Lawrence Durrell - The Black Book

Turn your face away, I am tired of looking at it. Open your legs and let me be sucked up into the bloodstream, poured from the aorta in a simple beat. I am weary. Do not speak to me, because you can only utter imbecilities. Shut up and function, you stale fucking block. Would you be happy if I went for your carotid with a razor, and showed you the nest of tubes and bladders which live disgustingly in your white throat? “Your poetry”, she says in the letter, “is wild and unformed. Concentrate on style. And I don’t understand how you can both love and hate the same woman at the same time. ”

Let us admit it frankly, then the summer is dying. Come, we will go, hand in hand, down the lighted streets and turn in at the doors of the cinema. I will let you stand me a one and three-penny dope. What a fine plush womb we have escaped into together, you and I. Yes, we are in time for the mob foetus to be born. Fancy the amnion having lighted walls and mock-Egyptian frescoes on it. We can send out to the clitoris for an ice. What fine strong whiffs of peppermint. But it is the plush walls of the womb I can’t get over. They are so cosy, so homy. A lovely dim wombland where we can cheer Conchita, the maneater, and sweat together. Jesus, how that girl eats her lovers! Let us pretend I am your lover, honey; come, masticate me downwards. Chew each morsel thirty-two times. Like a heavy cat she eats her heavies heavily. Suck my blood, dearies, it’s only ink. Christ! If you stretch those tongueless kisses out any more I’ll go mad.…

“Desire is the great problem,” says Chamberlain. “It is the real absolute you hear these casuists mistaking themselves about, eh? The focal point of living is sex.”

I can hear the ink running in the veins of Miss Smith. The batteries running down under the print dress.

The imitation croc-skin handbag is getting heavier and heavier to lift. The problem of desire eats into us like a chancre.

I am obsessed with the fear of snow. Waking in the morning, I run to the window, though I know it is ridiculous, to see if it has fallen during the night. The insane geometry of the statues seems to breathe premonitions of the winter. The ghost of the black car haunts me, riding against the moon. The blood on the floors of the slaughterhouses has not congealed as yet. The winter of our discontent is delayed; I am so beside myself with apathy and self-pity that when I stand here beside the bed, my delectable platypus, and watch your feet reaching the ceiling, I have the sensation of being a bomb: the explosion of a crammed world reaching down over you, to cover you in splinters, fragments, thorns, ashes, peelings. There is such an urgency in the air we breathe that I am on the point of exploding and littering the room with a heap of plaster images … solicitations, condolences, comforts, desires. I am participating in a disintegration of the personality, he tells me. The soul is entering a delirious syzygy. Hilda, like a great moon, and you whose cancerous wrists turn white against the streetlamps with a voltage as yet to be scientifically described.

Forgive my imprecision,* but it is as if I were packing to go on a long journey. Hilda lies open like a trunk in the corner of the room. There is room for everything, the gramophone, the records, the cottage piano, the microscope, the hair restorer, seven sets of clean clothes, manuscripts, a typewriter, a dictionary, a pair of jackboots, skates, an ice pick, a crash helmet, a sheath knife, a fishing rod, and the latest Book Society Choice. There is even room for a portable God, if you rope it up among the canvases. With these labels to assure me of my distinct and unique personality, I step down into the red tunnel, to begin the journey. For the purposes of simplification, let me be known as Jonah. With Hilda as the whale, there are implications in the Bible story which have been altogether ignored until now. Very well! With that knowing look I always imagine the spermatozoa to wear on their faces, I slip down towards the womb, carrying my belongings with me. It has all been arranged, I am going to be walled in. Womb, then, the tomb in one! Plush walls, naturally, and a well-furnished house. All the genteel possessions of the cultured owl. Sherry on tap, Picasso on the wall over the piano, and the rockiest Latins in the bookcase, glossy with age. Presently the embalmer will call. It will be Morgan, dressed up as Santa Claus; with the sharpest of his kitchen knives he will open the abdominal wall, and extract the guts, cure them, wrap them in brown-paper parcels, label them — and put them back. Meanwhile I shall be swilled out with grape juice. The brains will be hooked out through the nose and the cranium stuffed with chewing gum. Then I shall be ready to partake of eternity, sitting in a chair, with the good Ezra open on my lap. I will be just in the mood to lend a stiff ear to the felicities of Cavalcanti. Meanwhile from outside the work will go on. I will be completely bricked in.… But what am I talking about? I am bricked in! There, by the door, lie the ice pick, crash helmet, and skates. If I had known beforehand I should never have brought them with me. It is always the way. They are quite useless. Such a thing as a motor-bike is unheard of in this limited plush world. In it there is room for one thing only— pure thought ! Even memory is getting a little dim. Soon there will be no past. Already I have forgotten Madame About’s face: I know only that she carries ( carried ?) a cancer about with her like a hand grenade. Gracie, Chamberlain?… A strange procession of symbols across the consciousness. I do not know any more what they mean. It is useless to interrogate my jailors — the mummies which line the corridor, the stiffbearded winged gentleman who guards the bookcase. They live in the dimension of thought which is space. To speak they would have to inhabit time. Soon, I too will lose the power of time-speech. I can feel the heavy bulk of barbaric words in my brain coiling up and dying for want of use: the maggots of a large vocabulary eating each other for want of brain tissue to live on.

The air I breathe is pure and sterile, and reminiscent of a tube station. I am fed through the wall, in which lies a sort of filter, embedded. Once every two hours there is a gush of synthetic food which passes into me without my realizing it. I am happy because I am nothing, an idea which is a little difficult to express. This little plush world imposes a routine on me which I respect. I am fanatically regular. Between meals I sit and brood. Somehow the books are no longer interesting, because I am forgetting how to read. I sit with my hands over my eyes and feel the waves passing in my body. What they say I cannot as yet tell. It is a language totally unfamiliar, which runs along a dimension of sensibility I have not hitherto cultivated. Sometimes I take a little stroll up and down the chamber, repeating my own name to myself. The absolute deadness of the lithographs on the walls no longer depresses me. I have got beyond revolution, that is to say, beyond God. For a moment there was an obstinate nerve in my breast telling me to take the ice axe and smash my way through the red wall, but I resisted it. I am so happy in my weakness really. I do not even regret Pater. My glyptic jailors wait stiffly for me to address them in their own language. I must hurry up and learn the grammar of waves, the curious syntax which passes between them like a current. There is a supreme logic behind this life which I can sense but cannot understand. Concentrate, then, I must concentrate. If I did not feel I was being stifled the whole time, it would be easier.

As for the whale, the exterior universe which was Hilda (the name now lichenized, sponged, scurfed, dimmed), God knows where she spins, in what logarithmic water, over the Poles, her great flukes flashing blue, reaching up almost to the moon. God knows what deep-water fungus grows between her fins, what ice drums on the outside walls of my prison. Jonah, I say to myself, quietly, persistently. It is the only word left over from the dead vocabularies. The only sound which I dare use in this red balloon, where I am inhabited by space. It has become my JAH. On the strange numen of this sound, left over from drowned languages, I shall shape the contemplative myth. The nucleus, myself. Give it time and it will become lichenized over with fables, crusted in jewels and parables, fossilized, filtered, crushed, bathed in spores, made more vegetable than empires, snowed under with divinities, Konx Ompax. Never ask me the precise latitude and longitude of heaven. It is as remote as the great rolling whale, whatever ocean she crosses. There is no language, not even the new spatial language, which can do justice to loneliness. To the remote Jonah, shut in this furnished bladder, blinded away from continent to yellow continent, across maps as yellow as coin, deltas, swamps, green belts of fertility.