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 selclass="underline" 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
can’t bring Alice back.
*
115
Solitude is revenge. Writing is revenge. Poverty is your wild
pride, open sores, matted hair, gorgon, rags, hairshirt, filth
and smelclass="underline" 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