Andrea Dworkin - Ice And Fire

lost boy asleep. He is tangled in knots of helpless rage. He

thought life was fairer. He sleeps like a lost child. You are in a

fever of creation, waiting to die, hurrying to finish first. There

is more to do.

*

Solitude is a shroud, the creature inside it still alive; writing

resistance to being bound up and thrown in a hole in the

ground; poverty the wild weeds growing over the hard, lonely

earth. The lost boy sleeps, breathes, suffers: fingernails

scratching against the looking glass trying to get through, he

can’t bring Alice back.

*

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Solitude is revenge. Writing is revenge. Poverty is your wild

pride, open sores, matted hair, gorgon, rags, hairshirt, filth

and smell: arrogant saint nailed to a tired old cross. He tells

you he hates your pride. He does hate it.

*

It is too easy to be martyred. Your pride is more terrible than

that. You keep fighting. Solitude is revenge. Writing is revenge.

Medea, not Christ, is your model. Where are the children to

kill? I could, I could. “ I too can stab, ” she told Jason. I too

can stab.

*

So now we have come to rest in this awful place, the windows

open in the cold storm of winter, the fumes turning even the

coldest, fiercest wind stagnant, rancid. The vagabonds shit in

the foyer of the building’s lobby and behind the stairwell and

hide out on the landing above us. We are five flights up. There

is no money to move one more time: and my friend, my sweet

boy, sleeps in wool and thermal underwear and sweatshirts

pale and blue as if frozen by death: and I sit by the open

window in the dead of winter, wintry winter, the wind

streaming in, a small electric heater just keeping my fingers

from freezing up stiff, and I write, I am cold and tired beyond

anything I can say, any words there are: a dying bird, broken

wing, on a plain of ice; some creature, lost and broken, on a

plain of ice, isolated, silent, fatigued, famished for warmth and

rest and rescue, having no hope, wanting not to turn cannibal before dying: crawling, crawling, trying to find the end of the icy plain, the rich brown earth, a plant, a flower:

rescue, escape: some oasis not ruined by heavy, wet, implacable

cold.

I am cold all the time. I walk six hours a day, eight hours a

day, then come to this apartment where the windows are never

closed. I am desperate beyond any imagining. You will never

know. It is amazing that I do not kill.

*

I am afraid of dying, especially of pneumonia. I am sick all the

time, fever, sore throat, chill to the bones, joints stiff, abdominal pains from the fumes, headaches from the fumes, dizziness from the fumes. I am afraid of sleeping, afraid of dying: each day is a nightmare of miles to walk not to die: is there

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money for a cup of coffee today? I am a refugee: profoundly

despondent and tired enough to die: I want somewhere to live:

really live: I imagine it: warm and pretty: clean: no human shit

in piles: little bourgeois dreamer: dumb cunt: eyes hurt like

Spinoza’s: I am in the apartment, there is a driving rain, violent

wind, I stand in the rain inside, drenched.

*

The fumes start in winter. Winter, spring, summer, fall, winter

again, summer again: the edge of fall. The chill is in the marrow

of the bones. The fatigue makes the eyes gray and yellow,

great rings circle them: the skin is dirty ivory like soap left in a

bathtub for years: the fatigue is like the awful air that rises

from a garbage can left to melt in the sun: the fatigue especially

sits on the tongue, slowing it down, words are said in broken

syllables, sentences rarely finished: speech becomes desperate

and too hard: the fatigue drowns the brain in sludge, there is

no electricity, only the brain sinking under the weight of the

pollution: the fatigue is smeared all over, inside the head it is

in small lakes, and behind the eyes it drips, drips. It is fall. The

windows are open. The book has been finished now. Many

publishers have refused to publish it. There is virtually no one

left to despise it, insult it, malign it, refuse it: and yet I have

been refining it, each and every night, writing until dawn. Now

I am tired and the book is perfect and I am done, a giant slug,

a glob of goo. A woman lets me go to her apartment, on the

ocean. Perhaps she saves my life.

*

In the living room there are large windows, and right outside

them there is the beach, the ocean, the sky, the moon: the sound of

the waves, the sound of the ocean moving over the earth becomes

the sound of one’s own breathing. It is foggy, hot, moist, damp,

and when fog rises on the water, huge roaches climb the walls

and rest on the tops of the windows. They are slow, covered in

the sea mist, prehistoric, like the ocean itself. They seem part

of my delirium, a fever of fatigue: I am alternately shivering,

shaking delirious and comatose, almost dead: a corpse, staring,

no pennies for her eyes. I have no speech left. I sit and stare, or

shake and cry: but still, the ocean is there. I hear the ocean, I

see the ocean: I watch the huge bugs: at dawn, I swim: I see

the red sun rise and I swim: I hear the ocean, I watch the

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ocean, I see how it endures, going on and on, I listen to the

sound of its endurance, I sit and stare or I shake, fevered. The

bright sunlight breaks up the fog, dries up the mist, the huge

brown bugs disappear: outside normal people chatter: the

afternoons are long, dull, too much sun, too many chattering

vulgar souls not destroyed, normal people with normal concerns: cheery seaside banter: old women on benches on the boardwalk right under my window: and at night teenagers

drinking beer, listening to the blaring radios, courting,

smoking. I avoid the bright sun of the afternoon and the normal

people. I sit in the living room, the sound of the ocean cradles

and rocks me, and I read Thomas Mann, listen to Mozart.

When the vulgar afternoon is over, I watch the ocean and I

listen to it endure. At night, I go out and in, out and in, walk

the beach, walk the boardwalk, sit in the sand, the wet sand,

watch the ocean, I watch it sitting, standing, walking, I walk

along its edge with concentration like not stepping on the

cracks in sidewalks, or I just tramp through the silky water as

it laps up against the sand. I sit on the empty benches on the

boardwalk and I watch the ocean. I go to the edge and touch