MY BOOK
the book that bears witness to being a human being in this era—a breathtaking success!!!
the highest-sales-storming, best-seller-list-peak-surpassing sensation!!!
A BOOK WRITTEN BY THE CONSCIENCE
OF OUR RACE!!!
FANFARE!!!
and the smashing of cymbals sends a powdering of ten thousand white doves like confetti into the air—
and rolling and foaming out of the seething of the boundless crowd emerges the mighty back of the whale
EXCITEMENT
and sends after the swarming of the doves the skyward fountain of
JUBILATION
the upward proliferating atomic mushroom which tears out its stem together with the root fibers of uptossed
caps coifs papakhas
hats shakos
bonnets képis
hoods
berets
while the whale EXCITEMENT powerfully rolls over on the ball bearings of its back, into the deep again
so that the whirlpool crater of its suction
wreathes into
APPLAUSE
in a swelling surge that sends the phonometer into the high numbers way over the red borderline of frequencies audible to the human ear and the crowd gapes open in the wedge-blare of trumpets
!!!CLEAR THE WAY!!!
for
in the surging of red flags
it comes zooming along,
the troika
of the
ZEITGEIST
drawn by the three stallions
ALBERT EINSTEIN
SIGMUND FREUD
and
KARL MARX
!!!THREE GERMANS!!!
who have carried the mind of the West beyond the Gobi Desert all the way to the Middle Kingdom—
The children’s choirs sing:
Lao-tse
Mao-tse
sock them in the snout-tse
smash them in their kissers free
give it to them one two three!
!!!THREE GERMAN JEWS!!!
so that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion may be realized by the chosen people within the chosen people
The Kyffhäuser a cappella chorus sings:
Yankee doodle
Flirty Gerty
sighing for a Jewish noodle
Gerty is a pastor’s daughter,
never does the things she oughter.
and over all their silver-haired evangelist heads (Einstein silver above; Freud below; Marx all around), they wield a banner saying
ARISTIDES
—an evening star in the firmament of the waning novel—
!!! !!! !!! !!! !!!
(in the microphone, the breathless voice of the blurb writer: “. . . with his brilliant style, which reflects reality in a thousand facets, a style oscillating between crystalline hardness and rubbery flexibility, ironical, often even parodistic, then again as simple as biblical prose, yet utterly precise, always superbly precise, this panchaotic synoptist grasps the panorama of the present day as Bismarck once grabbed his king by the scabbard, virtually clutching, as it were, the reader’s sense of human responsibility by the moral balls . . .”)
and
SILENCE
so that you can hear a pin drop: the one with which the President of the Republic of VIELLE FRANCE is about to stick the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor on the brilliant publisher’s breast (the pin has slipped against the hard-currency-filled wallet in the pocket of his philistine lounge suit: M. Malraux hands him another)—
while the honorary members of the Comédie Française playing the roles of the latest Nobel Prize laureates (Ghana, Lapland, Monaco, San Salvador, Central Vietnam, Honduras, German Democratic Republic, Holland, Tibet, Indonesia, Panama, Switzerland) spray a triple salvo of ink with their Parker fountain pens
in honor of the first
STATELESS MAN
ever to be accepted into the Olympus of moralistically vitaminrich, socially redeeming, full-calorie literature (whispering in the audience: “Mais qu’est-ce-que c’est qu’un apatride?”—“Quoi? Tu connais pas ta mythologie? Ce que tu peux être con! Ce sont eux qui bouffent leurs enfants. Tu n’en as pas entendu parler?”)
but then
a bard’s mane swings:
SIR JOHN LENNON
of the
BEATLES
and the eardrum-splitting whistling of bats originates with the sulfur-yellow hell of epoch-making puberty—
and while it is filled with thrills from the first zap of an electric guitar
the white elephant comes swaying along on pneumatically pounding rubber soles
his name is
BALLYHOO
and the question mark of his trunk carries a board on which is written:
QUO VADIS WESTERN WORLD?
and he rolls along in the guitar’s sweet vibes (which are followed by the shrill voices of a hundred thousand bats) and he is fantastically beautiful:
In each of his rubber joints, stamped into his bark-skin-like thumb prints of titan gangsters, ten times a hundred Negro boxers roll their shoulders;
in each of his steps, shuffling with the sole-pressure of ten times a thousand atmospheres, ten thousand Puerto Rican boogie-woogie dancers swing their chicks so hard that they petrify into body-halos like the divine whores of Angkor Wat;
in the swaying of his fullness, directed by the Cuban cigars of five times fifty-five Wall Street tycoons, the opulent hips of ten times a thousand batter-battened Aunt Jemimas—
we now all sing:
bigbig is BALLYHOO and beautiful:
his toenails, elegantly clipped like the gateway arches of Kairoan and as red as the flesh of the Persian Revlon Melon, are the shields behind which thousands of wishful fantasies feel safe; his forehead, wisdom-buckling up to the bare skull, like that of Socrates, but flat, narrow, and domineering beneath it, like a Florentine coat of arms, is, like the southern firmament, strewn with myriads of pearls of the HONDA breed; from the meager wreath of his white eyelashes, TWIGGY’S peacock eyes peer, gold dust–powdered; of his mighty tusks (their ivory is milky like DAUM glass, they are curved into lunar sickles like the papyrus barks in which the pharaohs had themselves rowed through the indigo velvet of nights in the Valley of the Nile), the left one is encrusted with amaranths and is known as LIBERTY, the right one inlaid with an ivy tangle of green copper and known as TIFFANY: they carry us through the fragrances of NEWMOWNHAY; the gentle palm-frond fanning of his ears blows ten times ten million posters into the pagoda of the sails of the fully rigged ship VOGUE; on his back, as tremendous as the snowy flanks of the Himalayas, tassled like a cardinal’s hat in the red braid of the fashion fiber COCO CHANEL, sways the all-purpose object
PANDORA
(a female torso in segments made of LALIQUE that can contract telescopically and may be used as a dresser, a dummy, or an anima) and around him the mannequins stand like coral branches from whose twigs chains hang like spider webs in which the gold beetles of the jewels are caught; dreamy, the tenches of the most delicate lingerie swim back and forth among them; like frost, like mold, elegant furs are draped over them; in the breathing of beauty sleep, their shampooed hair floods in slow-motion rhythm . . .
and BALLYHOO hurls the sign that says:
QUO VADIS WESTERN WORLD?
far behind himself into the ecstatically yelling mob (whoever catches it can soon wed the giant SUCCESS) and stretches his trunk out into a greeting, blessing, trailblazing erection
and lifts it steep and shoots out from the gigantic exhaust pipe, high into the sky (where even the lightning rod of the Empire State Building no longer scrapes them), the stream of
PAPER
with which ten thousand breathlessly chaff-chopping rotary presses incessantly feed him:
shoots their roaring torrent all the way up to the cirrus cloudlets sailing in the icy wind of the stratosphere, so as to fan out featherily with them
over the continents
and descend like manna over Manhattan
and Adelaide, Athara, and Agrigento
and Bissau, Berne, and Basra
and Chuch’i, Charleroi, and Coventry
and Delhi, Diredawa, and Dar es Salaam
and Elk Point, Etumba, and Elberfeld
and Florence, Fukushima, and Fort Knox
and Gombe, Galveston, and Georgetown
and Hebron, Hoboken, and Hyderabad
and Inverness, Isalmi, and Izmir
and Jawhar, Jiggalong, and Jurf ed Deraswish
and Korsör, Kimberley, and Keflavik
and London, Linz, and Little Rock
and Madras, Montevideo, and Mandalay
and Natal, Nashville, and New Orleans
and Oklahoma, Olasvik, and Oallam
and Penang, Pittsburgh, and Pucallpa
and Quebec and there aren’t many more Q’s
and Reggane, and Rome, and Riobamba
and Surabaya, Salem, Sfax, St. Pölten, and St. Louis,
Tampico, Tocca, and Tamalameque
Ulm, Udine, and Ullapool,
Vancouver, Västmanland, and Viroflay,
Waipio, Westchester, and Winnipeg,
Xanthi, Xique-Xique, Xaparais
Ypern, which just about does it,
and Zofingen, Zenit, and Zaragoza—
—read it today in the Times Literary Supplement, the sensational computer prediction of the unique success of the book!!!!
The machine, data-fed by a committee of market researchers under the supervision of Mary McCarthy, draws the ascending curve of the dizzying edition-record-breaker
seventy-seven times at the top of the Book-of-the-Month Club;
the stage version running on Broadway for two years; eleven months at London’s Aldwych Theatre; seventeen full weeks at the Comédie Française; Felsenstein is planning a production in East Berlin;
the TV version beamed by satellite Xenia 29 from all stations in the Western hemisphere; presumably crowned by a
MAMMOTH MOVIE
A Wohlfahrt Production
of
INTERCOSMIC ART FILMS
absolutely superstar cast:
Marlene Dietrich at the soda fountain;
Frank Sinatra as caddie;
Richard Burton and Liz Taylor as Philemon and Baucis;
in all other parts:
Peter Sellers
The net receipts of the world premiere, with the presence of Princess Margaret, Lord Snowdon, Igor Stravinsky, and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, will go to charity (despite the thirty-six-million-dollar budget of the film);
a dance performed by the Mongoloid Ballet of the United Insane Asylums of New Jersey;
plus, as already agreed, the publisher has announced a
Comic Strip Version
even for the further diffusion of this monumental intellectual work, which is not easily accessible to people of all educational backgrounds (to be syndicated in more than one hundred and seventy-six leading dailies in fifty-eight countries simultaneously)—
!!!ATTENTION!!!
fan clubs, autograph collectors, organizers of culture conventions, cocktail-party hostesses, advertising specialists!!!
As is well known, the author, who lives in extreme isolation on his mountain farm near Gstaad (and is now on safari in East Africa), avoids any kind of publicity; requests for social events, television appearances, round-table discussions, and commercials are to be directed to the publisher. For information on background and foreground, physical statistics, skull formation, palm lines, sexual habits and proclivities, horoscope, hobbies, etc., please consult the life story penned by Bill Pepper with the personal cooperation of the author:
The Working Beast
(airtight information on all the links between biography and fiction!! The complete key to the characters, places, episodes!!! Also see the in-depth psychological study by Dr. Hertzog!!! As well as the monograph put out by the same publisher: Aristides par lui-même! A Portrait in His Own Words, profusely illustrated with previously unpublished material, including rare photographs of the author with Louis Armstrong, Gina Lollobrigida, Dr. Barnard of the Groote Schur Hospital, Moshe Dayan, and many others. In paperback for only five ninety-five!!!)—
•
but until then, we’ll live on advances, comrade! Both financially and morally (as if this weren’t the same thing for Christa and associates). We are living toward a promise—
living as sheer abstractions: anticipating a future that hovers before us like the proverbial carrot before the donkey’s mouth—
and thus the procession winds up without much ado. Ferme le pot de confiture, as Gaia would say; the audience disperses—
only you and I, brother Life-Dreamer, jog along undaunted behind ourselves: always on the same gray mount of a present that will be no different tomorrow from today; always a new day in which we await ourselves the next day; always a new loan of twenty-four hours on a property that may contain only twenty-three—
hours that we let wane by serving the piglets, pouring swill into their troughs and then consuming what they leave over for us; hours of frittering and, of course, also hours of desperate wishful thinking: fallen angels from imagination’s realm—
which make the mark of Cain on our foreheads light up when the urgent pleading appears in our eyes:
You who are entangled in the chaos of our life and fear being throttled in it—be patient for just a bit longer: we are not lying when we say:
I have only to doff my gray coat in order to be king.
And you who think you have seen through our con, you who hate us, despise us, want to shrug us off, ignore us contemptuously—just wait:
The day will come!
And you who love us—oh, do not torture us. The day will come, it will come for sure, it may come tomorrow—
End of transmission.
•
I drove very fast. It was a precarious morning, and my mood was as fragile as the glass-spun light in which autumn lavishly wastes its colors: postdiluvial, a rainbow across gurgling water. I floated above it, kept my sensoria under a steady, gentle pressure like that of my sole on the gas pedal, the quivering of the speedometer needle, and the dials of the tachometer and the oil gauge.
Like these, my sensoria were, of course, ready to drop to zero as soon as I let up. I had to keep them at full speed, even if it became dangerous. Life is just a risky business; I don’t cudgel my brain about what could happen if I’m doing a hundred ten and a tire bursts or a piston jams because of some worn-out valve in the bowels of my car. The results wouldn’t exactly be edifying, but that’s life, things like that happen, not all miracles have ceased . . .
•
Incidentally, that was an amusing notion. It could really happen—and what if it did? What if my car flew from the road at this speed, caroming back and forth like a billiard ball between the boulevard trees, and eventually boring into the plowland beyond? Wouldn’t that be a godsend for my son? He could turn me into his myth (which, if I went on living, he could not, presumably, do: “My father died before he could finish his work”—that sounds nice when the father is twenty-four, less nice when he’s seventy; forty-nine is the outer limit anyway) . . . In any case, the idea was pleasurable because of its novel-like dramatics. I saw the ruins of my vehicle, a wheel ripped from its axle, springing far into the field, reeling and fluttering around its tire like a decelerating top. The metal casing was squooshed up like a discarded piece of tinfoil (candy bar wrapper), the engine block had been shoved in, blood was oozing underneath into the peacock-blue, iridescent oil . . . perhaps my hand was dangling slackly from the half-shredded door, with the frame bent in like an hourglass (a jewel from Gaia’s stories about the youth of her mother, the alleged Princess Jahovary: the hand she had to suspend in morbid grace over the balustrade of the box when she was taken to the opera as a girl; her governess whispering to her, “Gabrielle, n’oubliez pas la main morte!�
�� and the totally different meaning of la mano morta in Italian: a lecherous paw in a crowd, wedging, as though accidentally, between a girl’s thighs—fine: it boiled down to the same thing).
At any rate, what I imagined could actually occur a few miles down the road. Would probably occur someday, if I kept driving through the countryside in my foolish fashion. It was even bound to come; I have known my death for a long time—now I suddenly felt it very close.
I am not timorous, which is why I drove no slower than before—in fact, even faster, more daringly, passing other cars more heedlessly, taking curves more ruthlessly—but my throat did tighten:
if I died (not necessarily today or tomorrow or the day after but perhaps in a couple of weeks, in six months, in a year), then I would be dead without having written my book—and that seemed like eternal damnation to me—
All at once, I knew what dying meant. This was no ineluctable biological phenomenon, no final decay of an organism, its dissolution and transformation into other kinds of matter; this was the death of my soul:
my book would never exist; it would be snuffed out with me, as though it had never existed (which indeed in an absurd way might be true: it didn’t in fact exist yet, of course, at least not in reality, but still actually did within me—but it would with my death lose even this actuality, not to mention its factual reality)—
And that would be as though I—my SELF—had never existed.
The evidence that I had ever been alive would forever be hidden in a dream.
•
Incidentally it was in my Hamburg days that I began dreaming the dream of my murder—in the first few years of my marriage to Christa at least, though it seems to me it started when I first started thinking about my book. Occasionally, the dream varied in structure. Sometimes, I had already killed the old witch, was about to bury her, and was trembling with fear at being caught; drenched with sweat, I was drudging away at forcing her unexpectedly bulky old-crone bones, and the tatters and tangle of poor woman’s clothing, misbegotten flesh, brains, and blood-smeared hair, into the narrow pit I had dug with the shovel—I know they’re on my trail, they’re about to look for me here, they’re already coming down the steps of the basement, whence I can no longer escape . . . Or else I had already buried the corpse; I was no longer in the basement but knew they were finding it there; she has moldered upward to bear witness against me, her carcass will expose me as her murderer—that’s what she wanted, she wanted me to murder her, she descended to the basement with me wittingly, intentionally, in order to become one with my murder, instantly, at the first stroke (with which I had by no means wanted to kill her) . . .
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