Don Quixote, Which Was a Dream (5 page)

All the people around Don Quixote decided she was mad. She was the maddest child they had ever seen. They had to get rid of her.

They tried to explain to her that human love and good deeds are good things. Humans should live for love and goodness.

'We love you.' That statement confirmed Don Quixote's belief that all their statements were hot air. 'In the past, romance was my joy and utter pain. Now I know it's all nothing. I have to be very precise now: I have to explain to you the exact truth. Here's my will:'

Anyone who knows enough to draw up a will must be sane. Her family was willing to re-own her. They began to cry because they felt so much.

Only Don Quixote was a feelingless monster.

'Here's proof that I'm sane:

'TO THE DOG: I give my dog everything. Please, dog, forgive me for my selfishness; please, all the ways I have not understood you, for I haven't been intelligent enough and known what love is. I will the rest of your life to be very happy and, more, I know it will be, for you're strong and patient and willing to understand, moreso than me, even if you are crazy.'

The dog interrupted, T don't want you to go.'

Don Quixote: 'We must do what we must.'

The dog: 'You're dying because I didn't love you.'

Don Quixote: 'No.' Don Quixote turned back to her last will and teaching,

'TO MY ABORTED SON: If you marry anyone, male or female, who isn't totally rich, you'll be poor. Otherwise you'll be poor.

'TO MYSELF: I was wrong to be right, to write, to be a knight, to try to do anything: because having a fantasy's just living inside your own head. Being a fanatic separates you from other people. If you're like everyone else, you believe opinions or what you're told. What else is there? Oh nothingness, I have to have visions, I can't have visions, I have to love: I have to be wrong to write.'

When she had finished writing down all these smart teachings, being old and worn-out, she reaffirmed her belief that human love doesn't exist and died. 'For me alone you were born, and I for you. We two are one though we trouble and hurt each other. You're my master and I'm the servant; I'm your master and you're my servant. I'm sick to death because I tried to escape you, love. I yield to you with all my heart or

mind. This mingling of our genitals the only cure for sickness. It's not necessary to write or be right cause writing's or being right's making more illusion: it's necessary to destroy and be wrong.'

The Second Part of Don Quixote Other Texts

BEING DEAD, DON QUIXOTE COULD NO LONGER SPEAK. BEING BORN INTO AND PART OF A MALE WORLD, SHE HAD NO SPEECH OF HER OWN. ALL SHE COULD DO WAS READ MALE TEXTS WHICH WEREN'T HERS.

TEXT 1: RUSSIAN CONSTRUCTIVISM

1. Abstraction

Petersburg, my city.

Petersburg steeples triangles bums on the streets decrepit churches broken-down churches churches gone churches used as homes for bums for children forced away from the abandoned buildings they run.

Son.

1.

City of people who weren't born here who decided to live here who're homeless, trying to make their own lives: poor refugees artists rich people. People who don't care and care too much. Homeless. You, baby crib, only you've been financially shuffled off by the USSR government.

You, city, along one of whose streets a hundred bums're sitting standing and lying. Three-quarters of these bums're black or Puerto Rican. The concrete stinks of piss much more than the surrounding streets smell. A few of the creeps smoke cigarettes. One half of the buildings lining the street're a red brick wall. Mostly the bums don't move or they move as little as they have to.

How is this City of Cities divided?

This new holy city is a reality not only without religion but also without anything to want or seek for: without anything. The city whose first characteristic is it gives nothing, breakdown, and so its inhabitants individuals, no its communities, have to make everything for themselves.

As taught in school, Petersburg has five parts: its main part is the Nevsky Prospect.

St Petersburg is actually the Nevsky Prospect.

The Nevsky Prospect's an island joined by bridges once on

its northern tip, twice on its southern, and once at its eastern edge to the rest of Petersburg. Though Petersburg is the capital of the USSR, most Russians who don't live in Petersburg hate and fear the Petersburgians: they think they're murderers, dope addicts, and perverted by fame.

Is there such a thing here as true love: that violence that's absolutely right?

Lamplights hang over the edges of the park running through the vertical center of the Nevsky Prospect, from its beginning at St Isaac's, about fifty blocks north, to its black section in the depth of the seventeenth line. The geographical divisions are actually racial: ghettoes, each one on the whole about nine to sixteen blocks large, don't mingle. This past year the ghettoes're beginning to physically cross cause the rich're now trying and will take over this whole city by buying all of its real estate.

The islands especially Vasilyevsky Island are the drug oases. The hooker centers're the Millionaya, again Vasilyevsky Island (pimps always get their puppets hooked), the large black bridge across the Neva, and the Winter Canal. The languages are less than 50% Russian, then, (heard less often in this order), Spanish, French, and German. Petersburg isn't Russian: it's a country on its own. Since it has no legal or financial national status; it's an impossibility, an impossible home; it's tenuous, paranoid. Its definitions and language're quantum theory, Zen, and the nihilism found before the Russian Revolution.

Squares quadrilaterals concatenations of imaginations who lack other necessary sensualities. The flesh which touches flesh has to resemble Martian green gook. City of simultaneous inner and outer space where each day a new human disease appears, whose inhabitants, like rats, through sickness remain alive and work. Who can tell me I'm too sick to be alive? My sickness is life. You, my city, romanticism of no possible belief:

In Peter one morning, the female weight-lifter fell out of her loft-bed. It was a beautiful day, late in September. Larks were singing and drops of sunlight were filtering through the navy blue Levelors (through the clouds through the pollution through the surrounding buildings' walls) which she hadn't

opened since she bought them cause she didn't want to see junkies shooting up.

A newspaper below her fallen body:

Meanwhile, in the alleyways, Dear Peter,

I can't stand living without you. I hate this day-after-day constant waiting-for-you: you're not here: all my hours spent in longing for what's not here. I won't stand for living like this. Then I realize I'm falling in love with you. There's no one to turn to: again and again I realize I have only myself.

Sixteen hours until I see you again. 123456789 10 11 12 13 14 15 16. I can count 16, but you'll probably not want to see me. If I see you, I'll want you. If I don't see you, I'll die. I'm going nuts. I don't care about this writing. I just want time. I can get rid of this night by closing up my eyes with work, brain calculations, dumbie-making TV: you have leapt into my arms, madness: I'll wait for you forever if you'll only come to me, for there's no time until I see you. Love makes time and life. I must be blind: you're poor. Your life is shambles. The more you want something, the more you deny it to yourself. You: my nightmare; I don't care. You've conquered me. You, kookoo totally untogether, make me as irritable and changeable as you are, so I've made myself into your Rock of Gibraltar in order to capture you but I don't want you, I don't want you to break up your marriage, I don't want you to do anything that'll hurt you: I have to lose. But if you don't see

me tomorrow, I don't have to lose because you don't love me. So: real love is strange and any simplicity between us has to be a lie.

I don't know what I'm doing. You're the only life I've known in a very long time. How can I let go of life again? You're my day and night. Forget it, little baby, he's told you clearly he doesn't want to have sex with you and he only wants you so he can revenge himself on his wife cause she once left him for a richer man. You are my madness. Come in me, my madness, and since you've already taken me, I beg you with everything that is me to take me. I'm sold, but not yet enjoyed. The day I'm going to see you I'm happy and the day I'm not going to see you I'm miserable. (My nurse enters and binds me up.) Nurse: Shut up, brat.

Myself, to Myself: I don't talk cause I can't talk about you. I guess I am obsessed possessed. Spain needed a revolution, a far more profound revolution in fact than that being attempted by the Republic. I'm bound by cords cause you aren't fucking me. (Aloud, ((Allowed))) Cords're binding me cause you aren't fucking me. You're going away from me. Juliet: You're going away from me. It's still dark and black and hideous: you don't have to leave me yet. You: It is daytime; there are candles. The beginnings of clouds can be seen. Since this world for her light no longer needs the stars, like the jealous bitch she is, she's shut them off. Day like total revolution's waiting to infiltrate. I have to get away from you to keep my life going.

Juliet: The light's that's coming within you for me's as violent as mine for you. As you say we've nothing to do with nature: the fire between us competes with the sun. I'll keep your unnatural solitary fire going! I'll follow you in disguise. You don't need to ever leave me. Don't go.

You: OK. I'll stay with you and I'll die. I give way to your love: These beginning light lines in the sky are the streaks of blood on your colorless unspeakable thighs. The unseeable approaching daylight isn't a day but just moon to your energy and grace. Since without you I die and with you I die, I chose

to die with you, my life, and besides, I've no choice. It's dark and black and hideous still.

Juliet, resigning herself: Go. Get out. This world stinks. We can't pretend this world doesn't exist. The Fascists have taken over. All that's natural and beautiful're dividing us. Since natural is now unnatural and unnatural is natural, those who love can't know. How should I know what to do? It is the day: get away from me!

Dear Peter,

Please understand me. Please believe what's in my mind at this very moment. I do everything you want. Now you want to be away from me cause you're fucking your wife. You're the only one I love and this moment's infinite. I'd do anything to phone you right now. Cause I can't phone you, I hate you. Cause I hate you, I'm never going to phone you ever again, cause I hate you. I'll say your name so the whole world'll know, cause what you fear most, your only morality, is what you think other people (whether or not they know you)'re thinking of you. King Sunny Adé. King Sunny Adé, I hate your guts. You were my sun and your house was my home and you threw me out like a kid without a home, (you) saying, All you want is security so you don't love me at all,' and then you didn't even understand that I love you. That's why this moment's infinite.

Why do I like you cause I know you're so self-righteous you'd holocaust the universe faster than Margaret Thatcher; you don't understand what art is cause you're so scared of your wildness with which, you artist, you're frothing, you're trying to eradicate every weakness mainly those in other people cause that's what you see so you demand certain behaviors and accept nothing else; when people act differently, cause you've buried your wildnesses more anger volcanoes out of you than I've ever felt from another human being? I like you cause your eyes look at me a certain way and cause your nose twitches; your mental capacities're at least as sharp and rapid as mine; when you're not being (ridiculously) ruled, you're as decadent as I am. Why do you give a damn about social rules? Why not become an artist? I'm going to fuck lots of men now if they'll

fuck me cause I need that physical reassurance and I'm sure while I'm doing this, there'll still be thoughts of our fucking:

Between you and me was a madness which's rare. Not just sexuality. Who're you kidding? That this anger and fear (appearing cause I touched your madness too closely or cause you care about society) are more powerful than your sexuality? Only a man who adores fucking comes near me. What's love? Love's the unity of friendship and desire. I messed up with you. I didn't care enough about friendship. I fought too hard against your desire to be socialized which, if I love you, should be as important to me as my ways. Can you be patient - I'm willing to fight myself to be with you?