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PARTISAN REVIEW
victory when there is not the courage to employ it. So he knew the
danger of inertia (if one does not grow, one must pay more for re–
maining the same), and for months there had been a decision he
was unable to make: as had happened before, he felt
his
powm
leaving him. His strength came from decision and action, he was
religious (in a most special way to be sure), he was superstitious with
the most sophisticated of superstitions, but as a practical matter he
believed in the reality of Hell, and he had come to the point in
his
life, as he had foreseen in terror many a time, when the flux of
his
development, the discovery of the new beauties of his self-expression
depended on murdering a man, a particular man, perhaps as excep–
tional as he, a man who could hardly fail to be aware that his own
development, as opposed to Marion's, was als0' at an impasse which
could be breached equally, if in the opposite direction, by the murder
of Marion Faye who once had been his friend.
It was a problem, then, and one of no mean proportions. The
tension to murder is as excruciating as the temptation to confess when
on a torture rack. So long as one holds one's tongue the destruction
of the body continues, the limbs and organs under question may
be
passing the last answer by which they can still recover, and if one
is going to confess eventually it is wiser to do it soon, do it now,
be–
fore the damage is irrevocable. So with the desire to murder. Each
day we contain it a little of that murder is visited upon our own
bodies, the ulcers seat themselves more firmly, the liver sickens, the
lungs wither, the brain bursts the most artful of our mental circuits,
the heart is sapped of stamina and the testicles of juice-who knows?
this may be indeed the day when the first of the exploited cells takes
that independent and mysterious flip from one life into another–
from the social, purposive, impoverished, and unspeakably depressing
daily life of an obedient cell, to the other life, wild-life, the life of
the weed or hired gun, rebel cell growing by its own laws, highway–
man upon the senses, in siege t0' the organs, rife with orgiastic speed,
the call of the beat drumming its appeal to the millions of cells, for
if other-life is short, it is wild as well, and without work. Yes, to
hold murder too long is to lose the body, hasten that irreversible in–
stant when the first cell leaps upon the habit of stale intelligence and
gives itself as volunteer to' the unformed cadres in the future legions
of
barbarian and bohemian.
