ut simply allowing time
for the functional processes of her marvellous machine so that once embarked
there would be no turning back. She was very calm and self-possessed at this
hour of the day; she was like a great bird of the air perched on a mountain
crag, dreamily surveying the terrain below. It was not from the breakfast
table that she would suddenly swoop and dive to pounce upon her prey. No,
from the early morning perch she would take off slowly and majestically,
synchronizing her every movement with the pulse of the motor. All space lay
before her, her direction dictated only by caprice. She was almost the image
of freedom, were it not for the Saturnian weight of her body and the
abnormal span of her wings. However poised she seemed, especially at the
take-on, one sensed the terror which motivated the daily flight. She was at
once obedient to her destiny and at the same time frantically eager to
overcome it. Each morning she soared aloft from her perch, as from some
Himalayan peak; she seemed always to direct her flight towards some
uncharted region into which, if all went well, she would disappear forever.
Each morning she seemed to carry aloft with her this desperate, last-minute
hope; she took leave with calm, grave dignity, like one about to go down
into the grave. Never once did she circle about the flying field; never once
did she cast a glance backward towards those whom she was abandon- ing. Nor
did she leave the slightest crumb of personality behind her; she took to the
air with all her belongings, with every slightest scrap of evidence which
might testify to the fact of her existence. She didn't even leave the breath
of a sigh behind, not even a toe-nail. A clean exit, such as the Devil
himself might make for reasons of his own. One was left with a great void on
his hands. One was deserted, and not only deserted, but betrayed, inhumanly
betrayed. One had no desire to detain her nor to call her back; one was left
with a curse on his lips, with a black hatred which darkened the whole day.
Later, moving about the city, moving slowly in pedestrian fashion, crawling
like the worm, one gathered rumours of her spectacular flight; she had been
seen rounding a certain point, she had dipped here or there for what reason
no one knew, she had done a tailspin elsewhere, she had passed like a comet,
she had written letters of smoke in the sky, and so on and so forth.
Everything she had done was enigmatic and exasperating, done apparently
without purpose. It was like a symbolic and ironic commentary on human life,
on the behaviour of the ant-like creature man, viewed from another
dimension.
Between the time she took off and the time she returned I lived the
life of a full blooded schizerino. It was not an eternity which elapsed,
because somehow eternity has to do with peace and with victory, it is
something man-made, something earned: no, I experienced an entr'acte in
which every hair turns white to the roots, in which every millimetre of skin
itches and burns until the whole body becomes a running sore. I see myself
sitting before a table in the dark, my hands and feet growing enormous, as
though elephantiasis were overtaking me at a gallop. I hear the blood
rushing up to the brain and pounding at the ear-drums like Himalayan devils
with sledge hammers; I hear her flapping her huge wings, even in Irkutsk,
and I know she is pushing on and on, ever further away, ever further beyond
reach. It is so quiet in the room and so frightfully empty that I shriek and
howl just to make a little noise, a little human sound. I try to lift myself
from the table but my feet are too heavy and my hands have become like the
shapeless feet of the rhinoceros. The heavier my body becomes the lighter
the atmosphere of the room; I am going to spread and spread until I fill the
room with one solid mass of stiff jelly. I shall fill up even the cracks in
the wall; I shall grow through the wall like a parasitic plant, spreading
and spreading until the whole house is an indescribable mass of flesh and
hair and nails. I know that this is death, but I am powerless to kill the
knowledge of it, or the knower. Some tiny particle of me is alive, some
speck of consciousness persists, and, as the inert carcass expands, this
flicker of life becomes sharper and sharper and gleams inside me like the
cold fire of a gem. It lights up the whole gluey mass of pulp so that I am
like a diver with a torch in the body of a dead marine monster. By some
slender hidden filament I am still connected with the life above the surface
of the deep, but it is so far away, the upper world, and the weight of the
corpse so great that, even if it were possible, it would take years to reach
the surface. I move around in my own dead body, exploring every nook and
cranny of its huge, shapeless mass. It is an endless exploration, for with
the ceaseless growth the whole topography changes, slipping and drifting
like the hot magma of the earth. Never for a minute is there terra firma,
never for a minute does anything remain still and recognizable: it is a
growth without landmarks, a voyage in which the destination changes with
every least move or shudder. It is this interminable filling of space which
kills all sense of space or time; the more the body expands the tinier
becomes the world, until at last I feel that everything is concentrated on
the head of a pin. Despite the floundering of this enormous dead mass which
I have become, I feel that what sustains it, the world out of which it
grows, is no bigger than a pinhead. In the midst of pollution, in the very
heart and gizzard of death, as it were, I sense the seed, the miraculous,
infinitesimal lever which balances the world. I have overspread the world
like a syrup and the emptiness of it is terrifying, but there is no
dislodging the seed; the seed has become a little knot of cold fire which
roars like a sun in the vast hollow of the dead carcass.
When the great plunder-bird returns exhausted from her flight she will
find me here in the midst of my nothingness, I, the imperishable schizerino,
a blazing seed hidden in the heart of death. Every day she thinks to find
another means of sustenance, but there is no other, only this eternal seed
of light which by dying each day I rediscover for her. Fly, 0 devouring
bird, fly to the limits of the universe! Here is your nourishment glowing in
the sickening emptiness you have created! You will come back to perish once
more in the black hole; you will come back again and again, for you have not
the wings to carry you out of the world. This is the only world you can
inhabit, this tomb of the snake where darkness reigns.
And suddenly for no reason at all, when I think of her returning to her
nest, I remember Sunday mornings in the little old house near the cemetery.
I remember sitting at the piano in my nightshirt, working away at the pedals
with bare feet, and the folks lying in bed toasting themselves in the next
room. The rooms opened one on the other, telescope fashion, as in the good
old American railroad flats. Sunday mornings one lay in bed until one was
ready to screech with well-being. Towards eleven or so the folks used to rap
on the wall of my bedroom for me to come and play for them. I would dance
into the room like the Fratellini Brothers, so full of flame and feathers
that I could hoist myself like a derrick to the topmost limb of the tree of
heaven. I could do anything and everything singlehanded, being
double-jointed at the same time. The old man called me "Sunny Jim", because
I was full of "Force", full of vim and vigour. First I would do a few
handsprings for them on the carpet before the bed; then I would sing
falsetto, trying to imitate a ventriloquist's dummy; then I would dance a
few light fantastic steps to show which way the wind lay, and zoom! Like a
breeze I was on the piano stool and doing a velocity exercise. I always
began with Czemy, in order to limber up for the performance. The old man
hated Czemy, and so did I, but Czemy was the plat du jour on the bill of
fare then, and so Czemy it was until my joints were rubber. In some vague
way Czemy reminds me of the great emptiness which came upon me later. What a
velocity I would work up, riveted to the piano stool! It was like swallowing
a bottle of tonic at one gulp and then having someone strap you to the bed.
After I had played about ninety-eight exercises I was ready to do a little
improvising. I used to take a fist-full of chords and crash the piano from
one end to the other, then sullenly modulate into "The Burning of Rome" or
the "Ben Hur Chariot Race" which everybody liked because it was intelligible
noise. Long before I read Wittgenstein's Tractatvs Logico-Philosophicus I
was composing the music to it, in the key of sassafras. I was learned then
in science and philosophy, in the history of religions, in inductive and
deductive logic, in liver mantic, in the shape and weight of skulls, in
pharmacopeia and metallurgy, in all the useless branches of learning which
gives you indigestion and melancholia before your time. This vomit of
learned truck was stewing in my guts the whole week long, waiting for it to
come Sunday to be set to music. In between "The Midnight Fire Alarm" and
"Marche Militaire" I would get my inspiration, which was to destroy all the
existent forms of harmony and create my own cacophony. Imagine Uranus well
aspected to Mars, to Mercury, to the Moon, to Jupiter, to Venus. It's hard
to imagine because Uranus functions best when it is badly aspected, when it
is "afflicted", so to speak. Yet that music which I gave off Sunday
mornings, a music of well-being and of well-nourished desperation, was born
of an illogically well-aspected Uranus firmly anchored in the 7th House. I
didn't know it then, I didn't know that Uranus existed, and lucky it was
that I was ignorant. But I can see it now, because it was a fluky joy, a
phony well-being, a destructive sort of fiery creation. The greater my
euphoria the more tranquil the folks became. Even my sister who was dippy
became calm and composed. The neighbours used to stand outside the window
and listen, and now and then I would hear a burst of applause, and then
bang, zip! like a rocket I was off again - Velocity Exercise No.
9471/2. If I happened to espy a cockroach crawling up the wall I
was in bliss: that would lead me without the slightest modulation to Opus
Izzi of my sadly corrugated clavichord. One Sunday, just like that, I
composed one of the loveliest scherzos imaginable - to a louse. It was
Spring and we were all getting the sulphur treatment; I had been pouring all
week over Dante's Inferno in English. Sunday came like a thaw, the birds
driven so crazy by the sudden heat that they flew in and out of the window,
immune to the music. One of the German relatives had just arrived from
Hamburg, or Bremen, a maiden aunt who looked like a bull-dyker. Just to be
near her was sufficient to throw roe into a fit of rage. She used to pat me
on the head and tell me I would be another Mozart. I hated Mozart, and I
hate him still, and so to get even with her I would play badly, play all the
sour notes I knew. And then came the little louse, as I was saying, a real
louse which had gotten buried in my winter underwear. I got him out and I
put him tenderly on the tip of a black key. Then I began to do a little
gigue around him with my right hand, the noise had probably deafened him
tenderly on the tip of a black key. Then hypnotized, it seemed, by my nimble
pyrotechnic. This trance-like immobility finally got on my nerves. I decided
to introduce a chromatic scale coming down on him full force with my third
finger. I caught him fair and square, but with such force that he was glued
to my fingertip. That put the St. Vitus' Dance in me. From then on the
scherzo commenced. It was a pot-pourri of forgotten melodies spiced with
aloes and the juice of porcupines, played sometimes in three keys at once
and pivoting always like a waltzing mouse around the immaculate conception.
Later, when I went to hear Prokofief, I understood what was happening to
him; I understood Whitehead and Russell and Jeans and Eddington and Rudolf
Eucken and Frobenius and Link Gillespie; I understood why, if there had
never been a binomial theorem, man would have invented it; I understood why
electricity and compressed air, to say nothing of sprudel baths and fango
packs. I understood very dearly, I must say, that man has a dead louse in
his blood, and that when you're handed a symphony or a fresco or a high
explosive you're really getting an ipecac reaction which was not included in
the predestined bill of fare. I understood too why I had failed to become
the musician I was. All the compositions I had created in my head, all these
private and artistic auditions which were permitted me, thanks to St.
Hildegarde or St. Bridget, or John of the Cross, or God knows whom, were
written for an age to come, an age with less instruments and stronger
antennae, stronger eardrums too. A different kind of suffering has to be
experienced before such music can be appreciated. Beethoven staked out the
new territory - one is aware of its presence when he erupts, when he breaks
down in the very core of his stillness. It is a realm of new vibrations - to
us only a misty nebula, for we have yet to pass beyond our own conception of
suffering. We have yet to ingest this nebulous world, its travail, its
orientation. I was permitted to hear an incredible music lying prone and
indifferent to the Sorrow about me. I heard the gestation of a new world,
the sound of torrential rivers taking their course, the sound of stars
grinding and chafing, of fountains clotted with blazing gems. All music is
still governed by the old astronomy, is the product of the hothouse, a
panacea for Weltschmerz. Music is still the antidote for the nameless, but
this is not yet music. Music is planetary fire, an irreducible which is
all-sufficient; it is the slate-writing of the gods, the abracadabra which
the learned and the ignorant alike muff because the axle has been unhooked.
Look to the bowels, to the unconsolable and ineluctable! Nothing is
determined, nothing is settled or solved. All this that is going on, all
music, all architecture, all law, all government, all invention, all
discovery - all this is velocity exercises in the dark, Czemy with a capital
Zed riding a crazy white horse in a bottle of mucilage.
One of the reasons why I never got anywhere with the bloody music is
that it was always mixed up with sex. As soon as I was able to play a song
the cunts were around me like flies. To begin with, it was largely Lola's
fault. Lola was my first piano teacher. Lola Niessen. It was a ridiculous
name and typical of the neighbourhood we were living in then. It sounded
like a stinking bloater, or a wormy cunt. To tell the truth, Lola was not
exactly a beauty. She looked somewhat like a Kalmuck or a Chinook, with
sallow complexion and bilious-looking eyes. She had a few warts and wens,
not to speak of the moustache. What excited me, however, was her hairiness;
she had wonderful long fine black hair which she arranged in ascending and
descending buns on her Mongolian skull. At the nape of the neck she curled
it up in a serpentine knot. She was always late in coming, being a
conscientious idiot, and by the time she arrived I was always a bit
enervated from masturbating. As soon as she took the stool beside me,
however, I became exdted again, what with the stinking perfume she soused
her armpits with. In the summer she wore loose sleeves and I could see the
tufts'of hair under her arms. The sight of it drove me wild. I imagined her
as having hair all over, even in her navel. And what I wanted to do was to
roll in it, bury my teeth in it. I could have eaten Lola's hair as a
delicacy, if there had been a bit of flesh attached to it. Anyway she was
hairy, that's what I want to say and being hairy as a gorilla she got my
mind off the the music and on to her cunt. I was so damned eager to see that
cunt of hers that finally one day I bribed her little brother to let me have
a peep at her while she was in the bath. It was even more wonderful than I
had imagined: she had a shag that reached from the navel to the crotch, an
enormous thick tuft, a sporran, rich as a hand-woven rug. When she went over
it with the powder puff I thought I would faint. The next time she came for
the lesson I left a couple of buttons open on my fly. She didn't seem to
notice anything amiss. The following time I left my whole fly open. This
time she caught on. She said, "I think you've forgotten something. Henry." I
looked at her, red as a beet, and I asked her blandly what ? She pretended
to look away while pointing to it with her left hand. Her hand came so close
that I couldn't resist grabbing it and pushing it in my fly. She got up.
quickly, looking pale and frightened. By this time my prick was out of my
fly and quivering with delight. I closed in on her and I reached up under
her dress to get at that hand-woven rug I had seen through the keyhole.
Suddenly I got a sound box on the ears, and then another and she took me by
the ear and leading me to a comer of the room she turned my face to the wall
and said, "Now button up your fly, you silly boy!" We went back to the piano
in a few moments - back to Czemy and the velocity exercises. I couldn't see
a sharp from a flat any more, but I continued to play because I was afraid
she might tell my mother about the incident. Fortunately it was not an easy
thing to tell one's mother. The incident, embarrassing as it was, marked a
decided change in our relations. I thought that the next time she came she
would be severe with me, but on the contrary; she seemed to have dolled
herself up, to have sprinkled more perfume over herself, and she was even a
bit gay, which was unusual for Lola because she was a morose, withdrawn
type. I didn't dare to open my fly again, but I would get an erection and
hold it throughout the lesson, which she must have enjoyed because she was
always stealing sidelong glances in that direction. I was only fifteen at
the time, and she was easily twenty-five or twenty-eight. It was difficult
for me to know what to do, unless it was to deliberately knock her down one
day while my mother was out. For a time I actually shadowed her at night,
when she went out alone. She had a habit of going out for long walks alone
in the evening. I used to dog her steps, hoping she would get to some
deserted spot near the cemetery where I might try some rough tactics. I had
a feeling sometimes that she knew I was following her and that she enjoyed
it. I think she was waiting for me to waylay her - I think that was what she
wanted. Anyway, one night I was lying in the grass near the railroad tracks;
it was a sweltering summer's night and people were lying about anywhere and
everywhere, like panting dogs. I wasn't thinking of Lola at all - I was just
mooning there, too hot to think about anything. Suddenly I see a woman
coming along the narrow cinderpath. I'm lying sprawled out on the embankment
and nobody around that I can notice. The woman is coming along slowly, head
down, as though she were dreaming. As she gets close I recognize her.
"Lola!" I call. "Lola!" She seems to be really astonished to see me there.
"Why, what are you doing here?" she says, and with that she sits down beside
me on the embankment. I didn't bother to answer her, I didn't say a word -1
just crawled over her and flattened her. "Not here, please," she begged, but
I paid no attention. I got my hand between her legs, all tangled up in that
thick sporran others, and she was sopping wet, like a horse salivating. It
was my first fuck, be Jesus, and it had to be that a train would come along
and shower hot sparks over us. Lola was terrified. It was her first fuck
too, I guess, and she probably needed it more than I, but when she felt the
sparks she wanted to tear loose. It was like trying to hold down a wild
mare. I couldn't keep her down, no matter how I wrestled with her. She got
up, shook herclothes down, and adjusted the bun at the nape of her neck.
"You must go home," she says. "I'm not going home," I said, and with that I
took her by the arm and started walking. We walked along in dead silence for
quite a distance. Neither of us seemed to be noticing where we were going.
Finally we were out on the highway and up above us were the reservoirs and
near the reservoirs was a pond. Instinctively I headed towards the pond. We
had to pass under some low-hanging trees as we neared the pond. I was
helping Lola to stoop down when suddenly she slipped, dragging me with her.
She made no effort to get up; instead, she caught hold of me and pressed me
to her, and to my complete amazement I also felt her slip her hand in my
fly. She caressed me so wonderfully that in a jiffy I came in her hand. Then
she took my hand and put it between her legs. She lay back completely
relaxed and opened her legs wide. I bent over and kissed every hair on her
cunt; I put my tongue in her navel and licked it clean. Then I lay with my
head between her legs and lapped up the drool that was pouring from her. She
was moaning now and clutching wildly with her hands; her hair had come
completely undone and was lying over her bare abdomen. To make it short, I
got it in again, and I held it a long time, for which she must have been
damned grateful because she came I don't know how many times - it was like a
pack of firecrackers going off, and with it all she sunk her teeth into me,
bruised my lips, clawed me, ripped my shirt and what the hell not. I was
branded like a steer when I got home and took a look at myself in the
mirror.
It was wonderful while it lasted, but it didn't last long. A month
later the Niessens moved to another city, and I never saw Lola again. But I
hung her sporran over the bed and I prayed to it every night. And whenever I
began the Czemy stuff I would get an erection, thinking of Lola lying in the
grass, thinking of her long black hair, the bun at the nape of her neck, the
groans she vented and the juice that poured out of her. Playing the piano
was just one long vicarious fuck for me. I had to wait another two years
before I would get my end in again, as they say, and then it wasn't so good
because I got a beautiful dose with it, and besides it wasn't in the grass
and it wasn't summer, and there was no heat in it but just a cold mechanical
fuck for a buck in a dirty little hotel room, the bastard trying to pretend
she was coming and not coming any more than Christmas was coming. And maybe
it wasn't her that gave me the clap, but her pal in the next room who was
lying up with my friend Simmons. It was like this - I had finished so quick
with my mechanical fuck that I thought I'd go in and see how it was going
with my friend Simmons. Lo and behold, they were still at it, and they were
going strong. She was a Czech, his girl, and a bit sappy; she hadn't been at
it very long, apparently, and she used to forget herself and enjoy the act.
Watching her hand it out, I decided to wait and have a go at her myself. And
so I did. And before the week was out I had a discharge, and after that I
figured it would be blueballs or rocks in the groin.
Another year or so and I was giving lessons myself, and as luck would
have it, the mother of the girl I'm teaching is a slut, a tramp and a
trollop if ever there was one. She was living with a nigger, as I later
found out. Seems she couldn't get a prick big enough to satisfy her. Anyway,
every time I started to go home she'd hold me up at the door and rub it up
against me. I was afraid of starting in with her because rumour had it that
she was full of syph, but what the hell are you going to do when a hot bitch
like that plasters her cunt up against you and slips her tongue halfway down
your throat. I used to fuck her standing up in the vestibule, which wasn't
so difficult because she was light and I could hold her in my hand like a
doll. And like that I'm holding her one night when suddenly I hear a key
being fitted into the lock, and she hears it too and she's frightened stiff.
There's nowhere to go. Fortunately there's a portiere hanging at the doorway
and I hide behind that. Then I heard her black buck kissing her and saying
how are yer, honey ? and she's saying how she had been waiting up for him
and better come right upstairs because she can't wait and so on. And when
the stairs stop squeaking I gently open the door and sally out, and then by
God I have a real fright because if that black buck ever finds out I'll have
my throat slit and no mistake about it. And so I stop giving lessons at that
joint, but soon the daughter is after me - just turning sixteen - and won't
I come and give her lessons at a friend's house? We begin the Czerny
exercises all over again, sparks and everything. It's the first smell of
fresh cunt I've had, and it's wonderful, like new-mown hay. We fuck our way
through one lesson after another and in between lessons we do a little extra
fucking. And then one day it's the sad story - she's knocked up and what to
do about it? I have to get a Jewboy to help me out, and he wants twenty-five
bucks for the job and I've never seen twenty-five bucks in my life. Besides,
she's under age. Besides, she might have blood-poisoning. I give him five
bucks on account and beat it to the Adirondacks for a couple of weeks. In
the Adirondacks I meet a schoolteacher who's dying to take lessons. More
velocity exercises, more condoms and conundrums. Every time I touched the
piano I seemed to shake a cunt loose.
If there was a party I had to bring the fucking music roll along; to me
it was just like wrapping my penis in a handkerchief and slinging it under
my arm. In vacation time, at a farmhouse or an inn, where there was always a
surplus of cunt, the music had an extraordinary effect. Vacation rime was a
period I looked forward to the whole year, not because of the cunts so much
as because it meant no work. Once out of harness I became a down. I was so
chock-full of energy that I wanted to jump out of my skin. I remember one
summer in the Catskills meeting a girl named Francie. She was beautiful and
lascivious, with strong Scotch teats and a row of white even teeth that was
dazzling. It began in the river where we were swimming. We were holding on
to the boat and one of her boobies had slipped out of bounds. I slipped the
other one out for her and then I undid the shoulder straps. She ducked under
the boat coyly and I followed and as she was coming up for air I wriggled
the bloody bathing suit off her and there she was floating like a mermaid
with her big strong teats bobbing up and down like bloated corks. I wriggled
out of my tights and we began playing like dolphins under the side of the
boat. In a little while her girl friend came along in a canoe. She was a
rather hefty girl a sort of strawberry blonde with agate-coloured eyes and
full of freckles. She was rather shocked to find us in the raw, but we soon
tumbled her out of the canoe and stripped her. And then the three of us
began to play tag under the water, but it was hard to get anywhere with them
because they were slippery as eels. After we had had enough of it we ran to
a little bath-house which was standing in the field like an abandoned sentry
box. We had brought our clothes along and we were going to get dressed, the
three of us, in this little box. It was frightfully hot and sultry and the
clouds were gathering for a storm. Agnes - that was Francie's friend - was
in a hurry to get dressed. She was beginning to be ashamed of herself
standing there naked in front of us. Francie, on the other hand seemed to be
perfectly at ease. She was sitting on the bench with her legs crossed and
smoking a cigarette. Anyway, just as Agnes was pulling on her chemise there
came a flash of lightning and a terrifying clap of thunder right on the
heels of it. Agnes screamed and dropped her chemise. There came another
flash in a few seconds and again a peal of thunder, dangerously dose. The
air got blue all around us and the flies began to bite and we felt nervous
and itchy and a bit panicky too. Especially Agnes who was afraid of the
lightning and even more afraid of being found dead and three of us stark
naked. She wanted to get her things on and run for the house, she said. And
just as she got that off her chest the rain came down, in bucketsful. We
thought it would stop in a few minutes and so we stood there naked looking
out at the steaming river through the partly opened door. It seemed to be
raining rocks and the lightning kept playing around us incessantly. We were
all thoroughly frightened now and in a quandary as to what to do. Agnes was
wringing her hands and praying out loud; she looked like a George Grosz
idiot, one of those lopsided bitches with a rosary around the neck and
yellow jaundice to boot. I thought she was going to faint on us or
something. Suddenly I got the bright idea of doing a war-dance in the rain -
to distract them. Just as I jump out to commence my shindig a streak of
lightning flashes and splits open a tree not far off. I'm so damned scared
that I lose my wits. Always when I'm frightened I laugh. So I laughed a
wild, blood-curdling laugh which made the girls scream. When I heard them
scream, I don't know why, but I thought of the velocity exercises and with
that I felt that I was standing in the void and it was blue all around and
the rain was beating a bot-and-cold tattoo on my tender flesh. All my
sensations had gathered on the surface of the skin and underneath the
outermost layer of skin I was empty, light as a feather, lighter than air or
smoke or talcum or magnesium or any goddamned thing you want. Suddenly I was
a Chippewa and it was the key of sassafras again and I didn't give a fuck
whether the girls were screaming or fainting or shitting in their pants,
which they were minus anyway. Looking at crazy Agnes with the rosary around
her neck and her big bread-basket blue with fright I got the notion to do a
sacrilegious dance, with one hand cupping my balls and the other hand
thumbing my nose at the thunder and lightning. The rain was hot and cold and
the grass seemed full of dragonflies. I hopped about like a kangaroo and I
yelled at the top of my lungs - "0 Father, you wormy old son of a bitch,
pull in that fucking lightning or Agnes won't believe in you any more! Do
you hear me, you old prick up there, stop the shenanigans . . . you're
driving Agnes nutty. Hey you, are you deaf, you old futzer?" And with a
continuous rattle of this defiant nonsense on my lips I danced around the
bath-house leaping and bounding like a gazelle and using the most frightful
oaths I could summon. When the lightning cracked I jumped higher and when
the thunder clapped I roared like a lion and then I did a handspring and
then I rolled in the grass like a cub and I chewed the grass and spit it out
for them and I pounded my chest like a gorilla and all the time I could see
the Czerny exercises resting on the piano, the white page full of sharps and
flats, and the fucking idiot, think I to myself, imagining that that's the
way to learn how to manipulate the well-tempered clavichord. And suddenly I
thought that Czemy might be in heaven by now and looking down on me and so I
spat at him high as I could spit and when the thunder rolled again I yelled
with all my might - "You bastard, Czerny, you up there, may the lightning
twist your balls off. .. may you swallow your own crooked tail and strangle
yourself... do you hear me, you crazy prick?"
But in spite of all my good efforts Agnes was getting more delirious.
She was a dumb Irish Catholic and she had never heard God spoken to that way
before. Suddenly, while 1 was dancing about in the rear of the bath-house
she bolted for the river. I heard Francie scream - "Bring her back, she'll
drown herself! Bring her back!" I started after her, the rain still coming
down like pitchforks, and yelling to her to come back, but she ran on
blindly as though possessed of the devil, and when she got to the water's
edge she dove straight in and made for the boat. I swam after her and as we
got to the side of the boat, which I was afraid she would capsize, I got
hold of her round the waist with my one hand and I started to talk to her
calmly and soothingly, as though I were talking to a child. "Go away from
me," she said, "you're an atheist!" Jesus, you could have knocked me over
with a feather, so astonished I was to hear that. So that was it? All that
hysteria because I was insulting the Lord Almighty. I felt like batting her
one in the eye to bring her to her senses. But we were out over our heads
and I had a fear that she would do some mad thing like pulling the boat over
our heads if I didn't handle her right. So I pretended that I was terribly
sorry and I said I didn't mean a word of it, that I had been scared to
death, and so on and so forth, and as I talked to her gently, soothingly, I
slipped my hand down from her waist and I gently stroked her ass. That was
what she wanted all right. She was talking to me blubberingly about what a
good Catholic she was and how she had tried not to sin, and maybe she was so
wrapped up in what she was saying that she didn't know what I was doing, but
just the same when I got my hand in her crotch and said all the beautiful
things I could think of, about God, about love, about going to church and
confessing and all that crap, she must have felt something because I had a
good three fingers inside her and working them around like drunken bobbins.
"Put your arms around me Agnes," I said softly, slipping my band out and
pulling her to me so that I could get my legs between hers... "There, that's
the girl... take it easy now... it'll stop soon." And still talking about
the church, the confessional. God love, and the whole bloody mess I managed
to get it inside her. "You're very good to me," she said, just as though she
didn't know my prick was in her, "and I'm sorry I acted like a fool." "I
know, Agnes," I said, "it's all right... listen, grab me tighter... yeah,
that's it." "I'm afraid the boat's going to tip over," she says, trying her
best to keep her ass in position by paddling with her right hand. "Yes,
let's get back to the shore," I said, and I start to pull away from her. "Oh
don't leave me," she says, clutching me tighter. "Don't leave me, I'll
drown." Just then Francie comes running down to the water. "Hurry," says
Agnes, "hurry ... I'll drown."
Francie was a good sort, I must say. She certainly wasn't a Catholic
and if she had any morals they were of the reptilian order. She was one of
those girls who are born to fuck. She had no aims, no great desires, showed
no jealousy, held no grievances, was constantly cheerful and not at all
unintelligent. At nights when we were sitting on the porch in the dark
talking to the guests she would come over and sit on my lap with nothing on
underneath her dress and I would slip it into her as she laughed and talked
to the others. I think she would have brazened it out before the Pope if she
had been given a chance. Back in the city, when I called on her at her home,
she pulled the same stunt off in front of her mother whose sight,
fortunately, was growing dim. If we went dancing and she got too hot in the
pants she would drag me to a telephone booth and, queer girl that she was,
she'd actually talk to some one, some one like Agnes for example, while
pulling off the trick. She seemed to get a special pleasure out of doing it
under people's noses; she said there was more fun in it if you didn't think
about it too hard. In the crowded subway coming home from the beach, say,
she'd slip her dress around so that the slit was in the middle and take my
hand and put it right on her cunt. If the train was tightly packed and we
were safely wedged in a comer she'd take my cock out of my fly and hold it
in her two hands, as though it were a bird. Sometimes she'd get playful and
hang her bag on it, as though to prove that there wasn't the least danger.
Another thing about her was that she didn't pretend that I was the only guy
she had on the string. Whether she told me everything I don't know, but she
certainly told me plenty. She told me about her affairs laughingly, while
she was climbing over me or when I had it in her, or just when I was about
to come. She would tell me how they went about it, how big they were or how
small, what they said when they got excited and so on and so forth giving me
every possible detail, just as though I were going to write a textbook on
the subject. She didn't seem to have the least feeling of sacredness about
her own body or her feelings or anything connected with herself. "Francie,
you bloody fucker," I used to say, "you've got the morals of a clam." "But
you like me, don't you?" she'd answer. "Men like to fuck, and so do women.
It doesn't harm anybody and it doesn't mean you have to love every one you
fuck does it? I wouldn't want to be in love; it must be terrible to have to
fuck the same man all the time, don't you think? Listen, if you didn't fuck
anybody but me all the time you'd get tired of me quick, wouldn't you?
Sometimes it's nice to be fucked by someone you don't know at all. Yes, I
think that's the best of all," she added - "there's no complications, no
telephone numbers, no love letters, no scraps, what? Listen, do you think
this is very bad? Once I tried to get my brother to fuck me; you know what a
sissy he is - he gives everybody a pain. I don't remember exactly how it was
any more, but anyway we were in the house alone and I was passionate that
day. He came into my bedroom to ask me for something. I was lying there with
my dress up, thinking about it and wanting it terribly, and when he came in
I didn't give a damn about his being my brother, I just thought of him as a
man, and so I lay there with my skirt up and I told him I wasn't feeling
well, that I had a pain in my stomach. He wanted to run right out and get
something for me but I told him no, just to rub my stomach a bit, that would
do it good. I opened my waist and made him rub my bare skin. He was trying
to keep his eyes on the wall, the big idiot, and rubbing me as though I were
a piece of wood. 'It's not there, you chump,' I said, 'it's lower down . . .
what are you afraid of?' And I pretended that I was in agony. Finally he
touched me accidentally. "There! that's it!' I shouted. 'Oh do rub it, it
feels so good!' Do you know, the big sap actually massaged me for five
minutes without realizing that it was all a game? I was so exasperated that
I told him to get the hell out and leave me alone. 'You're a eunuch,' I
said, but he was such a sap I don't think he knew what the word meant." She
laughed, thinking what a ninny her brother was. She said he probably still
had his maiden. What did I think about it - was it so terribly bad? Of
course she knew I wouldn't think anything of the kind. "Listen Francie," I
said, "did you ever tell that story to the cop you're going with?" She
guessed she hadn't. "I guess so too," I said. "He'd beat the piss out of you
if ever he heard that yam." "He's socked me already," she answered promptly.
"What?" I said, "you let him beat you up?" "I don't ask him to," she said,
"but you know how quick-tempered he is. I don't let anybody else sock me but
somehow coming from him I don't mind so much. Sometimes it makes me feel
good inside ... I don't know, maybe a woman ought to get beaten up once in a
while. It doesn't hurt so much, if you really like a guy. And afterwards
he's so damned gentle - I almost feel ashamed of myself..."
It isn't often you get a cunt who'll admit such things - I mean a
regular cunt and not a moron. There was Trix Miranda, for example, and her
sister, Mrs. Costello. A fine pair of birds they were. Trix, who was going
with my friend MacGregor, tried to pretend to her own sister, with whom she
was living, that she had no sexual relations with MacGregor. And the sister
was pretending to all and sundry that she was frigid, that she couldn't have
any relations with a man even if she wanted to, because she was "built too
small". And meanwhile my friend MacGregor was fucking them silly, both of
them, and they both knew about each other but still they lied like that to
each other. Why? I couldn't make it out. The Costello bitch was hysterical;
whenever she felt that she wasn't getting a fair percentage of the lays that
MacGregor was handing out she'd throw a pseudo-epileptic fit. That meant
throwing towels over her, patting her wrists, opening her bosom, chafing her
legs and finally hoisting her upstairs to bed where my friend MacGregor
would look after her as soon as he had put the other one to sleep. Sometimes
the two sisters would lie down together to take a nap of an afternoon; if
MacGregor were around he would go upstairs and lie between them. And he
explained it to me laughingly, the trick was for him to pretend to go to
sleep. He would lie there breathing heavily, opening now one eye, now the
other, to see which one was really dozing off. As soon as he was convinced
that one of them was asleep he'd tackle the other. On such occasions he
seemed to prefer the hysterical sister, Mrs. Costello, whose husband visited
her about once every six months. The more risk he ran, the more thrill he
got out of it, he said. If it were with the other sister, Trix, whom he was
supposed to be courting, he had to pretend that it would be terrible if the
other one were to catch them like that, and at the same time, he admitted to
me, he was always hoping that the other one would wake up and catch them.
But the married sister, the one who was "built too small", as she used to
say, was a wily bitch and besides she felt guilty toward her sister and if
her sister had ever caught her in the act she'd probably have pretended that
she was having a fit and didn't know what she was doing. Nothing on earth
could make her admit that she was actually permitting herself the pleasure
of being fucked by a man.
I knew her quite well because I was giving her lessons for a time, and
I used to do my damnedest to make her admit that she had a normal cunt and
that she'd enjoy a good fuck if she could get it now and then. I used to
tell her wild stories, which were really thinly disguised accounts of her
own doings, and yet she remained adamant. I had even gotten her to the point
one day - and this beats everything - where she let me put my finger inside
her. I thought sure it was settled. It's true she was dry and a bit tight,
but I put that down to her hysteria. But imagine getting that far with a
cunt and then having her say to your face, as she yanks her dress down
violently - "you see, I told you I wasn't built right!" "I don't see
anything of the kind," I said angrily. "What do you expect me to do - use a
microscope on you?"
"I like that," she said, pretending to get on her high horse. "What a
way of talking to me!"
"You know damned well you're lying," I continued. "Why do you lie like
that? Don't you think it's human to have a cunt and to use it once in a
while? Do you want it to dry up on you?"
"Such language!" she said, biting her under lip and reddening like a
beet "I always thought you were a gentleman."
"Well, you're no lady," I retorted, "because even a lady admits to a
fuck now and then, and besides ladies don't ask gentlemen to stick their
fingers up inside them and see how small they're built."
"I never asked you to touch me," she said. "I wouldn't think of asking
you to put your hand on me, on my private parts anyway."
"Maybe you thought I was going to swab your ear for you, is that it?"
"I thought of you like a doctor at that moment, that's all I can say,"
she said stiffly, trying to freeze me out.
"Listen," I said, taking a wild chance, "let's pretend that it was all
a mistake, that nothing happened, nothing at all. I know you too well to
think of insulting you like that. I wouldn't think of doing a thing like
that to you - no, damned if I would. I was just wondering if maybe you
weren't right in what you said, if maybe you aren't built rather small. You
know, it all went so quick I couldn't tell what I felt... I don't think I
even put my finger inside you. I must have just touched the outside - that's
about all. Listen sit down here on the couch ... let's be friends again." I
pulled her down beside me - she was melting visibly - and I put my arm
around her waist, as though to console her more tenderly. "Has it always
been like that?" I asked innocently, and I almost laughed the next moment,
realizing what an idiotic question it was. She hung her head coyly, as
though we were touching on an unmentionable tragedy. "Listen, maybe if you
sat on my lap . . ." and I hoisted her gently on to my lap, at the same time
delicately putting my hand under her dress and resting it lightly on her
knee . . . "maybe if you sat a moment like this, you'd feel better... there,
that's it, just snuggle back in my arms... are you feeling better?" She
didn't answer, but she didn't resist either; she just lay back limply and
closed her eyes. Gradually and very gently and smoothly I moved my hand up
her leg, talking to her in a low, soothing voice all the time. When I got my
fingers into her crotch and parted the little lips she was as moist as a
dish-rag. I massaged it gently, opening it up more and more, and still
handing out a telepathic line about women sometimes being mistaken about
themselves and how sometimes they think they're very small when really
they're quite normal, and the longer I kept it up the juicier she got and
the more she opened up. I had four fingers inside her and there was room
inside for more if I had had more to put in. She had an enormous cunt and it
had been well reamed out, I could feel. I looked at her to see if she was
still keeping her eyes shut. Her mouth was open and she was gasping but her
eyes were tight shut, as though she were pretending to herself that it was
all a dream. I could move her about roughly now - no danger of the slightest
protest. And maliciously perhaps, I jostled her about unnecessarily, just to
see if she would come to. She was as limp as a feather pillow and even when
her head struck the arm of the sofa she showed no sign of irritation. It was
as though she had anaesthetized herself for a gratuitous fuck. I pulled all
her clothes off and threw them on the floor, and after I had given her a bit
of a work-out on the sofa I slipped it out and laid her on the floor, on her
clothes; and then I slipped it in again and she held it tight with that
suction valve she used so skilfully, despite the outward appearance of coma.
It seems strange to me that the music always passed off into sex.
Nights, if I went out for a walk, I was sure to pick up some one - a nurse,
a girl coming out of a dance hall; a sales girl, anything with a skirt on.
If I went out with my friend MacGregor in his car - just a little spin to
the beach, he would say -1 would find myself by midnight sitting in some
strange parlour in some queer neighbourhood with a girl on my lap, usually
one I didn't give a damn about because MacGregor was even less selective
than I. Often, stepping in his car I'd say to him - "listen, no cunts
tonight, what?" And he'd say - "Jesus, no, I'm fed up ... just a little
drive somewhere . . . maybe to Sheepshead Bay, what do you say?" We wouldn't
have gone more than a mile when suddenly he'd pull the car up to the curb
and nudge me. "Get a look at that," he'd say, pointing to a girl strolling
along the sidewalk. "Jesus, what a leg!" Or else - "Listen what do you say
we ask her to come along? Maybe she can dig up a friend." And before I could
say another word he'd be hailing her and handing out his usual patter, which
was the same for every one. And nine times out often the girl came along.
And before we'd gone very far, feeling her up with his free hand, he'd ask
her if she didn't have a friend she could dig up to keep us company. And if
she put up a fuss, if she didn't like being pawed over that way too quickly,
he'd say - "All right, get the hell out then ... we can't waste any time on
the likes of you!" And with that he'd slow up and shove her out. "We can't
be bothered with cunts like that, can we Henry?" he'd say, chuckling softly.
"You wait, I promised you something good before the night's over." And if I
reminded him that we were going to lay off for one night he'd answer; "Well,
just as you like ... I was only thinking it might make it more pleasant for
you." And then suddenly the brakes would pull us up and he'd be saying to
some silky silhouette looming out of the dark: - "hello sister, what yer
doing - taking a little stroll?" And maybe this time it would be something
exciting, a dithery little bitch with nothing else to do but pull up her
skirt and hand it to you. Maybe we wouldn't even have to buy her a drink,
just hail up somewhere on a side road and go at it, one after the other, in
the car. And if she was an emptyheaded bimbo, as they usually were, he
wouldn't even bother to drive her home. "We're not going that way," he'd
say, the bastard that he was. "You'd better jump out here," and with that
he'd open the door and out with her. His next thought was, of course, was
she dean? That would occupy his mind all the way back. "Jesus, we ought to
be more careful," he'd say. "You don't know what you're getting yourself
into picking them up like that. Ever since that last one - you remember, the
one we picked up on the Drive - I've been itchy as hell. Maybe it's just
nervousness ... I think about it too much. Why can't a guy stick to one
cunt, tell me that. Henry. You take Trix, now, she's a good kid, you know
that. And I like her too, in a way, but... shit, what's the use of talking
about it? You know me - I'm a glutton. You know, I'm getting so bad that
sometimes when I'm on my way to a date - mind you, with a girl I want to
fuck, and everything fixed too - as I say, sometimes I'm rolling along and
maybe out of the comer of my eye I catch a flash of a leg crossing the
street and before I know it I've got her in the car and the hell with the
other girl. I must be cunt-struck, I guess ... what do you think? Don't tell
me," he would add quickly. "I know you, you bugger . . . you'll be sure to
tell me the worst." And then, after a pause - "you're a funny guy, do you
know that? I never notice you refusing anything, but somehow you don't seem
to be worrying about it all the time. Sometimes you strike me as though you
didn't give a damn one way or the other. And you're a steady bastard too -
almost a monogamist, I'd say. How you can keep it up so long with one woman
beats me. Don't you get bored with them? Jesus, I know so well what they're
going to say. Sometimes I feel like saying . . . you know, just breeze in on
'em and say; 'listen, kid, don't say a word .. . just fish it out and open
your legs wide.' " He laughed heartily. "Can you imagine the expression on
Trix's face if I pulled a line like that on her? I'll tell you, once I came
pretty near doing it. I kept my hat and coat on. Was she sore! She didn't
mind my keeping the coat on so much, but the hat! I told her I was afraid of
a draught... of course there wasn't any draught. The truth is, I was so
damned impatient to get away that I thought if I kept my hat on I'd be off
quicker. Instead I was there all night with her. She put up such a row that
I couldn't get her quiet. . . But listen, that's nothing. Once I had a
drunken Irish bitch and this one had some queer ideas. In the first place,
she never wanted it in bed . . . always on the table. You know, that's all
right once in a while, but if you do it often it wears you out. So one night
- I was a little tight, I guess - I says to her, no, nothing doing, you
drunken bastard . . . you're gonna go to bed with me to-night. I want a real
fuck - in bed. You know, I had to argue with that son of a bitch for an hour
almost before I could persuade her to go to bed with me, and then only on
the agreement that I was to keep my hat on. Listen, can you picture me
getting over that stupid bitch with my hat on? And stark naked to boot! I
asked her ... 'Why do you want me to keep my hat on?' You know what she
said? She said it seemed more genteel. Can you imagine what a mind that cunt
had? I used to hate myself for going with that bitch. I never went to her
sober, that's one thing. I'd have to be tanked up first and kind of blind
and batty - you know how I get sometimes . . ."
I knew very well what he meant. He was one of my oldest friends and one
of the most cantankerous bastards I ever knew. Stubborn wasn't the word for
it. He was like a mule - a pigheaded Scotchman. And his old man was even
worse. When the two of them got into a rage it was a pretty sight. The old
man used to dance positively dance with rage. If the old lady got between
she'd get a sock in the eye. They used to put him out of the house
regularly. Out he'd go, with all his belongings, including the furniture,
including the piano too. In a month or so he'd be back again - because they
always gave him credit at home. And then he'd come home drunk some night
with a woman he'd picked up somewhere and the rumpus would start all over
again. It seems they didn't mind so much his coming home with a girl and
keeping her all night, but what they did object to was the cheek of him
asking his mother to serve them breakfast in bed. If his mother tried to
bawl him out he'd shut her up by saying - "What are you trying to tell me?
You wouldn't have been married yet if you hadn't been knocked up." The old
lady would wring her hands and say - "What a son! What a son! God help me,
what have I done to deserve this?" To which he'd remark, "Aw forget it!
You're just an old prune!" Often as not his sister would come up to try and
smooth matters out. "Jesus, Wallie," she'd say, "it's none of my business
what you do, but can't you talk to your mother more respectfully?" Whereupon
MacGregor would make his sister sit on the bed and start coaxing her to
bring up the breakfast. Usually he'd have to ask his bed-mate what her name
was in order to present her to his sister. "She's not a bad kid," he'd say,
referring to his sister. "She's the only decent one in the family ... Now
listen, sis, bring up some grub, will yer? Some nice bacon and eggs, eh,
what do you say? Listen, is the old man around? What's his mood to-day? I'd
like to borrow a couple of bucks. You try to worm it out of him, will you?
I'll get you something nice for Christmas." Then, as though everything were
settled, he'd pull back the covers to expose the wench beside him. "Look at
her, sis, ain't she beautiful? Look at that leg! Listen, you ought to get
yourself a man . . . you're too skinny. Patsy here, I bet she doesn't go
begging for it, eh Patsy?" and with that a sound slap on the rump for Patsy.
"Now scram, sis, I want some coffee . . . and don't forget, make the bacon
crisp! Don't get any of that lousy store bacon ... get something extra. And
be quick about it!"
What I liked about him were his weaknesses; like all men who practise
will-power he was absolutely flabby inside. There wasn't a thing he wouldn't
do - out of weakness. He was always very busy and he was never really doing
anything. And always boning up on something, always trying to improve his
mind. For example, he would take the unabridged dictionary and, tearing out
a page each day, would read it through religiously on his way back and forth
from the office. He was full of facts, and the more absurd and incongruous
the facts, the more pleasure he derived from them. He seemed to be bent on
proving to all and sundry that life was a farce, that it wasn't worth the
game, that one thing cancelled out another, and so on. He was brought up on
the North Side, not very far from the neighbourhood in which I had spent my
childhood. He was very much a product of the North Side, too, and that was
one of the reasons why I liked him. The way he talked, out of the comer of
his mouth, for instance, the tough air he put on when talking to a cop, the
way he spat in disgust, the peculiar curse words he used, the
sentimentality, the limited horizon, the passion for playing pool or
shooting crap, the staying up all night swapping yams, the contempt for the
rich, the hobnobbing with politicians, the curiosity about worthless things,
the respect for learning, the fascination of the dance hall, the saloon, the
burlesque, talking about seeing the world and never budging out of the city,
idolizing no matter whom so long as the person showed "spunk", a thousand
and one little traits or peculiarities of this sort endeared him to me
because it was precisely such idiosyncrasies which marked the fellows I had
known as a child. The neighbourhood was composed of nothing, it seemed, but
lovable failures. The grown-ups behaved like children and the children were
incorrigible. Nobody could rise very far above his neighbour or he'd be
lynched. It was amazing that any one ever became a doctor or a lawyer. Even
so, he had to be a good fellow, had to pretend to talk like every one else,
and he had to vote the Democratic ticket. To hear MacGregor talk about Plato
or Nietzsche, for instance, to his buddies was something to remember. In the
first place, to even get permission to talk about such things as Plato or
Nietzsche to his companions, he had to pretend that it was only by accident
that he had run across their names; or perhaps he'd say that he had met an
interesting drunk one night in the back room of a saloon and this drunk had
started talking about these guys Nietzsche and Plato. He would even pretend
he didn't quite know how the names were pronounced. Plato wasn't such a dumb
bastard, he would say apologetically. Plato had an idea or two in his bean,
yes sir, yes siree. He'd like to see one of those dumb politicians at
Washington trying to lock horns with a guy like Plato. And he'd go on, in
this roundabout, matter of fact fashion to explain to his crap-shooting
friends just what kind of a bright bird Plato was in his time and how he
measured up against other men in other times. Of course, he was probably a
eunuch, he would add, by way of throwing a little cold water on all this
erudition. In those days, as he nimbly explained, the big guys, the
philosophers, often had their nuts cut off - a fact! - so as to be out of
all temptation. The other guy, Nietzsche, he was a real case, a case for the
bug-house. He was supposed to be in love with his sister. Hypersensitive
like. Had to live in a special climate - in Nice, he thought it was. As a
rule he didn't care much for the Germans, but this guy Nietzsche was
different. As a matter of fact, he hated the Germans, this Nietzsche. He
claimed he was a Pole or something like that. He had them dead right, too.
He said they were stupid and swinish, and by God, he knew what he was
talking about. Anyway he showed them up. He said they were full of shit, to
make it brief, and by God, wasn't he right though? Did you see the way those
bastards turned tail when they got a dose of their own medicine? "Listen, I
know a guy who cleaned out a nestful of them in the Argonne region - he said
they were so god-damned low he wouldn't shit on them. He said he wouldn't
even waste a bullet on them - he just bashed their brains in with a dub. I
forget this guy's name now, but anyway he told me he saw aplenty in the few
months he was there. He said the best fun he got out of the whole fucking
business was to pop off his own major. Not that he had any special grievance
against him - he just didn't like his mug. He didn't like the way the guy
gave orders. Most of the officers that were killed got it in the back, he
said. Served them right, too, the pricks! He was just a lad from the North
Side. I think he runs a pool room now down near Wallabout Market. A quiet
fellow, minds his own business. But if you start talking to him about the
war he goes off the handle. He says he'd assassinate the President of the
United States if they ever tried to start another war. Yeah, and he'd do it
too, I'm telling you ... But shit, what was that I wanted to tell you about
Plato? Oh yeah . .."
When the others were gone he'd suddenly shift gears. "You don't believe
in talking like that, do you?" he'd begin. I had to admit I didn't. "You're
wrong," he'd continue. "You've got to keep in with people, you don't know
when you may need one of these guys. You act on the assumption that you're
free, independent! You act as though you were superior to these people.
Well, that's where you make a big mistake. How do you know where you'll be
five years from now, or even six months from now? You might be blind, you
might be run over by a truck, you might be put in the bug-house; you can't
tell what's going to happen to you. Nobody can. You might be as helpless as
a baby..."
"So what?" I would say.
"Well, don't you think it would be good to have a friend when you need
one? You might be so god-damned helpless you'd be glad to have some one help
you across the street. You think these guys are worthless; you think I'm
wasting my time with them. Listen, you never know what a man might do for
you some day. Nobody gets anywhere alone..."
He was touchy about my independence, what he called my indifference. If
I was obliged to ask him for a little dough he was delighted. That gave him
a chance to deliver a little sermon on friendship. "So you have to have
money, too?" he'd say, with a big satisfied grin spreading all over his
face. "So the poet has to eat too? Well, well... It's lucky you came to me.
Henry me boy, because I'm easy with you, I know you, you heartless son of a
bitch. Sure, what do you want? I haven't got very much, but I'll split it
with you. That's fair enough, isn't it? Or do you think, you bastard, that
maybe I ought to give you it all and go out and borrow something for myself?
I suppose you want a good meal, eh? Ham and Eggs wouldn't be good enough,
would it? I suppose you'd like me to drive you to the restaurant too, eh?
Listen, get up from that chair a minute - I want to put a cushion under your
ass. Well, well, so you're broke! Jesus, you're always broke -1 never
remember seeing you with money in your pocket. Listen, don't you ever feel
ashamed of yourself? You talk about those bums I hang out with . . . well
listen, mister, those guys never come and bum me for a dime like you do.
They've got more pride - they'd rather steal it than come and grub it off
me. But you, shit, you're full of high-falutin' ideas, you want to reform
the world and all that crap - you don't want to work for money, no, not you
. . . you expect somebody to hand it to you on a silver platter. Huh! Lucky
there's guys like me around that understand you. You need to get wise to
yourself. Henry. You're dreaming. Everybody wants to eat, don't you know
that? Most people are willing to work for it - they don't lie in bed all day
like you and then suddenly pull on their pants and run to the first friend
at hand. Supposing I wasn't here, what would you have done? Don't answer...
I know what you're going to say. But listen, you can't go on all your life
like that. Sure you talk fine - it's a pleasure to listen to you. You're the
only guy I know that I really enjoy talking to, but where's it going to get
you? One of these days they'll lock you up for vagrancy. You're just a bum,
don't you know that? You're not even as good as those other bums you preach
about. Where are you when I'm in a jam? You can't be found. You don't answer
my letters, you don't answer the telephone, you even hide sometimes when I
come to see you. Listen, I know - you don't have to explain to me. I know
you don't want to hear my stories all the time. But shit, sometimes I really
have to talk to you. A fucking lot you care though. So long as you're out of
the rain and putting another meal under your belt you're happy. You don't
think about your friends - until you're desperate. That's no way to behave,
is it ? Say no and I'll give you a buck. God-damn it. Henry, you're the only
real friend I've got but you're a son of a bitch of a mucker if I know what
I'm talking about. You're just a born good for nothing son of a bitch. You'd
rather starve than turn your hand to something useful..."
Naturally I'd laugh and hold my hand out for the buck he had promised
me. That would irritate him afresh. "You're ready to say anything aren't
you, if only I give you the buck I promised you? What a guy! Talk about
morals - Jesus, you've got the ethics of a rattlesnake. No, I'm not giving
it to you yet, by Christ. I'm going to torture you a little more first. I'm
going to make you earn this money, if I can. Listen what about shining my
shoes - do that for me, will you? They'll never get shined if you don't do
it now." I pick up the shoes and ask him for the brush. I don't mind shining
his shoes, not in the least. But that too seems to incense him. "You're
going to shine them, are you? Well by Jesus, that beats all hell. Listen,
where's your pride - didn't you ever have any? And you're the guy that knows
everything. It's amazing. You know so god-damned much that you have to shine
your friend's shoes to worm a meal out of him. A fine pickle! Here, you
bastard, here's the brush! Shine the other pair too while you're at it."
A pause. He's washing himself at the sink and humming a bit. Suddenly,
in a bright, cheerful tone - "How is it out today, Henry? Is it sunny?
Listen, I've got just the place for you. What do you say to scallops and
bacon with a little tartare sauce on the side? It's a little joint down near
the inlet. A day like today is just the day for scallops and bacon, eh what,
Henry? Don't tell me you've got something to do ... if I haul you down there
you've got to spend a little time with me, you know that, don't you? Jesus,
I wish I had your disposition. You just drift along, from minute to minute.
Sometimes I think you're a damned sight better off than any of us, even if
you are a stinking son of a bitch and a traitor and a thief. When I'm with
you the day seems to pass like a dream. Listen, don't you see what I mean
when I say I've got to see you sometimes? I go nuts being all by myself all
the time. Why do I go chasing around after cunt so much? Why do I play cards
all night? Why do I hang out with those bums from the Point? I need to talk
to some one, that's what."
A little later at the bay, sitting out over the water, with a shot of
rye in him and waiting for the sea food to be served up ... "Life's not so
bad if you can do what you want, eh Henry? If I make a little dough I'm
going to take a trip around the world - and you're coming along with me.
Yes, though you don't deserve it, I'm going to spend some real money on you
one day. I want to see how you'd act if I gave you plenty of rope. I'm going
to give you the money, see... I won't pretend to lend it to you. We'll see
what'll happen to your fine ideas when you have some dough in your pocket.
Listen, when I was talking about Plato the other day I meant to ask you
something: I meant to ask you if you ever read that yam of his about
Atlands. Did you? You did? Well, what do you think of it? Do you think it
was just a yam, or do you think there might have been a place like that
once?"
I didn't dare to tell him that I suspected there were hundreds and
thousands of continents whose existence past or future we hadn't even begun
to dream about, so I simply said I thought it quite possible indeed that
such a place as Atlanris might once have been.
"Well, it doesn't matter much one way or the other, I suppose," he went
on, "but I'll tell you what I think. I think there must have been a time
like that once, a time when men were different. I can't believe that they
always were the pigs they are now and have been for the last few thousand
years. I think it's just possible that there was a time when men knew how to
live, when they knew how to take it easy and to enjoy life. Do you know what
drives me crazy? It's looking at my old man. Ever since he's retired he sits
in front of the fire all day long and mopes. To sit there like a broken-down
gorilla, that's what he slaved for all his life. Well shit, if I thought
that was going to happen to me I'd blow my brains out now. Look around you
... look at the people we know ... do you know one that's worth while?
What's all the fuss about, I'd like to know? We've got to live, they say.
Why ? that's what I want to know. They'd all be a damned sight better off
dead. They're all just so much manure. When the war broke out and I saw them
go off to the trenches I said to myself good, maybe they'll come back with a
little sense! A lot of them didn't come back, of course. But the others! -
listen, do you suppose they got more human, more considerate? Not at all!
They're all butchers at heart, and when they're up against it they squeal.
They make me sick, the whole fucking lot of 'em. I see what they're like,
bailing them out every day. I see it from both sides of the fence. On the
other side it stinks even worse. Why, if I told you some of the things I
knew about the judges who condemn these poor bastards you'd want to slug
them. All you have to do is look at their faces. Yes sir. Henry, I'd like to
think there was once a time when things were different. We haven't seen any
real life - and we're not going to see any. This thing is going to last
another few thousand years, if I know anything about it. You think I'm
mercenary. You think I'm cuckoo to want to earn a lot of money, don't you?
Well I'll tell you, I want to earn a little pile so that I can get my feet
out of this muck. I'd go off and live with a nigger wench if I could get
away from this atmosphere. I've worked my balls off trying to get where I
am, which isn't very far. I don't believe in work any more than you do -1
-was trained that way, that's all. If I could put over a deal, if I could
swindle a pile out of one of these dirty bastards I'm dealing with, I'd do
it with a dear conscience. I know a little too much about the law, that's
the trouble. But I'll fool them yet, you'll see. And when I put it over I'll
put it over big..."
Another shot of rye as the sea food's coming along and he starts in
again. "I meant that about taking you on a trip with me. I'm thinking about
it seriously. I suppose you'll tell me you've got a wife and a kid to look
after. Listen when are you going to break off with that battle-axe of yours?
Don't you know that you've got to ditch her?" He begins to laugh softly.
"Ho! Ho! To think that I was the one who picked her out for you! Did I ever
think you'd be chump enough to get hitched up to her? I thought I was
recommending you a nice piece of tail and you, you poor slob, you marry her.
Ho ho! Listen to me. Henry, while you've got a little sense left: don't let
that sour-balled puss muck up your life for you, do you get me? I don't care
what you do or where you go. I'd hate to see you leave town ... I'd miss
you, I'm telling you that frankly, but Jesus, if you have to go to Africa,
beat it, get out of her clutches, she's no good for you. Sometimes when I
get hold of a good cunt I think to myself now there's something nice for
Henry - and I have in mind to introduce her to you, and then of course I
forget. But Jesus, man, there's thousands of cunts in the world you get
along with. To think that you had to pick on a mean bitch like that .. . Do
you want more bacon? You'd better eat what you want now, you know there
won't be any dough later. Have another drink, eh? Listen, if you try to run
away from me to-day I swear I'll never lend you a cent... What was I saying?
Oh yeah, about that screwy bitch you married. Listen, are you going to do it
or not? Every time I see you you tell me you're going to run away, but you
never do it. You don't think you're supporting her, I hope? She don't need
you, you sap, don't you see that? She just wants to torture you. As for the
kid... well, shit, if I were in your boots I'd drown it. That sounds kind of
mean, doesn't it, but you know what I mean. You're not a father. I don't
know what the hell you are... I just know you're too god-damned good a
fellow to be wasting your life on them. Listen, why don't you try to make
something of yourself? You're young yet and you make a good appearance. Go
off somewhere, way the hell on, and start all over again. If you need a
little money I'll raise it for you. It's like throwing it down a sewer, I
know, but I'll do it for you just the same. The truth is. Henry, I like you
a hell of a lot. I've taken more from you than I would from anybody in the
world. I guess we have a lot in common, coming from the old neighbourhood.
Funny I didn't know you in those days. Shit, I'm getting sentimental..."
The day wore on like that, with lots to eat and drink, the sun out
strong, a car to tote us around, cigars in between, dozing a little on the
beach studying the cunts passing by, talking, laughing, singing a bit too -
one of many, many days I spent like that with MacGregor. Days like that
really seemed to make the wheel stop. On the surface it was jolly and happy
go lucky; time passing like a sticky dream. But underneath it was
fatalistic, premonitory, leaving me the next day morbid and restless. I knew
very well I'd have to make a break some day; I knew very well I was pissing
my time away. But I knew also that there was nothing I could do about it -
yet. Something had to happen, something big, something that would sweep me
off my feet. All I needed was a push, but it had to be some force outside my
world that could give me the right push, that I was certain of. I couldn't
eat my heart out, because it wasn't in my nature. All my life things had
worked out all right - in the end. It wasn't in the cards for me to exert
myself. Something had to be left to Providence - in my case a whole lot.
Despite all the outward manifestations of misfortune or mismanagement I knew
that I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth. And with a double crown
too. The external situation was bad, admitted - but what bothered me more
was the internal situation. I was really afraid of myself, of my appetite,
my curiosity, my flexibility, my permeability, my malleability, my
geniality, my powers of adaptation. No situation in itself could frighten
me: I somehow always saw myself sitting pretty, sitting inside a buttercup,
as it were and sipping the honey. Even if I were flung in jail I had a hunch
I'd enjoy it. It was because I knew how not to resist, I suppose. Other
people wore themselves out tugging and straining and pulling; my strategy
was to float with the tide. What people did to me didn't bother me nearly so
much as what they were doing to others or to themselves. I was really so
damned well off inside that I had to take on the problems of the world. And
that's why I was in a mess all the time. I wasn't synchronized with my own
destiny, so to speak. I was trying to live out the world destiny. If I got
home of an evening, for instance, and there was no food in the house, not
even for the kid, I would turn right around and go looking for the food. But
what I noticed about myself, and that was what puzzled me, was that no
sooner outside and hustling for the grub than I was back at the
Weltanschauung again. I didn't think of food for us exclusively, I thought
of food in general, food in all its stages, everywhere in the world at that
hour, and how it was gotten and how it was prepared and what people did if
they didn't have it and how maybe there was a way to fix it so that
everybody would have it when they wanted it and no more time wasted on such
an idiotically simple problem. I felt sorry for the wife and kid, sure, but
also felt sorry for the Hottentots and the Australian Bushmen, not to
mention the starving Belgians and the Turks and the Armenians. I felt sorry
for the human race, for the stupidity of man and his lack of imagination.
Missing a meal wasn't so terrible - it was the ghastly emptiness of the
street that disturbed me profoundly. All those bloody houses, one like
another, and all so empty and cheerless-looking. Fine paving stones under
foot and asphalt in the middle of the street and
beautifully-hideously-elegant brown-stone stoops to walk up, and yet a guy
could walk about all day and all night on this expensive material and be
looking for a crust of bread. That's what got me. The incongruousness of it.
If one could only dash out with a dinner bell and yell "Listen, listen,
people, I'm a guy what's hungry. Who wants shoes shined? Who wants the
garbage brought out? Who wants the drainpipes cleaned out?" If you could
only go out in the street and put it to them dear like that. But no, you
don't dare to open your trap. If you tell a guy in the street you're hungry
you scare the shit out of him, he runs like hell. That's something I never
understood. I don't understand it yet. The whole thing is so simple - you
just say Yes when some one comes up to you. And if you can't say Yes you can
take him by the arm and ask some other bird to help you out. Why you have to
don a uniform and kill men you don't know, just to get that crust of bread,
is a mystery to me. That's what I think about, more than about whose trap
it's going down or how much it costs. Why should I give a fuck about what
anything costs ? I'm here to live, not to calculate. And that's just what
the bastards don't want you to do - to live! They want you to spend your
whole life adding up figures. That makes sense to them. That's reasonable.
That's intelligent. If I were running the boat things wouldn't be so orderly
perhaps, but it would be gayer, by Jesus! You wouldn't have to shit in your
pants over trifles. Maybe there wouldn't be macadamized roads and
streamlined cars and loudspeakers and gadgets of a million-billion
varieties, maybe there wouldn't even be glass in the windows, maybe you'd
have to sleep on the ground, maybe there wouldn't be French cooking and
Italian cooking and Chinese cooking, maybe people would kill each other when
their patience was exhausted and maybe nobody would stop them because there
wouldn't be any jails or any cops or judges, and there certainly wouldn't be
any cabinet ministers or legislatures because-there wouldn't be any
goddamned laws to obey or disobey, and maybe it would take months and years
to trek from place to place, but you wouldn't need a visa or a passport or a
carte d'identite because you wouldn't be registered anywhere and you
wouldn't bear a number and if you wanted to change your name every week you
could do it because it wouldn't make any difference since you wouldn't own
anything except what you could carry around with you and why would you want
to own anything when everything would be free? During this period when I was
drifting from door to door, job to job, friend to friend, meal to meal, I
did try nevertheless to rope off a little space for myself which might be an
anchorage; it was more like a lifebuoy in the midst of a swift channel. To
get within a mile of me was to hear a huge dolorous bell tolling. Nobody
could see the anchorage - it was buried deep in the bottom of the channel.
One saw me bobbing up and down on the surface, rocking gently sometimes or
else swinging backwards and forwards agitatedly. What held me down safely
was the big pigeon-holed desk which I put in the parlour. This was the desk
which had been in the old man's tailoring establishment for the last fifty
years, which had given birth to many bills and many groans, which had housed
strange souvenirs in its compartments, and which finally I had filched from
him when he was ill and away from the establishment; and now it stood
in the middle of the floor in our lugubrious parlour on the third floor of a
respectable brown-stone house in the dead centre of the most respectable
neighbourhood in Brooklyn. I had to fight a tough battle to install it
there, but I insisted that it be there in the midmost midst of the shebang.
It was like putting a mastodon in the centre of a dentist's office. But
since the wife had no friends to visit her and since my friends didn't give
a fuck if it were suspended from the chandelier, I kept it in the parlour
and I put all the extra chairs we bad around it in a big circle and then I
sat down comfortably and I put my feet up on the desk and dreamed of what I
would write if I could write. I had a spittoon alongside of the desk, a big
brass one from the same establishment, and I would spit in it now and then
to remind myself that it was there. All the pigeon-holes were empty and all
the drawers were empty; there wasn't a thing on the desk or in it except a
sheet of white paper on which I found it impossible to put so much as a
pothook.
When I think of the titanic efforts I made to canalize the hot lava
which was bubbling inside me, the efforts I repeated thousands of times to
bring the funnel into place and capture a word, a phrase, I think inevitably
of the men of the old stone age. A hundred thousand, two hundred thousand
years, three hundred thousand years to arrive at the idea of the paleolith.
A phantom struggle, because they weren't dreaming of such a thing as the
paleolith. It came without effort, born of a second, a miracle you might
say, except that everything which happens is miraculous. Things happen or
they don't happen, that's all. Nothing is accomplished by sweat and
struggle. Nearly everything which we call life is just insomnia, an agony
because we've lost the habit of falling asleep. We don't know how to let go.
We're like a Jack-in-the-box perched on top of a spring and the more we
struggle the harder it is to get back in the box.
I think if I had been crazy I couldn't have hit upon a better scheme to
consolidate my anchorage than to install this Neanderthal object in the
middle of the parlour. With my feet on the desk, picking up the current, and
my spinal column snugly socketed in a thick leather cushion, I was in an
ideal relation to the flotsam and jetsam which was whirling about me, and
which, because they were crazy and part of the flux, my friends were trying
to convince me was life. I remember vividly the first contact with reality
that I got through my feet, so to speak. The million words or so which I had
written, mind you, well ordered, well connected, were as nothing to me -
crude ciphers from the old stone age - because the contact was through the
head and the head is a useless appendage unless you're anchored in
mid-channel deep in the mud. Everything I had written before was museum
stuff, and most writing is still museum stuff and that's why it doesn't
catch fire, doesn't inflame the world. I was only a mouthpiece for the
ancestral race which was talking through me; even my dreams were not
authentic, not bona fide Henry Miller dreams. To sit still and think one
thought which would come up out of me, out of the lifebuoy, was a Herculean
task. I didn't lack thoughts nor words nor the power of expression - I
lacked something much more important: the lever which would shut off the
juice. The bloody machine wouldn't stop, that was the difficulty. I was not
only in the middle of the current but the current was running through me and
I had no control over it whatever.
I remember the day I brought the machine to a dead stop and how the
other mechanism, the one that was signed with my own initials and which I
had made with my own hands and my own blood slowly began to function. I had
gone to the theatre nearby to see a vaudeville show; it was the matinee and
I had a ticket for the balcony. Standing on line in the lobby, I already
experienced a strange feeling of consistency. It was as though I were
coagulating, becoming a recognizable consistent mass of jelly. It was like
the ultimate stage in the healing of a wound. I was at the height of
normality, which is a very abnormal condition. Cholera might come and blow
its foul breath in my mouth - it wouldn't matter. I might bend over and kiss
the ulcers of a leprous hand, and no harm could possibly come to me. There
was not just a balance in this constant warfare between health and disease,
which is all that most of us may hope for, but there was a plus integer in
the blood which meant that, for a few moments at least, disease was
completely routed. If one had the wisdom to take root in such a moment, one
would never again be ill or unhappy or even die. But to leap to this
conclusion is to make a jump which would take one back farther than the old
stone age. At that moment I wasn't even dreaming of taking root;
I was experiencing for the first time in my life the meaning of the
miraculous. I was so amazed when I heard my own cogs meshing that I was
willing to die then and there for the privilege of the experience.
What happened was this ... As I passed the doorman holding the torn
stub in my hand the lights were dimmed and the curtains sent up. I stood a
moment slightly dazed by the sudden darkness. As the curtain slowly rose I
had the feeling that throughout the ages man had always been mysteriously
stilled by this brief moment which preludes the spectacle. I could feel the
curtain rising in man. And immediately I also realized that this was a
symbol which was being presented to him endlessly in his sleep and that if
he had been awake the players would never have taken the stage but he, Man,
would have mounted the boards. I didn't think this thought - it was a
realization, as I say, and so simple and overwhelmingly clear was it that
the machine stopped dead instantly and I was standing in my own presence
bathed in a luminous reality. I turned my eyes away from the stage and
beheld the marble staircase which I should take to go to my seat in the
balcony. I saw a man slowly mounting the steps, his hand laid across the
balustrade. The man could have been myself, the old self which had been
sleepwalking ever since I was born. My eye didn't take in the entire
staircase, just the few steps which the man had climbed or was climbing in
the moment that I took it all in. The man never reached the top of the
stairs and his hand was never removed from the marble balustrade. I felt the
curtain descend, and for another few moments I was behind the scenes moving
amidst the sets, like the property man suddenly roused from his sleep and
not sure whether he is still dreaming or looking at a dream which is being
enacted on the stage. It was as fresh and green, as strangely new as the
bread and cheese lands which the Biddenden maidens saw every day of their
long life joined at the hips. I saw only that which was alive! the rest
faded out in a penumbra. And it was in order to keep the world alive that I
rushed home without waiting to see the performance and sat down to describe
the little patch of staircase which is imperishable.
It was just about this time that the Dadaists were in full swing, to be
followed shortly by the Surrealists. I never heard of either group until
some ten years later; I never read a French book and I never had a French
idea. I was perhaps the unique Dadaist in America, and I didn't know it. I
might just as well have been living in the jungles of the Amazon for all the
contact I had with the outside world. Nobody understood what I was writing
about or why I wrote that way. I was so lucid that they said I was daffy. I
was describing the New World - unfortunately a little too soon because it
had not yet been discovered and nobody could be persuaded that it existed.
It was an ovarian world, still hidden away in the Fallopian tubes. Naturally
nothing was dearly formulated: there was only the faint suggestion of a
backbone visible, and certainly no arms or legs, no hair, no nails, no
teeth. Sex was the last thing to be dreamed of; it was the world of Chronos
and his ovicular progeny. It was the world of the iota, each iota being
indispensable, frighteningly logical, and absolutely unpredictable. There
was no such thing as a thing, because the concept "thing" was missing.
I say it was a New World I was describing, but like the New World which
Columbus discovered it turned out to be a far older world than any we have
known. I saw beneath the superficial physiognomy of skin and bone the
indestructible world which man has always carried within him; it was neither
old nor new, really, but the eternally true world which changes from moment
to moment. Everything I looked at was palimpsest and there was no layer of
writing too strange for me to decipher. When my companions left me of an
evening I would often sit down and write to my friends the Australian
Bushmen or to the Mound Builders of the Mississippi Valley or to the
Igorotes in the Philippines. I had to write English, naturally, because it
was the only language I spoke, but between my language and the telegraphic
code employed by my bosom friends there was a world of difference. Any
primitive man would have understood me, any man of archaic epochs would have
understood me: only those about me, that is to say, a continent of a hundred
million people, failed to understand my language. To write intelligibly for
them I would have been obliged first of all to kill something, secondly, to
arrest time. I had just made the realization that life is indestructible and
that there is no such thing as time, only the present. Did they expect me to
deny a truth which it had taken me all my life to catch a glimpse of? They
most certainly did. The one thing they did not want to hear about was that
life is indestructible. Was not their precious new world reared on the
destruction of the innocent, on rape and plunder and torture and
devastation? Both continents had been violated; both continents had been
stripped and plundered of all that was precious - in things. No greater
humiliation, it seems to me, was meted out to any man than to Montezuma; no
race was ever more ruthlessly wiped out than the American Indian; no land
was ever raped in the foul and bloody way that California was raped by the
gold-diggers. I blush to think of our origins - our hands are steeped in
blood and crime. And there is no let-up to the slaughter and the pillage, as
I discovered at first hand travelling throughout the length and breadth of
the land. Down to the closest friend every man is a potential murderer.
Often it wasn't necessary to bring out the gun or the lasso or the branding
iron - they had found subtler and more devilish ways of torturing and
killing their own. For me the most excruciating agony was to have the word
annihilated before it had even left my mouth. I learned, by bitter
experience, to hold my tongue; I learned to sit in silence, and even smile,
when actually I was foaming at the mouth. I learned to shake hands and say
how do you do to all these innocent-looking fiends who were only waiting for
me to sit down in order to suck my blood.
How was it possible, when I sat down in the parlour at my prehistoric
desk, to use this code language of rape and murder? I was alone in this
great hemisphere of violence, but I was not alone as far as the human race
was concerned. I was lonely amidst a world of things lit up by
phosphorescent flashes of cruelty. I was delirious with an energy which
could not be unleashed except in the service of death and futility. I could
not begin with a full statement - it would have meant the strait-jacket or
the electric chair. I was like a man who had been too long incarcerated in a
dungeon - I had to feel my way slowly, falteringly, lest I stumble and be
run over. I had to accustom myself gradually to the penalties which freedom
involves. I had to grow a new epidermis which would protect me from this
burning light in the sky.
The ovarian world is the product of a life rhythm. The moment a child
is born it becomes part of a world in which there is not only the life
rhythm but the death rhythm. The frantic desire to live, to live at any
cost, is not a result of the life rhythm in us, but of the death rhythm.
There is not only no need to keep alive at any price, but, if life is
undesirable, it is absolutely wrong. This keeping oneself alive, out of a
blind urge to defeat death, is in itself a means of sowing death. Every one
who has not fully accepted life, who is not incrementing life, is helping to
fill the world with death. To make the simplest gesture with the hand can
convey the utmost sense of life; a word spoken with the whole being can give
life. Activity in itself means nothing: it is often a sign of death. By
simple external pressure, by force of surroundings and example, by the very
climate which activity engenders, one can become part of a monstrous death
machine, such as America, for example. What does a dynamo know of life, of
peace, of reality? What does any individual American dynamo know of the
wisdom and energy, of the life abundant and eternal possessed by a ragged
beggar sitting under a tree in the act of meditation? What is energy? What
is life? One has only to read the stupid twaddle of the scientific and
philosophic textbooks to realize how less than nothing is the wisdom of
these energetic Americans. Listen, they had me on the run, these crazy
horsepower fiends; in order to break their insane rhythm, their death
rhythm, I had to resort to a wavelength which, until I found the proper
sustenance in my own bowels, would at least nullify the rhythm they had set
up. Certainly I did not need this grotesque, cumbersome, antediluvian desk
which I had installed in the parlour; certainly I didn't need twelve empty
chairs placed around in a semicircle; I needed only elbow room in which to
write and a thirteenth chair which would take me out of the zodiac they were
using and put me in a heaven beyond heaven. But when you drive a man almost
crazy and when, to his own surprise perhaps, he finds that he still has some
resistance, some powers of his own, then you are apt to find such a man
acting very much like a primitive being. Such a man is apt not only to
become stubborn and dogged, but superstitious, a believer in magic and a
practiser of magic. Such a man is beyond religion - it is his religiousness
he is suffering from. Such a man becomes a monomaniac, bent on doing one
thing only and that is to break the evil spell which has been put upon him.
Such a man is beyond throwing bombs, beyond revolt; he wants to stop
reacting, whether inertly or ferociously. This man, of all men on earth,
wants the act to be a manifestation of life. If, in the realization of his
terrible need, he begins to act regressively, to become unsocial, to stammer
and stutter, to prove so utterly unadapted as to be incapable of earning a
living, know that this man has found his way back to the womb and source of
life and that tomorrow, instead of the contemptible object of ridicule which
you have made of him, he will stand forth as a mm in his own right and all
the powers of the world will be of no avail against him.
Out of the crude cipher with which he communicates from his prehistoric
desk with the archaic men of the world a new language builds up which cuts
through the death language of the day like wireless through a storm. There
is no magic in this wavelength any more than there is magic in the womb. Men
are lonely and out of communication with one another because all their
inventions speak only of death. Death is the automaton which rules the world
of activity. Death is silent, because it has no mouth. Death has never
expressed anything. Death is wonderful too - after life. Only one like
myself who has opened his mouth and spoken, only one who has said Yes, Yes,
Yes, and again Yes! can open wide his arms to death and know no fear. Death
as a reward, yes! Death as a result of fulfillment, yes! Death as a crown
and shield, yes! But not death from the roots, isolating men, making them
bitter and fearful and lonely, giving them fruitless energy, filling them
with a will which can only say No! The first word any man writes when he has
found himself, his own rhythm, which is the life rhythm is Yes! Everything
he writes thereafter is Yes, Yes, Yes - Yes in a thousand million ways. No
dynamo, no matter how huge - not even a dynamo of a hundred million dead
souls - can combat one man saying Yes!
The war was on and men were being slaughtered, one million, two
million, five million, ten million, twenty million, finally a hundred
million, then a billion, everybody, man, woman and child, down to the last
one. "No!" they were shouting, "No! they shall not pass!" And yet everybody
passed; everybody got a free pass, whether he shouted Yes or No. In the
midst of this triumphant demonstration of spiritually destructive osmosis I
sat with my feet planted on the big desk trying to communicate with Zeus the
Father of Atlantis and with his lost progeny, ignorant of the fact that
Apollinaire was to die the day before the Armistice in a military hospital,
ignorant of the fact that in his "new writing" he had penned these indelible
lines, "Be forbearing when you compare us
With those who were the perfection of order.
We who everywhere seek adventure,
We are not your enemies.
We would give you vast and strange domains
Where flowering mystery waits for him would pluck it."
Ignorant that in this same poem he had also written:
"Have compassion on us who are always fighting on the frontiers Of the
boundless future,
Compassion for our errors, compassion for our sins." I was ignorant of
the fact that there were men then living who went by the outlandish names of
Blaise Cendrars, Jacques Vache, Louis Aragon, Tristan Tzara, Rene Crevel,
Henri de Montherlant, Andre Breton, Max Ernst, George Grosz; ignorant of the
fact that on July, 14,1916, at the Saal Waag, in Zurich, the first Dada
Manifesto had been proclaimed -"manifesto by monsieur antipyrine" - that in
this strange document it was stated "Dada is life without slippers or
parallel . . . severe necessity without discipline or morality and we spit
on humanity." Ignorant of the fact that the Dada Manifesto of 1918 contained
these lines. "I am writing a manifesto and I want nothing, yet I say certain
things, and I am against manifestoes as a matter of principle, as I am also
against principles ... I write this manifesto to show that one