as like a bad dream. It got
worse and worse. The house in which my relatives still lived was like an old
fortress going to ruin; they were stranded in one of the wings of the
fortress, maintaining a forlorn, island life, beginning themselves to look
sheepish, hunted, degraded. They even began to make distinctions between
their Jewish neighbours, finding some of them quite human, quite decent,
dean, kind, sympathetic, charitable, etc. etc. To me it was heartrending. I
could have taken a machine gun and mowed the whole neighbourhood down, Jew
and Gentile together.
It was about the time of the invasion that the authorities decided to
change the name of North Second Street to Metropolitan Avenue. This highway,
which to the Gentiles had been the road to the cemeteries, now became what
is called an artery of traffic, a link between two ghettoes. On the New York
side the riverfront was rapidly being transformed owing to the erection of
the skyscrapers. On our side, the Brooklyn side, the warehouses were piling
up and the approaches to the various new bridges created plazas, comfort
stations, pool rooms, stationery shops, ice cream parlours, restaurants,
clothing stores, hock shops, etc. In short everything was becoming
metropolitan, in the odious sense of the word.
As long as we lived in the old neighbourhood we never referred to
Metropolitan Avenue: it was always North Second Street, despite the official
change of name. Perhaps it was eight or ten years later, when I stood one
winter's day at the corner of the street facing the river and noticed for
the first time the great tower of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Building,
that I realized that North Second Street was no more. The imaginary boundary
of my world had changed. My lance travelled now far beyond the cemeteries,
far beyond the rivers, far beyond the city of New York or the State of New
York, beyond the whole United States indeed. At Point Loma, California, I
had looked out upon the broad Pacific and I had felt something there which
kept my face permanently screwed in another direction. I came back to the
old neighbourhood, I remember, one night with my old friend Stanley who had
just come out of the army, and we walked the streets sadly and wistfully. A
European can scarcely know what this feeling is like. Even when a town
becomes modernized, in Europe, there are still vestiges of the old. In
America, though there are vestiges, they are effaced, wiped out of the
consciousness, trampled upon, obliterated, nullified by the new. The new is,
from day to day, a moth which eats into the fabric of life, leaving nothing
finally but a great hole. Stanley and I, we were walking through this
terrifying hole. Even a war does not bring this kind of desolation and
destruction. Through war a town may be reduced to ashes and the entire
population wiped out, but what springs up again resembles the old. Death is
fecundating, for the soil as well as for the spirit. In America the
destruction is completely annihilating. There is no rebirth only a cancerous
growth, layer upon layer of new, poisonous tissue, each one uglier than the
previous one.
We were walking through this enormous hole, as I say, and it was a
winter's night, dear, frosty, sparkling, and as we came through the south
side towards the boundary line we saluted all the old relics or the spots
where things had once stood and where there had been once something of
ourselves. And as we approached North Second Street, between Fillmore Place
and North Second Street - a distance of only a few yards and yet such a
rich, full area of the globe - before Mrs. O'Melio's shanty I stopped and
looked up at the house where I had known what it was to really have a being.
Everything had shrunk now to diminutive proportions, including the world
which lay beyond the boundary line, the world which had been so mysterious
to me and so terrifyingly grand, so delimited. Standing there in a trance I
suddenly recalled a dream which I have had over and over, which I still
dream now and then, and which I hope to dream as long as I live. It was the
dream of passing the boundary line. As in all dreams the remarkable thing is
the vividness of the reality, the fad that one is in reality and not
dreaming. Across the line I am unknown and absolutely alone. Even the
language has changed. In fact, I am always regarded as a stranger, a
foreigner. I have unlimited time on my hands and I am absolutely content in
sauntering through the streets. There is only one street, I must say - the
continuation of the street on which I lived. I come finally to an iron
bridge over the railroad yards. It is always nightfall when I reach the
bridge, though it is only a short distance from the boundary line. Here I
look down upon the webbed tracks, the freight stations, the tenders, the
storage sheds, and as I gaze down upon this duster of strange moving
substances a process of metamorphosis takes place, just as in a dream. With
the transformation and deformation I become aware that this is the old dream
which I have dreamed so often. I have a wild fear that I shall wake up, and
indeed I know that I will wake up shortly, just at the moment when in the
midst of a great open space I am about to walk into the house which contains
something of the greatest importance for me. Just as I go towards this house
the lot on which I am standing begins to grow vague at the edges, to
dissolve, to vanish. Space rolls in on me like a carpet and swallows me up,
and with it of course the house which I never succeed in entering.
There is absolutely no transition from this, the most pleasurable dream
I know to the heart of a book called Creative
Evolution. In this book by Henri Bergson, which I came to as naturally
as to the dream of the land beyond the boundary, I am again quite alone,
again a foreigner, again a man of indeterminate age standing on an iron
bridge observing a peculiar metamorphosis without and within. If this book
had not fallen into my hands at the precise moment it did, perhaps I would
have gone mad. It came at a moment when another huge world was crumbling on
my hands. If I had never understood a thing which was written in this book,
if I had preserved only the memory of one word, creative, it is quite
sufficient. This word was my talisman. With it I was able to defy the whole
world, and especially my friends.
There are times when one must break with one's friends in order to
understand the meaning of friendship. It may seem strange to say so, but the
discovery of this book was equivalent to the discovery of a weapon, an
implement, wherewith I might lop off all the friends who surrounded me and
who no longer meant anything to me. This book became my friend because it
taught me that I had no need of friends. It gave me the courage to stand
alone, and it enabled me to appreciate loneliness. I have never understood
the book; at times I thought I was on the point of understanding, but I
never really did understand. It was more important for me not to understand.
With this book in my hands, reading aloud to my friends, questioning them,
explaining to them, I was made clearly to understand that I had no friends,
that I was alone in the world. Because in not understanding the meaning of
the words, neither I nor my friends, one thing became very clear and that
was that there were ways of not understanding and that the difference
between the non-understanding of one individual and the non-understanding of
another created a world of terra firma even more solid than differences of
understanding. Everything which before I thought I had understood crumbled,
and I was left with a dean slate. My friends, on the other hand, entrenched
themselves more solidly in the little ditch of understanding which they had
dug for themselves. They died comfortably in their little bed of
understanding, to become useful citizens of the world. I pitied them, and in
short order. I deserted them one by one, without the slightest regret.
What was there then in this book which could mean so much to me and yet
remain obscure? I come back to the word creative. 1 am sure that the whole
mystery lies in the realization of the meaning of this word. When I think of
the book now, and the way I approached it, I think of a man going through
the rites of initiation. The disorientation and reorientation which comes
with the initiation into any mystery is the most wonderful experience which
it is possible to have. Everything which the brain has laboured for a
lifetime to assimilate, categorize and synthesize has to be taken apart and
reordered. Moving day for the soul! And of course it's not for a day, but
for weeks and months that this goes on. You meet a friend on the street by
chance, one whom you haven't seen for several weeks, and he has become an
absolute stranger to you. You give him a few signals from your new perch and
if he doesn't cotton you pass him up - for good. It's exactly like mopping
up a battlefield: all those who are hopelessly disabled and agonizing you
dispatch with one swift blow of your dub. You move on, to new fields of
battle, to new triumphs or defeats. But you move! And as yon move the world
moves with you, with terrifying exactitude. You seek out new fields of
operation, new specimens of the human race whom you patiently instruct and
equip with the new symbols. You choose sometimes those you would never have
looked at before. You try everybody and everything within range, provided
they are ignorant of the revelation.
It was in this fashion that I found myself sitting in the busheling
room of my father's establishment, reading aloud to the Jews who were
working there. Reading to them from this new Bible in the way that Paul must
have talked to the disciples. With the added disadvantage, to be sure, that
these poor Jew bastards could not read the English language. Primarily I was
directing myself towards Bunchek the cutter, who had a rabbinical mind.
Opening the book I would pick a passage at random and read it to them in a
transposed English almost as primitive as pidgin English. Then I would
attempt to explain, choosing for example and analogy the things they were
familiar with. It was amazing to me how well they understood, how much
better they understood, let me say, than a college professor or a literary
man or any educated man. Naturally what they understood had nothing to do
finally with Bergson's book, as a book, but was not that the purpose of such
a book as this? My understanding of the meaning of a book is that the book
itself disappears from sight, that it is chewed alive, digested and
incorporated into the system as flesh and blood which in turn creates new
spirit and reshapes the world. It was a great communion feast which we
shared in the reading of this book and the outstanding feature of it was the
chapter on Disorder which, having penetrated me through and through, has
endowed me with such a marvellous sense of order that if a comet suddenly
struck the earth and jarred everything out of place, stood everything upside
down, turned everything inside out, I could orient myself to the new order
in the twinkling of an eye. I have no fear or illusions about disorder any
more than I have of death. The labyrinth is my happy hunting ground and the
deeper I burrow into the maze the more oriented I become.
With Creative Evolution under my arm I board the elevated line at the
Brooklyn Bridge after work and I commence the journey homeward towards the
cemetery. Sometimes I get on at Delancey Street, the very heart of the
ghetto, after a long walk through the crowded streets. I enter the elevated
line below the ground, like a worm being pushed through the intestines. I
know each time I take my place in the crowd which mills about the platform
that I am the most unique individual down there. I look upon everything
which is happening about me like a spectator from another planet. My
language, my world, is under my arm. I am the guardian of a great secret; if
I were to open my mouth and talk I would tie up traffic. What I have to say,
and what I am holding in every night of my life on this journey to and from
the office, is absolute dynamite. I am not ready yet to throw my stick of
dynamite. I nibble at it meditatively, ruminatively, cogently. Five more
years, ten more years perhaps, and I will wipe these people out utterly. If
the train in making a curve gives a violent lurch I say to myself fine! jump
the track, annihilate them! I never think of myself as being endangered
should the train jump the track. We're wedged in like sardines and all the
hot flesh pressed against me diverts my thoughts. I become conscious of a
pair of legs wrapped around mine. I look down at the girl sitting in front
of me, I look her right in the eye, and I press my knees still further into
her crotch. She grows uneasy, fidgets about in her seat, and finally she
turns to the girl next to her and complains that I am molesting her. The
people about look at me hostilely. I look out of the window blandly and
pretend I have heard nothing. Even if I wished to I can't remove my legs.
Little by little though, the girl, by a violent pushing and squiggling,
manages to unwrap her legs from mine. I find myself almost in the same
situation with the girl next to her, the one she was addressing her
complaints to. Almost at once I feel a sympathetic touch and then, to my
surprise, I hear her tell the other girl that one can't help these things,
that it is really not the man's fault but the fault of the company for
packing us in like sheep. And again I feel the quiver of her legs against
mine, a warm, human pressure, like squeezing one's hand. With my one free
hand I manage to open my book. My object is twofold: first I want her to see
the kind of book I read, second, I want to be able to carry on the leg
language without attracting attention. It works beautifully. By the time the
train empties a bit I am able to take a seat beside her and converse with
her - about the book, naturally. She's a voluptuous Jewess with enormous
liquid eyes and the frankness which come from sensuality. When it comes time
to get off we walk arm in arm through the streets, towards her home. I am
almost on the confines of the old neighbourhood. Everything is familiar to
me and yet repulsively strange. I have not walked these streets for years
and now I am walking with a Jew girl from the ghetto, a beautiful girl with
a strong Jewish accent. I look incongruous walking beside her. I can sense
that people are staring at us behind our backs. I am the intruder, the Goy
who has come down into the neighbourhood to pick off a nice ripe cunt. She
on the other hand seems to be proud of her conquest; she's showing me off to
her friends. This is what I picked up in the train, an educated Goy, a
refined Goy! I can almost hear her think it. Walking slowly I'm getting the
lay of the land, all the practical details which will decide whether I call
for her after dinner or not. There's no thought of asking her t6 dinner.
It's a question of what time and where to meet and how will we go about it,
because as she lets drop just before we reach the door, she's got a husband
who's a travelling salesman and she's got to be careful. I agree to come
back and to meet her at the comer in front of the candy store at a certain
hour. If I want to bring a friend along she'll bring her girl friend. No, I
decide to see her alone. It's agreed. She squeezes my hand and darts off
into a dirty hallway. I beat it quickly back to the elevated station and
hasten home to gulp down the meal.
It's a Summer's night and everything flung wide open. Riding back to
meet her the whole past rushes up kaleidoscopically. This time I've left the
book at home. It's cunt I'm out for now and no thought of the book is in my
head. I am back again this side of the boundary line, each station whizzing
past making my world grow more diminutive. I am almost a child by the time I
reach the destination. I am a child who is horrified by the metamorphosis
which has taken place. What has happened to me, a man of the 14th Ward, to
be jumping off at this station in search of a Jewish cunt? Supposing I do
give her a fuck, what then? What have I got to say to a girl like that?
What's a fuck when what I want is love? Yes, suddenly it comes over me like
a tornado... Una, the girl I loved, the girl who lived here in this
neighbourhood, Una with big blue eyes and flaxen hair, Una who made me
tremble just to look at her, Una whom I was afraid to kiss or even to touch
her hand. Where is Una? Yes, suddenly, that's the burning question: where is
Una ? In two seconds I am completely unnerved, completely lost, desolate, in
the most horrible anguish and despair. How did I ever let her go? Why? What
happened? When did it happen? I thought of her like a maniac night and day,
year in and year out, and then, without even noticing it, she drops out of
my mind, like that, like a penny falling through a hole in your pocket.
Incredible, monstrous, mad. Why all I had to do was to ask her to marry me,
ask her hand - that's all. If I had done that she would have said yes
immediately. She loved me, she loved me desperately. Why yes, I remember
now, I remember how she looked at me the last time we met. I was saying
good-bye because I was leaving that night for California, leaving everybody
to begin a new life. And I never had any intention of leading a new life. I
intended to ask her to marry me, but the story I had framed like a dope came
out of my lips so naturally that I believed it myself, and so I said
good-bye and I walked off, arid she stood there looking after me and I felt
her eyes pierce me through and through. I heard her howling inside, but like
an automaton I kept on walking and finally I turned the comer and that was
the end of it. Good-bye! Like that. Like in a coma. And I meant to say come
to me! Come to me because I can't live any more without you!
I am so weak, so rocky, that I can scarcely climb down the L steps. Now
I know what's happened - I've crossed the boundary line! This Bible that
I've been carrying around with me is to instruct me, initiate me into a new
way of life. The world I knew is no more, it is dead, finished, cleaned up.
And everything that I was is cleaned up with it. I am a carcass getting an
injection of new life. I am bright and glittery, rabid with new discoveries,
but in the centre it is still leaden, still slag. I begin to weep - right
there on the L stairs. I sob aloud, like a child. Now it dawns on me with
full clarity: you are alone in the world! You are alone . . . alone . . .
alone. It is bitter to be alone . .. bitter, bitter, bitter, bitter. There
is no end to it, it is unfathomable, and it is the lot of every man on
earth, but especially mine . . . especially mine. Again the metamorphosis.
Again everything totters, and careens. I am in the dream again, the painful,
delirious, pleasurable, maddening dream of beyond the boundary. I am
standing in the centre of the vacant lot, but my home I do not see. I have
no home. The dream was a mirage. There never was a house in the midst of the
vacant lot. That's why I was never able to enter it. My home is not in this
world, nor in the next I am a man without a home, without a friend, without
a wife. I am a monster who belongs to a reality which does not exist yet.
Ah, but it does exist, it will exist, I am sure of it. I walk now rapidly,
head down, muttering to myself. I've forgotten about my rendezvous so
completely that I never even noticed whether I walked past her or not.
Probably I did. Probably I looked right at her and didn't recognize her.
Probably she didn't recognize me either. I am mad, mad with pain, mad with
anguish. I am desperate. But I am not lost. No, there is a reality to which
I belong. It's far away, very far away. I may walk from now till doomsday
with head down and never find her. But it is there, I am sure of it. I look
at people murderously. If I could throw a bomb and blow the whole
neighbourhood to smithereens I would do it. I would be happy seeing them fly
in the air, mangled, shrieking, torn apart, annihilated. I want to
annihilate the whole earth. I am not a part of it. It's mad from start to
finish. The whole shooting match. It's a huge piece of stale cheese with
maggots festering inside it. Fuck it! Blow it to hell! Kill, kill, kill:
Kill them all, Jews and Gentiles, young and old, good and bad ...
I grow light, light as a feather, and my pace becomes more steady, more
calm, more even. What a beautiful night it is! The stars shining so
brightly, so serenely, so remotely. Not mocking me precisely, but reminding
me of the futility of it all. Who are you, young man, to be talking of the
earth, of blowing things to smithereens? Young man, we have been hanging
here for millions and billions of years. We have seen it all, everything,
and still we shine peacefully every night, we light the way, we still the
heart. Look around you, young man, see how still and beautiful everything
is. Do you see, even the garbage lying in the gutter looks beautiful in this
light. Pick up the little cabbage leaf, hold it gently in your hand. I bend
down and pick up the cabbage leaf lying in the gutter. It looks absolutely
new to me, a whole universe in itself. I break a little piece off and
examine that. Still a universe. Still unspeakably beautiful and mysterious.
I am almost ashamed to throw it back in the gutter. I bend down and deposit
it gently with the other refuse. I become very thoughtful, very, very calm.
I love everybody in the world. I know that somewhere at this very moment
there is a woman waiting for me and if only I proceed very calmly, very
gently, very slowly, I will come to her. She will be standing on a comer
perhaps and when I come in sight she will recognize me - immediately. I
believe this, so help me God! I believe that everything is just and
ordained. My home? Why it is the world - the whole world! I am at home
everywhere, only I did not know it before. But I know now. There is no
boundary line any more. There never was a boundary line: it was I who made
it. I walk slowly and blissfully through the streets. The beloved streets.
Where everybody walks and everybody suffers without showing it. When I stand
and lean against a lamp post to light my cigarette even the lamp post feels
friendly. It is not a thing of iron - it is a creation of the human mind,
shaped a certain way, twisted and formed by human hands, blown on with human
breath, placed by human hands and feet. I turn round and rub my hand over
the iron surface. It almost seems to speak to me. It is a human lamp post.
It belongs, like the cabbage leaf, like the torn socks, like the mattress,
like the kitchen sink. Everything stands in a certain way in a certain
place, as our mind stands in relation to God. The world, in its visible,
tangible substance, is a map of our love. Not God but life is love. Love,
love, love. And in the midmost midst of it walks this young man, myself, who
is none other than Gotdieb Leberecht Muller.
Gotdieb Leberecht Miiller! This is the name of a man who lost his
identity. Nobody could tell him who he was, where he came from or what had
happened to him. In the movies, where I first made the acquaintance of this
individual it was assumed that he had met with an accident in the war. But
when I recognized myself on the screen, knowing that I had never been to the
war, I realized that the author had invented this little piece of fiction in
order not to expose me. Often I forget which is the real me. Often in my
dreams I take the draught of forgetfulness, as it is called, and I wander
forlorn and desperate, seeking the body and the name which is mine. And
sometimes between the dream and reality there is only the thinnest line.
Sometimes while a person is talking to me I step out of my shoes, and, like
a plant drifting with the current, I begin the voyage, of my rootless self.
In this condition I am quite capable of fulfilling the ordinary demands of
life - of finding a wife, of becoming a father, of supporting the household,
of entertaining friends, of reading books, of paying taxes, of performing
military services, and so on and so forth. In this condition I am capable if
needs be, of killing in cold blood, for the sake of my family or to protect
my country, or whatever it may be. I am the ordinary, routine citizen who
answers to a name and who is given a number in his passport. I am thoroughly
irresponsible for my fate.
Then one day, without the slightest warning, I wake up and looking
about me I understand absolutely nothing of what is going on about me,
neither my own behaviour nor that of my neighbours, nor do I understand why
the governments are at war or at peace, whichever the case may be. At such
moments I am born anew, born and baptized by my right name: Gotdieb
Leberecht Miiller! Everything I do in my right name is looked upon as crazy.
People make furtive signs behind my back, sometimes to my face even. I am
forced to break with friends and family and loved ones. I am obliged to
break camp. And so, just as naturally as in dream, I find myself once again
drifting with the current, usually walking along a highway, my face set
towards the sinking sun. Now all my faculties become alert. I am the most
suave silky, cunning animal - and I am at the same time what might be called
a holy man. I know how to fend for myself. I know how to avoid work, how to
avoid entangling relationships, how to avoid pity, sympathy, bravery, and
all the other pitfalls. I stay in place or widi a person just long enough to
obtain what I need, and then I'm off again. I have no goal: the aimless
wandering is sufficient unto itself. I am free as a bird, sure as an
equilibrist. Manna falls from the sky; I have only to hold out my hands and
receive. And everywhere I leave the most pleasant feeling behind me, as
though, in accepting the gifts that are showered upon me, I am doing a real
favour to others. Even my dirty linen is taken care of by loving hands.
Because everybody loves a right-living man! Gottlieb! What a beautiful name
it is! Gotdieb! I say to myself over and over. Gottlieb Leberecht Muller.
In this condition I have always fallen in with thieves and rogues and
murderers, and how .kind and gentle they have been with me! As though they
were my brothers. And are they not, indeed? Have I not been guilty of every
crime, and suffered for it? And is it not just because of my crimes that I
am united so closely to my fellowman? Always, when I see a light of
recognition in the other person's eyes, I am aware of this secret bond. It
is only the just whose eyes never light up. It is the just who have never
known the secret of human fellowship. It is the just who are committing the
crimes against man, the just who are the real monsters. It is the just who
demand our fingerprints, who prove to us that we have died even when we
stand before them in the flesh. It is the just who impose upon us arbitrary
names, false names, who put false dates in the register and bury us alive. I
prefer the thieves, the rogues, the murderers unless I can find a man of my
own stature, my own quality.
I have never found such a man! I have never found a man as generous as
myself, as forgiving, as tolerant, as carefree, as reckless, as clean at
heart. I forgive myself for every crime I have committed. I do it in the
name of humanity. I know what it means to be human, the weakness and the
strength of it. I suffer from this knowledge and I revel in it also. If I
had the chance to be God I would reject it. If I had the chance to be a star
I would reject it. The most wonderful opportunity which life offers is to be
human. It embraces the whole universe. It includes the knowledge of death,
which not even God enjoys.
At the point from which this book is written I am the man who baptized
himself anew. It is many years since this happened and so much has come in
between that it is difficult to get back to that moment and retrace the
journey of Gottlieb Leberecht Muller. However, perhaps I can give the clue
if I say that the man which I now am was born out of a wound. That wound
went to the heart. By all man-made logic I should have been dead. I was in
fact given up for dead by all who once knew me; I walked about like a ghost
in their midst. They used the past tense in referring to me, they pitied me,
they shovelled me under deeper and deeper. Yet I remembered how I used to
laugh then, as always, how I made love to other women, how I enjoyed my food
and drink, and the soft bed which I dung to like a fiend. Something had
killed me, and yet I was alive. But I was live without a memory, without a
name; I was cut off from hope as well as from remorse or regret. I had no
past and I would probably have no future;
I was buried alive in a void which was the wound that had been dealt
me. I was the wound itself.
I have a friend who talks to me from time to time about the Miracle of
Golgotha of which I understand nothing. But I do know something about the
miraculous wound which I received, the wound which killed me in the eyes of
the world and out of which I was born anew and rebaptized. I know something
of the miracle of this wound which I lived and which healed with my death. I
tell it as of something long past, but it is with me always. Everything is
long past and seemingly invisible, like a constellation which has sunk
forever beneath the horizon.
What fascinates me is that anything so dead and buried as I was could
be resuscitated, and not just once, but innumerable times. And not only
that, but each time I faded out I plunged deeper than ever into the void, so
that with each resuscitation the miracle becomes greater. And never any
stigmata! The man who is reborn is always the same man, more and more
himself with each rebirth. He is only shedding his skin each time, and with
his skin his sins. The man whom God loves is truly a right living man. The
man whom God loves is the onion with a million skins. To shed the first
layer is painful beyond words; the next layer is less painful, the next
still less, until finally the pain becomes pleasurable, more and more
pleasurable, a delight, an ecstasy. And then there is neither pleasure not
pain, but simply darkness yielding before the light. And as the darkness
falls away the wound comes out of its hiding place: the wound which is man,
man's love, is bathed in light. The identity which was lost is recovered.
Man walks forth from his open wound, from the grave which he had carried
about with him so long.
In the tomb which is my memory I see her buried now, the one I loved
better than all else, better than the world, better than God, better than my
own flesh and blood. I see her festering there in that bloody wound of love,
so dose to me that I could not distinguish her from the wound itself. I see
her struggling to free herself, to make herself clean of love pain, and with
each struggle sinking back again into the wound, mired, suffocated, writhing
in blood. I see the terrible look in her eyes, the mute piteous agony, the
look of the beast that is trapped. I see her opening her legs for
deliverance and each orgasm a groan of anguish. I hear the walls falling,
the walls caving in on us and the house going up in flames. I hear them
calling us from the street, the summons to work, the summons to arms, but we
are nailed to the floor and the rats are biting into us. The grave and womb
of love entombing us, the night filling our bowels and the stars shimmering
over the black bottomless lake. I lose the memory of words, of her name even
which I pronounced like a monomaniac. I forgot what she looked like, what
she felt like, what she smelt like, what she fucked like, piercing deeper
and deeper into the night of the fathomless cavern. I followed her to the
deepest hole of her being, to the charnel house of her soul, to the breath
which had not yet expired from her lips. I sought relentlessly for her whose
name was not written anywhere, I penetrated to the very altar and found -
nothing. I wrapped myself around this hollow shell of nothingness like a
serpent with fiery coils; I lay still for six centuries without breathing as
world events sieved through to the bottom forming a slimy bed of mucus. I
saw the constellations wheeling about the huge hole in the ceiling of the
universe: I saw the outer planets and the black star which was to deliver
me. I saw the Dragon shaking itself free of dharma and karma, saw the new
race of man stewing in the yolk of futurity. I saw through to the last sign
and symbol, but I could not read her face. I could see only the eyes shining
through, huge, fleshy-like luminous breasts, as though I were swim- ming
behind them in the electric effluvia of her incandescent vision.
How had she come to expand thus beyond all grip of consciousness? By
what monstrous law had she spread herself thus over the face of the world,
revealing everything and yet concealing herself? She was hidden in the face
of the sun, like the moon in eclipse; she was a mirror which had lost its
quicksilver, the mirror which yields both the image and the horror. Looking
into the backs of her eyes, into the pulpy translucent flesh, I saw the
brain structure of all formations, all relations, all evanescence. I saw the
brain within the brain, the endless machine endlessly turning, the word Hope
revolving on a spit, roasting, dripping with fat, revolving ceaselessly in
the cavity of the third eye. I heard her dreams mumbled in lost tongues, the
stifled screams reverberating in minute crevices, the gasps, the groans, the
pleasurable sighs, the swish of lashing whips. I heard her call my own name
which I had not yet uttered, I heard her curse and shriek with rage. I heard
everything magnified a thousand times, like a homunculus imprisoned in the
belly organ. I caught the muffled breathing of the world, as if fixed in the
very crossroads of sound.
Thus we walked and slept and ate together, the Siamese twins whom Love
had joined and whom Death alone could separate.
We walked upside down, hand in hand, at the neck of the Bottle. She
dressed in black almost exclusively, except for patches of purple now and
then. She wore no underclothes, just a simple sheet of black velvet
saturated with a diabolical perfume. We went to bed at dawn and got up just
as it was darkling. We lived in black holes with drawn curtains, we ate from
black plates, we read from black books. We looked out of the black hole of
our life into the black hole of the world. The sun was permanently blacked
out, as though to aid us in continuous internecine strife. For sun we had
Mars, for moon Saturn: we lived permanently in the zenith of the underworld.
The earth had ceased to revolve and through the hole in the sky above us
there hung the black star which never twinkled. Now and then we had fits of
laughter, crazy, batrachian laughter which made the neighbours shudder. Now
and then we sang, delirious, on-key, full tremolo. We were locked in
throughout the long dark night of the soul, a period of incommensurable time
which began and ended in the manner of an eclipse. We revolved about our own
egos, like phantom satellites. We were drunk with our own image which we saw
when we looked into each other's eyes. How then did we look to others ? As
the beast looks to the plant, as the stars look to the beast. Or as God
would look to man if the devil had given him wings. And with it all, in the
fixed, dose intimacy of a night without end she was radiant, jubilant, an
ultra-black jubilation streaming from her like a steady flow of sperm from
the Mithraic Bull. She was double-barrelled, like a shot-gun, a female bull
with an acetylene torch in her womb. In heat she focussed on the grand
cosmocrator, her eyes rolled back to the whites, her lips a-saliva. In the
blind hole of sex she waltzed like a trained mouse, her jaws unhinged like a
snake's, her skin horripilating in barbed plumes. She had the insatiable
lust of a unicorn, the itch that laid the Egyptians low. Even the hole in
the sky through which the lacklustre star shone down was swallowed up in her
fury.
We lived glued to the ceiling, the hot, rancid fume of the everyday
life steaming up and suffocating us. We lived at marble heat, the ascending
glow of human flesh warming the snake-like coils in which we were locked. We
lived riveted to the nethermost depths, our skins smoked to the colour of a
grey cigar by the fumes of worldly passion. Like two heads carried on the
pikes of our executioners we circled slowly and fixedly over the heads and
shoulders of the world below. What was life on the solid earth to us who
were decapitated and forever joined at the genitals? We were the twin snakes
of Paradise, lucid in heat and cool as chaos itself. Life was a perpetual
black fuck about a fixed pole of insomnia. Life was Scorpio conjunction
Mars, conjunction Mercury, conjunction Venus, conjunction Saturn,
conjunction Pluto, conjunction Uranus, conjunction quicksilver, laudanum,
radium, bismuth. The grand conjunction was every Saturday night, Leo
fornicating with Draco in the house of brother and sister. The great malheur
was a ray of sunlight stealing through the curtains. The great curse was
Jupiter, king of the fishes, that he might flash a benevolent eye.
The reason why it is difficult to tell it is because I remember too
much. I remember everything, but like a dummy sitting on the lap of a
ventriloquist. It seems to me that throughout the long, uninterrupted
connubial solstice I sat on her lap (even when she was standing) and spoke
the lines she had taught me. It seems to me that she must have commanded
God's chief plumber to keep the black star shining through the hole in the
ceiling, must have bid him to rain down perpetual night and with it all the
crawling torments that move noiselessly about in the dark so that the mind
becomes a twirling awl burrowing frantically into black nothingness. Did I
only imagine that she talked incessantly, or had I become such a
marvellously trained dummy that I intercepted the thought before it reached
the lips? The lips were finely parted, smoothed down with a thick paste of
dark blood: I watched them open and dose with the utmost fascination,
whether they hissed a viper's hate or cooed like a turtle dove. They were
always close-up, as in the movie stills, so that I knew every crevice, every
pore, and when the hysterical salivating began I watched the spittle fume
and foam as though I were sitting in a rocking chair under Niagara Falls. I
learned what to do just as though I were a part of her organism; I was
better than a ventriloquist's dummy because I could act without being
violently jerked by strings. Now and then I did things impromptu like, which
sometimes pleased her enormously; she would pretend, of course, not to
notice these interruptions, but I could always tell when she was pleased by
the way she preened herself. She had the gift for transformation; almost as
quick and subtle she was as the devil himself. Next to the panther and the
jaguar she did the bird stuff best: the wild heron, the ibis, the flamingo,
the swan in rut. She had a w