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What I used to be, was no good for me. But it was from that not-good that I’d organized the best thing of all: hope. From my own flaw I had created a future good.
Early on I satisfied the duties of my senses, early and quickly I had my sorrows and joys—in order to be quickly freed from my minor human destiny? and be free to go in search of my tragedy. My tragedy was somewhere. Where was my greater destiny? one that wasn’t just the story of my
was finding out that the unclean animal of the Bible is forbidden because the unclean is the root—for there are created things that never decorated themselves, and preserved themselves exactly as they were the moment they were created, and only they continued to be the still wholly complete root. And because they are the root one cannot eat them, the fruit of good and of evil—eating the living matter would banish me from a paradise of adornments, and leave me to wander forever with a shepherd’s staff in the desert. Many were they who wandered with a staff in the desert.
recalled myself roaming the streets knowing I’d have the abortion, doctor, I who about children only knew and only would know that I was going to have an abortion. But at least I was getting to know pregnancy. Along the streets I was feeling inside me the child that still wasn’t moving, while I was stopping to look in the shop windows at the smiling wax mannequins. And when I entered a restaurant and ate, the pores of a child were devouring like the mouth of a waiting fish. When I was walking, when I was walking I was carrying
No, I don’t want to give you the fright of my love. If you’re afraid of me, I’ll be afraid of me. Don’t be scared of the pain. I’m now as certain as the certainty that in that room I was alive and the roach was alive: I’m certain of this: that all things course above and below pain. Pain is not the true name for whatever people call pain. Listen: I’m certain of it.
The hell I had gone through—how can I explain it to you?—had been the hell that comes from love. Ah, people put the idea of sin in sex. But how innocent and childish that sin is. The real hell is that of love. Love is the experience of a danger of greater sin—it is the experience of the mud and the degradation and the worst joy. Sex is the fright of a child. But how shall I speak for myself about the love that I now knew?