OBSESSION
 
                                by
 
                           KATHY ACKER
 
             _Postmodern Culture_ v.2 n.3 (May, 1992)
 
     Copyright (c) 1992 by Kathy Acker, all rights reserved.
     This text may be freely shared among individuals, but
     it may not be republished in any medium without express
     written consent from the author and advance
     notification of the editors.
 
 
 
 
MY FATHER
 
     Kathy says,
 
For finally my father was coming back.  As soon as the night
turned black as the cunts of witches, he walked through our door.
     Once he had settled down inside, with his pint and slippers,
the cat nodding drowsily against his shoulder, he told me that he
hadn't brought back what he had promised me, my own whip.
Instead he had come back with a non-white brat, outcast, orphan.
     This devil's child who was nameless was a pale, skinny male.
His hairs were blacker than a witch's vagina.  When I smelled
him, there was a reek of sheepdog who had never been taught
anything.
     I spent the night, sleepless, weeping into my pillow, and so
did he.
     I wasn't a good child.  Or, the same thing, they (the males
in my family) told me that I wasn't a good child.  I didn't know
how to react to this identity, this reification, other than by
throwing my badness, which my shyness always wants to keep
hidden, into their faces.
     But openly I loved the night.  Whenever it was black,
outside, I talked to those animals who sat around me and I knew
they had languages and I began to learn their languages.
     Then father tried to make the gipsy brat into something less
than outcast by giving him the name of a child who had already
died.  Day after day I watched the brat.  Unlike me he wasn't bad
because he was being told that he was bad; nameless, from as deep
as his self or sea went, all he wanted to do was to spit at the
world.  The human world that seemed nonhuman.  I admired his
ability; it didn't matter to him, as nothing mattered to him,
that I did.
     Even though he was only six years old, he would have stolen
everything from this father's house, but there was nowhere to go
with it.
     Though I never spoke to him openly, I would have done the
same thing.
     My father loved his false son.  Hindley, my father's real
son, hated the new Heathcliff.
     My father knew that I saw that all that I couldn't and
wanted to do, Heathcliff did.  "Why can't you be a good child,
Kathy?"
     "Why can't you be a good father, father?"
 
 
OUTSIDE THE FAMILY
 
Soon after these questions had taken place, Kathy's father died.
He would never return.
     Both Heathcliff and Kathy grieved.  Hindley didn't give a
shit because his father had hated him.
     Heathcliff and Kathy sobbed out each other's eyes, then ate
each other's tongues.
     Hindley (Hideous) inHeirited the House so Kathy and
Heathcliff moved out into tracks beyond and for them the human
world went away.  Their only adulthood, before begun, was gone.
The world gone, there was only nature.
     The days of grief, the days without shelter, announce to all
old maids and to all those who are maimed and who maim that the
actual churches are open.
     Remained outside.  Remained outside the family.  How Hindley
became the father, for the true father is nowadays President
Bush, so all the rest are orphans.
     This was how Kathy began to want all that lay outside:
nature and, most violent of all, the sun.  Crags who wait under
the sun.
     Kathy announced, "I will not come."  Heathcliff never
announced anything.  Heathcliff was naturally unapproachable.
 
 
IN THE BEGINNING, HEATHCLIFF DIDN'T MATTER TO ME
 
Kathy says,
     "One day I will never come back and on that day I will keep
coming back and coming back."
     My nurse's name was Ellen.
     "Hurry, Ellen, hurry.
"I know exactly where I want to go.  I want to go to where a
colony of moorgame are settled; blue and purple feathers more
aflame with green than any sun; I want to see whether they have
made their nests yet; I want to see."
     The sun.
     My nurse replied that the birds didn't breed on this side of
Penniston Crags.
     "Oh yes, they do.  I've been there."
     "You're too young to travel."
     "Only a little farther, I've got to go a little further than
I've ever been, climb to a certain hillock that I'll know, pass
by a bank that I've smelled, leaves of certain rust and one pile
of shit, I know there are tracks, and by the time I get to the
other side without noticing it, I will have met the birds."
Going to the other side and not dying.  Whether or not I died.
     My nurse didn't bother getting angry with me because she
knew I was wild.  Not wild enough.  She just sighed as if she was
swallowing her breath and whispered the only whisper of a
socially good woman: "It's a pity that you're never going to be
content."
     I didn't hear anything.  Not Heathcliff.
     The next morning the first thing I heard was the outside.  I
woke up to the shrieking rain.  The winds begin to tear.  Juice
ran down the insides of my legs.  Don't forget?  How can I ever,
even when dead?  For I'm always holding an orphan's hand.
 
 
I'M PERVERSE
 
In order to complete his bushy family, Hideous found himself
(somewhere) a child bride so that there would be a mommy and a
daddy.  Substitute mommy and daddy more than equal mommy and
daddy.
     The child bride, like most humans, was a substitute,  too,
because, being frail and weak and a good wife, she actively
detested Heathcliff even more than her husband (did) and threw
him out of the house every time Heathcliff returned to snatch
some food.
     At this moment, Kathy began to act as her parents wanted her
to.  Precisely: instead of being with Heathcliff, she stayed
home.  Then blamed her parents for making her and Heathcliff
separate.
     Was she, like me, scared of men?
     So now she had reason to detest Hideous.  Cliche: "Dear
Heathcliff," she wrote, "I'm acting in such a way that the only
relation we can have is that you'll reject me.  Once you've fully
rejected me, I'll be able to begin to love you."
     By refusing to run away with Heathcliff, Kathy began to gain
all for which she longed: to perversely enter into being with
Heathcliff.
     Or: %now that innocence was dead%, she and Heathcliff again
began to be the same through books.  Living with her parents,
Kathy was forced to go to school.  Heathcliff was going nowhere
outside.  Kathy taught Heathcliff how to read; this teaching
(creating hierarchy) poisoned her love, for identity is shit in
the midst of childhood.
     The kingdom of childhood is the kingdom of lust.  Books, by
replicating this or any phenomenon, cause perversity.
     I'm not trying to destroy B, but to destroy how I
continuously think about B, think about how our bodies burn
together, by repeating these thoughts perversely.
 
 
THE UNSPEAKABLE
 
Kathy says:
     Where the sun and the black sky are.
     They now consider Heathcliff less than a person.  "Heath,"
my new mother said, "if you must use the servants' bathroom, do
not do so during working hours."  But being nonhuman Heathcliff
doesn't need a bathroom.
     I don't care about Heathcliff.  Who will I pick to be?  A
person whose canopy is that velvet in which the stars lie.  My
family can kick the dogs like Heathcliff out of the house every
day of the week.
     I can't bear being without Heathcliff.  Today Heathcliff and
I ran into the fields which are wild.  We're never going to come
back.  I don't want my brain to hurt and, when my hand is stuck
up my cunt, my fingers are all full of juices.  I want to be in
the wild forever and I want to be Heathcliff and I don't care
about anything else.  See.  I'm breaking free.
     When I've broken free, there'll be no more such thing as
loneliness which torments me all the time.  Alone, without
loneliness: all there are around me are leaves and branches and
winds and fly through my hairs and everything living and moving
each other and each vision, thing seen, is another living thing
and I'm never going back to being lonely where I now am.
     I know what the society (my family) (here) is to which I'm
never going to return.  The inside of the family is a maze whose
entrances and exits are lost to those caught in its entrails.
The family is foul; garbage lies in its streets.  Street sign, NO
HUMANS EXIST HERE.
     I can't be other than Heathcliff because to be other than
Heathcliff is to be human.  Example: Hindley who is only himself
beats up his servants or dogs who are all the same to him.  His--
this society is foul because it's based on hypocrisy: it doesn't
recognize violence or death.  Hindley tells me that he loves me
and so, places me in his labyrinth.  Hindley owns the house or
labyrinths in which he's also inside; every street or portion of
this maze is foul, not by hypocrisy, but by possession.
     I must die for Heathcliff so that I'm no longer a human.
Only an outcast.
 
Today the witch went to see the sea because she had to hear
someone else's voice.  There was a dead person.  The only way to
raise the person from death is via the cunt.  As it crashed waves
against the rocks, the ocean began tossing up tiny fish and the
swept, repeatedly, into the witch's crotch.  The sun fell down
into the water.
 
And I have made my allegiances, although all allegiances are
hell.
 
I saw two seals.
 
The only way is to annihilate all that's been written.  That can
be done only through writing.  Such destruction leaves all that
is essential intact; resembling the processes of time, such
destruction allows only the traces of death to subsist.
     I'm a dead person.
 
Heathcliff says, "Down, dog, down."
 
 
STORY: THE BEGINNING OF THE WORLD
 
When the servant who was a FUNDAMENTALIST complained to his
master that he and his wife never went to church to eat Jesus'
flesh, his master punished him by making his, the master's,
daughter go to bed without supper.
     Immediately Kathy rebelled by running away with Heathcliff,
again, up into the moors.  This time they stayed in the beginning
of the world.
     Time began here, outside, where there were no humans.  They
wandered on the moors for days.  They're only safe where
everything's public.
     On the other side of the moors, they found a house similar
to theirs.  Because Kathy's nature was perverse or fucked-up, she
wanted to be wild and to be part of society.  In this total
freedom, she said to her friend, "Let's find out what the inside
of this house looks like."
     They climbed down the crags, then peered into two of the
windows.  They gazed upon a rich boy and a girl, who were their
age, dismembering a puppy.
     Heathcliff said, "They aren't nice people, those who live
inside of houses."  
     Kathy wanted to destroy the beginning of this sight or
world.  Heathcliff would do whatever Kathy wanted.  Listen.  "The
name of that which is forbidden is %Heaven%," Kathy said.  "Do it
to me now."
     Heathcliff said he would do whatever Kathy wanted.
     "Listen.  I, Kathy, am dreaming that sex which is the
witch's den.  The den is located in the true house."
     Rattles, colored wheels, amniotic rags, and an excessive
number of teeth were stigmatizing all outcasts.
     "I knew that there was a place where everything would take
place.  I started searching for that place.
     "I was inside a house. Leaving some room, I began looking
for tracks, a smell, these are the indications of the way to get
to the room I want to reach.  I dream, and have always dreamt, of
water.
     "The %armier% Arnaud Gelis has said, for we do not need
authorities but we do need information, that the dead, with whom
he had the unfortunate habit of consorting, wanted all the men
and women who were living to, also, be dead.  Whether or not you
admire this sort of thing.  Doves, owls, weasels, snakes,
lizards, hares, and all other animals who suck on the milk of
cows, goats, women are the associates of witches.  Behind milk
lies blood; so, behind every each witch, all the dead.
     "Between two rooms, one is always walking to another room.
I passed through a series of rooms.
     "Finally I came to thin metal stairs which descended
downwards.
     "According to our Inquisitors who are only able to see the
material world, the claviceps purpurea, a mushroom which grows
out of rye, causes ergotism whose symptoms are cramp-like
convulsions, epilepsy, and a loss of consciousness; ergot causes
abortion and is anti-hemorrhagic.  During such losses of human
consciousness, visions can appear.
     "I stood on the edge of the black metal stairs' first step.
     "A mushroom that grows near fir trees and birches, amanita
muscaria, causes both ecstasy and lameness.
     "I was standing in the middle of the fight of stairs.
     "In China, the name for amanita muscaria is %toad mushroom%.
Both toads and witches are crippled.  In the fourteenth century,
Billia la Castagna kept a large toad under her bed whom she
nurtured on bread, cheese, and meat so that she could make a
potion out of its shit.
     "I walked down metal staircase after metal staircase,
descending.  After long descents, I saw a floor that was stacks
of wood shelves, even cabinets, all filled with books, between
some of the shelves openings just large enough for a human to fit
into, all around the spiralling stairs.
     "Finally I descended to a huge room where there was red
somewhere.  This room, which was where I had wanted to reach, was
the library of the witch.  I felt scared.  I was at the bottom."
     As they were looking into the house and making fun of the
rich children, Heathcliff realized that it was time to leave.
Starting to run, he pulled Kathy's hand in such a way that she
tripped.
     A dog sat on and ripped her ankle while his purple, huge
tongue half-fell out of his lips and these pendant dripped with
bloody slaver.
     Since Kathy was missing, Heathcliff told Kathy's family
about what had just taken place.
 
 
HEATHCLIFF'S STORY OF THE RICH HOUSE
 
     The children are in their house, doing their homework.
These children consist of a young boy and a young girl.
     The young girl was assigned a paper on Edgar Allan Poe.  But
she doesn't have enough time to complete her assignment.
     In the classroom, the teacher talks.  Teach is paying
attention to many, almost all the other students and the girl
can't manage to interrupt to say that she didn't have time to do
her paper.  She runs out of the school.
     Being a good girl, she goes home, back to her room, and
works on the Poe paper incessantly, cutting and cutting until
only two sections are left.  Each of these sections is a few
paragraphs long.
     Despite all these odds--as if Fate is sitting in judgment
against her--the girl goes back to her school so she can present
her Poe thesis.  Now the institution is shut.
     Seeing that she was thrust out of school against her will
and desire, it is probable that the devil rules this world.
     The girl continued down the street, into the building next
to the school.  There she saw the spirit of Karen Finley.  Seeing
this spirit allowed her to take off all her clothes which were
now heavy, drenched in mud, icy from the outside mist.
     The slut walked bare-ass through what was simultaneously a
pub and a church.
     Saw that none of the building's inhabitants, all of whom
were male, gave a shit that she was naked.  One of them even
walked up to her and was very nice to her.
     Later on in the pub, she decided to hide behind the entrance
door so that she could slip a pair of shorts over her ass.  But
she couldn't find any.
     "Shit.  I didn't bring any shorts."
     She had to put back on all her clothes which were still wet
cold and dirty.
     One of these men, all of whom were older than her, comments,
"Nothing has changed.  Nothing changes."
 
 
ME
 
     Heathcliff says,
Because I had told them about Kathy caught in the strange house,
Hindley kicked me out for good.  So I threw away the rest of my
human trappings and I became an animal who didn't even clean
itself.  In order to toss their humanity into their faces.
     Humans run away from their own shit, their ends, whereas I
was now covered in mine: I had become twice a man.
     When Kathy returned from strangeness, I loved her more than
ever.  She had came back dressed like a lady, no longer like a
wild thing.  I didn't see her when she came in.  She was silent
about what had taken place in that strangeness.  She told her
father that she wanted to see me immediately.
     But I was shit.
     As soon as Kathy saw me, her heart leaped up %like the dog
it is%.  Even though romanticism pretends otherwise.
     As if one can own shit, Hindley owned me so he knew where I
was and ordered me to enter the house and greet Kathy as a
servant along with all the other servants.  I am not.
     I did as I had been told only in order to throw more shit
into their faces.  But, as soon as she saw me, Kathy threw her
finery into a bathroom and climbed on me until her lips became my
skin.  Because it was thirsty, her pussy rubbed me.  I knew that
I will always hold her cunt in the palm of my hand.
     Then she leaped back and informed me, I was only her servant
and, worse, I smell of piss.  "Oh, Heathcliff, have you forgotten
me?"
     Since I was her servant, I couldn't speak.
     Father said, "Since you're a servant, Heathcliff, you can
shake hands with Kathy.  Only once."
     I mumbled that I wouldn't do anything.  The lips of hell
were opening and closing.
     "You shouldn't be sulky because you smell of piss."
     I was silent because I was a hound.
     "Heathcliff.  Now shake hands with me."
     SOCIETY'S PROGRESS TO TOTALITARIANISM AROSE AND KEEPS
ARISING FROM ITS REFUSAL TO BE SHIT.  I touched her.
     "Oh, Heathcliff, you are filthy dirty."  Kathy was becoming
obsessed.  %Obsessed% because she simultaneously wanted to touch me
and didn't.  I knew every inch of her flesh, muscle, and liquids,
and I was hungry for her.  "I didn't ask you to touch me."
     Let the heavens open up, rain sperm.
     Kathy said, "But I want to touch you."  I knew, just as she
knew, that she would be unable to dream until the moment she
dreamed about me.
     I knew that she knew that I knew this, so I decided, in
order to teach her, that I would become dirtier and dirtier until
I was so dirty that I would have nothing more to do with what her
family named %reality% and I would drag her down with me.
     This is the way that Kathy says that obsession never rises
from and involves only one person: "Let all that matters be sex
when and where all is glowing."
     I say: I don't need sex.  I don't need a cock, my cock.
Simply: I am not going to and I am not living in hell.
     As soon as I had announced my allegiance to filth to Kathy's
family, I got out of their house.  I ran away to the crags and
moors and rocks who belong to anybody.
     Where it will always be raining, for the eyes will no longer
     For I, body, know who I am.
     I will not deny the witches.
     If Kathy was pure of cunt, she would follow the sperm out of
the cockless cock.
     She stayed behind because she preferred to make her
allegiance to skin, her fancy clothes, trappings of society,
rather than to me, the gook inside the body.  Because she was
scared to shake hands with filth.
 
 
KATHY IN HER SOCIETY FINERY,
 
"But if I knew what men were really like, I would never want one.
I say this so that I can be more desirable to men."
 
 
ME--PERVERTED
 
     Heathcliff says,
But I cried all night because she was mine and she was hurting
me.  I cried, but I wasn't ever going to be demeaned.  Naturally
I wanted my skin to be other than dark and my hair to be
straight, not so that I could live in a house, but so that she
could look up to me enough to run away with me.
     And then I'd sink my head into her stomach and my teeth
would turn into her bones.  I will not live without her--whatever
I must do!  I have sold myself to the devil!  As do those who
write.
     The next day I woke up and then I heard a noise.  When I
peered through one of their infernal windows, I saw those two
rich murderers or children walking into the black-and-white tiled
hallway.  Of course, I followed them inside.
     As soon as he had passed the ceiling beams, the boy turned
around and said to me that I should brush that horse's mane out
of my face.  I bucked, in the kitchen picked up a large pot of
simmering soup, ran back to the edge of the hallway and threw the
liquid into his visage.
     I had seen Kathy standing in the hall and, then, the look on
her face.  
     Here was the first time that I wanted to kill her.
That night I dreamed that she died from giving birth to a baby.
This was the first time I dreamed this.
     According to Gilbert Lely reciting some kind of Freudianism,
one of the ways a sadist can prevent himself or herself from
travelling from neurosis to psychosis is to sublimate his or her
asocial instincts into art.
     Freud.
     After I had put the boiling liquid to the boy's face, Kathy
loved me even more than before.  I needed to believe that she
loved me so that I could be alive.
     I kept turning nasty because there was nothing else I could
do in the face of rejection.  In the face of Hindley.  The
nastier I found myself, the more Kathy looked up to my purity.
     As Joseph who was religious said, "This house is an infernal
region."
     Today, a yellow worm that looked like a plastic banana began
a walk across a dirt path.  The path moved downhill in steeper
and steeper zigzags until it reached a sign that said BEWARE OF
RATTLESNAKES.
     Kathy hadn't run away with me to this earth of rattlesnakes
where there were no more humans.  Both Kathy and I knew that I
was the only one who could lead her here, where nature would tame
her by demeaning her so that she could begin to learn.
 
 
MARRIAGE ACCORDING TO HEATHCLIFF:
 
     As soon as her father went travelling, I returned to Kathy.
     The first time I stood again in that sittingroom, she was
mentioning to the nurse who happened to look like Jessie Helms
that the rich boy had asked her to marry him.
     I said, loudly, "Kathy, with all that I am and have--if that
is any power--I beg you to stop rejecting me for your rich
friends.  I have born too much rejection since I was born."
     Kathy didn't notice me because she was combing her pussy
hairs.
     "I've come back to you, Kathy.  Why aren't you looking at
me?"
     "Because you don't belong in any decent society.  You smell
like a horse, like Linton said you smelled, and you don't know
what a relationship is.  Human.  Your very presence bores me."
     I didn't know how to reply because I was open to her.
     "You're as dumb as any animal, Heathcliff."
     Because she needed me to be her and at the same time refused
to touch my skin, I no longer was.
     "But the fact that I'm marrying Linton has nothing to do
with you.  I'm not marrying Linton because you don't exist; what
you believe is my torment of you doesn't exist.
     "I'll explain to you why I'm marrying Linton:
 
 
MARRIAGE:
 
     Kathy says,
I said to my nurse, but not to Heathcliff: "Do you know the real
reason why I'm marrying that creep who doesn't possess a cock?
(Not that I give a damn about cocks: it's what they stand for.)
     "I can't marry Heathcliff because Heathcliff and I aren't
separate from each other.  It would be redundant for me to marry
Heath.
     "I need to get married.  Heathcliff and I don't belong in
the normal world whose name is society--we don't even know
whether we're male or female.  And.  But, unlike Heathcliff, I
can pass for normal; I want the money and moral position that
normalcy brings.  (When I pretended normalcy in the past, the
normals, who are named the %English%, stuck a lit bulb up my ass
then shorted it.)  I need to get married and get my certificate.
     "In the real or abnormal world, it's the law that Heathcliff
is more me than me, though no one knows who Heathcliff is, his
name.
     "It's disgusting for Heathcliff to live as a freak in my
family's world.
     "I'm going to marry Linton so that neither Heathcliff nor I
will have to live any more as freaks; for doesn't marriage in
this society render anything acceptable?  Freaks cannot live as
freaks because in reality there are no freaks: there are only
those society people who've carved identities out of fear.
     "Will I be able to be married without becoming perverted
like one of those society people?  I'm only human...
     "Therefore, by means of marriage to a rich person, I will
show that Heathcliff and I are as normal as rich people.  I
learned logic in school."
     Heathcliff overheard all of this.  As soon as he had
understood that it would degrade me to be with him, he ran out of
the room.
     This was how I threw myself or Heathcliff out of my life.
          I had the following dream:
     In a hotel that's under the aegis of the Buddhist Poetry
Institute, while I'm waiting for an elevator that's going up, I
recognize a man who's walking past.  He's a former lover.
     This hotel has a pool that's composed of several uneven
tiers.
     The hotel's bars and restaurants likewise hide the raised
and lowered floors.  My former lover and I sit down at a white-
cloth-covered table in the most secluded alcove.
     I feed him sake after sake, as I did when we used to fuck,
and he becomes drunker, as also used to happen.  All the time.
     The initials of this man's name, R.W., are those of a
boyfriend prior to him.
     Both of us are three-quarters sodden when I realize that
this man didn't and now doesn't love me.  His attitude toward me
is: about once a year he uses me to try to find the oblivion for
which he's longing.
 
 
MY FATHER (WHOM I'VE NEVER KNOWN) TRIES TO KILL HIS OWN CHILD
 
     Kathy says,
     Hindley, who had become drunker and drunker, returned home,
doused in alcohol like a rag in gas.  The chill night howled
through the dying branches and the dying cars started beeping.
Inside, he grabbed the child which he had had by his new wife and
cut off all its hair.  Raggedly.  When he let go of the brat, it
fell down a flight of stairs.  Didn't die.  Not noticing
anything, father kept looking for the Jack Daniels which had been
hidden.
     All my life I've dreamt dreams which, after the initial
dreaming, stayed with me and kept telling me how to perceive and
consider all that happens to me.  Dreams run through my skin and
veins, coloring all that lies beneath.
 
I DREAM:
I'm in a hotel in which I've never before been.  I have to give
another performance.
     Whenever I'm about to perform, I don't like to be around the
other performers.  I wander by myself in the unknown hotel.
     While I'm waiting in line for the elevator to go up, a man
who's also waiting recognizes me as a bodybuilder.  He's middle-
aged, large in body with the beginnings of a pot, disappearing
hair.  Standing right in back of me so that I can feel the pot,
his hands massage my biceps.  I allow this.
     Today is the day of sex.  Informing me that he's a trainer,
the guy shows me how I can tuck my stomach in or he makes my
stomach disappear.
     We go down in the elevator.  In the bathroom, he fucks me
from the back just like I used to be when I was a kid.
     Now that he's gone, I'm desperate to find a man who will
have me in order that I can become normal.
     My next lover is married.  (I fuck married men as a rule
because they don't want to come to close to me.)  Predictably,
the creep informs me that there's no way he can love who I am.
     After he tells me this, I squat down on his floor.  Then I
think, as I've thought before, many times, all I have to do now
is get myself out of here.  This house.  As soon as I do this one
thing, I promise myself, I can fall apart just as I want to: I
can be less than anything that is.
     Just as I have promised myself: outside his building, I
sink against the garbage cans that are against the wall.  I
had probably created or passed through romance just so I could be
here, where I should be, do what I should do.
     Let the garbage eat out the night.
     In that night, when two homeless recognize one of the
members and walk up to me, the thought comes to me that I'm ready
to pull myself up by the bootstraps.
     My next lover is, as much as possible, the man of my dreams.
     This time, there's a mass of wharfs and compartments whose
insides and outsides are mingled.  Or mangled.  In one of these
rooms, this man and I lie on a bed.  He can't get hard.  Female
creatures, as elegant and lean as those in Paris, are haunting a
few of the other rooms.
     Outside the room in which I'm trying to fuck, something
that's a combination of truck and tractor is zooming away from
the pier that's nearest the horizon and down a white road that
runs parallel to the dawn.  Then, the vehicle swerves around,
almost running into, five others.  Monsters.  All of whom are
whizzing around and around, breath-taking speeds, hurtling past
each other.  The tractor-trucks are just like horses.
     I watch them, amazed.
     %This is the realm of males%.  A man remarked to seemingly
no one, "This is how things are done."
     After watching the monsters, I decide that I can't marry my
boyfriend because he doesn't get hard.
     But if I'm not going to marry, how can I survive in this
society?
     In the same room in which he couldn't get it up, I'm
teaching a class.  One of my students asks me to dance.
     We dance in an oval, around the back of the room just behind
where the other students are sitting, as I had been taught to
dance in the school I had attended as a girl.  Waltzing and
tangoing seriously and with grace.
     Even though she appears fem, my student is leading me: I
orgasm several times.
     In this way I learn that, since I can come with a woman, I
don't need a man.
     After I have come or alternatively:
     For some time I've been standing, in front of a white stucco
wall, on a white road which, as though it's a platform, is raised
above all the surrounding and dirt underneath.  All around me are
masses of luggage, suitcases and bags.
     I'm leaving.  Finally.
     But as for me, I have too much baggage: I can carry all of
them only with great difficulty.  A man whom I don't know offers
to pick up all the suitcases and duffels that are dropping around
me and then hand them to me.
     While I'm just managing to hold on to these bags, two of the
people who seem to be in my group screech, "She's coming!"  Race
to, then down the pier that's on the left side of the white
building.
     Now there's a crowd of people down at the wharf.  I want to
be there too, but I've got all the bags.  Deciding that probably
no one's going to steal them, I abandon them, follow the crowd,
some of whom are my friends.
     At the left pier's end, a huge mass is watching a superstar,
perhaps Tina Turner, come.
     Now I know that there are two ways for me to survive without
marrying: I can either be gay or famous.
     The hell with dreams because dreams only lead to perversity.
     I dreamt I was in Heaven.  But I had no business being there
so I ran back to Wuthering Heights (this place) (loneliness)
(this state of %human%) (this impossibility named %hell%).  I
know that here is happiness.
     I was the day after my most important performance.  I was
cleaning the hotel room which the Buddhist Poetry Institute had
lent me; I always do exactly what I've been told to do.
     A large wood vanity whose mirror was hidden under layers of
clothing and cloths stood right in front of me.  A mirror because
I'm alone.
     A, the Institute's head, just opened my door and walked in.
She hadn't bothered to knock.  She had entered in order to pay
me.  "I'm only going to pay those writers who matter."
     "Matter?"
     "Who're important."
     This message is that writers are either famous or starve.
     While A was making her pronouncement, I was lifting up and
folding a huge thick olive wool blanket.  Beneath the blanket, a
bare mattress.
     Then A and I stood in front of the vanity's covered mirror.
     On the surface of the table part, some of the objects which
I had uncovered during my cleaning now began to move.  Two black
crabs the size of human fists strolled.  When I saw them, I was
confident that I could kill the...things or, at least, crush them
to pulp.
     The whole table was alive.  Specifics: two small black
lobsters; two black spiders as large as these lobsters, whose
legs resembled daddy-long-legs' but who weren't daddy-long-legs
because their bodies were as substantial as cats'; the two crabs
already recognized.
     I lifted a dress, then a white wool crocheted cloth, then
something which I couldn't recognize or can't remember off of the
mirror and A and I clearly saw its glass.
     The insects and the sea-life were crawling, or whatever they
do, under the strewn olive blanket, all over the mattress, hiding
in the wool folds.  Down to the floor.  They were disgusting.
     Now I saw who I was: one spider perched, half of it on the
top of my calf just below the back of the knee, half on my black
cowboy boot.  I'm not terrified of a spider because I know it can
be crushed.
     I slammed it to death.
     A and I crushed all of the moving beings.
 
 
THE LACK OF DREAMS IS DISAPPEARANCE OF THE HEART
 
     Kathy says,
Heathcliff had left.
     I said:
     "My flesh is wood that needs to be chopped up.  For this
reason, I'm never going to forsake you, whatever-your name-is and
wherever-you-are.  The cunt is always speaking.  But I will never
marry you, whoever-you-are, because marriage means nothing to the
likes of us because society means nothing to the likes of us.
     "Heathcliff, you are now %whoever-you-are% because I am
named %absence%."
     I BEGAN SEARCHING FOR HEATHCLIFF BECAUSE I DIDN'T WANT HIM.
AND I DON'T WANT HIM.
     Searching for Heathcliff (trying to turn whatever-you-are
actual), I fell out with my dreams.
     The fantasy, %to refuse to dream%, to which I have returned
again and again was the following:
     The situation is that I've suddenly learned that I have an
incurable disease.  This disease has something to do with my
heart.  Because it's inevitable that I'm going to become sicker
and sicker until I die, an authority declares, someone from this
moment onwards is going to have to take care of me until the day
I drop dead.
     But I don't want some creep to have anything to do with me;
I don't want to be a dependent person.
     A poet whom I like a lot begins to take care of me.  Then,
her husband becomes angry because she's not giving him enough
attention.  I'm abandoned, the usual, and usual, become upset.
     The authority who's a doctor repeats: you have to find
someone to take care of you.
     I decide that everything that this doctor, perhaps because
he's and authority, has said is a con.  That I'm ill's a con.
How can I be ill when I don't know I'm ill?
     I'm not ill.
     One day, while I'm performing my morning exercises (since
I'm exercising, I can't be ill), I see, right across my mattress,
my old nurse sitting meditating on the floor.  I ask her advice.
"Who's the best doctor," I inquire, "in the world?  If I consult
that doctor, he'll be able to cure me if I'm ill."  I assure
nurse that I have enough family money to afford the very best.
     Consulting this best doctor: Wherever I am, which is (the)
unknown, I look down on the handsomest possible man standing on a
span bridge.  As soon as I see him, my incurable disease is more
or less cured.  (I'm a romantic.  Incurable.)
     The next day or some days later, I see that my girlfriends,
all of whom are now standing around me, are wearing the same kind
of clothes: upper-middle-class cocktail drag heavy as possible.
I'm in a gold sweater knit nothing else.
     We stroll down a suburban street with its clean-cut lawns.
One of the women, who works in a store, keeps tugging at my
dress.  Finally pulls out a thread.  I'm irritated--I'm very
irritable.
     She exclaims, "You're so white, delicate.  You're the most
well-preserved of all of us."
     I no longer know whether or not I have this incurable
disease.
     Waking from the dream, I find myself in a business office.
I describe what I've dreamt to a man who was in my dream in order
that both of us can ascertain and know whether or not I'm going
to die.
     I had become almost sick with looking for Heathcliff.
     I had stopped eating because, when he's out on the moors,
Heathcliff doesn't eat.  Wandered around the rocks at night
because I didn't know where he was.
     I wasn't looking for him.
     The fogs made me animal.
     Returned home.  This is _WUTHERING HEIGHTS_ by a deadhead.
     Home.  "Look," my father said, "Look at the low-life.  She's
ill because she's always running after men.  She's going to be
dead soon."
     "No," I said to myself.  I didn't answer father because
there aren't any, anymore.
     "So where were you last night, and the night before, you-
good-for-nothing-cunt-juice?"
     (A sailor named St. Germanus has unmasked the diabolical
nature of certain spirits named %good women who wander about at
night%.)
     Father's replica, the religious servant: "Weren't you with
Heathcliff last night?"
     When that nut-case dared to question me, I became angry for
two reasons: Because my family was considering me ill
(nymphomaniac).  Because underneath their definition lay the
reality of my horniness.  (Horniness: I don't know where
Heathcliff is so I don't know who he is.)
     Now I knew that it's necessary to keep interpreting
everything because nothing's true and everything's real.  These
interpretations are my body.
     Therefore I said back to my family: "If you throw Heathcliff
out of this house because he's not like you, I'm going with him,
out into the fogs.  Our brains are already fogs.  But you can't
do anything to Heathcliff because he's gone."
     I had forgotten about myself.
     I stopped looking for Heathcliff.  After that, I could no
longer sleep.  I had lost the ways or entrances into dream.
     Without dreams, the body becomes sick.  I have an incurable
illness of the heart.
     I want (to find) Heathcliff (myself).
 
 
THE UNDERSIDE OF DREAM
 
     Kathy says,
I've always been bratty.  During the period when I was ill,
though not yet dead, I turned into more than a brat:
     "Ellen.  Dye my hair blonde."
     "Your hair's already blonde."  So she dyed my hair blonde.
     "My hair isn't blonde enough.  I look like Madonna fucking.
But I'm on my death bed because I'm dying.  I want my hair to be
pure white!"
     She took me through two more dye jobs.
     "Ellen.  I said I'm dying.  Now you have to make my pussy
hairs white."
     But, alive or dead, my pussy drips gold and red and tastes
like skunk.
 
 
RETURN TO DREAMING
 
     Heathcliff or the devil says,
And so Kathy married a rich man for the purpose of entering
society.  As multitudes of women have done before her.  The rich
man, Linton, infatuated with his new wife, believed himself to be
the happiest of men, as multitudes of men have felt before him.
Kathy's dream was that marriage is the destruction of society:
     This society is the family's house.  Kathy's living with her
uncle in a huge house.  It's of the utmost importance that she
palms him a check and equally important that no one knows that
this has happened.  If not, she'll die.
     Her uncle takes the check.
     Later, a man woman and child are standing on the lawn
outside the house.  The evil Trinity: they continually cut
themselves with razor blades.  If they succeed in penetrating the
house, they'll destroy everyone and everything including Kathy.
     Somehow they do.  Enter.  Kathy sees them in the downstairs;
instantaneously she knows that she has to do everything possible
and anything to prevent them from invading the inner dwelling:
she has to remain an enclosed self: otherwise evil might stick
its cock into her.
     Next, she's standing in front of the mattress over which she
handed her uncle the check.  He's now on the other side of the
mattress.  She knows that evil is coming.  So runs in back of the
mattress.  Up the stairs.
     The house ascends higher and higher; the higher, the holier
the space.
     They've arrived at the top of the house.  Now there's only
complete horror in this world: darkness and decay.  Flesh is
rotting frogs.
     All evil has come here so a spell begins.  This is real
creation, the beginning of the world, evil is always born in a
cloud of pink smoke emanating from pink incense.
     Is Kathy seeing her own blood?  She scoots as fast as she
can, faster, down the stairs, faster, through the hallway cut
into two by the light, out of the child's house.  Outside:
through a patch of shade, then into sunlight.
     (I have suddenly realized the meaning of %MY MOTHER:
DEMONOLOGY%.)
     In all the sunlight and cut grass, the child knows that she
is safe.
     Where will she go without home?  She is homeless.  She
realizes that she can be safe (live) as a wanderer.  Free.
     She roams through the suburbs and finds herself at a filling
station.  While she's leaning by one of the tanks, an American
car drives up.  (I don't know the names of any cars.)  The evil
people are sitting in this car.  Then Kathy sees a black man,
who's lying on a grey plastic parachute on the cement, look up,
see whatever's getting out of the auto (formlessness?), and
scream, "God!"
     A woman emerges from the car.  Her inner thighs have no more
skin, only blood.
 
 
MY CHILDHOOD BY HEATHCLIFF
 
The law that forms society is that which forbids all that reeks
of the name %humanity%.  From the moment that I was born, I knew
my society was corrupt.  I knew that, in and through the name of
%democracy%, the middle classes are being annihilated, that there
are numerous tribes as depleted as the homeless.
     My childhood training with Hindley taught me the
characteristics of loyalty, honesty, stubbornness, and ferocity.
Further, it caused me to disapprove of the familial society, the
only society I knew, which indulged itself in every hypocrisy,
corruption or putrescence, lack of control in every area of the
self.
     I became a handsome man, with a high-domed forehead, a
square jaw.  An air of authority lurked under every surface.  My
habitual garments of defenses identified me as a member of the
samurai class.
     Though I had as yet no dealings with anyone outside the
family, I knew, and I was deeply upset by this, that samurai were
starting to attend the local fuckhouses.
 
 
When I came back to Kathy, real life returned to her:
MY DREAM OF RETURNING TO KATHY:
 
     Heathcliff says,
     I was traveling, the same as flying, through rooms which
were connected to each other so that their outsides were both
outside and inside.  The name: %the crags of Penniston%.
     The room through which I was passing was either an expensive
Eastern clothing store, a window that displays two fur and silk
robes, or a Hindu temple.  All the walls were the same yellow-
white as the ground below them.  Sand lay everywhere.
     As soon as I had emerged from this temple's recesses, I was
presented with a photo of 'imminent decline'.  This photo
revealed an at least 70% decline, a road composed out of sand and
the rubble of a city.  A few people are half-buried in its dust;
a knee sticks upward.
     A voice announced, "People have died here.  But, at times,
these are the only streets that can take people to where they're
going.
     "The streets of death."
     Where I was heading, there was a chance of disaster, also of
rain.
     I parked my motorcycle facing upwards on a steep hill.
     Whoever I happened to be in lust with at that time gave me
the information that she had given permission to a friend of hers
to ride my bike.  That bitch had tipped it.
     "What?"  I couldn't say anything else because--I'm almost
never angry--my anger is always waiting to blow me up.  Then, I
became angry that there were no bike mechanics in the forsaken
place.  Then, I became angry that all she did was shrug.  My
lover just didn't care.  Finally and ultimately, I'm angry that
I'm helpless.
     Then, I realized that I could phone a mechanic myself so I
did.
     At the bottom of the decline, the crags, lay a building that
was my family's house.  My real father, the one who had started
everything, was inside this house.
     I had made its livingroom into my bedroom; father's bedroom,
which was next to mine, was the actual bedroom of the house.  We
needed space from each other.
     Below the normal rooms lay another level: a floor of unused
rooms.  In the past, something dreadful (or evil) had occurred in
these unused rooms.
     These are the rooms of childhood.
     The unknown floor's map was as follows:
     The large room on the right was the most public, not pubic,
knowable and known.  Its windows on its outside overlooked an
even larger parking lot which, unfortunately, belonged to the
neighboring house.
     Outside: "You're not concerned for his welfare at all?"
     "He's on welfare?"
     The rooms on the left formed a maze whose center was a
bedroom.  The bedroom.  Will I ever find you?
     In my search for freedom or in my search, I moved down to
the hidden floor.  The floor of childhood.  When I had been a
child, I did and now I do whatever I want to do.
     In these hidden rooms, my first bedroom was the room on the
right.  Despite the parking lot lying right next to its insides,
it was quieter than my former home.
     I still hadn't gotten what I wanted or I still wasn't where
I wanted to be.  I want to be in the most secret bedroom of all.
     Finally my father gave me permission to move in there.
     I proceeded:
     But just then, I saw outside that water was pouring, army-
like, into, down the wide grey street.  A wave was as high as my
motorcycle.  For the first time in my life, I felt fright: I was
terrified that my cycle would be flooded.
     I dashed outside; then the waters turned ferocious; I ran
for safety.  Home.
     In the rain my bike died.  I knew that I could have saved
bike if I had ridden it into the house as soon as I had seen
these waters coming.
     In order to save bike, I turned time backwards:
     When I rode my bike into the hall, my mother agreed that
this situation was an emergency and that all is decaying.  Here
lies the smelly realms of the cunt.
     Moving into the cunt:
     First object to be moved from known floor to unknown floor:
a large and low wood and green velvet table.  (Note: Has to be
cut into parts in order to be able to be moved.)
     Second object: a blue exercise mat.
     These necessities were too large for me to move myself.
When I asked my mother, who must have hated my guts before I had
been born because she had abandoned me, for help, for the first
time she agreed.
     Now I accepted my parents.
     Inside the secret bedroom: When I had finished furnishing
the three unknown rooms, they resembled or were the three known
rooms (bedroom, workroom, and exercise room) in which I used to
live.
     In this manner, I returned to Kathy, reached into her secret
place, and made her my image: In the name of anything but the
parent: 
     In the smelly realms of the cunt.
 
 
KATHY'S DREAM OF AND UPON HEATHCLIFF'S RETURNING TO HER AND
LAURE'S DREAM
 
     Kathy says,
Somewhere in Thrushcross Grange I was packing my suitcases
because I was getting out.  Finally.
     Then, I dragged these bags down to my bedroom where I packed
what I didn't want.
     When I had packed both what I wanted and what I didn't want,
I found myself next to Heathcliff.  Sitting on a stoop just as if
we were back in New York City, Heathcliff started burning some of
my skin with his cigarette.
     A boy named Linton with whom both of us were friends sat on
my other side.  He and Heathcliff burned me.
     Since he's my main man, Heathcliff was the one who talked.
"I'm deciding who you are."
     As soon as he had said that, I felt happy.  Happiness was a
mingling of feeling and physical heat; the liquid flooded the
caves beneath my skin.
     Heathcliff told Linton, "I own her."
 
 
I RETURN TO B
 
I was sitting in a theatre, watching a movie named _Wuthering
Heights_.  I had no idea which version.  On the movie screen, I
saw Kathy telling Heathcliff, who had just returned to her, that
the only thing she wants in life, now that almost no life is left
to her, is for her and Heathcliff not to part.  Never to part.
     Heathcliff, "But you did everything possible to ensure our
parting."
     Kathy answers that she only wanted them to be together.
     Across the screen, I see this word spread:
         THE KINGDOM OF CHILDHOOD IS THE KINGDOM OF LUST.
     I had come back to the theatre night after night.  Wood
walls and the bare and hard wood chairs that I remember from my
school days: those auditoriums in which movies were then shown.
But this was a real movie theatre, not a schoolroom.  And this
night, when I sat down and the room became totally black except
for the light from the screen, I placed my purse, as I always do,
under my seat.
     During my former visits to the theatre, I had become
friendly with a man named Jerry.  As _Wuthering Heights_ rolled
on
to the death of Kathy, Jerry asked if he could sleep with me.
     "But first," Jerry in the black, "I have to %show% you
something."
     He showed me that the top of his head was bald.
     No, it was something else.
     He opened his chest.  Most of the chest, its center, was
without skin, like an Invisible Man model.  I saw right through
to his plastic heart.
     But I didn't want to fuck with him for another reason.
Because he wasn't into what's imprecisely named S/M.
     There was no movie.
     Bored, and I hate more than anything to be bored, I left my
seat to get a drink.  When I returned and picked up my bag, I
noticed it felt light.  When I looked inside, there was nothing
there.
     Since I no longer had cash or credit cards, I was forced by
circumstances to enter a brothel.
     I have always found myself determined to survive.
     The cathouse in which I landed obviously catered to upper-
crust clients.  For there were deep pink velvet curtains and no
other visible walls.
     To my surprise I liked my first John.
     Then a murder took place; the victim was this first John.
Was I possibly the murderer?
     Because we had to ensure that we weren't caught, some girls
and I began escaping from the whorehouse.  As I loped down a long
and narrow hall, I gazed upon a black satin evening bag which
looked expensive.  On a tiny, antique mahogany table.  I snatched
the bag because mine had been taken from me.  But thought that
it's wrong to steal.
     The steep street outside our working quarters had become
steeper: my friends and I could barely climb up it.  I was
wearing very high-heeled shoes because I was a whore.  Here there
was no hope of running away.  I was aware that openly carrying
this purse rather than investigating its insides, keeping only
what I wanted and throwing away all the rest, was even more
dangerous.
     I opened the black evening bag.  At this moment I told the
other girls about my theft.  They didn't give a fuck.  I
extracted the bag's belongings; I preferred a pair of earrings to
money.
     The girls and I decided that we were going to be thieves.
     I found myself inside a brothel which was probably the
original one, though I couldn't remember how that brothel had
looked.
     The vestibule in which I stood was the lobby of a movie
theatre.  All of its velvet, cunt pink.
     I was watching a policeman talking to or interviewing the
movie's ticket-taker.  All sorts or documents concerning the
murder were on my person.  Of course I had done it.  The
policeman who was in the ticket booth didn't notice or care about
either my documents or my being; none of the cops walking around
the whorehouse cared about the hookers.  Already, hookers and
thieves, we decided we could be murderers.
     Heathcliff, my brother.