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Authors: Kathy Acker

Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Literary

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BOOK: Don Quixote, Which Was a Dream
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You don't think our friendship's important. Maybe you're so young, you believe there're an infinite number of mad relations.

I agree with you: I was too frightened you didn't love me and not terrified enough of imposing on your love. Please remember, you also feared I didn't love you and you begged me for reassurance.

I hope your wife'U make you happy forever. I'm saying this cause I want to be friends. I want my desire for friendship to waken your love for me -

Walking the streets.

Tatlin designed a city. Tatlin took unhandlable passion and molded it.

It all comes out of passion. Our city of passion.

Biely wanted to fuck his closest comrade, Alexander Blok,'s wife until the duel between them in 1906 (which never happened), then Biely left Russia for a year. When Biely described this passion, he constructed language as if it was a building. If architecture wasn't cool cold, people couldn't live in it. I have to figure out why I'm hurting so much. Recognition: I'm really hurting. One of this hurt's preconditions is I'm in love with you.

A city in which we can live.

What're the materials of this city?

Is sensuality less valuable than rational thought? Is there a split between mind and body, or rather between these two

types of mentality? Why's a Cubist painting, if it is, better art than a Vivienne Westwood dress? Is our city abstract?

When you talk to me on the phone I'm hurt and maddened by your lack of sexual and emotional communication. Art criticism, unlike art,'s abstract.

I'll mold my love for you: I can't say over the telephone what I want to say to you: 'Please touch your cock because I can't touch your cock now and I have to touch your cock.' What's mainly not allowed? Time's the main non-allower. I can't touch your cock right now because one event can't be another event. (Time is substance.) Three thousand miles now between the events of you and me, or three hours. Absence to a child is death. This is death. Time's killing me. Time's proving you don't love me. I have to mold my passion for you out of time:

2. The Poems Of A City

On Time

The subjunctive mood takes precedence over the straightforward active. The past controls the present.

desinas ineptire et quod vides périsse perditum ducas.

The past.

fulsere quondam candidi tibi soles,

cum it hurts me to remember I did act up today, a way of saying 'I'm not perfect,' forgive my phone call, ventitabas quo puella ducebat (on a leash: leather Rome)

The first future tense. What do words really say: does this future propose future time?

amata nobis quantum amabitur nulla.

ibi ilia multa kisses on kisses

between us your hands your flesh unending

time into time the past wasn't past - how do I

transform the past: that awful

prison cause it ends?

By repeating the past, I'm molding and transforming it, an impossible act.

fulsere vere candidi tibi soles.

New section:

nunc iam illa non vult: tu quoque, impotens can't fuck any boyfriends these days, bad mood no wonder I'm acting badly, noli NO

My present is negative. This present becomes imaginary: The future of amabitur and the subjunctive at the beginning of the poem?:

nee quae fugit sectare, nee miser

vive good advice sed obstinata mente

perfer, obdura. vale, puella. (My awful telephone

call. This's my apology, Peter.

Do you accept?)
iam
(ha ha)

Catallus obdurat, nec te requiret nee rogabit

invitam: I'm a good girl I have, behave perfectly, at tu dolebis. The imaginary

makes reality, as in love, cum

rogaberis nulla scelesta. Scelesta nocte. My

night, quae tibi manet vita

without me? quis nunc adibit? without me cui

videberis bella? quern nunc amabis? with me you

fuck whoever you want. Let the imagination reign

supreme, quern you now

fucking? cuius esse diceris

huh! quern basiabis a stupid question?

cui labella labula mordebis?

(allied to death?) at tu, Catullus, destinatus obdura

to facts, for only the imagination lives.

The imagination is will.

Will Versus Chance

no more sighing blackness nihilism and senile old fogies' blathers as snot falls out of their nostrils

all more worthless than the two bums I saw talking today, suns rise and set I never see them -for you my love and me a few brief hours of sun then no consciousness blackness perpetually, take it kiss me do it grab me grab my arms grab my ankles grab my cunt hairs the only nights of light the only eyes we have, conscious.

so much so much so many phenomena we can no longer think understand, realizing we're not responsible, so no bourgeois or moralist can touch us or know anything real about us.

Time Is Identity

No one he states my boyfriend'Id rather fuck than a duck, than me. Even if Psyche herself begged him. He said to me. But what a man tells any woman who loves him is lost in these winds and squalling

waters. My lover is changing water.

Loneliness

Lines one through four. Emotional thesis: on always being away from you. I'm not scared of dying. I fear dying (absolute absence)'11 take away your love for me.

Lines five and six. The supplementary thesis: death or absence destroys love.

Lines seven through ten. The antithesis: love can and does fight this absence.

Lines eleven and twelve. The synthesis: My love for you is making me your mirror your object, fuses, whether I'm with or away from you. So this love's overcoming and becoming, through identity, one with death.

Lines thirteen through eighteen. The next thesis is based on the above synthesis: when I'm dead and absolutely apart from you, I'll still love you. No matter how long you stay alive, we'll eventually be together forever.

Lines nineteen and twenty. The supplementary thesis: our love is absence.

Lines twenty-one through twenty-four (the first section which isn't just one whole sentence. The three short sentences of this section syntactically reflect their verbal content). The antithesis: This life or these constant changes may destroy our love. Like death, love is infinite.

Lines twenty-five and twenty-six. The synthesis: while we're alive right now we have to love each other as much as possible cause love has nothing to do with time. (I can never say anything this direct to you cause I love you too much.)

The overall sentence syntactical structure is and concerns the relations between several kinds of time. What is the verb structure? Verbs're Latin's grammatical backbone.

The first kind of time, lines one through four, is linear time. The first main verb is
is,
an
is
which isn't Platonic. This common
is
leads to the first person subjunctives,
fear
and
hinder,
as well as the
is'
subject noun,
fear.
This kind of time or the world makes human fear.

Common time's other or enemy is death.
Is
is bounded by death. So the other of
is
is
be without
in the present tense.

Since the past is like the present in this time model, lines five and six, death or absence also destroys memory. Here's another reason I'm afraid.

Since the only certainty I can have in common human time is that which has to be most feared - the end of time -, all I can feel is more and more pain.

The second temporal model begins with human will, when I will to enter the realm of death. Line seven. This is exactly what I can't do, the antithesis, the necessarily imaginary.

Because we're apart, our sex because it has to continue, is false, imaginary. Line nine. Love makes me dare. I'm coming, masturbating, in the darkness. Line ten. Blind. Because I love you I want to die. My main verb is
orgasm
in the mythological past tense; in the realm of blackness the mythological's more powerful than the temporal present. (What is the time model of my will?)

If I've died to you am dead, who am I? Because I love you I've destroyed myself: I'm you. Lines eleven and twelve. Love destroys common time and reverses subject and object; the verb acts on itself; I'm your mirror; identity's gone because there's no separation between life and death. Line twelve. The final model of time is that the mirror reflects the mirror: time is our love.

But my whole body's aching and I'm crying uncontrollably every night because you're not here:

Now all tenses and moods,
may come had given,
like and equal to all other phenomena appear out of nothing or death, line eighteen, which is also the ideal, lines fifteen and sixteen. But my whole body's aching and I'm crying uncontrollably every night because you're not here:

Now all tenses and moods, may come had given, like and equal to all other phenomena appear out of nothing or death, line eighteen, which is also the ideal, lines fifteen and sixteen. But my whole body's aching and I'm crying uncontrollably every night because you're not here, lines nineteen and twenty. The subjunctive tenses grammatically reflect this new model of common time: change is time.

I'm fighting the phenomenal that has to happen. I'm scared. Line twenty-one. So all the verbs are now subjunctives; all verbs are change. Again: loving you is making me feel pain. The final verb,
is changed,
grammatically reflects its opposite in content: the mirror. Time: love or fusion exists side by side with change:

I want you. That's all I can think. This is our absolute present. Line twenty-six.

Time is Pain

last night I couldn't sleep at all, then I woke up in a sweat though I wasn't crying tears fall from my eyes. I'm

in pain I phone I want to suicide you

over and over again my brain revolves you

focus obsession I see nothing else. You're my world

blindness' opening my heart. This 'love'

between us (your name) to me is
blood.

Everywhere you slept you touched you came

in this house is your blood.

I would do anything to fall asleep. At night. But as

each dream passes

each absolute reality shows itself temporary

I obsess you. At times I hurt

like hell. At times I'm dead. Every other night

there's been a morning when I can

stand up from this bed.

Now there's only night: each night

unnatural is the ornament of your blood.

Time Is Made By Humans

I hope there's some relief writing

this you: otherwise, none. I've never felt such pain.

Day after day pain after pain how do

I count these days? It's pain to count.

Pain to have a mind.

Worst: at the moment when sleep's ease should come,

(no coming, no you.) and thoughts are loosened,

but I don't want these thoughts.

I phone: I don't like life.

So stopping the mind up, no

life no utterance, jail within jail within

jail, what can days dates

time matter? Only this ease

of verbally sobbing out ugliness.

3. Scenes Of Hope And Despair

The girl's happy because she knows the man she loves's in love with her.

The girls sitting around: Peter didn't call me. You've got a

date tomorrow with him, don't you? Should we eat? Did they fuck yet? Great fun, seducing girls. These men have the most l'un. The most we can have is getting revenge. That is fun. Did they fuck yet? I don't know. Peter still hasn't called. I bet he forgets his accent. Uh-oh. Hurry back. Oh oh, she's drinking champagne. That means she's in love. I say, men just want you to suffer. They're so fucked up. They not only break up with you suddenly, they want this big dramatic thing. After you've broken up whenever a man starts talking about who's guilty, I tell him I couldn't care less I'd rather drink champagne. I think Peter's a little lame I mean he's always making dates and kind of forgetting the time but at the same time I could tell he really cared for me so his not calling me now doesn't mean he's off me. Edward's breaking up with me has made me think a man can't want me. All she does is cry. Englishmen fall in love too often so it doesn't mean anything to them. We always tell Englishmen, we only go with American men. This film is dumb.

Why do you want? I want love. You're not going to get love. OK. You're going to get hurt again. I know. The main thing is to always giggle. All the last week when I really hurt, I felt like I had a disease. Being hurt is having a disease.

The girls cross their legs and laugh. 'What should we do now?' 'I need food,' she, fainting, said. Her arms draped over the pillow. 'We're caught in our own trap,' she said laughing.

BOOK: Don Quixote, Which Was a Dream
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