Letters

A new letter to me of yesternoon, “washed up” in an otherwise almost empty, barnacled, sea-grown magnum of Mumm’s Cordon Rouge upon the beach before Mensch’s Castle during the refilming of the “Water Message sequence” of the motion picture FRAMES, duly discovered by yours truly, and found to consist this time wholly of body, without return address, date, salutation, close, or signature. To which the late “Arthur Morton King’s” reply would doubtless be the inverse, like Yours Truly’s to me of May 12, 1940. But I have commenced the second cycle of my life; I am striving through, in order to reach beyond, such games.

Dear Madam, Sir, or both:

A, in traditional letter-symbolism, = the conjoining of 2 into 1. Ad-mi-ra-ti-on, Be-ne-fi-ci-al, Con-so-la-ti-on, De-cla-ra-ti-on, Ex-hor-ta-ti-on, For-ni-ca-ti-on, Ge-ne-ra-ti-on, followed by Ha-bi-ta-ti-on, In-vi-ta-ti-on, & cet.: another bloody cycle of awakening, adventure, atonement at the Axis Mundi, apotheosis, and apocalypse.

All those sevens and sevenths seen together, in an instant, as if in a vision in Angie’s egg, on the 7th stroke of the 6th stage of the 6th lovemaking, etc., etc., on G’s & my wedding day: I.e., (a) that 7th stroke itself; (b) the postcoital embrace to follow it; then (c) the final lovemaking of that loveful day; then (d) the final day of that honeymoon week; then (e) the final week of that fine seven weeks of our Mutuality; then (f) this final stage — may it last long! — of our relation, wherein I am devotedly in love with my bride and she is serene, serene; then (g)…

Alphabetical Priority, yes: as if to discipline, even if only by artifice, as in formal poetry, our real priorities; Example follows.

Angie, at age not-quite-fifteen, is, so Magda’s gynecologist reports this morning, pregnant! Appointment made some weeks ago by M., without our knowing it, and kept secret since — through Mother’s dying, Peter’s dying, my remarrying, our own efforts at impregnation, etc. — “not to bother us prematurely” with her suspicions of my daughter’s skipped menses and recent morning nausea. Abortion, all hands agree, to be arranged.

Anniversary View of History: one Saturnian Revolution ago today, when I was eleven and she twelve or thirteen, Magda Giulianova introduced me, in the toolshed behind the old Menschhaus, to my sexuality — green then, still far from gray, but mightily toned down by this new news, by recent events, and by that seventh seven.

An old-time epistolary novel by seven fictitious drolls & dreamers, each of which imagines himself actual.

Author, old comrade and contrary, funhouse fashioner and guide: how’s that for your next and seventh?

B = mother of letters: birth, bones, blood & breast: the Feeder.

Birthmark itches like an old bee-sting; my turn to confront the family nemesis?

Bottled message: TOWER OF TRUTH 0700 9/26/69, plus some dark, grainy odd-odored solid, like freeze-dried coffee spoilt by moisture: not exactly a bombshell letter!

Break-in at M. M. Co. remains unsolved; Todd Andrews confides suspicions and reasons therefor, but has neither grounds nor inclination to prosecute; we neither.

Bray (with a rush of red rage I now recall his never-quite-explained tête-à-tête with Angela down by the Original Floating Theatre II in mid-July, which I broke up at cost of concussion from mike-boom blow; could he, of all the hair-raisingly creepish male animals upon this planet…)?!

Brice and/or Bruce it was who fetched me that blow that day; the same who — surely — planted Water Message #2 for my discovery yesterday; and they have intimated that Bray may make his “final appearance” at the Tower of Truth dedication ceremonies this Friday: the Ascension sequence, in which, I begin to think, I too must play a role.

Brother: thy will be done.

C = the crescent tumescent: creation, call, crossing, coincidentia oppositorum, catharsis, cataclysm.

Cancer of the Muse: if I am dying of it, it is living of me.

Castine (this reader of G’s collected letters suspects) may be, or at some point may have become, a chimera: three decades, years, days ago?

Conflict: last-ditch provincial Modernist wishes neither to repeat nor to repudiate career thus far; wants the century under his belt but not on his back. Complication: he becomes infatuated with, enamored of, obsessed by a fancied embodiment (among her other, more human, qualities and characteristics) of the Great Tradition and puts her — and himself — through sundry more or less degrading trials, which she suffers with imperfect love and patience, she being a far from passive lady, until he loses his cynicism and his heart to her spirited dignity and, at the climax, endeavors desperately, hopefully, perhaps vainly, to get her one final time with child: his, hers, theirs, (cc: Author)