How To Swallow A Pig

By Robert Priest, Michael Holmes

ECW PRESS

Copyright © 2004 Robert Priest
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-55022-649-2

Contents

BOOK 1 VENTRILOQUISM FOR DUMMIES,
BOOK 2 FROM THE INTERSTELLAR LIBRARY ON ARCTURUS,
BOOK 3 ADVENTURES OF MY HAND,
BOOK 4 UNSTABLE FABLES,
BOOK 5 COMIX,
BOOK 6 LOVE AS THOUGH,

CHAPTER 1

VENTRILOQUISM FOR DUMMIES

HOW TO SWALLOW A PIG

Because of the shape of its face, a pig is actually one of the easiest animals to swallow whole. Still, pig-swallowing is a very difficult and potentially dangerous activity. If you have advance notice, a certain amount of jaw-stretching and lip-widening prior to the event is always helpful. Your greatest enemy is self-doubt. You have to look at the pig’s head and tell yourself that you can do this. Once you have greased the pig, begin by letting the fine, tapered end of the snout proceed through your lips. The first obstacle, if it is not the back of your throat, will likely be your front teeth. Unfortunately these will have to be broken off. This clears the way for the full face-taper of the pig snout to zero in on your gullet. You have to be thinking “Outrage” when this begins to happen for it is entirely violating and painful. But your throat can take it. Allow the gorge to widen as though it were a fluid, thinner with each stretch. Your throat is a powerful python, infinitely elastic and accommodating. Once the entire pig head has squeezed by your gag reflex and entered your gorge, you are fully committed. You will not be able to vomit the pig out safely. Nor can you wait long to continue, for at this time your trachea is entirely blocked by the pig’s head. You are unable to breathe. Do not panic. Do not attempt to gasp or retch. Concentrate on swallowing. Having the wideness of the pig’s bulky shoulders in your once-narrow throat is perhaps the most violating thing you will ever experience. But you can do this. Just tell yourself, “This is possible.” Swallow and stretch. Keep your lower jaw loose to prevent the bone from snapping at the hinge. Suck with your guts. Use your lower diaphragm to draw the fat pig ever further down the gullet. Let your thick and lucent saliva lubricate the way. Saturating the pig with your juices will allow the ciliated gorge to usher the pig deeper and deeper into your being. You may now need a friend with a stick to stuff in the pig’s back end. This is the most crucial period. You will have been without oxygen for quite some time. You are probably blue in the face, but if you can widen to your most extreme limit, your throat cracking like wet bark, you will be able to slide your blue lips over the bare buttocks, and with the last kick of the back trotters, the curl of the pig’s tail will be gone. The entire pig is in your throat. Your intestines are stretching. Peristalsis has begun. The glottis is finally released and the first, terrible new breath can come with a gasp. You’ve lived! You’ve swallowed the whole pig. And now that it’s entirely in your stomach, ask yourself: “Is this not a most familiar feeling? Is this not the greatest feeling on earth?”

INSTRUCTIONS FOR LAUGHTER

It is not proper to go “Ha! Ha!”, open-mouthed, squinty-eyed, pointing. Laughing can be executed with perfect grace, elegance, and still be 100 per cent expressive. Laugh with a straight spine. Let the kundalini energy come straight up and have its own little dance in the beauty of your face. Don’t use laughing to shiver out disgust at your world, yourself, whatever lies are coiling too tight that night. Don’t use laughter to sneak out some grief. Don’t make hollow “Aaaw-aaaaaw” or “Eeee-aeee” sounds just to rattle some subterranean bit of the unused muscle of love. Don’t stuff your laugh with terror bits. Don’t push up a ragged laugh at outrage, or half-turn a laugh that ends in shock or shame. Don’t laugh in a high voice like a puppy when you don’t mean it. A laugh is not a bag you carry out the psychic trash in. You must not laden it with death-dread and toxic, boxy bits of brokenness. Let your body be a tickled trumpet-tit to the laughter. Let the giddy laughter play you like a tongue in the heart till you’re undone. Laugh till your genitalia are laughing too. Let each vein mouth laugh. But do not brazenly bend over with your hands on your knees and scream. Real laughter can occur at volumes well below 12 to 14 decibels. It is uncommon for evolved laughter to continue into weeping, but this on occasion can and will occur. In such instances it is proper to wipe tears with only one hand $$$— the funny hand. (Decide which hand is funniest and let it do the wiping.) It is considered vulgar to seek out laughter. It must come in the accidental course of living. Only this is true laughter. And so it is not proper to attend so-called comedy clubs, church services, or any reading, anywhere, of sacred vows.

COLOURS OF BULLSHIT

Out of the brain pan, then, let us spread wide the colours of bullshit like a fan, and examine them one by one. First there is red bullshit. Red is the colour of the ardent bullshit of love that is always speaking. This is the kind of bullshit that gods listen to when they need a good laugh. As a matter of fact, gods get together in groups and laugh until they are rolling when they hear the words of people in love. If they hear an exclamation such as “O my love, my love!” it will cause them to howl. If this is followed by phrases such as “I won’t ever leave you” and then a “Never?” followed by a “Never!”, the gods will all shriek the word “Never!” together, almost hurting their throats with the intensity of their mirth. Then there is blue bullshit which is the viable bullshit of the day. This is the bullshit of scientists, statisticians, and psychiatrists. This kind of bullshit carries its own little tag but is nevertheless hard for the unpractised eye to detect. Listen for phrases such as “experts agree” or “statistics prove.” Next in the total rainbow of bullshit comes green bullshit which is unhealthy and has lots to do with the bragging of young men in change rooms, business banter, and the sickly words of deliberate seducers. Green is the colour of advertising bullshit. It is the underlying tinge of World War II bullshit. It is the green of the goiter, the fungus, and the gangrene infection and is bottomed out only by that most despicable of all bullshit — white bullshit, which is of course the colour of recorded history. White bullshit is actually a very highly priced lubricant. The very one that keeps all those young bodies sliding into uniforms and all the pistons and gears of arms factories in motion. You have to be very careful with this kind of bullshit for it is a highly toxic, slippery, and explosive substance. When you see it, recognize it. Call it by its name which is its shame. Say “Bullshit! Bullshit!”

PEACHES

Who remembers eating his or her first peach? Nobody! Why? Because peaches are for amnesiacs. In fact, the peach is a huge hallucinogen — a round tab of sunlight that induces visions of Utopia. To eat of it is to dream that humankind can, by well-directed will and intellect, move closer and closer to a state of “divinity.” Repeated eating of peaches has led to some of the most benign leadership in all of history. Gandhi ate peaches. Mother Teresa ate peaches. Lennon ate peaches. When a bad peach is eaten, however, it is the whitest, weirdest side of the sunlight that slips into the mind’s long hallways and meadows, and there the dream of love — just as you reach for it — triggers some destruction. There, if you sing of love, towers fall and murders occur. In such a state the only way to preserve love is to be immobile and ignorant. But to eat of pure peaches — pure, radiant peaches — is a delight unequalled in all the known satisfactions of humankind and is easily worth the risk of going mad. Indeed, it is said that some, when finally tasting their first peach, have swooned and writhed in the ecstasy of mere taste. Poets fed peaches are fat with packed-in light. They glow from a centre in themselves that is totally luminous and willful. They eat a peach and they write another poem. They eat a peach and they glow in the dark. Poets eat peaches and forget. That is why they write poem after poem. That is why there is always juice on their chins.

MANGOES

In mangoes reside all the prime first kisses of passionate adolescence. These mango kisses are the purest, most uncontrived, unknowing kisses — kisses of forbidden love, red sunset kisses at dawn, hot kisses that bring down a pure glow of evening into the astonished mind. Mangoes preserve in a fine juice all that was best in everyone’s finest romantic moments, and they leave the taster forever changed. If a man who has never tasted a mango tastes and shares one for the first time with a woman, that woman shall forever have for his longing all that is best of the world’s kisses, and in seeking her love he will seek after the love of all the world’s women. Likewise, if a woman shares her first mango with a man, she will see in his eyes all that was ever in the eyes of men and more. She will feel in his loins all the loins, all the lives, and all the loves that could ever be. Such a couple can never be parted and their happiness can only increase the happiness of all lovers everywhere. Nor is the mango itself reduced in this happy exchange, for in return for the wonder it has brought them, such a couple always willingly donates their best kiss to the mango’s ever-increasing hoard.

SWEET AND SOUR ANGEL WINGS

First you must set up a reading lamp and leave open a book of good poetry. You need the best poetry so that when an angel is flying by it will sense something and nip in secretly to read this curious dust — language. That is when, if you have put a trick ending on the poem, you can catch the foot of its spirit and slowly, with a blue buzz saw, cut off its wings. After you have removed the angel’s wings you can let it go. No need to kill it, for it is now just like a man or a woman and even though it is suffering agony and hating you for what you have done, it will prefer the long suffering of life again rather than another immediate death.

If you are truly kind, there is a powerful ointment very helpful for the pain of wing-stumps!

Now pick the feathers from the wings and when they are stripped, cut them into book-sized chunks. The wings at this point are very delicate and should not be handled too roughly, for the marks will show up later as bright blue welts on the steaks. You will notice that there are many streaks of colour in the delicate flesh of angel wings. If you can succeed in cutting your steaks along the lines of pigment change, then you can serve what is known as “The Rainbow Banquet.”

When the steaks are cut, roll them, while they are still puffy, in bread crumbs, then cook for 30 seconds in boiling honey.

One angel serves a banquet of 20.

SECRETS OF PAPER

At night when you’re weary and you want to forget, simply stick your head up through a piece of paper. Sleep in a sheet of paper and pull it up over you so that you cease to exist. Paper can be opened up like shale and a thin layer of pain can slide in dark and deep like a sliver. If your body is full of pain, if your heart is full of anguish, simply wrap yourself in clean paper and pray. Paper is a blotter to such things. Paper absorbs psychoses and silent screams. It is an endless realm and each sheet is a portable window into further eternities — white unwritten eternities, waiting for limbs, hats, heads to pop up. Look, there is a body in the milk! A great whale arising, an ancient civilization. Look deep into the milky lens of paper and realize why you can’t just lie down and die. Because there is a trick alphabet at the bottom of paper that explodes — a deep electricity, thin filaments of feeling running out of sight to a white pool you can dive into from the heights. A forbidden milk. A detonator.

PAPER

I have found a mad way of throwing bits of paper in the air — old newspapers, notes, and ticket stubs — so that when they come down, the reeds in them blow hideous melodies, unbearable vows, and long, lyrical strands of divine information. Paper is a whole orchestra, a symphony of milk. Just hold a piece up to the wind and listen. Shrill poems blow off its first layer like dust. There are synthesizer notes stuck in it like gulls. Now take a single golden hair, draw it across paper and listen to the depths of resonance you uncover in it — snowy canyons of bassoon talk, thunderous up-swellings of awe and wonder. We unfasten paper from its place in the wind and let it fall, hearing quite shrill, like a thin layer of pain, oil burning off in the cries of multitudes, piccolo shrieks of jet planes harmonizing on high.

Let us fill up the white balloons of paper. Let us all slash the paper like mad swords in the air and listen. We don’t play enough with the music in paper. Our children struggle with tight pianos. They jinx their fingers on violins. Let them play trumpets made of paper. Aaaaah, while others toil at unwieldy instruments, let there always be this mad running about the house with a piece of paper on the end of a string.

THE SCHOOL BEHIND THE SCHOOL

Certain people feel that there is much to be gained in life from an ability to sit together in neat little rows of about ten — five rows side by side. To this end, they have built large walled buildings and therein train their children from an early age to resist all the temptations there are to rise up and go outside and play. Initially there is an adjustment period during which they do not unduly aggravate the young ones, but very soon they begin to test the children’s willpower with shrill chalk screams, cackling old ladies, and nasty men in square hats. If they can sit in these neat rows and learn to memorize facts for a period averaging 17 years, then upon passing a certain prescribed examination they are deemed to be graduates of the school itself and thereafter fit to be playground instructors, ministers of recreation, or revolutionaries. The entire education is not complete, however, unless they have passed the awful truth test. At some point during their endurance of the long training process, somewhere among history lessons, seminars on mathematics, and spelling bees, somewhere in the midst of all this the awful truth becomes visible to them for one searing second. If the child can maintain his or her composure when this happens and not rush from the room holding his or her head with both hands and screaming, the child will have passed the most important test there is, and shall then be considered a graduate of the school behind the school.

(Continues…)Excerpted from How To Swallow A Pig by Robert Priest, Michael Holmes. Copyright © 2004 Robert Priest. Excerpted by permission of ECW PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.