Lawrence Durrell - The Black Book

This is a reflection of that night when Tarquin was sitting at the keyboard like a ghoul; and the music — the music flowing like bile into your small alert ears — was so rancid with the truth that I was almost ashamed to look at you. I knew then that the whole thing was a fake — the legend that Tarquin is trying to create, the myth which Chamberlain hourly expects to speak from his stomach like a devil. The Gadarene descent is so violent that most of us are still unaware that we are moving, so rapt is the illusion of stillness. Where is this new myth coming from? Where is the great heroic figure on which it is to be shaped? The causeways are sinking deeper into the marsh, the future is growing a heavier and heavier burden; the past is cut off like a gangrenous limb. Where and what is the avatar — giant or dwarf? Where is the sterilized paragon of the new epoch — the clinic worker and Holy Ghost combined? Give it time, give it time, Chamberlain is shouting. A few more hospitals, less hours of work, more time for the pursuit of higher things. We must clear the ground first. (He is celebrating his own febrile gust in a whirl of wishbone fantasies.) The door of the Lock Hospital is green. The door of the antenatal surgery is white. Green again for the door of the maternity clinic. The foetus is disgorged like a turd from the infinitely distended red rubber neck of the cervix. Let me breathe, I am dying for air. The mask fits very close to the mouth. Filter my food through the placenta and watch my mother devour it afterwards. Chamberlain says we must clear the ground. Chamberlain says we must be more humane. We must love our own guts. Above all we must exterminate the politicians who poison humanity, whose souls are as the toes of old boots. Very just. We must make the way straight for the appearance of Mickey Mouse, who will arrive together with his invisible penis which he is never allowed to pull or twang. Chamberlain says, castrate the man who knows too much and is too little; do not mistake the cultured man for the man who is merely well-informed. Grab at the treasures of the passional life. Chamberlain says we must be born again. Tarquin says we are all born dead. Friends, Romans, Countrymen, there were physiologists who did not believe that the hymen existed; and here the fishermen are ashamed to run about naked though the fish wear no clothes! Nothing but fracture, schism, madness remains. Imprimis, Lawrence Lucifer, I per se I, standing on a high tower over many delicate counties, feeling the arteries in my limbs stiffen with weeping and lamentation. We, who are sitting outside in the dark, the great unorganized body of creators, know for certain that it is our own tenderness that is poisoning us. The ingrowing cyst of the love which we dare not offer to the world. That is the germ from which the new martyrdom springs: the stripping of the body, fibre by fibre, the branding and cleaning of the soul. I am remembering Hilda’s great rufous vulva like a crowded marketpiece; the great conduit choked with blood and paper and cigar ends which we must accept before we can go any farther. The great luminous symbol of the cunt, glowing softly in history like the Grail, the genesis of the living, the blithe plush cushion of life. Hilda lying there like Tibet, glowing in her convalescent secrecy among the snow-bound craters and jewels. (There are so few of us left with the murderous gift of love, so few.) And in that music which Tarquin made, as he said, for us, there was no love; there was no hate even — that symptom of love. Only the terrible enervation, the dead loss, the recoiling of the spirit before truth. I said nothing to you then, because I could remember nothing to say; if I had begun to speak I might never have ended. I thought of Morgan, down by the boilers, with the marks of the catheter on him; Madame About and the smell of her womb; Lobo weeping over the knife; Gregory standing before the death squad, facing the green bullets of words: I thought of us wandering that day by the river, among the elegiac kingcups, busy with dreams so trivial and bright that we had no idea of the doom settling from heaven on us like a floor of soot. Yes, when I said we became heraldic I meant a painted annihilation which you are still constantly mistaking for life. The country was alive in the sense that a playing card is alive. We are entering into a fiction, and all this is merely the paraphernalia of ballet, the insignia of clowns or swans strutting before some too stylized backcloth. That is why this writing had to become ballet and ape it: not the emotion of personalities, but a theatre of the idea. Ourselves, if we still had “selves”, as the projection of an idea tossed under a spotlight to spin and dither like Japanese waltzing mice …

Hush! We have fallen like statues on the grass, footsore, sundrunk, blind. Your face falls on my sleeve like a petal, the words empty themselves out of it into the silence. No continuity any more in the fable, but the warm naked statue under the dress. Heraldic? Time shut off, as sure as the invisible hand in the charnel house shuts off the breath of the dead. As the bee hangs, softly trembling above a flower, then lapses between the lips, a furry torpedo, so the fingers of their unique dream of logic follow the dumb curve of the statue downward, moist, to the final terminus of dream. Gently your body rides out and hangs above the lacquered river: an image not sponged out, or carried downstream among the Ophelias. They say we love only our own reflection in the faces of others, like cattle drinking from their own faces in a river. The heraldic Narcissus in your face has learned something at last. The true meaning of chastity is knowledge.

The long planes of water run through us like seed or spears. Here is a beautiful pupa stiffened in the crook of an arm, overlooked by a cloud of amazed corn. The music? What has the music to do with this moment in an old world? Nothing. We are as if dead. Death, but there is something left behind, which blows in and out of the nostrils, washes from the throat in a soft wave of invisible ashes; there is something here which dims candles in churches, evanescent — suds or spores or smoke. You have three sets of lips superimposed on one another softly. Such a thing as a kiss would melt, falling from dimension to delicate dimension of sense; the bland face in its surprise could play no part in it. Queer to think that we, who are here on a playing card, fixed for ever in an exclusive memory of desire, now share the “necrobiosis” (Tarquin) of the age. It is so easy to burst through the temporal stuff and delude ourselves. You are warm and ripe under the garish dress. I have entered you quietly without fever. The rain rattles among the leaves like dust-shot; the unwinking river is flowing at your head. An instant’s vision of the underwater girl, thighs drawn back in an arch to admit rape, tangled in the flowing weeds and fucus. I am with you to the hilt now, Excalibur bedded in the warm stone flesh, pushing open new continents, new vistas of emotion. The inexorable reaping penis stiffened in a field of parched corn. The trees are dragging their heads, caught in the wind. The river is glacid. The kingcups shine and shine, and scent of the crushed marshflower enters us. You are weeping now with delight, and everything is washed away in this effortless, happy weeping. The river has sponged away the dust, the recriminations, the platitudes, the agonies. We are caught in a loom of feeling, woven to water, to rock, to plant by this action. The axle of the world wavers, trembles, and begins a faster, a more nervous rotation: we are spun round with rocks and hills and chimneys. It is all so effortless; a warm plural moan — and the long still entry, shut off, drifting to harbour, home. The womb emptied like a bucket of musk into silence. The river flows. The kingcups shine and shine.