Archive for the ‘Trent Walters’ Category
Proust1: A Primer, which the Author Painstakingly Annotated to Allow How Not to Read about a Lout Whose Crimes Spouted against Humanity Are Not in Doubt2
Wednesday, April 4th, 2007
Squatting on the bottom library step, the mousy, elfin-framed man named Arthur4 dusted his snake5-skin suit, glanced at his watch6, then adjusted his horned1-rims to watch an old woman6 wheeze and labor7 up the steps with a dolly that held his titanic8 stack of manuscript pages. She paused to catch her breath and pushed long tresses of gray hair out of her face.
“Cease wool-gathering, Miss Mykoytress.” His eyelids hooded to slits. “We haven’t words enough and time9 before I present my doctoral thesis.”
“Did you reproduce this thesis and read three-thousand pages of Remembrances?”
Art raised himself, as if slowly uncoiling his legs. “That facsimile records the achievements of the all-time greatest novel.”
“I read the first fifty before I realized I hadn’t read the first.”
He hissed, ready to strike.
“I reread it, realizing he taught himself to write on my time. I don’t have much left.”
Scenting the proverbial lost sheep’s weakness, Art flicked his forked-tongue7 and slithered7 up the steps to make the intellectual kill. “He had strapping male companions, one of whom Proust bought an airplane which the companion promptly crashed into the ocean. Proust never regained the time lost from the loss.”
“I prefer Of Mice and Men.” The tresses of her hair writhed and turned him to stone.
_____
1 Pronounce Proust like Faust2 jousting it out with the metamorphosing Mephistopheles, whose elfin frame housed a Machiavellian mind that deluded the most casually espoused Marlowean/Goethean readers of Chairman Mao’s social policies.
2 The author uses assonance3 to demonstrate artfully4 the proper pronunciation.
3 The auctorial3 terms “ass-onance” and “pomp-ass” resonate like pans9 of Teflon-coated Freudian slips for the propensity to use overly erudite3 and pompous3 terms like “auctorial” in a flagrant flaunt of critical authority.10
4 The “author” impishly misdirects the reader with “Arthur” to obfuscate his identity slipping a devilishly deceptive “author” into the title.
5 The wise old woman archetype tempted into servitude by the wise old serpent male archetype.
6 Sly injection of the symbol of time.
7 Scathing indictment of the bourgeois laissez faire.
8 Double entendre alluding to the recyclable Greek myths and the ship that lost a thousand faces9. Note the juxtaposed conflation of a child’s and a man’s play toys: a doll-y and a ship (with phallic suggestion)–let alone the bio-ethical reproductive dilemma of cloning inherent in a “dolly.”
9 Marvel at the coy allusion to Andrew Marvell’s poem.
10 Never trust auctorial3 critical authority.
Sense
Thursday, March 29th, 2007
A proud and knowing forestpeople, we dwell near a clearing used for fertility festivals. The forest is all of the world, except for the sky. We see the sky and know it. Our home is parallel to the home of the sky, so we are parallel to the starpeople, their equals. But we are earthy compared to those lofty ones, who uphold their torches nightly, so far off they hear not our calls.
The forest is the world, the world the forest; the forest inscribes the world; the forest flows beyond what the eye can see. There are no words for these things. We do not write but only speak them. Some urge us to transcribe history for the next generation. Foolish conceit! People should live in the now, not the past.
Rumor spreads that our world shrinks, tree by tree. One claims to have marked a tree with his sharp stone, and on the morrow, it was leveled to a stump. This we find difficult to believe because this one often cannot find his own sleeptree at night, which he should know, blindfolded, like his wife’s form. Besides, what are we and what is the world without forest? If a tree disappears, does the world disappear with it? The notion’s nonsense.
Rumor also claims a grassland surrounds our home, the forest. This we also find difficult to believe. Grass is for walking on and softening your nest. It cannot shield you from the tusk beast. A people need only forest and juicy beige fruits that dangle off limbs. We know this, but we also smell smoke from foreign fires–smoke flavored with wild game and fragrant wood. Do we believe what we know or what we sense?
Some of us desire to descend from the trees, to lope to grasslands to see what strange beings these may be, if such truly exist. The starpeople we know. We see them every night. They are silent and persevering if aloof in their nightly searches by torchlight. But the grasspeople must indeed be strange–grazing their world upon all fours.
Others of us doubt the sense of leaving the safety of our world. Can these grasspeople be found? Would they want to be found? If they wanted to meet us, wouldn’t they have attempted to talk already? This assumes that we can find our way out of the forest, the world.