The light cut into the bones with bony words that could not commune with anything or change substance for communion.
She recognized him. He was the transformable man. He was the man without identity. He came into the dream and acted like a lover. He took her, but if she looked at him a second time he was no longer the man she had given herself to, he was changed. He was not the lover, he was the father. Or if it was the father who first came into the dream now he turned into the Voice, or oftener still into a woman with dishevelled hair as in moments of love. And the woman, when she was approached, turned out to be the long-haired Mischa. She could not hold the identity for more than a moment. The faces changed. All the personages were constantly altering, and the moment she recognized them they become some one else.
She was wearing a light, airy green dress. She was expecting the Voice, but it was Hans who came. She felt his tongue in her mouth. He began to embrace her but then he vanished. She felt a great despair. The atmosphere was yellow and heavy. When she came back the Voice had killed himself with a knife. He lay crumpled up and he looked like a child. She begged him to come to life.
In the corner, watching, was the father. She was embraced and possessed by Hans, but when she looked at him it was the father. The father had more sperm than any man. The richness of the father in sperm was frightening. He said: “My daughter, I have no more god. I have no more god.” He was the god. His embrace awakened her because she had come to an unutterable place. She was struck blind. She had no more feelings. She let this inhuman, this impossible flow of sperm into her from the god and she became blind. The other women around him wept because the daughter was being loved by the father.
She was going to the father with her face tattooed with needles to impress him with her beauty. She felt very beautiful with all the needles in her face. But when she returned home and looked at herself in the mirror her face fell apart, in triangular pieces, shattered. She rushed to her mother: “What shall I do?” The mother took out a comb with great simplicity and began combing her hair, which was silver white. She said: “This is all you do, just comb your hair gently.”
Te father was reconciled to the mother. They wrote messages to each other on a pad. She read what was written on her father’s pad: “Thou shalt love thy daughter, it is written in the Bible.”
She was beautifully dressed, with gold and jewels, a long cape of brocade, with furgloves, and she entered a hall where the music came out of the walls. It was the King who wanted to dance with her and who whispered adoring phrases in her ear. She was laughing and the laughter trickled through the walls. The King put his ear against the wall and said: “Instead of listening to the sea in sea shells I listen to your laughter. We will dance to it.” She did not feel the ground under her feet. She said: “We are inside the music, that is why we don’t see the musicians.”
There was a secret between them. A fire burst upon the hall from the garden. It moved forward like the waves on the shore, waves of smoke and flames rolling in a long line across the garden. She wanted to close the door, but then she understood that if she shut the door the others would be locked outside with the fire, so she opened the door and called them. Her dress was vaporous and enormous around her, like sails. It was raining. The rain was spoiling her dress. She took a carriage. The carriage moved too slowly and they were lost. She wanted to get back to the castle and the dance hall. Her feet were twinkling. She did not mind being wet, she was so happy.
There came the woman so round and full-fleshed, like the mother. So large and full, the Rubens woman, with enourmous breasts. But it was not her mother. She loved her breasts and caressed them. As she caressed the woman she felt her masculinity. She asked: “Why didn’t you tell me this before?” The woman answered: “I thought perhaps you would not like it.” No, it was true, she did not like it, she turned away. But the Rubens woman came back in another form. She was not deluded, she knew it was always the same woman. She was the whore, the woman animal, the lioness. She came back as a heavy luxuriant goddess, too, the goddess of abundance. Her flesh was down, a bed of sensuality, every pore and curve of her. She was the immense statue, the oldest of all the whores, with her mask of avidity. Her hands were grasping, her flesh throbbing in a mountainous heaving way, without electric sparks, rolling, fermenting, saturated with moisture, folded in many lapping layers of voluptuous inertia. Her flesh was without eyes, without antennae. It was without ears, without nerves, without currents. It was a bed of flesh, burning without fire, trembling only from caresses and then dying again. Dead when not touched; like layers of silk, tempting the hands. A river bed of engluing moss, of adhesive rubber plants. Perspiring milk from the heavy flow of desires, the moist currents flowing into the canals of her prone body; all the fluid currents of desire seeping along the silver bark of her legs, around the violin-shaped hips, descending and ascending with a sound of wet silk around the cones and crater edges of her breast. Flesh mother, the oldest of all the whores, who on dark nights of punishment took Hans away from her and left her weeping. She the whore and goddess of earth, whom on other nights Djuna destroyed with lightning, standing like an idol covered with splendor, breathing out a fire which turned the woman into a crumpled heap, like a dead animal. But the woman reappeared. She reappeared in the sparkling costume of the burlesque queens, she came dressed in the tight skirt of the street walker, always preying and waiting. And Djuna did not always hate her; she loved her heavy, obscene walk, her navel glance, her animal passivity, her spreading herself at a café table like a seal, her drunken sullenness. Djuna wanted to enter the woman in her, and be lost in her too, like the feelings of man when he entered and lay in her. She was inside the whore feeling the entrance of man, aware of her feeling, the woman’s feelings and the man’s feelings.
Djuna wanted to kill the Rubens woman. She prepared a bath for her with a strong acid. She said to her: “Let’s take a bath together.” The Rubens woman slapped her when she was naked, laughing. Djuna covered her own body with wax so that the acid would not touch her. She said to the Rubens woman: “This bath comes from Egypt.” The Rubens woman began to dissolve, still laughing. She dissolved completely. The bath was full of jellied substance. She touched it. It was like Jello which she did not like to eat as a child. She felt she must conceal this somewhere. She dug a deep hole in the earth. She filled the hole with the acid. It took her a long time; the hole seemed to get deeper and the jelly more and more abundant. She was so tired she fell asleep. When she awakened it was daytime and the jelly had all come to the surface again. The Voice was looking at the spectacle with his eye glasses shaking. His little hands rubbing together, and his voice unsteadily saying: “Everything is a symbol. The poet is the one who calls death an aurora borealis.”
While the concert was going on the Voice sat at the back of the box and showed only the refracted light on the rim of his glasses. Georgia, in her long black dress, looked like Rasputin. Her heavy hair straight and long, her two black arms, the chaste black monk gown, agitating herself over the instruments, projecting her strength into them.
Lilith sat below, but not lost among the other faces. Watched by the searchlight of the Voice’s glasses, her face, very white, was open to the music and her restlessness was for a moment suspended. When Mischa came out she thrust herself forward as if she wanted to envelope him in her own strength.
Lilith had gone backstage before the concert.
Georgia had fixed her with her wolf eyes and said: “I am playing for you.” So Lilith felt as if the concert were coming from her. And the Voice had told Georgia: “You will conduct well,” as if it were an order. So the Voice felt the concert was his creation; he was leading, he was the strength of it, in it, directing. And the music had been ordained to transmit the currents of his desire across the space to a Lilith on fire with desires. Mischa was giving a silver icy chant which Lilith accepted as an expression of her disenchantment. All the disenchantments—the Voice stepping out and metamorphosed into a man such as she had seen by the million all around her, less than all, a non-face, a non-body, a non-presence, a vanishing of his force, all the light gone out of him as soon as he stepped out of his mysterious Voice role; in the daylight his skin the color of death, his eyes the blurredness of death, his words the dullness of death. Music carrying in its immense waves a foam crest of delusions, in its falling, running, spilling downfall a moment of suffocation, in its undertows waiting for the moment of despair to engulf one. Lilith falling over with a vertigo of despair, struck in the center of her being by the constantly inaccurate shafts of sex—never thrusting her for life but bleeding her, mereaccuounds.