522
PARTISAN REVIEW
thaJt God like man can suffer occasionally from diarrhea is an infec–
tious thought which stimulates all but the churchly and the vicious.
I will leave the oceans then, I will leave the flowers and the
bees and the trees, reminding you that the extraordinary can hide
in the meanest maggot, and will reduce myself as an interesting
speculation to the dimensions of a dog. There
is
a hound in this
book, brought to aJ climactic party we are soon to talk about, a
poodle dog, Standard, pedigree, A.K.C., descended by his dam
from a line of Westchester champions, his sire merely certified, and
like all large poodles who have gained the attention due a rich
pervert, he
is
an incredible dog. I know him so well that I cannot
evade the last hypothesis----I could be that dog, for the vision of our
life which is soon to disrupt your brain is in part a dog's view: a
dog has no more than to meet another dog on the street, smell the
hindquarters, and know whether friendship is possible, which well
may be why dogs are invariably gloomy.
Enough. It would be unseductive to boast of how I will prob–
ably travel from the consciousness of one being to the emotions of
another-a house, a tree, a dog, a cop, a cannibal all equal to my
hunter's eye and promiscuous ear.
2.
There is a master pimp in our presence who is a candidate for
the role of hero (his rivals for your vote, a television celebrity and a
psychoanalyst) and for aJ time some years ago, this pimp, whose
name is Marion Faye, dabbled at the edges of painting (giving for
excuse the observation that such study might enrich his conception
of the pornographic photography by which he then was making his
living). Faye was a poor painter, but he had a love affair which went
on for several weeks with the form of the spiral, and it was a matter
of no mean significance to
him
that the valve of a snail shell
as
seen through his microscope (Zeiss, 2,000 Deutschmarks, oil immer–
sion, binocular eyepiece) was a spiral galaxy of horny cells whose
pigmentation had the deep orange of a twilight sun. Staring into
the eye of the snail valve, he would wonder what heats of emotion
had breathed into its red-he was of course on drugs at the
time–
and afterward, giving his marijuana-refreshed eyes to the whorls on
the ball of his thumb and the tips of his fingers, he found the spiral
