Ice And Fire

by Andrea Dworkin

my indulgences. The rest was austere, the heat prohibiting

  excess, poverty offended by it. The single mattress was like a

  prayer.

  I came alive again: in solitude: concentrating: writing.

  *

  Yes, there were men and women, women and men, but they

  were faded: they were background, not foreground, intrusions,

  failures of faith, laziness of spirit: forays into the increasingly

  foreign world of the social human being: they were brief

  piercing moments of sensation, the sensation pale no matter

  how acute, sentimental no matter how tough: namby-pamby

  silliness of thighs that had to open: narrow pleasure with no

  mystery, no subtlety, no subtext: pierce, come; suck, come;

  foretold pleasures contained between the legs, while solitude

  promised immersion, drenching, the body overcome by the

  radical intensity of enduring. *

  I met my beautiful boy, my lost brother, around, somewhere,

  and invited him in. I saw him around, here and there, and

  invited him in. Talking with him was different from anything

  else: the way the wind whispers through the tops of trees just

  brushed by sunset. It made me happy. I invited him in. My

  privacy included him. My solitude was not betrayed. We were

  like women together on that narrow piece of foam rubber, and

  he, astonished by the sensuality of it, ongoing, the thick

  sweetness of it, came so many times, like a woman: and me

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  too: over and over: like one massive, perpetually knotted and

  moving creature, the same intense orgasms, no drifting separateness of the mind or fragmented fetishizing of the body: instead a magnificent cresting, the way a wave rises to a height pushing

  forward and pulls back underneath itself toward drowning at

  the same time: one wave lasting forever, rising, pulling,

  drowning, dying, all in the same movement; or a wave in an

  ocean of waves covering nearly all the earth, immense. My lost

  brother and I became lovers forever, buried there, in that sea

  so awesome in its density and splendor. I need never touch

  him again. He became my lover forever. So he entered my

  privacy, never offending it.

  *

  I had learned solitude, and now I learned this.

  *

  On his birthday I gave him a cat that had his face.

  I had looked everywhere for it. I had looked in stores, I had

  traced ads, read bulletin boards, made phone calls. I had gone

  out, into the homes of strangers, looking for the cat I would

  know the minute I saw it. Red. With his face: a certain look,

  like a child before greed sets in, delicate, alert, listening. The

  day came and I didn’t have it. I knew the cat was somewhere

  waiting, but I was afraid I would not find it. The day of his

  birthday I went out, looking, a last search, asking, following

  every lead, hour after hour. The heat was rancid. Then a man

  told me where to look: a woman had found a pregnant cat in a

  garbage dump and had taken it home: the kittens were red. He

  called her. I went there. The skies had darkened, gotten black.

  The air was dusty. The thunder cracked the cement. Hail fell.

  I ran to her house, awed by this surfeit of signs, afraid of the

  stones of ice and the black sky. In the house the cat with his

  face was waiting. I took the cat home.

  *

  Year after year, he is with me. Solitude is with me and he is

  with me. Now I’ve spent ten years writing. Imagine a huge

  stone and you have only your own fingernail. You scratch the

  message you must write into the stone bit by bit. You don’t

  know why you must but you must. You scratch, one can barely

  see the marks, you scratch until the nail is torn and disintegrates, itself pulverized into invisible dust. You use the I23

  blood from your ripped finger, hoarding it to go on as long as

  you can but hurrying because you will run out. Imagine ten

  years of it. But the solitude changes. At first it is fresh and

  new, like any lover, an adventure, a ravishing excitement, a

  sensual derangement: then it gets deeper, tougher, lonelier, not

  because one wants the closeness of friends but because one

  doesn’t, can’t: can barely remember wanting anything but

  solitude. One remembers wanting, needing, like one remembers a childhood dream: but even the memory seems frivolous, trivial, a distraction: solitude kills the need for anything but itself, like any grand passion. It changes one, irrevocably. Promiscuous warmth dies, all goodhearted fellowship with others dies, seems false and cheap. Only burning ice is left inside. Whoever gets too near gets their skin burned

  off and dies from the cold.

  He lives inside my privacy. He coexists with my solitude,

  hating it sometimes but rebelling in silence by himself because

  he does not want to leave: I would make him leave, even now.

  I put solitude first, before him. His complaints are occasional,

  muted. I keep him far away even when he is gentle, asleep,

  curled up next to me like an innocent child, my solace, my

  human heart. The years of solitude— the seconds, the minutes,

  the hours, night into morning, evening into night, day stretching into night and weeks stretching into months— are a moat he cannot cross. The years of being together with him— the

  seconds, the minutes, the hours, the days into weeks into

  months into years— do not change this. This is the way I love

  now.

  You are nomads together, in cheap room after cheap room:

  poorer and poorer: the written word does not sell: some is

  published but it is not embraced, it offends, it does not make

  money, no one wants more of it, it has an odor, those with

  good taste demur: the pink apartment with the toilet in the

  hall is left behind: food stamps, bare foam rubber mattress

  that starts shredding and has great potholes like city streets,

  cold floors, cheap motels, the backs of rented trucks moving

  your few belongings from one shabby empty place to another:

  writing: hungry. He is closest and dear, loved more now, but

  he is necessarily outside the concentration and the pain of the

  task itself, the discipline and despair, the transcendent pleasure,

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  the incommunicable joy. The writing makes one poorer and

  poorer: no one likes it. It gets worse and worse, over years,

  that is the hard part, over years, day by day, for years. One

  absorbs that too, endures it, getting dead and mutilated inside:

  one endures the continuing, worsening poverty and the public

  disgrace: strangers despise you, for what you think or what you

  write, or no one knows you. And you put writing, solitude, this

  failure, first, before him: and his way of loving you is not to take

  offense: not to point out the arrogant stupidity of the choice:

  but to stay, to let you leave him out, far away, in the chill region

  because you have a cold and awful heart. He is for human times.

  But writing is cold and alone. It makes you monstrous, hard, icy,

  colder and more barren, more ruthless, than the Arctic Sea.

  *

  Each book makes you poorer: not just blood: money, food,

  shelter: the more time you use writing but not making money,


  the poorer you are. Each book makes you poorer. You are

  awash in pain, the physical poverty, the inner desolation. You

  get deader and deader inside. The blood still stains the stone, a

  delicate pink, tiny drops rubbed into signs and gestures. The

  glacier moves slowly over the fertile plain, killing. Everything

  around you begins to die.

  *

  Solitude is your refuge and your tomb, where you are buried

  alive. Writing is your slowr, inexorable suicide. Poverty is the

  day grinding into night, night hurling you back without mercy

  to day: day is teeth grinding to the exposed, raw nerves, slow,

  a torture of enduring. There are no human witnesses, only the

  lost boy asleep. He is tangled in knots of helpless rage. He

  thought life was fairer. He sleeps like a lost child. You are in a

  fever of creation, waiting to die, hurrying to finish first. There

  is more to do.

  *

  Solitude is a shroud, the creature inside it still alive; writing

  resistance to being bound up and thrown in a hole in the

  ground; poverty the wild weeds growing over the hard, lonely

  earth. The lost boy sleeps, breathes, suffers: fingernails

  scratching against the looking glass trying to get through, he

  can’t bring Alice back.

  *

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  Solitude is revenge. Writing is revenge. Poverty is your wild

  pride, open sores, matted hair, gorgon, rags, hairshirt, filth

  and smell: arrogant saint nailed to a tired old cross. He tells

  you he hates your pride. He does hate it.

  *

  It is too easy to be martyred. Your pride is more terrible than

  that. You keep fighting. Solitude is revenge. Writing is revenge.

  Medea, not Christ, is your model. Where are the children to

  kill? I could, I could. “ I too can stab, ” she told Jason. I too

  can stab.

  *

  So now we have come to rest in this awful place, the windows

  open in the cold storm of winter, the fumes turning even the

  coldest, fiercest wind stagnant, rancid. The vagabonds shit in

  the foyer of the building’s lobby and behind the stairwell and

  hide out on the landing above us. We are five flights up. There

  is no money to move one more time: and my friend, my sweet

  boy, sleeps in wool and thermal underwear and sweatshirts

  pale and blue as if frozen by death: and I sit by the open

  window in the dead of winter, wintry winter, the wind

  streaming in, a small electric heater just keeping my fingers

  from freezing up stiff, and I write, I am cold and tired beyond

  anything I can say, any words there are: a dying bird, broken

  wing, on a plain of ice; some creature, lost and broken, on a

  plain of ice, isolated, silent, fatigued, famished for warmth and

  rest and rescue, having no hope, wanting not to turn cannibal before dying: crawling, crawling, trying to find the end of the icy plain, the rich brown earth, a plant, a flower:

  rescue, escape: some oasis not ruined by heavy, wet, implacable

  cold.

  I am cold all the time. I walk six hours a day, eight hours a

  day, then come to this apartment where the windows are never

  closed. I am desperate beyond any imagining. You will never

  know. It is amazing that I do not kill.

  *

  I am afraid of dying, especially of pneumonia. I am sick all the

  time, fever, sore throat, chill to the bones, joints stiff, abdominal pains from the fumes, headaches from the fumes, dizziness from the fumes. I am afraid of sleeping, afraid of dying: each day is a nightmare of miles to walk not to die: is there

  1 2. 6

  money for a cup of coffee today? I am a refugee: profoundly

  despondent and tired enough to die: I want somewhere to live:

  really live: I imagine it: warm and pretty: clean: no human shit

  in piles: little bourgeois dreamer: dumb cunt: eyes hurt like

  Spinoza’s: I am in the apartment, there is a driving rain, violent

  wind, I stand in the rain inside, drenched.

  *

  The fumes start in winter. Winter, spring, summer, fall, winter

  again, summer again: the edge of fall. The chill is in the marrow

  of the bones. The fatigue makes the eyes gray and yellow,

  great rings circle them: the skin is dirty ivory like soap left in a

  bathtub for years: the fatigue is like the awful air that rises

  from a garbage can left to melt in the sun: the fatigue especially

  sits on the tongue, slowing it down, words are said in broken

  syllables, sentences rarely finished: speech becomes desperate

  and too hard: the fatigue drowns the brain in sludge, there is

  no electricity, only the brain sinking under the weight of the

  pollution: the fatigue is smeared all over, inside the head it is

  in small lakes, and behind the eyes it drips, drips. It is fall. The

  windows are open. The book has been finished now. Many

  publishers have refused to publish it. There is virtually no one

  left to despise it, insult it, malign it, refuse it: and yet I have

  been refining it, each and every night, writing until dawn. Now

  I am tired and the book is perfect and I am done, a giant slug,

  a glob of goo. A woman lets me go to her apartment, on the

  ocean. Perhaps she saves my life.

  *

  In the living room there are large windows, and right outside

  them there is the beach, the ocean, the sky, the moon: the sound of

  the waves, the sound of the ocean moving over the earth becomes

  the sound of one’s own breathing. It is foggy, hot, moist, damp,

  and when fog rises on the water, huge roaches climb the walls

  and rest on the tops of the windows. They are slow, covered in

  the sea mist, prehistoric, like the ocean itself. They seem part

  of my delirium, a fever of fatigue: I am alternately shivering,

  shaking delirious and comatose, almost dead: a corpse, staring,

  no pennies for her eyes. I have no speech left. I sit and stare, or

  shake and cry: but still, the ocean is there. I hear the ocean, I

  see the ocean: I watch the huge bugs: at dawn, I swim: I see

  the red sun rise and I swim: I hear the ocean, I watch the

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  ocean, I see how it endures, going on and on, I listen to the

  sound of its endurance, I sit and stare or I shake, fevered. The

  bright sunlight breaks up the fog, dries up the mist, the huge

  brown bugs disappear: outside normal people chatter: the

  afternoons are long, dull, too much sun, too many chattering

  vulgar souls not destroyed, normal people with normal concerns: cheery seaside banter: old women on benches on the boardwalk right under my window: and at night teenagers

  drinking beer, listening to the blaring radios, courting,

  smoking. I avoid the bright sun of the afternoon and the normal

  people. I sit in the living room, the sound of the ocean cradles

  and rocks me, and I read Thomas Mann, listen to Mozart.

  When the vulgar afternoon is over, I watch the ocean and I

  listen to it endure. At night, I go out and in, out and in, walk

  the beach, walk the boardwalk, sit in the sand, the wet sand,

  watch the ocean, I watch it sitting, standing, walking, I walk

  along its edge with concentration like not stepping on the


  cracks in sidewalks, or I just tramp through the silky water as

  it laps up against the sand. I sit on the empty benches on the

  boardwalk and I watch the ocean. I go to the edge and touch

  the vastness, the touch of my fingers is then carried back under

  the water across the earth, and I am immortal: the ocean will

  carry that touch with it forever. I breathe to the sound of it

  enduring. I breathe like it does, my blood takes on its rhythms,

  my heart listens to the sound of the ocean enduring and mimics

  it.

  After five days, my lost boy comes to visit. We swim. In the

  shower we make love. We sleep on the beach, in the fog, in the

  mist. Inside the huge slick bugs line the tops of the windows,

  poised there to drop off or fly, but never moving, primal, they

  could be gargoyles, guardians in stone but as old as the sea. I

  watch them. I stare. I am terrified by them but too tired to

  scream or run or move: I am restless: they sit: I am afraid: they

  sit: they are long, slick brown things, repulsive, slow: I must

  be here, near the ocean, or perhaps I will die: maybe they wait

  for that: grotesque guardians of my lonely, tired death. I am

  restless. I go inside, I go outside. I listen to music: Bach,

  Chopin, Mahler, Mozart. They and the ocean are renewal, the

  will to live. So is the boy, my love, sleeping on the beach. I

  have left him, fragile, exposed, as I always do, to sleep alone.

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  He sleeps, I am restless, I go in and out. He leaves the next

  day. I have two more days here. The ocean has turned me

  nearly human: closer to life than death. Someday I want the

  ocean forever, a whole life, day in and day out, a proper marriage: I want to be its human witness: near its magnificence, near the beat of its splendid, terrifying heart. Oh, yes, I am

  tired: but I have seen the ocean come from the end of the

  world to touch the sand at my feet.

  *

  He calls me, the publisher with the dripping upper lip, the hair

  on it encrusted slightly yellow, slightly green. His voice is

  melodious, undulating like the ocean, a soft washing up of

  words on this desolate human shore: a whisper, a wind rushing

  through the trees bringing a sharp, wet chill. He wants me,