Wilson

by David Mamet

  Reader, what is Time? Or, to solicit a, perhaps, less lengthy answer, may not our (so human) predilection for “cause and effect” bar us from a, if not deeper, at least different, perception?

  Could it not be that “reason;’ in the case, is (as has been suggested before)2 “the enemy of truth,” and that the most fell and unfortunate opponent of Free Thought is neither Government nor Religion, but, yes, but, the Calendar?

  Could it not be, dear Reader, that we labor neath a monstrous, a delimiting temporal prejudice?

  I will draw your attention to the Poem’s final line, traditionally rendered:

  Upon the deepest revelation of them all …

  A prior time made much of the acrostic (the first letters of the last stanza, of course, read “TOLLHOU”). And the neo-Formalists3 found comfort in conflating this, a (seeming) adumbrative reference to the Toll Hound, with that acrostic of the first stanza (DFSS, the first line of “code” written in Mrs. Wilson’s urine).

  They* devoted much time, and their followers have dedicated much shelf space, to the search for “the Last Two Letters” (i.e., those two final lines, that cadenza, which would supply the “ND”, and round out the anagram to its complete “TOLL HOUND.”

  They would draw your attention to the seventeenth line:

  … the buried bone

  as further “proof” of the poem’s essential caninity, and, thus, its authorship by Bootsie.4

  While the Cohanim, of course, animadverted upon the Formalists’ error, identifying the Wandering Jew as Jacob Cohen (himself, of course, in “the vermilion sway of Mars”).

  The Sensualists have put forward their thesis that the poem is either a construction of or a paean to their ilk, alleging “those controlled by Lust alone” must and can only be Chet and Donna, and that the Formalists were “a bunch of sesquipedalian motherfuckers.”5

  Their election of Ginger6 upon such, to be generous, scant evidence, is a welcome tot of levity in this oft-times dry conversation.

  And those of semantic–philologic bent have occupied themselves with the (necessary) rhyme (s) for “burnt,” in what would be the poem’s last two (missing) lines – the “ND” lines.

  Reader, I meditated on the poem (which of us has not?) one winter afternoon.

  I’d spent the morning in a trip to the coiffeur, and it had left my spirits unaccountably sad.

  Returning to my garret, while I “pondered weak and weary,”7 while the tea brewed, while the radiator hissed, while the shade snapped and fluttered in the more than occasional draft through the study windows – while life, in short, went on around me – I occupied myself, I say, in thought, say, or in reverie or meditation, on “Those Times,” the times of the Riots, and on the “Perturbation of the Great,” the “burden of the few,” et cetera – my thoughts ranging now to the micro, now to the larger levels of abstraction: who could have writ the poem? What did it “mean”? What were the missing lines?

  And, as I sat, I must have shook my head, for I saw several small hairs fall to the page.8

  One of these hairs, I saw, fell on the line: “Upon the deepest revelation of them all …” It fell between the “e” and the “m.” And I saw that the last two words could be rendered “the Mall”

  Can you conceive my beating heart, my flushed countenance, as I stared at that page?

  How can the o’erfamiliar be transmuted – flax into gold – into the intuitive, revelatory, in an instant!

  For, were it possible the poem referred to the Mall, the missing lines, then, must refer to its apotheosis.

  For, you see, it is this “missing term”, in retrospect, which must inform the poem. Not the identification, or the (real or imagined) homage to Chet, to Donna, to Ginger, to Bootsie, nor to the Wrangler Himself, no, but to Jane of Trent.

  And I saw, if the “final” line were warped by a compositor’s or proofreader’s error, was it not possible – was it not likely, in fact – that an adjacent line was similarly warped?

  Let us, then, admit that “… what imponderables burnt,” with all and sundry overtures of peace and gratitude to its interpreters, can make sense “only at a stretch?’

  Could it not be that a lax, a sleepy, or unqualified compositor misset the word? Might the line not have been, might it not be more reasonable to understand or to accept it as, “Of what imponderables blent”? Bear with me, Reader, and conceive the sequence –

  Held for the sake of what O’erarching All –

  Of what imponderables blent –

  Upon the deepest revelation of the Mall

  – the last rhyme suggesting itself, ineluctably, dear Reader – and then, if the last rhyme, if the conclusion of the coda, if the tendency of the whole poem, then, is, as it must be, “Jane of Trent”, must it not be that the last, “the deepest revelation of the Mall,” is that of the poem’s authorship, and that the author was Krautz?

  Note

  It is not for us to draw attention to the lacunae – for, if we were to begin, where end? I will only mention two of my favorite:

  1 The “figures carved in stone,” which popular and sustained scholarship, of course, identifies as Chet and Donna.

  2 The failure of the author to pay the slightest attention to “encapsulate.”

  For, if we are not talking about – if the author cannot give fair weight to – the overarching presence of Chet and Donna; if he can ignore the – one could not call it “coy” – reference to the Capsule, then what the hell are we talking about here?9

  The Riots

  The Riots

  For in the cauldron of the times the alloy of the soul was forged [cooked]. TRADITIONAL

  The populace had of course long suspected that all ethnic food was cooked in the one vast kitchen, and then trucked out and doused in that sauce which would identify it as Chinese, or Indonesian, Thai or what-have-you.

  And much had been written – in that special vein beloved of that era, of conspiracy theory – of the indistinguishability, on close inspection, of the Democrat and the Republican view.

  It was the staple of the age, in fact, that all things were alike, that all polarities were unities, that one would be well served to consider every solution as a problem, and every problem as a solution – that things, in short, were unfolding not only as they must, but happily; and that the detached viewer could observe their unfolding with jollity.

  But the wry stoicism of the age was shattered, as we know, by the revelations that October.

  Nothing of the discoveries of the amino-historiographers, neither the secret of Kennedy’s suicide, nor the revelation of Wilson’s sex, had the impact of the discovery that Coke® and Pepsi® were one.

  It is a mistake, I feel, to refer to the “Riots.”

  I think closer examination might reveal three distinct stages, and that each might deserve our study as a discrete whole, and I am indebted, as are we all, to Franz Krautz, and his seminal “Woodrow Wilson: Vice Versa,” for the paradigm, “Denial–Rage–Reaction.”

  I feel, however, the Krautzian Triad militates in favor of a unity which – as is the center of my thesis – may be lacking in that decade known to us as that of the “Cola Riots.”

  I first will take issue with the term per se.

  It is, I feel, a flag of convenience, uniting, finally, arbitrarily, events arguably unconnected (e.g. “Bolivia,” “deutero-Zoroatrianism’ “Muuguu?’)

  And though the Decade of the Riots (in point of fact, of course, fourteen years) will accept the template “D–R–R”, so will the rejected suitor, or the mis-seated diner forced to smoke.

  Is it not, finally, the nature of perception to order any untoward event or series of events into the form D–R–R–A;1 which tendency, if indulged, reduces and would reduce the task of both historian and, arguably, amino-historiographer to that of a mechanic.

  For I, like Krautz, like Aristotle,2 for that matter, advise that, finally, any event may be reduced to thirds and understood according to the formula, Crac
k, Snapple, Pop.3

  I do not claim immunity from the foibles of the enthusiastic, nor from the endemic tunnel vision of the professional; and am well aware of the dictum of George Bernard Shaw that “all professions are conspiracies against the laity”4

  I think the Decade of the Riots falls into stages not only distinct but (pace Professor Krautz) unconnected, or connected only by a common tinge of tragedy. By way of simile I would ask the reader to consider mourners from three different funerals misinformed, and arriving at a funeral home which houses the object of none of their obsequies.

  These people would conjoin and exchange the amenities pertinent to the scene, and would, in time, come to share reminiscences and condolences and, so, to discover, finally, that they held nothing in common save the fact of their grief and the accident of their individual (not “communal”) misapprehension.

  Nor can we, at this remove, conceive the atmosphere of disbelief, chaos, and distrust of authority engendered by the Crash, preceding the Riots by a scant fifty years.

  For, dating the birth of Edison in 1941,5 and the Crash of the Internet in 2021, we have a period of eighty or, in the words of the phone book,6 “four score, thank you for calling” years of the reign of that commodity understood as “information,” we have a scant ninteen years, the “time of the Troubles,” before the Revelation, and the Riots. It is my contention to reverse the commonly understood relation of planet-to-satellite, and suggest that the rage expressed at the Revelation was not displacement from the Crash, but, rather, that the Crash was a warning shock, a mechanic adumbration of the spiritual and psychologic torment of the Revelation.

  For it has been said that the beginning of wisdom is the ability to consider one’s position as a thing separate from one’s best interest.7

  And the evaporation of that which the world came to call its “Information” was, in my view, a “loss-on-paper,” while the Revelation and the suicide of Bart Greind touched a core of disaffection, “as old as the hills.”

  History offers many instances of the “incendiary incident.” It is, in fact, axiomatic that a period of unrest be sparked into conflagration by the intolerable: the French Revolution brought to being by the peasants’ rage at the destruction of the Bastille; World War II by France’s furor at the intrusion of Lindbergh, etc.

  The precepts of Psychic Economy instruct that the affect must be in adjustment to the stimulus.8

  The ravages of the Decade of Riots cannot, in the light of reason, be linked to the demise of the “Information Age;’ which must, on reflection, be seen as nothing more or different than a (granted, large-scale) loss of memory. (One might as well say that a man came home and murdered his dog because he forgot where he moored his car.)

  No, the Riots sprang into being “like Zeus from Leon’s Head.”

  Their cause was cause enough, and even now one wonders if sufficient time has passed for rational assessment.

  Be that as it may.

  The – as the reader has determined – anti-Krautzian bent of this article is neither historical nor amino-historiographic9 but a cry for reason. I will suggest and explore the alternatives to the triadic view in chapter 2.

  Three into Twelve

  Homage to the Triadic1

  While it has been suggested that early skirmishes in the Whole-at-Cost split the Reform movement upon the issue of one – or two – day celebration of Rosh Hashanah, more contemporary and, I must say, to me, more convincing scholarship suggests that the issue of contention was the inclusion of beach-blanket bingo as an Olympic event.2

  An idea so believed of its times as to be wellnigh insuperable, and found again and again in the paradigm of the helper–antagonist, as dwarves, disciples, graves-to-Cairo; and where we find the Krautzian Triad, on publication, scorned or the presentation (truth be told, of course, championship) of a psycho-numerology based upon the number three.

  Much has, of course, been written of the attempts of apologists to expand and/or subdivide the triads. The classic of the genre being, of course, Three into Tvelve by George Krautz3 – of which admissible critical restraint and respect for the father militate against application of the verdict “craven.”

  Stick to your last, the Ancients cautioned. Can we doubt their wisdom? No. The history of Krautz fils has little interest outside the bathetic. For did he not, in his wretched endeavors now to escape, now to explain, his feeling for his father, merely reiterate those – if only those – aspects of the bond he deemed unfortunate?4

  A Close Contemporary Allusion to “The Riots”1

  Once he had sought, as had many before, in the “Unsorted Notes,” and to the selfsame net effect. And once he had devoted himself to – it must be said to have surpassed an “interest,” and, perhaps, even, an “obsession” – an identification with the Fantasist.

  That, too, had passed. But each had formed the “thews and sinews” of his maturing intellectual constitution, and, in all his later works, their influence could be seen.

  Consider the phrase “struck from the flint of his imagination.”2 The very use of the stock phrase, considered as such even during the Time of the Riots,* is and must be considered as a jesting reference to the Fantasist. Its recrudescence3 suggests, again, an (almost) pathologic involvement with the same.

  It has been suggested that Home Again to Pinky can be read as a reverie upon “what might have been” had the Fantasist himself had access to the “Unsorted Notes.” While this is, to this writer’s mind, “a little hard to swallow,” it is the specific application of the Theory of Obsession, and not, at all, its overall supportability qua diagnosis which is here pooh-poohed.

  For, finally, he was obsessed. The very names of his pets4 testify to the fact, as do the names of his retreats.5

  But so what?

  “Each to his own,” as the Wrangler had it, and “Whatever gets you [through] [?] [to] [?] the Night.”

  To return –

  Once he had sought in the “Unsorted Notes.” Once he had “toyed” with the Fantasist. His works proclaim it, and that is the formulation I shall adopt in the second draft. Grace, pls take note. Thank you, P.

  … his works proclaim it. But see if you can include the footnotes, P. Strike out the section on the parking meter problem and put it later in the book. Thanx. P.

  Did I remember to ask you to send flowers to Mrs. Nulty? And put in a reference, if you would, to “Friday night”: thank you. P.

  Do you think I could get these pages by Monday? If it will help, forget about that “other thing” – thanks a lot. P.

  Ramifications of the Joke Code

  One need not, unfortunately, refer to a time even as little remote as that of the Riots to discover inordinate savagery and inhumanity unbounded.

  It is, if not a fashion, at least an accepted convention to compute or graph this or that enormity employing the formula, “Not since the time of the Riots.”1

  The above quotation, long a hobby-horse of the scholars and aficionados of the late Victorian period, cannot, unfortunately, be to a certainty translated to the modern mind. This is, of course, the yoke, burden, and secret shame of History – the degree to which she, even in her pose of jade, harlot, rough-trade, whore, slattern, etc., in which she allows the soupcan of certainty to be inferred, whilst, all the while, guarding her right of retreat to the safer ground of impartial transcriber; the degree, I say (and that degree near totality), that degree, her profession of the same not to the contrary, to which she knows less than one goddamn thing. None the less, we here offer a hint, and abjure, in the offering, any and all claim to its production, assistance in the same, copyright either moral or legal, to any, in short, real or imagined benefit either existing or to exist accruing to the discovery here below.

  Now, how could one do so, avoiding at all removes the possible assessment of “coyness,” which (having lived long enough to’ve lost any residual hint whatever (had it existed) of a belief in the fairy tale of “human goodness”), I must assume, w
ill be hurled at me by an intellectual and critical establishment the application of either adjective to which is a tragic joke?

  BY NAMING THE PERSON WHO MADE THE DISCOVERY, AND TO WHOM ALL CREDIT MUST ACCRUE (see chapter 12).

  The savagery to which I refer is, of course, that directed by the public (both per se, and, “in committee” – if you will – which is to say, as “the consensus of the learned,” which is to say those craven, old, emasculated wretches of all sexes sitting on their duffs in Towers of Ivory both figurative, and, for all I care, actually fashioned from the teeth of elephants, and raining down reactive, misinformed and cowardly opinions on a world which, as it was created by God, might be said to’ve deserved better – that pathologic, cruel, that inexplicable save by reference to the Zoroastrian, mischief: THE DISMISSAL OF THE JOKE CODE AND THE MARGINALIZATION OF ITS PARTISANS ADHERENTS AND INVESTIGATORS.

  Line them up against the wall, I say, and shoot them. For they have done bad, and they know it.

  The Writer’s Mind

  The Writer’s Mind

  For, to know the cry is to know the dog. BOOTSIE

  “U Thant,” he had written, “take a goldfish for walks.”1

  Which notion we see again explored in the margin of the facing page as “You can’t take a goldfish for walks, but you can take a goldfish for one walk. See page 12,” on which page, “U Thant take a goldfish for wogs. Does it begin to break down there?” he muses. And, yet, again, “U Thant take a goldfish to wogs.”

  By which it must appear that, having subdued the flanks, there rests the problem of, as Clausewitz had it, the Schwerpunkt, upon which subject we must quote Alexander the Great.

  He held that an attack upon the fortified center must and will demoralize the opposition, and grant the aggressor spiritual superiority (redeemable as victory-in-arms).