"By way of biography, I accept but one theme: my own."

- Paterne Berrichon

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by Edward Lacie

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Episode Seven

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Imagine if Rimbaud had written poems after learning the lessons he learned in Africa!

I won't be found out for the murder. But I've made mistakes in regard to the kidnapping and could be caught. A neighbor saw him!

"That's our Waldo," Truman says.

Jim and I are friends with our next door neighbor, Lara Hunt, a single mother. Her daughter, Sabina, is eight years old. They visit once a day or so.

I've kept my detainee in the basement with the door closed. But today (FBM as I type this, "But today" is how the newscaster continues his story) they came by unexpectedly and Sabina looked into the basement, saw signs of life. Lara saw nothing. I hope nothing becomes of it.

Original manuscript I was making note of whenever the word I was writing was being spoken by a character in "Twin Peaks" or a commercial or elsewhere in my immediate presence. These instances were not actually "BM"s but "Fake BM"s: thus, "FBM" as I retype and gain more of them. - ewl

Later note: A more appropriate classification would be "coincidental juxtaposition." -ewl

Laura Palmer is dead but her voice is being played on a tape recorder. Her cousin Matty, of course, sounds like her too, but this tape actually is Laura. Really.

It was at Boxx's,¹, the bar in Portland where they played trivia, that I began to stalk Baysans and first learned of Poet X. Baysans's lifestyle was far from what I'd imagined a poet's to be. He was working at a small graphics company. And drinking. I don't recall ever seeing him write. 

After a few months of sporadic surveillance (it's a three-to-four hour drive from Seattle to Portland), I realized that it was the drinking and the company of Poet X that kept Baysans from working on his poetic career, etc. His own lack of promoting himself prevented me from making any progress selling my explications and other studies to the JWR.

Chris Mulkey's character is out of prison now and works at his wife's diner. Peggy Lipton is his wife.

Baysans moved to Portland, Oregon, in 1993, after leaving The James White Review in 1991. (I was back in Seattle a second time after my ill-fated return to Spokane and breakdown in the direction of up.) He had lived in Minneapolis since January 1, 1980.

Born in Dickinson, North Dakota, the closest hospital to the miniscule town of Elgin where his father was teacher at a one-room schoolhouse, Baysans grew up primarily in the town of Minot, North Dakota, at the time the second largest city in the state (now third).

"Once a day, give yourself a present," Cooper advises.

On April 13, 2002, as Baysans and Poet X left their usual haunt, drunk as usual, I hit and killed Poet X on a rainy side street. Baysans wandered away without reacting and wondered, at home with no memory the next day, what had happened "the night before."

So, there. I've revealed my murder victim. 

But it wasn't me; I wasn't in my right mind! It felt very much like my "breakdown in the direction of up" in that much of the evening was dreamlike and involuntary; I feel little or no culpability for my actions, most of which were reaction only.

And the feeling lasted only that evening and into the next day, once I'd returned to Seattle. (Back in 1979, the feeling lasted from October until well into 1980.)

The first session of my first draft ended here after six and a half episodes. I slept for ten hours. I "woke with enough compassion that I allowed my detainee contact with the outside world - e-mail. I held a gun to his head and oversaw his every keystroke," the first draft reads.

On TV, as I rewrite this, Dr. Phil exhorts honesty, and I'm having some sort of attack of conscience. 

"You can't eat what you don't kill," Dr. Phil tells a son who is mooching off his father.

Rimbaud biographical notes in the first draft detail his return to France, his sister caretaking his last stay at "home", his near-death cab ride through the Paris he'd long before abandoned, his death in Marsailles, his final days back in the hospital where months before they'd amptated his leg, his leg.

About Rimbaud's writing, much of it was written in prose but is unquestionably poetry. 

I own two books of translations that are as different as urine and feces. 

Rimbaud would like the analogy; he was fond of making scatalogical references in public and inappropriate places.

There is something missing from most if not all translations of Rimbaud that I've read: the genius and radical poet of whom I've read. 

Rimbaud is mistakenly romanticized as a talent lost young, a sort of hopeless dreamer, not valued until after he died. It didn't happen that way.

There's a mistake in the chronology of these tapes. I missed an episode way back when and borrowed a friend's copy and had to copy it from his to my tape.

My first draft has a note here stating, "Dale Cooper is the grown-up version of the character also played by Kyle MacLachlan in David Lynch's movie 'Blue Velvet'." I forget if I was a big fan of that movie before or after my "Twin Peaks" devotion.

Laura kept a diary and, as a merchandise tie-in to the show, the diary was published and available in supermarket stands.² (I'm surprised, after all these years, that I never bought a copy or was curious to read it.) If memory serves me correctly, Lynch's daughter wrote it.

Rimbaud saved me from cracking up when I met Son of Sam all those years ago while writing the poetic version of this, my de profundis.³ Rimbaud taught me to be of "deranged senses" and yet stay out of a mental ward. His poem "Youth" (or was it "Childhood"? Bad translations.) got me through a tough time.

End of episode.