* * *
Several months have now gone since I began working—not every day and not for protracted periods—on the upright line emblemazing me. Soon, with the strong thumb of thought I could rub out its base, which corresponded to my joined feet. Being new to the process of self-deletion, I attributed the ecstatic relief of getting rid of my toes (as represented by the white pedicule I was erasing with more than masturbatory joy) to the fact that I suffered torture ever since
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D6
* * *
the sandals of childhood were replaced by smart shoes, whose very polish reflected pain and poison. So what a delight it was to amputate my tiny feet! Yes, tiny, yet I always wanted them, rolly polly dandy that I am, to seem even smaller. The daytime footware always hurt, always hurt. I waddled home from work and replaced the agony of my dapper oxfords by the comfort of old bed slippers. This act of mercy inevitably drew from me a volupt[u]ous
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D7
* * *
sigh which my wife, whenever I imprudently let her hear it, denounced as vulgar, disgusting, obscene. Because [she] was a cruel lady or because she thought I might be clowning on purpose to irritate her, she once hid my slippers, hid them furthermore in separate spot[s] as one does with delicate siblings in orphanages, especially on chilly nights, but I forthwith went out and bought twenty pairs of soft, soft Carpetoes while hiding my tear-staining face under a Father Chris[t]mas mask, which frightened the shopgirls.
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D8
The orange awnings of southern summers.
* * *
For a moment I wondered with some apprehension if the deletion of my procreative system might produce nothing much more than a magnified orgasm. I was relieved to discover that the process continued sweet death’s ineffable sensation which had nothing in common with ejaculations or sneezes. The three or four times that I reached that stage I forced myself to restore the lower half of my white “I” on my mental blackboard and thus wriggle out of my perilous trance.
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D9
* * *
I, Philip Wild[,] Lecturer in Experimental Psychology, University of Ganglia [, have] suffered for the last seventeen years from a humiliating stomack ailment which severely limited the jollities of companionship in small dining-rooms
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D10
* * *
I loathe my belly, that trunkful of bowels, which I have to carry around, and everything connected with it—the wrong food, heartburn, constipation’s leaden load, or else indigestion with a first installment of hot filth pouring out of me in a public toilet three minutes before a punctual engagement.
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D11
Heart (or Loins?)
* * *
There is, there was, only one girl in my life, an object of terror and tenderness, an object too, of universal compassion on the part of millions who read about her in her lover’s books. I say “girl” and not woman, not wife nor wench. If I were writing in my first language I would have said “fille”. A sidewalk cafe, a summer-striped sunday: il regardait passer les filles—that sense. Not professional whores, not necessarily well to-do tourists but “fille” as a translation of “girl” which I now retranslate:
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* * *
from heel to hip, then the trunk, then the head when nothing was left but a grotesque bust with staring eyes
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* * *
Sophrosyne, a platonic term for ideal self-control stemming from man’s rational core.
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Wild [0]
[Chapter Seven]
* * *
I was enjoying a petit-beurre with my noontime tea when the droll configuration of that particular bisquit’s margins set into motion a train of thought that may have occurred to the reader even before it occurred to me. He knows already how much I disliked my toes. An ingrown nail on one foot and a corn on the other were now pestering me. Would it no[t] be a brilliant move, thought I, to get rid of my toes by sacrificing them to an experiment that only
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Wild [1]
* * *
cowardness kept postponing? I had alwa[y]s restored, on my mental blackboard, the symbols of deleted organs before backing out of my trance. Scientific curiousity and plain logic demanded I prove to myself that if I left the flawed line alone, its flaw would be reflected in the condition of this or that part of my body. I dipped a last petit-beurre in my tea, swallowed the sweet mush and resolutely started to work on my wretched flesh.
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Wild [2]
* * *
Testing a discovery and finding it correct can be a great satisfaction but it can be also a great shock mixed with all the torments of rivalry and ignoble envy. I know at least two such rivals of mine—you, Curson, and you, Croydon—who will clap their claws like crabs in boiling water. Now when it is the discoverer himself who tests his discovery and finds that it works he will feel a torrent of pride and purity that will cause him
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Wild [3]
* * *
actually to pity Prof. Curson and pet Dr. Croydon (whom I see Mr West has demolished in a recent paper). We are above petty revenge.
On a hot Sunday afternoon, in my empty house—Flora and Cora being somewhere in bed with their boyfriends—I started the crucial test. The fine base of my chalk white “I” was erazed and left erazed when I decided to break my hypnotrance. The extermination of my ten toes had been accompanied with
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Wild [4]
* * *
the usual volupty. I was lying on a mattress in my bath, with the strong beam of my shaving lamp trained on my feet. When I opened my eyes, I saw at once that my toes were intact.
After swallowing my disappointment I scrambled out of the tub, landed on the tiled floor and fell on my face. To my intense joy I could not stand properly because my ten toes were in a state of indescribable numbness. They looked all right, though perhaps a
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Wild [5]
* * *
a little paler than usual, but all sensation had been slashed away by a razor of ice. I palpated warily the hallux and the four other digits of my right foot, then of my left one and all was rubber and rot. The immediate setting in of decay was especially sensationally. I crept on all fours into the adjacent bedroom and with infinite effort into my bed.
The rest was mere cleaning-up. In the course of the night I teased off the shrivelled white flesh and contemplated with utmost delight
[before his bath]
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Wild [6]
* * *
I know my feet smelled despite daily baths, but this reek was something special
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* * *
That test—though admittedly a trivial affair—confirmed me in the belief that I was working in the right direction and that (unless some hideous wound or excruciating sickness joined the merry pallbearers) the process of dying by auto-dissolution afforded the greatest ecstasy known to man.
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Toes
* * *
I expected to see at best the length [of] each foot greatly reduced with its distal edge neatly transformed into the semblance of the end of a breadloaf without any trace of toes. At worst I was ready to face an anatomical prep[ar]ation of ten bare phalanges sticking out of my feet like a skeleton’s claws. Actually all I saw was the familiar rows of digits.
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1
Medical Intermezzo
* * *
“Install yourself,” said the youngish suntanned, cheerful Dr Aupert, indicating openheartedly an armchair at the north rim of
his desk, and proceeded to explain the necessity of a surgical intervention. He showed A.N.D. one of the dark grim urograms that had been taken of A.N.D.’s rear anatomy. The globular shadow of an adenoma eclipsed the greater part of the whitish bladder. This
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2
* * *
benign tumor had been growing on the prostate for some fifteen years and was now as many times its size. The unfortunate gland with the great gray par[a]site clinging to it could and should be removed at once
“And if I refuse? said AND.
“Then, one of these days,
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* * *
that back[grd] keep it free from any intervention. tired eyes.
Such as hypnagogic gargoyles* or entoptic swarms*
a vertical line chalked against a plum* tinted darkness
over one’s collection of coins or insects
a manikin or a little skeleton but that demanded
* These phrases appear as well on this page, which may indicate that this card is a draft of that material.
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* * *
In this very special self-hypnotic state there can be no question of getting out of touch with on[e]self and floating into a normal sleep (unless you are very tired at the start)
To break the trance all you do is to restore in every chalk-bright details the simple picture of yourself a stylized skeleton on your men[t]al blackboard. One should remember, however, that the divine delight in destroying, say[,] one’s breastbone should not be indulged in. Enjoy the destruction but do not linger over your own ruins lest you develop an incurable illness, or die before you are ready to die.
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* * *
the delight of getting under an ingrown toenail with sharp scissors and snipping off the offending corner and the added ecstasy of finding beneath it an amber ab[s]cess whose blood flows[,] carrying away the ignoble pain
But with age I could not bend any longer toward my feet and was ashamed to present them to a pedicure.
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Last Chapter
Beginning of last chapter
* * *
[Miss Ure, this is the MS of my last chapter which you will, please, type out in three copies—I need the additional one for prepub in Bud—or some other magasine.]*
Several years ago, when I was still working at the Horloge Institute of Neurologie, a silly female interviewer introduced me in a silly radio series (“Modern Eccentrics”) as “a gentle Oriental sage, founder of
*Brackets around the first paragraph may be a reminder to set it as extract.
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Penult. End.
End of penult chapter.
* * *
The manuscript in longhand of Wild’s last chapter, which at the time of his fatal heart attack, ten blocks away, his typist, Sue U, had not had the time to tackle because of urgent work for another employer[,] was deftly plucked from her hand by that other fellow to find a place of publication more permanent than Bud or Root.
—
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First a
* * *
Well, a writer of sorts. A budding and already rotting writer. After being a poor lector in some of our last dreary castles.
Yes, he’s a lecturer too[.] A rich rotten lecturer (complete misunderstanding, another world).
Whom are they talking about? Her husband I guess. Flo is horribly frank about Philipp. (who could not come to the party—to any party)*
* This material fits in with conversation in the first chapter.
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First b
* * *
heart or brain—when the ray projected by me reaches the lake of Dante [or] the Island of Reil
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First c
Thornton + Smart Hum. Physiology
p. 299
* * *
Wild’s [ms.]: I do not believe that the spinal cord is the only or even main conductor of the extravagant messages that reach my brain. I have to find out more about that—about the strange impression I have of there being some underpath, so to speak, along which the commands of my will power are passed to and fro along the shadow of nerves, rather [than] along the nerves proper.
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First d
* * *
The photograph[er] was setting up
I alway[s] know she is cheating on me with a new boy friend whenever she visits my bleak bedroom more often than once a month (which is the average since I turned sixty)
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I
* * *
The only way he could possess her was in the most [ ] position of copulation: he reclining on cushions: she sitting in the fauteuil of his flesh with her back to him. The procedure—a few bounces over very small humps—meant nothing to her[.] She looked at the snow-scape on the footboard of the bed—at the [curtains]; and he holding her in front of him like a child being given a sleighride down a
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II
* * *
short slope by a kind stranger, he saw her back, her hip[s] between his hands.
Like toads or tortoises neither saw each other’s faces See animaux
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Aurora 1
Wild’s notes
* * *
My sexual life is virtually over but—
I saw you again, Aurora Lee, whom as a youth I had pursued with hopeless desire at high-school balls—and whom I have cornered now fifty years later, on a terrace of my dream. Your painted pout and cold gaze were, come to think of it, very like the official lips and eyes of Flora, my wayward wife, and your flimsy frock of black silk might have come from her recent wardrobe. You turned away, but could not escape, trapped
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Aurora 2
* * *
as you were among the close-set columns of moonlight and I lifted the hem of your dress—something I never had done in the past—and stroked, moulded, pinched ever so softly your pale prominent nates, while you stood perfectly still as if considering new possibilities of power and pleasure and interior decoration. At the height of your guarded ecstasy I thrust my cupped hand from behind between your consenting thighs and felt the sweat-stuck folds of a long scrotum and
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Aurora 3
* * *
then, further in front, the droop of a short member. Speaking as an authority on dreams, I wish to add that this was no homosexual manifestation but a splendid example of terminal gynandrism. Young Aurora Lee (who was to be axed and chopped up at seventeen by an idiot lover, all glasses and beard) and half-impotent old Wild formed for a moment one creature. But quite apart from all that, in a more
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Aurora 4
* * *
disgusting and delicious sense, her little bottom, so smooth, so moonlit, a replica, in fact, of her twin brother’s charms, sampled rather brutally on my last night at boarding school, remained inset in the medal[l]ion of every following day.
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Miscel.
Willpower, absolute self domination.
* * *
Electroencephalographic recordings of hypnotic “sleep” are very similar to those of the waking state and quite different from those of normal sleep; yet there are certain minute details about the pattern of the trance which are of extraordinary interest and place it specifically apart both from sleep and [waking].
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Wild’s note
* * *
self-extinction
self-immolation, -tor
As I destroyed my thorax, I also destroyed [ ] and the [ ] and the laughing people in theaters with a not longer visible stage or screen, and the [ ] and the [
] in the cemetery of the asym[m]etrical heart
autosuggestion, autosugetist
autosuggestive
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Wild’s notes
* * *
A process of self-obliteration conducted by an effort of the will. Pleasure, bordering on almost unendurable exstacy, comes from feeling the will working at a new task: an act of destruction which develops paradoxically an element of creativeness in the totally new application of totally free will. Learning to use the vigor of the body for the purpose of its own deletion[,] standing vitality on its head.
The Original of Laura Page 4