Jan 04 2009
You wouldn’t happen to have a toothpick, would you?
Those were the last words of Alfred Jarry, the author of Supermale, Ubu Roi, and the The Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, pataphysician.
I became Dr. Faustroll in 1974 when lightning struck while Blake Praytor, Randall Ashley, Jean R. Ligi, and I were smoking Craggy County Umber on the concrete front porch of a house we rented from Ralph Rampey. Randall had been struck by lightning previously on the Ocracoke Ferry while making light of the wrath of The Lord. I haven’t been struck by lightning although I don’t even believe that people are stupid enough to believe in The Lord.
I first became aware of the ludicrous life and times of Alfred Jarry while taking an honors course under Dr. Thomas Douglas at Clemson University in 1967 or 68. The course was called The Theatre of the Absurd, which was perfect for me because I has just finished rereading the entire Shakespeare canon, and I was fairly convinced that if all the world was a stage, we were sorely lacking in directors and support staff.
I don’t read much anymore because I don’t need to. After awhile everything becomes pretty much the same old shit, and I am particularly averse to reading anything written by anyone still alive because I don’t want to get sued for having tapped into one of the limited ideas available to the human species by someone with a good lawyer.
I write several thousand words a day, most of them forgettable or for hire. When I used to type words on sheets of paper using an IBM Selectric II, at least once a year, I would gather piles of paper that I did not bother to work on in the previous several months, and I would burn it all.
It is more difficult to vaporize your thoughts in this age of the Ted Stevens Intertube. I occasionally stumble across posts I wrote ten or fifteen years ago that still exists at URLs that someone is paying to maintain on the ether, which is itself an extremely old idea.
These posts are the digital equivalent of cave paintings by my reckoning. I used to worry about tracking them down and erasing them, but that would be like invading Gaza to bring peace to Israel. There will never be peace Israel until one of those assholes launches a nuke to protect the rest of the helmet heads.
I have a book here somewhere by Al Alvarez that is called The Savage God, which is about suicide, as if Ubu had anything to do with suicide. He was the dude that stuffed the torn up remnants of his opponents in his pockets. He was not a suicide. He was a killer.
The title of The Savage God comes from an observation written by William Butler Yeats after seeing the premiere live action performance of King Ubu in 1896: “The players are supposed to be dolls, toys, marionettes, and now they are all hopping like wooden frogs, and I can see for myself that the chief personage, who is some kind of King, carries for Sceptre a brush of the kind that we use to clean a closet. Feeling bound to support the most spirited party, we have shouted for the play, but that night at the Hotel Corneille I am very sad, for comedy, objectivity, has displayed its growing power once more. I say, After Stephane Mallarmé, after Verlaine, after Gustave Moreau, after Puvis de Chavannes, after our own verse, after all our subtle colour and nervous rhythm, after the faint mixed tints of Conder, what more is possible? After us the Sav
age God. “
I remember asking Tom Douglas if anyone ever suggested that Ubu was the typical American idiot who believed that he or she could grow up to be anything, and his answer was so cute: “Of course not,” he said, “We are all leaving that up to you.”
Imaginary solutions to imaginary problems. Imaginary cures for imaginary ailments. Imaginary answers for imaginary questions. Imaginary hopes and dreams to counter imaginary horrors and ordinary madness. That’s what this blog is all about.
If you stumble up the stairs to the flat behind the landing and encounter the dwarf with his larded hair and shoulder holsters, be sure to be carrying at least one toothpick. That’s all he ever wanted and all he will ever need.
