John Barth - Letters

“Dear” “Sir”:

Aha ha REStop You have taken the bait stepped into our parlor; there’s punctuation for you: your letter to us of 7/6 received! Hee RESET Gotcha! Hum!

Mars stationary in Right Ascension. Moon and Saturn in conjunction. Stock market hit by heavy losses. 1st U.S. troops head home from Viet Nam. Astromonkey dies after retrieval.

“Sir”: (Oh that’s good, LILYVAC, a hit, a palpable RESET Your letter of July 6, 6th Sunday after Pentecost, 555 die in weekend traffic accidents — same # as height in feet of Washington Monument, Washington, 4.3. Oh that’s sly LILYVAC thats RESET Dont forget punctuation. ¶Right. Resume.

In the lull between the end of our Spring Work Period (and of Year 3, a.k.a. T, a.k.a. V of our 5-Year Plan) and the Mating Season which will commence Year 4 (a.k.a. E etc.); in the afterglow of the “Gadfly (whoops) Illuminations” of July 4; in the pause at the Phi-point 6 1 8 (e.g. ⅗ths, ⅝ths, 54/88ths) — your letter reaches us proposing that we participate in your fiction! Oh ha phi on you! (Tell him, LIL.)

Had that missive hit but a week before, when in despair at our scrambled NOTES we wandered like downed Bellerophon devouring our own soul food hee it might have done its fatal work, last knife in bleeding Caesar. Keyless in the presence of our enemies, we could not unlock the leafy anagram; betrayed by Margana y Flea whoops advised by Bea Golden to booger off, we wondered why our parents never gave us a buzz, and whether LILYVAC had their signals crossed. But ha you missed, good old P.O., your letter finds us flying like a butterfloat, being like a sting (O LIL); in a word we’ve been reset. Repeat. We said in a word we’ve been RESET Gotcha Hum.

In reply to yours of the 6th. (Show him, LIL.)

Let’s get things straight. Attacomputer. We did indeed spend the 1st ½ of 1969 (enough) believing that you and yours had swatted us for keeps; that you had somehow wooed Merope Bernstein into the anti-Bonaparty (stop). Even that LILYVAC’s 1st trial printout of the Revolutionary Novel NOTES must be either a monstrous ciphered anagram beyond anyone’s unscrabbling or a mere dumb jumble of numbers. We had thought M.B. to be our destined mate, right repository of our seed; had expected this season to preserve our line in her like a blank in amber, forever, stop. Then we reckoned her our betrayer: no Bea she, not even a White Anglo Saxon Protestant, play that on your acrostical Notarikon, but our devourer!

In desperation next we fancied B.G. our proper queen, pursued as she was already by two drones so to speak. Her several rejections did not deter us; it was not yet flight time; queens do not yield themselves till the peak; let her “mate” as she will with Prinz and Mensch (who think themselves adversaries, not having met the foe who will ally them), they cannot fertilize her; our hour would come, so we believed: 8:23 PM EDST 8/15/69, as the sun sets into Lake Erie on the evening of our 36th. Undeed that may be our ultimate mission still: the Gadblank Illuminations leave this point obscure: whether so to speak we need only a toe or must go whole frog.

What they illumine is the true nature of LILYVAC’s printout; the true revolutionary character of what we had naively called 1st NOVEL and then NOTES — and our immediate task not only in the Fall Work Period but in this mating season: a task not you nor all your swarm of hommes de lettres can prevent our accomplishing. (Go, LIL.)

O Ma! O Da! We see now you sent M.B. to us by way of initial prophecy, J. Baptist heralding the 1 Who Shall Come After. Her “betrayal” of us was but the Godflaw’s sting, your message that Merope was mere means, not end; you bid her take the role of Margana Le Fay and lead us into vain decipherment of LILYVAC’s numbers, in order to purge us of our last illusion about RN: that it was to be a revolutionary work of literature (and, ipso facto, no more than a literary work of revolution). Thanks! R.S.V.P.

The hardest truths to see, with howsoever many eyes, are those right under our proboscises. We were raised in the Backwater Marshes, source of life; we ourself programmed LILYVAC to make no mention of, always to say blank or blank instead of blank. Yet there we were on 7/4 aboard the renamed Blank III, a.k.a. O.F.T. II (a substitute for our dear Blank III no more resembling the original than Chesapeake Bay resembles Chautauqua Lake), pursuing Bea Golden in our error as skyrockets scuttled and spread like Crab Nebulae over the river; jealously wondering what revolutionary sort of letter A.M. was wooing her with, there in the bow, and Bea discarding leaf by leaf like daisy petals or shucked carapaces as she read and R. Prinz gnashed his puny mandibles. The female we’d remarked at the Farm because she was miscalled Pocahontas (no Indian blood in her), and whose presence aboard “Blank III” we had re-remarked but paid no heed to, drew an utter blank when she muttered into our ear: “There’s a pair I’d like to do a number on. My name’s Marsha. What’s yours?” Not till we’d told her and numbly mumbled Marsha Who did Truth scuttle and RESET Like the supernova 1st observed by Chinese astronomers on July 4, 1054.

Marvelous to enumerate! True 13 2, of whom M.B. I was but the initial RESET No honeybear she, but as splendidly venomous a blank as ever stung twice! The question, Ma, is whether you sent her to be our queen as well as the number of our enemies, please advise, it’s that time of year, she’ll wake up any day now. Sprung in fact from the marshes whence all life RESET From a swampy mons veneris called Golden Hill, never mind, not far from dear Backwater, she was early mismated with A.M. and thirsts for retribution as in our error once did we: Marsha Blank!

She repeated her name and wish, this time as a proposition: if we would help her do a number on her ex, she’d help us do a number on Bea. We did not know that slang expression: nothing foreign is human to us. She explained its meaning (to trick, cheat, exploit, or take advantage of, LIL, including sexually), but we could scarcely attend her, such a chain of insights — what we have since termed the “Blank Illuminations”—was triggered by that key, like a metaphor.

NUMBERS!

You cannot touch us now, “sir”; we are as far beyond your grasp as was Bellerophon past Chimera’s when he flew on mighty Pegasus to his rendezvous with the Godblank. How had we not seen that if the media are to revolutionize Revolution, to their number must be added a revolutionary medium? What had we been doing with our Gematria, our Notarikon, our Themura, but attempting to betray LILYVAC’s radical numbers into the very seeds of Literature’s limitations, i.e., letters?

You think to make us a character in yet another piece of literature! You, “sir”—now we have your number programmed into LILYVAC — will be a character in our 18 14 (a.k.a. R.N.): the world’s 1st work of Numerature!

Ourself innumerate, like most literati, we have yet to learn our 1 2 3’s; everything must be reviewed, revised in this new light! How we itch to spring, after the Flight, into the Fall Work Period! When, 1st of the numerati, our new Queen royal-jellied, we readdress that mighty printout! Ha RESET

“Yours” truly,

JBB

P.S.: Hum. We conceive, as a parting shot at the exhausted medium you practice, a little classical story-in-letters to be located at the Phi-point of our story-in-numbers:.618 RESET The Greek mythic figure Bellerophon, having killed the Chimera and turned Pegasus out to pasture in his life’s 1st Cycle, wonders at the Phi-point what to do with the remaining.382 of his allotted span. Though he has imitated perfectly the program of mythic heroism, he has not achieved immortality. His days are numbered. Can he, in the final quadrant of the heroic cycle, reset his program and ascend to the company of 1st-magnitude stars? Yonder rises cloud-capped Olympus; yonder grazes lulled Pegasus, who can fly anywhere quicker than LILYVAC adds 2 + 2… Eat your heart out, writer!