Insel (20 page)

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 prolonged 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 condition.

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.

xxxv
III

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 __ __ __ __

[
XLI
]

For years, I had been submitted to the tedium of the imaginative living among races conceiving no final outlet for their dynamism but destruction, forced to inertia by the rush of intellect in the wrong direction, until the casual accident of chance threw me a dope-fiend—guinea-pig for experiment—in research on the
spirit
.

[
XLII
]

In the make-up of normal man, his good & evil are proportionately mixed. The outstanding characteristic of the drug addict is their separation; their awful alternation.

We hear that a drug in impairing nerve tissue produces a vicious exaltation & our curiosity is no further intrigued. Nevertheless I had come upon a creature of my own species intermittently enveloped in an aura identical with the atmosphere of some cathedrals in which one catches an actual detonation of a sanctity amassed through the ages.

[
XLIII
]

Sophia, rising from the incredible chaos she produced in the tiny bathroom, her arms white snakes ‘before the fall’, was weaving in the air the rhythm of her toilet.

Under my fingers the clammy tendrils clinging to her neck sizzled in the curling tongs. Her curses of procrastination crackled about my head while through the slab-like snow of her luminous back that faint electric ‘comfort of life’ conveyed her intrinsic aloofness of honnied marble. The silk, as if pleased to find no intervening fabric, slipped on the bare severity of her body.

I ‘do her up’.

Five strass discs confined to the acute concavity of her waist, crests of soft rocks, the pyramidal folds of a taffeta the colour of dim coal.

“Why the hell must you go and marry a great cow of a man? I’m huge!” she exploded.

The glitter of a girl prepared for a

[
XLIV
]

party drew the depths of her eyes to the surface. A tinge of azure underlying the shadows & roses of her skin unfolded in the beauty of her face an ineffable magnolia.

With the deep velvet of her cloak, she doused the unbroken harmonies of a figure she could not ‘see’. Her radiance
flared in the slam of a door, leaving a scattered ash of toilet articles & undercloths.

I picked them up with the successive effort of manual acts performed while the brain is tracing a dissimilar diagram __ _ _ _

[
XLV
]

until as in the confusion of uneasy dreams I must identify that Beam controlling a surrealist man with the high-light on a fallen curler _ _ the scintilla assuming an intermediary significance __ the phosphorescent drug-addict, like a guinea-pig for experiment, flickers within range of my speculations. It is, in as far as I am aware, no particularly cleanly matter from which radium is extracted.

*

End of Book
Visitation of Insel

*

Insel
is a novel written by a poet, with a poet’s interest in the sounds of words. What is at first most striking, and of special interest to readers of Loy’s poetry, is the adamantine, alliterative quality of the language here which, like the slow piling up of latinate diction and byzantine phrasing in her poems, makes Loy’s novel difficult. But what may on first reading seem byzantine and unapproachable is the very quality which gives Loy’s writing an austere beauty that repays the attentive reader. Choosing the most resistant subject matter, and employing language at once stony and visionary, she finds beatitude in the most unlikely places. Insel the
clochard
, the ethereal bum, belongs to a long line of materially destitute characters in whom Loy located spiritual riches.