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By Root 527 0

operating table, although I was not sick, and hacked up indiscriminately with a hundred different knives and scissors, even the uses of which were incomprehensible. With this in mind, please read through what you have written once again. Surely even you will be able to hear my cries of pain. If I had the time, I should like to explain the significance of those cries one by one. But it would be dreadful if I were so careless as to let you return while I was still here. It really would be dreadful. While you spoke of the face as being some kind of roadway between fellow human beings, you were like a snail that thinks only of its own doorway. You were showing off. Even though you had forced me into a compound where I had already been, you set up a fuss as if I had scaled a prison wall, as if I had absconded with money. And so, when you began to focus on my face you were flustered and confused, and without a word you at once nailed up the door of the mask. Indeed, as you said, perhaps death filled the world. I wonder if scattering the seeds of death is not the deed of men who think only of themselves, as you do.

You don’t need me. What you really need is a mirror. Because any stranger is for you simply a mirror in which to reflect yourself. I don’t ever again want to return to such a desert of mirrors. My insides have almost burst with your ridicule. I shall never be able to get over it, never.

(And then came about two and a half lines of erasures, obliterated to the point of illegibility.)

WHAT a surprise attack. To imagine that you perceived that my mask was a mask and nevertheless went on pretending to be deceived. A swarm of shame, centipede-legged, streamed out, choosing the parts of me most subject to goose flesh—my armpits, my back, my sides. Indeed, my nerves, feeling the humiliation, seemed to be at the very surface of my skin. I became flacid as a drowned man with the hives of my shame. It was stupid of me, however normal it may have been, to say that I had not wanted to be a clown and unaware of it; but these very lines have become those of a clown. To imagine that you had seen through everything! It was as if I were putting on a play in which I was the only actor, thinking I was invisible, believing in a fake spell. I was completely oblivious to the fact that I had been seen by a spectator. My swarming shame plowed my skin. Sea urchin spines sprouted in the turned-up furrows. Soon I should be obliged to join the ranks of spiny creatures.…

I stood swaying in blank amazement. When I saw my shadow teetering with me, I realized that it was not my imagination but that I actually was swaying. I had made a terrible blunder. I had taken the wrong bus someplace. How far back would I have to go to change for one in the right direction, for God’s sake? As I stood wavering, I tried to retrace the route of my memories with the help of a stained, illegible map.

The jealousy-filled night when I decided to write these notes. The afternoon of the seduction when I first spoke to you. The time I thought I was becoming a lecher. The faintly smiling dawn when I had at last completed the mask. The evening with its promise of rain when I began making the mask. And then the long period of bandages and scar webs that had led to all this. Still not enough? Though I had come this far, if I had taken the wrong route, I should have to find another point of departure in yet another direction. I wonder whether I was really stagnant water within, despite the outside container, as you imply.

There is no reason for me to accept this assertion of yours. I absolutely cannot agree with the opinion that someone who plants the seeds of death is a selfish person thinking only of himself. The expression “selfish person” is an extremely happy and interesting one, I think, but however you consider it you lend it too much significance when you think of it as anything more than a result. Thinking only of oneself is forever a result, never a cause. Because—I wrote this in my notes—what contemporary society needs is essentially abstract human relationships,