August. The air is snarling. From the carrion maw of the subway station entrance issues the bad breath of the beast. Breath of the dog-star. All wet tongue and hot panting wind and exposed teeth. I see my reflection in Le Pain Quotidien. Submarine loaves of air-conditioned boutique bread submerged behind a cool vitrine like sea sponges, fruits de mer glacés, next to an elegant barista in a blue apron, afloat like a mermaid at a cherry-wood bar, embellishing a menu with colored chalks.
From the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows: “catoptric tristesse,” the sadness of being shut out of a mirror. Definition of eros.
(Science of catoptrics. Study of reflected light. Reflection. Refraction. Bending. Breaking.)
The New York Post barks at me with the voice of Cerberus as I descend onto the subway platform, swallowed by furnace heat. Rare flower at the New York Botanical Garden. Another entry in the taxonomy of sadness. Thank you, taxonomic poets, for Amorphophallus titanum, or “corpse flower” (titan arum). Its name and perfume capture the titanic amorphous phallic sadness of human life, its tumescence, its evanescence, its stink of death. (A name is like a dog’s humid breath, or a weed’s rank scent. It permeates your skin, even coats your eyeballs with glue-like meaning. You can’t stop seeing what the name names.) Human life. The phallic corpse flower.
Soiled Macy’s ad, cast away on a subway bench next to the Post. Little girl in fringed buckskin leather mukluks, slender naked legs disappearing under a short dress of see-through dentate ivory lace. Sherpa vest, pompom knit beanie, cute hedgehog mittens. Back-to-school sale. Delirious with the heat, I see her materialize under brisk October skies near the seventieth street children’s playground on Central Park East. As she walks she seems to straddle a slender pink cord of immature vaginal flesh, invisible under her clothing, as if she were scooting on her crotch along a tightrope, a carnal violin string whose high-pitched, squealing music only a pederast can hear. Like a katydid, making stridulous music with her thighs. A moist highway of illicit sex. Schlitterbahn. Pissy little darling. Cold as a fish. Wiping the sweat out of one ear, I flip through the ad one last time and toss it into a bulging green trash canister with a white “recycle” logo printed on its phallic lip.
Tumescence. Evanescence. Stink of death.
(The subway, where dark, disturbing dreams incubate, and large machines burrow phallically through the urban substrate like maggots through a corpse, enriching the soil. Lady, whilst the machine is to him. Like father like son.)
Like a reptile in the desert heat I seek the cool shadows under your skirt, where pale pastures glimmer in the dark like the cheeks of planets. I lodge myself rattle, fangs and all in the chasm of your charm. In a fury of anger, desire and pompous rectitude and lechery we pounce upon artless innocence and rape it, like shoppers at a Black Friday sale, and then out of shame at what we’ve done we murder it. Because it is really better off dead anyway, we reckon, seeing as how it is now defiled and all. We rapists are very considerate cowboys. Return it for a full refund. The mirror of eros, sealed portal to a mystery beyond our comprehension, slides open like the glass doors of a suburban shopping mall retail outlet as we rush past the security guards and trample the merchandise. But the “merchandise” is our own skin. Mortality is self-inflicted punishment, we realize with awe and gratitude, like heroic aid-workers in Ebola countries who self-quarantine. We must not carry our disease into the mirror world, so pristine and serene, and fragile as an alpine pool stocked with clouds. Intangible in the strict sense of the word, and incorruptible. So we trample our own skin in the rush for bargains, self-reflexively, in a process some call “aging.” Murder itself is murdered in the great shopper’s stampede we call “death.” Our skin is imprinted with immortal characters, campaign ribbons, medals of valor. Tokens of restraint and perseverance. (And, yes, liver spots.)
Vintage clothing. Items marked down for liquidation. Soiled and damaged merchandise. Bench-crafted leather. Hand-tooled cartography of time. Weathered pigskin. Scarred scorecard. Ominous lampshade. Translucent beauty.
Old people probably make better lampshades than children. Their poor, punished pelts display more velvety grain and velum than the milk-fed latex bubblegum skins of pre-adolescent children, those pampered darlings—deliriously supple and radiant in life, dull and featureless no doubt when stretched on a wire frame—ever could. The skin of old people is not chalky and dead but seems to glow with the intense inner diffused lamplight of their senior years. They are already licked within by flames of the lower world, the distant fires of Acheron. They look like they could burn your hand if you touched them, as if age was a communicable skin disease, like scabies or a fire rash. As if life was an ancient parchment defaced with obscure characters, already burning in the fires of purgatory. Hot as a New York subway platform in August.
Human life. The corpse flower.
Amorphophallus titanum, the phallic corpse flower
