20090208

improv'd autotypist





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6 kommentarer:

Anonym sa...

A more popular presentation
of this spooky distant look :

(in our daily life can be entangled semiobjects such as in cryptography profitably be used)

(Pplease disturb you in the following not to 'unnecessarily complicated nature', a ppoem to send : as boxes are sent, you know, - how quantum systems are not usually connected instantaneously.)

The whole system out of balance in's stumble and gets a kind of 'dynamic torque' experiences.

Regularly called 'decoherence' , condition of the poem is clear -
but only on every other page!

(The trick now is zusammenzufalten the paper again, and to enlarge the hole, so to change it. It is clear that, unfolded, both holes are bigger. )

Hmm, but there is not an encryption system, the entanglement with the works? When someone tries to say, in the management rumzupfuschen, listening to them, etc., is an attempt also failed, because the poems are also intertwined and affect each immediately surface.

Then yes but with information about the words transmitted, keep the fact of influence than informational content.

Oder wie?
Or what?

The link dimension is probably an old hat. At least, in the triple slit experiment, the talk of a "unendlichdimensionalen" space.

Is my paper but can still be saved, what do you mean?

'poetry reflects a ungemeinen density of language'

Signs and semioses are to be found everywhere.

The metaphysical nude power doctrine, the essence of things and their driving forces capture, is in the scholastic science center. By contrast, modern scholars wonder how what relationship exists between the motion and the time that a falling pooem zurücklegt? This question is not metaphysical, it does not ask for a hidden reason, but according to geometric relationships that can be displayed.

It shows that the thing for certain visual perception characteristic curves.
There are continuous changes in the perception of content, if you have a thing or to turn it herumgeht.Covert pages to disappear while other parts of the thing out of sight.

"When was claimed that the poeming for centuries until the konkretan led to untergehe that they are here, so we said: if the plate of the square narrow channel of the picturesque culture has closed, it serves as a powerful back its foundation for the spatial growth of the real world."

During the verräumlichte space-based space is where things are located, is the living room präreflexives and in this sense präkognitives phenomenon. The room is lived without such a topic or subject of consciousness to be. This means that the living room is not the usual thing categories or where the central perspective can be taken, but requires separate categories. This is already the unusual usage of the 'living' space indicates. In an initial characterization, it can be said of the living space is based on the behaviors and the corporeality of a living. The structures of the living space which ways of "The-World-being".

Was ist damit gemeint?
What does that mean?

objectivity ] existing [things

The hypertextual forerunner in today technically possible conditions over - no more scrolling, blurred boundaries between different forms of representation by a simple mouse click. The fantasies produced in the viewer, without him gängeln. The reader need not fear it, to lose: we give it to the main strand, shown as a map, you certainly free to leave, but always return to him could - the computer as a bookmark.

The 'New' relativised just when the purely technological abstracts will - in an artistic sense of the materiality of communication, each 'material justice' can prevail. In this respect, the question would be interesting to see how the arts (literature) of modernity that is on offer, the media reflection and experimentation with perceptions and communications in relation to information technology developments to stage, which she herself provoked. It would be to observe how the media-related syndromes constant crisis, but always different and exciting way to be.That also means: digital poetry can not be a better medium for his artistic achievements already made. You can simulate any Default which is then either but only for self-ex negativo or teaching device. Digital poetry has much more their own conditions and opportunities to test and use up to quality in the state of the achievements in the tradition adapter.

( a game is a game is a game )

"Nothing is inside, nothing is out there, because what is inside, it's outside."

Under the pretext of internalization, the exopressionists in literature and in painting to a generation together castle, which now eagerly their literature and art history and appreciation expected for an honorable citizen-candidate recognition.

Under the pretext of the soul to propagate, they have in the battle against the naturalism of the abstract and pathetic gestures back found that a content-free, comfortable living and still have a condition.
The stages are filled with kings and poets Faustian nature of any kind, the theory of a world view Melioristischen whose childlike, psychologically naivste-style for a critical complement to the expressionism must remain significant, the durchgeistert did loose heads. The hatred against the press, hatred against the advertisement, the hatred against the sensation of talking to people, which you chair is more important than the noise of the street and have a preference out of it, from every angle slider übertölpelt them.

That sentimental opposition to the signs that are not better and not worse, not reactionary, not revolutionary than all other periods, those matte opposition.

Cloud-pump with pencil strokes and mark on the edge of poems especially interesting - and downright through excerpted with conspicuous omissions, and not always explainable small text changes.

What then in the poem comes to language, it does so not because the author actually wanted to talk about it, but because it is the rule suggests or requests, just this sentence, the word form. The most significant is this shift in the most strict forms like anagram and palindrome. »Es schreibt«
The "it writes" is thus doubly demonstrated by not only the language but also have the rule of sitting at your desk. And beyond the "It writes" sort things done - just the fact that the author of the rule, after which proceeds, usually designates.

[ the copy on paper is scanned by a beam of light frequencies and implemented by the receiving device to decode and a sheet over. ]

[911]: Experimentiren with pictures and words in the imagination [ungs] V [enable] on one of the phys [ikalischen] experiment [mentiren] analog way. Add [ammen] setting - etc. Emerge - etc.


(this Iconic Turn through the Internet has much more far-reaching consequences)

Then the advertising has been aimed not only the product but also the attitude of the consumer, bland narcisisticamente, creating an image of the self, which does not become Super-I, but is produced as a division of the self, which on the one hand the consumer denies the existence of a value of use to property (a toaster to nine temperature) on the other tends to give a value to use unnecessary, corresponding to the price that was paid, saying to themself a lie "can always serve", which accompanies the extreme division of self-modernist, and that is a prelude to the corner around the corner.

Na toll when everything is in English.

Müssen wir jetzt unsere Sprache schon ganz aufgeben?

Already word that apparently no longer own anything in language.

(this protects you against fraud or bad jokes)

jaja!
I know the phroem already!







------

08 februar, 2009 03:08
gary barwin sa...

Nice!

I have a hand that comes out from behind my keyboard and pokes me in the eye, that punches me in the teeth, but that never touches the keys. Except the space bar. Once.

08 februar, 2009 09:51
troylloyd sa...

yeah, the autotypist thing was kinda inspired by all the Spicerian stuff intha air & i was remind'd of "poetic dictation" & whadda long history it has, the muse morph'd & the talking typewriter told me so etc etc

a Spicer interview:


Jack Spicer: Now, tonight is rather an interesting time to discuss poetic dictation. It's Yeats's birthday. He'd be a hundred today if he weren't up there with the big skywriters in the sky. And Yeats is probably the first modern who took the idea of dictation seriously. And he might be a good person to start out from, seeing as how -- although I don't know why a birthday should be so important - it still is his birthday.

He was on a train back in, I guess it was 1918. The train was, oddly enough, going through San Bernardino to Los Angeles
cover design of The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer, ed. Peter Gizzi (Wesleyan/New England, 1998)

when his wife Georgie suddenly began to have trances, and spooks came to her. He'd married at the age of forty-five, something like that, a rather rich woman who everyone thought he married just because she was a rich woman and Lady Gregory was getting old and wasn't about to will him money. Georgie was in the tradition of the Psychic Research Society and all of that, and so naturally they would come in the form that the Psychic Research Society would think spooks would come. And she started automatic writing as they were going through the orange groves between San Berdoo and Los Angeles.

And Yeats didn't know what to make of it for a while, but it was a slow train and he started getting interested, and these spooks were talking to him. He still, I'm sure, thought that Georgie was doing all of this to diver him. He probably was in a nasty mood after having gone across the country on the Southern Pacific, which I imagine in those days was even worse than it is now. But he finally decided he'd ask a question or two of the spooks as Georgie was in her trance. And he asked a rather good question. He asked, "What are you here for?" And the spooks replied, "We're here to give metaphors for your poetry."

That's something which is in all English department lectures now, but it was the first thing since Blake on the business of taking poetry as coming from the outside rather than from the inside. In other words, instead of the poet being a beautiful machine which manufactured the current for itself, did everything for itself-almost a perpetual motion machine of emotion until the poet's heart broke or it was burned on the beach like Shelley's -instead there was something from the Outside coming in.

Now, the difference between "We have come to bring metaphors for your poetry" and what I think most poets who I consider good poets today believe-and this would include people as opposite in their own ways as, say, Eliot on one hand and Duncan on the other -is essentially that there is an Outside to the poet. Now what the Outside is like is described differently by different poets. And some of them believe that there's a welling up of the subconscious or of the racial memory or the this or the that, and they try to put it inside the poet. Others take it from the Outside. Olson's idea of energy and projective verse is something that comes from the Outside.

I think the source is unimportant. But I think that for a poet writing poetry, the idea of just exactly what the poet is in relationship to this Outside, whether it's an id down in the cortex which you can't reach anyway, which is Just as far outside as Mars, or whether it is as far away as those galaxies which seem to be sending radio messages to us with the whole of the galaxy blowing up just to say something to us, which are in the papers all the time now. Quasads, or ...

[Comment interjected from the audience:]

Jack Spicer: Something like that. At any rate, the first step is reached, I think, with Yeats. But the way that it works -- "We have come to bring metaphors for your poetry" -- this is like "we have come to bring fertilizer for your fields," that kind of thing. You know, "well, you have such nice poetry, Mr. Yeats, and we spooks have come down from above to give you metaphors to hang it on to."

Now this is not really what happens in my talking about my own experience most of the time. But I think I can also speak for the experience that others I know have had in dictated poetry. I think the first kind of hint that one has as a poet-and I must confess I was, as Karen [Tallman] would say, a retard in this respect-is after you've written poems for a while and struggled with them and everything else, a poem comes through in just about one-eighth of the time that a poem normally does. That's the first experience. And you say, "oh well gee, it's going to be much easier if I can just have this happen very often."

So then you write seventeen or eighteen different things which are just what you're thinking about at that particular moment and are lousy. It isn't simply the matter of being able to get a fast take. It's something else. But the fast take is a good sign that you're hooked up with some source of power, some source of energy.

Then the next thing is you suddenly figure out, well gee, when I've been wanting something, say I'm in love and I want to sleep with this person and, you know, the normal thing is, with a fast take, you write all these things down with an idea of, essentially, a way of selling a used car. [Laughter]

And this doesn't work.

So one day, after you've had this first experience, which just was something you couldn't imagine, and the poems haven't come this clean, this fast-and they don't usually, in dictated poetry anyway. Again, suddenly, there comes a poem that you just hate and would like to get rid of, that says exactly the opposite of what you mean, what you have to say, to use Olson's thing in one of its two meanings.

[Charles] Olson says the poet is a poet when he says what he has to say. Now, you can read that two ways: what he "has" to say, namely "I want to sleep with you honey," or "I think that the Vietnam crisis is terrible," or "some of my best friends are dying in loony bins," or whatever you want to say that you think is a particular message. That's the bad thing.

But what you want to say-the business of the wanting coming from Outside, like it wants five dollars being ten dollars, that kind of want- is the real thing, the thing that you didn't want to say in terms of your own ego, in terms of your image, in terms of your life, in terms of everything.

And how this operates, I haven't the vaguest notion. You could probably figure it out scientifically if you knew enough about the science of chance, combination, permutation, all of that. I don't know. But I know that it has happened. It's happened less to me than it has to other people, and I think it's happened more to Robin than to Duncan, who tends to fake up a few things like any good medium does. [Laughter]

Question: What happens if the poem wants you to happen?

Jack Spicer: I think both you and the poem explode. [Laughter] No, really, it's like saying what happens if a farmer wants a cow to happen, you know. The farmer wants to milk the cow. The cow Is to be milked. And I suppose there could be a kooky farmer that wanted the cow simply to remain in its cowness. But I don't really know what would happen except the cow would get awfully sick after a few days of not being milked.

I just don't think that whatever the source of energy is gives really very much of a damn about you. It wants to keep you in good condition, just like the farmer wants to keep the cow in good condition. Or the butcher, or the rancher, and then the butcher wants to keep the steer in good condition until it's butchered.

Gladys Hindmarch from the audience: Jack, I was going to ask you if you've ever had the experience of having a line that you're satisfied with at the time that then you did like later, and that wasn't going in the other direction -- a direction other than what the poem was. I think you're so definite about, if you're pleased with it, then it is wrong.

Jack Spicer: Well, everybody as a host to this parasite has a different reaction. But my thing is that I write it down too fast to be pleased with it. If it's really a good line that I liked, then I'd see that I liked it after the whole thing was through. In other words, if there's no resistance, if the thing saying the thing is exactly what the host wants to say, the host just doesn't have any feeling that he's said anything. It goes through like a dose of salts.

Question: That could sound as if you were so busy writing it that you had no time to stand back and make a judgment on it.

Jack Spicer: Yes, but on the other hand, there are plenty of times when you're so busy writing it and you have to wait for two hours because the thing is coming through in a way that seems to you wrong. It may be that you hate the thing that's coming through so much, and you're resisting it as a medium. Or it may be that the thing which is invading you is saying, "yeah, well that's very nice but that hasn't anything to do with what this is all about." And you have to figure that out, and sometimes it takes a number of cigarettes, and occasionally a number of drinks, to figure out which is which. And it's a dance in some way, between the two. And you often fall on your ass - hit the wrong one.

Gladys Hindmarch: What you're saying is that you shouldn't interfere with it?

Jack Spicer: No. You have to interfere with yourself. You have to, as much as possible, empty yourself for this. And that's not noninterference. I mean, it's almost an athletic thing. It takes a huge amount of practice to be able to avoid blocking a person when you're not supposed to block the person on the play, when you're supposed to let him in to be mousetrapped. It takes a huge amount because you have this natural impulse. You know. Anyone's coming by, you block him. And the business of being able not to do something, especially things which are so important to you, are you, takes a tremendous amount of patience. And it doesn't take humility, since I've never seen a humble poet.

Jack Spicer: Well, it's the rhythm between you and the source of the poetry. You have to dodge here, it has to dodge there, and all of that. And you're going to make some missteps. And maybe the source is just as bad as you are. I've never been able to figure that one out. I mean, this Martian, this ghost, this whatever the hell it is, may be just as dumb in its own way as you are and may misstep too. But since, when you're dancing you worry about where you misstep, not how your partner does, you try to adjust your step to your partner's. So it is in this sometimes horrible interlocking of you and the poem. And the you just has to-well, it doesn't lead.

Question: Then would the poet not be a creator? But the poem itself would exist outside the poet in sort of a spiritual existence, wouldn't it?

Jack Spicer: You mean can we take credit for our poems? Well, is a radio set a creator of the radio program?

Question: No. Well, that's what I mean.

Jack Spicer: Yeah. But at the same time you don't get the radio program if the radio set has static in it.

Question: Oh no, no. But the poet is an agent then, or . . .

Jack Spicer:: Well yeah, like a mother is, yeah. But you know, it's pretty hard for a father to have a baby. I mean, good agents are kind of hard to find these days. I don't really see that it's anything less to be proud of to be a good agent.

Question:: Oh no.

Jack Spicer: No. I really honestly don't feel that I own my poems, and I don't feel proud of them.

Question: Well, you start saying, well, I'm going to write a poem, you know, and sit down to accomplish that, and you're just letting yourself interfere completely.

Jack Spicer: Not necessarily. It depends. I'm usually suspicious if I want to write a poem, if I figure, oh this would be just a great time. I've had a lousy time at the bar. I'm frustrated, everything else. I'd feel great in the morning if I had a poem.

Well, I know very well that this is a lousy, lousy time to write a poem. But occasionally, after an hour or so of me trying to write the poem for the poem, a poem nudges me on the back and starts coining through. And by that time it's sun-up and I'm real pissed off at the whole thing because, really, if I'd known it would be that late that I'd have to work, I'd rather have gone to sleep instead, and not have the glory of it, you know.

But it depends, I think, on the person. Everyone's a different kind of host, and I can just tell you about my own experiences and no one else's. And I think that the general things I've outlined are true about dictated poetry.

Question: Is it the great poem that scares the poet?

Jack Spicer: Yeah. It says something that the poet not only didn't mean to say but doesn't quite understand, or draws back from and says, "oh yeah? But this isn't right." Or the poem, when you're trying to seduce somebody, will make the person run five miles away screaming.

09 februar, 2009 04:24
mike di tomasso sa...

j,et,z

16 februar, 2009 14:51
ArtSparker sa...

Moebius machine.

19 februar, 2009 19:06
troylloyd sa...

t i'm e

Ger: jetzt = time/now

Рэй Брэдбери.RU


Рэй Брэдбери. «Last Rites»

Time Traveler? All, yes.

For Harrison Cooper had spent the better part of his third decade wiring circuitries of impossible pasts and as yet untouchable futures. Most men philosophize in their as-beautiful-as-women cars. Harrison Cooper chose to dream and knock together from pure air and electric thunderclaps what he called his Mobius Machine.

He had told his friends, with wine-colored nonchalance, that he was taking a future strip and a past strip, giving them a now half twist, so they looped on a single plane. Like those figure-eight ribbons, cut and pasted by that dear mathematician A. F. Mobius in the nineteenth century.

"Ah, yes, Mobius," friends murmured.

What they really meant was, "Ah, no. Good night."

Harrison Cooper was not a mad scientist, but he was irretrievably boring. Knowing this, he had retreated to finish the Mobius Machine. Now, this strange morning, with cold rain streaming from his eyes, he stood staring at the damned contraption, bewildered that he was not dancing about with Creation's joy.

He was interrupted by the ringing of the laboratory doorbell and opened the door to find one of those rare people, a real Western Union delivery boy on a real bike. He signed for the telegram and was about to shut the door when he saw the lad staring fixedly at the Mobius Machine.

"What," exclaimed the boy, eyes wide, "is that?"

Harrison Cooper stood aside and let the boy wander in a great circle around his Machine, his eyes dancing up, over, and around the immense circling figure eight of shining copper, brass, and silver.

"Sure!" cried the boy at last, beaming. "A Time Machine!"

''Bull's-eye!''

"When do you leave?" said the boy. "Where will you go to meet which person where? Alexander? Caesar? Napoleon! Hitler?!"

"No, no!"

The boy exploded his list. "Lincoln-"

"More like it."

"General Grant! Roosevelt! Benjamin Franklin?"

"Franklin, yes!"

"Aren't you lucky?"

"Am I?" Stunned, Harrison Cooper found himself nodding. "Yes, by God, and suddenly-"

Suddenly he knew why he had wept at dawn. He grabbed the young lad's hand. "Much thanks. You're a catalyst-"

"Cat-?"

"A Rorschach test-making me draw my own list-now gently, swiftly-out! No offense."

The door slammed. He ran for his library phone, punched numbers, waited, scanning the thousand books on the shelves.

"Yes, yes, he murmured, his eyes flicking over the gorgeous sun-bright titles. "Some of you. Two, three, maybe four. Hello! Sam? Samuel! Can you get here in five minutes, make it three? Dire emergency. Come!"

He slammed the phone, swiveled to reach out and touch.

"Shakespeare," he murmured. "Willy-William, will it be-you?"




The laboratory door opened and Sam/Samuel stuck his head in and froze.

For there, seated in the midst of his great Mobius figure eight, leather jacket and boots shined, picnic lunch packed, was Harrison Cooper, arms flexed, elbows out, fingers alert to the computer controls.

"Where's your Lindbergh cap and goggles?" asked Samuel.

Harrison Cooper dug them out, put them on, smirking. "Raise the Titanic; then sink it!" Samuel strode to the lovely machine to confront its rather outre' occupant. "Well, Cooper, what?" he cried.

"I woke this morning in tears."

"Sure. I read the phone book aloud last night. That did it!"

"No. You read me these!"

Cooper handed the books over.

"Sure! We gabbed till three, drunk as owls on English Lit!''

"To give me tears for answers!"

"To what?"

"To their loss. To the fact that they died unknown, unrecognized; to the grim fact that some were only truly recognized, republished, raved over from 1920 on!"

"Cut the cackle and move the buns," said Samuel. "Did you call to sermonize or ask advice?"

Harrison Cooper leaped from his machine and elbowed Samuel into the library.

"You must map my trip for me!"

"Trip? Trip!"

"I go a-journeying, far-traveling, the Grand Literary Tour. A Salvation Army of one!"

"To save lives?"

"No, souls! What good is life if the soul's dead? Sit! Tell me all the authors we raved on by night to weep me at dawn. Here's brandy. Drink! Remember?"

"I do!"

"List them, then! The New England Melancholic first. Sad, recluse from land, should have drowned at sea, a lost soul of sixty! Now, what other sad geniuses did we maunder over-"

"God!" Samuel cried. "You're going to tour them? Oh, Harrison, Harry, I love you!"

"Shut up! Remember how you write jokes? Laugh and think backwards! So let us cry and leap up our tear ducts to the source. Weep for Whales to find minnows!"

"Last night I think I quoted-"

"Yes?"

"And then we spoke-"

"Go on-"

''Well.''

Samuel gulped his brandy. Fire burned his eyes.

"Write this down!"

They wrote and ran.




"What will you do when you get there, Librarian Doctor?"

Harrison Cooper, seated back in the shadow of the great hovering Mobius ribbon, laughed and nodded. "Yes! Harrison Cooper, L.M.D. Literary Meadow Doctor. Curer of fine old lions off their feed, in dire need of tender love, small applause, the wine of words, all in my heart, all on my tongue. Say 'Ah!' So long. Good-bye!"

"God bless!"

He slammed a lever, whirled a knob, and the machine, in a spiral of metal, a whisk of butterfly ribbon, very simply-vanished.

A moment later, the Mobius Machine gave a twist of its atoms and-returned.

"Voila!" cried Harrison Cooper, pink-faced and wild-eyed. 'It's done!"




"So soon?" exclaimed his friend Samuel "A minute here, but hours there!"

"Did you succeed?"

"Look! Proof positive."

For tears dripped off his chin.

"What happened? what?!"

"This, and this ... and ...this !"




A gyroscope spun, a celebratory ribbon spiraled endlessly on itself, and the ghost of a massive window curtain haunted the air, exhaled, and then ceased.

As if fallen from a delivery-chute, the books arrived almost before the footfalls and then the half-seen feet and then the fog-wrapped legs and body and at last the head of a man who, as the ribbon spiraled itself back into emptiness, crouched over the volumes as if warming himself at a hearth.

He touched the books and listened to the air in the dim hallway where dinnertime voices drifted up from below and a door stood wide near his elbow, from which the faint scent of illness came and went, arrived and departed, with the stilted breathing of some patient within the room. Plates and silverware sounded from the world of evening and quiet good health downstairs. The hall and the sickroom were for a time deserted. In a moment, someone might ascend with a tray for the half-sleeping man in the intemperate room.

Harrison Cooper rose with stealth, checking the stairwell, and then, carrying a sweet burden of books, moved into the room, where candles lit both sides of a bed on which the dying man lay supine, arms straight at his sides, head weighting the pillow, eyes grimaced shut, mouth set as if daring the ceiling, mortality itself, to sink and extinguish him.

At the first touch of the books, now on one side, now on the other, of his bed, the old man's eyelids fluttered, his dry lips cracked; the air whistled from his nostrils:

"who's there?" he whispered. "what time is it?"

"whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth, whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul, then I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can," replied the traveler at the foot of the bed, quietly.

"what, what?" the old man in the bed whispered swiftly. "It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation," quoted the visitor, who now moved to place a book under each of the dying man's hands where his tremoring fingers could scratch, pull away, then touch, Braille-like, again.

One by one, the stranger held up book after book, to show the covers, then a page, and yet another title page where printed dates of this novel surfed up, adrift, but to stay forever on some far future shore.

The sick man's eyes lingered over the covers, the tides, the dates, and then fixed to his visitor's bright face. He exhaled, stunned. "My God, you have the look of a traveler. From where?"

"Do the years show?" Harrison Cooper leaned forward. "Well, then-I bring you an Annunciation."

"Such things come to pass only with virgins," whispered the old man. "No virgin lies here buried under his unread books."

"I come to unbury you. I bring tidings from a far place." The sick man's eyes moved to the books beneath his trembling hands.

"Mine?" he whispered.

The traveler nodded solemnly, but began to smile when the color in the old man's face grew warmer arid the expression in his eyes and on his mouth was suddenly eager.

"Is there hope. then?"

"There is!"

"I believe you." The old man took a breath and then wondered, "Why?"

"Because," said the stranger at the foot of the bed, "I love you."

"I do not know you, sir!"

"But I know you fore and aft, port to starboard, main topgallants to gunnels, every day in your long life to here!"

"Oh, the sweet sound!" cried the old man. "Every word that you say, every light from your eyes, is foundation-of-the-world true! How can it be?" Tears winked from the old man's lids. "Why?"

"Because I am the truth," said the traveler. "I have come a long way to find and say: you are not lost. Your great Beast has only drowned some little while. In another year, lost ahead, great and glorious, plain and simple men will gather at your grave and shout: he breeches, he rises, he breeches, he rises! and the white shape will surface to the light, the great terror lift into the storm and thunderous St. Elmo's fire and you with him, each bound to each, and no way to tell where he stops and you start or where you stop and he goes off around the world lifting a fleet of libraries in his and your wake through nameless seas of sub-sub-librarians and readers mobbing the docks to chart your far journeyings, alert for your lost cries at three of a wild morn."

"Christ's wounds!" said the man in his winding-sheet bedclothes. "To the point, man, the point! Do you speak truth!?"

"I give you my hand on it, and pledge my soul and my heart's blood." The visitor moved to do just this, and the two men's fists fused as one. "Take these gifts to the grave. Count these pages like a rosary in your last hours. Tell no one where they came from. Scoffers would knock the ritual beads from your fingers. So tell this rosary in the dark before dawn, and the rosary is this: you will live forever. You are immortal."

"No more of this, no more! Be still."

"I can not. Hear me. Where you have passed a fire path will burn, miraculous in the Bengal Bay, the Indian Seas, Hope's Cape, and around the Horn, past perdition's landfall, as far as living eyes can see."

He gripped the old man's fist ever more tightly.

"I swear. In the years ahead, a million millions will crowd your grave to sleep you well and warm your bones. Do you hear?"

"Great God, you are a proper priest to sound my Last Rites. And will I enjoy my own funeral? I will."

His hands, freed, clung to the books at each side, as the ardent visitor raised yet other books and intoned the dates:

"Nineteen twenty-two . . . 1930 . . .1935 . . . 1940 . 1955... 1970. Can you read and know what it means?"

He held the last volume close to the old man's face. The fiery eyes moved. The old mouth creaked.

"Nineteen ninety?"

"Yours. One hundred years from tonight."

"Dear God!"

"I must go, but I would hear. Chapter One. Speak."

The old man's eyes slid and burned. He licked his lips, traced the words, and at last whispered, beginning to weep:

"'Call me Ishmael.'




There was snow and more snow and more snow after that. In the dissolving whiteness, the silver ribbon twirled in a massive whisper to let forth in an exhalation of Time the journeying librarian and his book bag. As if slicing white bread rinsed by snow, the ribbon, as the traveler ghosted himself to flesh, sifted him through the hospital wall into a room as white as December. There, abandoned, lay a man as pale as the snow and the wind. Almost young, he slept with his mustaches oiled to his lip by fever. He seemed not to know nor care that a messenger had invaded the air near his bed. His eyes did not stir, nor did his mouth increase the passage of breath. His hands at his sides did not open to receive. He seemed already lost in a bomb and only his unexpected visitor's voice caused his eyes to roll behind their shut lids.

"Are you forgotten?" a voice asked.

"Unborn," the pale man replied.

"Never remembered?"

"Only. Only in. France."

"Wrote nothing at all?"

"Not worthy."

"Feel the weight of what I place on your bed. No, don't look. Feel."

"Tombstones."

"With names, yes, but not tombstones. Not marble but paper. Dates, yes, but the day after tomorrow and tomorrow and ten thousand after that. And your name on each."

"It will not be."

"Is. Let me speak the names. Listen. Masque?"

"Red Death."

"The Fall of-" -

"Usher!"

"Pit?"

"Pendulum!"

"Tell-tale?"

"Heart! My heart. Heart!"

"Repeat: for the love of God, Montresor." "Silly."

"Repeat: Montresor, for the love of God." "For the love of God, Montresor'."

"Do you see this label?"

"I see!"

"Read the date."

"Nineteen ninety-four. No such date."

"Again, and the name of the wine."

"Nineteen ninety-four. Amontillado. And my name!"

"Yes! Now shake your head. Make the fool's-cap bells ring. Here's mortar for the last brick. Quickly. I'm here to bury you alive with books. When death comes, how will you greet him? With a shout and-?"

"Requiescat in pace?"

"Say it again."

"Requiescat in pace!"

The Time Wind roared, the room emptied. Nurses ran in, summoned by laughter, and tried to seize the books that weighed down his joy.

"What's he saying?" someone cried.




In Paris, an hour, a day, a year, a minute later, there was a run of St. Elmo's fire along a church steeple, a blue glow in a dark alley, a soft tread at a street corner, a turnabout of wind like an invisible carousel, and then footfalls up a stair to a door which opened on a bedroom where a window looked out upon cafes filled with people and far music, and in a bed by the window, a tall man lying, his pale face immobile, until he heard alien breath in his room.

The shadow of a man stood over him and now leaned down so that the light from the window revealed a face and a mouth as it inhaled and then spoke. The single word that the mouth said was:

"Oscar?"

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25 februar, 2009 04:42

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