And if they tell you that these things had to be, that things could not have happened otherwise, that France did her best and Germany her best and that little Liberia and little Ecuador and all the other allies also did their best, and that since the war everybody has been doing his best to patch things up or to forget, tell them that their best is not good enough, that we don’t want to hear any more this logic of “doing the best one can”, tell them we don’t want the best of a bad bargain, we don’t believe in bargains good or bad, nor in war memorials. We don’t want to hear about the logic of events – or any kind of logic. “Je ne parle pas logique,” said Montherlant, “je parle generosite.” I don’t think you heard it very well, since it was in French. I’ll repeat it for you, in the Queen’s own language; “I’m not talking logic, I’m talking generosity.” That’s bad English, as the Queen herself might speak it, but it’s clear. Generosity – do you hear? You never practise it, any of you, either in peace or in war. You don’t know the meaning of the word. You think to supply guns and ammunition to the winning side is generosity; you think sending Red Cross nurses to the front, or the Salvation Army, is generosity. You think a bonus twenty years too late is generosity; you think a little pension and a wheel chair is generosity; you think if you give a man his old job back it’s generosity. You don’t know what the fucking war means, you bastards! To be generous is to say Yes before the man even opens his mouth. To say Yes you have to first be a Surrealist or a Dadaist, because you have understood what it means to say No. You can even say Yes and No at the same time, provided you do more than is expected of you. Be a stevedore in the day time and a Beau Brummel in the night-time. Wear any uniform so long as it’s not yours. When you write your mother ask her to cough up a little dough so that you may have a clean rag to wipe your ass with. Don’t be disturbed if you see your neighbour going after his wife with a knife: he probably has good reason to go after her, and if he kills her you may be sure he has the satisfaction of knowing why he did it. If you’re trying to improve your mind, stop it I There’s no improving the mind. Look at your heart and gizzard – the brain is in the heart.
Ah yes, if I had known then that these birds existed -Cendrars, Vache, Grosz, Ernst, Apollinaire – if I had known that then, if I had known that in their own way they were thinking exactly the same things as I was, I think I’d have blown up. Yes, I think I’d have gone off like a bomb. But I was ignorant. Ignorant of the fact that almost fifty years previously a crazy Jew in South America had given birth to such startlingly marvellous phrases as “doubt’s duck with the vermouth lips” or “I have seen a fig eat an onager” – that about the same time a Frenchman, who was only a boy, was saying: “Find flowers that are chairs” . . . “my hunger is the black air’s bits” . . . “his heart, amber and spunk”. Maybe at the same time, or thereabouts, while Jarry was saying “in eating the sound of moths”, and Apollinaire repeating after him “near a gentleman swallowing himself”, and Breton murmuring softly “night’s pedals move uninterruptedly”, perhaps “in the air beautiful and black” which the lone Jew had found under the Southern Cross another man, also lonely and exiled and of Spanish origin, was preparing to put down on paper these memorable words: “I seek, all in all, to console myself for my exile, for my exile from eternity, for that unearthing (destierro) which I am fond of referring to as my unheavening … At present, I think that the best way of writing this novel is to tell how it should be written. It is the novel of the novel, the creation of creation. Or God of God, Deus de Deo.” Had I known he was going to add this, this which follows, I would surely have gone off like a bomb… “By being crazy is understood losing one’s reason. Reason, but not the truth, for there are madmen who speak truths while others keep silent. . .” Speaking of these things, speaking of the war and the war dead, I cannot refrain from mentioning that some twenty years later I ran across this in French by a Frenchman. 0 miracles of miracles! “Il faut le dire, il y a des cadavres que je ne respecte qu’a moitie” Yes, yes, and again yes! O, let us do some rash things – for the sheer pleasure of it! Let us do something live and magnificent, even if destructive! Said the mad cobbler: “All things are generated oat of the grand mystery, and proceed out of one degree into another. Whatever goes forward in its degree, the same receives no abominate.”
Everywhere in all times the same ovarian world announcing itself. Yet also, parallel with these announcements, these prophecies, the gynecological manifestoes, parallel and contemporaneous with them new totem poles, new taboos, new war dances. While into the air so black and beautiful the brothers of man, the poets, the diggers of the future, were spitting their magic lines, in this same time, 0 profound and perplexing riddle, other men were saying: “Won’t you please come and take a job in our ammunition factory. We promise you the highest wages, the most sanitary and hygienic conditions. The work is so easy that even a child could do it” And if you had a sister, a wife, a mother, an aunt, as long as she could manipulate her hands, as long as she could prove that she had no bad habits, you were invited to bring her or them along to the ammunition works. If you were shy of soiling your hands they would explain to you very gently and intelligently just how these delicate mechanisms operated, what they did when they exploded, and why you must not waste even your garbage because… et ipso facto e pluribus unum. The thing that impressed me, going the rounds in search of work, was not so much that they made me vomit every day (assuming I had been lucky enough to put something into my guts), but that they always demanded to know if you were of good habits, if you were steady, if you were sober, if you were industrious, if you had ever worked before and if not why not. Even the garbage, which I had gotten the job of collecting for the municipality, was precious to them, the killers.
Standing knee-deep in the muck, the lowest of the low, a coolie, an outcast, still I was part of the death racket. I tried reading the Inferno at night, but it was in English and English is no language for a catholic work. “Whatever enters in itself into its selfhood, viz. into its own lubet.. .” Lubet! If I had had a word like that to conjure with then, how peacefully I might have gone about my garbage collecting! How sweet, in the night, when Dante is out of reach and the hands smell of muck and slime, to take unto oneself this word which in the Dutch means “lust” and in Latin ‘lubitum” or the divine beneplacitum. Standing knee-deep in the garbage I said one day what Meister Eckhart is reported to have said long ago: “I truly have need of God, but God has need of me too.” There was a job waiting for me in the slaughterhouse, a nice little job of sorting entrails, but I couldn’t raise the fare to get to Chicago. I remained in Brooklyn, in my own palace of entrails, and turned round and round on the plinth of the labyrinth.
I remained at home seeking the “germinal vesicle”, “the dragon castle on the floor of the sea”, “the Heavenly Harp”, “the field of the square inch”, “the house of the square foot”, “the dark pass”, “the space of former Heaven”. I remained locked in, a prisoner of Forculus, god of the door, of Cardea, god of the hinge, and of Limentius, god of the threshold. I spoke only with
