Ladders to Fire Read Online Free PDF Page B

more
abandoned, more hungry, more orphaned than ever. Every time a parent embraced
his child I suffered so much that finally I ran away back to the asylum. And I
was not the only one. And besides this emotional starvation we got even less to
eat—the allowance being spent on the whole family. And now I lost my last
treasure: the dreaming. For nothing in the dreams took the place of the human
warmth I had witnessed. Now I felt utterly poor, because I could not create a
human companion.”
    This hunger which had inhabited her entire
being, which had thinned her blood, transpired through her bones, attacked the
roots of her hair, given a fragility to her skin which was never to disappear
entirely, had been so enormous that it had marked her whole being and her eyes
with an indelible mark. Although her life changed and every want was filled
later, this appearance of hunger remained. As if nothing could ever quite fill
it. Her being had received no sun, no food, no air, no warmth, no love. It
retained open pores of yearning and longing, mysterious spongy cells of
absorption. The space between actuality, absolute deprivation, and the sumptuosity of her imagination could never be entirely
covered. What she had created in the void, in the emptiness, in the bareness
continued to shame all that was offered her, and her large, infinitely blue
eyes continued to assert the immensity of her hunger.
    This hunger of the eyes, skin, of the whole
body and spirit, which made others criminals, robbers, rapers ,
barbarians, which caused wars, invasions, plundering and murder, in Djuna at the age of puberty alchemized into love.
    Whatever was missing she became: she became
mother, father, cousin, brother, friend, confidant, guide, companion to all.
    This power of absorption, this sponge of
receptivity which might have fed itself forever to fill the early want, she
used to receive all communication of the need of others. The need and hunger
became nourishment. Her breasts, which no poverty had been able to wither, were
heavy with the milk of lucidity, the milk of devotion.
    This hunger…became love.
    While wearing the costume of utter femininity,
the veils and the combs, the gloves and the perfumes, the muffs and the heels
of femininity, she nevertheless disguised in herself an active lover of the
world, the one who was actively roused by the object of his love, the one who
was made strong as man is made strong in the center of his being by the
softness e, ve . Loving in men and women not their
strength but their softness, not their fullness but their hunger, not their
plenitude but their needs.

    They had made contact then with the deepest
aspect of themselves— Djuna with Lillian’s emotional
violence and her compassion for this force which destroyed her and hurled her
against all obstacles, Lillian with Djuna’s power of
clarification. They needed each other. Djuna experienced deep in herself a pleasure each time Lillian exploded, for she
herself kept her gestures, her feeling within an outer form, like an Oriental.
When Lillian exploded it seemed to Djuna as if some
of her violent feeling, so long contained within the forms, were released. Some
of her own lightning, some of her own rebellions, some of her own angers. Djuna contained in herself a Lillian too, to whom she had
never given a moment’s freedom, and it made her strangely free when Lillian
gave vent to her anger or rebellions. But after the havoc, when Lillian had
bruised herself, or more seriously mutilated herself (war and explosion had
their consequences) then Lillian needed Djuna . For
the bitterness, the despair, the chaos submerged Lillian, drowned her. The hurt
Lillian wanted to strike back and did so blindly, hurting herself all the more.
And then Djuna was there, to remove the arrows
implanted in Lillian, to cleanse them of their poison, to open the prison door,
to open the trap door, to protect, to give transfusion of blood, and peace to
the wounded.
    But it was Lillian