Author: FarJourney Caribbean

        NUDE SKETCH – 01

     WE ARE TOLD that Wisdom helped to set the sought/foundations
     Of the Earth.   So why not invoke Wisdom to emerge here,
     At the start of this world, this odder dream?    Trouble is:   i
     Am no wisdom-wand god.     For one, i have no wisdom-teeth,
     Nor have ever had:   they never put in a twopairance,
     Never turned up, never sprouted, though I do remember
     Sore back-gums in my youth.   Susan, my last wife, consouled me
     that a lack of wisdumb-teeth did not necessarily
     (She liked staggering spanner-in-the-works words like that one,)
     Denote folly.   Would I rather be as long in the tooth
     As i was elsewhere short?     (Ouch!)   Often her words flagged themselves,
     Through her jestures of raised eyebows and a shrug, as a joke,
     A jovial javelin of revenge for all the pain
     I caused her by assuming we were both enjoying life.

        Another way of looking at our joking together
     (I was no better than Susan at not having to joke)
     Is that our jokes were like planks being nailed onto a frame
     Slowly that way becoming a bridge, one we more and more
     Needed between us ‒ before it turned into her caixão

      SKETCH – 02

        Will this record, of the kind of hajj i never dreamt i
      Would ever make, itself shrivel into a limping joke?
      But lame or not, as crutches, my jokes are a humorist’s,
      For l-imp-ing along the Serious Way, i tend to want
      To burst into laughter.    Or call me a mere absturdist
      Who can’t help seeing the vanity of all our buzzing
      Effarts ot climbing this or that molehill of ambition.

                   – 03 ***

       Should you, testy reader, need to tag such talk ‘pretentious’,
      I’d suggest you either throw out this book or, grinding your
      Wisdom-teeth, rip this page out and scrunch it up or mail it
      To the Onfire of the Minister of Forein Offears.
      But if you entertain these case-studies just as they are
      In your hands, they may dekidney a laugh or two, or more,
      Who can tell? – not only jokes but also less ambitious,
      Non-threatening notthings that have no pretentons to be
      Anything but what they are:    myrages (all records are
      Fictions) in a dessert with oases of detached smiles
      Here and there, even if only your smiles of indullgence
      Of the mush-rooms of my prolostly superfishy jokes
      Spored by an arrowgaunt childishness ever on the verge
      Of oblivion’s edge where the blindest child starts to see.

                                  
                                  
                            *** Behind that zigzagging 'style' loomed the polemical bent
                                   of a self-styled ‘Art-terror’ claiming her right to disrupt
                                   what she called the régime of too purrsuasive [sic] fictions
                                   with persuasionist detours of her own tangenital
                                   [sic] forays into angles and corners of reflection
                                   which the anglo-novel’s wayward seeds (like Fielding, Defoe,
                                   E. Brontë, Melville and Poe – and not excluding Milton,
                                   the Brownings and the Dante we know from bald translations)
                                   took not for granted but as a right of trust, an aspect
                                   of their relationship with their readers
                                                                         – Lissana Cesare-Ábusem, PhD 
                           

                 (from *fatima solagua arterra’s nudes* by Brian Chan, 2015)

         
         
         UNTRODUCTION – 01

       I recall her saying that her sketches would be ‘crude nudes
       for lewd prudes’, by which she meant to counter what she believed
       was a warp in written and graphic works of Western art,
       to cinemise or gossipise the force of womanhood
       with figurations of a flaccid femininity.
       (Such terms herein obliqued are lifted from her diaries.)

                                  – 02

       
                                                                 Hers was but one
         of many cases of delusio Caligaris
         identified in treatment-centres, and given import
         in professional journals and conferences, throughout
         the 1990s.    What was, till then, a rare condition
         (first drawn attention to by a Dr Fritz von Harbou
         in Berlin in 1927) seemed overnight
         to mushroom, along with an epidemic of rampant
         somnambulism, throughout immigrant populations
         of the unsettled and settled tribes of the entire world.

            Simply propounded, delusio Caligaris is
         a complaint which may assail a mental patient after
         immatisation in a therapy-facility.
         The condition involves her slowly coming to believe
         she is directing the functioning of the institute,
         rather than being but one of its inmates ‒ among which
         group she is likely to seem a kind of chameleon,
         or at best its most suggestible member, with leanings
         towards solacium potestatis (otherwise known
         as ‘consolation-controlitis’: vide Agressive
         Defense: Control-Freakery in an Age of Cowardice
         Codified, Berne & Hyde, Pentagoff Press, L.A.; p. 2)

            Such tiltings within the psyche may lead to the splitting
         or diverting or, in extreme cases, sheer postponement
         of personality as identity ‒ a syndrome
         indicated by Fatima’s anti-fiction sketches,
         as she termed them, that conjure two male stand-ins for her self

                                   – 03

          For all its extolling of the miracle of Woman,
          Fatima once scrawled after one session with me, Art shrinks
          the feminine principle to mere fuckability
          ‒ an outrageous but understandable claim by a ‘bitch’
          who had spent all her adult life as an overworked ‘whore’
          within what was then mainly a man’s field of faux-pursuit,
          that hunt-scent perverted (or ‘male cross-stitchery’, as she
          later called it) to Certifiable Accountancy.

                                   – 04

               Being put out to grass from their ‘field’ became her first stage
          of fertile depersonalization.   This I treated
          for eight years (before her suicide).    In treatment she seemed
          far from delusional:    mild-mannered and soft-spoken, her
          slightly ironic lazy-lidded gaze suggesting none
          of the incoherent anxiety usually
          displayed by depersonalized megalomaniacs.
          Yet it was the same Fatima (but was it?) who would mock
          our one-to-one sessions with hummed sentiments like With you
          I rule creation or I’m sitting on top of the world

         UNTRODUCTION – 05

                                   And once, without a trace of irony,
         she offered to write me a ‘nice’ commendation towards
         my next job ‒ as an auto-mechanic or cleaning-maid
         (a ‘slip’ revealing her obsession with self-revision).

         Less kindly, she was once eve/adamant that very few
         women give a fuck for the minds of the men who fuck them
         and fuck them over ‒ and over (Fatima had no faith
         in the promises of the Sexual Revolution);
         that they are no different from men in not giving a damn
         for the different feeling-mind quiddity of their not us

                                   – 06

          Arterra distrusted the cages of realism,
          with its verysilimitude [sic] the strangler of dreams.
          Thus, for example, her near-blind bookseller is given,
          in all his unlikelihood, as a presence in her ‘dream’,
          a figure of entry in her ledger of no account.

              We must also not forget that Fatima Arterra
          ‘sketched’ in a so-called foreign tongue, having picked up only
          English scraps while growing up in Angola and Macão.
          Those scraps, dismissible in a world of business-numbers,
          are less ignorable for their influence on the near-
          glossolalial utterances of her word-sketches
          – an idiomatic strain she called a distant cousin
          of the Pole Conrad’s trick of reviving great bad writing
          whose snakes of sentences undermined the ladders of Taste
          by empathically echoing the complexities
          threading the inner/outer magic-bag of consciousness.

                                  – 07

             A more detailed analysis of my patient’s complaint
          is not intended here:    these few lines are proffered only
          as a layperson’s guide into an orderly-seeming
          mind’s mazelike detours of which its unrevised ‘sketches’ are
          ample examples, evidence revealed only after
          Fatima’s sudden death.

                                      Lissana Cesare-Ábusem, PhD, ASPUC

          (from *fatima solagua arterra’s nudes* by Brian Chan, 2015)