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By Root 13950 0

whiteness of a sheet of paper on which I had written the word ‘Love’; my pen faltered, the ant turned back, and suddenly my candle guttered and went out. Clear octaves of yellow fight flickered behind my eyeballs. I had wanted to start a sentence with the words ‘Pro-ponents of love’ — but the thought had guttered out with the candle! Later on, just before dropping off to sleep an idea struck me. On the wall above my bed I wrote in pencil the words: ‘What is to be done when one cannot share one’s own opinions about love?’ I heard my own exasperated sigh as I was dropping off to sleep. In the morning I awoke, clear as a perforated appendix, and wrote my own epitaph on the mirror with my shaving-stick:

‘ I never knew which side my art was buttered’

Were the Last Words that poor Pursewarden uttered!

As for the proponents of love, I was glad they had vanished for they would have led me irresistibly in the direction of sex — that bad debt which hangs upon my compatriots’ consciences. The quiddity! The veritable nub and quiddity of this disordered world, and the only proper field for the deployment of our talents, Brother Ass. But one true, honest unemphatic word in this department will immediately produce one of those neighing and whinnying acts peculiar to our native intellectuals! For them sex is either a Gold Rush or a Retreat from Moscow. And for us? No, but if we are to be a moment serious I will explain what I mean. (Cuckow, Cuckow, a merry note, unpleasing to the pigskin ear.) I mean more than they think. (The strange sad hermaphrodite figure of the London dusk — the Guardsman waiting in Ebury Street for the titled gent.) No, quite another region of enquiry which cannot be reached without traversing this terrain vague of the partial spirits. Our topic, Brother Ass, is the same, always and irremediably the same — I spell the word for you: l-o-v-e. Four letters, each letter a volume! The point faible of the human psyche, the very site of the carcinoma maxima! How, since the Greeks, has it got mixed up with the cloaca maxima? It is a complete mystery to which the Jews hold the key unless my history is faulty. For this

gifted and troublesome race which has never known art, but ex-hausted its creative processes purely in the construction of ethical systems, has fathered on us all, literally impregnated the Western European psyche with, the whole range of ideas based on ‘race’

and sexual containment in the furtherance of the race! I hear Balthazar growling and lashing his tail! But where the devil do these fantasies of purified bloodstreams come from? Am I wrong to turn to the fearful prohibitions listed in Leviticus for an explanation of the manic depressive fury of Plymouth Brethren and a host of other dismal sectarians? We have had our testicles pinched for centuries by the Mosaic Law; hence the wan and pollarded look of our young girls and boys. Hence the mincing effrontery of adults willed to perpetual adolescence! Speak, Brother Ass! Do you heed me? If I am wrong you have only to say so! But in my conception of the four-letter word — which I am surprised has not been blacklisted with the other three by the English printer — I am somewhat bold and sweeping. I mean the whole bloody range — from the little greenstick fractures of the human heart right up to its higher spiritual connivance with the

… well, the absolute ways of nature, if you like. Surely, Brother Ass, this is the improper study of man? The main drainage of the soul? We could make an atlas of our sighs!

Zeus gets Hera on her back

But finds that she has lost the knack.

Extenuated by excesses

She is unable, she confesses.

Nothing daunted Zeus, who wise is,

Tries a dozen good disguises.

Eagle, ram, and bull and bear

Quickly answer Hera’s prayer.

One knows a God should be prolix,

But … think of all those different ******!

But I break off here in some confusion, for I see that I am in danger of not taking myself as seriously as I should! And this is an unpardonable offence. Moreover I missed your last remark which was something about the