I : THE SUPREME

REBEL TO DEATH AGAINST U. . .

— // IN UR SWEET POUTS // —

IN THE SULFURIC INFERNO : Times Square subway station, stultified in the Friday night bustle, bout to hop on the downtown 6 ; a darting bundle of sweaty citizenry barrels thru Gaby : a toppleworthy thud.

We’d been quibbling; she’d been annoying; a pin in my dreamballoon :

— I wanted to get an office with Ethan so we could fuck around with our incipiently legendary collaborations more officially.

(“R U stupid?! U can’t even pay for health-insurance, how are U gonna pay for that?” and on & on & on. . . I said, “Gaby, Ur fingers must be tired from all that HARPING!” ; but as I wrote in my journal the next day : being annoying is not an ethical transgression*

*(maybe it is, but not if U look as gorgeous as Gaby did).)

I was silent. I didn’t react AT ALL to her being pushed.

We got on the still-parked train; she got up in the pusher’s face, barked :

“U look real stupid now, huh!? Aren’t U glad U PUSHED A GIRL and now the train’s not even moving!! Weirdo!”

He cowered; she stepped off, harangue melting into snarly looks.

I literally did NOTHING the whole time. Drooled ineptly; defunct & pointless as a broken escalator.

We held the pole in the center of the train car.

She said, “oh U suck Ur teeth at me but when a dude LITERALLY ASSAULTS ME, my ‘big boxing coach boyfriend’ does NOTHING.”

I wheezed, obnoxiously, “gAAHBEEEE!”

She said, “don’t gaaahbeeee me! A man literally assaulted me on the train and U didn’t protect me. I guess U aren’t man enough.”

“Ok, I mean, ‘literally assaulted’ is dragging it a bit. . . he bumped into U.”

“So now Ur defending him?”

“The dude is old!”

“He’s not old!”

“Yeah but he’s like a carbuncular cantankerous pitiful fool!”

“‘Cantankerous’ what the fuck does that even mean? How am I ever supposed to understand what you’re talking about? Who talks like that!?”

“Coooome onnnn, U know what cantankerous means.”

“Don’t ‘come on’ me—”

“—certainly not on the train—”

“Shut up, Ur not being funny. Ur being fucking annoying. Cantankerous, UGH, I hate U.”

“What, U want me to go kick his ass? Is that what U want? U want me to go demand an apology?”

“I don’t want anything from U now.”

She sat down. I turned around to face the pusher. I stared at him with pre-pugilistic hate for the rest of the train-ride; he fidgeted nervously with his tie, never meeting my gaze while I made the rest of my fellow passengers uncomfortable at the thought of impending violence. . .

. . . this all really happened, but I WROTE it, aligning happenstance with the imperial miasma of ME, squashing dissent,

here, in my WRITING, I am SUPREME. . .

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— // A DOOR-HAGGARD STREET // —

I DON’T HAVE TIME TO WRITE!

I’m dictating the rest of this piece to my ill-paid amanuensis Curt Shortshrift.

LISTEN TO ME :

don’t employ improper words unmesclated with my style, an abominable style : a labyrinthine alleyway paved with alliterations, anagrams, idiosyncratic idioms, barbarisms, anastrophes to dazzle imbecilic inverts who experience erections by violent inversions of word order —

— Boss, what ?

— U have not destroyed oral tradition : it is the one language that cannot be sacked, robbed, repeated, plagiarized, copied, what is spoken remains alive, sustained by the tone, gestures, facial expression, gaze, accent, breath of the speaker —

— About your breath, boss. . .

— SILENCE. FOCUS : —

I read I The Supreme (1974) by Augusto Roa Bastos for the first time in 2020; the greatest teacher I ever had, Erroll McDonald, said it was one of his three favorite books. I read it in a week and thought I understood it.

Over the last 18 days, as part of my new commitment to militant-pan-latin-americanismo, I reread the book in a Portuguese translation by André Aires :

I didn’t understand it AT ALL when I was 23; but now this crazy book is starting to make sense. . .

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José Gaspar Rodriguez de Francia : Dr. Francia : was the supreme dictator of Paraguay from 1814 until his death in 1840. . .

He presided over the first stabilized revolution in South American history.

I listened to an amazing book this week : America, América (2025) by Greg Grandin;

he don’t mention Dr. Francia ONCE, focusing instead on an alternative revolutionary, the elite Simón Bolívar : the light to Francia’s shadow,

“Simón Bolívar also seeks to invade us. The Liberator of half a continent makes ready to attack Paraguay and subjugate the one country in all of American that is free and sovereign!”

Dr. Francia’s Paraguay was tawantinsuyual.

— Golly, boss, I mean, how am I supposed to spell that word? What does it even mean? How will your readers understand it?

— Hush, Curt! Isn’t it obvious what it means? It’s the name of the Inca Empire : a gloomy State where everyone wore the same clothes, worked all day; pathologically interested in the proper distribution of wealth. . .

Dr. Francia went around caped in a black cloak, balancing books, fostering an independent country irreliant on colonial influence & trade, — DEBT FREE.

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MONEY, MONEY, MONEY!

— about money, boss, do U mind if we square up today? It’s been a few weeks, —

What was the New World always about? The first Américan conscience, Bartolomé de Las Casas gives us an answer from a cacique named Hautey,

“‘They have a God whom they worship and adore and it is in order to get that God from us that they conquer us and kill us.’ He had beside him, as he spoke, a basket filled with gold and he said: ‘Here is the God of the Christians.’”

Bartolomé was not interested in revolution ; he wrote A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1542) as a direct appeal to King Philip II of Spain to treat his tawny new subjects with the grace of a true Christian father ; . . .

Bartolomé was one of the winners of The Conquest, he came over with Columbus in 1502 and got rich, — his bloodprofit made him sick : he converted.

. . . names passed down to us, soaked in evil atrocity :

Columbus, Cortés, Pizarro profited NOTHING from their labor.

They were LOSERS. Peripheral hustlers in the Old World who crossed the ocean to degrade their souls & have EVERYTHING they stole restolen by the Powers-that-Be.

. . . multitudinously bereft in an incarnadine wilderness : conquistadors & natives : lives annihilated by the horror of contact ; — while fat-cats & oligarchs scrooge-mcducked plumply into mountains of gold.

Is there not a natural alliance here against a mutual enemy? Dr. Francia thought so.

. . .

Wait : let me tell U about the first revolutionary document in Latin American history : eternally-damned, wrath-stained, crippled Lope de Aguirre wrote a stunning letter to Philip II in 1561, narcissizing Bartolomé’s lament, demanding singular redress :

“Look here, King of Spain! Do not be cruel & ungrateful to your vassals, while your father and you stayed in Spain without the slightest bother, your vassals, at the price of their blood and fortune, have given you all the kingdoms you have in these parts.

Beware, King and lord, that you cannot take, under the title of legitimate king, any benefit from this land where you risked nothing, without first giving due gratification to those who have labored and sweated in it. . .

Even in hell you would be worse than Lucifer, all you thirst after is human blood.”

Dr. Francia (whose father was a Brasilian mulatto, whose mother was a nobody, who grew up in a Paraguayan backwater) takes Bartolomé’s indigenous ethics, Aguirre’s paranoid economic zeal, & Enlightenment innovations to create a visionary alliance :

LOSERS of the New World unite!

He earned the Guarani nickname Karaí Guasú, Big Chief, from the PEOPLE :

“The Indian population, the wives of the natives in particular, deserve special protection. They too are Paraguayans. With all the more reason and natural rights of far longer standing than those who inhabit the country today. You must allow them and their customs, their languages, their ceremonies, to go on living in the lands, the forests that have been theirs since the beginning.”

Polyphonic polytropic guardianship crumbled into the paranoid reclusion of ME : Francia’s vision could’ve confederated grandly, influenced Bolívar’s WINNERS-rule notions of State,

“the obsessive idea of America as a single Fatherland, one and united, which could only have been born in Paraguay, the most hemmed-in, hounded country on this Continent, will explode like an immense volcano and correct the counsels of geography corrupted by cunning people-eaters. Let time take its course.”

but like the “cunning people-eaters” (not the Tupi-Guarani : the people getting rich off avaricious soul-anthropophagy) the integral vision is corrupted & rots. . .

— Boss, how do U know these quotes off the top of Ur head ?

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— // GRINGO FIRMAMENT, BLUE & LAUGHING // —

(in the private notebook)

I GOTTA GET AWAY FROM CURT.

the wily little perverter : cavorting my meaning // he wants this to be THE ANNALS OF CURT — — i need to talk to myself //

i was trying to tell gaby at the diner :

the new world IS a phenomenon of LITERATURE from the very beginning // every gap had to be bridged by INVENTION the fucking spanish were so obsessed with legalizing their sins they made a ridiculous document (1513) to read everytime they pulled up on some natives // must’ve sounded like complete gobbledygook even w/ a translator how the hell would u even translate “jesus christ”

they had to consent or else,

“if U do not agree to our despoil we will enter with the beasts of the apocalypse, powerfully, like an iron bar cranking open a crate, we will smelt down Ur memory, pack it away to the CROWN, our lawyers and notary have witnessed all this, witnessed Ur blank stares as we read U this document of PEACE ; the cries of Ur descendants will sound to us like gold coins clinking at the bottom of our purses, we have done the right thing requisitioning U and now please sign here or die thank U for ur time. . .”

horses were the beasts of the apocalypse ; i was telling gaby the conquest is a HORSE-PHENOMENON as much as anything else ; bartolomé says “the horse is the deadliest weapon imaginable against these people”

horses & writing : two never-before-seen technologies ; u could be supreme in the conquest & in the narrative, they never stood a chance // neither did Francia, he was building what bolívar was so terrified of : pardocracy :

Francia literally made interracial marriage a legal necessity ;

but supremacy is the antithesis of miscegenated rule

it was never gonna work : the perpetual dictator who IS the state. . . the body is not eternal // power darkens the soul : perpetuity is our business here. . .

maybe collaboration & influence is the key // maybe writing is like leadership //

the revolution has to keep REVOLVING ;

francia stopped acting ; he became a written phenomenon even tho,

“To write something has no meaning whatsoever. But doing does. The most ignoble shart of the last mulatto who works in the shipyards means more than scriptorial, literary language. There, that, a gesture, the movement of an eye, spitting in the palms of the hands before grabbing the adze again: that means something very concrete, very real! What meaning can writing have, on the other hand, when by definition it does not have the same sense as the everyday speech of ordinary people?”

if i was the supreme dictator i would’ve had the guy on the train sent to the gallows bc he sundered my narrative, however briefly : power’s ultimate weakness : the other side of the story // curdles ur essence // stagnates the revolution

— but : maybe his perspective would’ve made me stronger // would’ve made the story stronger —

copernicus coined the word revolution to describe a fixed cyclical eternal harmony ; — revolution is heavenly since the outset but revolt can become revolting, the devil can slip in

lope de aguirre literally murdered his own fucking daughter, inexplicably, her last words : satan has U fooled daddy!

maybe satan fooled francia. . . : unity is not perpetual oneness // out of many : one //

augusto was writing in exile from another dictator , the voice of the book is a curdled revolution // the rotten dream of the fulfilled potential of latin american unity without colonial influence . . . ; — — — — >

ricardo piglia went to visit bastos ; poor augusto was old, piglia wrote in his diary “he wrote I The Supreme, a masterpiece, and now he is sad, broken, and destitute” // francia’s bones ended up smashed up by a hammer stuffed in a macaroni box in some backwater clerk’s desk

what does it mean ?

“for me there is no religious consolation, there only exists prize & punishment which has no meaning after death, our civilization is not the first to deny the immortality of the soul, but it is, without a doubt, the first to deny the importance of the soul. . .”

paraguay came to a much worse end ; they finally opened the country up and in the 1860s brasil/argentina/uruguay teamed up to annihilate them

// NINETY PERCENT 90%! of the men in the whole country died //

it was a punishment u can’t forget ur place as a colonial subject in thrall to tru power // dreams of racial & economic harmony are always punished ferociously // made an example of

or was it francia’s fault they were destroyed ?

supremacy & eternity are myths

“For them you will be no more than the form of forgetfulness. An emptiness. An obscurity in that obscurity. You will make a superhuman effort to raise yourself from the great mass of darkness that is crushing you. You will not be able to.”

is there any lesson in history ?

one more thing i need to write : phe (the rest of the page is burnt)

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— // HOW FAR WILL THIS RAIN REACH ME ? // —

CURT, COME BACK HERE.

— Hey boss, U got that cash for me ?

No, no. . . let me look at U. I’ve never looked at U closely. . . hey, U look familiar. . . it was U, wasn’t it? U were the man who bumped Gaby on the train!

— Well, uhm, well, U know yes, uhm but I have a good explanation! U see I had a date in Brooklyn, and I was really nervous because I haven’t had sex in 15 years, I’m sorry if that’s ‘tmi’ but I was already running late, and this girl is just so beautiful, her name is Charlotte and I thought it was propitious my name also starts with a C and I met her at a flower shop and well U know, I didn’t mean to bump into Gaby I should’ve said sorry but I was so embarrassed and then when she started yelling at me I wanted to cry and then U didn’t recognize me and we’ve been working together for almost 4 years and I’m sorry. . .

Is that true?

— Well, uhmmm, no. I was just eager to get home to watch TV. I should’ve said sorry, but I don’t feel like I deserve to die!

. . . let me tell U, Curt : — when I was 23, what I didn’t understand about this book :

Augusto Roa Bastos is staging an alternative to Francia’s rule, formally. I was so obsessed with the bombastic voice of The Dictator, I didn’t notice The Compiler.

Bastos “compiled this text” ; he is constantly adding notes commenting on the Dictator’s voice, offering alternative written sources, creating a plurality out of the hermetic singularity of “supremacy”.

Augusto, in a footnote, tells the story about how he came to be in possession of the dictator’s pen ; a friend of his, Raimundo, gave it to him,

“Up there in the crawl space of my shack, just below the roof, inside a tin tube is the Pen. Grab it and go straight to the Devil with it. It’s not a gift. It’s a punishment. You waited a long time for the time of your perdition. I’m going to be free tonight. You’re never going to be free again. I don’t want to see you again. If you manage to write with the Pen, don’t read what you write. You’ll see terrible things heaped up in bunches in the dark that will make even the trees rotted by the sun sweat and scream. . . And if you’re a man erase with your blood the last word on the blackboard. . .

What word Raimundo?

He spoke no more.”

Raimundo died the next day. Augusto took the pen and the responsibility of reckoning with the legacy of Paraguay’s history. I was too young, the first time I read this book, to realize what serious business writing actually is; I’m still figuring it out. . .

Supremacy is as antithetical to writing as it is to society. . .

Do U understand what I mean, Curt? Curt?

I’m all alone.

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IF U COMMENT (CORRECTLY) WHERE I GOT THE SECTION HEADINGS I’LL VENMO U $1

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