LAST THING I do is mouth off to some Joe I'm a writer. Someone finds this out and next they want it legitimized. "What university do you work for?" they say. "You write for the papers? Does Random House publish you?" What arrogance, this vanity of the word! Deep down it's a question of authority. What outside the institution gives me the right to say anything at all? Never mind opinions zip by through casual conversations like mosquitoes in spring twilight. Who doesn't take advantage of the citizen ear? The Legitimate—these servants of The One City—seek power and manipulation. They hold their security over your doubts. They prey on your contradictions and dismay with disinterested, ironical sneers. They preach social values and duties but practice mutilation on what they most fear. They pray for order and straight sex, but jack off over a splintered cross, leather bankbook or dog-eared Homo Academicus. They are not individual. They are one. A dead god replaces language with delicate gestures no one fails to misread. There's no ecstasy of bodily spasm, a quick spray of heat to shatter the walls guarding these mammalian appetites. They hide from the stone, refusing to believe it receives sacrifice. Closed eyes in secret State sex. Children of the Globe greet them at the Border. Loosen a tie, undo a belt. Pants down. Red sky peeps through curtain seams. The Sonora desert hides the actual bodies. The literal surrounds us everywhere.
Posted by Dale at May 18, 2004 03:37 PMThe literal surrounds us everywhere. And it is fantastic. Here is our Auschwitz, our Treblinka, here our naked corpses piled, there our blown tires. It all goes somewhere. The Fuhrer so close, we know his last meal and how it digests. The literal surrounds us everywhere. Sometimes, after hours of fucking, after a buffalo rage and monkey inventiveness, after spitting snot balls into each other's reamed-out assholes and fucking some more, there comes this tender moment in which the one man will hold the other's whole torso from behind in a such a gesture the warmth. This while the held man strokes and strokes himself to orgasm. Who was the last superpower? Not beside us, not our Soviet brother, but before us. I can smell the leather, the identificatory thrill - I know that pleasure, I know that like-body, this wholly known thing in his arms and hands. Maybe the entire top brass of the Third Reich take turns, relieve each other in the duty of holding us up.
Posted by: Farid on May 20, 2004 07:01 AM