In the House of the Hangman 867

Imagine, for example, the following dialogue among a group of ancient Pythagoreans. Pythagorean 1. We have discovered that given any natural number n we can find another number m, such that n = m + m, or n = m + m + 1. In the first case we say that n is even, in the second case we say that n is odd. Pyth. 2. I see what you mean. The even numbers are those we can split evenly, like this, half to the left, half to the right. With odd numbers, instead, we get something left here in the middle. Pyth 3. In other words, the even numbers have a gap, a chasm at the center. In odd numbers, instead, there’s something sticking out. Pyth. 4. Then we should say that the even numbers are female, and the odd numbers are male. Pyth 5. Well and profoundly put. And therefore in the number 5 we have the model for marriage and procreation, which we might call the nuptial number, since it consists of 2 (the first female) plus 3 (the first male). When I first agreed to undergo chemotherapy, I found myself haunted by Franz Kafka’s parable “In the Penal Colony.” The grisly short story was easy to translate into language pertinent to my ominous sense of the standard treatment of advanced (and thus probably incurable) ovarian cancer. About to be attached to a remarkable piece of apparatus, the condemned woman tastes fear rising off her tongue as she finds herself led forward into a maze of equipment, but is assured that the machinery should go on working continuously for six hours or six days. If anything were to go wrong, it would only be a small matter that could then be set right at once by the uniformed technician. So my variation began. I was reading some Alice Munro, buzzing out of my mind on P.G. Tips. Alice Munro was describing a woman in an Observation Car looking out at the vast Canadian prairies. “What the heck is an Observation Car,” I said to myself. (I find that as a writer it often helps not to know what anything is or what it looks like, because then you can just imagine whatever you want.) So I pictured a big bovine caboose meandering serenely across the grasses, enormous glass windows for its eyes. “Oh my gosh what would its steaks be like, oh my gosh what would its jerky be like?” I wondered, and pictured the Observation Car lying on its side shot dead. And then @gregerskine sent me the incomparable “I HAND U A PANINI AND U OPEN IT UP 2 SEE THE COMMAND ‘ORGASM’ WRITTEN IN THOUSAND ISLAND” sext. From that moment forward the form seemed to be set, and other people took it up — it was simple, it was empty, it was elastic. No Piranhas, no noblese oblige, no blems. There’s a second world of anesthesia? Hiding beneath the first world’s bed? Baloney, Febreze, sequential sentient ants. Balancing death by Nestles Crunch on rope, on bridge, on Poison, on Blitzen, the nest spontaneously feathering Reddy Kilowatt forgetting generation, but me. me? me? Earl Scheib by Fisher Price, loaded with warm hot big huge hard stiff loads of compassion by the Helsinki Vicodin Quartet. I’ve written about this quite often over the years, but I always forget it. I am my brain. I can taste my spine. I can smell the rainbow Styrofoam and the plutonium guitar players. Far is getting closer. Moonboy then fell in love (at the same time). “This very much smells like the Higgs boson.” 840 million thoughts / the sutra says / come every night / & overwhelm the sleeper. Wake me from sleep / / not a ghost / / but a man of ash without speech. In Chile I once ate a bull’s testicle. It was tough, cartilaginous, and had a slight metallic tang. WHERE’S WALDO? – ANOTHER MUTATION. I cured this tree by tying its blind spots together. The sun in the back demonstrated how glowsticks eat their young. For I am Tarzan, an old junkie churning phlegm with his jaw, kept awake by its clicks and nervously flourishing a pencil torch into the dark recesses of the jungle. You wanna see a cross-section of my stump? “All peanuts at one point or another switch souls, the fruitfly’s spinal cord ends in chunky scrotum crust.”

[Note: Sources: Ricardo L Nirenberg and David Nirenberg, “Badiou’s Number: A Critique of Mathematics as Ontology”, in Critical Inquiry, v. 37 no. 4; Susan Gubar, “In the Chemo Colony”, in Critical Inquiry, v. 37 no. 4; Patricia Lockwood, as quoted in “Patricia Lockwood: ‘History of the House Where You Were Born’” at Poetry Northwest, Aug 011; Patricia Lockwood, as quoted in Matthew Simmons, “‘Aaliyah would have been on Twitter. It is fucked up that she is dead.’: An Interview with Patricia Lockwood, Poet Laureate of Twitter”, at HTMLGIANT, 7 Mar 012; Rick Wiggins, “You are Not a Boy?”, at livedeadcat press, 7 Mar 012; Levi R Bryant, “I Am My Brain”, at Larval Subjects 8 Mar 012; Schmidt, as quoted in Julia Ganzdag, “‘NEW GIRL’ S01E15: ‘INJURED’”, at Hello Giggles, 7 Mar 012; JBR; Graham Harman, “what I’m writing about tonight”, at Object-Oriented Philosophy, 7 Mar 012; Avrom Sutzkever, “Far is getting closer …” and “Ode to the Dove” (tr. Zackary Sholem Berger), at Paper Darts, 7 Mar 012; Beate Heinemann, as quoted in Dennis Overbye, “Data Hint at Hypothetical Particle, Key to Mass in the Universe”, at New York Times, 7 Mar 012; Jerome Rothenberg, as quoted in “A Round of Renshi and the Poet as Other: An Experiment in Poesis”, footnote 5, in Critical Inquiry, v. 37 no. 4; Brandon Shimoda, “Wake me from sleep”, in O Bon; Christine Baumgarthuber, “Kitchen Wisdom”, at The New Inquiry, 7 Mar 012; Tyson Bley, “WHERE’S WALDO? – ANOTHER MUTATION”, “TARZAN’S LOOSE COVERALLS”, “AN ORDINARY SUBURBAN MORNING”, “THE PEANUTS THAT GROW ON MARS”, “THE VEGETABLE CORE”, at Gobbet, 7 Mar 012]

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