passage from a modern masterpiece
posted 27 October 2009, 15:16 by Mike
“She turns. ‘Hold up my fur.’ He obeys. ‘Be careful. Don’t touch my skin.’ Earlier in this game she was nervous, constipated, wondering if this is anything like male impotence. But thoughtful Pointsman, anticipating this, has been sending laxative pills with her meals. Now her intestines whine softly, and she feels shit begin to slide down and out. He knees with his arms up holding the rich cape. A dark turd appears out the crevice, out of the absolute darkness between her white buttocks. He spreads his knees, awkwardly, until he can feel the leather of her boots. He leans forward to surround the hot turd with his lips, sucking on it tenderly, licking along its lower side … he is thinking, he’s sorry, he can’t help it, thinking of a negro’s penis, yes he knows it abrogates part of the conditions set, but it will not be denied, the image of a brute African who will make him behave…The stink of shit floods his nose, gathering him, surrounding. It is the smell of Passchendaele, of the salient. Mixed with the mud, and the putrefaction of corpses, it was the sovereign smell of their first meeting, and her emblem. The turd slides into his mouth, down into his gullet. He gags, but bravely clamps his teeth shut. Bread that would have floated in porcelain waters somewhere, unseen, untasted—risen now and baked in the bitter intestinal over to bread we know, bread that’s light as domestic comfort, secret as death in bed … Spasms in his throat continue. The pain is terrible. With his tongue he mashes shit against the roof of his mouth and begins to chew, thickly now, the only sound in the room…”-Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow