The Final Entry of Don Juan’s Private Journal
On a summer night too hot for sleep. I got up from my bed and walked the courtyard while Maria lay in the room above. The new one was in a small bed next to ours. There was an odd sense of stillness, though in late summer the night is never quiet. The tips of the branches against the milky clouds seemed to be listening- There was the relentless bleat of the night insects- Their repetition was like the drumbeat of desire. Strangely enough the image of Maria’s breasts, full of milk, came to my mind. But there is nothing I wanted from her. She would have accommodated me if I had asked it. But the she needed sleep. And there was nothing I wanted to do, though I felt it in my loins. Strange indeed, there can be desire, but nothing desired.
She, like me, is on the way to a place unknown. I seek to enter her heart, her body with delight. And compassion- There is throbbing like the insect cries. I feel its urgency in my bones, and yet there is some thing else. After all of these years, all the lovers, I still do not know how to name it. In bed I have become a listener, intent like a sibyl. Intoxicated I hear voices and speak out mysteries whose meaning I don’t understand.
The biblical phrase “carnal knowledge” is a curious one. Does one ever have knowledge? It is as if we were God’s alphabet with no more awareness of the text we form than the letters on a printed page know its meaning.
Strip off, strip down. Close, with her (and be encountered). The Angel Jacob wrestled with was female. And the contest came to this: “will you at last cry out, ‘I do not know the world.’”