Christine Brooke-Rose: The Brooke-Rose Omnibus

You don’t have the floor.

On a point of information

as object of exchange and from the start an object of central loss because stolen, like citrus fruits or a nose here and a dream there or kernel sentences out of faculty clashes books letters and symposiums to provoke the word by the word lighting up the commonplaces from the other place to generate a text.

So then I was being interviewed for a job by a woman professor who gave the job to a woman and I felt treated unfairly. Then as consolation she sent me out to play ball with her dogs saying a bit of fresh air will do you good and my dog will be kind don’t be afraid. I went out it was sunny, it was the university playing ground with a huge green field for rugby and a sandpit for pole-jumping. I had a red ball with black stripes and I threw it over the sandpit. All the dogs ran and jumped for it one of them was mine, they were all boxers and labradors but mine was a mongrel and he jumped the highest and caught the ball and brought it back to me. I think it means the general worry and anxiety over my career and my life obviously at a crossroads. The sun and the green space represent South America or possibly Africa. The pole jumping is the risk I have to take, the red and black ball is life which I throw and gamble, the dogs represent my problems but in the end life comes back to me and I feel that I win do you agree?

Hmmmm yes, at the manifest level. You shouldn’t tell me all these dreams, Stavro, I’m not an analyst and one needs the transfer.

Oh but you know so much about it you’ve read everything. And then I had another one I was in Ethiopia with you and going to visit a Russian church there and telling you all about it. It was Russian baroque, a small church with a huge tower over it and I kept telling you what a good imitation it was even though modern. Inside there was no iconostasis. The altar was like in St Peter’s almost in the middle and the columns, altar and walls were covered with mosaics and frescoes, some Russian some Ethiopian and I went on saying how everything was bogus but of good quality and at the same time I was feeling afraid that the whole thing might collapse on us and I was anxious to get outside. And I took you out in the end without showing my anxiety and then I noticed that the bell-tower was no longer solid stone as when we entered but coloured glass and even more impressive than before and taller and I felt safe and that it wasn’t going to collapse any more so I took your hand and the dream ended. Can you make anything of it?

A prepared oedipiano with a treble sound.

A foot man saying O in the mountains but O

Another one who grabbed a balloon and then let go.

You are the sentence I write I am the paragraph, generating each other cutting off each other’s word not following the principle but separating from it piecemeal fragmented though generating now and again a kernel sentence eaten or falling into an earful of sirensong or wax upon which bees dance their honeyvorous messages, which comes to the same thing for we cannot eat each other without becoming each other neither can we refuse the gods in us without crabs in our ears.

For the gods in us are organic they do not have livers kidneys and complexes did Christ have a Oedipus complex? They are the complexes narrative and generated they are the liverish kidneys. They are the eagle strangled in the sea the mouth removed for naming things the revolution long preparing out of archaic flaws bouleversing the boulevards back into bulwarks, they are the transfer utterance which can be interpreted at all levels as privation disjunction attribution conjunction thus representing the circulation of value-objects as an identification of the deictic transfers. And they do not exist except at your awakening touch. It has all been dreamt up by the lover of the moment but displaced, condensed, metonymised. Such a man would not fight the eagle for one thing or another or wring its neck. Nor would he have four eyes or see luminous hoops dancing through and through each other. It doesn’t work for him who will have to be dropped with an organised chiasmus since the lack of imagination cannot after all be imagined, only stolen, like citrus fruits out of stories and purloined letters to provoke the commonplaces out of the other place, the text within the text.

Qui parle avec un noyau dans la bouche?

You’re taking a long time have I given you food for thought?

There’s a well-known case, Stavro, of a man who used to write down all his dreams in a beautifully calligraphed hand, filling volume after volume which he brought to his analyst. And when he broke it off he asked for his dreambooks back but the analyst couldn’t lay hands on them, whereupon the patient went into a rage, accusing him of stealing his dreams, calling him the violator of his unconscious and saying that what is given must be returnable. But it isn’t you know.

I don’t understand, are you mistrusting me again? I’d never do that to you, I’m not a case and I love you.

No, well. Never let yourself be fully known.

You never tell me your dreams.

If I ever do it will be total reversal.

What do you mean?

Which I see already, from yours.

For the information-content of a particular unit is defined as a function of its probability. There are however many possible exits. In general the more probable a unit is the greater its degree of redundancy which, at night, at the flick of a switch, can turn smoky grey to dim the glare of a floodlight from the other eyes, exact replicas higher up the brow, and the dimming is preferable to the sudden isolation of seeing too much by the glare of floodlight you must dip, gently dip but not too deep.

Now droops the faun head underneath the changed modalities into a desperate love, discouraged and afraid you see, I’m boring you with my dreams, my problems, saying in effect the world is too much for me nanny please protect me. But it would be so much better to be able to accept this protection when I’m capable of giving it. I’ll find something, and even if it means separation for a while I want to come back a man. I don’t want to enter into a relationship in which I’m just your appendage.

Out of the mouths of babes.

But Stavro you have entered into such a relationship, insistently, though I kept trying to tell you. Any relationship between youth and age is by its very nature unequal, and on both sides, whichever way you look at it, though youth is bound to win, if only because it is youth.

You keep calling me young I feel so old.

Retaining a trace of hierarchy however despite youthful demand although the horizontal coordination degenerates, according to the narrator, into useless chatter between I promessi sposi who will go on as if.

Veronica!

Armel!

You look more beautiful than ever.

Because I love you. I’ve never stopped loving you I’ve missed you terribly.

On a point of information may we interrupt.

Oh go away with your politics we want to hear this course.

What is this reactionary culture you’re dishing out comrade the bourgeois idyll is over you can’t perpetuate it for ever. The revolution is upon us which has been long preparing out of archaic flaws, bouleversing the boulevards back into bulwarks as the city opens up its legs to receive the flood of the vox populi. In the beginning was the parting shot.

And as Marx said personalities and events recur, the first time as tragedy the second as farce.

Revolution is only another matrix, dismembering the paternal inheritance in a Macte Jovis followed by fratricide. To eat is to be eaten for you too will be fathers dismembered and ammazzati.

Phooey. Rhetoric out of a lawsuit over property in Syracuse, a disembodied vox.

Revolution is not an institution.