And while the children’s games became increasingly noisier and more complicated, while the city’s flushes darkened into purple, the whole world suddenly began to wilt and blacken and exude an uncertain dusk which contaminated everything. Treacherous and poisonous, the plague of dusk spread, passed from one object to another, and everything it touched became black and rotten and scattered into dust. People fled before it in silent panic, but the disease always caught up with them and spread in a dark rash on their foreheads. The faces disappeared under large, shapeless spots. They continued on their way, now featureless, without eyes, shedding as they walked one mask after another, so that the dusk became filled with the discarded larvae dropped in their flight. Then a black, rotting bark began to cover everything in large putrid scabs of darkness. And while down below everything disintegrated and changed into nothingness in the silent panic of quick dissolution, above there grew and endured the alarum of sunset, vibrating with the tinkling of a million tiny bells set in motion by the rise of a million unseen larks flying together in the enormous silvery infinite. Then suddenly came night, a vast night, growing vaster from the pressure of great gusts of wind. In its multiple labyrinths nests of brightness were hewn: the shops—large coloured lanterns—filled with goods and the bustle of customers. Through the bright glass of these lanterns the noisy and strangely ceremonial rights of autumn shopping could be observed.
- Bruno Schultz, “The Night of the Great Season”
[Note for the reader: the 'h' in Unhinger is silent (rhymes with 'stunning her')]
IDA: […] a long-goner, me, prima facie papa, tee hee, here on this airplane, back when, which had been taxiing on the runway peripheral to my focus, which was not really focus—I was quite definitively nowhere—began the embarkation—its takeoff. How long had I been sitting on this plane? Sensation that I have never felt in concert with takeoff before. Like a clitoral inanition unto horrific combustion in the get-up and the go. I felt something akin to relief, but it was not relief, because relief is not thrust, and it was like a cosmic exhale, but who has ever been able to project themselves forward with such force by virtue of exhale? You know what? What I thought it felt like? It felt like I was being vacuumed out of a uterus. But who gets vacuumed out of a uterus in order to go, fresh, and start to try all over again to live? Vacuumed out of a uterus. It is as inelegant a metaphor as one could possibly imagine, it is truly terrible, tee hee, but it’s also literally the thought I had, I remember clearly—so there you have it, I should think. Maybe you think I only attract dysfunctional people. There are lots of dysfunctional people. Right? At least there are lots of dysfunctional people. Maybe you think I no longer attract anybody. Maybe they can go fuck themselves. You know what? Maybe people are attracted to me. You know what? Maybe people see their attraction to me as dangerous, maybe kind of risky, or potentially fatal even. Are these lamentable munchkin communards engaged in suppressing the attraction? Don’t you often find yourself attracted to people and immediately think that if you were to go down that road it might kill you?It is certainly conceivable that people are secretly attracted to me. And it is certainly conceivable that you could go around operating as though the world is becoming more circumspect, and vast swathes of washed and unwashed peoples are concealing their attraction to you—or for you. It doesn’t even have to be true. Take it on faith. It might make it easier to navigate the world operating as though people who are attracted to you are not acting as though they are attracted to you. Because apparently it matters to you. Why does it matter to you? Worth. A question of the field of Value and its Contestation. This is a problem of establishing one’s Worth. It is irresponsible to contract out the establishment of one’s Worth. But we do. We do that. I do that. Maybe it’s also that there would seem to be some species of subterranean seismics at play. Of course, I am rarely truly attracted to anyone myself. The one thing that I do know for certain is that the few women and men and mutants I’ve been crazy about these past number of years, though some have grown very close to me indeed, have not been attracted to me, and many of them I got angry with real fast and breezily stomped right out. They’ve been scared shitless, eddying around the mystique until the whirlpool swallows them finally. There is a curse on me that severs the reproductive function from the mouth feel. Or maybe it’s just that I am so pitiably awkward and enveloped in a kind of attenuating incertitude, stymied by something immaterial. Naturally, it can be painful and crazy-making, but it is also instructive. As long as I have been running I have been running into walls. As a child my mother said I was always running into the goddamn walls. She says she knew early on that things would be hard for me. I am a lummox, like some dude, fumbling with his lessons.
LLOYD UNHINGER: Well, naturally, there’s all this incriminating footage, although you’re no dummy, and you understand, just as I understand, that incrimination is effectively a polyvocal universal. This is good footage, though, and there’s no gain in the mincing of words. You were in headlong romantic flight is what it looks like, and we folks at the Agency, as well as the ANTHROPOTECH people, all seem to want to agree this is your basic M.O. Back to about 1997. So here you are in Ottawa, 2015, about to board that plane. What is this you are up to, hmm? Not doing well—you are not looking like you’re doing at all well. Oh God. You take the bag you are checking to the washroom with you, frantic in the doing of it, shaking up a cloud of ambient suspicion. We have a bunch of camera angles on this. You appear to be calculating the steps that must be taken before you can freely puke. We know you to be a habitual hugger of porcelain from way back. My goodness, Holly Golightly, your nerves appear to be positively shattered.
IDA: My nerves were just fucked. Absolutely fucked. I had drank a Red Bull. It has done something helpful. Maybe. My reactions and my reflexes are strange. But I am so far away that I have trouble deducing what the things I introduce into my body and my world are actually doing to me. It is a liability and you, my dear good buddy, are paid to exploit those. I imagine that this is a common liability amongst the cherished maniacs...the liability of liability itself. But it had helped. The Red Bull. But I was going to puke. I was sure I was going to puke all the same. Some kind of miracle—somehow able to collect everything I took out of my pockets at security. Some shell-shock type things going on. The nerves. I had Aya’s house key. I had taken a lover’s house keys in London and now I had taken Aya’s house key in Ottawa. Both times I had made the discovery upon placing the keys in the bins at security, nerves all shot. Not abnormal, though maybe a little abnormal. The usual nerve thing, though not really the usual nerve thing, exactly. Some things were sped up, some things were slowed down to a crawl. Not a lot of sleep, caffeinating heavily, frantic activity, this rollicking mise en abyme of unrelenting torment, my métier. Of course. The torment was just the weather at this point. It was the basic prevailing condition. I guess I was a little frantic. There had been no torment in the aquarium when I had left. Please. There had been a comparatively minimal amount of torment in the aquarium compared to the current prevailing torment condition. Heh heh.
LLOYD UNHINGER: You get to the airport early. You always get to the airport early, having as a slightly younger older woman had that one bad experience years ago, and now, 2015, you always get to the airport early. Remember that earlier muck-up? Drunk, 2008. Very drunk. Heading to London. We have plenty of cause to believe missing that flight saved your life, but more on that anon. You had lost your passport. You looked frantically for your passport. Two assistants from the Agency and yourself. Looking frantically for that passport, for a very long time. I’m going to play some of that footage for you. The passport had been in the inside pocket of the lambskin coat you’d been wearing whilst frantically searching for the passport. A very well-missed flight!
IDA: Me to a T.
LLOYD UNHINGER: You drank three blueberry Red Bulls before you boarded that plane, you incorrigible maven!
IDA: Ha ha. I find that perfectly credible. I’m thinking, you know, of Eliot, ol’ T.S. Vivless, vivisected Tom. Ha ha. Four Quartets. That good ol’ “rending pain of re-enactment.”
LLOYD UNHINGER: And you know I’m just the mandrake to remind you that Eliot follows that up shortly with “Of things ill done and done to others’ harm / Which once you took for exercise of virtue.”
IDA: Sour fucking grapes, grandpa. We’re in the same bizz.
LLOYD UNHINGER: Don’t further muss yourself, please. Once so lovely, in your current state of dissipation and wreckage you remind me of nobody so much as Ingrid Thulin in After the Rehearsal.
IDA: Holy cow! Ha ha. You always looked and acted just exactly like Gérard Depardieu in Police. If it’s art movies from the 80s we’re onto now. Depardieu is the Ezra Pound of the 80s, and you were never the Ezra Pound of anything, except maybe the pound sign. With Depardieu it’s this hyperactivated megalomania slammed sideways by them northern mistrals. As for you, what it is is you’ve gotten horribly blue around the gills, running your melancholic perimeter checks for aeons. No bright new season for yar!
LLOYD UNHINGER: May I call you Aesop?
IDA: Ah! Hilarious. Yes, you may, Lloyd.
LLOYD UNHINGER: I’m going to show you a physical object…
IDA: Oh, yeah, that’s Aya’s Eiffel Tower keychain, quasi-aforementioned. Aya, Queen of Hoodwink Reiki. Hinky, kinky ablutions et al. You get up close in bed and she holds you back with a forcefield and touches you from afar, wigging you out, riling you up, very much not getting you off. But it was all my fault. Or at least God knows I kept telling her so! I wept at the Museum of Civilization. She was profoundly embarrassed for me.
LLOYD UNHINGER. This hamburger stand—
IDA: Is very much that: a hamburger stand. Assuredly. Dumb Ottawa hamburger stand.
IDA: Providential erotic culverts. Eternal return of the same. Eternal return of the shame. The specific thing with Tru, the texter, she who texts me, has texted me, the mechanics of it, about which, while it was happening and after it happened, I said nothing to Aya, and which I was explaining over the phone, sitting in the airport, to my handler, as things in Ottawa were going way far off from what I had hoped, really and truly deteriorating, for me at least, and I was dragging my sorry ass through the bountiful shame, on the last or second last of the four days. The text I receive is a Messenger ping from Luna, who was then called Tru, as per her assignment, as Aya was called Aya, and I sat outside at a picnic table adjacent to a quaint Ottawa burger stand, pictured here. I read the message without letting on that anything of any particular import was going on. I hadn’t received any kind of message from Luna/Tru in a very long time, and I am sitting with Aya at a picnic table casually reading this message, the mere existence of which fills me with a kind of alarm, feeling very, very pitiable indeed. I could go back through my Messenger messages and do a full-on proper accounting of all the particulars, but Christ, I cannot, absolutely cannot imagine doing that. I know I hadn’t heard from Luna/Tru in a very long time and I could swear that the last thing I heard from her was—Christ, it’s so typical—that she was going to make a better effort to stay in touch and that she had recently been through some dark shit. Time elapses, next thing I know she is popping up pregnant in a meadow on social media, more beautiful than can be adequately expressed. Then this message, ping, while Aya sits across from me working on her veggie burger. It was a very cordial communication. It contained what to most people would seem a benign entreaty. The message. She had been alerted to my presence in the nation’s capital from cryptic hints in the national paper of record the previous day. Come visit meeeeeeee! I was filled with warmth, love, total alarm, molten anguish. Aya is eating her veggie burger. Just this grief. This tremendous grief. Everything that has slipped through my fingers. The evanescence, precondition of the amorous. The partings and absences. Everything that failed to be born, that was stubbed out premature by my feckless, hapless fumbling. Just ping! and suddenly it becomes painfully clear that time and distance have healed the wounds not one bit. And the correspondence. The four days in Edmonton with Tru that hurled me off a cliff. Now four days in with Aya and feeling disconsolate in the extreme, shivering with something like foreknowledge, knowing that cliff, by God, feeling that memory. These two extraordinary women, intense feelings for them, the whirlwind they excite, as though the moment had lined them up before me to bowl down. The women I want, or think I want, who don’t want me, don’t want me the way I want them to want me, don’t want to be with me, recoil from my feeble tendernesses. I started to draft a return message to Luna/Tru. Aya, curious, asked me what was up, who I was messaging. Oh nothing, nobody. Whatever. Typical, the perfunctory deflection. Make a non-thing of the thing. I sent Tru a short, simple message. Basically: there isn’t going to be time. I don’t have time to visit. Flying out soon and spending the waning hours in the company of a friend. Sorry. Many blessings. Hope this message finds you well. Long may you flourish. I was atomized, reduced to particulate, dispatching pleasantries, trapped in the hideous patterns, wallowing, floundering, mocked by the patterns. Aya and Tru. Tru and Aya. Four days lined up against four days, superimposed transparencies. The sad, stupid, befuddling recurrence. Mired in doom. Doom down to the cellular level. The cells. The cells in bad, bad shape. And then there is this secret terror I can confide neither to Aya nor to Luna/Tru. I cannot tell Aya about Luna/Tru, and I can confide to nobody at all that I am a little suspicious of the Messenger message.
LLOYD UNHINGER: It occurs to you that the message, which effectively begs you to visit a remote location near Wakefield, Québec, spur of the moment, may not actually be from Luna.
IDA: Well, that’s right. Ha. Yes, you and me: we definitely got the same vocation. I figure it could be Zebra or whoever and therefore a trap. You’ve deduced this, Lloyd. Don’t pretend to be all friendly. When I grow up I want to be impaled on a church spire before a cheering horde. Hurl abuses at me. Hurl abuses at me, you fucking wretches.
LLOYD UNHINGER: We’re almost getting into a mucormycosis.
IDA: The Manchurian bicarbonate.
LLOYD UNHINGER: Jon Zebra is currently in Paris and we desperately need to apprehend him, though the whole map has slid far out of its original pattern. The two of you are effectively fused. That was your doing and you bloody well know it. Here’s recent footage of Zebra. He has landed at Orly and he’s swearing at everybody who accosts him. Or who…doesn’t. Check this out: he has exited the airport and is pissing on a wall for all to see.
IDA: Orly is already the Continent’s preeminent urinal. Give the guy a break. And if me and Zebra was fused that’s the upshot of set, setting, and all y’all’s meddling. He is a maniac by natural selection, as are I. You know very well the Zebra in Paris right this minute is an Open Field of Quantum Potential and that I’m the resident expert in this stuff, so stop waxing so butch. I will relieve you of your overseer’s pretences—mind you your Ps and Qs for you. Didgeridon’t and The Muzak Kid! Crack me open a can, Lenny!
LLOYD UNHINGER: Always trolling with Steinbeck.
IDA: I work with what I got. You guys sign beaucoup checks.
LLOYD: Now that you mention it…
IDA: Very subtle, Lloyd, you cracker. You want me to do remote reading like its oldentimes all over again. Get out your fountain pen, fucker. Jon Zebra’s my prize stud and I can’t not submit. I have our albumen-deficient mestizo hustler with piss dabs on his pants departing Orly and charming a cabdriver in that weirdly fluent barrio Arabic of his. He’s gonna go online to lookup sex workers and movie houses, and we’ll have him the next morning climbing out of the high-class shopping zoo, the whole world slower among the rich and toity widow-gazers, such that he’s singing out loud ‘la danse’ as he pivots aggressively ‘round and past, down now across the Seine to catch Joseph H. Lewis’s Gun Crazy on rue Christine. Gendarmes, tail this freak! He’s emerging from Shakespeare & Company with some Chester Himes and some Madeleine Bourdouxhe, positively asking for it as he does his daffy deal way too fast past Polly Magoo on Petit Pont, shortly thereafter hypnogogically arrested totalement by the beautiful young hyper-competents in the vicinity of the Sorbonne. After singing the Maddox Brothers and Rose to the visibly delighted clerk at CROCODISC he gets the terror real bad upon stumbling zombified into the posted road sign for rue Rene Descartes, a famous hex. Beware, Paris, transystematicity of intercomplexed arrondissement etymologies, rather than the Paris who is Homer’s prize goober, this Paris though a variegated megalopolis whose denizens could get beneath Homer’s Paris and carry him off to some Queen of the Drones in her fifth-floor unwalkable walk-up. Alas, woe be to thee aujourd'hui, Paris, you city. You shan’t hardly have it so easy with our Zebra! In passing him a cigarette you may in the passing casually burn a hole in the left cuff of his coat, and you may have the occasion to present yourself as the perfect distracted lowlife Sophie Marceau nursing that Allongé at the adjoining table on the patio at Le Hibou, precipitating visions of our man’s own death by hanging decisively in advance of any opportunity he’ll have to autonomically ejaculate either in or out of his pants. Still, you have not left your mark on Jon Zebra, and there isn’t the slightest chance he’s going to go on to consider himself to’ve been the least bit molested. He hasn’t had a drink since 2013, but he’s so high on his own nautical fumes at this point he’s for all the civilized world the spitting image of Edgar Allan Poe in late stage alcoholism. I don’t have to warn prospective muggers they’d better watch out.
LLOYD UNHINGER: A kind of surrender, the bad kind of surrender, succumbing to psycho-motor oblivion.
IDA: Watch out! I got Zebra clocking the whole forensic architecture schematic what’s got Sacré-Cœur complexed in with the whole early 20th century red light district scene and them steps down from which Michel Simon as Maurice Legrand first encounters Lulu and Dédé in le premier acte of Jean Renoir’s La chienne. That’s nothing. He’s positively screaming “la danse” as he’s falling in mud in front of joggers, lovers, single women, and, like, one or two hundred spread-out Chinese folks in Parc des Buttes-Chaumont where he’s ventured outrageously afield to mock-up that little Éric Rohmer homage on his iPhone, stumbling thereafter upon a tai-chi happening straight out of Sans soleil way up top there while he’s looking out over a vista he’s sure’s straight out of Le joli mai, which I’m sure you got to know’d make anybody dizzy as shit, such that right after that he’s rumbling down the proletarian carnival funnel of rue de Belleville, long gone daddy, I’ll tell you, desperately famished for flank steak and boiled potatoes. What have me and my beau gone and done to the Paris bleu? We are technologists and lay therapists, cinematized, ripened on Federico Fellini. We know a golden rule, scoop-up the golden eggs. The thing about it is, you don’t need to bring Cinecittà to Cincinnati when you can build Cincinnati out of plywood there. Dog and pony show? Watch how many haunted hours Jon Zebra can remain all but motionless in the atelier and garden of The Dead Painter, chronicler of unstilled impressionist incipience, before recognizing his hanging self from every sordid and soiled angle in the Baselitz exhibit, sharing a giggle with old pals Joseph Beuys and the coyote, and glowering malefic at the teeming stormclouds atop the Gangplanks of Pompidou. When the deluge hits him it ain’t nothing to him. He’s zeroed into overdrive, hardcore, strung-out on the wasp waists of fashion’s subjections. This, the Zebra, Jon-about-town, who took to heart the Church of the Subgenius down Texas way—when they told him they’d help him pull the wool over his own eyes. Right? Throw your shade all night, Lloyd. They’re billable hours. The Hounds of the Baskervilles reap their blowback, and it smarts, don’t it? Stabbing an escargot, Jon Zebra indexes all things, in a cavalier aristocratic sweep of the wrist none of us other practitioners have ever been able to muster, you least of all, jacking off in your lumpy wool sock no doubt presently, and offers to pay for ‘toute les choses’ to peels of public laughter before capping it all out gamely awaiting executioner and drinking a Perrier with a fellow tall drink of superfine mixed-race in a tavern in the 11th above which this Amazon resides.
LLOYD UNHINGER: Do you know who killed Katrina Plowhurst?
IDA: I figure you and I both know it were Aya must’a
done—
LLOYD UNHINGER: Peltier?
IDA: Peckerwood. Bird is the word.
LLOYD UNHINGER: That’s nice, girl. You make me a happy man. ‘Old times’ sake ain’t what she used to be, ain’t what she used to be,’ but this is still my bread and butter. You are like a marmalade. It’s warm in here. I want to do something fun. You’ve got me thinking. You’ve got me thinking la danse. A sweet nugget. I’m going to remind you of your Heraclitus—or Heidegger’s and Fink’s Heraclitus seminar, rather: “When I speak of thoughtful transposition into another dimension, that is only a first attempt to circumscribe the manner of our procedure, because we still do not know what it means to go over into another dimension. If we wish to speak of an analogy in this connection, then we must think it in a specific way. In this analogy only one side is given to us, namely the phenomenal one. As we hold selectively to specific phenomenal structures, we translate them into large scale in an adventurous attempt.” I am very pleased to see that you are grinning.
IDA: Oh, I know where we’re going, Wendy Hiller. Thoughtful transposition. Procedure. Analogy. Specific way. Translate. Baby, it’s the analogue—
LLOYD UNHINGER: And it’s la danse.
IDA: Boy, it sure is! And I’m House Mother! Are you thinking about Robert Bresson?
LLOYD UNHINGER: I am. Quatre nuits d'un rêveur.
IDA: Rêveur, injun revver, T.S Eliot’s brown river—
LLOYD UNHINGER: Adapted from “White Nights,” Dostoevsky.
IDA: That’s right.
LLOYD UNHINGER: What did Bakhtin say about Dostoevsky’s polyphony?
IDA: Bakhtin said affirmative work is not subjective or maudlin but rather the only reality. Bakhtin said “various stories” and he conjoined that at the hip to “various planes.”
LLOYD UNHINGER: Do you think Quatre nuits d'un rêveur employs the four act structure it would appear to promise us?
IDA: I do and I don’t. It’s like one act with clay bookends.
LLOYD UNHINGER: I have a bad habit of looking at all bookends as something other than bookends, but I know you’ll excuse an old lech. Still, nobody can deny that in Quatre nuits d'un rêveur the front bookend is ‘boy meets Paris.’
IDA: For sure.
LLOYD UNHINGER: Let’s invoke yourself again. Le premier acte.
IDA: Is a child being spanked? Are you drinking too much coffee, Lloyd?
LLOYD UNHINGER: You mind I tickle a minute these here pretty ivories? Are you ready for the House?
IDA: Oh, Lord.
LLOYD UNHINGER: In Quatre nuits, the great master Robert Bresson has employed the actor-model Guillaume des Forêts in something close to a pure personnel capacity in service to the filling of the function Jacques, young flâneur, wastrel, very attractive, a connoisseur of beautiful anemic girls.
IDA: I’ve always said that if you want to build consensus and get on good with the coworkers, what you ought to go do is just start off offering to have them buy you out. You know perfectly well that the Catholic Church and Dracula have for a good long while possessed complimentary tastes.
LLOYD UNHINGER: Why am I compelled to reconnoiter your expo?
IDA: I’m not what the expo people call a humanitarian, okay? Or community activist or any Mother Courage. With me it has just always been instinctual, you understand. With pushy and mean people I have just always experienced the motivation—just I’ve always been on the verge of digging my heel into the bridges of their noses. When not actually in the process of doing so, understand. When I was a girl watching TV it was tiresome to have all the heavies be like Ferdinand Marcos or General Ass-Flappin’-Month-of-August Pinochet, each to a man of jowl and brow and trowel most pitiful, and it was much more fun to get a Idi Amin or a Qadhdhāfī.
LLOYD UNHINGER: Black Test Car.
IDA: Real great picture.
LLOYD UNHINGER: It shares a reel-to-reel tape machine outboard in common with Quatre nuits.
IDA: And Pialat’s Police!
LLOYD UNHINGER: But the machine in the Bresson is an autoerotic sermonizing box or dictaphone with attached mic. Everything salient we’re learning about policing right this minute comes from Asian cinema and fiction of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The cinema of Yasuzô Masumura is of premier interest to us in present time. The tape machine glimpsed briefly at the beginning of Black Test Car, in the ditch right before the foreordained car wreck, ends up being the equivalent of the gun introduced in the first act that must go off in the third. We rate Masumura Yasuzô’s Black or Test Car aside specifically Takamura Kaoru’s novel Lady Joker and the films of Johnnie To. Confused and passionate people trying to make some small difference in the world, in combination with…, uh, governmental and extragovernmental…corporate and intercorporate, well, espionage. Grey markets produce opportunities for the opportunistic and provide likewise the occluding haze to cover their tracks. I want this to be our bread and butter, and we over here consider these considerations. The grey market married to the supposedly above board and to sly, infernal machinations. Everybody is jockeying, mostly half-blind. The recording instruments and the various salient technologies take on lives and half-lives of their own. But the little dictaphone in Quatre nuits employed by negatively sybaritic boy-Symbolist Jacques, into which he early on hastens to rustle his lovelorn phantasms—into which he recites a sort of bored oneiric poetry and into which he would have a fantasy woman encountered fleetingly dance—‘elle danse’—this machine is a dowser and a weapon of self-injury but it also bridges gaps and produces temporal disturbances. After Jacques has spent the first few of his four nights with the young woman Marthe, he travels the city yearning for her, breathing her name into his machine and playing the tape back, some perverse reflexology, only to have the city of Paris throw all kinds of supplemental Marthes back at him. The name is now jumping out of every corner. It’s a seance. The recoding device excites a certain unwieldy conundrum in the sign. At the same time, like in all of later Bresson, the film itself is using overlapping sounds to bridge cuts between distinct spatiotemporal localities, such that the recording technology employed by Bresson himself takes on the properties of an analogous sorcery. With his isolation, his canvases, and his recording machine, Jacques has been made into a little junior version of the movie director, collecting a cinematograph like it were random bottle caps in the street. Still, Jacques is like a drunk or an addict, fixated on the playback, getting high on his own supply, destined to remain in his flat painting his pictures alone and getting wrung-out by echoes. In this sense, Quatre nuits d'un rêveur is almost like the youthful prefiguration of Krapp’s Last Tape. Beckett is here. And so are Burroughs and Gysin.
IDA: Hey, look, I’ve always said so. We made this clear back in Edmonton in the early days, playing with our own tape loops and pharmacology. Brion Gysin grew up in Edmonton. We called him the first Aurora Kid and Zebra the second. Zebra was like the mascot who became a despot. What is on the tape is ineffaceable and it keeps coming back. You cannot get rid of a tape that asserts its own necessity, just like certain ideas are around for good once they’ve first hatched. Suicide, anal sex. They first showed up and then they weren’t going anywhere, clearly. They were gonna stick. Certain tapes are indestructible that way. Or nearly so.
LLOYD UNHINGER: I’d like more from you on Zebra and the early days. Edmonton and right after. Not that we don’t have all this…documentation.
IDA: Well, fair enough, Lloyd. Luna and I found Zebra. Before he was a guinea pig who went a little rabid he was just a hustler and a street kid. His mother was an indigenous Peruvian domestic and his father an Edmonton oil man. He told me he was born in Ciudad Chihuahua. Might be true—doesn’t have to make sense. He’d been hereditarily de-selected and left to founder, though he did not, on account of his gifts and his looks. Luna and I connected with him through our frontline work and we took a shine to him. You had a hand in all this, too.
LLOYD UNHINGER: You and Luna made a lot of audio and videotape.
IDA: Hey, you’d know better than I would.
LLOYD UNHINGER: Back then the three of us already had the knack for this racket. You two got in a little deep with the kinkier and slinkier research. But it all ultimately became more or less official and institutionalized—call it the cooption of the sleazy option. Though Zebra has never emerged as anybody’s idea of a ‘known quantity’…however amply documented and feverishly scrutinized.
IDA: We had him in our paws, for sure. The Aurora Kid. Picking up signals.
LLOYD UNHINGER: How do you feel about Luna now, and the trouble between you?
IDA: Well, I guess what I called her is I called her a comprehensively and prematurely hysterectomized petite bourgeoisie nullity. She huffed and puffed and said, effectively, that I was reading too much into it. I told her it’s no different than all of us basically knowing to what sort of a creature the word Appaloosa corresponds.
LLOYD UNHINGER: A Zebra is a Zebra. Then you and Zebra shacked up in that house up north.
IDA: We zeroed in on a private variation. We ran the tape.
LLOYD UNHINGER: You had effectively retired for a period. Self-moderated technical field work, maximally clandestine.
IDA: Like you said. Shacked up. Dropped out. To the tune of Jandek’s Ready for the House. And Fahey’s Yellow Princess. Whilst slamming caps of China White.
LLOYD UNHINGER: And Phil Ochs?
IDA: Oh, to be sure. Phil Ochs and John Train too. And corn liquor.
LLOYD UNHINGER: You were always passionate about Saint Augustine and his Confessions. Do you remain something of an adherent? Of course, most of what Augustine has to repent is youthful wiles and fairly tame misadventures in the company of his fellows prior to the decisive death of his saintly mother, Monica. Are you defined now by early indiscretions and efforts to get out from under them? My Gérard Depardieu in Police’s rebuttal can only ever be “Cantos VII,” plus interest: “Shell of the older house” and “House expulsed by his house.” Have you relinquished the house that failed to contain Zebra? Do child’s games still ring the clarion in your blackest of hearts?
IDA: The Confessions are more than just a pure incantatory honey, though this is the reason fundamentally that their importance is literary in addition to philosophical or spiritual. The troubles and emotional perplexities of St. Augustine may be a quandary or set of quandaries that embody the syncretization of future languages and modes. Can we ever be expected to stop reading various futures into all the old or very old things? In Augustine we already have the trace elements of Descartes and Leibniz, Kant and Hegel, Joyce and Beckett. We play any number of drums with our hands, but with our feet we play precisely two: remorse and passion. The limits of faith are the living hiccups of faltering passions, and faith is only infinite love, acceptance of total integration and immersion, the presiding condition one of epistemological blindness and displacement, counterpoised with the either/or and the fatuous sophistry of the Manichaeans, whose influence Augustine largely holds responsible for his early failures. Faith has to exist in concert with epistemological opacity. Sin becomes a symptom of man’s wholly creatural relationship with Time, a relationship of confusion and misapprehension. Somewhere there is a mistake, and everything spread out in Time marks that mistake and answers for it. We steal things haplessly away and we lose people as Time splurges on, overflowing its banks. In the beginning was the Word, fine, but then the words come and go in sequence, making noises, lodging aimless complaints, praying in ways dignified or not. Augustine’s holy trinity is to be, to know, and to will, and the will is not wrong or fundamentally errant, but it hedges. The will wants what it wants to the extent that it wants it and does not want the same thing to the extent that it does not. That’s Book VII of The Confessions. Everything is in here. In Book X we have the Lord of the Flies and the Angel of Light; in book XI the complexivity that binds creatures through creation and creator, creation belonging to the creators and the created; Book XII is an early primer on philology and deconstruction. Augustine ends, with Book XIV, by ultimately explicating his mode: incantatory transcendence, love loved through language, the crucible by means of which we may make the most lasting contact with infinite love. Faith is testament, but that testament must truly sing. Augustine’s style is also that of a renegade river overflowing its banks. Infinite love always collides with muddled and harrowing things that thrust betimes and invariably falter. Love mows things down. Time does so likewise—the inverse.
LLOYD UNHINGER: Well, surely Augustine calls out the “deceivers” and “dumb prattlers,” and we’ve always been able to rely upon you to do the same.
IDA: And I do it in the language of five hundred-plus Bantu daughter tongues, such to assure that the trains run very much not on time. My own confession would be a whole other deal altogether. I speak of gentle genitals that esteem their own erasure. Like cream-filled holiday chocolates put on mothballs; some eternally waylaid “somewhere else.” The palsy may speak up and noisily declare itself. There is always someone sitting somewhere on some toilet without hope of reward or relief. I feel this complaint in my guts. Are we killing time most of the time or just lopping off curious quantities of the invisible? When I was ten I thought my horse was a dragon breathing blue fire. Now I’m some old bitch who cannot even remember where she left the car keys. My whole life in its condensed presence is heinous and nastily belching. I misuse myself in order to test the gullibility of lovers and potential adversaries. I am on the outs with the elders of all protocol. I have a V-shaped navel and the nostrils of a stroke victim, maybe because of all the powders that’ve been vacuumed up. I increasingly have glacial ideas that fatigue and pancake, ever promiscuous in word and deed. I am never afraid to throw fists. I will topple cops and pummel security, even if I’m essentially an old lady. Am I looking out for my sisters or merely succumbing to transient pique? I imagine a mausoleum of picture windows, fragrance of those future mandates I already renounce. Somebody will have to care for the hoarders of wealth in their protracted winter of convoluted demise, but it shan’t be I, who hoard naught but gall. I haven’t ever been treated how I’d call “well.” I am at last extremely prickly.
LLOYD UNHINGER: My story feels far simpler. The life of a beat cop, even a kind of intentionally overblown one like myself, now puffed-up and gone international, is inherently ridiculous and a little pathetic. You hit the same avenues daily and get lost all over again.
IDA: Please. That’s not exactly the whole picture. You have always been an amiable pervert with a robust thirst for knowledge. If Augustine is my pin-up guy, you’ve got Beelzebub in his space craft taking his grandson for a ride and Heliogabalus the Crowned Anarchist in his raiments. You are a fun person, and were since the beginning, because you are a bit of a monster and have the sensitivities of a monster. You relate very much to the quarry and always did. Nothing is off limits to you if it has advanced to such a degree that it unmistakably exists somewhere quantifiable in the known world. You’re more the Grand Iniquitor than you are the Grand Inquisitor of legend.
LLOYD UNHINGER: I think of it as a straightforward byproduct of the work and the mindset. A cop likes to peek into cringy corners closely. For Augustine, the young strive to accumulate totalizing knowledge and are impatient to dispute. I am maybe just a less disputatious version of the person I was in Edmonton, when all of us were both working seriously and fucking about, as you’d say, “heinously.”
IDA: You’re the same person I fucked back then, Lloyd. And you’re still disputing.
LLOYD UNHINGER: When you had absconded with Zebra and set up shop in that house, were you earnestly of the belief that you were exploiting actual faculties of clairvoyance? Did you believe his cold readings were legitimate? Did you ever pause to consider it so much calculated gaff?
IDA: It’s not clear what I believed. Not to me. I know I was deep in it. It was a sort of free-fall. An addict’s. We achieved some kind of singularity and I don’t think anybody on your end is prepared to conclude it was all so much hot air. Were that the case, you could hardly be expected to be pressing so keenly. Or to be chasing after Jon Zebra. You want and dream about what I had in my possession for a fleeting moment.
LLOYD UNHINGER: Mind control never really did pan out as a going concern.
IDA: Hey! Well, yes and no.
LLOYD UNHINGER: When you were intercepted and brought back to roost, Zebra wasn’t with you any more. You were in that house alone. Tell me what happened.
IDA: We had been watching the same movies for a few days, drunk on Scotch and popping pills. We’d been watching repeatedly both Quatre nuits d'un rêveur and Abel Ferrara’s Dangerous Game, the one where Madonna plays an actress who has to be killed off in the movie within the movie where originally she had been meant to foment a feminist resistance, all because the actress, rather than the character she plays in the movie within the movie, has become a sinecure indexing all the rampant male insecurity and hypocrisy percolating around her. She’s a sacrificial goat for liars, cheats, and cads.
LLOYD UNHINGER: Zebra got fed up and bolted?
IDA: I swear he told me he was just going out to get cigarettes.
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