9/8/07
READER BE FOREWARNED! If graphic sex and violence offend you, skip this blog. What can I say? It was a sad day when I found this manuscript. How was I to know what kind of smutty fiction I would find in Dewey’s rotting fishing creel. I’m still trying to cope with the fact that my much beloved and deceased uncle could imagine such filth. Disgusting! He was a marathon dancer, a Busby Berkeley regular, and a fine, closeted gay man. Or so I thought. So, you may ask, why am I putting this trash on my blog. Three reasons. One, Dewey would have wanted his…err…art to live on, two, I’ve got chemo brain, three, Pluto was my dad!
For R. J.
Stories From Camp Kitsch
“One cannot bring children into a world like this. One cannot perpetuate suffering, or increase the breed of these lustful animals, who have no lasting emotions, but only whims and vanities, eddying them now this way, now that.”
- Virginia Woolf
Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
Pluto ran frantically through the poplar underbrush bearing the weight of a pursuing fury, in truth a burden where the fates of old executed their ultimate terrors, terrors born of the world's collective iniquities, transgressions--sins both mortal and venial that curse existence--terrors that no one but he could shoulder. His panting gave way to hyperventilation, which gave way to long pauses where he had no breath at all.
He clung to a massive dead birch, stripping the bark from the brickred rot disintegrating under his frozen maul. Prostrating himself before it he railed at its mute trunk, oblivious to the fatal anonymity nature ultimately guarantees.
Pushing on, he stumbled face first into a jagged stump, breaking off his two front teeth. His mind raced as the salty warm blood triggered jumbled memories of Zelda's horrifying immolation and his foster father's tongue stew. The knifing wind shearing the pinetops and smearing the thick overcast with dark streaks transformed the snow-covered swamp into a familiar place. A world beckoning to Zeke with a metallic tasting finality only he could interpret as typical. Suddenly, his troubles were irrelevant.
Stirring, he recognized the unfamiliar objects below him as his feet. They moved; he went on. An oak branch served as a crutch with which he dragged himself, sphinx-like toward the cliff. The earth moved as he did; as if they were going nowhere; and, in a moment of insight validated this parable of being. His exhaustion and desperation fed his exhilaration. He concentrated on images of his death; the shock of a stroke; the blitzkrieg heart attack; an aneuristic spasm.
When he hit the old lumber trail he found a better staff and headed for the Club road. Hearing an approaching snowmobile he dove into a thicket of tag elder. After a while, exhausted and delirious, he got to his knees and was startled by the realization of who he was; that he had an identity; that he was something more than brute animal consciousness.
Slowly, after an hour, perhaps two, he staggered on. Some three miles south, at the intersection of the Triple A road, he became disoriented and wandered in a panicky parabola toward the rising moon. One hour later he stumbled upon an isolated fishing camp on the Salmon Trout River.
He crawled between the broken down chassis of an ancient Willy's Jeep and a rusted out International Scout; passed by cords of snow covered hardwood, decrepit ice-shanties and outbuildings; and would have stopped had he known what he would see.
Pulling himself up on the Airstream's broken mirror he looked through the soot tinted oval, across the makeshift woodstove and beyond, at the sight of Bokasa raping Zelda. The translucence of the cracked glass that mediated this pathetic vision tormented his mental perception; mirroring his undeniable complicity in this unholy scene. For the first time he saw himself as another might observe him; an atavistic self-voyeur; a shunned harbinger of what was already; of a cruel life in all its terrifying clarity.
The trailer was littered with pornographic magazines and spent shell casings. Bokasa's massive back, scarred by a thousand wounds and surgeries, writhed in chiaroscuro silhouette against the setting sun and rising moon. Thrusting and pumping in the dying light, he had her pinned atop a cedar chest. Bokasa balanced himself against a stuffed deer head with his left hand while pistoning himself into her buttocks. Her doe-like legs splayed spasmodically as her beseeching arms flailed at her degradation.
Bokasa's larval girth obscured Pluto's view and muffled the hysteric cries of Zelda. The trailer cradled them in Cocteauesqe tableaux; its various mounted fish and antlered Ungulates lifelessly leering at Bokasa's loathsome act. Pluto could vaguely hear Bokasa's psychotic incantations as he plumbed Zelda's innocence.
Bokasa collapsed his spent tumescence onto a threadbare couch, his legs fleshy appendages suggesting an insect queen at the center of some depraved hive, his purple and red penis at the epicenter of a Bosch-like diorama of violent, bloody debauch. Beyond the couch where Bokasa lay gasping, Peacock's headless body lay on the yellowed linoleum. One of his hands was missing, and the pinkish bone of the upper arm protruded from the flesh.
Just beyond him a hounds tooth fedora floated in a pool of blood; like a tilted chocolate crown that might serve as a dessert garnish. Beneath it, lay the head. Two jagged brown teeth perforated the upper lip. An empty gray socket betrayed a missing eyeball. The matted hair was coated with icy mud. The gaping mouth clotted with yellow mucous.
Pluto began vomiting. Oatmeal gruel mixed with bits of bacon splattered the new snow.
The revulsion and shame he associated with his repressed incestuousness and homoerotic desire were made manifest in Zelda's violation and Peacock's brutal beheading. In this twisted projection, he saw a relationship between the rape and death before him and the lie of his desire, as if recognizing the external chaos before him might somehow relieve his sense of his inner turmoil.
Pluto had never loved anyone physically. His only succor being interminable frustration. The constraints on his longing were like iron shackles, prison bars, bulletproof glass, lessons learned with limbic certainty; the reptilian brain's reaction to months and decades of feeling the shock of the prod. His response was denial, and he gazed longingly from the cell of his self, attentive, optimistically despairing, patient for the lapse of the watcher, the dangled key, the impossible pardon...existing without hope and without capitulation.
He never condemned his latent deviance. He never saw his desires as depraved, as queer, as he associated perversion with ill will.
Gathering himself, Pluto crawled into the front seat of the jeep and went to sleep.
READER BE FOREWARNED! If graphic sex and violence offend you, skip this blog. What can I say? It was a sad day when I found this manuscript. How was I to know what kind of smutty fiction I would find in Dewey’s rotting fishing creel. I’m still trying to cope with the fact that my much beloved and deceased uncle could imagine such filth. Disgusting! He was a marathon dancer, a Busby Berkeley regular, and a fine, closeted gay man. Or so I thought. So, you may ask, why am I putting this trash on my blog. Three reasons. One, Dewey would have wanted his…err…art to live on, two, I’ve got chemo brain, three, Pluto was my dad!
For R. J.
Stories From Camp Kitsch
“One cannot bring children into a world like this. One cannot perpetuate suffering, or increase the breed of these lustful animals, who have no lasting emotions, but only whims and vanities, eddying them now this way, now that.”
- Virginia Woolf
Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
Pluto ran frantically through the poplar underbrush bearing the weight of a pursuing fury, in truth a burden where the fates of old executed their ultimate terrors, terrors born of the world's collective iniquities, transgressions--sins both mortal and venial that curse existence--terrors that no one but he could shoulder. His panting gave way to hyperventilation, which gave way to long pauses where he had no breath at all.
He clung to a massive dead birch, stripping the bark from the brickred rot disintegrating under his frozen maul. Prostrating himself before it he railed at its mute trunk, oblivious to the fatal anonymity nature ultimately guarantees.
Pushing on, he stumbled face first into a jagged stump, breaking off his two front teeth. His mind raced as the salty warm blood triggered jumbled memories of Zelda's horrifying immolation and his foster father's tongue stew. The knifing wind shearing the pinetops and smearing the thick overcast with dark streaks transformed the snow-covered swamp into a familiar place. A world beckoning to Zeke with a metallic tasting finality only he could interpret as typical. Suddenly, his troubles were irrelevant.
Stirring, he recognized the unfamiliar objects below him as his feet. They moved; he went on. An oak branch served as a crutch with which he dragged himself, sphinx-like toward the cliff. The earth moved as he did; as if they were going nowhere; and, in a moment of insight validated this parable of being. His exhaustion and desperation fed his exhilaration. He concentrated on images of his death; the shock of a stroke; the blitzkrieg heart attack; an aneuristic spasm.
When he hit the old lumber trail he found a better staff and headed for the Club road. Hearing an approaching snowmobile he dove into a thicket of tag elder. After a while, exhausted and delirious, he got to his knees and was startled by the realization of who he was; that he had an identity; that he was something more than brute animal consciousness.
Slowly, after an hour, perhaps two, he staggered on. Some three miles south, at the intersection of the Triple A road, he became disoriented and wandered in a panicky parabola toward the rising moon. One hour later he stumbled upon an isolated fishing camp on the Salmon Trout River.
He crawled between the broken down chassis of an ancient Willy's Jeep and a rusted out International Scout; passed by cords of snow covered hardwood, decrepit ice-shanties and outbuildings; and would have stopped had he known what he would see.
Pulling himself up on the Airstream's broken mirror he looked through the soot tinted oval, across the makeshift woodstove and beyond, at the sight of Bokasa raping Zelda. The translucence of the cracked glass that mediated this pathetic vision tormented his mental perception; mirroring his undeniable complicity in this unholy scene. For the first time he saw himself as another might observe him; an atavistic self-voyeur; a shunned harbinger of what was already; of a cruel life in all its terrifying clarity.
The trailer was littered with pornographic magazines and spent shell casings. Bokasa's massive back, scarred by a thousand wounds and surgeries, writhed in chiaroscuro silhouette against the setting sun and rising moon. Thrusting and pumping in the dying light, he had her pinned atop a cedar chest. Bokasa balanced himself against a stuffed deer head with his left hand while pistoning himself into her buttocks. Her doe-like legs splayed spasmodically as her beseeching arms flailed at her degradation.
Bokasa's larval girth obscured Pluto's view and muffled the hysteric cries of Zelda. The trailer cradled them in Cocteauesqe tableaux; its various mounted fish and antlered Ungulates lifelessly leering at Bokasa's loathsome act. Pluto could vaguely hear Bokasa's psychotic incantations as he plumbed Zelda's innocence.
Bokasa collapsed his spent tumescence onto a threadbare couch, his legs fleshy appendages suggesting an insect queen at the center of some depraved hive, his purple and red penis at the epicenter of a Bosch-like diorama of violent, bloody debauch. Beyond the couch where Bokasa lay gasping, Peacock's headless body lay on the yellowed linoleum. One of his hands was missing, and the pinkish bone of the upper arm protruded from the flesh.
Just beyond him a hounds tooth fedora floated in a pool of blood; like a tilted chocolate crown that might serve as a dessert garnish. Beneath it, lay the head. Two jagged brown teeth perforated the upper lip. An empty gray socket betrayed a missing eyeball. The matted hair was coated with icy mud. The gaping mouth clotted with yellow mucous.
Pluto began vomiting. Oatmeal gruel mixed with bits of bacon splattered the new snow.
The revulsion and shame he associated with his repressed incestuousness and homoerotic desire were made manifest in Zelda's violation and Peacock's brutal beheading. In this twisted projection, he saw a relationship between the rape and death before him and the lie of his desire, as if recognizing the external chaos before him might somehow relieve his sense of his inner turmoil.
Pluto had never loved anyone physically. His only succor being interminable frustration. The constraints on his longing were like iron shackles, prison bars, bulletproof glass, lessons learned with limbic certainty; the reptilian brain's reaction to months and decades of feeling the shock of the prod. His response was denial, and he gazed longingly from the cell of his self, attentive, optimistically despairing, patient for the lapse of the watcher, the dangled key, the impossible pardon...existing without hope and without capitulation.
He never condemned his latent deviance. He never saw his desires as depraved, as queer, as he associated perversion with ill will.
Gathering himself, Pluto crawled into the front seat of the jeep and went to sleep.
2 comments:
Great news today, Pluto is a life plowing up the history to feed the new.
First of all, WOW! Sick, wrong, and thoroughly twisted-- I love it! THANK YOU for the dedication.
I was somewhat reminded of this, I imagine you will recognize where this is from...
(Found Among the Papers of the Late Francis Wayland Thurston, of Boston)
"As my great-uncle's heir and executor, for he died a childless widower, I was expected to go over his papers with some thoroughness; and for that purpose moved his entire set of files and boxes to my quarters in Boston. Much of the material which I correlated will be later published by the American Archaeological Society, but there was one box which I found exceedingly puzzling, and which I felt much averse from showing to other eyes. It had been locked and I did not find the key till it occurred to me to examine the personal ring which the professor carried in his pocket. Then, indeed, I succeeded in opening it, but when I did so seemed only to be confronted by a greater and more closely locked barrier. For what could be the meaning of the queer clay bas-relief and the disjointed jottings, ramblings, and cuttings which I found?"
HPL, C of C.
Thanks again, Randy--
RJ
Post a Comment