Posted by nigel1 on May 28, 2002 at 14:39:00:
When I left the Danbury Depot, I had the perfect pen in hand. I was very happy, and I felt I had at least one novel fermenting in me like bad wine getting worse. It would have to be bad, given the state of my world, and the state of my talents. It was so bad, that I could actually smell the rot, and it smelled like heaps of moldy grapefruit, left to decay in a humid place.
Jet black ink and a fine, fine-pointed pen, I hoped, would be my ticket out of this place, and into the elmshaded houses of Danbury USA, where the air was sweet and the lawns were manicured twice weekly. I would be more at my ease there, with my back against a shade tree, shirt opened to the breeze, ass in the grass.
I hoped this would not prove to be too confusing.
Sometimes I confused the fruit with its rind, and the house with the home, and the outside with the inside. And I have no sense of smell. Thus am I handicapped, as author and lover. They do not grow their lawns, inside their houses, in Danbury USA. But I did not know that!
Strolling peacefully through the streets, with a drugstore here and a fruitstand there, full of grapefruit, I thought of Cezanne. Why not? Every pipsqueek pisscunt arrives at Cezanne sooner or later, and says something, usually about the man's apples, which must be a euphemism for his balls. An artist paints with his balls, and a writer writes with his balls. How many years, dear God, have I spent, bouncing them off the keys of some typewriter or other? More than I care to think. Then I found my fountain pen, on the floor of the train that carried me to Danbury, in the corrider. I don't think that a salesman lost it. I think a writer lost it. I think the writer was a lost soul, and I think he wrote weird tales, tales of eldritch horror. That's what I like to think. I think I thought then that I'd try something new, try writing with the pen, forget the balls, and maybe get better results. But this is what I thought about Cezanne at that time: it was said that he either abolished perspective or that he abolished scale. I didn't think you could abolish one without the other, so I didn't think it was really important to know what was said. And I still think so. In the case of an existing landscape, I thought, it would be possible to abolish both scale and perspective by bombing it into a more or less uniform expanse of colorless fragments, which would be gray, in practice. Consider the moon! An excellent illustration. I thought this would be a good idea. There would be little, then, to hinder the imagination, and as an artist I could appreciate the utility of this. Still do, as a matter of fact. Take Danbury. With all those artifacts cleared away, there would be room for anything one imagined! And I wanted to imagine in the vividest way, a killing field of naked women, just as nazis paraded women naked into ditches and shot them, creating a vast erotic work of art in authentic flesh and blood, so too for me, for my imagination to work with. But I needed a clear space. I needed a wasteland. And to create that wasteland I had with me in one of the copious pockets of my fatigue pants, an aerosol can full of a substance so toxic, and so corrosive, it was commonly known as Instant Death. Unless you had a very special polypropylene suit with a special HEPA filter, you were a goner. Heh, heh, it just so happened that I had such a suit packed in my little overnight bag, along with the laptop and digital camera I would use to create my art work, the Killing Field, in words and images. Danbury! I would kill you for my art! Far away, down the quiet street, a little boy, or even a little girl, wheeled a brilliant grass-green bicycle. Apart from that, there was not much life evident. Where had they all gone? And the child was not very active. He or She seemed to be watching me. Across the street, the Andy Hardy houses were curtained, and all were silent, but I sensed the prickling in the nerves signaled by people observing me. They were watching me, and I felt their eyes! Well, if they had the guts, they could stop me, if enough of them rushed me they could probably get me through the hail of 9mm bullets I'd send their way. Yes, I'd brought a Glock. I didn't think any of them would try anything. I loafed on a beg cool lawn, leaning on one elbow, legs extended, letting the sweat dry. I was comfortable now that the serious business was at hand. In a little while I'd pull on the anti-chemical suit. I felt so confidant I considered taking a little nap. But that would have been wrong, and the desire bugged me, making me hard. If I slept I'd dream about pretty naked girls dropping with bullet wounds in a ditch, falling over each other, mashing boobs and butts into cold earth, and the flow of blood like a blessing over all. How could those soldiers have resisted those enticing bodies, so recently shot, some surely bellyshot, and others with bloody holes in their breasts, stomach, butts, and yes, even a shattered skull, a pretty face shattered and besmirched with blood and brain. But the body! The warmth and suppleness, and absolute treasure of the body, of all the bodies! And to have pulled the trigger! To have been there, to have seen a gut shot nude beauty crawling slowly away from you, the butt wiggling prettily, and then to point your rifle and put a bullet in the middle of the girl's back, and see her body jerk and go limp, and perhaps pass a bit of bloody stool between divine butt cheeks! If I had a time machine, I wouldn't be doing this to poor Danbury, but such was life. And it was time. I donned the suit, quickly, drawing upon my training to do it within seconds. Into my hood, I spoke: "Danbury, prepare to die!" Histrionic, I know, but I did it, and then the whole process didn't take very long. Everything turned yellowish as the Instant Death reacted with moisture in the air. The grass fell to ashes, and the trees, dead birds rained down, disintegrating into fluffs of gray ash as they fell, down came the houses, and as far as my eyes could see there was a moonscape, a landscape of cinders, gray as those trenches the nazis made. Death, death, everwhere, for many miles. Now all I needed was a few hundred naked women and a Mauser, and a LOT of ammo!
At any rate, that's what I thought about Cezanne.