PARTISAN REVIEW
At first the repetitions stabilized. But as they went on I felt inexorably
caught in the schizophrenic glue of what I had created.
In my terror I took to being peremptory like a sultan in the
Time of Evil. I was drowning and I was shivering; I needed a ball–
room blaze of light; I was afraid to fall asleep because of the fantasies
I'd uncover in that land, all alone and unprotected. The only real
sultan is a child aged six, and
this
one, simplified to that, had eyes
only for the stepmother in bed beside him, the drowning day, the
wolves that were sure with nightfall to come under the dying embers
of the covers. Hate and love, the need for space - a cool, glassy,
lake blue space - struggled within me, while like an invalid I sought
to rearrange the bed, find some position that would stay the crowd–
ing terrors, the creams, golds and shooting satins of David's Napoleon
as it, too, conspired to invade the precinct.
I looked and the lamp was mine.
It
was in the course of that night I understood how much
talk–
ing was acting: the taking on of a role and playing it out to where
by some invariable miracle the pose affected turned and touched
some realer, more authentic me. This was not the truth come to, but
rather a confirmation of the acting: that it wasn't shallow. I knew
this because the moments of turning back and touching were not
signs of a recurring, in-spite-of-everything grace so much as sheer
applause; to be accompanied by a tilting of the head and a putting
forth of the eyes, "Brilliant?" This yo-yo of conversation - actor and
self - I was that night to become aware of. However beguiling the
fountain play it was terribly expensive. There had to be simpler ways
to proceed, to be me.
These were long hands and long minutes. I stayed with them
as I had never stayed with anything in my life: a forest of
silk
where
you glazed the dawn, a Tibetan manuscript might have worded it.
Total concentration - absence of desire - charity. Spinning road,
and at the gulf end whom I might be, if made clear to myself.
The trick for this new "I" would be to see all of my life as part
of this one concurrent strand of time for which I was now the spokes–
man. Sometimes the speeding forest crossed a light; sometimes it went
gray again, and a fox appeared, trotting evenly. To be honest would
be to keep that speeding swirl always in view, to be that "me," the
