My Vocabulary Did This to Me Read online

  There was a dead-letter office in every French village or town or city the size of Paris. There still is. Rimbaud was born in the Charlieville postoffice. He was a big child.

  Apollinaire used to play golf while other people were shooting machine guns. Big butterflies tried to liberate him from the liberal mineded. But Rimbaud crawled to the page that lifted him up from his nephews.

  That was born.

  Chapter II

  The Dead Letter Officer

  Mr. Still-Waters-Run-Do-Not-Walk-To-The-Nearest-Exit was an officer of the French government. His noms des ailes were Izzard, Cixambert, and David the Pig. He had enrolled in the French government when he was very young and liked the thought of being there while history was happening.

  He took a census of Rimbaud—also of butterflies-that-have-mildew, thoughts-of-this-generation, eyelids-of-people-who-didn’t-like-people-who-took-the-census, and God. He was a liberal.

  As long as this is a novel I mean that Mr. Still-Waters-Run-Do-Not-Walk-To-The-Nearest-Exit was a liberal. Not God.

  Rimbaud was not God or a liberal. He was born near the administration of President Buchanan.

  Chapter III

  What The Dead Letters Said

  “Dear X,

  I love you more than anyone could ever do. signed

  Y”

  . . .“. . . Yes, Virginia, there is a postoffice.”

  . . .“. . .I’m going to go home and eat rose-petals.”

  . . .“. . .It has all been anticipated, there isn’t any more for you to do.”

  “Dearest Y,”

  Chapter IV

  Rimbaud Puts Off Childish Things

  A baby has several choices all of which are unknown. Rimbaud made one of them.

  After he had been born in the postoffice he began to practice his mouth with a new language. He could not imagine persons to listen to the new language. He had not invented politics.

  He wrote poetry at the base of the postoffice. Not for anybody. He could not imagine what letters were for, or numbers. He was a baby. He could not imagine a whole word.

  The Dead-Letter-Office was in another part of the building. They put it there deliberately knowing that Rimbaud would not be born in it. It was later called the Liberation.

  He was then a baby and I am taking advantage of his name which was spelled with six letters R-I-M-B-AU-D. He put off all these childish things immediately and became a telegram.

  Chapter V

  French Politics

  The Frank Terrors was one of the political parties Rimbaud invented while he was being born. He knew that he would be dead. They existed somewhere between the Right and the Left of all human behavior.

  “Jim loves me,” the Right said. “Jim loves me,” the Left said. But the Frank Terrors were busy at being born and said nothing.

  Rimbaud did not really invent this political party. He took them as they were out of his soul. me with a sharp copula to add housing to the business of loving. Speaking sharp.

  Gambetta went up in a balloon one winter evening. That was a long time. There was no conversation.

  Chapter VI

  The Watch Rats

  The novelist should explain what he was going about. “Surrealism is a coat of many colors,” Rimbaud is supposed to have remarked long after everything was over. To love is not to continue with the Zanzibar slave trade. To continue with the Zanzibar slave trade is not to love. It is similar.

  The watch rats (they were really called wharf rats but Rimbaud called them wharf rats) ran along the Meuse River. They explained. The river ran to an ocean that ran to a number of oceans.

  “We get into the cargo,” said the wharf rats, “and then we get out to sea. We make journeys and it is history. Our ages are 6, 17, 24, and 75.”

  What they meant was that all this time Rimbaud was being born a little wharf rat was crawling from his skull, into his skull.

  Chapter VII

  So Far We Have Stressed the Humanness of Rimbaud

  The dead are not alive. That is what this unattractive prose wants to stamp out. Once you see an end to it, you believe that the dead are alive.

  Rimbaud is now fifteen and is shooting horses. Since he is now dead, the years 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14 are unimportant both to his death and our lives. It is as if one planted grass in the postoffice.

  The horses Rimbaud is shooting are the white and the black horse mentioned in Plato’s Phaedrus. Also known as a wall.

  Imagine not being attacked by Indians (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14). Imagine not being attacked by Indians. The horse, Phaedrus, will win the race, the black one, the white one.

  Imagine also that the dead are not alive and his awkward face.

  Chapter IX

  The Poem Rimbaud Wrote on October 20, 1869

  I do not proclaim a new age.

  That I am fifteen God only knows.

  I keep the numbers in my head

  When I am dead

  I will fall into a rage

  And bite off all my toes.

  When I am twenty I will see

  Eternity

  And all those old numbers

  And be their anger

  When I am dead

  I will leave the stage

  And bite off all my toes.

  Chapter X

  Sex

  Rabelais is on the middleaged side of the coin. Rimbaud is on the other. The middleaged side of the coin starts about twenty.

  There is a zoo of pleasures to Rabelais. To Rimbaud—but I am too old to remember. It would be wrong to say that the zoo was a jungle, but the animals did not seem to have cages.

  This did not have anything to do with poetry—being too old to remember—but Rimbaud thought it had anything to do with poetry—being 15,16,17,18,19, even 20. He was right.

  What it is that it has to do with poetry no one is old enough or young enough to know. Even if he kissed me now I would tell him that.

  He thought that poetry didn’t have to do with cages (which it didn’t) and that it was in a jungle (which it isn’t). He was fifteen at the time I am writing about this and never kissed me.

  BOOK II

  Chapter I

  A Charm Against the Discovery of Oxygen

  We had fought tooth and nail to maintain our beaches. The water sang where the water went and on the other side of it (a gentle rise of sand and then some palm trees) the others were fighting us.

  President Buchanan, frightened as if he were alive, appeared above us like a huge kite whose string we could not see against the sand and the jungle, causing panic to our invading hearts, to the others waiting there, and, inevitably, to the ocean.

  The barracks we had built the previous night had all turned green.

  We were not human, the others were not human, and the sea was not human. It was the old content of war.

  Chapter II

  Avoid As Much As You Can

  —I got a motorscooter for my birthday.

  —Indeed, you too have a problem. He had a problem.

  —There are no more of them to touch us. Sing out with them. They will think it is a song.

  —Beautiful you. Clever foster-parent of madness.

  —I was walking down the path one day and I saw a machine-gun. It was painted yellow and red. I was thinking about the tricks poems play on people that had to hear our voices and I wandered up the path again, singing.

  —No one deserves to die that hasn’t voice enough to carry.

  —They have stolen my bicycle and my alarm clock and my heart.

  Chapter III

  Jim

  A kind of witchdoctor told us that a name is the same name that has a property. A property right.

  They move in the cool evenings. The names—but their names do not matter.

  Expressed well there is a pun of all we do in heaven, in hell, in the outline of the stars, and even in our bank accounts. These graces are digressions but important.

  The slaves of poetry are
slaves in deed (in dead as Jim who the name of Jim would say—if he wasn’t dead and hadn’t died before anyone) and that is history and what they hadn’t seen hadn’t hurt them. They who were there.

  A kind of witchdoctor, his head hurting from the mask that was really a kind of magic, kinded them, the reasons for them. They answered.

  Chapter IV

  Rimbaud

  They said he was nineteen; he had been kissed

  So many times his face was frozen closed.

  His eyes would watch the lovers walking past

  His lips would sing and nothing else would move.

  We grownups at the bar would watch him sing.

  Christ, it was funny with what childish grace

  He sang our blues for us; his frozen lips

  Would lift and sing our blues out song for song.

  Intemperance of heart and of the mind

  Will block their progress to the last abyss

  Unwinkingly; they listen to the wind

  And find a final ceiling in the throat.

  Chapter V

  Freakish Noises

  Yes. Yesterday’s loves. The river was a piece of water that looked twisted. I thought Pan was upon it. Neither Pan nor the river were real—Upon The Water In Charlieville, 1868.

  Yes. Yesterday is a lover. If he turns around he will see them—beckoning him to some far off gymnasium or poem, turning him off his path, where he had gone so many miles the place to look back.

  Yestestday was eternity. Is backwards. Is the way that man faces the real that is always going past him. And him it. Yestestday survives in his eyes—like one water’s particle in his river. Yields salt and tears—they hadn’t seen us coming.

  Back there where the air was pure. Even yesterday was eternity where the air was pure. One does not discover yestestday remembering.

  Chapter VI

  An Excuse for This Novel

  Paul Morphy said, “P-K4, P-K4, Q-B5 mate” outdating a few pawns and bishops but showing a willingness to sacrifice his pawns, his rooks, his knights, his bishops, his very willingness to play the game of chess. He beat Adolf Anderssen without a question.

  When the taxi does not move it does not move. When you feed it gas or treat it like a dead refrigerator it does not move. Burn it as quick as you can.

  Chapter VII

  An Embarrassing Folksong

  No way to turn except upward. Rimbaud will turn sixteen, invent what my shrewdness (our shrewdnesses) will not remember, come to a more usable concept of sex and poetry—a machine to catch ghosts.

  Folksinging says that the youth of a hero is nasty, short, and brittle, says that the streets of Laredo will forever contain one coffin, that Sweet Williams’ grave will forever contain one brier, while we ghosts and shrewd people know that the graves and the streets are choked with them.

  Ghosts are not shrewd people. History begins with shrewd people and ends with ghosts.

  That is why are writing this novel. If he had read it when he was sixteen, he could have changed human history.

  Chapter VIII

  The Muses Count

  Determined funsters who have eaten half their skull away. These oldnesses are not human.

  These Muses (Lake Remember to the thought) when you didn’t get angry at other people’s putting to the question. When you heard and remembered other people’s putting to the question.

  An inquisition. Other people grow older. But the ghost don’t. Remembering every cup of blood they have lived.

  The marshmallows on the banks of the magnificent river draw away. Who is there to hear even his song. The coaches draw away.

  There is left a universe of letters and numbers and what I have told you. For Jim.

  Chapter IX

  Rimbaud Is a Gorilla with Seven Teeth

  In the middle of the river of our life.

  Things have passage. Most rivers eventually reach the ocean. Or a lake—an inland sea. This is like Africa in all continents.

  Rimbaud offered himself up to Africa in all continents. Built a sea wall. But he was sixteen and a love object (a love object) when we eventually heard of him.

  Literature suffered whenever he breathed. Literature could hear his chest moving. Great armies of sign painters came to carry him away.

  Shouts by the bamboo birds woke him up. They built houses on him while he lay dreaming. There was a raft floating by (a black raft, a black raft.)

  When Rimbaud was sixteen he never dreamed of Africa.

  Chapter X

  Who Are You?

  What has four legs, three feet and seldom talks to anyone?

  A corpse.

  What is seen in the distance when the murmurings of some defeated ideas, or lives, or even dreams are suddenly manifest?

  A ghost.

  What lives forever, has three knots in its rainbow, stores up passion like a squirrel stores up food for the winter, is disengaged from everything worthless, does not even sense the dreamings of poets or notice the river

  They.

  Notice the last lack of questionmark, notice the toss of the last question

  A defeat.

  BOOK III

  Chapter I

  An Ontological Proof of the Existence of Rimbaud

  Imagine, those of us who are poets, a good poet. Name to yourselves his possible attributes. He would have to be mmmmm, and nnnnn, and ooooo, and ppppp, but he would have to exist. It is a necessary attribute of the good to exist.

  This is called Occam’s Law or Davy Jones’ Locker.

  If they call him up into being by their logic he does not exist. John The Baptist, river-merchant, logician.

  The Word puts on flesh when he becomes sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. The Word before Whom all of us are witless.

  If Rimbaud had died there in the cabbage patch before we imagined he existed, there would be no history.

  Hysterical voices calling over the path to our womb.

  Chapter II

  The Dead Letter Office

  Sentiment is not to the point. A dead letter is there because it has no longer real addresses.

  If President Buchanan sent a letter to Cordell Hull (also dead) it would remain there. No thanks to the spirit of things. A dead letter is exactly as if someone received it.

  What Rimbaud knew or someone else knew is not incidental. Sentiment is not to the point. These dead poets knew what was coming to them.

  There was a blank book where the ghosts or the ages of them kept listening. To what the others said. As in the gold in an earring.

  A blank check.

  Or what the others said. President Buchanan pledged his truth when he died.

  Chapter III

  Plato’s Marmalade

  I can’t take the inferior while the superior is there. I, the author of the novel, the dupe—the danger any reader takes reading these words.

  After the breath stops, the words listen. To each other? To the song of each idea (whatever that means) that they are bound to? To something’s heart?

  A metaphor is something unexplained—like a place in a map that says that after this is desert. A shorthand to admit the unknown.

  A is a blank piece of driftwood being busted. E is a carpenter whose pockets are filled with saws, and shadows, and needles. I is a pun. O is an Egyptian tapestry remembering the glories of an unknown alien. U is the reverse of W. They are not vowels.

  When he said it first, he created the world.

  Chapter IV

  Rocks and Cabbages

  Mythopoetic creatures flock along the streets of our dreams. They do not mind being monsters. They are casual about the proof of their existence.

  What does not move does not move has a converse to it—what moves moves. No abstraction known to man and beast can prevent it.

  Those early wars. When the earth with all its pockmarks was young. Rocks and cabbages. One green, the other a base for growing.

  Worm does not devour rock, nor water cabbages. Everything changes. Not kn
owing its natural enemy.

  I sing the song of the wrath of Achilles.

  Chapter V

  Where and What

  “Why did you throw it?” I asked.

  “I threw it on the ground,” Rimbaud said.

  “What is the reason for this novel? Why does it go on so long? Why doesn’t it give me even a lover?”

  “On the page,” Rimbaud said.

  “Who is fighting? What is this war that seems to go on through history?”

  “On the battlefields,” and it was a little ghost that said this that had edged Rimbaud away for a minute.

  “Why is the river?”

  “I is the river,” the ghost said.

  Chapter VI

  The Dead Letter Officer

  Inside every Rimbaud was a ready-made dead-letter officer. Who really mailed the letter? Who stole the signs?

  The signs of his youth and his poetry. The way he looked at things as if they were the last things to be alive.

  The robes of his office are vague and noble. He has a hat that he wears on his head. His arms are attached to his shoulders.

  Our contempt for him is general and is echoed even in the house of the dead. Blood would not appease his ghost which stays in us even after we are in the house of the dead. He is in every corpse, in every human life.