...of transport

Out there where the black star hung, a Pan-Islamic silence, as in the cavern world where even the wind is stilled. Out there, did I dare to brood on it, the spectral quietude of insanity, the world of men, lulled, exhausted by centuries of incessant slaughter. Out there one gory encompassing membrane within which all activity took place, the hero-world of lunatics and maniacs who had quenched the light of the heavens with blood. How peaceful our little dove-and-vulture life in the dark! Flesh to bury in with teeth or penis, abundant odorous flesh with no mark of knife or scissors, no scar of exploded shrapnel, no mustard burns, no scalded lungs. Save for the hallucinating hole in the ceiling, an almost perfect womb life. But the hole was there - like a fissure in the bladder - and no wadding could plug it permanently, no urination could pass off with a smile. Piss large and freely, aye, but how forget the rent in the belfry, the silence unnatural, the imminence, the terror, the poom of the "other" world? Eat a bellyful, aye, and tomorrow another bellyful, and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow - but finally, what then? Finally? What was finally? A change of ventriloquist, a change of lap, a shift in the axis, another rift in the vault... what? what? I'll tell you - sitting in her lap, petrified by the still, prolonged beams of the black star, horned, snaffled, hitched and trepanned by the telepathic acuity of your intersecting agitation, I thought of nothing at all, nothing that was outside the cell we inhabited, not even the thought of a crumb on the a white tablecloth. I thought purely within the walls of our amoebic life, the pure thought such as Immanuel Pussyfoot Kant gave us and which only a ventriloquist's dummy could reproduce. I thought out every theory of science, every theory of art, every grain of truth in every cock-eyed system of salvation. I calculated everything out to a pin point with gnostic decimals to boot, like primes which a drunk hands out at the finish of a six-day race. But everything was calculated for another life which somebody else would live some day - perhaps. We were at the very neck of the bottle, her and I, as they say, but the neck had been broken off and the bottle was only a fiction.

[Tropic of Capricorn, Miller, H.]