It’s not impossible that it was myself that I was flaying, because at times the pain was quite spectacular. It was all through my body, to the very core; I’ve only once felt anything like that. But as I already said, physical pain doesn’t frighten me anymore. It ceased to frighten me after my oldest son was born. The night before I went into labor, a woman came to the house to give me some baby clothes she no longer needed, and, sitting on my sofa, she told me that in the throes of childbirth, the last thing she had wanted was to be prone on her back, numb from the lower spine down. On the contrary, the only conceivable approach was to be able to get up and walk right toward the pain, to meet it with every ounce of strength she had. This sounded like such common sense to me that when my water broke the very next night and I found myself in the hospital, doubled over with pain, I refused everything, refused even the IV that they insisted on trying to jab into the back of my hand the moment I arrived, and for the next seventeen hours I went right toward the pain of bringing a nearly ten-pound baby through what had always struck me as a rather narrow passage. When I could finally speak again, having come to after the blood lost from all the tearing, and was lying flat out on the bed, trying to sweep together the shredded filaments of my mind, I told someone who called on the phone, curious to know what it had all been like, that I felt like I had met myself in a dark valley. That I had gone down and met myself in the valley of hell. And so this pain, this flaying of the self or whatever it was that was happening to me now, was not about to do me in. This pain, as if my whole being were being pared away from the bone. Or maybe I was not afraid of the pain because I believed that my illness, whatever it was, was also a form of health, the continuation of a transformation already under way.
It must have been during the eye of the storm of my fever that I found myself half a mile out from the house, without a clue as to how I’d gotten there. I was watching a blot in the sky that I took to be an eagle circling overhead. It cried out, and as if the cry had come from me, I suddenly felt that what was straining behind my lungs was joy. A wild exultancy of the kind that would sometimes attack me without warning in childhood. A joy so powerful that I thought it might break my chest. Then it did, it must have broken right through, because for a moment I wasn’t contained inside anything anymore. I went clean through to the sky. Isn’t that the meaning of ecstasy, as the Greeks gave it to us? In that garden on the Mani, in love and fury, I’d read it: Ex stasis: to go out of oneself. But as much as I may have admired the Greeks then, in the end I could never be that, and if you are a Jew standing in the desert going completely out of yourself, falling out of the old order, it will always be something different, won’t it? Lech lecha, God told Abram, who had not yet become Abraham: Go—go away from where you live, the land of your fathers the land of your birth, to the place that I will show you. But Lech lecha was never really about moving from the land of his birth over the river to the unknown land of Canaan. To read it like that is to miss the point, I think, since what God was demanding was so much harder, was very nearly impossible: for Abram to go out of himself so that he might make space for what God intended him to be.
In the eye of the storm—I don’t know what else to call it. It must have also been then, during that bolt of energy that came from the cessation of pain, that I decided to drag the bed outside. It was difficult to get it through the door. I had to turn the bed at an angle to fit the headboard through, and naturally it jammed and I had to climb out through the window and come round the front to pull it. While I tugged maniacally, the dog howled from inside, skittering around and sniffing the other side of the bed. I think she thought that I meant to trap her inside and leave. When the headboard suddenly popped free, I fell back and the dog shot out of the house.
I dragged it some twenty feet out. With great satisfaction, I smoothed out the bedsheets and the tartan blanket and lay down under the tremendous sky. The dog finally cooled off and lowered herself onto the stony ground next to the bed. She rested her chin on the edge of the mattress, waiting to see if I had anything more to add. She must have once had a litter, maybe many, because her teats hung morosely down from her belly. I wondered where they were now, her children. I wondered if she ever considered them. Perhaps I spoke to her like that: as one creature that had borne the physical demands of bringing life into the world to another, who had the story of life-giving written into her body from conception, leaving her no choice, it seemed, but to enact it. Who felt the sheer force of its law move through her, and wondered whether there was any difference between it and love. Otherwise, I no longer remember the subject of our talks.
It was late afternoon, and the desert was turning ochre and the temperature was perfect as I watched a few pink clouds pass overhead. I was pleased with the results of my work. So much so, that after a while I decided to drag the rest of the furniture outside, too. The reading chair covered in a piece of old canvas to hide the ripped seat, the worktable, and even the typewriter and the stack of pages and the stone paperweight, which would now serve a purpose, as without it the pages would have been scattered by the wind. At first it looked like some sort of desert tag sale, which was not at all what I’d had in mind, and so I spent a long while arranging the jumble out in the open in front of the house, adjusting the spaces between each pair of items, laying it all out toward some inexpressible perfection. When it was almost perfect but not quite, I nipped back into the house and came out with the slippers, which I placed next to the bed, and Forests of Israel, which I laid on the night table.
A wave of exhaustion broke over me. I could barely take another step, and sank down on the mattress. I couldn’t imagine how I’d found the strength for it all. And yet, lying there out in the open, I felt close to that fullness that one sometimes senses is there beneath the surface of everything, invisible, as Kafka once wrote, far away, but not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf, and which, if we call it by the right name, might come.