Ladders to Fire Read Free Page A

but the
pain of the whole world, in which ugliness became not a personal experience of
ugliness but the world’s experience with all ugliness. By enlarging and
situating it in the totality of the dream, the unbearable event became a large,
airy understanding of life which gave to her eyes an ultimately triumphant power which people mistook for strength, but which was in
reality courage. For the eyes, wounded on the exterior, turned inward, but did
not stay there, and returned with the renewed vision. After each encounter with
naked unbearable truths, naked unbearable pain, the eyes returned to the
mirrors in the inner chambers, to the transformation by understanding and
reflection, so that they could emerge and face the naked truth again.
    In the inner chambers there was a treasure
room. In it dwelt her racial wealth of Byzantine imagery, a treasure room of
hierarchic figures, religious symbols. Old men of religion, who had assid at her birth and blessed her with their wisdom. They
appeared in the colors of death, because they had at first endangered her
advance into life. Their robes, their caps, were made of the heavily
embroidered materials of rituals illumined with the light of eternity. They had
willed her their wisdom of life and death, of past and future, and therefore
excluded the present. Wisdom was a swifter way of reaching death. Death was
postponed by living, by suffering, by risking, by losing, by error. These men
of religion had at first endangered her life, for their wisdom had incited her
in the past to forego the human test of experience, to forego the error and the
confusion which was living. By knowing she would reach all, not by touching,
not by way of the body. There had lurked in these secret chambers of her
ancestry a subtle threat such as lurked in all the temples, synagogues,
churches—the incense of denial, the perfume of the body burnt to sacrificial
ashes by religious alchemy, transmuted into guilt and atonement.
    In the inner chamber there were also other
figures. The mother madonna holding the child and
nourishing it. The haunting mother image forever holding a small child.
    Then there was the child itself, the child
inhabiting a world of peaceful, laughing animals, rich trees, in valleys of
festive color. The child in her eyes appeared with its eyes closed. It was
dreaming the fertile valleys, the small warm house, the Byzantine flowers, the
tender animals and the abundance. It was dreaming and afraid to awaken. It was
dreaming the lightness of the sky, the warmth of the earth, the fecundity of
the colors.
    It was afraid to awaken.

    Lillian’s vivid presence filled the hotel room.
She was so entirely palpable, visible, present. She was not parceled into a
woman who was partly in the past and partly in the future, or one whose spirit
was partly at home with her children, and partly elsewhere. She was here, all
of her, eyes and ears, and hands and warmth and interest and alertness, with a
sympathy which surrounded Djuna —questioned,
investigated, absorbed, saw, heard…
    “You give me something wonderful, Lillian. A
feeling that I have a friend. Let’s have dinner here. Let’s celebrate.”
    Voices charged with emotion. Fullness. To be
able to talk as one feels. To be able to say all.
    “I lost Gerard because I leaped. I expressed my
feelings. He was afraid. Why do I love men who are afraid? He was afraid and I
had to court him. Djuna , did you ever think how men
who court a woman and do not win her are not hurt? And woman gets hurt. If
woman plays the Don Juan and does the courting and the man retreats she is
mutilated in some way.”
    “Yes, I have noticed that. I suppose it’s a
kind of guilt. For a man it is natural to be the aggressor and he takes defeat
well. For woman it is a transgression, and she assumes the defeat is caused by
the aggression. How long will woman be ashamed of her strength?”
    “ Djuna , take this.”
    She handed her a silver medallion she was
wearing.