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Current Works by Louis E. Bourgeois
Dead
Sky
Be
it life or death we crave only reality.
--Thoreau
Chapter
1: A Rip in the Wind
First
you must tear up the garment you are wearing, this fabric of ignorance, this base
of ignorance, this bond of corruption, this dark wall, this living death, this
perceptible corpse, this grave you carry around with you, this robber within
you who hates through what it loves and envies through what it hates.
Chapter
2: The Pure Adulation of Misgivings
At
the moment the soul is getting ready to organize its riches, its discoveries,
this revelation of that unconscious instant when the thing is on the verge of
appearing, a superior and malevolent will attacks the soul like a vitriol…and
leaves me gasping as though at the very threshold of life.
Chapter
3: Kill Red the New Dawn
This
time it’s a fundamental malaise, where the mind affected by it seems to me in
danger of ruin when a sensation of appalling fatigue attacks me at the nape of
my neck with a violent impulse to throw myself to the ground, the mind
magnetically drawn by the earth as though cords running from my skull fixed me
to the ground and were violently tugging at me.
Chapter
4: Herisson
Then
after this sense of vertigo, of centralized enervation, after this feeling of
being unable to go on, there comes a piercing burning pain at the base of my
skull, over the ears, a pain like a contusion, like the shock of a violent
impact, and the head, as though made of glass, is crushed in splinters.
Chapter
5: Foaming at the Mouth
All
around us we must be doing black work, we have to kick over the traces. We are
entirely mummified still, mummified fiber by fiber, so we can’t tell what’s
constraining us. And if we haven’t come
together in conspiracy towards some end, I ask you why we have come together?
Chapter
Six: Endmouth
I
was…at the extreme point of suffering where there is nothing, beyond any
rallying thought. In a kind of mutable
and slippery despair, rent by conflicting impulsions, on a sort of crazed
flight path across the soul where, from the exterior to the interior, I sensed
the constant reabsorption and dying away of my
thought. Form cancelled itself in
expansive flames.
Chapter
7: A Game with No Rules
Alas, the moon!
Hesson
The clocks are dead and a mean
thought enters the room; namely, you are your father even though you’ve hated
him from day one; a hard father who is in the habit of strangling large fish with
his bare hands as he would strangle you and mother if he wasn’t afraid of going
to prison as much as he is afraid of losing power over the only two people in
the world that he controls. A large father in which flowers expire as he passes
and lakes go dry.
The sky goes dead in his presence.
Even fish burst into flames should
he as so much as touch the surface of the water and trees turn to blood—don’t
you understand? The clocks are dead
because your father has defeated everything, has left nothing to chance. Don’t you understand that everything
including the very molecular structure of nothingness is under his command?
The is no God but there is father—
Who has turned into a doll for his
own desires—you a doll—in a world without content—you only see yourself in
nightmares—amazing life, but ever so painful.
A race of fish-men and purple
women—you can kill me dear Father, but I will never surrender to you, please
forgive me—there is rebellion within rebellion that not even you can
comprehend—
I see myself reflected every where
and I am frightened.
We shall bake you tonight, Father,
like the fish: I will whisper into the
lemon sauce, there is no I. Who wants life if there is even one moment of
pain?
You are hard Father, I would prefer
it no other way—you are so dark too, no other father has been so dark
before—yet, I am proud of your darkness.
My father is a fish. I am the happiest child in the world.
We are so intensely, intensely large—we
have sacrificed many birds together, in order to keep ourselves alive—
How I hate the Middle Class, Father,
just like you Father, how proud I am of you for destroying me for thirty years
but which feels like twenty centuries—Father, you have earned special
recognition in me here for destroying me with no political motivation.
Dear Father, never cast you darkness
off and I will be your everlasting bride, I will lie down next to you and will
fill your ear with the new scientific dialectic that will anoint your wonderful
mind with pure blue—
All those days in the fields making
other people extremely wealthy is making good on a future payment in which the
rich will never be able to afford.
We will never die; the plows are
quickly turning into scrolls and swords—
And
--and—
--and—
Father, most of all I wanted to
assure you that the Revolution is about to have a name:
{ANAXIFORMINGS}
Can you hear it, Father? I can’t believe how lucky we are!!!
Polichinelle
You
have taken my bones, yet charge me with the crime—then laugh at me
because I walk funny; failing to mention the extraordinary willpower I exercise
in order to walk without bones—
Then,
you want me to forgive you, after these biological predeterminates
prey on your conscience, for your psychological crimes—my response—
BURN
IN HELL—
Crippled,
undaunted to the bitter end, willful, prodigious—I will become a bird—a genetic
bird—
You
are an aspic—
There
are absolutes of which your kind always fails to understand—there are
circumstances that are irredeemable for the victims of those circumstances and
the crimes of the perpetrators can only be remonstrated through the shedding of
Their
blood—
Your
blood—
There
has never been a judge who wasn’t guilty of judging—there never was a teacher
who didn’t sacrifice her students—
There
is no world without oppression and only the crippled posses any notion of truth
at all—
But
admittedly there is Progress of Events—one day the tortured will become large
winged birds, they will seek their prey—
Illimitable
justice at the End of Everything—
The
birds are about to take flight.
Heidegger Playing with Children
(A
Gather ‘round me boys and girls;
see, this is not a fish. This is definitely not a fish and if you look above,
you’ll see that there is no sky there, nor has there ever been a sky.
The only reality is ash. Jewish ash and stardust ash.
Ash is an image that keeps me up
late into the night. Some nights, I never sleep a’ tall.
This ball, children, this ball is
too much of itself. This ball is too much reality. Gravity is a sin against my
philosophical efforts—
Do you understand, children?
I will dance with you, yes, we will
dance and dance in the lovely meadow with the Charnel factory smoking in the
distance, but, first, I must ask you, don’t you loath the color green? Don’t
worry, one day you’ll understand the essence of this question better than I do.
Questions are the highest piety of
thought…but, remember well, this is not a fish; this is most certainly not a
fish and that Sun, if only I could crush it—
And put it into a glass tube, or
into the very filaments of a telephone.
You need to understand that the
reality of this world is only ash, Jewish ash and stardust ash.
Now, children, drop that ball and go
home and read The Complete Works of Plato and come back tomorrow and
tell me what you found there.
The
Mansion
They
began to mutilate one another; sister became armless, mother faceless, father
voiceless, brother and son went blind—servant became master, master piled up
loaves of shit in the outhouse. The dogs took over the table and the caged
birds settled down into bed with a good book.
The
home owners knew there was no way of stopping this; outside always gets in no
matter how hard you try.
Faux Dieu
I created the stars, but regretted
it instantly. Father told me not to create matter, so as not to upset the
universal balance of nothingness. Father said, To
create anything is not only superfluous but painfully misleading and will only
lead to needless suffering.
I did not go to Father, but to
Mother, Mother of Eternal Night. She
said she forgave me for creating the stars and if I created nothing more, then
no great harm would come to the universe. But I got older, and whoever created
Boredom was the true culprit of disharmony for I couldn’t help myself when I
gave into my impulses and created planets and moons.
It was then that Father sought me
out to destroy me, for he knew where all this was going and he was right too; I
was creating in order to amuse myself, not out of any virtuous principles
whatsoever.
I did not want to die again like I
had so many times before. Whenever Father got the notion in his head that I was
being a disobedient son, he would kill me and I would have to go through the
obnoxious process of being reborn, a process I can’t describe here because
there is no language to describe it. I hid on the third planet I created and
there was nothing but rock and thick vapors. Father is so confused by material
manifestations; I knew he wouldn’t find me on this planet. In hiding, I began
to create all kinds of things and quite by accident created Life, that is, I
created Time, the very thing Father most feared I would bring into existence.
Father was really too old to be
Nothingness, but he somehow held on to his position. In fact, his powers have somehow
expanded even greater than in his youth, for now he is the all-encompassing
Abyss. He is now everything that is
truly important. So much so, that he doesn’t seek me out any longer, he is far past worrying about my silly habit of creating.
And now I have created all this
life, and I am remorseful because the poor living entities were somehow—from my
sloppy alchemy—imbued with Purpose and Hope; they suffer in such a way that I
will never be able to comprehend. But if
I could find a way to communicate with them, if I could just find a way to
understand their language, I would like to tell them to be happy because I know
for a fact that their energy force will not last very long, therefore their
suffering is short lived, for soon Father will wipe out all my creations and it
will be as if they had never existed.
One grows tired of
killing snakes, gutting lizards, crushing spiders. My furniture is full of death; there are
bones in the walls. They don’t speak
nearly enough. The carpet is an ocean
where I am lost all the time. Outside
the window, blue dust stirs in the wind.
Further, the wild screams of children eat up the air.
I confuse myself
sometimes with the guitar, a Tupperware bowl, the toilet and a clay jar. I pick
myself off the coffee table, examining the thing that I am; a fork, a plate, a
cobalt blue candle. My eyes are annihilation, my toaster tells me so. One
shouldn’t eat toasters, but I have eaten mine.
The fish in the
aquarium are dead and have been for a long time. I’ve watched them float for days. In the yard, the voices keep ringing in the
tall grass–earth angels keep repeating a name. They are sad; time has done them
in too. What are roots that never clutch? The trees are too full of spirits–they
are too lucid to think about.
Down the street
near the marsh industrial machines fill up the landscape. I go there and feel ageless–my arms and legs
are spread out on the horizon, where the wild geese migrate in V formation,
frightening me with their large wings. All birds are people–you see yourself
trapped in their faces–the thought of a cormorant can kill you.
Where
I am, no one has ever existed. This world has never existed–no one has touched
the green grass, no one has seen the crystal streets–machines are your only
friends–all men are robots who throw off their disguises from time to time and
disappear forever where nothing is everlasting:
the birds are heavy in the sky–all things fill you with fear and make
you sad–you hear the echo of the sky and stars haunt the blood.
Three Examples of the Way Things
Could Be
The
price one pays for having a profession is a deformation professionelle,
as the French put it—a professional deformation. Doctors and engineers tend to see things from
the viewpoint of their own specialty, and usually show a marked blind spot to
whatever falls outside this particular province. The more specialized a vision the sharper its
focus; but also more nearly total the blind spot toward all things that lie on
the periphery of this focus.
--From William Barrett’s Irrational Man
1.
Finally, we got tired of it and one
evening we gathered all the shrinks and shot each and every one of them. And that’s a lot of shrinks too, about 6
million. Think about it, 6 million
shrinks, and there would have been even more if we hadn’t acted when we
did. We shot them and shot them until we
ran out of bullets, then when we ran out of bullets we bludgeoned them with
heavy sticks of oak and maple. When we
were finished killing all the shrinks in
There
was dancing all around the bodies, the dancers foaming at the mouth with
Euphoria.
2.
The cops, strangely enough, were not
quite as guilty as the shrinks. The
death policy we took with the cops was one of hanging them all from every
strong branch across the whole of the good old
There was about as much Joy as when
we killed all the shrinks.
3.
The medical doctors were next, but
we couldn’t kill them; they were somehow not guilty in the same way as the
shrinks and cops. With the doctors, it
was simply a matter of re-education. We
made them read Sartre, Camus, Heidegger, Kierkegaard,
and the like—all the Existential writers, Christian, Jewish, and Atheist. The doctors had to pass an examination based
on these Existentialists. If they
failed, they had to re-read all the Existentialists over again, or they could
choose to have their best hand amputated.
You would be surprised how many of them chose to have their hand chopped
off rather then read all that Existentialism over again., which goes to show
you how half educated doctors are, Existentialism being far beyond their small
minds.
4.
The
task of making this world a better place to live is far from over, of course—
Teachers,
lawyers, and politicians, you guys are next, so if I were you, I’d leave the
country now.
(The Absolute End)
The
Esoteric Pond
Malady. The chemical dawn has turned the water into
ash. Here, all birds are beasts, they
write poetry and sing silently at the bottom of the lake; blood itself is in the
air—all the trees are flesh—the sky resembles a cracked melon that will never
repair itself—
There
are wolf children who drank from me—
In
the forest they rejoice repeating the only word they have ever known:
Anaxiformings
Cannibalism is Conformity
I wake at sunrise to the sound of
squealing pigs; outside, an idiot child is eating pig shit and rat meat in a
dish of black decaying rice. Next door,
a virgin is being washed in a huge zinc tub; she is being cleansed for a political
sacrifice of dubious worth. Tonight, her
loins and buttocks will be served in rich sauces at the Imperial Table. I do not know what they will do with the rest
of her, except that she’ll disappear forever with the rest of the sacrifices—
But before then, I too will fall
into a trance, intoxicated with the dinner conversation of Aristotelian logic
and Middle Eastern affairs.