There is a condition of misery which is irremediable – because its origin is lost in obscurity. Bloomingdale’s, for example, can bring about this condition. All department stores are symbols of sickness and emptiness, but Bloomingdale’s is my special sickness, my incurable obscure malady. In the chaos of Bloomingdale’s there is an order, but this order is absolutely crazy to me, it is the order which I would find on the head of a pin if I were to put it under the microscope. It is the order of an accidental series of accidents accidentally conceived. This order has, above all, an odour – and it is the odour of Bloomingdale’s which strikes terror into my heart. In Bloomingdale’s I fall apart completely: I dribble on to the floor, a helpless mess of guts and bones and cartilage. There is the smell, not of decomposition, but of mis-alliance. Man, the miserable alchemist, has welded together in a million forms and shapes, substances and essences which have nothing in common. Because in his mind there is a tumor which is eating him away insatiably; he has left the little canoe which was taking him blissfully down the river in order to construct a bigger, safer boat in which there may be room for every one. His labours take him so far afield that he has lost all remembrance of why he left the little canoe. The ark is so full of bric-a-brac that it has become a stationary building above a subway in which the smell of linoleum prevails and predominates. Gather together all the significance hidden away in the interstital miscellany of Bloomingdale’s and put it on the head of a pin and you will have left a universe in which the grand constellations move without the slightest danger of collision.
It is this microscopic chaos which brings on my morganatic ailments. In the street I begin to stab horses at random, or I lift a skirt here and there looking for a letter-box, or I put a postage stamp across a mouth, an eye, a vagina. Or I suddenly decide to climb a tall building, like a fly, and once having reached the roof I do fly with real wings and I fly and fly and fly, covering towns like Weehawken, Hoboken, Hackensack, Canarsie, Bergen Beach in the twinkling of an eye. Once you become a real schizerino flying is the easiest thing in the world; the trick is to fly with the etheric body, to leave behind in Bloomingdale’s your sack of bones, guts, blood and cartilage; to fly only with your immutable self which, if you stop a moment to reflect, is always equipped with wings. Flying this way, in full daylight, has advantages over the ordinary night-flying which everybody indulges in. You can leave off from moment to moment, as quick and decisive as stepping on a brake; there is no difficulty in finding your other self, because the moment you leave off, you are your other self, which is to say, the so-called whole self. Only, as the Blooming-dale experience goes to prove, this whole self, about which so much boasting has been done, falls apart very easily. The smell of linoleum, for some strange reason, will always make me fall apart and collapse on the floor. It is the smell of all the unnatural things which were glued together in me, which were assembled, so to say, by negative consent.
It is only after the third meal that the morning gifts, bequeathed by the phony alliances of the ancestors, begin to drop away and the true rock of the self, the happy rock sheers up out of the muck of the soul. With nightfall the pinhead universe begins to expand. It expands organically, from an infinitesimal nuclear speck, in the way that minerals or star-dusters form. It eats into the surrounding chaos like a rat boring through store cheese. All chaos could be gathered together on a pinhead, but the self, microscopical at the start, works up to a universe from any point in space. This is not the self about which books are written, but the ageless self whith has been fanned out through millenary ages to men with names and dates, the self which begins and ends as a worm, which is the worm in the cheese called the world. Just as the slightest breeze can set a vast forest in motion so, by some unfathomable impulse from within, the rock-like self can begin to grow, and in this growth nothing can prevail against it. It’s like Jack Frost at work, and the whole world a window-pane. No hint of labour, no sound, no struggle, no rest; relentless, remorseless, unremitting, the growth of the self goes on.
Only two items on the bill of fare: the self and the not-self. And an eternity in which to work it out. In this eternity, which has nothing to do with time or space, there are interludes in which something like a thaw sets in. The form of the self breaks down, but the self, like climate, remains. In the night the amorphous matter of the self assumes the most fugitive forms: error seeps in through the portholes and the wanderer is unlatched from his door. This door which the body wears, if opened out on to the world, leads to annihilation. It is the door in every fable out of which the magician steps; nobody has ever read of him returning home through the selfsame door. If opened inward there are infinite doors, all resembling trapdoors: no horizons are visible, no airlines, no rivers, no maps, no tickets. Each couche is a halt for the night only, be it five minutes or ten thousand years. The doors have no handles and they never wear out. Most important to note – there is no end in sight. All these halts for the night, so to speak, are like abortive explorations of a myth.
One can feel his way about, take bearings, observe passing phenomena; one can even feel at home. But there is no taking root. Just at the moment when one begins to feel “established” the whole terrain founders, the soil underfoot is afloat, the constellations are shaken loose from their moorings, the whole known universe, including the imperishable self, starts moving silently, ominously, shudderingly serene and unconcerned, towards an unknown, unseen destination. All the doors seem to be opening at once; the pressure is so great that an implosion occurs and in the swift plunge the skeleton bursts asunder. It was some such gigantic collapse which Dante must have experienced when he situated himself in Hell; it was not a bottom which he touched, but a core, a dead centre from which time itself is reckoned. Here the comedy begins, for here it is seen to be divine.
All this by way of saying that in going through the revolving door of the Amarillo dance hall one night some twelve or fourteen years ago, the great event took place. The interlude which I think of as the Land of Fuck, a realm of time more than of space, is for me the equivalent of that Purgatory which Dante has described in nice detail. As I put my hand on the brass rail of the revolving door to leave the Amarillo Dance Hall, all that I had previously been, was, and about to be, foundered. There was nothing unreal about it; the very time in which I was born passed away, carried off by a mightier stream. Just as I had previously been bundled out of the womb, so now I was shunted back to some timeless vector where the process of growth is kept in abeyance. I passed into the world of effects. There was no fear, only a feeling of fatality. My spine was socketed to the node; I was up against the coccyx of an implacable new world. In the plunge the skeleton blew apart, leaving the immutable ego as helpless as a squashed louse.
If from this point I do not begin, it is because there is no beginning. If I do not fly at once to the bright land it is because wings are of no avail. It is zero hour and the moon is at nadir…
Why I think of Maxie
