ASTRAL AMERICA

I TRAVEL THROUGH THE U.S. as a soldier through a battlefield not his own, and over which clouds fly in the opposite direction. One conference a genuflexion, two, three conferences an uphill climb, a fleeting reflection in a New England mirror, I am the aeronautic missionary of silent majorities and fatal strategies, leaping catlike from one airport to the next, now the kindled woods of New Hampshire, yesterday the vertical sweetness of skyscrapers, tomorrow mellifluous Minneapolis, with its spidery suite of vowels half Greek and half Sioux evoking an auroral geometry at the edge of ice floes,

print October 1983

WHAT ARE YOU DOING AFTER THE ORGY?

Obscenity, were there such, would be such that no one, not even at the very core of the self, could escape it.

The secret, were there such, would be such that no one, not even its safekeeper, could betray it.

Assume for a moment the task of imagining a fanlike formation, a round of figures, of situations, unconnected and, if possible, without overt sexual connotation. Then gather these points of reference the way children play cat’s cradle, that you may observe the enigmatic and modern shape of obscenity as it emerges. It is a shape much vaster than the one already familiar to us; it is, quite