Winter would pass and spring would come before Rachel would find out; it was early May before Rachel discovered that her mother was fooling around with her boyfriend. Although Melissa took delight in both felicity and conic licorice, her major pleasure was, unlike her daughter’s, ordinary old fusing, and she would perch upon Daniel’s desk in the schoolhouse, leaning back on her hands, with her eyes closed and her teeth clenched and her throat saying yum-yummy yum-yummy to the rhythm of the punctures of her velvet. Oh, Daniel was quite a stud. I hate his guts. And at night in his dreams he would confuse Rachel’s red hair with her red monthly blood, and confuse all the orifices, red and pink and auburn and crimson. One of the big questions which he had to have Henry Fox answer convincingly was whether or not such an excess of fusing and felicity might not be injurious, whether or not it might shorten his life or sap his strength or wrinkle his skin or turn him green or something. Henry Fox, womanless these many years, seemed to take vicarious pleasure in listening to Daniel tell of his fusings and felicities. “Get all you can while you’re young,” was his answer to Daniel’s questions, “because when you’re my age you might have nothing left but all the recollections.” Now to hear Fox tell it, a recollection can be nearly as good as the real article, if you know how to remember—and Fox apparently did, although he never revealed to Daniel the specific amours of his past. It was his theory that, since mankind was the only breed of animal who “fused more often for pleasure than for procreation,” God or Mother Nature or The Evolution of The Species had seen fit to insure that fusing could never be injurious or harmful, regardless of how often indulged. This made Daniel feel a good bit better.
There are so many dozens of cassettes of tape with Henry Fox’s words on them that it’s difficult for me, as “editor,” to make a good selection, but one of my early favorites is this one, Fox’s reply to Daniel’s musings about the particular quality which attracted him to both Rachel McLowery and her mother. Listen to Henry:
It’s their It, Dan. Eye Tee, It. Everybody’s got an It. Look up It in that dictionary of yours, what do you find? It’s one of the words with no definition. Can’t be defined. All they do is give examples of how it’s used. No definition. But It’s a word, all right. Short word, syncope. Syncope’s from the Greek, cut off, a cuttingword, means shortening a word by taking out letters, like sailors say “bos’n” for “boatswain” or “foc’sle” for “forecastle.” Sailors have a lot of syncopes, probably because when a boat’s in a storm you don’t have time to say the whole word. [Fox pronounces “whole” as “hull” like other Vermonters, but I’m not trying to reproduce the inflections of his speech—“Ed.”] Well, It is a syncope for Identity. And what does your dictionary say about Identity? One thing it says is that identity is what you’ve got that makes me recognize you as an individual. But another thing it says is that identity is what you’ve got that makes you exactly like all other men. Sounds like a contradiction, don’t it? But it’s not. Every human creature has an It, which nonhuman creatures don’t have, and every human creature’s It is just like every other human creature’s It, at bottom at least.
But people, because they have Its, keep doing things to their Its. Sounds peculiar, I know, but the It does things to the It. Let me see if I can think up an analogy. Well, take a drinking man, there’s an obvious one. I don’t mean a fellow like you, Dan, who’s just pleasantly pickled on cider half the time. I mean the real serious belch-guts bottle-a-day toper, the inebriate like Aaron Tindall, for instance. Tanking up like that is self-destructive, and he knows it, but that don’t stop him. But that’s just drunkards. All Its are self-destructive, in different ways. It changes and alters Itself, for the worse, from cradle to grave. And the changes It makes on Itself are what gives the It its Itness. It’s what makes your It your It alone, unlike my It or any other’s It. It’s Its It that It is. Pardon if I splattered you with spittle.
Now you take women, females. What is the basic ingredient of the female It? Look up woman in your dictionary, look up female. Wo-man. Fe-male. Woman means “wife of man,” means “person,” means “It,” means “It who is for man.” Female, “It who is for a male.” Did you know, by the way, that the Latin root of female means “she who sucks”? Watch my mouth when I begin to say “female” or when I begin to say “fecund” or “fertile” or your “felicity.” My mouth makes a kind of sucking posture, don’t it? Well, all of those words come from an old root meaning “suck.” So the basic ingredient of the female It is sucking, not necessarily your specific felicity, because the velvet in a sense sucks the picket, does it not? And the female suckles as well as sucks. Why else is a grown man attracted to a woman’s bosom? It is all, sucking and suckling alike, the core of a woman’s It.
Her It, for some reason, like the drunkard drinking, makes her cover It and keep It covered. Fashion these days dictates that a woman not even permit her garment to demonstrate that she is bimammillate—that is, that she’s got two of them. Fashion—which itself is the creation of her It—dictates that she wear a painful corset which squeezes her poor belly—the home of her womb—and squeezes her two breasts into one unbroken bulge with no evidence of the bifurcate cleft dividing them. It has not always been so, but that’s what fashion has come to in this day and age.
But while her It requires her to cover It, her It also urges her to symbolize, nay, even to advertise It. The most obvious is the painting of the lips. Always red. Never green or blue or yellow or some other color. Less obvious is the bodily adornments. The necklace hanging in paraboloid curve from her neck forms the shape of that chief entrance into her It. If she wears a bow instead, it will have two strands, slightly parted, like the lips of her velvet. Or her fancy cape will part down the center with another O-shape around the shaft of her neck—and the edges all trimmed with fur, as her opening is trimmed with hair. Why, incidentally, do you think that women, alone of all animal creatures, have longer hair than their males? Think of male lions, think of the peacock. I won’t pause to digress on this subject. Why do women top their hair with fancy feathered hats and bonnets, whereas the man’s plain cap or bowler resembles the tip of his picket? And when the fe-male loses her male to death, the fancy leghorn hat is replaced with a close-fitting bonnet with a veil that covers and closes the face and the painted lips.
The It of female Itness makes all females female, one velvet like another, all, all alike. So that part is covered, and replaced by the individual It which allows a woman a hat or bonnet of her own choosing, a hair style of her own choosing, a cape or necklace or dress of her own choosing, an It of her own Itness.
I’ve spoken only of the sight of woman and her It. There is touch and smell and taste and sound as well. On one hand, the It sees to it that the Itness parts of a woman, her breasts and lips and velvet, are most pleasant to the touch, but on the other hand, the perverse It is able, when It wishes, to make her velvet the most malodorous place in all creation. Again, the It will douse her with fine colognes and still let her mouth have an effluvia like rotten eggs. Have you had enough experience with women yet to notice that there’s some kind of perverse correlation between the intensity of her ardor and the foulness of her breath? Or again, take sound: a woman’s voice is dulcet and lovely, but in the throes of fusing her mouth utters raucous yelps and grunts and croaks and gurgles and mewls and brays. And have you ever had the disquieting experience of your girl breaking wind while you fused her?
Strange are the ways of the It. The It knows what It is, and tries to ignore It, or disown It, or subdue It, or hide It, or disguise It. Consequently, most women’s Its are imperceptible. Still, there are women like Rachel and her mother. As far as I can detect, there is nothing extraordinary about the sight, or smell, or touch, or sound, of Melissa and Rachel.
Do you suppose, then, that God or Mother Nature or The Evolution of The Species, having endowed woman with such a cantankerous and fickle It, an It capable of self-denial if not self-destruction, saw fit to give the It a sixth quality
, an intangible quality, which It could not tamper with? A quality that we cannot see nor taste nor smell nor touch nor hear, but a quality all the same which we can somehow perceive, a quality that shouts, “Here I am, and I’m an It, and I’m all Itness! Come and get It!” a quality that looks, invisibly, like all that man’s eyes have coveted, a quality that sounds, inaudibly, like the orgasmic melodies of the master composers, a quality that smells, indetectibly, of the most exotic and alluring fragrances, a quality you can touch, intangibly, like being pressed all over by tingly eiderdown, and a quality that tastes, ingustably, like rich ambrosial flavors, but a quality which, above all, is perceived by that sixth sense not of sight nor sound nor smell nor touch nor taste so much as what I might call the sense of have: the wish to have, as one wishes to touch or taste, but a much stronger and more relentless wish.
The sense of have objectifies the It. The It is the sole focus of all having. Like the other senses, the sense of have could be used metaphorically. As we say, “She looks like a princess,” we could say, “She has like a nymph.” Or as we say, “She sounds like an angel,” we could say, “She has like a maenad.” We should never say “She is had” but always “She has”—the former implies that having her It is taking It, ravishing It. Are you following me?
To have is not merely in the matrimonial liturgic meaning of “to have and to hold.” That implies some duration, some permanence. Like the other five senses, the sense of have is temporary, often fleeting, as fragrances fade and sights vanish. But having is all the more sweet for being transitory. Can you imagine how tired you would grow of roast lamb if you had it in your mouth all the time, forever? Your taste buds would atrophy, just as your picket would atrophy if you left it in a velvet for more than an hour or so. Erections are transitory, but also cyclic. Are you still with me?
The It, both the woman’s It and the man’s It, realizes that It is subject to cyclic, transitory fluctuations. Its wish is to have constantly, but it cannot. So what can It do?
It can, and does, perversely it would seem, make Itself deliberately less haveable, make itself inhaveable, in periodic recurrent intervals between having, or, in the case of those few men and many women destined never to have, constantly, regularly.
Why do lovers quarrel? It is the battle of their Its fighting down to that level from which they might spring up to having again. Do you see that?
The It, then, has two stages, two forms. The right place for the It is in having. But since It cannot constantly have, it must return periodically to some other place, the place of not-having, of, even, anti-having. Only mankind has an It, and must shuttle perpetually between the right place and some other place.
And the trouble with mankind is that, because the right place can be found only in transitory, cyclic moments, mankind is always hunting for, and finding, some other place.
Whew. It’s easy to see why Daniel Lyam Montross was sometimes nearly inclined to agree with the people of Five Corners that Henry Fox was crazy. He was never able to grasp fully the fine points of Fox’s theories, and anything that he could not understand he suspected was meaningless if not insane. He was just seventeen when he got to know Henry Fox, and he was destined to know Fox, to be Fox’s protégé, for nearly eight years.
Diana claimed that Fox’s ideas were perfectly clear to her, and that she knew exactly what he meant. In our idleness we would spend a lot of time listening to the “Fox tapes” and discussing his ideas, philosophically you might say, and she would try to explain or interpret them to me, because truthfully a lot of what he said was way over my head.
I have to tell something about Diana. Just as I feel guilty and inadequate for doing such a poor job of moving the story of Daniel Lyam Montross through his Five Corners period (I’ve used up all this space and covered less than a year of his eight years in Five Corners), I also feel guilty for not really showing Diana as a person. Often, in these pages, she seems to be just a figure in the landscape, or a blur of a formless female who’s always either arguing with me or felicitating me or whatever. Of course, this could lend substance to my gnawing doubt that she really exists and isn’t just the product of my imagination. But—and this is rather strange—just at the point where I began believing in her, began, in fact, almost to take her for granted, she herself started having what she called “the It jitters,” or an identity crisis.
It was of course that “sermon” of Henry Fox’s which started this business. Diana got to brooding about whether or not she really had an It, a female Identity of the kind Fox described, and she kept trying to get me to reassure her. “Do you really think I have an It?” she would ask. “Are you really attracted to my It?” she would ask. “Do you have a sixth sense of have which perceives my It and is drawn to it?” she would ask. “You don’t really think I have any It at all, do you? You just think that I’m a convenient velvet you dreamed up for your own use. I’m really just a kind of masturbation for you.”
This led to another one of our bitter quarrels (I guess maybe there’s some truth to what Fox said about the de-having or anti-having nature of a quarrel). I told her to stop talking like that. I kept telling her that her It was very real to me and very important to me, and for her to stop brooding about It. “Then why,” she asked, “if you really think I have an It and you really are attracted to my It, why is it that you like for me to do you, but you won’t do me?” I didn’t know what she was talking about, and I told her so. But then she starting hinting around, and making allusions, and roundabout innuendoes, and I didn’t have to be a genius to figure out that she was referring to what Fox had called conic licorice. “Is that what you mean?” I asked. And she said that she loved that expression; that it put her in stitches. So I came right out and said that as far as I was concerned, there is a world of difference between felicity and conic licorice, I mean, after all, it’s not an equal proposition at all, because…well, because the former is at least similar in a way to actual intercourse, and therefore natural, whereas the latter is probably rather unnatural, not to say unsavory, and in any case it wouldn’t make her very feminine to me, it wouldn’t attract me to her It, not that It. I was very logical about this, but she got angry, and off we went on another storm of insults and taunts and complaints, and the worst thing she said was that if I admired and envied Daniel Lyam Montross so much, why then was I unable to do something that he not only did but also liked to do? To which I replied that I was beginning to admire and envy him less and less, that I was beginning, in fact, to resent and despise him.
But one thing, at least, I had in common with Daniel Lyam Montross during those days in Five Corners, is that he was never able to get Fox’s ideas out of his head, and neither was I. He would be leading the pupils in a recitation of “Barbara Frietchie” or “Curfew Shall Not Ring Tonight” when suddenly he would be aware that he wasn’t listening to the pupils but puzzling over something that Fox had tried to explain to him. And I would be reading a book or something—I had made a trip on foot into Woodstock once, nearly twelve miles, just to stock up on a pile of paperbacks, mostly murder mysteries and other light entertainment—I would be reading some gripping thriller when suddenly I would lose interest in the plot because my mind was pondering over something that Fox had said to Daniel Lyam Montross.
Even in sex. Before, sex for Daniel Lyam Montross had been a purely emotional experience, but now, right in the middle of fusing with Melissa or felicity from Rachel, he would sort of stop and intellectualize the experience according to Fox’s theories. Needless to say, this took part of the fun out of it. I know, because the same thing happened to me. It was getting to where Diana and I weren’t making love very much any more, because every time I tried, I would start thinking about Henry Fox’s theories, and then I couldn’t last more than a few seconds.
One afternoon, after waking up from one of my “sessions” with the tape recorder, I found a piece of paper in my lap. “What’s this?” I asked Diana. “Read it,” she said. It was titled, “K
nowing”:
I knew a man, who taught me all I know.
My mind is like a kingdom of the sun.
What use is knowing, if the heart’s in tow?
Our prize is wisdom. But with what a show!
I watch my wits cavort in unison.
I knew a man, who taught me all I know.
Of all his teachings I could not outgrow
The best and worst are now reduced to one:
What use is knowledge, if the heart’s in tow?
Mind saps the heart; I think of this with woe:
His life had left off where his wits begun,
This man I knew who taught me all I know.
Good living is a simple row to hoe
Until that question comes and kills the fun:
Of what use knowing, when the heart’s in tow?
This madness like a boil is touch-and-go
Until it festers. A phenomenon.
I knew a man, who taught me all I know:
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1 Page 53