The city forms — often physically, but inevitably psychically — a circle. A
Game. A ring of death with sex at its center. Drive towards outskirts
of city suburbs. At the edge discover zones of sophisticated vice and boredom,
child prostitution. But in the grimy ring immediately surrounding the daylight
business district exists the only real crowd life of our mound, the only street
life, night life. Diseased specimens in dollar hotels, low boarding houses, bars,
pawn shops, burlesques and brothels, in dying arcades which never die, in
streets and streets of all-night cinemas.
When play dies it becomes the Game.
When sex dies it becomes Climax.
All games contain the idea of death.
Baths, bars, the indoor pool. Our injured leader prone on the sweating tile.
Chlorine on his breath and in his long hair. Lithe, although crippled,
body of a middle-weight contender. Near him the trusted journalist, confdant.
He liked men near him with a large sense of life. But most of the press were
vultures descending on the scene for curious America aplomb. Cameras inside
the coffin interviewing worms.
It takes large murder to turn rocks in the shade and expose strange worms
beneath. The lives of our discontented madmen are revealed.
Camera, as all-seeing god, satisfies our longing for omniscience. To spy on
others from this height and angle: pedestrians pass in and out of our lens like
rare aquatic insects.
Yoga powers. To make oneself invisible or small.
To become gigantic and reach to the farthest things.
To change the course of nature. To place oneself
anywhere in space or time. To summon the dead.
To exalt senses and perceive inaccessible images,
of events on other worlds, in one's deepest inner
mind, or in the minds of others.
The sniper's rifle is an extension of his eye. He kills with injurious vision.
The assassin (?), in flight, gravitated with unconscious, instinctual insect
ease, moth-like, toward a zone of safety, haven from the swarming streets.
Quickly, he was devoured in the warm, dark, silent maw of the physical
theater.
Modem circles of Helclass="underline" Oswald kills President.
Oswald enters taxi. Oswald stops at rooming house.
Oswald leaves taxi. Oswald kills Officer Tippitt.
Oswald sheds jacket. Oswald is captured.
He escaped into a movie house.
In the womb we are blind cave fish.
Everything is vague and dizzy. The skin swells and there is no more distincion
between parts of the body. An encroaching sound of threatening, mocking,
monotonous voices. This is fear and attraction of being swallowed.
Inside the dream, button sleep around your body like a glove. Free now of
space and time. Free to dissolve in the streaming summer.
Sleep is under-ocean dipped into each night.
At morning, awake dripping, gasping, eyes
stinging.
The eye looks vulgar
Inside its ugly shell.
Come out in the open
In all of your Brilliance.
Nothing. The air outside
burns my eyes.
I'll pull them out
and get rid of the burning.
Crisp hot whiteness
City Noon
Occupants of plague zone
are consumed.
(Santa Ana's are winds off deserts.)
Rip up grating and splash in gutters.
The search for water, moisture,
«wetness» of the actor, lover.
«Players» — the child, the actor, and the gambler.
The idea of chance is absent from the world of the
child and primitive. The gambler also feels in
service of an alien power. Chance is a survival
of religion in the modern city, as is theater,
more often cinema, the religion of possession.
What sacrifice, at what price can the city be born?
There are no longer «dancers», the possessed.
The cleavage of men into actor and spectators
is the central fact of our time. We are obsessed
with heroes who live for us and whom we punish.
If all the radios and televisions were deprived
of their sources of power, all books and paintings
burned tomorrow, all shows and cinemas closed,
all the arts of vicarious existence…
We are content with the «given» in sensation's
quest. We have been metamorphosised from a mad
body dancing on hillsides to a pair of eyes
staring in the dark.
Not one of the prisoners regained sexual balance.
Depressions, impotency, sleeplessness… erotic
dispersion in languages, reading, games, music,
and gymnastics.
The prisoners built their own theater which
testified to an incredible surfeit of leisure.
A young sailor, forced into female roles, soon
became the «town» darling, for by this time they
called themselves a town, and elected a mayor,
police, aldermen.
In old Russia, the Czar, each year, granted-
out of the shrewdness of his own soul or one of
his advisors' — a week's freedom for one convict
in each of his prisons. The choice was left to the
prisoners themselves and it was determined in
several ways. Sometimes by vote, sometimes by lot,
often by force. It was apparent that the chosen
must be a man of magic, virility, experience,
perhaps narrative skill, a man of possibility, in
short, a hero. Impossible situation at the
moment of freedom, impossible selection,
defining our world in its percussions.
A room moves over a landscape, uprooting the mind, astonishing vision. A
gray film melts off the eyes, and runs down the cheeks. Farewell.
Modern life is a journey by car. The Passengers
change terribly in their reeking seats, or roam
from car to car, subject to unceasing
transformation. Inevitable progress is made toward
the beginning (there is no difference in terminals),
as we slice through cities, whose ripped backsides
present a moving picture of windows, signs, streets,
buildings. Sometimes other vessels, closed
worlds, vacuums, travel along beside to move
ahead or fall utterly behind.
Destroy roofs, walls, see in all the rooms at once.
From the air we trapped gods, with the gods'
omniscient gaze, but without power to be
inside minds and cities as they fly above.
June 30th. On the sun roof. He woke up suddenly.
At that instant a jet from the air base crawled
in silence overhead. On the beach, children try
to leap into its swift shadow.
The bird or insect that stumbles into a room
and cannot find the window. Because they know
no «windows.»
Wasps, poised in the window,
Excellent dancers,
detached, are not inclined
into our chamber.
Room of withering mesh
read love's vocabulary
in the green lamp
of tumescent flesh.
When men conceived buildings,
and closed themselves in chambers,
first trees and caves.
(Windows work two ways,
mirrors one way.)
You never walk through mirrors
or swim through windows.
Cure blindness with a whore's spittle.
In Rome, prostitutes were exhibited on roofs above the public highways for
the dubious hygiene of loose tides of men whose potential lust endangered the
fragile order of power. It is even reported that patrician ladies, masked
and naked, sometimes offered themselves up to these deprived eyes for private
excitements of their own.
More or less, we're all afflicted with the psychology of the voyeur. Not in a
strictly clinical or criminal sense, but in our whole physical and emotional
stance before the world. Whenever we seek to break this spell of passivity, our
actions are cruel and awkward and generally obscene, like an invalid who has
forgotten how to walk.
The voyeur, the peeper, the Peeping Tom, is a dark comedian. He is
repulsive in his dark anonymity, in his secret invasion. He is pitifully
alone. But, strangely, he is able through this same silence and concealment to
make unknowing partner of anyone within his eye's range. This is his threat