Class Warfare Read online

  We speak, when we see fit to speak at all, of homely subjects: the local climate, which is just sufficiently unpredictable to induce conversation; the precedence and composition of our several daily meals, the potential variety of which, in Janey’s opinion, is mathematically either incalculable or actually “infinite,” depending upon one’s assumptions re natural resources, the limits of biochemical ingenuity, and the vagaries of appetite and imagination; the manifold virtues and inconsolable sorrows of our forsaken parents, childhood playmates, counsellors, sophomore sweethearts, erstwhile partners in business and boudoir, of whose collective absence we humbly beg continuance; the bizarre pastimes of our present neighbours, the omniorgiasts; the whereabouts of the dictionary, which we have become expert at losing (thereby providing, on occasion, an entire evening of sparkling discourse); and the evidence of entropy in the molecular constitution of Masterpiece Avenue, which we cannot profess to understand.

  Are we contented, indeed? Silly question. We are envied, patently, we live well; surely that is enough? All we require comes to us at our behest, each Wednesday before sundown, in grey vans rattling richly up the broken stones of Masterpiece Avenue; tawny boys in uniform bring boxes, sacks, incontinent armloads of commodities from warehouses, from the bounteous city. The boys have muscled smiles that coil and flex as they perform acts of largesse around us; they sing in strong expectant voices songs of commercial opportunities, patriotic aspirations, the sweetness of vengeance, triumphant self-abuse in verminous hallways. Sometimes they begin an air we know well, and cherish:

  I never meant

  to steal your baubles, baby,

  I only meant

  to steal your mind.

  I wanted love

  to ease my troubles, baby,

  but good lovin’ is hard to find.

  Then, indeed, we are in danger, we are tested. Then, I notice the dampness creep like errant moonlight across Janey’s face, and Ambrose forgetful at the gate lower his blade to unmanly repose, and Spiffy arrested in greed stand agape and aglow with secret knowledge; and I, who betray too much at best of times, who am unworthy, wordlessly count money, thinking of Paracelsus dead, dishonoured, his doctrines yet lingering on and on, through centuries of disgrace, lingering even now, preserved in tinfoil and ashes, an afterlight on Masterpiece Avenue.

  I never meant

  to leave you hollow, baby,

  I only meant

  to leave you blind.

  I asked for light

  so I could follow, baby,

  I never thought I was unkind.

  Tested, so far, we do not fail, have not failed; we sway, pause, tremble an instant; we do not break. So far. I do not dismiss the possibility, altogether; I, at least, am only perishable matter, and know it. I study finitude and scratch its contours, lovingly, across my mortal skin. What is the enemy, who, and where? And what shall I do, what say, when one day we come, as come we must, face to face?

  Compassion, I’ll say: have compassion. You who are free, alive in the quick light of the confident world, forgive us. You who are loved, forgive us. Forgive us all who are your monuments, your history, who stand watch for you at the mouth of the labyrinth, beside Masterpiece Avenue. Have compassion. Have faith in us, whom you appointed to this eminence. Have faith, lest we fail you when the storms come, lest we leave you to fire and flood, industrial speculations, the ecstasy of the Minotaur. We have our work, as you in the ordinary world have yours: forgive us the work we do for you. Deserve well of us, as we deserve of you, on Masterpiece Avenue, this eminence.

  As for me, I take delight in commas, which hark of unfinished things, of memories still aborning, but I find comfort in the period I shall someday place, a token ring upon a beloved finger, at the certain and only end …

  THE EXAMINATION

  You are to write THREE essays, one from Parts I, II, and III. Take an hour for each essay. Plan carefully. At the end, proofread.

  The process of watching over the examination is called “invigilation.” The process of adoration is called “unprofessional conduct.” At nine o’clock in the morning, the beautiful of this world enter the examination room, to find the examination booklets set out for them, and the Professor behind his desk, adoring. There is no other word. He has decided to leave his wife.

  Discuss. The theme, “the theme of the poem.” He is open to discussion. He will observe, praise, the purity of these faces, concentrated, focused, on silly questions: this perfection of flesh, this effulgence. These are his students, and he is their English Professor: theirs. They are thinking of serious words, writing them down, filling the blue-lined pages, one-side-only, every-other-line-please. He is in love. The process of invigilation consists in doing nothing, vigilantly, for three hours of an April morning.

  Q. What did T.S. Eliot have to say about April?

  The Professor is going to leave his wife because she said: “You love your goddamned students more than me.” It’s true, he does. Choose ONE of the following topics. Plan carefully.

  He, too, is writing earnestly in the regulation booklet. He does it as a gesture of solidarity, “symbolic action”: it’s his job, his contract with the world, to deal in symbolism. See, he is saying, we are all alike oppressed. He will try not to look at the bent heads, the busy hands, writing, writing. “The universal truth expressed by the poet is …” (Discuss conflicts of this sort, with specific reference to …). He will try and try, not to look at them. The loveliest, the golden failures, will never know, they’ll never suspect. He’s had years of his profession to learn discretion. He won’t touch them, won’t caress, though they fall drunk against his shoulder in the Volkswagen, on the way home. “A reader may be, at first, puzzled by a work in which nothing much seems to be happening.” In the event of a bomb threat, please follow the procedures outlined below. Do not panic. Do not interrupt the examination. Your co-operation will be … Appreciated. The girl in the second row has long yellow hair, communicative eyes, and a valentine locket on a chain. Never mind that she’s a functional illiterate, that she doesn’t know an antonym from a pseudonym. Never mind.

  Nothing seems to be happening. He reads, “Such a reader may find illumination …” Strive vigilantly upward. Said the Buddha, he thinks. It sounds like the sort of thing the Buddha would have said. So much is slipping away … everything …

  The Professor is writing a letter in his booklet; it looks like this: Dear Valerie, I am leaving you, goodbye, goodbye forever.

  He is writing a poem, in iambic pentameter, in his head. He is thinking of a song heard on the radio, this morning: something about the waters of oblivion. Send her all my salary / from the waters of oblivion. What he heard, the rhyme he understood, was celery. Send her all my celery, he heard. Now he thinks of the tall green celery growing there, the pale green stalks waving wetly in the murky deeps, in the waters of oblivion. He knows those waters well; he has seen the celery. Valerie, I’m sorry, you can keep the car, the furniture, the dishwasher, the children. And the celery, if you must. There are so many bodies here in the examination room, and I am full of desire.

  He is saying to them in his heart: “Little brothers and sisters.” They are writing about metaphor, metapsychology, metastasis, metallurgy; they are writing about the Central Experience. He could tell them a thing or two about that: the C.E. It is a new department of the Government, very secretive, a vague amalgam of former welfare recipients housed in a converted warehouse, in a provincial city. What goes on there? Questions are asked in Parliament, loudly, by entrenched back-benchers; the Honourable Member from Purple Falls requests a definition of the Central Experience. Someone replies, softly: Celery. Plant tall celery, tend it, in the quiet sea.

  Q. Please, can I go to the, uh, washroom?

  A. Yup.

  The examination reminds him of too much. In blue ink, it has the effrontery to quote Wallace Stevens: “The body dies, the body’s beauty lives.” Discuss in depth, the examination says. (How did he know?)

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nbsp; Little brothers and sisters, I will plant tenderness in the hearts of English professors, your masters, everywhere. You will forget what an inscape is, and you won’t care. Oxymorons will proliferate, syllogisms will slide to and fro, and no one will care. Shapeliness will save you, shapeliness will suffice. Analyze this poem. With reference to one or more. More, always, more of everything. And I shall seed the waters of oblivion, lovingly, for you.

  The gardeners wear flippers and masks, pale green, who go down into the waters of oblivion. Gently, they weed and prune. Their bodies are smooth, with the smoothness of damp plaster, in that light. They make no sound.

  The man who is leaving his wife sits at the front of the examination room, writing. There is a question here about Meaning: levels of meaning. Last night he finished his essay on Anagogical Sublimation, a field in which he may be a pioneer. “Why the hell,” Valerie wanted to know, “do you waste your time with that stuff?” He’s wondered the same thing himself. If he were half a man he’d be in a logging camp, building Character, muscles, sublimating everything. Meanwhile he has a terrible hangover, and the room is rancid with panic. The aspirin, as usual, isn’t working. He remembers more of the song: Too much of nothing / makes a man feel bad. The examination will soon be over.

  The caloric content of celery is a negative quantity.

  Harvesting the waters of oblivion, a project: cutting celery, in the green sea. The gardeners use small, ivory-handled knives, souvenirs of the Jubilee, to slice the celery, to sever the tall green stalks.

  Where no fish glide to and fro. Where no bright red and golden fish dart, to and fro, among the pale stalks.

  Upward, my soul.

  Compare and contrast any TWO of the following. In case of emergency, follow directions on printed sheet. Remain calm … NOTE TO INSTRUCTORS: Do not answer questions asked by students during the examination period.

  NOTE TO STUDENTS: The Kermess is a Flemish outdoor festival.

  You learn something new every day.

  Upward, my soul, vigilantly through the green waters, these murky waters, oblivion. Explain, in as much detail possible. The harvesters work in perfect silence, deep in the celery plantations, in the salt sea. The students are beginning to drift away. One by one they go, away, the beautiful of this world. “Icarus,” the examination says, “a figure in Greek legend …” Goodbye, Valerie. Goodbye forever.

  At the end, proofread.

  SANTA CLAUS

  EVEN TO HIS closest friends, he was often a mystery; the great affection he inspired was not unmixed with awe, a sense of sheer astonishment at the multiplicity and ardour of his genius. His generosity had over the years become a part of him as essential, as physical, as the immense belly, the beard, the curious yet somehow appropriate manner of dress. What had begun, perhaps, as a rich man’s whimsical impulse—who could remember?—had grown into a habit, a lifework, an industry. If sometimes he wearied of it, if the scope and complexity of his responsibilities sometimes overwhelmed him, he nonetheless resisted, better than most men, the seductions of pessimism. The more cynical of his associates may have observed, toward the end, a note of strain, of obscure vexation, creeping into the familiar laughter; a handful of his intimates may have guessed, as Christmases rolled by with disheartening frequency, however more reluctantly he girded himself, year after year, for the long night journey. But to the world at large he betrayed no sign of despair, no hint of deepening disillusionment. No one can confirm, and many would deny, the legend that in his last years he had come to despise children, enduring their cloying company, their demands, only as a final reflexive gesture toward public relations.

  After his retirement, he wasted little time upon nostalgia, but it is said that he felt, and occasionally expressed, bitter disappointment at the indifference with which his departure was greeted. He was, after all, human, and in his way as hungry as any man for the honey of recognition; he had hoped for a Nobel Prize, or at least a gold wristwatch. That may, indeed, be the reason why, after leaving the Arctic, he undertook at once to erase all marks of his former identity; in this he was, by all accounts, remarkably successful. He lives today, unrecognizably slim, clean-shaven, sporting a stylish black hairpiece and tailored clothes from Joe’s of Hollywood, in an attractive mobile home in Sunset Village, near Tucson, where he pursues the customary enjoyments of the aged: golf, bridge, speculation in real estate. Normally reticent about his affairs, he recently confided to newsmen, however, that he and his present wife, onetime starlet Peggy Pringle, are both registered Republicans, “and damned proud of it.”

  MARIE TYRELL

  —for Joe Gluck

  “But she (sc. nature, matter’s mistress) holds our agreement as a mystic secret bond; and even if we decide to be off as though freemen, she claims we are fugitives, and tries to bring us back, again, and has us seized as runaways, quoting her document against [us].”

  —Synesius

  MARIE TYRELL AND Gerard Macklewain, her lover, were waiting for the police. They sat together in Gerard’s room, above a bakery, in the commercial district; the air smelled of bread. They shared a cigarette, her last, watching the smoke drift like coastal fog across the rental furniture. When the police came, Marie Tyrell picked up her knapsack, without haste, and walked to the door. Two policemen were standing there, and a woman in plain clothes; very little was said, nothing that matters. It would have been redundant, at that point, to have said goodbye.

  THE REVOLT OF THE LIBIDO

  Toward the end, she dreamed architecture, massive constructions in the New Brutalism, grey and brown, splayed out upon soft hillsides, institutional, guarded. The wind was blowing continually, from the east. She was allowed newspapers, carefully censored: in one of them she read that the government had fallen, in another that it didn’t matter, the military were pledged to keep order.

  Order was kept. A National Day of Mourning was declared, and duly observed. It was not clear to her what was being mourned, or whom. In her dreams Marie Tyrell paced up and down concrete corridors, under bare lights, reciting libertarian slogans in several languages. Awake, she thought extensively about God. Sometimes she thought about Gerard Macklewain, and summoned him to lie with her on the thin mattress, to be silent with her in the cold cell. In this time she began many letters, never finished, to people whose whereabouts she had long since forgotten. She wrote, “What would you do in my position? Would you drop the war where it is, or would you prosecute it in future with elder-stalk squirts charged with rose-water? Would you deal lighter blows rather than heavier ones? Would you give up the contest, leaving any available means untried?” She wrote, “I shall do nothing in malice. What I deal with is too vast for malicious dealing.”

  A SOUNDING PANTHEON

  From a letter found among the papers of Marie Tyrell, after her execution:

  Comrades, there is less to tell you now than I would have thought, less to say, evidently, than you are prepared to hear. Often my mind is wholly empty, quiet, a room vacated in anticipation of some catastrophe, which will come soon enough. I apologize to my brothers and sisters, for this. I understand what you expect of me, what you deserve, in this darkening of our history. You need something usable, a Statement, to ennoble our cause and shame our enemies, words to engrave, soberly, on the monuments you doubtless will not forget to erect to me. There was a time when I knew the words. I remember how they rang in our meeting-rooms, at our rallies, how they shone in my mind, when we spoke them together. I remember how I repeated them, for comfort’s sake, again and again through the nights I lay in hiding, and when I was discovered and taken away, how joyfully I spat them at my tormentors. They were good words, and I do not regret them, nor the end they led me to. Be certain of that. Now they have left me, as so much else is leaving me, and I have not the strength, nor the wish, to call them back. Let my memorial be silent, if you would build it. More blood than mine will be shed, before you do.

  DIES IRAE

  “It is reported that the subject habitual
ly spends much of her time in a lethargic, approximately quasi-catatonic state, leading us to hypothesize that (unidentified) visitors, or fellow inmates, may be supplying her, clandestinely, with one or more psychotropic drugs. We have questioned the subject at some length, however, without obtaining an unequivocal admission that this is in fact the case. We strongly urge that the customary procedures [Section IV-B, Subsection 2, ¶11] be implemented at once.

  “Periodically, the subject appears to undergo a radical alteration of her behaviour-patterns, characterized by hyperactivity, obsessional reiteration of ‘left-wing’ propaganda, and pronounced alienation from, and resistance to, authority. We were able to observe these phenomena on two [2] occasions. In the first instance, the subject, having conducted herself in a docile manner for several hours, abruptly began to walk back and forth across her quarters (‘pacing’) in a markedly agitated manner. She then paused, and recited what seemed to be a ‘speech,’ either improvised spontaneously or committed to memory at some earlier time. (It was not possible to determine which was the case, as the subject refused to answer, or may not have heard, our questions.) Unfortunately, our recording equipment was inoperative during this ‘performance,’ and we cannot provide an exact transcript of her words. The principal theme, however, was articulated quite distinctly, in the para-rational mode typical of Phase II paranoia [cf. Weber & Hartley]. The subject said, in effect, that a ‘revolution’ (presumably Communist, although we have no clear confirmation of this) was about to occur, and that everyone who had hitherto ‘oppressed the people’ [sic] would be killed. Significantly, the manner of death was not specified; we have found that many subjects in a delusional state are deliberately vague upon the actual implementation of their ‘fantasies.’ The subject went on to describe, more explicitly than we had anticipated, a number of acts of ‘terrorism,’ which she openly advocated, including the abduction and assassination of (unnamed) prominent public figures, the organization of a ‘gorilla army’ [sic], and a calculated campaign of bombing and arson, air piracy, larceny and what we interpret [cf. Section IX, Subsection 5-A, ¶ 6] as illegal assembly. It may be relevant to note that the subject referred, in several instances, to a pseudo-concept she called ‘correct thinking.’ We have encountered this syndrome in other subjects whose delusions assume a purportedly ‘political’ character, but we have no experimental evidence, to date, to indicate what, if anything, it may signify. During her ‘oration,’ which continued for a period of twenty-two [22] minutes, the subject spoke in a low monotone, as if addressing her remarks to a person or persons directly facing her. She either ignored, or was unaware of, the observers, and, at the conclusion, returned to her bed, and simulated an attitude of ‘sleep.’