ay of swooping suddenly, as if she had spotted a
ripe carcass, diving right into the bowels, pouncing immediately on the
tidbits - the heart, the liver, or the ovaries -and making off again in the
twinkling of an eye. Did someone spot her, she would lie stone quiet at the
base of a tree, her eyes not quite dosed but immovable in that fixed stare
of the basilisk. Prod her a bit and she would become a rose, a deep black
rose with the most velvety petals and of a fragrance that was overpowering.
It was amazing how marvellously I learned to take my cue; no matter how
swift the metamorphosis I was always there in her lap, bird lap, beast lap,
snake lap, rose lap, what matter: the lap of laps, the lip of lips, tip to
tip, feather to feather, the yolk in the egg, the pearl in the oyster, a
cancer clutch, a tincture of sperm and cantharides. Life was Scorpio
conjunction Mars, conjunction Venus, Saturn, Uranus, et cetera, love was
conjunctivitis of the mandibles, dutch this, dutch that, clutch, clutch, the
mandibular clutch-clutch of the mandala wheel of lust. Come food time I
could already hear her peeling the eggs, and inside the egg cheep-cheep,
blessed omen of the next meal to come. I ate like a monomaniac: the
prolonged dreamlit voracity of the man who is thrice breaking his fast. And
as I ate she purred, the rhythmic predatory wheeze of the succubus devouring
her young. What a blissful night of love! Saliva, sperm, succubation,
sphincteritis all in one: the conjugal orgy in the Black Hole of Calcutta.
Out there where the black star hung, a Pan-Islamic silence, as in the
cavern world where even the wind is stilled. Out there, did I dare to brood
on it, the spectral quietude of insanity, the world of men, lulled,
exhausted by centuries of incessant slaughter. Out there one gory
encompassing membrane within which all activity took place, the hero-world
of lunatics and maniacs who had quenched the light of the heaven with blood.
How peaceful our little dove-and-vulture life in the dark! Flesh to bury in
with teeth or penis, abundant odorous flesh with no mark of knife or
scissors, no scar of exploded shrapnel, no mustard bums, no scalded lungs.
Save for the hallucinating hole in the ceiling, an almost perfect womb life.
But the hole was there - like a fissure in the bladder - and no wadding
could plug it permanently, no urination could pass off with a smile. Piss
large and freely, aye, but how forget the rent in the belfry, the silence
unnatural, the imminence, the terror, the poom of the "other" world? Eat a
bellyful, aye, and tomorrow another bellyful, and tomorrow and tomorrow and
tomorrow - but finally, what then? Finally ? What was finally? A change of
ventriloquist, a change of lap, a shift in the axis, another rift in the
vault... what ? what ? I'll tell you - sitting in her lap, petrified by the
still, pronged beams of the black star, homed, snaffled, hitched and
trepanned by the telepathic acuity of your interacting agitation, I thought
of nothing at all, nothing that was outside the cell we inhabited, not even
the thought of a crumb on a white tablecloth. I thought purely within the
walls of our amoebic life, the pure thought such as Immanuel Pussyfoot Kant
gave us and which only a ventriloquist's dummy could reproduce. I thought
out every theory of science, every theory of art, every grain of truth in
every cock-eyed system of salvation. I calculated everything out to a pin
point with gnostic decimals to boot, like primes which a drunk hands out at
the finish of a six-day-race. But everything was calculated for another life
which somebody else would live some day -perhaps. We were at the very neck
of the bottle, her and I, as they say, but the neck had been broken off and
the bottle was only a fiction.
I remember how the second time I met her she told me that she had never
expected to see me again, and the next time I saw her she said she thought I
was a dope fiend, and the next time she called me a god, and after that she
tried to commit suicide and then I tried and then she tried again, and
nothing worked except to bring us closer together, so close indeed that we
interpenetrated, exchanged personalities, name, identity, religion, father,
mother, brother. Even her body went through a radical change, not once but
several times. At first she was big and velvety, like the jaguar, with that
silky, deceptive strength of the feline species, the crouch, the spring, the
pounce; then she grew emaciated, fragile, delicate almost like a cornflower,
and with each change thereafter she went through the subtlest modulations -
of skin, muscle, colour, posture, odour, gait, gesture, et cetera. She
changed like a chameleon. Nobody could say what she really was like because
with each one she was an entirely different person. After a time she didn't
even know herself what she was like. She had begun this process of
metamorphosis before I met her, as I later dis- covered. Like so many women
who think themselves ugly she had willed to make herself beautiful,
dazzlingly beautiful. To do this she first of all renounced her name, then
her family, her friends, everything which might attach her to the past. With
all her wits and faculties she devoted herself to the cultivation of her
beauty, other charm, which she already possessed to a high degree but which
she had been made to believe were nonexistent. She lived constantly before
the mirror, studying every movement, every gesture, every slightest grimace.
She changed her whole manner of speech, her diction, her intonation, her
accent, her phraseology. She conducted herself so skilfully that it was
impossible even to broach the subject of origins. She was constantly on her
guard, even in her sleep. And, like a good general, she discovered quickly
enough that the best defence is attack. She never left a single position
unoccupied; her outposts, her scouts, her sentinels were stationed
everywhere. Her mind was a revolving searchlight which was never dimmed.
Blind to her own beauty, her own charm, her own personality, to say
nothing of her identity, she launched her full powers towards the
fabrication of a mythical creature, a Helen, a Juno, whose charms neither
man nor woman would be able to resist. Automatically, without the slightest
knowledge of legend, she began to create little by little the ontological
background, the mythic sequence of events preceding the conscious birth. She
had no need to remember her lies, her fictions - she had only to bear in
mind her role. There was no lie too monstrous for her to utter, for in her
adopted role she was absolutely faithful to herself. She did not have to
invent a past: she remembered the past which belonged to her. She was never
outflanked by a direct question since she never presented herself to an
adversary except obliquely. She presented only the angles of the everturning
facets, the blinding prisms of light which she kept constantly revolving.
She was never a being, such as might finally be caught in repose, but the
mechanism itself, relentlessly operating the myriad mirrors which would
reflect the myth she had created. She had no poise what soever; she was
eternally poised above her multiple identities in the vacuum of the self.
She had not intended to make herself a legendary figure, she had merely
wanted her beauty to be recognized. But, in the pursuit of beauty, she soon
forgot her quest entirely, became the victim of her own creation. She became
so stunningly beautiful that at times she was frightening, at times
positively uglier than the ugliest woman in the world. She could inspire
horror and dread, especially when her charm was at its height. It was as
though the will, blind and uncontrollable, shone through the creation,
exposing the monster which it is.
In the dark, locked away in the black hole with no world looking on, no
adversary, no rivals, the blinding dynamism of the will slowed down a bit,
gave her a molten copperish glow, the words coming out of her mouth like
lava, her flesh clutching ravenously for a hold, a perch on something solid
and substantial, something in which to reintegrate and repose for a few
moments. It was like a frantic long distance message, an S.O.S. from a
sinking ship. At first I mistook it for passion, for the ecstasy produced by
flesh rubbing against flesh. I thought I had found a living volcano, a
female Vesuvius. I never thought of a human ship going down in an ocean of
despair, in a Sargasso of impotence. Now I think of that black star gleaming
through the hole in the ceiling, that fixed star which hung above our
conjugal cell, more fixed, more remote than the Absolute, and I know it was
her, emptied of all that was properly herself: a dead black sun without
aspect. I know that we were conjugating the verb love like two maniacs
trying to fuck through an iron grate. I said that in the frantic grappling
in the dark I sometimes forgot her name, what she looked like, who she was.
It's true. I overeached myself in the dark. I slid off the flesh rails into
the endless space of sex, into the channel-orbits established by this one
and that one; Georgiana, for instance, of only a brief afternoon, Telma, the
Egyptian whore, Carlotta, Alannah, Una, Mona, Magda, girls of six or seven;
waifs, will'o'-the-wisps, faces, bodies, thighs, a subway brush, a dream, a
memory, a desire, a longing. I could start with Georgiana of a Sunday
afternoon near the railroad tracks, her dotted Swiss dress, her swaying
haunch, her Southern drawl, her lascivious mouth, her molten breasts, I
could start with Georgiana, the myriad branched candelabra of sex, and work
outwards and upwards through the ramification of cunt into the nth dimension
of sex, world without end. Georgiana was like the membrane of the tiny
little ear of an unfinished monster called sex. She was transparently alive
and breathing in the light of the memory of a brief afternoon on the avenue,
the first tangible odour and substance of the world of fuck which is in
itself a being limitless and undefinable, like our world the world. The
whole world of fuck like unto the ever-increasing membrane of the animal we
call sex, which is like another being growing into our own being and
gradually displacing it, so that in time the human world will be only a dim
memory of this new, all-inclusive, all-procreative being which is giving
birth to itself.
It was precisely this snake-like copulation in the dark, this
double-jointed, double-barrelled hook-up, which put me in the strait-jacket
of doubt, jealousy, fear, loneliness. If I began my hem-stitching with
Georgiana and the myriad-branched candelabra of sex I was certain that she
too was at work building membrane, making ears, eyes, toes, scalp and
what-not of sex. She would begin with the monster who had raped her,
assuming there was truth in the story; in any case she too began somewhere
on a parallel track, working upwards and outwards through this multiform,
uncreated being through whose body we were both striving desperately to
meet. Knowing only a fraction of her life, possessing only a bag of lies, of
inventions, of imaginings, of obsessions and delusions, putting together
tag-ends, coke dreams, reveries, unfinished sentences, jumbled dream talk,
hysterical ravings, ill-disguised fantasies, morbid desires, meeting now and
then a name become flesh, overhearing stray bits of conversation, observing
smuggled glances, half-arrested gestures, I could well credit her with a
pantheon of her own private fucking gods, of only too vivid flesh and blood
creatures, men of perhaps that very afternoon, of perhaps only an hour ago,
her cunt perhaps still choked with the sperm of the last fuck. The more
submissive she was, the more passionately she behaved, the more abandoned
she looked, the more uncertain I became. There was no beginning, no
personal, individual starting point; we met like experienced swordsmen on
the field of honour now crowded with the ghosts of victory and defeat We
were alert and responsible to the least thrust, as only the practiced can
be.
We came together under cover of dark with our armies and from opposite
sides we forced the gates of the citadel. There was no resisting our bloody
work; we asked for no quarter and we gave none. We came together swimming in
blood, a gory, glaucous reunion in the night with all the stars extinguished
save the fixed black star hanging like a scalp above the hole in the
ceiling. If she were properly coked she would vomit it forth like an oracle,
everything that had happened to her during the day, yesterday, the day
before, the year before last, everything, down to the day she was born. And
not a word of it was true, not a single detail. Not a moment did she stop,
for if she had, the vacuum she created in her flight would have brought
about an explosion fit to sunder the world. She was the world's lying
machine in microcosm, geared to the same unending, devastating fear which
enables men to throw all their energies into creation of the death
apparatus. To look at her one would think her fearless, one would think her
the personification of courage and she was, so long as she was not obliged
to turn in her traces. Behind her lay the calm fact of reality, a colossus
which dogged her every step. Every day this colossal reality took on new
proportions, every day it became more terrifying, more paralysing. Every day
she had to grow swifter wings, sharper jaws, more piercing, hypnotic eyes.
It was a race to the outermost limits of the world, a race lost from the
start, and no one to stop it. At the edge of the vacuum stood Truth, ready
in one lightning-like sweep to recover the stolen ground. It was so simple
and obvious that it drove her frantic. Marshal a thousand personalities,
commandeer the biggest guns, deceive the greatest minds, make the longest
detour - still the end would be defeat. In the final meeting everything was
destined to fall apart - the cunning, the skill, the power, everything. She
would be a grain of sand on the shore of the biggest ocean, and, worse than
anything, she would resemble each and every other grain of sand on that
ocean's shore. She would be condemned to recognize her unique self
everywhere until the end of time. What a fate she had chosen for herself!
That her uniqueness should be engulfed in the universal! That her power
should be reduced to the utmost node of passivity! It was maddening,
hallucinating. It could not be! It must not be! Onward! Like the black
legions. Onward! Through every degree of the everwidening circle. Onward and
away from the self, until the last substantial particle of the soul be
stretched to infinity. In her panic-stricken flight she seemed to bear the
whole world in her womb. We were being driven out of the confines of the
universe towards a nebula which no instrument could visualize. We were being
rushed to a pause so still, so prolonged, that death by comparison seems a
mad witches' revel.
In the morning, gazing at the bloodless crater of her face. Not a line
in it, not a wrinkle, not a single blemish! The look of an angel in the arms
of the Creator. Who killed Cock Robin ? Who massacred the Iroquois? Not I,
my lovely angel could say, and by God, who gazing at that pure, blameless
face could deny her? Who could see in that sleep of innocence that one half
of the face belonged to God and the other half to Satan? The mask was smooth
as death, cool, lovely to the touch, waxen, like a petal open to the
faintest breeze. So alluringly still and guileless was it that one could
drown in it, one could go down into it, body and all, like a diver, and
nevermore return. Until the eyes opened upon the world she would lie like
that, thoroughly extinguished and gleaming with a reflected light, like the
moon itself. In her death-like trance of innocence she fascinated even more;
her crimes dissolved, exuded through the pores, she lay coiled like a
sleeping serpent riveted to the earth. The body, strong, lithe, muscular,
seemed possessed of a weight unnatural; she had a more than human gravity,
the gravity, one might almost say, of a warm corpse. She was like one might
imagine the beautiful Nefertiti to have been after the first thousand years
of mummification, a marvel of mortuary perfection, a dream of flesh
preserved from mortal decay. She lay coiled at the base of a hollow pyra-
mid, enshrined in the vacuum of her own creation like a sacred relic of the
past. Even her breathing seemed stopped, so profound was her slumber. She
had dropped below the human sphere, below the animal sphere, below the
vegetative sphere even: she had sunk down to the level of the mineral world
where animation is just a notch above death. She had so mastered the art of
deception that even the dream was powerless to betray her. She had learned
how to not dream: when she coiled up in sleep she automatically switched off
the current. If one could have caught her thus and opened up the skull one
would have found it absolutely void. She kept no disturbing secrets;
everything was killed off which could be humanly killed. She might live on
endlessly, like the moon, like any dead planet, radiating an hypnotic
effulgence, creating tides of passion, engulfing the world in madness,
discolouring all earthly substances with her magnetic, metallic rays. Sowing
her own death she brought everyone about her to fever pitch. In the heinous
stillness of her sleep she renewed her own magnetic death by union with the
cold magma of the lifeless planetary worlds. She was magically intact. Her
gaze fell upon one with a transpiercing fixity: it was the moon gaze through
which the dead dragon of life gave off a cold fire. The one eye was a warm
brown, the colour of an autumn leaf; the other was hazel, the magnetic eye
which flickered a compass needle. Even in sleep this eye continued to nicker
under the shutter of the lid; it was the only apparent sign of life in her.
The moment she opened her eyes she was wide awake. She awoke with a
violent start, as if the sight of the world and its human paraphernalia were
a shock. Instantly she was in full activity, lashing about like a great
python. What annoyed her was the light! She awoke cursing the sun, cursing
the glare of reality. The room had to be darkened, the candles lit, the the
windows tightly shut to prevent the noise of the street from penetrating the
room. She moved about naked with a cigarette dangling from the comer of her
mouth. Her toilet was an affair of great preoccupation; a thousand trifling
details had to be attended to before she could so much as don a bathrobe.
She was like an athlete preparing for the great event of the day. From the
roots of her hair, which she studied with keen attention, to the shape and
length of her toe-nails, every part of her anatomy was thoroughly inspected
before sitting down to breakfast. Like an athlete I said she was, but in
fact she was more like a mechanic overhauling a fast plane for a test
flight. Once she slipped on her dress she was launched for the day, for the
flight which might end perhaps in Irkutsk or Teheran. She would take on
enough fuel at breakfast to last the entire trip. The breakfast was a
prolonged affair: it was the one ceremony of the day over which she dawdled
and lingered. It was exasperatingly prolonged, indeed. One wondered if she
would ever take on, one wondered if she had forgotten the grand mission
which she had sworn to accomplish each day. Perhaps she was dreaming other
itinerary, or perhaps she was not dreaming at all but simply allowing time
for the functional processes of her marvellous machine so that once embarked
there would be no turning back. She was very calm and self-possessed at this
hour of the day; she was like a great bird of the air perched on a mountain
crag, dreamily surveying the terrain below. It was not from the breakfast
table that she would suddenly swoop and dive to pounce upon her prey. No,
from the early morning perch she would take off slowly and majestically,
synchronizing her every movement with the pulse of the motor. All space lay
before her, her direction dictated only by caprice. She was almost the image
of freedom, were it not for the Saturnian weight of her body and the
abnormal span of her wings. However poised she seemed, especially at the
take-on, one sensed the terror which motivated the daily flight. She was at
once obedient to her destiny and at the same time frantically eager to
overcome it. Each morning she soared aloft from her perch, as from some
Himalayan peak; she seemed always to direct her flight towards some
uncharted region into which, if all went well, she would disappear forever.
Each morning she seemed to carry aloft with her this desperate, last-minute
hope; she took leave with calm, grave dignity, like one about to go down
into the grave. Never once did she circle about the flying field; never once
did she cast a glance backward towards those whom she was abandon- ing. Nor
did she leave the slightest crumb of personality behind her; she took to the
air with all her belongings, with every slightest scrap of evidence which
might testify to the fact of her existence. She didn't even leave the breath
of a sigh behind, not even a toe-nail. A clean exit, such as the Devil
himself might make for reasons of his own. One was left with a great void on
his hands. One was deserted, and not only deserted, but betrayed, inhumanly
betrayed. One had no desire to detain her nor to call her back; one was left
with a curse on his lips, with a black hatred which darkened the whole day.
Later, moving about the city, moving slowly in pedestrian fashion, crawling
like the worm, one gathered rumours of her spectacular flight; she had been
seen rounding a certain point, she had dipped here or there for what reason
no one knew, she had done a tailspin elsewhere, she had passed like a comet,
she had written letters of smoke in the sky, and so on and so forth.
Everything she had done was enigmatic and exasperating, done apparently
without purpose. It was like a symbolic and ironic commentary on human life,
on the behaviour of the ant-like creature man, viewed from another
dimension.
Between the time she took off and the time she returned I lived the
life of a full blooded schizerino. It was not an eternity which elapsed,
because somehow eternity has to do with peace and with victory, it is
something man-made, something earned: no, I experienced an entr'acte in
which every hair turns white to the roots, in which every millimetre of skin
itches and burns until the whole body becomes a running sore. I see myself
sitting before a table in the dark, my hands and feet growing enormous, as
though elephantiasis were overtaking me at a gallop. I hear the blood
rushing up to the brain and pounding at the ear-drums like Himalayan devils
with sledge hammers; I hear her flapping her huge wings, even in Irkutsk,
and I know she is pushing on and on, ever further away, ever further beyond
reach. It is so quiet in the room and so frightfully empty that I shriek and
howl just to make a little noise, a little human sound. I try to lift myself
from the table but my feet are too heavy and my hands have become like the
shapeless feet of the rhinoceros. The heavier my body becomes the lighter
the atmosphere of the room; I am going to spread and spread until I fill the
room with one solid mass of stiff jelly. I shall fill up even the cracks in
the wall; I shall grow through the wall like a parasitic plant, spreading
and spreading until the whole house is an indescribable mass of flesh and
hair and nails. I know that this is death, but I am powerless to kill the
knowledge of it, or the knower. Some tiny particle of me is alive, some
speck of consciousness persists, and, as the inert carcass expands, this
flicker of life becomes sharper and sharper and gleams inside me like the
cold fire of a gem. It lights up the whole gluey mass of pulp so that I am
like a diver with a torch in the body of a dead marine monster. By some
slender hidden filament I am still connected with the life above the surface
of the deep, but it is so far away, the upper world, and the weight of the
corpse so great that, even if it were possible, it would take years to reach
the surface. I move around in my own dead body, exploring every nook and
cranny of its huge, shapeless mass. It is an endless exploration, for with
the ceaseless growth the whole topography changes, slipping and drifting
like the hot magma of the earth. Never for a minute is there terra firma,
never for a minute does anything remain still and recognizable: it is a
growth without landmarks, a voyage in which the destination changes with
every least move or shudder. It is this interminable filling of space which
kills all sense of space or time; the more the body expands the tinier
becomes the world, until at last I feel that everything is concentrated on
the head of a pin. Despite the floundering of this enormous dead mass which
I have become, I feel that what sustains it, the world out of which it
grows, is no bigger than a pinhead. In the midst of pollution, in the very
heart and gizzard of death, as it were, I sense the seed, the miraculous,
infinitesimal lever which balances the world. I have overspread the world
like a syrup and the emptiness of it is terrifying, but there is no
dislodging the seed; the seed has become a little knot of cold fire which
roars like a sun in the vast hollow of the dead carcass.
When the great plunder-bird returns exhausted from her flight she will
find me here in the midst of my nothingness, I, the imperishable schizerino,
a blazing seed hidden in the heart of death. Every day she thinks to find
another means of sustenance, but there is no other, only this eternal seed
of light which by dying each day I rediscover for her. Fly, 0 devouring
bird, fly to the limits of the universe! Here is your nourishment glowing in
the sickening emptiness you have created! You will come back to perish once
more in the black hole; you will come back again and again, for you have not
the wings to carry you out of the world. This is the only world you can
inhabit, this tomb of the snake where darkness reigns.
And suddenly for no reason at all, when I think of her returning to her
nest, I remember Sunday mornings in the little old house near the cemetery.
I remember sitting at the piano in my nightshirt, working away at the pedals
with bare feet, and the folks lying in bed toasting themselves in the next
room. The rooms opened one on the other, telescope fashion, as in the good
old American railroad flats. Sunday mornings one lay in bed until one was
ready to screech with well-being. Towards eleven or so the folks used to rap
on the wall of my bedroom for me to come and play for them. I would dance
into the room like the Fratellini Brothers, so full of flame and feathers
that I could hoist myself like a derrick to the topmost limb of the tree of
heaven. I could do anything and everything singlehanded, being
double-jointed at the same time. The old man called me "Sunny Jim", because
I was full of "Force", full of vim and vigour. First I would do a few
handsprings for them on the carpet before the bed; then I would sing
falsetto, trying to imitate a ventriloquist's dummy; then I would dance a
few light fantastic steps to show which way the wind lay, and zoom! Like a
breeze I was on the piano stool and doing a velocity exercise. I always
began with Czemy, in order to limber up for the performance. The old man
hated Czemy, and so did I, but Czemy was the plat du jour on the bill of
fare then, and so Czemy it was until my joints were rubber. In some vague
way Czemy reminds me of the great emptiness which came upon me later. What a
velocity I would work up, riveted to the piano stool! It was like swallowing
a bottle of tonic at one gulp and then having someone strap you to the bed.
After I had played about ninety-eight exercises I was ready to do a little
improvising. I used to take a fist-full of chords and crash the piano from
one end to the other, then sullenly modulate into "The Burning of Rome" or
the "Ben Hur Chariot Race" which everybody liked because it was intelligible
noise. Long before I read Wittgenstein's Tractatvs Logico-Philosophicus I
was composing the music to it, in the key of sassafras. I was learned then
in science and philosophy, in the history of religions, in inductive and
deductive logic, in liver mantic, in the shape and weight of skulls, in
pharmacopeia and metallurgy, in all the useless branches of learning which
gives you indigestion and melancholia before your time. This vomit of
learned truck was stewing in my guts the whole week long, waiting for it to
come Sunday to be set to music. In between "The Midnight Fire Alarm" and
"Marche Militaire" I would get my inspiration, which was to destroy all the
existent forms of harmony and create my own cacophony. Imagine Uranus well
aspected to Mars, to Mercury, to the Moon, to Jupiter, to Venus. It's hard
to imagine because Uranus functions best when it is badly aspected, when it
is "afflicted", so to speak. Yet that music which I gave off Sunday
mornings, a music of well-being and of well-nourished desperation, was born
of an illogically well-aspected Uranus firmly anchored in the 7th House. I
didn't know it then, I didn't know that Uranus existed, and lucky it was
that I was ignorant. But I can see it now, because it was a fluky joy, a
phony well-being, a destructive sort of fiery creation. The greater my
euphoria the more tranquil the folks became. Even my sister who was dippy
became calm and composed. The neighbours used to stand outside the window
and listen, and now and then I would hear a burst of applause, and then
bang, zip! like a rocket I was off again - Velocity Exercise No.
9471/2. If I happened to espy a cockroach crawling up the wall I
was in bliss: that would lead me without the slightest modulation to Opus
Izzi of my sadly corrugated clavichord. One Sunday, just like that, I
composed one of the loveliest scherzos imaginable - to a louse. It was
Spring and we were all getting the sulphur treatment; I had been pouring all
week over Dante's Inferno in English. Sunday came like a thaw, the birds
driven so crazy by the sudden heat that they flew in and out of the window,
immune to the music. One of the German relatives had just arrived from
Hamburg, or Bremen, a maiden aunt who looked like a bull-dyker. Just to be
near her was sufficient to throw roe into a fit of rage. She used to pat me
on the head and tell me I would be another Mozart. I hated Mozart, and I
hate him still, and so to get even with her I would play badly, play all the
sour notes I knew. And then came the little louse, as I was saying, a real
louse which had gotten buried in my winter underwear. I got him out and I
put him tenderly on the tip of a black key. Then I began to do a little
gigue around him with my right hand, the noise had probably deafened him
tenderly on the tip of a black key. Then hypnotized, it seemed, by my nimble
pyrotechnic. This trance-like immobility finally got on my nerves. I decided
to introduce a chromatic scale coming down on him full force with my third
finger. I caught him fair and square, but with such force that he was glued
to my fingertip. That put the St. Vitus' Dance in me. From then on the
scherzo commenced. It was a pot-pourri of forgotten melodies spiced with
aloes and the juice of porcupines, played sometimes in three keys at once
and pivoting always like a waltzing mouse around the immaculate conception.
Later, when I went to hear Prokofief, I understood what was happening to
him; I understood Whitehead and Russell and Jeans and Eddington and Rudolf
Eucken and Frobenius and Link Gillespie; I understood why, if there had
never been a binomial theorem, man would have invented it; I understood why
electricity and compressed air, to say nothing of sprudel baths and fango
packs. I understood very dearly, I must say, that man has a dead louse in
his blood, and that when you're handed a symphony or a fresco or a high
explosive you're really getting an ipecac reaction which was not included in
the predestined bill of fare. I understood too why I had failed to become
the musician I was. All the compositions I had created in my head, all these
private and artistic auditions which were permitted me, thanks to St.
Hildegarde or St. Bridget, or John of the Cross, or God knows whom, were
written for an age to come, an age with less instruments and stronger
antennae, stronger eardrums too. A different kind of suffering has to be
experienced before such music can be appreciated. Beethoven staked out the
new territory - one is aware of its presence when he erupts, when he breaks
down in the very core of his stillness. It is a realm of new vibrations - to
us only a misty nebula, for we have yet to pass beyond our own conception of
suffering. We have yet to ingest this nebulous world, its travail, its
orientation. I was permitted to hear an incredible music lying prone and
indifferent to the Sorrow about me. I heard the gestation of a new world,
the sound of torrential rivers taking their course, the sound of stars
grinding and chafing, of fountains clotted with blazing gems. All music is
still governed by the old astronomy, is the product of the hothouse, a
panacea for Weltschmerz. Music is still the antidote for the nameless, but
this is not yet music. Music is planetary fire, an irreducible which is
all-sufficient; it is the slate-writing of the gods, the abracadabra which
the learned and the ignorant alike muff because the axle has been unhooked.
Look to the bowels, to the unconsolable and ineluctable! Nothing is
determined, nothing is settled or solved. All this that is going on, all
music, all architecture, all law, all government, all invention, all
discovery - all this is velocity exercises in the dark, Czemy with a capital
Zed riding a crazy white horse in a bottle of mucilage.
One of the reasons why I never got anywhere with the bloody music is
that it was always mixed up with sex. As soon as I was able to play a song
the cunts were around me like flies. To begin with, it was largely Lola's
fault. Lola was my first piano teacher. Lola Niessen. It was a ridiculous
name and typical of the neighbourhood we were living in then. It sounded
like a stinking bloater, or a wormy cunt. To tell the truth, Lola was not
exactly a beauty. She looked somewhat like a Kalmuck or a Chinook, with
sallow complexion and bilious-looking eyes. She had a few warts and wens,
not to speak of the moustache. What excited me, however, was her hairiness;
she had wonderful long fine black hair which she arranged in ascending and
descending buns on her Mongolian skull. At the nape of the neck she curled
it up in a serpentine knot. She was always late in coming, being a
conscientious idiot, and by the time she arrived I was always a bit
enervated from masturbating. As soon as she took the stool beside me,
however, I became exdted again, what with the stinking perfume she soused
her armpits with. In the summer she wore loose sleeves and I could see the
tufts'of hair under her arms. The sight of it drove me wild. I imagined her
as having hair all over, even in her navel. And what I wanted to do was to
roll in it, bury my teeth in it. I could have eaten Lola's hair as a
delicacy, if there had been a bit of flesh attached to it. Anyway she was
hairy, that's what I want to say and being hairy as a gorilla she got my
mind off the the music and on to her cunt. I was so damned eager to see that
cunt of hers that finally one day I bribed her little brother to let me have
a peep at her while she was in the bath. It was even more wonderful than I
had imagined: she had a shag that reached from the navel to the crotch, an
enormous thick tuft, a sporran, rich as a hand-woven rug. When she went over
it with the powder puff I thought I would faint. The next time she came for
the lesson I left a couple of buttons open on my fly. She didn't seem to
notice anything amiss. The following time I left my whole fly open. This
time she caught on. She said, "I think you've forgotten something. Henry." I
looked at her, red as a beet, and I asked her blandly what ? She pretended
to look away while pointing to it with her left hand. Her hand came so close
that I couldn't resist grabbing it and pushing it in my fly. She got up.
quickly, looking pale and frightened. By this time my prick was out of my
fly and quivering with delight. I closed in on her and I reached up under
her dress to get at that hand-woven rug I had seen through the keyhole.
Suddenly I got a sound box on the ears, and then another and she took me by
the ear and leading me to a comer of the room she turned my face to the wall
and said, "Now button up your fly, you silly boy!" We went back to the piano
in a few moments - back to Czemy and the velocity exercises. I couldn't see
a sharp from a flat any more, but I continued to play because I was afraid
she might tell my mother about the incident. Fortunately it was not an easy
thing to tell one's mother. The incident, embarrassing as it was, marked a
decided change in our relations. I thought that the next time she came she
would be severe with me, but on the contrary; she seemed to have dolled
herself up, to have sprinkled more perfume over herself, and she was even a
bit gay, which was unusual for Lola because she was a morose, withdrawn
type. I didn't dare to open my fly again, but I would get an erection and
hold it throughout the lesson, which she must have enjoyed because she was
always stealing sidelong glances in that direction. I was only fifteen at
the time, and she was easily twenty-five or twenty-eight. It was difficult
for me to know what to do, unless it was to deliberately knock her down one
day while my mother was out. For a time I actually shadowed her at night,
when she went out alone. She had a habit of going out for long walks alone
in the evening. I used to dog her steps, hoping she would get to some
deserted spot near the cemetery where I might try some rough tactics. I had
a feeling sometimes that she knew I was following her and that she enjoyed
it. I think she was waiting for me to waylay her - I think that was what she
wanted. Anyway, one night I was lying in the grass near the railroad tracks;
it was a sweltering summer's night and people were lying about anywhere and
everywhere, like panting dogs. I wasn't thinking of Lola at all - I was just
mooning there, too hot to think about anything. Suddenly I see a woman
coming along the narrow cinderpath. I'm lying sprawled out on the embankment
and nobody around that I can notice. The woman is coming along slowly, head
down, as though she were dreaming. As she gets close I recognize her.
"Lola!" I call. "Lola!" She seems to be really astonished to see me there.
"Why, what are you doing here?" she says, and with that she sits down beside
me on the embankment. I didn't bother to answer her, I didn't say a word -1
just crawled over her and flattened her. "Not here, please," she begged, but
I paid no attention. I got my hand between her legs, all tangled up in tha