my indulgences. The rest was austere, the heat prohibiting
excess, poverty offended by it. The single mattress was like a
prayer.
I came alive again: in solitude: concentrating: writing.
*
Yes, there were men and women, women and men, but they
were faded: they were background, not foreground, intrusions,
failures of faith, laziness of spirit: forays into the increasingly
foreign world of the social human being: they were brief
piercing moments of sensation, the sensation pale no matter
how acute, sentimental no matter how tough: namby-pamby
silliness of thighs that had to open: narrow pleasure with no
mystery, no subtlety, no subtext: pierce, come; suck, come;
foretold pleasures contained between the legs, while solitude
promised immersion, drenching, the body overcome by the
radical intensity of enduring. *
I met my beautiful boy, my lost brother, around, somewhere,
and invited him in. I saw him around, here and there, and
invited him in. Talking with him was different from anything
else: the way the wind whispers through the tops of trees just
brushed by sunset. It made me happy. I invited him in. My
privacy included him. My solitude was not betrayed. We were
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
122
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,
124
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
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
*
115
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
1 2. 6
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
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
127
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
the vastness, the touch of my fingers is then carried back under
the water across the earth, and I am immortal: the ocean will
carry that touch with it forever. I breathe to the sound of it
enduring. I breathe like it does, my blood takes on its rhythms,
my heart listens to the sound of the ocean enduring and mimics
it.
After five days, my lost boy comes to visit. We swim. In the
shower we make love. We sleep on the beach, in the fog, in the
mist. Inside the huge slick bugs line the tops of the windows,
poised there to drop off or fly, but never moving, primal, they
could be gargoyles, guardians in stone but as old as the sea. I
watch them. I stare. I am terrified by them but too tired to
scream or run or move: I am restless: they sit: I am afraid: they
sit: they are long, slick brown things, repulsive, slow: I must
be here, near the ocean, or perhaps I will die: maybe they wait
for that: grotesque guardians of my lonely, tired death. I am
restless. I go inside, I go outside. I listen to music: Bach,
Chopin, Mahler, Mozart. They and the ocean are renewal, the
will to live. So is the boy, my love, sleeping on the beach. I
have left him, fragile, exposed, as I always do, to sleep alone.
128
He sleeps, I am restless, I go in and out. He leaves the next
day. I have two more days here. The ocean has turned me
nearly human: closer to life than death. Someday I want the
ocean forever, a whole life, day in and day out, a proper marriage: I want to be its human witness: near its magnificence, near the beat of its splendid, terrifying heart. Oh, yes, I am
tired: but I have seen the ocean come from the end of the
world to touch the sand at my feet.
*
He calls me, the publisher with the dripping upper lip, the hair
on it encrusted slightly yellow, slightly green. His voice is
melodious, undulating like the ocean, a soft washing up of
words on this desolate human shore: a whisper, a wind rushing
through the trees bringing a sharp, wet chill. He wants me,