Empire of the Senseless. Кэти Акер
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I loved her because she was the only person, that is, cunt, who loved me.
Then, because mommy still wanted me to be dead because she was, they gave me a new nurse. Since this one was English, she was proper and didn’t show (me) any feeling. I decided she was a witch.
As I approached adulthood I learned there are three types of females: dead, dumb, and evil.
My life was a life of separation. I remember. Even when I was growing up life was so boring and unpleasant that living didn’t matter to me. Only children who believe in something bother being evil and worshipping Satan. But I was a good child: I did everything exactly that my English nanny ordered me.
Nanny was an alcoholic. As a child I didn’t understand this. I couldn’t understand why she hated my first nurse. I hated Nanny for hating nursey. I hated Nanny the way children hate: absolutely. As fire burns. Most of my conscious moments were fantasies of burning up parts of Nanny’s body.
I knew I shouldn’t think like this. I knew my whole mind was twisted and perverted. If becoming an adult equals the process of acquiring self-consciousness, my first recognition of my adult self was my perception of my desire to torture and kill. I hated. So they sent Nanny away; I won the first round; but I still knew (remembered) I wanted to kill.
I have preserved my memory of that naughty period.
Since she’s wearing a short T-shirt and ankle socks, the beautiful naked woman looks like a child. A black leather snake which isn’t moving lies on her back. She tries to roll either way across the bed, but can’t because two extremely wide black leather bands, held by thick steel rings to the bed-posts which are far from each other, encase her pink wrists. My sister was my real mother’s and father’s daughter. She tortured me by making me look at drawings depicting lobotomies. These scenes caused me horrible nighmares, for I was sensitive.
I questioned to the point of obsession whether other humans are naturally evil, and if so why.
Unable to answer this question, I prayed to God about whom they had told me. God is He Who is unknowable. My sister was so malicious and my nightmares were so violent that I knew any Creator must be a sick pig. I named God ‘Sickpig’ and ‘Turdshit’. Everytime I saw a dog shit on the street, I thought of God. I had no idea what all this meant.
As for cripples beggars malformed bodies lobotomized women and other poor people, everytime I saw one of these living turds on the street I breathed so hard to avoid convulsing I almost convulsed.
The only thing I couldn’t tolerate was being told what to do. Since beggars or anyone else who was nothing told me who I was, I couldn’t bear any of them. I wanted to kill beggars because I was too scared to kill my real tormentor, my sister.
I shall now by means of my profound rational processes find the explanation for my madness, and human socially unacceptable behaviour.
Once my sister said to people who were walking behind her: ‘Look at my little tail.’ Another time she told people that she liked the portrait a certain artist friend had made of her because it showed her having a tiny penis.
I felt very happy when my sister’s huge hat, while we were both in an auto, flew away.
My sister and I are playing in a room. We are between four and six years old. My sister’s hand takes up my cock which is so small it’s almost non-existent. She rubs the non-existent. Then she tells me that my nurse whom I do love because my nurse loves me does this same thing with the cock of the gardener.
My sister was a tomboy and had a very high IQ, higher even than mine. Even though her IQ was high, she couldn’t understand how a high IQ and the desire to be loved as a female could exist together in one body. Since her body thus had to be monstrous, she refused to go out of our parents’ house. She knew who she was: since she was a freak, she was unlovable. She had to and did pay, rather my parents paid, someone to love her. She loved this paid companion because the paid companion loved her and at the same time she detested the paid companion because, since the paid companion loved her only for economic reasons, she was proved to be unlovable. When my sister suicided at the age of twenty-one I didn’t cry.
3. Beyond The Extinction of Human Life
I asked Abhor what she wanted with me. Did she also want to destroy my identity?
‘I work for this man. I’m collecting for him.’ As if I understood what she meant, blindly, I followed her out of my room. They say love’s also blind, but, for me, love has equalled pain.
Her boss’s name was Schreber. ‘I’ve never seen you before, have I?’ he asked.
‘No.’
‘I’m going to tell you something about yourself.’ Finally perhaps I’d learn something about myself. ‘You’re masochistic to the point of suicidal and, actually, physically damaged. You believe that, and the neurological and hormonal damage probably is, permanent.’
‘Yes.’
He wasn’t going to let me interrupt him. ‘You were … disrupted in your childhood by the usual causes. I’m not the least bit interested in psychological interpretations. They’re passé. But there’s one thing.’
I interrupted him. ‘I don’t give a damn. Not only about psychology. About myself.’ I continued, ‘You’re fat and ugly, sir, but I’m dead. Psychology and my psychology’s a dead issue.’ There were a lot of dead bodies floating around the world. ‘All I want to know from you is what you want from me.’ Otherwise, I wanted to be alone.
Because, for me, desire and pain’re the same.
I didn’t want her. I couldn’t so I didn’t want. Frigidity was a way of life. I didn’t know if phenomena such as desires which’re fleeting even mattered. Psychology isn’t here a dead issue. I decided I would keep her because I had to because she said I had to be hers.
Is reality always this unknown?
My friends informed me that the boss’s real name was Schreber. Dr Schreber. He’s honest enough, they said, as bosses are honest, to pay me for my work. So I could pay off my last boss so he wouldn’t off me. Of course there’s no money. Money’s flimsy paper people who don’t have power carry on them. What they do with money I don’t know. I needed drugs.
‘Your neurological and hormonal damage is making you degenerate so fast, faster than if you had AIDS,’ the fat man informed me in front of the cunt, ‘that within a couple of months you’re going to be a mongoloid, even stupider than a lobotomy case, due to all the hatred which is festering in you, unless I inject a certain enzyme into your bloodstream and then enable you to receive a full blood transfusion. You will get this enzyme, your saviour, flea, only if you do what I want.’
‘What do you want?’
‘For you to do exactly what I want until that time.’
The trouble was I had no way of knowing if he meant to keep his part of the deal. I couldn’t ask the cunt I thought I loved. Since I was thus dragging my tail through unknowable territory, my memory was useless. My memory was as dead as my desire used to be.
The next day, on a street, a garbage dump in front of the river, my former boss himself cut the throat of the fuck who informed on me in front of me. He slaughtered her because it was a practical way of making room for a fresh employee. Capitalism needs new territory or fresh blood.
I saw: blood sprayed from a jugular.
I needed my drug.
For a long time I had remained apathetic. So sure that my words meant nothing to anyone that I no longer spoke unless circumstances forced me to. So sure that my relations to the world were null that it didn’t matter to what I said ‘yes’. When I was young frivolity and trivia had been my weapons; now I did whatever I was told because I was no longer me. That is, the I who was acting was theirs, separate from the I who knew and