Agape Agape by William Gaddis Read Free Book Online Page B

the back here, banishing the imitative arts and the products of the imitative arts and the pantomimic artist who can imitate anything, “He will attempt to represent the roll of thunder, the noise of wind and hail, or the creaking of wheels, and pulleys, and the various sounds of flutes, pipes, trumpets, and all sorts of instruments: he will bark like a dog, bleat like a sheep, or crow like a,” a sheep? Bleat like a lamb what was her name, that first animal cloned from a cell taken from an adult yes banishing the products of the imitative arts before we start to clone people? Not for me says a scientist who invents the techniques, to say how we should use them and goodbye Hiroshima, right here in the paper somewhere, if one of my relatives got cancer I’d clone him says another, use the clone to donate bone marrow to save the life of the, the body as a prison where we came here to be punished and we ought to be punished no we, pantomimics who can imitate anything got to stop here, it’s, it’s madness it’s all madness thank God I’m not living now, get a fresh start in this pile where I put that diagram of this network of computers developing mutations that mimic natural selection and evolution all looked two dimensional so if you looked at them sideways you couldn’t see them at all but that’s, get a fresh start avoid stress get back to the, this pile here yes music haven’t even looked through yet but, good God look. Look at this one! After eight years of constant labour it says here and this is in 1906 yes thank God I’m not living today. A refined musical attraction operated by electricity with nickel-in-the-slot attachment the Wurlitzer Harp look at it! Six feet six about Frankenstein’s mimic’s height, seven hundred fifty dollars with one perforated music roll, the harp is in full view covered by glass offering the opportunity watching the fingers (almost human) pick the strings like those, those tiny felt-tipped wooden fingers almost human, playing the lyre at festivals for pleasure? Remember Meles the harp player? No chance of him performing for the good of his hearers was there? Or even for their pleasure he was so bad, but harp playing was invented for the sake of pleasure wasn’t it? So finally all of it’s banished but the shepherd’s pipe in the country and the lyre and the harp permitted in the city, extra rolls seven fifty and you can put in six nickels at once and get six tunes without getting to your feet again can’t even feel my left one numb from the knee down if, if I can just stop shivering top to bottom the whole thing’s wreckage except the heart, heart and arteries clean as whistles means the damn things will keep the prison going to enjoy every torment left, bad heart could take you out suddenly like Ambrose Bierce said, It beats old age, disease, and falling down the cellar steps find the pencil, I had a pencil get back to work’s the only refuge but where was I? Clones and products of the imitative arts the pantomimics didn’t know whether what they were cloning was good or bad, they wait, get this wet blanket off me here’s a pill, prednisone oxycodone God knows what take it anyway my head’s splitting, falls right into line doesn’t it, collapse of authenticity collapse of religion collapse of values what Huizinga called one of the most important phases in the history of civilization, and Walter Benjamin picks it up in his Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction in this heap somewhere, the authentic work of art is based in ritual he says, and wait Mr. Benjamin, got to get in there the romantic mid-eighteenth century aesthetic pleasure in the worship of art was the privilege of the few. I was saying, Mr. Huizinga, that the authentic work of art had its base in ritual, and mass reproduction freed it from this parasitical dependence. Ah, quite so Mr. Benjamin quite so, turn of the century religion was