FORGET THE FUTURE

 

                    FORGET     THE      FUTURE

                              a novel or something for James Thomson BV

                                                        by

                                       Thomas McGonigle

ACTIONS LEAVE SHALLOWER TRACES THAN DREAMS. ONCE THE DAY HAS ENDED THE LIFE THAT TOOK PLACE IS OF NO INTEREST TO ANYONE.

                                                       ---DOMINIQUE AURY

                          this apology of decay

                                                           ---Gottfried Benn

complications don’t sell, you can be complicated when you’re dead.

                     THOMSON AGAIN AND AGAIN

Only memory really exists and of course dies with us unless we find some way to preserve it…  every day when we wake we re-arrange the past and move through it as we move through what is becoming part of the past.

-Again.

-Again, I do go to James Thomson, yes, James Thomson BV

-Charlie Conklin was sitting on a bloody towel on a wooden chair in front of Jerry Foley’s Village Paddock on the corner of Jane Street and 8th Avenue that morning.   I’m bleeding from down there, he said.  Jerry---that cheap bastard--- wouldn’t let me sit in his bar.  He called an ambulance.  He was afraid I’d die in there and the city would close him down for a few weeks…

- I took a drive at 6:30 PM on a December night out from the house where I live three nights of the week and had to drive a few miles away.

-There are only a four streetlights on the long road into which I turned and there are few cars on this Sunday road.  I am listening to a CD on the car player as the wipers took the light rain off the windshield but the glistening glass harshly reflected the headlights of the on-coming cars.  I thought of the neighbor who had swerved into an incoming car with her car and walked away from the accident on this road.

-It was not a long drive and I had looked in the garage for a tourist brochure I had picked up long ago when I went to Illiers-Combray to see the house Proust described in Remembrance of Things Past.

-The house was not as I imagined it to be, though at this moment, I am thinking, was not the book by Proust a novel and why would I think the house I was to walk through was actually the “real” house, that is the setting for a never forgotten scene in a novel… except of course I had been told that it was, as I knew when I went to the Martello Tower in Dublin and to walk up to the gun rest… as stately plump…

-Should I write about him and be done with it for the moment and he will exist in the moment of the first person who reads these words.

      LEAVING APACHE

                   (photo to be inserted)

 

-It cannot be said that when leaving Apache one can see the sign.

      GOING TO APACHE

                                                has to end at the moment

           (photo to be inserted)

  while what alone remains from the many times of the going to Apache… one building by the side of the highway.

  

                (photo to be inserted)

There you have it--- this you, remembered or invented in the moment, without a name: a destination, a depository if you can… for these words, these pages, at the moment.

                     +++

He rejected my advice, saying that travels like the humanities, should serve only to enliven one’s style, “ and the incidents gleaned abroad might be used in a novel, but not in a straight account.  Travel writings were to him the same as news items, a low form of literature, and he had higher aspirations.”  Maxim du Camp on Flaubert  in FLAUBERT IN EGYPT by Frances Steegmuller 

“HER CUNT FELT LIKE ROLLS OF VELVET AS SHE MADE ME COME. “  

                                    ---GUSTAVE FLAUBERT.

                                           +++

        

-I shouldn’t write about him because of the difficulties of the places he inhabited: Patchogue, Dublin, Sofia and sometimes London.

IN THE LONG RUN, THE PAST AND THE PRESENT AND THE FUTURE ARE PRETTY MUCH THE SAME KIND OF FURNITURE,

                  --- JACK SPICER.   VANCOUVER LECTURE 

 

                                      +++

 -I can write about him if he can be said to live on the page by way of the words on the page but this is not for me to decide as while I am able to read these words I also am responsible for these words being on the page and that is where the problems come into being with the simple impossibility of something another might call objectivity… 

                                          +++

BOREDOM IS THERE, IS SOMETHING SPECIFIC, AND YET IT NEVERTHELESS ALWAYS  SURROUNDED BY THESE EXTRANEOUS CIRCUMSTANCES IN WHICH WE BECOME SIDETRACKED TIME AND AGAIN IN OUR ONGOING INVESTIGATIONS

                                  --MARTIN HEIDEGGER

                        +++

-To write from the personal point of view is to be constantly aware of the brevity of a life given to an individual--- yet unable or unwilling to rise or fall to that strange… thing: creation, to use words to create a person, a place, things, feelings and then to add adjectives: comic, tragic, friendly, nice, lovable, endearing, inspiring--- or not adding an adjective and choosing to describe action and creations participating in actions, inter-actions all as memorable as the person said to be standing at 

                                       

                                             STOP 

in Patchogue and being asked what he was doing replied, I am waiting for it to change.

                      ===

-Once upon a time a man asked Thomson for a likeness of himself and Thomson replied that he would send a sheet of paper with his name block lettered across the bottom of the page and above there would be an inked square of blank space:  all you should require when you want to call me to mind.

                                 IN REMEMBRANCE OF

                                             JAMES THOMSON

                                                      (B.V.)

                                    "The City of Dreadful Night"

                                          Born 23 November 1834

                                           Died. 3 June 1882

                                Interred at Highgate Cemetery

                                            8 June 1882

---That’s’ the trouble with you, Thomson is saying, the trouble with all of you, being born in that place---- America, infected with such a dreary portion of optimism.  Cannot help but think no matter what your sense, your memory telling you:  things are bound to change and on you go in spite of your going out to Highgate Cemetery and seeing I did not even get a grave of my own.

-Eventually, the poor me will arrive and I will then ramble down the lane, push aside the dead dog, the cat, pass the rutting lovers and find myself exactly where Thomson wanted me.

---Done with it and I have been done by it.

-Nothing to be extracted from a locket of hair.  The undertaker snipped a lock of my mother’s hair and gave it to me in a plain envelope.

-You’ve been kept busy with that hair! Thomson’s voice appears

-The question of the locket sewn into your own…

-What do you know?  

-The familiar misery, the comfortable misery.

-It gotta go on.  

-Has the life gotten better for you?

-Are you going to quote Pascal to me:  I believe only the histories, whose witnesses got themselves killed. (#593)