by Kathy Acker
A Nouveau-Riche Woman (to the rebels): You rebels are so fashionable. You dress in the most cunningly torn rags. Where can I buy rags just like yours?
Rebels (to Janey, who just escaped from gaol with Genet): You stink. Get out of here. We don’t need shit-ass dogs like you. Go to the sewers.
Janey: Please tell me if the world is horrible and if my life is horrible and if there’s no use trying to change, or if there is anything else. Is desire OK?
Genet: Where’s Sahih?
Janey: Please tell me if the world is horrible and if my life is horrible and if there’s no use trying to change, or if there is anything else. Is desire OK?
The rebels kick Janey out of the city.
Scene 10
The desert outside Alexandria. Janey and Genet are still walking. Soon there’s nothing. Due to the blazing sun and exhaustion, all Janey and Genet see are mirages or mirrors, pictures of themselves, images of the world which come out of themselves.
Janey: I’m tired. I can’t move anymore. Sun and dust. I’m sun and dust. The dust on the road is the sadness that’s blowing up inside me and that’s eating me away. Where are we going, Genet?
Genet (looking straight at Janey): Where am I going?
Janey: Where are we going, Genet?
Genet: I’m going, me, alone; how can I be with you? The closer you get to me, the more I hate you. I’m going, OK? Far far away, the land of the monster. Even if it’s where there’ll never be sun, since you’re tagging along, you’re my shadow.
Janey: You can leave me.
Genet: If you stick your filthy body so close to me you’re me, I’ve got to look for the land where the monster lives.
Janey: Wasn’t poverty and gaol enough?
Genet: Poverty and gaol are just the beginning. Don’t you know that by now? Soon there’ll be no more sleep and you’ll have to eat thistles.
Janey: Thistles?
Genet: Sand.
Janey: There’s really nobody. Nothing. Not a living thing. The stones are only stones. America and Europe’re no longer anything. Things are winding down to the sea, to the sea, we to the sand.
Genet: You don’t have to be shy anymore.
Janey: I do. (She pauses.) A mirror. (She picks up a comb and begins to comb her lousy hair.)
Genet: Don’t touch it. (He tears the comb out of her maggot hair and breaks it.)
Janey: I’ll obey you. But I want, (gains courage and firmness, decision) I want you to forget who you are. (Corrects herself.) Been. I want you to lead me without hesitation into the land of the shadow and the monster. I want you to plunge into endless misery and hardship. I want – because it’s my ugliness, my lack of femininity, my wounded body, earned minute by minute that is all that is left to speak – I want you to be without hope. I want you to choose evil. I want you to feel hatred and violence. I want you to refuse the delicacy of thistles, the softness of rocks, the beauty of the darkness, the emptiness. I know where we’re travelling, Genet, and I know why we’re travelling there. It’s not just to travel, but it’s so those others who kicked me out have a chance of being at peace, have a chance of knowing the land of the monster without going there.
Genet: Do you think that’s possible?
(A long silence. Genet takes off a shoe, shakes out a stone that has been bothering him. Then he puts the shoe on.)
The desert is absolutely brilliant. Gradually the sun becomes yellow, orange. Gleaming gleaming orange. The more brilliant it’s become, the more it sinks. The brilliant colour is going out of the sun as it’s turning dark red and going into the orange sky, above and below the orange a violet line. The violet lengthens and darkens into blue. The sky between the dark blue is purple. Above the clouds are pale purple. They drift past, above, the dark ball. The desert is grey. The air is getting cold.
Then it is night.
The dogs are barking in the distance. You can see the pointed tips of their heads.
Genet: Rest your head against this milestone and try to sleep.
Janey: Sleep? If I’m walking across rocks, if I’m eating thistles, if I’m letting my skin burn in the sun, it’s to murder my everlasting sleep.
Genet: Since it’s not going to croak until you do, at least let me sleep. It’s no good trying to die. Up there God controls everything …
End:
Back in Alexandria the rebels have taken over. They’re winning the city. Blood doesn’t spurt to the sky like a geyser, yet from one edge of the world to the other how red the night is!
Genet and Janey travel through Cairo, through the twin cities of Minya and Asyut, down to the city of Luxor. There Genet hands Janey some money and tells her to take care of herself. He has to go away to see a production of one of his plays.
She dies.
A second of time
So the doves …
So the doves cooed softly to each other, whispering of their own events, over Janey’s grave in the grey Saba Pacha cemetery in Luxor.
Soon many other Janeys were born and these Janeys covered the earth.
Blood and guts in high school
This is all I know
Parents teachers boyfriends
All have got to go.
Some folks like trains,
some folks like ships,
I like the way you move your hips
All I want is a taste of your lips,
boy,
All I want is a taste of your lips.
The Journey
There are no more judges, there are only thieves, murderers, firebrands.
Wild horses
A forgotten city.
We reached the tomb. Dead Catullus who was clutching the book woke up and told us the following story:
A rascally evil priest who cared only for money told me, when I was still alive, that the book I sought, this book which I’m now as a dead man holding, could be mine if I gave him $100,000. And two new coffins. I did what he asked and then held a knife to his throat. Just before I killed him, he told me I could find the book in a gold box in a silver box in an ivory box in a palm-tree wood box in a bronze box in a iron box
surrounded by swarms of the desires that drive us mad,
desires encircled by a golden bracelet whose ends are joined,
in the East River.
I set out,
says Catullus,
for the East
River …
“We don’t care what danger there is, we tell the dead man after he finishes speaking. “But we can no longer be human. We’ve got to have that book.”
“You don’t know what you’re doing,” the dead poet says.
“You don’t know anything. Therefore you can’t do anything.
“You’re capitalist bourgeois sluts.
“You’re insane. Go back home.”
We must have that book!
We gamble for the red book with the dead poet who becomes a devil.
We are dreaming of sex,
of thieves, murderers, firebrands,
of huge thighs opening to us like this night.
The World
The World
A light came into the world. Dazzling white light that makes lightness dazzling burning Happiness. Peace. The forms of the ancient arts of Egypt this is the time that wolves come out of the trees.
This is a wolf.
This is a dog.
This is a horse.
This is an elephant.
This is a kangaroo.
This is a snake.
This is a flower.
Golden bracelets lie around corpses’ arms.
Thick black bracelets, studded with silver, around their ankles.
The sun is the world.
In ancient Egypt the land of gold,
giant aligators lived in tall weeds.
The King of Alligators is Power.
The soul has freedom to wander at will
A human is a being halfway between a
n alligator and a bird who wants to be a bird.
The ancient books say there are ways humans can become something else. The most important book on human transformation is hidden with the corpse Catullus in the Saba Pacha Cemetery in Alexandria because all books were written by dead people.
Shall we look for this wonderful book? Shall we stop being dead people? Shall we find our way out of all expectations?
THE BEGINNING
Let the conversation begin …
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PENGUIN CLASSICS
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Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
First published in 1984
First published in Penguin Classics 2017
Copyright © Kathy Acker, 1978
Cover artwork after a photograph of Peggy Moffit by William Claxton/Courtesy Demont Photo Management.
The moral right of the author has been asserted
ISBN: 978-0-241-30252-1