Charles Paul radio script draft (never aired).
PAUL: [low and whispery] Fluttering spread thy purple pinions, gentle Cupid, o’er my heart, I a slave in thy dominions, nature must give way to art. [something from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons] … Radio does not have any real aesthetic, but tonight I am going to forge one. As a poet might. As a bard. I do not care if I bore you, thrill you, confuse you, frighten you, or push you to suicide. I guarantee you, as my audience, you do all this and more to me. You hellish masses, tilting your ears toward the waves, ignorant to your own wants, giggling, sighing, and yawning in the abysmal night as I entreat you. Alack and alas, no one cares. Fuck your FCC. Fuck your FCC’s mother. I am Charles Paul, and I will not be censored by your timid contextualities. I’m losing my mind, and I’m going to say what I want to. With Vivaldi in the background. These are the thoughts images words I composed at two thirty in the dark morning after I awoke from a maddening slumber, composed in stages for nearly three hours. I know not what they mean, but I will read them now, and without further explanation, for the next hour.
"In vainglory the chicken spreads the seed with his feet, amassing a mound of knuckle and ivory for the worms to habitate, glowing red with the eyes of the hierophant, glowing all colors with the spectral stretch of entrails it scratches out into the mud, out of the mud, its innards, into them, outward, glowing as the jade green ire of a dying ember of the constellation, his chicken heart bantam and fluttering his pinions, lo! what beauty can assault this literal poltroon, this stilted mind which falls under the paltry weight of a blue eye, a cheekbone, a quavering lip, now a dark talon drapes its sharp shadow across the shoulder of a tiny boy, the boy explodes the sky, the sky explodes, the shadow disappears, but in disappearing it is now everywhere, there is only shadow, there is only sharpness, only the pervasive talon, all the world in its leatherblade grip, all of it, the pain of that shadow is ubiquitous now, the lightless place in the toe of the hawk, the chicken, the falcon, the erne, the buzzard, under his wings, crushed by a ring of muscle, an orbicular eye not winking but shrinking, not an arc and nadir closing to a single line but a circle closing to a dot, the treachery of definition colluding with it to expire all that once constituted the middle, the world we know, the place we inhabit, the real, the actual, the concrete, the metaphysic of the thing aborted or stillborn, latent and now dead, bloomed into the grave, the corpus callosum, the corpus, all of our great work, in the dream my hair grows eight feet, my fingernails bloom trees, my eyes swirl into my head, my navel runs to my heart, my teeth become my jaw, my ears turn backward, my heart runs to my navel, my phallus has disintegrated, my mind floats above me like a spirit, a god who despises my body, a lithe brown rabbit with teeth grown in curls deep into its own brain sits glossed in blood over the striated pickings of a freshly killed wolf, it asks me where my poetry is now, it asks me what poetry has ever told of this, I tell it something but before I finish it dies of the teeth in its brain and begins to decompose, my breath is halted, I can not breathe, then there is the girl and I am sure she loves me and I am in love, she wears nothing, but she is so close to me, I know this by the warmth of her skin which I sense in pulses of warmth in the slight wind between our bodies, she says I love you Charles and I try to tell her I love her but before I can the wolf is attacking her and he has her by her thin neck pinned to the ground and she is screaming and dying when I see it is the same wolf under the bloody rabbit and its entrails and sinews are dangling and shaking from it, and I grab the sinews and entrails and try to pull the wolf off of her and it turns on me and begins to devour my intestines, I can feel it suddenly lapping up the pit of my stomach, it smiles with bloody teeth and looks me in the eyes as I am dying and I see the girl naked over the wolf’s shoulder smiling too, and she is fine, and she seems happy, and I see that blood is dripping from her nipples into shallow pools at her feet, dripping like milk, and the wolf wanders away from me and begins to lap at the bloodpools, and the girl smiles and I can see that she is happy and I feel betrayed, but I can not tell her how betrayed I am because she is too beautiful in the sunlight, which is now behind her, and now she is crying sweetly, as if to console me, and the wolf makes tiny quiet slurps and breathes gently its monstrous lungs, its dangled sinews broken now and then by rays of sunlight, and I die, and I float away, following my mind somewhere as a small blue light, and I am no longer sure what constitutes me, for I have left my body and am trailing my mind, I am without sensation but the sensation of movement, and then I am, I sense, in a single word, and I am part of that word, and I exist with others like me, whatever we are, whatever we are constituted by and constituents of, and I sense that the word is casualty, because I must have become a noun, and because, whatever we are, we may only be verbs in transmigration, and only adjectives in apostasy, and I understand that the noun is a sort of purgatory for us, that I am doomed to being a noun until I am not a noun, in ignorance, in azoic helplessness, in exanimation, and I see that the girl was always a verb, that she was a yet determined verb, but likely sear or perpetuate or collapse, and I sense that she will reach for me, that she will use me again, not knowing it, not realizing I am a part of what she is reaching for, and I try to change the very way she wishes to use me, try to extend myself unnaturally, to radiate an essence which might affect her understanding of me, but it is obviously unnatural and in time I realize impossible, and once used she disappears from my sight again, wherever I am, whatever elaborate catachresis has abducted me, or inducted me, or affected me.
I thought for some amount of time in this dream that I felt myself shift within the word as a tectonic plate along the crust of the earth, and that this phenomenon had apprised me of an opportunity, a chance to escape my concrete existence, but as I slid the final time and strained myself toward what I believed to be freedom I woke up, and my head was swarmed with words, these words I am writing now, and I sensed that in some world I had been doomed to that word, casualty, which had constituted my migrated soul, and that from now on any time I used casualty in speech or in composing my words toward some expression I would see myself there, and perhaps part of me would be translated, would migrate back to that place, wherever it was, but I would be helpless to stop it, or to avoid the word or using the word, or to follow that part of me with my mind, as I had followed my mind there in the first place.
And then the name Alexander Pope repeating in my head, everywhere, as I spent the next hour lying in bed, plodding to the bathroom, urinating, taking an Ambien, listening to Phil Hendry say “cat” and play at voices from the other coast, watching the television blankly, everywhere I thought Alexander Pope, Alexander Pope, Alexander Pope, until I consulted my books and found a thin collection of his work which I scanned, reading bits of The Duncaid, bits of The Rape of the Lock, finding nothing until I gave up and meandered to a collection of poetry given to me by a misguided friend, a poetry collection I would not otherwise have looked at, and I found within it this poem by A. Pope, called “Lines By A Person Of Quality”Fluttering spread thy purple pinions,
Gentle Cupid, o'er my heart,
I a slave in thy dominions,
Nature must give way to art.
Mild Arcadians, ever blooming,
Nightly nodding o'er your flocks,
See my weary days consuming,
All beneath yon flowery rocks.
Thus the Cyprian goddess weeping,
Mourned Adonis, darling youth:
Him the boar, in silence creeping,
Gored with unrelenting tooth.
Cynthia, tune harmonious numbers;
Fair Discretion, tune the lyre;
Soothe my ever-waking slumbers;
Bright Apollo, lend thy choir.
Gloomy Pluto, king of terrors,
Armed in adamantine chains,
Lead me to the crystal mirrors,
Watering soft Elysian plains.
Mournful Cypress, verdant willow,
Gilding my Aurelia's brows,
Morpheus, hovering o'er my pillow,
Hear me pay my dying vows.
Melancholy, smooth Mæander,
Swiftly purling in a round,
On thy margin lovers wander
With thy flowery chaplets crowned.
Thus when Philomela, drooping,
Softly seeks her silent mate,
So the bird of Juno stooping;
Melody resigns to fate.
This means, to me, that I have been given these visions and words by a guide of some kind, even if that guide is me. Every word in the poem seemed to come from me, and I think, in fact, I believe, that I heard these very words before I read them, that the language formed in my mind while dreaming and even so fully these words were heard minutes or possibly seconds before I read and reflected upon them at all. My thinking, as it were, became unnecessary before I ever employed it in reading “Lines By A Person Of Quality”. My thinking, in this instance, became obsolete, a needless function, as dead as a rolling rock. My mind became a casualty of a poem."
"In vainglory the chicken spreads the seed with his feet, amassing a mound of knuckle and ivory for the worms to habitate, glowing red with the eyes of the hierophant, glowing all colors with the spectral stretch of entrails it scratches out into the mud, out of the mud, its innards, into them, outward, glowing as the jade green ire of a dying ember of the constellation, his chicken heart bantam and fluttering his pinions, lo! what beauty can assault this literal poltroon, this stilted mind which falls under the paltry weight of a blue eye, a cheekbone, a quavering lip, now a dark talon drapes its sharp shadow across the shoulder of a tiny boy, the boy explodes the sky, the sky explodes, the shadow disappears, but in disappearing it is now everywhere, there is only shadow, there is only sharpness, only the pervasive talon, all the world in its leatherblade grip, all of it, the pain of that shadow is ubiquitous now, the lightless place in the toe of the hawk, the chicken, the falcon, the erne, the buzzard, under his wings, crushed by a ring of muscle, an orbicular eye not winking but shrinking, not an arc and nadir closing to a single line but a circle closing to a dot, the treachery of definition colluding with it to expire all that once constituted the middle, the world we know, the place we inhabit, the real, the actual, the concrete, the metaphysic of the thing aborted or stillborn, latent and now dead, bloomed into the grave, the corpus callosum, the corpus, all of our great work, in the dream my hair grows eight feet, my fingernails bloom trees, my eyes swirl into my head, my navel runs to my heart, my teeth become my jaw, my ears turn backward, my heart runs to my navel, my phallus has disintegrated, my mind floats above me like a spirit, a god who despises my body, a lithe brown rabbit with teeth grown in curls deep into its own brain sits glossed in blood over the striated pickings of a freshly killed wolf, it asks me where my poetry is now, it asks me what poetry has ever told of this, I tell it something but before I finish it dies of the teeth in its brain and begins to decompose, my breath is halted, I can not breathe, then there is the girl and I am sure she loves me and I am in love, she wears nothing, but she is so close to me, I know this by the warmth of her skin which I sense in pulses of warmth in the slight wind between our bodies, she says I love you Charles and I try to tell her I love her but before I can the wolf is attacking her and he has her by her thin neck pinned to the ground and she is screaming and dying when I see it is the same wolf under the bloody rabbit and its entrails and sinews are dangling and shaking from it, and I grab the sinews and entrails and try to pull the wolf off of her and it turns on me and begins to devour my intestines, I can feel it suddenly lapping up the pit of my stomach, it smiles with bloody teeth and looks me in the eyes as I am dying and I see the girl naked over the wolf’s shoulder smiling too, and she is fine, and she seems happy, and I see that blood is dripping from her nipples into shallow pools at her feet, dripping like milk, and the wolf wanders away from me and begins to lap at the bloodpools, and the girl smiles and I can see that she is happy and I feel betrayed, but I can not tell her how betrayed I am because she is too beautiful in the sunlight, which is now behind her, and now she is crying sweetly, as if to console me, and the wolf makes tiny quiet slurps and breathes gently its monstrous lungs, its dangled sinews broken now and then by rays of sunlight, and I die, and I float away, following my mind somewhere as a small blue light, and I am no longer sure what constitutes me, for I have left my body and am trailing my mind, I am without sensation but the sensation of movement, and then I am, I sense, in a single word, and I am part of that word, and I exist with others like me, whatever we are, whatever we are constituted by and constituents of, and I sense that the word is casualty, because I must have become a noun, and because, whatever we are, we may only be verbs in transmigration, and only adjectives in apostasy, and I understand that the noun is a sort of purgatory for us, that I am doomed to being a noun until I am not a noun, in ignorance, in azoic helplessness, in exanimation, and I see that the girl was always a verb, that she was a yet determined verb, but likely sear or perpetuate or collapse, and I sense that she will reach for me, that she will use me again, not knowing it, not realizing I am a part of what she is reaching for, and I try to change the very way she wishes to use me, try to extend myself unnaturally, to radiate an essence which might affect her understanding of me, but it is obviously unnatural and in time I realize impossible, and once used she disappears from my sight again, wherever I am, whatever elaborate catachresis has abducted me, or inducted me, or affected me.
I thought for some amount of time in this dream that I felt myself shift within the word as a tectonic plate along the crust of the earth, and that this phenomenon had apprised me of an opportunity, a chance to escape my concrete existence, but as I slid the final time and strained myself toward what I believed to be freedom I woke up, and my head was swarmed with words, these words I am writing now, and I sensed that in some world I had been doomed to that word, casualty, which had constituted my migrated soul, and that from now on any time I used casualty in speech or in composing my words toward some expression I would see myself there, and perhaps part of me would be translated, would migrate back to that place, wherever it was, but I would be helpless to stop it, or to avoid the word or using the word, or to follow that part of me with my mind, as I had followed my mind there in the first place.
And then the name Alexander Pope repeating in my head, everywhere, as I spent the next hour lying in bed, plodding to the bathroom, urinating, taking an Ambien, listening to Phil Hendry say “cat” and play at voices from the other coast, watching the television blankly, everywhere I thought Alexander Pope, Alexander Pope, Alexander Pope, until I consulted my books and found a thin collection of his work which I scanned, reading bits of The Duncaid, bits of The Rape of the Lock, finding nothing until I gave up and meandered to a collection of poetry given to me by a misguided friend, a poetry collection I would not otherwise have looked at, and I found within it this poem by A. Pope, called “Lines By A Person Of Quality”Fluttering spread thy purple pinions,
Gentle Cupid, o'er my heart,
I a slave in thy dominions,
Nature must give way to art.
Mild Arcadians, ever blooming,
Nightly nodding o'er your flocks,
See my weary days consuming,
All beneath yon flowery rocks.
Thus the Cyprian goddess weeping,
Mourned Adonis, darling youth:
Him the boar, in silence creeping,
Gored with unrelenting tooth.
Cynthia, tune harmonious numbers;
Fair Discretion, tune the lyre;
Soothe my ever-waking slumbers;
Bright Apollo, lend thy choir.
Gloomy Pluto, king of terrors,
Armed in adamantine chains,
Lead me to the crystal mirrors,
Watering soft Elysian plains.
Mournful Cypress, verdant willow,
Gilding my Aurelia's brows,
Morpheus, hovering o'er my pillow,
Hear me pay my dying vows.
Melancholy, smooth Mæander,
Swiftly purling in a round,
On thy margin lovers wander
With thy flowery chaplets crowned.
Thus when Philomela, drooping,
Softly seeks her silent mate,
So the bird of Juno stooping;
Melody resigns to fate.
This means, to me, that I have been given these visions and words by a guide of some kind, even if that guide is me. Every word in the poem seemed to come from me, and I think, in fact, I believe, that I heard these very words before I read them, that the language formed in my mind while dreaming and even so fully these words were heard minutes or possibly seconds before I read and reflected upon them at all. My thinking, as it were, became unnecessary before I ever employed it in reading “Lines By A Person Of Quality”. My thinking, in this instance, became obsolete, a needless function, as dead as a rolling rock. My mind became a casualty of a poem."