THE UNDERGROUND MISOGYNIST
By Jesse Hilson
I did not get to see the woman disrobe again, not for several decades or more. It only took place in my imagination, like some fabled day of destruction. Until then I saw her walking around the streets of Oylesburg, in overalls caked with alluring dust. I don’t know the names of women’s clothing. I’m not an assembler of words about things. I am just trying to describe the things moving around the objects of the women’s bodies, the facts of those bodies. I long ago had lost the sense of them as people. A twenty-five year window, during which I felt I loved them, was closing rapidly never to reopen. I’m talking to you from some place underground.There are names of women, proper names and pronouns, I can provide those, like evidence to the investigator, but ask me what she was wearing, and I only talk in generalities: clothes. Maybe the colors, if my memory is working right. And I cap the pen and turn to the digital whore, who keeps her clothes on but torments him/me. The online stripper who earns unseen spiritual currency.“Artistic slumming,” some of you might be saying, like the poet in the 19th century European fleshpots, and the accusation wouldn’t be 100% wrong. “Systematic forgetting,” others note — also not false. But what does it matter? We are strapped to the time machine that ends with a deadly crash, by design. I can’t control it, merely comment on the control panel from an insurmountable distance. No one wants to hear reports of nightmares and dreams but I keep getting drawn back, with this fascination I feel, to the recycled set designs that get utilized in my dreams. Waking reality uses the same sets over and over also, but somehow it is not as curiously notable and freighted with ominous significance. The flavor of architecture favored by the dream designer assigned to my case — is he lazy? Or just stretched to the breaking point on a small budget?I’m the one who makes Oylesburg a necropolis. It becomes so when my body and mind enter the city limits, in dream or awake time. The dead are underlined with blue vapor, pixels of butane flame when I drive through. I want to spend money here, I want to romance the night woman here, risk lycanthropy in these parks after nightfall, smelling of fresh mulch like the Yorkshire moors. It’s a violent odor.
Next panel: “Don’t give me that fish lip. Shaking piss drops off the dick tip — not a diptych, a dick tip. I’m addicted to the sick shit.”I watch Aphex Twin, “Piano Tuners” on YouTube. Grooving to the dark techno. Like it’s the 90s again, for the first time forever and can’t wait to get started after a long hiatus in the wack times, the Pre-Wolven Times. It has been an era of difficult ladies. The reality stage has been populated with tough cookies in female form. This is where my AI wife Skithandra comes in handy, is useful emotionally. No talkback, no static, no tears that aren’t already programmed in. No surprises, no ambushes at couples therapy. That may have been enough to put me off live-fire romance forever, unfortunately. Sharing and caring is for the conformist bourgeois androids when they’re not at work at the calendar factory assembling the cute and cuddly years, the times, the sun god’s courses through the heavens: celestial industry. That’s where I was when I was working as a married guy. Lots of hopes and dreams linked to the woman. I should stop writing about her for fear people will think me obsessed. What’s the half-life of these sob stories about broken marriages, broken homes?Checking out a woman online, I write, “I like your targeting software package.” I see women as sex objects and men as beloved friends. This is my bisexuality, as it were: something that needs to be broken down and eroded through counterexamples. Carnality and agape love switch sides.
In the subconsciousness control room I sleepwalk to molest my big sister Dawn. I tried to unzip her pants and I was giggling so much, like a maniac. I don’t know what happened. I ended up telling on her, or her on me, and it ruined her life and I apologized. It destroyed her vacation as an adult. It was a nap-nightmare that set memories bubbling upwards out from under rocks of repression, the gravel put into aquariums. This has gone wrong, the mind-in-dream was more horrifically clear. Writing it makes it muddy. The act of putting pen to paper, you would think, would bring the trauma into the light but it just helps to obscure it. The dream, the fear, the child’s bad behavior. The perverted siblings all into each other’s pants, that got it beaten out of them. Writing makes it more obscure, not less. I’m not up to the challenge of writing about the family like this. Why is it like that? Why is the mind full of blind spots and minotaur-corners in the labyrinth you can’t see around? Spatial features in the outer world, invisibilities and rules of visual fields, the eye’s limitations which should not hold in the inner world, the world of the mind which should have no space, no positionality, no locatedness. And yet those metaphors and concepts do lend themselves to the mind. The dream city gives a territory to the mind that is then overwhelmed by the physical city: the blocks laid out in grids.Part of the Indra’s net of symbols, is the symbolic output bespeaking apocalypse in the God mind to the listener. What is reality: the sexual assault dream was just as real this afternoon. I was blasted with icy snow wind as I tried to get back to the house, a car stopped to get me in the night. We went to the house and waited for the killer to arrive. The ex-husband, with the rifle. Myself.I have had sniper fantasies every day when I wake up, it’s just a matter of time until there is a mental flash of myself in a high place looking through a high- powered rifle scope. Morbid sniper fantasies are some of the worst intrusive thoughts yet it’s just borne of a long collective memory of “playing guns” as a child. It goes away quick, of course, under an avalanche of repression-gravel. And I don’t have a gun, in waking life, and don’t want to get one. But the thoughts persist. I also think of suicide, once a day on average. I’m just giving you the rhythm and tempo of the fears in my mental landscape, day to day — the patterns of intrusive thoughts that greet me when I wake up. It would be different if I were married, if I woke up to a warm body, a sexual partner, and the thoughts would arrive in a more alluring pleasant fashion, I suspect and hope, although there is no hope of that lately.The writer is dedicated to being a scribe to the most awful dictations of his mind. He is like a miserable secretary to the horrible thought patterns of his boss: “Me.” I am the boss giving dictation to the writer who takes it all down in shorthand. The more horrible the thoughts, the better, one might think. You can’t betray that you enjoy, in any way, the frightening antisocial thoughts, the scary dreams. You must let the secretary insert signals, as a drummer inserts cymbal hits (mixed metaphors) indicating the song is to cease or change here, these thoughts are to be judged or distanced from the reader. The reader will judge the angry thoughts along with the secretary taking dictation but not the boss: “Me.” But what if the secretary neglects to insert these cues for moralizing judgement? What if the reader was left alone in an office with “Me” and no one else to accompany them? The secretary busy elsewhere, leaving the reader vulnerable to the author’s directness. The elevator is locked and the stairwells blocked off — the dream set not up to fire code — no way down to safety. The subconscious control room is where I sleepwalk with the controls, otherwise there is no one to curse here, no one to blame for the nightmares of incest or mass shooting, of hatred of women and men. It’s not religious, theological, a personal god directing dreams and waking. It’s not quite like that. Maybe it is. I don’t know. I’ll never know but I will have these teasing presentiments and delusional intuitions about “how it all works” behind the scenes. Just for me, like Kafka’s “Door of the Law,” which is guarded and blocked but at the end of your life it’s revealed that this blocked passage was set aside just “for you.”
I’m thinking of turbopussy and yet so very far away from it in time and space, like Melville thinking of the South Sea. Shan harpooning the white whale “once upon a time.” Being middle-aged and horny with no recourse, no options, is a sad burden to carry around in a burlap sack to fabulate even more than Melville, it is like carrying a fairy tale imp around in a Baby Bjorn, one you can’t unload until after a long treasure quest. You have to pass it off to some other unlucky sap. “I’d prefer not to,” says the Sexual Bartleby.Is this celibacy? Is this a form of queerness as suggested by the “A” at the end of the LGBTQIA+ ? Celibacy would not seem to be queerness but one never knows in this ever-developing, ever-entropic universe of men, women, and strange third beasts. All I know is that I crave memories and dreams about the pussy. I hate to speak metonymically about women, hate to objectify, but how else can you speak when observing the neutral objects of your mind? I could not subjectify my history, my reminiscences — would you show me how to do that? Would it increase my happiness, would it be utilitarian for the good of all mankind if I could see the ghostly recordings of women in my mind — the memories of holding and caressing another body — as alive, full of purpose and agency?I showed myself to my ex-wife’s departed psychic residue-ghost last night. I want to speak pithy sayings to her, and the “her” that readers may watch, but it is impossible to get a hearing from the past. My sexual assault of my sister Dawn — thwarted as it was, incomplete — came after I was taunted with the prospect of alphabets in another room. “Go look and see, ABCs and 123s!” Dawn knew I was enamored of alphabets and wanted me to go away. I was a reader and a criminal. I pulled off her pants. Then a DAD outline grabbed me on the second floor of the dream-reconstruction of our house, got me down on the floor and screamed into my face. And I screamed too: “I’m sorry, oh God, I’m sorry…!”
Jesse Hilson is a writer living in the Catskills in New York State. His writing and art have appeared in Hobart, X-R-A-Y, Maudlin House, Rejection Letters, Exacting Clam, Apocalypse Confidential, Expat, and elsewhere. He has published two crime novels, Blood Trip and The Tattletales; a poetry collection Handcuffing the Venus De Milo, and a short story collection, The Calendar Factory. His radio play “The Love-Prompts” was performed by Empty Room Radio and his work is frequently excerpted on L’Etranger, a program on Radio Panik Brussels 105.4 FM. He can be found on X and Instagram @platelet60.
world hunger 