“To-day I don’t know whether this is a healing or a contagion. I am only discovering that we are all alike, and my patients desperately do not want me to be like them. The third day I dreamed of death. And the first man I talked with said: ‘There is something I must know, I must absolutely ask some one. You must tell me this: when a man is dead is his sex stiff, too? Is it as hard as it is in the morning? This has been an obsession with me, all my life. In death… if one died while inside of a woman, would one lie stiff in her? Or could one, after being dead, still have one last spasm? The nails keep growing, the hair too. Could it happen again after death if one died inside of a woman?’ “
Djuna walked slowly after leaving Lilith. The day was softer and the snow was melting under her feet. She felt in love with everyone, in love with the whole city. She remembered the tendrils of wild hair on Lilith’s neck, and felt herself inside of Lilith, burning with the cold fire which devoured her. She heard again her voice charged with secret pain, a voice wet with tears passing through a wide mouth made for laughter, a wide, laughing mouth, avid and animal.
She felt the restlessness of the Voice, sitting and listening all day, pinned to his confessions, disguised by the anonymity of vision, and desiring to play an active, personal role in these scenes perpetually unfolding before him. Too near, everything was too near. She felt the multiple footsteps of those walking along with her, not like a march, but like a symphony. In the shock of feet against pavements she felt the whole collision and impact of human being against human being. They resounded in her. Everything resounded in her. She smiled, thinking of what an immense music box she was. The relation between music and living was not merely an image. What a heavy connection between the sound box of instruments and the body, and what sameness between the caresses of the hands! Djuna felt at once so aroused that it was unbearable. She felt all her loves at once. Maternal, fraternal, sensual, mystical. So many loves. What was she? The lover of the world? Crazed with love, with remembrance of every touch and flavor, of every caress and word. And simultaneously with the communion, this communion with eyes closed, this taste of the wafer on her tongue, this sonorousness of sea in her ears, this constant simoun wind burning inside of her, came the pain of separation again. When people came as near as this, and breaths were so confounded and confused, then Djuna knew she was possessed.
In the morning the body had been clear like a statue, and as cool. The body moved with the harmony of its form, it stood in altitude, like the spire of a cathedral, it was light and free and passed through the moments easily like the wind, feeling neither doors nor walls, nor anger. There was in it the tranquillity of depths, of what lay below the level of storms. It was a mountain asleep without fire in its bowels. It lay asleep as it arranged itself, it moved in accord with its own pattern, with an even tread.
It was the moment of silence. The day begun in crystal cearness was blurred by the ascension of blood passing through the cells. The blood rising through the body like the sap in the trees. Antique vases filling with wine.
Djuna stopped walking. Everything had come too near, too near. The cells were full to overflowing with the warm invasion. The moon was shining hypnotically round, a fixed stare, and all the taboos which held the body upright were dissolved by this stare of the moon calling the blood to its own cycle. The moon was circling now inside of her body, with the same rhythm. Djuna lost her face, her name. She was tied to the moon by long threads of red tangled blood. She moved now like one much larger than herself. She moved like a woman tied to the moon, in a space so vast, pushed by a rhythm so strong that the small woman in her was lost. The moon enveloped her and it opened her to an absolute night without dawn.
Before the storm in her there was a suspense, there was time for fear. The trees were afraid, the sky was breathless, the air rarified, the earth parched.
Now her heart was no longer a heart, it was a drum beating continuously. The skin of her body was stretched like a drum. The tips of her hair were no longer hair, but electric wires charged with lightning. The hair was linked to lightning, the heart was a drum; the skin was a fruit skin exposed to warmth and cold. The teeth were sharp, lustful, sharpened with appetite.
The blood was rising and drowning the smaller world of the woman, a curtain of red falling over the eyes, drowning pity. Her tongue lashed like a whip, her voice whirled like a simoun wind, her hands tore everything apart, breaking all bonds with man, father, son, lover, brother. What erupted in her body was no longer love but hunger and hatred. Her body filled with teeth, with a drumming fever, with a delirium. Djuna was in a jungle, alone with her storm. She was alone in the forest of her delirium. Desire leaping wild and blind. The human eyes were closed. The storm was panting in her, the moon smiled, her anger seemed immense like the space around her. An enormous fury, as of an animal long taunted, so that when the blood rose every word withheld, every act of yielding, erupted. She trusted no one as she drank alone in the jungle of desire. Her nails were longer, tearing apart everything she had lulled. The storm of blood brought a cloudburst of laughter, the lightning struck down the love, broke all the bondages, drowned the pity.
Djuna was one with the moon, thrusting hands made of roots into the storm, while her heart beat like a drum through the orgy of the moonstorm.
Lilith talking to the Voice. Lilith had a headache.
My father had headaches like this, and he went mad. Do you think I will go mad? I dream of being under ether and I awake in terror. My father’s madness started with headaches. He began slowly to lose his memory. But I kept thinking—perhaps my father is not mad, but has had a dream. This dream has come and installed itself in his life. The dream is his life. What was this dream? Could I understand it? If I could see it, share it with him, enter his world and stay in it, perhaps he wouldn’t go mad. I feel that madness is only solitude. Ynly go mad when you see something no one else sees. There is a moment before madness when people have not yet cut the cord of connection and at this moment some one can hold them back. It’s what you do every day. There was the dream of the man who ate flowers so that the Revolution might not come… He was locked up. Only because he got confused with the symbol, he lived in the symbol. But if you understand it, nothing is mad. Everything is a dream, but we don’t always know the meaning. I wanted to know my father’s fantasy but he enclosed himself in it. I only discovered it when it was too late. And now I will admit all this I’m saying is to elude something I find very hard to tell you. You’ll be angry. The truth is I accepted an invitation to spend a night with Harold and a woman. When I arrived I was shown into his apartment, but he had not yet returned from a party. He had left a note, an erotic book for me to read, and drinks. I just sat there and dreamed about all my curiosities, all my erotic longings, my desire for woman. Arline came first and sat on the edge of the bed which was set in an alcove. Then Harold. Arline was blonde, with lax gestures, as in sleep. She began by taking my hands and admiring them, then she kissed me like a man. I slipped my hand under her skirt. Harold was kneeling down before the two of us and looking under our dresses. Harold made love to me more than to Arline. Do you think it was because I was the guest of honor? We took all our clothes off. I tasted a woman for the first time, and I didn’t like it. It tasted like a sea shell. But I loved her breasts and mouth. And it amused me that while we both caressed Harold we kept looking over his body at each other with something like human closeness. The man seemed the stranger. We would stop caressing him to kiss each other. When Harold, satisfied, fell asleep, Arline and I went on kissing and saying, how lovely you are, how soft you are. It was the abandon I liked. I felt nothing. I was desperately craving for love.