Richard Kostelanetz: experimental prose
EPIPHANIES
The only suspicious evidence in her refrigerator is a carton marked "bitter" but actually filled with chicken fat.
Don't tread on me.
How could the same man commit three murders in precisely identical ways, in three different parts of town, all within
roughly the same half hour?
What he missed most in his straitjacket was access to his fingernails.
Anyone with a college education and sufficiently rich literary imagination could write a hundred acceptable
Epiphanies; writing a thousand demands something more.
The lake before him, so still at dusk, looked like a blackboard.
The notion that an attractive man could find her apartment appealing, filled as it was with cats and kitty litter, give
her an anxious chill.
She strode right out of the movie screen, stepping over the audience.
The speech he had just delivered was so elegant, so good in ways untypical of him, most of us rightly wondered if it
were ghost-written.
Not unlike other women of recent vintage, she accepted freedoms, as well. as possibilities, that her grandmother
would have thought inconceivable.
Anything less than "the best deal" was unacceptable to him, in spite of any promise of profits it might yield &.
The principal fear I had in writing ~Epiphanies~ was that the sentences would become formulaic and thus
the whole repetitious.
He knew enough tricks to deceive the stupid~ students into believing he was brighter than his colleagues.
Her hair dyed green, she hoped to develop a clientele among people who were likewise green-inked.
The question then became when and where she lost her wedding ring?
Too young to obtain the necessary licenses, they contracted to play at being married.
Build me a pallet on your floor, and let me stay the night.
His creative work generated a dialectic between structure and chaos, logic and illogic, rigor and freedom, amidst
purely stylistic pleasures.
So long had it been since love for a woman had hurt her emotionally that she had forgotten how to climb out of her funk.
Capriciousness is a taste available to only the bully or the boss.
Once he chose a composition teacher, the direction of his musical career, as well as his sexual life, could be defined
in advance.
Even into her seventies, the man she wanted most beside her in bed was her first love.
Insisting that the room be dark before she undressed for a medical examination, she soon discovered that her doctor
had undressed as well.
A war no different from other wars, this one too kills mostly the wrong people. Rest assured, dear love, I spent last
night, and the night before that alone.
She was such an unreliable person that her colleagues would bet, at even money, whether she would show up on time.
He feared that if he slept with her she would ask him for money or, even worse, threaten him with a paternity suit.
why is it that the books in her immense library smell like fresh fruit?
In Epiphanies are elements of all the fictions ever written and perhaps all the fictions ever to be written. RECHECK
EACH STORY AGAINST EPIS COMPLETE (above)
From a hungry tiger, or an affectionate woman, there is no escape.
No matter how many gifts I sent her, no matter how hard I flattered her, no matter how often I asked her, I could not
persuade her to take drinks with me.
Her ease with his colored neighbors has less to do with her appearance than her fluency in English. Mediocrity is not
what I desire for myself, my art, or my children.
No white lie about money or sexual prowess or political power was more successful at getting proper young women
to bed than the promise of marriage.
Directly underneath me I could see the burning fires.
Epiphanies as a whole reflects a psychology that regards perception as essentially fragmentary and disconnected.
It was another evening with time to fill before bedtime.
Simply, for you or me to want to produce anything less than a masterpiece is to debase the integrity and traditions of
Art.
Does that woman smiling at me think of me as a man or another woman?
Now that she had been divorced and on her own again for more than six months, a quick in-and-out with
almost anybody attractive would no longer be acceptable.
Every time his head begins to sag to the side, his shoulders spring erect.
She drew a picture that, for all its apparent clarity to her, remains blurred in his mind.
Ho, nein, nyet, ouk, non, okhi, lo, nao.
He was faced with two choices--keeping his film in cold storage or selling the celluloid to a manufacturer of
mandolin picks.
She shoved her small fist past his teeth, deep into his mouth.
It was a daily debate whether to spend his paltry allowance on wood to heat his home or food to fill his
stomach.
Whenever I stop, he cries for more.
The key to understanding her self-image is that she regards people possessing power as considerably
different from those lacking it.
Their kitchen is alive with cooks and spices.
Within five minutes she quit her job, cleared her desk, emptied its drawers, retrieved spare clothes from the office
locker and slid down the stairs like a schoolgirl released from class.
I've more lovers than you have and you have and you have, and more money too.
My principal problem in writing Epiphanies is finding precise verbal equivalents in a language not my own.
At certain times I find my husband's face resembles that of a shark.
Often in the midst of making love, she will place a long-distance call to our mother.
He woke me up by kicking his foot through the bedroom wall
She served me the same breakfast everyday and would get cross if I asked for something else.
With no access to medicines, our doctor could do nothing more than diagnose.
Was he talking with uncharacteristic flawlessness, or has he simply memorized a speech?
His death was more surprising than hers.
Deposited in a space that had neither bars nor walls, he felt nonetheless imprisoned.
The box I purchased was eight feet long and inch wide and an inch deep.
Only by leaving the country, or committing suicide or going mad could she extract herself from her current affairs.
He feared not the lack of a lover or of sex but loneliness with his thoughts.
Though my Epiphanies may not contain everyone's epiphanies, I want to include at least some of your epiphanies.
How long, he asked himself, has his watch been lost?
He calculated, if he started to kiss her now, that the immediate gains would be too few, while the possible long-term
losses might be too many.
The fear is that she would think my lies true.
He spent the weekend locked in a graveyard whose spiked fence was twice his height.
The only pretense he cultivated was the capacity to do twice as much work.
The subway was so crowded I could riot see whose fist was pushing into my crotch.
Alibis, alibis--all he had were alibis.
She remained one of the few immigrants here to have come from a far more civilized country.
She spoke so quickly that one understood only the beginnings of her sentences.
The rules I made for myself I follow; the rules made for me are customarily violated.
She committed suicide because he could not find anyone to divorce her from her haunting past.
She is an employer whom employees can boss around.
The mess in which he had gotten himself was much more complicated than any he could previously imagine
and deeper than any he could get out of.
This poet's not just eccentric; he's full of alcoholic juice.
The legitimate question now was whether he finally possessed a productive farm or just a network of debts.
We knew exactly what sound Epiphanies should have, when read aloud.
Slumped against the wall, she seemed incapable of moving or of uttering a single sound.
Was she hearing her heart stopping beats?
For the duration of the day4ong trip, none of the passengers in the compartment spoke to any of the others;
not even eye contact was made among them.
She asked, with a mixture of fear and desire, wh~her we might expect anyone to interrupt our making love.
Her plumpness radiated both strength and sweetness.
She wanted us to believe that her bankruptcy was due merely to the perfidy of a few long4erm employees.
His sentences were as bloated as fresh-baked muffins.
She told me that she walked a hundred miles debating whether to fulfill a contract to take my life. He felt that in his
most recent debacle he had lost everything a person can lose.
The reuse of this sentence is forbidden by religious law.
Twice, in the course of writing ~Epiphanies ~, I got so excited I pushed my typewriter off the back edge of its table.
From so much stasis he feared not paralysis but insanity.
Free yourself from emotional entanglements, so that nothing will matter to you as much as your career. His taste in
women ran to thoroughbreds with elaborate authenticated pedigrees.
She picked at her warts, one after another, until they were constantly bleeding. When everything proceeds like
clockwork, no misunderstandings can arise.
In reading ~Epiphanies~, are you disturbed by the absence of the sorts of fully developed characters you have come to
expect of fiction?
He sprinted across the hot beach, his feet barely touching the sand.
Secure in his achievements, he enjoyed deflating the unattainable plans of his colleagues. She felt strange to herself~-stranger to herself than she had ever felt before.
Each of the sisters whispered reassurance and encouragement into the others ear.
No man could work a farm successfully without a cooperative wife.
It can be said that Epiphanies is full of stereotypes, but, I may I add, no prejudices. He laughed so fiercely his teeth
dislodged.
Married only to deceive the solicitous authorities, should we be considered collaborators or "co-conspirators"?
The expression on her face suggested that she had done, was doing, or was about to do something indubitably
contemptible.
Breath so foul scares away not just people but mosquitoes, mice and cockroaches.
Decades after she abandoned her theatric career, she could never overcome deceptive habits in dealing with people.
We grew up in the world, with its schools and cultural atmosphere, that too many of our colleagues foolishly wanted
for their own children.
Some of these Epiphanies were written in the woods, others by the side of a gently flowing stream, and yet others in
the middle of an embattled city.
From the need to entice everyone she met, she needed dispensations renewable daily. The footsteps of my soldiers
gave way to the tracks of bears.
The mechanisms of his life he automatically adjusted to his latest intelligence about himself, illustrating the principle
that, at least in his life, a human being could be a cybernetic system where mind preceded matter
Extravagance in a personality as charming as hers could be forgiven.
Every evening he arrived at his lover's door with another Epiphany, in lieu of food or flowers. Even after years of
living here I'm always opening doors to the wrong room.
Whenever he tried to think about his own life, he recognized that the terms of his thought-- the categories of his
analysis--were really more applicable to someone else.
Her professions of heterosexual fidelity became an excuse for chronic neglectfulness. Women differ from men in
~ting sore before they are satiated.
Delirium before sleep, abetted by alcohol, were among his pet preconditions for writing ~Epiphanies~.
Her visions of success in art were too simplistic to generate her goal.
Before typing his poems, he took off his gasses, knowing from experience that what he could not see would never
disappoint.
By treating him shittily she knew she incurred continually the risk of his terminating their relationship. I feared his
tool would come out my backside.
He was a professional, a full time professional, with no taste at all for honors and organizations that were not
remunerated
Acknowledge, my dears, that many of you have assimilated truths of mine that may have passed into you unnoticed.
How do you know, and can't you tell?
The characters populating his fiction were all based upon stars in long-forgotten movies. There was nothing wrong
with her that a little less narcissism couldn't cure.
He was initially impressed, but then dismayed, by the speed and ease with which his proposition was accepted.
Disengaged from her husband, she had to use her office as a trusting place.
She persuaded us to believe that eventually we'd be victorious, if only we'd accept surrender now.
He would watch his fingers freeze and his toes turn green.
Why shouldn't Epiphanies be considered "surrealism"--the artful spewing forth of dreams?
His bloated condition he attributed to a constant hankering after gourmet food.
Leaping up from the chair, as though it were electrified, she broke into an hysterical sprint.
Suddenly she noticed that she smelled nothing.
The rain poured through the ceiling for only a minute, leaving our atmosphere dry enough to see how drenched we
had become.
We didn't believe the competence he displayed.
Such revelations of his ignominy made him commit suicide some two decades after his public death.
She would never abandon her sense of herself as a moviestar's bastard.
Thanks to television, I traveled to worlds and periods of history that were available to my parents only through books.
Intercourse under the sky is twice as much fun and twice as dangerous.
In the mirror she could see a truth she could not feel--the fact of how old she had suddenly become.
The house's architecture was so distasteful to the eyes I hoped to stare it into a conflagration.
Turn over once, turn over twice, turn over thrice, and you'll be ready for loving.
His behavior was full of mannerisms and other devices to persuade us of his aristocratic heritage.
Different though she was from my previous girl friends, she resembled most of them in a single, highly disturbing
aspect-- she looked Ike my father.
His career was so unique we could never tell for sure if he were cunning or just eccentric.
Nothing perceptible about him betrayed a lifetime devoted to thievery.
In my experience of literature, I have no objection to being removed"; but what I dislike, and find distasteful, is
having my emotions ~pushed~.
No matter how hard he tries to be clear, his explanations become more and more incomprehensible.
One assumption behind Epiphanies is that "story" and "fiction" are not identical; each can exist without the other.
With all his excuses and circuitous rationalizations, he could never convince me of his credibility.
Had I not already written and published stories like ~Epiphanies~, someone else would have done it.
Every time his boat ascended to the top of a wave he saw a different shoreline.
To every participant in our poor peoples' march, he donated aplastic credit card; his wife, a toothbrush.
So undistinguished was his face, he would always be mist~ken for someone else.
If he earned enough money with his new book, he figured that the rest of his life could be devoted to
creating "masterpieces, only masterpieces."
One secret about himself best kept to himself is his obsessive homophobia.
What a pleasant surprise it was for me to discover that all three sisters, as well as their mother, were
sexily attracted to me.
She would always be the only daughter whom her father, a retired athlete, took to sporting events.
Her love for this newcomer brought back the English she had learned forty years before.
There were at least a dozen artists of a stature equal to his in his native city; none were friends.
I had to travel a full three thousand miles to dump my wife painlessly.
He fought off his attackers to protect not the money in his wallet but the gold in his socks.
They were drunk enough to try to make love, albeit clumsily, in the presence of others.
Every time she came to a climax she sneezed.
What I miss in Epiphanies are characters with whom you can, as we say, "identify."
He discovered by accident what it was that would make her love him--kissing and licking her feet as often
as possible.
The need to use a telephone other than her own curbed her communications style.
In a town so small, most of the faces were already familiar, even to a newcomer like myself.
He made fewer mistakes than anyone else he knew.
There was one servant to trim his beard, another to brush his teeth and a third to clean his ears.
The pattern of his sunburn at night revealed conclusively how he spent that day.
Tell me you like the Epiphanies you've read and I'll write a hundred more; tell me it is destined to be a
classic work of Literature and I'll write a thousand.
He was just another passing stranger whom she- a good looking woman, had enticed to watch over her
children in exchange for sexual favors.
Richard Kostelanetz is a renowned editor, poet, critic and fiction writer. Author of many books, his recent work
includes Writings on Glass and the memoir, 30 Years of Visible Writing.
Next
