232
PARTISAN REVIEW
parenthesis the two sexually most important gestures:
He loves to carve in bark
She loves to lift her legs.
...
We can add that the act of cutting into something has in many cases
something disloyal which is not displeasing to us. The real gash-the
gash that cuts half-way into wood as in a whistle, picks the weak point
on the bias or on the diagonal of the line it breaks. The woodcutter's
hatchet knows well the perfidy of the oblique. It never attacks straight
on, that is to say at a right angle, the branch in which it inscribes its
blow.
We get an additional joy by virtue of the fact that the gash intro–
duces the jag, the irregularity, the
infraction.
It contradicts the homo–
geneity of a vanishing line by a contingent fold. It nips with a fortuitous
hie
the abstract and undisturbed straightness that joins two infinites.
It
represents historical catastrophe. The continuity of a virgin edge, the
image of an uninterrupted development inflicts upon us to the point of
nausea the picture of a world that could exist without us. We must
suspend this line, this continuity, leave the mark of our bite upon it,
we must intervene whatever the cost, in this process of anonymity. The
gash is the quaver which attests to our presence in the vast possibility
of the musical staff, it is the point of reference, the element of gradation,
it is above all, since it occurs at the meeting point of two incisions which
cross, the stop notch, the punctual
nunc
which cuts the unbearable line
of becoming. It is the principle of a discontinuity the measure of which
finds the use, the guarantee of a singularity, which our misfortunes have
constituted and, in short, our refusal to become involved in the con–
spiracies of perpetuity. Whence the fact that any gash denies the existence
of time. The prisoner marks the passing of each day with a notch. And
if lovers carve their initials in bark, is it not in truth because they are
defying time?
Every mark we make is a mark of our superiority: every imprint
bail for our effectiveness. Does not every mark in fact represent the
battlefield, the record and in the true sense the
monument
of a success?
Now no trace fills us with as much joy as the gash inflicted for instance
on the tempting grain of a fine white board. This is because the gash is
born of cruelty and bears testimony to violence, to successful blows. We
perceive thereby that the voluptuousness of gashing goes back in large
part to the pleasure one feels in overcoming objective resistance: the
joy of being or of guiding the hardest instrument, of acting in the nature
of a most bruising salient and of imprinting one's
design
on a yielding
material. The blinding imperialism of the most resistant protuberance-
