Lawrence Durrell - The Black Book

Tomorrow the earth will be drenched, exhausted, and born again from this orgasm of water: sopping and juicy to the hilt, the roots of the bush. The penis buried and shriven, sliding back into hibernation, curling and somnolent as a taproot. The quickened walls of the cunt lined with quilts and membranes of gum, resin, foxgloves, puffballs, wheat. We will go out together on the steaming arable among the cattle, by the river, and re-create the legend of the kingcup which Tarquin missed. It will not be difficult if we practice humility: humility from the roots upward, all-devastating, all-devouring, omni-passionate. If we have wounds we will show them.

This morning it is Chaucer. We are following the pilgrims’ way southward. It is in order to refresh the negress that I am compelled to come out here with you, to taste again the prehistoric world, and reflect on its quietus; because in that stale room, overlooked by the charts, by the blind wall, I have been impregnated with the data of an epoch which is the subject of all contemplative dope. I am stifled in it. I mean the vellum and ground-ink ages, the patient, beautiful work, so complete and formal within the limits it set itself. The first presses groaning out their rich black ore of literature. Caxton, Mallory — the simple cunning of widowed children. Wiry paper smelling of candlesticks and glue. Choirs writhing with goblins alleged sacerdotal. Trefoil, cinquefoil, and the whole body of perpendicular gothic gray in the spires aspiring. Minted coins and humorous rapes. Inlaid hilts and beautiful women with the gummata growing in them. The Green King tied by the derelict barge to his mother’s breasts. Tertiary noses carved on the laughing faces of the court hunchback. The swans flying backward and the breviaries pullulating in heraldic animals. All this beautiful stuff circulating in the veins of the negress, poisoning her. It is in order to destroy history that I am compelled to experience it, all of it. But behind it all there is the image of the paper mill, the great domes of pulp, endless spools of marrow and garbage and cloth, woven into daily papers, sanitary towels, toilet wafers, blotting paper. I am again on the high tower among the sea-gulls, shaping the decision, when I watch this beautiful stuff poured away down the sewers. Somewhere the line has been broken, and we are wandering among the staggering nebulae, in a region of consciousness so cold, so rarefied, that we want to scream aloud for warmth. A region where the healing mythologies are so etherized that they float away elusive, before the mind can grasp them and burn them for fuel. This is the proper No Man’s Land, crammed with plenty and radiant steel, where the heart screams for pity, where the viscera contract at the smell of money, multitude, masturbation; where the warm thoughts, the feelings, the delights are stunted from the womb, vaporized and snuffed. Ephemera! Between Golgotha and the slaughterhouse where daylong one hears nothing but the hollow screaming of pigs. There is no quietus; no bodkin, dagger, bullet can ever a quietus make. The dance is on, eternally on.

That evening I was so certain of the age which lies beyond all this, the new dimension, the novel being — a dim gnosis. I have seen the tonsures moving along the leads at Christchurch where the Saxon river drags its sherds of ice all winter, lame of foot; have seen in peacetime a rosy Abbot come down in the dusk to fish the glacid water for trout, while the lights jump one by one to the tall windows.

Last night Morgan was sitting by the boiler telling me about the asylum in which he was an attendant. Juanita was prowling the corridors, her hair in her eyes, a chopper gleaming in her hands. Lobo was whimpering softly as he smoked. They had arranged a rendezvous by the foothills. It was the last attempt on his part to bring her round. He would rape her there and fill her mouth with sand. He was not quite sure whether he would kill her or not. But when she was there, with the child on her arm, lousy, hungry, red-eyed and sore with prickly heat, the whole focus of normality was restored in a second. He knew then that his weakness was too great ever to make him a murderer. He took the child from her and buried it up to its waist in warm shaly sand, so that it could not escape. And she saw at once what was coming, and began running away from him, groaning as if she were stabbed. He was gaining on her, murderously exultant, almost in reach — when suddenly she threw herself down like an animal, and gathering a handful of sand, scooped it full under the shabby dress; filled her cunt up with it, and lay exhausted, panting, utterly without a word, waiting for the tussle, like a bird. He was so unnerved by this gesture that he began to weep, to bluster, to protest, to shout. And all the while she lay there saying nothing. He exhausted every gesture, every threat, every shade of feeling between madness and death, and still she did not answer. In the end he had to go away and leave her lying there as she was, gathered up like a ball, waiting. Speechless. Terrified. Victorious.

What is history beside this unrolling reality which Lobo offers to me with emotion and cigarettes? The progress through the guts of a beggar. When I am covering you my cranium is packed with images, the whole body of the lost worlds is being poured down that narrow slipway to the absolute; history is launched suddenly for me like a dreadnought, the myth, the prophecy, the gloze, the glyph, the haunted hexameter, the dactyl, the pastoral. The world is crying for it to be restored, but we are offering it only a regression — an escape out of the geometrical rat-trap which is really only temporary. It is not only a question of going back to a myth. The myth will come back to us. That is the tenor of this rainy morning; that is what it is telling me, among its polished components of town and valley and farm. In such moments I can tell you for certain that this is the break-up, the cataclysm, the drop curtain on the world. A new language, a new deity, a new indulgence impend from heaven. No, they are already slipping on us. Forms are dying, becoming obsolete, falling aside. Everyone save the antiquarian is afraid. The man of learning has become a cipher — epicene, neuter — with the equipment of a book reviewer. Everything is drifting up in the Sargasso of progress, swathed and shot with weed, tangled in the fins of fish, bibles and lavatory seats, turds and turbines, shuttlecocks and battledores. In the Abbey they are still marking the places in the hymnbooks, oblivious of the fact that tomorrow we shall have forgotten how to read; in the hospitals the forceps are snapping at the sutures of the child; in the Sunday papers the great men become retromingent, pissing backwards into the mouth of the public and talking about the shapely subsisting beauty of tradition. In London they are dancing round the Walpole, the Faber poets are marking time and ushering in the millennium with a series of elegant squibs, the Lesbians are onanizing with squeals of buttered sperm, and the noise of the cleaver is lost in the nervous orgasm of a million women novelists. In Rome the papal nuncio announces the use of the fountain pen in such cases where the penis will not work. In Calcutta the black sweep is wandering with crumbs in his eyes, touching the untouchable, and eating the uneatable. In the Ghetto the streets are full of juice and the pavements slippery with haddocks’ eyes. In Lisbon there are women as inexhaustible as the Indian Ocean, lying with their legs apart, watching the express hurtle towards them on its metals. In Iceland Eric The Red sets off for the last time with his cargo of skins, wheat, chessmen, cider and porpentines. It is all being washed up towards a madness never before seen. The heretics themselves are appalled, are building themselves Arks from the flotsam of the imagination, and hanging their viscera out for sails; they are trying to escape, choosing what is frugal rather than countenance the ferment here, where life bubbles with the effervescent rhapsodic idiocy of soda from the siphon, and the continents fall away bit by bit, and the weakening Jesu Jesu booms in the Gothic whales — the skirling of Jonahs shut out. Relentless, the watery navel of the world claims everything. The Sargasso of weeds and creepers, where the wise, the children of light, the poor in spirit, the aseptic intellects, the various, the rational, can congregate and put their brains together in a stream of atoms. Not a nimbus is grudged, not a funeral note. Only the sea sucks in its toll of cider bottles, cigar butts, sandwiches, daily papers, and imperial turds. And the snore of the faithful is as murderous as the metronome.…