from
Part Two : Minotaur
Excerpted from Theseus: A Collaboration bpNichol and Wayne Clifford
1.
1974;
years after what's learned
ear's laughter flat off the tongue 's independence.
As the calloused ridge the ring nudges, worn
that when I opened your envelope, odour of old words led me empty-headed to the source again. Speaking's never gotten out of hand. The yellow pencil as well has thickened skin. That you, shadowboxing memory, other locked into my flesh, a notion of the beast.
Loaded into the scapes of my mouth. Air shaped of breath and will, made to fit another pressure: you pulled aloud out of silence. ( I looked for you in simple things. What I found were these things unchanged showing no trace of you, so insistent were they in speaking themselves.
So I tried to find you in complex things, ideas that whistle about in my head. Well, my ideas joined and dispersed but never managed to fit you in.
Finally I looked for you in nothing that sniffs at the edges of all things, curious. I found the place you'd been hiding for so long you'd forgotten where you were, and
gone.)
Beast rears up in its sleep. It senses the trickle of air uncomplicated thru the throat.
Beast only asked what language built itself syllable by syllable into the scrub,
to grub out what meal it contains. Its claws pried out by Mothertongue. Well, speaking's
never gotten out of hand. Grasped as a whip is, slashes beast back into the night it grew out of, howling and grappling at the moon cages it sounds to marks from our mouths into our eyes.
I gives up the centre. I surrenders to the page where you gather.
That in that surface, the shock: skin fragmented into dapples and patches as thot moves thru it. Scintillation ripples, self to other,
selfsame.
Flotsam. Silt from
this white tide. Fhh. Ahh. Breath. In the commonplace, the only value.
Who speaks and doesn't say breath? What worth is his authority? Dust bullies him as well.
He's chewed in the daily maw and spat up, hydrocarbons and trace elements, into the market breath gathers at. Who buys breath turns his hand in any idle way. Cheap as sand, particled unaccountable ground atmosphere.
As a series of fractions yielding one, you look out on your city: It is without qualm or interruption.
The sun surveys its right of way among the planes of the street. The city
breathes
and breathing, speaks, a lull, a murmur
in the depths of the house. Who among its walls straited to withholding the echo in your lungs?
So much trust in the elemental fondling of cell on cell, saline and whole, speechless with the business of living. The city in you, who speak a rafter of verb, a spike noun. Names fixing what bears the weight the city breathes in.
Breath of you, brought back, that when I spread the pages flat and read, filled the pause between that time and this.
You written.
----- Writing's the motion of fingers well balanced in space above the paper. Writing's emotion if fingers will balance the names
a trick to touch the world. The danger is, simply taking up the pencil, I lose the perspective I would have given it. Placed
on the ground the paper is that field's enterprise easier than the imaging over again what happened, disappears
before the eyes have it, signalling across the past tense, a no of accord a mutual objection. One
is not there. ----You, here in this paper crypt. Beast. The Shape bearing horns.
You
eeYoo whose names are none my tongue can say so that I link these words around each, let one wear the other.
2.
fingers & what lingers is the ryme (echoed then the voice of years ago questioning the you who eeyoo 'image of you, word' heard in the bright silence of the page) marked time as f to l shift's the spell gesture completes
cities between to mark the years (street shift a kind of speaking read as cancellation cross your hand written notes a music friends exchange) dialogue a kind of speaking pick up their pens in separate sittings let's the beast be
pacing the page he is brought back again strange landscapes outside his own direction overlapped in time begins a longer line defines itself briefly
writing out the shadow of the word as tho the eye's light were cast upon it as in a comic strip line dashes eye to seen thing 'word turning into you' r self moon's noominous noomismatic b rises in the east the foot's fled informed the early poem f led in the groan of speech
if he's in his grammar he is in his head screaming out the syntax writhes in vague an image like the horns of a dilemma devil and a nother voice created in between "thot i was crazy voices speaking out of me shifting fast as feelings shifted" adrift in scrub country
3.
The least meaningful part eff to ell
to fell fool
among stumps the season'll root up, nose over into architecture.
Cities between, yes, and between cities, rootless
the fool falls one way, his shadow another
opposed across a line in the mantle's local endeavour. Sagging bedrock, a rift in the strata, tripping him up. Adrift? Hey, ace, did you think this act was free? That because the fool sports a nose-ring, he's housebroken? In the unflowered mind the landscape lurches. Whaaho, posits idiot.
To feel fool, fall back in the seat of the mind unmend ego, let it go. There, there, the stupid part, skitterish critter wintering on our borders. Or else what does speaking come down to? The distance
unsheathes its newborn carapace, lies drying in the reality radiation. Idiot picks up a word
like an edge of burnt bone to slit its belly open, read the dying organs.
Whooha.
Least meaningful part, gap in imagination
between nothing and a name for nothing, reliance on the utterly simple. Whaah!
Gut pulled free of mesentery. Idiot cuts the knot. ( That, as for my house,
a preverbal daughter can be relique, in a mind condemned to language. Able not to distinguish the conjunction of self and actual, and so go thru? She shares in her utterances the unfragmented emotional resonance, as opposed to intuition, the thing, not the thinking to try to get there, the possibilities in that sound. Does speaking come down to this? Huh?)
And idiot cuts the heart: where to feel this happens here around you. Ah, transfiguration in the mirror of each day, it was never a question of identities. You knew what paid for your excursions into the interior. Reflections
broke you up. You. Second person plural, formal. Sie embossed on du. This language that can't tutuer.
Gone the familiar, a 'thou' too quaint to mean now, beyond the bric-a-brac of a good
indexed grammar. Oddment left on the lingual shitpile. Alluvial accretion. Mindbone.
That I find you again, in the eyes, watching impatient, watching, saying nothing as easily as if no word described it, watching.
The least meaningful part. F to L. Gape between the I's taking shape making a first sound, the unbroken breath song. The critter a bladder of air all tasting like air as Oodalaka's water crock all tasting salt.
But the white tasting of white
at the top in middle at bottom
the solitary page.
White without direction, within a thin mist, calling words, lost white, blizzard of the poisoned vision, white of the stare into sun, white, white, a bottomless white, the page a well of white in which memory falls away like a coin tossed in, words jangle down its dark echo breathlessly. The page, quick, pulls in the weight of ink, leaving only vague marks that might mean anything. Sloughs of rhythm in the ear, the mind rides the clear image upright in a suddenly strange room. Does speaking come down to this? White you confront and write: There the face of the beast stares back. Panachily, you draw a moustache on him. Oh, he snarls. You feel the room jounce a fraction on the Richter scale.
So you pencil in shaggy eyebrows. A few books tumble from the shelves, the lampshade's askew. Ace, you've got him now. You round two lenses before the eyes, scribble temple pieces over the ears and the ceiling collapses as you duck under your desk.
St. Utter cupped his hand around word, cowled in cadence, stooped before the parchment, bowed to the slow scrape of the chisel point, imagined the characters flowed both ways, from what he took of the skin, blocked and cut, a row of miniscule into the hand. ----- Arouse your heart! Holy fool in god's innocent belly unsure whether he is swallowed or conceived. Saint eeYoo!
---- [Ordinary Stuff Wrassles Abstraction's Horns into the Sand!] ----
( Brother One, later canonized but always ill-remembered, added the leaf and colour. After the page was completed, the two old men talked it over in the cloisters. "While I blackened the hide of some forgotten mutton, meditating on the spaces around each shape I imposed, I saw it, clearly as your face before me."
"But don't go on so," answered Saint (later) One. "I have covered what remained with gold, and what I could not cover, I have beautified."
"Neither gold nor ink will hold it back. Sometime, when we can no longer resist, it will seep thru as damp does in the cells."
The shade under the arch was full of the odour of sun that twisted a line around the dial in the yard. Memento mori, said the dial. Read the dial. Neither one of the old men could any longer make the distinction. The raised letters had been worn by the collective thumb of the
community.
"Well, what good to think of it, then," mused Brother One. He wished he'd brought out more wine in the jug. He hadn't filled it, and at the moment he was realizing the the part he'd left out would nicely fill his cup one more. Talking with this sainted man made him nervous, and when he was nervous, he grew thirsty.
"The lacquered skin of an apple I once polished on my habit, the translucence of red, green, yellow, falling toward its core, compelled my eye inward. Seed where lies the possibility of erupting root like the ache in loneliness. I bit to the core, shattered the lacquer, the illusion as well." St. Utter sighed. He wasn't thinking of the wine at all. He was trying to imagine what his hand would feel like at the moment it broke thru the white, his blood flowing out cleanly as lines and curves.) Myth.
What speaking comes down to, is
the lift the ear takes from throat's own moan; is the bell, word, rapped, clapper tongue lunging at gravity and other such as weigh it down. Between cities, the land was mapped not with transit and journal but by post and rail, a field at a time as the plough bit, or the animals pastured, sweat and curses.
The axe, the mallet and wedge, the stone boat, a sort
of melody running in the head its rhythm matched to the twist of shoulder over auger, each rail length of the field. This is
the land made known by rote. You bedded in dream's thicket, snoring out clods of name,
the stuff we shape our field from. What have we done, come to watch for you at this brink of white, that we still stare after we've gone blind? Turned barren.
Left to erode.
The beast, you, limps in shame down our streets where we wait behind the windows. Would we not have been better off to kill you, a long patience blooming into rage?
We wait with our axes in our hands. We had slit those tendons to make you need us. Now we will have you speak by cutting away your body from around the tongue.
The least meaningful part. Speaking at bottom.
ef tu el.
tu ef, el. Teufel, old saint with woman's dugs, a goat's horns.
When you knelt in your lukewarm bath to bind your balls up, thinking of your father,
cupping the root, did you not hear Beast behind the door, whispering and crushing something to it as a daughter does her doll loose-jointed and broken lisping nda nda nda ?
4.
wanted a letter
which was all his isolate a mother tongue to speak from singular
fool's quest stepping out unwary into space roadrunner come to another part of the marathon 26 miles & letters a question of pacing spacing cing any good man? or is it just the ingers angers ungers ergs of energy flips the flap'll flop it into placing cing cing
"it's just a sequence of triples, a mapped mind moving, graph ite, the right pen or pencil i wanted to pick up & rite you mondo mundane" ego i go so long ago back like a song picked up as a boy agoy yoga's ego as opposed to Freud's narcissus is the beast the guru's grrring
"scrub country's just the tub i bathed in with my momma" it was all one he was her tongue then "beast's east's two be movie moved me to seek one"
separate from the mom he came from "i so late arriving in this world"
he sits up nights studies daughter tongues moody as some muse sick mouth moves to re/mind the body lungs linking into the soundscape confronts the white world of morning thru his window stretched out on his floor fearful of the door opens into the street or into the world of metaphors disturb his thinking when the sheet becomes the white world he should be leaving filling another with his presence filtered thru specific sequences of letters fil can he fill them?
indefinite
phrases in a void
this game of speaking
this play
say ing the old saw's a speech balloon's cliche‚
hey to hay say speech is the fodder of us all
summer 74 to spring 76
how long to draw the words together in a poem?
january seventy-seven the pen's uneven scrawl moves to draw a fix picks the pen up
stroke/ meditated
get it right
it graphs the hand's stand in the white & air mind emptied third to first person speaks
he was the stone around St Utter's neck pressed his chest to stop his breath a parasite become a saint in his right saint one (I or like lower case L (eff (to ell) speaks: you were the one caused St Utter's stutter
your over-riding arrogance couldn't let e go scream of rage plastered your I across that parchment cage bound you in impotent posturing
(f moves across the stage. he is like a shadow. we see l fall to the stage floor. two gigantic faces, their mouths perfect O's of surprise, rush forward. the landscape lurches then freezes again.)))
this postal code becomes a poem in time a correspondence tween the real world & this other fictionary diction so that the letter never is all his it is dear to another waits beyond that door he is always opening face of the Beast he had so named crushing self to self revelling in the beauty of his birth right too full of feeling to get the words right he stutters a litany of praise
and a
and a
and a regret.
his voice breaks confusion confession these postures patterns blurred by self pity Haiee!
make noise quick!
Awug. Awah. AaewW! Arrogant, this you? angry and stupid? (Nuance. A sense of echoes.) Thiz' a fine stew he's landed in, Saint U, afraid to open his own door. Haven't U any sense? Listen, there are people out there. Listen:
"But John, that only proves his normal life is starved; his writing a book is only a kind of substitute for real things like -- like love and children." U, Mary comments not so much on love and children as on the nature of her reality. Whether U decide to share it, or merely create it, U're stuck with her saying it. Incidental that the only other person U know who talks that way's U. Her postures reduce U to a notime in which Mary exists coincident with Urselves uninterruptedly. U open the door.
iey loiter in the passageway. U stumble toward me, Ur breath uneven, one hand to the wall. The glare from the yard at my back makes U squint and U can't tell who iey am at first. However, U recognize the setting.
Fra One: My dear friend, iey wish to confess my sorrow at having offended thee.
beatific utter: bugger off, U stuckup turd. Fr. 1: Ah, don't be that way, please; iey really am sorry! bea. ut. : sorry like Ur ass. U don't even know what U're apologizing for.
Two old men sitting in the obscure shade of the south cloister arguing. Thru the dazzle of the garden their voices hover like bees. U come up to me, Ur hand raised, and iey flinch, thinking U're going to slap me, but U touch my face, puzzled. Together we step under the low eave into the heat. Dry scent of grass cut this morning yellowing. ing. ing.
Loop. Zing ing ing, Urtongue, muttisprach
Ing by the ingle, grim [ fathers ], grim law.
beep
how bout th time we firs met
beep
iey was a lidl shnackerd U know she was startin to give me that look
beep
and U were tawkin on the couch to joanne iey think well iey made some smartaz crack and
beep
U came this close to punchin me out beep End run. Process