Monday, December 25, 2006

Rotten Mail in Denmark



Dear Q.,

How quickly you lurch into hurt! And at the same moment you have begun to share my penchant for solipsism and the integrity of doom. I would have thought Mesmer to get along with Sancho, if not yourself, much in the same way you thought, some weeks ago, Sancho might get along with me. But I am glad you have seen the swords that guide this game of ours. You are in the desert. Your throat must be parched. Let the storms of betrayal restore you to things you knew all along - men operate on interest alone. Be that interest of the self or the interest of others. It happens, not unlike the way shortcuts form along paths. I must not let your exaggerated disappointment entagle me for long. I submit my apology here and now, but surrender my quill to the same excitement with which my eyes originally approached your daunting letter. I get the sense that you no longer take any satisfaction from our game, but are unwilling to let things go based on an older, romantic notion you hold of me. I shall not let this spoil my fondness for you. However, nor shall I restrict or protect you from 'M' - as you call him. Nor 'M' from you - Mesmer speaks for Mesmer and will admit no control from the likes of you or me!

I am the spirit of my father. I realized this after Mesmer placed me in a deep reflective state. In exploring the substantive encounter I made with his ghost. I relived the scene. I wished for night. Time out of joint, seated in Mesmer's chair, I watched the changing of the guard, and filled with tension, twitched with the nervous energy of the familar military routine. Horatio, Barnardo and Marcellus, not at all in the mood for this, stand on the periphery while I encounter the ghost. Snowing, and he moved and spoke uninhibited. The focus! The deliberation! O Q! I'm beginning to see that Father is more than a name! It's a verb! He whispers, sings, and I know now that my destiny is his becoming!

But let me return to this supposed slight. Although I swore against it bothering me only a paragraph below, the thought of your discomfort gnaws at me. There is a mad river, barely hemmed in by the Purple Hills of Mulmur. It burns through me now as a result of this mistake. But it is not a mistake. In this classroom and stage we are students making ourselves up, changing gears into different levels of performance. We are simply continuing as learners, though occasionally we find ourselves, unwittingly, working as actors. … Even more discomfiting - all are players and audience simultaneously. There will be as many Hamlets and Don Qs as there are participants on this stage of our own (un)maing. We are essentially producing the text for our own edification and delight, as individuals and as a group, not performing it for the approval of others. There is no one beyond. Not even Mesmer!

That said, I must return for another session, return to the ramparts. Only be revisiting the site of previous performance can I possibly understand the evolving collection of texts, images, and film relevant to my first encounter with the Ghost. Can you hear the hypnotist? Like the linguist, he spews the keywords I'll latch onto, the rock that flew through the window I'll transform into street, season, and pattern of brick ...


corrupt
help
save
destroy
induct
seduce
empower
infect
tempt
enslave
inspire
transform
ensnare
invade
use
guide

farther father & sooner son

H

P.S. Mesmer says:


Grow up (forgive my honesty, old friend. I only feel that your rights are further violated if I restrict you from language that has been spilled about you).

Monday, December 18, 2006

Frame Philosophy


Dear Q.,

Torture, degredation at every turn. From the castle have I fled and into the arms of a wicked master. Mesmer, he calls himself, though he is more like Sherlock Holmes spouting a lot of "your eyes are getting heavier and as you sit there and listen to my words, with your eyes closed, feeling your hands there on the arms of the chair, allowing my words to relax you as your breathing becomes regular and peaceful, I'd like you to let yourself begin to drift away into a kind of sleep ..."

Dear Q., I hate it, but I also love it! My new mission in life is to learn everything I can about leading people exactly where they wish to go. Heal the hell of Denmark in a single blow of xxxxx, shifting ideas by common technique without making the child feel stupid. All I have to do is tell him everything I've repressed since the pillow womb flung me against the window world! Wretched courtyard, fault of speed and presupposition! I should be healed in the space of two years! Well - What do you think?

Ham

The Wizard of Vice Versa



















Dear Sirs,

The approach of the psychologist is customarily manipulative; that is, we suggest methods of imposing controls or alterations of reference. We have paid less attention to the creation of internal controls, i.e., conversion of the source, so that voluntary cooperation results. Moral considerations aside, the imposition of external techniques of manipulating people carries with it the grave risk of later lawsuits, adverse publicity, or other attempts to strike back.

Hamlet has asked me to send you my assessment of his character over time and mail. It is above and beyond my normal practice, but as I am solely interested in maximizing the young lad's potential, and he genuinely seems to believe in your confluence, I have agreed to forward copies of the notes from my sessions with the young Prince of Denmark over the following weeks. He has neuralgia in his eyes, however, and I feel that I must warn you of this. He may wel l be a better mesmermist than even I. It's awful, I know - he can stare and point his finger at me and smile and even show his teeth. It is in the rottenness of his gaze that my anxieties suddenly fly from me! I have tried snapping the same techniques at my other clients, to no memorable result. Just the noise that most selfhood has already sufficiently achieved.

Alas, here you go - I take responsiblity for all errors, as I have copied these by hand in full daylight sans assistant (forgive that "sans" - a silly word, even amongst the French!).

Mesmer

The Orderly-Obstinate Character: 'tis unmanly ... But, orderly to end where I begun,. Our wills and fates do so contrary run ...

The Optimistic Character: irrepressible young pig with lots of grandiose ideas ...

The Greedy, Demanding character: Go Down, Moses ...

The Guilt Ridden Character: the lion cub flees into exile ...

The Character Wrecked by Success: oder Die langer Nacht nimmt ein Ende ...

The Schizoid or Strange Character: he merely feigns madness ...

The ExceptionThe Average or Normal Character: the commercial "hub" for several neighborhoods/villages and dare I say hamlets ...

P.S.

Please do not take my own psychoanalytic illness much into mind. We are trying to heal Hamlet, and not Mesmer, are we not?

M

Sunday, December 10, 2006

St. Isadore of the Internet



Dear Don,

This continuous business of rain concerns me. Is there something within you that traps you in such ruinous environs? You are, as you must realize, au courant of your own prospects and intentions. Please don't allow yourself to block yourself. Rather, seek defection from these internal elements. Perhaps the face of the man who shadows you has a special aptitude for magnetizing you beneath this wet language of the heavens. At any rate, spend no more time praising the names of your most obvious assassins.

I am, you will be glad to hear, unusually well. The perpetual opening and shutting, slamming and slapping of doors that goes on here, the ceaseless rush of outgoing invectives and fatigued complaint, surprised whistles, panics on every side - all of this makes sleep probably slimmer than it has ever been before, and much less nourishing. The food brings pimples, and I am exhausted, and yet there seems a chance that I will be revived entirely. With your constant encouragement, I may well avoid dying in this wilderness of charred wax and wicked intentions, and spend the rest of my life beside a smoking fire, twisting tobacco and selling whiskey to the natives. It is true. I have had G&R investigate my passage on a merchant vessel. Maybe Brazil, someplace on the new world map free from the watchfulness, fatigue, and penetrations of Denmark's dull faces, eyes turned inwards, sallow in savage resignation, revulsed, if revulsed were not too definite a word. I would swim a very bad tract, narrow and terrible, clearly unsafe, just to be free of here.

One thing puzzles me, returning to this matter of your rain. Your letters to me (save for the one to my mother, which I have not yet laid eyes upon), have been exceptionally dry. As if come from the great Gobi desert or the famed savannas of Afrika. It doesn't make sense, senseless enough for me to suspect that you may be closer to me than I think. I am not against you, nor do I allow suspicion to rule my activities, but you should know that G&R are on the lookout for unusual men bearing dried pages skulking about the landscape of Denmark. Not to cause you any harm, dear friend, but to rescue you from your own drenched soul of derisive delusions! And to finally bring you into my company!

I do not remember now the details of the book you seek. Please remind me. As for paper, if I cannot find you any, I will have some made. I shall have the court artists fashion you a watermark. Because they do not know your face, be prepared for a certain blurriness. Destroying clarity is their business. It is their very mechanical precision that stands opposed to your legibility. You would be better represented by free marks or scrubbing, neither of which these men are likely to perform.

H.

Monday, December 04, 2006

Alle Guten Dinge Sind Drei


Dear Quicks,

I neither forgive nor forget the trespass. This is not because I think you have done any wrong. It is perhaps more a matter of what I have been made to remember as a consequence of your tidily enveloped submission to Castle Denmark. I make many associations I neither have the courage nor the interest to reveal. So long as you are in touch with the conscious and unconscious flow between us, you will find that I perceive both more and less than the material world actually enables me to validate without distortion in my world without a father.

You might be expecting that I will follow up on your suggestions regarding positive thinking. Nonsense! I prefer to go against common wisdom and would like to share with you how negative thinking can actually be a benefit. The fact is, negative thinking is a kind of protection against disappointment (such as that feeling I refuse to shake regarding this by now ubiquitous letter to my mother - if only she had read your pages as often as we speak of them. She might have interpreted my defenses as based entirely on intrapsychic conflicts, and decided to place the entire responsibility on the patient and finally let me alone). The negative thinker expects nothing good to happen and is not disappointed when nothing good does happens. I care little for anything, but this is a difficult hallucination to maintain. I mobilize my defenses using fact and intellectualizing, contributions slashed at context junctures - which is why it is not at all surprising that you wrote my mother. Instead of embracing this with the therapeutic grace and thankfullness of the grateful patient, I dove deep inside and remembered the following:

Dear Queen, the letter began. I had intercepted the document at the gates, expecting the latest installent of "Hueffer's German Painters Expurgated & Explained," but discovered only a pile of envelopes in special packaging. The patrolman grinned coconut shy, relieved in the knowledge that another prince might have beheaded him for failing to produce the expected printed materials at the desired time. Instead, I shook his hand, and left him with his dreams of being a puppet used as a target in juvenile yardgames.

On the top of the pile of envelopes I recognized the handwriting of Oafelia. She was in Abscheroot at the time, where they often tied her to the wall with soft rope and wrapped her skull in padding. She would drool and smash her head against the walls, pausing only to scribble when crayons and paper were set in front of her. In my rooms, I played with candles and steam, removing the seal as imperceptibly as possible, hiking the folds with the utmost care in order to read that:

Hamlet imposbl
to git a pipSQueak out of
BUT i still indicate that I
am in course of perusin'yr
ult - mummyQueen
As to mistaking your son
For my brother
that is a pinwheel
at times stuck in yr
formidable hat to catch
a new cronie king

i did see Ham
quoted on a poster
statement of which
by other witnesses
confined to Ghosthouse
SHOULD BE CONFINED
IN OBVIOUS MANICOMIO
along with clowns of the limey variety
and the kind (if yu insist on the term)
that gets grain grown so that a country
need not sink into debt the variety
that does get the grain to grow
fixation, in short
death of mind

I'll be the first to admit, Dear Q., I have no idea what Oafelia refers to, beyond the basic references to my name and certain agricultural matters I often dabble in managing. Her concern for my vegatable responsibilities strikes me much less than her need to communicate all of this pap to my mother. What befuddles me even more is the care I took in disguising my intervention, painstakingly reproducing the seal, and dusting off my fingerprints before slotting the letter in my mother' s round tube pigeonhole.

Perhaps you, great friend, hold interpretation of these lines. Worry yourself not on them, but if your freebase this wretched alphabet, share with me your deluded dreams.

I am sending you a book, but will need time for extensive research to find just the tome you need. We maintain a special library in the dungeon, which will be more profitable than the dry columns kept above ground. The question is: what can I smuggle out of the castle? Books are bloody bricks, and do not travel unnoticed. I will likely have to hide your requested texts along with some artillery things. Several shipments move out every day, and they are increasingly richer and fuller, so I don't imagine the viscera of a book or two will garner much notice. In the meantime, I have recently acquired a few divination cards from a Frenchman (more of that mysterious figure later). Allow me to cast down for you a spread of three. I do not know what meaning they hold for you in your situation, but as you consider their message, allow yourself to imagine and visualize the things they bring to mind, the weight they place on your soul.

H.

Past Influence - Le Soleil (inverse)

Signs are of a troubled relationship, or the diminishing of a partnership. Broken engagements and contracts. There may be an abundance of activity, but all of it seems to lead to failure. Happiness hovers on the horizon, but even at the present moment, seems relentlessly delayed.

Present Influence - Le Bateleur (inverse)

Confusion, hesitation. The inability to make choices. Something prevents you from making use of your talents (this could also be speaking directly to me!) Giving up seems all to easy, and yet, mastery of the material world is close at hand. If only the persons referred to by this card could recognize their abilities and potential, the control of the weather would seem easy by comparison.

Future Influence - La Justice (inverse)

More delay. Complicated negotiations. Dear Q., I sincerely hope this isn't true.