Caloub Flambeaux Memoirs

Caloub Flambeaux Memoirs
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Novel / Journal

“We are supposed
to get together
tomorrow night [ ...]
I look forward
to meeting Caloub…”
—André Gide,
Les Faux-Monnayeurs

Unlike Gide’s Caloub—
I refused to follow Proust’s
Novelistic metanarrative:
My Caloub wasn’t Albertine

I proposed a metanovel—
That confronted the Proustian
Model, oriented my text toward
The reader of the future

Considering the story—
Of the book more important
Than the book itself, like
Édouard I won’t finish it

“La Marseillaise”—
Mirrored by my fake
Revolution & fake narrator’s
Journal des faux-Monnayeurs

The distinguished Francois Rude’s—
“La Marseillaise” nude statues
Transposing the Arc of Triumph
From Paris to Baton Rouge

A doubling of textual-mirrors—
Reflecting each other momentarily
With the Édouard captive author
Caught up in a House of Mirrors

How I faked my way into it—
Faked my way out of Miss Proust’s
And Miss Nabokov’s circularity with
Nude young Caloub as my guide

A young Marseillaise male—
Cumly Caloub coming to life or
Was he just another Lolita?

Was I Gaston or Humbert—
Both Story & History as one?
Going down on Arc of Triumph
Getting the kid’s exquisite wad?

A fake novel, a fake journal—
Telling two separate stories: that of
A boy and that of a man writing
A novel/journal—simultaneously?

Nabokov’s Fedor in Dar—
Feeling only intuition can transfer
His text from another dimension
Where it already exists

Édouard likewise assuming—
His method of cult of process works
Like Fedor’s trial and error method
Revealing the novel’s denouement

But for Gide a novel isn’t merely—
A mirror walking down the road
Bernard Profitendieu finds out that
He’s fruit of an extramarital affair

What appears real is actually—
Deceptive, must be filtered thru
The lens of writing since reflected
Life-utterances can’t be trusted

Mirrors as mise-en-abyme—
Mirrors imitating art like Fedor’s wallpaper
Matching the pattern of Frau Stoboy’s
Dress, movers move mirrors reflecting…

Mirrors becoming mise-en-abyme—
Like Fedor’s “mirrory heart” sliding
And swaying, haunting its way thru
Fedor’s manipulated literary mirrors

The author & hero of Counterfeiters—
And Dar’s “mirror prose” moving thru
Incorporated-incorporating texts and
Mirror compositions working together