Moise and the World of Reason by Tennessee Williams Read Free Book Online Page A

sad story that I began to shed tears as if I were listening to Lady Day again.
    â€œDidn’t mean to distress you.”
    As if to console me for a loss as great as his own, he began to stroke me here and there and God knows where it would have been next if the cab hadn’t lurched to a contemptuous halt in front of the dockside loft.
    I said, “Thanks for the ride,” and sprang out.
    â€œOh, do we get out here?”
    â€œI do but not you.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œBecause I live here.”
    â€œIn a place this big and dark? Nobody could live here!”
    â€œNo, but I do.”
    He gasped and said, “God almighty! I didn’t know you were
dead!
”
    â€œForget it or fuck it.”
    â€œBaby, I meant I thought that only
I
was. The single tenant of the great ebony tower! I didn’t know that we occupy the same world.
Hey, wait!”
    I don’t know if he meant me or the cab, but the cab lurched quickly away, and I am not at all sure that reporting this encounter in such detail is justified by the few little touches of parapsychology in it, faint as the bits of blue in Moise’s final (?) painting.

II
    WHICH BRINGS ME HOME and alone to my little Blue Jay in the West. I should probably explain that a Blue Jay is a grade-school notebook which is approaching extinction like certain species of real birds. I was so attached to it, the Blue Jay notebook, to the pale blue regularity of its parallel lines on each side of the page, that I had them mailed to me, in lots of a dozen, by their manufacturers in a Southern city that’s near my birthplace, Thelma, Alabama. Well, actually, I have them mailed to Moise, since this abandoned warehouse has no mailing address. I can’t rid myself of the feeling, even now when I’m thirty, that I am still a fugitive from the truant officer of Thelma. And from my hardshell Baptist mother who hasn’t written me, care of Moise, in a couple of years and so may have gone from earthly concerns by this time, including her excessive concern for her only child, which is me. Or have they put her away now, and which would be better? When a person is put away, if it’s a woman, she will occupy a rocker in what is called a dayroom. When she is agitated, she will rock fast. When she is sinking into the lethargy of despair, she will rock slower and slower, till finally the rocker stops altogether, and then they are likely to put her on another floor where people exist like vegetables, withering into a equinox which is opposite to vernal.
    (Of course I prefer to think that she has departed without stopping the rocker.)
    These pencil-scribblings in the Blue Jay, and soon to be on other surfaces available for scribblings, would be illegible to anyone less familiar with my own kind of speedwriting than I am familiar with it to the point of hysteria.
    The word “hysteria” derives from the word for womb in one of the ancient tongues, Greek or Latin. I know this because a woman has a complete or partial hysterectomy when all or some of her female organs are surgically removed because of disease or sadistic caprice upon the part of a surgeon.
    Deciding to conserve the remainder of the Blue Jay, I start to write upon rejection slips, a great horde of them in and out of their envelopes stashed beneath BON AMI , which is a deterrent to the progress of this thing as I can’t help reading the hasty little comments of the editors. The lady editors are consistently gentler than the gentlemen ones who are consistently waspish. One says simply, “Hysterical, see a doctor.” Another says, “An inflamed libido, suggest ice packs on head and crotch till corrected.”
    Yes, I agree, but
    I am at home and alone during those wolf’s hours that extend in an upward sweep of hysteria from midnight till winter daylight, unrecognizable here since never admitted to the hooked rectangle.
    The libido is in the unconscious which is in the