Amos Weisz

of mutabilitie: a night with will self


— benylin expectorant — junkie panorama:

raum fuer alle

for long enough i'd crawled up the blissed-out junkie's arse hole. his stooped gait as he returned from exile at his grammar school, by 15 in scarf à la boheme, leading us fat jewboys ["eigentlich nur halb jude"] in a little troupe across hampstead high street while he, cultural commissar of our literary obergau, less recommended than threatened immediate eclipse of our mental faculties if we did not immediately read the next book on the cultural syllabus ("steppenwolf", delivered with a sybarite's involuntarily wild, rotating orbs), thus causing our minds to be swayed by an opportunist trust that we had here to deal with a true pied piper, a master, a magus; early an initiate into the mysteries of hashish, innit, he from the beginning wove his own conundrum into its consumption practices, usually in darkened unpleasant rooms with a crowd of plaisaunte characters as his comrades in qif ("are you at oxford too?" asked one with a cheer of countenance impossible of correction — he was broken off by the droning voice laced with absurd-ironic humour of the hierophant to our grey mass — "i could go to state penitentiary at her majesty's pleasure for two years for this") — the aesthete as rebel, right from the start. i idolized this leader whose aplomb astounded and whose savagely incisive stock market quotations sent its adepts into ecstasies of "who is this guy?" / "bow down", and for whom urbanity, as he admitted to myself, consilieri to his cheekbone, while he pensively sketched out his existential project and brushed distantly at the bumfluff on his jaundiced, anglepoise lower jaw, was the true life goal. he seemed to lure his adepts into the promised land of a beautiful, free narcosis/addiction — though not without a cautionary, hallucinated downturn as of the hand that he was too subtle to draw attention to, for he & he alone had been called, as profoundly innervated daredevil of the first water, to experience in thought the alpha and omega of william burroughs (he knew all the texts by age fourteen); indeed at fourteen i stood with him on the touchlines of his alma mater's second rugby pitch at ucs (university college school), where i still studied, having been awarded my u-11 colours with adam, later captain of the england under fifteen rugby team, while he muttered sotto voce, but with a rasp of raucous contempt and that rhetorical snicker: "just imagine sticking your shlong up the caucasian buttocks of one of those scrum backs there," pointing at the adipose, dimpled buttock that peeped out shyly from under the flapping tarpaulin of a pair of rayon rugby shorts of a shocking, coruscating, cobalt hue. he was devil, angel, and — desired by women. whenever he summoned up one of his tall tales it seemed fitting and meet, at least to those who stood to wonder & gaze from afar, not even to try to consider the strategic advantages of doubting the veracity of what he had said. you had been enriched by another self cappriccio à l'improvisé. "et çela doît te suffir, mon brave." "i had wanted to shtupp her," he confided to me in a hushed snarl as we met by serendipitous chance at the stomach end to the lift shaft at belsize park underground station (i had availed myself of a free ticket to a schubert concert by the amadeus quartet, led by norbert brainin, now deceased), "but there was just too much angst flying around — i let her suck me off, and left her a fiver in a brown envelope." awe i felt, of course, but that awe had that british teint, in the face of that awe that invisible little cap was doffed, a little brief excision of volumes of air ("aah") ensued, and a communion each attributed falsely to the other, one in fiction, one in verse, descended upon us as we waited for the lift . . .

at that time we all ran with a gang that used to go to middlesex polytechnic every tuesday and thursday after school, in order to live out our socialist fantasies far from the workaday toil of inventories of cattle out of the aeneid while we were being pinned to the wall by the nonce rabbi of conundrum, doctor usher, our classics teacher, his breath residing hotly into our ear while he clenched a shoulder and massaged it lovingly, and we calculated, eyes pinned to the solitary tack on the picture rail, its domed, brassy knoll caked in excrement our one solace, how many battalions of tank and mig fighters would be needed to place a cordon sanitaire around hampstead. we were citizens of an institution with a predominantly jewish ethos (40% of us at university college school were jews; there were assorted indians, and one or two blacks, ambassadors' sons, usually, useful at the photo shoot for a national television company, when the film cameras arrived and mr morley, teacher in the other fast stream, would wave his mane of white hair magisterially to african music while playing the bongos), we three (i come to bondu later) were half jew uebermenschen, musketeers of another order entirely, sly fuckers in a bucket of slop. the national union of school students had been called into life shortly before, self had departed tragically to a 'grammar school' (his akademiks family in finchley had separated him), for reasons of lack of funds and in spite of the offer of a half-scholarship (exhibition, et voilà ) from this 'liberal' private school where junk wholesalers, furriers, bookkeepers, car salesmen, and sundry psychoanalysts sent their sons wholesale (but at bespoke prices) to rub their fur against the skins of exotic but useful anglos & cosmopolitans of another fatherhood entirely. his powers of description were extraordinary by the age of eight, and his turns of phrase baffled. i remember vaguely the hyperreal depiction of a wild hare on the butcher's block, the coagulated blood lacing the wound at its throat with a necklace of garnets. his other, real friends came from 'christ's college', which it pleased him to level down to a common-or-garden comprehensive according to official egalitarian, labour, not to mention anarcho-syndicalist (he was avowedly one, as he told me in secret enclave at the coffee cup, hampstead high street) doctrine. in fact it remained a grammar school with a predominantly middle-class ethos — but they were all better than us spoilt brats of a sly hunger at ucs (university college school). after the meetings at the nuss (national union of school students) we used to drink at the freemason's arms, in the days before lavender toxins infested its façade, with david, one of our drinking mates, who crawled passionately under barbed wire for the otc, and reckoned the guards at stammheim had killed meinhof, baader und gesellschaft — now, as far as i am informed, a composer. when self felt that it was time to graze pastures new, out of the routine of agendas and points of order (union meeting terminology), the clockwork gestus of our mutual presumption, he said: "now the bombshell; henceforth i am no longer president of this rat-infested den. whoever wishes, may replace me by sitting down on the chair i now vacate." i waddled up to the desired seat of authority & charisma, and said, after planting my arse on its leather upholstery: "now i have total power over you, especially your bodies." how we laughed. what wits we were in them days.

when, after my first sexual experience (aged seventeen) at the university of warwick, where i visited my friend dan, and met, at a toga party, a delightful indian girl with acne on her cheek, smittie, who took me to bed, told me of her strict family in birmingham (she had pictures of that family throughout the room), and let me jerk off on her thigh — "great that two of my friends should have got off", said dear dan — and asked me to help her with her differential calculus, i got cold feet, thinking that she was attempting to haul me in, make landfall, take possession of me, so i fled, and where else but to will's digs, at exeter college, oxford. i remember changing buses at banbury cross, and riding over the oh-so-flat hills to oxford. "who there?" he asked, still half asleep — it was noon. "amos," i said. "how's your sex life, you old dog?" he said. "terrifying," i replied, and briefly told him the story of my flight from feared love. "glad to hear it," he said and let me in. then he told me that he longed to see two friends of his having sex, two people he really liked, that he was awfully fond of, to put it in sentimental terms, "but just call me old-fashioned", and indicated a heap of grass in the middle of an otherwise empty wooden table, which he called "cornish supergrass" — a term unknown to me, surely calculated to crank up my awe for the innervated mysteries of the marijuana urpflanze (a reference, gentle reader, to schiller-und-goethe). he built a joint, and told me we were going to see his friends. as we walked past the stairwell, the son of an english four minute miler was dancing to the 'music' of madness in white suit and silver-topped cane; we smiled and continued. "are you still seeing thurston?" i was to ask later. "i'm afraid political differences foreclose that option," he was to reply.

so we dragged on over the quad (rectangular strip of lawn in the middle of the courtyard) of exeter college, to the large and equally minimalist room of his friend "pig", punk à la mode with pink hair, at the middle of whose large, round wooden table there was, instead of cornish supergrass, a huge pot of marmalade. self imposingly muttered the name of the department store (lilywhite department store) where this unique object was to be purchased. i was introduced to the gang, and we hit the booze. i remember a tender smile on the face of pig. soon i sank into the dusk of the uninitiate, unable to keep the pace, a barbarian of intoxication, eclipsed, after a brief upsurge of intensities, by the planet oblivion his consciousness so richly deserved, and not on a day return either. i still hoped and thought i was receiving, tremulous within the mixed wavelength of a high pity, the gentlest beams of a rewarding kindness, the fumes of a passionately discreet sympathy, none the less true for being brief, for my appalling, pitiful and pitiable behaviour, noblesse oblige, as uninvited guest, and awakened shortly thereafter, refreshed by sleep, covered in the excrement of a shame unacknowledged by any, and leaving i suppose after the usual keyword of cheer ("cheerio") in those days before thatcherism put an end to the "merry" in "christmas".

for a long time we saw nothing, heard nothing of one another, and at this point the moebius loop of memory must redeem the time of fallow intent, i must introduce bondu, the third of our trio à la falaise, since i have failed to speak of bondo, this certain bonduhu, who went with us to this jewboys' private school. he too was half jew, his father a bohemian glass importer and his mother a very beautiful, energetic and joyful woman who worked as secretary at a secretarial college and, in her time off, always celebrated rather than controlled the life of her offspring. bondi i had not known at all for the first year of junior school aged 8, because for some reason he had been placed in the lower stream (private school code for lack of university fibre, but they all got in), though after receiving his form (private) or class (comprehensive insurance) prize with a proud smile shimmering with bourgeois possibilities he was moved sharpish into the upper stream, where he in like wise shone as a brilliant classicist. the first time i saw him within the family context was when i was asked to bring him his latin homework. it was night, dark (an attribute of night), i meant to say it was winter, the word just slipped, c'est comme ça, hélas, quoi faire, it was night, dark, it was winter, as said, stated, it's a possibility, dark, as stated, ice-cold, as said, not, hampstead, the city of a thousand infirmities, diseases, and sundry crock on stilts was lit, illumined, falsified, by the coats of light given out on a thousand khaki streetlamps. a stone stairway led to a door stripped of truth by a lick of blue gloss. the narrow detached four-storey house was near the brow of heath street, whitestone pond, highest point in London. three or four windows had been blocked in with red-bake bricks during the eighteenth century due to the window tax. i no longer recall the act of ringing what must have been a bell and being ushered with what was doubtless forthwith hospitality into the hallway or corridor. a bondugaga i did not yet nor ever would know was lying in the top storey on a bed that brooked every infirmity of character — stolid maple from the time of tsar nicholas. his embroidered appliquéd coverlets masked the luxuriant, lulled confidence in his own abilities that characterized the most arrogant of us arrogant know-nothing nitwits, while his two sisters attended his every whim, served him refreshments, danced like graces around the nominal sickbed of their adored older brother. he lay there, resting, recovering, regathering, regrouping his forces for the assault on that holy of holies, a career. this pasha of cares, a moderate technocrat bred in the womb of an immodest thirst, not at all unhealthy to appearances, received with remote thanks the sorbets and glacés on offer from the hands of his beautiful sisters. i gave him his homework, he jerked his head up and down smugly in a honed mask of smile that brooked no conformity, i disappeared. we were yet to become friends, good by obsolete but prevailing standards.

really bonde had the closer fellowship with self than i. i am compelled to suppose that theirs was a friendship of contrarieties, that of couple rather than pseudo-couple (see beckett [siehe beckett [voyez beckett, et voilà]]), because bondicku had no differences with the moral order his bourgeouis heritage had conveyed, while self donned the paratrooper, punk junk of a mindset geared to trouble, war, violence, death — incalculable rebel, a revolutionary, even, in his plume de guerre of silk scarf that flapped wavily through arabesque squitters of a neon ink, in that cold air of a thousand diced dewdrops, as he raced over the gravel in the approach drive to the freemason's arms (more of that anon), the tyres screeching to a halt of this devil trained and certified at the acupuncture school of dr. thomas mann (read mephisis — but more of that anon), as he raised his hip over the reassuring leather of his 50 cc omt mikro. his favoured expression of just ire and wrath, hushed by the urbanity and worldly weariness of an experience yet to come — he had seen it all — was the presumptuous threat to a bourgeois côterie whose presence he sought anxiously at all times, over a cappuccino he would stir tiredly, calibrating the index of his thoughtfulness at the coffee cup, hampstead high street, and tapping his silver spoon with a general's demeanour against china of a rare porcelain while delivering himself with dark vexation and the sardonic cynicism of exordium artisticum praecox: "come the revolution, you'll all be lying in the gutter." this was, so the theory went, to be expected imminently, since america was up to its neck in bad credit and plus ça change, not, it was happening, shit hit shovel time, push come to shove, the revolution was upon us, and self was its leader in the top stratosphere, us. i was more of a fellow traveler in this sorry tale, not even perceiving the petty bourgeoisité of my ultimate reflexes, a mere absent presence presiding like a ghost over the game of masks: revolution vs. ultraconservatism that prevailed between bonda and self over earl grey and chocolate fingers. "who shall we kill?" "yum." he, the tearaway, whose moped's savage barks as he revved up the throttle could be heard from the gate of wrought iron at the front garden of bondiollina's mother's house, while bondicku assumed a grin of complacent indulgence for the hellraising antics of this ragga scholar and gentleman, and looked over at his darling, beautiful and wonderful sister natasha, lively for her part as sin. one time, i remember, bondiatika had to leave the house for some reason, and with an immediate glance of complicity in whose bond the demoniac resolve relumed gently, without a word, self and i dashed up the stairs, two at a time, and stormed into his room, where we immediately began rummaging in the drawers of his writing bureau for the private papers. i remember nothing we saw there but a tubular bells album, no doubt self remembers the rest. time to shovel out the shit of recognition, awe and kudos for him i loved in the trees of a fugitive visit and who now sits at cynicism's high table — the soul "a sediment annihilated at death for lack of a passport to oblivion", god "a fake, worthless" and death "a numb joke, designed to catch fleas".

to bondicciolina i gave vent to the sense of honour i involuntarily bestowed on my king as i squirmed in ecstasies of denial and knelt mentally on the purple velvet of a cushion presented only for the use of us chevaliers de la bonne foi, which act of denial was accompanied by a crippling, a seizure of the mental faculties, riot of the suns, with little giggly gasps of a barely sexualised nature. bondicku par contre adopted a laissez-faire cynicism with regard to self's purported vacations from the laws of obedience and gehorsam to the interests if not the manners of family that obtained in our various necks of the hydra-headed wood. scrubland wasteland dotted cubes of white light (siehe celan). the stone fountainhead at the bottom of fleet street, gospel oak, where we first watched woody allen, munching chips in the popcorn section of the abc cinema at the bottom of fleet street, and munching it well. i remember it well. anyway archway finchley belsize park hampstead gospel oak hampstead. in whom can i confide . . . my dream . . . such a purported dash for freedom from bourgeouis family constraint as his move to a squat opposite his mother's house in kentish town won bondhuhuhaha's contempt and derision, while it won my awe; though feebly contemptuous of his rhetorically voiced seafarer-academic bearing of hauteur and presumption of derision, i none the less, how shall i put it, snagged on the dream of his heirloom. he moved to the squat for a while, shortly after passing the entrance exam, finally managing a place at exeter college, oxford, cleared at the third orbit around the cautious, extramatriculatory feelers of these august, autumnal, even, institutions: "i got in by the skin of my teeth," self confided to me as he casually contrived another of those mythopoeic building blocks to my doom, and we sipped, genteelly (moi), him with harsh reality of resolve, at a glass of trapiste beer (brewed by monks) at the freemason's arms. "but i am psyche am world" he continued, after dropping a penny in the jukebox and thus giving that august icon of pop machinery leave to play gerry rafferty's baker street (there was no jukebox at the freemason's). "this is how it really went. i screwed up all the other papers, but hit the jackpot on a russell quote. i forget what it was. of course i tore it apart anyway. i used palaver like "if we posit" to refute a completely obvious truth. half way through the performance i went out to buy a pack of cigarettes, marlboro, i think it was, and came back to finish the essay. i scored an alpha + on it, top general paper in the country, & was immediately adopted to the oxford apostles as ganymede of the sour apples. i was chucked out in the first foundling round, but then they dropped me in a pool, which is UCAS (university entrance hawks, whose word holds sway over career & destin) jargon for the waiting hopefuls, contenders in spe, and because i got a first in the general paper, they accepted me to exeter college, my third choice, at the third instance." he had written the oxford entrance exam during the fourth term of his a level course at christ's college (english, canal walks, psychophilosophy, if memory serves), and after being finally accepted to exeter college, oxford, with a knight's sarcophagus already reserved in his name at westminster abbey, London, regardless of the possibility of future failure, of screwing up his a levels in code (english, canal walks, psychophilosophy), he moved into the squat.

there, i was received into the presence. pale, threadworn icons of another ascesis: guitar. bong, chased in silver and with a sad mesh, of fishbowl, glass titration pipettes, made and sold by a frank african named "boo-boo". self was all thumbs, hopeless with his hands — well, he could draw a bit. dostoyevsky's "the sons of adam". brighton rock through the canvas of his field bed. he roughly grasped, or rather grabbed, the neck of the guitar in his handwidth's harsh embrace, and began to pluck a couple of dissonances, while singing, or rather crowing, in a serviceable southern-state accent with an undertone of malice out of hitchcock's the birds: "i was in the jailhouse . . . in tennessee . . .". we smoked a spliff, then he discerned that the fuse in the bar heater's plug had blown, the rough, frayed muslin cladding to its wires etched like a sheath of reticulated wires in my memory. he girded himself for the stumble to bill's, the ironmonger's on kentish town road. at that time i could not imagine walking stoned through the unthinking hordes, through a paranoid maze of suffering heartless rara avis albinensis crowned with eagle feathers as at beckett's barbershop ("will you be having the lonesome eagle look this spring, sir?") looking for an opportunity to peck at my integrity, so that the signs would exfoliate drastically of an auto da fé in the barnyard of my own pleistocene noises. rapture in the fugitive flight from dread. i could not, i repeat, could not imagine walking the streets and tailoring my reply and demeanour to these cunts in civil suits and attire, in short, of performing for their act. kif was for me, an-sich, a journey into doom, a kind of visitation, a homecoming, an annunciation, of doom, in an accession of impotence and feeble-mindedness, well categorized by the concept so discerningly applied by les choisis et élus of the medical profession, paranoia, with its fictitious grid drawn on the haze of my surface, a paranoia i felt at least while tripping, stoned, solitary among the isolated whores of another justice and their enwrapping venom and latte froth, all the while conscious of a ghastly fall in my mental capacities, as i walked solemnly down the strand barefoot into this grey wash of complete cluelessness which i felt in my stomach, while the knowledge in weirdly heightened consciousness of being a goner, a basket case for the foreseeable future, which my arrogance while sober, carefully forged in the fire of a love both less and more than maternal, would conveniently lead me to forget (read castaneda, guy), this dianoetics of my nullity would resurface, filling me with dread and awe at the workings of a divine providence that would just not go away, ja get mi, and i'm suddenly sitting on a chair, waiting for the joint, in a hash circle full of goths all with bleeding auras discharging out of their matted hair, all of them gothed up to the max in belts and leathers of another feudal hokum, in gauntlet, spur, and trope, buckling and annealing that joint of scavenger community with a folded strip of silver paper. at that squat did then will self rise in resolve of steel, tempered at the anvil of doom, to purchase that little brass cylinder of connectivity that is the fuse. he came back with that fuse, if it was the same one, took screwdriver and loosened the screws from the back of the plug. having inserted said metal tube innits niche, innits little plastic grot, he re-screwed the screws, inserted the plug in the socket at the bottom of his writing wall with its handsome scritoire of embossed oak, pressed the red triangle — and it worked. "curious satisfaction upon bringing to a successful conclusion this smallest of actions," he remarked. i was stunned by the nullity of this remark, which reflected upon a reflection that i considered in itself a waste of time — i preferred to go stumbling on the rampage to mr cohen, the pharmacist on haverstock hill, belsize park, in my pyjamas, to ask for a bottle of gelignite, having waddled up england's lane humming schostakovitch's late quartets at top volume, in sequence and note for note, to fill up my brains with anything but this unbearable actuality. i murmured, let my head drop, and waited attentively, crucified by an honest love and adoration mingled with contempt for the disembodied quality that i felt he embodied, and waited for the next pearl of wisdom to drop from his mouth. "science," he continued, stabbing a razor with a ballpoint biro, "simply consists in piling up the greatest possible collection of the largest possible amount of facts. whoever has the largest number or amount (quantity; quantitaet; quantité — voilà ) of drawers in his filing cabinet at the end of his life, provided that they are full to the brim with the tatterdemalion echoes of another seething, another seeing — has won; his world is deepest." i, german idealist in spe, did not avail myself of the countering concept of theory lest i proffer lèse majesté to this wicca of empiricism. i dared not counter the concept of congeries, that heap of dissolute molecules signifying structurelessness, as hegel well puts it — in his "critique of empiricism and its discontents" at the beginning of chapter five to the phenomenology of mind, after the passage on the master slave dialectic — and which congeries hegel takes to represent the empiricist mindset, i dared not, i say, counter that concept of conneries, which to me was all his pragmatics amounted to, with the opposing concept of theory to which i had dedicated my life, in a leninisation of all interests to the point where i now read only on homology subspaces in topology theory for fear of sullying myself, of gritting my teeth on a lubricated falsity. the more powerful presence of a master whom i could endure (the feeling was mutual, i'm sure) only for short periods and at long intervals compelled my withholding of crucial information for the movement at the vital moment, and THE PRESENCE negligently absorbed my muttered dissent. "reasons?" it demanded magisterially. i had none.

for a long while i lost sight of him. a short note, written as in the twilight that ensues after heroin intake, addressed my gift of two years previously: the collected stories of john cheever, whose 'falconer' he had enthused about, and urgently recommended to us adepts at the high school for fat-arsed good-for-nothings (of its text i only remember a brutal murder with a red-hot poker). i, who kleptomanically went to foyles every weekend for the ritual breach of law, filling my plastic bag with recondite goodies and strolling out with cheeks bathed in fire from intoxication at the sin just committed, had given him the book of stories, though telling him after briefly glancing through its pages that i found it insipid. the tardy reply, two years later at my feminist communal house in cambridge (dishwashing optional — leave it to the girl):

"in the middle of a bored instant i looked up
and concluded you were right."

as usual, his shining insight and expression stung me with an indolence that trumped all possible response, which reaction then gave over to indifference on my part (suppressed envy or aversion to the lack of proportion between his tiniest mutations of mood and opulence of expression?); i put the scrap of paper aside and went whoring after the usual strange suspects.

". . . my word processor manipulations . . . you are german but why the move there . . . unfortunately no time for a thorough report on the weirdness . . . please do me the favour of accepting this fait accompli with good grace . . . i have reluctantly come to the conclusion that i am only really fit to be a writer, and indigent with regard to all forms of real economic activity (! — he had all his life wanted to be "a man of letters" (homme de letters) , or at least that's what he told me aged 15 in front of a changing booth at swiss cottage baths, while we fumbled with the wire cage of clothes to take to the counter. after our bath, which he took genteelly reclining on his back on a bed of water and paddling insouciantly with his feet while his lanky, sinewy arms trailed from their sockets, we repaired to the glass-walled café above the pool. "curious how few perfect bodies there are," he said there. "male or female?" i asked sharply. "both," he replied dreamily) . . . . . . good to receive your so witty letter on post-fascist conditions in berlin . . . please continue writing . . . meinhof lives . . . hell and high water . . ."

that was ten years later. summer, berlin. the winter previous, before i resettled in berlin, i was working for a bike courier outfit in goodge street, since, as a consequence of my unreliability, i had lost all employment as a freelance translator, and i myself was living in a squat with my first wife sandy and will, another, different will who was nonetheless to become chuffed to bits at the mystical affinity between their elective nicknames, as i did not neglect to inform will senior, the great writer. one evening after work, the most depressing night of my life, i saw, in the display window macraméd with christmas lights of a chain bookstore on charing cross road, a neat pile of books recommended for yuletide reading. their author: will self. 'the quantity theory of value'. again the luxuriant riot of latinate pseudo-concepts, cranked up to the max. i went inside and bought a copy. while reading it that same evening, muscles worked into a cramp and mind completely annulled by my disorientated stravage on wheels through the side-alleys, dead corners and buggered one-way streets of london (i was surely the worst rider in the outfit, could never find the way, or pedalled too slowly) it occurred to me that not i but self was the apostolic successor to samuel beckett. he had the sharper analytics, an eye for the absurd but telling detail, not i. why was i a poetry contender or aspirant? in order to convince the world of my soul's beauty. rent-boy in paris would have been too dicey for my taste, so i took pot luck with another milieu, another métier, that suited me just as well. self had made it. homme de letters. "on dirait."

dream: i am in a lift shaft with the aforementioned cognoscentus of female literature, we're fleeing the cops, reason: unknown. in free fall we bolt down a few more stories into a underground car park, where he changes into a woman by donning an matron's embroidered lace cap. "that way you'll get past the vicious pigs", he says, turning to me with a refulgent morsel of resolution glowing in the mount of his cheekbone. this was before or after i read quantity theory (a tract on the thermodynamic principle of conservation of energy, of which self is an acknowledged master) — previous to that i hadn't given him a thought. soon after the resumption of our correspondence, 1992–1993 london–berlin ("it will be good to hear from you. if not, it has been good writing to you", i wrote in dreamy evocation of a recondite beckett passage), my homage: "i have long been dreaming of you; — you have long been something to me like a spirit guide to the perplexed." maimonides junkie in spe, indeed. what deceit. he was the ideal foster father, at whose straitjacket, conjured up by myself, i could abreact the missed pubertary battles without committing myself, at a distance, as ironic disciple and crittietaster. i already knew myself better by then, knew that i would come to nothing in literary terms. i had whored in vain with the artistes of my love life. in spite of that i assumed or adopted his style, even if dumbed-down and consecrated to neurosis and failure, in a cheerful byronic parody about a stumblebutt [spitzbub] without discernable identity, who never gets to come or ejaculate.

father, hail to thee. I'm sitting in my neolithic flat in wedding, formerly a notorious communist hotspot of berlin, now a place for bikers and tattoo artists, with a nightlight of non-jewish provenance in front of me, the consumption of a pork kebab behind me. ruth, my father's spirit says, and disappears. i make to exchange my father complex for a mother complex. that has its rewards, in sexual terms also. jena site of the napoleonic war 1815 over german or french hegemony in the thuringian forest region. i encircle the valleyed cauldron counter-clockwise. self's code has been cracked. my life poem is to be entitled non juan. i am saved, released, liberated. that same evening i fall passionately in love with a beautiful east german girl. i write her love poems the next day ('the crowns of trees kissed my arse') and send them to her immediately. just call me a romantic. just like will, seul romancier de nos jours.