Days Journal 24 February 1976
There's a derelict hall—originally a schoolhouse—in the middle of the village which was built in Jabbertown around 1900. When Jabbertown fell, the school was dug up and brought into Tikigaq. Lately the old school transformed to community hall, but this winter some kids broke in, smashed the windows and set fire to the place—though part of the hall has since been reclaimed by "Head Start", an experimental playgroup funded by the federal government.
I wandered in this afternoon. There were flame-marks on the walls and the floor was charred; snow had drifted through the windows, and benches and tables lay scattered in the debris. But buried in this dreck, I found two valuable deposits. The first, in an alcove by the door, was the wreck of a radio-phone system ca. 1965: all the bakelite thoroughly axed and hammered. I stood in awe and surveyed the devastation. It was as though an epoch had flown in and crashed; and no-one had bothered to pick up the pieces.
The second trove was the dregs of a library. This must have been left here by Mike—a teacher and a true-believer—as a service to the village. The library—remnants of kultur and the epoch—lay scattered in slews of glass and splinters: Some sayings of the Buddha, The Bhagavad Gita, Gandhi's autobiography, Leaves of Grass, The Complete William Blake, Heidegger's Existence and Being, an anthology of pre-Socratic philosophy, and Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf. Nervously glancing round for the shades of librarians who might pounce on me for a ticket, I hurried off with as much as I could carry.
Overjoyed with this haul—bored silly with my own books—I found Hesse had brought me two distinct stories. For Steppenwolf had lain separate from the other books, alone in the radio-phone cubby-hole, skewered into the frost with that terrible spike from the liver of the American cocktail, an ice pick. I withdrew the point and riffled the pages, pulling them apart where they clung to the imprint—vortex, pimpled agenbite—of the ice pick's impression. When I got the book home I transcribed the words, by now warmed nicely in my jacket pocket, that had been punctured: one word (or word plus space and another word) per page in a more or less regular braille of prickles. The vocables—O dark Caesarian proscription—spoke disappointing nonsense; but there were places where a narrative tune could be traced in the wolf's tale. These are the ice-pick's indentations:
noiselessly - breathed - the - evening - Dostoievsky that - he - and none - moments - the wolf - of it was which - deep - impress - the - dregs - within - attracted - 'bourgeois' - his joys - considerable - were: to terms - himself - can be elements - science - dawns not her/(in poem) - each - calling - no - soared - next - certainly - fancy - down - this - I stiffened.
deep - sad - of the - gift - in once - unity - and dancing - amusement - with girl - let - got to be - ready - money's/sake - leaders - that - again joke - laughing - therefore/fleeing - appealing - connection their - man - way - when - before - no - wine did - with - eager - distant - a known - personality sense - dance - whom - It was - you - and saw - pretty - cabinet - unfeigned - last - each - hunting-had - has - watch - the/wheels - behind - now - are.
soon - police - say - comfortable - THE - disposal we - every - surged - word/leap - shook - entering river - delight/suffering - me - I - looked -
I/perceived - that - again - to/the - last - most/exalted/behind/me given - got - me endurable - of - eyes/girls - cool from - is - Observe learn/seriously - nothing - held - with - eyes - inner
There were four main things that could be done with this kebab of proscriptions:
1) I could trace each word to the original, and then skewer them in German;
2) or they might be translated into my own German kebabble regardless of Hesse;
3) the disjunctions could be made into a poem using a mixture of Chinese translator-ese, plus the sort of Hölderlin-ish lingo that Heidegger discusses in my other trouvée;
4) the word bones could be set to work as an oracle.
In deference to Booster and in the absence of a dictionary, I settled for 3. My poem, in a German-Arctic sub dialect of Mandarin, runs as follows:
Noiseless breathed the evening.
When I, whose inner wolf,
which deep impressed the dregs within,
approached joyous value.
Dawn overwhelmed me.
The tao, clouded by my calling,
soared crying its poem,
till I saw my last moment.
All gifts infuse a deep, sad unity.
Dancing with women,
the laughter fled each lively connection.
But to be human and drink wine,
with no intoxication,
pushed keen the far and half-known character.
The sense-tao-danced.
Then undisguised and beautiful,
that other-you-beyond the last circle,
hunting each particular,
saw all was past now.
A life of ascent could not be uneasy.
At each surged word, the leap shook our entrance.
A river'd delight spoke dukkha also.
Gazing ahead, beyond last things:
those I saw—things exalted—
persisted and endured from too long past,
whose young girls,
cold from observation, learned gravity
with eyes held—nothing!—inward.
Page(s) 92-94
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