When the wizard, after wandering around Oz, arrives at the long vacated immigrant home, he trades some gold he's gathered somewhere over the rainbow, and so comes legally to own it. The home is already churning out what seems like light incarnate in gunk, because spectral light acts differently from light absorbed and reflected by bodies, but not in this case. As with so many details of this whole story, the transparent, celestial version and the Aristotelian one, instead of contradicting each other, seem to share a common edge and lock together. Materialized, spectral appearance, the image made gunk, is for playing with, or eating in a pinch, or you can use the idea of it to clean the rare books that are writing the story on the walls of this maze they call the world wide web, which is as much as to clean itself. The guy from whom Harry buys the home, though, has put the stuff to work and never lets it play, and that's why he strips off all the ornament on the immigrant home, in his charge become a workhouse. He calls the refined stuff of appearance not Play-doh or Crazee Clayzee, but simply Absorene, because of its miraculously absorptive qualities.
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The Immigrant Home
as the Absorene Manufacturing Company |
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The Tornado Devastated Immigrant Home
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right now being restored, including the playful facade decorations
removed by the Absorene manufacturer
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okay but I hope they bring in immigrants, as the wheel regresses
so the wagon may progress. |
Before taking possession of the immigrant home, the wizard installs in the suburbs of Ozymandy a wife and family, including a boxer named Terry, to whom Kerry (later called Veri or Veronica or Veronika), his youngest, am terribly attached. Veri owns a few interior Kodak snapshots, along with Terry's smell and the feel of his coat and his weight as they roll around on the ground, then, buried under a pile of broken film reels, he's gone. Along with snapshots of Terry, Veri finds the characteristic smells associated with, and a few flashes of, buckets of wallpaper cleaner in the laundry room of the basement of their house. Though Kenny doubts it, Veri seems to recall dipping her hands into the buckets of cool moist pungent gunk and pulling off pieces to make things with before it was allowed -- but Harry, by family legend, spills the beans at a meeting of wallpaper cleaner manufacturers.
Though Wikipedia says our arch-enemy, Mr. Play-doh per se, is originally inspired by a newspaper article about kids using wallpaper cleaner as a modeling compound -- maybe that's the case, and Harry's mentioning it to this scoundrel -- not so much for help, but just because the two are supposed buddies, maybe -- puts him over the edge -- our legend has it that the Play-doh fellow basically snags Harry's idea, and we're stuck with what's thought to be the cheap imitation on sale for half price at Woolworths.
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However, as mentioned, Veri's innately patricidally inclined (see Freud) brother -- appearing below in near violent scorn of the arbitrary framing device, accuses the wizard of fabricating that story and mesmerizing us all to believe it, with my dogged complicity in, and now publicity of, the fabrication amounting to criminal besmirching of the Play-doh magnate's good name. But, in addition to reminding them of any earlier arguments, one must inquire of the prosecutor, the judge, and jury,
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To what purpose, if not toward the anticipated invention of the original Play-doh, does the wizard bring those wallpaper and rare book cleaner samples out to the suburbs and leave them in buckets in the basement, so that his kids, or at least Kerry, can sneak down there and open the lids, and play with the goodly gunk? There's plenty of room in the factory, and the atmospheric conditions similarly dank and dark.
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Veri returns in a revery to the basement gloom and the smell of laundry, earth, and cement, and what's no longer wallpaper cleaner, but not yet clay, something that was, and could become, anything. Her entire life seems to flower out of such experience. All she touches seems to possess the same genes, including this -- what would you call this genre of photographically illuminated non-fictional mythological memoir memorium writing, this blob in a blog shell, as if a blog were not already liminal enough, it must lie right on the line bisecting the blog into its left side and right side -- what but crassy classy crazee clazee, the world's most liminal stuff. Her whole life is built on a lie, the line on which it claims to lie also a lie -- as there are no lines in nature? But that would mean she imagines what it would have been to invent Play-doh, and then her life grew out of that fantasy; but it is proposed that you just can't imagine inventing something so preposterously novel until it happens, and then it keeps happening, always in unprecedented, unimaginable ways that are clearly begotten, not made. Though the premise favored by science, that there's a material source of a person's anomalous attraction to, and capacity to produce, anomalies, as with all impulses, can't be proven, still, it rests on evidence and experience, however extraordinary and seeming to contradict other evidence and experience. The evidence and experience trump everything else, unless and until thought can make them go away. It rests on deep, quite invulnerable allegiance to the premises of science -- perhaps due to the fact that I'm the loyal daughter of Mr. Harry the original not yet named Play-doh Potter, seeming to have sprung from the loins of knowledge like water from a stone.***
(If you think the essence of a thing lies in its material substance, and not its function, but if so, as suggested at the outset, there's no such thing as socks, shoes, hats, trees, people; there's only such thing as what subatomic particles are originally made of, if anything, so maybe it's material that's numinously imaginary, and only ideas are real after all, I as much as concluded as Absorene in my hands morphed into Crazee Clayzee )
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Harry and Kerry are allied in the Westerns they watch on the carpet as, in his boxer shorts, he leans on the bolster pillow propped up against the Bombay Company bed. In Oz he wears the pants, and he tries to let that go in his suburban retreat, where Suzy's allowed to yell as loud as he does. He has Kerry squeeze his thick finger as hard as she can, so as to notice how he fails to flinch. Then he plants little kisses all up and down her arm. (She's that wineglass, mentioned elsewhere, that stays upright a hair's breadth beyond the tornado razor's edge.) Falling into the world behind the screen, she's soon past Silver City, clip clopping along on Trigger in the golden country, where seldom is heard a discouraging word, even from Harry, and the skies are not cloudy all day.
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Un-retouched as found, image of emerald city,
greener even than usual |
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| Peggy, krVs, Jimmy, Kenny, Kathy, Grandpa, Bonnie |
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Among the scraps, there's a strand from commercial Christmas morning, fully devout to the worship of childhood demanded by the Gospels, and hidden in the basement from our orthodox Jewish Grandpa Is'. Is', who's versus Oz, as is Kansas, is an atheist, but about a century ahead of the rest of the free world, reverts to religion in his wise old age, when he stops taking everything so literally. Kerry doesn't notice that Kathy finds a miniature poodle among the boxes until she hears him yap, as she's rapt up less in unwrapping presents than in the presence, outside the rainbow world all one white blanket of diamonds melting into raindrops running down a small high window, the strong scent of pine and sap, the deep green tree spiraling with twinkling stars as plucked from the sky, the colored glass ornaments that look like tops, but with eye dropper like projections in which water bubbles to simulate the peaceful motion of flickering candles among the dangling glass balls and the animals and fairies and star shine reflected in them. It's just commercial Christmas, they're not supposed to believe in anything but Santa Claus, but this goes beyond Santa Claus.
23a
Kathy quickly calculates and concludes that all miniature poodles she's ever heard of are, and therefore should be, named Koko, where conformity to a standard is a good basis, as Veri can then operate on the original figures, combining the elements Terry and Koko to produce the compound terrier terribla, Toto, especially as Kathy, with marked magnetic qualities of her own and, indeed, of the same magnetic pole, including chameleon green eyes, is prone to throwing open the curtain on the wizard;
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the very Kerry (later sometimes called Veri) with Terry, Kathy, Grandpa Isadore,
and Kenny, in ongoing disputation with the bias, by arbitrary framing,
of the record keeping device |
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Neil and Gretel (showing that boxers run in the Hirsch family).
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but as when you're being yourself, you can't exactly see yourself, it also takes one who is not one to know one. To everything there is a season, and after a long long winter in this matter, the season of the one who is not one is bustin out all over, so with all due respect to Veri's elders, the wizard has been debunked long enough.
