Scene | Dec 13 2007
While shaving just now, I remembered that I hadn’t sent this email yet, although I wrote most of it last night (everything up to the paragraph about snow). I felt bad because you’ll think I’m not thinking of you when really I am. So I put down the razor and turned off the water.
On the way to my desk I imagined myself standing across the street with a bunch of strangers, watching our building burn to the ground. Every now and then a new person would arrive, and I would see it slowly dawn on this person that I must live in the burning building because half my face isn’t shaven.
Recently I’ve been having these experiences. I walk out of the apartment and stand at the top of the stairs waiting for K as she locks the door. While standing there I realize I can’t remember walking out of the apartment. I remember being about to leave, but I can’t remember leaving. Nonetheless I must have left because here I am at the top of the stairs.
I’ve never liked the word cunt. Not that pussy is any better. Cunt seems demeaning, while pussy seems—what?—silly. I can never decide which to use in my diary. I try cunt for a time, then switch to pussy, then return to cunt, sometimes in a single sentence.
In desperation I resort, now and then, to vagina. But vagina is so medical-sounding that I invariably cross it out. My diary is littered with sentences in which I’ve drawn a line through vagina and written cunt or pussy in the space above it.
A few times I’ve considered using the word sex (meaning vagina), but sex is far too poetical. No one uses sex (meaning vagina) in everyday speech for fear of sounding lofty or prudish, or both at once.
Baudelaire, if I’m not mistaken, used the word sex. Or rather his translators did—lord knows what word Baudelaire used.
Bernhard, by contrast, never mentioned this part of the female anatomy. Of course I’m referring to that portion of Bernhard’s work which has been translated into English. Because for all I know, Bernhard used the German equivalent of cunt or pussy in one of his lesser plays or novels, or perhaps in one of his poems (not one of which has yet made it into English!)
Still, I’m dubious, because nowhere in Bernhard’s translated work—twelve novels, three plays, and a three-volume memoir—does he refer, direct or otherwise, to sex (meaning sex). The only possible exception is the scene in Bernhard’s final novel, Extinction, in which the naked protagonist encounters his spinster sister in the hall on the morning of their parents’ funeral and sneers, Haven’t you seen a naked man before?
In a sense this is Bernhard’s only sex scene—his only scene, really: a repulsive man taunts his sister with his nakedness.
I celebrate myself, and sing myself. I develop and maintain smart, standards-compliant websites. I collaborate with design shops needing expert XHTML/CSS coding. Clear and sweet is my soul. 
