Such are the things I busy myself with and write down, and thus end up among my papers again; that is, lying in wait for myself

and yet I know that I cannot escape my destiny; I am pressured by time: I’ll soon be fifty, I could be dead tomorrow, and I haven’t done my work! Here’s my book, proliferating before my very eyes, in horrible hybrid cell growth, turning into a monstrosity—hence, I yearn for the dreadful, pleasurable recognition to fall upon me just once more, one single and lucid last time, the recognition with which (albeit for only a fleeting moment) I can be certain that it is true, that old nightmare: that I have in fact murdered, shamefully and for no other reason than to conceal some baseness deeply rooted in me—

but when? how? where? and whom? That’s what I can’t grasp. I’ve repressed it.

Even without consulting Dr. Sigmund Freud, I realized long ago that my forgetfulness suggests disreputable sediment in the dark depths of my soul, and I wisely make a point of not trying to fish it out with what that great son of the literary nineteenth century recommends as a fishing rod: the biographical. My horror, which I fear to the point of lust and then desire again, is of the sort that cannot be pursued back to my parents’ bedroom. It springs from the sheer terror of existence itself. Such a momentary revelation of the totally unknown that lies behind and beyond all that can be known is what the primitive man calls GOD.

•

How fine I’d have it if it were just a matter of biography (something like the early experiences of Freud’s Wolf-Man). A street ditty in a movie. Perfect pap for my piglets. The stuff writes itself, in contemporary style, which, in its love of atmosphere—oozing quotations of style—betrays its attraction to the past:

POSTER

(in psychedelically dynamized Jugendstil graphics: the linear flow narrowing to a cascade, the spectrum sprouting teeth, a buzz saw of nerves—rose-madder, sulfur-yellow, leek-green, violet . . . with interspersed boutique heraldry: two male hands, hacked off at the gentlemanly cuffs, with forefingers stretching like pistol barrels, point from either side at the name)

ARISTIDES
Chief Mechanic for the Western Union Tunnel of Love

(collage: model of an early locomotive from pioneer days, its cathedral-bell smokestack sending up as a cloud of steam a distilling flask with alchemical stuff in it—toads, snakes, embryos, homunculi; in the engineer’s cab, his booted foot on a female body with a bald head, General Custer with a drawn sword, his left hand waving a fresh scalp)

invites you

on a

TRIP TO HADES

into the

SPIRITUAL INNARDS

of the

CONSUMER SOCIETY TROGLODYTES

(newspaper advertisement praises a method for treating clubfeet and ears that stick out; likewise nose-shapers, body-hair removers, wart, blackhead, and goiter remedies)

Idea:

!A MIDDLE-AGED MAN COMES TO REALIZE

THAT HE IS REPRESSING GUILT!