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Authors: Kathy Acker

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BOOK: Don Quixote, Which Was a Dream
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Are women pirates or slaves? According to whom?

On no side, from no perspective, do women and men mutually see each other or mutually act with each other. Art, also, is fetishism.

I left behind all that I had known, I have left behind all that I know, so I go into the room of my death:

The top half of this room is a mirror of its bottom half. The bottom half is pale yellow, pale and dark green, and violet-blue; the top half is pale yellow and violet-blue deepening into dark blue.

In the middle of the floor, my mother lies in a coffin, in the non-possibility that is death. The skin of her face is bright green; her hair is yellow; her mouth and eyes are open in a scream.

Around her coffin are lots of flowers.

To the left of this coffin either a doctor or a butcher or a doctor who is really a butcher is standing over his patient who's a woman, just like my mother. My mother is adjusting her stocking - she always wore a white garter belt and sheer silk stockings. I remember. Since in this world men and women have nothing to do with each other, my mother isn't looking at her own doctor.

My mother used to take dexadrine so she could diet and then valium and librium to come down from the dex.

To the right of this coffin a naked woman is sitting on a dark blue-purple fish-face. Just as the doctor and his female patient didn't pay any attention to each other, men-fish and women who're fucking each other don't have anything to do with each other.

My dead, my suicided mother's mouth is shaped in a scream!

The reverse of this floor or life is the ceiling or land of death. In death, right is left and up is down.

In death three black tuxedoed men, the preacher men, sing and swing; they have lots of aspects, many faces; they don't have to say what they mean, cause they don't mean: they sing. Having more than one face and one set of eyes, the minstrels see each thing from all sorts of perspectives: in death there is no more human judgement, no more human moralism. Sing! Don't just look, Lulu: sing!

Now a walrus-like-head whose eyes are red is giving head, I

mean, what is the mean, is sitting on the non-existent head of two fishy tales. Near him and/or her, a white pussy is an angel. My pussy has a hard orange cock, when it gets hard, and he blows his horn. Oh, Lord, mama! He's blowing his music right out!

Two purple something-or-other's are, snakelike, wrapping themselves around the self, for each one is a self unto its oneness or selfishness. The self might be a bird; the self might be the unnamable spirit; the self might be me: the self might be language. Sing!

My mother's mouth is open in a scream. I will sing! The Young Girl: This isn't the archbishop's room. Lulu: Then we came to the fourth room. The room was empty. The gypsy girl left me alone.

I couldn't see anything.

Inside The Room

Lulu: I knew that, in order to make it to the morning, to light

to sunshine, I would have to go to sleep.

I couldn't go to sleep. I was face-to-face with myself. I was face-to-face with my hideousnesses. I had to see my characteristics. I was deeply bored. I wanted to run away, into having no mentality, but there was nowhere to run.

I was stuck with myself: some hideous, because known, blackness.

I hate solitude!

I sat down on the bed. There was nowhere to run: suicide wasn't possible because my mother had committed suicide. I had to sit on the bed.

I had no choice: I had to see. My eyes became accustomed to the darkness.

I saw a window. I saw that I was sitting on a huge bed. Attached to this bed, above my head, was a canopy. I saw a wardrobe so huge it had been made for a giant. It could be that humans are giants.

Something was the matter.

How did I know something was the matter? I didn't see anything that should have frightened me. What is this act of seeing? Is it just physical seeing?

I grew more and more frightened. I hated myself the more I became frightened:

Rapists were going to get me.

I had no friends.

Stop it. Calm yourself down because there absolutely is nobody who is going to take care of you. Just look:

I walked over to the window. The window was barred from the inside. I looked under the bed. Nothing. I walked over to the huge wardrobe. It had two large swinging doors. When I pried one door open by my fingernails, a dead body fell on top of me as if it wanted me.

I was looking into his face, his eyes. They were dead. I screamed.

I wondered if they were going to kill me. I was face-to-face with my fears; with death; my fears now were real. I had to act.

I wanted to disappear, I wanted to escape. I have never wanted any pain, any world which includes pain to be real. But if I am to survive it doesn't matter what I want, it matters if I can do what I have to. I opened my eyes and looked at the corpse.

Neither his body nor his clothes showed signs of violence and he was too big, a sailor, to have been slain without a struggle. I looked even more closely at the dead sailor who was next to me:

Since there were no clues to what had happened on his body or clothing, like a lover I looked into his eyes. Dead men say nothing. He had nothing to say to me.

What good is love which dies?

Truly, there is nothing.

In despair and fear I sat back down on the bed. I was so wrapped up in helplessness and fear, in nihilism: I didn't see anything.

With a last attempt of the will, I looked up. The bishop's canopy, lowering, was almost touching the top of my head. As I rolled off the bed, on to the dead sailor, the murderous canopy crushed into its ground and cracked.

Again I was looking fully into the sailor's face.

I quickly took his clothes off him, rolled them into a rope, and lowered myself through the now unbarred window. As soon as I reached ground, I ran to the sea.

6. To See The Sea

Continued from Act V. Lulu is standing in front of the ocean. Lulu: Now I must find others who are, like me, pirates journeying from place to place, who knowing only change and the true responsibilities that come from such knowing sing to and with each other. Now I am going to travel.

The Third Part of Don Quixote The End of the Night

DON QUIXOTE ACTS:

DON QUIXOTE IN AMERICA, THE LAND OF FREEDOM

A Brief Introduction: The Coming of Night. Don Quixote: 'He whom I love is my eyes and heart and I'm sick when I'm not with him, but he doesn't love me. He's my eyes; he's my I's; I see by my I's; he's my sun. My son lets me see and be. Thus he's my and the ®. I've said it in every book, mainly porn or poor books, I've ever written ®d nauseam even in nauseam, for love hurts badly. I'll say it again: without I's, the I is nothing. Or without feeling the body's dead. Now, without my heart, the malicious winds're blowing about my reactionless body. They do what they want with me. The evil enchanters.

'They've separated us. The evil enchanters of this world such as the editors of
TLS
or Ronald Reagan . . .'

'But you don't even know this man,' a dog-catcher whom Don Quixote had met on her American travels interposed.

'Ronald Reagan?'

'The one you're always talking about . . .'

'Ronald Reagan . . .'

'The love of your life.'

'Oh. That's not Ronald Reagan; that's a dog.'

'A dog,' the dog-catcher said excitedly.

'They're all dogs in this city,' Don Quixote was in New York City.

'Where are they?' The dog-catcher looked around and saw garbage.

'. . . but mine's a real dog.'

The dog-catcher nodded understandingly. Her pink tongue appeared between her lips. 'Then he's worth catching?'

'St Simeon.' Don Quixote could barely utter that name without tears appearing on the skin below her eyes. 'St Simeon the dog may or may not be real because the St Simeon in my heart is certainly my idea. In fact, I guess it doesn't matter whether or not St Simeon loves me.'

'If you don't care whether he loves you, why do you care whether you see him again?'

'Because of the evil enchanters!' Don Quixote expostulated. 'They separated us because they knew that the only thing that'll destroy me is to be apart from the dog. The dog (or saint) and I're two peas in a pod. Evil enchanters such as Ronald Reagan and certain feminists, like Andrea Dworkin, who control the nexuses of government and culture,'re persecuting and will continue to persecute us until they have buried and downed, drowned us in our own human forgetfulness.'

'I don't get it.'

'As soon as we all stop being enchanted,' Don Quixote explained, 'human love'U again be possible.'

'But why do Ronald Reagan and certain feminists give a shit about you?'

'Because they know that I'm about to defeat their evil enchantment in order to regain love,' replied the night.

Superficialities

In order to defeat the evil enchanters of America, Don Quixote

first had to find out how the American government works:

For the Kennedy and Johnson administrations Spurgeon M. Keeny, Jr's job had been to clear State Department and Pentagon policy cables to points overseas. It thus could control such policies. When Nixon and its pal Kissinger came into the White House, Kissinger barked that Keeny, Jr could stay, but it no longer had any policy control cause Kissinger had all the control. At the same time Kissinger was woofing to everyone that it wanted openness in terms of policy control for the first time in the White House. Only its hypocrisy troubled Keeny, Jr. When Gerard C. Smith, the newly appointed head of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, offered Keeny, Jr

the post of assistant director for science and technology, Keeny, Jr ran to it. Lee A. DuBridge, having been recently appointed science adviser by Kissinger, was never able to meet Kissinger. When Kissinger finally met it in a basement, Kissinger immediately took a phone call from a friend and stayed on the phone. Larry Eagleburger in the hospital barked to Roger Morris, 'Don't bark about anything on your phone. You're being tapped.' Both Eagleburger and Morris were members of the NSC staff. Kissinger was acting not out of greed, but out of fear. The USA government is run out of fear.

Kissinger barked about Nixon: 'The President is not about to be persuaded by opposing points of view. It feels threatened by them, obviously doesn't want to hear them. When ambassadors would go in (to pay courtesy calls) it became almost a joke. You know, American ambassadors going abroad would see the President and always raise two or three things, parochial concerns in those countries. I never sat in but would hear about them later. Nixon would start getting very cool and friendly and smile and appear to be agreeing and obviously had no intention of doing it but wasn't about to argue it through or confront it. Let the ambassadors woof it and go away and then write them off as fools for having misused their time with the President to try to get something out of it.' Halperin, at the Pentagon, barked about Nixon: 'Nixon basically is a dog who doesn't like to be pushed into a corner.' Is this an example of fear? It continued barking: 'If you got in to see it while it was President, and you asked for something and you pushed it - eventually it would bark, "OK, you can have it." And then when you walked out the door, it would pick up the phone and call Haldeman and bark, "I've just promised the Secretary of Transportation - or whoever - something. One, it is not to get it, and two, I never want to see that dog again. Send it down the shark chute.'" The New York City art world for obvious economic reasons modelled itself politically on the White House realm.

'Where shall I go?' Don Quixote, wandering, woofed ques-tioningly to nobody. 'Is anywhere in this world of despair, this post-war endo-colonization, somewhere?'

In the early 1960s Thomas A. Pappas had persuaded the

Greek government to grant it the right to build a 125-million-dollar oil, steel, and chemical complex in partnership with Standard Oil of New Jersey, but when George Papandreou, the head of the Center Union Party, came into power in 1963 and '64, he forced Pappas to renegotiate some of these contracts at a loss. Three years later the restored junta restored Pappas' prosperity and Pappas, according to Elias P. Demetracopoulos, a prominent Athens journalist, laundered 'hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Greek KYP ... for the Nixon campaign.' The American CIA, which had been born in 1947, had spent hundreds of millions of dollars in directly financing, training, and supplying the Greek intelligence service, the KYP.

An old friend and operative of Nixon's, Murray Chotiner, barked to Demetracopoulos to '. . . lay off Pappas. It's not smart politics. You know Tom Pappas's a friend of the President.' In 1976, Henry J. Tasca, a career Foreign Service officer who had been Nixon's Ambassador to Greece, woofed on oath to the House Intelligence Committee that Pappas had been a conduit. Tasca died in an automobile accident in 1978. After the junta's seizure of power, the Pentagon began to sell defense materials as 'surplus goods' to the junta. They couldn't sell them as defense materials cause the American dogs disapproved of the junta. Hypocrisy's greed's tool. With every year, the total worth of these military goods climbed by ten million dollars. The USA government is run by greed.

BOOK: Don Quixote, Which Was a Dream
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