English 521: Composition Theory and Pedagogy

"Sam, tell me a story."
"No."
"Sam, I wanna hear a story."
"You're a real piece a work."
"Yes? I think that…"
"That's the story. Goodnight."

     You want to know about me and writing. Hell, son, why don't you eat something and throw a chair out a window? Listen, listen, listen: I can't bring you there; I feel it, I've been there, you know, and I hope to get back, or I get back to hope rediscover illumination for illuminations sake: snap-act-do-be-do-be-collapse: get back Loretta. Time, time: I can't be your map to the stars, can't want it that way, you know what I'm saying, still, we keep on playing…?

Supercalifricandfrackandvitriolicquotients.

     But recall, recall, recall: that's the cry isn't it, that and a fresh coat of sinister yellow paint, emptied in the parking lot of an empty device? Sure: let's watch it fly my way and take a lot of photos and footage and draft a proposal and go before the board and eliminate the negative, accentuating only the illusion of "more than nothing, less than zero" and for the love of St. Sebastian and Sitting Bull, do it with a smile! This fish-fry's free for fools finicky enough not to eat of the stuff of life and the lie. I know things: I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Jobs.

     But here's a spot: spot me while I lift this thing over my head and throw it in your direction. See spot, question spot, dark spots run rampant over this hungry little impulse and hitch up the divorces and the dates and the fiery first-time flirtations and in the event of some disgusting emergency, we'll all be adorned in cowboy hats and polar bear boots.

     The river my ass. Was – not was – where. The chicken crossed the road to die in the rain. Stab a bull while the sun rises and sticks to your margerita-ridden corneas. I have no complaints, you see, because I ask nothing of it and it asks jack of me: jack be nimble, the gloves have come off in your universe, or my universe, and when did you and I become the dance, the story, the way of the river? We never became shit: there's our place, twinkling, learning, forgetting, blissfully forgetting, but connecting this to that and even just in our minds' eyes to announce that indeed, angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of infinite glory. Vampires tell us what to do in memo form and they eat their lunches down in the trenches but I am nimble and dull and the spider and the pearl and the water. Hats off in the rain: this is the only law I know to help you map your textual practices, and above all else, listen: do you want to know a secret?

     I have few of these to share. Writing is thunder to the me of a million years ago: did we ever stop to think (over beer) that "primitive" is the angriest, most xenophobic word beneath the aurora borealis? Language waps me. Language is the little fear which causes total obliteration, and if I should fall, catch my stumble. Publish it. Read it to your kids when they cat your cradle forty-three Christmases from now. Insist on the tree and cook without abandon. Hate yourself and remember to always place yourself far above the other doggies. After uncertain emotions, cower and glare and get it down. I'm not trying to make you feel uncomfortable: I'm not trying make you any wing at all. At all. @ todos.

     The fact remains that writing is a taboo, a rape of the gods, a hypnopompic sport which loses its angelic growl because its paradoxes need the distance. Pins in its wings don't answer the fantastic cry of the why, and the "why" is in the forest of the virile listening to one hand tapping. I have fallen in the forest: and psycho-epistemologically speaking, I can't get up. I'm not smart enough to drive, but I never had to learn because I get where they're taking me just fine. I have the words sing to me and I take dictation and if my telling you this sends that-this away, you and I are gonna do the two-men-enter-one-man-leaves to the beat of Jam on It with a bagpipe rhythm section.

     I would love to share this with you, to take you to the germinal moments which map out the kaleidoscopic tundra of my textual practices like the Ghost of St.Patty's Past. Why would you want me to? Having pinned it to your ceiling, would you feast upon whatever life you imagine it once enjoyed? The numbness disregards its numbing agent in all cases but the one which hammers numb. And here's the super phishy banana: you already know this: search your feelings. You and I haven't stopped being one thing since before the second thing threatened to deconstruct us. Fire sifts through us with all the glory of the contemplation, and to follow that path into the woods is to know just what the old woman over the pot beneath the shadow of a new mountain knows: it tastes good.

     When I was seven, I read this book, and I wanted to talk to it but it ate itself right in front of me. Horrified with the realization that I could not only not eat myself but would be asked for the rest of my natural born life (until such time as bingo and chucking engrams across the floor became my primary time-killers) to describe why and how and what I could not eat myself, I got fat. I knew not then the eating, but fell into the bowl with the ugly, still-birthed certainty of a thing which knows the forest floor will break its fall and fall itself into a red, wicked virus. Why should I cry for you, what have you and I, under the illusion of our separate meals, earned together in this adder-uddered, smoky, nihilistic, yearning, somber kitchen? Mickey had all those brooms to contend with: what are we doing in love?

     You cook. Yes. Not too spicy, not too alien: then I go and spoil it all by saying something stupid like war, what is it good for? There's a place where the borders flag down the last transport, don't you see? If it conduits through you, God bless all here. Jesus weeps and whose crocodile does that remind you of? I know. Where's the place this thing speaks of itself and not to itself? Where's the germinal process of writing-ness, who's to blame when parties get out of hand? I think I'd like to take the third part of the pi question first, Albert: language is a dodo with a prayer book in one hand and an ice pick in the other. My eyes adored you, but if I get my hands on that rat bastard you call pedagogy, I'll moida da drum.

     First, read. First, wash. After the fall, we have but the oil and the bread and the moments. We have the sitting: the forgiving, the uncles, the pewter mugs filled with someone's stale, sweet blood. I serve it up like John Mac before John John bid too high. What you ask I cannot say, what you ask you do not know, what you plant cannot be unplanted save in the event of a frozen winter and vigilant worms. I want to marry you, but I have to say goodbye to love now. I have to walk away.

     "I'm still with you. Not nuts. Wondering. Tired? Annoyed? Please be. It'll make my job so much easier, or at least, do-able, if I can have you worked up. Hot and bothered. I'm trying to drain your passion, doncha see? Trying to take from you all of whatever makes you not me. And you have no problem with that, you're a recently inducted Capitalist of Souls, slapping your stall's counter with the fervor of an orgasmic pope. Sell me. Buy me. Hedge against my losses. I need a beer. You want? Walk with me, talk with me, hold my hand and slide two fingers into my back pocket. I'm your fringey, frantic, frozen friend, and that comes with a promise: all this will start to make sense. You have to let go and hold on. You have to believe me. Don't feed me, sit at a safe distance from the pacing panther's cell. It transmutes. Desire me without the taking, sleep without the dream of having. Think after you abandon language like an unwanted pregnancy. You can. You can. Relax. Stop trying and relax. "Everything's gonna be alright, everything's gonna be alright…" Marley jamming with Cole. All we need now is Nina on harmony. Dig. Come fly wit me, friend – we'll pick you up a green pointy cap on the Avenue of Shits and Giggles, and nobody'll be the wiser. Pssst. Nothing more. This here's a Dis-a-nee trip, yep – but not the evil, Michael-Eisneresque Disney, no: here we got the Sunday-night-small-world- when-you-were-eight-and-your-mom-made-Rice-Krispie-treats Disney. We're crickets with top-hats, bedknobs with broomsticks, wishin' on twinklers and thwartin' wolfish Sheriffs of Nottingham. Say, we can fly in many ways: feet, hands, carpets, wands, umbrellas – but for now, let's just stroll. It's slower to stroll. Between us we'll get this done, and I have good days and bad. Slap me. I have no agenda, and I've been waiting for you for a very long time…"

     Wish with me after the read and the wash and the walk. Wish with me that Carl Gustav hopped over the coals before his feet remembered how to heal. I was BORN a coal miner's daughter, sister love: please release me, let me go. When we cross, we know, we see, and we ARE, but we can't speakie no more English, capeche? And it may surprise you to learn that we don't even need to. We read and write and rise with the sun.

      There isn't a line in here that makes sense. Mama, I'm your man. See you in Tokyo, you old mutineer.

"Come with me, my love, to the sea, the sea of love…."

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