Send a postcard with regards from Calcutta. See Calcutta and go on living. Meet your Damascus in Calcutta. As alive as Calcutta. Chop off your cock in Calcutta (in the temple of Kali, where young goats are sacrificed and a tree is hung
with wishing stones that cry out for children, more and more children). In Calcutta, encoffined in mosquito netting, dream of Calcutta. Get lost in Calcutta. On an uninhabited island write a book about Calcutta. At a party call Calcutta an example (of something). Rethink the Frankfurt/Mannheim area as Calcutta. Misbehaved children, women like Ilsebill who are never satisfied, and men who live for schedules-curse them, wish them all in Calcutta. Recommend Calcutta to a young couple as a good place to visit on their honeymoon. Write a poem called "Calcutta" and stop taking planes to far-off places. Get a composer to set all the projects for cleaning up Calcutta to music and have the resulting oratorio (sung by a Bach society) open in Calcutta. Develop a new dialectic from Calcutta's contradictions. Transfer the UN to Calcutta.
When Vasco da Gama, hardly able to remember his first landing, returned reborn to Calcutta, he decided to level the city with ten thousand bulldozers and rebuild it by computer. Thereupon the computer vomited up three thousand sixteen-story bustees, another vast slum, only deep-frozen and much lonelier, beyond hope of disaster and totally isolated, since all noise had been absorbed. And then Calcutta died, though the living standard had been raised just above the destitution level. Very little was lacking, only the things that matter. People who multiply as a form of self-assertion. All the same, says Vasco to himself, infant mortality has dropped. Or perhaps if all the existing statistical charts and tables were pulped, a new study could be financed on the proceeds. Let's not waste another word on Calcutta. Delete Calcutta from all guidebooks. In Calcutta, Vasco gained four and a half pounds.
Three questions
How,
where horror should cast us in lead,
can I laugh,
even at breakfast laugh?
How,
where garbage and only garbage grows,
am I to speak of Ilsebill because she is beautiful,
and speak of beauty?
How,
where the hand in the photo
remains forever riceless,
shall I write about the cook
and how she stuffs fattened geese?
The sated are going on a hunger strike.
O beautiful garbage!
It's enough to make you die laughing.
I'm trying to find a word for shame.
Too much
Between the holidays as soon as it's late and quiet enough, I read Orwell's Utopian novel, 1984, which I read for the first time in 1949 in a very different frame of mind.
To one side, next to the nutcracker and the package of tobacco, lies a book of statistics, the figures that maximize-minimize the world's population — according to how it will be fed or not fed up to the year 2000. In pauses,
when I reach for my tobacco or crack a hazelnut, I am overtaken by difficulties which in comparison with Big Brother and the world-wide protein shortage are slight but refuse to stop snickering in private.
Now I am reading about interrogation methods in the near
future. Now I am trying to remember figures, present infant-mortality patterns in southern Asia. Now I'm unraveling on the edges, because, before the holidays, ebbed quarrels were tied up in little packages: Ilsebill's wishes. .
The ash tray is half full of nutshells. Too much of everything. Something has to be deleted: India or Oligarchic Collectivism or the family Christmas.
Esau says
Commuted to lentils.
Drown in a sea of lentils.
On my lentil-stuffed cushion.
Hope springs like lentils.
And what the prophets have always wanted is
a miraculous multiplication of lentils.
And when he arose on the third day his hunger for lentils was great.
Beginning at breakfast. Thickened till the spoon stands erect. With marjoram-seasoned shoulder of mutton. Or remembered lentils: once when King Stephen Batory returned to camp from the hunt
Mother Margarete Rusch boiled up a (tough, year-old) pheasant with lentils to make him a Polish-style soup.
With a bagful I walked without fear. Since me, birthrights have been available. Paid off, I live by lentil law. My little brother has a tough time of it.
The last meal
First built in 1346 as a bastion to the High Gate and subsequently enlarged as the need for prison cells, torture chambers, and business premises increased, the Stockturm, whose dungeon keeps were reputed to be dry, was rebuilt in 1509, when city architects Hetzel and Enkinger added two stories and capped the tower. Thereafter it stood empty and unused until King Sigismund of Poland, responding in April 1526 to the call of Mayor Eberhard Ferber, occupied the city, posted Counter Reformation statutes in the seven principal churches, and haled all the leaders of the uprising against the patrician council, except for the fugitive preacher Hegge, before a court of aldermen, which sentenced the six ringleaders to death by beheading, including the blacksmith Peter Rusch, whose daughter had recently been appointed abbess of Saint Bridget's — an imposing woman of controversial reputation who flattered the taste of all parties with her conventual cookery, took her cut on every transaction, and even in times of general ruin (war, plague, and famine) made a profit.
And because Mother Rusch was not without influence, she was able to obtain, if not her father's pardon, at least the right to cook one last meal for him. Highly placed persons accepted her invitation. Mayor Ferber, deposed and banished to his starosty in Dirschau by the rebellious guilds but now restored to office, and Abbot Jeschke of the Oliva Monastery repaired to the Stockturm in fur-trimmed bra-bant, quite willing to join blacksmith Rusch in spooning up his favorite dish. Executioner Ladewig was also invited, and came. The cooking abbess had put her full kettle on the hearth the night before in the kitchen of the executioner (and knacker), and the smell penetrated to every last dungeon of the now fully occupied Stockturm.
Who will join me in a dish of tripe? It soothes, appeases the anger of the outraged, stills the fear of death, and reminds us of tripe eaten in former days, when there was
always a half-filled pot of it on the stove. A chunk of the fat paunch and the limp, honeycombed walls of the second stomach — four pounds for three fifty. It's the widespread distaste for innards that makes beef heart and pork kidneys, calf's lung and tripe cheap.
She took her time. She pounded the pieces and brushed them inside and out, as though some beggar's sweaty rags had found their way to her washboard. She removed the wrinkled skin, but she spared the belly fat, for tripe fat has a special quality — instead of hardening into tallow, it dissolves like soap.
When a last meal was prepared for blacksmith Rusch and his guests, seven quarts of water seasoned with salt, caraway seed, cloves, ginger root, bay leaf, and coarsely pounded peppercorns were set over an open fire. The limp pieces, cut into finger-long strips, were added until the pot was full, and when the water came to a boil the scum was skimmed off. Then the daughter covered her father's favorite dish and let it boil for four hours. At the end she added garlic, freshly grated nutmeg, and more pepper.