MICHAEL BRODSKY
221
It
was with a certain pleasure that she glided toward me, as on a
gondola, I groped toward her in turn and toward the words of her
world. I left in the morning and in the evening returned (chiasmus
knocks but once in a paragraph). There was no alteration in her
disposition over a wide interval, as with F. Nothing awakened her to
my inadequacies. That was a little disappointing. When I touched her
I asked myself, Do I touch her to call an emotion into being or to annul
its opposite, the opposite of the tender and inquisitive, already fer–
menting. All I can say is, for the duration of the touch I was the touch.
The touch was the emotion, no fringe. Nothing antedated, nothing
survived. Renewed by internal monologue, the whey of a long loath–
ing, I proceeded to touch more and more I touched. She was silent and
submissive. I made use of her silence, I invested it with undertone,
undertow, tinctured it with invective. In any case I strengthened it for it
had to be strong, in every faculty and fiber, to withstand my long plaint
against it. I adopted her conventions but not really. And then her words
began to be accurate. They quelled whatever engendered the need for
them. There was no longer a fringe that eluded.
At times the emotions to which they applied surfaced. Or rather
the gestures that peddled these emotions saw the light. But I wou ld
always resent my concession, the incessant concession that fortified me
too. I felt vulnerable at first.
If
I cou ld read my own emotions then
everyone could. I was a marked man. But it was better to use her words
than to have taken the initiative and depleted my already dwindling
arsenal. That would have been worse than any concession. And yet
there are times when annihi lation is to be preferred to concession. But I
needed my stock of words, I was their mating ground, their culture
medium for fortuitous juxtapositions. I was not trying to convey
emotions, some inner convulsion was merely the pretext, the spring–
board, for those fortuitous juxtapositions that brought a new entity
into being. And the new entity, that configuration of words, cou ld be
linked to a plethora of states. But I did not have that many words to
depend on. And those I had I returned to, faithful customer. And they
had begun to appropriate a little of the meaning of other words, they
were less themselves than a kind of penumbra, aftertaste, of all that
appropriation. I could weep and call the weeping a fart because fart
was one of those words that sucked others dry. I could have complained
about remembering and called it sweat. Because sweat was another
word. Not just because laughter is sometimes a kind of audible sweat
but because over epochs too lengthy to measure the word sweat had
learned to absorb so many of the juices of nuance, from other words.
ot that the word sweat, as it was for me, was not purged of all the
