I lay there, having drowned in West, my body having drifted down to lie there in the comforting, subliminal ooze on the sea floor of History. Lying there, I had what I thought then was a fine per- spective on my own history, and saw that the girl I had known that summer a long time back hadn’t been beautiful and charming but had merely been smooth-faced and healthy, and though she had sung songs to Jackie-Bird while she cradled his head on her breast, she hadn’t loved him, but had merely had a mysterious itch in the blood and he was handy and the word love was a word for the mysterious itch. And that she had been tormented by the mysterious itch and torn between its impulse and fear, and that all her withholdments and hesitations had not been prompted by some dream of making “love mean something’ and making me understand that dream but that they had been prompted by all the fears which the leaning, sibilant, sour-breathed old dough-faces of conventional society had whispered into her ear like fairy godmothers while she lay in her cradle, and that those withholdments and hesitations were no better or worse than the hottest surrender nor better or worse than those withholdments practiced by Lois for other ends. And in die end you could not tell Anne Stanton from Lois Seager, for they were alike, and though the mad poet William Blake wrote a poem to tell the Adversary who is Prince of This World that He could not ever change Kate into Nan, the mad poet was quite wrong, for anybody could change Kate into Nan, or if indeed the Prince couldn't change Kate into Nan it was only because Kate and Nan were exactly alike to begin with and were, in fact, the same with only the illusory difference of name, which meant nothing, for names meant nothing and all the words we speak meant nothing and there was only the pulse in the blood and the twitch of the nerve, like a dead frog's leg in the experiment when the electric current goes through. So when I lay there on the bed in Long Beach, and shut my eyes, I saw in the inward darkness as in mire the vast heave and contortion of numberless bodies, and limbs detached from bodies, sweating and perhaps bleeding from inexhaustible wounds. But finally this spectacle, which I could summon up by the mere act of closing my eyes, seemed merely funny to me. So I laughed out loud. I laughed out loud, and then after watching for some time the rhythmic flushing of the sea mist by the neon sign, I went to sleep. When I woke up I made ready to go back to the place and the things I had come from. Years before, a young girl had lain there naked on the iron bed in my room with her eyes closed and her hands folded over her breast, and I had been so struck by the pathos of her submissiveness and her trust in me and of the moment which would plunge her into the full, dark stream of the world that I had hesitated before laying my hands upon her and had, without understanding myself, called out her name. At that time I had had no words for what I felt, and now, too, it is difficult to find them. But lying there, she had seemed to be again the little girl who had, on the day of the picnic, floated on the waters of the bay, with her eyes closed under the stormy and grape-purple sky and the single white gull passing over, very high. As she lay there that image came into my head, and I had wanted to call her name, to tell her something—what, I did not know. She trusted me, but perhaps for that moment of hesitation I did not trust myself, and looked back upon the past as some- thing precious about to be snatched away from us and was afraid of the future. I had not understood then what I think I have now come to understand: that we can keep the past only by having the future, for they are forever tied together. Therefore I lacked some essential confidence in the world and in myself. She came, as time passed, to suspect this fact about me. I do not know that she had words to describe the fact to herself. Or she only had the easy words people gave her: wanting to have a job, studying law, doing some- thing. We went different ways in the world, as I have said, but I had with me always that image of the little girl on the waters of the bay, all innocence and trustfulness, under the stormy sky. Then, there came the day when that image was taken from me. I learned that Anne Stanton had become the mistress of Willie Stark, that some- how by an obscure and necessary logic I had handed her over to him. That fact was too horrible to face, for it robbed me of some- thing out of the past by which, unwittingly until that moment, I had been living. So I fled west from the fact, and in the West, at the end of His-tory, the Last Man on that Last Coast, on my hotel bed, I had dis- covered the dream. That dream was the dream that all life is but the dark heave of blood and the twitch of the nerve. When you flee as far as you can flee, you will always find that dream, which is- the dream of our age. At first, it is always a nightmare and horrible, but in the end it may be, in a special way, rather bracing and tonic. At least, it was so for me for a certain time. It was bracing because after the dream I felt that, in a way, Anne Stanton did not exist. The words Anne Stanton were simply a name for a peculiarly complicated piece of mechanism which should mean nothing whatsoever to Jack Burden, who himself was simply another rather com- plicated piece of mechanism. At that time, when I first discovered that view of things— really discovered, in my own way and not from any book— I felt that 1 had discovered the secret source of all strength and all endurance. That dream solves all problems. At first It was, as I have said, rather bracing and tonic. For after the dream there is no reason why you should not go back and face the fact which you have fled from (even if the fact seems to be that you have, by digging up the truth about die past, handed over Anne Stanton to Willie Stark), for any place to which you may flee will now be like the place from which you have fled, and you might as well go back, after all to the place where you belong, for nothing was your fault or anybody’s fault, for things are always as they are. And you can go back in good spirits, for you will have learned two very great truths. First, that you cannot lose what you have never Second, that you are never guilty of a crime which you did not commit. So there is innocence and a new start in the West, after all. If you believe the dream you dream when you go there.
and
a settlement named Don Jon, New Mexico, I talked to a man propped against the shady side of the filling station, enjoying the only patch of shade in a hundred miles due east. He was an old fellow, seventy-five if a day, with a face like sun-brittled leather and pale-blue eyes under the brim of a felt hat which had once been black. The only thing remarkable about him was the fact that while 332 you looked into the sun-brittled leather of the face, *which seemed as stiff and devitalized as the hide on a mummy's jaw, you would suddenly see a twitch in the left cheek, up toward the pale-blue eye. You would think he was going to wink, but he wasn’t going to wink. The twitch was simply an independent phenomenon, unrelated to the face or to what was behind the face or to anything in the whole tissue of phenomena which is the world we are lost in. It was remarkable, in that face, the twitch which lived that little life all its own. I squatted by his side, where he sat on a bundle of rags from which the handle of a tin skillet protruded, and listened to him talk. But the words were not alive. What was alive was the twitch, of which he was no longer aware. After my tank had been filled, I continued to watch that twitch, with glances stolen from the highway, as we sat side by side in the car and hurtled eastward. He was going east, too, going back. That was back in the days when the dust storms were blowing half the country away and folks headed west like the lemmings on a ram- page. Only, the folks who got there lacked the fine ecstasy of the lemmings. They did not start swimming in teeming, obsessed hordes straight out to the middle of the blue Pacific. That would have been the logical thing for them to do, just start swimming, pa and ma, grandpa and grandma, and Baby Rosebud with the running sore on her little chin, the whole kit and kaboodle of 'em, flailing the water to a froth and heading out. But, no, they were not like the lemmings, and so they just sat down and starved slowly in California. But this old fellow didn't. He was going back to north Arkansas to starve where he had come from. “Californy," he said, '‘hit is jes lak the rest of the world, only it is more of hit." “Yeah," I replied, “that is a fact." “You been thar?" he demanded. I told him I had been there. “You goen back home?" he asked. I told him I was going home. We rode across Texas to Shreveport, Louisiana, where he left me to try for north Arkansas. I did not ask him if he had learned the truth in California. His face had learned it anyway, and wore the final wisdom under the left eye. The face knew that the twitch was the live thing. Was all. But, having left that otherwise unremarkable man, it occurred to me, as I reflected upon the thing which made him remarkable, that if the twitch was all, what was it that could know that the twitch was all? Did the leg of the dead frog in the laboratory know that the twitch was all when you put the electric current through it? Did the man's face know about the twitch, m and how it was all? And if I was all twitch how did the twitch which was me know that the twitch was all? Ah, I decided, that is the mystery. That is the secret knowledge. That is what you have to go to California to have a mystic vision to find out. That the twitch can know that the twitch is all. Then, having found that out, in the mystic vision, you feel clean and free. You are at one with the Great Twitch.
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