Me and the Devil: A Novel (37 page)
“Oh, those things. The ones that come pre-sat-upon. I’ve no idea. I don’t much remember seeing them around there when I was coming up.”
We stood silently smoking awhile.
“Why do you ask?” he said.
“I don’t know. Maybe because lately I’ve been concerned inexplicably with meaningless things. With questions whose answers have no meaning. I don’t know.”
We smoked awhile more in silence.
“It’s all meaningless,” he said. “And it all has meaning.”
I looked at him, flicking my butt toward the gutter.
“And I have not the least fucking idea why I said that,” he said‚ laughing, “or whatever it could possibly mean.”
He flicked his butt. We returned slowly to the restaurant. As we did so, he glanced at the night sky and sang a few lines.
Barney Google tried to enter paradise,
Saint Peter saw his face, he said “Go to the other place.”
The sky above the spiritless electric haze of this island of dead souls was about as black as it ever got. It was good to imagine that someday black night would reclaim it, and the firmament would again be one of stars near and far.
Y
ES, AUTUMN WAS MY SEASON.
I
T WAS WHEN
I
FELT WHAT
was beyond the power to express. Part of that feeling was a minor-key fugue of deep, delicious melancholy that filled me and swept me into myself and the billowing swift-moving clouds at once. With every bright leaf I saw drift away in its death, borne by a breeze or a gust, the feeling grew deeper, and the melancholy became more exquisite than ecstasy: an inspiration, a truth of sadness and joy dancing gently together in a way that almost brought to the eyes the tears, so unknown and so longed for, of happiness and sorrow commingled.
I had once articulated this autumn spell as best I could, looking back on other autumns. I remembered recalling in it the autumn of my mother’s death, the autumn I shared with the love of my life, the autumn I lost her, or drove her from me—autumns and autumns, when times were good and when times were bad, but, no matter what, that same autumn spell cast its magic.
This had been written down in one of my notebooks or diaries, and I now set about searching for it. While, after many hours, these words were not to be found, I remained convinced that I still had them, somewhere. What I did find was a darkly revealing shock. As I went through the pages of decades of disparate notes, I saw that they possessed what my labors of long composition, my books, very often lacked: a theme. I had in fact some time ago consciously forsaken and denounced the frill of theme as almost
as silly a writerly pretense as symbolism. Yet here, scribbled amid the omniana of these ruled and unruled pages, spanning from the 1970s to the 1990s, I encountered what struck me increasingly as not only a theme, but the theme of my being.
In the oldest of the notebooks were the ancient Greek words for “poet of savagery” (αγριοποιος) and “beyond even the gods’ ability to express” (αθεστος). There was the orphaned phrase “Louise, in the darkness of her desire.” In notebooks that followed came—and I here set them down chronologically, be they notes intended for envisioned novels, diary entries, or personal secrecies:
I think these things—they plague me—awful dark moistures of past dreadful deeds or sins—and then somehow find myself smiling in the dark, my mind one way, my heart another… rapacity… fill mouth with water before blowing brains out… Face down, legs apart—wide, unmoving. In sleep you are a stranger. By some unbeing river in a dream you might meet me, slaughter me, and move on. I stare at you, kneel by you, by the bed, and masturbate. I rise, wipe the sperm from my hand, and sleep myself, by some river you do not know…
She made him jealous, made him want to kill her, and he did… deathward
… quattuor novissima
—the last four things… Hamlet’s resolution to ‘speak daggers’—III.ii.387…Her blood so sweet
… Illaque favente dolore—
fondling me in sorrow
… Vera incessu patuit dea
—she walked in the manner of a goddess
… ψυχοδλεθρος
—the death of the soul… Indo-European
ne,
the primeval grunt of negativity, negation;
nek,
destroy
→
Greek
nekros,
dead body, and
nux,
night, Latin
nox,
Italian
notturno,
Germanic
night
… Indo-European
leuk,
shining
→
Sanskrit
loka,
open space, the universe, Greek
leuko,
Latin
lux, Lucifer,
Germanic
light…
Death is this night’s light… I used to drink and fuck. What do I do now? I write: I used to drink and fuck… I am going mad, or growing sane, in the dullest, the deadliest of ways
…
“fucked girls and fat leopards”—Pound, Canto XXXIX… Pound re nuclear bomb / nuclear holocaust: “Step on it” (1946, St. Elizabeths)… the leopard alone removes the hide from the carcass of its prey… caress the dead… something in the blood… the blood of black night…There is a sadness within me as vast and as deadly as the Eocene dusk… He had never fallen for her, not really. It was better that way. He would’ve ended up hating her, loving her, one of those things… I wish I had a mother… To be like the leopard, to devour, to lay open the heart and drink the blood of beauty. To move with that blood flowing in the veins, unseen, like leopard or like wild dog, predator… May the leopard within become a creature of grace w/ no need again…“that which we are, we are”—Tennyson,
Ulysses…
“Whatever you is, be that”—Lightnin’ Hopkins…I have come from Mastema, have come from the quiet well of your fear. Enter me… When I drew the blade across her throat it was not only the blood of her extinction that flowed forth but also that of any love I might henceforth know… There is no love in my heart. There is nothing in my heart.
Words come to me from an ancient stillness, from nowhere… and to know that there is no love in one’s heart is to know love itself. And so
—delendum est
—I await the breath from the mouth of the Other… What cunt of you gods did rhythm my life w/ ink so black to leave me here to die alone?
… umbrosus et immensus…
“Fear stops men.”—Homer… the demon confessor…I await the savioress. I await deliverance. I cannot dwell here, in the dark of me, alone. A dark enshrouded in dark. A man can rip out his own liver, but not his own brain, not his mind.
The first time I saw her, I wanted to rape her. Not have sex with her, not make love to her: rape her. Maybe you can understand this. Why have I written that last line? There is no you. No one will ever see this. I am the you to whom I write. I am you. The only you. And of course I can understand this. I—you—of course we understand it…
I wanted to know. But I did not want to know what I ended up knowing
… in hora mortis
…
odium Dei
… What Hesiod knew of neuroscience we have yet to learn…“Thomas Cantipratensis, a Dominican of the thirteenth century, beheld the Devil in the form of a priest, who was exhibiting himself in a most indecent attitude.”—Arturo Graf,
Il Diavolo
(1889), English translation (1931), p. 35. Term “altar boy” not known until 1772…“Ye are of your father the Devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning…”—John 8:44…“Good and evil things fall without discrimination upon those who are good and those who are evil.”—Marcus Aurelius,
Meditations…Heel in
, ottobre 17…
Let those who care for me, and those who do not care for me, die. Let those who share these breezes perish… On a night such as this, I arm myself against love and disbelieve in all that has inspired and brought me breath. I prepare to go down… I had delivered myself. I was to know my fate…
1/16/94. Twenty-five years, a quarter of a century ago, I fucked her, came in her cunt, her mouth, her ass. Today, on the phone, sitting here watching Dallas not beat the spread,
Houston not beat anything, on this freezing day, coldest since 1893, she somewhere in Pennsylvania, not far from Valley Forge, said she’s a grandmother; he’s the joy of her life. How strange and how long the years. It’s as if that quarter century, what began w/ her, ended w/ Linda. That quarter century is over. Do I have another left to live? It is time to seize the years, these years, these moments—time to draw new blood, new life, new cunt into these days to mingle with, to temper, and to lighten the company of ghosts…
This last entry, this reflection and resolution of long ago, had been written, I could tell from its date, in my old poky flat in the Village, not long before I moved to my present place. But I had moved so little, inwardly, since that reflection and resolution of long ago.
I discontinued my search. I was unsettled to see my inner life so unchanged through all these years, from what was written in the oldest, leather-bound sketchbook, from the early 1970s, to the smaller notebook of the 1990s, to this very day, many years after abandoning the recording of such things. I had traveled the world, experienced much, learned much, done much, escaped death and the death-in-life of the workaday world. But I had not changed through all these years. These volumes of words to and of and by myself, from the earliest to the last of them, no matter how impressionistically, attested to this undeniably. They revealed my insides when they were written, and they revealed my insides today.
From the first diary entry to the last—I had stopped some years before the end of the century—the sporadic accounts of the days of my life reeked of booze and sex and desolation and little else. There were names of people that I no longer even faintly recognized. Many dated entries bore only the word
DRUNK
,
noted after the end of this bender or that in a devastating succession of them. The sex grew more sparse as the entries neared their end, but not the drunkenness and not the desolation.
What I read obliterated the search for my lost eloquence on the nuanced elusive magic of the fall. It all but obliterated that sense of magic itself.
All that blood. All that loneliness, no matter the laughter and companionship of the barroom scrouge, no matter the rare, loving women or all the others who held me close night after night, swooning in or accommodating me as I discharged my desperation into them. The leopards. All that death and all that dark. And, like a haunted rustling through it all, the fear.
I must change. Once and for all. For real. I must. But this realization, this resolution, seemed heartbreakingly futile in light, or in the darkness, of all that lay before me, the testament of my years, the seeming proof, in these pages and in me now, that I was ever thus, and thus I would ever be.
Could what I had written have been less of errant memoir, notation, and contemplation, but rather a foresight into what was to follow? Not a capturing of this moment or that, but more the annals of a foredooming, a capturing of the inevitable moments of here and now?
I saw the blood on the razor-like Japanese killing blade. I saw the leopard awaiting glance. I saw myself laying the whip hard to Lorna on her makeshift cross. I saw myself as I had been the other night, making love to the hosiery and high heels that Melissa had left behind, fucking them and with a wicked sigh telling myself afterward that it was better that way, for there was no one there, no one near, when the lovemaking was done. My preferred company—what had I called it?—“the company of ghosts.” Happily ever after, with a bunch of pantyhose and a few high heels, watching the shadows fall, seeing them grow darker every time they fell.
Where were they now: Lorna, Melissa, the others? They were here, with me. Ghosts.
His words whispered again through the air. Loath as I was to return to that night, I heard them. They were without voice.
“And why is it that you can only reach out for another person when you can barely reach out for another drink? What do you fear?”
I said aloud, with a bit of false roguish sarcasm, as if to banish the questions without voice:
“Ah, yes: To be, or not to be.”
But the questions, which I had unintentionally but very justly equated with Hamlet’s question, still whispered soundlessly in the air. For me—maybe for everyone—the questions came down to the same fear. There could be no life where fear lurked.