The Combinations, page 1
THE COMBINATIONS
LOUIS ARMAND
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
FICTION
The Garden
Menudo
Clair Obscur
Breakfast at Midnight
Canicule
Cairo
Abacus
POETRY
Inexorable
Weather
Land
Partition
Malice in Underland
Strange
Attractors
Picture
Primitive
Letters from Ausland
Synopticon (with John Kinsella)
Indirect Objects
The Rube Goldberg Variations
East Broadway Rundown
CRITICISM
The Organ-Grinder’s Monkey
Videology
The Combinations†
n
EQUUS
© Louis Armand,
ISBN ----
Equus Press
Birkbeck College (William Rowe)
Gordon Square, London, WC HPD, United Kingdom
Typeset & design by lazarus
Printed by PB Tisk
All rights reserved
Parts of this book first appeared in Ctrl-Z: New Media Philosophy, Flash, Golden Handcuffs Review,
Offcourse, Rampike, VLAK
Set in Caslon, composed by William Caslon in
64
_________
White can always play differently,
in which case he merely loses differently.
— Bobby Fischer
A Bust to the King’s Gambit
Habitants de Sodome, au feu du ciel
préférez le fiel de la queue.
— Rrose Sélavy
Alles begann am Anfang.
Aber sie nichts davon wußten…
— Zarathustra
By th’ mass, & ’tis like a rat indeed!
— Polonius
64
_________
Im einen Fall machen wir den Zug eines
bestehenden Spiels, im andern setzen wir
eine Spielregel fest. Man könnte auch das
Ziehen mit einer Spielfigur auf diese
beiden Arten auffassen: als Paradigma für
künftige Züge, und als Zug einer Partie.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein
Zettel
If the fool would persist in his folly
he would become wise.
— William Blake
The Marriage of Heaven & Hell
Ah din’t wake up dis moanin’…
— Robert Johnson
Golem City Blues
Graviora manent…
— Publius Vergilius Maro
Aeneid
64
_________
: Every confession’s a lie.
(Spare a thought for the old guy arrested barking ZHIDS OUT! KRAUTS IN! dragged
off to Gestapo HQ for the red-carpet treatment, sign the visitors’ book, tour the facilities
before having his balls fried off & fed back to him. ’Course he fessed-up, no secret about it.
Standard procedure, you could say. Official policy, even. Matter of black&white. Or maybe
the other way, white&black. Put a noose around his neck, too, for good measure, swung
from a meathook. Was anything gained? Hardly takes much to figure out, every comedy
needs a scapegoat like a soapbox needs a rousable rabble, like a discerning eye needs a
Pygmalion to perv at, like a banana skin needs a halfwit in blackface making pratfalls all
over the place, etc. Le condiment humain, as the Old Ballsack says in les classiques . Well, your Honoré, I’m just a poor, mixed-up, muddled shitstick who can’t see for thinking or think for
seeing, you know how it is your Honoré, blind passions and impassioned blindness, la gloire est le
soleil des merdes blah blah blah. Oh you can be sure he perceived the error of his ways after all
that, from end to finish, from start to the get-go, just a question of stringing a rope
between the posts, joining the dots, putting a frame around the big picture so none of the
details got left out. The whole operation was like a machine for turning-out sparkling
insights at an unparalleled rate. A man’s only the sum of his whatsits, after all. A pittance in
the Great Payroll, a two-bit AlphaOmega miming through his own operative pronoun, a
pinhole in the Light Fantastic shining on a mid-air dance act, neck-jobbed in a pool of
putrescence. Think that was the Angel of Salvation applauding from the wings & not just
another ratcheting-through-the-motions of the Funfair Funicular? They’re giving away
shares in the sequel each time you buy a ticket. Return to go. Just the highlights, a fifteen
minute flash in the pan if you’re lucky, saving the rest of the shtick for the pathologically
morbid among you — the matchsticks under the fingernails, the stitched eyelids, the
dripping faucet, the scalding, the freezing, the ruptured eardrum… Hypothetically at least
there’s no limit to their little hijinks. Like they say, God’s in the small print like the Devil’s
in the retail. You can always hit rep(l)ay if there’s something you want to savour. Or as the
Old Reprobate used to say when he was getting banged by the City’s Finest, Come again?
Comforting, eh, that you’ll wind-up just as you began, in a belch of bitchlitter under a
septic outhouse bench, on the bracken of a cursed hillside, in the bosom of insentient self-
deceit, blind as a newborn newt with barely a puddle to flap your last in? Ach, & after so
much wasted effort! Evolution? Well you could measure it all backwards & still come up
emptyhanded. One man’s tosspot’s another man’s phrenological cockhead. But someone’s
gotta draw the short straw. Yep. No good making a song&dance of it. All them amens &
yoohoos & lintel jobs! The hundredthousand culpa meas, the boneless beggaring, the
staunchless pleading, the knee-bended gobstopping! Destined is destined, from the very
first, or nearabouts. First glimpse out the wombwindow into the arsehole of it all. First
grimace. First clenching of fists. Little-Big-Man in the wigwam of the World. Swaddled in
mind’s-eye cinema of the Great Ghoulie, Zhidgeist of the Zeitverschwendung,V the whole
three reels: Mammy, Pap ’n’ li’l Noddibody. Casting back, oh how unpromising it must’ve
seemed, peekabooing out the O of Optimism’s lesser half, taking the measure of it, getting
a grip on the situation, proverbially of course, taking the proffered dilemma by the horns,
good antenna, bad antenna. Well tits is tits, me love. Ol’ wizened dugs in the moomouth
of him. Warts ’n’ all. Worts und alles. Oh but the words came later. Much later. Though
from where you’re standing you’d be forgiven for doubting there’d ever been anything but.
Woids, they said. Voids! As verbiloquatious as a bum alibi. Dolling-out the gilded nothings, the nounings, the nonsequiturs in a last-ditch run at conning a reprieve — Pleash oh pleash,
Big Meishter Funundgamesh — thinking to jerk a tear or two, the rained-on spit-sodden
butt of all the spent supplications of yore ( that old carcass, stuffed with bone & offal,
served-up on high with cabbage & dumplings). He must’ve been a boring old cunt before
He fell out of His tree & saw the Light Fantastic boring a blackhole in His brain.
Somewho up there must’ve been laughing at least, the Pater Primate’s pet parrot perhaps,
sulphur-crested & porcelain-plumaged, keeping up the bottled-guffaw routine ab
immemorabili tempore, even after the rest died waiting for the punchline. Nothing in the
Eagle’s Eerie but saintly arses on stunted thrones all turned to schist — how they must’ve
got sick of being so high&mighty after the first dozen Ice Ages, twirling field marshals’
batons & fingering each other’s whoopee cushions, wanting nothing less innocent than a
bit of good cheer to get them through their chilblains. Periscope to the lower depths to see
how their Neanderthal namesakes are getting along, doing the dirty in millennial cave-dark
& half the heathenly host with crook necks straining to get a looksee. And Himself,
needless to say, lying toes-up, right in the midst of it, like an untusked woolly mammoth
flat on its back. A quare sight indeed. Well, mimeth Pontius the Panto Parrot, show must go
on & all that razzledazzle crap. Cranking up the Looney Tunes theme like the tired wheeze of a jape gone stale. So what if it was no laughing matter? When the game’s up, you’d
think it was a contest to see who’ll choke last. The way they go on, trying to meet their
Maker halfway. That’s progress, see? Guinness Book longest gut-roar in History, before
the night finally closes-in. And it does, my preciouses. Like a finger on the restart button.
Like a fist around a fiver. Like the man-under-the-bed creeping out to stuff a pillow in
your face. Giving you the heebiejeebs. Clawing the walls of your little hemlock belly.
Sendin
Knows what’s coming, too, but isn’t saying. Too bad for you. Is that it? Is that all? What
about our chinooked castrato back in the cells with his wits knocked out of him & his
jester’s joystick jiggling his jugular? Lost the plot, you say? Gone missing from the
narrative, eh? Slipped out the backway to take in the view from the other side, mmm? Zion
of the Mind’s Eye? Ben-Gurion & what not? Should we oblige the bugger to lie still &
take his place in the Tale End of it All, the Untolled Troth, the Gullible’s Travesty? He
was a mensch, after all. He existed. Not for us to judge his one uncredited cameo in the
V “History, foreshortened by abstractions, is an advance to ‘something better,’ but Nature exhibits
only a perpetually self-repeating cycle.” G.W.F. Hegel
Great Schemer of Things’ thousandyear ad-break. (Who was he? No-one you’ll ever hear of again.) Such an erstwhile Oedipus as even ours would hardly be worth his weight in
footnotes. But wait (who knows?), perhaps the scholastic sticklers of some future Post-
Pleistocene might, one day — trifocals tilted at this infinitesimal event of questionable
non-repute, putting the inconsequential back into the Grand Design like a butterfly’s
wing-flutter in the vacuum of the Cosmic Mind — set down in higgledypiggledy casebook
hieroglyphics how, at the time of the Hitherto Unknown Offending Incident, the suspect
known only as “K” was discovered loitering at the gates of the Old Zhiddish Semetery,
attracting an audience, shouting his lungs out so to speak, waiving his arms, making a right
spectacle of himself, for anyone who could hear, anyone who could see: ZHIDS OUT! Ja,
ja, ja. KRAUTS IN! Ai, ai, ai. Occurring one mildly overcast midweek afternoon in the
salad days of the Occupation, with all the hilarity still to come. The moral of the story
being, were it to have one, Let the dead laugh at the dead. )
$ Foolery runs amok.†
† An oldendays Chesk proverb: “Blázniviny se rozsévají nazdařbůh.”
THE COMBINATIONS
OVERTURE
xv [ Unsightly Cinema]
A. EN PASSANT
E. THE SACRIFICIAL QUEEN
. [ They Say]
. The Great Instauration
. The Great Escapade
. The Rat Awakens to the Mysterious
. Poppylopping
Object in its Cage
. The Prodigal
. [ Does the Whale Worship at thy
. [ Institute of Human Studies]
Footsteps as the Thirsty Dog?]
. Golem City, Day Zero
. [ Reichsbahn]
. The Voynich Manuscript
. Pandora’s Box
. Boule de Juif
. Phantomwise
. Reise in die Nacht
B. THE ROOKS
. Eighty-Thousand Leagues
. Faust of Doom
. [ The Golden Goose]
F. THE GOOD & BAD BISHOPS
. Regard this Earth made Multitudinous
. [ Barrandov]
with your Slaves!
. Education is Technical Evolution
. What did Enoch do at Night?
. [ Athanasius Kircher]
. Ord’nary Volks
. Riders in the Sky
. Faktor
. The Angle of Coincidence Equals
. Bum’s Rush
the Angle of Confection
. The Father of His Nation
. The White Whale
. Chesk and Lesk
C. THE GIFTHORSE
. Roses are Red
. The Haunted Meridian
. Enculer les Mouches
G. THE POISONED PAWN
. All the Miscreants of Melodrama
. [ The Kid who brought the World
. Träumerei
to the Brink]
. Maso Kombinát
. [ The Master Ordinator]
. The Man in the Moon
. Die Wunderwaffe
. [ Didus Ineptus]
. Faustbitch
. Babelspeak
. The Emperor’s New Cock
. I want to be…
D. THE KING OF THE MAGICIANS
. The Key
. The Caretaker
. The Devil’s Wall
. Anagrammatised
. Untermenschen
H. THE WRONG SQUARE
. The Bugman
. Hang me with Slánský!
. Dogs in Space
. One for the Little Guy
. Pragerschinken
. Hospitality
. Der Ewige Jude
. Totentanz
. Ante Meridiem
. Peepholes to the Infinite
. Shot / Reverse-Shot
INTERMISSION
. The Case of Eldrich von N____
[ The Commentators]
. La Chute
[ The ŠVEJK]
[ Super COMBO Crossword]
CODA
xxiii
[ Warfarin]
Ove|tu|e
§
Begin with a room
& a man inside the room.
An indistinct source of yellowish light reveals:
an escritoire, four centuries antique already,
littered with manuscripts, inkblotters, pens,
inkwells & candlebutts. To the right of it, a long
trestletable stands against a grey stone wall. The
table, too, is littered with implements of diverse
kinds: a pestle & mortar, stoppered bottles, flasks &
beakers containing quantities of liquid in various
shades & hues, alembics, coiled glass tubes &
pipettes, faucets, ropes & pulleys, a collection of
earthenware jars large & small, an oil lamp with
blackened wick tapering out of it, etc. At the far end of
the trestletable stands a woodstove, its flue rising
towards an invisible ceiling — atop it (the stove) sits a pot
of filth slowly percolating through an inverted funnel joined,
by way of an equally filthy glass tube, to a complicated looking
apparatus which takes up the entire surface of a second table
positioned adjacent to it. Located between this table & the escritoire
are a pair of high bookcases, their shelves bowed under rows of
