For more on the casuistry, the soteriology, and even the proctology of the letter X, see Edgar Lee Meaulnes.
NO
Felipe Luini, Hunting Journal
Ideas of Order, Wallace Stevens
Table of Contents
THE SCENT OF THUNBERGIAS
I. Early
II. The Imitation of an Ounce
III. Returns
IV. Occupation
V. The House on Calle Piedras
VI. The Cult of St. Mawr
VII. America
VIII. The Scent of Thunbergias
THE SEYCHELLES
I. Laetitia Pilkington
II. Hilarión Curtis
III. Doris Dowling
IV. Constantin Berev
V. Lord Swindon
VI. Irene Adler
VII. Venus Rattlesnake
SHERBET ARIA
I. Stealth//Centipede
II. Centaur
III. Arena
IV. Rhetoric
V. Karmapolis
VI. Ahnungslosigkeit
VII. Sestina
VIII. Pop Museum
IX. Portrait of a Tin Soldier
X. Chronoscopy
XI. Sircular Cymmetry
XII. Lycergical Glossary
XIII. Away with Them [Dead Aunt’s Diary]
XIV. Epilogolipomena
POPULAR MECHANICS
I. Every Nerve and Sinew
II. Semblance
III. Replicas
IV. The Xochimilco Diary
Appendices
All About X
Fame, Polyonymy, and Denial in Agraphia
Photo Anthology
The Biographies
Epistolary
The Dry Martinis
Poem and Sestina
NO
Glenmorangie—Nicasio
Better: Lagavulin
Or bourbon—Wild Turkey—prefers Jim Beam to Jack Daniels. Four Roses. Canadian Club.
Wyborowa. Stolichnaya.
Angostura. Negroni
dosage
Fernet or Negroni, Eiralis.
Red without question. And lots of it. Lalo.
The Dry Martinis
To sing sweetly then perish—“For Janis Joplin,” A. Pizarnik
She seems quite despondent in that photo of her seated barelegged: an attitude of cloying introspection induced (more than likely) by the Southern Comfort
NO
Include “The Slow Ones”?
Because we were late in arriving, because we were late in departing, because we didn’t care that we’d be late, and, above all, because those for whom we waited turned out to be ourselves, which is to say, the others, the ones we called “the slow ones.”
There were whole days and nights during which we lost our way, during which we lost our purpose. We bummed around exchanging tales of days gone by, anecdotes, gossip.
Because we’ll be late in arriving, because we are loath to depart, because we don’t care that we’ll be late. Above all, because those for whom we wait will turn out to be ourselves, which is to say, the others, the ones we call “the slow ones.”
Neither drunkenly nor sleepily they’ll call us—no, are calling us—“the slow ones.”
And when the prize finally arrives, when it ripens, there will be music that will saturate us, sweep us from here to there,
reveal us to the women. When that very night suffocates us in its witching hour, the décolletées begin their long-awaited shift.
The night has plucked itself a jasmine, a gardenia, and we have vowed beneath our breaths to say now what tomorrow will catch (how this promise will bloom) in our throats.
It is now late (or expected) and obvious (or transparent)
the context to be demolished is night. Night, yes, but so close to the moment when she’ll take her leave, as that old Egyptian relic begins nodding off, that it’s practically day in the desolate dark.
They must conceal themselves. They are few, but they surround us. None can name them. They come, they float downstream, the décolletées.
“He dined on a mess of shadows,” one of them said, “what a mouthful (placed out of the children’s reach, yesterday—out of reach of their grasping nails). And now, once again, investors want to pluck out their own eyes, to be merely clients, but the kind that don’t pay.”
But we cannot be less useful than we are. We arrive late, but we don’t care. We are content to dine on leftovers. We, the Slow Ones. We take in their necklines with inadequate glances. We used to be nearsighted—now we’re farsighted; myopes become presbyopes (curious, is it not, the transit from a silent E to one with a stress?). That which we used to be, we are, in the high Sufic night, we, the violate relics. How we suffer to return.
[II] An eruption, a volcano. The scientific vocation is certainly wanting in mortals who commune closely with the gods.
Clucking tongue. The décolletées passing. Scapular. Swaying solemnly, that arbitrary souvenir, a volcano scapular from Storyville, the red-light district, which I still have. Why do I keep it, what will I do with it?
NO
Superimposition
of the bottom of my glass, a brief instant—a slick of melting ice, to the last drop—over the window of a Havana hotel. It’s raining in the dry season.
Out of a Greek Gift
Ranelagh, 29 December, 1995/91?
“So Doctor Yturri Ipuche is also Doctor Purcenau?”
“Could be”
“And apparently he lied about everything”
“Don’t know, maybe it was just nearly everything.”
“Nor could one simply attribute this to the fact that they’re all, well, fictional characters?”
“Hardly even that: they’re floating voices, like in that Sarraute novel …”
“Some English writer did the same thing”
“Les Fruits d’ Or”
“careful now, it’s not like we don’t have examples closer to home”
“since nobody understood a word they said”
“There’s just no way it can be sustained for long. Four or five voices without social or political status to differentiate them, all chasing after the same chick, a muse with a capital M”
“Please stop”
“Ave María purísima …”
“Ave martini … dry”
“Maybe if they shared a real project, a political agenda, then you’d be able to include them. What did you say the book was about, exactly?”
“Well, it’s centered mainly on her, as a peripheral figure—no, better to say a hidden figure … being a girl. But—in any case. Here they saw the potential for many roles, right?”
Hopefully it rained. It was raining.
“How learned you are, what did you say it was called, again?
“No, those guys were such navel-gazers. Completely incapable of telling a story … Look, if I’d actually studied …”
“It was psych, for me, lit for everyone else …”
“thing is, it was going to be a play, the title of which escapes me just now …”
“Urn something”
“and you called it … ?”
“oh, a … prolegomenon to an awful play. The awful”
“He was no stranger to them. And didn’t those guys also do work with the Brits and the Galicians?”
“perfectly bilingual”
“well, there you are, Melchior, it’s already getting hazy for you—he was Flemish, un flamand, he spoke six languages.”
“with that stupid face of his? … Tribilin … [?lingual]”
“Come now, we don’t want to let our reminiscing spoil your …”
“Spoil what?”
“The broth. This theory, hypothesis, or whatever it is”
“Wrong and wrong. Want another guess?”
“It’s a monograph”
“The hell you say”
“Don’t let the owner know, but that review of theirs keeps on coming out�
�
“and we two still contribute. Sporadically”
preaching to the deaf. My illegitimate father. Second chance, prayer of the river at the shores of.
how strange that I loved so …
“she’s no less important to us. As a spokeswoman”
“But how old are they?”
“Who?”
“Look, they’re coming down”
“How many miles has it been?”
“when did you finally tell the assistant?”
“So much the worse for us that we were picked to ‘discover her’ and “tell the story,’ in the movie by that friend of yours …”
“Every once in a while, or every so often, a novel, or a book with some political agenda is found …”
“the assistant”
“Lucky him”
“Politics in a novel, said Stendhal, is like firing a pistol during a concert. That’s stayed with me”
“We won’t ask for examples”
“But there are some”
“It’s a can of worms, Inés”
“But isn’t that all you do together?”
She wanted a glass to continue the argument. The other guy handed her one.
“that thing about the history of Prague—I read it too. And it was—what can I say? Bankrupt, inane …”
“Well, there are periods in history of which nothing survives. Or a little, just a little”
“Psychedelia, psycholalia … who the hell knows … experimental cinema”
“they leave their mark”
“Vienna while in Prague”
“who really cares … whether any of that stuff survives?”
“I disagree entirely”
“it all goes back to the father, see”
“what survives of that era? I noticed the other day … what’s his name?”
“Bergsonne”
“So-so”
If I should awaken, I will try to go back to sleep.
Since the reader will find throughout this effort a lot of unnecessary, perhaps superfluous, punctuation, reflecting the anxiety and indecision of the writer, it wouldn’t be entirely presumptuous to include a preface [note the inconsistency of this regime]. For what it’s worth: I wasn’t trying to write something experimental (much less spontaneous) when I commenced this journal. I was trying to find a structure in the mass of [modest, always modest!] narrative/cyclical intermittencies.
NO
Cryptodermia/deafness
There are none so deaf as those who will not hear
Strum away
Occupation
Auden, poem on Melville
As though his occupation were another island
When he saw them again, on that morning in August after returning from a visit to the city, he found them quite as submissive and conceited as ever; and he, once again trapped in their especial variety of conversational antechamber (in which they oft belabored him with successions of halting effusions), sought escape by firing off—or more properly, stammering—a bêtise on the “perfumed scent” of his butler’s arrhythmic respiration, which was indeed perceptible to him in more than one—and to more than one—sense. Not that George Smith’s exhalations were any more perfumed or arrhythmic than usual, but his master, having grown accustomed to the salubrious air of the city, and being somewhat distracted by his servants’ tedious divagations, judged his Butler’s breath to be, on this occasion, especially noisome, which contrasted starkly with that natural air of unbending courtesy that poor old George exuded in his manner, the odor of which, in its many persuasive nuances, would, in fine, have made any other man feel at home in his company.
Interruption: explanation/reasons/stylistic(s)
A story in the style of Henry James—perhaps unnecessary. Telling a genuine anecdote from his life (it’s in Leon Edel)—try to make convincing and meaningful for the ever-vigilant eye of Agraphia, or else discard. Don’t just parody, like Beerbohm (hopefully, I can pull it off). Try anyway.
Could proceed as follows:
When George had finally left, it was only the two of them at home, and he, nonetheless longed to evade that situation too, and by the same exaggerated dissimulation that proved useful in his escape from their suffocating antechamber. But Lydia Smith wouldn’t leave his side, debriefing him, as was customary, concerning his engagements for the coming hours, one of which, she supposed, would be a luncheon; and accumulating in the course of her routine interrogation, was that mixture of “perfection and sherry” he’d once mentioned in a letter to his brother (a letter in which, with customary—or simply epistolary—reserve, he’d avoided giving too many details), which continued accumulating as they settled his provisional itinerary for the coming days.
Keep the action slow, focus on preferences:
He would have preferred—he muttered to himself, before repeating it aloud to Lydia—a simple dish, something botanical: vegetables, greens… and so he continued, spouting synonyms in triplicate until he made of simplicity a conundrum. Then, ignoring his interlocutor’s indifference at this attempt to impose on their quotidian yet another one of his literary manias—and resisting the urge to answer the snub with a boast on his palatial refinement—he informed her that he would be dining alone this afternoon. His friends would only arrive the following day, while his gentleman acquaintance might arrive as soon as Thursday afternoon; on which day, in the event he should be alone—and safe, after all—(for there was always the possibility his friend might decline the invitation, or else arrive late, or else leave early), he would then also prefer a simple botanical collation (greens, vegetables), for he always ingested complicated fare when dining out. And, for him, dining out was not unusual.
He saluted Burgess with an expansive wave through the window, and when Max entered, he also saluted him, although he refrained from leaning over to do so. Nonetheless, after uttering some preliminary endearments that would have been unintelligible to Max even had he been human, his master stooped to pet him—a complicated act, from his altitude, especially given that his characteristically slight but by no means willowy frame had lately expanded to the dimensions of a prosperous entrepreneur—at which point, Lydia, with the finesse of an accomplished supporting actress, seized the opportunity to make a discreet if nonetheless theatrical exit. He straightened back up. Now steady, and with his eyes closed, he recalled again the scent of Lydia’s breath—perfection and sherry—and judged it less offensive and noisome than that of George.
To be continued?
“Dos de Nosotros” gives an account of Nurlihrt’s reflections on adultery:
He doesn’t really care, he insists, but as with any issue where what’s really going on and how it’s reported vary depending on their respective subjects and objects—when we criticize others, it’s called invective; when others criticize us, it’s called abuse [Kingsmill]—adultery is a question best examined, dispassionately, with neither pleasure nor circumspection, as part of a larger phenomenon, in this case called—without bandying words, and sans musique—jealousy.
He doesn’t really care, he insists, and insists I pay such close attention that I feel remiss in not taking notes as he tells me about Elena’s imperturbability yesterday after he took her hands in his and remarked, “Cold hands, warm heart! Is there anyone in particular on your mind?”
He doesn’t care. He looks at me, idly curious—putting on a mask of indifference to shield himself from the pain he knows he causes: “And what about Sabatani, Dos,” I asked, “after the storm, when I got back the day before—remember? You know, I couldn’t help but think of the enduring and astonishing validity of what Powell said about women, that their greatest show of fidelity was to start fights with their lovers.”
The nearest some women get to being faithful to their husbands is being disagreeable to their lovers.
A.P.
Terror that X-Positions might end up looking like those hated novels 62: A Model Kit or Revol’s Mutaciones bruscas (Sudden C
hanges).
Both of which I read so fondly when I was at the cusp of adolescence. But it does resemble them, sad to say. We can’t escape our early influences—there’s my attempt at rationalization. And more: there’s no denying the pressure exerted upon us at that most crucial moment—at the threshold between childhood and adolescence—by our reading. Just plain reading. The burden of those early devotions—like stamp collecting. And, even worse, the fact that your writing forever advertises every last baffling and muddy trace left behind by that confessional devotion: a sort of damper placed on your entire life, a humiliating expulsion of those errors you accumulated in the name of experience. To quote Lope de Vega’s fundamental, eternal, infrangible enjambment: “That I have loved at other times / I cannot deny.”
Girri / El Carapálida: Diary of a Book. In the letter, ambiguous forest
We return to James
Lydia—perhaps because she had a genuine faith in his judgment, or because she was being indifferently compliant, or because something had alerted her to the exigencies of the day—had left before the end of his oration. It was startling, a miracle of indecisiveness. Even his questions were somewhat vacuous, empty, so that they sounded like irresolute twangs redoubling in an echo chamber. But it mattered not in those instances how obvious those empty spaces were, how provisional, how inane the suspense they induced in the hearer, for they reflected his own unwholesome diet, his discipline of misgiving, his false modesty.
In the study with Max, his first thought was that he need not wait for George’s traps to fulfill their function, that Max could catch the rat on his own … And he recalled an anecdote of Doctor Johnson’s—or only half-recalled, rather, according to his customary mode of recollecting—: It was strange, uncanny really, especially for it being a piece of prose, and more so because he managed to remember all the subtleties of accent and rhythm, the variable cadences of the piece, and yet none of its sense. No, it wasn’t entirely strange: it was a confirmation of what he had believed his entire life, without realizing it, and certainly without regard for metrics or prosody; something that was difficult to explain without exhaustive preamble, for the belief required much correction and refinement over the years, during which time it grew like the spider’s web that eventually ensnared him, disrupted his life. Life, with its senseless task. To grumble every day and night scratching one’s head in an effort to apprehend what makes as much sense, superficially, as a black dog barking in the street. Because the substance of an event was never fully captured in the considered act of describing or defining as much as by a fleeting grammatical discharge, which reveals as much as can be revealed respecting an event’s fugacity or fixity, above all that mobile quality, that acoustic quality, imitated again and again, although the meaning was lost, or was relegated to the limbo of one’s memory.
No Variations (Argentinian Literature Series) Page 5