the reality was the stone Doctor Johnson kicked and Doctor Johnson himself, and hallucinations took place in the head, in the mind, now everything out there is the hallucination and the mind where the work is done is the only reality, because the work is the only refuge from this torn wet-smelling hallucination of the body looks like a, like some map all fingered and latticed see right through it where the Great Lakes with that biggest one hanging down like some immense weak malformed invertebrate fit only to be whipped, so if reality is the work when it goes wrong all thatâs waiting out there is the sweat, the blood and, problem whereâs the blood coming from, not bleeding anywhere but I keep finding fresh blood on the, not even on the collar no under the collar like a vampire? Nothing mystical about all this itâs not some half-baked Buddhist nirvana where all is illusion good God no, because the rage is there at the heart of it, the sheer energy, the sheer tension the tinge of madness where the work gets done, the only reality, the only refuge from the vast hallucination thatâs everything out there, and that youâre all part of out there where everything equals everything else. Ten, a hundred, a thousand years ago itâs all one, where immortality becomes gossip, 1890 van Gogh shoots himself in a wheat field, Rimbaudâs gone the next year, and so is Melville and to even things out Whitman a year later Rudolf Diesel invents the internal combustion engine, Eastman Kodak is founded in his motherâs kitchen tainted by gossip over just where he got the idea for flexible film and Thomas Edison celebrates entertainment and art and the ascendancy of the crowd, the herd, with the patent on the kinetoscope, you see? Carnegie the working manâs friend locks him out and goes fishing in Scotland to avoid the death and carnage at Homestead so itâs Frick who gets stabbed, pushpin or Pushkin long since killed in a duel and itâs all one, everything out there itâs all this grand hallucination where Count Tolstoy is stalking Turgenev, following him everywhere with his piercing frightening glare enough to drive a man mad with vicious remarks Turgenev tells a friend and heâs weeping again, remember? Being haunted by this Other weâve been talking about, The Kreutzer Sonataâs been banned here why? because Beethovenâs German? But itâs not the World War when Wagnerâs music was banned here no, no this goes back to the day Wagnerâs art was damned as ânothing more than the dope required by a decadent generationâ by his disciple, his apostle, by the one who believed him to be Germanyâs greatest creative genius, by the, good God canât you see? Wagner was the Other, he was the where is that, Michelangelo and the Self who could do more because thatâs what itâs all about so he had to be killed, Nietzsche had to kill him and be carried away to an asylum a year later, while great Wagner lifts us aloft above the clouds to the mighty halls of old Walhalla where these great artists will never play again, but their phantom hands will live forever, haunt us forever. Forever! Good God thatâs, questionâs whether all this clatter and bang, old Walhalla and Chin Chin Temple Bells preserved on piano rolls are part of the hallucination or only escape from it, see what was going on everywhere out there in this frenzy of invention more than a century ago? In Germany the Ariston player with thirty-six notes then the Hupfeld with sixty-one still no pneumatics till the Welte family patents its pneumatic Orchestrion operated with a perforated paper roll, in France Carpentier shows his Melograph and Melotrope to the French Academy, mechanical fingers brought to life by electromagnets and a perforated strip. But before that France had claimed credit for the whole thing with Fourneauxâs pneumatic Pianista, its fingers worked through a piece of
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