Nobody’s coming who’s not going, you can bet your paradigms and raise the stakes with Derrida, but it won’t come out Foucault, and you’ll be lucky if it’s not a priori and is what Kant calls ding an sich, reminding me of Husserl and his student Edith Stein’s einfuhlung and meaning something like things in themselves, which translates for me into each so-called thing being complete in itself and only what comes before is nothing to be thought about–earth, sky, sea etcetera (take that up with Genesis and spin your thread, Ariadne, all the way to Revelations, this St. John’s nonsense vision no one can believe who isn’t a priori her/himself.
Nobody–nothing–is coming that will not go, presumably traveling the way it came, this it that you and I are, whether God created us or we were merely the spawn of sperm and ovum–so if you’re born you start dying with the first breath.
I don’t read Barthes, I believe I’m the so-called author of the nonsense you may or may not have read to this point (no one’s going to read it to you–I stutter, I have stuttered, I will stutter, that must have been the way I was born, that stuttering gene already plaguing my stint in this world. I don’t know if Derrida’s Plato has it down, I don’t even remember what this it is: if writing came before speech, what mattered to me was the syllogism I cannot speak, therefore I write. So, for me, Foucault’s institutions–madhouse, prison, inter alia–make sense. I was in the former, Wall had been and is now in the latter.
Jimmy Wall’s Marge is running her own show again. She has no habit she needs to feed except sex. And obviously she needs the money. She doesn’t trust men other than those she knows beyond the bedroom, and so she insists on complete independence, meaning she’s a crime, that’s how the city turns its corners and enslaves you to follow . . .
Marge shows up one night I’m out for a walk, an unusual event, mind you, I’m either in bed with Cristina or at the Congress with the combo, so when I happen to meet Marge on the street I insist on taking her for coffee and giving her the hundred she charges for fellatio and fuck, two hundred for rear entry and orgasm there. She’s out for a stroll, she says. You’re walking the streets now? I ask. No, she says, I live off regulars, I’m home all the time. Come see me, she finishes her coffee and says before I begin walking her home.
She lives in a hotel that was once called fleabag, now it’s more like cockroach. She has traps set everywhere. Once you see her in the buff you know why she has regulars who don’t mind the vermin so much they would even think of staying away from such a body and, I like to add (because it’s my own signature), soul.
She proceeds to insist I stay, and knowing her from the days when she did me for free, I do, only to realize I can go up the back stairs to La Iglesia de La Puta, take off my clothes and remove hers and suck and fuck and come all night, though Marge will have to go before Cristina gets off work at two.
Afterward, she listens to me rap about Kant, phenomenology, Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault, and does her usual ritual of keeping me going, happily, a guest in my own church, the one that’s truly named after her and . . . I catch her up on the life I’m leading. She says, You’re doing well. Jimmy can’t stay out of prison, I can’t get my daughter back, you know, not after doing time myself. I tell her about Cristina’s desire to have a child with me. She says I’m crazy if I think my responsibility ends not only with conception or birth, but ever . . .
So maybe I have it all wrong. What’s coming will not go as long as two are involved in the making of a life, and Freud, I must finally admit, there may be four people in the bedroom but two will go eventually and the newborn third either learns to talk or off she/he goes, to, say, a foster home, which is damned well one institution Foucault never named in his archaeological reports before he died in his abattoir of pleasure performed by fellows in leather hoods and wielding whips, the dominants who give you what you ask for in becoming subordinate and leaning on the underground to keep you going above the ground. Foucault was there to prove, no matter what his genius, he was the flesh and bone he was born, the kind, no matter what you call it, dies, whose only hope is coming back, coming home.
(28 January 2013)
copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander
No comments:
Post a Comment