asks. “Confusing?” He asks. “We are always confusing the simplistic for simplicity. Never the twain, you know–the latter is the heart of genius; simplicity, yes. Love, though, is the soul of genius. Simplicity is but the heart of it,” he says. “You cannot allow yourself to believe that simplicity and complexity do not coexist, or cannot coexist, no, they do, they do coexist, simplicity and complexity.The simplistic is other than–it is something else, not even close to simplicity,” he says. “We have to understand the difference betwen complexity and complicated, too. These are not synonyms either; simplistic and simplicity are exclusive. So . . . what then must we do,” he says. Who says what he says when he says it how he says it where he says it to whom he says it, saying so much other with silence in pause. Remember this third-person me I am when I am he; who is he? I ask me in the mirror; me as I and me as you as well as he; round and round we go, I go.

“I say someone would ask, Do we chop off their fucking heads?  I try to answer this question, Yes, we must chop off their fucking heads, cut off their fucking heads in guillotines. Of course we chop off their fucking heads, I hear another and another and another say in petty paced speech until the last syllable is pronounced for thee. ‘How do we chop off their fucking heads?’ (I always ask for whom the bell is tolling.) I hear a young man ask, a boy, really, no older than my girlfriend’s boy, son,” I say he says. “I hear others say in a dream I dreamed, We do not have to chop off all of their fucking heads, these motherfuckers who are real motherfuckers fucking everything up. And they are, fucking everything up. Eventually for themselves too,” he will say.

“Italics are a convenient veil,” he says.  “But are they an effective one?” He asks. “What else are we to do? I ask myself,” he says. “Answers come to me in streams. The words fall off like pieces from a framed jigsaw puzzle,” he says. “Who frames jigsaw puzzles–why do we have to make fun of people who frame jigsaw puzzles?” He asks. “Liberals at Harvard are too full of themselves, having let the barbarians inside the gate–yes, it is the fault of liberals, American liberals, another name for stupid liberal, semi-literate liberal, historically ignorant liberal–” he continues, going too far, I think. Liberal. What does it mean today; I used to have an idea what it meant traditionally, something I had an affinity for not because it was traditional but because it made sense to me.

“Who is thinking except in bureaucratized slogans. American liberals today would have disgusted Shelley or Blake; would have puzzled and exaceperated Jefferson and Madison, but we have to question question question the validity of Jeffersonian mandates about freedom and democracy because in our ignorance we think we know better, another form of contempo-centrism rearing its ugliness over and over,” I say he says, as I have at other times, saying what is necessary to say I say, he says what he says, what he says herein what? How am I going to link him with me?” He asks.

He is convinced of what he says, has said, “Power only responds to power, money to money, I have said, I have written–I write a lot and often, keeping one or another blog, literary reviews on line–no one reads anymore. I know that reading and writing are not for most of us who parade around as if what comes out of their mouths were trenchant morsels of intelligence (and I do not mean to be overly sarcastic). . . how I hear these others speak, one speaks out of a mouth I’ve made, I’m sure that most of the people who hop around on line are  stupid–yes, all the stupid motherfuckers who are really stupid motherfuckers because they cannot read or think, and I am not talking about what some teenage arrogant twit thinks he thinks how he thinks what he thinks when he thinks in the Yxxx–assholes, all of them, really. Venting spleen seems to be what I do most if not best,” he says. “How to best my venting–she does not appreciate it,”he imagines he should say, should think, come to believe as she insists he must, belittling him and berating him, day in and day out, for infractions of etiquette, as if she is best to judge this, being non-native as she is; embarrassing him in front of her friends, every time they are together, by apologizing for behavior he has yet even to commit to, without a word, she insists that he behave, that he relax, more apologies about him being too much for people to take, saying this to others in front of him, and she not even seeing how uncomfortable others are to hear her say so, only recognizing their discomfiture when she wants to use it as an example of how he makes them, her friends, uncomfortable–not that her litanies of her perceptions about what he might do next make her friends uncomfortable . . . a degree of disrespect she has no way of acknowledging because she cannot see outside her own head, as solipsistic as she becomes through anxiety, neurosis and fear, projecting this onto others, but mostly himself, as she does, making him responsible for everything that does not go right for her in her deluded conceptions of what should be, of what could be, of what would have been had he not mis-behaved, persistently telling him day in and day out how he has no idea how to act or what to say or how not to say and mostly contrasted with how she does and it’s all too pettily competitive in some freaky grotesque way. And he generally tells her to fuck off with these anxieties, which she then uses as proof positive of what he fears out her neuroses.

He sometimes wishes he could conform to her anxiety, just as a way to have more peace; but that is like playing a game of psycho-hop-scotch. And then the litanies of how I do not love her, most probably do not love her; and if I were as simplistic as she gets sometimes with these fears, I probably would conclude that that’s exactly what she is trying to tell me, has always been trying to tell me, projection we used to say when we were undergraduates and felt we knew something as all undergraduates are convinced because we (they) discovered psychology 101. Simple and simplistic are no more the same than complex and complicated are the same. (I am sure there are those who will ask why they should take my word for everything, except I am here to tell you that I am an omniscient narrator. Now take that or leave that; one way, there is a series of relevant and appropriate what-ifs; the contrary way establishes other sets of what-if conclusions.)

“This is not an over generalization anymore than saying chimpanzees are arbitrarily violent. But they aren’t afraid–power isn’t afraid. Fucking chimps, we are; she said to me the other day that I should not think so highly of myself, which is not the issue, but she thinks that I do, think too highly of myself, because I have the willingness to critique social contexts, or so I assume, articulate enough to make commentary that is other than trite, and mostly, as she says rhetorically, because I do not have money or significant social position to make such critiques, which flies in the face of democracy, of liberty as understood in the American political vernacular, or just in my head as I have for as long as I have been thinking of liberty (and yes, I am as naive about democracy and liberty as Mr Smith who went to Washington in Capra’s greatest film?); and the inferences of what she said to me even fly in the face of what women have endured from men traditionally and continually in societies today, some of whom misguidedly use Holy Qu’ran as a means to justify culturally bred misogyny . . . it’s ridiculous, even,” I say he says.

He says, “Money isn’t afraid. We have enforced a psychopathic sense-need-demand for politeness, always polite, unnecessarily polite, counterproductively polite–no one is allowed to be righteously indignant unless it is for some Zionist framed outrage over what is believed to be Anti-Semitism, or how endemically racist white America is. Machiavelli would be proud. We have to make them afraid. We are not making them afraid. We don’t have to kill as many as the Bolsheviks or the Jacobins to make them afraid. We have the internet. We have video. We have social media. What else could we should we do to them who would and do subjugate us? I ask. Words that appear to have been asked–I am not asking. How fucking much like simpletons can we be? You ask. And we are just like simple-fucking-tons. Letting the barbarians inside the gate, neo-conservative barbarians, What’s wrong with the Ostrogoths or Visigoths, anyway? An alter-I asks,” he says.

“What is it here that follows–we follow, we bow, we bend, we succumb, we defer, we abdicate, we act irresponsibly with respect for our freedom–we have no respect for freedom–we do not have the literacy anymore to articulate what that freedom is or should be or is not anymore. The following herein has been thought by a simple man, not a simpleton. It was thought about and then written down in his journal while on vacation in Montauk, his favorite vacation spot in the world, perhaps, every summer going at least once if not twice to the east end of Long Island, the South side of the South Fork. I should speak about this, I should not bother to speak about this, I should speak for everyone, I should not speak for anyone, I could not speak for anyone unless–unless what? What is there that is unless? I should speak for myself only; I have only wanted to speak for me and for me alone,” he says.

“Who am I? Who are you? Who are we? I am we. I am we the people too. You are we the people as well. How can this be? You might ask. It is the way there are an infinite of relative centers to the expansion of the universe. There are an infinity of possible we the peoples, I am, you are, he is and he is and she is and they are and you are another in this how many could you count is not nearly high enough.” To count for infinity or not to count for infinity–what then would the question be?

II

“Twists and turns, twists and turns, on the paths I had taken when I was boy in the Berkshires; later on the roads we drove through the Berkshires, one trip I recall from Pittsfield through New York State across the top of the Finger Lakes to Buffalo before turning north to Niagra Falls,” he says. Without his trips, my trips every summer to Montauk–what does any of this mean to me, to you, to us, there is no understanding of us, who we are, what we could be, what we have been politically, this We the People and this Public we defer our People-ness for time in and time again, bureaucratically derived security . . . he could not imagine being rejuvenated, invigorated, renewed, he hesitates to think reborn without his trips my trips to Montauk, Long Island, the end of the South Fork, extending east further than the North Fork, the ocean side. The entries herein collected have been transcribed from his journal that was left at a friend of his . . . the friend had it on his shelf. I had come across it staying at this friend’s house. A mutual friend. Everyone he knows, I know; everyone I know he knows are the same people he knows, what he knows I know what I know he knows mutually, reciprocally . . . who I am . . . but what, how many, I am many. Populus versus Publius, I have argued.

I should not have read it–but then, how could I not have read it. I would have had to read it. I was compelled to read it as I am compelled to read anything I have written in another time another place which is everywhere I have written in my life from the one, the place and the time I occupy at present. But it was clear from the cover that it was not my friend’s journal,how many friends could anyone have; who are all these selves in my Self if not friends of mine, some of them, though, I am only acquainted with and have not become friends with. I made a space for me to violate the boundaries of the journal–are there things I think in one self I should or do keep from other selves, and is it natural for all of my selves to be curious about these other selves, and how does a self in the Self differ from another person outside the Self, not within but without, outside is without–that’s interesting. I had to remove the journal to get a book on the shelf I wanted to have a look at, not having had a look at it since college. And wanting peace and making peace are not the same; wanting does not bring about what you want unless you make, you do, you act.

The journal had caused the books on the shelf to be be more tightly wedged. The journal was protruding, and was easily gripped. I removed it and had a look at the cover and then decided to open it, and it was empty but for first few pages, a journal just initiated and other than the essay, the article, the something else that I read, that was it in the journal. I never did get to take out Hobbes’s Leviathan . . . we read excerpts from it when I was in 17th century philosophy class, which I took the same semester I took seventeenth century English lit, as well as a history seminar on the 30-years War, as well as an art history class in the Baroque. All in one semester. I sometimes imagine that I have nine thousand words to say one anything.

I am not going to list all the texts that I should read in the matter of our liberty and how it is waning–and it is waning, and it has been so for longer than we think, and it has been out liberals as well as our conservatives who have participated in this orgy of power–too strong–hyperbole, you say. What is waning is the knowledge that we can have knowledge. We have only doubt. Doubt is our highest wisdom I have heard before, read before, written myself before elsewhere, in other essays or blog entries in reviews I have published on line. I have been writing on line continually for ten years or more . . . and most people who imagine themselves educated or literate are horribly ignorant on the matters most relevant to their liberty, and that what democracy is, what and where our freedom is, escapes too many of them. Most university educated women would be hard put to come up with five hundred articulate intelligent words in defense of Roe versus Wade, and we wonder why we suffer the politics and the politicians we do today. What? Put pen to paper in defense of our liberty—why not just chant received slogans in the manner and matter of packaging democracy and freedom for the masses to regurgitate.

I have seven book shelves each about six feet tall with six shelves each and each of them is about three feet wide almost two feet deep . . . and the amount of books I have on shelves; no one has had as many books as I have had in my life, reading has saved me I could say, to read as I have learned to read is to begin to philosophize and to philosophize is to learn how to die–thus live? Or is it to truly die, the way we have learned to rationalize our way right out of rights–the completely stupid motherfuckers in their mother-fucking ignorance, as if it were a cultural marker to be so stupid, ignorant and semi-, if not completely il-literate.

I am bouncing around inside my skull, not the literal skull you simpleton fuck, Johnny, why can’t you write a simple memo, you illiterate–yes, illicit–ignorant bastard. How we write like the many monkeys at the many typewriters tapping, tapping, tapping the keys in infinite time . . . the impossible-to-conceive really dumb motherfuckers who come out against Jefferson in the most knee-jerk of ways, reflex is not thinking, responding to the stimuli of media that sells the idea that the only way to be authentically black is either to be one or another form of gangster, or an overly emotional wretch who can’t think his way past yesterday–and this same media will point elsewhere to find endemic racism in America . . . and so you can conclude for yourself what this means, the books and other . . . everyone, not only black people being sold the identity-images they wear, another Emperor’s new clothes for all of us imperial in our vanity.

Where then must we arrive . . . how then should he have conveyed, should anyone say, history? Every reflex these semi-literate motherfuckers have toward whatever half-baked notion of freedom and democracy they have wandering amid the images randomly passing in the mind that they confuse for thinking, comes from Jefferson and Madison, only incomplete, inconsistent, incontinent, diarrhea of the mouth, what we feed ourselves in the mind, junk-food thinking for the brain, diarrhea, diarrhea, diarrhea.

What can I tell you? What does anyone tell when they intend to tell, perhaps saying more by how they say what they do, as much by what they leave out, as anything said said, the way saying gets said in the words said . . . but don’t think I have any patience for stupid white motherfuckers either because I do not. It must be a special thing to live in a culture where everyone is in collective denial about all of these things to consider when speaking talking saying writing telling . . .

Hold this truth to be self-evident; I am we the people for if I am not then no one is–freedom is not something abstract but something real, tangible if not exactly tactile. It exists between you and me, and that’s first and last and a whole lot in between, the between–I have considered how so much of our lives is in the between, entering and exiting, to between or not to between. To enter is to between.

But then this kind of assumed collective awareness demands that each of us be more alert, more intelligent, if not better educated than we are or are going to be by the way we teach, if not simply more literate than we are . . . how we are far, far too short, too little or too few . . . what we have endured . . . we have endured one . . . one what? One media president after another for decades now leading us not . . . each man ascends this way in an effort to convince us package over product is the only intelligent way to elect or to govern or to rise from the dead; how we see the world, how we govern, how we think, what we say, when and where we say or think what to say, to say to think, more passing images in the mind.

Rapid fire montage after montage–we can’t even conceive of something as slowly turned as Eisenstein’s Potemkin montage. I don’t even have faith in our literacy to think that many of you will even get the reference, but then why should I assume this in this way, will I buy a rifle with my tax return.

We need to be better prepared–Jefferson was no stupid man, although he did own slaves–however, you know that the 13th Amendment was written using the words Jefferson had framed when he tried to prevent the expansion of slavery into the Northwest Territories. Do you imagine it is an accident that the Second Amendment is what it is after the First being what it is? Or maybe we should conclude that the Bill of Rights are invalid because Jefferson was a slave owner, and maybe we should look to our half-as-literate leaders to frame for us a more politically correct Bill of Rights.

III

“She and I . . .” another reference to he and she.

Literacy for me does include knowledge and dexterity in interpretation and understanding cinema as it does for what is produced in an oral culture, what do we mean by oral culture . . . oral cultures and literate cultures and the differences between them, what it means for one and the other in the matter and manners of psychology–mentality too–the latter being what a People think, how they think, what they think, and psychology being that of an individual, what he thinks, how he thinks it and why he thinks it. The Odyssey was transcribed, but I am also referring to products of orality that have not been transcribed, and I am not talking about sucking pussy, another kind of orality . . . and although this is a kind of orality, it is yet not the one we mean when we refer to the original composition of the Odyssey, oral, unless one wanted to recite it in Greek while sucking cunt.

Nonetheless nevertheless moreover non-voting for President is choosing not to choose, not to pick a winner as I had done at Belmont or Aqueduct in the past . . . going to the polls to be counted but non-voting, pulling the lever one way and then the opposite way . . . non-voting avoids choosing one or the other candidate from an unacceptable status quo of choice. My father’s father’s older brothers were bookmakers, and I do not mean book binders.

Every vote cast is not really a vote for a candidate or for a party or a platform or change; it is only ever an endorsement of the status quo, a support of the business of business as usual in the business of politics. Voting for Obama or for McCain was a vote for the Status Quo . . . more on this at a later time . . . it is already too late . . . all these people going to the polls to pick a winner–we are fools, that’s what we are. fucking fools for the motherfuckers who are motherfucking everything up. Moloch, Moloch, Moloch . . . “I first read “Howl” how long ago?” He asked.

All politicians inside American ideology are unilateral and uniform in spite of the apparent irreconcilable differences the parties play at to ensure we continue to vote for one to ensure we don’t get the other. Obama and McCain, for instance, were both American bourgeois capitalists–their brand of democracy first and last was the same; who wouldn’t rather fuck than vote or drink than vote or have a bar-be-que . . . the country’s entire shift to the right, making every one more conservative politically, has put the Republican Party in the position of being nearly reactionary all the time, everywhere everyone shoving a stick farther up the ass. My hopes for political recovery have disappeared; no change will come; the ideology of the power elite is one . . . Obama is the banker’s bitch, no? Is this too much?

Neither left nor right distinct from the other in that; Wall Street Finance or the Oil Conglomerates making one politician after another their bitch. Where are the people in this, fast disappearing. East is east is west and, west is west is east, the twain the same meeting three hundred and sixty degrees around the globe. Who said east and west do not meet? Republican and Democrats, one the other, heads or tails, flip the coin, the outcome is one. The metal’s the same. What metal were they made of, Obama, McCain . . . you have to know that the minting was singular; heads is heads is heads, and tails is tails is tails. One coin. So then what did I do when faced with this Obama-McCain dilemma? There are no straight lines in space; all space is curved, all lines, physical space and metaphysical space.

I went to the polls in O8 as someone who wanted to vote entering the booth and pulling the lever closing the curtain and setting in motion potential voting. This idea of the potentiality of voting could not mean much to anyone who wants to read this, or intends to even past what I am about to say, that is, more than setting in motion a potential vote. What I did actually in the booth, after having closed the curtains, was not to pick either candidate; moreover, I was counted as someone who did not want to pick a candidate. Yes, neither one of the two major candidates did I choose; in fact, no other candidate did I choose either . . . and I cannot tell you how many educated men and women I have had to explain this to . . . no one gets it, and that’s no one educated, no one I work with, no one. And yet I do not feel beset or alone or isolated; they do not have to be contingent, the feelings herein expressed.

Obama’s charisma, I have to say, is extra-ordinary. It has been his salvation . . . too many educated are fostered by or formed by or molded by or influenced by or manipulated by media messaging, the received ideas of our culture, the right way only way to think; the box is made manufactured by these media, oh, the channels between, communication channels between two people no less than the media channels of television of radio or satellite something out there of the internet . . . without the dimensions of his charisma, Obama, amabo, has charisma, a lot of charisma . . . and how these dimensions get drawn in society, and how charisma is political cache, how it gets negotiated as political currency–we do have more faith in Obama’s charisma than we do the dollar–without these, Obama would have been finished long ago, and I am not disregarding how low his approval rating has become. Now, his charisma aside–his demagoguery is also firmly set, securely established, tendered equally in the way criminals do counterfeit bills. Yes, even liberals can be demagogues. What politician hopes to be effective or successful in politics without being somewhat somehow a demagogue.

Who imagines that the left and the right do not operate with power, for power, by power acting powerfully, differently? Who still thinks that inside the dynamics of power the Democrats are really any different from the Republicans? In how each is allied with money and power, one is like the other. Brokering their political authority and social influence is appalling enough, but as they play out their own version of ideologue versus ideologue, it is even more insipid as it becomes more and more sickening. All the time the people lose . . . banks are our temples . . . banks are fucking evil, are Satan’s outposts, and no one wants to see it the SAME way no one really wants to know that the Matrix is a lie. We are in the matrix, the media matrices of our world.

IV

Utopian dreams, nightmares, prophesies . . . politics always again and again the same kind of ritual actions supporting the dogmas of the status quo, there is no limit to how the simple separate person everywhere all the time will compromise ethics, morality, good sense, decency and any value that stands in the way of him making an extra buck–do not tell me Americans are greedy–there are no greedier people than the teeming masses here not yearning to be free, but yearning to make money, and able and willing to fuck their neighbors at any turn for yet an extra one . . . dollar. Former communists now totalitarian capitalists. Everything is the same as usual, around and around it goes, this merry-go-round with us, all politics a menagerie. Totalitarian capitalist America . . . and do not tell me that former Communists doing communist things the ways communists cannot help but do them: to fuck people and then try to ruin their lives . . . it’s logic, it’s determinism . . . real pieces of shit these hateful motherfuckers . . . and right on with that, the United States is totalitarian capitalist in direct proportion and in constant ratio with how the Soviet Union was totalitarian communist . . , get with it, really, wake up, sleepwalkers. Republican and Democrat are both equally enemies of the People, yes, capital ‘P’ People; We the People that I am; that you are, that he is and she is and they are—it has to be this or it is meanigless.

The man who sees the Buddha on the road and does not know what the Buddha is . . . are you a god, are you a spirit, are you an angel, are you maybe a demon, what are you being so illuminated as you walk down the road that I can see it surround you this aura, all a round him a special luminescence, what is it, what are you, question following question, to which the Buddha says one after another, no, no, no, I am not a god, I am not an angel, I am not one of hundred different spirits, anhy one of them, each one of them, no, not any one of those spirits you imagine I might be, no, no, no to everything the man asks, to which the man rejoins in exasperation, what are you then, to which the Buddha in Buddha slyness says, Awake!

Friend of the banker Obama cannot be like the Buddha no matter how much those of us who love him want him to be saintly father Buddha-like or just the Buddha himself transfigured in the image of Obama, yet no one speaks out of the mouth of dissemblance better than he, so no Buddha-hood for him I flip my Kennedy half dollars the man next door gave my boy how long ago now I cannot say should we have been nicer to the man whose overtures were only sad lonely alcoholic longing for maybe a friend, but what kind of friend can you have with alcoholic, especially alcoholic who doesn’t drink anymore . . . heads is different from tails I know . . . the alcoholics last night—what a gang! What a group! What a something else there must be in words to say just how lunacy finds its way to settle in some minds—I cannot join the inmates, nor do I desire to be one of the doctors in the asylum everywhere has become; the latter almost crazier than the former, you have to know, should know, suspect at least because even anyone in the deepest denial has an invisible grip on how separate he or she is from sanity–and I am talking about true sanity, not what the mainstream mass of cattle-minded persons imagine is sanity, sanitized, sanitizing, sanitation. garbage men in charge of our minds?

We keep flipping political coins minted of one metal, but no matter how you flip Obama, his message and actions are checkered . . . but then we voted not for change but against the Republicans; which is why we are going to vote for Hilary because the Republicans do scare the shit out many of us. You do know, though, that Jefferson had said that banks are more dangerous to a people and their liberty than any standing army . . . but I have forgotten how friendly banks have become, how much friendlier and kinder and gentler banks are today, right?

Obama is the banker’s bitch a man said in a bar that he had heard in a dream he dreamed the day before, someone un-faced, unnamed, disembodied, only voice, like an echo, the mind a cavern, a cove in the mountains by a pool of cool water . . . and has sold the Oval Office to Flankstein, America’s chief Pimp. Oh yes! Wall Street are pimping us, one after another—we have sold our water for money; we have sold our daughters into harlotry.

But we like flipping coins and convincing ourselves we have experienced some substantial change. But then, we play hop-scotch with facts rather than pursue the Truth (always a capital ‘T’).Obama, tails, W., heads; flipping coins, flipping out. Hop-scotch is another favorite past time of Americans. The point herein is that money comes to money to operate socially with money for money by money to make money more monied–big news! Right? This ever increasingly monied-elite with their money fund our presidential campaigns, yes, even Obama’s, the prime governmental bitch of Goldman Sachs . . . the dream voice of a man in a bar telling the story of his dream voice speaking for—the prime player in both the economic debacle of 2008 and the Great Depression was Obama’s biggest campaign contributor, Goldman; but that was carefully through many, many, many smaller than large-large donations . . . money, money, money, money all of it adding up, and there imbeciles sitting over too many drinks in bars gleefully telling of these escapades of money as if they feel themselves in the know over the poor suckers who do not, and tell us when they do that that’s the way things are and there’s nothing anyone can do about it because they secretly support it having figured out how to get scraps or mostly crumbs from the tables of the Monied Elite and that puts them up on the poor bastards they pretend to have sympathy for all the while everyone around him or her nods in agreement or some other kind of accord, everyone in line, because it is far, far better to go along with what is wrong than to set oneself opposed to every sling and arrow of what is outrageously wrong, although alone, without support—and even a man or a woman’s family—loved ones—will oppose him . . . everything has become tainted. Le sang impur. Yes, the new impure blood that must flow in the gutters of our streets because none of us farm as much as we used to farm, the furrows of our fields are not our fields but the fields of corporate America . . . let the impure blood flow, we could say . . . how many of us go to see Les Miserables and miss the point? I saw a production of Brecht’s savage  musical based on John Gay’s savage Beggar’s Opera, and they turned it into Oklahoma. Three Penny Opera in the hands of then contemporary Broadway was pablum for we the imbeciles of the United States. The most savagely satirical songs that could not be altered were cut from production. People should read Hugo, should read Brecht, but we do not . . . would you or I join the Jacobins? Where are the American Jacobins? We might ask. Do I really want this? Do you? Do we? We seem headlong for this if we keep up with the ways we act, think, speak—thinking has little to do with the random passing of images in the mind that we do, or the hop-scotch with words that we play. Or is it hop-scotch with Truth that we play?

I sometimes imagine me an executioner, do we need a Jacobin-like revolution? Would the guillotine have any affect on how politics is played? I suspect that it would. Could the guillotine have an effect on how economics gets handled? I am of the mind that the power elite have no fear; I am of the mind that the monied elite have no fear. I am of the mind that they have only contempt for us. I am of the mind that power can only understand power as most English speakers only understand English. We are subjected to and subjugated by a social need to be polite to a psychopathic degree or extent–yes, we have become psychopathically polite, avoiding telling anything like it is for the softer, gentler advertising version that mandates positive spin be put on everything. Either that, or news is manipulated by those in control of the channels in the media for their own purposes or the effects beneficial to those they support or are in allegiance with . . . the media in America, particularly its press and its broadcast media, have more in common with the old Soviet Pravda than anything else in the history of human existence. I still think that chopping a few heads off might go a long way to instilling fear, a man tells a friend of mine in a bar about a voice he heard in a dream he dreamed, and the friend who heard the man tell of the voice in his dream told me a few days later, and I am telling you, showing you, writing it here almost verbatim, as word-for-word as anything remembered could be.

There is no Golden Age to come in the future; there is only the Will to Power, now especially that we have subverted and undermined democracy or democratic probabilities from our potential solutions . . . to become solvent, to solve, to dissolve, to re-solve, solvency, solvency, solvency.

V

“I dreamed a dream and in the dream a dream speaker spoke, Kill some of the motherfuckers in power? Kill some of the motherfuckers who control finance? Yes; no; maybe’ perhaps; if so then what? Will this do anything? Of course some say yes and others say no, and yet others say perhaps but only if . . . How can we know? Can we know? Should we do it and see what happens? None of us have the convictions of the Jacobins. Is this the problem? It might be. It might not be. It could be, but. It would be, if. None of us have the political sense of French peasants in the 18th century. We are all of us living in our technologically constructed Matrices. Ah yes! I wish I did not have so much bile,” he says. Everyone recoils from pronouncements of killing; everyone avoids listening to or understanding or re-reading thoughts in words about killing righteously, as if there were no righteous killing, as if all killing were murder.

“The Matrix is all around us, and there are many of us who would prefer to live in it knowing what it is . . . just look around you, listen to what people say about the things most important to them, what they say about relationships and love and freedom and democracy and how we speak and think in received ideas or the trite and cliche driven messages of advertising . . . we really are stupid motherfuckers. I want to disbelieve, but I cannot,” he says. But then murder and killing are not the same things, are they? They couldn’t be. No.

“Bile rising. Semi-literacy rules our world and has for so long that those in power now are frighteningly semi-literate to the point where narrow-mindedness wins every intellectual day whether it is on the side of liberalism or conservatism, neither one anywhere nearly as articulate as they once had been . . . and I have no optimism anymore for any solution to arise from the people who have so thoroughly transformed themselves into a gigantic monolithic state serving public that Jefferson’s We the People is dead, lost forever,” he says. Spleen. Everything I do mostly today is all about spleen; the ideas that rise with the bile my spleen produces. Your spleen; his spleen, hers too; ours as well as any other spleen. Everywhere everyone drowning in our bile.

“Do we, do you, do any of us really care who fucks who under the bed sheets? I care if it is a child abused by an adult; I care less if it is a sheep abused by a human adult; I care somewhat if it is a cadaver abused by a living person. I do not care if any adult fucks another consenting adult in any way he chooses she chooses to strap on a dildo and fuck her girlfriend in the ass–so what?” He asks. What more should he have said?

“But I still believe that it exists, this we in We the People, and that it exists between you and me and only there between you and me because that is the only place it could be, between you and me . . . motherfucker to motherfucker? We are not the motherfuckers who deserve to die, and there are those who deserve to die–there are always some who deserve to die. Killing is not murder the Jews have taught us. I had a Hasidic student who made that clear to me; thou shalt not murder,” he said. There it is again, what he thinks about what to do in the situation  we all of us seem to be fixed in.

“Power and greed can only respond to power . . . savage, brutal, bloody fucking screaming mess power. I want to lift blood dripping heads from baskets still moving their lips in half-asserted prayers under disbelieving and inaudible whispers. And that’s the horror of existence, we are so conventionally attached to our mainstream dogmas on appearances and the importance of appearances that we have dislodged Truth from where it could be fixed in us rightly,” he says. That we have allowed ourselves to be systematically undereducated that literacy and rationality and intelligence have been replaced with doubt, doubt and more doubt, a pervasive epistemological malaise, a deep metaphysical insecurity, a groaning pessimism about knowledge or the possibility of knowledge . . .these should not be a surprise, except these conditions have left us unable to see what should be clear and is clear to a few who are set to become pariahs among their friends and family who wish they would not rock the boat or could just go along to get along, which really amounts to adopting the correct and appropriate insanity . . .madness, madness, madness; everywhere Mad Men selling an image for us to buy, and if it buyable, or if it makes us want to own the image then it must be true the dogmas go, I say, would have said he has said, but do not intend to now.

“We do believe in nothing,” he says. “We do think we cannot believe in anything, we have undermined so much of what we have needed to maintain or fight for freedom in a mistaken effort to relieve ourselves what we misunderstood to be unnecessary burdens that the only thing we have left is the Will to Power . . . and the only response can be a savagely reaped blood . . . fuck the motherfuckers as badly if not worse than they are fucking us, and the motherfuckers who are really motherfuckers are fucking us as they fuck everything up for everyone else but themselves, the motherfuckers. I’d fist-fuck Flankstein up the ass to my elbow if I could, open my hand inside his colon, fingering my way to a grip of the inner walls, then pull it inside out through his rectum and anus. Kill the motherfuckers on Wall Street. Kill the motherfuckers on Capital Hill. Kill the motherfuckers in Hollywood, the motherfuckers in Publishing, the big motherfuckers in Broadcasting, in Social Media; yes, kill, kill, and kill again every motherfucker that deserves to die. . . . and there are many who do deserve to die, again, how can we imagine that we do not have the right–the obligation to kill all the motherfuckers robbing us of our freedom and our livelihoods, beating us and our children down, down, yeah though I walk through the valley of Gehenna . . . We know that this is not me saying what is being said herein. Fictional essays are just that, fiction–but even non-fiction essays are things made, as is everything that is fiction, but the fiction of a revolutionary cause with a revolutionary posture and revolutionary anger and hostility and violence is not to be taken literally except of course it will be by the impossibly stupid who now number too many of the low level authority of our society, too many who pretend to be defenders of liberty and democracy,” he said.

VI

i

A Voice

Gehenna; the Valley of Fire; Gehenna, the Valley of Moloch; Moloch’s abode, abiding Moloch, Moloch’s table, Moloch’s satiation, Moloch’s hunger for our children . . . Wall Street is in the Valley of Gehenna, every CEO an incarnation of Moloch.

Moloch, the destroyer of our lives, He who devours our loves, our freedom, our minds; Moloch, the destroyer of worlds, the consumer of souls.

Moloch needs our fear as much as our children, Moloch and Mammon, Mammon and Moloch, alliance and allied, allies against us. Mammon is incarnate on Wall Street. Moloch, Moloch, Moloch incarnate at Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs an animation of Moloch, animation, re-animation, aspect manifest

ii.

I hired a carpenter to build me a guillotine, a purely functioning guillotine.

I want to put it out on the front lawn next Bastille Day.

I will have a number of effigies whose fake heads I will chop off while video taping the event.

I plan to have extras in French 18th century dress cheering the heads coming off.

I might work out fake blood.

I can use it to chop my watermelons.

I plan to have a big bar-be-cue.

I am not going to have goons round up North African Muslims to kill on Bastille Day; my head and my heart tell me no, although my bowels tell me yes, yes, yes. Even I know that not every Muslim is with the fanatics, although I do suspect that there are many, many, many more everyday common ordinary average family raising Muslims who nodded their heads with smiles and said good after Omar shot up that gay club in Florida, but then there were enough fundamentalist Christian Americans who saw God working in mysterious ways through Omar, the fucking mental cases that both of them are, which is not to put me in the same category with Trump when he says, Both sides, both sides . . . !