Ancient Evenings
Authors: Norman Mailer
Tags: #Fantasy, #Classics, #Historical, #Science Fiction
Praise for Norman Mailer
“[Norman Mailer] loomed over American letters longer and larger than any writer of his generation.”
—The New York Times
“A writer of the greatest and most reckless talent.”
—The New Yorker
“Mailer is indispensable, an American treasure.”
—The Washington Post
“A devastatingly alive and original creative mind.”
—Life
“Mailer is fierce, courageous, and reckless and nearly everything he writes has sections of headlong brilliance.”
—The New York Review of Books
“The largest mind and imagination at work [in modern] American literature … Unlike just about every American writer since Henry James, Mailer has managed to grow and become richer in wisdom with each new book.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Mailer is a master of his craft. His language carries you through the story like a leaf on a stream.”
—The Cincinnati Post
2013 Random House eBook Edition
Copyright © 1983 by Norman Mailer
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, New York, a Penguin Random House Company.
R
ANDOM
H
OUSE
and the H
OUSE
colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Little, Brown & Co., Boston, in 1983.
eISBN: 978-0-8129-8607-5
v3.1
I believe in the practice and philosophy of what we have agreed to call magic, in what I must call the evocation of spirits, though I do not know what they are, in the power of creating magical illusions, in the visions of truth in the depths of the mind when the eyes are closed; and I believe … that the borders of our mind are ever shifting, and that many minds can flow into one another, as it were, and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy … and that our memories are part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself.
W. B. Y
EATS
Ideas of Good and Evil
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Dedication
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
I
T
HE
B
OOK OF
O
NE
M
AN
D
EAD
Crude thoughts and fierce forces are my state. I do not know who I am. Nor what I was. I cannot hear a sound. Pain is near that will be like no pain felt before.
Is this the fear that holds the universe? Is pain the fundament? All the rivers veins of pain? The oceans my mind awash? I have a thirst like the heat of earth on fire. Mountains writhe. I see waves of flame. Washes, flashes, waves of flame.
Thirst is in the rivers of the body. The rivers burn but do not move. Flesh—is it flesh?—lies beneath some heated stone. Lava rises in burned-out fields.
Where, in what cavern, have such disruptions taken place? Volcanic lips give fire, wells bubble. Bone lies like rubble upon the wound.
Is one human? Or merely alive? Like a blade of grass equal to all existence in the moment it is torn? Yes. If pain is fundament, then a blade of grass can know all there is.
A burning number came before me. The flame showed an edge as unflickering as a knife, and I passed into that fiery sign. In fire I began to stream through the clear and blazing existence of the number 2.
Pain entered on a pulse. Each rest between each pang was not enough—oh, the twisting of hope, the tearing of fiber. My organs had surely distorted, yes, and the shriek of bone when it cracked. Doors opened into blasts.
Pain took abode in the most brilliant light. I was exposed to burning rock. Demonic, the heat of the sun, and blood boiling in the veins. Would it never be blood again? The current of the highest fires told me then—by the intensity itself—that I would not be destroyed. There had to be some existence on the other side. So I let go of my powers as they charred in my heart. These dying powers might yet give life to other parts of me. For I could see a thread quivering in the darkness, a tendril alive in the smoked-up carbon of my meats, fine as the most exquisite nerve, and through each pain, I looked for this filament in every refinement of anguish, until pain itself took on such radiance that I knew a revelation. The filament was not one thread, but two, wound about each other in immaculate delicacy. They twisted together during the most intolerable spasms, yet were quick to draw apart at the first relief, and with such subtlety of movement that I was certain I witnessed the life of my soul (seen at last!) dancing like a dust-tail above the flame.
Then all was lost again. My bowels quaked with oceanic disruption, ready to jettison whole fats, sweetmeats and gravies of the old pleasure-soaked flesh, frantic as a traitor springing his leaks under torture. I would give up anything to ride lighter in the next wave of odium, and in the darkness of waves of flesh smacking raw waters of sound, I labored.
I could not bury myself in such sulphurs. It was not the fumes, but the terror of suffocation; not death by fire, but the soil burying me. It was the clay! A vision came forward of clay sealing the nostrils and the mouth, my ears, and into the sockets of my eyes—I had lost all vision of the double filament. There was only myself in these buried caves and the hammering of my gut. Yet if I were to be buried in the murk of these screaming scalding wastes, I had gained a vision with which to torment myself. For I comprehended the beauty of my soul at just the moment I could not reach its use. I would perish with such ideas even as I gained them!
A moment of peace arrived then in this storm and tumult of the pipes. I knew the solemn desolation of the subsided center of the hurricane, and in that calm I saw with sorrow that I might now be wise without a life on which to work my wisdom. For I had a view of old dialogues. Once I had lived like master and slave—now both were lost to each new seizure—oh, the lost dialogue that had never taken place between the bravest part of me and the rest. The coward had been the master. Something came apart then in the long aisles of my pride, and I had a view into the fundament of pain, the view as beautiful as it was narrow. But now the mills of vituperation were turning again. Like a serpent whose insides have blown apart, I gave up, sued for peace, and gave birth to my bloody clotting history of coiled and twisted eviscerate. Some totality of me went out of my belly, and I saw the burning figure of the 2 dissolve in flame. I would be no longer what I had been. My soul felt pained, humbled, furious at loss, and still arrogant as beauty itself. For the pain had ceased and I was new. I had a body again.
ONE
The darkness was deep. Yet I had no doubt. I was in an underground chamber ten paces in length by half in width, and I even knew (just as quickly as a bat) that the room was all but empty. Stone was the surface of the walls and the floor. As if I could see with my fingers, I had only to wave an arm to feel the size of the space beyond my reach. It was exactly so remarkable as to hear voices by the hairs of one’s nose. For that matter, I could smell the scent of stone. Say that an absence was in the air, some hollow that dwelt within another hollow. Now I was aware of a granite coffer near to me, as aware, indeed, of its presence as if my body had walked within—it was huge enough to be my bed! But a step away, as if on guard, were some aged droppings on the floor, pellets from a small fierce animal who had managed like myself to find its way here, and left its deposit and gone. For there was no skeleton to speak of the beast. Just the scent of some old urine-cursed dung—But where was the passage by which the animal could have entered? I breathed in the horror that comes when the air is close with an animal’s mean excrement. That has its own message to give!