Surly to bed and surly to rise makes a man dyspeptic, skeptic and snide. How many and how often have been my dreams of death: my feet cold before me, unmourned and blue. These same crabbed feet that trespass so lightly upon God’s sallow, hallowed creation! And did these feet in ancient times do more than dance in pagan parade, tripping in circular praise of the Christian Satan–the only adorable godhead who appealed to the prurient and true crux of man’s toilsome experience on this globe of universal molestations? Why accept an absent, unprovable Paradise, when opium dens curl filled with yellow heavens? Why lash the soul to penance with anything more soiling than the feathery quickness of my quill? Flightless, perhaps, but final in its editorial quickness! And in any case, the result will be as edifying in the end, the conclusion just as cold and eternal as any damnation: I shall rictify and rot in my final lengthwise lodgings, the tomb.
“Hail, Bonadventure! You greet me on the docks of Marseille, a fine and faithful friend after your own morose and fickle fashion! Come, walk beside me on the planks while the gulls tear at the rats’ innards under the weak sun of France. Africa was another land, another (wholly unannointed) dream of existence. I tell you, Bonadventure, I shall miss my Afric days, the grind of her freezing desert nights, the square glare of her endless afternoons. There one sees the life of man without civilization’s fibs. Without the crock of comforts and querulous confrontations–both!–annoyances and evasions of the modern scene.
“Long shall I crave that elemental landscape, that sea of sand, charmless and arid. And why? It is only here, in France, indeed solely in Paris, where the stage may be set and the wicked feast appointed where my noble words can be properly disgorged and digested. Ah, Mystery, it is truly only You who can know the conclusion to this question, only You who can hold our unknowingness–both while we breathe and bleed on Earth, and hereafter. If my adventure of Africa is to exist beyond the besotted nights of my own consciousness, then it must be in the ears of bumpkin Bonadventure, or nowhere. Eh, my friend? All my grand peregrinations of the spirit, all my tides of talk, must have their sinkhole in the human ear! Ironic reprimand of the irenic savior! So I must dig my soul’s home in my compatriot’s ear and be an eager parasite in life ‘while the worm turns.’ And beyond this temporary abyss in the listener? Nada, neant. Only my cold feet keeping each other company in the tomb, and the occasional droppings of stony mold as I shed my choiring wings for a bony xylophone.
“And so I have returned home from my dear adventure, my defining vision of the not-here; this is the keystone to every artist’s Edenic attempt to create, to name, in the plastic materials of his craft, the eternal carvings of his cravings. Here, in near Pariee, I will craft my misshapen missives to the African god of my Creole demoiselle. Dear, damned Aboulee.”
I watched friendly billows of smoke pour from Bonadventure’s clay pipe, tucked in a quirk of his smirk, as he listened and walked beside me, my heavy sailor’s dufflebag over his lanky shoulder. Seeing my glance, he reached into his vest pocket and pulled out another clay pipe, stuffed with fresh tabac, and handed it to me as he hopped a quick step and lit a match to ignite it. I have seen only the most adept puppeteers attempt to make their marionettes perform such a feat: at once so awkward and so graceful. But, this was Bonadventure’s very métier, and who am I to deny him the fullest expression of his servant’s gift? We walked on in silence as I watched the streets grow wet in the slow onset of a summer storm.
Spout, you Dickensean gutters, ripe with vile spillages from a weeping heaven! Pour up your spontaneous spoutings, puke ululatingly your dirty arias to a smoky sky. Ah, Marseilles! I know you as I know Paris–as the shame-filled covering for godless Luddites, the loin-wrap of pagans degraded into some savor of faith in the Hebrew God. Still, below your Gothic gutters, behind your green-filmed facades and the rickety glitter of your endless ’empresses of the comic opera,’ you cry out unto the mud-pits, the snake pits, as surely as any tatooed tribesman of the Congo. Whirl vibrantly while you may in your gay saloons and witty salons–I know your blotted heart! How you ache to be a victim, an honest loser in life’s catastrophe. Or, with equal thirst, how your throat burns to utter the humiliating cry, to pin the ancient crime onto the innocent’s skin and inscribe unwarranted tortures there to alleviate yourself from the boredom, the ennui, that your lie of civilization forces you to live humiliatingly within: a shipping clerk purple with rage and impotence, yet accurately tapping at his accounts withal. What we do, what we are: all of these veils we have imposed upon our true, our reckless desires! Why do we imagine that any of the charade matters at all? It does not. There is only the mind’s eternal oblation to its own ignorance of self–the simmering mystery that sex and pain force upon us against our wishes. Yes, I say against our wishes. For if our wishes were truly, nakedly known, we would far prefer the honest ignorance of infancy. There we did not know that we were a self. There, in the baby’s eyes, there is only the primeval palliative of the senses, the effects of nature painting themselves on us in infinite variety. And, without prejudice or comment, we record the sensations. There, in infancy, we are one with what is–until that damaging day a pain too great to be merely enjoyed comes pinching our pink bubble.
Then, to survive, we must invent a self separate from the coiling cosmos that stung us, in order to crawl away from danger. The same occurs with the scorpion sting of desire that bruises our loins. There we must also invent a new self, and move that self, sell that self–in the same manner as any madame or mistress of the night–in order to move toward our desire, toward the consummation a hundred adolescent midnights conjured, our breaking bodies ruddy in the whirlpool of filthy sheets.
“We, my sad-sack listeners, have been had!” And here I coughed into my pipe. Bonadventure looked over at me a moment, but did nothing to signal any discomfort at this sudden re-eruption of my disquisition. “Prodded or promised, all that we have created ourselves to be of infinity is but a persona we program to fuck or flee. Frightening, is it not? By sex we torture those who trouble with us, who twine with the divine from which we have abjectly awakened, and by investing in our manifested skin-sack, we paint ourselves in pain to be the victim of every tyrant’s whim. There is nothing else. All is a boulevard of carnival distractions where these menacing themes of victim and torturer play out, nothing more. Look honestly in that pearlescent mirror in your parlor, and know the infamous truth!”
After a pause in which we halted shoulder-to-shoulder to view ourselves in a shop window, I continued. “Bonadventure, I do hope that you have kept my rooms reassuringly arranged while I was away. I want no dollops of dust or ugliness to distract me from my etherial investigations when I return to my apartments. Come, let us away! Enough of this unmanly hugging.”
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