Soliloquy

By Kurt Cline

Soliloquy is a lyric autobiography that details the misadventures, life lessons, and glory moments of an American poet. This tale is a mix of personal history and cultural iconography, slipping from Soupy Sales to Edgar Allen Poe, from Mary Poppins to UFOs, and from comic book superheroes to underground poetry readings.

Battling a depression and anxiety endemic in our time, author Kurt Cline is propelled down a corridor of memory and imagination, having met some of the greatest poets of modern day. He hung out with the Sun Ra Arkestra for an entire evening in a snowed-in Howard Johnson hotel. He shook hands with Patti Smith at the stroke of New Years in the Bowery Ballroom of New York City.

This book is the story of a life lived through writing. In a poetic prose work reminiscent of Nabokov, Samuel Beckett, or Dylan Thomas, Cline intertwines strands of vision, emotion, and culture to form a personality-structure that is ultimately able to transcend the limitations of its past and discover a new, improved destiny.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing Singapore
• Release date: May 24, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543740813

Kurt Cline

Kurt Cline is associate professor of English and world comparative literature at National Taipei University of Technology. An award-winning writer, he is the author of Voyage to the Sun and The Poet and the Shaman: Radical Language Praxis. Cline is also a performance artist, theatrical magician, and singer-songwriter. His album Alien Shoe was produced by 12 Studio.

Book preview

1

THE LONG DISTANCE TELEPHONE CALL BLUES

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Y ou’re crazy! my wife exclaimed. Then the phone said bleep-bleep & went dead. Such are the vagaries of long-distance phone cards. Too psychically paralyzed to negotiate the bank of public telephone kiosks downstairs, I was left to wonder, was it true, was I really crazy? After all, it runs in the family. I have always been given to seeing existentially actual overlapping realities & perhaps deep down really did entertain the notion. Or it might have been Lily’s mind had been taken over by a certain Scorpio shadow sadist following her across the centuries, waiting for her to take him in. And I, the hero in the story, was all a-dither. Orpheus caught in the strings of his zither. I had forgotten Christ Tao Buddha Allah along the way, as can one forget the names of characters midway through Dostoyevsky novels. I had been having a long sequence of recurrent dreams, based equally on my hopes as well as my fears. In one, Lily really does come back, after all these delays, deceptions, the eight-hour long distance phone call I had to pay for the outcome of which was Lily canceling her flight on the next morning’s plane to Taipei. Yes it is really Lily, luggage & all, arriving at the door—just as I’m about to make it with some far-out chick I met on the beach. She never would let go. And I guess I never will be able to either, although I suffer greatly physically from the absence of said wife who perfect or not if non-existent leaves me to ponder am I really crazy or not? And part of the answer to this must lie in the very same question about her—is she crazy or not? Or more precisely, one supposes, just exactly how crazy am I to suffer her errant long-distance phone-call that leaves me feeling squeezed-out into a mop-bucket. Just as the Modern Lovers used to play back when punk rock was not yet new wave that is before its gradual disintegration. And that’s back it all started and I didn’t know where I was headed but somehow got through it all: the drugs the drags the drag-queens the hootenanny-holler with the field hands I took this certain very eccentric route. I really did want to become a great poet someday. I still do. But my time being was spent in a (not always so) systematic disintegration of the senses, although it was progressive. I didn’t know anything. I had to ask somebody where Xanadu was. But somehow, in spite of all the booze & drugs I still kept writing. Or, to be sure, a lot of times I wrote because of them.

But then that’s why cut out for tropical climes in the first place, now a college professor & who would’ve ever guessed? I learned something along the way but as I much as I learned I promptly forgot, which kept the balance even. Then there was this severance when I left my home and country, my cats & paintings & books. But most of all my wife, with whom I had been cohabiting with or without or with benefit of clergy for about thirty years. There was inevitably that something that happened. That drove us apart. I fled the sanctuary of that apartment of Seneca Street the way a deer might flee the relative safety of the forest for the danger of a deserted highway. Oh that apartment! How I used to sweep long coagulated clots of cat fur across the hardwood floor down the stairs & over the porch into the street. It was really the only home I’d ever known, every other having been disrupted. It had been the longest I had ever lived anywhere. She drove me from my emergency sublet to the airport & a great blizzard snowed us in for two days in Syracuse where we lounged at the hotel & shifted to being a couple of carefree bon vivants which is how we would act whenever we visited somewhere. Like a couple of swells, Lily used to say. And with dipping in the pool three times a day, sauna, fish dinner & a makeshift tour of Syracuse University where Dick Gregory was a distinguished alumni we thought maybe this was the answer to the problem. Whoever gets a full time job first the other goes along & finds part-time work. This was our longstanding agreement. My wife had yet to finish her doctoral dissertation, upon which she had been laboring for over ten years. She’d always found a way to blame it on me but the fact of it nevertheless stripped her soul—she became alcoholic & had a very vague affair I was only to figure out the affair later, with the aid of a Tarot deck, in far Taipei, the strange island I ended up where my sanity was slowly to erode from cultural & personal isolation into a sort of functional insanity. But that is part of the longer story & will become apparent in due time since was & still is the grinding post of my heart.

She promised then to come to Taiwan within the next three months. But time & distance still separated us & now I was in Puebla, Mexico, feeling the pyramid energy, the jaguar power, studying the Popul Vuh. In Chichen-Itza, at the site where the ball game descends into the Underworld, where the team captain is decapitated & his head kicked around, at the foot of the pyramid atop which the sacrificial victim’s heart was chopped out with an obsidian axe & held up to the sky I won’t say I didn’t feel a bit frightened. But I was in so much pain anyway not much more could hurt me. And by this time already so many years of Lily saying she would finish her dissertation & come to Taiwan to be with me. Always three months away. Until the next semester. Ended. Another dream in which I was held prisoner in some facility for 90 days. Little windows in the doors security wire running through them. A woman is in charge, but a man does her bidding. His job is to always make everything a little bit worse. If the light’s too bright to sleep, he increases its intensity. If it’s stiflingly warm, he turns up the heat. Later am physically tortured—skin cut into, nerves flayed. And such has been the story of my life for at least the past ten years. During which I have lost everything—my friends, my temper, my self-respect, my sense of adventure—all except items to add to my CV, as I am productive researcher in spite of everything else & still a writer. Am & always will be & don’t need to promise because whenever there is nothing else taking my time I will automatically sit down and write. I don’t know why this is. Some people might sit down and draw, or plan bridges, or work out quadratic occasions. But I always write & the singular interest of my inquiry is unerringly myself & how I feel & why I feel the way I do. Of course, the world outside my skin-encapsulated ego is not separate from this. It’s more a blend of inner & outer, the subtle & intense. And there I was in Mexico as in Taiwan as always quite alone. And waiting for her to come on Valentines Day & the day after that had been Ash Wednesday. But that was another Ash Wednesday, wasn’t it? I sat all alone at the coffee-table in the palatial apartment a colleague’s wife had rented to me for next to nothing, practicing Mexican rhythms on a cheap guitar, writing in my journal, reading Philip K. Dick novels & consulting the Tarot with a Mexican deck I’d picked up in one of the innumerable Aquarian age bookstores endemic in Puebla. El Diablo, scowls from the deck. The Devil almost always means trouble for me because I do have a bad temper, particularly when this anger is fueled by indignation, probably my greatest sin. I have long noticed that that which is most sacred is also that which is most profane & am drawn inexorably, no matter how saintly my most inward intentions, towards life’s seamier side, where I take great delight in giving in to every temptation my pocketbook will allow. So I have always been lucky (or impoverished) enough not to get myself killed. Whatever far-accompanying curse had left with me for a strong predilection of self-destructive behaviors, mangling my emotions into explosions, my passions into obsessions had counterbalanced my life by giving me the luck of El Loco, the Fool to always fall down but never get hurt. I had this mark of protection, according to the fortune-telling señorita, a diamond-shaped mark on the palm of my left hand. I had been born with this mark of protection. I would have a long life, she assured me, but there were troubles coming in the not-too-far distant future, difficulties I would surmount, but only with the greatest difficulty. I couldn’t imagine what she meant. I didn’t know how lucky I was.

The intention underlying this sabbatical had been to travel back to Ithaca—to make good & sure Lily finished her goddamned dissertation once & for all. But, after all had been approved for my sabbatic-leave by the appropriate university committees, Lily began putting up resistance in her usual passive aggressive manner. Her reluctance to receiving my visit was almost indetectable but was nevertheless ineluctable. It would mean her renting an apartment in town, & assuming the duties of the lease appended thereunto. Etcetera etcetera. Funny right now she lived in the house the guy who used to run the New-Age Bookstore in town. Lily intimated this gentlemen who used to pick her up regularly & inexplicably in a red pick-up truck when we lived together on Seneca Street would probably be inconvenienced by any visit I might make lasting more than a week at the most. Maybe this was so, maybe not. But the net result was I stayed on in Mexico, alone again. At this point I had been living alone for five years. I can’t help feeling I would’ve tamed that damned dissertation of hers & deep down she knew & feared this. If she ever actually finished she would have to change her identity. The way things were she would always say, I’m a Professor at SUNY Cortland, finishing up my PhD at Cornell. Of course she wasn’t really a professor, but a lecturer. And she wasn’t really finishing her PhD either, but rather & eternally working on it. Yet these half-truths held more weight in her mind than what reality might emerge in the emergence of some new possibility. In spite of my melancholia, I always seem to land on my feet. So there I was in that beautiful city of Puebla in the magnificent magic-land of Mexico. I had money in my pockets & a nice place to stay. What more could any man ask? During the day street-musicians played accordions, guitars and harmonicas but most numerous were the organ-grinders whose metallic tinkling gave the city center a carnivalesque air. After dark, in the many nightclubs around where I was staying one heard a curious mixture of Mexican cowboy tunes and Beatles covers. I would climb up on the roof & beauty would put her arms around me: the mountains the expanses of desert the pyramids. The transparent moon. The cupola & the obelisk rising up out of the dawn. Jaguars mutating into eagles in the clouds. The only thing missing was my wife. And that was all I could think about, in spite of all the things to see. The lack of someone to share it with. I was spinning, spinning into the void. And I had never stopped loving her in spite of our lengthy legal separation & the fact that we lived on opposite sides of the world. Or, at any rate, she never stopped professing her love for me, her promises to come be with me always three months in the offing. We could have that child we were always planning, after she finished her dissertation, at which time she would also quit smoking. But she stayed where she was long enough & SUNY gave her a so-called full-time part-time position that might have been mine if I’d stayed there. But I never seem to be able to stay anywhere, except where I am. I can’t believe it! It’s as if Gatsby had been written by Woody Allen! Lives wrecked while I find success & my beloved—for twenty years it’s been at this point—fails to complete her schoolwork! And there was always something about her eternal evasions that set off my latent paranoia fused with melancholia infiltrating my nervous system & made me one with swirling, refracted images of masked faces peering through holes in the sky. And wasn’t it all a subterfuge, a put off or put on? That woman had my head screwed on backwards. Hers were the words, You have just been poisoned etched at the bottom of that final, fatal cup of red wine. She was only one I ever dreamed of. Yet she led me to the abyss, never taking it amiss that every atom in my body had been rearranged. Don’t blame me if you can’t get laid she once said over the long distance phone-line as my own seemingly intractable middle-aged crisis took full bloom in a series of suicidal enactments, more or less ritualized, but at least one quite sincere. This was before I had the big idea of going back to Ithaca to bust Lily loose from her underground prison. For awhile, my daring plan had even rendered the destruction of my suffering self obsolete. I am reasonably good at formulating plans & then carrying them out, in spite of shifting circumstances. But this time I was stymied, trapped in an unstable paradise of peacocks & panthers.

Of all emotional maladies, depression is certainly the most stupefying, the most stultifying, & because the most predictable, the least interesting. In spite of the fact that the ancients associated it with visionary states. But it was with me, as it had been with my mother before me, who was also both dreamy & moody. But it’s all in your mind, Lily would object. It is hard for others outside to understand what is going on inside the mind of a depressed person. Everyone has been depressed, but clinical depression is qualitatively different from sorrows brought on by the setbacks of life. Depression is not even about sorrow, as some might assume, but about physical, bodily pain. It is spasmodic, linked to nervous and neuronal systems quite beyond one’s