Wilson

by David Mamet

  CAN THIS BE CHANCE?

  And, to those answering in the affirmative, then, what is chance?

  I propose that it is a process, or event beyond your understanding which you, in your ignorance, have enshrined as being incapable but of remaining so.

  Note on “Folderol”6

  Found in the Capsule

  The grand mal / revelation at the telescope / Priedieux dispatched to Louisiana. Why?

  These are the three (major) areas of (academic) investigation in “Folderol.”

  It has always baffled this investigator that the student mind has overlooked completely that area which I, for one, believe would offer, if not an explanation, at least a satisfying avenue of exploration – that of the antiquary.

  For, it has been noted that in that time there were to be found, both in Old and New France, and in the immediate areas of Priedieux perambulation, pieces of furniture which bore his name. I offer it not as a “suggestion,” to those students named above. Merely as an observation.

  Quick Study Guide

  See also: “The Sample Paragraph,” p. 81.

  (The third term is lost.)

  EAST led with a reference disallowed as “literary,” which his opponents, erroneously, interpreted as “signaling,” and responded to, accordingly, as below:

  SOUTH

  Pass.

  WEST

  Pass.

  NORTH

  Pass. (!!!!!)

  Any rational consideration of NORTH’s response must pale, and its proponent retire in awe at the outcome of what could (and, the result aside, can and must) be seen as a monstrous, an inexplicable blunder, if not, as a craven capitulation or surrender, a cheap resignation hoping to escape detection in its guise of thoughtlessness, or inattention.

  Of what, we ask, could Greind have been thinking? And we would not have been alone. Had one been in the audience at the announcement, one would have seen this: first, general irritation, and the approach of several onlookers to the Marker, asking that the obviously erroneous notation of NORTH’s move be corrected; second: incredulity – as the audience conferred with one another in an attempt to obtain that natural explanation which each, then, found was not to come; lastly: rage.

  But while the audience raged, play continued. With the sequelae far too well documented to require inclusion here.

  The question remains: Was EAST signaling? And, if not, what the hell did he think he was doing?1

  This and like inquiry was stilled, of course. In the days following, the Blue team returned to Mars, and the Greens had, in defeat, surrendered their platform.

  It remained for the scholarly community to “pick up the ball and run with it.”2

  Which, indeed, and famously, in the first years following the Riots (R + 6 R + 120), they did.

  But not before the issue had been mooted by the Arts.

  I call the reader’s attention to Greind’s “The New Palio,” composed, we are told, while the dust was still (literally) settling in what had been the streets:

  Yes, and Yes, Again,

  Who rested at The Table,

  Eyes locked in a gaze

  Which spoke of Intelligence

  SO ABRUPT as to Discomfit Wilson.

  “To Wit, To Woo”

  “Pass.” Yes, and “pass” again –

  Ye Ancient Geeks,

  Who fashioned Drama,

  Look down and gape

  At the appearance of

  This Bright, New Thing.

  He goes on to delineate the various inabilities of the Ancient Geeks, to “grasp,” to “digest,” to “render usable” (meaning, we must assume, to “turn into Art”).

  This upset, this event, which (he opines) carries within itself all the aspects of Art, rendering further elaboration pointless.

  This would seem to be a celebration, by Greind, of Art, and, by extension, of the Artist. However, it is quite another thing. In severing the, one would have thought, not only necessary but necessarily casual relationship between Artist and Art, Greind lauds, not the Deity, or Chance, if you will, but the Critic – i.e., that force capable of recognizing “Art” in, we may say, “random,” er, perhaps, better, in that, in a phrase of the day, “untouched by human hands.”

  And in this he begs the issue. If the issue is, as I hold it to be, “signaling.”

  Let us return the cursor “ad initium.”

  Are there doors, some door, Man was not meant to open?

  “No,” thought Ginger, as she laid the book down. “No. Nor woman, too.”

  “What are you reading, Hon?” Chet said, as he came in.

  “Oh, nothing.”

  The Inner Code

  The Inner Code

  Much has, unfortunately, been written about the “Inner Code,” conflating such (should it have existed, which this writer, for one, must deny) with the Joke Code – as if the Joke Code were (as was, as popular opinion held, the “Inner Code”) a cereal-box competition. Granted, yes, the Vedas, Sutras, et cetera ad nauseam, the apocrypha, arcana, and all similar “hid,” “inner,” or “infra-” canons partake or aspire to partake of that merit ascribed to the “lowly,” whence, the philosophically mature have long been wont to opine, comes wisdom. But their very age, their time-in-rank, so to say, as it adds status, weight, or, as the Ancients had it, “believability” to their position, simultaneously attenuates any daim they may possess of being undiscovered, “low,” “poor-in-spirit,” bullshit, and so on.

  Unfortunately,* it is not only religions which attract, inveigle and entrap by their claims to simplicity. We all are attracted to the undiscovered. In it we find that titillation of “something-for-nothing,” whether in real estate, in exploration, science,1 engineering – the attraction of each and all may be reduced to that sympathetic excitation of the quintessential human survival mechanism: the ability to imagine a way of getting out of work. Now, this work-to-be-avoided may be the inspiration for the center-span bridge (an alternative preferable to the wet trudge or long row from one shore to the other), or in a religious Epiphany (“I don’t have to worry any more!”), but all and each please, attract and excite as they employ the core, and irreducible essence, of our human being.

  How this spark has driven and has aided us! Without it we were, long ago, part of the compost on that moldering orb of our birth; it gave us medicine, sport, literature, art, and science. How could we have hoped that it would be an unmixed blessing? And, who, then, are we to carp at the unfortunate but arguably corollary creation of condensed books and the evening news?

  For there was, of course, no “Inner Code.” The suggestion of the same was but a ploy (as has been exhaustively demonstrated elsewhere)2 to market Whippies. And those obtuse enough to’ve “sent their boxtops in,” found out the same.

  They underwent that painful and humiliating revelation. Faced with their error, they had to stand, in light of day, and admit to themselves that their intellect had availed them nothing and they (a) had been “had,” and (b) had no one to blame but themselves.

  Would that the academics had had the courage to “stand the gaff” of a similar self-revelation.

  For it is in this, I believe, that lies the difference between those who wear the cap and gown and human beings.

  The very structure of the advertisement reveals and must reveal it to all but the most inverted as a joke:

  Two trains are leaving Chicago, as young Billy and young Sue arrange their picture puzzle on the small folding table.3

  Where, I ask in exasperation, where in these twenty exhaustively plumbed, studied, deconstructed, reconstructed, perused, parsed, and analyzed words, is it implied, let alone stated, that Billy and Sue are on a train?

  Or that they are in (or have just left) Chicago? Where? Point to it. It’s a joke. The problem is a joke. IT’S A JOKE, PEOPLE!

  It was perpetrated by the folks at Whippies, and there was no answer.

  HOW COULD THERE BE? THEY WERE NOT ON A TRAIN!

  Where is it
written?

  The contest was the construction of an idle or mischievous hour at the advertising agency.

  They. Were. Not. On. A. Train. If they were not, then, is no connection to the Joke Code, and, then, generations of mush, written on the “Inner Code,” are worthless* trash.

  Tesso, the fifteenth-century Japanese swordmaster, admonished his students that there was no inner meaning to the strokes, the point was “just to cut the other guy’s head off.”

  Those occupying themselves in contemplation of the “meaning” of “three petals falling”4 missed the whole point. They were “a bunch of assholes,”5 and had they gotten in an actual dust-up, they, inevitably, must have come up wanting, for they were missing the point.

  Just so those searching for the Inner Code.

  There is no Inner Code.6

  A Note on “The Inner Code”

  The editor’s statement that “this assumption was never investigated” is, of course, nonsense. And we, at our “wise, nay, infallible remove”7 now, of course, know that not only were Billy and Sue on a train, but that the train was, in fact, one of two leaving Chicago; and we are, further, of course, aware not only of the intended destination, but of the actual end of the “other train,” that train known to generations of schoolchildren as “train B”:8 the train which carried Greind.

  It was, ironically, his Tales of the Old Wrangler9 which gave rise to the anti-Gnosticism of the late twenty-first-century Nominalists, whose influence is seen so clearly in the fragment above.

  Taking a calm overview one can understand, and can, perhaps, almost “feel” the anxiety which gave rise to their spiritual and intellectual retrenchments.

  We cannot, however, condone nor excuse their actions.

  Their “sticks and stones both can and shall break their bones”10 has justly earned for its authors both a niche in history and a place in the language.

  From: “Tales of the Old Wrangler”

  Clip clop, clip clop, clip clop.

  How these sounds echo, not only per se, but, rendered through the necessarily traductive operations of language as a not-only-heard, but half-spoken (in what reflection must dismiss as a grossly anthropo-morphistic predisposition) phrase.

  No. No, however they may be (however inaccurately, at the end of the day) reduced and approximated by the alphabet, and, so, capable of being transcribed, and, thus, communicated and repeated, they (the sounds) are not the letters which approximate them; and the letters themselves, retronumically, and our reliance upon them, dilute and destroy our ability to hear the sounds pure, in themselves.

  Clip clop, clip clop went the donkey’s hoofs, and “Whoa, there, Chico!” Chet called out. For he had been roused from his semantic reverie by another sound, a sound which was not rendered into “words,” a sound which he perceived, and upon which he acted, but which was of a nature so pressing, so exigent, he did not pause to perceive that he perceived it, nor that he had spoken, nor upon his subsequent immediate movement.

  For his body knew its meaning, which meaning struck beyond the lenses of intellect and straight to the cerebral cortex, to his innermost, most animal core. And he was acting on it before he was aware that he had heard it at all. It was the click of a revolver’s hammer being drawn back to full-cock.

  “Well, that knocked my dick in the dirt,” Chet thought, as he crawled to cover behind the boulder at the side of the road. “Some mucho mal hombre ahead, fix’n to bushwhack me,” he thought, and chuckled. “Wall, lessee about that!”

  The burro stood where Chet had left him, in the middle of the road. Chet heard him paw the ground absently.* He slowly and quietly drew his boots off. He rose and worked his way, silently, around the boulder. He drew the large bowie knife from the sheath which hung down his back, and moved around the rock.11

  Aphrodite

  Or: “The Inner Code as Mariolatry”1

  Lost note from Lady of Spain

  Imagine the chagrin of the archeologists, toiling away, day after day on the et cetera, only to have the son of a bearer bring into camp the Shard, in which, et cetera, et cetera …

  The narrative breaks off here, and resumes with the point of the whole thing, to wit: the third (disputed) strophe,2 that is:

  Lady of Spain, you big whore, you …

  Compare “Aphrodite in her see-through nightie,”* in the poem “Two Bits and Dear at That,” by Eugene Fields, from Old Chicago Days, or The Algonquian Confederacy: More Than Just a Bunch of Indians, from which collection I include the following:

  Cho-tan-nah-pah

  chewed her moccasins until

  they were soft as the

  whispered response of

  a sex-crazed fourteen-year-old

  latterly giv’n in marriage …

  Why is this doggerel included?

  If we take every seventeenth letter in the poem we find this: DFSS, etc., a near-perfect recapitulation of that cryptogram3 written in Mrs. Wilson’s urine,4 and tossed through the library window, and, thence, into our hearts.

  The “Algonquian” series ends, it will be seen, with the sixteenth letter.

  It is only through an act of sophistry that the identity can be postulated.

  Question: Is this an arithmetic or ethical error? Let us examine it.

  The human wish to find connections has betrayed us into calamities far worse, far more destructive than this. But it is not, I fear, a solecism to suggest that we may, in this arguably benign case, perceive [sic] the paradigm.

  Note

  From: It’s Beyond Bearing, episode 12: “Historical Anomalies and the Insupportable Weight of Coincidence” (Pan American Museum of Broadcasting)

  This beggars imagination. The effort to find meaning in this academic nonsense exhausts the creative and moral capacities of anyone not seeking tenure. How long must we put up with this shit? Are we, like Frank Sinatra, destined to live for ever?

  Are we, like the sea anemones, born but to live, immobile, swaying now this way, now that, in the most circumscribed of orbits, glued to a rock in this undulating sea of shit, this precious, casuistic, useless crap, this vomit, this scholastic and obscene perversion of all that is good?

  Will no one answer me? Am I alone?

  The Timesheets

  The Timesheets: A Timely Surprise

  An interpolation – “The Events of That Day” – from Lais of the Fantasist

  As we here deviate from the traditional arrangement1 it is perhaps not inappropriate2 to improve upon the unexpected intermission with the injection of an “olio.”

  To begin: may we not address that phrase, so oft used as to’ve become (a) part of the language, and (b) wellnigh invisible: “these few slim volumes.” To what did this originally refer?

  Most would immediately respond “the Diaries” – but they are wrong.

  The phrase, though first penned by their “discoverer,” refers not to the Diaries, but to the, to him, far more precious artefacts, the Timesheets.

  Did Krauz (fils), indeed, have access to the Timesheets, you may riposte, and would, in so doing, place and mark yourself as belonging to the mainstream of Traditional Exegetic Thought.

  He did.

  “Defend your thesis,” you respond.

  I will.

  Let us cast our imaginations back to the Mud Pond, in that period directly before it received its name.

  I will ask you to picture ducks, geese, swallows, the occasional coot or “grebe,” a “loon,” perhaps, if this is not to overtax your imagination, the odd rowboat, skiff or dory, a green slime upon the water’s surface which, in my youth, was known as “whale vomit,” but which is, of course, algae. Reeds you may, in your mind’s eye, find along the marge, which merge, as we mount up the bank, into a dense grass skirting what is now the Mall. We see a man’s face, gazing, to the east, over the pond, in his hand a magazine or “book.”3

  I now ask you to review (not to question, never to question, solely to review) the Events of That Day – freely, easily,
as they come to you. The Coffee and Roll; the Lady who was so Rude; the Bus and the Bus Transfer; the odd cast of the sky; the gate; the Timeclock; the Second Cup …

  Now, hold this thought for one brief moment:

  I have recited to myself all the Events

  as they transpired on That Day.

  What is that “nagging” feeling?4

  Ages – Sages

  The Motive-Valise explored1

  That is a question for the Sages.

  That is the Question of the Ages.

  (Found in a trunk in Pinsk)

  “He said that he’s prepared, at any moment, to make an impassioned plea for whichever side of the argument inevitably proved to have been wrong.”

  “How frank,” the Proctor replied, and went on about an obiter dictum of his own, concerning the heat of a summer’s day and the – in retrospect – quite charming insect life associated with it in his mind.

  “The fellow’s stuck in the pre-sexual,” thought Greind, as the man droned on, not unlike, it may have occurred to him, those dragonflies, bees, or whatever on the marge of that cold lake.

  “F’the lake was so cold, why’d they have the insects?” he wondered.

  The man continued about the dog which had been at his side.

  “Long dead,” thought Greind, “long dead. Necessarily long dead, for their life span is a fraction of our own, all things being equal, and it would be seen as obscenity, were they to live as long as we. And yet,” he thought, “we pine to hang around for ever, like some deep-sea tortoise, rumored to wade through the centuries.”

  “… which bring you to us today,” said the Proctor.

  “Yes,” Greind said.

  They stared, one at the other, for the longest time.