The Bat Tattoo

32 R. Albert Streeter

To be a patron of the arts of painting and sculpture has been my delight. But now do I question whether I had not done better to buy a soccer team or found a leper colony. The competition to which I gave my name at the museum of the same name has produced a catalogue of fifty entries. I ask myself for what have these been chosen, what attributes? There is of course a place for dustbins and their contents, for used tampons and dirty underwear, but I weep to think that my museum is that place. Is this all there is?

‘Be tranquil,’ I say to myself. ‘It does not import, no.’ The money comes in faster than I can spend it. In my pocket it lights a fire and I extinguish this fire in one way or another. Sometimes with a Peng, sometimes with a whimper.

Ennui is the enemy constantly to be fought; cries once passionate become, with time, yawns of boredom. Someone has sent me a cutting from a London newspaper in which appears a photograph of Roswell Clark with a crash-dummy crucifixion. To this I say both ‘Ho-hum’ and ‘Thank you, no’. A crucified crash-dummy is not, may I say, comme il faut? ‘Anything goes,’ says an old song. But although one may take the boy out of the Jesuits one does not take the Jesuits out of the boy. Indeed, I have had enough of crash-dummies; they are so ‘last-year’, as one says. I had high hopes for Clark, and perhaps he may yet do something from which will spread ever-widening ripples; I wish him luck but my interest has moved elsewhere.

As to automata, couplings whether human or bestial, however diverse the partners, are of limited stimulation; horror has more depth in its eroticism. On my table the dark wood surrounds the little man; whichever way he turns, the horrible hopping thing is behind him; always it overtakes him as he knows it will. Does he perhaps long for this consummation? Does his desire incline to this ultimate surrender?

M. R. James is indeed premier cru but in H. P. Lovecraft might there be a riper, non-Euclidean delight — a more delicious shudder? Yes, I wonder what Dieter Scharf will do with Cthulhu, rising from the deeps of the ancient past to find love. Doing it his way.