[Reigian Studies.] [On behalf of the baroness.]


30.6.07

A few prefaces










A bunch of prefaces











Here are the prefaces to tales and bits of larger texts that I had been
preparing those last months.



I’ve changed my tack, though. I’ve decided to publish the texts
accompanied with a translation (and this takes time,) while getting rid
of distracting introductions. So, I’ve put the little prefaces together, I’ve
added the few that I had already attached to other texts, and the result
has to be a fragment or sketch of biographical information.












[After the suicide of his second wife (when at the beginning they
thought he had murdered her in Bangkok,) the obtuse Thai committed
him to the “sanatorium” – a ward for crazies in one big jail, where he
remembered the quasi-equivalent treatment (insulin-induced coma
plus electroshocks) he endured as a youth in Lleida. Here a poem he
wrote at the time. And a day of his diary where the executor (me) is
intuited. Notice the “algolagnic” of both contemporaneous
pieces.



Orestes was a (social) climber, an avenger, a guilt-crazed wanderer;
through him women lost their power – contrariwise, through Reig
(witness Travessa deserts,) they would’ve won it all again.
Orestes was the one that first fought against a flock of sheep wrongly
assuming that they were the enemy – (later, lesser writers stole the
episode for themselves); he died by the venom of a snake that suddenly
bit his prick; his bones were stolen by the enemy (the enemy is not me;
the enemy are the damned castilians who would appropriate to
themselves Reig’s works, same as they have been stealing the works and
belongings of all the Catalonians since the latter lost their vast empire;
even retroactively the castilians steal: you’ll see everywhere references
to Llull, Lucrècia Borja, the Almogàvers, etc. as bloody castilian (or
named by the still more repugnant insult of spanish.) Reig abhorred
official “history,” obviously such a heap of lies. And his only sin (or at
any rate the ugliest by far of his sins,) had been having unwittingly been
born under the fascist castilians’ invading boot. He never set foot in
spain; never spoke their dreadful lingo. From Catalonia he went into
the world. He never had to purge his pangs of conscience for he never
actually committed a crime.



His crazy-ward diary deserves publication – with the baroness’
permission I could do it even myself. The fragment I reproduce should
serve to titillate the reader’s palate.]






–00–








Wilco, milady,” I said when she asked me. She knew I had
some
appreciation for the poet, plus a few papers handed down to me by the
author himself.





So, on behalf of the dowager baroness, here we go. I’ll gather whatever
I’m able (and cull and add what the reader throws at me, if minimally
relevant) about Carles Reig – doomed minor poet.





(And therefore, as any minor, dutifully raped by the stern pedophiliac
judges of good taste and strict propriety. Disgusting thugs. After the
rape, it always follows, he was sent to prison, where he met with a most
gruesome death.)





(Just the highlights here, though. No rummy rerun of his rather boring
life. Just the highlights – mediocre dim highlights, alas, and therefore,
namely, the texts.)





(Indeed, while it lasted, shunned by the shallow and the sourly
exquisite, he
marinated in obscurity – and wouldn’t it be kind now if we helped,
albeit a trifle, to maintain him half-afloat, as is the case with any
obdurate floater...? To
this we’ll zealously strive, milady. Promise.)






–00–







Strange little tale where certain sensitive machines prove more humane
than the human beings themselves. The easiness with which the robotic
anchors ubiquitously parading their platitudinous pates flat on the
television screens effortlessly shift from the most heartrending news to
the most spurious banal jolly crap is shameful and demoralizing.







Damn the unimaginative brutes who are unable to feel the pain felt by
others! From this lack of fellow fondness stem all the wars and all
crimes against the well-being of the human worm. Instead of sending
every cruel creep and every war-mongering military fool to an asylum
for irreparable crazies, some of them are promoted to generals and
chiefs of enterprise and to president of the state. Sorrow state of
business.





In the story, the hero and one of his exes create a “Center for the
Description of the Niceties related to Being (and otherwise stolen away
by the powers that be.)” A sort of Society for the Protection of Sentient
Machines, one step deeper thus than the Society for the Protection of
Animals. And why not, for certain sensitive machines are bound to be, if
nothing else yet goes wrong (a big if,) the crutches with which human
beings might at last find the freedom to leave, still alive, the prison of
the carnivorous body. Rotting carcass.





(Of course, we refer to the GOOD machines. Not to the thug machines
the thugs employ for their murders and tortures. Those apache
helicopters, those bombing planes, those machine guns, and
flamethrowers, and poison dispensers, and lawnmowers and
leafblowers...)





Disconsolate, the meek and wise among the earthlings can’t digest such
existential discomfiture: that the thugs take their guns and fling them
about, and open their flies, and take out their most intelligent bit of
body matter, and therefore dangle their caricatural knouts, and jerk
them up and lay down the law.]








–00–







[I’ve gotten lately a few messages of protest objecting to a harmless
enough sobriquet. As it happens, for the sake of a joke, at the preamble
to these remembrances and little apropos notes, I’ve called Reig a
“minor poet.” Ok, he is a major poet, no doubt; but in my opinion he is
a great novelist – and that’s what matters. He was proposed for the
Nobel prize for literature many years in a row by a few first-class
Catalonian academicians, properly enthused with his humorous
masterpieces from the sixties, seventies and even eighties of the last
century – his comical novels, I say, not his scarcely circulated mostly
metaphysical poems. So?]






–00–








[Here’s the piece Carles Reig (it appears) was working on when... Ulrike
Morell tells us that “he was lucid until the last moment.”
Though a tad cryptically she adds: “Except that the last moment is
always the present moment
.”



Nonetheless, the tale is rather poignant, both in itself and because of
the attached circumstances. Though unfinished, it’s obvious where is it
leading, as a dog going somewhere fast, just catalectic, so fleeting the
artist forgot the tail to draw, and the last ellipsis (...) could as well be a
proper aposiopesis loaded with finality?]






–00–






[A photo taken of him, with this inscription behind: Amb les
orquídies per corbata
(Ailing with orchids at his neck.)]







–00–






The gal not to bright. They were visiting some cumbrous wasteful
cathedral, when he appraised her, in all seriousness, of the quaint
factoid. And she naturally believed him when Reig, with Reigian
understatement, told her that all men were autophagous. The little
(littler in his case) sausage that grows between their thighs liable to
recrescence. “When hungry and with nothing else handier, we just
cut a piece of it, a bit of it, the tip of it, and down it goes, somewhat
sour, but hey, if you are famished... No to worry, though; luckily, even at
mature ages, though slowlier then, the little sausage grows again, just
like lizzards’ tails, like crabs’ legs, and spiders’, and plenty other tricky
animals; ‘tis a well known fact, my pet
.”








–00–







Knew her at a hospital in Leeds – a XIX century affair – plenty of
glassed doors... Long corridors leading apparently nowhere. But he
roamed and roamed. At last he found these panels, at the end of one
corridor where upon glazed glasses, the “real” diagnostics were written:
No cancer,” she was told, but he went into the last lost glasses
and read: “Dead in three months.”







–00–







Here’s his wife Roberta P... [Phelps] asking at last for a divorce...
[Apparently Reig copied the letter, or a chunk of it, in one of his
diaries.] [Mostly, those facts are passed to us from the data Andreas
and Ulrike Morell, baroness von Frühlingsberg’s children, now hold.]







Listen, Chas, I’m up to here, ok? When I knew you, lithe and keen,
lively beyond any of the rest of the gray organisms found in the ochre
empty heather-strewn countryside, all those overbearing weeds that
choked us, you were I reckon a sort of therapeutic bust for me. I had
come to Aberdeen fleeing from the vainglorious scion of the
[a
world-renown paint producing company.]



V... was a sadistic, elegiac, genocidal foe. He had his acrobatic
henchman after me. I knew that, once caught, they wouldn’t stop at
anything. It would have been much worst that those two lorry-drivers I
told you about when I knew you. I loved your pellucid sclerae as you
couldn’t believe what I was telling you: such horror of maiming and
dagger-puncturing, and the squeals, the yells, the furry velvety rodents
up my ducts. You shrank cozier and cozier as the squall raged outside.
From the radio we were overwhelmed (at least I was) by the wavering
choirs – some Malherian upheaval – a blur where hell peeps and sneers
at two would-be lovers glued in the catalytic enthrallment of synergy
never to be repeated in the unwritten history of eternity
.



When I wed you and our livelihood depended on something so
flimsy as your translations, and we subsisted only on the nuts and
blackberries we found, and the rashes and eggs and cobblers we cobbled
together with the cheaper ingredients we found in M
... [name of
the store,] as they seemingly threw away nothing, I was brazenly
boisterously happy. I basked as any nimble nymph of the moors in our
wild bucolic
[crude word for sex making] and in our shared
ambitions at gallant artistry
.



And then you sold out. We had nested on the brink of the abyss: I
should have seen the harbinger of our destruction in the successful
glyphs you wrote that people wanted actually to read – nothing else but
the warmth of the public would now slake your hyoids and your teeth.
And so we moved to Brussels, besmirched heart of Europe, where the
death knell resounded and soared, unbearably, as I gasped and brooded
in my stalemated little flat: the sheets of my bed felt like shrouds, the
stained cracked walls of my bedroom were fraught with devious
intimations of suicide... Luckily I met J... As we absconded for a week of
wild lovemaking and your children, misshapen by sorrow, sued for
somebody to wipe their asses out, did you rue the day you chose
wracking fame above happy obscurity...? It is not even a
tossup
.



J... wasn’t an eyesore of thwarted sexuality for the benefit of
another page adroitly completed. His government wasn’t at his behind
with a whip. He cooled his heels, he evinced his gigantic barbaric

[member] and sent to hell all nuances and demonstrated such
virility as you never had – and the little you had alas by now had
irretrievably eroded, waned, and try as I might I couldn’t acquit you in
my mind
...



However, when you would crawl on the soft pulverulent floor of the
bedroom and in those glorious days of June when J... had had to return
for a few weeks to K..., from daybreak until dark you tears flowing, your
anchylosed occipital trying to wedge its way past the swollen edges of
my
[sexual orifices,] your middling boners chiseling away at
the marble of the night table (or maybe just at its wooden drawer, let’s
not exaggerate,) and the joy I felt as I broke and flung away all those
stupid texts you’d been slavering after for all those insecure, red, and
black nights of winter, how my jaws hurt from
laughing...!




You were my toy again. Ah the plenitude then...



Only that alas the mallet of the telephone ring resounded in the
emptiness and the fiery sparks of the sacrificial cradle flew not in vain,
for you jumped as if possessed
.



Did we both toil with our skulls or with our asses...? With the zeal
of a sub-vertebrate your started again to “work” for pay at your
translations and I was again left to look for some juicy tail
elsewhere
.



My ribs, my pelvis, my wings, all smarted as another genus of
rougher lover ploughed my neglected field. J... wouldn’t be back for
weeks... My vertebrae were suffering... I could have been killed. And yet
your “work” was too life-consuming for you even to inquire how good
had been my
[sexual intercourse] with the new partners.
That I couldn’t stomach, your lack of interest in my sex life – I
knew you loved J..., and that that was why you became a worm after I
came back some tryst with him and asked for after the sleepy details I
deigned to supply... But why the aloofness with all those
others...?




That was the beginning of the end. I knew we were growing apart,
becoming strangers, the hour of splitting the proceedings couldn’t be
far...”









–00–







In Brussels, where his wife at the time (the marriage endured
nonetheless a couple more years) was openly carrying on with a Polish
writer (then of note) away for a while from the so-called iron curtain
(benefiting from some type of special permission in order to research a
book,) a writer all in all not too appreciated today (though certainly
much more well-regarded than Reig himself; at least he is a “somebody”
seating in an Academy and everything)








–00–








Though he never finished his architectural studies, Reig was always
interested in the world of buildings. Actually his devotion to Catalan
culture stemmed from (or al least fed on) the example given by the
greatest of modern architects, the Catalonian Antoni Gaudí.




As is widely known, the castilian (or, in an abusive use of the word,
spanish) forces have been for 300 years crushing Catalonia. Before the
nazi Franco’s dictatorship [still proceeding apace with the current
crowned piece of crap,] the dictatorship of another “spanish” general
[another asshole, going by the name of Primo,] had begun in September
of 1923, after the Catalonian feast for independence, with its usual cries
of “Death to spain” and “Long live the sovereign nation of
Catalonia
” had frightened the shit out of some of the
moneybaggers because of its wide popular appeal. The following year
[1924], in the eleven of September [September eleven is when Catalonia
celebrates its feast for the return of Independence,] Gaudí, aged 71, was
detained in Barcelona by the occupying forces of police. Brought to the
military building, he was interrogated. He was beaten and jailed
because he refused to speak in “spanish” (meaning castilian, of course)
to his torturers. The chief of a church came to the rescue, he had to pay
a heavy fine. One year and half later, the seventh of June 1926, Gaudí
was secretely murdered by the spaniards, crashed in a “quaint tramway
accident.”








–00–






Deirdre M... [Murdock] never forgave him. She commited suicide in
such a way that the doubt sould never be slaked, and Reig “paid” for it
in a devilish Thai prison.







–00–







(Last letter to Joan Barceló – alas, it never reached the promising
author alive.)





Letter to a dead great poet.







A Catalonian Boris Vian, tragically cut down still sooner (than Boris) by
the fucking envious scissors-wielding running uglies of the skies – fates
malignant upon whom one every shit Reig shits anvengefully now
parks.



From this day on he always thought he had already lived for too long. 25
was the age to die; and he’d missed the date; and he’d never be great;
just dead.



Soaring wrinkles now as if the image of himself precedes him – the
image namely of Dorian Gray’s soul’s mirror.



Dithyrambic nonsense addressed by him to the threatening ghoul that
looked at him behind the truthful glasses... While, not to be placated,
gruffly the monster only answered: Futility, nonentity, you are already
dead, you are but a rotten piece of flesh – From then on he only saw
himself dead. He always hated mirrors.







–00–







Grave mistake – told his common law wife one’s prick not only grows
again, regenerates, if cut, but does so longer; he was sleeping and she
wanted a longer bigger one, you bet, and who wouldn’t. With silken
steps she approached. A foot coincided with the pisspot, the bearer of
the seamstress scissors tripped and fell. The scissors committed
loathsome rapine on her rank innards. The shout, the shriek. The
saintly hermit awoke; with vintage sweat he ran with her bleeding on
his arms...



At the crumbly Leeds hospital, Neal N... [Nul], the night surgeon,
surreptiotiously softened the swollen drums of her tummy with the
blurred sticks of his dirty fingers. Reig tried to enroll as a helper. An
insane nurse tossed him aside. Reig saw himself the duped hero in a
Burroughsian routine. What a travesty, he insisted. For now
the surgeons from another team were trying to operate on him. But
I’m just the bereaved, I was just trying to compose anthems of mercy for
my girlfriend’s sake; she’s perched, bloated and grunting, about to fall
(such a perilous balancing act,) over the sewers of never
more!




They hacked hard now, or so he dreamed, for he had been given a shot
of varnish that knocked him down for the length of time (the whole
night) that took for them to sew the woman up. Ellipses and parabolas
the hatchets drew over his empty spectral casing above the table, for he
soared over his own besmirched body. He was an angel avoiding the
hatchets’ geometrical shenanigans.



Though he died at age fifty-three, he continued writing well into his
nineties
, he heard, or thus interpreted the screaming wedge of
chalk writing over the wretched slate of his life’s diagnostics strung up
at the foot of his corpse. He descended over his vacant body, he dove
like a rocket into his own, and they got embroiled into strange
dovetailings. At last, some measure of composure imposed itself, and
now, after the occult groaning orgasms, they in peace cuddled together.
He awoke in tatters, his dreamed glimpses from the glorious summit
turned to nil, and his dry bloods ugly upon his grudging body.




His pockets were also empty. No currency, no credentials. He was
again the lovely nobody, the free errand boy of his youth, always on the
fly, after the first doozy of an event that caught his eye, after coins found
on the gutter, after gifts given by those forbidden lovers he was the
secret and trusted go-between
.



He flew now, and he never saw the woman again. [She’s still alive,
though.]









–00–







Another playwright of lame plays, a Something-Something S...
[Sinesterrae,] declared himself a flaky admirer in a toady’s letter, and
asked Reig for a play to be played in S.’s tiny Barcelona theater – that
play he wrote, ridiculing the first war against the Iraqis, got
appropriated by people “unknown;” the troupe in S.’s theater staged
bits and pieces of it and ascribed it to an “anonymous” author.








–00–








Entrusted by the trustees of Reig’s state with the task of winnowing the
baggage, I was given two boxes with bits and odds, and a few cd’s with
the latest writings...



There was on one of the diaries’ covers a drawing of Orestes and his eels
– Orestes, of course, the patron saint of masturbators.








–00–







Such a bucolic tragedy... Deirdre M..., not far from the cottage.





He was teaching his small son the names of the mushrooms –
Catalonians love them, and their names (incomparable richness of
vocabulary) are often poetical and any case deliciously euphonic – the
boy mostly knew already the names in Finnish and Russian...



Reig, dazzled by his own words, started to wax lyrical. Moved or
inspired by the names of the fungi, he had stopped on a parapet near
the road adjoining the forest and had started writing a poem that
included necessarily the beautiful names of the mushrooms...




Thus the child died – the baby crossed through a gap into the road and
a passing car took his life – the wife had been left carousing with a
(male) friend back at the place of the picnic...



Grac – hypocoristically Graquell – his dead son’s name. He was only
four. Thus he lost his only child... [Ulrike and Andreas are children of
the baroness.]



Thus the “trip to forgetting” to Asia...



Heart attack in Bangkok – they thought, the obtuse Thai, he had given
himself minor doses of pills to fake double suicide – as a former dead,
and consequently resuscitated, he was terribly feared, and shunned by
everybody. Those are the excruciating sheets from “Bangkok
’89
” – from the first day of captivity to the last.








–00–









From then on he foreswore women – at the end of his life, he only
married the baroness to ensure (with her wealth) his legacy.









[The texts © by Carles Reig; the notes © O’Donovan McCracken.]









we are the continuators... emptying the boxes, and more

visits since July 2008