Stories I Wrote for Girls Who Never Wrote Back I: The Caligari/Hitler Express

I.

I, Cesare, somnambulist and slave to Caligari, sleep like a mannequin full of hay. The old physician’s hands pass over my face, my only dream, and I awaken to the scent of laurel. I am in a coffin.

II.

-Cesare, how do you like these curtains?
-They are fine, Master.
-You sound less than enthusiastic, Cesare.
-I am a somnambulist and slave to Caligari.
-Yes, yes, but what do you really think of these curtains?
-What do I really think? There’s not much to say. They’re black curtains. Enormous black curtains.
-So, what are you saying?
-I am sure that they will go with the black throw rug and the black Chenille throws on the black sofa.
-So I know what I like. Is that a crime?
-Well, it should be.
-Cesare, I don’t quite care for your tone. In fact, I command you to like these curtains.
-Master, I just love these curtains.
-Very good, Cesare. These Are nice curtains. (To sales person) I will get these, please.
-Master?
-Yes, Cesare?
-Master, how do you know I am not just saying I like these curtains?
(Pause. The doctor waxes very darkly.)
-Cesare, somnambulist, slave, you like hot dogs, don’t you?
-Yes, Master, I like hot dogs well enough.
-Then you will hate hot dogs. Really. After you eat ten thousand of them.
-Um, Master...
-You will not actually eat all then thousand. After the first two hundred and fifty I expect you to pass out from the pain.
-Master, how can I pass out if I am already asleep?
(This is a dark, vexing day for Caligari)


III.

-So my problem, Doctor, is that I can’t seem to remember the plot of “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.” It’s sort of like a dream.
-I see.
-I watched it once while getting high. Could this be part of the problem?
-Do you feel you have a drug problem?
-No. Also, since seeing the film -what I remember of it -I have this incredible difficulty trusting Doctors. Specifically, psychiatrists. In fact, it’s remarkable that we’re talking now.
-Why is that?
-Well, for one thing, psychiatrists ask a lot of questions. No one who asks a lot of questions can be trusted. Particularly if there’s a pad involved. If there’s a lot a questions and things are being written down, things aren’t going well. That was true even the schoolyard. Remember that cootie catcher?
-Tell me about it.
-No, I just asked you about it. If this were a normal symmetrical conversation you would now tell me something yourself. You see what I’m talking about? Besides, there’s nothing to the cootie catcher, that’s the whole point. You’re whole profession, in its classical form, is dominated by the myth of origins, the myth that the genetic origin of things explains and gives understanding, that somehow its discovery and our knowledge of it will have an emancipation effect. And what did it do for Oedipus?
-It’s never the knowledge that does the harm, as much as how we come to know it or ignore it.
-This reminds me of a book I read once. Well, I didn’t read it, but I read about it. It’s called “From Caligari to Hitler” by Kracauer. Kracauer’s argument was that the rise of Nazism was foretold in the movie. In the original script there is no framing device: Dr. Caligari really is corrupt figure of authority who is capable of Mengele like experiments for the purpose of psychological manipulation to the point of murder . He’s arrested. In the final film, he's not: the whole thing turns out to be the narrator's psychotic phanstasy. This framing device, making the whole plot a matter of Francis’ sanity, represents an inward psychologistic turn that neutralizes the critique of authority implicit in the plot. It turns it inward. It’s this way with the whole of modernism: psychological bourgeois narratives, narcissism, rather than critique, transformation, ecstasy!

The doctor snaps his fingers and there is the scent of laurel, then blackness.

The Chinese Optometrist

At one or the other unexpected event during one or the other unexpected stay, I somehow lost my glasses -so after explaining what I could to the harbor authorities (it wasn’t much of an explanation) I had to visit the Chinese Optometrist. The waiting room was one of the most peaceful and harmonious places I have ever been, nothing fancy, just a very quiet garden framed with the traditional red gate and Koi pond, reminiscent of the Slow Pavilions, with an excellent selection of cranes and magazines.

I fill out the appropriate forms, exchange pleasantries with the receptionist and put my name on the list. Soon, at the appropriately auspicious hour, to a strike of the gong, the Optometrist himself appears and makes a decorous bow. “Shur-Shur-Shurr” he says. This as good a time as any to mention that I do not speak Chinese. Also without my glasses, I cannot see. In fact, it is only by a series of highly logical, yet fallible inferences, that I have concluded I am at an optometrists at all.

Nonetheless, I like his face. He reminds me of my father. I find my father inscrutable, remote and ruthless (in a word, “asiatic”, “oriental”). He was a doctor, too. It must be the white coat. He gestures sociably. I want to make him happy, to please him. To cooperate.

It’s just like a visit to an American optometrist -only instead of an eye exam where you read the eye chart aloud and the optometrist rotates different lenses in and out of the phoroptor and you answer whether you can see “better” or “worse”, at the Chinese optometrist all wrong, incorrect or hesitant answers are requited with a sharp rebuke from a supple stick kept within easy reach in the little office. It doesn’t seem like such a bad stick -it has a pleasing finish and seems actually quite delicate in the optometrist’s strong surprisingly rough hands (toughened and coarse, as though the good doctor, an older gentlemen, had done hard labor early in life), but personified with an elastic quality that made it quite piquant. The blows are not administered maliciously, but seriously and regularly.

You might think that this places an undue pressure on the patient to perform or try to guess the right answer or otherwise cheat to avoid punishment, but from the Chinese perspective there are billions of Chinese, and almost all of them myopic and therefore simply no time to waste on a few malingerers who would otherwise clog the process. Almost everyone cheats. Charts and cheat sheets are easily bought and sold in the marketplace for memorization the night before. The receptionist will sell you one. These cheat sheets are also in Chinese. They are no use to me, even though I bought a laminated “For Dummies”-styled one. I do understand that Chinese is a tonal language, though, so I try to answer each stinging interjection of the stick with a different pitch. I am an instrument. I am being tuned. I have faith in the process even though it is painful. I have faith in the process, perhaps because it is painful. I believe that the tears that spill from behind the mask of the phoroptor are tears of growth, painful growth, because I am being taught a new language, because I am at last being made to see.

Nightlife in The Forbidden City

The number of rooms is given at 9999. But this is a mistranslation, or a euphemism. The number is, in fact, infinite. The Emperors never died. The Dynasties never vanished. They never even moved away, but still persist, in some farther courtyard, some older wing. All of China’s history recurs, eternally, simultaneously in the infinite space of the Forbidden City. From the perspective of the window farthest to the east, the Great Wall is still being constructed. From the farthest west, it has already crumbled, as have the pyramids and the last of the new glaciers. From the farthest south, the Great Wall has not yet even been conceived of. From the north, it cannot even be concieved.

For this reason, the wisest of Emperors have always kept birds and creatues with finest senses, who can catch the most distant scent of gunpowder or trechery, burning silk, from chambers yet to be inhabited. It is in this sense it is completely accurate to say that the Forbidden City is haunted: but haunted only by the present.

The business of the the great Celestial City is the same as in the heavens in whose pattern it is cast: a series of messages sent across its infinite expanse, from one gallery to another. But the messages take so long to travel that they are invariably misunderstood, beyond all hearing, their authors long vanished, their addressees faded into the palimsest of the Middle Kingdom itself.

The gift shop is also infinite and features and amusing puzzle that allows you to build a scale replica of the Forbbidden City at home. The replica is also infinite and consists of an infinite series of identical unique pieces that are each used only once and can occupy only one and only one place in the structure. Each piece is effectively a hologram containing all the information present in all the other pieces. As the model is itself infinite, the souvenir has an added shelter value as it is possible to live in it. It is also quite possible to get lost.

So when touring the Forbidden City, if you get seperated from your tour group and know the short cuts -if you can walk a little farther and faster than the rest -quite a bit faster, but only a little faster than your own relection, you may yet overtake Marco Polo, himself awaiting his first exaggeration. If you run, you can escape the time of the Mongols entirely, though you should slow down and catch your breath before you run through the pearl curtain, for great and subltle events are attended by the First Emperors: here, the first presentation of the novelty of tea. To entirely unjaded ears the first notes of music. To unreading eyes, the first brushstrokes of writing.

But the true function of the Forbidden City is its nightlife; this is the only time the palace appears to everyone as it actually is, infinite. For just as the palace was constructed on the patterns eternally sketched in the constellations above, so too, was it built for the same purpose: as the setting for desire, forgetting.

My Game with Lo Pan

The SS Blessed Pensioner, having made an unscheduled detour into Drinking Horse Gorge, is compelled to make a further unscheduled stop


-Lo Pan, most wise and most generous, when will the people be free?

-Freedom is not possible as long as belief in individuals or collectivities exist.

-No, I mean the hostages, when will you let them go?

-If neither individuals, nor collectivities exist who can I be said to be holding? If freedom is not an impossibility, and there is no reason it should not exist, how can things be other than free?

-I mean the hostages from the boat. Is it your plan to eventually let them go?

-Chance and design are simply words we use to describe the same thing depending on how we are feeling. So it makes no difference whether I make the wisest choice, the kindest choice, the most appropriate choice, or if we were to throw dice for the souls on the boat, like in Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”.

-These dice are labeled in Chinese.

-Yes, I know. Oh, look: today you are not lucky.


And a thousand slimy things
Lived on;and so did I