Are You Loathsome Tonight? (2 page)

The night before inspiration told me that I had to save myself, find
salvation
, by bidding farewell to my false life through the murder of that man, I dreamed that I was embracing the corpse of the Savior.

Not long ago, Poppy Z. Brite ruffled a feather or two by publishing in her newsletter a lengthy meditation on the subject of an erotic encounter between herself and the mortal remains of William Burroughs. Burroughs, one cannot but think, would have been delighted.

At the center of its anarchic heart, the idea of narrative yearns simultaneously for wholeness and fracture. We begin in one place and time, we shift to another. Roughly, imperiously, we shift back. We catch up with ourselves, or we do not. It is satisfying when we do, but better, far better, when we scrap thoughtless versions of coherence. Jokes, anecdotes and shaggy-dog stories undermine lazy expectations, so let us sprinkle in any number of bafflements to the humorless. For the literal-minded, let us float the suggestion of a “theme": the “theme,” say, of “possession.” We may safely assume the failure on behalf on the literal-minded to recognize that every encounter with a text represents an act of “possession.” As the reader devours the text, the text inexorably colonizes the reader, who is, unlike the devouring text, altered by this process, in large part by means of that truest, most infallible expression of “theme,” the detail. As a result, every vibrant detail contains an erotic component.

There is much more in eroticism than we are at first led to believe.

Today, no one recognizes that eroticism is an insane world whose depths, far beyond its ethereal forms, are infernal.

...Eroticism is, first of all, the most moving of realities; but it is nonetheless, at the same time, the most ignoble. Even after psychoanalysis, the contradictory aspects of eroticism appear in some way innumerable; their profundity is religious—it is horrible, it is tragic, it is still inadmissible. Probably all the more so since it is divine.

—Georges Bataille,
The Tears of Eros

“God is in the details,” wrote Flaubert, who once took the time to have a pharmacist named M. Homais take in the billowing of Emma Bovary's clothing before the glow of a wood stove.

Here are three details from these stories:

It was a semi-automatic pistol with a six-inch sighted barrel and a checkered grip of heavy rubber, nearly three pounds of sleek steel filled with little silver-jacketed bullets like seeds in a deadly fruit.
("Saved.")

It was like some enormous steaming bowl of stew, full of glistening meat, splintered bone, great handfuls of tubes torn loose from their moorings, and everywhere the rich coppery sauce of blood. The sewer smell of ruptured bowel rose in shimmering waves from his body.
("Saved.")

In the streets, the harsh reek of exhaust fumes was filled with a million subtler perfumes: jasmine, raw sewage, grasshoppers frying in peppered oil, the odor of ripe durian fruit that was like rotting flesh steeped in thick sweet cream.
("Self-Made Man.")

In “Vine of the Soul,” a shaggy-dog story, the crowd on a street in Amsterdam moves in the “peristalsis” of waste through the intestines; “In Vermis Veritas,” a bubble of pure inspiration written as an introduction to a graphic novel, presents the rapturous meditations of a “connoisseur of mortality,” a highly conscious maggot devoted to the piquant memory-sensations embedded within “the translucent rose of fresh viscera, the seething indigo of rot” of those who died fearfully and in pain. The maggot is a reader for once gloriously empowered to stand in the place of the writer.

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels'

hierarchies? and even if one of them pressed me

suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed

in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing

but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure,

and we are so awed because it serenely disdains

to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, “The First Elegy,”
Duino Elegies

translated by Stephen Mitchell

I dreamed of embracing the dead Jesus in that Tomb, no more than a cave, actually. His small, wounded body seemed extraordinarily beautiful to me, for it registered every trace of his journey toward crucifixion: the hard calluses on the foot soles, the legacy of anger written across the forehead, the harsh, knifelike furrows at the corners of the eyes, the grime embedded into the folds of the knuckles. And, of course, the wounds.

I touched every inch, every micromillimeter of his body, and under my hands, his body spoke. The language in which it spoke was
Braille
. His body was a
sacred text
. By slow explorations of my fingertips, tongue, eyelids, lips, by awed, sensitive tissue of my cheeks and my nipples, also the aureolae and undersides of my breasts, also by the delicate kiss of my labia, I read of an
abominable grandeur
.

His body was sturdy, banded with muscle like the body of a mule, a peasant's body, its Mediterranean complexion tinged with the green of a Levantine olive. His coloring, lightest on the palms of his hands, darkest about the knees, elbows and scrotal sac, was that of a meal prepared over a desert campfire, and the smell of his flesh suggested sand, blazing sun, smoky cookfires built on the sides of salty lakes.

That was the most erotic dream I've ever had, even though it was all about
knowledge
.

Braille is a two-way street.

Transfigured, I woke up to a transfigured world.

The world is a corpse-eater. All the things eaten in it themselves die also. Truth is a life-eater. Therefore no one no one nourished by [truth] will die.

... God [ ...] a garden. Man [ ...] garden. There are [ ...] and [ ...] of God. [ ...] The things which are in [ ...] I wish. This garden [is the place where they will say to me, ‘... eat] this or do not eat [that, just as you] wish.' In the place where I will eat all things is the tree of knowledge.

—"The Gospel of Philip,” in
The Nag Hammadi Library

In Vermis Veritas

In 1996 I was asked to write an introduction to
Registry of Death
, a graphic novel by Matthew Coyle and Peter Lamb, which was being published by Kitchen Sink Press. Here's what I came up with. This is the first in a loosely linked series of fiction in which all the characters will be worms or larvae.

In Vermis Veritas

“It's nothing to do with mortality but it's to do with the great beauty of the color of meat.” So said Francis Bacon, an artist of the twentieth century, explaining why he painted scenes of gore and squalor. While admiring his sentiment, I would also postulate that Bacon's appreciation for the color of meat made him a connoisseur of the very mortality he pretended to eschew.

I consider myself a connoisseur of mortality. While my millions of brethren and sistren chew, chew, chew their way through whatever offal comes along, inexorable but mindless, I preserve my energies for the sweetest meat: the carcass tainted by fear. The carcass that suffered the protracted death, the agonizing death. Meat crisped alive by fire, meat sliced open by steel, meat with a bullet in its gut.

Here in the slaughterhouse, I dine well.

It is everything to do with mortality. It is the great beauty of the color of meat, of its many colors: the spongy purple of drowned flesh, the translucent rose of fresh viscera, the seething indigo of rot. Bacon must have painted in the slaughterhouse. It is the great beauty of the flavor of meat, of its many flavors.

When we reduce a carcass to bone, we not only reveal its structure; we become composed of its elements. For most of the others, this is a matter of breaking down proteins and replenishing simple larval tissues. For me it is a kind of catharsis. I take on the qualities of the deceased, I am nourished by his perceptions, and perhaps somehow I aid in releasing his soul.

Consequently, I have lived thousands of lives. I have memorized countless tomes, and written more than a few. I have constructed dynasties, then torn them down or watched them fall. I have been a foetus in a womb and a guru in a cave. I have digested the concepts of “freedom” and “love” and “eternity,” and excreted them, over and over again.

Men kill other men, sometimes for sport, sometimes for love, sometimes just sending them to the slaughterhouse to feed still more men—or, if left too long, to feed me and my kin. Each one thinks he has lived in the worst of times, but nothing has ever been different.

I curl in the slightly damaged brain of a young man who died for no particular reason, after a protracted and honorable hunt. The glistening whorls are dissolving, coming unglued, breaking down into their chemical components. I gorge myself on the primordial soup of his mind. The terrible realization that dawned upon him at the moment of death sharpens the taste.

I become drunk on his flood of experiences and emotions. I synthesize his knowledge. I live his entire life in the time it takes me to eat a path through his liquefying brain. I wallow in his world. I die his weary death.

As always, it makes me glad to be a maggot in the slaughterhouse and not a man.

Arise

You may have seen artwork by Alan M. Clark. It's sinuous, organic, foetal, alien, exquisitely wrought. I wrote “Arise” for
Imagination Fully Dilated
, a refreshingly nonstupid concept anthology in which writers were to verbalize Alan's paintings, which would then be reproduced in gorgeous color alongside the resultant stories. I chose a very Southern-looking painting of mountains and bare trees and a ruined graveyard and a haunted house, then stuck a couple of Brits in it and proceeded to begin it in Gabon. Don't even ask why because I don't know.

Arise

Nightfall in Gabon, and the bush was the darkest thing Cobb had ever seen. It rambled along the edge of the little beachside town and stretched away into the West African hills. If you stood at the edge of the bush and looked out at night, you could see dozens of little fires flickering in the distance, giving off less illumination than lighters in a darkened stadium, accentuating the blackness more than relieving it. These were not the fires of poachers (for there was nothing left to kill nearby), but of straggling nomads on their way into or out of town.

Cobb sat in the tin-sided bar as he did most nights, drinking African beer lightly chilled by the bar's refrigerator. This was to Cobb's taste, for he had once been an Englishman. Now he was a citizen of nowhere on earth. He drank his beer and rolled his fat cigars of African ganja and fixed his rust-colored eyes on the TV set in the corner, and it was very seldom anyone spoke to him. This, too, was as he preferred it.

When the police came by, Cobb would give them money to go away. When the television broke, Cobb paid for a new one. Though everyone in the town knew this man was very rich, no one cared whether he was alive, dead, or famous. The only conceivable reason he could have come here was to be left alone, and so he was.

He watched the television, mostly American cop shows and softcore porn from France. When the news came on, he ignored it. He had seen coverage of war, every kind of natural and manmade disaster, the assassination of one American and countless African presidents, the dissolution of the same Soviet Union he'd once written a satirical song about. But he never reacted to anything he saw on the TV.

Tonight, he saw a thing that made him react.

It began with the music: a few bars of a song by the Kydds, one of the really huge hits, one of Matty's. That was familiar enough, you couldn't watch TV or listen to the radio anywhere on earth without hearing the Kydds, and Cobb ignored it. Then the reporter's voice broke in: “Dead at 45, Eric Matthew, founding member and driving force behind the most successful pop group of all time..."

Cobb looked up. Matty's face filled the screen, an old picture. That girly smile, those fuck-me eyes that hid a will of steel. Then the screen switched to a picture of the four of them in concert, 1969, all long stringy hair and, Jesus Christ, velvet suits.

“ ... suicide at his New York apartment. Eric Matthew is the second member of the Kydds to die; guitarist and singer Terry Cobb was killed in a plane crash in 1985. All the details coming up on CNN."

Cobb didn't go to the bar for a week, but stayed in his house drinking whiskey. On the eighth day, a young African showed up at his door with a Federal Express box addressed to William Van Duyk, the name that had appeared on Cobb's passport for the past ten years.

The box was heavy, ten or twelve pounds at least. The return addressee was someone or something called Gallagher, Gallagher, Campbell, on the Upper West Side of New York. Cobb found a knife and opened the box. Inside was a cream-colored envelope and a heavy plastic bag full of what looked like coarse sand.

He stuck a long forefinger under the flap of the envelope and tore it open. A key fell out, and he let it lie on the floor for now. Inside the envelope were some folded sheets of creamy paper. “Terry,” the first line read—

Cobb dropped the paper. No one had addressed him by that name in over a decade.

His hand shaking a little, he picked up the letter. “Terry,” he read again, and this time he realized it was Matty's handwriting. He knew that neat schoolboy script well enough, had seen plenty of first-draft lyrics and signatures on contracts and bossy notes in that same hand. Matty knew where he was—had known where he was. Had known all this time. It was like one of the morbid jokes Cobb had always collected: Matty had known he wasn't dead, and now Matty was dead.

“Terry, you always said I had to have the last word, and it looks like you were right. I've found the most private place in the world. It wasn't enough to save me, but I think it might be just the thing for you. Get the fuck out of Africa at any rate—it's unhealthy for a Manchester boy. The house is yours. Do whatever you like with the other. Peace & Love—MATTY."