“So I told Nerval, whose gaze never quite meets the horizon, but, like a lunar lightbulb, instead hovers ever above the sinkline where the rest of humanity lives and breeds–I told him the truth of love! In thanks for the pains he took to acquaint Bonadventure and myself with his azure dream, I cut his heart out with my tongue until he had to admit that it was there on the floor, beating and bleeding before him.”
“Charles, the covers; I will wrap myself in them completely, you know how I love the feather-licks of silk, all except for my left ear. That I have always dedicated to your poetry exclusively, and now I will let you rant against its membrane; do, dear. It is my prettiest ear, is it not? You have always said so.”
“I took for him the example, so unlike ourselves, jaded Jeanne, of two lovers who are very much, as it is said, in love with one another. No matter how truncated their reason, no matter how engorged their duelling desires, one–either the male or the female–would be more hypnotized, more delirious than the other at any given moment in the relationship. This one, true to itself, will injure or torture the other with its coldness, the minutiae of withdrawal, the angst of insufficient affection; or else, wishing to comfort and uphold the beloved, the lesser loving lover will trampoline into a net of little lies and nefarious fictions, thus comforting the other and undoing itself.
“In this way, even the torturer (or the surgeon, who hopes to help and heal) may be the victim of the situation, in this unequal validation of battling blossoms–evil blooms of what may be termed, mewlingly, ‘love.’ And what of lovemaking itself? Let us not exclude the deluded act itself from our examination. Between the two-backed beast roils a cauldron as miced as any incestuous thought. And isn’t love-making just a pair of wildcats in claw-withdrawn attack? Sometimes not even that, not even that tiny retraction of the bestial scratch of our natures during the dark liaison. Muscles stiffen and contract as if in a death rictus, the supple troubles of the face stretch and distort into a form of skull, or slacken into a mash of unwilled ovoids–as if death had snaked the soul from its smelly bottle. Well, little ear, my pink and pouting conch shell, are you listening? What do you think? What can you say to me? Am I wrong?…. Ah! You too are now among the dead; you snore as do the dead; your face is bereft of speech, the chilled enamel of your teeth protrude from your wet lips only to drool….
“Still no response? Then let me apostrophize a memory of us while you lie here, entombed in your carnal silks. When I first met you, Jeanne damne, do you remember the occasion? I stood unobserved among a small battalion of my friends whose poems I couldn’t quite bring myself to abhor. Their works had the softening effect on my aesthetic judgment that occurs when one first sees a shivering kitten bald from mange. Out of that pack I advanced–you had a blue velvet boostier, and your face was sunk so deeply in a whirlpool of cosmetics, I almost couldn’t discern the stern glance of your crunched skull, or the dusky hue of your lustrous skin, save where one droplet of stagelit sweat had exposed the true you, just an inch in front of your left ear. I knelt before you as never before any other, dirtying a tailored knee in the beer and sawdust of the tavern floor. ‘I want to bite you,’ I said, and you turned to me those glacial eyes, at once so cold and so hot, twin extremes indecipherable in their effect. ‘I want to bind your hands in the hair of dead children, immortal and unstained. I want to draw you to the ceiling by your wrenched arms and see you naked–so that I might, on my bended knees among shards of shattered glass, worship your upraised feet.’ Your friend, I remember, screamed at my suggestion. But you, my dear, demented Jeanne, placed–very stealthily considering the crowd about us–my prayer-struck hand upon your cunt. And only then did you deign, so great was your grace, that evening, to smile.”
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