Mercy (51 page)

who could go from my father’s living room out into the

world. I got all fucked up with this peace stuff—how you can

make it better, anything better, if you care, if you try. I didn’t

want to kill Nazis, or anyone. In this sense I knew right from

w rong; it was an immutable sense o f right and wrong; that

killing killed the one doing the killing and that killing killed

something precious and good at the center o f life itself. I knew

it was wrong to take an individual life, mine, and turn it into a

weapon o f destruction; I knew I could and I said no I w on’t; I

could have; I was born with the capacity to kill; but m y father

changed m y heart. I said, it’s Nazism you have to kill, not

Nazis. People die pretty easy but cruelty doesn’t. So you got

to find a w ay to go up against the big thing, the menace; you

have to stop it from being necessary— you have to change the

world so no one needs it. Y ou have to start with the love you

have to give, the love that comes from your own heart; and

you can’t accept any terror o f the body, restrictions or

inhibitions or totalitarian limits set by authoritarian types or

institutions; there’s nothing that can’t be love, there’s nothing

that has to be mean; you take the body, the divine body, that

their hate disfigures and destroys, and you let it triumph over

murder and rage and hate through physical love and it is the

purest democracy, there is no exclusion in it. Anything,

everything, is or can be communion, I-Thou. Anything,

everything, can be transformed, transcended, opened up,

turned from opaque to translucent; everything’s luminous,

lambent, poignant, sweet, filled with nuance and grace,

potentially ecstatic. I thought I had the power and the passion

and the will to transform anything, me, now, with the simple

openness o f m y own heart, a heart pretty free o f fear and

without prejudice against life; a heart loving life. I didn’t have

a fascist heart or a bourgeois heart; I just had this heart that

wanted freedom. I wanted to love. I wanted; to love. I never

grasped the passive part where if you were a girl you were

supposed to be loved; he picks you; you sit, wait, hope, pray,

don’t perspire, pluck your eyebrows, be good meaning you

fucking sit still; then the boy comes along and says give me

that one and you respond to being picked with desire, sort o f

like an apple leaping from the tree into the basket. I was me,

however, not her, whomever; some fragile, impotent,

mentally absent person perpetually on hold, then the boy

presses the button and suddenly the line is alive and you get to

say yes and thank you. In Birkenau it didn’t matter what was

in your gorgeous heart, did it; but I didn’t learn, did I? I

wanted to love past couples and individuals and the phoney

baloney o f neurotic affairs. I didn’t want small personalities

doing fetishized carnal acts. I thought adultery was the

stupidest thing alive. John Updike made me want to puke. I

didn’t think adultery could survive one day o f real freedom. I

didn’t think it was bad— I thought it was moronic. I wanted a

grand sensuality that encompassed everyone, didn’t leave

anyone out. I wanted it dense and real and full-blooded and

part o f the fabric o f every day, every single ordinary day, all

the time; I wanted it in all things great and small. I wanted the

world to tremble with sexual feeling, all stirred up, on the

edge o f a thrill, riding a tremor, and I wanted a tender embrace

to dissolve alienation and end war. I wanted the w orld’s colors

to deepen and shine and shimmer and leap out, I didn’t want

limits or boundaries, not on me, not on anyone else either; I

didn’t want life flat and dull, a line drawing done by some

sophomore student at the Art League. I thought w e’d fuck

power to death, because sexual passion was the enemy o f

power, and I thought that every fuck was an act o f passion and

compassion, beauty and faith, empathy and an impersonal

ecstasy; and the cruel ones, the mean ones, were throwbacks,

the old order intransigent and refusing to die, but still, the

fuck, any fuck, brought someone closer to freedom and power

closer to dying. And yes, the edge is harrowing and poverty is

not kind and power ain’t moved around so easy, especially not

by some adolescent girl in heat, and I fell very low over time,

very low, but I had devotion to freedom and I loved life. I

w asn’t brought low in the inner sanctum o f m y belief; until

after being married, when I was destroyed. I remembered

Birkenau. I wished I could find my w ay back to the line, you

wait, you walk, you wait, you walk some more, it’s over. I

know that’s ignorant; I am ignorant. I wanted peace and I had

love in m y heart and being hurt didn’t mean anything except I

wasn't dead yet, still alive, still having to live today and right

now; being hurt didn’t change anything, you can’t let fear

enter in. According to the w ay I saw life, I incarnated peace.

M aybe not so some understand it but in m y heart I was peace;

and I never thought any kind o f making love was war; make

love, not war; and when it was war on me I didn’t see it as such

per se; war was Vietnam. I never thought peace was bland; or I

should be insipid or just wait. Peace has its own drive and its

own sense o f time; you need backbone; and it wants to win—

not to have the last word but to be the last word; it’s fierce,

peace is; not coy, not pure, not simpering or whimpering, and

maybe it’s not always nice either; and I was a real peace girl

who got a lot o f it wrong maybe because staying alive was

hard and I did some bad things and it made me hard and I got

tough and tired, so tired, and nasty, sometimes, mean:

unworthy. W hy’d Gandhi put those young girls in his bed and

make them sleep there so he could prove he wouldn’t touch

them and he could resist? I never got nasty like that, where I

used somebody else up to brag I was someone good. There’s

no purity on this earth from ego or greed and I never set out to

be a saint. I like everything being all mixed up in me; I don’t

have quarrels with life like that; I accept w e’re tangled. In my

heart, I was peace. Once I saw a cartoon in
The New Yorker
,

maybe I was eighteen. It showed a bunch o f people carrying

picket signs that said “ Peace. ” And it showed one buxom

woman carrying a sign that said “ Piece. ” I hated that. I hated

it. But you cither had to be cowed, give in to the pig shit

behind that cartoon, or you had to disown it, disown the

dumb shit behind it. I disowned it all. I disowned it without

exception. I kept none o f it. I pushed it o ff me. I purged m y