Afterwards, when we go out through the great doors, it is as if the night had burst open in a dark fruit, so immense and pithy it is, so silent and unshaken. I know then there are no questions to be asked any more, there are no queries to be put to the Host. Everything is washed clean in the stream of faces from the gold doors, the beards, the sacristan, the verger, the whore, the fillock, the slut, the gentry-mort, and the lusk. The light is leaking out among the blue gravestones. Sacred to the memory of Lawrence Lucifer who died this day of August. Offer a candle or a sprig of holly. I am a gnarled backbone of stone, speaking in many hectic lichens, a remote powder in a sheath of tepid lead, out of the reach of iambs or fugue. The whole question, in essence, is acceptance, the depersonalization of self, of the society which one has absorbed. It is not only a question of art, but a question of life. You are altered, affected, transmuted by this orientation. Whatever was your antecedent, your history, that no longer matters to me. I can no longer whimper when your head goes down like a hammer on the white pillow. The strange accidents of bone, the syntax of muscle and cartilage, exist in a relation to something that is no longer history or ideals.
“Lie down and die, frail helmet of dust,” I wrote once; and dying that way you were Sappho, you were Beatrice, curling up like a petal in an Egyptian evening. Death among tombs. Death like the salt whips and discord of the winter sea on the first day of desire. Yes, I am serious. What you are now is a lowest common denominator, agonizingly held for an hour in my vise of bone and blood. Believe me, I have taken nothing from you; or rather, by taking everything from you — everthing irrelevant, confusing, historical — I have made such an unbearable poignance of you, that just to try and utter it would send me mad. That part of what remains, when cupid’s loaves and fishes are gathered up, I keep always inside me, like a reserve of strength. I need it in life. I cannot destroy it by writing it — and destroying myself in a pattern of contagious syllables for the dull world. Never, I promise you, never. That much belongs to life. Amen.
When the drums begin, and the opaque lightning trembles in the night sky, I become a child again, in revisited history. I per se I, Lawrence Lucifer. In my dreams there is only one possible protagonist. I am moving across the scenery of the world on noiseless castors; my hand is held, but by whom I cannot tell. O per se O. Among the soft fermenting pastel green of the Himalayas Father Paul whittles his sailing boat from stumps of deodar; the hills breathe snow over the deserted playgrounds, a Tibetan panic of winter. The passes glow with eternal malevolence, and the river moves in soft packs of ice, or curdles with green velvet. On the highroad the lamas pass, twisting their tin wheels in their paws, murmuring; in the soft ferns of the hills the pug marks of the bear. On the treble slopes of the foothills the snow is gathering in clouds, the first dour caravans are wheeling up the plain to meet them. The duffle-clad Bhutias huddle in their sheepskins and grovel among the coloured cards on the flag steps of the churches. I am alone weeping over Everest. Somewhere over there, eternally veiled in blue, the forbidden City is lying, glowing like a stone. Lhasa where the great horns are braying and the devils jump one by one from the cliffs. I stretch out my arms and fall in the snow; the clouds gather, the avalanche walks down the hills in a toga, throwing petulant boulders. The wind opens up volley upon volley of empty words which drive past me like refuse. All that is locked up in a dream of Lhasa, is driven down into the river among the ice and the serpents. Nothing remains for me but the deaf-mute syllables of a tongue I have yet to learn. The priests are conducting the thunder of the litanies. In the Palace they are clicking their beads and smiling the canine smile. The slopes are writhing with flags; and the coloured paper horses gallop over the precipice, clipped with life-giving scissors, swept away as soon as created. The late voyager gathers his cloak in his armpits and bores his little pit of air into the hurricane. The antelopes gossip and quiver, their eyes molten, their flanks stiffened to the wind; and the man drops slabs of butter in his teacup and swallows a pill of sacred dung.
I am standing at the window watching the storm gather. The lightning is so smooth and trembling that it lights the room with a queer sustained glint of green, as it might be an aquarium, and me standing here, on the carpet of weeds and slimy rock, waiting. I am thinking of Tarquin’s music, and realizing that of all this fear and turmoil it has recorded nothing. From music we demand our whole life if it is to move us: every modulation of dream, despair, love, yearning. It is the past and the future, the first rapture of living, and that future going down into the tomb; the descent of Ishtar among the soiled roses; the entry into the chamber of the cosmos; the first kicking in the womb, and the last elegant spasm of cessation, lull, status.
Tomorrow the earth will be drenched, exhausted, and born again from this orgasm of water: sopping and juicy to the hilt, the roots of the bush. The penis buried and shriven, sliding back into hibernation, curling and somnolent as a taproot. The quickened walls of the cunt lined with quilts and membranes of gum, resin, foxgloves, puffballs, wheat. We will go out together on the steaming arable among the cattle, by the river, and re-create the legend of the kingcup which Tarquin missed. It will not be difficult if we practice humility: humility from the roots upward, all-devastating, all-devouring, omni-passionate. If we have wounds we will show them.
This morning it is Chaucer. We are following the pilgrims’ way southward. It is in order to refresh the negress that I am compelled to come out here with you, to taste again the prehistoric world, and reflect on its quietus; because in that stale room, overlooked by the charts, by the blind wall, I have been impregnated with the data of an epoch which is the subject of all contemplative dope. I am stifled in it. I mean the vellum and ground-ink ages, the patient, beautiful work, so complete and formal within the limits it set itself. The first presses groaning out their rich black ore of literature. Caxton, Mallory — the simple cunning of widowed children. Wiry paper smelling of candlesticks and glue. Choirs writhing with goblins alleged sacerdotal. Trefoil, cinquefoil, and the whole body of perpendicular gothic gray in the spires aspiring. Minted coins and humorous rapes. Inlaid hilts and beautiful women with the gummata growing in them. The Green King tied by the derelict barge to his mother’s breasts. Tertiary noses carved on the laughing faces of the court hunchback. The swans flying backward and the breviaries pullulating in heraldic animals. All this beautiful stuff circulating in the veins of the negress, poisoning her. It is in order to destroy history that I am compelled to experience it, all of it. But behind it all there is the image of the paper mill, the great domes of pulp, endless spools of marrow and garbage and cloth, woven into daily papers, sanitary towels, toilet wafers, blotting paper. I am again on the high tower among the sea-gulls, shaping the decision, when I watch this beautiful stuff poured away down the sewers. Somewhere the line has been broken, and we are wandering among the staggering nebulae, in a region of consciousness so cold, so rarefied, that we want to scream aloud for warmth. A region where the healing mythologies are so etherized that they float away elusive, before the mind can grasp them and burn them for fuel. This is the proper No Man’s Land, crammed with plenty and radiant steel, where the heart screams for pity, where the viscera contract at the smell of money, multitude, masturbation; where the warm thoughts, the feelings, the delights are stunted from the womb, vaporized and snuffed. Ephemera! Between Golgotha and the slaughterhouse where daylong one hears nothing but the hollow screaming of pigs. There is no quietus; no bodkin, dagger, bullet can ever a quietus make. The dance is on, eternally on.