I believe that the soul exists, but not all the time. It has to be whipped into shape, like an egg cream, like a political party, like a slave. But this calling forth of the soul is fraught, for what is whipped is not the soul but the self. The soul will only come forward when the self is effaced, and afterward, when it has departed, it is the body that must bear the pain of the beating. In your search you find yourself on my bed. I close your eyes and I seal your mouth, I fill your ears and I stuff your nose with amyl, I hide your face from you and from me. On the bed you are a naked body and on the bed you are a body without a head. You are a stranger on my bed, your face and all it signifies hidden from me and your body and all it signifies hidden from you. From now on you can only feel; from now on I can only act. Only I can act and I can only act on the shackled pink X that is your body. The black egg that your head has become retains its mysteries, and inside that egg you are trapped. The distant slapping and lashing and beating and punching are powerless blows against a shell that won’t crack, and the pain that you feel, but can’t see or hear, or cry out against, or know, or describe, is different from any pain you have ever felt before. Because your external senses have been made useless it moves inside of you, inside your body and then, inevitably, inside your mind, and soon it comes to feel like a part of you. That part of you is a wind, a tornado that lifts you from where you are—my bed, and this world, and your life—and sets you down somewhere else. Later you will be able to say nothing about this place save that whatever is there can’t be experienced through the senses, but while you are there you don’t even know you’re there. Only I know that. When you come back all you know is that you aren’t there anymore, and that you hurt. Distant points of violation identify themselves, and the pain you feel in each place is distinct from the pain in each of the other places. For a moment you slip inside each of these pains and for each of these moments you rise a few inches above the bed and are back where you had been. But then you fall, and fall again, again and again you fall until finally a knowledge that is more a yearning than an idea makes you still: you realize that it’s only in the moments after it leaves you that you know the soul in terms you can understand, in words, in remembered sensations. That’s all. That is all there is, and you know then that you can only lie here bound to the bed at your wrists and ankles but bound to the world by ties even more constraining, and you lie there, and you watch your soul retreat from you, and it retreats from you like the loss of your mother’s body.