250
ISE BALAsz-RAK6CZY
Entbluht auf meinem Grabe ein Blume
Die Rose der Asche meines Herzens
...
*
When I came back, everyone was drinking champagne and smoking.
A
bluish haze floated above, and in it, words: altarpiece ... Paris ...
cinema .. . Jew.
7.
When
I
say the tale is never done, I think I must be wrong. Because
the tale ends in the body. (In this, Freud was surely right.)
The problem is, to
be
a body.
When an animal satisfies its hunger or is hurt, that is
all.
When I suck my
lover's cock,
I
suck (or so they say) my mother's breast. But not only
that. [ also suck that
Zuckerbaby
Nannerl bought me one day in the
Prater. We were walking down the HauptalIee, she and
I,
and I wanted
so to ride the Ferris wheel. But she was too .. . too something. The
capacity for metaphor yields poetry, perhaps, but also, a substitute for
mindless
joy.
I want sex to be entirely a matter oflips, tongues, fingertips, stream–
ings. Or, for that matter, of pain. Pain and pleasure, at a certain extreme,
are equal. They wipe out thought.
We
are
on the Ferris wheel, Nannerl and
I.
Slowly it climbs and she
grips my hand. We are so high, I can see the cathedral and the palace.
The wheel reaches it apex, hesitates, rocks, then descends, gathering
speed. Next time it rises faster than before and descends at even greater
speed. We're being whirled around now, more and more - the world's
colors all ablur. At a distance, I sense Nannerl's terror but I refuse to
look at her. I keep looking
outside,
into that glorious kaleidoscope of
nothing.
7. Today,
H.
told me of Freud's death. I don't yet know how I feel. I
remember meeting him first in Vienna at N's, but I wasn't drawn to
him. He'd looked at me distractedly, and when I tried to talk of N's
Manets (she has two of his best flower paintings) he barely responded. He
liked only Classical things, less for their beauty, I suspected, than for their
associations. For my part, I
refused
to talk about analysis - boring,
boring! FinaiJy, we hit on Yvette Guilbert. We both remembered that
*[
have not been able to trace the source of this fragment, although it may derive from a poem
by
Heine, imperfectly remembered.
