538
PARTISAN REVIEW
One could do worse than to read this list again. I wonder
if
in
the history of our republic there has been a party equal in montage:
a movie star and a rat, a rapist and a war hero, a psychoanalyst
and a call girl, poodle and assembly-line worker, child and sibling,
an executioner and a ghost, a cemetery and a television entertainer;
yes, it is like one of those new games which trap psychology and
s0-
ciology in a three dollar cardboard box-"Theatre" it could be called,
for one chooses one's role: be a whore, a physicist, a jazz musician,
a queer-how dreary is our republic that so few people would buy
the game.
A bloody aye! What is to be said of the dead body? How ex·
traordinary a man-if it was a man-to compile such a schedule
of personality when he must have known how close he was hi.'l1Se1f
to being taken to the cleaners'-that quick phrase which contains
the notion that death purifies.
But death does not purify says my Reason, death dissipates: our
consciousness radiates away from ourselves as the cellves deteriorate
(forgive the pun, but we speak of death), we slip away-wastefully,
unheard but for the night air, our emotions, sneaks, smells, terrors,
titillations, thoughts, projects, plans, and-if we have died too late–
the dull blanketing gas of our boredom all enter the air, are breathed
by others and exhaled away again-perhaps we have influenced the
million light years of their imagination by a millimeter. The fats, the
blood, the muscles and the bone sink into the earth again (if we are
so fortunate as not to stifle in a deluxe hermetic crypt) yes, with the
pores of a pinewood box, we give of our poor soured flesh to the
wistful cemetery grass-in a century or two perhaps they will let
the cows enter there to eat and make the milk and give the meat
which will permit one distant relative of a molecule, ten hundred
dynasties of family removed, to slip into a human body again.
A
few
of our cells may make the transmigration from our body, which
is
gone, to the body of another-all that was us reduced to a molecule
whose minor deviations from the classical form of the giant protein
chain recapture (as do all deviations from classical form) some
wry
shrunken ion's head of the contradictions and possibilities which were
once a man, general of the armies of his cells, Deus to his body.
universe.
And is that all? a sacred cow ("I dig the Hindu bit," said Marion
