Whose cock was all rectangular,

But love showed him a guile.

He stuck it in a vise to file

It smooth into a cylinder.

That is the goal of our hard labor. This beckons as a reward for an upright life of crookedness—it already beckons to me; I feel I can grasp it. A movie starring Nadine Carrier could not possibly fail. A movie that has not bombed is bound to pull the next one after it. So: three solid scripts for Madame Carrier (if possible with a percentage of the gross), and everything would be hunky-dory. You can get a small farm in cider country: very easy what with the rural exodus; they’re a dime a dozen. And all my sins would be forgiven. There’d be a house for my son, and he could say, “This is our house.” Maybe Christa would come back to us. The old woman of my dreams would be killed off and all the dead would stay dead. I’d finally have peace and quiet to write my book—

MY BOOK

the book that bears witness to being a human being in this era—a breathtaking success!!!

the highest-sales-storming, best-seller-list-peak-surpassing sensation!!!

A BOOK WRITTEN BY THE CONSCIENCE

OF OUR RACE!!!

FANFARE!!!

and the smashing of cymbals sends a powdering of ten thousand white doves like confetti into the air—

and rolling and foaming out of the seething of the boundless crowd emerges the mighty back of the whale

EXCITEMENT

and sends after the swarming of the doves the skyward fountain of

JUBILATION

the upward proliferating atomic mushroom which tears out its stem together with the root fibers of uptossed

caps coifs papakhas

hats shakos

bonnets képis

hoods

berets

while the whale EXCITEMENT powerfully rolls over on the ball bearings of its back, into the deep again

so that the whirlpool crater of its suction

wreathes into

APPLAUSE

in a swelling surge that sends the phonometer into the high numbers way over the red borderline of frequencies audible to the human ear and the crowd gapes open in the wedge-blare of trumpets

!!!CLEAR THE WAY!!!

for

in the surging of red flags

it comes zooming along,

the troika

of the

ZEITGEIST

drawn by the three stallions

ALBERT EINSTEIN
SIGMUND FREUD
and
KARL MARX
!!!THREE GERMANS!!!

who have carried the mind of the West beyond the Gobi Desert all the way to the Middle Kingdom—

The children’s choirs sing:

Lao-tse

Mao-tse

sock them in the snout-tse

smash them in their kissers free

give it to them one two three!

!!!THREE GERMAN JEWS!!!

so that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion may be realized by the chosen people within the chosen people

The Kyffhäuser a cappella chorus sings:

Yankee doodle

Flirty Gerty

sighing for a Jewish noodle

Gerty is a pastor’s daughter,

never does the things she oughter.

and over all their silver-haired evangelist heads (Einstein silver above; Freud below; Marx all around), they wield a banner saying

ARISTIDES

—an evening star in the firmament of the waning novel—