Studying Hunger Journals, page 35
on me
there was no blueprint
there was no plan
so,
this is no working out
as planned
applied logic
is a sin
it’s cold outside
and warm as a sin in here
no memory
without
no memory
just chicory
that women like to write about
long,
screened out rest
and review,
provoke dreams
I have never left one
I was never left
it was never settled on
who does what to who
in the dark ages
(something about success)
and a plan
to doctor and disperse
smoke the little smoke
etc.
and breathe some mountains
as a fatal drift
around the complicated city
cause
you aint gonna know
what got into you
and you aint gonna rescue
fantasies either
I move
so you won’t move
who you
anybody
hangs up the phone
in a race,
first one.
And that is to say what there is to say, possibly in November.
December 5
Dear Belial, I need to go to the cemetery, I don’t want no parents, but I also need to run away, everybody’s smoking marijuana and out on the streets they are making deals, three men for one man-woman and heshe sucks each of their cocks in the hallway, real fast, one by one, except one of the ones didn’t want to watch but the others all watched and all this happened, I already told you, in the hallway, it should be black, and this is a final message: all I could see was the shifting of coats, the backs of coats moving, it’s 60 degrees on December 5, coats moving in the hallway and the deals made outside and a lot of numbers written down on small papers, some thrown away and a lot of numbers written down on the plastic covers of cokes-to-go, then thrown away and the reason I saw so little of this, I watched it through the binoculars from the fire escape. Now, on the other side of the street a big black man in a pale blue Cadillac, brand new with a white top, was rolling his window up and down, automatic, big black man made connection with the white queers of before and somebody handed somebody a transistor radio, in fact the transistor radio was handed around and men began to come up to the window and hand in books that were checked in the Cadillac and then handed back out and this took some time, black men shuffling feet as if it’s cold, I talked to Patti, it’s 60 degrees and the logic of this is that is not that, now, I am living here, this my new life on what Patti said was an award-winning block and it’s easy to see you can sit around thinkin you’re a genius but you always want a man, now that aint so, no, and the fear in the pleasure between, sure, waist and shoulders is that is this any moment in between someone might die on account of the logic of Spider and me. The work is dated. Patti’s performing. She says she’s good at sufferin. Like aspirin. You listenin. I have the feeling you aint. I have the feeling I aint got the balls to do something larger and everyone says you are in I am in a big hurry and I need rugs. I am not supposed to be doing this alone. Again. Like music. And if you get the music to repeat dead desire like the physiology of it repeats in anyone, even one who has none, then well then you might have a great record of music in her trance in his trance in the trance, somehow, in store in store for you anyway. So fuck off who knows, take a valium take a cancer like a European to lunch, I’m sorry, there are ideas about the review there’s my scarcity there’s great fear and there’s very little fear I have to be here to fill up the space, air presses against or would press if someone who was absent was here, so, I’m here instead like smoking in some school of dreams where Belial finally admits his fallen or decrepit love, where Spider and I argue about yoga which is blood, where scenes that take place have my shadow as a star, where Max is present where everyone else belongs without any hate and I hate it, where red tombstones are fucking whores skirts turned upside down, where tents become the hanging of a puppet stage that I am performing on, where red and green are demanded for free in a stone house full of greens, dried greens, it’s food for the babysitters and I’m off, where synchronicity is a piece of cake in a piece of bakery, where something prevents me running down the street or up, it’s a blind alley easily, where yogis fly at me dancing and I’m bored, where whatever you’re doing is whatever I’m doing, where I keep postponing saying, where the rugs come, they finally come but the doorbell don’t ring, it’s easy to be set in your piece without imagery with song with imagination’s simple content and now it’s time to be funny but not so funny that anybody will think you’re having a good time, you’re almost completely allowed to have a big book and no one can stop you from having serious time dreaming which is just a reform of ordinary thought and so, finally, the rugs came as if they were objects so desired and tried to be created by magic thinking which failed and so you constructed them in a book of rugs which is more of the space of the floor cause you can’t always hover at the ceiling and I wish I could communicate this faster to you like Leadbelly like his Black Betty like nobody’s problems at all like moving or a space filled with moving and if you buy enough books you might know you solved the problem and time spent alone is what songs are and I miss everybody and everything so I go away for a while so long, some song, an occupation, mr. blues singer aint much more than an image, but don’t tell Ariel, a lake or a river don’t tell and now is just the music, going on, so the rugs come.
It’s either 4:15 or 3:30 a.m. or maybe it’s 5:20 a.m. in New York City and I lost my sense of humor for a minute thinking of getting everything in the proper perspective which even every one isn’t sure of anymore and not getting there, well you know everything, well you’ve been writing a long enough time for it not to comfort you, there is no truths, there, there is no truths anywhere to contemplate, with inertia or without it, there is only leading, or, leading somewhere and maybe space makes its place in here or maybe there but then you leave out something and it will always take longer than you think it will to establish the way you feel in the morning, day after day, getting up without the pleasures you surrounded yourself with, nobody thinks they were, but they were, nobody sees them, but they were, maybe just the color blue or the color red, maybe pictures, maybe mending the sights and sown, whatever it was that was sown and put together and growing there, there aint no end to it and human beings eat they all eat the same, they may have trouble eating, they have no trouble eating, I watch them and I wait to see, to find something out, cause instead of that trust I developed none and none on the film that wasn’t used, in its place, that has to be developed, that is probably torn and ripped to shreds, inside me too, that’s fucking metaphor, if there ever was one, Clark. So to you and to you I can’t say nothing cause I get no help from you or from you and I can’t say that cause it aint fair, I’m just no where and the problems and the rain and it’s gonna rain and he knows it and he knows I know it and it’s gonna rain and I can’t hurt nobody and I can love everybody, easy, piece of cake and bakery, as they say, it aint no say, nobody no say. Who is that one who said moment and who is that one who said something that made me know he was crazy and who is that one who makes me know I can’t rely on him and who is that one who sang the song that said which one can I rely on as if it were, black, the way things go, they always go, in pairs, quite clear, no shame, which one, of two, can I rely on and I wanted that song. All the way down by Etta James and I am in a state and it aint no state cause no state will go on this way, it’s a way out it’s in it’s all that shit, it’s not my state it belongs, quite right, no shame, to someone else, and I try to be free of it and see all the shit that all those cats go through makin money and making time and I make some time and I guess up some money and I worry like a mother-fucker about what I done and about who’s there standing standing behind me now and watching watching like out the window there’s somebody, over my shoulder, into my space, there’s somebody watching and it aint my space but a space aint made that way, the way we think and the way we conceive of it, someone knows shit about thinking and conceptions and someone now knows no shit about that, conceptions empty, work hard and love, that’s all. There’s more space so there’s more, there’s empty space with transition’s time and that really is all, I fill it up, you stare like I stare and my eyes are there…each letter is a state in private language, fuck that, for the letters, Etta James, each letter is a state and that’s fine and that’s good and I’m gone as gone as I go as gone as any guy drinking all night in the Three Roses Bar where they put up the Christmas decorations where I thought to have a cup of coffee all by myself, in total safety, like the comet of the night that lights up the whole sky, I am safe, I am always safe on the streets when the streets know as they always know what I am doing and what I am doing is walking down or up or across them and that is all that I am doing so why is it so hard and I am feeling so hard and so the cause of so much and so I demand more, you or I it doesn’t matter, I demand another bottle of whiskey, I demand to be able not to drink it I demand to write a second page of these things I demand to be not to be a matter I demanded not to be a master of my style I demanded to stay up longer than you and get distracted when you passed through the room, I demanded to lie to everyone about love and love and I demanded not to know that there was any love because for a while a good long while there wasn’t and is this any different for me than for the guy on the street who demanded my cigarettes cause he was having a nicotine fit and I hadn’t heard that phrase in a long long time and since I felt bad I gave it all away and that’s the secret to that thought and that mode of thought the secret is I have nothing to communicate I can just continue to change the language if I can get my states of consciousness straight if I can think straight if I can ever get back to getting comfortable at all or the fucking concept of the own body which if it’s anything is something you control alone and alone comes in but not for long, yes someone said that was a meaningless concept and it tells you very little and is it any different for the guys in the newsstand who showed each other shirts and this is feeling and that is design or attempted design and so, there is something missing here, there’s something there isn’t room for as you get down to it, you tend to leave it out cause you have no reference for being at all, for being where you are and if you are and you know pretty well that you can’t use words like that when you’re doing strict work and strict work is what you’re usually doing cause why haven’t you been tempted to flip through those magazines that are lying all over the house and laugh more and paint the goddamn kitchen red and where is the end of all that, what I mean is I can’t end because I can’t begin to say what I want to say because this man here is frightened of what I might say and he’s right to be, this part of my life will be brief then, it is burning itself out and I’m breathing it in like everything that breathes itself into you without your choice and with it which is what has come before, without your choice and with it and that’s all.
December 16
It was actually on this day then that I wrote, “This is the scene of the crime, the people, fuck the people, all alone, fuck mothers and fathers…” ending with “Fuck Jesus, all you can.”
December 26, 1973
I think I can cave why the mind might need a vacation, might need to schedule a crazy rest a routine from the face of it all the unnecessary talented writing. Grace and Peter sleep. Woodstock, Kathy sleeps, Peter has asthma. The day is almost completely reversed, by the scene in the treehouse. I make a list of every hour in the day to see if there is a space for a large square where something might get done or change as, a door opens and closes: you can see the symptoms of this. This eating food.
I want to show everything. I want to show everything maybe in a diagram. I want to show everything maybe in a diagram that maybe you, the stars of this show, would become jealous of. Is it lunch time yet? Is it time for jealous cocktails? How do we know we have no way of knowing. I always take something with me. I am going to stop doing this while at the same time almost keeping on.
From rugs, the storehouse, to parents, the drug…to rearranging the order of the day, period. To destroying the chronology of even close to the end of the year. “See you next year” and all the while being more concerned about the real chronology of all the fucking rhetoric, the performing, which is the stash, the annihilation of the you, which is the connection, the paring down, the isolating of terms which is the only communication: “Is it time for cocktails or rain?” “It’s warmer today than yesterday, whatever that is.” Tight cold and close, desperate to fill all-in-words on the page, you planned the disappearance of my desire and now you are missing.
Many things fell down, many things fall down, tables fall, books fall, someone calls out my name, Bernadette, I hear it but I don’t want to recognize the voice, I don’t recognize it, I am growing up, I am optimistic about growing up or curling up, I sit still but I cannot stop. So, someone calls my name as a communication and I hear it, just hear it, that’s all I do, it’s my name, no voice no identity, mine. And in the foreground of that calling which is off to the left and back or far, ground, in the foreground there’s a dark or black mass of something which is moving, maybe not moving, it’s dark and I can’t see. My eyes hurt from moving moving them. “Who is missing,” whispers, must someone be missing? This is humming, woman sum of something humming, Freud’s own analysis. And so I concentrate on the voice, who’s the voice and in concentrating I can see that one black face the face of Spider can change will change into many other faces and some of them are willful and some of them are scared and some of them are awful and some just this one person. I am doing it. The salt that glows on the meat. The eating up of a person, here, in the night. What could I ever do with it, what’s new. A letter from Clark. I go to my grandfather’s funeral, this is duty, finally I go to my grandfather’s funeral (cause you won’t answer me? The last you). And when I walk in like the milk of (something), going up the escalator of the airport alone at night, leaving you alone at night, and when I walk in, the whole thing begins and takes shape—in the right church with the right rhythms and the right punctuation, yes he’s really dead, there. So. There is always rhetoric at a funeral or after one: Rico is back and I’d like to borrow money from him, Fern lives down the street, this is a hoax. You are (these are) the stars. Where is the comet? Will it be visible in the morning or evening? Will it clear? Rain. There’s a clarity at my grandfather’s funeral, there’s a voice, no voices, sustained. Clear outlines of figures erect and no doubt that they like the hunger artist are dead all dead. This here one. Has to. And Spider has to murder Stanislaus three times and even search for the jugular vein or something like it and Diane laughs and wonders who to call and puts it off and I think I should take charge but don’t, a phone call should be made but isn’t and Stanislaus wakes up complaining normally about the details of the stabbing, the looking and searching and he looks like a changed man. His nose is different.
Oedipal circus at the cemetery, stone wall. Freud’s jaw, John’s balls. The introduction of something new which is all old will hold this space, space of my driving, together, drive not instinct on desire. The whole half of it: people moving in the house you stay up with me you can stay up with me, I am denying one for one, I am forced to do this, no one’s forcing me and I am not dead or dying and if I were I would be certain I felt the same. Restrain him and ordinary things plainly thought like something in here and belongs there and drive not instinct on desire. One hour.
And the corpse perversion and the treehouse perversion and the beating perversion and the blind folding and the belts and the licking around the shoulders and the ears and the perversion of the holding of the head while you are working, everyone is lively or sleeping, many hours, she never spoke of it.
Wood can be made thin, labile and inconsistent. Consistence or lability are not essential to wood and water. But sensibility and intelligence being by their Nature and Essence free must be labile and by their lability may actually lapse (degenerate, etc.). Protoplasm comes to consist of two things…of acting part which lives and is stable, and of acted-on part which has never lived and is labile, that is, in a state of metabolism.
January 2
Six hours to showtime, 11 hours to showtime, the comet lives living in one room writing continuous like I do. No I don’t, sure hand, etc. A calendar, strict rules, the origins of that stuff alone with the origins of the publishing of someone’s sexual fantasies: “I find out about my real self by systematically in order of progressions away from ‘normality’ trying out each sexual act.” Cf. the fantasies and “real work.” “Are you all right?” and another: “Are you all right…”
No more, pain in left side of head.
Forget what you’re allowed to say (Italian cooks in kitchens at dawn) and work hard, you can’t stop anyway, wondering when the next connection will be made and not just playing so what is this seriousness that makes it impossible for you to anger to leave, say, Raphael, he already knows but you do not. Shakespeare had his own room and kept Elizabethan hours. Bernadette had her own room and kept Edwardian hours. Who reads and who can’t read? Still not going there, you need some time in between and the fantasy of a clean, not starving, place. You’re hardly starving. Thursday bank. Anyone work. Unconscious the fear of a fractured skull. Cracked ribs and swollen bones. Bruised eye. No bath. Instant sleep and good coffee. Learning. It just hit me when he hit me. Add waiting.
Some order, like, why do I want to keep writing “secret steeples, teeth and nails” and not reading, “You planned the disappearance of my desire.” You want to see me in good shape or looking good, I’ll show you a battered child. “When’s it gonna be ready?” Was all this necessary, you could begin to put it all together from beginning to end and hope, like Memory, it would come out that way with one big hope of revealment at the end, or, loose, like stone steps, you could store up forever, revealing any anymore “Pieces” of writing of ice, white knuckles on a cold red hand, Pound. So store it, so work it, I never had a moment today where I felt like it wasn’t yesterday or some other day at the store: food to eat, dream everything, a schedule, a lap, a comet, comet a Czechoslovakian, own a face a scare, altered states, own head a box for images of fear: “I’m not saying it’s bad, just saying it’s too fast, too drastic and at the same time, postponed, and that is why it is postponed.” The numbers racket, anything I can say to seem asexual (“It’s out the window.”), it must be transparent (through binoculars), a clouding of consciousness: “Fit it all in now, here!” Like schizophrenic lady on the page: “Thought, why do you wear that suit!” (wearing yourself away), a group of poets, fits it all in, and a comet, some red in its orange, distinguishes itself from the sunset by waiting till afterwards: “Never set out to do,” streaking away from the sun on through, they saw it. More distinct tasks. How can I leave or leave, I can. Driving somewhere away alone somehow. The mechanics of this. As, hitchhikers for company. Will there be many or none of them? Take care, of the dream. Guarding it. Driving somewhere away alone somehow. Without numbering and/or, but keeping track of time. Smoke a joint, a whiskey. 8:50, he’s better at no predictions than I am. Let’s tell a real story: (it’s too short): During these last decades the interest in professional fasting has markedly diminished. It used to pay very well to stage such great performances under one’s own management but today that is quite impossible. You don’t do half the things you planned to do but it is typical of the changes in the dreary memory of our society and society’s planning, setting up bookcases instead of wearing them on our heads, etc. that people, and here I might be accused of an oversimplification so I will say that someone who in the past would have been called a hunger artist and in fact filled that role in a direct performance in a cage, whether you let the sun in, whether you didn’t or it didn’t come in, would today translate those peculiarly palpable desires into nothing but words. And that those words, strung together and written out in time and worked on everyday would it’s true have an effect of shock and amazement on the fifty-odd people looking into the cage but that the only part of the phenomenon you could easily say was shared is that both the artist of yesterday and today’s secure writer, both knew that the fasting, if I can still call it that, could go on forever. And it’s fair to say both knew there was nothing special operating in its cause and in its necessity for isolation. But for the writer’s words to become so meshed with his normal thought that he actually encountered, day after day, a feeling that these as yet unwritten words would tell him more than or what he already knew and that this was his only way of finding out, this is what trapped him in a scene the old hunger artist disdained by instinct—he rarely spoke but he already knew. Examine the two more closely though and you will find out that the outcome is the same. Some sounds streamed with such ardent passion from his throat that for the onlookers it was not easy to stand the shock of it. But they braced themselves, crowded round the cage, and did not ever want to move away.
there was no blueprint
there was no plan
so,
this is no working out
as planned
applied logic
is a sin
it’s cold outside
and warm as a sin in here
no memory
without
no memory
just chicory
that women like to write about
long,
screened out rest
and review,
provoke dreams
I have never left one
I was never left
it was never settled on
who does what to who
in the dark ages
(something about success)
and a plan
to doctor and disperse
smoke the little smoke
etc.
and breathe some mountains
as a fatal drift
around the complicated city
cause
you aint gonna know
what got into you
and you aint gonna rescue
fantasies either
I move
so you won’t move
who you
anybody
hangs up the phone
in a race,
first one.
And that is to say what there is to say, possibly in November.
December 5
Dear Belial, I need to go to the cemetery, I don’t want no parents, but I also need to run away, everybody’s smoking marijuana and out on the streets they are making deals, three men for one man-woman and heshe sucks each of their cocks in the hallway, real fast, one by one, except one of the ones didn’t want to watch but the others all watched and all this happened, I already told you, in the hallway, it should be black, and this is a final message: all I could see was the shifting of coats, the backs of coats moving, it’s 60 degrees on December 5, coats moving in the hallway and the deals made outside and a lot of numbers written down on small papers, some thrown away and a lot of numbers written down on the plastic covers of cokes-to-go, then thrown away and the reason I saw so little of this, I watched it through the binoculars from the fire escape. Now, on the other side of the street a big black man in a pale blue Cadillac, brand new with a white top, was rolling his window up and down, automatic, big black man made connection with the white queers of before and somebody handed somebody a transistor radio, in fact the transistor radio was handed around and men began to come up to the window and hand in books that were checked in the Cadillac and then handed back out and this took some time, black men shuffling feet as if it’s cold, I talked to Patti, it’s 60 degrees and the logic of this is that is not that, now, I am living here, this my new life on what Patti said was an award-winning block and it’s easy to see you can sit around thinkin you’re a genius but you always want a man, now that aint so, no, and the fear in the pleasure between, sure, waist and shoulders is that is this any moment in between someone might die on account of the logic of Spider and me. The work is dated. Patti’s performing. She says she’s good at sufferin. Like aspirin. You listenin. I have the feeling you aint. I have the feeling I aint got the balls to do something larger and everyone says you are in I am in a big hurry and I need rugs. I am not supposed to be doing this alone. Again. Like music. And if you get the music to repeat dead desire like the physiology of it repeats in anyone, even one who has none, then well then you might have a great record of music in her trance in his trance in the trance, somehow, in store in store for you anyway. So fuck off who knows, take a valium take a cancer like a European to lunch, I’m sorry, there are ideas about the review there’s my scarcity there’s great fear and there’s very little fear I have to be here to fill up the space, air presses against or would press if someone who was absent was here, so, I’m here instead like smoking in some school of dreams where Belial finally admits his fallen or decrepit love, where Spider and I argue about yoga which is blood, where scenes that take place have my shadow as a star, where Max is present where everyone else belongs without any hate and I hate it, where red tombstones are fucking whores skirts turned upside down, where tents become the hanging of a puppet stage that I am performing on, where red and green are demanded for free in a stone house full of greens, dried greens, it’s food for the babysitters and I’m off, where synchronicity is a piece of cake in a piece of bakery, where something prevents me running down the street or up, it’s a blind alley easily, where yogis fly at me dancing and I’m bored, where whatever you’re doing is whatever I’m doing, where I keep postponing saying, where the rugs come, they finally come but the doorbell don’t ring, it’s easy to be set in your piece without imagery with song with imagination’s simple content and now it’s time to be funny but not so funny that anybody will think you’re having a good time, you’re almost completely allowed to have a big book and no one can stop you from having serious time dreaming which is just a reform of ordinary thought and so, finally, the rugs came as if they were objects so desired and tried to be created by magic thinking which failed and so you constructed them in a book of rugs which is more of the space of the floor cause you can’t always hover at the ceiling and I wish I could communicate this faster to you like Leadbelly like his Black Betty like nobody’s problems at all like moving or a space filled with moving and if you buy enough books you might know you solved the problem and time spent alone is what songs are and I miss everybody and everything so I go away for a while so long, some song, an occupation, mr. blues singer aint much more than an image, but don’t tell Ariel, a lake or a river don’t tell and now is just the music, going on, so the rugs come.
It’s either 4:15 or 3:30 a.m. or maybe it’s 5:20 a.m. in New York City and I lost my sense of humor for a minute thinking of getting everything in the proper perspective which even every one isn’t sure of anymore and not getting there, well you know everything, well you’ve been writing a long enough time for it not to comfort you, there is no truths, there, there is no truths anywhere to contemplate, with inertia or without it, there is only leading, or, leading somewhere and maybe space makes its place in here or maybe there but then you leave out something and it will always take longer than you think it will to establish the way you feel in the morning, day after day, getting up without the pleasures you surrounded yourself with, nobody thinks they were, but they were, nobody sees them, but they were, maybe just the color blue or the color red, maybe pictures, maybe mending the sights and sown, whatever it was that was sown and put together and growing there, there aint no end to it and human beings eat they all eat the same, they may have trouble eating, they have no trouble eating, I watch them and I wait to see, to find something out, cause instead of that trust I developed none and none on the film that wasn’t used, in its place, that has to be developed, that is probably torn and ripped to shreds, inside me too, that’s fucking metaphor, if there ever was one, Clark. So to you and to you I can’t say nothing cause I get no help from you or from you and I can’t say that cause it aint fair, I’m just no where and the problems and the rain and it’s gonna rain and he knows it and he knows I know it and it’s gonna rain and I can’t hurt nobody and I can love everybody, easy, piece of cake and bakery, as they say, it aint no say, nobody no say. Who is that one who said moment and who is that one who said something that made me know he was crazy and who is that one who makes me know I can’t rely on him and who is that one who sang the song that said which one can I rely on as if it were, black, the way things go, they always go, in pairs, quite clear, no shame, which one, of two, can I rely on and I wanted that song. All the way down by Etta James and I am in a state and it aint no state cause no state will go on this way, it’s a way out it’s in it’s all that shit, it’s not my state it belongs, quite right, no shame, to someone else, and I try to be free of it and see all the shit that all those cats go through makin money and making time and I make some time and I guess up some money and I worry like a mother-fucker about what I done and about who’s there standing standing behind me now and watching watching like out the window there’s somebody, over my shoulder, into my space, there’s somebody watching and it aint my space but a space aint made that way, the way we think and the way we conceive of it, someone knows shit about thinking and conceptions and someone now knows no shit about that, conceptions empty, work hard and love, that’s all. There’s more space so there’s more, there’s empty space with transition’s time and that really is all, I fill it up, you stare like I stare and my eyes are there…each letter is a state in private language, fuck that, for the letters, Etta James, each letter is a state and that’s fine and that’s good and I’m gone as gone as I go as gone as any guy drinking all night in the Three Roses Bar where they put up the Christmas decorations where I thought to have a cup of coffee all by myself, in total safety, like the comet of the night that lights up the whole sky, I am safe, I am always safe on the streets when the streets know as they always know what I am doing and what I am doing is walking down or up or across them and that is all that I am doing so why is it so hard and I am feeling so hard and so the cause of so much and so I demand more, you or I it doesn’t matter, I demand another bottle of whiskey, I demand to be able not to drink it I demand to write a second page of these things I demand to be not to be a matter I demanded not to be a master of my style I demanded to stay up longer than you and get distracted when you passed through the room, I demanded to lie to everyone about love and love and I demanded not to know that there was any love because for a while a good long while there wasn’t and is this any different for me than for the guy on the street who demanded my cigarettes cause he was having a nicotine fit and I hadn’t heard that phrase in a long long time and since I felt bad I gave it all away and that’s the secret to that thought and that mode of thought the secret is I have nothing to communicate I can just continue to change the language if I can get my states of consciousness straight if I can think straight if I can ever get back to getting comfortable at all or the fucking concept of the own body which if it’s anything is something you control alone and alone comes in but not for long, yes someone said that was a meaningless concept and it tells you very little and is it any different for the guys in the newsstand who showed each other shirts and this is feeling and that is design or attempted design and so, there is something missing here, there’s something there isn’t room for as you get down to it, you tend to leave it out cause you have no reference for being at all, for being where you are and if you are and you know pretty well that you can’t use words like that when you’re doing strict work and strict work is what you’re usually doing cause why haven’t you been tempted to flip through those magazines that are lying all over the house and laugh more and paint the goddamn kitchen red and where is the end of all that, what I mean is I can’t end because I can’t begin to say what I want to say because this man here is frightened of what I might say and he’s right to be, this part of my life will be brief then, it is burning itself out and I’m breathing it in like everything that breathes itself into you without your choice and with it which is what has come before, without your choice and with it and that’s all.
December 16
It was actually on this day then that I wrote, “This is the scene of the crime, the people, fuck the people, all alone, fuck mothers and fathers…” ending with “Fuck Jesus, all you can.”
December 26, 1973
I think I can cave why the mind might need a vacation, might need to schedule a crazy rest a routine from the face of it all the unnecessary talented writing. Grace and Peter sleep. Woodstock, Kathy sleeps, Peter has asthma. The day is almost completely reversed, by the scene in the treehouse. I make a list of every hour in the day to see if there is a space for a large square where something might get done or change as, a door opens and closes: you can see the symptoms of this. This eating food.
I want to show everything. I want to show everything maybe in a diagram. I want to show everything maybe in a diagram that maybe you, the stars of this show, would become jealous of. Is it lunch time yet? Is it time for jealous cocktails? How do we know we have no way of knowing. I always take something with me. I am going to stop doing this while at the same time almost keeping on.
From rugs, the storehouse, to parents, the drug…to rearranging the order of the day, period. To destroying the chronology of even close to the end of the year. “See you next year” and all the while being more concerned about the real chronology of all the fucking rhetoric, the performing, which is the stash, the annihilation of the you, which is the connection, the paring down, the isolating of terms which is the only communication: “Is it time for cocktails or rain?” “It’s warmer today than yesterday, whatever that is.” Tight cold and close, desperate to fill all-in-words on the page, you planned the disappearance of my desire and now you are missing.
Many things fell down, many things fall down, tables fall, books fall, someone calls out my name, Bernadette, I hear it but I don’t want to recognize the voice, I don’t recognize it, I am growing up, I am optimistic about growing up or curling up, I sit still but I cannot stop. So, someone calls my name as a communication and I hear it, just hear it, that’s all I do, it’s my name, no voice no identity, mine. And in the foreground of that calling which is off to the left and back or far, ground, in the foreground there’s a dark or black mass of something which is moving, maybe not moving, it’s dark and I can’t see. My eyes hurt from moving moving them. “Who is missing,” whispers, must someone be missing? This is humming, woman sum of something humming, Freud’s own analysis. And so I concentrate on the voice, who’s the voice and in concentrating I can see that one black face the face of Spider can change will change into many other faces and some of them are willful and some of them are scared and some of them are awful and some just this one person. I am doing it. The salt that glows on the meat. The eating up of a person, here, in the night. What could I ever do with it, what’s new. A letter from Clark. I go to my grandfather’s funeral, this is duty, finally I go to my grandfather’s funeral (cause you won’t answer me? The last you). And when I walk in like the milk of (something), going up the escalator of the airport alone at night, leaving you alone at night, and when I walk in, the whole thing begins and takes shape—in the right church with the right rhythms and the right punctuation, yes he’s really dead, there. So. There is always rhetoric at a funeral or after one: Rico is back and I’d like to borrow money from him, Fern lives down the street, this is a hoax. You are (these are) the stars. Where is the comet? Will it be visible in the morning or evening? Will it clear? Rain. There’s a clarity at my grandfather’s funeral, there’s a voice, no voices, sustained. Clear outlines of figures erect and no doubt that they like the hunger artist are dead all dead. This here one. Has to. And Spider has to murder Stanislaus three times and even search for the jugular vein or something like it and Diane laughs and wonders who to call and puts it off and I think I should take charge but don’t, a phone call should be made but isn’t and Stanislaus wakes up complaining normally about the details of the stabbing, the looking and searching and he looks like a changed man. His nose is different.
Oedipal circus at the cemetery, stone wall. Freud’s jaw, John’s balls. The introduction of something new which is all old will hold this space, space of my driving, together, drive not instinct on desire. The whole half of it: people moving in the house you stay up with me you can stay up with me, I am denying one for one, I am forced to do this, no one’s forcing me and I am not dead or dying and if I were I would be certain I felt the same. Restrain him and ordinary things plainly thought like something in here and belongs there and drive not instinct on desire. One hour.
And the corpse perversion and the treehouse perversion and the beating perversion and the blind folding and the belts and the licking around the shoulders and the ears and the perversion of the holding of the head while you are working, everyone is lively or sleeping, many hours, she never spoke of it.
Wood can be made thin, labile and inconsistent. Consistence or lability are not essential to wood and water. But sensibility and intelligence being by their Nature and Essence free must be labile and by their lability may actually lapse (degenerate, etc.). Protoplasm comes to consist of two things…of acting part which lives and is stable, and of acted-on part which has never lived and is labile, that is, in a state of metabolism.
January 2
Six hours to showtime, 11 hours to showtime, the comet lives living in one room writing continuous like I do. No I don’t, sure hand, etc. A calendar, strict rules, the origins of that stuff alone with the origins of the publishing of someone’s sexual fantasies: “I find out about my real self by systematically in order of progressions away from ‘normality’ trying out each sexual act.” Cf. the fantasies and “real work.” “Are you all right?” and another: “Are you all right…”
No more, pain in left side of head.
Forget what you’re allowed to say (Italian cooks in kitchens at dawn) and work hard, you can’t stop anyway, wondering when the next connection will be made and not just playing so what is this seriousness that makes it impossible for you to anger to leave, say, Raphael, he already knows but you do not. Shakespeare had his own room and kept Elizabethan hours. Bernadette had her own room and kept Edwardian hours. Who reads and who can’t read? Still not going there, you need some time in between and the fantasy of a clean, not starving, place. You’re hardly starving. Thursday bank. Anyone work. Unconscious the fear of a fractured skull. Cracked ribs and swollen bones. Bruised eye. No bath. Instant sleep and good coffee. Learning. It just hit me when he hit me. Add waiting.
Some order, like, why do I want to keep writing “secret steeples, teeth and nails” and not reading, “You planned the disappearance of my desire.” You want to see me in good shape or looking good, I’ll show you a battered child. “When’s it gonna be ready?” Was all this necessary, you could begin to put it all together from beginning to end and hope, like Memory, it would come out that way with one big hope of revealment at the end, or, loose, like stone steps, you could store up forever, revealing any anymore “Pieces” of writing of ice, white knuckles on a cold red hand, Pound. So store it, so work it, I never had a moment today where I felt like it wasn’t yesterday or some other day at the store: food to eat, dream everything, a schedule, a lap, a comet, comet a Czechoslovakian, own a face a scare, altered states, own head a box for images of fear: “I’m not saying it’s bad, just saying it’s too fast, too drastic and at the same time, postponed, and that is why it is postponed.” The numbers racket, anything I can say to seem asexual (“It’s out the window.”), it must be transparent (through binoculars), a clouding of consciousness: “Fit it all in now, here!” Like schizophrenic lady on the page: “Thought, why do you wear that suit!” (wearing yourself away), a group of poets, fits it all in, and a comet, some red in its orange, distinguishes itself from the sunset by waiting till afterwards: “Never set out to do,” streaking away from the sun on through, they saw it. More distinct tasks. How can I leave or leave, I can. Driving somewhere away alone somehow. The mechanics of this. As, hitchhikers for company. Will there be many or none of them? Take care, of the dream. Guarding it. Driving somewhere away alone somehow. Without numbering and/or, but keeping track of time. Smoke a joint, a whiskey. 8:50, he’s better at no predictions than I am. Let’s tell a real story: (it’s too short): During these last decades the interest in professional fasting has markedly diminished. It used to pay very well to stage such great performances under one’s own management but today that is quite impossible. You don’t do half the things you planned to do but it is typical of the changes in the dreary memory of our society and society’s planning, setting up bookcases instead of wearing them on our heads, etc. that people, and here I might be accused of an oversimplification so I will say that someone who in the past would have been called a hunger artist and in fact filled that role in a direct performance in a cage, whether you let the sun in, whether you didn’t or it didn’t come in, would today translate those peculiarly palpable desires into nothing but words. And that those words, strung together and written out in time and worked on everyday would it’s true have an effect of shock and amazement on the fifty-odd people looking into the cage but that the only part of the phenomenon you could easily say was shared is that both the artist of yesterday and today’s secure writer, both knew that the fasting, if I can still call it that, could go on forever. And it’s fair to say both knew there was nothing special operating in its cause and in its necessity for isolation. But for the writer’s words to become so meshed with his normal thought that he actually encountered, day after day, a feeling that these as yet unwritten words would tell him more than or what he already knew and that this was his only way of finding out, this is what trapped him in a scene the old hunger artist disdained by instinct—he rarely spoke but he already knew. Examine the two more closely though and you will find out that the outcome is the same. Some sounds streamed with such ardent passion from his throat that for the onlookers it was not easy to stand the shock of it. But they braced themselves, crowded round the cage, and did not ever want to move away.
