I
PARTISAN REVIEW
393
knows her thrust will be against an institution of oppression and
therefore will have no need to question the specific shape of her
charge at its moment of illumination.
The 1960s had come upon her in a rush, as had Zimmerman.
She had given this decade its peculiar shape through a violent eradica–
tion of the previous one.
If
they had been chained to the mediocrity
and hyperboredom of the times, the moment now cried out for det–
onation . He explained all this to her as he became exposed to the
political messages which marked the air like Morse Code. Flashing
assassinations and gliding chain-reactive explosions. Electricity and
its shocks, an overwhelming tactility and percussion for a world up a
blind alley.
But she thought he was all these things already. The specifica–
tion of it in words cheated him of a certain dynamic to which she
had spread her wings. To gather the shape of his anger was to lose
its ferocity. He wandered in a perpetual planning stage of cause and
effect, stepping out of its protective skin, now and again, to shatter
the brains of public men. And to do this was to leave her in the
wake of his new awareness. She had no place in it when docility and
silence were her measure.
She had anticipated his move to leave her behind and she drew
first fire by walking bachvard out of his aura. She tossed a hood of
silence over him and shrouded his body in the limp cloth of her own.
She fell away softly and, in his pride, he imagined he was leaving
her. It was necessary for him to be alone and clear in his acts. She
said nothing. She gave him nothing but her submission, never a ges–
ture in the holocaust of personality disruption. No barriers, no reefs
to crash on , only the calm waters of Nothing to glide. He promised
that every time he murdered, it would be her in his eyes. This proved
true and soon the dim politics of it eroded him.
And now in her dungeon she sees before her the landscape of
the decade as he absconds. The months of catatonia, hovering in
hovels, the project of rising to regret again through the taking of a
hundred arbitrary lovers. The rampant sexuality of her despair, the
force feeding, the dangerous cliffs over which her body dangles. And,
above all, the casual abuse of this body, the willing leap to migraine
in its inevitability, the mindless erosion of her contours through skin–
picking and excess weight, the tired bending of limbs to sexual assault
