Judith by Nicholas Mosley

out after a time – You mean that man at the end of the row, who was as if waving to me from a window, is called Jason?
    That same evening Oliver said – marching up and down the room as if there were flies or military music after him –
    â€˜I thought it was the
Die Flamme
people that you were so starry-eyed about: get the shit off the streets: rise and shine: get it poured over yourself: piss and polish: that sort of thing.
    â€˜You think people like being on top? They don’t. They like being underneath. It’s warmer where you’re shat on. Why do you think children like it, what do you think Freud went on about, was it Freud or Jung who had that dream about Godshitting on the world when on the seventh day he rested? That which proceedeth from the father and the son – Good boy! Mummy loves you!
    â€˜You think that was clever – Don’t you see what trouble they had to take in order to destroy themselves? –
    â€˜Give me a nice shiny scrubber any day. What was the name of that boy you were with? Desmond?’
    Oliver was standing over me by the edge of the bed.
    I thought – You mean, you are jealous of that person called Jason –
    â€“ You would like me to get in touch with Desmond?
    Why does it seem false, do you know, to try to give straightforward descriptions of sex: is it because sex itself is a metaphor for something different?
    This is one of the ways one knows (because there are metaphors) that there is something different?
    I mean – You do all these things with bits and pieces of yourself; but you do them because round a corner, just elsewhere, there is something of quite another kind coming together, falling apart, coming together: I mean why else would you spend all that time with bits and pieces of yourself if there were not something different?
    But when you can’t hold this, pin it down, because it is around some corner – then I suppose there is some rage in you that makes you go after the bits and pieces.
    Oliver wasn’t much good at straightforward sex: perhaps he had done too much: but then, there were all his bits and pieces. These, as Miss Julie would say, were hanging out; he had to do something with them. He was like some sort of genie half in and half out of a bottle.
    He would say – For God’s sake, if you wait for yourself, you might have to wait for ever.
    And I had got bored, yes, with men who hang around with their tongues out all day as if they were in a desert.
    Oliver would say – All right my puppet, my Petrouchka-girl; there’s a good centre of gravity!
    Sometimes a packet would arrive in Oliver’s letter-box downstairs that did not contain dope but implements, sexual devices, or whatever: these were I suppose of the same order as dope: they were mechanisms to give a home to fantasies that floated half in and half out of bottles. Do not all humans have fantasies – either trapped, or running wild? I suppose it is better if they are in some way held rather than roar like witches above battlefields.
    Oliver would say – Machinery, like puppets, yes, is less ridiculous than humans.
    I would think – Are there people, somewhere, who prefer not to be tethered?
    Oliver would say – There is no orderliness when there is a choice: humans are ludicrous when they think they have a choice.
    I would say – But it might be something one cannot talk about –
    Oliver would say – Saints, explorers, have always wanted pain. You know that prayer on Easter Saturday – Oh happy fault! or whatever – how would there be the bliss of redemption if there were no pain?
    I would think – Bliss is being in the present, here, and with no dimensions?
    Oliver would say – It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living god!
    Sometimes we would go out together: I would dress up: then we could shine – as if polished, I suppose, or pissed on, or pissing. We had probably