CODA

 

      Not long ago I was walking the streets of New York.  Dear Old Broadway.  It was night and the sky was an Oriental blue, as blue as the gold in the ceiling of the Pagode, rue de Babylone, when the machine starts clicking.  I was passing exactly below the place where we first met.  I stood there a moment looking up at the red lights in the windows.  The music sounded as it always sounded - light, peppery, enchanting.  I was alone and there were millions of people around me.  It came over me, as I stood there, that I wasn't thinking of her anymore; I was thinking of this book which I am writing, and the book had become more important to me than her, than all that had happened to us.  Will this book be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God?  Plunging into the crowd again I wrestled with this question of "truth".  For years I have been trying to tell this story and always the question of truth has weighed upon me like a nightmare.  Time and again I have related to others the circumstances of our life, and I have always told the truth.  But the truth can also be a lie.  The truth is not enough.  Truth is only the core of a totality which is inexhaustible.

      I remember that the first time we were ever separated this idea of totality seized me by the hair.  She pretended, when she left me, or maybe she believed it herself, that it was necessary for our welfare.  I knew in my heart that she was trying to be free of me, but I was too cowardly to admit it to myself.  But when I realized that she could do without me, even for a limited time, the truth which I had tried to shut out began to grow with alarming rapidity.  It was more painful than anything I had ever experienced before, but it was also healing.  When I was completely emptied, when the loneliness had reached such a point that it could not be sharpened any further, I suddenly felt that, to go on living, this intolerable truth had to be incorporated into something greater than the frame of personal misfortune.  I felt that I had made an imperceptible switch into another realm, a realm of tougher, more elastic fibre, which the most horrible truth was powerless to destroy.  I sat down to write her a letter telling her that I was so miserable over the thought of losing her that I had decided to begin a book about her, a book which would immortalize her.  It would be a book, I said, such as no-one had ever seen before.  I rambled on ecstatically, and in the midst of it I suddenly broke off to ask myself why I was so happy.

     

      Passing beneath the dance hall, thinking again of this book, I realized suddenly that our life had come to an end: I realized that the book I was planning was nothing more than a tomb in which to bury her - and the me which had belonged to her.  That was some time ago, and ever since I have been trying to write it.  Why is it so difficult?  Why?  Because the idea of an "end" is intolerable to me.

 

      Truth lies in this knowledge of the end which is ruthless and remorseless.  We can know the truth and accept it, or we can refuse the knowledge of it and neither die nor be born again.  In this manner it is possible to live forever, a negative life as solid and complete, or as dispersed and fragmentary, as the atom.  And if we pursue this road far enough, even this atomic eternity can yield to nothingness and the universe itself fall apart.

      For years now I have been trying to tell this story; each time I have started out I have chosen a different route.  I am like an explorer who, wishing to circumnavigate the globe, deems it unnecessary to carry even a compass.  Moreover, from dreaming over it so long, the story itself has come to resemble a vast, fortified city, and I who dream it over and over am outside the city, a wanderer, arriving before one gate after another too exhausted to enter.  And as with the wanderer, this city in which my story is situated eludes me perpetually.  Always in sight it nevertheless remains unattainable, a sort of ghostly citadel floating in the clouds.  From the soaring, crenellated battlements flocks of huge white geese swoop down in steady, wedge-shaped formation.  With the tips of their blue-white wings they brush the dreams that dazzle my vision.  My feet move confusedly; no sooner do I gain a foothold than I am lost again.  I wander aimlessly, trying to gain a solid, unshakeable foothold whence I can command a view of my life, but behind me there lies only a welter of criss-crossed tracks, a groping, confused, encircling, the spasmodic gambit of the chicken whose head has just been lopped off.

      Whenever I try to explain to myself the peculiar pattern which my life has taken, when I reach back to the first cause, as it were, I think inevitably of the girl I first loved.  It seems to me that everything dates from that aborted affair.  A strange, masochistic affair it was, ridiculous and tragic at the same time.  Perhaps I had the pleasure of kissing her two or three times, the sort of kiss one reserves for a goddess.  Perhaps I saw her alone several times.  Certainly she could never have dreamed that for over a year I walked past her home every night hoping to catch a glimpse of her at the window.  Every night after dinner I would get up from the table and take the long route which led to her home.  She was never at the window when I passed and I never had the courage to stand in front of the house and wait.  Back and forth I passed, back and forth, but never hide nor hair of her.  Why didn't I write her?  Why didn't I call her up?  Once I remember summoning enough pluck to invite her to the theatre.  I arrived at her home with a bunch of violets, the first and only time I ever bought flowers for a woman.  As we were leaving the theatre the violets dropped from her corsage, and in my confusion I stepped on them.  I was thinking how awkward I was - it was only long afterwards that I recalled the smile she had given me as she stooped down to pick up the violets.

      It was a complete fiasco.  In the end I ran away.  Actually I was running away from another woman, but the day before leaving town I decided to see her once again.  It was mid-afternoon and she came out to talk to me in the street, in the little areaway which was fenced off.  She was already engaged to another man; she pretended to be happy about it but I could see, blind as I was, that she wasn't as happy as she pretended to be.  If I had only said the word I am sure she would have dropped the other fellow; perhaps she would even have gone away with me.  I preferred to punish myself.  I said good-bye nonchalantly and I went down the street like a dead man.  The next morning I was bound for the Coast, determined to start a new life.

      The new life was also a fiasco.  I ended up on a ranch in Chula Vista, the most miserable man that ever walked the earth.  There was this girl I loved and there was the other woman, for whom I felt only a profound pity.  I had been living with her for two years, this other woman, but it seemed like a lifetime.  I was twenty-one and she admitted to be thirty-six.  Every time I looked at her I said to myself - when I am thirty she will be forty-five, when I am forty she will be fifty-five.  She had fine wrinkles under the eyes, laughing wrinkles, but wrinkles just the same.  When I kissed her they were magnified a dozen times.  She laughed easily, but her eyes were sad, terribly sad.  They were Armenian eyes.  Her hair, which had been red once, was now a peroxide blonde.  Otherwise she was adorable - a Venusian body, a Venusian soul, loyal, loveable, grateful, everything a woman should be, except that she was fifteen years older.  The fifteen years' difference drove me crazy.  When I went out with her I thought only - how will it be ten years hence?  Or else, what age does she seem to have now?  Do I look old enough for her?  Once we got back to the house it was all right.  Climbing the stairs I would run my finger up her crotch, which used to make her whinny like a horse.  If her son, who was almost my age, were in bed we would close the doors and lock ourselves in the kitchen.  She'd lie on the narrow kitchen table and I'd slough it into her.  It was marvellous.  And what made it more marvellous was that with each performance I would say to myself - This is the last time ... tomorrow I will beat it!  And then, since she was the janitress, I would go down to the cellar and roll the ash barrels out for her.  In the morning, when the son had left for work, I would climb up to the roof and air the bedding.  Both she and the son had T.B.... Sometimes there were no table bouts.  Sometimes the hopelessness of it all got me by the throat and I would put on my things and go out for a walk.  Now and then I forgot to return.  And when I did that I was more miserable than ever, because I knew that she would be waiting for me with those large sorrowful eyes.  I'd go back to her like a man who had a sacred duty to perform.  I'd lie down on the bed and let her caress me; I'd study the wrinkles under her eyes and the roots of her hair which were turning red.  Lying there like that, I would often think about the other one, the one I loved, would wonder if she were lying down for it too, or ... Those long walks I took three hundred and sixty-five days of the year! - I would go over them in my mind lying beside the other woman.  How many times since have I relived these walks!  The dreariest, bleakest, ugliest streets man ever created.  In anguish I relive these walks, these streets, these first smashed hopes.  The window is there, but no Melisande; the garden too is there, but no sheen of gold.  Pass and repass, the window always vacant.  The evening star hangs low; Tristan appears, then Fidelio, and then Oberon.  The hydra-headed dog barks with all his mouths and though there are no swamps I hear the frogs croaking everywhere.  Same houses, same car lines, same everything.  She is hiding behind the curtain, she is waiting for me to pass, she is doing this or doing that.... but she is not there, never, never, never.  Is it a grand opera or is it a hurdy-gurdy playing?  It is Amato bursting his golden lung; it is the Rubaiyat, it is Mount Everest, it is a moonless night, it is a sob at dawn, it is a boy making believe, it is Puss in the Boot, it is Mauna Loa, it is fox or astrakhan, it is of no stuff and no time, it is endless and it begins over and over, under the heart, in the back of the throat, in the soles of the feet, and why not just once, just once, for the love of Christ, just a shadow or a rustle of the curtain, or a breath on the windowpane, something once, if only a lie, something to stop the pain, to stop this walking up and down, up and down.... Walking homeward.  Same houses, same lampposts, same everything.  I walk past my own home, past the cemetery, past the gas tanks, past the car barns, past the reservoir, out into the open country.  I sit beside the road with my head in my hands and sob.  Poor bugger that I am, I can't contract my heart enough to burst the veins.  I would like to suffocate with grief but instead I give birth to a rock.

      Meanwhile the other one is waiting.  I can see her again as she sat on the low stoop waiting for me, her eyes large and dolorous, her face pale and trembling with eagerness.  Pity I always thought it was brought me back, but now as I walk toward her and see the look in her eyes I don't know anymore what it is, only that we will go inside and lie together and she will get up half weeping, half laughing, and she will grow very silent and watch me, study me as I move about, and never ask me what is torturing me, never, never, because that is the one thing she fears, the one thing she dreads to know.  I don't love you!  Can't she hear me screaming it?  I don't love you!  Over and over I yell it, with lips tight, with hatred in my heart, with despair, with hopeless rage.  But the words never leave my lips.  I look at her and I am tongue-tied.  I can't do it.... Time, time, endless time on our hands and nothing to fill it but lies.

      Well, I don't want to rehearse the whole of my life leading up to the fatal moment - it is too long and too painful.  Besides, did my life really lead up to this culminating moment?  I doubt it.  I think there were innumerable moments when I had the chance the make a beginning, but I lacked the strength and the faith.  On the evening in question I deliberately walked out on myself: I walked right out of the old life and into the new.  There wasn't the slightest effort involved.  I was thirty then.  I had a wife and child and what is called a "responsible" position.  These are the facts and facts mean nothing.  The truth is my desire was so great it became a reality.  At such a moment what a man does is of no great importance, it's what he is that counts.  It's at such a moment that a man becomes an angel.  That is precisely what happened to me: I became an angel.  It is not the purity of an angel which is so valuable, as the fact it can fly.  An angel can break the pattern anywhere at any moment and find its heaven; it has the power to descend into the lowest matter and to extricate itself at will.  The night in question I understood it perfectly.  I was pure and inhuman, I was detached, I had wings.  I was depossessed of the past and I had no concern about the future.  I was beyond ecstasy.  When I left the office I folded my wings and hid them beneath my coat.

      The dance hall was just opposite the side entrance of the theatre where I used to sit in the afternoons instead of looking for work.  It was a street of theatres and I used to sit there for hours at a time dreaming the most violent dreams.  The whole theatrical life of New York was concentrated in that one street, so it seemed.  It was Broadway, it was success, fame, glitter, paint, the asbestos curtain and the hole in the curtain.  Sitting on the steps of the theatre I used to stare at the dance hall opposite, at the string of red lanterns which even in the summer afternoons were lit up.  In every window there was a spinning ventilator which seemed to waft the music into the street, where it was broken by the jangled din of traffic.  Opposite the other side of the dance hall was a comfort station and here too I used to sit now and then, hoping either to make a woman or make a touch.  Above the comfort station, on the street level, was a kiosk with foreign papers and magazines; the very sight of these papers, of the strange languages in which they were printed, was sufficient to dislocate me for the day.

      Without the slightest premeditation I climbed the stairs to the dance hall, went directly to the little window of the booth where Nick, the Greek, sat with a roll of tickets in front of him.  Like the urinal below and the steps of the theatre, this hand of the Greek now seems to me a separate and detached thing - the enormous hair hand of an ogre borrowed from some horrible Scandinavian fairy tale.  It was the hand which spoke to me always, the hand which said "Miss Mara will not be here tonight", or "Yes, Miss Mara is coming late tonight".  It was this hand which I dreamt of as a child when I slept in the bedroom with the barred window.  In my fevered sleep suddenly this window would light up, to reveal the ogre clutching at the bars.  Night after night the hairy monster visited me, clutching at the bars and gnashing its teeth.  I would awake in a cold sweat, the house dark, the room absolutely silent.

      Standing at the edge of the dance floor I notice her coming toward me; she is coming with sails spread, the large full face beautifully balanced on the long, columnar neck.  I see a woman perhaps eighteen, perhaps thirty, with blue-black hair and a large white face, a full white face in which the eyes shine brilliantly.  She has on a tailored blue suit of duveteen.  I remember distinctly now the fullness of her body, and that her hair was fine and straight, parted on one side, like a man's.  I remember the smile she gave me - knowing, mysterious, fugitive - a smile that sprang up suddenly, like a puff of wind.

      The whole being was concentrated in the face.  I could have taken just the head and walked home with it; I could have put it beside me at night, on a pillow, and made love to it.  The mouth and the eyes, when they opened up, the whole being glowed from them.  There was an illumination which came from some unknown source, from a centre hidden deep in the earth.  I could think of nothing but the face, the strange, womblike quality of the smile, the engulfing immediacy of it.  The smile was so painfully swift and fleeting that it was like the flash of a knife.  This smile, this face, was borne aloft on a long white neck, the sturdy, swanlike neck of the medium - and of the lost and the damned.

      I stand on the corner under the red lights, waiting for her to come down.  It is about two in the morning and she is signing off.  I am standing on Broadway with a flower in my buttonhole, feeling absolutely clean and alone.  Almost the whole evening we have been talking about Strindberg, about a character of his named Henriette.  I listened with such tense alertness that I fell into a trance.  It was as if, with the opening phrase, we had started on a race - in opposite directions.  Henriette!  Almost immediately the name was mentioned she began to talk about herself, without ever quite losing hold of Henriette.  Henriette was attached to her by a long, invisible string which she manipulated imperceptibly with one finger, like the street hawker who stands a little removed from the black cloth on the sidewalk, apparently indifferent to the little mechanism which is jiggling on the cloth, but betraying himself by the spasmodic movement of the little finger to which the black thread is attached.  Henriette is me, my real self, she seemed to be saying.  She wanted me to believe that Henriette was really the incarnation of evil.  She said it so naturally, so innocently, with an almost subhuman candour - how was I to believe that she meant it?  I could only smile as though to show her I was convinced.

      Suddenly I feel her coming.  I turn my head.  Yes, there she is coming full on, the sails spread, the eyes glowing.  For the first time I see now what a carriage she has.  She comes forward like a bird, a human bird wrapped in a soft fur.  The engine is going full steam: I want to shout, to give a blast that will make the whole world cock its ears.  What a walk!  It's not a walk, it's a glide.  Tall, stately, full-bodied, self-possessed, she cuts the smoke and jazz and red-light glow like the queen mother of all the slippery Babylonian whores.  On the corner of Broadway just opposite the comfort station, this is happening.  Broadway - it's her realm.  This is Broadway, this is New York, this is America.  She's America on foot, winged and sexed.  She is the lubet, the abominate and the sublimate - with a dash of hydrochloric acid, nitro-glycerine, laudanum and powdered onyx.  Opulence she has, and magnificence; it's America right or wrong, and the ocean on either side.  For the first time in my life the whole continent hits me full force, hits me between the eyes.  This is America, buffaloes or no buffaloes, America the enemy wheel of hope and disillusionment.  Whatever made America made her, bone, blood, muscle, eyeball, gait, rhythm, poise, confidence, brass and hollow gut.  She's almost on top of me, the full face gleaming like calcium.  The big soft fur is slipping from her shoulder.  She doesn't notice it.  She doesn't seem to care if her clothes should drop off.  She doesn't give a fuck about anything.  It's America moving like a streak of lightning toward the glass warehouse of red-blooded hysteria.  America, fur or no fur, shoes or no shoes.  America C.O.D.  And scram you bastards before we plug you!  It's got me in the guts, I'm quaking.  Something's coming to me and there's no dodging it.  She's coming head on, through the plate glass window.  If she would only stop a second, if she would only let me be for just one moment.  But no, not a single moment does she grant me.  Swift, ruthless, imperious, like Fate itself she is on me, a sword cutting me through and through....

      She has me by the hand, she holds it tight.  I walk beside her without fear.  Inside me the stars are twinkling' inside me a great blue vault where a moment ago the engines were pounding furiously.

      One can wait a whole lifetime for a moment like this.  The woman whom you never hoped to meet now sits before you, and she talks and looks exactly like the person you dreamed about.  But strangest of all is that you never realized before that you had dreamed about her.  Your whole past is like a long sleep which would have been forgotten had there been no dream.  And the dream too might have been forgotten had there been no memory, but remembrance is there in the blood and the blood is like an ocean in which everything is washed away but that which is new and more substantial even than life: REALITY.

      We are seated in a little booth in the Chinese restaurant across the way.  Out of the corner of my eye I catch the flicker of the illuminated letters running up and down the sky.  She is still talking bout Henriette, or maybe it is about herself.  Her little black bonnet, her bag and fur are lying beside her on the bench.  Every few minutes she lights a fresh cigarette which burns away as she talks.  There is no beginning nor end; it spurts out of her like a flame and consumes everything within reach.  No knowing how or where she began.  Suddenly she is in the midst of a long narrative, a fresh one, but it is always the same.  Her talk is as formless as dream: there are no grooves, no walls, no exists, no stops.  I have the feeling of being drowned in a deep mesh of words, of crawling painfully back to the top of the net, of looking into her eyes and trying to find there some reflection of the significance of her words - but I can find nothing, nothing except my own image wavering in a bottomless well.  Though she speaks of nothing but herself I am unable to form the slightest image of her being.  She leans forward, with elbows on the table, and her words inundate me; wave after wave rolling over me and yet nothing builds up inside me, nothing that I can seize with my mind.  She's telling me about her father, about the strange life they led at the edge of Sherwood Forest where she was born, or at least she was telling me about this, but now it's about Henriette again, or is it Dostoyevsky? - I'm not sure - but anyway, suddenly I realize that she's not talking about any of these anymore but about a man who took her home one night and as they stood on the stoop saying goodnight he suddenly reached down and pulled up her dress.  She pauses a moment as though to reassure me that this is what she means to talk about.  I look at her bewilderedly.  I can't imagine by what route we got to this point.  What man?  What had he been saying to her?  I let her continue, thinking that she will probably come back to it, but no, she's ahead of me again and now it seems the man, this man, is already dead, a suicide, and she is trying to make me understand that it was an awful blow to her, but what she really seems to convey is that she is proud of the fact that she drove a man to suicide.  I can't picture the man as dead; I can only think of him as he stood on her stoop lifting her dress, a man without a name but alive and perpetually fixed in the act of bending down to lift up her dress.  There is another man who was her father and I see him with a string of race horses, or sometimes in a little inn just outside Vienna; rather I see him on the roof of the inn flying kites to while away the time.  And between this man who was her father and the man with whom she was madly in love I can make no separation.  He is someone in her life about whom she would rather not talk, but just the same she comes back to him all the time, and though I'm not sure that it was not the man who lifted up her dress neither am I sure that it wasn't the man who committed suicide.  Perhaps it's the man whom she started to talk about when we sat down to eat.  Just as we were sitting down I remember now that she began to talk rather hectically about a man whom she had just seen entering the cafeteria.  She even mentioned his name, but I forgot it immediately.  But I remember her saying that she had lived with him and that he had done something which she didn't like - she didn't say what - and so she had walked out on him, left him flat, without a word of explanation.  And then, just as we were entering the chop suey joint, they ran into each other and she was still trembling over it as we sat down in the little booth.... For one long moment I have the most uneasy sensation.  Maybe every word she uttered was a lie!  Not an ordinary lie, no, something worse, something indescribable.  Only sometimes the truth comes out like that too, especially if you think you're never going to see the person again.  Sometimes you can tell a perfect stranger what you would never dare reveal to your most intimate friend.  It's like going to sleep in the midst of a party; you become so interested in yourself that you go to sleep.  And when you're sound asleep you begin to talk to someone, someone who was in the same room with you all the time and therefore understands everything even though you begin in the middle of a sentence.  And perhaps this other person goes to sleep also, or was always asleep, and that's why it was so easy to encounter him, and if he doesn't say anything to disturb you then you know that what you are saying is real and true and that you are wide-awake and there is no other reality except this being wide-awake asleep.  Never before have I been so wide-awake and so sound asleep at the same time.  If the ogre in my dreams had really pushed the bars aside and taken me by the hand I would have been frightened to death and consequently now dead, that is, forever asleep and therefore always at large, and nothing would be strange anymore, nor untrue, even if what happened did not happen.  What happened must have happened long ago, in the night undoubtedly.  And what is now happening is also happening long ago, in the night, and this is no more true than the dream of the ogre and the bars which would not give, except that now the bars are broken and she whom I feared has me by the hand and there is no difference between that which I feared and what is, because I was asleep and now I am wide-awake asleep and there is nothing more to fear, nor to expect, nor to hope for, but just this which is and which knows no end.

      She wants to go.  To go.... Again her haunch, that slippery glide as when she came down from the dance hall and moved into me.  Again her words ... "suddenly for no reason at all, he bent down and lifted up my dress".  She's slipping the fur around her neck; the little black bonnet sets her face off like a cameo.  The round, full face, with Slavic cheekbones.  How could I dream this, never having seen it?  How could I know that she would rise like this, close and full, the face full white and blooming like a magnolia?  I tremble as the fullness of her thigh brushes me.  She seems even a little taller than I, though she is not.  It's the way she holds her chin.  She doesn't notice where she's walking.  She walks over things, on, on, with eyes wide open and staring into space.  No past, no future.  Even the present seems dubious.  The self seems to have left her, and the body rushes forward, the neck full and taut, white as the face, full like the face.  The talk goes on, in that low, throaty voice.  No beginning, no end.  I'm aware not of time nor the passing of time, but of timelessness.  She's got the little womb in the throat hooked up to the big womb in the pelvis.  The cab is at the curb and she is still chewing the cosmological chaff of the outer ego.  I pick up the speaking tube and connect with the double uterus.  Hello, hello, are you there?  Let's go!  Let's get on with it - cabs, boats, trains, naphtha launches, beaches, bedbugs, highways, byways, ruins; relics, old world, new world, pier, jetty; the high forceps, the swinging trapeze, the ditch, the delta, the alligators, the crocodiles, talk, talk, and more talk; then roads again and more dust in the eyes, more rainbows, more cloudbursts, more breakfast foods, more creams, more lotions.  And when all the roads have been traversed and there is left only the dust of our frantic feet there will still remain the memory of your large full face so white, and the wide mouth with fresh lips parted, the teeth chalk white and each one perfect, and in this remembrance nothing can possibly chance because this, like you teeth, is perfect....

     

      It is Sunday, the first Sunday of my new life, and I am wearing the dog collar you fastened around my neck.  A new life stretches before me.  It begins with the day of rest.  I lie back on a broad green leaf and I watch the sun bursting in your womb.  What a clabber and clatter it makes!  All this expressly for me, what?  If only you had a million suns in you!  If only I could lie here forever enjoying the celestial fireworks!

      I lie suspended over the surface of the moon.  The world is in a womblike trance: the inner and the outer ego are in equilibrium.  You promised me so much that if I never come out of this it will make no difference.  It seems to me that it is exactly 25,960 years since I have been asleep in the black womb of sex.  It seems to me that I slept perhaps 365 years too many.  But at any rate I am now in the right house, among the sixes, and what lies behind me is well and what lies ahead is well.  You come to me disguised as Venus, but you are Lilith, and I know it.  My whole life is in the balance; I will enjoy the luxury of this for one day.  Tomorrow I shall tip the scales.  Tomorrow the equilibrium will be finished; if I ever find it again it will be in the blood and not in the stars.  It is well that you promise me so much.  I need to be promised nearly everything, for I have lived in the shadow of the sun too long.  I want light and chastity - and a solar fire in the guts.  I want to be deceived and disillusioned so that I may complete the upper triangle and not be continually flying off the planet into space.  I believe everything you tell me, but I know also that it will all turn out differently.  I take you as a star and a trap, as a stone to tip the scales, as a judge that is blindfolded, as a hole to fall into, as a path to walk, as a cross and an arrow.  Up to the present I travelled the opposite way of the sun; henceforth I travel two ways, as sun and as moon.  Henceforth I take on two sexes, two hemispheres, two skies, two sets of everything.  Henceforth I shall be double-jointed and double-sexed.  Everything that happens will happen twice.  I shall be as a visitor to this earth, partaking of its blessings and carrying off its gifts.  I shall neither serve nor be served.  I shall seek the end in myself.

      I look out again at the sun - my first full gaze.  It is blood-red and men are walking about on the rooftops.  Everything above the horizon is clear to me.  It is like Easter Sunday.  Death is behind me and birth too.  I am going to live now among the life maladies.  I am going to live the spiritual life of the pygmy, the secret life of the little man in the wilderness of the bush.  Inner and outer have changed places.  Equilibrium is no longer the goal - the scales must be destroyed.  Let me hear you promise again all those sunny things you carry inside you.  Let me try to believe for one day, while I rest in the open, that the sun brings good tidings.  Let me rot in splendour while the sun bursts in your womb.  I believe all your lies implicitly.  I take you as the personification of evil, as the destroyer of the soul, as the maharanee of the night.  Tack your womb up on my wall, so that I may remember you.  We must get going.  Tomorrow, tomorrow....

 

                                                                                                                                September 1938

                                                                                                                                Villa Seurat, Paris