and the standing man opened his generous heart he truly did to the browncoat’s advice and the other nineteen or twenty men were clapping and the men in the adjacent cells were looking up and their ears pricked up in interest and the policemen and the guards who had come to bring the detainees their warm meals had borne witness to the entire exchange between the standing man and the browncoat and clapped also dropping the metal plates of soup and gammon and from the exchange with the browncoat the standing man stood taller and breathed deeper and thought purer and the standing man gazed upon the policemen and the policemen opened the cell tho’ none had locked it and the other cells open also and the standing man and the nineteen or twenty men and the other prisoners and the policemen all walked out of the local and they walked out of the police station and the brownback did not see it but quite possibly the bored men who owned desks too had walked with the standing man who walked above the others and later on as the browncoat awoke from his sleep in his vacant cell he thought he heard the standing man speak to the people outside the police station and from what was discernible to the browncoat it was the standing man’s generosity to spare his listener the embarrassment of believing himself cleverer than the speaker and it was mourning or it appeared to be mourning and the browncoat left the station through the back exit and he languished on his first pages awhile but beginnings were never any fun and the best way to work a page to work up or down a page, as its writer or not, is of course to tear it out and burn it and watch it darken the flames, and such at least would have been the advice extended by the standing man. but in the end crowds and plurals were not much to the browncoat’s liking for coition is after all only an inadequate surrogate for onanism no not orgies either and certainly too much agreement and synchronised nodding had been known to exert an impolitely dyspeptic effect on the browncoat’s imaginative faculties so he walked off in the away flushes of the noise and he looked up and poured young cement around all the stars in the net of his gaze yet it was only mourning and he thought of how in the standing man and his believers the pure unreflexive act of their forceful indicatives is violation projected on to the starry sky above and at this the brownback laughed at least he almost laughed but stopped in time and this time walked off from the intoxicated reach of the noise and into the amused distance.
i never say hello. i refused to. i find greeting others demeaning and can't explain why. my name is darling bahgerlaas and i'm a 35 year old sales clerk at waitrose. i pre-emptively strike the suggestion that you abstain from pitying, judging or empathising with me. i strike it to the face.
i have many things to say to you throughout these next pages, though i myself failed to find any of the events or thoughts contained therein either interesting or relevant. i will come to explain my obsession with the interesting in due time. i say these things to you, i say these things to you now not because i particularly want to but because they are already printed out and inevitably accessible to you and at will you can read them and my saying them to you at this point
depends not on me but on your willingness to pursue the course of things in this book. but just now i shall dispense with these introductory formalities, for they irk me and hopefully you as well.
before i go on to abandon you to the book proper, i wish to extend a friendly salvific hand to the few readers i expect this book may scavenge in the bookshops, like a vagabond may rescue moderately usable junk purloined from the city dump. if these readers be anything akin to how i envision them, they will think themselves pathetic for displaying at any time any interest or emotional involvement in the story, the fate of the characters or their spiritual and psychological states of turmoil. turn oil, turn to the oil. if they do manifest such preoccupations it will probably be
despite themselves. i will therefore attenuate the decibels of their inner 'you sad fucking lame cunt' (note the lack of an exclamation mark – i never use exclamation marks. i find them unbecoming) by informing them right now that i am the main character and the endodiegetic narrator, that i begin this book as an ultra-ratiocinating overeducated loser eking out a sad pathetic living in a sad pathetic chain store in a sad pathetic suburb of sad pathetic london, that i end it in much the same state and that i proceed to detach myself across this book's expanse from the few personal and societal connections left me (these connections too are sad and pathetic). in terms of narrative, [provides cruel, short summary of entire book, wherein nothing much happens anyway]. and that would be about it. and the old woman dies. that's all that happens in the following pages.
the reader
now knows everything about the book plotwise, and can see there is not much to know anyway: i should like to be believed when i tell the reader that nothing really happens at all in this book.
these have still the being of introductory formalities. i am annoyed.
and hopefully you also.
i am now satisfied that i have nothing else to say to the reader directly and can let him kick down my sand fortress and build his own raincastle. i in fact, i would find it amusing if the reader would pretend to be in on the joke by crossing out any passages that elicit within him a desire to do so and would write in alternative takes or curse words unframed by civil dialogue or the day's weather and insipid comments and blather about the day's weather or anything at all. i venture to speculate that the resultant book should be much improved æsthetically and would make what i myself wrote down look like a timid and hamfisted first draft [not that this my effortless book isn't a timid and hamfisted first draft anyway].
i didn't really write anything anyway. i just jotted down some cerebral coprolites, that would be all. and i certainly won't be coming back to reread my uninspired graffiti or edit them or place them critically within the scope of my life and œuvre [i have none of either life or œuvre, if or in case you were being curious] and remark how i've matured since or how those were the best of times, how those were the worst of times. i am saying this book is nothing. and was meant to be taken as such. not that i mean, ever.
i thought at first to alienate the reader from this book by adopting for its entirety a voice similar to that of the first of the two peter stillman characters in the ny trilogy. perhaps there were more than two peter stillmans but im referring only to those that had speaking parts, so to speak. haha sometimes when i speak i am so funny.
however, this would have excised a significant part of the sophisticated vocabulary i planned to employ in this book, and since my vocabulary is one of the few things i occasionally exhibit anything resembling pride towards i dropped this idea for this book i had not yet written when i was having this idea. brechtian absolute (textual) nudity was another alternative, though it would have been harder to employ as this is a prosaic text and not theatre or film; im certain an interesting brechtian novel could be written (and probably has been already) but im not a good writer anyway so i couldnt brave it. the last option i considered for the purpose of alienating my hopefully alienation-pre-saturated readers was joycean clamour to the tune of god's deathscreams but i didnt feel like fertilising a finnegans wake pastiche. this is why i settled on writing down the book in my own personal voice, for worse or for worse, and ruining.vacuuming up whatsoever romantic bookish stardust may have settled onto the readers creaky brain by boring him to death and revealing everything about the book and myself who wrote it down before the book even startled. that way i wouldnt have to stretch a kidney acting my lungs dry without letting the reader grow soft-comfortable in this book i wrote down.
i change my voice very often. one second i shall speak like an english barrister (within five seconds i will say english barristers are worser than retards, haha i am funny.) and the next year i talk like im retarded and then i get worse and go back to the english barrister accordingly. of mine own accord. this is your knowledge now. to your knowledge, i mean. my voice is inconsistent and i hope it breaks someday. i should love ever so much to put it back together again and glue it back together again.
hopefully my reader understands this and he was patient with me for i am a dear dear boygirl. haha i am just being silly. i am not insane i am just playing with something i do not understand.
i always say him when i say reader because no woman in his right mind would read this book. no woman would read this book in his right mind.
or left mind. or any mind.or no mind at all. no woman would read this book i wrote down. no woman could. no woman could, can or will can.
had you forgotten (the case of if), it is useful for me to know i'm a 35 year old sales
clerk at waitrose. useful for me and for me and for me. me+me+me= you.
i learned that in economics 101. darling baagerlahs sounds like a male name (of vaguely german or polish import – i use the brackets because this information is not axial to this book or the rest of this sentence i am in the writing of) but i do not know sometimes. again, i'm a 35 year old sales clerk at waitrose.no im not. i'm a 27 year old student at ucl. or the college of bard. i am short and i'm hirsute. i like cowboy and mafia films. i play video games and dislike my
cellphone. i go to musicals and cry at weddings. i do not like buying clothes but i shave my legs and my anus. i'm a 28 year old student at ucl and/or bard. but i'd prefer being a 35 year old sales clerk at waitrose. i shop at waitrose sometimes. from there i buy some things. i would like also to be a janitor. better than being a student. even if i were just a short and hirsute janitor. when i said i was the narrator and this book i wrote i wrote in my own personal voice i meant it was written in the third person singular [i dislike plurals and avoid them wherever anatomically feasible.which is why i am a virgin and bad at grammar]. i hope the narrator's third person voice is as cold and not-with-the-speechobjects as kafka.
kafka was a pervert (relative to his times) and you know this.
i am done talking and writing down in this book (the prebook, the prepuce of prepuscular proportions you may be reading now) the thoughts i am having after-outside
the thoughts i wrote down when i wrote the book proper. my proper book. i speak of the book left after this page right here.
someone outside my uncomfortable window is deflating a bouncy castle.
it is a purple bouncy castle and it is very loud. the deflation is very lond and loug and the people deflating the purple bouncy castle are very also lond and loug. i will now jump down from my fourth storey window to yell at them rude words. goodbye.
and he cant read through the music and he saw the baker whose daughter had died of consumption and the landlady whose brother had died in an early skirmish with the turks and the amateur composer whose wife had died in siberia after proclaiming dubious politics in suspect articles in questionable journals and they all rejoiced and the baked and the landed and the composed danced with their arms entwined and their room spun and he hurt in their ears and he tried a story below them to contain their jubilation in a spilt drop of ink but in the end the writer is not even allowed to live in his writing and the spiller cannot hide in his spill though it be dark as a murder and the man of the east cannot take partygoers or any other revellers seriously he feels they are actively missing the point the apical engorged point for want of imagination no less a wilted ostentation than that and their joy no rather the contentedness of reasonably happy reasonably fucked up people is a refusal of interpretation and their reasonable affable practicality combed as it is in pink utiles the yoke and the mute of fat pink flesh their practicality is a closing of the eye and from the primacy of practical reason it was always only a step to an hatred of theory and in a culture as theirs there is a bale on storytelling and a quiver in the obstinacy for resolution the skulk and the hiding from the unkindness that read down atop the tablets the husk reared on the stone of the tablets and its descent into the inevitables of the mind its murmuration into the ears of the cry of possibility the leap of understanding that all is not to their pride reason was not a monologic absolute there was always a mouth speaking reason and that mouth was the leash and the truth of reason was in its speaker in his mouth he has an amazing mouth in his gaze in his electric and in the ascension there are no ideas in themselves and in the descent an idea is always somebodys
idea and the clutching of the neck of the reasonspeaker and the cowardice overflying the creak and the sloth of the ideationist there was a family of suffering in their immanency and mouths can be stuffed and bodies can be brought into the crash and the bloat of flesh behind reason and the bouquet of larval flesh behind ideas its richness and implausibility these their temporal drift and the intrusion of their decay flesh can be stopped ideas are not immortal merely persistent they are ugly creatures insinuating themselves under the skin and theirs a venereal kindle and their call of ideas their song unsmotherable in flesh untrampled in lamentation unanswerable in kind ideas cannot be reasoned with the flesh of men their barren bed and from fleshs death reason draws light feeding on its godgiven flesh even as it dies symbiotically with its prey or rather male man mating with their praying mantis the history of ideas littered with signposts of phosphorescent cadavers and so because of death because death is metaphysics circulus vitiosus circulus otiosus fleshs search for truth mans search outside the clamour of reason and its strangled parliaments is a spiritual quest of no finality no aspiration to end no not merely intellectual the quest for truth truth was infinite the intellect was not and flesh could only grasp specks of it reflections in the spectral ice liquefied of broken mirrors and aliquiss flesh always longed for times when truth was not so far not enshrined in its own transcendence in childhood yes childhood and a word from the father a word from the mother sufficed to place a lid on the fleshs universe and with the names of objects flesh was given their truth and as the flesh grows and races the father dies away runs off into the crepitation of a dark hallway and can impart no more no nothing merely the viscidity of mumbles down his beard and truth is not given any longer and flesh seeks a truthgiver and god of course is the terminal surrogate father but one who also is capable of abandonment gods abandonment of truth and the flesh seeks truth yearns for its warmth and its light even if it must burn its own brand to ignite the truth and in russia the truth of russia was togetherness was love of hearth and family or so the flesh was incessantly told and he was told that god gave one family peoples so that one could through them learn how to love and such were the mythic origins of family and in them the origins of truth and all this all so distant was simply imprinted into the browncoats flesh and his struggles and his myopia in the bright rooms of his childhood where he was taught greek and testament and mental hygiene but of course even then before or perhaps after thought itself had become hygiene he knew he riddled that the brightest rooms are the secret domains of fæces and the dances above him were unbearable and he left his room and took to the street and two minutes in the browncoat saw an overturned hackney-carriage and there were four people inside and they had not been able to revert to verticality for lack of space and their heads still pointed downwards and their feet fought against the floor which was now roof and their bodies writhed diagonally and they were trying to get out but the doors were stuck and whenever the passengers put their hands out through the small windows to try to unlock the doors from without the driver who was perched atop the bottom of the carriage now serving as its roof and whenever the driver saw an hand snaking out of the windows he would snap at the hand with his whip as hard as he could and he appeared never to miss and the hand would be forced to withdraw and another hand would try again on the other side and sometimes hands were put out on both sides of the carriage so as to divide and lessen the drivers attention but his instincts were swift and his execution impeccable and the passengers were screaming and pushing and kicking against each other like dogs of war caged before a conflict with enemies riding elephants and there was no room inside and the men became stuck in the womens elaborate dresses not fit for such travel mens greasy feet upward their tired cunts and they all needed to get out and even when all four passengers let all their hands their hands already marked corroded and dripping skin and sacrificed inflame their hands point outward at the same time they did not manage to progress at all in the unlocking of the faulty doors for the driver was restless and the blades of his whip everywhere and the hands retreated in instinct but the driver never missed and the browncoat would have liked to watch this awhile but unfortunately the two horses who were being crushed as well under the hold-back and in a torturous position they were bleating their gleaming impertinent suffering into the street also and the blare aged intolerable and the browncoat left the street and he had heard recently abducted neighbours discuss a new american fair spiked onto the outskirts of moscow and since he never had any ideas he drifted into the carnival and entered the funhouse and behind him at the entrance a clown in poor makeup was playing of course his violin and the two sets of chords violin and fiddle immixed hungrily like a couple of essentially straight young women magnetized into mutual exploration and of course someone slammed the door behind him and there was but little light inside the funhouse tunnel most of it greedily farmed by the subitaneous dark through the cracks in the thin wooden walls the outside crashing against the thinnest of walls and foaming off again and then as the browncoat walked on he walked and recoiled into a chandelier a low-hanging grand chandelier of rusty axes and mausers and leeenfields and the wooden handles of the axes and the muzzles of the mausers were alight and the browncoat could see that this was a much fatter room than the slides he had passed through to get here and the walls did not look thin and rickety and uncombative as before and despite the light from the chandelier he could not see or remember whence he had come which entrance tunnel nor could he see where he could proceed how he could move forward so the browncoat circles the room and tested the walls and it was not such a large room the circumference was only ten seconds long but he kept missing the connecting tunnels there appeared to be no connecting tunnels and then the brownback tired of walking and sat down under the chandelier and the axe blades rustled and silvered against each other and they sang like a womans voice he was thinking he heard it like a song of escape and opening and the womans song soon perished as did the rustling and brownback thought woman after all is a sometime thing but such a slave of limits of reasonable restricting rules of collaborative social and moral intelligence and perpetuator of denial the murder of self selfhood to serfdom and he the browncoat would sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires but that of course was only an hypothetical he had never had a desire in his conscious life nothing beyond satisfying the amoral physical necessities food air drink masturbation and neither man nor woman had been inside his desire and such as he was desireless he was an inhabitant of the empyrean of sorts not polluted by the convolutions of desire of the psyche a clean expanse before the unconscious and before the moral but of course man had been there may have been there in the prior many have speculated of eden and its philosophy and the fall of course was caused by eve copulating with the serpent for such was womans blood even in the starkest numinous vapidity (of perfection) she could find hope dig and claw the interesting out of the tedium an archæologist of the entrenched platitude such was woman at her best but after her finest moment she seemed to shrink grew small under her own psychoses and madame for the most played no more and acquired rather expertise at refereeing away from the game and referees are abominated by one and all and as the game changed neither did woman and christ himself the fattest elephant sideways took much after his mother and in so far he was one of the worst of men and outside drowning in a roman well archæologists always risk dying moles dying as moles and even so woman and mankind for all their cracked old skin were metaphysical creatures illegible pathic instances of specious apologetics serpent reasonings scuppered theodicies but so prevalent the fatty layers in the human the browncoat could not stop thinking him the human in his the browncoats dark under the chandelier and loath as he was for most introversion the browncoat intuited that his real loathing and his the browncoats real fear is of anything in the plural but insight was cheap and mass reproducible and the browncoat could track no plurality no windy multitudes in his aloneness and solitude was insomnia not the brooding adult insomnia of bike rides across the province but the babys nauseous insomnia the methodical rational trituration of others sleep and of others dare he he dare selfhood through shaking and making the dark ones toy and solitude and the plurals only lesson he the browncoat had ever drawn from plurals was the mathematically fixated il faut être économe de son mépris étant donné le grand nombre des nécessiteux and the browncoat tracked the dust of the ground with his finger and found many small rocks and he thought rocks were good solid things to have in situations such as his and consequently filled his pockets with them and when all his pockets were reasonably full he picked up the last rock he could find around him without having to relinquish his seating stance to crawl around and look for more rocks under the chandelier and the browncoat threw this last his 37th rock into the air and it turned into a bird a real bird of wings and claw and flew away and flew straight into the chandelier of axes and died hacked to death by its own impetus and the fierce quality of the rocks suicide forced itself on the browncoat like closed mouth vomit one has to swallow again for ones inordinate fear of making a mess below downwards where only cowards gaze no eyes below and he remembered that pleasant fulfilled dreams and thoughts of uncastrated loft are actually as rare as happy music music of the very real and endless sheets flowing white and needless every inch a slave and were the lost feathers floating down on him and sticking to his lips in the vacillating cohesion of newly drawn blood were these feathers art had he made art by investing the room with death for after all every work of art is an uncommitted crime a blushing crime that preserves not him the artist but mens impossibilities and was art so very different from his isolation from the crushing of him by the funhouse asserting itself as a painter in need of fresh pigments dried of the ground browncoat and in the last couplet always the downfall of art itself is perennial the goal of every work of art in that it seeks to bring death to all others all art aims to end art and in it such bastardy such agitation and game mastery all to stifle competing lines to extinguish the unknown running fathers runaway seed in all but one riverbed surviving art killer of marlowe is heir to a mongrel bitch but at this time of aberration the browncoats powers were crescent and he knew so and in his mumbles quiescent language was dictated by hunger for the silent chew their words to fill their bellies many infinite taxonomies for hunger and the browncoat looked upon the blind chandelier and the ostentatious arrogant walls and he remembered of course that [the] night was his idea and he walked on into the next tunnel out of the enclosed room but as soon as the cell of the chandelier had reached behind him the browncoat looked back and moved uneasily and he did not quite wish to go where his will was dull demiurge he shifted like an emperors young new power-drinking kidney suffering with a crush of ostalgie over its ancient alcoholic dung-farmer master but such was the nature of his prolix indulgence in fine whines they kept him rooted in the particular but afforded him voyeuristic peeks at the general for there is but negative thought satiation was weakness most positive thought is expired ideology and the distance of thought from reality is itself nothing other than the precipitate of history of deaths lineage into concepts but then the browncoat stopped and heard and he was in a thin loose tunnel again and on the other side of the wall outside there was a map of the fayre with large colorful symbols on it pinned to the funhouse wall and an elderly woman was consulting it in the slow blurring of a splintered bores concentration and he the browncoat still locked inside the funhouse on the other side of the map threw his hand out and waved it about quickly and he so slapped that futile cunt on the hand through the wall and made her lose track of where she her finger had been on the map and the elderly woman went away and he was left alone with the map on the other side of the wall and the map was probably wrong anyway and the browncoat moved on muttering that the best samaritans name was simon and that walk no further that way sodomy lies or perhaps happiness either way turn around and so he did but he could not go back since back would somersault him in limber taunts whenever he turned to go back and point the nether way and he knew not the way and he thought he could solve the antinomy of going back on himself simply by walking backwards without turning around first and he did this awhile but nothing came of it nothing much for the slide tunnels did not end and the browncoat resigned his person to the forward movement forward was arbitrary what did he know regardless slashing the air and possibly the dark in two with his clutched face walking his hazy drip