“Didn’t you often wish to be a man?” asked the Voice.
“Yes, often. I envied my father. When he told me about his adventures—and he always gave me the fullest details—I used to feel what he felt as he talked about women. I was aroused by his stories. I used to envy him his enjoyment of woman. I felt being born a woman was a curse. I could take a woman, but not the same way… I didn’t feel I could possess her. Very often I had dreams in which I was a man. If only you would come to my concert!”
“Why?”
“Because you alone make me feel I am a woman. I feel that I get confused, lost, that somehow or other I butt my head against obstacles, blunder, but that you can take all this and direct it, transform it; that you lead me out of this great disorder. I fall into fears. Will you come? I will feel that you are the director, not I—you conducting me. Mischa is playing a solo—he wants you to come too.”
Lilith came to Djuna’s room, shed the long, white cape, and sat pulling the petals of her flower open. She could not bear buds. She would take the closed flowers and open them completely, like the flowers Djuna had seen floating dead on the river.
Lilith filled her room with perfume, turned around it several times as if it were too small for her.
“Come with me to the concert.”
“I am too tired.”
“You have a secret. You’re expecting some one.”
“No, Lilith. But it’s true, I have a secret. I have an opium. It’s the dream. I go to bed thinking: will I dream to-night? I await the dream with the same impatience as the lover.”
“Hans is not coming?”
“Not to-night.”
“Come to the concert.”
“Not to-night.”
“You mean the dream, the dream means so much to you? It isn’t that you love me less?”
“No, Lilith.”
Djuna locked her door: Will I dream to-night? Turned out the light. What will I dream to-night?
Awareness hurts. Knowingness hurts. Ideas hurt. Lucidity hurts. Relationships hurt. Life hurts. But to flow, to drift, to live as nature, does not hurt. Her eyes were closing. She was drifting, drifting. Drunkenness. It was not the Hotel Chaotica which had many rooms, but she, Djuna, when she lay on her bed, folding them all together, the layers, and all the things that she was not yet.
When she entered the dream she stepped on a stage. The lights cast on it changed hue and intensity like stage lights. The violent scenes happened in the spotlight and were enveloped by a thick curtain of blackness. The scenes were cut, interrupted, cut out in sharp relief, or broken with entr’actes. The mise en scene was stylized, and only what had meaning was represented. And very often she was at once the victim and the observer. She was on the stage and at the same time sitting before the stage and watching. She was at times aware that it was only a spectacle, and at other times engulfed by the images, so that she was one with them, and then one with the nightmare.
When she sat and watched what was happening to her on the stage of the dream she felt a deeper anguish, like that of a passive, chained prisoner watching out of a cell window. If she was in action, even when tortured, she felt less pain. In passion and drama there was no time for anguish.
The dream was composed like a tower of layers without end, rising upward and losing themselves in the infinite, or layers coiling downward, losing themselves in the bowels of the earth. When it swooped her into its undulations, the spiralling began, and this spiral was a labyrinth. There was no vault, and no bottom, no walls and no return. But there were themes repeating themselves with exactitude.
If the walls of the dreams seemed lined with moist silk, and the contours of the labyrinth lined with silence, still the steps of the dream were a series of explosions in which all the condemned fragments of herself, the cemeteries of the murdered fragments of herself, burst into a mysterious and violent life, with the heavy maternal solicitude of the night ever attentive to their flowering.
On the first layer of the spiral there was awareness. She could still see the daylight between the fringe of eyelashes. She could still see the interstices of the world. This was not altogether the dream, nor was it daylight. It was the penumbra, the frontier, the edge of the world where the thoughts were inlaid in the filaments of lightning. It was the place where the lights were arranged like foot lights, where the images and gestures were delicately filtered and separated, and their silhouettes thrown against space. It was the place where footsteps left no traces, where laughter had no echo, but where the hunger and fear were immense. It was the place where all the sails of reverie could swell and yet no wind was felt.
The light was stained with bright colors brought into being by the friction of the eyelid upon the eyeball, and this eyeball turning on its axis threw the light full on a buried world. The air was different, it was saturated with knowingness, it transmitted perception. The vegetation no longer concealed its breathing, its sleepiness, its lamentations, its shrivellings.
The sand no longer concealed its desire to enmesh, to stifle; the sea showed its true face, its insatiable craving to possess; the earth yawned open its caverns, the fogs spewed out their poisons. The dreams were full of danger, like the African jungle. The dream was full of animals. All the animals killed, stuffed, imprisoned by man, walked alive in the dream. The faces mocked all desire to identify, to personalize: they changed and decomposed before her eyes. They were evocative only. They puzzled and baffled, exposing only the identity of a whim, altering perpetually, eluding continuity.
There was no time: events passed without leaving a trace, a footprint, an echo. They left SPACE around them. Even a crowded street lay perpendicular between two abysses of blackness, as if it belonged to a planet without gravitation, reposing against space.
The dream was a filter. The world was never admitted. It was a stage surrendered to fragments, scenes telescoping, slices interweaving, with many pieces left hanging in shreds…
On the tip of the spiral she felt passive, felt bound like a mummy. She was lying down, with chains and bands of cloth around her. As she descended these obstacles loosened, the body moved. At first she was voiceless, numbed, feeling only the descent into the dream and a blanket covering the face.
The loss of memory was like the loss of a chain. With all this fluidity came a great lightness. Without memory she was immensely light, vaporous, fluid. The memory was the density which she could not transcend.
She was not lost, she had only lost the past. Sand passing through the hour glass which never turned. Passing.
By day, as if obeying a command, she followed the dream, step by step, blindly. She felt lost and bewildered if the day did not bring its replica. She felt compelled to recover a flavor, a color, to recapture the personage, the moment, the place. If she found it she remembered it. But at the same moment she became aware of the part of the dream which was missing. The missing fragment was unrecoverable. Yet she felt its presence. It was lying under the earth. It was like the broken arm of a statue, lying near the statue, but buried in the earth. The mutilated structure loomed in vivid colors, but static. So it presented itself during the day, attended with an uneasy, yellow aura of incompleteness.