sARTRE'S wRISTWATCH*

It’s 2:23 in the morning; Sartre’s wristwatch set to naught. My goodness-me, how time flies. Beanery and Time: what an extraordinary treatise, scrota in C-minor with fluting, a deontological jumpstart without cable and handsaw. Its 2:37 in the morning; a Profurn in D-major, sans flutes and oboes, but accompanied by a French horn and Basque bassoon. I must say, I do prefer the oboe, such a pleasant non-cons-anal refrain

pUCKMOUTH*

I took a puck to the mouth when I was a wee lad, cracked my two front teeth like dry Melba. No stitching, just a cracked lip and a penalty for hooking.

wHAT i sHOULD bE dOING*

Dominican University/College, Department of Philosophy, 2006-11-27
The Corpus Hispanorum de Pace {PH 521.3} Prof. Eduardo Andujar

Stephen Rowntree BA (Hons) MA.

The Natural Law, A Study in Legal and Social History and Philosophy, Chapter V111, Being and Oughtness. Heinrich A. Rommen (Dr. Rev. Pol. (Muenster) R. Jur. Utr. (Bonn)

Ought: to be compelled by obligation or duty; to be expected or likely; ought, anything whatever; aught (Archaic form). Webster’s

Oughtness: the being of ought, being-ought.

Being: the state of act of existing or living; existence or life; fundamental or essential nature; a divine {being}; fulfilment of possibilities; essential completeness; that which exists, can exist, or can be logically conceived. Webster’s

1. When the terms ought and being is conjoined, ought or ought to, becomes an act of being or being-ought. This necessarily occasions an act of being-ought, or oughtness. Ought can be used as ought-to or ought-not-to, as in you ought-to do this, but you ought-not do that. When conjoined with being, {the state or act of being} ought becomes an act-of-being or a being-ought. The implications of this being-ought, or oughtness are important for political philosophy, jurisprudence and theology.

eQUALS=*

{1+1=1+1=0}

[2+2=4=4-2+2-4=0]

aLMS aND tHE bOY*

pRECIOUS fRUIT*

This is not what I hired-on for; surely there has been a mistake, an error in reasoning and logic. I don’t know how much longer I can live in this state of penniless, this indigence, this alms-beggary. Hardship is distressing, a thirst that can be neither slaked nor coffined. I fear awakening each and every morn, the dread of another day in the trees looking for that precious fruit, a copper or a bronzed-nickel to keep my belly-teeming, lungs tucking, pain stayed and corrected. Sleep corrects all wrongs, even sleeplessness, so sleep I must, and quickly.

mOORHEN-gRAY*

A moorhen-gray day (so this is it) the morning after the night before, the daybreak at dawn, a simmering-blue-cuckold of sky, a sky too heavy and bloated to scarf up. Screw it (me) I’m going back to bed.

wOOD-tURNING aND pLASTICS*

For the love of Diogenes, Plato and Aquinas, why can’t I get my damn diploma into the frame? Maybe it’s because I bought it (well two of it’s) at the thrift store, so I suppose it serves me right. Before the night is through, and I’m close, real close, either I’ll have crammed it into the mounting or shredded it to smithereens. Just goes to show what a Master’s degree in philosophy is worth, or the paper it’s printed on. Maybe I should have taken shop, plastics and metals, or wood-turning on a spinning-dervish, milk and oil dripping like after-sex from the bore-wheel. Well I have three and a half years to figure this out, or when my PhD thesis is written and defended, whichever comes first; but I’m telling you, the shop idea is getting pretty enticing, bore-wheel and all, yes indeed.

bLACK dOG yELPING yES*

Scrod: I think I might have the impetigo…

Paddy: Starts in the legs, you know…deep in the bone.

Scrod: My legs are fine.

Paddy: Dogs’ legs…that’s what you’ve got…

Scrod: It’s a shame.

Paddy: Your legs?

Scrod: No…that you think I have dogs’ legs…with all we’ve been through, the itching and…

Paddy: That’ll get you nowhere…thinking like that all backwards…like a fool, I’d say…no?

Scrod: Water…I’m thirsty.

Paddy: Helps with the legs…?

Scrod: Impetigo, cuts the slake in the bone.

Paddy: Eats away like a cancer, so I’ve been told…festering and boiling up…

Scrod: And the itching…I can’t stand the itching…

Paddy: Like rats eating away at the legs, at the bone…

Scrod: With all we’ve been through…

Paddy: And what’s yet to come…yes…

Scrod: Yes…that too, the waiting…

Paddy: For it to come…yes, there’s always the waiting, never a moment’s rest…

Scrod: Never…

Paddy: Never a moment’s rest…

Scrod: And the festering and boil…in the bone.

Paddy: Always in the bone…like a cancer, so I’ve been told.

tRIPARTITE-tRINITY-tHREE*

To the best of my knowledge everything can be explained with a Venn Diagram; even Venn Diagrams. It’s the tripartite(ness), or trinity, the three in everything. Let’s see: Ego, Id, Super-Ego; Father, Son and the holy Ghost; either, neither, or; bologna, pastrami, cooked pork; Portrait of the Artist, Ulysses, Finnegans Wake; BA, MA, PhD; radio, television, gramophone; silly-child, silly-adult, silly-adult-child, the combinations and computations are endless.

tHE fATHER oF tRANSACTIONAL aNALYSIS*

Hull-born John Venn (1834-1923) was a British philosopher and mathematician who introduced the Venn diagram in 1881.

A stained glass window in Caius College, Cambridge, where he studied and spent most of his life, commemorates John Venn and represents a Venn diagram.

j.k. rAWLINGS oN sPEED aND METH*

I’m eating way too much peanut butter; all that lard and transactional-fat. Who the fuck fiddled with Freud and came up with that silly therapy for scooters and castaways? Ego-this and ego-that (a fucking free-for-all) my child is speaking, or is it my ego-adult, the fuck-wad with bad grooming habits. That’s him, the bastard fat Tony, sly fucker; J.K. Rawlings on speed and meth. Trans·ac·tion·al a·nal·y·sis: form of psychotherapy that emphasizes the interactions within and between individuals and classifies these interactions as “adult,” “parent,” or “child” Now wait a minute there, fuck off, will yaw, cripes!

pETER dINKLAGE iN lAGERKVIST'S dWARF*

cALF-tRIPE gLOVES*

Morton Salk had skinned knees, a pug-nose and wore Birkenstocks and calf-tripe gloves, regardless of the weather. He ate celery-rot, frozen parsnips, glue and pastry-sugar, and was a wee bit taller than a Lagerkvist’s dwarf and twice as cunning. He disliked people who wore sunbonnets, capes, strapless shoes and a doctor of philology named Karl Millermanstein. He penned a book on cattery, a style-manual for those absorbed with stupid notions and catcalls. He scorned and belittled dog-grooming, chivalry and cock-sniffing; as he felt roosters were God’s scourge on man and chivalry for imbeciles. Morton Salk died in a brothel-fire in 1642, and was found day’s later eating celery-rot, frozen parsnips, glue and pastry-sugar, and wearing a sunbonnet, cape and strapless shoes twice his size.

sOURCES rOAD*

pUSHCART*

Johnston Smack stole the French kid’s moped, block-peddles and a yellow banana seat with sparkles, busted it up and tossed into the sewer. A child’s electric pushcart, oiled with smear, for fast getaways and easy drafting. Ponce bastard should a stayed on his side of the tracks, no place for a Frenchfryman, ginner ‘em the old Doc-heave-ho to the coalscuttle, sad pathetic cunt. We had your’s side and they their’s, and you didn’t pass over the line; made for a fucking mess and tumble, shit and piss-vinegar flying like cats’ fur, a sight for bloodied eyes and bash-in noses; fucking cunts the lot of ‘em.

tHE mOUTH oF tHE lIFFEY*

sEINE fEIN*

Cunningham begs for biscuits and tea; bitters to slough lye and foggage; seine-fein (cursed-roil) Mervyn (misses) Tallboys, whose job it is to clean pottage-trap and cistern; Dignam, Dillard and Doyle, with Crofton-of-Gumley, skink a pot of ale and lager, to drown the scourge of Eire. Kearney (of bastard-at-whore) eats jellies scoffed from tinsmith’s pantry, in lieu of bitter-stout and kidney, surd of Bloom and Dylan, offal of mincemeat and Cornish pastie.

a dEAD dOG, mESCAL aND vOLCANOES*

Moriches Bibcock eats things soused in oilseed-oil and molasses and wears golfer’s shoes, though he doesn’t. He is neither a wise man nor a learned man, nor a timorous man or a brave man. He is neither either of these. When I first met him he was drunk on pot-sherry and rinse and syllabised every word, half-word and partial-word, word. He had a bump on his head where he’d fallen into a light-standard and a scrap on his cheek, the kind left by cheese-graters or chafer’s-awls. He was muttering something about a dead dog, volcanoes, mescal and a blistering hot Mexican sun. He insisted that I address him as consul-general, which I did, but against my better will and judgment. He died a horrible death by incineration in a crockery fire, soused in rinse, golfer’s shoes and fully-syllabic.

dECLAN'S sISTER, wENDY*

Declan Lamasery wore lift-shoes with braces and bundle-straps, to prevent him from caroming to one side. His father had gamey-legs, passing on the recessive gene to his son; and a split lip from excessive chewing. Declan smoke Cameo cigarettes and liked nothing better than a cheese sandwich with pat-butter and onion. He salted everything he ate, carrots, rutabaga, parsnips and calf’s liver, and preferred everything boiled in the same pot, ladling the simmer from the top with the cup of his tongue, feet shuffling beneath the bells of his trousers, an eye on the clock in case his mother was afoot. Declan’s sister, Wendy, ate cardboard and mock chicken, and chewed elastic bands and tubing, and chased the cat around the house, the bells of her pants cuffed with nip. Mr Lamasery drove his blue sedan into a lamppost, taking out a newspaper box, a stray and the man who made the ice at the outdoor rink. He exclaimed to the policeman, ‘I’ve got gamey-legs, for Christ’s sake, what’d you expect of me?’ Declan’s sister bundled the cat in a burlap shopping sac and buried it in the backyard under the juniper hedge.

tREMPONEMA-pALLIDUM*

Syphilis-tremponema-pallidum, gonorrhoeal-mitochondriosis, discharge of stout and lager; Soave-of-bitters for the cockle and moan, embalmer’s-oil to encourage blistering and clottage, a most inaccurate science of alchemy and dross, but a science nonetheless; trackman’s-harp, tympanic-foil, {musical frottage} not for the weak-kneed, bubonic or deckle {flail-skin-of-feta}, a ghetto of dilettantism, poverty and bad grammar.

tHE sEA*

rain
drawing
stickmen in the sky
a corpse dredged
up from the
sea

sANDINISTA@*

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandinista http://sandinista.guterman.com/

cUT tHE cRAP!*

http://clashphotorockers.free.fr/sommaire.htm

mESCAL, lOWRY aND jAMMY-jAM tARTS*

So this is it, there’s me and Lowry drinking mescal and eating jammy-jam tarts and this cunt comes up and busts Lowry right in the nose, splaying the corker all over his face. Jack-Ricky, who’s sitting at the next table, seeing what’s gone down says, ‘hey ya cunt, what the fuck are ya doing?’ So this is how it goes down, me and Jack-Ricky kick the bowels outta the cunt and leave him for dead, Lowry mumbling some shit about volcanoes, Mexican’s and a dead dog kicked down a cliff, or some shit like that. Me and Jack Ricky decide to give the worm to Lowry, cause he can’t breath proper and his nose is all fucked.

pOUR vOUS, mONSIEUR cLIFF*

I awoke disconnected to the thingamajig that haematites my fingers. This, so I was forewarned, portents a genocide of grammar and syntax, an elocutionary enchorial common to roustabouts and dustbin-men. Corruption, especially in the pre-frontal midrib, can cause horrid whooping and colic, night-sweats and coopery, a barrelhouse of shit-aphelia and whorish language. I will see what can be done, and rewire the cursor that attenuates the Babel in my head, next to Roget’s commode, a cowslip and the rector-rector’s bench.

tO rOBERT wALSER*

Walser’s prose work unsettles me; it is far too close to the marrow not to invite comparisons. Perhaps words, never as simple or innocuous as they seem, are only expressible in they’re utmost fragility by those of us blessed with a childlike innocence. Childishness so fragile and innocent, yet hardened and inured to the spitefulness of it all, eschewing any reasonable attempt at reconciliation between disparate wholes.

fONTANEL aND gROOMER'S wAX*

The brothel-maid wore a hat made from fontanel and groomer’s wax, and fought with the scullery-whore who slept in the shed at the back of the house. They were quite the pair, cheery faced, full of vim and rigor, binary opposites joined at the hip, windsocks bilge with Port and Sherry; a brothel-maid and a bedsore scullery-whore, what a fanciful fancy indeed.

fREUD, l*

hYLOMORPHISM*

wALLENSTEIN sURD fLUTIST*

Alulae, blasphemy, crossways, drachma, egress, flutist, gingivitis, hackneyed, imperious, jack-o-lantern, keelhaul, Loman, matriculate, nil, obstreperous, pixilation, queasy, Rasputin, scrofulous, timidity, ukulele, viviparous, Wallenstein, xylophone, yammer, (over)zealous.

Bloom in commode eating kidney soiled, fetter of surd. Denham dead rotting in bog peat, no such luck with trackman’s stub or adman’s commission, or coitus in porkpie hat, a wee Stephen begging foreskins for alms and mother, dog’sbody, jellyfish and undertow, and the Liffey runs round and back, over hillock, copse and morgue.

I conspire to conspire against myself, a conniving, a theory without a plot or narrative: incendiary thoughts, notions and dioramas, the cogs and wheels that drive the conniving machine. I reckon things out on the whetstone of my back, calculations and permutations, collations and computations, an adding up of figures and prime numbers; an abacas without beads and slide-rule.

wREN'S sKY*

rain
blistering
wren’s wing
sky

tHE pODIATRIST'S aWL*

I have a slot with the podiatrist tomorrow to scrape my feet. He uses a morticians’ awl and a wire-brush, has catacomb eyes and speaks gibberish, so he says. He wears loafers, black wingtips with yellow soles, and a cape that cinches round his hips with child’s string, the sort used for kites and postage. I will be shod in flip-flops and an ascot, a gift from my uncle Jim who has the curse of Saint John’s Wart and black teeth, and a cape similar to my podiatrist's, but without the cinching string or wire-brush.

sKINNED aLIVE*

cook’s knife flays flesh from bone
skinned alive, man’s inescapable horror

trees
speak to
fallen apples, and
lost children

bALTHAZAR*

gIFT fROM tHE cURATE*

Balthazar ate nothing green, olive coloured, lime, emerald or jade green. He had a sore-spot on his lip where the glass tube seared soft tissue, a chemical fusion of Cracker Jack and pus. He drew stickmen with a smudge-stick; alchemy he’d learned from a curate with whooping. Balthazar had one ear, a flat nose and a curlicue birthmark on the wad of his check, just below his eye, the ticking one. He had a three-legged dog without a tail (mange with fleas) and wren’s foot he kept in a thread-box, a gift from the curate.

cOUNTING mUTTON*

I need your opinion of something; does a blue sky in the morning foreshadow a red sky at night? How does a camera take pictures without having a mental image in its head? Do all dogs bark, and if not, which ones don’t? Are larks birds or sort of birds? Did Jung have shingles, which I suspect is true, and if so how many and where? Do cats litter? Does a car have a mind, and if so where and how big? Are clouds real or make-believe? Why do priests allow bazaars in church basements? And more importantly, why do churches have basements? Why do clocks have hands but no feet? And lastly, why can’t I stop counting and fall asleep?

dAFORTfORTdA*

eXSANGUINATIONS aND kIPPERS*

E-pluribus-ex-communion tabula rasa impugns. A fine and gentlemanly day, so it is; transubstantiate ex-glorious, wafers, biscuits and Port, a lolling good time {e-pluribus} on the nip of the tongue, exsanguinations from mud and water; Ipso recto abracadabra etcetera in VERITAS HUBRIS, one more for the kipper on rye Melba and lox.

dEBASEMENT*

A spoiled milk sky, a creamery of blue-steel, pox-clouds sullying a plainness of sky, whey separated from curd; lactose bigoted. No; a bowery sky, scullery with grime and sludge, a mire of brown-sky, a stain of sky; a debasement. Skeletal trees tonsured with pre-solstice fretting, branches at arms-length, a crapulence of rot and wither. Today I will purchase draperies for my bedroom window.

pOETIC pOLEMIC*

Having read Amatoritsero Ede’s polemic on the state of the poetic form I feel propelled to compose my own polemic, a leprotic row, a quarrelsome diatribe, perhaps. Plato’s greatest fear for a perdurable society was the sensual, riotous evocations of the poets. For they were the true antagonists of the Republic, the enemies of the Open Society, the purveyors of poetic sodomy, the sedition of the masses through meter and rhyme. It was Heidegger’s contention that the poet was the true philosopher, the Zarathustrian naysayer willing to plumb the depths of ontological insecurity. The poetic form is the Form of Forms, the template on which knowledge, both sensate and insensate, is predicated.

The German language, as one example, was irrevocable altered with the genocide of the Jewry in Eastern Europe in the 1940’s, never to be fully repatriated or re-appropriated. It was up to those who were subjected to the most horrid inhumane atrocities, a Bruno Schulz or a Paul Celan, to find a way to express man’s inhumanity to man through verse and poetics. They re-appropriated the German language to evoke the disturbing atrocities that man had perpetrated against his fellow man. To write, express and evoke such barbarity, they had to use the language of the perpetrator, the idiom of the genocide. It was only from within this language, this idiomatic slaughterhouse, that they could express the horrors of man’s inhumanity to man.

Poetry evokes the carnal appetite for the ugly and the beautiful. Poetry pushes one away as it draws one in, drawing one into the beatific and the monstrous, but away from acting on the monstrosities that it reveals through its unveiling. Poetry exposes, it does not hide. Poetry encourages dialogue, repatriation of language and emotion; it does not do away with both, with humanness. The poet is a curiosity seeker, a lover of the incongruent and the harmonious. The poet takes great joy in parsing together seemingly disparate words and evoking a sundry whole, a demulcent of the seemingly incongruent.

The poet is a Nietzschean naysayer, a parser of the sensual, an evoker, a lover of the riotous and disparate, and most importantly, a yeahsayer. The poet is a dialectician, an ontological voice for those without a voice and for those voices that go unheard or are discounted as unworthy of epistemic validation. The poet is a theorist whose chosen form of stylus is the hammer, the hammer of ideological/social and political deconstruction. The poet is a blacksmith, the anvil his mnemonic sounding board, the hammer his Thoracic roar and thunder.

aMAUROSIS pRAECOX*

tHE hUMAN wORLD*

It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement—that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life. And yet, in making a general judgment of this sort, we are in danger of forgetting how variegated the human world and its mental life are.

Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man.

Sigmund Freud

aRGIL gARDENER*

I have an audience today
with Bouvard et Pecuchet
for the job of le Gardenia
Deus Plenteous de loess

hOBBESIAN mALICE*

A medicate for a mendicant, and this ethereal cacophony, a hosanna Sanso for the herd of hearing and sylph. No Lilliputian’s or a one up the whole-end. That’d be a most unseemly monk and wallop. I say althea hosanna anal impetigo anon. never one am I to neither mince nor monger words swill-brewed and gulped upon gulp. Alabaster bastard’s wearied sole-shoed, neither shod of foot or Achilles’. Lance narks on the manse of his wee feats hackle sod and shoddy; fucking archly enemas for the faint of Intel and continent. I best get some sleep aft fore the mornings murmur puts a full stop to this murder of words et al anon so seethe me the cord all musty monk and lye.

This cannot go on, it will go on. Sleeplessness has taken its toll, axing bone from collar, scapula from rachis, yardarm from scaffolding, such colicky Hobbesian malice.

sOLIPSISTIC nOMAN'SLAND*

And now what have I, I have a sclerotic goiter hulled on the milady of my neck, breastplate (ed) next to an awful itching and new Copeland shoulder, resurfaced with ball-metal, Elm’s epoxy and shims. Wittgenstein took a shot at it, but never came close to an exegesis on pain, the solipsistic non-relational concupiscent nomad’s land that is pain. I will tell you about pain, pain and agony and the charnel ache that scuttles the skirting of the neck to the wooden wheel of the scapula. Pee in your trousers kind of pain; pain so merciless and ill mannered that it makes one think of ego-cide and dissolution by drowning. I could tell you but I won’t, because even if you were to listen and pay heed, it’d surely go in one paraffin-ear and out the other. Lash yourself to masthead and be done with it, no dilly dalliance and moot pointing round here, we’ll have none of that now will we (you not me, certainly not me, no never not me, never). You could, should you so choose, jam a ballpoint pen into the quail bone of my shoulder and I wouldn’t flinch a bit, a damn crumb. And that damnable Joycean file clerk giving me the once over, drawing a bead on me like a monk’s peeler bethel in glass oculars and wiretapped rims. Smoking incessantly helps assuage the pain, so I have discovered through persistent proofing and solecism. Smoking and bitter lye coffee trounced with heavy creams and unsweetened, not a dope of aspartame or Demerara cane for me, these two simple invasions seem to do the legerdemain. If Oedipus were to have met Dionysius, let’s say at a Marxist workers fry-up or an ophthalmologist’s quibble, the outcome would have been diarrheal and none too pleasing to the eye, purblind or not. All that cloacal self-importance would surely have driven Freud to self-castrate, on the skein of his cuckolded wife’s tatting needle no less, no more no less than more no more. I have put a temporary halt to writing poetry, as it tends to gird up the cushioning in the racio-Centrex of my thinking machine.

dIRGEWOOD*

hymnal wood rotted down to skeletal post
chiseling latch screws from ply-timber, tallness lines
penciled in level doorframes, they say he was much taller then
the crown of his head touching the edge of the pantry shelf

tHE aFTERGLOW*

Pumpkins strew in the ballyhoo, scabby rotting viscera. We took hockey sticks to the orange carcases, a sarcophagus best smote with a well-angled hook, sticky seeds and stringy bowels, pock guts and corm, a tuberose mess. The streets were a graveyard of orb and shrubbery, an embittered jack-o-lantern giving me the scornful eye, my friends re-taping their sticks, my mother hollering, ‘time for supper’, the streetlights dimming, pumpkins festering in the placental afterglow.

gOOD mORNING*

fOR sCROD*

Good morning Scrod, may the sky not fall on the tonsure of your heady-head. You, Scrod, are a mountblanche, a wastrel, a catechism without an offering plate. You are a boogieman, a phantasm, a Kantian nothing, an epistemic apology for bad reasoning, the poster-child for dullards and halfwits. You are the bent spoke in Mary Poppin’s umbrella, the silver in Carol’s mirror, the Gargantuan in Gargantua, the platitude in Shakespeare’s sonnets, the errata in Pound’s cake, a sandhog, a spinning wheel without a yarn-catch, a young cod, haddock split-cooked and served on a bed of wilt-lettuce, a latchkey without a keyhole. Good morning Scrod, may the sky not fall on your head.

bLACK dOG yELPING yES*

Scrod: Its cold dark…there’s no light…

Paddy: In the dark?

Scrod: None…

Paddy: Night, yes…

Scrod: So it is…yes…

Paddy: So…

Scrod: In the cold darkness…

Paddy: I ate a dog…

Scrod: Yesterday…in the cold?

Paddy: In the cold…

Scrod: Yes, I see… in the cold…

Paddy: It yelped, yes…

Scrod: Fucking black dogs…

Paddy: Roped its tail round my leg…yes.

Scrod: You ate it, the dog?

Paddy: Had to…stop the yelping…

Scrod: Yes…

Paddy: Cold…

Scrod: Yesterday, was it?

Paddy: The yelping, yes…

Scrod: Black dog?

Paddy: The yelping black coiling dog, yes…

Scrod: The yelping…must it be so…?

Paddy: Cold and loud and feral…yes, I suppose it must…

Scrod: Black Dog yelping and coiling…

Paddy: Round and round my leg…yes, it must be so…

Scrod: Natural Law…

Paddy: So it’s said…yes…so they said…

Scrod: They say it, don’t they…so the law…

Paddy: Must be so…

Scrod: Always…I suppose it must…

Paddy: Black Dog barking yelping coiling its tail…

Scrod: Round and round…it must be so…yes?

Paddy: I suppose it must…

Scrod: Always…I suppose it must be so…yes.

Paddy: Black dog yelping and barking and coiling…

Scrod: Its tail…a rope, it must be so…

Paddy: So it must…

Scrod: Onions, I suppose…?

Paddy: Yes…

Scrod: And garlic…?

Paddy: In the mix…yes, as it must…

Scrod: The mix is vital…

Paddy: To the whole…yes, always….

Scrod: And a rue…yes?

Paddy: And garlic and onion….

Scrod: In the mix…yes, I see, vital, to the mix…

Paddy: For the palate, brings out the palate, the flavour…

Scrod: Of course, yes…the mix is vital…

Paddy: To the whole…

Scrod: Black yelping…

Paddy: Part of the mix, brings out the palate…

Scrod: The flavour, you mean…yes?

Paddy: Yes…the mix is vital to the whole…

Scrod: Brings out the palate…yes…

Paddy: Of the whole, the palate…yes.

Scrod: The mix is vital to the whole…

Paddy: And the onion, the garlic…yes, brings out the mix…

Scrod: Which is the whole…the mix is vital…

Paddy: Yes, to the mix as to the whole…yes.

Scrod: The whole is vital…

Paddy: To the mix, yes…

Scrod: Stops the yelping, the coiling…the tail coiling and yelping, yes?

Paddy: The mix is vital to the whole, yes…

Scrod: I see; the mix is the whole…yes.

Paddy: So they say, yes…

kINCH aND sTEPHEN*

iPSO rATSO*

Had Rizzo know philosophy, the hermeneutical circle that whizzes round and round, he would have intoned, ‘ipso ratso’, and cuffed Buck in the back of the head, sending him careening into the lapdog ladies lap. Poor sad bastard sod: not a cistern to piss in or a match-striker to strike upon, just a can of shoeblack Sterno and a drag-anchor leg palsied with fretting and cold. Unstably plump Buck what’shisname giving it to those chancy old dowagers, the old in-and-out, cankered fret-holes reawakened with sweat. A cowboy and a derelict; what an inglorious binary-whole.