...And Dreams Are Dreams

Deep down, a shipwreck is replaced by a floating stage upon which famous stars sing. At the site of the shipwreck, of course. For the victims of the shipwreck.

But the shipwreck does not exist. Only entertainment exists.

Days go by. Time goes by. The leaves fall from the trees. But they grow back. Governments fall, others take their place. The price of gasoline goes up and back down.

“We’re used to watching scenes from Dachau while calmly eating our macaroni and cheese.”

“The image, in contrast to active memory, has a debilitating quality about it.”

“What’s the latest on Nicaragua, anyway?”

“It’s been a while since they gave us any news on the Iran-Iraq war.”

A coup d’état in some African country awakens that country from the lethargy of the map, only to let it sink back again into the nonexistence of the white world, the white news, the white madness. Because it will be whites who will meet with whites in Geneva to agree, if in fact they do agree, on nuclear arms. Those with black, yellow, and brown skins are out of the game. “White gentlemen,” she adds. “Because the white ladies aren’t going to agree on anything of the sort. They will visit museums or fine clothing stores, or they will attend a charity ball.”

“Whites have done a good job of dividing the world into capitalists and communists.”

Time goes by. Days go by. The seasons change their shirts, one after the other. He persists in not changing his. He likes grime. He feels more comfortable in filth. As for her, she likes order; she’s obsessive about cleanliness. Days go by. Time goes by. November is a very sweet month.

He smokes. Before he even looks for it, his lighter is in his hand. Before he even has time to desire something, she gives it to him, having guessed it. They have everything. But something is missing from their relationship. What could it be? “It’s like last night at the theater,” she says. “From my seat, I could only see half the stage. When the singers sang on the part of the stage that I could see, everything was fine. But when the action took them over to what was for me the dark side of the moon, I could only hear their voices. That was agony. I had to imagine them. And however much I bent down, I was still in a disadvantageous position.

From that box, with those two lesbians in front of me who would not let me squeeze into the front row, I couldn’t enjoy the show fully. I felt as if half of me was also missing. It was as if my destiny was showing me, at that moment, my situation. Because that’s how I am, my darling, without you. A half. With the thirst of the whole. Listening to the voices and imagining the movements. With two lesbians lying in wait like dogs.

Besides, if one should bend over too much, throwing up is just a matter of time.”

Yes, what was missing was perspective, that which keeps people alive. Without it, even the most permanent things in life seem temporary. The best things become bad. The most bearable become unbearable.

She leads him. She opens up horizons for him.

She helps him understand himself. Who he is. What he wants out of life. He writes and thinks of her in her pensive moods. He writes: “The word belongs half to him who speaks it and half to him who hears it”

(Montaigne). “Every door has its nail” (popular proverb).

But how to find the halfway point, the golden rule of cohabitation? How not to encroach upon each other’s land? When a woman, by nature, wants to share everything with the man she loves, and a man, by nature, when he loves a woman, wants to share everything with his friends? Or with other women whom he doesn’t love? When the home is the woman’s natural environment, and everything outside the home (the ballpark, the bar) is the man’s natural environment? When the void seeks to be filled, because the void does not accept itself, and woman has such a void, by nature (Bellotti), while man has a protuberance that can fill the void?

He builds guns, cannons, rockets, all phallic extensions of this protuberance. While woman lives surrounded by holes: drains, wells, bidets, buttonholes.

The void dresses up in fine clothes to cover itself. But it’s always lying in wait, gaping, under the clothes.

Thus the problem remains. And the soul is the void within the void. That’s where it’s based. And it gives off a foul odor when nothing fills it. By contrast it is calmed when something fills it. What would be the reason for having doors if nobody came in through them? (Windows are no more than breasts. They can only be aroused.) A tomb is a door that closes because nobody can go through it. However, things become more complicated from the moment that man himself realizes that he is half woman, since at the base of his penis lies the canceled female sex.