Wilson Page 6

  And now, looking back on a career which spanned those four decades, he could hardly, even now, could hardly credit it had passed. It was done. He had done it. And it was time to remove the goggles, the frock, the bulbous-toed shoes, so oft the loving subject of the parodist – to remove them, and … to walk away? How could one walk away from it? The friends, the jokes, the stories, the membership in the World’s Best Club?

  He did not think of the prerogatives. He never had.

  Not when this one or that had attempted to bribe him; not when, as daily happened, he saw envy in the eyes of a civilian – never. It was his job, his calling, and his duty, and that was the end of it. He glanced – could it be for the last time? – at the bronze plaque over the door – the figure of “Bootsie,” and the words, now become so much a part of the culture, “Oh, what the hell …” with the ellipsis standing in for the true burden of the phrase, suspected generally, but known, in truth, only to the Service: “… I’m fucked, anyway.”

  Oh, the tradition, he thought. And the love of tradition. It had raised and clothed and led and conforted him through – he could not say his “working” life. It was his life. And what would remain now?

  Years – any would be too long – of a retirement.

  What sentence could he hear less welcome – and him a perpetrator of no crime except longevity?

  Here the manuscript degenerates from doubtful into that which we must consider spurious. My reasons follow.

  One. Change in typeface.

  Two. Degeneration in orthography, e.g. “eksetera” (ms folio 17), where, previously both “etc.” and “et cetera” are found. (This I must consider the most telling, nay, incontrovertible evidence of traduction of the manuscript. And any still supporting the notion of integrity I must consider obdurate, not to say partisan.

  And to what end, I ask you, when the one author is dead, and any conceivable others unknown, conjectural; and, had they existed, remaining, of necessity, at this remove, unable to assert their identity(ies)?

  In what, then, is this supposed scholarship? Must it not be, has it not, in fact, degenerated into a mere parlor game or disons le mot a neurotic self-proclamation, which latter is, today, my theme.

  (Commotion on the floor. Sounds of a struggle in the anteroom, and the presence in the hall of the (masked?) (musked?) gunman, joined by several who had theretofore been unremarked, accepted as members of the Commission, these drawing from their sleeves or pockets black or navy-blue watchcaps, which, pulled over the head, proved to be balaclava helmets.)1

  The Halfway Point1

  At which we are surprised to have our attention drawn to our progress; for, though it surely “bisects the material,” it corresponds, rhythmically, to no inherited or learned predisposition for reflection or pause. It is an artificial period and, as such, it must compel our study. What was Krautz trying to say?

  Dating the Material

  Dating

  This item was found in a shoebox in the Room, the dust jacket read, Scilly, and the Channel Islands.

  It was not, of course, until the move to the New Museum that a careless workman (see below) dislodged the shoebox from its fixed position on the top shelf, and it fell, scattering the contents.

  The museum staff rushed to restore the artifacts to their appointed and relative positions on the shelf (a task of no difficulty, as they’d been pictured, for long, on the schematic drawing at the entrance to the Hall). Schoolchildren of that age would have been able to recite by heart: “The card from the optician, half a sheet of stamps, illegible letter from what is believed to have been an office-seeker, throat sweets, guide to Scilly and the Channel Islands, et cetera.”

  Can we imagine the surprise of those museum workers on discovering in this last, beneath its prosaic jacket and title, neath its dull, familiar cover, a tome of a somewhat different sort, entitled, A Dating Strategy for the Ages?

  Now, I will not waste the reader’s time with exegesis of the (to our modern eye) regressive, nay, it is, finally, not too strong to say “insupportable” notions1 which this book contains – another age might find these “quaint.” We cannot.

  I will limit myself, and direct the reader’s (kind) attention to another question altogether: What happened to the travel guide?

  The Uses of Inaccuracy

  Greind, and the Development of the Bungalow

  or: The Uses of Inaccuracy1

  Source: Tales of the Fantasist

  In the bungalow, in the early twentieth-century longing for the bucolic, we see the first (architectural) expression of nostalgia/Weltschmertz.

  Less than a hundred years into the Industrial Revolution, we see the mind of man grope backward toward the Farm.

  While all sing tropes to the New, the Future, while in Paris the conjunction of the (if misunderstood) Japanese love of the floriform finds its expression in art nouveau, that paean to writhing sexuality so curiously cast (hidden?) in the realm of the dicotyledon, in the United States the bungalow proclaims the wish to return, no, not to the jungle, no, but to that state (in its ideal, imaginary, form) uniting the wild and (or, better) expressing the idea of the wild-subdued; or, better, the innate harmony in the wild, or, the “savage” as a misunderstanding of the innately sublime – where a basically Protestant world view perceives all strife as error, and Paradise not as a state-after-death, but the true nature of the world, could we but deal with the Irish.

  This is the longing for the Farm, for that prelapsarian (imaginary)2 state where cows would milk themselves, roosters crow only upon request, all days be those of late summer or fall, all boys wear denim and all girls gingham or calico, and yet exhibit at the merest invitation, sexual abandon3 of a sort and degree unknown since the historic hubris of Mesopotamia.

  This is the bungalow, then.

  The career of Greind at the Beaux Arts needs no elaboration here.4 Suffice it to say […]5

  Lost

  Lost

  Source: “The Wars of the Lord,” Apocrypha, vol. 3 no. 3

  “Q. What if a book should be lost? What if a term should be lost – what would it mean if, without it, * it was reconstructed?† Would such increase our ignorance (for it would never be discovered)? And, on the other hand, what is our reason (thus, our history), save a procession of error?”

  “Th’ain’t nothin’, and nobody there but us chickens.”1

  “Who are the Hittites, anyway? And what did we ever do to them?”

  Oh, I don’t know. “Lost,”2 I suppose, although the very word seems to convey a foundation-of-meaning, an identity, if you will, far greater than any I enjoy. How odd is language, whereby, in identifying things, we “craft” them, we far-more-than-endow them, with the power to please, to terrify, to comfort. And how difficult to pierce its veil. To strike through to the ding an sich – to the meat of the whole dilemma, to which science a devotion is most usually accounted heresy – where Jack and Jim and Jones and Robinson say, “Do not affront me with your ‘language,’ your ‘semantics,’ your Jesuitical, Hebrew, Communistic, intellectual, fill-in-the-blank loathsome manipulation; but let me, I demand, dwell comfortable with my understanding of and application to the few works my betters have allowed me, and which talismans render comprehensible to me the world.”

  Times change. People change constantly, from conception till death (exempting, always, middle age); and even after death they change (decay), leaving, for the moment, the (semantic) question of whether, at that stage, they are still “people.”

  Interests change, tastes change – the taste buds (on the tongue) grow ever less acute over time, and give rise to the sophistication (good? bad?) of the culinary arts.

  But it has been said that the past does not change. What bullshit. How can we say that it does not change, if it is (as it is) unknowable?

  Werner Heisenberg (1902-1978-1982) was one of the best-dressed men of his day. It was said that his penis was of a length and (when aroused) circumference to awake either anxiety or rapt attentio
n in all who beheld it – but he is remembered, in our time, for quite another thing: his “uncertainty” principle. This held that it’s impossible to know both the speed and the location of a sub-atomic particle (who would want to?); or, in layman’s terms, where something is and how fast it’s going – or, that the act of observing something alters the thing observed.3

  Well, sure, and when’s it more true, than of the past?

  “O-ho,” the phenomenologists say, “you can change the ‘past’?” The answer is “Of course,” that, like the householder, slave to the bank, to the boss, the media, controlled by a few blunt expressions – “country,” “honor:’ “wealth,” “the future:” “democracy,” “free,” “on sale” – all are in thrall not to that power which can manipulate the physical world, but which interprets it.

  We have been raised and habituated to think of the past as “that which happened.” In fact, it is no such thing.

  The “past” reflection will reveal, is merely our idea of what happened. It has no connection whatever to the (should they, in fact, exist) actual events which have (perhaps) transpired. Even were we not manipulated by an outside (human) force, our memory is imperfect, our methods of recording liable to decay, loss and mistranscription (let alone analysis).

  More to the point, our perception (that survival mechanism) is a frayed, self-referential device. It fits us not to perceive the world, but to survive it – i.e., to see, understand, and act upon the universe only as threat (i.e. that which must be subdued).

  I will not even say all other information is discounted or ignored. No. I will say that anything not perceivable as threat is not accepted as information. It is not assessed, as it is not seen. Et cetera.

  No. This notion that the “past” is something which took place is wrong.

  It did not “take place.” It is taking place now.

  And the question is perhaps not why Greind (Bennigsen) wrote (as it seems likely that he did), “All is lust,” but why it should interest us.4

  The Toll Hound

  The Toll Hound

  The Appeal to Caninity

  I write of that collective history, that mass-race consciousness which does not name itself, but which is “culture”; where ten generations of schoolchildren have prattled that “There was a farmer had a dog, and Bingo was his name-o” – in the belief that “Bingo” was the name of the dog; whereas recent evidence has suggested most strongly, we may say incontrovertibly, that it was, in fact, the name of the farmer.

  Earlier times delighted in the picture puzzle wherein a field of flowers held, on observation, a concealed numeral or face – those puzzles of figure-and-ground, where the viewer, once ignorant of the crypto-content, having once become aware of it, could never banish it from his or her mind.

  Once the sign was a mere field, now it is a field in which there is a numeral.

  Once it was a vase. The vase, however, was revealed to be the outline, the profile of two facing visages, et cetera, et cetera. (A testimony to an era much more easily amused – that time, we might say, whose ur-phenomenological bent was capable of being titillated by visual ambiguity.)

  What can the modern philosopher make, however, of an ambiguity (say ambiguity or, if you will, “alternativeness”)? For, though prima facie source work establishes the date of the song’s first appearance, and the place – 1835, in Huguenot Louisiana, Priedieux Parish – the home, for eight generations previous, of the Bienguele – and though the clan was famed for, nay, though the name was synonymous with the breeding of dogs (some say with the actual creation of the Toll Hound), and though the phrase “adroit quant aux chiens comme les Biengueles” in the Cajun jargon1 survived well into the twentieth century, still, one might, from pique, or sloth, or intractability (for who can plumb the human mind?) stick at awarding a status greater than probably to the identity of the named figure.

  How charming, again, that time, how dear; and how the contemplation of history brings us simultaneously, gently as the zephyr, to the twentieth, to the nineteenth, and, inevitably, to the eighteenth century – to that France, Mother of Irony, which awarded the name Bienguele – for what oddity, propensity or prodigality we can only surmise – to that expulsion from France, to the New World, there to pursue, we assume, the rituals (whatever they may’ve constituted) of the Protestant Rite.

  I would beg the reader’s indulgence to recur, for a moment, to the song itself.

  Its first lines have already been quoted.

  The burden, for those unacquainted, continues:

  B.I.N.G.O.

  B.I.N.G.O.

  B.I.N.G.O.

  And BINGO was his name-o.

  How subtle, how lovely are the autonomic operations of a culture. Here, in a rhyme surviving for children, we find the reiteration, the insistence-from-the-grave, as it were, of the clan’s claim that its reputation be acknowledged.

  Driven from France, lost in the reductive combination and recombination which is Time. Still the name – separate from the entity, like a frog in a laboratory experiment whose limbs still respond, though sense is gone – lives on.

  Still the name resonates, insisting on its right to be heard; on its right to fame as dog-fancier – it lives on. Its orthography simplified, yes, for the New World, but simplified (obscured) in the very service of survival, crying for redress, but blessed, in that the very generations of children, ignorant of the song’s hero, their knowledge of the same only less than their apathy, that their prattle, though ignorant, was the vessel, and the only vessel, for this fragile memory, this voice from the grave.

  It was not a dog. It was the farmer of whom the song spoke.

  Found in a Trunk in Pinsk

  Source: “Pepita, Chet and Donna,” or “The Moving Picture Boys in Spain,” from The Cardiff Giant1

  To begin to understand the Hundmotif we must first acquaint ourselves, as in many other spheres, with the taxonomy of the breeder.

  What are we talking about here? Setter, pointer,2 hound, terrier, and, of course, spaniel.

  Working breeds all, happiest when, under the direction of man, they turn their energies to the mutually beneficial task.

  This task, be it shepherding, ratting, sport, chase, or what have you, blesses them both, as who that has witnessed can deny?

  It is no apologia, that creed which holds that God appointed each his place, high and low, master and man, it is proved as a mere matter of observation; why, look at the bees, flitting now this way and now that, making honey for the delectation of the higher form, of man.

  How unfitting, how terrible, how vile were the relationship inverted.

  It is, of course, Greind’s predilection for the canine which begets this endless scholarship – the (seemingly endless) outpouring of academic studies, which, were they to vanish, would force the library shelves to show their bare bottoms to the passing world.3

  The Sermon

  Translated from the German. Re-issued, in the American adaptation, as “By Works or By Faith?” and, again, redacted and condensed and found as an interpolated aphorism in The Toll Hound: Line Breeding in Louisiana, or Fifty Years of Coon Hunting by “A Gentleman”, in chapter 3, where it appears in the form, “What’s Better, Cake or Pie?” It appears, again in an ecclesiastic setting, quoted in I Know Where I’m Going, a collection of sermons by J. Bienguele, St Antoine’s Parish, Monkton, Louisiana, in the sermon, “Now Let’s Talk About Dogs.” This is the book found on the President’s bedside table, the letter-opener holding his place, and his place this very page.1

  How can a living God be both omnipotent and omniscient?2

  The Skunk1

  Lots of things don’t smell good, but few do it on purpose, and fewer still as their “best trick.” GINGER

  “… of the skunk, as it wandered across the road with the well-known peculiar gait, which,” et cetera.

  “THE OLD WRANGLER RIDES OUT”

  Which garnered this – we leave to the reader to determine if deserved or not – c
ritique:

  That anyone acquainted with the animal well knew the gait with which it wandered and that others learned of it only from the author’s promiscuous and false (to them) assurance of its currency. That, then, the description of the gait were supererogatory, or a Ciceronian device – a, if not fiendish, at least false attempt to win the friendship of the audience by ascribing to it an unwarranted conversation with the Wild.

  Many, at the time, found his absorption with the issue picayune; and the proverbial “correspondence which would fill volumes” did, in fact, expand and occupy and was presented in two volumes2 and consisted of letters to The Times, the responses of its editors and readership responses to these, and the subsequent general outcry. Which is memorialized and survives in the pictographs of graffiti, skywriting, and monumental art.3

  Someone once wrote, “O, Death, Where is thy Sting?”

  The answer, to those unfortunates in the editorial offices of The Times, proved to be: 16 Regent Street, Fourth Floor, on which we may assume they meditated for the space of five floors4 at the rate of 32 feet per second per second.

  “One riot, one Ranger,” wrote the anonymous Texan.

  And well might the cleaning staff so tragically mistaken for the editorial have lamented the absence of that one Ranger that cold fall day which proved to be their last.

  And would it, as has been argued elsewhere and at length, have been more or less of a tragedy had the staff actually been engaged in those activities to which the mob took exception?

  At what point (put differently) does the tragic become the pathetic, and vice versa?