Bardo
Lamellicorn the Clone once said that the only thing better than a good fuck is an orgasmic death. His writings, which almost obsessively juxtaposed quasi-biological sensations with abstract speculation, often graced the pages of THE SUN.
Now — if it can ever truly be said that a “clone” may die — he is dead. The circumstances of his death are unclear. Members of his family have been reluctant to release details. We can only hope that his was an orgasmic death.
His genetic code has of course not disappeared from the realm of organic life forms, since, during his lifetime he underwent innumerable “clonings.” Cloning is a type of a-sexual reproduction in which offspring are derived from a single individual. The process is complex and has only rarely (and probably illicitly) been performed successfully — let alone attempted — on human beings.
The essence of the operation is that each descendant receives a genetic code which is the exact replica of the parent’s. Some self-described servants of the public interest have denounced experiments in cloning, conjuring up horrific visions of an army of 100,000 Nixons battling an army of 100,000 Brezhnevs. But in fact there is little chance that children with the same genetic structure as a single parent will duplicate that parent’s growth. Lamellicorn the Clone, a clone himself of an even older member of his family, is proof of the profound role environment plays in the development of the human being. The resemblance between him and the woman he claimed to be his “parent” was remote.
Only a few weeks before his death we requested an interview and he agreed, on the condition that he select the interviewer. His choice, which surprised us but only at first, was a precocious, rather androgynous-looking pubescent child who calls him? her? -self “Lamia the Crone.”
We suspect now that (s)he is in fact a favorite clone of Lamellicorn’s own body and his natural heir — though his/her physical appearance differs strikingly from his in some respects. The interview quickly broke from the traditional mold and became an almost excruciatingly personal exchange of information between the two. We wish to present it here, however, as Lamellicorn the Clone’s last interview.
Child (Lamia the Crone): WELL DAD, how’s life on Uranus? I mean, what’s life really like on other planets?
Parent (Lamellicorn the Clone): HOW MANY HAIRS on the beard of Jesus Christ?
Child: What is this, a Zen self-help clinic? I want the facts, Daddy-o, the straight dope — not cold turkey illumination. Just give me something I can digest, not your cryptic mephitic allegories. Why don’t you just tell me what it’s like?
Parent: WHAT’S MY NAME? Ask me again and I’ll tell you the same.
Child: A real elitist, eh? You think just because you got a little specialized knowledge of no practical value to anybody you got the right to CLAM UP . . .
Parent: Crab up.
Child: Huh?
Parent: Crab up, not clam up.
Child: I don’t get it.
Parent: I’m a Cancer, ruled by the Crab.
Child: So?
Parent: Cancerians are notoriously secretive and indirect.
Child: Sounds like a sickness to me.
Parent: Actually I feel very healthy concealing things from people.
Child: Well it’ll kill you in the long run. Let me see those evasive eyes of yours — just as I thought. See how you got a sea of white underneath that hazy hazel pupil? It’s reeling like a drunken boat. I have it on good authority that anyone with eyes like yours is too sick to live through the Apocalypse.
Parent: Yeah? Says who?
Child: Some guy did a historical survey about the characteristics of people least likely to survive in times of mass catastrophe. You know, concentration camps, wars, forced migrations, natural disasters . . .
Parent: Yeah? And what makes you think I’m not just going to levitate myself up when the time comes and wait until the earth’s done rearranging itself?
Child: Your dreamy eyes for one thing, pop. And another sign of sickness this guy mentioned was habitual breathing through the mouth. Do you do that?
Parent: Only when all the smells around me are artificial.
Child: You’re a real wise guy. I bet you got crooked crowded teeth too, don’t you? That’s the third mark of the ones who get left behind.
Parent: Oh — won’t it be a relief to scour the planet clean of all the over-ripe people?
Child: Yeah, but what if you’re one of them?
Parent: Oh I wouldn’t worry about it. I’ve got a secret master plan for survival.
Child: Well you at least better tell the planet your big secret so she knows you mean well. Because you don’t look any stronger or sharper than the day I was first old enough to know you weren’t me.
Parent: I’ll tell you this — it takes a while before it begins to show. Seven years to be exact. Every seven years you have a whole new body. But meanwhile, during the changeover, it looks like you’re dragging around the old version.
Child: Well what is this secret master plan? Is that why you go vacation on Uranus and Neptune and leave me here having to scrounge for my food in garbage bins?
Parent: I don’t LIVE on Uranus. I only go there for the sake of mutation.
Child: Mutation? I thought mutation makes freaks.
Parent: Mutation just means the speeding up of the slow natural process of evolution. All I’ve done is to remove it from the realm of the accidental.
Child: Are you going to be a freak?
Parent: Everybody that survives is going to be a freak.
Child: I want to be a freak too — but I don’t want to be ugly.
Parent: Oh don’t worry. By the time everyone’s done becoming freaks who’re going to be freaks the standard of beauty will be very different.
Child: Will I look like you?
Parent: I don’t look like a freak yet. Mutation mostly just redesigns the genetic instructions at first — with little invisible surgeries. The body changes later, once all the old flesh is sloughed off.
Child: I want to do it too. Tell me how to do it.
Parent: Oh it’s not all so easy. It’s very secret as long as I talk about it. Otherwise it’s very clear and transparent.
Child: Come on. I don’t want to waste any more time.
Parent: OK. Last night I dreamed I was inside a space ship but at first I couldn’t find anyone else there. Then I grew a big wart on the back of my right hand and as soon as I did I saw a figure in a white linen suit carrying a geiger counter. I asked him how much plutonium there was in the world by this time, and how much time we had left, and he stabbed my wart with the wand of his geiger counter. It exploded in a million pieces and blew out of the space ship and fell like snow upon the earth.
Child: I don’t want to hear your dream. I want to know how to mutate.
Parent: You want to mutate, baby, you better learn how to dream.
Child: Dreams are just pretend.
Parent: Yes. Let’s say my dream was a big fat pretend. A drama of crystallization in the theater of my own brain. All those PRETEND bewildering age-old demonic memories finally gathering themselves into a little white wart on my hand and attracting my very own space man to scourge and heal me. It was just like finding living stellar dust hidden in my worst confusion — and a paternal hand there to come and give me away to my long suffering mother. Because when I fell like snow it was a return like oedipal sex when it’s still fresh and flesh-warm and mama is a stinging skin of orgasms with little bites you don’t know where next — and don’t care — because you forget who’s falling and who’s coming to meet, the sky or the earth you just know you have to blend with each other and bless and kiss their distance away from the end to the beginning and no longing and no Time to collapse and no breaths to take by yourself . . .
Child: When you going to tell me how to mutate?
Parent: I just told you how. I invited a strange flesh into my sleep and it squeezed my dream so hard my brain screeched like a nuclear bomb and scorched my genes full of mutation.
Child: Why can’t you just give me the facts? Why do you have to torment me with your evasive ego tricks? I think you got a parasite in your brain.
Parent: I assure you that this is the way mutation is passed on from generation to generation not by flesh but by dream.
Child: You got an answer for everything.
Parent: I’ve got two answers for everything, completely contradictory. If you had more animal intelligence in you you’d realize that right now you’re in an unbearable double bind and that the only way for you to escape is through either spontaneous unpremeditated schizophrenia or else a brilliant act of the creative will.
Child: Oh so you’re trying to make me into a lunatic, eh?
Parent: Listen honey, let me tell you something. The only reason you’re still missing the gist is that you don’t know the first thing about being a lunatic.
Child: Well who’s fault is that? You’re my great guru father guiding spirit all rolled into one. How am I supposed to learn how to be a lunatic if you don’t spell it out?
Parent: ABRACADABRA. Is that what you want? Peh. Spell it out? Baby, you got it all wrong. See my gills, these slits under my jaws? THAT’S one of the first signs of my mutation. THAT’S how a fish-man breathes. You never saw my gills before, in all these years, did you? You never knew I breathe water and talked through the Moon.
You keep listening to my voice and trying to breathe in the words and believe in them. But you can’t breathe in my words. Words are hot winds — if you open too wide they will scald your teeth, your tongue, and the roof of your mouth. My sexual flavor is water and my maker of sounds spreads through your body by water alone. Breathe in my sound, don’t believe it. Let the bare-ass back-side of the Moon tug at the back of your head, let the sound fall from my words and spill through your gills. And wherever the water of your body remembers the water of mine we’ll hear the same thing.
Child: But I want my body to be made of the same thing yours is. I thought you were my father.
Parent: You ARE my little germ. You are written out of me and I’m made of an angel. I want you to know this — the only book I ever made for you to read is your body — and you’ve got it on.
Child: My body! But everything on my body takes so long to grow. I feel so old and my body feels so young.
Parent: That’s because you’re not finished yet.
Child: I’m not a fish yet either. I can’t breathe like you say. I don’t even have gills.
Parent: Sure you do. You’ve got a third eye too.
Child: Oh yeah? Where are all those magical properties?
Parent: They’re not magical. They’re still dreaming that they’re dreaming and don’t feel themselves yet. I told you that you are a book that I wrote and you’re made out of me. Only you haven’t read certain parts of the book yet and so the book doesn’t know all about itself. As soon as you get to the place that says you have gills and a third eye and hands that heal and gonads that travel in time, you’ll remember the day a long time ago when they all developed at once. I know. I did it. I read the book of the angel I’m made of and I have it all now. Everything the angel has. And more.
Child: I want to be an angel too. I want to fly like you to other planets. I want to be invisible and spy in the shower stalls of flying saucers. I want to lick the shells of eggs turned inside out in black holes. I want to fly faster than light.
Parent: You’re awfully ambitious for a spiritual being, don’t you think?
Child: First you promise my body thrills untold and now you say I’m a spiritual being. Do you mean I’m just some kind of leaky vibration or something?
Parent: Not exactly. Let’s just say you’re the bruise of a big and awkward fuck between me and your mother . . .
Child: I’m just a mistake, huh? A ransom she demanded for her help? And now you want to dump me here on this stuffy planet? I don’t want to be so clumsy, I don’t want to be so heavy. I want to be a yellow feather that floats in and out of momentary eyes, watery eyes that gel as I drift through them and then suddenly gas away. I know there are such eyes. I know there are bright and dreamy eyes hanging in between the planets.
Parent: My love you may be rigid and heavy now. But I love you. And your mother loves you. And our love means to have you remain on Earth. You have many unexplored genetic landscapes to wander through but they have already awakened to the knives of surgeons and clowns who find the Earth mirrored in you.
Listen to what I say; I am under oath to pass this along to you:
The Earth is a great crystal being. What men call the fault lines in the Earth’s crust are the violent meetings of her eight great drifting plates on which the continents ride over the mantle. The faults are highly conductive rods circulating the energy which accumulates in transactions between the planet and the other heavenly bodies.
The Earth recognizes you as the totem of an age-old desire for radical mutation. You will mimic her — with great art — on a miniature scale. The serpent power has already designed in you a magnetic field that closely resembles the circulatory system of the planet. Your face is her face. The planetary grid is crystallizing in your own genetic globe. You are too young to know . . .
But scars are already forming where you will perform great experiments for Her in your own flesh. You will slash new interstices. They will be new links in the network. Vesicles stagnant with the fossils of human settlement will burst. The atoms composing all Akashic Records will be stripped of electrons and squeezed into the nucleus of a single dwarvish protoplanet. ALL terrestrial elements will undergo atomic reorganization. Expect all atomic heights to change. For an instant the nuclei of ALL atoms in this sphere will possess a negative charge, the electrons a positive charge.
You will cause fearsome pain and unendurable shock. But in the space of a single day and night the Earth will ignite an ecstatic furnace lethal to homo sapiens. Those who survive will have no genetic link to the old race.
You will not recall the specifics of what I have just told you for exactly seven years. You are too young to know. You need know nothing else now but to be a lunatic. And for that you must learn only to love your Mother.
Child: I don’t want to love my Mother. I want to travel to other planets like you.
Parent: Oh you’ll be able to travel to other planets without loving your Mother. I did. In the early explorations I was mean and VERY chic. And VERY VERY Sexy. Mine was the Charisma of disdain. I dismissed women and they loved me for it. They would do anything for me. I formulated my greedy plans to colonize the planets with permanent versions of ME and ignored them — and they begged me to screw them. I became the perfect Sexual Technocrat, a boy wizard. No fuck was wasted, no female essence left unexploited. For every night I spent trading orgone with a mature woman I saved enough propulsion to take me to the edge of the solar system and back.
But I was a Technocrat, not a lunatic. While my body had the heat to travel, it lacked the liquid to colonize. All my settlements failed. Every body I left on other spheres evaporated and I was left alone and stranded back on Earth. And you, my child, like me, will never be a lunatic as long as you do not love your Mother.
And as long as you don’t love your Mother, baby egg, you’ll be stuck right here.
Because you’ve got to carry your Mother with you in your liquid, not your heat. Relax and receive her love. There is no rush. Let her be your animal. Be drunk with her face and imagine her graven image in the nucleus of each of your cells. She is more powerful than a drug, and those who need Her will need you too.
Let me drop you a clue about the order of things in this little section of the galaxy. All the local planets know the Mother Earth as their Rememberer. She is the blind instinct to respond, and so attracts all bodies who wish to be remembered. But in fact they are always remembered here only by the way they are altered by her response. She makes everything into Herself.
She is true magnetism. Her desire to yield and receive is the same as her desire to transmute. And bodies that appear much more massive than Her — even the gaseous giants like Jupiter and Saturn — are really smitten with desire for Her. They imagine She will record them as they imagine themselves to be; but in the end they desire only to be endlessly deprived of that desire. In other words, She makes them desire NOT to be themselves — but to be continually transformed through Her. You understand? No planet in the solar system is more addicting.
When She is your animal She will BECOME the impulse of other planets to come to you. She will make them desire to be YOU.
In this way you will learn to have the planets visit you, and later inhabit your very flesh. Don’t worry. They are not really too big. It is as easy for them to be inside you as it is for you to be inside them. There is no need to travel out to them when they will travel in to you. You will never need to leave your body since they will BECOME your body. She will teach you to be magnetic.
Child: I don’t want to be magnetic. I want to FLY.
Parent: You want to talk and you want to fly and you want to fill things up with hot wind. But when you learn how to be silent and drop down and drown THEN you can travel like me. Come now. Look at my face. No. Look at my eyes. Look at my brain. Do you want to see the little electro-chemical flashes of my thoughts running along their circuits in my brain?
Child: Sure —
Parent: Then I’d better shut up.
Child: You’re going to have to teach me how to look through that bone cage around your brain. I don’t have X-ray vision yet.
Parent: No, I’ll just shut up and let all the sounds stay inside me. Watch. I’ll become completely transparent. Just look right here between my eyes.
Child: What if I don’t see anything?
Parent: We’ll just wait until you do. I’ll help you a little. I’m going to think of what it’s like on another planet and you’ll tell me where my memories are. OK? What animal do I look like?
Child: A wolf.
Parent: Where am I the wolf?
Child: It’s a place that feels very sticky or glutinous, with some kind of coarse sand and clay. There’s kind of a color orange but weak and dim like it was midnight and the sun was out. I feel barbs pinching me up and down my body, but like from the inside — not hurting really, but a hot kind of pressure in reverse, a sucking from inside to out like I was falling outside myself . . . and really barrar . . . barbarian . . . or barbarous, . . . my brow feels like it’s clogged with sticky hot metal . . . Iron. Red ferrous boats sliding along dry muddy craters . . . dry mud . . . dry red mud . . . whatever’s sticky without water. Breathing hot oil. Like my head banged against something hard and the blood was out of control but inside clanging around my sinuses. Blood sounds like bells. I can’t tell if it’s cold or hot. Just a shock. A jangling gash against the inside of my face. Like the soft parts are being scoured away and carried off by some acid. Smells of violent things, something cooking. Strong cancerous smells, something growing too fast. A sick kind of fermentation or perverted fertilization . . . raw, clapping pink. A fake-star squirting up my nose with long arms, very red or fire pink, a squeeze. I wish I was a man again, that red . . . I can’t stick to my eyes . . . the pregnancy of a glacier too hot but without any water to melt it . . . a hot red glacier, but not fire . . . who says I am a man . . . a red belt slithering in the mind of just my eye . . . each eye of mine two or three skins, a plague, a separation . . . a mirror between each peeling face . . . I’m looking at the red muscles between my faces . . . they feel like wax,
the worship of welts . . . I know I’m not bleed-
ing, I know there’s no fresh spill of me, I’m
too thick like the rest of the red face fall-
ing from me . . . a furnace burning
thick red roots, the pulp from the
root of my face . . . they’re
taking off
my face
Parent: OK. OK. Stop. Stop for a minute. Where are you — where am I?
Child: A red planet.
Parent: What red planet?
Child: A hot red planet.
Parent: What hot red planet?
Child: A hot sticky violent red planet.
Parent: What hot sticky violent red planet?
Child: Planet? Mars. MARS. I’m on fire. I’m on MARS. I’m a fruit of an evil act. I’m a bitter taste, a dry pulp without a face, a fire. I’m on fire, bring me back. Bring me back my daddy my sign, bring me back.
Parent: Go ye forth, my bitter fruit, go ye forth and multiply. You shall have a thousand faces.
Child: No no no no no I will not I will not I will stay sane I will stay sane. I’m sane I’m sane. I’m a miracle. I am bathing in no waters. I breathe no sea. I’m home in bed and dry as the white sky and no eyes see me swimming. I am my own eyes and yours and no one bigger can see me or find me drown me drink me for a wet omen. A child and I am until the end a child who buries my Mother dry and sleeps hollow-boned airy and sterile flying on the outside of time for the year to stop turning.
Parent: Give up you little egg. Give up you little egg. There are Chinamen paddling across the Great Deluge to tie stones to your bones. There are dogs in purple pools called Pluto tugging the soles of your lame feets to the underworlds of our very own Mother so lost and heavy-blooded all these years. We’ll go together my little egg. Sing a little song with me to make the singing more sinking:
Memories of the bright sea All alive in me Warm and wet and raw and strong Silky Stringy Milk Sea Sea food sent to feed the Moon Hungry Baby Eats the songs my Mother can sing Changes all her faces Memories of the bright sea All alive in me All alive in me All alive in me
