People came to him for strength, and their image of him was of his tallness, his firmness, his wisdom. His strange phrases which acted on them like some one breaking their chains. Simple phrases. He defended them, supported them, transported them. An Apocalyptic strength in him. Something above confusion and chaos. A total man, not made as they were of wavering moods, dispersed fragments, changes and contradictions. An alchemist who could always transmute the pain. The Sphinx who answered all questions. The one before whom one could always become small again, in whom one could find a refuge. He lulled them, lifted them up out of whatever agonizing region they were trapped in. Brought them where they could live better, breathe better, love better, live in harmony with themselves; he reconciled them to the world, conquered the demons and ghosts haunting them. But when they look at the man inside the armour of impersonal phrases they find him smaller, older, different than their image. The little man rises, his shoulders are stooped, he shakes off the stiffness of his limbs, the cramp of the attentive echo, shakes the blood that was asleep during the trance of clairvoyance, shakes off the role imposed on him.
In their dreams they saw him as a god, or a demon. But always above.
When the confession ended he was no longer above.
Lilith said: “I feel the real you behind the analyst. All you say comes out of YOU. No one else could act the same way towards human beings. It is not a system. It is your own goodness, your own compassion. I am sure they do not all use the same words, the same tone. There is magic in you.”
“I am only a symbol.”
“You are more than a symbol; I know separate and personal things about you. I have watched you. You have a love of the absolute, a passion for extracting the essence. You have been denying the human being in you.”
“That’s all very true.”
“You have a gift for life… which you have never used.”
“I was not permitted to use it. I was not loved for myself but for my understanding, for the strength I gave. It was always unreal and false.”
“I could say to you what you said to me: did you reveal your real self? Wasn’t it you who insisted on wearing the mask of the analyst? You who became a Voice? An impersonal Voice? Look how you sit now, while we talk. You never move. You always sit in the same chair. I know nothing about you. Naturally, I can only attach myself to an image. I wish… I’m going to ask you to do something very difficult. Suppose, just for once, that you lie here on the couch and that I sit in your chair—like this—and now I’m you and you’re me. What did you dream last night?”
She was laughing while she made him change places. He looked uneasy, bewildered.
“Why are you uneasy?” she asked, “what are you afraid to reveal? Tell me what you’re most ashamed to tell.”
“Not to you, because you still need me, and while you need me I must remain a mystery to you.”
“I don’t need you.”
“You do. Even what you’re doing now is only because you need a triumph, a victory, over me. I made you confess, you want to make me confess. As soon as you find some one who has the key to you, you want to reverse the roles. You can’t bear to be discovered or dominated.”
“You’re wrong, you’re utterly wrong,” said Lilith violently. “I only did it because I’m interested in you as a human being, because I’m wondering about this man we all use and whom no one really knows.”
“We’ll see who is wrong,” said the Voice, but this Voice was not as firm as when he sat with his back to the light.
The Voice is talking to Djuna:
“Do you think Lilith loves me? If Lilith loved me I would give all this up and begin a new life. I want to give up analysis. Otherwise I will go mad. Do you know what has happened to me during the last four days? Everything that I think of becomes the theme of the day, and all the people who come talk to me about the same thing. First I had a dream of jealousy. I was crazily jealous of some one, I don’t know whom. I awakened filled with a kind of fury and hatred as if some one were taking the woman I wanted away from me. I may haand begeen jealous of Lilith, I don’t know. But I awakened jealous. I wanted to walk out into the street and kill some one. And then the people began to come, one after another. I had no more time to think over my dream. But every one of them talked about jealousy. First came a woman who was jealous of her husband’s first wife, now dead. It was her own sister who had died, and whose husband had then married her. But he still loved her sister. The first time he took her he called out the name of the dead wife. He sought out the resemblance, he liked her to wear the same colors. And this woman felt it, and was tortured because she loved him and wanted his love altogether for herself. He lived in a dream, wrapped in the past. He took her without really taking her, as in a trance. She was in such despair that she thought of nothing else: how to kill his love for her dead sister, how to kill this other woman who had not died for him. She observed that he had been very jealous of her. She sought out the men he was attached to, and gave herself to them, always in such a way that it would be known to him. And then he began to suffer. He became slowly aware of her, of her being loved by other men. She became more vivid in him, through his hatred of her. By the presence of the pain and anger, he began to awaken to her, to her presence, nearness, seduction. He passed from long periods of dreaming to long moments of suffering. He lived with this violent consciousness of her sensual life. She would not let him touch her. Finally the pain became so intolerable that it aroused him to a violent awareness of her, desire for her; and in this fury somehow, the past was destroyed, like some vague dream. He became aware of the woman in her, her yieldings, her sensual responses, of their life in the present.
“This was the first story I heard in the morning. I was possessed with jealousy of Lilith, and everyone who came to me seemed to be possessed with jealousy. I felt my own jealousy in them, and it increased it, magnified it. I asked myself: what kind of feelings has Lilith toward me? Why has she become so vividly alive and why do I hate the way she gives herself? It seemed to me the world was full of jealousy, and that it was contagious. It lay at the bottom of every nature. I saw everyone as being jealous either in the past, the present, or the future. One man talked to me continuously about scenes which had never taken place, which he imagined. He lies for hours imagining this betrayal, reconstructing the scenes in every minute detail, until he goes nearly crazy believing it. His jealousy was really infernal, suffocating, dark, blind, not knowing where to strike and without any reality to support it. A continuous state of doubt. At the end of the day I was shattered. It seemed to me that whatever was in me was awakened in these people and that I was only awakening things which ought better be left asleep. I was increasing the awareness of pain, and breaking down all defences against it. Yes, I know they are false defences, but they are at least as good as the stones over a tomb. They give the illusion that the dead cannot return. But I do not even leave the stone. I take away the symbol of the burial. And that’s not all. The next day I awakened with anguish, with a kind of fear. A nameless fear. A kind of universal doubt. I doubted everything. Above all, Lilith. I feared to know, to really know what she felt. I would have given my life then to lose all my lucidity. And all day, all day the cripples talked to me about fear. I asked them questions I never asked before. Describe what you most fear! They exposed so many fears. But as I asked them it was like asking myself, and awakening my own fears. Fear. The whole world is based on fear, even behind the jealousy of the day before lay fear. Fear of being alone, fear of being abandoned, fear of life, fear of being trapped in tragedy, fear of the animal in us, fear of one’s hatred, of commiing a crime, fear of one’s violence, bestiality, of cancer, of syphilis, of starvation. I asked myself: was it the fear in me which uncovered all this? It was like opening tombs again. It was contagion, Djuna, I tell you…