26
PARTISAN REVIEW
everything the least way human in you, you lovely, proper monster,
choir boy and attorney, prosecuting vice
to
the unheard accompani–
ment of your secretly yearning, sniggering, reprocessed rubber heart–
it is for me that you sat up all night, your eyes sticking together like a
diseased whore's labia, it is for me that you suffered, that I might spit at
everything in myself which is the least way like you, that I, also a small
and ambitious and frightened and false little monster, might glory in
self-destruction and in the discomfiture of the Republican host. I
understand you, Tom Dewey, how well! You, too, have looked at the
fatheads about you and sworn to prove
to
yourself that not one of them,
not one, is better than you. But they have failed you, they have borne
you down, and me they have uplifted. Smart, brother, in your rejection ,
while I gloat in minel
Eliot's ideas are not those of a man who is daring,
vorausgehend,
enterprising toward life, but rather of a man who is in retreat but
would like to make his retreat appear a voluntary retirement from
action. Accordingly he has call ed every traditional idea, which would
make for the control of life-energy, to his support; but being well set in
his defense, he can let his ideas go,
to
persuade others. This is called
"culture" in our time.
A man simply says, "I am overwhelmed by the sadness of life! " But
one who has caught and is rotting away from the disease, analysitis,
says, "A loss in orgastic potency has caused me to say, 'I am over–
whelmed by the sadness of life.'"
The smells of sex, the smell of arm pits and breasts, the smell of
smegma and sweat, and the smell of the body, apart from any odors,
but of the warm life in it.
The form in which orgone theory is handed round is often very
funny. Thus I was talking to Bill Steig, '" who said, "A new bulletin has
just come out. Very exciting. Reich says that light doesn't come from
the sun. "
It turns out that this is merely an account of the diffusion of light
·William Steig, cartoonist and illustrator, was also a Reichian, and did the
illustrations for Reich's
Listen, Little Man
in 1948.
