D. Wilson - Primordial - An Abstraction

She brushes a sandbug from her nipple. “I can hold anything against anyone. Your existential crisis is hardly my affair. Pull up your trousers and pretend you’re a man. Better: pretend you’re the moon. This is not a sitcom. We are all going to die and be forgotten someday.”

There’s nothing I can do to counter the argument. Once the certainty of oblivion is invoked, disavowal shotguns into plainclothesed entropy.

“That’s my father.”

The librarian points at something behind me. I glance over my shoulder.

There’s a big poster. It occupies most of the wall.

On it is a rooster.

The rooster has a red mane and a red beard and cold eyes and a sharp beak and matted feathers and weird feet.

I eyeball the librarian. “Is that a photograph or an illustration? It looks real.”

The librarian squints at the poster, makes a frog face, and shakes his head.

I say, “ Rooster is slang for male chicken , you know. And slang for rooster is cockerel , but that’s a Britishism. Rooster , on the other hand, is an Americanism. I don’t see any balls on that cock either. Must be a capon . That’s a slang term for castrated rooster , which is to say, castrated cockerel , by which I mean, male chicken who has had his privates yanked off .”

The librarian taps his desk, tentatively, pensively, with a finger. “Are you calling my father a rooster?”

“Rooster?” I think about it. “Do you mean that rooster?”

Confused, the librarian has a nervous breakdown.

He tears off all of his clothes and runs through the stacks and up the stairs and down the stairs and he finds an ax somewhere and knocks over some bookcases and chops up some tables in a Quiet Area and then he gets tired and just kind of curls up and moans for awhile and the police come and leap upon him and put him in a straightjacket and drag him kicking and screaming out of the library.

On Monday, he punches in at 7:59 a.m.

I open the laptop.

I log onto a social network and find one of my professors. I friend him.

I wait.

A few seconds later the professor accepts my friendship.

I send the professor a message. It reads:

“What the fuck are you doing, asshole? Don’t you think it’s inappropriate for professors to be friends with their students like this? What the fuck? Pervert.”

A few seconds later the professor unfriends me.

I close the laptop.

I mentioned something earlier about having only one active memory. That’s not altogether true. Nothing ever is.

We are informed by history.

Subjective history, objective history.

Objectivity is a myth.

Here’s another memory:

We were saving pennies to go to Disneyland. We put the pennies in a tall stained-glass container.

Years passed.

We didn’t save enough pennies to get to Disneyland.

My stepfather did something to me and I refused to eat with him anymore.

Before dinnertime I would go into the kitchen and my mother would make me some food. I had to eat it as fast as I could before my step-father came home from work for the official family dinner.

Years passed.

One night I was late. I only had thirty seconds to eat.Mom tried to get things ready but there was no time.

My stepfather stormed into the kitchen. I slipped aside and went upstairs.

I waited.

I waited.

I waited.

After awhile I became deranged with hunger and I had to do something about it.

I went downstairs to the kitchen. There was my stepfather counting all of the pennies and stacking them onto the counter. He stacked them as high as they would go until they fell over. He stacked them again until he could get a good read and the pile wouldn’t fall over. Then he’d start a new pile.

I watched him from the wall corner.

He stacked and restacked and stacked and restacked and stacked and restacked the pennies until I fell asleep on the carpet.

Then he put the pennies away and went to bed.

I have lost track of what semester it is. I have lost track of how many semesters I have left. I have lost track of what my field of study is. I can’t remember if I’m a student or a professor, a self or an other, a subject or an object, an Oversoul or the Underneath. Am I married? Do I own a house? Do I believe in God? When was my last meal? Have I ever hired a bodyguard? Do I care what people think of me? Do I write good books? What is the square root of the angle of my disposition? What happened to the tendons in my index finger? Do I go to my classes on a regular basis? Where is the men’s room? Over there? Is that my 1966 Fender Bandmaster guitar amplifier? What has become of the guitar itself? Bass players worry me. I always have the feeling that they really want to be involved with a cello. But is it wrong to desire the cello above all else? Why must cortisol, epinephrine and norepinephrine pour into my bloodstream during moments of extreme panic? Can I have some more wine? Where did my copy of the latest issue of The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery go? And the antelope? Is utopia possible or are we destined to endure the bogeys of nomad subjectivity and social Darwinism forever? Why do my armpits sweat all day long? Why wouldn’t my students ever tell me when my fly was open? Why do I get good pumps during some workouts and bad pumps during other workouts? Can I have some more wine? Shawty! Does that professor like me? What’s my grade point average? Is mankind proud of me? As a child, did I kill a bullfrog by hurling it against a brownstone with a makeshift trebuchet? Or did I merely hurl it into a pond? Given sufficient velocity, the frog explodes either way.

I give this guy my card. My “business” card.

There’s only one word on it.

This word:

Miāo.

“That’s onomatopoeia,” I tell him. “But it’s in a different language than the one we speak.”

He blinks at me.

I say the word aloud, if only to encourage him, to assure him that the sum total of his fascia may not amount to the calibrated arrangement of his physiognomy. Therein lies my terminal modus operandi: to convince everybody, one social subject at a time, that they lack the fertility of tripe.

Nearby a Tesseract collapses into a morbid integer.

And so I thought to myself:. . This liebestod is no mere subliminal excrescence. It is some queer manner of Faustian, brick-layered scatology. Do you think the emission of my selfhood into the commode is funny, or cute? I am on the threshold of transformation from overcoded schiz-flow to self-immolating becoming-tortoise, a process implicating certain transversals that will bind all of my vectors together and possibly jeopardize my admittedly destratified concept of molecular conformity. If only I had a beak; my dripping cathexis might have been subject to an entirely different manner of abjection. I remember — yes, I remember everything now, if only for a wilting and perilous moment — when I took the agrégation . I performed well on the examination despite my stepfather, who occupied the starboard flank of the classroom and heckled me, lobbing insults and scribbling fearsome genitals on the blackboard as a means of distraction. But nothing distracts me when I accomplish a certain quantum focus. I feel like I’ve done this before. I feel like I’ll do this again. Once you engage a singularity you are doomed to fondle the ticklish parts of its shadow for eternity. The commiseration of meat. Chickenscratch. The logic of sense. Damnation is a far cry from the blues. I have neglected to remain impartial to dogpoets. I mention dogpoets in all of my books. I don’t know what they are.