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PARTISAN REVIEW
only matters of courage in a direct sense or of trusting one's courage.
Courage and sexual authority are the same thing but that courage is
not the only human quality involved. In the demonic risk admitted
to in art, and admitted to in worldliness, a handful of texts might
serve as an example for the most extreme risk of the soul's merit but
one would admire this on the basis of
mistrust-
keeping one's
mistrust at one's side - and an amplitude of courage would mean
one wasn't listening. The truth of a sort is I can do anything I like for
a while - and Ora will
enjoy
it - my reputation will benefit - we will
all
be violent . . .
Everything is confused in me - everything. The human rage
blazing in me sickens me. The one thing I know is that I have
afirst–
rate
mind attached to this peculiar physical authority - and that this
is what life is for me - sort of.
I don't know what any of this really means. One wanders free
inside the sexual- and intellectual- imagery and reality of the mo–
ment. Of the age. The degree of
my
honesty here is not great but
what there is of honesty in me is comparatively
pure.
One man's eyes, he was an old poet, were wide and metallur–
gically human, lecherously interested in what, as a young man, I
had as a sexual life and might do: his eyes heatedly smelted dross, a
shabby and stinking ore. The heat and adventure of another man:
the odor of hot slag. The
love
of others. On the canvases here near
me real objects are glued to painted and curved canvases: these pre–
sent episodes, notes from a life, the forepart of the consciousness
showing off how well it knows what
art
is at the moment.
Choice feels like a machinery of habit with only a flickering
now and then into sensations and sacredness and the immediate
refusal of the raw freedom such sensations offer.
It
wasn't clear, then
or now, that I was scared sensibly.
A girl near the door said to me, "What does it take to get a
mean son of a bitch to go to bed with me- and to be my very own?"
Me? The girl talking to me? I smiled sophisticatedly. A role. I
didn't want her to laugh at me.
Johnno had said earlier:
I know love backwards and forwards .
A
joke. A bluff.
Possibly a truth.
I went out the door, away from eyes alive with art and appetite
- eyes with the appetite for art, eyes oblivious to
ordinariness.
I went
down the steps and out onto the empty street.
In the dark, in the empty perspective, I had an attack of in-
