Djuna Barnes - Nightwood

‘You beat the liver out of a goose to get a pâté; you pound the muscles of a man’s cardia to get a philosopher.’

‘Is that what I am to learn?’ she asked bitterly.

The doctor looked at her. ‘For the lover, it is the night into which his beloved goes,’ he said, ‘that destroys his heart; he wakes her suddenly only to look the hyena in the face that is her smile, as she leaves that company.

‘When she sleeps is she not moving her leg aside for an unknown garrison? Or in a moment, that takes but a second, murdering us with an axe? Eating our ear in a pie, pushing us aside with the back of her hand, sailing to some port with a ship full of sailors and medical men? And what of our own sleep? We go to it no better—and betray her with the very virtue of our days. We are continent a long time, but no sooner has our head touched the pillow, and our eyes left the day, than a host of merrymakers take and get. We wake from our doings in a deep sweat for that they happened in a house without an address, in a street in no town, citizened with people with no names with which to deny them. Their very lack of identity makes them ourselves. For by a street number, by a house, by a name, we cease to accuse ourselves. Sleep demands of us a guilty immunity. There is not one of us who, given an eternal incognito, a thumbprint nowhere set against our souls, would not commit rape, murder and all abominations. For if pigeons flew out of his bum, or castles sprang out of his ears, man would be troubled to know which was his fate, a house a bird or a man. Possibly that one only who shall sleep three generations will come up uninjured out of that unpeopled annihilation.’ The doctor turned heavily in bed.

‘For the thickness of the sleep that is on the sleeper we “forgive", as we “forgive” the dead for the account of the earth that lies upon them. What we do not see, we are told, we do not mourn; yet night and sleep trouble us, suspicion being the strongest dream and dread the thong. The heart of the jealous knows the best and the most satisfying love, that of the other’s bed, where the rival perfects the lover’s imperfections. Fancy gallops to take part in that duel, unconstrained by any certain articulation of the laws of that unseen game.

‘We look to the East for a wisdom that we shall not use—and to the sleeper for the secret that we shall not find. So, I say, what of the night, the terrible night? The darkness is the closet in which your lover roosts her heart, and that night fowl that caws against her spirit and yours, dropping between you and her the awful estrangement of his bowels. The drip of your tears is his implacable pulse. Night people do not bury their dead, but on the neck of you, their beloved and waking, sling the creature, husked of its gestures. And where you go, it goes, the two of you, your living and her dead, that will not die; to daylight, to life, to grief, until both are carrion.

‘Wait! I’m coming to the night of nights—the night you want to know about the most of all—for even the greatest generality has a little particular; have you thought of that? A high price is demanded of any value, for a value is in itself a detachment! We wash away our sense of sin, and what does that bath secure us? Sin, shining bright and hard. In what does a Latin bathe? True dust. We have made the literal error. We have used water, we are thus too sharply reminded. A European gets out of bed with a disorder that holds the balance. The layers of his deed can be traced back to the last leaf and the good slug be found creeping. L’Echo de Paris and his bed sheets were run off the same press. One may read in both the travail life has had with him—he reeks with the essential wit necessary to the “sale” of both editions, night edition and day.

‘Each race to its wrestling! Some throw the beast on the other side, with the stench of excrement, blood and flowers, the three essential oils of their plight! Man makes his history with the one hand and “holds it up” with the other.

‘Oh God, I’m tired of this tirade. The French are dishevelled, and wise, the American tries to approximate it with drink. It is his only clue to himself. He takes it when his soap has washed him too clean for identification. The Anglo-Saxon has made the literal error; using water, he has washed away his page. Misery melts him down by day, and sleep at night. His preoccupation with his business day has made his sleep insoluble.’

Nora stood up, but she sat down again. ‘How do you stand it, then?’ she demanded. ‘How do you live at all, if this wisdom of yours is not only the truth, but also the price?’

‘Ho, nocturnal hag whimpering on the thorn, rot in the grist, mildew in the corn,’ said the doctor. ‘If you’ll pardon my song and singing voice, both of which were better until I gave my kidney on the left side to France in the war—and I’ve drunk myself half around the world cursing her for jerking it out—if I had it to do again, grand country though it is—I’d be the girl found lurking behind the army, or up with the hill folk, all of which is to rest me a little of my knowledge, until I can get back to it. I’m coming to something. Misericordia, am I not the girl to know of what I speak? We go to our Houses by our nature—and our nature, no matter how it is, we all have to stand—as for me, so God has made me, my house is the pissing port. Am I to blame if I’ve been summoned before and this my last and oddest call? In the old days I was possibly a girl in Marseilles thumping the dock with a sailor, and perhaps it’s that memory that haunts me. The wise men say that the remembrance of things past is all that we have for a future, and am I to blame if I’ve turned up this time as I shouldn’t have been, when it was a high soprano I wanted, and deep corn curls to my bum, with a womb as big as the king’s kettle, and a bosom as high as the bowsprit of a fishing schooner? And what do I get but a face on me like an old child’s bottom—is that a happiness, do you think?

‘Jehovah, Sabaoth, Elohim, Eloi, Helion, Jodhevah, Shaddai! May God give us to die in our own way! I haunt the pissoirs as naturally as Highland Mary her cows down by the Dee—and by the Hobs of Hell, I’ve seen the same thing work in a girl. But I’ll bring that up later! I’ve given my destiny away by garrulity, like ninety per cent of everybody else—for, no matter what I may be doing, in my heart is the wish for children and knitting. God, I never asked better than to boil some good man’s potatoes and toss up a child for him every nine months by the calendar. Is it my fault that my only fireside is the outhouse? And that I can never hang my muffler, mittens and Bannybrook umbrella on anything better than a bit of tin boarding as high as my eyes, having to be brave, no matter what, to keep the mascara from running away? And do you think that those circular cottages have not brought me to great argument? Have you ever glanced at one when the night was well down, and seen it and what it looked like and resembled most, with its one coping and a hundred legs? A centipede. And you look down and choose your feet, and, ten to one, you find a bird with a light wing, or an old duck with a wooden knee, or something that has been mournful for years. What? I’ve held argument with others at long tables all night through about the particular merits of one district over another for such things, of one cottage over another for such things. And do you suppose I was agreed with, and had any one any other one’s ideas? There was as much disagreement as there might have been, had we all been selecting a new order of government. Jed would say North, and Jod would say South, and me sitting between them going mad because I am a doctor and a collector and a talker of Latin, and a sort of petropus of the twilight and a physiognomist that can’t be flustered by the wrong feature on the right face, and I said that the best port was at the Place de la Bastille. Whereupon I was torn into parts by a hundred voices—each of them pitched in a different arrondissement, until I began clapping like the good woman in the shoe, and screaming for silence; and for witchery I banged the table with a formidable, and yelled out loud: “Do any of you know anything about atmosphere and sea level? Well,” I says, “sea level, and atmospheric pressure and topography make all the difference in the world!” My voice cracked on the word “difference", soaring up divinely, and I said: “If you think that certain things do not show from what district they come, yea, even to an arrondissement, then you are not out gunning for particular game, but simply any catch, and I’ll have nothing to do with you! I do not discuss weighty matters with water wits!” And at that I ordered another and sat with my chin up. “But", said one fellow, “it’s the face that you tell by.” “Faces is it!” I screamed, “the face is for fools! If you fish by the face you fish out trouble, but there’s always other fish when you deal with the sea. The face is what anglers catch in the daylight, but the sea is the night!"’