My Vocabulary Did This to Me Read online

  14) God loves God.

  15) Mertz must be applied to sex. People must learn to laugh into each other’s gonads.

  16) God is an unvert.

  17) Sex without love is better than love without sex. Sex without Mertz is never better than Mertz without sex. Nonsense is an act of friendship.

  18) The larger the Dada, the bigger the hole.

  19) Nonsense. Mertz, Dada, and God all go to the same nightclubs.

  20) So does Graham Macarel.

  EXCERPTS FROM OLIVER CHARMING’S DIARY

  October 31, 1953:

  I must unvent someone named Graham Macarel. He should be about seventeen or eighteen and have a large Dada. I can use him as the hero and victim of my Mertzcycle . . .

  November 5, 1953:

  Laughed all day. The elements of imagination are exhausting as Hell.

  November 23, 1953:

  It was more successful than I expected. He is beginning to become mythical. I saw him today and he told me that he is taking a course in his art school in which he has to clip examples of racial prejudice from Tarot cards and give their exact date. His art school’s name is the California School of Fine Flowers. His teacher’s name is S. We talked for a while and I am already beginning to destroy his universe. . . . Method is everything.

  December 1, 1953:

  Love must only be applied at the wrong time and in the wrong place. It must be thrown at the unsuspecting like a custard pie made of poison. . . . Nothing destroys Mertz more than custom. Nothing destroys it less than treason.

  December 7, 1953:

  I return to Graham Macarel. (Note—I must be sure to call him Mac. Graham reminds the uninformed imagination of crackers.) He has become a combination of a Boy Scout and a depth charge. He appeals to the primitive sources of nonsense and despair. I suspect that his teacher, S., is secretly an unvert—or at least a spoiled unvert. Something is going on between S. and history. I wonder if Mac realizes that an unvert is an agent of Kubla Khan.

  December 9, 1953:

  “An unvert is an angel of Kubla Khan.”—that’s what Mac said to me last night in the men’s room of the Palace Hotel. At the time he said it he was . . . which is certainly Dada if not Mertz.

  December 10, 1953:

  . . . suspects . . .

  December 18, 1953:

  It is Christmas vacation at the California School of Fine Flowers. S. was in the bars last night, very drunk. I think he is planning to unvert somebody.

  December 19, 1953:

  I had a conversation with S. late last night. He was again very drunk. “Why did you have to invent Graham Macarel?” he asked me angrily.

  “I thought it would be good for your poetry,” I answered.

  “Why didn’t you invent syphilis instead,” he asked contemptuously.

  So yesterday I invented syphilis. Today I am going to . . .

  December 22, 1953:

  S. is in Los Angeles.

  December 23, 1953:

  To appear as human among homosexuals and to appear as divine among heterosexuals . . .

  December 24, 1953:

  Nobody remains in this city and I have done all my Christmas shopping. The Dada in painting is not Duchamp. The Dada in poetry is not Breton. The Dada in sex is not de Sade. All these men were too obsessed with the mechanism of their subject. A crime against nature must also be a crime against art. A crime against art must also be a crime against nature. All beauty is at continuous war with God.

  December 25, 1953:

  Merry Christmas, Graham Macarel.

  December 26, 1953:

  It continually amazes the unprejudiced Mertzian observer that even the people who struggle most against the limits of art are content to have sex in ordinary academic ways, as if they and their bed-partners were nineteenth-century paintings. Or, worse, they will change the point of view (top becomes bottom, male becomes female, etc., etc.) and think, like the magic realists that they are, that they have changed something.

  Everybody is guilty of this—from Cocteau to Beethoven.

  December 28, 1953:

  A sailor asked me last night what the unvert thought of Kinsey. I told him that we held that Kinsey was a valuable evidence of the boredom of un-unverted sex—that ordinary sex had become so monotonous that it had become statistical like farm income or rolling stock totals. I told him that Kinsey was the Zola preparing the way for the new Lautréamont.

  It is remarkable how even science fiction has developed no new attitudes toward sex. The vacant interstellar spaces are filled with exactly the same bedrooms the rocketships left behind. It is only the unvert who dares to speak Martian in bed. I wonder if Kierkegaard had wet dreams.

  December 29, 1953:

  How the Zen Masters Taught Sex to Their Disciples—such a book would be the most useful book a man could publish. Sex is a metaphysical experience. Zen taught that man can only reach the metaphysical by way of the absurd. No, absurd is the wrong word. What is the Chinese for shaggy-dog story?

  The book should be illustrated pornographically but in the general style of Mad Comics. It should have a blue cover.

  December 30, 1953:

  S. is in town again. I saw him at the Black Cat. He looked confused at all the lack of excitement around him, as if he believed that a holiday was like a snowstorm and people should notice it.

  We began discussing homosexuality. I, by bringing in subtle pieces of unvert propaganda, and he, embarrassed and overintellectual as if he thought, or rather hoped, that I was trying to seduce him:

  “We homosexuals are the only minority group that completely lacks any vestige of a separate cultural heritage. We have no songs, no folklore, even our customs are borrowed from our upper-middle-class mothers,” he said.

  “What about camping?” I asked. “Isn’t that a cultural pattern worthy at least of Ruth Benedict’s cunt?”

  “What about camping?” he asked rhetorically. “A perpetual Jewish vaudeville joke—or, at the very best, a minstrel show impeccably played by Negros in blackface.”

  The trouble with S. is that he doesn’t understand Martian. I must tell him about the time . . .

  December 31, 1953:

  I rebel against the tyranny of the calendar.

  January 1, 1954:

  My analyst is teaching me French.

  January 2, 1954:

  S. says that it is inconsistent for an unvert to have a psychiatrist. He does not understand unversion. The relation between the analyst and the patient is the firmest and most hallowed, if the most conventional, sexual relationship in the modern world. This is precisely why it must be shaken. It is our task to experience and unvert all sexual relationships.

  January 3, 1954:

  Sometimes, in moments of depression, I think that all this talk of Dada and Mertz is merely the reaction of the unsuccessful cocksucker or artsucker who doesn’t understand beauty when it offers itself to him. Witness Western civilization or the bar last night. . . .

  January 4, 1954:

  Now that I have Graham Macarel, S., and a psychiatrist, all that I need is an angel. One cannot, however, safely invent an angel . . . Lot was the last person to safely invent an angel. He was bored with his lover, with their children, and with all the inhabitants of the immense and sandy Turkish bath that they were living in . . . He invented an angel and then everybody had to kill him. . . . Everybody had to kill him not because the angel was as dangerous as a hydrogen bomb (which he was) and not because the angel was beautiful as a Florida hurricane (which he was), but because the angel was a stranger and it is always the habit of Jews and homosexuals to kill strangers. . . . They almost caught the angel once in Lot’s chimney, and a sailor once managed to catch hold of its groin as it was disappearing into a broom closet; but soon fire and brimstone were descending on the town and Lot was walking with his lover along a deserted road on the first range of foothills carrying a packed suitcase. . . . The lover looked backwards, of course, to make sure that the angel was no
t following them and was immediately turned into a life-sized salt statue. It is very difficult to suck the cock of a life-sized salt statue, or to sample the delights of sodomy with a pillar . . . Lot left him there and trudged onward alone, with an angel on his back.

  I must take warning from this. There are some inventions even sex does not make necessary.

  January 5, 1954:

  No angel as of yet. I wonder if I could steal one. By a bit of clever propaganda I have arranged that Mac will have to report on angels to his history class. This should bring things into focus.

  Mac asked me about angels yesterday—whether I thought they really existed, what they did in bed, etc., etc. I told him that very few people under twenty-five had angels at all. That they were like a kind of combination of Siamese cats and syphilis and for him not to worry if they occasionally tugged at his pubic hairs. He was still uncertain: “How can I find any chronology in it?” he asked plaintively.

  January 6, 1954:

  There is a morning when it rains in the corner of everybody’s bedroom.

  January 7, 1954:

  My psychiatrist, Robert Berg, considers that it is his duty to unvent angels. It must be understood that unvention is different from unversion as psychoanalysis is from poetry.

  January 9, 1954:

  Mac tells me that he saw an angel resting in a tree above his art school. This must be the angel we have been waiting for.

  January 10, 1954:

  I have seen it too. It is a bearded angel, small as a bird, and answers to the name of Heurtebise. S., being what he is, pretends not to believe and says that it is only an owl or some unlucky night creature. He says that he is sorry for it.

  January 11, 1954:

  The angel keeps screeching in the tree. It is behaving more and more like a bird. We are doing something wrong. . . . Perhaps it isn’t our angel.

  January 12, 1954:

  I am gradually able to have the most Mertzian sexual experiences in my dreams, experiences as divorced from the limitations of the material as Dada poetry is from Dada sculpture. My psychiatrist, Robert Berg, is helping me to do this. It is his theory that psychiatrists should teach people how to dream properly, that a man’s day should not be wasted in a struggle for meaning but should be spent in the simplest pursuits (including the earning of enough money to pay for a psychiatrist) so that he may save all his energies from his dreams at night—the proper and strategic place to continue his eternal struggle against God.

  It is his feeling that the world of Mertz is the world of the dreamer—that to try to force the truly Mertzian act upon reality is like trying to make a collage out of a sheep’s belly or forcing a penis into an empty Pepsi Cola bottle. It is his conception that the most complete and metasexual act that man can hope for is the perfect wet dream, the bloody battlefield on which God is finally defeated.

  The angel screeched all night last night below my window.

  January 13, 1954 :

  Mac asked me to tell him another story like the one about Lot, he says it helps him with his classes, and so I told him the story about Noah.

  Noah was drinking in a bar one evening and he happened to knock over the glass he was drinking from. He asked the bartender for a rag to wipe up the puddle, which the bartender gave to him, but when he had finished wiping up the mahogany counter, it was just as wet as it had been before. He called over the bartender and asked him to wipe the bar over the bartender and asked him to wipe the bar with a fresh cloth. The same thing happened, in fact the puddle was even wetter. Noah knew then. He put a few tables together and began building an ark. . . .

  This, of course, has nothing to do with either angels or poems.

  January 14, 1954:

  . . . Mac begged me to tell him who Noah took along with him in the ark. I couldn’t, of course. It would be too cruel. . . . Noah took nobody, neither his wife, nor Mac, nor S., nor his psychiatrist, only a dove to tell him when land was ahead. . . . Nobody is necessary after you have built your ark. Mac is too young to understand without crying. . . . S., whom I met last night, tells me that he thinks the ark is a book. He would. The angel has stopped screeching outside my window.

  January 15, 1954:

  Very interesting session with Berg. Must remember that he, with his focus on the surreal, is the Trotsky of the movement. Today he suggested that the flood in my story symbolized the wet dream and the ark, the heart that emerges from it.

  In the course of a discussion of how to assassinate S., we came to talk of other repressed unverts. Who were our precursors? The men who almost succeeded in freeing us from the yoke of sexual meaning? We agreed that Plato was an unvert because he was able to unvent the figure of Socrates, that first and greatest of Dada poets who was able to unseduce Alcibiades as if he were a piece of rough trade. We rejected Tiberius as too ingenious. Of the moderns we agreed on Lewis Carroll and L. Frank Baum. We agreed that the frog Dada poets were mere bleeding-hearted sexual liberals who started out by proclaiming the absolute mastery of Dada and ended up writing poems about how nice their wives’ tits look. The only real unvert Berg could see among the contemporaries was Rimbaud on account of his childhood. The only one that I could see was Stevens on account of his secret vices.

  January 16, 1954:

  The negro’s aim is integration. The Jew’s and the homosexual’s aim is segregation. The unvert’s aim is a grand degradation between men and angels. We are a minority group only in our heros.

  Talked with S. in the Black Cat last night. He was quoting that great suppressed sonnet of Joyce Kilmer’s which describes a gay bar as a “savage fishpond.” I wish I could trust him enough to talk about unversion.

  July (no, January) 18, 1954:

  This is a country that destroys its children, almost before they are born. I know what they will make out of Mac, what they have made out of S. and Berg, what they will try to make out of me. There is only the angel in the tree outside—who may be the wrong angel—and then acres of empty television sets and children.

  January 20, 1954:

  My grandmother’s birthday . . . S. and Mac were playing chess together in The Place when I walked in last night. S. looked up and said, without really seeing me, “Ah, the Queen’s Gambit.” He is teaching Mac to distrust me. . . .

  Later, after a young woman had come in and taken Mac from the bar (another one of S.’s students) S. at once began talking to me about Genet. I told him that I thought that Gide was more to the point, that he was a subtler pornographer. S. would have none of this. “Gide’s inversion is like Christian socialism,” he said, “Gide has sex like a popular-front clergyman. He is on the letterhead of every pink committee to defend lonely gonads.”

  . . . . . . . . . . . “Anybody can have sexual fantasies in a prison,” I said.

  January 21, 1954:

  The girl’s name is Kathy.

  January 20, 1954:

  The angel in the tree turns out not to be an angel at all but an old bitter man named Thomas Wentworth Higginson who wishes to seduce me. He tells me that his cries were not shrieks or screeches at all. He was merely trying to attract my attention. . . . He says that he is only fifty-four (he looks sixty and smells of tobacco) and that he is able to maintain an erection . . . . . He knows my name and says that he has been watching me and wants to be loved.

  January 21, 1954:

  It was a warm night last night and the angel in my tree was naked. He keeps shouting now, “I will teach you the secrets that old men know” or, “Look, my penis is dry.” I liked him better as a bird . . . . . . . . .

  Earlier I had dinner with Robert Duncan, the poet. He is too concerned with affirmation, with flying his soul like a kite. . . . He substitutes wit for nonsense, the transcendent for the vicious. It is as if Gertrude Stein and Ralph Waldo Emerson had gone to bed together with Jean Cocteau holding the vaseline. He is the greatest poet America has produced since Pound and Williams died.

  S. writes poetry too. Mac writes wet dreams and Berg col
lects photographs of nude horses. But that old man in the tree, that angel, what does he write?

  January 22, 1954:

  Mac was in The Place with Kathy (this girl that he never talks about) and he asked me to tell them a story that both of them could use in the same class. I told them the story of Adam . . .

  Adam and the Devil lived together as lovers in a large garden. They would float down the river together, or ride railway trains together, or play a complicated form of cowboys and Indians . . . They loved to kiss each other’s beautiful sunburned faces.

  One day Adam invented a snake. It was very large and very deaf and Adam was amused to see how much it resembled his penis. Unfortunately a woman named Eve came along with the snake (she had been with it for years in sideshows and carnivals and she carried it in a golden box, which she kept sealed with a hairpin). Adam had no choice but to fall in love with her.

  The Devil was very hurt when he noticed that Adam never wanted to come to bed with him again. He couldn’t bring himself to kill Adam and it wasn’t in his power to kill Eve since she didn’t really exist. He wept and he suffered and finally, feeling truly alone, built a large apple tree and put all of his love for Adam into an apple that was to hang from its branches forever . . . Eve merely ate the apple and spat the seeds upon the ground.

  As a result of this, God created man.

  January 23, 1954:

  S. talked to the angel in the Black Cat last night. He insists on treating it as an old auntie just as before he insisted on treating it as an owl.

  “But Mr. Higginson—”

  “Call me Tom,” the angel said.

  “—I don’t sleep with old men.”

  “You’d sleep with Jean Cocteau, wouldn’t you?”

  S. was baffled.

  A rather remarkable evening. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Mac, S., and I were present. Nothing seemed further away than love.

  The Angel Higginson was dressed elaborately. A sunlamp had been used on his face. He sat and stared at S., who was uncomfortable. S. could finally stand it no longer. “You and your fake angels,” he said, turning angrily to me. “Your clever theology, your ingenious substitutes for bodies! Why don’t you tell us a story that doesn’t depend on the Jews?”