AN INTERLUDE

 

      Confusion is a word we have invented for an order which is not understood.  I like to dwell on this period when things were taking shape because the order, if it were understood, must have been dazzling.  In the first place there was Hymie, Hymie the bullfrog, and there were also his wife's ovaries which had been rotting away for a considerable time.  Hymie was completely wrapped up in is wife's rotting ovaries.  It was the daily topic of conversation; it took precedence now over the cathartic pills and the coated tongue.  Hymie dealt in "sexual proverbs", as he called them.  Everything he said began from or led up to the ovaries.  Despite everything he was still nicking it off with his wife - prolonged snakelike copulations in which he would smoke a cigarette or two before un-cunting.  He would endeavour to explain to me how the pus from the rotting ovaries put her in heat.  She had always been a good fuck, but now she was better than ever.  Once the ovaries were ripped out there'd be no telling how she'd take it.  She seemed to realize that too.  Ergo, fuck away!  Every night, after the dishes were cleared away, they'd strip down in their little birdlike apartment and lie together like a couple of snakes.  He tried to describe to me on a number of occasions - the way she fucked.  It was like an oyster inside, an oyster with soft teeth that nibbled away at him.  Sometimes it felt as though he were right inside her womb, so soft and fluffy it was, and those soft teeth biting away at his pecker and making him delirious.  They used to lie scissors-fashion and look up at the ceiling.  To keep from coming he would think about the office, about the little worries which plagued him and kept his bowels tied up in a knot.  In between orgasms he would let his mind dwell on someone else, so that when she'd start working on him again he might imagine he was having a brand new fuck with a brand new cunt.  He used to arrange it so that he could look out the window while it was going on.  He was getting so adept at it that he could undress a woman on the boulevard there under his window and transport her to the bed; not only that, but he could actually make her change places with his wife, all without un-cunting.  Sometimes he'd fuck away like that for a couple of hours and never even bother to shoot off.  Why waste it! he would say.

      Steve Romero, on the other hand, had a hell of a time holding it in.  Steve was built like a bull and he scattered his seed freely.  We used to compare notes sometimes sitting in the chop suey joint around the corner from the office.  It was a strange atmosphere.  Maybe it was because there was no wine.  Maybe it was the funny little black mushrooms they served us.  Anyway it wasn't difficult to get started on the subject.  By the time Steve met us he would already have had his workout, a shower and a rubdown.  He was clean inside and out.  Almost a perfect specimen of a man.  Not very bright, to be sure, but a good egg, a companion.  Hymie, on the other hand, was like a toad.  He seemed to come to the table direct from the swamps where he had passed a mucky day.  Filth rolled off his lips like honey.  In fact, you couldn't call it filth, in his case, because there wasn't any other ingredient with which you might compare it.  It was all one fluid, a slimy, sticky substance made entirely of sex.  When he looked at his food he saw it as potential sperm; if the weather were warm he would say it was good for the balls; if he took a trolley ride he knew in advance that the rhythmic movement of the trolley would stimulate his appetite, would give him a slow, "personal" hard on, as he put it.  Why "personal" I never found out, but that was his expression.  He liked to go out with us because we were always reasonably sure of picking up something decent.  Left to himself he didn't always fare so well.  With us he got a change of meat - Gentile cunt, as he put it.  He liked Gentile cunt.  Smelled sweeter, he said.  Laughed easier too.... Sometimes in the very midst of things.  The one thing he couldn't tolerate was dark meat.  It amazed and disgusted him to see me travelling around with Valeska.  Once he asked me if she didn't smell kind of extra strong like.  I told him I liked it that way - strong and smelly, with lots of gravy around it.  He almost blushed at that.  Amazing how delicate he could be about some things.  Food for example.  Very finicky about his food.  Perhaps a racial trait.  Immaculate about his person, too.  Couldn't stand the sight of a spot on his clean cuffs.  Constantly brushing himself off, constantly taking his pocket mirror out to see if there was any food between his teeth.  If he found a crumb he would hide his face behind the napkin and extract it with his pear-handled toothpick.  The ovaries of course he couldn't see.  Nor could he smell them either, because his wife too was an immaculate bitch.  Douching herself all day long in preparation for the evening nuptials.  It was tragic, the importance she gave to her ovaries.

      Up until he day she was taken to the hospital she was a regular fucking block.  The thought of never being able to fuck again frightened the wits out of her.  Hymie of course told her it wouldn't make any difference to him one way or the other.  Glued to her like a snake, a cigarette in his mouth, the girls passing below on the boulevard, it was hard for him to imagine a woman not being able to fuck any more.  He was sure the operation would be successful.  Successful!  That's to say that she'd fuck even better than before.  He used to tell her that, lying on his back looking up at the ceiling.  "You know I always love you," he would say.  "Move over just a little bit, will you.... there, like that.... that's it.  What was I saying?  Oh yes ... why sure, why should you worry about things like that?  Of course I'll be true to you.  Listen, pull away just a little bit ... yeah, that's it.... that's fine."  He used to tell us about it in the chop suey joint.  Steve would laugh like hell.  Steve couldn't do a thing like that.  He was too honest - especially with women.  That's why he never had any luck.  Little Curley, for example - Steve hated Curley - would always get what he wanted.... He was a born liar, a born deceiver.  Hymie didn't like Curley much either.  He said he was dishonest, meaning of course dishonest in money matters.  About such things Hymie was scrupulous.  What he disliked especially was the way Curley talked about his aunt.  It was bad enough, in Hymie's opinion, that he should be screwing the sister of his own mother, but to make her out to be nothing but a piece of stale cheese, that was too much for Hymie.  One ought to have a bit of respect for a woman, provided she's not a whore.  If she's a whore, that's different.  Whores are not women.  Whores are whores.  That was how Hymie looked at things.

      The real reason for this dislike, however, was that whenever they went out together Curley always got the best choice.  And not only that, but it was usually with Hymie's money that Curley managed it.  Even the way Curley asked for money irritated Hymie - it was like extortion, he said.  He thought it was partly my fault, that I was too lenient with the kid.  "He's got no moral character," Hymie would say.  "And what about you, your moral character?" I would ask.  "Oh me!  Shit, I'm too old to have any moral character.  But Curley's only a kid."

      "You're jealous, that's what," Steve would say.

      "Me?  Me jealous of him?"  And he'd try to smother the idea with a scornful little laugh.  It made him wince, a jab like that.  "Listen," he would say, turning to me, "did I ever act jealous toward you?  Didn't I always turn a girl over to you if you asked me?  What about that red-haired girl in SU office ... you remember ... the one with the big teats?  Wasn't that a nice piece of ass to turn over to a friend?  But I did it, didn't I?  I did it because you said you liked big teats.  But I wouldn't do it for Curley.  He's a little crook.  Let him do his own digging."

      As a matter of fact, Curley was digging away very industriously.  He must have had five or six on the string at one time, from what I could gather.  There was Valeska, for example - he had made himself pretty solid with her.  She was so damned pleased to have some one fuck her without blushing that when it came to sharing him with her cousin and then with the midget she didn't put up the least objection.  What she liked best was to get in the tub and let him fuck her under water.  It was fine until the midget got wise to it.  Then there was a nice rumpus which was finally ironed out on the parlour floor.  To listen to Curley talk he did everything but climb the chandeliers.  And always plenty of pocket money to boot.  Valeska was generous, but the cousin was a softy.  If she came within a foot of a stiff prick she was like putty.  An unbuttoned fly was enough to put her in a trance.  It was almost shameful the things Curley made her do.  He took pleasure in degrading her.  I could scarcely blame him for it, she was such a prim, priggish bitch in her street clothes.  You'd almost swear she didn't own a cunt, the way she carried herself in the street.  Naturally, when he got her alone he made her pay for her highfalutin' ways.  He went at it cold-bloodedly.  "Fish it out!" he'd say, opening his fly a little.  "Fish it out with your tongue!"  (He had it in for the whole bunch because, as he put it, they were sucking one another off behind his back.)  Anyway, once she got the taste of it in her mouth you could do anything with her.  Sometimes he'd stand her on her hands and push her around the room that way, like a wheelbarrow.  Or else he'd do it dog fashion, and while she groaned and squirmed he'd nonchalantly light a cigarette and blow the smoke between her legs.  Once he played her a dirty trick doing it that way.  He had worked her up to such a state that she was beside herself.  Anyway, after he had almost polished the ass of her with his back-scuttling he pulled out for a second, as though to cool his cock off, and then very slowly and gently he shoved a big long carrot up her twat.  "That, Miss Abercrombie," he said, "is a sort of Doppelgänger to my regular cock," and with that he unhitches himself and yanks up his pants.  Cousin Abercrombie was so bewildered by it all that she let a tremendous fart and out tumbled the carrot.  At least, that's how Curley related it to me.  He was an outrageous liar, to be sure, and there may not be a grain of truth in the yarn, but there's no denying that he had a flair for such tricks.  As for Miss Abercrombie and her high-tone Narragansett ways, well, with a cunt like that one can always imagine the worst.  By comparison Hymie was a purist.  Somehow Hymie and his fat circumcised dick were two different things.  When he got a personal hard on, as he said, he really meant that he was irresponsible.  He meant that Nature was asserting itself - through his, Hymie Laubscher's, fat circumcised dick.  It was the same with his wife's cunt.  It was something she wore between her legs, like an ornament.  It was a part of Mrs. Laubscher personally, if you get what I mean.

      Well, all this is simply by way of leading up to the general sexual confusion which prevailed at this time.  It was like taking a flat in the Land of Fuck.  The girl upstairs, for instance ... she used to come down now and then, when the wife was giving a recital, to look after the kid.  She was so obviously a simpleton that I didn't give her any notice at first.  But like all the others she had a cunt too, a sort of impersonal personal cunt which was unconsciously conscious of.  The oftener she came down the more conscious she got, in her unconscious way.  One night, when she was in the bathroom, after she had been in there a suspiciously long while, she got me to thinking of things.  I decided to take a peep through the keyhole and see for myself what was what.  Lo and behold, if she wasn't standing in front of the mirror stroking and petting her little pussy.  Almost talking to it, she was.  I was so excited I didn't know what to do at first.  I went back into the big room, turned out the lights, and lay there on the couch waiting for her to come out.  As I lay there I could still see that bushy cunt of hers and the fingers strumming it like.  I opened my fly to let my pecker twitch about in the cool of the dark.  I tried to mesmerize her from the couch, or at least I tried letting my pecker mesmerize her.  "Come here, you bitch," I kept saying to myself, "come in here and spread that cunt over me."  She must have caught the message immediately, for in a jiffy she had opened the door and was groping about in the dark to find the couch.  I didn't say a word, I didn't make a move.  I just kept my mind riveted on her cunt moving quietly in the dark like a crab.  Finally she was standing beside the couch.  She didn't say a word either.  She just stood there quietly and as I slid my hand up her legs she moved one foot a little to open her crotch a bit more.  I don't think I ever put my hand into such a juicy crotch in all my life.  It was like paste running down her legs, and if there had been any billboards handy I could have plastered up a dozen or more.  After a few moments, just as naturally as a cow lowering its head to grace, she bent over and put it in her mouth.  I had my whole four fingers inside her, whipping it up to a froth.  Her mouth was stuffed full and the juice pouring down her legs.  Not a word out of us, as I say.  Just a couple of quiet maniacs working away in the dark like gravediggers.  It was a fucking Paradise and I knew it, and I was ready and willing to fuck my brains away if necessary.  She was probably the best fuck I ever had.  She never once opened her trap - not that night, nor the next night, nor any night.  She'd steal down like that in the dark, soon as she smelled me there alone, and plaster her cunt all over me.  It was an enormous cunt, too, when I think back on it.  A dark, subterranean labyrinth fitted up with divans and cosy corners and rubber teeth and syringes and soft nestles and eiderdown and mulberry leaves.  I used to nose in like the solitary worm and bury myself in a little cranny where it was absolutely silent, and so soft and restful that I lay like a dolphin on the oyster banks.  A slight twitch and I'd be in the Pullman reading a newspaper or else up an impasse where there were mossy round cobblestones and little wicker gates which opened and shut automatically.  Sometimes it was like riding the shoot-the-shoots, a steep plunge and then a spray of tingling sea crabs, the bulrushes swaying feverishly and the gills of tiny fishes lapping against me like harmonica stops.  In the immense black grotto there was a silk-and-soap organ playing a predaceous black music.  When she pitched herself high, when she turned the juice on full, it made a violaceous purple, a deep mulberry stain like twilight, a ventriloqual twilight such as dwarfs and cretins enjoy when they menstruate.  It made me think of cannibals chewing flowers, of Bantus running amuck, of wild unicorns rutting in rhododendron beds.  Everything was anonymous and unformulated, John Doe and his wife Emmy Doe; above us the gas tanks and below the marine life.  Above the belt, as I say, she was batty.  Yes, absolutely cuckoo, though still abroad and afloat.  Perhaps that was what made her cunt so marvellously impersonal.  It was one cunt out of a million, a regular Pearl of the Antilles, such as Dick Osborn discovered when reading Joseph Conrad.  In the broad Pacific of sex she lay, a gleaming silver reef surrounded with human anemones, human starfish, human madrepores.  Only an Osborn could have discovered her, given the proper latitude and longitude of cunt.  Meeting her in the daytime, watching her slowly going daft, it was like trapping a weasel when night came on.  All I had to do was to lie down in the dark with my fly open and wait.  She was like Ophelia suddenly resurrected among the Kaffirs.  Not a word of any language could she remember, especially not English.  She was a deaf-mute who had lost her memory, and with the loss of memory she had lost her frigidaire, her curling irons, her tweezers and handbag.  She was even more naked than a fish, except for the tuft of her between her legs.  And she was even slipperier than a fish because after all a fish has scales and she had none.  It was dubious at times whether I was in her or she in me.  It was open warfare, the newfangled Pancrace, with each one biting his own ass.  Love among the newts and cutout wide open.  Love without gender and without lysol.  Incubational love, such as the wolverines practise above the tree line.  One the one side the Arctic Ocean, on the other the Gulf of Mexico.  And though we never referred to it openly there was always with us King Kong, King Kong asleep in the wrecked hull of the Titanic among the phosphorescent bones of millionaires and lampreys.  No logic could drive King Kong away.  He was the giant truss that supports the soul's fleeting anguish.  He was the wedding cake with hairy legs and arms a mile long.  He was the revolving screen on which the news passes away.  He was the muzzle of the revolver that never went off, the leper armed with sawed-off gonococci.

      It was here in the void of hernia that I did all my quiet thinking via the penis.  There was first of all the binomial theorem, a phrase which has always puzzled me: I put it under the magnifying glass and studied it from X to Z.  There was Logos, which somehow I had always identified with breath: I found that on the contrary it was a sort of obsessional stasis, a machine which went on grinding corn long after the granaries had been filled and the Jews driven out of Egypt.  There was Bucephalus, more fascinating to me perhaps than any word in my whole vocabulary: I would trot it out whenever I was in a quandary, and with it of course Alexander and his entire purple retinue.  What a horse!   Sired in the Indian Ocean, the last of the line, and never once mated, except to the Queen of the Amazons during the Mesopotamian adventure.  There was the Scotch Gambit!  An amazing expression which has nothing to do with chess.  It came to me always in the shape of a man on stilts, page 2,498 of Funk and Wagnall's Unabridged Dictionary.  A gambit was a sort of leap in the dark with mechanical legs.  A leap for no purpose - hence gambit!  Clear as a bell and perfectly simple, once you grasped it.  Then there was Andromeda, and the Gorgon Medusa, and Castor and Pollux of heavenly origin, mythological twins, eternally fixed in the ephemeral stardust.  There was lucubration, a word distinctly sexual and yet suggesting such cerebral connotations as to make me uneasy.  Always "midnight lucubrations", the midnight being ominously significant.  And then arras.  Somebody some time or other had been stabbed "behind the arras".  I saw an altar cloth made of asbestos and in it was a grievous rent such as Ceasar himself might have made.

      It was very quiet thinking, as I say, the kind that the men of the Old Stone Age must have indulged in.  Things were neither absurd nor explicable.  It was a jigsaw puzzle which, when you grew tired, you could push away with two feet.  Anything could be put aside with ease, even the Himalayan mountains.  It was just the opposite kind of thinking from Mahomet's.  It led absolutely nowhere and was hence enjoyable.  The grand edifice which you might construct throughout the course of a long fuck could be toppled over in the twinkling of an eye.  It was the fuck that counted and not the construction work.  It was like living in the Ark during the Flood, everything provided for down to a screwdriver.  What need to commit murder, rape or incest when all that was demanded of you was to kill time?  Rain, rain, rain, but inside the Ark everything dry and toasty, a pair of every kind and in the larder fine Westphalian hams, fresh eggs, olives, pickled onions, Worcestershire sauce and other delicacies.  God had chosen me, Noah, to establish a new heaven and a new earth.  He had given me a stout boat with all seams caulked and properly dried.  He had given me also the knowledge to sail the stormy seas.  Maybe when it stopped raining there would be other kinds of knowledge to acquire, but for the present a nautical knowledge sufficed.  The rest was chess in the Café Royal, Second Avenue, except that I had to imagine a partner, a clever Jewish mind that would make the game last until the rains ceased.  But, as I said before, I had no time to be bored; there were my old friends, Logos, Bucephalus, arras, lucubration, and so on.  Why play chess?

      Locked up like that for days and nights on end I began to realize that thinking, when it is not masturbative, is lenitive, healing, pleasurable.  The thinking that gets you nowhere takes you everywhere; all other thinking is done on tracks and no matter how long the stretch, in the end there is always the depot or the roundhouse.  In the end there is always a red lantern which says STOP!  But when the penis gets to thinking there is no stop or let: it is a perpetual holiday, the bait fresh and the fish always nibbling at the line.  Which reminds me of another cunt, Veronica something or other, who always got me thinking the wrong way.  With Veronica it was always a tussle in the vestibule.  On the dance floor you'd think she was going to make you a permanent present of her ovaries, but as soon as she hit the air she'd start thinking, thinking of her hat, of her purse, of her aunt who was waiting up for her, of the letter she forgot to mail, of the job she was going to lose - all kinds of crazy, irrelevant thoughts which had nothing to do with the thing in hand.  It was like she had suddenly switched her brain to her cunt - the most alert and canny cunt imaginable.  It was almost a metaphysical cunt, so to speak.  It was a cunt which thought out problems, and not only that, but a special kind of thinking it was, with a metronome going.  For this species of displaced rhythmic lucubration a peculiar dim light was essential.  It had to be just about dark enough for a bat a yet light enough to find a button if one happened to come undone and roll on the floor of the vestibule.  You can see what I mean.  A vague yet meticulous precision, a steely awareness that simulated absent-mindedness.  And fluttery and fluky at the same time, so that you could never determine whether it was fish or fowl.  What is this I hold in my hand?  Fine or superfine?  The answer was always duck soup.  If you grabbed her by the boobies she would squawk like a parrot: if you got under her dress she would wriggle like an eel; if you held her too tight she would bite like a ferret.  She lingered and lingered and lingered.  Why?  What was she after?  Would she give in after an hour or two?  Not a chance in a million.  She was like a pigeon trying to fly with its legs caught in a steel trap.  She pretended she had no legs.  But if you made a move to set her free she would threaten to moult on you.

      Because she had such a marvellous ass [arse] and because it was also so damned inaccessible I used to think of her as the Pons Asinorum.  Every schoolboy knows that the Pons Asinorum is not to be crossed except by two white donkeys led by a blind man.  I don't know why it is so, but that's the rule as it was laid down by old Euclid.  He was so full of knowledge, the old buzzard, that one day - I suppose purely to amuse himself - he built a bridge which no living mortal could ever cross.  He called it the Pons Asinorum because he was the owner of a pair of beautiful white donkeys, and so attached was he to these donkeys that he would let nobody take possession of them.  And so he conjured a dream in which he, the blind man, would one day lead the donkeys over the bridge and into the happy hunting grounds for donkeys.  Well, Veronica was very much in the same boat.  She thought so much of her beautiful white ass that she wouldn't part with it for anything.  She wanted to take it with her to Paradise when the time came.  As for her cunt - which by the way she never referred to at all - as for her cunt, I say, well that was just an accessory to be brought along.  In the dim light of the vestibule, without ever referring overtly to her two problems, she somewhere made you uncomfortably aware of them.  That is, she made you aware in the manner of a prestidigitator.  You were to take a look or a feel only to be finally deceived, only to be shown that you had not seen and had not felt.  It was a very subtle sexual algebra, the midnight lucubration which would earn you an A or a B next day, but nothing more.  You passed your examinations, you got your diploma, and then you were turned loose.  In the meantime you used your ass to sit down and your cunt to make water with.  Between the textbook and the lavatory there was an intermediate zone which you were never to enter because it was labelled fuck.  You might diddle and piddle, but you might not fuck.  The light was never completely shut off, the sun never streamed in.  Always just light or dark enough to distinguish a bat.  And just that little eerie flicker of light was what kept the mind alert, on the lookout, as it were, for bags, pencils, buttons, keys, et cetera.  You couldn't really think because your mind was already engaged.  The mind was kept in readiness, like a vacant seat at the theatre on which the owner had left his opera hat.

      Veronica, as I say, had a talking cunt, which was bad because its sole function seemed to be to talk one out of a fuck.  Evelyn, on the other hand, had a laughing cunt.  She lived upstairs too, only in another house.  She was always trotting in at mealtimes to tell us a new joke.  A comedienne of the first water, the only really funny woman I ever met in my life.  Everything was a joke, fuck included.  She could even make a stiff prick laugh, which is saying a good deal.  They say a stiff prick has no conscience, but a stiff prick that laughs too is phenomenal.  The only way I can describe it is to say that when she got hot and bothered, Evelyn, she put on a ventriloqual act with her cunt.  You'd be ready to slip it in when suddenly the dummy between her legs would let out a guffaw.  At the same time it would reach out for you and give you a playful little tug and squeeze.  It could sing too, this dummy of a cunt.  In fact it behaved just like a trained seal.

      Nothing is more difficult than to make love in a circus.  Putting on the trained seal act all the time made her more inaccessible than if she had been trussed up with iron thongs.  She could break down the most "personal" hard on in the world.  Break it down with laughter.  At the same time it wasn't quite as humiliating as one might be inclined to imagine.  There was something sympathetic about this vaginal laughter.  The whole world seemed to unroll like a pornographic film whose tragic theme is impotence.  You could visualize yourself as a dog, or a weasel, or a white rabbit.  Love was something on the side, a dish of caviar, say, or a wax heliotrope.  You could see the ventriloquist in you talking about caviar or heliotropes, but the real person was always a weasel or a white rabbit.  Evelyn was always lying in the cabbage patch with legs spread open offering a bright green leaf to the first comer.  But if you made a move to nibble it the whole cabbage patch would explode with laughter, a bright, dewy, vaginal laughter such as Jesus H. Christ and Immanuel Pussyfoot Kant never dreamed of, because if they had the world would not be what it is today and besides there would have been no Kant and no Christ Almighty.  The female seldom laughs, but when she does it's volcanic.  When the female laughs the male had better scoot to the cyclone cellar.  Nothing will stand up under the vaginating chortle, not even ferroconcrete.  The female, when once her risibility is aroused, can laugh down the hyena or the jackal or the wildcat.  Now and then one hears it at a lynching bee, for example.  It means that the lid is off, that everything goes.  It means that she will forage for herself - and watch out that you don't get your balls cut off!  It means that if the pest is coming SHE is coming first, and with huge spiked thongs that will flay the living hide off you.  It means that she will lay not only with Tom, Dick and Harry, but with Cholera, Meningitis, Leprosy; it means that she will lay herself down on the altar like a mare in rut and take on all comers, including the Holy Ghost.  It means that what it took the poor male, with his logarithmic cunning, five thousand, ten thousand, twenty thousand years to build, she will pull down in a night.  She will pull it down and pee on it, and nobody will stop her once she starts laughing in earnest.  And when I said about Veronica that her laugh would break down the most "personal" hard on imaginable I meant it: she would break down the personal erection and hand you back an impersonal one that was like a red-hot ramrod.  You might not get very far with Veronica herself, but with what she had to give you could travel far and no mistake about it.  Once you came within earshot of her it was like you had gotten an overdose of Spanish fly.  Nothing on earth could bring it down again, unless you put it under a sledgehammer.

      It was going on this way all the time, even though every word I say is a lie.  It was a personal tour in the impersonal world, a man with a tiny trowel in his hand digging a tunnel through the earth to get to the other side.  The idea was to tunnel through and find at last the Culebra Cut, the ne plus ultra, of the honeymoon of flesh.  And of course there was no end to the digging.  The best I might hope for was to get stuck in the dead centre of the earth, where the pressure was strongest and most even all around, and stay stuck there forever.  That would give me the feeling of Ixion on the wheel, which is one sort of salvation and not entirely to be sneezed at.  On the other hand I was a metaphysician of the instinctivist sort: it was impossible for me to stay stuck anywhere, even in the dead centre of the earth.  It was most imperative to find and to enjoy the metaphysical fuck, and for that I would be obliged to come out on to a wholly new tableland, a mesa of sweet alfalfa and polished monoliths, where the eagles and the vultures flew at random.

      Sometimes sitting in the park of an evening, especially a park littered with papers and bits of food, I would see one pass by, one that seemed to be going toward Tibet, and I would follow her with the round eye, hoping that suddenly she would begin to fly, for if she did that, if she would begin to fly, I knew I would be able to fly also, and that would mean an end to the digging and the wallowing.  Sometimes, probably because of twilight or other disturbances, it seemed as though she actually did fly on rounding the corner.  That is, she would suddenly be lifted from the ground for the space of a few feet, like a plane too heavily loaded; but just that sudden involuntary life, whether real or imaginary it didn't matter, gave me hope, gave me courage to keep the still round eye riveted on the spot.

      There were megaphones inside which yelled "Go on, keep going, stick it out", and all that nonsense.  But why?  To what end?  Whither?  Whence?  I would set the alarm clock in order to be up and about at a certain hour, but why up and about?  Why get up at all?  With that little trowel in my hand I was working like a galley slave and not the slightest hope of reward involved.  Were I to continue straight on I would dig the deepest hole any man had ever dug.  On the other hand, if I had truly wanted to get to the other side of the earth, wouldn't it have been much simpler to throw away the trowel and just board an aeroplane for China?  But the body follows after the mind.  The simplest thing for the body is not always easy for the mind.  And when it gets particularly difficult and embarrassing is that moment when the two start going in opposite directions.

      Labouring with the trowel was bliss: it left the mind completely free and yet there was never the slightest danger of the two being separated.  If the she-animal suddenly began groaning with pleasure, if the she-animal suddenly began to throw a pleasurable conniption fit, the jaws moving like old shoelaces, the chest wheezing and the ribs creaking, if the she-bugger suddenly started to fall apart on the floor, to the collapse of joy and over-exasperation, just at the moment, not a second this side or that, the promised tableland would heave in sight like a ship coming up out of a fog and there would be nothing to do but plant the stars and stripes on it and claim it in the name of Uncle Sam and all that's holy.  These misadventures happened so frequently that it was impossible not to believe in the reality of a realm which was called Fuck, because that was the only name which might be given to it, and yet it was more than fuck and by fucking one only began to approach it.  Everybody had at one time or another planted the flag in this territory, and yet nobody was able to lay claim to it permanently.  It disappeared overnight - sometimes in the twinkling of an eye.  It was No Man's Land and it stank with the litter of invisible deaths.  If a truce were declared you met in this terrain and shook hands or swapped tobacco.  But the truces never lasted very long.  The only thing that seemed to have permanency was the "zone between" idea.  Here the bullets flew and the corpses piled up; then it would rain and finally there would be nothing left but a stench.

      This is all a figurative way of speaking about what is unmentionable.  What is unmentionable is pure fuck and pure cunt: it must be mentioned only in de luxe editions, otherwise the world will fall apart.  What holds the world together, as I have learned from bitter experience, is sexual intercourse.  But fuck, the real thing, cunt, the real thing, seems to contain some unidentified element which is far more dangerous than nitro-glycerine.  To get an idea of the real thing you must consult a Sears Roebuck catalogue endorsed by the Anglican Church.  On page twenty-three you will find a picture of Priapus juggling a corkscrew on the end of his weeny; he is standing in the shadow of the Parthenon by mistake; he is naked except for a perforated jock-strap which was loaned for the occasion by the Holy Rollers of Oregon and Saskatchewan.  Long distance is on the wire demanding to know if they should sell short or long.  He says go fuck yourself and hangs up the receiver.  In the background Rembrandt is studying the anatomy of our Lord Jesus Christ who, if you remember, was crucified by the Jews and then taken to Abyssinia to be pounded with quoits and other objects.  The weather seems to be fair and warmer, as usual, except for a slight mist rising up out of the Ionian; this is the sweat of Neptune's balls which were castrated by the early monks, or perhaps it was by the Manicheans in the time of the Pentecostal plague.  Long strips of horsemeat are hanging out to dry and the flies are everywhere, just as Homer describes it in ancient times.  Hard by is a McCormick threshing machine, a reaper and binder with a thirty-six horsepower engine and no cutout.  The harvest is in and the workers are counting their wages in the distant fields.  This is the flush of dawn on the first day of sexual intercourse in the old Hellenistic world, now faithfully reproduced for us in colour thanks to the Zeiss Brothers and other patient zealots of industry.  But this is not the way it looked to the men of Homer's time who were on the spot.  Nobody knows how the god Priapus looked when he was reduced to the ignominy of balancing a corkscrew on the end of his weeny.  Standing that way in the shadow of the Parthenon he undoubtedly fell a-dreaming of far-off cunt; he must have lost consciousness of the corkscrew and the threshing and reaping machine; he must have grown very silent within himself and finally he must have lost even the desire to dream.  It is my idea, and of course I am willing to be corrected if I am wrong, that standing thus in the rising mist he suddenly heard the Angelus peal and lo and behold there appeared before his very eyes a gorgeous green marshland in which the Choctaws were making merry with the Navajos; in the air above were the white condors, their ruffs festooned with marigolds.  He saw also a huge slate on which was written the body of Christ, the body of Absalom and the evil which is lust.  He saw the sponge soaked with frogs' blood, the eyes which Augustine had sewn into his skin, the vest which was not big enough to cover our iniquities.  He saw these things in the whilomst moment when the Navajos were making merry with the Choctaws and he was so taken by surprise that suddenly a voice issued from between his legs, from the long thinking reed which he had lost in dreaming, and it was the most inspired, the most shrill and piercing, the most jubilant and ferocious cachinnating sort of voice that had ever wongled up from the depths.  He began to sing through that long cock of his with such divine grace and elegance that the white condors came down out of the sky and shat huge purple eggs all over the green marshland.  Our Lord Christ got up from his stone bed and, marked by the quoit though he was, he danced like a mountain goat.  The fellaheen came out of Egypt in their chains, followed by the warlike Igorots and the snail-eating men of Zanzibar.

      This is how things stood on the first day of sexual intercourse in the old Hellenistic world.  Since then things have changed a great deal.  It is no longer polite to sing through your weeny, nor is it permitted even to condors to shit purple eggs all over the place.  All this is scatological, eschatological and ecumenical.  It is forbidden.  Verboten.  And so the Land of Fuck becomes ever more receding: it becomes mythological.  Therefore am I constrained to speak mythologically.  I speak with extreme unction, and with precious unguents too.  I put away the clashing cymbals, the tubas, the white marigolds, the oleanders and the rhododendrons.  Up with the thorns and the manacles!  Christ is dead and mangled with quoits.  The fellaheen are bleaching in the sands of Egypt, their wrists loosely shackled.  The vultures have eaten away every decomposing crumb of flesh.  All is quiet, a million golden mice nibbling at the unseen cheese.  The moon is up and the Nile ruminates on her riparian ravages.  The earth belches silently, the stars twitch and bleat, the rivers slip their banks.  It's like this.... There are cunts which laugh and cunts which talk; there are crazy, hysterical cunts shaped like ocarinas and there are planturous, seismographic cunts which register the rise and fall of sap; there are cannibalistic cunts which open wide like the jaws of the whale and swallow alive; there are also masochistic cunts which close up like the oyster and have hard shells and perhaps a pearl or two inside; there are dithyrambic cunts which dance at the very approach of the penis and go wet all over in ecstasy; there are the porcupine cunts which unleash their quills and wave little flags at Christmas time; there are telegraphic cunts which practise the Morse code and leave the mind full of dots and dashes; there are the political cunts which are saturated with ideology and which deny even the menopause; there are vegetative cunts which make no response unless you pull them up by the roots; there are the religious cunts which smell like the Seventh Day Adventists and are full of beads, worms, clamshells, sheep droppings and now and then dried bread crumbs; there are the mammalian cunts which are lined with otter skin and hibernate during the long winter; there are cruising cunts fitted out like yachts, which are good for solitaries and epileptics; there are glacial cunts in which you can drop shooting stars without causing a flicker; there are miscellaneous cunts which defy category or description, which you stumble on once in a lifetime and which leave you seared and branded; there are cunts made of pure joy which have neither name nor antecedent and these are the best of all, but whither have they flown?

      And then there is the one cunt which is all, and this we shall call the super-cunt, since it is not of this land at all but of that bright country to which we were long ago invited to fly.  Here the dew is ever sparkling and the tall reeds bend with the wind.  It is here that the great father of fornication dwells, Father Apis, the mantic bull who gored his way to heaven and dethroned the gelded deities of right and wrong.  From Apis sprang the race of unicorns, that ridiculous beast of ancient writ whose learned brow lengthened into a gleaming phallus, and from the unicorn by gradual stages was derived the late-city man of which Oswald Spengler speaks.  And from the dead cock of this sad specimen arose the giant skyscraper with its express elevators and observation towers.  We are the last decimal point of sexual calculation; the world turns like a rotten egg in its crate of straw.  Now for the aluminium wings with which to fly to that far-off place, the bright country where Apis, the father of fornication, dwells.  Everything goes forward like oiled clocks; for each minute of the dial there are a million noiseless clocks which tick off the rinds of time.  We are travelling faster than the lightning calculator, faster than starlight, faster than the magician can think.  Each second is a universe of time.  And each universe of time is but a wink of sleep in the cosmogony of speed.  When speed comes to its end we shall be there, punctual as always and blissfully undenominated.  We shall shed our wings, our clocks and our mantelpieces to lean on.  We will rise up feathery and jubilant, like a column of blood, and there will be no memory to drag us down again.  This time I call the realm of the super-cunt, for it defies speed, calculation or imagery.  Nor has the penis itself a known size or weight.  There is only the sustained feel of fuck, the fugitive in full flight, the nightmare smoking his quiet cigar.  Little Nemo walks around with a seven-day hard on and a wonderful pair of blue balls bequeathed by Lady Bountiful.  It is Sunday morning around the corner from Evergreen Cemetery.

      It is Sunday morning and I am lying blissfully dead to the world on my bed of ferroconcrete.  Around the corner is the cemetery, which is to say - the world of sexual intercourse.  My balls ache with the fucking that is going on, but it is all going on beneath my window, on the boulevard where Hymie keeps his copulating nest.  I am thinking of one woman and the rest if blotto.  I say I am thinking of her, but the truth is I am dying a stellar death.  I am lying there like a sick star waiting for the light to go out.  Years ago I lay on this same bed and I waited and waited to be born.  Nothing happened.  Except that my mother, in her Lutheran rage, threw a bucket of water over me.  My mother, poor imbecile that she was, thought I was lazy.  She didn't know that I had gotten caught in the stellar drift, that I was being pulverized to a black extinction out there on the farthest rim of the universe.  She thought it was sheer laziness that kept me riveted to the bed.  She threw the bucket of water over me: I squirmed and shivered a bit, but I continued to lie there on my ferroconcrete bed.  I was immovable.  I was a burned-out meteor adrift somewhere in the neighbourhood of Vega.

      And now I'm on the same bed and the light that's in me refuses to be extinguished.  The world of men and women are making merry in the cemetery grounds.  They are having sexual intercourse, God bless them, and I am alone in the Land of Fuck.  It seems to me that I hear the clanking of a great machine, the linotype bracelets passing through the wringer of sex.  Hymie and his nymphomaniac of a wife are lying on the same level with me, only they are across the river.  The river is called Death and it has a bitter taste.  I have waded through it many times, up to the hips, but somehow I have neither been petrified nor immortalized.  I am still burning brightly inside, though outwardly dead as a planet.  From this bed I have gotten up to dance, not once but hundreds, thousands of times.  Each time I came away I had the conviction that I had danced the skeleton dance on a terrain vague.  Perhaps I had wasted too much of my substance on suffering; perhaps I had the crazy idea that I would be the first metallurgical bloom of the human species; perhaps I was imbued with the notion that I was both a sub-gorilla and a super-god.  On this bed of ferroconcrete I remember everything and everything is in rock crystal.  There are never any animals, only thousands and thousands of human beings all talking at once, and for each word they utter I have an answer immediately, sometimes before the word is out of their mouths.  There is plenty of killing, but no blood.  The murders are perpetrated with cleanliness, and always in silence.  But even if everyone were killed there would still be conversation, and the conversation would be at once intricate and easy to follow.  Because it is I who create it!  I know it, and that is why it never drives me mad.  I have conversations which may take place only twenty years hence, when I meet the right person, the one whom I shall create, let us say, when the proper time comes.  All these talks take place in a vacant lot which is attached to my bed like a mattress.  Once I gave it a name, this terrain vague: I called it Ubiguchi, but somehow Ubiguchi never satisfied me, it was too intelligible, too full of meaning.  It would be better to keep it just terrain vague, which is what I intend to do.  People think that vacuity is nothingness, but it is not so.  Vacuity is a discordant fullness, a crowded ghostly world in which the soul goes reconnoitring.  As a boy I remember standing in the vacant lot as if I were a very lively soul standing naked in a pair of shoes.  The body had been stolen from me because I had no particular need of it.  If I killed a little bird and roasted it over the fire and ate it, it was not because I was hungry but because I wanted to know about Timbuktu or Tierra del Fuego.  I had to stand in the vacant lot and eat dead birds in order to create a desire for that bright land which later I would inhabit alone and people with nostalgia.  I expected ultimate things of this place, but I was deplorable deceived.  I went as far as one could go in a state of complete deadness, and then by a law, which must be the law of creation, I suppose, I suddenly flared up and began to live inexhaustibly, like a star whose light is unquenchable.  Here began the real cannibalistic excursions which have meant so much to me: no more dead chippies picked from the bonfire, but live human meat, tender, succulent human flesh, secrets like fresh bloody livers, confidences like swollen tumours that have been kept on ice.  I learned not to wait for my victim to die, but to eat into him while he was talking to me.  Often when I walked away from an unfinished meal I discovered that it was nothing more than an old friend minus an arm or a leg.  I sometimes left him standing there - a trunk full of stinking intestines.

      Being of the city, of the only city in the world and no place like Broadway anywhere, I used to walk up and down staring at the floodlit hams and other delicacies. I was a schizerino from the sole of my boots to the tips of my hair.  I lived exclusively in the gerundive, which I understood only in Latin.  Long before I had read of her in the Black Book I was cohabiting with Hilda, the giant cauliflower of my dreams.  We traversed all the morganatic diseases together and a few which were ex cathedra.  We dwelt in the carcass of the instincts and were nourished by ganglionic memories.  There was never a universe, but millions and billions of universes, all of them put together no bigger than a pinhead.  It was a vegetal sleep in the wilderness of the mind.  It was the past, which alone comprises eternity.  Amidst the fauna and flora of my dreams I would hear long distance calling.  Messages were dropped on my table by the deformed and the epileptic.  Hans Castorp would call sometimes and together we would commit innocent crimes.  Or, if it were a bright freezing day, I would do a turn in the velodrome with my Presto bike from Chemnitz, Bohemia.

      Best of all was the skeleton dance.  I would first wash all my parts at the sink, change my linen, shave, powder, comb my hair, don my dancing pumps.  Feeling abnormally light inside and out I would wind in and out of the crowd for a time to get the proper human rhythm, the weight and substance of flesh.  Then I would make a beeline for the dance floor, grab a hunk of giddy flesh and begin the autumnal pirouette.  It was like that I walked into the hairy Greek's place one night and ran smack into her.  She seemed blue-black, white as chalk, ageless.  There was not just the flow to and from, but the endless chute, the voluptuousness of intrinsic restlessness.  She was mercurial and at the same time of a savoury weight.  She had the marmoreal stare of a faun embedded in lava.  The time has come, I thought, to wander back from the periphery.  I made a move toward the centre, only to find the ground shifting from under my feet.  The earth slid rapidly beneath my bewildered feet. I moved again out of the earth belt and behold, my hands were full of meteoric flowers.  I reached for her with two flaming hands but she was more elusive than sand.  I thought of my favourite nightmares, but she was unlike anything which had made me sweat and gibber.  In my delirium I began to prance and neigh.  I bought frogs and mated them with toads.  I thought of the easiest thing to do, which is to die, but I did nothing.  I stood still and began to petrify at the extremities.  That was so wonderful, so healing, so eminently sensible, that I began to laugh way down inside the viscera, like a hyena crazed with rut.  Maybe I would turn into a rosetta stone!  I just stood still and waited.  Spring came, and fall, and then winter.  I renewed my insurance policy automatically.  I ate grass and the roots of deciduous trees.  I sat for days on end looking at the same film.  Now and then I brushed my teeth.  If you fired an automatic at me the bullets glanced off and made a queer tat-a-tat ricocheting against the walls.  Once up a dark street, felled by a thug, I felt a knife go clean through me.  It felt like a spritz bath.  Strange to say, the knife left no holes in my skin.  The experience was so novel that I went home and stuck knives into all parts of my body.  More needle baths.  I sat down, pulled all the knives out, and again I marvelled that there was no trace of blood, no holes, no pain.  I was just about to bite into my arm when the telephone rang.  It was long distance calling.  I never knew who put in the calls because no-one ever came to the phone.  However, the skeleton dance....

      Life is drifting by the show window.  I lie there like a floodlit ham waiting for the axe to fall.  As a matter of fact, there is nothing to fear, because everything is  cut neatly into fine little slices and wrapped in cellophane.  Suddenly all the lights of the city are extinguished and the sirens sound their warning.  The city is enveloped in poison gas, bombs are bursting, mangled bodies flying through the air.  There is electricity everywhere, and blood and splinters and loudspeakers.  The men in the air are full of glee; those below are screaming and bellowing.  When the gas and the flames have eaten all the flesh away the skeleton dance begins.  I watch from the show window which is now dark.  It is better than the sack of Rome because there is more to destroy.

      Why do the skeletons dance so ecstatically, I wonder?  Is it the fall of the world?  Is it the dance of death which has been so often heralded?  To see millions of skeletons dancing in the snow while the city founders is an awesome sight.  Will anything ever grow again?  Will babes come out of the womb?  Will there be food and wine?  There are men in the air, to be sure.  They will come down to plunder.  There will be cholera and dysentery and those who were above and triumphant will perish like the rest.  I have the sure feeling that I will be the last man on earth.  I will emerge from the show window when it is all over and walk calmly amidst the ruins.  I will have the whole earth to myself.

      Long distance calling!  To inform me that I am not utterly alone.  Then the destruction was not complete?  It's discouraging.  Man is not even able to destroy himself; he can only destroy others.  I am disgusted.  What a malicious cripple!  What cruel delusions!  So there are more of the species about and they will tidy up the mess and begin again.  God will come down again in flesh and blood and take up the burden of guilt.  They will make music and build things in stone and write it all down in little books. Pfui!  What blind tenacity, what clumsy ambitions!

      I am on the bed again.  The old Greek world, the dawn of sexual intercourse - and Hymie!  Hymie Laubscher always on the same level, looking down on the boulevard across the river.  There is a lull in the nuptial feast and the clam fritters are brought in.  Move over just a little, he says.  There, like that, that's it!  I hear frogs croaking in the swamp outside my window.  Big cemetery frogs nourished by the dead.  They are all huddled together in sexual intercourse; they are croaking with sexual glee.

      I realize now how Hymie was conceived and brought into being.  Hymie the bullfrog!  His mother was at the bottom of the pack and Hymie, then an embryo, was hidden away in her sac.  It was in the early days of sexual intercourse and there was no Marquis of Queensbury rules to hinder.  It was fuck and be fucked - and the devil take the hindmost.  It has been that way ever since the Greeks - a blind fuck in the mud and then a quick spawn and then death.  People are fucking on different levels but it's always in a swamp and the litter is always destined for the same end.  When the house is torn down the bed is left standing: the cosmosexual altar.

      I was polluting the bed with dreams.  Stretched out taut on the ferroconcrete my soul would leave its body and roam from place to place on a little trolley such as is used in department stores for making change.  I made ideological changes and excursions; I was a vagabond in the country of the brain.  Everything was absolutely clear to me because done in rock crystal; at every egress there was written in big letters ANNIHILATION.  The fright of extinction solidified me; the body itself became a piece of ferroconcrete.  It was ornamented by a permanent erection in bad taste.  I had achieved that state of vacuity so earnestly desired by certain devout members of esoteric cults.  I was no more.  I was not even a personal hard on.

      It was about this time, adopting the pseudonym Samson Lackawanna, that I began my depredations.  The criminal instinct in me had gotten the upper hand.  Whereas heretofore I had been only an errant soul, a sort of Gentile Dybbuk, now I became a flesh-filled ghost.  I had taken the name which pleased me and I had only to act instinctively.  In Hong Kong, for instance, I made my entry as a book agent.  I carried a leather purse filled with Mexican dollars and I visited religiously all those Chinese who were in need of further education.  At the hotel I rang for women like you would ring for whisky and soda.  Mornings I studied Tibetan in order to prepare for the journey to Lhasa.  I already spoke Yiddish fluently, and Hebrew too.  I could count two rows of figures at once.  It was so easy to swindle the Chinese that I went back to manila in disgust.  There I took a Mr. Rico in hand and taught him the art of selling books with no handling charges.  All the profit came from ocean freight rates, but it was sufficient to keep me in luxury while it lasted.

      The breath had become as much a trick as breathing.  Things were not dual merely, but multiple.  I had become a cage of mirrors reflecting vacuity.  But vacuity once stoutly posited I was at home and what is called creation was merely a job of filling up holes.  The trolley conveniently carried me about from place to place and in each little side pocket of the great vacuum I dropped a ton of poems to wipe out the idea of annihilation.  I had ever before me boundless vistas.  I began to live in the vista, like a microscopic speck on the lens of a giant telescope.  There was no night in which to rest.  It was perpetual starlight on the arid surface of dead planets.  Now and then a lake black as marble in which I saw myself walking amidst brilliant orbs of light.  So low hung the stars and so dazzling was the light they shed, that it seemed as if the universe were only about to be born.  What rendered the impression stronger was that I was alone; not only were there no animals, no trees, no other beings, but there was not even a blade of grass, not even a dead root.  In that violet incandescent light without even the suggestion of a shadow, motion itself seemed to be absent.  It was like a blaze of pure consciousness, thought become God.  And God, for the first time in my knowledge, was clean-shaven.  I was also clean-shaven, flawless, deadly accurate.  I saw my image in the marble black lakes and it was diapered with stars.  Stars, stars ... like a clout between the eyes and all remembrance fast run out.  I was Samson and I was Lackawanna and I was dying as one being in the ecstasy of full consciousness.

      And now here I am, sailing down the river in my little canoe.  Anything you would like to have me do I will do for you - gratis.  This is the Land of Fuck, in which there are no animals, no trees, no stars, no problems.  Here the spermatozoon reigns supreme.  Nothing is determined in advance, the future is absolutely uncertain, the past non-existent.  For every million born 999,999 are doomed to die and never again be born.  But the one that makes a home run is assured of life eternal.  Life is squeezed into a seed, which is a soul.  Everything has a soul, including minerals, plants, lakes, mountains, rocks.  Everything is sentient, even at the lowest stage of consciousness.

      Once this fact is grasped there can be no more despair.  At the very bottom of the ladder, chez the spermatozoa, there is the same condition of bliss as at the top, chez God.  God is the summation of all the spermatozoa come to full consciousness.  Between the bottom and the top there is no stop, no halfway station.  The river stars somewhere in the mountains and flows on into the sea.  On this river that leads to God the canoe is as serviceable as the dreadnought.  From the very start the journey is homeward.

      Sailing down the river.... Slow as the hookworm, but tiny enough to make every bend.  And slippery as an eel withal.  What is your name? shouts someone.  My name?  Why, just call me God - God the embryo.  I go sailing on.  Somebody would like to buy me a hat.  What size do you wear, imbecile! he shouts.  What size?  Why, size X!  (And why do they always shout at me?  Am I supposed to be deaf?)  The hat is lost at the next cataract.  Tant pis - for the hat.  Does God need a hat?  God needs only to become God, more and more God.  All this voyaging, all these pitfalls, the time that passes, the scenery, and against the scenery man, trillions and trillions of things called man, like mustard seeds.  Even in embryo God has no memory.  The backdrop of consciousness is made up of infinitesimally minute ganglia, a coat of hair soft as wool.  The mountain goat stands alone amidst the Himalayas; he doesn't question how he got to the summit.  He grazes quietly amidst the décor; when the time comes he will travel down again.  He keeps his muzzle to the ground, grubbing for the sparse nourishment which the mountain peaks afford.  In this strange Capricornian condition of embryosis God the he-goat ruminates in stolid bliss among the mountain peaks.  The high altitudes nourish the germ of separation which will one day estrange him completely from the soul of man, which will make him a desolate, rocklike father dwelling forever apart in a void which is unthinkable.  But first come the morganatic diseases, of which we must now speak....

      There is a condition of misery which is irremediable - because its origin is lost in obscurity.  Bloomingdale's, for example, can bring about this condition.  All department stores are symbols of sickness and emptiness, but Bloomingdale's is my special sickness, my incurable obscure malady.  In the chaos of Bloomingdale's there is an order, but this order is absolutely crazy to me: it is the order which I would find on the head of a pin if I were to put it under the microscope.  It is the order of an accidental series of accidents accidentally conceived.  This order has, above all, an odour - and it is the odour of Bloomingdale's which strikes terror into my heart.  In Bloomingdale's I fall apart completely: I dribble onto the floor, a helpless mess of guts and bones and cartilage.  There is the smell, not of decomposition, but of misalliance.  Man, the miserable alchemist, has welded together, in a million forms and shapes, substances and essences which have nothing in common.  Because in his mind there is a tumour which is eating him away insatiably; he has left the little canoe which was taking him blissful down the river in order to construct a bigger, safer boat in which there may be room for everyone.  His labours take him so far afield that he has lost all remembrance of why he left the little canoe.  The ark is so full of bric-à-brac that it has become a stationary building above a subway in which the smell of linoleum prevails and predominates.  Gather together all the significance hidden away in the interstitial miscellany of Bloomingdale's and put it on the head of a pin and you will have left a universe in which the grand constellations move without the slightest danger of collision.  It is this microscopic chaos which brings on my morganatic ailments.  In this street I began to stab horses at random, or I lift a skirt here and there looking for a letter box, or I put a postage stamp across a mouth, an eye, a vagina.  Or I suddenly decide to climb a tall building, like a fly, and once having reached the roof I do fly with real wings and I fly and fly and fly, covering towns like Weehawken, Hoboken, Hackensack, Canarsie, Bergen Beach in the twinkling of an eye.  Once you become a real schizerino flying is the easiest thing in the world; the trick is to fly with the etheric body, to leave behind in Bloomingdale's your sack of bones, guts, blood and cartilage; to fly only with your immutable self which, if you stop a moment to reflect, is always equipped with wings.  Flying this way, in full daylight, has advantages over the ordinary night-flying which everybody indulges in.  You can leave off from moment to moment, as quick and decisive as stepping on a brake; there is no difficulty in finding your other self, because the moment you leave off you are your other self, which is to say, the so-called whole self.  Only, as the Bloomingdale experience goes to prove, this whole self, about which so much boasting has been done, falls apart very easily.  The smell of linoleum, for some strange reason, will always make me fall apart and collapse on the floor.  It is the smell of all the unnatural things which were glued together in me, which were assembled, so to say, by negative consent.

      It is only after the third meal that the morning gifts, bequeathed by the phoney alliance of the ancestors, begin to drop away and the true rock of the self, the happy rock sheers up out of the muck of the soul.  With nightfall the pinhead universe begins to expand.  It expands organically, from an infinitesimal nuclear speck, in the way that minerals or star clusters form.  It eats into the surrounding chaos like a rat boring through store cheese.  All chaos could be gathered together on a pinhead, but the self, microscopical at the start, works up to a universe from any point in space.  This is not the self about which books are written, but the ageless self which has been farmed out through millenary ages to men with names and dates, the self which begins and ends as a worm, which is the worm in the cheese called the world.  Just as the slightest breeze can set a vast forest in motion so, by some unfathomable impulse from within, the rocklike self can begin to grow, and in this growth nothing can prevail against it.  It's like Jack Frost at work, and the whole world a windowpane.  No hint of labour, no sound, no struggle, no rest; relentless, remorseless, unremitting, the growth of the self goes on.  Only two items on the bill of fare: the self and the not-self.  And an eternity in which to work it out.  In this eternity, which has nothing to do with time or space, there are interludes in which something like a thaw sets in.  The form of the self breaks down, but the self, like climate, remains.  In the night the amorphous matter of the self assumes the most fugitive forms; error seeps in through the portholes and the wanderer is unlatched from his door.  The door which the body wears, if opened out into the world, leads to annihilation.  It is the door in every fable out of which the magician steps; nobody has ever read of him returning home through the selfsame door.  If opened inward there are infinite doors, all resembling trapdoors: no horizons are visible, no airlines, no rivers, no maps, no tickets.  Each couche is a halt for the night only, be it five minutes or ten thousand years.  The doors have no handles and they never wear out.  Most important to note - there is no end in sight.  All these halts for the night, so to speak, are like abortive explorations of a myth.  One can feel his way about, take bearings, observe passing phenomena; one can even feel at home.  But there is no taking root.  Just as the moment when one begins to feel "established" the whole terrain founders, the soil underfoot is afloat, the constellations are shaken loose from their moorings, the whole known universe, including the imperishable self, starts moving silently, ominously, shudderingly serene and unconcerned, toward an unknown, unseen destination.  All the doors seem to be opening at once; the pressure is so great that an implosion occurs and the swift plunge the skeleton bursts asunder.  It was some gigantic collapse which Dante must have experienced when he situated himself in Hell; it was not a bottom which he touched, but a core, a dead centre from which time itself is reckoned.  Here the comedy begins, from here it is seen to be divine.

      All this by way of saying that in going through the revolving doors of the Amarillo Dance Hall one night, some twelve or fourteen years ago, the great event took place.  The interlude which I think of as the Land of Fuck, a realm of time more than of space, is for me the equivalent of that Purgatory which Dante has described in nice detail.  As I put my hand on the brass rail of the revolving door to leave the Amarillo Dance Hall, all that I had previously been, was, and about to be foundered.  There was nothing unreal about it; the very time in which I was born passed away, carried off by a mightier stream.  Just as I had previously been bundled out of the womb, so now I was shunted back to some timeless vector where the process of growth is kept in abeyance.  I passed into the world of effects.  There was no fear, only a feeling of fatality.  My spine was socketed to the node; I was up against the coccyx of an implacable new world.  In the plunge the skeleton blew apart, leaving the immutable ego as helpless as a squashed louse.

      If from this point I do not begin, it is because there is no beginning.  If I do not fly at once to the bright land it is because wings are of no avail.  It is zero hour and the moon is at nadir....

 

      Why I think of Maxie Schnadig I don't know, unless it is because of Dostoyevsky.  The night I sat down to read Dostoyevsky for the first time was a most important event in my life, even more important than my first love.  It was the first deliberate, conscious act which had significance for me; it changed the whole face of the world.  Whether it is true that the clock stopped that moment when I looked up after the first deep gulp I don't know any more.  But the world stopped dead for a moment, that I know.  It was my first glimpse into the soul of a man, or shall I say simply that Dostoyevsky was the first man to reveal his soul to me?  Maybe I had been a bit queer before that, without realizing it, but from the moment that I dipped into Dostoyevsky I was definitely, irrevocably, contentedly queer.  The ordinary, walking, workaday world was finished for me.  Any ambition or desire I had to write was also killed - for a long time to come.  I was like those men who have been too long in the trenches, too long under fire.  Ordinary human suffering, ordinary human jealousy, ordinary human ambitions - it was just so much shit to me.

      I can best visualize my condition when I think of my relations with Maxie and his sister Rita.  At the time Maxie and I used to go swimming together a great deal, that I remember well.  Often we passed the whole day and night at the beach.  I had only met Maxie' sister once or twice; whenever I brought up her name Maxie would rather frantically begin to talk about something else.  That annoyed me because I was really bored to death with Maxie's company, tolerating him only because he loaned me money readily and bought me things which I needed.  Every time we started for the beach I was in hopes his sister would turn up unexpectedly.  But no, he always managed to keep her out of reach.  Well, one day as we were undressing in the bathhouse and he was showing me what a fine tight scrotum he had, I said to him right out of the blue - "Listen, Maxie, that's all right about your nuts, they're fine and dandy, and there's nothing to worry about but where in hell is Rita all the time, why don't you bring her along some time and let me take a good look at her quim ... yes, quim, you know what I mean."  Maxie, being a Jew from Odessa, had never heard the word quim before.  He was deeply shocked by my words and yet at the same time intrigued by this new word.  In a sort of daze he said to me - "Jesus, Henry, you oughtn't to say a thing like that to me!"  "Why not?" I answered.  "She's got a cunt, your sister, hasn't she?"  I was about to add something else when he broke into a terrific fit of laughter.  That saved the situation, for the time being.  But Maxie didn't like the idea at all deep down.  All day long it bothered him, though he never referred to our conversation again.  No, he was very silent that day.  The only form of revenge he could think of was to urge me to swim far beyond the safety zone in the hope of tiring me out and letting me drown.  I could see clearly what was in his mind that I was possessed with the strength of ten men.  Damned if I would go drown myself just because his sister like all other women happened to have a cunt.

      It was at Far Rockaway where this took place.  After we had dressed and eaten a meal I suddenly decided that I wanted to be alone and so, very abruptly, at the corner of a street, I shook hands and said goodbye.  And there I was!  Almost instantaneously I felt alone in the world, alone as one feels only in moments of extreme anguish.  I think I was picking my teeth absentmindedly when this wave of loneliness hit me full on, like a tornado.  I stood there on the street corner and sort of felt myself all over to see if I had been hit by something.  It was inexplicable, and at the same time it was very wonderful, very exhilarating, like a double tonic, I might say.  When I say that I was at Far Rockaway I mean that I was standing at the end of the earth, at a place called Xanthos, if there be such a place, and surely there ought to be a word like this to express no place at all.  If Rita had come along then I don't think I would have recognized her.  I had become an absolute stranger standing in the very midst of my own people.  They looked crazy to me, my people, with their newly sunburned faces and their flannel trousers and their clockwork stockings.  They had been bathing like myself because it was a pleasant, healthy recreation and now like myself they were full of sun and food and a little heavy with fatigue.  Up until this loneliness hit me I too was a bit weary, but suddenly, standing there completely shut off from the world, I woke up with a start.  I became so electrified that I didn't dare move for fear I would charge like a bull or start to climb the wall of a building or else dance and scream.  Suddenly I realized that all this was because I was really a brother to Dostoyevsky, that perhaps I was the only man in all America who knew what he meant in writing those books.  Not only that, but I felt all the books I would one day write myself germinating inside me: they were bursting inside like ripe cocoons.  And since up to this time I had written nothing but fiendishly long letters about everything and nothing, it was difficult for me to realize that there must come a time when I should begin, when I should put down the first word, the first real word.  And this time was now!  That was what dawned on me.

      I used the word Xanthos a moment ago.  I don't know whether there is a Xanthos or not, and I really don't care one way or another, but there must be a place in the world, perhaps in the Grecian islands, where you can come to the end of the known world and you are thoroughly alone and yet you are not frightened of it but rejoice, because at this dropping off place you can feel the old ancestral world which is eternally young and new and fecundating.  You stand there, wherever the place is, like a newly hatched chick beside its eggshell.  This place is Xanthos, or as it happened in my case, Far Rockaway.

      There I was!  It grew dark, a wind came up, the streets became deserted, and finally it began to pour cats and dogs.  Jesus, that finished me!  When the rain came down, and I got it smack in the face staring at the sky, I suddenly began to bellow with joy.  I laughed and laughed and laughed, exactly like an insane man.  Nor did I know what I was laughing about.  I wasn't thinking of a thing.  I was just overwhelmed with joy, just crazy with delight in finding myself absolutely alone.  If then and there a nice juicy quim had been handed me on a platter, if all the quims in the world had been offered me for to make my choice, I wouldn't have batted an eyelash.  I had what no quim could give me.  And just about at that point, thoroughly drenched but still exultant, I thought of the most irrelevant thing in the world - carfare!  Jesus, the bastard Maxie had walked off without leaving me a sou.  There I was with my find budding antique world and not a penny in my jeans.  Herr Dostoyevsky Junior had now to begin to walk here and there peering into friendly and unfriendly faces to see if he could pry loose a dime.  He walked from one end of Far Rockaway to the other but nobody seemed to give a fuck about handing out carfare in the rain.  Walking about in that heavy animal stupor which comes with begging I got to thinking of Maxie the window trimmer and how the first time I spied him he was standing in the show window dressing a mannequin.  And from that in a few minutes to Dostoyevsky, then the world stopped dead, and then, like a great rosebush opening in the night, his sister Rita's warm, velvety flesh.

      Now this is what is rather strange.... A few minutes after I thought of Rita, her private and extraordinary quim, I was in the train, bound for New York and dozing off with a marvellous languid erection.  And stranger still, when I got out of the train, whom should I bump into rounding a corner but Rita herself.  And as though she had been informed telepathically of what was going on in my brain, Rita too was hot under the whiskers.  Soon we were sitting in a chop suey joint, seated side by side in a little booth, behaving exactly like a pair of rabbits in rut.  On the dance floor we hardly moved.  We were wedged in tightly and we stayed that way, letting them jog and jostle us about as they might.  I could have taken her home to my place, as I was alone at the time, but no, I had a notion to bring her back to her own home, stand her up in the vestibule and give her a fuck right under Maxie's nose - which I did.  In the midst of it I thought again of the mannequin in the show window and of the way he had laughed that afternoon when I let drop the word quim.  I was on the point of laughing aloud when suddenly I felt that she was coming, one of those long drawn-out orgasms such as you get now and then in a Jewish cunt.  I had my hands under her buttocks, the tips of my fingers just inside her cunt, in the lining, as it were; as she began to shudder I lifted her from the ground and raised her gently up and down on the end of my cock.  I thought she would go off her nut completely, the way she began to carry on.  She must have had four or five orgasms like that in the air, before I put her feet down on the ground.  I took it out without spilling a drop and made her lie down in the vestibule.  Her hat had rolled off into a corner and her handbag had spilled open and a few coins had tumbled out.  I note this because just before I gave it to her good and proper I made a mental note to pocket a few coins for my carfare home.  Anyway, it was only a few hours since I had said to Maxie in the bathhouse that I would like to take a look at his sister's quim, and here it was now smack up against me, sopping wet and throwing out one squirt after another.  If she had been fucked before she had never been fucked properly, that's a cinch.  And I myself was never in such a fine cool collected scientific frame of mind as now lying on the floor of the vestibule right under Maxie's nose, pumping it into the private, sacred, and extraordinary quim of his sister Rita.  I could have held it in indefinitely - it was incredible how detached I was and yet thoroughly aware of every quiver and jolt she made.  But somebody had to pay for making me walk around in the rain grubbing a dime.  Somebody had to pay for the ecstasy produced by the germination of all those unwritten books inside me.  Somebody had to verify the authenticity of this private, concealed cunt which had been plaguing me for weeks and months.  Who better qualified than I?  I thought so hard and fast between orgasms that my cock must have grown another inch or two.  Finally I decided to make an end of it by turning her over and back-scuttling her.  She balked a bit at first, but when she felt the thing slipping out of her she nearly went crazy.  "Oh yes, of yes, do it, do it!" she gibbered, and with that I really got excited, I had hardly slipped it into her when I felt it coming, one of those long agonizing spurts from the tip of the spinal column.  I shoved it in so deep that I felt as if something had given way.  We fell over, exhausted, the both of us, and panted like dogs.  At the same time, however, I had the presence of mind to feel around for a few coins.  Not that it was necessary, because she had already loaned me a few dollars, but to make up for the carfare which I was lacking in Far Rockaway.  Even then, by Jesus, it wasn't finished.  Soon I felt her mouth.  I had still a sort of semi hard on.  She got it into her mouth and she began to caress it with her tongue.  I saw stars.  The next thing I knew her feet were around my neck and my tongue up her twat.  And then I had to get over her again and shove it in, up to the hilt.  She squirmed around like an eel, so help me God.  And then she began to come again, long, drawn out, agonizing orgasms, with a whimpering and gibbering that was hallucinating.  Finally I had to pull it out and tell her to stop.  What a quim!  And I had only asked to take a look at it!

      Maxie with his talk of Odessa revived something which I had lost as a child.  Though I had never a very clear picture of Odessa the aura of it was like the little neighbourhood in Brooklyn which meant so much to me and from which I had been torn away too soon.  I get a very definite feeling of it every time I see an Italian painting without perspective; if it is a picture of a funeral procession, for example, it is exactly the sort of experience which I knew as a child, one of intense immediacy.  If it is a picture of the open street, the women sitting in the windows are sitting on the street and not above it and away from it.  Everything that happens is known immediately by everybody, just as among primitive people.  Murder is in the air, chance rules.

      Just as in the Italian primitives this perspective is lacking, so in the little old neighbourhood from which I was uprooted as a child there were these parallel vertical planes on which everything took place and through which, from layer to layer, everything was communicated, as if by osmosis.  The frontiers were sharp, clearly defined, but they were not impassable.  I lived then, as a boy, close to the boundary between the north and the south side.  I was just a little bit over on the north side, just a few steps from a broad thoroughfare called North Second Street, which was for me the real boundary line between the north and the south side.  The actual boundary was Grand Street, which led to Broadway Ferry, but this street meant nothing to me, except that it was already beginning to be filled with Jews.  No, North Second Street was the mystery street, the frontier between two worlds.  I was living, therefore, between two boundaries, the one real, the other imaginary - as I have lived all my life.  There was a little street, just a block long, which lay between Grand Street and North Second Street, called Fillmore Place.  this little street was obliquely opposite the house my grandfather owned and in which we lived.  It was the most enchanting street I have ever seen in all my life.  It was the ideal street - for a boy, a lover, a maniac, a drunkard, a crook, a lecher, a thug, an astronomer, a musician, a poet, a tailor, a shoemaker, a politician.  In fact this was just the sort of street it was, containing just such representatives of the human race, each one a world unto himself and all living together harmoniously and inharmoniously, but together, a solid corporation, a close knit human spore which could not disintegrate unless the street itself disintegrated.

      So it seemed, at least.  Until the Williamsburg Bridge was opened, whereupon there followed the invasion of the Jews from Delancy Street, New York.  This brought about the disintegration of our little world, of the little street called Fillmore Place, which like the name itself was a street of value, of dignity, of light, of surprises.  The Jews came, as I say, and like moths they began to eat into the fabric of our lives until there was nothing left but this mothlike presence which they brought with them everywhere.  Soon the street began to smell bad, soon the real people moved away, soon the houses began to deteriorate and even the stoops fell away, like the paint.  Soon the street looked like a dirty mouth with all the prominent teeth missing, with ugly charred stumps gaping here and there, the lips rotting, the palate gone.  Soon the garbage was knee deep in the gutter and the fire escapes filled with bloated bedding, with cockroaches, with dried blood.  Soon the kosher sign appeared on the shop windows and there was poultry everywhere and lox and sour pickles and enormous loaves of bread.  Soon there were baby carriages in every areaway and on the stoops and in the little yards and before the shop fronts.  And with the change the English language also disappeared; one heard nothing but Yiddish, nothing but this sputtering, choking, hissing tongue in which God and rotten vegetables sound alike and mean alike.

      We were among the first families to move away, following the invasion.  Two or three times a year I came back to the old neighbourhood, for a birthday or for Christmas or Thanksgiving.  With each visit I marked the loss of something I have loved and cherished.  It was like a bad dream.  It got worse and worse.  The house in which my relatives still lived was like an old fortress going to ruin; they were stranded in one of the wings of the fortress, maintaining a forlorn, island life, beginning themselves to look sheepish, hunted, degraded.  They even began to make distinctions between their Jewish neighbours, finding some of them quite human, quite decent, clean, kind, sympathetic, charitable, etc. etc.  To me it was heartrending.  I could have taken a machine gun and mowed the whole neighbourhood down, Jew and Gentile together.

      It was about the time of the invasion that the authorities decided to change the name of North Second Street to Metropolitan Avenue.  This highway, which to the Gentiles had been the road to the cemeteries, now became what is called an artery of traffic, a link between two ghettos.  On the New York side the river front was rapidly being transformed owing to the erection of skyscrapers.  On our side, the Brooklyn side, the warehouses were piling up and the approaches to the various new bridges created plazas, comfort stations, poolrooms, stationary shops, ice-cream parlours, restaurants, clothing stores, hock shops, etc.  In short, everything was becoming metropolitan, in the odious sense of the word.

      As long as we lived in the old neighbourhood we never referred to Metropolitan Avenue: it was always North Second Street, despite the official change of name.  Perhaps it was eight or ten years later, when I stood one winter's day at the corner of the street facing the river and noticed for the first time the great tower of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Building, that I realized that North Second Street was no more.  The imaginary boundary of my world had changed.  My glance travelled now far beyond the cemeteries, far beyond the rivers, far beyond the city of New York or the State of New York, beyond the whole United States indeed.  At Point Loma, California, I had looked out upon the broad Pacific and I had felt something there which kept my face permanently screwed in another direction.  I came back to the old neighbourhood, I remember, one night with my old friend Stanley who had just come out of the army, and we walked the streets sadly and wistfully.  A European can scarcely know what this feeling is like.  Even when a town becomes modernized, in Europe, there are still vestiges of the old.  In America, though there are vestiges, they are effaced, wiped out of the consciousness, trampled upon, obliterated, nullified by the new.  The new is, from day to day, a moth which eats into the fabric of life, leaving nothing finally but a great hole.  Stanley and I, we were walking through this terrifying hole.  Even a war does not bring this kind of desolation and destruction.  Through war a town may be reduced to ashes and the entire population wiped out, but what springs up again resembles the old.  Death is fecundating, for the soil as well as for the spirit.  In America the destruction is complete, annihilating.  There is no rebirth, only a cancerous growth, layer upon layer of new, poisonous tissue, each one uglier than the previous one.

      We were walking through this enormous hole, as I say, and it was a winter's night, clear, frosty, sparkling, and as we came through the south side toward the boundary line we saluted all the old relics or the spots where things had once stood and where there had once been something of ourselves.  And as we approached North Second Street, between Fillmore Place and North Second Street - a distance of only a few yards and yet such a rich, full area of the globe - before Mrs. O'Melio's shanty I stopped and looked up at the house where I had known what it was to really have a being.  Everything had shrunk now to diminutive proportions, including the world which lay beyond the boundary line, the world which had been so mysterious to me and so terrifyingly grand, so delimited.  Standing there in a trance I suddenly recalled a dream which I have had over and over, which I still dream now and then, and which I hope to dream as long as I live.  It was the dream of passing the boundary line.  As in all dreams the remarkable thing is the vividness of the reality, the fact that one is in reality and not dreaming.  Across the line I am unknown and absolutely alone.  Even the language has changed.  In fact, I am always regarded as a stranger, a foreigner.  I have unlimited time on my hands and I am absolutely content in sauntering through the streets.  There is only one street, I must say - the continuation of the street on which I lived.  I come finally to an iron bridge over the railroad yards.  It is always nightfall when I reach the bridge, though it is only a short distance from the boundary line.  Here I look down upon the webbed tracks, the freight stations, the tenders, the storage sheds, and as I gaze down upon this cluster of strange moving substances a process of metamorphosis takes places, just as in a dream.  With the transformation and deformation I become aware that this is the old dream which I have dreamed so often.  I have a wild fear that I shall wake up, and indeed I know that I will wake up shortly, just as the moment when in the midst of a great open space I am about to walk into the house which contains something of the greatest importance to me.  Just as I go toward this house the lot upon which I am standing begins to grow vague at the edges, to dissolve, to vanish.  Space rolls in on me like a carpet and swallows me up, and with it of course the house which I never succeed in entering.

      There is absolutely no transition from this, the most pleasurable dream I know, to the heart of a book called Creative Evolution.  In this book by Henri Bergson, which I came to as naturally as to the dream of the land beyond the boundary, I am again quite alone, again a foreigner, again a man of indeterminate age standing on an iron bridge observing a peculiar metamorphosis without and within.  If this book had not fallen into my hands at the precise moment it did, perhaps I would have gone mad.  It came at a moment when another huge world was crumbling on my hands.  If I had never understood a thing which was written in this book, if I have preserved only the memory of one word, creative, it is quite sufficient.  This word was my talisman.  With it I was able to defy the whole world, and especially my friends.

      There are times when one must break with one's friends in order to understand the meaning of friendship.  It may seem strange to say so, but the discovery of this book was equivalent to the discovery of a weapon, an implement, wherewith I might lop off all the friends who surrounded me and who no longer meant anything to me.  This book became my friend because it taught me that I had no need of friends.  It gave me the courage to stand alone, and it enabled me to appreciate loneliness.  I have never understood the book; at times I thought I was on the point of understanding, but I never really did understand.  It was more important for me not to understand.  With this book in my hands, reading aloud to my friends, questioning them, explaining to them, I was made clearly to understand that I had no friends, that I was alone in the world.  Because in not understanding the meaning of the words, neither I nor my friends, one thing became very clear and that was that there were ways of not understanding and that the difference between the non-understanding of one individual and the non-understanding of another created a world of terra firma even more solid than differences of understanding.  Everything which once I thought I had understood crumbled, and I was left with a clean slate.  My friends, on the other hand, entrenched themselves more solidly in the little ditch of understanding which they had dug for themselves.  They died comfortably in their little bed of understanding, to become useful citizens of the world.  I pitied them, and in short order I deserted them one by one, without the slightest regret.

      What was there then in this book which could mean so much to me and yet remain obscure?  I come back to the word creative.  I am sure that the whole mystery lies in the realization of the meaning of this word.  When I think of the book now, and the way I approached it, I think of a man going through the rites of initiation.  The disorientation and reorientation which comes with the initiation into any mystery is the most wonderful experience which it is possible to have.  Everything which the brain has laboured for a lifetime to assimilate, categorize and synthesize has to be taken apart and reordered.  Moving day for the soul!  And of course it's not for a day, but for weeks and months that this goes on.  You meet a friend on the street by chance, one whom you haven't seen for several weeks, and he has become an absolute stranger to you.  You give him a few signals from your new perch and if he doesn't cotton [on] you pass him up - for good.  It's exactly like mopping up a battlefield: all those who are hopelessly disabled and agonizing you dispatch with one swift blow of your club.  You move on, to new fields of battle, to new triumphs or defeats.  But you move!  And as you move the world moves with you, with terrifying exactitude.  You seek out new fields of operation, new specimens of the human race whom you patiently instruct and equip with the new symbols.  You choose sometimes those whom you would never have looked at before.  You try everybody and everything within range, provided they are ignorant of the revelation.

      It was in this fashion that I found myself sitting in the busheling room of my father's establishment, reading aloud to the Jews who were working there.  Reading to them from this new Bible in the way that Paul must have talked to the disciples.  With the added advantage, to be sure, that these poor Jew bastards could not read the English language.  Primarily I was directing myself toward Bunchek the cutter, who had a rabbinical mind.  Opening the book I would pick a passage at random and read it to them in a transposed English almost as primitive as pidgin English.  Then I would attempt to explain, choosing for example and analogy the things they were familiar with.  It was amazing to me how well they understood, how much better they understood, let me say, than a college professor or a literary man or any educated man.  Naturally what they understood had nothing to do finally with Bergson's book, as a book, but was not that the purpose of such a book as this?  My understanding of the meaning of a book is that the book itself disappears from sight, that it is chewed alive, digested and incorporated into the system as flesh and blood which in turn creates new spirit and reshapes the world.  It was a great communion feast which we shared in the reading of this book and the outstanding feature of it was the chapter on Disorder which, having penetrated me through and through, has endowed me with such a marvellous sense of order that if a comet suddenly struck the earth and jarred everything out of place, stood everything upside down, turned everything inside out, I could orient myself to the new order in the twinkling of an eye.  I have no fear or illusions about disorder any more than I have of death.  The labyrinth is my happy hunting ground and the deeper I burrow into the maze the more oriented I become.

      With Creative Evolution under my arm I board the elevated line at the Brooklyn Bridge after work and I commence the journey homeward toward the cemetery.  Sometimes I get on at Delancey Street, the very heart of the ghetto, after a long walk through the crowded streets.  I enter the elevated line below the ground, like a worm being pushed through the intestines.  I know each time I take my place in the crowd which mills about the platform that I am the most unique individual down there.  I look upon everything which is happening about me like a spectator from another planet.  My language, my world, is under my arm.  I am the guardian of a great secret; if I were to open my mouth and talk I would tie up traffic.  What I have to say, and what I am holding in every night of my life on this journey to and from the office, is absolute dynamite.  I am not ready yet to throw my stick of dynamite.  I nibble at it meditatively, ruminatively, cogently.  Five more years, ten more years perhaps, and I will wipe these people out utterly.  If the train in making a curve gives a violent lurch I say to myself fine! jump the track, annihilate them!  I never think of myself as being endangered should the train jump the track.  We're wedged in like sardines and all the hot flesh pressed against me diverts my thoughts.  I become conscious of a pair of legs wrapped around mine.  I look down at the girl sitting in front of me, I look her right in the eye, and I press my knees still further into her crotch.  She grows uneasy, fidgets about in her seat, and finally she turns to the girl next to her and complains that I am molesting her.  The people about look at me hostilely.  I look out of the window blandly and pretend I have heard nothing.  Even if I wished to I can't remove my legs.  Little by little though, the girl, by a violent pushing and squiggling, manages to unwrap her legs from mine.  I find myself almost in the same situation with the girl next to her, the one she was addressing her complaints to.  Almost at once I feel a sympathetic touch and then, to my surprise, I hear her tell the other girl that one can't help these things, that it is really not the man's fault but the fault of the company for packing us in like sheep.  And again I feel the quiver of her legs against mine, a warm, human pressure, like squeezing one's hand.  With my one free hand I manage to open my book.  My object is twofold: first I want her to see the kind of book I read, second, I want to be able to carry on the leg language without attracting attention.  It works beautifully.  By the time the train empties a bit I am able to take a seat beside her and converse with her - about the book, naturally.  She's a voluptuous Jewess with enormous liquid eyes and the frankness which comes from sensuality.  When it comes time to get off we walk arm in arm through the streets, toward her home.  I am almost on the confines of the old neighbourhood.  Everything is familiar to me and yet repulsively strange.  I have not walked these streets for years and now I am walking with a Jew girl from the ghetto, a beautiful girl with a strong Jewish accent.  I look incongruous walking beside her.  I can sense that people are staring at us behind our backs.  I am the intruder, the goy who has come down into the neighbourhood to pick off a nice ripe cunt.  She on the other hand seems to be proud of her conquest; she's showing me off to her friends.  This is what I picked up in the train, an educated goy, a refined goy!  I can almost hear her think it.  Walking slowly I'm getting the lay of the land, all the practical details which will decided whether I call for her after dinner or not.  There's no thought of asking her to dinner.  It's a question of what time and where to meet and how will we go about it, because, as she lets drop just before we reach the door, she's got a husband who's a travelling salesman and she's got to be careful.  I agree to come back and to meet her at the corner in front of the candy store at a certain hour.  If I want to bring a friend along she'll bring her girlfriend.  No, I decide to see her alone.  It's agreed.  She squeezes my hand and darts off into a dirty hallway. I beat it quickly back to the elevated station and hasten home to gulp down the meal.

      It's a summer's night and everything flung wide open.  Riding back to meet her the whole past rushes up kaleidoscopically.  This time I've left the book at home.  It's cunt I'm out for now and no thought of the book is in my head.  I am back again this side of the boundary line, each station whizzing past making my world grow more diminutive.  I am almost a child by the time I reach the destination.  I am a child who is horrified by the metamorphosis which has taken place.  What has happened to me, a man of the Fourteenth Ward, to be jumping off at this station in search of a Jewish cunt?  Supposing I do give her a fuck, what then?  What have I got to say to a girl like that?  What's a fuck when what I want is love?  Yes, suddenly it comes over me like a tornado.... Una, with big blue eyes and flaxen hair, Una who made me tremble just to look at her, Una whom I was afraid to kiss or even to touch her hand.  Where is Una?  Yes, suddenly, that's the burning question: where is Una?  In two seconds I am completely unnerved, completely lost, desolate, in the most horrible anguish and despair.  How did I ever let her go?  Why?  What happened?  When did it happen?  I thought of her like a maniac night and day, year in and year out, and then, without even noticing it, she drops out of my mind, like that, like a penny falling through a hole in your pocket.  Incredible, monstrous, mad.  Why, all I had to do was to ask her to marry me, ask her hand - that's all.  If I had done that she would have said yes immediately.  She loved me, she loved me desperately.  Why yes, I remember now, I remember how she looked at me the last time we met.  I was saying goodbye because I was leaving that night for California, leaving everybody to begin a new life.  And I never had any intention of leading a new life.  I intended to ask her to marry me, but the story I had framed like a dope came out of my lips so naturally that I believed it myself, and so I said goodbye and I walked off, and she stood there looking after me and I felt her eyes pierce me through and through, I heard her howling inside, but like an automaton I kept on walking and finally I turned the corner and that was the end of it.  And I meant to say come to me!  Come to me because I can't live any more without you!

      I am so weak, so rocky, that I can scarcely climb down the El steps.  Now I know what's happened - I've crossed the boundary line!  This Bible that I've been carrying around with me is to instruct me, initiate me into a new way of life.  The world I knew is no more, it is dead, finished, cleaned up.  And everything that I was is cleaned up with it.  I am a carcass getting an injection of new life.  I am bright and glittery, rabid with new discoveries, but in the centre it is still leaden, still slag.   Now it dawns on me with full clarity: you are alone in the world!  You are alone ... alone ... alone.  It is bitter to be alone ... bitter, bitter, bitter, bitter.  There is no end to it, it is unfathomable, and it is the lot of every man on earth, but especially mine ... especially mine.  Again the metamorphosis.  Again everything totters and careens.  I am in the dream again, the painful, delirious, pleasurable, maddening dream of beyond the boundary.  I am standing in the centre of the vacant lot, but my home I do not see.  I have no home.  The dream was a mirage.  There never was a house in the midst of the vacant lot.  That's why I was never able to enter it.  My home is not in this world, nor in the next.  I am a man without a home, without a friend, without a wife.  I am a monster who belongs to a reality which does not exist yet.  Ah, but it does exist, it will exist, I am sure of it.  I walk now rapidly, head down, muttering to myself.  I've forgotten about my rendezvous so completely that I never even noticed whether I walked past or not.  Probably I did.  Probably I looked right at her and didn't recognize her.  Probably she didn't recognize me either.  I am mad, mad with pain, mad with anguish.  I am desperate.  But I am not lost.  No, there is a reality to which I belong.  It's far away, very far away.  I may walk from now till doomsday with head down and never find it.  But it is there, I am sure of it.  I look at people murderously.  If I could throw a bomb and blow the whole neighbourhood to smithereens I would do it.  I would be happy seeming them fly in the air, mangled, shrieking, torn apart, annihilated.  I want to annihilate the whole earth.  I am not a part of it.  It's mad from start to finish.  The whole shooting match.  It's a huge piece of stale cheese with maggots festering inside it.  Fuck it!  Blow it to hell!  Kill, kill, kill: Kill them all, Jews and Gentiles, young and old, good and bad....

      I grow light, light as a feather, and my pace becomes more steady, more calm, more even.  What a beautiful night it is!  The stars shining so brightly, so serenely, so remotely.  Not mocking me precisely, but reminding me of the futility of it all.  Who are you, young man, to be talking of the earth, of blowing things to smithereens?  Young man, we have been hanging here for millions and billions of years.  We have seen it all, everything, and still we shine peacefully every night, we light the way, we still the heart.  Look around you, young man, see how still and beautiful everything is.  Do you see, even the garbage lying in the gutter looks beautiful in this light.  Pick up the little cabbage leaf, hold it gently in your hand.  I bend down and pick up the cabbage leaf lying in the gutter.  It looks absolutely new to me, a whole universe in itself.  I break a little piece off and examine that.  Still a universe.  Still unspeakably beautiful and mysterious.  I am almost ashamed to throw it back in the gutter.  I bend down and deposit it gently with the other refuse.  I become very thoughtful, very, very calm.  I love everybody in the world.  I know that somewhere at this very moment there is a woman waiting for me and if only I proceed very calmly, very gently, very slowly, I will come to her.  She will be standing on a corner perhaps and when I come in sight she will recognize me - immediately.  I believe this, so help me God!  I believe that everything is just and ordained.  My home?  Why, it is the world - the whole world!  I am at home everywhere, only I did not know it before.  But I know now.  There is no boundary line any more.  There never was a boundary line: it was I who made it.  I walk slowly and blissfully through the streets.  The beloved streets.  Where everybody walks and everybody suffers without showing it.  When I stand and lean against a lamppost to light my cigarette even the lamppost feels friendly.  It is not a thing of iron - it is a creation of the human mind, shaped a certain way, twisted and formed by human hands, blown on with human breath, placed by human hands and feet.  I turn round and rub my hand over the iron surface.  It almost seems to speak to me.  It is a human lamppost.  It belongs, like the cabbage leaf, like the torn socks, like the mattress, like the kitchen sink.  Everything stands in a certain way in a certain place, as our mind stands in relation to God.  The world, in its visible, tangible substance, is a map of our love.  Not God but life is love.  Love, love, love.  And in the midmost midst of it walks this young man, myself, who is none other than Gottlieb Leberecht Müller.

 

      Gottlieb Leberecht Müller!  This is the name of a man who lost his identity.  Nobody could tell him who he was, where he came from or what had happened to him.  In the movies, where I first made the acquaintance of this individual, it was assumed that he had met with an accident in the war.  But when I recognized myself on the screen, knowing that I had never been to the war, I realized that the author had invented this little piece of fiction in order not to expose me.  Often I forget which is the real me.  Often in my dreams I take the draught of forgetfulness, as it is called, and I wander forlorn and desperate, seeking the body and the name which is mine.  And sometimes between the dream and reality there is only the thinnest line.  Sometimes while a person is talking to me I step out of my shoes and, like a plant drifting with the current, I begin the voyage of my rootless self.  In this condition I am quite capable of fulfilling the ordinary demands of life - of finding a wife, of becoming a father, of supporting the household, of entertaining friends, of reading books, of paying taxes, of performing military service, and so on and so forth.  In this condition I am capable, if needs be, of killing in cold blood, for the sake of my family or to protect my country, or whatever it may be.  I am the ordinary, routine citizen who answers to a name and who is given a number in his passport.  I am thoroughly irresponsible for my fate.

      Then one day, without the slightest warning, I wake up and looking about me I understand absolutely nothing of what is going on about me, neither my own behaviour nor that of my neighbours, nor do I understand why the governments are at war or at peace, whichever the case may be.  At such moments I am born anew, born and baptized by my right name: Gottlieb Leberecht Müller!  Everything I do in my right name is looked upon as crazy.  People make furtive signs behind my back, sometimes to my face even.  I am forced to break with friends and family and loved ones.  I am obliged to break camp.  And so, just as naturally as in a dream, I find myself once again drifting with the current, usually walking along a highway, my face set toward the sinking sun.  Now all my faculties become alert.  I am the most suave, silky, cunning animal - and I am at the same time what might be called a holy man.  I know how to fend for myself.  I know how to avoid work, how to avoid entangling relationships, how to avoid pity, sympathy, bravery, and all the other pitfalls.  I stay in place or with a person just long enough to obtain what I need, and then I'm off again.  I have no goal: the aimless wandering is sufficient unto itself.  I am free as a bird, sure as an equilibrist.  Manna falls from the sky; I have only to hold out my hands and receive.  And everywhere I leave the most pleasant feeling behind me, as though, in accepting the gifts that are showered upon me, I am doing a real favour to others.  Even my dirty linen is taken care of by loving hands.  Because everybody loves a right-living man!  Gottlieb!  What a beautiful name it is!  Gottlieb!  I say it to myself over and over.  Gottlieb Leberecht Müller!

      In this condition I have always fallen in with thieves and rogues and murderers, and how kind and gentle they have been with me!  As though they were my brothers.  And are they not, indeed?  Have I not been guilty of every crime, and suffered for it?  And is it not just because of my crimes that I am united so closely to my fellowman?  Always, when I see a light of recognition in the other person's eyes, I am aware of this secret bond.  It is only the just whose eyes never light up.  It is the just who have never known the secret of human fellowship.  It is the just who are committing the crimes against man, the just who are the real monsters.  It is the just who demand our fingerprints, who prove to us that we have died even when we stand before them in the flesh.  It is the just who impose upon us arbitrary names, false names, who put false dates in the register and bury us alive.  I prefer the thieves, the rogues, the murderers, unless I can find a man of my own stature, my own quality.

      I have never found such a man!  I have never found a man as generous as myself, as forgiving, as tolerant, as carefree, as reckless, as clean at heart.  I forgive myself for every crime I have committed.  I do it in the name of humanity.  I know what it means to be human, the weakness and the strength of it.  I suffer from this knowledge and I revel in it also.  If I had the chance to be God I would reject it.  If I had the chance to be a star I would reject it.  The most wonderful opportunity which life offers is to be human.  It embraces the whole universe.  It includes the knowledge of death, which not even God enjoys.

      At the point from which this book is written I am the man who baptized himself anew.  It is many years since this happened and so much has come in between that it is difficult to get back to that moment and retrace the journey of Gottlieb Leberecht Müller.  However, perhaps I can give the clue if I say that the man which I now am was born out of a wound.  That wound went to the heart.  By all man-made logic I should have been dead.  I was in fact given up for dead by all who once knew me; I walked about like a ghost in their midst.  They used the past tense in referring to me, they pitied me, they shovelled me under deeper and deeper.  Yet I remember how I used to laugh then, as always, how I made love to other women, how I enjoyed my food and drink, and the soft bed which I clung to like a fiend.  Something had killed me, and yet I was alive.  But I was alive without a memory, without a name; I was cut off from hope as well as from remorse or regret.  I had no past and I would probably have no future; I was buried alive in a void which was the wound that had been dealt me.  I was the wound itself.

      I have a friend who talks to me from time to time about the Miracle of Golgotha of which I understand nothing.  But I do know something about the miraculous wound which I received, the wound which killed me in the eyes of the world and out of which I was born anew and rebaptized.  I know something of the miracle of this wound which I lived and which healed with my death.  I tell it as of something long past, but it is with me always.  Everything is long past and seemingly invisible, like a constellation which has sunk forever beneath the horizon.

      What fascinates me is that anything so dead and buried as I was could be resuscitated, and not just once, but innumerable times.  And not only that, but each time I faded out I plunged deeper than ever into the void, so that with each resuscitation the miracle becomes greater.  And never any stigmata!  The man who is reborn is always the same man, more and more himself with each rebirth.  He is only shedding his skin each time, and with his skin his sins.  The man whom God loves is truly a right-living man.  The man whom God loves is the onion with a million skins.  To shed the first layer is painful beyond words; the next layer is less painful, the next still less, until finally the pain becomes pleasurable, more and more pleasurable, a delight, an ecstasy.  And then there is neither pleasure nor pain, but simply darkness yielding before the light.  And as the darkness falls away the wound comes out of its hiding place: the wound which is man, man's love, is bathed in light.  The identity which was lost is recovered.  Man walks forth from his open wound, from the grave which he had carried about with him so long.

      In the tomb which is my memory I see her buried now, the one I loved better than all else, better than the world, better than God, better than my own flesh and blood.  I see her festering there in that bloody wound of love, so close to me that I could not distinguish her from the wound itself.  I see her struggling to free herself, to make herself clean of love's pain, and with each struggle sinking back again into the wound, mired, suffocated, writhing in blood.  I see the terrible look in her eyes, the mute piteous agony, the look of the beast that is trapped.  I see her opening her legs for deliverance and each orgasm a groan of anguish.  I hear the walls falling, the walls caving in on us and the house going up in flames.  I hear them calling us from the street, the summons to work, the summons to arms, but we are nailed to the floor and the rats are biting into us.  The grave and womb of love intombing us, the night filling our bowels and the stars shimmering over the black bottomless lake.  I lose the memory of words, of her name even which I pronounce like a monomaniac.  I forgot what she looked like, what she felt like, what she smelt like, what she fucked like, piercing deeper and deeper into the night of the fathomless cavern.  I followed her to the deepest hole of her being, to the charnel house of her soul, to the breath which had not yet expired from her lips.  I sought relentlessly for her whose name was not written anywhere, I penetrated to the very altar and found - nothing.  I wrapped myself around this hollow shell of nothingness like a serpent with fiery coils; I lay still for six centuries without breathing as world events sieved through to the bottom forming a slimy bed of mucus.  I saw the constellations wheeling about the huge hole in the ceiling of the universe; I saw the outer planets and the black star which was to deliver me.  I saw the Dragon shaking itself free of dharma and karma, saw the new race of man stewing in the yoke of futurity.  I saw through to the last sign and symbol, but I could not read her face.  I could see only the eyes shining through, huge, fleshy-like luminous breasts, as though I were swimming behind them in the electric effluvia of her incandescent vision.

      How had she come to expand thus beyond all grip of consciousness?  By what monstrous law had she spread herself thus over the face of the world, revealing everything and yet concealing herself?  She was hidden in the face of the sun, like the moon in eclipse; she was a mirror which had lost its quicksilver, the mirror which yields both the image and the horror.  Looking into the backs of her eyes, into the pulpy translucent flesh, I saw the brain structure of all formations, all relations, all evanescence.  I saw the brain within the brain, the endless machine endlessly turning, the word Hope revolving on a spit, roasting, dripping with fat, revolving ceaselessly in the cavity of the third eye.  I heard her dreams mumbled in lost tongues, the stifled screams reverberating in minute crevices, the gasps, the groans, the pleasurable sighs, the swish of lashing whips.  I heard her call my own name which I had not yet uttered, I heard her curse and shriek with rage.  I heard everything magnified a thousand times, like a homunculus imprisoned in the belly of an organ.  I caught the muffled breathing of the world, as if fixed in the very cross-roads of sound.

      Thus we walked and slept and ate together, the Siamese twins whom Love had joined and whom Death alone could separate.

      We walked upside down, hand in hand, at the neck of the bottle.  She dressed in black almost exclusively, except for patches of purple now and then.  She wore no underclothes, just a simple sheath of black velvet saturated with a diabolical perfume.  We went to bed at dawn and got up just as it was darkling.  We lived in black holes with drawn curtains, we ate from black plates, we read from black books.  We looked out of the black hole of our life into the black hole of the world.  The sun was permanently blacked out, as though to aid us in our continuous internecine strife.  For sun we had Mars, for moon Saturn; we lived permanently in the zenith of the underworld.  The earth had ceased to revolve and through the hole in the sky above us there hung the black star which never twinkled.  Now and then we had fits of laughter, crazy, batrachian laughter which made the neighbours shudder.  Now and then we sang, delirious, off key, full tremolo.  We were locked in throughout the long dark night of the soul, a period of incommensurable time which began and ended in the manner of an eclipse.  We revolved about our own egos, like phantom satellites.  We were drunk with our own image which we saw when we looked into each other's eyes.  How then did we look to others?  As the beast looks to the plant, as the stars look to the beast.  Or as God would look to man if the devil had given him wings.  And with it all, in the fixed, close intimacy of a night without end she was radiant, jubilant, an ultra-black jubilation streaming from her like a steady flow of sperm from the Mithraic Bull.  She was double barrelled, like a shotgun, a female bull with an acetylene torch in her womb.  In heat she focused on the grand cosmocrator, her eyes rolled back to the whites, her lips a-slaver.  In the blind hole of sex she waltzed like a trained mouse, her jaws unhinged like a snake's, her skin horripilating in barbed plumes.  She had the insatiable lust of a unicorn, the itch that laid the Egyptians low.  Even the hole in the sky through which the lacklustre star shone down was swallowed up in her fury.

      We lived glued to the ceiling, the hot rancid fumes of the everyday life steaming up and suffocating us.  We lived at marble heat, the ascending glow of human flesh warming the snakelike coils in which we were locked.  We lived riveted to the nethermost depths, our skins smoked to the colour of a grey cigar by the fumes of worldly passion.  Like two heads carried on the pikes of our executioners we circled slowly and fixedly over the heads and shoulders of the world below.  What was life on the solid earth to us who were decapitated and forever joined at the genitals?  We were the twin snakes of Paradise, lucid in heat and cool as chaos itself.  Life was a perpetual black fuck about a fixed pole of insomnia.  Life was Scorpio conjunction Mars, conjunction Mercury, conjunction Venus, conjunction Saturn,  conjunction Pluto, conjunction Uranus, conjunction quicksilver, laudanum, radium, bismuth.  The grand conjunction was every Saturday night, Leo fornicating with Draco in the house of brother and sister.  The great malheur was a ray of sunlight stealing through the curtains.  The great curse was Jupiter, king of the fishes, that he might flash a benevolent eye.

      The reason why it is difficult to tell it is because I remember too much.  I remember everything, but like a dummy sitting on the lap of a ventriloquist.  It seems to me that throughout the long, uniterrupted connubial solstice I sat on her lap (even when she was standing) and spoke the lines she had taught me.  It seems to me that she must have commanded God's chief plumber to keep the black star shining through the hole in the ceiling, must have bid him to rain down perpetual night and with it all the crawling torments that move noiselessly about in the dark so that the mind becomes a twirling awl burrowing frantically into black nothingness.  Did I only imagine that she talked incessantly, or had I become such a marvellously trained dummy that I intercepted the thought before it reached the lips?  The lips were finely parted, smoothed down with a thick paste of dark blood; I watched them open and close with the utmost fascination, whether they hissed a viper's hate or cooed like a turtle dove.  They were always close up, as in the movie stills, so that I knew every crevice, every pore, and when the hysterical slavering began I watched the spittle fume and foam as though I were sitting in a rocking chair under Niagara Falls.  I learned what to do just as though I were a part of her organism; I was better than a ventriloquist's dummy because I could act without being violently jerked by strings.  Now and then I did things impromptu like, which sometimes pleased her enormously; she would pretend, of course, not to notice these irruptions, but I could always tell when she was pleased by the way she preened herself.  She had the gift for transformation; almost as quick and subtle she was as the devil himself.  Next to the panther and the jaguar she did the bird stuff best: the wild heron, the ibis, the flamingo, the swan in rut.  She had a way of swooping suddenly, as if she had spotted a ripe carcass, diving right into the bowels, pouncing immediately on the titbits - the heart, the liver, or the ovaries - and making off again in the twinkling of an eye.  Did someone spot her, she would lie stone quiet at the base of a tree, her eyes not quite closed but immovable in that fixed stare of the basilisk.  Prod her a bit and she would become a rose, a deep black rose with the most velvety petals and of a fragrance that was overpowering.  It was amazing how marvellously I learned to take my cue; now matter how swift the metamorphosis I was always there in her lap, bird lap, beast lap, snake lap, rose lap, what matter: the lap of laps, the lip of lips, tip to tip, feather to feather, the yoke in the egg, the pearl in the oyster, a cancer clutch, a tincture of sperm and cantharides.  Life was Scorpio conjunction Mars, conjunction Venus, Saturn, Uranus, et cetera; love was conjunctivitis of the mandibles, clutch this, clutch that, clutch, clutch, the mandibular clutch-clutch of the mandala wheel of lust.  Come food time I could already hear her peeling the eggs, and inside the egg cheep-cheep, blessed omen of the next meal to come.  I ate like a monomaniac: the prolonged dreamlit voracity of the man who is thrice breaking his fast.  And as I ate she purred, the rhythmic predatory wheeze of the succubus devouring her young.  What a blissful night of love!  Saliva, sperm, succubation, sphincteritis all in one; the conjugal orgy of the Black Hole of Calcutta.

      Out there where the black star hung, a Pan-Islamic silence, as in the cavern world where even the wind is stilled.  Out there, did I dare to brood on it, the spectral quietude of insanity, the world of men lulled, exhausted by centuries of incessant slaughter.  Out there one gory encompassing membrane within which all activity took place, the hero-world of lunatics and maniacs who had quenched the light of the heavens with blood.  How peaceful our little dove-and-vulture life in the dark!  Flesh to bury in with teeth or penis, abundant odorous flesh with no mark of knife or scissors, no scar of exploded shrapnel, no mustard burns, no scalded lungs.  Save for the hallucinating hole in the ceiling, an almost perfect womb life.  But the hole was there - like a fissure in the bladder - and no wadding could plug it permanently, no urination could pass off with a smile.  Piss large and freely, aye, but how forget the rent in the belfry, the silence unnatural, the imminence, the terror, the doom of the "other" world?  Eat a bellyful, aye, and tomorrow another bellyful, and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow - but finally, what then?  Finally!  What was finally?  A change of ventriloquist, a change of lap, a shift in the axis, another rift in the vault ... what? what?  I'll tell you - sitting in her lap, petrified by the still, pronged beams of the black star, horned, snaffled, hitched and trepanned by the telepathic acuity of our interacting agitation, I thought of nothing at all, nothing that was outside the cell we inhabited, not even the thought of a crumb on a white tablecloth.  I thought purely within the walls of our amoebic life, the pure thought such as Immanuel Pussyfoot Kant gave us and which only a ventriloquist's dummy could reproduce.  I thought out every theory of science, every theory of art, every grain of truth in every cockeyed system of salvation.  I calculated everything out to a pinpoint with gnostic decimals to boot, like primes which a drunk hands out at the finish of a six-day race.  But everything was calculated for another life which somebody else would live some day - perhaps.  We were at the very neck of the bottle, her and I, as they say, but the neck of the bottle had been broken off and the bottle was only a fiction.

      I remember how the second time I met her she told me that she had never expected to see me again, and the next time I saw her she said she thought I was a dope fiend, and the next time she called me a god, and after that she tried to commit suicide and then I tried and then she tried again, and nothing worked except to bring us closer together, so close indeed that we interpenetrated, exchanged personalities, name, identity, religion, father, mother, brother.  Even her body went through a radical change, not once but several times.  At first she was big and velvety, like the jaguar, with that silky, deceptive strength of the feline species, the crouch, the spring, the pounce; then she grew emaciated, fragile, delicate, almost like a cornflower, and with each change thereafter she went through the subtlest modulations - of skin, of muscle, colour, posture, odour, gait, gesture, et cetera.  She changed like a chameleon.  Nobody could say what she really was like because with each one she was an entirely different person.  After a time she didn't even know herself what she was like.  She had begun this process of metamorphosis before I met her, as I later discovered.  Like so many women who think themselves ugly she had willed to make herself beautiful, dazzlingly beautiful.  To do this she first of all renounced her name, then her family, her friends, everything which might attach her to the past.  With all her wits and faculties she devoted herself to the cultivation of her beauty, of her charm, which she already possessed to a high degree but which she had been made to believe were non-existent.  She lived constantly before the mirror, studying every movement, every gesture, every slightest grimace.  She changed her whole manner of speech, her diction, her intonation, her accent, her phraseology.  She conducted herself so skilfully that it was impossible even to broach the subject of origins.  She was constantly on her guard, even in her sleep.  And, like a good general, she discovered quickly enough that the best defence is attack.  She never left a single position unoccupied; her outposts, her scouts, her sentinels were stationed everywhere.  Her mind was a revolving searchlight which was never dimmed.

      Blind to her own beauty, her own charm, her own personality, to say nothing of her identity, she launched her full powers toward the fabrication of a mythical creature, a Helen, a Juno, whose charms neither man nor woman would be able to resist.  Automatically, without the slightest knowledge of legend, she began to create little by little the ontological background, the mythic sequence of events preceding the conscious birth.  She had no need to remember her lies, her fictions - she had only to bear in mind her role.  There was no lie too monstrous for her to utter, for in her adopted role she was absolutely faithful to herself.  She did not have to invent a past: she remembered the past which belonged to her.  She was never outflanked by a direct question sine she never presented herself to an adversary except obliquely.  She presented only the angles of the ever-turning facets, the blinding prisms of light which she kept constantly revolving.  She was never a being, such as might finally be caught in repose, but the mechanism itself, relentlessly operating the myriad mirrors which would reflect the myth she had created.  She had no poise whatsoever; she was eternally poised above her multiple identities in the vacuum of the self.  She had not intended to make herself a legendary figure, she had merely wanted her beauty to be recognized.  But in the pursuit of beauty she soon forgot her question entirely, became the victim of her own creation.  She became so stunningly beautiful that at times she was frightening, at times positively uglier than the ugliest woman in the world.  She could inspire horror and dread, especially when her charm was at its height.  It was as though the will, blind and uncontrollable, shone through the creation, exposing the monster which it is.

      In the dark, locked away in the black hole with no world looking on, no adversary, no rivals, the blinding dynamism of the will slowed down a bit, gave her a molten copperish glow, the words coming out of her mouth like lava, her flesh clutching ravenously for a hold, a perch on something solid and substantial, something in which to reintegrate and repose for a few moments.  It was like a fantastic long-distance message, an S O S from a sinking ship.  At first I mistook it for passion, for the ecstasy produced by flesh rubbing against flesh.  I thought I had found a living volcano, a female Vesuvius.  I never thought of a human ship going down in an ocean of despair, in a Sargasso of impotence.  Now I think of that black star gleaming through the hole in the ceiling, that fixed star which hung above our conjugal cell, more fixed, more remote than the Absolute, and I know it was her, emptied of all that was properly herself: a dead black sun without aspect.  I know that we were conjugating the verb love like two maniacs trying to fuck through an iron grate.  I said that in the frantic grappling in the dark I sometimes forgot her name, what she looked like, who she was.  It's true.  I overreached myself in the dark.  I slid off the flesh rails into the endless space of sex, into the channel-orbits established by this one and that one: Georgiana, for instance, of only a brief afternoon, Thelma, the Egyptian whore, Carlotta, Alannah, Una, Mona, Magda, girls of sex or seven; waifs, will-o'-the-wisps, faces, bodies, thighs, a subway brush, a dream, a memory, a desire, a longing.  I could start with Georgiana of a Sunday afternoon near the railroad tracks, her dotted Swiss dress, her swaying haunch, her Southern drawl, her lascivious mouth, her molten breasts; I could start with Georgiana, the myriad branched candelabra of sex, and work outwards and upwards through the ramification of cunt into the nth dimension of sex, world without end.  Georgiana was like the membrane of the tiny little ear of an unfinished monster called sex.  She was transparently alive and breathing in the light of the memory of a brief afternoon on the avenue, the first tangible odour and substance of the world of fuck which is in itself a being limitless and undefinable, like our world the world.  The whole world of fuck like unto the ever-increasing membrane of the animal we call sex, which is like another being growing into our own being and gradually displacing it, so that in time the human world will be only a dim memory of this new, all-inclusive, all-procreative being which is giving birth to itself.

      It was precisely this snakelike copulation in the dark, this double-barrelled hookup, which put me in the straitjacket of doubt, jealousy, fear, loneliness.  If I began my hemstitching with Georgiana and the myriad-branched candelabra of sex I was certain that she too was at work building membrane, making ears, eyes, toes, scalp and whatnot of sex.  She would begin with the monster who had raped her, assuming there was truth in the story; in any case she too began somewhere on a parallel track, working upwards and outwards through this multiform, uncreated being through whose body we were both striving desperately to meet.  Knowing only a fraction of her life, possessing only a bag of lies, of inventions, of imaginings, of obsessions and delusions, putting together tag ends, coke dreams, reveries, unfinished sentences, jumbled dream talk, hysterical ravings, ill-disguised fantasies, morbid desires, meeting now and then a name become flesh, overhearing stray bits of conversation, observing smuggled glances, half-arrested gestures, I could well credit her with a pantheon of her own private fucking gods, of only too vivid flesh and blood creatures, men of perhaps that very afternoon, of perhaps only an hour ago, her cunt perhaps still choked with the sperm of the last fuck.  The more submissive she was, the more passionately she behaved, the more abandoned she looked, the more uncertain I became.  There was no beginning, no personal, individual starting point; we met like experienced swordsmen on the field of honour now crowded with the ghosts of victory and defeat.  We were alert and responsive to the least thrust, as only the practised can be. 

      We came together under cover of dark with our armies and from opposite sides we forced the gates of the citadel.  There was no resisting our bloody work; we asked for no quarter and we gave none.  We came together swimming in blood, a gory, glaucous reunion in the night with all the stars extinguished save the fixed black star hanging like a scalp above the hole in the ceiling.  If she were properly coked she would vomit it forth like an oracle, everything that had happened to her during the day, yesterday, the day before, the year before last, everything, down to the day she was born.  And not a word of it was true, not a single detail.  Not a moment did she stop, for if she had, the vacuum she created in her flight would have brought about an explosion fit to sunder the world.  She was the world's lying machine in microcosm, geared to the same unending, devastating fear which enables men to throw all their energies into creation of the death apparatus.  To look at her one would think her fearless, one would think her the personification of courage and she was, so long as she was not obliged to turn in her traces.  Behind her lay the calm fact of reality, a colossus which dogged her every step.  Every day this colossal reality took on new proportions, every day it became more terrifying, more paralyzing.  Every day she had to grow swifter wings, sharper jaws, more piercing, hypnotic eyes.  It was a race to the outermost limits of the world, a race lost from the start, and no-one to stop it.  At the edge of the vacuum stood Truth, ready in one lightning-like sweep to recover the stolen ground.  It was so simple and obvious that it drove her frantic.  Marshal a thousand personalities, commandeer the biggest guns, deceive the greatest minds, make the longest detour - still the end would be defeat.  In the final meeting everything was destined to fall apart - the cunning, the skill, the power, everything.  She would be a grain of sand on the shore of the biggest ocean, and, worse than anything, she would resemble each and every other grain of sand on that ocean's shore.  She would be condemned to recognize her unique self everywhere until the end of time.  What a fate she had chosen for herself!  That her uniqueness should be engulfed in the universal!  That her power should be reduced to the utmost node of passivity!  It was maddening, hallucinating.  It could not be!  It must not be!  Onward!  Like the black legions.  Onward!  Through every degree of the ever-widening circle.  Onward and away from the self, until the last substantial particle of the soul be stretched to infinity.  In her panic-stricken flight she seemed to bear the whole world in her womb.  We were being driven out of the confines of the universe toward a nebular which no instrument could visualize.  We were being rushed to a pause so still, so prolonged, that death by comparison seems a mad witches' revel.  

      In the morning, gazing at the bloodless crater of her face.  Not a line in it, not a wrinkle, not a single blemish!  The look of an angel in the arms of the Creator.  Who killed Cock Robin?  Who massacred the Iroquois?  Not I, my lovely angel could say, and by God, who, gazing at that pure, blameless face, could deny her?  Who could see in that sleep of innocence that one half of the face belonged to God and the other half to Satan?  the mask was smooth as death, cool, lovely to the touch, waxen, like a petal open to the faintest breeze.  So alluringly still and guileless was it that one could drown in it, one could go down into it, body and all, like a diver, and nevermore return.  Until the eyes opened upon the world she would lie like that, thoroughly extinguished and gleaming with a reflected light, like the moon itself.  In her deathlike trance of innocence she fascinated even more; her crimes dissolved, exuded through the pores, she lay coiled like a sleeping serpent riveted to the earth.  The body, strong, lithe, muscular, seemed possessed of a weight unnatural; she had a more than human gravity, the gravity, one might almost say, of a warm corpse.  She was like one might imagine the beautiful Nefertiti to have been after the first thousand years of mummification, a marvel of mortuary perfection, a dream of flesh preserved from mortal decay.  She lay coiled at the base of a hollow pyramid, enshrined in the vacuum of her own creation like a sacred relic of the past.  Even her breathing seemed stopped, so profound was her slumber.  She had dropped below the human sphere, below the animal sphere, below the vegetative sphere even: she had sunk down to the level of the mineral world where animation is just a notch above death.  She had so mastered the art of deception that even the dream was powerless to betray her.  She had learned how not to dream: when she coiled up in sleep she automatically switched off the current.  If one could have caught her thus and opened up the skull one would have found it absolutely void.  She kept no disturbing secrets; everything was killed off which could be humanly killed.  She might live on endlessly, like the moon, like any dead planet, radiating an hypnotic effulgence, creating tides of passion, engulfing the world in madness, discolouring all earthly substances with her magnetic, metallic rays.  Sowing her own death she brought everyone about her to fever pitch.  In the heinous stillness of her sleep she renewed her own magnetic death by union with the cold magma of the lifeless planetary worlds.  She was magically intact.  Her gaze fell upon one with a transpiercing fixity: it was the moon-gaze through which the dead dragon of life gave off a cold fire.  The one eyes was a warm brown, the colour of an autumn leaf; the other was hazel, the magnetic eye which flickered like a compass needle.  Even in sleep this eye continued to flicker under the shutter of the lid; it was the only apparent sign of life in her.

      The moment she opened her eyes she was wide awake.  She awoke with a violent start, as if the sight of the world and its human paraphernalia were a shock.  Instantly she was in full activity, lashing about like a great python.  What annoyed her was the light!   She awoke cursing the sun, cursing the glare of reality.  The room had to be darkened, the candles lit, the windows tightly shut to prevent the noise of the street from penetrating the room.  She moved about naked with a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth.  Her toilet was an affair of great preoccupation; a thousand trifling details had to be attended to before she could so much as don a bathrobe.  She was like an athlete preparing for the great event of the day.  From the roots of her hair, which she studied with keep attention, to the shape and length of her toenails, every part of her anatomy was thoroughly inspected before sitting down to breakfast.  Like an athlete I said she was, but in fact she was more like a mechanic overhauling a fast plane for a test flight.  Once she slipped on her dress she was launched for the day, for the flight which might end perhaps in Irkutsk or Teheran.  She would take on enough fuel at breakfast to last the entire trip.  The breakfast was a prolonged affair: it was the one ceremony of the day over which she dawdled and lingered.  It was exasperatingly prolonged, indeed.  One wondered if she would ever take off, one wondered if she had forgotten the grand mission which she had sworn to accomplish each day.  Perhaps she was dreaming of her itinerary, or perhaps she was not dreaming at all but 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 be 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-off, 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 toward 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 toward those whom she was abandoning.  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 tot he fact of her existence.  She didn't even leave the breath of a sigh behind, not even a toenail.  A clean exist, 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 antlike 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 experience 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 eardrums like Himalayan devils with sledgehammers; 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 mess 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 last move or shudder.  It is this interminable filling of space which kills all sense of space and 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 level 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, O devouring bird, fly to the limits of the universe!  Here is your nourishment growing 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 wellbeing.  Toward eleven or so the folks used to rap on the wall of my room 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 Czerny, in order to limber up for the performance.  The old man hated Czerny, and so did I, but Czerny was the plat du jour on the bill of fare then, and so Czerny it was until my joints were rubber.  In some vague way Czerny 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 fistful 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 Tractatus 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 skills, in pharmacopoeia and metallurgy, in the useless branches of learning which give 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 the music which I gave off Sunday mornings, a music of wellbeing, and of well-nourished desperation, was born of an illogically well-aspected Uranus firmly anchored in the Seventh 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 phoney wellbeing, 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. 947½.  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 Izzit 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 poring 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 me 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.  He was hypnotized, it seemed, by my nimble pyrotechnic.  This trancelike 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 potpourri 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 Prokofiev, 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 clearly, 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 the 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 inconsolable 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, Czerny 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 excited 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 of 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 then she took me by the ear and leading me to a corner 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 Czerny 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 of 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 - I 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 of hers, and she was sopping wet, like a horse slavering.  It was my first fuck, by 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 her clothes 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 the 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 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 Czerny 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 laying 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 hands 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 hear 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 time 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 clown.  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 wiggled 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 girlfriend 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 bathhouse 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 was 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 close.  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 the 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 hot-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 a crazy Agnes with the rosary around her neck and her big breadbasket 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 - "O 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 bathhouse, 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 Czerny might be in heaven by now and looking down on me and so I spat up 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 I was dancing about in the rear of the bathhouse 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 drove 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 was 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 arm 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 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 hand out and pulling her to me so that I could get my legs between hers.... "There, that's a 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 of 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 go 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 the 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 someone, someone 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 my cunt.  If the train was tightly packed and we were safely wedged in a corner 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 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 answer.  "Men like to fuck, and so do women.  It doesn't harm anybody and it doesn't mean you have to love everyone 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 he ever heard that yarn."  "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 it 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 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.  As 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 underlip 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 dishrag.  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 anesthetized 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 workout 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 alone for a walk, I was sure to pick up someone - a nurse, a girl coming out of a dance hall, a salesgirl, 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 - I 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 everyone.  And nine times out of ten 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 promise 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 haul up somewhere on a side road and go at it, one after the other, in the car.  And if she was an empty-headed 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 clean?  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 corner 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 keep my hat and coat on.  Was she sore!  She didn't mind my keeping my 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 tonight.  I want a real fuck - in bed.  You know, I had to argue with that 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 ... I said, '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 bedmate 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 today?  I'd like to borrow a couple of bucks.  You try and 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 so 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 corner 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 craps, the staying up all night swapping yarns, 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 loveable failures.  The grownups 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 anyone ever became a doctor or a lawyer.  Even so, he had to be a good fellow, had to pretend to talk like everyone 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 crapshooting 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 an 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 bughouse.  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 goddamned 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 club.  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 poolroom 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 those 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 bughouse; 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 goddamned helpless you'd be glad to have someone 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 - I 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 highfalutin' 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 sliver 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.  Goddamn 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 goddamned 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 tartar 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 someone, 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 yarn of his about Atlantis.  Did you?  You did?  Well, what do you think of it?  Do you think it was just a yarn, 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 Atlantis 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 - I 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 clear 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 can 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 today 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 goddamned 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 off, 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 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 know 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 Weltanschaunng 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 I 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 brownstone 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 clear 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 someone 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'identité 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 life buoy 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 pigeonholed 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 brownstone 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 had 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 spitoon 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 pigeonholes 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 midchannel 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 life buoy, 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 further 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 curtain went 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 clearly 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 the Mound Builders of the Mississippi Valley or to the Igorots 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: 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 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 letup 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 leaned, 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 straitjacket 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, 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 indestructible, 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 next 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 twenty empty chairs placed around it 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 this terrible need, he begins to act regressively, to become unsociable, 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 man 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 fulfilment, 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 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 Cendras, Jacques Vaché, Louis Aragon, Tristan Tzara, René Crevel, Henri de Montherlant, André Breton, Max Ernst, Georges 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 his 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 manifestos as a matter of principle, as I am also against principles.... I write this manifesto to show that one may perform opposed actions together, in a single fresh respiration; I am against action; for continual contradiction, for affirmation also, I am neither for nor against and I do not explain for I hate good sense.... There is a literature which does not reach the voracious mass.  The work of creators, sprung from a real necessity on the part of the author, and for himself.  Consciousness of a supreme egotism where the stars waste away.... Each page must explode, either with the profoundly serious and heavy, the whirlwind, dizziness, the new, the eternal, with the overwhelming hoax, with an enthusiasm for principles or with the mode of typography.  On the one hand a staggering fleeing world, affianced to the jinglebells of the infernal gamut, on the other hand: new beings...."

      Thirty-two years later and I am still saying Yes!  Yes, Monsieur Antipyrine!  Yes, Monsieur Tristan Bustanoby Tzara!  Yes, Monsieur Max Ernst Geburt!  Yes!  Monsieur René Crevel, now that you are dead by suicide, yes, the world is crazy, you were right.  Yes, Monsieur Blaise Cendras, you were right to kill.  Was it the day of the Armistice that you brought out your little book - J'ai tué?  Yes, "keep on my lads, humanity...."  Yes, Jacques Vaché, quite right - "Art ought to be something funny and a trifle boring".  Yes, my dear dead Vaché, how right you were and how funny and how boring and touching and tender and true: "It is of the essence of symbols to be symbolic".  Say it again, from the other world!  Have you a megaphone up there?  Have you found all the arms and legs that were blown off during the mêlée?  Can you put them together again?  Do you remember the meeting at Nantes in 1916 with André Breton?  Did you celebrate the birth of hysteria together?  Had he told you, Breton, that there was only the marvellous and nothing but the marvellous and that the marvellous is always marvellous - and isn't it marvellous to hear it again, even though your ears are stopped?  I want to include here, before passing on, a little portrait of you by Emile Bouvier for the benefit of my Brooklyn friends who may not have recognized me then but who will now, I am sure....

      "... he was not all crazy, and could explain his conduct when occasion required.  His actions, nonetheless, were as disconcerting as Jarry's worst eccentricities.  For example, he was barely out of hospital when he hired himself out as a stevedore, and he thereafter passed his afternoons in unloading coal on the quays along the Loire.  In the evening, on the other hand, he would make the rounds of the cafés and cinemas, dressed in the height of fashion and with many variations of costume.  What was more, in time of war, he would strut forth sometimes in the uniform of a lieutenant of hussars, sometimes in that of an English officer, of an aviator or of a surgeon.  In civil life, he was quite as free and easy, thinking nothing of introducing Breton under the name of André Salmon, while he took unto himself, but quite without vanity, the most wonderful titles and adventures.  He never said good morning nor good evening nor good-bye, and never took any notice of letters, except those from his mother, when he had to ask for money.  He did not recognize his best friends from one day to another...."

      Do you recognize me, lads?  Just a Brooklyn boy communicating with the red-haired albinos of the Zuni region.  Making ready, with feet on the deck, to write "strong works, works forever incomprehensible", as my dead comrades were promising.  These "strong works" - would you recognize them if you saw them?  Do you know that of the millions who were killed not one death was necessary to produce "the strong work"?  New beings, yes!  We have need of new beings still.  We can do without the telephone, without the automobile, without the high-class bombers - but we can't do without new beings.  If Atlantis was submerged beneath the sea, if the Sphinx and the Pyramids remain an eternal riddle, it was because there were no more new beings being born.  Stop the machine a moment!  Flash back!  Flash back to 1914, to the Kaiser sitting on his horse.  Keep him sitting there a moment with his withered arm clutching the bridle rein.  Look at his moustache!  Look at his haughty air of pride and arrogance!  Look at his cannon fodder lined up in strictest discipline, all ready to obey the word, to get shot, to get disembowelled, to be burned in quicklime.  Hold it a moment now and look at the other side: the defenders of our great and glorious civilization, the men who will war to end war.  Change their clothes, change their uniforms, changes horses, change flags, change terrain.  My, is that the Kaiser I see on a white horse?  Are those the terrible Huns?  And where is Big Bertha?  Oh, I see - I thought it was pointing toward Notre Dame?  Humanity, me lads, humanity always marching in the van.... And the strong works we were speaking of?  Where are the strong works?  Call up the Western Union and dispatch a messenger fleet of foot - not a cripple or an octogenarian, but a young one!  Ask him to find the great work and bring it back.  We need it.  We have a brand-new museum ready waiting to house it - and cellophane and the Dewey decimal system to file it.  All we need is the name of the author.  Even if he has no name, even if it is an anonymous work, we won't kick.  Even if it has a little mustard gas in it we won't mind.  Bring it back dead or alive - there's a twenty-five thousand dollar reward for the man who fetches it.

      And if they tell you that these things had to be, that things could not have happened otherwise, that France did her best and Germany her best and that little Liberia and little Ecuador and all the other allies also did their best, and that since the war everybody has been doing his best to patch things up or to forget, tell them that their best is not good enough, that we don't want to hear any more this logic of "doing the best one can", tell them we don't want the best of a bad bargain, we don't believe in bargains good or bad, nor in war memorials.  We don't want to hear about the logic of events - or any kind of logic.  "Je ne parle pas logique", said Monthelant, "je parle générosité".  I don't think you heard it very well, since it was in French.  I'll repeat it for you, in the Queen's own language: "I'm not talking logic, I'm talking generosity".  That's bad English, as the Queen herself might speak it, but it's clear.  Generosity - do you hear?  You never practise it, any of you, either in peace or in war.  You don't know the meaning of the word.  You think to supply guns and ammunition to the winning side is generosity; you think sending Red Cross nurses to the front, or the Salvation Army, is generosity.  You think a bonus twenty years too late is generosity; you think a little pension and a wheelchair is generosity; you think if you give a man his old job back it's generosity.  You don't know what the fucking word means, you bastards!  To be generous is to say Yes before the man even opens his mouth.  To say Yes you have to be first a surrealist or a Dadaist, because you have understood what it means to say No.  You can even say Yes and No at the same time, provided you do more than is expected of you.  Be a stevedore in the daytime and a Beau Brummel in the night-time.  Wear any uniform so long as it's not yours.  When you write your mother ask her to cough up a little dough so that you may have a clean rag to ripe your ass with.  Don't be disturbed if you see your neighbour going after his wife with a knife: he probably has good reason to go after her, and if he kills her you may be sure he had the satisfaction of knowing why he did it.  If you're trying to improve your mind, stop it!  There's no improving the mind.  Look to your heart and gizzard - the brain is in the heart.

      Ah yes, if I had known then that these birds existed -Cendras, Vaché, Grosz, Ernst, Apollinaire - if I had known that then, if I had known that in their own way they were thinking exactly the same things as I was, I think I'd have blown up.  Yes, I think I'd have gone off like a bomb.  But I was ignorant.  Ignorant of the fact that almost fifty years previously a crazy Jew in South America had given birth to such startlingly marvellous phrases as "doubt's duck with the vermouth lips", or "I have seen a fig eat an onager" - that about the same time a Frenchman, who was only a boy, was saying: "Find flowers that are chairs" ... "my hunger is the black air's bits" ... "his heart, amber and spunk".  Maybe at the same time, or thereabouts, while Jarry was saying "in eating the sound of moths", and Apollinaire repeating after him "near a gentleman swallowing himself", and Breton murmuring softly "night's pedals move uninterruptedly", perhaps "in the air beautiful and black" which the lone Jew had found under the Southern Cross another man, also lonely and exiled and of Spanish origin, was preparing to put down on paper these memorable words: "I seek, all in all, to console myself for my exile, for my exile from eternity, for that unearthing (destierro) which I am fond of referring to as my unheavening.... At present, I think that the best way to write this novel is to tell how it should be written.  It is the novel of the novel, the creation of creation.  Or God of God, Deus de Deo".  Had I known he was going to add this, this which follows, I would surely have gone off like a bomb.... "By being crazy is understood losing one's reason.  Reason, but not the truth, for there are madmen who speak truths while others keep silent...."  Speaking of these things, speaking of the war and the war dead, I cannot refrain from mentioning that some twenty years later I ran across this in French by a Frenchman.  O miracles of miracles!  "If faut le dire, il y a des cadavres que je ne respecte qu'à moitié."   Yes, yes, and again yes!  O, let us do some rash thing - for the sheer pleasure of it!  Let us do something live and magnificent, even if destructive!  Said the mad cobbler: "All things are generated out of the grand mystery, and proceed out of one degree into another.  Whatever goes forward in its degree, the same receives no abominate."

      Everywhere in all times the same ovarian world announcing itself.  Yet also, parallel with these announcements, these prophecies, these gynaecological manifestos, parallel and contemporaneous with them, new totem poles, new taboos, new war dances.  While into the air so black and beautiful the brothers of man, the poets, the diggers of the future, were spitting their magic lines, in this same time, O profound and perplexing riddle, other men were saying: "Won't you please come and take a job in our ammunition factory.  We promise you the highest wages, the most sanitary and hygienic conditions.  The work is so easy that even a child could do it".  And if you had a sister, a wife, a mother, an aunt, as long as she could manipulate her hands, as long as she could prove that she had no bad habits, you were invited to bring her or them along to the ammunition works.  If you were shy of soiling your hands they would explain to you very gently and intelligently just how these delicate mechanisms operated, what they did when they exploded, and why you must now waste even your garbage because ... et ipso facto e pluribus unum.  The thing that impressed me, going the rounds in search of work, was not so much that they made me vomit every day (assuming I had been lucky enough to put something into my guts), but that they always demanded to know if you were of good habits, if you were steady, if you were sober, if you were industrious, if you had ever worked before and if not why not.  Even the garbage, which I had gotten the job of collecting for the municipality, was precious to them, the killers.  Standing knee deep in the muck, the lowest of the low, a coolie, an outcast, still I was part of the death racket.  I tried reading the Inferno at night, but it was in English and English is no language for a Catholic work.  "Whatever enters in itself into its selfhood, viz. into its own lubet...."  Lubet!  If I had had a word like that to conjure with then, how peacefully I might have gone about my garbage collecting!  How sweet, in the night, when Dante is out of reach and the hands smell of muck and slime, to take unto oneself this word which in the Dutch means "lust" and in Latin "lubbitum" or the divine beneplacitum.  Standing knee deep in the garbage I said one day what Meister Eckhart is reported to have said long ago: "I truly have need of God, but God has need of me too".  There was a job waiting for me in the slaughterhouse, a nice little job of sorting entrails, but I couldn't raise the fare to get to Chicago.  I remained in Brooklyn, in my own palace of entrails, and turned round and round on the plinth of the labyrinth.  I remained at home seeking the "germinal vesicle", "the dragon castle on the floor of the sea", "the Heavenly Heart", "the field of the square inch", "the house of the square foot", "the dark pass", "the space of former Heaven".  I remained locked in, a prisoner of Forculus, god of the door, of Cardea, god of the hinge, and of Limentius, god of the threshold.  I spoke only with their sisters, the three goddesses called Fear, Pallor and Fever.  I saw no "Asian luxury", as had St. Augustine, or as he imagined he had.  Nor did I see "the two twins born, so near together, that the second held the first by the heel".  But I saw a street called Myrtle Avenue, which runs from Borough hall to Fresh Pond Road, and down this street no saint ever walked (else it would have crumbled), down this street no miracle ever passed, nor any poet, nor any species of human genius, nor did any flower ever grow there, nor did the sun strike it squarely, nor did the rain ever wash it.  For the genuine Inferno which I had to postpone for twenty years I give you Myrtle Avenue, one of the innumerable bridlepaths ridden by iron monsters which lead to the heart of America's emptiness.  If you have only seen Essen or Manchester or Chicago or Levallois-Perret or Glasgow or Hoboken or Canarsie or Bayonne you have seen nothing of the magnificent emptiness of progress and enlightenment.  Dear reader, you must see Myrtle Avenue before you die, if only to realize how far into the future Dante saw.  You must believe me that on this street, neither in the houses which line it, nor the cobblestones which pave it, nor the elevated structure which cuts it atwain, neither in any creature that bears a name and lives thereon, neither in any animal, bird or insect passing through it to slaughter or already slaughtered, is there hope of "lubet", "sublimate", or "abominate".  It is a street not of sorrow, for sorrow would be human and recognizable, but of sheer emptiness: it is emptier than the most extinct volcano, emptier than a vacuum, emptier than the word God in the mouth of an unbeliever.

      I said I did not know a word of French then, and it is true, but I was just on the brink of making a great discovery, a discovery which would compensate for the emptiness of Myrtle Avenue and the whole American continent.  I had almost reached the shore of that great French ocean which goes by the name of Elie Faure, an ocean which the French themselves had hardly navigated and which they had mistaken, it seems, for an inland sea.  Reading him even in such a withered language as English has become I could see that this man who had described the glory of the human race on his cuff was Father Zeus of Atlantis whom I had been searching for.  An ocean I called him, but he was also a world symphony.  He was the first musician the French have produced; he was exalted and controlled, an anomaly, a Gallic Beethoven, a great physician of the soul, a giant lightning rod.  He was also a sunflower turning with the sun, always drinking in the light, always radiant and blazing with vitality.  He was neither an optimist nor a pessimist, any more than one can say that the ocean is beneficent or malevolent.  He was a believer in the human race.  He added a cubit to the race, by giving it back its dignity, its strength, its need of creation.  He saw everything as creation, as solar joy.  He didn't record it in orderly fashion, he recorded it musically.  He was indifferent to the fact that the French have a tin ear - he was orchestrating for the whole world simultaneously.  What was my amazement then, when some years later I arrived in France, to find that there were no monuments erected to him, no streets named after him.  Worse, during eight whole years I never once heard a Frenchman mention his name.  He had to die in order to be put in the pantheon of French deities - and how sickly must they look, his deific contemporaries, in the presence of this radiant sun!   If he had not been a physician, and thus permitted to earn a livelihood, what might not have happened to him!  Perhaps another able hand for the garbage trucks!  The man who made the Egyptian frescoes come alive in all their flaming colours, this man could just as well have starved to death for all the public cared.  But he was an ocean and the critics drowned in this ocean, and the editors and the publishers and the public too.  It will take aeons for him to dry up, to evaporate.  It will take about as long as for the French to acquire a musical ear.

      If there had been no music I would have gone to the madhouse like Nijinsky.  (It was just about this time that they discovered that Nijinsky was mad.  He had been found giving his money away to the poor - always a bad sign!)  My mind was filled with wonderful treasures, my taste was sharp and exigent, my muscles were in excellent condition, my appetite was strong, my wind sound.  I had nothing to do except to improve myself, and I was going crazy with the improvements I made every day.  Even if there were a job for me to fill I couldn't accept it, because what I needed was not work but a life more abundant.  I couldn't waste time being a teacher, a lawyer, a physician, a politician or anything else that society had to offer.  It was easier to accept menial jobs because it left my mind free.  After I was fired from the garbage trucks I remember taking up with an Evangelist who seemed to have great confidence in me.  I was a sort of usher, collector and private secretary.  He brought to my attention the whole world of Indian philosophy.  Evenings when I was free I would meet with my friends at the home of Ed Bauries who lived in an aristocratic section of Brooklyn.  Ed Bauries was an eccentric pianist who couldn't read a note.  He had a bosom pal called George Neumiller with whom he often played duets.  Of the dozen or so who congregated at Ed Bauries' home nearly every one of us could play the piano.  We were all between twenty-one and twenty-five at the time; we never brought any women along and we hardly ever mentioned the subject of woman during these sessions.  We had plenty of beer to drink and a whole big house at our disposal, for it was in the summertime, when his folks were away, that we held our gatherings.  Though there were a dozen other homes like this which I could speak of, I mention Ed Bauries' place because it was typical of something I have never encountered elsewhere in the world.  Neither Ed Bauries himself nor any of his friends suspected the sort of books I was reading then nor the things which were occupying my mind.  When I blew in I was greeted enthusiastically - as a clown.  It was expected of me to start things going.  There were about four pianos scattered throughout the big house, to say nothing of the celesta, the organ, guitars, mandolins, fiddles and what not.  Ed Bauries was a nut, a very affable, sympathetic and generous one too.  The sandwiches were always of the best, the beer plentiful, and if you wanted to stay the night he could fix you up on a divan just as pretty as you liked.  Coming down the street - a big, wide street, somnolent, luxurious, a street altogether out of the world - I could hear the tinkle of the piano in the big parlour on the first floor.  The windows were wide open and as I got into range I could see Al Burger or Connie Grimm sprawling in their big easy chairs, their feet on the window sill, and big beer mugs in their hands.  Probably George Neumiller was at the piano, improvising, his shirt peeled off and a big cigar in his mouth.  They were talking and laughing while George fooled around, searching for an opening.  Soon as he hit a theme he would call for Ed and Ed would sit beside him, studying it out in his unprofessional way, then suddenly pouncing on the keys and giving tit for tat.  Maybe when I'd walk in somebody would be trying to stand on his hands in the next room - there were three big rooms on the first floor which opened one on to the other and back of them was a garden, an enormous garden, with flowers, fruit trees, grape vines, statues, fountains and everything.  Sometimes when it was too hot they brought the celesta or the little organ into the garden (and a keg of beer, naturally) and we'd sit around in the dark laughing and singing - until the neighbours forced us to stop.  Sometimes the music was going on all through the house at once, on every floor.  It was really crazy then, intoxicating, and if there had been women around it would have spoiled it.  Sometimes it was like watching an endurance contest - Ed Bauries and George Neumiller at the grand piano, each trying to wear the other out, changing places without stopping, crossing hands, sometimes falling away to plain chopsticks, sometimes going like a Wurlitzer.  And always something to laugh about all the time.  Nobody asked what you did, what you thought about, and so forth.  When you arrived at Ed Bauries' place you checked your identification marks.  Nobody gave a fuck what size hat you wore or how much you paid for it.  It was entertainment from the word go - and the sandwiches and the drinks were on the house.  And when things got going, three or four pianos at once, the celesta, the organ, the mandolins, the guitars, beer running through the halls, the mantelpieces full of sandwiches and cigars, a breeze coming through from the garden, George Neumiller stripped to the waist and modulating like a fiend, it was better than any show I've ever seen put on and it didn't cost a cent.  In fact, with the dressing and undressing that went on, I always came away with a little extra change and a pocketful of good cigars.  I never saw any of them between times - only Monday nights throughout the summer, when Ed held open house.

      Standing in the garden listening to the din I could scarcely believe that it was the same city.  And if I had ever opened my trap and exposed my guts it would have been all over.  Not one of these bozos amounted to anything, as the world reckons.  They were just good eggs, children, fellows who liked music and who liked a good time.  They liked it so much that sometimes we had to call the ambulance.  Like the night Al Burger twisted his knee while showing us one of his stunts.  Everybody so happy, so full of music, so lit up, that it took him an hour to persuade us he was really hurt.  We try to carry him to a hospital but it's too far away and besides, it's such a good joke, that we drop him now and then and that makes him yell like a maniac.  So finally we telephone for help from a police box, and the ambulance comes and the patrol wagon too.  They take Al to the hospital and the rest of us to the hoosegow.  And on the way we sing at the top of our lungs.  And after we're bailed out we're still feeling good and the cops are feeling good too, and so we all adjourn to the basement where there's a cracked piano and we go on singing and playing.  All this is like some period B.C. in history which ends not because there's a war but because even a joint like Ed Bauries' is not immune to the poison seeping in from the periphery.  Because every street is becoming a Myrtle Avenue, because emptiness is filling the whole continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific.  Because, after a certain time, you can't enter a single house throughout the length and breadth of the land and find a man standing on his hands singing.  It just ain't done anymore.  And there ain't two pianos going at once anywhere, nor are there two men anywhere willing to play all night just for the fun of it.  The men who can play like Ed Bauries and George Neumiller are hired by the radio or the movies and only a thimbleful of their talent is used and the rest is thrown into the garbage can.  Nobody knows, judging from public spectacles, what talent is disposable in the great American continent.  Later on, and that's why I used to sit around on doorsteps in Tin Pan Alley, I would while away the afternoons listening to the professionals mugging it out.  That was good too, but it was different.  There was no fun in it, it was a perpetual rehearsal to bring in dollars and cents.  Any man in America who had an ounce of humour in him was saving it up to put himself across.  There were some wonderful nuts among them too, men I'll never forget, men who left no name behind them, and they were the best we produced.  I remember an anonymous performer on the Keith circuit who was probably the craziest man in America, and perhaps he got fifty dollars a week for it.  Three times a day, every day in the week, he came out and held the audience spellbound.  He didn't have an act - he just improvised.  He never repeated his jokes or his stunts.  He gave him prodigally, and I don't think he was a hop fiend either.  He was one of those guys who are born in the corn crakes and the energy and the joy in him was so fierce that nothing could contain it.  He could play any instrument and dance any step and he could invent a story on the spot and string it out till the bell rang.  He was not only satisfied to do his own act but he would help the others out.  He would stand in the wings and wait for the right moment to break into the other guy's act.  He was the whole show and it was a show that contained more therapy than the whole arsenal of modern science.  They ought to have paid a man like this the wages which the President of the United States receives.  They ought to sack the President of the United States and the whole Supreme Court and set up a man like this as ruler.  This man could cure any disease on the calendar.  He was the kind of guy, moreover, as would do it for nothing, if you asked him to.  This is the type of man which empties the insane asylums.  He doesn't propose a cure - he makes everybody crazy.  Between this solution and a perpetual state of war, which is civilization, there is only one other way out - and that is the road we will all take eventually because everything else is doomed to failure.  The type that represents this one and only way bears a head with six faces and eight eyes; the head is a revolving lighthouse, and instead of a triple crown at the top, as there might well be, there is a hole which ventilate what few brains there are.  There is very little brain, as I say, because there is very little baggage to carry about, because living in full consciousness, the grey matter passes off into light.  This is the only type of man one can place above the comedian; he neither laughs nor weeps, he is beyond suffering.  We don't recognize him yet because he is too close to us, right under the skin, as a matter of fact.  When the comedian catches us in the guts this man, whose name might be God, I suppose, if he had to use a name, speaks up.  When the whole human race is rocking with laughter, laughing so hard that it hurts, I mean, everybody then has his foot on the path.  In that moment everybody can just as well be God as anything else.  In that moment we have the annihilation of dual, triple, quadruple and multiple consciousness, which is what makes the grey matter coil up in dead folds at the top of the skull.  At that moment you can really feel the hole in the top of the head; you know that you once had an eye there and that this eye was capable of taking in everything at once.  The eye is gone now, but when you laugh until the tears flow and your belly aches, you are really opening the skylight and ventilating the brains.  Nobody can persuade you at that moment to take a gun and kill your enemy; neither can anybody persuade you to open a fat tome containing the metaphysical truths of the world and read it.  If you know what freedom means, absolute freedom and not a relative freedom, then you must recognize that this is the nearest to it you will ever get.  If I am against the condition of the world it is not because I am a moralist - it is because I want to laugh more.  I don't say that God is one grand laugh: I say that you've got to laugh hard before you can get anywhere near God.  My whole aim in life is to get near to God,  that is, to get nearer to myself.  That's why it doesn't matter to me what road I take.  But music is very important.  Music is a tonic for the pineal gland.  Music isn't Bach or Beethoven; music is the can opener of the soul.  It makes you terribly quiet inside, makes you aware that there's a roof to your being.

      The stabbing horror of life is not contained in calamities and disasters, because these things wake one up and one gets very familiar and intimate with them and finally they become tame again ... no, it is more like being in a hotel room in Hoboken, let us say, and just enough money in one's pocket for another meal.  You are in a city that you never expect to be in again and you have only to pass the night in your hotel room, but it takes all the courage and pluck you possess to stay in that room.  There must be a good reason why certain cities, certain places, inspire such loathing and dread.  There must be some kind of perpetual murder going on in these places.  The people are of the same race as you, they go about their business as people do anywhere, they build the same sort of house, no better, no worse, they have the same system of education, the same currency, the same newspapers - and yet they are absolutely different from the other people you know, and the whole atmosphere is different, and the rhythm is different and the tension is different.  It's almost like looking at yourself in another incarnation.  You know, with a most disturbing certitude, that what governs life is not money, not politics, not religion, not training, not race, not language, not customs, but something else, something you're trying to throttle all the time and which is really throttling you, because otherwise you wouldn't be terrified all of a sudden and wonder how you were going to escape.  Some cities you don't even have to pass a night in - just an hour or two is enough to unnerve you.  I think of Bayonne that way.   I came on it in the night with a few addresses that had been given me.  I had a briefcase under my arm with a prospectus of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.  I was supposed to go under cover of dark and sell the bloody encyclopaedia to some poor devils who wanted to improve themselves.  If I had been dropped off at Helsingfors I couldn't have felt more ill at ease than walking the streets of Bayonne.  It wasn't an American city to me.  It wasn't a city at all, but a huge octopus wriggling in the dark.  The first door I came to looked so forbidding I didn't even bother to knock; I went like that to several addresses before I could summon the courage to knock.  The first face I took a look at frightened the shit out of me.  I don't mean timidity or embarrassment - I mean fear.  It was the face of a hod carrier, an ignorant mick who would as lief fell you with an axe as spit in your eye.  I pretended I had the wrong name and hurried on to the next address.  Each time the door opened I saw another monster.  And then I came at last to a poor simply who really wanted to improve himself and that broke me down.  I felt truly ashamed of myself, of my country, my race, my epoch.  I had a devil of a time persuading him not to buy the damned encyclopaedia.  He asked me innocently what then had brought me to his home - and without a minute's hesitation I told him an astounding lie, a lie which was later to prove a great truth.  I told him I was only pretending to see the encyclopaedia in order to met people and write about them.  That interested him enormously, even more than the encyclopaedia.  He wanted to know what I would write about him, if I could say.  It's taken me twenty years to answer that question, but here it is.  If you would still like to know, John Doe of the City of Bayonne, this is it.... I owe you a great deal because after that lie I told you I left your house and I tore up the prospectus furnished me by the Encyclopaedia Britannica and I threw it in the gutter.  I said to myself I will never again go to people under false pretences even if it is to give them the Holy Bible.  I will never again sell anything, even if I have to starve.  I am going home now and I will sit down and really write about people.  And if anybody knocks at my door to sell me something I will invite him in and say "why are you doing this?"  And if he says it is because he has to make a living I will offer him what money I have and beg him once again to think what he is doing.  I want to prevent as many men as possible from pretending that they have to do this or that because they must earn a living.  It is not true.  One can starve to death - it is much better.  Every man who voluntarily starves to death jams another cog in the automatic process.  I would rather see a man take a gun and kill his neighbour, in order to get the food he needs, than keep up the automatic process by pretending that he has to earn a living.  That's what I want to say, Mr. John Doe.

      I pass on.  Not the stabbing horror of disaster and calamity, I say, but the automatic throwback, the stark panorama of the soul's atavistic struggle.  A bridge in North Carolina, near the Tennessee border.  Coming out of lush tobacco fields, low cabins everywhere and the smell of fresh wood burning.  The day passed in a thick lake of waving green.  Hardly a soul in sight.  Then suddenly a clearing and I'm over a big gulch spanned by a rickety wooden bridge.  This is the end of the world!  How in God's name I got here and why I'm here I don't know.  How am I going to eat?  And if I ate the biggest meal imaginable I would still be sad, frightfully sad.  I don't know where to go from here.  The bridge is the end, the end of me, the end of my known world.  This bridge is insanity: there is no reason why it should stand there and no reason why people should cross it.  I refuse to budge another step, I balk at crossing that crazy bridge.  Nearby is a low wall which I lie against trying to think what to do and where to go.  I realize quietly what a terribly civilized person I am - the need I have for people, conversation, books, theatre, music, cafés, drinks, and so forth.  It's terrible to be civilized, because when you come to the end of the world you have nothing to support the terror of loneliness.  To be civilized is to have complicated needs.  And a man, when he is full blown, shouldn't need a thing.  All day I had been moving through tobacco fields, and growing more and more uneasy.  What have I to do with all this tobacco?  What am I heading into?  People everywhere are producing crops and goods for other people - and I am like a ghost sliding between all this unintelligible activity.  I want to find some kind of work, but I don't want to be a part of this thing, this infernal automatic process.  I pass through a town and I look at the newspaper telling what is happening in that town and its environs.  It seems to me that nothing is happening, that the clock has stopped but that these poor devils are unaware of it.  I have a strong intuition, moreover, that there is a murder in the air.  I can smell it.  A few days back I passed the imaginary line which divides the North from the South.  I wasn't aware of it until a darky came along driving a team; when he gets alongside of me he stands up in his seat and doffs his hat most respectfully.  He had snow-white hair and a face of great dignity.  That made me feel horrible: it made me realize that there are still slaves.  This man had to tip his hat to me - because I was of the white race.  Whereas I should have tipped my hat to him!  I should have saluted him as a survivor of all the vile tortures the white men have inflicted on the black.  I should have tipped my hat first, to let him know that I am not a part of this system, that I am begging forgiveness for all my white brethren who are too ignorant and cruel to make an honest overt gesture.  Today I feel their eyes on me all the time, they watch from behind doors, from behind trees.  All very quiet, very peaceful, seemingly.  Nigger never say nuthin'.  Nigger he hum all time.  White man think nigger learn his place.  Nigger learn nuthin'.  Nigger wait.  Nigger watch everything white man do.  Nigger no say nuthin', no sir, no siree.  BUT JUST THE SAME THE NIGGER IS KILLING THE WHITE MAN OFF!  Every time the nigger looks at a white man he's putting a dagger through him.  It's not the heat, it's not the hookworm, it's not the bad crops that's killing the South off - it's the nigger.  The nigger is giving off a poison, whether he means to or not.  The South is coked and doped with nigger poison.

      Pass on.... Sitting outside a barber shop by the James River.  I'll be here just ten minutes, while I take a load off my feet.  There's a hotel and a few stores opposite me; it all tails off quickly, ends like it began - for no reason.  From the bottom of my soul I pity the poor devils who are born and die here.  There is no earthly reason why this place should exist.  There is no reason why anybody should cross the street and get himself a shave and haircut, or even a sirloin steak.  Men, buy yourselves a gun and kill each other off!  Wipe this street out of my mind forever - it hasn't an ounce of meaning in it.

      The same day, after nightfall.  Still plugging on, digging deeper and deeper into the South.  I'm coming away from a little town by a short road leading to the highway.  Suddenly I hear footsteps behind me and soon a young man passes me on the trot, breathing heavily and cursing with all his might.  I stand there a moment, wondering what it's all about.  I hear another man coming on the trot; he's an older man and he's carrying a gun.  He breathes fairly easy, and not a word out of his trap.  Just as he comes in view the moon breaks through the clouds and I catch a good look at his face.  He's a man-hunter.  I stand back as the others come up behind him.  I'm trembling with fear.  It's the sheriff, I hear a man say, and he's going to get him.  Horrible.  I move on toward the highway waiting to hear the shot that will end it all.  I hear nothing - just this heavy breathing of the young man and the quick, eager steps of the mob following behind the sheriff.  Just as I get near the main road a man steps out of the darkness and comes over to me very quietly.  "Where yer goin', son?" he says, quiet like and almost tenderly.  I stammer out something about the next town.  "Better stay right here, son," he says.  I didn't say another word.  I let him take me back into town and hand me over like a thief.  I lay on the floor with about fifty other blokes.  I had a marvellous sexual dream which ended with the guillotine.

      I plug on.... It's just as hard to go back as to go forward.  I don't have the feeling of being an American citizen anymore.  The part of America I came from, where I had some rights, where I felt free, is so far behind me that it's beginning to get fuzzy in my memory.  I feel as though someone's got a gun against my back all the time.  Keep moving, is all I seem to hear.  If a man talks to me I try not to seem too intelligent.  I try to pretend that I am vitally interested in the crops, in the weather, in the elections.  If I stand and stop they look at me, whites and blacks - they look at me through and through as though I were juicy and edible.  I've got to walk another thousand miles or so as though I had a deep purpose, as though I were really going somewhere.  I've got to look sort of grateful, too, that nobody has yet taken a fancy to plug me.  It's depressing and exhilarating at the same time.  You're a marked man - and yet nobody pulls the trigger.  They let you walk unmolested right into the Gulf of Mexico where you can drown yourself.

      Yes sir, I reached the Gulf of Mexico and I walked right into it and drowned myself.  I did it gratis.  When they fished the corpse out they found it was marked F.O.B. Myrtle Avenue, Brooklyn; it was returned C.O.D.  When I was asked later why I had killed myself I could only think to say - because I wanted to electrify the cosmos!  I meant by that a very simple thing - The Delaware, Lackawanna and Western had been electrified, the Seaboard Air Line had been electrified, but the soul of man was still in the covered wagon stage.  I was born in the midst of civilization and I accepted it very naturally - what else was there to do?  But the joke was that nobody else was taking it seriously.  I was the only man in the community who was truly civilized.  There was no place for me - as yet.  And yet the books I read, the music I heard assured me that there were other men in the world like myself.  I had to go and drown myself in the Gulf of Mexico in order to have an excuse for continuing this pseudo-civilized existence.  I had to delouse myself of my spiritual body, as it were.

      When I woke up to the fact that as far as the scheme of things goes I was less than dirt I really became quite happy.  I quickly lost all sense of responsibility.  And if it weren't for the fact that my friends got tired of lending me money I might have gone on indefinitely pissing the time away.  The world was like a museum to me; I saw nothing to do but eat into this marvellous chocolate layer cake which the men of the past had dumped on our hands.  It annoyed everybody to see the way I enjoyed myself.  Their logic was that art was very beautiful, oh yes, indeed, but you must work for a living and then you will find that you are too tired to think about art.  But it was when I threatened to add a layer or two of my own account to this marvellous chocolate layer cake that they blew up on me.  That was the finishing touch.  That meant I was definitely crazy.  First I was considered to be a useless member of society; then for a time I was found to be a reckless, happy-go-lucky corpse with a tremendous appetite; now I had become crazy.  (Listen, you bastard, you find yourself a job ... we're through with you!)  In a way it was refreshing, this change of front.  I could feel the wind blowing through the corridors.  At least "we" were no longer becalmed.  It was war, and as a corpse I was just fresh enough to have a little fight left in me.  War is revivifying.  War stirs the blood.  It was in the midst of the world war, which I had forgotten about, that this change of heart took place.  I got myself married overnight, to demonstrate to all and sundry that I didn't give a fuck one way or the other.  Getting married was O.K. in their minds.  I remember that, on the strength of the announcement, I raised five bucks immediately.  My friend MacGregor paid for the license and even paid for the shave and haircut which he insisted I go through with in order to get married.  They said you couldn't go without being shaved; I didn't see any reason why you couldn't get hitched up without a shave and haircut, but since it didn't cost me anything I submitted to it.  It was interesting to see how everybody was eager to contribute something to our maintenance.  All of a sudden, just because I had shown a bit of sense, they came flocking around us - and couldn't they do this and couldn't they do that for us?  Of course the assumption was that now I would surely be going to work, now I would see that life is serious business.  It never occurred to them that I might let my wife work for me.  I was really very decent to her in the beginning.  I wasn't a slave driver.  All I asked for was carfare - to hunt for the mythical job - and a little pin money for cigarettes, movies, et cetera.  The important things, such as books, music albums, gramophones, porterhouse steaks and such like I found we could get on credit, now that we were married.  The instalment plan had been invented expressly for guys like me.  The down payment was easy - the rest I left to Providence.  One has to live, they were always saying.  Now, by God, that's what I said to myself - One has to live!  Live first and pay afterwards.  If I saw an overcoat I liked I went in and bought it.  I would buy it a little in advance of the season too, to show that I was a serious-mined chap.  Shit, I was a married man and soon I would probably be a father - I was entitled to a winter overcoat at least, no?  And when I had the overcoat I thought of stout shoes to go with it - a pair of thick cordovans such as I had wanted all my life but never could afford.  And when it grew bitter cold and I was out looking for the job I used to get terribly hungry sometimes - it's really healthy going out like that day after day prowling about the city in rain and snow and wind and hail - and so now and then I'd drop in to a cosy tavern and order myself a juicy porterhouse steak with onions and french fried potatoes.  I took out life insurance and accident insurance too - it's important, when you're married, to do things like that, so they told me.  Supposing I should drop dead one day - what then?  I remember the guy telling me that, in order to clinch his argument.  I had already told him I would sign up, but he must have forgotten it.  I had said, yes, immediately, out of force of habit, but as I say, he had evidently overlooked it - or else it was against the code to sign a man up until you had delivered the full sales talk.  Anyway, I was just getting ready to ask him how long it would take before you could make a loan on the policy when he popped the hypothetical question: Supposing you should drop dead one day - what then?  I guess he thought I was a little off my nut the way I laughed at that.  I laughed until the tears rolled down my face.  Finally he said - "I don't see that I said anything so funny".  "Well," I said, getting serious for a moment, "take a good look at me.  Now tell me, do you think I'm the sort of fellow who gives a fuck what happens once he's dead?"  He was quite taken aback by this, apparently, because the next thing he said was: "I don't think that's a very ethical attitude, Mr. Miller.  I'm sure you wouldn't want your wife to ..."  "Listen," I said, "supposing I told you I don't give a fuck what happens to my wife when I die - what then?"  And since this seemed to injure his ethical susceptibilities still more I added for  good measure - "As far as I'm concerned you don't have to pay the insurance when I croak - I'm only doing this to make you feel good.  I'm trying to help the world along, don't you see?  You've got to live, haven't you?  Well, I'm just putting a little food in your mouth, that's all.  If you have anything else to sell, trot it out.  I buy anything that sounds good.  I'm a buyer not a seller.  I like to see people looking happy - that's why I buy things.  Now listen, how much did you say that would come to per week?  Fifty-seven cents?  Fine.  What's fifty-seven cents?  You see that piano - that comes to about thirty-nine cents a week, I think.  Look around you ... everything you see costs so much a week.  You say, if I should die, what then?  Do you suppose I'm going to die on all these people?  That would be a hell of a joke.  No, I'd rather have them come and take the things away - if I can't pay for them, I mean...."  He was fidgeting about and there was a rather glassy stare in his eye, I thought.  "Excuse me," I said, interrupting myself, "but wouldn't you like to have a little drink - to wet the policy?"  He said he thought not, but I insisted, and besides, I hadn't signed the papers yet and my urine would have to be examined and approved of and all sorts of stamps and seals would have to be affixed - I knew all that crap by heart - so I thought we might have a little snifter first and in that way protract the serious business, because honestly, buying insurance or buying anything was a real pleasure to me and gave me the feeling that I was just like every other citizen, a man, what! and not a monkey.  So I got out a bottle of sherry (which is all that was allowed me) and I poured out a generous glassful for him, thinking to myself that it was fine to see the sherry going because maybe the next time they'd buy something better for me.  "I used to sell insurance too once upon a time," I said,  raising the glass to my lips.  "Sure, I can sell anything.  The only thing is - I'm lazy.  Take a day like today - isn't it nicer to be indoors, reading a book or listening to the phonograph?  Why should I go out and hustle for an insurance company?  If I had  been working today you wouldn't have caught me in - isn't that so?  No, I think it's better to take it easy and help people out when they come along ... like with you, for instance.  It's much nicer to buy things than to sell them, don't you think?  If you have the money, of course!  In this house we don't need much money.  As I was saying, the piano comes to about thirty-nine cents a week, or forty-two maybe, and the...."

      "Excuse me, Mr. Miller," he interrupted, "but don't you think we ought to get down to signing these papers?"

      "Why, of course," I said cheerfully.  "Did you bring them all with you?  Which one do you think we ought to sign first?  By the way, you haven't got a fountain pen you'd like to sell me, have you?"

      "Just sign right here," he said, pretending to ignore my remarks.  "And here, that's it.  Now then, Mr. Miller, I think I'll say good day - and you'll be hearing from the company in a few days."

      "Better make it sooner," I remarked, leading him to the door, "because I might change my mind and commit suicide."

      "Why, of course, why yes, Mr. Miller, certainly we will.  Good day now, good day!"

      Of course the instalment plan breaks down eventually, even if you're an assiduous buyer such as I was.  I certainly did my best to keep the manufacturers and the advertising men of America busy, but they were disappointed in me it seems.  Everybody was disappointed in me.  But there was one man in particular who was more disappointed in me than anyone and that was a man who had really made an effort to befriend me and whom I had let down.  I think of him and the way he took me on as his assistant - so readily and graciously - because later, when I was hiring and firing like a forty-two horse calibre revolver, I was betrayed right and left myself, but by that time I had become so inoculated that it didn't matter a damn.  But this man had gone out of his way to show me that he believed in me.  He was the editor of a catalogue for a great mail order house.  It was an enormous compendium of horseshit which was put out once a year and which took the whole year to make ready.  I hadn't the slightest idea what it was all about and why I dropped into his office that day I don't know, unless it was because I wanted to get warm, as I had been knocking about the docks all day trying to get a job as a checker or some damned thing.  It was cosy in his office and I made him a long speech so as to get thawed out.  I didn't know what job to ask for - just a job, I said.  He was a sensitive man and very kind-hearted.  He seemed to guess that I was a writer, because soon he was asking me what I liked to read and what was my opinion of this writer and that writer.  It just happened that I had a list of books in my pocket - books I was searching for at the public library - and so I brought it out and showed it to him.  "Great Scott!" he exclaimed, "do you really read these books?"  I modestly shook my head in the affirmative, and then as often happened to me when I was touched off by some silly remark like that, I began to talk about Hamsun's Mysteries which I had just been reading.  From then on the man was like putty in my hands.  When he asked me if I would like to be his assistant he apologized for offering me such a lowly position; he said I could take my turn learning the ins and outs of the job, he was sure it would be a cinch for me.  And then he asked me if he couldn't lend me some money, out of his own pocket, until I got paid.  Before I could say yes or no he had fished out a twenty-dollar bill and thrust it in my hand.  Naturally I was touched.  I was ready to work like a son of a bitch for him.  Assistant editor - it sounded quite good, especially to the creditors in the neighbourhood.  And for a while I was do happy to be eating roast beef and chicken and tenderloins of pork that I pretended I liked the job.  Actually it was difficult for me to keep awake.  What I had to learn I had learned in a week's time.  And after that?  After that I saw myself doing penal servitude for life.  In order to make the best of it I whiled away the time writing stories and essays and long letters to my friends.  Perhaps they thought I was writing up new ideas for the company, because for quite a while nobody paid any attention to me.  I thought it was a wonderful job.  I had almost the whole day to myself, for my writing, having learned to dispose of the company's work in about an hour's time.  I was so enthusiastic about my own private work that I gave orders to my underlings not to disturb me except at stipulated moments.  I was sailing along like a breeze, the company paying me regularly and the slave drivers doing the work I had mapped out for them, when one day, just when I am in the midst of an important essay on The Anti-Christ, a man whom I had never seen before walks up to my desk, bends over my shoulder, and in a sarcastic tone of voice begins to read aloud what I had just written.  I didn't need to inquire who he was or what he was up to - the only thought in my head was, and that I repeated to myself frantically - Will I get an extra week's pay?  When it came time to bid good-bye to my benefactor I felt a little ashamed of myself, particularly when he said, right off the bat like - "I tried to get you an extra week's pay but they wouldn't hear of it.  I wish there was something I could do for you - you're only standing in your own way, you know.  To tell you the truth, I still have the greatest faith in you - but I'm afraid you're going to have a hard time of it, for a while.  You don't fit in anywhere.  Some day you'll make a great writer, I feel sure of it.  Well, excuse me," he added, shaking hands with me warmly, "I've got to see the boss.  Good luck to you!"

      I felt a bit cut up about the incident.  I wished it had been possible to prove to him then and there that his faith was justified.  I wished I could have justified myself before the whole world at that moment: I would have jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge if it would have convinced people that I wasn't a heartless son of a bitch.  I had a heart as big as a whale, as I was soon to prove, but nobody was examining into my heart.  Everybody was being let down hard - not only the instalment companies, but the landlord, the butcher, the baker, the gas, water and electricity devils, everybody.  If only I could get to believe in this business of work!  To save my life I couldn't see it.  I could only see that people were working their balls off because they didn't know any better.  I thought of the speech I had made which won me the job.  In some ways I was very much like Herr Nagel myself.  No telling from minute to minute what I would do.  No knowing whether I was a monster or a saint.  Like so many wonderful men of our time, Herr Nagel was a desperate man - and it was this very desperation which made him such a likeable chap.  Hamsun didn't know what to make of this character himself: he knew he existed, and he knew that there was something more to him than a mere buffoon and a mystifier.  I think he loved Herr Nagel more than any other character he created.  And why?  Because Herr Nagel was the unacknowledged saint which every artist is - the man who is ridiculed because his solutions, which are truly profound, seem too simple for the world.  No man wants to be an artist - he is driven to it because the world refuses to recognize his proper leadership.  Work meant nothing to me, because the real work to be done was being evaded.  People regarded me as lazy and shiftless, but on the contrary I was an exceedingly active individual.  Even if it was just hunting for a piece of tail, that was something, and well worth while, especially if compared to other forms of activity - such as making buttons or turning screws, or even removing appendixes.  And why did people listen to me so readily when I applied for a job?  Why did they find me entertaining?  For the reason, no doubt, that I had always spent my time profitably.  I brought them gifts - from my hours at the public library, from my idle ramblings through the streets, from my intimate experiences with women, from my afternoons at the burlesque, from my visits to the museum and the art galleries.  Had I been a dud, just a poor honest bugger who wanted to work his balls off for so much a week, they wouldn't have offered me the jobs they did, nor would they have handed me cigars or taken me to lunch or lent me money, as they frequently did.  I must have had something to offer which perhaps unknowingly they prized beyond horsepower or technical ability.  I didn't know myself what it was, because I had neither pride, nor vanity, nor envy.  About the big issues I was clear, but confronted by the petty details of life I was bewildered.  I had to witness this same bewilderment on a colossal scale before I could grasp what it was all about.  Ordinary men are often quicker in sizing up the practical situation: their ego is commensurate with the demands made upon it: the world is not very different from what they imagine it to be.  But a man who is completely out of step with the rest of the world is either suffering from a colossal inflation of his ego or else the ego is so submerged as to be practically non-existent.  Herr Nagel had to dive off the deep end in search of his true ego; his existence was a mystery, to himself and to everyone else.  I couldn't afford to leave things hanging in suspense that way - the mystery was too intriguing.  Even if I had to rub myself like a cat against every human being I encountered, I was going to get to the bottom of it.  Rub long enough and hard enough and the spark will come!

      The hibernation of animals, the suspension of life practised by certain low forms of life, the marvellous vitality of the bedbug which lies in wait endlessly behind the wallpaper, the trance of the Yogi, the catalepsy of the pathologic individual, the mystic's union with the cosmos, the immortality of cellular life, all these things the artist learns in order to awaken the world at the propitious moment.  The artist belongs to the X root race of man; he is the spiritual microbe, as it were, which carries over from one root race to another.  He is not crushed by misfortune, because he is not a part of the physical, racial scheme of things.  His appearance is always synchronous with catastrophe and dissolution; he is the cyclical being which lives in the epicycle.  The experience which he acquires is never used for personal ends; it serves the larger purpose to which he is geared.  Nothing is lost on him, however trifling.  If he is interrupted for twenty-five years in the reading of a book he can go on from the page where he left off as though nothing had happened in between.  Everything that happens in between, which is "life" to most people, is merely an interruption in his forward round.  The eternality of his work, when he expresses himself, is merely the reflection of the automatism of life in which he is obliged to lie dormant, a sleeper on the back of sleep, waiting for the signal which will announce the moment of birth.  This is the big issue, and this was always clear to me, even when I denied it.  The dissatisfaction which drives one on from one word to another, one creation to another, is simply a protest against the futility of postponement.  The more awake one becomes, as artistic microbe, the less desire one has to do anything.  Fully awake, everything is just and there is no need to come out of the trance.  Action, as expressed in creating a work of art, is a concession to the automatic principle of death.  Drowning myself in the Gulf of Mexico I was able to partake of an active life which would permit the real self to hibernate until I was ripe to be born.  I understood it perfectly, though I acted blindly and confusedly.  I swam back into the stream of human activity until I got to the source of all action and there I muscled in, calling myself personnel director of a telegraph company, and allowed the tide of humanity to wash over me like great white-capped breakers.  All this active life, preceding the final act of desperation, led me from doubt to doubt, blinding me more and more to the real self which, like a continent choked with the evidences of a great and thriving civilization, had already sunk beneath the surface of the sea.  The colossal ego was submerged, and what people observed moving frantically above the surface was the periscope of the soul searching for its target.  Everything that came within range had to be destroyed, if I were ever to rise again and ride the waves.  This monster which rose now and then to fix its target with deadly aim, which dove again and roved and plundered ceaselessly would, when the time came, rise for the last time to reveal itself as an ark, would gather unto itself a pair of each kind and at last, when the floods abated, would settle down on the summit of a lofty mountain peak thence to open wide its doors and return to the world what had been preserved from the catastrophe.

      If I shudder now and then, when I think of my active life, if I have nightmares, possibly it is because I think of all the men I robbed and murdered in my day sleep.  I did everything which my nature bade me to do.  Nature is eternally whispering in one's ear - "if you would survive you must kill!"  Being human, you kill not like the animal but automatically, and the killing is disguised and its ramifications are endless, so that you kill without even thinking about it, you kill without need.  The men who are the most honoured are the greatest killers.  They believe that they are serving their fellowmen, and they are sincere in believing so, but they are heartless murderers and at moments, when they come awake, they realize their crimes and perform frantic, quixotic acts of goodness in order to expiate their guilt.  The goodness of man stinks more than the evil which is in him, for the goodness is not yet acknowledged, not an affirmation of the conscious self.  Being pushed over the precipice, it is easy at the last moment to surrender to one's possessions, to turn and extend a last embrace to all who are left behind.  How are we to stoop the blind rush?  How are we to stop the automatic process, each one pushing the other over the precipice?

      As I sat at my desk, over which I had put up a sign reading "Do not abandon all hope ye who enter here!" - as I sat there saying Yes, No, Yes, No, I realized, with a despair that was turning to white frenzy, that I was a puppet in whose hands society had placed a Gatling gun.  If I performed a good deed it was no different, ultimately, than if I had performed a bad deed.  I was like a equals sign through which the algebraic swarm of humanity was passing.  I was a rather important, active equals sign, like a general in time of war, but no matter how competent I were to become I could never change into a plus or a minus sign.  Nor could anyone else, as far as I could determine.  Our whole life was built up on this principle of equation.  The integers had become symbols which were shuffled about in the interests of death.  Pity, despair, passion, hope, courage - these were the temporal refractions caused by looking at equations from varying angles.  To stop the endless juggling by turning one's back on it, or by facing it squarely and writing about it, would be no help either.  In a hall of mirrors there is no way to turn your back on yourself.  I will not do this.  I will do some other thing!  Very good.  But can you do nothing at all?  Can you stop thinking about not doing anything?  Can you stop dead and, without thinking, radiate the truth which you know?  That was the idea which lodged in the back of my head and which burned and burned, and perhaps when I was most expansive, most radiant with energy, most sympathetic, most willing, helpful, sincere, good, it was this fixed idea which was shining through, and automatically I was saying - "why, don't mention it ... nothing at all, I assure you ... no, please don't thank me, it's nothing", etc. etc.  From firing the gun so many hundreds of times a day perhaps I didn't even notice the detonations anymore; perhaps I thought I was opening pigeon traps and filling the sky with milky white fowl.  Did you ever see a synthetic monster on the screen, a Frankenstein realized in flesh and blood?  Can you imagine how he might be trained to pull a trigger and see pigeons flying at the same time?  Frankenstein is not a myth: Frankenstein is a very real creation born of the personal experience of a sensitive human being.  The monster is always more real when it does not assume the proportions of flesh and blood.  The monster of the screen is nothing compared to the monster of the imagination; even the existent pathologic monsters who find their way into the police station are but feeble demonstrations of the monstrous reality which the pathologist lives with.  But to be the monster and the pathologist at the same time - that is reserved for certain species of men who, disguised as artists, are supremely aware that sleep is an even greater danger than insomnia.  In order not to fall asleep, in order not to become victims of that insomnia which is called "living", they resort to the drug of putting words together endlessly.  This is not an automatic process, they say, because there is always present the illusion that they can stop it at will.  But they cannot stop; they have only succeeded in creating an illusion, which is perhaps a feeble something, but it is far from being wide awake and neither active nor inactive.  I wanted to be wide awake without talking or writing about it, in order to accept life absolutely.  I mentioned the archaic men in the remote places of the world with whom I was communicating frequently.  Why did I think these "savages" more capable of understanding me than the men and women who surrounded me?  Was I crazy to believe such a thing?  I don't think so in the least.  These "savages" are the degenerate remnants of earlier races of man who, I believe, must have had a greater hold on reality.  The immortality of the race is constantly before our eyes in these specimens of the past who linger on in withered splendour.  Whether the human race is immortal or not is not my concern, but the vitality of the race does mean something to me, and that it should be active or dormant means even more.  As the vitality of the new race banks down  the vitality of the old race manifests itself in the waking mind with greater and greater significance.  The vitality of the old race lingers on even in death, but the vitality of the new race which is about to die seems already nonexistent.  If a man were taking a swarming hive of bees to the river to drown them.... That was the image I carried about in me.  If only I were the man, and not the bee!  In some vague, inexplicable way I knew that I was the man, that I should not be drowned in the hive, like the others.  Always, when we came forward in a group, I was signalled to stand apart; from birth I was favoured that way, and, no matter what tribulations I went through, I knew they were not fatal or lasting.  Also, another strange thing took place in me whenever I was called to stand forth.  I knew that I was superior to the man who was summoning me!  The tremendous humility which I practised was not hypocritical but a condition provoked by the realization of the fateful character of the situation.  The intelligence which I possessed, even as a stripling, frightened me; it was the intelligence of a "savage", which is always superior to that of civilized men in that it is more adequate to the exigencies of circumstance.  It is a life intelligence, even though life has seemingly passed them by.  I felt almost as if I had been shot forward into a round of existence which for the rest of mankind had not yet attained its full rhythm.  I was obliged to mark time if I were to remain with them and not be shunted off to another sphere of existence.  On the other hand, I was in many ways lower than the human beings about me.  It was as though I had come out of the fires of hell not entirely purged.  I had still a tail and a pair of horns, and when my passions were aroused I breathed a sulphurous poison which was annihilating.  I was always called a "lucky devil".  The good that happened to me was called "luck", and the evil was always regarded as a result of my shortcomings.  Rather, as the fruit of my blindness.  Rarely did anyone ever spot the evil in me!  I was as adroit, in this respect, as the devil himself.  But that I was frequently blind, everybody could see that.  And at such times I was left alone, shunned, like the devil himself.  Then I left the world, returned to the fires of hell - voluntarily.  These comings and goings are as real to me, more real, in fact, than anything that happened in between.  The friends who think they know me know nothing about me for the reason that the real me changed hands countless times.  Neither the men who thanked me, nor the men who cursed me, knew with whom they were dealing.  Nobody ever got on to a solid footing with me, because I was constantly liquidating my personality.  I was keeping what is called the "personality" in abeyance for the moment when, leaving it to coagulate, it would adopt a proper human rhythm.  I was hiding my face until the moment when I would find myself in step with the world.  All this was, of course, a mistake.  Even the role of artist is worth adopting, while marking time.  Acting is important, even if it entails futile activity.  One should not say Yes, No, Yes, No, even seated in the highest place.  One should not be drowned in the human tidal wave, even for the sake of becoming a Master.  One must beat with his own rhythm - at any price.  I accumulated thousands of years of experience in a few short years, but the experience was wasted because I had no need of it.  I had already been crucified and marked by the cross; I had been born free of the need to suffer - and yet I knew no other way to struggle forward than to repeat the drama.  All my intelligence was against it.  Suffering is futile, my intelligence told me over and over, but I went on suffering voluntarily.  Suffering has never taught me a thing; for others it may still be necessary, but for me it is nothing more than an algebraic demonstration of spiritual inadaptability.  The whole drama which the man of today is acting out through suffering does not exist for me: it never did, actually.  All my Calvaries were rosy crucifixions, pseudo-tragedies to keep the fires of hell burning brightly for the real sinners who are in danger of being forgotten.

      Another thing ... the mystery which enveloped my behaviour grew deeper the nearer I came to the circle of uterine relatives.  The mother from whose loins I sprang was a complete stranger to me.  To begin with, after giving birth to me she gave birth to my sister, whom I usually refer to as my brother.  My sister was a sort of harmless monster, an angel who had been given the body of an idiot.  It gave me a strange feeling, as a boy, to be growing up and developing side by side with this being who was doomed to remain all her life a mental dwarf.  It was impossible to be a brother to her because it was impossible to regard this atavistic hulk of a body as a "sister".  She would have functioned perfectly, I imagine, among the Australian primitives.  She might even have been raised to power and eminence among them, for, as I said, she was the essence of goodness, she knew no evil.  But so far as living the civilized life goes she was helpless; she not only had no desire to kill but she had no desire to thrive at the expense of others.  She was incapacitated for work, because even if they had been able to train her to make caps for high explosives, for example, she might absent-mindedly throw her wages in the river on the way home or she might give them to a beggar on the street.  Often in my presence she was whipped like a dog for having performed some beautiful act of grace in her absent-mindedness, as they called it.  Nothing was worse, I learned as a child, than to do a good deed without reason.  I had received the same punishment as my sister, in the beginning, because I too had a habit of giving things away, especially new things which had just been given me.  I had even received a beating once, at the age of five, for having advised my mother to cut a wart off her finger.  She had asked me what to do about it one day and, with my limited knowledge of medicine, I told her to cut it off with the scissors, which she did, like an idiot.  A few days later she got blood poisoning and then she got hold of me and she said - "you told me to cut it off, didn't you?" and she gave me a sound trashing.  From that day on I knew that I was born in the wrong household.  From that day on I leaned like lightning.  Talk about adaptation!  By the time I was ten I had lived out the whole theory of evolution.  And there I was, evolving through all the phases of animal life and yet chained to this creature called my "sister" who was evidently a primitive being and who would never, even at the age of ninety, arrive at a comprehension of the alphabet.  Instead of growing up like a stalwart tree I began to lean to one side, in complete defiance of the law of gravity.  Instead of shooting out limbs and leaves I grew windows and turrets.  The whole being, as it grew, was turning into stone, and the higher I shot up the more I defied the law of gravity.  I was a phenomenon in the midst of the landscape, but one which attracted people and elicited praise.  If the mother who bore us had only made another effort perhaps a marvellous white buffalo might have been born and the three of us might have been permanently installed in a museum and protected for life.  The conversations which took place between the leaning tower of Pisa, the whipping post, the snoring machine and the pterodactyl in human flesh were, to say the least, a bit queer.  Anything might be the subject of conversation - a bread crumb which the "sister" had overlooked in brushing the tablecloth or Joseph's coat of many colours which, in the old man's tailoring brain, might have been either double-breasted or cutaway or frock.  If I came from the ice pond, where I had been skating all afternoon, the important thing was not the ozone which I had breathed free of charge, nor the geometric convolutions which were strengthening my muscles, but the little spot of rust under the clamps which, if not rubbed off immediately, might deteriorate the whole skate and bring about the dissolution of some pragmatic value which was incomprehensible to my prodigal turn of thought.  This little rust spot, to take a trifling example, might entertain the most hallucinating results.  Perhaps the "sister", in searching for the kerosene can, might overturn the jar of prunes which were being stewed and thus endanger all our lives by robbing us of the required calories in the morrow's meal.  A severe beating would have to be given, not in anger, because that would disturb the digestive apparatus, but silently and efficiently, as a chemist would beat up the white of an egg in preparation for a minor analysis.  But the "sister", not understanding the prophylactic nature of the punishment, would give vent to the most blood-curdling screams and this would so affect the old man that he would go out for a walk and return two or three hours later blind drunk and, what was worse, scratching a little paint of the rolling doors in his blind staggers.  The little piece of paint that had been chipped off would bring on a battle royal which was very bad for my dream life, because in my dream life I frequently changed places with my sister, accepting the tortures inflicted upon her and nourishing them with my supersensitive brain.  It was in these dreams, always accompanied by the sound of glass breaking, of shrieks, curses, groans and sobs, that I gathered an unformulated knowledge of the ancient mysteries, of the rites of initiation, of the transmigration of souls and so on.  It might begin with a scene from real life - the sister standing by the blackboard in the kitchen, the mother towering over her with a ruler, saying two and two makes how much? and the sister screaming five.  Bang! no, seven, Bang! no, thirteen, eighteen, twenty!  I would be sitting at the table, doing my lessons, just as in real life during these scenes, when by a slight twist or squirm, perhaps as I saw the ruler come down on the sister's face, suddenly I would be in another realm where glass was unknown, as it was unknown to the Kickapoos or the Lenni-Lenape.  The faces of those about me were familiar - they were my uterine relatives who, for some mysterious reason, failed to recognize me in this new ambiance.  They were garbed in black and the colour of their skin was ash grey, like that of the Tibetan devils.  They were all fitted out with knives and other instruments of torture: they belonged to the caste of sacrificial butchers.  I seemed to have absolute liberty and the authority of a god, and yet by some capricious turn of events the end would be that I would be lying on the sacrificial block and one of my charming uterine relatives would be bending over me which a gleaming knife to cut out my heart.  In sweat and terror I would begin to recite "my lessons" in a high, screaming voice, faster and faster, as I felt the knife searching for my heart.  Two and two is four, five and five is ten, earth, air, fire, water, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, Meocene, Pleocene, Eocene, the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost, Asia, Africa, Europe, Australia, red, blue, yellow, the sorrel, the persimmon, the pawpaw, the catalpa ... faster and faster ... Odin, Wotan, Parsifal, King Alfred, Frederick the Great, the Hanseatic League, the Battle of Hastings, Thermopylae, 1492, 1776, 1812, Admiral Farragut, Pickett's charge, The Light Brigade, we are gathered here today, the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not, one and indivisible, no, 16, no, 27, help! murder! police! - and yelling louder and louder and going faster and faster I go completely off my nut and there is no more pain, no more terror, even though they are piercing me everywhere with knives.  Suddenly I am absolutely calm and the body which is lying on the block, which they are still gouging with glee and ecstasy, feels nothing because I, the owner of it, have escaped.  I have become a tower of stone which leans over the scene and watches with scientific interest.  I have only to succumb to the law of gravity and I will fall on them and obliterate them.  But I do not succumb to the law of gravity because I am too fascinated by the horror of it all.  I am so fascinated, in fact, that I grow more and more windows.  And as the light penetrates the stone interior of my being I can feel that my roots, which are in the earth, are alive and that I shall one day be able to remove myself at will from this trance in which I am fixed.

      So much for the dream, in which I am helplessly rooted.  But in actuality, when the dear uterine relatives come, I am as free as a bird and darting to and fro like a magnetic needle.  If they ask me a question I give them five answers, each of which is better than the other; if they ask me to play a waltz I play a double-breasted sonata for the left hand; if they ask me to help myself to another leg of chicken I clean up the plate, dressing and all; if they urge me to go out and play in the street I go out and in my enthusiasm I cut my cousin's head open with a tin can; if they threaten to give me a thrashing I say go to it, I don't mind!  If they pat me on the head for my good progress at school I spit on the floor to show that I have still something to learn.  I do everything they wish me to do plus.  If they wish me to be quiet and say nothing I become as quiet as a rock: I don't hear when they speak to me, I don't move when I'm touched, I don't cry when I'm pinched, I don't budge when I'm pushed.  If I complain that I'm stubborn I become as pliant and yielding as rubber.  If they wish me to get fatigued so that I will not display too much energy I let them give me all kinds of work to do and I do the jobs so thoroughly that I collapse on the floor finally like a sack of wheat.  If they wish me to be reasonable I become ultra-reasonable, which drives them crazy.  If they wish me to obey I obey to the letter, which causes endless confusion.  And all this because the molecular life of brother and sister is incompatible with the atomic weights which have been allotted to us.  Because she doesn't grow at all I grow like a mushroom; because she has no personality I become a colossus; because she is free of evil I become a thirty-two branched candelabra of evil; because she demands nothing of anyone I demand everything; because she inspires ridicule everywhere I inspire fear and respect; because she is humiliated and tortured I wreak vengeance upon everyone, friend and foe alike; because she is helpless I make myself all-powerful.  The gigantism from which I suffered was simply the result of an effort to wipe out the little stain of rust which had attached itself to the family skate, so to speak.  That little stain of rust under the clamps made me a champion skater.  It made me skate so fast and furiously that even when the ice had melted I was still skating, skating through mud, through asphalt, through brooks and rivers and melon patches and theories of economics and so forth.  I could skate through hell, I was that fast and nimble.

      But all this fancy skating was of no use - Father Coxcox, the pan-American Noah, was always calling me back to the Ark.  Every time I stopped skating there was a cataclysm - the earth opened up and swallowed me.  I was a brother to every man and at the same time a traitor to myself.  I made the most astounding sacrifices, only to find that they were of no value.  Of what use was it to prove that I could be what was expected of me when I did not want to be any of these things?  Every time you come to the limit of what is demanded of you, you are faced with the same problem - to be yourself!  And with the first step you make in this direction you realize that there is neither plus nor minus; you throw the skates away and swim.  There is no suffering anymore because there is nothing which can threaten your security.  And there is no desire to be of help to others even, because why rob them of a privilege which must be earned?  Life stretches out from moment to moment in stupendous infinitude.  Nothing can be more real than what you suppose it to be.  Whatever you think the cosmos to be it is and it could not possibly be anything else as long as you are you and I am I.  You live in the fruits of your action and your action is the harvest of your thought.  Thought and action are one, because swimming you are in it and of it, and it is everything you desire it to be, no more, no less.  Every stroke counts for eternity.  The heating and cooling system is one system, and Cancer is separated from Capricorn only by an imaginary line.  You don't become ecstatic and you are not plunged into violent grief; you don't pray for rain, neither do you dance a jig.  You live like a happy rock in the midst of the ocean: you are fixed while everything about you is in turbulent motion.  You are fixed in a reality which permits the thought that nothing is fixed, that even the happiest and mightiest rock will one day be utterly dissolved and fluid as the ocean from which it was born.

      This is the musical life which I was approaching by first skating like a maniac through all the vestibules and corridors which lead from the outer to the inner.  My struggles never brought me near it, nor did my furious activity, nor my rubbing elbows with humanity.  All that was simply a movement from vector to vector in a circle which, however the perimeter expanded, remained withal parallel to the realm I speak of.  The wheel of destiny can be transcended at any moment because at every point of its surface it touches the real world and only a spark of illumination is necessary to bring about the miraculous, to transform the skater to a swimmer and the swimmer to a rock.  The rock is merely an image of the act which stops the futile rotation of the wheel and plunges the being into full consciousness.  And full consciousness is indeed like an inexhaustible ocean which gives itself to sun and moon and also includes the sun and moon.  Everything which is is born out of the limitless ocean of light - even the night.

      Sometimes, in the ceaseless revolutions of the wheel, I caught a glimpse of the nature of the jump which it was necessary to make.  To jump clear of the clockwork - that was the liberating thought.  To be something more, something different, than the most brilliant maniac of the earth!  The story of man on earth bored me.  Conquest, even the conquest of evil, bored me.  To radiate goodness is marvellous, because it is tonic, invigorating, vitalizing.  But just to be is still more marvellous, because it is endless and requires no demonstration.  To be is music, which is a profanation of silence in the interest of silence, and therefore beyond good and evil.  Music is the manifestation of action without activity.  It is the pure act of creation swimming on its own bosom.  Music neither goads nor defends, neither seeks nor explains.  Music is the noiseless sound made by the swimmer in the ocean of consciousness.  It is a reward which can only be given by oneself.  It is the gift of the god which one is because he has ceased thinking about God.  It is an auger of the god which everyone will become in due time, when all that is will be beyond imagination.