CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“WHY
should we always go out of our way to describe the wretchedness and the
imperfections of our life and to unearth characters from wild and remote
corners of our country?”
Thus Gogol
begins Part Eleven of his unfinished novel.
I was now
well into the novel – my own – but still I had no clear idea where it was
leading me, nor did it matter, since Pop was pleased with all that had been
shown him thus far, the money was always forthcoming, we ate and drank well,
the birds were scarcer now but still they sang, Thanksgiving had come and gone,
and my chess game had improved somewhat.
Moreover, no one had discovered our whereabouts, none of our
pestilential cronies, I mean. Thus I was
able to explore the streets at will, which I did with a vengeance because the
air was sharp and biting, the wind whistled, and my brain even in a whirl drove
me on face forward, forced me to ferret out streets, memories, buildings,
odours (of rotting vegetables), abandoned ferry slips, storekeepers long dead, saloons
converted into dime stores, cemeteries still redolent with the punk of
mourners.
The wild
and remote corners of the earth were all about me, only a stone’s throw from
the boundary which marked off our aristocratic precinct. I had only to cross the line, the Grenze, and I was in the familiar world
of childhood, the land of the poor and happily demented the junk yard where all
that was dilapidated, useless and germ-ridden was salvaged by the rats who refused to desert the ship.
As I
roamed about gazing into shop windows, peering into alleyways, and never
anything but drear desolation, I thought of the negroes
whom we visited regularly and of how uncontaminated they appeared to be. The sickness of the Gentiles had not
destroyed their laughter, their gift of speech, their easygoing ways. They had all our diseases to combat and our
prejudices as well, yet they remained impervious.
The one
who owned the collection of erotica had grown very fond of me; I had to be on
my guard lest he drive me into a corner and pinch my ass. Never did I dream that one day he would be
seizing my books too and adding them to his astounding collection. He was a wonderful pianist, I should add. He had that dry pedal technique I relished so
much in Count Basie and Fats Waller.
They could all play some instrument, these lovable souls. And if there were no instruments they made music with fingers and palms – on table tops,
barrels or anything to hand.
I had
introduced no “unearthed characters” as yet in the novel. I was still timid. More in love with words
than with psychopathic devaginations.
I could spend hours at a stretch with Walter Pater, or even Henry James,
in the hope of lifting a beautifully turned phrase. Or I might sit and gaze at a Japanese print,
say “The Fickle Type” of Utamaro, in the effort to force a bridge between a
vague, dreamy fugue of an image and a living coloured woodblock. I was ever frantically climbing ladders to
pluck a ripe fig from some exotic overhanging garden of the past. The illustrated pages of a magazine like the Geographic could hold me spellbound for
hours. How work-in a cryptic reference
to some remote region of Asia Minor, some little-known site, for example, where
a Hittite monster of a monarch had left colossal statues to commemorate his
flea-blown ego? Or I might dig up an old
history book – one of Mommsen’s, let us say – in order to fetch-up with a
brilliant analogy between the skyscrapered canyons of Wall Street and the
congested districts of Rome under the Emperors.
Or I might become interested in sewers, the great sewers of Paris, or
some other metropolis, whereupon it would occur to me that Hugo or some other
French writer had made use of such a theme, and I would take up the life of
this novelist merely to find out what had impelled him to take such an interest
in sewers.
Meanwhile,
as I say, “the wild and the remote corners of our country” were right to
hand. I had only to stop and buy a bunch
of radishes to unearth a weird character.
Did an Italian funeral parlour look intriguing I would step inside and
inquire the price of a coffin. Everything that was beyond the Grenze excited me. Some of my most cherished cosmococcic
miscreants, I discovered, inhabited this land of desolation. Patrick Garstin, the Egyptologist, was
one. (He had come to look more like a
gold-digger than an archaeologist.)
Donato lived here too. Donato,
the Sicillian lad, who in taking an axe to his old man had luckily chopped off
only one arm. What aspirations he had,
this budding parricide! At seventeen he
was dreaming of getting a job in the
Making the
rounds from one alkali bed to another, I brought my geography, ethnology, folk
lore and gunnery up to date. The architecture
teemed with atavistic anomalies. There
were dwellings seemingly transplanted from the shores of the Caspian, huts out
of Andersen’s fairy tales, shops from the cool labyrinths of Fez, spare
cartwheels and sulkies without shafts, birdcages galore and always empty,
chamber pots, often of majolica and decorated with pansies or sunflowers,
corsets, crutches and the handles of ribs of umbrellas … an endless array of
bric-à-brac all marked “manufactured in Hagia Triada”. And what midgets! One, who pretended to speak only Bulgarian –
he was really a Moldavian – lived in a dog kennel in the rear of his
shack. He ate with the dog – out of the
same tin plate. When he smiled he showed
only two teeth, huge ones, like a canine’s.
He could bark too, or sniff and growl like a cur.
None of
this did I dare to put into the novel.
No, the novel I kept like a boudoir.
No Dreck. Not that all the characters were respectable
or impeccable. Ah no! Some whom I had dragged in for colour were
plain Schmucks. (Prepucelos.) The hero, who was also the narrator and to
whom I bore a slight resemblance, had the air of a trapezoid cerebralist. It was his function to keep the
merry-go-round turning. Now and then he
treated himself to a free ride.
What
element there was of the bizarre and the outlandish intrigued Pop no end. He had wondered
– openly – how a young woman, the author, in other words, came by such
thoughts, such images. It had never
occurred to Mona to say: “From another incarnation!” Frankly, I would hardly have known what to
say myself. Some of the goofiest images
had been stolen from almanacs, others were born of wet
dreams. What Pop truly enjoyed, it
seemed, was the occasional introduction of a dog or a cat. (He couldn’t know, of course, that I was mortally
afraid of dogs or that I loathed cats.)
But I could make a dog talk. And
it was doggy talk, no mistake about it.
My true reason for inserting these creatures of a lower order was to
show contempt for certain characters in the book who
had gotten out of hand. A dog, properly
inspired, can make an ass of a queen.
Besides, if I wished to ridicule a current idea which was anathema to me
all I had to do was to impersonate a mutt, life my hind leg and piss on it.
Despite
all the foolery, all the shenanigans, I nevertheless managed to create a sort
of antique glaze. My purpose was to
impart such a finish, such a patina, that every page would gleam like
stardust. This was the business of
authorship, as I then conceived it. Make
mud puddles, if necessary, but see to it that they reflect the galactic
varnish. When giving an idiot voice mix
the jabberwocky with high-flown allusions to such subjects as paleontology,
quadratics, hyperboreanism. A line from one of the mad Caesars was always
pertinent. Or a curse
from the lips of a scrofulous dwarf.
Or just a sly Hamsunesque quip, like – “Going for a
walk, Froken? The cowslips are
dying of thirst.” Sly, I say, because
the allusion, though farfetched, was to Froken’s habit of spreading her legs,
when she thought she was well out of sight, and making water.
The
rambles taken to relax or to obtain fresh inspiration – often only to aerate
the testicles – had a disturbing effect upon the work in progress. Rounding a corner at a sixty-degree angle, it
could happen that a conversation (with a locomotive engineer or a jobless
hod-carrier) ended only a few minutes previously would suddenly blossom into a
dialogue of such length, such extravagance, that I would find it impossible, on
returning to my desk, to resume the thread of my narrative. For every thought that entered my head the
hod-carrier or whoever would have some comment to make. No matter what answer I made the conversation
continued. It was as if these corky
nobodies had made up their minds to derail me.
Occasionally
this same sort of bitchery would start up with statues, particularly chipped
and dismantled ones. I might be
loitering in some backyard gazing absentmindedly at a marble head with one ear
missing and presto! it would be talking to me …
talking in the language of a pro-Consul.
Some crazy urge would seize me to caress the battered features,
whereupon, as if the touch of my hand had restored it to life, it would smile
at me. A smile of
gratitude, needless to say. Then
an even stranger thing might happen. An
hour later, say, passing the plate-glass window of an empty shop, who would
greet me from the murky depths but the same pro-Consul! Terror-stricken, I would press my nose
against the shop window and stare. There
he was – an ear missing, the nose bitten off.
And his lips moving! “A retinal haemorrhage,” I would murmur, and
move on. “God help me if he visits me in
my sleep!”
Thus, no
so strangely, I developed a kind of painter’s eye. Often I made it my business to return to a certain
spot in order to review a “still life” which I had passed too hurriedly the day
before or three days before. The still
life, as I term it, might be an artless arrangement of objects which no one in
his senses would have bothered to look at twice. For example - a few playing cards lying face up on
the sidewalk and next to them a toy pistol or the head of a missing
chicken. Or an open
parasol torn to shreds sticking out of a lumberjack’s boot, and beside the boot
a tattered copy of The Golden Ass pierced
with a rusty jack-knife.
Wondering what so fascinated me in these chance arrangements, it would
suddenly dawn on me that I had detected similar configurations in the painter’s
world. Then it would be an all-night
task to recall which painting, which painter, and where I had first stumbled
upon it. Extraordinary, when one takes
up the pursuit of such chimeras, to discover what amazing trivia, what sheer
insanity, infests some of the great masterpieces of art.
But the most distinctive feature associated with these
jaunts, rambles, forays and reconnoitrings was the realm, panoramic in
recollection, of gesture. Human gestures. All
borrowed from the animal and insect worlds.
Even those of “refined” individuals, or
pseudo-refined, such as morticians, lackeys, ministers of the gospel,
major-domos. The way a certain
nobody, when taken by surprise, threw back his head and whinnied, would stick
in my crop long after I had ceased to remember his words and deeds. There were novelists, I discovered, who made
a specialty of exploiting such idiosyncrasies, who thought nothing of resorting
to a little trick like the whinnying of a horse when they wished to remind the
reader of a character mentioned sixty pages back. Craftsmen, the critics called them. Crafty, certainly.
Yes, in my
stumbling, bumbling way I was making all manner of discoveries. One of them was that one cannot hide his
identity under cover of the third person, nor establish his identity solely
through the use of the first person singular.
Another was – not to think before a blank page. Ce
n’est pas moi, le roi, c’est l’autonome.
Not I, but the Father within me, in other words.
Quite a discipline, to get words to trickle without fanning them
with a feather or stirring them with a silver spoon. To learn to wait, wait patiently, like a bird
of prey, even though the flies were biting like mad and the birds chirping
insanely. Before Abraham was … Yes,
before the Olympian Goethe, before the great Shakespeare, before the divine
Dante or the immortal Homer, there was the Voice and the Voice was with every
man. Man has never lacked for
words. The difficulty arose only when
man forced the words to his bidding. Be still, and wait the coming of the Lord!
Erase all thought, observe the still movement of the
heavens! All is flow and movement, light
and shadow. What is more still than a
mirror, the frozen glassiness of glass – yet what frenzy, what fury, its still
surface can yield!
“I wish
that you would kindly have the men of the Park Department prune, trim and pare
off all the dead wood, twigs, sprigs, stumps, stickers, shooters,
sucker-pieces, dirty and shaggy pieces, low, extra low and overhanging boughs
and branches from the good trees and to prune them extra close to the bark and
to have all the good trees thoroughly and properly sprayed from the base to the
very top parts and all through along by all parts of each street, avenue,
place, court, lane, boulevard and so on … and thereby give a great deal more
light, more natural light, more air, more beauty to all the surrounding areas.”
That was
the sort of message I should like to have dispatched at intervals to the god of
the literary realm so that I might be delivered from confusion, rescued from
chaos, freed of obsessive admiration for authors living and dead whose words,
phrases, images barricaded my way.
And what
was it prevented my own unique thoughts from breaking out and flooding the
page? For many a year now I had been
scurrying to and fro like a pack-rate, borrowing this and that from the beloved
masters, hiding them away, my treasures, forgetting where I had stored them,
and always searching for more, more, more.
In some deep, forgotten pit were buried all the thoughts and experiences
which I might properly call my own, and which were certainly unique, but which
I lacked the courage to resuscitate. Had
someone cast a spell over me that I should labour with arthritic stumps instead
of two bold fists? Had someone stood
over me in my sleep and whispered: “You will never do it, never do it!” (Not
How does
on know that one day he will take wing, that like the humming bird he will
quiver in mid-air and dazzle with iridescent sheen? One doesn’t.
One hopes and prays and bashes his head against the wall. But “it” knows. It
can bide its time. It knows that all the errors, all the detours, all the failures and
frustrations will be turned to account.
To be born an eagle one must get accustomed to high places; to be born a
writer one must learn to like privation, suffering, humiliation. Above all, one must learn to live apart. Like the sloth, the writer clings to his limb
while beneath him life surges by steady, persistent, tumultuous. When ready plop! he
falls into the stream and battles for life.
Is it not something like that? Or
is there a fair, smiling land where at an early age the budding writer is taken
aside, instructed in his art, guided by loving masters and, instead of falling
thwack into mid-stream, he glides like an eel through sludge, mire and ooze?
I had time
unending for such vagaries in the course of my daily routine; like poplars they
sprang up beside me as I laboured in thought, as I walked the streets for
inspiration, or as I put my head on the pillow to drown myself to sleep. What a wonderful life, the literary life! I
would sometimes say to myself. Meaning
this in-between realm crowded with interlacing, intertwining boughs, branches,
leaves, stickers, suckers and what not.
The mild activity associated with my “work” not only failed to drain my
energy but stimulated it. I was forever
buzzing, buzzing. If now and then I
complained of exhaustion it was from not being able to write, never from
writing too much. Did I fear,
unconsciously, that if I succeeded in letting myself go I would be speaking
with my own voice? Did I fear that once
I found that buried treasure which I had hidden away I would never again know
peace, never know surcease from toil?
The very
thought of creation – how absolutely unapproachable it is! Or its opposite,
chaos. Impossible ever
to posit such a thing as the un-created.
The more deeply we gaze the more we discover of order in disorder, the
more of law in lawlessness, the more of light in darkness. Negation – the absence of things – is unthinkable;
it is the ghost of a thought. Everything
is humming, pushing, waxing, waning, changing – has been so since
eternity. And all according to
inscrutable urges, forces, which, when we recognize them, we call laws. Chaos! We know nothing of chaos. Silence! Only the dead know it. Nothingness! Blow as hard as you like,
something always remains.
When and
where does creation cease? And what can
a mere writer create that has not already been created? Nothing. The writer rearranges the grey matter in his
noodle. He makes a beginning and an end
– the very opposite of creation! – and in between,
where he shuffles around, or more properly is shuffled around, there is born
the imitation of reality: a book. Some
books have altered the face of the world.
Re-arrangement, nothing more. The problems of life remain. A face may be lifted, but one’s age is
indelible. Books have no effect. Authors have no effect. The effect was given in the first Cause. Where
wert thou when I created the world?
Answer that and you have solved the riddle of creation!
We write,
knowing we are licked before we start.
Every day we beg for fresh torment.
The more we itch and scratch the better we feel. And when our readers also begin to itch and
scratch we feel sublime. Let no one die
of inanition! The airs must ever swarm
with arrows of thought delivered by les
homes de lettres. Letters, mind
you. How well put! Letters strung together with invisible wires
charged with imponderable magnetic currents.
All this travail forced upon a brain that was intended to work like a
charm, to work without working. Is it a
person coming toward you or a mind? A
mind divided into books, pages, sentences replete with commas, periods,
semi-colons, dashes and asterisks. One
author receives a prize or a seat in the Academy for his efforts, another a worm-eaten bone.
The names of some are lent to streets and boulevards, of others to
gallows and almshouses. And when all
these “creations” have been finally read and digested men will still be
buggering one another. No author, not
even the greatest, has been able to get round that hard, cold fact.
A grand life just the same.
The literary life, I mean. Who
wants to alter the world? (Let it rot,
let it die, let it fade away!)
Tetrazzini practising her trills, Caruso shattering the chandeliers,
Cortot waltzing like a blind mouse, the great Vladimir horrorizing the keyboard
– was it of creation or salvation they were thinking? Perhaps not even of constipation … The road
smokes under your horses’ hooves, the bridges rumble, the heavens fall
backwards. What is the meaning of it all?
The air, torn to shreds, rushes by. Everything is flying by, bells, collar
buttons, moustachios, pomegranates, hand grenades. We draw aside to make way for you, you fiery
steeds. And for you,
dear Jascha Heifetz, dear Joseph Szigeti, dear Yehudi Menuhin. We draw aside, humbly – do you hear? No answer.
Only the sound of their collar bells.
Nights
when everything is going whish whoosh! when all the unearthed characters slink
out of their hiding places to perform on the rooftops of my brain, arguing,
screaming, yodelling, cart-wheeling, whinnying too – what horses! – I know that
this is the only life, this life of the writer, and the world may stay put, get
worse, sicken and die, all one, because I no longer belong to the world, a
world that sickens and dies, that stabs itself over and over, that wobbles like
an amputated crab .. I have my own world, a Graben
of a world, cluttered with Vespasiennes, Miros and Heideggers, bidets, a lone
Yeshiva Bocher, cantors who sing like clarinets, divas who swim in their own
fat, bugle busters and troikas that rush like the wind … Napoleon has no place
here, nor Goethe, nor even those gentle souls with power over birds, such as
St. Francis, Milosz the Lithuanian, and Wittgenstein. Even lying on my back, pinned down by dwarfs
and gremlins, my power is vast and unyielding.
My minions obey me; they pop like corn on the griddle, they whirl into
line to form sentences, paragraphs, pages.
And in some far off place, in some heavenly day to come, others geared
to the music of words will respond to the message and storm heaven itself to
spread unbounded delirium. Who knows why
these things should be, or why cantatas and oratorios? We know only that their magic is law, and that by observing them, heeding them, reverencing
them, we add joy to joy, misery to misery, death to death.
Nothing is
so creative as creation itself. Abel begot Bogus, and Bogul begot Mogol, and
Mogol begot Zobel. Catheter,
blatherer, shatterer. One letter
added to another makes for a word; one word added to another makes for a
phrase; phrase upon phrase, sentence upon sentence, paragraph upon paragraph;
chapter upon chapter, book after book, epic after epic: a tower of Babel
stretching almost, but not quite, to the lips of the Great I Am. “Humility is the word!” Or, as my dear, beloved Master explains: “We
must remember our close connection with things like insects, pterodactyls,
saurians, slow-worms, moles, skunks, and those little flying squirrels called
polatouches.” But let us also not
forget, when creation drags us by the hair, that every atom, every molecule,
every single element of the universe is in league with us, egging us on and
trimming us down, all to remind us that we must never think of dirt as dirt or
God as God but ever of all combined, making us to race like comets after our
own tails, and thereby giving the lie to motion, matter, energy, and all the
other conceptual flub-dub clinging to the asshole of creation like bleeding piles.
(“My straw
hat mingles with the straw hats of the rice-planters.”)
It is unnecessary, in this beamish realm, to feast on human
dung or copulate with the dead, after the manner of certain disciplined souls,
nor is it necessary to abstain from food, alcohol, sex and drugs, after the
manner of anchorites. Neither is it
incumbent upon anyone to practise hour after hour the major and minor scales,
the arpeggios, pizzicato, or cadenzas, as did the progeny of Liszt, Czerny and
other pyrotechnical virtuosi. Nor should one slave to make words explode like firecrackers, in
conformance to the ballistic regulations of inebriated semanticists. It is enough and more to stretch, yawn,
wheeze, fart and whinny. Rules are for
barbarians, technic for the troglodytes.
Away with Minnersingers, even those of
Thus,
while sedulously and slavishly imitating the ways of the masters – tools and
technic in other words – my instincts were rising up in revolt. If I craved magical powers it was not to rear
new structures, nor to add to the
Only to
one who has not yet found his way is it permitted to ask all the wrong
questions, to tread all the wrong paths, to hope and pray for the destruction
of all existent modes and forms. Puzzled
and perplexed, yanked this way and that, muddled and befuddled, striving and
cursing, sneering and jeering, small wonder that in the midst of a thought, a
perfect jewel of a thought, I sometimes caught myself staring straight ahead,
mind blank, like a chimpanzee in the act of mounting another chimpanzee. It was in this wise that Abel begot Bogul and
Bogul begot Mogul. I was the last of the
line, a dog of Zobel with a bone between my jaws which
I could neither chew nor grind, which I teased and worried, and spat on and
spat on. Soon I would piss on it and
bury it. And the name of the bone was
A grand life, the literary life. Never would I have it better. Such tools!
Such technic! How could anyone,
unless he hugged me like a shadow, know the myriads of waste places I
frequented in my search for ore? Or the
varieties of birds that sang for me as I dug my pits and shafts? Or the cackling, chortling gnomes and elves
who waited on me as I laboured, who faithfully tickled my balls, rehearsed my
lines, or revealed to me the mysteries hidden in pebbles, twigs, fleas, lice
and pollen? Who could possibly know the
confidences revealed by my idols who were ever sending me night messages, or
the secret codes imparted to me whereby I learned to read between the lines, to
correct false biographical data and make light of Gnostic commentaries? Never was there a more solid terra firma beneath my feet than when
grappling with this shifting, floating world created by the vandals of culture
on whom I finally learned to turn my ass.
And who, I
ask, who but a “master of reality” could imagine that the first step into the
world of creation must be accompanied with a loud, evil-smelling fart, as if
experiencing for the first time the significance of shellfire? Advance
always! The generals of literature
sleep soundly in their cosy bunks. We,
the hairy ones, do the fighting. From
the trench, which must be taken, there is no returning. Get thee behind us, ye laureates of
Satan! If it be cleavers we must fight
with, let us use them to full advantage.
Faugh a balla! Get those greasy ducks. Avanti,
avanti!
The battle
is endless. It had no beginning, nor
will it know an end. We who babble and
froth at the mouth have been at it since eternity. Spare us further instruction! Are we to make green lawns as we advance from
trench to trench? Are we landscape
artists as well as butchers? Must we
storm to victory perfumed like whores?
For whom are we mopping up?
How
fortunate that I had only one reader! Such an indulgent one, too.
Every time I sat down to write a page for him I readjusted my skirt,
primped my hair-do and powdered my nose.
If only he could see me at work, dear Pop! If only he knew the pains I took to give his
novel the proper literary cast. What a
Marius he had in me! What an Epicurean!
Somewhere
Paul Valéry has said: “What is of value to us alone (meaning the poets of
literature) has no value. This is the
law of literature.” Iss dot so now? Tsch, tsch!
True, our Valéry was discussing the art of poetry, discussing the poet’s
task and purpose, his raison d’être. Myself, I have never understood poetry as
poetry. For me the mark of the poet is
everywhere, in everything. To distil
thought until it hangs in the alembic of a poem, revealing not a speck, not a
shadow, not a vaporous breath of the “impurities” from which it was decocted,
that for me is a meaningless, worthless pursuit, even though it be the sworn
and solemn function of those midwives who toil in the name of Beauty, Form,
Intelligence, and so on.
I speak of
the poet because I was then, in my blissful embryonic state, more nearly that
than ever since. I never thought, as did
Diderot, that “my ideas are my whores”.
Why would I want whores? No, my
ideas were a garden of delights. An
absent-minded gardener I was, who, though tender and observing, did not attach
too much importance to the presence of weeds, thorns, nettles, but craved only
the joy of frequenting this place apart, this intimate domain peoples with
shrubs, blossoms, flowers, bees, birds, bugs of every variety. I never walked the garden as a pimp, nor even
in a fornicating frame of mind. Neither
did I invest it as a botanist, an entomologist or a horticulturist. I studied nothing, not even my own
wonder. Nor did I christen any blessed
thing. The look of a flower was enough,
or its perfume. How did the flower come
to be? How did anything come to be? If I
questioned, it was to ask – “Are you
there, little friend? Are the dewdrops
still clinging to your petals?”
What could
be more considerate – better manners! – than to treat
thoughts, ideals, inspirational flashes, as flowers of delight? What better work habits than to greet them
with a smile each day or walk among them musing on their evanescent glory? True, now and then I might make so bold as to
pluck one for my buttonhole. But to exploit it, to send it out to work like a whore or a
stockbroker – unthinkable. For me
it was enough to have been inspired, not be perpetually inspired. I was neither a poet nor a drudge. I was simply out of step. Heimatlos.
My only
reader … Later I will exchange him for the ideal reader, that intimate rascal,
that beloved scamp, to whom I may speak as if nothing had any value but to him
– and to me. Why add – to me?
Can he be any other, this ideal reader, than my alter ego? Why create a
world of one’s own if it must also make sense to every Tom, Dick and
Harry? Have not the others this world of
everyday, which they profess to despise yet cling to like drowning rats? Is it not strange how they who refuse, or are
too lazy, to create a world of their own insist on invading ours? Who is it tramples the flower beds at night? Who is it leaves cigarette stubs in the bird
bath? Who is it pees on the blushing
violets and wilts their bloom? We know
how you ravage the pages of literature in search of what pleases you. We discover the footprints of your blundering
spirit everywhere. It is you who kill
genius, you who cripple the giants. You, you, whether through
love and adoration or through envy, spite and hatred. Who writes for you writes his
own death warrant.
Little
sparrow,
Mind,
mind out of the way,
Mr.
Horse is coming.
Issa-San wrote that.
Tell me its value!