PARTISAN REVIEW
597
Almost instantly there sprang up an almost infinite number of
vaulted institutions filled with as many Eli Otics and Ez Raniks as
medieval divines found angels on the head of a secular pin. Their
institutional anthems were variously titled "Fire is dead" or "Light is
gone," and, quite miraculously and inexplicably, whenever they spoke
a thick gray smoke issued above their heads like a reversed black tornado
- smoke, that is, totally independent of any fire! This smoke hid
Prometheus, it hid those punishing birds, it even hid the fire most
men forgot was still there among them.
But in the middle of these smokemakers and smokebearers lived
an Isaiah or two, several Jeremiahs and Ezekiels, a Philip, a Ralph,
and this one Bernard I've decided to tell you about. They stood on
mountaintops and rooftops, on broad avenues, pointing: "Hey, look,"
they shouted, "of course there's no fire in heaven. Fire lives among us
on these streets!"
None of the smokepeople listened.
Living in banks, and those other vaulted institutions, Eli Ot's men
and women had simply ceased relying on their own ears or their own
eyes.
But the smoke didn't stay in those institutions only. It solidified,
broke apart. fell into mono type letters numerous as the grains of sand
in the desert. Smoke became a language, a style, and passed down the
hierarchy to a fate Eli Ot had never quite imagined. Smoketalk spiraled
up out of lecture halls, hitched rides on radio waves, bounced off satel–
lites, settled in a peculiarly thick pall in one spot now called the Smoke
House, whose resident company,
Die Drei Kameraden Und Freunde,
became smoke's grandest converts. Their best smoketalk invention was a
nearly independent kewpiedoll they named the Melvin Laird, whose
slightly crossed kewpiedoll eyes seemed to interdict each other. his head
precipitately balding, his lip motions preemptive, silllulating cartoon
synchronization as they sugges ted held-open options and the ultimate
form of political reaction known in smoketalk as "protective."
Die Drei
Kameraden,
also known as Herbert Zieglerdiensterlichkleinhaldemann,
relied on their intermedia men, also known as Howard K. Chancellor
Cronkite, to demonstrate the absence of both light and fire . Smoke–
talk thrived. Its power of containment was celebrated by not one but
two Bundys. and its potential brought to perfection by another well–
known Washington couple, the Rostows. Eli Ot's and Ez Ra's success
was obvious everywhere, especially in those walled institutions echoing
with smokewords like "fictive," "authorial," "feisty," "ambience."
