Andrea Dworkin - Ice And Fire

like women together on that narrow piece of foam rubber, and

he, astonished by the sensuality of it, ongoing, the thick

sweetness of it, came so many times, like a woman: and me

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too: over and over: like one massive, perpetually knotted and

moving creature, the same intense orgasms, no drifting separateness of the mind or fragmented fetishizing of the body: instead a magnificent cresting, the way a wave rises to a height pushing

forward and pulls back underneath itself toward drowning at

the same time: one wave lasting forever, rising, pulling,

drowning, dying, all in the same movement; or a wave in an

ocean of waves covering nearly all the earth, immense. My lost

brother and I became lovers forever, buried there, in that sea

so awesome in its density and splendor. I need never touch

him again. He became my lover forever. So he entered my

privacy, never offending it.

*

I had learned solitude, and now I learned this.

*

On his birthday I gave him a cat that had his face.

I had looked everywhere for it. I had looked in stores, I had

traced ads, read bulletin boards, made phone calls. I had gone

out, into the homes of strangers, looking for the cat I would

know the minute I saw it. Red. With his face: a certain look,

like a child before greed sets in, delicate, alert, listening. The

day came and I didn’t have it. I knew the cat was somewhere

waiting, but I was afraid I would not find it. The day of his

birthday I went out, looking, a last search, asking, following

every lead, hour after hour. The heat was rancid. Then a man

told me where to look: a woman had found a pregnant cat in a

garbage dump and had taken it home: the kittens were red. He

called her. I went there. The skies had darkened, gotten black.

The air was dusty. The thunder cracked the cement. Hail fell.

I ran to her house, awed by this surfeit of signs, afraid of the

stones of ice and the black sky. In the house the cat with his

face was waiting. I took the cat home.

*

Year after year, he is with me. Solitude is with me and he is

with me. Now I’ve spent ten years writing. Imagine a huge

stone and you have only your own fingernail. You scratch the

message you must write into the stone bit by bit. You don’t

know why you must but you must. You scratch, one can barely

see the marks, you scratch until the nail is torn and disintegrates, itself pulverized into invisible dust. You use the I23

blood from your ripped finger, hoarding it to go on as long as

you can but hurrying because you will run out. Imagine ten

years of it. But the solitude changes. At first it is fresh and

new, like any lover, an adventure, a ravishing excitement, a

sensual derangement: then it gets deeper, tougher, lonelier, not

because one wants the closeness of friends but because one

doesn’t, can’t: can barely remember wanting anything but

solitude. One remembers wanting, needing, like one remembers a childhood dream: but even the memory seems frivolous, trivial, a distraction: solitude kills the need for anything but itself, like any grand passion. It changes one, irrevocably. Promiscuous warmth dies, all goodhearted fellowship with others dies, seems false and cheap. Only burning ice is left inside. Whoever gets too near gets their skin burned

off and dies from the cold.

He lives inside my privacy. He coexists with my solitude,

hating it sometimes but rebelling in silence by himself because

he does not want to leave: I would make him leave, even now.

I put solitude first, before him. His complaints are occasional,

muted. I keep him far away even when he is gentle, asleep,

curled up next to me like an innocent child, my solace, my

human heart. The years of solitude— the seconds, the minutes,

the hours, night into morning, evening into night, day stretching into night and weeks stretching into months— are a moat he cannot cross. The years of being together with him— the

seconds, the minutes, the hours, the days into weeks into

months into years— do not change this. This is the way I love

now.

You are nomads together, in cheap room after cheap room:

poorer and poorer: the written word does not sell: some is

published but it is not embraced, it offends, it does not make

money, no one wants more of it, it has an odor, those with

good taste demur: the pink apartment with the toilet in the

hall is left behind: food stamps, bare foam rubber mattress

that starts shredding and has great potholes like city streets,

cold floors, cheap motels, the backs of rented trucks moving

your few belongings from one shabby empty place to another:

writing: hungry. He is closest and dear, loved more now, but

he is necessarily outside the concentration and the pain of the

task itself, the discipline and despair, the transcendent pleasure,

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the incommunicable joy. The writing makes one poorer and

poorer: no one likes it. It gets worse and worse, over years,

that is the hard part, over years, day by day, for years. One

absorbs that too, endures it, getting dead and mutilated inside:

one endures the continuing, worsening poverty and the public

disgrace: strangers despise you, for what you think or what you

write, or no one knows you. And you put writing, solitude, this

failure, first, before him: and his way of loving you is not to take

offense: not to point out the arrogant stupidity of the choice:

but to stay, to let you leave him out, far away, in the chill region

because you have a cold and awful heart. He is for human times.

But writing is cold and alone. It makes you monstrous, hard, icy,

colder and more barren, more ruthless, than the Arctic Sea.

*

Each book makes you poorer: not just blood: money, food,

shelter: the more time you use writing but not making money,

the poorer you are. Each book makes you poorer. You are

awash in pain, the physical poverty, the inner desolation. You

get deader and deader inside. The blood still stains the stone, a

delicate pink, tiny drops rubbed into signs and gestures. The

glacier moves slowly over the fertile plain, killing. Everything

around you begins to die.

*

Solitude is your refuge and your tomb, where you are buried

alive. Writing is your slowr, inexorable suicide. Poverty is the

day grinding into night, night hurling you back without mercy

to day: day is teeth grinding to the exposed, raw nerves, slow,

a torture of enduring. There are no human witnesses, only the