520
PARTISAN REVIEW
Yet I do not know
if
I should evade your questions. The most
murderous emotions are aroused when we cannot find the word to
fit the particle, and murder (in favor of which I will find some
arguments) still has the disadvantage of distracting the attention.
Since I wish the various intelligences who take the trip with me
to
finish with stimulation to their brains and sweet for their bodies,
I
must necessarily take into account that the duller minds among you
cannot support the luxury of listening to a voice without a face un–
less you are handed some first approximation to my state. I
will
therefore suggest it is possible I am a kind of ghost, the ghost of
ex–
hausted passion- but I prefer to believe this is completely untrue.
How much less disagreeable to be some breath in the caverns of the
unconscious of one of the figures in this unnatural mystery, or indeed
to be the consciousness brought into being by the relations and mu–
tilations of the exceptional characters I
will
introduce.
Only to say this is to deny it, for
if
I am the creature of rela–
tionship, I must be not so much consciousness as corporeal, contain–
ing a blastopore whose nucleic proteins limn a signature, the given
first half of my destiny. Yes, I must be the
bre~th
of the present–
present, a point of size swimming in my unglimpsed mother's first
freshets of amniotic fluid, an embryonic two-cell, me, engaging no
less than the fluid consciousness of a God, His comprehension still
in
mine, as I believe
is
true of all beings not yet born but budding
in
the belly. So I could be an embryo eight instants old, a work of ges–
tation away from light and noise and pain, and yet knowing more
than I will ever know
~gain
because I am part of Him. (Or
is
it Her?)
But to step without benefit of clergy onto the moot worms of
theology is to lose our ground. The dock of our embarcation
is
the
mystery of my eye and to whom or what it belongs: am I ghost,
embryo, intellect, wind of the unconscious, or some part of
Him
or
Her or Hem or Hir?-but there it is--Hem or Hir-a bona
fide
clue; only the Devil would ever boast of being thus intimate
with
the Divinity. So, through this work, at the best of times between us,
when we are even laughing together, there should remain a reserva–
tion, a polite terror that the illumination is furnished by the Prince
of DMkness, and the color of my light is satanic.
'Of course, I could be as easily the old house in which the end
