MICHAEL BRODSKY
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invoked. Needs, needs, I kept saying. Perhaps she was the first to use
the word. Not challengingly, not to dazzle me with her fissures , that I
was to feed. I used it forever after, even when unsolicited, even when
irrelevant, that is to say when I was most blind to my needs, from pride
or satiety. I protected myself from her further use of the words. For it
made me sad she was incomplete, lacerated by needs. And I protected
myself against her use of the word as expletive for me. How could she
know if I was in need, needy, if whenever she asked me I said, with a
snicker, I am in need. All the time I used it the word need seemed the
wrong word. I was doing her bidding in using it. I made it resonate
with my resentment at having
LO
use it. Until I kept going back to bask
in it, in the curt monosyllable, time and again, drawn by all the
potential energy with which it was invested. That is how icons are
born. For how could I communicate without using the words that
meant something to her. What matter if I used her word vindictively,
with the painless bravado of a slave. I used her words to describe what I
felt because I never had enough time or enough patience or enough
courage to decide what it was I was feeling. So that whenever I was in
the vicinity of a feeling, and feelings like ejaculations and deliveries are
always premature, I registered and annlllled it with a word. Not that
my feelings were particularly subtle, they were merely fleeting. Or
perhaps they were fleeting because I annulled them so quickly with the
words of another. They were her words, I read them off some invisible
slate of coercion. I cou ld not be held responsible for the lurid images
they provoked in my listener. I martyred my feelings to a sometimes
beguiling chiaroscuro. So when I seemed to be all severed nerve ends,
all lines of force deprived of its beneficent lodestone, then I called my
chaos need. For the duration of the syllable, while I lived in the
yllab le, I was furthest from need, from the stench of need. I need you I
said, and felt for the duration of the utterance on the right path,
following the trail she had left. What if after the utterance I was
LOrn
between rage and relief, rage the fringe benefit of relief. For I had
betrayed myself using her words. And sometimes I could not tell the
difference between using the words to label a phenomenon correctly
and shoving them back in her face, so much sand flung in the face
of her importunity.
And yet the use of her words brought new feelings into being.
Perhaps not the feelings for which they were labels, in the great world.
And how I treasured the feelings that were not quite my own. I felt
them as consigned to my safe keeping for a short time. For a short time
I li ved the life of men, no longer anachronism in any epoch. Using her
