Let me tell you what I have to say: Your murder was not properly structured; your sacrifice was in vain; you proved nothing, you only proved yourself to be a biological backfire; you did not kill yourself because your despair at existence in contemptuous conditions did not even let you write about it; the truth is: you lived in despair because you had to kill yourself.

You taught me a great deal about life, Schwab: you made me realize in what way I am superior to all of you: I ACCEPT THIS EXISTENCE IN CONTEMPTUOUS CONDITIONS HUMBLY AND GRATEFULLY. This is my HAVING for whose sake I AM GIVEN . . .

I am like that wolf in Bessarabia: I bite at everything around me, slavering, I bite into my flanks, and the bullet that is to release me shoots only my leg off, and I limp away on three legs, grateful THAT I AM ALIVE . . .

That is my monstrous power: the power with which I murder even when I don’t murder with my hands: FEAR IS MY POWER: wolf hunger and wolf tenacity and wolf fear in my sucked-in belly. . .

The fear, for instance, THAT I WILL NOT WRITE MY BOOK: this book with no solid ground plan or outline, no foundation-laying idea, no shaping principle. This book, which increases and proliferates like a cancer, nourished by my moods and whims, by my hopes, wishes, dreams, and visions, my ecstasies, illuminations, contritions, despairs, revelations, insights, perceptions, wrong erroneous foregone conclusions, drives, compulsions, likes and dislikes, by my wisdom and by my folly . . . This book, which grows out of all these things like one of the monstrous houses that fools build out in provincial nooks somewhere, remote from the times, like turned-up giant-dwarf grottoes among the gillyflowers and Aaron’s rods of their rustic gardens: with a hundred arches, stairways, galleries, oriels, and balconies; gabled, domed, and betowered; crowned with merlons, steps, ramps, balustrades; adorned with blind niches, vases, rosettes, and lanterns. All the formal elements of our form-proliferating, form-devouring Europe hybridly piled one on top of the other, crusted one on top of the other . . . thus proliferations of form coming not from a lack of form, but rather from a glut of it. I want to say everything in this book: everything I know, presume, believe, recognize, and sense: everything I have gone through and lived through; the way I have gone through it and lived through it; and, if possible, why and to what end I went through it and lived through it . . .

and I say it with the ardor of credulous simplicity—with blind faith in God—that a specific form must ultimately be ingrown in something that is so immediately and compulsively produced out of necessity (and against all expectations to the contrary) . . .

•

. . . and while I was thinking all these things, a memory flashed through me, terrifyingly, a memory of a conversation with S. (in front of Pollock’s canvases at the first Documenta? or later? at some trashy Action Painting show here in Paris?). Anyway, a conversation I outlined rather accurately and didn’t come across while going through my papers during the past few days. A conversation then that must be misplaced or lost, like so many other things . . . and (precisely because it’s been lost) seemed to contain something that must finally, as the conceptual essence of my book, contain the key to its form . . .