Her difference from him acts like a mirror. Whatever he notices or dwells upon in her, increases his consciousness of himself, without his attention shifting from her.
She is the woman whom he used to call Aunt Beatrice. She ran the house and gave orders to the servants. She linked arms with her brother and walked up and down the lawn. She took him when he was a child to church. She asked him questions about what he had learnt in the School Room: questions like What are the chief rivers of Africa?
Occasionally during his childhood she surprised him. Once he saw her squatting in the corner of a field and afterwards he wondered whether she was peeing. In the middle of the night he had woken up to hear her laughing so wildly that he thought she was screaming. One afternoon he came into the kitchen and saw her drawing a cow with a piece of chalk on the tiled floor—a childish drawing like he might have done when younger. On each of these occasions his surprise was the result of his discovering that she was different when she was alone or when she believed that he was not there.
This morning when she had asked him to come to her bedroom, she had presented a different self to him, yet he knew this was no longer a matter of chance discovery but of deliberate intention on her part. Her hair was loose around her shoulders. He had never seen or imagined it like that before. Her face seemed smaller, much smaller than his own. The top of her head looked unexpectedly flat and her hair over the flatness very glossy. The expression of her eyes was serious to the point of gravity. Two small shoes lay on their sides on the carpet. She was barefoot. Her voice too was different, her words much slower.
I cannot remember, she said, any lilac ever having a scent like this lot.
This morning he was not surprised. He accepted the changes. Nevertheless this morning he still thought of her as the mistress of the house in which he had passed his childhood.
She is a mythical figure whom he has always been assembling part by part, quality by quality. Her softness—but not the extent of its area—is more familiar than he can remember. Her heated sweating skin is the source of the warmth he felt in Miss Helen’s clothes. Her independence from him is what he recognized in the tree trunk when he kissed it. The whiteness of her body is what has signalled nakedness to him whenever he has glimpsed a white segment through the chance disarray of petticoat or skirt. Her smell is the smell of fields which, in the early morning, smell of fish although many miles from the sea. Her two breasts are what his reason has long since granted her, although their distinctness and degree of independence one from the other astonish him. He has seen drawings on walls asserting how she lacks penis and testicles. (The dark beard-like triangle of hair makes their absence simpler and more natural than he foresaw.) This mythical figure embodies the desirable alternative to all that disgusts or revolts him. It is for her sake that he has ignored his own instinct for self-preservation—as when he walked away, revolted, from the men in sack-cloths and the dead horses. She and he together, mysteriously and naked, are his own virtue rewarded.
Mythical familiar and the woman he once called Aunt Beatrice meet in the same person. The encounter utterly destroys both of them. Neither will ever again exist.
He sees the eyes of an unknown woman looking up at him. She looks at him without her eyes fully focussing upon him as though, like nature, he were to be found everywhere.
He hears the voice of an unknown woman speaking to him: Sweet, sweet, sweetest. Let us go to that place.
He unhesitatingly puts his hand on her hair and opens his fingers to let it spring up between them. What he feels in his hand is inexplicably familiar.
She opens her legs. He pushes his finger towards her. Warm mucus encloses his finger as closely as if it were a ninth skin. When he moves the finger, the surface of the enclosing liquid is stretched—sometimes to breaking point. Where the break occurs he has a sensation of coolness on that side of his finger—before the warm moist skin forms again over the break.
She holds his penis with both hands, as though it were a bottle from which she were about to pour towards herself.
She moves sideways so as to be beneath him.
Her cunt begins at her toes; her breasts are inside it, and her eyes too; it has enfolded her.
It enfolds him.
The ease.
Previously it was unimaginable, like a birth for that which is born.
It is eight o’clock on a December morning. People are already at work or going to work. It is still not fully light and the darkness is foggy. I have just left a laundry, where the violet fluorescent lighting bleaches most stains out until you unwrap the washing and look at it in your own room. Under the fluorescent lighting the girl behind the counter had the white face of a clown with green eye shadow and violet almost white lips. The people I pass in the rue d’Odessa move briskly but rigidly, or hold themselves stiff against the cold. It is hard to imagine that most of them were in bed two hours ago, languid, unrestrained. Their clothes—even those chosen with the greatest personal care or romantic passion—all look as though they are the uniforms of a public service into which everybody has been drafted. Every personal desire, preference or hope has become an inconvenience. I wait at the bus stop. The waving red indicator of the Paris bus, as it turns the corner, is like a brand taken from a fire. At this moment I begin to doubt the value of poems about sex.
Sexuality is by its nature precise: or rather, its aim is precise. Any imprecision registered by any of the five senses tends to check sexual desire. The focus of sexual desire is concentrated and sharp. The breast may be seen as a model of such focus, gathering from an indefinable, soft variable form to the demarcation of the aureola and, within that, to the precise tip of the nipple.
In an indeterminate world in flux sexual desire is reinforced by a longing for precision and certainty: beside her my life is arranged.
In a static hierarchic world sexual desire is reinforced by a longing for an alternative certainty: with her I am free.
All generalizations are opposed to sexuality.
Every feature that makes her desirable asserts its contingency—here, here, here, here, here, here.
That is the only poem to be written about sex—here, here, here, here—now.
Why does writing about sexual experience reveal so strikingly what may be a general limitation of literature in relation to aspects of all experience?
In sex, a quality of ‘firstness’ is felt as continually re-creatable. There is an element in every occasion of sexual excitement which seizes the imagination as though for the first time.
What is this quality of ‘firstness’? How, usually, do first experiences differ from later ones?