Dusklands by Coetzee J. M

Author:Coetzee, J. M. [Coetzee, J. M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Africa, Fiction, Modern Classics, Novel
Publisher: Random House
Published: 1974-01-06T02:00:00+00:00

It was neater in Dutch than in Nama, which still lived in the flowering-time of inflexion. I bored a sheath in the earth and would have performed the ur-act had joy and laughter not reduced me to a four-inch dangle and helpless urination. “God”, I shouted, “God, God, God, why do you love me so?” I frothed and dribbled. There was neither thunder nor lightning. I laughed till the muscles that cribbed my skull ached. “I love you too, God. I love everything. I love the stones and the sand and the bushes and the sky and Klawer and those others and every worm, every fly in the world. But God, don’t let them love me. I don’t like accomplices, God, I want to be alone”. It was nice to hear this come out. But the stones, I decided, so introverted, so occupied in quietly being, were after all my favourites.

I threw off my clothes and swaddled myself in blankets. My feet rubbed each other in ecstasy, my thighs lay together like lovers, my arms embraced my chest. I contemplated the miracle of the heavens and slid into a dream in which a slow torrent of milk, warm and balmy, poured out of the sky down my eager throat.

There is a little black beetle, to be found near water, of which I have always been fond. If you lift the rock under which he lives he will scuttle away. If you block his path he will try another path. If you block every path, or if you pick him up, he will curl his legs under his body and feign death. Nothing can trick him from this pretence; hence the lore that he dies of fright. You may pull his legs off one by one and he will not wince. It is only when you pull the head off his body that a tiny insect shudder runs through him; and this is certainly involuntary.

What passes through his mind during his last moments? Perhaps he has no mind, perhaps his mind is extraverted as mere behaviour, as they say of the praying mantis (hotnotsgod). Nevertheless, in a formal sense he is a true creature of Zeno. “Now I am only half-way dead. Now I am only three-fourths dead. Now I am only seven-eighths dead. The secret of my life regresses infinitely before your probing finger. You and I could spend eternity splitting fractions. If I keep still long enough you will go away. Now I am only fifteen-sixteenths dead”.

Under the Hottentot captivity I had not failed to keep the Zeno beetle in mind. There had been legs, metaphorical legs, and much else too, that I had been prepared to lose. In the blindest alley of the labyrinth of my self I had hidden myself away, abandoning mile after mile of defences. The Hottentot assault had been disappointing. It had fallen on my shame, a judicious point of attack; but it had been baffled from the beginning, in a body which partook

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