The Adding Machine: Selected Essays Read online

  What about the title? Does it arouse your interest? Does it evoke a picture in your mind? A good title can sell a mediocre book, a bad title can sink a good book. The Biological Time Bomb is a much more informative book than Future Shock. Future Shock became a best seller on the title, while The Biological Time Bomb sank into oblivion. There were two hundred suggested titles for Jaws.

  Devise alternative endings: Happy endings like Papa used to make. Gatsby marries Daisy and here they are twenty years later living in the south of France a dreary empty snobbish couple. Daisy has become a secret drunk.

  ‘Looking for this, Daisy?’ He holds up a bottle of gin. Quarrelling, angling for invitations to the Duchess’s party.

  Lord Jim lives on to become a living legend written up in all the Sunday Supplements, living in a 19th-century set that could fold tomorrow. Jim points sadly to graffiti scrawled on the wall of his compound: Honky Honk Home. He should be gone with the wild geese in the sick smell of morning. Often an early death is the kindest gift a writer can bestow on a beloved character, and Gatsby and Lord Jim both shimmer and glow from the love bestowed upon them by their creators.

  You can move character and story to another time and place, always looking for the right slot where it can fit. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness becomes Apocalypse Now. In the early days of the Vietnam conflict CIA agents set up their Ops in remote outposts, requisitioned private armies, overawed the superstitious natives and achieved the status of white Gods. So the context of 19th-century colonialism was briefly duplicated. That is what writing is about: time travel. So I drafted Denton Welch to be the protagonist of a 19th-century western on which I was then working.*

  In this novel Kim Carson is hiding out in a remote mountain valley with nothing to occupy his mind except an anthology of poetry, leather-bound with gilt edges and this leads us to an exercise I call intersection reading. Just where and under what circumstances did you read? What were you reading when the phone rang or some other interruption occurred? Note the exact place in your reading where this occurred. The point at which your stream of consciousness — and when you read of course you are simply borrowing the writer’s stream of it, being bored by your own, if indeed you have one, isn’t it all just bits and pieces, shreds and patches? Constantly being cut by seemingly random factors which on examination turn out to be highly significant and appropriate. For example, I am walking down a New York Street, Elizabeth Street come to think of it, just turned off Houston past The Volunteers of America. I am thinking about New Mexico and I look up and there is a New Mexico license plate. Land of Enchantment. So note and write down in the margin actual interruptions, which may be frequent if you are riding on a subway. I admire the intrepid breed of subway readers; perhaps they are quite literally escaping into their books. I have never heard of a reader being attacked. Why only yesterday a black youth was occupying a double seat with such truculent insolence that no one, myself included, dared to demand our squatters rights, but a young man with a large book on mathematics, he was very technical, made the sullen youth move his briefcase and set right to work on his formulae. So choose the subway for really adventurous intersections, but waiting rooms and airports are also rich motherlodes. You can just sit there and attract incidents like a blue serge suit attracts lint.

  And trains are the best because you’re perfectly safe and some oaf won’t suddenly confront you with a bestial snarl: ‘Who are you reading at?’

  I just tried an interesting experiment. I turn on the TV, open an anthology of poetry and read a few lines, noting action and words on screen. I throw away some duds but the hits are impressive. Just try it.

  ‘A violet by a mossy stone half hidden from the eye.’ Wordsworth/Lucy poems. There’s a flower on screen right now.

  ‘How dull it is to make an end/ to rust unburnished not to shine in use.’ Tennyson/Ulysses. On screen a cowhand is explaining to the girl he doesn’t want to be tied down. He wants to keep moving like a tumbleweed.

  ‘And never lifted up a single stone.’ Wordsworth/Michael. On screen some woman is rubbing on her hand cream. No stone lifting for her.

  Tor sweetest things turn sour by their deeds/ and lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.’ Shakespeare. On screen a personable model extols some kinda toothpaste called POL makes your breath soul-kissing sweet.

  ‘The same bourgeois magic wherever the mail train sets you down.’ Rimbaud/Historic Evening. A documentary on screen shows computerized travel at Kennedy Airport.

  ‘And the dream fades .. .’ Rimbaud/Vigils. On screen the lights in the Empire State Building go out.

  ‘The clouds gathered over the seas formed of an eternity of hot tears.’ Rimbaud/Childhood. On screen Arthur Miller is relating the death of this magnificent old salesman who died while trying to sell some shit or other over the phone.

  ‘Death will come when thou art dead... soon soon.’ Shelley/To Night. News story about some psycho tried to strangle a black man in a hospital. Seems this same Perp had shot two other black victims and cut their hearts out and taken their hearts away with him.

  What do we conclude from this exercise? It seems like our entire sensory input is pre-programmed. Mektoub. It is written. Snip. Snip. Cut it up.

  You can imagine a context. Say you are reading this in some 19th century jungle outpost Your traitorous boys slink away into the night. ‘Ali! Mustapha! Where are you?’ You ready your submachine gun and settle down to read to the pulsing signal drums. How sleep the brave/ REDRUM REDRUM REDRUM the drums pulse. ‘Sounds like they got Red and a rottener bastard never drew a breath. By Allah their country’s wishes blast...

  ‘Just doing our job is all. Recollect in the Congo they have a bounty on Niggers you turn in a pair of ears and collect. But it turns out some do-gooder bleeding heart bounty hunters was just cutting off the ears and letting the nigger go to undermine the whole purpose of the program. So after that you had to turn in his plumbing, cock and balls. And Red used to sit there counting the pricks and handing out the gold. But who am I to be critical with a fishing creel full waiting on the line?’ ‘And freedom shall a while repair to dwell a weeping hermit there...’

  Fire arrows rain on the roof.

  Or maybe you are a sixteen year old prep school boy on vacation Tausnitch edition Pension in Cannes.

  ‘There’s not a joy in the world can give like that it takes

  away.

  When bloom of early thought declines in feelings dull decay.’

  Byron.

  The world weary burnt out look is irresistably attractive to the young and innocent.

  ‘Shredded incense in a cloud

  From closet long to quiet vowed

  Moldering her lute and books among

  AS WHEN A QUEEN long dead was young.’

  Browning.

  The boy thinks this is funny and camps around with a skull mask he will wear tonight at the costume party at the Villa Mauresque where the big writer lives and isn’t he lucky to have wangled an invitation through his uncle in the State Department. How he will astonish them! He has the poem printed on a T shirt with skeleton ribs and he will act it all out like a charade. Some way the Villa Mauresque will be the ‘closet long to quiet vowed’ out of which he will burst ‘as when A QUEEN!!!’ Long dead ... he puts on his skull mask. Now he nonchalantly strips off his skeleton tights and his rib shirt and stands there chewing gum in his insouciant dazzling youth. ‘Was young’ is written across his chest in gilt letters. It was all very tasteful Audrey thought...

  So here is Kim Carson in his remote hideout reading poems over and over. Verses trill and tinkle from icy streams.

  ‘and the stars that oversprinkle

  all the heavens seem to twinkle

  with a crystalline delight.’ Poe.

  Holding the fish by its tail and its head Kim bites into the back of an eight inch trout. Verses whisper and sigh from grass and leaves. Kim is thinking about Tom’s recent death in an ambush arranged by a certain bounty hunter
named Mike Chase. Account to settle. Book keeping he called it. ‘Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course with rocks and stones and trees.’ Wordsworth.

  This blank assertion of the finality of death and human mortality from the man who wrote Intimations of Immortality? Wordsworth like so many artists was an alien, Kim decided, an immortal alien feeling the estrangement of human mortality. ‘Old unhappy far off things and battle long ago.’

  He could see Lucy poems written across the evening sky. ‘Fair as a star when only one is shining in the sky.’ Kim looks up at the evening star his hands bloody from cleaning fish. Who was this little twist? Was there some sordid English scene behind this, panted out behind the cow shed?

  ‘Don’t tell your mother and I’ll give ye half a crown.’

  This struck Kim as unlikely. She was a phantom like Wordsworth the English Bard with his walking stick and his black slouchy poet hat and cape and his ‘Dewy fingers cold/ returned to deck her hallowed mould.’ (Collins) These creepy old English poets!

  She was a phantom of delight, a hot English fox maiden fat, mate for a ghostly man of letters self-invoked to haunt ‘This heath this calm this quiet scene/ the memory of what has been/ and never more will be .. .’

  Kim sees flashes of his life with Tom like postcards: ‘Having fine time. Wish you were here.’

  Adding the Lucy poems to our list. There is a literary mystery here. Who killed the poet’s phantom nymphet? Who drew the gradual dusky veil on Lucy. Did the poet sacrifice mortal love for immortal verse?

  I think of this reading list as an organic accretion designed to animate works of excellence or distinction in some capacity. I intend to assemble from the list anthologies of outstanding passages not subdivided into Death/Love/Solitude/Old Age, but arranged by associational affinity.

  There is a fish that lives in very deep water in perpetual darkness. During the mating game the male becomes physically attached to the female and slowly she absorbs him until only his testicle protrudes from the female body.

  ‘The Lord turned and looked at Kim. His face was immeasurably old, smooth and yellow like flexible amber incrusted with layers of cruelty and evil and abominations that stopped the breath and closed round Kim’s heart with a soft slimy clutch. The eyes were shafts of dead water leading down into black depths.’

  There are panoramas of sunsets and sunrises and of course eventually the anthologies will be illustrated with reproductions of paintings and photographs. You’re just nobody if you’re not on the list. Wearily our reader sweeps a pile of best-sellers to the floor as a Michelin inspector is said to have dismissed an unsuccessful souffle. Oh yes, we will have our inspectors.

  The Inspector is a shabby gray inconspicuous man. He glances around the vernissage and yawns. He identifies himself. The artist and the gallery owner stand there waiting. He shakes his head with a terrible smile. The List will grow into an institute with a research staff, a library, a museum and film archives. Bulletins will be issued and funds allotted to deserving projects.

  Footnote

  * The Place of Dead Roads.

  Ten Years and a Billion Dollars

  My general theory since 1971 has been that the Word is literally a virus, and that it has not been recognized as such because it has achieved a state of relatively stable symbiosis with its human host; that is to say, the Word Virus (the Other Half) has established itself so firmly as an accepted part of the human organism that it can now sneer at gangster viruses like smallpox and turn them in to the Pasteur Institute. But the Word clearly bears the single identifying feature of virus: it is an organism with no internal function other than to replicate itself.

  I asked some of my Buddhist friends, including Allen Ginsberg, this simple question: who are you actually talking to when you are ‘talking to yourself?’ Without presuming a complete understanding of the nature of the Word, I suggested that such an understanding would make it possible to shut off the internal dialogue, to rub out the Word. Allen replied that the Buddhists have developed techniques over the centuries to do just that; it may be so. Not having experimented with their techniques, I can’t say. But I wanted some answers, and it seems to me that in the three thousand years the Buddhists have had to toss this around, they have not come up with any. I offered this challenge then and I repeat it now: give me ten years and a billion dollars for research, and I’ll get some answers to the question of Word.

  But I do not have a billion dollars, and I may or may not have ten years, so in the meantime I have developed certain techniques of my own. First of all, I recognized writing as a magical operation, and since such operations are designed to produce specific results, this leads us to an inquiry as to the purposes of writing. Remember that the written word is an image; that the first writing was pictorial, and so painting and writing were at one time a single operation. Historically, they do not separate until we have a highly stylized pictorial writing, as in Egyptian, which of course developed much later. The original invention from which writing developed was quite simply to create on a cave wall images and scenes: hunting, and often so-called pornographic drawings. The purpose was originally ceremonial or magical, and when the work is separated from its magical function, it loses vitality. That is, when some tribe starts making dolls for the tourists, it’s gone. And that is what bestsellers are doing — whole valleys of dolls and shark teeth for the tourists. It may make money but it isn’t magical. I know Dali says the measure of genius is gold, and I agree that artists should be at least as well-paid as plumbers.

  Journalism is closer to the magical origins of writing than most fiction. That is, at least a few operators in this area — people like the late Hearst and Henry Luce — certainly quite clearly and consciously saw journalism as a magical operation designed to bring about certain effects. And the technology is the technology of magic; in the case of newspapers and magazines, mostly black magic. They stick pins in someone’s image and then show that image to millions of people. You can see how easy it is, if you own a newspaper, to start slipping in non-existent events; this has been and is being done all the time — by TIME especially, in fact. Starting with being a week ahead, they literally write the news before it happens; which is why they print so many false statements that they have to retract. And so you get a retraction from them — how many people read the retraction compared to the number who have read the falsified story? You have all heard this one: a story went out that some hippies tripping on LSD stared at the sun and went blind. Later there was a retraction — the story was a hoax. But more people saw the story than saw the retraction, so the story is still circulating and still believed.

  William Randolph Hearst had two house rules at San Simeon: One, everybody staying in Mr Hearst’s house must appear at dinner no matter what condition he or she is in. That’s very understandable — otherwise people would be goofing off in their rooms, imitating his mannerisms, and he would lose control of the situation. It’s the old Army game of Roll Call. And rule number two: nobody may mention the word DEATH in Mr Hearst’s presence. There is a very good magical reason for that rale. Mr Hearst was playing Death. Playing Death means you must always be able to affect others, but they may never be allowed to affect you. Someone comes down to dinner in a skeleton suit, the old man could lose his position.

  So what is the difference between Hearst and a writer of fiction? I mean a real writer, like Beckett, Genet, Joyce, Hemingway, Conrad, Fitzgerald, Kafka... right away we have a distinction: can you imagine a writer or an artist who would be afraid to hear the word DEATH? I sure can’t. Any writer who cannot hear that word is not a writer. It can only mean one thing: he is trying to play Death and is not sure of his credentials, like a fake cop doesn’t want to see a real one. Another distinction is responsibility. Genet says that a writer assumes the terrible burden of responsibility for the characters he creates. They are his creations and he is responsible for them. Journalists on the other hand have no responsibility whatever for the characters they create. Let t
hem go and hijack a plane, kill five women in Arizona, assassinate the President, and what happens to them after that? Who cares? A basic difference in attitude.

  I have given my students several exercises to sharpen their perception as writers and to help them make their own enquiries into the nature of word and image as they manifest themselves along association lines. The exercise that has elicited the greatest response and produced the most interesting results has been the Walk Exercise. Basically it consists in taking a walk with the continuity and perceptions you encounter. The original version of this exercise was taught me by an old Mafia Don in Columbus, Ohio: seeing everyone on the street before he sees you. Do this for a while in any neighbourhood, and you will soon meet other players who are doing the same thing. Generally speaking, if you see other people before they see you, they won’t see you. I have even managed to get past a whole block of guides and shoeshine boys in Tangier this way, thus earning my Moroccan monicker: ‘El Hombre Invisible’. Another version of this exercise is simply to give no one a reason to look at you. Sooner or later, however, someone will see you. Try to guess why he saw you — what were you thinking when he saw your face?

  Another exercise that is very effective is walking on colors. Pick out all the reds on a street, focusing only on red objects — brick, lights, sweaters, signs. Shift to green, blue, orange, yellow. Notice how the colors begin to stand out more sharply of their own accord. I was walking on yellow when I saw a yellow amphibious jeep near the comer of 94th Street and Central Park West. It was called the Thing. This reminded me of the Thing I knew in Mexico. He was nearly seven feet tall and had played the Thing in a horror movie of the same name, and everybody called him the Thing. I hadn’t thought about the Thing in twenty years, and would not have thought about him except walking on yellow at that particular moment.