Behold the sagging tit, the drudged-gray mopped-out cunt-corked wife, stale as yesterday’s soapy water, or study the shiftless kid, seedy before any bloom, thin and mean as a weed in a walk;

smell the grease that stands rancid in the pan like a second skin, the pan aslant on some fuel-farting stove, the stove in its corner contributing what it can to the brutal conviviality of close quarters;

let depression like time-payments weigh you down; feel desperation and despair like dust thick in the rug and the ragged curtains, or carry puppy pee and plate-scrapings, wrapped in the colored pages of the Sunday paper, out to the loose and blowing, dog-jawed heap in the alley;

spend your money on large cars, loud clothes, sofa-sized paintings, excursions to Hawaii, trinkets, knickknacks, fast food, golf clubs, call girls, slimming salons, booze;

suffer shouting, heat rash, chilblains, beatings, betrayal, guilt, impotence, jail, jealousy, humiliation, VD, vermin, stink.

Sweat through a St. Louis summer and sing of that.

O muse, I cry, as loudly as I can, while still commanding a constricted scribble, hear me! help me! but my nasty echo answers: one muse for all the caterwauling you have called for! where none was in that lowlife line of work before?

It’s true. I’ll need all nine for what I want to do—all nine whom Hesiod must have frigged to get his way, for he first spoke their secret names and hauled their history by the snout into his poem. For what I want to do . . .

Which is what—exactly? to deregulate Descartes like all the rest of the romancers? to philosophize while performing some middle-age adultery, basically enjoying your anxieties like raw likker when it’s gotten to the belly? I know—you want to make the dull amazing; you want to Heidegger some wholesome thought, darken daytime for the TV, grind the world into a grain of Blake.

O, I deny it! On the contrary! I shall not abuse your gift. I pledge to you, if you should choose me, not to make a mere magician’s more of less. I have no wish to wine water or hand out loaves and fishes like tickets on a turkey, Misfits, creeps, outcasts of every class: these are my constituents—the disappointed people and if I could make them close ranks like a fist, strike as hard as any knuckle.

Hey Kohler—hey Koh—whistle up a wind. Alone, have I the mouth for it? the sort of wind I want? Imagine me, bold Kohler, calling out for help—and to conclude, not to commence to end, to halt, to -30-, stop, leave off, to hush forever to untick tock.

Imagine. Here, on this desktop, just beneath my nervous fingers and my trembling eyes, imagine—done into witty decals—lie all my lies, almost as many as the postage in an album which arranges by face value, color, and year the entire collection. No diaries for me, no leather-covered couch. No. I’ll dismiss the past as brusquely as a dishonest servant. I’ve small need for recollections. I have Bartlett’s Quotations. Do I consult that? Like a wonderful physician, will it prescribe for me? so many drops of Proust, a tincture of Old Testament, daily dose of Freud, and I shall peel off my past like a sticker warning FRAGILE. I have Roget’s Thesaurus. I have Skeat. I have a wall of histories, cartons of bones and rotting linen, as in the catacombs. Find Germany. It’s here somewhere. Between George Sand’s Indiana and Conrad’s Victory Why does anyone remember? Why, out of the active emptiness of everyday, why draw Tuesday’s plate of pork and beans, one word in anger, bitten finger, brittle dream? I remember a nipple through a sweater—just the bump—and it gives me pleasure. Yet that nipple is of no more use to me. I remember a day during the war when I dozed off in a warm glade. Then I remember a roll of wine through my mouth, my first Cézanne, the blues and green, a line of Pope which rose from the rest to strike me: