The Brooke-Rose Omnibus

by Brooke-Rose, Christine

  deutera trite tetarte pempte

  dawn to noon Courage Duty Piety Virtue

  noon to sundown Nature of Man Ideas The False The Disputer

  Symposium Being The Soul Friendship Beauty

  In the months of thirty-one days the symposium shall according to the desire of the majority either continue into hene kai nea or cease on the ninth day of the third decade thus affording two days of rest, hene kai nea and noumenia, the punishment in terminal position never falling on the euphoric term, always on the dysphoric. In the last decade the days are counted backwards. The timetable structures nobody wants with its built in obsolescence so why are you here or what will you put in its place? Oh not that question again brother you’re ruddy tape-recorders so are you.

  Danger men at playback, raising antimoneys by reaction that surpasses the subjective idea, rendering it objective for as Marx said personalities and events reappear, on the first occasion as tragedy on the second as farce. Albertine returning bereft of significance Paradise Regained a bore Maud Gonne and good riddance.

  There has however been a complete reform of congenital organisation as we move staggering through regressions to the other calendar.

  society but destroys the family which structures society, each tale-bearer pressured into his story in order that the hero’s quest may proceed. But as we saw the motivation may well be reversed, the timetable structuring the family but destroying society which structures the family, each tale-bearer carrying his coda in his mouth until he has eaten himself silly and soft and flabby, fit only for the undertaker who overtakes and takes over, the movement by which the family is constituted being also that by which it is dissolved, the womb the tomb a rectangle of time a city of rectangles along which the eye walks up and down like Gulliver on his contraption a moving finger mannikin that having writ with a spirit-loaded pen scrubs out the hieroglyphs and starts again.

  Some trace of hierarchy however has been retained in that you have to proceed from the conspicuous consumption of the civic virtues in the morning to the built-in obsolescence of the private passions at night, resting every decade. The hours between the symposium and rosy-fingered dawn may be spent in the winedark sea of infratextuality for there has been a complete reorganisation of flute-playing phallusies. And if you peer through the flawed hymen eye-lens of a judas-eye in the timetable you will see the high men of learning curiously foreshortened into highwaymen who point a pistol at your brain after the introduction of the parting-shot, proepigrammed within earshot of the primal scene which does not take place in the institution of learning for that is not the place but the placenta thrown out with the mannikin leaving danger men at replay, and if you lose the thread of the texture you lose your head your paradise your utterance your pygmalion-skinned hero creature that slips out of your grasp and becomes a line in its own rewrite rule going forth to multiply the multiplicator of books and looks within books like a function of narrative

  f (bo (lo (bo (lo (books) oks) oks) oks) oks)n

  For mimesis inevitably produces a double of the thing, the double being nothing a non-being which nevertheless is added to the thing, and therefore not totally devoid of value although, however resembling, never absolutely true. C Plato for yourself. And when by way of additional supplement the thing is as evasive as a sophist in perpetual flight behind binary digressions of the dianoia beyond the discourse, diegesis needs a digraph, the right hand resting on the liftable flap to write down a point of information, the left hand ignota treeing off unsupported by a head-noun and falling into the void that is presupposed even by a tree-structure. Thus you will have two hands, two pens, two penises to generate a double text into a corpus crysis.

  And if the master-marksman does not give us a little margin full of marks to add up we shall edge ourselves over the edge. These things do matter in a text like the human body or society as object of exchanging books and looks in the book of nature which is written up there or the book that imitates the soul or the soul of the book which is the unvoiced logos. And having edged ourselves out of the text we shall nevertheless be outlawed from the city because of the text that kills the head that brought it forth and is therefore fast exteriorised by the head before it generates itself into a patricide, safer outside.

  But Sordello? And my Sordello? There are but the twenty-seven Larissas, and each is marked with zero, liminivorous but eliminated by the letter she does not write since the epistolary novel is dead and it is so much easier to turn up The Collected Telephone Conversations of Larissa Toren Armel Santores Veronica Masters even though your demand cannot reach its destination and you are requested to call ulteriorly.

  For the more thoroughly we understand deep structures the more man is reduced to a cybernetic sigh to cypher into psychic invisibility a statistic two-dimensionally static on a page, diagramming his dysphoric dianoia, encoding his codal dreams, unless the motivation can be reversed so that the line of twenty-seven and a half black mannikins occurs in order to generate the lion-skinned hero helpless in his quest and displaying visceral organs overflowing from excess of amourous anguish. The heroine after all must not be found too soon since familiarity breeds contempt as the family breeds death. This seems not to apply to the hero apparent who is allowed to dis-chant his chances and enchantments from tale to tale ten a day for a hundred days owing to the double standard or taleological fallacy of felix culpa that the end be balanced by the meanness and the woman is always the end, the matter upon which you write your narcissistic love the virgin page you soil in which you sow your seed when the Pleiades go down to rest, the clay on which you scar the zero marks of masterhood by definition doomed to fail in that it masterhoods the eyes from the iotaboo. A good hero is hard to find.

  Thus the original escapes between the signifiers of a discourse which is not your discourse but a trompe l’oeuil. Tu m’as trompé l’oeuil. Sauve quipu.

  Qui parle? Socrates is the one who speaks, unpaid for selling truth beauty and goodness wrapped up in dialectic as objects of exchange for a good argument, Plato his microphone, his reverential reference. In any case students don’t read. Soon all these innumerable voices will be as transitory as those of the transistor twiddled along from the transatlantic disc-jockey to the news in Serbo-Croat. For the record does not tolerate the re-presentation of a subject in its text, the I who says I not being the said I so that the recipient of the twenty-seven coloured veils is left frantically signalling into the wings of a love where nobody gets the message, like a pompous pirate who would not stay for a dancer through hoops and loops riding roughshod eye-hooded over unbeing for if mimesis exists non-being is. Look it up.

  It follows therefore that if Larissa invents Armel inventing Larissa, Armel also invents Larissa inventing Armel. Thus there can be no communication between them and it is pointless or at least stylus-cramping to mime a dialogue of the deaf, an epistolary of the stolen I through purloined letters full of girded loins girdled with new leaves turned into fig-years of speech summarised in the minutes of their meetings where their mutual demand cannot reach its end let them call ulteriorly out of the anterior wilderness with mouthsful of locusts and white lies that eliminate Larissa right out of her own icon I-conned by his eyes until all that is signifiable in her is struck with latency as soon as raised to the function of the signifier which initiates this raising by its original disappearance, so that any discussion about whether to return to Armel (or to Larissa) as subject of discourse drifts into the undeicidable and she drives off again into the night watching the dancing hoops of taleological propositions split against one another inside the rectangle that reflects the rear a head, into which she enters as into a vehicle within a vehicle, twiddling along the transistor for other ideologies into which she enters as into a turntable broken into and broken up by a goldicondeology of golden youth for whom it is more difficult to enter the I of society than for the treasurer of signifiers to enter the paradiso terrestre as changed upon the blue guitar.

  Evasiveness i
s the privilege of woman but woman has lost all her privileges by emancipation while gaining none of man’s, only his responsibilities. And when man reverses roles to steal both the irresponsibilities and the privileges of woman adding them to his own while leaving her only the responsibility for everything he has nothing to do but find another vehicle to get into, another hole an O an open vowel who will nevertheless become consonantal with his inarticulate seed and bring forth a concatenation of consequences with the non-privilege of non-evasiveness. All privilege must therefore be abolished and we demand a complete reorganisation of visceral organs. La demande however ne peut aboutir and the staff knows this and goes on exactly as previously falling back into the old ruts which must be analysed as global social phenomena. A long discussion then opens on a two-pointed prong:

  A. Integration of a horizontal coordination into the proepigram (principle unanimously adopted: not to follow the principle).

  B. The number of groups thus desegmented to be actualised in the fall from the paradiso terrestre (Larissa Toren is opposed to all horizontal coordination which would degenerate, according to her, into useless chatter).

  Since, however, even a dead idyll is a mise-en-abîme and since every chasm opens into another chasm into which it is possible to fall as into a void, the intelligence nailed in pain as it sees through the acting out of its own lunatic trajectory, so every idyll dead alive or half dead opens out into another idyll, the idyll of Armel and Larissa, of Ali Nourennin and Saroja Chaitwantee Paolo and Francesca Lancelot and Guinevere Tristan and Iseult the potion and the holy grail the pen and the paper full of invariants such as the institution of learning rusticated into a bucolic carnival past-pralised by the presence of fixed motifs such as the equivocal use of exhorticultural terms for sexual ends and the display of vicious organs overflowing from the excess of hominivorous anguish. Larissa however has had most vicious organs removed, dropping a vessel here there and in the other place which explains her non-existence and consonantal compensation, piecemeal metonymised, parceled out, fragmented into synthetic synechdoche that organises a chiasmus in a forgotten name to create the rejection that she proinjects. Yours are the poems i do not write. In some languages things do themselves even when le ça ne se fait pas.

  But if you come too close to any icon vero or non vero you will see only the texture and the knife-strokes not the goddess curtained in black hair with a small phallus-man where the phallus by the psychological sell should be, wrapped up in swaddling clothes bandages or winding sheets. If however you distance yourself from that particular myth you see merely an oval with a blob off-centre which owing to an archaic flaw in the intensity of the illusion splits into dancing hoops that rise and fall into one another as if juggled by an invisible magician or a black recumbent grave into which two men leap to double death by dripping dagger plunged through a crown of thorns a golden O of all the world a stage which is the other scene. Let the phallos perceive its aim. Within each texture is another texture within each myth another myth each signifier signifying another each problem a preamble to a promble.

  Unless it is all the time, Oscar. The naked emperor of I-scream. Or the young man carbuncular whose concubines stereotype his index with names and numbers that he may reach his doctorate of indoctrination deliveried in ideology from top to toe a footman of the bourgeoisie.

  There are plenty of subjects to play with Oliver Claire Hubert Olaf Chou Gregory Stanley Catherine reformulating the poetics of the Renaissance in the poetry of the cry the representation always double and in any case unequal, in some respects less than life in others more than plenary Oscar for example more empirical and imperial than any empirical imperialist his lanky henchman more wenching and lanky in smoked glasses than any other guinea-pigs as eternal truths both universal and particular, each an emitter recipient and of course a place d1 1 d2 2 with sixteen possible types of unbalanced relationships the double standard being inescapable even in semiotics. Not to mention the students. Students however according to the lanky wenchman dressed in democracy and smoked glasses are very malleable. The element of manipulation however should not be too visible for it destroys the fictive illusion by making the recipient over-aware of a technique at work.

  Meanwhile Saroja Chaitwantee has at last fallen in love with Ali Nourennin just as he has grown a little weary of empty adagia wrapped in oriental mystery and hovers back to Hegel Heidegger Husserl. He also removes his watch, no one dreamer’s Kama Sutra fantasy coinciding in exactly the same quarter of an idyll.

  Which needs adjusting.

  Who speaks? What new narrator lover or mistress uttering there is no fear in love give not your soul etc except at night when the amber operates on both axes without taboo and all you need is care and courtesy (the notion of passion having disappeared), wondering however how to get through from the now which remains in the then to the then emptied of now. Simply by adding the heartlessness of then to then? But that is rather clumsy, metonymising the metaphor, projecting the horizontal axis of death onto the vertical axis of life and in a way cheating since you have given many a man a certain peculiar pleasure in frustrating their vulgar desire to know what happens inside you and that pleasure should not be dropped in mid-erection, leaving him hungry for it unless merely anorexic asthenic or cyclothymic, there can be no diagnosis since he too does not exist except as reinvestment itself perpetually reinventing S into O the Other Place and o the object of desire o1 o2 on.

  They reflect nothing, for the narrator has disappeared into a pool of lethal self-love with Echo echoing on, though that is only a manner of speaking and the manner of speaking says in the beginning was the parting shot. Never let anyone see you see through them. Never let yourself be fully known.

  Take these down as rules, preferable to thinking about the object of exchange in a double standard of the narrator’s omniscience that dips into many minds with varying degrees of presence of mind coming upon, at this point, the pistol, a mere instrument, whose only role is to utter by chance or by neurotic cunning the words of passion for ever unbelieved as surface structures every ninety minutes or so but opening up a vast mouthful of possible presences, an amateur Don Juan perhaps or Donatello of The Marble Faun why not? Oedipiano, piano.

  The moving finger writes and having writ scrubs out the diagram. Tous les signifiés du portrait sont faux but even altogether cannot succeed in naming the falsehood, although they point to it in a hermeneutic gap chock full of the parenthetic fallacy whereby the falsehood is long desired but evaded by way of the evasive mouth and its paradismal trick of articulation.

  It is the pain, it is the pain endures (I may the beaute of it not sosteyn) and pain, which takes a minimal fraction of a second thought to say, has to be lived through, and you could cover pages and maybe you do, rehandling the signifiers into acceptability and even amusement so that at last it vanishes like delight, a pricked balloon, a bubble not a festering boil. For no recipient desires a message of pain emitted from another, neither if he is in it nor if he is out of it, all the less so if has caused it. So you do not transmit the message, many times, and the unmany times you do you regret it since it falls on an earful of sirensong or wax or crabs. Only ebullience can be shared, grabbed, and is, for there is always someone who needs to reinvest in it.

  Marco for instance.

  Or is it Stavro?

  At last we

  The moving finger with its dumb designation maintains the truth (of the falsehood) in a pregnant plenitude the piercing of which (with the punishing finger in final position), both liberating and catastrophic, must bring about the end of the discourse, and the character (finger or pistol) is never more than a passage of the enigma with which you dip us all in the eternal debate with the sphinx that has stamped the whole of occidental paradismatics. Therefore the truth (about the falsehood) must be evaded at all cost of life until the death of the discourse.

  Or at any rate, it needs adjusting.

  Her hair is fair or dark, it doesn’t matter excep
t in gothic romanesque now that there are such subtle dyes even within the text. She is pale and sits

  Where?

  On the campus

  Can one sit on a campus?

  She sits on a castle terrace in Spain.

  Caramba not picaresque that’s as dead as the dread-letter novel.

  In Slovenia, talking to the count

  Titles have been abolished in Slovenia

  turning her back to you. It is a warm summer evening. The benches and tables are of wood, under a trellis of vine, facing the crenellated walls that hide the view of the valley. Scrub that. The bench and tables are of wrought iron, under the palladian colonnade, facing the flight of white stone steps that lead to the wide gardens wrought-ironed beneath the moon in patterns of clipped privet. By the light of adapted eighteenth-century coach-lamps between each tall french window two foursomes call out one heart, I pass, two diamonds, three clubs, three diamonds, I pass, four diamonds counterpointed by three hearts, four clubs, four hearts I pass. Other groups sit and talk, smoking and sipping wine.

  The count is a mad mathematician who makes strange signs on a sheet of paper as she leans half facing him, right breast tensed out by the angle of her arm right hand on her right hip, her thighs crossed tight under a black silk skirt, left elbow on the table the left hand supporting the long curve of jaw with thumb under the chin and the two long forefingers up into her temple hair the other two below her open lips, the two sets of two fingers forming an angle for the deeply interested gaze upon his words and symbols, and at the angle the wedding ring and the sapphire delicately ovaled in diamonds. But you should know Boolean algebra dear lady it would help you considerably look, I simplify, the connectives are not, or, and, if.