Don Quixote, Which Was a Dream (28 page)

'City my parent, for I have no other parents.

'Let us your children wild packs of dogs now roam down your streets looking for anyone who resembles food.

'For us, what
is purity?
What is
idealism,
world? Slashes and gashes of our blood're cutting the skies of love. Therefore this is our history. What you call
history
and
culture
is the denial of our flowing blood.

'Goodbye,
DON QUIXOTE:
The dogs howled.

'These are your words, city.
Purity. Idealism.
Your vision is the vision of the end of the world. Your world of landlords is the world of death,' the dogs howled.

The Beginning Of The Dogs' Song

'Because it isn't true that animal life is over,

because we are not worthless dogs,

because we are not slaves, oh landlords, oh J. Paul Getty,

even though now and then you pat us on our heads or fuck us,

throw us scraps of food and love, give us doggie walking suits

to make us slaves,

because your human history which is the history of slavery is

not our history,

because your culture is slavery:'

At The End Of The Night When Morning Was About To

Break, The Dogs Sang:

'The world is not ending. The work and the language of the

living're about to begin:

in the wee hours

where the first pale violet gray and pink rays hit objects at

random, when the eyes/I's see only with pleasure,'

The dogs sang their first words, 'The sun, turning round and round our earth, will never stop in our lifetime. Since you, only you, night, for only you are other than the sun, see this light, - since the see-er is part causer of what he or she sees, -you are the immediate cause or will behind our morning. Night, you are not our light, but you are the one who has freed the morning.

'Their created human history is the history of pain: this nighttime of our living; these tortured lives. Let this suffering,

this night, be the lance of the knight. Let this night which all of us can perceive be the lance we shall sprinkle with chicken blood, this lance of our blood and fat and muscle, this heart, be the needle by which we shall draw out the bad blood. The owners' blood.

'And at the end of the night,' having disposed of the knight,

'when morning's about to begin, in the winds of our lusts and emotions, I am a ship about to move.

'I/eye. We/Oui.

'Yes, we the dogs are pirates.'

One Pirate Sang:

'In this total devastation of the heart which is the world, the landlords rule. There is no way we can defeat the landlords. But under their reins and their watchful eyes,

'I sail as the winds of lusts and emotions bare me. Everywhere and anywhere. I who will never own, whatever and whenever I want, I take.

'Every part of the slave ship is cracking open. Its stomach vomits and echoes. Its cargo's ghastly tapeworm or capitalism gnaws whatever fluxam it receives while above on deck we teach each other to steal.

'White world, ho ho ho oy yoi yoi, we're doing everything you've told us and you tell us to do because we're good, and we're stealing you. Soon there'll be none left of you:

'Blood will lay on the cabin quilts blood will flood the hold blood slips along the bridges old blood stinking fish in the new bright sun blood lifts into the winds so that droplets of blood are flowing everywhere until the our newborn sun is glistening red blood being everywhere does what it likes.'

Chorus Of Pirates: 'The lousy cunts.'

Another Dog-Pirate Sings,

'No longer a poor woman: a woman dependent on the kindnesses of men in a land where there are no kindnesses for there is no land in

sight,'

Chorus Of Pirates:

'Where she's going to find love now, the lousy cunt?'

Dog-Pirate:

'No longer wandering because no longer trying to find what

she will never find driven driven.'

Chorus Of Pirates:

'She's not going to get love from us, the louse-filled cunt.'

Dog-Pirate:

'By the clanking sun of the noon sea. I the female pirate speak. By this beginning light which came up during the depth of our midnight.

'Listen, men. Listen. By this day of total disarmament, in our total naïveté in our total gleaming helplessness I am sailing over the crumbling European waters. Listen, to your graves.

'Listen. For I am crossing the seas. Listen to the waters. I am totally strong now in my helplessness because I am these waters which glisten and receive.

'Listen, men. Today my skin is aching because the sun is touching it. Listen now to the violent sex between sun and water.

'Rise, sun. Rise into a morning.'

At The End Of The Night When Morning Breaks, 'The sky over northern Haiti already holds pink and orange streaks. The fishing boats're out. Rise, you burning of the sky, you thief of all phenomena. Rise in my flesh. Rise in my now red vagina. Rise against all loneliness which exists.'

And the dogs in reply howled, 'Our suffering has been is and will be the anger, the real history, the hammer and wrench by which we, inch by inch, forge the glorious orb of our sun.'

Thus abandoned the night was crawling back home. As she wobbled her way onwards, and wended, and wandered, as is the way with females, the white religious men, being around, asked the knight, out of curiosity, if she was still mad. Having been defeated by white men and deserted by every dog, Don Quixote replied that she was mad.

When the people who lived in Don Quixote's home town, which is called Spain, espied this returning knight, - how different she now was from the insecure shy child they had known, - they jeered at all her characteristics with the full variety of drama native to Spaniards. But being vacant Don Quixote looked vacantly at the bourgeoisie. She had no idea where she was. Where in hell she was. She had never been to Spain.

Having passed beyond the pains of defeat and desertion, now vacant, Don Quixote settled into nowhere and drew up her will:

Don Quixote's Will To The Dogs, Her Only Hopes Of Love
'Dear Dogs,

'The sea retreats a virgin. Inland. England. The huge octopuses stranded on the sands never touch the ocean.

'Though, as you read this, I'm dead, I'm looking through all my memories of the tidal waves for something: joy. But too many evil suns are bursting their angers on the branch-tops; too many liars suck down and are sucked down into the lips' whirlpools.

'The ants polish skeletons. The ants at least have yanked technique from the nothingness, the sands' vagina.

'Is there nothing else in reality but a diseased forest's overly sharp points?

'I want to experience joy.

'Dogs of this world. You are holding bleeding flesh between your sharp reddened teeth. I recognize this flesh because it's mine.
Dogs of this world.

DON QUIXOTE'S DREAM

Being dead, Don Quixote wrote these recollections after she was dead:

'Now I'm going to speak directly.

'It is true that women are never men. Even a woman who has the soul of a pirate, at least pirate morals, even a woman

who prefers loneliness to the bickerings and constraints of heterosexual marriage, even such a woman who is a freak in our society needs a home.

'Even freaks need homes, countries, language, communication.

'The only characteristic freaks share is our knowledge that we don't fit in. Anywhere. It is for you, freaks my loves, I am writing and it is about you. Since humans enjoy moralizing, over and over again they attack us.

'Language presupposes community. Therefore without you, nothing I say has any meaning. Without love or language, I do not exist. We who are freaks have only friendship.

'I haven't told you yet anything about my marriage because I don't know anything about marriage. I'm not thinking about it any longer except when I'm thinking. But I know it's not good for anyone to become too used to habits because then that person is selfish.

'Nevertheless I am unhappy - however far unhappiness goes. Unhappiness goes far. The more tired I am at night, the less I can fall asleep; when I wake up by the morning, I hate myself or every moment I call consciousness. To rid myself of the loneliness of freaks, I'm going to get married.

'As soon as I'm married, I'll be a prisoner; I'll be normal. I'll have to stop having the dreams by which I now act.

'No longer being able to perceive dreams, since perceiving is feeling and touching, will narrow my feelings and touchings into a controllable range.

'But when I'm living alone, I don't touch anybody so I'm immersed in my own selfishness.

'I'm talking about the self and others. Where are there possibilities of lives of feelings and touchings? Where and when have people gotten along together and allowed each other to dream publicly? That is, to do art?

'I dream of Spain:

'The Spanish Republic of 1931 was born in a unique set of circumstances: a conjunction of long-term national political crisis, a severe economic depression occurring through the western world (as now), and an increasingly vigorous national

intellectual and cultural renaissance. (Is the latter happening now in England?)

'How did the intellectual and cultural renaissance which helped cause the Spanish Civil War begin?

'Two intellectual currents dominated early-twentieth-century Spain: a discourse derived from Karl Kraus' work and a nationalistic Catholicism.

'From his chair as professor of philosophy in Madrid Julian Sanz, Kraus' main Spanish disciple, advanced the doctrine of "harmonious rationalism". Since reality or the whole is fundamentally harmonious, poverty other forms of human degradation all forms of human brutality and undue suffering are humanly rectifiable. If we are badly hurting each other and we don't know how to stop badly hurting each other, we need to learn other intellectual emotive and behavioral models. Since we have to broaden our education, historical and imaginative, we must adopt temporal and geographical internationalism.

'Thomas Jefferson: "I think by far the most important bill in our whole code is that for the diffusion of knowledge among the people. No other sure foundation can be devised for the preservation of freedom, and happiness . . . Preach, my dear sir, a crusade against ignorance, establish and improve the law for educating the common people." Letter to George Wythe, August 13, 1786.

'What is the model for such education?

'In 1876, Francisco Giner de los Rios, professor of law, a disciple of Sanz del Rio, founded what was to be until 1936 the most influential secondary school in Spain, the Institution Libre de Ensenanza. The school taught that the first principle from which all manifestations come is Creation or Will. A secondary principle was internationalism: the magazine
a Bole-tin
acted as a forum for both Emile Durkheim, Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, etc., and the Spanish intellectuals.

'Whereas the Spanish Catholics advocated nationalism somewhat in the same way that England today, to avoid the recognition that her empire has gone, claims ownership of language and culture via Shakespeare, Milton,
etc.
The only or proper way to speak and write is English.

'In the early 1900s a mirror of del Rio's reaction against political and cultural chauvinism was the state of the Spanish language:

'The Catalans, who before this time had regarded their own language as a patois - as the Haitians now regard, or are supposed to regard their language, - began to create an impressive weight of writing and simultaneously to rediscover the glorious history of their Mediterranean Empire and the differences between them and other Spaniards. Both the Catalan peasants and the bourgeoisie worked together to produce a Catalan philological, literary, and artistic revival.

'The Basque language is unrelated to any language except for Magyar and perhaps Finnish. The Basque movement was political rather than cultural: until 1837 the Basque provinces had governed themselves.

'How did this situation of language affect Spanish politics?

'When the major debate had occurred between Marx and Bakunin within the First International in 1868, representatives from each side had arrived in Spain. By the 1920s the anarcho-syndicalists had become more powerful than the Marxists, and remained so until the Second Republic.

'Language being a form of communication is a political occurrence.

'The anarcho-syndicalists, advocates of decentralized political power, were trying to create a world-collectivist commonwealth. Since dualism's no longer a usable logical model, regionalism and internationalism, anarchy and collectivity can work hand-in-hand.

'How are the mind and the heart being educated to think and to act? To dream?

'The Spain of the Spanish Republic of 1931 is my dream or model:

'Many of the early anarchist leaders resembled the mendicant friars of former centuries: abstemious wanderers, proud to possess little and to be under-dogs, though physically not developed accustomed to the most strenuous physical battles and physically demanding situations: all to accomplish something-or-other. They were motivated by that inner certainty which by its very being denies human leadership and any