I suppose by now the reader is gasping for breath and attempting with every skill and attention to make some sense of the plot. For this, I do not blame them, and so I have assigned myself the task of acting as the one who will provide the bridging material to lend a sort of narrative skeleton to these ill-defined, corpulent lumps of flesh my authors so unceremoniously toss in our direction. 2 I will endeavour to make my interruptions brief yet informative.
You see, reader, the one known as Louis-Ferdinand Céline emerged somewhat suddenly and with considerable shock. Perhaps this was less mitigated by the fact that he had lost all memory of the French language. I find this to be an intriguing, if not indicative of a failing, development of my re-materialization method. You see, all the authors I have been able to re-materialize return to us with a kind of poetic justice manifest by their return coming at the cost of some privation. That is, each of my authors will experience some sort of lack that once characterized their personae. In Céline's case, whoever operates the fates has decided to deny him access to his original language, and so all of his thoughts and utterances occur in the English translation. Once I am to act as the bridge for the others in subsequent interruptions, I shall make clear their inherent deficiencies.
Céline appears as vitriolic as ever, if not more so. 3 This is a sure case of being the epigones of oneself, a parody unto oneself that exaggerates the master's voice. Ventriloquy, so to speak. He has returned only to find himself in Canada, 4 at a poetry reading surely by accident. He has now made the acquaintance of Mr Bukowski, although the latter does not recognize the former. Bukowski, according to his own admission in a few of his books, gives much praise to Céline's Journey. I should add this note: the process of re-materialization itself being an imperfect occult science does not resurrect these authors to physically appear identical as to what they did in their previous incarnations. They share some resemblance such as being, for instance, overweight or aged, but look altogether different. This abolishes any possibility of these authors being identified by sight as what they actually are. So, Bukowski does not recognize Céline.
Both men have managed to leave the bar and take to the street. What Celine's penchant for extreme exaggeration and cynical reportage fails to mention is that the two actually shared some pleasantries, and that the barrage of noisome utterances Céline makes are in direct contrast to his more quiet and soft-spoken manner. We will have occasion to speak of Bukowski in more detail later. However, there is this one thread I must insist on revealing to you now: all of these authors that I have selected are — we won't call them liars since lies are moot in the makings of fiction — culpable for fictionalizing themselves, making their own mythography through embellishment, hyperbole, and selective self-representation.
By the following day, Céline has opted to redress his deficiency by enrolling in a French language course. For beginners. Bukowski, as we will now see, has already secured himself in a self-similar role as an emergent poetic voice. I should say that Bukowski was the first of my attempts at re-manifestation, and so he has been with us for about three years now — just enough time to insinuate himself into the poetry establishment. Now, on to him...
Notes:
1 It should be noted that these Poundian interludes are not written at all, but are presented on the derelict mobile phone as sound files, recited by an unknown actor in a high, nasal ancient mariner's voice, with a definite (though studiously suppressed) Idaho accent such as one imagines the sourdough cooks on frontier wagon trains to have employed when calling the wranglers to their supper of jerked hanta-virus rodent sinew.
At times he drops this affectation and puts on a more or less creditable Irish brogue and begins to chant the words, meanwhile beating what sounds like a bargain-basement bass drum like an evil seductress in rhythm to himself.
2 The Poundian frame now pulls on the buskins of Ancient Gower and volunteers again to serve as Chorus in our twenty-first century remounting of Pericles, Prince of Tyre.
3 But see note 20.
Among the alchemists whom our author has invoked in his prologue, Vitriolum is an initialism of Visita Interiora Terrae Rectificando Inveniens Occultum Lapidem Veram Medicinam ("Look to the interior of the purified earth, and you will find the secret stone, the true medicine"). The selection of vitriol as this book's fuel, motto and organizing principle should be seen in the light of the particular "purified earth" in which our author found the only "true medicine" that could cure his ills, permanently: the lethally hermetic sands of the Utah Salt Flats.
One can only conjecture as to what level of awareness our author was operating on when he chose to employ what amounts to the Kabbalistic process of notariqon. (See Epistle IV, Magick Without Tears, in which Aleister Crowley describes it as "the accursed art of making words out of initials, like... [the] Gestapo and their horrid brood." If deliberate, this would indeed be a breach of political correctness.)
4 The irony is that the only natural-born Canadian in this entire burlesque is Sam Edwine—Afro-Canadian, to be precise. According to his own "poetry," his forbears rode the Underground Railroad from the cotton fields of the Confederacy to Southern Ontario--a mode of transportation that delivered results both glorious (Oscar Peterson) and appalling Sam/antha Edwine him/herself.
In fact, it was in a nameless Canadian English department that Edwine first fixed his hollow rattlesnake hypodermic dentition into our author, who, having no recourse to rail travel, underground or otherwise, had hitchhiked north from his unspecified American hometown to an assistant professorship, only to be seduced back southward, upon a refusal of tenure (engineered by Edwine, of course), to the aptly named Salt Flats.
"Faucher's" damnation of his five authors to "this most parochial nationette" is characteristically paradoxical, for it was the low-temperature, low-key groves of Canuck academe he would pine for, once hemmed in by the lacerating wind-blown hydrochloride grit. This natural academic had been dragged into deathly Gehenna, in which academe's offscourings smoulder.
