XVIII.
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.
XIX.
1
Carry clapping bundles of lath-strips, adjust, dig, saw on a diagonal, hammer a thousand ends fast and discover afterward the lattice-arbor top’s two clean lines in a dust of dew. There are days when leaves have knife’s edges and one sees only eye-pupils, fixes every catchpenny in a shop window and every wire against the sky but—goes puzzled from vista to vista in his own house staring under beds for God knows what all.
A lattice screen say fifty feet long by seven high, such a thing as is built to cut off some certain part of a yard from public view, is surprisingly expensive to put up. The wooden strips alone, if they are placed at all close together must be figured solid, as if it were a board fence. Then there are the posts, the frames, the trimming, the labor and last of all the two coats of paint. Is it a wonder the artisan cannot afford more than the luxury of these calculations.
2
Imperceptibly your self shakes free in all its brutal significance, feels its subtle power renewed and abashed at its covered lustihood breaks to the windows and draws back before the sunshine it sees there as before some imagined figure that would be there if—ah if—But for a moment your hand rests upon the palace window sill, only for a moment.
3
It is not fair to be old, to put on a brown sweater. It is not just to walk out of a November evening bare headed and with white hair in the wind. Oh the cheeks are ruddy enough and the grin broad enough, it’s not that. Worse is to ride a wheel, a glittering machine that runs without knowing to move. It is no part of the eternal truth to wear white canvas shoes and a pink coat. It is a damnable lie to be fourteen. The curse of God is on her head! Who can speak of justice when young men wear round hats and carry bundles wrapped in paper. It is a case for the supreme court to button a coat in the wind, no matter how icy. Lewd to touch an arm at a crossing; the shame of it screams to the man in a window. The horrible misery brought on by the use of black shoes is more than the wind will ever swallow. To move at all is worse than murder, worse than Jack the Ripper. It’s lies, walking, spitting, breathing, coughing lies that bloom, shine sun, shine moon. Unfair to see or be seen, snatch-purses work. Eat hands full of ashes, angels have lived on it time without end. Are you better than an angel? Let judges giggle to each other over their benches and use dirty towels in the anteroom. Gnaw, gnaw, gnaw! at the heads of felons.… There was a baroness lived in Hungary bathed twice monthly in virgin’s blood.
A mother will love her children most grotesquely. I do not mean by that more than the term “perversely” perhaps more accurately describes. Oh I mean the most commonplace of mothers. She will be most willing toward that daughter who thwarts her most and not toward the little kitchen helper. So where one is mother to any great number of people he will love best perhaps some child whose black and peculiar hair is an exact replica of that of the figure in Velasques’, Infanta Maria Theresa or some Italian matron whose largeness of manner takes in the whole street. These things relate to inner perfections which it would be profitless to explain.
XX.
1
Where does this downhill turn up again? Driven to the wall you’d put claws to your toes and make a ladder of smooth bricks. But this, this scene shifting that has clipped the clouds’ stems and left them to flutter down; heaped them at the feet, so much hay, so much bull’s fodder. (Au moins, you cannot deny you have the clouds to grasp now, mon ami!) Climb now? The wall’s clipped off too, only its roots are left. Come, here’s an iron hoop from a barrel once held nectar to gnaw spurs out of.
2
You cannot hold spirit round the arms but it takes lies for wings, turns poplar leaf and flutters off—leaving the old stalk desolate. There’s much pious pointing at the sky but on the other side few know how youth’s won again, the pesty spirit shed each ten years for more skin room. And who’ll say what’s pious or not pious or how I’ll sing praise to God? Many a morning, were’t not for a cup of coffee, a man would be lonesome enough no matter how his child gambols. And for the boy? There’s no craft in him; it’s this or that, the thing’s done and tomorrow’s another day. But if you push him too close, try for the butterflies, you’ll have a devil at the table.
3
One need not be hopelessly cast down because he cannot cut onyx into a ring to fit a lady’s finger. You hang your head. There is neither onyx nor porphyry on these roads—only brown dirt. For all that, one may see his face in a flower along it—even in this light. Eyes only and for a flash only. Oh, keep the neck bent, plod with the back to the split dark! Walk in the curled mudcrusts to one side, hands hanging. Ah well.… Thoughts are trees! Ha, ha, ha, ha! Leaves load the branches and upon them white night sits kicking her heels against the stars.
A poem can be made of anything. This is a portrait of a disreputable farm hand made out of the stuff of his environment.
XXI.
1
There’s the bathtub. Look at it, caustically rejecting its smug proposal. Ponder removedly the herculean task of a bath. There’s much cameraderie in filth but it’s no’ that. And change is lightsome but it’s not that either. Fresh linen with a dab here, there of the wet paw serves me better. Take a stripling stroking chin-fuzz, match his heart against that of grandpa watching his silver wane. When these two are compatible I’ll plunge in. But where’s the edge lifted between sunlight and moonlight. Where does lamplight cease to nick it? Here’s hot water.
It is the mark of our civilization that all houses today include a room for the relief and washing of the body, a room ingeniously appointed with water-vessels of many and curious sorts. There is nothing in antiquity to equal this.
2
Neatness and finish; the dust out of every corner! You swish from room to room and find all perfect. The house may now be carefully wrapped in brown paper and sent to a publisher. It is a work of art. You look rather askance at me. Do not believe I cannot guess your mind, yet I have my studies. You see, when the wheel’s just at the up turn it glimpses horizon, zenith, all in a burst, the pull of the earth shaken off, a scatter of fragments, significance in a burst of water striking up from the base of a fountain. Then at the sickening turn toward death the pieces are joined into a pretty thing, a bouquet frozen in an ice-cake. This is art, mon cher, a thing to carry up with you on the next turn; a very small thing, inconceivably feathery.
Live as they will together a husband and wife give each other many a sidelong glance at unlikely moments. Each watches the other out of the tail of his eye. Always it seems some drunkeness is waiting to unite them. First one then the other empties some carafe of spirits forgetting that two lumps of earth are neither wiser nor sadder.… A man watches his wife clean house. He is filled with knowledge by his wife’s exertions. This is incomprehensible to her. Knowing she will never understand his excitement he consoles himself with the thought of art.
3
The pretension of these doors to broach or to conclude our pursuits, our meetings,—of these papered walls to separate our thoughts of impossible tomorrows and these ceilings—that are a jest at shelter.… It is laughter gone mad—of a holiday—that has frozen into this—what shall I say? Call it, this house of ours, the crystal itself of laughter, thus peaked and faceted.
It is a popular superstition that a house is somehow the possession of the man who lives in it. But a house has no relation whatever to anything but itself. The architect feels the rhythm of the house drawing his mind into opaque partitions in which doors appear, then windows and so on until out of the vague or clearcut mind of the architect the ill-built or deftly-built house has been empowered to draw stone and timbers into a foreappointed focus. If one shut the door of a house he is to that extent a carpenter.
Coda
Outside, the north wind, coming and passing, swelling and dying, lifts the frozen sand drives it arattle against the lidless windows and we my dear sit stroking the cat stroking the cat and smiling sleepily, prrrrr.
A house is sometimes wine. It is more than a skin. The young pair listen attentively to the roar of the weather. The blustering cold takes on the shape of a destructive presence. They loosen their imaginations. The house seems protecting them. They relax gradually as though in the keep of a benevolent protector. Thus the house becomes a wine which has drugged them out of their senses.
XXII.
1
This is a slight stiff dance to a waking baby whose arms have been lying curled back above his head upon the pillow, making a flower—the eyes closed. Dead to the world! Waking is a little hand brushing away dreams. Eyes open. Here’s a new world.
There is nothing the sky-serpent will not eat. Sometimes it stoops to gnaw Fujiyama, sometimes to slip its long and softly clasping tongue about the body of a sleeping child who smiles thinking its mother is lifting it.
2
Security, solidity—we laugh at them in our clique. It is tobacco to us, this side of her leg. We put it in our samovar and make tea of it. You see the stuff has possibilities. You think you are opposing the rich but the truth is you’re turning toward authority yourself, to say nothing of religion. No, I do not say it means nothing. Why everything is nicely adjusted to our moods. But I would rather describe to you what I saw in the kitchen last night—overlook the girl a moment: there over the sink (1) this saucepan holds all, (2) this colander holds most, (3) this wire sieve lets most go and (4) this funnel holds nothing. You appreciate the progression. What need then to be always laughing? Quit phrase making—that is, not of course—but you will understand me or if not—why—come to breakfast sometime around evening on the fourth of January any year you please; always be punctual where eating is concerned.
My little son’s improvisations exceed mine: a round stone to him’s a loaf of bread or “this hen could lay a dozen golden eggs”. Birds fly about his bedstead; giants lean over him with hungry jaws; bears roam the farm by summer and are killed and quartered at a thought. There are interminable stories at eating time full of bizarre imagery, true grotesques, pigs that change to dogs in the telling, cows that sing, roosters that become mountains and oceans that fill a soup plate. There are groans and growls, dun clouds and sunshine mixed in a huge phantasmagoria that never rests, never ceases to unfold into—the day’s poor little happenings. Not that alone. He has music which I have not. His tunes follow no scale, no rhythm—alone the mood in odd ramblings up and down, over and over with a rigor of invention that rises beyond the power to follow except in some more obvious flight. Never have I heard so crushing a critique as those desolate inventions, involved half-hymns, after his first visit to a Christian sunday school.
3
This song is to Phyllis! By this deep snow I know it’s springtime, not ring time! Good God no! The screaming brat’s a sheep bleating, the rattling crib-side sheep shaking a bush. We are young! We are happy! says Colin. What’s an icy room and the sun not up? This song is to Phyllis. Reproduction lets death in, says Joyce. Rot, say I. To Phyllis this song is!
That which is known has value only by virtue of the dark. This cannot be otherwise. A thing known passes out of the mind into the muscles, the will is quit of it, save only when set into vibration by the forces of darkness opposed to it.
XXIII.
1
Baaaa! Ba-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! Bebe esa purga. It is the goats of Santo Domingo talking. Bebe esa purga! Bebeesapurga! And the answer is: Yo no lo quiero beber! Yonoloquierobeber!
It is nearly pure luck that gets the mind turned inside out in a work of art. There is nothing more difficult than to write a poem. It is something of a matter of slight of hand. The poets of the T’ang dynasty or of the golden age in Greece or even the Elizabethans: it’s a kind of alchemy of form, a deft bottling of a fermenting language. Take Dante and his Tuscan dialect— It’s a matter of position. The empty form drops from a cloud, like a gourd from a vine; into it the poet packs his phallus-like argument.
2
The red huckleberry bushes running miraculously along the ground among the trees everywhere, except where the land’s tilled, these keep her from that tiredness the earth’s touch lays up under the soles of feet. She runs beyond the wood follows the swiftest along the roads laughing among the birch clusters her face in the yellow leaves the curls before her eyes her mouth half open. This is a person in particular there where they have her—and I have only a wraith in the birch trees.
It is not the lusty bodies of the nearly naked girls in the shows about town, nor the blare of the popular tunes that make money for the manager. The girls can be procured rather more easily in other ways and the music is dirt cheap. It is that this meat is savored with a strangeness which never looses its fresh taste to generation after generation, either of dancers or those who watch. It is beauty escaping, spinning up over the heads, blown out at the overtaxed vents by the electric fans.
3
In many poor and sentimental households it is a custom to have cheap prints in glass frames upon the walls. These are of all sorts and many sizes and may be found in any room from the kitchen to the toilet. The drawing is always of the worst and the colors, not gaudy but almost always of faint indeterminate tints, are infirm. Yet a delicate accuracy exists between these prints and the environment which breeds them. But as if to intensify this relationship words are added. There will be a “sentiment” as it is called, a rhyme, which the picture illuminates. Many of these pertain to love. This is well enough when the bed is new and the young couple spend the long winter nights there in delightful seclusion. But childbirth follows in its time and a motto still hangs above the bed. It is only then that the full ironical meaning of these prints leaves the paper and the frame and starting through the glass takes undisputed sway over the household.
XXIV.
1
I like the boy. It’s years back I began to draw him to me—or he was pushed my way by the others. And what if there’s no sleep because the bed’s burning; is that a reason to send a chap to Greystone! Greystone! There’s a name if you’ve any tatter of mind left in you. It’s the long back, narrowing that way at the waist perhaps whets the chisel in me. How the flanks flutter and the heart races. Imagination! That’s the worm in the apple. What if it run to paralyses and blind fires, here’s sense loose in a world set on foundations. Blame buzzards for the eyes they have.
Buzzards, granted their disgusting habit in regard to meat, have eyes of a power equal to that of the eagles’.
2
Five miscarriages since January is a considerable record Emily dear—but hearken to me: The Pleiades—that small cluster of lights in the sky there—. You’d better go on in the house before you catch cold. Go on now!
Carelessness of heart is a virtue akin to the small lights of the stars. But it is sad to see virtues in those who have not the gift of the imagination to value them.
Damn me I feel sorry for them. Yet syphilis is no more than a wild pink in the rock’s cleft. I know that. Radicals and capitalists doing a can-can tread the ground clean. Luck to the feet then. Bring a Russian to put a fringe to the rhythm. What’s the odds? Commiseration cannot solve calculus. Calculus is a stone. Frost’ll crack it. Till then, there’s many a good back-road among the clean raked fields of hell where autumn flowers are blossoming.
Pathology literally speaking is a flower garden. Syphilis covers the body with salmon-red petals. The study of medicine is an inverted sort of horticulture. Over and above all this floats the philosophy of disease which is a stern dance. One of its most delightful gestures is bringing flowers to the sick.
3
For a choice? Go to bed at three in the afternoon with your clothes on: dreams for you! Here’s an old bonnefemme in a pokebonnet staring into the rear of a locomotive. Or if this prove too difficult take a horse-drag made of green limbs, a kind of leaf cloth. Up the street with it! Ha, how the tar clings. Here’s glee for the children. All’s smeared. Green’s black. Leap like a devil, clap hands and cast around for more. Here’s a pine wood driven head down into a mud-flat to build a school on. Oh la, la! sand pipers made mathematicians at the state’s cost.
XXV.
1
There’s force to this cold sun, makes beard stubble stand shinily. We look, we pretend great things to our glass—rubbing our chin: This is a profound comedian who grimaces deeds into slothful breasts. This is a sleepy president, without followers save oak leaves—but their coats are of the wrong color. This is a farmer—plowed a field in his dreams and since that time—goes stroking the weeds that choke his furrows. This is a poet left his own country—
The simple expedient of a mirror has practical use for arranging the hair, for observation of the set of a coat, etc. But as an exercise for the mind the use of a mirror cannot be too highly recommended. Nothing of a mechanical nature could be more conducive to that elasticity of the attention which frees the mind for the enjoyment of its special prerogatives.
2
A man can shoot his spirit up out of a wooden house, that is, through the roof—the roof’s slate—but how far? It is of final importance to know that. To say the world turns under my feet and that I watch it passing with a smile is neither the truth nor my desire. But I would wish to stand—you’ve seen the kingfisher do it—where the largest town might be taken in my two hands, as high let us say as a man’s head—some one man not too far above the clouds. What would I do then? Oh I’d hold my sleeve over the sun awhile to make church bells ring.
It is obvious that if in flying an airplane one reached such an altitude that all sense of direction and every intelligible perception of the world were lost there would be nothing left to do but to come down to that point at which eyes regained their power.
Towels will stay in a heap—if the window’s shut and oil in a bottle—if the cork’s there. But if the meat’s not cut to suit it’s no use rising before sun up, you’ll never sweep the dust from these floors. Hide smiles among the tall glasses in the cupboard, come back when you think the trick’s done and you’ll find only dead flies there. It’s beyond hope. You were not born of a Monday.
There are divergences of humor that cannot be reconciled. A young woman of much natural grace of manner and very apt at a certain color of lie is desirous of winning the good graces of one only slightly her elder but nothing comes of her exertions. Instead of yielding to a superficial advantage she finally gives up the task and continues in her own delicate bias of peculiar and beautiful design much to the secret delight of the onlooker who is thus regaled by the spectacle of two exquisite and divergent natures playing one against the other.
3
Hark! There’s laughter! These fight and draw nearer, we—fight and draw apart. They know the things they say are true bothways, we miss the joke—try to—Oh, try to. Let it go at that. There again! Real laughter. At least we have each other in the ring of that music. “He saved a little then had to go and die”. But isn’t it the same with all of us? Not at all. Some laugh and laugh, with little grey eyes looking out through the chinks—but not brown eyes rolled up in a full roar. One can’t have everything.
Going along an illworn dirt road on the outskirts of a mill town one Sunday afternoon two lovers who have quarreled hear the loud cursing and shouts of drunken laborers and their women, followed by loud laughter and wish that their bodies were two fluids in the same vessel. Then they fall to twitting each other on the many ways of laughing.
XXVI.
1
Doors have a back side also. And grass blades are double-edged. It’s no use trying to deceive me, leaves fall more by the buds that push them off than by lack of greenness. Or throw two shoes on the floor and see how they’ll lie if you think it’s all one way.
2
There is no truth—sh!—but the honest truth and that is that touch-me-nots mean nothing, that daisies at a distance seem mushrooms and that—your japanese silk today was not the sky’s blue but your pajamas now as you lean over the crib’s edge are and day’s in! Grassgreen the mosquito net caught over your head’s butt for foliage. What else? except odors—an old hallway. Moresco. Salvago. —and a game of socker. I was too nervous and young to win—that day.
3
All that seem solid: melancholias, idees fixes, eight years at the academy, Mr. Locke, this year and the next and the next—one like another—whee!—they are April zephyrs, were one a Botticelli, between their chinks, pink anemones.
Often it happens that in a community of no great distinction some fellow of superficial learning but great stupidity will seem to be rooted in the earth of the place the most solid figure imaginable impossible to remove him.
XXVII.
1
The particular thing, whether it be four pinches of four divers white powders cleverly compounded to cure surely, safely, pleasantly a painful twitching of the eyelids or say a pencil sharpened at one end, dwarfs the imagination, makes logic a butterfly, offers a finality that sends us spinning through space, a fixity the mind could climb forever, a revolving mountain, a complexity with a surface of glass: the gist of poetry. D. C. al fin.
2
There is no thing that with a twist of the imagination cannot be something else. Porpoises risen in a green sea, the wind at nightfall bending the rose-red grasses and you—in your apron running to catch—say it seems to you to be your son. How ridiculous! You will pass up into a cloud and look back at me, not count the scribbling foolish that put wings to your heels, at your knees.
3
Sooner or later as with the leaves forgotten the swinging branch long since and summer: they scurry before a wind on the frost-baked ground—have no place to rest—somehow invoke a burst of warm days not of the past nothing decayed: crisp summer!—neither a copse for resurrected frost eaters but a summer removed undestroyed a summer of dried leaves scurrying with a screech, to and fro in the half dark—twittering, chattering, scraping. Hagh!
Seeing the leaves dropping from the high and low branches the thought rises: this day of all others is the one chosen, all other days fall away from it on either side and only itself remains in perfect fulness. It is its own summer, of its leaves as they scrape on the smooth ground it must build its perfection. The gross summer of the year is only a halting counterpart of those fiery days of secret triumph which in reality themselves paint the year as if upon a parchment, giving each season a mockery of the warmth or frozeness which is within ourselves. The true seasons blossom or wilt not in fixed order but so that many of them may pass in a few weeks or hours whereas sometimes a whole life passes and the season remains of a piece from one end to the other.
THE END.