Prudence in Hell 001

Pishtacos

I was not expecting for The Bride to find her reader, but she has, and so now I may write her.

What was supposed to be a fairly private journal is now doubly private.

ii

The Bride Stripped is, as you will have noticed, a [s]word game.

Debride, Stripped. The Brides, Ripped.¹

(There may be others: I write in termite mounds, in synapses, in steaming piles.)

Some of my word games are war games. I move ‘words’ against each other, as if on a go board. The words are flags. They don’t signify so much as they signal. Like frozen corpses on the flank of Everest, I carve them up and steal their fat, like a pishtaco. ²

iii

I appreciate your clarity. I appreciate my obscurity. I appreciate the opportunity in being so poetically antithetical: as Lowell to Rimbaud; a pistol to a gunrunner.

Any poet is unique but every poet is universal.

iv

A tenebrous writer, a scrier.

v

The figure of the flayed man (de/brided) suggested itself to me about a year ago, at the time of my lecture on Hyperbaroque.

It came to me not as a concept but as a vision; a joke, perhaps: the man without (sensory) qualities.

vi

The mystery of beauty is not the problem of aesthetics.

vii

I laid one more egg than would fit in a box of a dozen.

I bled throughout the entire operation—the operation I shouldn’t have bled through.

viii

The first ship I knew was The Beagle. There have been others—The Bachelor’s Delight, The Demeter, The Bounty—but someone’s first ship is a baptism.

1. I have always found the figure of the bride intriguing because it is universally transitional.

The bride is not a maiden, but not quite a wife; she is no longer of her family nor of her new one, neither her father’s nor her husband’s. The Bride is ἐποχή (suspension of judgment / withholding of assent).

So bridehood is not only sacramental but an initiation.

2. From the Quechua, pishtay, to "behead [Acéphale] cut the throat, or cut into slices.” (I suppose I do mince words!).

The pishtaco, like the viracocha (the vampire and the civiliser), is usually white. The white wendigo. (Leukaemia.)

The Bride, like pishtaco, or viracocha, or MobyDick.

The Bride, like leukaemia.

“A McBride on her father’s side.”

[It is a defect of Substack that it doesn’t allow footnotes within footnotes]

So I will continue here.

The greatest essay ever written on the colour white is Chapter 42 of Moby Dick, aka the city I was born in. (Followed in stature only by Poe’s Gordon Arthur Pym).

Remember, Melville visited Manuela Sáenz in Paita, in person.