[Reigian Studies.] [On behalf of the baroness.]


18.12.08

fateful day... we shall see...









Seven years today he’s gone









So, I’m phoning the baroness, listen, seven years today since he left us... I mean... after Reig’s death, and not a peep from anybody; nobody caring a fig; the sites, the newspapers... never acknowledging his immense contributions to the culture; ignored by one and all; neither Agathon nor I getting a single (good or bad) reaction to our efforts...



The baroness too dignified, as ever, to chastise my abruptness... The truth will out, she says, never you worry, O’Donovan. We all die as mayflies but the reflection of a few of them lingers and rebounds in the recesses of the vast dark matter... Why would Carles’ brilliancy have to irrupt now and not later...? His time will come sooner than the end is due, and by a long long stretch, and we, the proper props properly relaying his shining, will also be remembered as rays of his very own light... Don’t feel bamboozled, O’D... Don’t feel, tout court; and, instead, do; feeling is for crickets and other disgusting beings whose feelers feel... spread along and hither and thither... but never go anywhere the clean ideas of their absent brains... And anyway, all good things are slow in coming... Tell me about Catalonian Independence... Why should Carles’ glory come before his country’s...? An artist, a talented artist, a genius, has to be epigonous to the group, no doubt... What would Shakespeare be without the English Independence behind him...? Do you imagine Shakespeare and his works recognized even as extant nowadays if his country had been still under the thrall of some fascist concern...?



Ah, the baroness, she cracks me... she’s so well versed in things Reigian! I see her stately face in my mind while we are talking on the phone... Notice her face’s windows: very much as a face made of hidden cards, only that instead of cards, it’s all open dark windows... Very suggestive of the intimate wishing of the empty bodies... They all long to be replenished in a single being, where everyone has ITS place... A face of nothings... or rather... a faith of nothings, of souls, of emptinesses, but a faith nonetheless, where what’s contained is the being that otherwise would have escaped us... She contains the uncontainable...



And she’s got amazing insight... She was very ironic, it appears; when she said “fascist,” she was playing with the red-neck / charred-neck dichotomy, I surmised... For there is that enigmatic, very controversial bit, in the texts: the strange exclusion of what Reig calls the “charred-necks” (who must be much worse than red-necks, no doubt,) whom biased, fed-up Catalonians, after almost three centuries of “sap-niard” misrule, thirsting for freedom, want to identify with what other freedom-fighters facetiously call “spics,” meaning: the sappy sap-niards, whom they pretend (quite untruly no doubt!) that Reig wants (at least in his more offensive writings) already non-extant anymore, or at the very least converted to something that is not so awful-sounding as that... for who in his right mind wants to be still, after all those decades and decades of opprobrium and ridicule, a fascist, a charred-neck, a spic, a sap-niard...?



But notice that all the pawns are red-necked. With a bit of imagination we could see them with charred necks... and that would go totally smoothly on the way of what Reig’s “religion” aims at: total inclusion...



It’s been widely known for ages that Reig was very fond of pulling your leg... He was also a jocose fellow... He had his morose and depressive moons, moods... but also his high, victorious, overreaching... spans.



That’s why there are pundits who believe this “charred-necks” business might be just a joke. Jocose in the jacuzzi, you know, inventing denunciatory epithets just for the sake of it... for fun, in a word, while wallowing in the healing mud, against boredom... Even when pretty wizened and loaded with years, he was known to feign having lain for days rotting on the ground to the despair of his scant followers – never more than two or three, for he would discourage them to follow anybody but themselves in self-realization, which after all is the realization of an ultimate “all-there”… In those occasions, as the youngsters would plow into what they thought to be a stinking carrion, Carles Reig would arise as if from the sulfurous pool in a cool spa: refreshed, always ready to teach the too-sticky a lesson in detachment.



I wont despair then... I’ll keep at it a while longer too... Even... until my own December 18th maybe...



I told the baroness, I’m sure you are right, baroness; I’m with you also here... Your approximation has got to be the most inspired... I’ll sign under... When Reig, in his marvelous novel “the Sky Assumes the Value,” depicts the truest death of a wife perhaps ever depicted in writing... and in such a gut-wrenching truthful manner, and so nakedly... that you feel yourself reduced to bones and entrails... and you see yourself as the dead wife... and then the husband enters into that desolate panoramic view of a world of worming souls... where the cruelty of children toward their own mirror selves... reduced to the size of insects... with feelers instead of brains... lost in the desert... myriads upon myriads of grains of sameness... what a striking allegory... how the Sun itself is the witless magnifying-glass that sooner or later will finish by roasting each of us... and then he shakes himself... he has no patience for the Sun to finish him... and finishes himself it such a way as to leave a lasting impression... In a burst of flames... We are still warmed by his pluck... He’s indeed one the shiniest bricks for the ulterior construction of a god who shall outshine the Sun... I mark your wise prophetic words, baroness...



My pledge must have pleased the baroness... She chirped...



And then nothing... A few sparse leaves that the wind brought down from the roof rapped on the glass... Sparse leaves, eh...? Questioning their being... “Here...” “here...” say their knuckles on the glass... sounding the glass... There is the never-ending quandary again: is the end god constructed as if by itself, in a self-understood manner...? or… is it constructed at the end of time by the mass alive…? Nothing is sure, nothing is mechanical… The mass of life... either succeeds... or... fails... ok…?



The striving... indeed... only the striving’s what matters for the while.







1.12.08

Last Tale; or How Reig Died December the 18th in New Orleans









Last Tale; or How Reig Died December the 18th in New Orleans.










Seven years ago, the entrails of the warrior were spilt. He’d been in New Orleans for about two weeks already. That day he’d gone out with a ticklish whore. She’d laughed like a neurotic hen at everything he’d say. “I’m bursting with comicality – my fallopian tubes are crammed with ingenuity and wit – wit! – twitted like my parroty aunt: wit, wit!” Reig would intone, gay and euphoric, and the whore, Naboniqua, exploding, her cackle like a lurid spark swollen into insane fireworks above the din of the rabble around.




Reig, I’m told, had been calling her a “goddess,” and Naboniqua was at first ensorcelled by the word. Then, with the heroin, the goddess moniker would just elicit floods of giggles.




Afterward, numbing syrupy flummery cloyingly lingered while they stood in the hotel lobby, full of popinjays and, much worse, some stinking clusters of abrasive kooks, utterly given to the sin of bigotry, at the same hotel seemingly for another obscene Congress about some supine stupidity or other related to the habitual sacred book of imbecilities for assholes. And there was, as always, both in mufti and uniformed, the sempiternally cruel bureaucracy – just watching, trying to catch somebody at something, the damned unadulterated creeps.




Reig and Naboniqua had been fucking and shooting up up there, in his monkish cell.




Now they went strolling in the sunshine. Enticing little girls were playing at the curb with dibs. The whore, “clothed in radiance,” Reig, patting his pocket, said, “wistful virgin exalted, salubrious palatable morsel of heaven unhinged, would be easy target for the scandal-prone ignoramuses that overrated every divine image that happened to walk among them... after the first incredulous tooted, alas, turning into a derisive throng of tarnishers the lot of them. That’s why I’m packing my revolver.”




Naboniqua, her scudding countenance bruised with the wanton balm of his toothy kisses, guffawed, the glint of flint of her black teeth, painted and buffed with shoe polish, then dazzling Reig’s eyes.




Meanwhile, the walk, instructive, of course.




Suddenly, thunder, squiggles of lightning in the grim sky, hisses of squirmy winds... and yonder the resentfully whispering hills, the frothy shores, the frowning horizon afire... everywhere tempestuous embers brought back from the grills of Vulcan on the clumsy busks of umbrellas...




Whining whores and their mangy beaus avidly circling every available threshold...




Reig and Naboniqua flying instead toward some ruins, romantic in the rainswept twilight. Here, over the dancing leaves and the crisp kernels of hardy trees, they also danced, a stifled minuet on tiptoe.




“You want to see my mother. I could marry you,” said the whore above the sizzling squeals and raucous expectorations of the raging storm.




“Open your mouth, I want to look inside your craw, so dark and foreboding, like a tyrant’s bent on some type of relentless guzzling of his own. Or aiming to swallow up a row of blazing beehives abundantly inhabited with sweating drones.”




But the ruins, I’m told, were the mother’s house. Normalcy had been forfeited; Reig became suddenly jittery. He was dismissing the idea of a visit to the matriarch. “Too soon no doubt; after all, we only know each other since early this afternoon.”




Infallibly, darkening farther in the dusk, the whore said: “Loathe to see you so remiss. My brothers are sure to take the idle procrastination awry. Unseemly for a gentleman to utter such unworthy obfuscations, insipidly seasoned with those too tempered words of caution, and that just after having shamelessly debouched himself even such as to unfathomably burn his brand all over my awed face.”




I must exude confidence, soar over the slump, he told himself. But how? Ah, maybe my comicality...? He tried joking to save himself from a sworn fate. And the pistol was clicking in his fingers. “Same as not all mothers are lovable, not all mothers are loving either – don’t take for granted your mother’s easy love,” he perorated, with an fake air of pedantry that nonetheless had always suited him fine.




“Your pistol is bulletless,” said the whore. “In between bland amenities, I furtively if awkwardly emptied the drum.”




“Look, the impetuous fluids sedulously sieved through the teeming baskets of the sky show patent signs of exhaustion, the fracas of the farting spirits of the burdensome air also wanes, the inexhaustible beauty of the renegade sun righteously scorches the bashful bloom of our reborn perceptions through the cyclopean clouds which are the fluffy atrium to the temple behind which the blue spy-mirror stands where the eye of the revengeful plenty-headed god watches non-stop for our reprobate’s glaring misdeeds, for our iniquitous sins to pop up like cursedly splashed flowers in incriminating exhibition.”




“Cut the crap already,” the powerful lady screechingly braked.




Reig caught glimpses of envious and hostile shadows behind the soiled and cracked glasses of the windows of mum’s house. A gathering of wolves and vultures peering from the dark. “Are those offerings...?” he said, pointing firmly, I’m told, at several little mounts of beer-colored big turds that surrounded the house. “Do fairies then come in the impish light of the rising moon, enveloped themselves in sparkling garments of tiny noons, to plant those other flowers of increased loftiness as the heavens, assuaged, only show zeniths of shiny sphincters shitting...? Or...?




No time for an answer, I’m told. Instead, he heard a roar. Heavy corpses of dogs poured from a flashing door. He patted his bleeding womb, weaned off knives since his last operation, where his cancerous prostate had been excised. He drove out his hands against the glints of tusks and sharp eye teeth. Those dead dogs were surely hungry, though. A forest of blades... Knives, knives hyperbolic. A Cesarean without other spontaneous birth than the one of fairy death, whose red fat lips are the lips of my wound, he thought, dying...





(...)





Less the four years later an also insatiable hurricane took it all to itself.




Reig’s grave, the flat gray stone that said “Carles Reig, Catalonian Poet,” the remains of his rotting body... all swallowed for ever, down the spiraling crusher of a ravenous tyrant’s inexhaustible black craw.



























[Follows a last poem (maybe) that showed later, encrusted with some dry snot, on his hotel’s night table.



It is surely pertinent to note that roughly six months before his own demise, he had buried his last wife... His last one, of course, before he then, utterly destitute, had married the charitable baroness on the 18th of November.]















devoid of dormitives, nonetheless I slumbered...












truculent glimpses has the witness

as resurgent he scrounges for relief in its shabby shelter

where he vouched to mourn for all the spilled bile

of so much now elapsed comfort, and whiny self-esteem...



let him now fret and sigh and frown

let him tame the moils, conflicts, feuds, as he discerns the outrage

that erudition is...



moldering perpetual succinct processes:

downtrodden decoys all wed to the void

a stew of thorns titivated with masking so-called beautifying saponacities
...



gloat the muscles of indulgence at the decay of so many intimacies:

insistent wrinkles elude the glowering mien



I used to be awesome, strict...



though uxorious enough, sure

equality my credo

lavish quarrels sway and wield the affable steels

of chronic second prizes...



now all are fled, the blanks to be leisurely filled in

with so many on the nose certitudes...



a succession of superb spell-bindings



the smoke gels into a maiden bride:

she’s very passionate – must be a great fuck...



confounding now shoveling shit with the bitter delight of gone dreams

the rigor of despair with

the exuberant phenomenon of the kneeling down in the quiet of night...



bedridden the scream of the invalid as an uptight horse that bolted from her skin!



my eyes open wide:

dazzled I crawl to the more garish naked plot of the visible...



a chill of oddity – misfits do so stimulate us, don’t they?

the answers flow then, their attitude so deranged

(goosebumps a burden the spooky fling, load the frightened with)



from the seals of monstrous senility frothily are gestated the realizations...



the seamy seams all faded, one looks already like a bug

the shelter assailed by daggers

of sculpted temper...



a gasp, a grunt

the momentum scalping oboes

(or are they other easy gadgets of dotage?)

the throat too tender then...



the caresses of worms, their nibbling

forsaken dalliance now revived...



with animosity, a slaughter as I shake myself:

gutsy obsolete opportunists, the worms

blundering, subservient, kissing up in the middle of the bloodbath...



contaminated, I drove suddenly (a genius, austere

saddened by no grudges, poised
) a hand over my traits...



I shrunk at the touch:

a battlefield of dozens of extinct (such a selfish tomb) creatures

too big for their britches, their raging hormones

(such a folly)

kept at bay...



in the hollow of the bedrock I seem to have lain fallow for hours

in bars and bathrooms, the sick honey of proud grapes of dripping jokes

harsher than balloons (their uncharted hafts tugging as I tug at the mirror

the hairs of my beard
)

kindred biles in atmospheric bursts...



baboons reign in a country of assholes:

glad we sang, fought, taught, were born...



leaning at the fence, weeping for our fate the busy guests:

the worms, the worms...



robbed by lightning

our ashes

hid like stories hit also with potentialities that averred themselves inviable...



unleashed ash burglars, bullies:

their oily chests balking at such heavy-lifting tasks...



my wrath subsiding at last:

relish the lithe risky blow of wealthy wealth

impress on the pecky culprit the improvement of strife...



get up and cleanse her wound:

be good, don’t shrink at the new poverty...



by the morn flummoxed, I admonish myself:

restrain thy killing stump

drown the marring hammer

stay a bit, maybe longer, until the gist pours freely...



as I glibly tug at recalcitrant shrubs sparkle the sour calluses

a quarrel of oaths down the fraudulent slope of chores

(I seem to have fused the old frauds with cloudier squanderings)



riveting tough nuts:

I’m panting in my cashmeres

(what an hypocritical castration, I think, unchallenged

as I clobber at the stones in the hoary graveyards where our enemies rot

and the splinters turn into dry manna)

an inept cobbler fueled at ease with obstacles impossible to stomach...



ah, but pleasantly surprised as I dwell now on a fund of upset strengths:

manifestations of health are so awful in a moribund, Lavinia!

they are often prohibited, often aborted, often...



moaning meretrix with henna on her hair:

a modest ride smoking the boss’ money, that’s what it all amounted really to

(the pregnant truth always a disappointed enraged broken-hearted fever

that never kills its prey
)

she wound up healthily gossiping about all the tawdry comic heroes

outrageously failing to rivet her attention on the newly brought cheaper chapter

of regrets...



repulsive humiliations erupted, outstretched, rampant:

how to salvage the ontological broodings-over now?



I enjoyed hearing the hints of envy eager to rely on the allusive code:

ah, the glamorous outgrowths of my up-standing



I won, unexposed as a whole, a waterfall of severances...



fist of the would-be murderer:

skittish around a panoply, a bulk of atrocious tokens

of rapt lifeless morbidity...



rise up from the languor and malaise under which you crawl and creep:

a scolding lame rained-over worm

too beholden to the parochial scraps of hierarchy



my fingers eidola in turmoil:

mourning the earlier firm grasp of the conked out head



she used to be so smashingly beautiful, didn’t she?



but that’s never finishing, and she’s suing for more laudanum:

once and for all let my ass be moved, ok?



rousant knuckles:

hunched arthritic hands that struggle with the several deliriants

on the shivering salver near the bed



we are wavering, our hostilities toward each other sweetened now



all that’s left from the conjugal fretting:

a frail tottering server and her catching snaggle-toothed mouth

a farce about to finish as I say:



we’ll yet eke by, all hazards numbed.









we are the continuators... emptying the boxes, and more

visits since July 2008