will you ... there, like that... that's it. What was I saying?
Oh yes... why sure, why should you worry about things like that? Of course
I'll be true to you. Listen, pull away just a little bit... yeah, that's
it... that's fine." He used to tell us about it in the Chop Suey joint.
Steve would laugh like hell. Steve couldn't do a thing like that. He was too
honest - especially with women. That's why he never had any luck. Little
Curiey, for example -Steve hated Curiey - would always get what he wanted...
He was a born liar, a born deceiver. Hymie didn't like Curiey much either.
He said he was dishonest, meaning of course dishonest in money matters.
About such things Hymie was scrupulous. What he disliked especially was the
way Curiey talked about his aunt. It was bad enough, in Hymie's opinion,
that he should be screwing the sister of his own mother, but to make her out
to be nothing but a piece of stale cheese, that was too much for Hymie. One
ought to have a bit of respect for a woman, provided she's not a whore. If
she's a whore that's different. Whores are not women. Whores are whores.
That was how Hymie looked at things.
The real reason for his dislike, however, was that whenever they went
out together Curiey always got the best choice. And not only that, but it
was usually with Hymie's money that Curiey managed it. Even the way Curiey
asked for money irritated Hymie - it was like extortion, he said. He thought
it was partly my fault, that I was too lenient with the kid. "He's got no
moral character," Hymie would say. "And what about you, your moral
character?" I would ask. "Oh me I Shit, I'm too old to have any moral
character. But Curley's only a kid." "You're jealous, that's what," Steve
would say. "Me ? Me jealous of him ?" And he'd try to smother the idea with
a scornful little laugh. It made him wince, a jab like that "Listen," he
would say, turning to me, "did I ever act jealous towards you? Didn't I
always turn a girl over to you if you asked me? What about that redhaired
girl in S.U. office... yon remember ... the one with the big teats? Wasn't
that a nice piece of ass to turn over to a friend? But I did it, didn't I? I
did it because you said you liked big teats. But I wouldn't do it for
Curiey. He's a little crook. Let him do his own digging."
As a matter of fact, Curley was digging away very industriously. He
must have had five or six on the string at one time, from what I could
gather. There was Valeska, for example - he had made himself pretty solid
with her. She was so damned pleased to have some one fuck her without
blushing that when it came to sharing him with her cousin and then with the
midget she didn't put up the least objection. What she liked best was to get
in the tub and let him fuck her under water. It was fine until the midget
got wise to it. Then there was a nice rumpus which was finally ironed out on
the parlour floor. To listen to Curiey talk he did everything but climb the
chandeliers. And always plenty of pocket money to boot. Valeska was
generous, but the cousin was a softy. If she came within a foot of a stiff
prick she was like putty. An unbuttoned fly was enough to put her in a
trance. It was almost shameful the things Curiey made her do. He took
pleasure in degrading her. I could scarcely blame him for it, she was such a
prim, priggish bitch in her street clothes. You'd almost swear she didn't
own a cunt, the way she carried herself in the street. Naturally, when he
got her alone he made her pay for her high-falutin' ways. He went at it
cold-bloodedly. "Pish 'it out!" he'd say opening his fly a little. "Fish it
out with your tongue!" (He had it in for the whole bunch because, as he put
it, they were sucking one another off behind his back.) Anyway, once she got
the taste of it in her mouth you could do anything with her. Sometimes he'd
stand her on her hands and push her around the room that way, like a
wheelbarrow. Or else he'd do it dog fashion, and while she groaned and
squirmed he'd nonchalantly light a cigarette and blow the smoke between her
legs. Once he played her a dirty little trick doing it that way. He had
worked her up to such a state that she was beside herself. Anyway, after he
had almost polished the ass off her with his back-scuttling he pulled out
for a second, as though to cool his cock off, and then very slowly and
gently he shoved a big long carrot up her twat. "That, Miss Abercrombie," he
said, "is a sort of Doppelganger to my regular cock," and with that he
unhitches himself and yanks up his pants. Cousin Abercrombie was so
bewildered by it all that she let a tremendous fart and out tumbled the
carrot. At least, that's how Curley related it to me. He was an outrageous
liar, to be sure, and there may not be a grain of truth in the yam, but
there's no denying that he had a flair for such tricks. As for Miss
Abercrombie and her high-tone Narragansett ways, well, with a cunt like that
one can always imagine the worst. By comparison Hymie was a purist. Somehow
Hymie and his fat circumcised dick were two different things. When he got a
personal hard-on, as he said, he really meant that he was irresponsible. He
meant that Nature was asserting itself - through his, Hymie Laubscher's fat,
circumcised dick. It was the same with his wife's cunt. It was something she
wore between her legs, like an ornament. It was a part of Mrs. Laubscher but
it wasn't Mrs. Laubscher personally, if you get what I mean.
Well, all this is simply by way of leading up to the general sexual
confusion which prevailed at this time. It was like taking a flat in the
Land of Fuck. The girl upstairs, for instance... she used to come down now
and then, when the wife was giving a recital, to look after the kid. She was
so obviously a simpleton that I didn't give her any notice at first. But
like all the others she had a cunt too, a sort of impersonal personal cunt
which she was unconsciously conscious of. The oftener she came down the more
conscious she got, in her unconscious way. One night, when she was in the
bathroom, after she had been in there a suspiciously long while, she got me
to thinking of things. I decided to take a peep through the key-hole and see
for myself what was what. Lo and behold, if she isn't standing in front of
the mirror stroking and petting her little pussy. Almost talking to it, she
was. I was so excited I didn't know what to do first. I went back into the
big room, turned out the lights, and lay there on the couch waiting for her
to come out. As I lay there I could still see that bushy cunt others and the
fingers strumming it like. I opened my fly to let my pecker twitch about in
the cool of the dark, I tried to mesmerize her from the couch, or at least I
tried letting my pecker mesmerize her. "Come here, you bitch," I kept saying
to myself, "come here and spread that cunt over me." She must have caught
the message immediately, for in a jiffy she had opened the door and was
groping about in the dark to find the couch. I didn't say a word, I didn't
make a move. I just kept my mind riveted on her cunt moving quietly in the
dark like a crab. Finally she was standing beside the couch. She didn't say
a word either. She just stood there quietly and as I slid my hand up her
legs she moved one foot a little to open her crotch a bit more. I don't
think I ever put my hand into such a juicy crotch in all my life. It was
like paste running down her legs, and if there had been any billboards handy
I could have plastered up a dozen or more. After a few moments, just as
naturally as a cow lowering its head to graze, she bent over and put it in
her mouth. I had my whole four fingers inside her, whipping it up to a
froth. Her mouth was stuffed full and the juice pouring down her legs. Not a
word out of us, as I say. Just a couple of quiet maniacs working away in the
dark like gravediggers. It was a fucking Paradise and I knew it, and I was
ready and willing to fuck my brains away if necessary. She was probably the
best fuck I ever had. She never once opened her trap - not diat night, nor
the next night, nor any night. She'd steal down like diat in the dark, soon
as she smelted me there alone, and plaster her cunt all over me. It was an
enormous cunt, too, when I think back on it. A dark, subterranean labyrinth
fitted up widi divans and cosy comers and rubber teedi and syringeas and
soft nestles and eiderdown and mulberry leaves. I used to nose in like the
solitary worm and bury myself in a little cranny where it was absolutely
silent, and so soft and restful diat I lay like a dolphin on the
oyster-banks. A slight twitch and I'd be in the Pullman reading a newspaper
or else up an impasse where there were mossy round cobblestones
l66
and little wicker gates which opened and shut automatically. Sometimes
it was like riding the shoot-the-shoots, a steep plunge and then a spray of
tingling sea-crabs, the bulrushes swaying feverishly and the gills of tiny
fishes lapping against me like harmonica stops. In the immense black grotto
there was a silk-and-soap organ playing a predaceous black music. When she
pitched herself high, when she turned the juice on full, it made a
violaceous purple, a deep mulberry stain like twilight, a ventiloqual
twilight such as dwarfs and cretins enjoy when they menstruate. It made me
think of cannibals chewing flowers, of Bantus running amok, of wild unicorns
rutting in rhododendron beds. Everything was anonymous and unformulated,
John Doe and his wife Emmy Doe: above us the gas tanks and below the marine
life. Above the belt, as I say, she was batty. Yes, absolutely cuckoo,
though still abroad and afloat. Perhaps that was what made her cunt so
marvellously impersonal. It was one cunt out of a million, a regular Pearl
of the Antilles, such as Dick Osborn discovered when reading Joseph Conrad.
In the broad Pacific of sex she lay, a gleaming silver reef surrounded with
human anemones, human starfish, human madrepores. Only an Osborn could have
discovered her, given the proper latitude and longitude of cunt. Meeting her
in the daytime, watching her slowly going daft, it was like trapping a
weasel when night came on. All I had to do was to lie down in the dark with
my fly open and wait. She was like Ophelia suddenly resurrected among the
Kaffirs. Not a word of any language could she remember, especially not
English. She was a deaf-mute who had lost her memory, and with the loss of
memory she had lost her frigidaire, her curling-irons, her tweezers and
handbag. She was even more naked than a fish, except for the tuft of hair
between her legs. And she was even slippier than a fish because after all a
fish has scales and she had none. It was dubious at times whether I was in
her or she in me. It was open warfare, the new-fangled Pancrace, with each
one biting his own ass. Love among the newts and the cut-out wide open. Love
without gender and without lysol. Incubational love, such as the wolverines
practise above the tree line. On the one side the Arctic Ocean, on the other
the Gulf of Mexico. And though we never referred to it openly there was
always with us King Kong, King Kong asleep in the wrecked hull of the
Titanic among the phosphorescent bones of millionaires and lampreys. No
logic could drive King Kong away. He was the giant truss that supports the
soul's fleeting anguish. He was the wedding cake with hairy legs and arms a
mile long. He was the revolving screen on which the news passes away. He was
the muzzle of the revolver that never went on, the leper armed with
sawed-off gonococci.
It was here in the void of hernia that I did all my quiet thinking via
the penis. There was first of all the binomial theorem, a phrase which had
always puzzled me; I put it under the magnifying glass and studied it from X
to Z, There was Logos, which somehow I had always identified with breath; I
found that on the contrary it was a sort of obsessional stasis, a machine
which went on grinding corn long after the granaries had been filled and the
Jews driven out of Egypt. There was Bucephalus, more fascinating to me
perhaps than any word in my whole vocabulary: I would trot it out whenever I
was in a quandary, and with it of course Alexander and his entire purple
retinue. What a horse! Sired in the Indian Ocean, the last of the line, and
never once mated, except to the Queen of the Amazons during the Mesopotamian
adventure. There was the Scotch Gambit! An amazing expression which had
nothing to do with chess. It came to me always in the shape of a man on
stilts, page 2498 of Punk and Wagnall's Unabridged Dictionary. A gambit was
a sort of leap in the dark with mechanical legs. A leap for no purpose -
hence gambit! Clear as a bell and perfectly simple, once you grasped it.
Then there was Andromeda, and the Gorgon Medusa, and Castor and Pollux of
heavenly origin, mythological twins eternally fixed in the ephemeral
stardust. There was lucubration, a word distinctly sexual and yet suggesting
such cerebral connotations as to make me uneasy. Always "midnight
lucubrations", the midnight being ominously significant. And then arras.
Somebody some time or other had been stabbed "behind the arras". I saw an
altar-cloth made of asbestos and in it was a grievous rent such as Caesar
himself might have made.
l68
It was very quiet thinking, as I say, the kind that the men of the Old
Stone Age must have indulged in. Things were neither absurd nor explicable.
It was a jig-saw puzzle which, when you grew tired of, you could push away
with two feet. Anything could be put aside with ease, even the Himalaya
Mountains. It was just the opposite kind of thinking from Mahomet's. It led
absolutely nowhere and was hence enjoyable. The grand edifice which you
might construct throughout the course of a long fuck could be toppled over
in the twinkling of an eye. It was the fuck that counted and not the
construction work. It was like living in the Ark during the Flood,
everything provided for down to a screw-driver. What need to commit murder,
rape or incest when all that was demanded of you was to kill time? Rain,
rain, rain, but inside the Ark everything dry and toasty, a pair of every
kind and in the larder fine Westphalian hams, fresh eggs, olives, pickled
onions, Worcestershire Sauce and other delicacies. God had chosen me, Noah,
to establish a new heaven and a new earth. He had given me a stout boat with
all seams caulked and properly dried. He had given me also the knowledge to
sail the stormy seas. Maybe when it stopped raining there would be other
kinds of knowledge to acquire, but for the present a nautical knowledge
sufficed. The rest was chess in the Cafe Royal, Second Avenue, except that I
had to imagine a partner, a clever Jewish mind that would make the game last
until the rains ceased. But, as I said before, I had no time to be bored:
there were my old friends. Logos, Bucephalus, arras, lucubration and so on.
Why play chess?
Locked up like that for days and nights on end I began to realize that
thinking, when it is not masturbative, is lenitive, healing, pleasurable.
The thinking that gets you nowhere takes you everywhere: all other thinking
is done on tracks and no matter how long the stretch, in the end there is
always the depot or the round-house. In the end there is always a red
lantern which says STOP! But when the penis gets to thinking there is no
stop and no let: it is a perpetual holiday, the bait fresh and the fish
always nibbling at the line. Which reminds me of another cunt, Veronica
something or other, who always got me thinking the wrong way. With Veronica
it was always a tussle in the vestibule. On the dance floor you'd think she
was going to make you a permanent present of her ovaries, but as soon as she
hit the air she'd start thinking, thinking other hat, of her purse, of her
aunt who was waiting up for her, of the letter she forgot to mail, of the
job she was going to lose - all kinds of crazy, irrelevant thoughts which
had nothing to do with the thing in hand. It was like she had suddenly
switched her brain to her cunt - the most alert and canny cunt imaginable.
It was almost a metaphysical cunt, so to speak. It was a cunt which thought
out problems, and not only that, but a special kind of thinking it was, with
a metronome going. For this species of displaced rhythmic lucubration a
peculiar dim light was essential. It had to be just about dark enough for a
bat and yet light enough to find a button if one happened to come undone and
roll on the floor of the vestibule. You can see what I mean. A vague yet
meticulous precision, a steely awareness that simulated absent-mindedness.
And fluttery and fluky at the same time, so that you could never determine
whether it was fish or fowl. What is this I hold in my hand? Fine or
super-fine? The answer was always duck soup. If you grabbed her by the
boobies she would squawk like a parrot; if you got under her dress she would
wriggle like an eel: if you held her too tight she would bite like a ferret.
She lingered and lingered and lingered. Why? What was she after? Would she
give in after an hour or two? Not a chance in a million. She was like a
pigeon trying to fly with its legs caught in a steel trap. She pretended she
had no legs. But if you made a move to set her free she would threaten to
moult on you.
Because she had such a marvellous ass and because it was also so damned
inaccessible I used to think of her as the Pons Asinorum. Every schoolboy
knows that the Pons Asinorum is not to be crossed except by two white
donkeys led by a blind man. I don't know why it is so, but that's the rule
as it was laid down by old Euclid. He was so full of knowledge, the old
buzzard, that one day -1 suppose purely to amuse himself - he built a bridge
which no living mortal could ever cross. He called it the Pons Asinorum
because he was the owner of a pair of beautiful white donkeys, and so
attached was he to these don- keys that he would let nobody take possession
of them. And so he conjured a dream in which he, the blind man, would one
day lead the donkeys over the bridge and into the happy hunting grounds for
donkeys. Well, Veronica was very much in the same boat. She thought so much
of her beautiful white ass that she wouldn't part with it for anything. She
wanted to take it with her to Paradise when the time came. As for her cunt,
which by the way she never referred to it all - as for her cunt, I say, well
that was just an accessory to be brought along. In the dim light of the
vestibule, without ever referring overtly to her two problems, she somehow
made you uncomfortably aware of them. That is, she made you aware in the
manner of a prestidigitator. You were to take a look or a feel only to be
finally deceived, only to be shown that you had not seen and had not felt.
It was a very subtle sexual algebra, the midnight lucubration which would
earn you an A or a B next day, but nothing more. You passed your
examinations, you got your diploma, and then you were turned loose. In the
meantime you used your ass to sit down and your cunt to make water with.
Between the textbook and the lavatory there was an intermediate zone which
you were never to enter because it was labelled fuck. You might diddle and
piddle, but you must not fuck. The light was never completely shut off, the
sun never streamed in. Always just light or dark enough to distinguish a
bat. And just that little eerie flicker of light was what kept the mind
alert, on the look-out, as it were, for bags, pencils, buttons, keys, et
cetera. You couldn't really think because your mind was already engaged. The
mind was kept in readiness, like a vacant seat at the theatre on which the
owner had left his opera hat.
Veronica, as I say, had a talking cunt, which was bad because its sole
function seemed to be to talk one out of a fuck. Evelyn, on the other hand,
had a laughing cunt. She lived upstairs too, only in another house. She was
always trotting in at meal times to tell us a new joke. A comedienne of the
first water, the only really funny woman I ever met in my life. Everything
was a joke, fuck included. She could even make a stiff prick laugh, which is
saying a good deal. They say a stiff prick has no conscience, but a stiff
prick that laughs too is phenomenal. The only way I can describe it is to
say that when she got hot and bothered, Evelyn, she put on a ventriloqual
act with her cunt. You'd be ready to slip it in when suddenly the dummy
between her legs would let out a guffaw. At the same time it would reach out
for you and give you a playful little tug and squeeze. It could sing too,
this dummy of a cunt. In fact it behaved just like a trained seal.
Nothing is more difficult than to make love in a circus. Putting on the
trained seal act all the time made her more inaccessible than if she had
been trussed up with iron thongs. She could break down the most "personal"
hard-on in the world. Break it down with laughter. At the same time it
wasn't quite as humiliating as one might be inclined to imagine. There was
something sympathetic about this vaginal laughter. The whole world seemed to
unroll like a pornographic film whose tragic theme is impotence. You could
visualize yourself as a dog, or a weasel, or a white rabbit. Love was
something on the side, a dish of caviar, say, or a wax heliotrope. You could
see the ventriloquist in you talking about caviar or heliotropes, but the
real person was always a weasel or a white rabbit. Evelyn was always lying
in the cabbage patch with her legs spread open offering a bright green leaf
to the first-comer. But if you made a move to nibble it the cabbage patch
would explode with laughter, a bright, dewy, vaginal laughter such as Jesus
H. Christ and Immanuel Pussyfoot Kant never dreamed of, because if they had
the world would not be what it is today and besides there would have been no
Kant and no Christ Almighty. The female seldom laughs, but when she does
it's volcanic. When the female laughs the male had better scoot to the
cyclone cellar. Nothing will stand up under that vaginating chortle, not
even ferroconcrete. The female, when her risibility is once aroused, can
laugh down the hyena or the jackal or the wild-cat. Now and then one hears
it at a lynching bee, for example. It means that the lid is off, that
everything goes. It means that she will forage for herself- and watch out
that you don't get your balls cut off! It means that if the pest is coming
SHE is coming first, and with huge spiked thongs that will flay the living
hide off you. It means that she will lay not only with Tom, Dick and Harry,
but with Cholera, Meningitis, Leprosy: it means that she will lay herself
down on the altar like a mare in rut and take on all comers, including the
Holy Ghost. It means that what it took the poor male, with his logarithmic
cunning, five thousand, ten thousand, twenty thousand years to build, she
will pull it down in a night. She will pull it down and pee on it, and
nobody will stop her once she starts laughing in earnest. And when I said
about Veronica that her laugh would break down the most "personal" hard-on
imaginable I meant it; she would break down the personal erection and hand
you back an impersonal one that was like a red-hot ramrod. You might not get
very far with Veronica herself, but with what she had to give you could
travel far and no mistake about it. Once you came within earshot of her it
was like you had gotten an overdose of Spanish fly. Nothing on earth could
bring it down again, unless you put it under a sledge-hammer.
It was going on this way all the time, even though every word I say is
a lie. It was a personal tour in the impersonal world, a man with a tiny
trowel in his hand digging a tunnel through the earth to get to the other
side. The idea was to tunnel through and find at last the Culebra Cut, the
nec plus ultra, of the honeymoon of flesh. And of course there was no end to
the digging. The best I might hope for was to get stuck in the dead centre
of the earth, where the pressure was strongest and most even all around, and
stay stuck there forever. That would give me the feeling of Ixion on the
wheel, which is one sort of salvation and not entirely to be sneezed at. On
the other hand I was a metaphysician of the instinctivist sort; it was
impossible for me to stay stuck anywhere, even in the dead centre of the
earth. It was most imperative to find and enjoy the metaphysical fuck, and
for that I would be obliged to come out on to a wholly new tableland, a mesa
of sweet alfalfa and polished monoliths, where the eagles and the vultures
flew at random.
Sometimes sitting in a park of an evening, especially a park littered
with papers and bits of food, I would see one pass by, one that seemed to be
going towards Tibet, and I would follow her with the round eye, hoping that
suddenly she would begin to fly, for if she did that, if she would begin to
fly, I knew I would be able to fly also, and that would mean an end to the
digging and the wallowing. Sometimes, probably because of twilight or other
disturbances, it seemed as though she actually did fly on rounding a comer.
That is, she would suddenly be lifted from the ground for the space of a few
feet, like a plane too heavily loaded; but just that sudden involuntary
lift, whether real or imaginary it didn't matter, gave me hope, gave me
courage to keep the still round eye riveted on the spot.
There were megaphones inside which yelled "Go on, keep going, stick it
out," and all that nonsense. But why? To what end? Whither? Whence? I would
set the alarm dock in order to be up and about at a certain hour, but why up
and about? Why get up at all? With that little trowel in my hand I was
working like a galley slave and not the slightest hope of reward involved.
Were I to continue straight on I would dig the deepest hole any man had ever
dug. On the other hand, if I had truly wanted to get to the other side of
the earth, wouldn't it have been much simpler to throw away the trowel and
just board an aeroplane for China? But the body follows after the mind. The
simplest thing for the body is not always easy for the mind. And when it
gels particularly difficult and embarrassing is that moment when the two
start going in opposite directions.
Labouring with the trowel was bliss; it left the mind completely free
and yet there was never the slightest danger of the two being separated. If
the she-animal suddenly began groaning with pleasure, if the she-animal
suddenly began to throw a pleasurable conniption fit, the jaws moving like
old shoe laces, the chest wheezing and the ribs creaking, if the she-bugger
suddenly started to fall apart on the floor, to the collapse of joy and
overexasperation, just at the moment, not a second this side or that, the
promised tableland would hove in sight like a ship coming up out of a fog
and there would be nothing to do but plant the stars and stripes on it and
claim it in the name of Uncle Sam and all that's holy. These misadventures
happened so frequently that it was impossible not to believe in the reality
of a realm which was called Fuck, because that was the only name which might
be given to it, and yet it was more than fuck and by fucking one only began
to approach it Everybody had at one time or another planted the flag in this
territory, and yet nobody was able to lay claim to it permanently. It
disappeared overnight - sometimes in the twinkling of an eye. It was No
Man's Land and it stank with the Utter of invisible deaths. If a truce were
declared you met in this terrain and shook hands or swapped tobacco. But the
truces never lasted very long. The only thing that seemed to have permanency
was the "zone between" idea. Here the bullet flew and the corpses piled up:
then it would rain and finally there would be nothing left but a
stench.
This is all a figurative way of speaking about what is unmentionable.
What is unmentionable is pure fuck and pure cunt; it must be mentioned only
in de luxe editions, otherwise the world will fall apart What holds the
world together, as I have learned from bitter experience, is sexual
intercourse. But fuck, the real thing, cunt, the real thing, seems to
contain some unidentified element which is far more dangerous than
nitroglycerine. To get an idea of the real thing you must consult a
Sears-Roebuck catalogue endorsed by the Anglican Church. On page 23 you will
find a picture of Priapus juggling a corkscrew on the end of his weeny; he
is standing in the shadow of the Parthenon by mistake; he is naked except
for a perforated jock-strap which was loaned for the occasion by the Holy
Rollers of Oregon and Saskatchewan. Long distance is on the wire demanding
to know if they should sell short or long. He says go fuck yourself and
hangs up the receiver. In the background Rembrandt is studying the anatomy
of our Lord Jesus Christ who, if you remember, was crucified by the Jews and
then taken to Abysinnia to be pounded with quoits and other objects. The
weather seems to be fair and warmer, as usual, except for a slight mist
rising up out of the Ionian; this is the sweat of Neptune's balls which were
castrated by the early monks, or perhaps it was by the Manicheans in the
time of the Pentecostal plague. Long strips of horse meat are hanging out to
dry and the flies are everywhere, just as Homer describes it in ancient
times. Hard by is a McCormick threshing machine, a reaper and binder with a
thirty-six horse-power engine and no cutout. The harvest is in and the
workers are counting their wages in the distant fields. This is the flush of
dawn on the first day of sexual intercourse in the old Hellenistic world,
now faithfully reproduced for us in colour thanks to the Zeiss Brothers and
other patient zealots of industry. But this is not the way it looked to the
men of Homer's time who were on the spot. Nobody knows how the god Priapus
looked when he was reduced to the ignominy of balancing a corkscrew on the
end of his weeny. Standing that way in the shadow of the Parthenon he
undoubtedly fell a-dreaming of far-off cunt; he must have lost consciousness
of the corkscrew and the threshing and reaping machine; he must have grown
very silent within himself and finally he must have lost even the desire to
dream. It is my idea, and of course I am willing to be corrected if I am
wrong, that standing thus in the rising mist he suddenly heard the Angelus
peal and lo and behold there appeared before his very eyes a gorgeous green
marshland in which the Chocktaws were making merry with the Navajos: in the
air above were the white condors, their ruffs festooned with marigolds. He
saw also a huge slate on which was written the body of Christ, the body of
Absalom and the evil which is lust. He saw the sponge soaked with frogs'
blood, the eyes which Augustine had sewn into his skin, the vest which was
not big enough to cover out iniquities. He saw these things in the whilomst
moment when the Navajos were making merry with the Chocktaws and he was so
taken by surprise that suddenly a voice issued from between his legs, from
the long thinking reed which he had lost in dreaming, and it was the most
inspired, the most shrill and piercing, the most jubilant and ferocious
cacchinating sort of voice that had ever wongled up from the depths. He
began to sing through that long cock of his with such divine grace and
elegance that the white condors came down out of the sky and shat huge
purple eggs all over the green marshland. Our Lord Christ got up from his
stone bed and, marked by the quoit though he was, he danced like a mountain
goat. The fellaheen came out of Egypt in their chains, followed by the
warlike Igorotes and the snail-eating men of Zanzibar.
This is how things stood on the first day of sexual intercourse in the
old Hellenistic world. Since then things have changed a great deal. It is no
longer polite to sing through your weeny, nor is it permitted even to
condors to shit purple eggs all over the place. All this is scatological,
eschatological and ecumenical. It is forbidden. Verboten. And so the Land of
Puck becomes ever more receding; it becomes mythological. Therefore am I
constrained to speak mythologically. I speak with extreme unction, and with
precious unguents too. I put away the clashing cymbals, the tubas, the white
marigolds, the oleanders and the rhododendrons. Up with the thorns and the
manacles! Christ is dead and mangled with quoits. The fellaheen are
bleaching in the sands of Egyptis, their wrists loosely shackled. The
vultures have eaten away every decomposing crumb of flesh. All is quiet, a
million golden mice nibbling at the unseen cheese. The moon is up and the
Nile ruminates on her riparian ravages. The earth belches silently, the
stars twitch and bleat, the rivers slip their banks. It's like this ...
There are cunts which laugh and cunts which talk: there are crazy,
hysterical cunts shaped like ocarinas and there are planturous,
seismographic cunts which register the rise and fall of sap: there are
cannibalistic cunts which open wide like the jaws of the whale and swallow
alive: there are also masochistic cunts which dose up like the oyster and
have hard shells and perhaps a pearl or two inside: there are dithyrambic
cunts which dance at the very approach of the penis and go wet all over in
ecstasy: there are the porcupine cunts which unleash their quills and wave
little flags at Christmas time: there are telegraphic cunts which practise
the Morse code and leave the mind full of dots and dashes; there are the
political cunts which are saturated with ideology and which deny even the
menopause; there are vegetative cunts which make no response unless you pull
them up by the roots; there are the religious cunts which smell like Seventh
Day Adventists and are full of beads, worms, clamshells, sheep droppings and
now and then dried breadcrumbs; there are the mammalian cunts which are
lined with otter skin and hibernate during the long winter: there are
cruising cunts fitted out like yachts, which are good for solitaries and
epileptics; there are glacial cunts in which you can drop shooting stars
without causing a flicker; there are miscellaneous cunts which defy category
or description, which you stumble on once in a lifetime and which leave you
seared and branded;
there are cunts made of pure joy which have neither name nor antecedent
and these are the best of all, but whither have they flown?
And then there is the one cunt which is all, and this we shall call the
super-cunt, since it is not of this land at all but of that bright country
to which we were long ago invited to fly. Here the dew is ever sparkling and
the tall reeds bend with the wind. It is here that great father of
fornication dwells. Father Apis, the mantic bull who gored his way to heaven
and dethroned the gelded deities of right and wrong. From Apis sprang the
race of unicorns, that ridiculous beast of ancient writ whose learned brow
lengthened into a gleaming phallus, and from the unicorn by gradual stages
was derived the late-city man of which Oswald Spengler speaks. And from the
dead cock of this sad specimen arose the giant skyscraper with its express
elevators and observation towers. We are the last decimal point of sexual
calculation; the world turns like a rotten egg in its crate of straw. Now
for the aluminium wings with which to fly to that far-off place, the bright
country where Apis, the father of fornication, dwells. Everything goes
forward like oiled docks; for each minute of the dial there are a million
noiseless docks which tick off the rinds of time. We are travelling faster
than the lightning calculator, faster than starlight, faster than the
magician can think. Each second is a universe of time. And each universe of
time is but a wink of sleep in the cosmogony of speed. When speed comes to
its end we shall be there, punctual as always and blissfully undenominated.
We shall shed our wings, our docks and our mantelpieces to lean on. We will
rise up feathery and jubilant, like a column of blood, and there will be no
memory to drag us down again. This time I call the realm of the super-cunt,
for it defies speed, calculation or imagery. Nor has the penis itself a
known size or weight. There is only the sustained fed of fuck, the fugitive
in full flight, the nightmare smoking his quiet cigar. Little Nemo walks
around with a seven day hard-on and a wonderful pair of blue balls
bequeathed by Lady Bountiful. It is Sunday morning around the corner from
Evergreen Cemetery. It is Sunday morning and I am lying blissfully dead to
the world on my bed of ferro-concrete. Around the comer is the cemetery,
which is to say - the world of sexual intercourse. My balls ache with the
fucking that is going on, but it is all going on beneath my window, on the
boulevard where Hymie keeps his copulating nest. I am thinking of one woman
and the rest is blotto. I say I am thinking of her, but the truth is I am
dying a stellar death. I am lying there like a sick star waiting for the
light to go out. Years ago I lay on this same bed and I waited and waited to
be born. Nothing happened. Except that my mother, in her Lutheran rage,
threw a bucket of water over me. My mother, poor imbecile that she was,
thought I was lazy. She didn't know that I had gotten caught in the stellar
drift, that I was being pulverized to a black extinction out there on the
farthest rim of the universe. She thought it was sheer laziness that kept me
riveted to the bed. She threw the bucket of water over me: I squirmed and
shivered a bit, but I continued to lie there on my ferro-concrete bed. I was
immovable. I was a burned-out meteor adrift somewhere in the neighbourhood
of Vega.
And now I'm on the same bed and the light that's in me refuses to be
extinguished. The world of men and women are making merry in the cemetery
grounds. They are having sexual intercourse. God bless them, and I am alone
in the Land of Fuck. It seems to me that I hear the clanking of a great
machine, the linotype bracelets passing through the wringer of sex. Hymie
and his nymphomaniac of a wife are lying on the same level with me, only
they are across the river. The river is called Death and it has a bitter
taste. I have waded through it many times, up to the hips, but somehow I
have neither been petrified nor immortalized. I am still burning brightly
inside, though outwardly dead as a planet. From this bed I have gotten up to
dance, not once but hundreds, thousands of times. Each time I came away I
had the conviction that I had danced the skeleton dance on a terrain vague.
Perhaps I had wasted too much of my substance on suffering; perhaps I had
the crazy idea that I would be the first metallurgical bloom of the human
species; perhaps I was imbued with the notion that I was both a sub- gorilla
and a super-god. On this bed of ferro-concrete I remember everything and
everything is in rock crystal. There are never any animals, only thousands
and thousands of human beings all talking at once, and for each word they
utter I have an answer immediately, sometimes before the word is out of
their mouths. There is plenty of killing, but no blood. The murders arc
perpetrated with cleanliness, and always in silence. But even if every