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RAYMOND ROUSSEL’S SELF HELP NOTES (A COMMENTARY ON BOB

If I could at least find some meaning for my chronic symptoms, even if I can’t cure them. Reducing them all to
the single fact is matter1 for fantasy, but I would settle for a thread of some kind. Already people are coming
to me, unsolicited, and asking advice on interface. But, it’s like I’m sending telegrams to myself, and five
words can say only so much. Ordinary things like black sky at night, reasonably integrated into the logic of
cause and affect, have the power to fill me with an utter sense of dread. No matter what I say I am, the
irrational residue of what I’m not haunts me more than anything.

When I was a kid, my friends and I stumbled on a blown up chain link fence. We knew at the time it wasn’t
really blown up, but we began to believe our own lie and the thought that it might really have been blown up
returned next morning stronger than ever. And by midnight the pain is almost palpable, we think that
we’re the chain link fence in the act of being blown up. The train seems practically expressive as it goes by,
mocking us.

It’s a story familiar as a story can be. Society has broken into bands the nineteenth century was sure
would end up burning characters in the withering capital.

The heroic figure straddled the globe—my father. The clouds enveloped the tallest mountains, rendering
his reaction to the death of his own father invisible. Tens of thousands of drops of rain could have fallen and
I would have been unable to know if he was crying. The monster struggled with Milton Bradley, and it all
depended on a roll of the dice.

I thought that on our wedding night I would broach the subject of my fear concerning fathering a retarded
child. I could tell it as a Gothic Romance, “The sorrow burned deeper than the fjords of Norway. Grimly I
pursed what violence destiny had chosen for me, a trap, a catch, a zine.” Fans stand up, yelling their
approval of the stage version. Lights go off in houses as couples are inspired to at least have the chance of
avoiding the birth canal. It would be neither an essay nor a novel, a fictional look, not quite a fiction. The
royalties are not important. To be able to talk about it is reward enough.

1
Bob Pereleman, “Chronic Meanings,” in Postmodern American Poetry (New York: Norton, 1994), 501-504.
The words in bold represent the lines of Perelman’s poem, in order, which in the original all begin with capital
letters and end in periods.

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The coffee sounds intriguing but looks even more so under the expert hand of Jean Luc Godard. She put
her cards on the table and admitted that boredom had driven her to this point. What had been comfortable
subjectivity suddenly degenerated into a very awkward conversation. The lesson we can each take from this
is to always load the burning deck.

An hour a day is not enough time to thoroughly exhaust my resources. Structure announces structure and
takes structure as its structure. He caught his breath in spades. The vista disclosed no immediate problems.

Another Saturday night, alone with a pun in the oven. The clock face and the mountain face were my only
company. Although I could have leaned on the rock of ages, a modern prosthetic seemed more in order. I
think I had better have a plan A.

I know all about globalism and multinational, cosmetic-driven satellite empire, but just now this particular
mall seemed different. The bag of groceries had a way of forcing you to decide just what your life would
become, whether a biographical junkheap or something that would make people tremble. In no sense do I
condone turning to a vegetable, but these fields make me feel like opening up, admit that I once proposed to
Mount Rushmore in a sonnet. Some in the party tried sestinas, so it’s not as if my scheme was completely
harebrained.

That always happened until one day she spread her arms and asked the sky if anything grew which left
a lot of one’s evenings and weekends free.

No one could help it fulfill the dreams its father had for the future. I ran farther than I had ever run before,
and when I got there I died. That wasn’t a good one. Now put down your pencils.

They won’t pull that over two or three yards. Standing up to the Empire requires the aid of a professional
like Hans Haacke. Even so, your wife may silence everyone—stop it, screaming in a voice reserved for
medieval torture and well-done porno. The calm before the storm comes with the smell of pine needles.

I've thought about psychotherapy, but economics is not my strong point. Until one of us reads the
instructions, this argument is pointless. I took a breath, then ran into the burning building. The singular
heroic vision, unilaterally inspired, came at the wrong moment.

Gregorian voices imitate the very words used at Greg’s funeral: “His bed was one place where he always
mixed business and pleasure. He knew what summed up a personal life, a toaster. Memorized experience
can’t be completely faithful to an individual as mysterious as he.”

Sometimes, while reading about the paradigm shift enacted by quantification of the speed of light, I’m
paralyzed by the impossibility of the simplest procedures, like not being punched in the face by an angry
motorist, losing my balance, and falling headfirst into traffic. Now someone might say, “You obviously can’t
handle books of such a specialized nature, so shut the fucking thing and realize that the world is divided into

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two types of people, those who read primary texts and those who read secondary texts.” But that same person,
upon starting to see me tear, would then say, “Now I’ve gone and put my foot in your mouth, but that
makes the world go round.”

The point I am trying to make, in case one day I should become someone’s Dr. Schreber, is that I feel like my
life has been wasted like a cartoon worm on benzedrine, which has speech without a physical mouth, when
all I ever really wanted was to be a real man on quaaludes, having a physical mouth without speech. If taken
to an extreme, this conceit could lead to Manicheism.

“The phone is for someone who really knows how to use it,” I proclaimed in a moment of rare charisma,
“like Dr. Freud.” At the moment I uttered the statement, it walked away from me like a distant woman in a
train station, and yet the next second it seemed trite. But did that really mean I thought the statement was
stale or hackneyed? I tried to ignore the ramifications, yet Los Angeles is full of agoraphobic dandies just like
me.

Naturally enough I turn to writing as an escape from life, thus rendering questionable its efficacy as a form of
therapy. When it comes to the mind, some things are reversible, some are not. We should be happy for even
that malleability. With physical laws, you don’t have that choice. I’m going to Jo’s for comfort food.

Now I’ve heard everything, he said in a tone that made one believe the statement was not only not stale, but
not even quoted. One time when I used quotes in the transcript of one of his speeches, he threatened to sue
me for the amount of dissatisfaction involved. Believe me, when you’ve seriously considered life at the whim
of the elements, you’ll discover the weather isn’t all it’s purported to be.

You’d think people would have a “category e,” or that they would invent one in order to justify whatever
they want to do. At least if the emotional elements of the problem were properly addressed, no one in their
right mind would begrudge the presence of an illusion.

The perfect place to write a great work of literature would be a symbiosis of home and prison. Then, having
become superfluous, time could really come into its own. One has to give to maintain appearances,
prioritize. For instance, there are only two things I want to taste: the first and last.

I remember the look in my mother’s eyes when I told her I wanted to make impressions of Africa for future
use. It was the first time she had ever grimaced and I had some gorgeous swelling feeling that the success
which owes its fortune to hard work would soon be a thing of the past.

Come what may it can’t be any worse than that. There are a number of ways to make a rebus but there is
only one way to tame one. That’s why I want to declare a moratorium on comparison and contrast.

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Alan Ramón Clinton is the author of a scholarly monograph, Mechanical Occult: Automatism, Modernism, and the
Specter of Politics (Peter Lang: 2004), and a volume of poetry, Horatio Alger's Keys (BlazeVox: 2008). He currently
lectures at the University of Miami.

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