The Brooke-Rose Omnibus (66 page)

Jacques
. –C’est qu’ils ressemblent si peu, que, si par hasard on vient à recontrer les originaux, on ne les reconnait pas. Racontez-moi les faits, rendez-moi fidèlement les propos, et je saurai à quel homme j’ai affaire.**

(Portrait of the portrait by Jaques le Fataliste)

Oh the moving finger points and having pointed itself out moves on, will not stay for an answer, tetrapod biped or tripod, two and a stick, a fang for an eye a foot in it for an unintentional phallusy but an intentional literality: gently dip but not too deep: you dip me I dip you I I sir you dip us. So that today we shall make a comparative analysis, taking these two famous classics, of the art of digression. Those of you who attend (or even analyse) General Assemblies and Faculty Meetings may well have concluded that it is not an art but a chaos. It is, however, a very subtly planned chaos, it has the odd, beautiful coherence of a neurosis. A pseudo-problem is raised, to which a false solution is found, thus creating (by design) another pseudo-problem. Neurosis has the cunning of stupidity, and stupidity is a dimension anyone can fall into, however intelligent, indeed, part of the intellect can rise suspended and watch, helpless and in pain, the misuse of its own projected trajectory struggling alone, as if cut off from itself, in a delirious discourse not its brother’s keeper.

These things do matter despite psychic invisibilty or because of in a text like the world or the human body that merely engenders

itself in

to

writing – for the foot men who say 

O in the mountain break fast tonguetables (thou shalt

eat thy prisoner) for a feted calf 

 

so poor Midas and other goldicondeologists prisoners of

well-planned desires for their own excrement obscurely alimenting them while nevertheless consuming them up regardless.

So more

or

less

literally

It has all been dreamt up by the trait-or markster of the comment, the tale-bearer as eiron-monger hatching against his homo-logos a plot from fear of trans fer ring a handful of

 

water for one thing nor wring its neck. Nor would he have four eyes neither in retrospeculation nor even in any kind of retrodiscourse as Armel might have and naturally does the moment they are uttered as possibilities epithets you mean no: sapphires or crysoprases staring tetracyclops from bare brow.

Clearly Veronica is in

love – true icon –       

who does not therefore exist

as Larissa does

(so?)

?

Who

has however an iconic nose

and eyes like Isis or even maybe Ra

                         
Jacques.
– O

the day (or night)

is green

she plays upon a blue guitar

she does not play things as they are

hearing in the air messages un

emitted unadmitted mean

ingventing your desire with La belle si tu voulais (bis)

Nous dormirions ensemble o-la (bis)

and answering it unspoken with

No vale la pena el llanto or l’amor è un

altalena or love is just a four-letter word and

more: love is a bore, a soap op

era a telephone that doesn’t ring

in many languages from Lucan to Lacan

she fills the air as well with

syntagmatic silence – from Phaedrus to Freud

Homer to Husserl and Locke to the Li Ki

effortlessly displacing notions with a diachronic chord.

          
Jacques.
– ee!

      Things as they are

are changed upon the blue guitar

namely

It is more difficult for a phallus-man to enter the I of a woman than for the treasurer of signifiers to enter the paradiso terrestre.

          
Jacques.
– ah.

Ah indeed. Larissa talks like that. The pathetic fallacy may be used to fill the hermeneutic gap. Or in the dialectic of desire, the subject is subverted and the object is from the start an object of central loss.

Jacques.
–Eh bien! monsieur, qu’avais-je besion du portrait que vous m’avez fait de cette femme?

Ne saurais-je pas à present tout ce que vous en avez dit?

Ecco! In any case the mistress of the moment should be changed, and no doubt will be in another moment though per haps she could meanwhile be called, Ruth, for mixed reasons of phonemic contiguity.

Jacques.
– eh?

The Master
.
– work it out for yourself it’s not very deep.

So that now we have at last returned to the subject of discourse, while still of the moment before being thru and hurt (oo!) but who is we to dip royally no collectively into an age-old narrative matrix before we gouge out the I in order carefully to gauge its liquid essence? The namers of things the silent obsessional re-emitters of words who will therefore have their mouths removed the spinners of texts that can engender only text such as the cold street juggling no hoops in no retrovizor and the sudden isolation of almost not wanting anything now standing in the wide street recumbent under great curved beams of pale light equispaced but staggered each to the other laterally, the quarter arches never meeting even on an imagined curve except quite distantly along the can yon of tall blocks all asleep all dreaming along the boulevard as they diminish in size quite distantly asleep whereas you standing out there in the cold street come along, did you hear? I bet you don’t know what I said I said you never tell me your dreams.

I don’t have any to tell.

Of course you do they’ve proved it.

Who have?

Every ninety minutes of the night why didn’t you know well fancy me teaching you something every one knows that, for a quarter of an hour you come up from deep level sleep and dream with electrodes no what are they called well yes electrodes I guess or something on the eyelids recording the movements up down and sideways called Rapid Eye Movements gee it’s just like television you just don’t remember honey and you need it like food and drink and sex too they’re called R.E.M.’s.

Not every ninety minutes then.

Oh yes you do they tried depriving them of their dreams waking them up you see when those rapid eye movements begin so then they compensated and dreamt twice as much and if they deprived them like that for fifteen days they got to the borders of schizophrenia.

Were they allowed in?

Er well I guess I just fill the air for you oh I said that earlier.

 

 

Cut

A diagram could

No doubt be drawn

You see

Oh

No.

 

Mars and Venus copulating under the net, the third day with the sixth day, though it could also be Wodinsday with Moonsday or or Thorsday with Freyasday but never on a Sunday or anyone of these juxtaposed with any non-contiguous other from the point of view of any one teacher or student for that matter with varying performance in each system country continent classroom of each institution of learning.