one
were killed there would still be conversation, and the conversation would be
at once intricate and easy to follow. Because it is I who create it!  I know
it, and that  is why it never drives  me mad. I have conversations which may
take place only twenty  years hence, when I  meet the right  person, the one
whom I shall create, let us say, when the proper time comes. All these talks
take place in a vacant lot which is attached to my bed like a mattress. Once
I gave it  a name, this <i>terrain vague:  I</i>  called  it Ubiguchi,  but somehow
Ubiguchi never satisfied  me, it was too intelligible, too  full of meaning.
It  would be better to keep it just "<i>terrain vague</i>", which is what I  intend
to do. People think that vacuity is nothingness,  but it  is not so. Vacuity
is  a discordant  fulness,  a  crowded ghostly world in which the soul  goes
reconnoitering. As a boy I remember standing in the vacant  lot as if I were
a very  lively soul standing  naked  in  a pair of shoes. The body  had been
stolen from me because I had no particular need of it. I could exist with or
without a body then. If I killed a little bird and  roasted it over the fire
and ate it,  it was not  because I was hungry but  because  I wanted to know
about Timbuctoo or Tierra  del Fuego.  I had  to stand in the vacant lot and
eat dead birds  in order to create a desire for that bright land which later
I would inhabit alone and people with nostalgia. I  expected ultimate things
of this place, but  I was deplorably deceived. I went as far as one could go
in a state of complete deadness, and then by a law, which must be the law of
creation,  I suppose, I suddenly flared  up and began to live inexhaustibly,
like a star whose light is unquenchable.  Here began the  real cannibalistic
excursions which have meant so much to me; no more dead chippies picked from
the bonfire,  but  live human meat, tender, succulent human  flesh,  secrets
like fresh bloody livers,  confidences  like  swollen tumors that  have been
kept on ice. I learned not to wait for my victim to die, but to eat into him
while  talking  to me. Often  when I walked  away  from an unfinished meal I
discovered  that it was nothing  more than  an old friend minus an arm  or a
leg.  I  sometimes  left  him  standing  there -  a trunk  full of  stinking
intestines.
     Being of the  city,  of  the only  city in  the world and no place like
Broadway  anywhere, I used to walk up and down staring at the  floodlit hams
and other  delicacies.  I was  a schizerino from the sole of my boots to the
tips of my hair. I lived  exclusively in  the gerundive, which  I understood
only  in Latin. Long  before  I  had  read other in  the  <i>Black  Book</i> I  was
cohabiting with Hilda, the giant cauliflower of  my dreams. We traversed all
the morganatic  diseases together and a few which were <i>ex cathedra.</i> We dwelt
in the carcass of the instincts and  were nourished by  ganglionic memories.
There was never a universe, but millions  and billions of universes,  all of
them put  together no bigger  than  a pinhead. It was a vegetal sleep in the
wilderness of the mind.  It  was the past, which  alone  comprises eternity.
Amidst the fauna and flora of my dreams  I would hear long distance calling.
Messages were dropped on my  table by the  deformed  and the epileptic. Hans
Castorp would call sometimes and together  we would commit innocent  crimes.
Or, if  it were a bright freezing day. I would do a  turn  in the  velodrome
with my Presto bike from Chemnitz, Bohemia.
     Best of all was the skeleton dance. I would first wash all  my parts at
the sink, change  my  linen,  shave,  powder,  comb my hair, don  my dancing
pumps. Feeling abnormally light  inside and out I would wind  in and  out of
the  crowd  for a time  to  get  the  proper  human rhythm,  the weight  and
substance of flesh. Then I  would make a beeline for the dance floor, grab a
hunk  of  giddy flesh and begin the autumnal pirouette.  It was like that  I
walked  into the hairy Greek's place  one night and  ran smack into her. She
seemed blue-black, white as chalk,  ageless.  There was not just the flow to
and   from,   but  the  endless  chute,   the  voluptuousness  of  intrinsic
restlessness. She was  mercurial and at the same time  of a  savoury weight.
She had the marmoreal stare of a faun embedded in lava. The time has come, I
thought, to wander  back  from the  periphery. I  made  a move  towards  the
centre, only to find the ground shifting from under my feet. The earth  slid
rapidly beneath my bewildered  feet. I moved again out of the earth belt and
behold, my hands  were full of meteoric  flowers. I reached for her with two
flaming hands but she was  more elusive than sand. I thought of my favourite
nightmares, but she was unlike anything  which had made me sweat and gibber.
In  my delirium I  began to prance and neigh. I bought frogs  and mated them
with toads. I thought of the easiest thing to do, which is to die, but I did
nothing. I stood still and began to petrify at the extremities. That was  so
wonderful, so healing, so eminently sensible, that I began to laugh way down
inside  the viscera, like a hyena crazed with rut. Maybe I would turn into a
rosetta stone! I just stood still and waited. Spring came and Fall, and then
Winter.  I renewed  my insurance  policy automatically. I ate grass  and the
roots of deciduous trees. I sat  for days on  end  looking at the same film.
Now and then I brushed my teeth. If you fired an automatic at me the bullets
glanced off and made a  queer tat-a-tat ricocheting against the walls.  Once
up a dark  street, felled by a thug, I felt a knife go  clean through me. It
felt like a spritz bath. Strange to say, the knife left no holes in my skin.
The experience was so novel that I went home and stuck knives into all parts
of my body.  More needle baths.  I sat down, pulled all the knives out,  and
again I marvelled that there was no trace of blood, no holes, no pain. I was
just about to bite into my arm when the telephone rang. It was long distance
calling. I never  knew who put in the calls because no one ever came to  the
phone. However the skeleton dance ...
     Life is drifting by the show-window. I  lie  there like a flood-lit ham
waiting for the axe to fall. As a  matter of fact, there is nothing to fear,
because  everything is  cut neatly into  fine little slices  and  wrapped in
cellophane.  Suddenly all  the  lights of the city are extinguished  and the
sirens sound  their warning.  The city is enveloped in poison gas, bombs are
bursting,  mangled  bodies  flying through  the  air.  There is  electricity
everywhere, and  blood and splinters  and loud-speakers. The  men in the air
are full of glee; those below are screaming and
     l82
     bellowing. When the gas and the  flames have  eaten all  the flesh away
the skeleton  dance begins. I watch from the  show-window which is now dark.
It is better than the sack of Rome because there is more to destroy.
     Why do the skeletons dance so ecstatically, I wonder. Is it the fall of
the world? Is it the dance of death which has been so often heralded? To see
millions of skeletons dancing in  the  snow while the city  founders  is  an
awesome sight. Will anything ever grow again? Will  babes come  out  of  the
womb? Will there be food and wine? There are the men in the air, to be sure.
They  will come  down to plunder. There will be  cholera  and dysentery  and
those who were  above and triumphant  will perish  like the rest. I have the
sure feeling  that I will  be the  last man on earth. I will emerge from the
show-window  when it is all over  and walk calmly amidst the ruins.  I  will
have the whole earth myself.
     Long distance calling! To inform me  that I am  not utterly alone. Then
the destruction was not complete? It's discouraging. Man is not even able to
destroy  himself;  he  can  only  destroy  others.  I am disgusted.  What  a
malicious cripple! What cruel  delusions! So  there are more of the  species
about and they will tidy  up the mess and  begin again.  God  will come down
again  in flesh and blood  and take up the burden  of guilt.  They will make
music and build things in stone and write it all down in little books. Pfui!
What blind tenacity, what clumsy ambitions!
     I  am on  the  bed  again.  The old  Greek world, the  dawn  of  sexual
intercourse - and Hymie! Hymie Laubscher always on  the  same level, looking
down on the boulevard across the river. There is a lull in the nuptial feast
and the  clam fritters are brought  in.  <i>Move over  just  a little,</i> he says.
<i>There,  like that, that's  it 1</i>1 hear frogs croaking in the swamp outside my
window.  Big cemetery  frogs  nourished by  the  dead. They  are all huddled
together in sexual intercourse; they are croaking with sexual glee.
     I realize now how Hymie was conceived and brought into being. Hymie the
bullfrog!  His mother was at the  bottom  of  the  pack and  Hymie, then  an
embryo,  was  hidden  away in  her sac.  It was in the early  days of sexual
intercourse and there were no Marquis of  Queensbury rules to hinder. It was
fuck and be fucked - and the devil take the  hindmost. It had been  that way
ever since the Greeks - a blind fuck  in the mud and then  a quick spawn and
then death.  People  are  fucking on  different levels but it's always  in a
swamp and the litter is always destined for  the same end. When the house is
torn down the bed is left standing: the cosmosexual altar.
     I  was  polluting  the  bed  with  dreams. Stretched out  taut  on  the
ferro-concrete my  soul would leave its body and roam from place to place on
a little trolley such as is used in  department stores  for making change. I
made ideological  changes and excursions; I was a vagabond in the country of
the brain. Everything  was absolutely  clear to  me  because  done  in  rock
crystal; at every egress there was written  in big letters ANNIHILATION. The
fright of extinction solidified me;
     the body became  itself a piece of ferro-concrete. It was ornamented by
a permanent erection in the best taste. I  had achieved that state of vacuum
so earnestly desired by certain devout members  of esoteric cults. I was  no
more. <i>I was not even a personal hard-on.</i>
     It was about this time, adopting the  pseudonym Samson Lackawanna, that
I began my depredations. The criminal instinct in  me  had  gotten the upper
hand. Whereas heretofore  I had been only an errant soul, a sort  of Gentile
Dybbuk,  now I  became a  flesh-filled ghost. I  had taken  the  name  which
pleased me and I had only to act instinctively. In Hong Kong,  for instance,
I made  my  entry  as  a book-agent. I carried  a leather purse filled  with
Mexican dollars and I visited religiously all those Chinese who were in need
of further  education. At the hotel I rang for women like you would ring for
whiskey and  soda.  Morning  I studied Tibetan in  order to prepare for  the
journey to Lhasa. I already  spoke Jewish  fluently, and Hebrew too. I could
count  two rows of  figures at once. It was  so easy to  swindle the Chinese
that I went back to Manila in disgust. There I  took a  Mr. Rico in hand and
taught him the art of selling books with no handling charges. All the profit
came  from ocean  freight rates, but it was sufficient to  keep me in luxury
while it lasted.
     The  breath had  become as much a trick as breathing.  Things  were not
dual  merely,  but  multiple.  I  had become  a cage  of mirrors  reflecting
vacuity. But vacuity once stoutly  posited  I was at home and what is called
creation was  merely a  job of filling  up holes. The  trolley  conveniently
carried  me about from place to place and in each little side pocket  of the
great  vacuum I dropped a ton of poems to wipe out the idea of annihilation.
I had ever  before me boundless vistas. I began to live in the vista, like a
microscopic speck on the lens of a giant telescope.  There was  no night  in
which to  rest.  It  was perpetual  starlight  on  the arid surface of  dead
planets. Now and then  a lake black as  marble in which I saw myself walking
amidst brilliant orbs of lights. So low hung  the stars  and so dazzling was
the light they shed, that it seemed as if the universe were only about to be
born. What rendered the  impression stronger was that I was  alone; not only
were there no animals, no trees, no other  beings, but there  was not even a
blade of grass,  not  even a dead root. In that  violet  incandescent  light
witihout even the suggestion  of a shadow motion itself seemed to be absent.
It was  like a blaze of pure consciousness, thought become God. And God, for
the  first time in my  knowledge, was dean-shaven. I  was also clean-shaven,
flawless, deadly accurate. I saw my image in the marble black  lakes and  it
was diapered with stars.  Stars, stars... like a clout between the  eyes and
all remembrance fast run out.  I was Samson  and I was Lackawanna and  I was
dying as one being in the ecstasy of full consciousness.
     And now  here I am, sailing down the river in my little canoe. Anything
you would like to have me do I will do for you - gratis. This is the Land of
Fuck, in which there are  no  animals, no trees, no stars, no problems. Here
the  spermatazoon reigns  supreme.  Nothing  is  determined in  advance, the
future is absolutely  uncertain, the past is non-existent. For every million
born  999,999  are doomed to  die and  never again be born. But the one that
makes a home run  is assured of life eternal.  Life is squeezed into a seed,
which  is  a soul. Everything  has soul, including minerals,  plants, lakes,
mountains,  rocks. Everything is  sentient, even  at  the  lowest  stage  of
consciousness.
     Once this fact is  grasped there can be no  more despair. At  the  very
bottom of  the ladder, chez the spermatozoa, there  is the same condition of
bliss as  at  the top, chez God. God is the summation of all the spermatozoa
come to full consciousness. Between the bottom and the top there is no stop,
no halfway station. The river starts somewhere in the mountains and flows on
into the sea. On this river that leads to God the canoe is as serviceable as
the dreadnought. From the very start the journey is homeward.
     Sailing down  the river... Slow as the  hook-worm, but  tiny enough  to
make  every bend. And slippery as an  eel withal. What is  your name? shouts
some  one. <i>My name? Why just call me  God - God the embryo,</i> I go sailing on.
Somebody would like  to  buy me a hat.  What size do you wear, imbecile!  he
shouts. <i>What size?  Why size</i> X!  (And why do  they always shout at me?  Am I
supposed to be deaf?) The hat is lost at the next cataract. <i>Tant  pis -</i>  for
the  hat. Does God need a  hat? God  needs only to become God, more and more
God.  All this  voyaging,  all  these  pitfalls,  the  time that passes, the
scenery,  and against  the  scenery  man, trillions  and trillions of things
called man, like mustard  seeds.  Even  in embryo  God  has  no memory.  The
backdrop  of  consciousness is made up of  infinitesimally minute ganglia, a
coat of  hair  soft as  wool.  The  mountain goat  stands  alone amidst  the
Himalayas; he doesn't  question how he got to the summit. He grazes  quietly
amidst the  <i>decor;</i> when the time comes he will travel down  again. He  keeps
his muzzle  to the ground, grubbing  for  the  sparse  nourishment which the
mountain peaks afford. In this  strange  capricornian condition of embryosis
God the he-goat ruminates in stolid bliss among the mountain peaks. The high
altitudes nourish the  germ of  separation which will one  day  estrange him
completely from the soul  of man, which will make him a  desolate, rock-like
father dwelling forever apart in a void which is unthinkable. But first come
the morganatic diseases, of which we must now speak...
     There is a condition of misery which is irremediable -
     l86
     because its  origin is lost in obscurity. Bloomingdale's,  for example,
can  bring  about  this  condition. All  department  stores are  symbols  of
sickness and  emptiness,  but  Bloomingdale's  is  my special  sickness,  my
incurable obscure malady. In the chaos of Bloomingdale's there is an  order,
but this order is absolutely crazy to me, it is the order which I would find
on  the head  of a pin if I were to put  it under the  microscope. It is the
order  of an accidental  series of  accidents accidentally  conceived.  This
order has, above all, an odour - and it is the odour of Bloomingdale's which
strikes terror into my  heart. In Bloomingdale's I  fall apart completely: I
dribble on to the floor, a helpless mess  of  guts  and bones and cartilage.
There  is the smell, not of  decomposition,  but of  mis-alliance.  Man, the
miserable alchemist, has welded together in  a  million  forms  and  shapes,
substances and essences  which have  nothing  in common. Because in his mind
there is a tumor which is eating him away insatiably; he has left the little
canoe which was taking him blissfully down the river in order to construct a
bigger, safer boat in which there  may  be room  for every one.  His labours
take  him so far afield that  he has lost all remembrance of why he left the
little canoe.  The ark  is  so  full of  bric-a-brac that it  has  become  a
stationary building above a subway in which  the smell of  linoleum prevails
and predominates.  Gather together  all the significance hidden away in  the
interstital miscellany of Bloomingdale's and put it on the head of a pin and
you will have left a universe in which the grand constellations move without
the slightest danger of collision. It is this microscopic chaos which brings
on my  morganatic ailments. In  the street I begin to stab horses at random,
or  I lift a  skirt here and  there looking  for  a letter-box,  or I  put a
postage  stamp  across a  mouth, an  eye,  a vagina. Or I suddenly decide to
climb a tall building, like a fly, and once having reached the roof I do fly
with real  wings and  I fly and fly and fly, covering  towns like Weehawken,
Hoboken, Hackensack, Canarsie, Bergen Beach in the twinkling of an eye. Once
you become a real schizerino flying is the easiest thing  in  the world; the
trick is to fly with the  etheric  body,  to leave behind in  Bloomingdale's
your  sack  of bones,  guts,  blood and  cartilage;  to fly  only  with your
immutable self which, if you stop a moment  to reflect,  is always  equipped
with wings.  Flying  this way, in  full  daylight, has advantages  over  the
ordinary  night-flying which everybody indulges  in. You can leave off  from
moment to moment, as quick and decisive as stepping on a brake; there is  no
difficulty in finding your other self, because the moment you leave off, you
<i>are</i> your other self, which is to say, the so-called whole self. Only, as the
Blooming-dale experience goes to prove, this whole self, about which so much
boasting has been done, falls apart very easily. The smell  of linoleum, for
some  strange reason,  will always  make me fall apart and  collapse on  the
floor. It is the smell of all the unnatural things which were glued together
in me, which were assembled, so to say, by negative consent.
     It is only after  the third meal that the morning  gifts, bequeathed by
the phony alliances of the  ancestors,  begin to drop away and the true rock
of the  self, the  happy  rock  sheers  up out of the muck of the soul. With
nightfall  the  pinhead  universe  begins to expand. It expands organically,
from  an  infinitesimal  nuclear  speck,  in   the  way   that  minerals  or
star-dusters form. It  eats into the  surrounding  chaos like a  rat  boring
through store cheese. All chaos could be gathered together on a pinhead, but
the self, microscopical at the start,  works up to a universe from any point
in space. This is  not  the  self about  which books are  written,  but  the
ageless self whith has been fanned out  through millenary  ages to  men with
names and dates, the self which begins and ends as a worm, which <i>is</i> the worm
in the cheese called the world. Just as the slightest breeze can  set a vast
forest in motion so, by some unfathomable impulse from within, the rock-like
self  can begin to grow, and in this growth nothing can prevail against  it.
It's like Jack Frost at work,  and the whole world a window-pane. No hint of
labour, no sound, no struggle, no rest;
     relentless,  remorseless,  unremitting, the growth of the self goes on.
Only  two  items  on  the bill  of fare: the self  and  the not-self. And an
eternity in which  to work it out. In this eternity, which has nothing to do
with time or space, there are interludes in which something like a thaw sets
in. The form
     l88
     of the self  breaks down, but the  self,  like climate, remains. In the
night the amorphous  matter  of the  self assumes the  most  fugitive forms:
error seeps in through the portholes and the wanderer is unlatched  from his
door. This door which  the body  wears, if opened out on to the world, leads
to annihilation. It is the  door in every  fable out of which  the  magician
steps; nobody has ever read of him returning home through the selfsame door.
If opened inward  there  are infinite  doors,  all resembling  trapdoors: no
horizons  are visible,  no airlines,  no  rivers,  no maps, no tickets. Each
<i>couche</i> is a halt for  the  night only,  be it  five minutes  or ten thousand
years. The doors have no handles and they never wear out.  Most important to
note - there is no end in sight. All these halts for the night, so to speak,
are like abortive  explorations of a myth. One  can feel his way about, take
bearings, observe passing phenomena; one can even feel at home. But there is
no taking root. Just at the moment when one begins to feel "established" the
whole terrain founders, the soil underfoot is afloat, the constellations are
shaken loose  from their moorings, the  whole known  universe, including the
imperishable  self,  starts  moving silently, ominously, shudderingly serene
and  unconcerned, towards an unknown, unseen destination. All the doors seem
to be opening at once; the pressure is so great that an implosion occurs and
in the swift plunge the skeleton bursts asunder. It  was some  such gigantic
collapse which Dante must have experienced when he situated himself in Hell;
it was not  a bottom which he touched,  but a core, a dead centre from which
time itself is reckoned. Here the comedy begins, for here it  is  seen to be
divine.
     All  this by way of saying  that in going through the revolving door of
the  Amarillo  dance  hall one night some twelve or fourteen  years ago, the
great event took place. The interlude which I think of as  the Land of Fuck,
a  realm  of  time  more than of space,  is  for me the  equivalent  of that
Purgatory which Dante has described in nice detail. As I  put my hand on the
brass rail of the revolving door to  leave the Amarillo Dance Hall, all that
I had previously  been, was, and about to  be, foundered.  There was nothing
unreal about it; the very time in  which I was born passed away, carried off
by a mightier stream. Just as I had previously been bundled out of the womb,
so  now I  was shunted  back to  some  timeless vector where the process  of
growth is kept in abeyance. I passed into the world of effects. There was no
fear,  only a feeling of fatality.  My spine was socketed to the node; I was
up against the coccyx of an implacable new world. In the plunge the skeleton
blew apart, leaving the immutable ego as helpless as a squashed louse.
     If from this point I do not begin, it is because there is no beginning.
If I  do not fly  at once  to the bright  land it is because wings are of no
avail. It is zero hour and the moon is at nadir...
     Why I  think  of Maxie Schnadig I don't know,  unless it is  because of
Dostoievski. The night I sat down to read Dostoievski for the first time was
a most important  event in my life, even more important than  my first love.
It was the first deliberate, conscious act which had significance for me; it
changed  the  whole face of  the world. Whether  it is  true that  the clock
stopped that moment when I looked up after the first deep gulp I  don't know
any more.  But the world stopped dead for  a moment, that I  know. It was my
first glimpse into the soul of a man, or shall I say simply that Dostoievski
was the first man  to reveal  his soul to me?  Maybe I have been a bit queer
before that, without realizing  it, but from the moment that  I  dipped into
Dostoievski I was definitely, irrevocably,  contentedly queer.  The ordinary
waking, work-a-day world was finished for  me. Any ambition of  desire I had
to write was also killed - for a long time to come. I was like those men who
have been too  long in the trenches, too  long under  fire.  Ordinary  human
suffering, ordinary human jealousy, ordinary human ambitions  - it was  just
so much shit to me.
     I can visualize  best my  condition when I  think of my relations  with
Maxie and his sister Rita. At  the time Maxie and  I were both interested in
sport. We used to go swimming together a great  deal, that I remember  well.
Often we passed the whole day and night at the beach. I had only met Maxie's
sister  once or twice;  whenever  I brought up  her  name Maxie would rather
frantically begin  to talk about  something else. That annoyed me because  I
was really bored to death with Maxie's company,  tolerating him only because
he loaned me money readily and bought me things  which I needed.  Every time
we  started  for  the  beach  I  was  in  hopes  his  sister  would turn  up
unexpectedly. But no, he always managed to keep her out of reach.  Well, one
day as we were undressing in  the  bath house  and he was  showing me what a
fine tight scrotum  he  had,  I said to him right out of the blue - "listen,
Maxie, that's all right about your nuts, they're fine and dandy, and there's
nothing to worry about but where in hell is Rita all the time, why don't you
bring her along some time and let me take  a good  look at  her quim... yes,
<i>quim,</i> you know what I mean." Maxie, being a Jew from Odessa, had never heard
the word quim before. He was deeply shocked by my words and yet at  the same
time  intrigued by this new word. In a sort of daze  he said to me - "Jesus,
Henry, you oughtn't to say a  thing like that to me!" "Why not?" I answered.
"She's  got a  cunt, your sister, hasn't she?" I  was about to add something
else  when  he broke  into  a  terrific  fit  of  laughter. That  saved  the
situation, for  the time being.  But  Maxie didn't like the idea at all deep
down.  All  day  long  it  bothered him,  though he never  referred  to  our
conversation  again.  No,  he was very  silent that day.  The  only  form of
revenge he could think of was to urge me to swim far  beyond the safety zone
in  the hope  of tiring  me out and letting me drown. I could see so clearly
what was  in  his mind that I was  possessed with the strength  of ten  men.
Damned  if I would go drown myself  just  because his sister like all  other
women happened to have a cunt.
     It  was at Far Rockaway where this took place. After we had dressed and
eaten a  meal  I  suddenly decided  that  I  wanted to be alone and so, very
abruptly,  at  the  comer of a street. I shook hands and said  good-bye. And
there I was! Almost instantaneously I felt alone in the  world, alone as one
feels  only in moments  of  extreme anguish. I think I was  picking my teeth
absentmindedly when this wave of loneliness hit me full on, like a  tornado.
I stood there on the street comer and sort of felt myself all over to see if
I had  been hit by something.  It was inexplicable, and at  the same time it
was  very wonderful, very exhilarating,  like a double tonic,  I  might say.
When I say that I  was at Far Rockaway I mean that I was standing at the end
of  the  earth,  at a place called Xanthos, if  there be  such a  place, and
surely  there ought to be a word like this to express no place  at  all.  If
Rita had  come along then I don't think  I would have  recognized her. I had
become an  absolute stranger standing  in the  very midst of my own  people.
They looked crazy  to me, my  people, with  their newly  sunbumed faces  and
their flannel trousers  and their dock-work stockings. They had been bathing
like myself  because it  was  a  pleasant, healthy  recreation  and now like
myself they were full of  sun and  food and a little heavy with fatigue.  Up
until this loneliness hit  me I too was a bit weary,  but suddenly, standing
there completely shut off from the world, I woke up with a start I became so
electrified  that I didn't dare move for  fear I would charge like a bull or
start to climb the wall of a building  or else dance and  scream. Suddenly I
realized that all  this was because I was really a  brother  to Dostoievski,
that perhaps I was  the only  man  in all America  who knew what he meant in
writing those books. Not only that, but I felt all the books I would one day
write  myself  germinating  inside  me: they were bursting inside  like ripe
cocoons. And since up to this time I had written nothing but fiendishly long
letters  about everything and  nothing,  it was difficult  for me to realize
that there must come a time when I should  begin, when I should put down the
first word, <i>the first-real word.</i> And this time was now! That was what dawned
on me.
     I used the word Xanthos a moment ago.  I don't know whether there  is a
Xanthos or not, and I really don't care one way  or another,  but there must
be a place  in  the world, perhaps in the Grecian islands, where you come to
the end of the known world and you are thoroughly alone and  yet you are not
frightened  of it but  rejoice,  because at this  dropping off place you can
feel  the  old  ancestral  world  which  is  eternally  young  and  new  and
fecundating.  You  stand there, wherever the place is,  like a newly hatched
chick beside its eggshell. This  place is Xanthos, or as it  happened  in my
case. Far Rockaway.
     There I was! It grew dark, a wind came up, the streets became deserted,
and finally  it began to pour cats  and dogs. Jesus, that finished me!  When
the  rain came down, and I got  it smack  in the face staring at  <i>the</i> sky, I
suddenly  began to  bellow with  joy.  I  laughed and laughed  and  laughed,
exactly like an insane man. Nor  did I  know  what  I  was laughing about. I
wasn't thinking of a thing. I was just overwhelmed with joy, just crazy with
delight in finding myself absolutely  alone.  If then and there a nice juicy
quim had been handed me on a platter, if all the quims in the world had been
afforded  me for to make my choice, I wouldn't have batted an eyelash. I had
what no  quim  could give  me.  And  just  about at  that  point, thoroughly
drenched but still exultant, I  thought of the most irrelevant thing in  the
world - <i>carfare!</i> Jesus, the bastard Maxie had walked off without  leaving me
a sou. There I was with  my fine budding antique world and not a penny in my
jeans.  Herr  Dostoievski Junior  had now to begin  to walk  here  and there
peering into friendly and un-friendly faces to see if he could pry  loose  a
dime. He walked  from one end of Far Rockaway to the other but nobody seemed
to give a fuck  about handing out carfare in the rain. Walking about in that
heavy animal stupor which comes with begging I got to thinking  of Maxie the
window-trimmer  and  how the first time  I spied  him he was standing in the
show-window  dressing  a  mannikin.  And from  that  in  a  few  minutes  to
Dostoievski, then the  world  stopped dead, and then, like a great rose bush
opening in the night, his sister Rita's warm, velvety flesh.
     Now this  what is rather strange ... A  few minutes after I  thought of
Rita, her private and extraordinary quim,  I was in the train bound for  New
York and dozing  off with a marvellous languid erection. And stranger still,
when I got out of the train,  when I had  walked but a block or two from the
station, whom should I bump into rounding  a  comer but Rita herself. And as
though  she had  been  informed telepathically  of what  was going  on in my
brain, Rita too  was hot under the whiskers. Soon  we were sitting in a chop
suey  joint, seated side by side in a little booth, behaving exactly like  a
pair of rabbits in rut. On the  dance floor we  hardly moved. We were wedged
in tight  and we stayed that way, letting them jog  and  jostle  us about as
they might. I could  have taken her home to my  place, as I was alone at the
time, but no, I had a notion to bring her back to her own home, stand her up
in the vestibule and give her a fuck right under Maxie's nose - which I did.
In the midst of it I thought again of the mannikin in the show window and of
the way he had  laughed that afternoon  when I let drop the word quim. I was
on the point of laughing aloud when suddenly I felt that she was coming, one
of those  long  drawn-out orgasms such as you  get  now and then in a Jewish
cunt. I had my hands under her  buttocks, the tips of my fingers just inside
her cunt, in the lining, as it were; as she  began to  shudder I  lifted her
from the ground and raised her gently up  and down  on the end of my cock. I
thought she would go off her nut completely, the way she began  to carry on.
She  must have had four  or five  orgasms like that in the air, before I put
her feet down on the ground. I took it  out without spilling a drop and made
her lie down in the vestibule. Her hat had rolled off into a  corner and her
bag had spilled open and a  few coins had tumbled out. I  note this  because
just before I gave  it to her good and proper I made a mental note to pocket
a few coins for my carfare home. Anyway, it was only a few hours since I had
said to Maxie  in the  bath  house  that I would like to take a  look at his
sister's  quim, and here it  was now  smack, up against me, sopping  wet and
throwing out one squirt after another. If she had been fucked before she had
never been fucked properly, that's a cinch. And I myself was never in such a
fine cool  collected  scientific frame of mind  as now lying on the floor of
the vestibule right under Maxie's nose, pumping it into the private, sacred,
and  extraordinary quim  of  his  sister Rita.  I  could  have  held  it  in
indefinitely - it was incredible how detached I was and yet thoroughly aware
of every quiver  and jolt she  made. But  somebody had to pay  for making me
walk around in the rain grubbing a dime. Somebody had to pay for the ecstasy
produced by the germination of all those unwritten books inside me. Somebody
had to verify the  authenticity of this private, concealed  cunt  which  had
been  plaguing me  for weeks and months.  Who better  qualified  than  I?  I
thought so hard and  fast between orgasms  that  my  cock  must  have  grown
another inch or two. Finally I decided to make an end of  it by  turning her
over  and back-scuttling her. She balked a bit  at first, but  when she felt
the thing slipping out of her she nearly went crazy. "Oh yes, oh yes, do it,
do  it!" she  gibbered, and with that  I really  got excited,  I  had hardly
slipped it  into her when I  felt  it  coming,  one of those long  agonizing
spurts from the tip of the spinal column. I shoved it in so deep that I felt
as if something had given way. We fell over, exhausted, the both  of us, and
panted like dogs. At the same  time,  however, I had the presence of mind to
feel  around  for a  few coins.  Not that it was necessary, because  she had
already loaned me a few dollars, but to make up for the carfare  which I was
lacking in  Far  Rockaway. Even  then, by Jesus,  it Wasn't finished. Soon I
felt  her  groping about, first with  her hands, then with her mouth. I  had
still a  sort  of semi  hard-on. She got it into her mouth  and she began to
caress it with her tongue. I  saw stars. The next thing I knew her feet were
around my neck and my tongue  up her  twat. And then I  had to get over  her
again and shove it in, up to  the hilt. She squirmed  around like an eel, so
help  me God. And then she began  to come again,  long, drawn-out, agonizing
orgasms, with a whimpering  and gibbering that was hallucinating. Finally  I
had to  pull it out  and tell her to stop. What a quim! And I had only asked
to take a look at it!
     Maxie with his talk of Odessa revived something which I  had lost  as a
child. Though I had never a very dear picture of Odessa  the  aura of it was
like the little neighbourhood in Brooklyn which meant so much to me and from
which  I  had been torn away  too soon. I get a very definite feeling of  it
every time I see an Italian painting without perspective: if it is a picture
of  a funeral procession, for example, it is  exactly the sort of experience
which I knew as a child, one of intense immediacy. If it is a picture of the
open  street, the women sitting in the windows are sitting <i>on</i> the street and
not above it and away from it. Everything that  happens is known immediately
by everybody, just as among primitive people.  Murder is  in the air, chance
rules.
     Just  as in the Italian primitives this  perspective is  lacking, so in
the little old neighbourhood from which I was uprooted as a child there were
these  parallel vertical planes on  which  everything took place and through
which, from layer to layer,  everything was communicated, as if  by osmosis.
The frontiers were sharp, dearly defined,  but they  were not impassable.  I
lived  then, as a boy, dose to the boundary between the north and the  south
side. I was  just a little bit over on the north side, just a few steps from
a broad thoroughfare called North Second  Street, which was for me the  real
boundary line between the  north and the south side. The actual boundary was
Grand Street, which led to Broadway Ferry, but this street meant  nothing to
me, except that it was already  beginning to  be filled with Jews. No, North
Second Street was the mystery street, the frontier between two worlds. I was
living, therefore, between two boundaries, the one real, the other imaginary
- as I have lived all my life. There was  a little street, just a block long
which  lay  between Grand Street and  North  Second Street,  called Fillmore
Place. This little street  was obliquely opposite  the  house my grandfather
owned and in which we  lived. It was the most enchanting street  I have ever
seen in all my life. It was the ideal street - for a boy, a lover, a maniac,
a drunkard, a crook, a  lecher, a thug, an astronomer, a musician, a poet, a
tailor, a shoemaker, a politician. In fact this was  just the sort of street
it  was, containing just such representatives of  the human race, each one a
world unto himself and all living together  harmoniously and inharmoniously,
<i>but  together,</i> a solid corporation, a dose-knit human spore  which could not
disintegrate unless the street itself disintegrated.
     So  it  seemed,  at least.  Until  the Williamsburg Bridge was  opened,
whereupon there followed the  invasion of the Jews from Delancey Street, New
York. This brought  about the  disintegration  of  our little  world, of the
little street called Fillmore Place, which like the name itself was a street
of value,  of dignity, of light, of  surprises. The Jews came, as I say, and
like moths they began to eat into  the  fabric of our lives until there  was
nothing  left  by this moth-like  presence  which  they  brought  with  them
everywhere. Soon the street began to smell bad, soon  the real people  moved
away, soon the houses began  to deteriorate and even the  stoops  fell away,
like the paint.  Soon the  street looked like a dirty  mouth  with  all  the
prominent teeth missing, with ugly charred stumps gaping here and there, the
lips rotting, the palate gone. Soon the  garbage was knee deep in the gutter
and the fire escapes filled  with bloated  bedding,  with  cockroaches, with
dried blood. Soon the Kosher sign appeared on the shop windows and there was
poultry everywhere and lax and  sour  pickles  and enormous loaves of bread.
Soon there were baby-carriages in every areaway and on the stoops and in the
little  yards  and before the shop  fronts. And with the  change the English
language also disappeared; one heard nothing  but Yiddish,  nothing but this
sputtering, choking, hissing tongue in which God and rotten vegetables sound
alike and mean alike.
     We  were among the first families to move away, following the invasion.
Two  or  three  times a year I came back  to  the old neighbourhood,  for  a
birthday or for Christmas or Thanksgiving. With each visit I marked the loss
of something I had loved  and  cherished. It was  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
<i>metropolitan,</i> 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 <i>one  is  in reality</i>  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 <i>one</i> 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,  <i>just as in a dream.</i> 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 <i>Creative
     Evolution.</i>  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,  <i>creative,</i> 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 <i>creative.  1</i> 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 - <i>for good.</i> 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 <i>Creative Evolution</i> 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 <i>fine! jump
the track,  annihilate  them!</i>  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. <i>Where is Una?</i> Yes, suddenly, that's the burning question: <i>where is
Una ?</i> 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? <i>When</i> 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 <i>come
to me! Come to me because I can't live any more without you!</i>
     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: <i>you are  alone in the world!</i>  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 <i>is</i> 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 <i>belongs,</i> 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 <i>life</i> 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  <i>the</i> 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>I was the wound itself.</i>
     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, <i>but I could not read her face.</i> 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</i>
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 way of swooping suddenly, as if she had spotted a
ripe  carcass, diving  right  into the bowels, pouncing immediately  on  the
tidbits -  the heart, the liver, or the ovaries -and making off again in the
twinkling of an eye. Did someone spot her, she would lie stone  quiet at the
base of a tree,  her eyes not quite dosed but immovable in that  fixed stare
of the basilisk. Prod her a bit  and  she  would become a rose, a deep black
rose  with the most velvety petals and of a fragrance that was overpowering.
It  was  amazing  how marvellously I  learned to take my cue; no  matter how
swift the metamorphosis I was always there in her lap,  bird lap, beast lap,
snake lap,  rose  lap, what matter: the lap of laps, the lip of lips, tip to
tip, feather to feather,  the yolk in the egg, the  pearl  in the  oyster, a
cancer  clutch,  a tincture  of  sperm and  cantharides.  Life  was  Scorpio
conjunction Mars,  conjunction Venus,  Saturn,  Uranus, et cetera,  love was
conjunctivitis of the mandibles, dutch this, dutch that, clutch, clutch, the
mandibular  clutch-clutch of  the mandala wheel  of lust. Come  food time  I
could  already hear her  peeling the  eggs, and inside the egg  <i>cheep-cheep,</i>
blessed  omen  of  the  next meal to come.  I  ate  like a  monomaniac:  the
prolonged dreamlit voracity of the man who  is thrice breaking his fast. And
as I ate she purred, the rhythmic predatory wheeze of the succubus devouring
her  young. What  a  blissful  night  of love!  Saliva,  sperm, succubation,
sphincteritis all in one: the conjugal orgy in the Black Hole of Calcutta.
     Out there where the black star hung, a Pan-Islamic silence,  as  in the
cavern world where even the wind is stilled.  Out there, did I dare to brood
on  it,  the spectral  quietude  of  insanity, the  world  of  men,  lulled,
exhausted  by  centuries  of  incessant   slaughter.  Out  there  one   gory
encompassing membrane within which all  activity  took place, the hero-world
of lunatics and maniacs who had quenched the light of the heaven with blood.
How  peaceful our little dove-and-vulture life in the dark! Flesh to bury in
with  teeth  or  penis,  abundant  odorous flesh  with  no mark of  knife or
scissors, no scar  of exploded  shrapnel, no mustard bums, no scalded lungs.
Save for the hallucinating hole in the ceiling, an almost perfect womb life.
But  the hole was  there  - like a  fissure in the bladder - and  no wadding
could plug it permanently, no urination could  pass off with a  smile.  Piss
large and freely, aye, but  how forget  the rent in  the belfry, the silence
unnatural, the  imminence, the terror,  the poom of the "other" world? Eat a
bellyful,  aye, and tomorrow another bellyful, and tomorrow and tomorrow and
tomorrow - but <i>finally,</i> what then? <i>Finally ?</i> What was <i>finally?</i>  A change  of
ventriloquist, a  change of lap, a shift  in the  axis,  another rift in the
vault... <i>what ? what ?</i> I'll tell you -  sitting in her lap, petrified by the
still,  pronged  beams  of the  black  star, homed,  snaffled,  hitched  and
trepanned by the telepathic acuity of your  interacting agitation, I thought
of nothing at  all, nothing that was outside the cell we inhabited, not even
the thought of a crumb  on a white tablecloth.  I thought purely within  the
walls of our  amoebic life, the pure thought such as Immanuel Pussyfoot Kant
gave us  and which only a  ventriloquist's dummy could  reproduce. I thought
out  every theory of  science, every theory of art, every grain of truth  in
every cock-eyed system of  salvation. I  calculated everything  out to a pin
point  with gnostic decimals to boot, like primes which a drunk hands out at
the finish of a six-day-race. But everything was calculated for another life
which somebody else would  live some day -<i>perhaps.</i> We were at  the very neck
of the bottle, <i>her  and</i> I, as they say, but the neck had been broken off and
the bottle was only a fiction.
     I remember how the second time I met her she told me that she had never
expected to see me again, and the next time I saw her she said she thought I
was a dope fiend, and the next time she called me a god, and after that  she
tried  to  commit suicide and  then I tried  and then  she  tried again, and
nothing worked except to bring  us closer  together, so close indeed that we
interpenetrated, exchanged personalities, name,  identity, religion, father,
mother, brother. Even her body  went  through a radical change, not once but
several times. At first she was big and velvety, like the  jaguar, with that
silky, deceptive strength of the feline species, the crouch, the spring, the
pounce; then she grew emaciated, fragile, delicate almost like a cornflower,
and with  each change thereafter she went through the subtlest modulations -
of  skin,  muscle, colour,  posture, odour, gait,  gesture,  et cetera.  She
changed like a chameleon.  Nobody could say what she really was like because
with each one she was an entirely different person. After  a time she didn't
even  know  herself what she  was  like.  She  had  begun  this  process  of
metamorphosis before I met her,  as I later dis- covered. Like so many women
who  think  themselves  ugly  she  had  willed  to make  herself  beautiful,
dazzlingly beautiful. To do this  she first of all renounced  her name, then
her family, her friends, everything which might attach her to the past. With
all  her wits and faculties she devoted herself to the  cultivation  of  her
beauty, other charm, which she already  possessed to a high degree but which
she had been made to believe  were nonexistent.  She lived constantly before
the mirror, studying every movement, every gesture, every slightest grimace.
She changed her  whole manner of speech, her  diction,  her  intonation, her
accent,  her phraseology.  She  conducted herself so skilfully  that  it was
impossible even to broach  the subject of origins. She was constantly on her
guard, even in her sleep. And,  like a good general, she discovered  quickly
enough that  the best defence is attack. She never  left  a single  position
unoccupied;   her  outposts,  her  scouts,  her  sentinels  were   stationed
everywhere. Her mind was a revolving searchlight which was never dimmed.
     Blind  to  her own  beauty, her own  charm, her own personality, to say
nothing  of  her  identity,  she  launched  her  full  powers   towards  the
fabrication of  a mythical creature, a  Helen, a Juno, whose  charms neither
man nor woman would be able to resist. Automatically, without  the slightest
knowledge of  legend, she  began to create little by little  the ontological
background, the mythic sequence of events preceding the conscious birth. She
had no need to remember her lies, her fictions  -  she had only  to  bear in
mind her role. There was no lie too monstrous  for her to utter, for in  her
adopted role she  was  absolutely faithful to herself. She did  not have  to
<i>invent</i> a past: she <i>remembered</i> the past  which belonged to her. She was never
outflanked by  a  direct  question since  she never presented herself  to an
adversary except obliquely. She presented only the angles of the everturning
facets,  the blinding prisms of light which  she  kept constantly revolving.
She was never a being, such as  might  finally be caught in repose,  but the
mechanism  itself,  relentlessly  operating the myriad  mirrors  which would
reflect the myth she had created. She  had  no  poise  what soever;  she was
eternally poised above her multiple  identities  in the vacuum of the  self.
She  had not intended  to make herself a  legendary figure,  she had  merely
wanted her beauty to be recognized. But, in  the pursuit of beauty, she soon
forgot her quest entirely, became the victim of her own creation. She became
so  stunningly  beautiful  that  at  times  she  was  frightening,  at times
positively uglier  than the ugliest  woman in the world. She  could  inspire
horror and  dread, especially when  her charm was at its height.  It  was as
though the  will,  blind  and uncontrollable,  shone through  the  creation,
exposing the monster which it is.
     In the dark, locked away in the black hole with no world looking on, no
adversary, no  rivals, the blinding dynamism of  the will slowed down a bit,
gave  her  a molten copperish glow,  the words coming out of her  mouth like
lava, her  flesh clutching ravenously for a hold, a perch on something solid
and  substantial, something in  which  to reintegrate and  repose for  a few
moments. It was  like  a  frantic long  distance  message, an S.O.S. from  a
sinking ship. At first I mistook it for passion, for the ecstasy produced by
flesh rubbing  against flesh.  I thought I  had  found  a living volcano,  a
female Vesuvius. I never thought of  a human ship going down in an  ocean of
despair, in a Sargasso of impotence. Now I think of that black star gleaming
through the  hole  in  the  ceiling, that fixed  star  which  hung above our
conjugal cell, more fixed, more remote than the Absolute,  and I know it was
her,  emptied  of  all that was  properly herself: a dead black sun  without
aspect.  I know  that we  were conjugating the verb  love like  two  maniacs
trying  to fuck through an iron  grate. I said that in the frantic grappling
in the dark I sometimes forgot  her name, what she looked like, who she was.
It's true. I overeached myself  in the dark. I slid off the flesh rails into
the endless  space  of sex, into the channel-orbits established  by this one
and that one; Georgiana, for instance, of only a brief afternoon, Telma, the
Egyptian whore, Carlotta, Alannah,  Una, Mona, Magda, girls of six or seven;
waifs, will'o'-the-wisps, faces, bodies, thighs, a subway brush, a  dream, a
memory,  a  desire,  a  longing.  I could start with  Georgiana  of a Sunday
afternoon near  the  railroad tracks, her dotted  Swiss  dress,  her swaying
haunch, her Southern  drawl,  her  lascivious mouth,  her molten  breasts, I
could start with Georgiana,  the myriad branched candelabra of sex, and work
outwards and upwards through the ramification of cunt into the nth dimension
of  sex, world without  end.  Georgiana was like the  membrane  of the  tiny
little ear of an unfinished monster  called sex. She was transparently alive
and breathing in the light of the memory of a brief afternoon on the avenue,
the first tangible  odour  and substance of the world of fuck  which  is  in
itself a being  limitless and undefinable,  like  our  world the  world. The
whole world of fuck like unto the ever-increasing membrane of  the animal we
call  sex,  which  is  like  another being growing  into  our  own being and
gradually displacing it, so that in time the human world will be only  a dim
memory  of this  new, all-inclusive,  all-procreative being which  is giving
birth to itself.
     It  was  precisely  this  snake-like   copulation  in  the  dark,  this
double-jointed,  double-barrelled hook-up, which put me in the strait-jacket
of doubt,  jealousy, fear,  loneliness. If  I  began  my hem-stitching  with
Georgiana and the  myriad-branched candelabra  of sex I was certain that she
too  was at  work  building  membrane, making ears,  eyes,  toes,  scalp and
what-not  of  sex. She  would begin  with  the  monster who  had raped  her,
assuming there was truth in the  story;  in any case she too began somewhere
on a parallel track, working  upwards and outwards  through  this multiform,
uncreated being  through  whose  body  we were both striving desperately  to
meet. Knowing only a fraction of her life, possessing only a bag of lies, of
inventions,  of  imaginings, of obsessions  and delusions,  putting together
tag-ends, coke dreams, reveries, unfinished  sentences,  jumbled dream talk,
hysterical ravings, ill-disguised fantasies, morbid desires, meeting now and
then a name become flesh, overhearing stray  bits of conversation, observing
smuggled  glances, half-arrested gestures,  I could well  credit her  with a
pantheon of her own private fucking gods, of only too  vivid flesh and blood
creatures, men of perhaps that very afternoon,  of perhaps only an hour ago,
her  cunt  perhaps  still choked with the sperm of the last fuck.  The  more
submissive she  was,  the more passionately she  behaved, the more abandoned
she  looked,  the  more uncertain I  became.  There  was  no  beginning,  no
personal, individual  starting  point;  we met like experienced swordsmen on
the  field of honour now crowded with the ghosts  of victory  and defeat  We
were alert and responsible  to the  least thrust, as only  the practiced can
be.
     We came together under cover of  dark with our armies and from opposite
sides we forced the gates of the citadel. There was  no resisting our bloody
work; we asked for no quarter and we gave none. We came together swimming in
blood, a gory, glaucous reunion in the night with all the stars extinguished
save the  fixed black  star hanging like  a  scalp  above  the hole  in  the
ceiling. If she were properly coked she would vomit it forth like an oracle,
everything that  had happened  to her during the  day,  yesterday,  the  day
before, the year before last, <i>everything,</i> down to  the day she was born. And
not a word of it was true, not a single detail. Not a moment did  she  stop,
for if she  had, the vacuum she  created  in her flight  would  have brought
about  an explosion fit  to sunder  the  world.  She  was the world's  lying
machine in microcosm, geared to the same  unending,  devastating  fear which
enables  men  to  throw  all  their  energies  into  creation  of the  death
apparatus. To look at her  one would think her fearless, one would think her
the personification of courage  and she <i>was,</i> so long  as she was not obliged
to turn in her traces. Behind her  lay  the calm fact of reality, a colossus
which  dogged  her every step. Every day  this colossal reality took on  new
proportions, every day it became more terrifying, more paralysing. Every day
she  had to grow swifter wings,  sharper jaws, more piercing, hypnotic eyes.
It was  a race to the outermost limits  of the world, a race lost  from  the
start, and  no one to stop it. At the edge of the vacuum  stood Truth, ready
in one  lightning-like sweep to recover the stolen ground.  It was so simple
and  obvious that it  drove her frantic. Marshal a  thousand  personalities,
commandeer the biggest guns, deceive the  greatest  minds,  make the longest
detour - still the end would be defeat. In  the final meeting everything was
destined to fall apart  - the cunning, the skill, the power, everything. She
would be a grain of  sand on the shore of the biggest ocean, and, worse than
anything, she would resemble each and  every  other  grain of  sand on  that
ocean's  shore.  She  would  be  condemned  to  recognize  her  unique  self
everywhere until the end of  time. What  a fate she had chosen for  herself!
That her uniqueness  should  be engulfed  in  the universal! That  her power
should be  reduced  to  the  utmost  node of  passivity!  It  was maddening,
hallucinating.  It could  not be!  It  <i>must</i> not be! Onward! Like  the  black
legions. Onward! Through every degree of the everwidening circle. Onward and
away  from  the  self,  until  the last substantial particle  of the soul be
stretched to infinity.  In  her panic-stricken flight she seemed to bear the
whole  world in her womb. We  were being driven out of the  confines of  the
universe towards a nebula which no instrument could visualize. We were being
rushed to a  pause so still,  so prolonged, that death by comparison seems a
mad witches' revel.
     In the morning, gazing at the bloodless crater of  her face. Not a line
in it, not a wrinkle, not a single blemish! The look of an angel in the arms
of the  Creator. <i>Who killed Cock Robin ? Who massacred the Iroquois?</i>  Not I,
my  lovely angel could  say,  and by God, who gazing at that pure, blameless
face could deny her? Who could see in that sleep of  innocence that one half
of the face belonged to God and the other half to Satan? The mask was smooth
as  death,  cool,  lovely  to  <i>the</i> touch,  waxen, like  a  petal open to the
faintest breeze.  So alluringly still and  guileless  was it that  one could
drown in  it, one  could go  down  into it, body and  all, like a diver, and
nevermore  return. Until the  eyes  opened upon the world she would lie like
that, thoroughly extinguished and gleaming with a  reflected light, like the
moon itself. In her death-like trance of innocence she fascinated even more;
her  crimes dissolved,  exuded through  the  pores,  she lay coiled  like  a
sleeping  serpent riveted to the earth. The  body, strong, lithe,  muscular,
seemed possessed of a weight unnatural; she had a  more  than human gravity,
the gravity, one might almost say, of a warm  corpse. She was like one might
imagine the beautiful Nefertiti to  have been after the first thousand years
of  mummification, a  marvel  of  mortuary  perfection,  a  dream  of  flesh
preserved from mortal decay. She  lay coiled at  the base  of a hollow pyra-
mid, enshrined  in the vacuum of her own creation like a sacred relic of the
past.  Even her breathing seemed stopped, so  profound was her slumber.  She
had  dropped below the  human  sphere, below  the  animal  sphere, below the
vegetative sphere even: she had sunk down  to the level of the mineral world
where animation is just a notch above death. She had so  mastered the art of
deception that even the  dream was powerless to betray her.  She had learned
how to not dream: when she coiled up in sleep she automatically switched off
the  current. If one could have caught her thus and opened up  the skull one
would have  found  it  absolutely  void.  She kept  no  disturbing  secrets;
everything was killed off which could be humanly  killed. She  might live on
endlessly,  like  the moon, like any  dead  planet,  radiating  an  hypnotic
effulgence,  creating  tides  of  passion, engulfing  the world  in madness,
discolouring all earthly substances with her magnetic, metallic rays. Sowing
her own death  she brought everyone about her to fever pitch. In the heinous
stillness of  her sleep she renewed her own magnetic death by union with the
cold magma of  the lifeless planetary worlds. She was magically intact.  Her
gaze fell upon one with a transpiercing fixity: it was the moon gaze through
which the dead dragon of life gave off  a cold fire. The  one eye was a warm
brown, the colour of an autumn leaf; the  other was hazel,  the magnetic eye
which flickered a compass needle. Even in sleep this eye continued to nicker
under the shutter of the lid; it was the only apparent sign of life in her.
     The  moment she opened her eyes she was wide  awake. She  awoke  with a
violent start, as if the sight of the world and its human paraphernalia were
a shock. Instantly she  was  in full activity,  lashing about like  a  great
python. What annoyed  her was the light!  She awoke cursing the sun, cursing
the glare  of reality. The room had to be darkened, the candles lit, <i>the</i> the
windows tightly shut to prevent the noise of the street from penetrating the
room. She moved about naked with a cigarette  dangling from the comer of her
mouth.  Her toilet was an affair of great preoccupation; a thousand trifling
details had to be attended  to before she could so much as  don a  bathrobe.
She was  like an athlete preparing for the  great event of the day. From the
roots  of  her hair, which she studied with keen attention, to the shape and
length of  her toe-nails, every part of her anatomy was thoroughly inspected
before sitting  down to breakfast. Like an athlete I said  she  was,  but in
fact  she was  more like  a  mechanic  overhauling  a fast plane for  a test
flight.  Once she slipped on her dress she was launched for the day, for the
flight which  might  end  perhaps in  Irkutsk or  Teheran. She would take on
enough fuel  at  breakfast  to last  the entire  trip. The breakfast  was  a
prolonged affair:  it was the one ceremony of the day over which she dawdled
and lingered. It was exasperatingly  prolonged, indeed. One  wondered if she
would ever take  on,  one wondered  if she had forgotten  the grand  mission
which she had sworn to accomplish  each day.  Perhaps she was dreaming other
itinerary,  or perhaps she was not dreaming at all  b