Darconville's Cat (83 page)

  “But take heart, Prince Darconville, and weigh well
the time—for death comes from life, not life from death. It is but
a small step between weariness and hate in a woman, and there is
not much to choose between a woman who deceives us for another and
a woman who deceives another for ourselves. Reality increases in
direct proportion to the length and proximity of contact and when
her retractile heart withdraws again—? Look to your sheets,
Dutchman. This whore of yours can count beyond two.

  Confirmatio

  “What
is
woman, anyway? A mere collection
of similar individuals, each cast in the same mold, the whole
forming as it were a continuous plasmodium. Googlies with bisque
hearts! Rash, inconsiderate voluntaries with dragons’ spleens! Pies
with the devil’s finger in them! But all women are at bottom one
woman. I mean, you’ve been presenting this bechangeable flouter of
yours as if she were the chryselephantine statue of Athena,
convincing me then, before all else, that men never want to see
women as they are, but if you must insist upon showing in both face
and sentiment the grace of the troubadours, you must then coquet
with truth after their fashion; the reality, I make free to say, is
quite otherwise— men either despise women or they have never
thought seriously about them, although the chap who does
successfully study them must of necessity be an amphibologist.

  “Look at them! The sight of an upright female form
in the nude makes most patent her purposelessness—if pretty,
briefly pretty, and yet how many abortions for one Helen, how many
Gothones for one Aphrodite? No, the caricature of a woman
isn’t
one! Their greasy faces! Their buttered hair! Their
fucused breasts! My God, they’re ugly as dubbs! A very, very woman
is a dough-baked man! They were the very last thing God
made—evidently he did so on Saturday night: she reveals his
fatigue—and the very first to betray him. Their brains, their
hearts, are tinier than those of men. Of the one face they’ve been
given they must make themselves another, and, mobbling it, they
come flying out at you behind that ill-befitting clownage of false
fingernails, chinstraps, mudpacks, padded asses, and toenail polish
and then dare to ask man, ‘Are you real?’ To hear such a thing! To
hear anything like it! To hear
anything
! Can you, for
example, think of a more revolting sound on earth than a woman
rummaging in her handbag? No, face it, woman is supreme only as
woman: ‘vapourizing, gesticulating, quarrelsome, restless, and
oversensitive,’ as Carlyle said of France.

  “What is the definition of gross incompetence? 144
women! They don’t live in the grip of envy only for others—no, most
girls, incredible as it may sound, are actually jealous of their
own bodies, coming to hate the very tits-’n’-bums superficially
used to attract men in the first place. They can’t be grateful,
conceptualize, or exercise heavy pressures with their arms raised
above shoulder height. Their acrobatics of excretion could bring a
smile to the face of Muscular Dystrophy. And the nap of the female
skin? It would vex a dog to see a pudding creep! The sinewy walk is
only a condition relating to a built-in instability in the
thighbones whereby they tend to lose their balance easily and
stumble. Their menstrual flux can sour wine, curdle milk, dim
mirrors, and wilt young plants. And, finally, food for her is but a
few seconds in the mouth, a few hours in the belly, and the rest of
her life on the hip, for, like medlars, they are no sooner ripe
than rotten, and when St. Jerome went to Scotland to find cannibals
there, it turned out that it was only male flesh that they’d eaten
because the female flesh—insipid and characterless as banana—was
stringy and vile, flowing with unsavory streams. Overbodied?
Well-punctured? With small irregular holes? Wherein, for chrissake,
does woman differ from a Tilsit cheese?

  “It made Byron sick to see a woman eat. Zeuxis
claimed he needed all the beauties of Agrigentum to compose the
image of a female, and then he died in a fit of laughter after
contemplating the face of the hag he’d painted, And then was it not
said by the only rare poet of that time, the Wittie, Comicall,
Facetiously-Quicke and unparalleled John Lilly, Master of Arts,
that if you take from them their perywigges, their paintings, their
Jewells, their rowles and boulstrings, thou shall soone perceive
that a woman is the least parte of hir self? The rest of them—and
it’s a good deal—lies on the dressing table! The traditional idea
of them being a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma is a
joke! A sphinx without a secret is a minx! It is of course
no
secret that they hate men for the talents they have,
partially because they’re covetous and partially because they don’t
know how it’s done. Behind every great man, believe me, stands an
astonished
woman! ‘Let the vain sex dream on,’ wrote
Swift, ‘their Empire comes from us.’ But the more women aspiring to
the arts who dominate the women’s movement, the more the unnatural
and long-frustrated desire for equality—mental, physical,
aesthetic—translates into the totally misleading equation of
emancipation with creativity. Woman has never created anything, and
will never create anything, as beautiful as she has destroyed, for
one thing. And then there could never be anything but an
ideologically imposed equality of the sexes anyway, for the
artistic and intellectual incompetence of women, with the singular
exceptions you could name only to reinforce that rule, is the most
embarrassing
fact of human history
—an utter void in music,
philosophy, sculpture, history, literature, and science for three
thousand years! I’m afraid you must look for the book
Significant Women Thinkers
in the same library where
you’ll find
Great Chinese Comedians
,
The Encyclopedia
of Dutch Etiquette
, and
The Jewish Book of Charity
.
But, you ask, weren’t they lacking in education? The mind is
school. Or wanting in leisure? Vision makes room for vision. Then
what about duress? You will argue, reductively, that women were
held down, calumniated, and oppressed over the centuries until you
stop to consider, with some shock perhaps, that such conditions are
more often than not the very linchpin of all meaningful
achievement!

  “Here, but this is tiring. Have you ever seen a
woman try to throw a ball?

  “No, nature, I’m afraid, has been very unkind to
women—indeed, it perhaps best explains their vindictiveness. They
have small sense of humor, less of continuity, and constantly live
in the throes of morbidly excitable hysteria—female tear ducts,
scientifically, are almost twice as active as men’s—the attributive
demonstration of which, while doubtless the result of their
constitutional irrationality and its
boiteuses journées
,
is especially felt in the presence of high-principled, essentially
masculine men. They can panic most mightily under such
circumstances—and of course when a woman loses her hypnotic power,
then what? Of course. She straddles a bike, becomes a religious
crank, and proceeds to teach Latin. Their so-called meekness,
however, is usually the result of finding discretion more necessary
to them than eloquence because, as thinking and feeling for them
are in opposition, they have less difficulty in speaking little
than speaking well. Mind, in fact, cannot really be predicated of
her at all—only the sexual instinct, and yet it is virtually
impossible for women, because they are
only
sexual, to
recognize their sexuality or the indiscriminate dispensation
thereof, for the recognition of anything requires a kind of duality
which
they
can only understand, experientially, in the
thoughtless and brazen act of cozening two men at the same time.
But what of it? By the very nature of being what they are, they
consequently need never inquire what they should be, refusing the
gambit right out and generously leaving that task to the
philosophical speculations of the male, whose uncertainty about it
all is at once both the source of his romance and the germ of his
malady. Women aren’t called whores, you see, in the same way
penguins aren’t called homely: all aren’t only because all are.

  Reductio ad absurdam

  “Sex! I hear no echo in this briefest word that
could ever make it song. Sex is merely lust—the batrachomyomachia
of bunghole and battery from which love, apparently, can do
anything but shelter one! It is the lowest form of communication,
the vilest expression of need, and the most brainlessly
discerptible action in the entire realm of human behavior. Coitus
is the price men have to pay to women for their oppression. Their
sex organs—a passive pot for fools to spend in—are nothing,
emptiness itself, the jar of the
Arabian Nights
into which
every Solomon tries in vain to pack his genie. What is their
twammy, however, that you need to know it? How value what you can
partake of without loving and yet love without partaking of? Who
buys a minute’s mirth to wail a week or sells eternity to get a
toy? Love
as passion
is a scam, the invention of the
Provencal knight-poets to justify their verse! There is, moreover,
no distinguishing
haecceitas
in the glands: they are all
the same, functioning in witless independence of that self we
vainly believe to be loved, for any one part of an extended
substantive is existentially other than any other part. Leave such
things for the sexly sex! The Hindus correctly look upon sexual
intercourse as a victory for woman, the degrading passion, in my
opinion, by which Adam and the serpent were actually tempted by
Eve
, for, ask yourself, was there any betrayal by the
former two until the introduction of the latter? Any
contentiousness? Any lack of trust, excess, disobedience?

  “No, copulation is abomination—you become
susceptible in the act to your own venom like the pigmy rattlesnake
that dies when it bites itself on the lip during its frenzy to
swallow mice! The violence! It’s a biological fact that peaceful
matings are nearly always sterile. The vice! Who, in reference to
this beastly whingeing, has ever dared admit the crucial and
contradictory paradox involved in taking by giving? Then the
vulgarity of it! The sparrow stands erect in coition, the hen
crouches, whales swoop up vertically, bears hug one another,
hedgehogs go at it face to face—only monkeys and women fall into
any posture whatsoever! H-o-double-r-i-b-l-e spells horrible!
Democritus of Abdera, who plucked out his eyes to avoid the sight
of female skirts, called it ‘the short epilepsy.’ Odysseus refused
to couple with Circe on the grounds that his vigor would be
impaired. Hector went straight from Andromache’s bed to battle—and
was butchered! And both Ambrose and Tertullian declared that the
extinction of the human race was preferable to its propagation by
sexual intercourse. Sex? O, Darconville, it is there in the womb
that we have all been taught cruelty and fitted for works of
darkness, fed with blood, deprived of light, and blinded and
warpled and set upsidedown in the cerements of our burial scene. We
live—
inter urinam et faeces nascimur
—between graves! We
wake only to celebrate our own funeral cries, perpetually driven to
abysses as if instinctively burdened with the true and terrible
knowledge that looking into a hole is nothing more than looking
into the future we, all of us, must share!

  Admonitio

  “Stop to think where they are now, your desertrice
and her impe-trating, impenetrating groom! Who have known each
other so briefly must then want each othef so well. Lichens liken:
about her he disapproves nothing, nor does she anything of him, for
to be overestimated is the only real appreciation. And so it is a
Dutch concert of lies—and, my, but they do lie a lot! But, here,
can castwhores pulladeftkiss if oldpollocks forsake ‘em? With
relish, my man! But, wait, is it limited to kisses? Cry broom! Were
kisses all the joys in bed, why one woman would another wed! No,
don’t turn away! Look, picture her, there she is noting his every
want and, mad to forestall it, tears away her clothes—she quivers,
she pants, she clucks, squealing now in language grown greasier
than her pigs and waggling in the air two legs turned to a shape
more crooked than a judas tree! Why, a woman, like a cat, could
calmly walk over your dead face! And will you still talk to me
about ideals, when then- ideals, like mantles, cover up their
palfreys so that two beasts seem to move beneath one skin? Yes?
Than take the fie out of fo and fum for you have paid the fee!

  “A new period of history is aborning! I would have
you free! Freedom and idleness—Allah’s greatest gifts! I would have
you join the 144,000 virgin males in Revelations undented by women!
Why, tell me, must a man’s qualifications as a male become
identical with that sole and lowly value so esteemed by women? To
but acknowledge himself proud in the eyes of a tribe of blowsy
she-dowds, repulsive skates, and drabs? The moral sanction that has
been invented for coitus, in supposing that there is an ideal
attitude to the act in which only the propagation of the race is
thought, is hardly sufficient defense. It is no defense. It is
defenseless. St. Paul, remember—who was blessed with his vision
only
after
the daughter of the high priest of Jerusalem
had rejected his ill-considered offer of marriage—says that the
single life is the only perfect one. He countenanced marriage of
necessity and against his own conviction, and his views on the
subject show at best a reluctant sanction, as I’m sure you know,
for he knew well the confusion, dullness, and strife apposite to
that way of life. Eris is only Eros with an eye. On the other hand,
don’t be confused. The term ‘virginity’ when applied to women is
merely a geographic expression—to them, little more than a point of
commerce—and the outward endeavor on their part to try to
correspond to man’s demand for physical purity must not be taken
for anything but a fear lest the buyer fight shy of the bargain. I
hardly think you can be unaware of the view women actually take of
virginity, can you? It’s the drats! They not only disparage and
despise virginity in other women; they are nothing less than
terror-fraught at the thought of their own—except, of course, that
men prize it so highly. Spry? O yes, they’re spry. Spry as a sprint
of sprue! But don’t be fooled—the Queen, remember, unites the power
of both the Rook and Bishop in her movements and, commanding both
the straight and the oblique, can get behind you faster than wind.
But that’s as it is, isn’t it? Simply, you must avoid them. Let
them alone to sprout up sins somewhence, somewhither, and somewhere
else! Take to heart the wisdom of the holy ancient saints, Jerome,
Anthony, and Hilarion who, along with your own holy martyred
kinsman, left no doubt as to what women really are: obstacles to
spiritual piety. Whoever, that lived its tragedies, says that life
must be propagated? That it must continue? Why, that’s nothing but
the worship of
life
, the foulest of heresies! The prophet
Jeremiah—16:2-4 of that book—was actually commanded to remain
single. Virginity, you’ll note, was essential for success in the
search for the Holy Grail, and if it comes as no surprise to you to
learn, parenthetically, that after the destruction and dissolution
of the Round Table all the surviving knights became hermits, how
then even in the absence of explicit statement should I ever hope
to expect, my friend, anything less of you? The sole purpose of
radiators is to
lose
heat. No, I’ll vouch you up a
chastity, my child, if to it you’re disposed, and there shall by a
virgin be a viragin deposed!