by David Mamet
His Epitaph
Found in a trunk in Herts*
He was a true psychotic, and an artist only by courtesy.
The epitaph is widely (universally) known. But how its meaning has been traduced by its truncation! Let us, in the always informative, if, sometimes, painful, process, examine the original:
He was a true psychotic, and an artist only by courtesy – has anybody seen his watercolors???1
Flight from Egypt
From: Wars of th’ Lord1
“The parameters,” he said, “the parameters, if I may, and who would refuse me?” Here he fairly glared. His glance taking in the entire room, not one of the occupants of which would have opposed his slightest wish, let alone an asseveration so obviously of the premier importance to him.
“The parameters,” he said, “of Ritual Murder.”
Here he tugged at his lapel, and cleared his throat, the two gestures having become so associated in the mind of his congregation that many, upon reflection, might have perceived that they understood their relationship to be one of cause and effect; and those better acquainted with the psychologic processes might well have reflected that, after a lifetime, the once accidental, then habitual, juxtaposition may have – indeed must have – become inevitable (and those further interested and versed in the intricacies of the physically pathologic may have wondered, given the symptom, if its subsequent exhibition may not have, in fine, brought about the somatic reality). (But must not each have regarded, and, so, understood the gesture from his own individual bias and perspective? The tailor, for example, musing on the torque transmitted to the cloth, the facing, binding, interfacing, etc., of the constituent layers of the lapels; the presser, if such there were in the room, on the havoc played with their, one would have to allow, most elegant roll, etc.)
“For the Book,” he said, “is nothing less – though it is, of course, much more – than the catalogue in esse, and the opposition to, in posse, that ritual murder, that obeisance finally, that fratricide to which I devote our brief hour together this fine Sabbath morning. For I ask you to consider the tale of the Flight from Egypt. Let us take the elements: the children thrown into the river, the Angel of Death descending upon the Egyptian firstborn, the flight of the Jews, their passage through the sea, and their subsequent situation, alone and afraid, in the wilderness.
“Now let us, as it were, write these ‘headlines,’ or ‘headings,’ each upon a card, and toss them in a hat.”
Each member of the congregation visualized, as he spoke, his own hat. And, as the words left him, he realized that they did, and that such might, nay, could, nay, with the blessing would offer a most promising topic for a future sermon.
He saw or rather felt the sermon take form, whole, in his mind’s eye – this one understanding “hat” to mean the daily trilby, bowler, Homburg; that woman, the veiled feathered confectionnerie of fashion, the children free to understand it as the mood and perceptive capacity fitted it: a sailor hat, perhaps, a motorman’s hat, the soldier’s helmet; and the practitioners, of course, of these professions, understanding it as use had habituated them – each hearing the term as who could say “random” history – if such there were – had fitted him. And if such were true, as each of them knew it true, of a simple hat, how much more true of the Name of God?
The faint, not inattentive, and not yet impatient, but inquisitive, polite, one might say, responsive murmur, or, better, rustle of the congregation brought him back to his text.
“– in a hat,” he said.
“And then, were we to pick them out, and spread them on a table, might we not understand their possible reordering thus:
“That they sacrificed children, that they fled from, or abandoned the practice of Infant Sacrifice; that, is passing through the sea they were, we might say, “reborn,” but reborn, reborn or reconstituted with this difference: that they, having abjured ritual murder, ritual child sacrifice, having abandoned what they must have understood – for is it not? – the ultimate propitiation, they were alone and afraid in what seemed to them a desolate land. A land …”
An opera hat! he thought. An opera hat, for it is deep, and its lining is silk, so that the cards would not adhere to it! And you can lay its crown flat, flat upon the table; and there may be myriad additional reasons, but these will suffice. That is the best hat!
Mars
Mars
Source: Book Two1
How the mind fights shy of the unexplained.
However much we must have novelty we welcome it only in its assigned place of “entertainment?” To encounter it outside that precinct induces, does it not, terror.
Were one to view the night sky, starry, in the absence of the city haze, a night sky full of stars, as in the desert or the American High Plains – to see such a sky, I say, after long years of an urban life, a life empty of the Natural, might, would one not exclaim at the novelty of it?
Picture, however, a young child put to bed in his or her accustomed room, who woke, in the midst of the night, to observe, above the bed, not the room’s ceiling, but, rather, that vast, whirling void, the infinite night sky.
What might that child not feel, whose mind had exhausted any possibility of encompassing this novel phenomenon?
We might, of course, picture the disordered child turning, now this way, now that, and its movements drawing the attention of the parent or adult cradling it in his arms, and the adult responding, “Hush, now, it’s all right. We’re only going on a sleighride to Grandmother’s house,” and the child sinking, once again, into a peaceful sleep.
And, as it sank down to sleep, might it not cast its gaze, once again skyward, to the spattered “dome,” capable of being viewed, once again, in tranquility, and appreciated as “the most novel of views.” But what, you might ask, if the adult speaking, however, were not the child’s parent, guardian, or care–giver? What if its voice were strange? What then, with the terror exacerbated – not the effect of an unexpected view of the stars, but of the certain knowledge one was being kidnapped?
Might the child, might the child, not, then, long for that other thing – that other (now viewed with nostalgia) terror-of-the-unexpected, brought about by a view of the essentially benign night sky?
Might the child, then, not profoundly (if unconsciously) wish to return to that previous “terror”?
(What an exercise in wish fulfilment the desire to “choose” one’s phantasm must be! To one not caught in the nightmare of unspecified anxiety it must seem the most charming and interesting of psychologic mechanics. To one, however, being kidnapped, it would, on the contrary, be the least charming of endeavors – bemusement at the instant and autonomic formation of a psychosis to explain that which, absent the explanation, must spell psychic death.)
Or, again, let us suppose the presence by the child’s side of the parent, but the parent dead, the sleigh speeding pilotless, and the infernal howling of wolves – or, again, the night sky, but this sky turning, as the parent and the child fell to earth in an aeroplane, its engine dead, and the wind whistling a protest scream, uttered on behalf of the falling.
But the psychosis, in these last moments of life, might be, might it not, a blessing – which of us can say? – for we cannot enter another’s state; however much we pride ourselves upon our “empathy,” the end of the day shows it to have been just another case of deluded self-love.
We know nothing of our fellows. We live and we die selfish, blind oafs, driven by hunger, fear and cold, the need to procreate, and so forth, like the other animals – but driven, also, by a counter-instinct: by the urge to utilize intelligence.
To manipulate or “control” the world around us.
Or, say, the night sky from a capsule falling through space, and the child doomed to live, and to live only, within its bounds? What greater autism? And say there was a triumph, a prodigy of will, of character, of intellect, of spirit, by which the child grew and prospered in its ethical and moral essence. To wha
t end, finally, if all were not known “in the mind of God”?
For we were informed that everything would pass, that that dictum itself would pass from our consciousness – the memory of man – that man would pass, intelligence would pass, history would pass, the world, the universe, the totality of whatever unity within or without our capacity to name or compass it would pass. And what would remain?
No, the mind is not able to grasp it – a world-without-end – that very specter terrifying the child gazing at the sky; and, perhaps, human nature, human consciousness itself naught but a psychic scar, wrought on the brain by an electric impulse – the first, the accidental momentary, the sole vision of that sky – searing the mind, engaged, therever after, in its own unfortunate proprietary drama?
What would we know had the book not been lost?
Would we know “more” than we know now?
What do we know now?
Chip
“Who Could Describe That Scene” from What Is Knowledge?, or The Moving Picture Boys on Mars
The Red Planet, fourth from the Sun, that blob of flaming gas (but how we need it, how we require its heat, its light, its inspiration …)
Think of a traveler in the wood. Perhaps he’s been out at night, perhaps he’s been pursued by a bear, perhaps he’s lost his way in a snowstorm, or he walked out to check on the car or something and he lost his way and he’s been out all night. Maybe he was scared. Maybe he was lonely. He must of been cold.* And, maybe those phantoms of savage times (never far from our mind), those phantasms, those fantods, those bugaboos so progenitive of all descriptions of scholastic debate, e.g.: “Bugbears: are they racial memories, or suppressed thoughts?”; “What are we frightened of?”; “Would we be better off without our mind?”, et cetera. Any case, there is a lot of garbage floating around in there, and it doesn’t take much to set it free.
Some think that the mechanism is not “terror of the dark,” “terror of loneliness,” at all, but rather just deprivation of customary sensory input, which, in itself, is frightening, and seeks codification in that “woooo woooo” shit; or else, when that† is gone, the stuff we’re sitting on all of the time “comes out of the woodwork.”
But I don’t know.
Because most times there’s nothing terrifying in the dark.
It’s just the closet door askew, or some loud “thump.”
But in the woods, it is another story.
So mused the “chief” of all the Moving Picture Boys, “Chip.”
“What cha thinking of, Chip?” Scooter said.
“Oh, nothing,” Chip replied.
Reassured, Scooter leant back once again against the log and stared into the fire, the orange sparks flying up to die in the night.
“Like angels,” he thought.
“Or like devils, shooting up from Hell.”
Chip settled himself down against a tree. He took the worn paperback from the thigh* pocket of his shorts, and it fell open at this spot:
“Two,” or, say, not two, but some number greater than one, and less than any multiple but two.
But his eye was drawn not to this gibberish, but down the page, to the line drawing below.
“Why,” he thought, “it is of course and obviously a vase, but when you stare at it, it resolves into two profiles, vis-à-vis. How full the world is!”
But when he looked up Scooter was gone.
What was that thrashing in the underbrush?
What was that cry?
What was the Purpose of Life?
The book dropped from his hands as he stood.
“The Purpose of Life …” he thought. “The Purpose of Life … The Purpose of Life …”
A strange happy light grew in his eyes as the thought formed and sought utterance in speech.
“The Purpose of Life is …”
The words were cut off by the embrace of the bear, squeezing Chip’s chest until it cracked like a bad walnut.
The fire burnt on. The bodies were dragged away. The book lay open where it fell. There was no one to read, but had there been they would have seen this: the sub-chapter heading:
Suicide of Greind
and the notation, in a young, masculine hand,
“Now we’re getting somewhere!!!”
Mars
On the other hand, perhaps it had not come from Mars.
Perhaps it had not come from anywhere.
Perhaps the Toll Hound danced for a completely different reason.
Perhaps he did not dance at all.1
They asked of Jacob Cohen, “What was it before you changed it?”, and, in later life, he answered, “It was different.”2
Which it would have been had he not changed it at all.
And, on the other hand, perhaps it had come from Mars.3
How would one know – the craft of record-keeping having disintegrated to this pretty pass …?
But, to recur to the principal proposition, or, to “take a running start:”4
It was said that it was said that it must be said (or stated): all things are the case which are the case.
Under which cleansing dictum we must place “Two trains are leaving Chicago,” not as the first term of a hypothesis structured as an equation, but rather as an immutable statement of fact.
O happy day, O happy universe to engender that poorest of devoirs: philosophy.
Which is to say it could have been Mars, and perhaps it was not; but the uncertainty of that issue may (may it not?) find counterbalance in the observation that it is true one of these things is true.
Thus, not unlike the focusing mechanic of a telescope, thus does philosophy, now advancing, now distancing us from a proposition, permit us that perfect, happy remove offering us peace.
O Tempura. O Morays.
Family Life on Mars
Excerpted from Learn-to-Read, “©”1 “Learn-to-Read” Publication, 2122
“Florrie, Max, Bunny …? Bound over here,” said Mother merrily, as she prepared their noonday snack.
“Oh John, oh John,” she said.
“John,” she said, in mock severity. “No! Not in front of the children …”
But the dog paid no heed, and the insistent throbbing, throbbing, throbbing of its …2
Inkblots, and What Can Be Made of Them
Excerpted from Joyce Harris-Sloane, Heroes for Sale, or The Films of Richard Barthelmess (Winchester Press, 1961); reprinted in The Wykemist, fall 20261
What can be made of inkblots?
Are they a message from the unconscious?
Are they a message from the ink?
Has too much been made of the capacity of our (the human) mind to organize the Random into Meaning? If so, whose fault is that?
And does this organization, this “new-as-organized” thing, not further complicate the problem, producing yet another bit of information* to be assimilated – as if, for all the world, a Bachelor’s dissertation on “The Antecedents of the Post-Modern Novel”† were of as much worth as the Grand Canyon, or as provocative as the human capacity for mischief. No, perhaps the Japs have got it right, and the ultimate, nay, the only wisdom is “to refrain.” For what would it profit him, to’ve arrived at an “understanding” of the blot of ink (which understanding, after all, would have had to be, finally, subject to his understanding)?
And yet he stared at the page.
“Harold,” the voice said. “Harold.”
He raised his head.
“Are you coming down?”
He looked out of the window.
“Are you coming down, I said!”
He saw the soldiers massing. “For the last time?” he wondered.
“No,” he thought. “They’re going home. The whistle is that of the train returning to its peacetime life. And now the men are standing, this last time, under the martial discipline, before being dispersed into world without war.”
He thought of the President at the (elm? black oak? marquetry?) long table at Versailles, of his gran
d vision of a World at Peace, of a community, a “league” of nations, allied not against but for, yes, to the contrary, for something.
For a proposition: that human concerns, one and all, could be addressed with humanity.
“Come down and eat, you sonofabitch,” the woman screamed. “Or it’s going out. I’m going to throw it out. DO YOU THINK I’M FOOLING? IS THAT THE THING? DO YOU THINK I’M KIDDING WITH YOU, AND THAT ALL I’VE GOT TO DO WITH MY DAY IS BEHAVE FOR YOUR AMUSEMENT? DO YOU THINK I FIND IT FUNNY TO SLAVE LIKE A FIELDHAND IN THIS FUCKING KITCHEN ALL DAY LONG, SO’S YOU CAN FLOP DOWN, ANY TIME YOU CHOOSE, LIKE A KING, ANY TIME YOU CHOOSE, LIKE SOME ORIENTAL POTENTATE, TO ‘GRACE’ ME WITH YOUR PRESENCE? YOU FAT SLOB. YOU SLUG. YOU WITLESS SLUG. I OUGHT TO’VE TOOK THE GASPIPE RATHER THAN OF HAD YOU. I COULD HAVE MADE SOMETHING OF MY LIFE. DO YOU KNOW THAT? DO YOU EVER THINK OF ME AT ALL? (THERE’S A JOKE), I’M TALKING TO YOU …”
“And yet,” he read, his eyes, once again, lowered to the page, “we must of course consider the viscosity, the percentage of the undiluted solids in the ink, the ‘nap,’ or ‘texture’ of the paper …”
“Yes,” he thought. “We must remember in our calculations that, were any in the slightest different, the resulting ‘blot’ would differ. Yes. Yes, yes,” he reasoned. “Yes. Yes. Yes …”
“HAROLD, YOU CUNT, YOU PIG, YOU SACK OF SHIT,” the woman screamed.
“… but, of course, as Rorschach, as Pitou, as Bennigsen says, yes, of course, the blot must be accepted, ‘per se’; of course, but …”
“GET YOUR ASS DOWN HERE,” she screamed.
He heard the sound of the drum in the freight yard.
“Yes, of course,” he thought. “Like the molecules in ink, the drum ‘marshals’ the people now into an army, now into a mob. And they can be convened as a ‘team,’ as, as … convened, and dispersed, like atoms, like, like molecules, like …” He looked at the ink in the pot metal inkwell.