Wilson

by David Mamet

  2 – “If by chance the eye offends you, pluck it out, lad.” (A. E. Houseman, Journal of the British Ophthalmologic Association, 20??)

  1 – Archives of the Commission. Search on: Capsule/Bookcase/[Shelf]/Diary/Mars.

  1 – Bombazine, 20??.

  2 – Ghee.

  3 – Subsequent discovery of the following month’s (December’s) issue shows the jack-o’-lantern replaced with the head of Kris Kringle, thus smashing into flinders the theorem above. Krautz (fils), expected to retire in ignominy from the discussion, to resign both his claim to the issue and his position at the University, stunned the (granted, starved-for-diversion) academic world with the publication of the unabashed and, frankly aggressive “Oh boo, oh hoo.”A I quote, with permission:

  Yah yah yah yah. I’m rubber, and you’re glue. Everything you say bounces off me and sticks to you. Your mother is a whore. Blow me.

  A – Bombazine, vol. 12, no. 5 (2021).

  1 – “For if there is up, if there is down, must it not all, at some point, ‘resolve,’ or is that not, and must it not be, an illusion? Doors within doors! Doors within doors!” Two hundred years of scholarship accepted, without (in a unanimous display of respect) comment, that Bennigsen means “doors beyond doors.” This lack of comment persisted until the publication in 2122 of Rinaldi’s Bennigsen and the Dutch Door, wherein the subject’s Low German antecedents were suggested as a possible explanation for what, otherwise, must have been taken (comment or not) as a solecism. As that can of worms has been (long) opened, I make fair to point out that, had he been alluding to Dutch architecture, he would have said, “Doors above (or below) doors.” Confute me who can.A

  2 – F. X. Bumphrey, Sacristan, St Catherine’s Church (1931-81), I Cover the Waterfont.

  A – See also, “The Pet Door,” p. 307.

  * Spherical.†

  † Neither, of course, was it perfectly round. The editor’s note was an impertinence.

  * i.e. Whippies.

  1 – Or “sac,” in the translation from the French Fou de Coudre, The Forbidden Stitch (A.L.G.W.U. publ.), where the original “reticule,” rendered as “sac,” in the 2009 Belgian edition, is found retranslated (Norton-Simon, Let’s Face Facts: The Uses of Perfidy, op. cit.); cf. Bergson’s disquisition, On the Preference for the Tainted.

  2 – “Coffee,” in the Peruvian edition.

  * One more than Goldilocks

  * Bongazine.

  1 – “Why the first occupation?” the attentive reader might enquire. Pray God I had the time to tell you.

  1 – “How wide his eyes grew, and how round – like drawings of eggs on a skillet, or like the old British penny …” Who wrote these words? Would anyone having the remotest clue please address him or herself to the editors?

  * The windowsill (?)

  1 – A shelf corporation of Bee-zine – called into being at the time of “The Great Migration,” and, originally a tax shelter for flight capital; Bee-zine has been identified as a financial ruse-de-guerre of Krautz. How telling, then, that it made money!A

  A – See also, Two Trains Leaving Chicago, op. cit.

  1 – Here follows a list:

  1 Should have been a fireman

  2 Too much carbohydrates

  3 Weak

  And a fourth entry, scratched out and indecipherable. How may we interpret this “toying with madness”? Thank God such is not our job.

  1 – The balaclava helmet was first used in the Crimean War (1857 et ensuite) as a facial protection from the cold, by British ranks:

  Gimme my balacalava helmet, Lloyd, and pray

  They stand down the firewood-gathering party.

  I’m soon bound away in any case

  Acrost that high-banked river

  Known to us of old.

  Ho, for a sojer’s life.

  Begorrah [etc.] A

  A – Flears’ bubblegum cards of “Famous

  Occupations”, series #5: Pipefitter,

  Crossing Guard, Dragoon.

  1 – This is not, as has always been apparent to anyone who takes the half-moment to consult the page numbers, the “halfway point” of A Consideration … – two choices offered us are:

  (a) its designation is a joke, or error, or act of intellectual savagery;

  (b) it is the halfway point of a shorter (or of another) work.

  1 – The Victorians (1837-1901) spoke of the “five forbidden topics.” They were: illness, wealth, religion, politics and servants. But their race is run. The Empire (sea power, funded through colonialism, slavery and opium) is reduced to some (limited) commerce in woollens and small, luxury leather goods. Time marches on. The working man was sloppy.*

  * And he got what he deserved.

  1 – In the original, “Innacuracy.” The debate has, no, I will not say “raged,” but has continued and continues regarding the intention or lack thereof of the author.

  Let me widen the debate.

  Could this have been a jolly jest on the part of the compositor?

  How we forget the lowly. How the wealthy and powerful (how the comfortable, in fact) overlook, nay, deny the sentience of their servants, gossiping in front of them as if they were deaf to all but the commands to fetch or carry.

  Must it not have been ever thus!

  Are those so treated (must they not feel themselves to be?) slaves, or slaves-of-a-sort? Is there not that in the employee–employer constellation militating toward abuse?

  Of course there is. For if the employer is denied the de jure right of life-or-death, the power to deny livelihood keeps alive the more-than-echo of its terror.

  Imagine the poor father of three* about to turn home.

  After a long, worrying day at his desk or factory bench. The owner passes, and the employee does not, in the owner’s mind, display sufficient deference.

  Suppose the stopping bell has rung. The employee is no longer, then, “at work,” but yet he stands upon the owner’s ground, and the owner feels himself owed an acknowledgment. The poor employee, fatigued from his day, his mind turned to the concerns of home, perhaps has not even noticed his superior walking by – but let us not weight the dice with coincidence – let us say that he has noticed, but that, feeling it incumbent upon him to display acknowledgment (after the bell) masters both habit and inclination (why would he not be polite?) and exhibits, let us say, for the sake of argument, a bit of diffidence, say truculence, even.

  In that brief half-second has not the employer marked him down, and will he not make haste to practice and to exercise the extent of that power he may display without discomfiture or censure upon the poor working man: demotion, dismissal, black-listing – none beyond his power. And does he not explain his depredation to himself thusly: “Such behavior breeds anarchy and destruction of the public order?”

  How this worker, should he never suffer any of the penalties suggested above, is still subject to anxiety over their very real possibility – the spectre of them, perhaps, sufficient to unman himA as he wrestles with the question: will the excellent man react when “the boss” walks by, and, if so, how is he, then, different from a slave?

  Granted the degree of slavery, as of anything,B may vary, but au fond it is the same. Might not, must not, this downtrodden being seek both redress and solace in escape? In alcohol or drugs, or raucous sex, or sports, or good works, in neurosis; or in rebellion: in armed uprising, unionism, petulance, sabotage, absenteeism, goldbricking, sloppiness, and, perhaps, occasionally, the jest?

  We relish, nay, cherish the employee’s jest in its grandiose form: the cap of the Chrysler Building, the bi-cameral system, etc. – let us not forget it exists, also, in the day-to-day, offering an escape, a counterweight, a flywheel, if you will, for the otherwise potentially destructive anger occasioned by subservience. What force is worse than prejudice? What beasts, what “swine” we are – to class “the other” as a fit object for rage for (s)corn,C for dismissal – and how the example is given us, the response, not “in kind
,” not blow-for-blow, but in jest, in gentle cleansing jest, in humor, the (along with religion) solace of the weak.

  I vote for it. I laud it. I praise those who practice it, and I suggest upon no evidence whatever, that the misspelling, “inaccuracy” [sic] may have been, may have been, I say, an intentional joke upon the part of the compositor.

  A cheap theorem, you may respond. No, I reply, no, not a theorem at all – merely a suggestion.

  2 – Pace, the Bible.

  3 – See The Hayloft, vols IV–CXC

  A – Impotence, premature ejaculation, priapism, etc.

  B – E.g. the temperature.

  C – In the original “corn.”

  * Or four.

  4 – For a fuller discussion see The Moving Picture Boys in Earthquake Land, etc.

  5 – Here the manuscript trails off into gibberish. The words at the bottom of page 12 alone standing clear: “Forgive, forget,” and a telephone number, which legal restraints prohibit me from printing here, but which may be released to qualified individuals or institutions upon written application.

  1 – In the original, our chickens. Jean Kerr, The Ego and I.

  2 – Spectrographic analysis in 2121 (Bell Labs, Hot Coffee, Ar) revealed that the supposed “o” in “Lost” was, in fact in the original manuscript a “u”, thus changing the meaning of the monograph considerably, and rendering its title, “And, Besides, the Wench is Dead,” more comprehensible.A

  A – Alternatively, “And besides, the witch is dead”[?], attrib. E. Y. Harburg.

  * The term.

  † The book.

  3 – E.g. a little worm crawling on a leaf, the glance of an old, half-dead, stinking carriage horse in Central Park.B Consider: from Robert W. Service, Tales of the Yukon and Allied Investigations (Potlach Press, Hyder, Alaska, 1931), quoted by permission:

  What do you think now, Jim McFay?

  With your dogs all dead at the end of the day

  With the wolves all a-singin’ hush-a-bye

  Would you sell your soul for a shot o’ rye?

  Would you trade your lungs for a gen-pox pipe?

  Would you* [etc.]C

  B – Especially if one is not in Central Park at the time.

  C – Generally understood as included as a “dog reference”, cf. C. Suarez. (“The Original Hairless Mexican”), The Adumbration of the Canine.

  * Also rendered “Wood hue.”

  4 – The response appears below:

  Everything is sex.

  Sex is sex.

  Art is sex.

  Literature is sex.

  Marriage, death and government are sex.

  War is sex.

  Pictures of naked women writhing and pretending to have fun are sex.

  Animals are sex.

  Food is sex.

  Other things are sex.

  They’re all sex.

  (JACOB COHEN, MARS)

  1 – Hi-John-the-Conqueron Morphée, “The man who wears the funny hat,” Legends of the Bayoux (privately printed). Cf. Anon., Muuguu: The Life of the Soul, an informal survey of the folkways and the ceremonial food preparation of Priedieux Parish.

  1 – See also Jacob Cohen, The Recurrence to the Canine in “Wilson”.

  2 – We are indebted past any rational hope of discharge to Fink, Poyle, et al., for their Funny Bathroom Signs of Wisconsin.A The index alone has had me chuckling many a long and otherwise tiresome suburban night.

  A – The fame of which has been (in my opinion, undeservedly) eclipsed by Berg’s I Don’t Swim in Your Toilet; Don’t Piss in my Pool. Cf. “We Aim to Please; You Aim, Too, Please”: The Legal Battles of Fink, Poyle et al.

  Can we account for critical taste? Can we account it “taste”? Must we not, rather, recognize it as the most pernicious admixture of vacancy and license?

  Imagine a chap instructed, hired to form and express an opinion on a subject beyond his grasp. Imagine farther, this chap (self-selected, as we have seen, for his biddable cupidity), given the hint that his work will be better received should it be deleterious. Couple this with the natural antipathy of the emasculated for the well and active, and you’ve got a can of worms.

  3 – Like a buncha whores.

  1 – Cf. “The Shadowy Figure of Col. House”, in Edith Wilson and the Re-enactment of the Primal Scene.

  2 – Followed in a much more flowing, not to say “hurried” hand, these words: “Oh God, oh God, oh, I’m so sorry.”

  1 – Its inclusion in this section generally accounted a jeu d’esprit, or “brainfart” on the part of the Fantasist, for the skunk, Mephitis mephitis (Lat.), is related if at all, not to the dog, but to the weasel. ’Nuff said.

  2 – E. K. Byrnes, Toujours Perdrix?! and The Charles River Whitefish (Sunset Press).

  3 – “This correspondence now must cease,” as displayed in Cute, the Journal of the Architectural Society, © Elders of the Architectural Society. Cf. ibid., “Carved in Stone, Written in Blood: The Curse of the Bambino.”

  4 – The floors being numbered, of course, in the European fashion – that counting the first, in their system, being the second in ours, and that which we know to be the first having no particular worth at all in their determination. I recommend to the reader D. S. Winicot, Where Is the First Floor? (D.I.Y., 19??).

  1 – i.e. center-of-mass – “a killing shot.” Not, as has been otherwise bruited, struck in the “epicenter,” which point could, of course, be determined only through abstruse applications of the calculus interesting to no one this author is capable of imagining.

  * In fact, eponymously.

  2 – Substantial scholarship suggests the hypothesis that the dog was a (badly drawn or imagined) spaniel. This, I feel, begs the question in a particularly dumb way. For did not and does not the same power or office, spirit of being or force dictate and control both choice and ability? I am sure it does.

  * Poem?

  1 – Or “limitless space,” the two being, generally, held identical. Cf. Flammable and inflammable. For a discussion of which, please see The Consulting Fireman, which survives, in part, in holograph, for those of that bent.

  * “Envelope?” Disputed.

  † “Biproduct?”

  ‡ “Cruel?”

  § A-ha.

  2 – Three Cohens in the Fountain.

  * Of what “turned it red.”

  1 – See also Moses and the Tablets, or Take Two and Call Me in the Morning.A

  A – I believe this marks the first uncensored appearance of “the Capsule Note” and I must ask: “What was all the fuss about?”

  1 – Omitted from the original. Discovered in a “saratoga” trunk in Alexandria, New Egypt, in 2191, the later-interpolated “How Bootsie Lost His Voice” will, of course, be found at this point in the narrative in the majority of subsequent editions. It was, of course, adjudged spurious by the 22nd Lateran Council,A but, as it has found its ineradicable place in our hearts, it will be found below.B

  A – See Bullshit, Proceedings of the Council, 2193.

  B – Cf. How Bootsie Lost His Whip, vol. 2: The Variants (Philovolpian Society, 2199), which treats of the (inevitable) congruent, “How B. Lost His: Boots, Shoes, Cane, Cape, Life, Voice,B1 Good Name,B2 etc.”

  B1 – The inclusion of “Bootsie/Voice” has been definitively linked to the much earlier “tales” of Kate Willingsley, as part of the “Bootsie” stories, that series of successful children’s books whose hero was a pink rabbit with white feet (“Boots”).

  It has been sugested that this “Alexandrian Link” may be inverted. That we may, in fact, as with Klein’s bottle, “jump in at any point” and name it the beginning (opening). Or, to be round, suggest that Kate Willingsley (in reality Arthur Wingsleye Brown, 1906–1959) created his pink rabbit in homage to that Master of Fox Hounds. But who cares?

  B2 – Never substantiated.

  1 – Attenuated, granted.

  * Maybe.

  2 – It may be, to pick the two most likely exampl
es, a religion or a committee.

  3 – See issue #4.

  4 – An “old thing.”

  5 – Gerund. See issue #4.

  * Clubs.

  6 – Others, of course, “begged to disagree.” Notably, the editor(s) of Bongazine, in their “GO BACK TO MARS!” (redacted and condensed in the more widely known (pamphlet) form, Keep Your Pagan Feet off the Mall! (Mud PongA Press)), and Bennigsen, in his Jane of Trent: A Life.

  A – In the original, “Pond.”

  1 – It has been established that this (Memoirs) is in fact the source of the (so famous) quotation. Its location needs no gloss here, neither the material into which it is carved, nor the style of the carving, no.

  That which I today present to you is an expatiation, rather, upon that which gave rise to the quotation’s fame. And I do not mean its reason or wisdom, no, nor to the fame of the book from which it comes, nor to the excellence of its redaction, no. Rather I direct your most kind and appreciated attention to that instrument which is responsible for its persistence through the years – that instrument which I believe must be the first tool of data storage: to the chiselA and to the derivative, vulgar, axiomatic “chiseler,” and “better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.”

  Let us consider the latter first – the so-well-known construction which began small, and accreted (not unlike the coral, that remarkable creature which built the atolls) thusly:

  1 Better than a poke in the eye

  2 Better than a poke in the eye with a stick

  3 Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick

  I leave, for the moment, the moot point: which is better, a poke in the eye with a stick, or a poke in the eye with a sharp stickB and conflate, for that which I sincerely hope will be your diversion, the more overtly sexual condignity:

  A – And to its drotomdical form, “the shard stick.”