Like One Long Joke
The word “surrealism” passed instantly, like a vaccine, into our bloodstream and can never be dislodged.
I knew this girl who was twisted twice and proud of it.
She was an expert at conflating canned advice with any excuse for drinking to oblivion.
When the booze invites horrors,
it’s time to try another trick.
(There are situations which cannot be resolved; there are questions for which there are no answers, and if you don’t accept this, then you will rapidly develop a police mentality.)
My hibernation was self-preservational. I thought that it was going to save my life.
And this narrative made more sense when I was alone:
Without an element of vulgarity, no man can become a work of art.
Maybe they’d lived wrongly. Their greatness might have poisoned them.
I have to try and think what an artist is, apart from a hooligan who cannot live within his income of praise.
Only so much can be expelled come daylight.
Scrutiny follows, and she is not a gentle orator.
You will search for culprits, you will tear up contradictory evidence, and you will push people around until they are in easily labeled and controlled blocs.
Puppetry is pretty, they said.
These antics were to her what a blue apron was to a butcher.
So life marched on like one long joke.
He wrote the story of his life, in which almost everything that other people would regard as frightening or disgusting was described as beautiful.
Maybe they understood, in fact, that beauty and meaning had nothing to do with one another.
And you’ll fault confusion, delusion,
the cast of the night.
Thank God for her, I thought, my whiny, moronic analgesic.
The young have not the means to cure the ills of the world: they can only protest—the more angrily because it can be seen that their action is futile.
“Do you live near any nuclear plants? Any high-voltage equipment?”
(Politics is the art of making the inevitable appear to be a matter of wise human choice.)
Rejection, I have found, can be the only antidote to delusion.
And who is it you’re talking to?
I felt myself float up and away, higher and higher into the ether until my body was just an anecdote, a symbol, a portrait hanging in another world.
So life marched on like one long joke.
The American appears to have planned nothing—except to plan nothing.
This was the beauty of sleep—reality detached itself and appeared in my mind as casually as a movie or a dream.
Platitudes lie next to gems of wisdom.
But I’ll indulge your projections if it means a more compelling conclusion.
The situation has been made possible by the moral laxity at present fashionable.
The apartment still smelled strongly of a deep fryer.
It’s no good running a pig farm for thirty years while saying, “I was meant to be a ballet dancer.” By that time pigs are your style.
So life marched on like one long joke.
XXX
CUT-UP SOURCES:
The Wit and Wisdom of Quentin Crisp by Quentin Crisp, Guy Kettelhack
