Milkbottle h, p.17
Milkbottle H, page 17
The Ode To A Nightingale is one of my favorites; I have often persuaded myself to sleep with a feeling of joy by reading his Ode aloud, softly, before turning my head on the pillow Levi and Rachel cannot hear. Well, I am not your mother. The trouble was that you could not look upon me either as a mother, or a sister, or a wife, or a mistress, or, indeed, as a woman of any sort. Obviously, however, I was not nor am not now a man, nor ever resembled one, so that I couldnt have frightened you by maleness. What of me did frighten you? I confess the cause is mysterious. That, perhaps, I was difficult to characterize; but, then, anybody is to a young man of seventeen—he finds it hard to differentiate one human being from another, they are all shooting off, like veils twisted into whips, in his mind. I think that, perhaps, I was a kind of false piece of art to you, whose sex had been abrogated. Mediocre art, yes. On whom sex had later been tacked. That I was so full and you were so empty, that you would have been a kind of film over me, with no more dimension than the thinnest transparency, and that you had no right to be so moulded, that I was a kind of snake, if you will, that shed skins, three showers a day worth. You were repelled by the series of transparencies you saw falling off from me. What was it? What? I wanted you so very much. You knew goddamned well how obvious it was. You saw it. Was a woman of forty so repugnant to a lad of seventeen? Was it this face of mine that we all agreed would be better off from the Winged Victory, showing my body only? Was it the advertisement of the Photograph that stopped you? the admission of guilt? the face featured of erupted lava stopping at the brim? That you would perhaps do me offense? Your body presuming upon a cartoon? What? Oh, Lee, I think it was the fear that you would leave off something. It was the fear that your face would be a kind of deposit upon my own, and that the juxtaposition would be a horror unto Nature, a gross insult to yourself. You were afraid of humiliating yourself, mortifying yourself to be in contact with me. It was as if you had told yourself that to have committed a sexual act with me would have been to admit your own inadequacy with women of your own age. Pride, goddamn it, sheer pride. You flung your pride at me. Oh, not really
flung. You sat in it, you were stubborn in it, unyielding. The fact that I communicated to you with everything short of words that I wanted you you interpreted as danger, or as a mockery of you, as an Error. I was making an error. It was not Lee that Terry wanted, you told yourself, but a particular kind of experience in which the special ingredient called Lee was not involved. You thought I looked past you, around you, not on you yourself. Now, then: pride and ego in you rejected me. Indeed, why should I have wanted you to drag me from the pedestal by my red hair, why should you have been so characterized as selected to do that, eh? What right had I to say that I wanted that of you when I complained I wanted it of men? Again, I insulted you. Insulted you by singling you out as a possibility for such an action, and what right had I thus to compliment you? The compliment was loaded with a responsibility I wished to impose on you, and where did Terry Shannon find her presumption? So, I narrowed you down. I put you up for a role. I all but said you are the one to rape me, at least to show invincible male aggressiveness toward Terry Shannon. I wanted to force you, I did my best by my suggestiveness. You felt the force, and you proved unyielding. I dont know where I got the right to ask it of you, Lee. There was no right, I suppose, that was involved. It was the sentimental determination of a fortyyearold female to ask you to touch me, to take me to bed, to let me teach you. You know of course, you knew, what was worse, that I wouldve had to teach you, and that was appalling. Why couldnt I have understood that? But I didnt want to think that I would have had to initiate you—the whole idea was contrary to your taking me. So, consequently, what I must have wanted to discover was the flaw in your maleness, so that I should have had to take over, and rectify it, and this would have been intolerable to you—you thought! But would it have been intolerable? Would you not at last have enjoyed it? enjoyed me? You could not penetrate to the final aspect, which would have been joy, for that would have been to be natural to yourself, to your body. Thats what I was asking, really, at bottom, that you be natural to your body, and you were incapable of it, but I shouldve known that and gone about the matter differently.
Why didnt I? Because, my unnaturalness matched yours. At forty, no different in the final effect from yours; and, extrapolating, I knew that you would be incapable in unnaturalness, and therefore I undertook no different method because I really didnt want it to turn out any other way, which you incontrovertibly sensed. Did you not? Oh, dont tell me, please dont tell me, I dont think the old lady could bear it, to remember the walks down narrow little Cherry Street to the cool saloon, sitting on the great grass lawns in front of the Bord of Education Building, the model of the Wright Brothers biplane in front of the Benjamin Franklin Museum, and the flagrant vulgar summer of the night on the East River Drive, the fortyyearold woman sedately indulging her noncontact orgy with Lee Emanuel. Hysteresis. Well, the sculpture should have told you. Francesca knew. Beauty, what is beauty? I certainly have been diligently looking for it, and here I am in Southern California, and will be elsewhere, persisting in the search, really an old lady, not that Ill stay in California, because the winters remind me too much as I am now, quite warm to the touch, you see, when the sun is up, during the day, but, withal, the most extraordinary kind of feathery chill in the very heat of the day, as if the heat is pale, a frail and brittle warmth. Yes, it is too evocative of myself, and it strikes me that what we both wanted was a kind of orgy of noncontact: people do go through such phases, I wish I could stop listening to you reply, well, what is beauty, Terry? Surely you must know what you are looking for, if only to recognize it when you see it. Perhaps the orgy of noncontact was something we both recognized simultaneously, and chose to pass by, finally, by our not being together at all, because we were both terrified; a recognition that this was all that anybody could have, anybody anywhere, orgies of noncontact, and that we decided, well, let us look upon it as it is and see if a relationship can be thus conducted. I am beginning to wonder if my sculpture was not its expression. But Francesca would have told me, directly. But perhaps she knew that though she would tell me directly that that in itself would have been a deception, and she desisted. She was careful, possibly, not to tell me the truth of things because she felt I would have taken truth to be truth, so she forebore. I think perhaps the happiest time of my life was with her, in her forebearance, in her delicate strategy to live directly in the indirect. After that first marriage of mine, to a boy with whom I had grown up, it was probably what I needed most— after that, and the voice breakdown following Sieglinde. It wasnt that my husband had not known how to make love, but that I simply didnt care for it, then. I owe Francesca that, too; she made me care for the physical aspects of love, by the very fact that she was a woman, you see, by the very fact, Lee, of her indirection— being a woman she could be only a surrogate; at first she made it seem not bad at all, then, at last, little by little, absolutely marvellous: she acted within the indirection of female to female, which I could accept without knowing what it was she was proving, so that, afterwards, years later, with men, I could still revel in the indirect ecstasy, and throughly participate in the experience as it is actually to our minds—secondhand. How could I accept Francesca? That was comparatively simple: because I knew she was not a male. And on her, on that woman, all successive males were reconstructed. Did you feel that you might have been thought of by me as a reconstruction? Well, then, now we can see, I suppose, that all the men I slept with were experiences of an orgy of noncontact, and that you were intuitively aware of that, and that I was, so that another kind of noncontact—contact itself—did not occur. Because, in any case, Lee, direct experience between us was impossible, is impossible, is impossible between and among human beings. The only direct experience a human is able to have is his own, or her own, thinking. Dont you see? Do you already know that? Is that why you were so astonishingly silent most of the time with me? Knowing that when another area of our bodies is involved in an experience that it transmits the message of the experience to the mind, but the message is already of the order of the past, so that the mind cannot know what the experience directly is that the other part of the body is having. All the mind in presentness and directness experiences is the nature of the message to it, and the mind’s thinking about the message, just as the other part of the body cannot directly experience the actual thinking of the mind and acts upon the message concerning the thinking when it is received. I am speaking of the conscious mind, of course, which is all, in all of earth and time, we can be sure we are conscious of. The sole direct experience a man or woman can have is the thinking of his own mind; all other experience is vicarious—to the conscious mind; the direct experience is, exclusively, the presentness of the recording the mind makes. It is a rigorous and awful limitation, though of course capable of enormous richness in itself; but it is rigorous and awful, Lee, because it is as much cut off in its limitations of directness as are all other phenomena. We are friendly strangers to the rest of our bodies—always a bit afraid of what the other parts of our bodies will do, though we often quite successfully tell them what to do and they tell us they have done it, but they may not report the whole truth, really, and theres no absolute way of checking up on them—we do it only circumstantially—and they might act quite dangerously before we can stop them, as other humans do to us, and suddenly, inexplicably, we are lost before we realize it. Yes, what is beauty, indeed? I guess what I have been searching for all these years, and now I realize that I will never, never find it, is the surcease from the loneliness of my only availability, accessibility—that of direct experience limited to my thinking. The beauty I look for is the beauty of nonloneliness, to have a direct experience not limited to my own thinking. Oh, Lee, is that what the two of us did? —recognized such an impossibility, that the two of us, a woman of forty and a boy of seventeen, each at that moment in their lives were looking for that with an intensity neither had before known, and that then we met and were related in the sympathy of the impossibility? I suppose that is it. I suppose that all human beings are lonely because at bottom they know they experience only their own thinking. I guess I should have been able to see that a long time ago, looking at my sculpture
her essential terror, Lee notes, lies in her unwillingness to take her belief one step further. She is fully aware of it, but he is afraid to look on its face. She must draw a line when she knows damned well theres no line that can be drawn. She must know, in short, that no direct experience is available at all. She must know that the socalled direct experience of thinking is in fact no more than the idea of thinking: one thinks that one thinks, a series continuously prolonged backward or circularly (whatever the nature of the arc) into time. What seems to occur is a curious circuit of indirection; that, because the given object contacted possesses no definable boundary, one is forever one step or god knows how many steps removed from direct contact. One can, therefore, never break off contact just as one cannot break into contact. She is terrified at the prospect of imagining a nonindividuated world; indeed, horrified at what to her is the monstrousness of the Spinoza formulation that we and all of nature are attributes of what he called God; that we are parts of the circuits of this Beast is too formidable for Terry to look on. She is afraid, in brief, of becoming antiSemitic
Francesca would touch me, looking at my sculpture—which I think, now, I should like—oh, not to crush, not to break up— but, simply, to discard altogether, to shove aside, to wave a wand over and have them painlessly disappear—all those papiermache little cubes cunningly put together in the shape of women’s hats, sometimes, in the shape of a deck of cards suddenly flung outward and boxed in, in the shape of reconstructed sails on an invisible deck, from which the wind had abruptly departed so that I could rearrange them in cubes, hollow cubes always, and each with two sides omitted, so that from whatever direction the light was coming the light would always manage to go through—in the shape of an ocean reef on which the land would be caught, things fighting to be abstractions, abstractions struggling to be things, a pinwheel that had got senile, a crank that had got surprisingly straightened out, breasts that had become caves for boys of light to play and hide in and discover themselves in, sculpture, Lee, that never made one cry or bellow with laughter or empty oneself out, the cubes were charms, amulets, if you will, to hang around the neck of a moment to frighten mock demons away—shaman Terry Shannon, medicine woman Terry Shannon, bracelets and necklaces in sculpture, African masks degenerated into a white woman’s cubes, I—I am almost ashamed, I think. I wanted, here, to make a Hymn of Old Women to Boys, but the hysteretic hysterectomy seems to be preventing me. I think of Francesca dying in her great house outside Lisbon, of cancer, and touching me as she dies. I didnt need the money, but she left me a little income, so that I should never have to worry. Not for a moment did she mention death—she welcomed her visitors with great abandon, and continued to touch me to the last, even while the visitors were there. She thought Camoens a great poet, and he isnt, and her thinking of him that way saddened me—I knew there was no one from whom I could expect perfection of judgment, infallibility. The hot sun falls here with its little feathers of chills. I think I will be going to Oregon next, to Portland, a firm of consulting engineers would like me on their staff, I will live on the Roosevelt Boulevard with Nick, my new husband, and my three children, your darling Rena, sleep sweetly, in Philadelphia. I tell you what I, Terry Shannon, will do, though, in the California winter, because I cant gather together all my sculpture in a heap, Id have to travel too far and too wide to do so, but what I can do, what I promise you the old lady will do is to gather together all my freckles. You remember my freckles, Lee? Im practically covered by them. Well, Im going to rake them all off my body, and put them into a little heap and then burn them, like autumn leaves, in a rusty little fire, Mrs Sherman has freckles too, and thats her trouble, because in her sleep shes gathering them all together and putting a flame to them, I know what she feels like. And then my skin will be pure white, unmarred, and then perhaps you will have me, hymn and all, veined as the cliff crouching over the young boy sleeping on the sand beneath. I think I love you rather fiercely, beyond, if you will forgive the play, beyond rapprochement my own mother Sadie Schwartz did as much as she could for me I must admit. Difficult, too, with my straight black hair dense with dandruff. It was simply that I could never stop giggling, old as I got, giggling and trying to stop by sharply sucking in my breath. I giggled all the way through the University of Pennsylvania on a scholarship, just as my younger sister Ethel did, the one who got cancer of the breast so that she had to get it cut off, which her husband the architect Myer Kaplan never said he minded, but then hed never admit anything intimate, nobody seems to, ever, to me. And I never got over being so tall, which is why I walked with bowed shoulders, giggling, sharply sucking in my breath, I knew I had to try to stop somehow, even with the thirtyfive thousand dollar dowry my mother had for me. I giggled, Lee, and I bowed, and I had a big white face and a big white high forehead and low big breasts and I always looked like an old maid and I began teaching school because of that, giggling at my little blackhaired bowed mother walking fiercely along the Boulevard with her prayerbook to the synagogue. The man who sold realestate in Trenton, Louis Garber his name was, he wanted me, but that wasnt good enough for my mother, who demanded what she called a professional man, oh, I giggled a lot that night, in my bed, over that, I sucked in my breath so sharply so many times that my throat felt cut up by little terribly sharp barnacles of giggle, but at that Im not as badly off as my sister, who owns only one breast now, and when Dr Adolph Anderman came along yes, young boys, The Student Prince at Garden Pier I leaned over Lee too, as I do now over the palisades, and I finally told him about Alex Bradlow, who was only at that time a young law student on scholarship, though my brother Russell never got one, but he’s equally brilliant, yet Alex had no money at all, he was working as he went to school, and he was tall, as you, Lee, and darkly sweet, and Im going down the beach in ten minutes or so to meet him, you can meet him too if you like, if you go right away, Lee, and my brother likes him, likes him a great deal, and Alex doesnt mind the impediment in my speech, I had a cleft palate when I was born and it had to be operated on, have you ever noticed the impediment, Lee? If it only werent for my mother. It doesnt matter to my father. Hed go along, hes so much softer than my mother, I really dont want to go to Beaver College, I just want to be with Alex, youre really too young to understand all of this, Lee, much much too young even though Im an old lady, but you dont have to understand anything at all, we old women dont want understanding, really, just the vision of a boy who wont mind old women without their breasts. We dont ever really want to see you again in the flesh, Lee, just the picture of you rising from the little heap of burning freckles. Because if we saw you, we would want to keep you forever, never let you go. Because, too, we will have other children in the flesh. Ethel Schwartz and Myer Kaplan have two children, and after they grow up they can take a trip to the Grand Canyon and Myer rises very early so as not to miss it and he urges Ethel to rise, to put on her dressing-gown because it wouldnt be nice to look at the Grand Canyon with one breast obviously missing. Donna Zion and Roy Lindauer, twenty years older than she is as Dr Anderman is twenty years older than Clara Schwartz, have three children in the flesh. We can let all of them go. But we couldnt you, Lee. We would dismember you first, even as Penthiselea murdered her own son when she discovered him, disguised, not recognizing him, watching her and the other women in their secret sexual mysteries —tore him down from the tree, she and the other women, killed and dismembered him, only to find that she had done this to her own son. Because, you see, the boy the old women are in love with watches them at their mysteries, at their secret ceremonies of their barren and unproductive selves. So, as at my little heap of burning freckles, the old women bend over their memories of the sunburnt boy, mumbling, holding aloft the severed breast, the boy the cancer itself growing in that breast, he did it, he started it, he whipped the cells into their spectacular growth so that we had to cut him from us, and be the ancient myth that all old women are, Onebreasted, hopping about from palisade to palisade in the California warm winter. Stealthily we watch you, lying warm and brown on the beach, a bumblebee buzzing about you, we raise our hands, he shall not sting you, we will swat the beastie as we go about the world swatting all the flying stinging beasties who would threaten young goldenbrown boys preenprone on the sands, may your member forever lie flaccid under its curling black hair, may the tawny sands forever stumble gently against the sides of your lean long body, may no high heel of the wind and the storm gouge you, may the sun forever mock a myeast of honey over your brow, may the Lourdes watch over you and protect you, sleep, boy, sleep, for the old women are forever awake, forever full of revenge for having given birth at all, like that old Hollywood biddy I know, whom I sucked off the other night, shes one of those who will take it wherever she can find it, I happened
