Communication on His Thirtieth Birthday

by Marvin Bell

You didn't have to travel to become an airplane,
nor fly to get high. Considerable numbers languished
in your exclusive calculations. You would wind up abroad.
You choose home entertainment and the mechanical society.

The machine had machines which told machines all about it.
The machine knew, for example, of sensational airwaves.
The machine knew how to go up and how to drop down.
The machine knew all the exits, and the best exits.

Then your metabolism changed and you entered energy:
model-making glue, carbon, tet., solder, a piezo-electric
crystal-controlled oscillator smelled like the real thing,
and gave you the advantage of interchangeable frequencies.



You were calibrating fame and the landscapes you entered.
you could prove forty-eight states and Britain
and at dusk you could prove the small isles of the Atlantic.
You spoke to every radio on St.Pierre and Miquelon Islands!

Fifteen years later, you abandoned your license,
just as the next generation was entering chemicals.
You were writing, compulsively, bit nothing fashinable.
A poem on your birthday seemed out of the question.

Yet, here you are, celebrating, speaking openly as if
the moral of aesthetics is that the parable convinces.
The easy way out, you concluded, is through the village,
under the antenna, down the long path intended for your feet.

(1967)

new post in Romanian

a new post on Gigi Becali, Elena Basescu, mysoginism and European elections at Scorpii si Gheonoaie

homophobia after death

I have just returned from Finland and while reading some blogs, I ended up with Renee's macabre short post at Womanist Musing about a gay man from Senegal who was exhumed twice from the graveyard for being gay. Not knowing much about Senegal, I won't make some statements about how homophobia works localy, the effects of French colonialism, the religious connotations or how heterosexuals discriminate gay people in Senegal. To put it simple, this case from Thies is really fucked up: "a man who was presumed to be gay died of natural causes in a hospital. Just hours after he was buried in a Muslim cemetery four men had his body exhumed his body, leaving it near his grave. The police were forced to intervene and the body was reburied. Not wishing to be stymied in their efforts the man was once again exhumed and this time his body was dumped in front of his family home."

Death is not a safe place anymore, even after becoming a corpse, the queer body is atill denied, rejected, thrown out of the grave. The zombiefication of the gay man in this case makes me wonder of some stories of life after death. Because obviously homophobia goes that far.

When did you stop wanting to be president?

Harper's Magazine published in 1975 an "unscientific poll of interested parties" on this issue. From the boring answers, one of them catches the eye. William S. Burroughs responds:

Both in this life or any previous incarnations I have been able to check out, I never wanted to be President. This innate decision was confirmed when I became literate and saw the President pawing babies and spouting bullshit. I attended Los Alamos Ranch School, where they later made the atom bomb, and bombs bursting in air over Hiroshima gave proof through the night that our flag was already there. Then came the Teapot Dome scandal under President Harding, and I remember the unspeakable Gaston Means, infamous private eye and go-between in that miasma of graft, walking into a hotel room full of bourbon-drinking, cigar-smoking lobbyists and fixers, with a laundry hamper.

“Fill it up boys, and we talk business.”

I do not mean to imply that my youthful. Idealism was repelled by this spectacle. I had by then learned to take a broad general view of things. My political ambitions were simply of a humbler and less conspicuous caliber. I hoped at one time to become commissioner of sewers for St. Louis County–$300 a month, with the possibility of getting one’s shitty paws deep into a slush fund–and to this end I attended a softball game where such sinecures were assigned to the deserving and the fortunate. Everybody I met said, “Now I’m old So-and-so, running for such and such, and anything you do for me I’ll appreciate.” My boyish dreams fanned by this heady atmosphere and three mint juleps, I saw myself already in possession of the coveted post, which called for a token appearance twice a week to sign a few letters at the Old Court House; while I’m there might as well put it on the sheriff for some marijuana he has confiscated, and he’d better play ball or I will route a sewer through his front yard. And then across the street to the Court House Café for a coffee with some other lazy bastards in the same line of business, and we wallow in corruption like contented alligators.

I never wanted to be a front man like Harding or Nixon–taking the rap, shaking hands, and making speeches all day, family reunions once a year. Who in his right mind would want a job like that? As commissioner of sewers I would not be called upon to pet babies, make speeches, shake hands, have lunch with the queen; in fact, the fewer voters who knew of my existence, the better. Let kings and Presidents keep the limelight. I prefer a whiff of coal gas as the sewers rupture for miles around–I have made a deal on the piping which has bought me a $30,000 home, and there is talk in the press of sex cults and orgies carried out in the stink of what made them possible. Fluttering from the roof of my ranch-style house, over my mint and marijuana, Old Glory floats lazily in the tainted breeze.

But there were sullen mutters of revolt from the peasantry: “Is this the American way of life?” I thought so, and I didn’t want it changed, sitting there in my garden, smoking the sheriff’s reefers, coal gas on the wind sweet in my nostrils as the smell of oil to an oil man or the smell of bullshit to a cattle baron. I sure did a sweet thing with those pipes, and I’m covered, too. What I got on the Governor wouldn’t look good on the front page, would it, now? And I have my special police to deal with vandalism and sabotage, all of them handsome youths, languid and vicious as reptiles, described in the press as no more than minions, lackeys, and bodyguards to His Majesty the Sultan of Sewers.

The thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts. Then I met the gubernatorial candidate, and he looked at me as if trying to focus my image through a telescope and said, “Anything I do for you I’ll depreciate.” And I felt the dream slipping away from me, receding into the past, dim, jerky, far away–the discrete gold letters on a glass door: William S. Burroughs, Commissioner of Sanitation. Somehow I had not intersected. I was not one of them. Perhaps I was simply the wrong shape. Some of my classmates, plump, cynical, unathletic boys with narrow shoulders and broad hips, made the grade and went on to banner headlines concerning $200,000 of the taxpayers’ money and a nonexistent bridge or highway, I forget which. It was a long time ago. I have never aspired to political office since. The Sultan of Sewers lies buried in a distant 1930s softball game.

What would you do if you were in the President’s place? You would be inexorably pressured by the forces and the individuals that made you President, and by your own desire to be President in the first place; so you would wind up doing just what they all have done. It’s enough to stop any sane man from wanting to be President.

photo via flickr