300,000 Swiss francs in the bank I was crazy
to enjoy myself, because in Russia they were always strict with me. And as I
was even more beautiful then than I am now I had all the men falling at my
feet." Here she hitched up the slack which had accumulated around her belt.
"You mustn't think I had a stomach like that when I came here ... that's from
all the poison I was given to drink ... those horrible aperitifs which
the French are so crazy to drink ... So then I met my movie director and he
wanted that I should play a part for him. He said I was the most gorgeous
creature in the world and he was begging me to sleep with him every night. I
was a foolish young virgin and so I permitted him to rape me one night. I
wanted to be a great actress and I didn't know that he was full of poison. So
he gave me the clap ... and now I want that he should have it back again.
It's all his fault that I committed suicide in the Seine ... Why are you
laughing? Don't you believe that I committed suicide? I can show you the
newspapers ... there is my picture in all the papers. I will show you the
Russian papers some day ... they wrote about me wonderfully ... But darling,
you know that first I must have a new dress. I can't vamp this man with these
dirty rags I am in. Besides, I still owe my dressmaker 12,000 francs ..."
From here on it's a long story about the inheritance which she is trying to
collect. She has a young lawyer, a Frenchman, who is rather timid, it seems,
and he is trying to win back her fortune. From time to time he used to give
her a hundred francs or so on account. "He's stingy, like all the French
people," she says. "And I was so beautiful, too, that he couldn't keep his
eyes off me. He kept begging me always to fuck him. I got so sick and tired
of listening to him that one night I said yes, just to keep him quiet, and
so as I wouldn't lose my hundred francs now and then." She paused a moment
to laugh hysterically. "My dear," she continued, "it was too funny for words
what happened to him. He calls me up on the phone one day and he says: "I
must see you right away ... it's very important." And when I see him he shows
me a paper from the doctor -- and it's gonorrhea! My dear, I laughed in his
face. How should I know that I still had the clap? "You wanted to fuck me and
so I fucked you!" That made him quiet. That's how it goes in life: you don't
suspect anything, and then all of a sudden paff, paff, paff! He was such a
fool that he fell in love with me all over again. Only he begged me to behave
myself and not run around Montparnasse all night drinking and fucking. He
said I was driving him crazy. He wanted to marry me and then his family heard
about me and they persuaded him to go to Indo-China ..."
From this Macha calmly switches to an affair she had with a Lesbian. "It was
very funny, my dear, how she picked me up one night. I was at the 'Fetiche'
and I was drunk as usual. She took me from one place to the other and she
made love to me under the table all night until I couldn't stand it any
more. Then she took me to her apartment and for two hundred francs I let her
suck me off. She wanted me to live with her but I didn't want to have her
suck me off every night ... it makes you too weak. Besides, I can tell you
that I don't care so much for Lesbians as I used to. I would rather sleep
with a man even though it hurts me. When I get terribly excited I can't hold
myself back any more ... three, four, five times ... just like that! Paff,
paff, paff! And then I bleed and that is very unhealthy for me because I am
inclined to be anaemic. So you see why once in a while I must let myself be
sucked by a Lesbian ..."
* * *
When the cold weather set in the princess disappeared. It was getting
uncomfortable with just a little coal stove in the studio; the bed-room was
like an ice-box and the kitchen was hardly any better. There was just a
little space around the stove where it was actually warm. So Macha had found
herself a sculptor who was castrated. She told us about him before she left.
After a few days she tried coming back to us, but Fillmore wouldn't hear of
it. She complained that the sculptor kept her awake all night kissing her.
And then there was no hot water for her douches. But finally she decided
that it was just as well she didn't come back. "I won't have that
candle-stick next to me any more," she said. "Always that candlestick ...
it made me nervous. If you had only been a fairy I would have stayed with
you ..."
With Macha gone our evenings took on a different character. Often we sat by
the fire drinking hot toddies and discussing the life back there in the
States. We talked about it as if we never expected to go back there again.
Fillmore had a map of New York City which he had tacked on the wall; we used
to spend whole evenings discussing the relative virtues of Paris and New
York. And inevitably there always crept into our discussions the figure of
Whitman, that one lone figure which America has produced in the course of
her brief life. In Whitman the whole American scene comes to life, her past
and her future, her birth and her death. Whatever there is of value in
America Whitman has expressed, and there is nothing more to be said. The
future belongs to the machine, to the robots. He was the Poet of the Body
and the Soul, Whitman. The first and the last poet. He is almost
undecipherable today, a monument covered with rude hieroglyphs for which
there is no key. It seems strange almost to mention his
name over here. There is no equivalent in the languages of Europe for the
spirit which he immortalized. Europe is saturated with art and her soil is
full of dead bones and her museums are bursting with plundered treasures,
but what Europe has never had is a free, healthy spirit, what you might call
a MAN. Goethe was the nearest approach, but Goethe was a stuffed shirt, by
comparison. Goethe was a respectable citizen, a pedant, a bore, a universal
spirit, but stamped with the German trade-mark, with the double eagle. The
serenity of Goethe, the calm, Olympian attitude, is nothing more than the
drowsy stupor of a German bourgeois deity. Goethe is an end of something.
Whitman is a beginning.
After a discussion of this sort I would sometimes put on my things and go
for a walk, bundled up in a sweater, a spring overcoat of Fillmore's and a
cape over that. A foul, damp cold against which there is no protection
except a strong spirit. They say America is a country of extremes, and it
is true that the thermometer registers degrees of cold which are practically
unheard of here; but the cold of a Paris winter is a cold unknown to
America, it is psychological, an inner as well as an outer cold. If it never
freezes here it never thaws either. Just as the people protect themselves
against the invasion of their privacy, by their high walls, their bolts and
shutters, their growling, evil-tongued, slatternly concierges, so they have
learned to protect themselves against the cold and heat of a bracing,
vigorous climate. They have fortified themselves: protection is the
keyword. Protection and security. In order that they may rot in comfort. On
a damp winter's night it is not necessary to look at the map to discover the
latitude of Paris. It is a northern city, an outpost erected over a swamp
filled in with skulls and bones. Along the boulevards there is a cold
electrical imitation of heat. Tout Va Bien in ultraviolet rays that
make the clients of the Dupont chain cafes look like gangrened cadavers.
Tout Via Bien! That's the motto that nourishes the forlorn beggars
who walk up and down all night under the drizzle of the violet rays.
Wherever there are lights there is a little heat. One gets warm from
watching the fat, secure bastards down their grogs, their steaming black
coffees.
Where the lights are there are people on the sidewalks, jostling one
another, giving off a little animal heat through their dirty underwear and
their foul, cursing breaths. Maybe for a stretch of eight or ten blocks
there is a semblance of gaiety, and then it tumbles back into night, dismal,
foul, black night like frozen fat in a soup tureen. Blocks and blocks of
jagged tenements, every window closed tight, every shop front barred and
bolted. Miles and miles of stone prisons without the faintest glow of
warmth; the dogs and the cats are all inside with the canary birds. The
cockroaches and the bedbugs too are safely incarcerated. Tout Va
Bien. If you haven't a sou why just take a few old newspapers and make
yourself a bed on the steps of a cathedral. The doors are well bolted and
there will be no draughts to disturb you. Better still is to sleep outside
the Metro doors; there you will have company. Look at them on a rainy night,
lying there stiff as mattresses -- men, women, lice, all huddled together and
protected by the newspapers against spittle and the vermin that walks
without legs. Look at them under the bridges or under the market sheds. How
vile they look in comparison with the clean, bright vegetables stacked up
like jewels. Even the dead horses and the cows and sheep hanging from the
greasy hooks look more inviting. At least we will eat these tomorrow and
even the intestines will serve a purpose. But these filthy beggars lying in
the rain, what purpose do they serve? what good can they do us? They make us
bleed for five minutes, that's all.
Oh, well, these are night thoughts produced by walking in the rain after two
thousand years of Christianity. At least now the birds are well provided
for, and the cats and dogs. Every time I pass the concierge's window and
catch the full icy impact of her glance I have an insane desire to throttle
all the birds in creation. At the bottom of every frozen heart there is a
drop or two of love -- just enough to feed the birds.
Still I can't get it out of my mind what a discrepancy there is between
ideas and living. A permanent dislocation, though we try to cover the two
with a bright awning. And it won't go. Ideas have to be wedded to action; if
there is no sex, no vitality in them, there is no action. Ideas cannot exist
alone in the vacuum of the mind. Ideas are related to living: liver ideas,
kidney ideas, interstitial ideas, etc. If it were only for the sake of an
idea Copernicus would not have smashed the existent macrocosm and Columbus
would have foundered in the Sargasso Sea. The aesthetics of the idea breeds
flower-pots and flower-pots you put on the window-sill. But if there be no
rain or sun of what use putting flower-pots outside the window?
Fillmore is full of ideas about gold. The "mythos" of gold, he calls it. I
like "mythos" and I like the idea of gold, but I am not obsessed by the
subject and I don't see why we should make flower-pots, even of gold. He
tells me that the French are hoarding their gold away in watertight
compartments deep below the surface of the earth; he tells me that there is a
little locomotive which runs around in these subterranean vaults and
corridors. I like the idea enormously. A profound, uninterrupted silence in
which the gold softly snoozes at a temperature of 17 ^ degrees Centigrade. He
says an army working 46 days and 37 hours would not be sufficient to count
all the gold that is sunk beneath the Bank of France, and that there is a
reserve supply of false teeth, bracelets, wedding rings, etc. Enough food
also to last for eighty days and a lake on top of the gold pile to resist the
shock of high explosives. Gold, he says, tends to become more and more
invisible, a myth, and no more defalcations. Excellent! I am wondering what
will happen to the world when we go off the gold standard in ideas, dress,
morals, etc. The gold standard of love!
Up to the present, my idea in collaborating with myself has been to get off
the gold standard of literature. My idea briefly has been to present a
resurrection of the emotions, to depict the conduct of a human being in the
stratosphere of ideas, that is, in the grip of delirium. To paint a
pre-Socratic being, a creature part goat, part Titan. In short, to erect a
world on the basis of the omphalos, not on an abstract idea nailed to
a cross. Here and there you may have come across neglected statues, oases
untapped, windmills overlooked by Cervantes, rivers that run uphill, women
with five and six breasts ranged longitudinally along the torso. (Writing to
Gauguin, Strindberg said: "J'ai vu des arbres que ne retrouverait aucun
botaniste, des animaux que Cuvier n'a jamais soupconnes et des hommes que
vous seul avez pu creer.")
When Rembrandt hit par he went below with the gold ingots and the pemmican
and the portable beds. Gold is a night word belonging to the chthonian mind:
it has dream in it and mythos. We are reverting to alchemy, to that fake
Alexandrian wisdom which produced our inflated symbols. Real wisdom is
being stored away in the sub-cellars by the misers of learning. The day is
coming when they will be circling around in the middle air with magnetizers;
to find a piece of ore you will have to go up ten thousand feet with a pair
of instruments -- in a cold latitude preferably -- and establish telepathic
communication with the bowels of the earth and the shades of the dead. No
more Klondikes. No more bonanzas. You will have to learn to sing and caper a
bit, to read the zodiac and study your entrails. All the gold that is being
tucked away in the pockets of the earth will have to be re-mined;
all this symbolism will have to be dragged out again from the bowels of men.
But first the instruments must be perfected. First it is necessary to
invent better airplanes, to distinguish where the noise comes from
and not go daffy just because you hear an explosion under your ass. And
secondly it will be necessary to get adapted to the cold layers of the
stratosphere, to become a cold-blooded fish of the air. No reverence. No
piety. No longing. No regrets. No hysteria. Above all, as Philippe Datz
says -- "NO DISCOURAGEMENT!"
These are sunny thoughts inspired by a Vermouth Cassis at the Place de la
Trinite. A Saturday afternoon and a "misfire" book in my hands. Everything
swimming in a divine mucopus. The drink leaves a bitter herbish taste in my
mouth, the lees of our great Western civilization, rotting now like the
toe-nails of the saints. Women are passing by -- regiments of them -- all
swinging their asses in front of me; the chimes are ringing and the buses
are climbing the sidewalk and bussing one another. The garcon wipes the
table with a dirty rag while the patronne tickles the cash-register
with fiendish glee. A look of vacuity on my face, blotto, vague in acuity,
biting the asses that brush by me. In the belfry opposite a hunchback
strikes with a golden mallet and the pigeons scream alarum. I open the book
-- the book which Nietzsche called "the best German book there is" -- and it
says:
"MEN WILL BECOME MORE CLEVER AND MORE ACUTE; BUT NOT BETTER, HAPPIER, AND
STRONGER IN ACTION ---- OR, AT LEAST, ONLY AT EPOCHS. I FORESEE THE TIME WHEN
GOD WILL HAVE NO MORE JOY IN THEM, BUT WILL BREAK UP EVERYTHING FOR A
RENEWED CREATION. I AM CERTAIN THAT EVERYTHING IS PLANNED TO THIS END, AND
THAT THE TIME AND HOUR IN THE DISTANT FUTURE FOR THE OCCURRENCE OF THIS
RENOVATING EPOCH ARE ALREADY FIXED. BUT A LONG TIME WILL ELAPSE FIRST, AND
WE MAY STILL FOR THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS OF YEARS AMUSE OURSELVES ON THIS
DEAR OLD SURFACE."
Excellent! At least a hundred years ago there was a man who had vision
enough to see that the world was pooped out. Our Western world! -- When
I see the figures of men and women moving listlessly behind their prison
walls, sheltered, secluded for a few brief hours, I am appalled by the
potentialities for drama that are still contained in these feeble bodies.
Behind the gray walls there are human sparks, and yet never a conflagration.
Are these men and women, I ask myself, or are these shadows, shadows of
puppets dangled by invisible strings? They move in freedom apparently, but
they have nowhere to go. In one realm only are they free and there they may
roam at will -- but they have not yet learned how to take wing. So far there
have been no dreams that have taken wing. Not one man has been born light
enough, gay enough, to leave the earth! The eagles who flapped their
mighty pinions for a while came crashing heavily to earth. They made us
dizzy with the flap and whir of their wings. Stay on the earth, you eagles
of the future! The heavens have been explored and they are empty. And what
lies under the earth is empty too, filled with bones and shadows. Stay on
the earth and swim another few hundred thousand years!
And now it is three o'clock in the morning and we have a couple of trollops
here who are doing somersaults on the bare floor. Fillmore is walking around
naked with a goblet in his hand, and that paunch of his is drumtight, hard as
a fistula. All the Pernod and champagne and cognac and Anjou which he guzzled
from three in the afternoon on, is gurgling in his trap like a sewer. The
girls are putting their ears to his belly as if it were a music-box. Open his
mouth with a button-hook and drop a slug in the slot. When the sewer gurgles
I hear the bats flying out of the belfry and the dream slides into artifice.
The girls have undressed and we are examining the floor to make sure that
they won't get any splinters in their ass. They are still wearing their
high-heeled shoes. But the ass! The ass is worn down, scraped, sandpapered,
smooth, hard, bright as a billiard ball or the skull of a leper. On the wall
is Mona's picture: she is facing northeast on a line with Cracow written in
green ink. To the left of her is the Dordogne, encircled with a red pencil.
Suddenly I see a dark, hairy crack in front of me set in a bright, polished
billiard ball; the legs are holding me like a pair of scissors. A glance at
that dark, unstitched wound and a deep fissure in my brain opens up: all the
images and memories that had been laboriously or absent-mindedly assorted,
labelled, documented, filed, sealed and stamped break forth pellmell like
ants pouring out of a crack in the sidewalk; the world ceases to revolve,
time stops, the very nexus of my dreams is broken and dissolved and my guts
spill out in a grand schizophrenic rush, an evacuation that leaves me face
to face with the Absolute. I see again the great sprawling mothers of
Picasso, their breasts covered with spiders, their legend hidden deep in the
labyrinth. And Molly Bloom lying on a dirty mattress for eternity. On the
toilet door red chalk cocks and the madonna uttering the diapason of woe. I
hear a wild, hysterical laugh, a room full of lockjaw, and the body that was
black glows like phosphorus. Wild, wild, utterly uncontrollable laughter,
and that crack laughing at me too, laughing through the mossy whiskers, a
laugh that creases the bright, polished surface of the billiard ball. Great
whore and mother of man with gin in her veins. Mother of all harlots, spider
rolling us in your logarithmic grave, insatiable one, fiend whose laughter
rives me! I look down into that sunken crater, world lost and without
traces, and I hear the bells chiming, two nuns at the Palace Stanislas and
the smell of rancid butter under their dresses, manifesto never printed
because it was raining, war fought to further the cause of plastic surgery,
the Prince of Wales flying around the world decorating the graves of unknown
heroes. Every bat flying out of the belfry a lost cause, every whoop-la a
groan over the radio from the private trenches of the damned. Out of that
dark, unstitched wound, that sink of abominations, that cradle of
black-thronged cities where the music of ideas is drowned in cold fat, out of
strangled Utopias is born a clown, a being divided between beauty and
ugliness, between light and chaos, a clown who when he looks down and
sidelong is Satan himself and when he looks upward sees a buttered angel, a
snail with wings.
When I look down into that crack I see an equation sign, the world at
balance, a world reduced to zero and no trace of remainder. Not the zero on
which Van Norden turned his flashlight, not the empty crack of the
prematurely disillusioned man, but an Arabian zero rather, the sign from
which spring endless mathematical worlds, the fulcrum which balances the
stars and the light dreams and the machines lighter than air and the
light-weight limbs and the explosives that produced them. Into that crack I
would like to penetrate up to the eyes, make them waggle ferociously, dear,
crazy, metallurgical eyes. When the eyes waggle then will I hear again
Dostoievski's words, hear them rolling on page after page, with minutest
observation, with maddest introspection, with all the undertones of misery
now lightly, humorously touched, now swelling like an organ note until the
heart bursts and there is nothing left but a blinding, scorching light, the
radiant light that carries off the fecundating seeds of the stars. The story
of art whose roots lie in massacre.
When I look down into this fucked-out cunt of a whore I feel the whole world
beneath me, a world tottering and crumbling, a world used up and polished
like a leper's skull. If there were a man who dared to say all that he
thought of this world there would not be left him a square foot of ground to
stand on. When a man appears the world bears down on him and breaks his
back. There are always too many rotten pillars left standing, too much
festering humanity for man to bloom. The superstructure is a lie and the
foundation is a huge quaking fear. If at intervals of centuries there does
appear a man with a desperate, hungry look in his eye, a man who would turn
the world upside down in order to create a new race, the love
that he brings to the world is turned to bile and he becomes a scourge. If
now and then we encounter pages that explode, pages that wound and sear,
that wring groans and tears and curses, know that they come from a man with
his back up, a man whose only defense left are his words and his words are
always stronger than the lying, crushing weight of the world, stronger than
all the racks and wheels which the cowardly invent to crush out the miracle
of personality. If any man ever dared to translate all that is in his
heart, to put down what is really his experience, what is truly his truth, I
think then the world would go to smash, that it would be blown to
smithereens and no god, no accident, no will could ever again assemble the
pieces, the atoms, the indestructible elements that have gone to make up the
world.
In the four hundred years since the last devouring soul appeared, the last
man to know the meaning of ecstasy, there has been a constant and steady
decline of man in art, in thought, in action. The world is pooped out: there
isn't a dry fart left. Who that has a desperate, hungry eye can have the
slightest regard for these existent governments, laws, codes, principles,
ideals, ideas, totems, and taboos? If anyone knew what it meant to read the
riddle of that thing which to-day is called a "crack" or a "hole," if any
one had the least feeling of mystery about the phenomena which are labelled
"obscene," this world would crack asunder. It is the obscene horror, the
dry, fucked-out aspect of things which makes this crazy civilization look
like a crater. It is this great yawning gulf of nothingness which the
creative spirits and mothers of the race carry between their legs. When a
hungry, desperate spirit appears and makes the guinea pigs squeal it is
because he knows where to put the live wire of sex, because he knows that
beneath the hard carapace of indifference there is concealed the ugly gash,
the wound that never heals. And he puts the live wire right between the
legs; he hits below the belt, scorches the very gizzards. It is no use
putting on rubber gloves; all that can be coolly and intellectually handled
belongs to the carapace and a man who is intent on creation always dives
beneath, to the open wound, to the festering obscene horror. He hitches his
dynamo to the tenderest parts; if only blood and pus
gush forth, it is something. The dry, fucked-out crater is obscene. More
obscene than anything is inertia. More blasphemous than the bloodiest oath
is paralysis. If there is only a gaping wound left then it must gush forth
though it produce nothing but toads and bats and homunculi.
Everything is packed into a second which is either consummated or not
consummated. The earth is not an arid plateau of health and comfort, but a
great sprawling female with velvet torso that swells and heaves with ocean
billows; she squirms beneath a diadem of sweat and anguish. Naked and sexed
she rolls among the clouds in the violet light of the stars. All of her,
from the generous breasts to her glearning thighs, blazes with furious
ardor. She moves amongst the seasons and the years with a grand whoop-la
that seizes the torso with paroxysmal fury, that shakes the cobwebs out of
the sky; she subsides on her pivotal orbits with volcanic tremors. She is
like a doe at times, a doe that has fallen into a snare and lies waiting
with beating heart for the cymbals to crash and the dogs to bark. Love and
hate, despair, pity, rage, disgust -- what are these amidst the fornications
of the planets? What is war, disease, cruelty, terror, when night presents
the ecstasy of myriad blazing suns? What is this chaff we chew in our sleep
if it is not the remembrance of fang-whorl and star cluster?
She used to say to me, Mona, in her fits of exaltation, "you're a great human
being," and though she left me here to perish, though she put beneath my feet
a great howling pit of emptiness, the words that lie at the bottom of my soul
leap forth and they light the shadows below me. I am one who was lost in the
crowd, whom the fizzing lights made dizzy, a zero who saw everything about
him reduced to mockery. Passed me men and women ignited with sulphur, porters
in calcium livery opening the jaws of hell, fame walking on crutches,
dwindled by the skyscrapers, chewed to a frazzle by the spiked mouth of the
machines. I walked between the tall buildings towards the cool of the river
and I saw the lights shoot up between the ribs of the skeletons like rockets.
If I was truly a great human being, as she said, then what was the meaning of
this slavering idiocy about me? I was a man with body and soul, I had a heart
that was not protected by a steel vault. I had moments of ecstasy and I sang
with burning sparks. I sang of the Equator, her red-feathered legs and the
islands dropping out of sight. But nobody heard. A gun fired across the
Pacific falls into space because the earth is round and pigeons fly upside
down. I saw her looking at me across the table with eyes turned to grief;
sorrow spreading inward flattened its nose against her spine; the marrow
churned to pity had turned liquid. She was light as a corpse that floats in
the Dead Sea. Her fingers bled with anguish and the blood turned to drool.
With the wet dawn came the tolling of bells and along the fibres of my nerves
the bells played ceaselessly and their tongues pounded in my heart and
clanged with iron malice. Strange that the bells should toll so, but stranger
still the body bursting, this woman turned to night and her maggot words
gnawing through the mattress. I moved along under the Equator, heard the
hideous laughter of the green-jawed hyaena, saw the jackal with silken tail
and the dick-dick and the spotted leopard, all left behind in the Garden of
Eden. And then her sorrow widened, like the bow of a dreadnought and the
weight of her sinking flooded my ears. Slime-wash and sapphires slipping,
sluicing through the gay neurones, and the spectrum spliced and the gunwales
dipping. Soft as lion-pad I heard the gun-carriages turn, saw them vomit and
drool: the firmament sagged and all the stars turned black. Black ocean
bleeding and the brooding stars breeding chunks of fresh-swollen flesh while
overhead the birds wheeled and out of the hallucinated sky fell the balance
with mortar and pestle and the bandaged eyes of justice. All that is here
related moves with imaginary feet along the parallels of dead orbs; all that
is seen with the empty sockets bursts like flowering grass. Out of
nothingness arises the sign of infinity; beneath the ever-rising spirals
slowly sinks the gaping hole. The land and the water make numbers joined, a
poem written with flesh and stronger than steel or granite. Through endless
night the earth whirls towards a creation unknown ...
To-day I awoke from a sound sleep with curses of joy on my lips, with
gibberish on my tongue, repeating to myself like a litany -- "Fay ce que
vouldras! ... fay ce que vouldras!" Do anything, but let it produce joy.
Do anything, but let it yield ecstasy. So much crowds into my head when I say
this to myself: images, gay ones, terrible ones, maddening ones, the wolf and
the goat, the spider, the crab, syphilis with her wings outstretched and the
door of the womb always on the latch, always open, ready like the tomb. Lust,
crime, holiness: the lives of my adored ones, the failures of my adored ones,
the words they left behind them, the words they left unfinished; the good
they dragged after them and the evil, the sorrow, the discord, the rancor,
the strife they created. But above all, the ecstasy!
Things, certain things about my old idols bring the tears to my eyes: the
interruptions, the disorder, the violence, above all, the hatred they
aroused. When I think of their deformities, of the monstrous styles they
chose, of the flatulence and tediousness of their works, of all the chaos
and confusion they wallowed in, of the obstacles they heaped up about them,
I feel an exaltation. They were all mired in their own dung. All men who
over-elaborated. So true is it that I am almost tempted to say:
"Show me a man who over-elaborates and I will show you a great man!" What is
called their "over-elaboration" is my meat: it is the sign of struggle, it is
struggle itself with all the fibres clinging to it, the very aura and
ambiance of the discordant spirit. And when you show me a man who expresses
himself perfectly I will not say that he is not great, but I will say that I
am unattracted ... I miss the cloying qualities. When I reflect that the task
which the artist implicitly sets himself is to overthrow existing values, to
make of the chaos about him an order which is his own, to sow strife and
ferment so that by the emotional release those who are dead may be restored
to life, then it is that I run with joy to the great and imperfect ones,
their confusion nourishes me, their stuttering is like divine music to my
ears. I see in the beautifully bloated pages that follow the interruptions
the erasure of petty intrusions, of the dirty foot-prints, as it were, of
cowards, liars, thieves, vandals, calumniators. I see in the swollen muscles
of their lyric throats the staggering effort that must be made to turn the
wheel over, to pick up the pace where one has left off. I see that behind the
daily annoyances and intrusions, behind the cheap, glittering malice of the
feeble and inert, there stands the symbol of life's frustrating power, and
that he who would create order, he who would sow strife and discord, because
he is imbued with will, such a man must go again and again to the stake and
the gibbet. I see that behind the nobility of his gestures there lurks the
spectre of the ridiculousness of it all -- that he is not only sublime, but
absurd.
Once I thought that to be human was the highest aim a man could have, but I
see now that it was meant to destroy me. To-day I am proud to say that I am
inhuman, that I belong not to men and governments, that I have nothing
to do with creeds and principles. I have nothing to do with the creaking
machinery of humanity -- I belong to the earth! I say that lying on my pillow
and I can feel the horns sprouting from my temples. I can see about me all
those cracked forbears of mine dancing around the bed, consoling me, egging
me on, lashing me with their serpent tongues, grinning and leering at me with
their skulking skulls. I am inhuman! I say it with a mad, hallucinated
grin, and I will keep on saying it though it rains crocodiles. Behind my
words are all those grinning, leering, skulking skulls, some dead and
grinning a long time, some grinning as if they had lock-jaw, some grinning
with the grimace of a grin, the foretaste and aftermath of what is always
going on. Clearer man all I see my own grinning skull, see the skeleton
dancing in the wind, serpents issuing from the rotted tongue and the bloated
pages of ecstasy slimed with excrement. And I join my slime, my excrement, my
madness, my ecstasy to the great circuit which flows through the subterranean
vaults of the flesh. All this unbidden, unwanted, drunken vomit will flow on
endlessly through the minds of those ho come in the inexhaustible vessel that
contains the history of the race. Side by side with the human race there runs
another race of beings, the inhuman ones, the race of artists who, goaded by
unknown impulses, take the listless mass of humanity and by the fever and
ferment with which they imbue it turn this soggy dough into bread and the
bread into wine and the wine into song. Out of the dead compost and the inert
slag they breed a song that contaminates. I see this other race of
individuals ransacking the universe, turning everything upside down, their
feet always moving in blood and tears, their hands always empty, always
clutching and grasping for the beyond, for the god out of reach: slaying
everything within reach in order to quiet the monster that gnaws at their
vitals. I see that when they tear hair with the effort to comprehend, to
seize this, forever unattainable, I see that when they bellow like crazed
beasts and rip and gore, I see that this is right, that there is no other
path to pursue. A man who belongs to this race must stand up on the high
place with gibberish in his mouth and rip out his entrails. It is right and
just, because he must! And anything that falls short of this frightening
spectacle, anything less shuddering, less terrifying, less mad, less
intoxicated, less contaminating, is not art. The rest is counterfeit. The
rest is human. The rest belongs to life and lifelessness.
When I think of Stavrogin for example, I think of some divine monster
standing on a high place and flinging to us his torn bowels. In The
Possessed the earth quakes: it is not the catastrophe that befalls the
imaginative individual, but a cataclysm in which a large portion of humanity
is buried, wiped out for ever. Stavrogin was Dostoievski and Dostoievski was
the sum of all those contradictions which either paralyze a man or lead him
to the heights. There was no world too low for him to enter, no place too
high for him to fear to ascend. He went the whole gamut, from the abyss to
the stars. It is a pity that we shall never again have the opportunity to
see a man placed at the very core of mystery and, by his flashes,
illuminating for us the depth and immensity of the darkness.
To-day I am aware of my lineage. I have no need to consult my horoscope or
my genealogical chart. What is written in the stars, or in my blood, I know
nothing of. I know that I spring from the mythological founders of the race.
The man who raises the holy bottle to his lips, the criminal who kneels in
the market-place, the innocent one who discovers that all corpses
stink, the madman who dances with lightning in his hands, the friar who
lifts his skirts to pee over the world, the fanatic who ransacks libraries
in order to find the Word -- all these are fused in me, all these make my
confusion, my ecstasy. If I am inhuman it is because my world has slopped
over its human bounds, because to be human seems like a poor, sorry,
miserable affair, limited by the senses, restricted by moralities and
codes, defined by platitudes and isms. I am pouring the juice of the grape
down my gullet and I find wisdom in it, but my wisdom is not born of the
grape, my intoxication owes nothing to wine....
I want to make a detour of those lofty arid mountain ranges where one dies
of thirst and cold, that "extra-temporal" history, that absolute of time and
space where there exists neither man, beast, nor vegetation, where one goes
crazy with loneliness, with language that is mere words, where everything is
unhooked, ungeared, out of joint with the times. I want a world of men and
women, of trees that do not talk (because there is too much talk in the
world as it is!) of rivers that carry you to places, not rivers that are
legends, but rivers that put you in touch with other men and women, with
architecture, religion, plants, animals -- rivers that have boats on them and
in which men drown, drown not in myth and legend and books and dust of the
past, but in time and space and history. I want rivers that make oceans
such as Shakespeare and Dante, rivers which do not dry up in the void of the
past. Oceans, yes! Let us have more oceans, new oceans that blot out the
past, oceans that create new geological formations, new topographical vistas
and strange, terrifying continents, oceans that destroy and preserve at the
same time, oceans that we can sail on, take off to new discoveries, new
horizons. Let us have more oceans, more upheavals, more wars, more
holocausts. Let us have a world of men and women with dynamos between their
legs, a world of natural fury, of passion, action, drama, dreams, madness, a
world that produces ecstasy and not dry farts. I believe that to-day more
than ever a book should be sought after even if it has only one great
page in it: we must search for fragments, splinters, toe-nails, anything
that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and
soul.
It may be that we are doomed, that there is no hope for us, any of us,
but if that is so then let us set up a last agonizing, blood-curdling howl, a
screech of defiance, a war-whoop! Away with lamentation! Away with elegies
and dirges! Away with biographies and histories, and libraries and museums!
Let the dead eat the dead. Let us living ones dance about the rim of the
crater, a last expiring dance. But a dance!
"I love everything that flows," said the great blind Milton of our times. I
was thinking of him this morning when I awoke with a great bloody shout of
joy: I was thinking of his rivers and trees and all that world of night
which he is exploring. Yes, I said to myself, I too love everything that
flows: rivers, sewers, lava, semen, blood, bile, words, sentences. I love
the amniotic fluid when it spills out of the bag. I love the kidney with its
painful gallstones, its gravel and what-not; I love the urine that pours out
scalding and the clap that runs endlessly; I love the words of hysterics and
the sentences that flow on like dysentery and mirror all the sick images of
the soul; I love the great rivers like the Amazon and the Orinoco, where
crazy men like Moravagine float on through dream and legend in an open boat
and drown in the blind mouths of the river. I love everything that flows,
even the menstrual flow that carries away the seed unfecund. I love scripts
that flow, be they hieratic, esoteric, perverse, polymorph, or unilateral. I
love everything that flows, everything that has time in it and becoming,
that brings us back to the beginning where there is never end: the violence
of the prophets, the obscenity that is ecstasy, the wisdom of the fanatic,
the priest with his rubber litany, the foul words of the whore, the spittle
that floats away in the gutter, the milk of the breast and the bitter honey
that pours from the womb, all that is fluid, melting, dissolute and
dissolvent, all the pus and dirt that in flowing is purified, that loses its
sense of origin, that makes the great circuit toward death and dissolution.
The great incestuous wish is to flow on, one with time, to merge the great
image of the beyond with the here and now. A fatuous, suicidal wish that is
constipated by words and paralyzed by thought.
* * *
It was close to dawn on Christmas Day when we came home from the Rue
d'Odessa with a couple of negresses from the telephone company. The fire was
out and we were all so tired that we climbed into bed with our clothes on.
The one I had, who had been like a bounding leopard all evening, fell sound
asleep as I was climbing over her. For a while I worked over her as one
works over a person who has been drowned or asphyxiated. Then I gave it up
and fell sound asleep myself.
All during the holidays we had champagne morning, noon and night -- the
cheapest and the best champagne. With the turn of the y