Parsifal, King Alfred,
Frederick the Great, the Hanseatic League, the Battle of Hastings,
Thermopylae, 1492,1786, 18l2, Admiral Farragut, Pickett's charge. The Light
Brigade, we are gathered here today, the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not,
one and indivisible, no, 16, no, 27, help! murder! police! - and yelling
louder and louder and going faster and faster I go completely off my nut and
there is no more pain, no more terror, even though they are piercing me
everywhere with knives. Suddenly I am absolutely calm and the body which is
lying on the block, which they are still gouging with glee and ecstasy,
feels nothing because I, the owner of it, have escaped. I have become a
tower of stone which leans over the scene and watches with scientific
interest. I have only to succumb to the law of gravity and I will fall on
them and obliterate them. But I do not succumb to the law of gravity because
I am too fascinated by the horror of it all. I am so fascinated, in fact,
that I grow more and more windows. And as the light penetrates the stone
interior of my being I can feel that my roots, which are in the earth, are
alive and that I shall one day be able to remove myself at will from this
trance in which I am fixed.
So much for the dream, in which I am helplessly rooted. But in
actuality, when the dear uterine relatives come, I am as free as a bird and
darting to and fro like a magnetic needle. If they ask me a question I give
them five answers, each of which is better than the other; if they ask me to
play a waltz I play a double-breasted sonata for the left hand; if they ask
me to help myself to another leg of chicken I dean up the plate, dressing
and all; if they urge me to go out and play in the street I go out and in my
enthusiasm I cut my cousin's head open with a tin can: if they threaten to
give me a thrashing I say go to it, I don't mind! If they pat me on the head
for my good progress at school I spit on the floor to show that I have still
something to learn. I do everything they wish me to do plus. If they wish me
to be quiet and say nothing I become as quiet as a rock: I don't hear when
they speak to me, I don't move when I'm touched, I don't cry when I'm
pinched, I don't budge when I'm pushed. If they complain that I'm stubborn I
become as pliant and yielding as rubber. If they wish me to get fatigued so
that I will not display too much energy I let them give me all kinds of work
to do and I do the jobs so thoroughly that I collapse on the floor finally
like a sack of wheat. If they wish me to be reasonable I become
ultra-reasonable, which drives them crazy. If they wish me to obey I obey to
the letter, which causes endless confusion. And all this because the
molecular life of brother-and-sister is incompatible with the atomic weights
which have been allotted us. Because she doesn't grow at all I grow like a
mushroom; because she has no personality I become a colossus; because she is
free of evil I become a thirty-two branched candelabra of evil; because she
demands nothing of any one I demand everything; because she inspires
ridicule everywhere I inspire fear and respect; because she is humiliated
and tortured I wreak vengeance upon every one, friend and foe alike; because
she is helpless I make myself all-powerful. The gigantism from which I
suffered was simply the result of an effort to wipe out the little stain of
rust which had attached itself to the family skate, so to speak. That little
stain of rust under the clamps made me a champion skater. It made me skate
so fast and furiously that even when the ice had melted I was still skating,
skating through the mud, through asphalt, through brooks and rivers and
melon patches and theories of economics and so forth. I could skate through
hell, I was that fast and nimble.
But all this fancy skating was of no use - Father Coxcox, the
pan-American Noah, was always calling me back to the Ark. Every time I
stopped skating there was a cataclysm - the earth opened up and swallowed
me. I was a brother to every man and at the same time a traitor to myself. I
made the most astounding sacrifices, only to find that they were of no
value. Of what use was it to prove that I could be what was expected of me
when I did not want to be any of these things? Every time you come to the
limit of what is demanded of you, you are faced with the same problem - to
be yourself! And with the first step you make in this direction you realize
that there is neither plus nor minus; you throw the skates away and swim.
There is no suffering any more because there is nothing which can threaten
your security. And there is no desire to be of help to others even, because
why rob them of a privilege which must be earned? Life stretches out from
moment to moment in stupendous infinitude. Nothing can be more real than
what you suppose it to be. Whatever you think the cosmos to be it is and it
could not possibly be anything else as long as you are you and I am I. You
live in the fruits of your action and your action is the harvest of your
thought. Thought and action are one, because swimming you are in it and of
it, and it is everything you desire it to be, no more, no less. Every stroke
counts for eternity. The heating and cooling system is one system, and
Cancer is separated from Capricorn only by an imaginary line. You don't
become ecstatic and you are not plunged into violent grief; you don't pray
for rain, neither do you dance a jig. You live like a happy rock in the
midst of the ocean: you are fixed while everything about you is in turbulent
motion. You are fixed in a reality which permits the thought that nothing is
fixed, that even the happiest and mightiest rock will one day be utterly
dissolved and fluid as the ocean from which it was born.
This is the musical life which I was approaching by first skating like
a maniac through all the vestibules and corridors which lead from the outer
to the inner. My struggles never brought me near it, nor did my furious
activity, nor my rubbing elbows with humanity. All that was simply a
movement from vector to vector in a circle which however the perimeter
expanded, remained withal parallel to the realm I speak of. The wheel of
destiny can be transcended at any moment because at every point of its
surface it touches the real world and only a spark of illumination is
necessary to bring about the miraculous, to transform the skater to a
swimmer and the swimmer to a rock. The rock is merely an image of the act
which stops the futile rotation of the wheel and plunges the being into full
consciousness. And full consciousness is indeed like an inexhaustible ocean
which gives itself to sun and moon and also includes the sun and moon.
Everything which is is born out of the limitless ocean of light - even the
night.
Sometimes, in the ceaseless revolutions of the wheel, I caught a
glimpse of the nature of the jump which it was necessary to make. To jump
dear of the clockwork - that was the liberating thought. To be something
more, something different, than the most brilliant maniac of the earth 1 The
story of man on earth bored me. Conquest, even the conquest of evil, bored
me. To radiate goodness is marvellous, because it is tonic, invigorating,
vitalizing. But just to be is still more marvellous, because it is endless
and requires no demonstration. To be is music, which is a profanation of
silence in the interests of silence, and therefore beyond good and evil.
Music is the manifestation of action without activity. It is the pure act of
creation swimming on its own bosom. Music neither goads nor defends, neither
seeks nor explains. Music is the noisdess sound made by the swimmer in the
ocean of consdousness. It is a reward which can only be given by oneself. It
is the gift of the god which one is because he has ceased thinking about
god. It is an augur of the God which every one will become in due time, when
all that is will be beyond imagination.
CODA
Not long ago I was walking the streets of New York. Dear old Broadway.
It was night and the sky was an Oriental blue, as blue as the gold in the
ceiling of the Pagode, rue de Babylone, when the machine starts clicking. I
was passing exactly below the place where we first met. I stood there a
moment looking up at the red lights in the windows. The music sounded as it
always sounded - light, peppery, enchanting. I was alone and there were
millions of people around me. It came over me, as I stood there, that I
wasn't thinking of her any more; I was thinking of this book which I am
writing, and the book had become more important to me than her, than all
that had happened to us. Will this book be the truth, the whole truth, and
nothing but the truth, so help me God? Plunging into the crowd again I
wrestled with this question of "truth". For years I have been trying to tell
this story and always the question of truth has weighed upon me like a
nightmare. Time and again I have related to others the circumstances of our
life, and I have always told the truth. But the truth can also be a lie. The
truth is not enough. Truth is only the core of a totality which is
inexhaustible.
I remember the first time we were ever separated this idea of totality
seized me by the hair. She pretended, when she left me, or maybe she
believed it herself, that it was necessary for our welfare. I knew in my
heart that she was trying to be free of me, but I was too cowardly to admit
it to myself. But when I realized that she could do without me, even for a
limited time, the truth which I had tried to shut out began to grow with
alarming rapidity. It was more painful than anything I had ever experienced
before, but it was also healing. When I was completely emptied, when the
loneliness had reached such a point that it could not be sharpened any
further, I suddenly felt that, to go on living, this intolerable truth had
to be incorporated into something greater than the frame of personal
misfortune. I felt that I had made an imperceptible switch into another
realm, a realm of tougher, more elastic fibre, which the most horrible truth
was powerless to destroy. I sat down to write her a letter telling her that
I was so miserable over the thought of losing her that I had decided to
begin a book about her, a book which would immortalize her. It would be a
book, I said, such as no one had ever seen before. I rambled on
ecstatically, and in the midst of it I suddenly broke off to ask myself why
I was so happy.
Passing beneath the dance hall, thinking again of this book, I realized
suddenly that our life had come to an end: I realized that the book I was
planning was nothing more than a tomb in which to bury her - and the me
which had belonged to her. That was some time ago, and ever since I have
been trying to write it. Why is it so difficult? Why? Because the idea of an
"end" is intolerable to me.
Truth lies in this knowledge of the end which is ruthless and
remorseless. We can know the truth and accept it, or we can refuse the
knowledge of it and neither die nor be born again. In this manner it is
possible to live forever, a negative life as solid and complete, or as
dispersed and fragmentary, as the atom. And if we pursue this road far
enough, even this atomic eternity can yield to nothingness and the universe
itself fall apart.
For years now I have been trying to tell this story; each time I have
started out I have chosen a different route. I am like an explorer who,
wishing to circumnavigate the globe, deems it unnecessary to carry even a
compass. Moreover, from dreaming over it so long, the story itself has come
to resemble a vast, fortified city, and I who dream it over and over, am
outside the city, a wanderer, arriving before one gate after another too
exhausted to enter. And as with the wanderer, this city in which my story is
situated eludes me perpetually. Always in sight it nevertheless remains
unattainable, a sort of ghostly citadel floating in the clouds. From the
soaring, crenellated battlements flocks of huge white geese swoop down in
steady, wedge-shaped formation. With the tips of their blue-white wings they
brush the dreams that dazzle my vision. My feet move confusedly; no sooner
do I gain a foothold than I am lost again. I wander aimlessly, trying to
gain a solid, unshakeable foothold whence I can command a view of my life,
but behind me there lies only a welter of crisscrossed tracks, a groping,
confused encircling, the spasmodic gambit of the chicken whose head has just
been lopped off.
Whenever I try to explain to myself the peculiar pattern which my life
has taken, when I reach back to the first cause, as it were, I think
inevitably of the girl I first loved. It seems to me that everything dates
from that aborted affair. A strange, masochistic affair it was, ridiculous
and tragic at the same time. Perhaps I had the pleasure of kissing her two
or three times, the sort of kiss one reserves for a goddess. Perhaps I saw
her alone several times. Certainly she could never have dreamed that for
over a year I walked past her home every night hoping to catch a glimpse of
her at the window. Every night after dinner I would get up from the table
and take the long route which led to her home. She was never at the window
when I passed and I never had the courage to stand in front of the house and
wait. Back and forth I passed, back and forth, but never hide nor hair of
her. Why didn't I write her? Why didn't I call her up? Once I remember
summoning enough pluck to invite her to the theatre. I arrived at her home
with a bunch of violets, the first and only time I ever bought flowers for a
woman. As we were leaving the theatre the violets dropped from her corsage,
and in my confusion I stepped on them. I begged her to leave them there, but
she insisted on gathering them up. I was thinking how awkward I was - it was
only long afterwards that I recalled the smile she had given me as she
stooped down to pick up the violets.
It was a complete fiasco. In the end I ran away. Actually I was running
away from another woman, but the day before leaving town I decided to see
her once again. It was midaftemoon and she came out to talk to me in the
street, in the little areaway which was fenced on". She was already engaged
to another man; she pretended to be happy about it but I could see, blind as
I was, that she wasn't as happy as she pretended to be. If I had only said
the word I am sure she would have dropped the other fellow; perhaps she
would even have gone away with me. I preferred to punish myslef. I said
goodbye nonchalantly and I went down the street like a dead man. The next
morning I was bound for the Coast, determined to start a new life.
The new life was also a fiasco. I ended up on a ranch in Chula Vista,
the most miserable man that ever walked the earth. There was this girl I
loved and there was the other woman, for whom I felt only a profound pity. I
had been living with her for two years, this other woman, but it seemed like
a lifetime. I was twenty-one and she admitted to be thirty-six. Every time I
looked at her I said to myself - when I am thirty she will be forty-five,
when I am forty she will be fifty-five, when I am fifty she will be
sixty-five. She had fine wrinkles under the eyes, laughing wrinkles, but
wrinkles just the same. When I kissed her they magnified a dozen times. She
laughed easily, but her eyes were sad, terribly sad. They were Armenian
eyes. Her hair, which had been red once, was now a peroxide blonde.
Otherwise she was adorable - a Venusian body, a Venusian soul, loyal
lovable, grateful, everything a woman should be, except that she was fifteen
years older. The fifteen years difference drove me crazy. When I went out
with her I thought only - how will it be ten years hence? Or else, what age
does she seem to have now? Do I look old enough for her? Once we got back to
the house it was all right. Climbing the stairs I would run my fingers up
her crotch, which used to make her whinny like a horse. If her son, who was
almost my age, were in bed we would dose the doors and lock ourselves in the
kitchen. She'd lie on the narrow kitchen table and I'd slough it into her.
It was marvellous. And what made it more marvellous was that with each
performance I would say to myself - This is the last time ... tomorrow I
will beat it! And then, since she was the janitress, I would go down to the
cellar and roll the ash barrels out for her. In the morning, when the son
had left for work, I would climb up to the roof and air the bedding. Both
she and the son had T.B.... Sometimes there were no table bouts. Sometimes
the hopelessness of it all got me by the throat and I would put on my things
and go for a walk. Now and then I forgot to return. And when I did that I
was more miserable than ever, because I knew that she would be waiting for
me with those large sorrowful eyes. I'd go back to her like a man who had a
sacred duty to perform. I'd lie down on the bed and let her caress me; I'd
study the wrinkles under her eyes and the roots of her hair which were
turning red. Lying there like that, I would often think about the other one,
the one I loved, would wonder if she were lying down for it too, or... Those
long walks I took 365 days of the year! -1 would go over them in my mind
lying beside the other woman. How many times since have I relived these
walks! The dreariest, bleakest, ugliest streets man ever created. In anguish
I relive these walks, these streets, these first smashed hopes. The window
is there, but no Melisande; the garden too is there, but no sheen of gold.
Pass and repass, the window always vacant. The evening star hangs low;
Tristan appears, then Fidelio, and then Oberon. The hydra-headed dog barks
with all his mouths and though there are no swamps I hear the frogs croaking
everywhere. Same houses, same car-lines, same everything. She is hiding
behind the curtain, she is waiting for me to pass, she is doing this or
doing that... but she is not there, never, never, never. Is it a grand opera
or is it a hurdygurdy playing? It is Amato bursting his golden lung; it is
the Rubaiyat, it is Mount Everest, it is a moonless night, it is a sob at
dawn, it is a boy making believe, it is Puss in the Boot, it is Mauna Loa,
it is fox or astrakhan, it is of no stuff and no time, it is endless and it
begins over and over, under the heart, in the back of the throat, in the
soles of the feet, and why not just once, just once, for the love of Christ,
just a shadow or a rustle of the curtain, or a breath on the window-pane,
something once, if only a lie, something to stop the pain, to stop this
walking up and down ... Walking homeward. Same houses, same lamp posts, same
everything. I walk past my own home, past the cemetery, past the gas tanks,
past the car barns, past the reservoir, out into the open country. I sit
beside the road with my head in my hands and sob. Poor bugger that I am, I
can't contract my heart enough to burst the veins. I would like to suffocate
with grief but instead I give birth to a rock.
Meanwhile the other one is waiting. I can see her again as she sat on
the low stoop waiting for. me, her eyes large and dolorous, her face pale
and trembling with eagerness. Pity I always thought it was that brought me
back, but now as I walk towards her and see the look in her eyes I don't
know any more what it is, only that we will go inside and lie together and
she will get up half weeping, half laughing, and she will grow very silent
and watch me, study me as I move about, and never ask me what is torturing
me, never, never, because that is the one thing she fears, the one thing she
dreads to know. I don't love you! Can't she hear me screaming it? I don't
love you! Over and over I yell it, with lips tight, with hatred in my heart,
with despair, with hopeless rage. But the words never leave my lips. I look
at her and I am tongue-tied. I can't do it ... Time, time, endless time on
our hands and nothing to fill it but lies.
Well, I don't want to rehearse the whole of my life leading up to the
fatal moment - it is too long and too painful. Besides, did my life really
lead up to this culminating moment? I doubt it. I think there were
innumerable moments when I had the chance to make a beginning, but I lacked
the strength and the faith. On the night in question I deliberately walked
out on myself: I walked right out of the old life and into the new. There
wasn't the slightest effort involved. I was thirty then. I had a wife and
child and what is called a "responsible" position. These are the facts and
facts mean nothing. The truth is my desire was so great it became a reality.
At such a moment what a man does is of no great importance, it's what he is
that counts. It's at such a moment that a man becomes an angel. That is
precisely what happened to me: I became an angel. It is not the purity of an
angel which is so valuable, as the fact it can fly. An angel can break the
pattern anywhere at any moment and find its heaven; it has the power to
descend into the lowest matter and to extricate itself at will. The night in
question I understood it perfectly. I was pure and inhuman, I was detached,
I had wings. I was depossessed of the past and I had no concern about the
future. I was beyond ecstasy. When I left the office I folded my wings and
hid them beneath my coat.
The dance hall was just opposite the side entrance of the theatre where
I used to sit in the afternoons instead of looking for work. It was a street
of theatres and I used to sit there for hours at a time dreaming the most
violent dreams. The whole theatrical life of New York was concentrated in
that one street, so it seemed. It was Broadway, it was success, fame,
glitter, paint, the asbestos curtain and the hole in the curtain. Sitting on
the steps of the theatre I used to stare at the dance hall opposite, at the
string of red lanterns which even in the summer afternoons were lit up. In
every window there was a spinning ventilator which seemed to waft the music
into the street, where it was broken by the jangled din of traffic. Opposite
the other side of the dance hall was a comfort station and here too I used
to sit now and then, hoping either to make a woman or make a touch. Above
the comfort station, on the street level, was a kiosk with foreign papers
and magazines; the very sight of these papers, of the strange languages in
which they were printed, was sufficient to dislocate me for the day.
Without the slightest premeditation I climbed the stairs to the dance
hall, went directly to the little window of the booth where Nick, the Greek,
sat with a roll of tickets in front of him. Like the urinal below and the
steps of the theatre, this hand of the Greek now seems to me a separate and
detached thing - the enormous, hairy hand of an ogre borrowed from some
horrible Scandinavian fairy-tale. It was the hand which spoke to me always,
the hand which said "Miss Mara will not be here tonight," or "Yes, Miss Mara
is coming late tonight." It was this hand which I dreamt of as a child when
I slept in the bedroom with the barred window. In my fevered sleep suddenly
this window would light up, to reveal the ogre clutching at the bars. Night
after night the hairy monster visited me, clutching at the bars and gnashing
its teeth, I would awake in a cold sweat, the house dark, the room
absolutely silent
Standing at the edge of the dance floor I notice her coming towards me;
she is coming with sails spread, the large full face beautifully balanced on
the long, columnar neck. I see a woman perhaps eighteen, perhaps thirty,
with blue-black hair and a large white face, a full white face in which the
eyes shine brilliantly. She has on a tailored blue suit of duveteen. I
remember distinctly now the fulness other body, and that her hair was fine
and straight, parted on the side, like a man's. I remember the smile she
gave me - knowing, mysterious, fugitive - a smile that sprang up suddenly,
like a puff of wind.
The whole being was concentrated in the face. I could have taken just
the head and walked home with it; I could have put it beside me at night, on
a pillow, and made love to it. The mouth and the eyes, when they opened up,
the whole being glowed from them. There was an illumination which came from
some unknown source, from a centre hidden deep in the earth. I could think
of nothing but the face, the strange, womb-like quality of the smile, the
engulfing immediacy of it. The smile was so painfully swift and fleeting
that it was like the flash of a knife. This smile, this face, was borne
aloft on a long white neck, the sturdy, swan-like neck of the medium -and of
the lost and the damned.
I stand on the comer under the red lights, waiting for her to come
down. It is about two in the morning and she is signing off. I am standing
on Broadway with a flower in my buttonhole, feeling absolutely clean and
alone. Almost the whole evening we have been talking about Strindberg, about
a character of his named Henriette. I listened with such tense alertness
that I fell into a trance. It was as if, with the opening phrase, we had
started on a race - in opposite directions. Henriette! Almost immediately
the name was mentioned she began to talk about herself without ever quite
losing hold of Henriette. Henriette was attached to her by a long, invisible
string which she manipulated imperceptibly with one finger, like the
street-hawker who stands a little removed from the black doth, on the
sidewalk, apparently indifferent to the little mechanism which is jiggling
on the doth, but betraying himself by the spasmodic movement of the little
finger to which the black thread is attached. Henriette is me, my real self,
she seemed to be saying. She wanted me to believe that Henriette was really
the incarnation of evil. She said it so naturally, so innocendy, with an
almost subhuman candour - how was I to believe that she meant it? I could
only smile, as though to show her I was convinced.
Suddenly I fed her coming. I turn my head. Yes, there she is coming
full on, the sails spread, the eyes glowing. For the first time I see now
what a carriage she has. She comes forward like a bird, a human bird wrapped
in a big soft fur. The engine is going full steam: I want to shout, to give
a blast that will make the whole world cock its ears. What a walk! It's not
a walk, it's a glide. Tall, stately, full-bodied, self-possessed, she cuts
the smoke and jazz and red-light glow like the queen mother of all the
slippery Babylonian whores. On the comer of Broadway just opposite the
comfort station, this is happening. Broadway - it's her realm. This is
Broadway, this is New York, this is America. She's America on foot, winged
and sexed. She is the lubet, the abominate and the sublimate - with a dash
of hydrochloric add, nitto-glycerine, laudanum and powdered onyx. Opulence
she has, and magnificence: it's America right or wrong, and the ocean on
other side. For the first time in my life the whole continent hits me full
force, hits me between the eyes. This is America, buffaloes or no buffaloes,
America the emery wheel of hope and disillusionment. Whatever made America
made her, bone, blood, muscle, eyeball, gait, rhythm; poise; confidence;
brass and hollow gut. She's almost on top of me, the full face gleaming like
calcium. The big soft fur is slipping from her shoulder. She doesn't notice
it. She doesn't seem to care if her clothes should drop off. She doesn't
give a fuck about anything. It's America moving like a streak of lightning
towards the glass warehouse of red-blooded hysteria. Amurrica, fur or no
fur, shoes or no shoes. Amurrica C.O.D. And scram, you bastards, before we
plug you! It's got me in the guts, I'm quaking. Something's coming to me and
there's no dodging it. She's coming head on, through the plate-glass window.
If she would only stop a second, if she would only let me be for just one
moment. But no, not a single moment does she grant me. Swift, ruthless,
imperious, like Fate itself she is on me, a sword cutting me through and
through...
She has me by the hand, she holds it tight. I walk beside her without
fear. Inside me the stars are twinkling; inside me a great blue vault where
a moment ago the engines were pounding furiously.
One can wait a whole lifetime for a moment like this. The woman whom
you never hoped to meet now sits before you, and she talks and looks exactly
like the person you dreamed about. But strangest of all is that you never
realized before that you had dreamed about her. Your whole past is like a
long sleep which would have been forgotten had there been no dream. And the
dream too might have been forgotten had there been no memory, but
remembrance is there in the blood and the blood is like an ocean in which
everything is washed away but that which is new and more substantial even
than life: REALITY.
We arc seated in a little booth in the Chinese restaurant across the
way. Out of the comer of my eye I catch the flicker of the illuminated
letters running up and down the sky. She is still talking about Henriette,
or maybe it is about herself. Her little black bonnet, her bag and fur are
lying beside her on the bench. Every few minutes she lights a fresh
cigarette which bums away as she talks. There is no beginning nor end; it
spurts out other like a flame and consumes everything within reach. No
knowing how or where she began. Suddenly she is in the midst of a long
narrative, a fresh one, but it is always the same. Her talk is as formless
as dream: there are no grooves, no walls, no exits, no stops. I have the
feeling of being drowned in a deep mesh of words, of crawling painfully back
to the top of the net, of looking into her eyes and trying to find there
some reflection of the significance of her words - but I can find nothing,
nothing except my own image wavering in a bottomless well. Though she speaks
of nothing but herself I am unable to form the slightest image of her being.
She leans forward, with elbows on the table, and her words inundate me; wave
after wave rolling over me and yet nothing builds up inside me, nothing that
I can seize with my mind.''She's telling me about her father, about the
strange life they led at the edge of Sherwood Forest where she was born, or
at least she was telling me about this, but now it's about Henriette again,
or is it Dostoievski? - I'm not sure - but anyway, suddenly I realize that
she's not talking about any of these any more but about a man who took her
home one night and as they stood on the stoop saying goodnight he suddenly
reached down and pulled up her dress. She pauses a moment as though to
reassure me that this is what she means to talk about. I look at her
bewilderingly. I can't imagine by what route we got to this point. What man?
What had he been saying to her? I let her continue, thinking that she will
probably come back to it, but no, she's ahead of me again and now it seems
the man, this man, is already dead; a suicide, and she is trying to make me
understand that it was an awful blow to her, but what she really seems to
convey is that she is proud of the fact that she drove a man to suicide. I
can't picture the man as dead; I can only think of him as he stood on her
stoop lifting her dress, a man without a name but alive and perpetually
fixed in the act of bending down to lift up her dress. There is another man
who was her father and I see him with a string of race horses, or sometimes
in a little inn just outside Vienna; rather I see him on the roof of the inn
flying kites to while the time away. And between this man who was her father
and the man with whom she was madly in love, I can make no separation. He is
some one in her life about whom she would rather not talk, but just the same
she comes back to him all the time, and though I'm not sure that it was not
the man who lifted up her dress neither am I sure that it wasn't the man who
committed suidde. Per- haps it's the man whom she started to talk about when
we sat down to eat. Just as we were sitting down I remember now that she
began to talk rather hectically about a man whom she had just seen entering
the cafeteria. She even mentioned his name, but I forgot it immediately. But
I remember her saying that she had lived with him and that he had done
something which she didn't like - she didn't say what - and so she had
walked out on him, left him flat, without a word of explanation. And then,
just as we were entering the Chop Suey joint, they ran into each other and
she was still trembling over it as we sat down in the little booth ... For
one long moment I have the most uneasy sensation. Maybe every word she
uttered was a lie! Not an ordinary lie, no, something worse, something
indescribable. Only sometimes the truth comes out like that too, especially
if you think you're never going to see the person again. Sometimes you can
tell a perfect stranger what you would never dare reveal to your most
intimate friend. It's like going to sleep in the midst of a party; you
become so interested in yourself that you go to sleep. And when you're sound
asleep you begin to talk to some one, some one who was in the same room with
you all the time and therefore understands everything even though you begin
in the middle of a sentence. And perhaps this other person goes to sleep
also, or was always asleep, and that's why it was so easy to encounter him,
and if he doesn't say anything to disturb you then you know that what you
are saying is real and true and that you are wide-awake and there is no
other reality except this being wide-awake asleep. Never before have I been
so wide-awake and so sound asleep at the same time. If the ogre in my dreams
had really pushed the bars aside and taken me by the hand I would have been
frightened to death and consequently now dead, that is, forever asleep and
therefore always at large, and nothing would be strange any more, nor
untrue, even if what happened did not happen. What happened must have
happened long ago, in the night undoubtedly. And what is now happening is
also happening long ago, in the night, and this is no more true than the
dream of the ogre and the bars which would not give, except that now the
bars are broken and she whom I feared has me by the hand and there is no
difference between that which I feared and what is, because I was asleep and
now I am wide-awake asleep and there is nothing more to fear, nor to expect,
nor to hope for, but just this which is and which knows no end.
She wants to go. To go... Again her haunch, that slippery glide as when
she came down from the dance hall and moved into me. Again her words ...
"suddenly, for no reason at all, he bent down and lifted up my dress". She's
slipping the fur around her neck; the little black bonnet sets her face off
like a cameo. The round, full face, with Slavic cheek-bones. How could I
dream this, never having seen it? How could I know that she would rise like
this, dose and full, the face full white and blooming like a magnolia? I
tremble as the fullness ot her thigh brushes me. She seems even a little
taller than I, though she is not. It's the way she holds her chin. She
doesn't notice where she's walking. She walks over things, on, on, with eyes
wide open and staring into space. No past, no future. Even the present seems
dubious. The self seems to have left her, and the body rushes forward, the
neck full and taut, white as the face, full like the face. The talk goes on,
in that low, throaty voice. No beginning, no end. I'm aware not of time nor
the passing of time, but of timelessness. She's got the little womb in the
throat hooked up to the big womb in the pelvis. The cab is at the curb and
she is still chewing the cosmological chaff of the outer ego. I pick up the
speaking tube and connect with the double uterus. Hello, hello, are yon
there? Let's go! Let's get on with it - cabs, boats, trains, naptha
launches; beaches, bedbugs, highways, byways, ruins; relics; old world, new
world, pier, jetty; the high forceps; the swinging trapeze, the ditch, the
delta, the alligators, the crocodiles, talk, talk; and more talk, then roads
again and more dust in the eyes, more rainbows, more cloudbursts, more
breakfast foods, more creams, more lotions. And when all the roads have been
traversed and there is left only the dust of our frantic feet there will
still remain the memory of your large full face so white, and the wide mouth
with fresh lips parted, the teeth chalk white and each one perfect, and in
this remembrance nothing can possibly change because this, like your teeth,
is perfect...
It is Sunday, the first Sunday of my new life, and I am wearing the dog
collar you fastened around my neck. A new life stretches before me. It
begins with the day of rest. I lie back on a broad green leaf and I watch
the sun bursting in your womb. What a clabber and clatter it makes! All this
expressly for me, what? If only you had a million suns in you! If only I
could lie here forever enjoying the celestial fireworks!
I lie suspended over the surface of the moon. The world is in a
womb-like trance: the inner and the outer ego are in equilibrium. You
promised me so much that if I never come out of this it will make no
difference. It seems to me that it is exactly 25,960 years since I have been
asleep in the black womb of sex. It seems to me that I slept perhaps 365
years too many. But at any rate I am now in the right house, among the
sixes, and what lies behind me is well and what lies ahead is well. You come
to me disguised as Venus, but you are Lilith, and I know it. My whole life
is in the balance; I will enjoy the luxury of this for one day. Tomorrow I
shall tip the scales. Tomorrow the equilibrium will be finished; if I ever
find it again it will be in the blood and not in the stars. It is well that
you promise me so much. I need to be promised nearly everything, for I have
lived in the shadow of the sun too long. I want light and chastity - and a
solar fire in the guts. I want to be deceived and disillusioned so that I
may complete the upper triangle and not be continually flying off the planet
into space. I believe everything you tell me, but I know also that it will
all turn out differently. I take you as a star and a trap, as a stone to tip
the scales, as a judge that is blindfolded, as a hole to fall into, as a
path to walk, as a cross and an arrow. Up to the present I travelled the
opposite way of the sun; henceforth I travel two ways, as sun and as moon.
Henceforth I take on two sexes, two hemispheres, two skies, two sets of
everything. Henceforth I shall be double-jointed and double-sexed.
Everything that happens will happen twice. I shall be as a visitor to this
earth, partaking of its blessings and carrying off its gifts. I shall
neither serve nor be served. I shall seek the end in myself.
I look out again at the sun - my first full gaze. It is blood-red and
men are walking about on the roof-tops. Everything above the horizon is dear
to me. It is like Easter Sunday. Death is behind me and birth too. I am
going to live now among the life maladies. I am going to live the spiritual
life of the pygmy, the secret life of the little man in the