'The only thing we have,' Mr Linker continued telling his hoodlums, 'which separates us from the beasts is Culture. Culture is our highest form of life. And it is literature more than any other art which enables us to grasp this higher life, for literature is the most abstract of the arts. It is the only art which is not sensual. You know most people do not read. These days they read only trash. They do not SEE. They do not appreciate nature. They do not have the artist's eye and they know nothing:
Out, out, brief candle.
Life's but a walking shadow,
A poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more . . .
Shakespeare said that in
Hamlet.
He said we are nothing without our culture.
'Where does culture come from? I will tell you. It comes from disease. All the great artists, Goethe, Schiller, and Jean-Paul Sartre - you must
read
Nausea
in the French, in English it is nothing - have said this. They are aware how evil they are. They are aware this life is truly evil; due to this awareness, they are able to go beyond. You know that medically, I am a doctor, a body cannot live without disease.'
Mr Linker gave an example of his own disease. 'Isn't this rug beautiful?' he said. 'I will tell you the story of this rug. It is not an agreeable story. My wife worked on this rug for five years.' Tiny birds silver and white and pale blue clustered around bunches of grapes and the pale grey moon. 'Every day she stitched.' Mr Linker had married a young upper-middle class Viennese girl and brought her to the United States. He bought a resort in the Catskills, his first resort, and she cooked, cleaned, scrubbed, vacuumed, kept the accounts, washed, nursed the hotel guests, and waited on her husband. 'Soon her eyes began to fail her. She kept on making the rug. She began to have trouble breathing. One day she could no longer stand and she could no longer do the housework. The doctor told me she was very sick and she would have to stop working on the rug because the wool was affecting her lungs. I don't understand exactly how. While she was coughing up blood, she kept on working on this rug. The very moment she died, it was in
her
hand.'
Actually Mr Linker's wife had been driven crazy and then locked up for life in a New York State Sanatorium.
After Mr Linker's wife landed in the sanatorium, he added the white slavery business to his lobotomy and summer resort operations. He didn't need the money: at age seventy-five he was a very wealthy
man.
He wanted to be able to indulge in his other peculiarities. He was very powerful and intelligent.
Janey lived in the locked room. Twice a day the Persian slave trader came in and taught her to be a whore. Otherwise there was nothing.
One day she found a pencil stub and scrap paper in a forgotten corner of the room. She began to write down her life . . .
A book report
We all live in prison. Most of us don't know we live in prison.
A throng of bearded men, in sad-coloured garments, were assembled in front of a gaol. They were waiting for a woman named Hester Prynne to walk out of the gaol.
All of them even the hippies hated Hester Prynne because she was a freak and because she couldn't be anything else and because she wouldn't be quiet and hide her freakiness like a bloody Kotex and because she was as wild and insane as they come.
Long ago, when Hawthorne wrote
The Scarlet Letter,
he was living in a society that was more socially repressive and less materialistic than ours. He wrote about a wild woman. This woman challenged the society by fucking a guy who wasn't her husband and having his kid. The society punished her by sending her to gaol, making her wear a red 'A' for adultery right on her tits, and excommunicating her.
Nowadays most women fuck around 'cause fucking doesn't mean anything. All anybody cares about today is money. The woman who lives her life according to nonmaterialistic ideals is the wild antisocial monster; the more openly she does so, the more everyone hates her. Women today don't get put in gaol for being bloody pieces of Kotex -only streetwalkers and junkies land up in gaol, gaol-and-law now being a business like any other business - they just starve to death and everyone hates them. Physical and mental murder help each other out.
The society in which I'm living is totally fucked-up. I don't know what to do. I'm just one person and I'm not very good at anything. I don't want to live in hell my whole life. If I knew how this society got so fucked-up, if we all knew, maybe we'd have a way of destroying hell. I think that's what Hawthorne thought. He set his story in the time of the first Puritans: the first people who came to the northern North American shore and created the society Hawthorne lived in, the society that created the one we live in today.
Another reason Hawthorne set his story in the past (in lies) was 'cause he couldn't say directly all the wild things he wanted to say. He was living in a society to which ideas and writing still mattered. In 'The Custom House', the introduction to
The Scarlet Letter,
Hawthorne makes sure he tells us the story of
The Scarlet Letter
occurred long ago and has nothing to do with anyone who's now living. After all, Hawthorne had to protect himself so he could keep writing. Right now I can speak as directly as I want 'cause no one gives a shit about writing and ideas, all anyone cares about is money. Even if one person in Boise, Idaho, gave half-a-shit, the only book Mr Idaho can get his hands on is a book the publishers, or rather the advertisers ('cause all businessmen are now advertisers) have decided will net half-a-million in movie and/or TV rights. A book that can be advertised. Define culture that way.
You see, things are much better nowadays than in those old dark repressed Puritan days: anybody can say anything today; progress does occur.
It's possible to hate and despise and detest yourself 'cause you've been in prison so long. It's possible to get angrier and angrier. It's possible to hate everything that isn't wild and free. A girl is wild who likes sensual things: doesn't want to give up things being alive: rolling in black fur on top of skin ice-cold water iron crinkly leaves seeing three brown branches against branches full of leaves against dark green leaves
through this the misty grey wanders in garbage on the streets up to your knees and unshaven men lying under cocaine piled on top of cocaine colours colours everything happening! one thing after another thing! . . . you keep on going, there are really no rules: it doesn't matter to you whether you live or die, but every now and then there's a kind of territory and you might get stuck; if you get stuck that's OK too if you really don't give a shit, but who doesn't give a shit! Loving everything and rolling in it like it's all gooky shit goddamnit make a living grow up no you don't want to do that.
The Massachusetts seacoast in the middle of the seventeenth century looked the same as it does now: WILD. Trees and bushes and weeds and wind and water. Trees and bushes and weeds and winds and water are always moving every moment the whole world is a totally different world air rides over shivering water so those water areas shiver harder grow darker below the water hit the sharper rocks harder splash! foam appears. And disappears.
My father told me the day after he tried to rape me that security is the most important thing in the world. I told him sex is the most important thing in the world and asked him why he didn't fuck my mother. In Hawthorne's and our materialistic society the acquisition of money is the main goal 'cause money gives the power to make change stop, to make the universe die; so everything in the materialistic society is the opposite of what it really is. Good is bad. Crime is the only possible behaviour.
Hester Prynne, Hawthorne tells us, had wanted to be a good girl. I remember I wanted to be a good girl for my father. Her loving husband sent her to the New World to prepare a way for him. Travelling in those days was dangerous - there were no roads - and her husband never showed up. Two years passed. Hester was being a good dead girl. Suddenly a little unsuspected ecstatic crazy-making overtaking wildness like a big King Viper spreading his hood, rising up and spreading overtaking everything, that's what love's like, snake-insane rose up in Hester she fucked. Pregnancy made her wildness or evil (that's the religious word for
wildness)
public. The child was the sign of her nasti-ness and disintegration and general insanity.
Hawthorne gives us a description of motherhood in the fucked-up society: All the people around Hester hate her and despise her and think she's a total freak. The kid's beyond human law and human consideration. How do you feel about yourself when every human being you hear and see and smell every day of your being thinks you're worse than garbage? Your conception of who you are has always, at least partially, depended on how the people around you behaved towards you. You sense the people around you aren't right: what you did, your need, you weren't defying them to defy them, it was your need, was
OK. You don't know. How can you know anything? How can you know anything? You begin to go crazy.
Hester's just stepping out of prison, out of prison, out of prison, but this is worse: huge staring eyes, whispers, her child laughed at, mocked, she's a woman, this isn't reality, the eyes turn around and around she can't be who she is, when suddenly she sees her long-lost husband.
This husband is now called Roger Chillingworth.
The top cops are screaming at Hester: 'You hideous woman.' 'Look at the hideous woman.' 'Who did the hideous woman fuck?' 'You're such a nice hideous woman, we know you didn't mean to do the tremendously horrible thing you did, just pretty please tell us who you fucked. We know what'll make you feel better.'
Hester's husband's a scholar. A scholar is a top cop 'cause he defines the roads by which people live so they won't get in trouble and so society will survive. A scholar is a teacher. Teachers replace living dangerous creatings with dead ideas and teach these ideas as the history and meaning of the world. Teachers torture kids. Teachers teach you intricate ways of saying one thing and doing something else.
The top cops start laughing at and mocking Hester and telling the crowd to laugh at and mock Hester 'cause she won't tell them who her baby's father is. Hester's acting out of love.
This husband, being a teacher, is a zombie and a ghoul. He sees his wife being tortured by lots of people, he sees his wife in pain in agony, he sees his wife nursing a strange kid, and he doesn't feel anything. He just wonders, intellectually wonders, who the kid's father is.
A final scene focuses this swirling horror. The young handsome Reverend who everyone thinks is gentle, honest, and kind takes up the spreading mockery and hatred and vomiting and says to Hester: 'You are the worst piece of trash-cunt whoever lived, no one will ever ever love you, there will be no more love in your life because, mainly because, you won't tell us who your bastard's father is.' Hester can't reply 'cause the guy who's screaming at her is the guy who fucked her. How can HE scream at her? All that she has left of the world: her memories disappear. Do you understand what reality is? She begins to go crazy
Boppy doppy doopy wah yahyah mm. Is that what you think craziness is? Are you scared you're going crazy? Do people who go crazy freak you? Look sweetheart.
I woke up in my attic that the winds swept through and all the world was grey and black. I saw pine trees covering the grey sky and sea, tall trees, boats, tall trees, boats.
I walked along a highway. I was looking for a place to sit down, for some grass I could walk in, for a wood I could explore. I walked for
hours. All the land on both sides of the highway, cultivated and wild, was private. I had to keep walking on the highway. I thought that people today when they move move only by car, train, boat, or plane and so move only on roads. They perceive only the roads, the map, the prison. I think it's becoming harder to get off the roads.
I live on a desert island. It's a nice desert island. I like it here. This is what I do: I eat; I sleep; when it rains and gets cold, I hide under some rocks. I like it here. But I'm getting bored . . . What can I do? I can repeat what I see. I can draw this old grey trunk lying flat across a valley of sand. I can draw the rotten trunk and make it look different. People got cures for polio and syphilis by imagining. People have and can change the world. In the beginning, on the desert island, the world was totally beautiful. Today in my room in New York City the world is horrible and disgusting. What the hell happened?
I don't want to be a slave, I don't want to be a whore, I don't want to be lonely and without love for the rest of my long life. I've got to find out how I got so fucked up.
Hester and her husband are sitting, after the torture, in her prison cell. Her husband has come inside to make her well again. He's a doctor.
'Fucking's the most wonderful thing in the world.' Hester is crazy.
'I want to fuck you right now,' her husband replies.
'Ugh. I wouldn't fuck you if you were the last man on earth. You make me sick to my stomach.'
A slight grimace crosses his face, but he manages to suppress it. 'Remember when we used to fuck? By the fireside in Amsterdam.' Tears appear in his thin eyes. 'You'd lay your head on my lap and we'd look into the fire.'
Hester's thinking the most wonderful thing in the world is to fuck a man you love. God she wishes she had it right now. Loving a man and being right next to him: naked against him naked there's no need to talk: naked wet warm his face his skin naked wet warm his thick lips glazed eyes you're on top of him naked wet warm never let you go the peace of the world never never never.
'I'm the guilty one,' the husband says. 'If I hadn't sent you alone to America, you never would've done this horrible inhuman thing.'
'Oh, I'm the guilty one.'
'I hate you now. I don't even hate you. I just want nothing to do with you. You're not to reveal that you have ever known me or had anything to do with me. Whatever love and affection occurred between us is now dead. We're dead people.'