A Description of a Really Nice Sausage

Volume 89 of The Epistler was the greatest ever. They published exchanges between Moreen Mannus and the Frankish Gestapo; Paul Severe and Ling Nass; the Viscount Edessa and Coolie Jones; and Nebuchadnezzar Holyrood and Tambergeron Sluigy. In addition Weyland Potsherd announced his project Krampus, and the last half of the issue was dedicated as a festschrift to the recently deceased More O’Breaton, about whom I have nothing bad to say except he did more ketamine, perhaps, than his art demanded. Tie the whole thing up with “Linus Rolph and the Spone Hammer,” and you’ve got an issue.

It was produced at the Bominable Collaboratory, in fact it was the last issue promulgated there.

The Collaboratory provides space; those who frequent it, the ideas. In each atelier the centerpiece is a series of terminals consisting of a memex, a googler, and a scanner.

Funnily, it is located on a hilltop as a small independent enclave within the carceral state of The Realm. A modest tribute maintains its independence and its supply lines.

The book starts conventionally (for this kind of book, anyway), with a search for the historical personage. Brocardus’s line had gone extinct. What few tracts remained with his name appended have been increasingly questioned as his autograph. Even the memory of him, in once-vital brains, has faded with timely attrition. What remains are the references to him, in his students’ and friends’ works. How can a man be remade from words? Sooner reconstitute the dust of his corpse then reanimate scribbles on a page.

The interesting part comes midway through. As much as is possible is gleaned from the old writings and a franken-Brocardus stitched together, very seamy. The author then turns to the problematization of the search for real personages. “The archaeologist, even, can’t get at a real person, but at bones only, plates and spear-points, about which he bends his imagination, same as we do with the writings about Brocardus.” If real evidence is unsatisfactory, what hope from tracts? Indeed, she makes a point of isolating the moment of inflection: “There is a clear separation. One time anyone can go see him, talk to him; after, no one can. He is gone. This time is the afterlife. He is effectively sublimed away into a grammalogical ghost. Compare the pure soul of a heavenly saint to the sin-immerded body below.”

What many critics find annoying—her constant proposition and contradiction—I find to be a delightful narrative device. For no sooner has she expounded the ghostliness of reference, than she demolishes all distinctions. “Even knowing the man brings no real person to the mind, for it is always filtered through words, actions, interpretations. It is masked by the stencil of the meeting, incomplete insofar as no one but he could have known him the entire time. Incompletable insofar as the state in which we are interested—his mind—is inaccessible, even in life.”

She ends the section humbly. “All that we have of people are the intentions out of our own inventory we ascribe to them. All that we have of them is ourselves.”

All about the fear now, blanching from effort. How every thing I conjure when away from the page in some other activity during which I wish I were writing flees in the bright light of the blank sheet.

You can’t call yourself a writer if you never write. It becomes another unrealized dream like all the other phantasms never committed to paper.

The calling oneself something, though, is part of the problem. Claiming an identity is the same as becoming a grotesque. There is something about the claim which makes the claimed thing inaccessible; the same way naming a thing attaches to it a little waldo or knob by which we can manipulate it—subsequently altering the thing forever. All our things are waldoed up. There’s no getting at them in a more satisfactory way.

But what of the things of our mind? Ideas. They shouldn’t need knobs, handles, gates, or sprues. They’re the same substance as the mind and ought to flow along the currents. Is it they’re just too low-level?

I think it’s that the sprues come when the page comes. You need something to get it out. The mind won’t abide its substance leaking all over the place. There’s a conservation of minimum surface at work.

But I’m being far too philosophical. I’m afraid of building. Not the foundations. I lay undressed stone indiscriminately. My portfolio is a ruins of crypts, cellars, and crawlspaces with a spar or two jutting up. The joists and rafters remain in my head.

To put it another way, I begin a story, and leave off the day’s work in one continuation, which becomes misplaced. And all my efforts after are digging after that continuation wherever it may be lost, scattered in reclaimed bits, and finding like the regenerate axon jammed up the wrong path, that the once-true way is barred by continual reconfiguration.

I am foiled by the evolution of the universe. No greater a foe, I suppose, in my petit grandiosity, could I find.

The processes of anathematization and problematization are synergistic. Many of the more dangerous ideas have been hidden in the apparatus, are hinted at in notes. In extreme cases, Batigne simply published a separate article as “cartae amici,” under another pseudonym, and cautiously referred the reader to these.

A treatment of cacodaemony follows by Cratinus, using a controlled vocabulary.

The work, which is known by its incipit, “Possibly by devouring,” is really a catalog of dangerous ideas. The catalog is carefully hidden in a narrative which borders on the psychotic, punctuated by long lists and monologues and tractatuses. There is a section on controlled vocabulary, another on pharyngeal jaws. There is an extended curse and an essay on battle cries.

“You went up the old road where they still have the median and the resting pansies. The plant sat like an encumbered king on five terraces of grey folds. The main gate a short gap in a tall fence crowned with razor wire swaged on a wall of whitewashed cinderblock. There the gatehouse sat up on a small stool of concrete and there was a guard standing just outside it with the look of abdominal fatigue and scrawny arms but a visible sidearm.

“You watched the shipments go through here and into the arms of the plant and then swing into the folds. Just a mist of sooty exhaust hazing the whole place. There are lights mounted high that cast a god-glance over every square, and then the big field of open ground between the big block-thighs of the plant.

“But that’s not your way in. You have found another way, an old employee entrance. When the plant was just built it was much smaller. It was just the brick little core with three black-painted-brick smokestacks poking out and a simple chain-link fence. The back door accommodated deliveries.

“That core, with its stack pulled down and the machines pulled out and only their nibbled-away fixing bolts left to screw down aluminum refectory tables, was now part of this wall. The old windows have been bricked up. The back corner is overlaid by the road as it rears up and throws a bridge across a brown switch-yard. The door is still there.

“You crawled under the street and sidled along the damp concrete embankment to a saddle-shaped gravel pit, climbing which you found yourself at the corner. The fence threw a torn slip up you could slink under, and there was the ancient door behind a slew of junk and enwrapping vines in an obscuring shade.

“The door opens with some difficulty, but you are in. You have on your worker skivs, in which you rolled about in the dirt for a quarter-hour to get them to look used. The hall is brightly but unevenly lit, and empty. It smells like burnt steak and frying-oil.

“As you go out there’s a voice calling, one of the cooks with steam-raw breath, yelling ‘Hey! buddy!’ You shut the door and start walking at a tangent away from the block. Don’t you look back. The door slams shut and doesn’t open again. You join a small knot of workers.

“‘What’s your name, buddy?’ they ask, noting a new face. You look them each in the eye. The smile is warm, but not memorable. Certainly you remember the Duchenne smile. ‘Fourchette,’ you tell them. You explain you just got the job after you married into some contacts. Three months going on. Wife’s already starting to let herself go a little bit but man her tits are worth it.

“The big trucks come and go in three columns. You and the knot slide along a spotty rope of bow-legged workers close to the plant’s right thigh. The windows are blackened. An executive golf cart whizzes by with hard-hatted suits. Crunches the yard-gravel.”

“I’ve got in me this novel but the expelling it is somewhat hard,” he used to tell me. He labored on that thing for years, and every time he finished it he printed it all out and sat with it for a day on his coffee table, sitting on the couch not reading it but with his feet up right next to the MS. The next day he would start all over, the old files were wiped clean. And he did that several times. He kept saying how it was all there but when he pushed it out it got ruined somehow but he’d keep pushing.

After a while he came up with the best of his rewrites and he put it out there. It stunk, really. It had things going for it, certain literary dashes of no little inventiveness, but given the effort it was a waste. Three months he was morose about the whole thing. He wasn’t selling well, he wasn’t critiquing well. He wasn’t sleeping well. He felt exhausted. Told me this was the thing he’d been waiting to get out and it was monstrous. He was “ashamed of it.”

At the end of the three months he perked up slightly. He didn’t show for breakfast but when I did talk with him he seemed somewhat cheery so we suspended the expectation. When I saw him he acted as if nothing was going on. He was dressed sloppily and let on that he spent his days lying about, lazing. What he was really doing was writing. In another two months he showed me his MS for Arms and Trembling. At the bottom of the last page was a diabolical signature.

The emperor issued his own Nakaz and established a modern codification. In this, as in everything he undertook, there was a striving for elegance.

He admired the federations surrounding him, and sought to divide his constituent peoples into helpfully-equal polities. In such a way, he tore countries along their perforations, and made northern Selzikirm and southern Selzikirm Boschla and Selzikirm, respectively.

As none spoke a common language, and the emperor himself despised most of the native tongues, he revived the temple liturgical tongue and bid a committee whip it into usefulness for an administrative language.

His predecessor having followed the advice of his close advisor, named Forward (in our tongue), the emperor proceeded along an opposite course which he named, privately, the Backward way. Though he term was also utilized by the emperor’s newly freed press, it was an independent coinage; officially, the emperor’s domestic policy went by a handful of ponderous acronyms.

The most likely avenue for the suppression of vicious influence is going to be through the stomachs of men. They are venial, awful people, and the continual chase after their appetites, which might in a more rational species have been sublimed away in the soft rays of adaptation, or at least been subject to a reasonable policy aimed at extermination, takes up such a complete fraction of their time—and even when they are wealthy, with retainers, such a large segment of their thinking, the budget of waking thoughts like a scattergood’s expended on an aliquot of good trafficking—what civilization remains in ’em has no cultivation to bind person to person, but in those sallow conspiracies of attempted satiation.

Hemingway talked about his clean, well-lighted place. I´m not too much in it for cleanliness, in fact I think a perfectly disordered room is probably the best metaphor, and so by unreasonable extension, the ideal catalyst for an active mind. Active minds don´t have everything to their place, little plastic fucking storage bins and old used baby-food bottles screwed to two-by-fours holding spare and jangling screws, nuts, and bolts—no, the active mind is cluttered, is a floor where you can´t stand or walk because you´ll trample over something, and odds are that if it isn´t valuable, something underneath the pile is, and just trying to get to the door so you can get a Coke is an exercise in turning over the pile and finding things you´d ostensibly forgotten, and now are just kind of in the way. And you say you´ll clean it all up sometime, find a proper place for everything, but who ever gets around to it? Cuz I don´t. It just all piles up. Soon the whole room will be junk—it will be a cube of junk and future archaeologists will assume the room was built as a shrine or a sarcophagus for the junk, like the close-fitting room that held Tutankhamun. And one little man-shaped hole in the middle, or perhaps I´ll be fossilized in my own pile of detritus, my flesh and bones replaced by spare sheets of paper, computer screws, pop cans, and scraggly books. And will they be able to piece together me from the things that have replaced me? I don´t fucking think so.

When he was readying to leave the hospital, Scetirious had been made to do exercises—as in, some form of ritual participation meant to further a skill. They told him he was not like other people and had some quite basic skills to work on: things like empathy, compassion, the rest. In addition, he had been used to accepting his delusions simply; uncritically; “Despite everything else, Mr Jackson,” they counseled him, “you might still have ended up murdering few if any people had your mind been geared to the more complex.”

Scetirious remembered it very vividly—in fact, it was the solace of his early years of detention, then the ruth of his laters, to at any time close his eyes and conjure the times he’d felt through.

We hesitate to jump from our narrative here to recount what is meant by that curious term, through. It was Scetirious’s coining, after in seriatim interrogations then psychoanalyses and finally pointed questions had only elicited from him lumps of ill-meaning, wretched, shapeless, impulverizable stones about nucleus too fine for his tools to excavate; he closed his eyes in the chair with the stained upholstery, the square-section bar frame that rolled right in below his shoulder-blades: he had contemplated this myriad times, and separately considered whole classes of words: colors, sounds, belly-feelings; numbers, then; and to be richer, vectors; contravariant tensors; he mused to disinterested shrinks the difficulty he had incidentally fallen upon (oblivious, in his serial killer’s way, to its being the central concern of a professional segment) of rendering the internal state of a man into words. “What’s hard, Doc,” he tried to explain, “is the difference in textures.” At any rate, prepositions were last to be tried, and among them he found this word, through, admirably suited. The psychoanalysts started as if at the sound of a sprung trap. They asked about his mother, about the brooch he’d made her in grade school—“Did you pin it on her yourself?”—asked about darts and tunnels and pets and what else had he a desire to be through? “Besides with all these questions?” Scetirious loved to countermand. But it was infinitely more complicated than that, as the shrinks, who knew he decapitated his victims rather than stab them, and who later encouraged him to develop complications, to multiply occasions with the best rhetoricians, should have divined.

What he remembered about the times he was through, was the steady-ramifying tree of complications each throughness brought. Of which, those who don’t murder are inclined to ignore that certain variables confound an otherwise simple act past reasonable vexation—and they thought he was a simplistic brute!

He took an education, though; far better, it’s fair to say, than he has ever taken a punishment. He learned up to recitation that the world is barely reducible; they’d made it a tick in him, even when events were laid about straight as a landing strip, to crawl along the asphalt edge and lay about the minute inconformities of nature.

Thus: Scetirious’s inclination was to say, he disliked or hated Baines. He felt it as earnestly as he had felt through before; but earnestness, as a fastness of murderous insanity, he’d learned to distrust, and no sooner recognized its walls then girdled it and put it to siege.