1
How deftly we keep love from each other. It is no trick at all: the
movement of a cat that leaps a low barrier. You have—if the truth be
known—loved only one man and that was before my time. Past him you have
never thought nor desired to think. In his perfections you are perfect.
You are likewise perfect in other things. You present to me the surface
of a marble. And I, we will say, loved also before your time. Put it
quite obscenely. And I have my perfections. So here we present ourselves
to each other naked. What have we effected? Say we have aged a little
together and you have borne children. We have in short thriven as the
world goes. We have proved fertile. The children are apparently healthy.
One of them is even whimsical and one has an unusual memory and a keen
eye. But—It is not that we have not felt a certain rumbling, a certain
stirring of the earth but what has it amounted to? Your first love and
mine were of different species. There is only one way out. It is for me
to take up my basket of words and for you to sit at your piano, each his
own way, until I have, if it so be that good fortune smile my way, made a
shrewd bargain at some fair and so by dint of heavy straining supplanted
in your memory the brilliance of the old firmhold. Which is impossible.
Ergo: I am a blackguard.
* * * * *
_The act is disclosed by the imagination of it. But of first importance
is to realize that the imagination leads and the deed comes behind.
First Don Quixote then Sancho Panza. So that the act, to win its praise,
will win it in diverse fashions according to the way the imagination has
taken. Thus a harsh deed will sometimes win its praise through laughter
and sometimes through savage mockery, and a deed of simple kindness will
come to its reward through sarcastic comment. Each thing is secure in its
own perfections._
2
After thirty years staring at one true phrase he discovered that its
opposite was true also. For weeks he laughed in the grip of a fierce
self derision. Having lost the falsehood to which he’d fixed his hawser
he rolled drunkenly about the field of his environment before the new
direction began to dawn upon his cracked mind. What a fool ever to be
tricked into seriousness. Soft hearted, hard hearted. Thick crystals
began to shoot through the liquid of his spirit. Black, they were:
branches that have lain in a fog which now a wind is blowing away.
Things move. Fatigued as you are watch how the mirror sieves out the
extraneous: in sleep as in waking. Summoned to his door by a tinkling
bell he looked into a white face, the face of a man convulsed with
dread, saw the laughter back of its drawn alertness. Out in the air:
the sidesplitting burlesque of a sparkling midnight stooping over a
little house on a sandbank. The city at the horizon blowing a lurid red
against the flat cloud. The moon masquerading for a tower clock over the
factory, its hands in a gesture that, were time real, would have settled
all. But the delusion convulses the leafless trees with the deepest
appreciation of the mummery: insolent poking of a face upon the half-lit
window from which the screams burst. So the man alighted in the great
silence, with a myopic star blinking to clear its eye over his hat top.
He comes to do good. Fatigue tickles his calves and the lower part of
his back with solicitous fingers, strokes his feet and his knees with
appreciative charity. He plunges up the dark steps on his grotesque deed
of mercy. In his warped brain an owl of irony fixes on the immediate
object of his care as if it were the thing to be destroyed, guffaws at
the impossibility of putting any kind of value on the object inside or of
even reversing or making less by any other means than induced sleep—which
is no solution—the methodical gripe of the sufferer. Stupidity couched
in a dingy room beside the kitchen. One room stove-hot, the next the
dead cold of a butcher’s ice box. The man leaned and cut the baby from
its stem. Slop in disinfectant, roar with derision at the insipid blood
stench: hallucination comes to the rescue on the brink of seriousness:
the gas-stove flame is starblue, violets back of L’Orloge at Lancy. The
smile of a spring morning trickles into the back of his head and blinds
the eyes to the irritation of the poppy red flux. A cracked window blind
lets in Venus. Stars. The hand-lamp is too feeble to have its own way.
The vanity of their neck stretching, trying to be large as a street-lamp
sets him roaring to himself anew. And rubber gloves, the color of moist
dates, the identical glisten and texture: means a ballon trip to Fez.
So one is a ridiculous savior of the poor, with fatigue always at his
elbow with a new jest, the newest smutty story, the prettiest defiance
of insipid pretences that cannot again assert divine right—nonsensical
gods that are fit to lick shoes clean: and the great round face of Sister
Palagia straining to keep composure against the jaws of a body louse. In
at the back door. We have been a benefactor. The cross laughter has been
denied us but one cannot have more than the appetite sanctions.
3
Awake early to the white blare of a sun flooding in sidewise. Strip and
bathe in it. Ha, but an ache tearing at your throat—and a vague cinema
lifting its black moon blot all out. There’s no walking barefoot in
the crisp leaves nowadays. There’s no dancing save in the head’s dark.
Go draped in soot; call on modern medicine to help you: the coal man’s
blowing his thin dust up through the house! Why then, a new step lady!
I’ll meet you—you know where—o’ the dark side! Let the wheel click.
* * * * *
_In the mind there is a continual play of obscure images which coming
between the eyes and their prey seem pictures on the screen at the
movies. Somewhere there appears to be a maladjustment. The wish would
be to see not floating visions of unknown purport but the imaginative
qualities of the actual things being perceived accompany their gross
vision in a slow dance, interpreting as they go. But inasmuch as this
will not always be the case one must dance nevertheless as he can._