378
PARTISAN REVIEW
"No."
It
was merely honesty.
I take that back. I was watching, openly and secretly both, ac–
tually as I had in reform temple when I was a boy, to see what light
showed here. My curiosity is about revelation, his emotions, the
world of others . . .
"You are a dumb bastard." Johnno said loftily-meanly-and
hurt - and piqued and interested, anguished and infatuated - I felt a
flicker of sexuality at my power and then a longer flicker of shame–
a coldness succeeded it.
"The mind is weird, it's a skull mounted on shoulders,
geist
on
an ox, the ox, the body has a separate thing-consciousness of its
own. My body thinks and has a will.
If
I tried to be a poet,Johnno, I
would have to mortify my body which otherwise would assert that
mind of its own. A Jew-mind starts by ignoring the body, sort of
anyway. The forepart of the mind, where the windows are and
quickness is, belongs to the body anyway." I was not clear: I was in–
tense. "That's where you are. That part of the mind is absorbed into
flesh, I think. Into the dumb, laboring parts. My mind is in the
backyard, looking through the house-the body-to the front porch.
t
Johnno, why should I attempt mortification for you,
art
demands no
,
such thing, it's just you."
"It's where real feeling is."
What he wouldn't do was to grant reality any basis of its own;
he had the right to define it; he had usurped that right from
Nature - he was an
artist.
"No one should howl except an animal," I said.
He wasn't insulted - at least outwardly. My voice had been
neutrally cold enough to protect him some.
It was an odd accusation for me to make since I held the
thought that art had to have an animal sense.
His ambition, our ugliness, his interest in me, my cruelty,
made him stink with nerves.
He thought I was tough.
Pain made him taut and dominating.
It
was his pain that gave
him his energy. He assumed pain as I assumed my right to freedom
from it at least part of the time.
"You always love the wrong people, you only love idols, gods,"
he said: that was smart-assed of him, smart, stinging-true enough.
But he became wet-eyed in the wooden battering of
his
knowledge of
things, including him and me - and our lives in the world; ah: in
