384
PARTISAN REVIEW
mind down here, to all these artists, is just too strange . I'm scared of
it-trademarked one-noters. Or take your sort of courtship: you
silence somebody, a man or a woman as if they were kids; then you
can look at them at your leisure ; you can make them pay attention to
implications; and if they want to speak, they have to speak physically,
that's the only way they can speak and have you listen to them."
For the moment, in the arc of his drinking, he was tensely
sin–
cere:
"Everything is dead except down here."
But fear, but doubt, but the same sort of provincial half-fanatic
concern for doctrine of his childhood Catholicism - the cruelty, or
anger, they're the same thing, just as rivalry and cruelty and
treachery are the same things, that stuff in me was eased at seeing
the Catholic frightened of Hell in J ohnno, the inflexibility of mind
inside, or alongside, the cleverness, the stultified vision, censored by
hysteria. ''Johnno, when someone is really sincere-" (I assumed he
had heard his own voice, his hysteria) "- the mind closes down–
feelings take over. This part of the world is dead, too . This is a
Reno. I mean a gambling place
~
a dead casino. One of those. And
making sense in words means things aren't exciting really: they're
just tense-or you wouldn't be able to make sense yet, not much
anyway, unless you were inspired, of course -"
"I
am
inspired - "
"It can only very rarely be sincere to speak with feeling , to
make sense and to have feelings. Most of the time we aren't going to
let go of what we are, of what we've learned - we're implicated in the
game of getting along- so what feelings are possible down here
either - tell me One thing, is it
heartbreaking?"
Here, I meant.
"No," he said. "Yes.
It
doesn't matter. I matter."
"If
things aren't hard to remember as they happen, then they're
a sort of skillful trespass; they're calculated . I
hate
being made a fool
of, Johnno. When you're running or when you're about to touch
someone, doesn't your mind go dark for a second or two?
If
you're in
control, it's not really happening. Or if you retreat entirely into
yourself. And a thing not-happening is not a neutral thing: it kills an
area of the consciousness.
If
what you're doing is really a commen–
tary on the act, then it's what you know but it's not the thing. To live
means the world has its way with you. The animal haze of action, I
have that in only a few things, and only sometimes. Mostly I just–
never mind. The higher the velocity, the more everything flies off
the face of the earth and becomes abstract and sort of falsely
pure - then it's
a ghost
-"
