Masters of Faust, The Gone Kings

fig.53.36) The mountains that I've held, at least they've known some.

There are no roads in a world with wide walls and seamless thoughts. We are here, constructing evidence that we've been all along. "See the light that's inside of the exhibition, see where it's upside is really down inside of there," this is what Camera-Boy always says to me. So explain to me please, the nature of this good letter inside of its crisp envelop? Explain the door's sash or the uneven bricks under the garden window where boys gather and sing the hits. Aren't they also like the soft shirts that sprawl on the back of a kitchen chair? Or the coffee that turns into beer and then the beer which turns into a long night of talking in the basement behind the steps, one playing card at a time?"

"No one can ever be as honest," I answer.

Near the escarpment beside the old building with the leaning rails. Out where the rusty flashing is still sitting in a jumble of sharp stones and the white furniture by the door huddles with its own rot. There are no roads longer than the street that you've already wished for. There's no coach here and there's no radio to play. All of the touching is done for now. These are the shoes that you'll wear to the garden.

But I'd like to see you standing again, maybe you'll dance some or explain the math to me. Maybe you'll tell me what it's really like. In LA near the escarpment, sitting alone and listening to the text of an old speech as the traffic continues to weep. You crawl into the back of the blue Buick. You use your clumsy elbows and bang your knee on something that's exposed. You wish that you were thirteen and that California would stop wishing this for you too. So what if you've wished for a street that's longer than most, it's not as though you asked to live here.

There are two books in back, one is from the library. It's dinged edges and broken spine suggest that its long overdue. The craggy pages have been spilled over with great attention. I remember seeing this one on the bar during the day. I'd be smoking and talking about how ornamentation works or the cost of growing peaches and then I'd suddenly see, Mann. But there would also be Goethe floating in when it was hot out or when you needed change for the bus. You would talk to me about needing to read more about the tasks at hand, their importance and such. You would talk to me about seduction and it's tethers.

I've seen the day take over more than once. I've also seen you walk by, inside of the dress of the night. I've watched as honesty has slipped through others and yet you've remained resolute, maybe even chaste. So open your box now and take that first deep breath of yours. Just before they cut into you, right before you wear your lung in it's lower pocket. Before the foam and the sawdust make you sneeze and then the jittery edge of our time slips away. Before the days of us that are right now, let's talk about it. Let's get on with it. Let's share something that's essentially the same wherever happens to be.

There's this chimney outside. It's like a crooked brick line, that is if a line were carved from the flat sky and then patched up with some calcium hydroxide and a sticky rice slurry so that it wouldn't be neat or even timid. It would just be this chimney that's outside, a direct line to great and terrible sky. When the wagon pulls into the shadow of this enormous thing the sun's late angle is nearly lost to it. In the back of the wagon is a box from some winsome garden. The box and its contents are motionless under the high arch of the gate.

If they come at all, it's with true enough purpose, you've said. So it is with the construction of any stylistic work. It will suggest the hum-drumming of the tools of interpretation and their potential. First she'll have to console him. She'll have to declare her love to him quickly and then move through the second act as effortlessly as a planitive breeze. This becomes a formal bridge in any well defined arc of narrative if ever there was one. But it's not to be confused with presence or actual heft. If they were believable they roles than they might be excused for their fluidity or for something that's red. But they don't deserve a reward for plain old utilitarian mendacity.

The voice of epoch is to be expected and it's going to be found again and again in such dear works of calculation and preciousness. It's plain that it's derivation is the chuff of a sad engine which is always sneaking around the bend. We'll watch this thing as it tumbles into hysterics. We'll go mad and we'll be gone from our choice of fantasy in the space of so much poverty. We should be well in our minds instead our eyes will be poor, bent and dribbling. We should be plain, not marching in droves with the bitter colors this thing has left on us like a fucking stain. It's such sadness to waste a plutocrat, even here...

Barrister's Clerk: Undulate waves of gold, and bricks, and wizard poop.
Stenographer's Witness: Tableau form of a greasy peanut stained little box.
Barrister's Clerk: cadence and pattern TBD, yolk of the plow or simple yolk of the plow.
Stenographer's Witness: Again and then again we'll see it soon enough.

When we're finally awake and it's the third act, our voice will be dynamic and not cold or alone. It'll be here that we discover we've already been to the stable and we're still very hungry. We could be always better and in greater control but for now, we're left at the low end of our threshold. We neither settle nor abide we're standing idle and we slack with the steaming team and its bucket of mash. There's a golden chaff of hay at our feet through these silent scenes. We're supposed to experience the apple of it's sweetness as a link to our lost romance and the depth of its failure, its falling and it's finality. So that once we've passed then Charlotte will also faint. She'll succumb to the dark which will be experienced as an echo of profound relief. When at last the curtain does drop they will be beyond either pity or rage. - From an unprecedented review of Werther.