“I have the fear that everyone is leaving, moving away, that love dies in an instant. I look at the people walking in the street, just walking, and I feel this: they are walking, but they are also being carried away. They are part of a current. Each moment that is passing takes them somewhere else. I confuse the moods which change and pass with the people themselves. I see them carried into eddies, always moving out of some state they will never return to, I see them LOST. They do not walk in circles, back to where they started, but they walk out and beyond in some irretrievable way, too fast, toward the end. And I feel myself standing there, I cannot move with them. I seem to be standing and watching this current passing and I am left behind. Why have I the feeling they all pass, like the day, the leaves, the weather, the moods of climate, into death? ”
“Because you are standing still and measuring the time by your standing still, the others seem to run too fast towards an end, which, if you were living and running with them, you would cease to be aware of. The death you are aware of is only in you because you are watching.”
“I stand for hours watching the river downtown. What obsesses me is the debris. I look at the flowers floating, petals completely opened, the life sucked out of them, flowers without pistils. Rubber dolls, punced, bobbing up and down like foetuses. Boxes full of wilted vegetables, bottles with broken tops. Dead cats. Corks. Bread that looks like entrails. Torn envelopes. These things haunt me. The debris. Well, when I watch people it is as if at the same time I saw the discarded parts of themselves. Detritus. And so I can’t see their motions except as acts which lead them faster and faster to the waste, the end, to the river where it will be thrown out. The faster they walk the streets, the faster they move toward this mass of debris. That is how I see them, caught by a current that carries them off. “
“Only because you are standing still. If you were in the current, in love, in ecstasy, the motion would not show only its aspect of death. You see what life throws out because you stand outside, shut out from the ferment itself. What is burnt, used, is not regretted by anyone who is the fire consuming all this. If you were on fire you would enjoy throwing out what was dead. You would fight for the lightness of your movements, loving, hating, dancing, caressing. It is not living too fast and abandoning oneself that carries one towards death, but not moving. Then everything deteriorates. When parts of yourself die they are only like leaves. What refuses to live in you will become like cells through which the blood does not pass. The blood must pass.
“There must be change. When you are living you seek the change; it is only when you stop that you become aware of death. Death and abandon. Death and separation.”
Djuna walked out in the street, blind with the rush of memories. She stood in the center of the street eddies, and suddenly she knew the whole extent of her fear of flowing, of yielding, of depending on another. Suddenly she began walking faster than whoever walked beside her, to feel the exultation of passing them. The one who does not move feels abandoned, and the one who loves and weeps and yields feels he is living so fast the debris cannot catch up with him. She was moving faster than the slowly flowing rivers carrying detritus. Moving, moving. Flowing, flowing, flowing. When she was watching, everything that moved seemed to be moving away, but when moving this was only a tide, and the self turning, rotating, was feeding the rotation of desire.
Djuna no longer watched death. She was dancing, and she was dancing away from Hans, and back to him, leaving more space and air between them. But thinking of him, attentive to her returns. Thinking constantly of Hans but dancing into new lives. Alert, and a little impatient, aware of time (to be there when he returns). She opened many doors. (I am not here to stay. He must not be kept waiting.) He is behind every move she makes. She is still swallowing food for him, looking at women with his eyes, feeling the sensuality of the day through his skin. She laughs his laughter, feels all the currents passing through him.