Alan Dugan

In order to perfect all readers the statements should be carved on rock walls, on cave walls, and on the side of pillars so the charm of their instruction can affect the mountain climbers near the cliffs, the plainsmen near the pillars, and the city people near the caves they go to on vacations. The statements should, and in a fair script, spell out the right text and gloss of the Philosopher’s jocular remark. Text: “Honesty is the best policy.” Gloss: “He means not ‘best’ but ‘policy,’ (this is the joke of it) whereas in fact Honesty is Honesty, Best is Best, and Policy is Policy, the three terms being not related, but here loosely allied. What is more important is that ‘is’ is, but the rocklike truth of the text resides in the ‘the’. The ‘the’ is The. By this means the amusing sage has raised or caused to be raised the triple standard in stone: the single is too simple for life, the double is mere degrading hypocrisy, but the third combines the first two in a possible way, and contributes something unsayable of its own: this is the pit, nut, seed, or stone of the fruit when the fruit has been digested: It is good to do good for the wrong reason, better to do good for the good reason, and best of all to do good good: i.e. when the doer and doee and whatever passes between them are beyond all words like ‘grace’ or ‘anagogic insight,’ or definitions like ‘particular instance of a hoped-at-law,’ and which the rocks alone can convey. This is the real reason for the rock walls, the cave walls and pillars, and not the base desires for permanence and display that the teacher’s conceit suggests.” That is the end of the statements, but, in order to go on a way after the end so as to make up for having begun after the beginning, and thus to come around to it in order to include the whole thing, add: “In some places the poignant slogan, ‘Morality is a bad joke like everything else,’ may be written or not, granted that space exists for the vulgar remarks, the dates, initials and hearts of lovers, and all other graffiti of the prisoners of this world.”

Speciously individual like a solid piece of spit floating in a cuspidor I dream of free bravery but am a social being. I should do something to get out of here but float around in the culture wondering what it will grow.

The skin ripples over my body like moon-wooed water, rearing to escape me. Where could it find another animal as naked as the one it hates to cover? Once it told me what was happening outside, who was attacking, who caressing, and what the air was doing to feed or freeze me. Now I wake up dark at night, in a textureless ocean of ignorance, or fruit bites back and water bruises like a stone. It’s jealousy, because I look for other tools to know with, and other armor, better girded to my wish. So let it lie, turn off the clues or try to leave: sewn on me seamless like those painful shirts the body-hating saints wore, the sheath of hell is pierced to my darkness nonetheless: what traitors labor in my face, what hints they smuggle through its arching guard! But even in the night it jails, with nothing but its lies and silences to feed upon, the jail itself can make a scenery, sing prison songs, and set off fireworks to praise a homemade day.

Now his nose’s bridge is broken, one eye will not focus and the other is a stray; trainers whisper in his mouth while one ear listens to itself, clenched like a fist; generally shadowboxing in a smoky room, his mind hides like the aching boys who lost a contest in the Panhellenic games and had to take the back roads home, but someone else, his perfect youth, laureled in newsprint and dollar bills, triumphs forever on the great white way to the statistical Sparta of the champs.

“If you work a body of water and a body of woman you can take fish out of one and children out of the other for the two kinds of survival. The fishing is good, both kinds are adequate in pleasures and yield, but the hard work and the miseries are killing; it is a good life if life is good. If not, not. You are out in the world and in in the world, having it both ways: it is sportive and prevenient living combined, although you have to think about the weathers and the hard work and the miseries are what I said. It runs on like water, quickly, under the boat, then slowly like the sand dunes under the house. You survive by yourself by the one fish for a while and then by the other afterward when you run out. You run out a hooky life baited with good times, and whether the catch is caught or not is a question for those who go fishing for men or among them for things.”

Nothing is plumb, level, or square: the studs are bowed, the joists are shaky by nature, no piece fits any other piece without a gap or pinch, and bent nails dance all over the surfacing like maggots. By Christ I am no carpenter. I built the roof for myself, the walls for myself, the floors for myself, and got hung up in it myself. I danced with a purple thumb at this house-warming, drunk with my prime whiskey: rage. Oh I spat rage’s nails into the frame-up of my work: it held. It settled plumb, level, solid, square and true for that great moment. Then it screamed and went on through, skewing as wrong the other way. God damned it. This is hell, but I planned it. I sawed it, I nailed it, and I will live in it until it kills me. I can nail my left palm to the left-hand crosspiece but I can’t do everything myself. I need a hand to nail the right, a help, a love, a you, a wife.

The river brought down dead horses, dead men and military debris, indicative of war or official acts upstream, but it went by, it all goes by, that is the thing about the river. Then a soldier on a log went by. He seemed drunk and we asked him Why had he and this junk come down to us so from the past upstream. “Friends,” he said, “the great Battle of Granicus has just been won by all of the Greeks except the Lacedaemonians and myself: this is a joke between me and a man named Alexander, whom all of you ba bas will hear of as a god.”

The river brought down dead horses, dead men and military debris, indicative of war or official acts upstream, but it went by, it all goes by, that is the thing about the river. Then a soldier on a log went by. He seemed drunk and we asked him Why had he and this junk come down to us so from the past upstream. “Friends,” he said, “the great Battle of Granicus has just been won by all of the Greeks except the Lacedaemonians and myself: this is a joke between me and a man named Alexander, whom all of you ba-bas will hear of as a god.”

For old Billy Dugan, shot in the ass in the Civil war, my father said. The old wound in my ass has opened up again, but I am past the prodigies of youth’s campaigns, and weep where I used to laugh in war’s red humors, half in love with silly-assed pains and half not feeling them. I have to sit up with an indoor unsittable itch before I go down late and weeping to the storm- cellar on a dirty night and go to bed with the worms. So pull dirt up over me and make a family joke for Old Billy Blue Balls, the oldest private in the world with two ass-holes and no place more to go to for a laugh except the last one. Say: The North won the Civil War without much help from me although I wear a proof of the war’s obscenity.

For old Billy Dugan, shot in the ass in the Civil War, my father said. The old wound in my ass has opened up again, but I am past the prodigies of youth’s campaigns, and weep where I used to laugh in war’s red humors, half in love with silly-assed pains and half not feeling them. I have to sit up with an indoor unsittable itch before I go down late and weeping to the storm- cellar on a dirty night and go to bed with the worms. So pull the dirt up over me and make a family joke for Old Billy Blue Balls, the oldest private in the world with two ass-holes and no place more to go to for a laugh except the last one. Say: The North won the Civil War without much help from me although I wear a proof of the war’s obscenity.