I had trouble falling asleep again; when I woke up I realized, as I so often did, that I was essentially outside of my four walls yet again. Yes, yet again I’d drifted away from myself… I hardly ever managed to make contact with myself. How, I asked, how are you supposed to do that, to find contact with yourself… practically speaking?
Surely not by bowing to the descriptions of you by others, which are often as cruel as can be.
Surely, then, by providing your own description, a description meant for your own gaze, and thus for the world outside your window… a wanted poster.
The world outside my window lacks that gaze that is mine, so I’d sometimes told myself.
But I’d had to realize that I was no one. — I didn’t know whether I existed; the fact of my birth had been kept secret from me. They kept it secret to punish me, for I hadn’t turned out to be the thing they’d hoped to bestow upon the world. Yes, I’d made the mistake of having myself be born, having myself be raised by the state and its pedagogy, by pedagogy and its state—I’d practically volunteered for it—but then I turned out differently. And so I had to be nullified, voided; there was neither a womb nor a pedagogy nor a state for the creature I’d become. I didn’t even have a name to lay claim to. If I wanted to start describing the world, my town for instance, the way I saw it through my eyes, I first had to engender myself, and had to do so again with each new attempt at a description. But in the unequaled fiasco of my development, neither the pedagogues nor the state had found it worthwhile to instruct me in the technical details of the progenitive act. When at last, by chance, I learned them myself, I began—my right fist forming a visual symbol that referenced this act—to rush around town, waving my lower arm to sling this symbol through the air, to make it absolutely clear to everyone that I’d resolved to engender my I once again. In so doing, I made a pledge, a pledge to my pedagogues: Let me do it just once, so that I can finally become I. — And at the same time I made a pledge to the state: If I become I, if I am able to do the same thing as my mother with her phallus, I’ll be just like you, and thus I’ll be the way you want me. I’ll be a swine, an old goat, a patriarch, an officer, a toolmaker. If you let me, just once, I’ll leave the trash heaps of my own free will, I’ll never be a pornographer again, I’ll forego my revenge. I’ll forget the state’s attempt to extirpate my gender by keeping my capacity for procreation secret; yes, I’ll accept it, I’ll forego procreating, I’ll never try to engender anything but myself. But they refused to believe that I wanted to forget, they wouldn’t even open their institution’s gates for me.
I’d made a serious mistake, I hadn’t pledged to keep engendering their idea—the idea that desire was permissible only as a gift from the state—no, I’d merely pledged to engender myself. And in so doing I forgot that I’d been recognized as an innate evil.
Vulgar desperation. My thoughts raged, raged, but there was no answer… those three raps of the crutch on the ceiling above me, in the syllabic rhythm of the three words on the wall by the trash cans, never came. — You are dead. Your eyes have given up describing… should I follow you? The pale yellow syrup I’d vomited while sleeping in the inert light of the ceiling lamp that joined my lips to the filthy tablecloth, the fungus spreading beneath my hair, the crust that covered my tongue each evening after I slept away the day that I moistened with the water dripping brown from the tap, then coughed black letters, crosses, jagged medallions into the sink: this, from now on, would be the material for describing my I. For describing a darkness-soaked stream of summers, light gridded by swarms of black type, a myriad of glowing filament Es that the lamp branded into my pupils. — Could I reach the trash heaps before the night was over, hurrying to huddle there amid the damp, hairy rubbish, to await the morning among nasty curs and copulating rats so that I could be the first to pounce, chance permitting, on some blurred piece of paper, a page documenting my sexuality, to use that awful word…? Probably not.
No, I knew it would be reckless of me to leave the house. — I did it anyway… warily I peered around to see if dogs or policemen were roaming near the house, but heard nothing, the full moon dripped down a stearin glimmer in which everything was deathly still. I hurried to reach the trash cans; from one of them I’d once dragged a corked bottle, still half full, which I took for a bottle of champagne. I’d given up on the paper… I’d try to reach my goal without it… in cases like mine, I told myself, hope is an almost unbearable cowardice, an extraordinary compromise tempting you to set nothing in motion ever again, to sit in your own filth and wait until that hope transpires. When in fact there’s only one hope: the hope of becoming unbearable. Without the hope of someone to help you bear things… You must still have had that hope, my friend, up there in your garret room. I always envied you for your bearability, but that was likely a mistake. The three words whose rhythm you produced with three raps in response to my cry are still scribbled on the wall in obscene chalk letters, showing that I’m in the right place. In our fantasies, my friend, we’ve long since adopted the name behind those words, I said with a peculiar grin. — And as I spoke I quietly opened, with less effort than I’d expected, a gap of about half a yard between the last two cans in the row. In this gap I sat down on the pavement with my legs splayed, my back pressed against the last container still with the rest of the row, quite straight, and then I pulled the last can close to my body. I pulled it as tightly as possible into the semicircle of my outspread legs, took a deep breath, and tugged once more at the can, a final jerk that wedged my lower body in place, so that I was set almost seamlessly between the two containers’ greasy zinc walls. Then I fumbled my genitals out of my pants, and with cautious balance I leaned my penis against the wall of the trash can that rose in front of me; it took me several tries to succeed, it went awry, despite the inscription on the wall above my head I couldn’t manage to simulate an erection, and finally contented myself with having the tip of my penis touch the zinc, shrinking from the night-cool metal. Eager to keep the plot of this immolation moving, I’d forgotten to take the half- or three-quarters-filled champagne bottle out of the trash can. I did so now, sat back down again as before, and placed the bottle just below the waist of my opened trousers, right on the palm-sized patch of skin where blond hairs sprouted. The slender green neck topped by the white plastic cork reared magnificently, somehow reminding me of the anatomical sketches we’d passed back and forth under our desks during political education sessions in my army days. I’d already sampled the bottle with my nose, and there was no doubt that it held gasoline, gasoline that had to be virtually if not completely unsalable; I carefully recorked the bottle and pondered what to do. I resorted to an old habit; first slowly and with feeling, then more and more rapidly and intensely, I began to masturbate; this time, in a deviation from routine, albeit a small one, I did so with my entire fist, closing it cautiously at first, then tighter and tighter; the neck of the bottle seemed to be wet on the outside as well, so it went effortlessly, indeed with wonderful ease; I felt the glass of the bottle start to warm, and paused just twice to wipe the sweat from my brow. It’s possible, I knew, for rapid warming to bring champagne bottles to ejaculation; if the bottle were heated enough, the powerful orgasm of the fermenting champagne would send the cork flying into my face… but despite the utmost exertions I couldn’t manage it, my hand slackened, and with resignation I ceased my movements.