48
PARTISAN REVIEW
a height that causes sickness. The heart begins to shamble, askew.
The stick has literally jostled the heart .
All at once, without clear transition, one slides-I slid-into a
gray, oily, uncertainly lit sleeve of almost complete pain. I could say my
predicament usurped all my attention to such a degree that I forgot, I
lost all sensIJal familiarity, I lost the immediacy of painlessness. Pain-
1essness
~eeP1ed
impossibly far away.
I
wa~
in the pain continuum.
I was
nQt
exactly aware of this yet-I was simply loosely wrapped
in, in a some;what oily, dirty , semitransparent rubbery sense of disloca–
tion and a loss ofany ordinary attachment
to
life. Certain areas of logic
had collapsed-momentarily-such as that of the expectation, the
assurance of breath, or of sight. Indeed, it was a matter of the collapse
ofmost of the ordinary expectations, a set of corrections: pain is a hell
of corrections-they seem quite final-a hell of other·than.the·light.
of-God. One can hate there . Happiness is nonexistent-is a
lap~(!
of
attention, ofintelligence-is a silly , grinning, leering idiocy.
On~ i~ ~et
free from the curatorship and bounding
cQ.ql~anionship
and ignorance
about one's happiness. One is set free iq
~n;\t
'one is pressed down; and
what arises, from one's spirit, one' s
po~h, i~
not willed by one's self:
one gives birth to-a field of dark
f1oW:~f~-v~rious
screams, uttered or
unuttered, various grittings, various
SHm;~
Qf
anguish .
M~ories
that are impossible
wheq
gne is happy or painless
gather
~nd
make a complete world, a <;Qminuum, going back to the
begin~ing.
Dog-headed presences,
lQe~iflgs,
old thumpings, prick–
ings, h9,t, abominable , noisome , are here . They are ancient and can
transform thtmselves.
I think
~o
the presence of that memory of pain-I mean the
completion of
~he
pain continuum as a real world, maybe a realer one,
shows on
one.~ ~
face: I think Nonie saw it-on my face-and I think
that then she \;\eqme more interested in what she was doing: she
experienced an
incr~ase
in the voltage of her interest in what was hap–
pening to me.
That interest was smeared with a sense of duty-a sense of duty
made of two strands , pagan and animal, duty to herself, to the
day~
light, to winter, and a sense of social,
i~~ylike
duty: she was a nurse,
a nursemaid, preventing me from doing harm: she was teaching me
