You can have it.
I am a man, and the Mountains of Abyssinia, and my Blue Nile flows towards the desert. There should be a woman somewhere far South, like a great lake, sending forth her White Nile towards the desert, too: and the rivers will meet among the Slopes of the World, somewhere.
But alas, every woman I’ve ever met spends her time saying she’s as good as any man, if not better, and she can beat him at his own game. So Lake Victoria Nyanza gets up on end, and declares it’s the Mountains of Abyssinia, and the Mountains of Abyssinia fall flat and cry: “You’re all that, and more, my dear!”—and between them, you’re bogged.
I give it up.
But at any rate it’s nice to know what’s wrong, since wrong it is.
If we were men, if we were women, our individualities would be lone and a bit mysterious, like tarns, and fed with power, male power, female power, from underneath, invisibly. And from us the streams of desire would flow out in the eternal glimmering adventure, to meet in some unknown desert.
Mais nous avons changé tout cela.
I’ll bet the yokel, even then, was more himself, and the stream of his desire was stronger and more gurgling, than William Wordsworth’s. For a long time the yokel retains his own integrity, and his own real stream of desire flows from him. Once you break this, and turn him, who was a yokel, into still another Number One, an assertive newspaper-parcel of an ego, you’ve done it!
But don’t, dear, darling reader, when I say “desire”, immediately conclude that I mean a jungleful of rampaging Don Juans and raping buck niggers. When I say that a woman should be eternally desirable, don’t say that I mean every man should want to sleep with her, the instant he sets eyes on her.
On the contrary. Don Juan was only Don Juan because he had no real desire. He had broken his own integrity, and was a mess to start with. No stream of desire, with a course of its own, flowed from him. He was a marsh in himself. He mashed and trampled everything up, and desired no woman, so he ran after every one of them, with an itch instead of a steady flame. And tortured by his own itch, he inflamed his itch more and more. That’s Don Juan, the man who couldn’t desire a woman. He shouldn’t have tried. He should have gone into a monastery at fifteen.