During the oral biting stage, the mode of deriving pleasure become modified. Its sources are File Size: 57KB. Published in the book become immediate popular and critical acclaim in philosophy, non fiction books. Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia.
The first edition of the novel was published in , and was written by Michel Foucault. The book was published in multiple languages including English, consists of pages and is available in Paperback format.
I would have to climb it. I pushed my way through a mass of prickly shrubberies. The wall was only shoulder high; I took off my shoes and threw them over, then scrambled up, using branches and the uneven bricking of the wall as toe-holds. Something ripped. I closed my eyes, knelt for a moment on the top of the wall, swaying dizzily, and dropped backwards. I felt myself caught, set down and shaken.
It was Peter, who must have stalked me and waited there on the side street, knowing I would come over the wall. His face in the light of the streetlamps was partly angry, partly alarmed. Len heaved himself over the wall and landed on the earth with a thunk. He was breathing heavily. Peter opened the front door for me and I slid in; Len got into the back seat with Ainsley. We pulled away from the curb and rounded the corner, Len giving directions.
I sat up straight and folded my hands in my lap. There was no elevator, just creaky stairs with dark wooden railings. We ascended in decorous couples. The apartment itself was tiny, only one main room with a bathroom opening to one side and a kitchen to the other.
The bed was immediately to the left of the door, doubling as a chesterfield, and I kicked off my shoes and subsided onto it.
My muscles had caught up with me and were beginning to ache with fatigue. Len poured the three of us generous shots of cognac, rummaged in the kitchen and managed to find some Coke for Ainsley, and put on a record. Then he and Peter began to fiddle with a couple of cameras, screwing various lenses onto them and peering through them and exchanging information about exposure times.
I felt deflated. I was filled with penitence, but there was no outlet for it. If I could be alone with Peter it would be different, I thought: he could forgive me. Ainsley was no help. I saw she was going to keep up her little-girls- should-be-seen-and-not-heard act, as the safest course to follow. Ainsley sat quite still though, holding her Coca-Cola glass in her lap and contemplating her own reflection on the brown surface inside it.
She registered neither pleasure nor boredom; her inert patience was that of a pitcher-plant in a swamp with its hollow bulbous leaves half- filled with water, waiting for some insect to be attracted, drowned, and digested. I was leaning back against the wall, sipping at my cognac, the noise of voices and music slapping against me like waves. I suppose the pressure of my body had pushed the bed out a little; at any rate, without thinking much about anything I turned my head away from the room and looked down.
I began to find something very attractive about the dark cool space between the bed and the wall. It would be quiet down there, I thought; and less humid. I set my glass down on the telephone table beside the bed and glanced quickly around the room. They were all engrossed: no one would notice. A minute later I was wedged sideways between the bed and the wall, out of sight but not at all comfortable. It will be like a tent. I eased the bed out from the wall as noiselessly as I could, using my whole body as a lever, lifted the fringed border of the bedspread, and slid myself in like a letter through a slot.
It was a tight fit: the slats were unusually low for a bed, and I was forced to lie absolutely flat against the floor. I inched the bed back flush with the wall. It was quite cramped. Also, there were large rolls and clusters of dust strewn thickly over the floor like chunks of mouldy bread I thought indignantly, What a pig Len is! But the semi-darkness, tinted orange by the filter of the bedspread that curtained me on all four sides, and the coolness and the solitude were pleasant. The raucous music and staccato laughter and the droning voices reached me muffled by the mattress.
I felt smug. It was satisfying to be the only one who knew where I really was. The position, however, was becoming more and more of a strain. The muscles in my neck were hurting; I wanted to stretch; I was going to sneeze. I began to wish they would hurry up and realize I had disappeared, so they could search for me.
It was ridiculous: I would be all covered with fluff when I came out. But having taken the step I refused to turn back. There would be no dignity at all in crawling out from under the bedspread, trailing dust, like a weevil coming out of a flour barrel. It would be admitting I had done the wrong thing. There I was, and there I would stay until forcibly removed. My resentment at Peter for letting me remain crushed under the bed while he moved up there in the open, in the free air, jabbering away about exposure times, started me thinking about the past four months.
Now, though, something in me had decided we were involved: surely that was the explanation for the powder-room collapse and the flight. I was evading reality. Now, this very moment, I would have to face it. I would have to decide what I wanted to do. Someone sat down heavily on the bed, mashing me against the floor. I gave a dusty squawk. I had decided to be noncommittal about the whole thing. I was amused, and indignant. Up above, they had another policy meeting.
It was going to be a major feat of engineering skill. There was a scuffling of shoes as they took their positions and got purchase.
Peter stood me up. Every inch of my dress was furred and tufted with dust. They both started to brush me off, laughing. You look a sight. He stepped back a pace; his eyes seemed to measure me coldly.
He took me by the upper arm as though he was arresting me for jaywalking, and turned to Len. I hope we can get together again sometime soon. Some kind of decision had been made, something had been finished. After that violence, that overt and suddenly to me embarrassing display, there could be no reconciliation; though now that I was moving away I felt no irritation at all towards Peter.
It crossed my mind, absurdly, that it had been such a peaceful relationship: until that day we had never fought. There had been nothing to fight about.
I looked behind me: Peter was nowhere in sight. I walked along the deserted streets, past the rows of old apartment buildings, towards the nearest main street where I could get a bus. The thought made me uneasy: the wind was now stronger and colder and the lightning seemed to be moving closer by the minute.
In the distance the thunder was beginning. I was wearing only a flimsy summer dress. He got out and stood on the empty sidewalk, waiting. I walked on steadily, neither slackening my pace nor changing direction.
Surely there was no longer any reason to run. I was no longer involved. When I was level with him he stepped in front of me. I hesitated. Why was he doing this? It might be only the same formal motive that prompted him to open car doors — almost an automatic reflex — in which case I could accept the favour just as formally, with no danger; but what would it really involve if I got into the car? I studied him: he had clearly had too much to drink, though clearly also he was in near-perfect control of himself.
His eyes were a little glazed, it was true, but he was holding his body stiffly upright. Though thank you just the same. I allowed myself to be led to the car and inserted into the front seat. I was, I think, reluctant; but I did not particularly want to get wet. He got in and slammed his own door and started the motor.
We turned a corner and the rain hit, blown against the windshield by sharp gusts of wind. At any moment we were going to have, as one of my great-aunts used to say, a trash-mover and a gully-washer. I sat up straight in the front seat, staring through a window out of which I could see little or nothing. There was a crack of thunder.
After all, Len was my friend. My voice was beginning to quiver. You were just being plain ordinary rude! It put him in the class of the people in the deodorant ads. He glanced quickly over at me, his eyes narrowed as though he was taking aim. Then he gritted his teeth together and stepped murderously hard on the accelerator. By that time the rain was coming down in torrents: the road ahead, when it could be seen at all, looked like a solid sheet of water.
I heard something snap. Peter rolled down the window and stuck his head out. Then he began to laugh. He stepped on the gas. The wheels spun for an instant, churning up the mud of the lawn and leaving as I later saw two deep gouges, and with a grinding of gears we moved up over the edge of the lawn and back onto the road. I was trembling now from a combination of fright, cold, and fury. His head was soaking wet, even from that brief exposure to the rain, and the hair was plastered down on his head, the water trickling from it over his face.
His satisfaction with what he considered a forceful display of muscle was obvious. It irritated me that he should appropriate as his own the credit due to the back wheels of his car.
The car stopped jerkily. I took hold of the door handle, intending, I think, to make a final unanswerable remark and dash for the house; but he put his hand on my arm.
We sat silently, listening to the storm. It must have been right overhead; the lightning was dazzling and continuous, and each probing jagged fork was followed almost at once by a rending crash, like the trees of a whole forest splitting and falling. I could only agree. His stare was intent, faintly ominous. Hold still. I suddenly felt limp as a damp kleenex. I leaned my forehead against his and closed my eyes. His skin was cold and wet and his breath smelled of cognac.
I did: we still had our foreheads pressed together, and I found myself at the next bright instant gazing into a multitude of eyes. We both laughed and he pulled me against him and kissed me. I put my arms around his back. We rested quietly like that for some time in the centre of the storm. I was conscious only that I was very tired and that my body would not stop shivering. He stroked my hair, forgiving, understanding, a little patronizing.
A tremendous electric blue flash, very near, illuminated the inside of the car. As we stared at each other in that brief light I could see myself, small and oval, mirrored in his eyes. I looked around the room, scarcely recognizing it as a place I had ever been before. My clothes were scattered over the floor and draped and crumpled on the chairback like fragments left over from the explosion of some life-sized female scarecrow, and the inside of my mouth felt like a piece of cotton-wool stuffing.
I got up and wavered out to the kitchen. Clear sunshine and fresh air were shimmering in through the open kitchen window. Ainsley was up before me. She was leaning forward, concentrating on something that was spread out in front of her, her legs drawn up and tucked under her on the chair, her hair cascading over her shoulders.
From the back she looked like a mermaid perched on a rock: a mermaid in a grubby green terry-cloth robe. Around her on a tabletop pebbled with crumbs lay the remnants of her breakfast — a limp starfish of a banana peel, some bits of shell, and brown crusts of toast beached here and there, random as driftwood. I went to the refrigerator and got out the tomato juice.
I was wondering whether I could face an egg. She turned around. I got home just before the storm broke and had a cigarette and a double scotch and went straight to bed; god, I was absolutely exhausted.
It was like escaping from a giant squid, but I did it, mostly by acting dumb and scared. I knew she would disapprove. I manoeuvred the egg into the saucepan; it cracked immediately. It was straight out of the refrigerator and too cold. It was like invoking a deity. I inspected my egg, which was sending out a white semi-congealed feeler like an exploring oyster.
I turned on the coffee and cleared a space for myself on the oilcloth. Now I could see what Ainsley was busy with. She had taken the calendar down from the kitchen wall — it had a picture of a little girl in an old-fashioned dress sitting on a swing with a basket of cherries and a white puppy — I get one every year from a third cousin who runs a service station back home — and was making cryptic marks on it with a pencil.
I whacked my egg against the side of my dish and got my thumb stuck in it. I poured it into the dish and stirred it up. I found out his father went to college. And he is in television, that means he must have something artistic in him somewhere.
She bore a chilling resemblance to a general plotting a major campaign. Or an aerial photograph. Then you could draw little arrows and dotted lines on it, and an X at the point of conjunction. Now she was counting under her breath. At least a month anyway. A moment of passion. My resistance overcome, swept off my feet and so forth. I was silent: the thought of Leonard Slank being undone beneath the same roof that also sheltered the lady down below and her framed family tree was disturbing to me; it would almost be a sacrilege.
Ainsley went into her bedroom, humming busily to herself, taking the calendar with her. I sat thinking about Len. I was again having stirrings of conscience about allowing him to be led flower-garlanded to his doom without even so much as a word of warning. Of course he had asked for it, in a way, I supposed, and Ainsley seemed determined not to make any further claims on whoever she singled out for this somewhat dubious, because anonymous, honour. But surely he was, I reflected as I sipped my coffee, a more complex and delicately adjusted creature.
In his own warped way he was a kind of inverted moralist. He liked to talk as though everyone was out for nothing but sex and money, but when anyone provided a demonstration of his theories in real life, he reacted with scalding critical invective. The supposedly pure, the unobtainable, was attractive to the idealist in him; but as soon as it had been obtained, the cynic viewed it as spoiled and threw it away.
Women whom he thought of as truly out of his reach, such as the wives of his friends, he treated with devotion. He trusted them to an unrealistic degree simply because he would never be compelled by his own cynicism to put them to the test: they were not only unassailable but too old for him anyway. Clara, for instance, he idolized. At times he showed a peculiar tenderness, almost a sloppy sentimentality, towards the people he liked, who were few in number; but in spite of this he was constantly accused by women of being a misogynist and by men of being a misanthropist, and perhaps he was both.
Clara sounded pleased, but her response was ambiguous. She was talking as though I was simply taking a prudent step. The rest of the conversation was about her digestive upsets. As I was washing the breakfast dishes I heard footsteps coming up our stairs. He had already assumed impromptu visiting privileges. I left the rest of the dishes in the sink and dried my hands on my apron. He came into the kitchen.
I guess I really tied one on. This morning my mouth tasted like the inside of a tennis shoe. We scanned each other warily. If there was going to be a retraction from either side, this was the moment for it; the whole thing could be blamed on organic chemistry. But neither of us backed down. Finally Peter grinned at me, a pleased though nervous grin.
You were drinking quite a lot. Like a cup of coffee? He did look hungover. This was an arranged carelessness; he was meticulously unshaven, and his socks matched the colour of the paint stains on his sports shirt. I turned on the coffee. I gave him a tender chrome-plated smile; that is, I meant the smile to express tenderness, but my mouth felt stiff and bright and somehow expensive. I poured two cups of coffee, got out the milk and sat down in the other kitchen chair.
He put one of his hands over mine. And maybe I was intending it, without knowing it. Somewhere in the vaults of Seymour Surveys an invisible hand was wiping away my signature. I lowered my eyes modestly and fixed them upon a toast crumb that had eluded me when I wiped the table. We were awkward with each other. We no longer had the assumptions, the tracks and paths of our former relationship to guide us.
Peter chuckled to himself. When I went out to get the car I found three shrubs caught underneath it; so I just took a drive past that lawn. We made a neat little hole in their hedge.
I could feel the stirrings of the proprietary instinct. So this object, then, belonged to me. I leaned my head against his shoulder. The funny thing was I really meant it. He said he needed to get some more sleep and he advised me to do the same. I was filled with a nervous energy which refused to dissipate itself in the restless forages I made through the apartment.
When the telephone rang I jumped for it eagerly: it was a wrong number. Finally I resolved to spend the evening at the laundromat. If she has any. She never allows anything as plebeian as washing to desecrate the well-kept expanse of her back lawn.
Neither of us has been in her cellar or even heard her acknowledge the existence of one. So when the mounds of unwearable clothes become intolerable and the drawersful of wearable ones are all but empty, we go to the laundromat. Sunday evening is a better time to go than any of the rest of the weekend. The nearest laundromat is a subway stop away, and Saturdays are bad because of the shoppers on the bus, again elderly ladies hatted and gloved, though not as immaculately; and Saturday evenings bring out the young moviegoers.
I prefer Sunday evenings; they are emptier. That evening I looked forward to the trip. I was anxious to get out of the apartment. I was stuffing the pertinent garments into my laundry bag when Ainsley wandered in.
Now some intuition had alerted her. She did not smile. Just essentials. She disappeared, and came back in a few minutes with both arms around a huge heap of multicoloured lingerie. She meant, I knew, to convey her disapproval of this flagrant exhibition of soilage. We are all, I silently quoted at her, utterly unclean. I was remembering a previous incident, a black-silk-swathed old lady with a mauve hat who had clutched at me one Sunday as I was getting off the bus.
She was disturbed not only because I was breaking the fourth commandment, but also because of the impious way I had dressed in order to do it: Jesus, she implied, would never forgive my plaid running shoes.
Then I concentrated on one of the posters above the windows, a colourful one of a young woman with three pairs of legs skipping about in her girdle. I must admit to being, against my will, slightly scandalized by those advertisements. They are so public. I wondered for the first few blocks what sort of person would have enough response to that advertisement to go and buy the object in question, and whether there had ever been a survey done on it.
Though perhaps the lithe young woman was a self-image; perhaps the purchasers thought they were getting their own youth and slenderness back in the package.
You have to be careful about things like that, I reflected; they have a way of creeping up on you before you know it. The laundromat was just along the street from the entrance to the subway station. When I was actually standing in front of one of the large machines I discovered I had forgotten the soap.
The person stuffing clothes into the machine next to mine turned towards me. He looked at me without expression. I stood there holding the box. He was scrutinizing me more closely. Without that official shell you look sort of — exposed.
Was that good or bad? I checked quickly to make sure no seams were split or zippers undone; then I began to cram the clothes hastily into the machines, putting darks in one and lights in the other.
Judging by his uninflected voice it had been merely a comment; and as a comment it was accurate enough, I thought wryly. I shut the two thick glass doors and put the quarters in the slots, paused till the familiar sloshing sound informed me that all was well, then went over to the line of chairs provided by the management and sat down in one of them.
What could I have been thinking of when I left the apartment? He sat down next to me. Not that I mind particularly. Have some chocolate? We both stared at the long line of gleaming white machines, and especially at those three glass windows, like portholes or aquaria, where our clothes were going round and around, different shapes and colours appearing, mingling, disappearing, appearing again out of a fog of suds.
He finished his chocolate bar, licked his fingers, smoothed and folded the silver wrapper neatly and put it in one of his pockets, and took out a cigarette. Except I can vary my programmes a little; if I get tired of watching the same stuff I can always put in a pair of green socks or something colourful like that. To get some more. He might have been talking to himself. I leaned forward too, so I could see his face. In the blue- tinged fluorescent lighting of the laundromat, a light that seems to allow no tones and no shadows, his skin was even more unearthly.
He has an amazing memory for detail. The thing is, they repeat themselves and repeat themselves but they never get anywhere, they never seem to finish anything. Once I went to the zoo and there was a cage with a frenzied armadillo in it going around in figure-eights, just around and around in the same path.
I can still remember the funny metallic sound its feet made on the bottom of the cage. He lit another cigarette. In English. All of us. It was quite strange when you walked in the other day and turned out not to be. Poor old Fischer is writing his thesis now, he wanted to do it on Womb Symbols in D. Lawrence but they all told him that had been done. I try not to think about it. I write a sentence a day. On good days, that is. He stared at them, morosely. Maybe you might be happier doing something else.
Something happens to your mind. Nobody in any other game would be crazy enough to hire me. I looked at him and tried to picture him working at a place like Seymour Surveys; even upstairs with the intelligence men; but without success. The subject of graduate school seemed to have been exhausted. Unless you count that new pseudo-British joint with the coat of arms and the monastery wall.
Fish was from Vancouver, he keeps missing the sea. The machines clicked off. We both got wire laundry-carts and transferred our clothes to the dryers. Then we sat down in the chairs again. A seedy old man shuffled through the door, saw us, and shuffled out again. He was probably looking for a place to sleep. Last week I set fire to the apartment, partly on purpose. I think I wanted to see what they would do.
Maybe I wanted to see what I would do. Mostly though I just got interested in seeing a few flames and some smoke, for a change. I know about all of that and none of it does any good. Besides, they sort of take care of me, you know. It seemed foolhardy to me, like an uncooked egg deciding to come out of its shell: there would be a risk of spreading out too far, turning into a formless puddle. My restlessness of the afternoon had vanished; I felt calm, serene as a stone moon, in control of the whole white space of the laundromat.
Still, there was something most unchildlike about him, something that suggested rather an unnaturally old man, old far beyond consolation. I thought too, remembering his duplicity about the beer interview, that he was no doubt capable of making it all up. It may have been real enough; but then again, it may have been calculated to evoke just such a mothering reaction, so that he could smile cleverly at the gesture and retreat further into the sanctuary of his sweater, refusing to be reached or touched.
He must have been equipped with a kind of science-fiction extra sense, a third eye or an antenna. I bring out the Florence Nightingale in them. But be careful. Florence Nightingale was a cannibal, you know. I felt mice-feet of apprehension scurrying over my skin.
What exactly was I being accused of? Was I exposed? I could think of nothing to say. The dryers whirred to a standstill. I got up. He got up too. He seemed again quite indifferent to my presence.
We stood side by side without speaking, pulling the clothes out of the dryers and wadding them into our laundry bags. We shouldered our laundry and walked to the door together, I a little ahead. I paused for an instant at the entrance, but he made no move to open the door for me so I opened it myself.
When we were outside the laundromat we turned, both at once so that we almost collided. We stood facing each other irresolutely for a minute; we both started to say something, and both stopped.
Then, as though someone had pulled a switch, we dropped our laundry bags to the sidewalk and took a step forward. His mouth tasted like cigarettes. We both stopped kissing at the same time, and stepped back. We looked at each other for another minute. Then we picked up our laundry bags, slung them over our shoulders, turned around, and marched away in opposite directions.
The whole incident had been ridiculously like the jerky attractions and repulsions of those plastic dogs with magnets on the bottoms I remembered getting as prizes at birthday parties. She had a wholesome, competent face and she was holding a bottle and smiling.
I found it strange not to have to go to the office this morning. The highways outside the city will be coagulating with traffic even this early, people already beginning to come back from their weekends at summer cottages, trying to beat the rush. Ainsley is in the kitchen. I can hear her walking about on the other side of the door, humming intermittently.
I feel hesitant about opening the door. It was my subconscious getting ahead of my conscious self, and the subconscious has its own logic. The way I went about doing things may have been a little inconsistent with my true personality, but are the results that inconsistent?
Of course I was more involved with Peter all along than I wanted to admit. So much of it is a matter of elementary mechanical detail, such as furniture and meals and keeping things in order. But Peter and I should be able to set up a very reasonable arrangement. Though of course we still have a lot of the details to work out. Peter is an ideal choice when you come to think of it.
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