I would like to give my critics some space, perhaps a half of an hour or an hour, of my valuable time (valuable because each moment is after it burns out extinct, is perishing, is effusion of heat like the icy, distant stars). Now I would like to have those utterances of theirs in front of us, so that we can see them, so that we can inspect them. They will be first like exhibits at an art galery (and very fine sculpted icicles) and then we will chisel our own meaning into their thoughts. So I produce them unadorned in this gaudy, gilded little room (you're quite cramped, I'm sure, and it's difficult to breathe -- when you entered the ceiling was an overhang a bit too low, scraping your scalp, skinning the nape of your neck in rough granite, harsh):

"It's amazing how vapid you are in person"

(on a little plum velvet cushion, resting like a diamond, a small little gold in ornamental ring the kind you put on your lover's finger if you ask her to wed -- the diamond catches the light, and sparkles ruby-red).

Now I shiver and shake. Now my fingers are not steady producers of words. Now an agony of shivers through me and out of me, but I was practicing the flute and I can assure you it made the notes shake in a most admirable canter. But we must steal ourselves, even as these words steal us away, and like Catullus, obdure. The next:

(Presented on a magnificent canopy, with very plush cushions and a drab of silk draped over the luxurious commode, with patterns of Japanese symbols and a woman with black hair extending into a billiard ball and slit eyes like a snake very attentively fixed on her dressing, which is itself flowing like a waterfall flows into a river I mean out into the silk expanse; lying on all this, reclining you might say, on the commodious oriental recliner, like a woman at her ease, of delicate fingers holding perhaps a tinted and sparkling glass of wine, a now really pudging from her pouty lips, like a perhaps aging hollywood matron, or a guest on I Love Lucy, this voluptuous phrase)

"An inability to say something obvious hovers over everything you say -- or possibly the even greater inability to say nothing at all".

Now it is Confucius, who pulls my cheeks and flounder-faced turns me to him (holding in long claws) and I like sushi, "Silence!" hisses (though this is uncooked meat).

So these commodious things in the little room with fauns dancing frescoed o'er the walls almost bulge out of it like post-modern architectural angles and perhaps we can see also above the dancing fawns, in Greek engraving, racing lutes and horns, the jealous faces of disapproving and spurned lovers. First Nabokov speaks,

"In my early days, in the prodigious beginnings of youth, I too would write scribblings, and honestly I can hardly blame him, for style is the least graceful of genius' attendants, and if the parade comes early, then she is late, but if she does not attend them, then they attend not her and she walks alone like a nimble whore and a wretch."

James Joyce, gibbering as always,

"Well I encourage the lad. Forge in the smithy of my soul and all that. He is a priest of the imagination: he is lighting the way to the avid debaucheries of his mature years. And if he is spurned then I will retire to France to make my life into literature, and he is well on his way."

(And did you notice the composition of that? Invent something until it came with God).

Now Moses never has anything appreciative to say, but perhaps it is because he was recently moved and sits in a dark and unappreciated corner of the room, and he has not a very good view of the pasty, glimmering gem or the symposium in a stool (and is it stool?).

Plato, however, is very angry, and his light makes shadows flicker through the dark room -- and in these lengthening and decreasing shadows (as happens with a glare) the fawns turn and almost seem to dance and strut about the facade, their grins seem almost wickedness and some impish cruelty. We needn't record what he says, for he won't deign to speak in jambs of any kind.

There is, however, a type-setter who is very pleased (perhaps it is Guttenberg, his picture more ordered than needed, and hardly placed with care). Now Guttenberg says, "Of cliches, I have had no more avid customer or consumer. So many lovely little pastel words he lays that it keeps me lock, stock, and barrel tied within my richest home. The more words, the more print, the more print, the more silver -- so let him emboss his speech with cheaply gold.

Does Shakespeare have anything to say? No. He is aware how much I hate him (although Harold Bloom, with a sly look, already came traipsing 'round here and pronounced a verdict, and it was a piece of work).

So shall we allow these dumb displays to speak? Shall these mute interlocutors talk? This would require something of sustained philosophy, for which I haven't breath, but on a few points I will try to pick the lock, unbar this granite block that keeps me from the clear air.

Reader: Well what I want when I read is something I can sink my teeth into, something tasty, something dripping like a steak; juicy with exotic spices and delectable, but palatable and nutritious.

I: I love fromage, and I love all the fixings, dresses -- I love spice, I like the smell of nard; every fragrance I encounter I'll mix with my food -- and even shit if it provides something of the right texture and the correct feel.

Reader: I have no joy for dainty dishes, and I'm no gourmet. Give me something hot off the ladle, filling and appeasing, satisfying; give me a strong and hearty gruel.

I: How can I? How can I resist serving up in a fine silver ladel the finest allusions?

Reader: Now seriously. I would not talk like this. You have something obvious to say, and it's your life. So say that. Now see how much we professed to enjoy it when you talked about sex. Are you going to string us along on your blind song for much longer? What cannot be spoken of we must pass over in silence.

I am mute and dumb at these reproofs. I can only say that I tried, in the ecstasy of a moment, to express -- with whatever words came handy. Oh there was nothing of Machiavell in that, and no philosophy. But my words are like pearls, precious pearls of my twilights taken from an overburdened chest. I like each of them no matter how long the glittering string, and I can't bear to be parted from them. In truth it bores and saddens me so that I have no satisfaction and I lie bleeding in the mess.

White attendants! Pale ghosts take me on the monstrous couch and lie me down, give me the precious gem and set it on my crown, so that in the spirit of my past, and my profaners' clasp, I may sigh and breathe my last breath, filled with the inutterable exhaust of all these myriad perfumes.

Now virtue has something to say:

Alex Leibowitz, I take my leave of you. Your back was made for the whip and the scourge. If you continue to speak this way, you'll end up a babbling fool like Joyce over there, like an itinerant player full of sound and fury but locked up in his own madness for whom all profess pity but none express love. Do you see that man behind me? He's Dante, the height to which that one aspired, and he failed to tower high enough. If I slap you in the face 'til tears pour from your eyes as if you were seething in a chamber of your own stinking sweat -- and if I kicked you so you recoiled in the stomach and rolled into yourself like a bloom imploded by the gravity of a sudden brush -- it would not be enough, and let alone caresses, is more than you deserve.

However, as for them -- never pay them heed or mind. It is most un-Christ like to dictate others' speech, and what they speak they speak in jest, or otherwise surely they would have submitted even their blessed names to the test of your approval: for fools and cowards leave neither thought, nor name, nor trace. And I have seen it often on these forums and I do not most approve at all, that those delectable beings who record and leave some fleeting residue of their lives are yet besieged by the calumnies not of time but of these haphazard scrawls and gestures as inappropriate as the graffiti on the thesis tower bathroom's walls. So fie on you all, wretches! Hear the crack of the whip! Leave your name, your number, and your address and we'll see what comes of it! We'll see, we'll see it all; say something as ferocious as it can be, but kind, and saperpouille to you! S'blood and saperpouille!