Gilbert Sorrentino - The Moon In Its Flight

With the advent of the long winter nights, the black crayons and other gritty things in the Crakkerjax Factory began to look “mighty good” to the personnel of Wonderful Colleagues, Inc. Still, winter or not, Mrs. Hacktree swore that wrong-thinking applicants would be admitted to the snugly idyllic cottages “over [her] dead body” and, by implication, her dead mind as well. Given her ideas, certain of the more daring interlocutors thought it useful to save such models of the mundane life as Worcestershire-sauce constructs, salad-dressing displays, and lipstick multiliths, while others wanted to throw hot spinach at the iconic snowman, at the blinds, the victuals, at, really, every motherfucking thing in sight. They were, it was clear, wholly unimpressed by the fact that the “Beechwood Cabin” had once housed Sarah Orne Jewett’s mother-in-law, the author of “Fling My Snood to the Winds.”

Outside of the closed world of the motivational offices and research laboratories, private parks and the proscription of urination by the wrong sort of citizens were part of Palo Alto’s “Figures of White” program. City Council members, agog with the restoration of historic beer barns and other tasteful edifices, were anxious for the perfect jewel of a town to “Say No!” to poor taste. In the midst of its opening meeting on the subject of punishment for the transient, one member made it embarrassingly clear that he believed that the color of decay, disease, shit, piss, vomit, paralysis, and death is a color that one can’t help but see each and every day, right on the quiet, but rather sticky streets. The very idea was appropriated by the Council, and a local artiste was commissioned to paint, to actual scale, the mural “Pendejos de Oro,” which was already painted to actual scale. The original had, unfortunately, been vandalized by homoerotically inclined athletes, whom all the neighbors really related to.

As the true nature of the cache discoveries and subsequent experiments slowly became known, the Symptomatic Referent Equalizer proved to be one of the very few instruments capable of bringing about successful solutions to rebuses and puzzles. Pearl S. Buck’s personal copy of The Good Earth , for instance, was discovered to contain disguised representations of fur cloches, rice cakes, vinyl-covered chairs, large goldfish, and many other elements of a traditionally inscrutable Oriental nature. Critics note that this was the special hors de commerce edition that featured the peppery Madame Solange, a character who would rather straddle her horse, Ching Chow, than sojourn in the Plum Blossom Mountains of the Golden Jade. It was this text that led H.A. Zipp to his idiosyncratic belief that absolute silence, in combination with the other absolute phenomena, would eventually lead to what he gloomily termed “the crossing-over into numbing terror.”

Much of this lore was forgotten or diluted or revised when Professor Andouille asserted that she had just begun to recatalogue her collection of Brooklyniana when a leering man, described by the professor as a “Baptist,” entered her office, his trousers neatly folded over his forearm. This seemed an unlikely event, although if one believes that all things are interchangeable, in the Boolean sense, then Professor Andouille’s somewhat overheated story seems much like any common dark liquid. Far removed from this sex disturbance, on the edge of the compound’s croquet lawn, a solitary camper found it terribly unsettling to realize that the tightly corseted young woman in the sepia-tone photograph is not forever reaching for a hydrangea blossom, but for something that is forever, of course, beyond the edge of the picture. This young fellow had been somewhat Faustian at one time, and was thought to have had something disturbingly weird in mind when he asked Mrs. Walking, his high-school mileage instructor, for a garter of her love. And it was not to his benefit that Captain Theodore Rosa-Rose had, at just about the same time, discovered that the Color of Decay was one of the many forbidden novelties available via mail order, along with spicy short stories and small fallen trees, the latter guaranteed to symbolize things. Plain folks, so to speak, had very little use for his Oxford-gray suit, but liked the oddities they pulled out of his well when he was away on one of his investigations.

A newly hired nurse, Jenny, didn’t really like to stand, half-dressed, at the window, but it was, she claimed, “a feminist act, or like, statement,” much like a false moustache. As a response to these rampant attacks on sacred womanhood, religious folk of all stripes claimed that America needed good old reliable fetishes to make a reappearance in society, for instance, girdles, support hosiery, white plastic handbags, big corks, bobby pins, and serious but wholesome and humorous plays, with nice music. At least, the shipment of navy-blue melton overcoats and other worthwhile garments arrived in time for really hip writers to wear to the “Salute to Rupert Murdoch” celebration.

However, the liberal Jewish transvestites who lived in the lake house threw things like Greek salad around with imbecile abandon in their demented worship of filth, disorder, runaway government spending, and dead Christian babies. And the Physics Department, at one time the jewel of Corporate Entercon Corporation, Incorporated, was foundering amid the faddish hermeneutics of Zeppelino contravariant theory, the last thing that anyone would have imagined. The senior scientists’ attendant explorations of other entities of banal dimensions, e.g., cocktail-sauce bottles, snow photos, scale-model Packards, Wally pennants, etc., seemed almost frivolous after the new Motivational Therapist, a young lady from France, boarded the company bus in what seemed to be a semi-conscious state, or “trance.” The subsequent behavior of the passengers, conductor, and driver surprised and angered many citizens, especially those who believed that the glass ceiling had long since been cracked, if not shattered.

In the end, or, as the Frenchwoman’s report put it, the “final analysis,” madness, rage, and erotic fury presented themselves as the three most obvious states of being to hold sway over the entire group, each speckled, misleadingly, like a starling, as a New Formalist poet phrased it, yet again! “To write poetry that makes no sense is something like playing tennis,” as Chet Blanky once put it in conversation. And so, with work in various stages of completion or decay, and with loved ones whining of closure, the company agreed that although there may very well be more stars than anything else, this probability has absolutely no effect on the meaningless, which remains, stubbornly whole and unchanging. Religious beliefs, appallingly tawdry visions, and harsh legislation proscribing, denying, or outlawing this persistent state of affairs, this “reality,” if you will, have all proven useless.

A Desk

To make a narrative concerning a number of aspects of what we might agree to be life — a simple enough program, and one that will, perhaps, make us feel closer to the world that we inhabit, more or less, or would prefer to inhabit were things as they should be. By paying strict, even rapt attention to the false world that will deal with certain aspects of life, embroidered, as they must be embroidered, we may gain an understanding of, well, real things as they really are. This is how literature works, if “works” is the word. I do not describe narrative, or this narrative, as false so as to mock or denigrate it, but to differentiate it from the real world that exists, despite all, for all of us, outside the narrative. And that is so even if the narrative appears to represent a number of aspects of that real world in, as might be said, moving and well-written prose. This seeming fidelity to the actual, while the actual roars on, unalloyed and unaffected, is one of the gloomy mysteries of fiction, a mystery that remains unsolved to the present day, one, in fact, that deepens with each reader who attempts to order his or her life by means of what can be called fiction. Some also use this latter to educate themselves. There is no telling what a reader may do when alone with a book.