56
PARTISAN REVIEW
sickness, of darkness were as innocent and ignorant as any flower, a
blossoming of darkness. I did not live among people who thought pain
was inevitable: pain has not been unmanageably ubiquitous for years.
I was already middle class and modern, in a sense; and I expected
an immediate cure: I expected this not to have happened, to be
untrue.
But at the same time, there was-there is only the faintest hope
the pain will stop now, stop at once, there is very little chance that this
isn't bad, isn't really bad, isn't real.
An odd, spareless, timeless almost floating, circling, a gradual
descent occurred, to lightlessness: a descent from, a dissent from time:
this is unbearable, this endless greasy slide.
It
hurts-only a little-but it hurts enough so that there is noth–
ing now but resignation or helplessness toward this slow discovery of
just how much it hurts.
Around this clouded waiting or ignorance, is now a dull memory
of the series of thumps, I
hear
them now, notice them only now: I felt
them then: I feel their consequences now-the times are mixed up, of
the noises, the wood-and-squashing noises, and those of the nerves
jumping around; the sounds continue, sickeningly: the memory is
stuck, wetly, fibrously, in my consciousness.
I see, out my eyes, in flickers, Nonie, Nonie's
face,jlesh-colored:
mostly I see a gray foggy wad, a dirty cotton wad that has been jammed
(it seems) into my eyes or eyesockets, into the eyes themselves: a damp
oppressive grayness: there is no color (colors are a special treat of well–
being). My lips are supernaturally dry. In my gullet the air drags.
All at.once, there is something like a gasping, of swollen, terri–
fied, hysterical
ttssue-but
this is buried, shovelled under by some
hunter's madness in me: I think, I would expect boys and girls to die
differently.
Achild has an inexact fear of death, a wordless is-this-death in the
way a child says is-this-the-circus?
Animals in a ring.
I am about to give birth-to death.
Sensations push in and out and in all directions in me: I am full: I
am a plenum of sensation: I am swollen with nausea, with self-aban–
donment, with
I wtil let go,
not as words, but like opening my fists: I
will not resist anything: anything can emerge from me, be taken
