Count the present days until today arrives (ME in 2016)

 

I had never before used anything but my own strength and resources to go from morning to night and then from night to morning without mortally wounding myself in the psychic traps of the Incognosphere. The labors of infinite variation in language in which I had engaged had revealed the Daimon in my consciousness, and everything now proceeded as if I were no longer the true master of my movements, but rather their sticky, electrocuted residue. Just as the Cromwellians had been the sticky residue of the Old Testament prophets; and in 1789, the French revolutionaries had been the electrocuted residue of Ancient Rome. Only the proletariat had attempted a revolution without imitating anyone, and soon everything went more or less wrong. Not that I was drugged by historical memories, but at that moment, walking through the old First District of Newark, I remembered with genuine fondness the Banco D'Auria on Seventh Avenue, where a loan had been opened for B. Mussolini before the outbreak of World War II. Fay had told me that when the Duce invaded Ethiopia, the priest at St. Lucia Church had rung the bells wildly for half an hour. Here in America, in Newark's First Ward. Fay had visited me again midweek and vehemently challenged my stance. "How frivolous you are (.)" she said. True: frivolous enough, as any man, regarding the "originality" of his own actions, to be willing to take the "refresher course in marriage," in the module "Love in the Light of the World Revolution," which she suggested for the weekend. ------ It wouldn't have been of much use to us (I said). Why slow down, if to return to the flat region of the mind I don't even have to stand up to keep myself upright and balanced (?), if there I can come and go anywhere in the world, like a great cylinder endowed with intelligence and will (?). I've never had a point of support as firm as this (!) ------, I concluded. Indeed, I was no longer a fleeting presence in the world. I lived there in that room alone, the small room where I wrote and ate, amid my chaos of small possessions. My art had progressively forced my presence into all the paintings and sandwiches of reality in the world, wanting to shine through in every possible and imaginable form. There was not a shred of modesty in that austere style of writing, which reduced all others to a peripheral activity of human intelligence. A writing of the total plundering of reality, inhumane and self-destructive. It was often from it that my voice emerged, like the vociferous enchanted baby in the land of the unisex economy, questioning surrealist politicians about philosophy and Hollywood extras. If what they saw was considered good, I would step forward and present something inconceivable. If what they saw was considered inconceivable, I would step forward and magically erase their minds. It couldn't have been long (I told Fay) that I had reviewed and controlled everything, trying to act and speak only in a mythical way, skipping the all-too-human dialogue. I now lived eternally imprisoned by a grandeur without models, contrary to the initial plan. Something inconceivable, I told her. They hadn't yet risked their skin like that to achieve the thing itself. They had always been content with symbols, the delicate ones. They hadn't been able to go all the way and unleash the highest qualities. And she was there all the time, as close to them as their jugulars.