Letters (150 page)
Think me mad, Germaine
(I do; Art won’t);
revoke if you will my Honorary Membership in Humanity
(not yet):
here are the 6’s I saw—they are, you guessed it, 6 in number, the last three in outline only—in a moment of clairvoyance that August Monday at the brink of Horseshoe Falls, as I bid adieu with you to Y.T.:
1. That our love affair,
Q.E.D.,
is the 6th and climactic of my life, its predecessors being each of a certain character, and with certain partners, not necessary here to re-rehearse. Call these love affairs Series One.
(Check.)
2. That—as I began to realise round about May of this year, you will recall—our connexion itself, at first by chance and then at my intrigued
(obsessed)
direction, recapitulated in its development its predecessors, as ontogeny repeats phylogeny. No need to outline
that;
we’ve lived
(& suffered)
it through, to when—Monday, 4 August, 1969—we were done with amorous gestation and born to ourselves: this happy 6th Stage, which you have been pleased to dub, and rightly, Mutuality. Call these stages of our love affair Series Two.
(Check, check.)
3. That, however
(uh oh),
this 6th Stage itself, no doubt by this time from mere reflex, has week by week echoed, more or less, that ontogeny that recapitulated that phylogeny. August 4-10 was not unlike our early courtship of February-March, our “1st Magda” Stage, excuse the expression. August 11-17 echoed our horny April, itself, etc. Etc. Thus we are just done for good and all with “Marsha,” in more ways than one; and today we commence Week 5,
i.e.
Stage 5,
i.e.
etc.(Entendu.) Thus too our thought to marry in Week 6, Sept. 8-14. Call these several weeks of our 6th Stage Series Three.
(Check, check, check. But.)
4. But all this implies, to you as well as to me and for better or worse, further concentric series:
e.g.,
your immediate suggestion that we wed on the
Saturday
of that week: its 6th, climactic, “ourmost” day. Call these days Series Four.
(Check X 4. But that’s not
all
it implies, Ambrose.)
5. You foresaw further, though reasonably mistaken in your divisor, that a late-afternoon or early-evening hour might be more appropriate than some other to the fine print of this programme; that in any case our “ourmost” day of our ourmost week of our ditto stage of our love affair might have so to speak an ourmost hour, or period, fittest for nuptials. Call these periods Series Five.
(Check etc.; but screw Art, Ambrose: get to it!)
6. Let’s not trifle around with minutes and seconds, but rather imagine that upcoming 6th week as a honeymoon week, our wedding-Saturday its climactic day, itself climaxed by our wedding. Come, Germaine: let’s imagine the 6th 6 to be, not some minute of some hour, but the climax of that climax: our first coming together as wife and husband.
(I like that, Ambrose.)
Eros, Hymen: give us strength! If we’re to have a Series Six, let it be the stages of our day’s sixth sex together, that initial legal lovemaking, and
its
6th point our first connubial climax. Betcha we can, Milady—and be
damned
if I can think of any fitter way to peak, vindicate, purge, and be done with this obsession for reenactment!
For your patience wherewith, Art and Germaine, once again my thanks.
A.
(Pause.
Now I am
not
pleased, love, as I was some sentences since.
Au contraire:
I am frightened to the heart as I push the
Pause
on your machine. Each and every of those six sixes implies a seven; that parade of climaxes a ditto of dénouements. Even a Seventh
Series,
it would seem, is pending: seven several strokes, must one presume, of that connubial climax? Now, betrothed sir: though I love you despite all this, very possibly carry your child, and brim with joy at the prospect of wifing you whatever our economic and other woes, you are as it happens not the first formalist I ever fucked. You say you could see, at Niagara-Fallsbrink, but 6/7ths through our story. What
I
see is, at the end of Series Seven, detumescence, say, and postorgasmic release. Dandy! At the end of Series Six, postcoital lassitude. Who cares? In the 7th period of Series Five, last hours of our wedding day, a weary, blissful 7th coupling. Fatigued joy! In the 7th day of Series Four (I review the transcript), the Sunday of our “honeymoon” week, a similarly lazy spell, let us imagine, of loving rest.
(So far, so good. But the 7th
week
of this honeymoony Mutuality, the close of your Series Three—am I to look not only for a week-long falling-off from loving vows so freshly vowed, but (chilling prospect!) for the end of Honeymoon before even the Sturgeon Moon is followed by the Harvest? And then (cold hand upon my womb!) a 7th Stage of our affair—commencing, let’s see, 22 September, Yom Kippur on my calendar, and ending God knows when—characterised, on the level of Series Two, by the
fin d’orgasme
of Series Seven, the postcoital blah of Six, the final fuck of Five, the day of rest of Four, the week’s falling-off of Three…?
(!
(And then—O January in the heart! O ice!—in Series One…
(I can see, Ambrose, but cannot say! O love, love: posttranscript me when I unpush this
Pause!)
P.S.: Adieu, Art. Now: Will you, dear Germaine, circa 5 P.M. Saturday, 13 September 1969, take me Ambrose as your lawful wedded husband, in dénouements as in climaxes, in sevens as in sixes, till death do us et cet.?
(Pause!
(Hm!
(Well…
(I will. Yes. I will.)
AM/ggp(a)
cc: JB
Ambrose Mensch to Whom It May Concern (in particular the Author).
Water message #2 received. His reply. A postscript to the Author.
The Lighthouse
Erdmann’s Cornlot
“Dorset,” Maryland
Monday, September 22, 1969
T | Whom it may concern |
F | Yours truly, Ambrose Mensch |
R | A new letter to me of yesternoon, “washed up” in an otherwise almost empty, barnacled, sea-grown magnum of Mumm’s Cordon Rouge upon the beach before Mensch’s Castle during the refilming of the “Water Message sequence” of the motion picture |
Dear Madam, Sir, or both:
A,
in traditional letter-symbolism, = the conjoining of 2 into 1. Ad-mi-ra-ti-on, Be-ne-fi-ci-al, Con-so-la-ti-on, De-cla-ra-ti-on, Ex-hor-ta-ti-on, For-ni-ca-ti-on, Ge-ne-ra-ti-on, followed by Ha-bi-ta-ti-on, In-vi-ta-ti-on, & cet.: another bloody cycle of awakening, adventure, atonement at the Axis Mundi, apotheosis, and apocalypse.
All those sevens and sevenths seen together, in an instant, as if in a vision in Angie’s egg, on the 7th stroke of the 6th stage of the 6th lovemaking, etc., etc., on G’s & my wedding day: I.e.,
(a)
that 7th stroke itself;
(b)
the postcoital embrace to follow it; then
(c)
the final lovemaking of that loveful day; then
(d)
the final day of that honeymoon week; then
(e)
the final week of that fine seven weeks of our Mutuality; then
(f)
this final stage—may it last long!—of our relation, wherein I am devotedly in love with my bride and she is serene, serene; then
(g)…
Alphabetical Priority, yes: as if to discipline, even if only by artifice, as in formal poetry, our real priorities; Example follows.
Angie,
at age not-quite-fifteen, is, so Magda’s gynecologist reports this morning,
pregnant!
Appointment made some weeks ago by M., without our knowing it, and kept secret since—through Mother’s dying, Peter’s dying, my remarrying, our own efforts at impregnation, etc.—“not to bother us prematurely” with her suspicions of my daughter’s skipped menses and recent morning nausea. Abortion, all hands agree, to be arranged.
Anniversary View of History: one Saturnian Revolution ago today, when I was eleven and she twelve or thirteen, Magda Giulianova introduced me, in the toolshed behind the old Menschhaus, to my sexuality—green then, still far from gray, but mightily toned down by this new news, by recent events, and by that seventh seven.
An old-time epistolary novel by seven fictitious drolls & dreamers, each of which imagines himself actual.
Author, old comrade and contrary, funhouse fashioner and guide: how’s
that
for your next and seventh?
B =
mother of letters: birth, bones, blood & breast: the Feeder.
Birthmark itches like an old bee-sting; my turn to confront the family nemesis?
Bottled message:
TOWER OF TRUTH 0700 9/26/69,
plus some dark, grainy odd-odored solid, like freeze-dried coffee spoilt by moisture: not exactly a bombshell letter!
Break-in at M. M. Co. remains unsolved; Todd Andrews confides suspicions and reasons therefor, but has neither grounds nor inclination to prosecute; we neither.
Bray
(with a rush of red rage I now recall his never-quite-explained tête-à-tête with Angela down by the
Original Floating Theatre II
in mid-July, which I broke up at cost of concussion from mike-boom blow; could
he,
of all the hair-raisingly creepish male animals upon this planet…)?!
Brice and/or Bruce it was who fetched me that blow that day; the same who—surely—planted Water Message #2 for my discovery yesterday; and they have intimated that Bray may make his “final appearance” at the Tower of Truth dedication ceremonies this Friday: the Ascension sequence, in which, I begin to think, I too must play a role.
Brother: thy will be done.
C =
the crescent tumescent: creation, call, crossing,
coincidentia oppositorum,
catharsis, cataclysm.
Cancer of the Muse: if I am dying of it, it is living of me.
Castine (this reader of G’s collected letters suspects) may be, or at some point may have become, a chimera: three decades, years, days ago?
Conflict:
last-ditch provincial Modernist wishes neither to repeat nor to repudiate career thus far; wants the century under his belt but not on his back.
Complication:
he becomes infatuated with, enamored of, obsessed by a fancied embodiment (among her other, more human, qualities and characteristics) of the Great Tradition and puts her—and himself—through sundry more or less degrading trials, which she suffers with imperfect love and patience, she being a far from passive lady, until he loses his cynicism and his heart to her spirited dignity and, at the
climax,
endeavors desperately, hopefully, perhaps vainly, to get her one final time with child: his, hers, theirs, (cc: Author)
Cook IV’s Ampersand Letter and the rest were supposedly written and posted after his alleged death in 1814; Cook VI’s “Francis Scott Key Letter”—so Prinz had Bruce say to me (Voice Over) at Fort McHenry—would “no doubt wash up in a bottle somewhere”; Coast Guard won’t say what they saw aboard
Baratarian;
what is this new water message the key to?
Cornerstone in round tower: letters to future, letter-bomb to present?
Cycle II must not reenact its predecessor: echo, yes; repeat, no.
D
= departure, dark descent through door of dreams and domain of dragons to deep sleep and dissolution.
Dates (of letters) should also “count”: alphabetics + calendrics + serial scansion through seven several correspondents = a form that spells itself while spelling out much more and (one hopes) spellbinding along the way, as language is always also but seldom simply about itself; and the narrative, like an icebreaker, like spawning salmon, incoming tide, or wandering hero, springs forward, falls back, gathers strength, springs farther forward, falls less far back, and at length arrives—but does not remain at—its high-water mark (making this note made me late arriving at Bloodsworth Island last Tuesday and possibly thereby saved my life).
Day of Atonement: Forgive me, Germaine; forgive me, son or daughter who may or may not exist in my wife’s womb, and Angie who exists imperfectly upstairs as I write this in the Menschhaus basement, and God whose image we have but darkly glimpsed in camera obscura and Easter egg; forgive me what wrongs I’ve done since, say, last year’s Kol Nidre, and others I may be about to do.
Dedication ceremony scheduled for 10 A.M. Friday; Sunrise at our meridian—I reckon from my almanac—approximately 0654 EDST. Daylight begins to dawn.
Design for
LETTERS
attached (see P.S.), courtesy of Ambrose M.: Doctor(er) of Letters,
honoris causa.
Dramaturgy =
the incremental perturbation of an unstable homeostatic system and its catastrophic restoration to a complexified equilibrium.
Dénouement:
not the issue of G’s appointment with Dr. Rosen tomorrow, or of her pregnancy, or of the dawn’s early light 9/26/69, or of the puzzles of Barataria and
Baratarian;
all those locks, and whatever lies beyond them, may be diversions: the real treasure (and our story’s resolution) may be the key itself: illumination, not solution, of the Scheme of Things.
Drew Mack: then Andrews is likely to be there too; even to get there first, as at McHenry and Barataria…
E
= Eros, erection, ejaculation, egg, embryo, ego escape, epiphany, elixir theft, etc.
“Easter-Egg Vision,” Item 7: see G:g, below. Echo, yes; repeat, no.
Entropy may be where it’s all headed, but it isn’t where it is; dramaturgy (see above) is negentropic, as are the stories of our lives.
Envoi:
Go, first such letter from yours truly, to whom these presents may concern, restoppered in your faithful craft along with whatever that brown stuff is: past cape and cove, black can, red nun, out of river, out of bay, into the ocean of story.
