I am a creature bankrupt of desire, save one — LUST. And what am I to do now, while in the experimental “foregoing of fucking” stage? If I deny my prime desire, and if I have no others, how am I to act other than at random, which I also refuse to do? If I have no desires except to fuck and if I have vowed not to initiate conjunction for that purpose, how the living fuck am I supposed to begin the movement, I mean lift my body from its position slumped over the typewriter, irritate the locomotive function? I am speaking of that body as it has come to be lodged in a corpuscle of time, I am observing that body from the inner eye and recognizing that that body does not and never will move unless it has a hunger. And I am mulling over this question: how is it supposed to BEGIN to move from that fixed point, from THAT fixed point, from THAT fixed point, from even one of those fixed points, unless there is a desire, quick and sharp and pungent, to GO somewhere, to SEE someone?
This to me is a humiliation, a desperate admission: that I should DESIRE to go to the house of a person who is NOT ME. This is open schism, a willing and spurious snub of devoted self-love, an affront to the divine right automatically and unintentionally to be always in the right place at the right time. Who offers more inspired guidance than my own loving demoniacal self? It is true that I have endured healings at the hands of friends and lovers. But how denigrating, how absolutely embarrassing to gravitate towards another reeking with expectation — the unforgivable desire to be enriched and inspired by the presence of another. The DESIRE itself. It is not the enrichment that is fatal, but the DESIRE.
How is one to proceed if deprived of desire? One wishes, on the one hand, not to anticipate enrichment, not only for fear of disappointment, but simply because the anticipation always precludes precise satisfaction. On the other hand why bother WILLINGLY to place oneself in the midst of a social gathering for an obligatorily polite snatch of time if nothing inspiring is promised? This is a big risk. When one places himself in company, it is the greatest gamble. This I cannot emphasize enough.
Before I knew I was from the Fourth World I used to struggle to stay ass-side up in the conversational flow, gladly and greedily skimming over incongruities and discolorments as long as I could pretend to the rhythms of the Three Dimensional World. This ploy usually failed. Most often, the Third Worlders would find me as swollen and insubstantial as the inside of a balloon. In time, I learned to activate the psychic corollaries of the autonomous biological functions, setting them to the task of dreaming up Third World conversational strategies while I slept or meditated, according to my wont. This won me a few admirers and no friends. But on good days I talked fast enough and exuded just enough charisma to distract my Third World companions from the ridiculous malapropisms paraded forth by my unconscious intelligences.
Before I discovered this little trick I was sick and scrawny, forever scrambling to keep up with the dirty gushings of the Third World ramble talk, furiously whipping up a hackneyed version of some thought, however unsavage, however effete and alien, into recognizable shape, with some little twist of the alphabet, fuzzy at the edges but suffused with enough of the jocular spirit, jugular veinous nonsense and banter, jargon of the Third World.
As a boy I lived under siege, barraged by traitorous urges to repudiate the birthright of conversation. But the conscious thought was not yet possible. In the world into which I was born, there were no words to identify experiences in the Fourth Dimension. I chose autistic children as my playmates. They could give me no words to name the tortured migrations of color and shape through my mind’s eye, but at least they could not deny their presence. Others used language skillfully, leading me to believe that there were experiences such as the words described; experiences which had never occurred to me, but which, I thought, someday might.
I was admittedly a PRIMITIVE, smothered with love for my moronic but lovable misunderstandings. I was a little gift of imbecilic innocence to my loved ones, a curiosity as irresistible as a cave man fumbling with a camera. Or else I was an unofficial Idiot-Savant, possessing the genius of another biological order, based perhaps on a silicon metabolism; complementing my adorable stupidity with occasional flashes of unearthly intelligence, spewing forth information of absolutely no practical value — the cube root of a twenty-digit number, the precise air pressure at a point five miles above the Statue of Liberty, the sum total of all the words in my father’s vocabulary.
But I have grown up now! And I have mastered the language. Or rather I have trained my unconscious mind to master the language. Through a kind of self-hypnotism I have bullied my unconscious mind into probing the minds of others so that it may grasp the nature of the experiences the language describes. I am still not able actually to undergo those experiences — but I know which words go with which behavior. And I have discovered a few words that nearly name some of the states of my conscious mind; though the emotional resonances they stimulate are very different. I have a word, for instance, that conveys to others the notions of indifference, apathy, even sullen desperation. But for me it is a cleansing, a purgation and celebration, a triumphant revolt: BOREDOM! I AM BORED. I HAVE BEEN BORED SINCE I WAS BORN. BORED. SCREWED. MISINFORMED. MALADAPTED. BORED. STUCK IN AN EVOLUTIONARY CUL-DE-SAC. THE LANGUAGE sucked clean of its meat. All the typical racial characteristics unfailingly epitomized on thousands of unmarked faces. BOREDOM! I have discovered what I am not. I have discovered what not to say. BOREDOM! I have seen what I do not have to die with. I have been relieved of what I do not need. BORED. UNMAGNIFIED. DE-SACRALIZED. UNHALLOWED. UNSWOLLEN WITH TERRIFYING SILENCE. All these years and I’ve been tricked. I was bored and they wouldn’t tell me I was bored. Made me think it was bad to be bored. But it is not bad to be bored. When you are bored you no longer want to be bored. And how could I have ever become God if I was bored? For I am not bored now. They have come for me and I am asleep, but not bored. Go away, I am asleep. I am dreaming that I am not bored. I am living in solitude until all the boring people die. I will think but I will not talk. Except for this one word: BOREDOM. I will speak no other word but this until all the boring people die and everyone has forgotten all the boring words. And then I will construct a new language, starting with the word BOREDOM. So that all boring words can be summed up in one word and never have to be invented again. I AM BORED. BORED. I am not dead. Everyone wants to talk and I am sleepy.
What’s left? one asks. How are human beings to COMMUNICATE with each other if CONVERSATION is outlawed? CONVERSATION: What other institution could serve as the foundation for human interaction? We have now two modes of information, presently conveyed in the highly specialized conversational style, which might be worth recalling according to a new set of rules:
1) Exchange of cultural information; conversation as a tool for self-anthropomorphization: man creating himself in his own basest image. The Primary Fact: The culture is announcing its own demise. What better way to spread the word than through the devalued word? In this way the message of decay is circulated even while the subtler, more intimate details of decay are perfected. And what better way to devalue the word than through conversation, every day and in every way? In conversation words don’t have to mean anything. The current state of collapse, even the more immediate and personal signs, can be openly discussed without anybody getting too worried.
Conversation has always conveyed information different than the literal meanings of the words. But it has never conveyed nothing. Words are the medium of exchange in this system, which exists for the sole purpose of perpetuating itself. CONVERSATION! The language has gone off the gold standard. Like paper money, words need no longer be backed by an incorruptible and intrinsically valuable substance. And when used in this way they are lethal! They suck the life from the organic matter for whom, in an earlier age, the uttered name transmitted the vibration of its archetype.
2) Exchange of personal information. “Personal” information. “Person” as defined in post-Esalen society: an accumulated history of the distortions of light through a surface unique in its impurity. “Personal” information is any of the hundreds of dark little knots of gruesomely contorted white light clamoring for recognition right behind the eyes, pressing everywhere against the underside of the skin, that their message may be sweated, excreted, spoken, visualized, somehow released into the public domain. These tenuous little bodies sustain their life form only through continual articulation. Their cries, always perilously close to extinction: “I distort light — THUSLY!” or “Observe — the peculiar way I have paralyzed the spirit!”
The exchange of “personal” information duplicates the exchange of cultural information on a lower level. The cells are doomed to suffer from the body’s infatuation with its own decay, tirelessly hallucinating a monotonous soliloquy describing death as light. The mouth of the “person” who describes the “person” betrays him. As do the tongue, the bowels, the vowels; the outrageous violations of the gesticulating hands, flinging secrets away. (The mummification of Psyche.) It’s easiest to say what’s closest. The little curios, the lies we hold so dearly: these come first.
I SAY: “CONDENSE CONVERSATION to a few feature-length movies shown twenty-four hours a day at some outposts far from the lunatic hearts of mine alabaster cities. Leave the Didacticians, the Archeologists, the Dildoless Matrons to perfect its cheap and sterile strategies.”
WE, inhabitants of the Fourth World, have memories to regurgitate. We have woolly cradles to prepare, for the Blood of the Lamb will be shed for us and for many. But not too many, not too many. Only the ones wearing the Christ-clown’s hand-me-downs. That’s us, and our chosen ones. The shoeless ones, thin and ductile, perfect conduits, bare feet electrified into the earth. We have forty-two crimes of passion to commit in communion with the Holy Ghost, on consecutive Sundays, in the last year of the Christian Era. Forty-two stinking pylons to erect in the collapsing aura of the Western World, that our snoozing friends and loved ones, some of them, may crap, and come to attention as they plunge uneventfully to their grey purgatory. We are not all yet otherworldly, even some who will be. We must bring along as many as we remember. Wake them up with hot farts and stones that talk — advanced ventriloquial phenomena, hallucination will do — induce premature visions of cataclysm, death-wish, the migration of the poles — there are too many still passing in and out, broken and disheartened by forgetfulness. There are some who will join us who have not yet.
THIS IS the end of the transmission. There are no further instructions. The remainder of the message is concealed even from you. I have encoded the sum total of my mutations during my passing through all worlds on a single megalith, shaped in the likeness of a dark purple chromosome. I have entitled my history “Pederast the Megalith” for I am omnipresent and fuck simultaneously with all matter, male and female, living and non-living. This you cannot know for we must remain conjoined for all eternity. This code will not be broken, no, and it will not, never, be spoken. My life story is articulate at all times and in all places and will never be described. There is no watcher, no guardian mindlessly recording the dazzling convolutions of my intelligence. I cannot be observed, only imitated. Therefore:
Mutation by invitation only.
Mutation of the fittest.
Mutation in time for the next Unveiling, the further warp of time.
