Insel Read online

  The glare in Capoulards Cafe grew dim. Insel’s brain floated up from his head, unraveled, projected its convolutions. They straightened in endless lines across a limitless canvas, a map of imminent direction. On the whole of space were only a few signboards on which grew hands, alive and beckoning.

  “Of course,” I was saying, “I don’t know where you are—wherever it is is very far away. And I am just as far away. I have existed before my time.”

  “How true,” said Insel.

  “Whatever I have found out belongs to a future generation.”

  “How true,” said Insel again, devoutly.

  “And by the bye,” I commented, “the sentiment of one generation is the neurosis of the next. All that stuff you have of ‘suffering for love’ is the most awful slush.”

  “I know—I know,” he agreed with fervor.

  —Indefinable lines of cerebral nerve marked on the map of inertia, unrealizable journeys. Along one route, die Irma dissolved to a puddle of serum, to be absorbed by the all-pervasive whiteness. To travel there was difficult; that volatile fungoid lichen outcrept one as one picked one’s way, grew tall until one must turn back.

  My former trust in the ripening of Insel’s work had had its foundation in that very “parting of the ways” he told me he had come to, where he turned assured toward something eternally immune to his host of elementals.

  It had taken so short a time for this parting of the ways to subdivide into the thousand directions. Yet even now he was rich in postponement. While that commonplace back of a woman watching for signs on his painted firmament turned in anonymous patience to this chart of unarrival.

  The curtain of the sky came down and she was not there— “If the painting no longer ‘goes,’ ” Insel surprisingly was ruminating, “I shall do as you do. Write. What a profession. One carries one’s studio about with one. A sheet of paper—”

  Because it was only a brain that had been spilled, the blank of orientation faded—the thousand directions withdrew, leaving us at a destination.

  Nothingness.

  It was not black as night nor white as day, nor gray as death—only a nonexistent irritation as to what purposed inconsequence had led us into the illusion of ever having come into being.

  The haunting thing about this Nothingness was that it knew we were still there— Two unmatched arrows sprung from its meaningless center—were surrounded by a numeral halo—I had to leave Insel, it was ten to eight.

  26

  “HOW GOES THE BOOK,” HE ASKED WITH HIS FORMER appreciative intimacy as we passed out of the cafe. I was feeling exceptionally “good” about my work just then, vainly imagining I had criticized my last incompletion.

  “It is going wonderfully,” and with a flash of that exhibitionism of the spirit succeeding to inordinate periods spent with no means of communication—I threw out my hands—elatedly believing I had reached the stage prescribed by Colossus for creation, when all that one has collected rolls out with the facility of the song of a bird.

  “Sehen Sie, Insel,” I explained, “Man muss reif sein—One must be ripe.”

  I felt Insel crack as if he had been shot alert.

  “Can she possibly mean it,” I could “hear” him ask himself as he wheeled towards me, noticing me for the first time; and then convinced, as I stood a little exalted on the corner of the street, decide, “Here is a woman with whom there is absolutely nothing to be done.”

  I must have had my hands outspread, for Insel dropped like a soft moth into my open palm— On his face was a smile unlike all the fluctuant smiles of hallucinated angels I had watched there. It was a normal smile. Yet in the old abnormal voice of whispering emotion, laying his dried branch across my shoulder, he choked, “Ich komme nach Hause.”

  He was “coming home.”

  Across his gentle brow floated the will-o’-the-wisp trailing a pair of boiled oysters in its wake, Mädchen, like missiles that have not gone off, he scattered abroad.

  “But Insel,” I reminded him, “you have an appointment for dinner.”

  Insel gaped at me.

  The illocal foci of his pupils exploding incredulously, darted in all the directions of the radial underpattern of his life. It took some moments to sort these simultaneous impressions. When I had done so, I longed to get even with Insel, to say “I have absorbed all your Strahlen. Now what are you going to do?”

  I said nothing of the kind. Because firstly it was not true, and secondly, it might inspire in him a worse obsession; for one thing one feared as above all else menacing Insel was some climax in which his depredatory radioactivity must inevitably give out.

  So all I said was “Good-bye.”

  “Good-bye,” smiled Insel, his bittersweet stare both dazed and stoic, “Danke für alles—Thanks for everything.”

  VISITATION

  I

  In the organic continuity of family life, one is under the earth caught among bare roots of imperceptible plants whose flowers lean out smiling toward the solar stimulation of a heterogeneous society.

  II

  Women particularly—lose their lovely faces in private—so much so that it is only in the occasional hazard of a party one may gauge the effect of creatures, one has actually in some remote biological process given birth to.

  III

  Alda who, in a crowd, caused me to blink as at the too near approach of a brilliant star—

  IV

  totally extinguished on her filial visits. Her face almost blotched with a fundamental erosion my essence produced in her—developed a kind of set jowl. As she sat down before me she would clutch that soft white fist. I watched it grow rosy as it squeezed out the inadvertible tide of my futility.

  “Aaron,” she announced, “doesn’t see why he should give you that hundred dollars”—and with that heinous crow I seemed to call up from the depths of so many of my intimates—“Your book!” she sneered, “It’s an excuse ___ to get money out of us!”

  V

  “You’re no good—never have been any good—” This blank truth struck me with the finality of unconsciousness. It was from very far away in time & space I heard her aggravation hollow out a course for my second childhood.

  “You wanted the business—we gave you the business—You wanted an apartment—we gave you the apartment and you sell it for nothing & come over here!”

  “But Aaron told me to sell it at that price — — —”

  VI

  I expostulated.

  “Pooh—he was drunk,” Alda retorted in a streak of decision.

  It is the reverse of enlightenment to see oneself ‘in reality’. Of the image & likeness that forms our inexpressible Being—in the metamorphosis of passing through other brains—all that appears to our companions is a chimney sweep.

  VII

  As she drew to a close, taunting me with my “painting _ _ _ that idleness where other artists prepared a whole exhibition in two months,” Fact dilated for me. Alda’s recriminations were identical with mine of myself. Incipient in my mother’s womb their transcription effacing time in me they now reverberated from the lipsticked mouth of a child I loved.

  VIIA

  My year of psychic discipline of those recriminations had gone for naught. Returned, they dragged my frightened ears even in the direction of the grave.

  VIII

  “I can proove it” _ _ _ _ Alda was babbling her way to the door “with your awful belly-aching letters _ _ _ proove it to anybody. I’ve kept them all.”

  IX

  Soon my breath grew regular again. “Now tell me,” I asked Sofia who had been present—“am I a disgruntled old nitwit who imagines monstrous things being said to her _ _ or did you hear what I heard?”

  “I heard,” Sofia answered, “You imagined nothing”—

  then with a flat neutrality—“she intended to be cruel __ _ _ _ _ So what? Do you think it’s exceptional that a daughter should hate her mother—”

  X

  Sofia, after that pr
olonged séance with her make-up which condenses woman’s life, returned in her hat & coat.

  —– “Shan’t be back this evening.”

  “Then would you buy me a sandwich there’s nothing to eat.”

  “No time”—she objected—

  Bewildered, I reminded her she had asked to housekeep for me—

  XI

  “I have no intention of doing so—you’re a beastly nuisance.”

  “But Sofia—I don’t understand. You begged me to come—”

  “I had to have you here—to be able to get off on you all I dared not ‘get off’ on Alda __ __ I’m scared of her,” she smiled engagingly.

  XII

  I also smiled as she left me alone. Intellectually it was refreshing, this ability of hers to express unabashed exactly what she felt with an honesty unveiling the ego. Ignoring distinctions between thee & me—she was with

  XIII

  precise calculation equally unbiased about the (rare) unpleasant or unfair reports of her made by other people.

  XIV

  Nevertheless my pain, itself behaving like an insupportable hunger, became grotesque when coupled with normal appetite, whereas, should I venture outside the cold would cleave it with a super-phenomenal blade.

  XV

  I ate a pat of butter & some dry corn-flakes left in the kitchen, then sickeningly relapsed to the depths of the divan. The pain stood out sharply as if in spite of the dim amber lamps it cast the impenetrable shadow of the gloomy sitting room.

  XVI

  I had lain there for a long while alternating that halfhearted squirm one opposes to agony & that unwilling patience imposed by agony, when, all at once the compact silence became curiously volatile. Drawn from my couch, I rose erect, walking, so far did my head turn sideways, rather like a crab. As if again I must ‘take stock’ of someone as I went my way.

  XVII

  There was no mistaking this ecclesiastic ‘current’. Here was my drug addict; divested of those shreds of flesh, easily as an aria relayed across the Atlantic, a recognisable ‘invisibility’ come to visit me.

  XVIII

  As an automaton I returned his salute, with the same ecstatic, friendly yet clerical benediction whose significance I realised, as I inclined in that direction, to be our mutual forgiveness. For his dope-ring duplicity? My written account of him?

  XIX

  His ‘presence’, conveying a solemn hilarity, declared in my brain “Ess ist doch nicht schlimm genüg __ _ _ Nothing they can do to you is bad enough _ _ _ _ you’re a revenge on your unfair advantage __ _ _ they cannot see what we see.”

  And the pain lay dead among the shadows.

  XX

  This reminder of the strange attributes of the drug fiend renewed my curiosity as to the major factor in the human make-up.

  Man’s dynamism.

  According to my experience in Geneva the force that drives us is of incalculable voltage conducted by the spinal column in the manner of a lightening rod.

  XXI

  If, as I suspect, we have our existence in an intelligential ether this force [flux] of life conveys to us not only our animation but also our intellectual concepts.

  [MISSING XXI A]

  XXII

  There are two modes in meditation, one in which the intellect functions with supernormal rapidity; one in which eased of even the normal staccato it slows down to the tempo of a prevalent wisdom at peace.

  [MISSING XXIII]

  XXIV

  Now I was engaged with a kind of surrealist man. Constructing, demolishing him kaleidoscopically, hoping to demonstrate how he ‘worked.’

  Made of that Shadow, beside me in Geneva, whose universe re-emerged as the omniprevalent ray struck him. What I seemed to be so intent on discovering was the nature of the

  xxv

  fusion of that Ray with himself.

  An Island in the air sustained by unseen attributes, this man derived his form from the symmetric evidence of the one half of the man being a replica of the other half. Attached to his blind back, his antedeluvian tail anchored him in the past.

  XXVI

  Nuzzling the future, the features of more sharp-scented animals have dwindled to incomparable beauty in his face of pinkish pulp.

  Behind this fragile front lies a delicate radio-raceiver of cosmic urges which canalised, intricated, misconstrued by his brain, compose the rhythm of his individuality.

  XXVII

  Become clair-voyable, whereas his body displays a crimson circulation, another half-extraneous phosphorescent circulation, some vortex in the intelligential ether spins through his head; as though he hung from the cosmic consciousness by a ring of light.

  XXVIII

  Taking on another aspect, emitting electric waves, he broadcast his thoughts which were returned to him conditioned by their effectiveness; ideas, operative as hands, shaping events.

  XXVIII A

  While, as directed by remote control above him in an ‘atmosphere’ enveloping his brain, shone the magnetic beam that guided him—the soul.

  XXIX

  I saw him submitted to opposite gravities, terrestial & celestial, pulling him downward & upward. When these were equal, he was in equilibrium. When he responded only to the terrestial, his body became heavy like lead; when more rarely, to the celestial, his spirit lightening, he diminished in weight.

  [MISSING XXX]

  XXXI

  So Manifold are the workings of the life-force _ _ so vast its resource_ _ _ Again [__] man appeared to me in the phenomenal world with his head at the same time in the eternally revealing cosmic consciousness.

  In this consciousness lay strata of various inspirations __ _ _ somewhere among them a strata of absolute felicity to which the majority of minds vaguely aspire. The clerical locate this Felicity in a region, the lay-man in a reaction, in this surrealist man the reaction derives from that region.

  XXXII

  Out of his head arose an ethereal dumb-waiter, stopped at the desired strata & having taken on the provision required descended to the intellectual laboratory __ __ __ __ __

  The elevator falls apart, leaving antennal strands feeling their way into the stratal continuum. Up there where he is aware of the penetration of his mind by an extra-luminous radiance.

  XXXIII

  A cosmic obviousness everywhere defined escapes him completely, intangible as God.

  The destructible robot, soft machine, senses a mystery, & as if attempting to locate the ‘genius’ revealed in a work of art through the analysis of the chemical properties of paint digs ever more deeply into his island Base in search of the origin of his impeti _ _ _

  For a moment, he imprisons the omniprevalent ‘leaning’ towards intercommunication in a gland _ _the last _ least co-operater becomes the initiator.

  XXXIV

  But when I watch this Sur-realist Being for long, I see him turn from his unfolding of concentrated distance; dropping his microscope in favour of an opposite lens which, contracting diffused distance, brings the unprecedented patterns of that cosmic obviousness he faces, within his view.__________

  The surrealist man is very short, awakened by desire—eclipsed by ennui.

  xxxv

  The surrealist man is very long, stretching like a live wire from 1938 as far into the future & through equally numerous stages of evolution as he reaches into the past. His beginning is a speck of transparency, impinged upon by the sun. His ultimate presence would have been virtually invisible to a twentieth-century eye.

  His way is strewn with stone implements, embedded bones & machinery he discarded as superannuated models of functions he slowly develops within himself. Transport telepathy, radio, & television together with surprising future facilities are effected by ‘centres’ in his cerebellum controlling the various potentials of the life-ray. The religious symbols of the precocious visionary in his early days, translated, become the ‘scientific’

  XXXVI

  commonplace of his further condi
tion.

  Even as of old angels grew wings & emitted haloes, he is buoyant in defiance of atmospheric pressure, his brain gives off a radium glow become apparent. He has X-ray eyes.

  XXXVII

  Arduous is his transformation. While experimenting upon the regulation of his electo-atomic velocities & resistances, he must pass the danger point at which he takes the risk of the power that holds him together dynamiting him with his own force.

  xxxvIII

  Of this danger, as of every phase he passes through, he stages repeated rehearsals with his heavy mechanical toys.

  Playing the role of a bombastic cell in an aggregate organism blasting surrounding cells to make room for his own inflation; his mind still bound by numeric (al?) restriction & geometric space waivers an infinite accommodation he imposes upon

  XXXIX

  himself a human menace—from without.

  In an amazing ‘dédoublement’ he confronts himself with an ‘Enemy’. Avid aggressor whose terrifying eyes are the eyes of an incontactable alien.

  During the ensuing horror any observer at large may witness a conjurous displacement: viewed from the opposite side the assailed becomes the assailant. He is blowing up his simulacrum.

  40

  “Mamma! I can’t set the curls at the back of my neck.”

  In lightning metamorphoses, the clockwork of the surrealist man runs down.

  At once an atom indistinguishable among a frontierless agglomeration and a tower of Babel built of all mankind _ _ _ he fades _ _ _ in ephemeral undulations to the etheric contour like a frame for training a fancy box-tree his substance clings to.

  Now only the searchlight shafts of his future eyes __ __ __ __