HAROLD BRODKEY
57
from me-I suppose, too, anything could be put into me.
There was a simultaneous rush of unforgiveness, forever
In–
curable.
Thin, underlying currents and spasms of fear and violence passed
beneath the resignation, the letting-go, the willed surrender (which
had an unwilled part as well) .
Perhaps it would be accurate to say my pain made itself more and
more known
to
me.
It
is not metaphorical or a figure of speech or a conceit
to
say that
as that knowledge grew
to
occupy the center and the periphery of my
attention, whatever else I knew seemed unimportant, and was, in a
geographical sense, forgotten: that is, there was no room for it in my
attention.
My name, the value of daylight, the assurance of any logic besides
that ofa short statement such as!
hurt,
are gone, are worthless . There is
a stew in
me,
meaty, acid, of unswallowable present consciousness of
being deep inside the realities, the boundaries, of pain: this stretches
forward and backward without interruption or memory or hope of
another state: this is, as I said, the pain continuum.
The nerves are lunatic more and more : with hardness, flights,
stirrings, yowlings, heats, softness (a rottenness), ignorance .
This is what she wanted.
The actuality of internal disorder is of another life: nothing here
is
right
except one's own painlessness-or death: the cessation of
consciousness. Pain does not have to be charted unless one is deter–
mined to escape: and then it is charted only so that one can find a way
to its edge in order
to
see the world again . If a woman is watchfulness
itself, perhaps then pain is worse for her. So far as I have experienced
my life, aman does not have
to
notice or understand or
0
bserve or map
his pain . He tries
to
function, and if he cannot function, he is as good
as dead: pain kills him early in a way .
Everything in me is wrong : everything in me gives offscreechings,
thumpings, everything is muffled and shuffling maloccurrences,
forbidden stretchings, distensions, ill-advised compressions-bruis–
ings, knottings-everything bears down and on the self, shrinks and
leaves a sore hollow: one gags everywhere, inside oneself, from surfeit,
from emptiness. The distance from here to painlessness is astronom–
ical.
