THE BOOK OF TEGHELER
Fictions by
PHILIP OPDYCKE
Copyright 2011 Philip Opdycke
Smashwords Edition
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PREFACE
AVE....
I have embarrassed myself.... I have embarrassed myself profoundly; I was just now rejected with the greatest politeness by yet another publisher. Why don’t I admit that I simply don’t fit in? My brain is no manicured lawn and I build upon ruins. I’m not sure that approval is something I even want; to not get it almost proves a principled point; the wrong element wants pleasing. All that I have wanted to do here is what I’d have been told I mustn’t do, had I the decency to ask. My sole sop to form is: there is a relic of Nichiren Daishonin, a Tooth held by Nichiren Shoshu priests, around which its old gum grows; The Collected Poems of Walter Tegheler is the tooth, and prose, The Book of the Saltus Walter Tegheler, has, simply and without historicity, grown around it, and not evenly. The gum around Nichiren’s Tooth must be enormous by now. What nutrients are in it, and could it feed a regiment?
When the Nichiren Shoshu priests gave permission to photograph the Dai-Gohonzon in 1910, they showed astonishing prescience; they must have known that Walter Tegheler would be born 40 years later, to take up the Daimoku cudgel 64 years later.
.... I must have seemed awfully slow-witted, seated on the floor with my toy empties, when the Doctor came to call to check on us as sterilization candidates; when he leaned towards me, I pulled those bottles towards me as though protecting children from rippers. He noted well that my Dad, although he was more-or-less gainfully employed, was drinking himself into a simplicity worthy of the scalpel halting further breeding; perhaps my own puerile state was proof of the need to end Dad’s breeding. Dad owned our house, but the authorities had to invade; we were trouble. I was to be an affectional laughing stock, so my removal from possible stirpiculture didn’t matter; my birth as the youngest was a definite mistake, and Dad had to be kept from breeding ever again. My Mother, who looked prematurely old, couldn’t much handle my getting, which turned the house upside down; she was at last headed for menopause, how merciful. We were adjudged to be a one-family race, a rassenkreis (racial set or circle), to be kept from congrex with politer populations. The Doctor promised me a ship crammed full of bottles if I’d go quietly for scalpeling; I still await his kept promise as I sit here all altered and alone decades later.
From a window I saw the Doctor try finding a way out of our irregularly-paved cul-de-sac alley, past the inbred children playing kickball; the Doctor stopped and stared nervously at an enormous pair of staring eyes painted skillfully on the cul-de-sac wall; he then walked around some playing children to get out of the alley.
.... Not to belabor the obvious, but apes know nothing of the effects of stimulating the brain’s angular gyruses, the joys of wrongly feeling that one’s followed (signs of a caring society), or the feeling that one floats above oneself, which prompts religionism.
.... I studied a ferrotype relic of Roberta “Bobbie” Joan Wolstan, perhaps my proudest creation; the eyes of that picture cried real tears. She was off somewhere with Lord Raglan, author of The Hero, indulging in Time-Wrecking, this world’s ruination in the wrong hands, doing the sacred work of debunking foul historicity Time-Wrecking itself caused, inserting herself into biographical gaps wherever nothing that was written as having happened ever really happened, in order that she might ensure that something did happen.
Raglan never confronted the Jesus myth, which could be considered the sweetest target.
Bobbie Joan herself is realer now as memory.
.... Walter Aslak approached my garret window giving onto a subroof at the Golden Eagle Hotel at Broadway and Montgomery in what was intermittently still San Francisco during chaos of the Overlay, translucent reëmergence of a fictitious past. He informed me that “they” would “stenograph” my every move from then on. “They” wanted to know why it was that I gave the gift of my artistic self to a world not wanting me alive at all. The “work” to which this is a preface explains nothing about why I might have wanted to do that; indeed, my early life could be called mysterious even to me, and it does not and will not occur to me that I might be one providing details.
Aslak punched the doors of my Ædicula, wherein the Holy Saltlick was enshrined, saying then, “You found neither our nor your actions on plot, but, rather, you let individual sentences guide you, which is dangerous Freethought.... You make your own tiny Cosmos from gossamer and Scrabble tiles.” Pivoting away, he then stepped hard on the side of his left foot, causing himself great pain as Cosmic punishment for bothering the Holy Saltlick.
.... My choice of enemies shows my great integrity. There is and has never been no love for me in this life, I do know that; it should be legal for me to kill anyone claiming to know why. You don’t, you can’t imagine what went on. Life lacked a certain sparkle. I don’t recall what Aslak hated about me; I vaguely recall someone much like him, with a British accent, in the early ‘Sixties playing “Combat” in his or someone nearby’s back yard; the game was named after a then-popular American TV show about World War Two. I was a preteen doing something unremembered that provoked decades-long resentment; I don’t recall poking someone in the eye with a toy gun as I ought to have, if indeed such had been done to Walter Aslak; my morals were developed early, that could not have been it; I was the local one to whom bad was normally done. The Cosmos owes me much for my trouble. Folks have wronged me with propitiation to The Omni (which is like The Giftie) to incite my well-earned comeuppance. Aslak said I was besotted with Causation; he insisted mindlessly that all of life is random. We’d have no evolution were that true, evolution a word he pronounced with a long e, which is a way in which we both believe things happen, which makes his assertion nonsense. I long ago lost interest in others’ opinions, having heard absolutely all of them. All thugs can be turned into cartoon characters. I even sleep with my clothes on, in case I am marched off somewhere; Kaiser Bill will have had his way at last, choosing to forget that we had a few laughs and “lively times.”
I mentioned my belief that I had admirers somewhere, adding in French, j’en ai (I have some); Aslak said, “It helps to be around when they are,” reminding me of Time-Wrecking, my admirers lost far elsewhere. He pissed on the floor behind my dressing screen, which was there for the impossible-to-foresee instance of an undressed body besides my own in that room; he scattered on that cluttered floor some can lids cut into star patterns, seemingly as a sort of caltrop, although there was no room for me to attack capitulating novelists from there; he simply meant to cut my stocking feet bloody to make me feel bad, for him to laugh at the reaction. He said, while zipping up, “You believe you are the Saltus, do you not?”
“If it pleases you to believe so,” I said.
“Then put on your Deathbum smock and proclaim yourself. It’s your reward for all we did to you on the schoolyard — you should be grateful to us.”
I said, “I don’t know why you’re anywhere near me.... I wouldn’t even care if you apologized, you’re not to be near me.... As far as my being the Saltus — I take a modest pride in concealing my rank.”
Aslak said, “What would make you reveal yourself?”
“Having a Gohonzon,” I said.
Aslak said, “A merchant seaman I met, who’d been in Japan after the War, said that the Gakkai were Reds.... In parades they weren’t allowed to stop, and they had to move faster than others in the parade. In the MacArthur years.... I don’t know that it’s a good thing to have, one of those Gohonzons, even if it makes you act funny so we can laugh at you, as in our ‘lively times’ on the schoolyard.... It could lead to dangerous amounts of civil unrest.”
I said, “It should lead to enough unrest to kill you. You were always my enemy, for reasons I have never figured.”
Why Walter Aslak should have wanted to be historic is beyond my guesswork, but it, alas, happened. Roadside forests were cleared to thwart his ambushes, his jumping out at novelists to demand their capitulation, holding out a quill and parchment to them to demand the neatliest-plotted of rewrites. Any denouncing him were cruelly dispatched; if he had no rope for hanging, he would jam and twist knives into his victims’ ajna chakra; weapons in his heyday did not kill quickly. I still resent the baselard of Sir William Walworth used to dispatch Wat Tyler by poking him in his head; irresponsible use of time travel technology, Time-Wrecking, has given me both roof-tiling ancestors and ancestors who were as sergeants-at-arms at Masonic lodges; as the baselard was jammed into Walter the Tiler’s dolichocephalic head as long as a thighbone, so too must these ill-considered words violate you.
You people are unhappy, and I want to remain remote from you. In your world the precise and recognizable lettering of Walter Sickert in his “Lusk Letter” goes unrecognized along with the shady dealings of governmental higher-ups, and you believe evilers to be simply of a higher class and therefore unassailable. You’re almost to blame for their evil.
I understand the pull of the smell of one’s own river; I hate going anywhere; I read news headlines and am very nearly agoraphobic; the world is so intolerant of frailty, even if that’s all there is at last for all flesh.
.... Tegheler had to formulate his becoming the Saltus; he’d heard (this was the late ‘Sixties) that a tablespoon of dry paprika could make someone high; he ate it and felt some nausea, and then he drank some water; he then felt a slight highness; he then heard church bells ringing, but not in the “Little Jimmy Brown” sense expressed in the English version of Les Trois Cloches, something that could give nausea.... He envisioned Loretta Young as a youngster called Gretchen; at that moment a small, lightweight and gleamingly bright disc jumped from his larynx through his mouth; he placed it back in his mouth and swallowed it, letting it melt as a voice in him said to please not chew it, Him, rather, and could the stomach be emptier next time.... The Host tasted of salt and blood.... Tegheler realized then that he could manufacture his own Hosts inside his midsection.... He had, at the age of 12 years before at Catholic Sunday school, seen the last view of the Damned before they were sent to Hell; it was a smooth marble bust of a bearded man with palms together in the “dripping candle position” that glistened as if with light. It was during the Ecumenical time, early 1963; it amazed him to hear a nun say then that Billy Graham was “a holy man.” When all becomes its opposite, as with enantiodromia, this is the Time of the Saltus; if it was someone else’s Host, Tegheler would try chewing it from then on, something most would think worthy of Walter Aslak, who was from a time when there was no Protestant alternative, dumped then among us by reckless time travel, that miserable miracle known as Time-Wrecking. Aslak did agree with Tegheler that there should be a death sentence for anyone claiming historicity, Aslak saying, “There could be reasoned doubts about me.”
.... Simultanagnosia is the best term for the problem of Walter Tegheler the Saltus; instead of striving to improve, he was to thenceforth ascribe all his earthly failure to simultanagnosia. He’d think, It will add up and others will see a pattern, perhaps something synchronistically conforming to bad Best Seller patterns, what the Great Public Beast wants; quite all right if El Greco had eye problems.
.... Perhaps it is true that a particular road surpasses in livability its nearest lodging; imagining himself welcome anywhere, Tegheler’s eyes were whirling spirals; he found out at last that the world was never to be welcoming.
.... Tegheler decreed that he was to be accepted “without washing,” which was to be understood (as it was by none) as being as close to an homage to Verlaine as could be managed by a straight person. Or was it simply bad parents? Tegheler was treated white in spite of all, so what bitterest regrets he had were minimal. I speak narrowly of his regrets; why go after this man? His earning capacity says he was no grown up male; you storm in upon him ordering something heavily plotted, an obvious earner like a pig you’d just made say of. He is at one with other biped mammals, one of those thinking past meatiness, mood swings deciding nothing. Physiognomically, he is quite average; Time-Wrecking keeps him in the present tense; he’s been known to call himself “forever prehumous.” No getting rid of him, that’s how I take it. He was born mislaid, life was unaware of him deep in the valley of his birth, Wanhope, Ohio, which reflected less than one percent of the sunlight falling on it, making it blacker than coal or any planet or moon in our solar system; life was unaware of him even at the tintamarre sounded by parish bells on the day of his infant baptism.
.... I make do with an actor’s brain, he thought, not taking into account the effect of intoxicants on his stuntedness. He believed that mere off-rhymes must be abolished; if one’s scribbles are meat for formulated existence, a form of alternative reality, then rhymes must be exact; they are the ladder of ascent, which must not be kicked out from under oneself; there is such a thing as society.
.... He tried to determine the source of his chronic detachment; reason was, perhaps, he’d been stored soon after his birth in a rock-lined hole in the ground, to keep him fresh while they decided whether or not to kill him; the social graces then were out of fashion.
.... He shuddered to think what he’d see in a basement apartment; more vermin, and not just of the biped variety, legs, shoes and anuses of the Public, what Hamilton called a “Great Beast,” but vermin of the crawling sort, for a basement apartment is right close to their darkened world. He decided that it was excessive to hate inferiors; they would evolve as they felt the need in due time.
.... I can understand, since I have just done inventory on this lengthy self-indulgent work you’re reading here, why you might think I lack all “footlight sense,” lack all warmth and human sympathy; I get why you might think this is a Dadaist’s gratuitous act, leavings of a copper-nosed and selenium-haired misfit. I have redone chapter headings, so the epub volume gets its precious content table; I must never forget proper recognizable form, for I have sinned against you, forgetting you exist for many blissful moments; still I’m not tossing this.
.... Allow me to warn you against his deservings; when he has not been scorned, he’s been ignored; his causal deservings from such abuse are vast; don’t let him into your consciousness. I suppose that, were he found alive somewhere, he would argue for the inclusion of his poetic volume The Collected Poems of Walter Tegheler; or, Simultanagnosia; or, Enantiodromia with, and as, in fact, one of his fictions here, in something like Satura form; he had not at first realized that the reason for any prose fiction from him was the potential for inclusion of poems within it. The poems in that “volume” (section of this larger work) had been rejected so many times, and with his not being at all sure that they were all that bad, one might well conclude that any not liking their inclusion, or, for that matter, the prose they have been included with at this time, can both choke on it and fuck themselves.
Chapter One
The bases of the pillars of
Heaven are in the Abyss.
—Walter Tegheler
This was the climate of Walter Tegheler, his unwittingness from which many suffered, marching people somewhere to be executed, and they didn’t complain; they were even photographed as they were guided to where they got shot, without struggling or running, by the Kapnovkorps (Capitulating Novelists’ Corps). That there was nothing hippielike or peaceable about this I need not add; Time-Wrecking, the miserable miracle of Walter Tegheler, irresponsible using of time travel, did it; the Past was unhealably broken. Capitulating novelists, artistic sellouts somehow worse than the most chancred hookers, gathered on the subroof near Walter Tegheler’s garret window, and there they prayed; they then took pickaxes to the Ædicula wherein the Holy Saltlick was enshrined; the expelling of religious gas therefrom knocked some on their well-fed asses, the monster of smoke and fire there released then deciding to go to friendlier worlds; Tegheler was a miserable protector; the beam of Chimæric light between his brows had been beer-dimmed. The Kapnovkorps demanded of Walter Tegheler that he base his sincere artistic efforts on jerrybuilt machinations, not the leadings of individual sentences; in a Delsartean manner they “indicated” that he veered dangerously towards prose poetry, whose individualism would confuse an already oblivious public; it would have been a real feather in their caps to inspect a farmhouse in Roussillon while Samuel Beckett, who was a courier for the Maquis, hid silently in a tree above, but they missed their era through misuse of time travel technology, Time-Wrecking; in that bumbling there is some small consolation.
Walter Tegheler sat impassively on his bed’s edge while the Kapnovkorps did their damage near his window; he would, upon occasion, bounce his torso up and down as he sat, as was observed among the Romanian orphans revealed to footage after the overthrow of Nicolae Ceausescu, also among some of the chimps being studied by Harry Harlow, both groups having been denied affectionate touch in impressionable years. Not that anyone deserves anything simply by being born; it would simply be parsley on the grownup plate to have memories of decent early treatment, something like the social graces encouraged early on leading to less unresolved stack-blowing trauma later. One of the Kapnovkorps, Walter Aslak, dueling scar on his brow with the stitches unremoved, riding crop in his right hand, leaned into the garret window, staring at Tegheler’s Main de Gloire, the finger-ends of which were topped by burning candles; Aslak blew them out, then said, waving his riding crop threateningly, extra incisors visibly grown from within his tongue, “It stinks. The life you have planned for us stinks.... And I advise you to alter your condition, or our Great Plotmaster will shorten your leash. We will bind you with whipcord.... We march on dry ground; your soul has become moist. Apparently, Communism is not the great help you thought it might be.” He and his fellows then left, their every plan for that day stiffly premeditated.... By “soul,” of course, he meant the word psyche in its wrong Sunday School meaning; as for Communism, Tegheler was never a Marxist, agreeing as he did with Alain Daniélou that Marxism was the last great religion of Kali Yuga, or Mappo, as Nichirenists might say, both terms meaning something like a final nodal age of great confusion; Walter Tegheler as the Saltus was obliged to wade through doctrinal niceties. By “Great Plotmaster” was meant evil’s Big Fire Source, Reverend Raptus.
Tegheler continued sitting impassively, skin in a deathly pallor, poker chip eyes behind pince-nez lenses of a grey tint, beard’s bushiness stuffed in his mouth, on his bed’s edge as the wreckage outside stenched like a rotting corpse, something living having been cruelly dealt with. Aliveness never lasted long with Tegheler, however living he himself might have seemed on the surface; there was too much youthful trauma left unresolved; he may as well have wrecked the Ædicula himself; he thought, I contain no accomodating social center.... Hell alone is Master....
.... Tegheler did not care if his future deified self was represented pictorially; he’d avoided photography often enough, few knew his looks; his walk in the garden in the cool of the day could have shown him in plus fours and a clawhammer coat, for all posterity might care. About his future carcass: he knew that one of the differences between Saints and common mortals was the fact that every part of a Saint’s body is edible; they are like pigs in their overarching usefulness; from them loaves and fishes can be had from a special spigot growth. A bottle of beer goes well with a Saint’s Foot; they possess what followers of the Negative Way (via negativa), credists not anthropomorphizing what for lack of a better term might be called “Godhead,” might call “Lotus Feet.” I hate the look of human feet, but it’s our ungulate heritage to be æsthetically guilty; at least one eats one’s local Saints, if one is a proper locovore.
.... Were an optograph to be taken of Walter Tegheler’s inner eye, it would resemble a screensaver, a term then unknown to him; if nothing moved in front of him, then would slowly and steadily appear, blocking his sight, still pictures he was dimly aware of having chosen, slowly presented and presented.
.... Taking into account that he might have been the loon some said he was, he’d say, “I’m sick, but not unto death.”
.... Without Walter Tegheler being conscious of it, his being in San Francisco during the early 1970s Great Religion Scare was proof that Western Philosophy is bullshit, xphi and all; as Alexandra David-Neel said of Western Philosophy, “C’est insipide! Insipide! Insipide!”
.... I’m sad that here I’m repetitive, and would that I had a conscience with which to apologize! It seems like such a cornball thing as I think of it now; when I first arrived in Saffrann (before then called San Francisco), a charmingly nerdy (not a term we used then) bespectacled female handed me my Rebirth Certificate. Her disposition seemed to say, “You are to regard this place as special, yourself also.” Of course, my idealism had not yet been dashed, as it was ultimately to be.... The Rebirth Certificate emblematized the influence of the via negativa on my post-Christian... well, for want of a better term, soul.... Why regard the “spiritual and immaterial part” of oneself as immortal? Of all the parts! it sounds flimsy, even... immaterial, one might say, right temporary; mummification sounds a bit sturdier, denying the notion of Constant Change or even the pleasant memory of someone as being a sort of immortality; the mishandling of time travel technology, Time-Wrecking, scotched that snake.
.... With the great irregularity of causal reality, it is often difficult to find Causation’s laws. Some results appear to be so senseless, one may as well waste many years waiting for enantiodromia, after years of no effort at all, such is the dejection some folks have felt.
.... I reported to the Casus Bureau with some regularity; I wanted to know why I was blamed for what I could no longer remember having done. Honegger, behind his desk at the Bureau, said, “Wait till you deal with the Gakkai. Ever hear of them?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s that Far Eastern Influence, blaming the victim — all part of the via negativa, avoidance of the word God, that anthropomorphic imago.”
I then said, “Will I be obligated to meet them? If so, what shall I then do?”
“It’s all in here,” he said; he showed me the glowing paper with shifting lettering holding the latest report, saying, “You were quite a cruel bastard on your last go-around.” I grabbed the paper from his hands; according to the report, which was called Enormities in a Previous Life, I deserved to be treated as “sexually failed” (the report’s words). I asked about dabblings in theatre I’d done up to then; I thought I might have been E.H. Sothern previously; Honegger said, “I heard a little something, about you being back there, writing a Passion Pageant, whatever it might be called, or even you playing the Christus — trouble with the police in 1879, in what Saffrann was called previously.”
“You’re not saying I was Salmi Morse, are you? He wrote a Passion Play and was in trouble with the San Francisco authorities. In 1879, as you say.”
“Or you could have been James O’Neill — the findings aren’t back yet. But how do you know about Salmi Morse?”
“I used to read theatre history, erroneously thinking I would one day be in it.”
“Didn’t you come to California to do that sort of thing?”
“Who the hell knows? I plan to give up.”
“Well, as I say, the findings aren’t in yet — I’ll send up a flare when they are — and I’ll tell you when you actually will give up.”
“I’ll have to come back — I don’t have a phone.”
“When you come back, I’ll tell you what your next number will be.”
Watching the lunch of Monterey crabs in clear plastic Honegger had on his desk for his lunch tormented me; I got up and left, the glowing paper in my pocket. Honegger called after me, saying, “Be careful — the letters on those pages rearrange themselves, with minds of their own and hating to be shaken.”
I walked with an underfed briskness to St. Anthony’s Dining Hall on Jones Street; then in late 1973 was my first time there; there was a long incline down to the eating place in the basement, it had been an auto repair place before 1950; a drunk at the end of the line turned around and said something I don’t recall when we at the back of the line were halfway down, and I left in response to his alkie breath; I had not quite yet grown up, I was not yet rotten with such breath myself. I walked south on Sixth Street, to a dive called the Hotel Metropole on Harrison Street near 6th Street, which was run by a middle-aged invert who had known Shane O’Neill, son of Eugene, personally. As I slept in the Metropole that night I had an attack of uræmia, there being no competition within my emptiness between piss and food. At the urinal down the hall from my room, I dizzily fell on my ass. I’d been sleeping in my clothes, and the glowing lettered page was still in my pocket; a force from it pulled me back up and off the floor, reminding me of when in my preteen years I touched with my thumb a piece of cloth that had “touched the bones” of (then Blessed, now Saint) Soeur Julie Billiart, co-founder of Soeurs de Notre Dame de Namur pasted to the back of a card with a hole in it, which is where my thumb committed its outrage. I was silly enough somewhere along the line to wonder if La Billiart knew aught of Uncle Toby Shandy, who’d been wounded at Namur; he was as good a man as ever blood warmed; I feel a catch in my throat to mention him; wearied of publicity, he faked his death and walks among us.
I went to the welfare place and a drone sitting at a window called my Dad; they were in and out of contact with him: I blew up a few times at the windowed ass, who was trying to verify from the coot on the other end of the line that I was who I said I was. I don’t know why it was that I was never brought up to earn; all of it is still a mystery to me decades down the road. I had no conception of what I would do when America was in flinders, when San Francisco would be Saffrann and America would be Achronesia, numerous town-sized discussion groups with no memory of federation.
.... Here are the contents of the Casus Bureau’s luminous lettered page, taking into account constant rearrangement of the letters and of divagations: In 1973, in his 23rd year, Blackwell walked up steps to the lower of two flats in the house on 2nd Avenue, in the Inner Sunset area of San Francisco. A door had been made in the lower flat to stairs of the upper flat. There was an office in the lower flat's front room. It was what was called an “emergency housing center” called Aquarius House. He had been referred there by Travelers' Aid, which was in a basement office at 50 Mason Street, several days after they’d put him up in a residential hotel.
Blackwell was from “back east,” as the saying went, from Ohio. How painful to have to write about him.
It hadn't occurred to Blackwell to wonder if he, in his unthinking energy, was less someone actual than he was, perhaps, a figure of mythic ritual for later generations, of no use while alive; while alive he was simply enraged and left out, the motives for the facts of his existence, which he ultimately must justify, unknown.
Blackwell (he, I'm sure, had a first name, but that's what you call someone you regard as human by) left his birthplace, which was Wanhope, Ohio, which was not unlike Dayton, for San Francisco, unprepared for the wide world after no normal youth of functioning, grown like a vegetable, as he himself claimed he was. He considered San Franciscans to be “metropolitans without urbanity, mere triflers.” I was acquainted with Blackwell, and I've asked others about him. Some coevals of his have said a malevolent Supernature seemed to follow him, forcing them to behave with an obsessive cruelty towards him; not entirely indecent except in thwarted future intent, but a bad daimon from his bad parents. Students from the two elementary schools he went to were obsessed with him, considering the amount of effort they put into how they treated him. He did not yet know the truth of Animism, and could not yet mitigate his causal punishment.
I never exactly interviewed him; he was pointed out to me when we were both of tender age as being someone of an unwanted birth similar to mine, and I was told to mend my ways, writing about him as ordered, or I'd be him; it's like the choice of reform school or the Army. I was fascinated by him as being emblematic of modern ugliness and puerility; he was like a child.... A reasonable question would be: Why elevate him to such importance? The answer is: He was right to believe himself the center of a vast conspiracy, don't ask me why. His tailing and transcribing was ordered by The Council of Seven, who are above even the Bilderbergers. Isn’t it obvious?
This report's tonal center is the scream of agony Blackwell gave off in reaction to being attacked in the left testicle. He’d been throwing a baseball against a wall and catching it — a slightly taller and older youth saying his name was Mike came by and asked Blackwell if he’d like to play some ball. He said yes, and he ran across the street to get a bat. Both coming and going, he did not notice me with my notepad as he ran by. When he returned to the wall, holding the bat, he stood batting right next to a theoretical plate — Mike nearly hit him in the crotch. Blackwell said, “Hey, watch it!” Blackwell shifted to batting left at the theoretical plate — Mike threw a perfect spiral, hitting Blackwell’s left testicle — Blackwell, bent over, screamed. Mike said, “Does it hurt?” Blackwell, born wrong, would not apologize to Mike for daring to use a baseball in his expert presence. The fact is that The Council of Seven said they wanted to deform his cods with the tortures they decreed. Such was the wrongness Blackwell’s birth embodied. Sex in later years became to Blackwell something that he felt he ought to be doing, nothing for which he had all that much drive.
He insisted on being out of his time, born to bad and unwise parents.
The military guy claiming to be a doctor visited a sandlot near where Blackwell lived, during a pickup game. He showed the youngsters there a picture of Blackwell, warning them about him, saying, “He will, in effect, invite you to make fun of him. He was of another time, and he was seduced by time travel, Time-Wrecking in future parlance. He was born in the wrong home, and he will bring out the worst in you. He deserves to be shot in the head — any takers?” None wanted to go that far, the stupes; it was enough for them to elicit funny reactions from him through daily cruel funmaking. Later in life, Blackwell wished he had killed them, he was so negative, possessed of what he saw as a well-earned negativity, for which he was to blame.
Blackwell understood that his opinions simply meant more than the opinions of others, even if ridiculed, because of the great bigness of his enemies. Also, he had grievously erred in other lifetimes, and he had to mindlessly suffer now. He was both an insignificant presence and a significant absence. He was no writer and did not follow himself around taking notes. If he'd written about himself, you couldn't have read it.
The reason for writing about him is to justify the ultimate trouncing of him by people of better family; this is even though he did in fact deflect fatal disaster through his espousal of True Animism, which mitigated his just punishment, the Tenju Kyoju principle. There is reason to fear his outlasting everyone in spite of all, especially with the punishment of the repeated Nineteen-Eighties, keeping him in his thirties, with what seems to be no reasonable motive for his remaining alive; I did approach him once, and I said to him, “Kindly state your motives for continuing uselessly,” and he moved on without responding. He seemed resolved to present himself as Motiveless Man, a real terror to the State. He should never have left his birthplace. He was hoping for an interdiction to disobey, a warning not to leave, something in line with the rules of folktale — he was expected to be practical, although no one ever gave him practical advice. Of importance also was the need to punish me with Blackwell's chronicling; I won't say what it was I did; I hadn't expected a life sentence....
*
He did some small voiceover jobs in Wanhope, filmstrip narration — there was a vocal depth lacking because of testicle injury from youthful attack. He was all middle range, nothing lower and manlier.
*
Blackwell's motiveless birth turned a household upside down; yes, one must be born with a motive.
*
During the mid-'Eighties, when I was taking notes on Blackwell at a rescue mission, Blackwell was seated on the middle aisle separating two sections of folding chairs; a louse jumped from a scratching derelict on the other side of the aisle, and it landed on Blackwell. He became dreadfully infested, and had to go to a nearby hospital to be deloused.
*
His big dream was the factory raising of bluespot salamanders for food, with a sideline of selling reprints of still lifes depicting skulls included among the fruit. His need for revenge demanded that Society both High and Low accept all of his professional demands, including the teaching of his incomprehensible poetry in schools. He said, “I have written nonsense, nonsense that must be published because I'll feel left out if it is not.” To him that seemed important.
Blackwell had no emotional knowledge that he'd committed a crime by being born; he was an honest liar. He was insulted on the schoolyard because kids there somehow knew that he would one day offend poetically, to the point of revealing Poetry's Aristocratic Secrets to commoners, offending Isis, whose name means “She who weeps,” terribly; she turned him into a garreteer, modern-day equivalent of an ass, trapping him in the Nineteen-Eighties, emetic decade, which repeated itself as if on an endless loop.
Perhaps the motive behind Blackwell's useless life was the need to become mythic, to become an avenging Supernature. To him even accuracies about him were slanders, none were to say anything, memories magically gone. Nowadays everyone's in mass media; doubtless his tune is changed if he has the misfortune to still be alive.
He had no idea about who ran the world; he didn't know that there is a group known as The Council of Seven above even the Bilderbergers. He believed that United States Presidents since JFK, whether or not he liked them, were legitimate. He believed that The Council of Seven's secret plan to reduce the world's population by many billions would somehow sidestep him. His conversion to Animism in 1974 did alter things, in a “Heavy Karma Made Lighter” (Tenju Kyoju) way. His insides were still chaotic, and he made a cause he would not have made otherwise when in his exasperation at being failed he hit a Gohonzon, one that he possessed, no one else's. He did hook on to True Animism, which mitigates the bad.... I'd looked forward to his demise, which True Animism postponed, so I could stop using him for subject matter.... All those hours with the hollow of a drinking glass held against a wall for the purpose of listening to him endlessly talking to himself like a heart beating loudly in a nightmare.... I had not thought that this would last forever. Blackwell denied me a life of my own, and I fear that he still lives.
*
At what was called an “Emergency Housing Center,” Aquarius House, on 2nd Avenue, in 1974: on a bulletin board there hung a Gohonzon, held up by a push pin; it had been left there by someone with intense face-twitches named Mark; Blackwell perceived Mark's twitches as an Animistic reprisal, causal retribution. Years later, Blackwell met someone who had burnt a Gohonzon; her son helped her do it, her damned son who was trouble, who had to be thrown out of the building they lived in for lighting a fire in an elevator. A long purple flame went up from the Gohonzon when it was burned, and the next day both she and her son were mugged in West Hollywood at a bus stop, stolen from and badly roughed up, where she was dragged around on concrete. I’m telling you, what the Gakkai propagated had some animistic torque in it; they were given away, essentially, like twelve-dollar party favors.
In the Hotel Metropole, a dive on Harrison Street near 6th Street, Blackwell aggressively repeated Daimoku in a bathroom down the hall from his room, intending it aggressively against someone at Aquarius House, where he had lived and now was a volunteer cook; he envisioned the Gohonzon in a heating grate there as he repeated and repeated Nam-Myoho-Renge-Kyo, shadow boxing as he did. When he went to Aquarius House later that day someone intensely shot some words at him, making him sheepishly withdraw as he felt a comeuppance for his aggressive use of Daimoku.... This all began when he met Claire from NYC. I don't know when he did, all I know is, he had become acquainted with her by February of 1974, after they had both stayed at Aquarius House. Blackwell and Claire were being driven around by Claire's friend Inez, in her Volks Bug. They stopped at Webster Street and Geary Boulevard, minutes after one of the Zebra Killings; two Salvation Army workers had been shot, a man and a woman. The woman was in the street near the curb, I know this from overhearing Blackwell talking to himself, he said that people gathered around tried to keep her from going to sleep; Inez put her coat around her. The man was dying in some nearby bushes; Claire heard his death rattle. Some black male youths were laughing on the pedestrian bridge above.
*
Blackwell left Wanhope, Ohio with no developed work ethic, no question of his being employable. He could be said to have been disabled, in a way; his brainwaves were different, from youthful meningitic coma.... A grocer near Aquarius House complained about bounced checks from Blackwell’s senile father in Wanhope.... Did Blackwell simply think he was going to be a professional poet? He was not published, no one wanted what he had in mind to have accepted. He had a vague idea of himself as a stage actor, having done a few amateur things, but he lacked an accommodating social center, so to continue acting was not so very possible. His loins had never ground into his paunch, he had done nothing. Claire from New York invited him to a “Buddhist meeting,” on Judah near 22nd Avenue, Nam-Myoho-Renge-Kyo propagated in someone’s San Francisco living room. Blackwell felt Claire at removes chanting for him to attend meetings; he would find copies of the World Tribune at odd moments, perceiving a connection – in the dive he lived in, the Hotel Metropole, in February 1974, atop a closed trashcan lid, he found a copy of the World Tribune – there was an article on Gongyo, recitations of chapters from the Lotus Sutra, how they led to more repetitions of Nam-Myoho-Renge-Kyo. Blackwell stayed with it for a strangely long time, given his level of fortune – he should have given up more easily.... Claire almost sat on Blackwell’s rolled-up Gohonzon, which was on a chair Blackwell meant to use as an altar. Blackwell even hit a Gohonzon once, feeling thereafter animistic consequences. He had not wanted to purchase, or I guess the term is lease, the Gohonzon, not wishing to be chained to the oars of Animism, but he feared rejection, they were so insistent. He’d been going to meetings most every day, so what was the rush? To train him up in recitation long before getting one would have been preferable, or so it seems from here. My heart has sunk many a time while eavesdropping on Blackwell incessantly chanting, knowing that it would help him survive in spite of animistic misbehavior.
Blackwell said to me as I squatted in a corner, not minding that I’d actually snuck in, “I will never admit you are here — if you are tangibly here and I’m looking at you as my mouth moves, I am still speaking to myself.”
Mister Blackwell, I wonder if you’ve ever heard of “perfection concerned only with itself.” You see, Mr. Blackwell, I am concerned with such matters in order that I might wrest free of you when you finally decide to die. Until then, I am chained to your oars. As far as the rest of you are concerned, I was talking to him, take no notice.
Since all life decreed I essentially am bad, hence my life sentence following Blackwell, I think it’s safe to say my modernism’s past — a dog’s head scarfing a nearby cockroach after being reanimated by Soviets in a film on Stalinist science from the early ‘Forties explains it all — I missed the boat along with Blackwell, and I’m not welcome among you thanks to him — watching you gives me false memories of doing, mirror neurons I suppose. Wearing the skin of a freshly-killed broadcaster, I pipe up click-songs of the unwanted births, true to my own senselessness at last.
*
To return as myself would be the worst causation.
*
I have given my mother heartbreak, I know that. I even stepped on cracks for the purpose of breaking her back. She’d caned me for stepping on tulips she’d planted, also for not wanting to go to school, where I was insulted by coevals daily. She said,
—You’ll go there and go there and go there, seated at that desk till drops of blood form on your brow.
She often said I should be more like our witchy ancestors, finding shortcuts to earthly success through spectral means. I never asked her why she and Dad never used such shortcuts for themselves, even in an era when the authorities never went after witches.... If they’d tried joining the Jihi Ma cult, centered around what they called “the Supper,” a sexual ritual (or perhaps just “meat and potatoes,” as it were, sexually speaking, no matter) which I tried and failed to enter, I would have been terribly embarrassed, for they never were physically attractive.
*
I was made aware of a book called The Dictes of Dr. Redland Smith, in classes run by his earthly representatives, his Apparitions, based on that book, long after his supposed death — any less intensity would magically turn a student into an unwashed punk who could not be expected to do his duty as America has a right to expect — not that there’s an America anymore.... Dr. Smith wrote, “In 1893 Leo XIII decreed in an Encyclical that, on a certain day in September of that year, heretics, by which he meant purebred Anglos native to America who never forget or forgive the Norman Conquest, needed a mowing-down.” Redland Smith saw the need for a proper Anglo tenseness opposed to the Norman Yoke, their goofy table manners and dangerous forks....
Mine was an accidental birth, totally needless. I’ve heard that my birth turned our house upside down. My parents stopped caring about keeping the house up, and how I was treated in school never did matter. I never did get the knack of blood-summoning, which, along with lack of hygiene from parental unconcern led to my being ragged mercilessly every day — someone guilty of bothering me said,
—It’ll add to your vengeance level — killing for you will almost be legal. You should pay us to keep up the torment.
*
The fact of Dr. Smith’s Apparitions bewildered me.... A particular crier, that is to say a street vendor, entered my neighborhood, and one of the last, they don’t come around anywhere anymore, foreign influence having ruined our settled culture--this was Wanhope, Ohio in the 1950s and very early ‘60s — I recall one crier with a whetstone to whom housewives would take their cutlery, and another one selling strawberries, and yet another one selling Apparitions. His face resembled Dr. Smith’s face, with a bloodied brow, but with much different hair, and his clothing was all of snakeskin, which perhaps should have made me more suspicious of him. He appeared through a dimensional warp and then approached me, without the usual sort of cry the others made as they hawked their wares--it appeared to me he performed something like a soundless scream. Without my saying anything he said,
—There’s something dead in your eyes — you’re in trouble, kid.
—How do you know?
—Doctor Smith has it figured. Had, I mean — he left his Apparitions, and we have it figured, since we are him, sort of, part of his ongoing dead imagination.... You’re in a terrible bind. I see no blood on your brow — if you can’t summon it now, in youth, you might never be able to, which in later life will mark you as uneducated. Can’t you tense up?
Through the dried blood on his brow he emitted a fresh bloodflow, which he did not wipe from his face and his clothing, and then he said,
—It should be easy for you by now. One would think you lacked creativity.
.... It seemed as if all of life’s facts existed anymore only to distort to some crackbrained fictional end.... I’d heard rumors of gas trucks dispatching journalists, but I didn’t believe it at the time.... I liked the thought of gassing being done to broadcasters, no real journalists among them, those vermin have it coming. The future had been interfering with us, time boundaries had been breached by a foreignness, the past eliminated. I asked,
—How much does an Apparition cost?
—Future trouble for you — you’ve begun life completely wrong, which guarantees future sufferings — that’s your payment. Doctor Smith, were he visible, would say so.
He then exited through a dimensional warp. I could not then figure the connection between Apparitions and bleeding brows, unless I was to have an Apparition of my own, to perhaps do the bleeding for me.
The following day at school, Smith176 called me aside, telling me,
—We’ll be holding you back a grade, which grieves me, for you are almost bright — you’ll be taking summer school classes from Smith284. You don’t bleed where you ought to. Try concentrating on your angular gyruses. Bop them a few times.
.... It was an era of primitive office equipment, and all depended on the talent of the individual to hold and sift through memory on his own with optimum tenseness, without a peri in an electric box, what a computer happens to be, holding memory for him despite minimal innate ability.
The teacher, Smith176, wearing a fedora, sat at his desk with a megaphone, exhorting the class in the manner of a sculling coach, saying,
—Tense! Tense! Tense! Tense!
For all the need to sweat blood in class according to Smith, there was no one with the name of Smith present to keep me from being hassled every day while walking through the hallways of one of his schools. And was Smith actually dead? They’d found snakeskin clothes left on a shore, but no body was ever found. How much of life had Dr. Smith created? Were his kin the Brothers shown on the cough drop box? Was there a Vulcanlike Ur-Smith? Smith’s influence was not a religion as so many have known religion — there was no Popelike figure, no “Paramount Smith.” That wouldn’t have been so bad, they could have done with some supervision and orthodoxy, but many assumed that Smith would return anyway, slack easily taken up from there, more trouble brought to us by the future than Anglos can handle will rouse him from sleep and make him save us....
I did not start Dr. Smith’s Magnum Opus, The Dictes, at the beginning, for I am a borderline dyslexic — that’s how I am with books generally, starting in the middle or near the end and then doubling back....
The Dictes, the copy I had, a very thick volume, had been printed with blood for ink, a thick enough volume to require gallons for each copy. I assume it’s human blood, or where are standards?
Always scrambling to overcome my minimal formal education, to fake something better, I eviscerated derelicts for anatomy studies, hanging them half-alive upside down with their insides cut open, to observe for myself how digestion worked even while a body is upside down. To ascribe other than educational intent to my vivisecting is just wrong.... Cows are simply more valuable than hoboes, and I’d have been nicer to hoboes if they had been cows.
*
.... I’ve had my nose rubbed in not having money many times, and I can do without the lot of you, emotionally anyway. I knew I was set apart for garreteering early on.... I was too mentally ill to plan on being employed when older, my early treatment ensured that.... I wanted to be an actor, and a stage actor at that, so who needs a camera — cameras are for those not easily embarrassed — I need a disguise. It was to be my work, dialogue my seed and projection my plow, dynamic over nothing commonly useful. Meningitis scotched that reasonable hope when I was 16 years old — after it was over I was told that my brainwaves were “different.”
*
.... I admit to having been part of the Jihi Ma cult for a time, her force coursing through me, not me claiming to be that force embodied — those cultists’ advocacy of altruism was of course deathly wrong. I was enabled to survive through their ministrations, and I admit I was a bum — generosity did me no favors and was no real mercy.... I enjoyed her church’s Snack Food Communions of hoboes’ chocolate-covered eyeballs and dried pituitary glands — their baked alcoholic flesh has its special allure also.
I spoke at a church basement meeting of Catholics Against Popery — at last I felt the blood form on my brow — I was 12 years old, and some there said my appearance there was worthy of a legend in a book of Scripture, myself having the inside track if a new Messiah should be needed — I told the assembled,
—We want the Smells and Bells and Saints’ Days minus paternalism!
Some there resented my precocious resonance, and did not want the smells and bells or Saints’ Days at all. The level of Hell they’ll wind up in for their advocacy of an empty calendar and allowing human stink to interfere with piety can only be guessed at. It seemed to me, as I was being ordained as the first child priest of Catholics Against Popery, prostrate before the altar of Jihi Ma, that I was the only real Anglo there because I felt threatened by the future. I knew that this fact would net me imprisonment of a sort, perhaps simply a nuthatch’s back ward for a proper pampering befitting my Anglo status. But who, I wondered, should I kill to get me there? Foreigners, natch, also Hoboes of the Law and not of Faith, hoboes believing that there is an orthodox manner of hoboing, not simply a feeling of exclusion that may or may not lead to it — I figured then I could use the help of grownups in our sect for those killings.... The tall pale pink-cheeked auburn-haired Jihi Ma opened her low-cut red dress, and her sizeable paps shot twin gushers of blood over my prostrate frame in its white ceremonial vestments — I stood up, and she from behind me placed over me the hooded blue cloak whose hood had a long bill mostly blocking my sight — I proclaimed myself her “Liegeman.” With genuine religious feeling she offered me a mercy hump, but an attack on my left ball by someone on the schoolyard left me unable, never mind my being a year perhaps too young to function under even normal circumstances — she said,
—Perhaps you will recover within living memory.
She then serviced the entire congregation, and I had to watch.... Soon after, her uncle, Bishop Danto Ma, castrated me in my sleep, to keep me from future frustrations — I did not feel it as I slept.... It was a great help for the justification of my future violence....
Pardon my smugness, but for me enlightenment really did start quite early. I know little about aboveground society and a lot about underground crawlers.... When I was 12 I saw the last vision of the damned before going to Hell — it resembled a snowy white marble bust of a bearded man with his palms together at his chest, glistening as if with light. This was for the slanderers of Jihi Ma on their way to damnation.
.... I was accused of inflicting acts of provisional enlightenment on the dead bodies of a family of Hoboes, Nameless, Fructose and Jihima Hobo, the last of which was sloppily named after the Foundress of my sect, or, if you sniffily prefer, cult. I deny nothing, I just don’t recall them — I do admit that what I’m accused of doing to them does sound like what I could have myself do. I have not been in the Blissful Snare of Jihi Ma for several years.... To have an Apparition do the remote tormenting and killing of hoboes makes it easy to lose track of what it is you’ll be blamed for later.... My Apparition even ate better than I did, until I raised a bitch to Jihi Ma.... By “hoboes” I don’t mean the respectworthy migrant worker sort, but panhandlers hitting me up when I was as broke as they were, making them meetest for death.... It seemed to me that the authorities weren’t after me for punitive reasons, for they appreciated my helping them thin the indigent population — they were protecting me from derelict lynch-mobs, Romish emblems of a future most threatening to real Angli. When my Apparition killed the Hobo Family, to choose only three examples, his clothes thickly bloodied as he left their cul-de-sac alley home, a cop in a parked black-and-white seeing him quick-march past said “Nice work.”
*