Don Quixote, Which Was a Dream (3 page)

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Authors: Kathy Acker

Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Literary

BOOK: Don Quixote, Which Was a Dream
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The Prince doesn't have any morals. Why? Because mor als're part and parcel of a government which runs partly by means of the so-called 'have-nots" or bourgeoisie's cover-up, (via 'Culture'), of the 'haves" total control. Morality and 'Culture' are similar tools. The only culture that ever causes trouble is amoral. The Prince isn't moral: he doesn't give a shit about anybody but himself. The Prince wouldn't die for anyone, whereas Our President will always die for everybody while he's garnering in their cash.

Look at Prince's life. He's ail-American because he's part black part white which is part good part evil. When he was thirteen, which is a magic number, he ran away from home just like Huckleberry Finn. He had nowhere to run to, cause

there's nowhere to run to anymore. So he ran to a garage. He and his friend Cymone made music while they were screwing, sharing, and tying up girls. The Prince was the good boy because he didn't cuss and Cymone was the bad boy because he stole cars. Now Prince is twenty-six years old; he'll be thirty when he gets elected President of the United States. Thirty years old is the height of male cowboy American rock 'n roll energy.

Don't vote for a croaker again to run your life.

Does it matter that Prince doesn't know anything about governmental politics? I presume he doesn't. All political techniques, left and right, are the praxis and speech of the controllers. How can we get rid of these controllers, their praxis and speech or politics? Let the country go to Hell. By going to Hell, Prince, a good Catholic, might be able to save this country. Anyway, we'd have a lot more fun than now, now when we're slowly being turned into fake people who're alienated from themselves, or zombies. Our minds're floating in other bodies. The Prince is Dr Strange so he'll restore to us and restore us to those lowest of pleasures that are the only ones we Americans, being stupid, desire. Fucking, food, and dancing. This is the American Revolution.

It has been said that Prince presents nothing: he's dead, an image. But who do you think you are? Are you real? Such reality is false. You can only be who you're taught and shown to be. Those who have and are showing you, most of the controllers, are shits. Despite that, how can you hate you or the image? How can you be who you're not and how can you not be? Prince accepts his falsity. Prince uses his falsity. Prince, being conscious, can lead us. 'I'm not a lover. I'm not a man. I'm something you can understand. I'm not your leader. I'm not your friend.' We must be conscious in order to fight outside control. Make Prince who may be conscious the next President of the United States.

THE ADVENTURE OF MEN

Don Quixote decided that the only thing's to be happy. Since the sole reason she ever went out of her house was to fuck, she decided that to be happy's to fuck. She was riding her horse along, in order to find sex that wouldn't hurt too much.

At this point she saw three to four hundred men. 'My God,' she said, 'how full of air they are!' She turned to St Simeon who was now a dog. 'Fortune's guiding our affairs beyond our most hopeful expectations. Here're those giants I've been looking for.'

The dog said, 'Woof.'

'I'm going to get what I want from them.'

'Woof.'

'You have very little experience,' Don Quixote told the dog, 'in matters of this kind. Go along muttering, as all Catholics do, while I engage in these perilous untried unbargainable adventures.'

The dog muttered 'Woof and hid from fear. Don Quixote went after the big men. The men began to run away. Don Quixote verbally dedicated herself to the cause of everlasting love or marriage, which is the most dangerous cause, cause it's no cause at all, then again and again went after the big men.

Some of the big men who didn't want to run away lashed out at this stalwart female. Again and again she rose up and went at them again. Nothing, not even a man, could stop her from going after them. She was inexhaustible indefatigable - a true knight. Nothing could stop her search for love, but death. Finally, a man hit her so hard she almost died. The dog came running over to her, but by the time it reached her, she could hardly speak, and it couldn't speak either.

The dog said, 'Woof.'

'Sentimentality,' Don Quixote, 'in time of war's more than useless: it's detrimental. Don't be sentimental, dog. Being severely physically and mentally hurt's no reason for me to stop my search for love. Being now so hurt I'm almost dead

only means in a few minutes I won't be dead because change 'n life are synonymous. What's more: I know I've been hurt by a man who is so evil, women have to fall in love with him.'

'Woof.'

'Once upon a time, there were no evil men. In those days of yore, a man loved a woman who loved him. And vice-versa. Not like today.

'Why have matters changed between men and women? Because today love is a condition of narcissism, because we've been taught possession or materialism rather than possession-less love. Those people in days of yore didn't have proper language, that is, correct Great Culture. They were just confused and loved out of confusion. Today, our teachers call this confusion "poetry" (and try to define each poem so that the language's no longer ambiguous), but in those days "poetry" was reality.

'Today, only the knights who're mad enough to want to love someone who loves them maintain this order of poetry. I'm such a knight. Unless I'm mad, those big men over there who're totally dressed in black must be the servants of Simon, the evil man who makes women fall in love with him . . . '

The dog, hearing his name, said, 'Woof.'

'. . . For they have a woman with them.'

'They're worse than men,' the dog said.

'Why?'

'They're monks. Catholics kidnap young women not cause they're women but cause they look like boys.'

'Bitch,' Don Quixote replied. 'You don't know what you're talking about.'

Disdaining to listen to a beast's mutterings, Don Quixote walked up to the monk mass and cried, 'You lousy stinking shits! All you ever do is talk about good and evil. If you don't tell this woman you don't love her, I'm going to erase you.'

'Please beat us up. We belong to the Order of St Benedict.'

'I don't care anymore what you say. I know you don't love me. I know you don't love women. I know Catholicism is really a secret order of assassins.' With that intelligence, Don Quixote leaped on one monk who was so drunk, he passed out.

The dog bit the drunk monk's clothes.

Two travellers, who happened to be passing by asked the dog why he was doing this to a holy father.

'Woof.'

Since the travellers were humanists, they beat up the dog, left it for dead, and rescued the monk.

When Don Quixote saw her dead dog, she cried. 'Such are the laments of the pain from my love for you.'

ANOTHER INSERT

The Arab leaders are liars; lying is part of the Arab culture in the same way that truth-telling and honest speech're American. Unlike American and Western culture (generally), the Arabs (in their culture) have no (concept of) originality. That is, culture. They write new stories paint new pictures
et cetera
only by embellishing old stories pictures . . . They write by cutting chunks out of all-ready written texts and in other ways defacing traditions: changing important names into silly ones, making dirty jokes out of matters that should be of the utmost importance to us such as nuclear warfare. You might ask how the Arabs know about nuclear armaments. Our answer must be that humans, being greedy, fearful, and needing vicious power, have always known. The Arabs are no exception. For this reason, a typical Arab text or painting contains neither characters nor narrative, for an Arab, believing such fictions're evil, worships nothingness.

THE AFTERMATH OF THE WORLD

The dog gave a little quiver. It actually wasn't dead, just in great pain. It gave a little quiver again. Slowly, life was returning, in the same way that light makes its way into a sky that has lasted through the night. The dog like a baby began to

crawl. Painfully, out of love, it inched over to Don Quixote and licked her feet.

'I'm the one who should lick you.'

'I'm sick of being so poor,' the dog howled. 'I don't like living in poverty. The poverty in which we're living isn't unbearable: it's creeping; crawling; restrictions; constant despair; gray; final disease. This poverty's more unbearable than unbearable screaming poverty because it can't shout it can't talk sensibly, it only mutters and moans, it hides itself in that terminal disease - gentility. Repression is ruling my world. Humans' most helpful and most pernicious characteristic is their ability to adapt to anything. First, Gestapo camps; now, here.'

'But you're not human. Not anymore.'

'I still need to eat. Take me out to dinner, baby.'

'Be patient. These things take time. In order to save the world, because this world's suffering, knights have to take on all this world's suffering.'

'Shit.'

'Suffering.'

'I'm sick of worshipping suffering. Those Catholic creeps who just beat the shit . . . '

'You mean "life."'

' . . . Out of me did so cause they believe in suffering. They're very powerful:' the dog was shivering from fear, 'cause due to their faith and belief in goodness and that what they're doing's always good, they don't question what they do.'

'Aren't you a Catholic?'

'I used to be until I was changed into a dog.'

'I'll protect you through this love from those monks,' Don Quixote cradled the dog in her arms, 'because I'm better than them. There's no man on this earth who's better than me. I'm strong. Valorous. Sincere. Slim and boyish despite how I look. When I have to be, I can be devious. As Hell. Charming. Cajoling. The most marvelous fuck in the world, as you well know.' The dog barked, 'Woof.' 'Totally devoted and totally callous just like Machiavelli. In short: a chameleon who has no goals except to change this world.' The dog, 'What's wrong with this world?' 'I admit that it's hard to live with me cause I

do keep going out on adventures. But when you get beaten up cause of me, you can always run to me. Have you ever, in any book, read about a human being such as me? Has there ever in history, that is, in novels, been a human being such as me? You have to totally love me.'

'I don't totally love you because I don't know how to read. I never went to public school. Looking at you, I think you're getting old. You're so fragile and physically debilitated, you can't even stand up without fainting.'

'I'm drunk.'

'What happens to a human when it dies - as a point of interest?'

'When a human dies, another human cuts the first one in two. Next, the second human glues these two body parts together - Plato told us this - and pours medicine down the first human's throat.'

'If human death isn't final, what's the cause of human suffering and pain?'

'Traditionally, the human world has been divided into men and women. Women're the cause of human suffering. For women are so intelligent, they don't want anything to do with love. Men have tried to get rid of their suffering by altering this: first, by changing women; second, when this didn't work because women are stubborn creatures, by simply lying, by saying that women live only for men's love. An alteration of language, rather than of material, usually changes material conditions . . .

'Women are bitches, dog. They're the cause of the troubles between men and women. Why? Because they don't give anything, they deny. Female sexuality has always been denial or virginity.

'This's why there's no love in this world, dog. The milk in the breasts of mothers all over this world is dry; the earth is barren; monsters, instead of children, run through our nuclear wastes. In Our Bible or The Storehouse Of Language, we tried to tell women who they are: The-Loving-Mother-Who-Has-No-Sex-So-Her-Sex-Isn't-A-Crab or The-Woman-Who-Loves-That-Is-Needs Love So Much She Will Let Anything Be Done To Her. But women aren't either of these. A woman is she

who stuck the stake through the red Heart of Jesus Christ. By refusing suffering, women have made armies of men into corpses. Their shut-up breasts, instead of giving men suck, brush over the once-populated Egyptian sands and the now even more decimated Russian snowy wastes where our dead bodies are lying on top of each other, unseen whites, our corpses' mouths're intertwining with each other's. This is the only love we now can know because women don't want anything to do with love.

'"What the Hell do you know!" screams Medusa. Her snakes writhe around nails varnished by the Blood of Jesus Christ. "I'm your desire's object, dog, because I can't be the subject. Because I can't be a subject: What you name 'love', I name 'nothingness.' I won't not be: I'll perceive and I'll speak.

'"What if," the bitch, (excuse me, dog), continues, "by 'love' you meant I was allowed to want you? Then we'd both be objects and subjects. Then sexual love would have to be the meeting-place of individual life and death.

' "Do any of you allow this transcendence?

' "As long as you men cling to your identity of power-monger or of Jesus Christ, as long as you cling to a dualistic reality which is a reality molded by power, women will not exist with you. Comradeship is love. Women exist with the deer, the foxes of redness, the horses, and the devious cats.

'"When you love us, you hate us because we have to deny you. Why? Objects can't love back. Your Man Of Love is a man of hatred. Human hatred, being functionless, turns back on itself: your love has to drive you to suicide.

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