When I think of Tibet lying out there among the snow craters, the Golgotha of the dead races, Minoa, Japan opening like the tail of a peacock, or Ethiopia where the lanterns swing darkly over pools of blood — then I know that the myth which hangs so heavily on us is not dead. It is coming back slowly into focus, its power is being restored; wherever we move we knock against its shapes — permeations and diffusions so vast that there is not a square foot of earth without its compulsive magic. Dig where you please along the craters of this battlefield, and your spade strikes gold. The ground is stuffed with it, loaded, grape-heavy, waiting for some cancerous spring to release all this shot and shivered rubbish to burst into crazy bloom around us. It runs in the water from the taps; it stiffens and breeds in the columns of water standing in trees; it permeates the granaries, runs in the seed of the cornfields. It is everywhere. A shovelful of bones will uncover temples to Quetzalcoatl and the horrors breeding in them; the bathtub from which Nezahualcoyotl, the poet, stared out across the infant world. The tombs in which even the mummies are dead, and wait stiffly for the resurrection. Caves with the rufous bison dancing on them; the Aurignacian dipping his finger in electricity and tracing the fugitive phenomena of the heraldic universe; the Pekin wonder, the age of lithos, lithos, lithos. Apes with extosis, and the forty-foot dinosaur with toothache. Patrol of the serious mammoth between the ice ages. Sabre-tooth changing his diet; crows’ feet left on pitchers. Minos. Byzantium flowering drably in Athos, practising a tradition so formal that fifty years killed its novelty and after twelve hundred you can still smell it, like sardines gone bad in a tin. Faith, you are always saying to me, ultimately one must have faith — but what degree of it, of shining will, is necessary in order to give these relics a decent burial? And anyway, when you say “Faith”, how do I know it is not one of the defunct idealisms under whose banner you are crusading? If I am foreign, it is because I am trying to accept the world, not deny its positivity; or build it up on the shaky armature of an ethic. I have quarrelled on this subject not only with you, but with Alan, with Peters, with Lobo. I shall continue to quarrel until my own position becomes, not hypothetical, but definite. Then vale: the days are too empty and the nights too long. How can I spend the rest of my time here once I am convinced that life is really imagination?
At night I dream. It is a queer sensation. I am killing everything around me, the ages I have visited, the epochs I have endured, the pilgrimages I have been making — lonelier than any Jew could be, more lonely in race. I give up and let everything pass through me from the age of Bronze to the age of Demons. I ride the wave to the height of a million light-waves, skimming the vertebrae of the canon, articulating the skeletons of old systems to examine them, and destroying them again. This fiendish activity has left me alone in a treasure of images, so barren in their value, that just to write them makes me weary: the filter, the pentacle, the necromance. Everything. The mild faces of the astrologers charting the planets. The stark equation of Good and Evil worn like a halter. The tympana writhing with little horned fellows — myctyres, oxyrhincus, cirripedes, holothurians. In my imagination I follow the myth wherever it burst forth, in Tuscany, Sparta; where you can still see it living in the stiff green candles of the cypress, the contorted silver of Byzance. The robes crusted stiff with apostles, jewels, and fossils. Metamorphic beards sharded in limestone. It is a form of escape. I identify myself with anyone and anything who has escaped death for a vivid history. I tell myself that I am an alien, a foreigner, a pyknic from Mars. I say this, not because I am lonely but because I know it will come true sooner or later. I establish my ancestry as greedily as any suburban householder, grabbing at the lost men, the scourgers, the writers who ate whips and breathed scorpions. In the severest extremity too, even the brothers among the caves, the troglodytes, the men with the green-stick backbones, the murderous syllables that were not words but spoken actions. At such times I might be God for all the world does to me. If my head were larger I might adopt a skullcap like Gregory and a feeling for language equal to Tarquin’s feeling for piano method. (‘Touch?’ I say to him. ‘Yes. So delicate my dear Tarquin as almost to be rectal!’ I offer him brandy before he has time to flinch. Gregory.)
Well, at night I decide it is no use. Escape is the endless theme of our contemplation, escape, escape. The city is beating around me like a foetus, chromium, steel, turbines, rubber, chimneys. The nights are dizzy with the fog, and the trains run amok. After twelve, there is an approximate stillness during which I begin my journeys in Time: the only anodyne, the only specific. I wander from house to ruined house of the Zodiac, or else narrow travel down to an abstraction which can gag the nerves and spread soma along the vertebrae. The world is speaking outside me, in the night, luminous with snouts of vomiting steel and chimneys. The new world, whose choice is strangling the fragile flame of the psyche. Chamberlain is asking for a mythology: no new mythologies, I thank you, we are insulated against the myth. The arteries are stiff with machinery, the spine is folding up like an umbrella. Across the fatal pantheon of the panic world, so irrationally mourned — not for its own sake, but because we have no pantheon of our own — slides the figure of Mickey Mouse, top-hatted maniac with the rubber pelvis, as blithe as the gonococcus in the veins of Dives. Because I tell myself I adore you, because when we fuck such vivid abstractions seem to jump from our bodies, I would like to offer you the traditional silver lining. But it is no good. When I hear the great chorus of the common people singing the nostalgic hopeless songs of the silver lining, I know it. It is no use. There is no way out. The inky slit between the legs of Miss Smith tells the same tale as you tell me, lying drawn down like a dog or leopard, vulnerable. Remote as the moon craters, the plumes of sunspot, I can only tell you that your fertility is going bad while you sit there, smoking, or reading the paper; it is falling away into the limbo of all this beautiful useless stuff which I am fighting, in order to try and break free from: in order to re-create and re-enter as a new gnosis.
This is a reflection of that night when Tarquin was sitting at the keyboard like a ghoul; and the music — the music flowing like bile into your small alert ears — was so rancid with the truth that I was almost ashamed to look at you. I knew then that the whole thing was a fake — the legend that Tarquin is trying to create, the myth which Chamberlain hourly expects to speak from his stomach like a devil. The Gadarene descent is so violent that most of us are still unaware that we are moving, so rapt is the illusion of stillness. Where is this new myth coming from? Where is the great heroic figure on which it is to be shaped? The causeways are sinking deeper into the marsh, the future is growing a heavier and heavier burden; the past is cut off like a gangrenous limb. Where and what is the avatar — giant or dwarf? Where is the sterilized paragon of the new epoch — the clinic worker and Holy Ghost combined? Give it time, give it time, Chamberlain is shouting. A few more hospitals, less hours of work, more time for the pursuit of higher things. We must clear the ground first. (He is celebrating his own febrile gust in a whirl of wishbone fantasies.) The door of the Lock Hospital is green. The door of the antenatal surgery is white. Green again for the door of the maternity clinic. The foetus is disgorged like a turd from the infinitely distended red rubber neck of the cervix. Let me breathe, I am dying for air. The mask fits very close to the mouth. Filter my food through the placenta and watch my mother devour it afterwards. Chamberlain says we must clear the ground. Chamberlain says we must be more humane. We must love our own guts. Above all we must exterminate the politicians who poison humanity, whose souls are as the toes of old boots. Very just. We must make the way straight for the appearance of Mickey Mouse, who will arrive together with his invisible penis which he is never allowed to pull or twang. Chamberlain says, castrate the man who knows too much and is too little; do not mistake the cultured man for the man who is merely well-informed. Grab at the treasures of the passional life. Chamberlain says we must be born again. Tarquin says we are all born dead. Friends, Romans, Countrymen, there were physiologists who did not believe that the hymen existed; and here the fishermen are ashamed to run about naked though the fish wear no clothes! Nothing but fracture, schism, madness remains. Imprimis, Lawrence Lucifer, I per se I, standing on a high tower over many delicate counties, feeling the arteries in my limbs stiffen with weeping and lamentation. We, who are sitting outside in the dark, the great unorganized body of creators, know for certain that it is our own tenderness that is poisoning us. The ingrowing cyst of the love which we dare not offer to the world. That is the germ from which the new martyrdom springs: the stripping of the body, fibre by fibre, the branding and cleaning of the soul. I am remembering Hilda’s great rufous vulva like a crowded marketpiece; the great conduit choked with blood and paper and cigar ends which we must accept before we can go any farther. The great luminous symbol of the cunt, glowing softly in history like the Grail, the genesis of the living, the blithe plush cushion of life. Hilda lying there like Tibet, glowing in her convalescent secrecy among the snow-bound craters and jewels. (There are so few of us left with the murderous gift of love, so few.) And in that music which Tarquin made, as he said, for us, there was no love; there was no hate even — that symptom of love. Only the terrible enervation, the dead loss, the recoiling of the spirit before truth. I said nothing to you then, because I could remember nothing to say; if I had begun to speak I might never have ended. I thought of Morgan, down by the boilers, with the marks of the catheter on him; Madame About and the smell of her womb; Lobo weeping over the knife; Gregory standing before the death squad, facing the green bullets of words: I thought of us wandering that day by the river, among the elegiac kingcups, busy with dreams so trivial and bright that we had no idea of the doom settling from heaven on us like a floor of soot. Yes, when I said we became heraldic I meant a painted annihilation which you are still constantly mistaking for life. The country was alive in the sense that a playing card is alive. We are entering into a fiction, and all this is merely the paraphernalia of ballet, the insignia of clowns or swans strutting before some too stylized backcloth. That is why this writing had to become ballet and ape it: not the emotion of personalities, but a theatre of the idea. Ourselves, if we still had “selves”, as the projection of an idea tossed under a spotlight to spin and dither like Japanese waltzing mice …