‘I guess I’ll sell koans something additional to neaten severed dicks.’*
GJS: That insoluble riddles might be sold supplementary goods in order to better arrange dicks that while having been cut off are still muddled, seems to imply that riddles are kept at bay in order that other confusions might become clearer. I proffer that the unsevered dick is presumed to be at all times neat, that there is no elbow room for its becoming muddled, and that it is detachment from its human that causes this. The severed dick then is nothing more than a pessimist’s limp staff. It’s what continues to exist regardless of having been removed from any life-sustaining purpose. The mystery bought off with superfluities in the hope of better arranging some accessible confusion.
EC: An unsevered dick is nothing more than a ‘tail, penis.’ The insoluble riddle, the muddle in man, is precisely this back-to-front hindmost part of the animal. To ‘neaten severed dicks’ presumably means to put them in their proper place, the terminal end to which they truly belong.
‘Likely sell an angel a humane dick actually worth being called
Ruth’s 500-year-old butthole with no make-up on.’
GJS: Once again a purveying of dicks, the selling of something that so often cannot even be given away, but ‘a humane one’ in its rarity might be worth something. The buyer’s being an angel suggests that this humane dick is so defenseless, a paradox of ugly meat, that only such a pure creature might love it, might be trusted with its continued wellbeing.
EC: Again, as per the ‘tail, penis,’ logic above, a humane dick is/ could only ever be an inhumane one, like the angel itself, the messenger of God to whom the poet would sell this appendage’s being-its-opposite – a void, a lack or, as you say above, and I say, whether severed or not, a pessimist’s limp staff. But more than that, there is pain here, pain in the appendage’s protrusion, a pain that is garnered throughout the collection in this dick’s insistence on being-there where it should be bare, the ‘500-year-old butthole with no make-up on.’ The dick’s actual worth, then, is that of an aperture or of an opening, like the vagina or mouth, or the vagina-mouth, the vagina dentata. Perhaps this explains the persistence of alimentary references in Mask with Sausage. The poet wants to eat this appendage. He wants to eat it and shit it out. That his hunger or ‘thirst is a mailing’ brings us back to the message and to the messenger of God. The poet wants rid of this inalienable thing. It is ‘actually worth’ nothing, 0. Knowing this, the only question left is, as you say, how to sell what you cannot even give away?
‘I place a chick with a dick.’
GJS: Two disparaging terms united. Two misrepresentations. Two reductionist promises that are not kept.
EC: Misrepresentation, indeed. The place of ‘a chick with a dick’ is topos outopos, placeless place, or no-place place, at once synonymous with the third heaven into which Paul is unknowingly ravished (raptus), ‘whether in the body or out of the body, I do not know’ (1 Cor. 12.2), and with the petit mort or ‘little death’ of orgasm: the promise that is not kept but keeps (from Old English cēpan, ‘to seize’ or ‘take in,’ but also ‘to care for’ or ‘attend to’) in the momentary cessation of individuation, of chick and dick.
‘Bats have dicks on their teeth.’
GJS: Meat-eating bats have sharp teeth. That those teeth should be adorned with dicks might suggest that such dicks are weaponized. But given that these bats have been pulled into the poet’s lungs in an earlier line, we could be led to think that these nocturnal mammals are nothing but consumers of night, of dark internal spaces and the smaller creatures that dwell there, and that armouring their teeth with dicks is not only an acknowledgement of the process of consuming minus the sensation of sustenance, but also the robotic consumption of an intrinsically dark and darkening force.
EC: Again, I’m reminded of the vagina dentata, or toothed vagina, essentially a cautionary folk tale in which a woman’s vagina is said to contain teeth, with the corresponding implication that sexual intercourse will result in the castration or emasculation of the man involved. What would a mouthful of dicks do? Certainly it is pertinent that we are brought back to the twin figure of fullness and lack in the bat, symbol of night, of inhuman love/lust, of teeth gnashing, of flesh bleeding, of a mouth full mouthful of nothing.
‘My cock is a mothball.’
GJS: In a drawer, forgotten, quaint and frumpy, an irrelevance, a posture of zeroing consequence.
EC: Exactly, as above.
‘In my cock
There’s small airplanes crashed into grammar schools’
GJS: The memories of an organ: those intimate flights that plummeted into yet-to-be-refined intelligences, into awakening brains disrupted by such an incongruous indulgence.
EC: ‘[G]rammar schools’ also suggests the mouth. The mouth of orality, os, oris. Memories of fellatio perhaps, of giving or of getting head, oral sex. But more than that, there is the face, metonym of the mouth it surrounds and renders visible. There is also fallacy, deception depicted in the ‘airplanes crashed.’ The mistaken belief in something, that is, accordingly, nothing. A non-event, then. 0’s crashing into 0’s. The poet seems to be saying, what is ‘[i]n my cock’ is irrelevant or, as the sum of its parts, in that this cock is not connected with or relevant to something, what is ‘[i]n my cock’ is nothing; my cock is a no-thing.
‘In my eye damns my cock
Birthing huge blindfolds for minds’
GJS: Either this cock is damning via the visual or the cock is itself damned by the visual. That the consequence of such damning is the temporary removal of thought, it seems likely that it is the latter, whereby sight bemoans its being cheapened.
EC: Damned by the visual indeed. That such damning be the consequence of the temporary removal of thought is anathema to thinking qua theoria, vision, contemplation, expressed throughout this collection, but nowhere more forcefully than in the very last poem, ‘Longest Water.’ Here, the poet says he has ‘looked far without seeing,’ the poet and his cock are thus damned to the dark, to the doubly-hidden dark of the cavernous mouth of the cavernous bat. Teeth with cocks are gnashing, for sure, but we will never see them, these cocks, these consumers of night, as you say, of dark internal spaces and the creatures that dwell there, are an acknowledgement of the process of fucking minus the sensation of sustenance and, thus, also of what you call the robotic consumption of an intrinsically dark and darkening force. The poet’s final trace is unveiled as that of a man ‘[a]lone in a mountain cave reanimating itself.’
‘Yelena tries my cock. She sucks it with a butter knife. Love is wack. Spring.’
GJS: The cock here is a yielding thing, flaccid to the point of spreading, all the promise of new life and love shown only as powerlessness, as wilting.
EC: Spring is always a greening. Naivete with a knife. Cutting away the old to make way for the new. The twin figure of death in life, of life in death. That the cock should ‘[s]pring’ physically when sucked has everything and nothing to do with this. As you suggest, all the promise of new life and love will eventually wilt and rot. ‘Love is wack,’ because it ‘smells like death’ (Bataille, ‘The Language of Flowers’).
‘My cock has eyes and God-tinglers harvested for nets.’
GJS: A hideous prospect, an excessive adornment: a cock with eyes, as far as such speculative evolutionary modifications go, is safely at the absurd limit of the scale. The cock itself is a joke, so to give it eyes… But that it also has an assortment of deity-stimulants, a phenomenon all too apparent in certain religious observances, calls further attention to its proposed elevation being not endorsed but lampooned.
All these dicks and cocks are sad things, the tools of a pessimist, used to expose a life-drive that imposes itself while remaining essentially alien, something pointless, yet irresistible.
* These quotations comprise the full extent of dicks and cocks in RC Miller’s Mask With Sausage.