Bernadette Mayer

that if you can get enough to eat will sustain itself can move forward & can live till it dies at this moment in this world there are millions of others of your species who you could say in language eat stand & site, fuck & shit, ingest procreate & defecate on or near this same ground, whichever may you like it you sit stand or lie on a world globe orb or circumstance that’s a planet revolving on its axis in an orbit around so-called sun what else could you say that’s true ? You could begin to tell how often you remember you’re one of these sorts of beings in this sort of place you could say what it feels like with a memory and how often you feel the pull (not like being famous or considered beautiful) out of your self and place which is a place so little so parochial that if you lived in it withtout the past you might never even know the shape of the earth and not mich about the rest (someone said I love you I want to be you).

Houses & buildings were not just left as they were : all doors are large, none are revolving, there are no cagelike places, elevators are transparent, all windows can open, places open out onto other places, hallways are generous, there is no rent, backyards behind city buildings are joined without fences so you could ride a horse behind the streets, some pavements have turned back to dirt, there isnt any money, money became so physically large that to accumulate five dollars it would take a whole old-fashioned room full of these big metal things ellipsoid in shape, all the sewage of the world makes fuel plus a generous contribution from the stars, the ex-oil companies take care of that, we clean the streets, the schools are an essay on schools, you can get what you need from the stores and storehouses, if you act greedy no one will look at you, drugs are dispensed by old people, if you want dope you have to go to the museum, when you die there’s no hospital, it’s safe to be born and safe to die at home, there’s no accidents, hideous things have ceased to befall you, various women and men come to your house when you need them to work against these things, often old people say, « I have never suffered pain, » old people run the newspapers and storehouses, they meet in conventions to plan the free travelling all over the world of the 18-25 year-olds in place of the ancient colleges, they run the nursery schools, it is to your greatest disadvantage to live in a house without an old person, you have no influence then, the whales are farmers for the humans, we cat their underwater potato baked with a steak of shark & seaweed salad in America, poets and artists entertain the people in the neighborhood, there are contests and exchanges with other parts of the world, neighborhoods publish books, the printing costs are paid by Ex-Landlords Inc. (Ex-Publishers Inc lost all their money investing in solid-state computer systems and are seeking to re-invest in literature), there are still cockroaches in the cities, they live in a museum built on top of the Frick called the Watt on Fifth Avenue (no children allowed) named after former Secretary of the Interior James Watt who had an out-of-the-body experience at the opening and after that he wasted away in a noisy wilderness somewhere, there are no dentists, dentists had to admit at last there were herbs that cured toothaches without any pain at all, for years the dentists were held in the jails for sadists, now they are released and live among us, there are still doctors whom you never have to wait to see, when patients (the word patients was changed to people, or, colloquially, leeks) go to a doctor’s office (the word office was changed to house) they are given tea and perhaps lessons and ointments, acupuncture is practiced to prevent diseases, operations are rare, they are performed in operation cathedrals, most diseases and chronic debilitating disorders disappeared after people began to stop being paid salaries for their work and the medical profession (the word profession has been changed to chore or inspiration) became so predominantly female for a while, there was a comedy show you could still go to for a long time where some man would stick his hand into some part of your body and say, « I’m the doctor, I know what’s best for you and my time is precious, » all over the world it was good news to know at last that by gently and aggressively rubbing the tip of the penis and the penis all over before what they used to call sexual intercourse with a great big hot sponge soaked in honey and karkade you have a 100 % chance of avoiding getting pregnant, actually the sponge doesnt even have to be hot and it doesnt have to be a sponge, you can do it any way, and when this method of birth control was first discovered it marked the beginning of the death of both capitalism and armies : people all over the world fled from misplaced tasks, there is no useless work, nobody has a job contributing to the making of money by somebody else jobs are either in the community or in the world, nobody works to sell things and it didnt take long to find out that with people working at useful things all the time to provide themselves and other people with what they need, and with no manipulations of currencies or power or land, there was enough food and shelter for everybody in the world, though some in the world wound up having fewer of the luxuries than they were used to having, crime is fading away, there are still courts and much of what the courts have to do has to do with the rest of crime and the rest of land there is still bad feeling about all this sharing of property and land, maps have become much more complex than they used to be, everyplace is smaller and there are more places than before, there is at this moment no longer such a thing (though it is being worked on) as a map of the world, the air is clear, it is golden, in summer it is iced, there is a little store on the avenue where you can stop if you want for a draft of elixir, it is golden, in summer it is iced, remedies become opaque in moonlight if you’re nervous, have lost love, there are the mesmeric tobaccos and the aphrodisiac ones, there are the work tobaccos, take this if you cant sleep, take this cure for the pains of childbirth, it’s a mixture that must be stolen from a neighbor and stand in a glass in the room next to you emitting a light of all the colors, go to the store of help to get some, there are the histories of all the individuals of the world, everyone adds to this part of the book.

I had been wanting to keep a journal of one week of living in New York and every detail of everything that happened at work, home and in the community, to see if recording everything about living in the city would be illuminating funny or useful because it would be about money, work, politics and sex.

Everything you or I or anybody says always seems 100 % wrong sometimes, unless you keep forcing it to be closer to the truth, kids have sharper memories till they learn to use the language well and then there is always all that prevaricating and the language begins to lie loosely once more : can I say this ? I got very angry…

I have an image of a beautiful man or woman who walks in the door like Christ and earnestly spends some time with us like the UPS man does.

An idea is to spend days walking nights writing never eating, sleep only when it rains and have an occasional beer.

A calm sentence like a story. I used to know a man who had a dog and I followed their steps in the snow, I got into the habit of walking just as far as they did every day. At the same time I also knew a woman whose husband had seven guns. I used to know a woman who’s the woman who married Neil Simon. I like the woman who used to work in the Lenox market, she never wears boots, then she retired. In New England the women are often more exciting than the men, Lewis thinks so too, I don’t know why. There’s a tribe somewhere where people say about the men, look how he’s changed since he’s had children, he looks awful !

I ask are you finished, you seem to want mine. There’s only time left to tell how the floors met the walls and we saw centipedes all the time crawling across the carpets which were green beneath the blue glass table which was a mirror with a plate of balls on it under the windows which on some days we cleaned but not too well so we wouldn’t fall out like my mother did not but someone else’s mother did and she died but my sister fell out once with a piece of cheese in her hand but she was so embarrassed and ashamed she didn’t tell anyone and just got up after I had already tried to compare with her how sex for us might be different but then we got into trouble again and resorted to the cellar to tear each other’s hair out and teach tongue-kissing.

The sauce is done. Then I went to visit a girlfriend of mine who was going to a Jesuit college in Syracuse. When I came home Bob met me at the airport, it was the first time I’d flown and I had fallen in love with someone and that was Ed. We went back to my house in Ridgewood, this was when I was trying to go to Barnard but it took me two hours to get there. Bob’s mother had given me a wedding shower because my grandfather had given me my mother’s diamond ring and she took that to mean we were engaged since she was worried anyway I’d get pregnant before we got married, though she was relieved that Bob wasn’t queer after all. I didn’t know anything about birth control. We had set a date for the wedding and arranged a reception but the place we were going to have it in burned down. Bob’s mother worked as a maker of wedding gowns. So that night in my house I told Bob to watch me sleep because I was afraid to sleep otherwise. In the middle of the night I sat up in bed, he said, and asked him a question. After that he always understood that I was no longer in love with him. I didn’t know what Ed wanted to do but a couple of days later he came to my house and said I want to live with you, meet me in two weeks. The night before I was supposed to leave I went out with Grace who a while before had been in such a bad car accident she was still walking with a cane. We went to a bar and I left with a minor league baseball player who had an MG, Grace left with somebody else and we met later at my house. I missed the taxi I had called to make the early plane but I caught a later one and when Grace woke up in my house all alone my grandfather mistook her for me even though she has red hair and he called her Bernie. When Grace left my neighbor Tex told her he’d seen the taxi and wondered what was going on, he’s the one who had said when my father died, « Who’s that ? »