52
PARTISAN REV. IEW
erection.
2
Impotent men who find themselves, on those "triumphant
mornings" which the poet mentions, ready to attack upon awakening
are well aware of this: their body, under the covers in a hard, fast
sleep, has been hatching its eggs. Ethics is opposed to all warmth–
even the warmth of passion, because warmth fatally paralyzes the
conscience. How can a man in this torpid comfort decide to withdraw
from himself? Heat makes no distinctions: it neither judges nor con–
demns. And in the nest, so mild and warm, even the sense of one's
own limits is lost: one uses, instinctively, someone else's, and asks no
questions. It is the mutual temperature of two people in bed which is
so obscene: who can doubt what "to sleep with somebody" means?
Since it is saturated with the smell of sweat and damp, the
warmth of the nest takes on a rather unhealthy character. The clam–
miness is the more repellant for the fever which it usually accompa–
nies: the shaking, blushing bodies of newly hatched young are a dis–
agreeable and sickly sight. This pathological factor is caught in the
two meanings of "incubate." The mother hatches her eggs as we hatch
a disease or a plot or a germ in the culture broth. The germ of an
egg requires the same conditions of warmth as the toxic germ of
microbe world. Now, the hearth is a hotbed of infection. But another
haunt of contagion is the nest. To contaminate someone is, in an
etymological sense, to make contact with him; and certainly the
warmth of the womb and the nest is that of animal adherence and
body against body. Sickness takes its victims one by one: it runs
through a family. And the terrible thing in the brood's case is that
there is no missing link: the perfectly contained nest distills its mi–
asmas and spreads its poisons forever.
Everything considered, we might say that promiscuity is really
to blame for this impurity. The nest is a mold of the bird himself,
who, turning round and round, swelling his chest and pressing against
his circular confines, is from head to foot the measure of his "home."
Whoever lives with
him
finds the space already filled, moves into
square feet previously captured and ably defended. The house of
anyone else is that other person's body and indeed his actual self.
And, therefore, cohabitation is equivocal from the start, and ends in
concubinage. The nest stands for many more things than a couple's
privacy. It relates them to all coexistent couples. And
this
seems to
increase and multiply its immorality. For joint pleasure with its com–
placence, its very complicity, is much worse. Every pleasure that one
2. In Italian the familiar word for bed is
nido.
