Letter to Manuel Puig – Louis Armand

November 1, 2020

Chère Manuela, if I may.
Of course, there’s no action that needs to be directly described. When I say that I’m writing to you, I describe nothing. Perhaps to write isn’t an action. Perhaps it’s the only action. In a universe in which everything merely occurs, wld writing, the singular act or non=act of writing, be the one indescribable thing? Neither a blackhole, nor a quantum superposition, nor a queer disguised as a womxn who really is a womxn, the one true womxn in fact, & w/out the armature of mythology or the most=hideous binary opposition, which indeed is the sole accomplishment of the species homo sapiens sapiens, descended as it allegedly is from a pokerfaced mud=mensch homunculus G.O.D. fashioned after itself in a fit of boredom & not any savannah ape, but in actuality being that cyclic redundancy error of a divine kick in the ribs (& we are still bearing the bruises), & like those ever=fructified relics of martyred saints that must number in the hundred million by now so a broken rib=bone did thus give rise by mitosis & meiosis to many multitudes & still gives rise, wherever the joke of creation sets its stamp, sprouting its little Mandelbrot sets in crossdressing chromosomal delirium & making no bones about it, hahaha, the greatest subdivision in history, out=Zenoing Zeno, a frogmarching parade to beat the band. Oh! Mamma Mia! Ah! Tia Tiresias! Who’d’ve thought such a nine=inch swinging Shia LaBoeuf discostick cld be more Lady Gaga than Conchita Wurst? Anachronism was their strongest suit, knowing there’ve been strange voices in the night long before this one, long before the first night & the one before that even, when moonlight falling in the Garden gleaming through the trees the silver branches & golden apples & the early worm turning w/ its one black periscope eye hypnotising G.O.D.’s little debutant addendum w/ her mind=body dysphoria creeping through the flowerbeds like a mirror image about to meet its maker. Cld this be love? This withering of illusion’s illusions, now, as upon one too=sweet piece of fermented fruit, pissing her Eve=self in Earth=shattering guffaws, & w/ no need of further persuasion stuffing the whole crop of cider down that fiascoed golem’s gullet? And you call that prose fiction? As sure as holy writ, patent pending & every sequel since, it wasn’t pilfered groceries that tilted this bluest of blue marbles on its axis, queering the pitch, skewing the cosmic gyroscopes, but an anti=authorial sleight of hand that scrubbed the first “I” in the annals of History from that original chromosome, leaving a one=legged “Y” (Eli Eli lama sabachthani?) to martyrise itself on the metaphoric cross of its exxing=out, from here till Kingdom Cum, amen! (Whoa!) And her, bellydancing down the balustrades of Babylon w/ a ribcage festooned w/ Ivorian gold, simpering on a Brazilian bandstand, sashaying down the Champs Élysées, brazening=out the Blitz, brandishing a bomb on Bikini Atoll, blowing kisses at the last Bolshevik, buying cheap & selling at top dollar the night before every stockmarket on the planet chokes to death on plague=hysteria, Queen of Making=a=Killing w/ the looks to go: razorwire Fabulash, eyes like supermassive blackholes, that zillion=dollar Luna Park smile, a nosejob every plastic surgeon on the globe wld die to own, & a pseudo=Graecian athletic body as irresistible as the Golden Horde & just as blood=hungry? We have our doubts & that’s all we have, being the proverbial impoverished, with nothing to our name but a stencil & a tabula rasa to spray it on, hahaha, & you thought the hundred=thousand prison walls they’ve been keeping in cold storage were just a secondhand Encyclopaedia Britannica with bleached pages to save on reprinting? Whereas the truth is you’d more readily welcome a fascist who’s been toilet trained & knows how to use a knife & fork than a pimplyarsed Rimbaud who knows how to rhyme proletariat with the seizure of power & is just as prone to masturbating into yr bedside milkbottle, but even the best intentioned people’s poet can never be as alluring as an Abyssinian slavetrader, or a gendarme on the Place Vendôme posing beside a toppled statue of Napoléon, or a petit bourgeois highschool graduate with their pants down in a ditch being sodomised by the local infantry regiment while dreaming of diagrams & symbols, gauges & exchange rates, & all of History’s Annihilation Orders fluttering from the hand of most rigid Authority (why fuck about with versification when you can buy straight into the real thing?), the kind of martyrdom that’s one day bound to earn you a place in the thinking womxn’s pantheon of “like minds,” Les Causes célèbres (Paulhan), Le Coupable (Bataille), Le Nègre (Soupault), L’Homme=Jasmin (Zürn), Le Désir attrapé par la queue (Picasso), Le Cheval de Troie (Nizan), La Folie en tête (Leduc), Le Déluge (Clézio for fuck’s sake!), in sum what all these can only aspire to, hahaha, being in fact a little Rêveuse Bourgeoisie (Drieu!!), & isn’t that the long & short of it, my dear, the whole reason for setting pencil to pavement, for the original stick in the mud, to make cuneiform from yr personal void jusque à l’infini?