Don Quixote, Which Was a Dream (27 page)

The Madness Of Don Quixote

By definition, being unable to know anything, Don Quixote

was mad. 'We must turn to madness, or Voodoun, in order to

set Queen Guinevere free,' Don Quixote announced to the

dogs.

The dogs didn't understand Don Quixote because they spoke a different language: 'Who's Queen Guinevere?'

'She's the woman whom the white penitents in front of us are holding in chains and raping.'

Since the dogs still didn't understand what her words meant, they thought she was mad. In her madness, she turned to poetry which, as is the nature of poetry, no one, rightfully, hears.

Don Quixote Explained Poetry To The Dogs 'I write words to you whom I don't and can't know, to you who will always be other than and alien to me. These words sit on the edges of meanings and aren't properly grammatical. For when there is no country, no community, the speaker's unsure of which language to use, how to speak, if it's possible to speak. Language is community. Dogs, I'm now inventing a community for you and me.

'I who am at the edge of madness. Mad, all I have vision: what I alone see.'

Don Quixote Actually Attacks White Religious Men

Now totally mad, Don Quixote sang to the white religious men

in order to make them release the Virgin Mary or Queen

Guinevere:

'Going going gone.

'Going somewhere. (Pirate-piracy.) Going anywhere:

'Going through time, the memories. The first streaks of daylight in the sky, over the ocean.

'Coming into port. Ugly city not mine.

'At first gray, gives way to lavenders and pinks. The first fishing boats.

'This is what the homeless see.

'But what do homeless dogs see?' Don Quixote asked the dogs.

'Joy.'

'This memory of joy makes me aware of my present suffering.

'My consciousness now is a bumpy road which is plunging its head into a hole where a few shacks lay scattered in deep and burning sands; an unending, unstoppable road which is charging ahead as fast as possible; at its bottom brutally it quicksands into a pool of clumsy houses; a road foolishly climbing up, recklessly descending . . .

'Mad language is consciousness in myth.

'The carcass of wood comically perched on cement paws I call "home". The style of its hair is corrugated iron that exists in the sun like skins being dried. In the diningroom, nailheads glisten from the rough floor, lines of pine and shadow run across a ceiling; the chairs are phantom; the light leaks out a gray light; the cockroaches buzzing seem about to hurt . . .

'This's vision because it's what I see.

'At the end of time before the morning, when I'm now homeless. When I, now, have no one. A country and a cunt are a lack of alienation. The most essential country in which dream's possible, this lack of alienation given to me needy, restored to my decision to allow neediness and desperation, therefore not restored in spreading tenderness, but given as a nipple. I don't need my actual mother who's dead, but I have the desperation of a baby who must suck her nipple. Restored in desire.

'Accidentally, the morning's teat is beside a palm-tree. The palm-tree's the cock, a type of teat, which's being rubbed until it is spurting out semen. From the torrents of semen, the Grand-Rivière in Haiti - our desire, our morning, - having been born, is hysterically sucking.

'As a child I never get enough food.

'As a child, Christmas is the magic time. At Christmas, since

I never get enough presents, I'm not loved. For presence is love. In this world into which I was born, love isn't possible:

'I shouldn't love anyone who can't love me:

'Since I no longer want anyone, I'm not human:

'I want to suck your teat.

'In the evening, during the holidays, there was a church which was little but nevertheless frightened me. I decided to ignore my fear because the experience seemed too valuable. The church was a Haitian church. Being Haitian it held all practices including every sort of fucking and Voodoun. All ways were allowed: all cultures: aloud.

'In this church the singers can't sing. Inside, the priests use nailpolish bottles, raw rums, and whatever they can get their hands on for everything. To eat is to appease hunger; to appease hunger is to touch and be touched.

'The town streets had become deserted. Sometimes I saw up to twenty people in the church. They were singing songs of desire. Music was always playing:

'"You are inside. You are warm, inside. You have eaten well, inside. When you drink their juice, you become happier. Red blood sausages unroll like snakes. One two-fingers-long sausage unrolls in coils. It's a zebra. But the other sausage is longer and thicker. My first sausage is wild thyme, while my second's hot pimento.

'"Then I drink rejoicing - steaming coffee, sugary milk punch - your liquid, until my taste buds arrive at the point of ravishment. Then, you tissue me in gentleness.

'"Laugh now, my baby: it is almost morning . . ."'

And Don Quixote concluded her madness. But, having no memory, only for a moment.

'It is necessary to sing, that is to be mad, because otherwise you have to live with the straights, the compromisers, the mealy-mouths, the reality-deniers, the laughter-killers. It is necessary to be mad, that is to sing, because it's not possible for a knight, or for anyone, to foray successfully against the owners of this world.

'This night I am mad,' Don Quixote concluded proudly.

'And at the end of time prior to the morning, this world in which we are now living is crawling on its hands and knees

through its muck without any desire to drill through the sky to reality. To drill through your steel as a protest of our claustrophobia. Howl, dogs.

'And at the end of time prior to the morning, when even your own homes' backs shrink in fear from all skies truffled by gun fire, when your feet fear the soil's erosion and the ground crumbling beneath them, until the point that there is no more ground, when even straights sense this decay of their world, we have the clues to the spirit.

'Nevertheless what they name
reality
is still throbbing out its death throes: linoleumed halls white lace curtains a drab carpeted sitting-room paint drips like the end of the world a bird cage

your eyes are reduced to petty binoculars your lips are chastity-belts your consciousness is only that of guilt you cannot even hate.

'May the malevolent tear apart what you have carefully constructed, through holes in your urban paradises. Through holes of rats cockroaches nuclear waste garbage lids, the actual world is coming through.

'At the end of time prior to the coming through of morning.

'At the end of time prior to the morning, my catatonia. I'll no longer speak because you are not hearing and will never hear me no matter how I speak. So I am a mass of dreams desires which, since I can no longer express them, are foetuses beyond their times, not even abortions. For I can't get rid of un-born-able unbearable dreams, whereas women can get rid of unwanted children. So I no longer know what I'm doing,' Don Quixote concluded her poem, lamely. No one reads poetry in this society anymore.

One dog yapped.

The night ended or shitted again. 'I wanted to find a meaning or myth or language that was mine, rather than those which try to control me; but language is communal and here is no

community.' Having concluded, Don Quixote turned around and started walking home, although she had no home.

Within her own self in some messed-up language which wasn't quite language, while she was walking nowhere, to herself the night said, 'At the end of the night when mourning's about to begin.

'When morning's about to begin, I don't know any country I don't know any community I don't know which of my memories to trust I don't know what memories to believe. Is there any history? Is there anything, here, but boredom?

'All singing must now be howling.'

The dogs who had been following the aged failure in the hopes that she would age and fail enough to give them fresh (dead) meat, howled.

Since the religious white men didn't give a damn whether she came or went, the image of the Virgin Mary didn't show any signs of noticing, and only the hungry hounds cared, Don Quixote being female started to cry. When Don Quixote cried, she wailed: She fell down, curled in a ball, stuck her hands in her mouth cause her mouth wasn't good for anything else, and attempted to hide from those all the white religious men who were tormenting her, whom she could no longer see.

No longer being able to see their food, the dogs howled:

The Dogs' Lament That Their Food, Don Quixote, Has

Disappeared

'Oh, beauteous night. Oh, reflecting glory of this world.

Especially to the race of white men. Oh.' The dogs, once they

started howling, forgot what they meant.

'Woof.

'Now that you are no longer here, we've nothing to eat. You were our sustenance; you, sustenance, were liberal beyond liberal, for the liberal by their hypocrisies have done in us poor; while you, poor knight, have been too weak and hopeless to do in anyone but yourself. And even that took you a whole eight months. Woof, night.'

The dogs remembered: 'You were humble, knight, because you were scared of everyone. At the same time, because you were mad, no one could scare or humble you. Nihilistic autistic

knight, neither religious men nor the image of the Virgin Mary could scare you.

'You are so autistic, knight, that you undertook every adventure any sane human would run away from and after that you ran away. You have failed me.'

The dogs described their love, 'You are so autistic, you don't know when humans're laughing at you and you always think humans're laughing at you. Since everyone must despise you; love, being impossible for you, is an obsession. Whatever your love's recipient happens to feel for you, since you're autistic, doesn't influence your belief that you're not worthy. Therefore, night, you always need love with desperate animalism and you can't actually love, that is clearly perceive your love's recipient.

'Night: Where are your eyes?

'When is there going to be daylight?'

The dogs began to howl out of hunger.

This was the first sign of their having language.

Having Language The Dogs Blame The World Knowing that the frail flailing failing knight was no longer their fodder, in ravenous hunger the dogs turned their attention to the world.

'World,' they yapped.

'We do not have a home in you because the people who own you, our landlords, charge too much rent.'

Dog Reasoning

'The only way a dog can attack its landlord is by biting its leg. By terrorism, which the landlords call useless. Terrorism is mad,' the mutts yapped.

A Discourse On Madness

'Drug-users must waste their lives or time obtaining drugs.

'Humans who live in and by fantasies so rigidified or needed they are obsessions must make their obsessions fortresses.

'The sole madness which uses precise perception, the perception of each moment or of mutability, is the scream.

'Let our madness be,' the mutts screamed in reason, 'the

anger and the pain which are rising, not out of forgetting or fantasizing, but out of remembering.

'For us remembering is too painful to bear.

'Remember everything and do not bear anything,' one bitch bitched.

At The End Of The Night When Morning Was About To Begin, The Dogs Sang,

'It is you, rotten world. It is you all my memories, the world: now ending.

'It is you mother and father who didn't want a child. Father, you left my mother when she was three months pregnant with me. Mother, you were too scared to get an abortion so you just hated me throughout my life because I was the reason your lover had left you. It is you who never should have procreated.

'It is you, grinding secretarial life. It is you, boss, Hello, boss, I mean
sir,
please excuse me,
sir,
please please excuse me, sir. I don't want to lose my job, for I have no other meaning in life. Therefore I will be whatever you want: I won't exist. I will I will, I will won't exist. Whatever you say, Boss, but I know, Sir Boss, I's never do nothing properly I'm just a good-for-nothing, old clown ho', plowing these here fields. You know, I'm madly in love with you. I'd do anything to kiss your cock, Boss. I shouldn't say those words. I'm bad. I'm very very bad. You're suck a good boss, Sir, because you know how to properly mistreat me, which is all I properly deserves; some bosses whose names I won't mention - actually act as if I'm a real person. You know better than that, Sir.

'It is you, city. Market of the world, that is, of all representations. Since you're the only home I've ever known, without your representation or misrepresentation of me I don't exist. Because of you, since every child needs a home, every child is now a white slave.

'City, owner of me. When you want pain out of me, you throw me amidst your bums and pimp-toads who wield smack needles like knightly swords in ancient or romantic times. When you want joy out of me, you make me famous, for I'm the baby, you're my only parent, and fame is your nipple.