Peter Whiffle

by Carl Van Vechten

Art is a protest, corrected Mina Loy. Each artist is protesting against something: Hardy, against life itself; Shaw, against shams; Flaubert, against slipshod workmanship; George Moore, against prudery; Cunninghame Graham, against civilization; Arthur Machen, against reality; Theodore Dreiser, against style....

Never did I feel less sure of the meaning of art than I do here, surrounded by it, began Peter, although I have never been more conscious of it, more susceptible to real beauty, more lulled by its magic. Yet I do not understand its meaning. It does not help me to work out my own problems. The trails cross. For instance, here is Edith leading her own life; here are we all leading our own lives, as remote as possible from Donatello and Gozzoli. Here is Gordon Craig, dressed like Bunthorne, driving a stage-coach and sending out arcane but thundering manifestos against a theatre in which his mother and Eleanora Duse are such conspicuous examples; here is Papini working and dreaming; here is Marinetti shooting off fire-crackers; here are the Braggiottis, teaching young Americans the elements of music in that modern music-room with bas-relief portraits of the great composers, Beethoven, Bach, Verdi, Mozart, Wagner, Rossini ... and Sebastian B. Schlesinger, moulded in the frieze. Here is Loeser, always building new houses and never completing them; here is Arthur Acton, with a chauffeur who sings tenor arias in the drawing-room after dinner; here is Leo Stein, collecting Renoirs and Cézannes for his villa at Settignano. What does it all mean, unless it means that everything should be scrambled together? I think a great book might be written if everything the hero thought and felt and observed could be put into it. You know how, in the old novel, only what is obviously essential to the plot or the development of character is selected. But a man, crossing a street to commit a murder, does not continuously think of the murder. The cry of Buns! hot cross buns! the smell of onions or dead fish, the sight of a pretty woman, impress his senses and remind him of still other things. These ideas, impressions, objects, should all be set down. Nothing should be omitted, nothing! One might write a whole book of two hundred thousand words about the events of an hour. And what a book! What a book!

This was before the day of Dorothy Richardson, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust. The contessa snorted. Mina Loy, at the other end of the table, looked interested in Peter for the first time, I thought. The white Persian cat, one of Edith's cats, with his superb porcelain-blue eyes, sauntered into the room, his tail raised proudly. Edith spoke:

The great artists put themselves into their work; the cat never does. Men like Stieglitz and de Meyer put themselves into their cameras, that is why their photographs are wonderful, but the cat never puts himself into a camera. The great conquerors put themselves into their actions; the cat never does. Lovers put themselves into the selves of their loved ones, seeking identity; the cat never does. Mystics try to lose themselves in union with their gods; the cat never does. Musicians put themselves into their instruments; the cat never does. Indian men, working in the ground, put themselves in the earth, in order to get themselves back in the forms of wheat or maize to nourish their bodies; the cat never does. Navajo women, when they weave blankets, go so completely into the blanket while they are working on it, that they always leave a path in the weaving that comes out at the last corner for their souls to get out of the blanket; otherwise they would be imprisoned in it. The cat never does things like this!

So every one really centres his self somewhere outside of himself; every one gets out of his body. The cat never does. Every one has a false centre. Only the cat—the feline—has a true centredness inside himself. Dogs and other animals centre themselves in people and are therefore open to influence. The cat stays at home inside his body and can never be influenced.

Every one has always worked magic through these false centres—doing things to himself—seeking outlets, seeking expression, seeking power, all of which are only temporarily satisfactory like a movement of the bowels, which is all it amounts to on the psychic plane. The cat is magic, is himself, is power. The cat knows how to live, staying as he does inside his own body, for that is the only place where he can live! That is the only place where he can experience being here and now.

Of course, all the false-centred people have a kind of magic power, for any centredness is power, but it doesn't last and it doesn't satisfy them. Art has been the greatest deceiver of all—the better the art, the greater the deception. It isn't necessary to objectify or express experience. What IS necessary IS to be. The cat knows this. May be, that is why the cat has been an object of worship; may be, the ancients felt intuitively that the cat had the truth in him.

Do you see where these reflections lead? The whole world is wildly pursuing a mirage; only the cat is at home, so to speak.

Actors understand this. They only get a sense of reality when they throw themselves into a part ... a false centre.

The cat understands pure being, which is all we need to know and which it takes us a lifetime to learn. It is both subject and object. It is its own outlet and its own material. It is. All the rest of us are divided bits of self, some here, some there. The cat has a complete subjective unity. Being its own centre, it radiates electricity in all directions. It is magnetic and impervious. I have known people to keep a cat so that they could stroke the electricity out of it. Why didn't they know how to be electric as the cat IS? The cat is the fine specimen of the I am. Who of us is so fully the I am that I am?