“A Scheme to bring the ashes of French poet Blaise Cendrars to the Sargasso Sea leads a novelist to unveil the tragedy behind the myth of one of France’s greatest poets.“

I had spent the entire day examining a photo of Cendrars and Léger which frames the two men engaged in intense discussion, as I imagined it, over the relative merits of painting vs. poetry, its similarities, the elements of painting that could be emulated in poetry, the question as to whether the poet uses similar tools to capture form, colour, shade. Or possibly Léger would borrow from the poet’s lexicon, such as when he spoke of painting in slang or of using flat areas of colour to create the impression of advancing or receding. The photo had iconic value for me. Two men, indifferent to the advance of time on their own bodies and minds, still following the light from beyond, following their instincts ruthlessly, single-mindedly tracking that which is the prey of the artist, using craft as a sort of lens to capture the elusive glimpse of the infinite which they sense more strongly than the common man.
I wondered again about the intent behind the quatrain. When a man says he wants to disappear anonymously and then publishes the wish in his most famous work, does he really want to disappear anonymously?

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The labyrinth of Chartres – a mediaval symbol encrusted within the floor of Charlemagne’s cathedral, as a symbol of the confusion that envelopes mankind in the absence of God. The theme is stolen from, excuse me, inspired by a Greek myth, that of Theseus who found his way through the labyrinth with the gift of the golden yarn, slayed the Minotaur and returned to the passionate embrace of Ariadne; now there’s a yarn for you. Christianity has genius, and lives by the credo of the 13th apostle, TS Eliot: “the immature poet borrows, the mature poet steals” – Decadents, Book IV, Verse I. Of course, no-one reads TS Eliot anymore, because he is a fascist – appellation fascismo controlée.

The Catholic Church only drinks wine, but it bottles eternity under the label, one holy catholic and apostoholic. The apostoholics are all 12 stepping, goose-stepping members of the four-sided religious yakusa – Islam, Catholicism, Freemasonry and lemme see – ah yes, the Orthodox Church of Modernity, the most rigid, the most unrelenting, and the most ruthless of the inquisitional elders, who claim “the truth” is held by a select few and which is currently attempting a hostile takeover of the house of eternal bliss, a family business run by the Wahhabis. Where then, is this God character in all of this? God isn’t in any of those places; he is discovered by the system of reverse negative induction, perfected by Russell Syntocky, the greatest card counter Vegas ever produced, a man who broke the house in sixteen casinos worldwide from Macau to Reno to Atlantic City, and had sixty-three different identities to slip past wary croupiers who had heard he could memorize six deck blackjack faster than an autistic mathematician.

When asked about the existence of god, Russell Syntocky, who was playing baccarat at the time in the VIP room of Stanley Ho’s Kingsway casino in Macau, responded simply:

“God is a work of the imagination.”

When further asked how much he’d wager on the existence of God, he answered:

“Sounds like a backdoor flush draw to me. One in twenty-three. But potentially huge payoff.”

“What’s that you said?” he queried, peering over those half-moon glasses, porto in hand.

“I said I’ve been admitted to law school, pa.”

“Hurrah!” he said, then paused to consider. “Hurrah!” he repeated. We were friends again.
  
Law school was easy compared to hauling rigs in forty below or feeding latrine moulds into a 2000 degree kiln. There were ten thousand cases to read, but not a foreman in sight. After three years of that, the big day arrived. We all wore legal gowns and shaved. Even the women. The Chief Justice droned on about pro bono publico and not promoting suits upon frivolous pretenses. Through all the decorum and pomposity, I could feel the bile rising. I’d quaffed a few beers on an empty stomach prior to the ceremony, and it was the hunch of what lay in store that was making me churn inside.
 
It didn’t take long for the Chief Justice, and the benchers of the Law Society and the remainder of them to recede from the mind’s eye. But Shevensky remained, his spirit and his voice resonant long after he’d been zapped off the planet. Shevensky had read Ignatius de Loyola.He’d studied Hui-neng and he’d read Jakob Boehme aloud while we watched the dawn sunlight hit the incoming ships coming into harbour through a haze of rotgut and psilocybin. Second best Kraut who ever lived.

“Who was the first?” I had wondered during one of our nocturnes in that shack on Musqueam land.

“Hank Bukowski.”

The poet named Bukowski, to hear Shevensky, was a pock-faced German-American son-of-a-bitch who street-fought like a warthog, but listened to Beethoven from his skid row flat, and charted the life of the lowly on the loser streets of San Francisco.

“He uses the simplest words, but nobody can copy him. He’s carved everything out of his life and soul. He bleeds onto the page. He owns it.”

“What does he own?”

“The zone of no-mind.”

With Shevensky dead and gone, I set out to discover Bukowski and this thing called no-mind.

I took to Rabelais right away because he loved drink and good food, because the monks wanted to kill him, because he was doctor and lawyer and vagabond, and pissed on the hypocrites and the sophists, but most of all because he took on the academy at risk of his life. But more than that, he could string a good tale together, and he made me realize that I had no interest whatsoever in the tamed beast known as literature, but only in finding more men, dead or alive, who could spin yarns and take the piss out of the true believers and the pedants and drink and eat to the wee hours.

Even his birthdate is controversial, although there is some record of cattle being slaughtered as he unceremoniously fell out of his mother’s womb, which would make it mardi gras, in the year 1494.

Here is the author’s Notice to the Reader in La Vie treshorificque du grand Gargantua which is an invitation to dine at the table of a bande d’ivrognes, nothing more, or less:

Amis lectuers qui ce livre lisez
Despouillez vous de toute affection
Et le lisant ne vous scandalisez
Il ne continet mal ne infection.
Vray est qu’ivy peu de perfection
Vous apprendrez, si non en cas de rire :
Aultre argument ne peut mon cueur elire
Voyant le dueil, qui vous mine et consomme,
Mieulx est de ris que de larmes escripre.
Pource que rire est le propre de l’homme

]]> http://davidjmackinnon.com/francois-rabelais/feed/ 0 http://davidjmackinnon.com/hunter-s-thompson/ http://davidjmackinnon.com/hunter-s-thompson/#comments Thu, 12 Mar 2009 15:46:18 +0000 admin http://davidjmackinnon.com/beta/?p=92

It’s a forgotten fact that a sizable share of the voting population regularly consumed hallucinogenics from the late sixties until the early 80s, when physical nerve excitement gained the ascendancy. LSD, in crude terms, is voluntary insanity. It makes you go bipolar. Nobody knows precisely how many people took it, or for how long, or the intensity of the doses, or who was doing the calibration of all the blotter and purple micro dot and mescaline being swallowed. We only know that at some point during the metaphysical bar mitzvah, when the heroes of World War II handled the mantle of glory to their sons, somebody pushed the reset button, and the heirs to be opted to completely erase their genetic card and start acting like salivating rats in the laboratory of life.

Enter Hunter S. Thompson – the Daniel Defoe of hallucinogenics.Thompson’s Journal of the Plague Year was Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Defoe clinically charted the deaths, village to village, week to week, parish to parish. Thompson clinically charted the self-imposed decline, from road stop to road stop. Here is Defoe’s introductory note to the Journal:

“being observations or memorials
of the most remarkable occurrences,
as well public as private, which happened in
London during the last great visitation in 1665.
Written by a Citizen who continued
all the while in London.
Never made public before.”

Thompson described his annals as a “savage journey to the heart of the American dream.”

Defoe described the increase in burials in St Giles in the Fields or St Andrews or Holborns.Thompson described the origins of the plague, one which was afflicting equal numbers in America:

“We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half-full of cocaine and a whole galaxy of multicoloured uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether, and two dozen amyls…But the only thing that worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible than a man in the depths of an ether binge…”

It’s hard to know what the numbers are. But if twenty per cent of young adults were strung out on acid during the period when their cerebral cortex hardened, and those people are aged fifty to eighty today and didn’t have the good sense to terminate the experiment like Thompson did in Woody Creek back in 2005, not even the supermarkets are safe.

I first landed on the old continent in 74, taking passage on the Dover-Ostend passenger ship. I stood on the docks in the pouring rain, pondering my next move with fifty English pounds to my name, then walked into a café with the sign Maes-Pils. A man waved me over to his end of the bar, and introduced himself as Gaby. Gaby had a face that rolled around like an egg on a counter. He wore an oversized black overcoat, and talked on about Eddie Mercx and the Paris-Roubaix cycling race.

After we got good and drunk, Gaby insisted I stay for the night at his house around the corner. Gaby had a freckled wretch of a ten year old son named Jos who drank table beer and smoked cigarettes from morning onwards, while Simone, his suffering wife, served plate after plate of stews and endives and glass after glass of that table beer. After a few days watching those potato eaters slurp down anguilles au vert and wetloof, the novelty was starting to wear off. Then a local hotel owner named Gerrit dropped by, a pretentious son of a bitch with a gorgeous black haired girlfriend, Magda. Gerrit was carrying a book, Nexus, by Henry Miller. Nothing better to do, I opened the book to the first page. “WOOF! Woof woof! Woof! Woof!” The author was barking into the night. …”Alone – with eczema of the brain.” But he didn’t just bark – he whinnied, he yelped, he mewled, he whined, he bayed at the moon, he bawled, he bared his teeth, he dropped his drawers, he clawed at the wall of his madness as he described the unquellable reverberation of a woman who had pushed him right to the edge. He was Isaac Dust salivating, ruminating, spewing out his love from Dante’s fifth heaven. He was Strindberg. He was the fifth cuckold of the eighteen thousandth implosion. He was a Pascalian bug, crawling across the shite of Botticelli, Bosch, Giotto, Cimabue, Piero della Francesca…I had arrived at the end of page one of Nexus. Thanks to a Brooklyn boy – Mr Henry Valentine Miller – I had been granted passage through a portal into old, corrupt, decadent, rotten Europe. I would never return to the maritime port of Vancouver. Ostend marked the port of entry into the millennial cesspool of Europe. Miller marked the day I vowed never to redeem my soul. My exile would be organic, total and irreversible.

In ’79, late August, I saw Milhoud for a routine checkup before I caught a ride out of town for New York and other points eastbound. Turned out something was wrong with me, and it had to be fixed. By the time I’d been through a second and a third operation I was somebody or something else. Chopped meat. For months, I could do nothing but read – and what I read was all right, but didn’t correspond to my state of mind. During one of those sojourns, I’d met a girl on 4th floor West, a leggy Scot named Dorothy who took to me, and got me thinking about the future for the first time in a long while. She had a thick Glaswegian brogue, and I hung onto her breasts and her laughter like a lifeline.

One Saturday afternoon, I dropped by the American Hotel to shoot some eight ball. I asked Minelli what he’d been up to – “I’ve been nailing a mean piece of pussy, some broad from Scotland”. Minelli’s tale was received by three or four smirks and nodding heads around the table. It was an amazing coincidence. We all knew somebody named Dorothy. Obviously there were a hell of a lot of Dorothys in Glasgow,and at least a half dozen of them had moved to Vancouver.

MacDonald dropped by the day after.

“Don’t take it so bad. Listen, there’s somebody named Charles Bukowski doing a gig at the Viking Hall on East Hastings. Wanna come?”

Bukowski was sitting at a table as we walked in, a liver lipped man with slouched shoulders and face boils, shouting for more wine. There were men like him down on the docks; it was the look in their eyes, not the size of their biceps that made you think twice before antagonizing them. You could smash a man like that a hundred times over, and he wouldn’t budge an inch. Whatever this Bukowski was, he felt no need to cover it up.

One of his poems was about a woman who trained lap dogs to perform unnatural acts. I liked that. There’s lots of truth and humour in rat dogs humping each other, and incontinent old drunks shitting their pants, and fighting when you know you’re chances of winning are nil.

Why is it that the simplest things are so hard to say. It was pretty raucous in the Viking Hall, but the place got quiet when Buke read out a poem called Consummation of Grief:

I even hear the mountains
the way they laugh
up and down their blue sides
and down in the water
the fish cry
and all the water
is their tears.
I listen to the water
in nights I drink away
and the sadness becomes so great
I hear it in my clock
it becomes knobs upon my dresser
it becomes paper on the floor
it becomes a shoehorn
a laundry ticket
it becomes
cigarette smoke
climbing a chapel of dark vines…
it matters little

very little love is not so bad
or very little life
what counts
is waiting on walls
I was born for this

I was born to hustle roses down the avenues of the dead.

To be there, in front of this man who ripped open his soul, leaving a wounded gash for you to peer in at what was inside, was a grace. And, it left you sad and lonely yourself, and it made you love that old son of a bitch, and his liver lips, and the fact that he never gave in to anybody. The next day I signed on at the toilet factory and caused myself a lot of pain and grief voluntarily, probably got into more fights than the Buke, and picked up a 1970 Grand Prix with a 440 under the hood, and tore up and down the Island highway with Jaws and the Mulcher, tossing bottles out the window, bully driving and going out on six day tears. What the Buke did had nothing to do with books. He was a rude saint, straight out of Chuang-Tzu. Every time I saw reason and held back instead of taking some prick’s head off, I felt guilty for days, as if I’d betrayed the Buke somehow. That was his gift and his curse.

I always thought of Buke when I was at the Exhibition Park race track, or on the assembly line, or when I managed to screw up another relationship…