So before I get started tonight, I want to apologize in advance for subjecting you guys to all the ridiculous gesticulations when I read…I have this whole set of ridiculous demagogic tics. And believe me, I wish I didn’t, but they’re completely involuntary — the clenched fists, the pugnacious outthrust chin and crossed arms, then the clasped hands and heavenward gaze, and, worst of all, the shuckling and the pantomimed mah-jongg shuffling…
Like the preening narcissism of so many physically repulsive men, nothing matches the overweening, magisterial pride of the abject failure, the son manqué. Freud said: “A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror.” And I believe this remains especially true for the son who has clearly demonstrated that he’s capable of accomplishing absolutely nothing.
You lie in bed staring up into the blackness of the room, or into the depths behind your impervious eyelids, and you see a gleam…and at first you mistake it for everything but what it actually is…you mistake it for a segment of the sun’s circumference during an annular eclipse, for some diacritical mark, some silver tilde…for, for the wet sex organ of a woman…but it’s the gleaming blade of a guillotine, your guillotine, your own, special, bespoke guillotine poised precariously up there…well, wait, wait…let me try putting it another way…It’s either the first thing you’ve ever seen, which is your mother’s shimmering benevolent smile, or the last thing, which is your guillotine. And I think…I was actually thinking about this in the car on the way here tonight…I think what illumination really is is when you realize that they’re the same thing — that shimmering smile and that gleaming guillotine — they’re the same swinging door. (MARK looks over at the PANDA EXPRESS WORKER. He swipes his armpit with two fingers, then snaps. And with an unexpectedly empathic warmth—)
MARK
Do you see what I mean? They’re the same thing. (The sound of rain hitting the skylight above the food court seems to be getting louder.)
MARK
Okay…before I, uh…get started here, just a couple of little things to help put the excerpts I’m going to read in some context for you…
The Fighter Jets was a cycle of crayon-on-coloring-book and crayon-on-construction-paper works that I produced from roughly 1962 to 1964, which clearly prefigured the violent poetry I would begin writing in 1967, when I was eleven. I was primarily doing…I don’t know what you’d call it, I don’t know what you’d call the style…naive or primitive or maybe outsider, proto-pop renditions of the U.S. Navy’s F4F-3 Wildcat, the Luftwaffe’s Messerschmitt Bf 109, and the Imperial Japanese Navy’s Mitsubishi A6M Zero…these three fighter aircraft were…these were my water lilies, I guess you could say. One could arrange the work in three loose thematic clusters: fighter jets in flight either singly or in formation, aerial battles or dogfights between fighter jets featuring multicolored tracer ammunition fired from mounted 20 mm autocannons, and in which one or both of the fighter aircraft are in flames and/or exploding in the air, and (in a series I completed in late ’64) kamikaze fighters smashing their jets into American battleships and aircraft carriers.
This latter series foreshadows one of the first poems that I submitted to a poetry workshop at Brandeis University when I was a freshman there in 1973, which was the first actual writing class I ever took. My classmates were all seniors, all several years older than me, very dour and humorless, and very cliquish and condescending toward me, and I wanted nothing more than for them to respect me and include me, and I guess my way of trying to ingratiate myself with them, of just trying to get them to like me — which I so desperately wanted — was to hand in increasingly aggressive, abrasive poems with disassociated imagery, jarring, dissonant non sequiturs, and increasingly antagonistic titles, basically an update of my proprietary vernacular of yama nashi, ochi nashi, imi nashi that I’d intuited years ago at the slot-car track in Livingston. So this poem I was referring to, for instance, had two stanzas; the first was…and I can’t remember the exact words, obviously…but it was something like: “Asked to describe the rabbi’s daughters, / the man doffs his baseball cap, / revealing the sun-spotted flesh of his balding head, / and pauses for a moment… / ‘The second daughter is more beautiful than the first, the third more beautiful than the second, and the first more beautiful than the third.’” And then the second stanza which was quite, quite long — it ran fifteen or twenty-some-odd pages — was intended as the dying soliloquy, the…the soliloquy in extremis, of a plummeting kamikaze pilot, except that you couldn’t possibly know that it was a dying soliloquy or any other kind of soliloquy for that matter, because it was written entirely as a spurious transliteration of completely fake Japanese, nor could you possibly know that it involved a kamikaze pilot, because although I’d originally entitled the poem “Kamikaze,” on the morning of the workshop, at the very last minute, I changed the title to “Eat Me. I Hate Everyone in This Fucking Class,” probably as a kind of preemptive provocation, assuming that the class would hate the poem (which the class vehemently did). And when people predictably took offense at the title, I remember explaining that “Well…it’s not me who’s actually saying that, it’s the narrator of the poem, it’s a character I’m playing,” that sort of thing. And of course I read my poem out loud, which is what we did in the workshop, and I read the faux-Japanese gibberish section in its entirety, which, seriously, must have taken about forty minutes, and which I could see just completely aggravated the shit out of everyone in the class. And all I really wanted out of all this was for someone, one of my peers, to just say to me, Look, I really appreciate how hard you’re working or I really appreciate how much you’re trying to do something unique or transformative or just fresh, something we haven’t heard before, or at least trying to wring some droll human comedy from the unrelenting grimness and abject indignity of life on this planet. But no one did. But, remarkably, Mark Strand, who was a very well-known, highly esteemed poet, who died fairly recently, and who was teaching this workshop back then…he actually seemed to get it. He said to the class — and, again, I’m paraphrasing something that was said a very long time ago — he said that the first part represented the enchantment and illogic and fear and suspense of beauty, and that all the ensuing faux-Japanese gibberish represented the incommunicable subjective reality of experiencing that beauty. So, surprised — shocked, actually — and sort of emboldened by what certainly seemed like Strand’s genuine engagement with the work, I piped up (and I was usually too bashful to say anything) and I said, somewhat flippantly and presumably to lighten the mood a bit, “I’m trying to do the Baal Shem Tov with a Tora! Tora! Tora! vibe,” but then I thought to myself, You know what, I am going to make a case for this poem, and I am going to explain exactly what I did and why. I was a great admirer of Andy Warhol then (and still am), and I got such a kick out of his coyness and his diffidence and nonchalance when he’d be asked why he silkscreened his paintings or why he’d just point his stationary 16 mm Bolex at a building or a fellated or sleeping man and let it run until the emulsion flickered and whitened and the cartridge expired, and this pale, pimply sphinx in his sunglasses would put his finger on his chin and think for a moment or two, and then just say, “Because it was easier.” But I wasn’t like that at all. As much as I would have liked to have been a pale and pimply sphinx, I had an uncommonly clear complexion and I had a decidedly unsphinxlike need for people to understand what I was doing and to admire it and to like me. And I certainly hadn’t done what I did because it was easier — it was extraordinarily time-consuming and laborious and difficult to write that amount of faux-Japanese gibberish because real words kept inadvertently popping up in the gibberish. And I explained how it’s almost impossible to completely purge a text of meaning. Meaning is like mice or eczema — it’s very hard, if not impossible, to get rid of completely. Not only because the purging itself, like a dance, or like a new science, generates a whole new signifying language of its own, but because meaning persists at much deeper levels than we can ever imagine and at a much more infinitesimal scale, gigantic monsters can be created by changing a single nucleotide in the genetic code — one can conjure an ornate, vanished world from outer space from the serif of a single letter. What else does the human being do but emit and decipher signs? Who else but the human being has this compulsion for finding patterns and structures in all sorts of incoherent noise (and craquelure!). With gibberish, you open the floodgates of meaning, everything is in there — actual poems by Saigyō and Fujiwara no Teika and Princess Shikishi (if that’s what you’re looking for), mitochondrial DNA sequences from honeybees and ants and aphids, blocks of AES/Rijndael-256–encrypted ciphertext, backwards excerpts from Don Quixote and Little Dorrit, from Gwyneth Paltrow’s It’s All Good: Delicious, Easy Recipes That Will Make You Look Good and Feel Great, long diagonal acrostics of John Galliano’s anti-Semitic tirade at La Perle bar in Le Marais…everything. In the faux-Japanese glossolalia of the plummeting kamikaze is the complete anagram of Gone with the Mind that would take scientists (i.e., the Imaginary Intern and myself) another forty years to unscramble. His gibberish is the incommunicable anguish that results from the impossibility of fulfilling incestual desire. He is, like a muttering Popeye, a hysteric describing his symptoms, destroying the world in order to save it. The vertiginous illogic, the impossibility of the exorbitant claims about the beauty of the rabbi’s daughters causes nausea. A little boy is having a tantrum because his mother is impossibly gone. He vomits gibberish. In the distance is a kamikaze’s long parabolic swoon. A little boy’s tantrum crescendos in a parabolic projection of vomited gibberish which is actually a secret language between kamikaze boy and the rabbi’s daughter who represents — drumroll, please — the mother!