Snow White (6 page)

Reaction to the hair:
Two older men standing there observed Snow White’s hair black as ebony tumbling from
the window. “Seems like some hair comin’ outa that winda there,” one said. “Yes it
looks like hair to me,” his companion replied. “Seems like there oughta be somethin’
to be done about it.” “Yes, seems like it oughta be punished with a kiss or something.”
“Well we’re too old for all that. You need a Paul or Paul-figure for that sort of
activity. Probably Paul is even now standing in the wings, girding his pants for his
entrance. So I guess I’ll go along to the hiring hall, where I hear there might be
some work.” “I’ll go along with you,” the other man said, “because even though I ain’t
a A.B., I
am
a B.A., and maybe in the dimness the one thing will be taken for the other, and we
can ‘ship out’ together.” “I hate to go away and leave all that hair hanging there
unmolested as it were,” the first man said, “but we have a duty to our families, and
to the country’s merchant fleet, some vessels of which are now languishing at their
berths doubtless, down at Pier 27 and Pier 32, for the lack o’ the likes of us. So
farewell, hair! Fare thee well, and if forever, still forever, fare thee well!”

Reaction to the hair:
Fred the rock-and-roll bandleader addressed his men. “Men, something happened to
me today on Monument Street. I saw a wall of hair black as ebony falling from a high
window. A girl, a look . . . Men, everything is changed. I am changed. I am no longer
the Fred of former times. And I say that things must be different with you, too, because
you are my men, and I am your leader. Now it is quite clear to me that you men wish
to play the buffalo music of your forefathers rather than the rock-and-roll we have
patented, amplified, advertised and been paid for. Now I want to say right now, that
that’s all right with me, the buffalo music I mean. From this day forward, until the
end of time, it will be nothing but buffalo music, in all the dromes of the world.
I don’t care a rap, that’s how all right it is with me, this freedom that I freely
grant you, that our gray hides have been hankering for. Now that, with a look, this
mysterious dark beauty has changed my life, which
needed
to be changed, we are, in a strange way, opened to ourselves, and to buffalo music,
until the red slag of the nooisphere descends to cover everything with the salty finality
of love. So go forth now with your amplifiers and all, and revise your lives upward,
as I have revised mine. Put the question mercilessly: Where have the buffalo gone?”
Fred’s men
exchanged silent looks. “It’s always like this,” the looks said, “in the spring. It’s
always this way, when the green comes again. Our leader suffers a spiritual regeneration,
from a bad man into a good man. It’s always some girl, who looks at him, at which
he falls into her power absolutely. We are tired of having for a leader one who is
nothing else than a damned fool. Let’s go down to the union hall, now, and write out
the specifications for a grievance against him, under Section Four, the grievance
section, of our union constitution. And we can think of other things, too, to add
to the list of charges. That will be amusing, writing out the charges.”

Reaction to the hair:
“Well, that is certainly a lot of hair hanging there,” Bill reflected. “And it seems
to be hanging from our windows too. I mean, those windows where the hair is hanging
are in our house, surely? Now who amongst us has that much hair, black as ebony? I
am only pretending to ask myself this question. The distasteful answer is already
known to me, as is the significance of this act, this hanging, as well as the sexual
meaning of hair itself, on which Wurst has written. I don’t mean that he has written
on
the hair, but rather about it, from prehistory to the present time. There can be
only one answer. It is Snow White. It is Snow White who has taken this step, the meaning
of which is clear to all of us. All seven of us know what this means. It means that
she is nothing else but a goddamn degenerate! is one way of looking at it, at this
complex and difficult question. It means that the ‘not-with’ is experienced as more
pressing, more real, than the ‘being-with.’ It means she seeks a new lover.
Quelle tragédie!
But the essential loneliness of the person must also be considered. Each of us is
like a tiny single hair, hurled into the world among billions and billions of other
hairs, of various colors and lengths. And if God does not exist, then we are in even
graver shape than we had supposed. In that case, each of us is like a tiny little
mote of pointlessness,
whirling in the midst of a dreadful free even greater pointlessness, unless there
is intelligent life on other planets, that is to say, life even more intelligent than
us, life that has thought up some point for this great enterprise, life. That is possible.
That is something we do not know, thank God. But in the meantime, here is the hair,
with its multiple meanings. What am I to do about it?”

Reaction to the hair (flashback)
: Paul sat in his baff, under the falling water. More hot water fell into the baff.
“I would retract the green sea, and the brown fish in it, and I would especially retract
that long black hair hanging from that window, that I saw today on my way here, from
the Unemployment Office. It has made me terribly nervous, that hair. It was beautiful,
I admit it. Long black hair of such texture, fineness, is not easily come by. Hair
black as ebony! Yet it has made me terribly nervous. Teeth . . . piano lessons . . .”

EBONY

EQUANIMITY

ASTONISHMENT

TRIUMPH

VAT

DAX

BLAGUE

Lack of reaction to the hair:
Dan sat down on a box, and pulled up more boxes for us, without forcing us to sit
down on them, but just leaving them there, so that if we wanted to sit down on them,
we could. “You know, Klipschorn was right I think when he spoke of the ‘blanketing’
effect of ordinary language, referring, as I recall, to the part that sort of, you
know, ‘fills in’ between the other parts. That part, the ‘filling’ you might say,
of which the expression ‘you might say’ is a good example, is to me the most interesting
part, and of course it might also be called the ‘stuffing’ I suppose, and there is
probably also, in addition, some other word that would do as well, to describe it,
or maybe a number of them. But the quality this ‘stuffing’ has, that the other parts
of verbality do not have, is two-parted, perhaps: (1) an ‘endless’ quality and (2)
a ‘sludge’ quality. Of course that is possibly two qualities but I prefer to think
of them as different aspects of a single quality, if you can think that way. The ‘endless’
aspect of ‘stuffing’ is that it goes on and on, in many different forms, and in fact
our exchanges are in large measure composed of it, in larger measure even, perhaps,
than they are composed of that which is not ‘stuffing.’ The ‘sludge’ quality is the
heaviness
that this ‘stuff’ has, similar to the heavier motor oils, a kind of downward pull
but still fluid,
if you follow me, and I can’t help thinking that this downwardness is valuable, although
it’s hard to say just how, right at the moment. So, summing up, there is a relation
between what I have been saying and what we’re doing here at the plant with these
plastic buffalo humps. Now you’re probably familiar with the fact that the per-capita
production of trash in this country is up from 2.75 pounds per day in 1920 to 4.5
pounds per day in 1965, the last year for which we have figures, and is increasing
at the rate of about four percent a year. Now that rate will probably go up, because
it’s
been
going up, and I hazard that we may very well soon reach a point where it’s 100 percent.
Now at such a point, you will agree, the question turns from a question of disposing
of this ‘trash’ to a question of appreciating its qualities, because, after all, it’s
100 percent, right? And there can no longer be any question of ‘disposing’ of it,
because it’s all there is, and we will simply have to learn how to ‘dig’ it—that’s
slang, but peculiarly appropriate here. So that’s why we’re in humps, right now, more
really from a philosophical point of view than because we find them a great moneymaker.
They are ‘trash,’ and what in fact could be more useless or trashlike? It’s that we
want to be on the leading edge of this trash phenomenon, the everted sphere of the
future, and that’s why we
pay particular attention, too, to those aspects of language that may be seen as a
model of the trash phenomenon. And it’s certainly been a pleasure showing you around
the plant this afternoon, and meeting you, and talking to you about these things,
which are really more important, I believe, than people tend to think. Would you like
a cold Coke from the Coke machine now, before you go?”

Additional reactions to the hair:
“To be a horsewife,” Edward said. “That, my friends, is my text for today. This important
slot in our society, conceptualized by God as very nearly the key to the whole thing
as Thomas tells us, has suffered in recent months and in this house a degree of denigration.
I have heard it; I have been saddened by it. So I want today if I can to dispel some
of these wrong ideas that have been going around, causing confusion and scumming up
the face of the truth.
The horsewife!
The very base-bone of the American plethora!
The horsewife!
Without whom the entire structure of civilian life would crumble! Without the horsewife,
the whole
raison d’être
of our existences would be reduced, in a twinkling, to that brute level of brutality
for which we so rightly reproach the filthy animals. Were it not for her enormous
purchasing power and the heedless gaiety with which it is exercised, we would still
be going around dressed in skins probably, with no big-ticket items to fill the empty
voids, in our homes and in our hearts.
The horsewife!
Nut and numen of our intersubjectivity!
The horsewife!
The chiefest ornament on the golden tree of human suffering! But to say what I have
said, gentlemen, is to say nothing at all. Consider now the horsewife in another part
of her role. Consider her sitting in her baff, anointing her charms with liquid Cheer
and powdered Joy
which trouble, confuse and drown the sense in odors. Now she rises chastely, and chastely
abrades herself with a red towel. What an endearing spectacle! The naked wonder of
it! The blue beauty of it! Now I ask you, gentlemen, what do we have here? Do we have
a being which regards itself with the proper amount of self-love? No. No, we do not.
Do we have a being which regards itself with the appropriate awe? No. No, we do not.
We have here rather a being which regards itself,
qua
horsewife, with something dangerously akin to self-hatred. That is the problem. What
is the solution.” Dan spoke up, then. “I could cut your gizzard out, Edward. You are
making the whole damned thing immensely more difficult than it has to be. I put it
to you that, without your screen of difficulty-making pseudo-problems, the whole damned
thing can be resolved very neatly, in the following way. Now, what do we apprehend
when we apprehend Snow White? We apprehend, first, two three-quarter-scale breasts
floating toward us wrapped, typically, in a red towel. Or, if we are apprehending
her from the other direction, we apprehend a beautiful snow-white arse floating away
from us wrapped in a red towel. Now I ask you: What, in these two quite distinct apprehensions,
is the constant? The factor that remains the same? Why, quite simply, the red towel.
I submit that, rightly understood, the problem of Snow White has to do at its center
with nothing else but
red towels
. Seen in this way, it immediately becomes a non-problem. We can easily dispense with
the slippery and untrustworthy and expensive effluvia that is Snow White, and cleave
instead to the towel. That is my idea, gentlemen. And I have here in this brown bag . . .
I have taken the liberty of purchasing . . . here, Edward, here is your towel . . .
Kevin . . . Clem. . . .” Chang watched sourly. That was the trouble with being a Chinese.
Too much detachment. “I don’t want a ratty old red towel.
I want the beautiful snow-white arse itself!
”

SNOW WHITE regarded her hair hanging out of the window. “Paul? Is there a Paul, or
have I only projected him in the shape of my longing, boredom, ennui and pain? Have
I been trained in the finest graces and arts all my life for nothing but this? Is
my richly-appointed body to go down the drain, at twenty-two, in this horribly boresome
milieu, which even my worst enemi would not wish upon me, if she knew? Of course there
is a Paul! That Paul who was a friend of the family, who had, at that point, not yet
assumed the glistering mantle of princeliness. There is a Paul somewhere, but not
here. Not under my window. Not yet.” Snow White looked out of the window, down the
hair, at the two hundred citizens on the ground, agape. “Ugh! I wish I were somewhere
else! On the beach at St. Tropez, for example, surrounded by brown boys without a
penny. Here everyone has a penny. Here everyone worships the almighty penny. Well
at least with pennies one knows what they add up to, under the decimal system. No
ambiguity there, at least. O Jerusalem, Jerusalem! Thy daughters are burning with
torpor and a sense of immense wasted potential, like one of those pipes you see in
the oil fields, burning off the natural gas that it isn’t economically rational to
ship somewhere!”

“Informal statements      the difficulties of ownership and customs      surprises
you by being Love exchanges      paint it      understanding brown boys without a
penny      I was      bandit headgear      And the question of yesterday waiting      members
     clinging clear milk of wanting fever hidden      melted constabulary      extra
innings of danger      hides      under the leg résumé      clip chrome method      decision
of the sacred Rota      muscular dream basket gesture      Kiss the paper with it
     tufts      more interesting than children      painful texture of interesting
children offensive candor      lesion      hanging mirror      They only want window
boxes moving with clean, careful shrubs      Manner in which the penetration was      Excited
groans stifled under      blankets upset      A parliament of less-favored glass doors
closed      extra”