The original of Laura

DN: CHAPTER SIX

"An enkephalin present in the brain has now been produced synthetically." "It is like morphine and other opiate drugs." Further research will show how and why "morphine has for centuries produced relief from pain and feelings of euphoria." [invent trade name, e.g. cephalopium; find substitute term for enkephalin]

I taught thought to mimick an imperial neurotransmitter, an awesome messenger carrying my order ot self-destruction to my own brain. Suicide made a pleasure, its tempting emptiness settling for a single line. The student who desires to die should learn first of all to project a mental image of himself upon his inner blackboard. This surface which at its virgin best has a dark-plum, rather than black, depth of opacity is none other than the underside of one's closed eyelids. To ensure a complete smoothness of background, care must be taken to eliminate the hypnagogic gargoyles and entoptic swarms which plague tired vision after a surfeit of poring over a collection of coins or insects. Sound sleep and an eye bath should be enough to cleanse the locus. Now comes the mental image. In preparing for my own experiment — a long fumble which these notes shall help novices to avoid — I toyed with the idea of drawing a fairly detailed, fairly recognizable portrait of myself on my private blackboard. I see myself in my closet glass as an obese bulk with formless features and a sad porcine stare; but my visual imagination is nil, I am quite unable to tuck Nigel Dalling under my eyelid, let alone keeping him there in a fixed aspect of flesh for any length of time. I then tried various stylizations: a Dalling-like doll, a sketchy skeleton or would the letters of my name do? Its recurrent "i" coinciding with our favorite pronoun suggested an elegant solution: a simple vertical line across my field of inner vision, I, could be chalked in an instant, and what is more I could mark lightly by transverse marks the three divisions of my physical self: legs, torso, and head.

Several months have now gone since I began working — not every day and not for protracted periods — on the upright line emblemizing me. Soon, with the strong thumb of thought I could rub out its base, which corresponded to my joined feet. Being new to the process of self-deletion, I attributed the ecstatic relief of getting rid of my toes (as represented by the white pedicule I was erasing with more than masturbatory joy) to the fact that I suffered torture ever since the sandals of childhood were replaced by smart shoes, whose very polish reflected pain and poison. So what a delight it was to amputate my tiny feet! Yes, tiny, yet I always wanted them, roily polly dandy that I am, to seem even smaller. The daytime footwear always hurt, always hurt. I waddled home from work and replaced the agony of my dapper oxfords by the comfort of old bed slippers. This act of mercy inevitably drew from me a voluptuous sigh which my wife, whenever I imprudently let her hear it, denounced as vulgar, disgusting, obscene. Because she was a cruel lady or because she thought I might be clowning on purpose to irritate her, she once hid my slippers, hid them furthermore in separate spots as one does with delicate siblings in orphanages, especially on chilly nights, but I forthwith went out and bought twenty pairs of soft, soft Carpetoes while hiding my tear-staining lace under a Father Christmas mask, which frightened the shopgirls.

For a moment I wondered with some apprehension if the deletion of my procreative system might produce nothing much more than a magnified orgasm. I was relieved to discover that the process continued sweet death's ineffable sensation which had nothing in common with ejaculations or sneezes. The three or four times that I reached that stage I forced myself to restore the lower half of my white "I" on my mental blackboard and thus wriggle out ol my perilous trance.

I, Philip [Wild], lecturer in Experimental Psychology, University of Ganglia, have suffered for the last seventeen years from a humiliating stomach ailment which severely limited the jollities of companionship in small dining rooms.

I loathe my belly, that trunkful of bowels, which I have to carry around, and everything connected with it — the wrong food, heartburn, constipation's leaden load, or else indigestion with a first installment of hot filth pouring out of me in a public toilet three minutes before a punctual engagement.

There is, there was, only one girl in my life, an object of terror and tenderness, an object too, of universal compassion on the part of millions who read about her in her lover's books. I say "girl" and not woman, not wife nor wench. If I were writing in my first language I would have said "fille." A sidewalk cafe, a summer-striped Sunday: il regardait passer les filles — that sense. Not professional whores, not necessarily well-to-do tourists but "fille" as a translation of "girl" which I now retranslate: [Here the story line jumps to sell-dissolution and this card comes much later.] from heel to hip, then the trunk, then the head [until?] nothing was left but a grotesque bust with staring eyes.]

Sophrosyne, a platonic term for ideal self-control stemming from man's rational core.