Don Quixote, Which Was a Dream (21 page)

'Being nothing, The Virgin, I can create my own characters: A tall thin blondish too-delicate-to-exist-in-this-world giraffe is an arrogant son-of-a-bitch. An angel, a veritable angel, cheeks pumped full up like that bum-boy of Caravaggio's, hair flowing out more Ariel-ly than any queen's, with a smile as sweet and tender as a babe's, looked at a just-sucked nipple. He is foul. He's the demon Beelzebub not even in disguise. He lies, and, worse, swears he is honest by his own virginal soul. Since, being virgin, he doesn't have any flesh, how can he be telling the truth? How can he be the virgin, for I am the Virgin Mary the Dream the Laughter? May the world be, it is, always joyous, for so am I.

'Oh, my lords, the Christmas season approacheth fast upon us so we must make this land ready. Bring forth the animals: the bear whose curly-clawing palm holds the dove; the truncated-trunked elephant and the arrogant giraffe whose neck had stolen the elephant's truncated trunk; the dog who's the ugliest thing in the world. Shall we tell the stories of all these singular creatures?

'"Tell only one, for night fast approacheth, and soon it is time we shall die."

'"The earth turneth black, and all to ice. Speak now, as quickly as possible. You must. For this Christmas is the last Christmas of all Christmases."

'Yay, and so I will tell you the story of THE RAVEN AND THE LAMBKINS

'Once upon a time, there was a raven who gave birth to a lamb. Since lambs don't usually come out of ravens, the little

lamb lambkins felt thats he was a freak therefore unwanted by the world. "No one wants me," the little lamb cried. "How can you be my mother? How can there be any mother, for those such as me?"

'"Come, love," the mother cried back, "for this is neither the season nor any season nor reason nor time: it is the flesh. Let our fleshes touch. Come here, hands who have never touched. Come, and open your flesh. Come, lamb. Come lions. Come, the gray elephants who've wandered lonely, human children, nosing around in every tree pocket they can find. All the flesh, all the animals must relax before you can come.

' "Lamb: Do you not want to come into me?

'"Kiss, lamb. Kiss your mother, the raven." The raven explains herself to her daughter. "The raven's been a very bad person because she made friends with Herpes and gonorrhea but now she's recovered, and flies through nothingness and chaos, soaring, her wings more magnificent than eagles', midnight, as were your eyes when you were born. Lamb."

'The mother talks about her child: "When you were born you were very red, no one wanted you, mange and worm-filled spots lay in the bits of your hair. You were a child I didn't want. I didn't want you because I'm a raven and you're a lamb."

'"I know this."

'"You hated yourself throughout your whole life because you're a lamb, not a raven. Briars tore your wool to bits on the tors. Wild foxes yapped at your paws. But you were safe, for your foulness made you too foul for wolves' food and wolverine delight. How many times when the mental heart shies from suicide, the physical body listening to its mental counterpart becomes sick. In a cold, gray country, no one cares whether a bum lives or dies. Not being able to be a raven, you tried to make yourself into a wolf. But, being a lamb, you were too dumb. You, lamb, were too dumb to live in this world and too dumb to die in this world."

'The lamb didn't say anything.

'"You ask me," the Virgin Mother said, "if there's anything else. For lambs. Anything except the impossibility of being

alive and of dying. There is everything else. There're animals who live only at night; there're animals whose beings are mirrors, who are only what they imitate; there're animals whose physical movements're sexuality; there're animals who speak to each other in complex ways.

'"All of these animals," the mother made her child know love, "who're more capable than you rejoice in you, for you need love so desperately."

6. Actuality Repeats The Dream

'The family doctor came to me.

'Doctor: What's making you suffer so much?

'Dog: I'm sick.

'Doctor: How're you sick? Are you physically ill? Are you

genetically defective? Are you insane? Are you poor? Have

you been beaten down by the system?

'Dog: They've beaten every bit of inside flesh to a pulp; they've

bruised into cowering my ability to feel. They've made me into

such a fountain of hate, I hate myself. I don't hate them. But

these can't be the reasons I'm so miserable cause many children

who come from the most horrible mean families turn out OK.

'The doctor thrusted further: What's making you suffer so much?

'Dog: My family's locked me in this room. I live in a mental world or according to beliefs which're false. The physical and the mental aren't separate, for there's only the body. My body's physically sick.

'Doctor: Every human being lives in a mental world that's false. But everybody doesn't suffer as much as you. 'Dog: The deaths of my real parents shaped me. If children come out of parents, I come out of and am nothing. My body's physically sick.

'Doctor: You're canine: you're not just the mechanical results of incidents.

'Dog: My mind is the results. I have neither parents nor friends nor a home so I can't get away from being miserable. I hate it here. I hate myself.

'Doctor: Since you're unhappy, your mind's sick. Can't you learn to think, or unthink, in some other way? 'Dog: Since there is nothing but this, if I stop feeling unhappy, I'm nothing. I'm scared of nothingness.

'I screamed.

'That's the only fact, so I have to face nothingness.

'I'd like to know something.

'The doctor and my fake mother agreed to send me away to school. I was able to leave the hateful home.'

'I agree with you,' Don Quixote, while interrupting the garrulous dog, got everything wrong, 'that our only sexuality's imaginative. I'm imaginatively saving the world.'

A DOG'S LIFE, cont.:

AN EXAMINATION OF WHAT KIND OF SCHOOLING WOMEN NEED

1. What I Really Learn In School: Isolation

'Winds. Howl by yourselves. Do you scream more when there's no one around or when there's someone to hear you?

'I want to get out all my anguish. These past few months. I will talk. I lived with a man. I can't talk directly. Will put down one sentence each space. I'm lonely unto sickness. Those humans who decide to leave their homes or the normal (conditioned) paths of living open their hearts to loneliness and to the violence of the SE winds.

'Blow. Winds. Rage rage more rage all that you can. I would have my heart caught by a demon and kissed.

'I proved beyond doubt,' the dog continued talking to Don Quixote, 'that I was the most wicked and abandoned child ever reared under a roof. For I felt only bad feelings foam in my breast.

'In the corridors of sex, my father whom I've never known is partly pain. Right now it's painful for me to come because no one's fucking me. Sex's a necessary physical ailment because it

changes one. So every day I talk to my unknown own lover. I

walk by ------'s side down through these unknown beautiful

English gardens. While I eat the food of his eyes, I eat with his eyes. I hurt because he doesn't exist. Do you understand why every orgasm's, partly, painful?

'Is sexual pleasure only pleasure?' asked the dog.

'I came to school and to my knowing loneliness on a cold wintry day, a day which was itself grabbing for breath. Rain and wind and cold and, worst of all, dullness darkness fill my eyes, so I no longer recognize even an idea of happiness. The mind is driven to a point next to nothingness. The long slate river: my heart.

'Alone, I don't know what I'm doing because I'm a child, I walk through some door on some house. It is too dark for me to see here. A faint figure which is sort of human is sitting, maybe, I can barely see it.

'"Is this the first time you've left your parents, child?"

'"I don't have parents."

'As of yet, I don't know what that means.

'First day.

'The first night's over. I know what's loneliness. I would rather have this loneliness than be with people who're supposed to love me because they're my only home but hate me. I know, now, I've no home. I'm lonely because the flesh and the rest of me is never touched. Blow, winds, because you're honest. There's nothing here, this cold gray country, but there's nothing anywhere, anymore.

'These're the actual aspects of loneliness: (1) This food stinks because they make us eat chipped beef which is rotten gray liquid with specks of floating solids or shit in it over white toast which is our protein. Everything else which is food is gray gush porridge which stops up sinks and pregnant women. (2) My "learning" is when I either do meaningless, that is so stupid as to be unquestionable, tasks, or else when I'm lost in doing nothing in uselessness. This "learning" is when my actions can never be meaningful. (3) I can't even masturbate because all the spaces here're public. Since my sleep is public, I can hardly go to sleep. (4) Since no one touches me, my own body's

hideous. I wear dull brown rags, old women's shoes, and thick stockings all over me, a uniform.

'I hate myself. Do all other people hate themselves? Must every single person be apart from every other single person? Now that I'm alone, I won't commit suicide. Maybe it's possible: maybe most people're lonely, so I in this lonely, hating this loneliness, at least I'm not queer. No matter how I rationalize this, when loneliness and not being sexually touched hurt, they hurt like the human hell they are.

'Now that I'm face to face with loneliness, I'm used to being alone. I'll go on this way. I don't talk to anyone and, I don't expect to talk to anyone. I'm surprised when another living being, who must be a girl, here, addresses me. Since her words have to be dead words, I only mumble back. I live in my own world of playgrounds trees animals books. I will never be intruded upon again. Or touched again. In the distance here, the river of my adoration flows long dull murky, all the way to the right and light. Lambs bleat on either side. Outside the icy air hardly impresses my flesh, for inside I'm all dissatisfactions. A cell-like shell bottles up the dissatisfactions.

'Unable to know any outside, I don't know where I am. Here's a red brick building. Here's a low, dullish brown brick edifice. Beyond's my river. Nothing's real because nothing has meaning for me because no one's touching me. No one tells me what means what. There's no schooling here. Where there's no language, there's no reality.

'This,' explained the dog, 'is why my heart is breaking.

'Cold. Wet. Dead. Low moors sitting over hidden rivers. Earth so heavy it could sink and is, into its lower geographical stratum of mud. Human heaviness heavier than death.

'Russian Politics. I've two recurring fantasies: Alone, I fantasize a human wanting me. But if I have someone to like, even if it's only a fantasy, I fantasize that I don't understand what's happening between that other person and myself. A third person tells me, for his or her own purposes, that my lover's with another person and that I should go see them. Or else, by chance, I catch sight of my lover petting another girl while

telling her he loves her. My lover rejects me either in an understood way or openly.

'As I was - as is usual with me - fantasizing I'm a baby, in a small square of dirt called a garden behind the school, a girl reading a book and sitting behind me asked me if I was an orphan.

'"No, I don't have any parents. My parents're dead."

'"Everyone, she explained, here "is one kind of orphan or another.

'"This isn't a school, but an institution for orphans. We are taken up here because we have nowhere to go, and the State, out of its kindness, is a Welfare State."

' "Then where do we go? Is the State our parent?"

'"The State won't give us charity because it believes, and rightly, that governmental charity creates a weak populace. So each of us, since we have nothing - "

'"I have nothing." I interrupted.

' " - must have a friend, or a trust, or a fucker who gives this school five hundred quid a year."

'"Then I can't be an orphan."

'"Oh, yes you are. Five hundred quid isn't even a dole. Orphans're grown-up children who're below dole. You're American, aren't you?"

'"Yes."

'"Since the USA, to make you strong, gives you nothing and takes away from you through taxes, you're below dole or an orphan. Therefore you have to depend on anybody who'll give you anything, even on a worker."

' "Then workers are my parents?"

'"No. They're not," she answered exasperated. "Workers are the people who, though they still have jobs, unlike half the people in this country, think they're the lowest of the low and the most despised. For this reason they're rigidly moralistic, like our school head."

'"Is he a worker?"

'"No, he's a vicar. He has to be kind."

' "You mean he isn't kind?"

' "None of us is anyone else's kind because we're orphans.

Therefore: get away from me," she ordered. She was vicious and I was alone. I wanted to be her.