Live Intimate Nostalgia (theory of tragedy), and: Best Practices (theory of tragedy)

LIVE INTIMATE NOSTALGIA (theory of tragedy)

scene: Steelman—in a frenzy of knowing—asks his daddy for advice.

• • “ If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two”

  Steelman:

  If my money is a loaf of cancer, which walks through flesh and butters what it likes, if it radiates plastic from its bladder, the brick and mortgaged idiom of rights; if time is ruined meat: the panting bowel implicit with oil—the dark continents of grief—policed by the ecstatic muscle, which bind its substance to a soapy fence—

  Daddy:

  then I went out to the pasture to say the unbearable weight of things on thought. These days devour memory. They break the delicate envelope of things. They cost     a pocket full of proses. Ashes, ashes:     O rapt pasture, show me where the cash is.

• • Enter Oedipus and the Sphinx, tenderly clothed in genre:

  O:

  I went out in the raw season to pay back taxes to the pasture: my vast dash of unwordable dressed in the slime of the earth. Here [ points at his bosom] the dead are leached of their longing by sweet industrial laundries. Here the dead rise up and press themselves into the groin of genre: humming and spent, wet with division. You are their mascot for the two hours traffic of our stage.

  S:

  Wrong-o, Keebler.

  O:

  All the plow-month, I spoke words chosen in desire: shaved and incontinent, language under a cloud of language. In the myth, there are many kinds of sensuous fake meat on which the dead feast: Sahara meat lovers combination for two; anchovy salad with hot chunks of the nude. In the myth, the brows and breasts of the dead are painted with ash, to mark them as the viral atom of wanting: the crisp nothing it gathers as.

  S:

  I’m afraid I’ll be of no more help to you goodbye.

BEST PRACTICES (theory of tragedy)

scene: Chorus and C.E.O. of Arcadia Steel discuss public relations strategy.

• • Chorus:

  Where we go a-gargling sweet and spermy data—a bulb of cameras overhead and plastic in the water—we said with corporate pleasure, lovely, dark and deep: “Ummmmm no comment. God will supply the want (though in a pinch, of course, our brand will do). He moves on the face of our revenue: the glad contract that makes our money meant.”

  C.E.O.:

  Our brand is a frail and fatty vessel: a varicose sack of departed acts or whatever. Go to the dead and ask for quality time and a bowl of pretzels.

  Chorus:

      We did. But they were out to lunch. Alone.     And Time said, with feeling, “Throw me a bone.”

• • Oedipus and the Sphinx, prolific as pornography:

  O:

  Tragedy is a desiccated animal Tragedy is a conduit for capital Tragedy is a rope of liquid soap Tragedy is a thrust of stone through stone Tragedy is field noise and work against the spine Tragedy is the style of desire particular to time Tragedy is the unplowed fingers of the dead which linger in the thing you said Tragedy is language and the weather rubbing their lard together Tragedy is the surplus of sleep aid which lingers under our author’s blouse Tragedy is the soft weather of appetite, an arcade which makes its country in the mouth Tragedy is the compact and gerrymandered essence which gives the self and its lesions The grass is grieving and the waters doubled Tragedy in its greasy limousine grins and rides the bubble

  S:

  Close. But no cigar.