The Unvert Manifesto

The Unvert Manifesto and Other Papers Found in the Rare Book Room of the Boston Public Library in the Handwriting of Oliver Charming. by S.


The Unvert Manifesto

An unvert is neither an invert or an outvert,
a pervert or a convert, an introvert or a retrovert.
An unvert chooses to have no place to turn.
One should always masturbate on street corners.
Unversion is the attempt to make the sexual act
as rare as a rosepetal. It consists of linking
the sexual with the greatest cosmic force
in the universe - Nonsense,
or as we prefer to call it, MERTZ.
Sex should be a frightening experience
like a dirty joke or an angel.
Dirty jokes and angels should be frightening
experiences. An unvert must not be homosexual,
heterosexual, bisexual,
or autosexual. He must be metasexual.
He must enjoy
going to bed with his own tears.
Mertz!
All the universe is laughing at you.
Poetry, painting, and cocksucking are all attempts
of the unvert to make God laugh.
The larger the Dada, the bigger the hole.
Sidney Mertz was the only man ever arrested for
drunken driving of a steam locomotive. He is now
the bartender of the American Legion bar in Jackson,
Wyoming. Jews and Negros are not allowed to be
unverts. The Jew will never understand unversion
and the Negro understands it too well.
An unvert loves only other unverts.
He will, however, consent to perform an act
of unversion with almost anything except
lovers and mountain lions.
God loves God.
Mertz must be applied to sex.
People must learn to laugh into each other's gonads.
God is an unvert.
Sex without love is better than love without sex.
Sex without Mertz is never better than
Mertz without sex. Nonsense is an act of friendship.
The larger the Dada, the bigger the hole.
Nonsense, Mertz, Dada, and God
all go to the same nightclubs.
So does Graham Macarel.



Excerpts from Oliver Charming's Diary

October 31, 1953:
"I must unvent someone named Graham Macarel.
He should be about seventeen or eighteen
and have a large Dada. I can use him as the hero
and victim of my Mertzcycle . . ."

November 5, 1953:
"Laughed all day. The elements of imagination
are exhausting as Hell."

November 23, 1953:
"It was more successful than I expected.
He is beginning to become mythical.
I saw him today and he told me that he is taking
a course in his art school in which he has to clip
examples of racial prejudice from Tarot cards
and give their exact date. His art school's name
is the California School of Fine Flowers.
His teacher's name is S.
We talked for awhile and I am already beginning
to destroy his universe. . . . Method is everything."

December 1, 1953:
"Love must only be applied at the wrong time
and in the wrong place. It must be thrown at
the unsuspecting like a custard pie made of poison . . .
Nothing destroys Mertz more than custom.
Nothing destroys it less than treason."

December 7, 1953:
"I return to Graham Macarel.
(Note - I must be sure to call him Mac.
Graham reminds the uninformed imagination
of crackers.) He has become a combination
of a Boy Scout and a depth charge.
He appeals to the primitive sources
of nonsense and despair.
I suspect that his teacher, S., is
secretly an unvert - or, at least a spoiled unvert.
Something is going on between S. and history.
I wonder if Mac realizes that an unvert
is an agent of Kubla Khan."

December 9, 1953:
"'An unvert is an angel of Kubla Khan.' -
that's what Mac said to me last night in
the men's room of the Palace Hotel.
At the time he said it he was . . .
which is certainly Dada if not Mertz."

December 10, 1953:
". . . suspects . . ."

December 18, 1953:
"It is Christmas vacation at the California
School of Fine Flowers. S. was in the bars last night,
very drunk. I think he is planning to unvert somebody."

December 19, 1953:
"I had a conversation with S. late last night.
He was again very drunk. 'Why did you have to
invent Graham Macarel?' he asked me angrily.
'I thought it would be good for your poetry,'
I answered.
'Why didn't you invent syphilis instead,'
he asked contemptuously. So yesterday I invented syphilis.
Today I am going to . . ."

December 22, 1953:
"S. is in Los Angeles."

December 23, 1953:
"To appear as human among homosexuals
and to appear as divine among heterosexuals . . ."

December 24, 1953:
"Nobody remains in this city and I have
done all my Christmas shopping.
The Dada in painting is not Duchamp.
The Dada in poetry is not Breton.
The Dada in sex is not De Sade.
All these men were too obsessed with
the mechanism of their subject.
A crime against nature must also be a crime against art.
A crime against art must also be a crime against nature.
All beauty is at continuous war with God."

December 25, 1953:
"Merry Christmas, Graham Macarel."

December 26, 1953:
"It continually amazes the unprejudiced
Mertzian observer that even the people who struggle
most against the limits of art are content
to have sex in ordinary academic ways,
as if they and their bed-partners were
nineteenth-century paintings. Or, worse,
they will change the point of view
(top becomes bottom, male becomes female, etc. etc.)
and think, like the magic realists that they are, that they have changed something.
Everybody is guilty of this - from Cocteau to Beethoven."

December 28, 1953:
"A sailor asked me last night what the unvert thought of Kinsey. I told him that we held that Kinsey was a valuable evidence of the boredom of un-unverted sex - that ordinary sex had become so monotonous that it had become statistical like farm income or rolling stock totals. I told him that Kinsey was the Zola preparing the way for the new Lautréamont.
It is remarkable how even science fiction has developed no new attitudes toward sex. The vacant interstellar spaces are filled with exactly the same bedrooms the rocketships left behind. It is only the unvert who dares to speak Martian in bed. I wonder if Kierkegaard had wet dreams."

December 29, 1953:
"How The Zen Masters Taught Sex To Their Disciples - such a book would be the most useful book a man could publish. Sex is a metaphysical experience. Zen taught that man can only reach the metaphysical by way of the absurd. No, absurd is the wrong word. What is the Chinese for shaggy-dog story?
The book should be illustrated pornographically but the general style of Mad Comics. It should have a blue cover."

December 30, 1953:
"S. is in town again. I saw him at the Black Cat. He looked confused at all the lack of excitement around him, as if he believed that a holiday was like a snowstorm and people should notice it.
We began discussing homosexuality. I, by bringing in subtle pieces of unvert propganda, and he, embarrassed and overintellectual as if he thought, or rather hoped, that I was trying to seduce him."
'We homosexuals are the only minority group that completely lacks any vestige of a separate cultural heritage. We have no songs, no folklore, even our customs are borrowed from our upper-middleclass mothers', he said." The trouble with S. is that he doesn't understand Martian. I must tell him about the time . . ."

December 31, 1953:
"I rebel against the tyrrany of the calendar."

January 1, 1954:
"My analyst is teaching me French."

January 2, 1954:
"S. says that it is inconsistent for an unvert to have a psychiatrist. He does not understand unversion. The relationship between the analyst and the patient is the firmest and most hallowed, if the most conventional, sexual relationship in the modern world. This is precisely why it must be shaken. It is our task to experience and unvert all sexual relationships."

January 3, 1954:
"Sometimes, in moments of depression, I think that all this talk of Dada and Mertz is merely the reaction of the unsuccessful cocksucker or artsucker who doesn't understand beauty when it offers itself to him. Witness Western civilization or the bar last night . . ."

January 4, 1954:
"Now that I have Graham Macarel, S., and a psychiatrist, all that I need is an angel. One cannot, however, safely invent an angel . . . Lot was the last person to safely invent an angel. He was bored with his lover, with their children, and with all the inhabitants of the immense and sandy Turkish bath that they were living in . . . He invented an angel and then everybody had to kill him . . . Everybody had to kill him not because the angel was as dangerous as a hydrogen bomb (which he was) and not because the angel was beautiful as a Florida hurricane (which he was), but because the angel was a stranger and it is always the habit of Jews and homosexuals to kill strangers . . . They almost caught the angel once in Lot's chimney, and a sailor once managed to catch hold of its groin as it was disappearing into a broom-closet, but soon fire and brimstone were descending on the town and Lot was walking with his lover along a deserted road on the first range of foothills carrying a packed suitcase . . . The lover looked backwards, of course, to make sure that the angel was not following them and was immediately turned into a life-sized salt statue. It is very difficult to suck the cock of a life-sized salt statue or to sample the delight of sodomy with a pillar . . . Lot left him there and trudged onward alone, with an angel on his back.
I must take warning from this. There are some inventions even sex does not make necessary."

January 5, 1954:
"No angel as yet. I wonder if I could steal one. By a bit of clever propaganda I have arranged that Mac will have to report on angels to his history class. This should bring things into focus.
Mac asked me about angels yesterday - whether I thought they really existed, what they did in bed, etc. etc. I told him that very few people under twenty-five had angels at all. That they were like a kind of combination of Siamese cats and syphilis and for him not to worry if they occasionally tugged at his pubic hairs. He was still uncertain: 'How can I find any chronology in it?' he asked plaintively."

January 6, 1954:
"There is a morning when it rains in the corner of everybody's bedroom."

January 7, 1954:
"My psychiatrist, Robert Berg, considers that it is his duty to unvent angels. It must be understood that unvention is as different from unversion as psychoanalysis is from poetry."

January 9, 1954:
"Mac tells me that he saw an angel resting in a tree above his art school. This must be the angel we have been waiting for."

January 10, 1954:
"I have seen it too. It is a bearded angel, small as a bird, and answers to the name of Heurtebise. S., being what he is, pretends not to believe and says that it is only an owl or some unlucky night creature. He says that he is sorry for it."

January 11, 1954:
"The angel keeps screaching in the tree. It is behaving more and more like a bird. We are doing something wrong . . . Perhaps it isn't our angel."

January 12, 1954:
"I am gradually able to have the most Mertzian sexual


Jack Spicer

Published on Jack Spicer Homepage


1956
copyright © 1975 by the Estate of Jack Spicer
reprinted from The Collected Books of Jack Spicer with the permission of Black Sparrow Press
all materials reprinted with the kind permission of Robin Blaser