Dying Inside

This is the third year since first I began to recede from myself. I think it started in the spring of 1974. Up till then it worked faultlessly, I mean the power, always there when I had occasion to call upon it, always dependable, doing all its customary tricks, serving me in all my dirty needs; and then without warning, without reason, it began dying. Little failures of input. Tiny episodes of psychic impotence. I associate these events with early spring, blackened wisps of late snow still clinging to the streets, and it could not have been ’75 nor was it ’73, which leads me to place the onset of outgo in the intermediate year. I would be snug and smug inside someone’s head, scanning scandals thought to be safely hidden, and suddenly everything would blur and become uncertain. Rather like reading the Times and having the text abruptly turn to Joycean dream-gabble between one line and the next, so that a straightforward dreary account of the latest Presidential fact-finding commission’s finding of futile facts has metamorphosed into a foggy impenetrable report on old Earwicker’s borborygmi. At such times I would falter and pull out in fear. What would you do if you believed you were in bed with your heart’s desire and awakened to find yourself screwing a starfish? But these unclarities and distortions were not the worst part: I think the inversions were, the total reversal of signal. Such as picking up a flash of love when what is really being radiated is frosty hatred. Or vice versa. When that happens I want to pound on walls to test reality. From Judith one day I got strong waves of sexual desire, an overpowering incestuous yearning, which cost me a fine dinner as I ran nauseated and retching to the bowl. All an error, all a deception; she was aiming spears at me and I took them for Cupid’s arrows, more fool I. Well, after that I got blank spaces, tiny deaths of perception in mid-contact, and after that came mingled inputs, crossed wires, two minds coming in at once and me unable to tell the which from the which. For a time the color appercept dropped out, though that has come back, one of the many false returns. And there were other losses, barely discernible ones but cumulative in their effect. I make lists now of the things I once could do that I can no longer. Inventories of the shrinkage. Like a dying man confined to his bed, paralyzed but observant, watching his relatives pilfer his goods. This day the television set has gone, and this day the Thackeray first editions, and this day the spoons, and now they have made off with my Piranesis, and tomorrow it will be the pots and pans, the Venetian blinds, my neckties, and my trousers, and by next week they will be taking toes, intestines, corneas, testicles, lungs, and nostrils. What will they use my nostrils for? I used to fight back with long walks, cold showers, tennis, massive doses of Vitamin A, and other hopeful, implausible remedies, and more recently I experimented with fasting and pure thoughts, but such struggling now seems to me inappropriate and even blasphemous; these days I strive toward cheerful acceptance of loss, with such success as you may have already perceived. Aeschylus warns me not to kick against the pricks, also Euripides and I believe Pindar, and if I were to check the New Testament I think I would find the injunction there as well, and so I obey, I kick not, even when the pricks are fiercest. I accept, I accept. Do you see that quality of acceptance growing in me? Make no mistake, I am sincere. This morning, at least, I am well on my way to acceptance, as golden autumn sunlight floods my room and expands my tattered soul. I lie here practicing the techniques that will make me invulnerable to the knowledge that it’s all fleeing from me. I search for the joy that I know lies buried in the awareness of decline. Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be, The last of life, for which the first was made. Do you believe that? I believe that. I’m getting better at believing all sorts of things. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. Good old Browning! How comforting he is:

Then welcome each rebuff
That turns earth’s smoothness rough,
Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand, but go!
Be our joys three parts pain!
Strive, and hold cheap the strain.

Yes. Of course. And be our pains three parts joy, he might have added. Such joy this morning. And it’s all fleeing from me, all ebbing. Going out of me from every pore.

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Silence is coming over me. I will speak to no one after it’s gone. And no one will speak to me.

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