by David Mamet
The phrase rang in Monica’s head – “What to do?” – as the waiter returned with the tea. He saw her consternation. She looked up.
“You did say ‘India,’ miss? Or ‘Ceylon’?”
“I said ‘coffee’,” she said. “Could you then tell me, in the name of everything good, how you could possibly have come to understand it as ‘tea’?”
The phrase from Hazlitt – so useful so oft – returned to her mind: “The truest test of superiority is never to be upset by impertinence.”
At which precise moment the doors blew in, and there was Mikey, in the long fur coat – that same fur coat she’d seen over the back of the chaise-longue in Sloane Square, the ice crystals still upon the collar, as her head turned to the side, his breath in her ear. “Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes,” and so on, and she wondered, not for the first, no, nor for the twentieth time, why she could never retain the definition of the term “guard hairs.”
The Lake Poets can kiss my ass
or: My ducts, my daughter, by a Member of the Medical Profession; this being, of course, that interrogatory eventually replaced by “The Sample Paragraph”,1 see p. 81.
“What is an electrical impulse?” These are the words which greeted Tom Burns on his first day in Professor Hodgkin’s class. They appeared at the head of chapter 12, not in the Professor’s (assigned) Etiology of Behavior, but in a sweat-stained paperback edition of Expo Summer.
“What is this trash doing on my desk?” Tom was surprised to find he’d spoken aloud. His query was answered by a throaty chuckle, and Tom turned to see a burly, bluff, good-natured-looking chap beside him.
“Thought I’d catch up on some lighter reading,” the fellow said. “Sorry if it puts you out. Seems we’re going to be sharing this desk; that being so, guess we’d better ‘howdy-and-shake’: I’m Butch Palmer,” and he held out a hand which proved to be warm, dry, and friendly when Tom took it in his own.
List the major themes introduced in the above paragraphs. Having listed them, rest, if rest can come to you in this vale of tears. Rest and reflect upon whatever subject, mood, or memory suggests itself to you. Remembering always to breathe through the nose, the breath flowing back against the rear of the throat such that it produces a slight “rasp” or roughness. Follow the breath down, down, drawing it down through the stomach, down, as if one pivoted the hips backward, the breath following, down to the anus, held, held, held, and, then released. So slowly. Slower, slower still; for what is breath but life? It goes, but to return; it returns but to reissue, again, and in again, the paradigm of all life, the essence of life, getting and spending, learning, and forgetting.*
What can the point of any of it be? There can be no point to it, no, not even meditation on some, or upon its absence. “It” is all it is. That’s it. Breathe in, breathe out. That’s all it ever was. The rest is advertising: man and woman, Chet and Donna, dog and cat, B and D, any and all, false and, yes, finally arbitrary oppositions, syn-, hom-, antonyms, identities, that parlor game we come to call philosophy, that whistling-in-the-dark.
“Yes, but,” the Jester said, “what about closing time, when all the girls look prettier, and the night is so long?”
“Well, that’s a different story,” the Old Wrangler said.
“Please, then, address it,” Jester beseeched.
“I will speak of closing time,” the Wrangler said, and sighed, “upon the understanding that I mean it to mean neither more, no, nor less, than that time at which they call ‘Last call,’ an’ ‘You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here’” and he began:
“There I was, the beer gone flat. Salt could not bring it back. The purple-pink stirrers were looped into themselves, which offered, to the drunk and sober mind, a vista of innumerable possibilities, but which, in the event, could but be worked into some variation of a neater or less-neat circle, square, figure-of-eight, or other closed system. It had been straight, now it was closed, and we then move on to another. Not unlike our progress to the next drink, cigarette, love, compulsive action, thought, addiction, meal, breath …”
Here the attendants arrived, and took, one on each arm, the Old Wrangler back to his room.
Jester sighed, and picked up his book.
“Where the Wattage is unknown, and our investigation is shifted, necessarily, to the Resistance,” he read.
“No,” he thought, “it is sufficient. It is not the life I would have chosen, had I had the choice, but it is a good life.”
An Adumbration of the Inner Code
Where the inner code is treated as if it existed; for, how else, were one so inclined, to understand in order to dismiss it?
“No, no, no, no,” she said, “but they are knocking at my door.”
The once supposed lifeless form of her husband stared on, eyes directed to the fourth rose down the left of the William Morris wallpaper they had planned (together) to employ to enliven the room.
“But yet he breathes,” she thought, “and that must be my consolation. Who will care for him, however, when I am taken away. And, equally, who will Care for the Country?”
Thwack. Thwack. Thwack.
“They are resorting to hammers,” she thought, “hammers or mauls, for I never have been able to keep the two sufficiently separated in my mind …”
She recurred to an autumn morning, in New Hampshire, at the farm.
Her husband, still youthful and powerful, though fifty, swinging that above his head which was either a hammer or a maul, and she looking on, proudly, her pride not untouched by that never totally absent anxiety for his health.
“Woodrow,” she’d said, “we must consider your health.”
“Nothing better for it,” he’d retorted. “Good for the pecs, the abs, the lats, the bis and triceps. Very little which it won’t improve. Best exercise there is, swinging a twelve-pound …”
And here the recollection dissolved, the word was lost as she saw, for the thousandth, nay, the millionth time, the scene dissolve, or, better, contract to the vision of his prissy mouth, spewing blood, as he fell over the chopping block, the maul or hammer dropping to his side, while someone’s voice screamed, “Corpsman!”
And now here she was, no one to help her, no one left to intercede, as the door splintered, and the Men in the White Coats approached, so carefully.
“Now, Ginger,” the fat one said, “now, Ginger, it’s time for our shot.”
He passed between her and the television, and, as was her wont, she spat.
She felt his arms pinioning her, and made as if to submit, relaxing her body for a moment. Then the needle found her vein, and she had no more need to feign lassitude. Nor had she the power, as she spiraled downard. Her last thought a frantic “But the President … the League of Nations …”
End of the Second Section
The Fox knows many things.
The Etrog knows One Big Thing.
AESOP, THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS
Then farewell to Jane of Trent – farewell, Jane, and farewell to Bennigsen, and to the intrigues of the Swedish crown, and to the self-effacing Scandinavian beloved of literature.
Where did we ever see an evil Swede?*
Farewell to battles, farewell to swords, farewell to medals and ribbons of gold and blue, farewell to fresh, thick butter from the churn, to white nights by the ——,1 mornings without fatigue, the day both introduced and softened by that rich, fine butter to which the drapiers must have alluded in the Scandinavian flags.
Oh, Bennigsen – how cold your grave, how undeserved your end – how much more fitting to the hero tale had you lived to embrace the Princess. You are bathed† not by the reverent, and not by the seasonable, loving tears of clean, filial sentiment, no, but by the lacrimations of the maudlin, of that unwashed and less-than-lettered readership2 to whom you are but a convenient fiction. O irony! No wonder that the poets live in your thrall – thou Greater-than-the-Gods.3
Now all that rises must converge, the non-Euclideans exclaim. Must not the
ir observation (of geometry) hold equally true of the Ironic, by the operations of which high and low, fear and pity, surprise and fore-knowledge, all, in short, are‡(re?)united.
What of Jane of Trent?
Section Three
As “God” is trifurcated into three essences, which are, then, played against four into that eternal dodecanensis of the seasons, disciples, Tribes of Israel, steps to partial sobriety, and, then, reformulated into its essentials – four becoming two in the hope that three, eventually, will become one.
MUUGUU
The Boathouse
Chet and Donna
In which it is suggested a previous chief executive wrote a celebrated address on the lack of an elephant.
I make bold to quote from the (pencil) manuscript, the first draft of Newport Summer, to the “short story”, “Chet and Donna in the Boathouse.” Chet is speaking:
“You know, Donna,” he said, as he brushed the sand off of his elbows, “you know, I don’t think the Professor is that far off base.”
“But, Chet,” she said, “I don’t understand. Why would he write about the lack of an elephant?”
He smiled. “Honey,” he said. He shook his head. No, now could she understand? Her knowledge of war was limited to those daguerreotypes in Grandfather’s rolltop. What could she know of “The Platoon in the Attack”, or “Kill or Get Killed: The Infantryman’s Guide to Sentry Elimination”, to any of it, in short?
“Honey,” he said, “to understand you have to look at the respective positions of the Union and the Confederacy at the time of the Address, and to one engine of warfare, shunned for centuries and never seen on this continent, an engine, however, perfectly suited – his advisers said – to combat in the coastal plain, in that area which the Ironclads denied to Yankee shipping: the pachyderm.”
Her eyes grew soft with love. “He’s just so smart,” she thought.
Alligators
Deleted from the “Chet” section of Rybecki’s Dream
He had been told when he was young that alligators sleep on top of each other stacked like cordwood.
It (the phrase) had informed his life, and had, in fact, become his life – both the pursuit and the paradigm of pursuit, of his waking hours – the attempt at verification of the proposition.
On meeting an attractive woman, for example, he would think to himself,* “Yes, she seems a ‘real good sort.’ However, how would one, finally, ‘know’, not having seen her, at night, in the deep, under water, stacked up with her kind …” et cetera.
How he both shone and sparkled in the first half-hours, for example, of the first party or gathering in any new group of acquaintance! And then there appeared, as his friends oft described it, “that look”
And, “No. No, not this time!” he thought. “Not this time?’
“I’ve so enjoyed myself,” he said.
“I have, too,” [she said] said the young lady.1 “Well …” she said. “Well …
“You have to go back to work?” he said.
“Actually, no,” she said. “It’s a half-holiday …”
The invitation was clear, and, emboldened, he responded to it.
“Perhaps a walk?” he suggested.
“Oh, excellent,” Ginger said. “Or, we could, we could go to the zoo …!”
“No. No,” he thought. “NO!”
She looked at him. “Anything the matter?” she asked.
“No, not the zoo,” he said. “NOT …”
And he thought, “Well, I guess that this is why they call it an obsession.”
“Well,” she said, “what about the planetarium …?”
And that is how he (a) contracted herpes; and (b) ended up on Mars.
Is this story an example of bathos or pathos?2
From Newport Summer
Let us examine the inscription on the boathouse door:
Those who write on bathroom walls
Should roll their shit in little balls
And those who read what they have writ
Should eat those little balls of shit.1
It was given to me to have been one of the group which discovered the original manuscript, in the poolroom, where it corrected the roll of a 5 x 10 Brunswick, Balke-Collender, Monarch (c.1843).
I prize, as do we all, the round impressions, page by page, made by that table’s foot.
I do not, as some do, however, construe the words and sentences so capsulated into an infra-, nay, an ur-, if you will, composition.
In so doing one posits, of course, a super-intelligence. One both creates and ascribes to a new religion.
But of this why not not of that?
Why not of any random realignment of intelligence? And must we not all, finally, consider it a worship of unreason to say, “all meaning resides in everything”?2
May we not torture any proposition into uselessness? May we not proclaim pure scholarship resembles nothing so much as the rubber band – its sine qua non, elasticity, an invitation to disaster?
Dink Stover at Yale
A fragment, believed to be from Aristotle, Dink Stover at Yale1
Yale, long the festering breeding ground of that country’s Intelligence Services, the dark secret, the Clan which dare not speak its name, that conclave not unlike and, in fact, balancing on the Right its opposite number, Bohemia, wherein Scotch and adultery stood in for mind drugs and free love, and the postulants went out not to seduce to sexual and aesthetic latitude and self-absorption but to banana wars across the world, cozy and warm in the hierarchic self-satisfied – we will not say “certainty,” for, finally, their creed was not more outward-directed than that of the Beatnik; the one operating under the Ensign Art, the other Polity, but each more than content to revel in the communitarily awarded perquisites, for which they were prepared to kill or die, the one from overdose, from sexual disease, the other at the head of a suborned column of supposed insurgents, marching – but I warp my metaphor in over-extension and it sags like the catenary.2 “When will I learn, O Lord, who maketh both the East and West, and sends down the White Race, to ravage the Land till its stink in the nostrils makes one long for Death? I wonder if the eggs are done …”
Philology
Source: Newport Summer
www.chetndonna.boathouse.com (in random search, by frequency, word association, and philologic average1) yielded:
1 Ginger
2 Real property
3 Incarceration: Ginger Sees Chet and Donna at the “Old Wilson Place” (original title: Trapped)
“Who is that cunt, Chet?” Donna said, her long legs thrown carelessly over his hard, sun-browned stomach.
They heard the sweet tenor throbbing of the Chriscraft as it made its way down the cove – such a fine, old-fashioned sound.
“… who is she, fir chrissake?”
But Chet was asleep. Lulled by the sun, the sex, the rhythm of the day, two hookers of fine, pale Amontillado sherry, filched from the butler’s pantry at the Lodge, and 4 ccs of intravenous synthetic morphine (Chacranovid) in the big vein behind the knee.
“Ah, shit,” Donna thought. “Ah, shit. I’ll have to lug the damn picnic basket up the hill myself, and I’ll get chafed on my shins from the wicker bouncing against me the whole time. Why can’t they design those things so’s they’ll be easier to carry …?”
Then the door blew open. Donna looked up to see a young woman with a gun. Looming above her was the Aggrieved Paramour, Vengeance, a Woman Scorned: the answer to her question, and the answer was: That cunt was Ginger. Blam blam blam blam blam. The bullets rocked her body.
“Gulp,” she thought. “They’ll hear that up at the old Wilson place …!”
And then she was dead.
Chet floated past her, in the guise of a fish, as did her father, then several containers which she understood as holding Weetabix. Then she was standing before a white-coated tribunal.
“If this isn’t the beatingest thing I ever did see,” she thought. “I will eat my hat.”
She longed, she burned for the presence of a comrade – someone with whom to share this final irony: that death was quite precisely as pictured in those works she’d always judged empty both of talent and imagination.
“This is one for the books,” she thought, and then the Judge of the Tribunal spoke.
“What do you get,” he said, “if you cross a chicken and an Irish terrier?”
“… huh,” she thought.
Donna looked down and realized she was floating. Above the world.
But the world above which she floated was not geography, but Time.
“… all right, then,” she thought.
Most instructive, looking down, were those incidents she had forgotten.
Incidents which, at the time, seemed crucial, essential, formative, tragic, life-changing, and which she’d discarded or repressed.
“Oh, my gosh,” she thought, “there I am in the closet with Mom’s masseur …”
There was a rustling of wings.
A big bird took her in its claws and swam through the air to a mountain eerie, where it dropped her into a large nest.
Two warring notions clashed in her mind: (a) this is comfy; and (b) what the fuck is going on?
In Trapped, the scene here shifts to Ginger in prison, formulating her last words:
“I’m not afraid of you sonsabitches, cause you can’t do anything to me worse than the stuff I’ve done to you …”
“Naa, fuck it,” she thought. “Why give them the satisfaction?”