Christine Brooke-Rose - The Brooke-Rose Omnibus

Or on a pale guitar addressing herself for you as La belle si tu voulais (bis) nous dormirions ensemble o-la (bis) and answering you with No vale la pena el llanto and readdressing herself for you with Yo no te offresco riqueza, Ti of fresco mi corazón and reanswering you with You ain’t going nowhere and a strange gaze at you through the whole repertoire in the dialectic of desire that gravitationally pulls you towards the centre of attention she enjoys as from the start an object of central loss, the sheer questiontagmatics having reversed the subject into a foreknowledge of the whole repeat performance which can only belong either to the narrator as a cheating young god or to Larissa as a well established structure that presupposes a void a fall into a delirious discourse watched indifferently through fingernail parings.

I’m not very good the first time.

O for a beaker full of the warm southern night that generates the first time into n swiftly changing viewpoints floating up from deep level dreamlessness every n minutes or so for a shared murmur of sweet nothingnesses then down again as mouth removes to mouth female to phallus in the show within the show, sucking the performer dry with recursivity from left to right in a performance that is to his competence as his nose is to his brow.

Fear is the function of his narrative.

You know his fear falls on the initial position but also on the last, he being a dysphoric term beneath his youphoria. And that the end of the kernel sentence is proepigrammed by the beginning, not by the bold centrecodpiece in mid copula as a wild manner of speaking pistolshot words like will you stay with me always always please will you marry me.

always? always Death said

The introduction, into the superficial grammar, of wanting as a modality, permits the construction of modal utterances with two actants united in a proposition, the axis of desire then authorising a semenic interpretation of them as virtual performer subject and an object instituted as value. Adam wants an apple Adam wants to be good. Such an acquisition, by the subject of the object, seems to occur as a reflex action, which is only a particular case of a much more general structure well known as the diagram of communication represented in its canonic form as an M and a Y of crossed limbs with diagonals from the I to the object

never believing anything said in moments of passion

(the notion of which has disappeared)

But I meant it, please, will you?

No my love, love is just a four-letter word.

That’s only a song, you know it’s more than that.

And when we’ve read the letters inside out and upside down you will go forth, and multiply.

But I don’t want to multiply I have three children already.

Go forth then. Fort-da.

What do you mean fortda?

Oh nothing. Just ticking myself off with something Freud said.

Da means yes in Russian

and gives in Italian so what? (Yes is for young men)

Or if by such misassociation when waking by anyone who swears eternal love make love not war make conversation as if conversation could be made all horizontal coordination degenerating into useless chatter: I didn’t know you were married.

I’m not I refused to marry her she took my name by Deed Poll.

Marriage is an outmoded institution. Only a few priests are thinking of it.

But you’re married.

Yes. What’s her name?

Maddy.

What?

Maddy. Well Madeleine really. Out of which improper name pours the surface grammar of his narrative disturbances for hours and days you shouldn’t talk of her like that you must have loved her long enough to have three children by her only two one is by an early marriage in Italy now annulled I didn’t love her you don’t know her she’s awful she drinks she’s a lousy mother she neglects the children it’s awful and I left her the house the car she’s done very well out of me. But I love my children I’m worried stiff about them it’s bad enough that I’ve become just a sort of uncle to Enzo that’s the first one but well as an unmarried mother she has all the rights I’m only the absent father. But I want to take them away from her oh please help me. Now, soon, I need you.

But when the shoulders shift back to the correct position the cars that look grey eminent into the retrovizor do not look double-faced or quadruple-eyed out of focus together with the four eyes but untarnished with single grins between two pale gold eyes one on either side or else two smaller city substitutes lower down but never two pairs together.

the grey eminence the retro-vizir beyond the consultana haggler of head nouns chopped below the performance yes your eminence I’ll come to that your reference but meanwhile

the retrovizor has a bluish tinge in the cold light the rectangle turns smoky grey to dim the dazzle of floods undipped or even gently dipped but the glare is preferable to the sudden isolation of almost not seeing behind a head

the dancing hoops. For the gold eyes when distant turn into hoops (at night in the correct position) of luminous green red amber bouncing in out of through and through each other narrowing to slim ovals vertical horizontal swaying undoing swiftly changing viewpoints as if juggled by a magician or the black recumbent street below and with the overhead bridges that make perhaps the optical illusion.

He shifts the mirror to his rearward glance. It doesn’t appear to work for him the lover of the moment of sudden isolation at not seeing the black magician who tantalisingly juggles luminous hoops into the rectangular hey you put my mirror back.

So it needs adjusting.

Why at this precise point introduce another idyll? Intensity of illusion is what matters to whoever is operating through a flaw in the glass darkly perhaps making two or four clear eyes stare back, two of them in their proper place at height of bridge of nose and, further up the brow, the

other two, exact replicas but dimmed as in a tarnished reflection, tarnished by the fringe they seem to peer through. A

second pair of eyes hidden higher up the brow certainly has its uses despite psychic invisibility or maybe because of. Gazing they do not see themselves. They reflect absolutely nothing, nor do they look at their bright replicas below in the proper place on either side of the nose which is a fraction iconic according to Armel but not precisely in this instance. Only these lower eyes, reflecting, presumably, the eyes of the real face as it leans for reassurance a bit to the right, see the upper eyes, looking up at the fringe of straight brown hair.

and so you glance askance at the short thick muscular body nevertheless a young god yet as you plunge into the dimension of his banality with the intention of tran-

smogrifying it by utterance into an idyll. Or a blue lacuna of learning moon june soon a blue lagoon.

Oh?

No well let’s face it, so far, as an idyll, it’s a flop.

The castle stands in oleander on hills with the Alps or is it the Appenine range behind it, overlooking the downward terraces trucked out and sliced away for low-roofed dead suburban villas and across the motorway to the wooden shacks and the white houses of cracked stucco under a forest of aerials and down again to the metropolitan sprawl below which is dying of the greed and brashness of the north and beyond, the bay the straits at the tiptoe of the foot upon thine eye wo die Zitronen glühen.

So you take off, racing down to the wine dark sea of infrasexuality for there has been a complete reorganisation of flute-players along the slum stretch of shore, trash filthy, as the young god swims out slicing the water with nothing in his head and spitting out foam like words of love into the chaparral of a canyon in the desert where the ear is full of sirensong under the shade of a red rock out of Eliot who’s Eliot or a hollow man saying always always.