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OED
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Nirvana [ ] blowing out (extinguishing), extinction, disappearance. In Buddhist theology extinction … and absorption into the supreme spirit.
(nirvanic embrace of Brahma)
bonze = Buddhist monk
bonzery, bonzeries
the doctrine of Buddhist incarnation
Brahmahood = absorption into the divine essence.
Brahmism
(all this postulates a supreme god)
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Buddhism
Nirvana = “extinction of the self” “individual existence”
“release from the cycle of incarnations”
“reunion with Brahma (Hinduism)
attained through the suppression of individ[ual] existence.
Buddhism: Beatic spiritual condition
The religious rubbish and mysticism of Oriental wisdom
The minor poetry of mystical myths
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Wild A
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The novel Laura was sent to me by the painter Rawitch, a rejected admirer of my wife, of whom he did an exquisite oil a few years ago. The way I was led by delicate clues and ghostly nudges to the exhibition where “Lady with Fan” was sold to me by his girlfriend, a sniggering tart with gilt fingernails, is a separate anecdote in the anthology of humiliation to which, since my marriage, I have been a constant contributor. As to the book,
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Wild B
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a bestseller, which the blurb described as “a roman à clef with the clef lost for ever”, the demonic hands of one of my servants, the Velvet Valet as Flora called him, kept slipping it into my visual field until I opened the damned thing and discovered it to be a maddening masterpiece
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Z
Last §
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Winny Carr waiting for her train on the station platform of Sex, a delightful Swiss resort famed for its crimson plums[,] noticed her old friend Flora on a bench near the bookstall with a paperback in her lap. This was the soft cover copy of Laura issued virtually at the same time as its much stouter and comelier hardback edition. She had just bought it at the station bookstall,
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Z2
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and in answer to Winny’s jocular remark (“hope you’ll enjoy the story of your life”) said she doubted if she could force herself to start reading it.
Oh you must! said Winnie, it is, of course, fictionalized and all that but you’ll come face to face with yourself at every other corner. And there’s your wonderful death. Let me
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Z3
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show you your wonderful death. Damn, here’s my train. Are we going together?[”]
“I’m not going anywhere. I’m expecting somebody. Nothing very exciting. Please, let me have my book.”
“Oh, but I simply must find that passage for you. It’s not quite at the end. You’ll scream with laughter. It’s the craziest death in the world.[”]
“You’ll miss your train” said Flora
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Five A
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Philip Wild spent most of the afternoon in the shade of a marbrosa tree (that he vaguely mistook for an opulent tropical race of the birch) sipping tea with lemon and making embryonic notes with a diminutive pencil attached to a diminutive agenda-book which seemed to melt into his broad moist palm where it would spread in sporadic crucifixions. He sat with widespread
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Five B
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legs to accom[m]odate his enormous stomack and now and then checked or made in midthought half a movement to check the fly buttons of his old fashioned white trousers. There was also the recurrent search for his pencil sharpener, which he absently put into a different pocket every time after use. Otherwise, between all those small movements, he sat perfectly still, like a meditative idol. Flora would be often present lolling in a deckchair,
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C
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moving it from time to time, circling as it were around her husband, and enclosing his chair in her progression of strewn magazines as she sought an even denser shade than the one sheltering him. The urge to expose the maximum of naked flesh permitted by fashion was combined in her strange little mind with a dread of the least touch of tan defiling her ivory skin.
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Eric’s notes
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To all contraceptive precautions, and indeed to orgasm at its safest and deepest, I much preferred—madly preferred—finishing off at my ease against the softest part of her thigh. This predilection might have been due to the unforgettable impact of my romps with schoolmates of different but erotically identical, sexes
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he too needed
and that he would come to stay for for at least a week every other month
This [key] for a Theme
Begin with [poem] etc and
finish with mast and Flora, ascribe to picture
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X
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After a three-year separation (distant war, regular exchange of tender letters) we met again. Though still married to that hog she kept away from him and at the moment sojourned at a central European resort in eccentric solitude. We met in a splendid park that she praised with [exaggerated] warmth—picturesque trees, blooming meadow—and in a secluded part of it an ancient “rotonda” with pictures and music where
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XX
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we simply had to stop for a rest and a bite—the sisters, I mean, she said, the attendant[s] there—served iced coffee and cherry tart of quite special quality—and as she spoke I suddenly began to realise with a sense of utter depression and embarrassment that the “pavillion” was the celebrated Green Chapel of St Esmeralda and that she was brimming with religious fervor and yet miserably, desperately fearful, despite bright smiles and un air enjoué, of my insulting her by some mocking remark.
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D0
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I hit upon the art of thinking away my body, my being, mind itself. To think away thought—luxurious suicide, delicious dissolution! Dissolution, in fact, is a marvelously apt term here, for as you sit relaxed in this comfortable chair (narrator striking its armrests) and start destroying yourself, the first thing you feel is a mounting melting from the feet upward
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Done
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In experimenting on oneself in order to pick out the sweetest death, one cannot, obviously, set part of one’s body on fire or drain it of blood or subject it to any other drastic operation, for the simple reason that these are one-way treatments: there is no resurrecting the organ one has destroyed. It is the ability to stop the experiment and return intact from the perilous journey that makes all the difference, once its mysterious technique
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Dtwo
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has been mastered by the student of self-annihilation. From the preceding chapters and the footnotes to them, he has learned, I hope, how to put himself into neutral, i.e. into a harmless trance and how to get out of it by a resolute wrench of the watchful will. What cannot be taught is the specific method of dissolving one’s body, or at least part of one’s body, while tranced. A deep probe of one’s darkest self, the unraveling of subjective associations, may suddenly
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Dthree
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lead to the shadow of a clue and then to the clue itself. The only help I can provide is not even paradigmatic. For all I know, the w
ay I found to woo death may be quite atypical; yet the story has to be told for the sake of its strange logic.
In a recurrent dream of my childhood I used to see a smudge on the wallpaper or on a whitewashed door, a nasty smudge that started to come alive,
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Dfour
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turning into a crustacean-like monster. As its appendages began to move, a thrill of foolish horror shook me awake; but the same night or the next I would be again facing idly some wall or screen on which a spot of dirt would attract the naive sleeper’s attention by starting to grow and make groping and clasping gestures—and again I managed to wake up before its bloated bulk got unstuck from the wall. But one night
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Dfive
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when some trick of position, some dimple of pillow, some fold of bedclothes made me feel brighter and braver than usual, I let the smudge start its evolution and, drawing on an imagined mitten, I simply rubbed out the beast. Three or four times it appeared again in my dreams but now I welcomed its growing shape and gleefully erased it. Finally it gave up—as some day life will give up—bothering me.
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Legs 1 7
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I have never derived the least joy from my legs. In fact I strongly object to the bipedal condition[.] The fatter and wiser I grew the more I abominated the task of grappling with long drawers, trousers and pyjama pants. Had I been able to bear the stink and stickiness of my own unwashed body I would have slept with all my clothes on and had valets—preferably with some experience in the tailoring of corpses—change me, say, once a week. But then,
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Legs 2 8
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I also loath[e] the proximity of valets and the vile touch of their hands. The last one I had was at least clean but he regarded the act of dressing his master as a battle of wits, he doing his best to turn the wrong outside into the right inside and I undoing his endeavors by working my right foot into my left trouser leg. Our complicated exertions, which to an onlooker might
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Legs 3 9
* * *
have seemed some sort of exotic wrestling match[,] would take us from one room to another and end by my sitting on the floor, exhausted and hot, with the bottom of my trousers mis-clothing my heaving abdomen.
Finally, in my sixties, I found the right person to dress and undress me: an old illusionist who is able to go behind a screen in the guise of a cossack and instantly come out at the other end as
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Legs 4 10
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Uncle Sam. He is tasteless and rude and altogether not a nice person, but he has taught me many a subtle trick such as folding trousers properly and I think I shall keep him despite the fantastic wages the rascal asks.
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Wild remembers
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Every now and then she would turn up for a few moments between trains, between planes, between lovers. My morning sleep would be interrupted by heartrending sounds—a window opening, a little bustle downstairs, a trunk coming, a trunk going, distant telephone conversations that seemed to be conducted in conspiratorial whispers. If shivering in my nightshirt I dared to waylay her all she said would be “you really ought to lose some weight” or “I hope you transfered that money as I indicated”—and all doors closed again.
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Notes
the art of self-slaughter
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TLS 16-1-76 “Nietz[s]che argued that the man of pure will … must recognise that that there is an appropriate time to die”
Philip Nikitin: The act of suicide may be “criminal” in the same sense that murder is criminal but in my case it is purified and hallowed by the incredible delight it gives.
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Wild D
* * *
By now I have died up to my navel some fifty times in less than three years and my fifty resurrections have shown that no damage is done to the organs involved when breaking in time out of the trance. As soon as I started yesterday to work on my torso, the act of deletion produced an ecstasy superior to anything experienced before; yet I noticed that the ecstasy was accompanied by a new feeling of anxiety and even panic.
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0
* * *
How curious to recall the trouble I had in finding an adequate spot for my first experiments. There was an old swing hanging from a branch of an old oaktree in a corner of the garden. Its ropes looked sturdy enough; its seat was provided with a comfortable safety bar of the kind inherited nowadays by chair lifts. It had been much used years ago by my half sister, a fat dreamy pigtailed creature who died before reaching puberty. I now had to take a ladder to it, for the sentimental
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oo
* * *
relic was lifted out of human reach by the growth of the picturesque but completely indifferent tree. I had glided with a slight oscillation into the initial stage of a particularly rich trance when the cordage burst and I was hurled, still more or less boxed[,] into a ditch full of brambles which ripped off a piece of the peacock blue dressing gown I happened to be wearing that summer day.
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Thinking away on[e]self
a mel[t]ing sensation
an envahissement of delicious dissolution (what a miraculous appropriate noun!)
aftereffect of certain drug used by anaest[hesiologist]
I have ne[ver] been much [interested] in navel
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* * *
efface
expunge
erase
delete
rub out
wipe out
obliterate
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The Original of Laura Page 5