Empire of the Senseless. Кэти Акер

or actuality into what can be perceived and so controlled. The subjects, us, are now stable and socializable. Reason is always in the service of the political and economic masters. It is here that literature strikes, at this base, where the concepts and actings of order impose themselves. Literature is that which denounces and slashes apart the repressing machine at the level of the signified. Well before Bataille, Kleist, Hoffman etc., made trial of Hegelian idealism, of the cloturing dialectic of recognition: the German Romantics sung brazenly brassily in brass of spending and waste. They cut through conservative narcissism with bloody razor blades. They tore the subject away from her subjugation to her self, the proper; dislocated you the puppet; cut the threads of meaning; spit at all mirrors which control.

      I knew that pleasure gathers only in freedom. For I was soaring through the sky, my huge white and grey wings stretched out to the horizontal limits of my vision. I was alone. In the sky. I was almost white.

      I flew downwards, hollering with pleasure, swoop as if into the slate of water. But I didn’t. Then swooped directly into the cold of that ocean, it was the light of morning, as directly as if I was going for food. Out of the tunnel my body had carved in the water, a fountain of light burst upward.

      The city awoke. Bursting. Angels sat on its head. Everything burst. Carolled. There is only glory. Because I know there are angels and visions, there is freedom. Only in real living human life. After years of regular torture, boredom replacing all other mental activity, continuous fear, forgetfulness of all dreams to the point of inability to dream, to have visions, after years of being driven into the corners of rats, of garbage cans filled with plague, of cut-off limbs, driven into every form of living which is death: suddenly the people in this city were free. They were free to experiment.

      This is what the people said to the sky. ‘Now the mad bird has won. Now even criminals can fly.’

      But (in my dream) thousands of tiny fish were translucent and looked like worms. They leapt, with their tiny sharp teeth, out of the water at me. The teeth bit through the thin feathers into my flesh. From me the little teeth were red. One baby fish leaped so high, he bit through my rotting teeth with his teeth. Then through my tongue tip. Many fish tore my wings off of me out of hunger. Me actually courageous I tried to keep my life by screaming swooping dodging. Nobody and nothing came to my rescue. There was no such thing as rescue. There could have been no reality. I had only myself to save myself. I couldn’t save myself. My wings were more torn than dishrags, they were sick, and the tongue was so torn it couldn’t speak. I could neither fly nor cry. Nor could I stay alive.

      Inside my mind I scream aloud; inside my mind, the world, I scream aloud. Somewhere I am a female and I have long hair and that hair is floating over the soil so dry, for centuries, that nothing ever grows in it. Here there is only emotion. I scream when I die. Then I sink into black. The rest of any living is nights. The cities have died. The cities are full of rats; the rats are bored; people seem as lonely as they are bored.

      After that night I was so unsure of myself, I desperately made love with anyone. Since lots of boys fell wildly in love with this double material sex and mental lack of me, daddy was jealous. ‘If I was a young boy, I’d knife a boy who fucked you.’

      ‘I don’t like knives.’

      ‘We’ve hit bottom.’ Daddy knew how low love had brought us. ‘We’re downwind from even from where the rich spit. Any man would do anything to prevent our joy. But they’ll all be sorry for their rules which are crimes. If, by any chance, there isn’t any real justice, if we have no rescue: I hereby invoke all the gods or Energies who sanctify our love or so-called crime to make these men suffer the horrors of hell. May their suffering equal God’s.’

      ‘I didn’t know God existed.’

      Not only did this monster to whose force I had, by force, yielded hate even the notion of my fucking a boy. He also, was, even more, frightened that other people, society, would notice his ridiculous restrictions of me and question why. He realized he had to give them, society, a reason why he was shutting me up.

      All daddy cared about was what society thought about him. He didn’t care if he was really evil because he didn’t have any morals. He was free to do whatever he wanted as long as he was secret. He was a moralist. He just didn’t want society to think him evil.

      So he gradually let it be known I was a cripple. For this reason, he was shutting me up for the rest of my life. I was a genetic cripple: I was weird. Also I was dyslexic and autistic. I was too crippled for anyone to love me.

      My mother knew I wasn’t a cripple. She was real dumb. So daddy gave her the one reason for my life imprisonment which could penetrate her thick skull. He, he explained, was saving me from marriage because marriage is the worst life any woman can have.

      My mother agreed.

      ‘Marriage,’ my father said, ‘turns woman into whining passive-aggressive liars while the men become narcissists. Whatever good is possible between any man and woman marriage destroys. For the woman becomes lobotomized and the man acts like a bad actor acting the part of President Reagan. My one goal in life, darling, is to allow your daughter to be as intelligent and fully realized a human being as possible.’

      ‘Yes,’ my mother dared to open her mouth, ‘males are creeps.’

      But as soon as her husband walked away from her, my mother, I hated those words, reverted to her usual inability to accept the truth. For the truth, being complex, always hurts. She whined to her mother, because she always turned to her mother, what her husband had said.

      At the moment my mother was whining, daddy was smelling my cunt. ‘I’ve reached my best moment now!’ he explained. Now I was sure what he was referring to. ‘This is the moment of truth!!! … I’m going off off off jacking it off!!! … my hands’re gonna be broken from this one!!! … I don’t even recognize my own body!!! … and it doesn’t matter!!! … I know you’re mine!!! … I made you!!! … I’m making you!!! … I swore I’d live for pleasure!!! … My tongue is fucking enormous!!! … feel it!!! … it’s reaching down to my waist!!! … you’re seeing your actual father in his moment of truth!!! … God almighty!!! … nothing matters!!! … you’re my God!!! … my daughter: I worship you!!! … I beg you to do it, show I can please you!!! … now look at it, it’s big, in my corkscrewing hand!!! … kiss it!!!’

      My father explained again, ‘I am fucking God and I made God!!! … Holy Shit!!! … all I have to do is look at God and God is happy cause I’ve made God come!!!

      ‘God is in heaven I’m in heaven I’ve died the whole world in heaven!!! … I’m coming all over your face!!!’

      I licked up his sperm.

      My grandmother, unlike my mother, wasn’t a dope. She didn’t do dope. When mommy whimpered to her that her husband (whom she loved more than anything on earth), that this husband was keeping me in a private prison and privately whipping me, grandma replied that this couldn’t be good for my welfare. This couldn’t be for the sake of my welfare. My father couldn’t be whipping me for my good. So he must be acting for his own good, because there is always Good. No one was sure what that might be.

      My mother’s mother was a dominating old bitch. With her shaking flesh she wobbled via taxi over to my father. ‘Bud,’ she asked him. ‘What’s this shit about you not letting my granddaughter fuck for money? I mean, get married?’ Grandma always got her terms mixed up. ‘Do you want your daughter to be a freak? After all, she carries our name.’

      ‘I don’t have enough money to let her marry, Florrie. Marriage’s too expensive a business.’

      ‘I’ll finance it,’ grandma replied.

      ‘If you finance her fucking for money,’ said my father whose IQ was 166, ‘I’ll let her do it.’ My father knew his mother-in-law was the cheapest thing on earth, even cheaper than himself.

      ‘I’ll finance it.’ Then grandmama huffed and huffed on to the uppitty hotel she called her home, but by the time she had walked into her grey red and black clown study, she had forgotten everything