Waking one morning in a lather of sweat, he noticed, at the door of his bedroom, two of the largest lemons he had ever seen. Although conventional wisdom scoffed and snickered, they were quite big!
“Josephine,” he called quietly into the melancholy darkness. The lemons rustled in the corridor. He felt as if he had lost his mind, or as if he was about to be compromised by radical groups he’d somehow offended by a thought he’d entertained. Now Florida seemed to be no more than the optical illusion he had always suspected it to be even when good friends had assured him of its actual size, more or less. Where now the quiet breeze?
“Josephine,” he called again, but the lady was not there. No more would she assure “Tod” that he was of average height and average build, of, in fact, a decent size, much larger, in fact, than any lemon she had ever seen. And no more would she explain to him that everything in life is but an optical illusion, or something like it, no more remind him that somebody had once said that a hero removes all fruits from their places.
ALLEGORY OF INNOCENCE
They discovered a cache of old books, replications, wooden fences, a spangled gypon, assorted spheroids, and many other items, as yet unidentified. The Director, despite his unnerving obsession with luminous white dresses—and their ever-varying representations in his collection of Christian Fundamentalist pamphlets—was lucid enough to assert that some of the more common fabrics would forever remain mysterious as to their composition. “Dried grit,” “Leaves,” “Pebbles,” “Rifle,” “Fishing rod,” were but some of the names they tried attaching to some of the things, although it was clear that nothing quite fit. One of the group of assistants—actually, more than one—thought that certain of the larger umbrellas looked like navy-blue melton overcoats, admittedly an eccentric notion. Hub shards were quickly identified, as were metal brassiere caps, and, though grotesque enough, they were not as grotesque as many of the other “discoveries.” At about this time, the Director took to covering himself with mounds of his cherished gossamer evening gowns, the color of new snow, and neglecting, for days, his investigation of the woody perennials that were doubtlessly clues to the identification of the least familiar clumps.
One of the young women in the motivational group said that she’d seen one or two of the brightly colored biloxis in what she called “the better shops,” but her suddenly recovered memories put the kibosh on that assertion. In addition, the lost items of clothing obscured the logic, so to speak, of the biloxis’ arrangement. After one of the most beautifully delicate of the random crystals disintegrated, every puta bag in the area was seized by security, even though such bags had never been used for anything other than extramarital sexual powwows, or, as the bitch of an editor put it, “adventures.” “Security must consider puta bags vectors of blazing darkness, rather than the simple, filthy things they really are,” a lissome assistant remarked, her beautifully shod feet nonchalantly “parked” on the desk.
A few of the younger women, the “troops,” as they were jocularly called, suggested that a harmonics inspissator might reveal the true nature of the symmetrical devices, but they were, predictably, patronized, insulted, mocked, ogled, and ruthlessly complimented on their looks and attire by executive officers. A week later, beneath an economy-size Mammoth Nut Bar, the shipping-room mascot found yet another shocking photograph of the boss.
Amid the confusion and grumbling over the newly appointed Creative Person, another problem arose when Nan Hacktree, the author of tales based on her own warm yet mentally deranged family, stubbornly held that Wallace Wally’s novel, Over My Dead Body, had to be judged as something more, much more, than a book. “And I do not feature the word ‘deranged’ to describe my relatives,” Mrs. Hacktree liked to repeat. At this point, odds and ends as diverse as torn panties, obscure freak cartoons, and an aluminum soap dish were discovered in a collapsed family room. With this, the senior writers’ clique that championed redemptive dialogue became emboldened enough to denigrate such malign yet seductive imagery as garden walls, gnomons, Nazi moms in sheer nylons, and stardust. Other corrupt figures, e.g., battered work boots, crusted, sour pipes, and 1956 Chevrolets fared badly as well, especially during the waspish and misogynist lunches that were cynically thought of, by the clerical staff, as postmortems.
Within weeks, lipsticks, especially the shades Red Rider, Black Cloche, Glorious Bimbo, and Sunburn, became the preferred tools with which the more avid tyros surreptitiously polluted themselves during the demanding Creative Writing examinations. Mysteriously, the graffiti in the employees’ lounge read, in part, LES GRANDS JETS D’EAU SVELTES PARMI LES CHOSES. It may have been written by the staff comedian, whose most celebrated routine had to do with Philadelphia lawyers, silver bugles, and stupid waitresses—of course! The Collectors Association, already on the defensive because of a smutty joke told in mixed company by its Curator, pretended not to know anything about its holdings of pornographic bar mitzvah music and its recent purchase of the revolutionary artwork, “Money Talks.” It wasn’t long before the Meat Czar arrived at the Association offices with steaks, shoes, books, wind-up tin pigs, white ribs, cheese maps, nostalgia bastors, celebrity indices, etc., etc., more things, in fact, than you can shake a stick at.
As the weather worsened, the more serious sex workers—many of them fresh from the famous porches of the Deep South—spoke of their dreams of empty patios, cold twilights, distant voices, California sunshine, good-time Johnnies, and other crass selections too vile to enumerate. A crude wag was arrested and held overnight by the Sensitivity Committee for opining that what the ladies of the evening did “beats working.” Many psychologists attributed the young man’s cruel remark to his belief that heterosexuals are, when all is said and done, really homosexuals underneath.
At about the same time, the Board of Directors, with the assistance of the Bureau of Culture, ascertained that Wallace Wally’s sweeping saga of a man who lost his way on the prairies, Carnal Jitters, had discouraged twenty-two young writers from sending gifts to casual friends, although the latter were leading simple yet zesty lives! Many of these same writers had learned their manners from the old frauds who pretended an interest in inexpensive yet robust wines, translucent spheroids, pitiful tennis afternoons, The Journal of Virginia Woolf Journal Studies, aerobic mania, and movie stars with really good and, like, humanistic beliefs. The Stupefatto Poll, to everyone’s amazement, discovered that the “things” that had made these young people writers in the first place—blue uniforms, lovelorn fantasies, trees hard by the handball courts, girlish laughter from a small, wooded island, etc., etc.,—were metonymic substitutes for the zeppelin, or, in Lacanian terms, the path of the zeppelin. “Who knew?,” Rory Stupefatto mused.
And yet, the rigid instructors stubbornly refused to designate as Actual Things the Red Ball Express, the ill-fitting cap, the perfumed and ice-cold Persian lamb coat, the Jodie suit, and the good read. Apprised of this, one of the women, a Catholic Romantic, mentioned, blushingly, that a “baloney” seemed to be “in the feverish grip of dreamlike fingers,” an exercise in incoherence that had even Father O’Flaherty holding on to his Rosary for dear life. Others were unanimous in their opinion that secondhand cigarette smoke causes sexual harassment—including unwanted compliments!—and automobile exhaust. A certain Babs, who yearned to wear small black hats with dotted veils, sheer off-black stockings, black suede pumps, and flattering accessories, had to deny herself this pleasure since her husband was seeking tenure and that was that for couture. She wished that she might get up the nerve to roll the razor-edged mileage calculator back and forth over her husband’s multicolored overview notes which, as he had often told her, had to be judged, as more, much more, than just notes. Where had she heard such bullshit before? Or had she read it somewhere—under an umbrella, perhaps, amid coffee, cigars, and good ruby port? The sun is often hotter than it seems, or so Babs had learned in the awesome stillness of the mountains.
With the advent of the long winter nights, th
e black crayons and other gritty things in the Crakkerjax Factory began to look “mighty good” to the personnel of Wonderful Colleagues, Inc. Still, winter or not, Mrs. Hacktree swore that wrong-thinking applicants would be admitted to the snugly idyllic cottages “over [her] dead body” and, by implication, her dead mind as well. Given her ideas, certain of the more daring interlocutors thought it useful to save such models of the mundane life as Worcestershire-sauce constructs, salad-dressing displays, and lipstick multiliths, while others wanted to throw hot spinach at the iconic snowman, at the blinds, the victuals, at, really, every motherfucking thing in sight. They were, it was clear, wholly unimpressed by the fact that the “Beechwood Cabin” had once housed Sarah Orne Jewett’s mother-in-law, the author of “Fling My Snood to the Winds.”
Outside of the closed world of the motivational offices and research laboratories, private parks and the proscription of urination by the wrong sort of citizens were part of Palo Alto’s “Figures of White” program. City Council members, agog with the restoration of historic beer barns and other tasteful edifices, were anxious for the perfect jewel of a town to “Say No!” to poor taste. In the midst of its opening meeting on the subject of punishment for the transient, one member made it embarrassingly clear that he believed that the color of decay, disease, shit, piss, vomit, paralysis, and death is a color that one can’t help but see each and every day, right on the quiet, but rather sticky streets. The very idea was appropriated by the Council, and a local artiste was commissioned to paint, to actual scale, the mural “Pendejos de Oro,” which was already painted to actual scale. The original had, unfortunately, been vandalized by homoerotically inclined athletes, whom all the neighbors really related to.
As the true nature of the cache discoveries and subsequent experiments slowly became known, the Symptomatic Referent Equalizer proved to be one of the very few instruments capable of bringing about successful solutions to rebuses and puzzles. Pearl S. Buck’s personal copy of The Good Earth, for instance, was discovered to contain disguised representations of fur cloches, rice cakes, vinyl-covered chairs, large goldfish, and many other elements of a traditionally inscrutable Oriental nature. Critics note that this was the special hors de commerce edition that featured the peppery Madame Solange, a character who would rather straddle her horse, Ching Chow, than sojourn in the Plum Blossom Mountains of the Golden Jade. It was this text that led H.A. Zipp to his idiosyncratic belief that absolute silence, in combination with the other absolute phenomena, would eventually lead to what he gloomily termed “the crossing-over into numbing terror.”
Much of this lore was forgotten or diluted or revised when Professor Andouille asserted that she had just begun to recatalogue her collection of Brooklyniana when a leering man, described by the professor as a “Baptist,” entered her office, his trousers neatly folded over his forearm. This seemed an unlikely event, although if one believes that all things are interchangeable, in the Boolean sense, then Professor Andouille’s somewhat overheated story seems much like any common dark liquid. Far removed from this sex disturbance, on the edge of the compound’s croquet lawn, a solitary camper found it terribly unsettling to realize that the tightly corseted young woman in the sepia-tone photograph is not forever reaching for a hydrangea blossom, but for something that is forever, of course, beyond the edge of the picture. This young fellow had been somewhat Faustian at one time, and was thought to have had something disturbingly weird in mind when he asked Mrs. Walking, his high-school mileage instructor, for a garter of her love. And it was not to his benefit that Captain Theodore Rosa-Rose had, at just about the same time, discovered that the Color of Decay was one of the many forbidden novelties available via mail order, along with spicy short stories and small fallen trees, the latter guaranteed to symbolize things. Plain folks, so to speak, had very little use for his Oxford-gray suit, but liked the oddities they pulled out of his well when he was away on one of his investigations.
A newly hired nurse, Jenny, didn’t really like to stand, half-dressed, at the window, but it was, she claimed, “a feminist act, or like, statement,” much like a false moustache. As a response to these rampant attacks on sacred womanhood, religious folk of all stripes claimed that America needed good old reliable fetishes to make a reappearance in society, for instance, girdles, support hosiery, white plastic handbags, big corks, bobby pins, and serious but wholesome and humorous plays, with nice music. At least, the shipment of navy-blue melton overcoats and other worthwhile garments arrived in time for really hip writers to wear to the “Salute to Rupert Murdoch” celebration.
However, the liberal Jewish transvestites who lived in the lake house threw things like Greek salad around with imbecile abandon in their demented worship of filth, disorder, runaway government spending, and dead Christian babies. And the Physics Department, at one time the jewel of Corporate Entercon Corporation, Incorporated, was foundering amid the faddish hermeneutics of Zeppelino contravariant theory, the last thing that anyone would have imagined. The senior scientists’ attendant explorations of other entities of banal dimensions, e.g., cocktail-sauce bottles, snow photos, scale-model Packards, Wally pennants, etc., seemed almost frivolous after the new Motivational Therapist, a young lady from France, boarded the company bus in what seemed to be a semi-conscious state, or “trance.” The subsequent behavior of the passengers, conductor, and driver surprised and angered many citizens, especially those who believed that the glass ceiling had long since been cracked, if not shattered.
In the end, or, as the Frenchwoman’s report put it, the “final analysis,” madness, rage, and erotic fury presented themselves as the three most obvious states of being to hold sway over the entire group, each speckled, misleadingly, like a starling, as a New Formalist poet phrased it, yet again! “To write poetry that makes no sense is something like playing tennis,” as Chet Blanky once put it in conversation. And so, with work in various stages of completion or decay, and with loved ones whining of closure, the company agreed that although there may very well be more stars than anything else, this probability has absolutely no effect on the meaningless, which remains, stubbornly whole and unchanging. Religious beliefs, appallingly tawdry visions, and harsh legislation proscribing, denying, or outlawing this persistent state of affairs, this “reality,” if you will, have all proven useless.
SAMPLE WRITING SAMPLE
A Desk
To make a narrative concerning a number of aspects of what we might agree to be life—a simple enough program, and one that will, perhaps, make us feel closer to the world that we inhabit, more or less, or would prefer to inhabit were things as they should be. By paying strict, even rapt attention to the false world that will deal with certain aspects of life, embroidered, as they must be embroidered, we may gain an understanding of, well, real things as they really are. This is how literature works, if “works” is the word. I do not describe narrative, or this narrative, as false so as to mock or denigrate it, but to differentiate it from the real world that exists, despite all, for all of us, outside the narrative. And that is so even if the narrative appears to represent a number of aspects of that real world in, as might be said, moving and well-written prose. This seeming fidelity to the actual, while the actual roars on, unalloyed and unaffected, is one of the gloomy mysteries of fiction, a mystery that remains unsolved to the present day, one, in fact, that deepens with each reader who attempts to order his or her life by means of what can be called fiction. Some also use this latter to educate themselves. There is no telling what a reader may do when alone with a book.
To the narrative, then, or parts of it, of the whole, of that which may ultimately “become” the whole. To that blessed narrative that may almost write itself. Then “control” would seem to be the word, although it is not the precise word, nor, for that matter, is “word.” No matter, of course, for all may be corrected, changed, polished, all made clear in revision, revision, the handmaid of “the writing process,” for which nobody is too good. Writers often insist
that they revise, again and again, everything that they write, for writing must be heartbreakingly difficult to be authentic, heartbreakingly and exhaustingly demanding. Even this small item will be, and has been revised, or is in the process, even as I “speak,” revised to a fare-thee-well, an odd phrase, that, but one that comes to mind, another curious phenomenon of writing, the things that come to mind. That such things, or “phrases,” are mostly old and warm and as well-worn as an old shoe is part and parcel of that inevitable process, so dear to life, called, well, called something. Perhaps good writers don’t revise everything, but they do revise a good deal, a lot, actually, if they are to be believed. Even the lacerating yet redemptive personal memoir, chockablock with scenes of guilt-ridden incest and battered puppies must be revised, revised and “touched up” and, well, fucked with, so to speak.
One of the many reasons that the demanding heartbreak of revision is so necessary is its role in making the absolute falsity of the representation of reality more precise; that is, to enable the falsity of the narrative, by dint of laborious revision and the odd polished phrase, to gleam with what seems to be—and why not?—truth. Or at least something that may well be mistaken for it, gleam to a goddamned fucking fare-thee-well, for that matter. So to speak, as it were, after all, in sum, and finally. To insist that the perfection of the false is much closer to the imperfection of the something or other is awkward, yes, but natural and casual. The phrase may be corrected, or course, in revision, or it already has been. Writing takes many drafts, usually, to emerge victorious—well, not precisely victorious—unless the writer is Proust, who was satisfied with one draft, and that a rough one. And, too, there are Moby-Dick and Ellen Finds Out. Look at them! Book reviewers are often cognizant of such phenomena, but rarely give us the benefit of their profound knowledge, given space restrictions, the demands of commerce, and what readers prefer in the way of a good read. They know what makes a good read, else what’s a heaven for, and know, too, that good reads make them—and us, always us—feel as if they know the people within the reads and have spent time with them, for instance, Holden Caulfield and others, good pals all. They will not be duped by cheap falsifications of reality, two-dimensional characters lacking not only flesh but blood, and always insist on well-written representations of the real, representations that read as if seeing something or other for the first time. Craft! Well-written craft! That’s—or they’re—the ticket. Life that throbs is also a big winner in these serious purlieus. And what of characters who, while throbbing, are redeemed, brought to justice, and speak nothing but the crispest dialogue? Take Sarah Orne Jewett. Take Minister Handy. Authors who have made a world that one can reach out and touch, gingerly, to be sure, but touch nonetheless. Living, loving, lolling, losing, and hating. It’s not only as good as life, some argue, but better, at least in selected passages. Can the remarks on Dark Corridors of Wheat, pointedly made by Patricia Melton Cunningham, be easily forgotten? Huh? Well, this is what one may call, with little fear of contradiction, writing that matters on writing that matters. Consider The Paris Review, and other items, if you dare.
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