Djuna Barnes - Nightwood

Nora turned away—‘What am I to do?’

‘Ah, mighty uncertainty!’ said the doctor. ‘Have you thought of all the doors that have shut at night and opened again? Of women who have looked about with lamps, like you, and who have scurried on fast feet? Like a thousand mice they go this way and that, now fast, now slow, some halting behind doors, some trying to find the stairs, all approaching or leaving their misplaced mouse meat, that lies in some cranny, on some couch, down on some floor, behind some cupboard; and all the windows, great and small, from which love and fear have peered, shining and in tears? Put those windows end to end and it would be a casement that would reach around the world; and put those thousand eyes into one eye and you would have the night combed with the great blind searchlight of the heart.’

Tears began to run down Nora’s face.

‘And do I know my Sodomites?’ the doctor said unhappily, ‘and what the heart goes bang up against if it loves one of them, especially if it’s a woman loving one of them. What do they find then, that this lover has committed the unpardonable error of not being able to exist—and they come down with a dummy in their arms. God’s last round, shadow-boxing, that the heart may be murdered and swept into that still quiet place where it can sit and say: “Once I was, now I can rest."

‘Well, that’s only part of it,’ he said, trying to stop her crying, ‘and though your normal fellow will say all are alike in the dark, negro or white, I say you can tell them, and where they came from, and what quarter they frequent, by the size and excellence—and at the Bastille (and may I be believed) they come as handsome as mortadellas slung on a table.

‘Your gourmet knows for instance from what water his fish was snatched, he knows from what district and to what year he blesses his wine, he knows one truffle from another and whether it be Brittany root or if it came down from the North, but you gentlemen sit here and tell me that the district makes no difference—is there no one who knows anything but myself? And, must I, perchance, like careful writers, guard myself against the conclusions of my readers?

‘Have I not shut my eyes with the added shutter of the night and put my hand out? And it’s the same with girls,’ he said, ‘those who turn the day into night, the young, the drug addict, the profligate, the drunken and that most miserable, the lover who watches all night long in fear and anguish. These can never again live the life of the day. When one meets them at high noon they give off, as if it were a protective emanation, something dark and muted. The light does not become them any longer. They begin to have an unrecorded look. It is as if they were being tried by the continual blows of an unseen adversary. They acquire an “unwilling” set of features: they become old without reward, the widower bird sitting sighing at the turnstile of heaven, “Hallelujah! I am sticked! Skoll! Skoll! I am dying!"

‘Or walks the floor, holding her hands; or lies upon the floor, face down, with that terrible longing of the body that would, in misery, be flat with the floor; lost lower than burial, utterly blotted out and erased so that no stain of her could ache upon the wood, or snatched back to nothing without aim—going backward through the target, taking with her the spot where she made one—’

‘Yes!’ Nora said.

‘Look for the girls also in the toilets at night, and you will find them kneeling in that great secret confessional crying between tongues, the terrible excommunication:

‘"May you be damned to hell! May you die standing upright! May you be damned upward! May this be damned, terrible and damned spot! May it wither into the grin of the dead, may this draw back, low riding mouth in an empty snarl of the groin! May this be your torment, may this be your damnation! God damned me before you, and after me you shall be damned, kneeling and standing away till we vanish! For what do you know of me, man’s meat? I’m an angel on all fours, with a child’s feet behind me, seeking my people that have never been made, going down face foremost, drinking the waters of night at the water hole of the damned, and I go into the waters, up to my heart, the terrible waters! What do you know of me? May you pass from me, damned girl! Damned and betraying!"

‘There’s a curse for you,’ he said, ‘and I have heard it.’

‘Oh!’ Nora said, ‘Don’t—don’t!’

‘But,’ he continued, ‘if you think that is all of the night, you’re crazy! Groom, bring the shovel! Am I the golden-mouthed St. John Chrysostom, the Greek who said it with the other cheek? No, I’m a fart in a gale of wind, a humble violet, under a cow pad. But,’ he said with sorrow, ‘even the evil in us comes to an end, errors may make you immortal—one woman went down the ages for sitting through Parsifal up to the point where the swan got his death, whereupon she screamed out “Godamercy, they have shot the Holy Grail!” —but not every one is as good as that; you lay up for yourself in your old age, Nora, my child, feebleness enough to forget the passions of your youth, which you spent your years in strengthening. Think of that also. As for me, I tuck myself in at night, well content because I am my own charlatan. Yes, I, the Lily of Killarney, am composing me a new song, with tears and with jealousy, because I have read that John was his favourite, and it should have been me, Prester Matthew! The song is entitled, “Mother, put the wheel away, I cannot spin tonight.” Its other name, “According to me, everyone is a kind-of-a-son-of-a bitch,” to be sung to two ocarinas and one concertina, and, if none of the world is about, to a Jew’s-harp, so help me God! I am but a little child with my eyes wide open!’

‘Matthew,’ Nora said, ‘what will become of her? That’s what I want to know.’

‘To our friends,’ he answered, ‘we die everyday, but to ourselves we die only at the end. We do not know death, or how often it has essayed our most vital spirit. While we are in the parlour it is visiting in the pantry. Montaigne says: “To kill a man there is required a bright shining and clear light,” but that was spoken of the conscience toward another man. But what of our own death—permit us to reproach the night, wherein we die manifold alone. Donne says: “We are all conceived in close prison, in our mothers’ wombs we are close prisoners all. When we are born, we are but born to the liberty of the house—all our life is but a going out to the place of execution and death. Now was there ever any man seen to sleep in the Cart, between Newgate and Tyburn? Between the prison and the place of execution, does any man sleep?” Yet he says, “men sleep all the way". How much more, therefore, is there upon him a close sleep when he is mounted on darkness."’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but—’

‘Now, wait a minute! It’s all of a certain night that I’m coming to, that I take so long coming to it,’ he said, ‘a night in the branchy pitch of fall —the particular night you want to know about—for I’m a fisher of men and my gimp is doing a saltarello over every body of water to fetch up what it may. I have a narrative, but you will be put to it to find it.

‘Sorrow fiddles the ribs and no man should put his hand on anything; there is no direct way. The foetus of symmetry nourishes itself on cross purposes, this is its wonderful unhappiness—and now I am come to Jenny—oh Lord, why do women have partridge blood and set out to beat up trouble? The places Jenny moults in are her only distinction, a Christian with a wanderer’s rump. She smiles, and it is the wide smile of the self-abused, radiating to the face from some localized centre disturbance, the personification of the “thief". She has a longing for other people’s property, but the moment she possesses it the property loses some of its value, for the owner’s estimate is its worth. Therefore it was she took your Robin.’