“Have you ever heard of Ewen Cameron?”
“No.”
“He was a psychiatrist. He worked up in Montreal during the fifties, and the CIA funded a lot of his research — you know, MKUltra shit. You've heard of that?” Nod. “Okay. Well, he realized that a patient's sense of self could essentially be eliminated by electroshock therapy — which destroys short-term memory — and sentences of total isolation. In other words, a mind that is forced to retreat into itself will inevitably collapse. This seems to buttress what Hegel posited: If one is liberated from all of the structures of society, then that individual ceases to have an identity. Identity is sufficient for a community.
“Keens would say that the greatest artists are those who are humans being. Get it? And that's the spirit of improvisation, and real art is nothing but improvisation. 'If you understand 'Trane,' he once told me, 'not just the notes he's hitting, or the theory behind the changes, but the force, then you will perceive his eidolon. The eidolon reveals itself in art.' Spontaneous creation is an instance of autonomy, perhaps humanity's only means of true autonomy — unless one claims that creation is just another example of an individual existing as an agent of the social forces around him, which is certainly possible, but this entails the complete absence of free will, which is something that no human can accept once they step out of the classroom. Regardless, that's what Keens wanted to do: He wanted to provide the venue for people to embrace that force within themselves, not just when it was directed at a canvas or through an instrument or onto a page, but in life, and he wanted there to be a community that shared this ethos in order to allow for a new understanding of the world in which we currently live.”
“The party just seemed like a bunch of people having fun.”
“Fun is kitsch,” he says stolidly. “So, too, was the spiritual awakening of the majority of the hippies in the sixties.” He pauses. “This is similar, only it is substantive. There are exceptions, of course.”
“Mongo?”
“Onion Man?” He laughs. “No, Onion Man is on his own page.” He lights another cigarette. “You said you know Winchester, right?”
“Yeah. He was the one who—”
“Told you about the Astral Resurrection Entities. You should have realized that the title doesn't make any sense. Onion Man came up with it to fuck with Winchester.”
“Why?”
“He, Mongo, had recently seen some documentary on the Yanomamo. In the film, the ethnologist or anthropologist tries to figure out the genealogy of various members of the tribe. After a few weeks, he finally realizes that the whole village was fucking with him, and that none of the information he'd been given was accurate. Onion Man thought it'd be funny to do the same type of thing to Winchester.”
“Why?”
“Humor.” Caesura. “Look, I don't know why Onion Man does half the shit that he does. I don't know why he's pissed away so much time trying to recreate one of Reich's orgone boxes. I don't know why he cans his own beer as opposed to bottling it. I don't know why he believes Gravity's Rainbow to be a continuation of V. Regardless,” as he drags from his cigarette, “Mongo's the reason why Winchester refuses to believe that Mordecai is Coprolalia.”
“What about him and Daphne?”
“Who?”
“Winchester.”
“Yeah — he wishes. They, Poot Moint, ended up playing a few sets at the party Winchester attended. They exchanged numbers. That's about it.”
“What about the Russians?”
“What?”
“The Russians. Sean said that—”
“Oh, that's because it was down in Brighton.”
“How do you know all of this?”
“I was there. Back then I spent a lot of time with the A-R-E.” He laughs. “We ended up sacrificing a pig on Brighton Beach — another one of Onion Man's brilliant ideas. Winchester ended up hightailing it back to the City after that.” He becomes quiet for a moment. “But you understand what I'm saying, right? About Keens and the A-R-E?”
“It's like a religion.”
“Only in the sense that it seeks to provide a spiritual experience without recourse to God. Have you ever thought about the conditional relationship between man’s soul and God? Does either one suffice for the other?”
“Well, it seems like God needs to exist for man to have a soul. Where else would it come from?”
“Has science proven that God didn’t create the Earth?”
“Well…no, actually.”
“I mean in seven days. Is Genesis accurate?”
“No.”
“So it’s possible that the material world can exist without God. Why not the spirtitual, too?”
Caesura.
“Look, the A-R-E was established to attempt to answer some of the questions that have plagued the human mind since it first became conscious of itself. The spiritual experience that Keens aimed to create was to be generated by the free association of eidolons among other eidolons. You know, because Keens always believed conversation to be the highest form of art. He was not fond of the now famous quote of a Nobel laureate, who claimed that hell is other people. Then again, the same laureate once said that an adventure is an event that is out of the ordinary without being necessarily extraordinary. So I guess he didn't have it all wrong.”
“Who? Sartre?”
“Yes. Look, the point is that hell is not other people; hell is dealing with the pretenses of other people. Heaven is all space, all time, filled with eidolons only.”
“So that was the goal.”
“No, the goal, the JOKE, was something different. As I've told you, no one really knows what it was or what it is supposed to be.”
“Did he ever write anything concerning the JOKE? Did he have a manifesto?”
“No.”
“Did he leave a note upon his death?”
“Yes.”
“What did it say?”
“'The only proof of the present is in syntax.'”
14
She's standing on the east side of Fifth Avenue, in the middle of what would be Seventy-First Street if there were no park, only a further extension of concrete. There continues to be a relentless drizzle, turning the City into a symphony of hues a la Ligeti. She is a haze of red and bronze with a chestnut halo that flutters gently as a slight breeze picks up, rustling the various shades of gray and brown and green that surrounds her. She is animated once again — self-animated rather — and no longer any number of visions torn from the picture book of memory. While the Connie of the past had the tendency to elicit every visceral emotion that seeks to protect or embrace or surrender, the Connie of the present evokes things no less carnal, but they all feel negative. I can't help but feel as though I hate this woman.
She is waving now, summoning a flood of images from the past, images that had not necessarily been repressed, but nonetheless relegated to some place that never gets visited, kind of like a senile grandparent's home. The entire train ride up here I felt inundated by her, by the fact that I would once again be in her presence. It was not the warming anticipation of having the opportunity to resume a relationship that had, perhaps, only been suspended; it was more like a walk to the principal's office. I knew I wanted to see her. The problem is that the veracity of this proposition is time-sensitive. I did want to see her, just under the condition that the act occur six months ago.