I understood very dearly, I must say, that man has a dead louse in his blood, and that when you’re handed a symphony or a fresco or a high explosive you’re really getting an ipecac reaction which was not included in the predestined bill of fare. I understood too why I had failed to become the musician I was. All the compositions I had created in my head, all these private and artistic auditions which were permitted me, thanks to St. Hildegarde or St. Bridget, or John of the Cross, or God knows whom, were written for an age to come, an age with less
instruments and stronger antennae, stronger eardrums too. A different kind of suffering has to be experienced before such music can be appreciated. Beethoven staked out the new territory – one is aware of its presence when he erupts, when he breaks down in the very core of his stillness. It is a realm of new vibrations – to us only a misty nebula, for we have yet to pass beyond our own conception of suffering.
We have yet to ingest this nebulous world, its travail, its orientation. I was permitted to hear an incredible music lying prone and indifferent to the Sorrow about me. I heard the gestation of a new world, the sound of torrential rivers taking their course, the sound of stars grinding and chafing, of fountains clotted with blazing gems. All music is still governed by the old astronomy, is the product of the hothouse, a panacea for Weltschmerz. Music is still the antidote for the nameless, but this is not yet music. Music is planetary fire, an irreducible which is all-sufficient; it is the slate-writing of the gods, the abracadabra which the learned and the ignorant alike muff because the axle has been unhooked. Look to the bowels, to the unconsolable and ineluctable! Nothing is determined, nothing is settled or solved. All this that is going on, all music, all architecture, all law, all government, all invention, all discovery – all this is velocity exercises in the dark, Czemy with a capital Zed riding a crazy white horse in a bottle of mucilage.
One of the reasons why I never got anywhere with the bloody music is that it was always mixed up with sex. As soon as I was able to play a song the cunts were around me like flies. To begin with, it was largely Lola’s fault. Lola was my first piano teacher. Lola Niessen. It was a ridiculous name and typical of the neighbourhood we were living in then. It sounded like a stinking bloater, or a wormy cunt. To tell the truth, Lola was not exactly a beauty. She looked somewhat like a Kalmuck or a Chinook, with sallow complexion and bilious-looking eyes. She had a few warts and wens, not to speak of the moustache. What excited me, however, was her hairiness; she had wonderful long fine black hair which she arranged in ascending and descending buns on her Mongolian skull. At the nape of the neck she curled it up in a serpentine knot. She was always late in coming, being a conscientious idiot, and by the time she arrived I was always a bit enervated from masturbating. As soon as she took the stool beside me, however, I became exdted again, what with the stinking perfume she soused her armpits with. In the summer she wore loose sleeves and I could see the tufts’of hair under her arms.
The sight of it drove me wild. I imagined her as having hair all over, even in her navel. And what I wanted to do was to roll in it, bury my teeth in it. I could have eaten Lola’s hair as a delicacy, if there had been a bit of flesh attached to it. Anyway she was hairy, that’s what I want to say and being hairy as a gorilla she got my mind off the the music and on to her cunt. I was so damned eager to see that cunt of hers that finally one day I bribed her little brother to let me have a peep at her while she was in the bath. It was even more wonderful than I had imagined: she had a shag that reached from the navel to the crotch, an enormous thick tuft, a sporran, rich as a hand-woven rug. When she went over it with the powder puff I thought I would faint. The next time she came for the lesson I left a couple of buttons open on my fly. She didn’t seem to notice anything amiss. The following time I left my whole fly open. This time she caught on. She said, “I think you’ve forgotten something. Henry.” I looked at her, red as a beet, and I asked her blandly what ? She pretended to look away while pointing to it with her left hand. Her hand came so close that I couldn’t resist grabbing it and pushing it in my fly. She got up. quickly, looking pale and frightened. By this time my prick was out of my fly and quivering with delight. I closed in on her and I reached up under her dress to get at that hand-woven rug I had seen through the keyhole.
Suddenly I got a sound box on the ears, and then another and she took me by the ear and leading me to a comer of the room she turned my face to the wall and said, “Now button up your fly, you silly boy!” We went back to the piano in a few moments – back to Czemy and the velocity exercises. I couldn’t see a sharp from a flat any more, but I continued to play because I was afraid she might tell my mother about the incident. Fortunately it was not an easy thing to tell one’s mother. The incident, embarrassing as it was, marked a decided change in our relations. I thought that the next time she came she would be severe with me, but on the contrary; she seemed to have dolled herself up, to have sprinkled more perfume over herself, and she was even a bit gay, which was unusual for Lola because she was a morose, withdrawn type. I didn’t dare to open my fly again, but I would get an erection and hold it throughout the lesson, which she must have enjoyed because she was always stealing sidelong glances in that direction.
I was only fifteen at the time, and she was easily twenty-five or twenty-eight. It was difficult for me to know what to do, unless it was to deliberately knock her down one day while my mother was out. For a time I actually shadowed her at night, when she went out alone. She had a habit of going out for long walks alone in the evening. I used to dog her steps, hoping she would get to some deserted spot near the cemetery where I might try some rough tactics. I had a feeling sometimes that she knew I was following her and that she enjoyed it. I think she was waiting for me to waylay her – I think that was what she wanted. Anyway, one night I was lying in the grass near the railroad tracks; it was a sweltering summer’s night and people were lying about anywhere and everywhere, like panting dogs. I wasn’t thinking of Lola at all – I was just mooning there, too hot to think about anything. Suddenly I see a woman coming along the narrow cinderpath. I’m lying sprawled out on the embankment and nobody around that I can notice. The woman is coming along slowly, head down, as though she were dreaming. As she gets close I recognize her. “Lola!” I call. “Lola!” She seems to be really astonished to see me there. “Why, what are you doing here?” she says, and with that she sits down beside me on the embankment. I didn’t bother to answer her, I didn’t say a word -1 just crawled over her and flattened her. “Not here, please,” she begged, but I paid no attention. I got my hand between her legs, all tangled up in that thick sporran others, and she was sopping wet, like a horse salivating. It was my first fuck, be Jesus, and it had to be that a train would come along and shower hot sparks over us. Lola was terrified.
It was her first fuck too, I guess, and she probably needed it more than I, but when she felt the sparks she wanted to tear loose. It was like trying to hold down a wild mare. I couldn’t keep her down, no matter how I wrestled with her. She got up, shook herclothes down, and adjusted the bun at the nape of her neck.
