Aug 192011
 

Mother, dearest maternal sog-lump of my too-tired heart, my consolation, my courage…. No one will read about me listening to Wagner. My booklets, so beautifully brought out and bound by Pouncelle, come back from the bookshops in teetering tiers, their luxurious pages uncut. As if the eye could not help instruct the ear! As if both were not frail funnels to the human heart itself–Satan’s parade ground and God’s golfcourse combined. Wagner is sweetly, rapturously, aware of how our tortured senses overlap in this happenstance deemed by the ignorant, Life. How much more clearly can we understand space through his recreation of its very concept in his uncompromising tones, the blank tabulation of every vagrant impulse that traps us between our ears! This is passion, this correspondence of the visual and the aural, and the radical of all these intersections always always the sodden heart herself, passive and useless spoof of the final agony of God that it is. Mother, I would murder to maintain my opinions against the world! My pen hefts with the clean weight of a throwing knife. Whether lit cigarettes shall suffer or the attentive girl’s nose be dispatched is the very substance of Fate.

Now, as to the matter of your harping tirade that I appear on your doorstep in Honfleur…. I cannot! Do not reduce me to such bourgeois displays of filial piety. On your breast, the reeling dreams of opium would not abate, and I would curl again into that solace you alone provide, and which your body itself produced, our inevitable, enviable mutual-dual sympathy.

Instead, I call you to me, maman, for say three weeks at the agreeable end of August, not so bad in the shadowy city, or three days if you cannot be so long bereft of the company of your housecat, or three hours which I, like Wagner, shall transmute into an eternity in remembrance.

Your letters are full of errors that a few hours of conversation would unwarp. I loved you passionately as a child! Come, be reasonable. Come.

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