Celebrated Letters of John B. Keane, page 27
Please remember that ninety-nine times out of a hundred there is no need of us even though you may think otherwise. You, the brain, are solely responsible for our inhumanity, our obstinacy, our inflexibility and only you, the brain, can soften and subdue us.
There are happy days, weeks, even months when we are non-existent. Our various parts fill other useful roles while we are dormant. Then, unfortunately, as a result of a chance remark, an allegedly unkind cut, a ridiculous, meaningless slight, we are mobilised once more and alerted for destruction even though it is a mobilisation that all too often backfires, leaving you with a bloody nose and broken fingers.
We will now, before concluding, pose you a few questions, Have you ever seen a clenched fist in the company of a laugh? Have you ever seen a fist being clenched while its owner rendered a lovesong? Have you ever seen a man with clenched fists embracing a woman? Have you ever heard of a man who made love with clenched fists or a man who stroked a girl’s hair with his fists? Of course not for the good reason that a fist only does injury whereas the actions to which I have referred call for softness and tenderness.
The only really good thing about us is that when your anger subsides we are dissolved. Now that the years are creeping up on you I think it is high time you retired us altogether. Dismiss us for once and for all and show the world that you have come to terms with yourself and the people about you. Grey hairs and clenched fists seem to us the most unseemly of companions. Wrinkles and clenched fists look even more ridiculous. Retire us at once, in God’s name, before you make a complete fool of yourself!
Sincerely
Your fists
The Penis Writes
Dear Master
I write to you as the most reviled of all your organs, objurgated and calumniated since the inception of copulation and constantly blamed for misdeeds which I freely admit to perpetrating – but always on your instructions. Anything I have ever done has been instigated by you.
There I would be pendant and somnolent and occasionally out of commission when suddenly you would shout ‘tenshun!’ and I would be obliged to spring instantly into action.
I was ever ready because eternal vigilance was my motto since I first became aware of your extraordinary and ungovernable proclivity towards the opposite sex.
Now that you have moved on into the years one would expect a katabolism or some slight contraction in the carnal drive. If anything, alas! you would seem to be more inclined than ever before towards sexual debauchery and would motivate me around the clock if you could bring yourself to stay awake that long.
God grant a silver bed in Heaven to your sainted, paternal grandmother; it was she who said that the body should be seven days dead before the penis would fully subside and even then she contended there were isolated cases where this much-maligned organ was seen to be still the outstanding feature in resurrected cadavers which had been interred months before. If this is true the cadaver was no cadaver. Rather was it a body in a state of suspended animation. An old wives’ tale I dare say but it shows that no female in her right mind would ever place the least trust, dead or alive, in the organ of organs, as I once heard it called by the captious old midwife who first brought you into the world.
It was she who said that ninety-nine out of every hundred males should be castrated at birth and the one percent isolated but sumptuously cossetted solely for the purpose of perpetuating the human species, ‘For,’ said she, ‘of all the attachments of the trunk it is the one which is to be trusted least.’
How wrongfully labelled have we penises always been. The old woman, for all her knowledge of the world, should have laid the blame for all my exploits fairly and squarely at your door.
I once heard an itinerant evangelist suggest at a street corner in the city of Dublin that there was nothing so profound as a common erection.
The truth is that there is nothing less profound for the pump in question, the pump of life, is the most uncomplicated adjunct of the entire human system, so whenever we hear a person say that he or she has read or heard something profound what it really means is that they are more mystified after experiencing this so-called profundity than they were before.
The point I would ram home – you’ll find the expression endearing I’m sure! – is that I am simply your puppet and that I have no influence whatsoever over my destiny.
There are people who say that excessive drinking brings out the worst in me. What they should be saying is that it brings out the worst in you and that you are capable of submitting me to the most extreme excesses after a sustained bout of intemperance. You would place my very existence in jeopardy such is your lack of restraint and distortion of outlook after an alcoholic shaughraun.
You take the whip to conscience and oust him from his watchtower whenever it suits your vile purpose.
Conscience, poor creature, is a head-shaker and a tut-tutter rather than a dictator. It is you who dictates to and manipulates poor Mister Conscience until he is more of a yes-man than an honest witness for that which prosecutes on behalf of the Creator.
I remember just before your first fall cut you irretrievably adrift from lovely Lily Lieloly, you were at that manky stage in your debauch-filled career when a choice had to be made between your continuing virginity and your likely defilement.
I had fondly hoped that because Lily Lieloly was also a virgin you would preserve me for that glorious union when you and Lily would consummate your betrothal and bring everlasting joy to both your hearts.
Virginity is, unfortunately, something of a souvenir, often priceless to its owner but frequently worthless on the open market.
You held yours in so little regard that you unashamedly and heedlessly disposed of it at the first available opportunity. Even after that first disappointing encounter I had hoped that your unsatisfactory initiation into the sorry rite of illicit deflowering would signal your return to the road of righteousness.
It was not to be and in no time at all you had exhausted the last reserves of local harlots and accommodating amateurs. Soon you were to become a familiar figure in the iniquitous dens of nearby cities until you were rendered temporarily hors de combat by a four-feet-eleven masseuse who, for a few extra quid, provided you with what she termed the full treatment as advertised in the jargon of the trade, on a charge sheet which hung between framed photographs of the late John F. Kennedy and Pope John the twenty-third.
It was Sir Alexander Fleming, through the medium of his miraculous penicillin, who must be praised and thanked for your speedy recovery. You were to indulge your weakness at colossal expense of both the physical and financial kind before finally succumbing to the wiles and monies of the oldish and plainish heiress, Miss Penelope Fitzfeckid.
There followed several years of marital harmony, during which time Penelope presented you with two daughters and a bouncing boy.
Then one day you called me up unexpectedly for active service far from the home front. It was the evening of some rugby international at Twickenham.
There you were one minute carousing and chorusing with your cronies and the next in the rear seat of a taxi heading for one of those haunts where you once excelled yourself, or so you believed, in those rakish days before marriage.
You were recognised at once and rapturously received by the never-ageing Madame who, according to herself, had spent the intervening years wondering and worrying about your sustained exile from her buxom charges, all of who had now been replaced by younger and more agile exponents of the high and ancient art of copulation.
There were times during that long weekend when I feared for our survival but miraculously you managed to escape visitation from the wide variety of painful diseases which were then rampant in that particular parlour.
We were not to be so lucky on a later occasion which I will also never forget for another reason, this being that you put me to work when I was no longer capable and made me the butt of your paramour’s vulgar wit – and not one word in defence out of you to whom I have given decades of incomparable service. Instead you laughed loud and long.
You once remarked to a crony that I had betrayed you. Your exact words were:
‘I might have been a chap of infinite morality, a veritable paragon had I not been let down by the most contumacious pudenda!’
I heard you announce another time, in an effort to justify a short-lived affair with a local matron:
‘What a wonderful fellow I would be but for this baggage of reproduction which demoralises my every thought and deed.’
Who knows better than yourself, my dear master, that it was nothing but your own interfemoral phantasising which was the paramount contribution in all our efforts. It has been said that I have no conscience and for once they speak the truth about me, for it is you who possesses the conscience and I can take some satisfaction from the fact that it keeps you awake nights.
However, it is true to say that your conscience takes leave of absence whenever I am called up to illicitly execute your iniquitous behests. Afterwards, when your conscience returns, I am sickened by the excess remorse in which you wallow, remorse, I might add, of little duration.
I will not cite other acts which I was obliged to perform on your behalf but I must mention your habit of urinating into your shoes whilst in your cups and indeed leaving your bed after a night consuming gallons of beer and advancing to the head of the stairs where you would set a minor cascade into motion. There must have been at least a hundred bed-wettings after your beer sessions. Indeed in your drunken stupors you have peed into purses, flowerpots, frying pans, pianos and wastepaper baskets, everywhere in fact but into the numerous chamber pots which your long-suffering spouse would so thoughtfully and strategically arrange at the precise places where you had emptied yourself before.
Often on your way home from pub crawls you would do it against dustbins and doorways, telephone and electricity poles, shop windows and sacrosanct monuments. No place was sacred when the urge beset you. Worst of all was that pre-wedding night when by some perverted mischance you located your mother’s wedding bonnet and filled its upturned crown with a froth-covered outflow which would have done justice to a Shergar or a Nijinsky!
There was a time you did it through the keyhole of a watchful neighbour and very nearly deprived the poor creature of a vision already impaired from exposure to constant draughts and rain-squalls. There was the time you attempted to do it against the trousers of a custodian of the peace and had to exert all your influences to keep the matter out of the courts.
I will never forget the night you were caught red-handed doing it into a flowerpot in the window of the local bully boy. The kick which he implanted fairly and squarely on me and the remainder of your apparatus left me unwell for days. I have often asked myself how is it that man will persist in aiming knees, boots and fists at that part of the anatomy which has given him the most pleasure. It is one of the more intriguing aspects of man’s mental infirmity.
If I were asked to recall the most outrageous statement you ever made I would suggest that it was that which referred to me as follows:
‘A man with an enthusiastic penis,’ you said, ‘is the servant of a headstrong master!’
One of your cronies insisted that you deserved the title of philosopher after such a perceptive declaration whereas if the truth were told it was about as philosophical an inanity as the nocturnal braying of a wandering jackass. Too well you know that I was never your master. You and you alone are responsible for my every action and my survival for when you go I will have to go with you, and when you decay I will decay too. But for the miracle of penicillin I would have long since capitulated to the overpowering influences of your many silent and most unwelcome visitors, chief amongst whom are those age-old invaders – clap, syphilis and pox. Monday morning blues was your way of referring to the first of this terrible trio, and what a brave face you would put on when you would whisper to the discreet apothecary in his dispensary that you required a small jar of mercurial ointment often so unpharmaceutically referred to by the loathsome name of ‘blue butter’. I refuse to recall the occasions and the wenches responsible for these visitations for I would not have it on my conscience that I scandalised the gentle reader with the more lurid details of your awesome sex life.
I am at a loss as to how I should conclude. Should I beg you to moderate your lifestyle, make representations to your better nature or ask you to turn to religion as a safeguard against eternal damnation? It would not matter one whit how I might address you since, as far as I am concerned, you have always seen to it that I will remain the most capricious of organs so that no trust whatsoever may be reposed in poor me!
Faithfully
Your Penis
The Nose Writes
Dear Brain
The only thing I can really say in your favour is that you never deliberately altered me. Altered I was by your headstong foolishness. Would you had heeded the sage advice of the forgotten poet who wrote so wisely:
Those who in quarrels interpose
Must often wipe a bloody nose.
I recall that night in Forty-Second Street when you announced in a topless bar that Richard Nixon was a gentleman. If memory served me correctly you described him as the most misunderstood man in America.
I’ll concede that you had no appraisal whatsoever of the coming blow but you might more profitably have kept your mouth shut especially since you were both inebriated and outnumbered. I was well and truly broken by the outsize fist of a squat Puerto Rican with no neck. Earlier you had told him in your own inimitable and cavalier way that he reminded you of John the Baptist with his head glued back on rather artlessly.
It was one of your more suicidal statements. However, we soon put all that behind us and after a botchy repair job by one of New York’s most expensive quacks I was still a fairly prepossessing proboscis.
Then there was the time you all but exterminated yourself drinking whiskey. Your liver, however, is better qualified to speak about your whiskey period than I am but I must remind you, in case of a recurrence, that I doubled in size during that time and my colour was temporarily transformed from a natural pink to a vile puce.
But for the nasal sentiments of Cyrano de Bergerac so passionately and eloquently conveyed I must surely have become clogged and inoperable. Oh that was a great declamation!
‘Let me inform you that I am proud of such an appendage since a big nose is the proper sign of a friendly, good, courteous, witty, liberal and brave man.’
When your doctor issued his ultimatum that your wife’s widowhood was imminent unless you refrained at once from imbibing rotgut, you turned to beer. My size and hue were restored within weeks and tragedy was narrowly averted.
Apart from playing host to mucousness, liquid and congealed, I am also the harbourer of your sixth sense. You might say that we are one. I do not expect gratitude. It is part of my job to see to your survival and this is why I nurture and cosset this most valuable of all the senses although I will never know why such a lowly organ as I was chosen to be the repository of one so gifted.
I myself have no difficulty in smelling smoke, fumes and gases provided you are not drugged with alcohol but the sixth sense which I house is a smeller of pitfalls; just as I direct you towards appetising food so does the sixth sense upon smelling trouble direct you in the opposite direction.
The sixth sense is capable of detecting the approach of gracious in-laws and mendicant relations. The sixth sense, often confused with experience, determines from the volume and tempo of a simple knock on a door whether job or sorrow wishes to be admitted. The housing and maintenance of this priceless instinct is a most onerous responsibility and were I a boastful, trumpeting nose I should be blowing my coals all day long.
Vanity is not my long suit but I will tell you this for I know it to be Gospel. When you first met Lily Lieloly she did not look into your eyes nor at the ebony curls atop your young and imprudent head. She did not gasp as others did at the whiteness and uniformity of your dazzling teeth nor did she judge you by the manliness of your unwrinkled brow. No sir! She looked at me, your nose, the only truly classical feature of an otherwise lacklustre face. She looked at me and that look lingered longer than any look I have ever experienced before or since. Her full lips parted as though she would speak. No words came but I sensed that if she had spoken she would have said:
‘Thou art the noblest Roman of them all.’
There was that awful period when you sported the moustache. You imagined you were being trendy whereas, in fact, all you did was to make yourself look ridiculous. Growing a moustache next to a nose is like pouring patented, bottled sauce over the mouth-watering creation of a world-class chef. I can stand on my own. The day you shaved off that bristling horror girls began to look at you again, particularly at that part of your dial where I hold sway.
There was the time you had your handkerchiefs monogrammed. The subsequent damage to my tender tissue has not yet healed from the blowing you gave me. Every time you wanted to show off you whipped out that crudely-labelled cotton duster and trumpeted like a rogue elephant, so that all could hear and, hearing, take notice of your scribble-defiled snot-rag. You must never use me in that fashion again. I am attached to your face for the primary purpose of taking pressure off you. Granted I assist with your breathing but your mouth is big enough to cope amply with that. It is a good job that the same mouth forms such a substantial gulf between myself and the jaw which receives most of the credit for being the gritty, gutsy hardchaw of the face whereas I am extended far beyond his utmost extremity and I am bloodied a hundred times more often than he is fractured or broken, bloodied so often by the probing nails of your index fingers as they scout my interior for recalcitrant snots that it’s a wonder I’m not whittled away altogether.
