Gunslinger 9781478002307

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Praise for Gunslinger

“Gunslinger is perhaps the strangest long poem of the last halfcentury: a quest myth wrapped around an acid-inspired western comic strip adventure in which a gunslinger, astride a drugtaking, talking horse called Levi-Strauss, searches for Howard Hughes.”—patrick mcguinness, The Guardian “There is nothing else like it in poetry.”—Publishers Weekly “A dramatic poem of the first order for our day.” —andrew hoyem, Poetry “Gunslinger is perhaps the most important poem of the last half of the twentieth century.”—james k. elmborg “An immense bundle of swift-moving fun from the beginning. . . . But the underlying spirit of it is immensely entrepreneurial and buccaneering and disrespectful and altogether a kind of advanced parody of the whole business of episodic serial writing (the fabular and fabulous in the fable). The entire American adventure is laid out there with great wit and humour.” —j. h. prynne “One of the major North American long poems.” —tom raworth, The Independent (London) “This is a jokey poem, high-spirited and good-tempered, carried forward on a steadily inventive play of puns and pleasantries.” —donald davie

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Gunslinger

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...

50th Anniversary Edition ...

With an introduction and a new foreword by Marjorie Perloff duke university press  Durham & London

Gunslinger © Edward Dorn (Jennifer Dunbar Dorn) Foreword © 2018, Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞ Cover designed by Matthew Tauch Cover art: Photo by Maciej Bledowski / Alamy. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Dorn, Edward, author. Title: Gunslinger / Edward Dorn ; with a new foreword by Marjorie Perlof. Description: 50th anniversary edition. | Durham : Duke University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.  Identifiers: LCCN 2018010544 (print) | LCCN 2018018678 (ebook) | ISBN 9781478002307 (ebook) | ISBN 9781478000631 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781478000853 (pbk. : alk. paper) Classification: LCC PS3507.O73277 (ebook) | LCC PS3507.O73277 G8 2018 (print) | DDC 811/.54—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018010544 “To Eliminate the Draw: Edward Dorn’s Gunslinger” was originally published in American Literature 53, 3 (1981): 443–464. ©1981. All rights reserved. “A Bibliography on America for Ed Dorn” from Charles Olson, Collected Prose, edited by Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander. ©1997 by the Regents of the University of California, Estate of Charles Olson, University of Connecticut. Published by the University of California Press.

Contents

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Foreword by marjorie perloff

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Introduction by marjorie perloff



Gunslinger by Edward Dorn



Book I

1



Book II

43



The Cycle 87



Book III



Book IIII 143

203

To Eliminate the Draw: Edward Dorn’s Gunslinger michael davidson

233

A Bibliography on America for Ed Dorn charles olson

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Foreword On the Fiftieth Anniversary of Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger

Book 1 of Gunslinger, published in the cataclysmic year 1968, begins with the Slinger’s quest to find “an inscrutable Texan named Hughes / Howard,” last seen in Boston but having, according to rumor, “moved to Vegas / or bought Vegas and moved it.” In my introduction to Gunslinger (1989), I noted that Dorn once referred to Hughes as an “extension of the earlier, nonelectronic, financial geniuses like [James] Fisk and [Jay] Gould.” And I added, “Dorn’s representation of Hughes anticipates, for that matter, the current ‘legend’ of Donald Trump and his empire.” When I reread these words recently I was quite startled. I can’t remember having even known of Trump’s existence back in the 1980s; I never paid attention to the endless tabloid stories about Trump Tower, the Trump divorces, and so on, and I must confess that I have never watched a reality show. Subliminally, however, Trump must have already been part of our collective unconscious and hence of my own. But celebrity is not, after

all, equivalent to fame: whereas Hughes, however sinister, was a genius in engineering, aeronautics, and film-making, Trump’s appeal is closer to the circus world of Barnum & Bailey. From Hughes to Trump: it seems a clear-cut example of Marx’s aphorism that great men always appear twice, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. Ed Dorn was unusually prescient in understanding how this evolution works: his Howard Hughes begins as a figure of mystery and charisma, but as the poem progresses, he increasingly becomes a Trumpian comic-book character, a mere cypher, who before long disappears from the poem’s scene, as does its “Western” geography, which gives way to the “marvelous accidentalism” at the end of Book IIII, where the poet announces that he is “Moving to Montana soon / going to be a nose spray tycoon,” even as the Slinger himself declares: I’ll go along with the tachyon showers which are by definition faster than light & faster than prime I’ll be home by suppertime. In his afterword to Dorn’s Collected Poems, published by Carcanet in 2012, Amiri Baraka, one of Dorn’s oldest poet-friends, reminds us that in a late poem called “Tribe,” Dorn writes: My tribe came from struggling labor Depression South Eastern Illinois Just before the southern hills start To roll toward the coal country Where the east/west morainal ridges Of Wisconsin trash pile up At the bottom of the prairie, socially ...

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Where I was brought up of and on during The intensity of the depression, parents Wandering work search, up and down The bleak grit avenues of Flint . . . ... Michael Moore–land from the beginning .... I’m with the Kurds and the Serbs and the Iraqis And every defiant nation this jerk Ethnic crazy country bombs— . . . But I’m straight out of my tribe from my great grandma Merton Pure Kentucky English. . . . “What’s so interesting,” Baraka comments, “is that Dorn always reflected that tribal anguished sense of being somehow distanced from an America he was obviously deeply a part of.” It is that conflict, he posits, that put Dorn in a unique position to write his gestural epic about a “Wild West” that is actually refracted through endless media and pop-culture prisms. Gunslinger is itself a kind of reality show, anticipating, in an uncanny way, the rhetorical games and bizarre pronouncements that paved the road to the White House for Donald Trump in 2016. Dorn’s is indeed Michael Moore–land. But—and this is what makes Gunslinger a unique long poem— however sharp the poet’s critique of the Western landscape and its denizens, its tale must be taken comically. Had Dorn been alive to witness the 2016 U.S. election, he would, I believe, have had no more patience with the solemn, self-righteous attacks on the president that flood our daily papers than with the memx

bers of his own “tribe” in the hills above the coal country who voted for Trump. This point is astutely made by another Dorn poet-friend, the Cambridge don J. H. Prynne. Known for the difficulty of his learned and scientifically sophisticated poetry, for his reclusiveness, his refusal of all media presence, Prynne flew halfway around the world to attend Dorn’s memorial in Boulder in 1999. In his eulogy, transcribed for the Collected Poems, he emphasizes the “rare precious quality of absolute independence of voice” in Dorn. Even in the face of 1968 tragic frenzy—the LA and Chicago Riots, the Vietnam War, the French uprising, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy— Dorn’s voice, Prynne remarks, “was never political in the sense that there was ever any party he had any time for whatsoever. Whenever the party got to organize, he was out of it. There was no question. The only people he had time for were the people whom the parties professed to speak on behalf of, whom they would employ as part of their rhetorical argument to mobilize whatever advantages they wanted for themselves. His sense of hypocrisy was extremely acute.” I think this is a very telling statement. Sometimes, Dorn’s satire can look unnecessarily harsh, too flatly negative. But as Prynne notes, the poet’s central purpose is “to keep the language from falling into the hands of those who want to promote it as an oppressive instrument.” To accomplish this, the poet must avoid the programmatic, the institutional, the endless claims for American exceptionalism made by both political parties. Only comedy, the poet of Slinger implies, can handle this state of affairs, and Gunslinger relies on parody, burlesque, a set of comic characters, and especially its brilliant verbal play to create the epic’s very special atmosphere. If, in this year of Oxycontin overdoses, its drug argot seems a bit dated, its critique of a money-mad society, in which highly trained physicians willfully distribute drugs like xi

Oxycontin to unsuspecting elderly people, is as sharp as ever. A poet genuinely ahead of his time and still largely unrecognized by the Verse Establishment, Dorn has given us a cartoon epic that eerily looks ahead to the Trump World of the twenty-first century in all its absurd dimensions. Mar-a-Lago: what a perfect name for the location—“the enormous space / between here and formerly,” “the vacuum of social infinity”—where Slinger and Madam Lil, Kool Everything and Tonto Pronto, Dr. Jean Flamboyant, the Stoned Horse named Claude after Lévi-Strauss, and especially the earnest narrator named “I”—conduct one of their evenings of fun and games? ­Marjorie Perloff

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Introduction

Driving South to the Los Angeles International Air­ port on Highway 405 (the San Diego Freeway), one takes the Sepulveda exit only to find oneself on what seems to be another highway, this one called Howard Hughes Boulevard. Improbably wide, newly paved, and treelined, Howard Hughes Boulevard invites high-speed driving but then suddenly dead-ends with a sharp left turn onto Sepulveda. A mirage of sorts, the boulevard provides the motorist with a glimpse of empty lots behind a chain-link fence : the road map does not identify the territory, but Los Angeles mo­ torists sometimes refer to it as the Howard Hughes Testing Range. But is anything actually being tested in all this emptiness? And what does Howard Hughes have to do with it? These are questions Edward Dorn posed almost two decades ago in SUnger, his dazzling anti-epic of

the W ild West, in which the narrator (“ I ” ), sets out with the “ Cautious Gunslinger/of impeccable per­ sonal smoothness/and slender leather encased hands” (3), on a quest in search of aan inscrutable Texan named Hughes” : Howard? I asked The very same. And what do you mean by inscrutable, oh Gunslinger? I mean to say that He has not been seen since 1833. (6) And again: but I heard this Hughes Howard? I asked Right, boy they say he moved to Vegas or bought Vegas and moved it, I can’t remember which. (9) But of course by the time we reach the end of SUnger, we “ can’t remember which” either. For Las Vegas turns out to be “ a vast decoy” (169), a simulacrum deflecting the Slinger’s “ timetrain,” just as the “ real” Howard Hughes Boulevard is a simulated speedway that dead-ends almost as soon as it gets under way. As an epic of contemporary celluloid America, with its cartoon versions of Capitalist Entrepreneurs and Outlaw Heroes, its simulated folksiness, its Sci-Fi allusions and reductive academic clichés, SUnger was a poem very much ahead of its time. When Book I

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appeared in 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War, it was treated as something of an anomaly, even though the Black Sparrow edition of only 600 copies quickly became an underground classic and a collec­ tor’s item. Neither confessional like Lowell’s Note­ book 1967-68) nor epiphanic and intensely subjective like Merwin’s The Lice, nor even enigmatically ru­ minative like John Ashbery’s The Double Dream of Spring, Book I of Slinger has more in common with Pop Art than with the mid-century American lyric, even the lyric of Black Mountain (Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov) with which Dorn has regularly been associated. Like such Pop Artists of the sixties as Jim Dine and Larry Rivers, Dorn is concerned with the ar­ chaeology of mass-produced myths, specifically, in the case of Slinger, the Western myth of the frontier, with its sharpshooters and ranchers, its saloons and small towns, its ballads and brothels. But his West is not that of John Wayne or Gary Cooper ; it is the plastic, gestural “ West” we encounter on t v , in comic strips, rock songs, drug argot and pulp science fiction. As such, geography (what Dorn has called in an in­ terview “ the writing of earth, earth writing” ) im­ perceptibly becomes history: indeed, place (Mesilla, Truth or Consequences, the Rio Grande, Las Vegas) is itself a simulacrum, the t v screen presenting the same images in New York as in Four Corners, whereas time, the Vietnam War moment of the late sixties and early seventies, is central to Dorn’s nar­ rative. Not that the poem is overtly about the war. In

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Dorn’s allegorical scheme, characters exist, not as particular individuals but as functions of a larger mechanism, relational properties that take on mean­ ing only in their interaction. The Gunslinger himself, for instance, is presented as the classic comic-book outlaw hero, a macho sharpshooter who drinks tequila and punctuates his cryptic remarks with obscenities. But the Slinger is also a Semidiós, who can “ unroll the map of locations” (4), a phenomenologist who is given to burlesque treatises like the following: Negative, says my Gunslinger, no thing is omitted. Time is more fundamental than space. It is, indeed, the most pervasive of all the categories in other words theres plenty of it. And it stretches things themselves until they blend into one, so if youve seen one thing youve seen them all. (4 -5 ) Slinger (in Britain the term refers to one who plays the stock market) or Zlinger, as he is later called, is also a Noble Bard of sorts, his farewell speech in Book 11II a slightly offbase iambic pentameter sonnet that splices together bits of Keats, Shakespeare, and Sci-Fi: Many the wonders this day I have seen the Zlinger addressed his friends Keen, fitful gusts are whispering here and there

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The mesas quiver above the withdrawing sunne Among the bushes half leafless and dry The smallest things now have their time The stars look very cold about the sky And I have grown to love your local star But now niños, it is time for me to go inside I must catch the timetrain The parabolas are in sympathy But it grieves me in some slight way because this has been such fine play and I ’11 miss this marvellous accidentalism (198) The poem’s “ fine play,” its “ marvellous acciden­ talism” stems, as we shall see, from the interaction between the Slinger and his two primary foils. The first is “ Hughes/Howard,” also known by his middle name as Robart (i.e., rob art, the role of American capitalism being, so Dorn believes, to destroy the mainsprings of art), toward whom the Slinger is al­ ways tilting even as he never catches up with Hughes and indeed ultimately forgets that it is his aim to find the mysterious entrepreneur. One of the poem’s ironies is that the counterculture Slinger himself can­ not help admiring this “ great singular,” as Dorn calls Hughes in an interview, this “ extension of the earlier, non-electronic, financial geniuses like Fisk and Gould.” Dorn’s representation of Hughes antici­ pates, for that matter, the current “ legend” of Don­ ald Trump and his empire. The gunslinger’s second foil is the poem’s nar­ rator, “ I,” who represents, in Michael Davidson’s words, “ the last vestige of the self-conscious, ration­

alizing ego” of Cartesianism, the unitary self whose trust in linear logic and rationality leads him into an endless series of questions that the Slinger and his friends find inappropriate if not ludicrous: Heidigger? I asked the Xtian statistician is that who you are? Are you trying to “ describe” me, boy ? (25) Or again: Please don’t hold my shortcoming against me oh Gunslinger and may I enquire of you — Enquire? he breathed don’t do that W ell then may I .. . no I wouldn’t do that Either (29) As Slinger’s persistent interrogator, “ I ” wants to un­ derstand what things mean (28), what is behind statements made, and where propositions lead. As such, “ I” is the object of everyone else’s ridicule, the poem’s phenomenological perspective denying First Principles and Transcendental Meanings and insisting that, in the words of the Slinger, it is wrong to “ want to know/what something means after you’ve/seen it, after you’ve been there” (29). As the nagging Ego in a world of fragmented selves, “ I ” appropriately dies in Book II and is embalmed in a five gallon can of LSD, but he reappears in Book IIII in his post-LSD

x v iii

incarnation as the secretary to the pre-Socratic phi­ losopher Parmenides, a kind of cybernetic intelligence who no longer tries to mediate the information he receives, no longer insists on the sanctity of his ego. The dismantling of “ I ” ’s consciousness plays a literary role as well. No longer, Dorn implies, is poetry bound to the first-person mode, the narrative controlled by the unitary voice of the first person. Rather, selves collide, merge, and take on each other’s identity ; indeed, the group supercedes the individual. Between Slinger and “ I,” other voices position them­ selves: Lil, the quintessential Mae West frontier dance-hall madam, the Poet-Singer, whose lyrics are a mixture of Shelleyan ode and media-speak and whose dismantling of the language plays a major role in Dorn’s epic, and the Stoned Horse (a parodie ver­ sion of the cowboy’s beast of burden), who smokes the giant marijuana cigars known as Tampico bomb­ ers and is a kind of Blakean “ horse of instruction” sometimes called Claude Lévi-Strauss and sometimes Heidegger— both critics, of course, of the Cartesian rationalism the poem is at pains to debunk. In later books we also meet a comic-book version of the sixties’ acid freak named Kool Everything (“ my Head has been misplaced” , 54) and a Dr. Jean Flamboyant (flamboyant gene), an all-promising mutant whose researches into “ post-ephemeral” (82) subjects are designed to “ fix anything” (81). In Book IIII, two new “ speedy” characters are introduced: Taco De­ soxin (Desoxin is a type of amphetamine) and his partner Tonto Pronto (the Lone Ranger’s trusted

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Indian). Together with Portland Bill and Dr. Flam­ boyant, this quartet of parody t v Western types spe­ cialize in “ Pre-pourd Scorn,” by “ burn [ing] tele­ phone poles,” “ eat[ing] fur coats,” and “ suck[ing] air thru white sidewalls” (167-68). The epic journey made by this “ constellation” turns out to lead nowhere. Its ostensible purpose — to find Howard Hughes in Las Vegas — is deflected as the party travels northwest along the Rio Grande to the town of Truth or Consequences, N .M ., and thence into Colorado. When Hughes finally turns up at Four Corners, he decoaches without encountering Slinger and abruptly heads for South America in search of new frontiers for his multinational empire. Indeed, by that time the Slinger has lost interest in the quest. Which is to say that we must give up a search for a Center, a logocentrism that privileges the Individual even as it creates an exploitative economic world of “ centerless systems (computer banks, fast­ food chains, corporate conglomerates) whose infor­ mation is transferable and variable” (Davidson, 120). Much has been made of the poem’s political cri­ tique, its indirect but searching attack on the Vietnam War as the very emblem of the “ Shortage Industry” created by industrial capitalism. But despite Dorn’s glancing references to the Four Corners Power Plant, to the military takeover in Chile or the business deals effected in Saudi Arabia, Slinger invokes rather than analyzes the debacle of postmodern monopoly Capi­ talism. Indeed, it could be argued that Dorn’s pop

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narrative and campy characterization give rise to what is correspondingly a Pop critique of “ the Great Cycle of the Enchanted W allet” (89), a critique that may strike readers of the late eighties as slightly “ sicksties” ( 159) in its assumption that rebellion against “ them” can effect change and that the drug culture is an ap­ propriate (and perhaps necessary) component of that rebellion. Each of Slinger’s four books is devoted to a specific drug: the first to marijuana, the second to l s d , the third and fourth to cocaine (Lil is known as Cocaine L il). In an interview with Steven Fredman, Dorn explains that “ the drugs are like the facade or the molding on the building. I don’t mean that as entice­ ments, in the sense that Hansel and Gretel’s witch had a lot of gingerbread around, but just as the fa­ cades that would be recognized as of the period. They were very much of the time.” And he adds, “ The [Vietnam] war was a drug war, too. They were the same thing in a way. . . . There was the drug traffic, which established itself right at the chisel-edge of the war” (93-94). The “ psychological problem” the United States was undergoing during the war “ got expressed,” so Dorn suggests, “ through drugs” (94). Which is to say that drugs often express contradic­ tory values in the poem. For even the sequences in which characters seem to perform more effectively when stoned: Thus sat the four of us at last a company it seemed

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and the Bombed Horse took off his stetson X X , and drew on the table our future course (2 1)— or those that present, say, the harvesting of the Erythroxylon coca shrub as an amusing and innocent ritual : CO-KÁNG! is the way it begaine, was a Girl from the montaine raised on air and light Erthralynn, painted with red clay and dressed in leaves resembling myrtle Erythra with a wig of roots and she was vulgar and strong as pure salt and intuition came to her like the red deer to a lick (172) are characterized by a nice double irony: drugs, it turns out, are a sign, not only of counterculture, but a sign that is itself wholly mediated through the simu­ lated “ Western” -speak that permeates the landscape, so that “ intuition” comes to a “ vulgar and strong” Cocaine L il “ like the red deer to a lick.” The same doubleness characterizes L il herself, whose arche­ typal status as Woman is repeatedly ironized by references to her expertise at running the show, an expertise that all but matches Hughes’s own: L il patted the Zlingers cheek and asked him if he could speak Looks like you slept through most of that she said (196).

Indeed, as “ the slave/of appearances” (27), L il paradoxically functions as mistress in the literal sense of mastery, in that she never succumbs to the notion that, as Slinger is still wont to suppose, “ There is but one Logos/tho many Images audition” (78). And in this sense L il’s asides and expletives play an im­ portant role in what I take to be the real thrust of Stìnger : its elaborate dismantling and deconstruction of our linguistic and poetic habits. Dorn’s “ A B SO L U T E L IN G U A T IL T SU R­ V E Y SIT E #1” (141) begins with the premise that there can be no accurate signification, that to be named is to be destroyed. For once you have a name: you can be sold you can be told by that name leave, or come you become, in short a reference (32). To be named or described is to be circumscribed and bound to a particular time and place, which is why Howard Hughes is also Robart and Slinger is called Sun God or Zlinger. The “ Literate Projector” of Book II, which turns image into script rather than the other way around, is thus the ultimate useless technological tool, the emblem of the signifier tied narrowly to a single transcendental signified. Consequently, language as communicative tool, as intentional circuit from A to B, gives way to the “ spasm/of presyntactic metalinguistic urgency” (73) that everywhere animates the text. Puns (Dorn’s fa­ vorite trope), paragrams, homonyms, portmanteau

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words, archaisms, nonsense words, parody tunes — these are spliced together with countless variations so to produce a “ map of locations” in which meaning is endlessly deferred, endlessly called into question. Thus when the Slinger “ parted the curtains/to have a look at the stereoscopic world,” he is “ astoned” (48 ), while L il complains to him that the Stoned Horse is uscarin my girls with hostyle talk” (24). The Poet, a “ drifting singer,” greets the horse with the words, “ Hi! Digger” (25), and responds to the request “ what song can you sing?” with a parody “ song be­ fore parting” : On a plane of this plain stood a dark colonnade which cast its black shadows in the form of a conception made where I first saw your love her elbows at angles her elbows at black angles her mouth a disturbed tanager, and in her hand an empty damajuana, on her arm an emotion on her ankle a band a slender ampersand (39) Such parody ballads take literalism to its logical and absurd extreme. Consider the following syllogism: ( i ) in formulaic folk-ballad diction, lips are conven­ tionally scarlet} (2) there is a bird called the scarlet tanagerj therefore (3) “ her mouth” is a “ disturbed

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tanager.” Again — this time a pun — the “ empty damajuana” is both a large earthenware or glass bottle (damajuana is Spanish for demijohn)·, the perfect appurtenance for a girl standing under a dark colonnade in, say, a Manet painting, but the word also designated, given its literal translation as Lady Jane, a popular slang term for marijuana, an empty or used-up reefer. The verbal ground of Slinger ranges over such “ subjects” as Pindar’s theory of light, the horse as personification of knowledge, game theory, the na­ ture of serial transmission, and the poet as authority figure, the epic’s “ L IN G U A T IL T ” skidding pre­ cipitously from science-speak (“ his minde/played over the austenitic horizon/and gaged the coefficient of expansion” — 186), to Shakespeare (“ How like a winter hath my absence been” — 47), even as the Poet accompanies these words with the “ S T R U M ” of his “ abso-lute.” In the end, Slinger is perhaps best understood as a poetic Sourcebook on postmodern discourses — the discourses of atomic science and cy­ bernetics, pop song and media-speak, Heideggerianism and high finance. As such, Dorn’s long poem, happily reissued here, marks an important turning point in American poetry, a turn away from the monologic lyric of mid-century to the dialogic “ parapoem” of fin de siècle, with its amalgam of “ theory” and lyric, of prose narrative and sound-text, and especially of citation embedded in or superimposed upon the speech of a particular self. It is a nice paradox, and one that must amuse Dorn himself, that this seemingly quintessential

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“ sixties” Pop epic, this underground classic of the seventies, has had to wait until the late eighties to come into its own. Marjorie Perloff

For Further Reading T h e reader is urged to consult Edward Dorn, Interviews, ed. Donald A llen (Bolinas, C a lif.: Four Seasons Foundation, 19 8 0 ), especially Stephen Fredm an’s “ R oad-Testing the Language.” A valuable introduction to Dorn’s life and work is W illiam M cPheron’s bibliographical essay, Edward Dorn (Boise State U n iver­ sity Western W riters Series, 19 8 8 ). Donald W esling’s Internal Resistances: T h e Poetry o f Edward Dorn (U niversity o f C a li­ fornia Press, 19 8 5) contains important essays on Slinger by Rob­ ert von H allberg, Paul Dresman, and M ichael Davidson. I am especially indebted to Davidson’s “ ‘T o elim inate the draw’ : Narrative and Language in Stinger.”

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BOOK I

The curtain might rise anywhere on a single speaker

for Paul Dorn

I

met ;n Mesilla The Cautious Gunslinger of impeccable personal smoothness and slender leather encased hands folded casually to make his knock. He would show you his map. There is your domain. Is it the domicile it looks to be or simply a retinal block of seats in, he will flip the phrase the theater of impatience.

If it is where you are, the footstep in the flat above in a foreign land

3

or any shimmer the city sends you the prompt sounds of a metropolitan nearness he will unroll the map of locations. His knock resounds inside its own smile, where? I ask him is my heart. Not this pump he answers artificial already and bound touching me with his leathern finger as the Ogeen of Hearts burns from his gauntlet into my eyes. Flageolets of fire he says there will be. This is for your sadly missing heart the gir1 you left in Juarez, the blank political days press her now in the narrow adobe confines of the river town her dress is torn by the misadventure of her gothic search The mission bells are ringing in Kansas. Have you left something out: Negative, says my Gunslinger, no thing is omitted.

4

Time is more fundamental than space. It is, indeed, the most pervasive of all the categories in other words theres plenty of it. And it stretches things themselves until they blend into one, so if youve seen one thing youve seen them all. I held the reins of his horse while he went into the desert to pee. Yes, he reflected when he returned, that's less. How long, he asked have you been in this territory. Years I said. Years. Then you will know where we can have a cold drink before sunset and then a bed will be my desire if you can find one for me I have no wish to continue my debate with men, my mare lathers with tedium her hooves are dry Look they are covered with the alkali of the enormous space between here and formerly. Need I repeat, we have come without sleep from Nuevo Laredo.

5

And why do you have such a horse Gunslinger? I asked. Don't move he replied the sun rests deliberately on the rim of the sierra. And where will you now I asked. Five days northeast of here depending of course on whether one's horse is of iron or flesh there is a city called Boston and in that city there is ahotel whose second floor has been let to an inscrutable Texan named Hughes Howard? I asked The very same. And what do you mean by inscrutable, oh Gunslinged I mean to say that He has not been seen since I 83 3. But when you have found him my Gunslinger what will you do, oh what will you do? You would not know that the souls of old Texans are in jeopardy in a way not common to other men, my singular friend. You would not know of the long plains night where they carry on and arrange their genetic duels with men of other states -

6

so there is a longhorn bull half mad half deity who awaits an account from me back of the sun you nearly disturbed just then. Lets have that drink.

STRUM!

Silli'Ul!II

And by that sound we had come there, false fronts my Gunslinger said make the people mortal and give their business an inward cast. They cause culture. Honk HONK, Honk HONK Honk that sound comes at the end of the dusty street, where we meet the gaudy Madam of that very cabaret going in where our drink is to be drunkHello there, Slinger! Long time no see what brings you, who's your friend, to these parts, and where if you don't mind my asking, Hello, are you headed ..

Boston!? you don't say, Boston is an actionable town they say never been there myself Not that I mean to slight the boys but I've had some nice girls from up Boston way they turned out real spunky! 7

But you look like you always did Slinger, you still make me shake, I mean why do you think I've got my hand on my hip if not to steady myself and the way I twirl this Kansas City parasol if not to keep the dazzle of them spurs outa my eyes Miss Lil! I intervened you mustn't slap my Gunslinger on the back in such an off hand manner I think the sun, the moon and some of the stars are kept in their tracks by this Person's equilibrium or at least I sense some effect on the perigee and apogee of all our movements in this, I can't quite say, man's presence, the setting sun's attention I would allude to and the very appearance of his neurasthenic mare a genuine Nejdee lathered, as you can see, with abstract fatigue Shit, Slinger! you still got that marvelous creature, and who is this funny talker, you pick him up in some sludgy seat of higher leamin, Creeps! you always did hang out with some curious refugees.

8

Anyway come up and see me and bring your friend, anytime if you're gonna be in town we got an awful lot to talk about for instance, remember that man you was always looking for name of Hughes? Howard? I asked You got it - that was the gent's first handle a texas dynamiter he was back in '32 always turned my girls on a lot when he blew In, A man in the house is worth 2 in the street anyday, like I say this Hughes had a kind of interest about him, namely a saddle bag full of currency which don't hurt none You remember there was this trick they called her Jane she got religion & left the unit but I heard this Hughes Howard? I asked Right, boy they say he moved to Vegas or bought Vegas and moved it. I can't remember which. Anyway, I remember you had what your friend here

9

might call an obsession about the man don't tell me you're still looking for him I mean they say, can't prove it by me, this Hughes -

Howard? I asked Hey Slinger you better shut that boy up! Cut it, my friend

I was justDrop it! Anyway, they say this Haward is kinda peculiar about bein Seen like anywhere anytime sort of a special type like a lotta texans I know plumb strange the way they operate. You know, I had to deal with a texan once nearly drove one of my best girls Out, insisted on her playing black jack with his stud horse who was pretty good held the cards with his hooves real articulate like and could add f astern most humans recall before I put a stop to it we had special furniture hauled inf rom Topeka.

IO

That horse would sit at the table all night, terrible on whiskey and rolled afair smoke and this texan insisted he was pa yin for my girl's time and he could use it any way he saw fit as long as he was payin like and I had to explain a technical point to that Shareholder namely, that he was payin for her ass, which is not time!

How did you get rid of him I asked Well boy, that was singular you know I thought and thought and I was plum stumpt that is, until one of my Regulars of the time who had an interest in this girl can't recall her name but you'd know the fella a wrangler from wyoming, THE Word his name was anyway he Suggested we turn that horse on Hughes? I asked. Jesus! Slinger can't you do something about that refugee no! his mother was Religious

I I

so we turned this stud on and it took most of a Tampico shipment to do the job but I'll tell you Slinger that horse laughed all that night and they carried him out next morning and put him on the stage for Amarillo, him and the texan sittin in there all alone and that horse was tellin everybody what to do Get that strong box up there, get them "horses" hitched up he'd say rollin a big tampico bomber with his hooves his shoes had come off, you see, and he could do it so natural anyway and then he'd kinda lounge inside the stage coach and lean out the window winkin at the girls, showing his teeth, I can't say he was Unattractive, something kinda handsome about his big face and suggestive he was a sorta manner he had He kept sayin Can You Manage? and Thank You! every time the hostler hitched up another horse and then he had a kinda what you might call a derisive air

12

when he'd say "Due In On Monday" because you see it was Sunday when they left town, but he kept knockin his right hoof against the inside of the coach sayin You All Alright Out There? and he had the texan' s hat on a stetson XX sorta cockwise on his head it was I tell you Slinger you would of split your levis and dropped your beads to seen it. Because he was sayin some of the abstractest things you ever heard like Celery Is Crisp! and we ain't seen him or that individual texan who owned him since. I swear that stud must have become a congressman or something since then He sure was going strong on that fresh Tampico - Some of the hands that was there that day infact claimed he didn't leave on the stage at all, there's still people around here who'll claim that horse flew back west when the texan went to sleep 5 miles out of town.

13

Where were we I asked, when I noticed my Gunslinger had retired to a shady spot cast by the town's one cottonwood Hold on, requested the Gunslinger and held a conference to the side with Lil and then he kissed with a smile her hand and she said you boys enjoy yourself, I'll see about you later. Then as we mounted the steps of the cabaret The Gunslinger sang Oh a girl there was in the street the day we rode into .,Ca Cruz and the name of the name of her feet was the same as the name of the street and she stood and she stared like a moose and her hair was tangled and loose . ..

STRUM rs.i1r1niU1

Do you know said the Gunslinger as he held the yellow tequila up in the waning light of the cabaret that this liquid is the last dwindling impulse of the sun and then he turned and knelt and faced that charred orb

14-

as it rolled below the swinging doors as if it were entering yet descending and he said to me NO! it is not. It is that cruelly absolute sign my father I am the son of the sun, we two are always in search of the third - who is that I asked Hughes? Howard? Yes. No. \Vhy not? Because the third can never be a texan J'{ever? Yes. Why not? I told you, back there when you held my horse. Ah. If that is the case then is your horse the Turned On Horse of whom we've just now heard and if that may be true how is it your horse is also that magnificently nervous mare I've back there held? Back There? what is it you ask? Is that your horse and was it the Turned On Horse. Possibly.

15

Possibly! what do you mean? No, my horse is not a texan. What? Drink the yellow sun of your tequila and calm yourself, Jack and then I shall tell you because you are inattentive and expect reason to Follow as some future chain gang does a well worn road. Look, by the way, a fight has started, order again before the place is Smashed I then did order, yet wondered, the inexplicability of all that had, in this half hour passed. And when the divine tequilas were served we two had retired to a table obscure in the corner. Lo que pasa he breathed this place is in the constructive process of ruin - Gaze upon it : tables upended, the flak of chips and drink surrounds us with perfect, monday night slowmotion

16

And now my Gunslinger in his steady way deliberated on the scene before us - Note he said that confusion. I did. What do you see he asked. Men fighting I answered Is that all, he asked Do you want the deetails I asked Don't be evasive he replied What is the principle of what you see. I was hard put to understand this I tried. The principle, I said is leverage. Not quite the Gunslinger rejoined, that is the mechanism I asked for the principle. Yes you did, quite plainly said I But I am afraid I Never mind he said, are these men men. Yes I answered on the heated margin of that general battle Is my horse a horse? he continued I'm on that score not sure I said.

17

Your horse seemes different from these men. Qgite right but that's not altogether what I am getting at. Here he said, passing me the cigarette. I think, he added of taking you to ~as Vegas. Then you aren't going to 'Boston. Not now he exhaled, fresh distortions as you yourself heard have reached my ears. Uh-huh I managed to exhale. Thus we sat and still I knew not the principle of which he spoke.

STRUIIIII

Then there was an interlude in which the brawl before our indented eyes went on.

I8

Auto-destruction he breathed and I in that time was suspended as if in some margin of the sea I saw the wading flanks of horses spread in energy

What makes? he suddenly asked in the smoke and turmoil, and the bullets flying, What makes you think oh what makes you that this horse sitting between us and who has not spoken a word or is it that I have from the beginning misjudged you. The Horse grinned at me

Oh my Gunslinger, I said If this be true and it must be because I can see in this horse the Horse described Will it not be very inappropriate that Lil see this same Horse in her establishment? What of the girls?

19

Why, untaught alien do you think I have arranged this mass collision, standard in its design you see raging not 15 feet away but to distract the vision of that spinning crystal? She seemed nice enough to me I said. You have not lived 2000 and more years and as he disengaged his eyes from mine he said And speaking of said Lady here, she, comes -

My god, Slinger, she said I am at your service, replied the Gunslinger. Oh knock that off! I've got a Business to tend to and the smoke in this corner is blindin besides, say haven't I met that Horse before? The Horse rose from his chair and tipped his stetson XX Hello .,eil, it's been a long time here have a seat, we've got a lot to talk about, Slow down the Gunslinger said and that was the only time I ever heard anybody speak obliquely to the Horse.

20

Thus sat the four of us at last a company it seemed and the Bombed Horse took off his stetson XX, and drew on the table our future course. Whispered, as I did, aside to the Gunslinger, Who, finally, is this gaudy Lil? Lil, I didn't expect to see here - we were in Smyrna together, now called Izmir when they burned the place Down, we were Very young then I might add. Does that satisfy you? Yes I answered. And then the Oblique Horse having waited patiently for the course of that aside to run asked Have you finished. It occurred to me I might not readily Answer a Horse but I was discouraged, in whatever question I might have felt, when the Gunslinger on my arm put

21

the pressure of his leatherbound fingers and gave me a look in the aftermath of those bullets and that dispersing smoke which said, Q.£ietly.

Then sat we mid aftermath and those unruly customers in Lil's cabaret and the Plugged In Horse covered the table with his elaborate plans and as he planned he rolled immense bombers from the endless Tampico in his saddle bags. What's happened to my black ace the Horse inquired scraping his chair, reaching under the table, smiling, passing at the same time his bomber without limit to me. But, I, don't recognize this size, it is, beyond, me. No, mortal, that size is beyond your conception Smoke. Don't describe yoursel£

22

That's right, referee, the Horse thinks he's makin telescopes Lil observed but one often makes a remark and only later sees how true it is! last pass it! Hey Slinger! Play some music. :R.._ight, breathed the Gunslinger and he looped toward the juke then, in a trajectory of exquisite proportion a half dollar which dropped home as the .44 presented itself in the proximity of his hand and interrogated the machine A28, Joe Turner Early in the Mornin' came out and lay on the turntable His inquisitive .44 repeated the question and BI 3 clicked Lightnin' Hopkins Happy Blues for John Glenn, and so on the terse trajectories of silver then the punctuations of his absolute .44 without even pushing his sombrero off his eyes

Gawddamit Slinger! there you go wreckin my Wurlitzer again sittin there in that tipped back chair, can't you go over to the machine and put the money in and push the button like a normal bein? We're at the Very beginning of logic around here

so them things cost money and besides that Slinger, some of these investors is gettin edgy since this Stoned Horse come in they're talkin bout closin my place Down scarin my girls with hostyle talk. My bartender gettin tighter every time you do some shit like that. Don't bring me down Lil, we'll be out of here by and by. Yea Lil, drop it the Stoned Horse said. We'd all rather be there than talk about it. It's all right Lil, I said. Oh refugee you talk like a natural mortal, take your hand off my knee I've got other things to do now.

STRUM Just then a Drifter carrying a divine guitar passed by our table and the guise

inlaid around the string cut hole pulsated as do stars in the ring of a clear night Hi! Digger the drifting guitarist greeted the Bombed Horse who was in his saddle bags rummagmg Heidigger? I asked the Xtian statistician is that who you are? Are you trying to "describe" me, boy? No, no, I hastened to add. And by the way boy if there's any addin to do around here I'll do it, that's my stick comprende? Where's my dark ace? Into the cord of that question a stranger turned his brilliantined head pulled open his fabrikoid coat and Said What's your business with Any dark ace! The scene became a bas-relief as the length of the bar froze arms and legs, belts and buckles caught drink stilled in mid-air

25

Yea! You! You're a horse aincha? I mean you! and, "looking around", Hor sejace !

The Stoned Horse said Slowly not looking up from his rolling and planning Stranger you got a pliable lip you might get yourself described if you stay on. Come on! Who's the horse, I mean who's horse is that, we can't have No Horse! in here. It ain't proper and I think I'm gonna put a halter on you!

Uh uh, the Gunslinger breathed. Anybody know the muthafucka the Stoned Horse inquired of the general air. Hey, hear that the stranger gasped that's even a negra horse! Maybe so, maybe not the Gunslinger inhaled but stranger you got an Attitude a mile long

26

as his chair dropped forward all four legs on the floor and as the disputational .44 occurred in his hand and spun there in that warp of relativity one sees in the backward turning spokes of a buckboard, then came suddenly to rest, the barrel utterly justified with a line pointing to the neighborhood of infinity. The room froze harder. Shit, Slinger,Lil noticed, You've pointed your .44 straight out of town. I keep tellin you not to be so goddamn fancy now that amacher' s got the drop on you! Not so, Lil! the Slinger observed. Your vulgarity is flawless but you are the slave of appearances this Stockholder will find that his gun cannot speak he'll find that he has been Described

the greenhorn pulled the trigger and his store-bought iron coughed out some cheap powder, and then changed its mind, muttering about having been up too late last night. Its embarrassed handler looked, one eye wandering, into the barrel and then reholstered it and stood there.

The total .44 recurred in the Slinger's hand and spun there then came home like a sharp knock and the intruder was described a plain, unassorted white citizen. You can go now, the Turned On Horse said. That investor' d make a good janitor Lil observed, if I was gonna keep this place I'd hire him. What does the foregoing mean? I asked. Mean? my Gunslinger laughed Mean?

28

Qgestioner, you got some strange obsessions, you want to know what something means after you've seen it, after you've been there or were you out during That timer No. And you want some reason. How fast are you by the wayr No local offense asking that is therer No. I like you mi nuevo amigo for a mortal you're exceptional How fast are your Oh, average fast I suppose or maybe a little more than average fast, I ventured. Which means you gotta draw. Well, yes. Umm, considered the Gunslinger taking the telescope from the Turned On Horse. Please don't hold my shortcoming against me oh Gunslinger and may I enquire of you Enquirer he breathed don't do that Well then may I ... no I wouldn't do that Either

29

How is it then? How can such speed be? You make the air dark with the beauty of your speed, Gunslinger, the air separates and reunites as if lightning had cut past leaving behind a simple experience. How can such aching speed be. Are you, further, a God or Semidi6s and therefore mortal? First things first he reflected in the slit of his eyes your attempt is close but let me warn you never be close. A mathematician from Casper Wyoming years ago taught me That To eliminate the draw permits an unmatchable Speed a syzygy which hangs tight just back of the curtain of the reality theater down the street, speed is not necessarily fast. Bullets are not necessarily specific. When the act is so self contained and so dazzling in itself

30

the target then can disappear in the heated tension which is an area between here and formerly In some parts of the western world men have mistakenly called that phenomenology You mean, I encouraged there is no difference between appearance and "~ealityr" he broke in I never "mean", remember, that's a mortal sin and Difference I have no sense 0£ That might be your sin and additionally Don't add, that's my stick, the Horse said smiling. Furthermore, the Gunslinger instructed More is more divine said the Immobile Horse Furthermore, don't attempt to burden me with your encouragement because to go on to your second Qgestion, I am un semidi6s. And so you are mortal after all said I

31

No mortal, you describe yourself I die, he said which is not the same as Mortality, and which is why I move between the Sun and you the ridge is my home and it's why you seem constructed of questions, uh, What's your name?

l, I answered. That's a simple name Is it an initial? No it is a single.

Nevertheless, it is dangerous to be named and makes you mortal. If you have a name you can be sold you can be told by that name leave, or come you become, in short a reference, or if bad luck is large in your future you might become an institution which you will then mistake

32

for defense. I could now place you in a column from which There is No Escape and down which The Machine will always recognize you. Or a bullet might be Inscribed or I could build a maze called a social investigation and drop you in it your name into it Please! I implored him you terrify me. What then, I asked is my case? looking into the Odd toed ungulate's eyes who had his left leg resting on my shoulder, The mortal can be described the Gunslinger finished, That's all mortality is in fact.

STRUM

Are you hungry mortal I the Gunslinger asked and Yes I answered reflecting.

33

Well then Lil, let's have some food of two sorts before we depart for Vegas. Lil snapped her gaudy fingers and drink was brought but not for the Classical Horse who forewent drink with a brush of his articulate hoo£ The usual he said Usual! There's nothin usual about your diet Claude Lil said, Horse chestnuts with the spiny covering intact and 38 stalks of celery in a large bowl. Claude I enquired Don't enquire boy It can be unhealthy pass the salt Do you get called Claude? Why not? Listen, I, I'm as mortal as you born in santa fe of a famous dike who spelled it with an e too. So your name is not Heidegger after all, then what is it? I asked. Levi-Strauss.

34

Levi-Strauss? Do I look like his spouse! No ... I mean I've never seen his wife. You're a very observant type Claude replied. Well what do you do I persisted. Don't persist. I study the savage mind. And what is that I asked. That, intoned Claude leaning on my shoulder is what you have in other words, you provide an instance you are purely animal sometimes purely plant but mostly you're just a classification, I mean it's conceivable but so many documents would have to be gone through and dimensions of such variety taken into account to realize what you are, that even if we confined ourselves to the societies for which the data are sufficiently full, accurate, and comparable among themselves it could not be "done" without the aid of machines.

35

Got it! the Slinger asked Yea, I heard it I said Not the same thing he said Tell me more I said The Horse has an interest in business, haven't you noticed. Noticed? l replied Forget it he said, remember you're just average fast. The Horse is a double agent -

Oh? But what about his name Claude Levi-Strauss is that Yes, you guessed it a homonym. Don't get bugged Amigo

Here comes Lil.

OK, the Gunslinger breathed we're briefed Hughes? I asked Nat now the Slinger said here's Lil Slinger! that Drifter claims he can sing you a song. What shimmering guesswork the Slinger smiled and beckoned to the young guitarist.

As he travels across the cabaret may I ask a question? Move on he said. Are those rounds in the .44 of your own making? No bullets, I rarely use ordinary ammunition. What then? Straight Information. What? You sound like the impact of a wet syllojsm Look, into each chamber goes one bit of my repertoire of pure information, into each gesture, what you call in your innocence "the draw" goes Some Dark Combination and that shocks the eye-sockets of my detainers registers what my enemies can never quite recall. Another question. Naturally. What do you know of Love? Know? Nada, if I knew it it couldn't be Love. Even a mortal knows that.

37

Then, what is it? IS is not the link it takes nine hundred years to explain one blown spark of Love and you don't have that much time Amigo. How can you? Leave it friend I was with Gladys, in Egypt witnessed messengers turned into phantoms. He pressed one long finger between his eyesit beats me how you mortals can think something is. Hush, pues, here comes our Drifta.

STRUM Salud, poeta what song can you sing? All songs but one. A careful reply. Then can you sing a song of a woman accompanied by that your lute which this company took to be a guitar in their inattention.

Yes I can, but an Absolute I have here in my hand. Ah yes, the Gunslinger exhaled It's been a long time. The drifting singer put one foot on a chair and began I shall begin he said the Song about a woman On a plane of this plain sl:ood a dark colonnade which cast its black shadows in the form of a conception made where I first saw your love her elbows at angles her elbows at black angles her mouth a disturbed tanager, and in her hand an empty damajuana, on her arm an emotion on her ankle a band a slender ampersand her accent so superb she spoke without saying and within her eyes were a variety of sparkling moments

39

Her thighs were monuments of worked flesh turned precisely to crush what they will enclose and in her manner is a hush as if she shall enrage with desire with new fire those maddened to taste from her jewelled toes to her swelled black mound her startled faun which has the earthy smell of slightly gone wild violets 0 Fucking Infinity! 0 sharp organic thrust! the Gunslinger gasped and his fingers spread across the evening atmosphere My Sun tells me we have approached the 24th hour Oh wake the Horse!

Lil, will you join us on our circuit to Vegas? Leave this place and be done? The stage sits at the post its six abnormal horses driverless, chafing their bits their corded necks are arching toward the journey

How far is it Claude? Across two states of mind, saith the Horse. But from Mesilla said I to Las Vegas - Vegas! the Horse corrected have you been asleep ... Must be more like a thousand miles . .More Zike? he laughed as we waited for the Slinger on his long knees facing the burning hoop as it rolled under the swinging doors west Mortal what do you mean asked the Horse lounging and yawning More Like! how can distance be more like. Thus, in the thickening vibration our departure took shape and Lil the singer holding her arm followed us out the swinging doors and into the stage coach we got and the Horse was leaning out making his pitch

distributing fake phone numbers and baring his teeth and the singer was whispering a lyric to Lil who had her hand on the Slinger's knee and he was looking at me And the stage its taut doubletree transfixed and luminous shot forth and the Horse pulling from his pocket his dark glasses put them on and spoke not and by those five missionaries Mesilla was utterly forgot.

BOOK I I

for Jennifer

L

tapestry moves as the morning lights up. And they who are in it move and love its moving from sleep to Idea born on the breathing of a distant harmonium, To See is their desire as they wander estranged through the lanes of the Tenders of Objects who implore this existence for a plan and dance wideyed provided with a schedule of separated events along the selvedge of time.

Time does not consent. This is morning This is afternoon This is evening Only celebrations concur and we concur To See The Universe All may wake who live the combination is given and Some comb the connections in blind search there are deaths at birth there is death at 2 I and burial at 80 each calculation involves another century. Our company thus moves collectively along the River Rio Grande. The poet starts the strings, as sleep inhabits the stage, along the silver of a morning raga, So this raga disperses as the shimmering of its sense goes out, Into the dry brilliance of the desert morning Along the vanes of the willow leaves Along the hallucination of the atmospheric realism Into the upper reaches of the Y ggdrasillic yoga Over inner structure of the Human Thing like Unto the formation of the pinnate ash in which our treehouse sways

and the samara goes winged, Oh wild Angelica! Oh quickbeam ! oh quake and sway into waking, With aspergill enter Into the future Suddenly the doubled reflection of a distant butte appear in the Slingers opened eyes He speaks the word Whitehare and makes a wish for the 1st day of the month and then chants Have you noticed how everboring the following day is, If there be nothing new but that which is And then he stretched so that, sitting between the Horse and Lil, his limbs pierced the windows on both sides and the stage had arms. How like a winter hath my absence been observed the Slinger to himself yet unable to stifle his yawn for his hands were with his arms off stage. Aah ... In the high west there burns a furious Starre It is morning Poet, that raga is called The Coast of the Firmament

47

Then you know it? PerfeB:ly I dont think the Perfect can be known. Very good. Then you must never consort with the PerfeB:, stick to the Absolute, it's pliable, and upon it you seem to play any tune you choose. Can we have a morning song? now. Yet first, do you sing the traditional Rock Oh Light; The Light! Then, as the poet fixed his 'Lute the Slinger parted the curtains to have a look at the stereoscopic world. From your sweet voice I am astoned, before you begin, he said as the poet began, Now; get this action right! When I say light I mean the light Thats the light within the light Thats the mornin thats the light Light the mornin light the light Thats the natchral thats all right Oh baby, light the morning like the light

Oh baby, light the morning like the night Put the mornin where it's tight Hey theres the sun hes comin in Theres the bird shes back again Make the sun hes comin up Make the bird shes gonna sing Turn your head, dig let it rang Oh baby douse the funky night Put the mornin where it's tight. A roll of Solar Reality, my friend, your mind is marvelously heliocentric your fingers have been brushed by the fleece on Aries flank. Thus I see we are yet some distance outside Universe City, will you please then, draw your fingers across a variation of the line "Cool Liquid Comes" so that the roots of my soul may be loosened and grow past the hardness of the Future. The poet turned the claws of the Golden Griffin of his pure lute and absolved the strings. I hope I can make that he breathed.

49

Cool Liquid Comes he whispered and grazed an ascension of notes, he sang

Cool liquid comes the morning ... sensing ... the morning sensing lnne the blend of spatial hours cool blending comes Comes blending the arc comes gripping urge timing the xvx\oi; blanching the plain branding morning on the worlds side the great plaining zodiacus The great brand of our crossing the fabulous accounting of our coursing the country of our consciousness Cool comes the greatness the scalar beauty intointoo oh our morning bright environment along the passage of our company into the hoodoos lying around the foot of our future

50

Cool flight along our trail comes a rupture of feathers, Laterally comes the desert lark throat of memory of an extinct tree into the light of afterdark gone out to the dry sea in bateaux Cool dry, Shall come the results of inquiry out of the larks throat oh people of the coming stage out of the larks throat loom the hoodoos beyond the canyon country Oh temptation of survival oh lusterless hope of victory in opposites Cool Liquid, cool liquid distilled of the scalar astral spirit morning sensing congealing our way, hours of spatial cooling weighing the lark appealing Oh Narrowness of protestation! And oh in the cool lateral morning even in the cool wide burn of our renanthic unrest and willfullness we move west and no more Shall Dawn Bless our Altar Cloth

51

Aye singer. 0 absolutist. You have sung a spelling account of this Zone, yet what a way to begin the morning! Aye, Aye, you have lyricd somewhat predestinarian as all things of the imagination must be. Thank you nomad, for that rendering of the Panorama. The singer took away the yellow rose from his pleated blousecuff and presented it to the morning wind then turned to adjust his astrolabe and applied the oil of Atropine to its working parts. Andromeda turns and flashs on the far shore, he observed. The Slinger crossed his sheathed legs and pulling on his vest fastened the mescal buttons thereon and truly turned his eyes into the landscape, Who is this? he asked. Is that an abstract question? No, it seems material but we'll know more if the horses choose to stop.

52

What can you see then with the sun on our right in this vacuum of social infinity that you blink your eyes so? asked the poet When most I wink then do mine eyes best see. A man appears. He gestures with his thumb. The six driverless horses are inquisitive, they draw to a stop. Wayfarer, Have you a name for Fate to use when she pulls the end of your time off the spool? Yes. A birth Pang from my mothers mind

A diacritical remark, What is it? Kool Everything. We Did! several miles back awoke and spoke the Horse yawning thru the awning.) Your surname I find hard to place, its generalness is overwhelming.

53

My fathers seed burst away as the autumn dispersal of a milkweed pod conveying me into my mothers womb via the wind. A windy beginning! What is the name of your throat? Huh!? You have introduced your thumb yet omitted his name Man I dont know where youre At I'm just hitchhiking to Universe City and beyond Where you going? Universe City. Can I have a ride? That was assumed gesturelessly the six driverless horses stop only to pick up. What keeps you beside the road? Dispersal, friend my Head has been misplaced. Then climb in and get yourself centered we approach the outskirts.

54

Our company moves once more in the swift running coach across the sparkling morning thru the sharp rising scent of the sage scattered river hills. And in the Yellow Rose of Dawn Miss Lil reads her encyclopxdia in a slender handled mirror held before her in her exquisitely strung hand and reaffirms that ancient arrangement of amaranthine flesh the quick aniline of flawless brow the pure full readyness of her lips the open public amazement of her silken cheek, And I shall turn, into a Bluebird she sings to the breeze and then with some Smiles she arrives at the dock in a Masserati and boards the ship of Dawn. Smoke? asked Everything offering the lady his jewehstudded bag.

What is it? Tobacco.

No thank you. What's your name. Kool Everything.

You better stay away from tobacco or you might do just that, Pardner.

55

What happened to I she asked his eyes dont seem right. I is dead, the poet said. That aint grammatical, Poet. Maybe. However Certain it seems, look, theres no reaction. Shake him no more then! requested the Gunslinger, we'll keep him with us for a past reference Thus are his cheeks the map of days outworn, Having plowed the ground I has turned at the end of the row a truly inherent versus .daeha sa kcab emas eht si I ecnis Thus this poor individual like all the singulars of his race came in forward and goes out sternward and some distant starre flashes even him an indiscriminate salute. That sounds deep, Slinger But it makes me sad to see I go, he was, I mean I was so perplexed I's obsessions were almost real me and I had an understanding I dont like to see I die.

56

I dont wish to di§traB: you with the metaphysics of the situation Lil yet be assured, I aint dead.

I know that, Slinger. It's possible you missed it the Slinger allowed, I speak of/ Him? Lil pointed. Is that not I? Stilled inside whoever he is. Oh. Well I'll be . .. We never knew anything much about him did we. I was the name he answered to, and that was what he had wanderin around inside him askin so many questions his eyes had already answered But wheres he at If I aint dead? Life and Death are attributes of the Soul not of things. The Ego is costumed as the road manager of the soul, every time the soul plays a date in another town I goes ahead to set up the bleechers, or book the hall as they now have it, the phenomenon is reported by the phrase

57

I got there ahead of myself I got there ahead of my I is the fact which not a few anxious mortals misread as intuition. The Tibetans have a treatise on that subjeB:ion. Yet the sad fact is I is part of the thing and can never leave it. This alone constitutes the reality of ghosts. Therefore I is not dead.

Imagine that, Lil said patting l's stiff knee. We wont have to Everything offered it's gonna be hot soon. I only mean I never met I but if he turns out to be put together like most people l's gonna come apart in the heat. You see what I mean?

The boy has a point Slinger it could get close fast in here. Yes, reflected the Poet As the Yellow Rose of Dawn climbs he loses the light azimuthal fragrance of his arrival and becomes a zenith of aparticular attention All Systems Go.

There will be some along our way to claim I stinks. The Slinger considered this conference of voices yet could relate very little to the realness of the engendering emergency. Since I am extraTerrestial he said I have no practical sense of smell. More likely you can't keep your nose out of those $50 bags, observed the Horse. Anyway we can drop it off at a bus stop as we go thru Albuquerque that populationll never know the difference. I would urge you, friends. I is a reference to the past and cannot be So dropped If I stinks, it is only thus we shall not so easily forget his hour of darkness. Perhaps the Slinger signals a detour past a probable and dangerous lapse counseled the Singer. By the way Everything, what Have you in that 5 gallon gas can? Huh! ? oh that. well thats, uh, Acid.

59

How pure is it? Straight man. 1 ooo percent, nothin but molecules. Will you pour a little on this and the Poet took away from his blousecuff the Supreme Colorless Rose of Noon and held it under the spout. Thank you, Kool. The poet then presented the Rose to his nose and sniffed the autotheistic chemical What subtle richness he whispered this would turn one into an allegory and after an inordinately long time he observed all eyes upon him and said I believe, not that it matters, this to be our solution the perceptual index of Everythings batch is High, to say the least. What then, if we make I a receptable of what Everything has, our gain will be twofold, we will have the thing we wish to keep as the container of the solution we wish to hold

60

a gauge in other words in the form of man. It is a derangement of considerable antiquity. Instead of formaldehyde? Lil asked

Exactly, replied the poet. What will that do to I and what will it do to my uncut batch Everything wondered. Only Time can reveal the immaterial the poet said, rolling up l's sleeve, at the same time hanging the 5 gallon can spout down from the ceiling of the coach and adjusting the tubes. I wont hold 5 gallons Everything said as tho he'd thot of a hitch.

I will the poet answered we'll use his stomach too, and elaborated, All that I will hold we will put into him. That, observed the Slinger is where your race put its money. 61

Advice is common, answered the poet the race is not over. Well said, breathed the Slinger. We're inside the outskirts, announced the Horse, a creature of grass and only marginally attracted to other distortions. Here we are in the sheds and huts of the suburbs. There are some rigid types in here. It's kinda poignant but that doesnt move it any closer to the center. Yup! empty now of all but a few stubborn housewives and disturbed only by the return of several husbands known to be unable to stay away during this celestial repast called lunch. Thats where youre out before you leave. Theres a man turning on his sprinkler, it should be illegal a small spray to maintain his grass, the Edible variety no one doubts. But I see none of my friends grazing there these green plots must be distress signals to God that he might notice their support of one of his minor proposals He must be taken by these remote citizens to be the Patron of Grass.

62

Holy shit, ~awn grass ... from that great tribe they selected something to .Jv.low And the Horse came apart laughing pounding his belly so that the coach swayed and rocked from the shifting about of his 14 hundred pounds.

Hey Horse! youre gonna loosen all the connections! youre gonna spill the cargo! Dont lower the Horse, Gunslinger admonished Everything He has a pure Head. It's a rare thing these days. And Our mission is to encourage the Purity of the Head pray we dont lose track of our goal. Sorry Horse, Kool said gently I lost my head. Forget it Everything, youve got a lot on your mind. Here, have a chew off my plug. Is that Tennessee roughcut? No, it's Pakisl:ani Black. Thanks. It exudes the sweat of young boys.

I wouldnt appreciate that. The Slingers right I guess, I am a pure head. Here, let me help you with those tubes.

No, No, thats ok it's kinda delicate work. And when, the grass comes u-up sang the Horse And when the grass goes dow-own And when, the fair yong sor-rel lies in the green green tow-own the para-dice will floo-rish And we'll be moving gra-zing in the wind, oh in-to the oowind. And when, the grass comes u-up and when the wind goes dow-own We'll Flash on our own legs then and nev-er-more come dow-own An Equestrial song Horse, I'm moved next to your race by its beauty, the poet related with a look of sadness, I hope you make it. The Gunslingers eyes were covered with his slender fingers. I'm alright Lil whispered when the hand of Everything touched her shoulder, I'm just looking for my handkerchief.

There was the faintest semblance of a smile on l's posthumous mouth. The Poet took away from his embroidered lapel the Rose of High Noon too intense to be seen too bright to be identified by color and with a sigh of regret presented it to the rising thermal dust where it became inset in the scrolls of the precious atmosphere. We're Here! laughed Everything Sounds like an adverb disguised as a place, commented the Slinger What? Sounds like an adventure. Oh, yea, man I never that I'd see this place. Then you'll have the privilege of seeing it without having thot it, prompted the Slinger. Let's have Lunch, said Lil, I'm starved. Then youre beyond the hand of Lunch diagnosed the Slinger

65

Scheduled food is invariably tasteless said the Poet. Yet in the desert you'd be happy to eat the schedule itself the Slinger finished. And so, they all decoached in Old Town. And having touched their soles to terra firma they all stood deeply and fully struck and their physical peripheries grew so dumb that they appeared studiously normal when I decoached unaided and attended only by an attitude of such expressive conception he seemed the offspring of a thousand laboratories. I has shot past mortification whispered the Slinger I carries the Broken Code the key to proprioception, is it possible he has become the pure Come of become, asked the Poet of the Slinger's ear. Would you put that into my ear another way? Por nada. I is now an organ Ization a pure containment

66

He has become a Five, Gallon, Can I is now a living Batch Me heard you the First time the Slinger nodded thats a Very interesting tautology. The Tautology walked from the stage step to the hitching post and there stroked the manes of the six driverless horses, latherbathed and steaming.

Thats never before been done, Slinger breathed Whats happening to my batch, Kool enquired Your batch is now The batch expropriation is accomplished we stand before an original moment in ontological history, the self, with one grab has aquired a capital S, mark the date the Gunslinger instructed, we'll send a telegram to Parmenides. That shits not gonna help me, Kool exploded I was going to retire on that batch!

I has, the Slinger corrected, at which Everything fell to the ground. Our company reassembled itself and followed I with a triple impression -

for now they sought to keep track of what they Had, invested in where it Was, and carried by where it's At We need help, the Poet reckoned. A band of citizens gathered. They blocked the way. They too were meshed with the appearance of I Tho their interest was inessentially soldered to the surface, and tho they had nought invested, an old appetite for the Destruction of the Strange governed the massed impulse of their tongues for they could never comprehend what the container contained. Whats That! they shouted Why are his eyes turned north? Why are his pants short on one side? Why does his hair point south? Why do his knees laugh? How does his hat stay on? Wherez his ears? The Feathers around his ankle! What does his belt buckle say, What do his shoes say, we cant hear them! Why dont his socks agree! Theres a truckpatch in his belly button does he have a desire to grow turnips?! He hasnt bought a license for his armpits!

68

Look! they shouted, his name is missing from his shirt pocket and his Managers name is missing from his back, He must be a Monster! Look His pocket meters show Red and they all laughed and screamed This Vagrant, they shouted, has got nothing, has no cash and no card, he hasn't got a Pot ... Into the dead center of this ellipsis the Slinger shot a complex gesture and his mouth worked feverishly thru the data of a forgotten alphabet and his eye tracked smoothly toward the East and there was produced in l's right hand a Pot, and in his left hand a Window exactly between the citizens voices ... to piss in or a w i n d o w like when the Plug is pulled. Whereupon the Slinger with a bow of great elaboration and Immense profundity turned to the half hyphen crazed crowd and said I thank you, kind people, for your lunchtime welcome, you have greeted us with a kiwanis enthusiasm we have been welcomed by Lions as the sign outside your town predicted.

Witchcraft! shouted a man deep inside the crowd and was instantly conveyed to within one inch of the Slingers nose by an arm become a boom, its fingers encircling the mans neck - You are correct citizen, your identification is the same as your word for fear! Huh?! Put me down! Whereupon the Slinger opened his fingers, and the citizen dropped into the dust. So this is Universe City Lil annotated.

So it is, echoed Everything. Used to be called Truth or Consequences they ordered the truth and got shipped the consequences One of their mainstreet thinkers must have thot they could make it back with something Large - thats how come it looks like a rundown movie lot a population waiting around to become White Extras. Wide spots in the road have a tendency to get wider due to the weight and speed of the traffic going thruem. I snt that Interesting Lil thot as if she were not listening.

70

Everything tugged at the Slingers embroidered sleeve Hey, now that you dealt the crowd why dont we have a walk around the plaza stretch our legs, pan the scene you know, get it Right, we dont wanna go straight into an automatic scarf Let's exercise - shoot some grass. You have an impeccable sense of everything, including the next step, the Slinger had to say. Yeah, well thats because I think I saw Dick Tracy descend in a bucket with crutches. Is that an alarm? No brother it's a fact. Now he's walkin toward us trying to get on the soundtrack of a flick titled Reality but look! some wit stamped Crime Watcher on his forehead when he wasnt lookin Let's move! Hang light, Kool, the earth moves beneath your feet like a ball bearing. The travelers drift easily around the plaza, I examines the jewellery of the native women 71

with the rhythmic patience of Eternity. He gradually drops behind. The poet accompanies Lil and guides her meanderings over the civilian and pseudo-historic terrain as if he had spent late hours pouring over charts. The Horse evangelizes now and again the reinchecked horses of the plaza, bringing news beyond the heads of most of them. Still, One big white runs off immediately when it is explained to her the reins are not fixed to the ground, and into the ear of a tall black standing in front of the saloon the message ran straight and clear. This horse laughed out loud and tore the finely tooled saddle off his back by hooking the belly strap on a knot in the hitching rail whereupon he seized the pommel with his Great Teeth and pitched the whole affair thru the swinging doors leaving one of them banging off one hinge. A loud vacuum of pure silence flowed suddenly forth from that busy place.

And in its wake, with a punctuality almost beyond relief, appeared the Owner of the saddle and the horse guns in both hands cigar between teeth hat on head sideways his face a miracle of undocumented attention, his eyes engaged in full count down his head is a spasm of presyntaB:ic metalingui§tic urgency What What What Where Where Where Who What Where What Where Who Someone conducts a search for simple social data a quest abstracter than Parsifals the Slinger commented as his group strolled past the scene. I dont think so the stoned Horse said This owner seeks a x,µa,pa What a difficult target to find The Slinger smiled I havent seen one since December And thats gone north for the Winter the Horse reckoned

73

Immediately these words out of the Horses mouth were out the enraged Owner discharged ten rounds with such ferocious rapidity the bullets got stuck back to front crowding each other out of the barrel and fell to the boardwalk as two segmented slugs I 2345 each about 2 ~ inches in length. Plunk Plunk said Kool Everything and picked up one of the formations and handed it to the Slinger who spoke on it Brilliant. I'm sure Ive never seen the result of such ferocity, a stutter of some deep somatic conflict, this owner was ill-advised to use a gun at all and least of all to let it speak for him. You see, he continued turning to Lil and the Poet this can only be materialism, the result of merely real speed. All the smoothest gunnies Ive known were metaphysicians and of course no jammonings of this sort were ever associated with their efforts and the slug was then handed to the poet. A timejam of some crudeness observed the poet, the bullets are dead lead has been rendered to lead.

74-

Yes, lead is a Heavy metal the Slinger agreed, Whats that Crunch? Everything asked and the group turned in time to see the Owners gun fall to pieces in his terrifik Hamlike grip, the pearl powdered, the ferrament altogether crushed at the same the Owners hulk settled into a sort of permanence as if a ship, gone to the bottom shifts several ways into the sand while finding her millennial restingplace. It has become an Old Rugged Statue of the good ol days, Everything gasped a summary of accounts compiled from frontier newspapers, it must be worth a pile do you think we should auction it? On the spot answered the Horse who had a gavel and began to pound upon a barrel Do I hear a do1lar, and he heard a dollar and since money speaks the company left him at the direction of a lively scene. Kool Everything promenaded with the Slinger and bent his ear toward a piece of Explanation picked up from an hand bill he found on the ground where the stage stopped This kinda talkie sounds new. It's a revolutionary medium It's sure to turn everything around.

75

Sounds as tho it's meant only for you commented the Slinger Thats the trouble with a name like mine What I mean is Everybody A tangible change, the Slinger noticed. Everybodys got to see this Is all the world a cinema then? Name this thing. Well, There's a ~iterate '.Projector, which, when a 35 mm strip is put thru it turns it into a Script I nflantaneously ! and projects that - the finished script onto the white virgin screen and theyre gonna run it in Universe City tonight Is there no more to this Reversal asked the Slinger. Yea, it will Invent a whole new literachure which was Already There a lot of big novels will get restored in fact Everything, uh, I mean all of it can be run the other way some of the technikalities havent been worked out for documentaries but let's face it,

you could rerun I mean all of it jatenci6n! - Shoot a volcano, project it and See the Idea behind it sit down at the geologic conference and hear the reasons Why skip the rumble, move into the inference. Eventually you could work your way back to where it's still really dark all the way back of the Brain?! Hows it powered? hundred and 40 shots into the same instant any outlet. 2

Every outlet? No, just any. Theres no color of course It's gonna be a black and white script even when it's a color film, you see, parrots dont show up Hows that? Well, I'm not sure, handbill dont say. But colors kinda complex, probly can't uncrank intime to send it the other way it's got something to do with reality comprende, Bwana? Forever, inhaled the Slinger

77

See! theres the marquee·---=

~?;°terate Projeclor And get this They can distort the Projector so that the script Departs from the film, in Front! now brother thats complex, every day is payday like April 1st! There is but one Logos tho many Images audition the Slinger intervened. What?! Resume your Ontology, Everything. Ontology? I'm just telling you a story about this projector, thats all. My medium friend, nothing which is demonstrative, as this L.P. seems to be, is ever All, for one thing it is locked on this Side of the Beginning, Toward what are you pointing by so speaking of the projector as the Sunne and the Script as Holy Writ?

Fantasia, in other images this machine makes it possible for people who can't make films to produce scripts and, as the author of the handbill is at some pains to point out it was designed for the stix but works best in University towns and other natural centers of doubletalk. To put it in another Can the Literate Projector enables the user to fail insignificantly and at the same time show up behind a vocabulary of How It Is Shake a circus up and down put funny music next to Death Or document something about military committment and let woodchucks play the parts so say something quick about the war in, well you know where the War is. The point is it has to be read to be seen, and like if the accent is so incomprehensible and hysterical it can only be coming from inside the cinerama of the 3rd Reich youre just not supposed to hear it. Like as the waves make toward the Pebbled shore Qgoth the Slinger What were you doing on December 7th? I wasnt born then.

79

Nevertheless we must witness this phenomenon We must have a Littoral instance. I didnt know you had a drawl, Slinger I dont, I slow up at noon from the inertia of National Lunch and from the scatteredness of the apexed sun which attempts at that point to enter a paradox namely, The West which is The East. You say the Sun moves! ? Not exactly. Yet when I say what I say, The Earth Turns. UmmUm. That's Big, Everything reflected No Local Parallels, admitted the Slinger. Look ye Everything, is that a heavy-duty worker I see at the newstand laughing into a copy of Scientific American? It appears so, Master Slinger. Then we'll question him, Here he is: How, dreamer, will fate mark you in her index when she comes dressed as a crystalographer to religne the tumblers inside your genetic padlock?

So

Hows that? He wants to know your name. Ah yes, how foolish of me, Dr. Flamboyant, Dr. Jean Flamboyant I was the flame of my Lyceum I can fix anything Anything? said Everything Anything. Would you like a light I see yor roach has gone out continued the Doctor Catching his breath Slinger, did you flash how the PHD caught his breath, never saw anybody do it with their hand Yes agreed the Slinger, Brilliantly fast Uh thank you puffed the Slinger youre very polite, Did, Thanks! Did you take a degree? May I sit down asked the doctor fanning his neck with the Scientific American and motioning to a bench. Prie Dieu ! the Slinger gestured with his long fingers, scattering half the population of the plaza.

81

Thats right - tho I didnt know it was missed I took a degree which they had refused to give to me Oh? Oui. They couldnt find the ... the Object of my dissertation: The Tensile Strength of Last Winters Icicles.

You must be joking. Not at all, it was that conjectural it's whats called a post-ephemeral subject always a day late, their error lay of course in looking for an object Ah Yes the Slinger mused When it gets to you them in their case, me m mme, it doesn't exist Like the star whose ray announces the disappearance of its master by the presence of itsel£ Correct! That is, within the limits of analogy Excellent, Excellent. Will you join us Doctor, as we circle the square of this plaza?

82

May I accompany you As you wish, flourished the Slinger And so they continued to walk and to talk and to discourse on the parameters of reality. And by this process they arrived at the door of the printers just in time to greet the Horse quitting that establishment with a bundle of parchment. Hello Horse, How'd the Auction go, Kool asked Not Bad Not Bueno the Horse laughed There was some figurante standin there in a bucket with crutchs, he was a "Lucky-Strike Green" fan so I got the Tall Black to start a rumor about the statue was a Hughes disguise and the fan jumped the bid from IO dollars to 20,000 Dollars?!

No. Thats the funny part. Pounds; this fan was covered so many ways he got confused. Fantasfa. What happened then? Well Nothin. It stayed there Sold to the man in the bucket with crutchs. I mean no local was gonna raise that. So he straps it to the bucket and takes off. By the way Slinger that printers a local printer. Makes sense, answered the Slinger. The Horse then left the set and began to nail his parchments around the plaza.

•--------

Proclamation RE:

The CYCLE of

ROBART'S

WALLET

TO THE CITIZENS OF

u. C.:

THERE IS

IN YOUR CITY TODAY AN ILLUSTRIOUS TRAVELLER

WHOSE

EARTHNAME

IS

GUNSLINGER AND WHOSE IMAGE YOU HAVE SEEN AN HOUR AGO DECOACH AT THE SOUTHWEST CORNER OF THE PIGSTY YOU CALL YOUR PLAZA. THE GUNSLINGER HAVING TURNED THE CONDITION OF THE LOCAL CITIZENRY AROUND AS HE TURNED HIMSELF AROUND THE PIGPEN YOU CALL YOUR PLAZA HAS CONCLUDED THAT THE PRESCRIPTION FOR YOUR SICK HEADS CAN BEST BE FILLED

BY YOUR

PERSONAL

ATTEN-

DANCE FIVE MINUTES HENCE IN THE TANNER'S YARD AT THE S.E. CORNER OF THIS "PLAZA" TO SEE THE POET RE· CITE THE ABOVE ALLUSION. YOUR PRESENCE IS MORE THAN REQUIRED,

Does that mean we dont have to go asked one clever voter of the Horse. That's right, answered the Horse studying the voter. If youre as clever as your question indicates you can stick a dime stamp on your head and send it thru the mail - we'll process it as soon as possible. But ij youre not, I'd advise you to get your head over there just like the proclamation says!

86

THE CYCLE

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T

Slinger speaks

0 Singer, we are assembled here beneath the rafters of the tanner's shed Turn the Great Cycle of the Enchanted Wallet of Robart the Valfather of this race turn the Cycle of Acquisition inside the Cobalt Heads of these otherwise lumpish listeners and make their azured senses warm &ake your norm their own deliver them from their Vicious Isolation

Whereupon the Poet, with one foot forward released the garmlees

I

I see cars drawn by rainbow-winged steeds Which trample the dim winds: in each there stands A wild eyed charioteer urging their flight On a long take-off roll, this is the purging of the beads.

2

Of opulence is the secret Journey, & mad Beside him stand Fear and Surrender The organic radicals in full salute Eager to plunge into the country and keen eyed

3 Covering every exit of the blank hotel The perversion of the service elevator Of the vacuum of creation and transportation Of his unseen symbolic Body Of the shrouding 4 In the sacred Commerce of South Station Where he walked, exempt of mortal care 'Io his leased car through the taint of small owners And human hands first mimicked and then mocked

5 For He was decoyed as the cheeze in a burger Upon a long white stretcher ferried by two poodles While he shuffled along with his feet encased In kleenex boxes He wobbled astride an industrial broom 6 The perfect disguise of the causal janitor Who came through Janus from the far side From that place where the Mint has its root From that place where the Owl has its hoot

90

7 And human hands first mimicked and then mocked Were seen to whisper and were heard pointing That gross was the dead certain and random And chance lewdness of the multitude 8 Look! The Burger's cheeze, That's it! Let's rush the rack and get it back Let's turn that cheeze to shit Come On! Let's spin a little bit 9 The scene thus leans the way of the stretcher As His guard of AntiBasins teleglance The Gate and guard the shuffie as Save the Cheeze Programs through their simple relays IO

And they push all buttons [lose all gratings Revise all functions ~eview the digits on The Move Repunch the possible _,eocate the Im Feed Back the pragma of the plan Itself

I I

This Imperial Fact was tripped While Failure drew his plans

I2

This one switch was thrown While Indignation kicked the throne

I3

This cantankerous crowd was led To discover how it bled By the apparition of a Cheeze, in bed And do you know what they said?

14 Do you know what they said? They said But He aint never bin seen! And he said You maybe oughta look for a bean Under at least three shells 91

I

5 And that was the Word which nobody heard They were into their L:._ ean so hard So they took two steps back And fell into their crack (just like a bucket of lard

16 Well then He smiled and L:._eaned on his broom And joined them In the dangerous disguise of Nobody He ran up a flag of John Adams in drag I7

I

And a card upon which said Start! Here's Being and Time and I'm goosing them good And both of ems yours For a Dime

8 Did you hear That they gassed We've made it at last And they jived and they jived And they jived and they jived

I9

The green flash struck red And one kicker asked as part of the group Will you please put it on the loop I aint leavin till I get fed

20

So The .Man throws away his broom Like you'd throw away your speech So it's Off the Cuff Fairly quick, but it's enough

2I

To win, and it Does matter how you win So for part of the riddle He goes into a diddle where He's dressed Like a briefcase with its pants down 92

22

And the rest is invested in a surenough latch However, His mind was so cool and smart That he threw away the key and said sweetly All that I've done I've done only for thee

23

Yet I fear we've been Seen and Surrender Tells me we must part

24 Goodbye Goodbye as if I Were a bomb saying Hello to Guatemala or As if I were a banana saying goodbye to Plato And as if I were a cherry pit

25 Emerging from the anus of George Washington Goodbye and Goodbye you effect me like a lullabye Since there's nothing to choose you may do as you please And as far as I'm concerned you can 'l(eep the (heeze

26 Then He entered the car which stood along the siding Its outside as blank as the loin of a Chester White To hide the pale movements of the Janitor Who is already strained over the chords of seclusion 27

Who rises now and then pondering the messages Suspending the messengers in the formula Of another instant That they may never see, feel and conceive

28 And inhabit themselves for in :J{o Way May they occupie their instant No matter How they watch for it They get sent for Burgers Everytime

93

29 Also, they are designed to relate Rather more with the pickles than with the mustard For some strange reason 30 But perhaps it is because They must be ready at a moments notice To 'lake Off, and mustard, whatever it may do Has an exceedingly long Take-Off Roll 3 I A Fast Head leans over the board He's not been seen but you know He's there It's Him, the Naked Disposition The straight Ray of the Immaculate Attention

32 The direct access to Everyplace The means to hold it while He burns its face With the hot end of His joint And to step around the lurch for the car moves 33 Now the slow exotic periods of the wheels Across the sections of track as the car Goes over the accordion rails to the Main Line The design of the Goddess herself 34 Is tacked to the board as the car tacs To the Main Line, this is not about haulage Tied up at the dock in ships, this is the Inventory And then the Overhaul of the fucking mind!

35 We find 95% of it Unnecessary, He mused And Surrender stepped forward right out of his shoes Is something the matter in there Right Now Or is there anything around here you think you can Use

94

36 I sure could Pickel: Mustard and catsup And hold the onion and on your way back Pick up a Crack I'm into What Happens when you lose 37 Then when the messenger got off To the county seat He turned on the AM and hummed the tune

From the Fall if Anytime ... lookout! summers endin Betty These days are pretty pretty Betty But theyre a Little colder Betty Yes theyre a little colder now And people say if you think Youre the One You better not go to Wisconsin Betty To catch the trees this time around They say those people aint so glad They say theyre kinda hoppin mad Cause they know Why! They just don't know How they been had

3 8 What took you so long Surrender You got the longest roll in the business Now hand me that Panhandle And step aside 39 The data the data is spraying the shrine Start• to ma tremble life was basically a freeload• Stop That's the simple sense of it refined From the flak of Biodetail interference

95

40 That big bleep is the birthday Big Bleep Mother's maiden name, the day she choked On the apple core No Big Bleep This is not gonna go very deep

41 This is a pennsylvania crack, vertical vertical Get me another, something up ahead And I don't mean Indiana I know where that's at Find me a crack from a society with no history 42 Find me a crack that ain't been surrendered in

Get me a crack from Way up ahead All these cracks have already been You Know Get me one from Around-the-Bend, somethin goin in 43 And the car slipped by the contradictions outside The Green and Red and Green and Red And as the Globe rotates against the wheels The whole thing starts to Rock and Roll 44 And there is nothing more for now to know Because the signals speak among themselves In an Isolating tongue Red and Green And Amber is the medium

45 For it is Amber that his lenses are As he sinks in the chair they come out of his head Each one revolves to his nose So the car moves into the mother train 46 The click of their coupling is as startling And as urgent and as quick as a whisper Into the ear of a corporate being

With a perfect background, The shrill scream Of metal to metal across the switch-yard 4 7 The scream of the Accomplished Present A conglomerate of Ends, The scream of Parallels All tied down with spikes These are the spines Of the cold citizens made to run wheels upon 48 Parallels are just two things going to the same place that's a bore He whispers and folds His hands Nor do His eyes flash inside the Amber 49 They emiT, and the emissions brake They turn hot red to cold green They fuck up microreality but good! No impressions, and like endless kleenex

50 Each datum is caught I got em And stored cold in a special future And sent to the floor below You 'K.__now, it's a Very short Take-Off roll

5 1 The prescription of His Amber shades A mysterium as booby-trapped with counter-locks Perhaps, As the multiple entrances to Ft. Knox

52 What has been run thus far Is what has been run before Its what can be seen from the floor It won't make us lock up the store

97

53 For I once met the decorator of that Interior And he pourd a description Of that wheeled apartment Into mine ear 54 The trickiest assignment of his life he said And one that he'd never declare But leave it at this: The space has no front it's dll rear

The Interior Decorator Runs the Scenario of the Winged Car I

To make all that clear Let me unscrew your ear

2

The design problems were insurmountable As there was nothing whatever to do For you understand that By its nature The Rear hangs Wholly behind you

3 The scenario is all Emanation The nesting ground of number There are no things there as such Material is a not with the K detached 4 All is transhistorical, functions Have no date, there is no gear The sentient might With toothy confidence engage

5 Functions have no date nothing occurs Dates have no function anyway Christmas is a tape of Halloween Every package is a '.Bomb 6 In case you thought all the shit was Out Of Pandora's box at last There is no light as we get it Nor any dark as such and the atmos 7 Is the medium of variable tubes of spectra Like nothing yet gleaned from the Sunne The condition in there May not therefore be agnate 8 In other words it could be the One You know how the species begun And how the Unique got it off With his hand 9 Well it's more like that Which is how it could be Than it's been since he joined the band

Io Still, there is no-one inside For inside there is no-One There is indeed inside only The No No No I I

And hear the language cleaner As it sucks up the negatives From the cracks in the positive linoleum For this is a large-scale linoleum

99

12

Inside the Car whose wheels turn Opposite to the direction they serve Is a man named Al whose codename is Rupert Isn't that outrageous

13 Isn't that epistimonical Isn't that an appetite for apatite What used to be called a deceiving form Isn't that the azimuth of the truth 14 This Grand Car with the Superior Interior Moves with a basal shift So Large It would be a dream to feel time curve For no masses so locked serve straight time 15 Thus rhythm has a duty to de-tour the Vast Contra Naturum? Baby you ain't heard nothin yet Like this is a day in the life Of The Man who grabbed the crack

16 And wrapped it around the An tho-space From the Eye of the U on out Displacement is never felt If that's where you're at, uh, It looks like that's that 17

I learned that memory here Is the mean difference between your shift And Star shift It's the appetite for apatite It's the principle of I feel a storm comin

18

And the sun pops out and all the daisies Take off like World Cruisers

100

Rupert's view of the planet is as From directly over the N Pole

19 From which point of view Florida Is about as far south as he can see Yet equal sense can never clock The frozen pendulum of such a movement 20

Inasmuch as the Sweep itself Distinguishes not Between the Outbound And the Inbound

2I

I didn't receive it as crackproof Until I located an aperiodic compass Under that chair He sits in Also He's got some primitive touches

22

Like the sundial Mounted in the palm of His hand And I don't Know, But They Say He's got a Star finder in the head of His cock

23 Or used to have 24 It isn't the Eye nor is it the U The shades are drawn against The shades are drawn against The organ of the Imagination

25 Which in Rupert's estimation Distorts the Interior, turns up the set When He's only named the game you know, He AIN'T DELT YET

IOI

The I.D. Runs the Actual Furnishings I

The furnishings are all strictly flat That is, if you see a chair to sit in You sit in the image of that chair You fry an egg in the image of the skillet

2

Which Looks at you like you're Killin it Goodbye anything which dares purport To Be I myself saw a typewriter filled with concrete And raised aloft in instant mockery

3 By living Atlantes, a race of half-column half-man Who turn each such thing smirking dizzying with threats of abandonment To gravity A basic trick in this uncentered locus

4 Atlantes also hold the drawn shades down And they open and close the rear door When Fear and Surrender come and go On their unscheduled excursions

5 And these Atlantes pick the pockets Of the passing guard producing almanacs Or tintypes of Brigham Young in drag But they cannot count 6 Neither do pictures constitute an image In their plaster heads, In any case They mostly make a gesture of disgust and wink Which is always a chain reaction among them

102

7 When they speak they say simply Shit! Or thanks! though sometimes they whine Could I have the pickle when youre done with it? 8 Their conversational English is limited Yet they mimick its rehearsal very cleverly They fear one thing and one thing only And that is the avaricious Vice-Versas 9 An obscene and gluttonous order of rat The Supreme Janitor unleases on the floor After Lunch where they destroy themselves With madness IO

When they find nothing But their Raving Expectations And upon this Nought They bloat and bloat and bloat

I I

And Rupert cackles and grabs for Breath And hollers This! Is what we keep the slums awake with

I2

And then, there is the Atlante who holds A special position the one With the fixed Astral Grin Detested by all the others

13 But not because he is Rupert's favorite In his hand he holds a tablet as a waiter holds a tray And upon the tablet rests an urn

14 Which in turn bears the inscription EMIT NO TIME Cut in a lascivious style around its liprim Yet around the base is cut An even greater impudence MADE IN JAPAN I

5 Inside this urn are the ashes The final remains of a colossal clock Which stood in the hallway At the beginning of Organized History

I6

And the sound started out as a Tock But quite soon it settled down as a Tick It possessed .no face so it couldnt be traced

I7

And this Atlante whos name is Al After his master did a number which went Four Five Slow Four Five Slow Three Four Low Three Four Low Three Four Five Three Four Five Through chorus after chorus

18

His eyes are sunk from the perpetual Debauchment of gross scorn He pours into the urn with his eye Onto the ashes of the Idea of Time

I9

Under his left ear he bears The cuneiform form of Man And below his right ear the mark of God And these were the signs of his predicament

104

20

For his head was caught like a pod Between this nasty pair

21

And he wasted Rupert by seeming To tip the Urn too far And he likewise drove the other Atlantes wild Whose coats had been pulled

22

That if Time is spilled in a gravityless space And becomes equally distributed That is if an absolute symmetry occurs And inertia is total That's as heavy as shit in suspension can get

23 So it sure kept their form sacerdotal With unending regret that the inscription Was not quite the same backwards as forwards And Although they detested him 24 Because he treated the whole Interior As if it were a cloakroom They were always excited By the way he provided a rundown

25 Take One, he'd begin, That was what in Olden Times Was called a perfect mistake, 'The Singularity 25• You know how Supermorph here Got into Meta-physics? 26 Well he's got such a short take-off roll That he was usually Up before The front end got off the ground So if anything went wrong He was

105

27 Still up when the nose went down Oh Children! The hour has struck by the clock Don't mean shit to him 28

He's got this rag clock With a yellow shag He keeps um under his pillow He talks to um to keep um awake

29 Pay eA'ttention he screams then bites um And spits minute words in urns ears Very small words in urns ears This is no hypothetical radical sweetheart This is a systematic arrangement like salt 30 This junk is out the back door And as youve Heard there's only the rear here Meta Meta Meta Meta Mount the thing before that mother 3 I Or one of his clones hits the button, Lest he mete and dole You all better roll and wrap Your finger around the Cola Coka 32 Glug your dugs but don't drap it It'll break your Base and you'll, Um Come in riffin your kneecaps like You're involved in some world-wide shit 33 Wink! But Cocaine, oh sure There's a national experience Would you Bolivia that? It's inside your heads Alright like a blackboard eraser

106

34 Its always On The Other Hand Or futher datadata could uh Verify If you lift the lid you'll get to the toilet Oh my neglected field of stunted glories 35 You sure got transferred to the side crack Oh my frozen beauties that rap's Not funny, Forgive me to the futurePast And he fell silent and shed a tear 36 Like a ball of jasper it rolled Into the mouth of a Vice-Versa and disappeared And the Atlantes listend to the disturbing silence In the eyes, the haunted eyes of Rupert's favorite 3 7 And Rupert sat still behind his slick lids And the subtlest twitch he made Because he was as proud, brother, as a dog With two tails 3 8 While in the fits of his astral vision Al the Atlante paced the Hall with his dumb eyes Dear friends you've gotta know I'm sad Where where Where have they got us Where is the crack where they've put us 39 We have got no feet! That's the cruel fucking fact Atlantes Look at yourself HEADLINES Power Struggle in Drop City

40 So when he hits the button You all better make sure your pedestal Ain't made out of nothin organic um Looks like you \Vooden types will have to go

41 Oh, e.,![l, we've got a tacktical problem here e.,![l We've got a tacktical problem here Al The Atlante numbered 19 changed the subject Yes Al, something for the crimestoppers 42 Came over the wire you know Something going on here Of an epicene gender Al In a Epicrene fury Very Very E7rLKOLvor; « Get it over with 19 ! » 43 Oh Hum Yess Yess It's whether or not You can scan the plot «You know you can do as you choose 19 !» 44 Yes, I figure that's on Since this Dawg in the door Is flashing his scar and pointing down thar But it's whether or not you can scan the plot 45 And make it fast Which came by last? I mean Big Richard was holding the Pot I mean, Now, we know he's Held it 46 Shut up 19! Rupert snapped on And moved his amber shades Like a sweep from the conning tower And His finger poised over the button 4 7 Which could activate the Vice-Versas And either way it's far out how

108

He cons the present to hustle the futchah By a simple elimination of the datadata 48 Which was unpunched and resealed And into the system came the muse Singing Used War for Sale As down from the rear came the message 49 I think this is it Boss The crack we been waitin for The scanners have picked off A telegram to Parmenides

50 From a point on the arc 2 days minus 4 Corners We sure know where that's at Boss, um We can find it in the 'Dark

0 Poet! the sun like a sword Cuts below the 'Tanner's Yard and we must hear the effect formed of the code name Rupert another time Another time we will witness how this double hydrocarbon hustles the future but for now, Fresh 'Distortions have swept the screen And from the smell brought in by the winde we have news of the Master Nark whb trailed us into your cycle Yet there is another, an Unknown who tracks us Someone whose fame is his :]\(_ame

109

A summer storm advances Though it is autumn You will conclude in another Town away from the Shades When under the cool Strokes of (Jvf uthos we'll find out about which way that Epactos goes

110

BOOK I I I

The inside real and the outsidereal

for Har()ey Brown

The Lawg

C

ontained in the brain like the nose was invented by cocaine is the sum of What Slam that filing cabinet shut!

Here Kurns the Kosmos Dont just stand there! (lookin dumb Stick out your thumb.

The Body in winter is the hunting lodge deep in the forest sheltered, with a view overlooking the full metaphor of the hart and before all else in the winter interior before winde and snowe and before you goe or when you suddenly are the guest of time where the afterbirth of space hangs in the mirror of rime and where one place is the center of this terrific actualism the waves of simplicity cross the shoals of destiny the shadows a cross the top of your grand desk are the numbers of your Winter Book the tumblers of the opening falling opening the Gates of Capricorn, the days have decreased as much as they ever will snowe covers living things with quietude Death rules over the visible, then, Life surges with the Sunne out of decline the Sunne moves northward the light tauter spring spreads the New Life over cool death and the dissected earth includes the contrary over which our heads are not pervasive for there the nightforce increaseth "a rite not of passage but penetration a cellular destruction an act of will"

I 14

the maneuvers of a brilliant ghost who returns with a longer stride in his eye Apparently, we wobble several important periods show it There is no vacuum in sense connection is not by contact sense is the only pure time connection is a mechanical idea nothing touches, connection meant is Instant in extent a proposal of limit Dear lengthening Day I have loved your apparencies since you created me

II5

The Winterbook

For some while we parallel the train whose shining rails are closed at both horizons and this group in which our brain is contained, speakes in the excellent tones of the beginning of an ascent, feel them rising into the realm of the surprising bent over what they say along the river Rio Grande 'earing the low chordes of the foothills spitting the seeds of the Sandias out of the corners of their eyes as they rise towards the land of the crazy Utes over and thru the mordants of the bridges and the buttes

Has Anybody got any Simple Class the Slinger enquired of the complicated group or is this road not "on the road." Someone bumped by the Rational could get on a plea for unencumbered forward motion because since I got here I've been issued every ball of twine your poor molecules can combine from A to C Whad you get for B Everything asked politely Bullshit the Slinger replied and the sign to Santa Fe grazed his vision This Tampiquefio imprisons my head in a pre-Cornel Wilde timeblock I'm too inside oilrigs and big assed gents from Corpus Christi Well now that I know the location, Senor I'll alight in Santa Fe later in the day to score a lid, what say you I picked it up the Slinger said as L.W. Lyde, Manchester 1935, who said, Pindar did A large portion of his work under the influence of the Emotional light - in the early hours and in the late hours of the day

I

17

Youll need tiptop growth Everything began to say because your head is almost out of-the-way like as in some farflung passion play I see us going thru the village of Placitas the poet interrupted, Slinger? Do you forsee the Master Nark interpreting our route Thats not possible to say returned the Slinger swaying in the coach He's so complicated he believes the shortest distance between two states is a straight line and since he's travelling on roller skates I'd say he'll be there ahead of time or shortly thereafter and since a icecream cone is what he'll be inside it's not exactly likely that we'll collide, here take a look, the Slinger says holding up a handmirror

No thanks the poet refused the place I could have used that was in the village we just left behind, a kind of Mexican hat you know where thats at!

II8

Dont push your luck the horse advised Theres less to that village than meets your eyes Thanks a lot Levi-Strauss Thats typically wise and by the way Slinger since our horse is so NIZE will you speak a response to the request "build me a better genetic louse-trap" and then we can take our mormng nap BUILD ME A GENETIC LousE TRAP yawned the Slinger - Better, the poet corrected Let's see, that sounds Mercenary But, THE HoRsE is a wringer for memory and because we're here you can understand this hemisphere was initiated to Europa's myths by this creature whome we've learned to steer Get Away ! the Horse had to say He pranced across the Incas and now he puts down the fincas He is wherever power is flexed I notice except in the sea for he's too small there

Il9

He's the one who NEVER LOOKED AT THE CAMERA, thats ex camera He is the companion of aftermath thats post-numeral He's the one who studied war itself before the invention of the path Your horses personify the striving after knowledge the road along which we drive symbolizes (you are aware Symbolize and Personify is a mimicry of Earth Habits, The Slinger said aside Symbolizes our thinking process Sagittarius is the art of memory the Arrow The brother is the horse of mem -ory The horse is the brother of woman The brother of Mother Memory you know, the lady who runs the hot-dog stand

Thats an elegant genealogy the Poet whispered into the ear of the risen morning Sunne as the stormclouds covered it and the Horse smiled perceptibly and asked the Slinger Do vou REMEMBER ME? dont you have something else to say?

120

OH Jack, the Slinger prayed I want you to feel and in your feeling move your bones for the want we now have of your access in this time so little beyond you and which needs your moving nerve as it dries tacked on the warp of its own flat sedimentary internalism The divisions of hunger shut behind their Doors Pinned down by their Stars Kept going by their Rotors Waked up by their Alarms Attended by a Prose which says how Dead they are Frozen by a Brine which keeps them from Stinking It looks to me Jack like The Whole Set is Sinking And theyre still talkin occology Without even Blinking Ah Men, saith the Horse

iivey

Here comes Indica Jack He's got his gnosis in a sack on his back

soberly

Now, repeat after me

falsetto

20

times

I promise my mother I will not join the Sierra Club

I21

Wild Horses! Everything promulgated What kinda mother you got Are you serious? She's a horse Naturally Of course, of course AND, you dont want none of your sacred quatrapeds packin no Honky Bi-peds to the top of no sierras for a look at whats left of their more prominent hysterias! Everything, you have got an Instant sense is what the Horse could feel in recompense And Everything like a Simple Worker had his wares laid out Announcing that the flipside always comes as the light snowe casually attracted to the earth drifting blew thru the perfumery of the pifion clad hills which flash on the frames of the windows of our journey and cause the junipers to go by Poet, me senses say you have in you something Low this morning

122

fewer stairsteps support your duel You stare out the window at the peasants gathering fuel on the hill have ye banked yor fires wheres the Fairbanks of your desires? In your eyes I see the underground like a miner with his lamp turned around The weather in the winter the poet nodded is a circulated mound the great policer of the glaciers intermission from the cruel isotherms He hunts the land, and all things there on And because the soul of man must always seek a warm tit he tends to like his summer fine "Light and Darkness, thats it" we 'ear from Parmenides, in frag. 9 And he TENDS to get in line as long as the sign above the booth reads SUBLIME STABBING THE MAN

(sold out)

123

Yor imagery is sensational the Slinger interrupted the singer But you know, it's also associational Listen, my celestial friend, We've got it from the Man on the 9th floor who has been lookin all over the Milky Way for a Mars Bar like you if only to confirm his faith in the Monte Carlo Procedure And he has declared his crosshair at 2 days minus 4 corners 37° North 109° West more or less That's Associational PROJECTIONS OF THE FUTURE BORE ME

like back in Olde Towne & beyond the Slinger spat you know why everybody in this state's fatr They're convinced torque is a relationship between the tongue and the fork now you know where thats at!

124

I do said the poet and I sure heard the third rime they want it all the tine Continue then with the construction of your sets each piece fits So, like the mind goes foward to the Hoodoos, sabe? to the site of their theoretical looming It is the load above it is the hod-carrier of the head, love What was It doing there? It sat on the trap door in the floor then It laid down this very strange backtrack and It got to thinking so wide Eats head went out the side of the room of the room and moved the stadium to declare its connections and the flashy scoreboard read THE OUT*oF*TOWN TEAM IS VERY MODAL THEREFORE THIS SHIT COULD BE

TOTAL 125

VAroom ! he said Whats that? The room he said whats that a bloom he said oh whats that the Bloom he said Oh what is that Kartoum he said oh what is THAT it is the Imperial bloom he said what is it? Outside the room they said What, Whats outside? Everything says it must have come from under his hat! I agree with Everything the Horse said we'll have to look into that! The Imperial bloom is waht prompted him to go into the room and put on Bruckner as the sun was going down like into the basement of walt disneys asshole What, whats outside? The outside, the OUTside the chorus chorused

So then, Slinger it is still not known how deeply you have studied this lingual springer of the western Kind how we came past the methadrain and how the war was begain

126

and now falls out on them hoodos in the rain in those hodos under the sunne ... As the sapien who peels his lupus vulgaris in the light of the moon is inferior to the scandian loon So he is superior to the mammal in the reading room who can't build a scaffold without losing his head and who Does Not feel his philosophy when it drops but who has an abstract in his case of a portable mystery before which he is harangued to stay awake! lest he move his whadayacallit into the line of his spine a curve of some grace it could serve as a place from which to go thru I mean the excellence of the yew bow

Just so, the auditory Slinger returned There are some reasons why I am taken by the beauty of your number yet repelled by your device and the energy of your pseudodox

127

To a poet all authority except his own is an expression of Evil and it is all external authority that he expiates this is the culmination of his traits Thus my mission on position seven is Inspector of the Grates Like when the fire goes out here I'll report back AND AHEAD

It is my fate you might say to occupy position eleven the same way I do seven But whats this? the Horses of Instruction have made the grade outside Madrid tho they crave no more effort than a hickory winde Me sees past the curtain a certain destruction the hills have been upended theyre no longer blended upon the plates of their own dynamic principles could a lover have done this, hombre? I dare not say but while the coach was dark and I had, combined, the circumference of Our Mind, a stark alignment of the Sunne Ourselves and the Moon occurred

128

And when the lunation was screened I had this vision which came in as a poem called The Poem Called Riding Throughe Madrid I shall speak it When next you visit The World Talk with the Trees and Speak into the Trees and Get it on with the Trees They know whats happening Over the hill of time Stand up in the Trees They go straight to heaven And they have heaved in waves Their deposits in earth The miner has brought up The madder from their graves They have made the vanes and They have made the stage And it is only they Who have given their flesh To this thing And this ring And this ring

129

The Horse then made a Gong! with his shoes

And Lil began to choose from her case a star from the flowering tree space and out of the storm there came a chickadee who sat on her wrist for a while and brought a smile to the Horse whose feet were still tingling from the gonging You have made my ears remember "the world soul slumbers in matter" the Slinger quoted and added Slap in a tape of my second favorite group we'd best relieve this little troupe if that machine is worth its quartz with TH' EUROPEAN SoN To DELMORE ScHWARTZ And the coach runs smartly now by the torn rooves of this company town while the tabla of the 4 & 20 hooves and the run run run of the sound brings the cognition of our psychomorphs around So now, the Slinger says We're Cerrillos bound

130

Just then a goggled bi-plane pilot hung from a pure hemp line across the window like a pendulum do waving a night letta with the sheepskin glove of his hand Then let him in the Slinger suggested and the pilot swung through the door Havent we seen you before? Lil conjured You might have, I used to be the chisel holder to Praxiteles Now I'm the messenger to the secretary to Parmenides Was that a promotion? Lil asked aside

And I have brought you the data in this here night letta uhHuh, whats back of it? The One uhHuh, whats thatr A tricky plea to deny the 'other' hand of reality Is that the code? No that's the imagery The Code is Sllab -

I'll take a stab the Slinger said Who's that There is but one Sllab ahead ( don't look back and Bean is his messenger We have reckoned that the Slinger said From the shape of your head What else? Sllab has a Double Trough JEntenna from which he gets his information the Pilot reported Here's a random sample -

Kick out the Dickel a hard bunch of consumers is comin through the door

Does Sllab know the xntenna is fucked Maybe it aint, Anyway That's not the biggest key all his data is based on WHAT THEY SAY Moreover he leases the data to an activity called HooRay which went right on down to produce a group

132

with such a heavy assay it was called Western Man or, Imprudential Behavior it was a real flash in the pan but, you know, that had this hit like Waffle Time! and you must recall their early side LET'S SPEND AN AFTERNOON ON THE MOON DIGGIN IT UP WITH A SPOON AND SOON THE EARTH WILL RISE TO OUR GREAT SURPRISE WHILE YOUR HAND ON MY HOOD IS GONNA FEEL REAL GOOD

?

What a title! How does the lyric goe? How would I know! I gotta go now, Buena suerte! and the pilot swung out on his Pure Hemp Line and was winched up to his bi-plane O, are you gonna open the Night Letta Slinga the chorus asked Once we're away from Santa Fe we'll see what the Secretary to Parmenides has to say

133

But now A weak-minded mammal stands on the corner of his head and fort Phil Korny avenue you can catch him as the Driverless Horses pull in this must be Everything's connection whos haranguing the perspicacious crowd 'But why is he so loud' Lil asked 'perhaps he can use some help before he gets boxed up and sent North May I ask you a question the subject asked with his head in the window and his finger sticking in his muthos or have you got the time? A fast nickel beats a slow dime, Jim Well, uh, the world is absolutely finite and the cosmos is indefinitely finite whats that? a cross between a billiard table ana sponge cake the Horse whispered in Lil's pierced ear YOU HAD HELP! Here! catch, and Everything woke up with a big Hello just in time to grab the gramme Hello Everything, the Horse said as his left eye lockt on Slinger What makes Process and Reality heavy is the&! 134

Slinger shouldn't we oughta hear that Night Letta before we Blow Upr Makes sense the Slinger agreed as he opened the letta and commenced to read REPORT

GX

&C

the Public Version THE SECRETARY TO PARMENIDES SENDS THE NIGHTLETTA VIA THE BIPLANE

The phone on the stagecoach wall then Rang and the Horse picked it up February 31st ! he said into the mouthpiece Levi-Strauss here Ah, Flamboyant Youre in Beenville, is that a place or THE FLATULENT TENSE And at this precise moment Dr. Flamboyant began to arrive in a Turing Machine one automatum at a time What's this a toe and an earr the Slinger asked and put on the speaker with a snap of his finga Anyway Flamboyant your voice sparkles like a zircon Nice of you to say that Lev I've been working on the 3 Great Beenville Paradoxes 135

State them the Slinger requested the tape's awinding like J. Edgar Whoever is on Crank Thanks for the extra attention

Flamboyant crackled and began Take 1 of 3 of the Great Beenville Paradoxes Nature abhors a vacuum but for nature, A VACUUM'S GOT NOTHING AT ALL

Take 2 of 3 To be in Beenville Was IS To be in Beanville still Take 3 of 3 The vacuum ADORES Nature for heers abhoring

Thats straightforward enough the Slinger commented, Waht's Heers? Thats a combining form used here to circumscribe It, but wait there is a matching set of pseudoparadoxes pseudo P(a Time and Life cooperate once a week, or used to

pseudo P (b Muy Sefiores Nuestros the mass of me you have in your coach can never be longer than yesterday's roach pseudo P (c Everything is prehensible for from that which is not we fall off

Thanks a lot Flam Everything murmured Dr. Flamboyant, the Slinger asked what is the condition of Pseudo P (b a "Garden of Eden Pattern"

uh Huh, your hand has arrived shall we shake itr Whew! I don't know, this Turing Machine I'm travelling in has a worn timing chain I need a digital transient recorder Bad the main mass of me which waits here in Beenville decided to phone ahead, quite without the authority of the Whole Body so my head might still be here when you arrive Just bring what you receive of my body in a safeway paper bag marked BEANS I'm trying to convince someone here I'm a Traditionalist

137

Four-ten! Doc, will do but dont hang it up yet the Slinger has some questions about the set Et bien, put him in

Slinger here, Doctor Flamboyant What's the Garden of Eden's function in Beenville None whatever, this is a contingency observation from WHATS LEFT OF ME in Beanville

Youre getting configurations that cannot arise in a game because no preceding generation can form them They appear only if given in the zero generation Because such a configuration has no predecessor it can not be self reproducing - in otherwords Pat it on the back, give it something to eat put it in a crib, and tell it it looks sweet

I follow you the Slinger puzzled but arent you the predecessor? ONLY IN BEENVILLE, Flamboyant shouted

Ah yes, the Slinger smiled the Pre-emption of the Ultra-specific! but how do I know which one of you to consult? See pseudo P lowercase c

138

Thank you! uh, don't you loose something when you transmit your self serially? Everytime, but not Everything, Once I lost my keys and couldnt get in Once I lost my knees and couldnt get down Once I lost my face and couldnt frown But I've never lost my place and that's why work it I'm still around M uy M uy insoportable the whole group chorused By the way Slinger Flamboyant asked Did you get the Night Letta of which I got a carbon brought here by the goggled biplane pilot? Yas! Will you need help with it ? Perhaps, how do you think it feels? DoeKnow, I wired for clarification and I sent the following help I know all I have written I have not written all I knows Seventy six!

139

Affirmative the Slinger nodded taking up the night letta as the phone went dead Now he said lets hear what I said:

THE SECRETARY TO PARMENIDES SENDS THE NIGHTLETTER VIA THE BIPLANE REPORT BGX + QUAD III [ 2 D'S - 4 C'S] EARTH FOR TRANSMISSION DEEP SECTION REF. "EMISSION POSITION 9" CLEAR PAST HOURS PRESENT TIME ALIEN PLANTATIONS REVERSE SENSE EE GEE ROWS B TO Z DECADE 7 NATION 23 TERMINAL DISPOSABILITY SKIP SIMPLE NULLIFICATION NO HIT STOP HIT PROCESS: STRICTLY FRONTBRAIN DEXTROROTARY EQUATIONS: SPECULATION SIMULATORNAILSFOLLOWINGPROBATEON PROGRESSIVE WHOOPEE CURVE: ACTUAL NUMBERS - IRREVERSABLE PREFIX LINE LITERAL NUMBERS-FLATRAP INFORMATION TEETOTTER WORKING "NOOSE" CASIONS GX + -2,

RESULT: IDENTICAL BUILT-IN EFFECTS PREDICTED AS IN OC12&:3 OF JUMBLED PAST [ REPT. WORKS]

WE [ 1ST SYNTHETIC ENTITY SERIES] AN­ TICIPATE [ LOCAL MISTAKE ] ABSOLUTE LINGUATILT SURVEY SITE #1 TIMEROOF [ JERKWATER IMAGE ] STEP - THIS - WAY EFFECT RELATIVE DISLOCATION: PARAL­ LEL SURVEY ASSURES COLLOQUIAL LOCKS HOLD AGAINST ANY METHOD APPLIED OUT­ SIDE TIME: THE LINE FOR LITERAL NUM­ BERS STABLE WITHIN WIDE PRESENT FRAME - ALL PRESENT SCHEMA KNOWN CONFORM LOCAL STRANDS: SET BIOLINES AT GROSS BODY MOTIONS: RADICAL CONFORMATION CURVED TO SURVIVE SPLITTING • 78 IN­ TERIOR VECTORS AT "WATCH IT!" FRE­ QUENCY# 4: COMPENSATE STIMULATED DRIFT CONTINENTAL SLAVES BY FACTOR 10 SQUARES [ STANDARD SIGNAL + 4 ] : LIN­ GUATILT PROVIDES TONAL EQUIVALENT FOR HABIT: REAL NUMBERS UNSTABLE IN CLASS 1 &: 2: EXPECT MATERIALIZATION AT PRE­ CISELY 4 CORNERS REGARDS TO EVERYTHING

•

I

SECRETARY TO PARMENIDES

141

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BOOK I I I I

for Jeremy Prynne

Prolegomenon

oddesse, excellently bright, thou that mak'st a day of night. You tell us men are numberless and that Great and Mother were once synonymous.

« We are bleached in Sound as it burns by what we desire» and we give our inwardness in some degree to all things but to fire we give everything. We are drawn beneath your fieryness which comes down to us on the wing of Eleusian image,

and although it is truely a small heat our cold instruments do affirm it. So saith Denis, the polymath. \Ve survey the Colorado plateau. There are no degrees of reality in this handsome and singular mass, or in the extravagant geometry of its cliffs and pinnacles. This is all water carved the body thrust into the hydrasphere and where the green mesas give way to the vulcan floor, not far from Farmington and other interferences with the perfect night and the glittering trail of the silent Via Lattea there is a civil scar so cosmetic, one can't see it. A superimposition, drawn up like the ultimate property of the ego, an invisible claim to a scratchy indultum from which smoke pours forth. But now, over the endless sagey brush the moon makes her silvery bid and in the cool dry air of the niht the winde wankels across the cattle grid.

Book 1111

Then went through the Superior Air a descension in summer from the troposphere over the high mountains and along the Colorado Plateau dry and warm, the fairest and rarest mood of the southwest earth And the currents of fragrant oil disperse in the hills like greek wine Only at the rim does the day tremble & shine. With the self-protecting instinct of a surgeon at an inquiry Robart let the document fall open Ordnance, Municiones, he muttered

The Global report fell continuous from the wire into his hand It was the braille version which he read with his finger tips as with his other hand he read the menu and laughed long and loud He was riding backward ... I has returned from the cultural collective his fingers told him An artificial bird twittered on the theoretical window sill A digital smile swept his lips Robart took up a Sullivan and Al stepped forward working the wheel of a feudor not quite out of his shoes in fact, Al has got rather slow since coming to Colorado Robart ordered a Steffansson Special one quickly grilled lamb but he departed from the classic menu by having some bread, a roll, This roll's as hard as a rock, he sang it amused Robart to eat bread that was his way of identifying with the masses 'J(eeping in touch he called it

He chewed his meat very thoroughly and swallowed it with a Very Great Deal of Thot trying the various chain messages of the animal's day, caterpillars big as tractors the strange garlic of the herders the dewy mornings in the sweet Utah hay the buzz of the massive afternoons then abruptly picked up the courvoissier and spit it into a waiting basin # 19 held before him for Robart used liquor Strictly for mouthwash. And then with an electric mutter he began to plan a major invasion of the modality Plaise the Lord and pass the municiones Al chortled Have you read that nasty note from the Xahr Shadup you impudent slave Robart grinned and balanced a kleenex on the tip of his nose You the onliest man in the world can do that boss, Al sang You say that because it so true, Albert No patron I say that because you got the only special rigid kleenex in the unit

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That's what I like about you Al youre smart, youre independent youve got class youre the Robert Taylor to my Lee J Cobb Uh, Honey, Al whispered I know it's a big move to change the subject SUBject Robart Spewed That's another thing I like about you Al youre So traditional Uhhuh, nevertheless Ducks, whats on the chain now that it's obvious to the Opposition how much we been blue-shifted Don't worry your plaster head Al, we can turn this car into a chile rellefio in a mere fraction of N othin Flat! Yesah, but it's always 60 feet long an on wheels You misjudge this population Albert theyll think it's experimental Eeow!, like the Toronto La Crosse Club? Exactly, more not less and what with the Shortage Industry wirkin thre shifts theyll just think it's Something to Eat

and as for wheels Ive wired Akron for a full set of tortillas, Total Agony! Slicks? Superslicks, no surface At All and anyway, parkins easy in Scratchback In sum, I don't see any trouble at the Big End so long as we keep the error-box empty, Now take care of this communique and what say we double the order on the fireworks of nostalgia Gums & resins, brimstone naphtha and the other bitumens and uh more saltpetre & sulphur benzol & potassium, dont forget the ducks grease and pass me that dish of Radio poo you got there by your elbow and oh yes, one gross CO. pellets a battery of HeN e lazers one mobile Rulz Field Beam What's that last item, Boss? # 19 inveigled That's the sow, we'll use it to hold the property lines when the maribunta pour in Al stepped forward right off his plinth

and add a ton of Traen Oil and a pot big enough to boil it up just in case we need to give those Mogollones a bath and find out if they got any OT in this trivium We're gonna have Order Even if we have to inject it. Those types are itching for the court of piepowder and altho they were once amusing this is no time for technological sentiment weve got to put those dusty feet on the path to oblivion did you know we've cornered the short-time fuses? But Pet, a lot of those Single Spacers is what you fondly called your Glorious Low-Violence Army Now you want to soakem in all this draino? We're Scientists Al, Sometimes we have to do Things we hate Things that even sicken us You remember, when we was red-shifted how sick I got when I had that sharp focus view of the Great Beyond we were in motion ahead of the velocities like the tachyon

Well, now it's all backfire and we're sucked again through the Dust Veil and I see the Pleiad just gathering for breakfast at the Cafe Sahagun, pass me that pick-up cone and me goggles and man the toggles

In the Cafe Sahagun in downtown Cortez, Colorado our party assembles from out of the thin air I comes thru the door twirling his psychognosis in his fingers and throws it at affective intervals into the air like a texas cheerleader and when he drops it behind his back which is quite often, according to the formula, he turns around to pick it up with a dainty bending of the knees and an expression of Oh-that-doesnt-matter on his vibrant lips as he hums Just for today I will not be afraid and I will enjoy murdering now that I can perform all by myself, an act of oblivion

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What do you want for Breakfast the manager shouted Give me a drum roll and a symbol crash! I glared thru the propeller of his baton He shoulda stayed in Greece Everything muttered he's coked out to his ears and he's spewing with chewing gum

Hello Everything, thought you'd Never get here HI there Lil, did you all keep me in minde, oh Looke I wish I had some of Those Things Everything's eating That's a dish of Etzalqualiztli! Lil said, extending her hand Corn & beans

Fascinating, I said, taking it Everything you got Produce all Over your lapel, say whats that other bowl of matter stationed before you like a Hollywood award

Crawfish pie, Everything shuddered Crawfish pie is frozen for Certain in Cortez, Everything, I nodded so that should get you right for Apache time. Oh is this Apache time, Everything doubted No it's sublime time I screamed Los cajeros llena menguante nueva Deevine. Ay yi yi yi, ay yi yi yi I sang and motioned for the check That's where I fell in love when stars above came out to play Did you all know the athapascans had no word for red? Now that's confidence! Entrapment is this society's Sole activity, I whispered and Only laughter, can blow it to rags But there is no negative pure enough to entrap our Expectations So what you all been up to in this land of endowed monks Rockin Along, Everything gesticulated Dr. Flamboyant blew his struts but he xld be along soon

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Yes I heard that I said, glazed with amazement when the manager kicked the table with a smirk and presented the check which turned out to be a series of characters written on his index finger which he stuck in Everythings Ear Everythings eyes spun. Two plumbs, the manager shouted hanging on to Everythings tongue too bad you only got two eyes youd make a fair bandit A 50 Caliber Derringer sprung out of l's right sleeve and drilled two test holes in the managers skull Whaaa, Everything stammered as the manager hung by a finger from Everythings ear It's OK I said, theres no Ban on mobile weapons, remember? Salt talks, or as Dr. Johnson said: if Public war be allowed to be consistent with morality Private war must be equally so I don't give a fuck about that Everything panicked, get this finger outa my ear

Um, zymosis of the brain, I observed peering thru the managers head But whats this I said Those two flies mating on the opposite wall were clean on line, still sittin there strapped together there must have been some Irregularity in the managers head I shoulda used a Pepperbox But let's talk Process, not Content Robart will be trying to cut our ion source, Said the Slinger looking thru the window, whats that stickin outa your ear, a finger? Yea, it belongs to that manager down there on the floor, I had to cut it off his hand Where's our poet the Slinger asked Oh yes, Lil said, he's up ahead Went to meet Taco Desoxin, they just brought Tonto Pronto, down from Toronto to meet Dr. Flamboyant, if he's able to reassemble hisself there, Theyre going to cross the cross Theyre working out their theory of the chic ground loop, the original art of which is rumored to be "eminently rapid"

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and depends on the difference between Saying and singing, Tonto Pronto is the World Famous ear specialist

Well have him take a look at Everything I can't live with that finger in his ear it's just too conspicuous But what else can Tonto Pronto do, Lil? What can Tonto Pronto do? Oh No, Tonto Pronto dont do anything but so far he's told us Robart just passed into the Scratchback purview and when we asked him how he knew it he said he Heard im do it

The lonely wail of the old Cannonball blazing through the night the chorus chorused Remarkable Powers. Thats stylish the Slinger continued while the populi have been set to trash control, the media dream of war, Robart dreams in transit while he riddles the carpet on his floor Made in Japan, the chorus chorused Like the Zlingers Forty-four Lets hear about your tour, I Lil requested,

since that cold sicksties night in Blackturkey, New Mexico, remember when you got that cubic mile of air pumped into your head? We'd like to hear how ameliorating you thought any of that stuff was Like trying to read a newspaper from nothing but the ink poured into your ear First off, the lights go out on Thought and an increase in the thought of thought, plausibly flooded w/ darkness, in the shape of an ability to hear Evil praised, takes place then a stroll through various corner-the-greed programs where we encounter assorted disasters guaranteed to secure one's comfort After that, an appropriate tightening down on all the debris left over from the Latest original question, yet How rich with regal spoils It was all Data Redux caught in the ombrotrophic mire but I sure got my Mood elevated Like the Truth from Home, Lil agreed Did you see the Revolution?

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Well I went down to the Square and somebody slammed a cardoor on my Sign, but I came thru with certain gyroscopic effects and despite what they say you can see it all on the scanner and as for Parmenides, He's got a brain like a golfball typewriter and really, you can feel his mind tug, it's abstracter than a seeing eye dog But I hear we're going out to the big Ascension Day Burn out at the, what is that placer It aint no place, it's a Idea Everything yawned, by the way what the shuit they lobbin inside our reduitr That's just the man disintegrating in this terrible heat, I replied why don't we go outside and join the Zlinger in the coach I feel him signal the time to spin and I'd like to brief him on the Jam we're in.

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The Zlinger was standing in the sunne by the stage, his cheek reflecting the fairness of a winter spent in Bisbee, when the mayor's wife, a formidable lady wearing a string of pearls and a babyblue cardigan came along the buckled boardwalk He stepped smartly up to her and said Howdy mam and presented a large bouquet Red Roses, expertly rendered in Solid lead And as she felt their great weight in her arms, a smile of regret raced across her superbly fastidious and disapproving lips, as she sank slowly through the boards, out of sight Sheer gravity, I noticed, defined completely by its amazing inwardness I nodded to the autocephalous horses and said: who needs wisdom? I'm glad youre not tigers! And what I, have you brought us from your tour of the Cumulus the Zlinger asked

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I had one eye out for the prosecutors of Individuality and the other eye out for the advocates catching in that spectrum all the known species of Cant which I've put in this bag, here, of fine Iranian tooling you'll find the whole package up to date A true gift, I, for the man who has everything, Grammercy That nearly completes my speciman collection now that I got me a real freak's lip And then he threw it on top the coach but, because the Zlinger undereckoned the stupidity of dead weight the bag flew on West with a systematic bias toward las esquinas some miles away, where it evidently came to ground a few seconds later when an oppressive nugatory roar was heard from that quarter and there rose up a powerful fountain of blobs, each one consisting of forty-two U.S. gallons of highsulphur crude Zlinger, you better go home Lil declared, collapsing her fan and stepping into the coach, somebody somewhere was praying for that

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Well if they were in that general area their prayers are now dripping with hydrogen & carbon, but that thing 's as spurious as the Wortham pool Never mind that, the Oil Smellers have already got the scent Everything hollered and slammed the door and the horses reared and churned the dust as they went quickly to the limits of Cortez to the nightmare limits of town through the smell of cut and bleeding grass One thousand geodetic feet beyond a historical marker they came upon The Hill of Beans in the very shadows of mesa verde and I suggested they stop What for, Everything asked it don't amount to nothin Don't give me that rock & roll, I'm interested in the figure not the hill I said You mean that giant bronze bean? that's Sllabs messenger that memory's now obsolete I know Everything but I've never actually seen it what's this inscribed around its base?

Hecho en Tejas para El Hughes Tool Co. That Sllab has a lotta rind Lil reflected opening her parasol By the way she added is this heroic or colossal taking a coin from her purse

Neither one Everything muttered banging on the side of Bean with his knuckle, it's Rubber give me that coin we'll hear what it's got to say Everything predicted as the machine began to speak: Achievement comes thru absolute power and power comes thru strength And Strength comes thru Digitalis Everything screamed cranking the finger in his ear Don't overwork your lung books, son your forms are not primitive enough this nation is the product of reason & corn but that was before you were born before the boiling of the seething masses reduced it to commentary TREMENDOUS! FANTISTACK!

it's all over your back like a bivouac, sorry, I meant to say Sllab did a fantastik job and furthermore, left it right in the middle of the field at halftime, remember, then he took a plane to the Garage and Drove the rest of the way Sllabs final words are thus recorded: The Fenomena is stark, energetic full-of-shit & well defined= altho there is much that I find sickening= the excessive opulence & waste, the blatant commercialization on which the society is built, the selfish introspective approach to world affairs, the hysterical obsession with disease, the puerile abhorrence of old age & death= all these illnesses are the manifestation of overdeveloped rites Don't look for ambiguities or textual tickets as the vocabulary blended in this resume prohibits the use of them

"CLICK"

Off in the vast distance a touch of dust appeared and a mounted group slowly and smoothly came into focus And just as the poet, accompanied by Taco Desoxin and Tonto Pronto and our Horse arrived there was a roar from out of town along the road to the monument when Dr. Flamboyant, driving a bright green 1976 Avocado with a white vinyl top and full hyperbolic clutch slid into the lot and stopped after bouncing 2 5 geodetic feet straight back off the Bean Then he got out and squished the door shut with his foot Stylish, the Zlinger whispered Thats a smart car you got there Doctor whered you get it? I picked it off a tree in Riverside. Well, he then said looking the company over Space is rich, Time is poor I've just been up on the mesa preparing the reduit, we can start up anytime. Hello Taco,

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Zlinger says youre the best environmental modification man in the business, do you think you can work with Portland Bill? Well, I don know, said Taco Yeah I think I can work with Portland Beel if Portland Beel ever work He's so low he's solo I hear he's good at climbin trees but I aint seen any trees around here I got my people down at the Corner we straighten some fenders, by the way that Avocado over there could use some work and we blow some smoke stacks burn telephone poles slice permutationes thin as baloney nothin complex we also kick the perpendiculars outa right anglos eat fur coats suck air thru white sidewalls but thats a Zen Act, extra and, we do Blowtorch pretty good we just Blowtorch Vegas from the kitchen aprons, delante, serve the godfathers like live spaghetti, Spaghetti con vida, activo spend all day Holiday Inn, live spaghetti crawl out nose, Maldici6n, Muy Dindan

Tres Injusto, en casa mucho madness, Irritante! Consumidores jump off deck Portaviones muy pronto! We also supply Hi-grade lunatic information you can get it here & so forth also do Pre-pourd Scorn, that's on twenty-four hours notice Thats good repertoire Dr. Flamboyant cut in, Tres chic, the Zlinger nodded but it's not too much to go against the Mogollones Not the dreaded Los Mogollones! Taco gasped with fake splendor None Other, they are the new machinists Masters of the wedge inclined plane screw Silhouetted against the growing intensity of teutonic artillery fire over the western line Don't worry, the poet advised a pound of gold is worth a ton of lead Depends on what you wanta use it for saith the horse Just now I saw the sign on the necklace of a crazy Zodiac Lil announced And What did it tell you the poet asked leafing through the Slingers extragalactic notebook 168

Vegas is a vast decoy

How do you interpret it? the poet idled A mirage it is not It's real, like a hunter's duck

Then we're in luck, the Horse observed Only the duck is faithful to that deception and when he is shot down his temperature plunges to meet that of his fabricated brother Wherever that is in the water of a glacial pool in the gamebag of a metropolitan fool or in the wagon of a suburban ghoul Yet he may rise again when the oven's hot to the mouth of his sporting consumer and find his way digested by the drafty stomach and ignored a little later by the daffy brain as he winds his way by porcelain bowl to plastic pipe and concrete main while the eye that shot him jogs thru a page of Field & Stream so when you multiply that bit enough you end up in a trough of xit and when the handle floats by you'll pull it! Desperate the Poet whispered Vicious and Desperate ...

Men and Horses Lil smiled share a similitude supported by foolishness you both wear blinders though only your race, Claude, wears them openly I've seen them on the road where they come and go in the same direction and when you are made of wood I've heard you have men in your belly and in your arched and idealized neck and whence from these parts they spill to take what they could not take by storm do you share the feast more than a fake duck? when they take you apart to fuel their fires and brace their hulls and start, each one, to his disastrous home.

Uh, I'm not sure I get your question Lil the Horse exhaled, but are you speaking of the need for horsepower? Yes, I suppose I am, In Horses!

How would you like poco coito, Lil? Claude asked suddenly My virtne is not presently on the market, fella Lil glared, which is bad timing of course because I might be amused to make it with a horse.

Make It, Claude frownd It aint nothin but a neuter pronoun.

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You've got no sense of cooperation Horse, Now that we stepped out of our coach, Lil continued and beneath this monument recline with our jug, can you sing an ordinary song after the wailing of that Firecar passes Hows that? How's what? What meanst thou? Well, like your mother would like to hear Ah Yes, That Test reflected the Poet through the slits of his psychic blind ... Are you a relative Lil of the famous Cocaine Lil? The Chicago Lady whose story opens with the quatrain: Did you ever hear about Cocaine Lil? She lived in Cocaine town on Cocaine hill, She had a cocaine dog and a cocaine cat, They fought all night with the cocaine rat. Those lines are on the mirror if she was a woman then she is my sister!

A marvelous reflection Lil That's when Sandberg was aJY... iceberg. How about a song then my mother sung to me when I was small and in her arms it is her song but mine as I remember it, a song of Times Past Nostalgia for lunch! I wanted you to make one up but let us hear the one you heard when you were just a pup

CO-KANG! is the way it begaine, was a Cir l from the montaine raised on air and light Erythralynn, painted with red clay and dressed in leaves resembling myrtle Erythra with a wig of roots and she was vulgar and strong as pure salt and intuition came to her like the red deer to a lick to blow the bare words of insinuation into human nature the only nature to her, because this Cir l is permanent Only in the air

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Miss Americaine, was a mountain thaing dressed in red bright calico a long and tender radiating crystal and like the knowledge in her nose a lioness, intense to the switching of the Inner Trail which leads by hidden passage to the Absolute Outside yes, dressed in red bright calico the sunne moves down on the gir1 from Cuzco Bright Erythra, the girl in calico when the sunne comes up on Cuzco She snaps her fingers and they produce the numbers never produced before, C 19 H 21 , then five times more for the fugitive N0 4 five times more to lock it ON the awful shyness of the N0 4 Now, a man is what he thinks I suppose it matters zero what he eats with what he blows his nose is what he knows, ah yes, there where the blood docks I will be because this is My country And then the great raptorial birds fly like sheets across her lenses while down the road she goes

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Such is the nature of this Dope that upon this eastward glancing slope the leaf is grown, and it's no mysteri how on this terrace of our globe the limousine was born Look, no wheels, sefior Where the Moon's leaf was forbidden by the Royal Inca Cocalero who first knew outerspace covered with blood and wax the same as you my dear and rode along the cordillera in a smooth chair Nor could, my child, that which exists be more Here and less There The thing that can be thot and that for the sake of which the thot exists is the same as the only function and in it the Power of Reality rides behind the oneway vision of the darkened glass snowblind with fixity, on the Equator Surrounded so by Envy there appeared at sunrise on the first of April Suddenly as Monco Capac at the Lake Titicaca a man in cream-colors a funnel hanging from his brain saying It is all one to me where I begin For I shall come back again there Thus spake his Highness Mescaleen

He rode out from the tilting capitol arrayed in the plumy cinerama of his adrenalin and displayed by his bioluminescence He was as fresh as you my dear the night you sprung from my body covered with blood and wax and laughing out an ode to space endlessly Then they met. She was a bride like Afias, remembering the reddish disk of which we have merely Heard the melting occurred and which may be jamd but not disclosed "There lives a fonne that fuckt an earthly mother." She whispered as they passed And she could pass the Madagan Test he thought, without a cloud Save your flattery for the nickels She smiled, and by this simple change their passing conveyed, apparently in the flash of the meridian arc upon her lacquered nail's convexion, a scoop of crystal like a giant &

MORE than enough it is safe to say to satisfy the whims of bobby blue bland Plus the latterday frenzies of duane allman La Bella Donna was abroad. She's the one who turned the coffeepot upsidedown in Tulsa who maintains the madness of mumbling

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She rose like a shade between them as they turned about to reconsider and in turning they were so into what they could see they couldn't see what they were out of And in the stillness of the spells and wonders an interruption of the indifferent flow of the sunne rather as the scarce planets who keep it for a while clasped in their penumbras until the parsed rays flow from the point of the cone they pass into futurity and the whole system can see whats going on in the third orbit My Darlings! Dofia Bella greeted them there you are, thrilled as parallels shining in the geometric morning Then Dofia Bella whispered to their surprise, my principle will prop open your disguise This is the genuyne stuff I keep in the veins of my vine, she said Then cast the distillation into their eyes and the dream came Now let's have a look through that brocade, Mister Deity You'll see it more, for a while but we'll see it Whole, forever

right through those paki threads there in there underneath all that Red Beetle hair Because there's not even a quarterinch a Inca here and as for you my Dear Girl she said, Turning to her cousin I can only recommend it to your brain you know what I mean, Americaine since even Dr. Merck lied about his werk I'll kiss your thaing with a drop of rain for any word which drops from you nose to your mouth without a gettin itchy to leave the plain truth behind So if You dont Mind, she then suggested you can take your Big Visions, O.ff my road and Watch out for that Toad! Thus she had the drop on their eyes and they were rigid along their vectors and they saw thru each other the Correctors with eyes that were mined in Kimberley and cut and polished in Amsterdam ...

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11

La ~ejanfa. The poet whispers, sweeping the ancient threadbare blanket of the floor resting at the monuments to volcanic action to the last pefi.asco, desprendimiento de tierra, ash & lava mojones superboa, paisaje magnffico masculino, all thats left of the plumbing dikes, flues, the tubes of frozen magma Rico, a thing to contemplate Holly Holia, this is where the earth bared herself This is the old altar of fire This is San Juan reaching still sagrado and not consagrado this was once plasta now a worn and bitter fugue by Chaos This is the quantus laid as bare as it can be laid It doesnt do to enter it its scale is revelatory not comparative, it never worked to cast the myth too close to this place

Is that all you seer the Horse asked in his hammock from this our reduit

Nay, mein Pferdehandler the poet answered his glass in his hand Beneath the twisted rose boughs of the heat our shadows walk like little foreigners Shape without form shade without colour Other interviewers have set strange feet upon the set There are some consumed by a blinding meditation zeveral xeiks xilly xally in the xade enwrapped in the winding cloth of their long-winded algebraic logic They are going to marry those dumb ones the ones with hands like chainsaws This is a discreet rumor Till quarrying starts us with amazed shock hooked claws, wrinkled scale This is a dragon flock There won't be a defense of anything All is Kaput And now, from down at the bottom comes the Product, Robarts Mogollones 179

Creeping Craters! The poet gasped a lone caballero is galloping thru that mess headed straight for this mesa That would be Portland Beel called Taco, from under the Avocado Hees always late, eh Tonto? Incidentally, how you doin with Everything's ear Well it's like the cork & bottle problem: I don't know whether try to get it out or shove it all the way in in a way it wld have been better if I had cut off the whole hand at least that way we'd be presented with a conventional sign we'd Get the Picture, cosmetically speaking But the way it is, with what we've got to work with here and what with the way that finger keeps twitching ... oh by the way Everything can you feel anything in the finger? You Can? A ghost hand? Zlinger, this is the most pre-classical case I've had in 20 years of Ear Eye Nose & Throat of the problems of the external auditory canal

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I've seen impacted cerumen ( wax to you) boils, strictures due to blame I mean flame bony growths, malignants, caries and necrosis and, just plain foreign bodies but this case has got me stumped, although come to think of it, it's probably common there being only one other place where anthropos usually has his finger but we never had a case like this in Toronto by the way what's Etzalqualitzli? it's stamped on this finger Some kina corn and beans But I can't say exactly what the Zlinger said from under his hat Speaking of ears, Tonto Pronto continued did you know the length of the ears in comparison with that of the skull in North American Hares varys with the temperature? I reckon I thought it was the width so What can you do about my receiver? Well, from this cabana you can see for miles but that don't help your ear I could make an artificial finger for your other ear, but ... Cut that xit pronto, Everything shouted

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Now careful lad, remember we aint had our hearing impaired I think I'll recommend a finger specialist in Big Bend He a friend of yours, Everything suspicioned No, but he's the only finger specialist I ever heard of, in the meantime I'll give you a prescription for a ring at least people will think you're married to it

Now, from the north the Single Spacers have breached the pass the Poet cast peering through his telescope How much optical recovery do you get with that thing Tonto Pronto enquired Quite a bit Quite a bit Dr. Flamboyant replied manning the monitor we can see the Octane tanks hangin on the Mogollones side they can't breathe the air you know the conditions out here are way too pure and slow I know they brought their tanks along I heardem all the way to ,,C . .A. when they put em on

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I also hear a full set of Tortillas Double Agony Slicks, Akron Specials screatch onto a siding in downtown Pagosa Springs And dealers are climin all over it How you know theyre dealers from your teeth clamped down on that knife stickin in that tree Everything questioned Because, Kimosabe, they're shouting Dynamite in their dreams That's the Home Truth, Everything reflected Who do the Mogollones belong to Doc Taco wanted to know They all belong to Robart [altho they don't necessarily know it Theyre his version of anti-personnel Their messenger came over in a submarine He likesem because they got no vices of course they got no virtues either since those two qualities are alike the result of natural processes in other words these types are totally Anti-Darwinian Love it or Kill it, the Zlinger snorred They are all verna, homegrown slaves

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On the Other Hand the Single Spacers are Anythingarians le, opposed to nothing [that would include Everything, at least before his accident They belong to anything they can get their tongs around, theyre really monotremata, but they've adapted and now most of them wear shoes if thats the word for such a jacked up footcover in order to get their heads above the crowd Well who do we want to win and what's next, Everythin perplexed We don't care who wins None of that bunch trusts us and if they werent so careless they'd trust us even less but my moneys on the Mongollones theyre gonna burn those singlespacers out Hard to say, the poet cautioned make no mistake, the Singlespacers are good, in fact, theyre Awful streaming in like a horde of chromeplated ball bearings To warm up they throw bags of bolts into turbine generators

or tear the toenails off Bengal tigers and just before they come on the field they push a Black & Decker high speed drill into the trunk of a Bull Elephant or sometimes they just kick a gorilla in the balls Serious Warm-Up, Everything agreed Yes, the Horse expanded, I interviewed one of their number down on the blanket Their favorite or Dreurve is electric eels, which they swallow alive and whole shocking habit, theyre the original slime mould Where they comin from Lil called from under the shade of a juniper tree

Theyre going to LA I said but theyre outa Hardass Tennessee and they seem to have done something to the subduction zone look over there at that cone the way it's huffing and puffing Upon hearing this news the Zlinger lit up a Sullivan and leaned back his eyes fixed in crypt;esthesic isolation His mind hung bat-like from the rafters of the Burlington Arcade

He rolled the seed ball of a platanus occidentalis in his finger, his minde played over the austenitic horizon and gaged the coefficient of expansion The immense inertia of the old order buckles that chain of blue mountains This is old dinosaur country a record full of sudden changes I see the grass shake in the sunne for leagues on either side the chorus sung Oh Zlinger are we lost No, we are crystals of gold along the axes of upheaval When, he asked, will they take up all their tappet clearance Round Lunchtime, the Doctor theorized The amateurs trouble, the Zlinger pondered is over-revving, quite often with a cold engine, and that would lead he knew, to inertial failures of the Big End fatigue cracks, the separation of the Bosses from the Crown This will be very low-grade glory this cranking up for the chiliad he said At this very moment a zephyr struck the mimosa

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as down the draw/ and up the hill rode the very intrepid / Portland Bill That's a grotesque exercise you got down there he addressed the Zlinger who was still suspended in his mental hanger we the only spectators here? It's a Big-Ticket Item the Horse responded Vaz This, Portland Bill blurted from behind his moustache a Shpeaking Horse? Shuks, the Horse laughed and kicked a barrel labeled crackers You think Thats inconvenient listen to my Friend here The Speaking Barrel Can he walk? No, but he can roll He hangs out with the tumbleweeds and he loves to talk I can believe that Everything noticed look at the way it vibrates You better ask it a question before it busts a band Hokay, Portland Bill blurted What about Oil I aint no drum! the Barrel shouted

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No No! Portland Bill exploded I mean Rangoon Tar UhHuh ! you'll settle for anything On the other hand, the Barrel began to expand They can now grow Reindeer Commercially, Rather unsettling news for Reindeer And I heard they've crossed the feeble & the bold Rather unsettling news for Feebalo They say depressions are nearly always due to chemical imbalance But the only cure they can think of is Taalk But the best bet of all, would be to choose an impeccable gem from the new snobbery: Don't give your drippy offspring an electric train for christmas Givem a Railroad! In other words, fancy face if you can't improve your standard improve your mind and remember, autoinsurance companies really take the public for a ride And Now How'd Yawl lika riddle 0 h speak Barrel The chorus shook

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Well, you know the trouble with D.C. theyre all coked out to their ears have been for years And you know the trouble with S.R can't get enough of that wonderful stuff And you know the trouble with Chi still singin pie in the sky And you know the route to L.A. It's about two inches deep! And you know the trouble with Lanta they just do what they gotta So where does that leave NY? Here's soot in your eye! Practical to the last detail, Everything remarked But has that got something to do with the News Everything scratched his head When you snooz you looz, the Barrel said Yes, but that can cut two ways Everything protested It can for a while the Barrel observed you know more about crackers than I do!

Now I didnt bring them up Everything disallowed, Somebody here's making a pitch to the crowd The condition of your stomach is personal to you the Barrel interrupted I'm speaking from the standpoint of an Object and I get more sure of myself as I settle in What about the riddle Everything enquired what kind of answer have you got after all, youre just a barrel of crackers Well, I have, uhhuum the Barrel began to extol looked at the bottoms of a lot of feet and Never saw a sole But the system works! Everything quoted or have you got another version of how we got here? The WHAT works! The WORKS work, you fancy faced digit! What's that finger doing in your ear? churned the Barrel

Now you better hold your staves Everything threatened or I'm liable to unwrap you I wouldn't try that Hothead this contraption youre talking to might spring apart in your, uh face continued the Barrel indifferent to caution Anyway Everything I do and It's not some Kleenex-out-the-hatchinfection theory neither I heard it was a can of Pork & Beans over the rail Everything chimed No, that's too natural grinned the Barrel It's all over your meat and what you eat for instance there's this citizen is out looking for produce He's got a little on his lapel Nothing specific, could be anything from chinese to italian by the way you might be interested to know whats going on in this church Up in Seattle ( where I caught rain last month the barrel parenthesized They call themselves the Pulpers

I'd sure be interested in any church a barrel attended Everything prodded, What's it about Strict Fidelity! They allow Nothing Oh, you mean no sing no dance All work no play? Everything gaped Not quite. They start before that, No Breathe Plain Jesus! is that a fact Not yet, theyre in the slogan stage Theyve cranked consumption down to plain water, that was my job till I got pneumonia and went back to crackers But theyre bracing for the Boreal Invasion bury their dead and not quite dead in the roots of trees some consign their money directly to the ice That's nice, Everything waited They belong to the Scare Story Chapter a subgroup and some plan to leave all they can think of to a dawg

I can see what you mean by Strickt Fidelity Everything marveled that's pure Egyptian Yes, the signs are all over the sidewalk the Barrel resonated it's the new Freedom Now I don't know what you mean by freedom, Barrel But you better keep your lid on or you might get used for pickles Do not deny in the new vanity the old, original dust You can't scare me Everything because I aint a pickle barrel That's your distinction it dont mean a thing to us because when we get in a lot of pickles we throwem in the first barrel we see! And that aint the worst of it When the Mogollones get here Theyre liable to fit your case on a single pickle and marry you off to a gate post where youll take delivery on the mail until some drunk comin home late at night in a camaro jacked up with flames devours you!

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Ho Ho the barrel puffed I'm gonna be saved by the Nature Lobby I'm very well crafted you know authentic Old Time and I still got my lid it's around here someplace I wouldnt count on the nature lobby Barrel Portland Bill said stickin his hand in for a cracker looks like theyre not gonna show up Get your hand outa me! the barrel rumbled, I know you youre a sponger of exemplary singlemindedness and absolutely no astuteness besides, one cracker leads to another and I aint no pork-barrel neither! What's it like down there on the flat Bill, the poet asked It's like Brutalidad, quarks zippin right out of the main manifold it's the tamale finale screamin zucchini impaled on pinnacles all the hysteria of a fake disaster set I was able to talk briefly with Trig Utah the matinee idol of the Mogollones who travels on a diesel-powered skateboard holding a hatful of dinosaur piss and he said Robart was shipping them a full car load of peste bub6nica real over the border quality

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but then somebody fucked really strong with the subduction zone and I saw this fixed head coupe clear the horizon doing a full charge ton and that's when I skedaddled Here, I've got it I'm almost inside, the doctor cried but that car has got so much lead around it May I present sputtered thru the monitor His Holinas the I9th Hodunkas oj Hot Springs K:.rackle K:.rackle K:.rackle

Incarnation is bunk, Al Get that Punk outa here And send jar the Hydralicx we're in a fracture surprise is no longer the mode We gotta get as big as we can as fast as we can, that's the game plan Can't do that Patron He don't pray jar rain no more he was a happy man but they kicked him upstairs and moved him to Chicago He travels jastest who travels alone jAdi6s!

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Robart shouted as the side of the Chester White Special Came down on pulleys and he spurrd down the gangplank on his cow, not exactly an ordinary cow, white hands clinging to the tightened rein and ran straight for the border That's a long way if he's goin to Chile Everything observed But that's no hoss the Doctor said, look at the screen, it's a naked singularity he must be headed for Siberia! Off in the distance there the Poet pointed are those guys workin on the railroad Si sen.ore, Taco squinted theyre choppin down the watertower Wellwellwell, the doctor raved it looks like the Magma Source was saved Lil patted the Zlingers cheek and asked him if he could speak Looks like you slept thru most of that she said

But you'll be happy to learn that Robart' s redshifted again and all the Atlantes tumbled out of the car and made for the skislopes we've effected the saneamento!

So Robart didn't carry out his purge of the Atlantes while passing thru Iowa as threatened. That's welcome news Lil Oh, hello Bill, the Zlinger blinked. Get your dog away from me the Barrel rumbled I can't stand that thing, it's mental! You don't like my dogr asked Bill No, get it outa here it's a hunk of trash on four legs! Why you crazy crackerbarrel Bill sputtered and drew a Big Revolver I'm gonna make you look like a hunk of gruyere I think I'm gonna retch Lil said

Not around me the barrel rolled And just as it reached the lip of the mesa it stalled, stuck against a clod

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Wrong Way, the Zlinger called and then the earth shook and the barrel rolled over and the finger fell out of Everything's ear and in the distance he could hear a vast rheumatism Many the wonders this day I have seen the Zlinger addressed his friends Keen, fitful gusts are whispering here and there The mesas quiver above the withdrawing sunne Among the bushes half leafless and dry The smallest things now have their time The stars look very cold about the sky And I have grown to love your local star But now nifios, it is time for me to go inside I must catch the timetrain The parabolas are in sympathy But it grieves me in some slight way because this has been such fine play and I'll miss this marvellous accidentalism Oh no, Zlinger, Lil trembled must you leave now, we've just hit the Top and you belong to us

Ah Dear Lillian, give me a kiss you know my heart beats to another radio signal Whats it like, Lil asked

Our Source is self refracting and when it rises it actually plays a tune on one's eyeballs, Maximum Deum and our birds have two heads and sing duets Holy xit, Everything wept and the cows have the ability to convert their teets in the summertime when they give a substance not unlike tasty-freeze Rather convenient said the Horse who was speaking on the phone to Frank Chrystler Canlid, the great producer Yes, since the trees bear a double cone Where then, Lily are you off to? as this company scatters on the marvellous winde

I have this incomparable feeling and it keeps calling me home a feeling of Wyoming I'd like to get back, before they tear off the dome And you Poet, whats in the cards for you Moving to Montana soon going to be a nose spray tycoon

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Give my regards to Portland Sure will said Bill Good work doctor shows what you can do if you persevere Do you mind if I keep your hand as a souvernr Goodbye I, keep your eye on the local species theyre nothing but a warehouse full of peanuts But how will you get there

the poet asked

I'll go along with the tachyon showers which are by definition faster than light & faster than prime I'll be home by suppertime Adi6s Taco Goodbye Tonto and take my greetings to the lads in Toronto Goodbye to Everything waved the Zlinger thru the dust veil Vaya con ojo caliente vaya con zapatas, muchachos vaya con mucho infinito y voluptuoso Adi6 por eternidad, Lindas Hasta la Vista!

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Linotype: Caslon Old Face & Caslon No. 137 Badoni Book, Granjon, Remington. Foun dry: Caison 471, Bauer Badoni, Ultra Badoni, Badoni Bold, Garamond, Co mstock: Spring Creek San Franci sco. Printer's Button and Lady Caslon G by M. Myers. Spec ial effects by H. Teter. Text from Wivenhoe, Lawren ce, Taos, Ardleigh, Ch icago, Cuernavaca, K ent, Riverside, Lo ndon, Kimmerid ge, Wivenhoe Park, and Cambr idg e

To Eliminate the Draw Edward Dorn’s Slinger Michael Davidson

When Charles Olson set out to delineate texts and contexts about America for his Black Mountain student, Edward Dorn, he emphasized those works which invert the traditional terms for personal, spiritual, and political life. Rather than study the purely physical universe, Olson proposed a study of the “human universe,” stressing that for any historical study, “it is not how much one knows but in what field of context it is retained, and used.”1 Obviously the “Bibliography on America for Ed Dorn” was intended to do more than provide a reading list. It suggested a radical re-thinking of “place” as characterized by its linear history, geography, discoveries, and warfare. Authors recommended by Olson like Carl Sauer, Leo Frobenius, Alfred North Whitehead, Frederick Merk, Brooks Adams or Katherine Coman, offered a methodology for studying and presenting historical data in some determinate relation to one’s immediate concerns—the writing of poems, for example.2

Dorn responded to Olson’s advice by taking the American West as his chosen area and researching the lore of its discovery, development, and exploitation. His poetry of the mid-fifties to late sixties deals with the “iron locomotives and shovels, hand tools / And barbed wire motives”3 behind the settlement of the frontier. Its geography is projected as a component of the mind, possessing and terrifying the local inhabitant who in turn alters the landscape to his own uses; what is “seen” becomes a matter of what frames the sight. When Dorn comes to expand his vision to include the West as a global category in “The North Atlantic Turbine,” it is with the sense of how the local in America has been appropriated. The new westerner does not follow a linear path but “goes anywhere apparently / . . . and space is muddied / with his tracks / for ore he is only after . . .” (CP, 116). Olson’s “local” is Gloucester, a single town in Massachusetts which becomes, in The Maximus Poems, a microcosm for the nation. For Olson, at least in the early portions of that series, place is specific. Dorn’s “local,” as seen through such long poems as “The Land Below,” “Idaho Out,” and “The North Atlantic Turbine,” gradually expands to include the West as a large metaphor for modern man. According to Dorn, the local has been lost, and in its place is a variable fiction created by global capitalism, manipulable by those few who have the cunning and will to use it. The central recognition in these long poems is that man has become a function of a series of signs, dispersed from distant data banks (economic, intellectual, scientific). One’s ability to stand upright, once thought to be a sign of individuality, has been undercut; man’s gravity is his “ordered and / endlessly transferrable / place” (CP, 182). This “endlessly transferrable / place” is the locus of Dorn’s epic of the new West, Slinger, a poem which extends from Olson’s Maximus Poems but which marks a significant break with it as 204

well.4 Where Olson’s Maximus is the embodiment of the potential inherent in any citizen, Dorn’s gunslinger is a problematic blend of existential outlaw, robber baron, and metaphysician. Where Olson focuses on Gloucester as, for better or worse, the American representative small town, Dorn’s view ranges over the entire industrialized world as a succession of replaceable parts in what he calls “the cultural exchange.” Despite Olson’s despair over the gradual commercialization of American life, he is essentially nostalgic for virtues of self-reliance and independence visible in those early settlers, explorers, and fishermen who populate his great work. Dorn projects in the place of Olson’s Leviathan-like representative man, a gunslinger whose draw is faster than human intention and whose speech is as laconic and arch as that of any TV outlaw. What might have disturbed Olson in Dorn’s long poem would not be the historical-social critique but rather the method of its presentation. Slinger is highly ironic, full of puns, jokes, and verbal pratfalls. At times it proceeds by means of an arcane systems language, resistant to even the closest reading. For the literalminded Olson, such playfulness must have seemed irrelevant to the task at hand, and yet part of Dorn’s task involves undercutting the high rhetoric of epic vision. At many levels the poem approaches the epic in its use of narrative, its conflicts between men and gods, its attendant poet who sings songs of comfort to the hero, its heroic epithets and its sustained social theme. It is, however, an epic closer to Don Juan or the Dunciad 5 than to The Iliad or The Aeneid; and the humor of the poem has a deadly seriousness behind it—one stated as such by “I” in the fourth book: Entrapment is this society’s Sole activity, I whispered

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and Only laughter, can blow it to rags (S, 153) I In many respects, Slinger resembles allegory more closely than epic because the narrative moves through set dialogues spoken by characters who seem to step forth from a two-dimensional backdrop or “tapestry,” as Dorn calls it. The world it depicts is one in which purposeful action has been severely curtailed. To travel from one place to another is unnecessary since all places are potentially the same. By the end of the poem, the journey which seems constantly underway gradually dissolves. Las Vegas, the ostensible object of the Slinger’s search, is never reached; it has become a “vast decoy,” capable of providing an illusion of place while existing as an extension of Howard Hughes’s empire. If allegory involves a flattening of narrative action and setting appropriate to the problematics of space in this poem, it reduces characters to two-dimensional cutouts. The various personages of Slinger—Lil, the Stoned Horse, Kool Everything, Dr. Flamboyant and the Gunslinger himself—are taken from the TV westerns, comic books, underground press newspapers, and country music which represent the West to most of us. They extend from the structures of production and consumption which generally control mercantile society. However endearing, they are “signs” of persons rather than psychologically complex characters. As I have pointed out, the space of the poem is the West in its largest sense. Not only is it the West created by television and movies; it is also the West of exploration and exploitation. The true heroics of this realm are seldom played out at high noon between gunfighters but often performed in the offices and backrooms of merchants, traders, manufacturers, and financiers. For Dorn, wealthy entrepreneurs like Daniel Drew, Jim Fisk, and 206

Jay Gould are the true western demi-gods, for they affect and modify the environment in ways which decisively alter the national consciousness. The Slinger (in Britain, the term means one who plays the stock market) participates somewhat in the high-rolling style of the robber baron. Like Howard Hughes, whom he sometimes resembles, he is mysterious and eccentric. He lives anywhere and seems able to appear in several places at once. His inscrutable actions confound all onlookers. He is to be revered and feared at the same time because he lives by laws totally beyond those of the average citizen. It would be tempting to read the poem as progressing toward a high noon duel between the Slinger and Hughes, but such a reading depends upon an outmoded fiction of absolute heroes and villains. If the Slinger journeys perpetually to search for Hughes, it is perhaps because the two characters are positive and negative poles of the same energy field. They represent two aspects of power in the Western world, one which maintains cycles of acquisition and warfare, another which deconstructs the rhetoric upon which these cycles are based. Behind the geographical and economic West, manipulated by Hughes and his ilk, lies a more philosophical one: that metaphysical-theological tradition based on the primacy of Being as presence. The Cartesian separation of man from the objects of his knowledge, the divorce of being and thought, forms a topography every whit as decisive to western man as the plateaus and river basins of the geographical West. The Slinger is resolutely anti-Cartesian. He travels with a horse whose name alternates between Heidegger and Lévi-Strauss, two foremost critics of Cartesian rationalism. Heidegger’s temporalization of Dasein and his radical critique of being as presence in the Kantian tradition produce a dislocated subject whose being is endlessly deferred. Likewise, Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of kinship systems in 207

terms of their differential and categorical status violates the idea of a social contract with its attendant belief in a realm of inherent human values. Man, the Horse explains, has become a “classification,” and his societies have become masses of data. To understand “what / you are” could not be accomplished “without the aid of machines” (S, 33). The logocentric/Rousseauist view attacked from the perspectives of existential phenomenology and structuralism provides an appropriate philosophical background for the West of Howard Hughes. His entrepreneurial skill has produced a world of centerless systems (computer banks, fast-food chains, corporate conglomerates) among which information is transferable and variable. Heidegger and Lévi-Strauss, as debunkers of privileged philosophical “centers” (the transcendental subject, a primordial Logos), become hapless “sidekicks” for the Slinger.6 Dorn provides a foil for such philosophical outlaws in a character who stands at the pinnacle of western metaphysics: “I.” “I” is both a pronoun and a name, “an initial” and a “single.” “I” is the figure who interprets the meaning behind events, who needs to know what is happening and to whom. He is the last vestige of the self-conscious, rationalizing ego—a consciousness which understands the principles behind things and the ideals towards which events move. He appears early in Book I of the poem to question relentlessly the Slinger’s opaque language and attends the first part of the journey towards Las Vegas. He dies in the second book, only to be preserved in LSD until he comes to life at the end of Book III as the secretary to Parmenides. Thereafter, “I” stands for the new man, capable of a consciousness appropriate to Pre-Socratic and Post-Modern deconstructions alike. As Dorn kills off the ego he destroys the primacy of the first-person narrative. In creating a character who is also a pro208

noun, Dorn illustrates the predicament of a post-Cartesian ontology in which man’s being is defined both by his thought and his ability to call that thought into doubt. The reader becomes caught in a double-bind by following a first and a third person narration at the same time. Dorn’s strategy thus collapses subjective upon objective poles without, at the same time, having to posit a transcendental principle. This is the monism he admires in Pre-Socratics like Parmenides, whose “it is” rejects a binarism of presence/absence or being/nothingness. As the Slinger explains, the “scenario” of this poem is the “redecoration” of the western mind: The scenario is all Emanation The nesting ground of number There are no things there as such Material is a not with the K detached All is transhistorical, functions Have no date . . . (S, 96) The ontological concerns in Slinger are flanked by a mock trinitarian theology. The Father is a kind of ultimate corporate captain named Robart, “the Valfather of [the] Race” who wages fantastic earthly wars. His “enchanted Wallet” contains the oppressive “Cycle of acquisition” which maintains those wars. His earthly counterpart is the Slinger, half mortal and half deity, who searches every day of his two-thousand plus years for a mysterious “third,” the inscrutable Texan named Howard Hughes, Dorn’s Holy Ghost. Since Hughes’s middle name is Robard, one can be reasonably sure that Dorn is playing with the idea of God’s suppressed or hidden name. Whether this allegory can support a clearly defined triad is difficult to say. Dorn has left the supposed identity of such figures obscure. By the end, it is

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difficult to say what is happening; identities have changed hands many times, and Howard Hughes has long since disappeared from the Slinger’s concerns. Still, the pursuit of a ghostly spirit capable of living everywhere at once, whose face is never seen yet who contains the power to “buy Vegas and move it” (as Lil suggests), forms the ostensible goal of the Slinger’s quest and suggests the poem’s mythic dimension. The other members of the party form a “constellation” of characters who speak as various aspects of the poet’s mind. They include Lil, the prototype of the frontier dancehall madam and a solid critic of the Slinger’s more extravagant gestures.7 The Stoned Horse parodies the cowboy’s beast of burden, spending the bulk of his time rolling giant “Tampico bombers” and making oblique comments to all passersby. Since his name has become associated with the internal combustion engine (“horse power”), he rides as passenger inside the coach he used to pull. The next character in the party is a bard who offers interludes of song on his “abso-lute.” His lyrics mix Shelleyan rhapsody with cybernetic argot, the high and low styles fused in a manner not unlike that of Dorn’s own earlier poetry. In addition to these central characters, there appear Kool Everything, a kind of sixties acid freak, and Dr. Flamboyant, whose researches into “post-ephemeral” subjects are the kind of far-out scholarly work the Slinger appreciates. Flamboyant, with his paradoxes, double-binds and unresolvables, is a comic synthesis of Whitehead, Parmenides, and Charlie Ruggles. Along with the Slinger and “I,” the “pleiad” of characters follows a path from Mesilla, a town on the New Mexico border, along the Rio Grande to Truth or Consequences and thence north toward Four Corners, site of a power plant which provides the focus for the last two books and serves as an archetypal example of man’s usurpation of the landscape. In Book IV, the ac210

tion takes place in Cortez, Colorado, a town near Mesa Verde in the southwestern part of the state. Despite its semblance of a linear journey, the action of the poem occurs largely within an inner landscape of dialogues, monologues, and printed readouts. What is important is not where the Slinger goes but what he sees and does. By disavowing laws of sequence and causality, the Slinger may eliminate the contingent nature of time and place and thus penetrate these categories. He exists “in that warp of relativity one sees / in the backward turning spokes / of a buckboard” (S, 25). The poem consists of four books and two transitional sections, The Cycle (between Books II and III) and Bean News (between Books II and IV).8 The latter is a collaborative effort by Dorn and various friends to create the kind of newspaper that might be found in the Slinger’s stagecoach. It is not included in the book proper but exists as a separate publication, thus extending the poem “vertically off the pages of the poem in a three-dimensional sense.”9 Bean News is printed in a tabloid format, but its news is made of scientific-cybernetic jargon taken from technical journals. Both The Cycle and Bean News operate from within the highly codified, technocratic worlds of systemsmanipulation and can be read as oblique commentaries on the larger action of the poem. II Having provided these contexts, I want to summarize the events of the poem as it unfolds, taking as Dorn’s theme the gradual dispersion of “place” from its specific geologic-historical locale and its mediation by entrepreneurial capitalism. The language of Book I is the easiest going of the entire poem. The opening lines are written in a meter familiar to anyone who has listened to “The Streets of Laredo”: 211

I met in Mesilla the Cautious Gunslinger of impeccable personal smoothness and slender leather encased hands folded casually to make his knock. He would show you his map. There is your domain. Is it the domicile it looks to be or simply a retinal block of seats in, he will flip the phrase the theater of impatience. (S, 1) The question of the second stanza becomes central: is one’s domain an empirical fact or a phenomenological projection? Subsequent questions by “I” and the Slinger’s arch responses form part of a Socratic dialogue about appearance and reality. The Slinger counters by attacking the primacy of space over time: Time is more fundamental than space. It is, indeed, the most pervasive of all the categories in other words theres plenty of it. And it stretches things themselves until they blend into one, So if youve seen one thing youve seen them all. (S, 3) Space, which Olson saw as the central fact of America, no longer defines the national psyche. Dorn substitutes time as

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more “fundamental.” It is the field of exploration for relativity physics and quantum mechanics—in a world where no volume or velocity may stand fixed. The Slinger, a time-traveller, blends all individual moments into one. Space, viewed as an extended field of discrete areas, is closed; it has been bought up, appropriated, and modified. Time, then, becomes the medium of the new, post-modern and post-Einsteinean man. The central scene in the first book occurs in Lil’s cabaret. The presence of the Slinger’s horse brings on an argument with a local citizen. The ensuing gunfight between the Slinger and the citizen exposes how fast a draw can be. Whereas the citizen’s draw is based on “leverage” (the sequence of logically connected events among drawing a gun from its holster, aiming, and firing), the Slinger’s is based on the principle of pure intention. By refusing the logic of cause and effect, the Slinger eliminates the draw and confounds his enemies: To eliminate the draw permits an unmatchable Speed a syzygy which hangs tight just back of the curtain of the reality theater down the street, speed is not necessarily fast, Bullets are not necessarily specific When the act is so self contained and so dazzling in itself the target then can disappear in the heated tension which is an area between here

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and formerly In some parts of the western world men have mistakenly called that phenomenology . . . (S, 28–29) What the Slinger is saying is that men mistake the attempt to synthesize the objective with the subjective world by developing the science of Phenomenology—a study rigorously based in Cartesian dualism. Dorn would probably prefer to think of the Slinger’s gestural synthesis as cosmology, a dramatic collapsing of time and space into one “dazzling” action. The citizen, by his exclusionary and proprietary attitude toward the horse (“that’s even a negra horse,” he says), has already “described” himself by his speech and so has already “drawn.” He exists in a defunct logic, one which the Slinger debunks by refusing to play by its rules. To be “described” is the greatest danger in the Slinger’s West. Once you have a name, you can be sold you can be told by that name leave, or come you become, in short a reference (S, 30) To be described is to be bound to a single identification—a condition which, as the Slinger points out, defines mortality. The name “I,” for example, stands for those assumptions about man which set him over against the world. When “I’s” name is missing from his shirt pocket in Book II, the citizens shout “monster” and “witchcraft” at him, to which the Slinger replies, “you are correct / citizen, your identification is the same / as your word for fear!” (S, 62). Obviously, a name called may revert back on its user and freeze him for all to see. Howard Hughes, by adopt-

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ing many names and identities, avoids the danger and maintains spectral authority over the world of ordinary citizens. At the end of Book I, the five “missionaries” set out for Las Vegas in a stagecoach pulled by six “driverless horses.” The allegorical nature of the journey is established in a beautiful prelude to Book II which defines the journey as if it were a “tapestry.” The five characters, “estranged from that which is most familiar,” to adopt Heraclitus’ words, seek a unifying vision: “and we concur To See / The Universe.” They will encounter the world of commercialism (“Tenders of Objects”) which presents a vision of time as a series of “separated events.” They desire neither material nor spiritual riches; they wish “To See.” Sight becomes the dominant weapon against the “Vicious Isolation” of local citizenry who “implore this existence / for a plan and dance wideyed provided with a schedule of separated events.” Book II chronicles the ride along the Rio Grande to Universe City, accompanied at times by the bard’s “heliocentric” songs. On the way, the stage stops to pick up Kool Everything whose “head has been misplaced” and who carries a five gallon can full of LSD. He presents the laid-back, untroubled acid freak whose remarks are invariably a kind of ultimate cosmic reduction: “man I dont know where youre At / I’m just hitchiking / to Universe City and beyond. . . .” At the point where Everything enters the coach, “I” dies, and the Slinger preserves him for a “past reference” in Kool Everything’s acid. The language here is brilliantly funny; “I” can contain “Everything,” an ontological (and linguistic) feat of large proportion. Upon transfusing Everything’s can of acid into “I,” the Slinger observes: we stand before an original moment in ontological history, the self, with one grab

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has acquired a capital S, mark the date the Gunslinger instructed, we’ll send a telegram to Parmenides. (S, 65) Parmenides must witness this “expropriation” because it was his view that self and other are one and the same—that in order for one to conceive of sensible objects at all one must be part of those objects as well. The “I” Dorn kills off in the poem is that ego which detaches itself from the moment and anticipates, intuits, regrets, longs for, desires and generally abstracts what it experiences. The ego, Slinger says, is “costumed as the road manager / of the soul,” but when preserved in Kool Everything’s “autotheistic chemical” is transformed into allegory. Universe City, where the group (with the preserved “I”) decoaches, is an archetypal American small town. Its residents water their lawns, enjoy the “celestial repast” of lunch, and joke about “I’s” strange appearance. The law is present as a narcotics agent (disguised as Dick Tracy) who follows the entourage around town in a “bucket with crutches.” Like most western towns, Universe City began as a wide spot in the road; but, as Kool Everything explains, “Wide spots in the road / have a tendency to get wider / due to the weight and speed of the traffic going thruem.” As its name implies, the city is a microcosm for the nation. Unlike Olson’s Gloucester or Williams’ Paterson, Universe City is only propositional—an extension of its developers, commerce, and media. Like Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, it has changed its name to accommodate its anonymity, erasing whatever relation it once had to geography or history. The theological center of town is the movie theater which houses “The Literate Projector,” the ultimate positivist tool. It turns an image into its script, transforming reality into the idea behind it. Here is one of Dorn’s most brilliant conceptions

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(though he has since questioned its usefulness10), “designed for the stix / but works best in University towns / and other natural centers of doubletalk” (S, 77). The Literate Projector is an extension of a logocentric universe in which each signifier is flanked by a primordial signified, in which essence precedes form and idea precedes image. Most insidiously, it may be used to provide ultimate rationales for unethical or immoral acts; it may “put funny music next to death” Or document something about military committment and let woodchucks play the parts (S, 77) Given the official government rationalizations for continuing the Vietnam War during that period, it would be fair to say that the Literate Projector was already in use. Its primary function is to reverse experience into text, to take complex issues and transform them into palatable substitutes. Book II exposes the varieties of double-talk available to Universe City by means of the “Cycle of Robart’s Wallet,” announced at the end of the book. Its purpose is to liberate the paranoid citizens from their “Vicious Isolation” and expose the structure of global capitalism. The Slinger advises the citizens to reject their out-of-date materialism and begin to live under a new deific dispensation called “Sllab.” If the new logos of this post-modern world is to be Robart’s global dollar, its New Testament is given in The Cycle. III Trying to interpret The Cycle is a little like decoding glyphs for which no Linear B is known. Relentlessly obscure, the language refuses at every point to fit a readable context. Dorn’s comment on this difficult section of the poem indicates that, at one level, 217

it is a speculation about Robart’s/Hughes’s “habits and frame of mind and his furnishings which are apparently like a battery of twelve TV sets or something.”11 Robart’s name, however, never appears; “(he) only appears as an echo of the psychological condition of the United States of America. Therefore, the interior is a negative quantity, it’s anti-gravitational.”12 I read “interior” as both a reference to the mind of Hughes and to the nature of America, so that part of the difficulty in reading this section results from Dorn’s attempt to activate the unconscious imagery of a psychic state. At its most fundamental level, The Cycle describes the journey of Howard Hughes (or, as he is known in this section, “Rupert”) from his hotel in Boston to Las Vegas, a journey which actually took place in the mid-sixties and has already been alluded to in Book I. He disguises himself (in typical Hughes fashion) as a janitor and moves “decoyed as the cheeze in a burger” among the crowds at the railroad station. Attended by his servant, Al, the time-twisting Atlante, Hughes/Rupert enters his private railroad car and ponders the cosmos while moving west. The bulk of the poem concerns the “furnishings” of the railroad car as described by a mysterious “interior Decorator.” One realizes, after a time, that the interior stands for what it contains: the mind of Robart in which “functions have no date nothing occurs / Dates have no function anyway. . . .” In this mind, time cannot be compared to linear motion but rather to the imploding and expanding astral bodies in a periodic universe. The classical division of time into past, present, and future no longer holds in Rupert’s world, and his movements between Boston and Las Vegas can be compared to the alternating patterns of a star (or atom) within this steady-state system. Extending the theme of time is Dorn’s use of Parmenides

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whose great philosophical “Proem” presents an earlier discourse on the nature of truth by poetic allegory. The opening lines of The Cycle appear to be a rough translation of Parmenides’ poem. Like The Cycle, the “Proem” is an allegory depicting the stages from the world of seeming and illusion to that of truth. Both poems provide a circular or cyclic logic in which “What has been run thus far / Is what has been run before” (S, 95). The nature of Parmenides’ truth is like that of the Slinger. For Parmenides, truth is a totality, “well-rounded” and capable of no division. Things are not created or destroyed but exist eternally. To say that something does not exist is to utter a meaningless phrase since in order for something to be comprehensible, it must already “be.” Mortals (Dorn’s “lumpish listeners”) have been deluded by the idea that a thing which exists may also, in time, perish and something else take its place. Parmenides’ alternative to doctrines of flux and change is simple: “it is,” and if it is not, it cannot be thought. Though the philosophical monism provides the epistemological backdrop for The Cycle, the poem’s mise en scène blends Parmenidean cosmology with Hughesean myth. The chariot and horses, the theological premise, the Goddess, the spinning wheels of the chariot, the allegorical language, all parallel Parmenides’ poem. Likewise, the vision of Rupert wearing Kleenex boxes instead of shoes, his travel in railroad cars, his battery of antiseptic bodyguards, his demand for anonymity are all legends about Hughes no more fantastic than those told about other national heroes. Such stories form the basis for legends (or “cycles” of legends) sung by bards and used as exempla in projecting the national character. Dorn’s “cycle” provides an ironic continuation of this tradition. To treat The Cycle as simply a code for a subterranean story

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would, however, be anathema to Dorn. Rupert’s journey involves “The Overhaul of the fucking mind,” and the poem’s language reflects that transformation by presenting meta-information whose source can only be traced to the computer bank named Robart/Rupert. Words are not tied to discrete meanings; they have only a differential function: “there is nothing more for now to know / Because the signals speak among themselves.” Language no longer constitutes or secures a primordial meaning but suspends it indefinitely within an infinite series of binary functions. What fragments of recognizable language one encounters in The Cycle come in the form of cliché, jive talk, scientific argot and newspaper lingo—the privileged codes of a culture’s unconscious life. At the end of The Cycle, Dorn alludes to the other journey in progress, that of the Slinger and his party to Las Vegas. Rupert and his number one henchman, Al, have “picked off” the telegram to Parmenides on their scanner. They will now be able to intercept the Slinger’s party at the “crosshairs” of Four Corners— but to what end, we have yet to see. The railroad tracks which carry Robart’s car become a metaphor for linear time. In the West, they are the great equal signs, carving the history of exploitation into the landscape and collapsing vast spaces into smaller and smaller units. Book III describes the gradual merging of space and time by proposing a third alternative, “personal time” or proprioception: There is no vacuum in sense connection is not by contact sense is the only pure time connection is a mechanical idea nothing touches, connection meant is Instant in extent a proposal of limit (S, 113)

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The last line suggests that, for Dorn, one moves in an “extended instant,” a moment of sudden attention or intensity which structures the nature of limit. This extended instant releases landscape from its sentimental associations and fuses it with human attentions. “I have the sense that we know totality all the time through our senses,” Dorn says in his Contemporary Literature interview, “and what part of that totality we can capture is the definition essentially of our sensate capabilities.”13 The “outside real,” seen from passing train or stage-coach, becomes “insider­ eal,” the human assimilation of landscape or the incorporation of space by existential time. IV Much of what occurs in Book III is an extension of what (and how) the Slinger sees, but we begin to feel that his quest is breaking down—at least in the conventional, narrative sense. Books I and II present an almost recognizable journey from one town to another. Book III continues the playful, punning quality of The Cycle but complicates the narrative by eliminating practically all connectives and transitions. What appears instead is a series of cartoon dialogues—the breakdown in narrative continuity reflecting the dissociation of that causal logic on which conventional stories are built. Since there is no place to go, why not intensify where one is? The road that the Slinger’s band follows is no longer “on the road”; it “Symbolizes our thinking process.” The cartoon dialogues of Book III take on an impressive variety of subjects: Pindar’s theory of light,14 the horse as personification of knowledge, the relation of the poet to authority, the nature of “Sllab,” Olbers’ paradox,15 game theory, the role of contingency in generation and the nature of serial transmission. Each one of these subjects is covered by means of a verbal shorthand which transforms it into a witty digression. Hidden behind 221

many of the jokes in Book III lies a further exploration of the proprioceptive view announced at the end of The Cycle. The prologue to the book, to take one example, frames those laws which unite man to the cosmos. “The Lawg,” as the prologue is called, is a capsulized record (a log) of the “human universe” which Olson valued over the older humanism of the Greeks and their tendency to abstract man from his literal, biological condition. “There are laws,” Olson admits at the beginning of his “Human Universe” essay, but they are laws of man as organism, not solely as egocentric, reflective mind. The laws of this organism are those of the body, the senses, the musculature responding at every moment to the world. This dynamic participation with the so-called “outer” world replaces the concept of law as Mosaic and Deuteronomic and forms the basis for Dorn’s cosmic inversion: Here Kums the Kosmos Dont just stand there! (lookin dumb Stick out your thumb. (S, 111) Such cosmological banter makes up most of Book III and continues in Bean News, where we hear, for example, of the “Conference on Nothing” taking place in Notsuoh Texas (or Houston spelled backwards). There the central question is “When (and where) is Now.” Or we read of the arrival of “Sllab” in a “Cloud of Adobe Dust and Chicken Feathers” or of the first “macro transplant” (i.e., of a whole body). The language plays with recognizable information channels but debunks them at the same time by extending real conferences, geodetic occurrences, and organ transplants toward absurd regressions. Behind Dorn’s arch debunker stands a social critic who grasps the deeper implications behind physical laws and media dissemination as they are subsumed by economic interests: 222

you know why everybody in this state’s fat? They’re convinced torque is a relationship between the tongue and the fork . . . (S, 122) If Book III has a central event, it is the delivery of the “night letta” from Parmenides via “I” disguised as a goggled bi-plane pilot (another Hughes persona). He hangs from his bi-plane to the window of the Slinger’s carriage and hands in a letter which reads like a computer printout. The only recognizable information appears at the end of the letter: “Expect Materialization at Precisely 4 Corners,” a reference to the long-anticipated incarnation of Robart. The rest of the message is in code which, as the Slinger observes, is “Sllab.” This is the first major appearance of that deific principle by which Robart operates. Since the word is “balls” spelled backwards, one can assume that this deity works through an inversion of the male sexual principle by which father is replaced by son, a transmundane God by a mortal Christ. Sllab is not “past-trapped” but is a “perfectly proceeding, but irregularly worn Cube, imbedded 5 quarters into the hypersurface of Eternity.”16 Dorn has spoken of Sllab in terms of Kubrick’s giant monolith in his movie 2001 (which also proposes an inversion of temporality) and has described it elsewhere as the ultimate Rosetta stone upon which the key to deity is inscribed.17 Its appearance in absentia at the end of Book III suggests that Book IV will be a mock Revelation, a last judgment in which the key to Robart (alias Rupert, alias Hughes) will be revealed. V Though Book IV does provide a kind of last judgment, its terms are economic rather than eschatological. It is the book of Ro-

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bart’s “Shortage Industry,” the manipulation of which keeps the world in a constant state of turmoil. The book’s locale is southwestern Colorado near Cortez and presumably within range of Four Corners. In the “Superior Air” beyond this area resides Robart, who unrolls his “Global Report,” attended by his aid, Al, who plays Rochester to Robart’s Jack Benny. Robart’s “Global Report” includes information about his earthly warfare between the “dreaded Mogollones” (the name taken from an Apache tribe) and the “Single-Spacers” (“your Glorious Low- Violence Army”) which he keeps alive by playing one side off against the other. Such diabolical management keeps everyone in an uncertainty which only Robart can transcend. The “Shortage Industry” creates the illusion of limited supplies in order to drive up prices, a condition felt acutely during the oil crisis which occurred while Book IV was being written. When Robart talks about turning a car into a chile relleno or when Flamboyant drives up in a “green 1976 Avocado” we witness the transformation of our immediate needs (foodstuffs) into cars, a ratio which exists at every level of the economy. The ethic of the “Shortage Industry” is preached by a giant hill of beans outside of Cortez, Colorado. This hill is Sllab’s messenger and has been made, like much else in the West, by the Hughes Tool Company. Its message is all too clear: Achievement comes thru absolute power and power comes thru strength . . . this nation is the product of reason &corn (S, 162) And, one might add, beans. Only to a privileged class does a “hill of beans amount to nothing.” To poor Indians in the Southwest, for example, the trope is meaningless, and “I” notices this fact by paying attention to the figure of speech, “not the hill.” Those 224

who are in a position to indulge themselves in such a figure are the same who hide behind a rhetoric of humanist concern—who abhor the excessive opulence & waste, the blatant commercialization on which society is built, the selfish introspective approach to world affairs . . . (S, 163) Sllab, speaking through its talking hill of beans, has appropriated all symbol systems and rhetorics, feeding them back, like a juke box, to anyone willing to deposit a dime in the slot. Robart and Al, as lesser deities in the configuration of this new Logos, operate from a similarly lofty vantage. In The Cycle they occupy a celestial railway car, but in Book IV they are clearly residents of the astral realm. Like their earthly counterparts, they exist in a state of war, but their opposition is never named. Warfare at this level involves the implosion and explosion of galaxies, registered by Robart’s scanners as red-shifting and blue-shifting. The warfare between the Mogollones and SingleSpacers, which Robart maintains on earth, is a microcosm for the large-scale stellar movements comprehensible to us according to the Doppler Effect. We read Robart’s movements by means of varying frequencies of light rays, but we feel his effects in the form of perpetual global turmoil. One of the central events of Book IV is the return of “I,” who has been on a “tour of the Cumulus” and is now apprenticed to Parmenides. He has become an observer of the contemporary scene in a manner not unlike the Slinger, “one eye out / for the prosecuters of Individuality / and the other eye out for the advocates.” (S, 160) His gift to the Slinger is a bag filled with “all the known species of Cant” which, when thrown on the stagecoach, 225

sails over the top and lands in the desert, whereupon a geyser of oil springs up. Apparently Dorn intends a satire on the relations which exist between oil and the diplomatic jargon involved in procuring it from the Middle East (the bag is decorated with “fine Iranian tooling”). “I’s” indifferent observation of this incident indicates that he has come a long way from his earlier confusions. In addition to “I,” several new characters are added: Taco Desoxin, the “best / environmental modification man / in the business,” and his partner, Tonto Pronto. Both parody TV western characters. Taco Desoxin is a new-age Speedy Gonzales (Desoxin is a type of amphetamine), and Tonto is the Lone Ranger’s trusted Indian. As “speedy” types, they are adept in interpreting Robart’s movements. Along with Dr. Flamboyant and a fourth character, Portland Bill, they form a quartet of Luddite anarchists who destroy technology from within. They “burn telephone poles / slice permutations thin as baloney” and “supply Hi-grade lunatic information.” Such subversion is prepared by Flamboyant for conflict with the Mogollones, “the new machinists / Masters of the wedge inclined plane screw.” Though the millennial battle between the Mogollones and Single-Spacers never takes place, it serves as a metaphor for the war between technology and the environment. Dorn’s satire is as black as that of William Burroughs, whose Nova Police and mind control experts are comic projections of entropic disorder. The Mogollones have neither virtues nor vices; they are “totally anti-Darwinian,” living on octane fumes since they cannot breathe the pure desert air. The Single-Spacers are “anything­ arians” (i.e., “opposed to nothing”), capable of torturing animals and altering the “subduction zone.” Robart, as cosmic mediator, provides each side with “peste bubonica” to make the stakes higher. The Slinger and his comrades view the coming battle 226

from a mesa high above Four Corners—a false Pisgah before which Robart is to fulfill his ambiguous covenant. When Robart finally appears, it is in the form of an overheard conversation picked up on Flamboyant’s radio (called a “reduit,” presumably because it “re-does” what has already been done). Robart then descends from his railroad car, riding a cow, and takes off for Chile. The cow is perhaps that “longhorn bull” for which the Slinger searched in Book I; but if this is Dorn’s incarnation scene its grandeur is diminished by the rapidity of Robart’s withdrawal. The moment is wonderfully bathetic, deity reduced to an escaping bandido and the reverent multitudes transformed into wise-cracking gawkers. Lil interprets Robart’s sudden exit as an example of red-shifting (he moves away from the group), but Dorn provides no “textual tickets” to explain the event. VI At this culminating point, we might become intrepid “I’s” and ask a few questions: does Flamboyant’s “reduit” actually receive Robart’s messages? Are Robart’s movements subject to unearthly forces beyond the Slinger’s purview? What is the function of Taco and Tonto’s “environmental modification”? What happened to the battle between the Mogollones and the Single-Spacers? Is the Slinger an antagonist to Robart or a part of him? In other words, to what pass has this poem brought us? Instead of providing the proverbial western sunset with hero and heroine victorious over forces of evil, Dorn quickly disperses the party—the Slinger to his “timetrain,” “I” to the “tachyon showers,” and the rest to other states. In what sense, then, is this the end? The answer has already been repeated many times in the form of a paradox: “Everything is prehensible / for from that which is not / we fall off.” The Whiteheadean term “prehension” de227

scribes the nexus of elements within a cellular model. Each element in a system depends on (prehends) all other events for its existence. What Dorn has provided is a single cell (or solar system) made up of various atomic units whose interaction is total. From any point outside the structure (i.e., from Robart’s vantage) the organism seems whole and unified; but from any point on the inside events may be interpreted as threatening, friendly, encroaching, or departing. Those who, by their vast control of media, technology, and finance, are able to mediate the way in which these events are interpreted may adjust how we perceive an individual event (the war in Vietnam, say, or the oil crisis). Robart’s control is total; he adjusts the economies of the Southwest as easily as he adjusts his own identity. “Vegas is a vast decoy,” Lil says, but so are the anonymous Chevrolets, airplanes, and hotel rooms which hide Howard Hughes. Such absolute control creates a world in which a handshake in America can effect a military takeover in Chile or a business deal in Saudi Arabia (to use the two axes most often invoked in Book IV). If Slinger is incomplete, it is because it has viewed the demand for closure as one of the oppressive features of western thought. Dorn refers to the progress of his poem in terms of a “moving Future” which is always at a selvedge between the finite and the infinite.18 Rather than fulfill the eschatological frame proposed from the first book, Dorn disperses his characters among the western states as signs of a new awareness which evolved during the late sixties, assisted by the various drugs which attend each book. The self-conscious, rationalizing “I” has given way to a proprioceptive “eye” that has learned both how to see and read the world at the same time: Our Source is self-refracting and when it rises it actually plays a tune

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on one’s eyeballs, Maximum Deum and our birds have two heads and sing duets (S, 197) These lines seem to refer to Olson’s valorization of the eye in The Maximus Poems and to the maximal self which lies potential (self-refracting) in any individual. And at the end of this most un-Olsonic comic vision, Dorn’s homage to the older poet’s sense of polis as “eyes” is profound. If Olson could not have anticipated where his bibliography would lead Edward Dorn it is only because his student so realized other methodological implications behind the study of American history. Slinger is not only a poem generated out of Olson’s teaching and example; it is a truly American poem, “indirect” as Whitman felt the new epic must be. It is not simply content to reflect landscape and history but struggles constantly with its own precarious existence, creating a hero as problematic as Natty Bumppo, Huck Finn, Ishmael or Isabel Archer. Its spirited language and acidic humor create an alternative tone to the epic tradition as found in Whitman or Pound, and yet its interest in “personal time” and heroic gesture are themes congenial to earlier American poetry. At its most fundamental level, Slinger provides us with a comprehensive look at language in the postwar era. Dorn invents a “language cleaner,” an inversionary critique which transforms all talk into meta-talk, thus exposing the arbitrariness of sign production. He wants to keep language in “interesting repair” at all times by relentlessly testing its limits while at the same time exposing its vulnerability to forms of social control. His analysis of exploitation begins with the rhetoric of western romance and refers to theology, metaphysics, cybernetics, thermodynamics, comic books, rock and roll, biology, newspeak, technocracy and high finance along the way. It is not enough to treat these areas as discrete, metaphoric subjects. Dorn must incorporate

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them as semiotic systems embedded in the texture of modern American life. The Slinger indicates that it is no longer possible to look from any privileged position at a landscape not already modified—if only by rhetoric—and it is this heavily encrusted topography of signs and dollars that compels his heroic search. Notes

This essay first appeared in American Literature in 1981, and it appears in its original form. At that time (and perhaps influenced by Olson’s own usage) I was more comfortable using the masculine pronoun to refer to the general category of human beings. I would not do so now. 1. Charles Olson, “A Bibliography on America for Ed Dorn,” in Additional Prose: A Bibliography on America, Proprioception & Other Notes & Essays, ed. George F. Butterick (Bolinas, Calif.: Four Seasons Foundation, 1974), pp. 3–14. 2. I have developed some of these ideas on history and methodology in another essay, “Archaeologist of Morning: Charles Olson, Edward Dorn and Historical Method,” ELH, 47 (Spring, 1980), 158–79. 3. Edward Dorn, The Collected Poems: 1956–1974 (Bolinas, Calif.: Four Seasons Foundation, 1975), p. 44. Hereafter abbreviated in the text as CP followed by page number. All subsequent references to Slinger derive from the Wingbow edition (Berkeley, Calif.: Wingbow Press, 1975), abbreviated here as S and paginated from the first page of poetry text. 4. There is some ambiguity about what Dorn intended as his title to the poem. In the 1975 Wingbow edition, the cover and title page indicate that the title is Slinger, but on the spine, the title is listed as Gunslinger. In the republished version of this book, Duke University Press uses the title Gunslinger throughout. In this essay, I refer to the title character as “Slinger,” as Dorn tended to do in the later books of the poem. According to the Historical Dictionary of American Slang, a gunslinger refers to a “manager of a high-risk, high-performance mutual fund.”

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5. Of the Don Juan figure in relation to the Slinger, see Road­ testing the Language: An Interview with Edward Dorn, ed. Steven Fredman, Documents for New Poetry 1 (San Diego, Calif.: Archive for New Poetry, Univ. of California, San Diego, 1978), p. 24. Hereafter listed as Roadtesting. 6. On Dorn’s use of Heidegger and Lévi-Strauss, see “An Interview with Edward Dorn,” Contemporary Literature, 15 (1974), 308. Hereafter listed as CL. 7. See Roadtesting, pp. 11–12, for Dorn’s discussion of Lil. 8. On The Cycle and Bean News as transitional bridges, see the interview with Dorn in Vort, 1 (n.d.), 19. 9. CL, p. 20. 10. “It’s [the Literate Projector] the most arbitrary thing in Book II. In some ways it violates the forwardness of the book. I was interested in the idea, at the time, and while I was writing I got into it. But I think it mars the poem because it’s only an occasional idea. In fact, when I republish the whole poem I think I might extract that” (CP, p. 306). 11. Vort, p. 18. 12. Vort, p. 18. 13. CL, p. 305. 14. Dorn seems to be referring to a book by Lionel W. Lyde called Contexts in Pindar (Manchester, Eng.: Manchester Univ. Press, 1935), which discusses Pindar’s poetry in terms of light and the effects of light rays upon the Greek poet. Dorn’s reference to Lyde on page 115 condenses a paragraph of Lyde’s on page 41. 15. Dorn speaks of the German astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers in Roadtesting, p. 34, and mentions his paradox: “the universe cannot be infinite and entirely visible,” a passage which seems to lie behind the lines on page 132 of Slinger. 16. Bean News (San Francisco: Hermes Free Press, n.d.) under heading, “Where Is Now,” p. 5. 17. CL, p. 311. 18. Roadtesting, p. 33.

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A Bibliography on America for Ed Dorn charles olson

Assumptions: (1) that politics & economics (that is, agriculture, fisheries, capital and labor) are like love (can only be individual experience) and therefore, as they have been presented (again, like love) are not much use, that is, any study of the books about

(2) that sociology, without exception, is a lot of shit—produced by people who are the most dead of all, history as politics or economics each being at least events and laws, not this dreadfull beast, some average and statistic Working premises:

I That millennia: & II person

are not the same as either time as history or as the individual as single

In other words, that plural & quality (taste)—King Numbers & King Shit—obscure how it is. And that one must henceforth apply to quantity as a principle (totally displacing hierarchies of taste or quality, as though there were any other “like” than an attention which has completely saturated or circumvented the object); and to process as the most interesting fact of fact (the overwhelming one, how it works, not what, in that what is always different if the thing or person or event under review is a live one, and is different because adverbially it is changing)— one must henceforth apply to quantity as a principle and to process as the most interesting fact all attention Results, as of historical study: (a)  it is not how much one knows but in what field of context it is retained, and used (millennia, & quantity) (b)  how, as yourself as individual, you are acquiring & using same in acts of form—what use you are making of acquired information (person, & process) THE ABOVE, IN OUTLINE FORM, IS A TABLE OF CONTENTS. The PREFACE is to follow. One needs to go back over these axes of relevance before listing the books. The local, for example, becomes crucial once the crossed-stick of these axes is used to pick it up: millennia person process quantity

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Applying all four of these at once (which is what I mean by attention), the local loses quaintness by the test of person (how good is it for you as you have to be a work of your lifetime?); itself as crutch of ambience, by test of millennia; its only interest is as process (say barbed wire, as attack on Plains husbandry) or as it may be a significant locus of quantity (in America how, say, prairie village called Chicago is still, despite itself, a prairie village—as against, say, LA; or, by turning itself inside out from size, Manhattan is now a vulgar village (note: this last wld be an example of the exercise of inversion, one of the more interesting moral effects of quality, inversion is/ how Rimbaud put it, “What’s on the other side of despair?” excuse me for a moment, but I once knew a guy who almost succeeded in doing that which every theatrical office doesn’t believe will ever happen— that a play on Edgar Allen Poe (more such mss come in than any single other try) will be written, by having him turn his coat inside out, and wear it so, going home along Fordham Road drunk, like they say The best definition of inversion I know is the chemical one—turning cane sugar by hydrolysis (another word for inversion) from the dextrorotatory it is to a levorotatory mixture of dextrose and levulose It is possible chemically to kill a person by inversion. To illustrate the value of the practice of these axes (instead of the old axis of history as time, and the axis of the individual versus society—and vice versus), study Webb’s Great Frontier 235

versus his Great Plains, how, in the latter book, his first, he caused the local to yield because at least he applied process, and some millennia sense, probably because the geography of the Plains enforces it on everyone; but in his latest book, because he is a professor instead of a person, and shows himself to have no sense of the quantities of geography by extrapolation from his knowledge of a “local” like the Plains, he is led back into the trap of history as time and comes to the foolish conclusion that it is the Frontier which is done, and the Metropolis which done it in! Note: having recently visited Manhattan and having recently written your second story (the wide one, not the ‘local’ one), you may judge for yourself BECAUSE THE LOCAL AND THE SENTIMENTAL IS HOW HUMANISM COMES HOME TO ROOST IN AMERICA, THIS IS ENOUGH OF A PREFACE. “TO GET TO THE OTHER SIDE,” IS THE ONLY MORAL ACT WHICH CAN POSSIBLY CORRECT THE WEST, AS EITHER GREEK OR U.S. I. Millennia Sauer  Environment & Culture in the DeGlaciation (Am Phil Soc) Lobeck  Physiography of the U. S. (get maps which go with it, & fill em in, locate stuff, etc., to get that topographic sense in the mind as you have it in the feet) 236

[Gladwin] Men Out of Asia (New Mexico pot-man, guessing on migrations) Indian texts on migrations, such as the Toltecs being pushed out of Tula by Chichimecs, etc.—also codices in which feet (like on floor after bath) are as arrows in Klee Herodotus At least first chapter of Histories on sailors & rapes of several women (Europa, Io, Helen, etc.) Frobenius —anything; Jung, in fact, also (at which point I am suggesting how, when one widens out on any of these four points of the Double-Axe, one begins to hit one of the other 4, in this instance, person—Read D H Lawrence preface to Fantasia (don’t bother with rest of book!) Brooks Adams The New Empire (despite the analogical reasoning for nature as machine, the space of the facts and the maps as routes equaled by nothing here except Sauer’s space of time and precisions on roots With great care one might add astronomy, simply that a scrupulous experience of light-years (as distance, not time) is a form of exercise (literally, muscle-stuff ) of what it means to apply a context as delicate to handle as this one of millennia. (An example of how even one of the best men don’t quite make it is a last possible reference to start with, W C Williams American Grain—consider the Jacataqua essay, and the Houston, versus what, say, Jim Beckwith—or Red Cloud braining the Fort Phil Kearny massacre (also called the Bozeman Road M)­—are. 237

Nuff sed.) Like I have said elsewhere, Rider Haggard. And old American Weekly. II. Person what, in fact, the critter, homo sap, is, as we take it, now? yrself, surely, here, the book: simply that you has this ADVANTAGE, that you is an american (no patriotism intended: sign reads, “LEAVE ALL FLAGS OUTSIDE— PARK YR KARKASSONE”) recommend, for light reading: homer’s odysseus (for odysseus as more interesting feller than hamlet or captain ahab); mister jung, like i say (except that he ain’t free to write—hides his “creative” mss in a safe—he is the one religious i mean he is serious in his attention to the importance of life as it is solely of interest to us as it is human, like they say, of any of the new scientists of man—and i for one think the body of these men (Sauer is one) are a vast improvement on almost all the “creative” men who have gone alongside of same (say, Peek-gas-so, Prrrroost, JJJJoys, all but Chaplin. And Eisenstein. Yes. Eisenstein. TRANSFER TO LOCAL. BUT TO DO IT, LET ME MENTION ONE VICTOR BERARD’S WORK ON THE ODYSSEY AS A REWRITE OF A SEMITIC (PROBABLY PHOENICIAN) ORIGINAL SAILING-DIRECTION. You can find it in French in the Sondley library. So far as “scholarship” might, it will disclose the intimate connection between person-as-continuation-of-millennia-by-acts-ofimagination-as-arising-directly-from-fierce-penetration-ofall-past-persons, places, things and actions-as-data (objects)— not by fiction to fiction: our own “life” is too serious a concern

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for us to be parlayed forward by literary antecedence. In other words, “culture,” no matter how great. (I should think, if one stopped long enough, one could expose a fallacy here which has dominated all living— literally—since the 5th Century bc, when, for the first time, that unhappy consciousness of ‘history’—and which consciousness begets ‘culture’ (art as taste, inherited forms, Mr Eliot— indeed, Mister Pound as he preaches the “grrrate bookes”) came into existence. I don’t know whether you know the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, but if one cld stop long enough one ought to expose like fallacies in art, like it’s called, to what Alfie has so hugely exposed in the metaphysic which fucked everyone up from those Grks (or that Chink) to Alfie. He’s just the greatest, if you read only his philosophy. If you read him on anything else, especially culture andor beauty, you realize that old saw, a man can’t do everything! Well, it doesn’t matter whether we do expose fallacies. The point is, all that any of us iz now doing is trying to get sd poor critter back on his rail. And once done, there won’t be any of that nonsense to shovel one’s way through. I imagine you don’t have as much shit in you as I do simply that you iz later, Mister/Dorn. To get one with sd bibliography abt man in Amurrica: III. Process sd Whitehead Process and Reality. An Essay in Cosmology as of the States, all you can pack in such matters as Mr Melville, how to cook a whale; Professor Merk, how pemmican was born; how to skin a buffalo (cf only—and poor—on same,

239

in, Queen of Cowtowns: Dodge City, Stanley Vestal); on how fish are put in a cornhill (ask Freddie, who knows, and why); how to live, by Charles Olson; how to not know know-how (by an American, after the deluge); how to remember (cf Muses) how to find out: PAUSANIAS’ Description of Greece (the bible, you can’t read it, but for gawd sake own it, and whenever, look up anything, especially ARCADIA how to find out now about then: MISS JANE HARRISON, Prolegomena, Themis, and her first book, which is Mythology and Monuments of Ancient Athens—and is, by god, nothing but Pausanias on Pausanias! She is Lady Pausanias. Magnificent. And as yet no one has applied that methodology (HOW­—AS, hu ¯—PROCESS (is “to move”)—METHOD IS (meta hodos, the way after: TAO)—what I am trying to say is that a METHODOLOGY is a science of HOW) ... The principle at work here—“we should start from the notion of actuality as in its essence a process” (Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, p. 355)—is: yes, let me try, for once, for you, to do the chiasma. I cannot stand anything short of Miss Harrison, say (or Pausanias), or Sauer, or my man Merk (whom I can at least give you a taste of by showing you some of his reprints on the Oregon Triangle, of which he is the master historian up to now)—and a carpenter doing it is the same thing, or a sailor, or anyone who really knows what he is doing doing it; and if you are lucky, and you stumble on someone in print telling you how to do it, if, say, it’s something like lowering a whale, say, which ain’t done anymore, lowering 240

a boom (cf sd Melville on how a whale uses his flukes, chapter called THE TAIL, I believe, that exactitude of process known I can only stand DeVoto, say (who knows as much as any literary man abt America West), when he ain’t cute, and is very damn serious abt the facts abt, say, exactly who was there that night that camp a day’s drive east of Laramie, was it Jim Fitzpatrick who was sitting just inside the light, and the Donners, both Jacob and George, didn’t know that that man was the one man who cld have saved them what they went through because Hastings, that first of advertising men . . . because they didn’t have the advantage of Jim’s knowledge . . . there you get DeVoto at his best, that, he thought the knowledge of a mountain man was the great thing in knowledge an American has yet had (like, say, Homer had, Berard thinks, abt a Phoenician manuscript . . . The point is, that scholarship in history (not the academic but Miss Harrison’s exactitudes, her care—or Pausanias, than whom none . . . is the same thing as care of Swedish cabinet maker—or Meister Eckhart on how a soul is only one when it is not me in God but God in me, that precision (?) And the dividing line between all that was from Grks (and that Chink) to what now is, is exactly this one of PROCESS: HOW: so anywhere you find it (and in America as a history you damn well have to look for it) is, it will turn out, to be scratched for. That is why I don’t, here, list books under III. Process: you will 241

have to find em yrself. And by wading through unconscionable stuff. Like, for example, I give you: A READING LIST: can’t lay my hands on the damn book at the moment but see Vestal Queen of Cowtowns: Dodge City’s bibliography as ex. of what, if you wanted to find out for yourself (istorin) you’d have to go through I guess you’d say I got off the track. Well . . . To jump back on: IV. Quantity (continued on our next. . . . Appendix A: Berard’s point is that the Incidents in the Odyssey result from the Place-Names, in other words not fiction in any humanistic sense but that the process of the imagination is from 1) a place  person  thing  event—to—2) the naming of it—to—3) the reenactment or representation of it, in other words object name image or story Ex.: Kirke = s she-hawk; in Phoenician periplous her island was Nesos Kirkes = Isle of the She-Hawk (in fact the very place is the haunt of birds of prey, Italian Coast just above ancient 1st Greek City). But here’s the kicker: Odysseus says “we came to the island Aeaea, where Circe lived.”—Aiaia, in Hebrew, means “Island of the She-Hawk”! You will imagine what this does to me who is such a hound of a believer in fact-act-datum as what we damn well do eat up! And thereby, “proceed”! 242

OK. I want to make a drawing [What was HISTORY as a static]

[What used to be called THE INDIVIDUAL]

  eld

fi its  

  the res ult  

(archeology: (science of the soul science of beginning) psychology) MILLENNIA PERSON 12,000 BC to 1955 AD as as round as is long as as wide as is down

his

me

“ti

”? 



 

his

act

 

  



(methodology (technology viz, E. Dorn meta + hodos = techne = art)  TAO)  PROCESS    QUANTITY Increase of human beings how-how-how, & what happens takes a on earth; increase of production; machine certain amount of time to extending individual’s happen, a measurable quantum, powers of production— say, 1/10th of a second. So long arm; past, present, & future are c. 1/10th of a second

  

Note how each pair of corners invert previous axes of reference; process is soul where person is science of soul, time is quantity where field is millennia.

[Previously, THE SOUL or THE SPIRITUAL LIFE]

me fecit January 7, 1955

[What used to be called ENVIRONMENT (?) or SOCIETY (?)]

Basic Reading List: Merk (Harvard Press) on Westward Movement (you can eat yr way thru this list forever!) I. Far West: Katherine Coman Econ. Beginnings of the Far West W. P. Webb The Great Plains

& such as DeVoto’s Year of Decision (not so much for itself as for what it starts up: that is, DeVoto’s knowledge is so wide & curious it should be better. He should have written the unwritten book) and such books on regions as you will stumble on for yourself, viz. Edwin Corle’s Desert Country (or maybe the much praised recent job in the River Series on the Rio Grande, don’t know) II. Physiography of country as a whole—always the geology & geography—Carl O. Sauer, from “Environment & Culture in the Deglaciation,” all the way through “Road to Cibola,” back to his first job, for the State of Illinois handbook (1915?) on the new State Park at Starved Rock, Sauer doing job on Indian agriculture Francis Parkman—especially, for me, his LaSalle, but Canada as well, or Florida, if you go off the main trail that much (as I imagine any one might, but not me) III. To start with the millennia, read for kicks Men Out of Asia, by N. Mex. archaeologist named [Gladwin] on 244

arrival of migrations in America. Beyond that how does one get the space-time thing except in the imagining of men? Such characters as Sam Houston, Jim Beckwith, (Simon Gurty?), any of em as our kind of “You-liss-seas”? Plus—always—geography Here’s where IV comes in: PRIMARY DOCUMENTS. And to hook on here is a lifetime of assiduity. Best thing to do is to dig one thing or place or man until you yourself know more abt that than is possible to any other man. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Barbed Wire or Pemmican or Paterson or Iowa. But exhaust it. Saturate it. Beat it. And then U KNOW everything else very fast: one saturation job (it might take 14 years). And you’re in, forever. This one principle (& it’s new: even the best of recent men didn’t do it, once) plus millennia (or quantity as a principle instead of commodity. / or space-time (=s the littlest is the same as very big if you look at it) does the trick. So far as it’s reading (& history is, because you can’t find em all in Justus Garage of an afternoon!) reading (=s oral history, if one’s ears are open as well as one’s eyes—why I say it’s men, millennia, & one man’s work): the point is to get all that’s been said on given subject. And I don’t mean books: they stop. Because their makers are usually lazy. Or fancy. Or they are creative. And that’s the end. But DeVoto ain’t. And that’s where the trouble comes in: so few are, but so many think they are. QED: you’ll have to dig mss As of Am. history: 245

Repository

#1: THE NAT’L ARCHIVES, Wash., D.C. #2: Senate Documents (published) #3: Bureau of Am. Ethnology Reports & Bulletins (pub. by Smithsonian Inst.) & then, depending on subject, all over the place: ex., Donner Party, Sutter’s Fort Mus., & Cal. State Libr., Sacramento ex., the Adamses: Mass. Hist. Soc., Boston Ex.: Whaleship Essex: privately owned, Perc Brown, oilman, Jersey—at cruxes, mss will be in private hands, & one has trouble, patience, breaks getting same. But it doesn’t matter—all goes back to the ONE JOB— that’s where one’s nose is whittled. If you don’t do that one, you can never do the others. And it’s crazy, how one yields. You can go anywhere—right into some old maid’s front parlor, Craigie Circle, Brooklyn—or Monterey, Cal. (& eat smidgen for the first time, fried, with harbor on top OK—Just to get you started. And if I say it don’t end short of Pelasgus (date 7000 bc, place circum Mt. Lycaon, Arkadia), don’t let that scare you: I’m only trying to say how far bill WCW missed by not going behind Sam one Houston! Love, O PS: (1) Indians is wicked. I think the thing is to settle on one of em, either literally one, Red Cloud, say; or the Utes (whose language is of family of Nahuatl, thus showing Aztecs passed down Rockies); or a “civilization”—like Plains, or Maya, or 246

Arawak; or even a tribe, Shawnee, say—and once one is dug, the rest ought to yield more easily. (2) History as events. That is, social, or national, or “cultural,” or “intellectual.” I think it’s now mostly hogwash. Morphology has knocked this stuff cockeyed. And except for Frobenius—or such a clear man as Sauer (who’s no historian except in the initial sense of istorin, to find out for oneself)—I think the best thing is to have yourself catch it up as you have to, (a) because so few even good men will bother with it; and (b) the sequence of events you will want for yourself—just as you want geography: the locus is now both place & time (topology) W. E. Woodward, say Turner, yes— at least the book of his essays called The Frontier in Amer. Hist. Brooks Adams New Empire—for sure as well as his Civ. & Decay DHL’s Studies WCW Am Grain Pound’s Guide to Kulchur & the unwritten book by Fred Jackson Merk I have been trying to get out of him for yrs: LAND Also read Webb’s last book, The Great Frontier with its false notion Metropolis has bested Frontier, but a flurryer this book, because it at least represents what Toynbee & Europe can’t do, I mean move —oh yeah: (3) trees!   Get a load of Edgar Anderson’s Plants, Men, & Life or some such title (available Asheville Public Lib due to my asking em to buy it). Which leads out, this way: biosis, is now the wildest science. After what morphe did for

247

75 years (1875 all the “new sciences” began), biosis ahead: ex. blood (Gates’ Human Ancestry, Harvard Press—let’s get BMC library to buy it; Boyd at Boston U). But also such silly business as Jonathan Sauer (Carl O’s son) now becoming the world authority on the amaranth plant from studying dump-heaps! No end to this wild stuff. And turns it, by way of ESP, to psychology, of course. Merely to remind you: science, now, is man (& man is millennia). OK. That is, if Crows cut off troopers’ genitals decoratively each thing has its efficient cause! PS 2 About Economics. It’s like politics: I don’t myself know how you master them except by practicing them. I can’t for the life of me see how books help here. They are not history. They are too ingrained in our daily lives. They are like secondary love: what can you do about it except to have it? They are axiomatic—& have nothing (or everything to do) with class. Except this way: as of America (and I can’t tell you where to go for it, simply that I imagine it’s a law, complementary to the foregoing, that the real power contemporary to one is kept hidden), one damn well better guess, at least, and then try to find out, keep asking, how the money or “ownership” really keeps its hidden hands on the machinery: for ex., the “China Lobby.” I have come to believe that American Asiatic policy is not so much a financial matter (Electric Bond & Share, the Philip’s Corp., etc.—thus Bank of England), as it is the Protestant Church! So you see what I mean. (Dave Corkran, son of a methodist minister & Wesleyan univ. 248

graduate like myself, once told me that the 18th Amendment was the best hint to Teddy Roosevelt’s Russo-Jap policy as anything! And when I think of Congressman Judd (one of Pound’s “agents” on the Hill!) . . . I don’t know. One is confronted here. One can only hack away at it. And read between all lines: 50 Families or Gustavus Myers won’t do it. It’s why I say one has to either be a banker—or know one, intimately. We need now another set of muckrakers. But the FBI’s got’em all in hand! It’s a tough one. One thing’s sure. Economics as politics as money is a gone bird. It’s much more now power as state as fission. And therefore harder than ever to get at, if more mortal! OK, this has now become a letter. How’s the Big Shitty? Yrs Olson (1955)

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