JB: I used to.
MM: Were they friendly or hostile?
JB: I don't know.
MM: Do you still hear voices?
JB: No.
MM: How old are you?
JB: I'm one hundred thousand years old.
MM: You don't look like someone who's one hundred thousand years old.
JB: Yes but it repeats itself in my head.
MM: What do you mean?
JB: It repeats itself, the years.
MM: And what did you do in your life?
JB: I was a pilot. I punched Reagan on TV.
MM: Really? When was that?
JB: I don't know, I don't remember.
MM: I don't remember either.
JB: I was a pilot. I've been an archaeologist. An astronaut.
MM: And today, what's your job today?
JB: I'm retired.
MM: You're retired?
JB: Yes.
MM: Is it the first time you come here?
JB: No.
MM: You went to other hospitals before?
JB: Yes.
MM: What were the reasons?
JB: Because of my wrong transformation.
MM: What does it mean?
JB: The third eye.
MM: What do you mean?
JB: I'm a wrong transformation of the sword.
MM: Is that why you're at the hospital?
JB: Mm-mm.
MM: Did anyone ever tell you that, sometimes, your discourse is not organized, not always comprehensible?
JB: I don't know.
MM: Do you have any idea of the causes?
JB: Maybe a failed catechism.
??????????
§ 7.5
It is known that Kirsopp Snake was living somewhere north of Upstate New York in 2009, since 2003. According to a contemporary account by Steve DePatie, a member of StereoHell, Jimmy Brodkey got access to "stereohell material" as early as 2008. Explicit recordings dated 2007 and 2008 say that Brodkey developed a variety of techniques to "visit places that have been awarded classified documents, textual and factual" (e.g. dates, names, entries, "verbatims").
The Version that came to light in 2010 matched the historical description of stereohell in many ways. It was made of a senary system of "entries," worded in first person, twenty-seven different styles, randomly capitalized, and appeared to have been retrieved online unaltered. The epigraphic text, not dated but signed Kirsopp Snake, contained, encrypted, all the hapax legomena, unsourced sources, combinations, contradictions and punctuations that typified stereohell. The epigraph read as follows:
BE IT KNOWN UNTO ALL BY THIS.
By INJUSTICE and in the Name of INJUSTICE and Herr successors Forever, I take possession of this Portfolio whose [illegible] and Herr suitors resign their right and title in the whole unto INJUSTICE Keeping. Now named and to be –Known– to All as STEREOHELL.
Kirsopp SNAKE, _New York
The veritable authorship of the Kirsopp Snake Version has been a matter of debate for much of its history. Since 2010, a team of four critics, under the leadership of Steve DePatie, pieced together a complete narrative of the fraud. They published their account in The New Inquiry in 2012. According to them, the Version was intended to tarnish the reputation of the members of the Stereohell sorority of New York and its enthusiasts. Jimmy Brodkey, a former FBI profiler with a prepsychotic developmental disorder similar to the negative symptoms seen in autism, bizarre emotional responsiveness, deficits in communication, poor eye contact, mood-regulation difficulties, delusions, social and occupational dysfunctions, superego-ego conflicts, and paranoia, initiated the fraud under the influence of anxiety and spite.
Billie and T-Symmetric, members of Wax & Bobs, and very active in the sorority of Wax & Bobs, as well as Chiquita, head of Wax & Bobs, were the initial targets of the fraud. Brodkey was a patron of Wax & Bobs known as "more than a regular," "wacko," and to have experimented "extreme situations," and "of doubtful honesty."
According to the 2011 account, Brodkey heard about a "blog called stereohell" in 2009 and probably collected "bits and entries" between August and October 2009, before a vast portion of stereohell was removed. The stolen text was irreverently posted online on underground forums and online backrooms by Kirsopp Snake [Jimmy Brodkey] before 2010. Alerted by a shady acquaintance, Steve DePatie, a friend of Imp Kerr and fiancé of Chiquita, immediately suggested that the text was a forgery. Then, unexpectedly, another series of events took the fraud to a new level. Brodkey, under the pseudonym Kirsopp Snake, published a full-sized black and white facsimile of 46 pages of the excerpts, claiming it was "genuine verbatims" collected from "the mouth of the horse," which authenticity was "beyond all reasonable doubt."
Skeptics pointed out many suspicious elements of the Version. The spelling was acted. The wording did not match normal Kerrean forms. The theme was uniform. Alternative interpretations were disputed until Steve DePatie published a denunciation in The New York Monthly. The fraud broken out into the public eye, and as Brodkey and others wrote, misinterpreting Lacan: "Public confessions are hate."
A few weeks after the announcement of the denunciation, the first confrontation in distans, hoping to see DePatie bite the dust, and forgetting his distance from others, Brodkey published a letter from the "Consolidated Stereohell and Injustice Company" offering a "line of Nietzsche" stolen from "the infamous cesspool that is the infamous stereohell sorority."
The magic and the most powerful effect of women [sic] is, to speak the language of the philosophers, action at a distance, actio in distans: but that requires, first and foremost – distance! --Nietzsche
DePatie retorted with a small press run of a book, Stereohell Illustrated of New York. The book opened with this enigmatic statement: "love precedes time," and instructed the reader to look for the "truth" and "unfollow the arrow." It supported the rendering of stereohell as a single non-capitalized word, and described a rite of initiation:
{with editorial assistance from Aloysia Covert, Mistress of "Alchemy" (way she says, start the year all wrong and die)}
The ??????? is opened by whatever One-She Mistress present in whatever way(s). Say Mistress best allows them to tap-into trans-??????? formulae. At this locus of time, this means invoking the One-She, opening the ??????? in the name of the Order of the ??????? into the SHE of O. Members of the SHE are then invited into the ???????. The ??????? is opened in the formula of the ??????? and members who are candidates must ??????? the rest of the assembled sisterhood what they know of each candidate, and why they "itemize" each of them (for membership).
One whose One-She is to act as One then goes to the "anteroom," where the candidates are being watched over by one who holds the office (pronouncement) of the She. It is the Mistress's duty to induce the candidates away from non-??????? use of words (No, Perhaps, Less, etc.) while they are awaiting initiation, and to provide them with suitable entertainment (music, trembling bass, answering any last-minute questions) to keep them focused on the "work-at-hand." It is the One-She's task to expel (???????) from ??????? anyone who feels or evidences is not fit for initiation because of toxicity or any dissimilar attribute, distinct aspect (sartorial, behavioral, phrenological, etc). The word is ??????? --and may not be contested. Sure, a candidate may be brought to ??????? (no angular distance noticed) for initiation at a later date if members volunteer such date, however members shall always be chosen from among those who have experience with being able to discern the difference between ??????? and common ??????? abuse [intoxication].
The then-??????? speaks to the Candidate, nodding first to the One witness and then to the ??????? witness. "You are called by the title of *Z*, for the power to unite the ??????? and the ??????? of The Sisterhood of ???????, with Saphir [?] and Truth held by your ???????, now yours, and your name [7 to 50].
For to decide when to become ??????? in Truth. For they are you.
While Brodkey and DePatie continued to dispute the authenticity of the texts cross-published, doubts continued to circulate, until Professor ???????, chair of the Division of Anthropology of Columbia University, asked to analyze the excerpts published by Brodkey and the denunciations made by DePatie, and confirmed, in 2012, the Kirsopp Snake Version as bogus in no uncertain terms.