WHEN the cold weather set in the princess disappeared.  It was getting uncomfortable with just a little coal stove in the studio; the bedroom was like an icebox and the kitchen was hardly any better.  There was just a little space around the stove where it was actually warm.  So Macha had found herself a sculptor who was castrated.  She told us about him before she left.  After a few days she tried coming back to us, but Fillmore wouldn't hear of it.  She complained that the sculptor kept her awake all night kissing her.  And then there was no hot water for her douches.  But finally she decided that it was just as well she didn't come back.  "I won't have that candlestick next to me anymore," she said.  "Always that candlestick ... it made me nervous.  If you had only been a fairy I would have stayed with you...."

      With Macha gone our evenings took on a different character.  Often we sat by the fire drinking hot toddies and discussing the life back there in the States.  We talked about if as if we never expected to go back there again.  Fillmore had a map of New York City which he had tacked on the wall; we used to spend whole evenings discussing the relative virtues of Paris and New York.  And inevitably there always crept into our discussions the figure of Whitman, that one lone figure which America has produced in the course of her brief life.  In Whitman the whole American scene comes to life, her past and her future, her birth and her death.  Whatever there is of value in America Whitman has expressed, and there is nothing more to be said.  The future belongs to the machine, to the robots.  He was the Poet of the Body and the Soul, Whitman.  The first and the last poet.  He is almost undecipherable today, a monument covered with rude hieroglyphs for which there is no key.  It seems strange almost to mention his name over here.  There is no equivalent in the language of Europe for the spirit which he immortalized.  Europe is saturated with art and her soil is full of dead bones and her museums are bursting with plundered treasures, but what Europe has never had is a free, healthy spirit, what you might call a MAN.  Goethe was the nearest approach, but Goethe was a stuffed shirt, by comparison.  Goethe was a respectable citizen, a pedant, a bore, a universal spirit, but stamped with the German trademark, with the double eagle.  The serenity of Goethe, the calm, Olympian attitude, is nothing more than the drowsy stupor of a German bourgeois deity.  Goethe is the end of something, Whitman is a beginning.

      After a discussion of this sort I would sometimes put on my things and go for a walk, bundled up in a sweater, a spring overcoat of Fillmore's and a cape over that.  A foul, damp cold against which there is no protection except a strong spirit.  They say America is a country of extremes, and it is true that the thermometer registers degrees of cold which are practically unheard of here; but the cold of a Paris winter is a cold unknown to America, it is psychological, an inner as well as an outer cold.  If it never freezes here it never thaws either.  Just as the people protect themselves against the invasion of their privacy by their high walls, their bolts and shutters, their growling, evil-tongued, slatternly concierges, so they have learned to protect themselves against the cold and heat of a bracing, vigorous climate.  They have fortified themselves: protection is the key word.  Protection and security.  In order that they may rot in comfort.  On a damp winter's night it is not necessary to look at the map to discover the latitude of Paris.  It is a northern city, an outpost erected over a swamp filled in with skulls and bones.  Along the boulevards there is a cold electrical imitation of heat.  Tout Va Bien in ultraviolet rays that make the clients of the Dupont chain cafés look like gangrened cadavers.  Tout Va Bien!  That's the motto that nourishes the forlorn beggars who walk up and down all night under the drizzle of the violet rays.  Wherever there are lights there is a little heat.  One gets warm from watching the fat, secure bastards down their grogs, their steaming black coffees.  Where the lights are there are people on the sidewalks, jostling one another, giving off a little animal heat through their dirty underwear and their foul, cursing breaths.  Maybe for a stretch of eight or ten blocks there is a semblance of gaiety, and then it tumbles back into night, dismal, foul, black night like frozen fat in a soup tureen.  Blocks and blocks of jagged tenements, every window closed tight, every shopfront barred and bolted.  Miles and miles of stone prisons without the faintest glow of warmth; the dogs and the cats are all inside with the canary birds.  The cockroaches and the bedbugs too are safely incarcerated.  Tout Va Bien.  If you haven't a sou why just take a few old newspapers and make yourself a bed on the steps of a cathedral.  The doors are well bolted and there will be no draughts to disturb you.  Better still is to sleep outside the Metro doors; there you will have company.  Look at them on a rainy night, lying there stiff as mattresses - men, women, lice, all huddled together and protected by the newspapers against spittle and the vermin that walks without legs.  Look at them under the bridges or under the market sheds.  How vile they look in comparison with the clean, bright vegetables stacked up like jewels.  Even the dead horses and cows and sheep hanging from the greasy hooks look more inviting.  At least we will eat these tomorrow and even the intestines will serve a purpose.  But these filthy beggars lying in the rain, what purpose do they serve?  What good can they do us?  They make us bleed for five minutes, that's all.

      Oh, well, these are night thoughts produced by walking in the rain after two thousand years of Christianity.  At least now the birds are well provided for, and the cats and dogs.  Every time I pass the concierge's window and catch the full icy impact of her glance I have an insane desire to throttle all the birds in creation.  At the bottom of every frozen heart there is a drop or two of love - just enough to feed the birds.

      Still, I can't get it out of my mind what a discrepancy there is between ideas and living.  A permanent dislocation, though we try to cover the two with a bright awning.  And it won't go.  Ideas have to be wedded to action; if there is no sex, no vitality in them, there is no action.  Ideas cannot exist alone in the vacuum of the mind.  Ideas are related to living: liver ideas, kidney ideas, intestinal ideas, etc.  If it were only for the sake of an idea Copernicus would have smashed the existent macrocosm and Columbus would have foundered in the Sargasso Sea.  The aesthetics of the idea breeds flowerpots and flowerpots you put on the windowsill.  But if there be no rain or sun of what use putting flowerpots outside the window?

      Fillmore is full of ideas about gold.  The "mythos" of gold, he calls it.  I like "mythos" and I like the idea of gold, but I am not obsessed by the subject and I don't see why we should make flowerpots, even of gold.  He tells me that the French are hoarding their gold away in watertight compartments deep below the surface of the earth; he tells me that there is a little locomotive which runs around in these subterranean vaults and corridors.  I like the idea enormously.  A profound, uninterrupted silence in which the gold softly snoozes at a temperature of 17¼ degrees Centigrade.  He says an army working 46 days and 37 hours would not be sufficient to count all the gold that is sunk beneath the Bank of France, and that there is a reserve supply of false teeth, bracelets, wedding rings, etc.  Enough food also to last for eighty days and a lake on top of the gold pile to resist the shock of high explosives.  Gold, he says, tends to become more and more invisible, a myth, and no more defalcations.  Excellent!  I am wondering what will happen to the world when we go off the gold standard in ideas, dress, morals, etc.  The gold standard of love!

      Up to the present, my idea in collaborating with myself has been to get off the gold standard of literature.  My idea briefly has been to present a resurrection of the emotions, to depict the conduct of a human being in the stratosphere of ideas, that is, in the grip of delirium.  To paint a pre- Socratic being, a creature part goat, part Titan.  In short, to erect a world on the basis of the omphalos, not on an abstract idea nailed to a cross.  Here and there you may have come across neglected statues, oases untapped, windmills overlooked by Cervantes, rivers that run uphill, women with five and six breasts ranged longitudinally along the torso.  (Writing to Gauguin, Strindberg said: "J'ai vu des arbres que ne retrouverait aucun botaniste, des animaux que Cuvier n'a jamais soupçonnes et des hommes que vous seul avez pu creer.")

      When Rembrandt hit par he went below with the gold ingots and the pemmican and the portable beds.  Gold is a night word belonging to the chthonian mind: it has dream in it and mythos.  We are reverting to alchemy, to that false Alexandrian wisdom which produced our inflated symbols.  Real wisdom is being stored away in the subcellars by the misers of learning.  The day is coming when they will be circling around in the middle air with magnetizers; to find a piece of ore you will have to go up ten thousand feet with a pair of instruments - in a cold latitude preferably - and establish telepathic communication with the bowels of the earth and the shades of the dead.  No more Klondikes.  No more bonanzas.  You will have to learn to sing and caper a bit, to read the zodiac and study your entrails.  All the gold that is being tucked away in the pockets of the earth will have to be re-mined; all this symbolism will have to be dragged out again from the bowels of man.  But first the instruments must be perfected.  First it is necessary to invent better airplanes, to distinguish 'where' the noise comes from and no go daffy just because you hear an explosion under your ass.  And secondly it will be necessary to get adapted to the cold layers of the stratosphere, to become a cold-blooded fish of the air.  No reverence.  No piety.  No longing.  No regrets.  No hysteria.  Above all, as Philippe Datz says - "NO DISCOURAGEMENT!"

      These are sunny thoughts inspired by a vermouth cassis at the Place de la Trinité.  A Saturday afternoon and a "misfire" book in my hands.  Everything swimming in a divine mucopus.  The drink leaves a bitter herbish taste in my mouth, the lees of our Great Western civilization, rotting now like the toenails of the saints.  Women are passing by - regiments of them - all swinging their asses in front of me; the chimes are ringing and the buses are climbing the sidewalk and bussing one another.  The 'garcon' wipes the table with a dirty rag while the 'patronne' tickles the cash register with fiendish glee.  A look of vacuity on my face, blotto, vague in acuity, biting the asses that brush by me.  In the belfry opposite the hunchback strikes with a golden mallet and the pigeons scream alarum.  I open the book - the book which Nietzsche called "the best German book there is" - and it says:

 

      "MEN WILL BECOME MORE CLEVER AND MORE ACUTE, BUT NOT BETTER, HAPPIER, AND STRONGER IN ACTION - OR, AT LEAST, ONLY AT EPOCHS.  I FORSEE THE TIME WHEN GOD WILL HAVE NO MORE JOY IN THEM, BUT WILL BREAK UP EVERYTHING FOR A RENEWED CREATION.  I AM CERTAIN THAT EVERYTHING IS PLANNED TO THIS END, AND THAT THE TIME AND HOUR IN THE DISTANT FUTURE FOR THE OCCURRENCE OF THIS RENOVATING EPOCH ARE ALREADY FIXED.  BUT A LONG TIME WILL ELAPSE FIRST, AND WE MAY STILL FOR THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS OF YEARS AMUSE OURSELVES ON THIS DEAR OLD SURFACE."

 

      Excellent!  At least a hundred years ago there was a man who had vision enough to see that the world was pooped out.  Our Western World! - When I see the figures of men and women moving listlessly behind their prison walls, sheltered, secluded for a few brief hours, I am appalled by the potentialities for drama that are still contained in these feeble bodies.  Behind the gray walls there are human sparks, and yet never a conflagration.  Are these men and women, I ask myself, or are these shadows, shadows of puppets dangled by invisible strings?  They move in freedom apparently, but they have nowhere to go.  In one realm only are they free and there they may roam at will - but they have not yet learned how to take wing.  So far there have been no dreams that have taken wing.  Not one man has been born light enough, gay enough, to leave the earth!  The eagles who flapped their mighty pinions for a while came crashing heavily to earth.  They made us dizzy with the flap and whir of their wings.  Stay on the earth, you eagles of the future!  The heavens have been explored and they are empty.  And what lies under the earth is empty too, filled with bones and shadows.  Stay on the earth and swim another few hundred thousand years!

      And now it is three o'clock in the morning and we have a couple of trollops here who are doing somersaults on the bare floor.  Fillmore is walking around naked with a goblet in his hand, and that paunch of his is drumtight, hard as a fistula.  All the Pernod and champagne and cognac and Anjou which he guzzled from three in the afternoon on, is gurgling in his trap like a sewer.  The girls are putting their ears to his belly as if it were a music box.  Open his mouth with a buttonhook and drop a slug in the slot.  When the sewer gurgles I hear the bats flying out of the belfry and the dream slides into artifice.

      The girls have undressed and we are examining the floor to make sure that they won't get any splinters in their ass.  They are still wearing their high-heeled shoes.  But the ass!  The ass is worn down, scraped, sandpapered, smooth, hard, bright as a billiard ball or the skull of a leper.  On the wall is Mona's picture: she is facing northeast on a line with Cracow written in green ink.  To the left of her is the Dordogne, encircled with a red pencil.  Suddenly I see a dark, hairy crack in front of me set in a bright, polished billiard ball; the legs are holding me like a pair of scissors.  A glance at that dark, unstitched wound and a deep fissure in my brain opens up: all the images and memories that had been laboriously or absentmindedly assorted, labelled, documented, filed, sealed and stamped break forth pell-mell like ants pouring out of a crack in the sidewalk; the world ceases to revolve, time stops, the very nexus of my dreams is broken and dissolved and my guts spill out in a grand schizophrenic rush, an evacuation that leaves me face to face with the Absolute.  I see again the great sprawling mothers of Picasso, their breasts covered with spiders, their legend hidden deep in the labyrinth.  And Molly Bloom lying on a dirty mattress for eternity.  On the toilet door red chalk cocks and the madonna uttering the diapason of woe.  I hear a wild, hysterical laugh, a room full of lockjaw, and the body that was black glows like phosphorus.  Wild, wild, utterly uncontrollable laughter, and that crack laughing at me too, laughing through the mossy whiskers, a laugh that creases the bright, polished surface of the billiard ball.  Great whore and mother of man with gin in her veins.  Mother of all harlots, spider rolling us in your logarithmic grave, insatiable one, fiend whose laughter rives me!  I look down into that sunken crater, world lost and without traces, and I hear the bells chiming, two nuns at the Place Stanislas and the smell of rancid butter under their dresses, manifesto never printed because it was raining, war fought to further the cause of plastic surgery, the Prince of Wales flying around the world decorating the graves of unknown heroes.  Every bat flying out of the belfry a lost cause, every whoopla a groan over the radio from the private trenches of the damned.  Out of that dark, unstitched wound, that sink of abominations, that cradle of black-thonged cities where the music of ideas is drowned in cold fat, out of strangled Utopias is born a clown, a being divided between beauty and ugliness, between light and chaos, a clown who when he looks down and sidelong is Satan himself and when he looks upward sees a buttered angel, a snail with wings.

      When I look down into that crack I see an equation sign, the world at balance, a world reduced to zero and no trace of remainder.  Not the zero on which Van Norden turned his flashlight, not the empty crack of the prematurely disillusioned man, but an Arabian zero rather, the sign from which spring endless mathematical worlds, the fulcrum which balances the stars and the light dreams and the machines lighter than air and the lightweight limbs and the explosives that produced them.  Into that crack I would like to penetrate up to the eyes, make them waggle ferociously, dear, crazy, metallurgical eyes.  When the eyes waggle then will I hear again Dostoevski's words, hear them rolling on page after page, with minutest observation, with maddest introspection, with all the undertones of misery now lightly, humorously touched, now swelling like an organ note until the heart bursts and there is nothing left but a blinding, scorching light, the radiant light that carries off the fecundating seeds of the stars.  The story of art whose roots lie in massacre.

      When I look down into this fucked-out cunt of a whore I feel the whole world beneath me, a world tottering and crumbling, a world used up and polished like a leper's skull.  If there were a man who dared to say all that he thought of this world there would not be left him a square foot of ground to stand on.  When a man appears the world bears down on him and breaks his back.  There are always too many rotten pillars left standing, to much festering humanity for man to bloom.  The superstructure is a lie and the foundation is a huge quaking fear.  If at intervals of centuries there does appear a man with a desperate, hungry look in his eye, a man who would turn the world upside down in order to create a new race, the love that he brings to the world is turned to bile and he becomes a scourge.  If now and then we encounter pages that explode, pages that wound and sear, that wring groans and tears and curses, know that they come from a man with his back up, a man whose only defences left are his words and his words are always stronger than the lying, crushing weight of the world, stronger than all the racks and wheels which the cowardly invent to crush out the miracle of personality.  If any man ever dared to translate all that is in his heart, to put down what is really his experience, what is truly his truth, I think then the world would go smash, that it would be blown to smithereens and no god, no accident, no will could ever again assemble the pieces, the atoms, the indestructible elements that have gone to make up the world.

      In the four hundred years since the last devouring soul appeared, the last man to know the meaning of ecstasy, there has been a constant and steady decline of man in art, in thought, in action.  The world is pooped out: there isn't a dry fart left.  Who that has a desperate, hungry eye can have the slightest regard for these existent governments, laws, codes, principles, ideals, ideas, totems, and taboos?  If anyone knew what I meant to read the riddle of the thing which today is called a "crack" or a "hole", if anyone had the least feeling of mystery about the phenomena which are labelled "obscene", this world would crack asunder.  It is the obscene horror, the dry, fucked-out aspect of things which makes this crazy civilization look like a crater.  It is this great yawning gulf of nothingness which the creative spirits and mothers of the race carry between their legs.  When a hungry, desperate spirit appears and makes the guinea pigs squeal, it is because he knows where to put the live wire of sex, because he knows that beneath the hard carapace of indifference there is concealed the ugly gash, the wound that never heals.  And he puts the live wire right between the legs; he hits below the belt, scorches the very gizzards.  It is no use putting on rubber globes; all that can be coolly and intellectually handled belongs to the carapace and a man who is intent on creation always dives beneath, to the open wound, to the festering obscene horror.  He hitches his dynamo to the tenderest parts; if only blood and pus gush forth, it is something.  The dry, fucked-out crater is obscene.  More obscene than anything in inertia.  More blasphemous than the bloodiest oath is paralysis.  If there is only a gaping wound left then it must gush forth through it produce nothing but toads and bats and homunculi.

      Everything is packed into a second which is either consummated or not consummated.  The earth is not an arid plateau of health and comfort, but a great sprawling female with velvet torso that swells and heaves with ocean billows; she squirms beneath a diadem of sweat and anguish.  Naked and sexed she rolls among the clouds in the violet light of the stars.  All of her, from her generous breasts to her gleaming thighs, blazes with furious ardour.  She moves amongst the seasons and the years with a grand whoopla that seizes the torso with paroxysmal fury, that shakes the cobwebs out of the sky; she subsides on her pivotal orbits with volcanic tremors.  She is like a doe at times, a doe that has fallen into a snare and lies waiting with beating heart for the cymbals to crash and the dogs to bark.  Love and hate, despair, pity, rage, disgust - what are these amidst the fornications of the planets?  What is war, disease, cruelty, terror, when night presents the ecstasy of myriad blazing suns?  What is this chaff we chew in our sleep if it is not the remembrance of fang-whorl and star cluster.

      She used to say to me, Mona, in her fits of exaltation, "you're a great human being," and though she left me here to perish, though she put beneath my feet a great howling pit of emptiness, the words that lie at the bottom of my soul leap forth and they light the shadows below me.  I am one who was lost in the crowd, whom the fizzing lights made dizzy, a zero who saw everything about him reduced to mockery.  Passed me men and women ignited with sulphur, porters in calcium livery opening the jaws of hell, fame walking on crutches, dwindled by the skyscrapers, chewed to a frazzle by the spiked mouth of the machines.  I walked between the tall buildings toward the cool of the river and I saw the lights shoot up between the ribs of the skeletons like rockets.  If I was truly a great human being, as she said, then what was the meaning of the slavering idiocy about me?  I was a man with body and soul, I had a heart that was not protected by a steel vault.  I had moments of ecstasy and I sang with burning sparks.  I sang of the Equator, her red-feathered legs and the islands dropping out of sight.  But nobody heard.  A gun fired across the Pacific falls into space because the earth is round and pigeons fly upside down.  I saw her looking at me across the table with eyes turned to grief; sorrow spreading inward flattened its nose against her spine; the marrow churned to pity had turned liquid.  She was light as a corpse that floats in the Dead Sea.  Her fingers bled with anguish and the blood turned to drool.  With the wet dawn came the tolling of bells and along the fibres of my nerves the bells played ceaselessly and their tongues pounded in my heart and clanged with iron malice.  Strange that the bells should toll so, but stranger still the body bursting, this woman turned to night and her maggot words gnawing through the mattress.  I moved along under the Equator, heard the hideous laughter of the green-jawed hyena, saw the jackal with silken tail and the dick-dick and the spotted leopard, all left behind in the Garden of Eden.  And then her sorrow widened, like the bow of a dreadnought and the weight of her sinking flooded my ears.  Slime wash and sapphires slipping, sluicing through the gay neurons, and the spectrum spliced and the gunwales dripping.  Soft as lion-pad I heard the gun carriages turn, saw them vomit and drool: the firmament sagged and all the stars turned black.  Black ocean bleeding and the brooding stars breeding chunks of fresh-swollen flesh while overhead the birds wheeled and out of the hallucinated sky fell the balance with mortar and pestle and the bandaged eyes of justice.  All that is here related moves with imaginary feet along the parallels of dead orbs; all this is seen with the empty sockets bursts like flowering grass.  Out of nothingness arises the sign of infinity; beneath the ever-rising spirals slowly sinks the gaping hole.  The land and the water make numbers joined, a poem written with flesh and stronger than steel or granite.  Through endless night the earth whirls toward a creation unknown....

      Today I awoke from a sound sleep with curses of joy on my lips, with gibberish on my tongue, repeating to myself like a litany - "Fay se que vouldras!... fay ce que vouldras!";  Do anything, but let it produce joy.  Do anything, but let it yield ecstasy.  So much crowds into my head when I say this to myself: images, gay ones, terrible ones, maddening ones, the wolf and the goat, the spider, the crab, syphilis with her wings outstretched and the door of the womb always on the latch, always open, ready like the tomb.  Lust, crime, holiness: the lives of my adored ones, the failures of my adored ones, the words they left behind them, the words they left unfinished; the good they dragged after them and the evil, the sorrow, the discord, the rancour, the strife they created.  But above all, the ecstasy!

      Things, certain things about my old idols bring the tears to my eyes: the interruptions, the disorder, the violence, above all, the hatred they aroused.  When I think of their deformities, of the monstrous styles they chose, of the flatulence and tediousness of their works, of all the chaos and confusion they wallowed in, of the obstacles they heaped up about them, I feel an exaltation.  They were all mired in their own dung.  All men who over-elaborated.  So true is it that I am almost tempted to say: "Show me a man who over-elaborates and I will show you a great man!"  What is called their "over- elaboration" is my meat: it is the sign of struggle, it is struggle itself with all the fibres clinging to it, the very aura and ambience of the discordant spirit.  And when you show me a man who expresses himself perfectly I will not say that he is not great, but I will say that I am unattracted ... I miss the cloying qualities.  When I reflect that the task which the artist implicitly sets himself is to overthrow existing values, to make of the chaos about him an order which is his own, to sow strife and ferment so that by the emotional release those who are dead may be restored to life, then it is that I run with joy to the great and imperfect ones, their confusion nourishes me, their stuttering is like divine music to my ears.  I see in the beautifully bloated pages that follow the interruptions the erasure of petty intrusions, of the dirty footprints, as it were, of cowards, liars, thieves, vandals, calumniators.  I see in the swollen muscles of their lyric throats the staggering effort that must be made to turn the wheel over, to pick up the pace where one has left off.  I see that behind the daily annoyances and intrusions, behind the cheap, glittering malice of the feeble and inert, there stands the symbol of life's frustrating power, and that he who could create order, he who would sow strife and discord, because he is imbued with will, such a man must go again and again to the stake and the gibbet.  I see that behind the nobility of his gestures there lurks the spectre of the ridiculousness of it all - that he is not only sublime, but absurd.

      Once I thought that to be human was the highest aim a man could have, but I see now that it was meant to destroy me.  Today I am proud to say that I am inhuman, that I belong not to men and governments, that I have nothing to do with creeds and principles.  I have nothing to do with the creaking machinery of humanity - I belong to the earth!  I say that lying on my pillow and I can feel the horns sprouting from my temples.  I can see about me all those cracked forebears of mine dancing around the bed, consoling me, egging me on, lashing me with their serpent tongues, grinning and leering at me with their skulking skulls.  I am inhuman!  I say it with a mad, hallucinated grin, and I will keep on saying it though it rain crocodiles.  Behind my words are all those grinning, leering, skulking skulls, some dead and grinning a long time, some grinning as if they had lockjaw, some grinning with the grimace of a grin, the foretaste and aftermath of what is always going on.  Clearer than all I see my own grinning skull, see the skeleton dancing in the wind, serpents issuing from the rotted tongue and the bloated pages of ecstasy slimed with excrement.  And I join my slime, my excrement, my madness, my ecstasy to the great circuit which flows through the subterranean vaults of the flesh.  All this unbidden, unwanted, drunken vomit will flow on endlessly through the minds of those to come in the inexhaustible vessel that contains the history of the race.  Side by side with the human race there runs another race of beings, the inhuman ones, the race of artists who, goaded by unknown impulses, take the lifeless mass of humanity and by the fever and ferment with which they imbue it turn this soggy dough into bread and the bread into wine and the wine into song.  Out of the dead compost and the inert slag they breed a song that contaminates.  I see this other race of individuals ransacking the universe, turning everything upside down, their feet always moving in blood and tears, their hands always empty, always clutching and grasping for the beyond, for the god out of reach: slaying everything within reach in order to quiet the monster that gnaws at their vitals.  I see that when they tear their hair with the effort to comprehend, to seize this forever unattainable, I see that when they bellow like crazed beasts and rip and gore, I see that that is right, that there is no other path to pursue.  A man who belongs to this race must stand up on the high place with gibberish in his mouth and rip out his entrails.  It is right and just, because he must!  And anything that falls short of this frightening spectacle, anything less shuddering, less terrifying, less mad, less intoxicated, less contaminating, is not art.  The rest is counterfeit.  The rest is human.  The rest belongs to life and lifelessness.

      When I think of Stavrogin for example, I think of come divine monster standing on a high place and flinging to us his torn bowels.  In The Possessed the earth quakes: it is not the catastrophe that befalls the imaginative individual, but a cataclysm in which a large portion of humanity is buried, wiped out forever.  Stavrogin was Dostoevski and Dostoevski was the sum of all those contradictions which either paralyse a man or lead him to the heights.  There was no world too low for him to enter, no place too high for him to fear to ascend.  He went the whole gamut, from the abyss to the stars.  It is a pity that we shall never again have the opportunity to see a man placed at the very core of mystery and, by his flashes, illuminating for us the depth and immensity of the darkness.

      Today I am aware of my lineage.  I have no need to consult my horoscope or my genealogical chart.  What is written in the stars, or in my blood, I know nothing of.  I know that I spring from the mythological founders of the race.  The man who raises the holy bottle to his lips, the criminal who kneels in the marketplace, the innocent one who discovers that all corpses stink, the madman who dances with lightning in his hands, the friar who lifts his skirts to pee over the world, the fanatic who ransacks libraries in order to find the Word -  all  these are fused in me, all these make my confusion, my ecstasy.  If I am inhuman it is because my world has slopped over its human bounds, because to be human seems like a poor, sorry, miserable affair, limited by the senses, restricted by moralities and codes, defined by platitudes and isms.  I am pouring the juice of the grape down my gullet and I find wisdom in it, but my wisdom is not born of the grape, my intoxication owes nothing to wine....

      I want to make a detour of those lofty arid mountain ranges where one dies of thirst and cold, that "extratemporal" history, that absolute of time and space where there exists neither man, beast, nor vegetation, where one goes crazy with loneliness, with language that is mere words, where everything is unhooked, ungeared, out of joint with the times.  I want a world of men and women, of trees that do not talk (because there is too much talk in the world as it is!, of rivers that carry you to places, not rivers that are legends, but rivers that put you in touch with other men and women, with architecture, religion, plants, animals - rivers that have boats on them and in which men drown, drown not in myth and legend and books and dust of the past, but in time and space and history.  I want rives that make oceans such as Shakespeare and Dante, rivers which do not dry up in the void of the past.  Oceans, yes!  Let us have more oceans, new oceans that blot out the past, oceans that create new geological formations, new topographical vistas and strange, terrifying continents, oceans that destroy and preserve at the same time, oceans that we can sail on, take off to new discoveries, new horizons.  Let us have more oceans, more upheavals, more wars, more holocausts.  Let us have a world of men and women with dynamos between their legs, a world of natural fury, of passion, action, drama, dreams, madness, a world that produces ecstasy and not dry farts.  I believe that today more than ever a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it: we must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and soul.

      It may be that we are doomed, that there is no hope for us, any of us, but if that is so then let us set up a last agonizing, bloodcurdling howl, a screech of defiance, a war whoop!  Away with lamentation!  Away with elegies and dirges!  Away with biographies and histories, and libraries and museums!  Let the dead eat the dead.  Let us living once dance about the rim of the crater, a last expiring dance.  But a dance!

      "I love everything that flows," said the great blind Milton of our times.  I was thinking of him this morning when I awoke with a great bloody shout of joy: I was thinking of his rivers and trees and all that world of night which he is exploring.  Yes, I said to myself, I too love everything that flows: rivers, sewers, lava, semen, blood, bile, words, sentences.  I love the amniotic fluid when it spills out of the bag.  I love the kidney with its painful gallstones, its gravel and what-not; I love the urine that pours out scalding and the clap that runs endlessly; I love the words of hysterics and the sentences that flow on like dysentery and mirror all the sick images of the soul; I love the great rivers like the Amazon and the Orinoco, where crazy men like Moravagine float on through dream and legend in an open boat and drown in the blind mouths of the river.  I love everything that flows, even the menstrual flow that carries away the seed unfecund.  I love scripts that flow, be they hieratic, esoteric, perverse, polymorph, or unilateral.  I love everything that flows, everything that has time in it and becoming, that brings us back to the beginning where there is never end: the violence of the prophets, the obscenity that is ecstasy, the wisdom of the fanatic, the priest with his rubber litany, the foul words of the whore, the spittle that floats away in the gutter, the milk of the breast and the bitter honey that pours from the womb, all that is fluid, melting, dissolute and dissolvent, all that pus and dirt that in flowing is purified, that loses its sense of origin, that makes the great circuit toward death and dissolution.   The great incestuous wish is to flow on, one with time, to merge the great image of the beyond with the here and now.  A fatuous, suicidal wish that is constipated by words and paralysed by thought.