PARTISAN REVIEW
to their care. Anyone who has not experienced this can refer to chapter
eleven in
Gargantua.
The pure is that which is unmixed. Confusion leads invariably
to moral confusion. And the nest is singularly pell-mell in its over–
loaded condition. For that matter, the Spanish word
cerrado
signifi–
cantly links the idea of closed places and interior compression. To
economize space, the nestlings are jammed into the nest, squeezed
against each other, doubled up and huddled together. A subway car
in the rush hour is a human nest in the same predicament: bodies so
imbricated and dovetailed as to form an inextricable system: the
breaths blending with the perfumes: and it all seems very warm and
homogenous, indeed. Here the
approach
is unnecessary, and the intro–
duction, and the transitions (a hazard always in the maiden days
of love). No retreat either for the man who would like to backtrack
once he feels sure of success. Contact is inevitable, and who can say
whether that hand
must
fall there, or whether it does so by design.
Who can tell? But morality, with its brand of bourgeois analysis,
tries to slide out of the implicit, to understand the reasons, to get rid
of "complexes," and, in short, to unravel the plot.
In conclusion, one may note that even the most modest psycho–
analytic opinion finds fault with the structure of the nest. The latter
is really the image of a lukewarm cavity, soft and hairy, which haunts
the mind of every male. The nest is first the womb, then the lap,
always the receptacle, the container, the mold, and the first form.
Everything about it whispers love and not for reproduction only.
A call of a sexual nature, an internal, psychological summons arouses
the bird when spring comes, and impels"
him
to build. But here pre–
cisely
is
felt the terrible ambiguity of the hatching period, taken as an
intermediary act between sexual and maternal love. The major im–
purity of the nest is one for which every female must answer: it
!–
that of a being
in
whom tenderness is inseparable from sexual solici–
tation. Poised like a keel atop her eggs, the bird-who is brooding her
own ovarian grapeshot--does not distinguish her pleasure from her
most sacred duty. Fix-eyed, beatified, plunged into the pure present
of her own satisfaction, the brooder asks no more than the pleasure
of resting her belly and smarting organs, sore and red from the
bloody mess, on the cool eggshells, heedless whether they are painted
wood or plaster. With certain species like the grouse the maternal
pleasure is so great that the bird lets herself be captured in her nest.
And then there is the breast which assumes the double duty of
whetting sexual pleasure and assuring the life of infants. Atrocious
