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
