Wakefield by Andrei Codrescu Page A

continues, only slighty perturbed.
    â€œI am a poet.”
    Laughter in the audience.
    â€œYou laugh because you don’t know what a poet is. A poet is the most creative being alive, a being who says things like ‘Ah, Sunflower, weary of time!’ or ‘I have seen what other men have only thought they’ve seen.’ And when they say such things, they keep saying them, repeating them over and over until they are filled by what they just said and until the whole world repeats after them, ‘Ah, Sunflower, weary of time! I have seen what other men have only thought they’ve seen.’ Now repeat after me:
    â€œâ€˜Ah, Sunflower, weary of time!’”
    A few embarrassed voices mumble after him. It sounds like a single word: “AWSFLAWAME!” And again. Soon Wakefield has everyone repeating the lines, and people are laughing and shouting as if this is the funniest thing they’ve ever said out loud. Childishness breaks out. It’s good. Maggie is smiling.
    â€œIHSEENTAMATHODSCEEN!”
    Wakefield lets the noise die down. They trust him. They think they know what this is about. Some of these people are from the West Coast: they have shared feelings, held hands, sat in hot tubs together, done art therapy, howled at the moon in expensive resorts. In their childhoods there were campfires and singalongs. This is America, a land of joy. This is fun . But Wakefield notes that there are also a number of sullen faces. Foreigners. Russians, who never smile. Indians, who smile, but not innocently. Pakistanis, whose mustaches are trembling angrily. Hungarians, smirking. To them, Wakefield now addresses a mournful addendum.
    â€œCreative activity is full of abandoned original utterances and one-of-a-kind failed experiments. But how do the rich get rich and stay rich? Exactly like poets. The rich find something that works and they do it over and over until it stops paying off. How do scientists discover something? They repeat and repeat the experiment. Only their spouses know just how much they repeat themselves. You know that bored, desperate, neurotic, on-the-verge-of-a-nervous-breakdown look that the spouses of the wealthy have in soap operas? Well, the reason for this despondency is the unconscionable number of times they’ve heard their mates say the same thing over and over. It is the same with the spouses of scientists and poets. It is the same with all creative people. Yes, honey, I know, you said that already. ”
    Not as many guffaws as Wakefield would like. The reason might be that Company spouses also work for The Company and are equally repetitive.
    â€œOnly children are not bored by repetition: they are surprised by it. They anticipate it with delight. How is it possible for a marvelous thing to reappear in the exact same form only a second later? On the other hand—and I’m speaking for children here—how could things fail to repeat themselves? A tired parent who makes the mistake of shortening the bedtime story by leaving out a repetition or two is in for a tantrum. What happened to repetition number eight, Daddy? Those of you who repeat certain experiments over and over know what the children mean. You cannot leave out a DNA combination because it looks mind-numbingly similar to the one that came before. Happily, computers don’t get bored, which is why they are saving our sorry sleepy ass over and over.”
    The Devil, seated in the projection booth above the room, dressed in cap and knickers like a projectionist of silent movies, doesn’t like the drift of Wakefield’s talk. He suspects that his client is pursuing a deconstructive agenda that, after a few detours in art, will take him down to the elemental building blocks of matter, possibly, for the purpose of exposing him , the Great Malign One, hooves and all, before this conclave of geeks. The Devil hates to be seen. Or Wakefield may be after even bigger game; he may intend to shed