The art, you see, is really the head, however you train the body.
What does all this mean? That I am your hostess, your friend, your ally. That we are in the same boat. That I am the grand-daughter of Madam Cause; my great-aunts are Mistress Doasyouwouldbedoneby and her slower sister, Mistress Bedonebyasyoudid. As for my mother, she was an ordinary woman-that is to say, very helpless-and as my father was pure appearance (and hence nothing at all), we needn't trouble about him.
Everything I do, I do by Cause, that is to say Because, that is to say out of necessity, will-I, nill-I, ineluctably, because of the geas laid on me by my grandmother Causality.
And now-since hysterical strength affects me the way staying up all night affects you-I'm going to sleep.
X
In my sleep I had a dream and this dream was a dream of guilt. It was not human guilt but the kind of helpless, hopeless despair that would be felt by a small wooden box or geometrical cube if such objects had consciousness; it was the guilt of sheer existence.
It was the secret guilt of disease, of failure, of ugliness (much worse things than murder); it was an attribute of my being like the greenness of the grass.
It was in me. It was on me. If it had been the result of anything I had done, I would have been less guilty.
In my dream I was eleven years old.
Now in my eleven years of conventional life I had learned many things and one of them was what it means to be convicted of rape-I do not mean the man who did it, I mean the woman to whom it was done. Rape is one of the Christian mysteries, it creates a luminous and beautiful tableau in people's minds; and as I listened furtively to what nobody would allow me to hear straight out, I slowly came to understand that I was face to face with one of those shadowy feminine disasters, like pregnancy, like disease, like weakness; she was not only the victim of the act but in some strange way its perpetrator; somehow she had attracted the lightning that struck her out of a clear sky. A diabolical chance-which was not chance-had revealed her to all of us as she truly was, in her secret inadequacy, in that wretched guiltiness which she had kept hidden for seventeen years but which now finally manifested itself in front of everybody. Her secret guilt was this: She was Cunt.
She had "lost" something.
Now the other party to the incident had manifested his essential nature, too; he was Prick-but being Prick is not a bad thing. In fact, he had "gotten away with" something (possibly what she had "lost").
And there I was, listening at eleven years of age: She was out late at night.
She was in the wrong part of town.
Her skirt was too short and that provoked him.
She liked having her eye blacked and her head banged against the sidewalk.
I understood this perfectly. (I reflected thus in my dream, in my state of being a pair of eyes in a small wooden box stuck forever on a gray, geometric plane-or so I thought.) I too had been guilty of what had been done to me, when I came home from the playground in tears because I had been beaten up by bigger children who were bullies.
I was dirty.
I was crying.
I demanded comfort.
I was being inconvenient.
I did not disappear into thin air.
And if that isn't guilt, what is? I was very lucid in my nightmare. I knew it was not wrong to be a girl because Mommy said so; cunts were all right if they were neutralized, one by one, by being hooked on to a man, but this orthodox arrangement only partly redeems them and every biological possessor of one knows in her bones that radical inferiority which is only another name for Original Sin.
Pregnancy, for example (says the box), take pregnancy now, it's a disaster, but we're too enlightened to blame the woman for her perfectly natural behavior, aren't we? Only keep it secret and keep it going-and I'll give you three guesses as to which partner the pregnancy is in.
When you grow up as an old-fashioned girl, you always remember that cozy comfort: Daddy getting angry a lot but Mummy just sighs. When Daddy says, "For God's sake, can't you women ever remember anything without being told?" he isn't asking a real question any more than he'd ask a real question of a lamp or a wastebasket. I blinked my silver eyes inside my box. If you stumble over a lamp and you curse that lamp and then you become aware that inside that lamp (or that wooden box or that pretty girl or that piece of bric-a-brac) is a pair of eyes watching you and that pair of eyes is not amused-what then?
Mommy never shouted, "I hate your bloody guts!" She controlled herself to avoid a scene. That was her job.
I've been doing it for her ever since.
Now here the idiot reader is likely to hit upon a fascinating speculation (maybe a little late), that my guilt is blood-guilt for having killed so many men. I suppose there is nothing to be done about this. Anybody who believes I feel guilty for the murders I did is a Damned Fool in the full Biblical sense of those two words; you might as well kill yourself right now and save me the trouble, especially if you're male. I am not guilty because I murdered.
I murdered because I was guilty.
Murder is my one way out.
For every drop of blood shed there is restitution made; with every truthful reflection in the eyes of a dying man I get back a little of my soul; with every gasp of horrified comprehension I come a little more into the light. See? It's me!
I am the force that is ripping out your guts; I, I, I, the hatred twisting your arm; I, I, I, the fury who has just put a bullet into your side. It is I who cause this pain, not you. It is I who am doing it to you, not you. It is I who will be alive tomorrow, not you. Do you know? Can you guess? Are you catching on? It is I, who you will not admit exists.
Look! Do you see me?
I, I, I. Repeat it like magic. That is not me. I am not that. Luther crying out in the choir like one possessed: NON SUM, NON SUM, NON SUM!
This is the underside of my world.
Of course you don't want me to be stupid, bless you! you only want to make sure you're intelligent. You don't want me to commit suicide; you only want me to be gratefully aware of my dependency. You don't want me to despise myself; you only want to ensure the flattering deference to you that you consider a spontaneous tribute to your natural qualities. You don't want me to lose my soul; you only want what everybody wants, things to go your way; you want a devoted helpmeet, a self-sacrificing mother, a hot chick, a darling daughter, women to look at, women to laugh at, women to come to for comfort, women to wash your floors and buy your groceries and cook your food and keep your children out of your hair, to work when you need the money and stay home when you don't, women to be enemies when you want a good fight, women who are sexy when you want a good lay, women who don't complain, women who don't nag or push, women who don't hate you really, women who know their job, and above all-women who lose. On top of it all, you sincerely require me to be happy; you are naively puzzled that I should be so wretched and so full of venom in this best of all possible worlds.
Whatever can be the matter with me? But the mode is more than a little outworn.
As my mother once said: The boys throw stones at the frogs in jest.
But the frogs die in earnest.
XI
I don't like didactic nightmares. They make me sweat. It takes me fifteen minutes to stop being a wooden box with a soul and to come back to myself in ordinary human bondage.
Davy sleeps nearby. You've heard about blue-eyed blonds, haven't you? I passed into his room barefoot and watched him curled in sleep, unconscious, the golden veils of his eyelashes shadowing his cheeks, one arm thrown out into the streak of light falling on him from the hall. It takes a lot to wake him (you can almost mount Davy in his sleep) but I was too shaken to start right away and only squatted down by the mattress he sleeps on, tracing with my fingertips the patterns the hair made on his chest: broad high up, over the muscles, then narrowing toward his delicate belly (which rose and fell with his breathing), the line of hair to below the navel, and then that suddenly stiff blossoming of the pubic hair in which his relaxed genitals nestled gently, like a rosebud.