The Village on Horseback: Prose and Verse, 2003-2008

1

One does not feel throughout one’s life that one is always the particular age that one is. Rather, there are various stations in which one settles one’s identity. As that station becomes unfit, or as one becomes unfit for that station, a new station must be reached. I, for instance, believed myself in many ways to be a child up until two or three weeks ago. Now I feel that I have lost something. But what I have lost is not childhood. It is not the freedom of childhood; that, I preserve. No — instead I have lost the time in which I was free to imagine myself a child. But what of it? I can still wrap a blanket around my shoulders and hide under rocks and bushes. I can still run through the house as fast as I can, run up and down the stairs as fast as I can. Why is it that we all have a tender spot in our hearts for bank robbers? Is it not because banks should be burned, because money itself is a vile creation? The disrespect of property is a religious propensity, and should be regarded as such.

2 — PERHAPS

it is best to think of myself as an animal, as a bird with a coat of feathers crouched in the space beneath a bush. A place to live, a way to eat; nothing more. My own entertainments I can provide, and too my own teachings.

3

Without knowing, therefore, what I am after, I head once more into the hills. Up a path, up a road, along a wall. I pride myself on the variety of my foolish physical expression. One moment I am sulking, the next capering and taunting storm clouds. I believe that, were it possible, you might one day meet with me and be thus then affrighted by my terrible aspect. That is to say — at this moment, I am a robber set foot in the public sphere. Do you like my pistol? my dagger? Whatever you answer, you must admit, I carry them boldly. Boldly, yes boldly, I go into town any time I please. Not for me to fear the wag of tongues. Oh, sir, do you recognize me from two nights’ past when I erupted from the road to steal your carriage? Well, then, a duel. Let us to it. So you see I am not afraid of CIRCUMSTANCE, and court it with my every gesture. OF COURSE there are those times, those times when tired and empty of myself, I walk past some brightly lit cottage where a supper of some sort happily is being conducted. It’s then that the long years of rascalry sit heavily on my shoulders. OF COURSE it is of no account, for should I choose, there’s many a winsome maid who’d have me in her house and household, setting up and settling up the days and hours. Yes, the peculiar quality of my life is that I allow myself to think that nothing yet has been excluded. Everything is still possible, and in the meantime I take to the hills and prey upon lone carriages and go with my hands gloved in the finest cloth.

4

Why are people so concerned with closets? I, of course, have had many but never put anything into them. I save the closet strategically. Often I refer to the closets in passing, sometimes going so far as to offer their dubious services to the person in question, as I myself can make no use of them. WHY YOU ASK DO YOU NOT use your closets? WHERE DO YOU PUT your things? And the truth is, I delight in seeing my few belongings. I hang them in place of paintings on the wall. I lay them out on shelves. My clothing, my writing supplies, my books, my maps, my tools. On what else would my eyes find such satisfaction as upon these gathered items — that which I find most suiting to myself in the world. And you say, put them away sir? Hide them away in a closet? I shall not. I shall never.

5

Of course, one’s empty closets are always filling up with children unexpectedly. Of course, that is the price set, the price that must be paid to live the life I do, in the skin of an owl, on the branch of an evening maple.

6

Fortunately for me the nurses were all blind and my nakedness went undetected all through the first and second parts of this complicated Amazonian hospital in the faltering construction of a dream.

7

Without knowing the names of the men who came this way once, gathered up in this same foolishness which I call strength, I rejoice nonetheless in their companionship in their invisible sovereignty — for surely each has been and is suzerain of some single portion of this clever map? Today I resolved to count things in days to take the uselessness of the week and the day of the week and their names and make it still more useless by lettering any letters seventeenth Sunday of the year, fifth Tuesday, thirty-second Friday. Yes, yes, you have perhaps received already one of my frantic letters dated thus on the back: Thirty-fourth Thursday of my twenty-seventh year. I wonder if you took heart at this small uselessness. I wonder if you smiled and braved your way through some season of filth and disease using small kindnesses that I bestowed on you as breviaries or crutches, as pigeons to be mocked and chased. Chase and they shall lead you to the cote where I sit with a good warm bottle of spirits and a fist of chocolate. We shall go on sitting in secret and we shall, I promise you, let no one know what of we speak. And how the portioned day advances never by portion. I refuse its fingertips when they come slipping through my pockets and setting my coat upon my shoulders. Merely because another wants me to go out? Is that reason enough? It is clear to me that the greater part of happiness is to be found in spending as much time as possible roused and gone out from the place in which one sleeps. Yet how to do this simple thing? Even now I write “roused and gone out” yet I’m within my chamber — is it unseemly not to take one’s own advice? But I do, I do. I am a taker of my own advice such as there has never been in this world, and there are many who think me difficult because of it. But there are others — and how sweet their faces are, come calling in my recollection — who see my gladness in the midst of my contrary nature and it is my gladness they go greeting. It is my gladness therefore that goes to greet them that goes walking with them, impromptu, incandescent, ensconced like a glittering mote in the eye of a sometimes pharaoh who calls upon cats and only cats to navigate this much folded kingdom of days.

8

Going out now and then with a heavy wig upon his shoulders Marzipan was soon overwhelmed by the trading of insults that any outward endeavor soon become in these forthright, claptrap, and cancerous times. Have I shown you the masks I made in these days? the lovely daily masks made for business purposes? A mask for the bakers, a mask for the bank, a mask for gardening, for correspondence. I took myself here and there like a leaf in a dry season, framing my replies with all of my heart. If I knew the interlocuter, if I praised the arbiter with a moment’s pause in my rambling interrogations, then who can speak slightingly of my influence? Some are born in latter times with great capability for grasping certain facts, certain ideas, but not others, and so, when they go wandering in their father’s garden that is the past they receive only half the take of their ears. And I, little gray flower at the pond’s edge, make no case for myself on the long corridors of history. My time was wasted in speaking with frogs in treating with minor devils of time and armature. I who lapped happily at my own edges, gracing the lips of an October machination, was soon party to the dream sendings of just such an incorporeal statesman of the old sort, bearded, you understand, decorated in blood (all duelists of note, retaining nothing if not their word as bond). They sowed amongst themselves no good season giving onto season and now the walls shudder before the might of an evening no parlor or parlor game can dispel. Go out Millicent, to the porch and see what he wants, go at once.

9

M. Lion Tamer, a puppeteer of no real note, begins each performance with the saying of a Roman proverb. How much I like him for that. Yes, that and the press of the crowd as Christmas nears. Lights have been hung throughout the city center and happiness like coins defeats for a moment the ground of sorrow.

10

In a golden room I will resolve on all my futures, placing days like ranked and filed soldiers into passes, bridgeheads and river crossings that must at all costs be held.

11

Not without fault then the arrival of the vain, the timorous, the sounding of their names one by one on the rooftops where we wait with hooks and nets for their leader who comes in the guise of concealed laughter. In my coat, the pistol that’s to be used. My hand was trembling when I took it. I am young and not used to these things.

12

My love I want only to go to the sunlit chamber above tables and chairs I would push aside spreading space I would lay a sheet upon the ground a sheet of soft cotton and I would say is it soft enough my love? and you would stretch and lie upon it and rise, saying, “it is not soft enough,” and I would lay another sheet upon the first, saying, my love is it soft enough? and you would stretch and lie upon it and rise saying only, my love it is not soft enough. and so for the laying of nineteen sheets, of softest cotton, and the sun.

13

Not through any change of color do they blend with their environment but rather through a native instinct. First he matches the footsteps of a fellow and seems to go with him, seems in company. Next he is beside a woman — he seems her husband. Her child immediately appears as his daughter. So convincing the part, so regal. But does she take his hand? We cannot say for sadly we have lost them in the press on this hot day in one or another delinquent later month.

14

It was a sort of typewriter, but for writing on thin stone tablets. They watched as the man expertly tapped away here and there on the keys. In a moment, something was prepared! He pushed it into a slot in the wall. A door opened on the far side of the room.

— Some sort of death certificate, said Macalister. But for whom?

— Oh, don’t say that, said Lorna. It can’t be.

They shrunk together against the hard wall of the cell.

Could it be that the Aztec god was an enormous stone adding machine?

Macalister thought back. If only he’d kept a hold of his “thunder-stick.” Then they wouldn’t be in this mess. He glared impotently at the guard, who was busy drawing a pictograph of Lorna in her modern-style underwear.

15 — A LIE HAD BEEN SPREAD

A lie had been spread throughout the court, that he who would kill the King would have the Queen’s gratitude and would rule beside her. When a man rose up and killed the King, he was captured by the guards and brought before the Queen, who gave him but one prerogative, that he would forever set the manner of punishment that should befall regicides, and that he himself would begin this new tradition. To which the man, sensible of the great honor being done him, replied with a complicated and elaborate manner of death, one that would require an enormous preparation of years, and the expenditure of great wealth. And the Queen set the preparations in motion, and put the resources of her kingdom to this task, and laboured beside the man for fifteen years, until she was no longer a great beauty, and he seemed to her to be no longer the man who had killed her husband, but another man, of newer and more valuable vintage. Yet to his death the man went, in a ceremony so grand that the kingdom was beggared. The execution itself took an entire year, during which no one in the land was allowed to labor. General fasting was required, with the taking of only water allowed, and only that once a day. When the man died in the specified manner, of grief at the loss of a kingdom of lives, the land was barren and corpseridden, and the next traveler to come that way was puzzled at the immense arena which stood in the midst of an empty city, with the body of the regicide set atop a pillar at its very center.

16

Why do I always return to the forest path again and again? The forest path, the forest path with all its attendant resources — the hiding of animals, of people, the dangers, the dimness at midday while near in a clearing the shuddering of full day and dens and burrows beautiful beneath the ground how long days seem when they reach and reach again to their full length and stretch themselves so kindly along the forest path! Shall we go then now and see? Would that I was not so far from the forest. Would that even now I might see with these old eyes the forest path.

You laugh at my odd bearing, my pauses in speech. You smile at my uncouth abode. Yes it is true, I live in what might be called a meager hut in a filthy dell, set in a wood between hither and yon. Yes it is true, I wriggle in my disguise and seek with each breath to escape. I was, you know, once a fox. Someone tricked me into this human shape and here I will remain until I die. A little girl told me once words of comfort:

you’ll be a fox again when you’ve gone to your grave.

It cost her nothing to say it, but for me it was a matter of great pain.

17

At the hurdy-gurdy factory, the Master-Builder was selecting melodies. His office was like the inside of a massive harp. Everything was possible with him. One was afraid even to move.

— Sir, I yelped.

I was waving some letter, some nonsensical letter. I don’t even know where it came from, but it was very dirty, and distasteful even to hold.

— Sir, I yelped. Sir!

But that day was soon finished, and the one after it, and now things have gone so far I can’t even say whether this was my memory or my grandfather’s, the violent man whose grave I share.

And with waking now upon a particular morning and before you, worlds and doors locked once, left open, particular and inconceivable. Shall we go out this way and down the avenue? shall we enter by the garden gate and slip up the unlocked stair to the room beneath the roof? the unkempt room that once was let to German boarders, young men and such, engaged always in the study of some or another mathematics?

18

Licorice. . it was considered a poison by the Romans, and acted in fact, quite well in this regard, save that, as it possesses none of the qualities of a true poison, its victims would have to be informed of their fate. This led to scenes that were often parodied by persons blessed by history with a better understanding. Yet think of this, and think clearly for once — the taste of licorice. . does it not recall to you something? Its taste is misplaced. Somewhere, an error was made and never rectified. The question nonetheless remains, who first discovered its safe use in confections? Thousands of people must have died before some tribune or proconsul proclaimed it safe. And then, how confusing a thing it must have been to the survivors. How sad the fate of those reached last by the news, some proud couple living in a manse on the far frontier, self reliant, comforted by their own strength. The messenger finds only their bodies. I don’t believe anyone knows any more about this.

It has been long believed that wind is due to pressure differences in the air. However, the recently published research of Ch. Stevens of Greenwich has called this theory into question. Through painstaking observation he has noticed that while pressure differences seem to account for wind, they only approximate how wind might be, leaving us with two possible conclusions — the first that it is not pressure at all that determines wind, but something else entirely, and the second, that some common thing determines and influences both wind and pressure differences, and that the discrepancy between the two is caused by the influence of some third factor. The question then, what is the third factor, has been the work of Stevens’ life. He discovered the discrepancy as a child poring over charts, but told no one for sixty-five years as he set about cementing his theory of the THIRD FACTOR.

The THIRD FACTOR is, Stevens believes, observation by man or animal. His thesis in particular explains the sudden escalation of tornadoes and tsunamis which hitherto have been scientifically unexplainable. Furthermore, Stevens has posited an enormous sea eye lying at or near the center of the fabled Bermuda triangle.

19

said the soldier to the grackle king:

I am glad of this theatre you so joyously provide, for I travel by foot and by picturing myself still farther down these roman roads.

20

I drew you aside once, do you remember it? We were young — you four, I three, we had been put for safekeeping in the charge of a farmyard. Everyone was cruel and we couldn’t see why. We went apart to a shallow ditch in the back of a goose pen and sat in the shade of wet ground. I don’t remember what was said but there was much. We talked all day and into the night, and the searchers discovered us by the moon’s broken spokes. I often think of that conversation, often feel my life has been the length of those words, those scratched diagrams and shapes in mud. Did we leave the wiser? What did I tell you, so important, a thing I now don’t know save in mourning and loss?

21

The apologies rendered me by the provincial mayor were, I must say, quite insufficient. I coughed merely and looked into my sleeve while his aide de campe blanched at the insult done. But what matter is it to me? If I choose I may change into a cloud or a stone and sleep for a century until all living are now dead. I have done so before and there is no trouble involved. Only an undoing of buttons, an unhooking of hooks, a light wheeling of countenance here and then about.

22

The red cloth that you named Garment Beamer and how you wrapped all your things in it, so many and joyful, and went with me gladly as I sang a song of warders and the wide advance. We climbed a well and were lost to what we knew. Then, afterwards, the day of whistled faces and crowns, the lunches prepared in our honor by a man we had seen once in a shop and thought vaguely respectable.

23

In a dream, I come upon a sort of paramilitary canteen. An attack is being readied. People of all sorts, dressed in civilian garb are standing about, remonstrating with each other, preparing themselves. There are great quantities of weapons, presided over by older men, precise fellows of a Swiss type. There was a place to be shoed, a place to be jacketed, belted, etc. Shall I say that the guns were quite odd? Most were of a sort, as was explained to me — oh, I should say first, just then everyone left. It had begun. I was standing there, and the great mass of people left the place of armament and went off into the town. The sound of gunfire came from almost every direction. Still, in the armory I felt quite safe. I talked with one of the men who explained that these weapons they were distributing were of a peculiar sort fit for revolution. They were three shot pistols, firing shotgun shells. They could not be reloaded. Once the pistol was done, perhaps recourse to a knife? I did not ask him this. The main thing is, the pistol could also be used as a grenade, in which case all three shells would explode simultaneously. — Very effective, he explained. No one will have predicted this.

As a kindness he provided me with an old Remington break-barrel shotgun with which to make my way East. It was predicted the countryside would rise. But if they did not?

24

I fought with 3 older children in my father’s garden. What right had they to be there? They are painted, garish like a festival and I am wearing the plainest of clothes. They are older all and speak with authority of matters out in a world to which I have never gone.

And yet, it is my father’s garden. I approach them even now and the quarrel begins anew.

25

I came, when all the rest had gone, with many fine things to say and do. We went as tinkers through the farthest settlements in the fifth of your five lives. So often you would say to me if only our lives had been laid head-to-head and foot-to-foot — instead this brief exchange of shipwright and wind having less to do with what is known than with what we would know and tell.

26

The flea perched on the chair’s back reports with utmost fury: There are no studies so foolish as those taken up with another’s leave.

27

Of not less than three I speak now coming in rain in dubious transport through borders of clay and roadways of stone. The mast is off course and next shall cause — treason, which is the poor man’s chance, dubbed fortune in an era of coalbins and apple trees.

28

A project:

1. Find a man out for a walk with his two children, both of a portable and inconsiderable age. Though old enough for memory’s sake. Say five or half past four.

2. Come upon this man in prepared union with a friend (you and a friend or confederate). Spring upon him in a park, seizing both children when they are equidistant from the man. This is crucial: we will discuss why later.

3. Proceed to kidnap the children, running away at a hasty, but not overwhelming pace. You therefore force the man to choose from between his children which is to be saved. When he takes up chase the one pursued will lead him upon a merry run for a short stint providing time for the other to escape. When that aim has been accomplished (and presumably then the father will be close) the child will be set down neatly and escape will be easily effected for the father will then stop to take care of his stolen child. And meanwhile, the other captor is well away and safe, having succeeded in the theft.

4. The stolen child in step 4 will be kept away for a period not longer than one calendar day. Following that period of separation, he will be returned safe and sound to the bosom of his family.

5. It is crucial to understand here that while the child is held in illegal custody it will be supported in high style, given various treats and placated in countless inventive and surprising ways. Then the child will be taught about the event that has transpired. It will be made most carefully to understand that in an even contest, its father’s affections were led to choose its brother rather than itself. How sad the child will be then. Perhaps it will be shown footage of the crucial incident such that it can see for itself how its father abandoned it to a cruel and uncertain fate. Then, as we say, the child is returned secure in the knowledge that its father chose not to save it.

6. The plan now proceeds to stage six. Immovable bronze statues depicting each boy, the father and the kidnappers will be placed in the park in correct relative position complete with dedication and name-plates. At the induction ceremony the family will be invited and the entire matter explained to the press.

7. However uncomfortable things are in the happy home, they will be made still more, for a sum will be laid on the stolen unchosen (by his father) boy and provided annually and overlooked such that he is capable of a standard of life of which his brother and family could never hope to attain.

THEN the chosen child will wish himself Unchosen and all will be quite grand for of a Sunday in the park as they grow older and age into death they will now and again come upon these statues and remember deeply and indefatigably their father’s true choice.

29

Meanwhile in the forest the door to the very largest tree had been left open and all manner of creatures whether desired or not could come and go through all and any rooms of the great and complicated house that he had made both at once in passing in a childhood conversation and later with his own two hands from a place of hiding. Who then to come once and for all and set matters straight?

30

I was nevertheless famous in many circles, my name known, for instance, to those who dwelt alone, to those who drew water in silence at midnight from the well at the world’s heart.

31

A character who enters the scene, always by balloon.

32

An Egyptian painter whose lettering and figure work was so precise it far surpasses the precision and accuracy possible today through the use of machines.

33

I should like very much to have a shop in the downstairs section of some boarding house or general store that I own. The employee would sit behind a desk dressed well, and would make boldfaced lies to whoever comes in. These lies would in some sense be regimented, for instance, no promises of any kind would be made.

34

A man came to Inilvick out of a great storm repeating over and over the seventeen characters and fourteen formulations that make up the long lost language of the countryside. For once in Inilvick man had the faculty of speaking with animals and such as he liked. For that reason, though the old arts are long lost, all the best animal trainers of the fourteenth century were born in Inilvick.

35

Some began the meeting with loud angry or dissatisfied talk while others shrank together at first out of fear but sometimes verging into inappropriate groping. I admonished a handsome woman who sat beside me in a dress having no fewer than 93 buttons: WHY MUST YOU WEAR SO MANY BUTTONS? to which she opened wide her pretty mouth to show 3 rows of sharpened teeth.

36

Cleverly we accord no respect to wily makers of intricate toys or to the writers of wire-thin stories that confound even the kind attentions of dressmakers crouched resolutely in a sultan’s hourglass with precise, indeed all-comprehending instructions.

37

OH the long winters! Yes, we in Lundil do survive from year to year, or so we are told, but the tactics we must employ, though perhaps obvious, are lamentable and leave us powerless to know how things were in the previous year, or even who we were. What of my associations? What of my medals, my friendships? What of our great tradition of letter-writing, second only to the town of V. far down the river? Well, each year we of the town congregate and are assigned notes as in some staged production. It is then, in the aftermath of four months’ hibernation, in which dreams have emptied our minds of all true import, that we can slip with impossible ease, into our new roles, like the scissored rain clouds of some failed attempt to render the ever-present sky.

38

Goodbye, again, and all of them going off down to the shore, and out to sea. Well, we shan’t see each other again I say, not in this life, and then I too am off into the waters, swimming at my resolute, far-grasping pace. We shall not see each other again, I say, but how long life is, and how foolish all predictions. Throw me ashore on some desert coast sweep me up on some eastern river: All that I plan is replaced with that which I dread in a manner so very predictable I find I often see the world makers’ hand. Yet what then? Knowing you are being tricked is no help if you can find no one to tell you why.

39

Though it is often said that Noah escaped the flood due to a warning from God, we find it much more likely that he happened anyway to be building a boat and happened anyway to be amassing a living record of the world, that he happened anyway to be at sail on that particular day when the skies opened. In short it was a mixture of diligence and chance that saved him from that which claimed all other lives. Yet he is not alone in this. For plague is as voluminous as water, as all-seeing, as dark-minded. I shall speak of those who have built arks with which to weather that deft and thriftless horror, the bubonic plague.

40

I leap down from the still-moving train and cry out to you— after so long, I have arrived at last.

— Have you then, arrived at last, you say doubtfully, and this dream too is confined to a place of disrepute and forfeit.

41

No! No!

And with that the curtains break from the ceiling and fall, crushing the almost imperceptibly tiny figures below in immense and incarcerating folds.

42

And with the light of a sudden fields appear and houses, hills topped with green and gray outcroppings of stone.

43

Those there are walking alone with a stick in black night that come now at once with me to day. In the wood where the reddest bird draws on its beak and ascends to its body, there I will wait and consider what first I will say.

44

Pastimes are arranged so precisely in this collapsible season to prepare for the arrival at any moment of a still greater conception. This is to say the youngest and prettiest girls put on their best clothes but do not go out or even rise to answer the door.

45

Recording the moment of his death in the twelfth century, Abbot Corgris had himself dipped in ink and placed on a thirty-foot-square piece of drawn cloth. Has the record since been lost? I have not seen it in my travels to England’s abbeys and convents, but of course, someone could be treasuring it, keeping it in a sacred place and looking glowingly upon it from time to time. It is said his sprawling death moved him first towards the top of the canvas and then away down and left.

46

A large animal attacked a child between four and five crowds that had been on the avenue. Neither the fourth nor the fifth was there. One had left, one was to come.

The child was alone. Then, a rustling in the bushes. A large animal; yes, a large animal. Presumably it tore the child limb from limb or bit at it over and over while pinning it beneath a hideous forepaw. I really can’t say exactly what happened having not been there and indeed never having heard of the incident until now.

47

I dug a hole with an antique trench shovel that my great grandfather brought back from the wars. It fits in the hand so nicely, it makes you wish there were more reasons to use a trench shovel. And how it folds up so deliciously and fits so precisely into its tarpaulin carrying sack! I decided then and there I would hate Mrs. Eddling whose place is next over. So, I began by pelting her with stones. When she responded badly to this, the line was drawn. I dug a trench clear across the yard. Eventually I will dig another and another until I reach the house. Then I will push her into a hole and use my antique shovel to throw dirt in until there’s too much for her to bear and then I will rest and after a while finish the job, but oh my it is nice to have this spade and I really don’t mind at all inventing reasons to use it. Don’t you feel the same way?

48

I saw a man with the wind in a bag go about in a finely tailored suit here and there showing off his finely trimmed hooves and saying, dear sir, dear madamoiselle, are you aware that the show is about to begin?

49 — Method of Secret Committee

Six to nine men or women are to be gathered, masked, and cleansed of recognizable detail. There each puts forward some task he or she needs solved. Then unbeknownst to the others, each takes on one of the other’s tasks and performs it secretly.

50

Opening the vent, I am engaged, yes, desperately engaged, in moving the air from the outside in. It is this way with me that when I become furious and reach a red wall in my thoughts, I do not speak or make any outer countenancing, but go straightaway to this place and open the vent. Thereafter shall follow, thereafter follows, events in which I can take no pride.

51

And shall we predict the passage of a certain young lady down the street? Yes, a certain young lady, a certain girl, wearing a rather stiff rubber suit. It is a punishment enacted by her father, a veterinarian. He is pleased to drive very thin pins into the back of her neck which swell at his command.

52

What if you were told of this behavior of his? What if you were witness to it in his house, brought there as a guest? Do you have within you the strength to stand up to him? He seems sometimes to be at least a hundred feet tall, with a face as deep as an avenue.

53

At the edge of these reflections, there is a little closet into which one can sometimes cram oneself. Then to sit there until everyone has gone, and the house is empty! I wonder, have the hallways of my youth extricated themselves from all our foolish pranks?

54

The knife strikes here and there, thin as a bird beak, and wanting as much to satisfy some undisclosed covenant of shape that stands as a rebuke to our present geometry.

55

Do I desire to have the dresses from the backs of all the loveliest workers in this cruel factory? Is it in the name of an inspection that this will be done? Then what smooth well-formed limbs, what lithe shoulders, what slender waists. . are not the women of our collective beautiful? Indeed it is sometimes said that in the factory they are not forced to work at all but only to bathe and groom and shape themselves in long cool tiled rooms while discussing philosophy. Is it true? Is such a hideous rumor true? Well, I confess, our truest natures are to be found in lunacy, and it is over such a realm that I preside, even now. Out with the lamp!

56

How disappointing it is to find that so many of the doors one comes upon in the hills and between the streets, yes in the town where you were born, beside the towering hospital, lead nowhere and do not give onto that great and stretching second world for which you hope and hope.

57

Defeating the world’s strongest man in a fight does not make you the world’s strongest man, just as killing Jesse James does not make you Jesse James.

58

The King is the first: all must obey him, at least when in his presence. That is why the King keeps a court — in order to enlarge his presence.

59

I went out without my coat. The day was too cold, and I suffered there in the street, going about my business.

Small women and men called to me with their paltry voices. A dog was attaching itself to a very beautiful girl where a green spread of grass met the street. She was using both hands to keep her skirt down, and the weather was bad.

Won’t you help me? she cried.

But I love another and she is gone into a far country from where I cannot retrieve her.

60

Pheasants and scatterguns, alphabets, charms, phrases, curses, naysayers, nickel machines, mistaken identities. It was all too much for little Alphonse, who cluttered his brain with anything anyone happened to say to him. He went about in a little blue suit rather worn at the knees and a little paper satchel stitched with his initials.—

Hello, he would often say, whether anyone was there or not. — Hello, I am with the name Alphonse and I am so lucky I can’t tell you. Would you believe more than one woman fell for this trick and got right into bed with him? Well, yes, it is true. They properly waited no more than five or ten minutes upon making his acquaintance to take him across the doorstep, etc. But did this please our Alphonse? We shall say rather that he delighted in meat pastries and thought foremost of this gluttony above and beyond all others. He was, it is said, a fixture at the shop of Baker Morton, who despised him and beat him relentlessly whenever the poor boy came into reach.

61

Has not the geometry of comparison, the superimposition of another land on this present land, become a bit wearisome to you who travel in our good company? One cannot go on using it in place of the eyes.