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1 (Apostrophe)
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I have-- well, had-- a friend who claimed the only effect LSD had on him was to make him unsure whether his eyes were open or closed-- as if what the drug did was tear down the wall around the self and expose the synaethesthetic being to the world. Fowlie-- and who can blame him, an entire generation taught to reduce everything to psychology, the science of the walled-up self-- says you mistook your own childhood for the golden age of history. What you learned in the school of happiness may have only lasted a tenth of a second, but I would never want to translate you or anyone else, though just to do the magical study so far as I have I had to cloister myself a little. The night you wrote "O Saison" I was out riding motorcycles with friends and we turned off the road into a vineyard (this was in Arkansas believe it or not) and parked under the stars and ate grapes and smoked dope. Like you, we were happy. We didn't know it, of course; you never know it when you actually have the thing no matter how you study, except maybe on acid you might get that double drift, close your eyes and nothing changes.
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2 (Life of X: timeline)
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i is someone else
arrested as i got off the train for not having a centime
i am not sending you any stories... it costs too much!
you will have forced me to sell all your clothes
i will soon have a job and i am already working enough to live, though in a small way
i am paid by the month, 150 francs, i believe
if this happens, i will earn a good recommendation... and put aside a few hundred francs
Album of Forest and Farm Sawmills, in English
The Pocket Book of the Carpenter
by now i am very well versed in the coffee trade
i am the only employee and everything goes through me
moreover, i have about 200 francs in cash
Construction in Metal, by Monde, priced at 10 francs
Bottin, Paris et Etranger (telephone book)
Dictionary of Engineering military and civil, priced at 15 francs
Plaisanteries, jeux de mots, in Arabic
if i wish, i will quickly earn back the 2000 francs that this cost me
one of these photographs shows me standing on a terrace of the house; another, standing in a café garden; another, with my arms crossed in a banana garden
the agency at Harar, which i directed, is closed
since no one here can be trusted, i have to keep my savings on me and keep a constant eye on it
i still feel pretty well in this filthy country
i also buy many other things: gum, incense, ostrich plumes, ivory, dried leather, cloves, etc., etc.
Dictionary of Commerce and Navigation of Guillaumin
don't think i have become a slave merchant. the merchandise we import is rifles
if my associate had not died, i would have earned about thirty thousand francs
i continually carry about in my belt sixteen thousand and a few hundred francs in gold; it weighs about eight kilos and gives me dysentery
could i come home to you and get married next spring
i would leave here, and believe that the intense heat of Aden would do me good, but i am owed a great deal of money
after the deal is closed i will have about 35 thousand francs
i had to enter the Hospital of the Conception, where i pay 10 francs a day, doctors included
i have money on my person i can't even take care of
why do we exist
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3 (etude)
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circular manifestations concatenate
below ground and above the aether
exemplifications caught signing to each other
immemorial plaques relentless melting in conflagration
in end-of-millenium inward invisible latin storms
gray vowels captured bluejay blue rupture seamless
mottle of daylight and writing
carrying text to market in wheelbarrows
gray bread rag flour wormwood in water this stone
bringeth sleep to fish-signs in early winter waiting
out the viral thaw beyond organism in centered
houses of dream cardboard dwellers in concrete
island road-soot chateau(x) of lugubrious harmonies
where the cock crew croaked
sapping weakness from wordless webbing
of what stares back from the opaque
face of time not circular not skew
chord of infinite sustain
of infinite
irresolution
our house dead nameless brother
rainbow of sound
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October, 1999
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