Maudit Anglais

Maudit Anglais

       by Dr. Electrolux

                        sibling rivalry sucks

                        waycliff chicken's clucks

                        pounding rain on ducks

                        aircraft planes called fukes

                        simpson shows have yucks

                        heroes, men with plucks

                        ford two-fifty trucks

                        yours, electrolux

Is it swearing when said, by myself, in a language I do not understand? This--this sentence--would be the profound start to a serious investigation in any premodernist, modernist, or postmodernist work of fiction. I do not care about the answer to this question. I do not wish to answer the question. I do not wish to ask it either. I wish to examine the asking of any question or any question that is asked in order to be answered or in order to mock the question and the answer or the question or the answer. This exegesis of the question above is what fledgling philosophers mean when they say, "Today, philosophy questions the possibility of the question." Its spokeswomen make this clear, however, in their breasts: "If only there were an answer" when they say there are no questions. There are no discoveries that matter. The world--science, philosophy, agriculture, and history--says the opposite. The profound desires in the breasts of philosophers Svetlana Tate at York University, Agnes Bradigan at Stanford, Brünhelga Walliams at Connecticut College, Mrs. H. D. Smith at Harvard, Ryatia Weyland at Oxford, Hysop Bisset at Calcutta U., and Bridget Smudgedigit at Edinburgh, are that a world of meaning be restored, found, sought, plied, worked, willed, wanged, split open, forged, jerked into being, found, discovered, fine-tuned, lamented, praised, scrounged, fought for, converged upon, analyzed, credited, raised, magnified, transcended, as well as be looked at. For these scholars "There is no question" is greeted by the only allowable emotion, despair, but unspoken as such. "Let us never say 'I despair,' but much rather keep searching" is the agreement between them all. That is their bureaucracy, their jobs depending on that view and such behavior. Meaning and the search for it are economic. Prevailing hierarchies depend on the pull and push of meaning. Let's call it the industry of meaning.

       Ms. Jane Scott, Ph.D., Ass. Professor of continental philosophy, would never have, despite her twenty-year study of Derrida--and thus incidentally of Heidegger--admited that she was in any way clodded into a spectacularity of meaning's thrusts and that she would defend the presence of the absence of meaning with her very life, until she almost lost it (life and job at the U of B.C.) and then give up on meaning as easily as she gave up on her kid when it became plain that he was actually going to be a lifelong and serious alcoholic and she could not fix him at all. "The question's" presence or absence matters not a turd. It is inconsequential in the absolute. What matters--to me--is the fact that those who lament its absence want it to be the point of discussion. After this short and stupid piece I will never again bother with "the question."

       Who am I? I will tell you by regaling you with a story about myself. I am now fifty-six. When I was twenty-three I got married to a pretty nineteen-year old. I asked her if she would be my bride. She agreed. We were married six months later on an exceptionally hot day when the suits of those attending the wedding were soaked with sweat. Sweat ran down the inside of the bride's dress, front and back, in rivulets. A male attendant fainted and fell to the floor at the feet of the minister, head under the bride's skirts. In the process of falling he reached out to grasp something to keep himself upright. It happened to be the bride's flowing gown just below the waist. The whole thing came off her shoulders and fell to the floor in a second. She stood before the minister and the church naked, wearing just her red thong panties, the dress around her knees and over the inert unfortunate. The groomsmen all got immediately active, crowding around and attempting to coax the oddly reluctant dress back up over her bosoms. The bridesmaids appeared stuck, unable to move to aid their mistress.

       The unfortunate male attendant chipped a tooth. I was almost as shortsighted then as I am now. My parent had driven in from Abbottsford fifteen hundred miles away. They were too poor to come to the affair but they did so anyway. My father was a proud man. My mother is a proud woman. What she said did not always go. I do not recall any of the music that was played at the event. Muchachos. The minister droned on. After the ceremony everyone ate and opened presents and shook hands many times and laughed and felt terrible in the heat and then my bride and I left for Mexico in our Volkswagen bug.

       The first night we drank wine, made love once, and fell asleep. In the morning I noticed that the room was neat and had been vacuumed and prettified by the order of some good management even though it had cost us so little. The next day we drove all the way to the Grand Canyon and looked into it through a pay telescope. We made the fateful decision to hike down one of the canyon's many trails. We did that and after six miles of a hundred and ten degrees we arrived at the bottom and to the Colorado flowing past. Next day we set out and hiked back up by another route. Nine miles later in that hundred and fifteen degree furnace we made it to the top. My bride cried the last four miles. We continued on our honeymoon then into Mexico where we attended a bullfight and visited a Mennonite village before returning to Winnipeg. We are still married some thirty-five years later. My wife will retire from teaching primary school in two years. I will teach at the University of Manitoba for another six or seven years and then we will see. What do you make of that? By the way, if anyone has a copy of the video of the wedding, or some pictures of the ceremony, would you consider letting me know? I'd like copies.