The Brooke-Rose Omnibus (75 page)

She is not like Larissa at all or Ruth or Saroja Chaitwantee. Shot 7 Larissa watches, bored, the imperceptible shrug of scorn functioning like the bar between signifier and signified for ever eluded played out elsewhere yet ineluctably played out right here in the beginning as a parting shot

8. Close-up of Christopher Masters unmasterful long-haired but thin on top frail slight cowed in a winged armchair and pulling at his earlobe. This shot to be cut in at various points in the sequence. Shot 9. Another man, the host, filling glasses, handsome, silver at the temples, a professor perhaps or a publisher. Shot 10. His wife archavid out of Who’s Afraid, watching Shot 11 et seq but seriously do you? I do. When I was a little girl with rapid eye movements (dialogue can be easily improvised out of seduction clichés and mystical maxims such as there is no fear in love in order to find your true Self the lower self must die which the recipient in the present instance is clearly meant to translate as O felix culpa in the presence of the divine I say O in the mountains which means O felix culpa etc). As they speak Armel uttering the maxims Shot 12 with a devouring yes-tell-me expression that lights his voice and eyes into what is your sign? No don’t tell me, Gemini Shot 13 but how did you know (R.E.M.’s) I guessed (Shot 14 continues with R.E.M.’s and illustration) from your gestures hands eyes ways of talking you’re very interested in art aren’t you? Why yes I work with art publishers I’ve always loved art even as a little girl (R.E.M.’s) so it must be true then. Can you interpret dreams too? I had such a strange dream last night I was in a huge tiled room on the edge of a small swimming pool and out of the pool there was an arm sticking out (rappel: shot 8) and I was trying to pull it out but it wouldn’t come. And suddenly it did and I become a sort of bird, flying around the room unable to get out. What does it mean Armel? Puzzlement all round the publisher’s wife archavid out of Who’s Afraid of Sigmund Freud. It’s a very poetic dream Veronica you have a poetic soul the arm is Excalibur and the bird the eternal spirit you see she sees and rapid eye moves.

So that is what went wrong, plunging into the dimension of banality. But no. Shot 26 Larissa purses an oddly prim mouth and shrugs, separating signified from signifier as God the lower from the upper waters or Freud the latent from the manifest, and within earshotful of sirensong a shot, a mere assassination or tearing off of orphic limbs as declencher of world conflict that has been long preparing out of archaic flaws in the dialectic of change, raising antinomies by action that surpasses the subjective idea, is the parting shot, rendering it objective, here on the ocean edge by the fireside, in an elegant trouser-suit sea-green with deep cleavage revealing apple-breasts laced in foam emerging like a trace in the memory and beckoning, naked, sprayed with the froth of stars and the existence of God as a seduction gambit in words Fiat Deus and there was love, each creating the other as Chronos created the phallus-girl cut from Uranos approaching the earth’s open legs and tossed into the sea so that man realises retrospectively that he has accomplished more than he desired and worked at something infinitely beyond him like love out of revenge for the death of love.

Man advances staggering through regressions. Says Larissa (Shot 42).

The other eyes reflect nothing, and when the shoulders move back to the correct position in the armchair the image vanishes. In any case God as signifier is non-specularisable and cannot see himself signified except by a hidden representation of a representation. You should read Lacan.

This is Larissa’s parting shot in the battle of books versus God as conversation gambits hiding the representation of another battle from which she withdraws into tacitactic defeat, back into the back of her creator’s mind where she talks to her publisher, waiting strategically to re-emerge one day, fully armed, after a Trojan disc-horse war, content merely to send Hermes the swift-footed to Calypso’s island or to appear disguised as Mentor on the lone sea-shore.

Neil Alder

 

Meanwhile.

Her creator works on the idyll.

Which is always a mise-an-abîme even though it occurs on the crests of amorous euphoria

slipping into another timetable through an open mouth full of stars art history and the existence of God in her open convertible (Larissa having insisted on not sharing the car with the ghost of an icon) and away in oleander on hills, the great St Gabriel range behind them overlooking the downward terraces trucked out in layers for low-roofed dead suburban villas and the bridge to the clapboard shacks and Mexican white houses of cracked stucco under a forest of aerials and beyond that the metropolitan sprawl that is eating up the plain, the ranch-lands, the orange-groves, spreading north and south in a death-crawl from which it is dying of the greed that made it and beyond that the bay out of which she came and the distant cliffs of Palos Verdes. Away above the chaparral of a canyon and into the desert where the air is hot but gentle on your skin, hungering between the accolades of breasts and hipbones each pointing to a mouth that grips the senses and old idyllic sentences such as your eyes are a bucolic entertainment your voice that of a shepherdess singing in green pastures your scent of musk and
fruit your thighs those of the Syracuse Venus under eyes devouring the inverted accolade that points down again into one word zero.

Peter Brandt

 

And I shall teach you another alphabet with which it is impossible to write anything except love and laughter ‘Ay for ‘orses Beef or Mutton See for yourself. Devolution Evolution Effervesce into peals of mirth. It works all the way from alpha to omega into which you plunge with a spirit-loaded pen floating up every nineteen minutes or so for slowed down eye-movements under electroded lids and a shared Elf of gnome Emphasis Envelope O for the Wings of a Dove. O for a beaker full of the warm south tasting of Flora and the country green. Not Flora, me. Yes, you, V for le roi E for lution R for eedom is a noble thing O for the wings N for lope I for Novello C for yourself A for ‘orses. And I shall spell you in the stars A for Andromeda R for what there’s no R. Let’s say R for Aries. Why R for the Ram! M for Mercury E for I don’t know oh yes Earth we’re a planet anyway. You’re mixing stars and planets galaxies and constellations who cares L for Leo and Love. V for Venus and Vega E for Earth R for the Ram O for Orion N for er nebula I for what, I for Icarus a falling star? C for Centaurus Coma Capricorn Cygnus goodness what a lot of C’s why don’t astronomers distribute the stars better and finally A for Aquarius. I shall spell you into the sentence I speak into the paragraph into which I insert my you the sentence I speak. Thus you spell her to your image out of the stars and when the Pleiades come down to rest sow thou thy seed the I subsumed in the dialectic of desire yet growing big with adoration for a hero must have adoration out of which you form her to your image of an iotaboo like the existence of goddesses naked under elegant trouser-suit sea-green and laced with foam cut by time out of sky in coitus interruptus with earth’s sacred belly and dropped into the ocean as a phallus-girl no one fantasy coinciding in exactly the same curve of time never quite meeting other curves along the canyoned thorax like a bladed rib kept back or withdrawn once long ago into a creature made to man’s desire but somewhere along the sequence slipped out of his optical illusion to become a person in her own right wrong. Was it awful?

Yes. Was it nice?

O for the bathetic phallusy of words that fear to explode into the other place at a mere touch since in every idyll there opens out another idyll, lost, as a vast mouth opens, never naming the secret chiasmus the signifying substance which once upon a spacetime is accidented as the idyll of Armel and Larissa poem not couple.

Hmmm. That’s interesting Julia, you’ve used the given elements very well and introduced new ones. Where did you learn that alphabet?

Oh in London, as a child. It’s an old thing, my mother taught it me. You can tell it’s English and old on account of A for ’orses and Ivor Novello. I couldn’t think of a more modern Ivor except Ivor Winters and that seemed a bit too specialised.

Well considering you quote Hesiod via Pound and we’ve used almost everything from Phaedrus to Freud you shouldn’t worry. After all it’s our text, isn’t it, for us only. I see what you mean though. How about ivory coast?

Gee yes, that’s much better, with the sea symbolism and all.

I see you change the referent of the you at the end. Do I take it she’s imagining the whole thing?

Could be, or passing from one to the other it doesn’t really matter. He’s gone off for a weekend you see and I wanted the shock of ordinary language in a conjugal state of tension at the end.

I see. Well, what do the others think? Shall we discuss how to proceed or do we have more to say on Julia’s piece?

Well actually I worked with Salvatore, not with him I mean but we divided the sequence and I told him where I’d leave off and he’s gone on from there.

Fine. Well Salvatore we’re all agog.

Ahem. Julia’s going to read Larissa as I’ve done the beginning all in dialogue and it’ll be clearer. Okay Julie?

You know these weekends are always awful. There’s the ridiculous aspect, you trotting off with your little suitcase or like this time shouting for your clean pajamas which I’d put in the machine with the others by mistake then of course going off without (laughter, smirk from Salvatore) and returning asking was it awful. But there’s also the degradation.

Oh don’t start

But I want to understand. Why? You’ve always insisted on a rigid structure, no invasions from outside, we were a poem not a couple, no criss-crossing social foursomes with wife-exchange and the usual hypocrisies.

Well I’ve CHANGED.

Don’t shout. Yes you have. But into what?

I don’t know. I’m in a crisis help me instead of going for me.

Oh it’s not the thing in itself that’s banal enough it’s the contradiction, the principle being that you don’t follow the principle

Shut up you bitch you castrating bitch.

So that’s where we’ve got to.

I can’t stand this pressure, from both sides, all this drama why the hell can’t women accept their respective positions the mistress wants to be a wife and the wife a mistress oh don’t start crying again for God’s sake.

You always said

always said always said well I don’t say now

that I didn’t love you, because I, didn’t, feel jealousy whereas, you, did. Well you’ve succeeded, now, if that’s, what you, wanted.

Lara stop this.

But why, Armel? You’ve said yourself you don’t want to marry her, or live with her, and it’s only, an obsesssion

Well you’ve had obsessions too.

Yes but they never went, that far, and you made me pay my God you did, and I always stopped, when I saw, you were hurt, so I suffered both, the detach, ment and your, punishment, you’d go off for, days, and nights, whereas

Please stop this hysterical rewriting of history.

But what do you want?

Ah! che vuoi? You made me read whatshisname, go and look at that skull-like diagram of his with che vuoi, a diagram of psychosis as you should know.