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.